relationship with Pershing Square serves as an example of what can happen when a company adopts an activist's strategy that lacks support from the broader shareholder base.
Pershing's founder, William Ackman, joined the retailer's board in 2011 as part of a settlement and played a major role in orchestrating a turnaround plan that ultimately failed as sales plunged by 25 percent the following year.
Within the past year, however, activists' presence on company boards is coming under heavier scrutiny.
According to people familiar with the matter, Chico's new CEO, Shelley Broader, discussed her strategy with the company's largest shareholders shortly after she took over the post in December. She spoke again with some of them after Barington arrived, at which point they signaled their support for a fight with the hedge fund, the people said.
A Chico's spokeswoman declined to comment.
In the case of Freeport, lack of board experience of Icahn's two young lieutenants who represented him was the reason BlackRock did not support the miner's agreement with the investor, people familiar with the matter said.
Freeport and BlackRock declined to comment about the matter.
(Editing by Greg Roumeliotis and Tomasz Janowski)
Bill Cosby got some good news and some bad news from a judge on Friday.
The scandal-plagued comedian can go ahead and sue his accuser, Andrea Constand, for breach of contract, Judge Eduardo C. Robreno ruled in federal court in Pennsylvania but not before Robreno partially dismissed portions of Cosbys claims against Constand.
Cosby is suing former Temple University employee Constand who claims that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at his Pennsylvania home for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, claiming that she violated a confidentiality agreement stemming from a settlement of Constands lawsuit against Cosby.
Also Read: Bill Cosby Defamation Lawsuit Dropped by Accuser
In his ruling Friday, Robreno found that Constand didnt violate the agreement when she provided information to law enforcement officials.
However, the judge declined to dismiss Cosbys claims that Constand violated the agreement in other ways.
Specifically, Cosby claims that Constand breached the agreement by tweeting in 2014, I wont go away, there is a lot more I will say and Its not that everybody just forgot about it, truth is nobody cared. Constand contended that the tweets did not mention Cosby or the litigation by name, but Robreno found, This argument is unavailing because, of course, a statement can be a reference to an individual or situation even if it does not explicitly say so.
Also Read: Hugh Hefner Deposed in Bill Cosby Lawsuit
Constand also sought to have Cosbys breach of contract claim against her over a Toronto Sun interview she did dismissed. The judge shot down that request, as well as Constands attempt to have the unjust enrichment claim dismissed.
Cosby was charged with aggravated indecent assault over the Constand case in December, after incoming Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, district attorney Kevin Steele decided to pursue a criminal case against the comedian. Constand filed her lawsuit in 2005 after former district attorney Bruce Castor declined to press charges.
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Cosby has been accused of rape or sexual assault by dozens of women, many of whom claim he drugged them beforehand. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against the comedian. Cosby has denied the allegations, and in some cases sued his accusers for defamation.
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.
Related stories from TheWrap:
Bill Cosby: These 28 Universities Still Haven't Withdrawn Honorary Degrees
Bill Cosby Defamation Lawsuit Dropped by Accuser
Bill Cosby's Lawyers Cite Accuser's 'Hazy Recollections' in Motion for Dismissal
London (AFP) - Britain's new foreign minister Boris Johnson has given up his lucrative newspaper column, which he had used for years to mock world leaders, his spokesman said Monday.
The leading Brexit campaigner was paid A250,000 ($330,000, 300,000 euros) a year for his weekly article in The Daily Telegraph broadsheet, which he continued writing during his eight-year tenure as mayor of London.
He used the column to showcase his rapier wit, but some of his barbs -- including comparing White House hopeful Hillary Clinton to a "sadistic nurse" -- came back to haunt him when he was named foreign secretary last week.
Prime Minister Theresa May, who took office following the June 23 referendum vote for Britain to leave the EU, stunned observers by naming gaffe-prone Johnson as her top diplomat.
His new job comes with a salary of A135,527 a year, which includes A74,962 for being a member of parliament.
"Whilst Mr Johnson has enjoyed a close working relationship with The Daily Telegraph for over 20 years, it would not be appropriate for him to continue writing his long-standing column for the newspaper given his new role as foreign secretary," his spokesman said.
When asked if May had told Johnson to give up the column, the prime minister's spokeswoman said only that it was his decision.
"Boris has been an outstanding columnist for The Daily Telegraph for many years, with a legion of devoted readers," said Telegraph Media Group editor Chris Evans, adding that he wished him well in his new job.
Johnson, who stepped down as London mayor in May, was in Brussels on Monday for his first talks with EU counterparts.
The 52-year-old was also working on a book on Shakespeare that was due to be published in October, but has now been postponed "for the forseeable future", publishers Hodder and Stoughton said.
Johnson has received an advance payment of around A90,000 for the book but it is thought unlikely that he will have to repay it as the commission has not been withdrawn.
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"Hodder and Stoughton confirm that they are postponing publication of Boris Johnson's 'Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius'," the publishers said in a statement.
Documents released earlier this year showed Johnson earned A987,097 from his Telegraph column over the past four years, while book royalties brought in a further A469,385.
In 2009, Johnson described his Telegraph earnings as "chicken feed".
Brussels (AFP) - New British foreign minister and top Brexit backer Boris Johnson pledged Monday Britain would continue to play a leading role in Europe as he met his European Union peers in Brussels for the first time.
The normally ebullient Johnson was on his best behaviour after infuriating his partners in the run-up to the referendum by comparing the EU's ambitions for closer European integration to Adolf Hitler's.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union but... we are not going in any way to abandon our leading role in European participation," Johnson told reporters.
He said he had had a "very good conversation" on the subject with EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogherini late Sunday -- although his dinner with her was called off after his plane had to make an emergency landing.
"I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues," he added.
Johnson was a key player in the June 23 Brexit referendum and his appointment last week stunned many in Europe, with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying he had lied to voters during the campaign.
- France 'frank' with Britain -
Mogherini, arriving just after Johnson, said the two had had "a good exchange on the main issues on the agenda today."
She refused to be drawn on Britain's negotiations for its departure from the bloc, which EU leaders insist can only start once London invokes Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to trigger the divorce.
Britain remains a member of the EU until those negotiations are completed, she added.
Ayrault, speaking separately, said he had had a "frank and useful" phone conversation with Johnson.
"There are lots of things to work on with Britain, I will always talk to Boris Johnson with the greatest sincerity, the greatest frankness, I think it's like that we have to move on," he told reporters.
At the same time, he repeated French calls for Britain to launch the Article 50 negotiations as soon as possible so as to end the uncertainty.
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New British Prime Minister Theresa May says she will likely do that at the end of this year or early in 2017 but not before London has worked out what sort of future relationship it wants with the other 27 EU members.
The foreign ministers' meeting was overshadowed by the failed military coup in Turkey and last week's deadly attack in Nice, the third major terror incident in France since 2015.
US Secretary of State John Kerry went into the talks without comment but Turkey is a key NATO ally for the United States and a major player for both Washington and Brussels as they keep a wary eye on increasing turmoil in the Middle East.
- Trepidation over Johnson -
Johnson's arrival was awaited with some trepidation given his role in the Brexit referendum and his reputation for quips and bon mots which have often landed him in hot water.
The former mayor of London and one-time schoolmate of former premier David Cameron is well known in Brussels where he worked in the 1990s as the Daily Telegraph's EU correspondent.
His critics accuse him of beating up his stories to play to the eurosceptic gallery at home.
Officials in Brussels stressed they would welcome Johnson as they would any new foreign minister but there is little doubt his Brexit role ruffled feathers.
Johnson was supposed to have met all his EU colleagues on Sunday for an informal dinner but several member states objected, saying it would amount to "informal talks" with London before it had triggered Article 50, one European diplomat said.
Johnson's influence in the Brexit process may be limited however as May has named leading Conservative eurosceptic David Davis as special minister for Brexit.
LONDON (Reuters) - New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called on Tuesday for Russia and other states to demand Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down as he prepared for his first meeting with Western counterparts on Syria's intractable civil war. Johnson will meet peers from Germany, France, Italy and the European Union in London to discuss Syria's five-year conflict, which has spurred the rise of Islamic State, sucked in regional and major powers and created the world's worst refugee crisis. "I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this," Johnson will say, according to remarks released by his office in advance of the meeting. Johnson will also see U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in London on Tuesday, less than a week after the ex-London mayor known for his undiplomatic wit was surprisingly appointed as foreign secretary by incoming Prime Minister Theresa May. Russia and the United States are co-sponsors of peace talks, and back opposing sides, in the Syria conflict. Those talks, currently on hold, have so far carefully skirted the question of whether a peace deal would require Assads departure, so negotiations could theoretically limp along despite contradictions between the stances of Moscow and Washington. Sources familiar with the Kremlin's thinking said in June that Russia will countenance Assad leaving office, but only when it is confident a change of leader will not trigger a collapse of the Syrian government. The last round of talks between the Syrian government and opposition broke up at the end of April as Assad's forces, backed by Russian air strikes, escalated their assault on rebel-held areas in the northern city of Aleppo. Speaking in December, before his appointment, Johnson had called for Britain to set aside a "Cold War mindset" when dealing with Russia over Syria. In a newspaper column in March this year, Johnson said "bravo for Assad" for saving the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, from Islamic State militants. "...No matter how repulsive the Assad regime may be and it is their opponents in Islamic State ...are far, far worse," Johnson wrote. (Reporting by William James; editing by Mark Heinrich)
(Adds name of vessel, traders' comments)
HOUSTON, July 18 (Reuters) - British oil company BP Plc has chartered a foreign-flagged vessel to transport Alaskan crude, the company said on Monday, the latest sign that producers of Alaskan North Slope, or ANS, crude are eyeing new markets.
ANS is mostly transported to the U.S. West Coast on U.S.-flagged vessels owned by BP, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil. Two shipments have left U.S. ports this year for destinations in Japan and Nicaragua, but ANS exports remain rare because of the high shipping costs from Alaska.
BP spokeswoman Dawn Patience said in an email that the company had chartered Tianlong Spirit, a Bahamas-flagged Suezmax vessel, for commercial and operational reasons. She declined to specify the destination for the crude and said the vessel would sail after BP receives approvals from the state of Alaska and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Two trade sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, said the cargo would sail to Asia.
Reuters Vessel Tracking data showed the ship was off the coast of Baja California on Monday.
ANS had been exempted from a decades-long U.S. ban on crude exports which was lifted late last year.
(Reporting by Liz Hampton; Editing by Peter Cooney and Richard Chang)
By Anjuli Davies and Olivia Oran
LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Market ructions caused by Britain's decision to leave the European Union are set to widen the gulf between Wall Street and European investment banks, potentially leaving the continent without its own global champion.
The Brexit vote has pushed shares in Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse to record lows and triggered a string of analyst downgrades, highlighting expectations that Europe's already-struggling investment banks will be pushed further to the sidelines by their U.S. counterparts.
"In our view, the uncertainty created post Brexit, if it leads to long-term negative impact on profitability, could result in further restructuring in Tier Two investment banks," JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note on July 11, downgrading their estimates for European banks in favour of their U.S. rivals.
Brexit is seen as a negative for banks on both sides of the Atlantic because the uncertainty could subdue dealmaking and trading activity. And banks may also face the cost of relocating some London-based businesses and staff to other EU cities.
But European banks will find it tougher as Brexit comes on top of post-financial crisis structural overhauls that their U.S. counterparts have largely completed.
Since Britain's vote to leave the European Union, some headhunters on Wall Street have reported getting more calls from investment bankers at European groups asking about jobs at their U.S rivals.
"People I've been in discussion with since the middle of last year have all of a sudden started saying 'you were right ... I should be more open-minded ... I don't want to be the last guy here to turn the lights off. Is it too late in the year to move?' Gary Goldstein, founder and CEO of executive search firm Whitney Partners in New York, said.
Europe's banks were already on the back foot before the vote, focused on cost-cutting and shoring up capital while more strongly-capitalised U.S banks have been able to go out to win new business.
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"We have been getting a number of calls from senior bankers at the European institutions in the U.S.," Kevin P. Mahoney at Bay Street Advisors, LLC, said.
"The concerns range from the European banks' inability to lend, and thus compete on deals going forward, to the quickly eroding value of their stock awards and overall compensation."
GLOBALLY RELEVANT
Some senior executives, worried about the risks of Wall Street dominating the region, argue that Europe needs its own investment banks to service companies at home and abroad and help to spur economic growth.
"It is in the interests of Europe at large to have a strong, globally relevant bank in Europe," Alasdair Warren, head of corporate and investment banking EMEA at Deutsche Bank told Reuters.
"If the only globally relevant banks of scale are North American, it's not politically or socially good for Europe. But of course, all institutions, irrespective of geography need to be globally competitive."
Barclays' chief executive Jes Staley said earlier this year that the region risked tipping over into American dominance, which could leave Europes capital markets entirely dependent on firms based elsewhere.
European companies could also play a role in supporting their home banks. In a research paper in March, think-tank Bruegel said companies could help to bolster the continent's investment banks.
"We recommend that the big European corporates should cherish the (few) remaining European investment banks, by giving them at least one place in otherwise U.S.- dominated banking syndicates," the paper said.
"That could help to avoid complete dependence on U.S. investment banks."
WALL STREET VS THE REST
In 2007, the eight biggest European banks' FICC (fixed income, currencies and commodities) revenue was $48 billion, compared with the $38 billion generated by the five biggest U.S. banks, according to data from analytics firm Tricumen.
Last year, European banks' revenue was $26 billion while U.S. banks was $43 billion. In eight years, there has been a $22 billion fall in FICC revenue at European banks and a $5 billion increase at U.S. banks. Europe's 26 percent advantage has turned into a 40 percent deficit.
European banks' total fee revenue from bond issuance, equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fell from $17 billion to $13 billion between 2007 and 2015, while U.S. banks' fees remained unchanged at $23 billion.
"I would expect European banks to lose more market share to the U.S. banks," Darko Kapoor a partner at Tricumen, said.
The Wall Street banks potentially face some big Brexit costs.
The five largest U.S. banks employ around 40,000 people in London, more than in the rest of Europe combined, taking advantage of the EU "passporting" regime that allows them to offer services across the bloc.
If they have to set up new continental European outposts this could be extremely costly.
It could cost 50,000 pounds ($66,215) per person, on average to relocate an employee to the EU, according to consultancy Crossbridge, taking into account the costs of hiring and redundancy, new building, rent and other infrastructure and contingency costs.
U.S. investment banks have 20 percent more EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) staff in Britain than their European counterparts, according to industry analytics firm Coalition.
"Most banks (U.S. and European) have put in place a hiring freeze and are following a "wait and watch" approach. Some banks that had launched restructuring before Brexit are looking at accelerating those programs," Coalition said.
($1 = 0.7551 pounds)
(Additional reporting by Lawrence White and Mike Stone, editing by Jane Merriman)
By Robin Emmott and Gabriela Baczynska BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain's Boris Johnson, who made his name as a Brussels-bashing journalist in the 1990s, was determined to avoid making headlines when he returned to his old stamping ground on Monday. The mop-haired politician, who led last month's referendum campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, was on his best behavior at his first EU foreign ministers' meeting. "We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union, but that in no sense means that we are leaving Europe," Britain's newly minted foreign secretary said. "We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds," Johnson told reporters on arrival. He took no questions. Ten hours later, he said on his way out that Britain wanted to see the EU develop and go forward, "and all we would say is that to make sure there are docking stations and doors for future UK involvement down the track". For most of the day Johnson, a Daily Telegraph journalist in Brussels in 1989-94 and longtime scourge of EU integration and regulation, was a man more talked-about than talking. Pooled television pictures showed him chatting animatedly in a group with his Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourg, Spanish and Maltese counterparts before the meeting, occasionally stuffing his hands awkwardly into the jacket pockets of an ill-fitting suit. The bigger beasts of the EU jungle avoided that huddle. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who had called Johnson a liar on his appointment last week, sat stony-faced in his seat while Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had branded the Leave campaigner irresponsible, looked away. Johnson's first words to the official session were in French to honor the victims of last Friday's truck attack in Nice, switching to English to express sorrow and finishing with the French word "solidarite", officials present said. It fell to visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to give Johnson, who relished verbal jousts with then European Commission President Jacques Delors, a veiled lesson in the benefits of the EU. "I ask anyone who questions the importance of the EU or its relationship with the United States, (to consider) not just the history that I articulated, but the increase of prosperity, the rise in the standard of living ... the better protection of rights for individuals in the EU, as a consequence of what we have done together," Kerry said. NO APOLOGY Asked if the former mayor of London had apologized for having compared the EU's goals to those of Hitler and Napoleon during the referendum campaign, Ayrault said: "No he did not apologize ... Boris Johnson came to the council and behaved with a certain modesty. "For me the essential thing is clarity, not making snide remarks or snap judgments. But what matters is the relationship that we'll now have to construct between the EU and Britain," the French minister said. Steinmeier said Johnson had distinguished between "Europe" and "the EU", and "tried to make clear the UK will still engage in conflicts like Syria even if it will leave the EU". The German minister dodged a question on the suitability of Johnson as foreign secretary, telling reporters: "This is a British decision that we don't want to criticize ... Boris Johnson... said today he was taking this task seriously." One EU colleague had warm words for the newcomer. His Polish counterpart, whose conservative nationalist government has defied Brussels in a drive to shackle the constitutional court, said Johnson had made some "conciliatory gestures". "He was positive, asked a lot of questions as some of the terminology and procedures are new to him, but he was showing interest, was engaged," Witold Waszczykowski said. "At the same time he does have this easy-going style so that makes the meeting a bit more colorful." (Additional reporting by Manon Jacob and Tom Korkemeier; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Pravin Char)
* UK needs to replace subs carrying nuclear weapons by 2030s
* Opposition Labour leader and some lawmakers oppose renewal
* Ministry of Defence estimates replacement cost at 31 bln pounds (Updates after vote)
By Michael Holden and Kylie MacLellan
LONDON, July 18 (Reuters) - Lawmakers voted strongly on Monday to renew Britain's ageing nuclear weapons system, a multibillion-pound project regarded as key to maintaining the country's status as a world power following its vote to leave the European Union.
Despite opposition from the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) and some in the opposition Labour Party, parliament approved the renewal of the Scottish-based nuclear-armed Trident submarines by 472 to 117 votes.
Some opponents said the vote was being used by new Prime Minister Theresa May to unify her party, which has a parliamentary majority of 16, after a bruising Brexit campaign, and embarrass Labour by highlighting its own deep divisions.
In her first statement in parliament as prime minister, May urged lawmakers to back Trident, not only to protect Britain from growing threats from Russia and North Korea, but also to protect thousands of jobs in Scotland and elsewhere.
"What this country needs to do is to recognise that it faces a variety of threats and to ensure we have the capabilities that are necessary and appropriate to deal with each of those threats," she said ahead of the vote.
Britain needed to retain a nuclear deterrent which had been an insurance policy for nearly 50 years, May said.
"We cannot outsource the grave responsibility we shoulder for keeping our people safe ... 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."
Parliament agreed in principle in 2007 to replace the deterrent system and Monday's vote was to rubber stamp the decision to approve the building of four submarines to ensure Britain can have nuclear weapons continuously on patrol at sea.
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UK'S "OUTSIZED" ROLE
U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said in February Britain must renew the submarines, based at Faslane, if it wanted to maintain its "outsized" role in world affairs.
During more than five hours of debate in parliament, many argued that failing to renew the system would mark Britain retreating from the world.
However, Scottish nationalists and some in Labour believe the weapons are no longer needed as they are little use against terrorists and the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been challenged by two candidates seeking to take the helm of the centre-left party, questioned the need for Britain to possess "weapons of mass destruction" and said it should press for a nuclear-free world.
"I would not take a decision that kills millions of people, I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations," said Corbyn, who had indicated his lawmakers could vote freely on Trident.
Many Labour lawmakers criticised their leader's view, which is in contrast with the party's official position on Trident.
SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson said the renewal was opposed by Scotland, where May's Conservatives hold just one of the 59 seats in the British parliament.
"It is obscene that the priority of this government ... is to spend billions of pounds on outdated nuclear weapons that we do not want, do not need and could never use," he said during the debate.
"This government has a democratic deficit in Scotland and with today's vote on Trident it is going to get worse not better."
SELF-HARM
Some military officials also oppose the outlay on Trident, saying the money would be better spent on maintaining the army and on more conventional technology, both of which have recently suffered cutbacks.
The Ministry of Defence has said replacing the four submarines would cost 31 billion pounds ($41 billion), plus a contingency fund of 10 billion pounds, with another 4 billion already allocated to the design process.
Defence firms BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Babcock can expect to benefit from a renewal, with the new submarines expected to enter service from 2028.
However, in response to a freedom of information request from Reuters in March, the ministry said it could not provide details of the costs for the nuclear warheads, support services infrastructure and running costs over the system's expected life.
Calculations by Reuters and Conservative lawmaker Crispin Blunt suggest it could reach 167 billion pounds ($220 billion) over 32 years.
Blunt, head of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, said on Monday the costs had increased and may eventually reach 180 billion pounds.
"I oppose the renewal of Trident because I care about the security of my country," he said in a statement. "I'm not prepared to be party to the most egregious act of self-harm to our conventional defence." ($1 = 0.7583 pounds) (Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper and Sarah Young; Editing by Giles Elgood and James Dalgleish)
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May said it would be "quite wrong " for Britain to get rid of its nuclear weapons, speaking in parliament on Monday as lawmakers prepared to vote on renewing the country's ageing 'Trident' nuclear weapons system. "Some people suggest to us that we should actually be removing our nuclear deterrent. This has been a vital part of our national security and defence for nearly half a century, and it would be quite wrong for us to go down that particular path," May told parliament. She said threats from states like Russia and North Korea remained "very real". (Reporting by William James; Editing by Kylie MacLellan)
The only thing this British burglar should be dancing to is "Jailhouse Rock."
The suspect was caught on surveillance footage doing a happy dance after discovering 50 (about $66) in a wallet he was accused of stealing out of a parked car in Birmingham.
Read: Men Playing Pokemon Go Catch Naked Woman Vandalizing Church Property
Kamayi Matumona, 31, can be seen in CCTV surveillance footage doing a shimmy as he left the scene.
Cameras also caught him pulling the cash out of the wallet, and putting it in his pocket around 2:30 a.m. one night in late June.
"We couldnt believe it when we saw the footage," West Midlands Police Sergeant Alan Lawless said in a statement. "He was so happy at getting his hands on someone elses cash that he did a little dance on the pavement."
But Matumona's moves were short lived when the West Midlands Police department immediately idenfitied him from the footage.
"Matumona has an extensive criminal record, especially for car crime, and when the footage was circulated on police systems, an offender manager immediately identified him," Sergeant Lawless said in a statement.
According to police officers, the man had a record of theft, shoplifting, criminal damage, and vehicle interference.
Days later, police officers arrived at Matumona's home and arrested him for theft.
"He may have felt like dancing at the time but he looked pretty miserable when we knocked at his door to arrest him," Lawless said.
Read: Man Leads Police on High-Speed Chase, Tells Them It Was on His Bucket List
Matumona pleaded guilty earlier this month and was sentenced to 22 weeks in jail.
Hopefully, he had his prison pirouette prepared.
Watch: Elderly Couple Facing Eviction After Grandson Allegedly Scams Them Out of Their Home
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(LOS ANGELES) An American student from the University of California, Berkeley, was identified Sunday as one of the 84 people killed in Thursdays Bastille Day truck attack in the French city of Nice, according to statement from the school.
The university said the FBI informed school officials that the body of 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie of Del Mar in the San Diego area had been identified. Leslie was a junior at Berkeleys College of Natural Resources.
This is tragic, devastating news, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a statement. All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence.
Berkeley student Tarishi Jain was among the hostages killed by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earlier this month.
Read More: Family Mourns American Father and Son Killed in Nice Attack: We Are Heartbroken and In Shock
Berkeley students have been plastering Nice with fliers asking for any information on Leslie and other students . Members of his family had raced to Nice after the attack to search for him.
Leslie was among three foreign students studying technology entrepreneurship at the European Innovation Academy who were among those missing after 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.
Leslie was born in Italy and moved with his family to Del Mar, where he graduated from high school. At Berkeley, he was a member of Net Impact, a student-run consulting group that provides marketing, research and social responsibility advice to non-profits and businesses focused on environmental sustainability.
Read More: What We Know About the Driver in the Nice Attack
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His Facebook page shows him surfing, kite boarding and scuba diving.
Three other UC Berkeley students were injured in the attack, all suffering broken bones, according to the school statement. Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, and Diane Huang, 20, have been released from a hospital and returned to their summer dorms, while 21-year-old Daryus Medora remained hospitalized.
A vigil was planned for Monday at UC Berkeley.
A message left Sunday seeking more details from the FBI wasnt immediately returned. Members of Leslies family could not be reached.
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 Rod Nickel
WINNIPEG, Manitoba, July 18 (Reuters) - Canada's agriculture minister said on Monday that he is hopeful of striking an agreement with China before it toughens its shipping standard for Canadian canola.
China's quarantine authority, AQSIQ, told the Canadian government in February that it would impose a stricter standard for foreign material in canola shipments starting April 1. It later postponed the move to Sept. 1.
"There have been some difficulties but we truly hope and feel that we'll have an appropriate solution," Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay said in Winnipeg, adding that Canada's trade department was closer to the situation than his officials.
"It's vitally important to the country and vitally important that we establish regulations that are adhered to. I think we will come to an agreement that will satisfy both (countries), hopefully."
A tougher Chinese canola shipping standard would raise costs and risk for Canadian exporters, who include Richardson International, Viterra Inc and Cargill Ltd , for selling canola to Canada's biggest export market for the oilseed.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Ottawa could not be immediately reached.
The new standard will allow no more than 1 percent foreign material, such as straw and other plant seeds, per shipment, compared with the current maximum of 2.5 percent.
Some traders in both countries have said they believe China's main motivation for the new standard is a need to slow imports due to large domestic rapeseed oil stocks. However, China has since 2009 raised concerns about possible transmission of blackleg disease, caused by a fungus that Beijing now fears could be transmitted through foreign material in crops.
(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Editing by Chris Reese)
By Rod Nickel WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Canada is hopeful of striking an agreement with China before it toughens its shipping standard for Canadian canola, Canada's agriculture minister said on Monday, as the issue threatens to curtail sales to its top export market for the oilseed. China's quarantine authority, AQSIQ, told the Canadian government in February that it would impose a stricter standard for foreign material in canola shipments starting April 1. It later postponed the move to Sept. 1. "There have been some difficulties but we truly hope and feel that we'll have an appropriate solution," Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay said in Winnipeg, adding that Canada's trade department was closer to the situation than his officials. "It's vitally important to the country and vitally important that we establish regulations that are adhered to. I think we will come to an agreement that will satisfy both (countries), hopefully." A tougher Chinese canola shipping standard would raise costs and risk for Canadian exporters, who include Richardson International, Viterra Inc [VILC.UL] and Cargill Ltd [CARGIL.UL]. Counselor Yang Yundong, spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, said Chinese experts are currently visiting Canada and conducting research with Canadian counterparts into establishing how much foreign material should be allowed. "I believe this issue will be solved in a proper way," the counselor said in a statement. The new standard will allow no more than 1 percent foreign material, such as straw and other plant seeds, per shipment, compared with the current maximum of 2.5 percent. Some traders in both countries have said they believe China's main motivation for the new standard is a need to slow imports due to large domestic rapeseed oil stocks. However, China has since 2009 raised concerns about possible transmission of blackleg disease, caused by a fungus that Beijing now fears could be transmitted through foreign material in crops. (Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; editing by Chris Reese and Jeffrey Hodgson)
* Fitch does not cut Poland's rating outlook despite fears * Turkish coup attempt ignored, stocks hit multi-week highs * ECB policy seen remaining loose, positive to CEE assets By Sandor Peto BUDAPEST, July 18 (Reuters) - Central European assets mostly firmed on Monday after Fitch reaffirmed Poland's rating and its outlook on Friday rather than lowering it as some investors had feared.
A fall in Turkish shares after a failed military coup did not spill over into the European Union's emerging markets, which have relatively weak economic links with Turkey.
For example, in the case of Hungary, less than 2 percent of exports go to Turkey.
The region's economies are seen expanding at healthy rates of around 3 percent even though Britain's exit from the EU, decided at a referendum on June 23, could slow growth.
Regional assets benefit from the European Central Bank's policy which is likely to remain loose after its meeting on Thursday, one Budapest-based fixed income trader said.
A weak link in regional markets has been Poland, due to concerns over a rise in the burdens on banks, a loosening budget policy and measures seen as weakening democratic checks and balances.
Standard & Poor's downgraded Poland's credit rating in January, and before a review by Fitch on Friday, a Reuters poll of analysts indicated a 55-percent chance for a cut in the outlook to negative from stable on its A- rating.
But Fitch kept the stable outlook, saying that reduced policy predictability was offset by robust economic fundamentals and improving external finances.
The zloty firmed 0.2 percent to 4.4 against the euro by 0859 GMT. The Czech crown, the forint and the leu gained 0.1 percent.
Both S&P and Moody's have negative outlooks on their ratings for Poland.
"The very diverging rating assessments ... are likely to add to some market pricing uncertainty in case of Poland," Raiffeisen analysts said in a note.
The slide of Turkish shares has not wiped out risk appetite in European markets. Central Europe's main equities indexes rose, with the exception of Budapest, which is retreating from 9-year highs hit last week.
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The main indexes in Prague and Bucharest touched 6-week highs and Warsaw's bluechip index set a 3-week high. The three indexes have now fully recovered from a plunge after the British EU membership referendum.
Rating agencies also reviewed Croatia's and Serbia's ratings on Friday, but the ratings did not change despite some expectations for a cut for Croatia, hit by a political crisis, and an upgrade for Serbia, where economic fundamentals have improved.
Both the kuna and the dinar firmed 0.1 percent against the euro.
New York (AFP) - Canadian superstar Celine Dion is ready with a new album, the first since her husband's death, that will feature collaborations with French stars and uplifting lyricism, her label announced Monday.
The album, which will come out on August 26, is entitled "Encore Un Soir." Dion released the title track -- which means "One More Night" in English -- in May.
The pop diva, 48, had dedicated the ballad to her late husband Rene Angelil, who died in January from throat cancer at age 73.
Angelil was taken by Dion's voice when she was a child and became her musical guide and manager, marrying her in 1994 when she was 26.
The song "Encore Un Soir" was written by Jean-Jacques Goldman, a leading French pop star.
Label Sony Music said that the album will also feature Dion's first song written by two other prominent French rockers, Francis Cabrel and Serge Lama.
"Celine voluntarily chose uplifting themes that focused on life and positivity," the label said in a statement.
Dion will also delve into her Quebecois heritage with a cover of "Ordinaire" by Robert Charlebois, a major artist of the French-speaking province.
Dion, who also sings in English, has sold 220 million albums, placing her among the ranks of the most successful recording artists of all time.
Dion is on a tour that includes nine sold-out shows at the Bercy arena in Paris as well as 10 concerts in Montreal, five in Quebec City and two in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, before she returns to her residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Canadian superstar Celine Dion is ready with a new album, the first since her husband's death, that will feature collaborations with French stars and uplifting lyricism, her label announced Monday.
The album, which will come out on August 26, is entitled "Encore Un Soir." Dion released the title track -- which means "One More Night" in English -- in May.
The pop diva, 48, had dedicated the ballad to her late husband Rene Angelil, who died in January from throat cancer at age 73.
Angelil was taken by Dion's voice when she was a child and became her musical guide and manager, marrying her in 1994 when she was 26.
The song "Encore Un Soir" was written by Jean-Jacques Goldman, a leading French pop star.
Label Sony Music said that the album will also feature Dion's first song written by two other prominent French rockers, Francis Cabrel and Serge Lama.
"Celine voluntarily chose uplifting themes that focused on life and positivity," the label said in a statement.
Dion will also delve into her Quebecois heritage with a cover of "Ordinaire" by Robert Charlebois, a major artist of the French-speaking province.
Dion, who also sings in English, has sold 220 million albums, placing her among the ranks of the most successful recording artists of all time.
Dion is on a tour that includes nine sold-out shows at the Bercy arena in Paris as well as 10 concerts in Montreal, five in Quebec City and two in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, before she returns to her residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has room to increase its fiscal deficit ratio to between 4 and 5 percent to more effectively boost the economy, official media quoted a central bank official as saying.
China's current fiscal deficit target is 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), up from an actual 2.4 percent in 2015.
But there is room for a slight increase, the Shanghai Securities News quoted Sheng Songcheng, director of the Survey and Statistics Department at the People's Bank of China, as saying at a forum on Saturday.
While monetary policy is effective, it is limited and requires coordination with a proactive fiscal policy, Sheng was quoted as saying at the forum, where he also suggested that China increase its government bond issuance.
Sheng also reportedly warned that China has already fallen into a "liquidity trap", where increased money supply is being absorbed by firms that are not in turn investing the cash.
Data on Friday showed that China's economy grew 6.7 percent from a year earlier in the second quarter, slightly faster than expected as higher government spending and a housing boom boosted construction-related activities and industrial output.
But the numbers also fuelled concerns that China's growth is becoming ever more dependant on government spending and debt. First-half bank lending hit a record and government spending jumped 20 percent in June.
At the same time, growth in investment by private firms fell to a record low in the first half, as businesses retrenched in the face of the sluggish economic outlook and weak exports.
(Reporting by Winni Zhou and Nick Heath; Editing by Kim Coghill)
By Karen Lema and Neil Jerome Morales MANILA (Reuters) - Patrolling downtown Manila in his new Toyota, Uber driver Daniel Canezal is grumpy. It's not from the heat, grime or traffic of the capital's clogged streets - it's the Philippines' ramshackle internet service that is making his life a misery. Since signing up with the ride-hailing app this year, the 61-year-old has lost count of fares missed because of patchy smartphone networks as one of Asia's fastest-growing economies labors with one of the region's slowest webs. "They should correct their services, it's embarrassing," said Canezal. That's all about to change, say the operators of the country's two networks, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co (PLDT) and Globe Telecom Inc. After a $1.5 billion deal in May to buy prized mobile spectrum from a potential rival, the duo say they plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to boost coverage. But from Uber drivers to business elites, users complain they are fed up with a duopoly that has had decades to build a reliable web. Industry leaders have already tasked new President Rodrigo Duterte with making the web faster - or risk a drag on the robust economic growth he has vowed to ensure. The tough-talking Duterte wasted little time issuing a threat to liberalize rules to bring in foreign telecoms companies if need be. "Improve the service or I will open the Philippines for competition," Duterte warned PLDT and Globe in May. The need for more speed is crystal-clear: The Philippines' market of 100 million people ranked 21st out of 22 Asian countries in terms of internet speed, according to a study by data analytics firm Ookla - just ahead of Afghanistan. PLDT and Globe say their move to jointly buy food-to-power conglomerate San Miguel Corp's start-up telecoms business - snapping up premium 700-megahertz spectrum compatible with 4G services - was what was needed to kickstart upgrades. But with PLDT and Globe controlling 57 percent and 43 percent of the wireless market respectively, sceptics have noted the deal cements their dominance of a market worth about $6 billion in annual revenue, effectively raising the bar for potential new entrants and undermining incentives to improve. DUOPOLY VS. RED TAPE? The joint PLDT-Globe deal - the biggest acquisition in the country in nearly three years - came soon after a failed attempt by Australia's Telstra Corp to enter the Philippines in a joint venture with San Miguel. Telstra said the deal fell through because commercial terms could not be agreed. "It's one thing for PLDT and Globe to say they will improve service, it's another thing for them to provide that," said Mary Grace Santos, a research fellow with Information and Communications Technology think tank LIRNEasia. "The consumers will definitely lose, the economy will also suffer," said Santos. "We really need to shake things up." At Globe, President Ernest Cu said his firm was not against a third player coming into the market. But he said snail-paced internet service was down to excessive administrative hurdles slowing plans to expand data capacity, rather than the effective existence of a duopoly. "It is incumbent upon the government entities to rid the bureaucracy, the red tape that plagues us," Cu told reporters when the deal was announced late in May. Even if administrative delays are stripped away by Duterte's government, a more serious headache for PLDT and Globe could be in the offing, with some analysts predicting their deal to buy the San Miguel assets may not pass muster as it stands with antitrust authorities. Regulator National Telecommunications Commission has given Globe and PLDT a year to ramp up speeds. Meanwhile a newly formed Philippine Competition Commission is looking into the San Miguel deal closely, even as PLDT and Globe separately asked the Court of Appeals to stop the body from scrutinizing the agreement. Still Globe does have contacts with the new Manila administration: Duterte has appointed Rodolfo Salalima, former chief legal counsel of Globe, to head up the newly formed Department of Information and Communications Technology that will oversee telecoms policy. CONNECTIVITY VITAL In the meantime, customer firms reliant on the internet say they're more worried about lost business than getting value for money in the telecoms service. "It's common for online customers to abandon an e-commerce transaction if it takes so long to load a page," said Jacqueline Van Den Ende, the country head of online property broker Lamudi. At Uber, general manager for Manila, Laurence Cua, highlighted the importance of reliable connectivity, and said some drivers and riders provide feedback citing difficulty connecting online. "We are rapidly moving towards an Internet-dependent economy, where opportunities such as flexible working hours and more effective ways to find riders and drivers are only made possible with the efficient transfer of information," said Cua. For Uber driver Canezal, a livelihood is at stake. "With my savings and my wife's income still not enough to send my children to school, my wife and I decided to have a car through a loan payable in 5 years," he said. "I work full time in Uber...It is now my source of income." (Reporting by Karen Lema and Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty and Kenneth Maxwell)
By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - Freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end "in disaster", a senior Chinese admiral has said, a warning to the United States after last week's ruling against Beijing's claims in the area. China has refused to recognize the ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague that invalidated its vast territorial 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 adherence to the decision. China has repeatedly blamed the United States for stirring up trouble in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually. China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have rival claims, of which China's is the largest. The United States has conducted freedom of navigation patrols close to Chinese-held islands, to Beijing's anger, while China has been bolstering its military presence there. Speaking behind closed doors at a forum in Beijing on Saturday evening, Sun Jianguo, an admiral and deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the powerful Central Military Commission, said the freedom of navigation issue was bogus and one that certain countries repeatedly hyped up. "When has freedom of navigation in the South China Sea ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there won't be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks," he said, according to a transcript of his comments seen by Reuters on Monday. China is the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and won't let anybody damage it, Sun said. "But China consistently opposes so-called military freedom of navigation, which brings with it a military threat and which challenges and disrespects the international law of the sea," Sun said. "This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way," he added, without elaborating. A U.S. Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States reserved the right to carry out freedom of navigation operations and the Chinese admiral's comments would not change that. Sun also said the court case at The Hague must be used by China's armed forces to improve its capabilities "so that when push comes to shove, the military can play a decisive role in the last moment to defend our national sovereignty and interests". Despite the warnings, China and the United States have been maintaining open lines of communication, with U.S. Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson meeting the head of the Chinese navy, Wu Shengli, in Beijing on Monday. "I think that you can visit China this time at our invitation, that shows both sides attach great concern to maritime security," Wu told Richardson in brief comments in front of reporters. In the meeting, Wu said China would not stop building reefs and islands in the sea, state-owned Xinhua news agency reported, with that construction also a part of China's efforts to bolster its claims. Separately, China's Maritime Safety Administration said on Monday that an area just off the east of the island province of Hainan would be a no-sail zone from July 19-21 while military drills take place. China generally describes its exercises in the South China Sea as routine. China's air force also said on its microblog it had recently carried out "normal battle patrols" over the South China Sea involving bombers, spy planes and flying tankers, including over Scarborough Shoal, which is disputed with the Philippines. Such air patrols would become "a regular practice" in the future, Xinhua reported an air force spokesman as saying. (Additional reporting by Beijing monitoring team and Idrees Ali in Washington.; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Nick Macfie and Paul Simao)
BEIJING (Reuters) - Home price rises in China slowed in June for a second straight month, adding to fears that a construction-led rebound in the economy may not be sustainable.
The property market is a key driver of the world's second-largest economy and a robust recovery in home prices and sales gave a stronger-than-expected boost to activity in the first half of the year.
But slowing price growth in smaller cities and cooling property investment show the bounce may already be fading, raising the risk of weaker economic growth in coming months.
Home prices in China's 70 major cities rose 7.3 percent in June from a year earlier, an official survey showed on Monday, accelerating from a 6.9 percent rise in May.
To be sure, some of the biggest cities showed eye-popping gains on a yearly basis, with prices in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen up 46.7 percent and Shanghai up 27.7 percent.
Gains on a monthly basis continued to slow, however, as cities tightened policies amid fears of a housing price bubble.
The monthly rise slowed slightly to 0.8 percent in June, easing from 0.9 percent in May, according to a Reuters calculation based on data issued by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
"We continue to expect the property rebound to subside and property investment growth to fall in the second half of the year," economists at Nomura said in a note, predicting sales would stabilise and a large glut of unsold homes would keep pressure on prices in some areas.
"As such, our long-term view of a gradual (economic) slowdown remains unchanged."
Prices stalled or fell on a monthly basis in 15 cities in June, compared to 10 cities in May, with all of the weakness is smaller cities.
Industrial cities Tangshan, Jinzhou and Baotou went from gains to declines month-on-month in June.
First-tier cities maintained recent rapid price rises, with Shenzhen and Shanghai rising 2.0 percent and 2.6, respectively, on a monthly basis, faster than in May. That could raise the risk of further property cooling measures in some areas.
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CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION
The recovery in China's property market and a government infrastructure building spree in recent months have helped shore up growth in economy, which has been weighed down by weak demand at home and abroad, cooling investment and excess industrial capacity.
But there are increasing signs of fatigue in the nine-month-old property rally, raising concerns about both the economic outlook and banks' heavy exposure to mortgage lending.
Growth in investment in China's real estate sector slowed in first half to 6.1 percent, down from 7 percent in Jan-May, presenting a challenge for policymakers who need the critical sector to maintain growth without creating a price bubble.
For June alone, property investment was up only 3.5 percent from a year ago, according to Reuters calculations, compared with 6.6 percent in May.
Policymakers are facing a tough balancing act. The concern is that tighter mortgage rules in the largest cities have not cooled prices enough, while fragile markets in secondary cities that are beset by oversupply likely need more stimulus to keep prices from sliding again.
After the investment data on Friday, economists at ANZ said that China's property-led recovery was over, which could pose further risks to the economy in the second half of the year.
(Reporting by Winni Zhou, Nicholas Heath and Elias Glenn; Editing by Kim Coghill)
By Stine Jacobsen and Paul Carsten
OSLO/BEIJING (Reuters) - A $1.2 billion takeover of Opera Software by a group of Chinese internet firms fell through on Monday after failing to get regulatory approval in time, sending the Norwegian browser firm's shares to a seven-month low.
The deal needed a green light from the United States and China, and one firm in the Chinese consortium said U.S. privacy concerns would have led to an investigation into some of Opera's products that risked delaying the acquisition for up to a year.
Opera and the Chinese group have instead come up with an alternative deal worth $600 million which strips out some products and services in a bid to overcome regulatory hurdles.
The so-called Kunqi consortium, which includes online and mobile games distributor Beijing Kunlun Tech Co and search and security business Qihoo 360 Technology Co, will now buy certain parts of Opera's consumer business.
It will acquire Opera's mobile phone and desktop computer browser business, its performance and privacy apps division, its technology licensing business, as well as its stake in Chinese joint venture nHorizon.
However, the consortium will no longer buy Opera's advertising and marketing business, its TV operations, nor its game-related apps.
The hope is that the alternative deal will make it easier to win regulatory approval from U.S. authorities, one of the Chinese partners told Reuters on Monday.
"According to what we know, it was because of Opera's other services, and involves very many users' privacy. This would be extremely rigorously investigated during the U.S. government's audit and probably would have delayed the entire acquisition process by six months to a year," a Kunlun spokeswoman said.
"So we opted for a better method, and chose Opera's core assets, namely the consumer business, as the target of the acquisition. That greatly accelerates the acquisition process," she said in an emailed statement.
Opera declined to comment Kunlun's statement to Reuters.
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The acquisition was part of a complex of deals being done by the Chinese buyers seeking to join forces in their home market, which is dominated by giant rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent. Buying Opera will also help the group expand into emerging markets in Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
EXTRAORDINARY DIVIDEND
Shares in Opera, which had flagged potential regulatory issues last week, slumped as much as 17 percent but recovered to trade at 54.25 crowns by 1210 GMT, 11 percent higher than before the original deal was announced in February.
Earlier on Monday, Opera said the original deal was lacking regulatory approval, without saying whether it was awaiting the green light from China, the United States, or both.
The final deadline for the offer, and the deadline for approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, were both on Friday.
"No regulators have said no. We have not received an answer within the agreed deadline," Opera Chairman Sverre Munck told Reuters, adding that the parties could have postponed the deal but decided to pursue the alternative instead.
"A vast part of the investors are disappointed. We understand that, and we are also disappointed that the original offer didn't go through," said Munck.
"People had expected a payout of 71 crowns, they won't get that. Instead, they will get an extraordinary dividend by autumn at some point," he said, without giving a figure for the payout.
The hope is that the new deal, which has been approved by Opera's board of directors, will close late in the third quarter. It is expected the proceeds will be used for a distribution to shareholders, share buyback and debt repayment.
"Since it will not repay all its net debt, but maybe reduce net debt by around half ... the expected distribution of one time dividends and share buy backs is likely to be between 25-30 crowns per share," Norne Securities analyst Karl-Johan Molnes said.
Qihoo and the Kunqi consortium, which also includes Golden Brick Silk Road (Shenzhen) Equity Investment Fund and its Yonglian Investment affiliate, declined to comment. Chinese regulators did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury, which handles media inquiries for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, was not immediately reachable for comment outside regular office hours.
(Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom, Gwladys Fouche and Ole Petter Skonnord in Oslo; writing by Gwladys Fouche; editing by Susan Thomas and David Clarke)
AMMAN (Reuters) - At least 20 civilians were killed on Monday in air strikes by U.S.-led coalition planes on the Islamic State-held city of Manbij in northern Syria, near the border with Turkey, a monitoring group said. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the raids hit the northern Hazawneh quarter of the besieged city where U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, are engaged in street fighting with the militants. The monitor said more than 100 civilians had now been killed in U.S.-led raids on the city and its outskirts since the SDF launched a major offensive at the end of May to seize the last territory held by Islamic State on the frontier with Turkey. Progress into the city has been slow with the militants deploying snipers, planting mines and preventing civilians from leaving, hampering efforts to bomb the city without causing large casualties, Kurdish sources said. The sources say Islamic State has prevented thousands of the city's more than 50,000 population from leaving, effectively holding them hostage to slow the advance of the SDF fighters. Rebels and many residents say Russia's bombing campaign has been even more indiscriminate and accuse the Russians of deliberately hitting hospitals, schools and infrastructure in opposition-held areas, something Moscow denies. The Manbij operation marks the most ambitious advance by a group allied to Washington in Syria since the United States launched its military campaign against Islamic State two years ago. (Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Nablus (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Clashes erupted Monday as Israel's military demolished the home of a Palestinian accused of involvement in a February attack outside Jerusalem's Old City that killed a policewoman, officials said.
The family home of Bilal Abu Zeid in Qabatiya, in the north of the occupied West Bank, was destroyed by a bulldozer around 2:00 am (2300 GMT), Israel's army said.
Clashes erupted when the military convoy arrived, with Israel's military saying soldiers responded after being targeted by Molotov cocktails and fire from improvised guns.
The army confirmed three Palestinians were hit.
Palestinian officials reported six Palestinians wounded, including two by live fire and four by rubber bullets.
Israel regularly destroys the homes of Palestinian attackers in what it says is a deterrent.
Rights groups and Palestinians condemn the practice as collective punishment that forces family members to pay for the crimes of others.
Abu Zeid is accused of having assisted three Palestinian attackers in the February 3 incident that killed the police officer and badly wounded another outside the Old City's Damascus Gate.
He is currently imprisoned by Israel. Details on how he allegedly assisted the attackers were not provided.
The three Palestinians were armed with rifles, knives and explosives, Israeli authorities said at the time, and the policewoman died from a gunshot wound to the head.
The three attackers were killed at the scene and their family homes were demolished two months later.
Since October, around 10 Palestinians from Qabatiya have been killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.
Violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories since October has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese.
Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.
Others were shot dead during protests and clashes, while some were killed by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year expedited home demolitions of Palestinian attackers in a bid to deter the violence.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- More than most presidential elections, the 2016 race has been driven by arguments over immigration policy, largely because Donald Trump, expected to win the Republican presidential nomination this week, has made border security, the construction of a wall between the US and Mexico, and the threat of terrorism a central part of his campaign.
In Cleveland, the site of the GOP convention that starts today, two men who came to the United States as immigrants joined thousands of law enforcement officers, convention-goers and locals on the streets Sunday afternoon in a city that felt oddly both giddy and on edge.
Recent shootings of multiple law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas, the long string of African American men killed unnecessarily by police, promises to show up armed in Cleveland by gun rights advocates both supporting Trump and opposing him, had created the potential, if not the guarantee, of violence.
Related: Post-Baton Rouge, Police in Cleveland Look Warily at RNC Protests
Hoping to prevent that, 80-year-old retired psychotherapist Yusif Barakat stood at a trolley stop in the middle of Euclid Avenue. Thin and bearded, he wore a skullcap and a bright yellow vest with the words Peace Team on the front. Others in the same vest milled around. There were 15 of them, he said, mostly from Michigan, where Barakat lives, outside Detroit.
I am originally from Palestine, he said. I became a refugee when I was 12 years old.
Barakat said that his group, whose members have been trained to help de-escalate potentially violent situations, had come to Cleveland with the aim of physically inserting themselves into the expected protests, using their own bodies to maintain a presence between factions, so that they can say whatever they want, as long as theres no violence.
The police know were here, and were supposed to have armbands when we get to the location, Barakat said.
Related: Cleveland on the Eve of the Convention
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Asked what protesters he was expecting, he appeared to genuinely have no idea -- or care very much.
Who knows? he said. They could be the gun holders for Trump, they could be a lot of people against Trump.
The point was to prevent things from getting out of control. The consciousness of America is one of violence, because we grew up that way.... We personally believe in non-violence and we try to maintain that.
Half a mile away, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a red Make America Great Again hat, artist Julian Raven stood in Clevelands Public Square. He was propping up an eight-foot long copy of his much larger painting Unafraid and Unashamed, which he has been showing across the country as part of a pro-Trump pilgrimage.
Related: Will Trumps Unconventional Republican Convention Unify the GOP?
The painting (the original is 15 feet long and 7 feet high) is dominated by a stern-looking portrait of Trump, set next to a bald eagle with a billowing American flag in its talons, flying above the earth as the sun rises on North America.
Born in London and raised in Spain, Raven now lives and works in Elmira, NY. He is a convert to evangelical Christianity, who came to the US in the 1990s and only recently became an American citizen.
But he doesnt seem too enthusiastic about others taking the same path. He spoke strongly in favor of Trumps plan to crack down on illegal immigrants, as he handed out flyers promoting his tour and his work.
As black and white children played together in squares central fountain and people of all races sat and enjoyed a sunny afternoon in the calm before the storm of the Republican convention, Raven leaned over the top of his painting. He flashed a thumbs-up at a photographer, and chanted, Build that wall! Build that Wall!
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
What does this mean to us, as we face the week in Cleveland?
2: In the preparations for the Rules committee meetings, we learned that the Trump campaigns own internal whipping of the delegates indicates that they have fewer than 900 delegates who can stand Donald Trump. The suspicions of the #NeverTrump movement that the vast majority of Republicans, and even the vast majority of the delegates, can stand him are proven correct.
1: In the Rules committee meetings, we learned that the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee leadership commonly known as the GOP Establishment are now happy warriors together, working hand-in-glove to manage a rubber-stamp convention.
We learned a few interesting things in the weekend before the 2016 Republican National Convention two particularly important things that had been suspected, but only now are proven.
A Divided Party
The Republican Party has never been fully unanimous. It is a big tent party, not just by design, but by necessity. As the Democrats have driven conservatives, moderates, and even mild liberals out of their party, the GOP was the only place for them to go. The Democratic Party is now, therefore, a fully socialist party, so if youre not socialist, youre a Republican by default.
This fact alone should settle every election; since most Americans are not (intentionally) socialist, the GOP should win every election. But the Democrats are splendid at politics, if not at governing, while the Republicans are fine at governing, but dreadful at politics. So the Democrats win, and the Republicans lose.
Two key reasons are the massive welfare state and the immigration balloon The nation especially the electorate has essentially been invaded; we have tens of millions of people now participating in the electoral process who have no tie with, possibly even no consciousness of, the Founding Fathers and their philosophy of natural rights, Western civilization, market economics, and the rule of law. Is it any wonder the Democrats win and the Republicans lose?
All the Republicans need to do is come together, and present a uniform message, through an effective messenger. Unfortunately, the Republicans have had several poor messengers in a row.
The Republican electorate has been looking forward to 2016 for years; this was to be the year when our deep bench of wonderful candidates was guaranteed to produce a good one. With proven governors and proven senators, the GOP was certain to nominate a pro until Donald Trump invaded the process and declared a populist moment. All you need in a field of 17 is to have the largest 17th, and sure enough, Donald Trumps primary votes won him the largest share in the convoluted six-month Trial by Ordeal that we call the primary season.
The convention now begins with a division it has never had before. Past nominees have always been from among the legitimate groups within the GOP. We have had conservatives (Harding, Coolidge, Goldwater, Reagan), moderates (Eisenhower, Ford, the Bushes), even liberals (Nixon, Dole, McCain) but as they were always experienced people of the party people who had held office as senator or governor or vice president, or even commanding general the party could always unify, if a bit grudgingly, before.
In 2016, Donald Trump enters the convention without any grounds for demanding such unity. Never an officeholder before, never a candidate before, never even a precinct captain before. And yet he and his supporters demand the same kind of partisan loyalty that his predecessors had actually earned.
They wonder why the non-Trump supporters are offended, even repelled, by such an approach.
The divisions that were always there, remain present today. But Donald Trump has added a whole new layer of division the entitlement of the outsider who won the primaries vs. the disgust of the majority who rightly feel invaded, cheated and robbed by an interloper who has staged a hostile takeover of the Grand Old Party.
The Nations Needs
What does America need today? The daily headlines leave it without question: we need a man or woman at the help who has real-life experience solving our nations problems.
We have a criminal justice system that allows criminals to escape conviction, and allows convicted criminals to escape serious sentencing.
We have a military that is stretched ever further, with ever fewer resources, ever more limited by outrageous Rules of Engagement, and wasted by disjointed and fatalistic foreign policy.
We have ongoing unemployment, spiraling downward for a decade, kept hidden only by growing entitlement programs and new ways of counting, to hide the fact that 95 million people of working age are now outside the workforce.
We suffer an ongoing loss of manufacturing, as plant after plant, industry after industry, have fled to foreign shores not been stolen, as some would have it, but driven off by a tax structure, litigious legal climate, and regulatory leviathan that have made life unbearable for the manufacturing sector.
Our culture suffers daily from attacks on traditional morality, attacks on church and synagogue, attacks on police and schools, attacks on charities and civic groups. Obamacare was created to wreck the healthcare sector, from your neighborhood doctor, nurse, and insurance salesman to the wonderful hospital down the street. The very foundation of American society is attacked daily by the press and the activist Left. They file class action lawsuits demanding that we throw out physical standards for men at the fire house, that we stop having mens and womens bathrooms and locker rooms in the schools everything American is under assault, from the local level to the national.
Our nation doesnt need a Hillary Clinton, who comes to the race with all the negative experience in the world. Her resume is impressive, from Watergate investigation clerk to corporate lawyer to first lady, from the U.S. Senate to the State Department. But all her experience, at every level and in virtually every job, proves her to have identified with the problems rather than with the solutions.
Hillary Clinton is in every way identified with the breaking of our criminal justice situation, not its correction. She is identified with the weakening of our military and destruction of our foreign policy, not their improvement. Her economics would continue to worsen our job crisis and our shrinking economy. And she has fought against the wonderful culture of the American Way her entire life; if elected, she would only work to intentionally worsen everything from which we already suffer.
As an alternative, who does the GOP have to offer? Through a clever and incredibly lucky combination of marketing talent and an open primary system, Donald Trump won enough delegates to arrive at Cleveland as the frontrunner. But he has no proven ability to correct any of these problems he may have undemonstrated ability, of course, but no proven ability he is a hotel-builder and television star, which certainly takes talent, but hardly talent that translates to the job at hand.
And Donald Trump arrives in Cleveland with forty years of baggage that would sink even the most talented candidate.
The Deep Bench
By contrast, the Republican Party has a deep bench of wonderful talent the very talent that we saw in the 2016 primaries, but which was too often obscured by the sparkle and flash of the Trump campaign.
We have Scott Walker, who managed a metro area as Milwaukee County Executive, then managed an amazing turnaround that not only saved the State of Wisconsin on a statewide level, but even saved the institutionally bankrupt school districts of his state by retooling their economics to be sustainable at last.
We have Tom Coburn, a six year Congressman and ten year senator, a medical doctor and budget whiz who participated in the great mid 1990s leadership that reined in the Clinton administration and brought the federal budget into balance.
We have Ted Cruz, who as solicitor-general of Texas united dozens of state governments in organized opposition to federal encroachments, successfully arguing case after case before the Supreme Court, becoming the defender of the Constitution in the United States Senate.
And we have so many more the Republican Party of 2016 has so many talented and experienced potential presidents-to-be Jindal and Perry, Abbott and Martinez, Rubio and Haley, Sessions and Pence that many in the Republican base didnt even participate in the 2016 primaries. They thought that from such a bench, we couldnt go wrong, so they sat it out.
Sadly, while an overly confident Republican base sat out the primaries, independents and Democrats, disgusted by the choices in the Democrat primaries, came over and took Republican ballots. Some for good reasons, some for bad. Some because they truly liked the 140-character soundbites that Donald Trump issued hourly, some because they wanted to vote for the man they knew would be the weakest candidate in November.
Some of these will vote for Donald Trump if hes the nominee; some would never dream of it. Some will never vote again; they were attracted while he was hot, and theyll be back to the fall TV lineup again, their interest drawn elsewhere, as it always is. Many already regret their vote for Trump, as theyve seen him retreat from what had seemed to be such firm positions in the spring, which he now calls just suggestions as he pivots for the fall.
The Republican Convention Delegates face a quandary: what to do, when fewer than half of us can stand him, when most of us sincerely doubt he can win, when most of us know that the only thing he has going for him is that Hillary Clintons negatives are as high as his?
The Delegates look back on this spring, and look ahead to the fall, and dream of what might have been
Its Not Too Late
But in fact, it is NOT too late. The fact remains that only 900 delegates are firmly committed to Donald Trump. And the fact remains that the Republican bench is still as good as it was a year ago.
Everyone on that beautiful bench is still there, ready and willing, but with another year of experience!
If just half of the Trump Delegates who really cant stand him just sit on their hands and abstain on the first ballot, well have him under the necessary threshold. With every successive ballot, more delegates are free to vote their conscience.
As of this writing, the Republican Party can still have the exciting, thrilling convention that Americans dream of, possibly even the kind of excitement that we havent been able to truly enjoy since the television age began.
Just imagine the speeches as delegates place into nomination the knowns like Coburn and Cruz and Walker and the dark horses perhaps senators, governors, past cabinet officials we havent thought of yet as well?
The convention will be watched and Americans will see the Republican party in action, a party that the press has hidden from them for year. A party of successes at the state level. A party of principle, a party of proud Americans who love their Constitution and the heritage of our Founding Fathers.
If we leave Cleveland with someone else atop our ticket, we will create levels of genuine interest, and even true excitement, that we havent seen since 1980.
Republican Delegates, its in your hands. Be brave, be principled, be Americans.
Copyright 2016 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based international trade lecturer, writer, and actor. A former area Republican party volunteer, campaign manager and onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party Chairman, he has now been a recovering politician for nineteen years (but, like any addiction, youre never really cured).
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.
CLEVELAND, Ohio As the gavel dropped at the Republican National Convention here, kicking off the most crucial week yet for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton gave a speech calling for criminal justice reform just a few hours away in this swing state.
We all know about that other convention happening up in Cleveland today, Clinton told the NAACP national convention Monday afternoon in Cincinnati. My opponent in this race may have a different view, but theres nowhere Id rather be than right here with all of you. Trump turned down the NAACPs invitation to speak, citing convention duties.
While the RNC began its day of law-and-order programming titled Make America Safe Again, Clinton laid out her own criminal justice agenda, calling for an end to violence between police and citizens, as well as a renewed commitment to rebuild trust between them. The presumptive Democratic nominee began her speech by saying her heart was broken by the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, La. If you take aim at that and at them, you take aim at all of us, she said.
But Clinton also called for national standards on police use of force and a commitment to reform the justice system from the ground up. She said the changes were necessary to make the justice system fairer to all, particularly minority men.
Everyone is safer when there is respect for the law and when everyone is respected by the law, she said.
The Republican National Committee quickly shot back, accusing Clintons speech of embracing empty platitudes. Donald Trump wants to restore law and order to our communities and Make America Safe Again, and at a time when the country is in need of healing, our Party is committed to providing strong leadership at every level that will achieve peace, unity, and a stronger America, said Telly Lovelace, an RNC spokesman.
This year, Clinton is defying the unspoken tradition of lying low during the rival partys political convention. Shes scheduled to speak five times early this week, with many expecting her to announce her vice presidential pick on Friday.
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Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign is holding daily briefings featuring surrogates just a few miles from the Quicken Loans Arena every morning. The counter-convention effort is called Better Than This, and will draw attention to Trumps comments at the convention. The campaign put out an edition of a mock newspaper called the Trump Times, which includes a satirical advice column called Dear Donnie, horoscopes (Cancer: Be greedy, greedy, greedy) and a faux travel column urging readers to summer in Atlantic City to see the tragedy of ruined businesses and lives.
Monday morning, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland addressed reporters at the temporary Clinton HQ in Cleveland, alongside DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz. Strickland, a Democrat, said hes proud of Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich for not throwing his support behind Trump and avoiding the convention. Hes not my best personal friend in all of the world but I can say that I admire his integrity in making the decision that he has made to avoid giving Donald Trump his endorsement, Strickland said of Kasich, who defeated him in the 2010 elections.
Wasserman Schultz and Strickland pointed to the many national Republicans who also are skipping their own convention, saying it reflected badly on Trumps chances in the general election. (Kasich is skipping the convention altogether. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman is set to make a brief appearance without speaking.) The Republican leadership in Ohio is sending a message, said Strickland, who is now running against Portman. If they thought Donald Trump was going to do well in Ohio, they wouldnt be avoiding it.
Clinton and Trump are running fairly close to each other in head-to-head national polls so far, but Wasserman Schultz argued that Clinton has the edge in swing states and in the ground game. The Republicans are extremely far behind, there is panic setting in, Wasserman Schultz said. We are very clearly out-organizing and out-mobilizing the Republicans.
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With the Republican National Convention kicking off Monday in Cleveland, the filmmakers behind Blood on the Mountain will offer a free screening of the coal mining-themed documentary in the city on Tuesday, July 19.
The screening, which will be held at Nuevo Cleveland, is being tied to the convention, where the future of coal mining is expected to be referenced by Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has said he supports the industry. The screening at Nuevo Cleveland will be followed by a Q&A, intended to give coal miners a platform to speak near the RNC.
"The American worker may not have a voice at the RNC, but we're here to give everyone who wants to be a heard a platform," said the film's director Mari-Lynn Evans.
Co-directed by Jordan Freeman, Blood on the Mountain is an investigation into the economic and environmental injustices that have resulted from corporate control on West Virginia coal mining and the ripple effect on American workers.
The film, which is produced by Deborah Wallace, Evans and Freeman, will be released theatrically nationwide by Abramorama in the fall 2016. The issue of coal mining is expected to play throughout the presidential election. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has supported plans to move away from coal-based energy.
Beirut (AFP) - Air strikes by the US-led coalition killed at least 21 civilians in and around a stronghold of the Islamic State group in northern Syria on Monday, a monitor said.
At least 15 civilians were killed in raids in a northern district of Manbij while six others were killed in a village near the city, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The jihadist bastion lies on their main supply route between Syria and Turkey in the northern province of Aleppo.
It has faced a US-backed offensive by Kurdish and Arab fighters since May 31 that has caused thousands of civilians to flee.
But tens of thousands of civilians are still trapped in Manbij, most of which is controlled by the jihadists.
On June 23, the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters broke into western districts of Manbij, after blocking the road south of the city heading to IS's de facto capital of Raqa.
But their advance has been slowed in the past month because of landmines planted by the jihadists, which are also fighting back by launching suicide attacks against the SDF.
Founded in October, the Kurdish-dominated alliance has seized territory from IS across large parts of northern and northeastern Syria.
Capturing Manbij would be its most significant victory yet.
Syria's war has killed more than 280,000 people and displaced millions since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
By Ginger Gibson and Emily Stephenson CLEVELAND (Reuters) - The Republican National Convention briefly erupted in chaos on Monday when opponents of presumptive U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump stormed out of the room and others chanted in a failed attempt to force a vote opposing his candidacy. The turmoil threatened efforts by the Trump campaign to show the party had united behind the businessman-turned-politician and distracted from the day's theme of "Make America Safe Again," meant to depict Trump as a strong leader capable of shielding the country from violence and Islamist militancy. Trump's son and adviser, Donald Trump Jr., threatened the leaders of the attempted revolt, saying: "Your careers are finished" in a message posted on Twitter. The anti-Trump forces wanted to change the party's nominating rules to allow delegates to support alternative Republican candidates over Trump. Party leaders held a voice vote, then declared the opponents lacked enough votes, triggering pandemonium on the floor of the Cleveland basketball arena where Trump is due to be formally nominated this week for the Nov. 8 election. Many delegates began chanting: "Roll Call. Roll Call," effectively calling for a lengthy process that would allow every state to weigh in. Some, including the Colorado delegation, walked off the convention floor saying they had to assess their next steps. "This entire system is rigged to force the vote for Donald Trump," said Kendal Unruh, one of the Colorado delegates. Ken Cuccinelli, a delegate from Virginia who also favored a roll-call vote, called the situation "appalling". "This is the party of law and order. ... If you won't obey your own rules there is no reason to think you'll obey any others," Cuccinelli, the state's former attorney general, told MSNBC. While delivering a jolt to the highly scripted program, the anti-Trump forces failed, their rebellion quashed. The convention then approved the party policy platform and took a scheduled break before a lineup of evening speakers due to include Trump's wife, Melania, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But the furor, an embarrassment to Trump, put a spotlight on the deep divisions within the party that have emerged over his candidacy. A string of senior Republicans, worried about Trump's temperament and policies, were already avoiding the convention. KILLINGS OVERSHADOW CONVENTION The gathering opened on Monday afternoon in the shadow of racially tinged killings of police officers and black men, and as protesters for and against Trump faced off in a plaza a few blocks from the convention, shouting slogans at each other, separated by a wall of police. Trump allies planned to promote what he has billed as a tough line on law and order and national security in speeches on Monday night. Sunday's shooting of three policemen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana - a targeted attack that may have been in retaliation for a series of police killings of black Americans - hung over the gathering. Trump has sought to position himself as the law-and-order candidate in an echo of Richard Nixon's successful presidential campaign of 1968. Speakers were likely to promise that Trump will crack down on Islamic State abroad and toughen up on crime at home if he wins the election. Iowa's Republican Party chairman, Jeff Kaufmann, said the top issue a month ago for voters in the state was the economy. Now, he said, he was hearing concerns about security. "Rightly or wrongly, the shootings that we've had have vaulted, not just national security in terms of external terrorism but also the knowledge that terrorism is occurring within our country," Kaufmann said. Such concerns might lead voters to choose Trump over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in November, he said. (Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson, Amy Tennery, Michelle Conlin, Scott Malone, Daniel Trotta and Jonathan Allen; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Howard Goller and Peter Cooney)
CLEVELAND - Ohio Governor John Kasich will not be attending the RNC Convention being held in his state, but he did visit with Illinois delegates at a nearby hotel Monday afternoon. According to ABC's Ben Bradley, Kasich did not voice support for Trump, nor did he encourage delegates to support the presumed nominee.
San Francisco (AFP) - Netflix shares plunged Monday after its latest quarterly update showed subscriber growth below expectations for the streaming television giant.
Netflix shares tumbled 15 percent in after-hours trade after the quarterly report.
The company said it ended the second quarter with 83 million subscribers, adding 1.7 million. That was well below Netflix's own forecast of 2.5 million additions and lower than many analyst forecasts.
Netflix said growth was hurt, especially in the United States, when it raised rates on many long-time subscribers who had been "grandfathered" when it hiked most prices.
"We think some members perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering," the company said in a statement.
"Churn of members who were actually ungrandfathered is modest and conforms to our expectations."
Net profit for the quarter was $41 million, up from $26 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $2.1 billion from $1.6 billion.
Netflix said its march to becoming a global television provider was making progress, projecting gains of some two million subscribers outside the US in the third quarter.
"Our approach in expanding our global footprint in January was to launch a service targeting early adopters and then to listen, learn and iterate quickly," it said.
"Now that we are six months in, we will localize Netflix in Poland and Turkey with the addition of local language in the user interface, subtitles and dubbing. Localization in other markets will take place over time as economically prudent."
The streaming television pioneer in January significantly expanded its global footprint to 190 countries, making its Internet TV service available in 130 new markets, including India -- but not China.
July 18 (Reuters) - Corvex Management LP, the activist fund run by former Carl Icahn protege Keith Meister, has amassed small stakes in U.S. seeds company Monsanto Co and its aspiring acquirer, Germany's Bayer AG, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.
Corvex, which also owned Monsanto stock two years ago, would favor a sale to Bayer for a rich enough price, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is not public.
Corvex declined to comment, while Monsanto and Bayer offered no immediate comment.
Activist hedge fund Glenview Capital Management LLC already owns a 2.5 percent stake in Monsanto, making it the company's seventh-largest shareholder, according to regulatory filings.
(Reporting by Michael Flaherty and Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Tensions were evident in Nice on July 18 as crowds gathered to observe a minutes silence for the 84 people killed in the Bastille Day attack. In this encounter, captured by a reporter at the scene, a man is heard tell a woman to go back to her own country. She responds angrily, shouting that her country is France, and calling the man a racist. Police then intervene to try to calm the woman. Credit: Remy Buisine
An Arizona couple found themselves stuck in the sewers after wandering for hours in search of a doomed puppy.
Read: Two Doberman Pinschers Rescued After They Somehow Became Lodged in a Storm Drain
According to the Phoenix Fire Department, the man and woman in their 40s said they had seen the puppy fall into a storm drain.
They promptly followed it in an attempt to rescue the dog, although authorites said they did not know how the two adults got inside.
"[Storm drains] are actually built to keep people out so this exact thing does not happen," a representative from the Phoenix Fire Department told InsideEdition.com.
They had been reportedly walking around 16-feet underground for hours, both in search for the puppy and for a way out when a passerby heard screaming as he was biking past the block, and dialed 911.
"They're lucky that somebody actually heard them screaming for help," the rep said, explaining the toxic air within the sewers can make it a very dangerous place to be.
Read: Shocking 911 Call From Man Trapped in Cargo Plane: 'I'm Inside This Plane!'
Officials promptly arrived and pulled the pair to safety in an hour-long rescue.
The couple was not injured. However, they never found the puppy.
Watch: Couple Refuses to Give Up on Dog With Backward Paws: 'Our Dogs Are Our Children'
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Donald Trump showed off his latest acquisition - uh, vice-presidential running mate - Sunday night in a 60 Minutes joint interview featuring him and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Viewers, who had no doubt prepared for the broadcast by Googling "Who is Mike Pence?" were probably left as befuddled by interviewer Lesley Stahl, who at times seemed to want to wink at the camera and ask, "Can you believe this?"
Trump explained his choice of Pence in his typical businessman fashion, eschewing such traditional approaches as say, having shared political views. "I looked at the numbers," he explained, referring to Pence's economic record but sounding more like he had just picked up a particularly choice piece of real estate. "I think we will have very good chemistry," he added, as if forgetting that he was on 60 Minutes, not The Dating Game.
Stahl began the proceedings by asking the not-so-hardball question, "Are you ready for the world we are facing today?" Trump unsurprisingly assured her he was, disappointing the anchor who was apparently hoping that he would suddenly be gripped by a panic attack, mutter an anguished "no," and slink off, never to be seen again.
As for Pence, Trump is getting his money's worth, with the politician - who describes himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order" (Trump barely qualifies in any of the three categories) - acting so lovestruck and moony-eyed that at times he seemed ready to jump onto Trump's lap. He gushed that the businessman candidate embodied "broad-shouldered American strength," as if Trump was running for the title of Mr. Universe, not president. He later described his running mate as "one of the best negotiators in the world" as Trump's orange tresses began to expand like a peacock's feathers.
But if anyone was hoping to get a better idea of who Pence is - and that includes pretty much everyone - they were left disappointed by the interview, which, like all things Trump, inevitably focused on Trump. He dominated the discussion while the handsome, square-jawed, white-haired Pence looked on adoringly.
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To her credit, Stahl pressed hard on the policy differences between the two men, which are legion. Trump brushed off Pence's strong support of the Iraq War, including his vote to authorize it while he was in Congress. "I don't care," Trump said dismissively. "He's entitled to make a mistake once in a while."
Pence, not as adept at duplicity, had a harder time dealing with the subject. He was bobbing and weaving throughout, shamelessly reversing his previous positions on such issues as free trade, suspending immigration of Muslims and waterboarding. Donald tried to help him out by altering his language, among other things. "I'm all for free trade," he announced, utterly contradicting himself. And he backed off his stance on banning Muslims from entering the country, explaining that potential immigrants would instead be subjected to "extreme vetting," which he'll probably soon be pitching as a new reality series.
When he was asked if he would be willing to criticize Trump for such things as going too far in his name-calling, Pence managed to turn even that response into a compliment. "One of the things I found out about this man is that he appreciates candor," he gushed.
Trump returned the favor when Stahl followed up by asking if Pence agreed with Trump's insulting John McCain for having been "captured." "You can say yes," Trump graciously instructed Pence, who was beginning to take on the glazed look of a battered wife.
The political shotgun marriage was sealed by the end of the segment, with Pence declaring, "This good man, I believe, will be a great president of the United States."
For any other politician, that statement would have been the cue for a similarly effusive remark. But Trump, of course, is not your ordinary politician. "I love what he just said," he crowed. You could tell he was already figuring out how to emblazon his name on Pence's forehead.
BELGRADE (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.[L8N19D2YV] 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. 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)
And developer sales down 50% in June.
Singapore dollar bondholders, already stung by the first default since 2009, face more companies struggling to meet the terms of their debt, after two oil and gas companies sought to extend maturities. Ausgroup Ltd. and Otto Marine Ltd. are among 10 Singapore-listed firms that have started a process to loosen bond vows this year, up from eight in 2015, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. Read more here.
Singapore Exchange Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Loh Boon Chye apologized for a technical malfunction that angered traders, promising to do better and saying the company will be accountable for Thursdays five-hour halt that attracted a rebuke from the city-states central bank. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said it will review SGXs investigation findings before deciding on appropriate supervisory actions. Find out more here.
Excluding executive condominiums (ECs), property developers sold 536 new private homes last month, down 50 percent from the 1,065 units sold in May, according to fresh data released by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). The significant drop in sales can be attributed to the lack of new units launched in June. Only 234 units were released to buyers, down more than 80 percent from the month before. Read more here.
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On this day in 1947, Congress changed the order of who can succeed the President and Vice President in office, more closely reflecting the wishes of the Founding Fathers.
truman speech
When the Constitution was written in 1787, the issue of who takes the Presidents place in case of death, disability or resignation was murky at best. It took until 1841 for John Tyler, the first Vice President to face the problem and settle the question at least until the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967.
After William Henry Harrison died just a month after his own inauguration in April 1841, Tyler decided to take the oath as President and not as Acting President as some people suggested. The precedent held for eight instances until the 25th Amendment was ratified.
But what happens when the offices of President and Vice President are vacant at the same time and no one can discharge the powers and duties of the office of President? In 1791, responsibility for deciding the line of succession was left to the First Congress. A House committee suggested that Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, an anti-Federalist, be named as third-in-line to the White House, an idea opposed by the Federalists.
Instead, the Second Congress agreed in 1792 that the Senate President Pro Tempore and then the Speaker of the House would serve as Acting President until a disability was removed that prevented a President or Vice President from serving, or until a new election was held. (In that case in 1792, Richard Henry Lee and Jonathan Trumbull were next in line as Acting President.)
The original presidential succession act had some problems, specifically related to the Constitutions missing provision to name a replacement Vice President for when that office became vacant. (That 25th Amendment also addressed that problem.)
In 1886, Congress and the Grover Cleveland administration pressed for changes in the secession act after Clevelands Vice President, Thomas Hendricks, had died. Also, the Senate had been unable to agree on a President Pro Tempore after President James Garfield was shot and dying.
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The new version made the Secretary of State third-in-line, and then other Cabinet members based on the tenure of their departments. Importantly, a special election wasnt required to choose a new President. The Acting President would serve until the next scheduled election was concluded in the Electoral College.
In late 1945, President Harry Truman had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt and he pressed for a return to the succession line from the 1792 act with one important difference: The House Speaker would be the third-in-line for the White House, followed by the Senate President Pro Tempore. The special election would return to fill White House vacancies.
Congress passed a revised version of this plan, which was signed by Truman and enacted on July 18, 1947. There would be no special election provision, and Cabinet officers, based on their departments tenure, followed the Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tempore in the line of succession. Anyone serving in the role of Acting President needed to resign the office they held that allowed them to serve as Acting President.
Today, House Speaker Paul Ryan is first in line under the 1947 act as Acting President, followed by Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch, Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. It is possible for an Acting President to be replaced by someone holding an office higher in the order of succession if that office was vacant. For example, the Senate Pro Tempore would serve as Acting President if the House Speaker position became vacant until the House chooses a new Speaker.
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CHICAGO - The Nation of Islam based in Chicago was in the news this past weekend when the man that assassinated three Baton Rouge policemen Sunday morning was found to have self-identified as a former member .
We believe that the offer of integration is hypocritical and is made by those who are trying to deceive the black peoples into believing that their 400-year-old open enemies of freedom, justice and equality are, all of a sudden, their friends, Elijah Muhammad - one of Farrakhan's mentors - wrote.
Other tenets include that African-Americans should be freed from the names imposed upon him by his former slave masters and that its followers should not participate in wars which take the lives of humans unless America agrees to give us the necessary territory wherein we may have something to fight for.
In March this year, Farrakhan made a trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran to meet with the nation's ayatollah during the Muslim nation's celebration of its revolution, and while there, he interviewed with Iranian journalist Nader Talebrzadeh.
During the recorded conversation, Talebrzadeh asked Farrakhan how he thought his people in the Nation of Islam would be able to survive the terrible future ahead for America, and Farrakhan answered:
Separation is the best answer. America is on a downward trajectory and some of those that I've been watching who want to be president will hasten the trajectory downward when you listen to their speeches for their so-called desires for America. But the black man, he has to taste some of the punishment because every great leader that we've ever had, we've never followed him well. We cheer them, and when they were gone we go right back to sleep. So we're headed for a divine whipping. But America is headed for divine destruction. So when I go back - God willing - I have to point out to America her only way out of what's come upon her. Then it's up to her to desire to do what she pleases and to do with what we say. But the calamities are increasing daily and Allah is whipping America with the forces of nature and America can escape it, but there's something America has to do, and it starts with the word "repentance." If American will not repent - and I doubt she will because she's so arrogant over her perceived power. She thinks she can make the whole world afraid of her and most of the world is afraid of her. But today, ask North Korea, you afraid of America? Ask China, how about you? Ask ISIL - America's talking about there's 30,000 of them and you've got to get the whole Western world together to fight ISIL? What happened to you? You can't go it alone no more? Suck your brothers into your demise. Yes, we're in a great and a dreadful day right now. America can escape it - it's a very narrow window, but we will present to America that narrow window and see what she will do. She's at the end.
The video in its entirety, in which Farrakhan also reviews a 40 minute conversation with Iran's ayatollah:
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Any move by Turkey to reinstate the death penalty after the failed military coup would derail its efforts to join the European Union, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Brussels on Monday. "Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU," Steinmeier told reporters. He said Germany expected Turkey to deal with those responsible for the attempted coup in line with the rule of law. Turkey decided to abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing Ankara to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday there could be no delay in using capital punishment after a failed coup attempt, adding the government would discuss it with opposition parties. (Reporting by Tom Korkemeier; Writing by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Michael Nienaber)
Another 12 people have died after drinking toxic homemade liquor in northern India, officials said Monday, taking the overall toll to 33 with dozens more fighting for their lives in hospitals.
The victims, all from the same district in Uttar Pradesh state, fell ill after drinking the alcohol on Friday night and were taken to hospital suffering from severe stomachache, vomiting and blurred vision.
Most were daily wage labourers and farmers too poor to afford branded alcohol, who would usually buy a cheap mix from illegal bootleggers.
Police have arrested a local vendor on charges of culpable homicide and authorities have suspended 11 officials, including some police.
Ajay Yadav, the top civil official in Etah district, told AFP the death toll there had reached 29.
In neighbouring Farrukhabad district, police said the death toll climbed to four, with over a dozen more in critical condition.
Bootleggers often add methanol -- a highly toxic form of alcohol sometimes used as an anti-freeze or fuel -- to their home-brew liquor to increase the alcoholic content.
If ingested, it can cause blindness and liver damage and can kill in larger concentrations.
Hundreds of poor people die every year in India due to alcohol poisoning, mostly from consuming cheap hooch.
In April eight people including two soldiers died after drinking tainted liquor in the western desert state of Rajasthan.
More than 100 people died in Mumbai last year after drinking illegal homemade moonshine in a slum.
Nearly three billion litres of legal liquor and an estimated two billion litres of hooch are consumed in India annually, according to the International Spirits and Wines Association.
To keep up with Democracy Lab in real time, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
In the wake of the Nice attack, Christian Caryl asks why so many terrorists come from Tunisia, the Arab Springs only success story.
Blessing-Miles Tendi explains why Zimbabwes passionate social media activists cant bring down Mugabe all by themselves.
Michael Rubin cautions that Iraqi Kurdistans reputation as an oasis of democratic governance may be undeserved.
Sarah Margon warns that Burmas democratic transformation will mean little unless it can bring peace to the countrys long-suffering ethnic minorities.
And now for this weeks recommended reads:
The latest issue of the Journal of Democracy is out. Highlights include an essay by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk highlighting the dangers of democratic backsliding in the worlds consolidated democracies and Henry E. Hales examination of why, 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, its former republics have not broken through to freedom.
For Foreign Affairs, Brian Klaas explains why the Turkish coup failed. Reuters Humeyra Pamuk and Ercan Gurses report on President Erdogans widening crackdown in response. And, if youre looking for new voices on Turkey, FP Interrupted has a list of excellent female journalists and commentators.
Foreign Policys Siobhan OGrady brings us a special report from the front lines of South Sudans civil war. Also in Foreign Policy, Emile Simpson argues that those who downplay the importance of terrorist attacks based on their statistical rarity are missing the point.
In a paper for the Cato institute, Oleh Havrylyshyn, Xiaofan Meng, and Marian L. Tupy find that big bang approaches to reform worked much better than gradual reforms in the former Communist world.
For Al Jazeera, Tendai Marima reports on growing discontent with Robert Mugabes long-time rule in Zimbabwe.
For the Carnegie Endowment, Benedetta Berti explains how Syrias warring parties have weaponized the provision of humanitarian aid.
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For CSIS, Andrea Kendall-Taylor warns that a global decline of democracy threatens the stability of the international order.
Amensty International reports that Egypts security services are regularly abducting, torturing, and forcibly disappearing the regimes critics.
International IDEA has published an in-depth paper examining the quality of Latin Americas democracies.
And finally, the Human Rights Foundation offers a striking infographic on Venezuelas humanitarian crisis.
In the photo, people carry the coffin of coup victim Sehidmiz Murat Inci during his funeral ceremony at the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara on July 18.
Photo credit: DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The deputy mayor of Istanbul's Sisli district has died after being shot in the head by an unknown assailant on Monday, Turkish broadcaster NTV reported. A Turkish official said the incident was not related to Friday's abortive military coup in which more than 200 people were killed. Turkey remains in a state of high tension, though the government says it has the situation fully under control. NTV reported that an assailant had entered the office of deputy mayor Cemil Candas and then gun shots were heard. Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) runs the prosperous Sisli district. (Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Ayla Jean Yackley; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Catherine Evans)
As he claims the mantle of the Republican Party, Donald Trump will seek to soften the edges of a public persona sharpened by an adult life lived in full view of the New York media and honed on reality television.
The most unpopular major-party standard bearer in recent history, the real estate mogul is looking to show a more personal side, leaning on his family and a coterie of close friends as he makes his case for the presidency. At the same time, hell try to tone down some of the rhetoric and ideas that gained him a zealous following in the Republican primary even as they tarnished his image in the eyes of some general-election voters.
Released late Sunday after weeks of delay, the convention schedule is far more traditional than the fireworks both literal and figurative that Trump once promised. The speaker list is full of political leaders and conservative personalities who are familiar on the GOP speaker circuit, as well as a long list of people with the last name Trump.
The plan for the Trump campaign for this convention is to help the American people to learn more about Donald Trump the man, not just the man they see on the campaign trail, but the breadth of the man himself, said Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Sunday. Part of the historic nature will be the impact that family members have talking about the candidate.
Trumps four grown children Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka and Tiffany are set to speak, along with his wife Melania. In additional to plugging the businessmans family enterprise, they are expected to provide testimonials about the presumptive nominees character and temperament when the cameras turn off.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has expressed hope in conversations with Trump and reporters that the candidate would show his softer side at the convention.
If the public sees the Donald Trump that Ive gotten to know in private, he will not be stopped, Priebus predicted on Meet the Press.
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But it is a big if. Party officials have come to rue Trumps capacity for unforced verbal miscues and digressions leaving them less than confident that he can make it through the week without a misstep. But they are also mindful that Trump is at his most electric when speaking off the cuff and preaching to a roomful of acolytes. The convention is set to be more of an acoustic set. The inherent contradiction is still a glaring strategic question, with the party both encouraging the more mature Trump, while mindful that they risk losing his dynamism if he goes too far in that direction.
The impact of political conventions has been under steady decline for decades, but for a media-centric candidate like Trump, it could be more pivotal than any in recent memory. Trump himself has predicted record ratings, and aides say he recognizes that it may be his final opportunity for the universally known figure to rebrand himself in the nations eyes. Should he revert to his bombastic self before tens of millions of eyeballs, they fear it would be a wasted opportunity.
Trump has said he would use a teleprompter for his formal remarks claiming the nomination on Thursday nightthe marquee event of the week, which is followed by the customary balloon drop. The move follows several cautious Trump speeches in recent weeks on everything from ISIS to global trade. But aides hinted that Trump would likely make more than one appearance in the Quicken Loans Arena, though it wasnt yet clear if he would speak more than once. And even when reading off prepared notes, as he did when he introduced his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Saturday, Trump has a penchant for going off script.
Asked whether Trump would appear more scripted at the convention in an effort to minimize the risks, Manafort balked.
Donald Trump will be Donald Trump, he said. Scripted is the wrong word.
Trumps wife Melania is set to speak Monday evening, he will be formally nominated on Tuesday evening, and Pence will speak Wednesday night.
The family focus also betrays lingering tensions at the GOP convention. Mitt Romney and all of the Bush family perennial top-tier talent will skip the gathering in protest of Trump, with whom they have forcefully disagreed.
Conventions offer candidates unfettered opportunity to control their message to the public. But even the most carefully stage-managed events have run into problems.
During the 2012 Republican convention, Mitt Romney aides plotted an elaborate effort on the final night to show the true Romney, with testimonials from businesses and employees he helped turn around, family friends, and co-religionists. But the carefully scripted message, encapsulated in a moving video set to air just before he took the stage, was overshadowed by Clint Eastwoods bizarre unrehearsed speech.
Trump is at 32 [percent] favorable, former Romney senior strategist and outspoken Trump critic Stuart Stevens told TIME. Until he revamps his image, everything will work against him. Most dont like him and all negatives will stick.
60 Minutes aired the first interview with Donald Trump and his newly announced running mate, Gov. Mike Pence, on Sunday night. Lesley Stahl sat down with pair, and the two spent much of the interview reconciling their very different personalities.
Stahl asked Pence, who has been openly critical of Trump in the past, about his view on Trumps call for a temporary ban on Muslims. He tried to steer the conversation away from his criticism by talking about suspending the Syrian refugee program. However, Stahl pushed, In December you tweeted, and I quote you, Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.
Before Pence could respond, Trump quipped, So you call it territories. OK? Were gonna do territories. Were gonna not let people come in from Syria that nobody knows who they are.
Stahl also brought up both Pences and Hillary Clintons votes for the Iraq War. Trump has been critical of Clintons vote for the war, but when referring to Pences vote, he said, Hes entitled to make a mistake every once in a while.
Many see Trumps choice of Pence as an appeal to the conservative and religious base. However, Pence and his low-key demeanor was overshadowed by Trump and his brash interjections. Stahl asked, Youre not known to be a humble man. But I wonder
Trump interjected, I think I am, actually humble. I think Im much more humble than you would understand.
60 Minutes airs Sundays at 7 p.m. on CBS.
Watch Stephen Colbert serve Bill Maher a Bowl of Trump for being wrong.
Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or leave your comments below. And check out our host, Cynthia LuCiette, on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, sat down with vice presidential running mate Mike Pence for their first interview together since Trump announced his VP pick Friday.
In an interview with Lesley Stahl that aired on CBS' 60 Minutes on Sunday night - on the eve of the Republican National Convention, kicking off Monday in Cleveland - the duo sat down to answer questions together. But Trump fielded most of the questions, and even interrupted both Stahl and Pence to get his comments in (the Washington Post tallied that Trump spoke more than 2,160 words while Pence uttered about 900), leading to the media describing the interview as everything from "awkward" to "tense" to "excruciating."
Here are five of the most awkward moments.
1. Trump and Pence disagree over negative campaign tactics.
When Stahl asked Pence what he thought "about your running mate's campaign and the tone and negativity of it," the Indiana governor replied with a non-answer: "I think this is a good man who's been talking about the issues the American people care about."
When pressed by Stahl, Pence followed up: "In the essay that I wrote a long time ago, I said campaigns ought to be about something more important than just one candidate's election. And this campaign and Donald Trump's candidacy has been about the issues the American people care about."
A moment later, Trump reiterated his frequent remarks that Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is a "liar" and again called her a "crook." He noted that Pence refuses to call her that: "He's not that kind of a person. We're different people. To me, she's 'Crooked Hillary.' I don't think he should use that term. I've never said one way or the other. But to him, I don't think it would sound right, but he will say how dishonest she is by going over the facts."
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Read More: Michael Wolff on GOP Convention: For Trump, Massive TV Ratings Matter Most
2. Trump allows Pence to get off the hook for voting to authorize the Iraq war - but not Clinton.
Before being elected as Indiana's governor, Pence served in the House of Representatives, during which time he voted to authorize the war. That's something for which Trump has repeatedly hammered Clinton. When Stahl asked why Trump was willing to let that slide with his running mate, Trump replied: "I don't care. It's a long time ago. And he voted that way and they were also misled. A lot of information was given to people." He added that Pence is "entitled to make a mistake every once in a while." As for Clinton? "No, she's not."
3. Trump cuts Pence off to tout himself.
Trump frequently interrupted both Stahl and Pence to get his own point across. At one point, Pence was looking to explain why he was at first opposed to Trump's ban on foreign Muslims. Noting that Trump is "not a politician" and nor does he speak like one, Pence said, "He speaks from the heart."
Trump interrupted: "Is that a good thing? I think that's a good thing. Well, I speak from my heart and my brain. Just so we understand."
Pence's response: "Right."
4. Trump gives Pence permission to answer a question.
Trump caught flak last year when he said Arizona Sen. John McCain is considered a war hero only "because he was captured." Stahl, in her interview, asked Pence if he thought Trump went too far with that remark.
Perhaps sensing some discomfort from Pence, Trump then gave his running mate permission to say yes: "That one, you could say yes, I mean, you're not - it's fine. Hey, look, I like John McCain. But we have to take care of our vets."
Read More: Mike Pence Defends Donald Trump's Campaign Rhetoric on '60 Minutes'
5. Pence wouldn't be afraid to confront Trump in the White House if the two disagree. Maybe.
Pence had trouble answering the question posed by Stahl. "It's probably obvious to people that our styles are different, but I promise you, our vision is exactly the same," he said. But Stahl pressed further. "One of the things I found out about this man is he appreciates candor," he continued, prompting Trump to cut in: "I'd like him to if he thinks I was doing something wrong."
When asked by Stahl if Trump would listen to Pence, the presidential candidate replied: "Absolutely. I might not apologize. I might not do that, but I would absolutely want him to come in. If he thinks I'm doing something wrong, Mike, I would want him to come in." He continued: "I accept that from my consultants and my people and if Mike came in and told me: 'You know, I think you should do this or that,' I would listen and very likely listen to him."
6. Trump is willing to praise Pence when Pence praises Trump.
Said Pence at one point: "Talking with him in private settings, I love the words you used because this man is awed with the American people, and he is not intimidated by the world. And Donald Trump, this good man, I believe, will be a great president of the United States."
Trump's reply: "I love what he just said."
Read More: Donald Trump Responds to Bastille Day Attacks in France: "This Is War"
Watch the interview below.
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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.
60 Minutes aired the first interview with Donald Trump and his newly announced running mate, Governor Mike Pence. Lesley Stahl sat down with the two in what was nearly twenty minutes of the two reconciling their very different personalities. Mike Pence has been openly critical of Donald Trump. Stahl asked Pence about his view on Trump's call for a temporary ban on Muslims. He tried to steer the conversation away from his criticism by talking about suspending the Syrian refugee program. However, Stahl pushed, "In December you tweeted, and I quote you, 'Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.'" Pence could respond before Trump quipped, "So you call it territories. OK? We're gonna do territories. We're gonna not let people come in from Syria that nobody knows who they are." Lesley Stahl also brought up both Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence's votes for the Iraq war. Trump has been critical of Clinton's vote for the war but referring to Pence, he said, "He's entitled to make a mistake every once in a while." Many see Trump choice of Pence as an appeal to a conservative and religious base. However, Pence and his low-key demeanor was overshadowed by Trump and his brash interjections. Stahl asked, "You're not known to be a humble man. But I wonder-" Trump interjected, "I think I am, actually humble. I think I'm much more humble than you would understand."
Donald Trumps response to the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this weekend showed how his campaign has changed its response to a string of tragedies over the past year.
But while the tone has shifted, the underlying message has remained the same.
Trumps Facebook message about Baton Rouge followed a familiar format, including an emotional response to the event, laying blame for it and proposing a solution. But the language was more restrained, calling for more leadership and not naming President Obama.
By comparison, Trumps responses to attacks in Paris in November and a shooting at a gay club in Orlando that left 49 people dead in June also called for toughness and vigilance but included some self-congratulation that was widely criticized.
Read More: Donald Trumps Tweets Are Getting More Polished
Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016
Everyone is now saying how right I was with illegal immigration & the wall. After Paris, theyre all on the bandwagon. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2015
The shift in tone in Trumps immediate response began with the Dallas shooting that left five police officers dead and several others wounded. A Facebook message posted then again called for law and order and strong leadership while also offering thoughts and prayers for all of the victims families and calling for love and compassion.
His response to the attack in Nice, France, also included a call for prayers and condolences.
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My prayers and condolences to the victims and families of the terrible tragedy in Nice, France. We are with you in every way! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2016
Bruce Hardy, a professor of strategic communication at Temple University, said that part of the reason is simply the shift from talking to a more partisan audience in a primary to running in the general election.
Basically when youre in the primaries, youre talking to the base, so its OK to be more extreme in your ideological positions and your ideological responses, he said. I have a feeling well see a much more traditional presidential candidate than we have seen during this very interesting primary season.
University of Arizona professor Kate Kenski agreed.
That doesnt mean hes not going to throw some curveballs along the way just to keep things exciting, but he has to do it within a certain boundary now, Kenski said. He cant afford to do anything that would make him look particularly un-presidential.
- The Kremlin rubbished a report for WADA that laid bare Russian state-run doping in sport, saying the findings were based solely on the testimony of a former official wanted in Moscow. "The accusations against Russian athletes are based on the testimony of one person. A person with a scandalous reputation," the Kremlin said, referring to Grigory Rodchenkov, who was head of Moscow's anti-doping laboratory before fleeing to the United States and is under criminal investigation in Russia.
AFP
- All Russian government officials implicated in a state-backed doping system must be sacked, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Craig Reedie said in light of the damning revelations. A WADA-mandated investigation by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren alleged that Russian government officials were part of a programme of doping evasion used at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in the country. "The McLaren report confirms that, at a minimum, (Russian Anti-Doping Agency) RUSADA's return to compliance cannot be considered until all persons from the Russian ministry of sport and other government departments and agencies that are implicated by the report, including RUSADA, are dismissed from their roles," Reedie said.
AFP
- A state-backed doping scheme by Russia at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics outlined in a report revealed "a mind-blowing level of corruption," US Anti-Doping Agency chief executive Travis T. Tygart said. A World Anti-Doping Agency report unveiled by Canadian attorney Richard McLaren found that Russian secret service and sport leaders switched sample contents and made some doping samples disappear, to allow Russian dope cheats to compete at Sochi. "The McLaren Report has concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, a mind-blowing level of corruption within both Russian sport and government that goes right to the field of play," Tygart said. "And most importantly, our hearts go out to athletes from all over the world who were robbed of their Olympic dreams.
AFP
Stocks edging higher as Wall Street turns its focus back on to earnings. Will Netflix, and perhaps Yahoo keep the good times rolling? Catch The Final Round with Alexis Christoforous and Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer.
Winners and losers
Lets take a look at some of todays winners and losers. (FS) Stocks on the move lower today include Hasbro slipping on concern over slowing growth in its boys division, I-P-O darling Twilio as Wall Street analysts initiated coverage of the stock with steep price target discounts, and Monster Beverage shares of the energy drink company fizzling out following a Wells Fargo downgrade, citing concerns over shrinking revenue growth.
Stocks on the move higher today include Groupon as Piper Jaffray upgraded the the deals site on its focus on successful products and regions, ARM Holdings soaring as Softbank bids $32 billion for the chipmaker, and Bank of America the nations second biggest bank by assets surging as the bank posted an earnings beat fueled by strong bond-trading revenue.
Consumer shares to the rescue?
As the markets notch new highs, how sustainable is the rally? And which sectors could power the next leg of the bull market? Yahoo Finances Justine Underhill on why it might be the consumer coming to the rescue.
Peter Kenny on the markets
For more on the markets and where were headed following another up day for stocks, Im joined by Wall Street veteran and longtime NYSE floor trader Peter Kenny of Kennys Commentary dot com.
Looking ahead
Seattle is often called the Emerald City, and from this video, it would seem that even that sparkling nickname doesnt do it justice. The camera pans up from Husky Stadium at the University of Washington, across the university buildings, before sweeping into a wider shot of the rest of the city. The most eye-catching thing is the sheer beauty of the water and forestry within the city. Credit: Just 2 Guys Creative
When Emmy nominations were unveiled this week, Louis C.K.'s Horace and Pete, the critically acclaimed dramedy streaming on LouisCK.net, received two mentions: outstanding guest actress in a drama series (Laurie Metcalf) and outstanding multicamera picture editing for a comedy series (Gina Sansom). Which begs the question: How did a single series secure nominations in both drama and comedy categories?
Over the years, due to ever-changing Television Academy rules and guidelines, the classifications of some shows have transitioned from comedy to drama (e.g. Netflix's Orange Is the New Black) or drama to comedy (e.g. Showtime's Shameless). But never before, as far as I can tell, has a show been nominated in one category as a drama and another category as a comedy in the same year.
When C.K. was a guest on the "Awards Chatter" podcast, he told me in no uncertain terms that he regards Horace and Pete as a drama, not a comedy like his other series, FX's Louie. So my initial assumption was that this year's nominations split was the result of a ballot screw-up that was not discovered until nomination voting was already underway or completed.
But a Television Academy spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter that the Horace and Pete category placements were no mistake: "We are committed to honoring quality work. We strive to be as inclusive as possible. In this case there was no picture editing category for multicamera drama. The only category they could enter was the one in which they were nominated. The decision to allow them to enter that category was thoroughly reviewed by the governors of the Picture Editors peer group."
He continued: "With literally hundreds upon hundreds of rules, we are constantly refining to cover as many contingencies as possible. We are thrilled with the nomination slate this year and as always, when this Emmy season is complete, we'll open the rule book again and consider logical improvements."
Read More: Emmy Nominations: Redemption for Some, A Cold Shoulder for Others (Analysis)
BRUSSELS, July 18 - EU competition authorities have resumed their investigation into U.S. rail component maker Wabtec Corp's $1.8 billion bid for French rival Faiveley Transport after the companies provided details about the deal.
The European Commission, which launched a probe in May into the deal involving the two global makers of railway equipment, such as brakes and doors, halted the process last week.
"Once the parties submitted the information we had requested, the deadline suspension was lifted," Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said in an email.
The EU antitrust enforcer will now decide by Oct. 24 whether to clear or block the deal. Wabtec and Faiveley compete with Germany's Knorr-Bremse.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, editing by Louise Heavens)
(Adds details on priorities and new forum, reaction)
By Lisa Lambert
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Reuters) - Maintaining the European Union's financial stability is the top priority following Britain's vote last month to leave the bloc, the European Commission's new financial regulatory chief said on Monday.
"Following the UK's decision to leave the EU, ensuring financial stability is our first priority," Valdis Dombrovkis said in a speech in which he laid out his priorities for dealing with the uncertainty stemming from the June 23 referendum and for overseeing banks and institutions in the EU.
Dombrovkis also discussed strengthening ties with the United States, noting that he was visiting the U.S. capital on his first day in his new role.
"What my approach will be: Above all, continuity," he said.
Dombrovkis said he will continue the work of his predecessor, Jonathan Hill, on capital markets and reviewing regulations enacted after the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
He said he had met with his U.S. counterparts, and they were establishing a forum to meet frequently and discuss regulatory cooperation. Through the forum, he will meet with the U.S. Treasury secretary every year.
"This relationship can be driven further in both directions," he said. "We need to talk to each other more often, to clarify the scope of future rules and to ensure we understand impact of regulation on ground."
The major purpose of the forum is to identify potential problems at the early stage of the regulatory process, Dombrovkis said.
Dombrovkis also listed some of the European Commission's upcoming moves, including releasing a proposal for resolution of failing banks later this year and finalizing the steps for implementing the Basel III banking rules.
He added that "in time" the EU will implement requirements for how much capital and long-term debt banks must have on hand so they can resolve a failure without government assistance, known as "Total Loss Absorbing Capacity."
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He said he will also talk to members of the European Parliament about advancing a long-stalled proposal on bank structural reform.
The U.S.-EU financial forum was generally greeted with optimism on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Association for Financial Markets in Europe said it has the potential to build upon current transatlantic cooperation, and that "more needs to be done to enhance international coordination and facilitate cross-border investment."
Meanwhile, the American Insurance Association said the forum "recognizes the need for discussions about the potential economic impacts of proposed rules." (Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Additional reporting by Huw Jones in London; Editing by James Dalgleish and Paul Simao)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission will grant an additional 500 million euros (417 million) to help farmers tackle a long-lasting crisis linked to low prices, mainly in the dairy sector hit by the scrapping of production quotas and a Russian import ban on Western products.
The Commission, the EU executive, presented the package at an EU Agriculture Council gathering of member states' farm ministers, it said in a statement.
It mainly included a plan to reduce milk production, worth 150 million euros, and 350 million of subsidies that would come on top of aid granted by member states, thus potentially doubling the support being provided to farmers, it said.
The EU executive had granted a package of 500 million euros in September, targeting mainly cash-flow difficulties and market stabilisation, as well as a plan in March allowing producers to freeze milk output, relaxing EU limits on subsidies and effectively suspending EU rules on fair competition.
(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide in Paris and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; Editing by Dale Hudson)
Athens (AFP) - The European Union and Greece hope to reach a deal on the crisis-hit country's debt mountain by the end of the year, EU economic affairs chief Pierre Moscovici said on Monday.
"We need to reach a positive agreement involving the IMF by the end of the year," Moscovici told reporters after meetings with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos.
But the Frenchman stressed that any agreement would have to include the International Monetary Fund, which has so far refused to commit itself to the bailout Greece signed with the EU last year.
"It is in the interest of all parties that the IMF is fully on board," Moscovici said, noting that the global lender brought "credibility and visibility" to the rescue.
The IMF has said it won't give a penny to the latest bailout -- Greece's third since 2010 -- until it sees a concrete plan from the Europeans to cut substantially Greece's massive debt burden.
The IMF and EU creditors disagree on just how much Athens can improve its finances through ongoing reforms.
Europe insists that Greece will be able to achieve a 3.5 percent primary budget surplus, which excludes debt servicing, within a few years but the IMF says a 1.5 percent surplus is the best that can be expected.
Moscovici on Monday said "complacency" could delay or negate the benefit of the reforms.
An upcoming review of the Greek bailout in the autumn will include bad bank loans and a labour relations overhaul likely to cause social unrest.
"We need to enter a new phase of cooperation and trust...there must be coherence on what has been decided," Moscovici said.
Greece's economy is expected to exit recession after the second half of 2016, he said.
By Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers urged Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday to respect the law and human rights in dealing with defeated coup plotters, warning that reinstating the death penalty would likely end Ankara's EU membership bid. After a breakfast in Brussels with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the ministers condemned the weekend coup attempt in a common EU statement, but expressed alarm at Erdogan's public comments on Sunday that there could be no delay in using capital punishment. "The EU recalls that the unequivocal rejection of the death penalty is an essential element of the union acquis," ministers said, referring to the body of EU law that underpins the bloc. The statement was agreed by all 28 EU ministers, including new British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who campaigned successfully for Britons to vote to leave the bloc, attending his first EU Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels. Germany, Austria and France also warned separately that bringing back the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004, would undo years of membership talks that began in 2005. "Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU," said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a position echoed by his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in less direct terms. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini noted that Turkey was a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans capital punishment across the continent. Turkey purged its police on Monday after rounding up thousands of soldiers, judges and prosecutors. Protestors at pro-Erdogan rallies have demanded that the coup leaders be executed. Erdogan's authoritarian turn had worried the EU well before Friday night's coup attempt, but Turkey's role as an ally in Syria, in facing off with Russia and as gatekeeper on a migrant route to Europe have all tempered the bloc's criticism. Abolishing capital punishment, which in Europe remains only in Belarus, is at the heart of EU policy. Erdogan's position, which the Turkish government will discuss with opposition parties, appeared to be a step too far for EU ministers, even as the EU faces a particularly tricky time with Turkey in the next three months. Brussels is trying 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 still depends 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. (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor in Brussels; Writing by Alastair Macdonald, editing by David Evans and David Stamp)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union reminded Turkey on Monday that it is bound by its commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights and as a member of the Council of Europe not to reintroduce the death penalty. "No country can become an EU member state if it introduces the death penalty," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters when asked about suggestions that EU accession candidate Turkey might execute leaders of the failed coup. She also noted that Turkey was a member of the Council of Europe and a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans capital punishment across the continent: "Turkey is an important part of the Council of Europe and is bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, which is very clear on the death penalty," she said. (Reporting by Robin Emmott and Robert-Jan Bartunek; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
By Ines Kagubare BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union states are broadly united in calling for Britain to quickly launch formal negotiations on leaving, and in rejecting new limits on migration within the bloc, a survey by Reuters has found. The Brussels missions of 18 of the 27 other EU member states responded to questions from Reuters that included when Britain should formally notify the Union of its exit plan and whether the Union should consider further limits on the free migration of workers, which was seen a key factor in the Brexit vote. 1. Would you welcome Britain deciding to stay in the EU? Most found the question too speculative and dependent on UK internal politics for them to answer. Of the 18, five clearly said they would be pleased if Britain did a U-turn. No state said it would definitely now prefer Britain to leave the EU. A Lithuanian spokeswoman noted President Dalia Grybauskaite was asked what she would say if the British government did not launch the exit procedure: "Welcome back," was her reply. But an Austrian official summed up the general assumption: "There was a referendum and we assume there will be a Brexit." 2. When should Britain formally notify the EU that it is leaving, triggering the two-year exit process under Article 50? "As soon as possible," was the reply of 13 out of 18, but few were willing to be more specific about how long that would be. Finland spoke of September. Others think by the end of the year. A German spokesman was typical in this response, stressing a need to end uncertainty: "Insecurity is bad for the market." Two countries declined to answer. Three, Hungary, Poland and Greece, voiced the clearest preference for not rushing. Hungary's mission said: "There is no rush in regard to the notification." Poland said: "We do not want to rush the UK to notify its intention to leave." A Greek spokesman said: "A good and beneficial Brexit agreement is more important than timing." 3. Should the EU consider more limits on free movement? Of the 18, 15 said no and three -- Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland -- did not reply directly to the question. Bulgaria's spokeswoman summed up the general view: "Free movement is a fundamental EU value that we must guard strongly." Latvia's mission said: "Latvia would not be in favour of starting discussions on the overhaul of the core principle of the EU." (Reporting by Ines Kagubare; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
Ohio is a perennial presidential battleground state, and Republicans are acutely aware of this as they host their party's national convention there this week.
So are Democrats. Hillary Clinton and her super PAC allies have run more than 8,500 television ads there since June 8, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data provided by ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG. That's an average of about one ad every six minutes since Clinton clinched her party's presidential nomination.
With the exception of Florida, no other state has seen so many ads since the primaries ended.
Democratic state Sen. Capri Cafaro, who represents an area of northeastern Ohio outside of Cleveland, is concerned that Republican nominee Donald Trump is more appealing to Rust Belt voters than Clinton is. An average of recent polls in the state helps support this notion: it currently gives Clinton less than a two-point lead over Trump.
The Center for Public Integrity recently caught up with Cafaro to talk about her qualms about Clinton, why Trump is winning over many Ohioans and the role of super PACs in the 2016 election.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Related: Capri Cafaro quote
This story is part of Buying of the President 2016. Tracking the candidates, political committees and nonprofits that are making this presidential election the most expensive in history. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.
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Center for Public Integrity: How competitive do you think Donald Trump will be in Ohio?
Capri Cafaro: Very. One of the reasons hes gotten so far is because there is a general frustration by the electorate that they are sick of career politicians. People have come to the Rust Belt for the last 20, 30-plus years and promised X, Y, Z as far as an economic resurrection. But no one has really reflected the anger and the frustration of these people. Thats where I think Trump really has a competitive advantage.
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Look at the primary results. Basically every single county from Lake Erie all the way down to West Virginia, from Ashtabula to Gallia County, all went for Trump. Theres a good reason for that. He didnt win because Republicans voted for him. He won because Democrats voted for him. There are a lot of disenfranchised Reagan Democrats who may cross over for Trump in battleground states like Ohio.
What do you think about Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee in 2016?
Im very open about my reservations in regards to Secretary Clinton. Frankly, I would have preferred [Vice President] Joe Biden. I feel that shes certainly capable of doing the job, but she, in my view, is not a perfect candidate.
What weaknesses do you think she has?
She has weaknesses in regards to relatability, in regards to trustworthiness. It seems as if she is more focused on becoming president of the United States because she wants to be president of the United States, not necessarily because she wants to serve the people of the United States. However, I am a Democrat and a Democrat for a reason. And there is a lot at stake in this election issues like Supreme Court vacancies, the protection of reproductive rights and the continuation of the Affordable Care Act.
Whats your take on the role super PACs are playing in 2016?
I have general disdain for both super PACs and Citizens United. What has come of politics is greatly fueled by the glut of money that has entered, particularly post-Citizens United.
What lessons do you think Democrats should learn from the proliferation of super PACs?
In order to compete, people are going to have to play by the rules that exist. Obviously, Bernie Sanders has done an incredible job raising low-dollar donations at a high volume, which we saw Barack Obama do, which we saw Howard Dean do. But its possible [super PACs will continue to be embraced], unless there is significant campaign finance reform.
There is a bill pending in Congress to limit the amount of time one spends raising money, which I think is fantastic. The fact that members of Congress spend more time raising money than they do, you know, actually doing their job in order to keep their job theres something obviously, distinctly wrong with that.
Some people have proposed getting rid of contribution limits to ease politicians fundraising pressure. How would things be different if you could ask for checks of unlimited amounts?
Our contribution limit is like $12,500, okay? Thats a pretty high individual contribution limit. In a place like Ohio, I dont necessarily know how many people you could just call upon to get $12,500. It could have some kind of an impact, but as with super PACs, it creates an inherent discrepancy between those that have networks of people who can write huge checks and those that cant.
What do you find most striking about an election between Clinton and Trump?
Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been known by the American public for 25, 30 years. How are either of them going to move the needle with just ads, or tweets, or anything else? Peoples minds are pretty made up. How do you redefine yourself? How do you re-introduce yourself to the American public when youre already ingrained in the American consciousness?
This article was co-published with PRI.
This story is part of Buying of the President 2016. Tracking the candidates, political committees and nonprofits that are making this presidential election the most expensive in history. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.
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Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
Sydney (AFP) - Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd Monday revealed he wants to succeed Ban Ki-moon as the next UN secretary general, asking Canberra to endorse his nomination.
A growing list of candidates have declared their interest in becoming the world's top diplomat, including UNESCO chief Irina Bokova of Bulgaria and former New Zealand prime minister and head of the UN Development Programme Helen Clark.
The Mandarin-speaking Rudd, who is based in New York as head of the policy institute Asia Society, served as Labor prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Monday he had officially asked for government backing, with the cabinet to consider the request.
"Kevin Rudd has requested that the Australian government nominate him and, as the prime minister has indicated on a number of occasions, that'll be a matter for cabinet," she told Sky News. "I'll certainly put the matter forward."
Candidates must be nominated by their governments, with Ban due to stand aside on January 1.
For decades, the choice of the UN chief has been in the hands of the Security Council and its five permanent members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- in a process largely kept behind closed doors.
But the General Assembly last year voted to shake up the process, asking candidates to send a formal application letter, present their resumes and appear at hearings.
The final decision still rests with the Security Council, but the new openness could put some pressure on big powers to pick a nominee with broader appeal.
Rudd was elected Australian prime minister in the 2007 general election in a landslide defeat of John Howard, but in his first term was dumped by colleagues fed up with his style of management. He became foreign minister in Julia Gillard's government.
He remained popular with the electorate and Labor returned to his leadership in June 2013, making him prime minister for a second time.
However, he announced an end to his political career in November 2013, two months after losing elections won by conservative Tony Abbott.
A former diplomat who has long studied China, Rudd was an outward-looking prime minister whose love of travel earned him the nickname "Kevin 747".
By Nate Raymond
NEW YORK, July 18 (Reuters) - A former portfolio manager at Visium Asset Management LP pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges that he engaged in a scheme to defraud investors by inflating the value of a bond fund and overstating its liquidity.
Stefan Lumiere, 45, entered his plea to conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud charges in federal court in Manhattan, about a month after he was first arrested in connection with the investigation.
The charges stemmed from a probe that has already resulted in two people pleading guilty and insider trading charges against Sanjay Valvani, a portfolio manager at Visium who committed suicide in June following his indictment.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff scheduled a trial for Lumiere on Dec. 19. Eric Creizman, Lumiere's attorney, outside of court said he planned to fight the charges.
"We're ready to go forward and do what we have to do and get him exonerated," Creizman said.
The probe prompted New York-based Visium, which under founder Jacob Gottlieb came to manage about $8 billion, to last month announce it would close down its flagship fund and sell another portfolio to asset manager Alliance Bernstein.
Prosecutors said that from 2011 to 2013, Lumiere and two other Visium employees participated in a scheme to each month mismark the value of securities held by a fund that invested in debt issued by healthcare companies.
Prosecutors said the mismarking caused the fund's net asset value to be overstated often by tens of millions of dollars each month, resulting in higher payments to Visium and bigger bonuses for Lumiere.
The scheme also had the effect of deceiving investors into believing the bonds were relatively liquid, when they actually were entirely illiquid, prosecutors said.
Authorities said Lumiere's co-conspirators included Christopher Plaford, a Visium portfolio manager who oversaw the fund from its inception through its liquidation in 2013.
Plaford pleaded guilty on June 9 to charges related to the mismarking and has agreed to cooperate with authorities.
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He also pleaded guilty to participating in an insider trading scheme with Valvani that prosecutors say made $25 million based on tips about U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals of generic drug applications.
Valvani had plead not guilty before his death.
The case is U.S. v. Lumiere, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 16-cr-483.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Editing by Andrew Hay)
The Hague (AFP) - Former shareholders of the now-dismantled Russian oil giant Yukos on Monday appealed a Dutch court's decision to overturn a ruling that ordered Moscow to pay them a record $50 billion in damages.
Main ex-shareholder GML and Veteran Petroleum Limited "filed an appeal against the judgement... which challenged the July 2014 award against the Russian Federation," they said in a statement.
Yukos was once Russia's biggest oil company but was broken up after its former owner, Kremlin critic and ex-tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested in 2003.
His arrest came shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin, then the prime minister, warned the nation's growing class of oligarchs against meddling in politics.
Yukos was sold off in opaque auctions to state companies led by Rosneft between 2004 and 2006.
State-owned Rosneft was then small, but has become a leading global player among the world's biggest listed oil companies by production volume.
In a major coup for the claimants, the international Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled in 2014 that Russia had forced Yukos into bankruptcy with excessive tax claims and sold off its assets to state-owned companies.
It ordered Moscow to pay in "excess of $50 billion" to the former shareholders -- a record award for the arbitration tribunal.
However, in April the district court in The Hague ruled that the PCA, based in the Dutch city, was "not competent" to rule in the matter.
"We remain determined to hold the Russian Federation responsible for the expropriation of Yukos," GML director Tim Osborne said in the statement.
Global health officials are racing to better understand the Zika virus behind a major outbreak that began in Brazil last year and has spread to many countries in the Americas. The following are some questions and answers about the virus and current outbreak: How do people become infected? Zika is transmitted to people through the bite of infected female mosquitoes, primarily the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same type that spreads dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said Aedes mosquitoes are found in all countries in the Americas except Canada and continental Chile, and the virus will likely reach all countries and territories of the region where Aedes mosquitoes are found. How do you treat Zika? There is no treatment or vaccine for Zika infection. Companies and scientists are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine for Zika, but the World Health Organization (WHO) had said it would take at least 18 months to start large-scale clinical trials of potential preventative shots. How dangerous is it? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that infection with the Zika virus in pregnant women is a cause of the birth defect microcephaly and other severe brain abnormalities in babies. The CDC said now that the causal relationship has been established, several important questions must still be answered with studies that could take years. According to the World Health Organization, there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can cause the birth defect microcephaly in babies, a condition defined by unusually small heads that can result in developmental problems. In addition, the agency said it could cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can result in paralysis. Conclusive proof of the damage caused by Zika may take months or years. Brazil reports the number of confirmed cases of microcephaly at more than 1,600 as doctors and Brazilian health officials find that some suspected cases of microcephaly are not the disorder. Suspected ones under investigation declined to 3,257. Colombia confirmed two cases of microcephaly linked to Zika. Brazil registered 91,387 likely cases of the Zika virus from February until April 2. Current research in Brazil indicates the greatest microcephaly risk is associated with infection during the first trimester of pregnancy, but health officials have warned an impact could be seen in later weeks. Recent studies have shown evidence of Zika in amniotic fluid, placenta and fetal brain tissue. What are the symptoms of Zika infection? People infected with Zika may have a mild fever, skin rash, conjunctivitis, muscle and joint pain and fatigue that can last for two to seven days. But as many as 80 percent of people infected never develop symptoms. The symptoms are similar to those of dengue or chikungunya, which are transmitted by the same type of mosquito. How can Zika be contained? Efforts to control the spread of the virus focus on eliminating mosquito breeding sites and taking precautions against mosquito bites such as using insect repellent and mosquito nets. U.S. and international health officials have advised pregnant women to avoid travel to Latin American and Caribbean countries where they may be exposed to Zika. Cases of sexual transmission have also been reported, prompting health officials to advise use of condoms, or abstaining from sex, to prevent infection between partners. How widespread is the outbreak? Active Zika outbreaks have been reported in at least 50 countries or territories, most of them in the Americas, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Brazil has been the country most affected. (http://1.usa.gov/1ovAJyh) Africa (1): Cape Verde Americas (41): Anguilla, Argentina, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Bonaire, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Curacao, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Saint Barthelmy, Saint Lucia, Saint Martin, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Eustatius, St. Maarten, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. Virgin Islands and Venezuela Oceania/Pacific Islands (8): American Samoa, Fiji, Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, and Tonga. What is the history of the Zika virus? The Zika virus is found in tropical locales with large mosquito populations. Outbreaks of Zika have been recorded in Africa, the Americas, Southern Asia and the Western Pacific. The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947 in rhesus monkeys and was first identified in people in 1952 in Uganda and Tanzania, according to the WHO. Can Zika be transmitted through sexual contact? The World Health Organization (WHO) said sexual transmission is "relatively common" and has advised pregnant women not to travel to areas with ongoing outbreaks of Zika virus. It also advised women living in areas where the virus is being transmitted to delay getting pregnant. The U.S. CDC is investigating about a dozen cases of possible sexual transmission. All cases involve possible transmission of the virus from men to their sex partners. The WHO has also identified Zika cases in Argentina, Chile, France, Italy and New Zealand as likely caused by sexual transmission. British health officials reported Zika was found in a man's semen two months after he was infected, suggesting the virus may linger in semen long after infection symptoms fade. The PAHO said Zika can be transmitted through blood, but this is an infrequent transmission mechanism. There is no evidence Zika can be transmitted to babies through breast milk. What other complications are associated with Zika? Zika has also been associated with other neurological disorders, including serious brain and spinal cord infections. The long-term health consequences of Zika infection are unclear. Other uncertainties surround the incubation period of the virus and how Zika interacts with other viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes, such as dengue. (Compiled by the Americas Desk)
By Brian Love and Sophie Sassard PARIS/NICE, France (Reuters) - Crowds jeered France's leaders at a tribute on Monday to victims of last week's truck attack in Nice and an opinion poll showed a sharp drop in confidence in the ability of President Francois Hollande's government to combat terrorism. Before and after a minute of silence held to pay respects to the 84 dead, many of the thousands gathered in the south-coast resort city of Nice chanted "resign, resign" at Manuel Valls, the Socialist prime minister. Others yelled "Hollande, resign". The poll published in Le Figaro newspaper showed 33 percent of respondents were confident in national leaders' ability to fight terrorism, down sharply from confidence levels of at least 50 percent in the wake of two major attacks last year. "The government promises us things but nothing sticks," Nice city resident Antony Fernandez told Reuters. "What have they done up to now to make us feel safe? And yet what do we expect? Every six months we're going to mourn for more dead?" Less than a year before a presidential election, political opponents have abandoned the restraint that usually prevails immediately after such national tragedies to sharply criticize Hollande and his government. Ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is competing in a November primary for the ticket to run as presidential candidate for France's mainstream center-right parties, said overnight that Hollande's government had failed to do all it could. "I know there's no zero risk, I know perfectly well that we don't pull each other apart before the victims have even been buried," Sarkozy told TF1 TV. "But I want to say, because it's the truth, that everything that should have been done over the last 18 months ... wasn't done," he said, without proposing what could have been done better. Prime Minister Manuel Valls dismissed those suggestions. He told a news conference that plans to extend the state of emergency this week would give police renewed powers to conduct searches without getting judicial warrants and include new measures to exploit information from telephones and computers. In Thursday's attack, delivery man Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plowed a 19-tonne truck into crowds of Bastille Day revelers, killing 84, before being shot dead by police. The third major attack on France in less than two years has plunged the country back into a state of grief and fear. POLITICS UNDER SCRUTINY The rapid and bitter political recriminations contrasted with the restraint seen in the immediate wake of the attacks on Paris last November and on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in January 2015. Like them, the Nice attack was claimed by Islamic State although no hard evidence linking Bouhlel to the militant group has been found. The government has struck back by denouncing opponents for breaking ranks so fast. Speaking ahead of the nationwide minute-of-silence on Monday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve accused the government's opponents of unseemly behavior. "We've seen tirades emerge immediately and personally this is both shocking and sad ... it's undignified in the current context," he said. Voters also denounced the lack of restraint among competing politicians while many of those killed in Thursday's attack on the seafront Promenade des Anglais boulevard have still to be identified or buried. "I'd have liked the politicians to have the decency when the bodies were still on the Promenade not to start saying, it's so-and-so's fault," said Stephane Bebert, who was at the ceremony. As tributes drew throngs of people back to the scene of the carnage, police continued to investigate. Four of the six people arrested after the attack were transferred early on Monday to the headquarters of France's counter-terrorism department in the western edge of Paris, where they will be questioned. PREMEDITATED ATTACK Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins, who is in charge of the investigation, said the attack was premeditated. From July 1, Bouhlel had made internet searches for festivities in Nice and had driven the route of the attack two days prior to Bastille Day. Molins said the killer had recently developed an interest in radical Islam, telling people he had grown a beard for religious reasons and that he could not understand why Islamic State could not have its own territory. On June 28 had tried to get a 5,000-euro bank loan, which he was denied. Bouhlel had also carried out daily searches from the start of July of jihadist propaganda websites showing violent images. "While there are no elements in the investigation to suggest at this stage an allegiance to Islamic State nor links with individuals from the group ... he (Bouhlel) showed a certain recent interest in radical jihadist movements," Molins said. (Writing by Brian Love; Additional reporting by John Irish, Chine Labbe, Johnny Cotton; Editing by Andrew Callus and Catherine Evans)
(BATON ROUGE, Louisiana) Just days before he was shot and killed Sunday morning, a Baton Rouge police officer posted an emotional Facebook message saying he was physically and emotionally tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, a friend said Sunday.
I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me, Montrell Jackson wrote.
Friends and family of Jackson, 32, were mourning the 10-year veteran of the police force that relatives described as a gentle giant and a protector after he and another two law enforcement officers were shot and killed Sunday morning by a gunman.
Sgt. Don Coppola Jr. of the Baton Rouge Police Department identified the other slain Baton Rouge police officer as 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been with the department less than a year.
Read More: Weary Baton Rouge Struggles to Come to Grips With Latest Deadly Shooting
The third officer killed was 45-year-old sheriffs deputy Brad Garafola, a 24-year veteran, spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriffs Office said.
In the Facebook posting Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
Ive experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core, the posting read.
The message was posted July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge. That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the countrys fraught history of race relations. Another black man was shot and killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend livestreaming the aftermath on Facebook. Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, killing five police officers.
Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
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Erika Green told The Associated Press Sunday that she is friends with the family of Jackson, one of three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers who were killed Sunday morning. She said she saw the message on his Facebook page.
In the message, Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired.
These are trying times. Please dont let hate infect your heart, Jackson wrote.
A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet but is no longer on Jacksons Facebook page.
Read More: President Obama: Killing of Baton Rouge Cops Was Work of Cowards
Jacksons family was mourning the officer Sunday afternoon.
Kedrick Pitts, the 24-year-old younger half brother of Montrell Jackson, said he was very close to his older brother.
With him it was God, family and the police force, Pitts said outside his mothers 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 that 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 brothers death, put on a brave face and did not shed any tears. I did all the crying I can do. Its not going to bring him back, he said.
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 dont get it, she said.
In the rural Livingston Parish, family of Jacksons wife was also mourning their loss.
Lonnie Jordan, Jacksons father-in-law, spoke to reporters on the front lawn of Jacksons house. Jordan said he heard about Jacksons 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, 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 didnt let it show.
Garafolas house in the Baton Rouge suburb of Denham Springs lies at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac and there were several cars parked in front. East Baton Rouge sheriffs deputies said the family needed its privacy and was not speaking with any more media after having done an interview with a local newspaper.
A neighbor, Rhonda Smith, a 39-year-old marketing representative, said Garafola was a family man.
You never saw him without at least one of his kids, she said Sunday evening.
She said he had four children a 7-year-old girl, a 12-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter and a 21-year-old son.
She said she and the Garafolas were the first to build homes in 2007 in the subdivision where they live.
He was low-key, happy, she said. He never raised his voice, never hollered at anyone. The epitome of a peace officer.
She said Garafola mowed peoples lawns just to be a good neighbor and built a back yard fence for her. She said he also kept an eye on the neighborhood.
Very surreal. Still cant wrap my brain around it. My heart goes out to those kids and Tonja (his wife), she said.
Officer Gerald and his wife, Dechia, celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary just two weeks ago, according to WWL-TV (http://bit.ly/2a9jnF9 ).
The couple had a 3-year-old daughter together and Gerald had adopted his wifes older daughter from a previous marriage.
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.
Hes a good family man, good cop, loving husband, family friend Skye Turner said.
Associated Press reporter Kevin McGill in Livingston Parish contributed to this report.
Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Civilians in rebel-held parts of Syria's Aleppo expressed fears Monday of a lengthy government siege, as food supplies dwindled after regime troops seized the only road into the city's east.
The government advance, which has been backed by a Russian air offensive, is seen as a major setback for opposition forces in Syria's second city.
The United Nations says about 600,000 Syrians already live under siege countrywide, most encircled by government forces, though rebels and the Islamic State group have also used the tactic.
A US-backed alliance of Kurds and Arabs has also surrounded the IS stronghold of Manbij about 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Aleppo city.
Air strikes by the US-led coalition killed at least 21 civilians in and around the jihadist bastion on Monday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In Aleppo city itself, air strikes struck rebel areas, killing four civilians in Qaterji, the monitor said.
In Bab al-Hadid, another district that was hit, an AFP correspondent saw a man searching for his family under the rubble.
He called out to his daughter, who replied: "I'm in the basement. There's no air," before she fell silent, and he burst into tears.
Bombs then dropped nearby causing more casualties, including a woman who lost a leg, said the correspondent, who noted attacks on eastern Aleppo had intensified in recent days.
Food and fuel shortages had already hit rebel-held districts that are home to at least 200,000 people, after government forces advanced to within firing range of the key Castello Road supply route on July 7.
- 'Nowhere to go' -
Regime forces seized the road itself at the weekend, completely severing the rebel-held portion of the city from the outside world and raising fears of a potentially devastating siege.
"I don't know what is going to happen to us," said 38-year-old Mohamed Rukby, an unemployed father-of-four in the Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood.
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"We have nowhere to go. All the roads are closed and we've been suffering for days with shortages of bread, food and basically everything."
In the opposition-controlled Al-Mashhad district, mechanic Mohamed Zeitun said his work had dried up because fuel shortages meant residents were not driving anywhere.
"The idea of the siege keeps me up at night," the 44-year-old told AFP.
"I don't have supplies to last me more than a week, and if there is no food in the markets, there could be a famine," said the father-of-five.
Aleppo city was once Syria's economic powerhouse, but it has been ravaged by the war that began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.
The conflict has killed more than 280,000 people and left Aleppo divided roughly between government control in the west and rebel control in the east.
Analysts said the government advance was a significant blow to the rebels.
"It has now become mission impossible for Syria's rebels who are completely deprived of any breathing space," said Karim Bitar, an analyst at the Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
The advance also leaves Syria's President Bashar al-Assad feeling "considerably more secure than a few months ago," he said, meaning his forces could move "to further consolidate his positions".
- 'Devastating blow' -
The encircling of eastern Aleppo has raised international concern, with the UN's humanitarian coordination body OCHA warning that "the situation is particularly worrying due to the high concentration of people living in this area".
It said eastern Aleppo had not received humanitarian supplies since July 7, and that there was enough food there to last 145,000 people for one month.
OCHA said some essentials had been stockpiled and there were sufficient emergency medical supplies for four to five months.
But "further life-saving aid is needed urgently", it added.
In some places, civilians have reportedly starved to death or died for lack of medical supplies because of siege tactics.
Despite successive rounds of talks, international efforts to find a solution to the conflict have yet to bear fruit, and UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura has urged Russia and the United States to push for renewed peace talks in Geneva next month.
But the opposition High Negotiations Committee said the regime's advance around Aleppo could jeopardise new talks.
"This is pushing the negotiations in Geneva to a more remote date. Frankly the prospects are becoming less and less possible or more and more remote," HNC member Basma Kodmani said late Sunday.
Syria expert Aron Lund, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that if Assad manages to secure both Damascus and Aleppo it would be a "devastating blow for his opponents".
"It wouldn't mean the war is over. The government is still weak and exhausted... But it might have severe repercussions for rebel morale and perhaps also for foreign support to the opposition," he added.
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators are investigating whether Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV had inflated vehicle sales figures, the company said Monday, following a lawsuit by Illinois dealers in January. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice are probing the way the Italian-American automaker reports vehicle sales to individuals, rental fleets and other end users, the company said in a statement. In the civil lawsuit, two Chicago-area dealerships of the Ed Napleton Automotive Group accused Fiat Chrysler officials of pressuring dealers to falsify sales reports. The federal probe could raise questions about how U.S. automakers compensate dealers for achieving sales targets. Fiat Chrysler said in Monday's statement that annual and quarterly financial statements filed with regulators are based on shipments to dealers, and not on sales to end customers. In its lawsuit, the Napleton dealership group cited factory-to-dealer payments based on hitting quotas for selling certain models, or achieving overall sales targets. The group said Fiat Chrysler officials solicited competing dealers to falsely report sales to receive tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses from the automaker. In January, Fiat Chrysler said the claims were baseless and that its quarterly financial reports presented a true picture of vehicles built and shipped. Automakers release monthly reports of sales by dealers, including to individuals and rental fleets, and cars titled to dealerships for use as loaners. Some automakers use a dealer's monthly sales as the basis for calculating sales bonuses and other payments to the retailer. A dealership that hits a sales target can make more profit on each vehicle sold than one that falls short. Maserati North America Inc dealers in New York, New Jersey and California have also filed a similar lawsuit in New York against the company, which is owned by Fiat Chrysler. Fiat Chrysler's U.S.-traded shares edged down 2 cents to $6.73 on Monday. Its shares traded in Milan closed up 2 percent at 6.20 euros. (Reporting by Bernie Woodall in Detroit, Ankit Ajmera in Bangalore and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Richard Chang)
Paris (AFP) - The first sign that the Nice truck attacker was planning something violent came about eight months ago, when he snapped a picture of a news story headlined: "Man deliberately rams car into cafe terrace."
Around the same time, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel showed a friend a video of a hostage being decapitated, according to Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, revealing details of the investigation to reporters on Monday.
"When (the witness) expressed his surprise, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel said 'I am used to it'," said Molins.
- 'Unbridled sexual activity' -
Many people interviewed by investigators described the Tunisian father of three as "someone who did not practise the Muslim religion, ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had an unbridled sexual activity".
However Molins said a "clear, recent interest in the radical jihadist movement" had emerged before Bouhlel rammed a 19-tonne truck into a crowd on Bastille Day in the Mediterranean resort city of Nice, killing 84 people.
However there has been no clear link established to the Islamic State group which claimed the attack, saying Bouhlel was one of its "soldiers".
Analyses of his computer and cellphone showed a wide-range of images and internet searches showing a fascination with violence and jihadist movements such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.
- Researched Orlando attack -
From July 1 Bouhlel made near-daily searches for video of nasheeds -- religious chants used in Islamic State propaganda -- as well as videos of readings from the Koran.
He also looked for information on the fasting month of Ramadan which ended earlier this month.
In addition, he searched for information about the terror attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead, and the Paris suburb of Magnanville -- where a police couple were killed last month.
Both were linked to the Islamic State group.
- 'Premeditated nature' -
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Bouhlel also had "very violent" photos on his computer, of corpses, fighters posing with the IS flag, photos of Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden as well as Mokhtar Belmokhtar -- a former commander for Al-Qaeda's north Africa branch who has since formed his own group Al-Murabitoun.
There was also a photo of the cover of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were gunned down by brothers in an attack claimed by Al-Qaeda in Yemen in Paris in January 2015.
Molins said the attack was "of a premeditated nature."
From July 1 Bouhlel had searched for information about the Bastille Day fireworks display online and searches such as "horrible fatal accident", "terrible fatal accident" and "shocking videos not for sensible viewers."
- 'Religious beard' -
He also researched truck rental agencies and looked up the address of a weapons store.
He reserved the rental truck on July 4, around the time he stopped shaving his beard, one witness told investigators.
When questioned about his facial hair Bouhlel responded: "The meaning of this beard is religious".
After picking up the truck on July 11, Bouhlel staked out the site of the carnage on the Promenade des Anglais at 6 pm on July 12 when video surveillance showed him briefly stopping the truck along the road, and again at 10 pm on July 13, roughly 24 hours before he would launch his attack.
- Taking selfies -
On the day of the Bastille Day carnage he appeared to have spent much of the national holiday on the promenade, taking selfies on the beach and the walkway throughout the afternoon.
Molins said "instructions" from IS to its supporters abroad to carry out attacks "can lead certain individuals to take action in France without needing to go to Syria and without precise orders".
"Adhesion to these instructions, radicalisation, can happed even faster when aimed at disturbed individuals or those fascinated by violence.
"Either way, this is a terrorist act."
Fans of the intergalactic saga were waiting for news from London, UK, July 15 to 17, when the British city hosted this year's Star Wars Celebration convention. With all communications under strict control, fans eagerly awaiting news on the franchise's upcoming instalment weren't treated to as many revelations as they might have hoped. Still, here are five things we did learn about the next "Star Wars" episodes and their spin-offs.
"Rogue One : A Star Wars Story" gets a poster
The first spin-off from the Star Wars franchise now has its first movie poster, although it's still provisional. The poster shows a paradise setting -- with a beach lined with palm trees and turquoise waters -- as the backdrop for a battle between humans and their droids and an army of Stormtroopers. In the sky, X-wings can be seen circling and a translucent Death Star shows its menacing presence. A few new images from the film were also unveiled in a video mixing scenes from the first trailer and behind the scenes footage: https://youtu.be/HUb_zpdyDpU.
Darth Vader is definitely back
Eleven years after "Revenge of the Sith," the Sith Lord is set to return to the saga via the "Rogue One" spin-off. Announced back in June, Darth Vader's return has ben confirmed by a teaser unveiled at this year's Star Wars Celebration. Darth Vader makes a very brief appearance right at the end of the video. Fans immediately recognized his legendary breathing before even seeing him onscreen. Unfortunately the teaser isn't available online for the time being.
Episode VIII will directly follow "The Force Awakens"
For the first time in the history of the saga, the next episode will pick up the story directly after the previous installment. With no omissions or jumps forward in time, Rian Johnson's movie -- which has just finished filming -- will pick up exactly where the J.J. Abrams film left off -- in other words, when Rey and Luke Skywalker meet.
Alden Ehrenreich is the new Han Solo
The 26-year-old American actor is set to play the legendary smuggler -- previously portrayed by Harrison Ford -- in a spin-off about his younger years and early encounters with the Rebel Alliance. Alden Ehrenreich, seen recently in the Coen brothers' "Hail, Caesar!," was officially introduced at Star Wars Celebration. The Han Solo movie is due to start filming in January or early February 2017, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ("The Lego Movie," "21 Jump Street"), and is slated for release in May 2018.
More in store for 2017
In the end, there were very few revelations from the London edition of Star Was Celebration. There was hardly any new information on Episode VIII, for example, which still has no title or teaser. Next year's Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, USA, should make up for things April 13 to 16, 2017. As well as being held a few months before the release of Episode VIII, the 2017 edition is also likely to celebrate the saga's 40th anniversary.
When Mike Hicks began investing in the stock market almost 30 years ago, he practically gave up on analyzing the market itself.
"I was so confused by trying to interpret the market decades ago that I almost gave up trying and just focused on individual stocks, which was completely wrong," the retired CPA told IBD.
"There was so much conflicting information out there, even for a certified public accountant, for an educated person," Hicks said. "If you were trying to understand the 'experts,' one says 'A' and another says the opposite of 'A.' So you came away pretty much frustrated in that exercise, feeling that nobody can call the market."
That attitude turned 180 degrees when a friend showed Hicks a copy of IBD in the 1980s. The newspaper was launched as a daily in April 1984.
"I was absolutely amazed that I almost had to sit in a chair," he said. "This was what I was looking for all my life."
Hicks savored the screens of stocks that showed a rare combination of traits: strong volume demand and stellar fundamentals.
"It was like heaven," he said. "Now I could rely on the financial statement information, but I had the timing of how to read the chart and the backdrop of the all-important market status. So when you stack these advantages into your probability (of finding a winner), you start having markedly better success on a more consistent basis."
The "Ask Bill" series -- a former Investors.com feature that gave concise answers to questions submitted by readers about the stock market -- also energized Hicks. He says he printed out nearly every answer and stored them in a file for frequent reference.
Hicks is not only a longtime IBD reader, but also a host of the St. Petersburg/Clearwater, Fla., Meetup group, one of the best-attended IBD Meetups in the U.S. (To find a Meetup in your area, hover the mouse over "How to Invest" in the main navigation bar at Investors.com, then click on "IBD Meetups.")
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At a past gathering, 53 people showed up, a monthly record and all the more impressive considering that snowbirds from the Northeast had already headed back up the coast.
'Please, No Rubber Carrots'
The group, started in October 2003, had a humble start. It had no whiteboard on which to diagram the winning patterns that great stocks form before breaking out. No computer. No internet connection either. They examined charts with transparencies, a grease pen and an overhead projector.
Now, Hicks and fellow staffers charge $26 a ticket. In return, the attendee gets a two-entree dinner with salad, bread, coffee and dessert, a batch of charts and other information, and several hours of education and guidance from veteran IBD readers on how to follow the market, how to build a watch list and how to use charts.
"The problem all the Meetups will face is the room charge. You can handle the meal costs, because you're giving people the value of the meal, although they do complain about the quality of the food regularly," Hicks said with a laugh.
"But I always tell them, 'Look, we're getting the room for such a discount because we're buying the meal, just pretend the meal is free.' I've been acting as assistant chef and telling them what vegetables were good to prepare from (the) frozen (stage). My line to the catering manager is, 'Look, please do not give us rubber carrots.' "
By adding a small override to the attendance fee, Hicks was able to raise enough funds to buy a digital projector and whiteboard to enhance the learning experience. He also gives a welcome package with 64 pages of material -- mostly Investor's Corner articles -- to new members.
"We had borrowed a number of techniques from the (Meetup) folks in Chicago," he said.
A Golden Goose
Hicks says a turning point in his investing life came in 2003. In the years preceding that, an 80-hour workweek and a string of personal tragedies made it hard for him to concentrate on the stock market.
"In May 2003, I knew that IBD is a golden goose, so I decided that either I had to study it, like a CPA, or I had to discredit it and become a mutual fund investor," he said.
After the grueling tax-return season, he spent a weekend that month going through the educational features on Investors.com.
That's when he discovered "Ask Bill." He learned so much from each nugget of information that he locked himself in his study from Friday night to Sunday night, asking his wife to leave meals outside the door. His computer printer ran all day, all night.
"It was an epiphany. I didn't know how the printer did not burn out," he said.
He caught the new roaring bull market by the tail.
GPS device leader Garmin[ticker symb=GRMN] was his first CAN SLIM stock, which he bought right at the breakout from a proper cup with handle in December 2002, two months after the major indexes bottomed. Hicks sold the stock for a 66% gain in less than six months.
He scored a bunch of winners that year, nailing down gains of 30% to 60% each.
Then came his all-time portfolio champ, stun gun maker Taser International[ticker symb=TASR].
IBD: You scored a 100% gain the first time you bought Taser in 2003. Why did you buy it again?
Hicks: I was sorry I sold it the first time. I was looking at a proper new entry point, and I saw that narrow opportunity in mid-December (1). It did not quite meet all the criteria, but you could just kind of tell (it was setting up for a new breakout). The way it acted reminded me of the Nicolas Darvas book, "How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market." You could almost see that stock crouching like a dancer crouching before he jumped.
When I saw that settle down over the holiday season in December, I took a pretty significant position, and then I pyramided that position up in January. Then I just sat tight.
I could not believe my eyes as the tens of thousands (of profits in dollars) rolled up. All my friends, of course, and my family, and wife said to me, 'Are you going to hold it until you lose it all?' It just kept going up and up, and I kept sitting with my lips pursed.
It was just so strong, and the story was so profound; that weapon was saving lives.
But by April of 2004, the day I sold was a Monday. Obviously I knew the quarterly earnings would be released at 4:05 p.m. (Eastern time) that day. It had all the signs of a climax top. I said to myself, the expectations on this stock have to be so incredibly high at this point, I don't think even Taser could meet them. So I picked up the phone, called my broker and told her to sell everything. It is the first, and probably last, time that I sold a stock right at the top." (Hicks achieved a 285% gain on the position.)
IBD: Which features in IBD do you discuss regularly at the Meetup?
Hicks: What I use for the printouts every month for the Meetup is The Big Picture. It does a number of things, especially for new people, but I also use it personally to interpret the market for me, even after all these years.
Not only does it explain the market, but it gives you every day a list of the leading stocks that were up or down in big volume. So you can use that every day to identify those quality stocks according to CAN SLIM principles. And the text usually discusses some of those stocks.
I think a lot of people do not recognize the immense value of what they're looking at on that page. I'm not aware of any other publication that puts on the front page a market call every day and tells you to the exact day that a new rally starts. And they call the exact day that they think it stops. I think that's an incredible thing to put on the front page of a major financial publication.
IBD: Do you encounter some attendees who mix the rules of CAN SLIM with other systems or their own?
Hicks: Yes, we've had quite a few, actually. I try not to give my opinion but Bill O'Neil's opinion, and what he advocates in all his materials. Bill has studied all these methodologies as well as charting methodologies like candlesticks, for example ... and he's not apologetic to say matter-of-factly that he's looked at these and invalidated them, and that none of these are superior to a simple price and volume chart.
(Editor's Note: This interview originally published in the June 3, 2011, edition of IBD.)
A tragic shooting took the lives of three police officers in Baton Rouge over the weekend, heightened already elevated concerns over racial divides in America.
During an interview on the FOX Business Networks Mornings with Maria, former Republican Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said it wont be easy to bring the nation together, but support for law enforcement across the country is vital.
Crime has become a huge issue in this country for the first time in a long time, and these murders of police officers have made that explosive, he said. Totally indefensible blue lives matter. Thats something thats been said. Of course all lives matter, but the people that protect us, provide our securitywe owe them better.
Barbour, who also served as chairman of the Republican National Committee, added these clashes area low, low point in Americas history and called on President Barack Obama to speak out to strongly condemn the acts.
The former governor said along with crime, economic conditions in the U.S. have contributed to heightened tension saying out on Main Street, its sometimes impossible to tell recession from recovery.
Median household income is down, more small businesses are closing than are openingmost of the unemployment drop has been because people are dropping out of the workforce, not because people are finding jobs. So that and the increase in crime, the worry about national securityparticularly terrorism [are contributing to the tension], Barbour said.
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PARIS, July 18 (Reuters) - France's competition authority on Monday approved plans by French music and book chain Fnac to take over consumer electronics retailer Darty .
The regulatory decision means that the two companies will create France's largest electrical goods retailer with combined sales of nearly 8 billion euros ($8.84 billion), allowing it to better compete with online retail giants such as Amazon .
As part of its approval, the French competition authority required the combined unit to get rid of some six stores.
The authority said earlier this month it would take account of online sales when analyzing the deal, which was bound to lower Fnac and Darty's share of the physical store market in France.
Fnac made a final offer for Darty of 170 pence a share in April, valuing it at about 900 million pounds, and putting an end to a long-running bidding war with South Africa's Steinhoff . It held or had received valid acceptances for 91.89 percent of Darty's share capital at the first closing date of the offer on July 15.
($1 = 0.9054 euros) (Reporting by Dominique Vidalon)
At a Monday memorial service for the at least 84 people killed and more than 200 injured during last Thursdays terrorist attack in Nice, attendees cheered for emergency workers, clapped along to the French national anthem, and kept quiet during a moment of silence for the victims.
But when Prime Minister Manuel Valls emerged from the crowd to sign a condolence book, the crowd booed, called him a murderer, and yelled at him to resign.
The incident reflected a growing dissatisfaction and sense of distrust toward the ruling French government, which has failed to stop three major terrorist attacks in the past 18 months. That sentiment that was made worse when Valls said after the Nice attack that times have changed, and France is going to have to live with terrorism.
Valls claimed after the attack that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was radicalized too quickly for him to even appear on French radar screens. According to Lahouaiej-Bouhlels computer records, the future terrorist searched a number of times for videos of deadly traffic accidents and for information about Nices Bastille Day celebration. French media reports that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel even ran trials of the attack days before it took place.
And the crowd in Nice on Monday arent the only ones who see the attacks as a failure directly tied to those leading the country.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right politician who led France until Francois Hollande beat him by a small margin in 2012, has used the series of attacks that began after he left office as an opportunity for him to bash the Hollande government.
I know that we shouldnt fight or tear each other up while the victims havent been buried yet, Sarkozy said in an interview with French media. But I want to say that everything that should have been done over the past 18 months was not done.
Sarkozy announced earlier this month that he plans to resign from his post as head of his political party, Les Republicains, hinting that he could be interested in seeking the presidency again. He would be unable to accept an eventual nomination if he remained head of the party.
Photo Credit: Nicolas Kovarik/IP3/Getty Images
Culoz (France) (AFP) - Reigning Tour de France champion Chris Froome believes his Sky team-mate Woeter Poels would be a leader in any other outfit.
Poels was the one Sky team-mate to stick with Froome all the way to the end of Sunday's mountainous 15th stage and did the bulk of the chasing on the final climb of the day to ensure none of the Briton's rivals could attack.
He may be down in 34th place overall and nearly an hour behind his team leader, but Poels has been saving energy in non-mountain stages in order to be more effective when he's called upon.
Froome's rivals have variously described his Sky team at the Tour this year as an "armada" and "untouchable".
"That's one of the things I said coming into this race: I really am in such a privileged position to have such a strong team around me," said Froome, following Sunday's stage.
"It's possibly the strongest team Sky have put into the Tour de France.
"These guys would be leaders in other teams in own their own right."
And the one in particular he singled out is Poels, a talented Dutch climber who won the prestigious one-day Ardennes Classic race, Liege-Bastogne-Liege in April.
"He's not just any other rider -- he won Liege-Bastogne-Liege, one of the greatest classics in the world," added Froome.
"I'm really fortunate to be in this position."
This year's Tour has been marked by the lack of any race-changing attacks from Froome's rivals.
Until now, his team has controlled the race to such an extent that the few times someone has tried to put in a burst of acceleration on a climb, they've never got very far ahead and been brought back quickly.
"It must be quite demoralising for the others to be attacking and knowing this calibre of rider is going to be chasing after them and riding a tempo that's going to neutralise their attacks," added Froome.
Even so, the 31-year-old said he had expected more from his rivals.
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"If I'm honest, yeah, I am quite surprised," he said.
"It really was a stage (on Sunday) where I expected more from Movistar in particular. They had two strong guys in the breakaway -- I thought they'd give more on the final climb."
Young Briton Adam Yates, one of the surprises of the Tour so far as he sits third at 2min 45sec from Froome, said the strength of Sky simply makes it impossible for anyone to do anything.
"With Sky riding such a hard tempo there's not much you can do," he said.
"As soon as there's an attack, they (the attackers) gain a few seconds and then start going backwards.
"Maybe you have to attack earlier or get in the breakaway because Sky are looking untouchable."
- 'More fire and fight' -
Movistar's Nairo Quintana was expected to be Froome's major rival this year but has been conspicuous by his lack of fight so far.
The Colombian is fourth overall at 2:59 and showed weakness on Thursday's climb up Mont Ventoux.
But his Movistar team-mate Alejandro Valverde insists the Charge of the Light Brigade is coming -- just not until the final week.
"Sky were very strong yet again and they really made it hard for us," the Spaniard said after Sunday's stage.
"It was a very difficult stage, and difficult for us to do anything with the pace.
"Nairo seemed pretty relaxed, he's very strong coming into this next week.
"We're going to try to do our best in the coming week. We're definitely going to try something.
"I think people are expecting more fire and fight from us. We will fight in the coming stages but not today (Sunday)."
Berlin (AFP) - German prosecutors said Monday they had brought charges against a rail dispatcher accused of causing a train crash in February that killed 12 while playing a mobile phone game on duty.
Two commuter trains crashed head-on at high speed near the southern spa town of Bad Aibling on February 9 in one of Germany's deadliest accidents in years, which also left 89 injured.
The dispatcher, whose name has not been released, stands accused of 12 counts of involuntary manslaughter, the prosecutor's office in the nearby town of Traunstein said in a statement.
"There is reason to believe the dispatcher, in violation of a ban, was distracted by using an online computer game directly before the collision of the trains," it said.
The two trains carrying about 150 passengers in total were travelling toward each other on a route covered by a single track.
Prosecutors said the dispatcher had mistakenly cleared both drivers to proceed and overrode technical precautions to prevent a collision.
Frantic emergency calls to the drivers did not go through because of a mistake using the radio equipment, "which had the effect that the drivers could not be warned in time".
The trains collided in a forest area about 60 kilometres (40 miles) southeast of Munich, the Bavarian capital.
Authorities said an investigation had ruled out a technical defect as a cause of the disaster.
The accident was Germany's first fatal train crash since April 2012, when three people were killed and 13 injured in a collision between two regional trains in the western city of Offenbach.
The country's deadliest post-war rail accident happened in 1998, when a high-speed ICE train linking Munich and Hamburg derailed in the northern town of Eschede, killing 101 people and injuring 88.
Frankfurt (AFP) - The German economy, Europe's biggest, will continue to expand strongly in the third quarter, despite potential risks from the British vote to quit the European Union, the German central bank or Bundesbank said on Monday.
After growth slowed in the second quarter of 2016, "the underlying economic trend remains very strong and a sharp increase in overall economic output can be expected in the summer quarter," the Bundesbank wrote in its latest monthly report.
In the period from July to September, the main driving factors behind recovery -- the very favourable situation on the labour market, rising wages and expansive fiscal policy -- "remain intact," the report said.
"Continued positive sentiment among companies and households suggest that the slowdown in growth in the second quarter will only be temporary," the central bank continued.
"It is currently difficult to forecast the economic fallout for Germany (from Brexit), but it is likely to remain limited, at least in the short term," it said.
German gross domestic product (GDP) expanded by 0.7 percent in the first three months of this year, but is expected to have slowed in the second quarter.
The Bundesbank is currently pencilling in GDP growth of 1.7 percent for the whole of 2016.
FRANKFURT, July 18 (Reuters) - Germany's economy will rebound in the coming months after a weak second quarter and any impact from Britain's decision to leave the European Union in the near future could be limited, the Bundesbank said in a monthly report on Monday.
The euro zone's biggest economy has struggled since a superb first quarter with falling industrial production, weak orders and dropping exports raising doubts about its prospects and suggesting that Germany may be succumbing to a broader global slowdown.
But the Bundesbank dismissed those concerns, arguing that one-off factors were contributing to the poor performance and the economy remains on solid footing.
"The fundamental trend remains quite strong and economic output is expected to significantly increase during the summer quarter," the central bank said.
"The driving factors of the domestically supported upswing remain intact, including the excellent labour market, rising real wages and an expansionary fiscal policy," it said. "The continued favourable business and household sentiment suggests a purely temporary breather in the second quarter."
The bank said estimating the impact of Britain's referendum on EU membership was difficult for now but said for now it only saw a limited near term impact.
(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Francesco Canepa)
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's economy will rebound in the coming months after a weak second quarter and any impact from Britain's decision to leave the European Union in the near future could be limited, the Bundesbank said in a monthly report on Monday.
The euro zone's biggest economy has struggled since a superb first quarter with falling industrial production, weak orders and dropping exports raising doubts about its prospects and suggesting that Germany may be succumbing to a broader global slowdown.
But the Bundesbank dismissed those concerns, arguing that one-off factors were contributing to the poor performance and the economy remains on solid footing.
"The fundamental trend remains quite strong and economic output is expected to significantly increase during the summer quarter," the central bank said.
"The driving factors of the domestically supported upswing remain intact, including the excellent labour market, rising real wages and an expansionary fiscal policy," it said. "The continued favourable business and household sentiment suggests a purely temporary breather in the second quarter."
The bank said estimating the impact of Britain's referendum on EU membership was difficult for now but said for now it only saw a limited near term impact.
(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Francesco Canepa)
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany plans new legislation to require manufacturers of cars equipped with an autopilot function to install a black box to help determine responsibility in the event of an accident, transport ministry sources told Reuters on Monday.
The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car in its Autopilot mode has increased the pressure on industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology can be deployed safely.
Under the proposal from Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt, drivers will not have to pay attention to traffic or concentrate on steering, but must remain seated at the wheel so they can intervene in the event of an emergency.
Manufacturers will also be required to install a black box that records when the autopilot system was active, when the driver drove and when the system requested that the driver take over, according to the proposals.
The draft is due to be sent to other ministries for approval this summer, a transport ministry spokesman said.
Germany is home to some of the world's largest car companies including Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW and the government wants the industry to become a global player in the market for self-driving vehicles.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said in April the industry should draw up a wish list for Berlin to help develop self-driving vehicles, ideally with a timetable.
Companies around the globe are working on prototypes for self-driving vehicles, but such cars are not expected to be available for the mass market before 2020.
(Reporting by Markus Wacket; Writing by Caroline Copley; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
By Michael Nienaber and Andrea Shalal BERLIN (Reuters) - Turkey cannot join the European Union if it reinstates the death penalty, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in a telephone call on Monday, a German spokeswoman said. Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing it to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then. With pro-government protesters demanding that the coup leaders be executed, Erdogan said on Sunday there could be no delay in using capital punishment and the government would discuss it with opposition parties. Merkel told Erdogan on the phone that the European Union and Germany vehemently oppose the reinstatement of the death penalty and that such a step is "in no way compatible" with Ankara's goal of EU membership, a Berlin government spokeswoman said. "The chancellor also urged the president to abide by the principles of proportionality and rule of law in the Turkish state's response (to the coup attempt)," she added. "The recent wave of arrests and dismissals in Turkey are a matter for grave concern." Merkel's comments were echoed by Foreign Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who told reporters in Brussels that Germany expected Turkey to deal with those responsible for the attempted coup in line with the rule of law. "Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU," Steinmeier said. Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference earlier on Monday that Germany and the EU categorically reject the death penalty. "A country that has the death penalty can't be a member of the European Union and the introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would therefore mean the end of accession negotiations," Seibert said. Even before the coup attempt, many EU states were not eager to see such a large, mostly Muslim country as a member, and were concerned that Ankara's record on basic freedoms had gone into reverse in recent years. Turkey widened the crackdown on suspected supporters of the coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000. German officials said they had seen no evidence of any conspiracy in the events beyond an effort by parts of the Turkish military to seize control of the government. Erdogan and the Turkish government have accused the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, of orchestrating the coup. (Reporting by Michael Nienaber, Andrea Shalal, Joseph Nasr, Michelle Martin und Thorsten Severin; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
MUMBAI, July 18 (Reuters) - German potash miner K+S will ship potash to India at the same decade-low price that other sellers to the country have agreed to, three industry sources said on Monday, at a time when global supply of the crop nutrient is exceeding demand.
K+S's decision could pressure other key producers such as Russia's Uralkali and North American trading group Canpotex Ltd, owned by Potash Corp of Saskatchewan , Mosaic Co and Agrium Inc, to consider offering potash at similar prices.
Indian Potash Ltd (IPL), one of the country's biggest fertiliser importers, will buy 125,000 tonnes of potash at $227 per tonne on a cost and freight (CFR) basis with a credit period of 180 days, said the officials, who declined to be named as the contract has not been officially announced.
The price is a third lower than last year. Belarusian Potash Company (BPC) and Israel Chemicals (ICL) have agreed to supply potash at the same rate to India, one of the world's top buyers of the material.
Uralkali, the world's biggest potash producer, has said the price agreed by BPC was too low and it was not yet ready to sign a potash supply contract with India.
But Indian officials said they could not accept a price above $227 a tonne since the country has already bought around 1.5 million tonnes at the price. Prices were as high as $490 three years ago.
"There is no question of raising prices. If other suppliers don't agree, then we can buy more from Belarus, ICL and K+S," said a senior official with a state-run Indian fertiliser company.
IPL declined to comment on any potash contract, while K+S was not immediately available for the comment.
Last week, BPC signed an overdue deal with a consortium of Chinese firms to sell potash at $219 per tonne for 2016, a 30 percent drop from last year.
Due to weak global demand, fertilizer miner Mosaic Co has idled production at its Colonsay, Saskatchewan potash mine in western Canada for the rest of 2016.
(Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Additional reporting by Patricia Weiss in FRANKFURT; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, and Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters (Columbia Pictures)
After this weekend, Sony aint afraid of no ghosts or Ghostbusters, for that matter. The unexpectedly controversial reboot of Ivan Reitmans 1984 favorite earned a not-at-all horrifying $46 million for its debut weekend, as well as a B+ Cinemascore from general audiences. That gave Sonys distribution president, Rory Bruer, incentive to promise that new Ghostbusters Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones will be suiting up again in the near future. Speaking to The Wrap, Bruer remarked: The Ghostbusters world is alive and well. I expect Ghostbusters to become an important brand and franchise. While nothing has been officially announced yet, theres no doubt in my mind it will happen.
Related: Ghostbusters: All the Callbacks, Cameos, and Easter Eggs You Might Have Missed
Of course, if you stayed through the end credits, you already know that director Paul Feig is fairly confident in his sequel prospects. A short scene before the final cut-to-black all but promises who the villain will be when the quartet is called back into action, and its a four-letter name that will be instantly familiar to Ghostbusters fans. No, not Vigo. Allow Joness savvy buster, Patty Tolan, to give you the 411: While listening in on the EVP-enabled headphones that Abby (McCarthy) and Holtzmann (McKinnon) used to play a joke on Erin (Wiig) at the beginning of the film, she hears something that sure doesnt sound like a laughing matter. Turning to her comrades in slime, she asks, Whats Zuul? and is only greeted with blank stares in return.
As most viewers will know all too well, Zuul isnt a what, but a who. Specifically, Zuul is an emissary of Gozer, the shape-shifter who transforms from a David Bowie-esque glam rocker into a super-sized version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that Dan Aykroyds Ray Stantz accidentally conjures into existence during the climax of the original Ghostsbusters. Gozers ultimate agenda was to usher in a ghost-pocalypse, a desire shared by the reboots main bad guy, Rowan (Neil Casey), but, thankfully, thwarted by the new team. Well have to wait and see whether this new Zuul is paving the way for Gozer or is more of a freelance operative. Either way, his presence doesnt spell good things for the new Ghostbusters.
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That scene is a fun tag to the end of a fun film, but its far from the only reason to stay through the closing credits. The entire credits reel is almost a mini-movie in and of itself, complete with bonus scenes, snazzy CGI graphics, and even an entire deleted sequence that doesnt appear in the film proper.
Related: How the Ghostbusters Team Landed All Those Cameos From the Original Cast Members
Next to the Zuul reveal, the most notable bonus scene in the Ghostbusters credit sequence has to be Sigourney Weavers cameo as Rebecca Gorin, Holtzmanns mentor, who helped her build a ghost containment unit that will house all the spirits their proton packs vacuum up. The actress is one of the many stars of the 84 film to re-appear here, and it may be the funniest cameo of the bunch. Thats largely because Weaver channels her pupils infectiously wacky spirit; in fact, the potent comic chemistry she shares with McKinnon during her brief appearance has us hoping this isnt the last we see of the dynamic duo of Gorin & Holtzmann.
Another scene, meanwhile, reveals some of the new ghostbusting tech we might see in the sequel, including the bear trap that was teased way back in the first trailer. And in between these moments, images of the Ecto-1 and various ghosts accompany the credits on screen while Elle Kings Good Girls, blasts through the speakers. (Kings tune, by the way, seems to have replaced Fall Out Boys cover of Ray Parker Jr.s original Ghostbusters anthem, which didnt exactly have a lot of fans.)
But wait, theres more! Midway through the credits scrawl, youll start seeing but not hearing, as the original audio isnt included scenes from the big finale in Times Square, which serves as the climactic battleground for Rowan and the Ghostbusters. At this point, Rowans spirit is still inside the strapping body of himbo secretary, Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), and hes frozen dozens of New York City citizens, including a pair of FBI agents played by Michael Kenneth Williams and Matt Walsh, in place. In the movie itself, they remain still as statues.
Related: Chris Hemsworths Funniest Pre-Ghostbusters Moments
But in the footage glimpsed here, you can see Rowan-as-Kevin leading the public in a Michael Jackson-esque dance routine that, per the credits, is choreographed by none other than Stephen tWitch Boss of So You Think You Can Dance fame. Production designer Jefferson Sage told Yahoo Movies in a discussion of the Times Square production sequence that the dancing was indeed shot to be part of the main film, at a point when Rowan-as-Kevin decides he wanted to have a little fun.
Director Paul Feig spoke with Vulture about the sequence, telling the site it was done to the Bee Gees You Should Be Dancing. While he told Vulture he loves the sequence (This was the biggest decision of my life, whether to keep this scene in the movie or not), he took it out and made it over to use in the credits because it was stopping the flow for the audience and it was hurting our story a little bit. The good news for fans who really want to see Hemsworth get dancing: Feig promises when the extended cut comes out on DVD, we restored the full scene into the body of the movie, with effects.
For now, at least, the chance to get a first look at Hemsworths dance moves are just one more reason why you should stay put once the Ghostbusters credits start rolling.
Ghostbusters: Meet Chris Hemsworths Kevin:
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Talking Points:
Gold Technical Strategy: Intermediate-term Bullish Trend seeing continued retracement in Gold prices.
The bigger-picture up-trend combined with macro back drop continues to make long-Gold an attractive venue.
An analyst pick for Long-Gold was set on Friday.
If youre looking for trading ideas, check out our Trading Guides. And if you want something more short-term in nature, check out our SSI indicator.
In our last article, we looked at the continued up-trend in Gold and the fact that despite its recent bout of strength, the move was looking quite overbought as indicated by diverging relative strength on the 4-hour chart. And given the way that the top-side move has built in Gold of recent, with strong and quick bursts in the trend-side direction followed by slower, grinding yet bearish price action on retracements; looking for a deeper retracement could be a far more attractive way of trying to catch the top-side move rather than chasing whilst near highs.
Since the short-term top was set last week just .01 above the prior swing high of the previous week, price action in Gold has continued in a bearish short-term pattern of lower-lows and lower-highs on the 4-hour chart. This set a fresh near-term low on Thursday of last week at $1,320, which is near the top-end of the S2 support zone that we had identified in our previous article; and since that short-term low was set, weve seen multiple instances of buyers coming in to further support gold prices above this level, producing a series of short-term higher-lows on the 4-hour chart (indicated below by the up-ward sloping red line).
On the chart below, were looking at the 4-hour variation in Gold prices; and notice how the blue box indicates numerous iterations of support as indicated by elongated wicks, signaling buyers coming-in to the market, helping to produce the series of higher-lows thats been showing of recent.
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Gold Prices Are Attempting to Carve Out Higher-Low Support
Created with Marketscope/Trading Station II; prepared by James Stanley
Traders looking to treat the Gold setup aggressively could look at this attempt to carve-out higher-low support as a potential top-side entry.
For traders that want to tread a bit more conservatively, a deeper retracement could be sought to the more well-heeled, better tested zone of longer-term support/resistance in the $1,283.82-$1,301.61 range, with each of those price levels being derived from longer-term Fibonacci studies. The area around $1,283.82 has two relevant Fibonacci levels within $2 of each other, while $1,301.61 is the 50% retracement of the post-Financial Collapse move in Gold prices.
Gold Prices Are Attempting to Carve Out Higher-Low Support
Created with Marketscope/Trading Station II; prepared by James Stanley
--- Written by James Stanley, Analyst for DailyFX.com
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By Olivia Oran
July 18 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc's Jason Gottlieb, a partner in the bank's asset management division, is leaving the firm.
Gottlieb, one of four portfolio managers on the Goldman Sachs Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund, will leave the bank in August, according to an internal memo sent last week and seen by Reuters.
A Goldman Sachs spokesman confirmed the contents of the memo but declined to discuss the reasons for Gottlieb's departure.
Goldman's Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund allows retail investors to gain exposure to alternative investments, such as hedge funds, through a mutual fund.
The fund has returned 1.9 percent since the beginning of the year, compared to 0.2 percent for the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index and 5.8 percent for the S&P 500.
The fund will continue to be managed by Kent Clark, Ryan Roderick and Betsy Gorton.
Gottlieb joined Goldman in 1996 and has worked in the bank's risk department, where he was responsible for analyzing market risk on the firm's trading portfolios, according to Morningstar. He was named partner in 2014.
Gottlieb's departure comes as Goldman is looking to grow its investment management arm, known as GSAM, as regulatory pressures have crimped growth in traditional profit centers like trading.
But asset management businesses are facing increasing outflows from mutual funds that hand pick their positions, in favor of so-called passively managed funds with lower fees.
So-called "alternatives" funds generally carry higher fees than other mutual funds.
Goldman's Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund charges an expense ratio of 2.5 percent, meaning investors will pay $250 in annual fees for every $10,000 invested. That compares to 0.77 percent in fees that investors paid for the average stock-and-bond mutual fund in 2015, according to the Investment Company Institute trade group.
Firms from Goldman to JPMorgan Chase & Co to Legg Mason Inc have been launching new exchange traded funds to capitalize on an investor shift toward funds with lower fees .
Goldman saw total assets under supervision in its investment management division increase by $35 billion to $1.29 trillion in the first quarter.
(Reporting by Olivia Oran in New York; additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt)
So long, Nils. Nice knowing you.
Less than a week after it was revealed that Taylor Swift secretly co-wrote ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris' "This Is What You Came For" under the pseudonym Nils Sjoberg, the official BMI credit on the song has been changed.
It's unclear when the switch happened, but Sjoberg is now gone and Swift is officially listed as the co-author of the worldwide smash featuring Rihanna's vocals. Harris confirmed Wednesday that he wrote the music, produced the track and arranged the vocals and that Swift "initially" wanted to keep things on the DL, but that she sang on the track "a little bit."
Taylor Swift Co-Wrote Calvin Harris' 'This is What You Came For' Under Swedish Pseudonym
What started out as a juicy secret revealed, with Harris calling Swift an "amazing lyric writer," quickly turned ugly when the producer/DJ went on a Twitter rant lashing out at Swift and her team for the "hurtful" way the news came out. "Hurtful to me at this point that her and her team would go so far out of their way to try and make ME look bad at this stage though," he tweeted.
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Calvin Harris Says It's 'Hurtful' That Taylor Swift's Team is 'Trying to Make Me Look Bad'
Spokespeople for Swift and Harris could not be reached for comment on the credit switch at press time. Though the change in the track's BMI status won't have an impact on how much each artist takes home from the song's sales and performance, it does draw a historical line in the sand by clearly defining who the track's real authors were and adding yet another twist to its origin story.
(CLEVELAND) The Republican National Convention is set to kick off as the nation reels from another deadly shooting and dissident delegates stage a longshot, last-gasp effort to deny Donald Trump the GOP nomination for president.
Amid the tumult, it was undeniably Trumps moment a week at the pinnacle of American politics that few could have imagined when the New York billionaire entered the race a year ago.
We want America to understand who Donald Trump the man is, not just Donald Trump the candidate, said campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Yet the first act Monday was likely to underline how divisive Trump has been. Delegates were voting on the rules that will govern the convention week, and insurgent delegates said they would try to force a state-by-state vote a move that could disrupt floor proceedings even if they fail.
Trumps opponents want to change a rule that requires delegates to vote for the candidate to whom they were committed after state primaries and caucuses. Trumps nomination is essentially automatic under the current rules, because he has far more than the 1,237 delegates required to win.
Some rebellious delegates threatened to walk out if they are thwarted, perhaps on Monday. Should that occur in significant numbers, it could leave television cameras panning across empty seats.
We wont sit around and coronate a king, said Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, who like many insurgents has backed vanquished presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Trumps campaign dismissed the effort.
What will happen on the floor, if theres any attempt, is the party and Trump are going to rise against it, Manafort said.
The roll call vote on the nomination was expected Tuesday, with Trump scheduled to close the convention with an acceptance speech late Thursday.
Trump would gain the nomination at a time of crisis and tumult at home and abroad, punctuated Sunday by the deadly shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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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. Obama 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 the Baton Rouge shootings and added on Twitter, We demand law and order. Democrat Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, echoed Obamas words in a statement urging Americans not to turn our backs on each other.
Even before the latest violence, Trumps choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate had been overshadowed by a deadly truck attack in France and an attempted coup in Turkey.
Cleveland hoped it would escape any violence of its own.
Protests are widely expected outside the Quicken Loans Arena, where the citys police chief, Calvin Williams, said Sunday it seemed everyone was arriving 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 across America.
Trump has thrilled supporters with a willingness to hurl insults at Democrats and Republicans alike: Little Marco (Rubio) and Crooked Hillary among them. Yet his off-the-cuff rhetoric and disorganized campaign have turned off many Republican leaders.
His blunt tone and aggressive approach to immigration and terrorism have 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 that makes the convention must-see TV.
He doesnt have natural filters, said New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox. Lets see about the acceptance speech. People dont know exactly what its going to be.
Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Josh Lederman in Cleveland contributed to this report.
Interlacing waves of clouds decorate the sky above the coast of Angola in a new satellite image.
The image, taken June 26 by an instrument on NASA's Terra satellite, highlights the atmospheric patterns off the coast of West Africa. The clouds are called gravity waves, which form as gravity and buoyancy try to balance each other out. (Gravity waves are different than gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time.)
According to NASA's Earth Observatory, the culprit here is dry, cool air moving out of the nighttime Namib desert and over the ocean. This cool air pushes the humid and warm ocean air up (there's the buoyancy part of the equation). As the moisture rises and condenses to form clouds, gravity pushes it back down, where it hits the rising column of dry air and gets hoisted up again. (A similar push-and-pull occurs at the ocean's surface because of the interactions of wind and gravity.)
[See Photos of the Namib Desert's Fairy Circles]
The ripple-like clouds seen in this image represent the peaks of the gravity waves, where the moisture in the air condenses. The clear skies between the peaks are the troughs of the gravity waves.
On the day the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the Terra satellite captured this image, winds were creating gravity waves in all different directions, Bastiaan van Diedenhoven, who researches ice-containing clouds at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told the Earth Observatory. The result was a complicated pattern of crisscrossing clouds curving across at least 620 miles (1,000 kilometers). These patterns are often seen off Angola and Namibia in the morning and early afternoon, van Diedenhoven told the Earth Observatory, and tend to be pushed out to sea as the day goes on.
Gravity waves may be important for commercial air travel. A study presented in 2012 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union found that gravity waves can break against an aircraft just as ocean waves break against a beach, causing turbulence in otherwise clear skies.
Story continues
Original article on Live Science.
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Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Frankfurt (AFP) - German container shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd announced Monday it is teaming up with United Arab Shipping Company to become one of the world's top five shipping companies as consolidation in the sector continues apace.
"Hapag-Lloyd AG and United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) have signed a Business Combination Agreement to merge both companies, subject to the necessary regulatory and contractual approvals," the firm said in a statement.
The combined companies would become the world's fifth-largest container firm with an annual turnover of around $12 billion (10.8 billion euros).
No financial details were disclosed.
"This strategic merger makes a lot of sense for both carriers - as we are able to combine UASC's emerging global presence and young and highly efficient fleet with Hapag-Lloyd's broad, diversified market coverage and strong customer base," said the German firm's chief executive Habben Jansen.
Once UASC's ships are integrated into the fleet, Hapag-Lloyd will have 237 ships afloat with a total capacity of 1.6 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units, which is the standard measure of a container), expected to transport around 10 million TEU to destinations around the world each year.
The combined firm will remain listed on the German stock exchange and retain Hapag-Lloyd's headquarters in the northern port city Hamburg.
UASC's majority shareholders, Qatar Holding LLC and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, will take stakes of 14 percent and 10 percent in the merged company.
- Shareholder approval -
All of UASC's shareholders unanimously approved the deal at an extraordinary general meeting.
Hapag-Lloyd's shareholders are scheduled to vote on the merger at their annual meeting in August.
CSAV, the city of Hamburg and Kuehne Maritime will remain the largest shareholders in Hapag-Lloyd.
The merger is expected to be completed by the end of 2016.
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Hapag-Lloyd comes to the UASC deal off the back of a successful purchase of Chilean firm CSAV's container shipping arm and its own stock market flotation, both in 2015.
With global demand for logistics services slipping, firms active in the sector have found themselves with too much capacity on their hands.
That has made for an environment friendly to mergers -- including Hapag-Lloyd's own takeover of CSAV's shipping arm in exchange for a 30 percent stake in the merged company.
Hapag-Lloyd also recently inked an alliance deal with five Asian maritime shipping groups that will come in to force in early 2017.
Together representing 18 percent of the global container fleet, the THE alliance hopes to lure clients as a one-stop shop for a wider range of services and destinations.
Shares in Hapag-Lloyd were showing a loss of 8.4 percent at 17.20 euros on the Frankfurt stock exchange in late morning trade on Monday.
By Subrat Patnaik
(Reuters) - Hasbro Inc (HAS.O) reported higher-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue, driven by strong demand for Disney Princess and Frozen dolls and action figures based on "Star Wars" movies.
However, the toymaker's shares fell as much as 7.6 percent in noon trading on Monday, which analysts attributed to factors such as slowing sales of toys targeted at boys, inflated Street expectations and a near 30 percent runup in the stock this year.
Sales growth in toys targeted at boys - Hasbro's largest business - dropped to 4 percent in the second quarter from 24-32 percent in the prior three quarters. The category accounts for more than a third of total revenue.
The "sharp slowdown" in sales growth in the category was "worrisome", Jefferies analyst Trevor Young said.
Chief Executive Brian Goldner said the category was hit due to a massive drop in sales of toys based on "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World" films and Hasbro would no longer make "Jurassic Park" toys from the end of 2017.
Revenue from toys targeted at girls jumped 35 percent as Hasbro benefited from demand for dolls based on Walt Disney Co's (DIS.N) princesses such as Cinderella and Snow White.
Hasbro acquired the rights to make these dolls in 2014 and started selling them this year.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Hasbro's quarterly sales beat analysts' expectations by a margin of 2.3 percent, compared with 3-8 percent in five of the prior six quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Investors were getting accustomed to a big beat and this "straight down the middle fairway" quarter feels like a disappointment, Piper Jaffray & Co analyst Stephanie Wissink said. "If I was a long-term investor in this story, what happened today would not shake my confidence."
Goldner said on a conference call that Hasbro would start shipping toys based on "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" in the current quarter. Dolls based on DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc's (DWA.O) movie "Trolls" will hit the stores in August.
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Goldner also said Britain's vote to exit the European Union had created some near-term uncertainty, but Hasbro was yet to see any negative impact.
The net income attributable to Hasbro jumped 24.6 percent to $52.1 million, or 41 cents per share, in the quarter ended June 26, while revenue rose 10 percent to $878.9 million.
Analysts on average had expected earnings of 39 cents per share and revenue of $859 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
(Reporting by Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey)
The Hub will scale up to over 1,000 HDB blocks.
Singapores Housing and Development Board (HDB) has tapped a consortium led by NCS to deliver a Smart Urban Habitat Master Plan (SUHMP) to help guide the future evolution of HDBs new towns in Singapore, according to a media release by NCS.
NCS, a subsidiary of Singtel, is joined by AECOM, Arup Singapore, and Samsung SDS Asia Pacific in the consortium.
The consortium will deploy eco-friendly and smart features through the Smart Hub, which is based on NCSs IntelliSURF platform for situational awareness and smart city operations. Upon development, the Smart Hub will integrate the data it receives from sensors embedded within the estate, and generate relevant insights for HDB.
For instance, HDB estates would conserve energy and slash wastage of resources by analysing data from and optimising efficiency of sensors on solar panels, LED lights, and smart pumps in water tanks. Service disruptions would also be minimised by studying usage patterns of common amenities like lifts and smart lights to pre-empt maintenance issues.
NCS further reports that the Smart Hub will scale up to over 1,000 HDB blocks progressively from 2017 onwards.
These initiatives can include a variety of estate enhancing services such as smart community services and implementation of game-like tools to engage residents and foster closer community living, NCS stated.
More From Singapore Business Review
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A well-advertised, intense and long-lasting heat wave is gearing up across the middle of the U.S. on Monday, and is not forecast to ebb until at least a week from now.
Although the heat may not topple many records, the combination of temperatures running between 15 and 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal along with high humidity will make this heat event a particularly dangerous one for public health.
SEE ALSO: A massive heat wave is poised to envelop the U.S. from coast to coast next week
The heat plus humidity will send heat indexes soaring across the Plains, Upper Midwest, and mid-South, among other areas. The National Weather Service in Minneapolis, for example, has issued an excessive heat watch, warning of heat indexes reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
"100 degrees in the metro area? I wouldn't rule it out. The last time MSP hit 100F was July 6, 2012 (102F)," wrote Minneapolis area meteorologist Paul Douglas on his blog.
As of Monday morning, at least 14 states had some type of extreme heat-related weather alert in place, from Louisiana to Minnesota. High temperatures in some areas will be well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37.8 degrees Celsius, with heat indexes which corresponds to how hot the air will feel to the human body even higher than that.
Image: NOAA/CPC
Some of the cities that will be hardest hit include Dallas, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines and Minneapolis.
Computer models have been strongly hinting at this heat wave for more than a week, and Mashable first alerted readers to it on July 13. Since that time, it's become more clear that this will not be a record-shattering event, but will nonetheless poses major risks to public health.
Prolonged exposure to heat and humidity can cause illnesses including heat stroke, and more people die each year in the U.S. from heat than from extreme cold.
Strong high pressure area won't budge
The culprit for the sultry weather is an unusually intense and expansive area of high pressure, also referred to as a "heat dome," that is parking itself over the South Central U.S.
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The clockwise circulation of air around this high is dragging moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and pumping it northward, all the way to Canada, which is resulting in the high humidity levels.
In addition, evapotranspiration from crops in agricultural states such as Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Minnesota is also adding to the moisture content of the atmosphere.
The high pressure area itself will be strong enough to put it on a list of strongest such weather systems observed in that part of the country.
Image: NWS
Meteorologists often look to a metric known as geopotential height to gauge the intensity or unusualness of a heat dome like this. Geopotential height measures the elevation of an air pressure surface.
Hot air masses expand, and elevate pressure surfaces, while cold air masses are more dense and compact, which lowers them.
According to the National Weather Service in Minneapolis, the height of the 500 millibar pressure level may be near 6,000 meters, "which is very rare and considered an extreme event."
Citing computer model data as of Sunday morning, the Weather Service stated: "...This is expected to be the hottest atmosphere for this time of year compared to 1985-2012! As a result, this may be one of the worst heat waves in the last few decades."
Excessive heat will grip the middle of the country through the weekend, at which point computer model projections show that the heat dome will slide southwestward.
This could yield a heat event in California, Arizona and New Mexico next weekend, while the rest of the country cools off.
Climate change links
While a heat wave in mid-July somewhere in the country is a typical occurrence, extreme, long-lasting heat waves that come with high humidity are a hallmark of global warming.
As average temperatures increase around the world, there is a higher probability of extreme heat events, and this has already been observed in the U.S. and other countries.
A study published in 2015 in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the probability of 1-in-1,000-day hot extremes over land is already about five times higher than it was in pre-industrial times, when global average surface temperatures were lower.
To put it another way, the study found that about 75% of "those moderate hot extremes are attributable to warming."
The study, along with many others, found that the probability of hot extremes is likely to increase significantly as global warming continues.
Another study, published in February in the journal Climatic Change, found that severe heat waves that typically occur once every 20 years could become annual events across the majority of the world's land areas by 2075, depending on greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Some reports have even raised concerns that amplified heat waves could reduce economic productivity in entire regions of the world, such as Southeast Asia, within the next few decades.
For Immediate Release
Chicago, IL July 18, 2016 Zacks Equity Research highlights Herbalife (HLF) as the Bull of the Day and Avon Products (AVP) as the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), Blue Calypso, Inc. (BCYP) and LivePerson Inc. ( LPSN).
Here is a synopsis of all five stocks:
Bull of the Day :
Shares of Herbalife, the maker of nutritional supplements, surged about 10% on Friday after announcement of a settlement with the FTC. It has been a roller coaster ride for investors in this company that has been battling allegations about it being a pyramid scheme. What lies ahead for this Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stock?
About the Company
Founded in 1980 and based in the Cayman Islands, Herbalife ( HLF) is a global nutrition company that sells weight-management, energy and fitness and personal care products through independent distributors in more than 90 countries.
The company employs over 8,000 employees worldwide and had net sales of $4.5 billion in 2015.
Is the Worst Over After FTC Settlement?
In a statement issued Friday morning, the company said: We announced a settlement with the F.T.C. that does not change our direct selling business model and will set new standards for the industry. We agreed to the terms and to pay $200 million because we simply wanted to move forward with our mission.
Per FTC: 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.
Even after the fine and rebuke from FTC, the settlement is excellent news for the company as it has avoided being classified as a pyramid scheme.
Epic Battle between Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman
Herbalife has been making headlines over the past three years as it was the subject of an epic battle between billionaire investors Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman. Ackman, manager of hedge fund Pershing Square, revealed his huge short be against Herbalife in December 2012 calling it a pyramid scheme and asked the FTC to investigate the company. The FTC opened an investigation in March 2014.
On the other hand, Carl Icahn has been a big supporter of Herbalife. The company had granted Icahn the right to own up to 34.99% of its outstanding shares. He reportedly owns about 18.3% of the companys stock currently. After the settlement, he said: Now that the Company has reached a settlement with the FTC, it is time to consider a range of strategic opportunities, including potential roll-ups involving competitors, as well as other strategic transactions.
The news could not have come at a worse time for Ackman whose fund is already down 20% this year as he has also lost a lot of money on his stake in Valeant. Valeant stock is down almost 80% this year while Herbalife is up about 22% now. Pershing Square had lost about 20% of its value in 2015 too.
The Bottom-Line
In addition to a top Zacks Rank, the stock looks very good on style metrics too, with Zacks Style Score of A for both Value and Growth and B for Momentum, resulting in a VGM Score of A.
The company currently trades at a multiple of 12.31X forward earnings compared with 17.45 times for the industry.
Bear of the Day:
Global cosmetics company Avon Products ( AVP) has been facing a lot of headwinds of late as it works through a major restricting of its business. Its loss worsened in the first quarter, leading analysts to cut their estimates and sending the stock to a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell).
About the Company
Headquartered in New York, Avon is the world's largest direct seller with more than 6 million active independent sales representatives. Avon products which are available in over 100 countries include color cosmetics, skincare, fragrance, fashion and home products, under brand names like Avon Color, ANEW, Skin-So-Soft and Advance Techniques.
Disappointing Results
The company reported a loss of $165.9 million, or $0.38 per share for the first quarter, compared with a loss of $147.3 million, or $0.33 per share, in the first quarter of 2015. Adjusted loss per share of $0.07 per share was substantially worse compared with earnings of $0.03 per share in the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Earnings Estimate was $0.02 per share.
The company has missed in three out of last four quarters, with an average negative quarterly surprise of 188%!
Foreign currency headwinds and ongoing deconsolidation of Venezuela operations hurt results. Shares fell about 3% after the results.
Additional content:
Alphabet (GOOGL) Hit with Antritust Charges from EU Yet Again
Last week The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that EU was gearing up to file fresh antitrust charges against Alphabet Inc. ( GOOGL) over its dominance in advertising that is said to be violating competition rules.
The EU was said to be preparing a formal Statement of Objections for which, it was seeking statements from the companies who had filed complaints against Google to publish some of their confidential information.
The news turned out to be more than true as The European Commission issued two Statements of Objections against the search giant on Thursday accusing it of using its web search dominance unlawfully to hurt its competitors.
The Allegations
The first statement accuses Google of preventing advertisers under its fold from using or switching to other competing search advertising platforms.
The second one is a reinforcement of the existing allegation that the company misuses its search results to benefit its own shopping service.
If Google is found to have broken the rules, it might have to pay penalties of up to 10% of its worldwide revenues, which was $74.5 billion in 2015.
The EU has given Google 10 weeks to respond to the ad related case and 8 weeks to the shopping service charge.
ALPHABET INC-A Price | ALPHABET INC-A Quote
Watch Your Back Google
Mired in legal troubles across practically all continents, Google is surely facing a huge drain on resources and earning a bad name on privacy concerns, anti-competitive concerns, patent infringements and what have you.
Though the company so far has had extraordinary success in the courtroom and with government officials around the world, its streak of good luck can change any time. Therefore, investors remain wary.
At present, Google has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). Some better-ranked stocks worth considering are Blue Calypso, Inc. (BCYP) and LivePerson Inc. ( LPSN), each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
Get todays Zacks #1 Stock of the Day with your free subscription to Profit from the Pros newsletter:
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On a sidewalk far, far away, two guys made the spontaneous decision to play the Star Wars theme in front of the house of John Williams, the legendary composer behind the iconic music of Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and, of course, Star Wars.
Bryce Hayashi, a 13-year-old trumpeter, and flugelhorn player Michael Miller joined forces to play a rendition of the Star Wars theme before the creative genius himself.
It was so good that Williams actually came outside to meet the brave and talented boys.
Wicked stoked cat Boomer skateboards like a pro, my dudes
Stephen Colbert kicked off the Republican National Convention and then got 'kicked off' the stage
All this wombat wants to do is give lots and lots of kisses
Mark Hamill given custom-made lightsaber by fan, reacts like the hero he is
Lieutenant Brian Rice, the highest-ranking Balitmore police officer charged in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, has been acquitted on all charges, marking the fourth non-conviction in the case, PEOPLE confirms.
Judge Barry Williams ruled in a bench trial on Monday that prosecutors failed to prove the charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office, The Baltimore Sun reports.
Prosecutors argued Rice, 42, who pleaded not guilty, was in charge at the time of Gray's arrest and should have known to secure Gray with a seat belt when he was transported in a police van. He was being arrested for allegedly possessing a switchblade and trying to flee capture.
Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died a week after his arrest from a spinal injury sustained in the incident, sparking protests and riots in Baltimore and protests around the nation.
According to CNN, Williams spent nearly half an hour explaining the reasons behind his ruling, noting it was "critical not to base any decision on public opinion."
The judge said there was also no evidence that Rice was aware that failing to fasten a prisoner with a seat belt might result in injury or death. He added that the prosecution failed to prove Rice had read an order requiring officers to seat belt prisoners, reports said.
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.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake issued a statement following the verdict that said Rice still faces an administrative review by the police department.
"This has been a very difficult time for our city and I thank the community for their patience during this time and ask their continued respect for the judicial process as we move forward," Rawlings-Blake said.
Six police officers, three white and three black, were charged in Gray's death, with charges including murder. Three previous trials resulted in two acquittals and one mistrial because of a hung jury.
Williams is the same judge who acquitted Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson on all charges related to Gray's death.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has re-purposed a 1964 political ad hitting Donald Trump in the same way President Lyndon B. Johnson hit Republican nominee Barry Goldwater.
In the 1-minute spot William Bogert, who appeared in the original 1964 ad, confesses that he can not vote for the Republican nominee. The Clinton campaign is tapping into concerns of a number of Republicans who are worried about Trumps rise. Former Republican nominee Gov. Jeb Bush wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that said he does not believe Donald Trump reflects the principles or inclusive legacy of the Republican Party.
I was a Republican who voted to Eisenhower and Nixon. My father was a Republican, his father was, the whole family was, the actor says. But, Donald Trump, hes a different kind of man. This man scares me.
The Democratic nominee dropped the ad at the start of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio where Trump will be named the 2016 nominee. The ad echoes the infamous 1964 ad; the majority of the script in the two ads is the same.
Watch the original ad below.
Just five years out of law school, Gennady Litvin ran a bustling legal practice that took in millions of dollars from distressed homeowners who hoped they could avoid foreclosure.
The Litvin Law Firm grossed $5.2 million in 2013, much of it from financially strapped clients who paid $500 a month or more for help negotiating lower mortgage rates or other legal assistance to keep them from losing their homes. That year, Litvin drew a salary of $466,477, according to court filings.
But the Brooklyn, New York, law firms fortunes soured as it faced repeated accusations of fraud and other illegal conduct in complaints filed by state regulators and disgruntled clients, some of whom were low-income and minority homeowners who lost their property after trusting the firm. In March and April 2015, Litvin and the firm both filed for bankruptcy, leaving more than 4,500 potential creditors, mostly former clients.
There was a ton of money that he made and where that money has gone, we dont know, said Cleveland lawyer Geoff McCarell.
McCarell represented Branko Perisic, of Parma, Ohio. Perisic ran a small trucking firm that fell on hard times as fuel prices spiked and demand for his services fell off during the recession. In 2011, he hired the Litvin firm to get him a break on his home mortgage.
Perisic paid a total of $4,760, but got nothing but stall tactics and unmet promises as his finances worsened, according to a lawsuit he filed.
In April 2015, a Cuyahoga County judge awarded Perisic $287,575. Most of the award was to punish Litvin for fraudulent and/or deceptive conduct, and his willful, reckless and/or grossly negligent breaches of care and/or ethical duties to plaintiff, according to the court docket.
But because of the bankruptcy case the chance of Perisic getting paid is slim to none, according to his attorney.
Litvin, who lists his current practice address as the Law Office of Yuriy Moshes in Brooklyn, would not discuss his legal career.
Story continues
Related: Low bar sig
Related: Strapped homeowners say theyve been cheated by lawyers
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Thank you for reaching out seeking comment but I have no comment to make on your article, Litvin wrote in an email.
Litvin is one of hundreds of lawyers and law firms nationwide that have participated in suspect foreclosure rescue schemes in the wake of the housing market crash nearly a decade ago, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found. State and federal authorities contend these plans typically have violated a range of legal ethics codes and consumer-protection laws. But while dozens of lawyers have been stripped of their licenses for running them, many others have paid little in penalties even when desperate homeowners lost millions of dollars. Litvin is in good standing with the Florida Bar Association, which oversees lawyers in the state. He is not eligible to practice there, however, unless he completes 30 hours of continuing legal education required of all lawyers, officials said.
In New York, Litvin has no record of public discipline, according to the New York State Unified Court System.
Litvin graduated in 2008 from the University of Miami School of Law and practiced in Florida and in Brooklyn. In a 2013 deposition, he recalled operating an open door practice, as in anything that walks in through the door.
Within two years, Litvin had cut a deal with telemarketers operating out of Fort Lauderdale who were pitching expert foreclosure relief plans nationwide for which homeowners paid $595 to $750 a month.
Sales of these foreclosure rescue plans took off in the wake of a 2009 federal government program that encouraged lenders to cut rates or balances on home mortgages through a review process known as loan modification.
Federal officials had hoped cutting loan balances would help millions of people behind on their mortgage payments from being foreclosed on. But they quickly were overwhelmed by complaints that scam artists were ripping off desperate homeowners by promising them loan modifications for a fee and not delivering.
Often, telemarketers partnered with a law firm, which gave them a look of legitimacy. The practice also exploited loopholes exempting lawyers from regulations that prohibited advance fees for securing loan modifications.
Litvin early on caught the attention of regulators in several states. In December 2011, Connecticut officials ordered Litvin to cease and desist from soliciting its residents because he lacked a license to practice law there. Officials in Georgia, Rhode Island and North Carolina later issued similar orders.
Litvin pushed back, arguing he had built a network of affiliated attorneys in 31 states, which he said permitted the firm to operate in those places and accept advance fees.
Some of the Litvin affiliated lawyers were hired in response to ads he posted on the online classifieds website Craigslist. The Litvin firm split the fees it received from homeowners with the affiliated attorneys, Litvin testified in a deposition.
One Litvin ad sought lawyers with experience in the foreclosure defense area who were looking to make an extra $5,000 to $10,000 per month per state (and more with time) without having to increase their expenses. At different times, Litvin listed at least 52 lawyers as affiliates.
In late 2012, the Federal Trade Commission sued the Florida telemarketers working with Litvin, alleging their customers suffered significant economic injury, including going into foreclosure and even losing their homes.
The FTC accused the telemarketers, who operated as Prime Legal Plans as well as under several other names, of taking $21 million in fees from distressed homeowners through deception. The FTC suit criticized the performance of the Litvin firm, but it did not name him or the firm as a defendant. The FTC would not discuss the matter.
According to the FTC, the marketers falsely promised clients that a network of top-notch attorneys would defend them against foreclosure actions and win concessions from lenders that will result in lower mortgage payments.
The FTC cited an email telemarketers sent to customers, written in capital letters, that read: YOU HAVE RIGHTS, AND NOW HAVE AT YOUR DISPOSAL, AN ATTORNEY NETWORK THAT IS ABLE TO KEEP YOU IN YOUR HOME, HALT THE FORECLOSURE PROCESS, AND FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS!
In 2012, Litvin was enjoying his honeymoon in Hawaii when an associate phoned to tell him federal agents had raided the Fort Lauderdale offices and shuttered the sales operation, according to his deposition.
Despite the raid, Litvin forged ahead with his foreclosure practice. In New York, Litvin relied partly on a website to promote his services.
Who said that a high quality defense attorney had to cost a fortune? reads a note on the Litvin Law Firms website, which has since been taken off-line.
Litvin Law firm understands that if you could afford to pay high attorney fees then you probably could afford to pay your mortgage.
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Nattily attired and confident, Litvin starred in several videos posted on YouTube, some replete with gushing testimonials from thankful clients. He also made appearances on New York radio and television, weighing in on a host of debt-relief strategies.
But punching back at regulators and civil lawsuits from upset clients began to take a toll and business dropped off sharply. In 2014, the firm took in $3.5 million, down from $5.2 million the year before. Litvins salary in 2014 fell to about $92,000 from $466,477 the previous year, according to bankruptcy court filings.
The Maryland Attorney Generals office filed administrative charges in 2014 questioning whether that money was made honestly, accusing the firm of projecting an air of trustworthiness while providing little or no legal services.
At least 129 of 500 Litvin clients in Maryland, who paid more than $1.4 million in fees, were foreclosed on anyway, according to the suit.
Sixty-three clients eventually lost their homes, while 10 others kept them only by resorting to bankruptcy, according to the Maryland attorney generals research.
In New York, criticism from regulators was blistering. The New York Attorney Generals Office in a lawsuit accused the Litvin firm of repeated and persistent fraud and illegality. Potential clients were told they could get foreclosures dismissed and mortgages deleted, results the attorney general called improbable at best, according to the lawsuit.
Some clients, according to complaints, said the firm advised them to avoid contact with their lenders, leaving them in the dark about how their cases were proceeding, if they even were.
One couple alleged the Litvin firm led them to believe they would be given their Maryland home debt-free. Instead, the house where they had lived for two decades and raised six children was sold out from under them because the firm failed to complete paperwork to forestall foreclosure, according to a lawsuit they filed.
So far, both regulators and former clients at least eight have sued Litvin for what his bankruptcy petition calls malpractice and fraud have received nothing.
Litvin, in a June 2015 court filing, said the cost of defending lawsuits and a drop-off in clients took a heavy financial toll and that bankruptcy loomed for me and for the firm.
In that filing, Litvin denied misleading anyone and said he had saved his clients more than $75 million, including reductions in future mortgage payments.
The lawsuits are on hold while the Litvin bankruptcy cases play out. So is a $2.3 million federal court judgment from May 2015 that names an earlier Litvin legal partnership that operated out of Miami.
In court filings, Charles H. Lichtman, a Florida attorney appointed in the FTC case to chase after any possible money on behalf of victims, said he knew collectability was problematic. But Lichtman said he sought the judgment because of the firms substantial roles in this massive consumer fraud, and that he couldnt let them simply get away with it without recourse.
Lichtman said in an interview that he handled hundreds of phone calls from people who lost their homes, or gave some of their very last money to the scheme.
It caused them immense personal distress, he said. It was genuinely heartbreaking when you heard the stories.
The New York Attorney Generals Office has sought more than $24 million from Litvin, half of it restitution and half as a penalty.
But in early May, the office offered to settle, for far less. The deal would require Litvin to pay $15,000 and for five years 15 percent of his annual salary, or $12,000, whichever is greater. The agreement says the minimum overall amount Litvin must pay is $75,000.
A hearing on the matter is set for July 19.
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Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
Mohd Shafie Mohd Hanapiah, an Imam with the Singapore Muslim Casket, saying a prayer at a plot at the Lim Chu Kang Cemetery. (Yahoo Photo: Safhras Khan)
More Than a Job
Whatever your chosen craft, vocation or profession, we all have work to do. In a biweekly series, Yahoo Singapore talks to individuals who have chosen unique, unconventional and distinctive careers. For some, its about passion. Others have a sense of duty. But for all of them, its more than a job.
Carrying a cardboard box, 42-year-old Mohd Shafie Mohd Hanapiah made his way to a room in the Pusara Aman Mosque at Lim Chu Kang Road.
When he entered the room, Shafie placed the box on a table and carefully took out its contents, laying them out in front of him on a stainless steel slab.
The box contained four foetuses and a few other surgical remains which he collected earlier from Changi General Hospital.
After reciting a quick prayer, Shafie began to carefully wash each foetus and each of the surgical remains. A sombre mood hung over the room.
(video by Nurul Amirah)
Shafie said that he treats the foetuses as if they were his own.
Sometimes when we do our duty and cleanse the foetuses, I will talk to them and say that they are like my children, he said.
Working with an assistant, Shafie proceeded to carry out the necessary Islamic rites before shrouding the foetuses and surgical remains, then putting them back into the cardboard box to transport for burial later.
As an Imam with the Singapore Muslim Casket (SMC), it is Shafies responsibility to cleanse, shroud and bury unclaimed foetuses and surgical remains in accordance with Islamic ritual.
It is wajib (compulsory) in Islam to wash, shroud and bury the foetuses. We cannot just dispose of them anyhow, said Shafie.
A gravedigger arranging the foetuses in an unmarked grave in the Muslim Cemetery in Lim Chu Kang. (Yahoo Photo: Safhras Khan)
Unclaimed bodies handled by SMC and MTFA
Working together with the Muslimin Trust Fund Association (MTFA), the SMC handles the burial of miscarried and aborted foetuses, surgical remains and unclaimed Muslim bodies in Singapore.
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MTFA pays for the burial services for the burial of unclaimed Muslims bodies who have passed away in Singapore, as well as those whose next-of-kin are unable to pay for the burial rites. The services also include burying foetuses and surgical remains.
MTFA said the number of burials that includes unclaimed bodies, surgical remains and unclaimed foetuses varies from month to month.
In 2015, the association buried 27 bodies, 239 foetuses and 489 surgical remains. The number of foetuses rose by 15 per cent to 239 in 2015 after declining in the previous two years.
Shafie, extreme left, with other officials from MTFA and SMC, attending the burial process of four foetuses at the Lim Chu Kang Muslim Cemetery. (Yahoo photo: Safhras Khan)
Unmarked graves
A former Company Sergeant Major with the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Shafie has been preparing the foetuses, bodies and surgical remains for burial for the past 28 years. He started volunteering to cleanse and shroud Muslim bodies when he was 14.
The bachelor sees it as his responsibility to ensure that the unclaimed bodies, especially foetuses, are given proper burials.
According to Muslim laws, even a small part of the body needs to be buried. We cannot just anyhow put the remains (foetus or body parts) at any plot of land. It has to be buried in a cemetery, explained Shafie.
Shafie takes about 40 minutes to cleanse and shroud each foetus before they are brought to an unmarked piece of land at Lim Chu Kang Muslim Cemetery for burial.
Each plot is divided into two parts, and up to 20 foetuses are buried in each part, he said. At the cemetery, another quick prayer is recited after the foetuses and remains are buried.
There are no tombstones to mark the area.
Despite doing this job for almost 30 years, Shafie admits that burying a foetus is always heartbreaking.
The feeling of sadness is there. We do have feelings for it (the foetuses) and it is not an easy task to do but we still have to proceed with it, he said with tears welling up in his eyes.
Related:
Look out for the next instalment of More Than A Job on Monday 1 August.
By Krishna N. Das NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will double the target for energy to be generated from solar parks by 2020, a top government official said, as roof-top installations progress slower than anticipated and U.S. company SunEdison's projects are threatened by its bankruptcy. The solar parks are sought after by companies because the Indian government acquires land for the installations and sets up transmission lines, major attractions in a country notorious for red tape and public opposition to land transfers. Debt-heavy SunEdison was one of the first companies to be drawn into the program to encourage solar use, bidding aggressively to win a 500 megawatt (MW) project in Andhra Pradesh state in India's south last November. But after its bankruptcy, SunEdison has been forced to initiate stake-sale talks with companies like Adani Group and Finland's Fortum Oyj for funds, according to sources. "We are adding 25 more solar parks to create a buffer for exigencies like SunEdison," Upendra Tripathy, secretary at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, told Reuters on Monday. "Solar parks are a hit with companies. A lot of them are interested." Tripathy declined to name any companies. But the new generation target of 40,000 megawatts for solar parks was likely to be approved by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet in two months, he said in an interview in his office. Pashupathy Gopalan, president of SunEdison Asia Pacific - which focuses mainly on India - did not immediately respond to calls for comment. He has previously said the company would stick to its India growth plans. Analysts said it was doubtful any rival would pick up the Andhra Pradesh project at the aggressive power prices promised by SunEdison. Once the fastest growing renewable energy developer in the United States, SunEdison beat out 29 other bidders for the solar park with a record-low tariff of 4.63 rupees per kilowatt-hour. Japan's Softbank Corp, Taiwan's Foxconn and India's Bharti Enterprises have pledged to invest a total of about $20 billion in India's renewable sector. Global solar giants like First Solar Inc, Trina Solar Ltd and Fortum are also expanding their presence. Modi wants India's solar capacity to jump nearly 30 times from 2014/15's levels to 100 gigawatts by 2020. Last month India secured a loan of more than $1 billion from the World Bank for its ambitious solar program. Total investment needed for the solar goal is around $89 billion, according the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. India wants renewable energy, excluding hydro-electricity, to contribute 8 percent of the energy mix by 2022, up from 5.7 percent early this year. (Reporting by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Tom Hogue)
An Indian student was recovering in hospital after being gang-raped by a group of men including some charged with sexually assaulting her three years earlier, an officer said Monday.
Police in Haryana state were hunting for the five, accused of abducting the 21-year-old student of the lowest Dalit social caste from outside her college before drugging and raping her in a car.
The student was found unconscious in bushes on the side of a highway last Wednesday night in Haryana which borders New Delhi, in the country's latest shocking sexual attack.
Haryana deputy superintendent of police Pushpa Khatri said the student, who is still in hospital, has identified all five men -- two of whom are currently on bail awaiting trial for raping her in 2013.
"She has identified the five accused and two of them were involved in the gang-rape of the student in Bhiwandi district in 2013," Khatri told AFP.
"We have formed several teams to arrest the accused."
The woman's family has accused the five of threatening them in the lead-up to Wednesday's attack, demanding that they withdraw the rape case lodged after the 2013 assault.
"The accused were constantly threatening us to compromise outside the court. They even offered us a hefty amount for settlement. But we didn't agree," the victim's brother was quoted by the Hindustan Times as saying.
The family also alleged they were forced to move to Rohtak district in the state from a neighbouring district after the 2013 attack because of harassment by the accused.
Members of the Dalit caste held small protests in Rohtak on Sunday to demand justice for the victim.
The fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 shone a global spotlight on frightening levels of violence against women in India.
It also led to major reform of India's rape laws, including speeding up of trials and increased punishments for offenders, but horrific attacks continue to be reported in the media on a daily basis.
The most recent official figures show that 36,735 rapes were reported across the country in 2014, although activists say the true number is likely much higher because of the social stigma attached to sexual crimes.
Indonesia's most wanted Muslim militant may have been killed Monday in a firefight with security forces, police said, after a lengthy hunt for the Islamic State (IS) group supporter.
Santoso, the leader of extremist group the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, is suspected to have been shot dead along with another militant in a jungle-clad, mountainous district on central Sulawesi island.
National police chief Tito Karnavian said there were indications the man killed was Santoso.
"There are indeed signs, a mole on his forehead, which matches the features of Santoso," he said, adding the bodies of those killed were being removed from the site of the firefight for further identification.
As well as those killed, one other man and two women managed to escape during the firefight in Tambarana village, said Karnavian.
If confirmed, the death of Santoso would represent a major victory for the Indonesian authorities who had sent thousands of troops and soldiers to Sulawesi to hunt him down.
Santoso, known by several aliases including Abu Wardah, led a small group of ragtag fighters who had been hiding in the jungles for several years and were known for carrying out deadly attacks on domestic security forces.
He had pledged allegiance to the IS group and was put on a list of global terrorists by the United States earlier this year, and in recent times several members of China's ethnic Uighur minority had joined his group.
However analysts think that other cells in Indonesia may now pose an even greater threat, and Santoso was not believed to have played a role in a deadly attack on Jakarta in January claimed by IS.
CHICAGO, July 18 (Reuters) - Utah health officials on Monday said a caregiver of an elderly patient from Utah who died while infected with Zika has tested positive for the virus, they said in a statement. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that the person who helped care for the individual, who died while infected with Zika has now contracted the virus, Utah officials said. They said the infected caregiver had not had any recent travel to an area with Zika infection nor had sex with an infected individual. Utah officials are still investigating how the person became infected. (Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Bernard Orr)
Tehran (AFP) - Iran has criticised as "unconstructive" a Bahraini court's decision to dissolve and seize the funds of the country's main Shiite opposition group.
The order -- which can be appealed -- came Sunday despite international criticism of the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom's intensified crackdown on dissent.
The administrative court in Manama found Al-Wefaq guilty of "harbouring terrorism" and ordered the government to seize its assets.
"Such actions by the Bahraini government prove that they don't seek to resolve the existing crises," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said in a statement late Sunday.
Bahrain has unleashed a crackdown on opposition groups since a wave of Shiite-led protests in 2011 called for greater freedoms in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.
It has long accused Iran of fomenting unrest among the island's Shiite majority.
Sunday's ruling came amid appeals by the United Nations, United States and rights groups for the legal action against Al-Wefaq to be dropped.
Ghasemi called on Bahrain to replace "escalated security and police approaches with trust-building measures," setting the stage for "serious, constructive and converging dialogue".
Authorities have 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.
Dissolving "moderate groups" and stripping political and religious leaders of their citizenship are "not in line with the regime's interest," Ghasemi said.
Last month, Iran voiced concern over Bahrain's decision to strip Qassem of his nationality.
"Surely they know that the aggression against Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassem is a red line... that will leave no option for the people but to resort to armed resistance," said Qassem Suleimani, head of the elite Revolutionary Guards' overseas operations arm, the Quds Force.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran will issue a preliminary list of international energy companies eligible to take part in tenders to develop its oil and gas fields within the next two weeks, a senior Iranian oil official said on Monday.
"Not all foreign companies active in the oil industry can participate in Iran's tenders," Ali Kardor, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), was quoted as saying by the oil ministry's news agency SHANA on Monday.
"Only those international companies that meet the standards of NIOC will be chosen."
Kardor said that, apart from U.S. companies, there were only around 37 companies in the world that might meet Iran's standards.
He said companies would only be eligible that are registered as exploration and production or international oil companies and are also rated by Standard & Poor's, Moody's or Fitch credit rating agencies.
"After creating the first list of international companies, a limited tender will be held," Kardor added.
The tenders will be based on Iran's new oil and gas contracts (IPCs) which have yet to be unveiled after some amendments.
Iran has promised IPCs will offer more flexible terms and end a system known as buy-back contracts that foreign companies say give them a limited return on investment while denying them any rights to the oil, with the Iranian government taking the bulk of the profits.
However Kardor reiterated on Monday that alongside IPCs, oil fields could still be developed through buy-backs, engineering, procurement, and construction and engineering, procurement, construction and financing contracts.
(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; editing by Adrian Croft)
DUBAI (Reuters) - Russia has delivered the missile part of S-300 surface-to-air defense system to Iran, Tasnim news agency reported on Monday, moving to finish the delivery of all divisions of the system to Tehran by the end of this year. "The first shipment of missiles of S-300 missile system has recently entered Iran that shows Iran's determination to equip its air defense circle with this system," Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Revolutionary Guards, reported. Russia's agreement to provide Iran with S-300 has sparked concern in Israel, whose government Iran has said it aims to destroy. Russia says it canceled a contract to deliver S-300s to Iran in 2010 under pressure from the West. President Vladimir Putin lifted that self-imposed ban in April 2015, after an interim agreement that paved the way for July's full nuclear deal. Russia delivered the first parts of S-300, the missile tubes and radar equipment, to Iran in April. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday he had spoken with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan to express his happiness at the return of security to Turkey after a failed military coup. "In a phone call with the Turkish president, (I said) we are happy that stability and security have returned to Turkey today," Rouhani said on his Twitter account. Iran said on Saturday it fully supported the government of neighbouring Turkey against the attempted coup launched on Friday night, despite Tehran and Ankara's differences over Syria and other regional issues. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Baghdad (AFP) - UNESCO has named Iraqi marshlands once ravaged by dictator Saddam Hussein as a World Heritage Site, a bright spot for a country where jihadists have repeatedly sought to wipe out history.
The area named "is made up of seven sites: three archaeological sites and four wetland marsh areas in southern Iraq," UNESCO said.
"The archaeological cities of Uruk and Ur and the Tell Eridu archaeological site form part of the remains of the Sumerian cities and settlements that developed in southern Mesopotamia between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE," it said.
"The Ahwar of Southern Iraq -- also known as the Iraqi Marshlands -- are unique, as one of the world's largest inland delta systems, in an extremely hot and arid environment," UNESCO said.
Iraq has been seeking World Heritage status for the marshes since 2003, and its government hailed the move.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated the Iraqi people on UNESCO's decision, and thanked "all those who contributed to this success".
Abadi also said that culture in the country will continue "despite the destruction and demolition of Iraqi heritage and antiquities by barbaric terrorist gangs".
He was referring to Islamic State group's destruction of artefacts at the Mosul museum and the ancient cities of Nimrud and Hatra, the latter of which is a World Heritage Site.
IS has sought to couch the destruction in religious terms, saying it was targeting idols, but that has not stopped it from selling artefacts to fund its operations.
The marshlands once stretched across some 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles), but they were devastated after Saddam ordered them drained in the 1990s to stop them being used as hideouts by Shiite guerrillas opposed to his regime.
Many dams and canals ordered built by the dictator have now been demolished, allowing waters from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to flood back, fish and fowl to return and humans to settle once again.
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But dams farther upriver in Syria and Turkey still limit the flow of water into the marshes, and high levels of salinity in water in the south has also been a problem, making it undrinkable for humans and animals and killing fish.
In addition to the newly named site in the south and Hatra, an ancient fortress city in present-day Nineveh province in the north, Iraq is home to three other UNESCO World Heritage sites.
The Arbil Citadel, where 19th-century facades still stand at a much older site, is located in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, while Samarra Archaeological City -- the site of the 9th-century capital of the Abbasid Caliphate -- lies north of Baghdad.
And Ashur, a city that dates to the 3rd millennium BCE and which was the first capital of the Assyrian Empire, is in the Sharqat area to the north of Samarra, where Iraqi forces have battled IS militants.
(Reuters) - One of the three police officers killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was a military veteran who served three tours in Iraq. Another had a son who turned four months old on Monday. Law enforcement officials provided new details on Monday about the six officers who were slain or wounded during an ambush a day earlier, including a sheriff's deputy fighting for his life after being shot in the head and stomach. Following are updates on the officers who Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson said were "intentionally targeted" by the gunman. A 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer who has been on the force for nine years and suffered non-life-threatening injuries has not been named. MATTHEW GERALD Baton Rouge Police Officer Matthew Gerald, 41, was a veteran of both the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army, serving as a member of a Black Hawk helicopter crew and doing three tours in Iraq, Police Chief Carl Dabadie told a news conference. He had been on the local police force for less than a year, but "he spent his whole life serving this country," Dabadie said. "He's a hero for everything he's done," he added. Gerald was a married father of two children. MONTRELL JACKSON Montrell Jackson, 32, served as a Baton Rouge police officer for a decade. Dabadie was his instructor at the police academy. "Montrell stood tall every day," the chief said. "He never wavered. He never quit. His heart was in service for this community." A few days before the Sunday shooting, the police chief said he visited some officers to lift their spirits after many days of protests in the city. Jackson "ended up giving me a pep talk," the chief said. An emotional Dabadie read a statement from the officer's wife, with whom Jackson had an infant son who turned four months old on Monday. Montrell was my everything, she said. He loved his family and he loved his fellow officers. I know without a shadow of a doubt he loved his job, and he loved his city. Knowing this gives me a little peace and comfort. BRAD GARAFOLA East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, died after leaving his cover during the attack to give a wounded police officer aid. "My deputy went down fighting," the sheriff said. "He returned fire until the very end." Garafola, who had been employed by the sheriff's office for 24 years, left behind a wife and four children. I know they are hurting, but I want them to know that we are here for them now and forever, Gautreaux said. They are our family. NICHOLAS TULLIER Sheriff's Deputy Nicholas Tullier, 41, is in "very critical condition" and is on a ventilator after suffering extensive damage from gunshot wounds to his head and stomach, Gautreaux said. Tullier has served with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office for 18 years. "Were just praying for him," the sheriff said. "Hes not in good shape at all." BRUCE SIMMONS Deputy Bruce Simmons, 57, suffered non-life threatening injuries but still faces a long recovery, the sheriff said. Simmons was headed on Monday night for his second surgery since the attack, Gautreaux said. He has already had a titanium rod inserted into his shattered arm and faces several more reconstructive surgeries. Simmons has 23 years of service for the sheriff's office. (Reporting by Colleen Jenkins and Joseph Ax; Editing by Mary Milliken)
Najaf (Iraq) (AFP) - A powerful Iraqi Shiite cleric whose militiamen battled US forces after the 2003 invasion has said that hundreds more American troops being sent to Iraq are "a target for us".
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter announced on a recent visit to Baghdad that 560 extra military personnel would be sent as part of efforts to combat the Islamic State group, which overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014.
"They are a target for us," Moqtada al-Sadr said in a statement on his website on Sunday, responding to a question about Carter's announcement.
There are already thousands of American military personnel in Iraq as part of the anti-IS fight, meaning that Sadr's forces have had ample opportunities to target US troops if they were going to do so.
Sadr's Mahdi Army militia was one of America's main foes in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, engaging in fierce fighting with US troops in Baghdad and the city of Najaf to its south.
Sadr's forces -- now called Saraya al-Salam -- have taken part in operations against IS, but one of their main tasks has been the defence of shrines and other religious sites.
Iraqi forces -- including pro-government paramilitaries groups, of which Iran-backed Shiite militias are the most powerful -- have regained significant ground from IS.
A US-led coalition is carrying out air strikes against the jihadists and also providing training and other assistance to Iraqi forces.
With Carter's announcement, a total of more than 4,600 American military personnel are now authorised to be in Iraq.
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland's premier urged fellow European Union leaders on Monday not to impose harsh terms on Britain as punishment its vote to leave the bloc, warning such an approach could inflame anti-EU sentiment across the continent. Britain's shock June 23 referendum "out" vote has sparked debate in Europe about how to prevent other members following suit, with some fearing a favorable deal for Britain could tempt others to leave. But Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said a punitive settlement for Britain could be equally destabilizing. "Any perception that the UK is being punished for its democratic decision to exit the European Union will only further inflame the growing populist backlash against European integration," Kenny said in a speech to academics. "It is in nobodys interests for the UK and the EU to have anything but the best possible future relations," he said, according to a transcript published by his office. Ireland will cooperate closely with other member states anxious to see "a constructive and respectful outcome", he said. The Irish Republic is keen to avoid restrictions on the free movement of goods or people arising from Brexit, fearing this would undermine Northern Ireland's peace process and damage trade across its border with the British province. A majority of voters in Northern Ireland, as well as in Scotland, voted to remain in the EU, unlike much more populous England. As a whole, Britain voted by a 52 to 48 percent margin to leave the bloc. Britain accounts for 16 percent of Ireland's exports, but this rockets up to 44 percent when foreign-owned firms operating out of Ireland are excluded. Northern Ireland will represent the only land frontier between Britain and the EU once Britain leaves. Theresa May, who replaced David Cameron as British prime minister last week, said on June 30 that details of future Irish border arrangements will hinge on the outcome of Brexit talks with Brussels. But she noted that there had been a common travel area with the Irish Republic since the 1920s. (Reporting by Conor Humphries; editing by Mark Heinrich)
By Daniel Trotta CLEVELAND (Reuters) - The normally straight-laced Council on American-Islamic Relations tried humor to win over Republicans at their national convention on Monday, handing out packets of a satirical medicine called "Islamophobin," a treatment for Islamophobia. Islamophobin, which is really just chewing gum in a clever package, promises to treat "blind intolerance, unthinking bigotry, irrational fear of Muslims, (and) U.S. presidential election year scapegoating." On the first day of the Republican convention to nominate Donald Trump for the Nov. 8 election, CAIR leaders urged the party not to push Muslims voters away. Trump has proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. He opposes letting in refugees from the Syrian war, suggesting some may be militants posing as the downtrodden. He has made claims, unsupported to date, that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey openly cheered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In an interview broadcast Monday on CNN, Trump's wife Melania, due to speak at the convention later in the day, said of her husband: Hes not racist, hes not anti-immigrant, and added, He wants to keep America safe. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad urged Republicans instead to court Muslims voters, saying they could be crucial in swing states that decide presidential elections. "Too often over the course of this campaign, Republican presidential candidates have pandered to these inner-core Islamophobic leaders and their supporters with proposals like patrolling so-called Muslim neighborhoods, surveilling and shutting down mosques, and openly questioning whether a Muslim can serve as president," Awad said. As a prescription, Awad offered Islamophobin, a concept borrowed from Muslims in Sweden who created a similar product. CAIR sells a package of 12 sugar-free pieces for $1.99 on amazon.com. The package says: "Take two and call a Muslim in the morning." But it comes with a warning. "Those who already believe in religious diversity, tolerance and mutual understanding should not use this product," the package says. "Stop taking this product if you begin to develop warm feelings toward Muslims, immigrants or refugees." Nearby at a separate event, Christian demonstrators tried to eclipse a speech by Rose Hamid, a Muslim woman who was ejected from a Trump rally in South Carolina in January for her silent protest, by standing up wearing her head scarf and a T-shirt reading, "Salam, I come in peace." As Hamid spoke in favor of a peaceful coexistence at a platform in Public Square set aside for scheduled speeches, the small group behind her hoisted signs such as one saying, "Muhammad is a liar, false-prophet, child-raping pervert." When they tried to drown out Hamid with a bullhorn, she turned around to see them for the first time and remarked, "Oh, they're lovely." Police then removed them from the scene for demonstrating without a permit. (Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Howard Goller)
BARI, Italy (Reuters) - Italian counter-terror officials are investigating a Tunisian living in the southern city of Bari who spoke to Nice attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel hours before he killed 84 people, investigative sources said on Monday. The man spoke with Bouhlel, who was also Tunisian, by telephone just hours before the delivery man ran down revelers at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice on Thursday with a 19-tonne refrigerator truck, sources said. Italy's anti-terror police and magistrates opened the probe at the request of French authorities, who had Bouhlel's phone records, the sources said. The two men had spoken several times in recent weeks, the sources said without giving further details. Three people close to Bouhlel were arrested in Nice on Sunday. Four others arrested previously were still being held. Islamic State has claimed the attack, calling Bouhlel one of its soldiers, but authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old, who was shot dead by police, had any actual links to the militant group. (Reporting by Vincenzo Damiani; Writing by Steve Scherer; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
London (AFP) - Japanese mobile giant SoftBank on Monday snapped up iPhone chip designer ARM Holdings for 24.3 billion, the pair announced in a major boost for post-Brexit Britain.
Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May declared that the record Asian investment proved "Britain is open for business", just three weeks after Britons voted to leave the European Union.
The all-cash deal, worth the equivalent of $32 billion or 29 billion euros, was unanimously backed by ARM management, the two companies revealed in a statement.
"We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market-leader in its field," said SoftBank chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son.
"This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made, and I expect ARM to be a key pillar of SoftBank's growth strategy going forward."
May had given her backing on Sunday after talking with Son, whose company has vowed to double ARM's British workforce and keep its headquarters in the university city of Cambridge.
"I have spoken to SoftBank directly. They have confirmed their commitment to keep the company in Cambridge and to invest further to double the number of UK jobs over five years," May told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
"This 24-billion investment will be the largest ever Asian investment in the UK. It is a clear demonstration that Britain is open for business, as attractive to international investment as ever."
Prior to becoming prime minister, May had pledged a "proper industrial strategy" for closer scrutiny of foreign takeovers of British firms.
Son added on Monday that the deal marked SoftBank's "strong commitment to the UK and the competitive advantage provided by the deep pool of science and technology talent" in Cambridge.
British finance minister Philip Hammond praised the mega deal that comes amid warnings about a slowdown to growth in the country after its June 23 vote to exit the EU bloc.
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"Just three weeks after the referendum decision, it shows that Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors."
- Weak pound -
Analysts said the vast weakening of the pound, in particular against the dollar, since the referendum result is making British companies attractive for foreign groups.
"We can see in this deal the effect of Brexit and the collapse in the pound as British companies become ripe takeover targets," said Neil Wilson, analyst at ETX Capital trading group.
"A lot more British firms could become foreign-owned quite soon," he added.
SoftBank meanwhile said it would offer 17 for each ARM share, a premium of around 43 percent compared with Friday's closing price of 11.89.
That sent ARM's share price rocketing by about 41 percent on Monday.
ARM develops and licenses technology central to digital electronic devices, including those made for Apple and its fierce rival Samsung.
The British company's customers shipped "about 15 billion ARM-based chips" in 2015, up almost a quarter year-on-year, according to the group's website. Almost half of the chips were used for mobile phones and tablets, it added.
ARM's revenues meanwhile jumped 15 percent to almost $1.5 billion last year on the design of chips used also in computer servers.
- Counterbid threat -
City Index analyst Ken Odeluga warned that the "main risk" to the SoftBank deal was a "potential counterbid" from a big chip-sector player like Intel or Samsung.
"Intel might be motivated to make a counter offer by its notable failure to penetrate deeply into the mobile components space," Odeluga said.
"Samsung might spy an opportunity to synergise and expand its own chip manufacturing business.
"Both would, like SoftBank, be mindful of how rare the current steep discount on British companies will turn out to be, following the pound's (recent) fall to 30-year lows" in the wake of the shock Brexit decision.
* ARM chairman interrupted sailing holiday
* ARM technology in nearly every smartphone
* Company heavily focussed on engineering
By Paul Sandle and Makiko Yamazaki
LONDON/TOKYO, July 18 (Reuters) - As the world reeled from the shock Brexit vote, the founder of Japan's SoftBank was sitting in a Turkish restaurant by the sea trying to persuade the bosses of ARM to let him buy Britain's most successful technology company.
With Masayoshi Son keen to seal a deal, ARM Holdings' Chairman Stuart Chambers interrupted his sailing holiday to meet the founder of SoftBank in the Mediterranean port of Marmaris, along with ARM Chief Executive Simon Segars.
"I proposed to him for the first time in the restaurant," Son told reporters after announcing the $32 billion takeover.
With an offer on the table, ARM's board considered the bid in the low-key, analytical style that characterises a company that supplies technology to nearly every smartphone from Apple's iPhone to Samsung's Galaxy, and a host of other devices.
The disciplined approach has long impressed investors.
ARM's shares were trading at 1 pound 10 years ago and are worth 17 pounds under SoftBank's offer. A record 14.8 billion chips powered by ARM technology were shipped in 2015, accounting for 32 percent of the global market. Revenue grew 15 percent to $1.5 billion and pretax profit grew 24 percent to 512 million pounds.
Chief Technology Officer Mike Muller, one of the dozen founders of the company, said ARM valued technical brilliance above all.
"It's always been a heavily engineering-focused company, so it's fairly open, transparent and at times a little brutal because I guess we are a bunch of slightly autistic engineers who just want to do the right thing," he told Reuters.
"It's always been 'Let's agree what is the right thing to do driven by a certain amount of data', rather than it being about politics."
LOW PROFILE
Suiting its low profile, ARM is located in a business park in Cambridge, the university city an hour from London.
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Its offices have none of the funky fittings found at Facebook or Google, and its executives favour business suits over hoodies.
ARM traces its history back to the mid-1980s, when a group of software engineers decided to design their own microprocessor for the Acorn BBC Micro, a device that introduced a generation of British school children to computing.
Muller said the rise of rival computers based on Intel chips dealt Acorn a fatal blow, but despite the failure Apple had seen something it liked in the technology, which it wanted to use in its Newton handheld device.
With Apple's backing, ARM was spun out of Acorn in 1990.
The Newton failed, but ARM persevered with its designs and was chosen by another company set to become a global leader - Nokia - for a new mobile phone in the mid-1990s.
"Because Nokia was then becoming the number one mobile phone company, other people knew they'd selected ARM to use in mobile phones, and that drove a lot of adoption from other players," Muller said.
Nokia chose ARM'S processor designs because they required less power than those from rivals, making them ideal for a mobile device powered by a battery.
COMMON ARCHITECTURE
An early decision to let its customers innovate using ARM's core technology was key to its success, Muller said, giving partners such as Apple, Samsung or Qualcomm the freedom to develop their own chips while using ARM's common architecture that had become the industry standard.
The company and analysts had said that partnership model had made ARM less vulnerable to a takeover because an acquisition by the likes of Apple or Intel could put off its other partners.
SoftBank, a telecommunications and internet company with no presence in semiconductors, largely sidesteps that problem.
ARM chief executive Segars, who trained as an engineer, said he didn't ask the company's customers before agreeing the deal, relying instead on the analysis of the board.
"We weren't out consulting with our customers, we believe this is going to be a great thing for ARM, our partners, our employees, our shareholders and that's the judgment we've taken," he told Reuters.
British politicians were also kept largely in the dark, although new prime minister Theresa May and her finance minister Philip Hammond were briefed on the deal over the weekend.
After the early meeting in Turkey, the two sides retreated to the offices of financial advisers Lazard and Goldman Sachs in London, as well as the Berkeley Hotel. Due diligence was done in "literally 24 hours", a source said.
Son, seen as a unconventional visionary in the closed world of corporate Japan, said that unlike many of his fellow international investors, he was not put off by the turmoil that ensued from Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
"Talking is easy," said the man ranked by Forbes as Japan's second richest. "People say the UK is still a great country. That's easy to say.
"I'm proving that with cash ... I say this is the time to invest." (Additional reporting by Freya Berry; editing by Kate Holton and Giles Elgood)
By Robin Emmott and Gabriela Baczynska BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Boris Johnson, who made his name as a Brussels-bashing journalist in the 1990s, was determined to avoid making headlines when he returned to his old stamping ground on Monday. The mop-haired politician, who led last month's referendum campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, was on his best behaviour at his first EU foreign ministers' meeting. "We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union, but that in no sense means that we are leaving Europe," Britain's newly minted foreign secretary said. "We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds," Johnson told reporters on arrival. He took no questions. Ten hours later, he said on his way out that Britain wanted to see the EU develop and go forward, "and all we would say is that to make sure there are docking stations and doors for future UK involvement down the track". For most of the day Johnson, a Daily Telegraph journalist in Brussels in 1989-94 and longtime scourge of EU integration and regulation, was a man more talked-about than talking. Pooled television pictures showed him chatting animatedly in a group with his Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourg, Spanish and Maltese counterparts before the meeting, occasionally stuffing his hands awkwardly into the jacket pockets of an ill-fitting suit. The bigger beasts of the EU jungle avoided that huddle. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who had called Johnson a liar on his appointment last week, sat stony-faced in his seat while Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had branded the Leave campaigner irresponsible, looked away. Johnson's first words to the official session were in French to honour the victims of last Friday's truck attack in Nice, switching to English to express sorrow and finishing with the French word "solidarite", officials present said. It fell to visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to give Johnson, who relished verbal jousts with then European Commission President Jacques Delors, a veiled lesson in the benefits of the EU. "I ask anyone who questions the importance of the EU or its relationship with the United States, (to consider) not just the history that I articulated, but the increase of prosperity, the rise in the standard of living ... the better protection of rights for individuals in the EU, as a consequence of what we have done together," Kerry said. NO APOLOGY Asked if the former mayor of London had apologised for having compared the EU's goals to those of Hitler and Napoleon during the referendum campaign, Ayrault said: "No he did not apologise ... Boris Johnson came to the council and behaved with a certain modesty. "For me the essential thing is clarity, not making snide remarks or snap judgments. But what matters is the relationship that we'll now have to construct between the EU and Britain," the French minister said. Steinmeier said Johnson had distinguished between "Europe" and "the EU", and "tried to make clear the UK will still engage in conflicts like Syria even if it will leave the EU". The German minister dodged a question on the suitability of Johnson as foreign secretary, telling reporters: "This is a British decision that we don't want to criticise ... Boris Johnson... said today he was taking this task seriously." One EU colleague had warm words for the newcomer. His Polish counterpart, whose conservative nationalist government has defied Brussels in a drive to shackle the constitutional court, said Johnson had made some "conciliatory gestures". "He was positive, asked a lot of questions as some of the terminology and procedures are new to him, but he was showing interest, was engaged," Witold Waszczykowski said. "At the same time he does have this easy-going style so that makes the meeting a bit more colourful." (Additional reporting by Manon Jacob and Tom Korkemeier; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Pravin Char)
LONDON (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Monday he had held "positive and productive" one-on-one talks with many of his European Union counterparts about implementing Britain's vote to leave the bloc. Britain will need to negotiate a new relationship with the EU once the government triggers Article 50, the formal start of divorce talks with the bloc. "Met many EU counterparts one on one to discuss giving effect to EU vote, talks were positive and productive," Johnson said on Twitter. Appointed last week, Johnson was in Brussels for his first Foreign Affairs Council event, where he said future UK-EU co-operation on foreign policy and security were discussed as well as the failed coup in Turkey and the truck attack in Nice. (Reporting by Sarah Young, Editing by Kylie MacLellan)
Riyadh (AFP) - Saudi Arabia's national shipping company and the Arab Petroleum Investments Corp. (APICORP) have launched a joint fund to purchase large oil tankers for the kingdom, an official statement said on Monday.
The $1.5-billion fund aims to purchase 15 Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) for the kingdom's state-owned shipping firm in three phases, the statement said.
The agreement signed between the two companies Sunday night in Riyadh said the fund's duration is for 10 years.
APICORP, the development bank of the 10 Arab petroleum exporting countries, will contribute 85 percent to the fund's capital while the Saudi firm will make up the remaining 15 percent.
Established in 1978, the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia owns 83 various vessels including 36 VLCCs.
Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said the fund will contribute to turning the kingdom into a regional logistics hub.
The minister however denied that the purchase of tankers was a sign that Saudi plans to increase its oil production capacity, which currently stands at over 12 million barrels per day (bpd).
The kingdom pumps 10.2 million bpd and is the world's top crude exporter.
Judd Apatow will be honored with the 2016 Generation Award at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal.
Festival organizers on Monday in a statement cited Apatow as "one of the most important comedic minds of his generation." Apatow has directed, among other comedies, This is 40, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Funny People.
His producing credits include Superbad, Bridesmaids, and Anchorman, and he executive produced HBO's Girls, co-created Love on Netflix and is currently producing the HBO series Crashing, starring Pete Holmes.
Apatow was last at the Montreal comedy festival in 2008 to perform his Apatow For Destruction Show, while receiving the Comedy Person of the Year trophy that year at the ComedyPRO conference.
He will receive his latest Just For Laughs comedic tribute on July 29 at the Hyatt Regency Montreal. The Just For Laughs festival is set to run through Aug. 1, 2016 in Montreal.
Read More: Judd Apatow, Jerry Seinfeld Reminisce About Stand-Up and Garry Shandling on 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee'
On Monday, Bill Cosby got a mixed ruling in his civil lawsuit against former Temple University employee Andrea Constand and her attorneys. A Pennsylvania federal judge has thrown out one key claim the embattled entertainer has made, but allowed others to move forward. Additionally, Cosby is being allowed to sue the parent company of National Enquirer.
Constand is the woman whose rape allegations have Cosby facing a pending criminal proceeding in the state. After the District Attorney brought charges this past December against Cosby over a sexual abuse alleged to have happened back in 2004, Cosby returned fire with a civil lawsuit against Costand, her mother, her attorneys Delores Troiani and Bebe Kivitz, as well as American Media for allegedly breaching the confidentiality provision of a 2006 settlement agreement.
In a ruling today, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno has granted a motion to dismiss as it pertains to Constand, her mother and her lawyers talking to law enforcement.
Although the settlement agreement prohibited Constand and her reps from disclosing any aspect of her prior litigation against Cosby, the judge agrees with Troiani and Kivitz that such confidentiality is unenforceable because it violates public policy by purporting to prevent individuals from providing information concerning alleged criminal conduct.
Cosby argued from a reading of prior cases that public policy only prevented disclosures elicited through a subpoena, but Robreno rules that Cosby hasn't cited any support for the proposition that parties can be bound against voluntary disclosures to law enforcement officers.
As such, Cosby loses that aspect of his breach-of-contract claim, but he experiences better luck on how Constand's lawyers allegedly violated confidentiality by participating in the release of Cosby's decade-old deposition - the now infamous one where he admitted giving women drugs for the purpose of sex.
Troiani and Kivitz contended that they played no role in the release of the deposition transcript and that the court reporting service that leaked the transcript wasn't their vendor. But the judge says these are factual issues that can't be resolved at this preliminary stage.
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Additionally, the judge declines to reject a claim directed at Constand over two 2014 tweets and an interview with the Toronto Sun. In one tweet, Constand wrote, "I won't go away, there is a lot more I will say," and in the other, she wrote, "It's not that everybody just forgot about it, truth is nobody cared."
Constand argued that the tweets couldn't form the basis of a breach of contract because she didn't name Cosby.
"This argument is unavailing because, of course, a statement can be a reference to an individual or situation even if it does not explicitly say so," writes the judge. "Whether the tweets were in fact references to Cosby - and, if so, whether Constand breached the CSA by tweeting them - are questions to be answered at a later stage."
The woman accusing Cosby of rape also fails at the initial stage in making the argument that Cosby's own unclean hands in talking to the press prevents his claim. As Cosby has an unjust enrichment claim against her, she faces the possibility of having to give Cosby back the monetary proceeds of the settlement. Meanwhile, American Media - which was part of the decade-old Constand lawsuit over what it reported in National Enquirer - must also face Cosby's wrath over articles it more recently published on Constand's allegations and Cosby's deposition. The judge find that what's public is another question of fact that can't yet be resolved.
U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno has ruled that entertainer Bill Cosby cannot sue accuser Andrea Constand for breach of contract for violating their confidentiality agreement by cooperating with law enforcement officials in a case that led to Cosby's arrest last December.
However, Cosby can sue her for some of her tweets and an interview she did with the Toronto Sun last summer, according to Robreno's order. He can also sue her attorneys, Dolores Troiani and Bebe Kivitz, for an open letter they wrote to Bruce L. Castor, Jr., who was running for district attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, last September and who did not prosecute Cosby during his previous stint as district attorney. The letter was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In addition, Cosby can explore how his deposition in Constand's 2005 civil suit which he settled in late 2006 got into the hands of the media last summer, the judge ruled.
Robreno also ruled that Cosby's civil suit against the National Enquirer for allegedly violating a confidentiality agreement can proceed as well. However, Robreno died Cosby's request to delay discovery in that case until his criminal case was resolved.
In a statement to PEOPLE, a spokesperson for American Media Inc., the publisher of the Enqurier, said, "While we are disappointed that the court did not dismiss Mr. Cosby's breach of contract claim outright, we are very pleased with court's decision to deny his motion to stay discovery. We very much look forward to deposing him and establishing the meritlessness of his position."
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Andrew Wyatt, Cosby's spokesman, had no comment on Robero's ruling. Neither did Troiani and Kivitz or a spokesperson for the Enquirer.
RELATED VIDEO: What Would Stacey Dash Say to Bill Cosby Today?
Cosby, 79, has been charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting Constand, now 43, at his Elkins Park, Pennsylvania mansion in January 2004.
He denies the allegations as well as similar ones from more than 50 women.
Cosby filed the lawsuit against Constand this past February two months after newly elected Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele charged him in Constand's case.
While Cosby is actively trying to get the charges against him dismissed, so far he has lost all the motions to do so. He is due in court in Norristown, Pennsylvania on Sept. 6 for a pre-trial conference.
Milan (AFP) - Italian champions Juventus are set to pay a hefty 94.7 million euros ($105m) release clause in Gonzalo Higuain's contract with Napoli to lure the Argentina star to Turin, reports claimed Monday.
Higuain joined Napoli for 40 million euros from Real Madrid in 2013 and has since gone on to become one of the most exciting, and bankable stars in Italy's top flight.
The 28-year-old centre-forward hit a stunning 36 goals last season to break Gunnar Nordahl's 66-year-old record of 35 goals for AC Milan in a 20-team season, which he achieved in 1950.
Now the Argentina star is set to break Napoli hearts by joining their bitter, northern rivals in a deal that could see Juventus offer several players and pay the massive release clause to Napoli to secure Higuain's services.
According to widespread reports in the Italian media, Higuain has personally agreed to the move.
Talks between both clubs were expected to begin on Monday and although they may continue for some time, Juventus are set to pull out all the stops in a bid to secure Higuain.
La Gazzetta dello Sport said Juventus are willing to offer striker Simone Zaza and defender Daniele Rugani as part of the deal.
If Higuain were to join Juventus, Napoli would then focus on replacing him with either Mauro Icardi (Inter Milan), Alvaro Morata (Real Madrid) or Nikola Kalinic (Fiorentina), said the report.
Napoli have maintained in recent weeks that Higuain is not for sale, the club's vice-president Edoardo De Laurentiis -- the son of club owner Aurelio -- even telling worried fans on Sunday to "sleep tight" when asked about Higuain's possible departure.
But a front page headline in Gazzetta dello Sport warned Napoli fans it was "Higuain Day" and that Juventus would be "launching an assault" in a bid to close the deal.
At Juventus, Higuain would join up with fellow Argentina international striker Paulo Dybala, forming a formidable duo that would likely strike fear into the hearts of Serie A defences before a ball is kicked in anger.
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While Higuain hit 36 league goals in 2015-2016, Dybala finished Serie A's second-highest scorer on 19.
Dybala also followed Higuain on the social media platform Instagram last weekend, fuelling speculation the Napoli striker is set to quit the southern club two years before his current contract expires.
Juventus claimed their fifth consecutive Serie A title last season with a nine-point cushion on Napoli, who will feature in next season's Champions League.
The new Serie A season starts on August 20.
Washington (AFP) - The third time was the charm for Croatian Ivo Karlovic, who lifted the ATP Newport title at last with a 6-7(2/7), 7-6 (7/5), 7-6 (14/12) victory over Gilles Muller.
In his third straight appearance in the final on the grass courts of Newport on Sunday, the 37-year-old Karlovic grabbed his seventh ATP Tour title and at 37 became the oldest winner in the tournament's history.
In fact, he's the oldest ATP singles champion since Marty Riessen in 1979.
"After all these years when I was losing in the final and now I was finally able to do it," Karlovic said. "And I was down a match point. That makes it even nicer."
Karlovic's usual monster serve again made the difference. The former world number 44 fired 27 aces and won almost 90 per cent of his first-serve points.
But both he and Muller began the match battling nerves. Karlovic, who had been broken once in Newport heading into the final dropped his first service game.
Muller then held to lead 3-0, but Karlovic broke back to set the course for what would be the first of three tiebreakers.
Neither player mustered a break point in the third set. Muller earned the first match point at 6-5 in the tiebreaker but couldn't convert.
Muller saved four match points on his own serve, but Karlovic gave himself a fifth chance on his serve and made no mistake -- denying the 33-year-old Muller a first career ATP title.
The 33-year-old from Luxembourg is 0-5 in career finals.
Actress Kate del Castillo braved a face-to-face meeting last year with one of Mexico's most fearsome drug lords, yet it's the Mexican government whom she fears the most nowadays.
Speaking on the Univision weekly news program Aqui y Ahora, which aired Sunday night, del Castillo, a naturalized U.S. citizen residing in Los Angeles, believes Mexican authorities are monitoring her phone conversations and text messages when she communicates with her family, friends and lawyers in Mexico.
"You hear it when you go in. In everything, I know that I'm completely wiretapped," she told network anchor Jorge Ramos. "I think (the tapping) is by the Mexican government, I'm almost positive, but I don't know it for a fact. But I know it with all my heart because I hear noises that I didn't hear before."
Earlier this year, Mexico's Attorney General's Office said it was investigating del Castillo for possible money laundering. Attorney General Arely Gomez said there were "indications" that the actress may have received illicit funds from Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman for her tequila brand, Tequila Honor. Authorities said that if del Castillo returns to Mexico, she would be detained for questioning.
Read More: Actress Kate Del Castillo Sought for Questioning About El Chapo in Mexico
Del Castillo insists she has received no money from El Chapo, and her attorney has requested a court-ordered injunction prohibiting authorities from detaining her.
"I never received money from El Chapo," said The Queen of the South actress. "I was never going to do business with him. And that is all, all (the authorities) accuse me of."
The big question is why the Mexican government might be trying to persecute her, as del Castillo claims. Ramos suggested that the government might be scared that El Chapo revealed incriminating information to her about Mexican public figures during their six-hour secret meeting in the mountains.
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But del Castillo says they never discussed that.
"The truth is, I don't know why (there's) a terrible witch hunt against me," del Castillo said. "And I hope that things get settled very soon."
Del Castillo met with El Chapo in September along with Penn and two film producers to discuss the possibility of making a biopic about the drug baron's life story. El Chapo granted exclusive rights to del Castillo to make the movie, but she has yet to move forward on the project.
Read More: Kate del Castillo Shares Her Side of the Story About El Chapo and Sean Penn
Univision and Netflix, however, have teamed up to produce a drama series titled El Chapo, which is set to air next year. Univision rival Telemundo also is producing a series, El Chema, which is based on El Chapo's dramatic prison breakout of a maximum-security facility last year.
El Chapo's lawyer Andres Granados has threatened to file a lawsuit against Univision and Netflix unless royalty payments are made for the El Chapo series, according to The Associated Press.
Del Castillo says she could sue as well, but she doesn't know if her legal rights have been violated.
"I have to take a good look at it with my lawyers," she said. "I really cannot stand up to Univision and Telemundo or anybody among all those who are going to do this."
Univision's Ramos also questioned del Castillo about a series of late-night tweets that she posted last month in which she called the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump "vulgar, bellicose, racist, egotistical" and then likened him to Hitler.
"How is it possible that there is a presidential candidate with Hitler-style ideas in the first place?" she asked during the interview. "We have gone back decades because of his transgression and his vulgarity full of personal interests."
Del Castillo believes Mexicans and Latinos need a wake-up call ahead of the Nov. 8 election.
"I would like to tell all Mexicans, all Latinos to get out and vote," she said. "Because the African-Americans, something happens and everyone is there and everybody supports each other. We lack unity as Mexicans, as Latinos ... I truly think we need to raise our voices. We are very fearful. The Trump campaign is based on fear."
Read More: Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Why Donald Trump "Couldn't Even Clean the Cape" of Ronald Reagan (Q&A)
Del Castillo is currently working on the Netflix series Ingobernable, a political drama in which she plays the wife of Mexico's president.
ALMATY (Reuters) - Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, convened an emergency meeting of the Central Asian nation's Security Council on Monday, his office said, after gunmen attacked police and security forces in Almaty, killing four people. The attacks in the former Soviet republic's biggest city followed deadly clashes between Islamist militants and security forces in the city of Aktobe in June and a foiled plot in another province, also blamed on followers of radical Islam. (Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov/Mariya Gordeyeva; Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
ALMATY (Reuters) - One gunman close to Salafists, followers of an ultra-conservative school of Islam, was behind the three deadly shootouts in Almaty on Monday, senior security officials said. The suspect, 26-year-old Ruslan Kulikbayev, had been imprisoned before for robbery and illegal arms possession and "became close to Salafists" in prison, KNB security service head Vladimir Zhumakanov told a Security Council meeting in a video published by President Nursultan Nazarbayev's office. Interior Minister Kalmukhanbet Kasymov told the same meeting police had mistakenly believed the attacker had accomplices. (Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; editing by Vladimir Soldatkin)
By Andrei Khalip
LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal has a budget cushion worth 0.3 percent of GDP to guarantee that this year's fiscal commitments are met, the government told the European Commission on Monday as it seeks to convince Brussels not to impose sanctions over its 2015 deficit.
"Sanctioning the past doesn't make political and economic sense for countries that are already taking effective action, as in the case of Portugal," Finance Minister Mario Centeno wrote in a letter to the commission on Monday.
He said Portugal was on course for a 2016 deficit "clearly below 3 percent", which is the European Union's limit, but that sanctions could jeopardise that goal.
Last week, EU finance ministers backed a sanctions procedure for Portugal and Spain after the European Commission said both countries had failed to do enough to correct excessive budget deficits for 2014 and 2015.
The commission has indicated that sanctions could be purely symbolic if the countries show sufficient commitment to further deficit cuts. A decision is expected on July 27.
"The Portuguese government is ready to adopt fiscal measures to correct any eventual deviations on the budgetary execution," the letter said, explaining that the budget had "an additional buffer of expenditure cuts" worth 0.2 percent of GDP, which are kept in reserve in case they are needed to meet the target.
These appropriations were applied to public institutions that had projected spending increases compared with 2015.
In addition, a report accompanying the letter cited further unspecified reserves worth another 0.1 percent of GDP that "can be used in case of larger deviations".
"Overall, the 2016 budget has contingency measures amounting to 542.8 million euros (453.2 million), or 0.3 percentage points of GDP," the report said, adding that so far the government's monthly monitoring process had not revealed any significant deviation.
Portugal has vowed to cut the budget deficit to 2.2 percent of GDP this year from last year's 4.4 percent, which occurred on the previous administration's watch.
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Brussels and the IMF doubt that Portugal's growth this year will be enough to halve the deficit, and expect an economic slowdown after a 1.5 percent expansion in 2015.
The government projects GDP growth of 1.8 percent, but said that, even if it came in as low as 1.4 percent, the use of the 0.2 percent buffer would still allow the nominal deficit to be cut to 2.3 percent of GDP.
(Reporting By Andrei Khalip; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Secretary of State John Kerry warned the Turkish government Monday that its actions could have consequences for the NATO alliance if it goes too far with its ongoing purge of thousands of military personnel, judges, and police officers accused of involvement in last weekends failed coup attempt.
The U.S. diplomats remarks, delivered at a meeting of the European Unions 28 foreign ministers, came as authorities acting on behalf of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sacked more than 8,000 police officers and officials in a massive effort launched in the aftermath of the coup, according to the Washington Post and Reuters.
Erdogan has already alarmed outside observers by detaining more than 6,000 military and civilian personnel, Turkeys justice minister confirmed on Sunday. On Monday, Johannes Hahn, the European commissioner for regional affairs, suggested that Erdogan had been ready for a crackdown. The arrests showed at least [that] something has been prepared because lists are available already, Hahn said.
A lot of people have been arrested and arrested very quickly, Kerry told journalists. The level of vigilance and scrutiny is going to be very significant in the days ahead.
He noted that NATO, which Turkey has been a member of since 1952, has a requirement with respect to democracy, and NATO will indeed measure very carefully what is happening.
At the same gathering, the EUs foreign-policy chief, Federica Mogherini, was asked about Erdogans recent suggestion that Turkey may reinstate the death penalty, a measure the country abolished in 2004 as part of its effort to join the EU. No country can become an EU member state if it introduces death penalty, she said.
Kerry said he spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu several times over the weekend and had received assurances that Ankara will respect the democratic process. U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby clarified on Monday that there is no immediate threat of Turkey losing its NATO membership but that we are all watching what they are doing.
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We will certainly support bringing the perpetrators of the coup to justice but we also caution against a reach that goes beyond that and stress the importance of the democratic rule being upheld, Kerry said.
According to Turkish media reports, prosecutors have interrogated dozens of generals over the attempted overthrow of the current government. Authorities reportedly fired at least 30 governors, steps that have chipped away at the initial international backing of Erdogans government against what has widely been seen as an illegal effort to depose a democratically elected, though increasingly authoritarian, leader.
This post was updated at 10:14 a.m. on July 18, 2016.
Photo credit: Anadolu Agency/Contributor/Getty Images
Istanbul (AFP) - The future use by the United States of a key Turkish air base near Syria risks causing new tensions between the key NATO allies after the botched coup attempt, but using it as a bargaining chip could prove risky for Ankara.
Washington has since 2015 used the Incirlik base in the southern province of Adana as a highly convenient launch pad for bombing raids against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.
Before being granted permission by Turkey to use Incirlik for the air strikes -- after tough negotiations -- US planes had to use bases far further away in Jordan and Kuwait.
However Friday's failed coup, which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames on US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, has raised anti-American rhetoric in Ankara.
Turkish officials are furious that the United States has so far turned a deaf ear to requests for his extradition, with the Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu even saying Washington was "behind the coup".
This has raised fears that Ankara could use Incirlik as a lever to pressure Washington for Gulen's extradition to face trial in Turkey.
Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund's office in Ankara, said Turkey-US tensions were already high because of Washington's support for Kurdish militias in Syria.
"The situation would only get worse if Washington does not answer Turkey's calls for Gulen's extradition," he told AFP.
- 'Risks backfiring' -
Gulen, a reclusive 75-year-old Islamic preacher, has been in exile in the United States since 1999, but wields enormous influence in Turkish society, with supporters in the media, police and judiciary.
The United States has so far shown little interest in Turkey's repeated demands for his extradition since a vast corruption scandal that shook Erdogan's government in 2013, which was also blamed by Ankara on Gulen and his loyalists in the police and judiciary.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Programme at The Washington Institute, said Turkey would be making a mistake to use Incirlik to speed up Gulen's extradition.
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"In my view, if Ankara did that, it would backfire," he told AFP.
"While access to the base is important for US operations against the Islamic State, it is not indispensable.
"Washington gained access to the base only in 2015 and before then, it was handling anti-IS operations very well without access to Incirlik or other Turkish bases," he said.
"If Turkey forces the United States, Washington can go back to that option again."
Incirlik houses 1,500 US troops and is just 70 miles (110 kilometres) from the Syrian border.
It has notably been used to deploy drones, Prowler electronic warplanes and A-10 ground attack aircraft in the fight against IS.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that Washington would assist Turkey in the investigation of the failed coup, inviting Ankara to share any evidence it has against Gulen.
Unluhisarcikli said any use of Incirlik as a bargaining chip would dent Washington's reliance on Turkey as a partner in anti-IS operations and would push Americans to seek an alternative.
"And that would not be smart," he told AFP.
- 'Active anti-IS player' -
Already, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Sunday that the events in Turkey had raised questions about its "reliability" in the fight against IS.
And after Friday's turmoil, Turkey briefly shut down Incirlik, forcing its NATO ally to halt strikes in Syria.
Turkish authorities also detained at the base a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Sunday that operations against IS had resumed from the base after its air space reopened.
After long being accused of not doing enough in the fight against the jihadists, Turkey has played a fuller role in the US-led anti-IS coalition and carried out its own artillery strikes.
"Turkey is an active member of the international coalition," a Turkish official said.
But Turkey had also lamented the delay in the delivery of American light multiple rocket launchers -- High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) -- to be deployed along its border with Syria to combat IS.
Three Baton Rouge police officers were killed and three more were injured on Sunday by a suspect identified as a former U.S. Marine sergeant. The suspect reportedly ambushed the police officers behind a store while they were responding to a report of a man armed with an assault rifle before 9 a.m. on Sunday morning.
The attacker, dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, was killed after a gunfight with law enforcement lasting about eight minutes, according to Reuters. Long certainly was seeking out police, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said Monday, according to the Associated Press. His movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers, Edmonson said.
Who Was the Shooter?
The suspect has been identified as Gavin Eugene Long, 29, a former Marine from Kansas City, Mo. According to the Associated Press, Longs military records show he served from 2005 to 2010, deploying in Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009. A spokesman confirmed to the AP that Long briefly attended the University of Alabama in 2012.
In videos, photographs and messages reportedly posted online using the alias Cosmo Setepenra or simply Cosmo, a web user with an email address associated with Long denounces recent shootings of black men by police. Baton Rouge itself erupted in protests after 37-year-old Alton Sterling was shot to death on July 5 by a police officer, an incident that was captured in a cell-phone video later posted online. Cosmo reportedly urged black men viewing his online videos to make sacrifices for their race. You gotta fight back, he allegedly said in one post, according to the Guardian.
Two other individuals were detained briefly following Sundays shooting, but they were released without charge. Authorities now believe Long acted alone.
Who Were the Officers?
Three officers have been confirmed dead, and another three were injured in the ambush.
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The deceased officers have been named as Matthew Gerald, 42, Brad Garafola, 45, and Montrell Jackson, 32. Jackson, a black officer, had recently posted a heartfelt Facebook message about his experiences as a patrolman in Baton Rouge amid heightened tensions following Sterlings killing.
The AP cited a spokeswoman for the sheriffs office identifying two of the police officers injured in the attack as deputies Nicholas Tullier, 41, and Bruce Simmons, 51. Tullier, an 18-year veteran of the force, was in critical condition, spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks told the AP.
What Has the Reaction Been?
Reuters reports that Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the shootings an unspeakable, heinous attack.
There simply is no place for more violence. That doesnt help anyone, it doesnt further the conversation, it doesnt address any injustice, perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself, Edwards told reporters.
The shooting is the second time in two weeks that U.S. police officers have been targeted, amid heightened tensions from recent killings of black men by police. Another veteran, Micah Johnson, targeted police in Dallas overseeing a Black Lives Matter rally in the city on July 8, killing five officers.
President Obama in a statement Sunday said the incidents targeting police were attacks on public servants, on the rule of law and on civilized society, and they have to stop.
These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes, Obama said.
Three police officers in Baton Rouge, La., were fatally shot on Sunday morning, less than two weeks after a black man, Alton Sterling, was killed in an altercation with officers outside a convenience store in the southern city. Three other officers were wounded after Sundays assault, at least one critically.
The suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Gavin Long, who was killed at the scene after firing at the officers. Long certainly was seeking out police, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said Monday, according to the Associated Press. His movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers, Edmonson said.
This is what we know about Long:
1. He has a military background.
Like Micah Johnson, the alleged perpetrator of the July 7 shooting of police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, Long fought for the U.S. military in the Middle East. The AP reports that Long served as a Marine sergeant from 2005 to 10, and was posted in Iraq from the summer of 2008 until early 09. He was praised for his service, accruing several medals during his time as a data-network specialist in the Marines. He was discharged honorably, and later attended Central Texas College and Clark Atlanta University, according to NBC News, which cited his LinkedIn page.
2. He allegedly leaves a troubling digital footprint.
After Long was identified as the suspect in Sundays attacks, media outlets were quick to uncover a series of posts and videos on websites authored by a user named Cosmo or Cosmo Setepenra, reportedly associated with an email address used by Long. The Los Angeles Times says that the domain name ConvosWithCosmo.club was registered in April using Longs Kansas City, Mo., address. A similarly named site, ConvosWithCosmo.com, includes links to podcasts, YouTube videos, and other content that appear to be by Long, according to NBC News. Biographical data on the site, such as military service, also appears to align with Longs.
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Many of the posts made by the user Cosmo or Cosmo Setepenra, are of violent and incendiary nature, the Washington Post reports. In now deleted postings to a YouTube channel named Cosmo Setepenra, made shortly after the Dallas killings, a man appearing to be Long reportedly called on black men to make sacrifices for their race and talks about protesting, oppression, and how to deal with bullies.
You gotta fight back, he allegedly says in one video that was quoted by the Guardian.
(TIME has not authenticated the videos or the ownership of the YouTube channel.)
3. He reportedly claimed to not be affiliated with any movement or entity.
According to NBC News, Cosmo emphasized this point in a deleted video originally posted on July 8.
I want to let yall, if anything happens with me dont affiliate me with nothing Im affiliated with the spirit of justice, nothing more nothing less, he is quoted as saying.
Sometimes, reality is so absurd that it outstrips anything conspiracy theorists could come up with. More than 13 years after the congressional investigation published its report into the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks, the much-discussed 28 pages on Saudi involvement in the terrorist assault, which had been held back as too sensitive to publish, have been released. As it turns out, there are 29 pages, not 28, numbered 415 through 443 in the congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. And deletions on the pages sometimes words, often whole lines add up to the equivalent of a total of three pages. So we still are not being given the full story.
It is instantly apparent that the widely held belief for why the pages were not initially released to prevent embarrassing the Saudi royal family is true.
The pages are devastating:
Page 415: While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support and assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi Government. [A]t least two of those individuals were alleged by some to be Saudi intelligence officers.
Page 417: One of the individuals identified in the pages as a financial supporter of two of the 9/11 hijackers, Osama Bassnan, later received a significant amount of cash from a member of the Saudi Royal Family during a 2002 trip to Houston.
Page 418: Another Saudi national with close ties to the Saudi Royal Family, [deleted], is the subject of FBI counterterrorism investigations.
Pages 418 and 419: Detained al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida had in his phone book the unlisted number for the security company that managed the Colorado residence of the then-Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
Page 421: a [deleted], dated July 2, 2002, [indicates] incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists inside the Saudi Government.
Page 426: Bassnans wife was receiving money from Princess Haifa Bint Sultan, the wife of the Saudi ambassador. (Her correct name is actually Princess Haifa bint Faisal.)
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Page 436: The general counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department, David Aufhauser, testified that offices [of the Saudi charity al-Haramain] have significant contacts with extremists, Islamic extremists. CIA officials also testified that they were making progress on their investigations of al-Haramain. [T]he head of the central office is complicit in supporting terrorism, and it also raised questions about [then-Saudi Interior Minister] Prince Nayef.
On reading this, I let out a shout: Yes!
In January 2002, U.S. News & World Report quoted two unidentified Clinton administration officials as saying that two senior Saudi princes had been paying off Osama bin Laden since a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, which killed five American military advisors. I followed up in an August 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed, reporting that U.S. and British officials had told me the names of the two senior princes who were using official Saudi money not their own to pay off bin Laden to cause trouble elsewhere but not in the kingdom. I referred to the princes in a later Wall Street Journal op-ed: They were Prince Nayef, the father of the current crown prince, Muhammad bin Nayef, and his brother Prince Sultan, then-defense minister and father of Prince Bandar. Both Prince Nayef and Prince Sultan are now dead.
The U.S. News & World Report article quoted a Saudi official as saying: Wheres the evidence? Nobody offers proof. That official was current Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, who has no doubt spent recent days lobbying members of Congress and doing advance damage control my bet is he has probably been using the same lines.
But with the release of the 29 pages, and their detailed description of the financial connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi officials, Jubeirs argument has become increasingly difficult to make. The inquiry, after all, quotes a redacted source alleging incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi Government.
Upon the pages release, Washington-based public relations firm Qorvis, which has a lucrative contract with the kingdom, released its own analysis that began with a quote from an interview CIA Director John Brennan gave to Al-Arabiya on June 11. It reads in part: [T]here was no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually, had supported the 9/11 attacks.
That could very well be right. But it still allows for the possibility, indeed the probability, that the actions of senior Saudi officials resulted in those terrorist outrages. I have never suggested that the Saudi government or members of the royal family directly supported or financed the 9/11 attacks. But official Saudi money ended up in the pockets of the attackers, without a doubt. I once asked a British official: How do we know? He replied that we know what account the money came out of and where it ended up.
On Friday, Jubeir held a news conference at the Saudi Embassy in Washington where he declared, The matter is now finished. Asked whether the report exonerated the kingdom, he replied: Absolutely. I think not.
Photo credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
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Bank of America Merrill Lynch beat expectations on Monday.
The US bank reported second-quarter earnings per share of $0.36 on revenues of $20.6 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings per share of $0.33 on revenue of $20.4 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The firm joins JPMorgan and Citigroup in beating estimates on earnings. Goldman Sachs is set to report Tuesday, and Morgan Stanley on Wednesday.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley has merged three businesses within its prized equity sales and trading business and it's emblematic of a bigger trend taking place across the Street.
SocGen used the codewords "Pizza," "Zorro," and "the Men in Black" to hide corruption, a Libyan fund has alleged. And these hedge funds are killing it this year.
SoftBank is buying the British chip-maker ARM Holdings for about $32 billion and it's big news for two boutique banks. The boutiques The Raine Group and Robey Warshaw landed roles as financial advisers to SoftBank along with the Tokyo-based Mizuho Bank.
In macro news, something that could give a massive boost to the world economy isn't going to happen. Turkey's failed coup could whack its economy. And Nigeria finally did the painful thing that everyone said it needed to do.
Finally, this relatively unknown town in Florida has become a playground for the richest of the rich.
Here are the top Wall Street headlines at midday:
One of the hottest areas of finance now has its own stock market index The index will track the performance of companies that leverage technology to deliver financial products and services and represents approximately $785 million in total market cap.
One of Yahoo's most important businesses stopped growing and could face a lot of questions on Monday Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has long touted Mavens, short for mobile, video, native, and social revenue, as the company's new growth driver.
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Morgan Stanley thinks everyone else is too bullish on the world Morgan Stanley analysts are more bearish on the global economy than everyone else.
Wall Street is obsessed with this technology but a big group of investors is missing out Blockchain could be a real game changer for the financial-services industry, but one big subset of Wall Street is watching from the sidelines.
GOLDMAN: This 'textbook' rally in stocks has a long way to go After a post-Brexit misstep, the stock market has regained its footing and roared past all-time highs in the past week.
How having zero experience in finance helped this founder build a $2.25 billion payments company Swedish payments startup Klarna is now a $2.25 billion company, but when CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski cofounded the company a decade ago, none of the three founders had any experience in finance whatsoever.
More From Business Insider
CHARLESTON, SC / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2016 / Kona Gold Solutions, Inc. (OTC Pink: KGKG), a premier hemp lifestyle brand of exclusivity and status, is pleased to announce that the Company is retiring 30 million free trading common shares of Kona Gold Solutions, Inc. stock. The Company has negotiated with a shareholder to reduce the overall number of free trading shares to help position the Company for future growth. The 30 million Free Trading shares have been sent back to the Company's Transfer Agent and will reduce the current float for Kona Gold Solutions, Inc., which is 62,031,197 as of July 18, 2016.
"In efforts to reduce the outstanding number of free trading shares, we have worked with a long standing shareholder who has agreed to retire 30 million free trading shares," stated Robert Clark, CEO of Kona Gold Solutions, Inc. "As we continue to build Kona Gold on a solid foundation, it's important that our stock reflects that growth and we feel that a reduction in free trading shares aligns our stock with our growth strategy."
The Company has had a tremendous amount of success placing its product in retail locations throughout Florida, so the Company's management team has decided to look for warehouse space in Florida to continue its growth. The Company plans to have additional warehouse space within the next 14 business days and will have its new warehouse stocked with its Hemp Energy Drink, Clothing Line, Hydroponic Systems as well as its non-hemp energy drink and shots.
For more information regarding Kona Gold Solutions, please visit:
https://www.facebook.com/konagoldhemp
https://twitter.com/konagoldhemp
https://www.instagram.com/konagoldhemp/
http://www.konagoldhemp.com
Kona Gold Solutions, Inc.:
Kona Gold Solutions, Inc. is currently in the process of developing a premier Hemp Infused Product line as well as merging its current subsidiaries out of the Company. The Company announced it has moved its Corporate Headquarters to 1591 Savannah Hwy, Suite 201, Charleston, SC 29407. Kona's new warehouse and office space gives the Company the space needed to expand rapidly.
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The Company has created Kona Gold LLC, a Delaware Corporation, to begin developing its Hemp Product line. Kona Gold will begin developing Hemp Energy Drinks, Energy Patches, Hemp Apparel, Hemp Shampoo as well as a Hydroponics division; please visit the Company's new website to view updates and new products: www.konagoldhemp.com.
There are many hemp companies out there that get lost in the crowd, but Kona Gold sets the gold standard with its premiere line of products.
Safe Harbor Statement:
The information posted in this release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by use of the words "may," "will," "should," "plans," "expects," "anticipates," "continue," "estimate," "project," "intend," and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic and business conditions, effects of continued geopolitical unrest and regional conflicts, competition, changes in technology and methods of marketing, delays in completing various engineering and manufacturing programs, changes in customer order patterns, changes in product mix, continued success in technological advances and delivering technological innovations, shortages in components, production delays due to performance quality issues with outsourced components, and various other factors beyond the Company's control.
Investor Relations Contact:
investorrelations@konagoldhemp.com
SOURCE: Kona Gold Solutions, Inc.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Kuwait's Zain has communicated to Egypt's telecommunications regulator its preliminary interest in obtaining a fourth-generation (4G) licence, the operator said in a bourse filing on Monday. Zain "is studying a number of investment opportunities available in the region, one of which is the Egyptian telecommunications market as a strategic market in the Middle East and Africa", the company said, adding that it had made the approach through one of its subsidiaries. A senior Egyptian telecommunications ministry official told Reuters on Sunday that Zain had expressed interest in applying for a 4G licence. Sales of such licences are part of the country's long-awaited plan to reform its telecommunications sector. (Reporting by Hadeel Al Sayegh; Writing by David French; Editing by Andrew Torchia)
KELOWNA, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2016 / Laguna Blends Inc. (CSE: LAG) (OTC: LAGBF) (Frankfurt: LB6A.F) (the "Company" or "Laguna"), a network marketing company, today highlights recent milestones complementary to its overall growth strategy and planned entrance into the $121 billion global skin care industry.
Most recently and as previously announced, Laguna signed a non-binding letter of intent to acquire the exclusive license brand name and existing inventory of CannaCeuticals of California, USA ("Canna"), a Swiss heritage company utilizing cosmeceutical-grade cannabidiol (CBD) for its line of revolutionary skincare products. Upon closing of the transaction, Laguna Blends will leverage its expanding affiliate marketing network to sell Canna products in North America. Per the agreement, Laguna will also receive license and marketing rights to sell Canna products in Asia, Europe and Mexico, subject to regulatory approval in those markets.
In a recent clinical trial of the efficacy of Canna's CBD face serum, test subjects reported a 100% overall improvement to the appearance of skin within 14 days. Additional findings from the clinical study include:
85.71% of test subjects noticed an improvement to their skin appearance within the first seven days
80.95% of subjects noticed an improvement to their skin texture within 14 days
80.95% of subjects noticed an improvement in the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles of the mouth area
80.95% of test subjects said they would purchase the Canna serum product if it was made available for sale
InvestmentPitch.com recently recapped this news in a video alert, which can be viewed here: http://www.investmentpitch.com/video/0_vk4mhtrd/Laguna-Blends-CSE-LAG-reported-highlights-of-clinical-data-provided-by-CannaCeuticals or on YouTube at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzl7yfm2ti0.
Laguna Blends also recently announced initial sales of its unique hemp-based Caffe and Pro369 functional beverage products, marketed through its growing network of independent affiliates in the United States and Canada. Unaudited sales for the 11-week period ended May 31, 2016, totaled $105,000, beating internal expectations.
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Brand exposure plays a significant role as the Company continues to accelerate its sales strategy. Laguna Blends' products and operations were recently featured in the June 2016 Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) quarterly magazine, placing the Company's profile in financial and brokerage offices across the country. View the full profile here: http://pr.report/ROcJvkzG.
Ray Grimm Jr., President of Laguna Blends, said, "The momentum we have gained in the last 30 days is testament to our commitment to the Laguna Blends brand, our affiliates, and our shareholders. The achievements noted above cast significant light on the high-potential future of Laguna Blends, as well as our ability to rapidly yet successfully execute an aggressive growth strategy. With regard to our negotiations with Canna, we have a lot more potential and milestones on deck, and we look forward to updating our shareholders in the near future."
About Laguna Blends, Inc.
Laguna is a network marketing company that generates retail sales through independent affiliates. Affiliates utilize tools and technology that enable them to build an international business from their own home or anywhere else in the world. This technology replaces the need for expensive travel and hotel meetings.
The Company is currently focused on the nutritional health benefits derived from hemp. Laguna's first product category as an entry to market are functional beverage products that contain hemp and other efficacious ingredients. Laguna's initial products to market are the following:
"Caffe" is an instant, "just add water" hot coffee beverage that is infused with both whey and hemp protein. With 2 grams of protein in every serving, our proprietary product packs a powerful protein punch. Caffe, contains Instant coffee, whey protein hydrolysate, hemp protein, natural flavors.
"Pro369" is a single serving, "on-the-go," plant based, instant, hemp protein that is served cold and comes in 4 delicious flavors. Pro369 is water soluble and can be directly mixed in water, added to milk, almond milk or coconut milk. Pro369 can also be blended in a shake or smoothie. Pro369 is also a source of Omegas, 3, 6 and 9 and contains ginseng.
Laguna Blends has been granted approval from Health Canada for four powdered flavours: Pro369 Chocolate Banana, Mixed Berry and Vanilla Caramel and Tropical Powder. Pro369 contains Hemp protein, natural flavors, stevia, and American ginseng.
The Minister of Health from Health Canada has granted Laguna a product license along with a Natural Product Number ("NPN") for all four of the Pro369 Flavours. They are all listed under the same NPN.
i. A source of protein that helps build and repair body tissues.
ii. Source of amino acids involved in muscle protein synthesis.
iii. Assists in the building of lean muscle.
iv. An adaptogen to help maintain a healthy immune system.
v. Supportive therapy for the promotion of healthy glucose levels.
Hemp has long been recognized by the health and nutrition industry as a super food, cited in many publications as a balanced source of all ingredients required to achieve health and wellness.
HempOmega
HempOmega is an environmentally sustainable, vegetarian source of Omegas 3 and 6 that boasts a superior nutrient profile. A water soluble, homogenous, powdered ingredient, it can be easily integrated and/or manipulated, with no unpleasant taste or chemical contamination opening up entirely new product formulation opportunities. Hemp Omega's greater ability to endure the digestive process delivers unmatched bioavailability, thereby maximizing its potential health benefits.
The Company sells its products through its independent affiliates in the USA and Canada.
HempOmega is a Trademark owned by Naturally Splendid Enterprises, Ltd. and is used under license by Laguna Blends Inc.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD
Stuart Gray
Laguna Blends Chief Executive Officer
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Beirut (AFP) - Syrian refugee Abu Adnan was rushing his newborn to the doctor one night in the Lebanese town of Rmeish when municipal police stopped him and began questioning him.
He was in violation of a municipal curfew that prevents Syrian refugees from leaving their homes between sunset and sunrise.
"They began questioning me -- 'Where are you going? Why?'" he told AFP, speaking on condition that a pseudonym be used.
Eventually he was allowed to continue, but was followed to and from the doctor's office, ensuring that he returned straight home.
This is just one example of what Syrian refugees and local activists say is increasing pressure on, and even outright racism against, Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
Lebanon hosts more than one million Syrian refugees -- roughly a quarter of its population -- and has regularly been praised for opening its borders to those fleeing the brutal conflict in its neighbour.
But the refugee influx has strained resources and tempers, with some Lebanese viewing the years-long presence of Syrians as a burden, even an imposition.
Some municipalities have taken matters into their own hands, imposing curfews on refugees, ordering night raids on their homes, evicting them or even making them clean the streets.
"Lately, things have become very difficult," said Abu Adnan.
"Once, a group of drunken young men broke into the home of some Syrian refugees and started beating and cursing them," he said.
"The municipality did nothing for the Syrians; instead it evicted dozens from their homes."
- Obligation to protect refugees -
Such incidents spiked again recently after a string of suicide bombers attacked Al-Qaa village on Lebanon's border with Syria.
Reports initially suggested the attackers had come from nearby refugee settlements, though that was later denied by Interior Minister Nuhad Mashnuq.
Lebanese activists say the security fears of citizens are being manipulated by some to justify measures against the Syrians.
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On Monday evening, a "march against racism" took place in Beirut.
Several dozen demonstrators carried placards declaring "No to the curfew", "Racism threatens civil peace" and "Security forces only attack the weak".
Rights groups have urged Lebanon to protect Syrians escaping the war that began in March 2011 and has killed more than 280,000 people.
"Amnesty International is concerned about recent reports of harassment and physical abuse of Syrian refugees including arbitrary arrests and forced evictions from informal settlements," said its refugee researcher Khairunissa Dhala.
She said Lebanon has "international obligations to protect Syrian refugees who are seeking safety in the country".
Matthew Saltmarsh, senior communications officer for the UN's refugee agency UNHCR, added: "It is important to remember that Syrian refugees in Lebanon are themselves seeking sanctuary from violence in their home country."
But in Rmeish, the municipality's Facebook page urges "all citizens to be guards".
"It is our duty to report any suspicious movement to the authorities," it says.
Municipality chief Marun Shibli says Rmeish is home to 6,000 Lebanese and that the arrival of more than 1,000 Syrians was "more than we could handle".
- 'Forced to clean streets' -
"A decision was taken to keep only those who could have a local sponsor. Now there are only about 500 refugees left," he said.
Other municipalities have also come under fire for their treatment of refugees.
In mid-July, municipal police in the coastal town of Amchit, north of Beirut, carried out night-time raids on several homes.
Pictures posted online showed refugees kneeling or lined up facing a wall, their hands crossed behind their backs, as municipal policemen checked their identity documents.
Under pressure from activists, the interior minister wrote to municipality heads warning that law enforcement officers would face "disciplinary measures" if they abused their power.
Amchit municipality dismissed any wrongdoing and said its policemen were acting in line with nationwide security measures aimed at "preventing any terrorism action".
Other violations of refugee rights have been reported.
In Tartej village north of Beirut, municipal officials forced refugees to "clean up the streets", As-Safir newspaper reported in mid-July.
And in the predominantly Christian coastal town of Jounieh, also north of the capital, one resident said she witnessed municipal policemen beating up and insulting a Syrian man.
"It was a painful sight," said Sarah Kamel, who tried in vain to defend the man, a resident of Lebanon for more than 20 years.
She said she shouted at the policemen, who said the man failed to heed a warning to stop.
"The policemen told me 'When he comes to your house to rob you, you can come to us and defend him,'" she said.
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We all know that Donald Trump will enter the Cleveland Republican National Convention next week as the presumptive nominee, but the most important word there is 'presumptive.'
It hasn't been an easy road to hoe for poor, embattled Trump, despite the fact that he won 1,543 delegates of the 1,237 needed to secure the nomination. He has faced the #NeverTrump movement, threats for delegates to vote for a completely different nominee and the spectre of unbound delegates.
And he still faces some longshot Hail Marys that are trying desperately to divert the nomination away from the golden-haired real estate mogul/reality star/rumored small hands owner. Several different schemes have been set in motion to nominate someone else, anyone else, as the Republican presidential nominee.
SEE ALSO: The internet tells Trump his rumored VP choice sucks
Of course, these plans have a minuscule, basically non-existent, chance of succeeding. But that didn't stop us wanting to explain them all and why they are doomed.
1. Contested convention
Image: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
The largest area of the Stop Trump venn diagram, onto which most other plans load their hopes, is the idea of a brokered, or contested, convention.
This idea would come from the fact that many, though not most, states allow for delegates to be 'unbound' if a candidate does not win the majority of the vote. This means that those delegates could vote for another candidate other than the one declared the winner of the specific contest.
As you will recall, the Republican primary began with quite the crowded field of 14 bright-eyed candidates all vying for the top seat aboard the charging elephant. Because of this, especially in early contests, Trump succeeded (where he did) by winning a plurality of votes and not a majority.
In fact, he was only able to win a majority of voters in 17 states, and several of those primaries were held after his main rivals got the hell out of Dodge.
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So, the theory was that enough of these delegates would be free from their responsibility because of the primary results to break from the 'winner' of their state and vote for someone completely different. Like anyone else.
Likelihood of stopping Trump:
This will not happen. It was discussed a lot in the spring, because Trump had not yet reached that magic number of 1,237 to clinch the presumptive nomination. Then, it looked possible that Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich could rustle up enough delegates of their own to keep Trump away from the number. If that would have happened, then even more of the delegates would have become unbound and could vote for whomever.
Alas, to those hoping for such an eventuality, Trump, secured 1,543 delegates and only 95 of those remain unbound not enough to keep him away from the number needed.
2. Unbound the delegates
Trump's safety in numbers has not stopped other conservatives from hatching other plans.
Two new groups, Free the Delegates and Delegates Unbound, have joined their efforts and millions of dollars raised over the past few months to petition the Republican National Convention's Rules Committee. The groups hope to convince the committee to, as their name suggests, free the delegates from voting based solely on the outcome of their states' primary.
"[T]oday, we are saddled with a presidential candidate who holds none of the qualities of our party's greatest leaders," the petition on the Free the Delegates website reads. "He lacks common decency, respect of the Constitution, and the temperament of someone fit to be Commander-in-Chief... [Reince Priebus], we are calling on you to support us in reaffirming the longstanding principle that delegates to the GOP Convention can vote their conscience in the name of preserving the legacy of our party and our nation."
Likelihood of stopping Trump:
This is very unlikely, especially after last Thursday, when the Rules Committee voted against this 'conscience' unbinding proposed by the Never Trump groups.
But it's not over quite yet. The leader of Free the Delegates, Kendal Unruh, is prepared to file a "minority report," whereby, if she can find 28 members of the Rules Committee to sign it, then this proposition will go before the entire convention for a decision.
Politics, y'all.
3. Vote for Paul Ryan
Image: AP Photo/Cliff Owen
Months ago, many rumors circulated about Paul Ryan taking over a contested convention and becoming the nominee in the process.
Billionaire GOP funder Charles Koch seemed certain back in April that Trump would fail to secure the delegates and that the Speaker of the House would be a shoe-in for the contested votes that would follow. Since then, of course, the delegates have been sealed and it doesn't look like they will be unbound.
But still, as a speaker at the Republican National Convention and the highest-ranking, currently serving establishment politician in attendance, his words carry weight. So, it came off to some as pretty telling when he said last month, It is not my job to tell delegates what to do.
Likelihood of stopping Trump:
Nope, sorry. Because of the numbers Trump gained and Ryan's commitment to unify the party as much as he can, the speaker will most likely talk up the importance of togetherness.
4. Rule number nine
Should Trump's nomination go forward as planned, the Republican National Committee does have a dastardly ejection seat that it could use to escape the jet and have it fly into the political mountain. In the rules of the Republican National Committee, last amended in August, 2014, there exists rule number nine. It reads as follows:
"The Republican National Committee is hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States or the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, as nominated by the national convention..."
Essentially, since "otherwise" is a very vague term, the Republican National Committee could, in theory, simply remove a candidate (after they are chosen) and fill the vacancy. Just as simple as that.
Likelihood of stopping Trump:
Nah, they wouldn't do that. This would be like a self-destruct button. It would completely undermine millions of voters and cast a very long shadow over the Republican Party, one that would take them a long time to get out of. Plus, the bad press such a move would cause would most probably affect the upcoming election and not in the way the GOP would want.
5. Trump wins election, goes \_()_/ and chooses not to serve
Image: Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx
Say he wins the nomination as planned and then goes on to defeat Hillary in the November election, is there still a chance he would decide not to serve?
He alluded to as much in an interview July 7 with the New York Times.
Ill let you know how I feel about it after it happens, he said, referring to the electoral win.
Of course, this is a very broad statement and the Times sells it as being said with "a mischievous smile." They assert that Trump is ultra competitive and might not be interested in actually leading the executive branch of the country.
In that case, Trump would basically join the #NeverTrump movement and grant them what it wants.
Likelihood of Trump stopping Trump:
As interesting as this would politically be, it's probably, almost definitely not going to happen. The flimsiness of the Times' quote does not give near enough credence to that line of speculation. If he wins, the world will probably be stuck with him.
Sorry anti-Trump folks, it looks like he will be the Republican candidate and maybe serve as the president.
Lin-Manuel Miranda will be honored in Puerto Rico with his very own star in the island's Walk of Fame. The Hamilton creator and award-winning artist is set to reveal his star on Wednesday, July 27 in the iconic Ashford Avenue.
"For us, it is great news that Lin-Manuel Miranda will join us during this ceremony. He is an international artist who has given Puerto Rico great pride because of his success with Hamilton. It's an honor and much happiness that he has accepted our invitation to be present when we reveal his star," said founder of Puerto Rico's Walk of Fame Santiago Villar in a statement.
News of his star comes just days after Miranda performed for the last time with Hamilton's original cast on July 10. He also recently dropped the peace and love anthem "Love Make The World Go Round" with Jennifer Lopez which was inspired by Orlando shooting victims; proceeds will benefit the Hispanic Federation's Proyecto Somos Orlando initiative, which pledges to "address the long-term needs for mental health services that are culturally competent and bilingual."
Watch Jennifer Lopez & Lin-Manuel Miranda's 'Love Make the World Go Round' Lyric Video
The Puerto Rican superstars have performed their track on television shows like Today and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
A woman in New York City who was infected with Zika passed the virus to her male partner during sex, marking the first report of female-to-male sexual transmission of this virus.
Previously, all reports of sexual transmission of the Zika virus have been cases of men passing it to their sexual partners, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The new report "adds to the growing body of knowledge about the sexual transmission of Zika," the CDC said. "Ongoing surveillance is needed to determine the risk for transmission of Zika virus infection from a female to her sexual partners," the report said. [Zika Virus News: Complete Coverage of the 2016 Outbreak]
The woman, who is in her 20s and is not pregnant, had recently traveled to an area with ongoing Zika transmission, according to the report. (The Zika virus is currently spreading in many countries in Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean.)
The day the woman returned to New York City, she had sex with her male partner without using a condom. The next day, she had a fever, rash and joint pain, which are all symptoms of infection with Zika. The woman also started her period that day, and she reported it was heavier than usual.
She soon went to the doctor, and a test detected the Zika virus in her blood and urine samples.
Six days after having sex, the woman's partner also developed symptoms of Zika, and he went to the same doctor that the woman had seen. Tests showed that the man also had Zika, and the doctor suspected that the man may have contracted the infection during sex.
An interview with the man confirmed that he had not been exposed to Zika in any other way; he had not traveled to a country where Zika is spreading, he had not been bitten by a mosquito (which can spread the virus), and he did not have any other recent sexual partners, the report said. The Zika virus is not known to spread through casual contact with an infected person, such as touching or hugging.
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"The timing and sequence of events support female-to-male Zika-virus transmission through condomless, vaginal intercourse," the report said. Virus in either the vaginal fluids or menstrual blood could have infected the man during sex, the report said.
The CDC currently recommends that pregnant women either use condoms or abstain from sex if their partners have traveled to areas where Zika is spreading. Zika virus infection during pregnancy can cause a birth defect called microcephaly, or an abnormally small head and brain.
People who are not pregnant but who want to reduce their risk of contracting Zika through sex should use condoms or abstain from sex, the CDC said. The agency also said it is updating its guidelines on preventing Zika transmission through sex.
Original article on Live Science.
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By Sharon Shi HONG KONG (Reuters) - When activists began setting fire to trash bins and hurling bricks at police during a February riot in Hong Kong, Chris Lee became more convinced his decision to leave his siblings and mother behind and move to Taiwan was the right one. Hong Kong, long known as one of the safest and most law-abiding cities in Asia, has become increasingly polarized with occasional violent protests, fueled in part by tensions with Communist Party leaders in Beijing over the Chinese-ruled city's democratic future. "It's not just the politics that are messed up," said Lee, who moved to Taiwan in March and opened a restaurant. "It is also the people who have become irrational and fickle that drove me to leave." Lee is not alone. Some 42 percent of Hong Kong residents want to leave, a survey by independent think tank Civic Exchange showed in June. This compares with 20 percent wanting to leave neighboring Singapore. Seventy percent of 1,500 people surveyed said Hong Kong had become "worse" or "much worse" to live in, with the biggest concerns housing, the "quality of government" and education. The number of Hong Kong people emigrating to Canada almost doubled in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, and the number moving permanently to Taiwan rose 36 percent over a similar time frame, data shows. The most recent data from the United States is from 2014 and flat. Emigration to the UK has declined, but the minimum amount for those seeking to qualify for residency as investors there has also doubled to 2 million pounds ($2.64 million). Australia doesn't provide data for Hong Kong but aggregate figures for emigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Mongolia rose slightly last year. "STARTED TO BE NERVOUS" The diminishing confidence in Hong Kong's future follows the "Occupy Central" protests in late 2014 demanding Beijing grant Hong Kong full democracy. "After Occupy, (Hong Kong people) started to be nervous about the future," said Andrew Lo, a director of Anlex Services Limited, which handles Taiwan immigration cases. Mary Chan, of immigration experts Rothe International Canada, said the immigration process typically takes one to two years. "Which is why the numbers are only increasing now," she said. The disappearances of five Hong Kong booksellers who specialized in gossipy political books about Chinese leaders, some of whom were believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents, has also eroded broader confidence in the "one country, two systems" formula under which the former British colony returned to China in 1997. One of the booksellers who returned to Hong Kong told media he may emigrate to Taiwan because he no longer feels safe in the city. "Young people were more upset about the government two years ago but the sense of dissatisfaction actually cuts across ages now," said Professor Michael DeGolyer, who co-led the study. The Mainland Affairs Council in Taiwan, a self-ruled island China considers a breakaway province, said it expected the increase in Hong Kong immigrants to continue. "Taiwan is an open, pluralistic and liberal democracy. The people are very friendly. Housing prices and consumer prices are relatively cheap, while entrepreneurial opportunities and the similar cultures of Hong Kong and Taiwan are all factors for Hong Kong residents to consider coming to Taiwan," it said. Hong Kong's immigration department declined to comment on the survey. The Security Bureau declined to answer questions about whether the Hong Kong government was concerned about emigration or believed it was due to political concerns. It provided its own emigration estimates based on the number of requests it had received for certificates of no criminal conviction. Those figures showed a slight increase last year but were below where they were a decade ago. (Additional reporting by JR Wu in TAIPEI; Writing by Clare Baldwin; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree and Nick Macfie)
Photo: Zozoliina
The rise of hijab fashion and beauty bloggers over the past few years has completely changed our perceptions of what it means to be a Muslim woman. Their fashion-forward Outfit of the Day posts and brightly colored makeup tutorials are proof that you dont have to sacrifice modesty for style.
Zohra (better known as Zozoliina) is a 22-year-old blogger who landed on our radar thanks to her Instagram account, where she serves up a bevy of inspiration on everything from casual looks to wear on the weekends to drugstore mascaras for super-long lashes.
Photo: Zozoliina
She was born in Germany and currently lives in Marseille, France. Her mother is German-Armenian and her father is Algerian, but she is proud to be a French woman. Zozoliina tells Yahoo Beauty: Growing up with this multiculturalism opened my mind. Without my French culture, I wouldnt be the woman I am today.
Photo: Zozoliina
Another source for Zozoliinas pride in being French is LOreal Paris makeup designer Ziana Salima, her muse. She is someone who represents the new French woman, says Zozoliina. Veiled, careerist [Salima] is a breath of fresh air for Muslim women in France.
Even though Zozoliina is Muslim, she does not wear the hijab. (France passed a law in 2010 prohibiting burqas and other face-covering veils, worn mostly by Muslim women, in public spaces. Anyone who is caught wearing a veil risks paying a fine of upwards of $200.) In fact, it has been only five years since she started wearing turbans. There are so many things that changed in my life since Ive worn it. Good things, bad things I took every struggle like a lesson. And I gradually learned not to retain these difficulties, she says.
Photo: Zozoliina
Zozoliinas words of advice to other Muslim women living in France: Live like you want; your faith is just between you and God. Whatever you do in life, people will judge you.
Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
How outspoken are judges allowed to be away from the bench? Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was widely criticized for her public remarks about Donald Trump, but there are other judges who have tried to walk the tightrope that Ginsburg fell off.
Becoming a judge is a lot like being gelded, says Judge William Bedsworth, who serves as an associate justice for the Fourth District of the California Court of Appeal. Which is frustrating. By definition were interested in the political process, and were highly educated. We would love to speak out.
Bedsworth does manage to speak outby way of a syndicated humor column, A Criminal Waste of Space, which has run in a variety of publications for 35 years. In most of my judicial writing, theres no room for humor. I cant say, The five-million-dollar judgment against you is reversed, but did you hear the one about the nun, the parrot, and the sailor?
Among the best-known judge-cum-writers is Judge Richard Posner, who serves on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. Since his appointment to the bench in 1981, Posner has published more than 20 books, continued to teach, and has written frequently on law and economics for both scholarly and popular audiences.
But Posner, who through an assistant said he was not allowed to comment on what Ginsburg said, is far from the norm. Its hard to find other federal judges who write frequently. And after Judge Richard Kopf, a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, closed his blog in 2015, that made one fewer.
Two years after Kopf assumed senior status in 2011, he began that blog, Hercules and the Umpire, about the endeavors of a federal trial judge. He wrote, almost daily and generally without much fanfare, on his caseload and on topics that interested him. Sometimes he would wind up in the internets crosshairs, like he did after a post in which he called himself a dirty old man and commented on the dress of female attorneys, or another in which he told the Supreme Court to STFU after the Hobby Lobby decision in 2014.
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But nothing caused him quite so many problems as a post in 2015 in which Kopf wrote that Texas Senator Ted Cruz was demonstrably unfit to become president. (Cruz had proposed retention elections for Supreme Court justices.) If you go back and read the comments on my blog postand you shouldnt, because youll want to put a gun in your mouththe Cruz folks saw this as a reflection of the liberality and untethered actions of judicial activism, Kopf says. In the view of the commenters, the post called into question not only my legitimacy, which has always been suspect, but other judges as well. (A law professor, Orin Kerr, had written on the Washington Post website that Kopfs post had violated the federal rules; at first Kopf disagreed but later allowed that Kerr was correct. Shortly thereafter, Kopf closed the blog, when some colleagues suggested it had become an embarrassment to the court.)
Indeed the courts legitimacy is the major matter protected by the restrictions on judges speech. Putting on a robe, not engaging in politics, not engaging in fundraisingthere are a whole range of things that the judge does that are designed to impress upon the judge him- or herself- that in their judicial role they are supposed to be impartial, says Michael McConnell, a former judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and now the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford. When I left the bench and people asked why, I told themonly semi-jokinglythat I wanted my First Amendment rights back.
In exchange for its judges impartiality, the federal judiciary has been granted since the early 1800s an implicit license to operate without interference from the other branches of government. (Supreme Court Justice Samuel P. Chase had been impeached by the House of Representatives in 1805 for attacking the actions of Thomas Jefferson in a public forum; the Senate acquitted him.)
Kopf says he agrees with the prohibitions on political speech from lower-court federal judges like himself. But he figures theres less harm in having Supreme Court judgeswho deal more than he does with policy and principlesshare their political views.
Says Bedsworth, the judge with the humor column, Im sure there are colleagues of mine who read me and say, Aw, shit, not this guy again. But he wants the public to know that judges are members of their communities trying their best to serve, and not a cadre of elitist oligarchic Pharisees. A few jokes, he says, go a long way.
Melania Trump wouldnt be your typical first lady. An immigrant from Slovenia, she became a naturalized citizen after marrying billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump in 2005. A former model who kicked off her career in the United States in 1996, Mrs. Trump spends her time building an empire of her own while the Donald runs for the most powerful office in the world.
Though typically pictured as the quiet and elegant better-half of the headline producing Republican candidate and reality TV star, Melania Trump is very much a successful entrepreneur in her own right, who lets her work speak for itself.
1. Shes a naturalized citizen.
If Donald Trump, a leading frontrunner on the GOP side of the presidential race, is voted into office, she would be the second first lady in the history of the United States to not have been born within the nation, along with John Quincy Adams wife Louisa.
It was a move she says was brought on by her successful career as a model. I came here for my career, and I did so well, I moved here, Melania Trump told Harpers Bazaar in January. It never crossed my mind to stay here without papers. That is just the person you are. You follow the rules. You follow the law. Every few months you need to fly back to Europe and stamp your visa. After a few visas, I applied for a green card and got it in 2001. After the green card, I applied for citizenship. And it was a long process.
2. She has a massive QVC empire.
The potential first lady has already had the rights reserved to her first name for a widely successful jewelry line with the retail giant QVC. The line, titled Melania Timepieces & Fashion Jewelry, features diamond studded watches, decorative bracelets and
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3. Donald Trump first asked her out while he was on another date.
He wanted my number, but he was with a date, so of course I didnt give it to him, Trump told Harpers Bazaar. I said, I am not giving you my number; you give me yours, and I will call you. I wanted to see what kind of number he would give me if it was a business number, what is this? Im not doing business with you."
She says Donald Trump gave her at least three phone numbers to choose from, including his office and his personal line. The two met a few days later and began dating in New York City shortly after. The rest, of course, is history.
4. Shes been more open about her sexuality than any first lady to date.
Melania Trump would also be the first wife of a president to ever pose nude for a publication, as she did for British GQ in 2000. She also called in to the Howard Stern radio show that same year, revealing she wasnt wearing much during the time of the interview and was enjoying "incredible sex on a daily basis with the Donald sometimes more.
5. Shes very political but youll never hear about her views.
Im choosing not to go political in public because that is my husbands job, Melania Trump told Harpers Bazaar. Im very political in private life, and between me and my husband I know everything that is going on. I follow from A to Z, but I chose not to be on the campaign. I made that choice. I have my own mind. I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me."
As for her thoughts on her husbands campaign? "I give him my opinions, and sometimes he takes them in, and sometimes he does not. Do I agree with him all the time? No. I think it is good for a healthy relationship. I am not a 'yes person. No matter who you are married to, you still need to lead your life. I dont want to change him. And he doesnt want to change me.
Nice (France) (AFP) - In the midst of the flowers and candles on Nice's Promenade des Anglais, a pile of stones and rubbish has piled up on the spot where the truck attacker's rampage ended.
Passers-by stop to spit on the pile of garbage, adding to it with their cigarette butts and plastic bottles.
Someone has scrawled "coward!" at the spot near where Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was shot dead by police in his truck after careering through a crowd, killing 84 people on Thursday night.
The pile lies only a few metres from the makeshift memorial that has cropped up on the promenade, a sea of flowers, candles, teddy bears and loving messages.
Among the dead, 10 were children, and the massacre of a crowd of young and old has shaken France to its core for the third time in 18 months.
Angry residents left insulting messages at the site of Bouhlel's death, including an image of a middle finger with the words "Fuck Daesh" scrawled across it, using the Arabic name for the Islamic State group.
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - More than 200 migrants were caught up in a brawl in a migrant processing center near Hungary's border with Serbia on Sunday evening, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's national security adviser said, according to state news agency MTI. Nine people were injured and eight of them hospitalized in the southern town of Kiskunhalas, Gyorgy Bakondi told MTI on Monday. He said about 20 migrants had started fighting around 1800 GMT, though the reasons were not yet clear. Around 200 police arrived to restore order as the clashes spread, Bakondi added. The camp had seen other incidents in recent weeks, he added without elaborating. More than a million migrants passed through Hungary last year on what was then the main overland route from the Middle East to western Europe. The flow has slowed since Hungary set up a razor-wire fence along its southern border with Serbia and Croatia. But migration remains a highly charged issue and Orban is preparing to call a referendum, asking voters to reject an EU plan to re-distribute migrants across the bloc. (Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth in Malibu, Calif., on July 15. (Photo: PacificCoastNews.com)
If there were any doubts that Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are back on those doubts have been put to rest. On Friday, July 15, the 23-year-old pop star and the 26-year-old actor canoodled over dinner at celebrity hot spot Nobu in Malibu, Calif. They both dressed casually for their outing, sporting jeans and track jackets.
They looked very much in love as they left the Japanese restaurant and headed to their car. Miley clung tightly to Liams arm, and both of the young lovebirds were grinning ear to ear.
Miley and Liam just spent a few days together in Malibu. Miley has been going back and forth between Los Angeles and New York for the Woody Allen series, a source told People. (ICYMI, back in January, Miley was tapped to star in Allens upcoming series for Amazon.) Now back to the important stuff. She was happy to spend some time with Liam. Things are great between them, the source reported.
Further confirming their return to romantic bliss, Miley posted a rare pic of her beau on her Instagram on Sunday, July 17. So much love in one pic. she wrote alongside a shot of the Independence Day: Resurgence star snuggling with his dog Dora (which she helped him adopt last year) and modeling one of Cyruss Happy Hippie shirts. Get ur happy hippie teeee hereeeee, she added. Hey, theres probably no better ad for her merchandise than that.
So much love in one pic. get ur happy hippie teeeee hereeeee http://miley.lk/HappyHippieMerch A photo posted by Miley Cyrus (@mileycyrus) on Jul 17, 2016 at 5:01pm PDT
But before you start imagining what Mileys wedding dress will look like, know this: There are no set wedding plans, the source confirmed. That said, they are reportedly enjoying their engagement. Even Mileys dad, Billy Ray, has reportedly said theres no wedding in the works, but she and Liam are so happy right now. So, yes, they are technically still engaged or re-engaged. The details remain a little murky.
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As a refresher, the stars met in 2010 on the set of The Last Song and got engaged in May 2012. By mid-2013, however, they had decided to postpone their wedding to figure out their life together before they tied the knot and by that fall, they had officially called it quits. (This was during Mileys wild child days when she pretty much never took a picture without her tongue and/or nipples hanging out.)
For a while, they seemed to be genuinely separated as Miley flitted around the globe in various states of undress dancing with giant balloon animals. But earlier this year, they sparked rumors that they had reunited when they were spotted looking cozy at the Falls Music and Arts Festival in Byron Bay, Australia. At the time, the Daily Telegraph reported that they were seen drinking and kissing at the festival, as well as hanging out with Liams two brothers, Chris and Luke, and their wives (which would indicate that Miley was in good standing with the Hemsworth family despite her patchy history with Liam).
As recently as March 2016, however, Liam insisted that he was not engaged during an interview with Australias TV Week, even though Miley had posted a photo to her Instagram months before in which she prominently flashed what appeared to be the Neil Lane sparkler he had given her back in 2012.
I look like a fucking strawberry. #looklikemyfuckingmomdressedmethisam #prettysureihadthissamelookat6 A photo posted by Miley Cyrus (@mileycyrus) on Jan 18, 2016 at 7:07am PST
By May, Liam had changed his tune quite a bit, though. When asked about their status in an interview with GQ Australia, he quipped, People will figure it out. They already have Theyre not dumb. He did admit that their initial split after getting engaged was hard, explaining, At the time we were going in different directions and its what needed to happen. We were both super-young, and it was a good decision at the time we both needed that. It seemed that absence made his heart grow fonder.
While he didnt officially confirm the news, he added, I guess when I feel something, then I just feel it and I go for it. I make my decisions about whats going to make me happy, what I think is right, and what I want to do and I dont worry too much outside of that.
Based on the latest pics from their romantic weekend in Malibu, its safe to say that whether wedding planning is in the works or not, these two are very, truly, deeply in love at least for now.
A mother in a wealthy Minnesota suburb has been accused of abusing her nanny and keeping her in slave-like conditions.
Lili Huang, 35, is facing five felony charges including human trafficking, false imprisonment and unlawfully taking another persons passport.
PHOTOS: Stars at Court
The 58-year-old nanny from China who has not been named was found bruised and wandering in the streets of Woodbury, Minnesota, just after midnight on Thursday, July 14, Twin Cities Pioneer Press reported. She had two visible black eyes, and X-rays at a hospital later revealed broken ribs and a broken sternum.
She was held in pretty appalling conditions, in appalling discipline, Washington County attorney Pete Orput told Twin Cities Pioneer Press.
The victim began working for the Huangs in Shanghai, China, where they treated her well, according to a criminal complaint obtained by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She was brought to the U.S in March.
According to the complaint, she was forced to work up to 18 hours a day and was forbidden to leave the $539,000 home. Authorities calculated her hourly salary to be $1.80, but she did not receive any of her pay.
PHOTOS: Celebrity Mugshots
During the time in the home she was physically assaulted by defendant, often times in front of the children, Orput told The Washington Post in a statement. When this occurred she told defendant she wanted to return to China. Defendant acquired the victims passport and kept it and told the woman she was not going anywhere.
The nanny claimed she was fed nothing but crackers, causing her weight to plummet from 120 pounds to 88 pounds in four months, per The Washington Post.
On July 4, Huang allegedly bashed the nannys head into a table, the paper continues. On July 10, she was so incapacitated by the beatings that she walked around on her hands and knees like a dog for for hours, the Woodbury Bulletin reported.
PHOTOS: Celebrity Babysitters: Stars Who Have Babysat Other Celebs
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When police and authorities from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security searched the home, they discovered a bag full of human hair, which Huang had allegedly ripped from the womans head, according to the Associated Press. The nanny had been hiding it under her bed so Huang wouldnt find it and force her to to eat it.
Huang is being held on a bail of $350,000.
Angela "Big Ang" Raiola may be gone, but her memory lives on.
On Saturday, friends, family and fans gathered in Staten Island, New York, to celebrate the life of the late Mob Wives star with "one big dance party."
"We had a beautiful night and phenomenal lineup of talent," Angela's attorney Stephen Spinelli told E! News after the charity event. "All of the talent donated their acts and services to the show. You couldn't ask for a better lineup."
In honor of the the late VH1 star, guests enjoyed a night of Ang's most favorite names in the disco, freestyle and dance music genres, according to the party's release.
"[Her husband] Neil was very happy to see the turnout and see how many people loved his wife," Spinelli told E! "All in all, I would categorize it as an upbeat, happy event because that's what Neil wanted. He was sure that is what Angela wanted. If you knew Angela, she would have said enjoy yourself and get over it."
Big Ang was 55 years old when she died on Feb. 18 after a difficult battle with throat, lung and brain cancer.
"It is with sad regret that we inform you that at 3:01 a.m. Angelia Raiola peacefully ended her battle with cancer, and was called home," according to a post on her Twitter page from friend Vinnie Medugno.
"She was surrounded by nothing but love from her immediate family, and the closest friends. YOU, (her fans) were some of the most special people in the world, and she loved you immensely. Thank you for your love, prayers, and unconditional support of Angela right to the very end."
By Greg Roumeliotis
(Reuters) - U.S. seeds company Monsanto Co (MON.N) is negotiating the terms of a confidentiality agreement with Bayer AG (BAYGn.DE) that would allow extensive due diligence, after the German drug and crop chemical group raised its acquisition bid to more than $64 billion, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday.
While there is no certainty the latest talks between the two companies will result in a confidentiality pact, let alone in any deal, the move indicates that Bayer's latest offer may at least help the negotiations make progress.
Bayer said last week it had sweetened its acquisition offer for Monsanto to $125 per share in cash from $122 per share and offered it a $1.5 billion reverse antitrust breakup fee. [nL8N1A04RN]
Monsanto would still require Bayer to raise its offer further in order to agree to a sale, the source said. The source asked not to be identified because the negotiations are confidential. Bayer and Monsanto declined to comment.
Monsanto shares jumped percent to $106.61 on the news. Bayer shares had previously ended trading in Frankfurt down 1.4 percent to 92.67 euros ($102.62).
Access to confidential information has been a major sticking point in Bayer's negotiations with Monsanto ever since the Leverkusen, Germany-based company first offered to acquire its smaller St. Louis, Missouri-based peer in May.
Monsanto Chief Executive Hugh Grant said last month that his company was in talks with Bayer and other companies in its sector about "alternative strategic options." He did not name the other companies, but Reuters has previously reported that Monsanto had discussed a business combination with BASF SE (BAYGn.DE). [nL4N19L3SJ]
Bayer argued last week that it had comprehensively addressed Monsanto's questions about financing and regulatory matters and said it was prepared to make certain commitments to regulators, if required, to complete a deal.
Monsanto responded by noting that its board would review Bayer's latest proposal, in consultation with its financial and legal advisers.
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The seeds and agrochemicals industry, long dominated by six large companies, has been jolted by several large deals in the past year as low crop prices and belt-tightening by farmers pressured earnings.
Syngenta AG (SYNN.S), which Monsanto tried to buy last year, agreed in February to be acquired by ChemChina for $43 billion, while Dow Chemical (DOW.N) and DuPont DD.N struck a $130 billion megamerger last year. ChemChina and Syngenta however are still waiting for the U.S. to clear their deal based on any national security concerns.
Bayer's relatively modest price increase in its offer last week also reflected the view that Monsanto's recent poor earnings have weighed on its valuation.
Monsanto said last month its net income tumbled more than 37 percent to $717 million in the quarter ended on May 31. It cited a global glut of generic glyphosate, the active ingredient in its Roundup herbicide, and delays in securing European Union import approval for its next-generation biotech soybeans.
(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Tom Brown and Andrew Hay)
(Refile for wider audience)
By Kristen Haunss
NEW YORK, July 18 (Reuters) - The Credit Suisse distressed trading team led by Bob Franz, former head of US credit trading at the bank, and Ken Hoffman, former head of distressed trading, has founded asset management firm Arbour Lane Capital Management.
Arbour Lane, which launched July 1, currently manages about $1.3 billion of credit assets for TSSP, the global credit and special situations unit of TPG, according to sources. TSSP bought the portfolio in May from Credit Suisse.
The assets consist of a mix of upper middle-market corporate debt, distressed bonds and loans, special situations and post-reorganization equities, the sources said.
The holdings are made up of more than 270 instruments to about 170 companies across asset types and geographies, according to a May news release announcing the portfolio sale.
"The Credit Suisse distressed credit desk has been a long-time trusted partner to TSSP globally and we are pleased they selected TSSP to help it quickly execute on its strategy," Clint Kollar, a TSSP partner, said in the May news release. "The portfolio we are acquiring has deep, long-term potential and fits well with our patient and flexible capital."
A TSSP spokesperson and Franz both declined to comment.
In the future, the firm may seek to manage other similar-type credits, according to the May news release.
The Stamford, Connecticut-based Arbour Lane team currently consists of eight members, including Franz and Hoffman, and it plans to add a few more, said the sources.
Franz worked at Credit Suisse for 14 years, previously serving as co-head of syndicated loans and head of distressed trading. Before joining the bank in 2002, he worked at Morgan Stanley where he was co-head of loan trading, according to FINRA BrokerCheck and sources.
Hoffman joined the bank in 2000 through its purchase of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette and was named head of North American distressed, special situations and customer finance in 2006, also according to BrokerCheck and sources.
The portfolio sale followed a Credit Suisse March announcement that it was exiting the distressed credit business, as well as European securitized product trading. When announcing the sale and departures of Franz and Hoffman, the bank said it was was implementing a lower risk appetite and reduced volatility business model. The asset sale cut the bank's distressed credit exposure by $1.24 billion, according to the May news release. .
(Reporting by Kristen Haunss; Editing By Michelle Sierra)
Roger Ailes days atop Fox News are numbered: Rupert, Lachlan and James Murdoch have decided to remove the networks CEO, per New York Magazine.
The 21st Century Fox braintrust is a bit divided on the timing, however. According to the report, James wants to present the 76-year-old executive with the option to resign or be fired this week. His dad and brother purportedly prefer to wait until after the GOP convention but want the same end result.
Ailes was sued on July 6 by former Real Story host Gretchen Carlson, who accuses her erstwhile boss of sexual harassment. 21st Century Fox opened an internal investigation of the claims later that day.
Also Read: Sorry Dad: Are Lachlan and James Murdoch Voting for Hillary Clinton?
Regarding the rumors of Ailes ouster, 21st Century Fox said in a statement on Monday, This matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded.
Carlsons lawsuit against Ailes, filed earlier this month, claims he sexually propositioned her, then fired her in retaliation after she complained about discrimination and harassment. Ailes has called her claims false and offensive, and promised a vigorous defense.
Last week, his lawyers moved to relocate the proceedings from New Jersey to the Southern District court in New York, arguing that Carlsons employment agreement calls for resolution of any claims via arbitration in the networks home state.
Also Read: Roger Ailes Wants Gretchen Carlson Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Moved to NYC
Since Carlson filed suit, six more women have come forward with claims that Ailes sexually harassed them over multiple decades, pre-dating his time as the head of Fox News.
Related stories from TheWrap:
Sorry Dad: Are Lachlan and James Murdoch Voting for Hillary Clinton?
Roger Ailes vs Gretchen Carlson: Supporters on Each Side of the Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (Updating Photos)
5 Most Shocking Sexual Harassment Allegations Against Roger Ailes
North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles on Tuesday, in further defiance of the international community and in apparent reaction to the planned deployment of a US defence system in the South.
The launches drew swift condemnation from the United States and Japan, who vowed a coordinated response to Pyongyang's repeated violations of UN sanctions that bar it from weapons tests.
They come as North Korea's isolation deepens after it said this month it was severing all diplomatic channels with the US.
Two SCUD missiles flew between 500 and 600 kilometres (310-370 miles) into the Sea of Japan, while a third, believed to be Rodong intermediate range ballistic missile, was fired about an hour later.
The trajectory of the Rodong missile was still being analysed, spokesman Jeon Ha-Kyu of Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
The SCUD missiles' range is such that they could strike anywhere within South Korea, the military said, adding that the latest tests were presumed to be linked to the North's recent threats.
Pyongyang last week said it would take "physical action" after Washington and Seoul announced the deployment of a sophisticated US anti-missile defence system.
The announcement of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, was prompted by a series of missile launches this year that analysts say demonstrate that the North is making progress toward being able to strike the US mainland.
Another military source that the SCUD missiles would likely be Pyongyang's weapon of choice if it were to target places like Seongju, where the THAAD system will be deployed.
"We strongly condemn this and North Korea's other recent missile tests, which violate UN Security Council Resolutions explicitly prohibiting North Korea's launches using ballistic missile technology," Pentagon spokesman Gary Ross said.
"We intend to raise our concerns at the UN to bolster international resolve in holding the DPRK (North Korea) accountable for these provocative actions," Ross said.
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Japanese Defence Minister Gen Nakatani said the latest launches "compromise peace and safety of the region, including Japan".
"The Japanese government will strengthen cooperation with related countries, namely the United States and South Korea, and strongly urges North Korea to exercise self-restraint, while preparing for any contingencies," he said.
- Repeated tests -
The North test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile on July 9, following back-to-back tests of a powerful new medium-range missile on June 22.
Those two missiles achieved a significant increase in flight distance over previous failed launches and were believed to be of a much-hyped, intermediate-range Musudan missile -- theoretically capable of reaching US bases as far away as Guam, the South's defence ministry said in June.
The North previously launched relatively short-ranged SCUDs in March, as it flexed its muscles in response to joint US-South Korea military drills just south of the border.
A US think-tank last week warned there was intense activity at a North Korean nuclear test site.
The US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University said images from July 7 of the Punggye-ri site show what appear to be supplies or equipment stacked near the spot where the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in January.
The institute cautioned that it was not possible to determine whether this was maintenance or possible preparations for a fifth nuclear test.
"Nevertheless, it is clear that North Korea is ensuring that the facility is in a state of readiness that would allow the conduct of future nuclear tests should the order come from Pyongyang," it added.
Development Planned for Multiple Epithelial Cancer Types, Starting with Brain Cancer, In Mainland China
TAIZHOU, ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA & VERO BEACH, FL / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2016 / Nascent Biotech, Inc. (NBIO), and Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical Company Ltd., today announced they have entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for the development and commercialization of Nascent's primary asset, Pritumumab, a monoclonal antibody for the treatment of epithelial cancers (which include brain, pancreas, colon, lung and breast), in mainland China. The agreement between the two companies licenses development, manufacture and commercialization rights for Pritumumab to Hisun, for the treatment of epithelial cancers in China.
"There are significant unmet medical needs in a variety of cancers," said Sean Carrick, President of Nascent Biotech. "Nascent is committed to changing patient expectations in some of the world's most debilitating cancers, and licensing Pritumumab to Hisun for therapeutic use in China will bring this promising treatment to significantly more patients who are in need. We're highly encouraged by the potential of Pritumumab to deliver an innovative, first-in-class treatment option, and we are delighted to be working closely with Hisun in this collaboration."
Mr. Bai Hua, Chairman of Hisun, expressed that licensing this promising biotech asset will enable Hisun to significantly move forward its goal of diversifying its product portfolio with branded and generic products and achieving Hisun's long-term vision of "becoming a widely respected international pharmaceutical company" by "persisting in pharmaceutical innovation for the benefit of human beings."
Under the terms of the agreement, Nascent Biotech will provide to Hisun its Master Cell Bank and related technology, which will allow Hisun to quickly begin manufacturing and further clinical development of Pritumumab in China.
"We are confident that this license agreement will allow Hisun to rapidly fill an unmet need in the cancer space while enabling Nascent to continue to advance this valuable asset in the US. Both companies will benefit greatly from this License arrangement," added Dr. Haibin Wang, Senior Vice President, Head of Hisun Biopharmaceutical.
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About Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceuticals
With Revenues over $2 Billion annually, Hisun was founded in 1956, the vision of Zhejiang HISUN Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. (stock code 600267 - hereinafter called "HISUN") is to become "a widely respected international pharmaceutical company" by advancing its mission of "persisting in pharmaceutical innovation for the benefit of human beings." It focuses on the integration of pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) with production resources in order to provide its global customers with outstanding products and services. Visit http://www.hisunpharm.com.
About Nascent Biotech Inc
Nascent Biotech, Inc is a clinical-stage biotech company engaged in the development of monoclonal antibodies to be used in the treatment of various cancers. Its products are not commercially available. For further information please visit our website www.nascentbiotech.com.
Safe Harbor:
Statements in this press release about our future expectations constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and as that term is defined in the Private Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, and our actual results could differ materially from expected results. These risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, Nascent Biotech Inc's ability to target the medical professionals; Nascent Biotech Inc's ability to raise capital; as well as other risks. Additional information about these and other factors may be described in the Nascent Biotech Inc's Form 10, filed on May 2, 2015, and future subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this statement or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.
Contact Information:
Nascent Biotech, Inc.
Sean Carrick
President | CEO
772.713.0541
sean.carrick@nascentbiotech.com
www.nascentbiotech.com
SOURCE: Nascent Biotech, Inc.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg expressed full support for the Turkish government during a telephone call with President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday and said there could be no room for military coups in a NATO member state, a senior Turkish official said. The official said German Chancellor Angela Merkel had also spoken by phone with Erdogan on Monday and had denounced the coup attempt as unacceptable. (Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Brussels (AFP) - NATO head Jens Stoltenberg on Monday said Turkey must fully respect the rule of law and democratic freedoms, just like any other alliance member, in the aftermath of a failed military coup.
"Being part of a unique community of values, it is essential for Turkey, like all other allies, to ensure full respect for democracy and its institutions, the constitutional order, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms," Stoltenberg said in a statement after speaking with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Earlier Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogherini had warned Erdogan against taking draconian measures in a crackdown on suspected coup supporters.
Kerry noted specifically that Turkey, as a NATO ally, had to live up to the values of democracy and rule of law which the US-led alliance is meant to protect and foster.
"NATO will indeed measure very carefully what is happening and my hope is that Turkey is going to move in ways which do respect what they have said to me many times is the bedrock (value) of their country," Kerry said.
"The level of vigilance and scrutiny is obviously going to be significant... hopefully we can work in a constructive way that prevents any backsliding," Kerry added.
In his statement, Stoltenberg said he welcomed the "strong support shown by the people and all political parties to democracy and to the democratically elected government."
"Turkey is a valued NATO ally with whom I stand in solidarity in this difficult time," he added.
Turkey has the second largest military in the US-led NATO alliance and plays a key role in ensuring western security across the Middle East.
By Richard Lough and Sophie Sassard NICE, France (Reuters) - In the poor Nice suburb of Ariane, many Muslims feel their community is being unfairly blamed for the Bastille Day attack that killed 84 people, and fear discrimination and social divisions will grow in its wake. Islamic State claimed the attack and hailed Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck through a crowd of revelers on the French city's sea-front promenade last Thursday, as one if its soldiers. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said at the weekend that the 31-year-old attacker had been "radicalised very quickly". The Paris prosecutor said on Monday that, while there was no evidence that he had direct links to Islamic State, he had recently developed an interest in radical Islam. In Ariane, a district with a big Muslim population a few kilometers from the Abbatoirs neighborhood where Bouhlel lived, the imam of the local Al Fourkane mosque said radical groups preyed on the weak, and cautioned against focusing on the killer's faith. "Because the weak are being exploited doesn't mean that we should come down hard on their religion. Quite the opposite. We should be uniting together and defending the country," said Boubekeur Bekri, adding that "a crime is a crime" regardless of faith. Bouhlel left Tunisia in 2005. His family have painted a picture of a man who suffered "psychiatric troubles" and was prone to depression and violent outbursts. He had several run-ins with the law, including a conviction in March this year for hurling a wooden pallet in a road rage incident. Relatives and friends of Bouhlel also described a man who at least until recently drank heavily, smoked marijuana and womanized - behavior at odds with a devout Muslim life. Elabed Lofti, the imam for Antibes and Juan-Les-Pins, is among Muslim leaders in southeastern France who have distanced their community from the attacker. "The guy didn't observe Ramadan, the minimum to be considered a good Muslim," he said, referring to the Muslim fasting month that ended late June. France is home to Europe's largest Muslim minority. In a sign of the growing feeling of alienation among many Muslims in Ariane and elsewhere, Younis, a roof-builder born to Moroccan immigrants, said the whole community was blamed "every time something happens in France, in Europe". "Once the problem was racial discrimination, now it's religious discrimination," said Younis, who declined to give his surname, sitting at the entrance to a dreary eight-storey block of flats opposite the suburb's small mosque. RECRUITS For decades Nice, better known for the super-yachts that anchor in its cobalt blue waters and palm-fringed boulevards, has been a gateway for waves of immigrants arriving from France's former colonies such as Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. It has also produced the largest contingent of French militants waging jihad in Syria, with about one in 10 originating from the Mediterranean city. Islamic State has lost much territory in Iraq and Syria this year and some officials fear it may be calling on adherents to conduct high-visibility attacks. Regardless of whether Bouhlel is proven to have direct links to Islamic State, his profile chimes with the findings of a recent Europol study of foreign militant recruits. The study showed that about four in every five Islamic State recruits have criminal records, while some 20 percent were diagnosed with mental health issues. Psychologist Brigitte Juy counsels Muslim youths who feel marginalized and angry at French society and may be vulnerable to militant recruiters and others who have been exposed to hardline Islamic ideology, including some who have returned from Syria. Juy said accounts of Bouhlel's character by relatives and neighbors reported in the media appeared to portray an unstable character who felt isolated and was susceptible to violent outbursts. In this sense, she said, Bouhlel, was not necessarily an isolated case. "It's a profile that we see out there," Juy said. "And then at a certain moment different factors might collide, including perhaps in the personal life, which means that a tipping point is possible and the ground is laid for them to seek a 'remedy' to settle their score ... by committing an atrocity." (Editing by Pravin Char)
MSAKEN, Tunisia The uncle of the truck driver who killed 84 people on the French Riviera says his nephew was indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice.
French officials could not confirm Monday that attacker Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel had been approached by an Algerian recruiter, saying that the investigation is ongoing.
IS claimed responsibility for last weeks attack, though Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday that investigators have found no sign yet that Bouhlel had links to a particular network.
The drivers uncle, Sadok Bouhlel, told The Associated Press that given Bouhlels family problems he was estranged from his wife and three children the Algerian found in Mohamed an easy prey for recruitment.
Bouhlels rapid radicalization has puzzled investigators. Friends and family said he had not been an observant Muslim in the past. Cazeneuve said Monday on RTL radio that the driver may have been motivated by IS messages but not necessarily coordinating with a larger network.
Mohamed didnt pray, didnt go to the mosque and ate pork, said Sadok Bouhlel, a 69-year-old retired teacher, in the drivers hometown of Msaken, Tunisia. The uncle said he learned about the Algerian recruiter from extended family members who live in Nice.
Sadok is devastated by his nephews act, and doesnt want him buried in Msaken. He made more than 80 families grieve, and stained the reputation of our town and our country.
Many of the dead and injured were children watching a fireworks display with their families. Cazeneuve said 59 people are still hospitalized after the attack Thursday, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
France held a moment of silence Monday to remember the victims. Thousands of people massed on the waterfront promenade where the Bastille Day celebrations became a killing field on Thursday night.
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Among the mourners was Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who was loudly booed as he arrived at and left the ceremony in Nice.
President Francois Hollandes Socialist administration has come under blistering criticism from opposition conservatives after last weeks deadly attack. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy accused the government of bad policies that he says failed to prevent three major attacks in the past 18 months.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve hit back Monday, listing a series of laws and extra police forces created under Hollandes presidency to face a threat that France was not prepared for when he took over from Sarkozy in 2012.
After a special security meeting, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French forces in the U.S-led coalition struck IS targets again overnight and on Sagturday. French warplanes have been involved in the operation in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Syria.
Charlton reported from Paris. Frank Jordans in Nice contributed.
Abuja (AFP) - Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday said he was concerned about delays in prosecuting former public officials for corruption, warning it could harm his high-profile stance on graft.
"I am worried that the expectation of the public is yet to be met by the judiciary with regard to the removal of delay and the toleration of delay tactics by lawyers," he said.
"When cases are not concluded the negative impression is given that crime pays," Buhari told a summit examining the role of the judiciary in the overall drive against corruption.
"This certainly needs to change if we are to make success in our collective effort in the fight against corruption."
Buhari, who was elected last year on a platform to tackle graft, has said "mind-boggling" sums of public funds were stolen over decades and has made recovering the money a central plank of his presidency.
Most of those currently on trial are linked to the former administration of his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, and centre around an alleged $2.1 billion (1.9 billion-euro) "arms scam".
Former national security advisor Sambo Dasuki is accused of overseeing a sprawling embezzlement scheme that saw money earmarked to fight Boko Haram diverted for political purposes.
But there have been repeated delays and adjournments in that case and others, leaving Buhari without a single high-profile conviction since starting the crackdown in May last year.
Buhari told the summit that government corruption cases "are not progressing as speedily as they should be... because the courts allow the lawyers to frustrate the reforms introduced by the law."
Jonathan's main opposition Peoples Democratic Party has accused Buhari of a political witch-hunt, as most of those on trial are PDP members, supporters or linked to the former government.
Buhari and his government have been criticised for disregarding the separation of powers of the executive and judiciary by keeping suspects in custody, despite courts having granted them bail.
Last year, he said Dasuki and the detained leader of a Biafra separatist group should be detained because they had committed "atrocities" against the state, despite neither being convicted.
SYDNEY, July 18 (Reuters) - Australia's competition watchdog said on Monday that Japanese shipping company Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha pleaded guilty to criminal cartel conduct in Australia's federal court.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said in a statement that the company pleaded guilty after the ACCC brought charges.
"This is the first criminal charge laid against a corporation under the criminal cartel provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act," ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said in the statement.
"This matter relates to alleged cartel conduct in connection with the transportation of vehicles, including cars, trucks, and buses, to Australia between July 2009 and September 2012."
Nippon Yusen is a transportation conglomerate, with headquarters in Tokyo.
The matter is next scheduled for a directions hearing in the Federal Court on 12 September 2016.
(Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Michael Perry)
(Adds company comment, detail of possible fines)
By Tom Westbrook
SYDNEY, July 18 (Reuters) - Japanese shipping company Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha pleaded guilty on Monday in Australia's federal court to criminal cartel conduct in relation to the transport of vehicles into the country.
The charges, which were brought last Thursday by Australia's competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), could lead to a fine of at least A$10 million ($7.6 million).
"This matter relates to alleged cartel conduct in connection with the transportation of vehicles, including cars, trucks, and buses, to Australia between July 2009 and September 2012," ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement. The company had pleaded guilty, the statement said.
It was the first criminal charge laid against a corporation under the Competition and Consumer Act, Sims said, following a law change in 2009 that made cartel conduct a criminal act.
Jason Glynn, the general manager of corporate affairs for Nippon Yusen's Australian subsidiary, NYK Line (Australia) Pty Ltd, confirmed the guilty plea.
"NYK has co-operated fully with the ACCC during the course of this investigation. NYK will not make any further comment while this matter is before the courts," he said.
Nippon Yusen's Tokyo headquarters could not immediately be reached for comment.
The penalty for cartel conduct under Australian competition law is the greater of $A10 million, triple the benefit attributed to the offence, or 10 percent of the corporation's annual turnover in Australia.
The matter is due in court again on Sept. 12, with sentencing expected at a later date.
Nippon Yusen was one of 14 shipping companies that earlier in July offered to change their pricing practices in Europe to stave off possible fines after European Union antitrust regulators launched a probe in 2013.
($1 = 1.3189 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Tom Westbrook and Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Michael Perry and Richard Pullin)
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea fired three ballistic missiles early on Tuesday into the sea off its east coast that had a range of between 500 and 600 kilometres (300 and 360 miles), South Korea's military said. The missiles were launched towards east from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju from 5:45 a.m. local time (2045 GMT Monday) to 6:40 a.m., the South's military said. "The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 kilometres to 600 kilometres, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea including Busan," the South's military said in a statement. Busan is a South Korean port city in the south. North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months including an intermediate-range missile in June and a submarine-launched missile this month. Tuesday's launch came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision this month to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North. North Korea's military has threatened to retaliate against the deployment of the system with a "physical response" once its location and time of installation were decided. China has also sharply criticized the decision as a move that will destabilize the security balance in the region. (Reporting by Jack Kim and Ju-min Park; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea fired three ballistic missiles early on Tuesday into the sea off its east coast that had a range of between 500 and 600 kilometers (300 and 360 miles), South Korea's military said. The missiles were launched towards east from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju from 5:45 a.m. local time (2045 GMT Monday) to 6:40 a.m., the South's military said. "The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 kilometers to 600 kilometers, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea including Busan," the South's military said in a statement. Busan is a South Korean port city in the south. North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months including an intermediate-range missile in June and a submarine-launched missile this month. Tuesday's launch came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision this month to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North. North Korea's military has threatened to retaliate against the deployment of the system with a "physical response" once its location and time of installation were decided. China has also sharply criticized the decision as a move that will destabilize the security balance in the region. (Reporting by Jack Kim and Ju-min Park; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
LONDON (Reuters) - Wood Group (WG.L) oil and gas maintenance workers employed at several Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) platforms in the North Sea will go on strike for 24 hours on July 26, labour union Unite said on Monday.
The workers, who are protesting against changes to pay and working conditions, will also undertake several three-hour stoppages over the following weeks, a union representative said.
"It is anticipated that the action will severely disrupt operations on the Shell platforms," the union said in a statement.
Shell declined to comment.
(Reporting by Karolin Schaps; editing by David Clarke)
At laboratories and factories where American nuclear weapons are designed and built, and at the sites still being cleansed of the toxic wastes created by such work, contractor employees outnumber federal workers six to one. That makes them key sentinels when something goes awry, a circumstance that officials say explains why they get legal protections when whistleblowing.
Thats the theory. It turns out that the Energy Department has actually handed most of the oversight over these protections to the contractors themselves, robbing workers at key nuclear weapons sites of confidence that pointing out security and safety dangers or other mistakes wont bring retaliation, according to an audit released by the Government Accountability Office on July 14.
The Energy Departments decision to embrace contractor self-regulation of its whistleblowing protection system means in many cases that those overseeing it work for the contractors top lawyers, who must defend the contractor against employee claims of wrongdoing, or for those officials responsible for deciding about job cuts, the report disclosed.
The result has been a climate of widespread anxiety: At four of five nuclear weapons sites where DOE conducted surveys from 2012 to 2014, roughly a third of the employees said they disputed a claim that management does not tolerate retaliation, the report said. More rosy contractor-run surveys were marked by leading or biased interview questions and problems assuring confidentiality during interviews, the GAO said.
Related: Wyden pull quote
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At the Energy Departments Hanford Nuclear Site, for example, a contractor employee reported that in the first iteration of one such survey, specific responses could be linked directly to those participating, and after revisions, the employee had heard managers were pressuring employees to give favorable responses. Many of the results were deleted before being analyzed, the employee said part of a series of flaws that DOE overlooked.
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The report disclosed that despite some highly-publicized instances of retaliation against whistleblowers in the nuclear weapons complex, and many public statements by DOE and contractors of support for transparency and technical dissent, DOE has only three times punished contractors who retaliated against whistleblowers in the last 20 years. One of those punishments was just a stern letter.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who requested the GAO report with two Senate colleagues, said at a Capitol Hill press conference about it that in my view, the department is guilty of willful negligence at best, and at the worst, actively aiding the violation of whistleblower rights. The governments costly cleanup of the Hanford site, located in Wydens home state, has been tainted by repeated allegations of retaliation against whistleblowers.
When DOE allows contractors to grade themselves on how well they treat whistleblowers, Wyden said, its a rigged test and there is no failing grade.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, who appeared with Wyden at the press conference, said she suspected that contractors have been muffling dissent because heeding whistleblowers safety warnings delays projects and causes contractors to lose out on lucrative bonuses that are conditioned on good and timely performance. This is all about everything going smoothly so they get the plus-ups that are baked into the contracts, McCaskill said.
In a written response attached to the report, DOEs top oversight official on safety and security matters, Glenn Podonsky, reiterated what he described as the departments commitment to foster a work environment that encourages open communication, a questioning attitude and an organizational culture that promotes the free expression of safety concerns by our workforce. He said that while progress had been made, DOE acknowledges that work remains.
But the GAO report was scathing about the departments long record of inaction. It said DOE has taken limited or no action to hold contractors accountable for creating a chilled work environment in part because DOE has not clearly defined what constitutes evidence of a chilled work environment or the steps needed to hold contractors accountable. DOE officials have been crafting new, stronger regulations for whistleblower protection since 2008, and theyre still not complete, the report said.
Our problems are with the way [the Energy Department] allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is, Diane LoFaro, the assistant team leader for the GAOs investigation, told The Center for Public Integrity in an interview. Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors cultures.
The problems run deeper than self-regulation, the report states. When contractor employees have brought concerns directly to the Energy Department, partly out of fear of retaliation by their bosses, the department has often referred those complaints back to the contractor, potentially jeopardizing the complainers anonymity or creating the appearance of impaired independence at DOE. And a program meant to adjudicate such issues within DOE is procedurally complex and sometimes too challenging for workers, the report said.
Monitoring whistleblowers to suppress them
To prepare their report, auditors from the GAO interviewed whistleblower protection officers known formally as employee concerns program managers from the DOE and its contractors at the 10 sites with the largest budgets between 2014 and 2016, and reviewed 87 whistleblower cases form those sites between 2009 and 2014. All of the DOE [employee concerns program] managers we interviewed regarding the issue told us that they were aware of contractors that had created chilled work environments, the GAO report said.
One such manager, at a site that was not named, went so far as to write a Freedom of Information Act request to get emails between the worker and the DOEs whistleblower protection office. During a mandatory meeting with everyone from the managers department in attendance, he warned employees not to raise concerns with DOEs whistleblower protection office.
After the incident, officials told us there was a substantial drop in the number of employee concerns received from employees of that contractor, the GAO report said. The whistleblower protection officer told his supervisors about the situation, but they didnt act on it, and generally according to the officers account were not responsive to retaliation complaints.
Knowing what I know about the [employee concerns program], if I had a concern, I would not use it, that protection officer told the GAO.
An Energy Department official told the auditors about similar harassment, according to the report. He said that a contractor at the nuclear site hes assigned to help oversee insists on its lawyer being present for every whistleblower discussion, even during the earliest informal stages, long before its evident whether resolving an employees complaint will be contentious. He believes this practice may be intimidating to employees, the GAO report said of the official.
The auditors experienced some of this themselves, they noted. During their visit to a nuclear weapons site they did not name, a contractor insisted on its lawyer being present at all the meetings, including the officer in charge of fielding whistleblower complaints. During our meetings, the attorney advised his client not to answer certain questions or, in some cases, provided the answer for the client, the GAO report said. Those interactions were extremely tense and did not result in a free exchange of information.
Sandra Hightower Black, who headed the employee concerns program at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, in Aiken, S.C. a consortium of Fluor Corporation, Honeywell International Inc. and Newport News Nuclear Inc. told the press conference that she repeatedly witnessed such acts of intimidation. She said one manager pressured an investigator in her office to flip a whistleblower complaint that had been substantiated and categorize it as unfounded. Another manager demanded the name of the rat in a whistleblower case.
To executives at the company, Black said, she eventually became an employee advocate, which they regarded as a liability. A 59-year-old single mother, Black trembled at the press conference behind dark-framed glasses, as she said she was eventually fired for doing what she thought she was supposed to do.
I would not lie or cover up substantiated concerns or engage in unethical or illegal activities that I was directed to do, she said.
In an email Thursday, a spokeswoman for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions denied that Blacks firing had anything to do with her cooperation with the GAO. We deny in the strongest possible terms, that Ms. Black was terminated for an improper reason or in violation of any law or regulation, Angeline French wrote. SRNS disputes Ms. Blacks version of events, and we are in the process of vigorously defending against her allegations through the appropriate legal channels.
French wrote in the email that Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is paying for its own legal defense in Blacks case. But the Energy Department typically reimburses contractors for the settlements they reach in such whistleblower cases, the GAO report said.
Blacks case is still pending. But the report said other contract employees at the Savannah River site told the auditors that a poor climate persisted there:
We were told that if you talk to DOE, you will not be considered part of the team.
"They will make an example of anyone who challenges them.
Employees are very afraid to raise safety issues at the meetings because they will be terminated or embarrassed.
They fired the [employee concerns program] Manager. What do you think they will do to me?
A whistleblower from the Hanford site, Walter Tamosaitis, also appeared at the press conference. Hes an engineer who worked on the management team constructing the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at Hanford, a project long plagued by delays and cost overruns. In 2010, he spoke up at a management meeting about his worries that the costly plant would be unsafe, and even provoke an unexpected nuclear chain reaction. Tamosaitis almost immediately was kicked off the project and spent the next 18 months in a windowless basement office, before finally being fired.
Last year, one of the major contractors at the site, AECOM (formerly URS Construction), agreed to pay 69-year-old Tamosaitis $4.1 million, but did not admit wrongdoing. He said at the news conference Thursday that the suppression of dissent by DOE contractors is motivated by greed.
The GAO noted that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission handles whistleblower protections differently. Unlike the DOE, the commission tracks every case of reported retaliation, even if its not substantiated. When investigating claims of retaliation, the NRC studies whether managers at the site in question are generally open to workers raising safety concerns. If the NRC determines that it is not, a public letter is issued to assure the workforce that the regulators are monitoring the situation. Neither of these steps occurs in retaliation cases involving the Energy Department and its contractors.
In 2013, McCaskill authored an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act meant to reform how the departments contractor whistleblower cases are adjudicated. McCaskills amendment directed that whistleblower complaints -- in lieu of being decided in a court-driven process that can be difficult to navigate or afford -- be adjudicated by the independent Inspector Generals office.
Lawmakers in the House of Representatives changed the language, however, and turned what McCaskill intended to be a permanent solution into a temporary pilot program that ends in 2017. The Senate has passed legislation this year that would make the process permanent, however, and a House bill to achieve the same goal is awaiting a vote.
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Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a last-ditch effort to revive a White House plan to protect up to 4 million immigrants from deportation, the Obama administration on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rehear a case on which the eight-member court was split 4-4 last month. The June 23 high court decision left in place a lower court ruling that blocked the plan, which has never been in effect. The court is currently one justice short following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. In a filing, the Justice Department asked the court to take a second look at the case once it has a full complement of nine justices. It is unclear when that would be, as the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate has declined to act on Obama's nominee, appeals court judge Merrick Garland. As such, even if the Supreme Court was to grant the request, it is unlikely to rule on the case until well after Obama leaves office in January. Acknowledging that the high court rarely rehears cases, Acting Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn said the immigration case is unique because the court could not in future take another case to resolve the issue if the plan is blocked. The high court "should be the final arbiter of these matters through a definitive ruling," he wrote. Obama unveiled his plan in November 2014. It was quickly challenged in court by Republican-governed Texas and 25 other states that argued that Obama overstepped the powers granted to him by the U.S. Constitution by infringing upon the authority of Congress. Because the court was split, a 2015 lower-court ruling invalidating Obama's plan was left in place. The plan never was implemented because the lower courts had blocked it. The plan was tailored to let roughly 4 million people - those who have lived illegally in the United States at least since 2010, have no criminal record and have children who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents - get into a program that shields them from deportation and supplies work permits. (Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama awarded Monday the highest US military honor to a retired Vietnam War helicopter pilot whose heroic actions saved the lives of dozens of his fellow soldiers.
Charles Kettles, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel, was recognized for his valor while leading an army airborne infantry unit tasked with evacuating wounded soldiers in May 1967.
"Of all the military decorations that our nation can bestow, we have none higher than the Medal of Honor. As many who know him said, nobody deserves it more than Charles Kettles," Obama said in presenting the medal to Kettles, 86, at a White House ceremony.
During the dangerous mission to rescue wounded soldiers, the choppers came under fire from enemy small arms, automatic and heavy weapons but Kettles refused to give up until he had filled the aircraft to capacity.
He then returned to the field of battle under intense enemy fire that severely damaged his aircraft.
"Under withering fire, Chuck landed his chopper and kept it there exposed so the wounded could get on and so that he could fly them back to base," Obama recounted.
With fuel pouring from his damaged helicopter, Kettles flew the wounded to safety. Upon learning that a handful of soldiers were left behind, he found another chopper and flew back through enemy fire to rescue them.
"He broke off from formation, took a steep sharp descending turn back toward the valley, without aerial or artillery support, and rescued the stranded soldiers," the president said.
"A soldier who was there said, 'that day Major Kettles became our John Wayne'," Obama said.
"To the dozens of American soldiers that he saved in Vietnam half a century ago, Chuck is the reason they lived and came home and had children and grandchildren," he added.
"Entire family trees made possible by the actions of this one man."
Sony Pictures has unveiled an official trailer for its upcoming Western action feature "The Magnificent Seven" which is set for release September 23, 2016.
The film, by MGM-Columbia Pictures, stars Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke and is the latest incarnation of director Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Japanese drama adventure movie "Seven Samurai."
"The Magnificent Seven," directed by Antoine Fuqua, with a screenplay penned by "True Detective" writer-creator Nic Pizzolatto, follows the story of seven outlaws, headed by bounty hunter Sam Chisolm, who are recruited by the townspeople of Rose Krick to protect them against a group of savage thieves.
Previous modern interpretations of "Seven Samurai" include Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight" and Adam Sandler's "The Ridiculous Six," notes Variety.
Watch the trailer for "The Magnificent Seven": https://youtu.be/q-RBA0xoaWU
One of three police officers killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday penned an emotional Facebook post earlier this month following the police killing of Alton Sterling a black man whose death sparked furious protests.
The Baton Rouge Police Department has identified 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, who had served on the force for a decade, as one of the officers fatally shot while investigating a report of a man with an assault rife. The department paid tribute to Jackson and Matthew Gerald, 42, whom it also named as one of those killed Sunday morning, saying they were great examples of what it means to protect and serve a mission they demonstrated through their work at the department and in their daily lives.
Three days after Sterlings death on July 5, Jackson took to Facebook to vent his feelings. Im tired and physically emotional, wrote the officer, who according to reports had recently fathered a baby boy. He wrote that he was disappointed by some of the reckless comments of others, including fellow officers, in the heated atmosphere following the shooting. He also thanked others for showing support to him and his wife.
I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me, Jackson wrote. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.
The Associated Press said a family friend had confirmed the veracity of the post, which no longer appears on Jacksons Facebook page.
These are trying times, Jackson wrote. 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.
Cell-phone video taken by a bystander appeared online immediately after Sterlings death, and appeared to show him already pinned to the ground before an officer opened fire. Thousands of people joined protests in Baton Rouge, which soon spread nationwide, fueled by another shooting of a black man by a police officer a day later in Minnesota this time the aftermath was broadcast live online by the victims girlfriend via Facebook.
Jacksons killer, meanwhile, has been identified as 29-year-old former U.S. Marine Gavin Long. The shooting comes only 10 days after another veteran killed five police officers in Dallas. The Dallas shooter, Micah Johnson, told law enforcement during a standoff before he was killed that he was upset about recent shootings of black men by police that have roiled relations between police and African-American communities across the U.S.
Yerevan (AFP) - Hundreds of anti-government protesters rallied in Yerevan on Monday calling for a bloodless resolution to a hostage crisis a day after a pro-opposition armed group seized a police building in the Armenian capital.
One policeman was killed during Sunday's assault on the building.
The gunmen were holding five police officers hostage and have demanded the resignation of President Serzh Sarkisian and the release of detained opposition leader Zhirair Sefilyan, who was arrested last month for alleged possession of firearms.
Chanting anti-government slogans, the protesters gathered at Yerevan's central Freedom Square and tried to march towards the police building in the Erebuni district where the gunmen are holding hostages.
Police blocked off the area and started arresting demonstrators, an AFP journalist witnessed. Some of the protesters burst through police cordons and clashed with officers.
Armenia's first deputy police chief Hunan Pogosyan urged the crowd to stay calm, saying that turmoil would only exacerbate tensions as police held talks with the gunmen.
The demonstration came after Armenian police briefly detained dozens of political activists for questioning over the crisis.
The gunmen were still holding five hostages on Monday, Armenia's national security service said. They freed two hostages overnight and released one on Sunday.
"Law enforcement agencies are doing everything possible to secure the situation's peaceful resolution," the security service said in a statement.
The gunmen, who captured a large arsenal of police weapons and are using their hostages as human shields, have so far refused to surrender.
The hostages include Armenia's deputy police chief General Major Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan deputy police chief Colonel Valeri Osipyan.
The attackers are supporters of Sefilyan, who was previously accused of plotting a violent overthrow of the government.
Sefilyan, the leader of small opposition group the New Armenia Public Salvation Front, and six of his supporters were arrested in June after authorities said they were preparing to seize government buildings and telecommunications facilities in Yerevan.
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A fierce critic of the government, 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.
Sarkisian, a 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.
In May 2002, police discovered the mutilated body of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi, Pakistan. When it was time for Pearls remains to be collected and prepared for the long trip back to the United States, the police who found the body didnt undertake this delicate task. Neither did any other law enforcement official or public servant.
Instead, the task fell to a white-bearded elderly charity worker named Abdul Sattar Edhi. He gently collected the body parts, all ten, National Geographic reported five years later, and took Daniel Pearl to the morgue.
On July 8, Edhi, Pakistans and possibly the worlds greatest humanitarian, passed away in a Karachi hospital. The cause of death was renal failure. He was 88.
Edhis death triggered an outpouring of grief across Pakistan. He received a state funeral, an honor the country had not accorded in nearly 30 years. Pakistanis are calling for a national holiday in his honor, and for stadiums and airports to be renamed after him. Countless encomiums have appeared in the Pakistani press in recent days.
This deeply respectful posthumous treatment is befitting for arguably the most widely admired person in Pakistan the man who revolutionized philanthropy and social work in the country. Edhis fellow Pakistanis routinely bestow upon him honorifics rarely heard anywhere in the world: living saint, angel of mercy, even Father Teresa.
Such admiration is easy to understand. For 68 years, nearly the length of Pakistans entire existence, Edhis life served a singular and sublime purpose: to help as many people as possible, with no questions asked and no expectation of reward or recognition.
In 1948, not long after partition drove his family out of Gujarat in present-day India and into Karachi, then the capital city in the country that would become his home, he cobbled together the funds to purchase an old station wagon, which he refashioned into an ambulance. At barely 20 years old, he set up a modest medical facility, and slept on a bench outside so that he could immediately receive anyone arriving in the middle of the night.
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In the succeeding years, Edhi and his wife Bilquis would develop the Edhi Foundation, a sprawling yet remarkably efficient welfare organization that now provides medical care, ambulatory services, schools, orphanages, and facilities for the mentally ill, drug addicts, and victims of domestic violence. Its work also extended abroad, assisting the needy across the world, including in the United States.
The stories that Pakistanis tell about Edhi have made him a living legend. He owned just several articles of clothing. He slept in his office and always traveled in an ambulance so that he would be ready, at any second, to aid those in need. He placed cribs outside his foundations offices so that unwanted babies could be left in his care instead of simply abandoned. As a result, 20,000 people in Pakistan now list Edhi as a parent or guardian, in a country where the state cant provide care at that volume. And he never accepted a single donation from the Pakistani government. As a matter of principle, he only took private donations.
During his final days, Edhi refused offers to go overseas for treatment. He insisted that his eyes one of his few remaining working organs be donated. And, immediately after his death, they were to two blind people. His last words were reportedly: Take care of the poor people in my country.
What endeared Pakistanis to Edhi was not just his prodigious philanthropy per se, but also the critical purpose it served providing basic services that were otherwise in desperately short supply. According to one estimate, there is only one doctor for every 18,000 people in Pakistan. Public ambulatory services are sparse and shoddy; one provincial health minister has suggested that ambulances have been used for shopping expeditions instead of emergency response. At least 4 million orphans live in Pakistan, according to estimates, yet there are few national laws or policies to help them. Epidemics of heroin and meth, among other drugs, are ravaging Pakistan, yet counternarcotics officials peg government spending at just four cents per addict annually. In the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone, according to a 2014 estimate, there are nearly 2 million drug users, yet only 17 treatment facilities. And some 25 million Pakistani children do not attend school.
The Edhi Foundation addresses all these needs, thereby filling an enormous vacuum left by an overburdened and absentee state.
In Pakistan, however, Edhi is revered not just for what he did, but for what he represented. He reflected aspects of the nation often overlooked overseas, where Pakistans image is far from stellar which upsets Pakistanis to no end.
Additionally, his work represented a lifelong act of defiance against Pakistans deeply entrenched afflictions. In a dangerously divided nation, he dared to deliver aid to anyone who needed it, regardless of sect or ethnicity. In a country cursed by vast levels of inequality, and where ruling elites have never made sustained efforts to uplift the masses, Edhi was unapologetically pro-poor and anti-rich. The rich have deprived the people of their rights, and the state does not take responsibility for their welfare, he declared in a 2011 Washington Post interview. It is my dream to build a welfare state in Pakistan. And in a society riven by extremism, Edhi publicly shrugged off threats from religious militants angered by his refusal to prioritize the care of Muslims over that of religious minorities.
Edhi was a unique figure in Pakistan. Islamist extremists aside, he attracted few enemies a rare feat in a nation often unkind to its heroes. Some of Pakistans greatest figures from schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai (dismissed by some Pakistanis as a tool of the West) to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Abdus Salam (disparaged for being a member of the minority Ahmadi Muslim community) have been shunned or maligned. Also, in recent years, some of Pakistans most prominent national heroes have emerged only in death. Recall Aitzaz Hasan, the courageous teenager killed in 2014 when he tackled a suicide bomber outside his school and saved scores of lives. He posthumously received Pakistans top award for bravery.
And then there is Edhi, who was revered for his heroic deeds in life and will be in death as well. When alive, he was described as Pakistans only true living hero. In reality, Pakistan has always had living heroes, but few if any as well known and widely admired as Edhi.
To pay attention to the work of these other living heroes would help ensure that Edhis legacy lives on. We should focus on those who embody Pakistans rich tradition of charity and humanitarianism. These unsung heroes include Parveen Saeed, who runs a business that provides a full meal for three cents to anyone wishing to eat; Syed Fahad Ali, who manages a group of schools for the poorest of the poor in Karachi and other Pakistani cities; as well as young people in Lahore who spend their Sundays collecting garbage. Theyre not as accomplished as Edhi, but theyre no less deserving of recognition and praise.
Edhis death is a loss for Pakistan, but also for the world. He passed away at a moment when violence, ignorance, injustice, and discrimination all of which he deplored deeply are seemingly intensifying across the globe, including in the West. We need more Edhis in this world. Thats all the more reason to highlight those in Pakistan, and beyond, who continue to carry out quietly the kind of work that made Edhi a living legend. Perhaps, in time, accounts of the work of these heroes can inspire new ones.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
By Mubasher Bukhari LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - A prominent Muslim cleric in Pakistan who was censured for appearing in "selfie" photographs with murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch is being investigated in connection with her killing, police said on Monday. Baloch, 26, described as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, divided opinion in the deeply conservative Muslim society with her risque photos. Her murder on Friday has shocked the country and sparked fresh debate about so-called honor killings. Baloch's brother, Muhammad Waseem, told media he drugged and strangled his sister as she had violated their family's honor with her social media posts, including a series of selfies with cleric Abdul Qavi last month. One video appears to show her sitting on Qavi's lap. Police said Qavi, who was suspended from a prominent Muslim council after the photographs were published, was also part of their investigation into her murder. "We have decided to widen the scope of the investigation and include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the probe," Azhar Ikram, the police chief in the town of Multan, where Baloch was killed, told Reuters. Qavi has denied any involvement in Baloch's murder but told Reuters on Monday he would present himself to police for questioning if summoned. Qavi told media on Saturday Baloch's death should serve as an example for others who tried to malign the clergy, though he also stated that he had "forgiven her". Baloch, who described herself as a modern day feminist, was unapologetic about her bid to push the boundaries of acceptability for women and change "the typical orthodox mindset" of Pakistanis. Her pictures and videos outraged religious conservatives who viewed her as a disgrace to the cultural values of Islam and Pakistan. Others hailed her as a "feminist icon". BREADWINNER Police were also investigating Baloch's other brother, Muhammad Aslam, who is a junior army officer, Ikram said. More than 500 people - almost all of them women - die in "honor killings" in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives acting over a perception "shame" has been brought on the family. Governments have deplored the practice but done little to stop it. Many Pakistanis have called for the passage of an anti-honor killing law aimed at closing a loophole that allows family members to forgive those responsible for such killings. After Baloch's death her father, Muhammad Azeem, filed a police report against both his sons, alleging Aslam had encouraged Waseem to carry out the killing. Police have declined to comment on Aslam's role and he was not available for comment on Monday. Baloch built a modeling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner. "She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son," Baloch's father said, according to the English-language Dawn newspaper. "She supported all of us, including my son who killed her." Azeem was also not available for comment. After the outcry over the selfies with Qavi, Baloch held a news conference and appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security. No help was provided. (Additional reporting and writing by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Editing by Robert Birsel)
By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Children and adolescents should receive age-appropriate and evidence-based education about sex and sexuality from pediatricians, schools, professionals and parents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. In the U.S., according to the AAP, about one in three adolescents does not receive any information on sexuality from pediatricians. And when the subject does come up between doctors and kids, the average conversation lasts less than 40 seconds, the group says in a new report. "Which means two-thirds of the time its not discussed at all, and when it is discussed it's such a brief time," said Dr. Cora Breuner, chairperson of the AAP's Committee on Adolescence. Children and adolescents should have an open discussion with their parents, pediatricians or healthcare providers and in their schools as well, she said. "If we dont bring it up in a calm and open environment, they are going to turn elsewhere," said Breuner, who is also a pediatrician at Seattle Childrens. The AAP's report - its first on the topic since 2001 - was published in Pediatrics. It defines sexuality education as "teaching about human sexuality, including intimate relationships, human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, sexually transmitted infections, sexual activity, sexual orientation, gender identity, abstinence, contraception and reproductive rights and responsibilities." The report says sexuality education has been shown to prevent and reduce the risks of adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Pediatricians are in an excellent position to provide and support sexuality education as part of preventive healthcare, the report says. Additionally, it says, formal sexuality education in schools can improve the health and well-being of adolescents and young adults. Parents and caregivers are their children's primary sexuality educators, says the report. But lack of knowledge, skills or comfort may impede parents or caregivers from fulfilling that role. Breuner suggested people remember the acronym A-B-L-E when talking to young people about sexuality. She said the letter A should remind people to ask kids if they have questions, assume they have questions and at all ages. The letter B is a reminder to be respectful and calm, and be aware of their own issues and agendas. The letter L is to listen, let the youth guide the conversation and learn from others if you need help. The letter E is to educate using methods backed by research and to encourage more questions. "You need to be a resource for them, as well as your pediatrician and school," said Breuner. The report also says that while abstinence is 100 percent effective, promoting abstinence-only until heterosexual marriage occurs is ineffective. "Not only do kids have sex when you have an abstinence-only curriculum, they get pregnant more than those who have a comprehensive sexual education," said Breuner. She said youngsters who get abstinence-only education tend to get more sexually transmitted infections, too. For schools and the community, Breuner recommends a document from the Future of Sexuality Education (http://bit.ly/29IYOuP). For youth, she recommends the website Scarleteen (http://www.scarleteen.com/). SOURCE: http://bit.ly/29IZlNx Pediatrics, online July 18, 2016.
By Marco Aquino LIMA (Reuters) - A World Bank panel rejected a lawsuit filed against Peru which charged the nation with failing to clean up pollution tied to a smelter, the government said on Monday, but the company bringing the suit pledged to refile it immediately. New York-based Renco Group Inc sued Peru for $800 million in 2011, accusing it of failing to clean the soil around the La Oroya smelting plant as promised when it was sold to the company in 1997. It also said Peru did not take responsibility for legal claims regarding past pollution tied to the smelter. The World Bank's International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ruled unanimously that Renco's claims must be rejected due to a lack of jurisdiction, Peru's finance ministry said in a statement. Renco said the lawsuit was rejected on technical grounds and that it would continue legal action. "Indeed, the Tribunal's decision is an insignificant victory for Peru as Renco plans to immediately refile the same claims in a manner that cures the technical legal defect that was the basis for dismissal," the company said. Renco-owned Doe Run Peru had operated the smelter until the company ran out of money to buy concentrates in 2009. It also lacked financing needed to finish an environmental cleanup and pay for upgrades to curb pollution. Now controlled by Doe Run's former creditors, the smelter faces liquidation on Aug. 27 unless a new buyer is found. Peruvian President-Elect Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has vowed to make the "strongest effort" to reopen the La Oroya smelter, saying it could process concentrates from several nearby mines. La Oroya was once the world's most diversified smelter, churning out gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper and a dozen specialty metals. But it helped turn the town of La Oroya into one of the 10 most polluted places in the world, according to a 2007 report by the Blacksmith Institute, an environmental group. Peru's finance ministry trumpeted the ruling as a success in the first dispute brought against the South American country under its free trade agreement with the United States. Peru is also being sued in the ICSID by Canadian mining company Bear Creek over a silver project suspended after local protests turned deadly. Gramercy Funds Management LLC filed a $1.6 billion suit against Peru last month over the country's 40-year-old land reform bonds. (Reporting by Marco Aquino; Writing by Gram Slattery; Editing by Paul Simao and Matthew Lewis)
Manila (AFP) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said human rights are not a concern in his war on drugs, vowing to ignore due process and comparing himself to former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
Duterte's threat came as the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) joined the chorus of groups criticising Duterte's advocacy of killing.
In the latest of a series of tirades, the country's newly elected leader doubled down on a promised campaign of widespread killings and said he wouldn't listen to "bleeding hearts".
"I will retire with the reputation of Idi Amin," he said in a speech Sunday, referring to the late African ruler whose 1971 - 1979 regime was characterised by large-scale rights abuses that killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of Ugandans.
"I am not afraid of human rights (concerns.) I will not allow my country to go to the dogs," Duterte said, vowing to pardon all abuses committed by security forces.
"Why will I give you a (due) process? I am the president. I don't give you (due) process," he said.
Duterte swept to power on May 9 after pledging to end crime in the Philippines using the same "shoot-to-kill" methods critics say he employed as mayor of the southern city of Davao.
Police on Monday unveiled plans for a large electronic billboard outside the force's Manila headquarters to broadcast a running tally of drugs suspects who have been arrested or "neutralised" -- killed -- during operations.
The billboard will "give everyday people... the accomplishments of their police," community relations chief Senior Superintendent Gilberto Cruz told AFP.
The billboard, which was ordered by Duterte and the police leadership, will likely be completed by September, he added.
In a public statement, the Bangkok office of the ICJ criticised Duterte, saying "there has been a marked increase in the number of deaths of alleged drug dealers from the day you assumed office."
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"We are also concerned about your recent statements that appear to be encouraging extra-judicial killings," the non-government organisation of judges and lawyers said.
The group reminded him that the Philippines had passed laws and signed international agreements binding it to work against police abuse, extra-judicial killings and the death penalty which Duterte hopes to restore to the country.
Major TV network ABS-CBN said it had recorded 408 "drug fatalities" between May 10 and July 15, based on police and media reports.
Images of people killed in police anti-drug operations, or corpses found with signs saying things like "I am a drug pusher" have become daily fare in the local newspapers.
A former addict told AFP Monday that he had handed himself into police as part of an official mass drug amnesty event after two acquaintances turned up dead.
"I could be killed. That really scared me," he told AFP.
Theres a simple answer to the question of why the Pokemon Go mobile game has proved so addictive: Its that Pokemon are designed to be addictively cute. The millions of people running around trying to catch animated critters are the latest victims of a cult of cute a cult that, like Pokemon itself, has its origins in Japan. And its to Japan that we must look if we want to understand the cults darker undercurrents.
Pokemon is a franchise of the Pokemon Company, which is partially owned by the Japanese multinational Nintendo. It is also part of a long tradition of the kawaii, or cute, aesthetic in modern Japanese culture that has given birth to things like the emojis on your phone and the animal onesies you might have considered wearing to a costume party.
An embodiment of everything endearingly childlike, kawaii has been embraced by the Japanese government as one of its main cultural exports and the linchpin of its soft power strategy. With Pokemon Go, kawaii is continuing its relentless incursion into American culture.
What makes Pikachu and his friends so irresistible? The most basic answer is found in evolutionary psychology. When humans see something that resembles a baby big eyes, large head, floppy or shortened limbs, a clumsy walk it triggers a feeling of euphoria in the pleasure center of the brain (the same part of the brain, incidentally, that is stimulated by food, sex, and drugs like cocaine). This feeling motivates humans to get closer to and interact with the cute object. In the past, that instinct ensured that humans nurtured and protected babies, helping to perpetuate the species.
Today, of course, it is also imploring us to play with the big-eyed, round-bodied creatures of Pokemon. Every time we do so, were pressing the brains cute receptors and being rewarded with a relaxing hit of opioid-like happy hormones. Its the same flood of happy hormones that explains why, at times of stress, you might turn for relief to online images of kittens or stumbling baby pandas on YouTube.
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But, brain chemistry and GIF coding aside, its impossible to explain the rise of cute culture without Japan. Pokemons kawaii aesthetic is itself a reaction to traditional Japanese culture, which emphasizes responsibility, fortitude and self-restraint. For Japanese people in search of an alternative culture or unconsciously in need of one kawaii represents a form of indulgent escapism. Those who feel stressed by brutally long working hours, uncaring bosses, or an unhappy home life can receive brief mental respite from kawaii credit cards, bento, and even dish sponges. In recognition of its appeal, the Japanese government has appointed kawaii ambassadors to spread the trend around the world.
Kawaii culture was not always so mainstream, however. It emerged as a schoolgirl rebellion in the 1970s, Japans corollary to British punk culture. Teenage girls adopted childish handwriting and baby-speak and wore cutesy clothing as a way of disobeying their teachers and wider societys will to mold them into responsible, mature, and serious adults, according to anthropologist Sharon Kinsella.
Unlike Western teenagers, who usually rebel by adopting attitudes and habits beyond their years smoking, drinking, piercings, and tattoos to try to break away from parental and societal authority, Japanese teenagers acted like children to postpone the bleakness of adulthood and its accompanying stresses and remain in a Peter Pan-like idyll forever.
What started as rebellion, however, has now become the status quo. Japan has come a long way from the early tentative efforts by companies like Sanrio, the maker of Hello Kitty, to sell pencil cases decorated with bug-eyed frogs. Kawaii has turned into a society-wide embrace of the cute aesthetic in practically all situations. Japan now even prints cartoon bunnies on reminders for cancer screenings, tsunami warnings, and insurance brochures.
To a foreigners eye, this might seem to inject a disconcerting levity into serious issues. But in Japan, its now believed that cuteness is entirely practical; kawaii is used to make somber topics more approachable and easier to digest. Adults are thought to be far more likely to get a Pap smear or renew an insurance policy if an animated rabbit is imploring them to do it.
Companies outside of Japan have also cottoned on to the psychological effects of kawaii. In recent years, international car companies have started putting out cute cars, such as BMWs Mini marque, with rounder bodies and circular headlights that look like friendly eyes. And Google, which dumbed down its serif logo into a more childlike font last year, released a prototype self-driving car that looks like a baby koala, perhaps to disguise the fact it is a potentially lethal robotic device.
Automakers may have made a calculated decision based on studies that show people become more attentive and cautious around cute things meaning other drivers would be less likely to ram into the back of their car. The protective emotions triggered by its anthropomorphized face may also prevent others from suffering fits of road rage when the driver is slow or clumsy.
These are the positive effects of kawaii or cute objects: They can make us gentler, neutralize our anger, and boost our focus and productivity. Cute objects are increasingly used for therapeutic applications, such as a fluffy robotic seal called Paro, which has been shown to improve mood and stimulate social interaction in dementia patients.
Its therefore no surprise that some people suffering from depression or anxiety are reporting psychological relief from playing Pokemon Go. In addition to motivating them to go outside, exercise, and interact with other people playing, the cuteness of the Pokemon characters has a psychologically uplifting effect that, say, an adult-looking figurine would not.
But there are negative aspects of kawaii, too. The feel-good, happy hormones cute things trigger can overwhelm other, more rational thoughts and feelings. In the case of Pokemon Go, rather than increasing feelings of empathy and caution for traffic, many players seem to acquire a kind of tunnel vision, plowing down streets and through private buildings in a frenzied hunt for rarer monsters like Vaporeon and Ivysaur. If anything, the cuteness of the characters is making players oblivious to everything except the little critters they are hunting and those they are competing against, making them more hazardous to everyone else as a result.
The other problem with kawaii is that it has a tendency to dumb things down, obscuring serious issues and threats. Much like the Puss in Boots character from the Shrek films, a hired assassin who lulls his enemies into a false sense of security by adopting an innocent, wide-eyed expression, kawaii can obscure or neutralize dangerous and upsetting elements of reality. In Tokyo, for example, the police forces kawaii mascot, Pipo-kun, masks the menacing aspect of law enforcement. A cutesy cartoon of lung cancer hides the ugly reality of blackened organs, reducing motivations to quit. At the strange historical juncture we find ourselves at, Pokemon Go may be a glorious escapist trip into a layer beyond the reality of race politics, the prospect of increasing terrorism overseas, and a tense presidential race, but it may also steal us away from actual problems that require our attention.
Scared at what a Donald Trump presidency and Brexit and nukes and police brutality might mean for tomorrow? Well, no worries; just play Pokemon Go and feel those worries sink away. Much like the Japanese teenagers who kicked off this whole kawaii trend, sinking yourself into the visual massage that is Pokemon Go is a distraction from the reality at hand.
Photo credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images; YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images; Foreign Policy illustration
Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, was on its highest alert on July 18 after at least three police officers and a member of the public were shot and killed. Local reports said a police station, the offices of a national security agency and a third location were attacked. Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev described the attack as an act of terrorism.
In addition to the fatalities, Tengrinews said at least seven police officers were in critical condition. At least one of the alleged gunmen was taken into custody, according to reports. Credit: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Amid the chaos of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, police rescued U2 frontman Bono during the melee.
The musician has a home near the Promenade des Anglais and was dining on the outdoor terrace of a restaurant, La Petite Maison, celebrating Bastille Day like the thousands of other revelers on the French Rivera, when people began running for their lives just feet away.
Read: How Nice Killer Prepared For Attacks
Bono was trapped inside until finally being rescued by armed police.
The attack, carried out by driver Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel left at least 85 people dead and more than 200 injured. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks, praising the terrorists actions by calling him a soldier.
Following the attacks, U2 posted an image of guitarist The Edge, who also owns a home in Nice, it is unknown if he was there at the time, asking for peace.
Love is bigger than anything in its way - Bono, Edge, Adam, Larry pic.twitter.com/1w31gcXIQR U2 (@U2) July 15, 2016
This is the second time in less than a year that the members of the Irish band were in the country during a terrorist attack.
The band were set to perform in Paris on November 14 and 15, yet, rescheduled the concerts following the terrorist attacks that sieged the City of Light on November 13.
Read: Eagles of Death Metal Play 'People Have the Power' With U2 As They Return to Paris
U2 were one of the first artists to return to the city and perform just weeks later on December 6 and 7 as part of their Innocence & Experience Tour. During their final performance performing in Paris, they brought out Eagles of Death Metal, the California rock and roll band that were performing inside Parisian venue, Le Bataclan, when 89 people were killed on the violent November night.
Watch: The Most Heartbreaking Images from the Nice Attack
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BOGOTA, Colombia When Wilson Cordoba was growing up in rural Colombia, his 90-minute walk to school through the forest was a perilous one: He and his friends had to pass illegal armed groups that fought in the area and recruited many of his friends to join their ranks. The psychological pressure was immense, he said. When he got home from school, there was no playing outside rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), paramilitaries, and the Colombian army fought over territory, sometimes leaving dozens dead and disappeared in a single day. I didnt have a childhood, he said.
Cordobas experience is not unlike that of many rural Colombians who were terrorized or displaced during the countrys half-century of armed conflict against the FARC, which first rebelled in the 1960s over land inequality; later, it would turn to kidnapping, narcotrafficking, and violence, earning it a classification as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States. The right-wing paramilitary groups that rose up to fight the FARC were even worse, carrying out massacres and displacing millions of people. Both groups raped, disappeared, assassinated, tortured, and threatened civilians. After more than 50 years of war, Colombias total displaced population rivals that of Syria.
But on June 23, officials with the government and the FARC took an important step toward ending the conflict by signing a permanent cease-fire agreement. After four years of negotiations, the deal will put an end to hostilities that saw the government lose two-thirds of the nations territory in the early 2000s one-third to the FARC and one-third to paramilitaries, said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.
Santos announced that by July 20, the two sides will sign a finalized peace deal. He has also promised to hold a plebiscite (at a date to be determined) to allow Colombians to register their approval. Although the plebiscite isnt legally binding, Santos hopes it will counter claims from the opposition that he has been unilaterally negotiating the countrys future with a feared and hated rebel group. But a no vote would send both parties back to the drawing board. The decision of whether to hold a plebiscite is before the countrys Constitutional Court, which will probably approve it.
If the peace deal succeeds, however, Santos will have brought the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere to an end. But not everyone is celebrating not even Cordoba, who was elected to Congress in 2014 as a member of the Centro Democratico, the center-right party standing in Santoss way. The Centro Democratico says the deal gives impunity to the FARC and will allow it to hold on to its arms and drug money while participating in Colombian politics. New violence, the party says, will be the consequence.
Whether through the plebiscite or later in the 2018 presidential elections, the Centro Democratico stands ready to capitalize on the widespread mistrust of the peace process; Santoss approval ratings among urban Colombians dropped to 21 percent in May. In the same poll, 66 percent of urban respondents said they believed the peace negotiations would produce a bad deal. Finalizing the deal appears to have given him a bump, though Santoss approval ratings rose to 30 percent in July. The majority of likely voters now say they will vote for the plebiscite, though the Centro Democratico will have time to chip away at its legitimacy and encourage their supporters to abstain.
Santos now must convince the public particularly those who lost their homes and family members in the war that the country has more to gain from an imperfect deal than from continuing to fight or delay. At a recent economic forum, the president went so far as to suggest that if the referendum failed, war would break out again. He said he had ample information that the FARC is preparing to return to war, even an urban war. Santos was probably trying to convince the public by making the stakes clear, but his opponents have portrayed it as a blunder an attempt to blackmail the public.
While FARC leaders later promised that the guerrilla army will not return to war, no matter the results of the plebiscite, a breakaway 200-person unit said on July 6 that it will not demobilize and will continue to fight. The unit, which is called the Armando Rios First Front, gained infamy for kidnapping presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt in 2002. The FARCs leadership responded days later by saying that any unit that rejects the peace deal was no longer part of the FARC and could not use the organizations name, arms, or resources.
Santos has staked his legacy on the deal, sacrificing political and personal ties along the way. From 2006 to 2009, he served as minister of defense under President Alvaro Uribe, who left office with a 75 percent approval rating thanks largely to his tough military action against the rebels. In 2010, Santos captured the presidency easily, riding the wave of Uribes immense popularity and promising to continue his hard-line policies. But once in office, Santos aggressively pursued peace, triggering a falling out with Uribe, who in 2013 founded the Centro Democratico.
Uribe, who was elected to the Senate in 2014, actively campaigns against Santos, saying his deal has wounded the very idea of peace. So great is his influence that Rodrigo Londono, better known as Timoleon Timochenko Jimenez, the head of the FARC, wrote Uribe a letter in May, inviting him to the negotiation table. Uribe rejected the invitation to discuss his concerns, insisting that he had already stated them publicly as well as to individuals involved in the peace process. That month, Uribe also launched a civil resistance campaign, which has included marches, speeches, and a petition demanding that the plebiscite allow the populace to vote on the peace accords point by point, rather than in its entirety. The petition makes other demands as well, including Santoss resignation.
The Uribistas opponents, on the other hand, say the Centro Democraticos objections to the process are disingenuous. Ivan Cepada, a leftist senator who has written a book about Uribeism tweeted on June 15 that the Uribistas should take off the mask and say openly and directly that they dont want peace.
Though the cease-fire with the FARC has been in place since 2015, violence in Colombia is rampant, making the expedited finalizing of the deal all the more important. The FARC is no longer fighting, but other leftist militias and former paramilitaries are, including the National Liberation Army (ELN), which has been spotted in the FARCs old territory. The ELN has asked for its own peace negotiation with the government, but the process has stalled and the guerrilla group appears to have reverted to its old ways. In May, a Spanish journalist went missing in Catatumbo, where she is believed to have been kidnapped by the ELN. While the paramilitaries officially demobilized in 2006, they have been replaced by what the government calls criminal bands, which continue to murder and displace civilians and activists.
Amid the ongoing violence, Uribistas like Federico Hoyos say theyre offended by the idea that their party doesnt want peace. The youngest member of Congress, Hoyos says he wants a durable, legitimate peace, not one that treats the FARC as legitimate political actors. He says after years of kidnappings, massacres, and child recruitment, the FARC has forfeited the right to be an equal negotiating partner. Hoyos and the Uribistas often point to the FARCs designation by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization as a reason that the peace talks are inherently flawed: A peace deal happens after a war between states; terrorists like the FARC are defeated. Why should I, when the only thing I have in my backpack is pens and an iPad, be seated next to a guy that might have a gun in his backpack? Hoyos asks, balking at the idea that FARC members will be allowed to run for office.
Though Uribe and his followers have vehemently opposed the idea of FARC members serving in Congress, leaked documents in 2014 showed that when he was president he attempted a peace negotiation with the FARC that would have offered them both congressional seats and protection from extradition.
Centro Democratico also criticizes the transitional justice tribunals that are included in the deal, saying they will give the FARC impunity for their crimes by allowing short sentences and alternatives to prison such as residence in rehabilitation zones or doing community-service work like demining. Another young Uribista congressman, Samuel Hoyos (no relation to Federico), who serves on the Congressional Constitutional Committee, balked at the idea that the FARC will participate in selecting the justices. Its permitting the victimizers to choose who will be their judges. Thats unacceptable.
Minster of the Interior Juan Fernando Cristo disputed this, writing in an email that the selection process for justices had not been established yet but that they would have to meet the same requirements as those who serve on the Supreme Court, in addition to having expertise in international human rights or conflict resolution. He added that the selection process would have to give confidence to the Colombian people and offer complete guarantees of impartiality and independence.
The Centro Democraticos are not the only ones to raise the alarm about the tribunals. In 2015, Human Rights Watch said the tribunals would make it virtually impossible that Colombia will meet its binding obligations under international law to ensure accountability for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Others, like former Constitutional Court Magistrate Rodrigo Uprimny have argued that flexibility is necessary on matters of justice in order to secure the end of the war.
Just as central to the peace process are issues of land rights and displacement both of which played a major role in driving Colombias civil war. The FARC first rose up to demand a change to Colombias vast land wealth inequality. The right-wing paramilitaries, in turn, have fought land redistribution efforts and helped wealthy interests consolidate even more land. Paramilitaries, who carried out 1,166 massacres between 1982 and 2013, displaced and murdered both leftists and peasant farmers with small land holdings. Much of the stolen land has ended up in the hands of large agribusiness or mining companies, combatants, and farmers with ties to armed groups. A land restitution law enacted in 2011 attempts to restore land to those who have lost it through violence.
However, the FARC have sought to go further in the peace negotiations and achieve land redistribution one of the insurgencys original objectives. In 2012, the government and the FARC compromised by agreeing that legal private property would not be touched, but public lands and territory confiscated from drug traffickers would be redistributed. The deal they made clearly upsets Federico Hoyos. He said landowners in Antioquia, the northwestern department (a Colombian territorial division) he was elected to represent, fear that the government is coming for their land. In my department, people will not let this happen, Hoyos says. This might be the birth of new violence because if theyre dealing with the land ownership with the FARC, a lot of people in this country are going to do whatever it takes to protect their land.
Federico Hoyoss prediction is particularly worrisome in light of the Uribistas alleged ties to paramilitaries. Between 2006 and 2013, 45 congressmen and seven governors were convicted of having connections to paramilitary groups. Even Uribe himself has been implicated. Survivors of a 1997 massacre in Antiochia, when Uribe was governor of that department, said a government helicopter circled overhead as paramilitaries burned houses, killed people, and raped women. A former paramilitary commander also claimed that Uribe knew about the massacre. Uribe denies all involvement, though an investigation was opened in 2015 after the commanders allegations.
As a former president, Uribe enjoys immunity from prosecution and continues to serve as a senator and leader of the Centro Democraticos. But in February, authorities arrested his brother for allegedly leading a death squad known as the Twelve Apostles, which is accused of planning assassinations at the Uribe family ranch during the 1990s.
Sen. Alfredo Ramos, a Centro Democratico, is the son of another Uribista politician who was arrested for alleged paramilitary ties in 2013 while campaigning for the partys presidential nomination. In a Skype interview in June, he told Foreign Policy that his father, who is still in prison but has not been convicted, had been accused by false witnesses and that his father and other Centro Democraticos had been the victims of political persecution. While he cant prove that Santos and his government are deliberately persecuting the Centro Democraticos, he says the party believes Santos is trying to accelerate prosecutions against the party to diminish its credibility.
Whether or not the Santos government is truly targeting the Uribistas, the investigations into politicians with alleged links to paramilitaries have been going on since before his election. Uribes credibility has taken a hit; now that he is a senator, his approval rating has dropped below 50 percent. But perhaps the real test of his partys credibility will be whether it can persuade Colombians to vote against the peace deal in the plebiscite, or to sign their civil resistance petition against the deal.
Ramos thinks his party can turn the Colombian population in the Centro Democraticos favor. He says the Colombians felt blackmailed by Santos after his comments about the likelihood of the FARC returning to war if the plebiscite fails. The more the population of Colombia feels blackmailed, the more support President Uribe will have in the future, he predicted.
Ramos may be proven wrong now that the FARC has agreed to lay down its weapons, confidence in the peace process could skyrocket, the plebiscite could pass easily, and the influence of Uribe and the Centro Democratico could fade. Many Colombians, after all, doubted that the four-year process would lead to a deal at all.
However, Ginny Bouvier, a Colombia expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said it is difficult to predict how the electorate will vote in a plebiscite. Uribe has plugged into the deepest fears of Colombians, she says. The question is whether the emotion of peace will outweigh the emotions of fear and of vengeance.
If the plebiscite fails, it would be back to the drawing board, Bouvier says. But even if it passes, the first five years following the singing of a peace deal are perilous. Various academic studies have found that between 40 and 50 percent of countries relapse into war after a peace deal, with the riskiest period occurring just after the signing, as the tough work of implementation begins.
Another factor that could drive former FARC combatants back to violence and one of the main post-conflict dangers is the use of violence against demobilized FARC combatants by those who remain violently opposed to their participation in politics, says Cynthia Arnson, who heads the Wilson Centers Latin America program. That could really cause things to unravel if it happens on a significant scale, she adds. The largest neo-paramilitary group, or criminal band promised on Monday that they would not attack demobilized FARC soldiers, but the risk of breakaway factions remains.
When an earlier, more tenuous peace process began in the 1980s, thousands of members of the FARCs then-political party, the Patriotic Union, were slaughtered by paramilitaries, members of the armed forces, and criminal groups. The FARC itself has said it fears this outcome. And it is not hard to see how precedent could lead individuals to once again take up arms, even if the FARC sticks to its word and does not return to war.
Cordoba insists that this is not what he wants. Who more than me, having lived what Ive lived, wants now, tomorrow, for it to be signed and for us all to have the tranquility of a peace process? Cordoba asked as he sat in the salon of the Colombian Congress in April. We dont make objections because we dont want peace. We want to help the peace process along so that it is what all us Colombians are hoping for effective and forceful.
Megan Alperts reporting in Colombia was made possible by an Adelante fellowship from the International Womens Media Foundation.
Photo credit: Eduardo Leal For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Oh baby, baby! Pregnant Teen Mom 2 star Chelsea Houska took to Twitter on Monday, July 18, to share her excitement over hearing her unborn childs heartbeat for the first time.
PHOTOS: Teen Mom Stars, Then and Now!
I was able to find baby's heartbeat with the Doppler for the first time today, the 24-year-old MTV personality, who is pregnant and expecting her first child with fiance Cole DeBoer, wrote. I cannot handle it! I want to listen all day!
Although she is thrilled about becoming a second-time mom, the 16 and Pregnant alum who welcomed daughter Aubree, 6, in September 2009 with ex Adam Lind feels a bit anxious about carrying her latest bundle of joy.
When one of her followers recently asked Houska if she feels better prepared for baby No. 2, the South Dakota resident responded by writing, I feel more nervous for some reason! Its been a while and I want to do everything perfect. #deboerbaby.
PHOTOS: Celebrity Pregnancies
Nerves aside, the expectant reality star is looking forward to expanding her family.
Were really excited, and Aubree is pumped to be a big sister, Houska told MTV News on July 12. DeBoer, who has taken on a larger role in Houskas daughters life since the couple moved in together last year, gushed, "I'm a proud dad of one already, so adding another to the family is just amazing."
As previously reported, Houska announced her pregnancy via Instagram and her brand-new personal website on July 12.
PHOTOS: Famous Celebrity Pregnancies: Baby Bump Hall of Fame
Oh my gosh! Im so excited to finally be launching my website, and I felt like the perfect first post would be to announce to everyone that baby DeBoer is expected in February 2017! she wrote on her site. We are beyond excited for this journey and cant wait to share it with you all! Big sister Aubree is also extremely excited, and its no secret that she is hoping for a girl haha.
The couple who met each other at a gas station in 2014 got engaged in November 2015 after nearly a year of dating. While they plan to tie the knot later this year, Houskas father, Randy, revealed that his daughter is barring MTV from filming her upcoming nuptials.
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PHOTOS: Teen Mom 2 Tots: My, How They've Grown!
Chelseas getting married in October she drew the line [on filming the wedding], the dentist explained during a Friday, June 24, appearance on the podcast Dentists, Implants and Worms. She wont let them tape it. That was a lot of fighting back and forth. They certainly wanted it.
While the network offered to pay for the ceremony, Houska still said no. She doesnt want it taped; she doesnt want it on TV, he added. She doesnt need it paid for. I was very proud that she grew the balls to say no. Theyll go to the bachelorette party and stuff [to film], but for the wedding she agreed that shell send a bunch of professional still photos [to them to use for the show].
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton promised on Monday to bring the "full weight of the law" against people who kill police officers if she becomes the next U.S. president after two recent episodes of gunmen slaying police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate ahead of a Nov. 8 election, made the promise in a speech in Cincinnati at the annual convention of the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "Anyone who kills a police officer and anyone who helps must be held accountable," Clinton said. "As president, I will bring the full weight of the law to bear to make sure those who kill police officers are brought to justice." The penalties for killing a police officer are rightly more severe than those for killing a civilian because police are symbols of the rule of law, she said. Clinton's remarks come among heighten tensions between police forces and many black and Latino Americans, who have been rallying in protests across the country against a spate of police killings of black men, often unarmed, during encounters. A black former soldier killed five police officers during one such protest in Dallas, Texas, on July 7. On Sunday, another black former U.S. Marine sergeant killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alan Crosby)
July 18 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the business pages of British newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
The Times
Presidential power grab after failed Turkish coup
President Erdogan of Turkey launched an unprecedented purge of the military and judiciary after a failed coup that opened the clear path to absolute power that he has long been accused of craving. Almost 6,000 people have been detained since Friday's attempt to oust Erdogan, including at least 2,840 members of the military and 2,745 judges. (http://bit.ly/29TnaVg)
The Guardian
Bank of England to close personal banking service for employees
Bank of England employees will lose a 300-year-old job perk after it was announced that a small staff bank within Threadneedle Street is closing. Staff had been able to access Bank of England accounts for personal use, even after retirement. But the Bank has confirmed that the service is coming to an end following a cost-cutting review initiated by its governor, Mark Carney, soon after he arrived in 2013. (http://bit.ly/29Fhq2y)
Brexit impact is going to be horrible, says leading City fund manager
One of the leading money managers in the City of London has said the fallout from Britain's vote to leave the EU will be "horrible" and that the Square Mile is still "slightly stunned" by the result. Richard Buxton, the chief executive and head of UK equities at Old Mutual Global Investors (OMGI), which manages 26 billion pounds of funds on behalf of individual investors and institutions, said warnings from the pro-EU campaign about the impact of Brexit before the referendum were well-placed. (http://bit.ly/29FhxuW)
The Telegraph
HS2 railway project to go ahead despite change in government
The HS2 railway project will still go ahead despite the change in government, the new Transport Secretary has pledged. Chris Grayling vowed not to scrap HS2, easing fears of those concerned that it may have been abandoned by Theresa May's new government. (http://bit.ly/29TlH1f)
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Sky News
Santander Eyes Restructured RBS Branch Deal
Santander UK Plc is examining a restructured deal to acquire millions of customers of rival Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc as a five-year process to create a new high street lender remains mired in technology problems. The Spanish-owned bank, which is already the fifth-biggest in Britain, has been looking at whether it can take on an entity due to be rebranded as Williams & Glyn through a so-called asset transfer deal. (http://bit.ly/2a31G7t)
Hammond Targets Sheffield Deal On China Visit
A string of urban regeneration projects in Sheffield worth nearly 200 million pounds is among the trade deals being targeted by Philip Hammond when he visits China for the first time as chancellor this week. Hammond is expected to sign a deal with Sichuan Guodong Construction Company during a trip to China for the G20 finance ministers' meeting in the city of Chengdu. (http://bit.ly/2a8UcT4)
Lad Bible Gets Its First CFO
A fast-growing British youth media brand TheLadBible Group, which publishes a digital magazine of the same name, will name former eBay executive Pete Wade as its first chief financial officer. (http://bit.ly/2alBnsv) (Compiled by Rama Venkat Raman in Bengaluru; Editing by Paul Simao)
July 18 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories from selected Canadian newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
** Mistaken Point, a 17-kilometre stretch of Newfoundland coastline that bears some of the oldest recognizable traces of life on Earth, including frond-like animals called rangeomorphs that looked more like plants, has been chosen as Canada's latest World Heritage Site. (http://bit.ly/29GcBGq)
** The Canadian embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul will be open as usual Monday, the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion said. The government is advising Canadians in Turkey to remain indoors, limit their movements and avoid crowds and public gatherings, as the situation in the country is still fluid. (http://bit.ly/29Gc47p)
** British Columbia technology leaders are urging the provincial government to do more to foster the development of homegrown talent as the sector grapples with a labour shortage. (http://bit.ly/29Gdn6b)
NATIONAL POST
** Shaw Communications Inc credits its entrance into the wireless market and exit from the media business for tripling its quarterly profit despite a loss of more subscribers than expected due to Fort McMurray wildfires and Alberta's tough economic climate. (http://bit.ly/2a31chW) (Compiled by Shalini Nagarajan in Bengaluru)
July 18 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories in the Wall Street Journal. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
- Japan's SoftBank Group Corp has reached a deal to buy UK-based chip designer ARM Holdings Plc in an all-cash deal valued at more than $32 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation. http://on.wsj.com/2a1olkP
- Volkswagen AG executives in the United States have pledged to compensate hundreds of American franchise dealers who have been damaged by the emissions scandal, according to dealers who met with the company on Friday. http://on.wsj.com/2a1ouon
- At a mid-June dinner with a delegation of Saudi Arabia officials, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman indicated his kingdom aimed to do more Silicon Valley deals like the $3.5 billion investment in Uber Technologies Inc announced two weeks earlier, according to a person who attended the feast hosted at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. http://on.wsj.com/2a1piK0
- A gunman fatally shot three police officers and wounded three others before being killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday morning, the second deadly multiple shooting to target police in 10 days. http://on.wsj.com/1ejfriJ
- The failed coup attempt in Turkey has fueled a sharp conflict with Washington over the fate of a Turkish cleric in the United States, while posing a broader challenge to the West's efforts to fight terror and promote liberal democracy. http://on.wsj.com/2a1psAT (Compiled by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru)
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If you've always wanted to own a tropical island, now is your chance. Although, if you have a spare A$30 million ($23 million) or so to throw down on some real estate, you'll likely have more than a few chances.
Keswick Island, located in the Whitsundays region of the Great Barrier Reef, is up for sale. The stunning island is currently owned Keswick Developments, which is headed up by "family friend to the royal family," Edward Dawson-Damer, the Australian Financial Review reported.
SEE ALSO: Sea turtles in Great Barrier Reef are dying from mysterious tumors
Even if you're not royal by association, for a truckload of cash, you could become the proud owner of 517 hectares (1,278 acres) of land, complete with 400 hectares (988 acres) of national park.
The sale is being facilitated by Colliers International, which said in an emailed statement Keswick features "quintessential island scenes of white sandy beaches and clear water that is home to colourful coral reefs, turtles, dolphins and whales." According to the agency, the island is approved for large-scale development with up to 1,000 dwellings and 3,000 people.
While tourism on the reef generates millions of dollars, the region is increasingly under threat. A global coral bleaching event has affected its northern and central reaches thanks to warmer than average sea temperatures caused by a combination of the El Nino and global warming.
Coral bleaching occurs when coral expels the algae in its tissue that gives it colour and nutrients. Caused by stresses including warmer water temperatures and pollution, bleaching makes coral more vulnerable to disease and can lead to coral die-offs.
While the Whitsundays area mostly escaped the devastating event in early 2016 the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority estimated in June the average coral loss in the area was 3 percent the entire reef remains a fragile ecological site.
Maybe the buyer will have a heart and turn the whole of Keswick into a giant nature reserve.
Republicans adopted a significant, if largely symbolic, populist plank in the party platform on Monday, calling for a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law designed to protect taxpayers from Wall Streets excesses.
Thats a surprise. The position, long championed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is usually associated with the liberal Democratic base. The Republicans decision to include it in its official platform marks a break from the position of the business-side Republican establishment, which has long called for more incremental reforms on the banking sector, and moves the party toward a more populist stance on financial reform.
We also call for a reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, which created barriers between what big banks can do, Paul Manafort, the campaign manager for presumptive nominee Donald Trump, told reporters on Monday.
The Democrats recently included language in their own party platform calling for a modernized version of Glass-Steagall.
The law, which was first passed in 1933, was repealed during the Clinton Administration in 1999. It draws a bright regulatory line between investment banks and their less flamboyant, commercial counterparts. Advocates say Glass-Steagall would protect federal institutions, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, from being forced to bail out banks engaged in risky, speculative and proprietary trading.
Neither partys platform is formally binding, although their positions are also seen as a litmus test of where the party is headed. The GOP platform will likely be made public Monday.
In talking with reporters Monday, Manafort explained the Republicans embrace of Glass-Steagall in political terms. In running against Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, who has historically enjoyed a very close relationship to Wall Street power brokers, Manafort seemed to suggest that Trump was the more natural heir to the populist, anti-Wall Street mantle.
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We believe the Obama-Clinton years have passed legislation that has been favorable to the big banks, which is why you see all the Wall Street money going to her, he said. We are supporting the small banks and Main Street.
Since Sanders bowed out of the Democratic race last week, Trump has repeatedly called on Sanders supporters to join his campaign.
Establishment and libertarian Republicans have long been skeptical of the utility of reinstating Glass-Steagall on the grounds that, in the event of a financial crisis, the federal government would likely to have to bail out large banks, regardless of their status under Glass-Steagall, to protect the broader financial sector.
* Hellenikon shut 15 years ago; currently hosts migrants
* Plans to raze crumbling complex, build coastal resort
* Project among biggest private investments in Greece
* Previous efforts to develop site have fallen through
By Angeliki Koutantou and Karolina Tagaris
ATHENS, July 18 (Reuters) - A crumbling former Athens airport complex housing thousands of stranded migrants will be transformed into one of Europe's biggest coastal resorts if a Greek development company realises its ambitions.
The 7-billion-euro plan to develop Hellenikon, a site three times the size of Monaco, has the potential to help kick-start an economy that is limping back to growth after seven years of recession.
Co-investor Lamda Development will obtain a 99-year lease to turn the wasteland of crumbling terminals and rusting airplanes into a glitzy seaside town of hotels, residences and shops.
Efforts by successive governments in recent years to turn the 620-hectare (1,530 acre) plot into a profitable venture have all fallen through, including plans in 2011 to build a financial district similar to London's Canary Wharf with Qatari backing.
But the chief executive of Lamda, which is owned by Greece's powerful Latsis family, is confident things will be different this time.
"This project is a game-changer," Odisseas Athanassiou told Reuters in an interview. "It is going to change the psychology of foreign capital towards investment in Greece."
Backed by Chinese conglomerate Fosun, an Abu Dhabi-based company and other prospective investors, Lamda intends to spend about 1.5 billion euros ($1.66 billion) on roads and other infrastructure.
A further 5.5 billion euros is being earmarked for about 8,000 homes, hotels, shops and a 494-acre park, making the project one of Greece's biggest private investments.
FROM JET SET TO REFUGEES
For about six decades, Hellenikon was Athens's only airport.
Those with long memories will recall its 1960s jet-set heyday, when shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis ran Olympic Airlines in lavish style and his partner at the time, opera diva Maria Callas, added a dash of glamour and gossip.
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But in 2001 Athens decided to shut the by then run-down facility to make way for a more modern airport before the city hosted the 2004 Olympic Games.
In its latest incarnation, Hellenikon is housing more than 3,000 migrants and refugees who have fled war and poverty in the Middle East and Asia.
Its once-busy arrivals terminal is tightly packed with scores of tents where more than 1,300 mostly Afghans live in squalid conditions. One woman said she sleeps in shifts to protect her younger siblings from people-smugglers.
Prayer mats are laid in the direction of Mecca beneath signs pointing to shuttered Duty Free shops and announcement boards offering eerie reminders of long-departed flights.
Greece's shipping minister said the government planned to move the migrants by the end of July, taking them to other sites across the country already hosting 54,000 others.
For Lamda, that is welcome news. "From the start we had assurances that when we took over the project, it would be ready from all aspects," Athanassiou said.
'NOT JUST FOR THE ELITE'
Those living at Hellenikon say they have been told nothing.
"We have no idea what we're going to do," said Afghan Ali Ahmad Jafari, who has spent a "miserable" five months there sharing a tent with his wife and two sons.
The family spent all their savings to reach Greece, he says.
Lamda, meanwhile, hopes excavations at the site will begin in the first half of next year and many of the commercial buildings will be ready in 2020.
The company will use 300 million euros in private funds as a down payment on the site, and another 500 million for construction work in the first two years. It will also invite investors to join the project, Athanassiou said.
He is confident demand for property there will be satisfactory despite years of crisis.
"Since it's not only for the elite - there will be several mid-range residences - I believe a lot of people would like to live there."
But investing in Greek state assets is not always easy.
A privatisation programme linked to Greece's international bailout has been progressing slowly, and the Hellenikon plan still lacks parliamentary and court approval - decisions that can take months.
Greece, which has lost about a quarter of its output during the recession, is desperate for investors as it struggles with record unemployment, and Athanassiou believes his project could help fix the mood.
"Instead of saying 'I am not investing because I don't trust you' they (investors) will say 'I should invest because others are investing and I don't want to miss that'."
($1 = 0.9049 euros)
(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; editing by John Stonestreet)
Beauty entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein in 1934. She will be portrayed by Patti LuPone in the new musical War Paint. (Photo: Getty Images)
Long before Emily Weiss, Bobbi Brown, and even Estee Lauder burst onto the cosmetics scene and took it by storm, there were Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, the founding mothers of what would eventually become todays $265 billion global industry. They were visionaries, pioneers, and intense rivals and this week their story will be brought to life onstage with a fresh dose of drama in War Paint, a new musical starring Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole, opening July 18 in Chicago.
The world premiere, directed by Michael Greif and written by librettist Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel, and lyricist Michael Korie, tells the story of cosmetics titans Rubinstein (LuPone) and Arden (Ebersole).
Elizabeth Arden, of the famous Red Door Salon, in the 1930s. (Photo: Getty Images)
The women, according to press notes, defined beauty standards for the first half of the 20th Century. Brilliant innovators with humble roots, both women were masters of self-invention who sacrificed everything to become the countrys first major female entrepreneurs. They were also fierce competitors, whose 50-year tug-of-war would give birth to an industry. From Fifth Avenue society to the halls of Congress, their remarkable rivalry was ruthless, relentless and legendary pushing both women to build international empires in a world dominated by men.
In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Korie noted, Makeup was a new industry when these two women arrived. These two really were the top of the line. He added, Estee Lauder really was a direct copy of Ms. Rubinstein. Max Factor was just a Hollywood guy who put out a cheap line. Truly, everyone else came after them.
Patti LuPone will play Rubinstein in War Paint. (Photo: Walter McBride/Getty Images)
That includes Revlon, founded by Charles Revson, which recently announced it was buying rival Elizabeth Arden for more than $419 million, to the amusement of the War Paint creative talents. After all, back in the days when Rubinstein and Arden ruled, Korie noted, Revson was a little man who they squashed under their feet.
Though both tough-as-nails entrepreneurs were great successes in a mans world, the two women were vastly different. Arden opened her first spa on Fifth Avenue in 1910 when it was rare for women to wear makeup, let alone run a business, according to the company website.
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From there she began to build one of the first global beauty brands and soon became a suffragette, once marching past her own salon with 15,000 fellow womens rights advocates, all wearing red lipstick to show their bold strength. Arden created cosmetics for women who served in the military during World War II and became one of the first women to grace the cover of Time magazine in 1946. Way ahead of her time, the beauty maven was also known for her holistic approach encouraging women to stay hydrated, keep out of the sun, and to practice yoga, decades before such notions were popular.
Christine Ebersole will portray Arden in War Paint. (Photo: Gary Gershoff/WireImage)
Rubinstein was born in Poland and started her career in 1902 in Australia, distributing a beauty cream that her mother had used. She soon founded a beauty salon and manufactured cosmetics, expanding her business with fierce determination to open salons in London, Paris, and eventually New York City not far from Ardens. Her company grew into a global cosmetics empire, and she eventually created the Helena Rubinstein Foundation in 1953, becoming a philanthropist in the name of childrens health organizations.
What compelled Wright about both women was that they became so seismically successful even though they were both outsiders at heart, he told the Chicago Tribune. For all of their size and grandeur, these women mostly just wanted to belong. One was a Canadian who professed to be an American aristocrat. The other was a Jew from Krakow who professed to be lost Bohemian royalty. They both wanted a place in the American mythology of success.
They both found it. And now War Paint hopefully Broadway bound will help others find their incredible stories.
Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The Rock is on a roll.
The movie and TV star (see: Central Intelligence, HBOs Ballers) finally made his move onto YouTube official, releasing the first video on his brand-new channel on Monday. He teased the channel this spring, but its only now that were getting a peek at the kind of content we can expect from the larger-than-life celebrity.
In the video, entitled The YouTube Factory, The Rock takes a trip to a secret YouTube content production lair beneath an island volcano. Guided by YouTube star Lilly Singh, the two check in on a number of production rooms within the facility: a cat room, a Rock impersonator room, a beauty video tutorial salon. Other big names in YouTube success make cameos, like Gigi Gorgeous, Grace Helbig and Alex Wassabi.
Who knew that there was so much fresh, innovative, non-pornographic material online? Its crazy, The Rock explains by way of intro to his latest project.
Dude, you just created what could potentially be the biggest channel on YouTube, Singh tells him.
If youre hungry for more Rock videos, theres also a brainstorming session with Lilly Singh to dig into. But it looks like hes just getting started with his foray into short-form Internet video, so there should soon be much more to watch.
Bern (Switzerland) (AFP) - Peter Sagan said he was lucky to pip Alexander Kristoff in a photo finish to the Tour de France 16th stage on Monday -- and admitted he initially thought he had come second.
At first glance Norway's Kristoff seemed to have won, but a close inspection showed the world champion Sagan had edged past him by the rubber on his front wheel.
"I was not waiting for the results, I thought I was second until they came and told me I had won. It's unbelievable after so many times finishing second," said Sagan, who has been second 17 times on Tour stages.
The Slovak, who won his third Tour stage this year and seventh in total, said it was a technical mistake that cost Kristoff what would have been his third stage success at the race after two in 2014.
"You can see from the final picture -- I've lost a lot of times like this, by a very small piece of tyre," said Sagan, 26.
"Today I was lucky. Alexander just made his jump on the line very late, I jumped before.
"When you jump you have to pull the bike on the front -- at that moment he was pulling on the back, not on the front."
For race leader Chris Froome, who finished safely in a much-reduced peloton alongside his main overall rivals, there's nothing lucky about what Sagan does.
"He's a phenomenal rider -- most people in the peloton are scared of him," said the 31-year-old Briton.
"It's just his ability -- he can do everything. He chooses when he wants to go in a breakaway, how he wants to ride the finish.
"I'm actually surprised he didn't attack on that last climb and ride away solo, but he still managed to win the stage."
- 'Not for me' -
The finish to the 209km 16th stage from Moirans-en-Montagne to Bern in Switzerland had a tough climb just before the sprint to the line.
It proved selective with most of the pure sprinters unable to keep up.
Only Mark Cavendish did, but the Briton, a winner of four stages this year and 30 in total, used up all his energy in doing so and was unable to position himself for the sprint finish.
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It turned into a battle between Sagan and Kristoff, with Norwegian Sondre Holst Enger taking third.
Froome still leads by 1min 47sec overall from Dutchman Bauke Mollema ahead of Tuesday's rest day, before four Alpine stages from Wednesday.
Given the tough drag up to the finish, some pure sprinters had already decided they'd be having a quiet day.
"I don't think it's really a stage for me. With the two bumps in the finale, it's more for riders like Sagan or (Michael) Matthews," said German Andre Greipel.
"But I think it's also a great day for a breakaway because everybody's tired and it's before the rest day and nobody will really want to chase."
- Hard chasing -
That was certainly the attitude taken by his great German sprint rival Marcel Kittel's Etixx team.
German time-trial specialist Tony Martin set off on one of his epic escapades alongside young French Etixx team-mate Julian Alaphilippe, who was heading for victory on Sunday before his chain stuck.
However, the Tinkoff and Katusha teams of Sagan and Kristoff had other ideas and chased hard.
By the 83km mark the front two's lead reached its apex, at almost six minutes, but it came down quickly over the final 100km.
Inside the final 30km, they had less than a minute and 5km later Alaphilippe had given up, with Martin resisting only another 2.5km.
That provoked a counter-attack from former world champion Rui Costa of Portugal, but he was caught 4.5km from the finish, and thereafter it was all about Sagan and Kristoff.
SEOUL (Reuters) - Biosimilars maker Samsung Bioepis, part of South Korea's top family-run conglomerate Samsung Group [SAGR.UL], said on Monday it is seeking regulatory approval in Europe to sell its copy of AbbVie Inc's rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira. Samsung Bioepis said in a statement the European Medicines Agency has accepted for review its application to sell its biosimilar of Humira, the world's best-selling drug that generated $14 billion in sales last year. The company did not say when it submitted the application for its Humira copy. Interest in biosimilars, a cheaper copy of complex biotech drugs, has soared in recent years as copies of some of the world's best-selling prescription medicines have hit the market. Medical officials and insurers in the United States and Europe hope biosimilars will significantly reduce healthcare costs. Samsung Group hopes its biosimilar company can emerge as a new growth driver as the global smartphone industry matures, clouding long-term earnings prospects for flagship Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. Samsung Bioepis, which seeks to be first or second to market with its products, already received regulatory approval earlier this year to sell its copies of Amgen Inc's Enbrel and Johnson & Johnson's Remicade - two rheumatoid arthritis drugs that are also among the world's best-selling medicines. It was not immediately clear how quickly Samsung Bioepis can bring its Humira biosimilar to market even after regulatory approval from the European Union, as AbbVie's composition patent for Humira will not expire in Europe until October 2018. The U.S.-based company, which earned 61 percent of its 2015 net revenue from Humira, has been filing new patents in a bid to push back sales of biosimilars of the drug. Samsung Bioepis, along with partner and minority shareholder Biogen Inc, filed a lawsuit against AbbVie in Britain on March 24 to stop the U.S. company from blocking the launch of the Humira biosimilar. (Reporting by Se Young Lee; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
By Rushil Dutta
July 18 (Reuters) - Southeast Asian stock markets took a
breather on Monday after last week's gains and ahead of the
European Central Bank's first policy meeting since Britons voted
to leave the European Union.
ECB President Mario Draghi is likely to plead for
governments to do more to boost the euro zone's economy in a
meeting on Thursday, its last before an eight-week summer break.
The ECB is not expected to change its monetary stance.
Governments in China, Japan and Britain have already started
easing their fiscal stance or hinted at plans to do so.
"After six strong days of climb recently, U.S. investors are
taking a breather. Likewise, Asian stocks are also locking their
gains since a week ago," said Cheng Hooi Lee, an analyst with
Malaysia-based Maybank Investment Bank.
"Probably for the afternoon session, Asia would remain
sluggish and trading between 0.5 percent gains and 0.8 percent
losses ahead of the ECB's potential stimulus plans."
Philippine stocks were headed for their first fall in
seven sessions, with investors focussing on Mexican cement maker
Cemex SAB de CV's debut in the country.
Cemex Holdings Philippines Inc opened at 11.20
pesos, 4.2 percent higher than its IPO price of 10.75 pesos.
Property developers and telecom stocks led the losses, with
Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co and Ayala Land
among the biggest losers.
"Most of the attention is on the new listing. Out of the
trading value of about 2.9 billion pesos, 1.9 billion are in the
new company," said Joseph Roxas, president of Manila-based Eagle
Equities.
"That would explain why others are more flat than usual."
Indonesian and Vietnamese stocks eked out
small gains, while Malaysia was slightly lower.
Thailand stock markets are closed on Monday and
Tuesday for national holidays.
For Asian Companies click;
SOUTHEAST ASIAN STOCK MARKETS
STOCK MARKETS
Change at 0420
GMT
Market Current Previous Pct Move
Close
Singapore 2928.35 2925.35 0.10
Bangkok 1492 1488.69 0.22
Manila 7981.53 8030.06 -0.60
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Jakarta 5125.164 5110.178 0.29
Kuala Lumpur 1665.5 1668.4 -0.17
Ho Chi Minh 666.28 664.56 0.26
Change on year
Market Current End 2015 Pct Move
Singapore 2928.35 2882.73 1.58
Bangkok 1492 1288.02 15.84
Manila 7981.53 6952.08 14.81
Jakarta 5125.164 4593.008 11.59
Kuala Lumpur 1665.5 1692.51 -1.60
Ho Chi Minh 666.28 579.03 15.07
(Reporting by Rushil Dutta; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)
In a fragile ecosystem, how do you conserve limited resources for future generations? That's the question that the small Pacific island nation of Palau is grappling with as it tries to combat illegal fishing. The country's rich marine ecosystem is now at risk, as boats from Southeast Asia venture farther into its crystalline waters in search of tuna and other prized fish. Watch part one of our Great Big Film, "Sea Change," by our friends at Vacationland. Watch part two here.
(CLEVELAND) The fatal shooting of three police officers in Louisiana added new concerns Sunday about security at the Republican National Convention 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 Governor 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, Louisiana, and three more injured in a shooting less than one mile from local police headquarters.
Read More: What to Expect This Week at the Republican Convention
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 marching in a noisy Shut Down Trump and the RNC 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, Chief Calvin Williams said during an interview on CBS News Face the Nation.
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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.
Read More: Cleveland Police Union Seeks Ban on Open Carrying of Weapons During RNC
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-caliber 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.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus contributed to this report.
It will be deployed in the North Sea.
The offshore arm of Sembcorp has delivered the Noble Lloyd Noble to Noble Corporation, a high-specification harsh environment rig which is the first of its kind to comply with both Norwegian and UK standards.
According to a press release by Sembcorp Marine, the rig is the seventh to be completed for Noble, and is based on the GustoMSC CJ70 design as well as Statoils Category J specifications.
The rig has an operational air gap of 69 metres and is capable of operating in a water depth of up to 150 metres (492 feet) in harsh environmental conditions. It boasts a maximum total drilling depth capacity of 10,000 metres (approximately 33,000 feet), the press release said.
To be deployed in Statoils Mariner field development in the North Sea, it achieved 8 million man-hours worked without reportable incidents onboard the rig.
It also scored a low Accident Frequency Rate (AFR) of 0.10 per million man-hours worked over a 31-month construction period, the release said.
More From Singapore Business Review
One of the biggest art festivals in Japan, the Setouchi Triennale is held on a cluster of islands in the eastern part of the Seto Inland Sea of Japan. 2016's summer session opens Monday, July 18 and runs until September 4.
Art to stimulate growth
The art festival was first held in 2010 as a response to the severe depopulation of the islands in the Seta Inland Sea, the mass of water which separates Honshu and Shikoku. Held every three years, the event is divided into three sessions - spring, summer and autumn. The objective is to make the islands a venue for contemporary art exhibitions, thereby increasing tourism revenue and raising the region's international profile.
The larger islands of Naoshima, Inujima and Teshima serve as main focal points, but even the smaller and more remote islands such as Takamijima play host to artworks. In all, 12 islands and two ports participate in the Setouchi Triennale, with some only open in particular sessions due to accessibility reasons.
For this year's summer session, over 100 artworks by Japanese and international artists are being displayed across the group of islands.
Highlights and institutions
Highly anticipated exhibitions include the locally-grown bamboo dome "Dreams of Olive" by Wang Wen Chih on Shodoshima; the giant floating seed "Beyond the Borders" by Lin Shuen Long at Takamatsu Port; and the disused-storehouse-turned-theater/arthouse "Island Theater Megi" by Yoichiro Yoda on Megijima island.
In Naoshima, visitors can explore the Chichu Museum, Benesse Art House, Lee Ufan Museum and the Art House Project as well as numerous installations around the island, many outdoors. The art in Teshima is concentrated in the island's four main villages, which are accessible by bus. The main site is the Teshima Art Museum. The island of Inujima is hosting a dozen different exhibitions this year, including the Seirensho art project built into a former copper refinery, and can be visited on foot.
For more information: www.setouchi-artfest.jp/en/
Another ambush shooting claimed the lives of three Baton Rouge, Louisiana law enforcement officers and injured three others on Sunday morning. The president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, Stephen Loomis, told Fox News the violence against police officers has escalated since President Obama validated the false narrative of anti-cop sentiments expressed throughout the country.
Those police-involved shootings are what absolutely has triggered a rash of senseless murders of law enforcement officers across the country. It is reprehensible. The president has blood on his hands and it will not be able to come washed off, Loomis said.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke agrees, telling the FOX Business Network he believes Obamas rhetoric is directly related to the attacks on law enforcement officers.
President Obama has been the maestro. He has led course and fanned the flames of anti-police sentiment that is sweeping this country, Clarke said on Varney & Co.
In a statement after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Obama said, "And when incidents like this occur, theres a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same. And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us."
Clarke thinks President Obama should have disavowed the anti-law enforcement sentiments expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement and suggests a good start to ease tensions is for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to publically dissociate herself with such groups at the annual NAACP conference across the state in Cincinnati on Monday.
They must denounce and I am talking about specifically, none of this code language, none of this ambiguous language. They must denounce the anti-cop sentiments spewed by this hateful ideology Black Lives Matter, Clarke said.
Clarke would like the Attorney General of the United States and the Department of Justice to perceive local law enforcement officers as an ally in the pursuit of justice.
Related Articles
Not many people run toward the sound of gunfire, but for 31-year-old Gillian Triche, running into a dangerous situation is just a natural instinct.
The Baton Rouge, La., resident was doing her math homework when she heard several gunshots near her home on Old Hammond Highway. Without even questioning it, she jumped into her truck and sped toward Airline Highway where a Missouri man had shot and killed three police officers.
Triche heard one single shot which echoed and cracked like only gunfire can and then bursts of three gunshots for the next few seconds, she said.
As a soldier, I wanted to see how I can help, she said. When I found out there was nothing I could do, I started filming to get the story out.
Read More: Weary Baton Rouge Struggles to Come to Grips With Latest Deadly Shooting
Triche was just a few hundred feet from where dozens of police, EMS and SWAT vehicles were waiting outside of the B-Quik gas station where the shooter was found. She started livestreaming the scene on Facebook, though she said there wasnt much to see at first. Triche said police were pulled back from the gas station at first and everything seemed still. She heard an officer tell the suspect to come out with his hands up, but then she was waved from the area by police. Triche chose to take shelter in an Albertsons Grocery across from the gas station, to the dismay of her girlfriend Lillian Phillips.
Phillips, 31, was asleep when Triche ran toward the gunfire. She awoke to a text alerting her that her girlfriend was squirreled away in Albertsons after speeding toward the danger, so she decided to walk toward the store and get Triche herself.
But Phillips was turned away from the scene by police, which was when she met up with DAndre Randolph, who was walking to work. She immediately offered to take him to safety.
It wasnt safe for a black man to be outside, Phillips said. It wasnt safe for anyone to be outside.
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She took Randolph into her home for a few hours until Triche returned from the shooting scene. Randolph, who was heading to his second job when the shooting occurred, recalled seeing a bunch of police cars shooting down Airline. Police closed all the roads that led to his work and his home so he just walked until Phillips found him.
Read More: President Obama: Killing of Baton Rouge Cops Was Work of Cowards
Triche returned home around 3:30 p.m. and, once all together, the trio decided to walk Randolph back to his home. The women didnt want him to go alone or to go hungry, so they packed up some chips, sandwiches and water for the journey.
Strangers at first, the trio are best friends now.
Triche said shes concerned this event will set off even more tragedies in the area, especially given the tension over the past few weeks in Baton Rouge following the death of Alton Sterling, who was killed by police on July 5. The combat veteran said that while she supports the police especially those shes served next to she understands the frustration in the black community.
If you have any type of racist ideals, you have no right to be wearing a uniform, Triche said.
For now, shell continue to help her community in any way she can, whether its livestreaming breaking news, packing sandwiches for a new friend or supporting the causes she believes in.
I support police officers and I support Black Lives Matter, she said. Those two are not mutually exclusive.
"Silicon Valley" star T.J. Miller has landed the leading role in the upcoming "EmojiMovie: Express Yourself," with Sony Animation unleashing a clip of his audition to herald World Emoji Day on July 17.
The 57-second joke video shows Miller imitating a series of popular emojis (Kissy face, Fried shrimp), apparently under the impression that he has been picked for a live-action emoji feature -- before being corrected and told that it will actually be animated.
Miller, whose best known comedic role is for the HBO series "Silicon Valley," has also previously lent his voice to films such as "How to Train Your Dragon," "Big Hero 6" and "High School USA."
"EmojiMovie: Express Yourself" is set to hit theaters in August 11, 2017, and will be directed by Anthony Leondis from a script by himself and Eric Siegel (via Variety).
Watch the clip here: https://youtu.be/KFv5bgIOlg4
Here it comes. The coup is over. And the crackdown is in full swing. After Fridays failed attempt to overthrow the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by a faction within the military, the government has quickly arrested at least 6,000 people mostly military personnel dismissed nearly 3,000 prosecutors and judges, and sacked a staggering 8,000 police officers in a wholesale gutting of the nations military and legal apparatus that likely spells dark days ahead for the country.
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. Turkish officials say they are continuing to look for other potential plotters and even issued an arrest warrant Sunday for Erdogans top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici.
How does this end? The Turkish government is lashing out in all directions, with a high-ranking member of the Erdogan government accusing Washington of directly helping to foment the putsch. Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu bluntly claimed over the weekend that the U.S. is behind this coup attempt. The comments 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, FPs Yochi Dreazen writes.
Whos army is it? The rift within the ranks of the Turkish armed forces which had already endured years of ousters to ensure loyalty to the president signals that the NATO country is far less stable than had been thought. Erdogan has claimed the conspirators were loyal to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Turkey has demanded that Washington extradite Gulen, something Secretary of State John Kerry said is possible, if enough evidence against him could be furnished.
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FPs Siobhan OGrady and Elias Groll have more on the controversial cleric here.
Loyality. The Institute for the Study of War released an analyst note Sunday night assessing that the inability of the junior officers in charge of the coup to broaden their support base indicates that Erdogan has the personal loyalty of most of the senior officer corps, and that Erdogan will take this opportunity to further establish his cult of personality in the military by purging the military at lower levels.
What does this mean for ISIS fight? The turmoil in Turkey likely wont be good news for the fight against the Islamic State, FPs Paul McLeary reports. U.S. officials have long been openly critical of the limited role the Turkish military has played in stopping the flow of foreign fighters moving into Syria, and the latest instability will likely do little to improve the situation.
Commando raids, F-16s. Some critical details of the scope of the insurrection emerged on Sunday, which included a daring special operations raid on the coastal resort where Erdogan had been staying which just failed to nab the leader, and a harrowing incident where two rebel-flown F-16 fighters followed the presidents plane on its way to Istanbul, locking radars on the jet, but failing to fire.
As the purge of the military continued on Sunday, one of those arrested was Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, the chief of Incirlik Air Base, from which the U.S. military flies missions over Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State. Reports have emerged claiming Van asked U.S. officials at the base for asylum, but was refused. The Greek government also finds itself in a tough spot after eight Turkish officers flew a helicopter to Greece in a bid for asylum. Turkey has demanded their extradition.
The European Union is worried. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Monday that shes worried about the arrests and dismissals. Legitimate institutions needed to be protected, she told reporters before a EU foreign ministers meeting, also attended by John Kerry. There is no excuse for any steps that takes the country away from that.
Europe had long been concerned about Erdogans authoritarian tendencies, but officials were more open about their suspicious on Monday. Johannes Hahn, the European commissioner for regional affairs, suggested that Erdogan was more than ready for the crackdown. The arrests showed at least that something has been prepared because lists are available already, Hahn said Monday.
Remember the GOP? Amid the turmoil in Turkey and France, lets not forget that the Republican convention kicks off in Cleveland on Monday. FPs Molly OToole is right in the thick of things on the golden shores of Lake Erie, reporting back that Brexit leader Nigel Farage and far-right Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders are coming to Cleveland 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.
Hey there! Good morning and as always, if you have any thoughts, announcements, tips, or national security-related events to share, please pass them along to SitRep HQ. Best way is to send them to: paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary or @arawnsley
France
Details about the attacker in the horrific truck attack against Bastille Day celebrations in Nice are beginning to trickle in. French media report that the driver of the vehicle, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, carried out reconnaissance for the attack two weeks prior, driving the route he would later use to kill 84 people. The Islamic State-linked propaganda outlet, Amaq news agency, released a statement by the group claiming responsibility for the attack and calling Bouhlel a soldier for the group. The jihadist group previously claimed Orlando shooter Omar Mateen as a fighter for the Islamic State in one of its statements despite no evidence of operational support for or foreknowledge of the attack. For more, check out FPs Paul McLeary examining the roots of the idea for using a vehicle as a weapon.
North Korea
North Koreas been spending big to develop weapons of mass destruction and asymmetric capabilities but its having a harder time improving its conventional forces, Reuters reports. In the past year, Pyongyang has tested a nuclear weapon and shown off a range of new ballistic missiles and delivery systems. Its conventional forces, however, are still saddled with aging equipment. Kim Jong Un appears to be trying to cut the fat from his officer corps and gain more control over the military. Since coming to power, Kim put civilians in charge of the National Defense Commission and forced generals to prove their merit in marksmanship competitions and flight trials to suss out those whove risen through corruption and nepotism.
Russia
Russia is pushing its anti-access and area denial capabilities closer to the West, this time with plans to deploy S-400 air defense missiles to Crimea. Defense Tech reports that Russias Lt. Col. Evgeny Oleinikov said the country will send the S-400 Triumf, Russias most advanced air defense system, to the Crimean peninsula next month. The S-400 will add to the S-300 batteries, which Russia has already stationed there. Russia also recently sent additional S-300 missiles to Belarus, with which it shares a joint air defense network.
The Monterey Institute of International Studies released a study showing that Russia digitally altered satellite photographs which it claimed were evidence that Ukrainian missile systems downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. Using sophisticated forensic software, the researchers concluded that the satellite photographs presented by Russias Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been altered, with a portion of one photograph showing an inconsistent compression with the rest of the image and another showing purported Ukrainian missile systems in sharper focus than its context. Open source analyses of the incident have repeatedly pointed to Russian complicity the downing of the flight, but Russia denies its forces had any role in the incident.
Syria
Assad regime forces have captured rebels last remaining supply route into the city of Aleppo, tightening the stranglehold of the city and raising fears that Aleppo will face a lengthy, punitive siege. The Assad regime and its allied forces have besieged a number of cities throughout the conflict, starving the civilian populations as international aid agencies try in vain to deliver aid to those affected. The encirclement has rebel groups worrying about their future just as American and Russian diplomats are at work on an agreement to jointly target extremist groups.
A drone launched from Syria crossed into Israeli airspace and missed getting hit by Israeli Patriot missiles and an air-to-air missile. Defense News reports that Israeli forces tried to shoot down the unmanned aircraft with two Patriot missiles and a missile fired by an F-16 as the drone flew over the Golan Heights. All three missiles missed and the aircraft as yet still unidentified returned back to Syrian airspace. The Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah has frequently sent Iranian-made drones into Israeli airspace over the years.
Iraq
Iraqs maverick militant cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, has told his followers to take aim at American troops in the country. Reuters reports that Sadr posted a statement to his website saying that American military personnel are a target for us after a follower asked him to respond to Defense Secretary Ash Carters announcement that the U.S. would send 560 more troops to Iraq. Sadrs Mahdi Army frequently fought U.S. troops during the American occupation of Iraq but lately the firebrand cleric has been focused on staging protests in the Green Zone against corruption in the Iraqi government.
Army
Special operations always gets the good stuff. DOD Buzz reports that Army special operations troops are getting the iPhone 6s and ditching their buggy old Android devices. The Apple devices will be used as part of U.S. Army Special Operations Commands (USASOC) version of the Nett Warrior program, which links mobile devices into military networks. USASOC had previously used Android phones in the program, as the rest of the service does, but found the Google-developed open source operating system to be wanting in the user experience department. A source tells the news outlet that iPhones can display drone video feeds with seamless quality whereas Android freezes up.
Cyber
The Defense Departments effort to hack and disrupt the Islamic States communications isnt going so well, according to the Washington Post. Over the past few months, Pentagon officials have been hyping up an effort to use offensive cyber capabilities against the jihadist group. Cyber Command had set up a specific unit named Joint Task Force Ares to develop malware for use against Islamic State targets. But the task force is lagging behind in getting the requisite personnel and putting together its menu of malware.
Photo Credit: Burak Kara/Getty Images
(Reuters) - The six Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers killed or wounded in an attack on Sunday morning ranged from a newcomer to the force to veteran officers, officials said, in the latest mass shooting to afflict a U.S. city.
Three officers died and a fourth was fighting for his life after the attack by a suspect who opened fire on them in Louisiana's capital city.
The suspect, identified by a U.S. official as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, was believed to have acted alone.
The dead included Montrell Jackson, a 32-year-old new father who had served for 10 years with the Baton Rouge Police Department, and Matthew Gerald, at 41 a newly minted law enforcement officer with a military background, the police department said on its Facebook page.
Also slain was Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four, local media reported, citing Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and Garafola's wife, Tonja.
"He loved us so much," Tonja Garafola told the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper. "He didn't deserve this."
Friends and relatives of Jackson took to Facebook to remember him.
Rest in Peace to my former partner and one of the best cops I've ever known... His name was Montrell Jackson! Facebook user Marcus Tillman said in a post, which received more than 8,000 likes and 6,000 shares by midday on Sunday. "He was a black life that apparently didn't matter to the one that took it!
The Facebook page shows several pictures of a baby boy, and comments suggested that the child was Jackson's son.
"Cuz, this is you all over again," commenter Catina Williams Alexander wrote beneath the photo of the child. The Facebook page includes a picture of a police badge, posted in 2015.
'BIG TEDDY BEAR'
Jonathan Saunders, a friend of Jackson, said the officer was a big man - but gentle and kind.
"He was 220 pounds of Teddy Bear," said Saunders, who now lives in New Orleans and once worked at a Laser Tag business where Jackson was a part-time security guard. "If you needed a hug, you could walk up to him and hug him. He cared about everybody."
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Saunders said in a phone interview that Jackson's child was just a few months old.
A Facebook page belonging to Matthew Gerald in Baton Rouge featured images of law enforcement badges, and friends and family posted condolences on a page that appeared to belong to his wife.
Earlier in the day, Dechia Badeaux Gerald posted a news video of the shooting aftermath with the comment: "Everyone please pray!!! My husband along with others is out there."
A 41-year-old sheriff's deputy was in critical condition, "fighting for his life as we speak," said Gautreaux.
In addition, one sheriff's deputy was in surgery for non-life-threatening injuries, Gautreaux said. A 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer, on the force for nine years, also received a non-life-threatening injury, Dabadie said.
"We are grieving for each other, we are grieving for our loss and we are grieving for our families," Gautreaux told a news conference on Sunday.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein, Melissa Fares and Steve Gorman; Writing by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Alan Crosby and Peter Cooney)
By Claire Milhench
LONDON, July 18 (Reuters) - French investment bank Societe Generale on Monday asked for an adjournment to push back the date of a trial in a long-running dispute with Libya's $67 billion sovereign wealth fund over a series of trades entered into between 2007 and 2009.
At London's High Court, Adrian Beltrami, a lawyer acting for SocGen, requested an adjournment, citing the amount of work that still needed to be done before the three-month trial is scheduled to start on Jan. 23, 2017.
The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) is pursuing the French bank for some $2.1 billion in relation to the disputed trades.
In court filings seen by Reuters, the LIA alleges the trades were procured through a "fraudulent and corrupt scheme" involving the payment of $58.5 million to a Panamanian-registered company called Lenaida, controlled at the time by Libyan businessman Walid Giahmi.
SocGen has said it refutes the allegations and "any claim tending to question the lawfulness of these investments".
Giahmi's representatives have not responded to repeated requests for comment on the case.
Beltrami said that a parallel investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice had added to the workload, which meant that the timetable for the case had become very compressed.
A subpoena originally served on the New York branch of SocGen in April 2014 requires the production of all documents in the investment bank's possession or control regarding its business in Libya from 2004 to April 2014.
The LIA's response to the adjournment application, set out in its court filings, was that there was no need to move the trial date, which had been fixed since November 2014.
It argued that SocGen's disclosure exercise had been running for 22 months, which was more than ample time for a litigant with SocGen's resources to complete standard disclosure.
Beltrami also requested the adjournment on the grounds that the leadership dispute between two rival chairmen of the LIA -- Hassan Bouhadi and AbdulMagid Breish -- had yet to be resolved.
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As an interim measure, advisers BDO were appointed by the court in July 2015 to manage the litigation on the LIA's behalf.
However, Beltrami said the subsequent establishment of a United Nations-backed unity government in Libya had complicated matters.
"There's now a risk that both of them is the wrong person and has no authority," said Beltrami. "It's the lack of clarity that causes the concern."
In its court filings the LIA said the receivership posed no real risk to any of the defendants and provided no justification for an adjournment.
The LIA is also pursuing Goldman Sachs for $1.2 billion in a separate litigation. The trial is ongoing in London's High Court and Goldman Sachs is contesting the case vigorously.
(Reporting by Claire Milhench; Editing by Catherine Evans)
LONDON (Reuters) - Japan's SoftBank (9984.T) does not expect any regulatory obstacles to its deal to acquire British chip designer ARM Holdings (ARM.L), its chairman and CEO said on Monday.
"We do not see any major obstacles in getting approval from other countries," Masayoshi Son told reporters.
He said he did not anticipate any opposition from any of ARM'S major customers, including Apple (AAPL.O) and Samsung , saying there would be no conflict of interest with them.
(Reporting by Costas Pitas and Jemima Kelly; editing by Kate Holton)
LONDON (Reuters) - Japan's SoftBank Group (9984.T) made its first formal approach to buy UK chip designer ARM (ARM.L) after Britain voted to leave the European Union on June 23, a source close to the situation said.
The shock vote to leave the 28-member bloc has hammered sterling and hurt confidence in the British economy, but the share price in ARM has risen as the group's revenues are largely in dollars.
The source said the change in the value of the pound and the firm's share price meant the deal was around 7 percent more expensive than it would have been if it had happened a month ago.
The firm also briefed Britain's new prime minister, Theresa May, and finance minister, Philip Hammond, on the deal over the weekend ahead of the announcement on Monday.
(Reporting by Kate Holton; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
By Robert Smith and Laura Benitez
LONDON, July 18 (IFR) - SoftBank Group said it has "no immediate plans" to issue fresh debt to back its acquisition of UK chip designer ARM Holdings for 24bn.
SoftBank plans to finance its largest acquisition with 2.3trn (16.3bn) of cash on hand and a 1trn (7.1bn) bridge loan from Mizuho, according to a conference call on Monday. The bridge loan matures in July 2018.
Debt investors had initially anticipated a jumbo bond to take out the bridge loan, but a representative of SoftBank said this was not imminent, in response to a question on the call.
"No immediate plans," he said. "We have a one trillion bridge loan from Mizuho and the rest is cash, in terms of how this deal is being financed."
The Japanese telecoms and tech firm last tapped the international debt markets a year ago when it printed a 2.25bn and US$2bn deal in July, which included a 12-year euro tranche, its longest bond to date.
"I was looking forward to (another) jumbo deal," said one high-yield bond investor after SoftBank confirmed it had no plans to tap the market imminently.
SoftBank has US$70bn-equivalent of debt outstanding, including US$29bn at US subsidiary Sprint. It is rated Ba1/BB+ by Moody's/S&P, but on the call chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son said he considers the company "already investment grade", as the large publicly-listed equity stakes it holds mean it has "virtually, effectively no net debt".
"Yoda says in Star Wars 'Listen to the force'. If you listen to the force, this is the best company to invest in the debt," he said.
Son also addressed the heavy debt burden at Sprint, stating that the telecoms firm would be free cashflow neutral or positive by "the end of this year or beginning of next year".
"Sprint is becoming self-sufficient now, that's why it gives me room to consider the next big move," he said. "If it was last year I wouldn't consider this (acquisition), as I had to focus on turning around Sprint."
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The US firm is the largest issuer in the US high-yield market and some of its bonds slumped to cash prices in the low 60s and high 50s in January, caught in the crosshairs of a sharp sell-off in junk-rated debt.
While SoftBank has helped Sprint raise lease and spectrum financing, Son ruled out the possibility of providing additional capital to the US company when asked on the call.
"It does not even need SoftBank additional funding, it is self-sufficient, so why do you need to even discuss that?" he said.
(Reporting by Robert Smith and Laura Benitez, editing by Sudip Roy, Julian Baker)
LONDON (Reuters) - Bankers are set to share up to $120 million in fees thanks to SoftBank Group Corp's planned acquisition of British chip designer ARM Holdings, according to estimates on Monday.
Seven finance houses will divide the proceeds for working on the 24.3 billion pound ($32 billion) purchase by the Japanese company. Each side could pay out $50-60 million in fees to their respective advisers, the estimates by ThomsonReuters/Freeman Consulting showed.
Goldman Sachs and Lazard were the lead financial advisers to ARM and will receive the lion's share of the money, according to the estimates. UBS and Barclays were also on the ticket.
SoftBank is being advised by U.S. boutique The Raine Group and UK outfit Robey Warshaw, plus Japanese bank Mizuho Securities.
There will be a further windfall from the bridge financing, which is forecast to yield some $45 million in arrangement fees.
The transaction will give some succour to European bankers who had feared that Britain's vote to leave the European Union could leave a blank space in their deals calendar for the rest of the year.
Last year was a bumper year for mergers and acquisitions, providing plenty of paydays for advisers.
Bankers advising Royal Dutch Shell on its acquisition of British energy firm BG netted some $182.6 million in fees, according to estimates at the time.
Global M&A advisory fees fell 15 percent in the first half of 2016 against the same period last year, totalling some $11.5 billion. That is roughly in line with a 23 percent decrease in dealmaking this year, according to Thomson Reuters data.
($1 = 0.7554 pounds)
(Reporting by Freya Berry; Editing by Keith Weir)
Gunshots rang out in the Turkish city of Ankara on Friday, July 15, as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim confirmed there had been an attempt by part of the military in a coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Military jets and helicopters were also seen flying at low altitude in the skies above the city.
Helicopters were also seen in the skies above Istanbul, with soldiers closing both the Bosphorus and Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge in the city, according to Reuters. Credit: Twitter/HazalKoptagel
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From flags to undergarments, musicians get a lot of items chucked at them while they're on stageand Justin Bieber is no exception.
At a recent stop in New Jersey, Bieber responded to the long tradition of fans flinging their precious things at him with an unexpected comment.
SEE ALSO: Justin Bieber plays 'Pokemon Go', just like us
"Take this moment to listen and try not to get give me a hat or whatever you're trying to throw on stage right now, because I probably don't want that shit," he told the Beliebers.
"Sorry, that was mean," he immediately said.
He continued, mentioning that he was in the zone and the hat really threw him out of it, before launching into an inspirational monologue.
Fans also posted footage of Bieber apologizing for the comments later in the show, adding that the fan "ruined the moment."
This isn't the first time that Bieber has had an uncomfortable brush with fan gifts. In Argentina, Bieber was accused of throwing a flag back in the face of a fan.
Seoul (AFP) - Tens of thousands of South Korean auto and shipbuilding workers are set to launch partial strikes this week after negotiations over wage increases stalled.
Employees at Hyundai Motor -- the South's top automaker -- are set to walk off the job for at least four hours a day from Tuesday to Friday, a labour union spokesman told AFP.
About 75 percent of the firm's 48,800 unionised workers voted last week for the stoppages after months-long negotiations with management failed to meet their demand for a 7.2-percent pay rise and other benefits.
It would mark the fifth straight year of industrial action at the automaker. Hyundai, along with its smaller affiliate Kia, forms the world's fifth-largest carmaking group.
At the same time, workers at Hyundai Heavy Industries -- the world's largest shipbuilder by sales -- are set to walk off the job for at least four hours a day on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.
Some 60 percent of the 15,000 unionised workers approved the partial stoppage to demand a bigger wage rise and bonuses.
Workers of the two firms will hold a joint rally Wednesday in the southeastern industrial city of Ulsan, where both companies have their biggest plants, a Hyundai Heavy union spokesman said.
"We happened to go on strike at the same time so we decided to do this together," he told AFP.
It will be the first time in 23 years that workers in both firms have staged industrial action at the same time.
The planned strikes could cost both firms heavily. Hyundai Motor has suffered drops in quarterly profit for nearly two years due to slumping sales in China and currency swings.
Hyundai Heavy has been forced to shed thousands of jobs in recent years as part of state-led restructuring of the country's once-mighty shipbuilding industry.
The Ulsan-based firm has reported a net loss for two straight years totalling $4.4 billion, after a prolonged slump in oil prices and the global economic slowdown sapped demand for tankers and container ships.
The South's "Big Three" shipbuilders -- Hyundai, Samsung Heavy Industries and Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering -- have cut tens of thousands of jobs amid mounting losses, sparking angry protests from workers.
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For the second time ever, Elon Musk's SpaceX has landed one of its Falcon 9 rocket boosters back on land after launching a payload into orbit.
The Falcon 9 took flight at 12:45 a.m. ET Monday carrying an uncrewed Dragon capsule filled with thousands of pounds of supplies and experiments toward the International Space Station for NASA.
SEE ALSO: Elon Musk's SpaceX has chosen a rocket for its first true reusability test
Shortly after launch, the first stage of the rocket, known as the booster, separated and softly touched down on a pad in Florida as part of a spectacular nighttime landing.
This is the second booster SpaceX has brought back to land and the fifth the company has recovered after launching a payload into orbit.
The other three boosters were recovered on a drone ship in the ocean, a landing profile necessary for high-velocity missions that burn a lot of fuel.
Landing pad landings are somewhat easier than landing on a drone ship, because it's an easier target to hit. It does require more fuel for success, however, meaning that for missions that burn a lot of fuel, landing on a drone ship in the sea will be necessary.
SpaceX is performing rocket landings with the goal of eventually reducing the cost of launching to space by reusing rocket bodies for multiple spaceflights.
Currently, rockets are spent after launching one payload to space, but if reusable boosters become a reality, companies that hope to get their wares to space will only need to pay for the cost of the spacecraft and the fuel for launch.
Of course, SpaceX is still a long way from achieving that goal.
The company is expected to re-fly its first landed rocket sometime in September or October, but the actual mission it will launch hasn't yet been decided, according to SpaceX.
Musk's space outfit isn't the only one attempting to make reusable rockets a reality.
Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin has already flown a suborbital-class rocket four times, but to a much lower altitude than SpaceX.
Spain cut in half the number of feature films awarded subsidies this year in the first application round under a newly instated formula for awarding subsidies to the film industry. The country on Monday listed only 20 films that will receive &euro20 million ($22 million).
The Film Protection Fund now hands out the money before productions start based on "objective" criteria in the project stage as opposed to the previous method of awards after theatrical releases with a two-year lag in the disbursement of funds. There will be a second installment for 2016 at the end of the year, which will add another $11 million, probably for about 10 more films. That figure will still fall way below previous years where the amounts weighed in at $51 million in 2012 and $41 million in 2013.
One of the main ideas behind the new formula is to allow producers to access the funds before production, creating fewer but stronger state-funded films. Less than half of the 43 films that applied for aid received it in this first-time use of the new method.
The two systems will overlap for two years as the government pays off the remaining subsidies from 2014 and 2015.
Last year, the government decided that 47 films from 2013 would receive funding. In 2011, a total of 73 films were subsidized.
Juan Antonio Bayona's upcoming Marrowbone, Loreak directors Jon Garano and Aitor Arregi's Aundiya and Paco Plaza's El Expediente topped the list of films that made this year's cut and are the only three to take slices of just over $1.1 million.
Of the 20 films named, seven hail from TV network groups Telecinco and Antena 3, which have become the motor behind Spain's film production pipeline.
Spain has long had one of the smallest subsidy funds in Europe, a fraction of that of Italy, France and Germany.
Read More: Brexit: Three Possible Outcomes and What They Would Mean for the Entertainment Industry
COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lankan financial crime police arrested on Monday a brother of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa for a third time over suspicion of state fund misappropriation when he was economic development minister, a lawyer said. Rajapaksa's younger brother, Basil, is on bail after being arrested twice for alleged misappropriation of state funds and a land deal allegedly involving money laundering. Court hearings into the two cases are going on. Sri Lanka's new president, Maithripala Sirisena, faces pressure to act on allegations of corruption dating back to the Rajapaksa era, especially from civil society organizations who backed his successful bid to oust Rajapaksa last year. Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president for a decade until January 2015 and is now an opposition legislator, is popular among many ethnic majority Sinhala Buddhists who credit him with ending a 26-year-war against ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009. He is trying to rally opposition to the current government with the help of Basil. Basil Rajapaksa's lawyer, Jayantha Weerasinghe, told Reuters police had taken his client to court regarding the supply of building materials to district councils when he was a minister. "There is nothing illegal and it is an utterly false allegation," Weerasinghe said. Neither Basil Rajapaksa nor his family members were immediately available for comment. Several members of the Rajapaksa family are facing police investigations for alleged financial crimes. They include Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brothers Basil and Gotabaya. Mahinda Rajapaksa's eldest son, Namal Rajapaksa, who is also a member of parliament, was released by a court on bail on Monday, media reported. He was arrested on July 11 for suspected misappropriation of funds in a high-end apartment project. Namal Rajapaksa denies wrongdoing as do his father and other relatives facing investigations. (Reporting by Ranga Sirilal and Shihar Aneez; Editing by Robert Birsel)
The gunman who police say targeted and killed three officers in Baton Rouge, La. on Sunday often expressed his anger at law enforcement and the injustices he felt black Americans faced, but his family never thought hed lash out violently, his stepbrother said Monday.
Gavin Long, a 29-year-old former Marine from Missouri, died in a shootout with police officers after he opened fire on them outside of a convenience store in the southern city. Long killed three officers and wounded three others who were responding to a report of a man walking around with a rifle, authorities said.
Im really at a loss for words. I dont know him to be what I saw yesterday, Longs stepbrother, Joshua Woodley, told TIME. Its very difficult to process whats going on.
Long called himself a spiritual being and had self-published three self-help books on how to live holistically and healthily, said Woodley, 24, of Missouri. Long was also passionate about his podcasts, in which he refers to himself as Cosmo and talks about the recent shooting deaths of black men at the hands of police officers.
He didnt express all of his anger to me. I could tell he was upset, of course, said Woodley, citing his relatives blog entries and social media posts. I didnt know the severity of it. I didnt think it would reach this point today.
Long, who wore all black during his assault on officers, certainly was seeking out police, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said Monday, according to the Associated Press. His movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers, Edmonson said.
In one of his podcasts, Long says people need to do more than just protest, adding that all successful revolutions have come from bloodshed.
You got to fight back. Thats the only way that a bully knows to quit, he says. Youve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just like the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did. Thats what Nat Turner did. Thats what Malcolm did. You got to stand, man. You got to sacrifice.
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Long served in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, during which time he earned several awards, according to Yvonne Carlock, a Marines spokeswoman. He was promoted to a sergeant in 2008 and was deployed to Iraq, serving there from June 2008 to January 2009.
Long, a data network specialist, had received the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, an Iraq Campaign Medal and National Defense Service Medal, among other awards.
He was discharged honorably, and later attended Central Texas College and Clark Atlanta University, his stepbrother said. Long then moved to Africa, where he lived for about two years studying history and culture in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Ghana and Burkina Faso, according to one of his books.
He wanted to know more about African history, things that here in America they dont speak about, Woodley said. It was very, very important to him.
Thats where he penned his books, including his first one, The Cosmo Way: A W(H)olistic Guide for the Total Transformation of Melanated People.
Long and Woodley last spoke a few days before Long carried out his deadly ambush in Louisianas capital. Long had been in Houston to promote his books, his stepbrother said.
He was so smart. He read a lot of books. He had a lot to offer, Woodley said. I dont agree with anything that he did. I still cant believe he did it. It wasnt worth it. Ive been thinking about everything that has been going on. It wasnt worth it. It just wasnt worth it.
Long had changed his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra last May, Reuters reports, citing public records. He also had pledged affiliation to the Washitaw Nation, an African-American offshoot of the anti-government Sovereign Citizens Movement, according to the news agency.
On the day of the shooting, Long tweeted an ominous message: Just [because] you wake up every morning doesnt mean that youre living. And just [because] you shed your physical body doesnt mean that youre dead.
Stephen Colbert is no stranger to mocking the GOP, and the late night jokester was back at it Sunday, hijacking a microphone ahead of the RNC to poke fun at one of his favorite targets: Donald Trump.
Read: Colbert Rapport: 'Late Show' Host Shares Adorable Story About How He Knew His Wife Was the One
Colbert, who is in Cleveland all week recording The Late Show live from the RNC, dressed up as The Hunger Games MC Caesar Flickerman and called the event The hungry for power games.
"Look, I know I'm not supposed to be up here, but let's be honest, neither is Donald Trump," he said on stage Sunday at the Quicken Loans Arena.
Security eventually came and escorted the comedian off the stage.
The video has gotten more than 600,000 views in less than 24 hours after being posted.
This is not the first time Colbert has bashed the party. Prior to taking over The Late Show from David Letterman last year, he hosted Comedy Centrals wildly popular, The Colbert Report, where he portrayed a conservative, megalomaniacal talk show host.
Read: Donald Trump Tells Stephen Colbert About Obama's Birth: 'I Don't Talk About it Anymore'
In 2006, Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner and mocked then-President George W. Bush to his face.
The dinner, which occurred eight months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Colbert said: I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble, and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.
Watch: Well, That Was Awkward: Trump and Pence Clash in Their First Joint Interview
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Stephen Colbert is still hours away from airing his first live Late Show tied to the 2016 Republican National Convention but already footage of one of his sketches from this years event has popped up online.
Colbert, as his version of The Hunger Games Caesar Flickerman, did a Hungry for Power Games bit from the RNC stage, seemingly for his show.
Video shot on the convention floor and posted on YouTube features Colbert in his Caesar Flickerman garb, seemingly speaking about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
He has formed an alliance with Indiana governor Mike Pence, Colbert says in character before letting his head fall forward as if he suddenly went to sleep. Sorry I blacked out there for a moment.
In recent days, Colbert has regularly pretended to fall asleep when mentioning Pences name on his show.
He then bangs a gavel, launching the 2016 Republican Hungry for Power Games.
Read More: Jon Stewart to Join Stephen Colbert on The Late Show for the Republican National Convention
With that someone grabs Colberts elbow and struggles to get him off stage as Colbert can be heard saying, I know Im not supposed to be up here, but lets be honest, neither is Donald Trump.
Colbert is broadcasting four nights of live shows this week, tied to the RNC, and next week, tied to the Democratic National Convention, but all of them will be from the Late Shows home base of New Yorks Ed Sullivan Theater.
It seems, though, that Colbert couldnt stay away from Cleveland, stopping by over the weekend to tape at least the Hungry for Power Games bit. His Twitter account also posted a photo of him at the center of power for the convention.
At the center of power at the RNC pic.twitter.com/R8kBtEI7Hq
- Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) July 17, 2016
Colberts guests for Mondays show include Zoe Saldana Jennifer Saunders and Ron Suskind as well as a special appearance by Late Show executive producer Jon Stewart, news of which first surfaced at the end of last week. Its unclear, though, what role Stewart will play on tonights show.
Read More: Stephen Colbert Compares Bernie Sanders to Ned Stark on 'Game of Thrones
Here are 5 stocks added to the Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) List today:
Allegiant Travel Company ALGT focuses on the provision of travel services and products to residents of under-served cities in the United States. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings has been revised 3% downward over the last 30 days.
Aviva Plc AV provides long-term insurance and savings, general and health insurance, and fund management products and services worldwide. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings has declined 5.9% over the last 30 days.
ENSCO PLC ESV provides offshore contract drilling services to the oil and gas industry worldwide. It has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings being revised 5.7% downward over the last 30 days.
Fortinet Inc FTNT provides cyber security solutions for enterprises, service providers, and government organizations worldwide. The Zacks Consensus Estimate revision for its current year earnings was a negative 1.5% over the last 30 days.
W. R. Grace & Co GRA produces and sells specialty chemicals and materials worldwide. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings has moved 0.4% lower over the last 30 days.
View the entire Zacks Rank #5 List.
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A recent study proves that the images we see every day affect our self-esteem. (Photo: Getty Images)
It turns out youre probably more impressionable than you think. But dont take our word for it look to a recent study by researchers at Australias Macquarie University, which found that the vast majority of participants view their own bodies as abnormally thin when showed pictures of themselves digitally altered to appear heavier, and abnormally fat when showed their slimmed-down figures, according to New Zealands Stuff.
The possible effects of this phenomenon are far-reaching. Theres a link between the misperception of a persons own body size and eating disorders and chronic body image disorders, said associate professor Kevin Brooks, who led the study. And Brooks and his team found that it takes as little as two minutes of being exposed to another body type for most people to start turning negativity and criticism inward.
Societys ongoing preoccupation with ultra-slim bodies has resulted in body-positive movement in the past few years, but thinness is still in vogue and womens bodies are still heavily scrutinized by the media and beyond. Just last week, Jennifer Aniston wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post, in which she called out publications that criticize her body and send the wrong message to young girls.
If I am some kind of symbol to some people out there, then clearly I am an example of the lens through which we, as a society, view our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, female friends, and colleagues. The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. The way I am portrayed by the media is simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty, Aniston said. She calls cultural standards an unconscious agreement, which essentially encapsulates the findings of this study.
Body image is very dependent on your culture and what surrounds you, so Im not surprised that feelings about personal body image can change so quickly, says Senior Priory psychotherapist Julia Cole, of Priorys Wellbeing Centre in Southampton. Its really important for women in particular to develop a positive sense of themselves from an early age so that they can combat unrealistic expectations when they are teenagers and adults. The way to achieve this is to eat healthily, exercise regularly but importantly avoid images that are triggers for negative thoughts.
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Of course, if unrealistic bodies are plastered all over websites, ads, and social media and have a negative impact on women then the opposite holds true too: If were more inclusive of all body types when we represent women in a public forum, people will start to be positively influenced by other women who look like them, and their attitudes will be affected for the better. In other words, we have the power to control the message we send.
Psychotherapist and body image specialist Holli Rubin agrees. Limiting exposure to social media and being disciplined to switch off from all the imagery and visual noise will lessen its negative impact on self-esteem, she says. We know what [people in the media] seem to look like may more than likely not be real.
Overall, these results confirm that adaptation to images that have been manipulated to appear thinner or fatter than normal are effective in creating aftereffects of perceived body size, Brooks and his co-authors wrote. Such aftereffects increase over time, so if women are bombarded with unrealistic body images, their distorted senses of self are bound to last longer.
A woman can look perfectly normal in the literal sense of the word but still be negatively influenced by the images she sees every day. In the report, Brooks says that despite the fact that participants were in pretty good shape and are pretty psychologically healthy, the study shows we can till manipulate their perception and its very quick.
The study used 59 subjects in total psychology students from the university. Of the group, 24 students were shown digitally altered photos of other people, and 35 were exposed to altered images of themselves. In both cases, self-perception and self-esteem were affected alarmingly quickly.
Brooks believes that the results of this study strongly pertain to real life, and that we are influenced by external stimuli subconsciously every single day of our lives. Everything we think is normal is the result of all the aftereffects of a lifetime of stimulation, he says.
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Factory workers in the garment industry have long gone unnoticed to much of the world wearing the clothes they make. Following the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, they were still boiled down to nameless, faceless numbers: 1,134 killed.
Since the incident, there have been calls for reform, stricter regulations and more humane working conditions. But as with any industry, change takes time. However with the help of artist and activists like director Andrew Morgan, whose documentary, The True Cost, put the conditions of textile workers before audiences, consumers are slowly becoming more aware of what goes in to producing the clothes on their backs.
Read More: Elle King's Makeup Artist and Stylist Talks Badass Style for "Good Girls" Video
Shivam Punjya, founder of New York-based ethical clothing line Behno, is another industry member looking to enlighten shoppers. Earlier this year, Punjya invited photographer Dan Smith and videographer Kent Matthews to his factory in India to capture the female workers and to tell their stories. The 16 powerful portraits will be displayed this Wednesday at Sotheby's, with a silent auction and cocktail reception hosted by celebrity stylist Micaela Erlanger.
FACES: A portrait from Shivam Punjya's exhibit, "Dharmishtha." (Photo by Dan Smith)
"As someone who works with many different designers and brands and with conscientious celebrity clients, the conversation of ethical practices is one which comes up increasingly more often," Erlanger told Pret-a-Reporter. "I felt that I have a duty to bring awareness to this topic."
The stylist, who works with the likes of Lupita Nyong'o, Jennifer Hudson and Common, certainly has an extensive influence (44k followers on Instagram) - one which she hopes to use to not only showcase the artisans in factories but also to educate her ethically conscious fans. Some of the changes she hopes to see in the greater community are already being implemented in Punjya's company.
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"Behno really has made a mission to help put an end to the unethical treatment of women and workers, raise the standards and ensure that these employees are given rights, sustainable wages, and the insurance needed to live," she said of the contemporary luxury label that has been worn by the likes of Emma Watson and Alysia Reiner on the red carpet.
In speaking with Erlanger about his project, Punjya noted that they found many common interests, including the organization Labour Behind the Label, a British non-profit that works with brands to help them understand what Punjya refers to as "the invisible side of the industry."
Read More: Mane Monday: Gigi Hadid Resurrects Velcro Rollers for Bombshell Waves
As for how to achieve meaningful change, Erlanger said it all begins with awareness. "I have made it my mission to be incredibly informed regarding the production practices utilized in the garments I put on clients and in my own personal collection."
She continued, "Consumers are asking more questions and doing their research. People have a genuine interest in being knowledgeable and ethically conscious. I think the biggest tip is to pay attention and ask questions." Punjya agreed on this point, noting that young people in particular are instigating the movement. He also stressed the importance of "looking at garment workers in an artistic way," adding, "they are artists, not machines."
Punjya and the team hope to humanize and contextualize the workers. "We wanted to tell their stories in a way that's emotional, but not sad. We wanted to convey this in a very beautiful way."
Brace yourselves for a summer of Instajealously -- the fashion world has officially gone on vacation. But as the stars kick back and enjoy the good life, their social media updates are gold for updating your summer beauty look. Today, we show you how to get Gigi Hadid's sizzling tangerine style.
Gigi's latest Instagram post shows her reclining in the sunshine, rocking a slick beauty look that revolves around matching her nail polish to her lipstick color. The approach screams Hollywood siren, but by opting for a fiery orange instead of a classic red hue, the supermodel keeps things contemporary and edgy.
Red lip colors with orange undertones are hot right now, so there is plenty of choice on the market. NYX Cosmetics has just released a new Full Throttle Lipstick line, providing a waterproof pop of saturated matte color ideal for summer days lying around the pool, with shades including the bright orange 'Jolt' ($7). Alternatively, try Christian Louboutin's new Loubilaque gloss in the flame-hued Altressa ($58), or Dolce & Gabbana's Cream Classic Lipstick in sunny Delicious. Orange lipstick requires a bold approach, so make sure your lips are perfectly outlined and filled in.
When it comes to matching nails, Christian Louboutin's high-shine The Pops collection ($50) is a good bet -- opt for the vibrant coral shade Edgypopi - Popi for maximum impact. Nars' high gloss Nail Polish ($20) includes the deep mandarin red hue Hunger, while Yves Saint Laurent's La Laque Couture Nail Laqueur in Corail Colisee ($28) also strikes the balance between deep pink and orange.
Follow Gigi's lead and team the look with natural brows, a matte base and a sweep of golden eyeshadow to underline the summery vibe. Sephora's MicroSmooth Baked Eyeshadow Trio in Sunray ($19) or Kat Von D's Metal Crush Eyeshadow in Thrasher ($21), should fit the bill nicely. A coat of black mascara finishes the look off nicely, and then all that remains is to break out the shades, kick back and relax, supermodel style.
By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin DUBAI (Reuters) - More than 10 people accused of storming Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran in January appeared in a Tehran court on Monday, Iranian news agencies reported, weeks after President Hassan Rouhani urged the judiciary to take action. The suspects are accused of "disturbing the public order and damaging embassy buildings", according to state media. Around 10 other suspects were absent from the first hearing. Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic relations with its Shi'ite Muslim rival Iran after protesters stormed the kingdom's embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad following Riyadh's execution of a prominent Saudi Shi'ite cleric. The Iranian government condemned the assault and Rouhani, keen to improve Tehran's long-strained relations with neighbours and the West, asked the judiciary to punish the protesters and prevent further attacks. Such incidents have recurred throughout the Islamic Republic's 37-year history, often harming its foreign relations. Protesters attacked the U.S. embassy in 1979, Kuwait in 1987, Saudi Arabia in 1988, Denmark in 2006 and Britain in 2011. None of the assailants were convicted. Iran's judiciary announced in April that more than 100 suspects had been arrested over the attack on the Saudi missions and 48 charged. All were released on bail. At Monday's hearing, a 25-year-old defendant said he had learned of the protest action against the Saudi embassy from social media groups "said to be linked to the Revolutionary Guards", according to the ISNA news agency. The Revolutionary Guards Corps is the strongly anti-Western and most powerful military and security force in Iran. Some Guards commanders condemned the attack as a plot against Iran and suggested "foreign agents" had been behind it. ATTACK DAMAGED IRAN, KHAMENEI SAID "I didn't know the protest did not have a permit ... I am regretful as I broke the heart of the supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei)," ISNA quoted the unnamed defendant as saying. Khamenei, the highest authority in the Islamic Republic, has said the attack was "very bad and wrong" and had "damaged the country and Islam". A defence lawyer said two of his clients were absent from court as they were fighting in Syria against the rebels. Iran is allied with President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's civil war while Saudi Arabia has supported his opponents. Another defendant at Monday's hearing testified that he had been on an errand to a pharmacy but was arrested by security forces when he stopped his car to watch as protesters set fire to the embassy building. Some of the defendants said they had gathered in front of the embassy to protest against the "Saudis' crimes in the Yemen war," but they had not thrown stones or entered the building. One said he entered the embassy to help people who were caught in the fire. Speaking at the judiciary's annual gathering in June, Rouhani urged the courts to take action. "People want to know how the judiciary will deal with those who attacked the embassy against the law and Iran's national security," Rouhani said. "They are waiting to hear the verdicts for these rogue elements." Since reaching a landmark agreement last year on curbing its nuclear programme, Rouhani has sought to repair Iran's international relations. But the embassy assault harmed that effort and caused Saudi allies such as Bahrain and Sudan to sever diplomatic relations. The United Arab Emirates downgraded its ties. The second hearing will be held on Tuesday, state news agency IRNA said. (Editing by Mark Heinrich and Robin Pomeroy)
Taiwan has arrested three foreign suspects over a $2.5 million cyberheist which used malware to hack into a major local bank's ATM network and steal bags of cash, police said Monday.
The attack, the first of its kind in Taiwan, targeted the First Commercial Bank's ATM network last week, using malware to withdraw more than Tw$81 million ($2.5 million) from dozens of machines in three cities.
A Latvian suspect, identified as Andrejs Peregudovs, was arrested by police in the northeastern county of Yilan after being spotted by an off duty police officer from Taipei who was on holiday in the area.
Two other suspects from Romania and Moldova were arrested Sunday at a hotel in Taipei, police said, adding they believed the heist was carried out by a 16-member international crime ring.
"This is the first ATM theft by a foreign crime ring in our country," the police said in a statement.
Police have recovered more than half of the stolen money, but warned that 13 of the suspects -- including five Russians -- had already fled Taiwan after the heist.
"We will continue to search for the rest of the stolen money to let international hackers know that Taiwan is not a crime haven," the statement said.
Police have sought assistance from both Interpol and Russia's de facto embassy in Taiwan.
Surveillance images released by the bank showed masked robbers working in two-man teams targeting 41 ATMs belonging to the First Commercial Bank in three cities.
It is not clear how the thieves installed malware on the ATMs, but within five to 10 minutes, the thieves are seen walking away with bags full of stolen cash, the bank said.
After the theft was discovered, more than 1,000 ATMs of the same type targeted in the heist have been shut down by banks nationwide.
Taylor Swift is not only pissed at Kanye West for taping a phone call in which the two discussed the emcees Famous lyrics, shes willing to see him prosecuted for it.
TMZ reported on Monday that the pop-country star threatened the rapper with criminal prosecution months ago for allegedly secretly recording their conversation. Thats illegal in the state of California, where West was reportedly located for his end of the telephone discussion.
Recording a phone call without both parties consent is a felony in the Golden State.
Also Read: Taylor Swift Rips Kanye, Kim for Leaked Famous Lyrics Convo (Video)
The letter from Swifts attorney states: Demand is hereby made that you immediately destroy all such recordings, provide us of assurance that this has been done, and also assurance that these recordings have not been previously disseminated, per the Hollywood gossip website, which claims to have a copy.
In addition to the potential criminal prosecution, Swift can also file an actual lawsuit.
Swifts publicist did not immediately return TheWraps request for comment.
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By Valerie Volcovici and Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. oil refiners Tesoro Corp and Par Hawaii Refining reached a $425 million settlement with the United States on Monday to resolve air quality violations at six refineries in Western states, the government announced on Monday. The accord requires the companies to invest $403 million in new equipment to better control air emissions at operations in Alaska, Northern California, North Dakota, Utah, Hawaii and Washington, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency said. Tesoro is required to pay a $10.45 million civil penalty and spend about $12 million to fund environmental projects in local communities that were affected by pollution, the government added. "We are pleased to have reached agreement on this consent decree that allows us to fully implement the required procedures and investments to further improve our environmental performance, said Keith Casey, Tesoro's executive vice president for operations. Tesoro sold its Kapolei refinery to Par Pacific Holdings, the parent company of Par Hawaii Refining, in 2013. Par Hawaii Refining, its subsidiary, said in a statement that Tesoro is obligated to "pay all applicable fines and penalties related to the consent decree," which is estimated at $30 million. It will install leak detection and repair equipment at its refinery and make additional improvements to reduce air pollutants and emissions, the company said. John Cruden, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Environmental and Natural Resources Division, said the settlement requires "cutting edge technology to address global issues like climate change." Monday's settlement addresses a variety of allegations, including leak detection, repair and flaring violations of the Clean Air Act. Once the new technology is installed, the government expects annual emissions reductions at the six refineries to total an estimated 773 tons of sulfur dioxide, 407 tons of nitrogen oxide, 1,140 tons of volatile organic compounds, 27 tons of hazardous air pollutants, 20 tons of hydrogen sulfide and the equivalent of 47,034 tons of carbon dioxide. This settlement puts new enforcement ideas to work that will dramatically cut pollution and protect communities," said Cynthia Giles, the assistant administrator for the EPA's enforcement and compliance assurance. The Justice Department, the EPA, the attorneys general for Alaska and Hawaii, and the Northwest Clean Air Agency filed the their complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. There will be a 30-day public comment period on the proposed settlement. (By Valerie Volcovici and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Alan Crosby and Matthew Lewis)
The third victim of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shooting has been identified as East Baton Rouge Sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, multiple outlets report.
According to The Advocate, CNN and WITN, Garafola, 45, was one of three officers who were shot and killed by a gunman on Sunday.
"Everybody on this street depended on him," Garafola's wife Tonja Garafola told The Advocate."He loved us so much. He was always bragging about his family."
According to The Advocate, Garafola leaves behind four children a 21-year-old son who lives in Texas, a 15-year-old daughter, 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
"He was a great guy. Not just a great law enforcement, he was a great husband and a great father," Tonja said. "He didn't deserve this. He always helped everybody."
The other victims have been identified as Baton Rouge Police Department officers Matthew Gerald, 41, and Montrell L. Jackson, 32.
According to the New York Times Jackson commented on the recent killing of Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge, which led to nationwide protests.
"I'm tired physically and emotionally," Jackson, 32, reportedly wrote on July 8. "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. I've experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core."
"This city MUST and WILL get better," he continued, according to screenshots taken from his page and the Times. "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."
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At 9 a.m. police received a call of a "suspicious person" walking down Airline Highway with a gun. The suspect, who was later identified as 29-year-old Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, opened fire when police arrived on the scene. He later died in a shootout with police.
At a press conference Sunday afternoon, Gov. John Bel Edwards said: "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."
Photo:Facebook/delicateflower
Last week, 29-year-old model Dani Mathers secretly photographed a naked woman taking a shower at the gym and posted the image on Snapchat with the caption, If I cant unsee this then you cant either.
Since this despicable act took place, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched an official investigation into the incident, and the 2015 Playboys Playmate of the Year gym membership at L.A. Fitness has also been permanently revoked. (Surprise, surprise.)
And many women still have lots to say on this upsetting matter, including Facebooks Delicate Flower, who took to social media on July 16th to post a Dear Dani Mathers messagea message that has received over 16,500 Likes.
The 510, 194-pound woman included a naked photo of herself (censored with the black bar, which was considered a #liberated movement by Kim Kardashian and Emily Ratajkowski earlier this year) and introduced Mathers to her lumpy, bumpy glory with the hashtags #UnSeeTHIS and #AllBodiesAreBeautiful.
Along with the thousands of Likes followed an outpouring of heartfelt messages. But even the woman behind Delicate Flower didnt expect this tremendous amount of attention.
I expected maybe a couple of hundred comments, Christine Blackmon tells Yahoo Beauty. At first when I saw the amount of shares, I thought, Oh my God, my bumpy butt is all over the place! But once I saw everybody posting [in response], I was so proud of them.
The Army veteran, wife, and mother refers to some of the comments that she considers astounding, like a number of females whove been fighting various illnesses.
One of the women had a metabolic issue and she was sick of people saying, You dont look good. You dont look healthy. Everyone likes curves better than sticks, recalls Blackmon. Its not okay to shame somebody big, but why is it okay to shame somebody thin?
Theres also the new mom who posted a photo of herself holding her six-month-old child. She said, This baby wrecked my body and my husband wont have anything to do with me anymore, but it was worth it. I just cried. Shes really beautiful.
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There were even a few men who chimed in on the issue. They posted, I tell my wife this all the time, but she wont listen to me. That was great, too!
While Blackmon is flattered with the ongoing compliments, she wants to set the record straight about those who now consider her to be a courageous warrior.
Im no different than anyone else, she states. Ive gotten a lot of people saying to me, I wish I could be so bold and so confident! Yes, I was in the army, and one day Id be thinking, This body has made babies, climbed mountains and has jumped out of planes! But Ive also posted when Ive literally melted down and cried on the floor in a Marshalls changing room because I felt fat and ugly. Please dont put it out there that Im some, I love my body and everybody should have mad, crazy confidence like I do. Im no different [than other women]. I just try to surround myself with people who will try to pull me up when I dont have the strength to do it.
In order to improve her internal dialogue, Blackmon has been making an effort to put everything in perspective. Im a widow, and I know its so easy to get sucked into feeling about how sh*t your life could be, she admits. But theres always someone looking at you, saying, I wish I had what she had.
And she remembers this theory when she begins judging herselfand her body.
I think all of us are critical of ourselves, and as much I can be critical of myself, Im also keenly aware that my before picture is somebody elses after picture, states the 42-year-old whos partnered with a newly-launched genetic-based skincare line, Targeted Skin. So sure, I look at pictures my husband takes of me, and Ill think, Oh, my arms look so fat, because Im comparing it to myself from a few years ago. But someone else may be thinking, What are you complaining about? I would give anything to look that way. So I try to be appreciative of that.
And thousands of women are appreciative of you, Delicate Flower!
Have a beauty story youd like to share with us? Email YStyleBeauty@yahoo.com.
For months, members of Congress have been at odds over how much money the United States ought to spend on fighting the Zika virus.
The World Health Organization declared Zika a global emergency back in early February, around the time the Obama Administration asked Congress for $1.9 billion in emergency money to combat the mosquito-borne virus. Republicans balked at that request, and many of them dismissed it as unnecessary. If the White House wanted money to fight Zika, they said, it would have to dip into the funding already set aside to combat ebola.
More than five months passed, and Zika has proved to be worse, in many ways, than health officials feared. A suspected link between the virus and the grave birth defect microcephaly was confirmed. Scientists learned that Zika can cause devastating outcomes, including death, in infected children and adultsnot just among fetuses. And it became clear that the virus is spread not just by infected mosquitoes but through sexual contact. Health officials are only just beginning to understand the enormous scope of Zikas impact, and the threat of an outbreak in the United States remains acute. The first death caused by Zika was recorded in the United States earlier this month.
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Yet when members of Congress embarked on a seven-week recess last week, they failed to resolve the question of whether to approve money to combat Zika.
Without ensuring there are sufficient resources available for research, prevention, control, and treatment of illnesses associated with the Zika virus, the United States will be ill equipped to deploy the kind of public-health response needed to keep our citizens safe and healthyespecially since the spread of mosquito-borne illness is accelerated during the summer months, the American Medical Association said in a statement on Thursday.
Thats part of why Congresss failure to act has stunned even those who track the legislative body closest. Nobody should be surprised when the present House of Representatives, dominated by penurious reactionaries, produces a stingy response to a danger that calls for compassionate largess, The New York Times editorial board wrote in May, But for sheer fecklessness its hard to top the Houses response ... to the Zika virus.
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One Republican who has pushed for Zika funding is Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whose statealong with Texasis considered to be among the highest risk regions in the U.S. for an outbreak of the virus.
It is the obligation of the federal government to keep our people safe, Rubio said in remarks on the Senate floor back in April. There is no such thing as a Republican position on Zika or Democrat position on Zika because these mosquitoes bite everyone.
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As of last week, the CDC reported 1,305 cases of Zika in the United States, but no local cases of transmissionmeaning mosquitoes arent known to be spreading the virus in the United States at this point. But even if the United States avoids a serious outbreak this summer, the fight over Zika funding reveals a much larger problem with the way Congress thinks about the role of the United States in public health emergencies.
Even if the United States didnt have a moral obligation to use its substantial resources and global standing to fight diseases like Zika, several public-health officials told me, protecting U.S. citizens requires looking beyond the countrys borders.
Knowing this is a disease transmitted by mosquitoes and by humans means we should be investigating it as if were part of the world, and not shielded from it, said Paul Farmer, the physician and humanitarian.
An isolationist attitude toward public health may seem to some members of Congress like a way to save money, but its an approach that doesnt actually reflect how diseases spread. A failure to act globally, Farmer says, puts everyone at risk.
Its very frustrating, he added. If it werent for Bill and Melinda Gates, Im not sure wed be approaching polio eradication. Why should very wealthy individuals have to bear that burden?
There have been some promising signs that hint at the possibility of bipartisan cooperation on matters of public health: The National Institutes of Health, which is the worlds largest source of public research funding, is poised to receive an increase in funding for the second consecutive year. Last week, a House committee cleared the way for a $1.25 billion increase to the agencys budget for 2017a smaller amount than the $2 billion its Senate counterpart approved, but an increase nonetheless. (Overall, the NIH is likely to receive roughly $33 billion to $34 billion.)
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But even with a better-funded NIH, scientists will still turn to Congress for emergency funding requests, as in the case of the Zika virus. Its possible we are entering a period of more such crises, many have suggested. Looking more broadly, Zika may be representative of the kind of disease that increasingly characterizes the modern eraan illness that thrives, in large part, because of how human activity has affected the planet, Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and an expert in neglected tropical diseases, wrote in an essay for PLOS NTD earlier this year. Forces like climate change, urbanization, deforestation, and political destabilization all nurture the outbreak of diseases like Ebola, Zika, and other mosquito-borne sicknesses.
If Zika hasnt prompted Congress to act, its unclear whatif anythingactually will.
Read more from The Atlantic:
This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three U.S. states plan to unveil new lawsuits against Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) on Tuesday tied to the automaker's sale of diesel vehicles with emissions-cheating software, even after they announced settlements with the German automaker in June.
Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh said in a news release that he would disclose details of the Volkswagen suit on Tuesday that accuses VW of violating state environmental laws and defrauding regulators.
New York state and Massachusetts are filing separate lawsuits related to the same issue, according to a source. Frosh said the states are seeking civil penalties, injunctive relief and other penalties.
New York state said last month it had reached a "partial settlement" with the automaker - joined by 43 other states including Maryland and Massachusetts - worth a total of $603 million. Volkswagen said that settlement was to resolve existing and potential state consumer protection claims.
The suits are the latest sign the automaker's legal troubles stemming from the massive diesel emissions scandal are far from over. VW also faces an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation.
Last month, the German automaker announced a settlement with federal and state regulators and lawyers for 475,000 owners of 2.0 liter polluting diesel cars worth up to $15.3 billion - including the $603 million state settlement.
A spokesman for New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman declined to comment Monday or confirm the state is filing a lawsuit.
"These partial settlements announced today exact a stiff price from Volkswagen for its deception of consumers and the environmental damage it has caused in New York and across the country," Schneiderman said last month, noting the state's ongoing investigation.
Volkswagen faces a July 26 hearing before a federal judge seeking preliminary approval for its $14.7 billion settlement with federal regulators and owners, and it still must address claims from 85,000 owners of larger 3.0 liter vehicles and its dealers.
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Last week, California's chief air regulator rejected a proposed recall plan from Volkswagen to fix 3.0-liter diesels in the state equipped with devices designed to evade emissions tests.
The California Air Resources Board said it will not have enough data at least until December to make a determination on whether a 3.0-liter fix would work for all vehicles. If no fix is possible, the company may have to buy back the vehicles, which could add billions to the cost of its buy-backs.
VW is also in talks with its 650 dealers, who have been prevented from selling nearly 12,000 new diesel cars after regulators barred the sale of new polluting diesel vehicles last year.
VW spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan said the company is in regular talks with dealers "as we work to make things right. We cannot comment further on ongoing discussions."
VW is holding meetings with its dealers - including sessions this week in Nevada, Florida and Texas, dealers said. So far, only a small number of U.S. VW dealers have sued the automaker.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Paul Simao and Andrew Hay)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Three students on a study abroad program in France were wounded and another was missing in Thursday's Bastille Day attack in Nice, the University of California, Berkeley, said on Friday. The university identified the missing student as Nicolas Leslie, 20, one of 85 Berkeley students on a 15-day study abroad trip on entrepreneurship in Europe. Two of the other students who suffered broken bones have been released after medical treatment, while the third injured student remains at a hospital, the university said. "May Nicolas Leslie be found safe," the University of California's flagship campus posted on Facebook Friday, along with the hashtag #PrayforNice and the image of a heart painted like the tri-color French flag. A Texan and his 11-year-old son on a family vacation were also among at least 84 people killed when an attacker crashed a heavy truck through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in the French seaside city, officials said on Friday. The Berkeley students were studying at a program affiliated with the international European Innovation Academy in Nice, the university said. The program was suspended temporarily as France marks three days of mourning, and students will be given the option of returning home early, the university said. Leslie, a junior in the university's College of Natural Resources, was not listed among the dead in the attack, but family members have not been able to reach him, a woman who said she was a family friend said in an interview. "The last thing that we heard from one of his friends is that he was seen running off," said the woman, who gave only her first name, Antonella. Leslie, who was born in Italy and grew up in the San Diego area, was a U.S. national, university spokesman Roqua Montez said. The injured students were Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, a computer science major who suffered a broken leg, and Diane Huang, 20, who studies environmental economics and suffered a broken foot in the attack. Both students were back in their dormitories in Nice. The third student, Daryus Medora, 21, whose leg was broken, remains at a hospital. In the attack, a man identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plowed into a crowd of some 30,000 local people and tourists attending a fireworks display to celebrate Bastille Day. At least 84 people were killed, 10 of them children, and 202 more were wounded. French officials said Friday that Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian resident of Nice, was known to police for petty crime and violence, but had not been suspected of Islamist militancy. (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California, and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by James Dalgleish and Richard Chang)
The following timeline charts the origin and spread of the Zika virus from its discovery nearly 70 years ago:
1947: Scientists researching yellow fever in Uganda's Zika Forest identify the virus in a rhesus monkey
1948: Virus recovered from Aedes africanus mosquito in Zika Forest
1952: First human cases detected in Uganda and Tanzania
1954: Virus found in Nigeria
1960s-80s: Zika detected in mosquitoes and monkeys across equatorial Africa
196983: Zika found in equatorial Asia, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan
2007: Zika spreads from Africa and Asia, first large outbreak on Pacific island of Yap
2012: Researchers identify two distinct lineages of the virus, African and Asian
201314: Zika outbreaks in French Polynesia, Easter Island, the Cook Islands and New Caledonia. Retrospective analysis shows possible link to birth defects and severe neurological complications in babies in French Polynesia
March 2, 2015: Brazil reports illness characterized by skin rash in northeastern states
July 17: Brazil reports detection of neurological disorders in newborns associated with history of infection
Oct. 5: Cape Verde has cases of illness with skin rash
Oct. 22: Colombia confirms cases of Zika
Oct. 30: Brazil reports increase in microcephaly, abnormally small heads, among newborns
Nov. 11: Brazil declares public health emergency
November 2015-January 2016: Cases reported in Suriname, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay, Venezuela, French Guiana, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Guyana, Ecuador, Barbados, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Curacao, Jamaica
Feb. 1: World Health Organization (WHO) declares public health emergency of international concern
Feb. 2: First case of Zika transmission in United States; local health officials say likely contracted through sex, not mosquito bite
Feb. 5: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says virus being actively transmitted in 30 countries, mostly in the Americas
Feb. 8: U.S. President Barack Obama requests $1.8 billion to fight Zika
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Feb. 12: Brazil investigating potential link between Zika infections and 4,314 suspected cases of microcephaly. Of those, 462 confirmed as microcephaly and 41 determined to be linked to virus
Feb. 17: Brazil investigating potential link between Zika and 4,443 suspected cases of microcephaly. Of those, 508 confirmed as microcephaly and most of those cases are linked to the virus. WHO seeks $56 million to fight Zika.
Feb. 18: CDC adds Aruba and Bonaire to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 32.
Feb. 23: CDC investigating 14 cases of possible sexual transmission of Zika. CDC also adds Trinidad and Tobago and Marshall Islands to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 34.
Feb. 25: Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases number more than 580 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil is investigating an additional 4,100 suspected cases of microcephaly.
Feb. 27: France detects first sexually transmitted case of Zika.
Feb. 29: CDC adds St. Maarten, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 36.
March 1: Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases rose to 641 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil is investigating an additional 4,222 suspected cases of microcephaly.
March 8: WHO advises pregnant women to avoid areas with Zika outbreak and said sexual transmission of the virus is "relatively common."
March 9: CDC adds New Caledonia to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 37.
March 15: Cuba reports first case of Zika contracted in the country.
March 16: Cape Verde identifies first case of microcephaly.
March 18: CDC says during Jan. 1, 2015 to Feb. 26, 2016, 116 residents of the United States had evidence of recent Zika virus infection based on laboratory testing.
Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases rose to 863 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil is investigating an additional 4,268 suspected cases of microcephaly.
March 19: CDC adds Cuba to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 38.
March 21: South Korea confirms first case of Zika.
March 22: CDC adds Dominica to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 39. Bangladesh confirms first case of Zika virus.
Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases rose to 907 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil is investigating an additional 4,293 suspected cases of microcephaly.
March 29: Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases rose to 944 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil said the number of suspected cases of microcephaly dropped slightly to 4,291.
March 31: According to the World Health Organization, there is a strong scientific consensus that Zika can cause the birth defect microcephaly as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can result in paralysis, though conclusive proof may take months or years.
April 1: CDC adds Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 40.
April 4: CDC adds Fiji to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 41.
April 5: Vietnam reports first Zika infections.
April 6: Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases rose to 1,046 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. The number of suspected cases of microcephaly dropped to 4,046.
April 7: St. Lucia confirms first two cases of Zika, contracted locally.
April 12: Brazil says confirmed microcephaly cases rose to 1,113 and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. The number of suspected cases of microcephaly dropped to 3,836. It was the second week in a row that the overall total figure fell.
April 13: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that infection with the Zika virus in pregnant women is a cause of the birth defect microcephaly and other severe brain abnormalities in babies. The CDC said now that the causal relationship has been established, several important questions must still be answered with studies that could take years.
CDC adds St. Lucia to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 42.
April 14: Colombia confirms two microcephaly cases linked to Zika.
April 18: Peru reports first case of sexually transmitted Zika virus.
CDC adds Belize to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 43.
April 19: Chilean authorities find Zika mosquito for first time in decades.
April 25: Canada confirms first sexually transmitted Zika case.
April 26: Brazil says the number of confirmed cases of microcephaly climbed to 1,198 from 1,168 in the week through April 23, but suspected ones under investigation continued to decline to 3,710 from 3,741 a week ago.
Brazil registered 91,387 likely cases of the Zika virus from February until April 2, the health ministry said, in its first national report on the epidemic.
April 29: Puerto Rico reports first death related to Zika, according to the CDC. The country also confirmed 683 Zika cases, including 65 pregnant women, and five suspected cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome from Zika, the CDC reported.
May 4: Panama confirms four microcephaly cases tied to Zika.
May 6: Spain gets first case of Zika-related brain defect in a fetus.
May 9: CDC adds Papua New Guinea, Saint Barthelemy and Peru to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 46.
Honduras suspects first case of microcephaly in Zika patient.
May 11: Brazil says the number of confirmed cases of microcephaly dropped to 1,326 in the week through May 7 as doctors and Brazilian health officials find that some suspected cases of microcephaly are not the disorder. Suspected ones under investigation continued to decline to 3,433.
May 12: CDC adds Grenada to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 47.
May 13: Puerto Rico reports first case of Zika-related microcephaly.
May 20: WHO says an outbreak of Zika virus on the African island chain of Cape Verde is of the same strain as the one blamed for birth abnormalities in Brazil.
May 24: Brazil reports the number of confirmed cases of microcephaly at 1,434 for the latest week to May 21. Suspected ones under investigation declined to 3,257.
May 26: CDC adds Argentina to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 48.
June 9: WHO issues updated guidelines on prevention of sexual transmission of the Zika virus, including advising women living in areas where the virus is being transmitted to delay getting pregnant.
June 14: El Salvador confirms first case of microcephaly linked to Zika.
June 23: CDC reports seven babies in the United States with microcephaly or other Zika-related birth defects such as serious brain abnormalities, and five lost pregnancies from either miscarriage, stillbirth or termination.
June 28: First baby with Zika-related birth defect microcephaly born in Florida.
June 30: CDC adds Anguilla to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 49.
Guinea-Bissau confirms three cases of Zika, government says.
Spain records first case of sexually transmitted Zika virus, health authorities said.
July 8: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a Utah resident's death last month is the first Zika-related death in the continental United States.
July 14: CDC adds Saint Eustatius to countries and territories with active outbreaks, bringing total to 50.
July 18: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that caregiver of Utah man who died of Zika tested positive for virus.
SOURCES: World Health Organization, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Reuters
(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by the Americas Desk)
If youre heading to the parks for the first time in a while, theres tons of new stuff to take in. For example, visitors can now breeze onto the newest attractions (and grab the very best seat!) as well as cool off with all things frozen, both slushies and princesses.
If it seems like too much to handle, dont worryour insider tips are here to help.
Here are our proven tricks for living it up like an expert in Disney World this summer:
Grab the very best seat on Frozen Ever After.
The brand-new ride has garnered one of the longest queue times at EPCOT, but for Frozen fanatics, its totally worth it. Get up close to your favorite characters by requesting certain seats within the attractions boats. Olaf fans should sit toward the right, where all three of the warm-hug-loving snowmans appearances will be, and any Elsa-obsessed youngns should sit in the front to get the very best view of her mid-ride rendition of Let It Go. Impartial to either? Sit toward the back. Youll get the best perspective of the ride as a whole, even if it includes other guests cell phones.
Leave yourself plenty of time to experience the new Norway.
The Frozen-themed ride has been experiencing sporadic mechanical difficulties since it opened in June, causing wait times to fluctuate. Head over to Epcots Norway Pavilion first thing in the morning to line up before the waits top out, and be sure you dont have any lunch reservations for early that afternoon in case of any malfunctions. Afterwards, enter Royal Sommerhus to meet Elsa and Anna face-to-face in their summertime cabin. (This is the only place for meet-and-greets with the princesses; Olaf meet-and-greets currently take place at Hollywood Studios.)
Beware the Anna and Elsa gift shop.
The merchandise game is strong at Epcots newest attraction, and the ride shop is packed with become-a-princess kits that will transform your child into Arendelles young royals. There are gloves, purses, wigs and full-on gorgeous gowns for both Elsa and Annaand theyll cost a pretty penny. If you dont have your Halloween costumes in order and are bad at saying no, consider this your warning!
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For Star Wars fans, the force and the wait will be with you.
If youre ride or die for the Rebel Alliance, youll definitely want to experience Hollywood Studios brand new nighttime show Star Wars: A Galactic Spectacularand if you want the full experience, youre going to have to get there early. The show, which employs pyrotechnics and plenty of visual surprises is a sight worth seeing, but because there are more projections than fireworks (its said this was changed in order to avoid wildlife disruption at Animal Kingdom), youll need to be within closer range to see everything thats happening. Plan to arrive at least an hour beforehand if you want to see it without obstruction.
Brace yourself for the heat.
If youve never been to the Florida parks in the middle of summer, it can sometimes be even hotter than you planned for. Shade can be minimal within the parks, so pack hats, sunscreen, and cooling towels. A portable fan is a good idea, too, and as counterintuitive as it may sound, an extra layer in case the indoor AC is too strong. Try your best to take sit-down breaks for lunchits a great opportunity to recharge and stay out of the afternoons strong rays.
Experience Magic Kingdoms new stage show late in the day.
Try to attend each afternoons final performance, when the crowd may be smaller and the temperature will be at least a few degrees lower. And, if you have to stave off some young Frozen obsessives to enjoy the show instead of naptime, feel free to give them the promise of princesses.
Cool down with some delectable frozen delights.
There are plenty of ice-cold treats thatll keep you cooler longer than a melty cone of frozen yogurt. Opt for a frozen pineapple-coconut slushy at Epcots Electric Umbrella, or head over to the World Showcase for Japanese shaved ice at Kabuki Cafe. At Animal Kingdom, visit Harambe Market for a strawberry passion fruit Frozen Flamingo. And, at Magic Kingdom, try a raspberry-lemonade slushie at Cheshire Cafe or the signature frozen apple Lefous Brew Gastons Tavern. Over in Disney Springs? Pop by the Yesake kiosk for sake slushies, or Morimoto Asias Street Food counter for a pick-a-flavor black tea slush.
See the new Soarin how it was intended...
In case you havent heard, the beloved virtual hang glider now flies over monuments and landscapes across the world instead. Soarin Over The Horizon showcases monolithic buildings and global scenery, zooming past plenty more than the more simple, scenic version park guests are used to. To see it in its full glory, request to sit in the front center section. This way, the castles, pyramids, and monuments can be seen without the curvature of the massive domed IMAX screen skewing their appearance.
...unless youve got little ones in tow.
Believe it or not, young children may be a bit scared of this new take on Soarin. While the previous version was more tranquil, the new quick cuts between segments can somewhat intense. Small children or ones who frighten easily may be more sensitive to the newer film, so be sure to take it into consideration.
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Hiddleston in his Nike running kit. (Photos: Splash; Graphic: Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Style)
If youd asked me a month ago how Id describe Tom Hiddlestons style, I probably wouldve replied, Who? And then, Oh, wait. Is he a British actor?
But as the power couple known collectively as Hiddleswift has taken hold of my fantasies and Facebook feed, thats obviously no longer the case. I can now tell you, confidently, that Thomas William Hiddlestons style consists of exactly two outfits (that is, when he isnt on the red carpet or in a film): one for running outdoors and one for doing errands or chillin with the love of his life, Taylor Swift.
The former is a simple, all-black Nike ensemble: a black tee, black gym shorts, black socks, and black sneakers. Its what you might expect either a New Yorker or the member of a stage crew to wear while working out. The latter, while a bit more varied, remains equally monotonous: a quilted, navy blue jacket (Ralph Lauren), a solid colored tee or polo, dark rinse jeans, and gray suede lace-up shoes.
Outfit No. 2. He never goes out of style or does he? (Photos: Splash; Graphic: Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Style)
Thats it. He wears NOTHING ELSE. His girl goes about wearing new cute outfits every single day, while her partners wardrobe remains remarkably unchanged. And the Hiddleswifters have begun to take notice:
Dont mean to be bitchy, but does Tom Hiddleston only have that one jacket?! @taylorswift13 take him shopping. #TaylorSwift Mushka (@mushkagg) July 17, 2016
What I enjoy most about the whole Taylor Swift/Tom Hiddleston situation, is that he seems to have only 1 jacket. Melissa (@meliperr) July 9, 2016
The situation has become so severe that an account called @HiddlesFashion (<3 2016 <3) wrote up a long Instagram caption detailing the history of Hiddlestons coat:
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For real I am so tired of hearing people (media) continuously talking about Tom Hiddlestons jacket, the fan shared. He should be applauded for using sustainable fashion; not mocked because he doesnt feel the need to put on a fashion show every day. OK, got that one settled: Tom Hiddleston is a sustainable fashion pioneer!!
But what about the black Nike workout gear, which hiddlesfashion refers to as his @nike contract audition? Yes, it could be a matter of his being an extremely light packer. But could it also be Hiddlestons attempt at boring the paparazzi into submission? I have no idea how hounded he was for photos prior to his Swift romance, but photographers have certainly been after him since mid-June.
Theres also the possibility (though it seems less likely as the day go on) that the entire Hiddleswift union is part of an elaborate production on Swifts part to promote an upcoming album in which case, Hiddlestons many outfit repeats are due to the projects wardrobe guidelines, including reshoots, etc. I mean, maybe Nike and Ralph Lauren are sponsors?! Stranger things have happened.
But whatever the reason for Hiddlestons stagnant sartorialisms we truly hope hes got a regular laundry schedule to go along with it.
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Peter Sagan won the 16th stage of the Tour de France in a photo finish Monday as defending champion Chris Froome retained his yellow jersey lead.
Sagan of Slovakia edged Alexander Kristoff of Norway at the line as the race crossed into Switzerland. Norwegian Sondre Enger was third in the 130-mile stage from Moirans-en-Montagne, France, to the Swiss capital of Bern.
Kristoff pumped his fist in celebration but learned seconds later he finished second.
"I was lucky I threw my bike," said Sagan, who won his third stage in this Tour and the seventh of his career. "I was certain I would finish second."
The 31-year-old Froome, the 2013 and 2015 champion from Britain, remains in the lead entering the second and final rest day on Tuesday. The Tour then has four challenging climbing stages in the Alps.
"Today it was just about not taking any risks," Froome said. "I just thought about following others."
Froome (72 hours, 40 minutes, 38 seconds) kept his 1-minute, 47-second lead over Dutch rider Bauke Mollema, with Britain's Adam Yates in third, 2:45 back, and Nairo Quintana of Colombia fourth, 2:59 behind.
American Tejay van Garderen remained eighth overall, 4:47 behind Froome.
There was a minute of silence at the start of the stage to pay tribute to the victims of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, last week that killed 84 people and wounded more than 200 others.
The Tour ends Sunday with mostly a ceremonial finish in Paris on the Champs Elysees.
By Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As Republicans spilled into Cleveland on Monday to nominate Donald Trump as their presidential candidate, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney had an equally crucial task: Entertaining his grandchildren at his lakeside summer house in New Hampshire. U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican nominee who has endorsed Trump despite the latter's insults, attended an ice cream party with his wife, Cindy, and volunteers in his re-election campaign in Prescott, Arizona. He also took part in a veterans' gathering. "Working out of my office in Miami this week," former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in February, said in an email to Reuters. Bush had been the most active in attacking Trump on the campaign trail and has said he will not be voting for either Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8. His brother, former President George W. Bush and father, former President George H.W. Bush, were also not at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. These are some of the big names from a long list of prominent Republicans who are not venturing this week to Cleveland, where Trump is to be formally nominated on Thursday after a rough-and-tumble Republican primary fight that ripped wounds in the party that have yet to heal. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told reporters the convention is a "healing time" for the party and that Republicans will leave Cleveland united, but he criticized Ohio Governor John Kasich for not participating in an event in his own backyard. And Republicans have moved past the Bush era, he added. Theyre part of the past. Were dealing with the future," he said. Kasich, a one-time rival of Trump's for the nomination, is making the rounds in Cleveland without endorsing Trump or speaking at the convention, a snub that Manafort told NBC's "Today" show is "embarrassing the state" of Ohio. Kasich adviser John Weaver shot back: "Governor Kasich has made it clear why he hasn't endorsed Mr. Trump. They share a different world view in how to move the country forward." Some of the party's best diverse talent was missing from Cleveland or limiting their participation, including U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, an Indian-American. Many Republicans feel the party is in sore need of more Republicans like Rubio and Haley to appeal to a broader segment of the electorate. As Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus gaveled the convention to order, Rubio was in Fort Myers, Florida, talking about how to tackle toxic algae polluting some of the state's waterways. Rubio, who lost to Trump in the primary battle and is running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, is to deliver a short videotaped message to the convention on Wednesday. Haley is to speak at a breakfast for the South Carolina delegation in Cleveland on Wednesday. "Chairman Reince Priebus asked if Governor Haley would speak at the convention a couple weeks ago. Governor Haley was grateful for the invitation and looks forward to attending the convention, but, as we have said before, she has no plans to speak so she declined the opportunity," said her deputy chief of staff, Rob Godfrey. Romney, who has been a prominent voice among the anti-Trump forces, was in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, with 36 members of his family for their annual summer gathering, a spokeswoman said. CHENEY HITS TRAIL FOR DAUGHTER Danny Diaz, who was campaign manager for Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, said the convention is missing a chance to show off some of its most talented Republican politicians. "It speaks to where we are as a party at the moment more than anything else," he said. Former Vice President Dick Cheney was in Wyoming helping the congressional campaign of his daughter, Liz Cheney, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was talked about as a possible vice presidential running mate for Trump, was at home in Palo Alto, California. "Writing her book about democracy!" said her chief of staff, Georgia Godfrey. Some of Trump's former rivals for the nomination are speaking in Cleveland, like U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. But some of the others felled by Trump were doing other things. U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, an eye doctor, was providing free eye care in Paducah, Kentucky. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham was in his home state of South Carolina for the week. Republican strategist Ryan Williams said the no-shows are evidence of a party still deeply fractured, despite the calls for unity. "It shows that Trump has more work to do uniting the party and that he should continue to try to bring Republicans together even after the convention," Williams said. (Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson and Ginger Gibson; Editing by Caren Bohan and Ross Colvin)
Cincinnati (AFP) - Hillary Clinton sought to wrest the spotlight from the Republican National Convention on Monday, by taking her own campaign to Ohio and telling civil rights activists that Donald Trump cannot become president.
Speaking at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati as the Republican jamboree opened a five-hour drive up the road, Clinton announced a nationwide drive to register millions of new voters to stop Trump.
The former secretary of state, who swept to victory in the Democratic primaries thanks to support from African Americans, painted her billionaire opponent as a threat to democracy, who lacks a policy platform and whose company refused to rent to blacks in the 1970s.
"Donald Trump plays coy with white supremacists. Donald Trump insults Mexican immigrants... Donald Trump demeans women. Donald Trump wants to ban an entire religion from entering our country and Donald Trump loves to talk to the press," she said.
Trump is to be anointed as Republican presidential nominee at the four-day convention in Cleveland by the party once led by Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery in the 19th century.
Clinton told the conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which Trump declined to address, that the Republicans were becoming the party of Trump.
"It is a threat to our democracy and it all adds up to an undeniable conclusion... Donald Trump cannot become president," she said to huge applause and delegates leaping to their feet.
"That's why we've got to work together to get the vote out this fall," she said, announcing a nationwide drive to get three million people registered to vote in the November 8 general election.
It is customary for presidential candidates to address the NAACP convention but the presumptive Republican nominee snubbed an invitation to speak at the Cincinnati event.
The Trump campaign gave no reason, as the candidate's wife Melania prepared to take the stage at the Republican convention later Monday, just 250 miles (400 kilometers) away in the same state.
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- 'Madness has to stop' -
Ohio is a key battleground state and Trump lost the Republican primary to Governor John Kasich. But a recent NBC News poll put Clinton and Trump tied at 39 percent with 21 percent of voters undecided.
The former US secretary of state used much of her speech to call for criminal justice reform, an end to systemic racism and to denounce the killing of police officers as totally unjustified.
"This madness has to stop," she said in reference to the attack Sunday that killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"We have difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and our communities, and between and among each other," she added.
"The next president should make the commitment to fight for the reforms we so desperately need, holding police departments like Ferguson accountable," she said to deafening applause.
The 2014 shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, unleashed widespread protests, some violent, about fatal police shootings. The decision not to indict the police officer prompted more protests across the country.
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is America's oldest and largest civil rights organization, campaigning to end racial discrimination.
Her voice cracking with emotion, Clinton also read from the Facebook post of Montrell Jackson, one of the officers killed in Louisiana on Sunday, who spoke of his hurt at being met with hostility when on duty, and viewed as a threat -- as a black man -- when out of uniform.
"We have to heal the divides that remain, make the United States what it should be -- stronger and fairer, more opportunity for every one of our people," she said.
The NAACP gave her a warm welcome on Monday. Members of the audience expressed disappointment that Trump chose to stay away and said Clinton appeared to be the candidate best suited to ending inequality.
Donald Trump continued to criticize President Obamas response to the deadly shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge, La., saying America needs a cheerleader for law enforcement as commander in chief.
I think we need strength, Trump said in a phone interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, a day after three officers were killed and three others wounded by a lone gunman in what Louisiana officials say was an ambush. I think we also need somebody who could be a cheerleader. Hes been a great divider in this country. I think race relations now are as bad as theyve ever been.
On Sunday afternoon, Obama condemned the killings in a statement from the White House.
The death of these three brave officers underscores the danger that police across the country confront every single day, Obama said. And 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.
But Trump said the presidents body language told a different story.
I watched the president. Sometimes the words are OK. But you just look at the body language theres something going on, Trump said. Theres something going on. Theres just bad feeling.
The presumptive Republican nominee admitted that his experience with police is different than it is for African-Americans. He said theres something going on within that situation as well.
Its probably something that we really dont know and maybe we cant feel it unless were black, Trump said. Theres something going on there also. And that has to do with training and that has to do with something, but there is something going on that maybe we cant recognize it and we cant see it unless youre black. But its an experience, theres no question about that. And perhaps its a difference experience.
President Obama just had a news conference, but he doesnt have a clue. Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016
Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade framed his follow-up question in simpler terms.
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How do you address the issues of African-Americans in America if youre a white guy? Kilmeade asked.
You have to see and you have to put yourself in their position and you have to see whats going on, Trump replied. But were at a point now where its so out of control.
Its not the first time Trump has said theres something going on with Obamas response to a shooting. Following last months deadly attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Trump questioned the presidents commitment to fighting radical Islamic terrorism.
Were led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or hes got something else in mind, Trump said on Fox & Friends on June 13. Theres something going on its inconceivable. Theres something going on.
Trump added, He doesnt get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands.
Donald Trump and his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, dont have much in common--politically, philosophically or personally. And their awkward marriage was on full display in the first interview the two gave together on Sunday on 60 Minutes.
Its probably obvious to people we have different styles, Pence, who served six terms in Congress, told Lesley Stahl. I promise our vision is exactly the same.
In the interview, Trump made clear that he chose Pence in part because he thought it would satisfy the establishment wing of the Republican party. It was party unity. Im an outsider, Trump said. People I wasn't necessarily getting along with are loving this pick, adding: The main reason I picked him was the incredible job he did in Indiana, as governor.
In the interview, it was clear that the two have big differences in policy, but Pence was more willing to paper over them. In December, Stahl noted, Pence had tweeted that Trumps plan to bar Muslims from entering the United States was offensive. In the interview, Pence insisted that he now supports the temporary ban. Stahl didnt ask why hed changed his mind.
Pence, as a member of Congress, had also voted for major trade agreements, including NAFTA, which Trump has railed against. One of Trumps key campaign promises has been to get rid of these bad agreements. Im not an isolationist, Trump told Stahl. I want to make great deals for our country. Pence chimed in, saying that he believes that Trump will be able to renegotiate NAFTA and make it more advantageous for Americans.
Watch a clip:
Pence also supported the Iraq War, which Trump has claimed to oppose from the beginning. Hes allowed to make mistakes, Trump said.
A devout Christian and family man, Pence has also said that he doesnt believe in negative campaigning. Trump said that he doesnt expect that Pence will call Hillary Clinton crooked, as Trump does. But he will say how dishonest she is by going over the facts.
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Stahl asked Trump if he was awed or intimidated at the prospect of becoming president in such troubled times. (Trump said he was focused on how he could fix the problems.) At the end of the interview, Pence said: This man is awed with the American people. Hes not intimidated by the world. And, Donald Trump, this good man, I believe, will be a great President of the United States.
And finally, the two seemed to be on the same page. I love what he just said, Trump said.
This story was updated to make clear that Pences use of the words awed and intimidated were in response to Stahls questions.
See original article on Fortune.com
More from Fortune.com
Cleveland (AFP) - Thousands of delegates descended on a tightly secured Cleveland arena Monday for the opening of the Republican National Convention, with Donald Trump's wife playing character witness as the tough-talking mogul locks up his party's presidential nomination.
Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, will headline the opening night of the 2016 convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which takes place against a backdrop of fear over racial violence and unrest abroad.
The four-day confab will end Thursday with a speech from the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul, whose rise to lead the Republican White House ticket has been one of the more improbable journeys in American politics.
Trump told Fox News early Monday that his wife would be "speaking about her love of the country," adding that he will attend the opening session and may even say a few words -- a sign that the convention will be anything but political as usual.
"I will be there. I want to watch. It's going to be very exciting," Trump said.
The theme of Monday's proceedings, which will also feature former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, is "Make America Safe Again" -- a play on Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again."
A spate of race-tinged police-involved shootings -- and cop killings, including the fatal shooting of three officers in Louisiana on Sunday -- has put the country on edge.
Deadly attacks overseas, most recently in Nice, and an attempted coup in Turkey, have only stoked an overall sense of instability.
President Barack Obama has urged Americans to temper their words and show stronger common resolve, but Trump is instead highlighting divisions.
"We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police," Trump tweeted shortly after the Baton Rouge shooting, referring to the Islamic State group.
"Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching."
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Trump has portrayed himself as a sheriff who can fix things.
"We have to bring law and order back to this country, whether we like it or not," he told Fox, as he bemoaned the deteriorating race relations in America.
He believes that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should be jailed for using a private email server to handle sensitive government documents while serving as secretary of state, something the FBI said was careless but not criminal.
On Monday, Trump will also call on retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and tough-talking Senator Joni Ernst as convention speakers to back up his point.
- Internal affairs -
Of more immediate concern for Trump however is a split among Republicans.
The reality TV star's unorthodox style and hard-right message have left the party more divided than it has been in a generation.
After his wife, the candidate's team will send his son and daughters to the convention stage in the coming days in an attempt to humanize The Donald.
Polls show that Trump struggles badly with moderate voters, and his campaign will want to project a more positive image to the general electorate.
But several party luminaries will be absent -- reportedly including John Kasich, host state Ohio's sitting governor.
Kasich battled Trump and others unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination, and kept himself out of contention to be Trump's vice presidential running mate.
"He's making a big mistake," Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said of Kasich's absence.
Trump's choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate could help shore up his position among conservatives, although the real estate billionaire seemed tepid about his decision.
In a remarkable first joint appearance on Saturday, Trump eventually got around to talking about Pence and explained why he was picked, in less-than-enthusiastic terms.
"One of the reasons is party unity -- so many people have said, 'party unity.' Because I'm an outsider."
Manafort insisted Republicans were shoulder to shoulder. "This is a Trump convention. The party is united," he said.
"It's a few people who are holding up and they don't reflect anything other than their personal opinion."
Pence will address the convention on Wednesday.
- Protests -
Inside the convention arena, it remains to be seen if the "Never Trump" camp will make themselves heard.
Outside, however, law enforcement is bracing for a wave of protests, including on Monday, when protesters aim to march close to the heavily protected venue.
Cleveland's roads are lined with concrete barriers and metal fencing, and helicopters buzz overhead.
The Midwestern city of nearly 400,000 has taken out $50 million in protest insurance.
Ohio's open-carry law, which allows people to carry loaded weapons on the streets, is adding to fears of violence.
Police Chief Calvin Williams said officers were on alert after the Dallas and Baton Rouge killings.
"Officers are more keen to things that are happening and our officers are told to be especially cautious during their tours," Williams said.
Cleveland (AFP) - Melania Trump brings poise and glamour to billionaire husband Donald Trump's run for the US presidency, but the Slovenian-born former model still has some explaining to do to be accepted as a potential first lady.
She showed stage presence and polish in a prime-time speech to the Republican National Committee Monday, captivating a hall full of cheering delegates.
But the golden opportunity to tell America her story went badly awry after the US media noticed striking similarities with a speech by Michelle Obama to the Democratic convention in 2008.
Her husband swiftly came to her defense, without acknowledging any plagiarism.
"It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud!" the billionaire tweeted.
She had used the occasion to take some of the rough edges off her combative husband.
"He's tough when he has to be, but he's also kind and fair and caring," Melania Trump said, describing her husband as "intensely loyal" to family, friends, employees and the country.
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he's the guy," she said.
- Glamorous life -
Born Melanija Knavs in Slovenia -- then part of Yugoslavia -- to a fashion-industry mother and a car-salesman father, she studied design and architecture before leaving for Milan and Paris to launch her modelling career.
That brought her to the United States in 1996, where two years later she met Donald Trump. She later became his third wife.
On Monday night, she said becoming a US citizen, in 2006, was "the greatest privilege on planet earth."
Her American experience has certainly been far removed from that of the average immigrant.
Her Twitter account -- inactive since Trump declared his candidacy -- reflects the privileged lifestyle of a jet-setter traveling between a lavish New York apartment and residences in Florida.
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She has tweeted photographs from high-society gatherings and major sporting events, as well as recollections of her red-carpet saunters and charity functions. In each image, Melania appears impeccably dressed.
When Donald and Melania married in January 2005 in Florida, the cost of her Dior dress was estimated at $200,000.
Among the invited celebrities was Hillary Clinton, this year's likely Democratic presidential nominee.
Initially, Melania did not seem to be entirely on board with the idea of her husband launching a White House bid.
Trump once admitted Melania would have been content as the wife of a billionaire businessman and reality TV star.
"She said, 'We have such a great life. Why do you want to do this?'" Trump told The Washington Post.
She has been largely absent from her husband's presidential campaign, only rarely speaking on the stump.
But she unwittingly found herself in the eye of the primary storm when an anti-Trump political group unveiled a questionable ad on Facebook that used a photo of her lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase.
The photograph, taken aboard Trump's custom-fitted private jet, was part of a shoot for the magazine GQ in 2000, before the couple married.
The ad, released just before votes in Arizona and Utah, featured the photo with the words: "Meet Melania Trump. Your next first lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday."
Washington (AFP) - Some fear that chaos in the streets will overshadow Donald Trump's crowning moment at this week's Republican convention, but as leading presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls, it would not be the first time.
From dueling Republican candidates in 1912 to violent protests outside the Democratic convention in 1968, drama has sometimes been a factor when the nations political parties gather to anoint their White House nominees.
In 1912, Goodwin told AFP in an interview, anger and tension transformed the Republican confab into a distressing and sometimes violent spectacle.
That Chicago gathering 104 years ago was the first time a handful of states used the "primaries" system, as the country began shifting away from the old-boy network of party leaders to appoint delegates to the convention.
"There were police around the convention hall," said Goodwin, the award-winning author of books on Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.
"The two (candidates) were so angry at one another that The New York Times wrote an editorial" decrying "this new system of letting the people choose rather than party leaders."
"We have to stop this," Goodwin paraphrased the Times. "It's embarrassing for foreigners to see what's going on here. This is... not a rational system."
At the time, American political conventions were unpredictable affairs that could erupt into bitter struggles between feuding party factions that sought to coax -- or even buy -- the votes of delegates who, for the most part, were not chosen by the electorate.
Impasses were common. In 1924, for example, it took 103 rounds of balloting for the Democratic National Convention to finally nominate a candidate.
But in the 1960s, the party bases began demanding more of a say in the process.
In 1968, demonstrations by Democrats were violently suppressed by Chicago police swinging batons and unleashing tear gas outside the convention. Protesters had denounced the nomination of candidate Hubert Humphrey, a Vietnam war supporter who had not even participated in the primary process.
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After the Sixties, with the primary system in place, the conventions "mattered less in recent years, if you know the nomination has already been sealed by one of the candidates," said Goodwin, 73.
"It really is more an advertising campaign for the party and the unity of the party, and you have the balloons and all these speeches, and everybody is trying to make love to each other."
- Powerful speeches -
This year promises more drama.
Republican delegates opened their four-day convention in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday, when they aim to elevate Donald Trump as their nominee for November's election.
But inside and outside the convention, protesters opposed to the populist billionaire could disrupt the process -- even if no GOP heavyweight steps forward to challenge him on the spot.
"It is generally unusual in recent history to have a party as divided as the Republicans are this year," Goodwin said.
What could Trump get out of the Cleveland convention? "To show the country and show the world that now that he's in a position where he really will be the nominee... he can hold back his temper."
The nomination speech, traditionally delivered on the convention's final evening, will be a huge moment for Trump.
In 1968, Richard Nixon to some extent managed to "create an image of the new Nixon, that he was going to be more moderate, more controlled, less angry," Goodwin said. Nixon won the election three months later.
The 1992 biopic released for Bill Clinton's Democratic nomination, "The Man From Hope," had a vital impact on the candidate's image.
But "the two most important convention speeches in our history, probably at least in the 20th century, were not by presidential candidates," she said.
The address by Franklin Roosevelt in 1924 was "fabulous," all the more remarkable because it was the first time most Americans saw Roosevelt since he had been stricken with polio. He was elected to the White House 12 years later.
In 2004, a young, little-known African-American senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, gained instant notoriety and presidential buzz with his commanding delivery of the keynote address on behalf of Democratic nominee John Kerry.
"So things can happen at these conventions," Goodwin said, "even if it's not the actual candidate."
Istanbul (AFP) - Support from the highest echelons in the army helped keep President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in power after the failed coup but Friday's events risk further undermining the military's status as a key player in Turkish politics.
Relations between Erdogan and the Turkish army have often been strained, but he can thank the top brass -- as well as the mass mobilisation of his own supporters -- for seeing off the threat.
Turkey has detained 103 generals and admirals as well as more than 2,800 soldiers accused of supporting Friday's attempted power grab, but most of the military's senior figures stayed loyal to Erdogan.
These included chief of staff General Hulusi Akar who was taken hostage by the coup plotters in a terrifying ordeal.
"The coup d'etat was foiled thanks to an alliance between Erdogan and the secular arm of the army," said Fuat Keyman, director of the Istanbul Policy Center.
- 'Army chief refused to sign' -
Erdogan has reached out more to the armed forces since he fell out with erstwhile ally Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher now living in the United States, whom the Turkish leader blames for the attempt to topple him.
Ironically, Erdogan, who came to power in 2003, allied himself with Gulen in order to rein in the military deemed to be the main threat to his Islamo-conservative government.
The armed forces are considered the guardians of the secular Turkish state created in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, ready to act when the mainly Muslim nation's government takes on a religious hue.
The army led successful coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 and was also behind the ouster in 1997 of Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, a political mentor of Erdogan, in a bloodless coup.
But when the putschists were trying to overthrow Erdogan, dozens of senior officers, including generals, rushed on to television channels to denounce the move.
Akar was held hostage for 20 hours during the coup attempt. He refused, despite a pistol held to the head, to sign a declaration that the rebel leaders had taken power, according to comments given to NTV television.
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He was applauded and cheered as a national hero by lawmakers when he attended an extraordinary session of parliament after the foiling of the coup.
- 'Marriage of convenience' -
Analysts say the rapprochement between Erdogan and the military came about for two reasons -- hostility to Gulen and the renewal of the Kurdish conflict in the southeast.
Kurdish rebel attacks against Turkish security forces have intensified with almost daily attacks since the collapse of a two-and-a-half-year ceasefire last July.
For Professor Jean Marcou of France's Sciences-Po university, the new relationship between the head of state and the army is a "marriage of convenience".
The alliance was on display in April when Turkey's highest court quashed the 2013 convictions of dozens of senior army officers for allegedly trying to overthrow the government.
The Turkish authorities said Gulen -- who wields enormous power with supporters in the media, judiciary and police -- was behind that bid.
Retired General Ilker Basbug, a former chief of staff who was jailed for life under the original ruling, on Sunday denounced the "action of the putschists" and said he hoped the army would emerge stronger.
- 'Devastating for army' -
But Friday's events have more likely provided Erdogan with the chance to again clip the wings of the armed forces.
The army now risks losing its role as a political actor and becoming more of a traditional purely military force, said Marcou.
Erdogan could meanwhile beef up the role of the police, who were massively opposed to the plotters and had already been growing in power.
"The videos of men in uniform attacking civilians are devastating for the army, which is now going to have to work hard on its image," said Keyman.
After having supported Erdogan, the army could present itself as "not just the guardian of secularity but also of democracy," he added.
Any sanctions against the army, which is fighting both the Kurdish rebels in the southeast and bombarding Islamic State jihadists in Syria, could have a serious impact, and not just at home.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on Sunday questioned Turkey's "reliability" in the fight against Islamic State in the wake of the abortive coup.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey has dismissed almost 9,000 officials including a massive number of police officers after a failed coup targeting the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the state-run Anadolu news agency said citing the interior ministry.
A total of 8,777 public personnel including 7,899 police, one provincial governor and 29 governors of towns have been dismissed, the ministry said.
They also include 614 members of the police force that looks after domestic security, it added.
Turkey has cracked down on coup plotters that left over 290 dead, as Erdogan pointed the finger of blame at the supporters of US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is believed to wield influence in the police and judiciary.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the attempted coup in Turkey was that it had not already occurred. The obvious tensions between civil and military authorities have been a long-simmering witches brew in Turkey, dating back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire a century ago and continuing through multiple coup attempts over the past four decades.
Hundreds of senior admirals and generals were charged and jailed on suspect charges in the so-called Sledgehammer scandals of the 2000s, and the seeds of the current coup were planted when bitter military leaders watched their commanders and mentors be taken to prison in handcuffs.
During my four years as supreme allied commander at NATO, I often visited Turkey and developed close relationships with many senior Turkish military officers some of whom served time later in notorious Turkish prisons, including the former chief of the general staff, Gen. Ilker Basbug. I know the current chief, Hulusi Akar, as well. Both always struck me as totally loyal to civilian leadership, and it appears at this point that the guilt for initiating the coup will fall lower in the chain of command.
The crisis will give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan all the ammunition he requires to conduct a severe crackdown on both the military and the courts. He has said he will use this to purge the military and the courts chilling words, indeed. With nearly 300 dead as a result of the coup, the desire for vengeance will be strong. Hundreds of jurists already have been arrested many of whom were instrumental in blocking various initiatives coming from Erdogans palace. More than 6,000 officials and service members have been detained, and roughly 8,000 police officers have been taken off the streets.
One particularly troubling element is the status of Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, where NATO reportedly has housed tactical nuclear weapons, though the United States will neither confirm or deny their presence. If true, this poses a very dangerous problem, and Washington will need Ankaras full cooperation to ensure that all U.S. military equipment and forces are fully protected which appears to be happening, after some moves toward isolating the base Saturday.
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But the big questions remain: How will the failed coup impact Turkey in its role as a military ally in the NATO structure, and what should the United States be doing?
Clearly, there will be a strong negative impact on the ability of the Turkish military to perform its duties across the spectrum of alliance activities. Turkey has sent troops, aircraft, and ships to every NATO mission: to Afghanistan, the Balkans, Syria, Libya, and on counterpiracy missions. Unfortunately, it is likely that the military in the wake of the coup will be laser-focused on internal controversy, endless investigations, and loyalty checks and simply surviving as an institution. This will have a chilling effect on military readiness and performance. While some operations have resumed at the crucial Incirlik Air Base, cooperation is already frozen across many U.S. and NATO channels.
At the same time, the Turkish civilian authorities will be deeply suspicious of their military and gendarme forces following the coup, even though at this point it appears more beer-hall putsch than geopolitical earthquake. This will make Turkish civilian leaders, from Erdogan on down, less likely to be willing and capable partners in ongoing military operations outside of Turkey (e.g., the NATO missions against the Islamic State).
For the United States, there are four key actions Washington should take to try to move forward.
First, we need to stand firmly on the side of the Turkish civilian government. Despite the authoritarian impulses of the current regime, it is unquestionably democratically elected and deserves support in the face of the coup attempt. That does not mean the United States should falter in criticizing flawed human rights policies and new attempts to crack down on the media. We need to encourage our Turkish partners to be measured, legal, and balanced as they investigate. There is clearly a danger of the post-coup investigations becoming a vehicle to cleanse jurists and military members who were not involved in the coup but are perceived as being politically difficult for the regime. This will require a delicate balance.
Second, we should send our senior military officials to Ankara to hear from their counterparts about the situation while congratulating Turkeys leadership on doing the right thing and helping stop the coup. Additionally, our civilian leaders from the secretary of state on down should likewise visit and reassure the Erdogan government of our support. It is premature to judge evidence on Erdogans request for extradition of Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish cleric in Pennsylvania, but the United States needs to be open to requests in the spirit of international law as it would for any other case.
A third smart move by the United States would be to increase cooperation in intelligence sharing and targeting against Kurdish radical terrorist groups. We have cooperated in the past with the Turkish military very closely, but those relationships have become blurred given the commendable actions of the Kurdish militias in Syria against the Islamic State. Turkey needs a signal from the United States that it stands with Ankara against terrorism within its borders. This could include, for example, additional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft and better satellite imagery.
Fourth, and finally, the United States should use NATO as a mechanism to support Turkish positions. We are at a very delicate and crucial point in the negotiations about how to deal with the problems in Syria, and how Turkey is handled within the context of NATO leadership is important. Too often, the Turks feel as though their unique concerns and geography are not respected within the North Atlantic Council, the governing body of the alliance. Given the unfortunate confluence of the recent terrorist attack at the Istanbul airport and the coup, we need to be sensible and supportive of Turkish positions on how to deal with the Islamic State and Bashar al-Assads regime. This should include increasing resources to the Allied Land Command in Izmir, the largest NATO installation in Turkey.
The highly unstable geopolitics of the Levant and NATOs expanding security needs come together at a crossroads in Turkey. It is not only a nation, but a civilization as well, one that has an acute sense of its importance and history in the region. In a host of issues from the Islamic State to Syria; Israel to oil and gas in the eastern Mediterranean; responding to radical Islam to stability in Egypt Turkey has an enormous ability to influence events. Washington needs to be a good friend supportive in real ways while providing advice and incentives (like membership in the European Union), which may help circumvent any tendency to overreaction that tramples on human rights in the drive for vengeance. Its a hard balance to strike, but one that demands the full attention of the United States in the days ahead.
* Editors note: The United States will neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons in Turkey.
Photo credit: ORHAN AKKANAT/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday a total of 232 individuals were killed during a failed coup attempt, as a soldier opened fire outside a courthouse in Ankara where the Turkish government continues to round up thousands of suspected plotters.
Yildirim said the toll comprises 208 martyrs 145 civilians, 60 police officers and three soldiers and 24 coup plotters. With a cracked voice and tears, he repeated a question his grandson had put to him: Why are they killing people? He put the total numbers of detentions since Fridays tumultuous night at 7,543, including 6,030 military.
In Ankara the alleged attacker was detained, a government official said. The gunfire signaled ongoing pockets of resistance among the coup plotters as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration implemented a sweeping clampdown within state institutions.
Television footage showed security forces in Ankara sweeping a street near the location of the shooting, ordering a driver out of his car and on to the ground, while a siren blared. Turkeys Hurriyet newspaper said the shooter was a military official who took a hostage while resisting arrest. There were conflicting reports about whether there were casualties.
The state-run Anadolu Agency said a group of 27 generals and admirals questioned by prosecutors in Ankara includes 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.
Meanwhile warplanes patrolled Turkeys skies days after a failed coup, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over. A senior official said F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight, after a faction within the military launched an attempted coup late Friday against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.
The state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s for the control of the airspace and security.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey has sacked almost 9,000 officials in its relentless crackdown against suspected coup plotters, authorities said Monday, as the former air force chief denied masterminding the weekend's failed putsch.
With Western allies expressing alarm over fears Ankara that could reinstate the death penalty in response to Friday's dramatic coup bid, General Akin Ozturk appeared in court, looking haggard and with his ear bandaged.
"I am not the person who planned or led the coup. Who planned it and directed it I do not know," state-run news agency Anadolu quoted him as saying in his statement to prosecutors.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to wipe out the "virus" of the putschists, whose attempted power grab left more than 300 people dead.
But the United States, European Union and United Nations have sternly warned him against excessive retribution as authorities round up the alleged perpetrators.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman denounced "revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets" after disturbing pictures emerged of the treatment of some detained suspects.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said over 7,500 people have been detained, including 103 generals and admirals, over the coup bid which Erdogan has blamed on his arch-foe, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.
The interior ministry said almost 9,000 people, including almost 8,000 police but also municipal governors and other officials, had also been dismissed in a widening purge.
Early Monday, special Istanbul anti-terror police units raided the prestigious air force military academy, detaining four suspects, Anadolu reported.
Authorities have also detained General Mehmet Disli, who conducted the operation to capture chief-of-staff Hulusi Akar during the coup, an official said.
Erdogan has urged citizens to remain on the streets even after the defeat of the coup attempt, in what the authorities describe as a "vigil" for democracy.
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Public servants' annual leave has meanwhile been cancelled until further notice.
With Turkey's big cities still on edge, Turkish security forces killed an armed attacker who shot at them from a vehicle outside the Ankara courthouse where suspected coup plotters were appearing before judges.
- 'End of EU bid' -
Western leaders have pushed Turkey to follow the rule of law as the massive retaliatory purge adds to existing concerns about human rights and democracy in the strategic NATO country.
"We also urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions," US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters after talks with EU foreign ministers.
The Council of Europe joined the criticism, with its panel of constitutional experts saying: "Arrests and mass sackings of judges are not an acceptable way of restoring democracy."
Prime Minister Yildirim said the plotters would be brought to account but Turkey would "act within the law".
But Erdogan added fuel to the fire, reiterating that bringing back the death penalty is not off the table for the coup plotters.
"There is a clear crime of treason," Erdogan told CNN in his first media interview since the chaotic events of Friday night.
"The leaders will have to come together and discuss it. If they accept to discuss it, as the president, I will approve any decision to come out of the parliament."
Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 as part of its long-running efforts to join the EU -- and the bloc's foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini responded bluntly to the suggestion it could be reinstated.
"Let me be very clear," she said. "No country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty."
The US on Monday lifted restrictions on flights to Turkey that had been imposed in the wake of the coup.
Meanwhile, a Greek court will Thursday decide the fate of eight Turkish military officers who fled across the border by helicopter after the coup, with Ankara seeking their extradition.
- 'Show us evidence' -
The turbulence has raised concern about the stability of Turkey, which is part of the international coalition fighting Islamic State jihadists in Syria.
It has also hit financial markets, with the lira at one point losing five percent in value against the dollar although it rallied slightly Monday.
Ankara has demanded that Washington extradite Gulen, but Kerry said he had urged his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu to "send us evidence, not allegations".
The preacher's followers have a powerful presence in Turkish society, including the media, police and judiciary, and Erdogan has long accused him of running a "parallel state" in Turkey.
But the 75-year-old has categorically denied any involvement in the plot and suggested it could have been staged by Erdogan himself.
In another development, police on Monday detained seven soldiers after searching the key Incirlik air base in southern Turkey used by the US for air raids on IS jihadists, Anadolu reported.
Berlin (AFP) - Germany warned Turkey on Monday against reinstating the death penalty, as it blasted "revolting scenes of caprice and revenge" in the wake of a failed coup attempt.
In strongly worded remarks, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters that Berlin had grave questions about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response to the foiled military takeover.
After Erdogan said Sunday that Turkey would consider a return of capital punishment, Seibert said such a move "would mean the end of EU membership talks".
Seibert said the EU was a "community of laws and values" with which capital punishment was not compatible.
"Germany and the EU have a clear stance: we categorically oppose the death penalty. A country with the death penalty cannot be a member of the EU," he said.
He urged a proportionate response from the government in Ankara.
"In the first hours after the failed coup, we witnessed revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets," Seibert said. "That cannot be accepted."
Seibert reiterated that Germany "condemns" the attempted takeover but stressed that the response by the Turkish government needs to be "proportionate" and "based on the rule of law".
"In that context, we need to say clearly: it raises profound and worrisome questions when on the day after the coup attempt, 2,500 judges are removed from their posts," he said.
In the aftermath of Friday's failed coup, thousands of Erdogan supporters called for capital punishment to make a return.
"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," Erdogan said Sunday.
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.
Germany has the largest ethnic Turkish community outside Turkey with some three million members.
WASHINGTON/ SAYLORSBURG, Pennsylvania (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. In an interview from Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen told reporters he did not know who was behind the attempted coup and suggested it might have been staged by Erdogan's government to seize more control. "This is not the pattern of an attempted coup," Gulen said through an interpreter. (Reporting by Julia Edwards; Additional reporting by David Chance and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Alan Crosby)
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish security forces are still searching for some of the soldiers involved in a failed coup attempt and their weapons in various cities and rural areas but there is no risk of a renewed bid to seize power, a senior security official said on Monday. Turkey's military command has been dealt "a heavy blow in terms of organisation" by the attempted coup, but is still functioning in coordination with the intelligence agency, police and the government, the official told Reuters. Some high-ranking military officials involved in the coup attempt have fled abroad, the official also said. (Reporting by Orhan Coskun; Writing by Nick Tattersall)
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) would not support any proposal put to parliament on the reintroduction of the death penalty following a failed coup attempt, party spokesman Ayhan Bilgen told Reuters. "No, we will not support it," Bilgen said, adding that in any case new laws could not be applied retroactively and that it was the responsibility of politicians to communicate this to the people. Responding to crowds of supporters calling for the death penalty for the plotters on Sunday, President Tayyip Erdogan said such demands could not be ignored. (Reporting by Gulsen Solaker; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Akin Aytekin)
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek told CNBC on Monday the failed military coup over the weekend was "like a nightmare." But he said it's over, and things in Turkey are returning to normal.
"We are back to some sort of normalcy fairly quickly," Simsek said in a phone interview with "Squawk Box." "Domestic markets [in Turkey] are functioning pretty efficiently."
Since Friday's coup attempt, some 6,000 armed forces and judiciary members have been rounded up as the administration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan investigates those responsible for the revolt.
"Six thousand people ... put that on a population adjusted basis, that's a day in the United States where 25,000 judges, prosecutors, and senior military ... [would be] put under arrest. It's unimaginable," said retired Adm. James Stavridis, former NATO supreme allied commander.
Erdogan is "obviously going too far," argued said Stavridis, who is said to be on among Hillary Clinton's list of possible vice presidential running-mates.
Responding to the worries of Stavridis and others, Simsek said the arrests have been proportionate to the act. "Turkey is a rule-of-law country. They have to face the justice. So judiciary will decide what happens next."
Simsek, formerly Turkey's finance minister, said the political and economic fallout should be short-lived.
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ANKARA, Turkey (AP) Warplanes patrolled Turkeys skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over.
A senior official said F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight, after a faction within the military launched an attempted coup late Friday against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.
The state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s for the control of the airspace and security.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion which was not supported by the militarys top brass was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in the rebellion that took the government and much of the world by surprise.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life had returned to normal. But he and other officials also urged people to take to streets at night, saying risks remained in its aftermath.
At nightfall, thousands of flag-waving people rallied in Istanbuls Taksim Square, Ankaras Kizilay Square and elsewhere. Erdogan remained in Istanbul despite statements that he would return to the capital and address crowds in Kizilay Square. News reports said close to 2,000 special forces police officers were deployed in Istanbul to guard key installations.
The government moved swiftly in the wake of the coup to shore up its power and remove those perceived as enemies, detaining some 6,000 people including a number of generals.
As the cabinet prepared to meet for its first regular session since the attempt, security forces continued raiding military facilities in search of suspected plotters. They searched the Air Force Academy premises and residences in Istanbul early on Monday, Anadolu reported. It was not clear if any arrests were made.
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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.
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.
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.
Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus defended the crackdown on judiciary officials in an interview with CNN-Turk, saying many of them would have played a role had the coup attempt succeeded.
All of these (judiciary officials) did not necessarily have first-degree knowledge about this pro-junta initiative. Had they succeeded (with the coup) it is clear that these people would have been included into this business. Therefore, anyone connected to this group will be exposed.
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.
Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup will receive every punishment they deserve. Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was abolished in 2004 as part of the countrys 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 Erdogans increasingly heavy-handed rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.
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 governments charges.
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.
___
Soguel reported from Istanbul.
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stepped up pressure on the United States on Monday to extradite exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Ankara of being behind a failed military coup late on Friday in which more than 200 people were killed. "We would be disappointed if our (American) friends told us to present proof even though members of the assassin organization are trying to destroy an elected government under the directions of that person," Yildirim said, referring to Gulen and his supporters in Turkey and abroad. "At this stage there could even be a questioning of our friendship," Yildirim added. Gulen has strongly denied any involvement in Friday's coup attempt. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday in Brussels that Ankara must provide genuine evidence that withstands scrutiny when it requests Gulen's extradition. (Reporting by Ercan Gurses and Humeyra Pamuk. Writing by Dasha Afanasieva; Editing by Gareth Jones)
On Friday, Turkish officials claimed a coup attempt had been repelled after Turkey's armed forces declared they had taken control of the country. Explosions and gunfire rocked the capital in a night that left at least 17 dead.
People in the area were quick to take to social media to document the violence - even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once referred to Twitter and all social media as a "menace to society."
With his whereabouts unknown at the time, Erdogan spoke to a reporter on-air via FaceTime to send a message to his people. He also took to Twitter to encourage people to "go to the streets" in a show of support for his government. Saying "there's nothing more powerful than the people."
His usage of social media is being called out as ironic by many in the area after several years of Erdogan trying to block social media in Turkey or punishing those who use it to criticize his government.
In 2013, Erdogan, then prime minister, blamed Twitter for social unrest, calling it a "menace to society" after protesters took to Istanbul's main square. "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."
Reports abounded on Friday that Twitter and Facebook had been blocked in Turkey, but Twitter said "we suspect there is an intentional slowing of our traffic in country." Similar reports floated in 2014, when Erdogan reportedly blocked access to the site after protests. #TwitterisblockedinTurkey began trending immediately.
Read More: Turkey Coup Attempt Captured Live on Social Media
Erdogan claimed that Twitter failed to remove links that the Turkish government did not approve, and released the statement: "If Twitter officials insist on not implementing court orders and rules of law ... there will be no other option but to prevent access to Twitter to help satisfy our citizens' grievances."
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John Oliver's Last Week Tonight had an entire segment about Erdogan, who prosecuted a comedian who mocked him on German television. The comic read a poem on air that poked fun at the leader, and Erdogan asked Chancellor Angela Merkel to take legal action against him in Germany. This wasn't a unique instance, either. A doctor lost his job for sharing a meme about Erdogan earlier that year, according to Oliver's segment. And former Miss Turkey Merve Buyuksarac posted a satirical poem on her Instagram account in 2014 and was convicted of insulting Erdogan.
The chaos on Friday comes after a period of political turmoil in Turkey, blamed on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule, which has included a government shake-up, a crackdown on dissidents and opposition media and renewed conflict in the mainly Kurdish areas of the southeast.
VIENNA (Reuters) - It would be unacceptable for Turkey to reintroduce the death penalty in response to Friday's failed coup, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said in an interview published on Monday before a meeting with his EU counterparts. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday there could be no delay in using capital punishment, which Turkey abolished in 2004, and the government would discuss the measure with opposition parties. "The introduction of the death penalty would of course be absolutely unacceptable," Kurz said in an interview with Austrian newspaper Kurier. Turkey has ambitions to join the European Union, but a revival of the death penalty would freeze any discussion of membership. EU foreign ministers will on Monday urge Erdogan to respect the law and human rights in dealing with defeated coup plotters, but they have limited leverage over their strategic neighbor. "There must be no arbitrary purges, no criminal sanctions outside the framework of the rule of law and the justice system," Kurz said. "Austria will push at the foreign ministers' meeting ...to set very clear boundaries for Erdogan." Kurz said a deal with Turkey aimed at stemming the flow of migrants into Europe was no reason to back down. "The migration pact cannot be a reason to deviate from our fundamental values and clear position." (Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by John Stonestreet)
ATHENS (Reuters) - Turkish soldiers who fled to neighboring Greece in a military helicopter after the weekend coup attempt "fear for their lives" back home and do not want to be returned, one of their lawyers said on Monday as they appeared in a Greek court. The eight men, who have sough political asylum in Greece, landed in the northern city of Alexandroupolis on Saturday after issuing a distress signal. They were arrested and charged with crossing into the country illegally. Turkey has branded them "traitors" and asked Greece to extradite them. Athens has assured Ankara that their asylum requests will be processed swiftly but will stick strictly to international law and human rights treaties. Vasiliki Ilia Marinaki, a lawyer representing four of the men, reiterated that the defendants "knew absolutely nothing about the coup" and were following orders from their superiors. "They fear their lives are in danger. For that reason they do not want to return to Turkey and they have requested political asylum," she told Skai TV. At one point their Black Hawk helicopter came under fire from Turkish police, she added. At the same time they had received text messages on their phones that the coup attempt was underway, so they decided to feel to neighboring Greece. Since the coup attempt crumbled on Saturday, the Turkish government has launched a purge of the armed forces and judiciary, rounding up thousands. The three lawyers representing the men requested a three-day postponement during Monday's court appearance to prepare the case. The helicopter has been returned to Turkey. (Reporting by Karolina Tagaris; editing by David Stamp)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States cautioned Turkey on Monday against going too far as it tries to bring to justice those responsible for Friday's attempted coup, and it said Ankara had not formally sought the extradition of a U.S.-based cleric it blamed for the attempt. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the United States had not made any assessment about whether U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen had any role in the attempted coup. He said as far as the State Department knew, Gulen was living peacefully in Pennsylvania. Ankara has accused Gulen of masterminding the coup. Gulen, who has a wide following in Turkey, has denied any involvement. Toner said the United States would welcome a formal request for Gulen's extradition from Turkey along with any evidence it had of his involvement. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Eric Beech)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The U.S. government is committed to concluding a free trade deal with the European Union this year and believes it is even more essential after Britons voted to leave the bloc, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday.
The United States and the European Union have been negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) for three years, with both seeking to conclude talks in 2016.
"This remains a high priority for President Obama and for our administration and there's a reason for that," Kerry told a news conference after meeting EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
Kerry said he disagreed with those that say TTIP will not proceed.
"We believe there is some mythology that has been attached to it and it's our job to make sure that we adequately inform people about the ways in which the facts of the TTIP actually work for the people of Europe," Kerry said, adding that he planned to lay out those facts in several speeches in the coming months.
He also said that TTIP had become more important in the light of Britain's exit from the European Union, given it would create a vast market.
"It has the ability to act as a counter to whatever negatives may or may not ultimately attach themselves to whatever construct is negotiated between the UK and Europe."
(Reporting by Robin Emmott and David Brunnstrom, writing by Philip Blenkinsop)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States' alliance with the European Union is "unbreakable", U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said after meeting EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday. "The U.S.-EU partnership is strong," he told a news conference. "Strong today, will remain strong in the future. It is ensuring and it is unbreakable." Recalling a weekend visit to a World War Two U.S. military cemetery in Luxembourg and the U.S. contribution to liberating Europe, he said cooperation was as intense now as it has ever been and that all sides, including British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, were determined to have as smooth a transition in the relationships as possible as Britain moves to leave the EU. (Reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Robert-Jan Bartunek)
As Russian-backed forces reportedly intensify their siege on the Syrian city of Aleppo, a leader of the Syrian opposition peace negotiation team said the United States is not adequately confronting Russia for its war crimes.
What we lack here is a serious reaction to Russian behavior on the ground, said Bassma Kodmani, a member of the High Negotiations Committee, according to Reuters. Russia is saying one thing and doing another.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently visited Moscow for a fresh round of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on reestablishing the peace process in Syria. Kerry said the meeting ended with a shared understanding of how to restore peace to the war torn nation, but implementation of those steps would take time.
We would like to see what kind of guarantees the U.S. is able to agree with Russia, Kodmani said. What we want is solid guarantees about the cessation of hostilities being restored.
[Reuters]
Last Friday, the U.S. telecom regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) declared that its ongoing 600 MHz low-band wireless spectrum auction, popularly known as -- Incentive Auction -- has received as many as 62 applications. All 62 bidders have made upfront payments. The Incentive Auction, which was kicked off by the FCC on Mar 29, 2016, recently completed its first part.
In the first part, which was essentially a reverse auction, the airwaves were freed by TV broadcasters who no longer had any productive use of the same. The TV broadcasters had agreed to free a substantial amount of 126 MHz of spectrums for a massive $86.4 billion.
In the second part of the auction process, the FCC will resale these airwaves to wireless operators, cable MSOs (multi-service operators) or tech firms through competitive bidding. The second part is known as forward auction. Needless to say, the total bid price of the forward auction must reach at least $86.4 billion for the Incentive Auction to be successful. The second part of the Incentive Auction is likely to start from Aug 16, 2016.
Important bidders include national telecom giants like Verizon Communications Inc. VZ, AT&T Inc. T, T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS, satellite TV operator DISH Network Corp. DISH and cable MSOs (multi service operators) such as Comcast Corp. CMCSA and Liberty Global Inc. Low-band spectrum is crucial for wireless operators as the signals can be transmitted over longer distances and through brick-and-mortar walls in cities.
However, several industry experts believe that telecom operators may be reluctant to offer such a hefty sum for low-band airwaves. Some industry watchers have also predicted that telecom operators may need around 70 MHz to 80 MHz of spectrums in the 600 MHz bands instead of the total freed up 126 MHz airwaves. In such a scenario, the FCC may have to conduct another round of reverse auction for a reduced volume of spectrum at lower prices.
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The FCC was initially hopeful of completing the Incentive Auction process by the end of the third quarter of 2016. However, industry watchers are now expecting it to be much more prolonged and may continue till early 2017. Notably, the freed spectrums cannot be utilized commercially before 2020.
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By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - An expected Iraqi assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul is likely to cause mass civilian casualties and force hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, the United Nations said on Monday. It appealed for funds to deal with the humanitarian crisis, saying it would cost $284 million to prepare the necessary aid and up to $1.8 billion to deal with the aftermath. "The impact of the Mosul military campaign on civilians will be devastating," the U.N. said in the summary of its Iraq humanitarian response plan. "Mass casualties among civilians are likely and families trying to flee areas controlled by ISIL (Islamic State) are expected to be at extreme risk," it said. Large-scale displacement of people was expected when Mosul city itself came under attack, it said. Between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people are estimated to live in the city. "In a worst case, all or the majority of these people will require life-saving assistance and protection," it said. Difficulties will include operating close to the Syrian border and the need to support civilians who escape across the frontline, transport them hundreds of kilometers to safety, and house and protect them in hundreds of camps, transit centers and reception sites. In the best case scenario, 300,000 people will be displaced for three months, requiring an aid budget of $143 million. The worst case would be 1 million displaced for a year, meaning a $1.8 billion cost. In any case, aid agencies need two and a half months of lead time and $284 million before the assault on Mosul starts. If funding comes too late, they will be unable to respond appropriately, the U.N. document said. Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told Reuters last month that at least 430,000 more people could be displaced this year in Anbar, Iraq's desert province stretching west from Falluja to the Syrian border. The United Nations asked for $861 million in January this year for Iraq, the minimum needed to keep people alive, knowing that it was unlikely to get the $4.5 billion needed to offer 10 million Iraqis international standards of care, the document said. However, less than 40 percent of that appeal has been received, stopping 99 frontline aid programs and hindering assistance for 85,000 people who have fled from Falluja. (Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
* Three new, two revamped structures to come on line by 2018
* Healthy packer profit, China demand fuel expansion
* First U.S. pork packing plants to be built since 2004
* Industry interest in ractopamine-free pork to serve China
By Theopolis Waters
CHICAGO, July 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. pork industry could be heading for higher hog prices as processing plants come on line at an unprecedented rate with packers investing millions of dollars to satisfy the appetite of protein-hungry China, industry analysts said.
Pork packers including Seaboard Foods and Triumph Foods, who slaughter hogs and turn them into bacon, pork chops and other products, plan new or expanded plants in the next two years. This building boom could result in an extra 6 percent added to capacity by the end of 2017 compared with 2015 levels.
Another 1.8 percent of capacity will be added when Prestage Farms completes its new plant, said Steve Meyer, pork analyst at Indiana-based EMI Analytics. Prestage plans a plant that can process 10,000 pigs a day but it is still looking for a site and there is no completion date.
"Those companies have been profitable so they want to grow," said Meyer. Average gross margins for packers jumped to $28.88 per head from 2009 to the present, compared with $20.37 from 1999 through 2008, he said. He declined to project how margins would fare in the future.
No new plants have been built in the United States since 2004 and there have never been more than two built within a 12-month period, according to Meyer.
Analysts said the industry is playing catch-up after losing several plants during the late 1990s and early 2000. The loss of capacity is causing bottlenecks, as record numbers of hogs head for slaughter in the industry that last year posted revenue at the farm level of $21 billion.
A major incentive for adding capacity is China's rampant demand, which accounts for about a quarter of U.S. domestic production. Exports of pork to China and Hong Kong jumped 80 percent in volume in the first five months of this year from a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
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In total, U.S. exports of pork rose 1 percent to 2 billion pounds from January-May 2016, with a value of $2.27 billion, down 6 percent from a year ago, the USDA said.
China is the world's biggest consumer of pork but strictly enforces a ban on the beta-agonist ractopamine - a feed additive used to plump up pigs. So much of the capacity coming onstream will be for hogs that have not been fed ractopamine.
All hogs produced by Prestage Farms are free of ractopamine and head for packers such as Smithfield Foods and Seaboard Foods, said John Prestage, whose family owns and operates North Carolina-based Prestage Farms.
The company's new plant is likely to process pork without ractopamine, with some of that product probably for export to China, he added in an email.
Glen Taylor, a Prime Pork co-owner, said the company is working with clients in Japan in its first foray into Asia. He declined to say whether China would later be included.
"As a small plant we'll be able to ... uphold the guidelines that these foreign markets would request to provide the product," said Taylor.
Seaboard Foods, Triumph Foods and Clemens Food Group are among other plants listed by USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service as eligible to export pork to China. None of them returned requests for comment.
Not all U.S. processing plants will survive the competition, however, experts said.
"We are likely to have excess slaughter capacity and therefore I think it is likely that an older or smaller hog slaughter plant or two will close as a result," said University of Missouri economist Ron Plain.
(Editing by Jo Winterbottom and Matthew Lewis)
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 VicePresident Riek Machar engaged in five days of street battleswith anti-aircraft guns, attack helicopters and tanks until aceasefire was reached on Monday. The fighting prompted the United Nations and some countriesto 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)
KAMPALA (Reuters) - Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said he was opposed to a U.N. plan to impose an arms embargo on his neighbor South Sudan, saying it would weaken its army just as the country was trying to contain a resurgence of violence. The statement from one of the region's main powers, issued over the weekend, came after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Security Council to block arms sales to try and end more than two years of fighting in the world's newest nation. At least 272 people have died in the latest clashes between forces loyal to South Sudan's President Salva Kiir and his rival, Vice President Riek Machar. Museveni told Ban he was against the embargo at an African Union summit in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Saturday, officials said. "When you impose an (arms) embargo on South Sudan you destroy the local force on which you need to build a strong integrated army, a statement from his office read. He did not say if Uganda would take any more concrete action against the plan for South Sudan, which declared independence from Sudan five years ago. Uganda sent troops into South Sudan to back Kiir during latest conflict, which started in December 2013, and sent troops back again during this month's resurgence in fighting, saying they would rescue Ugandan citizens there. (Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by George Obulutsa)
By Michael Holden and Kylie MacLellan LONDON (Reuters) - Lawmakers voted strongly on Monday to renew Britain's ageing nuclear weapons system, a multi billion-pound project regarded as key to maintaining the country's status as a world power following its vote to leave the European Union. Despite opposition from the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) and some in the opposition Labour Party, parliament approved the renewal of the Scottish-based nuclear-armed Trident submarines by 472 to 117 votes. Some opponents said the vote was being used by new Prime Minister Theresa May to unify her party, which has a parliamentary majority of 16, after a bruising Brexit campaign, and embarrass Labour by highlighting its own deep divisions. In her first statement in parliament as prime minister, May urged lawmakers to back Trident, not only to protect Britain from growing threats from Russia and North Korea, but also to protect thousands of jobs in Scotland and elsewhere. "What this country needs to do is to recognize that it faces a variety of threats and to ensure we have the capabilities that are necessary and appropriate to deal with each of those threats," she said ahead of the vote. Britain needed to retain a nuclear deterrent which had been an insurance policy for nearly 50 years, May said. "We cannot outsource the grave responsibility we shoulder for keeping our people safe ... 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." Parliament agreed in principle in 2007 to replace the deterrent system and Monday's vote was to rubber stamp the decision to approve the building of four submarines to ensure Britain can have nuclear weapons continuously on patrol at sea. UK'S "OUTSIZED" ROLE U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said in February Britain must renew the submarines, based at Faslane, if it wanted to maintain its "outsized" role in world affairs. During more than five hours of debate in parliament, many argued that failing to renew the system would mark Britain retreating from the world. However, Scottish nationalists and some in Labour believe the weapons are no longer needed as they are little use against terrorists and the money could be better spent elsewhere. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been challenged by two candidates seeking to take the helm of the center-left party, questioned the need for Britain to possess "weapons of mass destruction" and said it should press for a nuclear-free world. "I would not take a decision that kills millions of people, I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations," said Corbyn, who had indicated his lawmakers could vote freely on Trident. Many Labour lawmakers criticized their leader's view, which is in contrast with the party's official position on Trident. SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson said the renewal was opposed by Scotland, where May's Conservatives hold just one of the 59 seats in the British parliament. "It is obscene that the priority of this government ... is to spend billions of pounds on outdated nuclear weapons that we do not want, do not need and could never use," he said during the debate. "This government has a democratic deficit in Scotland and with today's vote on Trident it is going to get worse not better." SELF-HARM Some military officials also oppose the outlay on Trident, saying the money would be better spent on maintaining the army and on more conventional technology, both of which have recently suffered cutbacks. The Ministry of Defence has said replacing the four submarines would cost 31 billion pounds ($41 billion), plus a contingency fund of 10 billion pounds, with another 4 billion already allocated to the design process. Defence firms BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Babcock can expect to benefit from a renewal, with the new submarines expected to enter service from 2028. However, in response to a freedom of information request from Reuters in March, the ministry said it could not provide details of the costs for the nuclear warheads, support services infrastructure and running costs over the system's expected life. Calculations by Reuters and Conservative lawmaker Crispin Blunt suggest it could reach 167 billion pounds ($220 billion) over 32 years. Blunt, head of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, said on Monday the costs had increased and may eventually reach 180 billion pounds. "I oppose the renewal of Trident because I care about the security of my country," he said in a statement. "I'm not prepared to be party to the most egregious act of self-harm to our conventional defense." (Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper and Sarah Young; Editing by Giles Elgood and James Dalgleish)
Unconventional is Yahoo News complete guide to what could be the craziest presidential conventions in decades. Heres what you need to know today.
Welcome to Cleveland whether youre here in person, like Unconventional, or just gearing up to watch the festivities on TV.
From now until July 28, Unconventional will be publishing every weekday morning. Our goal? To be the one thing you need to read to understand whats really happening at the conventions. Each edition will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the biggest and weirdest moments of the day, with original dispatches from the entire Yahoo Politics team. Well also give you a sneak peek at whats next.
So lets get this party started.
A forced march? Invasion of the body snatchers?
The mood right now in Cleveland in the last hours before the convention officially begins is almost eerie. The GOP is marching forward, en masse, to nominate Donald Trump. But beyond the 900 or so rank-and-file delegates who are personally loyal to the tinsel-haired mogul, many of the Republicans in town seem to feel a little queasy about what theyre about to do.
After a few drinks last night, a former staffer for Ted Cruz let slip a stinging criticism of Trumps personal integrity before remembering where she was.
That was off the record, she insisted. That was definitely off the record.
Yahoo News Senior Political Correspondent Jon Ward spent much of last week talking to influential Republicans here, and he neatly captures the zeitgeist when he writes that many of them are taking part in the convention and helping to nominate Donald Trump only out of concern for their party or because they dislike presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton so intensely.
One person actively working to ensure that other Republicans fall in line behind Trump admitted, in Jons words, that he wasnt even sure if hed vote for Trump this fall. A Rules Committee member described an existential sense of drift, a loss of purpose that made it harder to get out of bed in the morning, since Trump began to dominate the primary even though this same member voted with the Trump-aligned forces on the committee every time last week.
Story continues
Having reported on several previous conventions ourselves, we assure you: This is not what theyre usually like.
For more, make sure to read Jons entire story.
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What does Mondays marquee speaker really think of Trump?
Speaking of body snatchers, perhaps the most entertaining spectacle this week in Cleveland will be watching various politicians who were never particularly keen on Trump before he won the primary attempt to deliver sympathetic speeches on the convention stage.
First up on Monday night is Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. Ernst is presumably going to say nice things in her remarks. But she also rejected Trumps VP entreaties earlier this month, and shes never been particularly enthusiastic about the presumptive nominee.
In December, she called his plan to ban Muslims from entering the country ludicrous. In April, she dismissed his remarks about women as nonsense. Last month, she pushed back on his Asia policy.
And while Ernst officially refused to endorse any of this years GOP candidates ahead of the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, she was widely seen as favoring Marco Rubio. She appeared at one of his events. She described him as a good friend who is very near and dear to [her] heart. The two youngish Republicans even hired some of the same campaign staffers.
On Iowa caucus day, Ernst directly questioned Trumps commitment to conservatism in a breakfast interview with Bloomberg Politics, pointing to his past views on abortion and taxes as cause for suspicion.
Judging from what he said just a few years ago, I would not have agreed that he was a conservative, Ernst explained. Theres no proof out there yet. . We dont have a record that we can judge him by.
Just some context to keep in mind as you listen to Ernsts speech Monday night.
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Overheard
When Donald Trump says, Im the law and order candidate, hes the first nominee to say that since Nixon. It captures the mood of the moment.
an Ohio GOP delegate reacting to the Baton Rogue shooting while sipping coffee in a Cleveland Starbucks
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Happening Monday: #NeverTrumps next-to-last stand
With Jon Ward
For months, the media Unconventional included hyped last weeks Rules Committee clash between the Trump campaign and conservatives determined to free the delegates as a potentially explosive moment that could change the course of the entire convention.
Could the delegates unbind themselves from their states primary results and instead vote their conscience on the first ballot a maneuver that would allow them to rebel against Trump and select someone else instead?
It was by far the most pressing question heading into Cleveland. But then the Rules Committee actually met and the campaign to unbind the delegates fizzled like faulty firecracker. Outnumbered by Republicans who supported the status quo, and out-organized by the tactically brilliant RNC-Trump whip team, the insurgents simply couldnt compete. They lost the decisive vote 87 to 12.
But apparently the story isnt over just yet. The rebels are refusing to give up.
Im not going to let the Rules Committee think that theyre relevant, Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate and leader of the Free the Delegates movement, told Politico. Im not going to empower them anymore. The power has been and will continue to be in the hands of the delegates.
With almost no chance of success and time running out anti-Trump conservatives are still preparing to disrupt the proceedings at two points this week.
Their first opportunity comes Monday.
So what are they planning? Last Friday, Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, summoned sympathetic Rules Committee members to a where do we go from here? strategy session at the Hilton DoubleTree Hotel downtown. It lasted for eight hours. Heres a photo from inside the room:
Similar meetings took place throughout Cleveland over the weekend. By the time Sunday rolled around, Unruh & Co. seemed to have settled on strategy. On Monday, the conventions 2,472 delegates are set to automatically adopt the new package of rules passed by the Rules Committee last week. But the insurgents want the convention to break with tradition and reject this package and approve a different version that would free delegates to rebel against Trump.
To accomplish this Herculean feat, theyll first have to convince a majority of the delegates from at least seven states or territories to sign their petition; only then can they force a floor vote on the matter. Next, theyll actually have to win that vote by convincing the entire convention to rewrite the new rules again, and in a manner that the Rules Committee has already repudiated.
Its hard to overstate how difficult this will be especially with the crack RNC-Trump team still whipping votes against them. But it should be interesting to observe.
Meanwhile, Unruh and Cuccinelli are both attempting to gather the 28 Rules Committee signatures they need to pass minority reports and force the entire convention to hold messy, divisive votes on their pet issues unbinding in Unruhs case; closed primaries and other conservative reforms in Cuccinellis. The deadline for minority reports is also Monday.
Late Sunday, a person involved in the talks told Yahoo News that their chances of success both with a minority report and rejecting the rules package were mostly over.
The groups last-gasp effort, according to this source, was shifting to a walkout by delegates on Monday when the rules package is voted on. And some delegates but not a statistically significant number are still planning on voting for Sen. Ted Cruz instead of Trump on Tuesday night.
Cuccinelli contested the idea that the minority report was a lost cause. We should be fine on [that], he told Yahoo News. But he said the rules package fight was less solid and that his group wont know till tomorrow whether they have enough support.
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Convention Diaries
Click through for the full Yahoo News convention diary from Mississippi GOP delegate Nell Frisbee.
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Cleveland protestors, under the gun
Two fundamental American protections the right to bear arms and the freedom of speech may wind up clashing this week on the street of Cleveland.
At this point especially after the shootings Sunday of several Baton Rogue police officers youve probably heard about one of the more surreal quirks of Clevelands security plan. While convention-goers are prohibited from bringing water guns anywhere near the Quicken Loans Arena, actual fireams are fine.
(Also explicitly banned: the ancient battle glove known as a cestus but thats another story.)
How will Ohios open-carry laws affect the convention? Should people in Cleveland (and elsewhere) be preparing for OK Corral-style shootouts between politically passionate vigilantes on the streets of the CLE?
Bryan Hambley, for one, thinks the focus on violence is a bit overblown. But he warns that guns could have a big impact on the RNC regardless of whether anyone actually pulls a trigger.
Hambley is the young doctor who leads Stand Together Against Trump (STAT), the group that will be spearheading the conventions largest anti-Trump march and rally on Thursday.
Anything could happen, but at least I know that none of our people are bringing guns, Hambley tells Unconventional. (STAT strongly emphasizes peaceful and positive protest tactics.) What worries me more is if a small number of people with guns get a large amount of attention in the media and if that, in turn, dissuades people from coming out to demonstrate.
Hambleys fear is that if images of guys with AR-15-style weapons strapped to their back start to circulate online and on TV, a lot of potential protestors will choose to stay home instead of speaking out.
The first such image surfaced Sunday right on cue:
First gun Ive seen by the RNC. If he owns it legally, this is legal. Ohio has open-carry laws. pic.twitter.com/cY1yysWOBB Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) July 17, 2016
Hambley is hoping for 5,000 anti-Trump protestors. Whether they actually show up, though, may depend on how many similar photos they see. And they will likely see more in the wake of the Baton Rogue shootings, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has refused to a request from the Cleveland Police Union to restrict the brandishing of guns in the convention area.
One of the ICU nurses was planning to bring her kids because she wants them to see history in the making, says Hambley. But now shes going to be watching the first few days of the convention closely, and if there are a lot of people carrying guns, shes not going to come.
Hambley sighs. Which is disappointing, he finally says. Kids should feel safe downtown Republican kids and Democratic kids.
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And the award for craziest GOP comment goes to Michael Folk of West Virginia!
By Michael Isikoff
Its a safe bet there will be plenty of Clinton bashing at this weeks Republican convention in Cleveland. But one GOP delegate may have jumped the shark when he called for the former secretary of state to be tried for treason and hung on the Mall in Washington D.C.
The lawmaker, West Virginia State Representative Michael Folk, who is also a United Airlines pilot, has since deleted the offending tweet. But United Airlines said over the weekend in its own statement on Twitter that it was appalled by the comments and looking into the matter further.
United subsequently revealed that Folk had been removed from flying pending our investigation.
Earlier Sunday, a new anti-Trump super-PAC seized on the incident as a prime example of toxic political rhetoric, calling for a nationwide boycott of United Airlines until they take concrete action to protect the public.
Jon Cooper, chairman of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, said the group wants United to perform a psychological evaluation before Mr. Folk is allowed to return to the skies.
For his part, Folk appeared to apologize for his tweet. I do think she should be tried and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Folk told CNN Saturday. But as for being hanged, he said, No, my gosh. That was the hyperbole in the statement.
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By the numbers
50,000: The number of visitors expected to flood into Cleveland during the convention, according to organizers.
66,186: The average number of fans in attendance at a 2015 Cleveland Browns home game
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The best of the rest
Dont expect this years GOP convention to be the traditional love fest for chosen candidate, @nbenac writes. https://t.co/7QXrKJgOIF The Associated Press (@AP) July 17, 2016
REPORT: Trump To Name Prospective Cabinet at Convention https://t.co/lq7Jyv4Jpo DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) July 17, 2016
Youll never guess how many black delegates will be at the Cleveland convention. https://t.co/eXORJjuhqQ Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) July 17, 2016
Every Republican, including every convention delegate, needs to read Pete Wehner and wrestle with his argument: https://t.co/SyU3yGN2lq Michael Gerson (@MJGerson) July 17, 2016
AP: Clinton using Republican convention to spur voter signup https://t.co/kGjAXaANlv Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) July 17, 2016
This is what a contested convention could look like: https://t.co/HwLQSgMK9L pic.twitter.com/pN7tEuYt1M The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) July 17, 2016
As he takes victory laps on Sunday shows, @paulmanafort confirms to me plans for more minority outreach. https://t.co/Q5ADcpN0Q9 Ed O'Keefe (@edatpost) July 17, 2016
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What to watch Monday
1 p.m.: Convention officially opens; Convention Business Session follows
TBA: Speech by Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty
TBA: Speech by Marcus Luttrell, retired U.S. Navy SEAL and author of the book Lone Survivor
TBA: Speech by Scott Baio, former star of Charles in Charge
TBA: Speech by Pat Smith, mother of the late Sean Smith, information Management Officer, United States Foreign Service
TBA: Speech by Mark Geist, Member of Benghazi Annex Security Team and Co-Author of 13 Hours
TBA: Speech by John Tiegen, Member of Benghazi Annex security team and military consultant
TBA: Speech by Antonio Sabato Jr., former star of General Hospital
TBA: Speech by Jamiel Shaw, immigration reform advocate
TBA: Speech by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton
TBA: Speech by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions
TBA: Speech by Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City
TBA: Speech by Melania Trump, wife of Donald Trump
TBA: Speech by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
TBA: Speech Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst
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On the ground at the RNC Convention A photo report >>>
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Convention floor erupts when no roll call taken to change rules to unbind delegates >>>
Demonstrators protest outside the RNC >>>
Donald Trumps America >>>
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Preparations and protests on the eve of the Republican Convention in Cleveland. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos, clockwise from top right: John Moore/Getty Images, Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images, Carolyn Kaster/AP, John Minchillo/AP; 3 background photos: Getty Images)
Yahoo News has enlisted participants at the Republican National Convention representing different viewpoints and roles to file daily diary entries on their experiences in Cleveland. They will be your eyes and ears at one of the most unconventional political gatherings in generations, offering a front-row seat on the convention floor, behind-the-scenes access to key political meetings and a vivid picture of what conventions are really like, both inside and outside the arena. Were excited to bring you these first entries. Check back in the following days for more.
Ive been to seven Republican National Conventions, but none have compared to 2016. This year Im in a different role: In addition to serving as a delegate for my home state of Mississippi, I was also appointed to serve on the Rules Committee for the RNC. In the past, Ive been a delegate, Ive been an alternate and Ive been a guest, but this is my first time on the committee. Im excited for this upcoming week, as the only convention Ive missed in recent years was in 2000, in Philadelphia.
So far, Cleveland has been very good. There has been great weather, and the flight was smooth and fast. I have no complaints. I arrived last Wednesday so that I could attend the Rules Committees first meeting. Our first meeting was that afternoon, and then we recessed until 8 a.m. Thursday. Then after another recess, we came back at 1 p.m. and stayed til midnight. It was a long day, but lots of things were accomplished and I think settled as far as the Rules Committee was concerned. I was pleased with the outcome.
The Rules Committee primarily discussed what to do about the many states that dont register voters by party. In some states, you had to be a registered Republican to vote in the primary, but Mississippi and other states do not require voters to be registered with a party to vote in the primary elections. There was also a push within the party to unbind Trump delegates from their states results, allowing them to represent another candidate. We stayed up until midnight with that resolution, but it ultimately failed.
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Vincent DeVito, center, delegate of the Republican National Convention Rules Committee, at the committees meeting in Cleveland on Thursday. (Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters)
The Rules Committee will meet for the last time this year on Monday morning, before the convention starts, to adopt our final rules, unless theres some objection. The rules are pretty expansive: It is a three-part, 62-page document, and its hard to say what it all contains. I do think there will be some opposition, but I hope there wont be too much. I imagine that the rules will pass, and I hope the day will run as smoothly as my airplane did on Wednesday.
Im looking forward to getting through the final rules meeting and getting things started. My goal for the convention is to meet Donald Trump. I dont think that will happen, but you never know. I think that things in Cleveland will be very lively more exciting than theyve been at past conventions.
I cant wait to hear all the speeches. Each night is going to have a theme to it, I think. Monday nights theme will be illegal immigration. One speaker Im really excited to hear is Jamiel Shaw Sr. Shaws son was killed by an illegal alien in 2008 he was gunned down in the middle of the street for no reason at all. The gunman who killed this young man had been arrested three times before he killed Shaws son and was not deported. Thats criminal; it really says a lot about the leadership in this country.
Shaw lost his son, and I lost my niece. Several years ago, my niece was struck by an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk. I want to see that wall built. I want to enforce our border laws and support our border patrol. I dont mind anybody who is here legally, and I welcome anybody who comes legally to this country, but not illegally.
I think the Republican Party is in good standing to move forward and away from current policies. I think that Mike Pence is a good choice to be Trumps vice president. Pence has been a congressman for six years and has been on important committees, so he knows how it all works. After serving in Congress, he came home and was elected governor of Indiana and has done an outstanding job. I think that serving as governor and having a real job, as opposed to career politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who have never had a real job, is important. As a businesswoman, I like that. I hope that Trump will announce even more of his cabinet this week. Pence will especially appeal to the evangelicals, I think. It should be a win-win.
I saw a poll on Sunday morning that showed Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were even. Weve just got to move past all of this and win the election. We need to seek out independents and Democrats who are changing their registration for the November election. I think there are a lot of independents in my home state especially who will change their registration, and I hope to see that across the country.
As told to Susanna Heller/Yahoo News
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I remember when Stand Together Against Trump started. It was a Monday morning and Trump announced that he was doing a pre-Ohio primary rally at the I-X Center, in Cleveland, later that week. I got an email from my friend Nate that said, We have to do something when he comes to town. And from there we organized, and I think we had 15-20 physicians and residents outside wearing shirts saying, Muslim Doctors Save Lives. And Nate and I felt compelled to go inside and interrupt the speech and chant, Stop the bigotry.
We thought Trump was done, he would fizzle out, Republicans would nominate Cruz or Kasich and we would go back to our normal lives. And that didnt happen. The Indiana primary happened, and he was all of a sudden the nominee. And it hit a lot of people like a wall, this thing we didnt think could happen, that an overtly racist person would be a major partys nominee for president. It just stopped us in our tracks.
We always thought: Well, well start organizing and we would join a bigger group, a national organization that is well and well organized. Wed have our group of doctors and join something bigger. But no one else had anything for the Thursday night when Trump accepts the nomination. And then, over the past few weeks, weve gotten emails from groups that are saying, We want to join you and come be a part of this. And so it has expanded beyond a group of just doctors and nurses to a whole host of young professionals, a whole bunch of individuals around the country who are looking for something. It has been wonderful, but Ive also been busy!
Bryan Hambley is removed from the crowd as Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Cleveland. (Photo: Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters)
Were not here to yell at Trump delegates or supporters. We think they should have their space to project their views. No one is going to be convinced by a yelling match. We are having daily peace and nonviolence trainings, and those will be focused on taking people, many of whom are first-time protesters, and preparing them for the chaos of a convention, of a busy city, of a hectic situation and to make sure they know how to react and make sure it is a peaceful event. Thats a fundamental thought of what we believe but also what we think is most effective. We think Trump wins when there is violence. We think he wins when there is dislike and hatred and anger. He is really very good at driving narratives when people dont like each other. We think the message can be that we dont dislike any one person but that we have different values. Our values are that we respect all people, regardless of their religion, regardless of where they came from, whether they are man or woman. And we think if we keep the discussion this week on that area, on a positive projection of values, we think we win. We think if it descends into hatred, Trump probably wins the week. Its also strategic, its how we see the election evolving.
Right now, were expecting the turnout to be high hundreds, low thousands for Thursday. Those are mainly out of town. The rest is how many people in Cleveland, in Ohio, in the Midwest turn on their TVs Thursday morning and realize, Trump is accepting the nomination tonight. And how many of those people get in the car, come to downtown and wear a yellow shirt to join us, that will determine if the rally gets 1,000 people or 5,000 or more. I hope a lot of people come out, but a lot will depend on the first couple of days of the convention.
Were excited. We have a lot of people coming in from across the country in the next few days. We have people staying at our house. All the Stand Together Against Trump leadership is opening our doors. It is an exciting thing to have people coming together around a positive message at this moment. We really see it as a moment. Nothing like this in our lives has happened before in terms of presidential politics. Weve never seen a candidate as dependent on rebranding himself at the convention. He has to rebrand himself or he cant win. And we think this is a moment where we can quote Trump back to himself at an inconvenient time for him, and remind people were better than this. We have a friend driving in from Chicago, we have a friend flying in from North Carolina, we have friends coming in from the East Coast, and to have them all come together is exciting. Were stoked.
As told to Andrew Bahl/Yahoo News
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Ive been really anticipating the convention. You watch all the stuff on TV and they hype it up, but it has been great. The people at the airport took care of us. The gentleman who met Rep. Tom Rice and me there made sure we got to the right place, grabbed us a taxi and got us straight down here.
I flew down with Tom, whose campaign I worked on in South Carolina. My congressional district was created during redistricting, so before Tom was elected, I was selected to be the Republican chair for the new congressional seat. Hes done a fabulous job, a real gentleman. Hes on the House Ways and Means Committee as a sophomore already. Hes a really good guy and understands things.
I had a conversation with a woman on the plane, and she wanted to unbind the delegates from their states primary results in order to stop Donald Trump. But after I got done talking to her, she wanted to drop out of that group and volunteer for the RNC. She thought she couldnt trust Trump to make his own Supreme Court nominations, but I said, Lets see, hes already put out a list of names. Hes run them by Ted Cruz and people. And even if you can only trust Donald Trump 30 percent, you cant trust Hillary Clinton at all. I think the bell went off in her head. I also sat next to a young Army man and talked him through how to go to college through the military. So it was an eventful plane ride.
Jerry Rovner, right, with Todd Payne of Cleveland Airport services upon his arrival for the Republican National Convention. (Photo: Courtesy of Jerry Rovner)
They had a delegate meeting today, but I missed it. Weve had some other meetings already and I pretty much know what Im doing based on life experience and being my own guy. Im kind of unique: Im retired military, I was a businessman and I was a city councilman off and on for 18 years. I have a military, business and political background, so I can look at things from a lot of different angles. It has always served me well, and this is a great way to put a different hat on and approach things differently.
Im looking forward to exploring and looking around. Tomorrow we have a breakfast to get things settled, then Ill get my credentials and go from there. We have to be at the arena at 1 p.m. and Im excited to get in the arena to check it out.
As told to Andrew Bahl/Yahoo News
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Rhonda Welsch, a Trump supporter at the rally. (Photo: Jeff Stacklin/Yahoo News)
CLEVELAND Among the 100-plus Donald Trump supporters at the America First rally along the Cuyahoga River in the Flats of Cleveland on Monday, Rhonda Welsch was truly disappointed. She expected more.
More people, that is. Hundreds of thousands of people should have come out for the rally, said Welsch, who traveled from Kahuku, Hawaii, to witness the Republican National Convention.
People are afraid to come out, said Welsch. What 60-year-old individual, whos got bad knees, wants to come here and put themselves at risk?
She blames the media and threats of violence against police for more supporters not attending. At Monday afternoons gathering, there was no violence not even verbal outbursts from anyone but Trump fans.
Besides Trump supporters, most of whom were part of a Bikers for Trump group, the only other group present was the media en masse. Under sunny skies and summer heat, there may well have been as many reporters, photographers and videographers at the rally as Trump fans.
If there were supporters of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among the crowd, you didnt see or hear them.
Roger Stone, a Trump adviser, addresses the crowd at rally in Cleveland. (Photo: Jeff Stacklin/Yahoo News)
The keynote speaker of the rally was Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser known for conspiratorial attacks on the Clintons. Although he arrived nearly two hours late, Stone fired up the crowd by promoting the presumptive Republican nominee as a man of unity, an economic driver and a man of the people.
I have never been more excited about a presidential campaign, said Stone, who told the crowd hes worked on nine Republican presidential races. This is not the Republicans versus the Democrats. This is the elites of the Republican and Democratic parties, who have driven this country into the ditch, versus Donald J. Trump and the rest of America.
Much to the crowds pleasure, Stone took swipes at Hillary Clinton and her husband, and commended those in the crowd wearing Hillary for Prison T-shirts which were promoted and distributed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who also addressed the crowd.
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Were going to push even harder with more Hillary for Prison shirts, Jones told the crowd. That [Hillary for Prison] meme, multiple times, has been the No. 1 search term above Brexit and Pokemon Go. Thats right, were even giving the Nintendo a run for the money now.
If there was a confrontation at the rally, it was between Jones and comedian Eric Andre, who was in the crowd and summoned onstage by Jones. Just bring the agitator up here, Jones said.
Im not a Democrat Im a nihilist, Andre told Jones in his deadpan tone. I want you to have sex with my wife.
Oh, youre just trying to be shocking, Jones responded. This is an agitator who just wants to shut down our speech.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The United States has lifted a ban on flights to and from Turkey following a failed coup in the country, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday. The ban, which included both direct flights and those from a third country, went into effect after a faction of Turkey's military attempted to overthrow the Turkish government. The coup crumbled on Saturday as supporters of President Tayyip Erdogan took to the streets in defiance of the coup plotters. The attempted coup forced airlines to cancel flights. Shares of Turkish Airlines had tumbled 12.6 percent on Monday, logging their biggest one-day drop since 2013. The FAA said in a statement that it lifted the restrictions at 1:45 p.m. EDT (1745 GMT). CNN Turk had previously reported the news. In a statement, Turkish Airlines said its flights to the United States would resume on Tuesday morning. The attempted coup followed a series of bombings that have 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. As of July 2, international flight bookings to Istanbul for trips in the second half of the year were down 36 percent from a year ago, travel data analysis company ForwardKeys said. (Reporting by Nick Tattersall and Jeffrey Dastin; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Gareth Jones and Tom Brown)
Urban Outfitters has never shied away from controversial product offerings (a blood-stained vintage Kent State sweatshirt, offensive shampoo bottles, a decorative tapestry reminiscent of Holocaust garb, etc.). So it comes as no surprise that the retailer has waded into 2016's tumultuous election cycle.
Just in time for the Republican National Convention, the Philadelphia-based brand is selling its women's "IDK Not Trump Tho 2016" tee for a discounted price of $19.99, marked down from $28. (The men's tee is still full price.)
According to Buzzfeed, the slogan was the brainchild of David Ross, who began producing tees and stickers late last year at the request of passersby who saw his "IDK Not Trump Tho" lawn sign. Soon after the merchandise went viral, Urban Outfitters approached Ross for a licensing deal.
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In addition to Ross' tees, the retailer has more branded anti-Trump goods, including mugs, a pin and a book titled Quotations from Chairman Trump modeled after Mao's infamous red book.
On the other side of the spectrum, the store is also hocking "Feel the Bern" tees (still full price, despite Bernie Sanders' recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton) as well as "Hillary Runnin' Thangs 2016 Tour" men's shirts.
As Bloomberg pointed out, Urban Outfitters is sticking its neck out by choosing sides in the political sphere, potentially alienating customers and possibly upsetting the boss - CEO Richard Hayne - who has publicly donated to prominent Republican candidates in the past, including Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.
Cleveland (AFP) - The Republican Party opened its national convention Monday, kicking off a four-day political jamboree that will anoint billionaire Donald Trump as its presidential nominee.
Some 2,000 delegates descended on a tightly secured Cleveland arena where Trump's wife will take center stage later in the day to make a personal pitch to voters that her billionaire husband is the best candidate for the White House.
The tough-talking mogul -- whose rise to lead the Republican White House ticket has been one of the more improbable journeys in American politics -- seeks to unify a party deeply split by months of bitter campaigning and divisive rhetoric.
"This convention will come to order," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told cheering delegates at 1:00 pm (1700 GMT).
Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, has top billing for the opening night of the four-day convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which takes place against a backdrop of fear over racial violence and unrest abroad.
The opening-day theme is "Make America Safe Again" -- a play on Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again."
Priebus swiftly addressed the unrest that has rattled American communities, calling for a moment of silence for officers killed in the line of duty, including those gunned down in two attacks in the past 10 days.
"Before we begin the official business of this convention, I would like to take a moment to recognize the fallen police officers in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and elsewhere," he said.
"We also want to recognize the families who lost loved ones during these troubling times. Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings."
Trump told Fox News early Monday that his wife would be "speaking about her love of the country," adding that he will attend the evening session and may even say a few words -- a sign that the convention will be anything but politics as usual.
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"I will be there. I want to watch. It's going to be very exciting," Trump said.
A spate of race-tinged police-involved shootings -- and cop killings, including the fatal shooting of three officers in Louisiana on Sunday -- has put the country on edge.
Deadly attacks overseas, most recently in Nice, and an attempted coup in Turkey, have only stoked an overall sense of instability.
President Barack Obama has urged Americans to temper their words and show stronger common resolve, but Trump is instead highlighting divisions.
"Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching," Trump tweeted shortly after the Baton Rouge shooting.
Trump has portrayed himself as a sheriff who can fix things.
"We have to bring law and order back to this country, whether we like it or not," he told Fox, as he bemoaned the ragged state of race relations in America.
Trump believes that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should be jailed for using a private email server to handle sensitive government documents while serving as secretary of state, something the FBI said was careless but not criminal.
On Monday, Trump will call on retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn and tough-talking Senator Joni Ernst as convention speakers to back up his point.
- Internal affairs -
Of more immediate concern for Trump is a split among Republicans.
The reality TV star's unorthodox style and hard-right message have left the party more divided than it has been in a generation.
After his wife, the candidate's team will send his son and daughters to the convention stage in the coming days in an attempt to humanize The Donald.
Polls show that Trump struggles badly with moderate voters, and his campaign will want to project a more positive image to the general electorate.
But several party luminaries will be absent -- the entire Bush family, Mitt Romney and reportedly even John Kasich, host state Ohio's sitting governor.
Trump's choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate could help shore up his position among conservatives, although the real estate billionaire seemed tepid about his decision.
In a remarkable first joint appearance on Saturday, Trump eventually got around to talking about Pence and explained why he was picked, in less-than-enthusiastic terms.
"One of the reasons is party unity -- so many people have said, 'party unity.' Because I'm an outsider."
Pence will address the convention on Wednesday.
- Protests -
Inside the convention arena, it remains to be seen if the "Never Trump" camp will make themselves heard.
Outside, however, law enforcement is bracing for a wave of protests, including on Monday, when demonstrators began gathering downtown and chanting "dump Trump."
As the GOP convention kicked off, Clinton blasted Trump's candidacy as a "threat to our democracy," and accused him of stoking racial and ethnic tensions with his rhetoric.
Trump "plays coy with white supremacists, Donald Trump insults Mexican immigrants," she told the NAACP, America's largest black civil rights organization, at a meeting in Cincinnati.
"Donald Trump cannot become president of the United States," she said, to huge applause.
The Republican convention ends Thursday with a speech from the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul. The Democrats stage their own convention next week in Philadelphia.
By Donna Owens
BALTIMORE (Reuters) - Baltimore prosecutors on Monday failed for the fourth time to secure a conviction against a city police officer for the death of black detainee Freddie Gray, as a lieutenant was cleared of all charges.
The acquittal of Lieutenant Brian Rice renews questions about the prospects for the remaining cases stemming from the death of Gray, who suffered a fatal neck injury in April 2015 after he was bundled into the back of a police transport van.
Baltimore's police union called on prosecutors to drop the charges against three officers still awaiting trial in the case. Gray's death triggered protests and rioting in the mainly black city and stoked a national debate about how police treat minorities.
Tensions flared anew this month with the deaths of African-American men at the hands of police in Minnesota and Louisiana. The controversy took a tragic turn when eight police officers were shot dead in apparent reprisal attacks staged by lone black gunmen in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Rice, 42, the highest-ranking officer charged in the Gray case, was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct following a bench trial.
Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams, who oversaw a non-jury trial at Rice's request, said prosecutors did not prove that Gray died as a result of Rice's failure to secure him with a seat belt.
In separate statements, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Congressman Elijah Cummings, who represents the district Gray lived in, urged city residents to respect Williams' decisions.
Baltimore was peaceful after the verdict. Only a handful of protesters had gathered outside the downtown courthouse and there were no police reports of unrest.
Rice was the fourth of six officers to stand trial in the case. Williams had acquitted Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson Jr., both of whom were in court on Monday.
Goodson, the driver of the van, had faced the most serious charge, second-degree murder. Officer William Porter faces a September retrial after a jury deadlocked.
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Officer Garrett Miller is scheduled for trial this month, while Sergeant Alicia White's trial is set for October. Porter and White face manslaughter among their charges, while Miller is charged with assault and other crimes.
Warren Alperstein, a Baltimore defense attorney who attended the trial as a spectator, said he was "not surprised by the verdict whatsoever."
"At the end of the day, the state may have to say we're cutting our losses and moving on," he said.
But Doug Colbert, a law professor at the University of Maryland, said there was still value in having brought the prosecutions, even if they were unsuccessful.
"The police departments are now on notice that the legal community stands ready to prosecute in these types of cases," he said.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers in the case are barred from commenting by a gag order from Williams.
Rice, who is white, ordered two officers on bicycle to chase Gray, 25, when he fled unprovoked in a high-crime area.
Prosecutors said Rice acted negligently by failing to secure Gray with a seat belt in the van.
But defense lawyers said Rice made a reasonable split-second decision while Gray was being combative and a hostile crowd looked on, they said.
The judge said prosecutors failed to show the lieutenant was aware of a departmental policy requiring seat belts for prisoners during transport.
"A mere error in judgment is not enough to show corruption," Williams said.
(Writing by Ian Simpson in Washington and Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Tom Brown)
In the spirit of patriotism, convention-goers can buy wooden flags handcrafted by combat veterans at the 2016 Republican National Convention underway in Cleveland, Ohio.
Flags of Valora veteran owned and operated companyis one of 22 vendors showcasing their product at this weeks event.
Air Force veteran and President of Flags of Valor Brian Steorts said he got the idea for the company after being injured while deployed. He joined the FOX Business Networks Maria Bartiromo to share his story.
I went to a rehabilitation program and I didnt wear my uniform anymore, Im used to having my flag on my shoulder and so it kind of upset me, Steorts said. There was a flag that I found that was actually a beautiful flag, but it wasnt made in the United States, and so for therapeutic reasons I started making my own and I wanted to make it all with materials made in America.
Steorts said hed never done woodwork before, but picked up the trade by watching do it yourself videos of painting and distressing.
After it became a passion for Steorts, he says he launched the Virginia-based company to offer jobs to veterans.
Flags of Valor now employs five other combat veterans and sells handcrafted U.S. flags named after specific groups of people or military events.
Were very old school Steorts said. We make everything by hand. We believe Made in America still matters, we believe that our veterans are an untapped resource, and believe in giving back.
When it comes to hiring, Steorts said he advocates for veterans because they thrive in the workplace.
Its a great therapeutic transition for them to go from military lives to civilian and to really search for that camaraderie and brotherhood that we have at our company, he said. Im a veteran myself and I know what drives me and what drives these men and women. Theyve been through some very intense conflicts and theyre very well at handling stress and being in those kinds of environments.
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Steorts said he hopes to spread that message and share his love for America at this weeks convention.
Weve gotten to connect with almost every one of our customers in one way or another, and its very rewarding to know that something that I started in my garage. and have gotten to train ally my guys, my team back in Virginia, veteran craftsman, he said. Its self-rewarding and its philanthropic when we give back. We love being able to promote patriotism like this.
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HANOI (Reuters) - A provincial Vietnamese TV channel has dropped a Chinese drama series after several Chinese actors condemned a court's decision that denied Beijing's vast claims to the South China Sea. China claims most of the energy-rich waters through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, deciding a case lodged by the Philippines, ruled last week that China's "nine-dash line" encircling its territory, almost all the South China Sea, was illegal and breached Manila's sovereign rights. "Due to some objective reasons related to several Chinese actors criticizing the court's ruling on the nine-dash line and to show clear views of a mouthpiece under the Communist Party and the State, Binh Thuan TV announces the suspension of broadcasting of 'Shanghai Bund'," a station anchor said in a video posted by media. "Shanghai Bund" is a Chinese television series remake of the 1980 Hong Kong television series "The Bund", starring Huang Xiaoming, who voiced support for Beijing's claims. Binh Thuan TV is a state-run station based in the southern province of the same name. Beijing has called the court ruling a farce and several Chinese celebrities have spoken up against the court's decision. Many Vietnamese people have shared the video clip and showed support for the channel. About 20 Vietnamese were detained on Sunday while trying to hold a protest against China's rejection of the court decision. Vietnam has welcomed the ruling, but not said whether it will pursue the same legal path as the Philippines. (Reporting by My Pham; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Personal finance addresses the ways in which individuals or families budget, save and spend their money. Although this is a topic that everyone should be educated on, there are only 17 states in America that require their high school students to take a course in personal finance. This means theres a large population of adults who lack some measure of financial understanding.
In an effort to educate the public, one of Visas financial literacy programs, Practical Money Skills for Life, focuses their efforts on creating quality, engaging and innovative materials that can bring interest and fun into financial education.
Its important to start financial literacy at an early age and to continue often if we actually want to end up with adults who have good money management skills, says Hugh Norton, head of US Financial Education at Visa.
The idea of a personal finance comic book originated in 2012 when Visa partnered with Marvel Custom Solutions for the very first time. It really just seemed like a natural winning combination to put together our financial literacy expertise and their iconic characters, says Norton.
Marvel Custom Solutions, Marvels in-house creative agency, is often approached to take on educational projects. Editor and project manager at Custom Solutions, Darren Sanchez, says educational comic books are a great way to teach kids important lessons while still keeping them entertained.
With about half a million copies distributed in eight different languages in 42 countries, the first comic, Avengers: Saving the Day, was nothing short of a success.
Now, after four years, these big name companies worked together to create their latest comic, Guardians of the Galaxy: Rockets Powerful Plan. Superhero characters from both Avengers and Guardians comic series appeared in blockbuster movies, the most recent being Guardians of the Galaxy 2 scheduled for release in 2017.
The months it took to create Guardians of the Galaxy: Rockets powerful plan included endless approvals and a team of talented writers and artists. But the challenge with these types of educational comics, says Sanchez, is making sure the comic incorporates Visas main teaching points, includes all of the characters and making sure kids engage with its message.
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For this issue, Visa wanted to teach their readers about saving up for an emergency and how to save up for big-ticket items that they need but cant normally buy.
Rocket and Groot are the stars of the comic. Its called Rockets Powerful Plan and hes the one thats saving money, says Sanchez. Hes the mastermind behind all of it. And Groot is the irresponsible side to show what not to do.
The colorful 20-page issue is filled with action-packed fight scenes and finds a way to seamlessly integrate the story with financial terms like investment, exchange rate, live within your means, savings account and emergency fund.
Weve rationed out money for living expenses, says Rocket in the comic, squirreled away cash for emergencies and now after all that time we finally have enough for our new toy! The newest in stark tech.
In an effort to be more aggressive in spreading financial literacy, this time around, Visa also partnered with the Public Library Association.
Norton tells Yahoo Finance that they didnt want to just hand the comic book over to people in hopes they would use it. We wanted to to be able to put real learning materials in peoples hands and partnering with the public library association allows us to put that comic into communities across America in a much more accessible way than if it was only available through our site.
The initial launch of Guardians of the Galaxy: Rockets Powerful Plan, was translated into eight languages. But the May release was so successful that it is now being translated into an additional eight languages, including Turkish and Fijian.
Its a myth that an ill-informed consumer is somehow better for business, says Norton. In the long term an informed and educated consumer who knows how to deal with their own finances is better for everyone. Its the right thing to do and we need to start financial education early.
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PARIS (Reuters) - French market regulator AMF on Monday said French media group Vivendi now owned more than 20 percent of the voting rights of French video game company Ubisoft and 22.63 percent of its equity after purchasing shares on the market.
AMF reiterated that Vivendi said it did not plan to make a bid for Ubisoft.
The Guillemot family, which owns about 9 percent of Ubisoft, considers the arrival of Vivendi in the company's capital as hostile and has refused so far to cooperate with the media giant, led by billionaire Vincent Bollore.
(Reporting by Astrid Wendlandt; editing by John Irish)
PARIS (Reuters) - French market regulator AMF on Monday said French media group Vivendi now owned more than 20 percent of the voting rights of French video game company Ubisoft and 22.63 percent of its equity after purchasing shares on the market. AMF reiterated that Vivendi said it did not plan to make a bid for Ubisoft. The Guillemot family, which owns about 9 percent of Ubisoft, considers the arrival of Vivendi in the company's capital as hostile and has refused so far to cooperate with the media giant, led by billionaire Vincent Bollore. (Reporting by Astrid Wendlandt; editing by John Irish)
The Recently Revised Website Includes the Addition of New Products and Better Graphics on the Homepage
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2016 / VL Health, a top producer of quality health and beauty products, is pleased to announce the launch of its new and updated website. At the recently renovated online VL Health Shop, customers will find an enhanced selection of products, improved graphics on the homepage, special offers and expedited shipping options.
In addition to the upgraded website, the founders of VL Health are also celebrating a positive review of their company on the Suplementos.org website. The authors reviewing the VL Health product line took an in-depth look at Arizona-based company and its diverse selection of products.
As the review notes, VL Health sells a nice selection of skin care products, including one called Celleral Eye Gel. The cosmetic cream was designed to reduce the signs of aging around the eyes.
"More specifically, it minimizes the appearance of fine lines, reducing puffiness/bags under the eyes, and giving the eyes a firmer and brighter look," noted the review on Suplementos.org, adding that the product contains some effective skin care ingredients such as Pronalen Fruit Acids, DuPont Glypure, Syn-Coll and Regu-Age.
Celleral Anti-Aging Serum is another product found on the VL Health site. As the review notes, it is meant to enhance skin health and combat the signs of aging. Argan Oil, which is extracted from the argan tree in Morocco, is also sold on the VL Health website. As the review notes, many people who use pure argan oil on their skin are pleased how it naturally moisturizes their dry skin, leaving it looking healthy and vibrant.
"In addition to offering great products, VL Health also believes in offering clients value for the money as well as a great customer experience," the review noted.
"For instance, on the customer service front, VL Health has posted an email address and phone number on its site that customers can use to order its products or make queries."
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The review also noted the way VL Health rewards its customers; for example, with a buy 2, get 1 free special and through offering lower prices on 3-packs of argan oil.
Anybody who would like to learn more about VL Health is welcome to visit the companys updated and more user-friendly website at any time. There, if they wish, they may also place an order.
About VL Health:
VL Health is a leader in producing beauty and health products. For more details go to their website to learn more about all the company has to offer. Website: http://www.vlhealth.com/.
Contact:
Rex Huff
admin@rocketfactor.com
(949) 555-2861
SOURCE: VL Health
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) is seeking a settlement with Canadian diesel vehicle owners similar to the one reached in the United States, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Monday, citing a spokesperson for the carmaker.
Volkswagen last month agreed to pay as much as $15.3 billion after admitting it cheated on U.S. diesel emissions tests for years, to buy back vehicles from consumers and provide funding that could benefit makers of cleaner technologies.
The carmaker will set aside $10.033 billion to cover buybacks or fixes for diesel cars and sport utility vehicles that used illegal software to defeat government emissions tests.
Volkswagen would be on the hook for up to $2 billion if it reached a similar settlement in Canada, Handelsblatt reported, without saying what the source of that information was.
A spokesman at Volkswagen's headquarters in Wolfsburg declined to comment.
"We are not commenting on speculation in the media. VW is in talks with the Canadian authorities but there are no decisions yet," the spokesman said.
(Reporting by Harro ten Wolde and Andreas Cremer; Editing by Catherine Evans)
Volkswagen is reportedly considering building its own battery factory as part of a large commitment to electric cars.
The company is targeting sales of more than 1 million electric cars within 10 years, potentially as many as 3 millionwith large numbers of those destined for China.
That total will include sales not only from the main Volkswagen lineup but also other VW Group brands like Audi and Porsche.
DON'T MISS: Daimler to spend $500 million on electric-car battery factory
To supply battery cells for all of those cars, Volkswagen may build its own cell fabrication and battery assembly plants, according to German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
VW's non-executive supervisory board reportedly considered the plan before the company's annual meeting June 22. A decision is expected before the end of the year.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published on June 1, 2017. We have updated it to reflect more recent reporting by Bloomberg on potential battery-cell partners for Volkswagen.]
Volkswagen Budd-e Concept
The battery factory already has apparent support from Volkswagen's works council and the German state of Lower Saxony, its largest shareholder.
Lower Saxony would also be the likely location for one battery factory, at a cost of 1.7 billion to 2 billion euros ($1.9 billion to $2.2 billion). The total plan for multiple factories could cost 10 billion euros ($11.2 billion).
The possibility of such a Volkswagen battery factory in Germany was first reported by German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
MORE: U.K. Plant To Assemble Larger Battery Packs For Next Nissan Leaf
To reach its 1-million-unit goal, VW will likely rely heavily on the MEB platform for compact electric cars announced last year.
The company has also announced an electric version of the next Volkswagen Phaeton luxury sedan, as well as production versions of the Audi e-Tron Quattro SUV and Porsche Mission E sedan concepts. Those luxury models will likely sell in somewhat low volumes, however.
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In addition to supplying larger volumes of electric cars, the goal of owning battery factories would reportedly be to help VW operate independently of suppliers like Panasonic, Samsung, and LG Chem.
Volkswagen Budd-e Concept
The two South Korean firms are already committed to supplying battery cells for the Audi electric SUV, which is due in 2018.
They are reportedly among the top contenders to provide cell fabrication technology and manufacturing for future VW plants.
Tesla is working closely with Panasonic on its massive battery "gigafactory" in Nevada, with the Japanese company contributing technical knowledge and funds.
General Motors engaged in a far-reaching partnership with LG in which the Korean company developed numerous components for the Detroit firm's Chevrolet Bolt EV electric car.
Other companies find no issue with buying battery cells from suppliers.
Volkswagen e-Golf and e-Up electric cars
Daimler recently announced plans to triple production capacity for battery packs at its Deutsche Accumotive battery subsidiary.
The company will spend 500 million ($550 million) on a second battery plant, which will produce packs with cells manufactured by South Korean suppliers.
Daimler shut down its cell subsidiary Li-Tec last year, saying it simply wasn't economical to make cells itself in Germany.
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LONDON (Reuters) - The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on Monday recommended that the IOC and International Paralympic Committee should consider banning all athletes entered by the Russian Olympic Committee for next month's Rio Olympics. WADA was responding to a damning independent report produced by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren and published on Monday that revealed evidence of widespread state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. WADA made seven recommendations after the report was published, including one that Russian government officials be denied access to international competitions, including Rio 2016. Among the other recommendations, WADA said international federations from sports implicated in the report consider action against Russian national bodies and that McLaren and his team complete their mandate provided WADA can secure funding. "Shamefully, the McLaren Report corroborates the allegations, exposing a modus operandi of serious manipulation of the doping control process in the satellite laboratory set up in Sochi for the 2014 Games; and, the Moscow laboratory since 2011 and after the Sochi Games," WADA president Sir Craig Reedie in a statement. "Not only does the evidence implicate the Russian Ministry of Sport in running a doping system that's sole aim was to subvert the doping control process, it also states that there was active participation and assistance of the Federal Security Service and the Centre of Sports Preparation of National Teams of Russia." The WADA-backed independent report confirmed allegations made by former Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory head Grigory Rodchenkov, who two months ago told the New York Times that dozens of Russians used performance-enhancing drugs in Sochi with approval from national sports authorities. The report said Russia's Sports Ministry had overseen the manipulation of athletes' analytical results for years before Sochi. In Sochi itself, where international observers were scrutinising the drug tests, positive results could not simply be brushed away, so a system of sample-swapping was put in place with the help of the FSB intelligence service, the report said. McLaren described the deceptions to Reuters as "beautiful in it's simplicity". (Reporting by Steve Keating/Martyn Herman; Editing by Pritha Sarkar and Frank Pingue)
For those not too familiar with Canadian geography, Thunder Bay is a port city on Lake Superior, just north of Minnesota, with a population of over 100,000. To put the population in perspective, Thunder Bay has a slightly larger population than another Great Lakes port city, Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Unfortunately for those Thunder Bay citizens that shop regularly at the citys three Walmart stores, they cannot use their Visa (V) cards anymore to make their purchases. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) announced Monday that certain Canadian locations stopped accepting Visa credit cards after the companies failed to reach a deal over what the retailer called unacceptably high fees, per an article from Fortune.
The decision to stop taking Visa in the three stores in Thunder Bay, Ontario, will eventually be the norm in more than 370 outlets in the country, said Walmart Canada in a statement on Monday, though it did not give details. The decision will not affect stores outside Canada. A spokesman added that Wal-Mart was optimistic that we will reach an agreement with Visa, per Fortune.
According to a report from Bloomberg, Wal-Mart prepared its Thunder Bay customers for the change back in June of this year via its website. Signs hung in the stores leading up to the change, and on Monday store greeters, employees and managers approached customers as they walked in to remind them. Some cashiers even offered customers a chance to sign up for a Wal-Mart Mastercard.
It doesnt bother me, said Lea Bostan, a 73-year-old retiree and Visa cardholder who echoed the sentiments of many shoppers, per Bloomberg. I come here all the time. Ill still come here but Ill just use cash.
Unfortunately, Visa and Wal-Mart have been unable to agree on an acceptable fee for Visa transactions, Alex Roberton, a spokesman for the retailer in Canada, said in an e-mailed statement, per Bloomberg. He added the company hasnt yet set a timetable for the rollout to other markets.
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Wal-Mart Stores has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and Visa Inc. has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
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TORONTO, July 18 (Reuters) - Some of Wal-Mart Stores Inc's Canadian locations stopped accepting Visa Inc credit cards on Monday, the retailer said, after it failed to reach a deal over what it called "unacceptably high" fees.
In a rare example of negotiations between a major retailer and credit card company spilling out in public, Walmart said last month it had been unable to agree with Visa on an "acceptable fee" and would no longer accept the company's credit cards unless it got a better deal.
The decision to stop taking Visa in three stores in Thunder Bay, Ontario, will eventually be mirrored across the more than 370 outlets in the country, Walmart Canada said in a statement on Monday, though it did not give details.
The decision will not affect stores outside Canada, the company said. A spokesman added that Walmart was "optimistic that we will reach an agreement with Visa."
Canadian retailers have long complained about what they call the high interchange fees they pay credit card companies, though representatives of Walmart Canada and Visa have declined to address questions on specifics of payment terms.
Visa has taken up ads in several Canadian newspapers, saying Walmart is using its customers as pawns in its bid to get lower fees.
Visa "remains committed to doing everything reasonable" to ensure its cards can be used at Walmart stores, a spokeswoman said in a statement.
(Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson)
Britney Spears is giving fans a sneak peek into new choreography for her just-released single "Make Me," featuring G-Eazy.
The pop princess took to Twitter to post a short clip of some practice time in the studio. Spears does some body rolls, booty popping and hip winding in the video alongside her choreographer.
The new routine for "Make Me" is reminiscent of classic Britney from her 2001 MTV VMAs "I'm a Slave 4 U" performance with a boa or her 2003 "Toxic" video. The new choreography could be for a new video coming soon, or simply practice for her upcoming return to Las Vegas.
Spears' next performance is scheduled for Aug. 17 at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas.
#MakeMe move https://t.co/6vY9g54WLf pic.twitter.com/G9SadnKBSi
- Britney Spears (@britneyspears) July 15, 2016
This article originally appeared on Billboard.com.
It was the exactly kind of disarray that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump had hoped to avoid.
The GOP convention in Cleveland briefly descended into chaos Monday in an embarrassing display of party rancor as pro-Trump delegates in the hall shouted We want Trump while their opponents chanted We want a roll call.
Just ahead of the vote on the conventions nominating rules, which require delegates to vote for Trump, the winner of the Republican primary, opponents known as #NeverTrump sent out a release announcing they had sufficient signatures to force a roll call vote.
It was a last ditch attempt by the NeverTrumpers to free up delegates so that they would not be bound to vote for the New York real estate mogul on the first ballot for the presidential nomination.
Watch the moment here:
Noting Trump praises murderous dictators for their governing tactics, the #NeverTrump statement said, Nobody should be coerced to vote for a candidate as dangerous and unprincipled as Donald Trump.
Key GOP national security leaders and former senior officials organized their own protest movement in March, arguing Trump is dangerously incoherent on foreign policy. Several have even said theyll vote for the Republicans Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
When a voice vote for the nominating rules was called, the presiding party official ignored loud boos from delegates on the floor, declaring the rules faced no opposition and banging the gavel. Pro-Trump protesters roared in a bid to drown out the dissenters.
For years, the party conventions have long been highly-scripted affairs designed for television with internal divisions muffled. But the Republican convention veered off script at least temporarily as confusion reigned on the floor. Trump supporters attempted to take the stage with a banner, but were stopped by a secret service agent.
A delegate from Utah approached the microphone on the floor, making a motion to hold a roll call vote on the rules rather than a voice vote, and announcing that nine states supported the move one more than the required eight.
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But Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack, presiding over the convention proceedings, said that after the initial voice vote, three states had withdrawn their support. The anti-Trump rebellion had failed, inviting more boos, and cheers from Trumps supporters.
As cable television channels interviewed the dissenters, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the chairman of the Platform Committee, took to the lectern and tried to defuse the tension with an appeal to patriotism. Whos proud to be an American? he asked.
The crowd roared, seemingly as one.
Photo credit: YouTube
Lady Gaga visited the Casa Hogar home for boys in Cabo San Lucas over the weekend and sang an emotional rendition of Born This Way for the children living there.
The Cheek to Cheek artist performed an a cappella version of the hit single (from her 2011 album of the same name) while spending the day at the Mexican orphanage an organization that strives to, offer a special and happy boys home set in a camp like environment providing physical and emotional care.
Gaga also shared a photo on Instagram Monday of herself wearing a backpack that the kids there gave her. Already miss the boys at Casa Hogar, she captioned the post. Wore my shwag out on the town. mis amores.
Already miss the boys at Casa Hogar. Wore my shwag out on the town. mis amores. A photo posted by Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) on Jul 17, 2016 at 11:46pm PDT
Watch the full performance below.
Londons three-day Star Wars Celebration is over, but even if you couldnt make it across the pond to enjoy the far, far away festivities, some of the panels and interviews that took place are now online and few were as entertaining as the audience-Q&A chat that Mark Hamill conducted over the weekend.
During his hour-long appearance (available above), the franchises Luke Skywalker took the stage, solo, to field questions about anything and everything fans wanted to know about except, of course, next years Episode VIII, which he admitted he was contractually obligated to not spoil. Despite confessing the secrecy that surrounds the series can be really annoying and intrusive, Hamill was nothing if not a jovial and gregarious speaker while in the Celebration spotlight, touching upon his own toy-collection hobby, his reaction to learning about his (exceedingly minor) role in Episode VII: The Force Awakens, his favorite moments from the original George Lucas-authored trilogy, and his future animated-TV-show voice-work duties as Batmans arch-nemesis, The Joker.
Hamill wasnt the only Star Wars luminary sitting down to talk during Celebration. The Rogue One cast and crew dominated Friday, and the Episode VIII filmmakers alongside those heading up the Han Solo origin-story prequel were the big news on Saturday. But that wasnt all the original Chewbacca himself, Peter Mayhew, also stopped by to briefly discuss his role as the giant furry Solo sidekick, and his surprise at the unbelievable popularity of The Force Awakens became in America. (Watch that above.)
Garrick Hagon, a.k.a. Biggs Darklighter childhood friend of Luke Skywalker, who died during the final aerial battle in A New Hope also stopped by to reminisce about his participation in the franchise, most notably about the mustache he sported in the movie (and has long since shaved away).
Star Wars Celebration may be over, but news about the sci-fi sagas impending releases are no doubt only going to be ramping up in advance of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which will recount the Rebel Alliances pre-Episode IV theft of the Death Star plans. It debuts in theaters Dec. 16.
Related: What We Learned About Star Wars: Episode VIII and the Young Han Solo Movie at Celebration
Related: Lucasfilm Head: Darth Vader Has 'Very, Very Important Part in 'Rogue One
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
The recent Black Lives Matter movement has permeated the Internet and many news outlets, generating a dialogue about police brutality against blacks, especially in America. While this pressing issue is worthy of address, it is also significant to take a look at how ethnic minorities in general are confronted by law enforcement.
Bryanne Salazar, a Latina mom, recently spoke out about her fears of being confronted by the police as an ethnic minority in an article for Mom.me. This was prompted by her sons recent encounter being pulled over for a broken taillight.
We were driving down to the road last night to play Pokemon Go, and I noticed red and blue flashing lights behind me, her 18-year-old son, Alvaro, tells his mother. Alvaro was with his girlfriend, also a Mexican, when they were pulled over.
ALSO SEE: Dad catches 13-year-old daughter on Tinder, deals with it in the most dad way ever
Just the day before, Id had another talk with both of my sons about what to do if they were ever pulled over by a police officer. Id told them to never resist and to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times, Salazar says.
While she acknowledges the prejudiced dealings of blacks by law enforcement, she also emphasizes the unjust treatment towards families of colour by the police in general.
No, my family isnt black but our names and identities mark us as non-white and in this day and age, that feels dangerous.
According to Mom.me, five unarmed Latinos were also shot and killed by the police the same week Sterling and Castile were killed. What is more concerning to this mother is the fact that Latinos account for just over 17 percent of the population, make up 23 percent of the total searches by police officers and an astounding 30 percent of deaths by police, reports Mom.me.
Salazar also talks about her husbands experience with the police on a fishing trip with their son by a local pier. His experience is described as one where he was profiled as an ethnic minority, and perhaps treated differently because he was not white.
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[A]n elderly white police officer stood and stared at my husband for about 20 minutes while he was fishing, [and] he wondered why he, among everyone else, had attracted the officers attention, Salazar says.
Her husband was asked if he speaks English and after replying yes, the officer asked, well then do you not know how to read? while pointing to a sign that read No Overhead Casting. He was issued a $100 ticket and also asked if he was lying when asked for identification.
As he walked off the pier, my husband saw two young men clearly hold their poles over their heads and cast their fishing lines. If the officer even noticed them, he said nothing, Salazar says.
ALSO SEE: Should Parents Kiss Their Kids On The Lips?
Incidents as such, in turn, influence how parents of colour bring up their children.
The harsh reality is that my white friends with white children cannot identify with the fear of having non-white kids being confronted by police. They can empathize, but they cannot actually know my fear of having my husband or children targeted because of their skin colour, Salazar writes.
Salazars son was finally able to understand his mothers concern after his experience with the police. He, along with his girlfriend, were asked if they were convicts or had been previously arrested.
To the kids, the cop seemed like he was on high alert the moment he approached their car, says Salazar.
The reality is that this police officer, like so many of us, may also fear of being targeted or killed because of his appearance. The recent horrific Dallas police shootings are a reminder that this anger at the injustices against people of colour can erupt in senseless, stupid violence that only serves to strengthen the disparity between us.
Should Salazar be concerned about her son being profiled as an ethnic minority? Let us know what you think by tweeting to @YahooStyleCA.
Shares of Groupon Inc. GRPN are surging today after analysts at Piper Jaffray Cos. PJC upgraded its recommendation for the online marketplace from neutral to overweight, citing that the company has narrowed its focus and has increased marketing spending. They also issued a $6 price target for the stock.
In a note, Piper Jaffray analyst Samuel Kemp wrote, Groupon is quickly narrowing its product and regional focus to the categories where it can be successful, while deploying marketing dollars to drive growth in North America local deals.
Shares of Groupon spiked more than 11% Monday, bringing the stocks year-to-date gains up over 26% for 2016. The company is currently a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock.
Once a favorite tech stock for investors and analysts, the company has struggled since its IPO in 2011 to grow its user base and profits. Groupon replaced its CEO in November 2015, and new CEO Rich Williams has increased marketing budget in an attempt to revive and reinvent the company. The company will spend $150 million to $200 million on marketing this year, which will drive as many as 4.5 million new accounts over the course of the current year, and lead to similar levels next year. Those new accounts will eventually drive $215 million to $280 million in annualized gross profit, and return North America local billings growth to double-digit levels, according to Kemp.
Bottom Line
Groupon has had a successful run thus far in 2016 as seen in the growth of its stock price, and the company is looking to continue its run. With a new CEO at the helm and the possibility of its sales and profits growing at double digit pace, it could very well do so. Though its just a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) now, things are looking up for Groupon, and if more analysts from other firms become more bullish on the company, that ranking, and its stock price, could be on the move.
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This is the first story in a multipart series on the Ladies in Red, chronicling the work of Republican women as they influence the future of conservatism. Our coverage of their Democratic counterparts include the new Elizabeth Warren, the pro-fracking environmentalist and this daring heroine from Georgia.
There was a man at the gavel, but he was flanked by two women. To the right of the GOP platform committee chairman sat co-chair Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin; to his left sat the other co-chair, North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx. When a male rep from Maine proposed a platform addition banning junk food from federal food stamps, it was Hawaiis Adrienne King, the tanned, spunky prosecutor and business owner, who added a dose of common sense by asking, Is there going to be a definition of junk food? Sure, some women made a case for the controversial ban, but it was Californias Noel Irwin Hentschel who took the kill shot: Were trying to tell people what to eat? she said. Were supposed to be the party of individual freedoms. The amendment failed.
Gettyimages 150902793
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin speaks at the 2012 Republican National Convention.
Source: Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call
The proceedings were erratic at times, as delegates struggled over whether porn was a public health crisis (it was, according to the adopted statute), whether the Bible should be taught as literature (it should, as decreed) and whether they should be the anti-prairie chicken party (yes!). As Republicans gathered to discuss a party platform that strove to be an aspirational brochure for conservatism yet included strong language opposing LGBT rights and immigration it became clear that here, at least, women had a firm seat at the table. Of the 112 delegates, exactly half were Republican women.
Their growing influence is visible in the female-flush congressional offices, party committees and talk-show rounds, on issues including medical marijuana, criminal justice reform and national defense. Here in Cleveland, the role of women in reshaping the platform is televised on C-SPAN and available to the public for praise or ridicule (unlike the Democratic platform, which is led by a DNC-appointed 25-person committee and conducted away from the cameras). That transparency comes with risk, though: Its where all the worst political fights take place, one longtime RNC official who played a role in the 2012 platform tells OZY. Nothing good comes out of it. And some wonder how much a platform matters when the message can so easily be shrugged off by a candidate, as Donald Trump has largely ignored the 2012 platforms dreams of inclusiveness.
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Adding to the challenge is that Republican women are already set to lose three of their 28 representatives in Congress. We dont seem to be able to make steady progress, says Foxx, who was elected in 1994, shortly after the Year of the Woman in 1992 that led to six women sitting in the U.S. Senate. (Today there are 20.) Until they get close to 50 percent, its very difficult for women to feel like they have made a huge difference, says Foxx.
While Trump has a reputation for hiring and promoting female executives in his businesses, hes also been criticized for presenting a problem for women trying to define conservatism. Its very concerning what he says about women, says Larissa Martinez, a former Carly Fiorina campaign hand. But when it comes to what hell do policy-wise, it gets trickier. While many conservative women think Trumps rhetoric is insulting, some believe Hillary Clintons leadership would hurt them worse. Policy trumps gender for me, says Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates, mostly women, for office. Donald Trump has said contradictory things in the past, but hes always corrected himself.
Some women are also pushing the party down roads it isnt ready to cross.
Still, center-right women are playing center stage in the partys evolution. U.S. Rep. Stacey Guerin of Maine fought for a proposal mandating that the federal government gets approval from state legislatures before designating monuments or parks as federal land, a departure from historically conservationist Republicans like Gerald Ford and Teddy Roosevelt. As Republicans discussed language to require colleges to shuffle rape investigations to police, it was Californias Henstchel who suggested that delegates show as a party that we care about young women and their safety, advocating a greater emphasis on counseling and heightening awareness of date rape. When the party approves language to further cut abortion funding, it doesnt hurt to have female messengers to stave off liberal criticisms of sexism. Women are uniquely able to be mothers, Quigley says. The issue means something to us.
However, some women are also pushing the party down roads it isnt ready to cross. The GOPs first openly gay platform delegate, Rachel Hoff, a D.C. defense analyst, made a plea to ax measures against gay marriage. In high school, I chose to be a Republican, she said, before adding, humorously, so I wasnt born this way. Other Republicans, including New York platform delegate Amy Dickerson and Margaret Hoover, the granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover, have argued that individual freedoms include a right to marry. And Juanita Cox of Nevada came out in favor of cannabis oil, a medical marijuana derivative that doesnt get patients high but can help children with severe seizure disorders. This gives them a chance for more of a normal life, Cox said.
Many female conservatives, including Foxx, prefer to downplay the role of being a minority in the Grand Old Party. We eventually want to be seen as not just women, but leaders, policy professionals, says Martinez. Many Democrats, meanwhile, are looking at this and saying, we just need numbers, she says. They get behind sisterhood, womens bills and issues. Take the case of Martha McSally. Even as Republicans talked admiringly of the respected congresswoman who was the first woman to fly in combat in 1991, they passed a stance that would prohibit women from combat roles.
The debate is over. Women have been serving in combat since the Revolutionary War. Get over it. https://t.co/uW30GlOxvKhttps://t.co/YnKtmmaNcg Martha McSally (@MarthaMcSally) December 16, 2015
Its a reticence that some women adjust to as they garner more influential roles. Television mainstays like Fox News Megyn Kelly and CNNs Mary Katharine Ham are emerging as thoughtful leaders and ambassadors of the right. Senators Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Joni Ernst of Iowa have led efforts on the Workplace Advancement Act, a response to liberal suggestions on equal pay thats meant to encourage female-led businesses and end retaliation for women inquiring about their pay. Martinez is executive director of RightNOW, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization dedicated to creating spaces for center-right women to network and educate themselves politically. I constantly get asked: Why are you a Republican? the millennial Latina, who is often mistaken for a Democrat, says. Limited government. Strong national defense. Strong economy. Do I believe in every stance on the platform? No.
(Reuters) - Days before he was gunned down in Baton Rouge by an ex-Marine, veteran police officer Montrell Jackson shared his emotional fatigue at serving in a city he feared was falling out of love with law enforcement. Jackson, 32, died on Sunday along with two colleagues when the decorated former sergeant opened fire on them, nearly two weeks after police in Louisiana's capital shot and killed a black man. That earlier shooting triggered nationwide protests, including one in Dallas where five officers were shot dead, and left Jackson, who had served the force in Baton Rouge for 10 years and whose partner recently gave birth, psychologically scarred. "These last three days have tested me to the core," Jackson wrote on his Facebook page, in an entry posted the day after the Dallas shootings and just over a week before he was killed. "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." He described himself as "tired physically and emotionally," adding: "These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart." Also among the dead officers was Matthew Gerald, 41, a rookie with a military background, the police department said on Facebook. The third officer killed was Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four, local media reported, citing Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and Garafola's wife, Tonja. A fourth policeman, aged 41, was fighting for his life on Monday, Gautreaux said, one of six in all shot by a attacker who officials named as decorated ex-U.S. Marine sergeant Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri. Long, who was believed to have acted alone, was himself shot to death in a gunfight with police. Both he and Jackson were black. 'BIG TEDDY BEAR' Jackson's friends and relatives took to Facebook to remember him. "Rest in Peace to my former partner and one of the best cops I've ever known," Marcus Tillman said in a much-shared post. "He was a black life that apparently didn't matter to the one that took it." The Facebook page shows several pictures of a baby boy, and comments suggested that the child was Jackson's son. Jonathan Saunders, a friend of Jackson, said the officer was a big man - but gentle and kind. "He was 220 pounds of Teddy Bear," said Saunders, who lives in New Orleans and once worked at a Laser Tag business where Jackson was a part-time security guard. "If you needed a hug, you could walk up to him and hug him. He cared about everybody." Jackson ended his post with the words: "If you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you." Saunders said in a phone interview that Jackson's child was just a few months old. A Facebook page belonging to Matthew Gerald featured images of law enforcement badges, and friends and family posted condolences on a page that appeared to belong to his wife. Two other officers received non-life-threatening injuries in Sunday's attack. (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein, Melissa Fares, Steve Gorman and Chris Michaud; Writing by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by John Stonestreet)
(Reuters) - Yahoo Inc's (YHOO.O) quarterly earnings fell short of Wall Street expectations on Monday in what may be the company's last financial report before it sells its core business.
Yahoo reported adjusted earnings of 9 cents per share, short of the 10 cents that analysts expected. It also announced a $482 million write-down on the value of Tumblr, the social media service that it acquired in 2013 for $1.1 billion.
Total revenue rose to $1.31 billion from $1.24 billion a year earlier, though that seeming improvement was the result of a change in the way the cost of acquiring traffic is counted. After deducting fees paid to partner websites for traffic, revenue fell to $841.2 million from $1.04 billion.
Revenue in the company's emerging businesses, which Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer calls Mavens - mobile, video, native and social advertising - showed some life, rising 25.7 percent to $504 million in the second quarter ended June 30.
Gross search revenue for the quarter was $765 million, a 17 percent decrease from the same period last year. The company posted a net loss of $439.9 million, or 46 cents per share, compared with a loss of $21.6 million, or 2 cents per share, a year earlier.
"If search continues to decline as much as it has that's something that's going to be called into question," said JMP Securities analyst Ronald Josey.
Yahoo is in the process of auctioning off its search and advertising business and is expected to choose a winner this week. The company said its board has made "great progress on strategic alternatives" but did not comment further on the auction process.
Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and AT&T Inc (T.N) are said to be in the running, as well as private equity firm TPG Capital and a consortium lead by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and backed by billionaire Warren Buffett.
Yahoo's fortunes have waned under Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has made little progress in her attempts to gain ground against newer, bigger Internet players such Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google.
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The tepid progress in turning around the business attracted pressure from activist investors who pushed Yahoo to launch an auction of its core business in February. Yahoo has also said it could spin off the business.
Yahoo's shares were little changed at $37.92 in trading after the bell.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Jonathan Weber and Chris Reese)
Miami (AFP) - An elderly man who died of the Zika virus in Utah appears to have spread the infection to a caregiver, US health officials said Monday.
The case raises the prospect of a previously unknown path of transmission for a virus that is capable of causing birth defects and has traveled quickly though Latin America.
The caregiver has since recovered from the infection, which is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes but can also be passed on through sexual contact.
However, common modes of transmission have been ruled out in this case. The caregiver had not traveled to a Zika-affected area or had sex with an infected person, Staples said.
Mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus are not believed to present in Utah.
"We are learning something new about Zika virus every day," said Erin Staples, a medical epidemiologist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This situation appears to be unique," she told reporters.
A statement issued by the CDC said the elderly victim had "uniquely high amounts of virus -- more than 100,000 times higher than seen in other samples of infected people -- in his blood."
The man, who was in his 70s and had an underlying health condition, passed away in late June, after traveling to a country where the mosquito-transmitted virus is active, the Salt Lake County Health Department said.
- Transmission route unclear -
Health authorities said they are investigating how the caregiver, described only as a "family contact," may have been infected with Zika.
Previous research has shown Zika virus has been detected in blood, semen, saliva, urine, breastmilk and in swabs from the female genital tract.
"We are not at the point today to describe any specific action that might have led to transmission," said Michael Bell, medical epidemiologist at the CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
Asked by a reporter if airborne transmission was considered a possibility, Bell replied: "In our line of work, nothing is ever truly off the table. The table is vast and we never want to underestimate possibilities.
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"However, it would be extremely, extremely unlikely for something like that to occur in the absence of something like a medical procedure."
As of mid-July, US health officials have reported 1,306 cases of Zika in the continental United States and Hawaii.
None of these cases have been the result of local spread by mosquitoes. Fourteen have involved sexual transmission and one was the result of a laboratory exposure.
Zika virus can cause a variety of symptoms, including rash and joint and muscle pain, but often carries no symptoms at all.
It is primarily of concern to women who are pregnant or want to become pregnant, because the virus carries the risk of causing irreversible brain defects in the fetus.
Harare (AFP) - Zimbabwe has delayed paying its soldiers for a second successive month, sources said Monday, underlining the worsening economic crisis that has triggered recent protests.
Ten days ago, President Robert Mugabe's government was shaken by a national strike led by civil servants frustrated over several salary delays as Zimbabwe's treasury struggles with a severe cash shortage.
The military are normally the first priority for payment due to their role in protecting the regime of Mugabe, 92.
But they were not paid as scheduled last week, and last month's salaries were paid about two week late.
"We were supposed to get our salaries last Friday but there was nothing at the bank," a junior soldier who requested anonymity told AFP. "We do not know when we will be paid."
Other soldiers confirmed the delay.
The cash-strapped government, which spends more than 80 percent of its revenue on wages, has resorted to staggering pay dates as it scrapes the bottom of its coffers.
Protests in recent weeks over salaries, alleged police corruption and import restrictions have exposed growing public anger as the country's economy has ground to a halt.
Mugabe has previously used his ruthless security forces to crack down on any public show of dissent.
Christian pastor Evan Mawarire, who has emerged as a leader of the protests, was last week arrested and then released after charges that he had attempted to overthrow the government were thrown out by a court.
"We have gotten to a place as Zimbabweans where... the personal struggle has become too difficult to hide," Mawarire told South Africa's Radio 702 on Monday.
"No matter what your religion is or background or political affiliation, we have just reached a point where we are saying... we are done with this," said the 39-year-old, who has travelled to neighbouring South Africa.
He said he was safe following fears that he would be targeted by pro-Mugabe groups, but he gave no more details about his whereabouts or future plans.
An army spokesman did not immediately comment on the reported salary delays.
The average soldier's pay is about $500 a month.
Qatar's internet service providers have apparently blocked access to the Gulf state's most popular English-language news website in what managers said looked like a deliberate move by the government (AFP Photo/Lionel Bonaventure) (AFP/File)
Oslo (AFP) - A Chinese consortium has bought the Opera internet browser for $600 million (543 million euros), its Norwegian developer said Monday, after a public share offer for the company failed.
The consortium led by Golden Brick Silk Road will purchase the mobile and desktop versions of the internet browser, plus performance and privacy apps and a stake in a Chinese joint venture, but not the advertising, games and television units, said Opera Software in a statement to the Oslo stock exchange.
The transaction was announced simultaneously with the failure of the $1.2 billion public offer to take over the entire company.
It gave no reason for the failure, but in a statement to the Oslo stock exchange last week Opera Software said the outcome of the offer was uncertain as it had not yet received regulatory approvals by the deadline of July 15.
"It wasn't that the approvals weren't given, just that it didn't happen before the deadline," chief executive Lars Boilesen was quoted as saying in the daily Dagens Naeringsliv.
Golden Brick Silk Road fund is a Chinese consortium which includes Beijing Kunlun Tech which specialises in mobile games and cybersecurity specialist Qihoo 360.
Opera's management had backed the proposed takeover as it would give the browsers access to the extensive internet user bases of Kunlun and Qihoo in China.
Opera says its light, quick browser is used by more than 350 million consumers worldwide.
Last month it ranked fourth for mobile devices behind Google Chrome, Apple's Safari and Android Browser, according to data by NetMarketShare, and sixth on desktop computers.
The purchase, which should close in the second half of this year, may be the better deal for Opera.
"Opera acquisition do-over is interesting: it's now getting half as much ($600m) for approximately one-quarter of its business," tweeted tech journalist Ingrid Lunden.
The advertising, games and television units generated 77 percent of Opera Software's $616 million in sales last year.
Opera's shares, which took a beating last week after the company warned the share offer might fail, fell by 15 percent in early trading on the Oslo stock exchange.
BROOKLYN, NY The famous freeway hack of a Jeep Cherokee in 2013 was set into motion partly because General Motors executives told the government they wouldn't fix security vulnerabilities in vehicular computer systems unless the government made them do it, a former Defense Department official said at the Summercon 2016 hacker conference here today (July 15).
Peiter Zatko, also known as Mudge, created a program called Cyber Fast Track while he worked at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) from 2010 to 2013. He said in his keynote address at Summercon that GM executives had asked him and his colleagues whether DARPA had any secret research findings that might help GM compete not only against foreign car makers, but against domestic rivals Ford and Chrysler as well.
Shocked at the request, Zatko said that he had replied instead with a question of his own what was GM doing to mitigate security vulnerabilities in the computer systems running on its vehicles?
The GM executives' response, Zatko said, was that "We don't care about those, and we're not going to care until you make us care with laws and regulations."
MORE: Meet the Hackers Making Your Connected Car Safer
Two days later, Zatko related, he got a call from Charlie Miller asking if there might be government funding available for research into hacking cars. Zatko gave Miller and his fellow researcher Chris Valasek (an organizer of Summercon) a grant to buy two vehicles, resulting in the famous video of the Cherokee's brakes cutting out on the freeway while Wired reporter Andy Greenberg drove.
Zatko was one of the founding members of the L0pht, a Boston-area hacker collective in the 1990s. He and fellow L0pht members testified to Congress about security vulnerabilities in 1999, and several L0pht members have become prominent figures in the information-security industry. Today, Zatko works with the Cyber Independent Testing Lab to verify consumer products, but during his tenure at DARPA, he created Cyber Fast Track after he saw that the normally years-long procedure for securing government research funding was too slow for the rapid-paced hacker community.
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Miller and Valasek's Jeep hack was perhaps the most prominent result of Zatko's program. It had the desired result of bringing awareness of vehicular cybersecurity to the general public, and, more importantly, to members of Congress and to federal regulatory agencies.
Three days after Greenberg's story ran and the Jeep hack made the network news, Fiat Chrysler was ordered to recall 1.4 million Cherokees and related vehicles to apply a software patch. Ironically, Chrysler was one of the companies that GM wanted to better compete against by using confidential government research results. But the Jeep hack made it harder for the entire automotive industry to ignore computer security.
"You can thanks GM's management for making that much more of a possibility," Zatko told the audience at Summercon.
Copyright 2016 Toms Guides , a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- By Naman Shukla
After struggling for several quarters, it looks like Samsung (000830.KS) has finally managed to outsmart its rival in the smartphone segment.
At the present stage, Samsung and Apple (AAPL) are the two most significant players in the smartphone industry. It appears that Samsung has finally defeated Apple, however, by introducing its latest flagship model Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge.
Before Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, the company made Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, which lacked many features the Galaxy S7 models have. The Galaxy S6 models did not have a memory card slot and was not efficiently water proof while the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge has upgraded RAM, water proof efficiency and most importantly, camera quality.
I believe it was Samsung's strategy to introduce Galaxy S6 models first so users became attracted to the edge screen with fewer features and then to launch a new upgraded model with all the major advances to force users to upgrade from the S6 models to S7 models.
The updates are definitely drawing more customers Galaxy S7 sales are higher than its predecessor's. This trend will likely continue.
Purchasing Joyent is a great move
Recently, Samsung agreed to purchase Joyent in order to gain access to access a platform that can be used in its phone, IoT devices and cloud based services. At present, it cannot be said how much Joyent could add to the company's bottom line, but It can certainly be said that Samsung is likely considering speeding up its mobile division, where Joyent will legitimately exist.
According to Gartner, the value of the public cloud services market is $204 billion at present. The company is now aggressively focusing on cloud software and services, and Joyent is a rock-solid move into the space. This could help Samsung gain traction in this wide market, which can act as a long-term tailwind for Samsung investors.
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Conclusion
It seems like Samsung has outwitted Apple in the flagship smartphone segment this year, sales of its latest devices are soaring. While Apple's iPhone 7 is yet to hit the market, it is highly unlikely that Apple would do better this time as Samsung has already taken a large chunk of the high-end phone market.
Disclosure: I don't hold a position in any of the stocks mentioned in the article.
This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
NASA vowed to award up to three $30,000 prizes for the most promising in-suit waste management systems (AFP Photo/Stan Honda) (AFP/File)
Taipei (AFP) - Taiwan is building a $47 million lunar lander as part of the first ever moon-mining project, officials said Monday.
The lander, to be made by the island's Chung-shan Institute of Science and Technology, will carry a rover and touch down on the moon's surface after a three-day journey from Earth.
US space agency NASA is leading the project, which is called Resource Prospector and aims to be the first mining expedition on another world.
The rover is designed to excavate hydrogen, oxygen and water from the moon, NASA says on its website.
"To be honest, the schedule is pressing," Han Kuo-chang, the head of CSIST's international cooperation programme, told AFP, adding that the US would supply the rover and the lander's descent propulsion system.
"Should the Resource Prospector prove to be successful, the moon could be used as a base for space journeys into Mars," Han said.
It is the first time Taiwan has built a lunar lander. CSIST is required to deliver the 3.7-tonne vehicle to NASA before the end of 2018, according to the agreement signed between Taiwan and the US space agency.
NASA is due to launch the moon-mining mission early in the 2020s.
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwanese micro-audio specialist Merry Electronics and China's Luxshare Precision Industry Co have agreed a potential 600 million yuan ($90 million) tie-up less than a month after a separate deal between the pair had been blocked. Shenzhen-listed Luxshare Precision plans to invest 400 million yuan to 600 million yuan for a 40 percent to 60 percent stake in Merry's manufacturing unit in Suzhou, China, the companies announced on Monday. The move follows swiftly on the heels of a rejection by Taiwan regulators of a plan by Luxshare Precision's Hong Kong unit to take a 25.4 percent stake in Merry for T$3.78 billion ($118 million). Taiwan regulates China-related investments in the island's technology industry very carefully, given that the sector is a mainstay of the economy, with Taiwan's new government more wary of its neighbor than the previous government. "We have not given up on the previous investment plan," Merry Electronics spokesman Allen Huang told reporters, adding that the new plan agreed in a letter of intent is aimed at giving both companies a better chance at clinching future business. The new investment plan will expand capacity at the Suzhou plant, which mainly produces audio speakers, Huang said. Luxshare Precision said the investment will increase the competitiveness of both companies in the audio electronics market. It made no mention of the previous plan to take a stake in the parent company. Huang also said that the new deal is unlikely to require approval from Taiwan regulators because no capital in entering or leaving Taiwan via the investment into the Suzhou plant, but that the company will communicate with regulators on the deal. Merry Electronics makes headsets, speakers, amplifiers and other small acoustic devices. (Reporting by J.R. Wu; Editing by David Goodman)
By Yasmeen Abutaleb and Dustin Volz SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Twitter Inc moved swiftly to remove posts from Islamic extremists glorifying a truck attack in Nice, France, watchdog groups said on 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. Friday's unsuccessful 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. U.S. 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 has always had policies banning violent content, such as advocacy of terrorism, and recently made them more explicit. "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. [http://reut.rs/28U55Vp] 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. (Reporting by Yasmeen Abutaleb in San Francisco and Dustin Volz in Washington; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Andrew Hay)
Sony Pictures Television has promoted key programming execs Lauren Moffat to SVP comedy development, and Jordan Feiner to SVP scripted programming. Both have been elevated from their VP roles.
Moffat has moved up the ranks since joining SPT in 2007, most recently serving as VP comedy development. She has guided the development of Netflixs One Day At A Time, as well as a number of broadcast and cable pilots and series including Hulus Future Man and NBCs Marry Me. Earlier during her tenure at SPT. she was director, comedy development, working on series including TBS Men at Work and served briefly as director, current programming on shows like ABCs Happy Endings and Lifetimes Drop Dead Diva. She joined SPT from Paradigm Talent Agency.
Lauren has been a key contributor to the growth of our slate, said EVP of comedy development Glenn Adilman, to whom she reports. Her fantastic taste and great relationships make her an invaluable member of our team, and she has been instrumental in expanding our business with cable and streaming networks.
Serving as VP of current programming since 2011, Feiner last worked as an executive on NBCs hit-drama, The Blacklist and is responsible for shepherding the spinoff, The Blacklist: Redemption. Recently he has also been involved in the new Netflix series,The Get Down as well as Showtimes hit, Masters of Sex. Prior to joining SPT, he was director of development at Endemol USA and a coordinator in comedy development at Fox Broadcasting.
Jordans impressive track record here at SPT, having guided some of our most ambitious and successful programming, will help us continue to move forward as the leader in television today, said EVP of scripted programming Kim Rozenfeld, of whom he will continue to report. I know that he will continue to exemplify great leadership and insight.
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'The Goldbergs' Sold In Broadcast Syndication To Tribune Stations
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has declared the results of the Chartered Accountants final examination and Common Proficiency Test (CPT) on the official website.
Steps to check results of ICAI CA Final and CPT Exam 2016
By India Today Web Desk: The results of the Chartered Accountants Final Examination and Common Proficiency Test (CPT) examination have been announced on July 18.
All the candidates can check the results on the official website, the link for which is icai.nic.in .
This year, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) conducted the Chartered Accountant final exam from May 2 to May 16.
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Steps to check the results:
All the candidates need to log on to official website
Click on relevant link
Enter registration number or PIN number along with his roll number
Also, facilities have been made for students desirous of knowing their results with marks on SMS.
For getting results through the message students should type:
1 .CA Final Examination result
CAFNL(space)XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is the six digit Final Examination roll number of the candidate)
e.g. CAFNL 000128
2. Common Proficiency Test (CPT) result
CACPT(space)XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is the six digit Common Proficiency Test roll number of the candidate)
e.g. CACPT 000171
Moreover, the result notifications will be made available in the Institute's Head Office and also at the Institute's Office at Plot No. 52-54, Institutional Area, Vishwas Nagar, Shahadra, Delhi - 110032.
Important note:
Details of marks will not be available at the institute's Head Office and Vishwas Nagar office.
Read: UPSSSC Revenue Inspactor Examination 2016: Admit cards released at upsssc.gov.in
Read: GMAC launches user's guide to full-time MBA rankings: Identify the ranking methodologies
For information on more upcoming exams and results, click here.
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Nelson Mandela has left a legacy behind himself to remember. Here's a look at some interesting facts about him.
By India Today Web Desk: The anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918 and died on December 05, He was a politician, philanthropist and an activist; who served as a President of South Africa.
On Nelson Mandela's birth anniversary, here are some interesting facts that you must know:
In 2009, United Nations declared July 18 as Nelson Mandela International Day or Mandela Day
Nelson Mandela was born in a royal family. Mandela's great-grandfather was a ruler of South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, while his father was a counsellor and a local chief of the monarchs
Nelson Mandela was the first member of his family who attended school. He was named Nelson by his teacher in school as each student was required to have an English name
In college, Nelson Mandela was an all-round student. He played sports, performed in drama society, took up ballroom dancing and gave Bible lessons in a local community
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In 1953, Mandela, along with his friend Oliver Tambo, opened his own law firm, which happened to be the first and only African-law firm in the country
Mandela was known as the master of disguise. He usually disguised himself as a chauffeur and he travelled incognito, holding meetings and attending strikes
In 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested. He was charged with instigating strikes of workers and for leaving the country without permission
Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, where he served for 27 years
Nelson Mandela gave a three hour speech, 'I am prepared to Die', in a courtroom during his trial
After his release, Nelson Mandela along with his supporters, increased pressure on the South African white minority government and even addressed the international communities
In 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first black President of South Africa. He became the first President who was elected by a democratic system and he served from 1994 to 1999
Nelson Mandela was a philanthropist who focused on doing social charity work in battling poverty and HIV/AIDS
Nelson Mandela was a controversial figure. He was addressed as a terrorist and communist by many, and was even denounced due to his friendship with leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro etc.
Nelson Mandela received over 260 awards and one of them was Nobel Peace Prize received in the year 1993
Nelson Mandela has been tributed in both films and music. Artists like Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Youssou N'Dour paid tribute through their music. Actors like Morgan Freeman, Terrence Howard, Idris Elba etc. portrayed him in many films
India and Pakistan both awarded Nelson Mandela with their prestigious awards consecutively in the years 1990 and 1992. In 1990, India gave Mandela the Bharat Ratna Award, while in 1992, Pakistan gave him the Nishan-e-Pakistan Award.
Check out Mandela's incredible speech here:
Interested in General Knowledge and Current Affairs? Click here to stay informed and know what is happening around the world with our G.K. and Current Affairs section.
To get more updates on Current Affairs, send in your query by mail to education.intoday@gmail.com
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Leaders from across several parties indulged in a discussion in Parliament over the seething Kashmir issue. Several ideas and operation plans were discussed by the political honchos.
By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: As the heaven on earth "Kashmir Valley" continues to simmer in the ongoing turmoil, parliamentarians unanimously demanded an all party meet. Politicians from different political parties, regions and ideologies spoke passionately in the debate which lasted for over two hours.
The shocker however came from Home Minister Rajnath Singh who gave detailed information of the 10-day long spell of violence in the Valley.
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Singh said that there were 566 incidents of violence reported from the valley. About 43 civilians lost their lives, 1948 suffered injuries. While 1744 were discharged, 204 continued to be treated.
The figures are equally alarming for security forces, as 1671 security personnel were reported to be injured, while one died. He said that the numbers are a stark reminder of things that went horribly wrong. But home ministry blamed Pakistan saying "it had nefarious designs" .
CENTRE TRYING HARD TO BRING PEACE IN THE VALLEY
Singh today assured the parliament that the Centre was trying hard to bring peace to the valley. "We deal with militants sternly but will show sympathy with civilians," said Singh.
He added that security forces have been told to use non lethal weapons like the tear gas and water cannons. He said that they would examine the use of pellet guns.
The debate began after Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad gave a speech for nearly 35 minutes. Azad who lashed out at BJP, stating that people of Kashmir have not accepted BJP.
" There is an atmosphere of mistrust," said Azad. He also expressed concern over newspaper ban and essential items not reaching people in valley.
UNDERSTAND THE PAIN OF PEOPLE IN KASHMIR
"We need to share the pain of people of Kashmir. Disproportionate forces cannot be used and curfew of 10 day is unconceivable. There is a serious issue of mistrust and a dialogue should be initiated with all stakeholders. We need to break away from mould," said Congress leader and son of the erstwhile ruler of Jammu and Kashmir Karan Singh.
While senior left leader Sitaram Yechury said that the govt should try to get to the root of the problem. "Pakistan blames India and vice versa. India cannot have a hyphenated existence," said Yechury.
Taking a jibe at the prime minister he said that there is no consistency in Narendra Modi government. "One day he has 65 inch chest and the other day he drops down to Pakistan to taste Biryani," he added.
GOVT NEEDS TO TALK TO SEPARATIST LEADERS
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Leaders like Naresh Aggarwal of Samajwadi Party and JDU leader Sharad Yadav urged the dire need to speak to separatists. "Government should accept that separatists are popular in valley. Yasin Malik, Geelani and Maualana Umar Farooq are popular and we should engage with them," said Sharad Yadav.
While Naresh Aggarwal said that a parliament team needs to be sent to the valley urgently. Rushing forces will not help situation. Senior TMC leader Derek o Brien said that the soul of Kashmir needs to be protected while D raja said article 370 should not be abrogated and AFSPA should be repealed .
Rajnath Singh said that he is in constant touch with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and added that he would discuss with her on how to carry forward the dialogue process. Meanwhile he also said he would head to the valley as soon as there was semblance of normalcy and talk to locals in Kashmir.
JAITLEY JUSTIFIES USE OF FORCE
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley justified use of force in Kashmir while tearing into the allegations of Congress-led opposition. He said that if a violent mob attacks the force or the police stations. The forces have to respond.
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Even as Pakistan plans to observe a black day for killing of Burhan Wani, the Hizbul Mujhahideen Commander on the 19th of July. All parties condemned Pakistan sponsored terrorism. Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said, that ties with Pakistan needs to be severed. Despite demand of an all party meet on Kashmir, government did not give any word on the same.
Also read:
Kashmir situation: Oppn wants political solution
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One woman dies of cervical cancer every eight minutes in India.
For every two women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, one woman dies of it in India. Picture courtesy: Pinterest
By Indo-Asian News Service: Forty-six per cent of women suffering from cancer are under 50, a worrying trend that's likely to continue in the coming years due to lifestyle changes, said doctors.
Late marriages, multiple sex partners and late pregnancy have contributed to incidence of cancer among women, of which breast and cervical cancers are the commonest forms, they said.
"Two per cent of the Indian women suffering from cancer are in 20-to-30-years age group, 16 per cent are in 30 to 40, 28 per cent are in 40 to 50 age group. So, almost 46 per cent women patients are below 50," said Sameer Kaul, senior consultant of Surgical Oncology at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, New Delhi.
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He said an increasing number of patients are in the 25-to 40-years age bracket, which is an "alarming" situation.
Since discussing private body parts is a taboo in many communities in India, women prefer to remain silent until their condition becomes unbearable or incurable, Kaul said.
"Discomfort with the process of diagnosis and treatment is an additional concern. Research conducted in other countries suggests women perceive mammography exams as uncomfortable, and these feelings are shared by women in India too," he said.
The disease, especially breast and ovarian cancer, also carries a stigma for women, he said.
According to the National Institute of Cancer Prevention and Research (NICPR), one woman dies of cervical cancer every eight minutes in India.
For every two women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, one woman dies of it in India. The data also shows that as many as 2,500 persons die every day due to tobacco-related diseases in India.
Kaul said more young women seem to suffer from breast cancer these days than older women.
"Young breast cancer patients have special concerns. Their cancers tend to be more advanced, more aggressive, more likely to be caused by an inherited defective gene, and may respond differently to treatment than breast tumours in older women."
"Issues of infertility, body image and the disease's impact on family life, relationships, career and finances also are different for younger women," said Kaul.
Oncologist at Safdarjung hospital, Priyanku Sachdev, agrees, saying that tobacco abuse, hereditary factors and bad lifestyle choices are among the emerging factors contributing to cancer among women.
"While tobacco is the leading contributor to cancer, about 40 per cent cases can be ascribed to causes such as unhealthy eating and bad sexual habits," Sachdev said.
"By the time people consult doctors, their cancer is in the advanced stage. A wound that does not heal, cough, stubborn fever, lumps, change in any mole and bleeding etc, are generally the first warning signs that the body gives. So, one should be prompt in seeing the doctor," said Sachdev.
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In the encounter that took place in the jungles of Sondaha in Aurangabad between security forces and Maoists, ten COBRA jawans were martyred and three Maoists were killed.
By Rohit Kumar Singh: An encounter between security forces and Maoists took place in the jungles of Sondaha in Aurangabad this evening.
Local officials reported that ten Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) jawans were martyred and five were injured in the Intensive Explosive Device (IED) blast.
The CRPF jawans succumbed to their injuries due to absence of medical aid.
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Three Maoists were also reportedly killed in the encounter. The injured are being taken to Gaya.
HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED
The encounter began in afternoon and ended in the evening. A search operation is still underway under the supervision of CRPF's inspector general and deputy inspector general.
Some arms and ammunition were also recovered from the site.
Officials said the casualties may rise as some of the jawans of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) were critically injured in a fierce gun battle, which was still raging.
CRPF commandos injured in Gaya Naxal encounter brought to A N Memorial Magadh Medical College (earlier visuals) pic.twitter.com/D6c8qDzM9gANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
Officials said the mobile phone connectivity is very bad in the area hence much information is not trickling out.
The jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were deployed in the state for conducting anti-naxal operations.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the CRPF for undertaking special jungle warfare operations.
10 jawans who laid their lives:
HC/GD Anil Kumar Singh(r/o-Buxar,BHR) HC/GD K Opendra Singh(r/o-Thoubal,MNP) CT/GD Sinod Kumar(r/o-Azamgarh,UP) CT/GD Ramesh Kumar(r/o-Hosiarpur,PNB) CT/GD Diwakar Kumar(r/o-Khgariya,BHR) CT/GD Polash Mondal(South Denajpur,WB) CT/GD Deepak Ghosh(Nadia,WB) CT/GD Manoj Kumar(r/o-Betul,MP) CT/GD Harvender Panwar(r/o-Muzaffarnagar,UP) CT/GD Ravi Kumar(r/o-Siwan,BHR)
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By India Today Web Desk: India's youngest superhero A Flying Jatt was not made in a day. Before fighting the main villain on the moon, the Flying Jatt crashed into police jeeps, got chased by dogs and had pepper sprayed into his eyes, as the new trailer of the film would show us.
ALSO READ: Tiger Shroff sports a beard in new poster of A Flying Jatt
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ALSO READ: Tiger Shroff fights Mad Max villain Nathan Jones in A Flying Jatt
ALSO READ: Tiger Shroff and Baaghi director Sabbir Khan to file defamation suit?
Balaji Motion Pictures shared the trailer of the upcoming superhero film starring Tiger Shroff as the Flying Jatt and Dishoom actor Jacqueline Fernandez as his love interest.
A Flying Jatt is directed by choreographer-turned-filmmaker Remo D'Souza who has previously made the ABCD films. With his regular composers Sachin-Jigar on the music director's chair, A Flying Jatt is expected to have foot-tapping music and cool dance sequences apart from lots of action and CGI.
Keeping in line with Shroff's young age and boyish looks, in the first half of the trailer, we see the Flying Jatt not taking his powers seriously. He lends his hand to save a child in a burning building only to end up putting his hand on fire. The Flying Jatt, with his fear of heights, as his mother (played by Amrita Singh) complains, flies down into a police jeep and then gets his cape stuck in the tire.
But when a suit-wearing Kay Kay Menon unleashes his nemesis (played by Mad Max: Fury Road actor Nathan Jones) on the world, the Flying Jatt trains hard and gets back on his feet to fight the evil, on land, under water, in the skies, and even on the moon. That's right. They take their fight to the moon.
Watch the trailer here:
A Flying Jatt will release in Indian theatres on August 25 this year.
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Alden beat 3000 actors to bag the role of Han Solo, made famous by Harrison Ford.
By Bang Showbiz: The 'Hail, Caesar!' star 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 (17th July) 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!"
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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.
ALSO READ: Star Wars secrecy is annoying, says Mark Hamill
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.
ALSO READ: Barkhad Abdi joins Blade Runner sequel's Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford
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.
*h/t Bang Showbiz
--- ENDS ---
If reports are to be believed, Alia Bhatt has now officially introduced Sidharth Malhotra as her boyfriend in front of her close friends.
By India Today Web Desk: Alia Bhatt and Sidharth Malhotra have never admitted about their relationship in open. But if the latest reports are to go by, Alia has now officially introduced Sidharth as her boyfriend in front of her close friends.
ALSO READ: Have rumoured lovebirds Sidharth Malhotra and Alia Bhatt ended their relationship?
ALSO SEE: This picture of Alia and Sidharth proves that they haven't broken up
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According to a report in Mumbai Mirror, the Highway actor invited some close friends to her new Juhu residence and introduced Sidharth as her beau. The report further also stated that the lovebirds also headed for a secret vacation. They were spotted at Mumbai aiport.
And reportedly, Alia had no issues posing for the cameras but Sidharth asked the reporters not to click him. The Brothers actor's spokesperson revealed that he headed to Delhi for his personal work.
Earlier, there were reports that all is not well between them. Speculations were rife that they have broken up with each other and the reason was Sidharth's proximity with Shraddha Kapoor.
On the work front, Sidharth and Alia were last seen together in Kapoor And Sons.
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By India Today Web Desk: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen told India Today that the recent unrest in Kashmir has been grossly mishandled by the Indian government to the extent that the region reflects as the biggest blot on Indian democracy in the West.
"It is the biggest blot on Indian democracy. There's no question about that. There are a number of claimants to that position of being a blot. It is a case that figures a lot in foreign discussions. On my first night when I came here, a long CNN coverage on the brutality of policing and law and order was aired," said Sen, one of the world's greatest scholars, Nobel Prize winning economist, former master at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Harvard University professor.
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Kashmir mishandled for decades
"I don't deny that Kashmiris are meant to be Indians. The Kashmiris' attitude to rest of India has varied a lot. Basically, we have mishandled it for a number of decades. Right now, we are mishandling it very badly indeed," said Sen in an exclusive interview with Karan Thapar on his show To The Point.
"It is not a law and order problem. It is the people of Kashmir we are looking at. It is quite important to do the law and order right. The kind of horrific and violent treatment of protest and also banning newspapers will isolate Kashmiris. All these are penalising Kashmiris in a way is giving them absolutely no reason to feel close to India," he said.
Will it put off Western investors?
"I don't know and don't really care. But I do think that the lives and freedom of Kashmiris and the sense of pride and belonging of Indians to India is more important than whether Modi gets his investment or not," said Sen.
Sen also said that China spends about 3 per cent of their GDP on healthcare and India spends about 1 per cent, and it was no surprise that the Chinese get much better healthcare and much greater benefits from the high growth rate than India does. The real issue for the Modi government was not whether the growth rate is high, but what are the poor getting out of that, he said.
Raghuram Rajan's exit will damage economy
"There are three things we know about Raghu clearly. One, that he is a superb economist. Second, he was doing India a lot of good, both within the nation as well as internationally. Third, that he thought that powers that be, bigger powers than Subramanian Swamy, did not sufficiently detach themselves from that rather nasty criticism," said Sen.
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW BELOW
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With his head convered by a handkerchief and folded hands, Kejriwal went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the "Langar hall."
By Indo-Asian News Service: Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal cleaned utensils at a community kitchen as he and other party leaders performed "sewa" (voluntary religious service) inside the Golden Temple complex here early on Monday.
Case registered against AAP leader Ashish Khetan
Accompanied by senior party leaders, including Ashish Khetan, HS Phoolka and Bhagwant Mann, Kejriwal arrived at the Golden Temple complex, where the holiest of Sikh shrines Harmandar Sahib, popularly known as The Golden Temple, is situated, before dawn on Monday.
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With his head convered by a handkerchief and folded hands, Kejriwal went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the "Langar hall", the community kitchen which serves food to over one lakh people in a single day.
Kejriwal and others, who remained in the shrine for about an hour, also partook of "langar" (community food).
The move by Kejriwal to come here was to seek forgiveness for his party's political gaffe after the party's youth manifesto carried a picture of the shrine along with a broom which is AAP's election symbol.
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Ratchanok Intanon has been cleared of doping charges paving the way for the Thai to participate in the Summer Olympics.
By Reuters: World number four Ratchanok Intanon has been cleared of an anti-doping violation, the Badminton World Federation (BWF) said in a statement on Monday, paving the way for the Thai medal hope to compete at the Rio Olympics.
Ratchanok had been given a provisional suspension on July 13 after reports that she had failed a dope test during the Uber Cup tournament in China in May.
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A second sample taken from Ratchanok was sent to Japan for testing and a hearing process by badminton's governing body began following Ratchanok's suspension.
"The Panel concluded that ... no violation of the regulations was committed," the BWF said in a statement.
Badminton's governing body lifted the suspension, allowing Ratchanok to take part in competitions with immediate effect.
At a news conference in Bangkok on Monday, Ratchanok said she was happy to have been proven innocent.
"I didn't do anything wrong and I am confident in the decision of the BWF. I'm happy I received justice," Ratchanok told reporters.
"I will focus on training in order to bring success to the Thai people."
Ratchanok's team had said she received an injection during the China tournament in May to treat a knee injury and that could have been the reason for her sample initially testing positive.
The 21-year-old will be among Thailand's main medal hopes in Rio and one of the chief threats to China's chances of defending their sweep of all five badminton titles at the London Games. (Also read: Adapting to the conditions in Rio will be key: Saina Nehwal)
The daughter of factory workers at a Bangkok sweet-maker, the former world champion hopes winning gold at the Rio Olympics might inspire more Thai girls to chase their dreams.
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Cabinet Secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam said both India and Bangladesh can now extradite any accused for his or her trial if any judge, magistrate, tribunal and competent authority of the respective countries issue warrant for the arrest against him or her.
By Sahidul Hasan Khokon: Bangladesh Cabinet on Monday approved a proposal to amend the existing Treaty between Bangladesh and India relating to extradition for simplifying the existing extradition process of accused between the two countries.
The approval came from the regular weekly meeting of the Cabinet held at Bangladesh Secretariat with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair.
Briefing reporters after the meeting, Cabinet Secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam said the Indian government has proposed to simplify the existing extradition treaty by amending the clause 10/3. Later, the Ministry of Home Affairs brought this proposal before the Cabinet which then amended it. He said both India and Bangladesh can now extradite any accused for his or her trial if any judge, magistrate, tribunal and competent authority of the respective countries issue warrant for the arrest against him or her. Shafiul Alam said earlier the extradition process was a bit complicated as there was a need to show evidence alongside the warrant of arrest against the accused for his or her extradition. "But, as per the amendment, there will be no need to show evidence against accused." He said this treaty became effective between the two neighbouring countries on October 23, 2013.
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Also Read
Bangladesh's elite educational institutions are a haven for extremists, says security advisor
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By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 18 (PTI) Banks and financial institutions have sanctioned about Rs 78,830 crore funding for clean energy projects, of which Rs 33,482.83 crore has been released till March end this year, Parliament was informed today.
"Banks and financial institutions (FIs) have supported (renewable energy) projects of 30,983.70 MW capacity with sanction and released an amount of Rs 78,829.69 crore and Rs 33,482.83 crore respectively as on March 31, 2016," Power, Coal, Mines and New & Renewable Energy Minister Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha today.
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Overall, as many as 23 public sector and 7 private sector banks as well as 4 public sector and 2 private sector non-banking financing companies (NBFCs) have committed for financing renewable energy projects of 76,350 MW in the country with an outlay of Rs 3,72,240 crore.
Goyal said the World Bank has also approved a loan of USD 620 million (Rs 4,228 crore) and a grant of USD 5 million (Rs 34.50 crore) from clean technology fund for the grid connected rooftop solar programme in May 2016.
Public sector banks have provided Rs 19,639.52 crore finance for 12,619.83 MW renewable projects and have already released Rs 7,333.35 crore.
Private sector banks have provided Rs 18,660.01 crore for 6,905.24 MW projects, and have released Rs 8,615.07 MW.
Public sector NBFCs have provided finance of Rs 20,802.01 crore to fund 6,121.68 MW projects, and released a total amount of Rs 9,442.71 crore.
Similarly, private NBFCs financed 5,336.95 MW projects and sanctioned Rs 19,728.15 crore. These firms released Rs 8,091.70 crore for these clean energy projects.
Among the public sector banks, State Bank of India has financed the largest renewable capacity of 1,832.93 MW and provided fund to the tune of Rs 5,418.81 crore. It has released Rs 1,634.47 crore.
Among the private banks, Yes bank has financed the largest capacity of 2,364.28 MW and provided finance of Rs 8,764.90 crore. It has released 3,904.72 crore for these projects.
Among public sector NBFCs, Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Ltd (IREDA) has provided maximum finance of Rs 8,489.72 for 2,337.30 MW projects. IREDA has released Rs 4,526.50 crore.
Similarly, L&T Infrastructure Finance Company Ltd is a private NBFC which has sanctioned maximum finance of Rs 14,863 crore for 3,434.05 MW projects. It has released Rs 5,962.90 crore.
These clean energy projects of 30,983.70 MW include 16,040.09 MW of wind power, 13,773.81 MW solar power and 700.95 MW of small hydro power projects (of up to 25 MW capacity). PTI KKS SA
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Twenty-nine-year old Long, who lived in Kansas City, was affiliated with the anti-government New Freedom Group, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Police officers attend a vigil after a fatal shooting of Baton Rouge policemen, at Saint John the Baptist Church in Zachary, Louisiana, on July 17, 2016. (Photo: Reuters/Jeffrey Dubinsky)
By Reuters: A former US Marine sergeant who served in Iraq has been identified as the gunman who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday, a government source said.
Another source familiar with the investigation said the suspect, Gavin Long, 29, was from Kansas City, Missouri. The source said there was reason to believe a 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 by investigators.
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Officials speaking publicly have not yet released the name of the suspected killer or any details, beyond saying they believed the single shooter was killed in the shootout.
SUSPECTED BELONGED TO ANTI-GOVT GROUP
Long, who was black, was affiliated with the anti-government New Freedom Group, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation. A spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, said she had no information about that.
Sunday was Long's 29th birthday, according to the Kansas City Star newspaper.
He served in the Marines for five years, from August 2005 to August 2010, and rose to the rank of sergeant, according to Yvonne Carlock, deputy public affairs officer for the US Marines. Long was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009.
CBS News reported that Long left the Marines with an honorable discharge. Carlock would not confirm that detail.
Public records show Long had lived in Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri, as well as San Diego and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
POLICE CORDON OFF STREETS IN KANSAS
In Kansas City, police cordoned off streets within a block or more of the house where Long lived in a working-class neighborhood of mostly black residents.
Bob Phillips, 24, had lived across the street from Long for a month but said he did not know him. Phillips said he was surprised to hear that Long lived nearby.
"It's a quiet neighborhood, kids out playing," he said.
Missouri court records show Long divorced his wife in 2011, with no children at the time. There was no criminal record for him in Missouri.
Long was a defendant in a case involving delinquent city taxes. It was filed in March and was dismissed in June, according to court records.
Long attended the University of Alabama for one semester in spring 2012 and made the Dean's List, according to university spokeswoman Monica Watts.
"The university police had no interaction with him while he was a student," she said in an email.
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Brady Vancel, a witness to the Baton Rouge shooting on Sunday, said on CNN that he ran into the suspect, who was dressed in black, a few minutes before the police officers were shot. The man was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle and wearing a ski mask, Vancel said.
The gunman "looked up and he saw me. We stopped, I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction," Vancel said.
ALSO READ:
3 police officers shot dead in Baton Rouge in Louisiana, 1 gunman killed
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Motorists caught driving under the influence of alcohol for a second time, will face action from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
By Mail Today: The Bengaluru Police, in a major drive against drunken driving, booked 912 motorists in a span of 5 hours in the city on Saturday.
INCREASE IN NUMBER OF ROAD ACCIDENTS
The drive comes in the wake of an increase in the number of road accidents involving drunken motorists in the city. Incidentally, on Saturday, the government had relaxed the norms for bars and restaurants in the city by permitting them to operate till 1 am on all days of the week.
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"On Saturday, we tested over 10,000 drivers between 8 pm and 1 am and booked cases against 912 offenders. The highest number cases were registered in west Bengaluru (434). They have to pay the fine in the court by appearing before a judge," a senior police officer said.
TOUGH ACTION TO BE TAKEN
Motorists caught driving under the influence of alcohol for a second time, will face action from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Bengaluru police have recommended the suspension of the driving licence of such offenders.
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By PTI: From Aditi Khanna
London, Jul 18 (PTI) Theresa May today announced Germany and France will be her first foreign tour destinations as British Prime Minister later this week as her country prepares to leave the European Union.
"The prime minister will make her first overseas visits this week. This will be an opportunity to discuss the bilateral relationship, cooperation on a range of global challenges, and of course how the UK and Germany can work together as the UK prepares to leave the EU," a Downing Street spokesperson said.
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With Brexit at the heart of her premiership, it came as little surprise that May chose the two leading EU economies to kick-start talks over the UKs future relationship with the economic bloc.
May, 59, will begin talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday, soon after she addresses her first Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons.
After her "bilateral meeting and a working dinner" in Berlin, May will head to Paris on Thursday for talks with French President Francois Hollande during her two-day trip.
The Downing Street spokesperson said Thursdays meeting with President Hollande at the Elysee Palace would cover Brexit "as well as Thursdays attack in Nice and counter- terrorism cooperation".
Last Friday, May made her first trip as prime minister to Scotland, where she held talks with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Brexit negotiations were again at the centre of their dialogue.
Meanwhile, star Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson arrived in Brussels todayfor talks with his EU counterparts in his new role as foreign secretary.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union but... we are not going in any way to abandon our leading role in European participation," Johnson told reporters.
Britain had voted in favour of Britains exit from the EU in a historic referendum on June 23.
It triggered a series of seismic changes in the UK political establishment, with David Cameron resigning as Prime Minister for May to take charge. PTI AK SAI AKJ SAI
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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.
By Mail Today Bureau: UNESCO has 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.
Approval of the two sites came two days after the ruins of Nalanda University in Bihar obtained the elite tag at the 40th session of The World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul.
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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.
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.
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.
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 Sikkim of northern India, 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 like caves, rivers, lakes, 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, a statement said. In India, the Western Ghats with its rich flora and fauna was earlier listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.
Also read:
Nalanda University is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site!
Nalanda University might not be awarded as World Heritage Site. Here's why
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By Indrajit Kundu: Judges at the Calcutta High Court have unanimously decided to oppose the Centre's recent proposal to rename it as "Kolkata" High Court. Judges at the Calcutta High Court decided to decline the change in nomenclature of the institution citing the "long history and tradition associated with the existing name".
Earlier this month, the Union Cabinet had approved a change in the names of the Madras, Bombay and Calcutta High Courts to reflect the alterations in the official nomenclature of these cities. Accordingly, the Cabinet approved the introduction of the 'The High Courts [Alteration of Names] Bill, 2016' in Parliament.
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Communicating the view of the Judges, Calcutta High Court Registrar General Sugato Majumdar has written a letter to the Incorporated Law Society at the court. "The Full Court of High Court at Calcutta in a meeting held on July 11 unanimously declined to accept the proposal of the Government of India for changing the name of 'High Court of Judicature at Calcutta' to 'High Court of Judicature at Kolkata' in view of long history and tradition associated with the existing name of the High Court at Calcutta," the letter said.
The letter also mentions that the objection to the Centre's move "has been communicated to the Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India."
In its 154th year, the Calcuta High Court is the oldest High Court in India. It was established as the High Court of Judicature at Fort William on 1 July 1862 under the High Courts Act, 1861. It has jurisdiction over the state of West Bengal and the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Despite the city being officially rechristened as Kolkata from Calcutta in 2001, the High Court retained its old name due to its heritage.
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The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navy's top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
In this Friday, July 8, 2016 photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese missile frigate Yuncheng launches an anti-ship missile during a military exercise in the waters near south China's Hainan Island and Paracel Islands.
By AP: China said Monday that it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
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The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navy's top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson is meeting with China's navy commander, Adm. Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao that began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour china's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
CHINA REJECTS TRIBUNAL'S RULLING
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are "China's inherent territory," and says it could declare an air defense identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippine fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the United States should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunal's decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the country's economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared to his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
WHAT UN-BACKED TRIBUNAL SAID
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
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Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. China's navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
China's island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, US warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the US of threatening its national security.
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The Supreme Court wants petitioners to approach the National Green Tribunal with their plea of banning the Chinese manjha.
By Harish V Nair: Kai Po Che, the victory cry after cutting a kite may get far more subdued this Independence Day or coming Makar Sankranti.
The Supreme Court has asked petitioners in public interest litigation - which sought countrywide ban of nylon, synthetic or glass-coated strings called the "Chinese manjha" used for flying kites - to approach the National Green Tribunal with their plea.
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WHY WAS THE PETITION FILED
Petitioners Khalid Ashraf and Rani whose close relatives died after a synthetic nylon string slit their throat drew the court's attention to nearly 40 deaths and several cases of injuries in Delhi, UP, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odissa after coming in the way of such strings. "These are reported incidents from big cities. There will be hundreds of more incidents in small cities and villages", they said.
"Earlier the victims were mostly birds. There were widespread reports of thousands of birds getting killed. But now human beings are under the threat of this deadly thread," their lawyer Tariq Adeeb told a bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONNECT
"This issue involves environment and wildlife protection too. If environment protection is your concern why don't you approach the National Green Tribunal? They have countrywide jurisdiction too. If they do not give you any relief you can come back here. We are not shutting you out", CJI told Adeeb, who said he will soon approach the green court with the petition.
Environment Protection Act bans use of hazardous substance, which means any substance or preparation which, by reason of its chemical or physico-chemical properties or handling, is liable to cause harm to human beings, other living creatures, plant, microorganism, property or the environment.
There had been crackdown and regional bans earlier. On January 21, this year, Cuttack district administration banned sale and use of plastic and manja strings.
Special squads were formed to raid shops selling these and strict action was ordered against violators. Move came after death of a five-year-old girl Swetalina Behera, whose neck was slashed with a sharp manja thread.
THREAT FROM MANJHA
In January 2011, Mumbai Police banned sale of glass-coated strings used for flying kites. The order said any trader who violated the ban can face action, can be jailed for one month and fined Rs 200.
In December 2009, Gujarat government prohibited use of plastic or any such synthetic material or other toxic materials like iron powder, glass powder etc. which is likely to cause injury to the birds as well as people and to ensure that the same is not used for kite flying.
In October 2014, Allahabad High Court asked to curb such incidents, which are highlighted in the petition. Direction was issued to initiate steps to spread awareness on the inherent danger involved, to prevent the use of Chinese manjha and to adopt suitable measures to prevent accidents.
Also read:
Jaipur: Boy's face and throat gets cut with Chinese manja, child gets 22 stitches
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PIL against use of nylon threat for kite flying: HC seeks govt
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"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."
By India Today Web Desk: While the news of Pakistani internet sensation Qandeel Baloch's brutal murder continues to evoke a vast range of emotions in almost everyone who has heard of it, its her murderer's words that are equally, if not more haunting than the act itself.
Baloch, whose real name is believed to be Fauzia Azeem, had garnered more than mere attention for her provocative posts across several social media platforms; something that did not go down well with her brother, Muhammad Waseem who went ahead and murdered her for the sake of his family's 'honour'.
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Also Read: Who was Qandeel Baloch, and why was she killed?
Taking action on his disapproval, Waseem drugged Baloch and strangulated her on Friday, July 15 at her family home in Multan.
"Yes of course, I strangled her," Waseem said in a press conference arranged after his arrest on late Saturday, July 16.
Also Read: Qandeel Baloch's brother arrested, says he killed her for bringing disrepute to family
According to a report in The Tribune, an unapologetic and unrepentant Waseem also said these 8 other things.
"Whatever was the case, it (his sister's behaviour) was completely intolerable." "I planned to murder her and was only waiting for the best moment." "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." "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 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 so I went with the former plan."
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Stealing the show was former BJP minister Eknath Khadse whose Pune land deal documents are on display. Allegations against the Minister of Rural Development, Women and Child Welfare Pankaja Munde also find a place in the display.
Stealing the show was former BJP minister Eknath Khadse whose Pune land deal documents are on display.
By Kamlesh Damodar Sutar: Maharashtra state Congress recently came up with a new idea to protest against prevalent corruption. Targeting the Opposition, Congress organised an exhibition that features photos and details of allegations against the BJP and Shiv Sena ministers.
Stealing the show was former BJP minister Eknath Khadse whose Pune land deal documents are on display. Allegations against the Minister of Rural Development, Women and Child Welfare Pankaja Munde also find a place in the display.
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Apart from the two, the exhibition has photos, cartoons, caricatures related to the allegations of corruption against ministers Girish Bapat, Vinod Tawde, Jaikumar Rawal, Pandurang Fundkar, Dipak Sawant and Ravindra Waikar.
Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil said that the party will be raising the issue of corruption in the monsoon session, but they also want the citizens to know of prevalent corruption.
The visitors to the exhibition also get 2 kgs of onions as a gift. This, says the Congress is their way to protest against the rising onion prices.
Also Read
Bombay High Court orders cyber cell to register case and investigate Khadse call record issue
Devendra Fadnavis backs his ministers, says he is confident Eknath Khadse will come out clean
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The probability of Congress striking a compromise with the Centre on the passing of GST bill seems high with several leaders admitting to putting in extra effort to the cause.
By Javed M. Ansari : The possibility of a compromise between the government and those opposed to the GST Bill principally the Congress party have brightened considerably. This follows a series of back channel contacts and meetings between the two sides.
In addition to the meetings between the finance minister Arun Jaitly, with the leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma, this morning Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the initiative to break the ice with Congress President Sonia Gandhi. He walked up to her in the lok sabha and chatted amiably with her for a couple of minutes. Many believe that one of the main reasons for the breakdown in relations between the two parties is the total lack of communication between the Gandhi family and Modi.
CONGRESS WORKING TOWARDS A COMPROMISE ON GST
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Sonia Gandhi refused to divulge what transpired and deflected queries saying it was " purely an exchange of pleasantries." However, senior Congress party leaders told India Today that efforts are on to work out a compromise on the GST.
"The government has to come back to us with its proposal, once they do that we will consider it " says Jyotiraditya Scindia Lok Sabha MP.
The Congress party wants the government to do away with the one per cent tax on the interstate movement of goods, because in its view it will create disruptions. The government has indicated its willingness to let go of this and compensate the manufacturing states. The Congress also wants an independent dispute settlement mechanism, the government is flexible on this issue.
CONG DEMANDS TO PUT A CAP ON GST TAX RATE
However the sticking point is the Congress party's demand to put a cap on the GST tax rate in the Constitution. The government believes making this a part of the Constitution will make it difficult for the states to levy taxes to meet any exigencies. The differences on these issues have narrowed down considerable and both sides appear a lot more amenable to reach a compromise.
At the meeting between the Finance Minister and the Congress party the broad contours of a possible compromise were worked out. The government is in the process of drafting the details of the proposed amendments after which it will formally approach the Congress party.
Also read:
Constructively engaged with govt on GST: Congress
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This will add to the 2,800 Central Reserve Police Force personnel which were sent to assist the Jammu and Kashmir Police last week.
Clashes between protesters and security forces have left at least 39 people dead and over 3,100 injured in Kashmir.
By Mail Today Bureau: Close to 5000 personnel from CRPF will be guarding the streets of Kashmir as the Valley has been hit with violence following the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani who had become a poster boy for militancy in the state. Clashes between the protesters and forces have left the 39 persons dead and over 3100 wounded.
5000 CRPF JAWANS GUARDING THE VALLEY
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A fresh batch of 20 companies of CRPF is being rushed to the violence-hit Valley. Officials said that this will add to the 2,800 Central Reserve Police Force personnel which were sent to assist the state police last week. With another 2000 headed for Kashmir the total strength will be nearly 5000.
"The additional reinforcements will be deployed to further enhance the security arrangements in the Valley. Some fresh units will exclusively work to secure the movement of security forces' convoys," a senior official said. About 60 battalions, with 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.
MODI PRAISES PARTIES FOR SPEAKING IN 'ONE VOICE' OVER KASHMIR
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Sunday, expressed satisfaction during an all-party meet convened ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament that political parties were speaking in one voice over the developments in Kashmir and asserted that it has sent the right message to the country.
Various parties have given statements on Kashmir events which benefited the country. Modi has thanked all the parties for conveying the right messages. The Prime Minister said, there is a need to keep national interests above anything else.
Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh on Sunday said the government was taking various measures to restore peace in the Valley. Only a handful of people are involved in fomenting trouble and there is a need to isolate and expose them, while interacting with the members of various social and religious organisations.
Also read:
Kashmir unrest: Security officials incur grave injuries in clash, only protestors deserve sympathy?
Muslims defy curfew in Kashmir to ensure ritualistic funeral for a Kashmiri Pandit
Pakistan funded terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir; provided Rs 100 crores in past one year
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By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 18 (PTI) Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya today met central trade unions to apprise them about steps taken with regard to their 12-point charter of demands. Central trade unions are pushing for the 12-point charter of demands and have proposed a nationwide strike on September 2 to press for the demands, including minimum monthly wages of Rs 15,000 and minimum assured pension of Rs 3,000. The minister, who met unions after a gap of 10 months on the issue, told the representatives that the government was working on eight of their demands and had progressed well on seven issues.
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The Labour Ministry has also indicated that it may soon organise meeting of the ministerial panel on labour issues headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to deliberate on the demands.
The panel had several rounds of meeting with trade unions in August last year to understand their view point on various labour issues, including amendments in labour laws.
As many as 10 central trade union excluding RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) have give a call for a day-long nationwide strike to protest against unilateral labour law amendments and not paying heed to their charter of demands.
The unions have been asking government to consider their key demands, including minimum monthly wage of Rs 15,000, assured pension of Rs 3000, no foreign direct investment in sectors like railways, defence and insurance, among others.
After the meeting, Dattatreya said, "We have spoken to trade unions. They have 12 demands. We are working on their eight demands and progressed well on seven demands."
The minister further said, "We have met some of their demands like Bonus Act, minimum monthly pension and also about minimum wages where we are at advance stages."
During the meeting he told unions that their are certain court cases regarding implementation of amendment in Bonus Act, which will soon be transferred to the Supreme Court for speedy disposal.
Explaining further he said, "The proposal regarding minimum wages has been sent to Law and Justice Ministry. We will sent this proposal for Cabinet approval to fix a universal minimum wage."
About providing relief to contract workers, he said, "We have also worked on social security of workers. We will also work on providing job, wage and social security to contract workers."
However, the trade unions gave no assurance to the Labour Ministry regarding their strike call on September 2.
The representatives of BMS said that they will take a call on joining the strike in its meeting scheduled on August 10.
Last year, BMS had opted out of the strike observed on September 2, 2015, in view of governments assurances to meet certain demands out of 12-point charter of demand. PTI KKS MR
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On Vin Diesel's 49th birthday, Deepika Padukone shared a teaser from her debut Hollywood film and she looks seductively evil in it.
Vin Diesel and Deepika Padukone in a still from xXx: The Return of Xander Cage
By India Today Web Desk: With just two days left for the release of the first trailer of xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, Deepika Padukone gave a small sneak-peek into the film on her Facebook account on Monday.
The Bajirao Mastaani actor looks seductively evil in the 13-second-video as Serena Unger, a huntress who was Xander Cage's former lover.
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ALSO READ: Deepika Padukone unveils the first logo of xXx The Return of Xander Cage
SEE PICS: Deepika Padukone and Vin Diesel in stills from xXx The Return of Xander Cage
ALSO READ: 10 best films of Vin Diesel you must watch on his 49th birthday
xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is the third film in the series after 2002's xXx and 2005's xXx: State of the Union. While the first film starring Diesel was successful at the box office, the second film, which did not have Diesel, tanked miserably. The new film will carry forward the story of extreme sports professional-turned-government operative Xander Cage (Diesel) from the first film.
The Return of Xander Cage also stars Chinese martial artist and Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen, famous for playing the legendary Wing Chun grandmaster Yip Man in the 2008 biopic Ip Man.
This is Deepika Padukone's debut Hollywood feature and with the return of Diesel as Xander Cage and Donnie Yen's inclusion, expectations are high from this high-octane action adventure film.
Vin Diesel also shared another teaser from the film on his Facebook account.
At the end of both clips, Diesel as Xander Cage says, "Damn, it feels good to be back." Oh yes, Vin, it sure feels good to see you go Xtreme again.
xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is slated for a January 20 release next year in the United States.
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In Sitamarhi, a father who worked as a daily labour demanded money from his son Chandan to buy liquor for himself. Chandan, aged 16 and student of Class 10th , however, refused to give any money to his father.
By Rohit Kumar Singh: Its been more than three months that prohibition was imposed in Bihar but gory tales of its adverse impact continues to shock people not only of the state but of the country. A incident has been reported from Sitamarhi district of Bihar last week where a father not only killed his son but also cut his body into pieces. This gory act was carried by the father after his son denied to give money to him for his daily liquor.
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HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED
The incident has been reported from Ram Nagra village in Sitamarhi. The father Ramdhani Patel who worked as a daily labor after his days work in the evening demanded money from his son Chandan to buy liquor for himself. Chandan, aged 16 and student of Class 10th , however, refused to give any money to his father. Despite insistence from the father, Chandan refused to part with the money saying that he had to pay the school fees with the money.
This infuriated the father and in a fit an extreme anger, he grabbed an axe and attacked him and killed him. Later he also chopped his body into pieces. When the incident happened, the entire family was present in the house. After the incident took place, father Ram Dhani escaped from the location. The shocked family members started shouting and the locals assembled at his place and came to know about the gory killing.
Thereafter the matter was reported to the police and Chandans body pieces was found in his house. According to locals, father Ram Dhani had an unstable mind and absconding after the incident.
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Officials allege that Infosys was given the contract to prepare computer system for the GST Network while the government itself is capable of putting the system in place.
By Atir Khan: While the government prepares to bring GST Bill in Parliament this Monsoon Session, it is confronted with a difference of opinion within Finance Ministry on the manner GST's logistics will be implemented. Top officials have raised strong objection why the project is being given in private hands when government is capable of putting the computer system in place.
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Departments within the Finance Ministry are unhappy that government has entrusted private players for evolving a computer system, which will help implement GST in the country.
GST Network: UPA project
The seeds of Goods and Services Tax Network (front-end computer), a company formed for this purpose, were sown in 2011-13 during UPA regime when it was decided that a unified computer system network was required to regulate collection of Goods and Services Tax by Centre and states.
With a view a big investment would be required for this purpose the then Government had roped in HDFC Bank Ltd., HDFC Ltd, ICICI Bank Ltd, LIC Housing Finance Ltd, NSE Strategic Investment Corporation Ltd. to invest money for the making of the system. The idea was to impose certain fee which would help private players sustain. These private financial bodies invested an amount of over Rs 5 crore rupees for the purpose.
GOVT TO INVEST RS 3,000 CRORES
Thus the Government entered into an agreement with private players that the former would hold 49 per cent stake and the latter would hold 51 per cent stake in the GSTN company, which will be responsible for making and running of the computer network. The total cost of the project was estimated to be more than Rs 3,000 crores.
However, top official sources in the Finance Ministry say the government has now decided that it will single-handedly be making all future investments required for the project.
'UNDESERVING BENEFITS'
Infosys has bagged the government contract to prepare the computer system. But the private financial bodies like HDFC and ICICI will continue to enjoy the same equity without making any more investments.
Meaning with merely investing a little over Rs 5 crores, they would be liable for almost equal benefits in the company though the Government will make all the investment in phases. Sources say Expenditure Secretary and Central Board of Excise and Customs officials have raised an objection on this.
Their contention being CBEC has its own computer systems wing, which in the past has been making computer systems required for tax collection. And the department is capable of making the system at a much lower cost than is being incurred by Infosys.
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The government plans to push the Constitutional Amendment bill in Rajya Sabha for rollout of GST in the monsoon session starting Monday. The Bill has been approved by the Lok Sabha earlier. The Government is in talks with Opposition parties especially Congress, which had been opposing the implementation of GST it its earlier avatar, to ensure that the bill sails through this Parliament session.
ALSO READ:
Jaitley to have two deputies in Finance Ministry
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As per established norms, the House usually adjourns for the day after paying tributes to the departed Member who has died either during the inter-session period or during the session itself.
By India Today Web Desk: First day of the Monsoon Session is likely to be adjourned after an obituary reference to Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP from Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh who passed away on June 1.
Five-term MP Paraste (66) had suffered a brain hemorrhage while he was attending a public function and passed away at a private medical hospital where he was undergoing treatment.
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As per established norms, the House usually adjourns for the day after paying tributes to the departed Member who has died either during the inter-session period or during the session itself.
OPPOSITION TO CORNER GOVT ON ARUNACHAL PRADESH, NSG
Meanwhile, the Opposition, boosted by the Supreme Court verdict on Arunachal Pradesh, will try 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 to make the session a tempestuous affair.
On the other hand, the government is hopeful of a breakthrough on the key GST bill, which it wants passed during the session, following a recent meeting between senior ministers and top Congress leaders. The two sides are likely to meet again during the session.
JAITLEY, NAIDU MEET CONGRESS LEADERS
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu had met Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma last week to iron out differences on key clauses of the GST bill.
The contentious Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, known as the GST Bill was moved in the Upper House in August last year after being passed by Lok Sabha.
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.
With the opposition set to raise the issue of India's failure to get a berth in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the government has said External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was ready for discussion on issues including Prime Minister's recent foreign tours.
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.
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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.
CONGRESS LEADERS CHALK OUT STRATEGY
Top Congress leaders met party chief Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi last week to chalk out its strategy on crucial issues, including the GST bill.
The meeting was held at Sonia Gandhi's residence and was attended by Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, party's deputy leader in upper house Anand Sharma and chief whip in Lok Sabha Jyotiraditya Scindia.
Also read:
Parliament Monsoon Session: Modi proposes, opposition disposes
Monsoon Session of Parliament: Opposition to target Modi govt on Kashmir, GST Bill and NSG
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By PTI: London, Jul 18 (PTI) Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have discovered that the genes of some chickens make them almost completely resistant to a serious strain of bird flu, a finding that may help better understand the mechanisms of avian influenza transmission.
Influenza virus is the cause of influenza, or flu - the contagious respiratory viral disease common in many birds and mammals.
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The viruses circulating in wild birds and domesticated poultry may mutate into forms that are capable of infecting humans, and represent an emerging threat to human health as potential sources of the next flu pandemic.
This danger has led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to highlight effective control measures, as well as an in-depth assessment of factors surrounding the infection of host animals, as part of their research priorities.
"It is important for us to understand how different genetic lines of bird react to influenza viruses, so that we can begin to understand the spread of the disease," said Colin Butter from the University of Lincoln in the UK, who led the study.
"Until now we knew relatively little about how a birds genetics can affect its reaction to flu virus but this new research, which for the first time shows that some poultry lines are genetically resistant to avian flu, represents a significant step forwards," Butter said.
"Our results are valuable in emphasising the important role a host plays in the spread of avian flu, and also in highlighting a number factors relating to the chain of infection and control mechanisms which are affected by the route of infection," he added.
The researchers examined two different lines of chickens to determine whether genetics played a part in the susceptibility or resistance to infection.
They found that birds that carried the virus but were genetically resistant to the disease only shed the virus through their respiratory tract and for a limited period of time, whereas birds which were susceptible to the disease also shed virus in faeces and over a longer time.
The researchers discovered that this was the only relevant means of spreading the virus and that resistant birds were therefore completely unable to initiate or sustain a chain of infection.
Further results in the study suggest that this could be due to a genetic restriction within the animal which stops the virus spreading when inside the body.
"The findings of this study emphasise the importance of examining the intricate nature of the virus-host interactions and the potential role of the host genetic factors influencing the transmission dynamics and outcomes of important diseases such as avian flu," said Venugopal Nair, the Head of the Avian Viral Diseases programme at The Pirbright Institute.
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The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports. PTI MHN AKJ AJR
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A Kolkata based firm orchestrated a unique stunt called Tea for Trump where they delivered 6,000 tea bags to Donald Trump in an attempt to "purify" the Republican presidential nominee.
By India Today Web Desk: Donald Trump has risen to popularity for all the wrong reasons. His innumerable controversial statements during his speeches, his impulsive offhand comments have made him the most hated man on the planet.
But one thing that stands out is his mass appeal, and this Kolkata based tea company cashed in this very aspect of Donald Trump's ability to go viral.
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They orchestrated a unique stunt called Tea for Trump wherein they carted a whooping 6000 bags of green tea to the door of the Trump Tower in New York, in an attempt to 'purify' his mind body and soul.
Tea-a-Me, a Kolkata based company that sells flavoured teas internationally, released a video in which sari clad women deliver large box of Assam green tea. The quantity of tea bags is enough for him to drink three cups a day for four years.
Why did they send such large quantities of green tea to Trump?
Here's what they says in the video, "Dear Mr Trump, namaste from India, we are sending you lots and lots of natural green tea. It fights against harmful free radicals. It helps purify mind and body and regain a healthy balance. It has also proven to make people smarter. Please Mr Trump drink the tea. For your sake, for America's sake, for the world's."
The voice over in the called video 'Trumping Donald' quips, "Donald Trump has got the whole world worried. We can't stop him, but maybe we can change him."
But this epic marketing mission was not an easy feat.
The Scroll quoted, Creative Head Orko Basu as saying, 'It was a multi-city, international effort to deliver the tea. Given Donald Trump's profile, security was intense.' The report states that it took a weeks time to execute this innovative campaign.
"If he needs more, we'll be happy to provide. Green tea has been proven to fight against harmful free radicals and cleanse the mind and bodies, helping one regain a healthy balance," the company's managing director, Sumit Shah, said.
"All we are doing with this campaign is to take a Gandhian and polite approach to urge Trump to detox a little and think clearly." says Shah.
Since its release the video has gone viral with Twitterati going beserk sharing the quirky message with the hashtag #TeaForTrump. The company has even set up a micro site called TeaForTrump to capture the enormity of this viral campaign.
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IT professional Gavai and his parents were killed when a pickup truck crashed into their car while they were returning after watching Fourth of July fireworks.
By Indo-Asian News Service: The body of an Indian man, who died in a road accident in the US earlier this month, is likely to be buried as his wife is in coma and cannot give consent for his cremation.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Sunday that Indian Consul General in New York Riva Ganguly has proposed that the body of Chandan Gavai, who died along with his parents when a pickup truck crashed into their car in New York on July 4, be buried till his wife Manisha Surwade came out of coma.
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HOW THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED
IT professional Gavai, 38, and his parents Kamalnayan Gavai, 74, and Archana Gavai, 60, were killed when a pickup truck crashed into their car while they were returning after watching Fourth of July fireworks.
The truck driver also died on the spot.
Both vehicles burst into flames immediately after the accident which happened at Yaphank in Suffolk county, New York.
Surwade, 32, sustained life-threatening burns and head injuries while their 11-month-old son sustained non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
The family hails from Kalyan in Maharashtra.
Stating that the bodies of the parents will be cremated in the US, Sushma Swaraj tweeted: "Burial of Chandan as his wife Manisha is in coma and she alone can give consent for his cremation."
WHAT US LAWS SAY
According to US laws, the spouse's consent is needed for the cremation of a body.
"Burial only till his wife Manisha recovers from coma. Once she gives consent, Chandan will also be cremated," she said in another tweet.
She said that death certificates would be issued for all the three who died and the family would be helped in getting insurance money.
Sushma Swaraj added that all members of the family, including of Manisha, who are in the US, are agreeable to the Consul General's proposal.
Also read:
Locals rescue Amarnath pilgrims injured in Bijbehara road accident
Youth suffers 2-litre blood loss after liver injury in freak accident
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By Indo-Asian News Service: The massive popularity of electronic dance music (EDM) in India has paved the way for a bevy of music producers who are creating groovy, rhymthic and bass-laden tunes to win over fans. Delhi-based artiste Sarthak Sardana aka Sartek has singlehandedly ensured that Indian EDM is taken seriously and recognised across the world.
The young DJ has opened for international stalwarts like Martin Garrix and Paul Van Dyk at popular electronic music festivals. He has featured on the prestigious Beatport top 100 (electro house) multiple times with his tracks Back to the future (No. 51) , Dopamine (No. 73) and his last release, Don't need love.
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His chartbuster Back to the future was, in fact, premiered by French DJ, producer and remixer David Guetta -- one of the luminaries of EDM -- on his radio show.
Sartek, who has earned these laurels at the age of 27, had humble beginnings. He started off as a CA student whose passion for dance music compelled him to embark on the path of production.
First episode of my radioshow 'Back To The Future' is out on my Soundcloud. Tune in here: https://t.co/O4Ele3PH66 pic.twitter.com/GpD7YtF3EY Sartek (@sartekmusic) May 20, 2016
"It all started for me after I attended a legendary trance DJ gig by Ferry Corsten in 2007, having no idea what dance music is all about. The gig changed the perspective of music for me as I never knew electronic music could make me so inspired seeing happy vibes all over. I joined an academy in Delhi in 2009 to pursue my passion and love for dance music while attending my CA classes," Sartek told IANS.
Also Read: Mandira Bedi creates new brand of saris for Sunburn
"It took me four years to learn the art of production and released my debut track on Tiesto's label Magik Muzik which marked the first official breakthrough," he added.
Now, Sartek has even launched his own podcast on online audio distribution platform Soundcloud, which is named after his hit song "Back to the future".
"When I started producing, I had a real hard time getting my music across people and making them aware about me as a producer. I really feel blessed that I am one of the few artists in India who broke through internationally. I see and feel that a lot of upcoming artistes are struggling to get their music heard. So, I decided to pick one track each month and feature it on my podcast," Sartek said.
According to him, the move will help the artistes "boost their career as I plan to take my show to online radio stations in a few weeks".
There's no denying that the scope of EDM is only going to expand in the coming years. According to Sartek, "the scene has grown at the fastest speed I have seen any music genre grow".
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"I personally think it has just started and merely 8-10 per cent of our youth is exposed to EDM. Earlier I used to do shows only in big cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, etc., but now I get more inquires from Tier-2 cities like Indore, Nagpur and Agra which indirectly implies that dance music has reached a lot of parts of India and is still growing to a bright future ahead. Also the perspective of being a DJ has been completely changed from playing at private parties to rocking the concerts," Sartek said.
Also Read: Here's how you can make the most of EDM fests Sunburn and Supersonic, while they last
"We are now called as rockstars," he added.
Sartek believes that the key to becoming a successful DJ is to learn the "art of engineering your track yourself".
Talking about his work with popular Dutch DJ Hardwell, who signed him to his label Revealed Recordings, Sartek said "it was indeed a dream come true moment to sign a track on the world's biggest dance music producer's record label".
"It has been an honour to work with him as he's a complete professional when it comes to picking music for his label, thus making me improve my quality every time I sit down to produce. Collaborating with Hardwell is the biggest dream I've ever had and it might become a reality soon," he added.
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By PTI: Mumbai, Jul 18 (PTI) Indian general insurers do not see any negative impact of Brexit, the UK vote to leave European Union, on their business.
The countrys general insurance sector largely depends upon the London market for their specialised and reinsurance needs. Over USD 2.5 billion of Indian reinsurance business is transacted in the London market every year.
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Some of the major energy insurance and aviation deals involving ONGC, Indian Oil, Air India and Jet Airways are placed in the London reinsurance market every year.
"I dont think Brexit will impact our operations in anyway. Indian economy is on the verge of transformation and we want expertise from the London market to manage risks in various segments," GIC Re Chairman and Managing Director Alice Vaidyan told PTI.
Vaidyan recently attended an insurance event held in London.
GIC Re has got a profitable branch operation in London, where it is planning to set up a syndicate. The company underwrote a gross global premium of Rs 18,436 crore during 2015-16, registering a growth of 21.41 per cent over the previous fiscal.
Their premium split between the domestic and overseas business during the year was 55 per cent and 45 per cent respectively.
"We are in London since 1920 and have branches here besides reinsurance business of over Rs 1,000 crore in Lloyds market. We will continue to operate here and expand our business," New India Assurance chairman and managing director G Srinivasan said.
According to Srinivasan, the countrys general insurance industry will provide great deal of opportunities to the overseas insurance and reinsurance companies to set up their business here.
General insurance companies will significantly diversify from the current mix dominated by traditional areas like motor, fire and health even though a significant chunk of premium currently remains extremely under penetrated.
Moreover, micro/rural insurance would witness a massive growth aided by Government initiatives, he said. PTI KD RSY MR JMF
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Madaari Irrfan bares his heart in an exclusive interview to IndiaToday.in about being misquoted, words being blown out of proportion, why he is no longer Irrfan Khan and his upcoming film.
By Ananya Bhattacharya: Irrfan is a man on a mission. He has taken upon himself the task of asking netas some questions that have been bothering him ever since he wrapped up his upcoming film Madaari. The actor has already had a live chat with Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, but isn't satisfied with the latter's 'nothing-new' solutions to problems. He is now to meet Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, followed by Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Not the usual people you meet if you have a film release at hand. Barring Arvind Kejriwal, of course.
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ALSO READ: Irrfan connects with real politicians for promotions of Madaari
ALSO READ: Box-office clash for Rajinikanth's Kabali and Irrfan's Madaari
In Delhi for the promotions of Nishikant Kamath's Madaari, Irrfan bares his heart about being misquoted, words being blown out of proportion, why he is no longer Irrfan Khan and more. Excerpts from Irrfan's conversation with IndiaToday.in:
The name of the film is Madaari. Is it a comment on the politicians who use the jamoora to make us commoners dance to their tunes? Or is it more to do with your character, the vigilante who has taken the law in his own hands?
It's not a single-dimensional word. It has several connotations; it's diverse. It also talks about our own responsibilities and complacency. We are sometimes the jamoora; at others, the Madaari. Every jamoora knows that he is dancing to someone else's tunes. And because we are human beings, we've got the faculties to understand and analyse and reflect on it. When we have a deeper understanding about something, we are in a better situation to choose things for ourselves. You have to discover the meaning that suits you the best. Superficially, yes, it is a metaphor for being controlled or whether you have any choice to break out of it.
The way Madaari is being marketed... you're looping in politicians and questioning them about the situation in the country - it is an unheard of promotional strategy. What made you give this spin to the promotions?
It's a simple thing, actually. It's a naive way, actually... my film is talking about the system and what do I do, how do I reach out to those who are running the system? Because the film leaves you with certain questions and they are still with me and they will remain with me. I just wanted to address those questions to the people who are running the system and I wish we could get some kind of clarity. Some kind of hope... or maybe a statement that there's no hope.
The trailer of Madaari is reminiscent of A Wednesday somewhere...
See, the film is not just what we're showing in the trailer. It is a combination of an emotional drama and a thriller. We could only reveal one portion, one aspect of the film, one flavour of the film, which makes it look like a thriller. But there's so much that is not in the trailer. It was difficult to cut the trailer. The trailer is where people make their mind. Generally, whatever highlights you have, you put in the trailer. But we wanted to go the other way round where the audience could be surprised.
Madaari somewhere seems a comment on the country's media too - spice over content. How far do you agree with what you seem to be showing in your film?
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It is not particularly about the media... the media is a part of the system. The media also shows what times we are living in. It has great power, great great possibility to build the nation. And it constructs perceptions. There also lies a huge responsibility. Whatever we see in today's times, is reflective of our times. It depends on the media, whether it is making you a robot or is it developing an introspective personality in people.
So news should be consumed with a pinch of salt in our times?
People are clever. They are getting more clever by the day. I think if they could see the reality, if they could understand why somebody is showing what, that will do a lot of good. But sometimes, news becomes noise. It is not about what is newsworthy, it is more about what can grab your attention... what is it which can create friction and address a reactionary mental state.
After your chat with Lalu Prasad Yadav, you said in an interview that he said what he had to but it was nothing new. You have reached out to Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal. Are you expecting something different from them?
Oh, yes! Otherwise there is no point of going to them. I'm looking for answers; if somebody could be courageous enough and accept how things are and tell us the way forward; where we are heading to in this country.
Irrfan's Madaari hits the screens on July 22
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You have been asked to 'concentrate on your films' instead of talking about Islam because, clerics pointed out, you 'have no knowledge of Islam', after your Ramzan comment. What was your reaction when you first got to know that your personal opinion had sparked off such a controversy?
I don't want to discuss it here. But I will talk about it on a platform I can rely on and my words won't be misconstrued. It is my personal opinion. I really want to understand this concept of freedom of expression. Is it just a phrase and has got nothing to do with our lives? I'm still wondering. I hope I'll get some answer from somewhere or my experience will tell me. Then I'll be able to conclude it. Right now, I'm still wondering what is freedom of speech. You're concerned most of the time... if you say something and you don't know which thing will be picked up and blown out of proportion. And it will become a compulsion for every channel to discuss that, not understanding that there are burning issues in the country which they can invest their time in. 'Usne yeh bol dia' -- that's not an issue where people's lives are affected. If someone said something loosely, not understanding the repercussions and not meaning that, that goes out of proportion. You are then compelled to wonder what are the priorities of people who are on a responsible chair.
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You've dropped the Khan from your name. How conscious a decision was it?
Oh, yes. It was a very conscious decision. At one point of time I understood that it's us... it's our choices that write the story of our life. It's not our background, not my lineage, it's my actions and choices which will help me write the story of my life. Whenever I go to my hometown, I still see people discussing how our forefathers did what and they are very proud of that. They are not responsible for their own choices. I feel sad. I feel what is the point of living in the past. You are alive. Your actions matter. Your actions and choices are going to make your life. I wanted to emphasise that I should be known for what I do, not for my background or caste or religion. These are my personal things and they should remain to myself. It's not for the public.
You've hosted a screening exclusively for children...
Yes... it's a very emotional film, explores the father-son bond. We thought parents and children will enjoy the film. I was really pleased by the children's reaction. They are all intelligent kids. We underestimate them when we're showing them only cartoons and superheroes. Their taste is diverse. I observe my kid. He's watching everything on the internet; be it serious drama, sitcoms, thrillers, comedies. He doesn't watch TV.
How much do you think films help in shaping the growth of a child in our day and age?
It does affect people's sensibility for sure, but it can have only a limited effect if it is not supported by life. If you're watching cinema and see that the society is also the same, it has a great impact on people's minds. It does affect you, but doesn't change you completely. It is one factor where you get influenced. But you won't say that kisi aadmi ne jaake rape kar dia kyuki usne yeh film dekhi thi. If that is possible, then toh cinema is enough. You don't need anything else! Cinema will change everything then.
You're producing Madaari too...
I'm a creative producer. My role was to choose the team and have some control over the release of the film that you cannot stop my film.
Talking of the release, you're clashing with Rajinikanth's Kabali - unintended, of course. Are you worried?
Unintended, of course, and I think I am fortunate to have Rajinikanth's blessings. I am a huge fan of Rajinikanth.
What message do you have for the youngsters and commoners of the country?
I have no message to give, you know... I'm not in a position to give messages to people. I myself am wondering about my life and trying to make sense. I'm still trying to solve this puzzle called life. I'm not mature enough to give messages.
(The writer tweets as @ananya116 )
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By Bang Showbiz: The 45-year-old actor has returned to the role of the special agent for a fourth time for 'Jason Bourne' following a nine-year break, and is sure the franchise will continue but thinks he'll eventually be too old for the role. He said: "My guess is it will be a while before we'll even get around to doing another one. They might reboot me before I bow out." In an interview with the pair for The Guardian newspaper, director Paul Greengrass added: "It's got to continue."
ALSO READ: How did Matt Damon get back in shape for Jason Bourne?
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The latest film - which also stars Alicia Vikander, Tommy Lee Jones and Julia Stiles - required Damon to undertake 90 minute high-intensity gym sessions every day for 10 weeks and eat only vegetables and protein for months before filming.
The actor explained: "Paul said early on, 'Look, if we open the film and in the first frame of Jason Bourne we see your face and you look like you've lived well these past 10 years, we do not have a movie. You have to look like you've suffered. And the only way to do that is to suffer."
But Damon and Greengrass have a great working relationship, which made making the movie so much easier, and would love to work together again.
Greengrass added: "Every film is a big gamble, large or small... You can come on set some days and feel, 'I don't know about this'. The anxieties are very profound. That's why it's such a stressful undertaking. When you've got someone like Matt who's going to sell it for you, who's going to be brilliant and is committed, the feeling of empowerment is so intense. And love. He's a fantastic man to make a film with. And we've been in the trenches before. We've been in the deepest shit that it's possible to be in on a film set."
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Delhi government is all set to open Dr Kalam's memorial at Dilli Haat on July 27 - his death anniversary. His grave, however, remains tucked under a tin shed, surrounded by barricades.
By Vishakha Saxena: Seven months ago, as reports came in about the dismal condition of Dr Kalam's gravesite, outrage was in the air. "Shameful!" read majority comments as people urged the government to turn it into a proper memorial.
Amid the furore, CPWD officials paid a visit to his make-shift grave in Rameswaram. As tempers calmed, all was forgotten.
Some 2,200 kilometres away in Delhi, the state government is now set to open a memorial at Dilli Haat on July 27 - his death anniversary. The memorial will have notes, books, clothes and other personal items of the former president.
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Dr Kalam's grave, however, remains tucked under a tin shed, surrounded by barricades.
Garbage near grave
Hardly any Indian president inspired people like Dr Kalam did - public events he attended were often jam-packed and when he spoke, audiences cheered every word. Even today, his admirers consider a visit to his final resting place akin to a pilgrimage. In fact, pilgrims going to Rameswaram temple often visit his gravesite too.
Despite the love and affection for the Missile Man, his grave has been neglected. Reports from December 2015 - five months after his death - described how his gravesite became home to herds of cattle and garbage. Though a makeshift structure was built, it did little to stop people from littering.
Facing heat, the Tamil Nadu government clarified it had already handed over 1.5 acres of land to the government for constructing a memorial. A few days later a foundation stone was laid at a ceremonial function to construct a compound around the proposed memorial complex.
And yet, Kalam's gravesite looks more or less similar today.
Efforts that were made
Dr Anantha Krishnan, an advisor at the Kalam Foundation, spoke relentlessly about the state of the Missile Man's gravesite last year. "Several members of his family have been buried at a private place which is maintained by the family. It is only because Kalam was a public figure that they agreed to have him buried at a spot which people could visit and where they could pay their respects. The family can't guard it, the government has to do it," he told The News Minute.
"You can't have a Bharat Ratna being left like this. If it was a politician, by now some structure would have come up," he told NDTV. He even started a Facebook campaign called "Justice4GuruKalam".
Krishnan's feelings still find resonance among many others who loved and respected Kalam.
Family unhappy
Kalam's 99-year-old elder brother repeatedly requested the government to intervene and "expedite the matter", but to no avail.
Initially, the Centre even turned down their request to convert his Delhi home into a knowledge centre and all his belongings including were sent back. Despite protests, the house was allotted to Union Tourism and Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, pushing Kalam's grand nephew, APJ Sheikh Salim, to quit the BJP in protest.
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It was then that the AAP government announced the Dilli Haat memorial and Kalam's family agreed to move his belongings there instead of Rameswaram.
Efforts continue
Krishnan has yet again taken charge of bringing attention to Kalam's ignored grave. He is urging people to sign a Change.org petition demanding a proper memorial for Dr Kalam.
The petition was initiated by Kalam's elder brother APJM Marakaiyar in December. "I am 99 years old and cannot run after them to make this happen. I need your support. This is the wish of every Indian," he wrote.
"All that has been done in the last 7 months is the addition of a fence around the shed. The project has been passed from one department to another. First Urban Development Ministry. Then DRDO. Now Military Engineering Services (MES). Why is it so complicated to build a simple memorial?" asks Krishnan in his latest attempt.
His tweets have won him an assurance from MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who promises to take up the issue in Parliament. But assurances have clearly not worked for the grave of one of India's most beloved presidents.
A country which fails to make a memorial of #AbdulKalam can never progress.Its a tragedy. #Kalamletdown Ashoke Pandit (@ashokepandit) July 13, 2016
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By India Today Web Desk: Actor Karan Patel is making news again, and this time, it's not because of his hit television soap, Ye Hai Mohabaatein. The talented actor reportedly ignored the media at his co-star Divyanka Tripathi's recently held reception (July 14) in Mumbai.
Also read:Soon-to-be mother Shweta Tiwari's pictures from Goa are lovely
The newly weds had a reception in Mumbai exclusively for their industry friends, as they were not a part of the wedding (and the first reception that was held in Chandigarh). Stars from the small-screen industry made the best of the bash, and were even interacting with the media actively. But things took an unsavory turn when media persons tried to interview Karan Patel. Apparently, the actor just walked away when he was approached by the press.
Karan Patel takes a selfie at the Divek reception. Picture courtesy: Instagram/vivekdahiyafanclub
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Now, Karan has come out clean regarding the whole affair.
"It's just sad that one's attitude is always speculated even if you've not done something. The media was barely at arm's length when I requested them to stay a little away and bytes would be given to all," the actor said in a statement.
The cast of Ye Hai Mohabaatein. Picture courtesy: Instagram/karan9198
He said that he felt "unnerved", and fearing a stampede, walked away, since there were too many people there.
"I've always loved the media and will continue to do so, but I do feel with due respect to all concerned that surrounding us and giving us no space to move becomes difficult when you're out with family," he added.
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Minister K J George resigned after a Bengaluru court today directed the police to file an FIR against him and two top police officials in connection with the suicide of DySP M K Ganapathy.
By India Today Web Desk: Minister K J George who courted controversy for his alleged involvement in the suicide of DySP M K Ganapathy tendered his resignation today. The resignation came soon after a Bengaluru JMFC court directed the police to file an FIR against him and two top police officials in connection with the suicide.
The directive was ordered by the court after the deceased's son Nehal Ganapathy filed a private criminal complaint. Nehal requested the court to direct the police to conduct a probe on the minister and the top officials for allegedly abetting the DySP's suicide.
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Sources said that soon after the directive, George announced that he will come out clean in the case. The DySP's suicide stirred up a row after the opposition demanded George's resignation over the incident. The opposition leaders wanted the top cops suspended for an impartial probe in the incident.
KIN APPROACHED COURT AFTER POLICE REFUSED TO FILE COMPLAINT
The deceased's wife and son approached the court, after the police refused to file a complaint lodged by them with the Kushalanagar police on July 10 against George and IPS officials A M Prasad and Pranab Mohanty.
In his complaint, Nehal said that his father had named the minister and the top IPS officials before committing suicide.
MK Ganapathy (51) was found hanging from the ceiling fan in a lodge room in Madikeri of Kodagu district, Karnataka on July 7.
Also read:
Dy SP Ganapathy's suicide: Karnataka Assembly adjourned
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Over a week long cycle of violence has left 40 protesters and two policemen dead in Kashmir. Authorities have officially confirmed that newspaper owners were asked not to publish newspapers till July 19.
CRPF jawans stand guard near razor wires during curfew and strike in Srinagar on Friday. Photo: PTI
By Indo-Asian News Service: Officially imposed curfew and a shutdown called by the separatists paralysed normal life for the 11th consecutive day in the Valley on Monday.
Officials told IANS that Sunday was the first day without any civilian casualty since the violence engulfed the Valley on July 9, following the killing of Hizbul Commander Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces on July 8.
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"A violent mob attacked a camp of the Rashtriya Rifles in Saderkot area of Bandipora district yesterday (Sunday) forcing the soldiers to open fire in self-defence."
"Four protesters were injured in the incident."
"Except for stray incidents of stone pelting at some places, the overall law and order situation remained calm yesterday (Sunday) across the Valley," a senior police officer told IANS.
40 PROTESTERS, 2 POLICEMEN DEAD SO FAR
Over a week long cycle of violence has left 40 protesters and two policemen dead in Kashmir. Authorities have officially confirmed that newspaper owners were asked not to publish newspapers till July 19.
Cable television services have, however, been resumed after service providers took off all Pakistan TV channels and two private Indian channels.
All mobile phone services including Internet and call facilities have been snapped across the Valley.
Limited call facility continued on post-paid cell phones provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
SCHOOLS, COLLEGES CLOSED TILL JULY 24
All schools, colleges and universities have been closed till July 24. All job interviews by the state Public Service Commission (PSC) have also been postponed.
Closure of the strategic Jammu-Srinagar National Highway for over a week has caused shortage of essential items in the Valley.
All supplies of essentials of life are routed into the landlocked Valley through this highway. Train services between Baramulla town in the Valley and Bannihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended for the 11th day on Monday.
Separatist leaders continue to remain under house arrest and preventive detention in summer capital Srinagar.
The centre has rushed another 20 companies of paramilitary forces to assist the state government in maintaining law and order in the trouble-torn Valley.
Also read:
Fresh batch of 20 CRPF companies rushed to Kashmir to control violence
Kashmir unrest: Security officials incur grave injuries in clash, only protestors deserve sympathy?
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By PTI: From Lalit K Jha
Cleveland (US), Jul 18 (PTI) Ohio Governor John Kasich is "embarrassing" the Republican party by not speaking at the national convention here, the Trump campaign said today as it called for unity in the party ahead of the November polls.
"The party is unified. Certainly, the Bush family we would like to have them. But they are the past. We are dealing with the future," Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort told reporters at a news conference here when asked about the absence of top Republican leaders including those from the Bush family -- from which the party has had two US Presidents -- George H W Bush and George Bush.
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"We would like to have them. But they do not reflect the future of the party. Many of the delegates supporting Jeb Bush are supporting Donald Trump now at this convention. Conventions are a healing time. We feel that the healing time is happening and when we leave here, it is going to be by and large a united party," Manafort said.
Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who is the vice presidential nominee of the party, would "certainly" help do that, he said.
The decision by Kasich, who is not attending the Cleveland convention despite it being held in his home state, to not attend the Cleveland convention despite it being held in his home state is "embarrassing", Manafort said.
He said Kasich, a former White House contender, was invited to speak at the Convention but he declined to do so.
"He did not want to participate (in the convention). We did not make that decision. We invited him. He chooses not to. This was his decision. We think, this was wrong decision. We wanted him to speak at the Convention. He chooses not to," Manafort said in response to a question.
Several top Republican leaders are not attending the Republican convention which is seen as their opposition to Trump. Prominent among them being 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Indian-American former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
Manafort said the party is united behind Trump.
Several of the former primary rivals of Trump including Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are speaking at the Convention.
On the first day, the convention would approve the platform, which is similar to the party election manifesto in India.
Kasich not attending the convention is "unusual", said John Green, Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, The University of Akron.
"This could have a very big impact (on Trumps prospects in Ohio)," he said at a news conference.
"May be many Ohio voters would be inclined not to vote either Trump or Clinton," he said.
On the Republican side, there is a good bit of a tension between the Trump campaign and the Republican party.
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With Kasich not supporting Trump, this could have a big impact on election prospects given that the latest polls indicate that it is a very tight race between Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. PTI LKJ ASK ASK
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By PTI: Los Angeles, Jul 18 (PTI) Actress Kate del Castillo fears her native country Mexico is spying on her after El Chapo meeting.
The film and TV actress, who famously brokered Sean Penns Rolling Stone interview with drug kingpin El Chapo, believes Mexican authorities are monitoring her phone conversations and text messages when she communicates with her family, friends and lawyers in Mexico, said The Hollywood Reporter.
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"You hear it when you go in. In everything, I know that Im completely wiretapped. I think (the tapping) is by the Mexican government, Im almost positive, but I dont know it for a fact. But I know it with all my heart ? because I hear noises that I didnt hear before," del Castillo said during Spanish-language broadcaster Univisions weekly news program Aqui y Ahora.
Earlier this year, Mexicos Attorney Generals Office said it was investigating del Castillo, 43, for possible money laundering.
Attorney General Arely Gomez said there were indications that the actress may have received illicit funds from Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman for her tequila brand, Tequila Honor.
However, Del Castillo insists that she has not received any money from El Chapo. Her attorney has also requested a court-ordered injunction prohibiting authorities from detaining her.
"I never received money from El Chapo. I was never going to do business with him. And that is all, all (the authorities) accuse me of," said "The Queen of the South" actress.
"The truth is, I dont know why (theres) a terrible witch hunt against me. And I hope that things get settled very soon," she added.
Del Castillo met with El Chapo in September along with Penn and two film producers to discuss the possibility of making a biopic about the drug barons life story. El Chapo granted exclusive rights to the actress to make the movie, but she has yet to move forward on the project. PTI SHD SHD
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Critics slammed Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal's dish washing act at Golden Temple by calling it a political drama. Kejriwal,however, maintained that the act was to repent unintentional mistakes committed by AAP workers.
By Manjeet Sehgal: Desecration controversy continues to haunt AAP's National Convenor and New Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal who washed utensils in Golden Temple complex on today morning to repent the disrespect which his party had shown to religious scriptures including Guru Granth earlier this month while releasing party's Youth Manifesto in Amritsar.
Kejriwal who did not tender any apology personally to Sikhs, joined dozens of Sikh volunteers at about 4 am and washed used utensils left by the Sikh followers for nearly 30 minutes. He spent one hour offering prayers, listening to hymns and taking a Parikarma of famous Golden Temple complex.
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As expected, Kejriwal did not render the shoe dusting and floor sweeping service. He left the temple complex soon after paying obeisance at Golden temple.
WASHED DISHES FOR ATONEMENT
"We rendered service as an atonement for the unintentional mistakes and got peace of mind in return," Arvind Kejriwal told media persons while leaving the temple complex alongwith party's National Spokesperson Ashish Khetan.
Khetan had earlier caused a major embarrassment for the party by comparing its manifesto with various religious scriptures including Holy Bible, Bhagwad Geeta, Quran and Guru Granth Sahib on July 3.
While AAP claimed that the party by rendering selfless service has proved that it respects the religious sentiments of Sikhs, Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), Akali Dal and Congress leaders termed Kejriwal's temple service as a political drama.
Speaking to India Today, Chief Secretary SGPC ,Harcharan Singh slammed AAP and accused Arvind Kejriwal of creating a political drama in the name of service.
"There is no need to have complaints. Their document itself is an evidence that they have a scant regard for Sikhs and they want to misuse the people. It is the duty of police and state government to punish them. Had he been seriously repenting, there was no need to bring crowd and cameras with him," Singh said.
REPENTANCE WAS AN EYE WASH
Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal also termed Kejriwal's repentance as an eye wash and accused him of hurting religious sentiments of Sikhs. Senior Congress leader Ambika Soni and some SGPC and Akali Dal leaders even accused Kejriwal and his men of washing the already cleaned utensils.
"Even if he cleaned a single plate that is a service. The service is open to all irrespective of religion. All we want is that it should be done selflessly and with a clean heart," Harcharan Singh said.
When contacted the Langar (community kitchen), officials refused to comment whether Kejriwal had washed clean utensils. Reacting to the allegations, AAP leaders Sucha Singh Chotepur (Punjab Convenor) and MP Bhagwant Mann criticised opposition parties for unnecessarily dragging the issue .
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AAP DENIES CAPITALIZING ON RELIGION
"AAP does not believe in making a political capital out of religious issues. We apologised to the waheguru ( almighty ) and not to political parties," Sucha Singh Chotepur said.
It is worth mentioning here that AAP had very carefully planned the party supremo's Amritsar visit. Kejriwal visited the shrine at a time when it was difficult for the demonstrators to organise a protest against him. On July 3 he had faced a poster attack.
The party leaders also avoided media and parried political questions. Though AAP made a carefully planned attempt to douse the flames of discontentment but the desecration cases continue to haunt the party leaders including Kejriwal and Ashish Khetan. Punjab police is investigating two cases of desecration of holy books filed against its leaders.
Also read:
FIR against AAP leader Ashish Khetan for hurting religious sentiments
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In February, the duo was apprehended by the police from a lodge in Thiruvananathpuram after their families filed a missing complaint. They were then produced in front of the magistrate who released them to their respective parents. However, they were both dismissed from college.
Kerala High Court today upheld a college management's decision to dismiss a fifth semester student who eloped with a male student from the class.
In February, the duo was apprehended by the police from a lodge in Thiruvananathpuram after their families filed a missing complaint. They were then produced in front of the magistrate who released them to their respective parents. However, they were both dismissed from college.
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The order dated June 15 and released on Friday states, "This is not a mere case of love, but the two students took the drastic step of eloping and living together without even contracting a marriage. As consenting adults they could definitely act according to their volition, but here they could not have married legally. When they decided to take a such a step for the sake of love, as adults, they should also be ready to face the consequences."
The girl, a student of BA at Mar Thoma College of Science and Technology in Kollam district was in her fourth semester during her dismissal. She approached the university and the district administration for help, but in vain. She approached the High Court in April.
COLLEGE'S TAKE ON THE INCIDENT
The students, both 20-years-old, had admitted to the allegation and apologised in front of a five member committee appointed by the college. According to the report, "The management were also concerned with the fact that the boy who eloped with the petitioner was not of marriageable age."
"She will not be able to continue her studies in the same college. She was excellent academically, scored above 80-85 per cent. The college needs to readmit her and give her a transfer certificate if she has to join elsewhere and continue her studies. If not she will have to repeat the semester she has already passed," said KV Anil Kumar, the girl's lawyer.
The two families have decided to get the duo married after the boy attains legal age of marriage.
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Petitioner Manish Bhangale had alleged that there were number of calls made between Khadse and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's house in Pakistan.
By Vidya : Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) has told Bombay High Court that there is no angle of terrorism that they have found in their preliminary investigation in ex-Maharashtra minister Ekanath Khadse's call record case.
Bombay High Court has directed cyber cell to register and investigate the case.
WHAT THE CASE IS ALL ABOUT
Petitioner and professional hacker Manish Bhangale had alleged that there were number of calls made between Khadse and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's house in Pakistan. The landline numbers that he had cited belonged to Dawood's wife Mehzabeen according to information that Bhangale had received from Pakistan telephone directories he alleged.
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Khadse had outrightly denied these allegations however he had resigned from the post of Revenue Minister of Maharashtra after this and many more allegations were levelled against him.
Mumbai Police had given him a clean chit too on the allegations of call records but after much pressure state goverment had asked Anti-Terror squad to look into the case.
PETITIONER CLAIMS SECURITY THREAT
Bhangale had few months back filed a petition in Bombay High Court seeking protection for himself and claimed that influential people were trying to threaten his family in Jalgaon. He also in his petition, sought investigation in the case. Bhangale who had apppeared before the ATS, told the court that the squad cannot do a thorough investigation until they register the case.
Bombay High Court ordered that the cyber cell of Mumbai should register a case and investigate it. With this, Bombay High Court has disposed off the petition filed by Bhangale.
Also read:
India Today Impact: Eknath Khadse resigns amid charges of corruption, links with Dawood Ibrahim
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The government has virtually rejected the Congress' demand for a tax rate cap in GST.
By India Today Web Desk: Today was the first day of the monsoon session of Parliament, which is likely to be headlined by the government's aggressive pitch over the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, stalled by the opposition Congress in the Rajya Sabha.
"This session takes place before India's Independence Day...I have spoken to all the parties over the past few days. Everyone is in the mood to take the best decisions in the interest of the country," Prime Minister Narendra Modi told reporters outside Parliament.
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Here are the latest developments: On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had appealed to all the political parties to back the long-pending crucial reform bill. The government has virtually rejected the Congress' demand for a tax rate cap terming it "not feasible and advisable". "I have faith in all political parties. Have spoken to them and it is clear everyone is in a mood to take good decisions," said the Prime Minister. "This session is taking place ahead of the 70th Independence Day Celebrations. In this session we wish to take the journey of these 70 years to greater heights, a new direction, and momentum by indulging in the best of discussions and take excellent decisions for the larger interst of the nation," he added. In Lok Sabha, the first day of the session was adjourned after an obituary reference to Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP from Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh, who passed away on June 1. Modi introduced the newly-inducted ministers in the Lok Sabha, which will now resume on Tuesday. There is less likelihood of much harmony in Parliament, however, with the opposition planning to target the government on Kashmir crisis as well as the role of governors against the backdrop of Arunachal Pradesh political crisis. Buoyed by the restoration of its governments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Congress will target the NDA for "using all tricks" to destabilise the opposition-ruled states. In the Rajya Sabha, the session started with Chairman Mohammad Hamid Ansari administering the oath of office to the newly-elected members of the House. The monsoon session ends on August 12.
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Irrfan undertook this novel way to promote Madaari, a film about a man taking on the system.
By India Today Web Desk: Irrfan has undertaken a rather novel way of promoting his latest release, Madaari. He has asked to connect with top politicians on Twitter, asking them for an appointment, so he can meet them personally and ask them a few questions as a common man. He reached out to politicians like Lalu Prasad Yadav, Arvind Kejriwal, the PM's office, Rahul Gandhi's office and the response has been encouraging.
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ALSO READ: When 'Madaari' Irrfan met Lalu Prasad Yadav
Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @PMOIndia ? Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016
Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @ArvindKejriwal? Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016
Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @OfficeofRG? Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016
Lalu Prasad Yadav gave the Haasil actor the go ahead, who visited Patna and interviewed him. He tweeted the same thing to everyone, "I am a common man of this country. I have a few questions. Can I meet you?" While PMO and Rahul Gandhi's office have responded and agreed to fix an appointment, Kejriwal has gone ahead and given them an appointment at his office on Tuesday, 11 am.
@irrfan_k Currently the PM is occupied with the upcoming Parliament Session. Please send a letter with details. PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 17, 2016
.@irrfan_k Tuesday 11 am, my office. Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 16, 2016
@irrfan_k Happy to meet.
Pl DM your number Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) July 16, 2016
Madaari is the story of a man who kidnaps the boy of the high-ranking minister, after the loss of his own son. He blames the system's incompetence for the loss of his child. The film has Jimmy Shergill playing a principal role and is directed by Nishikant Kamat.
Madaari will hit the screens this Friday on July 22.
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One of the most significant aspirations of the Narendra Modi government's much-publicised 'Make in India' initiative is to boost India's manufacturing sector considerably, not only to spur economic growth, but also to generate large scale employment. The aim is to create 100 million jobs and have manufacturing contribute 25 per cent to the country's GDP by 2022.
However, this will not be easy, going by some of the data coming in of late. Industrial output growth, measured by the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), was in the negative zone, at -0.8 per cent for April, contrary to the one per cent growth market analysts had anticipated. This was due to a below par performance of the manufacturing and mining sectors, and a decline in capital goods output. Weak manufacturing growth, a struggling agriculture sector courtesy widespread drought, and cost control across sectors are also causing panic in the job market. Job creation in eight employment-intensive industries for the first half of fiscal 2016 fell year-on-year to 91,000 from nearly 500,000 in the first half of fiscal 2015.
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A joint report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and apex industry chamber Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in September 2015, while expressing pessimism at the targets for the Make in India initiative, said manufacturing still accounted for only 17 per cent of India's GDP, and has remained more or less stagnant for the past five years. This compares poorly with neighbour China, where manufacturing and industry comprise around 44 per cent of its GDP. While India's share in the global GDP increased from 2.2 per cent in 2009 to 2.5 per cent in 2013, its share in global manufacturing actually fell from 2.2 per cent to 2 per cent in the same period. Similarly, although manufacturing exports increased from $188 billion in 2011 to $203 billion in 2014, India's share in the global export market hovers at 1.5 per cent. These shortfalls have been reflected in the job market, the report says. Only four million jobs are estimated to have been created in manufacturing since 2010. "Extrapolating this growth of 1.5 per cent, we will fall short of the (government's) target by 92 million jobs by 2022," the BCG-CII report adds.
REFORMS PUSH
The government would like to argue otherwise. India has grown at 7.6 per cent in 2015-16, outpacing even China. Several measures it has taken, it says, to make the country more investor-friendly are bearing fruit. It cites the foreign investment numbers to prove its point. FDI inflows to India touched $55.46 billion in 2015-16 from $36.04 billion in 2013-14, which the government attributes to the FDI policy reforms undertaken in its two-year rule. On June 20, the government unleashed another round of FDI reforms, inviting investment in nine sectors, including aviation, defence and pharmaceuticals, which it said should spur growth and create more employment. The government also gave a major push to the Make in India project through a week-long jamboree in Mumbai in February this year, at the end of which it said it has been able to get commitments for $222 billion in overseas investment in manufacturing.
These measures apart, several states are devising their own ways to attract investment. The Gujarat government, for instance, is planning to set up an electronics products manufacturing hub in the state, in line with its newly announced Electronics Policy 2016, which will generate about 500,000 jobs over five years. The Uttar Pradesh government has secured investment deals worth Rs 5,000 crore for setting up mobile manufacturing units in the state, while Maharashtra has already cleared land allotment for 130 industrial units with an investment of Rs 6,266 crore. Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn had announced a $5 billion investment in the state. Clean energy investments in India touched $7.9 billion in 2014, propping India as the seventh largest clean energy investor in the world.
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WOOED BY INDIA
The government cites moves by global manufacturing giants such as GE, Siemens, HTC, Toshiba and Boeing to invest in high-tech manufacturing here as an example of the country growing more investor-friendly. In 2015, India jumped 12 places over last year to 130 in the ease-of-doing-business rankings, thanks to a string of measures by the Centre and some states, including reducing the number of clearances needed to start new businesses. "In terms of brand building and marketing, things have progressed really well," says S.V. Sukumar, partner and head, manufacturing sector, at consulting firm KPMG India. "The country has been able to capture investors' mindshare, if not business share." While the FDI move will have an impact in the short term, the initiatives taken to improve infrastructure, for instance, will have a significant long-term impact.
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But there is still much more to be done. According to the latest World Bank's India Development Update, although India's economy expanded at a faster pace in financial year 2016, a number of its growth engines stalled. Agriculture-having faced two consecutive years of drought-rural household consumption, private investments and exports have not performed to their potential.
To sustain the growth it has achieved, the economy needs to activate these engines, while ensuring demand from urban households and public investments does not run out of fuel. "There are good reasons for confidence in India's near-term prospects," says Onno Ruhl, World Bank country director in India. "However, a pickup in investments is crucial to sustain economic growth in the longer term." The recently approved Bankruptcy Code will be of help in this regard. Once implemented, it will help unleash the productivity Indian firms need in order to create jobs and become globally competitive, he adds. The government is fully tuned to this reality. "It is not just about opening up sectors, but also promoting India as a market, making India predictable," Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, said after the FDI push was announced.
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MAKING FOR INDIA
Creating local demand for products and services thus becomes crucial. "Investors will be keen to know how much they can make and sell in India," says KPMG's Sukumar. "India has to be a market first." Business sentiment is yet to take off, and private investment has been lagging. One measure that can boost up investor confidence is the Goods and Services Tax (GST), for which there is yet to be consensus among all states. Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra says 'Make in India' is only a rallying point to gather attention. "Once it has set the direction, the government should move out of the way," he said during the high decibel 'Make in India' week in February.
"At this point, companies are making in India as they used to, but are they making and growing in India is the question to ask," says Rajesh V. Shah, co-chairman and managing director at steel maker Mukand Ltd. For this to happen, demand has to improve. The government has intervened to bring down steel imports, offering some relief to the industry, but a recovery may not happen too soon. "There is a big debt overhang in many companies, and they are not going to invest in a hurry," says Shah.
This means several challenges remain for the Make in India drive, though an earnest start has been made. Plugging the loopholes will be crucial to get anywhere near the targets the government has set.
Follow the writer on Twitter @MGArun1
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The NGT has directed the Delhi RTO to provide the list of de-registered vehicles to the Traffic Police in the Delhi-NCR region.
The Delhi RTO has been ordered to publish public notice for the NGT order.
By India Today Web Desk: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) today directed Delhi Regional Transport Office (RTO) to de-register all diesel vehicles over 10 years old in the Delhi-NCR region.
ALSO READ: Provide information on vehicle pollution levels in three weeks: NGT tells states
The NGT also directed the Delhi RTO to provide the list of deregistered vehicles to the Traffic Police in the Delhi-NCR region.
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Moreover, the Delhi RTO has been ordered to publish public notice for the NGT order. The NGT will hear the diesel matter again on July 20.
ALSO READ: Kerala High Court stays NGT's ban on diesel vehicles in Kerala for 2 months
In its order, the NGT said Delhi's odd-even scheme hardly improved the Delhi-NCR region's air quality. Moreover, the number of impounded old diesel vehicles have increased drastically and have accepted the fact that diesel vehicles pollute more than other sources.
Various authorities have informed that the Delhi odd-even scheme was of "hardly any success", in reducing pollution coming from old diesel vehicles.
ALSO READ: Auto industry leaders meet PMO officials; seek solution over diesel ban
In its hearing last week, the Supreme Court demanded the Delhi government to share the data on the number of diesel vehicles, older than 10 years, and petrol vehicles, older than 15 years, that were impounded by the RTO in the past one year. The Delhi government replied that the Delhi RTO has impounded around 3,000 vehicles in the past one year, but have been released since then.
However, according to the Motor Vehicle Act, 1988, the authority to de-register old vehicles falls under the regional transport department and not the NGT.
ALSO READ: Toyota, Mercedes-Benz to re-consider investment plans in India
Diesel vehicles older than 15 years are already banned in Delhi.
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:
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By PTI: Bhubaneswar, Jul 18 (PTI) With the death of at least 18 children in a span of three months allegedly due to malnutrition at a village in mineral-rich Sukinda valley of Jajpur district, Odisha govenrment today set up a taskforce to ensure all round development of the area.
The taskforce was constituted based on the report of director, social welfare, development commissioner R Balakrishnan said. The director in his report had stated that the area is deprived up of basic facilities like health, education, communication, power and drinking water.
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The Development Commissioner said revenue divisional commissioner (RDC), central division, will head the taskforce. "The RDC will submit weekly report on the developmental activities of Nagada area," Balakrishnan told reporters.
Five nodal officers will be appointed to look after five different sectors like food security, health, education, road communication and drinking water facilities, he said.
Nagada is situated on a hilltop in a dense forest under mineral-rich Sukinda block. Located about 30 km from Sukinda chromite valley and more than 50 km from Kalinga Nagar Industrial complex, there is virtually no road to the village.
The people have to trek more than 15 km through a dense forest to reach a motorable road, the director of social welfare mentioned in his report.
Though the state government has been implemnting the Nutrition Operational Plan (NOP) supported by DFID (Department for International Development) in 15 High Burden districts, Jajpur was not in the list. PTI AAM MM
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Sources in the Delhi Police said she was quizzed about the alleged fight between her and Sunanda in January 2014, days before the latter was found dead.
By Tanseem Haider: Pakistani author and columnist Mehr Tarar, who is alleged to be close to former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor, was questioned by the Delhi Police's Special Investigation Team in the Sunanda Pushkar murder case.
Tarar had emailed former Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi, saying she was willing to join the probe into the alleged murder of Pushkar in a five-star hotel in Delhi in 2014. She was earlier quizzed in March this year.
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Exclusive: The last photos of Sunanda Pushkar
Since Tarar, 48, is a Pakistani, summons couldn't have been issued to her. The SIT therefore requested her to join the probe. Sources in the Delhi Police said she was quizzed about the alleged fight between her and Sunanda in January 2014, days before the latter was found dead.
TARAR MET THAROOR IN 2013
Tarar was also told about allegations levelled by journalist Nalini Singh, Sunanda's close friend, over her closeness with Tharoor, which the Pakistani columnist denied. But Tarar, mother of a 13-year-old, accepted that she knew the thrice-married Tharoor and had met him at a book exhibition in 2013.
Sunanda Pushkar was found dead inside her suite at a five-star hotel in New Delhi in January 2014, a day after she was believed to be involved in a spat with Tarar on Twitter over the latter's alleged affair with Tharoor, presently a Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram.
Pushkar's viscera samples were sent to the FBI lab in Washington DC in February last year to determine the kind of poison that killed her after an AIIMS medical board identified poisoning as the reason behind her death.
ALSO READ:
To India, with love...An article by Mehr Tarar, days before Sunanda Pushkar's death
Sunanda Pushkar death case: Delhi Police asks DG health services to form board to examine evidence
Sunanda Pushkar case: Delhi Police SIT questions AIIMS over discrepancies in medical reports
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Pakistani 'selfie' cleric is being investigated in connection with social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch's killing.
By Reuters: A prominent Muslim cleric in Pakistan who was censured for appearing in "selfie" photographs with murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch is being investigated in connection with her killing, police said on Monday.
Baloch, 26, described as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, divided opinion in the deeply conservative Muslim society with her risque photos. Her murder on Friday has shocked the country and sparked fresh debate about so-called honour killings.
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Baloch's brother, Muhammad Waseem, told media he drugged and strangled his sister as she had violated their family's honour with her social media posts, including a series of selfies with cleric Abdul Qavi last month.
One video appears to show her sitting on Qavi's lap.
Police said Qavi, who was suspended from a prominent Muslim council after the photographs were published, was also part of their investigation into her murder.
"We have decided to widen the scope of the investigation and include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the probe," Azhar Ikram, the police chief in the town of Multan, where Baloch was killed, told Reuters.
Qavi has denied any involvement in Baloch's murder but told Reuters on Monday he would present himself to police for questioning if summoned.
Qavi told media on Saturday Baloch's death should serve as an example for others who tried to malign the clergy, though he also stated that he had "forgiven her".
Baloch, who described herself as a modern day feminist, was unapologetic about her bid to push the boundaries of acceptability for women and change "the typical orthodox mindset" of Pakistanis.
Her pictures and videos outraged religious conservatives who viewed her as a disgrace to the cultural values of Islam and Pakistan. Others hailed her as a "feminist icon".
BREADWINNER
Police were also investigating Baloch's other brother, Muhammad Aslam, who is a junior army officer, Ikram said.
More than 500 people - almost all of them women - die in "honour killings" in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives acting over a perception "shame" has been brought on the family.
Governments have deplored the practice but done little to stop it. Many Pakistanis have called for the passage of an anti-honour killing law aimed at closing a loophole that allows family members to forgive those responsible for such killings.
After Baloch's death her father, Muhammad Azeem, filed a police report against both his sons, alleging Aslam had encouraged Waseem to carry out the killing.
Police have declined to comment on Aslam's role and he was not available for comment on Monday.
Baloch built a modelling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner.
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"She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son," Baloch's father said, according to the English-language Dawn newspaper. "She supported all of us, including my son who killed her."
Azeem was also not available for comment.
After the outcry over the selfies with Qavi, Baloch held a news conference and appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security. No help was provided.
ALSO READ | Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch laid to rest in her ancestral village
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Both houses of the Maharashtra assembly were adjourned after the opposition demanded a discussion on the brutal rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl in Ahmednagar district of the state.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was targeted by the opposition following a ruckus over the rape and murder of a minor girl in Kopardi village.
By Kamlesh Damodar Sutar: The brutal rape and murder of a minor girl in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar rocked the state's assembly session on its first day. With the opposition demanding discussion on the floor of the house. Both the houses were later adjourned following a pandemonium.
A 15-year-old girl was raped last week by three men who inflicted injuries all over her body and broke her limbs before brutally murdering her in Kopardi village of Ahmednagar district.
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The barbaric rape which is a stark reminder of the Nirbhaya case, has sparked outrage as well as political slugfest, with the Congress demanding Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' resignation on "moral grounds".
NCP LEADER RAISED THE ISSUE IN THE LOWER HOUSE
NCP leader and former deputy CM Ajit Pawar raised the issue in the Lok Sabha saying that he was ashamed to be an elected representative after the incident.
Pawar added that the Kopardi case was more heinous than the Nirbhaya gangrape in Delhi. Pawar appealed the CM to take action against the guilty, considering the victim as a daughter.
Former CM Prithviraj Chavan insisted that the House discusses the issue on Monday itself. Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil raised the issue through an adjournment notice.
While talking to reporters outside the house Vikhe alleged that the government was not serious about discussing the issue. Following the pandemonium, Fadnavis announced that action has already been taken in the case as the police had arrested three and booked them under POCSO and IPC sections.
RS 5 LAKH AID TO VICTIM'S FAMILY
Fadnavis also informed the House that that the matter will be heard in a fast track court and Ujjwal Nikam will be the Special public prosecutor. The state government had also announced a financial aid of Rs five lakh to the victim's family.
The issue also rocked the Upper House of Maharashtra Legislature. Leader of opposition in the Legislative Council, Dhananjay Munde launched a scathing attack on the government alleging that the CM who always used social media for trivial updates did not get time to mention his sympathies on twitter.
Another former CM Narayan Rane too lashed out at Fadnavis saying that the law and order situation the state has deplored. Earlier in the day, opposition members shouted slogans on the stairs of Vidhan Bhawan demanding strict action in the case.
Ruckus continued in both the houses of the Legislature after which both the houses were adjourned. The issue is likely to be discussed in the House on Tuesday.
Also read:
Minor girl gangraped and murdered in Maharashtra's Ahemadnagar district
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By India Today Web Desk: Congress leader and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad today led the discussion in Rajya Sabha on the unrest in the Valley on the first day of Parliament's monsoon session.
"The situation in Kashmir is worse than what it was in 2008 and 2010," Azad said, wondering what went wrong this year that more than 40 people have been killed since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani earlier this month.
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"The prevailing situation in Jammu and Kashmir has many aspects - the internal situation, the role of the state and central government, and external forces," the Congress leader said.
Azad also attacked the government for what he called the "heavy hand" of the state in dealing with protests and asked why the "common people were dealt in the same way as militants are".
"Should locals be treated in the same way we treat militants? Should same bullets that are used on militants be used on innocent people of Jammu and Kashmir? We stand with the government in ending militancy, but we don't support this kind of treatment with the civilians," Azad said in Rajya Sabha.
JAITLEY'S RESPONSE
In response to Ghulam Nabi Azad, Rajya Sabha member Arun Jaitley said that the government formed in Jammu and Kashmir was dictated by election result and Congress did the same in the past. He said, "His alliance was not the real reason of disturbance in the valley or any TV show discussion caused disturbation," adding "Reason is that Pakistan never reconcile the idea of creation of Jammu and Kashmir."
He further said, "In Jammu and Kashmir, it is not a fight between BJP and Congress, but fight between the separatist and mainstream political parties."
He said, "It's not fight between BJP and Congress, but separatist and mainstream parties."
Kashmir under curfew
Meanwhile, curfew continued in all the ten districts of the Valley to curb the clashes in the aftermath of Wani's killing.
A ruling PDP MLA was injured in an attack by a stone pelting mob in Pulwama district. Newspapers failed to hit the stands for the third day following a controversial gag order issued by the state.
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By PTI: New Delhi, July 18 (PTI) The Press Council of India (PCI) chairman Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad has ordered registration of a complaint over alleged crackdown on media in the Kashmir Valley and sought a report from the state government on the issue within a week.
His direction came on a complaint by president of Jammu and Kashmir Press Association G H Kaloo on alleged "attack on press" in the restive state.
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"The Chairman took into consideration the communications made by Council members expressing their concern about state of affairs in Jammu and Kashmir and prima facie being satisfied sought reports within one week from the Chief Secretary, Secretary (Home) and Director General of Police," the PCI said in a statement.
The Editors Guild of India had yesterday condemned the Jammu and Kashmir government for "unwarranted muzzling" of media in the state and termed as "unfortunate" the attempts "to shoot the messenger".
The newspaper owners in violence-hit Kashmir have decided not to publish newspapers after authorities allegedly raided some media houses and seized their printed copies on Saturday.
Local newspapers in curfew-bound Kashmir failed to hit the stands for the third consecutive day today after the alleged "clampdown" on the media in the aftermath of widespread protests in the Valley following the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter with security forces.
No local daily -- English, Urdu or Kashmiri -- was available as the newspaper owners decided not to publish them after the "clampdown" by the government on Friday night. PTI MPB SK SK
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By India Today Web Desk: SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company, launched a space station docking port for astronauts today from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Photo: AP
Photo: AP
This is the second time that Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX is delivering a new-style docking port for NASA. This docking setup is required at the space station before Americans can fly there in crew capsules next year.
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Photo: AP Photo: AP
Photo: AP
The American aerospace manufacturer is also building astronaut-worthy versions of its Dragon cargo ships, and Boeing, which makes these docking ports, is working on a crew capsule called Starliner.
Photo: AP
Photo: AP
During the launch broadcast, the three hosts pulled off a Pokemon Go joke as the cartoon version of the company's Dragon capsule appeared on the screen.
(Inputs from AP)
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Qandeel Baloch was put to rest in her ancestral home today and her brother, who killed her to preserve her family honour, has been placed in three day custody.
By Indo-Asian News Service: Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch, who was strangled to death by her brother in the name of "family honour" two days ago, was laid to rest in a local graveyard at her ancestral village near Multan on Monday.
The funeral prayers of Qandeel were offered in the village Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan district on Sunday.
Meanwhile, a Duty Magistrate in Multan remanded her brother and confessed killer, Waseem, in police custody for three days.
Qandeels body was taken to her village, where a large number of people had gathered. Before the funeral, women relatives of Qandeel applied henna to her hands and feet as per local tradition. Her mother repeatedly kissed her hands. Her brothers and two married sisters were also present to perform the last rites. Talking to the media, Qandeels father Mohammad Azeem said he would pursue the case against Waseem. She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her,?? Dawn news online quoted Azeem as saying. His sons were unhappy over her achievements?? and turned against her even though she supported them, he said. The residents of the village condemned the killing of Qandeel, terming it a brutal act??. Waseem confessed to having killed Qandeel in the name of honour. He said that he had no regrets, a police official told the media at a press conference on Saturday. A woman in Multan, who lived in a house adjacent to Qandeels, told the media that the deceased had asked for the hand of her daughter for Waseem. It seems unbelievable that she has been killed by a brother for whom she was trying to arrange a marriage,?? she said.
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Also Read
Qandeel Baloch's brother: I gave her a tablet to subdue her, then strangled her
8 chilling confessions made by Qandeel Baloch's murderer brother
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By PTI: Bengaluru, Jul 18 (PTI) Grammy-winning Indian musician Ricky Kej has received the prestigious Excellence and Leadership award as a global humanitarian artist, from the United Nations General Assembly recently. "It was an absolute honor, and the greatest milestoneof my life to perform at the United Nations General Assembly,"Kej said immediately after his performance and acceptance ofthe prestigious award.
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Kej performed at the United Nations General Assembly Hall, as part of the opening of the first ever annual NOVUS Summit, at the special event held during the United Nations High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.
"Every single great leader across the globe has graced these hallowed halls, and all major historic decisions andtreaties have been initiated here.
"I am truly humbled that my music and activism found a place here, and it was a trulyemotional moment for me to hear my music echoing within thesewalls," he said.
Joining him at the venue were vocalist, performance artist, composer and humanitarian activist, Sussan Deyhim, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Premik Russel Tubbs and keyboardist, Lonnie Park.
Kej ended his performance by saying, "To end I want tostate the obvious ... Climate change is real ...Climatechange is human induced. Climate change is affecting us all... and our actions affect countries on the other side of theworld."
The summit served as a global platform to inspire innovators and humanitarians from around the world to come together to create plans and strategies that will have a positive impact on the world, and promote the UNs 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The event was witnessed by delegates, globalleaders, conservationists, activists andhumanitarians from various parts of the world and it was streamed live across the world on the web. PTI BDN RA ROH BN JCH KK
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By PTI: From Lalit K Jha
Cleveland, Jul 18 (PTI) The Republican National Convention would make a strong case to the American public against presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as to how her policies and that of President Barack Obama have made US unsafe, the Trump Campaign said today.
Speakers after speakers at the Cleveland Convention, "would talk about the failures of the Obama-Clinton administration and setting up the issues in each of the relevant blocks that were stressing tonight," Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort told reporters at a news conference.
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"Making America safe, has to pieces to it. It -- focuses on certainly the international peace that, you know, is the point of the campaign...the points the campaign is making relate to certainly the rise of terrorism, -- the dysfunctionality in the Middle East, a lack of leadership presented by the Obama and Clinton administration around the world and the consequences of that weak or failed leadership," Manafort said.
"We will be stressing, in the course of the week, an indictment of Hillary Clinton as the ultimate establishment candidate. In a year of change Donald Trump clearly represents the change candidate and our opposition is that Hillary Clinton not only is the establishment candidate, but shes the epitome of the establishment," Manafort said giving a preview of the convention.
"Her 25 years in public service going back to the 1990s all the problems that she is campaigning against are problems that came on her watch and with her involvement and we find it ironic that the things that she says are broken that she wants to fix are usually things that broke down during the last eight years during her term of foreign policy standpoint and during the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration," Manafort said.
He said the talking issues were of her character, of her failed leadership, of her personal issues whereby she has put personal interest above political interest or has used levers of power as secretary of state to advance interest of the Clinton Foundation or other certain donors of hers.
All this will be discussed during the course of the week "because all of them, we believe, relate to talking about how the system is not working," Manafort said.
Meanwhile the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee lashed out at Trump, saying that America deserves better than him.
"Americans deserve better than Trump and (Mike) Pences shared support of torture, Trumps ban on Muslims, his disregard for the threat of nuclear weapons, his secret plan to destroy ISIS that he wont tell anybody, his praise of dictators and his abandonment of our allies like NATO," said the DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a news conference. PTI LKJ ASK ASK
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By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 18 (PTI) Roche Diagnostics India has appointed Shravan Subramanyam as the Managing Director for its operations in India and the neighbouring markets such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan.
He succeeds Guido Sander, who has shifted to Singapore, to head high growth markets for Roche Diagnostics Asia Pacific business.
Commenting on the development, Sander said: "His wide experience covering pharmaceuticals and diagnostics in countries which are at different stages of healthcare evolution will be valuable for the growth plans of the Roche Diagnostics India and neighbouring markets business."
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"I look forward to being a part of this journey, where Roche Diagnostics globally renowned solutions are made available in India, to bring patients and their loved ones health and peace of mind," Subramanyam said.
Roche Diagnostics India started its India operations in January 2002 and provides diagnostic testing for early detection, evaluation and monitoring of diseases. PTI AKT BAL MKJ
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By PTI: From Yoshita Singh
New York, Jul 18 (PTI) Separatist Kashmiri groups have held demonstrations outside the premises of Indias Permanent Mission to the UN here protesting against the Indian forces in the Valley and demanding UN intervention in the Kashmir issue.
The Kashmir American Council led the three-hour protests yesterday attended by women and children as well.
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Holding banners and placards that read Indian Forces Out of Kashmir, No Democracy Without Self-Determination and Time to Resolve Kashmir Dispute Now, the protesters shouted slogans demanding "freedom" for Kashmir and its people.
The demonstrators also shouted slogans in support of Hizbul Mujahideen commanderBurhan Wani, who was killed this month by Indian forces in Kashmir.
"The US and other western countries must intervene to stop the human rights violations in Kashmir," Shaheen Khalid Butt, Chairman of the Kashmir Mission USA, said.
Ghulam Nabi Fai of World Kashmir Awareness said India and Pakistan must sit at the negotiating table "without any condition from any party" and keep "their horizon open" to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute.
Fai has served two years imprisonment in the US on the charges of working on behalf of Pakistans ISI.
The protesters, demonstrating a few yards away from the UN headquarters, also demanded intervention by the world body to settle the Kashmir issue. PTI YAS NSA
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A 25-year-old research student was attacked by members of ABVP in the campus of University of Hyderabad after he was mistaken to be a former Kashmiri student.
By India Today Web Desk: In a shocking incident, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) reportedly attacked a student of University of Hyderabad after they mistook him for a Kashmiri student.
Research student Anmol Singh (25) was attacked by a gang of nearly 25 people from ABVP, when he was on his was to his hostel. Singh was reportedly returning from a protest against alleged police atrocities in the Valley.
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"They punched me on my face and stomach. I along with my friends tried to escape, but the gang chased us and thrashed us," said Singh.
According to Singh, the ABVP members mistook him for Bilal a former student of the university who hailed from Kashmir. Singh said that the ABVP targeted him for his beard and skin colour.
SINGH MISTAKEN FOR FORMER KASHMIRI STUDENT
Sources said that Bilal had completed his PhD and returned to Kashmir few months ago. Bilal was reportedly vocal about the plight of the Valley and had also participated in several demonstrations.
According to sources, the security guards did not intervene when Singh was being attacked. One of the students claimed that the ABVP workers were furious and came shouting for Bilal.
Sources said that the attack did not stop, Singh was assaulted by another group of ABVP after he reached the hospital. The group left soon after other students intervened.
ABVP DENIED ALLEGATIONS
While Singh maintained that he was attacked repeatedly by the group, an ABVP leader reportedly denied the allegations saying that Singh and his friends had attacked the ABVP members.
Sources said that while Singh was part of a group of students who raised slogans supporting freedom for Kashmir, ABVP workers were raising slogans like 'Bharat Mata ki Jay'. Both the group had clashed in the recent past too.
Also read:
Hyderabad University erupts again: Students in custody for breaking through campus gates
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In the Facebook post, Montrell Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
By AP: Just days before he was shot and killed, a Baton Rouge police officer posted an emotional Facebook message saying he was "physically and emotionally" tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, a friend said Sunday.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," Montrell Jackson wrote.
VICTIMS
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Friends and family of Jackson, 32, were mourning the 10-year veteran of the police force that relatives described as a "gentle giant" and a "protector" after he and another two law enforcement officers were shot and killed Sunday morning by a gunman.
Sgt. Don Coppola Jr. of the Baton Rouge Police Department identified the other slain Baton Rouge police officer as 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been with the department less than a year. The third officer killed was 45-year-old sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, a 24-year veteran, spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said.
PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY TIRED
In the Facebook post, Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I've experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core," the posting read.
The message was posted July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge. That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the country's fraught history of race relations. Another black man was shot and killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend livestreaming the aftermath on Facebook. Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, killing five police officers.
Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
Erika Green told The Associated Press Sunday that she is friends with the family of Jackson. She said she saw the message on his Facebook page.
In the message, Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired.
"These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," Jackson wrote.
A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet but is no longer on Jackson's Facebook page.
JACKSON'S FAMILY
Jackson's family was mourning the officer Sunday afternoon.
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."
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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.
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.
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He called Jackson a hard-working police officer who often worked seven days a week.
ALSO READ:
Slain Louisiana police officers ranged from rookie to veterans
Ex-Marine who served in Iraq: All you need to know about Baton Rouge shooter
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More than 100 bold women stripped and posed naked with mirrors for a renowned photographer during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Find out why.
By India Today Web Desk: Over a 100 women joined a unique protest where they stripped and posed naked with mirrors on the eve of the Republican Convention starting on Monday to mock the GOP's presidential nominee-in-waiting Donald Trump.
The protest was staged as a response to a New York based photographer Spencer Tunick's call to blend art with politics. Tunick is known for taking startling photos of large groups of naked people in public places.
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More recently, nearly 3,000 people stripped naked for his project called 'Sea for Hull'. People were painted with four shades of blue body paint which represented water. He is also known for his massive human installations in Place des Arts in Montreal, Mexico City and Sydney Opera House.
This time he roped in just 100 women holding up mirrors for the project entitled "Everything She Says Means Everything". It took place a day before the biggest week in Cleveland history, the Republican National Convention.
The photo art featured women of all shapes, colors and sizes, holding up mirrors toward the arena.
The significance of mirrors
The official website of this unique project Tunick explains the motive behind the use of mirrors.
Photo:Spencertunickclevelend.com
He writes,"the photograph involved 100 nude women holding large mirror discs, reflecting the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of "Mother Nature" into and onto the convention center, cityscape and horizon of Cleveland. The philosophy of the artwork relates to the idea of the sacred feminine. By holding mirrors, we hope to suggest that women are a reflection and embodiment of nature, the sun, the sky and the land."
Acoording to AFP, although nudity is illegal in Cleveland, Spencer was able to pull off this audacious stunt because the installation took place in a private property and he went ahead with the project with the owner's consent.
Installation to oppose Donald Trump
Reeling off a list of groups Trump offended including Mexicans, Muslims, Jews democrats and even Republicans, Tunick told AFP that he 'felt compelled to take action and that this was one of his most politically inclined projects ever.
Photo:Spencertunickclevelend.com
Talking about his inclusive and interactive artwork Tuncik's website explains that "Republicans, Democrats and all other political parties were welcome to take part reflecting their anger through art against the hateful repressive rhetoric of many in the Republican Party towards women and minorities. Trump and Pence are giving many in America the belief that is OK to hate."
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The website also lauded the fact that over 1800 women signed for the event and this itself was "a testament to their bravery and desire for change, they did not know where they were going to pose when they signed up to be part of this art action, it could have been in the epicenter of the security zone, but they still wanted to participate."
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By PTI: Hyderabad, Jul 18 (PTI) SRI Capital, a Hyderabad and Philadelphia-based investment firm founded by serial entrepreneur Sashi Reddi, has announced that it invested a total of USD 2.3 million in three SaaS (Software as a Service) startups -- WorkApps, Yellowdig and Zuppler.
Reddi, Managing Partner of SRI Capital, would join the Boards of all three companies, it said in a statement.
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WorkApps is an enterprise workflow software, Yellowdig an innovative learning management software, while Zuppler is an online ordering platform for restaurants, it said.
SRI Capital now has a total of 15 SaaS startups in its portfolio. PTI RS NRB
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By PTI: crash
New Delhi, July 17 (PTI) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today 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. 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.
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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 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.
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. 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. PTI MPB SK SK
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Salman Khan says that there is a lot of pressure from his family to get married soon.
By India Today Web Desk: Salman Khan, who is rumoured to be in a relationship with Iulia Vantur, isn't too keen to tie the knot any time soon. In fact, Bollywood's most eligible bachelor says that he does not know when he will get married, but reveals that his mother and sisters are putting pressure on him to tie the knot soon.
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ALSO READ: Salman Khan and Iulia Vantur party all night to celebrate the success of Sultan
ALSO READ: Post Iftar party, Salman Khan takes Iulia Vantur out on a dinner date?
Ever since the rumours of Salman dating Iulia started doing the rounds, his wedding date has always been in the news so much that the Bajrangi Bhaijaan actor once said that he will tell his fans when he is getting married through Twitter.
When asked about his marriage date, which is rumoured to be November 18, the 50-year-old actor told PTI, "Ye 18th November kuch bees-pachees Novembers se chal raha hai...18th November hota hai ki nahi pata nahi kaunse saal may hota hai, but hoga. (This talk about marriage has been going on since the last 20-25 years. I dont know when it will take place, but it will happen)."
The Sultan star was speaking at the launch of Sania Mirza's autobiography "Ace Against Odds" in Mumbai.
Sania, replying to the actors comment, said, "It's okay, I think not many women are complaining that you are not getting married. It's fine."
Replying to this Salman said, "I know a few...Aapko nahi pata mujhpe kitna pressure aata hai (you don't what kind of pressure I face). By the way, I know a few means those are my mother and sisters."
Salman also said that November 18 is the wedding anniversary of his parents. When asked if it will be his wedding date as well, he said, "Agar woh date calendar mein ho toh. Pata chala woh 18th November koi nikaal diya. (Only if that date is there in the calendar. Or else somebody will remove November 18 from it)."
On the work front, his recently released film Sultan is all set to cross the Rs 250-crore mark. Directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, Sultan also stars Anushka Sharma.
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Chandigarh's Capitol Complex is now a World Heritage site, according to the World Heritage Committee's latest decision of including 12 new sites in the World Heritage list.
By Indo-Asian News Service: The World Heritage Committee on Sunday evening agreed to put 12 new sites on the World Heritage List before ending its 40th session in Turkey's Istanbul city.
Chandigarh's famed Capitol Complex was also added to the UNESCO's World Heritage list, an official said.
Chandigarh's home secretary, Anurag Aggarwal 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 success."
Chandigarh Capitol Complex. Picture courtesy: Twitter
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The session placed a total of 21 out of 27 nominations for this year on the prestigious list, Xinhua news agency reported.
Also read: 10 heritage destinations in India that could soon be on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites List
With the 21 newly added--12 cultural sites, six natural and three mixed ones--the heritage list has now 1,052 sites in 165 countries.
The state of conservation of 155 properties was examined as well during the session, with five in Libya making it to the List of World Heritage in Danger, along with one in Uzbekistan and another in Mali.
Meanwhile, one site in Georgia was removed from the list of endangered sites, while the site of Nan Madol, or the Ceremonial Centre of Eastern Micronesia, was simultaneously inscribed on the World Heritage List and on the list of World Heritage in Danger.
The 40th session started on July 10 and was cut short by four days due to the outbreak of a coup attempt in Turkey on Friday night.
Also read: IN PICS: 10 of the most beautiful heritage sites around the world
The 41st session is slated for July 2017 in Krakow, Poland.
The heritage committee was formed in 1977 to enforce the World Heritage Convention.
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During PM Modi's visit in June this year, the US government had returned more than 200 stolen cultural artefacts, some of which date back to nearly 2,000 years and are worth nearly $100 million. However, the government is now in a fix over where to keep them safe.
The process of sending these artefacts back to India kicked off last month when US Attorney General Loretta E Lynch formally announced the beginning of the process.
By Soudhriti Bhabani: India is welcoming back a bevy of priceless artefacts, but the BJP-led central government is in a quandary over where to put these long-lost national treasures amid massive security concerns.
A series of inter-ministerial meetings has failed to find an answer, even as scores of antiques, either stolen or illegally exported from the country, are being repatriated.
India is one of the principal targets for smugglers, who sell stolen antiques and other culturally important artefacts to art dealers and museums abroad.
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NO PLACE FOR THE PRIZED ARTEFACTS?
"Now the problem is if we get these antique idols back to India where will we keep them? We can't 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 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.
In the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the US government had returned to India over 200 stolen cultural artefacts, some dating back 2,000 years, worth nearly $100 million, when he had visited the country in June this year.
The PM had called the gesture a "great binding force in bilateral relationships" in order to restore India's cultural inheritance. Expressing his gratefulness to US President Barack Obama for returning these treasures, Modi had said that in the last two years various countries had endeavoured to return India's stolen cultural heritage.
HOW WE LOST THESE ARTEFACTS
Sources say 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 that 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.
HOW ARE WE GETTING THEM BACK
The process of sending these artefacts back to India kicked off last month following a ceremony of Repatriation of Cultural Property where US Attorney General Loretta E Lynch formally announced the beginning of the process.
The repatriation had been initiated by the efforts of the Ministry of Culture and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in New York. Consequent to these efforts, a team consisting of the officials of MoC and ASI also visited the city in the first week of June, 2016 and examined several objects along with Consul Trade of the CGI, New York.
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"Though the CGI is insisting on speeding up the process, the ministry is buying time to decide on the security issue," sources said.
Meanwhile, the first consignment of artefacts, illegally exported out of India, will soon be sent back. The team examined 25 antiquities and 64 hand drawings in the Toledo Museum of Art at Ohio, warehouse of the Department of Homeland Security, and CGI, New York.
"Out of these, 17 artefacts including 5 bronzes, 10 stone images, 1 figure and 1 tile in terracotta were found to be antiques," an MoC statement said. Among these, 8 artefacts have already been returned to India with PM Modi and the remaining would be repatriated soon.
Sources said the MoC, through the CGI, New York, is in constant touch with the Department of Homeland Security to retrieve other objects seized by them. "The Centre is making all-out efforts to bring the lost cultural property back to their place of origin," an official said.
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Also read:
Gharwapsi of gods, US to return stolen idols to Modi
Ganesh and his mother return home from US with Modi
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By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 18 (PTI) A US-developed weapon system that strikes the atmosphere with a focussed electromagnetic beam may cause global warming, the government today said and acknowledged that climate change is likely to reduce the yield of major crops like wheat and maize in India.
"The US has developed a type of weapon called High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme. HAARP strikes the upper atmosphere with a focussed and steerable electromagnetic beam," Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.
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"HAARP is an advanced model of a super powerful ionospheric heater which may cause the globe to warm and have global warming effect," he said.
Dave was replying to a question on whether the government is aware of HAARP, capable of effecting devastating impact on the worlds climate including that of India and resulting in destabilisation of agricultural and ecological systems.
He said a study conducted by Indian Council of Agricultural Research has projected the impact of climate change to be adverse in terms of reduction of yield of major crops including wheat, maize, mustard, potato and sorghum.
Recognising the adverse impact of climate change, the minister said that the government launched the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in June 2008 to deal with climate change-related issues.
NAPCC comprises eight missions in areas of solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, habitat, water, sustaining Himalayan ecosystems, forestry, agriculture and strategic knowledge of climate change.
It also addresses the issues relating to mitigation of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change on environment, forest, habitat, water resources and agriculture.
Dave said 32 states and UTs have also prepared a State Action Plan on Climate Change (SAPCC). PTI TDS ABH ZMN ABH
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By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 16 (PTI) In the backdrop of reports claiming some Keralites joining certain banned terrorist outfits abroad, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan today asked the Centre to offer more support and assistance for collection of intelligence in this regard.
Speaking during the 11th Inter-State Council meet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi here, Vijayan said the state government is handling the matter "legally with due sensitiveness".
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Among other issues, Vijayan also expressed his reservation over dismantling of Planning Commission, terming the move as "unfortunate" and insisted that the dispensation of the erstwhile body should be restored.
"Dispensation of Planning Commission should be restored so that even the remote areas too will figure in the comprehensive and planned development of the nation," he said.
Vijayan also sought a special scheme for the state to upgrade and modernise the state police intelligence by pointing out the activities of the "Left-wing extremist" in the northern districts bordering Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
During the Council meet, the Kerala CM demanded a discussion in the Standing Committee over the Punchhi Commission report which had recommended for an effective restructuring of Centre-State relations.
Kerala has also demanded grant to start Coastal Police Training School, Marine IR Battalion and a Counter Insurgency and Anti-terrorism school in the state considering internal security issues and the states strategic position.
Pinarayi Vijayan also met Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu in the evening and discussed various issues pertaining to the development of railways in the state and suggested floating a State-Railways joint venture to expedite the development of railways in Kerala.
The CM, who is accompanied by states Ports Minister Kadannapally Ramachandran, plans to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari tomorrow to discuss the issue of Centre issuing in-principle nod to Colachel Port in Tamil Nadu, nearly 30 km away from the proposed Vizhinjam Port project in state. PTI RRT RG TRK
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BSP leader Mayawati got into a war of words with union minister M Venkaiah Naidu after she accused the Centre for the rising incidents of atrocities against Dalits in the country.
By Indo-Asian News Service: Rajya Sabha today witnessed a verbal spat between Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati and Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu after the BSP leader blamed Centre for the rising incidents of atrocities against Dalits.
Mayawati raised the issue of beating up of four Dalit youth in public and parading them in Una town in Gujarat by cow protection vigilantes.
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"Since the BJP-led government has come to power (at the Centre), the Dalits are being exploited at different levels. There are several incidents, and this reflects the narrow and casteist mindset of this party towards these groups," said Maywati.
Naidu immediately objected and said, "you cannot take the party's name. You can raise the issue and that is the ideal practice."
Mayawati, however, did not shy away from naming the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which irked Naidu. The minister retorted while Mayawati was speaking, but his comments were not clearly audible.
BSP LEADER RAISED ISSUE OF ASSAULT ON DALIT YOUTHS IN GUJARAT
Mayawati said some "anti-social elements" caught the Dalit youth when they were removing the hide off a dead animal, they were stripped half-naked and beaten up with rods and sticks.
"The administration did not take action against the culprits and the police was a mute spectator," the BSP leader said.
Former Uttar Pradesh chief master asked the central government to instruct the Gujarat government to take action against the guilty. Soon after, as Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Hamid Ansari wanted to take up the Question Hour, BSP members trooped near his podium and started raising slogans against the government.
In the din, the House was adjourned for 10 minutes. Later, the House took up the Question Hour. According to reports, the youth beaten up in Una had been called by farmers to skin dead cattle. The incident came to light after a video of the atrocity went viral on the social media.
Also read:
Maharashtra: BJP MLA compares Dalits with pigs, courts controversy
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120 employees saved their one month's salaries to buy a brand new Tesla model S for their CEO. Find out why.
By India Today Web Desk: Heard about a rarest of the rare situation? Here is one: 120 employees of a company saved their salaries to gift their CEO his dream car because he gave them a generous appraisal.
Yes, they still make such humans.
In April 2015, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments- a Seattle-based credit card processing company, announced raise of the minimum wage to $70,000 a year. This he did by slashing his own salary from $1.1 million to $70,000- the minimum wage.
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The youngest CEO of Gravity Payments is said to have read a study showing that an extra income improves the happiness of people who earn less than about $75,000. "It's not about making money; it's about making a difference", Dan said in an interview.
Overwhelmed with his kind gesture, those 120 employees who got this great hike thanked their boss by gifting him something in return.
After saving their one month's salary, the 120 employees bought a brand new Tesla model S. The car happens to be Dan's dream car and its starting price is $70,000.
Dan took to Facebook express shock and happiness. A 24-year-old single mother apparently came up with this idea.
For some of the employees, their salaries was raised almost double after the CEO increased the minimum wage by standardising his salary.
However, Bloomberg reported that this unusual and generous move was made to dodge an accusation by his brother and co-founder Luas Price that he paid himself too much and charged personal expenses to a corporate card. Dan, reportedly, wanted to avoid a lawsuit filed by his brother who accused him of violating Lucas' rights.
But then, we would like to believe in there are good people in the world.
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By PTI: From K J M Varma
Beijing, Jul 18 (PTI) China will not stop construction on the islands in strategic South China Sea which was awarded to the Philippines by an international tribunal, a top Chinese admiral today said, dismissing the pressure from Washington.
"We will never stop our construction on the Nansha (Sparatly) Islands halfway. The Nansha Islands are Chinas inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful," commander of the Peoples Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli told his US counterpart Admiral John Richardson during their meeting here.
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A tribunal appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration acting on a petition from the Philippines quashed Chinas claim of historic rights on the South Chinas Sea last week and upheld Manilas claims over the islands.
China, which boycotted the tribunals proceedings, rejected the verdict questioning its legality.
Describing the security situation in waters around China as "complicated and sensitive", Wu said Richardsons visit will be beneficial for the two countries to strengthen communication, promote trust, resolve doubts and avoid misjudgments.
"We will never sacrifice our sovereignty and interests in the South China Sea," Wu was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
He stressed that it is Chinas "core interest" and concerns the foundation of the ruling Communist Partys governance, the countrys security and stability and the Chinese nations basic interests.
Wu said that China will not recede over territorial sovereignty or fear any military provocation, which the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with.
He stressed that "no matter what country or person applies pressure," China will push forward and complete island construction as planned.
Wu said China will never be caught off guard, and the number of its defence facilities is completely determined by the number of threats it faces.
He vowed that China will never give up its efforts to solve the South China Sea issue peacefully, despite "many negative factors at present," but warned that "any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect."
The Chinese admiral hoped that the two countries air and maritime forces will fully follow the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and the Rules of Behavior for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters to avoid strategic misjudgment or exchange of fire, and jointly ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.
Wu called on the two sides to promote strategic mutual trust, seek common ground, expand the scope of cooperation and create new momentum for China and the US to develop a new type of major-power relations between the two countries. PTI KJV ZH
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"I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We're going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don't have. We don't have the people over there," Trump explained.
By Press Trust of India: Republican presidential Donald Trump has said if elected he will "declare war" on the Islamic State, but would send "very few" US troops on the ground to combat the dreaded terror outfit.
"It is war. By the way, it is war," Trump told '60 Minute' of the CBS News in an interview.
"We have people that want to wipe us out. We're gonna declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS," he said in response to a question.
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"I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We're going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don't have. We don't have the people over there," he explained.
"We are going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. And we have to wipe out ISIS," he said, adding that he would send "very little" US troops on the ground.
Joining Trump in the interview his vice presidential running mate Mike Pence said this is the kind of leadership that is needed in the US.
"This is the kind of leadership that America needs and it begins with deciding to destroy the enemies of our freedom," he said.
Trump claimed the US under his administration would get rid of ISIS, big league.
"We are going to get rid of them fast. And we're going to use surrounding states. We're going to use NATO, probably. And we're going to declare war. It is war. When the World Trade Center comes tumbling down, with thousands of people being killed," he said.
When pointed out that Pence also voted for war in Iraq as did his Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump said the Indiana Governor is entitled to make mistake once in a while, but the former Secretary of State is not.
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By PTI: From Lalit K Jha
Cleveland (US), Jul 18 (PTI) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said if elected he will "declare war" on the Islamic State, but would send "very few" US troops on the ground to combat the dreaded terror outfit.
"It is war. By the way, it is war," Trump told 60 Minute of the CBS News in an interview.
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"We have people that want to wipe us out. Were gonna declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS," he said in response to a question.
"I am going to have very few troops on the ground. Were going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we dont have. We dont have the people over there," he explained.
"We are going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that arent doing what theyre supposed to be doing. And we have to wipe out ISIS," he said, adding that he would send "very little" US troops on the ground.
Joining Trump in the interview his vice presidential running mate Mike Pence said this is the kind of leadership that is needed in the US.
"This is the kind of leadership that America needs and it begins with deciding to destroy the enemies of our freedom," he said.
Trump claimed the US under his administration would get rid of ISIS, big league.
"We are going to get rid of them fast. And were going to use surrounding states. Were going to use NATO, probably. And were going to declare war. It is war. When the World Trade Center comes tumbling down, with thousands of people being killed," he said.
When pointed out that Pence also voted for war in Iraq as did his Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump said the Indiana Governor is entitled to make mistake once in a while, but the former Secretary of State is not. PTI LKJ NSA
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By Javed Anwer: It's no secret that Nokia is plotting a comeback into the phone market. Earlier newly-formed HMD global Oy, which took control of the Nokia brand, had said that it expected to launch the Android new phones by the end of this year. Now the buzz is that there are two Nokia phones coming and that both will have high-end hardware.
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It has been said that the new Nokia strategy would be to chase Apple's and Samsung's approach. The company will launch two phones -- one small with 5.2-inch screen and the other a bigger one with 5.5-inch screen. However, both phones are likely to have AMOLED screens with 1440p resolution. It is worth remembering that Nokia, when it was part of Microsoft, loved AMOLED screens and put them in high-end Lumia phones. The two phones will also have dust and waterproofbody and will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor.
The Nokia Android phones are likely to use Android Nougat with Nokia Launcher Z, which is available right now, running on top of the pure Android. It has also been speculated that the two phones will have superb camera performance -- and area where Nokia has always been fairly strong -- but the details of actual hardware are missing for now.
Also Read: Nokia announces return to phone business with Android phones, tablets
Although, Nokia still enjoys decent brand recognition, it may find the going tough because the phone market has changed considerable and the competition is so intense that even very good phones get lost in the crowd.
Also, Nokia is charting its comeback through a rather unusual route. The brand will be called Nokia but the company that will make and manage the phones is HMD global Oy, which recently bought assets related to Nokia's phone business from Microsoft. The HMD global Oy is a Finnish company and is mostly staffed by ex Nokia and Microsoft Mobile executives.
"HMD has been founded to provide a focused, independent home for a full range of Nokia-branded feature phones, smartphones and tablets. HMD's new smartphone and tablet portfolio will be based on Android, uniting one of the world's iconic mobile brands with the leading mobile operating system and app development community," the company had said in a statement in May this year.
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By India Today Web Desk: At its July 27 press conference in Beijing, Xiaomi will reportedly launch two new products. While one of them is said to be a phone - probably the Redmi Note 4 - the other is said to be a laptop - the company's first. Rumours that the company would launch the fourth-generation Redmi Note budget phablet on July 27 have been doing the rounds for quite some time now. Xiaomi was also expected to launch the Mi Note 2 at the scheduled event. Now, a third device has come into the light.
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Note that the company is likely to launch just two products on the said date. So, it's either going to be the Redmi Note 4 and the Xiaomi laptop - Mi Notebook - or the Redmi Note 4 and the Mi Note 2. Although, chances of the laptop coming up seem more, as the confirmation (sort of) comes directly from Xiaomi's director of new media via his Weibo account.
Xiaomi's first-ever laptop will reportedly come with Intel Atom processor and built out of aluminum. The laptop will further reportedly look like Apple's MacBook, only that it would be considerably cheaper. Xiaomi's laptop will reportedly be offered in two screen sizes: 12.5 and 13.3-inch.
Also Read: Xiaomi is launching a mystery phone on July 27
As for the new Xiaomi phone, 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.
There have also 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.
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The Office of the Prosecutor was singled out as the key decision-maker on behalf of the state, but, the report said, not only were penal authorities complicit in the abuse but so too were prison doctors.
The report reviewed a number of documented cases of abuse, illustrating not only the immediate cruelty of these human rights abuses but their irreversible impact on the long-term health of political prisoners.
Zeynab Jalalian, serving a life sentence in connection with her alleged membership of a Kurdish opposition group, is going blind because her skull was fractured when interrogators repeatedly hit her head against a wall. Intelligence officers have told her that she is denied an operation unless and until she makes a confession.
Omid Kokabee, a 33-year-old physicist serving a 10-year sentence for refusing to work on military projects in Iran, went unexamined for five years while his kidney cancer progressed. A photograph of him chained to his hospital bed in 2015 caused outrage on social media.
Afshin Sohrabzadeh, an Iranian Kurdish political prisoner serving a 25-year sentence, was also repeatedly denied the treatment needed for intestinal cancer, resulting in severe and frequent gastrointestinal bleeding.
Afif Naimi, one of seven imprisoned leaders of Irans Bahai community serving a 10-year prison term, suffers from a severe and potentially fatal blood clotting disorder which causes recurrent bleeding and loss of consciousness. Despite being deemed unfit for imprisonment by medical professionals several times, the Office of the Prosecutor has refused to release him.
Alireza Rasouli, who, like other political prisoners has gone on hunger strike in protest at the abuse, was, like others, sentenced to additional years after he was convicted of national security charges including spreading propaganda against the system. He suffers from a bone disease, which, untreated, is deteriorating, causing him severe pain and restricting his ability to move.
Scores of political prisoners affiliated to the main Iranian opposition group, the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK), have gone on hunger strike on many occasions in the past year in protest at inhumane conditions and abuse in the regimes prisons. There have also been continuous reports of the mistreatment of other political prisoners from ethnic and religious minorities, in particular of Kurdish and Sunni prisoners.
Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities to immediately stop denying prisoners access to adequate medical care, in line with their international obligations. The authorities must investigate the prosecution authorities and all other officials including medical staff who may be involved in deliberately denying medical care to prisoners.
About the deportation, the state-run ISNA news agency quoted Ashayeri as saying, Given that those present at this party were traveling illegally in Qazvin Province, following the necessary coordinations they were transferred to Asgarabad Prison in Varamin, and were then deported from the country.
This is frighteningly reminiscent of the recent floggings last May, when some 35 young men and women took part in a mixed-gender party after their graduation ceremony near Qazvin city.
A special court session was held after all the young men and women at the party were rounded up, and Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, a notorious mullah, stated, After we received information that a large number of men and women were mingling in a villa in the suburbs of Qazvin all the participants at the party were arrested. The following morning the detainees received 99 lashes by the so-called Morality Police.
The regimes prosecutor claimed that the judiciary would not tolerate the actions of law-breakers who use excuses such as freedom and having fun in birthday parties and graduation ceremonies.
She called the work done by the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), and its President-elect, Maryam Rajavi increasingly important in the face of violent extremism and Irans oppressive regime. You stand for gender equality, Mrs. Rajavi, against a misogynist regime. You have suffered for that.
Townsend said she was proud to stand with the women of the movement, as well as the women of Camp Liberty. She cited the recent rise of horrific acid attacks meant to intimidate and silence women, and said, I am proud to be your voice and I stand with you.
She concluded, You here today, those in Camp Liberty and in Ashraf before them, you are the future of Iran. You are the voice of Iran. Tehran hears you today and the world.
Camp Liberty houses members of the main Iranian opposition group Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK) in Iraq.
Rajavi said: The spasms of violence in Orlando, Istanbul, Bangladesh and, most recently, Saudi Arabia, are the deliberate outcomes of a frightening and aggressive world outlook that offers a twisted image of Islam. Its foot soldiers strip Quranic verses and the traditions of the Prophet of all context in a vainand illegitimateattempt to justify murder, conquest and subjugation.
She cites the Quran texts which implore people to remove their neighbours chains, love one another and considers all human beings part of the same family.
She said: What is essential in relations among human beings is not retribution, tyranny and exploitation, but freedom, compassion and unity. Sadly, oppressive rulers and forces have interpreted Quranic verses over time in accordance with the most reactionary schools of thought. In the course of this conflict, two diametrically opposed versions of Islam have emerged. One is based on tyranny. The other is based on freedom.
She said that the mullahs regime in Iran, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Boko Haram and Daesh all espouse the same oppressive interpretation of Islam, corrupting the term Jihad for their own brutal means.
Rajavi said: The meaning of Jihad in the Quran is to rise up against injustice, something that has even been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Quran gives permission for jihad only to those who face injustices, are being murdered or forcibly exiled from their country. Ironically, Muslims who oppose the rule of clerics or caliphs, as well as non-Muslims who refuse to surrender to them, are the primary targets of this falsely labelled jihad.
She criticises the Regimes unequal treatment of women; depriving them of their rights, barring them from leadership and promoting violence against them despite Islams role in the liberty and freedom of women.
These brutal groups attempt to discredit and malign humanitarian principles in a battle for ultimate power. She cites that before he became the leader of Iran, Khomeini wrote in his book, The Islamic State, that mass killings were permissible to maintain the state and to uproot corrupt races.
Rajavi said: It brings me deep sorrow that extremists of all stripes portray themselves as defenders of Islamic and moral standards. In order to implement unjustified violence, which they falsely describe as Islamic punishments, they have amputated limbs, gouged out eyes and stoned women to death with indescribable barbarity. No one has trampled upon Islamic law more than this bunch.
The true followers of Islam are those standing up against these lies; like the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the main component of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), who have worked hard for over 50 years to promote freedom, justice, equality and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities and other matters.
She called for Muslims across the world to come together at the end of Ramadan to reject religious conflicts and work to expose the real enemies of world peace.
She said: We must declare that the struggle is not between Shiites and Sunnis, or Muslims and Christians, or the people and culture of the Middle East against the people and culture of the West. Rather, the main struggle is between tyranny and extremism on the one hand, and democracy and freedom on the other.
CHARLESTON (JG-TC) -- A presentation scheduled to take place at Fox Ridge State Park on Wednesday will focus on the benefits of grassland vegetation for nesting birds.
A news release said the presentation is set for 6 p.m. in the park's White Pines Pavilion. Matt Kneitel, a graduate student in biology, will conduct the presentation.
Kneitel will explain how grasslands are important ecosystems and home to many birds. His research examined what types of vegetation are most beneficial and how nest heights affect birds' vulnerablity to predators, according to the release.
There is no charge to attend the presentation. Fox Ridge State Park is located on Illinois Route 130 south of Charleston and signs will direct visitors to the White Pines Pavilion.
At the end of a weeklong trial, a federal jury Monday found a California man guilty of conspiracy to launder more than $140,000 in drug money and to distribute meth in Lincoln in 2011.
But the jury found Sergio Valencia Sr., of Santa Ana, not guilty of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
He is set for sentencing on the drug and money laundering charges in October.
In a federal indictment unsealed last year, the U.S. Attorney's Office accused Valencia and Marisela Pescador of funneling more than $141,000 received in exchange for delivering methamphetamine to Lincoln through banks in Nebraska and California between April 2011 and September 2011.
They alleged drug couriers brought methamphetamine to Lincoln and deposited the proceeds in Wells Fargo bank accounts, making nearly three dozen deposits of $5,000 or less.
Then, the couriers contacted Valencia and Pescador, who withdrew the cash in California.
In an opening statement July 11, defense attorney Carlos Monzon called Valencia a scapegoat, chosen by two other men trying to get out of federal prison earlier by giving the government information.
He said he was representing an innocent man.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Fullerton called witnesses who said Valencia paid them to take drugs from California to Lincoln.
The jury got the case Friday afternoon and went home without a verdict at 6:20 p.m. Jurors returned Monday and returned to the courtroom with a verdict shortly after noon.
Pescador is set for sentencing later this month for conspiracy to money launder. She pleaded guilty.
Several drivers and a utility worker told police a stop light wasn't working prior to a four-car pileup at 70th Street and Old Cheney Road that sent four people to the hospital Thursday, according to an accident report.
Lincoln Police didn't ticket any of the drivers in connection with the wreck, which happened around 2:35 p.m.
A Lincoln Electric System worker told police that after he flipped a switch in an electrical box near the intersections southeast corner someone said the stop lights went out.
That occurred about 30 seconds before he heard a collision, according to the accident report.
Two of the drivers involved had stopped at the intersection because the lights were out and were hit by two other vehicles, police said in the report.
When Lincoln Fire and Rescue crews arrived, Battalion Chief Leo Benes said one vehicle was on top of another with one person stuck in the vehicle on top, unable to get out on his own.
All four drivers were transported to Bryan West Campus for evaluation of injuries, but none of their injuries were life-threatening, Benes said.
The power outage associated with the traffic signals also turned out the lights for 1,144 LES customers in the area.
An LES spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment.
A 52-year-old California woman got 18 days in jail and a $2,000 fine for getting caught with nearly 227 pounds of marijuana in a traffic stop on Interstate 80 in Seward County last year.
Debbie Tresner, of Del Paso Heights, California, already has served the jail time.
She pleaded guilty to attempted possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Seward County District Judge James Stecker sentenced her Monday.
On April 4, 2015, a Nebraska State Patrol trooper stopped her around 12:30 p.m. driving an eastbound 2014 Chrysler minivan near the Seward exit for following too closely and failure to signal and smelled a strong odor of marijuana.
A search turned up 226.6 pounds of marijuana in nine duffel bags in the cargo area.
The patrol also stopped a black Chevy Suburban, which had been traveling with the minivan. Between both vehicles, troopers arrested six people.
In February, Stecker sentenced Tresner's passenger, 62-year-old Betty Jane Smith of Sacramento, to one to two years in prison for attempted possession with intent to distribute and no tax stamp. She pleaded no contest and was released in April.
Of those in the SUV, Pedro Maximiliano Alaniz, 33, San Francisco; and Mariano Alaniz, 39, Novato, California, both are awaiting trial for aiding and abetting possession with intent to distribute and no tax stamp.
The prosecutor dismissed aiding and abetting charges filed against Zeev W. Malkin, 29, of San Jose, California. Another man never was charged.
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?
OMAHA -- Late Monday morning, little girls ran through the CenturyLink Center Omaha wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with a trio of one-syllable words: Strong Smart Bold.
The strong, smart, bold girl they have come to hear isnt yet on stage.
It has been nearly four years since Malala Yousafzai, now 19, survived being shot by the Taliban on her way home from school.
Two years since the girl born in the Swat Valley of Pakistan and educated at the school founded by her father became the worlds youngest Nobel laureate.
A girl who blogged about the Talibans repression of girls and women under a pseudonym and won Pakistans first National Youth Peace Prize when she was 14.
And became a target.
After the bullet pierced her left eye socket on Oct. 9, 2012, and she spent months recovering in the United Kingdom, she wrote a 315-page autobiography that began with a simple, two-sentence dedication: To all the girls who have faced injustice and then been silenced. Together we will be heard.
On Monday, she was heard by 3,000 guests, sitting at round tables of 10 with centerpieces of petunias and impatiens, lunching on grilled chicken salad and red velvet cake.
Security was tight; police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs explained the Girls Inc. speaker is still under threat from the Taliban.
The young woman who started the Malala Fund after being attacked was accompanied to Omaha by her father and was not made available for interviews before or after her short speech.
But the star of the fundraiser shared the spotlight with the girls in red T-shirts, who recited speeches, talking about the opportunities Girls Inc. has given them. They talked about camp and Legos and math and engineering and trips to monuments and museums and economic independence.
Yousafzai became the third Nobel laureate to speak at the Girls Inc. annual fundraiser, after Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Barack Obama, then a senator.
Billie Jean King addressed the luncheon last year and before her Chelsea Clinton, Michelle Obama and Madeleine Albright.
Malala has emerged as one of our most eloquent champions for girls and women, said Girls Inc. executive director Roberta Wilhelm. Her insistence on the equal right of girls and women to an education is an inspirational story of courage and resilience.
Yousafzai stood on stage wearing a bright pink hijab and spoke briefly about the plight of girls worldwide -- married off as early as age 11, pregnant by 14, confined to refugee camps without opportunity for schooling, poverty and lack of opportunity sometimes driving them to extremism.
Then she sat for a Q&A with Wilhelm and three teenaged Girls Club members.
Her observations and wise words:
* Always take challenges, though you might not always win. Be confident. Believe you have the right to learn.
* In Pakistan, a majority of women do not have the right to go to school or to work. Things are better in the cities, but a young female social media star was recently killed by her brother for her posts challenging womens roles. Because she spoke up for freedom.
* Her overall campaign is for every girl to get 12 years of education. (Yousafzai started the nonprofit Malala Fund in 2013 to help empower girls and provide educational funding.)
* She is grateful to be in a position of being a voice for young girls and a voice for women, speaking out for education.
* Her (two) younger brothers can be annoying: Just because you won the Nobel Prize doesnt mean you know everything.
* On leaving Pakistan after the assassination attempt: My goal is to return. Thats where I started my journey.
* Men and women are not equal. No, no, no, women are even more important than men.
* She is helping teach her mother, who was denied an education and recently returned to school. She wants to have a say.
* Girls need to believe in themselves. Challenge yourself so you can have the courage and strength to go forward.
After the questions, Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert presented Yousafzai with a key to the city and the stage filled with girls in red serenading their guest.
A chorus of Strong Smart Bold Malalas in training.
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.
Nebraska taxpayers are shelling out a lot of money to a national company called Maximus to certify workers who help older and disabled people with meals, bathing and similar tasks.
Things arent going well. Providers are not getting paid on time. Delays in getting applications and certification are too common.
Maximus needs to get the problems solved. The Gov. Pete Ricketts administration might need to crack the whip.
After all, in most cases the workers are people getting paid $9 to $12 an hour. Few have a hefty cushion of savings in the bank to tide them over until a paycheck finally arrives.
The Journal Stars JoAnne Young told of the predicament that Dawn Reed is in as a result of the payment problems.
Reed said she finds it fulfilling to work with Medicaid clients so they can stay in their homes and have a degree of independence. One has dementia. Another needs help with a catheter. Reed helps clients bathe, dress, prepare meals and with other tasks.
Shes been doing such work for six years. Now the paychecks arrive sporadically.
And who can pay their bills like that? No one, Reed said.
And she has a word of advice for the elected officials who are supposed to make good use of taxpayer dollars.
If you lose us, the state is going to have to start putting people in nursing homes, she said.
That, of course, would be more expensive.
To be sure, Maximus and state government are wrestling with some complexities foisted on them by the federal Labor Department. A new overtime rule for in-home care providers took effect in October.
And the state implemented a new provider enrollment system that went into effect in December.
Calder Lynch, Medicaid division director for the state, said that improvements are being made. He said the state is now caught up on caught up on retroactive overtime payments.
He said that software updates have been installed and another is slated in August to improve processing times, which now averages about 30 days.
And Calder seems to grasp the difficulties created for providers and the long-term problems that delayed paychecks create. We know that without them, we would be really challenged to care for those we that we have responsibility for, in their homes and in their communities, which is our goal, he said.
In theory handing over duties to a private company like Maximus is supposed to mean greater efficiency and less cost to taxpayers. But elected officials cant simply have blind faith in theory. They need to make sure taxpayers, providers and clients are getting the good service and results they deserve from Maximus.
OMAHA Families of refugees from Syria have begun settling in Nebraska over the past two months.
Nearly 50 Syrian refugees have quietly moved into Nebraska with the help of relief agencies. Just last month more than 2,400 Syrian refugees arrived in the United States.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts continues to question whether federal authorities are doing enough to check the backgrounds of refugees and find potential terrorists, but he acknowledges that he has no power to stop their arrival.
"I urge the president to reconsider and to take common-sense steps to protect the security and well-being of the American people and their families," Ricketts said.
Federal officials have defended the security procedures they are using as robust and thorough.
The local agencies helping settle Syrian refugees say they are treating these people just as they have hundreds of other refugees they help each year.
"We're entrusted to protect their privacy and safety and help them get a good start," said Ann Marie Kudlacz of the Refugee Empowerment Center, one of two local agencies settling the Nebraska Syrians. "We didn't want too much attention."
The refugees that arrived recently are still adjusting to Nebraska. Faedah Karbouj said she is grateful for the opportunity her family has now.
"Thank you, America, especially Omaha, Nebraska. They are good, friendly people," Karbouj said.
The long journey for Fatima al-Sebaie and her family began five years ago in Homs, a midsize city in central Syria. She and her husband and three children arrived in Omaha last week with hopes of reclaiming the life they enjoyed before Syria's civil war.
"We have been through tough times, but we are not going to let this affect our lives and our kids," she said through an interpreter.
The agencies helping the refugees have had strong support from faith groups in the community.
"These families are coming from a war-torn country and have been through many difficult situations," said Todd Reckling of Lutheran Family Services. "We are happy to help them with a safe environment and services to help them get settled here."
Zac Cepure, son of Paul and Marche Cepure of Lincoln, was honored June 26 at an Eagle Scout ceremony at Southwood Lutheran Church. He earned his Eagle Rank award Dec. 17, 2015.
Zac, 17, is a senior-to-be at Lincoln Southeast High School and a member of Boy Scout Troop 15, which meets at Southwood Lutheran Church and is led by Scoutmaster Chris Cook.
He earned 34 merit badges en route to earning Scoutings highest honor. He attended summer camps at Camp Cornhusker in Humboldt, Neb., Ben Delatour in Colorado, Many Points in Minnesota, and Rocky Mountain High Adventure Base in Colorado.
He began his Scouting career as a Tiger Cub in first grade and continued to cross over with his Arrow of Light into Boy Scouts. He was a Cub Scout with Pack 15.
His community service project involved organizing and leading volunteers in painting the Germans from Russia Museum/Headquarters Building at Sixth and D streets in Lincoln.
He joins his dad and his brother Nick in attaining the Eagle Scout rank. He continues to earn merit badges and Eagle Palms in his quest to continuing contributing to his community and school.
This column started when I read in the Lincoln Journal Star of the death at age 87 of Elie Wiesel (pronounced eh-lee-vee-ZEL). It thought I had an autographed copy of his classic book, NIGHT. I do have a little paperback copy, but it is not signed. Wiesel was a prolific writer and a much sought-after speaker. I love books. They have educated me and enriched my life.
Writers have differing goals. They write novels, poetry, compile references, tell where to find places, biographies, how-to-do things, etc. Dont forget the fantastic photographs by Joel Sartore and Michael Forsberg and other wildlife and nature cameramen and women.
Our dog Friskie is lying nearby in my still-cluttered den. Its cool in here and as I write the temperature outdoors is 93. Were both comfortable.
While looking among a stack of books for which there is not room on the shelves, I found two very old ones. Here is one that has this long title, The Art of Writing & Speaking The ENGLISH LANGUAGE. It was published by Funk & Wagnalls Company in 1905. The author was Sherwin Cody. The other bears the title THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY and was published in 1898 by D.Appleton and Company. The author was Joseph Jacobs. Surely you wanted to know that stuff. Friskie couldn't care less.
Autographed books
To my great surprise, I found in my computer a list of autographed books in my library. They number between 40 and 50. Several are signed by persons well-known to Nebraskans. Because you were about to ask, here are names you may know:
Paul Johnsgard, Ted Kooser, Paul Olson, Jim McKee, Ron Hull, Jack Botts, Betty Stevens, Lilya Wagner, Roger Welsch, Nancy Savery, Mary Jane Nielsen, Everett Dick, Bob Kerrey, Clarice Orr, Ted Sorensen, Art Linkletter, Gene Budig, Don Bryant, R. Neale Copple, Peggy Kelly, Mary Pipher, Bob Nelson, Marianne Means, Anthony Lewis, David Gergen, Beth Davis, Forrest M. Stith, Jim Moore, David McCullough, Roger Welsch, Paul Fell, Dan Sullivan, Leonard Pitts Jr., Loren B. Belker, Bryan L. Jones, Donald Clifton, Harold Hamil and Dorcas Cavett. Several books in my library are by living writers and are begging for autographs.
Tribute to Wiesel
A few years ago some students at Lincoln Southwest High School not only toured the Holocaust Museum, but also were privileged to hear Elie Wiesel speak. That would have been a memorable experience.
President Barack Obama said of Wiesel: As a writer, a speaker, an activist, and a thinker, he was one of those people who changed the world more as a citizen of the world than those who hold office or traditional positions of power. His power and his example urge us to be better.
Wiesels wife said: He fought for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and he fought for Israel. He waged countless battles for innocent victims regardless of ethnicity or creed.
His tools were words and he used them wisely in speech and in books, at least 36 that he authored.
What a wonderful world we would have if humans would cease killing each other.
We're counting down the days until the University of Wisconsin kicks off its 2016 season at Lambeau Field against LSU on Sept. 3.
RACINE Being a stranger in a strange land can be daunting, even scary.
Being an undocumented resident in an alien country can be downright terrifying.
I believe almost everyone who is here wants to be here legally, said Annabell Bustillos, a member of the Racine Interfaith Coalitions immigration task force. No one wants to live in fear.
For undocumented residents of Racine County, now there is help to alleviate those fears: an attorney who specializes in immigration issues will be in Racine once a week.
Barbara Graham, director of immigration legal services for Catholic Charities in Milwaukee, will be in Racine every Tuesday at the Catholic Charities office, 800 Wisconsin Ave.
Graham appeared at Cristo Rey Hall at St. Patricks Catholic Church, 1111 Douglas Ave., on Sunday afternoon to answer questions and address concerns from interested residents.
The forum, called Know Your Rights, was sponsored by the Racine Interfaith Coalitions immigration task force.
Graham spoke in smooth, unfaltering Spanish, trying to answer queries as best she could.
Each persons case is different, explained Sister Joyce Quintana, a Racine Dominican nun who has been on the task force for four years. Everyone has a different situation and different questions.
Graham is one of five attorneys in the Milwaukee office and probably the most knowledgeable about immigration issues, said Don Mueller, a St. Patricks parish member.
In talking to our parish members and others in the community we found one of our biggest needs here was to get an attorney in Racine, Mueller said. Barbara will help people get straight answers.
Many undocumented Racine residents are hesitant and afraid to drive to Milwaukee to see an attorney without proper identification, Mueller said.
With the number of presumed undocumented people in Racine County, the program could easily expand into five days a week, Mueller said.
Interested individuals must schedule an appointment by calling the Milwaukee office, Mueller said. The number is 414-643-8570.
The St. Vincent de Paul Society Our Lady of Guadalupe Conference, which consists of the St. Patrick, St. Richard and St. Joseph parishes, is working to fund the program, Mueller said.
Graham charges clients on a sliding scale, usually based on a clients income and ability to pay. She also will help keep residents away from immigration scams people who claim they can help immigrants become legal then take their money and providing nothing, Mueller said.
Legal representation is key for immigrants seeking to endure the sometimes-arduous path to become citizens, said Bustillos, who works as a bilingual advocate for Lutheran Social Service Inc. sexual assault services.
It can be very difficult to find immigration lawyers, said Bustillos, whose mother and father came from Mexico and became citizens in the 1980s. Some cases have lasted 16 or 17 years. Many people are in that limbo of being in the process.
Mexicans have always crossed the border to work in America, said Quintana, who has worked with immigrants since 1999. Many undocumented residents came here to visit relatives and simply never left, she said.
The real influx came after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2005, she said. Millions of young males from Mexican and Central American countries streamed into the United States looking for jobs, she said.
They took the risk of coming here to find work that in many cases could pay them as much in one day than they could in one week or even one month in Mexico, Quintana said.
MOUNT PLEASANT A Kenosha man who reportedly tried to steal a vacuum from Wal-Mart in January was in court Monday to face charges after he had a warrant out for his arrest, according to court records.
Anthony Jett, 35, of the 6200 block of 73rd Street, reportedly went into Wal-Mart, 3049 S. Oakes Road, with a small female child in a stroller on Jan. 12, according to the criminal complaint.
Jett allegedly placed a Dyson V6 Slim handheld vacuum cleaner into the back of the stroller and passed the checkout lines. At the door, Jett was stopped by the greeter who asked him about the vacuum. Jett then gave the vacuum to the greeter and then left the Wal-Mart, the complaint said.
The value of the vacuum was $279, according to the complaint.
The officer investigating the case was informed that the Vernon Hills Police Department in Lake County, Ill., had a suspect who was doing the same type of retail thefts. After comparing a photo from the Mount Pleasant Wal-Mart theft, Jett was identified as the suspect in the Illinois case.
According to the complaint, Jett also has similar cases in Kenosha County, where it is alleged that he conducted similar activities to what occurred in Mount Pleasant.
In Racine County, Jett is facing one felony count of bail jumping and two misdemeanor counts for bail jumping and retail theft. He was in custody as of Monday night at the Racine County Jail, jail records indicate. Jett has been assigned a preliminary hearing on Aug. 4 in Racine County Circuit Court, court records indicate.
RACINE Judy Hart spent the better part of two days this month away from her room at the Riverside Inn while hotel employees sprayed and re-sprayed her room for bedbugs.
When Hart, who has lived at the Riverside since 2009 and deals with chronic lung problems, woke up on Friday morning, she had fresh bites from the continued presence of bugs in her room.
"They did not lift up the box spring, the bed, none of that was lifted up," said Hart, 54, who is disabled. "It wasn't moved, you could tell. They're too lazy to do that much."
Hart's accusations come after years of frustration with the Riverside management team, headed by owner Sarmad "Sam" Naimi, especially in regard to the conditions of her room. She spent time in the emergency room two years ago because of mildew exposure in her room and is still paying off the hospital bill.
Hart claims that her struggles and frustration with Riverside are not unique, and Racine City Health Department records seem to support her claim. Since the start of 2013, the Health Department has conducted 22 inspections at Riverside, just four of which are classified as routine, annual inspections every lodging business receives.
"They have a high volume of individuals that circulate through the facility," said Dottie-Kay Bowersox, Racine's public health administrator. "With that number of rooms, that age of the building, you would assume that the Health Department would have some interactions."
Nearly half of the inspections since the start of 2013 have been complaint-driven, according to records. The complaints have varied from bedbugs to peeling walls to the hotel selling food without a license out of its lobby, something Riverside has been reprimanded or fined for three separate times since 2013.
"At any point during the course of the year, an individual that is participating in their services can call with a complaint," Bowersox said. "Depending on whether its applicable for the Health Department, we would go out there and interact with the owner or the manager and either confirm or deny the complaint."
The remaining eight inspections have been follow-up or re-inspections based on the roughly 100 issues reported from the four routine inspections since 2013. Three of those four inspections required multiple follow-up inspections to correct all of the problems reported, and less than two weeks after the other one, the most recent one in January 2016, a complaint yielded 21 new violations.
The first follow-up inspection costs a business $220 if not all the problems have been corrected and each subsequently failed inspection costs $240, according to Bowersox. She said the most significant issue from Riverside's January inspection was leaky roofs.
"There was a variety of issues and the latest is the roof," she said. "They have several rooms that have to be maintained vacant because of roofing issues, which they are remediating at this point."
Concern over Riverside is widespread
The Health Department isn't alone in its problematic dealings with Riverside.
Mayor John Dickert said his office has been keeping a "very close eye" on Riverside due to the number of violations the hotel has accrued.
"The owners of the property have to start playing by the rules and playing by the ordinances and if they dont, theyll be penalized accordingly," he said.
Sixth District Alderman Sandy Weidner, who reprsents Riverside's neighborhood, says she hasn't received calls from residents of the hotel, but is frequently contacted by neighbors.
"I cannot imagine anyone living there long-term," she said. "Ive had lots of calls over the years, complaints involving drug dealing, prostitution and the condition of the property there."
Police also handle a significant amount of calls from the hotel, according to Racine Police Deputy Chief Al Days. Among those was a March 29, 2015, stabbing incident. Journal Times archives show 104 entries when the terms "Riverside Inn" and "police" are entered. Among those reports were cases involving drugs and prostitution.
The Health Department's file included a police report from 2013 in which a person staying at the hotel overnight quarreled with management over finding bugs in his bed.
The conflict was resolved by officers and the man received his money back and left, but not before "the desk person got in his face," according to the police report. That behavior fits Hart's depiction of Riverside management.
"If you shut your mouth, theyll let you live with them," Hart said.
Hart is attempting to leave the place she's called home for seven years as soon as possible. She has relatives in the area, but fears staying with them because she may unintentionally bring the bedbugs with her.
In the meantime, Hart hopes her stand will help resolve Riverside's problems.
"This place has been doing so much wrong to people for so long and I've sat back and watched it," she said. "It has to be handled right."
A request for comment from Riverside Inn management was not returned.
CLEVELAND After a successful effort to prevent him from winning the state's primary election, Wisconsin Republicans are uniting behind Donald Trump, if only because he's not Hillary Clinton.
"I think it's happening," said Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, speaking to reporters Monday after a Wisconsin delegation breakfast to kick off the GOP national convention. "Ive spoken to a lot of people just in the last day and a half, and everybodys kind of moving in that direction."
Party members are starting to see the inevitability of Trump's nomination, Fitzgerald said, and that allows them to focus on coming together on down-ticket races.
Fitzgerald was one of the first party leaders in the state to publicly support Trump after it became clear the real estate mogul would likely earn the GOP nomination. He said he followed the lead of Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus as he called for others to back Trump.
Last month, he reiterated the need for Republicans to get on board for the sake of other races on the ballot in November.
This week in Cleveland will be an important one, Fitzgerald said, because it will allow candidates up and down the ballot to coalesce around the same message.
But while Fitzgerald has come around to the prospect of a Trump candidacy, his counterpart in the Assembly hasn't gotten there yet.
"I have not been an on-the-board 'Trump Train' supporter like my colleague Sen. Fitzgerald," said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester. "I want to actually hear what he has to say."
Vos said both he and his constituents want to hear more specifics from Trump, and that's something he expects will happen this week.
In the meantime, Vos said, Trump's vice presidential choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence whom he described as an "articulate, reform-minded conservative" makes him "optimistic."
While Fitzgerald said state Republicans need to rally around Trump to win other races on the ballot, Vos said he's seen some voters start to draw a line between Trump and the Republican Party, and he's confident about the prospects of Republican candidates in some of the state's most competitive districts.
Both party leaders represent areas whose congressional districts supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary. Things are different in the northwestern part of the state, where Trump carried the 3rd and 7th congressional districts, party activists said.
"Hillary Clinton is such a terrible candidate it makes it very easy to unify behind the need to defeat her," said 3rd District GOP chairman Brian Westrate.
Westrate said it would take a "perfect storm" for Trump to win Wisconsin in the general election, but said he thinks it's possible.
"Wisconsin has traditionally been thought of as a blue state but if you look at the last six years, its hard to argue now that its not at least purple," he said.
Fitzgerald said he's heard from Trump supporters in his district, and the overwhelming sentiment among them is a desire to "shake up D.C."
Trump performed so well in the 3rd and 7th districts represented in Congress by Democratic Rep. Ron Kind and Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, respectively because voters there are "middle class, salt-of-the-earth Wisconsinites," Westrate said.
"And we've lost a lot of manufacturing jobs and people have really been hit hard," added 7th District GOP chairman Jim Miller. "Trumps message really resonates with working people."
It could also resonate with people who just don't want to see a Clinton presidency.
"Im already halfway there," Vos said of his support for Trump, "because I am definitely not for Hillary Clinton, and once you have only two choices the choice really is pretty clear between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton."
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Ways to be successful at your new job
You just got a shiny new job, at a great company. Congrats! Your first day at a new job can either be the first day of the rest of your life or the first of a series of endless Groundhog Dayexperiences
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Yes, they will make the city more inviting
Maybe ... does it really matter?
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No, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars
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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.
HUNTERTOWN Don Hoffman doesnt eat a chicken at a restaurant.
I remember how chicken used to taste. Today, it taste like cardboard, he said.
And the chicken you buy in the stores?
It is just awful. Its not what I grew up on and prefer, he said.
Don and his brother, Ben, are co-owners of Hoffman Certified Organics, which operates on their family farm at 2606 Chapman Road in Huntertown. Their company is the first and only 100 percent USDA certified organic pasture-raised poultry farm in Indiana, specializing in pasture raised chickens.
Our motto is that we are going to raise our chickens to taste like it used to taste back in the day when they farm-raised chickens, Don Hoffman said. Today, we marinate it or we brine it. You shouldnt have to.
Added brother Ben, There is a big movement in knowing your farmer and the farm to fork atmosphere. We decided to go organic because we saw a need for it in our area. It is very difficult to find an organic, pasture raised bird. There is a fine line between what is organic and what is pasture-raised organic. The flavor is in the chicken. That is the difference between a confined operation and a place like ours, where the birds can go out when they want, come in when they want and eat what they want.
The Hoffman family has owned the property since 1976, but it sat idle for 35 years until the brothers decided to take on the new venture. Don had raised chickens on his property for nearly 25 years and together with Ben, began the road to organic pasture-raised birds three years ago. The company was incorporated in 2015.
It needs to be done, Don said.
They raise a White Mountain Broiler, which can grow to 4.5 to 6 pounds. The females grow on the lighter end of the scale while the males are heavier. The bird is more popular in Ohio, but has a smaller mortality rate than the cornish crossbird, which is more popular in Indiana. The birds have a 56-day life cycle.
The brothers pick up the chicks just after they are hatched from Eagles Nest Poultry in Oceola, Ohio. They are driven back to their farm and are housed in their brooder, where they are cared for with feed, water and an introduction to clover. Over time, the birds will eat less feed and more clover and grass.
The organic feed comes from a certified distributor in Wolcotville and the brothers are certified to grow their own organic clover.
Once the chicks are about four weeks old, they are moved them from the brooder to the pasture. They are housed in chicken coops known as chicken tractors to keep them safe from predators. Each tractor is loaded up with water and feed bins and the birds will eat the clover and grass as they are moved up and down the family farm each day.
Ben Hoffman said before they utilized the chicken tractors and allowed the birds to roam free, 142 of 400 birds were killed by area predators. He said they have had no deaths since utilizing the chicken tractors.
At full growth, the birds are then transported to a processing center in Colfax, Indiana, located halfway between Lafayette and Indianapolis along Interstate 65. There, between 600 and 800 birds are processed in a 3-day period. The first run of 2016 produced 642 birds.
They will make eight or nine trips to processing center of the course of a year.
You want to make sure the birds are familiar with people handling them, that way your losses during transport decrease, because they are familiar with people handling them, Ben Hoffman said. As much interaction you have with these birds, decreases the shock value when you do handle them and have to transport them over two hours away. It can be five seconds. You can pick one up, set it down, and that can be the end (of its life). We only lost two birds of the 642 on the first run. The processor said they had never seen (a successful transport) like that before.
Although there are other organic chicken farms in Indiana, Hoffman Certified Organics is the only farm of its kind that allows their chickens to be raised outdoors at pasture. Its location is a fortunate one, with ACRES Land Trust, Issak Walton League and the Girl Scout Camp of Northern Indiana on its borders.
It can be virtually impossible to guarantee your product will be organic. Out here, we are just so fortunate, Don Hoffman said. Being sandwiched between so many amazing preservationists makes over spray concerns nonexistent. It allows our farm property to exceed the USDA Organic regulations and ensure that our USDA Organic seal is trusted.
Neither described the certification process as difficult, just that it provided a lot of hoops to jump through. The cost of certification through the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Agency is $1,300, but the farm was reimbursed $750 through a USDA grant. Water and soils must be tested, a daily feed log must be provided as well as a mortality rate. The farm is inspected on site and the certification must be renewed annually.
Hoffman Certified Organics will have its chicken for sale every Saturday at the Fort Wayne Farmers Market from 9 .a.m to 1 p.m. near the corner of Barr St. and Wayne St. It is also available at LaOtto Meats and can also be ordered for on-farm pickup. The brothers hope to start a delivery service in 2017.
The whole organic idea is to grow local, be local and know who is raising the birds. Keep transportation and fuel costs low and be environmentally-friendly. That is how we wanted to start, Don Hoffman said.
The company has just three other employees. Dons wife, Stephanie, runs the office and handles accounting and sales operations. Bens fiance, Natalie, handles is the marketing and social media manager. Lastly, the boys mother, Dotsie, provides daily help.
Don also works for Asphalt Drum Mixer in Huntertown as a steal fabricator, parts cutter and welder and Ben works as a general contractor. They both still find time each day to spend 4-5 hours on the farm, where they also grow organic sweet corn. That, however, is not yet certified for resale.
Chickens is enough for our plates right now, since we still have two jobs. Once we get used to it, we can ease into something else, Don Hoffman said.
And they wont eat them from anywhere else.
An Illinois woman who lost her purse last week at Valley View Mall was reunited with it and nearly $12,000 cash thanks to an honest Hallmark worker.
Norberta Pickett said she and her husband were hoping to purchase a camper while riding motorcycles around Sparta earlier this month. On the last day of their vacation, they visited Valley View Mall in La Crosse and stopped into the Hallmark Store, where Pickett said she asked to use the restroom.
When they got back to their motel, Pickett realized her purse was missing.
They searched through their van and the room. The next morning, while she and her husband returned to Rockford, her son went back to the mall and checked every store.
Pickett, 73, said she was most upset about losing her husbands checkbook and pictures of her kids and grandkids, including a son who died last year.
Meanwhile, a Hallmark employee who found the purse in the restroom assumed it belonged to a coworker. When no one had claimed it by Friday, she checked for an ID and turned it over to police, who found $11,773 in cash as well as several gift cards. Police contacted Pickett, who made the 3 1/2-hour drive up to La Crosse to claim it.
I couldnt believe it, Pickett said. I wouldnt know what Id do if I didnt get my purse back with my wallet with all my pictures.
WINONA, Minn. Five-term U.S. Rep. Tim Walz has maintained a strong lead in fundraising as he moves toward the November election.
The second-quarter 2016 reports, which both Walz and his second-time contender Jim Hagedorn released late last week, show the Walz campaign has repeated its effective fundraising in this cycle.
Walzs records show his campaign has raised $218,665 since April, has $489,459 on hand, and has no debt. Walz has raised more than $1.146 million so far in the election cycle.
Meanwhile, Hagedorns campaign has raised $69,550 since April, has $54,953 on hand and owes $26,833. It has raised $190,189 overall in the campaign cycle.
The Walz campaign has had little trouble outraising and outspending opponents in past elections.
In the final weeks of the 2014 election against Hagedorn, Walz had spent a little more than $900,000 and had $564,000 in the bank. Walz raised about $1.4 million overall by mid-October during that election cycle.
Hagedorn, by comparison, spent about $137,000 and has $40,000 in the bank, according to his reports covering the same period. He raised about $177,000.
Walz beat Hagedorn by a comfortable margin in that election, taking 54 percent of the vote to Hagedorns 46 percent.
Hagedorn, a Blue Earth businessman, first ran against Walz in 2014, after pulling off an upset over the GOP-endorsed candidate for Minnesotas First Congressional District. He then struggled to raise funds for the campaign.
There has been a lot of talk around the country about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership is good for our agricultural economy. Im not buying it.
Over the last several decades, the story of trade agreements ratified by Congress has been one of broken promises. Backers of trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Korea Free Trade Agreement, promised U.S. farmers increases in farm income and more rural economic activity. These promises largely remain unfulfilled. In fact, agricultural imports have surged while exports have lagged behind under recent free trade agreements, hurting U.S. farmers.
Wisconsin Farmers Union believes that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement among 11 Pacific Rim countries, poses a serious threat to dairy farmers. Among other concerns, the agreement could lead to greater imports of milk protein concentrates, which displace demand for milk produced on U.S. farms. New Zealand, the leading exporter of concentrates, is a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Exchange rates are especially important when it comes to trade in agricultural commodities. When the value of the U.S. dollar is high, U.S. commodities are relatively more expensive to international traders, and traders will opt to buy commodities from other countries instead. Since U.S. negotiators failed to secure binding prohibitions on currency manipulation in the agreement, all of the supposed gains to agricultural exports under the deal easily could be wiped out by currency manipulation.
Another possible detriment to the agreement is that Canadas milk quota system is supposed to be phased out over the next decade. Will it still have the ability to protect its farm structure? And how will that impact our fragile U.S. dairy market?
Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit continues to rise. Without some safeguards in place and a provision to address currency manipulation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not going to be good for American agriculture.
Under the agreement, dairy prices will struggle; the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that imports will rise by close to 5 billion pounds by 2025. This is in comparison to less than 4 billion under current trade agreements.
But think of the exports, they say!
Were told exports will save us, but look at what has happened over the last 18 months exports have fallen by nearly 13 percent in volume and 33 percent in value. That means there is less money returning to the local economy and more money leaving the U.S. to buy imports.
Additionally, dairy farm numbers in the U.S. have been declining for several decades now. In 1970, there were around 648,000 farms. In 2006, there were 75,000. We have fewer than 58,000 dairy farms across the country today. Wisconsin is losing one farm a day on average and California is losing up to two per week as a result of low milk prices.
With falling exports and rising imports, there will be pressure for prices to remain below farmers production costs. We cant risk another economic downturn like those weve experienced under previous trade deals. Wisconsin Farmers Union opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has urged our representatives to reject the agreement.
Where do our candidates and elected officials stand? President Barack Obama supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In contrast, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have voiced opposition to it. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson says that he is undecided, even though the proposal was released in November of last year. Johnson did vote to authorize the president to fast-track the agreement. Johnsons Democratic challenger, Russ Feingold, opposes the deal.
While many in our agricultural community would have you believe that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is all sunshine and roses, past trade deals should give us serious pause. Dont believe the hype. Standing up for Wisconsin farmers means standing against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The following editorial appeared in Thursdays The Sacramento Bee.
Its no secret that young people tend to shy away from voting more than older people do.
And this Election Day, extraordinary though the campaign season is, likely will be no different. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that Americans ages 18 to 34 will make up only 17 percent of the countrys likely voters in November.
Those are the same millennials who flocked to former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his political revolution. Now that he has dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination, many of his more ardent supporters have vowed to skip the polls in November, even though the senator from Vermont endorsed Hillary Clinton last week.
Sanders might not be in the race anymore, but there are plenty of reasons to turn out at the polls. Here are five:
STUDENT DEBT
Sanders ignited his revolution with promises to help a generation of young people and their families who are drowning in debt from skyrocketing tuition and fees. Its a real issue, as many millennials know.
Clinton wisely released a proposal that would forgive loans for at least 25 million borrowers. She also has promised to make in-state public colleges and universities tuition free by 2021 for families making less than $125,000 a year.
Thats a reason to vote that will actually pay off.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Millennials care about the health of a world they have to live in long after most baby boomers are gone. One of the most effective means of ensuring that is to elect leaders who will implement policies to combat climate change.
Nobody can solve this problem on his or her own. But by taking the simple step of voting for candidates at all levels of government who will make the environment a priority, the country can continue down the path to cut carbon emissions.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This one might not be as obvious. For those who study abroad or enjoy traveling, the nations position on foreign affairs is vitally important to its relationships with other countries. That goes for countries in Europe, recently shaken by Britains exit from the European Union, and in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Millennials are globally engaged, understanding completely that the world is indeed flat. For this reason, its important to vote for leaders who represent those values.
U.S. SUPREME COURT
The next president of the United States will decide who is appointed to fill the vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in the U.S. Supreme Court. Critically important decisions hang in the balance.
Among them, laws that ensure the hard-fought rights of women and gays and lesbians remain intact. Campaign finance laws, another hot-button issue for Sanders and his young supporters, could to come before the court again. Vote for someone who will take you into consideration when nominating the next justice.
A VOICE IN SOCIETY
This year, more than in many years, theres talk of how voting doesnt make a difference. The system is rigged, some say. But millennials make up about 32 percent of the U.S. population, up there with baby boomers for the biggest group eligible to vote. It was the youngest of Americans, through their support for upstart Sanders, who got the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee to consider a far more progressive agenda than planned.
No matter which candidates you support, your vote matters. Remember this come November.
CLEVELAND On the first day of the Republican National Convention, House Speaker Paul Ryan told Wisconsins delegation that Americas problems are fixable, but he didnt evoke presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trumps name.
Ryan said President Barack Obama was responsible for limited economic growth, flat wages, excessive government regulations, high and complicated taxes, dependence on government anti-poverty programs and a foreign policy he described as phoning it in and leaving others to pick up the pieces.
All of these problems in America are fixable problems, Ryan said during a breakfast meeting with the state delegation. It is our job, our duty and it is our opportunity to show people a better way.
Ryan highlighted parts of his recently released A Better Way House agenda and mentioned his trip later Monday to Elyria, Ohio, where he was scheduled to visit with groups on the front lines of helping those with addictions and other problems recover.
Its not enough for us simply to complain, it is not enough to simply oppose, Ryan said. Weve got being an opposition party down to a T. We need to be a proposition party.
Ryan also touted Wisconsins economy, saying under Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature, the state implemented conservative solutions and we have a better economy than everybody else has.
Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Brandon Weathersby pointed out that under Walker, the state has passed anti-union legislation, cut education funding and enacted tax cuts that have benefited the wealthy.
The result isnt a booming economy, but a 32nd-in-the-nation job creation record since the governor took office, Weathersby said.
As he kicked off his remarks, Ryan asked if Walker was in the audience. It turned out he was at the Iowa delegations breakfast instead.
A Walker spokesman didnt respond to a request for comment about the governors absence. Mike Wagner, a UW-Madison journalism professor, said Walkers visit with the Iowans, who host the first presidential nominating contest every four years, is a sign that hes still interested in running for president again.
He is doing the kinds of things one would do to try and earn support in early primary states if one wants to leave open the possibility of running for president in four years, Wagner said.
Ryan didnt mention the partys brash billionaire likely nominee, who has cut deep divisions among Wisconsin Republicans.
Paul Nehlen, Ryans Republican opponent in the Aug. 9 primary and a Trump supporter, said the Speaker didnt mention Trump because Ryan represents everything thats wrong with government: arrogance, condescension and spin.
Ryan praised the work of grassroots members of the delegation, such as Ginny Marschman, whom he recalled stuffing envelopes with in 1997, before he ran for Congress.
We dont lick envelopes anymore, but you know what I mean, he said to laughter.
The event was held at the Hilton hotel in downtown Cleveland where the state delegation and top members of the Republican National Committee are staying.
CLEVELAND Trump or false?
That was the question state Rep. Paul Tittl of Manitowoc was asked when he ran into late night talk show host Stephen Colbert during a Republican National Convention party Sunday night at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Colbert was filming a segment for his show this week and Tittl, attending his first convention, was the first to volunteer.
Colbert read Tittl a statement and asked him to evaluate whether it was a real Donald Trump quotation or not. Tittl wrongly guessed it was not.
"It was dealing with the size of hands, but it wasn't about Marco Rubio (and was) a little more in depth than what I heard," Tittl said. "He even gave me an opportunity to to change my answer after I said false."
When Tittl told Colbert he was from Manitowoc, Colbert responded, "I got drunk so many times in Manitowoc."
CLEVELAND Wisconsin's youngest GOP convention delegate grew up hearing stories from her dad about House Speaker Newt Gingrich, GOP strategist Karl Rove and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
On her first night in Cleveland at a party the Wisconsin and Mississippi delegations attended honoring RNC chairman Reince Priebus, Kathryn Heitman ran into Barbour in an elevator and asked if she could take a selfie.
It was a surreal moment for Heitman, 31, a legislative aide in the state Capitol, whose father passed away seven years ago.
"It's been touching," Heitman said. "This is the world he and I always dreamed I would be in."
Heitman brought copies of several books by her Republican heroes hoping to get autographs. Her mom, whom she brought as a guest, asked her how she remembers all the names.
Heitman rode with about 40 other members of the Wisconsin delegation from Pewaukee to get to Cleveland. She had to leave Lyndon Station at 2 a.m. Saturday to make the bus in time.
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 said 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.
Nearly a week after losing its territorial claims in the South China Sea, China is closing part of the region for military exercises this week.
China issued the warning for the exercises on Monday. It said an area located southeast of the island of Hainan would be off limits between Tuesday and Thursday.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China has no historic title to the South China Sea. And, the court ruled that China had violated the Philippines rights by interfering with that countrys fishing and oil exploration in the area. The decision was a ruling on a complaint filed by the Philippines in 2013.
China refused to participate in the case. China said the court had no right to decide the matter. The Chinese have also denounced the ruling.
The United States warned China to avoid provocative statements or actions following the ruling from The Hague.
China has taken part in the seizure and rebuilding of land throughout the South China Sea in recent years. It has turned reefs into artificial islands that can support military bases. China has built the islands and ignored claims and protests by Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The court also ruled that Chinas rebuilding efforts have caused severe harm to the coral reef environment.
Close to $5 trillion in global trade passes each year through the South China Sea. The sea is home to rich fishing grounds and a vast wealth of oil, gas and other natural resources.
Im Jonathan Evans.
The staff at VOA News wrote this story. Jim Dresbach adapted it for Learning English. Hai Do 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
reef n. a long line of rocks or coral or a high area of sand near the surface of the water in the ocean
seizure n. the act of taking control of something especially by force or violence
1 A protester carrying a peace flag walks in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, where the Republican National Convention is going to be held on July 18.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday he wants those who attempted to seize power in Turkey to be brought to justice.
But, Kerry warned the government against going "too far" while seeking to return order to the country.
We will certainly support bringing the perpetrators of the coup to justice, but we also caution against a reach that goes well beyond that. And stress the importance of the democratic rule being upheld.
Kerry spoke at a news conference after a meeting with EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium. He said, "We stand squarely on the side of the elected leadership in Turkey." He added, "But we also firmly urge the government of Turkey to maintain calm and stability throughout the country."
State-operated news agency Anadolu reports that 8,777 officers have been suspended. The news agency said about 6,000 members of the judiciary and military have been detained.
However, world leaders are voicing concern and are warning against actions that would harm constitutional order.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini also spoke at the meeting in Brussels. She said the rule of law "needs to be protected for the sake of the country."
Conditions remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other provincial cities.
Many have been arrested in search for plotters
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has promised to find people involved in the attempted coup. He compared those involved to a virus saying, "At every level of government, the period of cleaning this virus will continue."
State-operated media report that an assistant to Erdogan is among those being held. Also, an arrest order has been given for Erdogan's top military aide, Colonel Ali Yazici. It was not immediately clear whether Yazici had any part in the failed coup attempt.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag says Turkish officials are increasing the number of arrests. Those detained include judges, military officers and soldiers. The commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, was also seized. He could face charges of treason.
Other high-ranking military officials went to neighboring Greece by helicopter and requested political asylum. Turkish media reports say some of those who fled are believed to be among those who planned the coup.
The possible use of the death penalty has become an issue
Erdogan spoke to a crowd outside his home in Istanbul on Sunday. Many in the crowd reportedly supported the death penalty for some involved in the coup. Erdogan said the use of capital punishment cannot be delayed.
People in the crowd reportedly called for the death penalty. Erdogan is said to have answered, "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get.''
Erdogan said he would discuss punishment with opposition parties. However, 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. Capital punishment was legally ended in 2004 as part of Turkey's attempt to join the European Union.
On Monday, Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz said reintroducing the death penalty would be "absolutely unacceptable." He spoke during an interview with state media.
Kerry says no U.S. involvement in overthrow attempt
Secretary Kerry also has denounced suggestions that the U.S. 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 Erdogan has accused religious leader Fethullah Gulen of planning the attempt to seize power. Gulen now lives in the United States. Erdogan has demanded that Gulen be returned to Turkey.
The U.S. State Department reports that Turkeys foreign minister has denounced claims of U.S. involvement. The minister said in a telephone call such claims are harmful to our bilateral relations.
Kerry also told CNN that Turkey has made no official request for Gulen to be returned to Turkey. He added that, "The United States is not harboring anybody."
Gulen has denied involvement in the coup and has denied knowledge of who might be responsible.
Turkey mourns those who lost their lives
Reports differ about how many people were killed in clashes during the coup attempt. On Sunday about 265 were reported dead, including many civilians.
In Istanbul and Ankara this weekend, thousands of people attended funerals for those killed. Prayers were read in Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon on Sunday to honor those who died.
Turkey reopens its airspace
Turkey on Sunday also reopened its airspace to military aircraft, allowing the U.S.-led coalition to continue air operations against Islamic State militants.
Turkey had closed its airspace following the attempted coup.
Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The country is an important partner in U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group. Turkey also has permitted American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against extremists in nearby Syria and Iraq.
Im Mario Ritter.
VOA's National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, White House Correspondent Mary Alice Salinas, VOA's Turkish service, Georgian service, and reporters Ken Schwartz and Isabela Cocoli are among those who contributed to this story. Mario Ritter adapted it for VOA Learning English. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor.
_____________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
perpetrators n. people who carry out an act, usually something illegal
stability n. not an extreme state, remaining within the rules
irresponsible adj. not responsible, not showing good judgement
harboring v. to provide shelter or a safe place for someone
mosques n. Muslim places of worship
Starting pitchers led the way with 11 Least Valuable Players at the position. First basemen and outfielders tied for second with five represen
Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is buying UK-based chip designer ARM, which would give SoftBank control over the company that designs the technology used in the processors that power almost every major smartphone, many tablets and a range of other devices including servers, set-top-boxes, and even some Chromebooks.
ARM-based chips are also expected to play a key role in emerging automotive technology, smart home devices, and other Internet-of-Things products.
The two companies have reached an agreement which would involve SoftBank paying $32 billion for ARM.
SoftBank is based in Japan, but the company also has international reach: among other things, it owns US wireless carrier Sprint.
ARM doesnt actually manufactur chips. But it designs chip architecture which is then licensed by companies including Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Rockchip, Allwinner, and others.
Under the agreement, ARM would continue to operate as an independent company but it would get a lot bigger. ARMs headquarters would remain in Cambridge and existing senior management would remain in place. But SoftBank wants to at least double the number of people working in the UK office and increase the headcount of ARM employees outside the UK over the next five years.
via Bloomberg and SoftBank (PDF)
The intersection of 28th Street North and 1st Avenue North doesn't make the list of the top 50 crash intersections in St Petersburg. However, to neighbors nearby, the sounds of metal against metal in that intersection are all too frequent.
21 crashes in intersection since 2013
City engineers tasked to find a solution
Bay News 9's Real Time Traffic Reporter Chuck Henson takes an in-depth look at transportation issues around the Bay area
Twenty-one crashes have happened in the intersection since 2013, according to City of St Petersburg officials. Resident Jenifer Greenwell believes changes to the signals could cut the number of crashes here significantly.
"I think [drivers are] confused between the one [signal] on First and Central. I think they're reacting to the one on Central because it's delayed, so that traffic can get through."
Quinton Cummings lives on the corner of 28th Street North and 1st Avenue North, and sees driver impatience as the issue.
"These three lights, when one changes they're trying to gun it to beat that," said Cummings. "And then you've got oncoming traffic and they ain't slowing down, so that's why we have a lot of accidents."
St. Petersburg Director of Transportation and Parking Management Evan Mory has asked city engineers to help find a solution.
"Even though its not a high-crash intersection, we will review like I promised and see if there are any very recent trends or things that have changed, and also see if any counter-measures are appropriate," said Mory. "That could possibly be increased enforcement, or engineering."
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If ever you are plagued by doubts about whether India is culturally one nation, watch our soaps or commercial cinema across languages.
Debutant director Nithin Renji Panickers Mammootty-starrer Kasaba perfectly exemplifies the shared cinematic tastes of Indias masses, beyond state borders and regional boundaries. It was released in Kerala on Eid and this week has come to theatres in Delhi, having already reportedly smashed the Kerala box-office.
The megastar of Gods Own Country is the storys Circle Inspector Rajan Zachariah, an elderly brattish policeman with a trademark swagger who does not play by the rules. That is a polite way of saying he commits atrocities against members of the public. When a policeman dies in a mysterious incident in a town called Kalipuram on the Kerala-Karnataka border, Zachariah asks for a transfer there since two of his acquaintances were also killed in the incident.
In Kalipuram, he encounters the attractive brothel keeper Kamala (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar), her middle-aged lover Parameshwaran Nambiar (Sampath Raj) who is a politician, Kamalas sidekick Thankachan (Alancier Lay Lopez), the good prostitute Susan (Neha Saxena) and sub-inspector Mukundan (Jagadish).
Most films in this genre yes, this kind of cop drama is a genre unto itself get around those tiny little thingies called ethics and human rights violations by portraying the protagonist as a golden-hearted, well-intentioned chap constrained by a corrupt system and compelled to go outside it to deliver justice to beleaguered common folk. Not so much here. Kasaba just cursorily refers to the systemic issues that hold back honest police officials. Besides, though Zachariahs desire to solve those murders purportedly drives the film, what truly drives it is his sickening misogyny couched in humour and smart-alec dialoguebaazi.
That misogyny irretrievably mars this otherwise effective though loud and not extraordinary suspense thriller, the kind that India calls timepass fare. Over-the-top, stylised action flicks can be enjoyable if they get their tone right. Unfortunately, Panickers work seems rooted in a conviction that you cannot entertain the janata without bottom-of-the barrel sexist one-liners.
It is all very cleverly handled though, with justifications pre-emptively built into the script. For instance, in one scene, a woman police officer Zachariahs junior in age, but senior in the profession unbuttons her uniform shirt (because, yknow how it is, a womans body is her only weapon against a cheeky man) before she needlessly needles him. He strikes her down with his words, grabs her by the belt, and as he holds her crotch against his, makes a disgusting comment about how he could disrupt her bodily functions.
Note: A pointed effort is made here to mark her out as an outsider by having her speak in Hindi and mention her IPS cadre. This woman is clearly not a Malayali, her accent suggests she is a north Indian. Is that meant to be another point in Zachariahs favour?
Four centuries after Petruchio tamed Katherina in Shakespeares England, men across Indian film industries are still taming those damned shrews. Yknow how it is.
This scene in Kasaba has been as carefully designed as those Malayalam teleserials in which husbands smack their wives after they have been built up over several episodes as scheming witches out to harm the docile women and hapless men of the family. This sort of scripting is calculated to give fans excuses such as, She asked for it. She started it. Cmon, its her fault.
Stupid feminists just do not get it. She asked for it. But of course.
Panicker has been quoted on NDTV responding to criticism from Keralas activists and some reviewers in these words: What you have seen in the movie happens all around you. Even worse things than this. Like the Nirbhaya case. The dialogues are nothing new and I have not made them up. Weve heard these things. This is a commercial film and thats why the cliches.
Err Yes, Mr Panicker, these things do happen all around us, but please do note the difference between portraying these things and glorifying them. Kasaba presents Zachariahs misogynistic dialogues and behaviour as the epitome of coolth. Since the young writer-director brings up the December 2012 Delhi gangrape in his nonchalant explanation, it is important to ask him whether he would make a biopic of those six rapist-murderers and project them as cool dudes, the good guys of that story who attacked a woman because she asked for it.
It does not help the situation that some of the criticism of Kasaba has not been well articulated.
One reviewer, for instance, seems bothered by the fact that Parameshwaran Nambiar has two adoring wives. Another has issues with Zachariahs use of profanities and double entendre per se. This is where Panickers misguided point about reality becomes relevant. Bigamy does exist in this country and many women do willingly play along with patriarchy. Nambiar is the villain of the piece and his two marriages are not shown in a positive light anywhere in the film.
Likewise, a film may well revolve around a foul-mouthed negative character. The reason why Zachariahs troublesome dialogues and actions are objectionable is because they are comedified and glorified, and because they come from a man who is projected as a nice guy.
Kasabas gender insensitivity is particularly problematic because jolly ol Zachariah is played by one of the most respected star actors in the history of Indian cinema.
As it happens, even within its genre, this is an opportunity lost for the actor in Mammootty who is equally capable of bringing gravitas to serious roles and being hysterically funny. He does not walk, he struts about as Zachariah and is a hoot while doing so to the accompaniment of a signature tune that is amusing despite the decibel level. It is also nice to see his trimness at the age of 64 and his agility in the action scenes.
All the pizzazz in the world though is not enough compensation for the stars willingness to play a character whose positioning within Kasaba normalises a congenital contempt for women.
This choice he has made hurts even more because Kasaba comes to theatres just 10 months after Salim Ahameds Pathemari for which Mammootty rightfully deserved the Best Actor National Award 2015 which went instead to Amitabh Bachchan for Piku. There was that stirring performance as the heart-wrenchingly dignified Pallickal Narayanan in an entertaining yet socially responsible film, and then there is this film that plumbs the depths of misogyny to play to the testosterone-laden gallery.
Mammoottys co-stars in Kasaba are a talented bunch. Varalaxmi Sarathkumar merits a mention for making her mark as Kamala despite the veil of hair covering too much of her face almost throughout. Sampath Raj as Nambiar is excellent.
In a scene towards the end of Kasaba, Zachariah tries to enter Kamalas brothel. Where is your warrant? she asks. If you asked for a warrant from everyone coming here, your business would suffer, he replies mockingly. Can there be a more undisguised metaphorical re-affirmation of the widely held social notion that a sex worker has no right to turn a man away, that if a man forces himself on a sex worker it does not amount to rape?
In yet another instance of the Censor Boards confused ideology, Kasaba has been rated UA rather than A. UA stands for Unrestricted Public Exhibition but with a word of caution that parental discretion is required for children below 12 years. I guess the point being made is that it is okay to feed coarse expressions of misogyny to kids so long as their parents do not mind.
It's been a great year for Radhika Apte.
After winning rave reviews for her performance in Pavan Kirpalanis Phobia as an artist suffering from agoraphobia, she was named Best Actress at the Tribeca Film Festival for her role in Clean Shaven, directed by Anurag Kashyap (it is a part of Madly, a six-part anthology film about love). Radhikas Shirish Kunder directed short film Kriti, in which she played Manoj Bajpayee's psychiatrist has also been talked about.
Now all eyes are on her big Tamil commercial entertainer, Kabali, which releases on 22 July. Directed by Pa Ranjith, Kabali had Radhika playing Rajinikanth's wife.
In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the elusive actress opened up about Kabali and a lot more.
Radhika, it's been a great year for you so far.
Yes, Im happy with the way things have been unfolding as (there's been) a lot of appreciation for my work in Phobia, Kriti; and now Kabali is releasing this Friday. To be paired with Rajini sir is truly incredible and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Why were you chosen as heroine opposite Rajinikanth, who normally has glamorous leading ladies from Bollywood: Aishwarya Rai (Robot), Deepika Padukone (Kochadaiyan) and Sonakshi Sinha (Lingaa)?
To be frank, there were no mediators or casting agents who normally ask, 'would you be interested in doing a big south film with Rajinikanth?' The director of Kabali, Ranjith called me directly and said he wants to cast me and asked me to come down to Chennai for a narration. I found the character that I play in the film, Kumudhavalli, has a lot of depth and her relationship with her husband, the don Kabali played by Rajini sir, is the pivot around which the story develops. I signed the film immediately as Im a big fan of Rajini sir and also the directors earlier film, Madras, impressed me a lot.
How did you cope with the language and lip sync? Was there any prompting by assistant directors on the sets?
There was no prompting, the lines were given to me in advance. I learned my lines, as it was written in Devanagiri and an assistant helped me to get the lip sync correct, though I have not dubbed for the film.
How was it working with Rajinikanth?
I had a great time working with Rajinikanth. He is truly inspiring and an amazing person. He is so committed and a total professional. When I first went up to meet him, during the initial photo shoot for the first look posters, he was waiting outside his caravan to welcome me. Which star would do that? Of course first I spoke to him in Marathi and later we conversed in English and Hindi.
In the film you play mother to Dhansika, who in real life is as old as you are...
Kabali is not the usual commercial film. It is a subject-driven film, well etched by Ranjith in which I have a solid role. Im both young and old in the film. Yes, Dhansika plays my daughter in the film.
Are you open to doing more roles in Tamil films at a time when you are doing a lot of off-beat films in Hindi and also doing short films?
I dont differentiate between commercial and art films. For me what excites meis the kind of role I do. I did short films like Ahalya and now Kriti, which did not have a commercial theatrical release but got me a new reach in an exciting new medium. At the end of the day, commercial viability is important as film production is a business. If I get the right film like Kabali, I would be open to doing more south films.
So what comes next?
Watching Kabali first day first show! Im also shooting for Ghoul, a horrorfilm where I play a military officer. After I wrap up the film in the first week of August, I will take a two-month break and travel around.
Mumbai: Shirish Kunder is delighted as his short movie Kriti has been viewed over three million times on YouTube, after battling copyright issues.
"Kriti crosses three million views! Truth can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped," Kunder tweeted on Monday.
#Kriti crosses 3 Million views!
Truth can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped.
Watch here: https://t.co/LfZerJmhP4 Shirish Kunder (@ShirishKunder) July 18, 2016
Shirish had got caught in a legal battle with a Nepali filmmaker who claimed that the Bollywood filmmaker's Kriti is a copy of his film BOB.
In a statement shared earlier, it was said that the long drawn copyright claims over Kriti, produced by Muvizz.com, was finally put to rest on 15 July as the film, starring Manoj Bajpayee, Neha Sharma, and Radhika Apte, returned on YouTube.
In the event of a false copyright claim done by makers of BOB and then failing to grant sufficient proof within the given 15 days notice, Kriti is now back on YouTube.
The producers of the film have not only sought to claim Rs 5 crore in a lawsuit against the team of BOB for damages but they have bigger plans for the film.
Due to the overwhelming response from the viewers, Muvizz.com and Kunder plan to make Kriti a full feature film or a web series in near future.
Piiyush Singh, co-founder of Muvizz.com, said: One of the major reasons for seeking Rs 5 crore in a lawsuit against Aneel Neupane was to let people with ulterior motives know that there is rule of law, and platform like us and people associated with good cinema are not going to let someone take away the credit for their hard work."
"Be on the side of truth and it shall always prevail. Being our home production, Kriti is very close to our hearts and we are proud that it is restored back by YouTube, Singh said.
The short film released on 22 June.
Kunder said: "Kriti was never treated as a short film. Since the inception of the idea, we have always thought of it as a full-fledged feature film and put a lot of efforts in it."
"Today after millions of people watching it and film getting global audiences from places like Brazil, Poland, Egypt, Israel, and many more countries, Muvizz.com and I have decided to double out efforts and showcase more of Kriti to our audiences through the format of a web series or a feature film.
The 68th Primetime Emmy Award nomination list had a distinct feeling of deja vu when Game of Thrones and Modern Family landing nominations again on Thursday.
The fan favourite Game of Thrones, which has just completed it's 6th season, is leading the nomination list with 23 nominations. Last year the show had won it's first 'Best Drama' Emmy and also came out as the show with the most number of Emmy nominations in the history of the awards at 24 nominations.
Mr Robot, along with the spy drama The Americans are new entrants in the drama category and will compete with Game of Thrones for the Emmy along with Vince Gilligan's Better Call Saul, Homeland, House of Cards and Downton Abbey.
The acclaimed show The People vs OJ Simpsons, the dramatisation of the notorious murder trial, came in second after Game of Thrones in the nominations race with 22 nominations.
Last year, the Emmys made changes to the voting process, opening up the best drama and comedy categories to all Television Academy voters, not just a committee. Game of Thrones, which has never been more popular, has probably been a beneficiary to the rules change.
Also the Emmy's received a big nod on the Hollywood's diversity debate, with nearly a quarter of the nominated actors being 'non-wthite'. Viola Davis was nominated again for the role of Best Actress in a Dramatic role for How to Get Away with Murder. Other 'non-white' actors getting nominated this year include Black-ish actress Tracee Ellis Ross, Mr Robots Rami Malek and Master of Nones Aziz Ansari. Additionally, Ansari became the first actor of South Asian descent in Emmy history to be nominated for a leading role.
Even if you want to give the Emmys' a thumbs-up for it's dedication to diversity, there were a lot of surprising snubs. Missing from the whole diversity debate was the talk show category, where Trevor Noah's The Daily Show was missing from the nominations. Trevor Noah took the reigns of the show from Jon Stewart and has been as popular as his predecessor with the show's fans.
Also missing were nominations for the richly deserved Orange is the New Black. The animated adult cartoon Bojack Horseman and the comedy You're The Worst were also snubbed.
Here are the nominations for the major categories of the 2016 Emmys:
Outstanding Comedy Series
Black-ish
Master of None
Modern Family
Silicon Valley
Transparent
Veep
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Black-ish Master of None Modern Family Silicon Valley Transparent Veep Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Outstanding Drama Series
Homeland
Downton Abbey
Game of Thrones
House of Cards
Mr Robot
The Americans
Better Call Saul
Homeland Downton Abbey Game of Thrones House of Cards Mr Robot The Americans Better Call Saul Outstanding Mini-Series
The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story
American Crime
Roots
Fargo
The Night Manager
The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story American Crime Roots Fargo The Night Manager Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
Will Forte, The Last Man on Earth
Thomas Middleditch, Silicon Valley
Anthony Anderson, Black-ish
William H Macy, Shameless
Aziz Ansari, Master of None
Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent
Will Forte, The Last Man on Earth Thomas Middleditch, Silicon Valley Anthony Anderson, Black-ish William H Macy, Shameless Aziz Ansari, Master of None Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
Ellie Kemper, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Amy Schumer, Inside Amy Schumer
Laurie Metcalf, Getting On
Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie
Tracce Ellis Ross, Black-ish
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Ellie Kemper, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Amy Schumer, Inside Amy Schumer Laurie Metcalf, Getting On Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie Tracce Ellis Ross, Black-ish Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Kevin Spacey, House of Cards
Kyle Chandler, Bloodline
Matthew Rhys, The Americans
Rami Malek, Mr Robot
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Kevin Spacey, House of Cards Kyle Chandler, Bloodline Matthew Rhys, The Americans Rami Malek, Mr Robot Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series
Viola Davis, How to Get Away With Murder
Taraji P Henson, Empire
Claire Danes, Homeland
Robin Wright, House of Cards
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black
Keri Russell, The Americans
Outstanding Variety Talk Show
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee
Real Time With Bill Maher
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
The Late, Late Show With James Corden
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
The debate who will win is on. Fans are of course pushing for a big Game of Thrones win, but the competition is looking tough. The date for this year's Emmys set on 18 eptember and with Jimmy Kimmel hosting the show, we can hardly wait.
Even as the Narendra Modi government prepares to give one big push to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the Monsoon Session of Parliament that began on Monday (18 July), a legal doorway has been opened up by the Supreme Court that might end up in large-scale changes to the taxation regimes across the country.
In a far-reaching move, the Supreme Court has set up a nine-judge constitution bench to examine the validity of separate entry taxes on goods imposed by various state governments. Should the constitution bench agree with petitioners who have challenged various entry taxes on the grounds that they restrict the free movement of goods and strike them down as unconstitutional, it could actually make the GST proposals a reality without the bill having to be approved by Parliament.
The constitution bench will start the hearing on a day-to-day basis as early as this month.
The decision to set up a nine-member bench one of the largest benches set up by the apex court to date was possible after a three-judge bench headed by chief justice T S Thakur took note of the entry tax provisions of various states.
Some large companies have challenged these entry tax provisions on the ground that they are against the concept of free trade and commerce under Article 301 (Freedom of trade commerce and intercourse) of the Constitution.
The nine-member bench will comprise the Chief Justice himself, Justice A K Sikri, Justice S A Bobde, Justice Shiva Kirti Singh, Justice N V Ramana, Justice R Banumathi, Justice A M Khanwilkar, Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan.
Chief Justice Thakur, while constituting the bench, observed that these matters have lingered. The time has come we must discuss (this issue)...There is no way we can escape this.
He had noted how these cases were actually referred to a nine-judge Bench way back in 2010 by a Constitution Bench led by Justice SH Kapadia but remained unheard till date.
At stake is an important constitutional issue -- whether the States have the right to levy entry tax on goods entering their respective territories. But the other constitutional issue is whether any party has the right to impede free movement of goods within the boundaries of a territory that is actually a single nation.
Can one or more states break up the smooth movement of commerce through the introduction of entry taxes? At stake is a large sum of around Rs 30,000 crore a year that is collected by states by way of entry tax. And this is the official sum. Unofficial collections could be equally large.
The outcome of this hearing will have huge ramifications for Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) which collects around Rs 7,500 crore annually through octroi levy another form of entry tax. Considering that Mumbai has a budget of Rs 33,700 crore for 2015-16, the share of this entry tax alone accounts for around 20 percent.
Another state which has used the entry tax to fill private pockets is Uttar Pradesh, where no product can enter the state without filling up forms and paying taxes. Although the form itself costs just a rupee, transporters and companies must pay anywhere between Rs 5,000 and Rs 50,000 just to get the form and begin the process of paying the official entry tax. The private collections on account of this entry form alone is said to be enormous.
Yet another state that could get affected is Odisha which collects around Rs 1,600 crore annually through imposition of entry taxes.
The three-member bench observed that Counsel for the parties submit that the main appeals/ petitions are all ripe for listing before a larger bench of nine-Judges. They submit that instead of dealing with the interim applications or directing any modification in the arrangement already made, it would be more appropriate if the appeals/petitions are set down for final hearing in the month of July, 2016. We accordingly direct that the papers shall be placed before the chief justice for constituting an appropriate bench to hear the main appeals/petitions in the month of July 2016. Te apex court was thus clubbing some 2,000 cases filed in various courts, but dealing with the same issue of the constitutional validity of the levy of entry tax.
Today, thanks to the entry tax, vehicles are stopped at designated checkpoints for a few hours to a few days. This waiting period is one of the factors which compels transporters and companies to pay cash bribes at each check post to prevent any further harassment. Consequently, goods that should have taken a maximum of two days for covering the distance between Delhi to Mumbai, currently take almost 10-15 days. The increased number of days adds to the interest cost on delays and inventory pileup.
The entry tax mechanism has allowed each state to garner revenues both on as well as off the books. This is one of the reasons why the states have not been willing to sign up for the GST Bill. While the Bill provides for meeting any deficit in tax collections for a period of five years, there will be no way to compensate for the loss of income that party faithful get from cash collections at these entry points.
The three member bench has requested senior advocate Harish Salve, representing some companies in the matter, to file his submission on all issues involved.
We make it clear that apart from the comprehensive compilation which Mr Salve proposes to file, each one of the counsel for the parties to these appeals/petitions shall file a brief of the submissions not exceeding 10 pages in each case . . .The submission shall be filed within six weeks... none of the counsel shall be permitted to seek any adjournment on the dates fixed for hearing, stated the bench and fixed the matter for hearing on 18 July. No further notice regarding this needs be issued by the Registry. The Registry shall club all the connected matters and list them for final hearing before the larger Bench in the week commencing 18th July, 2016.
In doing so, the Supreme Court has done two remarkable things. No submission of the parties hall exceed 10 pages in length. Thus, the apex court has ensured that the judges are not swamped with thousands of pages of notes and annexures. Second, by ruling out adjournments, the Supreme Court is paving the way to speedy trials without adjournments.
So, critical as the GST debates in Parliament will be, the proceedings in the Supreme Court will be of no less import this month.
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 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 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 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.
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.
The last word has not been said in the curious case of Jignesh Shah, once described as the poster boy of Indian commodities market and now in police custody for allegedly abetting in money laundering in the NSEL payment defaults.
His arrest happened on July 12, 2016, the second time in a span of two years, and the following day, July 13, he was remanded to police custody till July 18.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED), functioning under, and at the behest of, the finance ministry, which sought his custody, argued Shah was at the brain behind multi-layered transactions allegedly as a front to launder Rs 76 crore.
The ED claimed Rs 114 crore was remitted by defaulters of the beleaguered NSEL to subsidiary companies of FTIL, but the transactions on NSEL platforms were bogus and artificially exaggerated.
The ED even detailed how Shah created these subsidiaries and sister companies, including the Indian Bullion Market Association (IBMA) and the National Bulk Handling Corp (NBHC) to route illegal cash and project it as untainted.
But what set the cat among the pigeons was the way Shah was arrested. Called for interrogation, he was asked to stay back and eventually informed he would be arrested.
What was more surprising was the fact that charges presented by the ED were already there in the first charge sheet filed in the court. Do you arrest again to file a supplementary charge sheet?
Worse, the investigating agencies have - by their own submission - informed the court that Shah has been more than cooperative during their probe and that no money trail was traced to Shah, as was started by Justice Thipsay while releasing Shah on bail nearly two years back from his previous judicial custody. So where was the need for another arrest, asked many in Mumbai, home to Shah?
The arrest was the perfect trigger for the anti-Shah gang to start their twitter trolls, at times appearing like lynch mob. They were encouraged by some politicians who - probably - felt if Shah was taken in, all the cash would return like a reverse Pied Piper tune.
Strangely, the trolls did not talk about the defaulters, and the fraudulent brokers, who lured the alleged investors or bogus traders to enter into bogus trades on NSEL for illegal arbitrage gains.
Sensing the legal reactions on the arrest, they argued that Shah was taken in only because Shreekant Javalgekar, President (Special Affairs), FTIL, was unable to offer evidences for the aforesaid transactions, and said it was Shah who was in control.
Javalgekar stated that the ultimate beneficiary of the business activities of all the FTIL group companies was Shah as he was the majority shareholder of FTIL. Shah being in control of these entities can only throw light on the rationale behind these transactions, read the ED remand application.
But didn't he make the same submission earlier? And wasnt this fact about Shah - he was the head of the conglomerate - known earlier to the ED, CBI, EoW of Mumbai Police probing the payment crisis?
Senior advocate Satish Manshinde said he was surprised at Shahs arrest for money laundering because the case has been going on for more than two years.
I am not comfortable the manner in which ED has used the law for something which is extremely, extremely widespread in India, Maneshinde said in a telephonic interview.
Manshinde found instant support from senior advocate and MP, Majid Memon, who said Shah has been questioned on large number of occasions during the past months. ED must have done all its exercise during those days and collected whatever papers or documents it wanted from him.
Memon said the ED definitely knows its business but if it is focussed high on Shah, then it should also focus on 24 members or defaulters or the brokers as well or the second rung of the management that was at NSEL or FTIL. I have not heard anything about them.
The ED, which had no answers why it went slow on the defaulters and brokers, argued Shahs custody was to have his custodial interrogation and should not be seen as punishment or humiliation.
The arrest is purely to further a cause of investigation, said an ED source, without elaborating which bit of further investigation the agency was seeking from Shah.
The arrest has had its impact in the Indian Capital where many called it politically motivated. Rajya Sabha member and senior advocate of Supreme Court, KTS Tulsi, said he was sanguine that Shahs arrest was unconstitutional because a FIR is already in place and Shah had been arrested once, and was sent to judicial custody.
The money trail has not been established, and the ED has not submitted any fresh evidence, they cannot force an accused to accept allegations, said Tulsi.
The investigating agencies want favourable judgements all time and becoming a bit desperate, said the veteran lawyer.
So, the billion dollar question remains: Who gave the orders to ED to arrest Shah? No answers are forthcoming from the ED. Till that happens, Shah - in all probability - will have to be in custody. That is not good news for investors who lost cash in the NSEL crisis and beleaguered staffers of 63 Moons.
San Francisco: Tesla Motors today 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 here, 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.
In his interaction with senior company officials, Gadkari proposed to the Tesla senior executives to make India their Asia manufacturing hub and offered land near major Indian ports to facilitate export of their vehicles to South and South East Asian countries.
"Tesla senior executive admitted that their manufacturing hub has to be outside the US for markets in rest of the world and appreciated the Indian offer of cooperation which they said will certainly be considered at the appropriate time in future.
"They said India will definitely be a market for their next generation low cost sustainable model-3," a media release said.
Gadkari's visit comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited Tesla Motors last year. The Modi government believes that Tesla Motors and its green technologies can play a crucial role in introducing pollution free road transport in the country.
Responding to questions from Gadkari, Tesla officials said they have future plans for trucks and pick up vans but not buses and two wheelers.
"They evinced keen interest in knowing whether there was any subsidy on electric vehicles in India. Gadkari asked Tesla executives to outline their proposals for entry into Indian market," the statement said.
Currently on a week-long US visit, Gadkari apprised Tesla executive of the progress Indian automobile manufacturers have made in the field of electric vehicles and exuded confidence that very soon Indian market will become very competitive in this sector.
He also inquired about the battery packs that can store energy from the power grid and from solar panels.
He was told, Modi, during his visit to Tesla, too was keen to know how batteries and solar panels could be the future of electricity generation for India, particularly in rural areas.
Gadkari was told that Tesla was inviting suggestions for locations in India for demonstrations, the press statement said.
After liquor firm United Spirits last week found potential diversions of around Rs 900 crore linked to its former chairman Vijay Mallya, the Enforcement Directorate has reportedly started investigation based on the complaint by its current owner and the world's largest liquor firm Diageo.
Based on a slew of complaints the regulators received a week ago, the ED is investigating foreign exchange violations worth Rs 900 crore by Mallya, a report in The Economic Times said.
Following its internal inquiry, USL said Mallya diverted funds to over half a dozen companies, having direct or indirect interest, said the ET report.
"The funds have been routed through USL subsidiaries to around seven entities related to Mallya including four in the UK, two in the Bahamas and one in Europe," ET quoted an official, adding that USL has evidence of all the remittances made.
The internal inquiry revealed actual and potential diversions of about Rs 910 crore ($135.5 million) and other potentially improper transactions amounting to about Rs 310 crore involving USL and its subsidiaries between October 2010 and July 2014, USL said in a filing to stock exchanges after a board meeting on 9 July.
The overseas beneficiaries or recipients include Force India Formula One team, Watson Ltd, Continental Administrative Services, Modall Securities, Ultra Dynamix and Lombard Wall Corporate Services, while the Indian beneficiary was mostly Kingfisher Airlines.
Already, the ED is already investigating a fund diversion case against Mallya, where the former liquor baron allegedly routed IDBI Bank funds through Kingfisher Airlines.
However, Mallya has denied the charges by USL. "I have absolutely no knowledge about the purported enquiry by E&Y nor the suggested allegations," ET quoted Mallya.
Mallya agreed in February to give up his chairmanship and board position at United Spirits.
The company said at the time that it would continue to pursue a claim for the recovery of Rs 1,337 crore of loans to former group company United Breweries Holdings Ltd (UBHL).
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court later on Monday will hear the contempt petition filed by a consortium of banks against businessman Vijay Mallya, said The Indian Express citing ANI report.
In April, the apex court had directed Mallya to disclose all of his assets held by him and his family.
The consortium of banks had also rejected his offer to repay Rs. 4,000 crores as settlement of all debts.
It is learnt that Mallya is currently in London. He had left India on 2 March 2016, the day the banks moved the Supreme Court against him.
Later in an interview to Reuters, Mallya had said he was willing to answer questions about his business dealings but was reluctant to return to his homeland "unless assured of a fair trial in India, if at all there needs to be a trial".
BATON ROUGE, La. The black U.S. Marine Corps veteran who shot dead three police officers in Louisiana's capital specifically targeted them, police said on Monday, as the United States reeled from the latest deadly violence involving police and black people.
Following Sunday's shootings, Baton Rouge police officers took steps to increase their own security. Baton Rouge police spokesman Sergeant Don Coppola said, "We usually ride solo. We're riding in pairs for now."
The city had been the scene of repeated protests against police violence following the July 5 fatal shooting by officers of Alton Sterling, a black man, outside a convenience store.
The Baton Rouge gunman has been identified as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who served in the Marines for five years, including a 2008 deployment in the Iraq war. Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was shot dead on Sunday morning in a gunfight with police.
Long had legally changed his name in May 2015 to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, according to records in Jackson County, Missouri.
Racial tension in the United States has been especially high since a black former U.S. Army Reserve soldier fatally shot five Dallas police officers who were patrolling a protest over the police shootings of Sterling and another black man in Minnesota.
"It's a very tough situation here, an attack on the very fabric of society," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told MSNBC on Monday.
Louisiana State Police spokesman Lieutenant J.B. Slaton told the New York Times on Monday that a preliminary investigation shows the Baton Rouge gunman "definitely ambushed those officers."
"We are still trying to find out what his motive was, and thats going to be part of our investigation. But we believe he was targeting those officers," Slaton said.
A website, social media accounts and YouTube videos that appeared tied to Long include complaints about police treatment of black people and praise for killings of the Dallas policemen.Documents also showed that Long pledged affiliation to an African-American offshoot of the U.S. anti-government Sovereign Citizen Movement.
The dead officers in Baton Rouge were identified as Montrell Jackson, 32; Matthew Gerald, 41; and Brad Garafola, 45.
Edwards said one of the wounded officers was fighting for his life while a second underwent surgery and needed further surgery on his neck. A third officer who had a graze wound to his neck was released from a hospital on Sunday.
MEMORIAL AT SHOOTING SCENE
At the B Quick gas station where the shootings occurred, people left flowers and balloons in memory of the slain officers.
"I just want us to have peace and drive down the road and not feel like we have to duck our heads and look around and see if someone's going to be on top of a roof," said Pam Collins, a resident of the Baton Rouge suburb of Prairieville who brought three shiny balloons to honor the officers.
Law enforcement officials were working to determine if the Baton Rouge gunman acted alone or conspired with others, Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told CNN.
"We are on every lead," he said.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in remarks prepared for a conference of black law enforcement officers in Washington, said federal law enforcement agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service were on the scene in Baton Rouge.
"At the Department of Justice, we are determined to do everything we can to bridge divides, to heal rifts, to restore trust, and to ensure that every American feels respected, supported, and safe," Lynch said in her remarks.
Louisiana's capital is a city with a long history of distrust between black residents and law enforcement that has been inflamed by Sterling's death. For many in Baton Rouge, the police have been viewed as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of a city where more than half the 230,000 residents are black.
On a July 10 YouTube video attributed to Long, he said he was speaking from Dallas after going there to join protests against police violence, and suggested that only violence and financial pressure will cause change.
The recent U.S. violence has heightened security concerns, notably for the Republican convention beginning in Cleveland where Donald Trump is positioned to get his party's presidential nomination for the Nov. 8 election, and the upcoming Democratic convention in Philadelphia where Hillary Clinton is due to get her party's nomination.
In Cincinnati, Clinton promised in a speech to the NAACP civil rights group to bring the "full weight of the law" against people who kill police officers.
(Additional reporting by David Alexander and Eric Walsh in Washington and Laila Kearney in New York; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
For the past two weeks, people of Nashik and the officials in the Excise Department are waiting for Sandip Maruti Sabale to arrive and take up his post in the flying squad in Satana. An official order issued earlier this month had transferred Sabale from Kolhapur to Nashik. What no one seemed to have known is that Sabale passed away in 2013.
On 3 July, 2016, the Excise Department promulgated a one-page order transferring Excise Inspector Sandip Maruti Sabale from Daulat Sahakari Sugar Factory in Kolhapur to a flying squad in Satana, Nashik district and it was signed by Joint Commissioner (administration) Tanuja Dandekar. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who was in charge of the Excise Department for a month after Eknath Khadse resigned, approved the transfer.
But official documents, including a death certificate, available with Firstpost show that Sabale passed away in a road accident on 26 July, 2013, at the age of 30. Since then, his wife Varsha has been running from pillar to post so that she can get a job in the Excise Department, according to government rules.
SM Sable's death certificate
Instead of solving Varsha's problem, the Excise Department issued Sabale's transfer papers. In the order dated 3 July, 2016, it stated that the Kolhapur excise superintendent will have to relieve Sabale with immediate effect and that the Nashik excise superintendent has been asked to ensure that Sabale will take up his new assignment without any delay. "If Sabale brings pressure, it will be considered as indiscipline," the order signed by Dandekar said. It also stated that if he did not join on time, he will not be paid his salary after 30 June, 2016.
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Letter transferring SM Sabale to Nashik
Talking to Firstpost from Satara, Sabales wife Varsha said that in the three years since Sabale's death in a road accident, she has reached out to several departments for a job but is yet to get any decision. She has two children and none of the other family members are employed. "It's horrible to walk to every department to get a job. In the past three years, we lost everything. We are now financially very weak," she added.
Varsha Sabale's letter to excise commissioner
The much-beleaguered Excise Department has faced several accusations of corruption and malpractice. Recently, three officials caught red-handed by the Anti-Corruption Bureau in 2015 were not only reinstated, but given plum assignments. Corruption allegations even led to Excise Minister Eknath Khadse putting in his papers on 4 June, 2016. After the cabinet reshuffle of 8 July, 2016, Chandrashekhar Bawankule took over as excise minister. Sources said that before Bawankule's appointment, CM Fadnavis smartly approved the transfers of 220 inspectors and senior inspectors 180 of whom are police sub-inspectors and the rest are higher officials during the transit period on the advice of State Excise Commissioner Vijay Singhal and Principal Secretary Rajesh Kumar. Sabale's order was issued on 3 July, five days before the excise portfolio was handed over to Bawankule.
It has been two weeks since the order was issued and the confusion is yet to be cleared. Officials in Nashik are unaware of Sabale's passing and told Firstpost that they are still waiting for him. The post Sabale was appointed to is currently vacant as his predecessor was transferred elsewhere. Singhal said he will verify if a transfer order has been issued in the name of a dead official. "I will check with the administration," Singhal told to Firstpost.
By Ila Ananya
Now, writers, you must have read JK Rowling. You know how in the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there is a scene in which Hermione, Ron and Harry are standing in the kitchen at the Burrow, when they see three owls flying towards them with the results of their Ordinary Wizarding Levels exam? Hermione is terrified in the way that only Hermione can be terrified about exam results, and at the end of the scene, Hermione gets an Outstanding (O) grade in every subject but one, while Ron and Harry seem happy theyve passed.
Now, when a decision by Indias Ministry of Culture can remind you of a novel with wands and flying broomsticks, you think there must be something wrong. But the ministrys new decision to rate artists, dancers, and writers across the country and place them into three categories Outstanding (O), Promising (P), and Waiting (W) is the most sensible thing Ive heard today.
Are you worried that nobody knows what Waiting means (waiting for a breakthrough, waiting for food, waiting for the results of silly lists, obviously waiting for Godot)? Just the idea of a Bharatnatyam dancer or writer sitting by their door waiting for metaphorical owls to come and tell them how the government has graded them will give you fresh perspective on life, art and everything. Too often writers try to secede from the nation. Now they can rejoin the masses. I only wish theyd created one more category called Struggler/Open Mic Participant. Then thered been a full picture.
The Ministry of Culture says that this rating will help them decide which artist or dancer is to be sent to participate in events or festivals, in the hope that it will prevent a clique from dominating the cultural space. The rating will be done by the ministrys bureaucrats and a few selected artists, and only those whove been given an Outstanding or Promising grade will be allowed to attend international events. If youre wondering how the process works, its very simple artists just have to go to the Centre for Cultural Resource and Training (CCRT) website to fill in an online application form thats modestly titled Bharat Ka Sanskritik Maanchitran (Cultural Mapping of India).
Put aside those old-fashioned ideas that art is extremely subjective, because the Ministry of Culture has very obviously considered this. Look at the form, and you will see that there are no questions about how large the body of work of these artists are, or even the more mainstream question of how many tickets theyve sold. Instead, the artist must choose the art form that they practice, mention how many years theyve been working in the field, and indicate whether the art form in question is dying, or is still being performed, and thats all. You are now ready to be neatly fit into a shiny new compartment, when all you may have wanted to do in the first place was sing at an international festival for Hindustani musicians and meet new people there with whom you could talk about music.
Like us, if you cant tell what to judge from this minimal information, dont worry: the judges making these decisions probably really really know how to judge art from the questionnaire the artists have filled up. It doesnt matter that this form is even vaguer than what Alfred Nobel is believed to have said about the Nobel Prize for Literature it is to be given to the most outstanding work in an ideal direction even though we may all have different ideas of this ideal direction.
Please ignore the fact that when committees are given relatively much less power they get things rather garbled. Perhaps you have heard stories like this one in 2012, when the Bharatiya Jnanpeeth first gave Hindi novelist Gaurav Solanki a young writers award and praised his book, before refusing to publish it because its stories lacked true love and had siblings who talked about sex because this goes against the sanskaar of readers and asked him to change the stories. Gossip has it that the Jnanpeeth folks offered him the workaround of making it cousins rather than siblings. Solanki said no, thanks. But forget all that. This is going to be great, obviously. Its going to take the messy cliques, alliances, snobbery and affection of artistic communities and give it a good, robust system. It will be like an Aadhar for art, a biometrics card of the soul, an iris scan of emotions.
But maybe if youre wondering where to place paintings by Durgabai Vyam, Ravi Paranjape and Yusuf Arakkal, this categorisation will help you the painting by a woman who has an Outstanding grade will go above the man with the Promising grade, which will in turn go above the painting by a man with a Waiting grade. Dont worry about the troubling decisions the ministry will have to take if two people had the same Promising grade: would you then put them next to each other, or one above the other, and not next to someone with a lower grade. The ministry knows all. Also art after all maya hai.
I once met a writer of detective fiction who said in one breath that exams terrify her, even as she dismissed my worry about them as silly because they never test anything. And it is true that so many artists and writers are bad at exams and were waiting to be done with exams for ever. Now they will learn the reality (not to mention realism) because avoiding tuitions never helped anyone.
As a writer you must have read George Orwells Animal Farm, when the famous line that everybody quotes appears, All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others; and the pigs are seen walking around with whips like men used to, and Napoleon is seen strolling in the farm with a pipe in his mouth, wearing a black coat and leather leggings.
From now on some writers will be more equal than others.
Perhaps you are worried that nothing is mentioned about being able to move between the three grades either, its like youre stuck on the cultural map of India as a 23-year-old writer who has only won one award, and so youre part of the Waiting category, even when youre actually 40, and have received multiple writing fellowships and have published two books that you enjoyed writing more than other things youve written. This new system will only be as mysterious as trying to figure out what to wear to a book launch in Delhi, or once at the book launch, how to get featured in Mayank Austen Soofis blog (which in our grading system is already Outstanding).
In fact, as a writer you should be enthused by this tribute to probably one of your greatest sources of inspiration: Mother Russia. Back in the day, Russia also used to sensibly put all the writers in one colony. Imagine Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel all living next door to each other in government-built homes called dachas costing lakhs of rubles. Of course sometimes writers behaved badly and then they had to go live in Siberia in another kind of housing called gulag. But that is life, that is reality, that is all grist for the literary mill. Suffering is good for art.
The Ladies Finger is a leading online feminist magazine.
The wait for the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) examination candidates for their Final and Common Proficiency Test results will get over on Monday.
A positive result in the ICAI examinations is greatly coveted by the applicants, it is the one of the most difficult and prestigious examinations in India. In 2015, 1,28,916 appeared for the examinations, but only 32,619 examinees qualified the test. This means that only 25 percent of the people who appeared for the exam were able to clear it. A minimum of 30 percent is needed to qualify the exam.
The ICAI exam is divided into four categories Fundamentals of Accounting, General Economics, Quantitative Aptitude and Mercantile Laws with the weightage as 60, 50, 50 and 40 respectively.
This year, the exam was held in 3 centres abroad and in as many as 170 centres in the country.
According to Financial Express, students have been eagerly searching for exam results. However, it would be difficult for the students to be able to access the website since there is a surge in traffic that is expected. To be able to access the results, a candidate should have relevant details like official registration, roll number and date of birth, handy.
While reading their results candidates should be aware of the fact that the minimum pass percentage for each section is 30 percentage of total marks.
Students should be also aware of the fact that the minimum pass percentage for each section is 30 percentage of the total marks.
Candidates are advised to keep checking official ICAI website icai.nic.in for the latest information.
New Delhi: Senior IAS officer B K Prasad, who probed the Ishrat Jahan missing files case, has got two month-extension with Prime Minister Narendra Modi reducing the three-month period sought by Home Minister Rajnath Singh.
In a letter to Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha, Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi has said that finding Prasad's replacement will not be easy and changing the officer, who was recently in news for allegedly 'tutoring' a witness, will set the clock back by almost three months.
While seeking the three-month extension, he also said that the probe is "highly sensitive" and the report may be discussed in Parliament.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has then processed the request for Prasad's extension which was
approved by the Prime Minister for only two months till 31 July.
Prasad, a 1983 batch IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, was due to retire on 31 May. The government has recently appointed
Maharashtra cadre IAS officer Bipin Bihari Mallick as his replacement.
In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the issue of missing papers from the file dealing with the filing of
affidavit in Ishrat Jahan case, the Home Ministry had ordered an enquiry by Prasad on 14 March, this year. The panel has
submitted its report on 15 June.
"Since this is highly sensitive enquiry and there is all likelihood that the report will be discussed and analysed in
several forums including, perhaps, in Parliament. It is imperative that the enquiry may be completed by B
K Prasad himself, because to change the enquiry officer at this stage will set the clock back by almost three months.
Also, finding a replacement will not be easy; the officer doing this enquiry has to be fair-minded and with experience
of having worked in the MHA," Mehrishi has said in the letter written on 3 May, which also cited Prasad's retirement in that
month-end.
Considering these circumstances and the public interest involved, the Home Minister has approved the proposal for granting extension in service to Prasad for a period of three months, beyond 31 May, 2016, i.e. up to 31 August, 2016, the
Home Secretary had said and requested approval of the competent authority.
19-year-old Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed in an alleged fake encounter in Gujarat in 2004. The Gujarat Police had then claimed those killed were LeT terrorists and had gone there to assassinate the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
The papers, which disappeared from the Home Ministry, include the copy of an affidavit vetted by the then Attorney General and submitted in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 and the draft of the second affidavit vetted by the AG to which changes were made by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram.
Srinagar: Officially imposed curfew and a shutdown called by the separatists paralysed normal life for the eleventh consecutive day in the Valley on Monday.
Officials told IANS that Sunday was the first day without any civilian casualty since the violence engulfed the Valley on 9 July, following the killing of Hizbul Commander Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces on 8 July.
"A violent mob attacked a camp of the Rashtriya Rifles in Saderkot area of Bandipora district yesterday (Sunday) forcing the soldiers to open fire in self-defence. Four protesters were injured in the incident. Except for stray incidents of stone pelting at some places, the overall law and order situation remained calm yesterday (Sunday) across the Valley," a senior police officer told IANS.
Over a week long cycle of violence has left 40 protesters and two policemen dead in Kashmir.
Authorities have officially confirmed that newspaper owners were asked not to publish newspapers till 19 July.
Cable television services have, however, been resumed after service providers took off all Pakistan TV channels and two private Indian channels.
All mobile phone services including Internet and call facilities have been snapped across the Valley.
Limited call facility continued on post-paid cell phones provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
All schools, colleges and universities have been closed till 24 July.
All job interviews by the state Public Service Commission (PSC) have also been postponed.
Closure of the strategic Jammu-Srinagar National Highway for over a week has caused shortage of essential items in the Valley.
All supplies of essentials of life are routed into the landlocked Valley through this highway.
Train services between Baramulla town in the Valley and Bannihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended for the 11th day on Monday.
Separatist leaders continue to remain under house arrest and preventive detention in summer capital Srinagar.
The centre has rushed another 20 companies of paramilitary forces to assist the state government in maintaining law and order in the trouble-torn Valley.
Amritsar: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal cleaned utensils at a community kitchen as he and other Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders performed sewa (voluntary religious service) inside the Golden Temple complex on Monday.
Accompanied by senior party leaders, including Ashish Khetan, lawyer HS Phoolka, AAP MPs Bhagwant Mann and Sadhu Singh, actors and AAP members Gul Panag and Gurpreet Ghuggi and others, Kejriwal arrived at the Golden Temple complex, where the holiest of Sikh shrines, the Harmandar Sahib, is situated.
The move by Kejriwal to come here was to seek forgiveness for AAP's political gaffe after the party's 'Youth manifesto' carried a picture of Harmandar Sahib, popularly known as the Golden Temple, along with AAP election symbol of broom.
"While releasing the 'Youth Manifesto' of the party, we had committed some mistakes unintentionally. To seek forgiveness, we have done sewa at Darbar Sahib," Kejriwal, who remained inside the shrine complex for nearly one hour, told media after performing service at the shrine.
Sporting a white handkerchief to cover his head and with folded hands, Kejriwal went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the langar hall, the community kitchen which serves food to over one lakh people in a single day.
Kejriwal and others also partook of langar (community food).
The AAP, and Kejriwal, faced criticism from the Sikh community, Punjab's ruling Shiromani Akali Dal, Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and radical Sikh organisations for the goof-up. Protests were held against the AAP.
This was Kejriwal's second visit to the Sikh shrine within 15 days. He had begun his three-day Punjab tour on 3 July by offering prayers at the same shrine. It was immediately after his visit that Kejriwal released the party's controversial 'Youth manifesto' here, 250 km from Chandigarh.
AAP leader Ashish Khetan was also booked by the Punjab Police on charge of hurting religious sentiments of the Sikhs by equating the manifesto with Guru Granth Sahib, the Bible and the Gita. Apologies by Khetan and the AAP over both controversies were rejected by the Akali Dal, opposition Congress and the SGPC.
The AAP gaffe gave political fodder to the Akali Dal, Congress and others to corner the party just months ahead of assembly elections in Punjab which are likely to be held in February next year. The AAP is posing serious challenge to both parties in Punjab.
Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his deputy and son Sukhbir Singh Badal had accused the AAP leaders of "hurting the religious sentiments of the Sikhs" through their actions.
The Chief Ministerhad said the "atrocious act" of displaying a picture of the temple on the cover of the AAP 'Youth manifesto' along with a picture of broom was "blasphemy".
Akali Dal President Sukhbir Badal too said that the AAP and its leadership was a "bunch of outsiders who don't have any inkling of the culture and traditions of Punjab."
Punjab Congress president Amarinder Singh had questioned Kejriwal for seeking forgiveness 15 days after committing the mistake.
Mumbai: NIA on Monday filed a charge sheet against the chief recruiter for the banned Islamic State terror group in India Shafi Armar alias Yusuf-Al-Hindi and three others for allegedly being involved in various terror activities in the country.
The NIA filed the charge sheet against Armar, Rizwan Ahmed, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and Ayaz Mohammed before a special court here under various sections of Indian Penal Code and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
While Armar and Mohammed are absconding, the two others are in judicial custody.
The NIA said it found during the probe that Armar and his three accomplices hatched a conspiracy between July and December 2015 to "influence, instigate, motivate and radicalise the young vulnerable Muslim youth from Malwani area of Malad, Mumbai, to join the ISIS."
All the four had used numerous social networking platforms for waging jihad by violent means to attract the attention of like-minded persons and motivate vulnerable youngsters to indulge in terror activities for the banned international terrorist organisation, Islamic State, with an intent to threaten the integrity of the nation.
According to the NIA, Ayaz Mohammed went to Iraq via Afghanistan and joined the Islamic State. He was in contact with Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and a few other youths from Malwani, whom he tried to radicalise and motivate to join the Islamic State.
Sayyed tried to spread his network and motivated youths to participate in the activities of the Islamic State in India, and for this purpose, he was in close contact with Rizwan 'Nayab Ameer' of the organisation which was affiliated to the Islamic State.
Rizwan Ahmed, who was also a member of SIMI, Jundul Khilafa Al Hind (JKH), Indian Mujahideen and Ansar-Ut-Tauheed (AUT), had made elaborate preparations and went to Chennai for collecting money for Jihad.
NIA said they prepared fake identity cards and used assumed names to conceal their identities. They extensively used different social media platforms like Facebook, Trillian, WeChat, WhatsApp, Surespot and Telegram, to communicate among themselves, besides exchanging e-mails.
The NIA said there was evidence to establish that Armar was the on-line handler in this conspiracy and was involved in motivating and radicalising the "vulnerable" Muslim youths all over the country.
A resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka, Armar was believed to have been killed in a US drone attack in March this year but the news proved wrong after he started getting in touch with youths again in May this year.
Srinagar: Ruling PDP MLA from Pulwama, Mohammad Khalil Band was injured in an attack by a stone pelting mob in his native district late last Sunday night, police said on Monday.
Band was on his way to Srinagar at around 11 pm when a mob attacked his vehicle with stones at Prechu in Pulwama, 26 km from here.
The driver lost control of the vehicle, which resulted in the car turning turtle, a police official said.
He said the MLA was injured in the incident. He has been admitted to Army's base hospital for treatment.
The personal security guard and the driver of the MLA suffered minor injuries.
Kashmir has been rocked by violence following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on 8 July. Thirty-nine people have been killed and over 3,160 injured in clashes between security personnel and protesters who have attacked police stations, vehicles, pickets and army camps.
Jodhpur: The Rajasthan High Court on Monday rejected the interim bail plea of self-styled godman Asaram, facing rape charge, on health ground, saying he did not have any serious ailment.
Asaram, 74, had moved the bail application last month citing a medical report by an ayurvedic doctor mentioning 12 different types of disease and had sought the permission to go to Kerala for proper treatment.
In her order, Justice Nirmal Jeet Kaur observed that he did not have any serious health problem citing a medical report prepared by a medical board, said PC Solanki, counsel for the victim girl.
"The high court had asked for a detailed medical report by a medical board. Based on the report, which did not mention Asaram to be afflicted with any serious disease, the high court rejected his bail plea," he said.
Solanki said that the court decided to issue a guideline to the state government for the treatment of Asaram so that all the recommended diagnostic tests are done and medication ensured.
The court also sought a progress report on the trial in the case for the past two-and-a-half years, while listing for hearing a regular bail application of Asaram on 26 July.
He was sent to jail in August 2013 for allegedly sexually assaulting a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
In the latest development in the Sunanda Pushkar murder case, sources in the Delhi police revealed that Pakistani columnist Mehr Tarar was questioned by the Special Investigation team (SIT) in the last week of February. Tarar was questioned on the fight that ensued between her and Pushkar sometime in 2014 January or February.
Sunanda Pushkar death case: Pak columnist Mehr Tarar was questioned by Delhi police SIT in last week of February- Delhi Police Sources ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2016
Tarar was questioned about the bitter fight that had broken out between her and Sunanda in Jan/Feb 2014: Delhi Police Sources ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2016
According to The Times of India (TOI), Tarar had come to Delhi a few months back and was questioned for about three hours in a five-star hotel in Central Delhi, after the police requested her cooperation in the investigation.
Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, was found dead in Leela Palace Hotel on 17 January, 2014. Just a day before her death, Pushkar engaged in a Twitter spat with Tarar upset over the text and tweet messages shared between her husband and Tarar.
A series of tweets had sprung up in January on Tharoor's timeline claiming several hyperbolic forms of love for Tharoor, on his own Twitter handle. Soon, Tharoor had declared that his account has been hacked and will be non-functional for a few days. Just when the dust was about to start settling, Pushkar had declared that neither her or her husband's account has been hacked. In fact, it was she, who had logged into Tharoor's account and posted messages that Tarar had sent her husband to tell the world that her husband was being stalked. The Pakistani journalist had later denied having an affair with Tharoor.
Tarar's name also came up in the statements made by several people connected to Pushkar. The TOI reported that journalist Nalini Singh told cops and the magistrate that Pushkar feared that Tharoor was going to marry Tarar and wanted to retrieve BBM messages exchanged between Tharoor and Tarar.
Sources in the Delhi police, however, told TOI that Tarar denied having an extra-marital affair with Tharoor.
New Delhi: A 21-year-old Dalit student is recovering in hospital after being gang raped by a group of five men, the same five charged with sexually assaulting her three years earlier, a police officer said on Monday.
The police in Haryana were hunting for the five men, accused of abducting the student from outside her college last Wednesday, before drugging and raping her in a car.
The girl was found unconscious in bushes on the side of a highway along the Haryana-Delhi border, in the country's latest shocking sexual attack.
Haryana's deputy superintendent of police, Pushpa Khatri, said the student, who is still in hospital, has identified all five men two of whom are currently on bail awaiting trial for raping her in 2013.
"She has identified the five accused and two of them were involved in the gangrape of the student in Bhiwandi district in 2013," Khatri told AFP. "We have formed several teams to arrest the accused."
The woman's family has accused the five of threatening them in the lead up to Wednesday's attack, demanding that they withdraw the case lodged after the 2013 assault.
"The accused were constantly demanding us to compromise outside the court. They even offered us a hefty amount for settlement. But we didn't agree," the victim's brother was quoted by Hindustan Times as saying.
The family alleged they were forced to move to Rohtak district in the state from a neighbouring district after the 2013 attack because of harassment by the accused.
On Sunday evening, Dalit members held a protest in Rohtak to demand justice for the victim.
The fatal gangrape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in 2012 had shone a global spotlight on frightening levels of violence against women in India. It also led to major reform of India's rape laws, including speeding up of trials and increased punishments for offenders, but horrific attacks continue to be reported in the media on a daily basis.
The most recent official figures show that 36,735 rapes were reported across the country in 2014, although activists say the true number is likely much higher because of the social stigma attached to sexual crimes.
Warsaw: Gay and transgender Christians will set up a ministry during World Youth Day, when Pope Francis is expected to meet hundreds of thousands of young Catholics in southern Poland later this month.
Leaders of the Warsaw-based Faith And Rainbow LGBT organisation say they want to minister to the thousands of gay, lesbian and transgender people attending the event by setting up a "LGBT Pilgrim's Haven".
"We want to create a space in which they will feel safe and where they will find answers to issues facing them," organiser Misza Czerniak told the Monday edition of Poland's Rzeczpospolita broadsheet daily.
Organisers however told AFP their initiative is not officially a part of World Youth Day, running 26-31 June in and around Krakow, southern Poland.
The group will set up the "Pilgrim's Haven" in a cafe in Krakow's Kazimierz Jewish quarter.
American Jesuit priest Jim Mulcahy, described on the group's Facebook page as "an experienced pastor and spiritual father of many LGBT believers" in Eastern Europe will be among featured speakers.
Pope Francis will spend five days at the event, arriving on 27 July and concluding his visit on 31 July.
Earlier in his papacy, Francis famously remarked "Who am I to judge?" about homosexuality but in April refused to recognise homosexual couples in new Church guidelines on family life.
Francis noted that bishops who reviewed Catholic teaching on same sex couples at synods in 2014 and 2015 had observed that "there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family."
While the guidelines also expressed opposition to "every sign of unjust discrimination" based on sexual orientation, they include no positive language about gay relationships.
Held once every three years, this year's World Youth Day will be the 31st edition of the event, initiated in Rome in 1986 by John Paul II.
The last was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, shortly after Francis' election as pope.
Ahmedabad: In the wake of recent resignation of Union Minister Najma Heptulla due to the undeclared age bar
of 75 years for ministers put by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now speculations are rife here on the fate of Gujarat Chief
Minister Anandiben Patel, who will touch the line in November.
Patel, who took over as Chief Minister in May 2014 from Modi, will cross the age bar of 75 years on 21 November this
year as she was born in 1941.
"This question about Patel, when she turns 75 is on everybody's mind," said a BJP leader on the condition of anonymity. "Speculations are on if she will be asked to quit or will she be an exception and allowed to continue for one more year
till 2017 Assembly polls," another leader, who also refused to be named, said.
Heptulla, who crossed 75 years was reportedly asked to submit her resignation due to the age bar. Earlier, a couple of ministers in Madhya Pradesh including senior leader Babulal Gaur and Sartaj Singh were dropped from the state cabinet by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan due to the age bar.
In 2014, when the Narendra Modi government came to power, the age bar had cancelled out ministerial berths for senior
leaders like L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Shanta Kumar and Yashwant Sinha.
Sinha had in the past remarked that BJP has "declared brain dead on May 26, 2014" its leaders above the age of 75. Under the leadership of Patel, who has been a minister in the BJP government since 1998 and CM from 2014, the BJP for the first time in the post-Narendra Modi era in Gujarat is facing a tough challenge from its opponents.
Elections in the state are due in the later part of 2017. Patel had to face defeat as BJP recently fared badly in the rural civic bodies polls in December 2015.
This was considered as a major loss for her as opposition Congress was able to win polls after almost 25 years in the state.
She also had to face the fierce Patel community quota agitation, one of the factors which contributed to BJP losing in rural local bodies polls, while retaining urban areas.
Opposition Congress has also leveled allegations of corruption against her. No BJP leader was ready to speak on the subject officially saying that this could be "just a speculation".
The Congress, however believes that this rule is followed as per the convenience of top leadership of the BJP. "This is the internal matter of BJP. But, we believe that this rule is followed as per the convenience of the party leadership. If they want to keep someone then they do it and if somebody is to be removed the rule is followed," Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi said.
"Due to UP elections they have not taken the resignation of Union minister Kalraj Mishra. However, when they wanted to keep Advaniji and Murli Manohar Joshi out of the cabinet they followed that rule," he added.
Rampur: Two Uttar Pradesh BJP leaders on Monday lashed out at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for accusing the Narendra Modi dispensation of turning the Union government's relationship with the state government into an "India-Pakistan situation."
"Whatever Kejriwal has stated correctly placed him in the category of the head of the enemy country," said Surya Prakash Paul, general secretary of BJP's western Uttar Pradesh unit, and Avdhesh Sharma, general secretary of its youth wing.
Kejriwal, also the national convenor of AAP, had said in the first edition of his 'Talk to AK' show yesterday that his government would have achieved four times of what he managed in 17 months had the Centre not put "obstacles" and "if they would not have made this an India-Pakistan situation."
"(Kejriwal) keeps one eye closed towards laudable acts of the Union government whereas the open eye sorts out certain points to show the Union government as his foe," they said.
The duo said: "Pakistan conspires to destabilise India and Kejriwal attempts to weaken the BJP."
Kejriwal had alleged that the Centre was trying to "break" the AAP government in Delhi and that BJP president Amit Shah was micromanaging the CBI, adding, "but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end."
The BJP leaders said such utterances "emphatically" give an impression that the former tax-man was "losing his balance of mind and decency in behaviour".
They asked Kejriwal to clarify whether he spent "hundreds of crores of rupees on advertisements mostly for self-publicity from his own pocket or from party's fund?"
The duo termed Delhi government's measures like the "odd- even" scheme and its promise to provide free wi-fi a "ruse" to save face because of his government's failures.
"Kejriwal should remember that Delhi is an international city hence sensitive issues cannot be handed over to the state," they said, referring to his promise to conduct an "opinion poll" on full-statehood for Delhi and bringing subjects such as police and land under the jurisdiction of the state government.
New Delhi: Under opposition attack over the unrest in the Kashmir Valley, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said his government has nothing to hide and would take everybody into confidence while dealing with it.
He made these remarks at a meeting of the NDA constituents which was preceded by a meet of the BJP Parliamentary Party Executive where he said the government will talk to all parties on the GST bill and seek to build a consensus for its passage.
Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut told reporters that Modi touched upon the issue of ongoing unrest in Kashmir and sought views of the BJP allies.
"He said that the government had nothing to hide over the matter and it will take everybody into confidence," Raut said.
The Sena leader said he asked the Prime Minister to hold "chai pe charcha" (talk over tea) with the people of Kashmir. He said the people did not like his 'chai pe charcha' with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif even though his intentions may have been good.
Sena has had uneasy ties with BJP and often attacked the Modi government over a host of issues.
Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu told reporters that Modi explained to NDA leaders the importance of the GST bill and the need to pass it.
"All parties (of NDA) are together on the GST bill. The PM explained to them its importance and the need to pass it," he said.
The government had made similar points the all-party meet yesterday.
New Delhi: Former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, who has been projected as the Congress' chief ministerial candidate for the Uttar Pradesh elections, on Monday described Ghulam Nabi Azad as the Amit Shah of Congress.
"If BJP has Amit Shah, then Congress has Ghulam Nabi Azad," said Dikshit.
Azad is one of the senior-most leaders of the Congress and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. Amit Shah is the BJP President.
Dikshit also said that Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra should campaign in the state and the party would "benefit from it".
She said Priyanka "is a popular leader and she should come for campaigning. Congress will benefit if Priyanka campaigns for the party in UP".
In an interview to ETV, Dikshit when asked about the main agenda in the Uttar Pradesh elections, said: "The present Akhilesh Yadav government's work has discouraged the public. Due to this, people are not going to give him another chance. For us, only development will be the agenda."
Dikshit also said she would concentrate only on campaigning now and no decision has been taken on contesting the election.
Asked about party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's role and whether he'll be elevated to the post of party President, Dikshit said: "He should be given more time. Party High Command will take a decision on whether Rahul Gandhi will be made the party President or not."
Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dikshit said: "Modi's popularity has decreased in last two years and he has failed in fulfilling the election promises."
"It doesn't befit a Prime Minister to make comments like Congress-free India. Such statements don't come in favour of a Prime Minister," she added.
Karnataka minister KJ George resigned on Monday hours after a court in Madikeri ordered Karnataka Police to file an FIR against him in connection with the suicide of Deputy SP MK Ganapathy.
BJP leader BS Yeddyurappa reacted to George's resignation and said that the govnerment of Karnataka had not listened to the voice of the people.
Yeddyurappa also said that George's resignation was not enough and called for a free and fair CBI investigation into the Ganapathy suicide case, adding that he will continue agitating against the Karnataka government.
The court order by Additional Judicial Magistrate First Class Annapurneshwari had come on a private criminal complaint filed by the deceased police officer's son Nehal Ganapathy requesting the court to direct the Kodagu police to take up investigation against the minister and two officers for allegedly abetting his father's suicide.
Ganapathys wife Pavana and Nehal had approached the court, stating that the police had rejected a complaint lodged by them with the Kushalanagar police on 10 July against George and IPS officials AM Prasad and Pranab Mohanty.
In his complaint, Nehal had said his father had made a "dying declaration" naming George and the two officers and their acts amounted to "abetting suicide".
Appealing to the court to take cognizance of the offence punishable under IPC section 306 read with Section 34, the complaint had also claimed the accused were highly placed and influential people who had prevailed upon police from taking action against them.
Nehal's counsel MT Nanaiah had said the investigating officers would have to question George and the two police officers and take a call on whether to arrest them depending on the probe.
Reacting to the court's directive in Bengaluru, Opposition BJP leader Jagadish Shettar had said the minister should resign immediately and the two IPS officers be suspended to pave the way for an impartial probe.
Ganapathy, 52, was found hanging from the ceiling fan in a room at a lodge in Madikeri on 7 July, prior to which he gave an interview to a local TV channel, stating the minister and AM Prasad (IG-Intelligence) and Pranab Mohanty (IGP- Lokayukta) would be responsible "if anything happens to me".
(With inputs from PTI)
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"I will not accept that this problem is just one created by Pakistan or separatists," he said.
"You cannot escape the issue by just blaming Pakistan for the problems in Kashmir," he said. "Just because of good tourism in one season in Kashmir, you cannot think you solved the problem. If you do not pay attention to this problem, it will turn into a law and order problem."
"There must be a conspiracy being hatched by Pakistan. But you have to look at the measures you are taking to counter it," Yechury told the government in Rajya Sabha.
In response, a beleaguered Arun Jaitley said that BJP will take strict action against Dayashankar Singh. "I should tell Mayawati ji that the party shares her grief over this issue, I will look into this matter, we stand with her...I am personally hurt that a BJP party person used such derogatory words against Mayawati," he said.
"This is not only a woman's issue. This is a man's issue," said TMC MP Derek O'Brien.
Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury stressed on the fact that the man making such remarks was none other than the vice president of the UP unit of BJP and demanded that he be arrested. "A man speaks with such language on the day both houses are discussing issues on violence on Dalits?" she said.
"The nation will not forgive BJP for this, especially with what is going in Gujarat," ANI quoted Mayawati as saying. "There are wars of thoughts and ideas in the House, but never have I used derogatory words against anyone ever," she said.
"The insulting words used against me are against all of womankind," said Mayawati. "Dayashankar Singh should be arrested. Otherwise, if in response to this people get violent, it will not be on my conscience," she added.
UP BJP vice president Dayashankar Singh's cheap remark against BSP chief Mayawati created uproar in the Parliament as Opposition leaders attacked the Modi government over the issue.
Rajya Sabha adjourned till 11 am on Thursday due to uproar over BJP leader's remark against Mayawati
In response, a beleaguered Arun Jaitley said that BJP will take strict action against Dayashankar Singh. "I should tell Mayawati ji that the party shares her grief over this issue, I will look into this matter, we stand with her...I am personally hurt that a BJP party person used such derogatory words against Mayawati," he said.
"This is not only a woman's issue. This is a man's issue," said TMC MP Derek O'Brien.
Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury stressed on the fact that the man making such remarks was none other than the vice president of the UP unit of BJP and demanded that he be arrested. "A man speaks with such language on the day both houses are discussing issues on violence on Dalits?" she said.
"The nation will not forgive BJP for this, especially with what is going in Gujarat," ANI quoted Mayawati as saying. "There are wars of thoughts and ideas in the House, but never have I used derogatory words against anyone ever," she said.
"The insulting words used against me are against all of womankind," said Mayawati. "Dayashankar Singh should be arrested. Otherwise, if in response to this people get violent, it will not be on my conscience," she added.
UP BJP vice president Dayashankar Singh's cheap remark against BSP chief Mayawati created uproar in the Parliament as Opposition leaders attacked the Modi government over the issue.
Rajya Sabha adjourned till 11 am on Thursday due to uproar over BJP leader's remark against Mayawati
"On one hand, BJP did a lot of things to celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti and assured Dalits that they will do a lot to celebrate it. On the other hand, Dalits still do not have reservation rights in the private sector," she added.
"The legal rights which Ambedkar created for the backward sections of the society will only reach the society when honest work is done for providing those rights to them," she said.
"Even after the country got independence, whether it is Congress rule or BJP rule, the sad truth is that the Dalits are still suffering," Mayawati said in the Rajya Sabha.
"There is an urgent need to change the mindset of the major political parties of the country towards Dalits," she said. "I have to tell the Union government that this is a serious matter. I ask the government to give justice to the Dalit victims in Gujarat. It is not enough to just send the Gujarat CM to meet them. Action needs to be taken against authorities which were negligent. They should be arrested," she said.
"In the name of protection of cows, a lot of unfair things are being done. Injustice against Dalits is being done in the name of protection of cows," said Mayawati in the Rajya Sabha.
Crimes against Dalits being done in the name of cow protection, says Mayawati
"Instead of making Dalits a political weapon, Congress, BJP and other parties should be reminded that they should rise above petty politics and work for the development of backward sections," she said.
"The victims often do not get justice in case of a CID probe," said Mayawati in the Rajya Sabha. "Gujarat government did not act quickly enough. It was only when the media picked up this issue that some action was taken."
"This Una incident case should run in a fast track court. We also demand that one of the judges should be a Dalit," Mayawati said. "Forget about Dalits getting justice, even their FIR is not filed many times and the latest example is the Una (Gujrat) incident," she also said.
After the Rajya Sabha hotly debated this issue, Kurien called for adjournment of the House till 12 pm.
Deputy Chariman PJ Kurien denies that the House is taking the subject lightly. Rajya Sabha is currently debating Aam Aadmi Party lawmaker Bhagwant Mann's video of him entering Parliament by crossing several security layers. Mann then posted it on social media, inviting attack from MPs across party line, who termed his act as a security breach.
In the video, which went viral, Mann was seen showing entry gate through which MPs enter Parliament House and saying how strong is the security. "The car is registered with the Lok Sabha. It has a censor, which has the vehicle details. As soon as so you come near the gate, the censor identifies the car and announces the name and number of the car," Mann says in the video with him crossing several layers of the security.
On the fifth day of the Monsoon Session (Friday), Aam Aadmi Party MLA Bhagwant Mann's filmed a video entering Parliament by crossing several security layers, which eventually caused uproar in both the Houses. Mann, who posted it on social media, invited attack from MPs across party line, who termed his act as a security breach.
As soon as the House assembled, she informed it about the action being taken on the issue which had led to the adjournment of Lok Sabha proceedings on July 22. "The inquiry committee shall inquire into the serious security implications and related aspects.... (and) suggest suitable remedial measures to avoid recurrence of such incidents in future and recommend appropriate action in the matter," the Speaker said.
The member is "advised not to attend the sittings of the House" until a decision is taken in the matter, Mahajan said. Mann was not present in the House.
The panel has also been asked to "suggest remedial measures" so that such episodes are not repeated.
Mahajan has formed the nine member panel headed by BJP MP Kirit Somaiya which includes Anandrao Adsul (Shiv Sena), Meenakshi Lekhi, Satya Pal Singh (both BJP), B Mahtab (Biju Janata Dal), Ratna De Nag (Trinamool) and K. C. Venugopal (Congress) and other members.
Therefore, the "act of the member" has put the security of the Parliament in peril, she said. Mahajan said she had consulted leaders of all political parties and everyone supported her actions on this issue.
Describing Parliament as "sanctum sanctorum" of democracy, Mahajan recalled that on 13 December, 2001, security personnel had sacrificed their lives protecting the parliament and after that entire security system was reviewed and overhauled.
It put "security of the parliament in peril", Mahajan added. Mann has been asked to appear before the panel by 10.30 am tomorrow and make his submission.
Addressing the Lok Sabha as soon as it reassembled after the weekend break, Mahajan said taking audio video footage of security zones in the parliament by Punjab's Sangrur MP Mann on July 21 and putting them on social networking site was improper.
"The act of the member of audio-visual recording of the Parliament and posting it on the social media puts the security of Parliament in peril," the Speaker said, adding that several members had expressed concern over the issue on Friday last.
The panel, chaired by BJP member Kirit Somaiya, has been asked to submit its report by August 3, while Mann has time till tomorrow morning to submit his explanation to the committee.
Acting tough, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan today said AAP MP Bhagwant Mann's videography of the Parliament House complex had put its security "in peril" and asked him not to attend the House till a decision is taken on the matter while setting up a nine-member panel to probe the issue.
The Lok Sabha is likely to discuss The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill today. Apart from this, the Lower House is also slated to discuss The Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Bill.
Sasikala Pushpa began crying in the House over the issue of attacks on women in the country. She has alleged that she was harassed and was being forced to quit her post.
"So what if we disagreed with you? This is not the country we are used to living in," O'Brien said. "The Prime Minister needs to come in the House and say that we can live in the India we know, the India of unity and diversity."
"For Rs 15, they (Dalits) are being killed because they are Dalits. I am a gau sevak. But in the name of gau sevaks, don't cross the line. This is a sitaution which has gone beyond the border of this country. Since they are taking these decisions, they must listen to what the UN had to say about this country," he said.
"The curb on religious fundamentalism, this is a dangerous situation. If it happens and happens and happens, it is a decision. This is a decision of this government. Otherwise, the Defence Minister would not have said what he said yesterday," TMC MP Derek O'Brien said, referring to Parrikar's remarks that Aamir Khan needs to be taught a "lesson" because of his remarks on intolerance.
An angry Parrikar responded by saying that he did not take the name of any person in the video.
"Since the BJP government came to power, they targeted Muslims first. Now, they are committing atrocities against the Dalits. The Prime Minister should come to the Parliament and clarify on what is happening," Mayawati said.
CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury responded to Parrikar and said, "What he said is objectionable. That cannot be acceptable. Tomorrow, are you going to threaten me? If he is raksha mantri, kiska raksha ho raha hai?"
Defence Minister Parrikar responded to the uproar in the Rajya Sabha over his remarks against Aamir Khan and said, "Let them see the video themselves and make up their minds."
"We should think about the respect for women. In Bareilly, a teacher was abducted during daytime. This is not right. The government should speak. Why is the government silent?" she said.
"There are rapes taking place against Dalit women everywhere in the country. The government should take this matter seriously," Mayawati said.
Naqvi agreed with her and said the government was ready for a discussion.
"I am really embarrassed for standing here and talking about the same issue once again, even after the Nirbhaya gangrape...I want a discussion on women's protection. I do not care which place. I do not want politicising of this issue," Jaya Bachchan said in the Rajya Sabha.
An emotional Jaya Bachchan got up in the Rajya Sabha and demanded a discussion on the issue of safety of women.
"In view of seriousness of matter, Bhagwant Mann is further advised not to attend the sessions of Parliament for further two weeks," she said.
"The chairperson (of the committee) has sought extension of time for further two weeks. I have accepted the request for extension," Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said.
On the issue of AAP MP Bhagwant Mann being barred from the Parliament for making a video of the Parliament House complex, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that the committee probing this issue had asked for more time.
Bhagwant Mann not to attend Parliament for two more weeks
"This legislation will only be passed after a serious discussion. I hope the Finance Minister passes the Bill not on the strength of his numbers, but on the basis of logic," Chidambaram said.
"Government tried to pass the GST Bill without the support of the principal Opposition and I am happy they failed," he said.
"Many issues are still outstanding issues and still need to be resolved. We had earlier tried to pass the GST Bill with the support of the Opposition and we failed," he said.
"I welcome the friendly tone of the Finance Minister's speech. I think the tone and approach has changed over the last few weeks," Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said.
There are still outstanding issues: Chidambaram on GST in Rajya Sabha
"The standard rate of GST should not exceed 18," he said.
"People of India expect low indirect taxes. There are many voices in the government which speak for the corporate, but someone must speak for the people. I am doing that," Chidambaram said in the Rajya Sabha.
"When this Bill is passed today, we will prepare for the next stage of the debate, which is the Central GST Bill. I want an assurance from the Finance Minister....This is a very important legislation. I want an assurance that when that Bill is brought, that will be brought as a Financial Bill and not as a Money Bill," Chidambaram said.
"Persuade all parties and sections of the people that a standard of 18 percent is the most appropriate," he added.
"The worry that we have is creeping taxation. But that is what Parliament is for. Taxation is the exclusive power of the Parliament. It is ultimately Parliament which calls the shots in taxes," he said.
"I, on behalf of my party, loudly and clearly demand that the GST rate should not exceed 18 percent," Chidambaram said in the Rajya Sabha.
Bill in next stage of GST debate should be brought as a Financial Bill: Chidambaram
Chidambaram warns that a rate too high, something like 23 percent, will be inflationary. He insists that the Bill needs to be passed as a finance Bill. The critical point we shouldnt be miss here is that the Congress is pitching for 18 percent standard GST rate and isnt ready to give up on this point in any case.
This comment is crucial since the NDA government has not yet arrived on a single rate. Chidambaram attacks the Narendra Modi government, saying it does not care about the problems of the common people. Chidambaram stresses on the point that the rate should be changed only with the permission of Parliament, and thus makes Congress compromise formula that the GST rate should be included in the GST Bill, though his party is willing to compromise on the earlier demand that the rate should be included in the constitution.
According to Firstpost Financial Editor Dinesh Unnikrishnan, P Chidambaram has hit the core point in his speech the final GST rate. Chidambaram positions Congress as the voice of poor and emphasises on the fact that standard GST rate should not exceed 18 percent on the lines of what governments chief economic advisor, Arvind Subrmanian, suggested.
"It (GST) violates states' autonomy. It results in permanent revenue loss to the state of Tamil Nadu. We strongly oppose this Bill," AIADMK MP A Navaneethakrishnan said in the Rajya Sabha.
"We have moved an amendment that the compensation should be for at least 5 years," he added.
"Tamil Nadu will lose Rs 9270 crore because of GST. This is not a small amount," he said.
"Till date, the revenue-neutral rate has not been fixed by the government," he said, adding that this was a problem in the GST Bill.
"Petroleum and petroleum products must be kept outside GST permanently. We can save our people only then," he said. "It is a well-known fact that Tamil Nadu is a manufacturing state. It is also known that this method of taxation is destination-based. We strongly oppose that," he said.
He then went on to elaborate on the changes which AIADMK wanted in the GST Bill.
"GST has different implications for different states," he said.
"The composition of the GST Council is not fair. The weightage of each state's vote should be in proportion to their representation in the country," said the AIADMK MP in the Rajya Sabha.
"Now let me tell you about the ping pong match," O'Brien said
"I'm feeling like a teenager in the presence of these senior lawyers," O'Brien said. "There is the politics of the Bill. GST can also be interpreted as the Girgit Samjhauta Tax," TMC MP Derek O'Brien said in the Rajya Sabha.
TMC MP Derek O'Brien has always been dramatic in his speeches, and his speech during the GST Bill is a perfect example.
The money has to first come from Centre to states and then from states to local bodies. If the availability of funds to local bodies gets delayed, that can seriously hamper functioning of local bodies, Patel cites. In a larger context, this problem is not for MCGB alone. It would apply to all big and small local bodies across the country in the GST regime. Patels remarks suggest the magnitude of challenge the Modi government has while implementing the revolutionary tax regime.
Patel raises the challenge of GST implementation. Under the GST regime, when various indirect taxes including sales tax, VAT and Octroi get consolidated in one uniform tax rate, will large local bodies such as MCGB get funds on time for its daily functioning? Patel asks.
Firstpost Financial Editor Dinesh Unnikrishnan says that NCP Rajya Sabha MP Praful Patel raises an interesting case of states within the states, citing the example of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGB), which under Octroi alone garners about Rs 8000 crore to Rs 9000 crore per annum.
"The Prime Minister should come to the House apologise to the nation. If he cannot come, we will be happy even if Finance Minister Jaitley apologises," Budania said. "It was Congress which forced you to follow the right path of this Bill."
"At that time, the then Gujarat CM had said that this Bill is against the welfare of the nation. Today, the same man who is now PM, said that this Bill is benefitial for the nation," he said.
"When the Congress had brought this Bill to the Parliament, then BJP had protested against it," said Narendra Budania, Congress MP from Rajasthan.
PM Modi should apologise to the nation for his U-turn on GST Bill: Congress in Rajya Sabha
"We have given this notice for discussion to wake up the government. It is unfortunate that the Taj of Hindustan is burning but the central government cannot feel the heat. Which kind of heat will wake up the Kashmir government?" Azad said.
"Today, it has been 30 days since curfew was imposed in Jammu and Kashmir. I do not think that any state in India has seen curfew for 30 days since Independence," Congress leader Azad said.
It has been 30 days of curfew in Kashmir: Ghulam Nabi Azad in RS
"Please call for an all-party meeting and send a delegation to Kashmir," he said.
"This cannot be solved through law and order machinery," he said. "The silence of the Prime Minister is more eloquent than words. He is sending the message that the government does not care about the situation in Kashmir."
"This is one of the most grave situations I have risen in to speak. I have not seen continuous curfew for 30 days in my life. How can we remain silent? More than 1000 incidents of firing have been reported in a month. More than 8000 have been injured. 60 are dead. It is inhuman and criminal. Why are we using pellet guns? I am told that even Israel does not use pellet guns against Palestinians," CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury said.
Congress walks out of Lok Sabha in protest against violence faced by Dalits
"If you (BJP) were not opposing this Bill at that time, this Bill would have been passed two years ago. So, you are actually responsible for delaying the Parliament passing this Bill, but we are taking the blame," he said.
"Why was it that in 2011, some ministers who are sitting on that side were opposing this Bill?" Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said in the Lok Sabha.
You were responsible for delaying the GST Bill: Congress tells govt in Lok Sabha
"Today, the Parliament is going to take a big step for the freedom from tax terrorism," he said. "Some people will know the condition of taxation in our country," he added.
"Today is 8 August. On this day many years ago, Mahatma Gandhi had moved the nation with 'Bharat choro' slogan," PM Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
Parliament going to take big step for freedom from tax terrorism: PM Modi in Lok Sabha
"GST means Great Step Towards Transformation. It means Great Steps Towards Transparency. 'Ek Bharat, sreshth Bharat' is everyone's dream," Modi said.
"Therefore, who won and who lost is not a matter of debate," the Prime Minister further said.
"But the credit for this Bill does not belong to one party. It belongs to the culture of Indian democracy," Modi said.
"It is true that someone created this Bill while someone else nurtured it," he said. "Just as someone gave birth to Krishna and someone else raised him," he said.
"I thank all political parties involved for this step," said PM Modi in Lok Sabha.
"The most important requirement was the creation of trust between Centre and the states. The most important thing was to not decide this on the basis of sheer numbers. That is why I have earlier said that democracy is not just about numbers," he said.
"We were successful in taking care of a lot of flaws with the GST Bill. 'Ek manch, ek manth, ek marg, ek manzil' is the mantra behind GST which all of us have experienced," the PM said.
"Sometimes, there were doubts about the GST. When I was the CM, even I had doubts about GST. And today, because of seeing GST continuously as a CM, my viewpoint changed when I viewed it as Prime Minister," Modi said.
"All Centre and states need to unite to create a mechanism for Ek Bharat," PM Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
I had different view of GST because I looked at it earlier from the point of view of a CM: PM Modi in Lok Sabha
"A message will go to the people through GST that the consumer is the king," Modi said. "GST gives a guarantee of security to small traders and businessmen. It will result in economic growth."
"Despite our differences, we made efforts to take GST forward," he said. "A uniformity in the processing of taxation will come through GST."
"In the entire discussion of GST, none of us used it as a platform for politics. We rose above politics for the welfare of the nation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
GST will send the message that the consumer is the king: PM Modi in LS
"Even during the all-party meeting, I had said that the credit for the GST Bill goes to all political parties," the Prime Minister said.
"It is a matter of great strength for Indian democracy that all of us are making efforts to take this forward together," he said.
"It is also true that we need to have IT-preparedness and legal preparedness. In the world, even the countries which are praised for their democracy find it tough to deal with Bills," he said.
"Because of GST, the taxpayer will realise that he will benefit from honesty. Therefore, we will succeed in bringing down the generation of black money," Modi said.
"There will be data integration. Because of a strong cross-checking mechanism, a seamless method which will help in catching any wrongdoing will be created," the PM said.
"GST will help in curbing corruption and black money," Modi said. "Corruption will move towards zero because of GST," he said.
"When something happens in Africa, the Prime Minister tweets about it. But when the Taj of India is burning, the heat is not reaching the central government," he added.
"We were told that he spoke on Kashmir issue in Madhya Pradesh because the CM told him to do so. This shows that the Parliament means nothing to the PM and he would not have spoken on the Kashmir issue if the Chief Minister had not asked him to do so," he said.
"This is the fourth time we are asking the Prime Minister to provide a statement in the House," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the Rajya Sabha.
PM spoke on Kashmir in Madhya Pradesh just because the CM told him to do so: Azad in RS
"When you truly feel pain from the heart, it will reach Kashmir," he said.
"When you say Kashmir is an integral part of India, it should not only be on paper. There should be integration of hearts and minds. What about the integration between federal and state government?" said Azad.
"Law and order in Kashmir in not just in the hands of Jammu and Kashmir police, but also in the hands of paramilitary forces," Azad further said. "If someone says that Mehbooba Mufti should alone solve the problem in Kashmir, that is not possible for her," he added.
"Kashmir is secular. The destruction of Kashmiriyat and insaniyat is not happening because of democracy but because of the pellet guns," he said.
"There is a difference between communalism and separatism. Militants are also targeting Muslims. Militancy has no religion," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the Rajya Sabha.
Law and order in Kashmir is not just Mehbooba's problem: Congress in RS
"You can only keep Kashmir in India when you treat Kashmiris as equals," he said. "Shoot the people but do not use pellet guns. Pellet Guns are worse than live bullets. It is worse than killing people," he further said.
"The Prime Minister said that the people of the country love Kashmir. But the people of Kashmir should also love the country," JD(U)'s Sharad Yadav said.
Shoot the people but don't use pellet guns: Sharad Yadav in Rajya Sabha on Kashmir issue
"Merely repeating what Atal Bihari Vajpayee said is not going to create that trust. Create that trust by stopping the communal polarisation that is taking place in the country," he said.
"If everyday you talk about abrogating Article 370, you talk about love jihad, ghar wapsi, are you creating trust?" said Yechury.
"Unless you address the central question of the promises made to the people of Kashmir at the time of independence, this problem will not be solved," he said. "The problem today can only be solved if you initiate a political dialogue. I have urging this government that this can only come through with an atmosphere of trust.
"The trust deficit exists (in Kashmir) because of the string of betrayals of the promises made," said the CPI(M) leader.
He also took a dig at the government's foreign policy and said, "When you want to wish Happy Birthday, you go to Pakistan."
"If other governments have engaged in dialogue in the past, what is preventing this government from initiating the political dialogue?" Yechury said.
"The threat we face today is not a mere question of autonomy. There is also an orchestrated terrorist threat in Kashmir," he said.
"Today, there is an attempt to create dual power in Kashmir," Dasgupta further said. "Let us remember that dialogue cannot be done if we are going to tie the hands of the executive."
"While I agree with Sitaram Yechury that we need a form of political approach, the form and time of that approach should be different," he said.
"We have been talking about development and healing hearts and unfortunately, we have come across a rather big emotional divide. At an earlier time, it was thought that Article 370 would facilitate the process of integration. But we may have actually hardened the emotional divide," he said.
"A lot of the people who have taken to the streets may be spontaneous. But there is also a large degree of pre-meditation in the protests," he said.
"That was the death of Burhan Wani. The death of any Indian should be a source of anguish. But Burhan Wani never considered himself an Indian. And what do you say about a person who glamourises terrorism?" Dasgupta said.
"The problem we face in Kashmir today is somewhat different from the problems we have faced earlier," he said. "Three months ago, Kashmir was peaceful. We had a unique political experiment. It was an alliance between the Valley and Jammu, something which was unique and encouraging. And then something broke loose," he added.
"While we try to evolve a consensus on this issue, we should sometimes be brutally frank about what we are dealing with," Swapan Dasgupta, nominated MP, said in the Rajya Sabha.
"I wish people in this Parliament talked about sending a delegation to AIIMS, where a girl injured by pellet guns is admitted," he said.
"Why do we only remember Kashmir when it is burning? Guns will not solve any problem," he said. "The people of this country should understand what the problem in Jammu and Kashmir is."
"Why wasn't there any problem in Kashmir until 1987?" said a dramatic PDP MP Nazir Ahmad Laway in the Rajya Sabha.
Why do we remember Kashmir only when it is burning? asks PDP MP in Rajya Sabha
Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia: When we are talking about Swachh Bharat, we should first clean our minds. Fringe elements have now turned into the Centre today. Why the Home Minister didn't visit Rohith Vemula?
PM made a strong statement: Shoot me, not the Dalits. But why he didn't include Muslims? Muslims can never be part of Hindu nationalism but they are a part of Indian nationalism.
Sexual violence against Dalit women has increased. About eight lakh Dalits are dependent on selling skins, bones of dead cows, what will they do now?
AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi: No democracy in the world has prioritise animal life over human life. But the Indian democracy has. Why do gua rakshaks have come to power? The credit goes to the idealogy of ruling party. What right do so-called gau rakshaks have to look at what I eat?
NK Premchandran, RSP MP from Kollam: The attrocities against the Dalits is politics. Educational, economical and social upliftment is the need of the poor.
We all should work together and committ ourselves in taking action in order to stop the atrocities on Dalit. Also, I would appeal all the state governments to take strictest action against anti-social elements who try to disrupt the harmony of secular fabric of the country.
It is pointless to blame the other government. Why did we celebrate Ambedkar's 125th anniversary with such genuinty? Respecting Ambedkar is like respecting India.
Seva Bharati, an RSS organisation, is one of the organisations which has been majorly active at the grassroots for the upliftment of Dalits.
Dalit community has contributed a lot towards Indian heritage. When India was under the British Rule, no matter how atrocities were inflicted on them, still they stood by India. They never demanded a separate country. We in the government emphathise with the Dalits.
On PM Modi's silence, Singh said, "Has any PM spoken during all discussions in Parliament? When PM spoke on the atrocities, and gau rakshaks, I issued an advisory that strict action should be taken against such gau rakshaks.
Our biggest challenge is to counter the twisted mentality of the perpetrators. What happened in Una was extremely condemnable.
"This is rumour that after BJP came to power that the atrocities on Dalit have increased. Just ask yourselves if this is true. Show me the data records. I don't want to point fingers at any political party. But following figures would explain: In 2013, 39,346 cases were registered against atrocities, 40,300 and 35,564 were registered respectively," Singh said.
"We can make India world's best country if we consider humanity above all. There are many articles in our Indian constitution for Dalits. But there is a need for effective laws to act on these articles. Our government is working at socio-economic development of the Dalits."
"It is painful that even after 70 years of independence we are still discussing atrocities on Dalits. We cannot deny that there are people from several castes and religion. We should not politicise the atrocities on Dalits," Singh said.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh replies to the discussion on atrocities on Dalits in Lok Sabha:
Bills for consideration and passing in the Rajya Sabha are Appropriation No.3 Bill, 2016, Employee's Compensation (Amendment) Bill, 2016, Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2016, Factories (Amendment) Bill, 2016.
On Friday, 12 August, 2016 the bills for consideration and passing in the Lok Sabha are Mental Health care Bill,2016 and Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016.
Congress leader Anand Sharma said that the government should not be hypocritical. He said, "When administrators have high salary, MLAs have a good rise, why don't we get the same treatment?"
Ram Gopal Yadav, SP, Uttar Pradesh raised the issue of the low wages of the members of Parliament. He said, "The pay of the MP's is only a fraction of ministers in Telangana Assembly or Delhi Legislative Assembly. We are asked to reduce our expenditure but we cannot do that when we have to entertain people of our constituency. The rising inflation also makes it difficult for us to sustain ourselves."
In the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha Congress leader Shashi Tharoor raised the issue of failing start-ups in India. He said, "The government has given tax incentives to the start-ups but everyone knows that they don't make any money in the first few years. Hence the tax incentives should be given to the angel investors."
After GST this is the second resolution which has been adopted unanimously.
She added, "This house earnestly appeals to all sections of society in India to work for the early restoration of normalcy and harmony. This is to restore confidence in people and youth in general. The resolution is adopted unanimously."
Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan announced that the resolutions proposed on the Kashmir issue has been passed. She said,"This house expresses serious concern over the violence in Kashmir Valley. Everyone here conveys loss of life caused by the deteriorating situation. The house is of the firm view that there cannot be a compromise on security."
A significant bill aimed at putting in place a single common examination for medical and
dental courses was on Tuesday passed by the Lok Sabha, with the government saying even private colleges will be under its ambit.
The Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill, 2016 and the The Dentists (Amendment) Bill, 2016 provides a Constitutional status to the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) examination" which is intended to be introduced in the academic session next year.
With the second day of the Parliament's Monsoon session, the BJD and JD(U) members demanded a separate Ministry to deal with natural calamities like flood and drought, even as they sought a more pro-active approach by the Centre in releasing funds to affected states.
Participating in a discussion in Rajya Sabha on a Calling Attention Motion regarding the situation arising due to floods, several leaders also questioned the official data on damages caused in the calamities and sought steps to put in place a warning system for floods and cloudbursts.
Responding to the members, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju admitted that 196 people have lost their lives, 2,184 cattle perished and 38,285 houses and huts damaged besides 0.357 lakh hectares of crop area damaged this year due to floods.
He, however, said the primary responsibility to deal with natural calamities lies with the state government concerned. Maintaining that the country received heavy rainfall from June to September each year during the southwest monsoons, he said "the rainfall during this period accounts for about 70-90 percent of the total rainfall over India. As a consequence of this rainfall, flooding of rivers is a natural phenomenon."
Dilip Kumar Tirkey (BJD) sought a separate Ministry to deal with the calamities saying the present system of having the department under the Home Ministry, was not functioning well.
He got support from JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav who questioned the effectiveness of the National Disaster Management Authority and also demanded a separate Ministry to take care of the matter.
Many other leaders questions the effectiveness of the concerned authorities and agencies.
"You talk about steps taken after the flood, but what are the steps being taken for prevention of flood," questioned A U Singh Deo of BJD.
He said that there was urban flooding, river side flooding and flooding in the hills due to various reasons, including rampant construction activity.
Deo said it was a national shame that New Delhi also gets flooded even after an hour of rain.
Raising the issue of Polavaram project, he accused the Chhattisgarh government to making barrages despite objections by Odisha and sought a meeting at the level of Prime Minister or the Home Minister to resolve the issue.
The much awaited session of the Parliament began on Monday with the BJP government expecting the passage of the GST bill to pave through, started with Speaker Sumitra Mahajan paying tribute to Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh who passed away on 1 June.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced the new ministers of his cabinet to the members of Parliament, as per the custom.
However, soon after Modis address, the Lok Sabha was adjourned till Tuesday to pay tribute to Paraste.
Lok Sabha adjourns till tomorrow on account of passing away of Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP from Shahdol (Madhya Pradesh) ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2016
After the adjournment, Modi moved to the Upper House to oversee the oath-taking ceremony of new Rajya Sabha members, including senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, Union minister Piyush Goyal and NCP leader Praful Patel, who was cheered by members of the House.
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad gave a notice in the Rajya Sabha to discuss the violence in Kashmir.
In view of the ongoing unrest in the volatile state of Jammu and Kashmir, the matter was discussed extensively in the House with Azad leading the discussion.
Opposition Parties accused the government of mismanaging Kashmir issue
Azad began the discussion on the Kashmir issue by questioning the use of excessive force in the state. The attitude of the central government should be that of a parent when it comes to Jammu and Kashmir," he said.
The Congress leader further said that the problem in Kashmir has multiple aspects. The internal situation of Kashmir, role of central and state government and external forces, especially Pakistan, have influenced the prevailing situation, he said.
He further talked about the incompetence of the BJP while working for the development of the state. "What the Congress had done to end militancy, no one can ever do even in 50 years," Azad added.
He further asked the government to distinguish between the common people and the militants, adding that both cannot be treated in the same way.
Before ending his speech, Azad expressed his partys support to end militancy but made it amply clear that he does not approve of the way civilians are treated in Kashmir.
While blaming Pakistan for the rapidly deteriorating situation in the state, he sent out a strong message for them : People who stay in homes made of glass should not throw stones at others. We are capable and we beg you (Pakistan) to leave us alone with our problems.
Naresh Agarwal of SP also attacked Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over his comments after violence in Kashmir. Sharif had declared that they will observe Black Day on 19 July and called Burhan Wani a soldier.
Agarwal reiterated Azads view that the people of Kashmir have no trust in the central government.
Derek oBrien of TMC accused the union government of mishandling the Kashmir situation. He also urged the government to comprehend and effectively use the power of the digital media.
Sharad Yadav of the JD(U) also lashed out at the Modi government, saying, "Even your government admits that the people injured in this conflict are common people of India.
CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury said that the government could not use Pakistan as an excuse for all their problems. He said that the power of diplomacy was available to the government to deal with Pakistan. "I will not accept that this problem is just one created by Pakistan or separatists," he said.
Yechury further appealed to the government to convene an all-party meeting on the Kashmir issue.
Satish Chandra Misra of BSP urged the people of Kashmir to assist the government and maintain calm.
Newly elected member NCP leader Praful Patel said, "I won't blame any government but let's unite as a country and work to restore peace in the Kashmir Valley. He also said that the very existence of the Pakistan army is to keep the fight between India and Pakistan going.
Azad addressed the House again to bring up the issue of lack of essential commodities to the people of Kashmir. Essential commodities, like LPG and medicines, are still not available in Kashmir, he said.
Government responds by blaming Pakistan
Arun Jaitley spoke on behalf of the central government. "We agree with the Congress that the situation in Jammu and Kashmir is very serious. The situation was more than normal till now. It was a bumper tourist season and that sends out a message to the whole world. The state's economy is healthier because of that. We had even expected that pilgrims will be more for Amarnath yatra. But thinking that PDP-BJP government is behind the Kashmir unrest is a political thought. I am not going to stand here and recall Congress' history with Kashmir," he said.
He added that Pakistan has never accepted Kashmir as part of India, which has led to three conventional wars.
Rajnath Singh too addressed the House to respond to the allegations of the Opposition parties. He defended Modi and said that the entire government is worried about the escalating tension in Kashmir.
According to a report that Singh cited, 1948 civilians have been injured up till now and 1671 security personnel. He said that Wani worked with Pakistan to wage jihad in India and the situation in Kashmir is sponsored by Pakistan.
Singh assured Azad that the Centre will try its best to make essential commodities available to the people of Kashmir.
Apart from the unrest in Kashmir, which dominated the House proceeding on the first day of the monsoon session, atrocities on Dalits, GST and the clean Ganga mission was also discussed.
BSP chief Mayawati raised the issue of recent incident in which some members of the dalit community, engaged in skinning dead animals, were beaten up in Gujarat in the Question Hour.
Congress leader P Chidambaram said that Azad and Anand Sharma have held talks with Jaitley, who has promised to come back with concrete proposals. Congress will respond after looking at the draft, he added.
Questions were raised about the steps taken by the government to clean river Ganga. Water Resources minister Uma Bharti responded by saying that industries have been warned not even to release the treated water In the holy river.
After an eventful day and substantial discussion on important issues, the Rajya Sabha was also adjourned.
New Delhi: Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday hit out at the Centre over "brutalities" inflicted on civilians in Jammu and Kashmir, asking if civilians should be "treated in the same manner as militants".
"The situation in J&K has never been so bad. Why has the situation in Kashmir worsened since 2008-09? Even our government, Omar Abdullah's government and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's government saw such incidents, but we have never seen such brutalities on the civilians ever," said Azad.
"They have used bullets and pellet guns on the children, old men and women. Should locals be treated the same way we treat militants? Should the same bullets that are used on militants be used on innocent people of the state," asked Azad.
Azad further said: "We are with the government in ending militancy, but cant support this treatment of civilians. No one supports militants. But there should be a difference between militants and common people," he said.
"People have been killed in all 10 districts of the state, the maximum damage was done in four districts of south Kashmir," he added.
Two-and-half months after he was nominated to Rajya Sabha by the Narendra Modi government, Navjot Singh Sidhu on Monday resigned from, what some may say, a highly coveted position of an MP. Adding insult to injury, Sidhu's wife Navjot Kaur Singh, too resigned from the official post she held in Punjab.
A resignation of this kind, from a nominated member, in such short span is unprecedented and would reflect badly on BJP leadership's judgment.
This, however, is not the first time that Sidhu has tendered his resignation from the Parliament he quit from Lok Sabha in December 2006 when he was convicted in an 18-year-old road rage case. Again in July 2009, it was reported that Sidhu quit Parliament due to a few developments in the Punjab BJP unit. However, he had sent his resignation letter to the party leadership and not to the Speaker of Lok Sabha.
His resignation was not accepted and he continued to be in the party and in the Parliament as an MP. His resignation from 2006 was soon forgotten because he was soon returned to Parliament after being re-elected from Amritsar.
But this time around, things will be different since the move comes ahead of Punjab Assembly elections. The resignation from Rajya Sabha could well be followed up with a resignation from the party. Technically, as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, he is not a BJP member.
Sidhu perhaps thought to be on the right of perceived public morality and quit from the post offered by the BJP before he makes his next move join the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and lead its campaign in Punjab, with or without officially being named as its chief ministerial candidate. Sidhu's surprise resignation is undoubtedly a huge setback for the BJP and could prove to be a booster for the AAP.
The AAP had lately courted so many controversies simply because the party leaders, who para trooped from Delhi, didn't know the social and cultural practices of the state and weren't able to relate to their sensitivities. That was one of the reasons why Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal performed a sewa at the Golden temple to "atone" for mistakes committed by the party, albeit in most dramatic fashion, cleaning already cleaned plates.
It's interesting that within minutes of Sidhu's resignation, AAP Punjab convenor Sucha Singh Chhotepur jumped the gun and virtually announced Sidhu's AAP turn:
Appreciate Navjot Sidhu and Dr. Navjot Kaur Sidhu Move,looking forward for their Welcome to @AAPPunjab2017 @AamAadmiParty @DrDrnavjotsidhu Sucha Singh Chotepur (@SChotepur) July 18, 2016
Navjot Singh Sidhu is most welcomed to join @AamAadmiParty @sherryontopp @AAPPunjab2017 . Sucha Singh Chotepur (@SChotepur) July 18, 2016
The AAP had gained some ground in Punjab but it desperately needed a Sikh as a party face to take on the Akali-BJP combine in the state. The party's best known face in the state so far is the stand-up comedian, Bhagwant Mann who is taken to be a lightweight compared to the might of the Badals and Congress' Amarinder Singh. Sidhu, despite his humorous streak, is taken seriously as a politician and within whom the people of Punjab have placed their faith.
But what mattered most to the AAP in luring Sidhu to his side is him being the most credible public face who has ability and appetite to take on the ruling Badal family, who he is vehemently against. Sidhu's grouse against the BJP was that the party was too heavily influenced by Parkash Singh Badal and Sukhbir Singh Badal. In fact, that was one of the reasons why he developed strained relationship with his onetime mentor Arun Jaitley.
In the run up to the 2014 parliamentary elections, while he "happily" stepped out of Amritsar seat and electoral politics but chose not to campaign for Jaitley just because Badal family was managing Jaitley's campaign. Sidhu's fight against Badal family has been relentless though it had not so much been in the public space. But their mutual dislike is no secret in Punjab and outside.
During the recent Cabinet reshuffle in the Narendra Modi government, many thought that a turbaned Sikh would be inducted in the government. Sidhu, however, was not considered because he was recently nominated to Rajya Sabha and the party also suspected his loyalty. SS Ahluwalia with his encyclopedic knowledge of parliamentary norms and ability to connect with leaders across party lines and conceive strategy was taken to be a better choice. Sidhu, apparently, didn't take that kindly.
Sidhu could prove to be the big catch that Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP had been looking for in Punjab. And it is also time for the BJP to reflect on not-so-sudden-turn-of-events.
Ranchi: The opposition in Jharkhand is preparing to corner the state government in the assembly session starting on Friday on the alleged sexual misconduct of the son of the state BJP president and the "rigging" of the Rajya Sabha polls.
"The real face of BJP as a party and the BJP government led by Raghubar Das stands exposed. Both issues will be raised during Monsoon session," Kishore Sahdeo, the spokesman of the Jharkhand unit of the Congress, told IANS.
He said Chief Minister Raghubar Das has shown no interest in giving justice to tribal girl who was sexually exploited by Munna Marandi, the son of Jharkhand BJP president Tala Marandi. Munna has also been accused of marrying a minor girl.
"No medical board has been set up to ascertain the age of the bride whose school records show she is a minor," said Sahdeo.
Leader of the Opposition Hemant Soren, who belongs to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), said the government used unfair means to win the two seats in the 11 June Rajya Sabha elections.
The government has failed on every issue and there is plenty that the opposition has to corner it, he said.
Pradeep Yadav of the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha-Pratantrik (JVM-P) said the BJP is using its majority to act like a dictator.
State Congress president Sukhdeo Bhagat said a "Ravan-Raj" has been prevalent in Jharkhand as is evident in the acts of the ruling BJP.
On Friday, JVM-P President Babulal Marandi made public certain audio and video recordings that purportedly show Raghubar Das, an ADG rank police officer, and a close aide of the chief minister interacting with Congress leader Yogendra Sao who is also husband of Congress MLA Nirmala Devi.
The recordings purportedly show the police officer suggesting to Sao the political favours he and his wife will enjoy if they helped the BJP candidate win in the Rajya Sabha elections.
A video clip also showed Raghubar Das meeting Yogendra Sao a day before the Rajya Sabha poll, claimed Babulal Marandi.
State BJP president Tala Marandi is also facing many questions not only from the opposition but also some of his own party men.
Some of the BJP members demanded his resignation after two First Information Reports (FIRs) were registered against him and his son Munna Marandi who is alleged to have sexually exploited a girl and married another who is said to be a minor.
A medical examination of the girl alleging sexual exploitation suggested she had been sexually active with possibly more than one partner.
The age of the girl Munna Marandi married is yet to ascertained through a medical test.
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"I will not accept that this problem is just one created by Pakistan or separatists," he said.
"You cannot escape the issue by just blaming Pakistan for the problems in Kashmir," he said. "Just because of good tourism in one season in Kashmir, you cannot think you solved the problem. If you do not pay attention to this problem, it will turn into a law and order problem."
"There must be a conspiracy being hatched by Pakistan. But you have to look at the measures you are taking to counter it," Yechury told the government in Rajya Sabha.
In response, a beleaguered Arun Jaitley said that BJP will take strict action against Dayashankar Singh. "I should tell Mayawati ji that the party shares her grief over this issue, I will look into this matter, we stand with her...I am personally hurt that a BJP party person used such derogatory words against Mayawati," he said.
"This is not only a woman's issue. This is a man's issue," said TMC MP Derek O'Brien.
Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury stressed on the fact that the man making such remarks was none other than the vice president of the UP unit of BJP and demanded that he be arrested. "A man speaks with such language on the day both houses are discussing issues on violence on Dalits?" she said.
"The nation will not forgive BJP for this, especially with what is going in Gujarat," ANI quoted Mayawati as saying. "There are wars of thoughts and ideas in the House, but never have I used derogatory words against anyone ever," she said.
"The insulting words used against me are against all of womankind," said Mayawati. "Dayashankar Singh should be arrested. Otherwise, if in response to this people get violent, it will not be on my conscience," she added.
UP BJP vice president Dayashankar Singh's cheap remark against BSP chief Mayawati created uproar in the Parliament as Opposition leaders attacked the Modi government over the issue.
In response, a beleaguered Arun Jaitley said that BJP will take strict action against Dayashankar Singh. "I should tell Mayawati ji that the party shares her grief over this issue, I will look into this matter, we stand with her...I am personally hurt that a BJP party person used such derogatory words against Mayawati," he said.
"This is not only a woman's issue. This is a man's issue," said TMC MP Derek O'Brien.
Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury stressed on the fact that the man making such remarks was none other than the vice president of the UP unit of BJP and demanded that he be arrested. "A man speaks with such language on the day both houses are discussing issues on violence on Dalits?" she said.
"The nation will not forgive BJP for this, especially with what is going in Gujarat," ANI quoted Mayawati as saying. "There are wars of thoughts and ideas in the House, but never have I used derogatory words against anyone ever," she said.
"The insulting words used against me are against all of womankind," said Mayawati. "Dayashankar Singh should be arrested. Otherwise, if in response to this people get violent, it will not be on my conscience," she added.
UP BJP vice president Dayashankar Singh's cheap remark against BSP chief Mayawati created uproar in the Parliament as Opposition leaders attacked the Modi government over the issue.
"On one hand, BJP did a lot of things to celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti and assured Dalits that they will do a lot to celebrate it. On the other hand, Dalits still do not have reservation rights in the private sector," she added.
"The legal rights which Ambedkar created for the backward sections of the society will only reach the society when honest work is done for providing those rights to them," she said.
"Even after the country got independence, whether it is Congress rule or BJP rule, the sad truth is that the Dalits are still suffering," Mayawati said in the Rajya Sabha.
"There is an urgent need to change the mindset of the major political parties of the country towards Dalits," she said. "I have to tell the Union government that this is a serious matter. I ask the government to give justice to the Dalit victims in Gujarat. It is not enough to just send the Gujarat CM to meet them. Action needs to be taken against authorities which were negligent. They should be arrested," she said.
"In the name of protection of cows, a lot of unfair things are being done. Injustice against Dalits is being done in the name of protection of cows," said Mayawati in the Rajya Sabha.
Crimes against Dalits being done in the name of cow protection, says Mayawati
"Instead of making Dalits a political weapon, Congress, BJP and other parties should be reminded that they should rise above petty politics and work for the development of backward sections," she said.
"The victims often do not get justice in case of a CID probe," said Mayawati in the Rajya Sabha. "Gujarat government did not act quickly enough. It was only when the media picked up this issue that some action was taken."
"This Una incident case should run in a fast track court. We also demand that one of the judges should be a Dalit," Mayawati said. "Forget about Dalits getting justice, even their FIR is not filed many times and the latest example is the Una (Gujrat) incident," she also said.
Deputy Chariman PJ Kurien denies that the House is taking the subject lightly. Rajya Sabha is currently debating Aam Aadmi Party lawmaker Bhagwant Mann's video of him entering Parliament by crossing several security layers. Mann then posted it on social media, inviting attack from MPs across party line, who termed his act as a security breach.
In the video, which went viral, Mann was seen showing entry gate through which MPs enter Parliament House and saying how strong is the security. "The car is registered with the Lok Sabha. It has a censor, which has the vehicle details. As soon as so you come near the gate, the censor identifies the car and announces the name and number of the car," Mann says in the video with him crossing several layers of the security.
On the fifth day of the Monsoon Session (Friday), Aam Aadmi Party MLA Bhagwant Mann's filmed a video entering Parliament by crossing several security layers, which eventually caused uproar in both the Houses. Mann, who posted it on social media, invited attack from MPs across party line, who termed his act as a security breach.
As soon as the House assembled, she informed it about the action being taken on the issue which had led to the adjournment of Lok Sabha proceedings on July 22. "The inquiry committee shall inquire into the serious security implications and related aspects.... (and) suggest suitable remedial measures to avoid recurrence of such incidents in future and recommend appropriate action in the matter," the Speaker said.
The member is "advised not to attend the sittings of the House" until a decision is taken in the matter, Mahajan said. Mann was not present in the House.
The panel has also been asked to "suggest remedial measures" so that such episodes are not repeated.
Mahajan has formed the nine member panel headed by BJP MP Kirit Somaiya which includes Anandrao Adsul (Shiv Sena), Meenakshi Lekhi, Satya Pal Singh (both BJP), B Mahtab (Biju Janata Dal), Ratna De Nag (Trinamool) and K. C. Venugopal (Congress) and other members.
Therefore, the "act of the member" has put the security of the Parliament in peril, she said. Mahajan said she had consulted leaders of all political parties and everyone supported her actions on this issue.
Describing Parliament as "sanctum sanctorum" of democracy, Mahajan recalled that on 13 December, 2001, security personnel had sacrificed their lives protecting the parliament and after that entire security system was reviewed and overhauled.
It put "security of the parliament in peril", Mahajan added. Mann has been asked to appear before the panel by 10.30 am tomorrow and make his submission.
Addressing the Lok Sabha as soon as it reassembled after the weekend break, Mahajan said taking audio video footage of security zones in the parliament by Punjab's Sangrur MP Mann on July 21 and putting them on social networking site was improper.
"The act of the member of audio-visual recording of the Parliament and posting it on the social media puts the security of Parliament in peril," the Speaker said, adding that several members had expressed concern over the issue on Friday last.
The panel, chaired by BJP member Kirit Somaiya, has been asked to submit its report by August 3, while Mann has time till tomorrow morning to submit his explanation to the committee.
Acting tough, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan today said AAP MP Bhagwant Mann's videography of the Parliament House complex had put its security "in peril" and asked him not to attend the House till a decision is taken on the matter while setting up a nine-member panel to probe the issue.
The Lok Sabha is likely to discuss The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill today. Apart from this, the Lower House is also slated to discuss The Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Bill.
Sasikala Pushpa began crying in the House over the issue of attacks on women in the country. She has alleged that she was harassed and was being forced to quit her post.
"So what if we disagreed with you? This is not the country we are used to living in," O'Brien said. "The Prime Minister needs to come in the House and say that we can live in the India we know, the India of unity and diversity."
"For Rs 15, they (Dalits) are being killed because they are Dalits. I am a gau sevak. But in the name of gau sevaks, don't cross the line. This is a sitaution which has gone beyond the border of this country. Since they are taking these decisions, they must listen to what the UN had to say about this country," he said.
"The curb on religious fundamentalism, this is a dangerous situation. If it happens and happens and happens, it is a decision. This is a decision of this government. Otherwise, the Defence Minister would not have said what he said yesterday," TMC MP Derek O'Brien said, referring to Parrikar's remarks that Aamir Khan needs to be taught a "lesson" because of his remarks on intolerance.
An angry Parrikar responded by saying that he did not take the name of any person in the video.
"Since the BJP government came to power, they targeted Muslims first. Now, they are committing atrocities against the Dalits. The Prime Minister should come to the Parliament and clarify on what is happening," Mayawati said.
CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury responded to Parrikar and said, "What he said is objectionable. That cannot be acceptable. Tomorrow, are you going to threaten me? If he is raksha mantri, kiska raksha ho raha hai?"
Defence Minister Parrikar responded to the uproar in the Rajya Sabha over his remarks against Aamir Khan and said, "Let them see the video themselves and make up their minds."
"We should think about the respect for women. In Bareilly, a teacher was abducted during daytime. This is not right. The government should speak. Why is the government silent?" she said.
"There are rapes taking place against Dalit women everywhere in the country. The government should take this matter seriously," Mayawati said.
Naqvi agreed with her and said the government was ready for a discussion.
"I am really embarrassed for standing here and talking about the same issue once again, even after the Nirbhaya gangrape...I want a discussion on women's protection. I do not care which place. I do not want politicising of this issue," Jaya Bachchan said in the Rajya Sabha.
An emotional Jaya Bachchan got up in the Rajya Sabha and demanded a discussion on the issue of safety of women.
"In view of seriousness of matter, Bhagwant Mann is further advised not to attend the sessions of Parliament for further two weeks," she said.
"The chairperson (of the committee) has sought extension of time for further two weeks. I have accepted the request for extension," Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said.
On the issue of AAP MP Bhagwant Mann being barred from the Parliament for making a video of the Parliament House complex, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that the committee probing this issue had asked for more time.
"This legislation will only be passed after a serious discussion. I hope the Finance Minister passes the Bill not on the strength of his numbers, but on the basis of logic," Chidambaram said.
"Government tried to pass the GST Bill without the support of the principal Opposition and I am happy they failed," he said.
"Many issues are still outstanding issues and still need to be resolved. We had earlier tried to pass the GST Bill with the support of the Opposition and we failed," he said.
"I welcome the friendly tone of the Finance Minister's speech. I think the tone and approach has changed over the last few weeks," Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said.
"People of India expect low indirect taxes. There are many voices in the government which speak for the corporate, but someone must speak for the people. I am doing that," Chidambaram said in the Rajya Sabha.
"When this Bill is passed today, we will prepare for the next stage of the debate, which is the Central GST Bill. I want an assurance from the Finance Minister....This is a very important legislation. I want an assurance that when that Bill is brought, that will be brought as a Financial Bill and not as a Money Bill," Chidambaram said.
"Persuade all parties and sections of the people that a standard of 18 percent is the most appropriate," he added.
"The worry that we have is creeping taxation. But that is what Parliament is for. Taxation is the exclusive power of the Parliament. It is ultimately Parliament which calls the shots in taxes," he said.
"I, on behalf of my party, loudly and clearly demand that the GST rate should not exceed 18 percent," Chidambaram said in the Rajya Sabha.
Bill in next stage of GST debate should be brought as a Financial Bill: Chidambaram
Chidambaram warns that a rate too high, something like 23 percent, will be inflationary. He insists that the Bill needs to be passed as a finance Bill. The critical point we shouldnt be miss here is that the Congress is pitching for 18 percent standard GST rate and isnt ready to give up on this point in any case.
This comment is crucial since the NDA government has not yet arrived on a single rate. Chidambaram attacks the Narendra Modi government, saying it does not care about the problems of the common people. Chidambaram stresses on the point that the rate should be changed only with the permission of Parliament, and thus makes Congress compromise formula that the GST rate should be included in the GST Bill, though his party is willing to compromise on the earlier demand that the rate should be included in the constitution.
According to Firstpost Financial Editor Dinesh Unnikrishnan, P Chidambaram has hit the core point in his speech the final GST rate. Chidambaram positions Congress as the voice of poor and emphasises on the fact that standard GST rate should not exceed 18 percent on the lines of what governments chief economic advisor, Arvind Subrmanian, suggested.
"It (GST) violates states' autonomy. It results in permanent revenue loss to the state of Tamil Nadu. We strongly oppose this Bill," AIADMK MP A Navaneethakrishnan said in the Rajya Sabha.
"We have moved an amendment that the compensation should be for at least 5 years," he added.
"Tamil Nadu will lose Rs 9270 crore because of GST. This is not a small amount," he said.
"Till date, the revenue-neutral rate has not been fixed by the government," he said, adding that this was a problem in the GST Bill.
"Petroleum and petroleum products must be kept outside GST permanently. We can save our people only then," he said. "It is a well-known fact that Tamil Nadu is a manufacturing state. It is also known that this method of taxation is destination-based. We strongly oppose that," he said.
He then went on to elaborate on the changes which AIADMK wanted in the GST Bill.
"The composition of the GST Council is not fair. The weightage of each state's vote should be in proportion to their representation in the country," said the AIADMK MP in the Rajya Sabha.
"Now let me tell you about the ping pong match," O'Brien said
"I'm feeling like a teenager in the presence of these senior lawyers," O'Brien said. "There is the politics of the Bill. GST can also be interpreted as the Girgit Samjhauta Tax," TMC MP Derek O'Brien said in the Rajya Sabha.
TMC MP Derek O'Brien has always been dramatic in his speeches, and his speech during the GST Bill is a perfect example.
The money has to first come from Centre to states and then from states to local bodies. If the availability of funds to local bodies gets delayed, that can seriously hamper functioning of local bodies, Patel cites. In a larger context, this problem is not for MCGB alone. It would apply to all big and small local bodies across the country in the GST regime. Patels remarks suggest the magnitude of challenge the Modi government has while implementing the revolutionary tax regime.
Patel raises the challenge of GST implementation. Under the GST regime, when various indirect taxes including sales tax, VAT and Octroi get consolidated in one uniform tax rate, will large local bodies such as MCGB get funds on time for its daily functioning? Patel asks.
Firstpost Financial Editor Dinesh Unnikrishnan says that NCP Rajya Sabha MP Praful Patel raises an interesting case of states within the states, citing the example of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGB), which under Octroi alone garners about Rs 8000 crore to Rs 9000 crore per annum.
"The Prime Minister should come to the House apologise to the nation. If he cannot come, we will be happy even if Finance Minister Jaitley apologises," Budania said. "It was Congress which forced you to follow the right path of this Bill."
"At that time, the then Gujarat CM had said that this Bill is against the welfare of the nation. Today, the same man who is now PM, said that this Bill is benefitial for the nation," he said.
"When the Congress had brought this Bill to the Parliament, then BJP had protested against it," said Narendra Budania, Congress MP from Rajasthan.
PM Modi should apologise to the nation for his U-turn on GST Bill: Congress in Rajya Sabha
"We have given this notice for discussion to wake up the government. It is unfortunate that the Taj of Hindustan is burning but the central government cannot feel the heat. Which kind of heat will wake up the Kashmir government?" Azad said.
"Today, it has been 30 days since curfew was imposed in Jammu and Kashmir. I do not think that any state in India has seen curfew for 30 days since Independence," Congress leader Azad said.
"Please call for an all-party meeting and send a delegation to Kashmir," he said.
"This cannot be solved through law and order machinery," he said. "The silence of the Prime Minister is more eloquent than words. He is sending the message that the government does not care about the situation in Kashmir."
"This is one of the most grave situations I have risen in to speak. I have not seen continuous curfew for 30 days in my life. How can we remain silent? More than 1000 incidents of firing have been reported in a month. More than 8000 have been injured. 60 are dead. It is inhuman and criminal. Why are we using pellet guns? I am told that even Israel does not use pellet guns against Palestinians," CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury said.
"If you (BJP) were not opposing this Bill at that time, this Bill would have been passed two years ago. So, you are actually responsible for delaying the Parliament passing this Bill, but we are taking the blame," he said.
"Why was it that in 2011, some ministers who are sitting on that side were opposing this Bill?" Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said in the Lok Sabha.
"Today, the Parliament is going to take a big step for the freedom from tax terrorism," he said. "Some people will know the condition of taxation in our country," he added.
"Today is 8 August. On this day many years ago, Mahatma Gandhi had moved the nation with 'Bharat choro' slogan," PM Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
"Therefore, who won and who lost is not a matter of debate," the Prime Minister further said.
"But the credit for this Bill does not belong to one party. It belongs to the culture of Indian democracy," Modi said.
"It is true that someone created this Bill while someone else nurtured it," he said. "Just as someone gave birth to Krishna and someone else raised him," he said.
"The most important requirement was the creation of trust between Centre and the states. The most important thing was to not decide this on the basis of sheer numbers. That is why I have earlier said that democracy is not just about numbers," he said.
"We were successful in taking care of a lot of flaws with the GST Bill. 'Ek manch, ek manth, ek marg, ek manzil' is the mantra behind GST which all of us have experienced," the PM said.
"Sometimes, there were doubts about the GST. When I was the CM, even I had doubts about GST. And today, because of seeing GST continuously as a CM, my viewpoint changed when I viewed it as Prime Minister," Modi said.
"All Centre and states need to unite to create a mechanism for Ek Bharat," PM Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
I had different view of GST because I looked at it earlier from the point of view of a CM: PM Modi in Lok Sabha
"A message will go to the people through GST that the consumer is the king," Modi said. "GST gives a guarantee of security to small traders and businessmen. It will result in economic growth."
"Despite our differences, we made efforts to take GST forward," he said. "A uniformity in the processing of taxation will come through GST."
"In the entire discussion of GST, none of us used it as a platform for politics. We rose above politics for the welfare of the nation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
GST will send the message that the consumer is the king: PM Modi in LS
"Even during the all-party meeting, I had said that the credit for the GST Bill goes to all political parties," the Prime Minister said.
"It is a matter of great strength for Indian democracy that all of us are making efforts to take this forward together," he said.
"It is also true that we need to have IT-preparedness and legal preparedness. In the world, even the countries which are praised for their democracy find it tough to deal with Bills," he said.
"Because of GST, the taxpayer will realise that he will benefit from honesty. Therefore, we will succeed in bringing down the generation of black money," Modi said.
"There will be data integration. Because of a strong cross-checking mechanism, a seamless method which will help in catching any wrongdoing will be created," the PM said.
"GST will help in curbing corruption and black money," Modi said. "Corruption will move towards zero because of GST," he said.
"When something happens in Africa, the Prime Minister tweets about it. But when the Taj of India is burning, the heat is not reaching the central government," he added.
"We were told that he spoke on Kashmir issue in Madhya Pradesh because the CM told him to do so. This shows that the Parliament means nothing to the PM and he would not have spoken on the Kashmir issue if the Chief Minister had not asked him to do so," he said.
"This is the fourth time we are asking the Prime Minister to provide a statement in the House," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the Rajya Sabha.
PM spoke on Kashmir in Madhya Pradesh just because the CM told him to do so: Azad in RS
"When you truly feel pain from the heart, it will reach Kashmir," he said.
"When you say Kashmir is an integral part of India, it should not only be on paper. There should be integration of hearts and minds. What about the integration between federal and state government?" said Azad.
"Law and order in Kashmir in not just in the hands of Jammu and Kashmir police, but also in the hands of paramilitary forces," Azad further said. "If someone says that Mehbooba Mufti should alone solve the problem in Kashmir, that is not possible for her," he added.
"Kashmir is secular. The destruction of Kashmiriyat and insaniyat is not happening because of democracy but because of the pellet guns," he said.
"There is a difference between communalism and separatism. Militants are also targeting Muslims. Militancy has no religion," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the Rajya Sabha.
"You can only keep Kashmir in India when you treat Kashmiris as equals," he said. "Shoot the people but do not use pellet guns. Pellet Guns are worse than live bullets. It is worse than killing people," he further said.
"The Prime Minister said that the people of the country love Kashmir. But the people of Kashmir should also love the country," JD(U)'s Sharad Yadav said.
"Merely repeating what Atal Bihari Vajpayee said is not going to create that trust. Create that trust by stopping the communal polarisation that is taking place in the country," he said.
"If everyday you talk about abrogating Article 370, you talk about love jihad, ghar wapsi, are you creating trust?" said Yechury.
"Unless you address the central question of the promises made to the people of Kashmir at the time of independence, this problem will not be solved," he said. "The problem today can only be solved if you initiate a political dialogue. I have urging this government that this can only come through with an atmosphere of trust.
"The trust deficit exists (in Kashmir) because of the string of betrayals of the promises made," said the CPI(M) leader.
He also took a dig at the government's foreign policy and said, "When you want to wish Happy Birthday, you go to Pakistan."
"If other governments have engaged in dialogue in the past, what is preventing this government from initiating the political dialogue?" Yechury said.
"The threat we face today is not a mere question of autonomy. There is also an orchestrated terrorist threat in Kashmir," he said.
"Today, there is an attempt to create dual power in Kashmir," Dasgupta further said. "Let us remember that dialogue cannot be done if we are going to tie the hands of the executive."
"While I agree with Sitaram Yechury that we need a form of political approach, the form and time of that approach should be different," he said.
"We have been talking about development and healing hearts and unfortunately, we have come across a rather big emotional divide. At an earlier time, it was thought that Article 370 would facilitate the process of integration. But we may have actually hardened the emotional divide," he said.
"A lot of the people who have taken to the streets may be spontaneous. But there is also a large degree of pre-meditation in the protests," he said.
"That was the death of Burhan Wani. The death of any Indian should be a source of anguish. But Burhan Wani never considered himself an Indian. And what do you say about a person who glamourises terrorism?" Dasgupta said.
"The problem we face in Kashmir today is somewhat different from the problems we have faced earlier," he said. "Three months ago, Kashmir was peaceful. We had a unique political experiment. It was an alliance between the Valley and Jammu, something which was unique and encouraging. And then something broke loose," he added.
"While we try to evolve a consensus on this issue, we should sometimes be brutally frank about what we are dealing with," Swapan Dasgupta, nominated MP, said in the Rajya Sabha.
"I wish people in this Parliament talked about sending a delegation to AIIMS, where a girl injured by pellet guns is admitted," he said.
"Why do we only remember Kashmir when it is burning? Guns will not solve any problem," he said. "The people of this country should understand what the problem in Jammu and Kashmir is."
"Why wasn't there any problem in Kashmir until 1987?" said a dramatic PDP MP Nazir Ahmad Laway in the Rajya Sabha.
Why do we remember Kashmir only when it is burning? asks PDP MP in Rajya Sabha
Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia: When we are talking about Swachh Bharat, we should first clean our minds. Fringe elements have now turned into the Centre today. Why the Home Minister didn't visit Rohith Vemula?
PM made a strong statement: Shoot me, not the Dalits. But why he didn't include Muslims? Muslims can never be part of Hindu nationalism but they are a part of Indian nationalism.
Sexual violence against Dalit women has increased. About eight lakh Dalits are dependent on selling skins, bones of dead cows, what will they do now?
AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi: No democracy in the world has prioritise animal life over human life. But the Indian democracy has. Why do gua rakshaks have come to power? The credit goes to the idealogy of ruling party. What right do so-called gau rakshaks have to look at what I eat?
NK Premchandran, RSP MP from Kollam: The attrocities against the Dalits is politics. Educational, economical and social upliftment is the need of the poor.
We all should work together and committ ourselves in taking action in order to stop the atrocities on Dalit. Also, I would appeal all the state governments to take strictest action against anti-social elements who try to disrupt the harmony of secular fabric of the country.
It is pointless to blame the other government. Why did we celebrate Ambedkar's 125th anniversary with such genuinty? Respecting Ambedkar is like respecting India.
Seva Bharati, an RSS organisation, is one of the organisations which has been majorly active at the grassroots for the upliftment of Dalits.
Dalit community has contributed a lot towards Indian heritage. When India was under the British Rule, no matter how atrocities were inflicted on them, still they stood by India. They never demanded a separate country. We in the government emphathise with the Dalits.
On PM Modi's silence, Singh said, "Has any PM spoken during all discussions in Parliament? When PM spoke on the atrocities, and gau rakshaks, I issued an advisory that strict action should be taken against such gau rakshaks.
Our biggest challenge is to counter the twisted mentality of the perpetrators. What happened in Una was extremely condemnable.
"This is rumour that after BJP came to power that the atrocities on Dalit have increased. Just ask yourselves if this is true. Show me the data records. I don't want to point fingers at any political party. But following figures would explain: In 2013, 39,346 cases were registered against atrocities, 40,300 and 35,564 were registered respectively," Singh said.
"We can make India world's best country if we consider humanity above all. There are many articles in our Indian constitution for Dalits. But there is a need for effective laws to act on these articles. Our government is working at socio-economic development of the Dalits."
"It is painful that even after 70 years of independence we are still discussing atrocities on Dalits. We cannot deny that there are people from several castes and religion. We should not politicise the atrocities on Dalits," Singh said.
On Friday, 12 August, 2016 the bills for consideration and passing in the Lok Sabha are Mental Health care Bill,2016 and Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016.
Congress leader Anand Sharma said that the government should not be hypocritical. He said, "When administrators have high salary, MLAs have a good rise, why don't we get the same treatment?"
Ram Gopal Yadav, SP, Uttar Pradesh raised the issue of the low wages of the members of Parliament. He said, "The pay of the MP's is only a fraction of ministers in Telangana Assembly or Delhi Legislative Assembly. We are asked to reduce our expenditure but we cannot do that when we have to entertain people of our constituency. The rising inflation also makes it difficult for us to sustain ourselves."
In the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha Congress leader Shashi Tharoor raised the issue of failing start-ups in India. He said, "The government has given tax incentives to the start-ups but everyone knows that they don't make any money in the first few years. Hence the tax incentives should be given to the angel investors."
After GST this is the second resolution which has been adopted unanimously.
She added, "This house earnestly appeals to all sections of society in India to work for the early restoration of normalcy and harmony. This is to restore confidence in people and youth in general. The resolution is adopted unanimously."
Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan announced that the resolutions proposed on the Kashmir issue has been passed. She said,"This house expresses serious concern over the violence in Kashmir Valley. Everyone here conveys loss of life caused by the deteriorating situation. The house is of the firm view that there cannot be a compromise on security."
Dubbing passage of the GST Constitution Amendment Bill as historic, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said that manufacturing taxes and VAT will come down with the new national sales tax but the same for services tax will be decided by states and Centre. The Goods and Services Tax (GST), which will subsume over a dozen central and state levies including excise duty, service tax and VAT, is "perhaps the most important" tax reform, he said soon after Rajya Sabha overwhelmingly voted for the legislation.
"Today is a historic day for the reason that Rajya Sabha has passed the GST bill which have been held up for a very long time. All members present at the time of voting, voted in favour of the bill," Jaitley told reporters in Parliament House.
Thanking Congress and other opposition parties for supporting the legislation, he said proceedings in the Upper House demonstrated to the world that this is a great day for Indian democracy and Indian federalism. "In fact Indian democracy and Indian federalism are at there very best in as much as all national political parties and regional parties, state governments have come together to usher a major taxation reform.. The government wanted to build a larger consensus, which we succeeded in doing," he said.
Asked if the implementation of the GST would mean rise in cost of air travel, mobile bills and eating out because of incidence of service tax going up in the new regime, he said that tax rate would be decided by the GST Council, comprising of the Centre and the states.
"Manufacturing taxes will certainly will come down, VAT will come down. What level services taxes are to be kept is a discretion of GST Council. It will depend on what states along with Centre will decide," he later told Times Now. On Congress demand for not converting the supporting GST legislation as Money Bill, Finance Minister said he has not pre-decided on bringing the Bills as Money or Finance Bills.
"Once the GST is implemented, it will bring basic changes as far as the Indian tax structure is concerned, it will converge India into one unified market, with one unified tax in the country, it will improve the base of taxation, it will make evasion extremely difficult.
"The central and state governments have to work together to make this a great success. Overall, I think we had an excellent debate," he told reporters.
He said although every state government is on board in order to implement one of the most important taxation reform in India, the fact is that it has been passed unanimously all regional and national parties have actively supported it.
Congress hoped that subsequent legislations for its implementation like CGST and IGST bills would be brought in the Winter Session as financial and not money bills. Former Finance Minister and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said he was only half satisfied with the Finance Minister's promise made in the Upper House in this regard.
"It's a half promise. Therefore, I am half satisfied," he told reporters after the passage of the Constitution Amendment Bill. Chidambaram said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has assured that he will hold discussions with the Congress party before bringing the bills. Senior Congress leader and former Law Minister Kapil Sibal cited the example of Aadhaar Bill to claim the new legislations could be converted into Money Bills to block voting.
"We have seen the Aadhar Bill was converted into a money bill and we were not given the right to vote on it. We have doubt that this GST bill will also be turned into a money bill whereby a discussion on it will take place in Rajya Sabha but members will not be allowed to vote on it. We are concerned over it," he said. "We hope that it will be a financial bill and there will be a discussion on it and we will be given the right to vote on it," he said.
Another Congress member Renuka Chowdhury said, "They have considered many of our aspects. Have to wait and see what happens in the winter session." NCP leader Praful Patel said it is very good that the Constitution amendment bill to bring GST was passed with general consensus.
"It is good for the country and states will also benefit, especially those which considered themselves as backward as they will get more revenue.
"We hope that the Bill to be brought by government in November will also be passed with general consensus. Finance Minister has given an assurance that whatever bill will be brought, it will be honoured," he said. Earlier in the day, Congress had made it clear to the government that firm assurances for keeping the GST rate capped at 18 per cent and bringing subsequent legislations needed for its rollout as financial bills alone could ensure its support to the long-pending Constitution Amendment bill.
"We also demanded an assurance that the CGST and IGST should not be moved as money bill. The Central GST and Integrated GST are bills which will apply on taxpayers, on common man. They must be debated and voted upon by both Houses of Parliament. We hope to get assurance from the Finance Minister. If these assurances are forthcoming, we will be able to support," Chidambaram told reporters.
The GST Bill will finally be taken up for discussion in the Rajya Sabha.
India Inc had said it is looking forward to introduction of the much-awaited Goods & Services Tax (GST), saying it would be a very significant step in the field of indirect tax reforms in India.
The government has circulated official amendments to the GST bill to drop 1 percent additional tax and include a definite provision in the statute for compensating states for revenue loss for 5 years as it gears up to discuss the long-pending bill in Rajya Sabha.
The eleventh day of Parliament's Monsoon Session on Monday began with AIADMK Rajya Sabha member Sasikala Pushpa's statement where she said that she was facing a "life threat" and was being "compelled to resign".
Sasikala, who hit the headlines for slapping DMK leader Tiruchi Siva at the airport on Saturday, said: "I am receiving an unconditional apology from Tiruchi Siva. Something was spoken against my party leader and I behaved like that."
The parliamentary proceedings over the day saw the passage of the Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill, 2016, and the Dentists (Amendment) Bill, 2016, that provide for putting the NEET in place for admission to medical and dental courses across the country from next year; and National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research (Amendment) Bill, 2016 in Rajya Sabha.
The Enforcement of Security Interest and Recovery of Debts Laws Amendment Bill 2016 was moved in the Lok Sabha for consideration and passing.
Key proceedings/issues discussed in Lok Sabha:
Supplementary demands over additional spending
The government sought parliament's nod for additional spending of Rs 1.03 lakh crore, though the cash outgo will only be Rs 20,948.26 crore.
Presenting the Supplementary Demands for Grants for 2016-17 in the Lok Sabha, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley sought parliament's approval for a transfer of Rs 5,000 crore towards National Employment Guarantee Fund and Rs 1,000 crore for providing funds to Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves for Sovereign Strategic Crude Oil Reserve at Vizag, Mangalore, and Pudur.
Bill for speedier recovery of bad loans passed
The Enforcement of Security Interest and Recovery of Debts Laws Amendment Bill 2016 was moved in the Lok Sabha for consideration and passing.
Piloted by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, the bill seeks to amend four laws the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002; the Recovery of Debts due to Banks and Financial Institutions Act, 1993; the Indian Stamp Act, 1899; and the Depositories Act, 1996.
Special status: TDP MPs protest in Parliament
Unhappy over the Centre's stand on special status to Andhra Pradesh, TDP, a partner in NDA government, staged protests both inside and outside Parliament. Seeking immediate announcement for special status, the MPs of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) tried to disrupt the proceedings in the Lower House.
Holding placards and raising slogans in support of their demands, the TDP members in the Lok Sabha began the protest as soon as the house met for the day. They rushed to the speaker's podium, demanding that the government fulfill its commitments under Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act.
Speaker Sumitra Mahajan repeatedly appealed to members to return to their seats but they continued the protest. The Speaker conducted the proceedings amid the uproar before adjourning the proceedings till 2 pm.
Attack on Dalits and Muslims
Opposition members expressed concern over growing attacks on Dalits and minorities and called for stern action against cow vigilante groups which have been targeting them.
Raising the issue during Zero Hour, Trinamool Congress leader Sudip Bandopadhyay underlined the need for action against those targeting the Dalits and Muslims to uphold secularism and communal harmony.
Key proceedings/issues discussed in Rajya Sabha:
GST Bill listed for Wednesday
The government has listed the GST bill for discussion in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, hoping it will be passed through consensus, but the opposition Congress said that consultation is still on over the issue and an agreement is not yet finalised.
In view of the development, the BJP has issued whip for all its Rajya Sabha members to be present in the house for the next three days.
"The GST bill is listed for Wednesday. We hope it will be passed through consensus," Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said.
Bills to put in place NEET passed
The Rajya Sabha passed by voice vote the Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill, 2016, and the Dentists (Amendment) Bill, 2016, that provide for putting the NEET in place for admission to medical and dental courses across the country from next year.
The bills provide for a Constitutional status to the 'National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) and seek to amend the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956, and the Dentists Act, 1948.
Responding to a debate on the bills in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of Health and Family Welfare Jagat Prakash Nadda said the whole exercise was aimed to stop multiplicity of examinations, to bring transparency to curb corruption and to stop exploitation of students.
Uproar over Manohar Parrikar's comments on Aamir Khan
Rajya Sabha witnessed a brief uproar by opposition members over alleged remarks by Manohar Parrikar against actor Aamir Khan even as the Defence Minister denied having said what was been quoted to him.
During the Zero Hour, Derek O'Brien (TMC) raised the issue of "dangerous" rise in religious fundamentalism in the country, saying the government, ministers and people associated with the ruling party were "shooting their mouths off every day".
"The Prime Minister needs to come and say these are in fact mistakes, this is not thinking of the government. Prime Minister come here and assure us that we can live in the India we know Unity in Diversity".
As soon as he finished his Zero Hour mention, Leader of Opposition and senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad quoted a report which said 'Parrikar takes a swipe at actor Aamir; those who speak like this must be taught a lesson'.
"So may I ask him (Parrikar who was sitting in the House) what lesson he is going to teach us...The entire nation should be told what type of action and lesson he is going to teach the minorities of this conuntry," Azad said.
To this, Parrikar said: "I would only say one thing. Let the members see the video...and make up their mind". However, this did not pacify the agitated opposition.
New Delhi: Rajya Sabha on Monday condemned "senseless and barbaric" acts of violence in various parts of the world, including France and Bangladesh, and called upon the global community to unitedly combat terrorism.
Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari referred to terror attacks in various parts of globe in June and July, which claimed several lives and left several others maimed and injured.
Manifestation of terror in the form of gunfights and bomb explosions in Istanbul, suicide bomber attacks in Kabul and Baghdad, terror attacks in Nice, Dhaka, Jeddah, Qatif and the holy city of Madinah have stunned the world, he said.
"These senseless and barbaric acts of violence across the world have shaken the conscience of humanity at large and are a grim reminder that the tentacles of terrorism are slowly spreading all over the globe. These growing terror acts are deplorable and deserve to be condemned," Ansari said.
He said such acts only re-affirm "our resolve to fight terrorism with determination and to reiterate our call to the global community to unitedly combat and eliminate the scourge of terrorism from the world".
The loss of innocent lives and injury to hapless people in all these tragic incidents is indeed outrageous and condemnable, the Chairman said.
"This House joins me in expressing our deep sorrow and sympathy and heartfelt condolences on the losses suffered by the friendly people of Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and France and reiterate India's stand of solidarity with the government and the people of these countries in their hour of grief," he said.
The House also expressed grief over several deaths due to natural calamities like cloudbursts, floods and lightning strikes in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and some other parts of the country during June and July.
The members rose in their places and observed silence as mark of respect to the memory of those who lost their lives in these tragedies.
Arvind Kejriwal's tenure as Delhi Chief Minister is actually one big, sustained, high-pitch campaign for the post that he truly covets the Prime Minister's chair.
Consider that right now, the Aam Admi Party is little more than a regional power. Kejriwal has no footprint outside New Delhi. For a PM aspirant, that presents a challenge. More so when it comes to taking on Narendra Modi, the leader of a party with a massive national footprint.
His quest for the 7 Race Course Road office, therefore, makes it imperative for Kejriwal to constantly brand and rebrand his image. His latest mass interactive outreach 'Talk To AK', an hour-long monthly session the first edition of which kicked off on Sunday, is one more step in that direction.
Events such as these are tailored to serve some crucial ends. One, Kejriwal knows that media will instantly compare his initiative with Modi's Mann Ki Baat, tacitly placing him as 'Modi's equal' in the national consciousness. Two, it will help him stay relevant at a time when the AAP is gearing up for Assembly elections in Goa, Punjab, Gujarat and other states. Three, it will create more hype around the Delhi CM and place him ahead of regional satraps such as Nitish Kumar in the race to challenge Modi despite the fact that the Bihar CM is probably a better administrator and heads the government of an important state, not a Union Territory.
As a politician, Kejriwal's strategy is astute.
Problem lies in the fact that it is not enough for the AAP supremo to project himself as a national leader. He feels a curious urge to pose as the hero of a morality play perched permanently atop his high horse. That is where his moves fail to pass the smell test of ethics and he ends up repeatedly exposing himself.
Expelling Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav after claiming that he was against "high command culture" in politics; attempting to retrospectively exempt 21 AAP MLAs from disqualification provisions by amending the Delhi Members of Legislative Assembly (Removal of Disqualification) Act; the handling of Jitender Tomar, Rajendra Kumar issues are just a few instances where the 'hero' has failed to live up to the standards of morality that he demands from others.
In fact, even his rage against Modi is fake.
Firstpost has argued in the past how Kejriwal's seemingly visceral hatred for Narendra Modi and frequent vituperative statements against the PM are also part of an ingenuous strategy to remain on top of the news cycle.
Attacking Modi is the easiest and most efficient way of doing it. It is sure to be carried in the media, both mainstream and social. And any backlash from the PM's chair will immediately give Kejriwal the chance to play victim. He will get more reason to paint himself as the "cornered crusader" whom Modi is "determined to crush using the might of state".
Talk To AK is essentially carrying forward this concept of forcefully projecting Kejriwal as "Modi's equal", if not even bigger in stature.
Consider that even as Kejriwal and his team were essentially copying PM's concept of addressing the nation through radio show Mann Ki Baat, it was made to appear as if Talk To AK is a superior idea because it is, as AAP claims, "is a dialogue, a two-way conversation" unlike PM's 'monologue'.
The clear message is this: "Modiji only makes people listen to his voice, whereas I, Shri Arvind Kejriwal, allow people to talk to me and respond to them also."
So through the hosting of this social media outreach, Kejriwal becomes this magnanimous leader who is not afraid of taking "tough questions" because he has "nothing to hide".
Talk To AK hence has little to do with the stated purpose that Kejriwal "will take the opportunity to apprise people of AAP govt's work and initiatives". It is rather a thinly veiled political campaign to claim that he is a better and more 'open' leader than even Modi.
But if this was indeed the message, Kejriwal seems to have scored yet another self goal of duplicity.
Maan Ki Baat, for instance, has no claims of being an interactive show. Modi selectively takes up a few questions during his address. Talk To AK, however, was billed as a real-time "hour-long live interactive session with people" where Kejriwal will take questions through Twitter, Facebook, phone calls and text messages.
In a recent report, a senior Delhi government official told Times of India that "for a long time, the media team of the CM (Kejriwal) was working on the project. The government has launched a dedicated website 'talktoak.com' through which people can directly ask the questions."
But it is not clear, at least after the first session on 7 July, if Kejriwal indeed answered all questions in real time or if it was a careful selection of questions by music composer Vishal Dadlani who was moderating the event. Kejriwal sat beside him with deputy CM Manish Sisodia in tow.
Dear Dhar Saab! All Qs taken weren't taken LIVE, let me update u that #TalkToAK was accepting Q's since last 4 days https://t.co/hhEcFS510t Dilip K. Pandey (@dilipkpandey) July 17, 2016
Ever seen a more fixed interview than this? Ye toh bahut Krantikari ho gaya ispe bahut response aayenge #TalkToAK pic.twitter.com/AEsQVeG9gx Ankur Singh (@iAnkurSingh) July 18, 2016
A report in IBNLive also raises questions on whether the "live" session was actually "scripted". In the video which has gone viral, Dadlani and Kejriwal seem to be rehearsing the session.
Before the session was aired finally on Sunday, Dadlani, a known AAP backer, told Catchnews in an interview that the event would have "nothing to do with Modi."
"It's not a "talk show" at all. It's a forum, where AK will take questions from people at large. I'm only there as the voice to those questions This has nothing to do with Modi ji at all. This is between Arvind Kejriwal and the people who have reposed faith in him and the AAP revolution."
What we saw instead after an hour of monologue, in which Kejriwal listed his governments achievements, was the same old template of Modi bashing and victimhood narrative.
In PMs 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.
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.
That's not all. Some of Kejriwal's claims also seemed at odds with those of senior AAP leaders. The first question which Kejriwal took up for answering was one about AAP's huge advertisement budget for which the party has come under sharp criticism.
There is no comparison with the RSS when it comes to spreading rumours. We have only spent Rs 75 crore on advertising and not Rs.526 crore as claimed by many, justified Kejriwal.
But only recently, AAP leader Ashutosh had defended the Rs 500 crore ad budget in an NDTV column titled "AAP's 500-Crore Ad Budget is Far From Excessive".
Did the AAP forget to do its homework?
Janata Dal (United) MLA Shyam Bahadur Singh is an interesting man.
Elected for the second time in the 2015 Bihar Assembly Election from the Barharia consituency in the state's Siwan district, Singh is known for his penchant for the finer things in life: Riding an elephant to Assembly, shaking a leg, shaking the other leg, shaking both legs at once, shaking everything else (well, you get the idea), and as it has been alleged in certain quarters, harbouring a certain fondness for the bottle.
The 53-year-old with three criminal cases against him (including two charges related to theft under Section 379 of the Indian Penal Code and one charge 1 related to an attempt to murder under Section 307) found himself in yet another soup on Sunday as a fairly incriminating video footage emerged on the World Wide Web. Said footage appears to depict the MLA gyrating oddly, pushing women around and prancing around in a manner that can be described as 'lewd' and 'lascivious'.
That's what the video appears to depict, without a sense of context.
We dispatched our investigative team to Barharia to find out just what happened.
As it turns out, they never made the trip only a phonecall and then spent a couple of hours watching trains.
Upon returning to the office FP Special Forces headquarters, they told us a very interesting Shyam Bahadur Singh factoid: The MLA is an avid gamer with a particular predilection for Pokemon Go.
It's all starting to make a bit more sense now, right?
Singh, it would transpire, was a man on the receiving end of a very bad day. He was invited to an event that he attended, reluctantly. He tried to sit at the back but was forced to sit right at the front so as not to offend his hosts. And then, all of a sudden, something went off on his cellphone.
The level seven trainer at the time anyway needed only 100 XP points to unlock level eight, as well as 15 Poke Balls, 10 Potions, 5 Revives, 10 Razz Berry, one Lure Modulator and a Razz Berry. Naturally, he wasn't going to let the little critter go without a fight. Particularly if the critter happened to be a Charizard a fire-breathing champ! Let no one tell you otherwise.
Unfortunately, that's when tragedy struck. Just as he approached his potential prey, Charizard disappeared... or so it seemed.
Luckily for Singh, he was able to sort out that problem and set about capturing Charizard.
Unfortunately, the day went from bad to worse for Singh first, being forced to attend the event; second, being made to sit right up front and now, this as he discovered in his midst two other trainers with their greedy eyes on Charizard. There was only one way around this and that was to shove the lot of them out of the way.
But on a day that makes battling Lt Surge for the Thunder Badge in the Vermilion City Gym look like a walk in the park, Singh should really have expected that nothing was going to go his way.
Pikachu, it would appear, wasn't in the mood.
And then that video went viral.
A terrible day altogether.
Disclaimer: We're not entirely sure that Singh actually plays Pokemon Go, but if he does, it's heartening to see how much effort he puts into catching 'em all. If he doesn't, perhaps he should. It'll keep him occupied and away from whatever it is he's meant to be doing in the video.
The US may be a nation of immigrants. But, if there is one political topic that always gets Americans riled up, it is immigration. In fact, the Republican National Convention 2016, which begins on Monday, is scheduled to discuss immigration on the first day of the four day programme. Three immigration reform activists will speak on the issue during the prime time session, as will Donald Trump's wife Melania.
The issue looks to heat up as earlier this month, two US lawmakers Democratic Partys Bill Pascrell from New Jersey and Republican Partys Dana Rohrabacher from California dealt a sharp blow to Indian and US tech industries when they introduced a bill regulating H-1B and L1 visas in the US House of Representatives. The bill, which specifically targets the use of these visas by Indian companies to send talent to the US to work for American firms, has once again brought to the fore Americas attempts to tackle immigration.
Software services companies such as Infosys, Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant and Wipro which have operations in India make liberal use of the provision in US law wherein they can employ Indians to work in the US under the H-1B and L1 visas. The Bill proposes that not only does this take away jobs from qualified Americans but also leads to abuse of Indian workers rights.
The H-1B visa programme began in 1990 and made it possible for companies in the US to hire workers from across the world in almost all fields. But nowadays, most applications are for computer engineers and software professionals, reports San Francisco Chronicle. The publication, which crowdfunded a campaign to be able to report on H-1B visas, also states that between 2013 and 2016, applications for these visas increased by 90 percent. In the fiscal year 2014, Indians received 67 percent of H-1B visas issued.
With immigration being one of the key factors that led British voters to cast their ballots for a Brexit, the issue has once again become an important platform for candidates in the US presidential race. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump have both discussed their stand on immigration on their official campaign sites.
According to Clinton, immigration is a family issue and not just an economic issue. Immigration reform is needed not just because its the right thing to doand it isbut because it will strengthen families, strengthen our economy, and strengthen our country. While she talks about the broken system in general, she doesnt mention H-1B visas specifically on her campaign website.
However, Trump is a different story. When politicians talk about immigration reform they mean: amnesty, cheap labour and open borders, his website states. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.
He insists, The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans including immigrants themselves and their children to earn a middle class wage.
It's no wonder then that Trump chose Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence is one of the many state governors who announced that they will not allow Syrian refugees to be resettled in their state until the federal government assures him that sufficient security measures have been taken in vetting the refugees. According to OnTheIssues.org, Pence had, in 2006, voted to build a fence along the Mexican border in order to stop illegal entry into the US. In 2007, he co-sponsored a bill that wanted English to be declared the official language of the US (the nation doesn't have an official language). The bill failed to get passed. Pence has not made any official comment on H-1B visas but his thoughts have aligned with Trump's in other immigration matters so far.
Trump's plan is manifold but there are two points that specifically target H-1B visa holders.
Trump states on his website that one way to curb unemployment is by increasing the prevailing wage for H-1Bs. This will force the companies to give the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) jobs to Americans, instead of hiring the no-longer cheap labour from other countries. That way, more women, blacks and Hispanics will get jobs in the STEM industry. He wants to introduce a rule so that companies that want to hire workers on H-1B will be required to hire American workers first, even before greencards (permanent residence status) are issued to foreign workers.
As Jayant M, an Indian tech worker in California points out, Clinton only talks about immigration reform from the illegal immigration perspective since she is targeting the Latino voters. The Indian community is not as active in US politics as the Latino community is and politicians have bigger fishes to fry.
He doesnt have much faith in Trump being able to bring about any significant change that will affect the Indian community even though he agrees that immigration has been the cornerstone of Trumps campaign. Trump is a typical populist politician here; his immigration policies are just like his other ones: talk wildly about things that sounds good in speeches, but make no sense whatsoever and can never be implemented. As far as the Indian tech community goes, if he is elected, I think he will try to reduce the number of H-1B visas, and make the requirements more stringent just because it will be a populist thing to do. It is worth noting that these laws cannot be made by the president directly. Congress has to pass these laws for them to come in effect. Trump will have a hard time getting the Democrats to agree to his proposals.
Sarita B, who also went from India to the US, believes neither of the two presumptive candidates have sound, workable ideas when it comes to immigration. It is fair to put American workers first, she says, but adds, I dont think increasing wages for anyone hired through an H-1B is a good idea as companies already pay to sponsor visas of these employees. As for Clintons policies, As much as I like the thought of giving illegal immigrants a chance to become naturalised through (Deferred action for childhood arrivals) DACA/(Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents) DAPA, Im afraid they will become reasons for more and more people to immigrate illegally.
Whether the proposed Bill gets any traction or not, the fact remains that immigration will remain a hot topic for voters this US presidential election.
DUBAI Bahrain on Monday dismissed as "unacceptable interference" U.S. and British criticism of its decision to dissolve the main Shi'ite Muslim opposition party, as senior clerics warned the Shi'ite majority was under threat.
Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, said a court's decision on Sunday to dissolve the al-Wefaq opposition group, accused of helping foster violence and terrorism, was "just" and "transparent", state news agency BNA reported.
The move against al-Wefaq was one of several steps taken by the Sunni-led government against its opponents that have drawn international criticism, including revoking the citizenship of the country's Shi'ite spiritual leader Ayatollah Isa Qassim.
"Bahrain expresses its deep regret at the statements from the British foreign secretary and U.S. State Department and considers them as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs," said BNA.
Close ally Britain expressed deep concern at Sunday's ruling and a statement by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Bahrain to guarantee political freedoms for all its citizens.
The U.S. State Department said the governments recent steps to "suppress nonviolent opposition" undermined Bahrains and the regions stability, and strained America's partnership with its Gulf ally.
Bahrain said it wanted to take into account the interests of its allies and partners to preserve "distinctive and historical relations" with them.
The Gulf country has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni Muslim-led government, mainly drawn from the ruling al-Khalifa family.
In a joint statement distributed on social media, Bahrain's four main Shi'ite Muslim clerics warned that the government crackdown was not limited to the political opposition.
"We, the Shi'ites, as a main component of this homeland have become greatly convinced that we are being targeted in our existence, identity, beliefs, rituals and practices," the statement, signed by Sheikh Abdullah al-Ghuraifi, Sheikh Abdul-Hussein al-Sitri, Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Rubaiyi as well as Qassim, said.
Bahrain's justice ministry rejected the charges and vowed to keep up measures against what it said those who would try to divide the country on sectarian basis and finances terrorism.
"Everybody must support the measures taken by the state against those who violate the law, incite violence and are linked with forces abroad," the ministry said in a statement.
Seen by other Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdoms like Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Iranian influence, it put down Arab Spring protests in 2011.
The country has been gripped by political tension since 2011, with Shi'ites complaining of discrimination and demanding
reforms that would give them a bigger say in government affairs.
Bahrain denies any discrimination and says a minority
inspired by Iran are trying to foment sectarian unrest in the
kingdom.
(Reporting by Noah Browning,; Writing by Tom Finn and Sami Aboudi; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Dhaka: Days after the Dhaka cafe siege and a terror attack on an Eid congregation, Bangladeshi forces conducted a search in Bogra in Rajshahi district on Monday to locate militant training camps. They also announced a 10 lakh Taka reward for any militant who would lay down arms.
The joint forces conducted searches in different areas of Dhunot and Sariakandi upazillas in Bogra in search of militant training camps.
Benazir Ahmed, director general of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), announced Tk 10 lakh reward for any militant outfit member who was ready to return to normal life and give specific information about activities of militants.
He also announced that Tk 5 lakh will be given to anyone who provides specific information about activities of terrorist and militant groups.
The RAB, police and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) conducted the anti-militancy drive, reported the Daily Star. Ahmed said all militants outfits operating in the country will be uprooted.
The drive in Bogra was initiated following information provided by Shariful Islam alias Shafiul Islam alias Saiful Islam, a suspect held in the Sholakia Eid congregation attack in Bangladesh on 7 July.
Three machetes, three knives and six jihadi books were recovered during the three-hour drive conducted by the joint forces.
In a media briefing on Sunday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said the government's priority is to find those who are instigating young men to engage in militancy.
Expressing her concern, Hasina said boys from well-off families are now getting involved in militant extremism. "What's the reason behind it? Who are instigating them," she asked.
She stressed upon finding those who are supplying arms to young men and funding terror attacks. She also said that the government has reached an understanding with India and the US over sharing of intelligence and assistance to combat terrorism.
The 1 July terror siege in a Dhaka cafe led to the death of 20 hostages, mostly foreigners, including one Indian.
Baton Rouge: Three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed on Sunday, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by the police 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. Although he was believed to be the only person who fired at officers, authorities said they were unsure 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 interests" were detained in the nearby town of Addis.
A witness described the gunman as wearing all black and carrying extra clips of ammunition. He was identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, said East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden.
The 29-year-old black man 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.
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 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.
The shooting which took place just before 9 am, less than a mile from police headquarters came amid escalating tensions across the country between the black community and police. Just days earlier, one of the slain officers posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.
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.
President Barack Obama urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions.
"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. "Everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further."
Authorities initially believed that other assailants might be at large, but hours later said that no other active shooters were on the loose. 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 two-and-a-half 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.
The officers who were shot worked for the Baton Rouge Police Department and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office.
"There simply is no place for more violence," Gov John Bel Edwards said. "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."
From his window, Joshua Godwin said he saw the suspect, who was wearing all 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.
Officer Montrell Jackson, who was black, posted his message on Facebook on 8 July, 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.
The Baton Rouge attack unfolded hours after a domestic violence suspect opened fire early Sunday 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.
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 have 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."
Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, who was killed on Sunday, had written a Facebook post expressing how difficult it was for him to be both a black man and a police officer.
The message was posted 8 July, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge.
Here is the post:
"I'm tired physically and emotionally. Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments but hey what's in your heart is in your heart. I still love you all because hate takes too much energy but I definitely won't 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 at threat. I've 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 don't 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 don't let hate infect your heart. 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."
The words of BR Police officer killed today. Please listen to him. pic.twitter.com/j2JqA16RoX Christee Atwood (@ChristeeAtwood) July 17, 2016
The post, which has since been removed from Jackson's page, ended with two emojis: a police officer and peace sign.
Brussels: New British foreign minister and top Brexit backer Boris Johnson pledged on Monday that Britain would continue to play a leading role in Europe as he met his European Union peers for the first time.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union but... we are not going in any way to abandon our leading role in European participation," Johnson said.
He said he had had a "very good conversation" on the subject with EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogherini late Sunday although his dinner with her was called off after his plane had to make an emergency landing.
"I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues," he added.
Johnson was a key player in the 23 June Brexit referendum and his appointment last week stunned many in Europe, with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying he had lied to voters during the campaign.
He also infuriated many by comparing the EU's ambitions for closer integration to Adolf Hitler's.
Mogherini, arriving just after Johnson at a regular EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, said the two had had "a good exchange on the main issues on the agenda today."
She refused to be drawn on Britain's negotiations for its departure from the bloc, which EU leaders insist can only start once London invokes Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to trigger the divorce.
Britain remains a member of the EU until those negotiations are completed, she added.
BRUSSELS Britain's Boris Johnson, who made his name as a Brussels-bashing journalist in the 1990s, was determined to avoid making headlines when he returned to his old stamping ground on Monday.
The mop-haired politician, who led last month's referendum campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, was on his best behaviour at his first EU foreign ministers' meeting.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union, but that in no sense means that we are leaving Europe," Britain's newly minted foreign secretary said.
"We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds," Johnson told reporters on arrival. He took no questions.
Ten hours later, he said on his way out that Britain wanted to see the EU develop and go forward, "and all we would say is that to make sure there are docking stations and doors for future UK involvement down the track".
For most of the day Johnson, a Daily Telegraph journalist in Brussels in 1989-94 and longtime scourge of EU integration and regulation, was a man more talked-about than talking.
Pooled television pictures showed him chatting animatedly in a group with his Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourg, Spanish and Maltese counterparts before the meeting, occasionally stuffing his hands awkwardly into the jacket pockets of an ill-fitting suit.
The bigger beasts of the EU jungle avoided that huddle.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who had called Johnson a liar on his appointment last week, sat stony-faced in his seat while Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had branded the Leave campaigner irresponsible, looked away.
Johnson's first words to the official session were in French to honour the victims of last Friday's truck attack in Nice, switching to English to express sorrow and finishing with the French word "solidarite", officials present said.
It fell to visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to give Johnson, who relished verbal jousts with then European Commission President Jacques Delors, a veiled lesson in the benefits of the EU.
"I ask anyone who questions the importance of the EU or its relationship with the United States, (to consider) not just the history that I articulated, but the increase of prosperity, the rise in the standard of living ... the better protection of rights for individuals in the EU, as a consequence of what we have done together," Kerry said.
NO APOLOGY
Asked if the former mayor of London had apologised for having compared the EU's goals to those of Hitler and Napoleon during the referendum campaign, Ayrault said: "No he did not apologise ... Boris Johnson came to the council and behaved with a certain modesty.
"For me the essential thing is clarity, not making snide remarks or snap judgments. But what matters is the relationship that we'll now have to construct between the EU and Britain," the French minister said.
Steinmeier said Johnson had distinguished between "Europe" and "the EU", and "tried to make clear the UK will still engage in conflicts like Syria even if it will leave the EU".
The German minister dodged a question on the suitability of Johnson as foreign secretary, telling reporters: "This is a British decision that we don't want to criticise ... Boris Johnson... said today he was taking this task seriously."
One EU colleague had warm words for the newcomer. His Polish counterpart, whose conservative nationalist government has defied Brussels in a drive to shackle the constitutional court, said Johnson had made some "conciliatory gestures".
"He was positive, asked a lot of questions as some of the terminology and procedures are new to him, but he was showing interest, was engaged," Witold Waszczykowski said.
"At the same time he does have this easy-going style so that makes the meeting a bit more colourful."
(Additional reporting by Manon Jacob and Tom Korkemeier; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Pravin Char)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Beijing: China said on Monday that it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defence Ministry had no immediate comment.
The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navy's top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson is meeting with China's navy commander, Adm. Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao that began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour china's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are "China's inherent territory," and says it could declare an air defense identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippine fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the United States should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunal's decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the country's economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared to his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. China's navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
China's island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, US warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the US of threatening its national security.
Jakarta: A man has been arrested for trying to board a Garuda Indonesia plane bound for Saudi Arabia with 10 pythons in his socks, an airline official said Monday.
The man was stopped after security officers saw something suspicious during an X-ray check at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Saturday, said Benny Butarbutar, spokesman for the national airline.
It was not clear what the man's motives were, he said.
Local media identified the passenger as Saudi national and said the pythons had been hidden in his black socks.
According to Asian Correspondent, the man, identified as Koufiah Jihad Zaki was attempting to smuggle snakes to be sold in Saudi Arabia, initial prove revealed. The alleged animal smuggler is currently being held by the police to assist with investigations.
With inputs from DPA Features
BARI, Italy Italian counter-terror officials are investigating a Tunisian living in the southern city of Bari who spoke to Nice attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel hours before he killed 84 people, investigative sources said on Monday.
The man spoke with Bouhlel, who was also Tunisian, by telephone just hours before the delivery man ran down revellers at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice on Thursday with a 19-tonne refrigerator truck, sources said.
Italy's anti-terror police and magistrates opened the probe at the request of French authorities, who had Bouhlel's phone records, the sources said.
The two men had spoken several times in recent weeks, the sources said without giving further details.
Three people close to Bouhlel were arrested in Nice on Sunday. Four others arrested previously were still being held.
Islamic State has claimed the attack, calling Bouhlel one of its soldiers, but authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old, who was shot dead by police, had any actual links to the militant group.
(Reporting by Vincenzo Damiani; Writing by Steve Scherer; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Melbourne: US Vice-President Joe Biden on Monday condemned the slaying of three police officers in Louisiana, dubbing the shootings a "despicable act."
Biden, who made the comments during a speech at a Boeing factory he is visiting in Australia, said while the details and motive behind the killings remain unclear, the public owes police officers in general a debt of gratitude for putting their lives on the line.
"It's a despicable act and it's an attack on our very way of life at home," Biden told a crowd at the Boeing facility.
The slayings occurred in the city of Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police there in a confrontation that sparked protests across the country. The officers had been investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle when they were killed. Three other officers were wounded, one critically. Police said the gunman was killed at the scene.
"My enduring thanks for every police officer who gets up in the morning and goes out on that night shift. And they look for one thing they kiss their wife good-bye or their husband and they want to go home and tuck in their kids," Biden said. "They have a right to do that. They have a right to be able to be protected and we owe them big."
Biden is in Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific. Prior to his speech, he met with Boeing workers and toured the multi-million dollar factory, which manufactures wing flaps for the Dreamliner 787 aircraft.
Biden will fly to Sydney later Monday to meet with business leaders and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. On Wednesday, he travels to New Zealand.
Rabat: Moroccan King Mohammed VI announced that his country wanted to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member.
"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 on Sunday, the MAP Moroccan news agency reported.
Morocco quit the grouping in protest in 1984 when the Saharan 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. Morocco has occupied the sparsely populated Western Sahara area since 1975 in a move that was not recognised by the international community.
It maintains that Western Sahara is an integral part of the kingdom even though local Sahrawi people have long campaigned for the right to self-determination.
In 1991, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire between Moroccan troops and Sahrawi rebels of the Algerian-backed Polisario Front but a promised referendum to settle the status of the desert territory has yet to materialise.
In his address to the African Union, King Mohammed urged the bloc to rethink its position on the "fantom state" of Western Sahara, saying that a political solution was being worked on under the auspices of the UN.
Islamabad: Prominent Pakistan cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi, who made headlines in June for appearing in a video with Qandeel Baloch, will be included in the murder investigation of the slain social media star, a police official said on Monday.
"We have decided to include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the murder investigation," said a police official in Multan where Baloch was killed, Geo news reported.
On Sunday, Qandeels brother Muhammad Waseem admitted to strangling her to death for the "honour of the family". Waseem said he gave a "tablet" to Qandeel to sedate her and then strangled her in their family home over the weekend.
"The scope of the investigation has been widened. The victim's brother, Aslam, will also be investigated. We are waiting for the forensic reports," said the police official.
"As per our initial investigation, 'honour' is the motive of murder," the police official said earlier.
Waseem admitted that he killed his sister due to her activities on social media, including a series of posts with prominent cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi in which one video showed Qandeel shaking hands with Qavi as she sat on the arm of a sofa by his side.
Qavi, who was suspended from the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee as a result of the controversy following the posts, told the local media after Qandeel's death that he had "forgiven her" and the matter was now in God's hands, Geo news reported.
Prior to her death, Qandeel, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, spoke of worries about her safety and had appealed to the Pakistan Interior Ministry to provide her with security for protection.
No help was provided and the Pakistan Interior Ministry has not commented on her death.
In Facebook posts, Qandeel, 26, spoke of trying to change "the typical orthodox mindset" of people in Pakistan. She faced frequent abuse and death threats but continued to post provocative pictures and videos.
The so-called "honour-killing" has sent shockwaves across the country and triggered an outpouring of grief on social media for Qandeel.
Islamabad: Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch, who was strangled to death by her brother in the name of "family honour" two days ago, was laid to rest in a local graveyard at her ancestral village near Multan, a media report said on Monday.
The funeral prayers of Qandeel were offered in the village Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan district on Sunday, Dawn news online reported.
Meanwhile, a Duty Magistrate in Multan remanded her brother and confessed killer, Waseem, in police custody for three days. Waseem confessed to having killed Qandeel in the name of honour. He said that he had no regrets, a police official told the media at a press conference on Saturday.
Qandeels body was taken to her village, where a large number of people had gathered.
Before the funeral, women relatives of Qandeel applied henna to her hands and feet as per local tradition. Her mother repeatedly kissed her hands. Her brothers and two married sisters were also present to perform the last rites.
Talking to the media, Qandeels father Mohammad Azeem said he would pursue the case against Waseem.
She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her, Dawn news online quoted Azeem as saying. His sons were unhappy over her achievements and turned against her even though she supported them, he said.
The residents of the village condemned the killing of Qandeel, terming it a brutal act. A woman in Multan, who lived in a house adjacent to Qandeels, told the media that the deceased had asked for the hand of her daughter for Waseem. It seems unbelievable that she has been killed by a brother for whom she was trying to arrange a marriage, she said.
The sanctimonious outrage in India against ''those Pakistanis" for killing Qandeel Baloch and then rejoicing over her corpse is amusing. For, we have killed our very own Baloch many times with equal nonchalance.
Look around, our own graveyards and crematoriums are lined with Balochs. Face a mirror, there is a lot of Pakistan in in all of us. Introspect, in every Indian there is a Waseem Azeem waiting to kill for honour, religion or misogyny.
Baloch may have been strangled by her brother Waseem. But, she is a victim of a lynch mob mentality that commits and justifies crimes in the name of gairath, culture and religion. Of the mindset that imposes on others what they should eat, drink, wear, speak; who they should idolise and marry. Of those who think they have the right to decide who deserves to die for not conforming to their mindset. Of those who want to be arbiters of individual and collective freedoms, those who despise others for seeking azaadi from orthodoxy, hypocrisy, bigotry and stifling patriarchy.
Baloch is in every woman we kill for honour because she married against her wishes. She is in every Babli who gets slain for marrying a sagotriya (from the same clan) Manoj, every Neeraj Kumari that gets burnt for ignoring the family's diktat.
When it comes to honour killing, India is neck and neck with Pakistan, literally. According to experts, every years at least a 1000 women get killed in the name of honour in India, almost the same as in Pakistan. Every fifth woman that is killed in the name of honour in the world is Indian.
'Qandeel Baloch should have come to India, she would have been safe here,' someone tweeted in a bid to compare Islamic Pakistan with Hindu India.
Safe in India, really? Safe in a country with a sex ratio of 940?
If not for honour, it is quite likely that Baloch could have been killed before birth just because of her gender. In western India, states like Haryana (879), Punjab (895), Rajasthan (928) and Gujarat (919) that lie on the India-Pakistan border, the sex ratio is a damning condemnation of how girls are considered a perishable commodity, just as Baloch was. (Incidentally, Pakistan's sex ratio 1:1.05 is better than India's.)
Qandeel Baloch is in every Akhlaq Mohammed we kill for their personal choices, in the name of religion and then come up with shameless explanations to justify the murder and hound the victim. She is a victim of every person who rejoiced Akhlaq's death saying he deserved to die for the choices he (may have) made for lunch.
Qandeel Baloch is in every Indian whose freedom of expression is sought to be repressed in the name of ideology and deshbhakti; in every Indian who wants to speak his mind without fear or favour but gets threatened by faceless, nameless patriots out there to save India's sanskriti.
Just a few days before she was killed, the Pakistani media disclosed Baloch's identity, something she had taken lots of precautions to conceal. Had the media pondered consequences of invading her personal space, revealing her familial ties, perhaps her brother would not have been enraged enough to kill her for 'bringing shame' upon the family.
So, Qandeel Baloch is in every Indian whose lives get ruined by an insensitive media that loves to pry into personal lives, turn them into The Truman Show we can consume in the night and rail against in the day; in every victim of its lies, canards and concoctions (remember the doctored video against Kanhaiya Kumar?).
Cry for Baloch if you want. But, don't laugh at her murderers. They are just like us.
A counterview to this was published on Firstpost. Read it here
The coup in Turkey attempted by a group of middle-ranking soldiers of the country has gone down in West Asian history as an ill-designed expedition.
Leaving around 265 people dead and nearly 1,500 wounded including members of the coup 3,000 soldiers have been arrested. They mainly targeted Ankara and Istanbul, taking control of the Istanbuls bridges, airports, the Turkish parliament and some police stations.
It is gratifying that the Turkish government has scuppered the coup attempt. But an irony that has left many in the lurch is the current Turkish establishments blame on the Turkish-origin moderate and progressive Islamic scholar and social thinker, Fethullah Gulen for being behind the coup. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has bluntly blamed it on the Hizmet movement, Gulens initiative for intercultural and interfaith dialogue and education in the country expanding across the world today. But for many immensely impressed by Gulens global humanitarian, social and Islam-based peace activism, it remains an obscure question as to how the former ally of his country is now blamed for the coup?
Not many in India know who Fethullah Gulen really is, despite his significant contributions in different parts of the country in promoting interfaith dialogue, modern education and peace activism.
An authoritative mainstream Turkish Islamic scholar, social thinker and educationist Fethullah Gulen (1938) has long been engaged in peace activism, interfaith and intercultural dialogue, promoting science, democracy and spirituality. Living in exile in Pennsylvania, he promulgates a spiritually inclined faith in Islam. He has propounded spiritual Islamic theories, which can contribute to the modern approaches to peace, non-violence and counter-extremism. Interestingly, he is not a social scientist but his ideas are very relevant to peace and conflict resolution. Gulen strongly advocates the importance of democracy, pluralism, education, science and interfaith dialogue for peace and conflict resolution in the Muslim world. In a research paper entitled Fethullah Gulen and His Liberal Turkish Islam (Movement. MERIA Journal. V4, No:4), Aras and Caha (2000) have concluded that Gulens basic idea is to replace the theory of clash of civilisations with the cooperation of civilisations towards a peaceful world.
It is not going to be all that easy to blame Gulen for the Turkish coup for two main reasons: First, Fathullah Gulen and his Hizmet movement fully supported the Turkish president Erdogan when his ruling party, Justice and Development Party democratically rose to power. Second, the mainstream peace-loving Turkish people around the world endorse the writings and teachings of Fethullah Gulen, which lay the foundation of the Hizmet Movement. It has earned huge appreciation from an overwhelming number of independent researchers and writers, both from Turkey and foreign countries. Even the Turkish media has favoured the humanitarianism of the Gulen movement until the recent forced capture of the mainstream media outlets like the most popular daily newspapers Zaman and Todays Zaman which often spoke for the Hizmet. Reporters Without Borders' security-general Christophe Deloire released a hard-hitting statement about the takeover of independent media in Turkey, calling it "ideological and unlawful." He wrote: "Erdogan is now moving from authoritarianism to all-out despotism". As a result, the editorial tone of several media outlets in connection to the Hizmet movement has changed after the takeover, as Al-Jazeera has pointed out in an article dated 6 March.
Gulens ideas, primarily drawn from Islamic sources, have inspired the powerful civic and social movement, Hizmet or what is popularly known as Gulen movement within Turkey and abroad. The Turkish word Hizmet is derivative of the Arabic-Persian word Kihdmat meaning service and hence the movement has established hundreds of educational, civic service organisations and institutions in over 160 countries, actively contributing in the areas of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, intercultural-interfaith dialogue, education, media and relief work. These institutions engage in various initiatives that foster inclusiveness, build community capacity and create shared spaces.
Remarkably, the prominent scholars of the country have produced numerous works on Fethullah Gulen and his peace activism in English, Turkish, Arabic and Urdu literature. However, most of the publications about Gulen were designed for the academia, not for the popular consumption of regular media audience. Nevertheless, they have developed a nuanced understanding of Gulens thoughts, particularly his theories of peace, nonviolence and counter-extremism. In this context, it would be quite pertinent to glance through a few rigorous research studies on Gulen and the Hizmet:
The renowned Turkish academician, Zeki Saritoprak, director of the Bediuzzaman Said Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, has tweeted, I strongly condemn all dictatorships in Turkey be by military or political Islamists. In 2007 at the SOAS conference, Saritoprak had explained that Gulen believes in the integrity of the individual; his approach to social restoration and peace building, therefore, is one of bottom-up social change which is similar to the famous Muslim sociologist Ibn Khalduns understanding of building peace.
In 2001, Berna Turam, professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies at Hampshire College, studied the Gulen Movement in McGill University for her PhD that was based on an extended empirical research project undertaken in Turkey and Kazakhstan between 1997 and 1999. She wrote Between Islam and the State: The Engagements between Gulen Community and the Secular Turkish State. The main findings of her research contrast the juxtaposition of Islam and the state. She noted:
"Throughout the Middle East, the clash between Islamic forces and authoritarian states has undermined many democratization efforts. But in Turkey, Islamic actorsfrom the Gulen movement to the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Partyhave been able to negotiate the terms of secular liberal democracy" "Though both the Gulen and JP have ambivalent attitudes toward individual freedoms and various aspects of civil society, their continuing engagements with the state have encouraged democracy in Turkey. As they contest issues of education and morality but cooperate in ethnic and gender politics, they redraw the boundaries between public sites and private lives."
As mentioned above, the ruling party in Turkey Justice and Development Party (JP) was not antithetical to Gulens movement in its initial phase. But what catapulted it from being an ally of the Hizmet to get vehemently opposed to it. Turkish President accuses Gulen and Hizmet of running a "parallel state" with thousands of supporters in all structures of authority, all with the aim of overthrowing the government. However, the supporters of Gulen and Hizmet volunteers have retorted this accusation. They averred that Gulen is now Erdogans default scapegoat and hence whatever wrong goes in the country is wrongly blamed on Gulen.
But to many analysists and West Asia experts, the tension is much deeper. They view it as a rivalry between the political Islamism and the moderate and mystical narrative of the faith. Fathullah Gulen has written many articles and books in support of democracy, liberalism and pluralism. Given this, it appears to be a slugfest between a relatively liberal and secular Islamic modernist in disagreement with Turkey's conservative and political Islamist government!
Gulens progressive ideas have inspired a new-age Turkish generation dedicated to advocate democracy, dialogue, and humane values, stressing Islams universal and egalitarian messages through social agencies such as education, health, interfaith dialogue, relief programmes and other humanitarian channels. Going by a conservative estimate, the Hizmet movement runs more than thousands of secular educational institutions, hospitals, dialogue centres and unaccounted relief programmes.
At a time when the Muslim youth are falling prey to the extremist jihadist thoughts, Gulens initiatives are particularly aimed at producing solutions to the baffling problem of radicalisation and growing religious extremism in the Muslim societies.
The Alliance for Shared Values is one of the various global interfaith organizations that espouse the ideas of Gulen. It has condemned the coup attempt in the early hours, followed by the strongest condemnation of the incident by Gulen himself.
According to The Financial Times, many other Gulen-inspired organisations have denounced the coup in categorical and unequivocal terms.
The author is a scholar of Comparative Religion, Classical Arabic and Islamic sciences, cultural analyst and researcher in Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, JMI Central University
WASHINGTON The United States expects to raise about $2 billion from donor nations for Iraq's needs during a pledging conference in Washington this week, a senior State Department official said on Monday.
"We're hoping to raise in excess of $2 billion in what has been a roughly six-and-a-half-week pledging effort," the official told reporters a day before the conference.
(Reporting by Warren Strobel; Editing by James Dalgleish)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Berlin: German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday to discuss Britain's decision to leave the European Union and its consequences, a government spokesman said in Berlin.
May will be welcomed at the chancellery with military honours and will hold talks with Merkel at 5.30 pm, followed by a working dinner, Steffen Seibert announced Monday, adding that the coup attempt in Turkey would also be discussed.
After her Berlin visit, May will fly to Paris for a bilateral meeting with French President Francois Hollande, Downing Street announced on Monday.
The meetings in Germany and France mark May's first foreign trip since her appointment as prime minister in the wake of Britain's referendum vote on 23 June.
The month of July has not been an easy month in the world, and especially in the world of tourism. Until recently, tourism oriented nations experienced one or another form of crisis on a tri or bi-monthly or monthly basis. During the last few weeks, the crisis du mois seems to have become the crisis de la semaine (the crisis of the week).
During the last few weeks, the Middle East, especially Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the Asian sub-continent have witnessed an upsurge of violence. Attacks have not only been against tourist hotels but also against restaurants, in such diverse places as Dacca, Bangladesh and Bagdad Iraq. In both cased patrons were attacked and tourists (or foreigners), taken hostage and murdered. Last month terrorists began to shoot restaurant patrons in Tel Aviv, Israel, and only the quick action of the other patrons stopped the attack from being worse.
Also during this first half July tourism officials are still dealing with the disappearance of the Air Egypt plane over the Mediterranean Sea. In the United States the tragic killing of two African-American men provoked street manifestations around the nation and the murder of police officers in both Texas and Tennessee. Europe continues to deal with a continental-wide crime wave and the latest terrorist attack in Nice, France. The Nice attack occurred in southern France's most important tourism city on Bastille Day and the start of the summer tourism season. In Turkey there was a failed coup d'etat with hundreds either dying or injured. To add to the tourism industry's challenges there is Brazil where the Summer Olympics Games are to be held in the midst of a major crime wave coupled with an economic and political crisis, and where the possibility of a police strike during the 2016 Olympics plus a series of medical issues threatens the Olympic Games' success. Visitors will be "treated" with seeing some 85,000 soldiers on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. South America must also deal with Venezuela as that country continues its downhill slide into both hunger and political turmoil and with the aftermath of Ecuador's earthquakes. To round out the month's first fortnight, in the USA both major political parties are holding their well televised national conventions with thousands of protestors promising violence.
A Word of Caution
Terrorism, a phenomenon that has existed in various forms for over 400 years, is a highly complex topic. It is so complex that there is a whole scholarly literature dedicated to understanding it and its impact on both tourism and world economies. This short article does not provide an extensive analysis of the topic but rather seeks to raise important questions for contemplation by those in the tourism industry.
Furthermore, despite the public's desire for total travel and tourism security and safety, no one can guarantee a pain-free and totally secure travel experience. Even the best experts cannot predict every act of terror and no one can control a free media. Especially in an age or terrorism risk is not only part of the travel and tourism experience, risk it is also a part of life.
The following article then does not provide a recipe for travel and tourism safety for anyone particular part of the industry. It is strongly recommended that tourism experts consult on a continuous basis with travel security experts before implementing any policy decisions. To do less is to place the traveling public in undue risk.
Dealing with an Age of Violence
The Tourism Industry, if it is to survive in an ever changing and more challenging world will need to consider various paradigm shifts. Among these shifts are the following:
-The tourism industry needs to come to the sad but true realization that it is not merely collateral damage within the world of terrorism, but rather that tourism is one of terrorism's principal targets. Tourism stands for everything that threatens terrorists. Tourism is about open societies in which we judge each person on his or her merits. Terrorism is just a modern form of Nazism, where people are judged not by who they are but to which social, national, or religious group they belong.
-The tourism industry will have to find a way to creatively protect its customers, without creating so many travel difficulties that travel becomes unbearable. Currently tourism safety and security are more about "security-theater" than about real security. Airport security is often reactive and haphazard at best. All too often those working in it are often poorly trained and paid resulting in personnel whose actions are all too often unprofessional.
-Tourism education will need to include courses on tourism safety and security. These courses are rarely taught. Once again, universities are not keeping pace with a changing world. This lack of cutting edge thought combined with political correctness means that future leaders in tourism will not be prepared to deal with a changing world.
-The tourism industry needs to become much more knowledgeable about terrorism and violence. The media and politicians from all sides of the spectrum continue to use misleading words such as "lone wolf" or "lone wolf attacks". These terms are not only misleading, but also often dangerous and misleading. The use of a false narrative creates either a sense of ennui, despair, or "mis-actions". Tourism officials need to get beyond political correctness and as the Egyptian government has done, actually identify culprits and then begin to face ideological warfare.
-Tourism officials must learn to coordinate their marketing strategies with their security experts. Most tourism centers have a great deal of demographic information. Yet often various tourism departments fail to share information with each other. Just as security professionals must realize that their actions impact the way that tourism is marketed and thrives, so too must marketing experts come to realize that they must coordinate their campaigns with their tourism security experts. To make matters worse, too many tourism entities lack a tourism safety and security manager or department.
-Tourism security experts must realize that no two tourism entities are the same and that tourism needs individualized security tailored to a particular locale rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This realization means that security experts need to take into account such variables as: language spoken by visitors at specific locales, visitors' age ranges, and visitors' special physical needs. Because the list of variables is almost infinite, the best forms of risk management need to be employed so as to gain the most protection from available resources.
-Tourism marketers will have to come to the realization that these problems cannot be covered over. No matter how much money the tourism industry spends are feel-good marketing, it cannot market away terrorists' threats to the industry. Currently marketers dominate the tourism industry. Marketers tend to find lots of money for advertising but never seem to have the funds to promote security. The tourism industry says it is interested in protecting its clients, but rarely are words turned into action. Instead, a great deal of caring is expressed during a crisis and then once the crisis passes the industry returns to business as usual.
-Tourism officials need to know when to discourage tourism. Although it is almost impossible to predict a specific terrorist attack, such as that which occurred in Nice, France, other manifestations are predictable. The absolute best protection is not to be at that locale. This statement does not mean that we should not travel. As noted above merely living is a form of risk-taking. It does mean that certain geographic sections of the world have specific risks and that tourism officials must be aware of those risks, explain the risks honestly, take measure to mitigate the risks and have a recovery plans in place should the risk occur.
-The tourism industry needs to have real recovery plans in place. This means that medical plans need to be coordinated prior to a terrorist attack and not as an after-thought. For example, if your community has a manor stadium or other areas with large crowds, be sure that there is both an evacuation plan and a triage plan put in place. Practice these plans and know what are their weaknesses. Make sure that there is a communication plan in place and a way to get needed cash or lines of additional credit for visiting victims.
These are only a few of the generalities that tourism leaders will need to consider now and into the future. Terrorism and acts of criminality and violence cannot be solved with nothing more than innovative marketing. These social cancers must be faced, diagnoses and defeated. If a modicum of certainty we can predict that locations such as Europe and parts of the Middle East will see higher levels of terrorism. The United States has numerous explosive situations throughout the country. These social sores can ignite in a form of societal spontaneous combustion. Latin America lives on the verge of crime, terror and corruption.
These are real problems that deserve the attention of all who care about the world's largest peacetime industry. If the tourism industry chooses to face these issues head-on then it shall become a major force for peace in the world, but if it chooses a form of marketing-ostracism than it may expect further bloodshed and negative headlines. The choice is up to us.
Peter Tarlow
President Tourism and More
+1 979 764 8402
Tourism and More
With 26 hotels in 15 cities, after Spain and Cuba, Germany is the third largest country in which Melia Hotels International has hotels. The Company currently operates hotels under three of its brands: Melia, Innside by Melia and Tryp by Wyndham, although it is confident that other brands will achieve a presence in the near future given the cosmopolitan and dynamic nature of the German market.
Germany is also the fourth biggest feeder market for Melia, behind Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, providing nearly 10% of our guests in our hotels all around the world, another factor that encourages us to continue to increase our presence in the country. Cities such as Berlin, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Dresden, Aachen, Leipzig, Munich, Dortmund, Wolfsburg and Frankfurt, among others, are home to some of the most iconic of our hotels, such as the Melia Berlin, the Innside Frankfurt Eurotheum, Innside Dusseldorf Hafen, Melia Dusseldorf, Innside Dresden, Innside Wolfsburg and Innside Aachen.
Due to the importance of the German market, Melia located its Central European offices in Dusseldorf, and attributes a large part of its success to its adaptation to German partners and customers, meaning that in Germany, Melia feels German and thinks German. In line with Company strategy to strengthen its hotel management function, most Melia hotels in the German market are operated under lease or management agreements.
Acquisition of Innside a turning point
In 2007, when the Company acquired Innside, a small German hotel chain founded in 1997, for 16.5 million euros, the growth of Melia in Germany entered a new stage of development. From the 8 original Innside hotels, the brand currently has a total of 14 hotels in Germany either open or scheduled to open. More importantly, what was originally a young and exclusively "German" brand, has now become highly internationalized, as Melia has signed up Innside hotels in such disparate and remote locations as China, Chile, Dubai, Doha, Spain, and New York, where the magnificent Innside New York Nomad has just opened to a great response from the market.
The Melia brand is also well positioned on the east-west axis, with Melia hotels in Dusseldorf and Berlin, and from 2018 also in the geographical and financial heart of the country in Frankfurt. The aim is now to add Melia hotels on the north-south axis, in cities such as Hamburg and Munich, which together with our Innside hotels will further strengthen our brand recognition.
Paradise for "bleisure hotels" and the MICE segment
The mentioned Melia and Innside hotels in Germany are a great example of urban hotels adapted to both business and leisure travellers: what we now know as the "bleisure" (business + leisure) segment. Thanks to these brands, our leadership in the resort hotel industry, and our commercial strength, our hotels are ideally positioned for business travellers, yet also offer a complete destination and lifestyle experience: of the 26 hotels we operate in Germany, 12 offer facilities for meetings and conventions, a segment that in Germany moves around 11.4 million travellers a year, generating around 7.5 million overnight stays. In a segment in which innovation is very important, the introduction of Innside brand attributes such as "creative meetings" also give our hotels a competitive advantage in the German market.
Among our main competitive strengths in Germany are the fact that our Company is supported by significant investors and hedge funds, and thanks to an impeccable track record in Germany, Melia is nowadays a Company that inspires confidence and which can grow faster as it has already overcome the learning curve. In terms of reputation, we benefit from our Mediterranean nature and origin, and the close relationship that exists between Germany and our headquarters in Mallorca. Our Innside hotels have been named as the favourite hotels for German travellers for several years by the prestigious reservations website Hotel.de. This recognition is also reflected in our sales growth in Germany, with an increase of 50% in sales through melia.com in 2016 over the previous year.
According to Enrique Ortiz, Vice President for Europe, Middle East & Africa, "the commitment of Melia Hotels International to Germany is even more consolidated year on year. It is not only one of the countries in which we are growing fastest and the birthplace of our successful Innside by Melia brand, but German cities are also the perfect setting for our urban brands focused on the fast-growing "bleisure" travel market, combining business facilities with spaces for leisure and for discovering the cities". For Ortiz, "the main challenges for the Company in Germany today are to continue to grow with emblematic hotels in cities on the north-south axis, and to introduce other brands that are already market leaders in other countries such as the luxury lifestyle and cutting-edge ME by Melia brand (ME London, ME Milan, ME Miami, etc.) or the classical luxury with an avant-garde flair of the Gran Melia brand (Gran Melia Rome, Gran Melia Colon, Gran Melia Palacio de los Duques, etc.)".
About Melia Hotels International
Founded in 1956 in Mallorca (Spain), Melia Hotels International operates more than 390 hotels (portfolio and pipeline) throughout more than 40 countries, with brands including Gran Melia Hotels & Resorts, Paradisus by Melia, ME by Melia, Melia Hotels & Resorts, INNSiDE by Melia, Sol by Melia and TRYP by Wyndham. The Company is the global leader in resort hotels, while also leveraging its experience to consolidate the growing segment of the leisure-inspired urban market. Its commitment to responsible tourism has led the Group to become the third most sustainable hotel company in the world in 2018, according to RobecoSam, the investment company to produce the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Melia Hotels International is also included in the IBEX 35 Spanish stock market index and it is the Spanish hotel leader in Corporate Reputation (Merco Ranking). Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram meliahotelsinternational.com
Communications Department
+ 34 971 22 44 64
Melia
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.
The internationally acclaimed St. Petersburg Ballet is coming to Macau to present their full-length classic performance of one of the worlds most famous ballets, Tchaikovskys Swan Lake, at The Venetian Macao.
First staged in St. Petersburg in 1895, Swan Lake is set to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovskys immortal score and is one of the most popular ballet productions in the world today, despite its initial failure in the late 19th century.
Swan Lake tells the story of the young Prince Siegfried who falls deeply in love with the Swan Princess Odette, a young woman who was transformed into a white swan by the evil sorcerer Rothbart. The heart-wrenching tragedy is a timeless tale that has captured the imaginations of audience for over a century.
Founded in 1994, the well-known 60-member company of the St. Petersburg Ballet, led by ballerina Irina Kolesnikova, continues to receive praise from around the world. Following sold out seasons in London, Paris and Singapore, the globally renowned St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre is bringing the ballet sensation to Macau.
In reviewing the performance, Pariss Danse Magazine wrote, The St. Petersburg Ballet has left a considerable mark on the history of world ballet, while New Zealands Dominion Post called it one of those rare and beautiful moments Not to be missed. The UKs Sunday Times simply termed it extraordinary and said it was a phenomenal night out.
Two performances will be held at The Venetian Theatre on December 2 and 3.
Answering natures call was once a nightmare for Rashida Begum, who had to creep around the jungle for a suitably private spot. Her home had no toilet, like the thousands of others in her crowded cluster of farming villages outside the capital.
In just over a decade, thats all changed, in her neighborhood and many others.
Through a dogged campaign to build toilets and educate Bangladeshis about the dangers of open defecation, the densely populated South Asian nation has managed to reduce the number of people who defecate in the ope
n to just 1 percent of the 166 million population, according to the government down from 42 percent in 2003.
Once it was our habit to go to the fields or jungles. Now, it is shameful to us, Begum said in Bormi, a cluster of poor farming villages just outside Dhaka, the capital. Even our children do not defecate openly anymore. We do not need to ask them; they do it on their own.
Bangladeshs success in sanitation something so far unattained by its wealthier neighbor to the south, India came from a dogged campaign supported by 25 percent of the countrys overall development budget.
The government has made a huge commitment, said Akramul Islam, director for water, sanitation and hygiene of the development NGO Brac. The government decided that funds should go to the extreme poor who do not have latrines. So that basically gives a big push from the public sector for spending on sanitation.
The governments engineers also partnered with village councils and charities to spread the message on how toilets are key to better health. Rising incomes moving from an average of USD1,154 in 2012-13 to $1,314 in the last fiscal year, according to the World Bank also helped to drive demand, Islam said.
Activists say small-scale surveys show that the campaign has improved public health, though there are not yet any government statistics to prove it more broadly.
We see clearly that there is a decline in waterborne diseases and diarrheal diseases, so there is a clear link there, Islam said, while acknowledging that the improvement was something we have to study.
Begum said her children have had no stomach illnesses since she installed an in-house toilet.
Open defecation is considered a major public health menace, causing childhood diarrhea, parasitic worm infections and other scourges that contribute to childhood stunting, malnutrition and tens of billions of dollars in lost productivity every year. Diarrheal diseases kill 700,000 children every year in India alone most of which could have been prevented with better sanitation.
India has spent about $3 billion since 1986 on campaigning and sanitation programs, but has not come close to Bangladeshs success. Two-thirds of Indias 1.25 billion people still use the great outdoors as their public latrine. About half of Nepals 30 million people and about 20 percent of Pakistans 182 million also do not have facilities at home.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made public sanitation a hallmark of his Clean India drive, promising that every home would have a toilet by 2019 and setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars for the job. India has already built around 20 million toilets, but still has another 111 million to build to reach its goal.
Bangladeshs sanitation victory didnt come easy. Millions of dollars from the government and charities were spent, and campaign volunteers said they worked hard to change public attitudes and habits.
Many villagers particularly men preferred going outdoors, where they could think in private, survey their lands or just feel the evening breeze or gaze at the sky. For women, however, having no toilet was both a nuisance and a danger, as many said they had to wait for nightfall for privacy.
We had to cover our noses during rainy season because of the bad smell, said field campaigner Al Amin Akand of the charity Plan International, which works on community issues. We had to work for years to motivate the villagers.
Back in 2008, most people in Bormi had no choice but to use the surrounding forests to defecate.
We had to do fierce campaigning, going door-to-door for years, said Mohammed Badal Sarker, chairman of a local village council. The council even turned children into whistleblowers literally.
We provided schoolchildren with whistles to alert the villagers. It worked like magic, the chairman said. Children were encouraged to shout slogans like Defecating in the open is the enemy of the people and No one will marry your daughter if you do not have a toilet at home.
The drive has even sparked a new industry in household sanitation, with small businesses cropping up across the country to sell the components for making inexpensive latrines. All it takes, they say, is an investment of $12 to $60 to buy two to three concrete rings and a concrete pan.
Now you will not find a home without a sanitary latrine, Sarkar said.
There is still cause for concern. Bangladeshs overpopulated urban areas are proving to be more of a challenge, mostly because the opportunity for contaminating the water supply is much greater.
People might be using a toilet or a latrine, but then where does the human waste go from there? said John Sauer, senior technical adviser of the Washington-based Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Population Services International (PSI). Waste water could be dumped on a field where children play, or where food is grown. We must address where the human waste goes and how it is treated, disposed or reused.
Still, Sauer said, the achievement of virtually eradicating open defecation in just a decade is astonishing.
Bangladesh has a lot to teach the rest of the developing world, he said. Julhas Alam, AP
Ng Kuok Cheong commented on last weeks rejection by the Legislative Assembly (AL) president, Ho Iat Seng, of the proposal by Gabriel Tong to reinterpret the Land Law.
Even if I dont agree with the content of the proposal I cant agree with the fact that the president [of the AL] wants to stop it, Ng said. I do not agree with some regulations in the Macau Basic Law that create too many limitations for the lawmakers for their law proposals. I cant agree with this principal, he added, referring to the fact that the Basic Law states that all law proposals that are considered to run contrary to government policy should seek consent from the Chief Executive before being discussed at the AL. The lawmaker argues that the referred principal is being used by the AL presidency to stop Mr Tongs proposal.
The ceremony organized last Friday evening by the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong and Macau to celebrate Frances National Day (Bastille Day) was marred by the shocking Nice terrorist attack that happened only a few hours before.
The event held at Sofitel Hotel began with a minute of silence to pay tribute to those killed in the attack, as well as their families and friends.
The speeches echoed the same mourning tone, with the French Consul-General, Eric Berti, paying tribute to the victims of the attack and adding that there were, at that moment, no report of Chinese citizens or residents from Macau or Hong Kong among the high number of victims.
We know that there is a threat. We hoped that the fact that the Euro Cup went so well could mean that the threat was less present. We see that is not the case so we must keep our guards up and maintain a very high degree of vigilance. We are very sad for what happened, Berti told TDM.
Representing the local government at the event, the Secretary for Administration and Justice, Sonia Chan, said that the Chief Executive and the government expressed its deepest condolences to the people of France.
In her speech, Secretary Chan also said the Nice terror attack was a shock to the whole world, reaffirming the position of the SAR government in their need to take a firm stand against terrorism.
In her official speech, the government official highlighted Macaus strong and friendly relations with France and the many advances in mutual cooperation between the two nations in areas such as tourism, infrastructure, utilities and luxury products.
Chan also expressed her hopes that the miniature Eiffel Tower in Macau will bring a sense of closeness to those French citizens residing here.
The director of the Alliance Francaise de Macao (AF), Xavier Garnier, told the Times yesterday that Friday was in fact a sad day. For us, it was not such a good thing to celebrate the French National day after learning about this terrible attack, he said, classifying the attack as even more moving because it happened during a sensitive moment; during the National Day, during summer, and on the French Riviera, a highly renowned location for tourism and world-class events.
According to Garnier, the tragic occurrence is evidence that this is not only about French people, it [was] aimed also at the tourists coming from many different countries, it is an international [attack].
The AF director reaffirmed that the problem is not French, the problem is international and the victims are also international. These problems concern everyone and everywhere. I think France is a target because it is more visible. We cant even speak about a problem of security, as Nice is one of the safest cities in the world. I think the location was chosen to get international impact.
Of course we are worried and people are worried in France too because thats the first time the attacks happened in the Provence which clearly shows that absolutely anywhere can be the next target, Garnier remarked, adding that this is a worldwide war. I hope all the countries [and their leaders] can strengthen together to fight this barbarity of terrorism, so that the lives of these people were not lost in vain.
ggct issues travel security alert
The Tourism Crisis Management Office (GGCT) issued a travel security alert for France on Friday. The GGCT informed that although there are no residents affected by the events of the night of July 14 at the Promenade des Anglais in the city of Nice, it will continue to closely monitor the latest developments. In addition, they have advised Macau residents who intend to travel to France to follow the situation closely, critically assess the security risks and cautiously consider their travel plans. As for residents already in France, the GGCT advises them to take security precautions to ensure their personal safety.
Launched on July 20, 2006 in a bid to promote and represent British business interests in the region, the British Business Association of Macau will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Wednesday.
Throughout its first 10 years, BBAM has sought to create an environment and the circumstances that are conducive to the generation of mutually beneficial business opportunities for British and Macau enterprises, according to the associations statement.
The associations press release highlighted the importance of social networking events in generating business opportunities for its members.
Commenting on the BBAM milestone, Henry Brockman, BBAM chairman noted: Our networking events are designed to facilitate knowledge exchange and the development of British and local industries as a whole.
BBAM takes very seriously its mission of defining, upholding and encouraging best business practices at the member level. We endeavour to act as the focal point in Macau for British industry, he added.
BBAMs Corporate Social Responsibility programme has also supported scholarships for local students during the past decade, demonstrating British businesses commitment to being responsible members of the regions society.
It has been a real pleasure to be the chairman of BBAM for many of the past ten years. I have witnessed the Association grow from an idea on a page to what it is today arguably the most active Western Business Chamber in Macau, Brockman concluded.
Lawmaker Chan Meng Kam is preparing two lists for the Legislative Assembly (AL) elections which will take place in 2017, the media reported last Friday. Chan is reportedly expecting to be invited by the Chief Executive to become a part of the AL as an appointed legislator. According to the weekly newspaper O Clarim, the two lists in preparation by Chan will be headed by Si Ka Lon and Ung Choi Kun, a former lawmaker that currently heads the Association of Property Agents and Realty Developers of Macau. As for the lists second runners, Song Pek Kei and Si Li Ya will occupy the positions respectively.
Handover exhibition hall to be shown in Guangxi
Shi Wan Shan Qi Xing Ding integrated tourism zone is expected to undergo a trial period next year and to host a dragon boat festival next summer, according to a report by Jornal Va Kio. The whole project sits between 545 to 745 meters above sea level, and it occupies an area of 940,000 square meters at Fang Cheng Gang city of Guangxi. Nearly 10 facilities, including hotels, are still under construction. However, a lotus statue and a Macau handover exhibition hall are ready to welcome customers.
Man dies escaping illegal detention
The Judiciary Police (PJ) have arrested two men for the illegal detention of a third man who, in his attempt to escape, fell to his death from a residential building.
According to the PJ, the two suspects from mainland China were involved in a gaming-related scam in the city. First, they encouraged the victim to gamble in the NAPE area, and then offered to lend him money once he had lost his initial capital. When the victim lost the loaned money, he was taken by the suspects and locked in a residential unit. Authorities say he was assaulted and filmed by the suspects. The victim, who was left naked after the assault, tried to escape the residential unit through a window, however he fell to his death.
An energy and environment roundtable discussion was held at Jardim de Vasco da Gama yesterday afternoon, seeking to understand energy consumption patterns in Macau, considering alternative sources to power the region, and the effect that these may have on the environment.
Organized by political association, Macao Civic Power, the discussion was partly seeking to frame the groups energy and environment policies for the Legislative Assembly election next year. However, when the Times visited the roundtable in the late afternoon, there were only a dozen people present.
Among these was scholar and roundtable panelist, Agnes Lam, who told the Times that she doesnt think that there is sufficient public awareness in Macau over our energy consumption and even what an energy policy should look like. Her comments reflected the low attendance at the public forum event.
Right now we dont really have an energy policy, she said. Its important for us to understand how much energy we are using and where it is coming from. Then we can look at the impact on the environment and consider any alternatives.
The government does have a basic energy strategy but it is undeveloped and non-specific, argued Chen Junming, the president Macau Green Student Union.
The governments [intention to] reduce electricity consumption per capita in Macau is not working well because, although they have released some guidelines for this policy, the strategy is not well-developed, said Chen.
He added that he hoped yesterdays roundtable discussion would help pave the way to examine the potential for Macau to further utilize cleaner and renewable sources of energy.
Regarding the gaming industry and its energy demands, Agnes Lam said, I think we should have some sort of control over gaming operators.
Right now the [gaming operators] have arrangements with energy suppliers that afford them discounted prices per unit of consumption [as large customers]. We need to control this and to prevent them from being encouraged to consume more, she proposed. I am not suggesting a punishment but some sort of incentive for them to reduce their usage. And this should be a part of [the governments] energy policy.
On the other hand, Chen highlighted that although the rise in commercial demand for electricity has been driven by the development of the gaming industry, it is hard [for the government] to bargain with the casinos, because that is the major source of the governments income.
The panel, which included two other speakers aside from Chen and Lam, also planned to discuss the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant.
Lam proposed that the panel discuss whether the Taishan facility is the only option for the MSAR. Is this the only alternative or source we have? she asked.
Asked whether she would be in favor of the project, which is currently under construction, should it be proven within reasonable doubt to be safe, Lam said: I cant say whether I will accept it or not, without understanding the other options. Here in Macau we just dont know [what those options are], so thats part of the purpose behind today to understand our choice.
Safety concerns over the facility were heightened earlier this year when it emerged that certain components had been manufactured in mainland China, not in France as was previously thought. Mainland and Macau authorities stressed that safety assessments of the plants construction were in line with international standards. Nevertheless, the issue has prompted concerns from lawmakers and the general public.
Why do we need it near [Macau]? Is it really safe? Lam asked. We just dont know whether it will be a security threat to Macau. She added that it would be a good idea for the Macau Liaison Office to voice the concerns of the people in the MSAR, but signaled she is not sure how much they can say.
land law cannot be decided by the few
On the sidelines of the roundtable yesterday, Agnes Lam said that she is opposed to changes to the Land Law, justifying that any change in the future has to come from a collective opinion, not just a few developers [with an interest in the matter]. Some of the developers will lose their land but thats the purpose, she said. Not to confiscate their land but [] ensure that it is used for the public interest and not anything else.
France called up thousands of reserve security forces Friday as authorities tried to determine why a Tunisian deliveryman known only to be a petty criminal took the wheel of a 19-ton truck and plunged through a terrified seaside crowd on Bastille Day, leaving 84 people dead and more than 200 wounded.
Witnesses described how Mohamed Bouhlel barreled his truck in a zigzag path down a crowded Nice promenade, aiming directly for children, for mothers pushing strollers and for families cowering behind plastic benches.
President Francois Hollande extended for three months a state of emergency that stretched back to the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people and was claimed by the Islamic State group. It had been set to end July 26.
The government tapped its operational reserve of 25,000 composed mainly of ex-military or former gendarmes to relieve its tired officers and bolster border security.
Nices famed Promenade des Anglais, at the heart of city life and the killing path of the truck became a place of grieving with bouquets of flowers piling up as residents, some with candles, paid tribute to the dead.
Hollande said the attack was undeniably terrorist in nature, but prosecutors said the 31-year-old driver, a Tunisian who lived in Nice, wasnt known to intelligence services.
No group claimed responsibility for Thursday nights slaughter of tourists and locals packing the upscale seafront, where an estimated 30,000 had just watched a Bastille Day fireworks show.
They fanned out to enjoy nighttime street artists, arcade games and food stalls or strolls to their hotels beside the Mediterranean. Then Bouhlel used his truck to turn a celebration into a dash for survival. Cyril Croisy said he saw the truck accelerate into the first crowds outside Niceslandmark Negresco Hotel, aiming straight for a stand selling candy to children.
He said he tried to help the wounded, including a woman with catastrophic injuries. I was there when her heart stopped, said Croisy, his eyes welling with tears. The 40-year-
old Parisian suffered a broken arm while fleeing and jumping from the Promenade to the beach below.
Ten of the 84 dead were children. Of the 202 injured, 52 were critically hurt.
Among the dead were immigrants and tourists from many nations, including Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Switzerland and the United States. Two Scots were among the dozens listed as missing.
French prosecutor Francois Molins said Bouhlel had a loaded handgun, three replica weapons and an empty grenade in the truck, which he had rented three days earlier. Police considered him a petty criminal suspected since 2010 of various threats and acts of theft, vandalism and violent conduct, he said.
In March, he was convicted for a road-rage crime when he struck another motorist with a wooden pallet but received a suspended six-month sentence because it was his first proven offense.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, his full name, from the Tunisian town of Msaken, in the center-east, was a resident of Nice, married to a Tunisian with dual nationality.
Bouhlels father, interviewed in Tunisia by Frances BFM TV, said his son was a depressed man who, in Tunisia, took prescription medication to calm fits of anger. He was not religious, neither praying nor fasting during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and was always alone. Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel said his son had not been home in four years.
Hollandes government, whose popularity is plumbing record lows in polls, has been buffeted by allegations that Frances intelligence services have failed to get a handle on the countrys jihadist threat. France has known for years that it is a top Islamic State target, and France also is the biggest source for European recruits for IS, with more than 1,000 fighting in Syria or Iraq.
Hollande, who flew to Nice visit the injured in Pasteur Hospital, declared three days of national mourning from Saturday. He was booed by angry members of the public as his motorcade passed the scene of the slaughter.
Why Nice? Hollande asked in a television address. Because it is a city that is known worldwide, one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. Why on the 14th of July? Because it is a celebration of freedom.
Bouhlels attack was stopped thanks to a handful of police who pursued the truck on foot and, possibly, by motorcycle as he plowed through the first crowds outside the imposing Negrescol.
German tourist Richard Gutjahr filmed the truck from his hotel balcony as an apparent police motorcyclist mounted a curb and tried to open the drivers door, only to tumble to the pavement and barely miss being crushed by the wheels. The video showed the unseated motorcyclist continue pursuit on foot, briefly climbing on the side of the accelerating truck, as two officers fired shots from handguns into the truck cabin.
The truck tore into a pedestrian area as the crowd scattered, many leaping to the beach below. The truck bore down toward English tourist Simon Coates, who had just lost his wife Amanda in the chaos.
Within a few seconds it was almost upon me, Coates told the BBC. I looked to my left and there was an old man, perhaps a grandfather, and a young boy of about 10. The truck aimed straight for them. I leapt one way. The little boy, I dont know how, but he managed to get away from the truck by inches.
Coates said he reluctantly turned to follow the truck to find his wife and searched among dozens of crushed bodies seeking to identify her from her bicycle or an article of clothing. He couldnt find her before reaching the point where police finally shot to death the driver barely 20 meters in front of him.
The police were screaming to get away. They thought there was a bomb, so I turned around as quickly as I could. The ground was very slippery with what was left of some people, Coates said. I saw some dreadful things. It was like a chamber of horrors. Every person seemed to have died in an increasingly grotesque way.
Egyptian tourist Nader El Shafei said he tried imploring Bouhlel in Arabic through the attackers open window to stop what he was doing. Instead, he said, he saw the truck smash into a girl and drag many bodies wedged in its undercarriage.
When police closed in, handguns drawn, El Shafei said Bouhlel opened fire.
I saw the gun in his hand and I saw him shooting through the window, he said. The police surrounded the car and they kept shooting him until they were sure hes dead.
Watching from his hotel window, English tourist Paul Gordon said he saw the truck bouncing over the bodies of the dead and wounded. I saw people being knocked over like skittles, said Gordon, who had just left the promenade with his wife and 18-month-old daughter.
Stephane Erbs said he was heading back to his car with his wife, Rachel, and their two children when he saw the truck bearing down on them. He told AP that his first instinct was to throw his 7-year-old son, Celion, out of harms way, while his wife pushed their daughter, 12-year-old Noemi, to safety.
I threw him in the direction of the wall next to the beach, said Erbs, who broke seven ribs as he tried to get out of the way. His children were unharmed but his wife remained missing Friday.
Coates said he found his unhurt wife, Amanda, after a frantic search of bodies on the path back to his hotel that was the longest 20 minutes of my life. He said as horrible as the slaughter had been, the placement of a sidewalk-blocking gazebo and the bravery of a handful of armed officers had reduced the potential death toll.
Police gunfire kept the attacker from reaching much larger crowds where hundreds of people could have been killed, he said. It could have been incalculably worse. Colleen Barry, Lori Hinnant, AP
President and CEO of the American Gaming Association, Geoff Freeman, cautioned that what works for Vegas may not be exactly what works here [in Macau], in an interview recently published by Calvin Ayre, a gaming news website. Freeman indicated that even if Vegas success cannot be replicated in the MSAR, the city can still benefit from a growing non-gaming tourism sector, which will be driven by the gaming operators. Non-gaming is not as big here [in Macau], in terms of the percentage of the revenue, as it might be in Las Vegas or in other markets, but its still bigger in total than any other market in the world, he told Calvin Ayre.
Balloon Dinosaur Carnival ongoing
The Balloon Dinosaur Charity Carnival kicked off on Saturday. Organized by the Macau International Carnival Association, the festival will continue until August 31 at the Macau Tower. This year, the organizer will invite balloon masters from Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan to make a a large balloon train which will be made with more than 100,000 balloons.
Cultural Heritage Committee gathers
The Cultural Heritage Committee gathered in a plenary meeting last Friday at the Cultural Centre. In the meeting, presided over by the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Alexis Tam, the Cultural Affairs Bureau presented the discussed the archaeological findings in Coloane, as well as the works related to the list and graphic delineation of the heritage classified buildings and their protection zones, published in the governments Official Gazette.
The Tourism Crisis Management Office (GGCT) has received one request for assistance and two requests for information in relation to the attempted coup in Turkey over the weekend, according to a statement from the entity.
The individual who requested assistance is a Macau resident who is currently safe, GGCT informs, and is awaiting a return flight to Hong Kong in the restricted section of the Istanbul airport. She reported to the office that she has been provided food by the airline.
GGCT said that it is in regular contact with the Office of the Commissioner in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC in the Macau SAR, and the Embassy of China in Turkey, in order to gather intelligence and provide assistance to the resident.
It has recommended that Macau residents not travel to the country during the turbulent period.
A joint statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Embassy in Turkey advised Chinese citizens not to travel to Turkey during this period.
Chinese citizens and institutions already in Turkey should remain on high alert, strengthen security precautions, be prepared for emergencies, [and] avoid leaving their residences or going to areas with large concentrations of people, the statement read.
In view of the special circumstances in that location, if Chinese citizens insist on traveling to that country after this alert is issued, they might encounter high security risks and be subjected to delays in receiving any assistance, warned the statement.
For more information, individuals can call the 24-hour tourism hotline on 2833 3000.
A Hong Kong lawmaker on Saturday urged the UK consulate to intervene in the property fraud scams that have allegedly victimized nearly 300 buyers, including investors from Hong Kong and Macau.
Democratic party lawmaker James To Kun-sun handed a letter to a representative at the UK consulate on behalf of the over 150 buyers from Hong Kong and Macau.
Some 20 victims of the fraud held a demonstration in front of the consulate in the HKSAR.
South China Morning Post reported that most of the buyers acquired property though Hong Kong-based property agents and paid a deposit of at least 50 percent of the unit price.
Most investors purchased property, mostly flats, in over 10 different projects in the UK over the past few years.
Our main aim is to draw attention to the fact that there are serious fraud cases involving UK property, in which Hong Kong people have been victims over the past years, said To.
Although buyers have reported their cases to several responsible authorities, they have yet to find out how they can recover their investments.
If these scams continue without proper investigation and rectification, the UKs reputation at large would be at stake also, added the lawmaker.
Sulu Sou and Ng Kuok Cheong, both members of the New Macau Association (ANM) voiced their expectations and concerns regarding the Iec Long Firecracker Factory land swap, which was deemed illegal by the Commission Against Corruption (CCAC) last week.
In a press conference held Friday at the ANM headquarters, association representatives claimed that there are two areas in this case that urgently need to be addressed according to the former president of the ANM, Sulu Sou.
ANM is urging the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) to pursue the investigations and bring those held responsible to justice. The association is also claiming that, in light of the CCAC report, the government has the duty to pursue the recovery of lost public resources.
Questioned by the Times on the sidelines of the press conference, lawmaker Ng Kuok Cheong said that it should be the secretary [for Transport and Public Works] to lead the process to claim the government interests and not DSSOPT. Ng indicated that he sees the secretary Raimundo do Rosario as a competent individual and above all, an individual with no prior connections to the case.
According to Ng, this first step in protecting the public interest should start as soon as possible and should be as simple as claiming the land back, or finding an equivalent compensation if the first option is not possible anymore. The government should claim the land back or [acquire] a compensation, he said.
Regarding eventual legal consequences, the ANM lawmaker thinks that it is up to the government to submit complete information to the procurator [public prosecutor] in order to find and hold responsible the people accountable and thereby protect the interests of Macau SAR government and the public.
In Ngs opinion, the reasons behind cases like this are related to political interests and a political struggle, resulting from the fact that from 1999 until now the government and the bourgeoisie have had a very close connection, and they have been transferring interests to different bourgeoisie families but some of them do not stop. They ask for more and exert continuous pressure on the government, and therefore there is a political struggle [like what is] happening now.
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 Haitis 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 dEau, where they scrubbed their bodies with aromatic leaves and soap. It was the final day of this years 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 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.
Ive come to put my sickness in the water and gain fresh luck, said Dieudeaue Beauvil, who says shes 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 dEau, pilgrims converged on the local church to pray to the Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, closely associated with the Voodoo goddess of Erzulie. Saut dEaus 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
The U.S. Navys top admiral is making a three-day visit to China and meeting with his Chinese counterpart at a time when Beijing has rejected an international tribunals ruling that invalidated its expansive claims in the South China Sea.
Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, will meet the commander of the Peoples Liberation Armys Navy, Adm. Wu Shengli, during his trip to the Chinese capital of Beijing and the port city of Qingdao starting yesterday.
Richardson is scheduled to visit the Chinese navys headquarters in Beijing and meet with other senior defense officials. He will visit the navys submarine academy and tour the aircraft carrier, Liaoning, when he is in its home port of Qingdao.
They will discuss the South China Sea, ongoing Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, military drills, and ways to boost interactions between the two militaries.
The visit comes as China has warned other countries against threatening its security in the South China Sea after a five-member tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled that China had no legal basis for its claim to most of the South China Sea. Beijing has responded to the ruling by asserting that the islands in the South China Sea are Chinas inherent territory.
Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said last week that Beijing could declare an air defense identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
Chinas island development in the South China Sea has inflamed regional tensions, including with nations that have competing claims to the land formations. Most fear that Beijing, which has built airfields and placed weapons systems on the man-made islands, will use the construction to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, U.S. warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the U.S. of provocative action. AP
The Bastille Day truck attack in Nice may have shaken Frances collective psyche, further unnerving a country already traumatized by extremist attacks that have become alarmingly more frequent. Yet there is hope that the French, while shaken, will not be defeated.
Despite being under a heightened state of emergency, French security forces failed to stop Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel from barging past police vehicles at the entrance to Nices famed Riviera beachfront, where the zig-zagging truck he was driving instantly transformed a crowd of families and fun-seekers into utter tragedy.
The fact that this attack occurred when security measures were supposedly in place makes this very different from previous attacks, said Neil Greenberg, a professor of military mental health at Kings College London. That undermines the trust people have in the government to stop these events and it is extraordinarily hard to rebuild that trust once its lost.
Greenberg said he expected to see a dip in the numbers of French people willing to venture into public places that might now be considered risky. He noted that past attacks on Paris including the January 2015 shootings at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the coordinated November strikes that killed 130 people seemed more targeted, and thus avoidable, compared with the random group of Nice residents and tourists engulfed in chaos late Thursday night.
Nice is known as the place where people go to the beach, Greenberg said. The attack there may have more of an impact than the Paris attacks because people may now be thinking, where can I go to relax and be safe? He said that the pattern of repeated attacks could eventually prompt people to change their behavior, if they fear the government is unable to protect them.
Still, Greenberg said the only people likely to develop significant mental health problems after such events are those already suffering from psychiatric illnesses, and that while some people might experience some short-term anxiety or stress, it was unlikely there would be a significant spike in mental health disorders among the general population. Past studies show that most people who witness traumatic events recover on their own and that attempts by mental health professionals to offer counseling in the immediate aftermath of the events could actually worsen their prognosis, he said.
Other experts warned its critical that the French governments reaction to the latest attack doesnt further fragment the country.
There are concerns about whether the Muslim community will be used as a scapegoat, which could increase alienation and ultimately drive more recruitment into the radicals cause, said Andrew Silke, director of terrorism studies at the University of East London. He said that countries with a history of repeated terror attacks like Northern Ireland and Israel have reacted to such violence with surprising resilience.
What you see is that people pull together and communities become more bonded against the attacks, he said, predicting that the same phenomenon could happen in France. Silke said the sporadic nature of these attacks means that they can still unsettle Frances national psyche, but that the more often they happen, the less impact they will have.
The most disruptive attacks are those that come out of the blue, like Sept. 11, Silke said, adding that France is unfortunately becoming more accustomed to extremist attacks on its soil.
Given its long and fractious history marked by bloody rebellions, revolutions and religious divides, some experts said the latest string of attacks will pose little threat to Frances ability to heal.
France has been at the heart of two world wars and theyve kept on ticking just fine, said Frank Farley, a past president of the American Psychological Association. The French people dont get knocked down that easily.
For Italian retiree Piera Badino, canceling a planned trip to Nice because of the truck rampage was out of the question.
I did not think of not coming, Badino said. We cannot stay closed at home. Otherwise what are we, half dead? So we can never stop. AP
Police find cocaine, cash at nice suspects home
French officials say police found 11 telephones, cocaine and 2,600 euros (USD2,900) in cash at the home of a suspect held in the investigation into the deadly Bastille Day attack in Nice.
The suspect is among seven people in custody in the probe into last weeks attack, which killed 84 people. Three of the suspects were brought to French intelligence headquarters in Paris yesterday to face eventual terrorism charges, according to a security official.
At the home of one of the suspects, an Albanian national, investigators found the phones and cocaine, according to that official and the Paris prosecutors office. They wouldnt elaborate on the relationship between the suspect and attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was killed by police after ramming a truck through a crowd watching fireworks. Maria Cheng, Helena Alves
Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the wee hours of yesterday in half a dozen cities to defend democracy and support the countrys 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 with their children. Rather than toppling Turkeys strongman president, the attempted coup that left some 265 dead and 1,440 wounded appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogans popularity and grip on power.
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 yesterday.
Security forces yesterday 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.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Fridays failed coup will receive every punishment they deserve. The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline Traitors of the country, while the Hurriyet newspaper declared Democracys victory.
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 tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.
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.
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, while 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.
But Saturday afternoon, when tensions eased, an atmosphere of celebration broke around as Turks answered official calls to rally to protect Turkish democracy. 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 in Ankara.
Flights resumed late Saturday into Istanbuls Anaturk Airport after being halted for nearly 24 hours and scores of government supporters gathered to make sure the airport was not a coup target again. The usually buzzing airport was eerily quiet.
In an unusual 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.
Officials claimed the judges and the coup plotters were 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.
In a televised speech, Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen.
At a news conference Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, 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.
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.
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.
Turkeys military staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pressured Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, a mentor of Erdogan, out of power in 1997. Dominique Soguel, Suzan Fraser, AP
6,000 detained in crackdown after coup try
turkeys 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.
Dozens of Vietnamese who gathered for an anti-China protest in central Hanoi were taken away by authorities yesterday as they tried to rally support for an international tribunals ruling rejecting Beijings claims in the South China Sea.
About two dozen people were bused away from around the landmark Hoan Kiem Lake in Vietnams capital even before they began their protest. There was a heavy police presence around the lake, with cars briefly banned from around it.
The rally was organized by No-U, a Hanoi group that opposes Chinas expansive claims in the South China Sea. It came after the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration issued the ruling last week in a case initiated by the Philippines, which together with Vietnam is one of the claimants in the disputed waters.
China rejected the tribunals ruling and refused to take part in the arbitration.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law, specifically the Philippines maritime rights, by building up artificial islands that destroyed coral reefs and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Nguyen Chi Tuyen, a member of No-U, said the activists who were detained by police were all released by yesterday afternoon.
Another small group of activists gathered in front of the Philippine Embassy in Hanoi at around noon with banners that read Thank you, Philippines, you have a brave government and China, you must comply with international law, Tuyen said.
Vietnamese authorities have clamped down on such protests before, fearing they could stir dissent in the communist country. AP
TWIN FALLS Tonight, Big Macs will help pay for backpacks.
The fourth annual McCash for Kids fundraiser takes place from 5-8 p.m. at McDonalds locations in Twin Falls, Jerome, Buhl, Burley and Gooding. Twenty-five percent of all money spent at those restaurants will go toward school supplies for children from qualified low-income families in the Magic Valley.
With school starting a bit earlier this year, South Central Community Action Partnership and Townsquare Media decided to have the fundraiser in July instead of August.
It allows the kids from these families to start on equal footing, as you will, with everyone else, said Bill Kyle, president of Valley Food Service Inc.
The Kyle family has supported each of the last three fundraisers at four restaurants in Twin Falls and Jerome. But with the new Blue Lakes building not opening until August, Kyle decided to add in Buhl. To sweeten the deal, he included the other locations.
We will have six restaurants participating this evening, he said.
SCCAP receives supply lists for children in kindergarten through 12th grades in each school district.
They can be very expensive, said South Central Community Action Partnership CEO Ken Robinette.
Last year, McCash for Kids supported the purchase of supplies for 400 schoolchildren, he said. Children without these tools might otherwise have low self-esteem or difficulties with learning, Kyle said.
Cash donations will also be accepted at each location. Organization employees and board members will be present to answer questions about any of its programs.
Alzheimers support
Alzheimers Association, Greater Idaho Chapters Caregiver Support Group meeting, 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Twin Falls Senior Center, 530 Shoshone St. W., Twin Falls. The group meets on the third Wednesday every month.
Information: Pattie Dennis, 208-734-4264 or 208-539-4290.
Laughter exercise
Laughter Therapy class, 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays at the Twin Falls Senior Center, 530 Shoshone St. W., with Mary Martinat, a retired physical education instructor.
Learn how laughing can relieve stress and improve your breathing.
Free. 208-734-5084.
C-sections
Caesarean childbirth class, 6:30 to 9 p.m. Wednesday in the Oak Rooms on the lower level of St. Lukes Magic Valley Medical Center, 801 Pole Line Road W., Twin Falls.
Topics: Caesarean deliveries, pain management, non-conforming labors and hospital procedures.
Free; pre-registration is required, 208-814-0402.
Asthma education
Free asthma education class for patients and caregivers to assess and manage asthma will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday. The class is presented by St. Lukes Magic Valley and meets on the third Thursday of each month.
Pre-registration is required. To register and for location of the class: 208-814-8765.
Grief support
Griefshare meeting, 6:30 p.m. Thursdays at Lighthouse Church, 960 Eastland Drive, Twin Falls.
Anyone who has lost a loved one and/or friend is welcome to attend. A separate class for teens will be possible if there is interest. You can begin at any session. Attendees should enter through the east doors at the rear of the building.
Information: 208-737-4667.
CPR, first aid
St. Lukes Magic Valley Education Department is offering a Heartsaver Pediatric CPR, First Aid and AED class, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday in Oak Rooms 5-6 on the lower level of St. Lukes, 801 Pole Line Road W., Twin Falls.
The course provides training for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid and using an automated external defibrillator.
Cost is $50. Pre-registration is required, 208-814-9050.
Fitness
Ladies Fitness Day will be held Saturday at Redfish Lake near Stanley. The event is for all fitness levels.
Participants may drive their own vehicle or join the carpool that will leave at 6 a.m. from the Jerome Recreation District and return about 5:30 p.m.
Activities will include hiking, biking, canoeing and paddle boarding. A trailer will be available for hauling bikes, or rent a bike at the Redfish Lodge.
Cost is $10. Pre-registration is required: Amy, 208-324-3389, or redfishlake.com.
Joint replacement
Free class on total joint replacement, 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 26, at BridgeView Estates, 1828 Bridgeview Blvd., Twin Falls. Meet in the lobby.
Topics: Preparing for joint-replacement surgery, amount of pain, recovery time, insurance coverage, care after surgery, discharge planning and long-term rehabilitation.
Tours of the BridgeView rehabilitation facility are available.
Pre-registration is required, Amy at 208-280-0047 or Sarah at 208-280-0045.
Vision support
Visually Impaired Support Group meeting, 12:45 to 2 p.m. Thursday, July 28, at the Twin Falls Senior Center, 530 Shoshone St. W., Twin Falls.
Topics: glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetes-caused vision problems.
Information: Idaho Commission for the Blind, 208-734-2140, or Verna Motes, 208-732-0627.
Want to stare hate in the face?
No need to seek it out in the evening news. Why look to Nice, France, or San Bernardino, Calif., or Bangladesh or Iraq or Louisiana or Minnesota or any number of places where unspeakable acts of hatred have rocked the world in recent months?
Its right here at home.
Twin Falls city officials have received more than 100 emails in the fallout from the Fawnbrook Apartment case, where police say a 5-year-old was assaulted by young boys. Authorities have released few details about the case customary when juveniles are involved but that hasnt stopped islamophobes and racists from spinning lies about what really happened to fuel their hatred-driven agenda.
Dont take our word for it. Reporter Nathan Brown quotes directly from the screeds in a story in todays edition. Its simply shocking.
One writer said the council deserved bullets in their heads. Others talked about raping the wives and children of council members.
The worst emails were left unsigned, making it hard to determine if the writers were locals, but at least a dozen were clearly from Idaho, officials said. The FBI is investigating the threats.
Is this who we have become? An angry mob threatening to kill and rape our local elected leaders over their handling of a case whose details have been grossly overblown?
This bears repeating: A girl was victimized, and as a community our hearts should go out to her and her family. But this case isnt validation of the nefarious-Muslim narrative those opposed to refugee resettlement have tried so desperately to frame it as.
Rather than revealing some truth about the dangers of multiculturalism, this case has instead served to reveal our own ugly biases and insecurities.
This isnt the first time weve written to condemn hatred, and sadly, it likely wont be the last. Were committed to calling out hatred whenever and wherever we see it. Anything less, and the hate will only continue to fester, to spread in our community like a cancer.
But our voice wont be enough. Now is the time for the community to make clear that such hatred has no place in Twin Falls and the Magic Valley. The College of Southern Idaho (sponsor of the federally run resettlement program), the city, the business community everyone has a responsibility to help shape our ethos and our culture.
That has yet to happen in any collective sense, so hatred has largely filled the vacuum over the past year in Twin Falls, at CSI board meetings, in street rallies, at public comment forums at City Council, and perhaps in the kind of quiet conversations with friends and relatives that make us cringe but not enough to speak up and counter their ignorance.
Perhaps you feel too polite. Maybe as a business owner youre worried taking a stand could jeopardize your company. Maybe as an elected official youre concerned standing up to hate will hurt your chances for re-election.
Maybe. But now is not the time for silence. Now is the time for courage.
Now is the time to redefine our regions story, to overpower the hatred by lauding all that makes the Magic Valley such a special place to live. Because if we dont, and Twin Falls becomes synonymous with bigotry, forget about attracting new companies to the area. Forget about the progress weve all worked so hard to attain. Forget about giving your children a life better than the one you had.
Instead, those of us who dont move away to flee will be left in a town where we passively accepted death threats to our elected officials, hatred to our neighbors.
And well wish we would have spoken up a lot sooner.
Will Mike Pence help Donald Trump win over Christian conservatives?
White evangelical voters who are put off by Trumps misogyny, racism or astonishing business ethics wont be swayed by the addition to the ticket of a conservative Midwesterner fleeing from his own political problems.
And the millions of Christian conservatives who arent put off? Trump has already won their devotion: He had them at Hell, no.
As the Pew Research Center reported last week, white evangelicals are even more strongly supportive of Trump than they were of Mitt Romney at a similar point in the 2012 campaign. More than three quarters 78 percent of white evangelical voters say they would vote for Trump, and about one third back his campaign strongly.
As a model of Christian virtue, Trump is less than ideal. But most Christian conservatives arent looking for a virtuous lamb. They want a street fighter the more aggressive the better.
Echoing a quintessentially Trumpian refrain, pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas complained that the evangelical elite who have resisted Trump are out of touch with the average person in the pew. In confronting a dangerous world, Jeffress said, I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think thats where many evangelicals are.
Where many white evangelicals are, at least in their own minds, is on the losing end of a seismic event: the transformation of the U.S. from a nation that, from its founding until the end of the 20th century, was utterly dominated by white Christians, into a racial and religious polyglot that in 2008 elected Barack Obama president.
In remarks at the Brookings Institution, Robert Jones, the author of The End of White Christian America, described the 2016 election as a referendum on that end. The termination date on white Christian pre-eminence, fittingly, was smack in the middle of the Obama administration. The nation went from 54 percent white Christian in 2008 to 45 percent today.
Conservative politics in the Obama era has been dominated by that fact and shaped by the anxieties and insecurities flowing from it. Birtherism, nativism, congressional obstruction, the Tea Party and other manifestations of panic have culminated in the blunt racial assertion that is the Trump campaign.
Evangelical support for Trump was all but preordained. It was certainly predicted, however obliquely, in one of the more interesting research projects of the past few years a series of focus groups conducted in 2013 by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg.
The six groups convened by Greenberg were divided into moderate Republicans, white evangelicals and Tea Partyers.
The moderate Republicans understood contemporary America in terms consistent with the portrait portrayed in, for example, mainstream news media. They didnt like Obama, but found him a readily comprehensible political figure: Christian, liberal, Democrat.
Tea Partyers and conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, deemed the president a mysterious alien intent on destroying all they hold dear. Evangelical participants variously described Obama as a tyrant, who wanted to undermine Christianity and usher in communism.
Of course, forces ranging from Fox News to Republican congressional leaders to Trump himself deliberately encouraged such flights of fantasy. But the focus groups, along with multiple surveys indicating that Christian conservatives cant seem to get a handle on the president, or the America that produced him, do put evangelical support for Trump in context.
Trump has promised to resuscitate the white Protestant dominance of the 1950s, thus magically sweeping aside the decades of messy, difficult and unwanted change that have cost Christian conservatives status and power.
With or without a social conservative on the ticket, Trump is the only one making such an attractive offer.
The French-language disc, due August 26, is called Encore Un Soir, which translates to "Another Night." The title track will be available as a free download for fans who pre-order the album. It was written by French superstar Jean-Jaques Goldman, who wrote songs on Celine's album Falling Into You and Let's Talk About Love, as well as her album D'eux, [deuh] which is the best-selling French language album in history. The two haven't worked together in 12 years.
Among the other writers contributing to the album is a guy named Daniel Picard, the winner of a contest on Celine's website. His song, whose title translates to "At the Highest Branch," was chosen from over 4,000 submissions to be recorded by the star.
Despite her sadness over the loss of her husband Rene Angelil and her brother earlier this year, Celine "voluntarily chose uplifting themes that focused on life and positivity" for the album, according to her record label.
Celine is currently on a tour which saw her recently wrap up nine shows in Paris. She'll kick off ten concerts in her native Montreal on July 31, and them move on to five concerts in Quebec City on August 20.
Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Theresa May has indicated that Brexit could be delayed as she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed UK approach backed by Scotland.
The Prime Minister on Friday travelled to Scotland to meet Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, and discuss plans for Britains Brexit negotiation.
In a sign that the new Prime Minister is committed to keeping the Union intact, she said she will not trigger Article 50 the formal process for withdrawing from the EU until all the devolved nations in the country agree.
Irelands Bogus 26% GDP Economic Boost
Jonathan Newman writes: Irelands Central Statistics Office updated their 2015 national income figures and revealed a staggering 26.3% increase in real GDP from 2014 to 2015.
Paul Krugman called it leprechaun economics.
Joseph Salerno said thats unbelievable!
I say its just one more reason to doubt official macroeconomic statistics.
While some initially responded with accusations of duplicitous methods, the CSO assures that the figures were calculated using the standard EU accounting rules, including the reported 34.4% increase in exports and 87.3% increase in industry (!) over the same time period.
The culprit is the large number of corporate inversions and mergers that legally shuffle ownership of taxable revenues and assets to Ireland, where lower tax rates and other laws allow companies like Google keep 94% of their non-US profits from government theft. For comparison, official US corporate tax rates range from 15%39%, so its no wonder why some might prefer to travel on a road with fewer highway robberies.
While many commentators are using this as an opportunity to denounce legal tax avoidance, the main lesson here is that official national income accounting statistics do not portray what many take them to portray.
Most use GDP or GDP per capita to measure how wealthy the citizens of some nation are, how their wealth changes over time, or how wealthy they are compared to other nations. But these applications are spurious for many reasonsno one would say that the average Irish citizen is now 26% wealthier because some multinational corporations filled out some paperwork. No one would say that Ireland actually experienced real economic growth on the order of 26.3%.
Whats more, the large part of the 26% boost to Irelands statistics is only possible through a decrease in other countries statistics, which calls their data into question, too. Though a few large companies transferring taxable items from the US to Ireland might be a drop in the bucket for the US and a big splash in Ireland, both countries GDP figures are going through the same statistical wringer.
In modern times, when the legal ownership of firms and bank accounts can dart across the globe with a simple signature or a press of a button, national income statistics are becoming increasingly meaningless. The problem isn't the globalization, the tax avoidance, or the technology that makes such transfers possible. The problem lies in the figures themselves and their exultation by mainstream economists.
Jonathan Newman is a 2013 Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute and teaches economics at Auburn University. See Jonathan Newman's article archives.
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Morocco has officially launched its bid to reclaim its legitimate seat it reluctantly left in protest after the former Organisation of African Unity (OAU) illegally accepted the memebership of a self-proclaim phantom entity.
In a message addressed to the 27th Summit of the African Union in Kigali (Rwanda), King Mohammed VI of Morocco said time has come for the North African country to retake its natural place within its institutional family after many African countries have long been urging the country to return to the African organization.
One cannot change geography, nor can one escape the burden of history, said the Sovereign, stressing that Morocco should not remain outside its African institutional family and should regain its natural, rightful place within the AU.
The North African Kingdom will contribute to making the AU a more robust organization one that is both proud of its credibility and relieved of the trappings of an obsolete era, added the Monarch.
By returning to its African family, Morocco aims to keep up its commitment to Africa and strengthen its involvement in all matters it feels strongly about, said King Mohammed VI, pledging to make constructive contributions to the AU agenda and activities.
Morocco, which will host the COP22 Climate Conference next November, will defend the position of our Continent, which is greatly affected by climate change and sustainable development issues, added the Sovereign.
Though Morocco left the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1984 in very special circumstances, the North African country never left the continent but continued to enhance its relations with African countries, said King Mohammed VI, affirming that Morocco is an African nation and it always will be. And all of us, Moroccans, shall remain at the service of Africa. We shall be at the forefront of actions to preserve the dignity of African citizens and ensure respect for our Continent.
He also said that Morocco has forged a unique, authentic and tangible South-South cooperation model which has made it possible not only to consolidate cooperation in the traditional areas of training and technical assistance, but also to engage in new, strategic sectors such as food security and infrastructure development.
Morocco is already the second largest investor in the Continent, added the Sovereign, recalling the important involvement of Moroccan operators and their strong engagement in the areas of banking, insurance, air transport, telecommunications, housing
Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society was dissolved by a Bahraini administrative court in Manama on Sunday arguing that the organization prejudices the respect for the rule of law and foundations of citizenship based on coexistence, tolerance and respect for the other; provided an atmosphere for harboring terrorism, extremism and violence and for foreign interference in national affairs.
To support its ruling, the court stressed that al-Wefaqs activities incite violence, encourage demonstrations and sits-ins which could lead to sectarian strife in the country.
The organization has been the most vocal opposition institution against the government and it boycotted parliamentary elections citing the lack of significant political reforms.
The court stated that al-Wefaqs claims that Bahrain is suffering from a vacuum over the 2002 constitutions failure to garner the consensus of the people; and that the constitutional amendments carried out in 2012 dont represent the nations will were all detrimental to the tranquility of the kingdom.
Court sessions have been boycotted by the organizations lawyers since June 28 but they can appeal against the ruling in the next 45days.
Iran reacted against the ruling through its foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi who said Bahraini authorities are not after settling the existing dilemma and problems. He warned that such unconstructive measures would further complicate the situation. Qassemi signaled that the mounting organized pressure against individuals and organizations could promote non-peaceful approaches.
Al-Wefaqs activities were suspended on June 14 and its assets frozen by the court but the ruling on Sunday ordered the government to seize its funds.
Bahrain does not have political parties as they are referred to as associations under the Political Societies law. They are expected to represent citizens, reinforce political practice and cultural background in their activities in accordance with the constitution.
A first shipment of missiles of the S-300 missile system has recently been received by Iran, evidencing Tehrans determination to equip its air defense circle with this system, reported Tasnim news agency, quoting Revolutionary Guards.
At the beginning of the month, Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili, commander of the Khatam al-Anbia Air Defense Base, said the system would be delivered and be fully operational before the end of the Iranian year which falls on March 20 2017. The missile system is being shipped in parts to Iran. The missile tubes and radar equipment were delivered a couple of months ago.
Israel is one of the main countries in the region concerned over the delivery of the S-300, which claims it threatens its security and weakens its regional aerial-security supremacy. Air Force commander Major general Amir Eshel last year stated that although the missile system poses a significant challenge, it is not insurmountable. Israel had tried to block the sale of the system to Iran.
Dubbed as of the most advanced missile system of its kind currently in the market as it is capable of long-range protection against warplanes and missiles, the S-300 will be a boost to Irans arsenal that it has been trying to improve over the years.
Israel as well as Gulf states will continue to monitor the situation as they remain cautious of Tehrans ambitions.
Turkish authorities led by President Erdogan Sunday called on the United States to extradite U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen and his supporters; accused of formatting the Friday failed military coup.
Ankara firmly believes that Gulen, based since 1999 in the U.S., in Pennsylvania, orchestrated the military coup attempt, which shook President Erdogans regime on Friday.
Turkeys Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag speaking to state-run media TRT indicated that keeping Gulen wouldnt befit the solidarity, cooperation, alliance and friendship between Turkey and the United States.
Bozdag said a formal request would be sent to Washington to hand over the cleric.
The US State Department, in response to Turkish authorities statements, demanded that Ankara produces strong evidence that the Turkish scholar has been involved in the coup attempt.
Turkish authorities accuse Gulens transnational religious Hizmet movement of sponsoring the coup. Gulen, 75, was a former Erdogans ally but fell from grace after the Turkish leader became wary of his movement.
Manhunt has taken place in Turkey since Friday. About 6,000 people have been arrested in connection with the failed coup. More than 3,000 soldiers including scores of army generals have been arrested. Army Chief of Staff General Hulusi Akar has been replaced by Umit Dundar as acting chief of military staff.
Authorities have targeted thousands of judges and prosecutors across the country accusing them of facilitating the coup. Some 500 of them have been already arrested reports say.
President Erdogan Saturday at a funeral of some 250 killed in the Friday violence vowed to clean the army and state institutions of what he called a virus that spread.
He called on supporters to remain mobilized in the streets as he argued that the situation is not settled yet.
Forces loyal to the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) announced Friday they lost seven fighters in the battle with the Islamic State (IS) militants as fighting narrows down to the command centre of the militant movement still holding the coastal city of Sirte.
49 other fighters have been wounded in the fighting, the forces said in a statement.
Friday gun battle took place around Ouagadougou conference centre, turned into nerve centre by the militants, the statement added.
GNA forces have this week intensified airstrikes and shelling of militants positions, pinning down the militants to their hideouts. The assaults regained momentum after few weeks of slowdown to avoid further losses among Libyan forces as militants fought back, using snipers, explosives, and suicide bombers.
Since the beginning of the campaign, more than 200 fighters were killed and the number of injured is put at over 1,400 according to medical sources.
IS took control of Muamar Gaddafis hometown last year after massacring militiamen protecting the city situated at 450 km, East of Tripoli.
GNA leader Faiez Serraj has put takeover of the town on top of his priorities. The GNA has received strong backing of the international community, which, in May, accepted to ease the arms embargo imposed on the country since 2011 in order to allow regular forces acquire the necessary weaponry to flash out the militant group.
The Mauritanian Government has maintained it did not ransom head of Muammar Gaddafis intelligence services, arrested in Nouakchott in March 2012.
Allegations that Nouakchott took fat check for extradition of Abdallah Senoussi at the request of the then Libyan authorities has re-surfaced in the Saharan country as public opinion and the opposition question authorities candour.
The Mauritania regime reportedly pocketed $200 million to handover Senoussi to post-revolution authorities which had launched an arrest warrant against him.
Opposition figure and president of Hatem party Salah Ould Hanana has recently called for a probe on the issue after a Libyan lawmaker alleged Senoussi was handed over to Libya under a deal.
The Mauritanian foreign minister, Isselkou Ould Ahmed Izid Bih, rejected the claims when senate member Mohamed Ould Ghadda questioned him over the allegations.
He explained that Senoussi was extradited after consultation with the countrys Fatwa Council members who green-lighted his transfer to Libyan authorities rather than to French authorities which also sought his extradition.
Senoussi was arrested at Nouakchott airport in 2012 with a Malian passport on his way from Morocco.
He is wanted by French authorities for his alleged involvement in the attack against UTAs DC aircraft in September 1989.
He is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for crime against humanity.
King Mohammed VI of Morocco made an official call for regaining the African Union after 32 years of an empty seat policy within the pan-African organization.
Today, Morocco wishes resolutely and unequivocally to regain its place within its institutional family and to continue to live up to its responsibilities, with even more resolve and enthusiasm, King Mohammed VI said in a Royal message addressed to the 27th summit of the African Union which opened in the Rwandan capital Kigali on July 17.
The message was handed by Moroccos Lower House Speaker Rachid Talbi Alami to the President of Chad, Idriss Deby Itno, who holds the rotating presidency of the African Union.
This confirms the media reports that raised Moroccos possible re-joining of the African Union, from which it has pulled out in 1984 in protest over the lack of neutrality on the Sahara issue, after the pan-African body admitted the self-proclaimed SADR as a fully-fledged member.
King Mohammed VI called on African nations to repair the unfair and unlawful decision to admit within its ranks an entity that lacks the attributes of a state, saying that such an ideological move undermines the UN-brokered peace process by prejudging the outcome.
The African Union can better constructively contribute to the achievement of a solution to the Sahara issue through a newfound neutrality, added the King.
The Monarch made it clear that the immoral fait accompli of admitting the Algerian-based SADR entity was a coup against international legality and that time has come to reconsider such decision.
History will remember this episode as an act of deceit and as a misuse of procedures to serve interests that are yet to be elucidated an act similar to the abduction of a child, since the OAU was fairly unseasoned at the time, explained the King.
In his message, which was published by the news agency MAP, King Mohammed VI stressed Moroccos commitment to Africa and its contributions to the emergence of a pan-African consciousness, and highlighted the efforts undertaken by Morocco in the field of economic cooperation and peace keeping in the continent.
Even when it was no longer a member of the OAU, Morocco never left AfricaIn 1984, it simply left an institution in very special circumstances, the Monarch said, adding that Africa has never been so much at the heart of Moroccos foreign policy and its international action as it is today.
Morocco should not remain outside its African institutional family and should regain its natural, rightful place within the AU, the Sovereign insisted, pledging that from within, Morocco will contribute to making the AU a more robust organization one that is both proud of its credibility and relieved of the trappings of an obsolete era.
After he pointed out that This well-thought-out decision to come back is endorsed by all of the nations forces, King Mohammed VI said Through this historic, responsible act, Morocco seeks to work within the AU to transcend divisions, and pledges to make constructive contributions to the AU agenda and activities.
Renewing his commitment to the continent, King Mohammed VI said Morocco has forged a unique, authentic and tangible South-South cooperation model which has made it possible not only to consolidate cooperation in the traditional areas of training and technical assistance, but also to engage in new, strategic sectors such as food security and infrastructure development.
This process will not be ending any time soonit is irreversible, asserted the King who recalled the important involvement of Moroccan operators and their strong engagement in Africa in the areas of banking, insurance, air transport, telecommunications, housing as well as the ranking of Morocco as the second largest investor in the Continent.
Morocco, which will host the COP22 Climate Conference next November, will defend the position of our Continent, which is greatly affected by climate change and sustainable development issues, added the Sovereign, recalling that cooperation, which is already intense with many countries at the bilateral level, will be further expanded and revitalized. Moroccan expertise and know-how can therefore be offered on an even broader scale and in a more streamlined framework, he said.
This is particularly true regarding issues relating to security and the fight against terrorism. The Moroccan expertise, which is widely recognized at the international level and is sought by many countries including European ones would be leveraged to promote security and stability in all African countries, particularly those in West and Central Africa, King Mohammed VI promised.
Members of Libyas Dialogue committee are meeting in Tunisia to discuss the countrys political stalemate as the House of Representative (HoR) in Tobruk fails to hold a vote of confidence on the U.N-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The delegates also considered the formation of a unified military command following the proposal by the UN special envoy Martin Kobler.
The discussions, which began on Saturday, will continue on Monday and progress seems to be stiff although Prime Minister-designate Fayez Serraj stated that the discussions have been frank, transparent and open. He added that all the challenges facing the GNA were discussed.
Kobler said all Libyas problems today are tied up to the security issue and warned that the country cannot be united as long as it has several armies.
The GNA enjoys the support of Western countries but has not been approved yet by the HoR. The president of the parliament, Ageela Saleh, is accused of delaying the vote of confidence.
A draft of a new constitution was presented at the meeting by members of the Constitution Drafting Assembly (CDA) and one of its members, Omar Mohamed Ali, said the Dialogue Committee was very appreciative of it.
Some members of the CDA have however denounced the presentation of the draft saying it was not unanimously accepted by the sixteen members of the CDA, representing other regions.
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Posted on: July 18, 2016
SERVICE TO MAN IS SERVICE TO GOD
The story of how Swami Karunyananda
came to live with Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba
- Part 2
Part 01 || Part 03
Swami Karunyananda is perhaps the only person who came to Swami as a 60 year old and still managed to stay with Him and serve Him for four decades! A common sight for the regular Puttaparthi visitor in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Swami Karunyananda happily gave up an entire service organisation he had started from scratch in order to find ultimate fulfilment of his life. From walking behind Bhagawan holding an umbrella to holding the empty pot from which Baba manifested vibhuti galore; from staying with Swami to travelling with Him to distant places - Karunyananda was blessed with it all. His is a story extraordinaire of a mans passion for service and Gods appreciation of it.
When we are evaluating a company, more often than not, we look at the present circumstances and decide whether it is good or not. If it isnt doing well today, it is a bad company; if it is doing well, its a good one. There are a few people however, who are able to study the company by going into its past and then, they predict its future trajectory. These are investors and they benefit by association with the company. Any good company has its share of ups and downs and the wise investor always studies good companies. So too, if we want to be wise investors in the business of life, we not only need to keep good company of noble people but also study the timelines of these noble ones!
Anyone who would have seen or come to know of Swami Karunyananda in the 1980s and 1990s would have thought that he is one hell of a lucky person. It is only the spiritual investors who would benefit by looking beyond at his past to study and understand his life. Yes, Karunyananda was a blessed soul because he was born with virtues of compassion and caring. He was also blessed to get a virtuous being as his mother. That was destiny. But that does not mean he didnt have to slog and toil hard to get a permanent place in Swamis heart and Prasanthi Nilayam. His sincerity, determination and efforts are worthy of emulation.
Venkatasubbiah to Bala Subbaramadas through Bhakti
He was born as Venkatasubbiah at 4:30 am on 10th October 1894 in Athimanjeripeta (in current day Tiruttani taluk of Tiruvallur district, Tamil Nadu) to parents Subbulakshmamma and Venkatappa Naidu. Subbulakshmamma was a doting mother who instilled love and forbearance in the lad as we read in the first part. However, when Venkatasubbiah was about seven years old, his mother passed away. Unable to tend for the little child amidst his travelling and work, the father gave him into the care of the Karnam (Government clerk during the British times) of Pennalurpeta, Venkatarayudu. This Venkatarayudu and his wife treated the boy more like a slave than a son. Thus, he had to do all the household chores even though he was barely a 10 year old. But the little lad did not wince even a bit.
He remembered his mothers words in those trying situations.
Every time we feel that we are being beaten, remember the Dhobi (washerman) pounding the clothes on a rock. The clothes are trashed but they are actually being cleaned. Hardships cleanse us.
Deriving strength from those words, he dutifully went about doing everything with a smile. Destiny however, seemed to conspire with misfortune for Venkatasubbiah. Even as he began primary education at Thiruvalangadu at the home of the Karnams relative, his father expired! Though this was a devastating blow, Venkatasubbiah used this as another excuse to turn inwards.
From that day on Venkatasubbiah would complete all his duties and responsibilities at school and home and rush to some Satsangh or Bhajan session. He would keep company of the Sadhus and saints as much as possible, thinking of God. He was particularly regular in the service of Mouni Swami, a sadhu who had taken to the observance of silence. Venkatasubbiah learned that silencing the mouth is the first step in silencing the senses and the mind. On the rare occasions when Mouni Swami dispensed with his silence to speak on Vedanta, Venkatasubbiah was always there, drinking deep into the wisdom. At other times, the lad absorbed himself in the songs of Bhadrachala Ramadas. Such was his flair for service, spiritual knowledge and singing that the elders soon began to call him as Bala Subbaramadas (meaning Subba, the young Ramadas).
Swami Karunyananda is born
When Balasubba Ramadas heard about the sage of Thiruvannamalai, Sri Ramana Maharshi and a longing to meet him grew. Thus, in 1914, he travelled further south to the Virupaksha cave in the Arunachala hills and prostrated at the feet of Ramana Maharshi.
Revered one, please teach me the Spiritual Truth.
Child, start making efforts to find the answer to one question - Who Am I. Ask yourself that and find its answer.
The lad did not understand the significance of the message. Nor did he get inspired by it. But he felt thrilled just to be in the presence of the master and in the temple at Thiruvannamalai. So, he continued his life here, serving the holy ones and sustaining himself on the Prasadam at the temple. It is indeed amazing how a man seeking spiritual riches can make do with the most meagre of worldly wealth!
Many months passed this way. This was the time when World War I was in full swing and the British Government in India was forcing all able-bodied men into the army. Subbaramadas (the prefix Bala was dropped since he was in his youth now) was remanded with a view to deport him to the war zone. Subbaramadas pleaded with them,
I am committed to Ahimsa (non-violence). You may send me with a gun to the battlelines. But know for sure I will not harm any being. I will die if I am shot and the loss of a soldier and his equipment will be all yours. I assure you that I'm on a spiritual path and am of no use to you or your government.
Call it the power of speaking the truth or the impact of an aspirants determination, it worked! Leave this place or you will be caught again, the policemen said as they let him go.
When one seeks in all humility and genuineness, the Lord always responds. When Subbaramadas was wondering where he would go to, he got the acquaintance of Palani Swamy who told him,
This is not a proper place for you. If you want to progress, go to Tirumala. In the hills there, at Gogarbha, is a great soul who is meant to show you the path to tread.
That was how Karunyananda met his mentor and Guru - Sri Malayala Swami. He stayed with him for several days, yearning and learning. He sold the silver waistband in order to get money to fulfil his paltry material needs. The time spent here saw Subbaramadas grow in wisdom to complement his devotion. Realizing the futility of a worldly life, he sought the Sanyasa Deeksha (initiation into the life of a complete renunciant) from Malayala Swami.
My child, I have not taken the Sanyasa Deeksha myself and so it is not right for me to confer it on you. You should go meet Swami Sivananda in Rishikesh and get the Deeksha from him.
As you wish master, Subbaramadas replied, but please suggest the name I should choose when asked for...
You have a lot of compassion for living beings since childhood. So choose the name Karunyananda.
Thus it was that Subbaramadas was initiated into Sanyasa by Swami Sivananda at Rishikesh and he came to be known by the name - Swami Karunyananda.
Bhakti and Jnana need Karma to supplement
The Sanyasa Ashrama is the final stage of life as per the Ashrama Dharma.
Ashram or stage Age
(approx) Description Brahmacharya
(student life) Till 24 Brahmacharya represented the bachelor student stage of life. This stage focused on education and included the practice of celibacy. The student went to a Gurukul (house of the guru) and typically would live with a Guru (teacher), acquiring knowledge of science, philosophy, scriptures and logic, practicing self-discipline, working to earn dakshina to be paid for the guru, learning to live a life of Dharma (righteousness, morals, duties). Grihastha
(household life) 24-48 This stage referred to the individual's married life, with the duties of maintaining a household, raising a family, educating one's children, and leading a family-centred and a dharmic social life. Grihastha stage was considered as the most important of all stages in sociological context, as human beings in this stage not only pursued a virtuous life, they produced food and wealth that sustained people in other stages of life, as well as the offsprings that continued mankind. The stage also represented one where the most intense physical, sexual, emotional, occupational, social and material attachments exist in a human being's life.
Vanaprastha
(retired life) 48-72 The retirement stage, where a person handed over household responsibilities to the next generation, took an advisory role, and gradually withdrew from the world. Vanaprastha stage was a transition phase from a householder's life with its greater emphasis on Artha and Kama (wealth, security, pleasure and sexual pursuits) to one with greater emphasis on Moksha (spiritual liberation). Sanyasa
(renounced life) 72+
(or any time) The stage was marked by renunciation of material desires and prejudices, represented by a state of disinterest and detachment from material life, generally without any meaningful property or home (Ascetic), and focussed on Moksha, peace and simple spiritual life. Anyone could enter this stage after completing the Brahmacharya stage of life.
It is often thought that Sanyasa is the renunciation of all responsibilities. It is actually the other way. In Brahmacharya, one is responsible only for oneself. In Grihastha, the responsibilities increase and one has to think of family and society. In Vanaprastha, one has to be more broad-based and take up responsibility for all the beings in the world. The Sanyasi has the maximum responsibilities because his life is no longer his; it is Gods!
Swami Karunyananda understood this when he met Mahatma Gandhi at Rishikesh in 1933. Gandhiji arrived before time for the public meeting and took his place on the dais. He observed that a lot of sadhus and sanyasis had also gathered in the assembly. He began his address with a question,
The mere presence of so many Sanyasis evokes joy in me. I want to know what you all are doing here...
We are here for lifelong Tapas (penance), a sadhu replied.
What is Tapas? asked Gandhiji.
Seeing no answer forthcoming, he answered with a discourse,
Embodiments of the Atma! Tapas is not leaving responsibilities and meditating. Not confining the use of the physical body for selfish interests and making it useful for others is Tapas. In spite of having great wealth, Bharat is suffering under foreign rule. It is only when our people engage in selfless service that our country can get back its original high stature.
I humbly request you to engage in selfless service for the benefit of community. Selfless service is the surest path to realization of God. That is true Tapas. Sadhus! You have dedicated your hearts to God. Service to man is service to God. Are we all ready?
In response, only one hand went up in the audience. It was Karunyananda!
I wholeheartedly offer myself to the service of mankind today...
Gandhiji was impressed. He got the details of Swami Karunyananda. After this, several others also raised their hand in dedication to the service of mankind. Inspiration is contagious indeed!
Later, Karunyananda wrote a letter to Gandhiji seeking his blessings. The reply he got touched him,
If you follow the Truth without lapse, that itself will bless you and protect you for there is no God higher than Truth.
Charged up with inspiration and compassion, Swami Karunyananda returned to Samalkota town (also called Samarlakota) in East Godavari region. He began working in right earnest for the service of society. The result of his efforts was the establishment of the Jeeva Karunya Sangam in 1935. Since this was during the ghastly 2nd World War, the Sangam had multiple noble objectives as listed below:
Propagation of Non-Violence (Ahimsa)
Uplift of Harijans (the outcastes in society)
Free medical aid and health education.
Refuge for the aged, diseased and orphaned.
Supplying milk to undernourished children
Cremation of unclaimed corpses
Free food for the Disabled
Helping Children - supplying milk, educational aid, adoption and finding homes for children lost during the war.
Helping families in Distress
Service to Lepers
To rush to the aid of peoples affected by natural calamities, such as cyclones, fires, accidents, etc.
Adult Education
Imparting Spiritual Knowledge
The activities of the Sangam grew at such a pace that it got headquartered at Rajahmundry in 1940 and continued its sterling service for decades. Now, is it any wonder that Karunyananda found a place in Swamis heart?
Reaching God through the world
Imagine the finger saying that it loves the body but it will not serve the hand. Foolish isnt it? It is ignorance that prevents the finger from realizing that serving the hand also means serving the body. Swami clearly states that a person who says that he loves God but refuses to serve the society and creation is being as foolish.
Vyashti (individual) is a limb of Samashti (society) which in turn is a limb of Srishti (creation/nature). Srishti is part of Parameshti (God). That is why Swami exhorts,
The best way to love God is to love all and serve all.
Karunyananda had spent six decades of his life serving individuals, the society and nature. He also interacted with the who's who of Indian society in the course of his work. He had been selfless in his intent and eager to progress spiritually. Though he had been conferred Sanyasa, he had the humility to heed to Gandhijis call and plunge into service of society. Every sinew in his body ached to serve his fellow beings - not just humans.
Karunyananda was responsible for stopping the animal sacrifices that went on at the famous Nakulamma temple at Samarlakota.
All beings are children of Mother Earth; none will dare to eat his or her own children. How then will Goddess Nukalamma like to have her own children killed in front of her own shrine and offered in sacrifice?" he provoked their collective conscience.
In a nearby village of Yeleswaram, Swami Karunyananda's disciples went to the temple of Rupulamma and found animal sacrifice taking place on a large scale. Swami Karunyananda addressed the people at a special meeting for propagation of non-violence. The sacrifices ceased almost instantly!
Such had been his service towards society and nature that God decided to grant him the greatest gift - Himself. Once we see the way Karunyananda lead his life, it becomes a natural progression that Swami should walk to him that wonderful day at Rajahmundry and ask,
Karunyananda, I am going to Kakinada. Would you like to come with Me?
Soon, Karunyananda became a regular at Puttaparthi. He began to spend more and more time with Swami than with the organisation that he had built and nourished. On his part, Swami received him and allowed him to stay next to his own room in the Mandir. Later, he was allotted a room in South Prasanthi but he was granted the privilege to seek an audience with Swami whenever he wished! It is a beautiful experience to read his own words about these days.
I have the good fortune of being the first person to greet Bhagawan in the morning. I go upstairs, and open the door of Bhagawan's room and have darshan and padanamaskar of Bhagawan. There is Divine Power in the feet of Swami. There is power in the glances of Swami. His body is not like ours, it is a Chinmaya Sareeram (divine energy form). Ours is a body made up of dust, which dissolves finally, into the primordial elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether.
He is not limited to one form. He is the form of all deities worshipped by religions. He is the very embodiment of Chaitanya (energy, force). He is the embodiment of all Gods. We cannot probe into Him. Have you not seen Him during the mornings? He has a special effulgence in Him; sometimes this effulgence is frightening. On the last day of Devi Navaratri (Dasara) when Poorna Ahuti is performed, His body temperature becomes hot. I have touched His feet at such times and found that they were very hot.
Later on, Karunyananda shut shop on the Sangam that he had started and settled down permanently in Prasanthi Nilayam till his last breath. Such a being is sure to have had several experiences with Swami. This part was meant to highlight the truth that service to society actually transforms into the opportunity to serve God! That being done, the icing on the cake - the experiences of Karunyananda with Baba - will be reserved for the next part.
Part 01 || Part 03
- Aravind Balasubramanya
Radio Sai Team
QUT Senior Research Fellow Peter Lazzarini has led research showing preventable diabetes foot disease hospitalisations are not only costing millions of dollars each year but can lead to amputation and even death. Credit: Queensland University of Technology
New research from QUT shows preventable hospitalisation from diabetic foot disease is costing Australia hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology and co-chair of Diabetic Foot Australia, Peter Lazzarini, said the importance of early prevention of diabetic foot disease was never more important than in this year's National Diabetes Week (10-16 July).
Mr Lazzarini led the Australian-first study published in BMJ Open finding one in every 22 patients in our hospitals have active diabetic foot disease.
"Our study, which investigated a representative sample of hospitalised patients in five hospitals across metropolitan and regional Queensland, found 4.6% of all patients had active diabetic foot disease and nearly half of those were in hospital because of their diabetic foot disease.
"This equates to 27,600 hospitalisations each year caused by diabetic foot disease in Australia, which puts diabetic foot disease easily in the top 20 causes of hospitalisation in Australia."
He said this amounted to an annual direct cost to Australia for hospitalisation alone of $350 million.
"This figure is much higher than we previously thought and is still very much a conservative estimate, because this cost only relates to patients admitted because of their diabetic foot disease in public hospitals," he said.
Mr Lazzarini said diabetic foot disease didn't stop with hospitalisation and that it also causes 4,400 amputations and nearly 1,700 deaths in Australia each year.
"If diabetic foot disease is left untreated it can quite easily result in hospitalisation, amputation and even death," he said.
"Unfortunately, we also found that people hospitalised because of diabetic foot disease had rarely received the recommended multi-disciplinary foot care needed to properly treat their disease in the year prior to their hospitalisation. This seems to confirm our thoughts that people with diabetic foot disease that do not see a multi-disciplinary foot disease team are more likely to end up in hospital."
However, Mr Lazzarini offers a message of hope: early prevention.
"We know from our previous research in Australia that when people with diabetic foot disease receive this recommended multi-disciplinary foot care we can prevent around half of the hospitalisations, amputations and costs that would have occurred without this care. Diabetic foot disease is a readily preventable disease if diagnosed and treated early."
Mr Lazzarini, and a national expert team from Diabetic Foot Australia, are advocating for a national multi-disciplinary approach this National Diabetes Week to help end avoidable hospitalisation and amputation from diabetic foot disease.
"Our study, and similar research from Europe and the US, firstly recommends everyone with diabetes presenting to a hospital needs to have their feet screened for diabetic foot disease. This would help identify nearly everyone who presents to an Australian hospital that needs treatment for this disease but doesn't necessarily know it.
"Secondly, everyone who is found to have diabetic foot disease needs to be seen by a multi-disciplinary foot disease team both in and out of hospital. In the UK they are up in arms that 20% of their hospitals do not have these teams. We estimate only 20% of our hospitals in Australia actually have these teams and this needs to significantly improve.
"Thirdly, people with diabetes need to see their GP or podiatrist at least every year for a foot screen. Unfortunately, people with diabetes can lose feeling in their feet and left unchecked diabetic foot disease can develop in the form of sores, infections and poor circulation. We know that about 50 per cent of the over one million Australians with diabetes have a foot screen each year. This means we don't know if diabetic foot disease has affected the other 50 per cent and sometimes it's too late when we do. If we can pick up diabetic foot disease early and refer people to these multi-disciplinary foot teams we can prevent thousands of hospitalisations, amputations and even deaths.
"We know these simple preventative measures can save our hospital system millions and millions of dollars each year, but most importantly, change the lives of thousands of Australians with diabetes by empowering them to keep both their feet firmly on the ground and out of hospital."
Diabetic Glenn Wilson from Albany Creek knows only too well the value of early intervention.
Having lost every toe on his left foot and one on his right some years ago, Mr Wilson is keen to raise awareness of the need for diabetics to keep their diabetes under control.
"You have to be on your toes to keep your toes," he said.
"You can only keep your diabetes under control if you are having regular check-ups with your GP and your podiatrist, self-check for any injuries or abnormalities, a feeling of heat in the foot which can indicate infection even though you might not be able to see it, and check your blood sugar levels daily.
"All this information wasn't available when I first had diabetes but people now have the knowledge and knowledge is power."
Mr Wilson said people needed to be aware of the need to act quickly when they spotted a problem.
"When I saw an infection on my foot a while ago and couldn't get an appointment with my GP I came to the QUT Podiatry Clinic and was able to have a script prepared so I could receive the antibiotics I needed," he said.
Mr Wilson said the cost to the health system was really just a fraction of the overall cost to society.
"There are so many things that people take for granted that I can no longer do. For example, walking on the beach and being able to feel sand between your toes, hiking in nature, riding a bike. I can't even ride an exercise bike because I have no feeling in either foot," he said.
Explore further In Queensland: Diabetes related amputations on the decline
More information: Peter A Lazzarini et al. Direct inpatient burden caused by foot-related conditions: a multisite point-prevalence study, BMJ Open (2016). Journal information: BMJ Open Peter A Lazzarini et al. Direct inpatient burden caused by foot-related conditions: a multisite point-prevalence study,(2016). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010811
The hippocampus is a region of the brain largely responsible for memory formation. Credit: Salk Institute
A new study on infantile memory formation in rats points to the importance of critical periods in early-life learning on functional development of the brain. The research, conducted by scientists at New York University's Center for Neural Science, reveals the significance of learning experiences over the first two to four years of human life; this is when memories are believed to be quickly forgottena phenomenon known as infantile amnesia.
"What our findings tell us is that children's brains need to get enough and healthy activation even before they enter pre-school," explains Cristina Alberini, a professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science, who led the study. "Without this, the neurological system runs the risk of not properly developing learning and memory functions."
The other authors of the study, conducted in collaboration with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, included: Alessio Travaglia, a post-doctoral researcher at NYU; Reto Bisaz, an NYU research scientist at the time of the study; Eric Sweet, a post-doctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai; and Robert Blitzer, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai.
In their study, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers examined the mechanisms of infantile memory in ratsi.e., memories created 17 days after birth. This is the equivalent of humans under the age of three and when memories of who, what, when, and whereknown as episodic memoriesare rapidly forgotten. The phenomenon, referred as to "infantile or childhood amnesia," is in fact the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories that took place during the first two to four years of life.
In addressing this matter, Alberini and her colleagues compared rats' infantile memory with that when they reached 24 days oldthat is, when they are capable of forming and retaining long-term memories and at an age that roughly corresponds to humans at six to nine years old.
The episodic memory tested in the rodents was the memory of an aversive experience: a mild foot shock received upon entering in a new place. Adult rats, like humans, remember unpleasant or painful experiences that they had in specific places, and then avoid returning to them.
To do so, rodents were placed in a box divided into two compartments: a "safe" compartment and a "shock" compartment. During the experiment, each rat was placed in the safe compartment with its head facing away from the door. After 10 seconds, the door separating the compartments was automatically opened, allowing the rat access to the shock compartment. If the rat entered the shock compartment, it received a mild foot shock.
The first set of results was not surprising. The authors found infantile amnesia for the 17 day-old rats, which showed avoidance of the "shock" compartment right after the experience, but lost this memory very rapidly: a day later these rats quickly returned to this compartment. In contrast, the rats exposed to the shock compartment at 24 days of life learned and retained the memory for a long time and avoided this placerevealing a memory similar to that of adult rats.
However, remarkably, the younger rats, which had apparently forgotten the initial experience, subsequently showed they actually had kept a trace of the memory. When, later in life, these rats were prompted with remindersi.e., they were presented with recollections of the context and the foot shockthey indicated having a specific memory, which was revealed by their avoidance of the specific context in which they received a shock at day 17 of life. These findings show how early life experience, although not expressed or remembered, can influence adult life behavior.
The findings raised the following question: what is occurringneurologicallythat explains why memories are retained by the younger rats only in a latent form but are stored and expressed long-term by older ones? Or, more specifically, what occurs during development that enhances the ability to form lasting memories?
To address this, the scientists focused on the brain's hippocampus, which previous scholarship has shown is necessary for encoding new episodic memories. Here, in a series of experiments similar to the box tests, they found that if the hippocampus was inactive, the ability of younger rats to form latent memories and recall them later by reminders as they got older was diminished. They then found that mechanisms of "critical periods" are fundamental for establishing these infantile memories.
A critical period is a developmental stage during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to environmental stimuli. If, during this period, the organism does not receive the appropriate stimuli required to develop a given function, it may be difficult or even impossible to develop that function later in life. Well-known examples of critical period-based functions are sensory functions, like vision, and language acquisition.
The study shows that there is a critical period for episodic learning and that during this period the hippocampus learns to become able to efficiently process and store memories long-term.
"Early in life, while the brain cannot efficiently form long-term memories, it is 'learning' how to do so, making it possible to establish the abilities to memorize long-term," explains Alberini. "However, the brain needs stimulation through learning so that it can get in the practice of memory formationwithout these experiences, the ability of the neurological system to learn will be impaired."
These studies, the researchers observe, suggest that using learning and environmental interventions during a critical period may significantly help to address learning disabilities.
Explore further Brain caught 'filing' memories during rest
More information: Infantile amnesia reflects a developmental critical period for hippocampal learning, Nature Neuroscience, nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nn.4348 Journal information: Nature Neuroscience Infantile amnesia reflects a developmental critical period for hippocampal learning,
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
A new study in Biological Psychiatry reports that variations in 16p11.2, a region of the genome associated with risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have distinct effects on cognition. The findings highlight the diversity of people with ASD.
Extra or missing copies of genetic material in a small region of the genome in chromosome 16, designated 16p11.2, increases the risk of autism spectrum disorders. Known as duplications or deletions, these alterations in the 16p11.2 genomic region are also associated with intellectual disability.
In the first study to look at the effect of both duplications and deletions in 16p11.2 on specific cognitive domains, senior author Dr. Sebastien Jacquemont, from the University of Montreal in Canada, and a large research team assessed the effects of these variations in 62 deletion carriers, 44 duplication carriers, and 71 controls from within the same families. According to Jacquemont, determining the effect of these alterations can only be performed through family studies. The researchers used neuropsychological tests to assess overall cognitive functioning, fine motor skills, language, memory, and executive functions.
After accounting for the lower IQ associated with 16p11.2 variations, differences in specific cognitive domains emerged. Deletion carriers had difficulty with phonology, reading fluency, fine motor skills, and verbal and motor inhibition. Duplication carriers outperformed controls with the same IQ on tasks of verbal memory, executive functions, and phonological skills. The authors suggest this is reminiscent of the complex and conflicting association between language impairment and autism.
"These data suggest that copy number variants may generally increase risk for intellectual disability and autism, but that the particular nature of the genetic alteration may have specific functional consequences for brain and behavior," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.
"Genomic variants associated with ASD may be associated with very different cognitive alterations and profiles," said Jacquemont, "and we may learn something on the developmental mechanisms involved in ASD by focusing on the cognitive comorbidities." He added that generating similar data across other regions of the genome will be essential to understand the impact of different variants on development.
The findings of the study may help better inform the type of intervention that patients will benefit from most; the authors write that the use of visuospatial processes when learning may help patients who carry a deletion, whereas verbal methods may improve learning strategies in patients who carry a duplication.
Explore further Twenty-five-point drop in IQ caused by lack of gene copy
More information: Loyse Hippolyte et al. The Number of Genomic Copies at the 16p11.2 Locus Modulates Language, Verbal Memory, and Inhibition, Biological Psychiatry (2016). Journal information: Biological Psychiatry Loyse Hippolyte et al. The Number of Genomic Copies at the 16p11.2 Locus Modulates Language, Verbal Memory, and Inhibition,(2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.10.021
A non-surgical treatment that uses a patient's own bone marrow stem cells to treat chest pain or angina improved both symptoms and the length of time treated patients could be physically active, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association's Basic Cardiovascular Sciences 2016 Scientific Sessions.
Angina is chest pain or discomfort caused when the heart does not get enough oxygen-rich blood due to narrowing or blockages in the arteries leading to the heart.
Most studies that have explored stem-cell therapies for angina required surgery to directly inject stem cells into the heart muscle or the heart blood vessels.
"We injected a 'catalyst' molecule that caused bone marrow stem cells to enter the patient's blood, then harvested them to re-inject into the patient. This is not considered a surgical procedure, is easy to implement, and allows for repeated administrations," said Hadyanto Lim, Ph.D., study senior author and professor of pharmacology at The Methodist University of Indonesia in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia.
Fifteen patients were first injected with a molecule called granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) once a day for four days. G-CSF stimulates stem cells to migrate into the bloodstream from the bone marrow where they reside. Stem cells have the ability to transform into different types of cells.
On the fourth day, three hours after the last G-CSF injection, blood was drawn and stem cells were separated from the blood. Stem cells were identified by the presence of a protein called CD34 on the cell's surface. Thirty minutes after the cell separation procedure finished, the collected stem cells were injected back into the patient through an IV.
Four weeks after receiving the treatment, patients experienced significantly fewer angina-related symptoms, and they were able to exercise at a higher intensity and for a longer period of time. Most patients also reported mild muscle pains in their backs or legs, but the pain could be managed with acetaminophen.
When lifestyle changes and drug therapies do not control chest pains and discomfort, patients are often recommended for surgical procedures including coronary angioplasty in which a small mesh tube is inserted in the narrow heart artery to open it up and coronary artery bypass grafting in which healthy blood vessels are used to shunt blood around the narrowed heart arteries. However, 20 percent to 30 percent of patients with severe coronary atherosclerosis are not suitable for these interventions.
"Previous studies have shown that transplanting stem cells helps treat heart disease caused by narrowed or blocked arteries and heart failure. Using G-CSF to isolate CD34-harboring stem cells, called CD34+ stem cells, for transplantation back into the patient may be a practical alternative for hard to treat patients. The stem cells cause new blood vessels to grow which can improve blood circulation and may help repair the lining of the blood vessels," said Lim.
The study's limitations are the small number of patients and absence of a control group. Because no control group was used, the placebo effect cannot be ruled out, Lim noted.
Although this treatment is currently used to treat some cancersmultiple myeloma and lymphomait will need more investigation before it can be made available to the general public to treat angina, according to Lim.
Explore further Stem cell therapy shows potential for difficult-to-treat RA patient population
Indonesia Monday began re-inoculating children who received fake vaccines in a major drug counterfeiting scandal that has sparked protests from concerned parents.
President Joko Widodo attended a health clinic in Jakarta at which 36 children were given fresh booster vaccines, vowing the process would continue until all youngsters affected had received new shots.
The health ministry said the first stage of re-inoculation would take place at four hospitals and clinics on the main island of Java where children had been identified as having received fake vaccines.
Police last month smashed a criminal syndicate accused of selling fake vaccines for more than a decade to health clinics across Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 255 million people.
Twenty-three people, including midwives and doctors, have been arrested for alleged involvement in the scheme and vaccines have been confiscated from dozens of health centres across the country.
One of the midwives at the clinic visited by Widodo on Monday is suspected of involvement in the scam, the president said.
The scandal sparked panic and anger among Indonesian families, who last week rallied outside hospitals demanding answers about their children's health.
Widodo urged concerned parents to remain calm and give authorities time as they assess the scale of the problem, suggesting reforms could be needed in future to protect the community.
"This gives us all momentum to improve governance around the pharmaceutical industry regarding the manufacture and distribution of medicines, including vaccines," Widodo told reporters.
"Our goal is for the entire community to receive good health care."
The syndicate, which police said operated for more than a decade, manufactured and distributed fake boosters for diseases including tuberculosis, hepatitis B and tetanus.
The scandal was brought to light after a major pharmaceutical company alerted Indonesian authorities that some of its products had been counterfeited.
Explore further Parents told to contact doctors amid Indonesia vaccine scandal
2016 AFP
Credit: Martha Sexton/public domain
Are mice fans of film noir? Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle can't answer that question - yet.
But they have succeeded in capturing video images of nerve signals flashing through the brains of living mice as the animals watched the opening sequence of Orson Welles' "A Touch of Evil."
The video images, which show neurons twinkling like stars in the Milky Way, are part of the newly released Allen Brain Observatory - a neurological database like no other. Instead of static data on cell type and genes, the online observatory reveals the way brain cells respond to visual stimuli ranging from old movies to simple grid lines.
"We want to produce a body of data that hasn't been generated anywhere else before, so that we can ask questions no one has asked before," said neuroscientist Shawn Olsen.
The new database advances the institute's broader goals of understanding how neurons work together in the brain to generate thought, consciousness and memory - and what goes wrong in people who suffer from brain disorders like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease.
Though the focus is on the visual system of mice, the results should also shed light on the functioning of the more complex human brain, Olsen said.
Bankrolled by $500 million in donations from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the brain institute is known for its industrial-scale approach to neuroscience. Past projects have included atlases of brain genetic activity and cell types used by researchers around the world.
But the ability to peer into the living brain is relatively new, enabled by genetic and technological breakthroughs.
The observations rely on mice that have been genetically engineered so specific types of brain cells will light up, or fluoresce, when activated by the animal's thought patterns.
To generate the initial batch of data unveiled this week, scientists showed mice pictures of animals, plants and standardized patterns, like vertical bars, in addition to short film clips.
As the animals viewed the images, a special laser microscope scanned their brains through tiny windows implanted in their skulls. The mice aren't sedated, but are actually running in place on a kind of treadmill throughout the process.
"The raw data is literally a movie," Olsen said.
From the movie, the researchers can identify which neurons light up and how the signals are transmitted between cells. They can also extract information on individual neurons or groups of neurons.
Like all of the institute's results, the data are freely available.
"Other researchers are going to be able to use it to build hypotheses they can test in their own experiments," said senior scientist Saskia de Vries.
She expects keen interest among researchers working on computer models of the brain. More than 160 scientists applied for 25 openings in a workshop this summer on the new data and how to use it.
The institute's own experts are also beginning to explore the data, even as they continue to add to the observatory.
While mice don't see colors and have blurrier vision than humans, the basic neural pathways are very similar, the scientists pointed out.
But that doesn't mean the mice are able to comprehend any of the images - or Welles' 1958 thriller, de Vries cautioned.
For example, certain neurons seemed to fire each time a mouse was shown a photo of a butterfly. The animal probably didn't recognize the insects, but may have been responding to contrasting colors on the wings, de Vries said.
The only reason she and her colleagues picked the opening of "A Touch of Evil" is because it's a continuous shot, with a variety of camera angles.
"We just did a Google search for 'famous long shots,'" she said.
It's impossible to know what the mice perceived, but the experiment revealed an active and surprisingly consistent pattern of nerve impulses each time the animals viewed the clip.
Why - and what the significance might be - are the types of questions the scientists hope to answer in the future.
"This data was just collected this year," Olsen said. "We expect that we will be analyzing it for years to come."
Explore further Allen Brain Observatory launched
2016 The Seattle Times
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
@JeremySWallace
A more aggressive Carlos Beruff came out swinging today at U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.
Last week Rubio's allies went after Beruff, a Republican from Manatee County, for supporting former Gov. Charlie Crist in 2010 after he left the Republican Party and ran as an independent. But campaign finance records show Beruff never donated any money to Crist after he left the Republican Party. Beruff attended a fundraiser Crist was at in 2010, but Beruff did not donate any money at that event.
"Washingtons candidate Marco Rubio continues to lie about me and about his record, hiding behind his Washington allies of course," Beruff said in a sharply worded press release sent to the media this morning. "Its no surprise considering integrity is clearly not an important quality to Senator Rubio, who lied to the people of Florida about amnesty, lied about his support for Donald Trump and lied about his promise to not run for reelection."
And now Marco Rubio is ducking debates, afraid to answer for his record face to face. Its common in Washington to pass the buck and hide from a challenge, but the people of Florida deserve a Senator whos not afraid to take a stand. My message to Marco is simple: man up.
The new more aggressive tone comes just days after Beruff spent nearly $1 million on ads attacking Rubio for his previous support of an immigration reform bill in Washington back in 2013.
In response to the ads, Rubio's campaign put out a statement from Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, Rubio's longtime friend, further trying to link Beruff with Crist.
"His record is clear, just like his good friend Charlie Crist, Carlos Beruff continues to flip-flop to try to be everything to everyone," Lopez-Cantera said. "Hes a Crist insider who values political opportunity over Floridas conservative principles."
Lopez-Cantera was originally running for the U.S. Senate as well, but quit the race when Rubio changed his mind last month and decided to run for re-election.
Rubio and Beruff are battling in an Aug. 30 Republican Primary.
@alextdaugherty
Television ads are not enough to change Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's mind.
Tim Canova despite the Canova campaign's The DNC chair has no plans to debate Nova Southeastern law professordespite the Canova campaign's release of a TV ad this week that features Wasserman Schutlz (D-Weston) deflecting questions on the issue.
"The debate we are focusing on right now is that Donald Trump can never become president," Wasserman Schultz said to the Miami Herald on Sunday .
Canova released an ad July 11 titled #DebbieDodgesDebate that features multiple clips of Wasserman Schultz being asked if she will debate.
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio Florida delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland kicked off their quadrennial confab with a breakfast featuring four speakers. PolitiFact took a look at some of their talking points.
Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, touted his states economy on his watch.
Ive been governor for 18 months, he said. We have a 3.8 percent unemployment rate, which is the lowest rate in the history of Arkansas.
Hes correct. The state set a new record low for unemployment in March 2016 with 4.1 percent, breaking the previous mark set in 2000. The rate fell further, to 3.9 percent in April and 3.8 in May.
The biggest applause of the morning came for a remark by Karen Vaughn, senior military families adviser for Concerned Veterans for America and the mother of Navy SEAL Aaron Carson Vaughn, who was killed in action in 2011.
Vaughn said her son didnt give his life for the principles represented by Hillary Clinton. Clinton, she said, stood over the bodies of four dead Americans and lied to their families.
Keep reading Louis Jacobson's article from PolitiFact.
@PatriciaMazzei
Hillary Clinton will spend two days campaigning in Florida before the Democratic convention begins next week.
Clinton has scheduled events in Orlando and Tampa on Friday, and in South Florida on Saturday, her campaign announced Monday. The Tampa event will be a rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds. The campaign did not provide any further details on the Orlando and South Florida events.
Members of the public can try to get tickets for the Tampa rally here and for the South Florida event here. The RSVP site says Clinton will talk about the economy.
The presumptive Democratic nominee is expected to name her running mate right around that time. Doing so in Florida -- or traveling to Florida immediately after the announcement -- could be a way to get lots of news coverage in the crucial battleground state. It could also rob Republican Donald Trump of some coverage following prime-time Thursday speech at the Republican National Convention.
The Democratic National Convention will begin next Monday in Philadelphia.
At least one Florida Republican rising star wasnt planning to be in attendance when the GOP convention opened its national convention in Cleveland on Monday.
State Rep. Jose Oliva, the Miami Lakes Republican who is designated to be Florida House speaker in 2018, gave up his delegate spot and is heading to Nicaragua this week to tend to his tobacco company.
Im not going to Cleveland, said the CEO of Miami-based Oliva Cigar of the expected coronation of Donald Trump as Republican nominee. At this point its just a formality and Im not much for ceremony.
Oliva says he will vote for Trump since he cant agree with the alternatives but its not a decision that pleases him. Story here.
@PatriciaMazzei
CLEVELAND -- Imagine delegates to the Republican National Convention opening the local newspaper Tuesday and finding an image of a stylized scorpion wearing a signature red hat with white lettering. The hat reads: The Donald.
Thats how billionaire Miami healthcare magnate Mike Fernandez wanted to portray his political party's presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, in the GOP conventions host city, Cleveland.
But he won't get a chance to not in Cleveland, at least.
The Plain Dealer newspaper asked Fernandez to remove Trumps name from the ad copy for publication. They wanted Fernandez to call Trump the nominee or the candidate and to do away with the red hat.
Fernandez, who helped bankroll Jeb Bushs Republican presidential campaign and who has made a habit of publishing anti-Trump ads in newspapers across the country, said no.
I cannot believe that it was rejected because they would not allow me to have the name Donald Trump in the ad itself, Fernandez told the Miami Herald in an email. But where there is a will there is a way. I will be placing in every search engine within 20 miles of the convention center the pop up directing people to the ad that the Cleveland newspaper did not want them to see.
The Plain Dealer could not be immediately reached for comment. Fernandez provided the Miami Herald with an email from the newspapers advertising department asking for the changes to the ad. The full-page ad will run in the Herald on Tuesday.
In December, a Trump attorney threatened to sue Fernandez over an earlier anti-Trump piece. No suit has been filed.
More here.
@PatriciaMazzei
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio -- Ask incoming Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, who famously said earlier this year that Donald Trump "has offended every other possible group known to mankind," how to describe his attitude toward Trump now that he's about to get the GOP's presidential nomination, and Corcoran hesitates and smiles wryly.
"I don't -- I don't --" stammers Corcoran, who first backed Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, then Ted Cruz. "Um."
He finally settles on a word: "Encouraged."
Encouraged, above all, by Trump's vice-presidential pick of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. "It sends a strong message to the conservative base that this could be good," Corcoran told reporters Monday after the Florida delegation's breakfast.
But is Trump himself conservative?
Corcoran responds with a side-eye.
"It's certainly -- there's never -- I'm --" he begins, undoubtedly trying to sound diplomatic. "I would argue that there's never been...there's never been a candidate you agree with 100 percent of the time. I'm not sure at times it exists in my own legislative chamber."
Obviously hundreds of cities, towns, villages, even ghost towns are listed on Montana state highway maps and in various atlas editions. Population statistics are equally as varied, from zero ghosties to overcrowded subdivisions and block after blocks of apartment buildings and thriving business districts.
Yet, because Montanans are Montanans, there are still certain social traditions that mark everyday life like morning and afternoon coffee hours popular with self-styled over the hills gangs whose members tell tall tales and have ridiculous arguments about everything under the sun.
Say, for instance, you dropped in at the mythical Coffee Creek gatherings and applied individual coffee drinkers identifications to Montana place names (cities, towns, landmarks, etc. marked by underlines): Cars are a popular debate topic in any Montana City from Absarokee to Zurich. This morning Brady Baker, Chester Powell, twin brothers Forest Park and Clyde Park, and several cronies were seated around a large table for their morning coffee break. As usual, they used every Opportunity to argue.
Troy Hays, a Great Falls attorney, started the debate, saying, Ill bet a whole months Billings I can tell you what kind of car Madison and Jefferson would have driven.
A Lincoln, opined banker Craig Richey. "Dependable, secure. They could drive from Saltese to Amsterdam via Glasgow and back through Manhattan and Harlem to the Potomac again.
I disagree, snorted owly Conrad Proctor, who had moved to the area with his wife, Dagmar, from a Homestead near Scobey. Youve got bats in your Belfry. They would have driven a Frazer.
No way. No more than Lewis and Clark would have had a Peerless, chimed in Blaine Clinton, a copper miner from Butte. "You can bet your Pony on it.
You cant Buffalo me. Youre both wrong, interrupted Granite Hill, a farmer from the Dell area. They wouldve driven a Franklin.
Why? asked Elmo Rollins, a former Hebgen Dam caretaker.
Because they were as solid as a Silver Gate. They had the grace of a Black Eagle. Theyd glide along the highway, and never Fishtail even while turning Bowmans Corner.
Just then, Victor Dutton, a jet set Emigrant from Judith Gap, burst through the door, looking as lean as a Hungry Horse.
Hi, guys. Just flew in from West Yellowstone. Oh oh, it Simms like youre arguing again. What about this time?
Famous peoples cars, replied Rudyard Sheridan Custer, a bald, retired Reserve general from Lodge Grass near Hardin.
Victor, who fancied himself quite a wit, asked, All right, guys, what must a car have if it has no brakes?
A Bighorn, the men hooted.
Right on. Your Wisdom exceeds only that of a Lame Deer, a Whitetail at that, Victor chortled.
The sudden silence made it Plains that it was a poor choice of words. There wasnt even time for Victor to Fallon on his knees and seek forgiveness before the fireworks started.
Two-thirds of a pun is p-u, moaned Clancy Condon. You Otter get your Moccasins out of here. Go sit on a Geyser, soak your head in the wash Basin. Jump in Flathead Lake. Climb Iron Mountain, get lost in the Highwood. I think Ill Belt you one.
With his face as red as a tomato, Victor warned with a Superior air, You Boyes better not be mean to me. Im quite Poplar and influential in the Capitol at Helena. Ill show you.
Surly Edgar Carter, whose temper would Acton the least provocation, warned with a Savage snarl, You know that Lonepine, the only tree in the Rock Springs national forest, between Angela and Cohagen?"
As Carter rose from his chair, Geraldine Garrison, the waitress with the Rosebud-print apron, took command.
Armed with Three Forks and speaking with distinct new York accent, she ordered OK, you Boyds, no Moore. Ill Stanford no rough stuff. Ill Collins Marshal Dillon if I have to.
Willard Westby, editor of the Big Arm Muscle, made a peaceful overture, Cmon, fellows, this is a Pleasant Valley, a regular Eden. No violence. Lets get back to famous persons cars.
I agree, said Edgar Elliston, a forest ranger being transferred from Missoula to Kalispell. Id say that Jackson, of course, wouldve liked a Jackson; Cleveland would have preferred a Drummond and Harrison would have gone for an Essex.
Yeah, and Grant would insist on a Jordan. That car was faster than a Wild Horse chasing an Antelope on the Grass Range somewhere west of Laredo, asserted Lindsay Livingston.
That was west of Laramie, dummy, snorted Shelby Townsend, a grizzled old Shepherd. Neither of those are in Montana.
Whatever, Terry Noxon added quickly. I think Roosevelt would have had an old Lambert if he were able to find one. Instead, he had to drive around Fort Peck in Raynesford. And Garfield would have liked an Austin.
No way youre thinking of Churchill declared Mosby Meagher, whose grandfather had been an English remittance man who ranched along the Musselshell River between Roundup and Melstone.
Troy Hays, who initiated this Ringling circus-type debate, said, You could Yaak about this all Somers long. Whos gonna buy this alleged coffee?
Shelby Sheridan, a retired professional gambler, challenged, Ill bet your Twin Bridges to my Four Buttes it wont be me.
Oh, be Quietus, Hays retorted, This is a Richland, someone Hanover some of that Gold Creek Lustre.
Ill pay Fergus and me, volunteered Logan Dixon, but the rest of you Outlook for yourselves. Maybe you can roll a Paradise to see wholl Winnett.
Worry not, gentlemen, said a stranger dressed in white. "Allow me the Liberty of picking up the tab. Ive enjoyed listening. I had heard of your unusual coffee break arguments. Now I have a Fairview of how things are.
Thank you, sir, Hays acknowledged, peering quizzically at the Circle of light around the strangers head. Have I seen you Pryor to this? Who are you?
No, you havent, but youll see me again in the future. Im St. Peter from Heavens Peak.
***
Paul Fugleberg is a former editor and co-publisher of the Flathead Courier of Polson and the Ronan Pioneer, his freelance articles and photos have appeared in numerous national and regional magazines and newspapers, and he has written several books. He may be reached at pfugleberg@bresnan.net.
A low-income, disabled individual has been referred to a physical health specialist in Seattle and is looking to cover some caregiver costs for this trip. If anyone can assist with a financial donation, call Sarah at 532-9741.
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A single, disabled, homeless man needs assistance paying for his storage unit while he tries to find a place to live. He has a storage unit at Vigilante Mini Storage, and will need to extend his lease for another month. Checks can be made out to Vigilante Mini Storage for $40.
Another single, disabled, homeless man needs assistance to pay the application fee to apply for housing. Application fees vary from $20-$40. If you can help with either request, contact Becca at Winds of Change, 926-9927 or rkwon@windsofchangemontana.com.
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A disabled mom with no income is seeking assistance for an oil change through Valvoline. The total bill for the oil change is $80.72 and can be paid by a check made out to Valvoline. She would also benefit from a check for $8 to Valvoline for a tail light replacement. If you can help, call Hannah at 721-2038.
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A woman from the Carol Graham home who has transitioned into an apartment needs the following household items: Tupperware, knives, baking pans, cooking sheet, casserole dish, pots and skillets, toaster, Crock Pot, oven mitts and pot holders, mixing bowls, egg beater, mixing spoons, whisk, spatulas and a ladle. If you can help, call case manager Linda Lawson at 532-8940.
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An adult male needs assistance with Greyhound bus fare from Missoula to Butte or possibly all the way to Great Falls for medical care. From Missoula to Butte averages $42-$49, from Missoula to Great Falls averages $75-$90. If you are able to help with the purchase of this ticket, call Lauren at 543-2202, ext. 2109.
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Home & Community Based Services is working with a woman with disabilities who is living in an assisted living facility. She has limited income and is in great need of additional summer clothing. If youre able to help, we are requesting monetary/gift card assistance for her so that she can go shopping. Or, if you have gently used clothing, also feel free to donate womens size 3X summer clothing/medium size socks to the office at 2685 Palmer Suite D, or contact Esther at 327-4695.
The Montana Historical Society's basement shelves are filled with a trove of vintage political commercials, most of Metcalf, who represented Montana in the U.S. Senate from 1961 until his death in 1978. The reels, some preserved as VHS tapes, are part of a collection of more than 400 old movies given to the historical society three decades ago, along with 800 boxes of other documents from the Metcalf estate.
Archivists have been slowly working their way through the collection, viewing and cataloguing the hours upon hours of footage. The goal is to eventually make the collection available to the public, including researchers.
The simple commercials are a stark contrast to today's polished political ads. Metcalf tended to focus on issues such as veterans affairs, Social Security and the environment. Absent was the partisan acidity that marks many of today's campaigns.
"Back then, there was a bit more collegiality. There were lines that wouldn't be crossed," said Tom Cook, a spokesman for the historical society and a former political reporter for Montana's Lee Newspapers. "I find them a lot less strident than the ones today."
For example, one spot shows Metcalf speaking directly to the camera as he makes his case for re-election by citing legislation he helped pass that created the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs in 1970.
"This committee helped to pass the veterans health care expansion act, which will help hospitals improve facilities, expand home care and provide additional personnel," Metcalf said in the spot.
Metcalf filmed his reports for residents back home from the basement of the U.S. Capitol, Cook said.
"As his productions continued, they became more sophisticated. Initially, they were very staged, almost like fireside chats," Cook said. "They were very simplistic, but he became increasingly more adept at communicating as time went on his policy positions and his political campaigning."
Jennifer Graves, a film archivist at the historical society's museum in Helena, has been among those working to preserve the collection over the years. It's been slow going because of limited money and staffing. A grant is financing the project. Graves herself will soon be leaving for another job in the nation's capital.
Graves isn't much into politics, but she said some of the issues brought up remain relevant today. "Different times, but same old things," she said.
Candidates still stump for support by meeting voters at rallies, shaking one hand at a time and kissing babies in a crowd. But with the advent of radio and television, the meet-and-greet has become less important than the airwaves as a political tool.
These days, campaigns raise big money to spend on TV commercials, a much easier way to reach the masses. Metcalf's use of television ads made him a trailblazer for his time, Cook said.
"He was one of the first to recognize the power of communicating with constituents through productions he sent back to Montana," Cook said.
The archive also includes commercials from former Rep. John Melcher, who served Montana in the U.S. House from 1969 to 1977. It also has a few reels from Adlai Stevenson, the former presidential candidate from Illinois.
HELENA Montana Gov. Steve Bullock signed an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service on Monday for the state to play a bigger role in forest management on federal lands, which officials say will speed up backlogged logging projects.
Forest management and the declining timber industry have emerged as major issues in this year's governor's race, with Weyerhaeuser announcing last month that it would close a Columbia Falls lumber and plywood mill. The closure will put about 100 people out of work in addition to 100 administrative jobs that are being eliminated or moved with Weyerhaeuser's purchase of Plum Creek Timber.
With the Chessman Reservoir as a backdrop, Bullock, Forest Service Regional Forester Leanne Marten and Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation Director John Tubbs signed the Good Neighbor Authority agreement, which was authorized under the 2014 federal Farm Bill.
The agreement will allow the state to work on behalf of the Forest Service on federal land, such as conducting environmental analyses for logging projects. Forest management, including logging trees for fuel reduction, is important as fire seasons grow longer and more intense, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Robert Bonnie said.
But most of the Forest Service's budget is being spent fighting fires, and the number of non-fire Forest Service employees has dropped 39 percent since the 1990s, Bonnie said.
"This allows us to get more work done more quickly," Bonnie said of the agreement.
Two logging and restoration projects in the Flathead National Forest and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest will be the first conducted under the signed agreement, but Bullock said two other projects have been undertaken without a formal deal.
The Chessman Reservoir project, which logged more than 400 acres of trees killed by the recent mountain pine beetle outbreak from Helena's main water source, was the first example of a federal-state logging and restoration partnership, Tubbs said.
"We're already out there doing this," Tubbs said.
Timber interests were cautiously optimistic about the deal but want more details about how it will be implemented.
But Greg Gianforte, Bullock's Republican opponent in the November election, criticized Bullock for waiting so long to sign the agreement after it was authorized in 2014. At least 18 other states have already entered into similar agreements, the Bozeman businessman said.
"We've already lost 600 timber jobs under his watch, including 100 job losses just announced last month in Columbia Falls," Gianforte said.
Bullock dismissed Gianforte's comments as part of the "silly season" of election politics, and said the state and federal forest collaboration was happening long before Monday's signing.
"We've been doing the work even without a piece of paper signed," Bullock said.
Julia Altemus, the executive director of the Montana Wood Products Association in Missoula, said she supports the agreement - with a couple caveats.
"There has to be a (financial) match," she said. "The state or somebody has to put up money to get projects going. In Idaho, the (timber) mills came forward with seed money. The mills in Montana can't do that. They don't have the resources. Does the state have extra money they can put into this project? It's a good provision, but we have some hurdles to get over first."
Altemus said that while Montana is behind other states in signing an agreement of this nature, that's not necessarily a bad thing because Montana can learn from others' mistakes.
"That's OK because other states are feeling their way through it," she said. "We are pretty far behind, though."
Altemus added that some mill owners in western Montana have concerns about legal liability when they get state contracts.
"There is some discrepancy about something within the state contracts," she said. "If a project were to go into litigation who is liable? We need to figure that out, because obviously if a mill is liable for losses because of an environmental lawsuit, that is not going to work for a mill."
Altemus said she's been trying for the last six weeks to get a meeting set up with state officials to discuss her concerns on behalf of the industry, and she believes she will finally get that meeting next week.
"Until that happens we're not sure how much we're going to be behind this, but generally, we're supportive," she said. "It's one of the better provisions that came out of the Farm Bill."
Last week Bernie Sanders, the fire-breathing, self-described democratic socialist, threw his support behind Hillary Clinton, the Democrats presumptive presidential candidate. But for those who were feelin the Bern, there is no joy in Mudville and the entire affair leaves a very bad taste for those who find Hillary Clinton an extremely poor substitute for Bernie Sanders when it comes to progressive issues.
In what the Washington Post described as a stiff appearance on stage together, Sanders focused less on Clintons positions and abilities and more on the necessity to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. That, however, is far from the positive and upbeat message that was the trademark of Sanders astounding campaign, which energized millions of young people and shattered the myth that you had to pander to super PACs and billionaires to raise competitive campaign funds. Instead, Sanders supporters raised tens of millions of dollars, with the average donation being a very humble $27.
Of course the intent here is to somehow stitch together Demo unity, which is reflected in Clintons stronger together slogan. The problem is that Sanders and Clinton are nearly polar opposites on far too many issues and, despite the endorsement, those who supported Sanders are highly unlikely to find a champion for their cause in Clinton.
For example, how is it possible that Hillary Clinton, who took $675,000 from Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs for three speeches, will ever fulfill Sanders promise to break up the Wall Street giants? Does anyone really believe Clinton is going to bite the hand that fed her such outrageous sums of money for such minimal output? In the meantime, Clintons billionaire supporters continue to fill the coffers of the super PACs supporting her a position totally antithetical to Sanders refusal to use PAC money and, arguably, the core of whats wrong with todays corrupt political system.
When Sanders backed the much more logical single-payer health care system instead of the complex and increasingly expensive Obamacare system controlled by insurance companies, Clinton opted for tweaking Obamacare. That leaves the health care of hundreds of millions of Americans in the hands of the rapacious insurance industry that has recently announced rate increases of as much as 60 percent for their policies. The vast gulf between the Sanders and Clinton positions was supposed to be bridged by a Clinton promise to try and get a public option insurance implemented, although that option was thrown off the table by the very Democrats who crafted Obamacare years ago.
Or how about the free tuition at public universities that Sanders espoused to give millions of students a chance at higher education without coming out tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even have a chance to get a job? Clintons position was weak tea in comparison, with some blather about a three-month break on student loan repayments. As one wag said, thats just about enough time to move into their parents basement.
Do Democrats really believe that Sanders peace-loving supporters who are tired of perpetual war are now going to embrace Clintons warhawk approach to interacting with the rest of the world? On this the record couldnt be clearer given her disastrous experience as Secretary of State that has left the Middle and Near East in chaos, turmoil and ashes. There is no indication Clinton has changed in this regard and if she is elected president, Americans can look forward to a continuation of the Bush-Obama never-ending wars that only highlight the fact that Obama utterly failed in his promise to end the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan when he took office eight years ago.
The polls say Hillary Clintons disapproval ratings are significantly higher than her approvals, including in a new poll of young people, of whom more than half have an unfavorable view of Clinton. Instead of pulling young people into the Demo Party to energize it and provide a brighter future as Sanders did, Clinton is leaving that segment of the population disenchanted and unlikely to vote for her.
The same party insiders who continually urged Sanders to end his primary campaign and did everything they could to hasten that day are predicting that his supporters will now flip to Clintons Im not Trump campaign. Fact is, Hillary Clinton may well beat Donald Trump since he has even higher disapproval ratings. But as one young Sanders supporter said, its picking the lesser of two evils which is a truly loveless choice for voters.
The University of Montana recently released a bipartisan poll showing that Montanans, by an overwhelming majority, cherish public lands.
This poll is just the latest indication of what we all know intuitively that nothing unites Montanans of all political stripes quite like our shared love of special wild places and our desire to conserve those places. As UM geography professor Rick Graetz put it after the poll was released, national parks and conservation is about as popular and bipartisan an issue as you can find these days in Montana.
Not surprisingly, then, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines and Congressman Ryan Zinke, who both refer to themselves as Teddy Roosevelt conservationists, have expressed a commitment to conserving the places Montanans cherish and have stressed the need for us to work collaboratively on the ground, neighbor to neighbor, to make that happen.
Both Daines and Zinke now have a golden opportunity to champion a public lands proposal that is as popular, bipartisan and collaborative as legislative proposals can be. This opportunity is offered in the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Project proposal. As the UM poll showed, 74 percent of Montanans from across the political spectrum support the BCSP. Republicans favor the project by 74 percent, Independents by 75 percent and Democrats by 73 percent.
In April, Zinke reminded us of his dedication to conservation in an opinion piece. While there is a lot that separates folks as Republicans and Democrats, he writes, theres also a lot that binds us together as Montanans and Americans. Preserving and conserving our public lands, is one of those values. Im calling on my colleagues to work on the things that bring us together.
As a Republican and a fellow Teddy Roosevelt conservationist, I agree with Zinke, and thats why Im urging him and Daines to support the BCSP.
The BCSP is exactly the sort of thing that can bring Sen. Jon Tester, Daines and Zinke together. Its already brought together a diversity of Montanans representing timber, small businesses, ranching, conservation, snowmobiling and other recreation. Members of the BCSP came to the table 10 years ago each with individual perspectives and agendas. They were able to put aside their differences and focus on one of the proposals that brought them together as Montanans a love of the wild public lands in our backyard around Seeley Lake and Ovando.
Their work has already paid off economically by adding 138 forest jobs and bringing $19 million in federal investment into our local economy for forest restoration.
Now its time to implement the conservation and recreation aspects of the proposal. Those aspects include adding 83,000 acres to the Bob Marshall, Scapegoat and Mission Mountain wilderness areas and creating new opportunities for snowmobiling and other recreation between Seeley Lake and Ovando. These aspects require, however, an act of Congress to become a reality.
Montana Wildlife Federation, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Montana Trout Unlimited and the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Park Commission have recently endorsed the BCSP because the proposed wilderness additions, places such as Monture Creek, Grizzly Basin, and the North Fork of the Blackfoot, are some of the most historic and storied hunting and fishing grounds in Montana.
Dozens of diverse endorsees of our proposal including Pyramid Mountain Lumber, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association, Montana Association of Christians, three county commissions, conservation groups, local businesses and many, many more agree that the time is now for our congressional delegation to act on what we so clearly want, and we want our congressional delegation to work together in turning the BCSP proposal into law and permanently protecting this special part of Montana.
KALISPELL The Montana Nurses Association has begun a statewide campaign to explain the need for legislation that would make it a felony to assault a health care worker or emergency responder while they're on duty.
MNA labor representative Sandi Luckey says they're making a statewide effort this year after a bill introduced during the 2015 legislative session failed in committee. She says lawmakers didn't believe such attacks were that common.
The Daily Inter Lake reports that the MNA is sending postcards to lawmakers with stories of nurses who have been verbally and physically assaulted by patients.
MNA Executive Director Vicky Bird says it's a felony to attack a police dog, law enforcement officers or officials at sporting events, but health care workers don't have the same protection.
The MNA held its most recent meeting in Kalispell and will be in Butte on Friday.
Since the senseless massacre in Orlando, there has been a lot of discussion about gun control. This leads to questions regarding the Second Amendment. The purpose of this article is to look at the history behind the Second Amendment and the current debate surrounding the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution states: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
AMENDMENT HISTORY
From the middle ages through the 17th century, every Englishman was expected to have a gun. The King of England did not have a large standing army. Thus, every man had the duty to be ready to defend England at a moments notice, thus the term minutemen. This idea carried over to colonial America.
Many of the early colonial constitutions had a provision about bearing arms to protect the state if necessary. Local groups, called militias, used their own guns to train and utilize in any military events. The British knew this and tried to confiscate guns during the Revolutionary War. In fact, the first battles of the Revolutionary War occurred when the British attempted to capture colony ammunition and weapons at Concord and Lexington. These are the battles of Paul Reveres famous ride and where the shot heard round the world occurred.
Two hundred forty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, we sometimes forget the Second Amendment was established not only to protect against foreign enemies, but also to protect against our own government. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it"
Noah Webster supported this idea when he wrote: Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops raised in the United States.
The Constitutional Convention drafted our Constitution, and then sent it to the 13 states to be ratified. Some, called anti-Federalist, led by George Mason and Patrick Henry, thought the federal government was too powerful in the constitutional structure proposed. Others, led by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, called Federalists, supported the Constitution as written. A compromise was needed to gain the necessary nine votes for ratification. Thus was born the Bill of Rights. The Federalists promised the First Congress would pass a Bill of Rights listing specific rights of the people. The Second Amendment is the second of these rights.
LATEST DEBATE
Today some earnestly believe that if guns were outlawed, gun violence would cease. Others earnestly believe we have a right to defend themselves, not only in our own homes, but also against a foreign enemy or even a destructive government. This debate can further be boiled down to whether the Second Amendment is meant to allow states to have a militia or whether it was meant to allow individual self-defense. The Supreme Court answered this question in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, which stated the right to bear arms is an individual right. The court held total gun bans were unconstitutional, such as the ban of hand guns, but some regulation is legal. Rules regarding criminals, the mentally ill and concealed weapons permits, for example, are allowed.
Thats where we stand today. Let the discussion, and the legislative debate, commence!
-- Russell Fagg, of Billings, has been a district court judge for 21 years, trying thousands of cases and handling over 25,000 cases. Fagg is former president of the Montana Judges Association.
MISSOULA 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.
MUSCATINE, Iowa Safety for judges, jurors, employees and other visitors to the Muscatine County Courthouse has been a large focus for the county, prompting a move by the county to plan for installation of a camera system.
The Muscatine County Board of Supervisors approved funding for the interior camera portion of the project at its meeting Monday.
Cameras will be installed by FSS Incorporated inside the building for $19,537, but the board tabled funding for the exterior of the courthouse pending the addition of funds for an extra camera to cover the parking lot to the west.
"There is one tree that is an obstruction," said JJ Koehler, vice president of FSS Incorporated.
Board Chair Jeff Sorensen said he had no interest in cutting down a tree, but the supervisors agree that full coverage of the parking lot was important to the safety of those parking in the area.
Koehler said he will bring a full budget for the courthouse exterior to next week's supervisor meeting.
Although adding a camera will increase expenditures for the project, Muscatine County Sheriff C.J. Ryan said increasing security in the courthouse needs to move forward.
"It's just a question of is this the right thing and the right time. I think (the) consensus is yes," Ryan said.
The cameras will be placed, Koehler said, to ensure the building's appearance will not be negatively affected.
"Knowing the historical significance of the courthouse, we are putting great effort in trying to place these where they would not be a detractor to the appearance of the courthouse," Koehler said.
Supervisor Kas Kelly said the security addition to the courthouse is timely due to recent events across the country.
"I think it's important that we note that with what's going on in the country today that we are doing as a government the absolute most that we possibly can do to keep people safe," Kelly said.
She also encouraged residents to "take responsibility for themselves," and to call the Police Department if they become aware of issues in their neighborhoods.
Two public hearings were rescheduled for 9 a.m. Monday, Aug. 8. The first is for proposed revisions to the Muscatine County Zoning Ordinance to add commercial wind energy conversion systems as a permitted special use in some districts, and the second is on proposed amendments to the floodplain ordinance.
Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi []
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
While chip-and-PIN technology is meant to protect bank cards from card skimming, criminals have found ways to work around the chips protection.
Thats according to Nathan Desfontaines, who spoke at a recent meeting of the South African chapter of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Desfontaines said that although the chip on your bank card protects you from fraud by requiring a PIN for transactions, legacy support for swiping means that cards are still vulnerable.
Floor limits
Skimmers also exploit floor limits that banks afford to clients.
A floor limit is a set transaction value, below which the card machine does not authenticate a transaction with the bank.
Instead, the details of the transaction are held and processed in a batch at the end of an agreed period (daily, weekly, or monthly).
Floor limits are useful in places that deal with large volumes of customers, where the risk of authenticating a transaction later is worth the extra speed. Toll gates are an example.
Swiping without getting a PIN prompt
In South Africa, when you swipe a debit or credit card without putting in the chip first, it tells you to insert the chip part of the card.
This function is controlled by the cards service code, said Desfontaines.
However, since the service code is stored on the card, skimmers can manipulate it to make the card behave as if it was not secured by a chip and PIN.
Luis Padilla from Universidad Complutense de Madrid published a specification of the data stored on the magnetic stripes of financial cards, including the service codes.
Examples of service codes may be found in a Visa newsletter on mitigating fraud risk through card data verification.
The infographic and photos below of a card skimming demo illustrate how track data is stored and what different service codes mean.
Magnetic stripe data and service code hacking
Card skimming demo
Card data reader and writer
Example card with bank-issued service code
Cloned card with no-PIN service code
Nathan Desfontaines
More on bank card security
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How ATM card skimmers work
How to spot a card skimmer at a restaurant
Standard Bank building system to beat SIM-swap fraud
Cape Town barman and waiter arrested for card skimming
Netflix and CBS Studios International have announced a licensing agreement for the new Star Trek television series.
Netflix will be the exclusive premiere home of Star Trek in 188 countries, and each episode of the new series will be available globally within 24 hours of its US premiere.
Additionally, all 727 existing episodes of Star Trek will be available on Netflix around the world by the end of 2016.
This includes Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.
All of the above shows are already available on Netflix in South Africa.
The new Star Trek show will begin production in Toronto in September for its January 2017 premiere.
More on Netflix
The Netflix binge and savour scale
Netflix cracks down on IPv6 tunnels for geo-unblocking
If Eskom does not meet demands set by Numsa workers, the union may go ahead with a strike.
This is according to Vuyo Bikitsha, electricity sector coordinator for Numsa. Numsa workers arranged a picket on Monday, outside Eskom head office at Megawatt Park.
The main purpose of the picket is to pressurise Eskom management into making a proper, fair and reasonable wage offer, said Bikitsha. The workers are calling for South African citizens to understand the issues dividing Numsa and Eskom, he said.
Eskom only introduced a 7% increase across the board. This is unfair, unreasonable and insufficient, said Bikitsha. Eskoms moves have not been significant. For women, five months full wages and 30% wages in the sixth month for maternity leave was introduced, explained Bikitsha.
Last week, wage negotiations reached a deadlock. As a result the CCMA will step in. It has been agreed that conciliation with Eskom will be extended until Monday, 25 July 2016. Numsa is the only trade union that has formally declared a dispute with the CCMA. They are waiting to join the National Union of Mineworkers and the union Solidarity before taking further strike action.
Only a strike will move Eskom A strike is looming, he said. Numsa represents over 10 000 workers at Eskom. A strike will only be successful if various trade unions work together.
This is just a warning. We are prepared to go for a full-blown strike if they dont meet our demands, added Kau Rasehlo, chairperson of the region, Numsa shop steward committee.
Eskom recently reported sound financial results for the year ending March 2016. All financial ratios have increased and Eskom is doing well, said Bikitsha.
Their key gripe is that a 7% increase is proposed but over the past two years, chief executive Brian Molefes salary skyrocketed from R2.95m to R9.5m, excluding benefits and perks. Thats more than 174% increase in two years, he said.
How can they only give a 7% increase if more than R792m is shared by bosses as executive bonuses? Workers worked hard for a profit, reported at R4bn. We are appealing to Eskoms conscience, he said.
Among the demands is a housing allowance of R5 000. The housing allowance is currently R2 600. In terms of bonuses, Numsa demands 25% they same as the managers are getting. They are currently getting 12%, according to Rasehlo.
Bikitsha also mentioned the oppressive working conditions. Workers can no longer endure oppressive working conditions at a low salary base, he said. A number of workers took resignation packages in 2015.
Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe told Fin24 earlier on Monday workers have a right to picket and hand over a memorandum of their demands. We will respect it and respond to it accordingly.
The power utility is in wage negotiations with unions and believes an agreement that covers their demands will be reached.
Phasiwe said Eskoms position has moved from an initial increase offering to 5% to 7% for middle management and 9% for the lowest paid workers.
Responding to whether service delivery may be impacted, Phasiwe said: We hope people wont down tools; the law does not allow it.
He explained that like the police and army, workers at Eskom are essential service providers and are not allowed to go on strike, by law.
We will do our best to meet employees half way, added Phasiwe.
He also said workers should remember that Eskom has undertaken a R280bn capital expenditure project which includes the completion of Medupi and Kusile power stations.
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Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor says with only 16 dishes launched so far, the MeerKAT is already the best of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Minister said this on Saturday when she went to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) site in the Northern Cape to mark the MeerKAT Array Release 1 (AR1) telescope, or simply put, the first 16-dish array that scientists can use for research.
So right now, with only 16 of the eventual 64 dishes in place, MeerKAT is already better than anything equivalent in the Southern Hemisphere.
This is astounding because we were supposed to reach that goal only with 32 dishes. We can now expect that when the full 64 dishes are in place at the end of next year, it will be the best telescope of its kind in the world, she said.
The MeerKAT is the precursor SKA, which will be built in two phases SKA1 and SKA2 from 2018.
SKA1 will include two components SKA1 MID, to be built in South Africa and SKA1 LOW, to be built in Australia. They will both observe the universe at different radio frequencies.
Upon completion, the SKA will be the most sensitive radio telescope in the world.
Speaking to journalists from the site where the 16 dishes are located, Minister Pandor said the hard work put in by hundreds of engineers, managers and staff, local and international industrial partners and the support from government spanning a decade was finally paying off.
It is all beginning to come together but there is a great deal of work to be done. This place is going to look very different in five or so years.
I am really thrilled that we got to this point and that now we are beginning to be recognised as a country that can offer world class science to the world.
I am so honoured, privileged and humbled I am happy for the team. I can feel the excitement
Minister Pandor said South Africans should appreciate the fact that big science brings opportunity to South Africa and to the African continent.
This is not purely a South African project. It is a global project that involves several countries on the African continent. We will have remote sites of the SKA in eight other African countries.
These were opportunities that they hadnt hoped for before this project came into being. So I think what we would like to have an appreciation of is big science matters to local and national issues.
Dr Rob Adam, Project Director of SKA South Africa, said the launch of MeerKAT AR1 and its first results was a significant milestone for South Africa.
Through MeerKAT, South Africa is playing a key role in the design and development of technology for the SKA.
The South African team of more than 200 young scientists, engineers and technicians, in collaboration with industry, local and foreign universities and institutions, has developed the technologies and systems for MeerKAT, he said.
Demonstrating the performance of the 16-dish AR1 MeerKAT, Dr Fernando Camillo, the SKA SA Chief Scientist, said the new image taken by the radio telescope in a small patch of sky shows more than 1 300 radio galaxies in the distant universe.
This is compared to 70 in the previous best image.
This gives us confidence that the MeerKAT will, by the end of next year, be the best radio telescope in the world, he said.
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Image Group LA/ABCIn the words of Marvin Berry, listen to this! Coldplay invited actor Michael J. Fox on stage Sunday night during their show at MetLife Stadium to play Chuck Berry's signature hit "Johnny B. Goode." You can watch fan-shot footage of the performance now on YouTube.
Fox, of course, famously rocked "Johnny B. Goode" as Marty McFly in the 1985 film Back to the Future. In introducing Fox to the stage, Coldplay's Chris Martin referred to Back to the Future as the "best movie of all time."
Coldplay and Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, also jammed together on the doo-wop classic "Earth Angel," another song prominently featured in Back to the Future.
Over the weekend, Coldplay launched their North American tour in support of their new album A Head Full of Dreams. The tour will continue July 20 in Indianapolis.
Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
A confrontation between brothers led to a stabbing, hospitalization and arrest, Napa Police reported.
Officers were called to a home at 9:29 p.m. Saturday in the 1200 block of Sierra Avenue after a report of a stabbing, according to Sgt. Amy Hunter. When police arrived, a man living at the home had been taken away, injured, in a private car heading for Queen of the Valley Medical Center, she said.
After speaking with family members at the scene, police learned that 19-year-old Eddy Olvera Haro had been in a physical altercation with his brother before stabbing him three times, according to Hunter.
The victim, whose name was not immediately released, was admitted to the Queen in critical condition and was still at the hospital Sunday night, Hunter said.
Police detained Olvera Haro and recovered a weapon from the scene, according to Hunter. He was booked into the Napa County jail for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon, battery causing great bodily injury, and violating his probation in Napa County.
BATON ROUGE, La. 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.
President Barack Obama urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions.
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 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 Longs.
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 gunmans 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 shooters location.
Almost six minutes pass after the first shots are reported before police say they have determined the shooters 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 doesnt further the conversation. It doesnt 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 Sheriffs 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 hes out of uniform, he said, some people consider him a threat.
A friend of Jacksons 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 Sterlings 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 Sterlings death, and Baton Rouge police arrested more than 200 demonstrators.
Sterlings 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 wouldnt want this, Carter said. He wasnt 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.
Its 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 cant solve violence with violence.
Michelle Rogers and her husband drove near the shooting scene, but were blocked at an intersection closed by police.
I cant 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.
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TITUSVILLE, Florida Hundreds of residents from North Brevard County attended at a rally to support their local law enforcement officers Sunday night. The event, sponsored by the The Church is One in North Brevard Pastors Prayer Group, was an opportunity for the community to come together to express their appreciation for the strong, longstanding partnership between law enforcement in North Brevard and its citizens.
Several local pastors lead the crowd in prayer for the community, focusing on everyone continuing to work together during the recent violent events that have unfolded across the United States.
Words cannot express how much this turnout means to the men and woman of our department, said Titusville Police Chief John Lau who praised the outstanding teamwork in the North Brevard Community. The support we get from our Citizens, City Council, and our City Manager is second to none.
The crowd, estimated to be at several hundred, wore t-shirts with Titusville Police Department and Brevard County Sheriffs Office patches. Members of the Titusville Fire & Emergency Services were also present to show support at the event.
The show of support to local law enforcement was in stark contrast to some of the anti-police protests that have been covered on national news outlets recently.
23:29
Burdwan Superintendent of Police Kunal Agarwal said acting on a tip off the force raided and seized 123 bombs stored in six drums from one Ahad Sheikh's house at Kalyanpur village in Mangalkote area on Sunday.Thirteen people, including Sheikh were arrested in connection with the seizure, following a clash between two groups of the ruling Trinamool Congress on Saturday.
In a second incident 107 bombs were seized from a club at Kandra in Ketugram area of the district.Following this, the anti-corruption wing of district police raided other villages of the district and seized the rest 423 bombs, the SP said adding a total 1,117 people have been arrested in the drive by the police.
This apart 26 arms, 28 live cartridges, ganja and foreign liquour were also seized, he said.The district had been in the news after the blasts at Khagragarh in which JMB terrorists were killed about two years ago.
In a major crackdown, 653 crude bombs were seized from West Bengal's Burdwan district and as many as 1,117 people have been arrested in the drive launched by the police.
15:53
Melania Trump -- until now only a minor presence on the campaign trail -- found herself in the midst of an embarrassing plagiarism controversy today after a prime-time defence of her husband Donald that appeared to be lifted in part from a speech given by Michelle Obama.
No sooner had the poised, 46-year-old former model delivered her speech to cheering delegates at the Republican National Convention than the unmistakeable similarities to a passage from Obama's speech to the 2008 Democratic convention came to light.
In both passages, the women are introducing themselves to the American public by speaking of the values that have shaped their lives. "My parents impressed on me the values: that you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. That you treat people with respect. They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son," Melania Trump said. "And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
In her speech, Michelle Obama said "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them. "And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Trump's senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, issued a statement that sidestepped the plagiarism question while not denying it. "In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," he said. "Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success."
The speech was the highlight of a chaotic opening day of a Republican convention that is set to formally nominate her husband as the party's presidential candidate later this week. A beaming Trump personally introduced his glamorous, European-born wife to the cheering delegates gathered in Cleveland, breaking with tradition by appearing before his actual nomination.
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Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch, who was strangled to death by her brother in the name of "family honour" two days ago, was laid to rest in a local graveyard at her ancestral village near Multan, a media report said on Monday. The funeral prayers of Qandeel were offered in the village Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan district on Sunday, Dawn news online reported. Meanwhile, a Duty Magistrate in Multan remanded her brother and confessed killer, Waseem, in police custody for three days. Qandeels body was taken to her village, where a large number of people had gathered. Before the funeral, women relatives of Qandeel applied henna to her hands and feet as per local tradition. Her mother repeatedly kissed her hands. Her brothers and two married sisters were also present to perform the last rites. Talking to the media, Qandeels father Mohammad Azeem said he would pursue the case against Waseem. She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her, Dawn news online quoted Azeem as saying. His sons were unhappy over her achievements and turned against her even though she supported them, he said. The residents of the village condemned the killing of Qandeel, terming it a brutal act. Waseem confessed to having killed Qandeel in the name of honour. He said that he had no regrets, a police official told the media at a press conference on Saturday. A woman in Multan, who lived in a house adjacent to Qandeels, told the media that the deceased had asked for the hand of her daughter for Waseem. It seems unbelievable that she has been killed by a brother for whom she was trying to arrange a marriage, she said. --IANS ask/rn/dg ( 311 Words) 2016-07-18-16:38:01 (IANS)
Mumbai, July 18 (ANI-Businesswire India): The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) has conferred L&T Technology Services Limited with the exclusive Company of the Year award at the 12th Indo-American Corporate Excellence (I-ACE) Awards 2016. This is the highest distinction conferred by the IACC to any company. IACC further honored L&T Technology Services' by awarding the company the 'Green Office Space of the Year'. The awards were first established in 2004 to highlight and celebrate outstanding performance by the Indian and American companies who have excelled in both trade and commerce between both countries. These awards have grown from strength to strength since its inception. Rajya Sabha MP, former union law minster and Chairman of Bar Council of India Ram Jethmalani was the chief guest, while the guests of honor were Ms. Deanna Hanek, Acting Consul General, U.S. Consulate General, Mumbai and; Dr. Mukund Rajan, Brand Custodian and Member, Group Executive Council, Tata Sons. Dr Keshab Panda, CEO & Managing Director at L&T Technology Services received the award for the company of the Year. Mr Paneesh Rao, Chief Human Resources Officer and Mrs Divya Bhatt, Global Head of Process Industries at L&T Technology Services together picked up the trophy for Best Green Office Space of the Year. An eminent jury comprising of business leaders and bureaucrats from US government examined the applications and selected the awardees. The event was attended by representatives from the Indo-US business community, IACC Members, US and other diplomatic community, expatriates and celebrities. "Winning an award in a category is no simple feat and winning the 'Award for Company of the Year' is truly commendable. It is our privilege and pleasure to bestow this award upon L&T Technology Services Ltd. as they have outdone their competition on multiple levels. One needs to excel in all respects and that is exactly what they have done!" said Mr. Sunder Advani, President, Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, West India Council. Dr. Keshab Panda, CEO & MD, L&T Technology Services, said, "At L&T Technology Services, we strive to deliver the objectives that our clients desire for and the Company of the Year Award is a testimony to our efforts in providing solutions to our Fortune 500 customers. The Green Space Award further reiterates our belief in providing green innovation and technology." (ANI-Businesswire India)
The death toll includes at least 190 civilians and 100 coup plotters, the statement said, adding that more than 1,400 were wounded in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.
More than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the failed coup, Xinhua news agency quoted the statement as saying.
The statement said it was the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen that staged this coup attempt.
"Our government has been constantly exposing the real motives of this terrorist group and its leader, Fethullah Gulen, to all allies and partners. The foiled coup is the latest criminal act revealing the danger posed by Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organisation," it said.
--IANS lok/
( 155 Words)
2016-07-18-03:20:01 (IANS)
The 'Anger Management' actor, who announced he was HIV positive last year, has reportedly met with producers about documenting his journey living with the virus in a new series.
A source told US Weekly that the 50-year-old actor wants the show to be about "his life in general," adding: "He's met with various producers. He'd really open up and allow the cameras inside his world."
The 'Two and a Half Men' star was once one of the highest paid actors, but his reign drew to a close after studio bosses sacked him for his erratic behaviour, disparaging comments about the series' creator Chuck Lorre and drug use.
Since his career meltdown and subsequent HIV announcement, Charlie has been making moves to get his career back on track.
On the work front, he is shooting new film 'Nine Eleven' and has become the brand ambassador for condom company 'Lelo Hex.' (ANI)
Along with all the Rajni-fans, Akshay Kumar too is super excited for his '2.O' co-star Rajnikanth's upcoming flick 'Kabali' and wished to be in Chennai on the release day. According to a Deccan Chronicle report, the 48-year-old actor, who is now in Chennai to shoot his portions for the 'Robot' sequel, opened up about 'Kabali' and Tamil cinema fans' respect for the Thalaiva. "I can't wait to see Superstar's 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 Kabali's release," said the 'Khiladi' actor. Further, speaking about the aura of the 65-year-old Superstar, the 'Airlift' actor said, "There's 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 can't even think of doing myself!" The Airlift actor added that he has learnt a lot from the South industry as he "closely follow the works of actors like Vijay, Vikram and Kamal Haasan." (ANI)
As soon as Saif Ali Khan confirmed his wife Kareena Kapoor Khan's pregnancy, the news spread like wildfire with loads of speculations associated to it; but looks like the would be-mommy is disappointed with the news. According to Hindustan Times report, being irritated by the news and the speculations, the 35-year-old actress said, "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 continued. "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," she added. For the unversed, it was reported that the 'Ki and Ka' actress, who is due in December, will complete the shoot of her next 'Veer DI Wedding' with Sonam Kapoor and also the shoots for some magazine covers by October before she goes on maternity leave. Apparently, Bebo is currently associated with over 18 brands and is planning to shoot for the campaigns in the upcoming months. In this regard, she said, "It is great. they will love me for what I stand for, what I represent, and my talent." Meanwhile, Kareena were spotted yesterday with her baby bump and pregnant glow at the Mumbai airport with hubby Saif, while returning from their Eid vacation in Pataudi. (ANI)
They visited over the weekend.
"Appa and I at his guru Satchidananda's Lotus all faiths temple" 30th anniversary Yogaville Virginia," Aishwarya wrote on her Twitter page on Monday.
She also posted two photographs.
The 65-year old actor left for the US nearly a month ago. He's believed to return to India later this week, according to a source.
"He should be back home this week. He's yet to watch the final copy of 'Kabali'," a source close to the actor told IANS.
In "Kabali", which releases this Friday, Rajinikanth plays a don who fights for equal pay rights for Malaysian Tamils.
--IANS hp/nn/vm
( 128 Words)
2016-07-18-12:06:19 (IANS)
Saurabh shared a caricature on Twitter which showed the 53-year-old star on a judge's chair and actors Akshay Kumar and Annu Kapoor as lawyers.
"Started shooting 'Jolly LLB 2'," Saurabh tweeted on Monday.
The sequel will reportedly be shot in Lucknow and Varanasi, as also in.
The 2013 film, directed by Subhash Kapoor, told the story about Jolly, a struggling lawyer, who comes upon a hit-and-run case and decides to fight for the victims.
--IANS dc/nn/vm
( 106 Words)
2016-07-18-12:44:04 (IANS)
A new study has found that many elderly people are risking their health by taking prescription medicines "inappropriately." The study from Belgium also found a link between underuse, not taking essential medications, and an increased risk of dying or needing to be hospitalized. Appropriate prescribing of medications is a major challenge in the care of elderly adults because older patients tend to be more sensitive to the effects of medications than younger patients, and they often have multiple conditions requiring numerous prescriptions that could negatively interact with each other. To examine patterns of prescription drug use in elderly adults, Maarten Wauters of Ghent University and his colleagues studied 503 community-dwelling adults aged 80 years and older for a period of 18 months. The researchers found that 58 percent of patients were taking five or more chronic medications daily. Few patients were taking medications appropriately, with underuse occurring in 67 percent of patients and misuse occurring in 56 percent of patients (with some overlap between these groups). Just 17 percent of the population were not affected by any kind of underuse or misuse. Over the 18-month study period, underuse was associated with 39 percent and 26 percent increased risks of mortality and hospitalization, respectively, per underused medication. Associations with misuse were unclear. "Taking too many medications or unsafe medications are known to cause adverse health outcomes; however, we have shown that not taking essential, beneficial medications is more frequent and can be more strongly associated with negative outcomes," said Wauters. "Prescribing medications to older persons should be done after careful thought, balancing the benefits and risk of every medication at regular intervals." Wauters noted, "Clinical pharmacologists can help prescribers to clearly assess misuse and underuse of medications in full knowledge of the patient, their comorbidities, and their medications. They can help to build electronic systems for constant monitoring of the quality of prescribing, using evidence-based criteria of potentially inappropriate prescribing." The study is published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. (ANI)
Fortis Healthcare Limited dedicated a 'Wall of Tribute' at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute (FEHI) to donors and their families who have helped save several lives. The initiative is supported by the Fortis Organ Retrieval and Transplant (FORT). The event was flagged off by Mr. Bhavdeep Singh, CEO, Fortis Healthcare Limited, Dr. Ashok Seth, Chairman, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute and Dr. Avnish Seth, Director, Fortis Organ Retrieval and Transplant. Fortis believes in the cause of organ donation and is acknowledged the magnanimous souls who passed on the gift of life to others by creating a 'Wall of Tribute'. This initiative is to honor the heroes whose organs have saved many lives. The 'Wall of Tribute' mentions the names of the donors, along with the dates of their organ donation. Just like tiny stars that twinkle in the night sky and selflessly give hope and light to many, these generous souls also selflessly shine and live on through the lives they have helped save. The initiative to honour the families of the deceased is the first of its kind in the country. The event was also graced by the families who took the courageous decision to donate the organs of their loved ones after death. The cause of organ donation does not enjoy a prominent place in the minds of Indians. This is clearly evident in the extremely low donation numbers in India and the lack of awareness on the process of organ donation. India has only 0.5 donors per million while there are more than 30 donors per million in many western countries. Most of the general population has no clue about which organs can be donated, in what circumstances, what is the process of registration, and more of such critical questions. And each year, thousands of people die while waiting for a transplant, because no suitable donor can be found for them. As a leader in the healthcare sector of India, Fortis Healthcare decided to take up the cause of organ donation in an effort to positively impact the well-being of the nation. The organization realizes that only by driving a systemic change in the perceptions and the behaviour surrounding organ donation, can we increase the number of registered organ donors in India. At the national level, suggested measures to increase awareness on organ donation include introduction of the topic in in school, college and MBBS curriculum, sustained media campaign, involvement of spiritual leaders and inclusion of best practices in organ donation in the accreditation process for hospitals. Most of the organ donation activity is seen in South and Western part of the country. The Transplantation of Human Organs Act Amendment 2011 and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Rules 2014 should be adopted by all states at the earliest. Other actions suggested at the state level include publication of relevant Government Orders to streamline the process of organ donation, availability of organ-pledgingfacility at the time of making driving license and computerized registry for potential organ recipients. Recommendations at city level include launching awareness drives, sensitization of police for quick clearance in medico-legal donations and establishment of green corridors for rapid transportation of organs. Hospitals should ensure that 'Declare All, Approach All' policy is followed for patients with brain death and donor maintenance protocols are implemented by critical care teams. Mr. Bhavdeep Singh, CEO, Fortis Healthcare Limited said, "This initiative is our humble tribute to the deceased as well as their families who have been so noble as to save the lives of strangers. There is a wide chasm between the increasing demand of organs for people at end stages and the paucity of the same. Adding to the complexity is the lack of awareness, simultaneously surrounded by superstitions which present themselves as the key obstacles. Donating organs is a humanitarian cause that will gain momentum with increasing awareness in society. At Fortis, we will continue to contribute as much as we can by educating people and saving more and more lives. We hope this 'Wall of Tribute' inspires all, and reminds us that each one of us has more to give. " Dr. Ashok Seth, Chairman, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute said, "We have as an institute received organs that have saved lives that had a slim chance. It is not only a step in increasing awareness but also a step in clearing myths and cobwebs that shroud this topic. With more and more systems by the NOTTO in place; NGOs working towards increasing awareness about organ donation; several changes brought about by The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Rules 2014, the process of organ retrieval and donation has been simplified. " Dr. Avnish Seth, Director FORT - Fortis Organ Retrieval and Transplant said, "The organ donation rate in the country has increased 10-fold over the last 5 years from 0.05 per million population to 0.5 per million. People from all walks of life are increasingly saying yes to donation and we are truly humbled by their kind gesture every time. The country needs to take up organ donation as a priority and we in the medical community have to take the lead. Brain deaths occur in up to 30 percent patients who die of head injury or stroke, but go unrecognized or unreported. Those of us who have tried sincerely for organ donation by introducing Standard Operating Procedures, increasing awareness amongst hospital staff and training transplant coordinators have found an acceptance rate amongst families of over 40%, provided the family is happy with the quality of medical care provided to their loved one. We hope that this initiative helps us bridge the wide gap between demand and supply of organs " The demand for organ transplantation has rapidly increased all over the world during the past decade due to the increased incidence of vital organ failure, the rising success and greater improvement in post-transplant outcome. However, the unavailability of adequate organs for transplantation to meet the existing demand has resulted in major organ shortage crises. As a result there has been a major increase in the number of patients on transplant waiting lists as well as in the number of patients dying while on the waiting list. In India, less than 15000 kidney transplants are carried out annually against an estimated requirement of over 2,20,000. Similarly, only 2000 liver transplants are performed every year in a country where over 100,000 perish due to end-stageliver disease, mostly related to preventable causes such as hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The annual requirement of hearts is estimated to be around 50,000 and lungs about 20,000. (ANI)
BJP leader Shaina NC said comparing Centre-state relations with India-Pakistan relations shows Kejriwal's 'mental block'
"Arvind Kejriwal is clearly copying our honourable Prime Minister's Mann ki baat. But as they say, imitation is the best form of flattery. We take it in that spirit. Comparing about relations between Centre and State with that between India and Pakistan shows of a mindset which has a mental block," she told ANI.
"The prime minister has always said that federalism, its structure will be that Centre always coordinates with states. That is why he has met chief ministers of all the states repeatedly to understand problems," she added.
During the interactive session yesterday, which was moderated by music composer Vishal Dadlani, Kejriwal said his government had saved taxpayer's money and stopped the 'donation' trend to get admission in schools.
The Chief Minister also highlighted subjects like 'mohalla clinic', electricity bill, compensation to farmers, hoarding of pulses.
When asked about his promise of free Wi-Fi in the national capital, Kejriwal said that the work on it was stalled due to the recent arrest of his key aide Rajendra Kumar.
Rajendra Kumar, an IAS officer who was Kejriwal's Principal Secretary, was arrested by the CBI earlier for his alleged involvement in Rs.50 crore scam. (ANI)
A Division Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Ravindra Nath Kakkar, while hearing the PIL filed by Ashwini Upadhyay and two others, summoned all records of petitions related to the incident filed before the court.
Upadhyay had contended before the Division Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Ravindra Nath Kakkar that the Uttar Pradesh Government had in January 2014 granted permission for a group of 200 persons to hold a demonstration inside Jawahar Bagh in Mathura for two days.
He said eviction began only after repeated directions and warnings from the High Court.
The PIL seeks a CBI probe into the events leading to the violence at the public park from where a huge cache of firearms was recovered after hundreds of squatters belonging to Azad Bharat Vidhik Vaicharik Kranti Satyagrahi were evicted.
Illegal encroachment of government-owned Jawahar Bagh in Mathura by members of a group had led to clashes between the squatters and police leaving 29 persons dead, including two police officials earlier on June 2. (ANI)
On his arrival at Sri Vari Temple, the DGP was welcomed by the priests and officials.
After 'dharshan' , the DGP along his wife was blessed with Vedic Hymns at Ranganayakula Mandapam. DIG Prabhakara Rao, Octopus Additional DG, Surendra Babu, Superintendent of Police (Urban) Ms Jayalakshmi, and others were also present.UNI KNR PS ADG 1045
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The Shiv Sena, which has been extremely vocal for banning controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, on Monday compared him to India's most wanted criminal Dawood Ibrahim. Shiv Sena's Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut said the government should act on these 'smaller Dawoods' in the country. "Who is Zakir Naik? If this government has guts then it should first foil the bids of these smaller Dawoods and their attempts of making mini Pakistan in the country," Raut told ANI. Raut had recently in party's mouthpiece Saamna slammed Naik for radicalising youth towards terror. Pleading innocence that he never encouraged terrorism, Naik had last week alleged that the Indian media started trying him just because one of the Bangladesh newspapers reported that one of the terrorists involved in the Dhaka cafe attack was inspired by him. "I am seeing that there is an India media cry on me just because a report came in one of the Bangladesh newspapers 'The Daily Star' that one of the terrorists who was involved in the attack was inspired by me, and the media trial started. On July 29, the newspaper corrected themselves that they never said that Dr Zakir inspired him and Dr Zakir did not inspire any terrorist to kill innocent people," Naik told a press conference in Mumbai via Skype from Medina. Following the Centre's tough stand on Zakir Naik's controversial comments on terrorism, nine teams from the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and other agencies earlier began scanning the former's activities, while special teams scanned every footage of his speeches. Sources stated that Naik may be banned soon and the Centre has sought fresh legal opinion regarding the controversial preacher. The government is most likely gearing up to make a strong legal case against Naik. (ANI)
Controversial Islamic preacher Dr Zakir Naik should have been taken note of long ago but the sudden realisation of the need to contain his ideology is the result of the fact that for the US, Saudi Arabia, which had been funding such people, is no more a ''holy cow''. The focus of the US today is more towards Russian President Vladimir Putin, and not so much on containing ''the global war on terror,'' and so Saudi Arabia is not as much a priority for it as it used to be earlier, says Saeed Naqvi, the veteran journalist and observer of international politics. ''And that's why here in India we have taken a signal from it, and swung into action against the Saudi funded radicalisation of Islam in a belated exercise against a problem that had already done damage, '' he said talking to UNI about his just released book 'Being the Other: The Muslims in India' in which he has devoted a long chapter on the politics of ''global war on terror''. ''Why so much hue and cry about the likes of Dr Zakir Naik. They have existed for long funded by Saudi Arabia under the nose of the successive Governments over the years, but then Saudi Arabia was a close ally of the US which we blindly embraced as the perfect ally in the war on terror,'' Mr Naqvi said. He wondered why Muslims with moderate faces and preachers with more syncretic and sufi view of Islam never found favour with the establishment. The establishment has always been looking towards Muslims with Wahhabi view of Islam when it came to finding leaders of the community, but leaders with sufi and syncretic view of Islam , were never taken note of, he said. He says today's Islamic radical and extremists like Taliban and other groups funded by Saudi Arabia were first conveniently overlooked as they were thought useful for putting up a Muslim resistance to Russian designs in the region. '' And in this war Saudi Arabia was the close ally of the US. The Saudi Arabian funding of organisation tasked with propagating a radical version of Islam was always conveniently overlooked here, with the resulting fall out,'' he said. Mr Naqvi also cautioned against forces using the ''fight against terror'' for creating a wedge between Hindus and Muslims in India. UNI NAZ SV ADG 1215 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-841930.Xml
"Paying homage to Nelson Mandela on his birthday. Let us remember and always be inspired by his years of struggle," Banerjee said in a tweet.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, born on July 18, 1918, was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and politician. He served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
He was the country's first black chief executive, and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election.
--IANS and/py/vm
( 107 Words)
2016-07-18-13:06:23 (IANS)
Congress chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh Sheila Dikshit today played the emotional angle as she rubbished criticism that she was an outsider and stated that she got married in the state and also began her political journey there. "How come I am an outsider? I started my political journey from there, I got married there. My husband was an IAS officer serving in Uttar Pradesh," she said. Responding to a poser about the Congress' strategy for the Uttar Pradesh elections, Dikshit said her party's aim is to take everyone together and not to isolate any community or religion. "We don't believe in caste politics, we will work for everyone," Dikshit told ANI here. "Our strategy is to gather all people. We don't want to isolate any particular community or religion," she added. Dikshit, who was formally declared the Congress chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh earlier on Thursday, had earlier said that it was a big responsibility and thanked the party high command for trusting her for the job. The announcement was made by Congress general secretary Janardan Dwivedi at the party headquarters in New Delhi. 78-year-old Dikshit's choice for the top post comes amid speculations that Prashant Kishore, who has been roped in as the party's poll strategist for Uttar Pradesh, is of the view that a Brahmin face represents the Congress in the politically crucial state. Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh Uma Shankar Dikshit, who was a Brahmin face and had served as a union minister and governor for a long time. This move can be seen as an attempt on the Congress Party's part to win back its traditional upper caste voters. The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress, later shifted allegiance to the BJP. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to the BSP in the past when party supremo Mayawati gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community. Dikshit, who served thrice as the Delhi Chief Minister before AAP's Arvind Kejriwal dismissed her with a record mandate in December 2013, had earlier said that she was ready for any role which the party assigns to her. (ANI)
from today. Besides Dr.Rajan, the inaugural session of the seminar being held at the NIRD campus near will be attended by NIRD director general Dr.W.R.Reddy ,Andhra Bank managing director Suresh N.Patel ,Nabard deputy managing director R.Amalorpavanathan , MUDRA bank CEO Jiji Mammen and other senior officials from nationalised banks.
The seminar was titled "Equity,Access and Inclusion-Transforming Rural India through Financial Inclusion".
Later in the day,Dr.Rajan will take part in a programme being organised by the Institute of Development and Research in Banking Technology in the city.UNI SMS PS 1335
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Actor Deepika Padukone released teaser of her upcoming Hollywood film 'xXx: The Return of Xander Cage' today.Sharing the teaser on her Instagram account, the actor wrote "Ready for the Return of Xander Cage? Trailer in two days!!! #xXxTheMovie #ReturnOfXanderCage #serenaunger."Hollywood superstar Vin Diesel also shared the teaser on Facebook, posting ''IT IS AWESOME''.In the teaser Deepika tells Vin, "Whatever you are here for, you are going to come up short.Whereas Vin, who is reprising the role of Xander Cage for the third time tells the world, "It is good to be back." Deepika is playing Serena Unger, who is quick with guns, knives and one-liners.The trailer of the movie will be out in two days.Directed by D J Caruso, the flick also stars Nina Dobrev, Ruby Rose, Samuel L Jackson and Jet Li.The third installment of the series will release on January 20.UNI SHS RJ1427 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0138-842158.Xml
With excess of water flowing from Gambhir river, lower reaches of the town were submerged by flood waters, due to which approximately one and a half dozen of villages had lost their connection with the district authorities.
However, H2O levels gave a new lease of life to the farmers as Bokoli river, which was dry from the last 20 years, was flowing with water.
The administration erected a temporary school in Sigannkedha village after flood waters entered the main school premises.UNI XC PS RJ 1436
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The Business Advisory Committee (BAC) of the Parliament on Monday allocated five hours for discussion on the long withstanding Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill. The decision has been made as no consensus has emerged yet. The Monsoon Session will have 20 working days and will conclude on August 12. Meanwhile, former finance minister P. Chidambaram asserted that the Congress will reply on the subject once the NDA Government comes out with a draft on the GST Bill. "Anand Sharma and Ghulam Nabi Azad held talks with the Finance Minister and he has promised to come back with some concrete proposals. Let's see the draft which they bring and then we will respond," Chidambaram told reporters outside Parliament. 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 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. The Congress has been pressing for a GST cap of 18 percent as part of the Constitutional Amendment bill with which the government is not in agreement. The Constitution amendment bill for roll-out of GST is pending in Rajya Sabha for a long time and the government is keen to ensure its passage. The GST seeks to bring a uniform tax structure subsuming a number of imposts and the government claims that it will help add one to two percent to the country's GDP. (ANI)
Congress today regretted that militancy, which had nearly died down in the Kashmir Valley, had again revived with greater force and never before-- even in the worst phase of the 1990's-- had such a situation prevailed when all districts were affected. Initiating a short duration discussion in the Rajya Sabha on the recent turmoil in the Kashmir Valley resulting in the loss of lives and property, he said there had been disproportionate use of force, and even four-year-olds had been beaten mercilessly and elderly and women were victims of pellet gun injuries Calling for making a distinction in the harsh treatment meted out to the common people and militants, Mr Azad pointed out that hospitals were full of pellet injury victims and ''hundreds had been blinded''. He blamed the distrust against the Centre for the situation prevailing in the sensitive border state which the Union Government had been struggling since 1947 to bring them into the mainstream. Pointing to the turbulent situation in the valley where despite a ten-day curfew, protests had not waned, he warned that it would take a long time for the situation, which was similar to the '90s, to stabilise. Assuring him that the Congress was with the Government in wanting normalcy to return to Kashmir, Mr Azad said that the situation should not be further aggravated and blamed certain television channels and exiled entities, including Taslima Nasreen and Tareq Fateh, for fanning the communal flames. The Congress leader also wanted the government to rein in BJP leaders from making inflammatory speeches. He said Pakistan was the malady and root cause of the anti-India unrest in the valley. ''Black day is to be observed for India but there is no black day when mass murders takes place,'' he berated Islamabad. He called for a all-party meeting discuss the issue. MORE UNI SD SB/RSA 1610 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0005-842422.Xml
Navjot Singh Sidhu, a nominated member by the BJP today resigned from the Rajya Sabha, Deputy Chairperson PJ Kurien informed the House. The resignation has been accepted by Chairman Hamid Ansari with effect from July 18, he said. Mr Sidhu had taken the oath of membership during the Budget session of Parliament.Speculations were rife that the actor-turned-politician is likely join the Aam Aadmi Party ahead of crucial Assembly polls in his home state Punjab. UNI MK SB/RSA 1629 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0089-842486.Xml
In an effort to support smart city solutions in India, the Institute for Sustainable Communities, with funding from the US Department of State, is sending American sustainability technology expert Dr Anuradha Ramaswami to select cities within India from July 1827. Dr Ramaswami will be visiting Jaipur, Ajmer, Allahabad and Visakhapatnam as part of the exchange. She will be visiting Visakhapatnam from July 25-28, an official statement said here today. Dr Ramaswami will meet with state and city government officials, stakeholders, and Indian urban development experts to learn about their current work on making India's cities "green" through a variety of sustainability initiatives, and furnish advice from her 20 years of work in engineering/technology, sustainability and development in the United States. The goal of the exchange is to develop long-lasting professional relationships between Indian and American experts that will accelerate smart city solutions in India. Two experts have already participated in the exchange meeting on water and air quality. Three more experts are anticipated to make the trip in the fall. "Cities throughout the world are laboratories when it comes to finding smart solutions to sustainability challenges," said Dr Ramaswami. "Finding the best innovations means that we must communicate with one another and share what works, and what doesn't." Dr Ramaswami is currently the Denny Chair Professor of Science, Technology & Public Policy, Director, Center for Science Technology & Public Policy Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Serving on the Steering Committee of ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability-USA, she has helped to develop protocols and international data-standards for community-wide GHG reporting, and provided technical assistance for climate action planning to Denver and more than 20 cities and towns in Colorado. As Director of UC Denver's NSF IGERT on Sustainable Urban Infrastructure, Dr. Ramaswami is leading interdisciplinary curriculum development on topics related to sustainable urban infrastructure, and sustainable cities. She received her PhD and Master's in Civil Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and her Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.UNI VV RJ 1544 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-842308.Xml
The Madras High Court today ordered issuance of notice to Senior Kanchi Acharya Jayendra Saraswathi and eight others on aN appeal filed by the Tamil Nadu government challenging theiracquittal in the Auditor Radhakrishnan assault case of 2002. When the appeal filed by the government challenging the lower court order came up for hearing, Justice R Subbiah ordered issuance of notice to all the nine accused, returnable by two weeks, on the maintainability of the petition. The Kanchi Seer was cited as the prime accused in the case. Other accused in the case included Kanchi Mutt Manager N Sundaresa Iyer and M K Raghu, younger brother of Junior Kanchi Acharya Vijayendra Saraswathi. It may be recalled that Additional Sessions Judge Rajamanickam had on April 29, acquitted all the accused on the ground that the prosecution has failed to prove the case beyond any reasonable doubt. The prosecution case was that on September 20, 2002, auditor Radhakrishnan, a former associate and auditor of the Kanchi Mutt in Kancheepuram, was attacked with deadly weapons in which he and his wife were seriously injured. The Foreshore Estate police registered case against 12 people, including Jayendra Saraswathi, in connection with the attack. The charge sheet was filed in 2006 for offences including criminal conspiracy and attempt to murder. The prosecution submitted that the gang had attacked Radhakrishnan assuming that he was writing letters in the name of 'Somasekhara Ganapadigal' alleging irregularities in the administration of the Kanchi Mutt. Of the 12 accused in the case, two of them, Appu andKathiravan, died during the pendency of the trial and an other accused, Ravi Subramaniam, had turned approver. UNI GV RSS 1550 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-842414.Xml
Putting to rest all speculationsabout Tamil Superstar Rajinikanth's health, his daughter Aishwarya R Dhanush has posted a photo of the actor offering prayers at a temple in Virginia in the United States. The actor was expected to return to the city before therelease of his latest flick 'Kabali' on July 22, advance bookings for which began today and the tickets have virtually been sold out within a couple of hours. The photo posted by Aishwarya in her twitter page, showed Rajini clad in black T-shirt and a jean, while offering prayers. When there were rumours about his health condition andhis sudden departure to the US, Aishwarya, who had been with him, refuted rumours and said her father flew to the US to spend some quality time with family before resuming the shooting for Director K Shankar's '2.0'. With just five days to go for the release of 'Kabali', fans of the actor were hoping for some news about their hero. And Aishwarya's tweet with pictures of the actor offeringprayers at the Lotus Temple of All Faiths in Virginia, has brought joy to them. Having created so much hype, Rajinikanth's Kabali, directed by Pa Ranjith and produced by Kalaipuli S Thanu, is all set for a mega release in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi simultaneously in over 4,000 screens across the world. UNI GV RSS 1625 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-842519.Xml
The Madras High Court today ordered shifting of the three victims of police bruatlity at Chengam to Tiruvannamalai Government Hospital, while asking the RDO to complete the probe within two weeks and submit a report. The Court had taken strong objections to the police brutality at Chengam, when three cops thrashed an auto driver, his wife and their son in public view, and observed that the way the police had acted was not acceptable. When the petition seeking action against the cops came up for hearing, the Tamil Nadu Government filed a report stating that the three victims were shifted to the Rajiv Gandhi Government Hospital (RGGH) in Chennai as per the court orders and that they were improving. Their condition was also stable. The government also submitted that the RDO probe into the incident was on and that any action would be taken only after receipt of the investigtion report. To this, the Court said the three victims could be shifted back to Tiruvannamalai Government Hospital for treatment. While observing that a fair probe alone would enable the guilty to get punishment, the Court asked the RDO to expedite the probe and complete it in two weeks, before adjourning the matter. It may be recalled a video of a couple and their son being beaten up by police men in public view went viral on social media and has landed the state police in a soup. The incident was reported on Monday last, near the old bus stand at Chengam. The video showed two policemen beating the family up with sticks. Raja (45), an auto driver, wife Usha (40) and their son Surya (18), were the victims of this police brutality. Raja and his family were returning from jewellery shop. The couple entered into an argument and in a fit of rage Raja slapped Usha. When the quarrel was taking place, three police men intervened. Raja tried to explain to them that it was a personal fight, and tried to convince them not to interfere. But the cops refused to budge. This lead to a tiff between the family and the cops, and it soon turned into a police brutality as the cops thrashed , slapped, kicked and assaulted the father and son with lathis in full public view, despite Usha falling at their feet and requesting them not to beat them. Various political parties condemned the police brutality following which the three cops were transferred to Vellore Armed Reserve.UNI GV RSS 1715 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-842681.Xml
The 13th Egmore MetropolitanMagistrate Court today extended the judicial remandof P Ramkumar, the lone accused in the woman techieSwathi murder case, till August one. On expiry of the remand, he was produced beforeMagistrate Gopinath through video-conferencing fromthe Puzhal Central prison. Following this the Magistrate, extended his remandfor a further period of 15 days till August one. Meanwhile, police, who have questioned Ramkumarin their custody for three days, were expected to file the chargesheet in the next few days and claimed that they have gathered a lot of information from him. Police said the accused also enacted the murdersequence at the Railway station. It may be recalled that Swathi was hacked to death at a railway station here on June 24. The killing triggered an uproar in the state with various political parties demanding a thorough probe,including by the CBI, into it. The Madras High Court also suo motu initiated proceedings and condemned the police for failing to make any arrests even three days after the murder and said it would intervene in the event of any lapse in the investigation. Following this, the investigation was transferred to the Chennai City Police from the Government Railway Police. Soon special teams were formed, and after analysing various footages recorded in the CCTV cameras, police zeroed in on the accused, got the address from the register of a mansion where Ramkumar stayed, and arrested him. When police went to arrest him at his house nearTenkasi, Ramkumar attempted suicide by slitting histhroat. However, he was overpowered and admitted to Government Tirunelveli Medical College and Hospitalfrom where he was shifted to Government Royapettah Hospital in the city, before being shifted to the Puzhal Prison.UNI GV RSS 1725 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-842715.Xml
Renowned agricultural scientist M S Swaminathan and former DGP V Vaikunth were among those chosen for this year's 'Pride of Madras' awards. Instituted by SCGOBN in 2015 in association with the Rotary Club of Madras Mount, the awards were beingpresented to individuals who have gone beyond the call of duty in serving senior citizens and the poor and needy through their respective professions. A release from the organisers said the awardeeshave through their social service put Madras (Chennai) on the world map and were really and truly 'The Pride of Madras.' The awards would be presented during Madras Week celebrations in August every year. The recipients of this year's awards included Dr M S Swaminathan of MSSRF Foundation, Mr Vaikunth, Dr S Rajan. Director, Madras Medical Mission, R Nagasundaram, senior advocate of Madras HighCourt, Padma Ramamurthy, noted medical practitioner and C Mahadevan, software engineer.UNI GV RSS 1740 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-842765.Xml
Succumbing to the compulsions of electoral politics in poll bound state, the Uttar Pradesh government today gave in-principle approval for implementation of the recommendations of the 7th pay commission, benefiting over 16 lakh state employees of the government-run schools and colleges. The state cabinet today decided to set up a committee to look into the matter. A meeting in this direction was chaired by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav to decide about the constitution of the committee, officials here said. Citing financial crunch,Mr Yadav had earlier urged the Centre to share 50 per cent of the additional financial burden for few years, arising out of the implementation of the seventh pay commission report with retrospective effect from January 1. He however, did not specify the number of years for the same. Mr Yadav and other stakeholders had requested the Centre on the issue in February during the pre-budget meeting, convened by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in Delhi. Mr Yadav had then said the past experience of the state government suggested the implementation of the pay commission report caused huge financial burden on the finances, forcing the state government to compromise with development works. He had argued, "The state government is forced to divert the money from capital expenditure earmarked for development for meeting the non plan committed expenditure like salary and pension, thus seriously affecting the development of the state and the Centre should provide at least 50 per cent financial assistance to the state government for meeting the additional financial burden to be caused by the seventh pay commission report''. Uttar Pradesh, categorised as `fiscally stressed' state had earlier in December 2015 communicated the Centre to go slow on implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission's recommendations, seeking extra time to be able to absorb the burden of the pay hikes. The additional financial burden due to seventh pay commission on UP government is likely to be higher than expected as the actual hike in salary in pension is more than what was recommended by the Pay commission. Ever since the second pay commission in 1960s most of the state follow the Central Pay Commission's recommendations, and, with some modifications, announced roughly similar salary hikes for state government employees. State's finance department sources said there was no such precedent where the Centre had ever offered financial assistance to the states in meeting the additional financial burden arising out of the implementation of the pay commission report. Till the current fiscal 2015-16, the total outgo on account of salary and pension is over Rs 1.10 Lakh crore which is over 50 per cent of the total revenue receipts of the state government. With the implementation of the seventh pay commission report minimum annual recurring additional financial burden on state will be over Rs 35,000 crore. If the hike in allowances like TA,DA, HRA, CCA, Health and insurance is also included then the total burden could even touch Rs 45,000 crore annually. The other major burden on the finances of UP is the payment of principal and interest on the previously contracted loan. This amount in 2015-16 is Rs 32,100 crore on total debt burden of Rs 2.93 lakh crore.UNI MB AKC PR RJ RAI1908 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-842780.Xml
A Muslim cleric has complained to the district authorities against his wife, who demanded that he should be clean shaven, otherwise she will commit suicide. Police sources here said that police was also in a fix on the complaint of Maulana Arshad Badruddin and they were yet to approach his wife. The district authorities have sent the copy of the complaint to the police for necessary action. The 36-year-old in the complaint also asked District Magistrate Pankaj Yadav to arrange for counselling of his wife. Maulana Badruddin said in his letter that his wife demanded that he should shave or else she would commit suicide. He even claimed that his wife was using a smartphone to chat with other men. He fears that he would be blamed, if his wife takes the extreme step. In his complaint to the DM, the cleric said "I am a 'pesh imam' (who leads prayers at a Mosque) and I am a true follower of Islam. I got married to Sahana of Pilkhuwa town in Hapur district in 2001. Soon after our marriage, my wife demanded that I should shave and not keep beard as she admires clean-shaven men like Bollywood actors Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan. ''She has also brought a smartphone and chats with gair mard all day and night." Arshad said he tried to convince his wife often and that clerics like him should keep their beards, but she is adamant. "We have four children, and yet she insists on her demand. I have also told her many times to curtail the use of mobile phone as I fear that our children will also pick up the bad habit and it would become difficult to discipline them. I am irritated by her behaviour. When I scolded her recently, she started crying and threatened to commit suicide after poisoning our children," the cleric wrote in his letter to the DM. Arshad also stated in the letter that recently, on the occasion of Eid, she wanted to buy western clothes for the children and herself. "When I refused to accompany her for Eid shopping, she quarrelled with me and again threatened to kill herself. "On the next day of Eid, she locked herself in a room. When I peeped inside, I found that she was trying to hang herself with a rope from the ceiling fan. I immediately called other family members and broke open the door. Luckily, we managed to save her. When we asked her why she was taking the extreme step, she kept mum and stopped talking to us," Arshad added.UNI MB AKC RJ 1836 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-842806.Xml
CPI(M) District Secretary P Jayarajan today alleged that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had organised the murder of CPI(M) activist Dhanaraj of Payyanur on July 11, on the basis of a decision taken in an RSS meet, convened by RSS national chief Mohan Bhagwat in November, 2015. It became clear, following the arrest of four RSS activists that the Sangh planned the murder of Dhanaraj, Mr Jayarajan said. RSS is spreading false campaign against the non-minority people. At the same time, the Sangh is unleashing violence in the CPI(M) stronghold pockets of Kannur. The motive of creating panic is suspected to be one of the methods, chalked out in the RSS state level meet here, last year, he alleged. Talking to the media, Mr Jayarajan demanded the police to register case against the RSS leaders under the conspiracy angle, who were behind the planned murder of Dhanaraj. He also said RSS was trying to create communal tension by unleashing a false campaign, stating that some other political party had enmity with late Dhanaraj and also that different opinion was reported between the CPI(M) local leaders and Dhanaraj for the last days. But, police arrested four RSS criminals, who are directly involved in this murder, he added. RSS organised a protest agitation in the first week of July, citing that CPI(M) workers hurled bomb against the Sangh workers at Kankol. This was arranged for set up as a background for the 'planned murder'. Police should conduct comprehensive cases, filed by BJP/RSS activists against CPI(M) workers of Dhanaraj in related incidents, Mr Jayarajan said. He alleged that RSS leaders of other districts, who were camping in Kannur to strengthen the party under the hidden agenda, were behind the murder of the CPI (M) activist. He also alleged that Congress was helping the 'fascist force' RSS as a motive to weaken the CPI (M) in Kerala. To a question, Mr Jayarajan admitted that some unfortunate events were held at Payyanur, following the murder of Dhanaraj. However, the retaliation attack or murder is not the policy of CPI(M) and the whole responsibility is with RSS leaders for the after incidents of Payyanur, he added.UNI AK AKC RJ 1901 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-842893.Xml
Five Dalit youth consumed poison, while a large number of Dalits pelted stones at passing buses to protest the incident of beating of Dalits in Una town of Gir Somnath district, last week. Large number of members from Dalit community gathered in Gondal town of Rajkot district of Saurashtra, to protest against atrocity committed against dalits in Una. They were seeking action against the accused and rising incidents of atrocities against dalits. The five youth who consumed poison were rushed to local civil hospital. Their supporters started pelting stones at passing buses and had altercations with the police who resorted to lathicharge to quell the mob. "We have made adequate arrangements to control the situation and as of now things appear to be under control," Antrip Sood, superintendent of police, Rajkot Rural, said. Last week, a video of some men beating half-naked members of dalit community went viral. The men, who claimed to be cow protectors, were shown beating the dalit men allegedly for skinning a dead cow. The dalits today took out a procession and staged dharna carrying the bodies of dead animals in three vehicles to the collector's office, demanding swift action against the accused involved in Dalit atrocities. They also threatened to stop lifting dead animals from villages and towns.Similar scenes were witnessed in Surendranagar district too, where people from dalit community brought dead animals to the Mamlatdar's office compound in protest. They also took out a rally across the town against the Una incident. With Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati raising the issue in Rajya Sabha, the Anandiben Patel government in Gujarat reviewed the situation and plan curative action at a meeting called by senior minister and BJP president Vijay Rupani and and attended by social justice minister Ramanlal Vora. So far, nine persons have been arrested and four police officials suspended for the incident.The chief minister, after almost four days of the incident, today tweeted that she was "Deeply pained by the incident" and that it was "very unfortunate". She went on to say that her government was taking all necessary actions and already 8 accused have been arrested and one police inspector and three constables have been suspended. Our minister and parliamentary secretary have visited the spot. Compensation of Rs 1 lakh per person has been sanctioned. We will continue to extend all support to victims. Gujarat government is fully committed to protect weaker sections of society." Anandiben said in her series of tweets. UNI ND CJ RJ 1951 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-842991.Xml
Samajwadi Party has asked the leaders of its youth organisations in Uttar Pradesh to firm up the strength of the organisation at the polling booth level. SP also said only the youth leaders of the party can bring the party back to power in 2017. The meeting of the youth organisations also finalised the road map of the election campaign for the 2017 state assembly elections. UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, who is also the state president of the party presiding over the meeting of the party's youth organisations here today asked the youth leaders to prepare for the success of his `rath yatra' to be taken out from Lucknow in September next. The Yatra will cover the entire state ahead of the state assembly elections likely to be held in February-March. Akhilesh Yadav asked the youth leaders to devote their time and energy for the party as there was little time left for the next state assembly elections. The meeting of the youth organisations Lohia Vahani and MUlayam Singh youth brigade was held here today at the state office of the party. He said without the determined efforts of the youth organisation the party cannot be voted back to power. He said it's the time to act in a coordinated manner and tell the people that the SP government has worked as per their expectations and has delivered as per the promises it had made in the election manifesto of 2012. He said the SP government in last over four years has delivered to the people in all the fields of development and welfare schemes. ``Now it's the time to apprise the people of the achievements of the state government in last over 4 years'', said the chief minister. The Samajwadi Party is yet to fully gear up for Assembly elections. The party has however already announced candidates for over 150 constituencies. The Congress has stepped up its campaign by naming new state president and also the chief minister candidate while the BJP president Amit Shah has held series of political rallies across the state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also addressed several rallies in UP in last two months and likely to step up campaign in coming days. Samajwadi Party in March last had released a list of 142 candidates on seats which it had lost in the 2012 state elections. For the last over a month the ruling party has been in the news for negative reasons like the aborted merger of the Quami Ekta Dal and electoral alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal. The parliamentary board of the party on June 25 had decided that the Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav would launch the poll campaign by taking out Samajwadi Vikas Rath Yatra, highlighting the development works that his government has done. The Yatra is expected to be taken out after the meeting of the party's national executive meet in Lucknow either in July or August. The SP had recently reconstituted its national executive. SP spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary said the dates for the national executive meet and Samajwadi Vikas Rath Yatra are yet to decided. "SP is already campaigning through its development works. The CM himself has been visiting villages and people understand this fact," he claimed.UNI MB CJ RJ 1951 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843098.Xml
APCC President N Raghuveera Reddy today alleged that the ruling Telugu Desam Party is indulging in murky politics by encouraging defections and depicting the principal Opposition YSR Congress Party with melting ice as the party MLAs are quitting it. Addressing press meet programme, here today, he said the TDP and the BJP were deceiving people in getting Special Category Status (SCS) to Andhra Pradesh. The Cabinet approval is enough to grant SCS. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu, who had over three decades of political experience, knew that but they were not exerting pressure on the Centre to get SCS, he slammed."The Congress party is moving a private bill on SCS issue during the monsoon sessions of Parliament and the bill come for debate on July 22. I hope that the MPs of all political parties will extent support the bill", he said.Criticising the TDP led state government is fooling the farmers in acquiring lands under land pooling scheme, Mr.Reddy alleged the government acquired land by using intimidation, threatening and by creating a scary situation. Taking exception to the government's proposal of acquiring one lakh acres of land for the construction of sea port and establish industries in Machilipatnam, he reminded that when the TDP was in Opposition, it said 1200 acres of land sufficient for sea port and now it wanted to acquire one lakh acres.Depicting the Opposition YSRCP with melting ice, he said its MLAs were quitting the party and joining the running TDP. The YSRCP would become empty soon since it is being run by a single individual without clarity, vision or polices.The APCC President took strong exception to the comments, made by Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu that he did not want to construct a slum as capital city for the state. The comment of the Chief Minister is amounted humiliating of Indian engineers, the APCC president flayed. Mr Naidu made the comment, when asked why he was approaching the Singapore companies for the construction of new capital city Amaravathi.UNI DP AKC RJ 1932 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-842437.Xml
Police said Muthupandi (48), who is running a textile shop had gone to Namakkal to his in-laws house yesterday leaving his elderly mother Subbulakshmi alone in the house. The dacoits broke the door lock and looted the gold jewellery and cash from the steel almirah in the wee hours.
The dacoity came to light this morning, when Subbulakshmi found the steel almirah broken and the articles stolen.
Based on a complaint, senior police officials along with finger print experts visited the house and held inquiry. A special team was formed to arrest the culprits. Valanadu police have registered a case and are investigating. UNI GSM AKC RJ 1944
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After BJP, Uttar Pradesh Congress will send a four-member team to Etah to probe into the hooch in which 33 people have died so far. Vice-chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee, media cell, today announced that a four-member party delegation would visit Etah and Farukkabad, tomorrow to inquire the happening. Newly-appointed president of UPCC Raj Babbar, also demanded a judicial probe in the matter. The official communiqu of the Party said Mr Babbar charged Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav with appointing tainted and corrupt officials in the Excise Department which led to several incident of hooch tragedy in the state so far claiming several hundreds lives. The state president also demanded that since the Chief Minister had the charge of excise ministry also, so he must take morale responsibility of huge loss of human lives in spurious hooch tragedy and submit his resignation. Meanwhile a delegation of the BJP led by Etah MP Rajveer Singh visited Etah. The seven-member delegation blamed the officials for the tragedy and demanded a judicial probe into the incident. "Death of so many innocent people was reflection to government's failure to check bootlegging," they alleged. Leader of the delegation and local MP Rajveer Singh said that what the members came to know was very startling. We had impression that illict liquor was sold from a shop but the fact came to light that Sreepal, owner of the liquor shop, had deputed many representatives who used to go to different villages and sell liquor. "These representatives used to come at a fixed time at particular place carrying pouches of liquor in the dickey of their mobike. They used to sell these liquor pouches at Rs 10 per pouch. Villagers knew about these mobile shops and used to assemble at particular site at particular time," he said. Mr Singh said this shows deep nexus between bootleggers, police and excise officials. "Chief Minister has suspended some officials but this seems a cosmetic attempt to save the image of his government. Few months back over 50 people have died in Unnao after drinking illicit liquor. Then also some people were suspended but this government action failed to break the nexus," he said. The BJP leader said only a judicial probe will bring the culprits to book.UNI MB CJ AE 2026 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843293.Xml
Former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, who has been projected as the Congress' chief ministerial candidate for the Uttar Pradesh elections, on Monday described Ghulam Nabi Azad as the Amit Shah of Congress. "If BJP has Amit Shah, then Congress has Ghulam Nabi Azad," said Dikshit. Azad is one of the senior-most leaders of the Congress and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. Amit Shah is the BJP President. Dikshit also said that Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra should campaign in the state and the party would "benefit from it". She said Priyanka "is a popular leader and she should come for campaigning. Congress will benefit if Priyanka campaigns for the party in UP". In an interview to ETV, Dikshit when asked about the main agenda in the Uttar Pradesh elections, said: "The present Akhilesh Yadav government's work has discouraged the public. Due to this, people are not going to give him another chance. For us, only development will be the agenda." Dikshit also said she would concentrate only on campaigning now and no decision has been taken on contesting the election. Asked about party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's role and whether he'll be elevated to the post of party President, Dikshit said: "He should be given more time. Party High Command will take a decision on whether Rahul Gandhi will be made the party President or not." Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dikshit said: "Modi's popularity has decreased in last two years and he has failed in fulfilling the election promises." "It doesn't befit a Prime Minister to make comments like Congress-free India. Such statements don't come in favour of a Prime Minister," she added. --IANS sid/rn/bg ( 298 Words) 2016-07-18-21:30:01 (IANS)
Seven oil-filled tankers were damaged in a fire at an unloading station of Oil India Ltd was at Dikom in Dibrugarh district of eastern Assam today. Dibrugarh deputy commissioner informed that the seven tankers were completely damaged in the fire. Fire tenders from all nearby areas were pressed into action and the fire was brought under control after a few hours. No person was injured in the fire. Black smoke had enveloped the entire area, causing panic among the people. UNI SG CJ AE 2147 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843421.Xml
Uttar Pradesh Chief Secretary Deepak Singhal today said measures necessary for cleaning and making Ganga river pollution-free should be ensured on priority. He asked to ensure that water-level of Ganga should not fall. He said the state government will give full cooperation for cleaning of Ganga river. The Chief Secretary was holding talks with Mr Jun Matsumoto, Senior Water Resources Management Specialist of World Bank and Mr Rajesh Balasubramaniam, Senior Water & Sanitation Specialist, Dr Halla M, Senior Water Economist along with senior officer of Namami Gange programme. Mr Singhal said the state government had successfully worked to clean and make Gomti river pollution-free according to an action plan. He said environmental and cultural sites would be developed along the banks of Gomti. Mr Singhal said the state government was striving to clean Varuna and others rivers of the state as well. He said preparing action-plan was not enough to clean the Ganga river, but that plan would have to be implemented on ground within the specified time-schedule. He said that he believed in ensuring work at ground level and not in reports. UNI MB CJ AE 2221 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843455.Xml
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government is facing criticism over the handling of the situation in the valley, today said there was nothing to hide on Kashmir and sought the views of all BJP allies on the issue. Speaking at a meeting of the NDA allies, Mr Modi said his government would take everybody into confidence on the developments in Kashmir, Shiv Sena leaders Sanjay Raut told reporters after the meeting. According to sources, Shiv Sena pressed for establishing direct communication with the people of Kashmir. It said if the Prime Minister could discuss the issue with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, then why not with the people of Kashmir. Later, Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu told reporters that the meeting also discussed the issue of the passage of the GST Bill and all the NDA allies were in favour of clearing the Bill in this session. The Prime Minister explained to them the importance of the legislation getting Parliament nod in this session. Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Anant Kumar said the Government was ready to listen to all the suggestions of the Opposition on the GST Bill.UNI NAZ AE 2343 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843501.Xml
ABCNews.com(WASHINGTON) -- House Speaker Paul Ryan's selfie with Capitol Hill interns is prompting a backlash on social media and raising questions about diversity on Capitol Hill.
The photo was posted over the weekend to his Instagram account and critics have noted that virtually all of the interns visible in the photo are white.
Ryan's office did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment on reactions to the photo. The House Democratic caucus and House GOP conference did not return requests for information about intern diversity in House offices.
.@SpeakerRyan, in this day & age, theres no excuse for not having diverse staff & interns. https://t.co/8SUrigUxaK Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 18, 2016
Capitol Hill internships are mostly unpaid.
Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
A recent study has shown that the neural architecture in the auditory cortex, the part of the brain that processes sound, of profoundly deaf and hearing people is virtually identical. Lead author Ella Striem-Amit from Harvard said, "One reason this is interesting is because we don't know what causes the brain to organize the way it does. 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, the team first obtained what are called "tonotopic" maps showing how the auditory cortex responds to various tones. 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 senior researcher Yanchao Bi from Beijing Normal University, "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?" The study appears in Scientific Reports. (ANI)
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. --IANS lok/ ( 179 Words) 2016-07-18-03:06:06 (IANS)
First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon on Sunday said that she would consider a second referendum on Scottish independence in the first half of next year if British government started the formal process of leaving the European Union without Scotland's position being safeguarded. Her comments follow a Friday meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, in which May assured Sturgeon that she would listen to any options brought forward by the Scottish government, BBC reported. May, however, appeared unwilling to consider a second referendum on Scottish independence, saying people in Scotland sent a "very clear message" in 2014. May also said she would not trigger article 50 -- the formal process of Britain leaving the EU -- until there was a "UK approach and objectives", which, according to the First Minister, meant Scotland had been put in a very, very strong, strong position. On the BBC's Sunday Politics Scotland programme, when asked about her position if article 50 was triggered in December and the Scottish government was not "on board", Sturgeon said that was why she was making preparations for a second independence referendum. "Of course at that point that would be an option and a decision that I would have to consider," she said. She also suggested that Scotland could stay in Britain as well as the EU. She said: "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." "I think 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 that the Scottish government would bring forward to give effect to how Scotland voted and we will certainly bring forward options," BBC quoted her as saying. She said that in Brussels she had encountered "a warmth, an openness a great sympathy to the position Scotland finds itself in". Britain voted to leave EU in June 23 referendum by 52 per cent to 48 per cent while Scotland voted to remain by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. --IANS lok/ ( 383 Words) 2016-07-18-03:08:02 (IANS)
A former African-American US Marine killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on his birthday, in an incident similar the July 5 Dallas attacks, where another former black soldier killed five policemen. On Sunday, a man identified as Gavin Long of Kansas city went on a shooting rampage on his 29th birthday that left two police officers and a sheriff's deputy dead, CNN quoted police sources as saying. Long, was a former Marine who spent time in Iraq and was discharged at the rank of sergeant in 2010, according to the US military. Police officers who responded to Sunday's shootings killed Long in a gunbattle after the other officers were ambushed, the police sources told CNN. The murder weapon was an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle, according to law enforcement officials. Police have not officially released the names of the victims but one was identified by family members as Officer Montrell Jackson. Law officers Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola were also killed. That was corroborated with social media posts. The gunman also critically injured a deputy who is "fighting for his life", said East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux. Another wounded deputy and police officer have non-life-threatening wounds, law officers said. Jackson had posted on Facebook on July 8 how physically and emotionally drained he had been since protests had erupted in Baton Rouge after the July 5 killing of the unarmed African-American man, Alton Sterling by police. "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. ... These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," CNN reported citing Jackson's post. Long was a prolific user of social media, with dozens of videos, podcasts, tweets and posts under his pseudonym 'Cosmo Setepenra'. Under that name, Long also tweeted a link to a news story about Dallas shooter Micah Johnson and said the shooter was "one of us! # MY Religion is Justice", CNN added. President Barack Obama on Sunday condemned the killings and all attacks on law enforcement. "We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement," Obama said. "Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible," CNN quoted the President as saying. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a probe. --IANS ksk ( 420 Words) 2016-07-18-09:06:08 (IANS)
A California university student who has been missing since Thursday's Bastille Day attack in Nice is among those who died after a truck driver deliberately plowed through a crowd, killing at least 84 people, University of California, Berkeley, said.Nicolas Leslie, 20, was one of 85 Berkeley students on a 15-day study-abroad trip on entrepreneurship in Europe. Three other students were injured in the attack."This is tragic, devastating news," UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a statement released yesterday. "All of us in the UC Berkeley family - both here on campus, and around the world - are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence."Leslie was a junior in the university's Natural Resources department who planned to go on to business school, Dirks said. He was one of 85 Berkeley students attending a 15-day course on European entrepreneurship and innovation held in Nice, the university said.Of the three students who were wounded in the attack, two have been released after medical treatment. Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23 and Diane Huang, 20, continue to study at the program, the university said in the statement.A third, Daryus Medora, 21, remains in the hospital, the university said.Leslie's death marks the second time in less than a month that a Berkeley student died in attacks by militants abroad. Two weeks ago, 18-year-old sophomore Tarishi Jain died when militants attacked a cafe in Dhaka, killing 20.The radical Islamist group Islamic State has claimed the Nice attack, calling the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, one of its soldiers. But authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old had any actual links to the militant group.Bouhlel was shot dead at the scene of the attack.During a visit to Nice yesterday, 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.A Texan and his 11-year-old son on a family vacation were also among at least 84 people killed in the July 14 attack.REUTERS DS0505 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-841704.Xml
The gunman who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been identified as a former US Marine named Gavin Long, according to a government source with knowledge of the investigation.Officials speaking publicly have not yet released the name of the suspected killer or any details, beyond saying they believed the single shooter was killed in the shootout.Another source familiar with the investigation told Reuters Long, 29, was from Kansas City, Missouri. The source said there was reason to believe a 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 by investigators.Long, who was black, was affiliated with the anti-government New Freedom Group, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation. A spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, said she had no information about that.Long served in the Marines for five years, from August 2005 to August 2010, according to a report in the New York Times, citing Yvonne Carlock, the deputy public affairs officer for the US Marines. Long was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, the Times reported.CBS News reported that Long left the Marines with an honorable discharge in 2010 with the rank of sergeant.Public records show Long had lived in Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri. He had also lived in San Diego and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.Long was on the University of Alabama dean's honor list in 2012, school records show.Missouri court records show he divorced his wife in 2011, with no children at the time. There was no criminal record for him in Missouri.Long was a defendant in a case involving delinquent city taxes. It was filed in March and was dismissed in June, according to court records.Brady Vancel, a witness to the Baton Rouge shooting yesterday, said on CNN that he ran into the suspect, who was dressed in black, a few minutes before the police officers were shot. The man was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle and wearing a ski mask, Vancel said.The gunman "looked up and he saw me. We stopped, I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction," Vancel said. REUTERS DS0540 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-841707.Xml
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has officially requested the support of his country's new government to back a bid for the top job at the United Nations, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said today.Rudd, a fluent Mandarin-speaker, had been rumoured to be garnering support to replace UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon when he steps down at the end of 2016, after a second, five-year term."Kevin Rudd has requested that the Australian government nominate him, and as the prime minister has indicated on a number of occasions that'll be a matter for the cabinet," Bishop told Australia's Channel 7 television."I'll certainly put the matter forward. It'll be a matter for the cabinet."Newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is expected to announce his cabinet today after a closely-fought July 2 national poll. Turnbull's conservative Liberal-National coalition is split on whether to support Rudd, a member of Australia's opposition Labor party.There are more than a dozen high-profile candidates vying for the position, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova of Bulgaria; former Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.Ultimately however, the council's veto powers - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - have to agree on a candidate. There is no requirement for the five to pay attention to the popularity of candidates with the General Assembly.Under an informal tradition of rotating the top post between regions, it is Eastern Europe's turn and eight of the current nominees are from there. Rudd, who is known for a fiery temper and keeping an almost super-human work ethic, would represent a departure from that tradition.REUTERS DS0544 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-841708.Xml
A former US Marine sergeant who served in Iraq has been identified as the gunman who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to a government source with knowledge of the investigation.Another source familiar with the investigation told Reuters the suspect, Gavin Long, 29, was from Kansas City, Missouri. The source said there was reason to believe a 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 by investigators.Officials speaking publicly have not yet released the name of the suspected killer or any details, beyond saying they believed the single shooter was killed in the shootout.Long, who was black, was affiliated with the anti-government New Freedom Group, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation. A spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, said she had no information about that.Sunday was Long's 29th birthday, according to the Kansas City Star newspaper.He served in the Marines for five years, from August 2005 to August 2010, and rose to the rank of sergeant, according to Yvonne Carlock, deputy public affairs officer for the US Marines. Long was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009.CBS News reported that Long left the Marines with an honorable discharge. Carlock would not confirm that detail.Public records show Long had lived in Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri, as well as San Diego and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.In Kansas City, police cordoned off streets within a block or more of the house where Long lived in a working-class neighborhood of mostly black residents.Bob Phillips, 24, had lived across the street from Long for a month but said he did not know him. Phillips said he was surprised to hear that Long lived nearby."It's a quiet neighborhood, kids out playing," he said.Missouri court records show Long divorced his wife in 2011, with no children at the time. There was no criminal record for him in Missouri.Long was a defendant in a case involving delinquent city taxes. It was filed in March and was dismissed in June, according to court records.Long attended the University of Alabama for one semester in spring 2012 and made the Dean's List, according to university spokeswoman Monica Watts."The university police had no interaction with him while he was a student," she said in an email.Brady Vancel, a witness to the Baton Rouge shooting yesterday, said on CNN that he ran into the suspect, who was dressed in black, a few minutes before the police officers were shot. The man was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle and wearing a ski mask, Vancel said.The gunman "looked up and he saw me. We stopped, I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction," Vancel said. REUTERS DS0706 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-841720.Xml
According to CNN, thousands of soldiers have been arrested and hundreds of judiciary members removed since Friday's uprising, which left at least 290 people dead and more than 1,400 injured in a chaotic night of violence.
Around 6,000 people have been detained and arrests will continue, according to Turkey's foreign ministry.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has vowed that "they will pay a heavy price" and Erdogan asserted that he will remove the "viruses" from all state institutions.
The arrests include Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik Air Base, according to the Turkish President's office. The United States uses the airbase to launch airstrikes on ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
An "order of detention" for Col. Ali Yazici, a senior military aide to Erdogan, has also been issued, according to Anadolu.
Clashes occurred Sunday between security forces and coup plotters resisting arrest nearly 200 miles south of Ankara at Konya Airbase.
Attending a funeral on Sunday for those killed during gunfire, Erdogan said, "It is not anything ordinary that my young brothers lay under tank pellets; this is a manifest of faith."
He also asked his supporters to stay on guard saying, "You should fill the squares. This isn't a 12-hour operation. We will continue determinedly." (ANI)
The world's six wealthiest countries host less than 9 per cent of the world's refugees, a new report issued on Monday said. While the US, China, Japan, Germany, France and UK make up more than half the global economy, in 2015 they only hosted 2.1 million refugees and asylum seekers -- just 8.88 per cent of the world's total, international aid organisation, Oxfam said in its report. Germany took the largest share of refugees among the world's richest countries (around 700,000), with the remaining 1.4 million split between the other five nations, CNN reported citing the report. In sharp contrast, the nations that host more than half of the world's refugees and asylum seekers account for less than 2 per cent of the world's GDP, the report noted. Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa and Palestine collectively host almost 12 million people. "It is shameful so many governments are turning their backs on the suffering of millions of vulnerable people who have fled their homes and are often risking their lives to reach safety," CNN quoted Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, as saying. "Poorer countries are shouldering the duty of protecting refugees when it should be a shared responsibility," she added. According to the UN, the number of displaced people is currently at the highest ever recorded, surpassing even post-Second World War numbers. More than 65 million people -- one out of every 113 people on the planet -- have been forced to flee their homes due to conflict, violence or persecution, a 5.8-million increase on the year before, CNN quoted the UNHCR as saying. --IANS ksk ( 278 Words) 2016-07-18-12:26:02 (IANS)
Leaders and activists of the Free Balochistan Movement (FBM) have started their "Long March" from Germany's Dusseldorf city. Before commencing the march, participants issued an appeal to international media and human rights organisations to take note of the atrocities being committed in Balochistan by the Pakistani authorities. In their appeal, which was read out at the Dusseldorf railway station, the participants said, "We have decided to organise this 'Long March' to highlight the ongoing Pakistani state atrocities and human rights violations in Balochistan. The aim of our march is also to inform the free born people of world that there is a war going on in Balochistan, but the international community and world media mostly either remains unaware of this war, or they are misled by Pakistan state sponsors into believing that everything is fine in Balochistan." The participants said that their objective would be to highlight human rights violations being committed in Balochistan since 1948 when Pakistan occupied what they called "the sovereign state of the Baloch nation". "This march is also aimed at showing the world the other side of the Baloch story that Pakistan and its media tries conceal from the rest of the world," they added. They requested German and other human rights activists to join the march as an expression of support and solidarity with the people of Balochistan. More than 5000 people have been eliminated and over 20,000 people have disappeared from Balochistan in the last 15 years and not a day passes by without Baloch civilians being attacked by the Pakistani soldiers. The participants walked for 30 kilometers from Dusseldorf to Wuppertal on Saturday, chanting slogans and giving out leaflets to the German public. Baloch social media activists took to twitter and Facebook using hashtags #FreeBalochistanMovement #BalochFreedomMarch and #LongMarchForFreedom to share information about Pakistan state brutalities in Balochistan and sought the support of pro-freedom Baloch activists. The Freedom Balochistan Movement is an international campaign group spreading awareness about the situation in Balochistan. It has also set up a Facebook account called www.facebook.com/freebalochistanmovement where they will be sharing regular pictures and videos of the long march. Pro-freedom Baloch leader Hyrbyair Marri had called for this international awareness campaign, saying that the first phase will start from Germany and be followed by similar programmes in other countries. (ANI)
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today named a new cabinet little changed from that with which he narrowly won July 2 elections, eschewing a major reshuffle in favour of consolidating his shaky position.Turnbull just barely scraped together a majority of 76 seats, the minimum needed to avoid relying on support from independents and small parties.Industry Minister Christopher Pyne took on the new role of Minister for Defence Industry, gaining control over one of the world's most valuable defence contracts, a A 50-billion dollar (38-billion dollar) submarine-building project in his state.No ministers lost their jobs, but neither did coalition partner the National Party pick up any critical slots on the frontbench, in a surprise move.Although Turnbull has formed a narrow majority government, his gamble in calling the election backfired badly, with a swing to the centre-left Labor opposition and a rise in the popularity of minor parties and independents.Industry body the Queensland Resources Council praised the appointments of Resources Minister Matt Canavan, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and the shift of former environment minister Greg Hunt to industry, science and innovation."The resources sector requires steady safe hands to ride through the commodities downturn and in the face of a relentless green activist campaign," Chief Executive Michael Roche said in a statement.But Turnbull's narrow margin of victory over Labor leaves him likely to be forced to rely on independents, who won five seats, to ensure the passage of legislation.That raises questions about how effective his government will be in the long term, especially without the support of powerful conservatives.After the election, the Australian government faces even more foreign investment sceptics than before, due to the increased number and prominence of rural-centric Nationals members in the ruling Coalition.Australia this year rejected a A 371-million dollar bid for its biggest farmland holder, Kidman & Co, after Treasurer Scott Morrison ruled the sale was not in the national interest.A source involved in the current negotiations told Reuters that Chinese bidder Hunan Dakang Pasture Farming Co Ltd would not lodge a new bid until it was clear a foreign-controlled offer would be acceptable under the new-look government."Why would they?" said the source, who asked not to be identified over concerns that public comments might hurt the deal. "They don't know what the rules are."Dakang did not respond to requests for comment.Foreign investment of more than A 55 million dollar in agriculture is screened by the Foreign Investment Review Board, on national interest criteria. Australia's treasurer must give final consent for such a transaction to proceed. REUTERS SDR VP1317 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-842043.Xml
Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) said today the reponse to a failed coup attempt must be conducted within the rule of law and that the plotters and those who helped them must be tried in the courts.Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of the failed military coup yesterday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000.In a statement, the CHP also said the military must not be portrayed as the enemy.REUTERS SDR VN1358 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-842118.Xml
US presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he would declare war on ISIS and send "very few" U.S. troops to the Middle East to combat the terrorist group. He made the remarks on Sunday, while speaking in his first interview alongside his new running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, reports the CNN. "We're going to declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS," said Trump. Trump alleged that right now the US doesn't have a good intelligence system in place to combat the terrorist organisation, but, added that he will amend it if chosen president. "I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We're going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don't have. We don't have the people over there," he said. Trump added: "We're going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. We have to wipe out ISIS." Trump tweeted on Sunday, "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 also blamed the rise of ISIS on Hillary Clinton, who was President Barack Obama's secretary of state during his first four years in office. "Hillary Clinton invented ISIS with her stupid policies. She is responsible for ISIS. She led Barack Obama -- because I don't think he knew anything; I think he relied on her," Trump said. (ANI)
Curtains came down on the 33rd Jerusalem Film Festival last night after 11 days of the best of world cinema, but it was the live on stage show of celebrated American director Quentin Tarantino that provided the spark for the cinematic extravaganza this year.Tarantino, who was bestowed the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jerusalem festival this year, came to the holy city with a 35 mm print of his cult film ' Pulp Fiction. And it Tarantino himself, who gave the best introduction to his film, with an hour-long talk on his films and himself."Shalom," Tarantino greeted a packed audience at the Jerusalem Cinematheque venue overlooking the old city at the live show held on the second day of the festival, which began on July 7."I make my films particularly for cinephiles," he said, while admitting he himself was a film fan before a film maker."I am also making the film for myself. If I like it at the end of the day I am happy, because I have to live with it for the rest of my life," he added.Terming himself a "member of the audience", the director of such critically acclaimed works as "Reservoir Dogs', 'Inglourious Basterds' and 'Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2', said he worked for the "subconscious"."It is important to sit in the dark (in a movie hall) and be turned on," Tarantino said.Confessing he doesn't have a specific plan for directing his actors, Tarantino said it was necessary for his actors to know the dialogue "back and forth"."You disrespect me otherwise," he added.He said he look for the moment in his actors when they are not the persons they are. "They know I am paying them to do their job," he joked.A self-confessed opponent of digital cinema, Tarantino said the new digital was for televisions do movies are to be watched in a cinema. "That is why you leave the house."'Pulp Fiction', which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 1994, followed the live on stage programme, with Tarantino joining the Jerusalem festival audience to watch the whole film. More than 200 films were screened during the 11-day festival, run by the Jerusalem Foundation, a nearly half-century-old organisation that works for an open and culturally vibrant Jerusalem. UNI XC RP1705 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-842592.Xml
Any move by Turkey to reinstate the death penalty after the failed military coup would derail its efforts to join the European Union, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Brussels on Monday."Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU," Steinmeier told reporters. He said Germany expected Turkey to deal with those responsible for the attempted coup in line with the rule of law.Turkey decided to abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing Ankara to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then.Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday there could be no delay in using capital punishment after a failed coup attempt, adding the government would discuss it with opposition parties.REUTERS CJ RAI2030 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843308.Xml
The United States and Vietnam signed an agreement on Monday resolving two longstanding World Trade Organization disputes over imports of Vietnamese shrimp to the United States, the US Commerce Department said."The agreement also provides a framework for the settlement of certain U.S. court litigation, as well as the resolution of certain outstanding duty claims covering various administrative reviews of the warmwater shrimp antidumping duty order," the department said in a statement.As a result, Minh Phu Group will no longer be subject to the antidumping duty order, while other Vietnamese exporters of warmwater shrimp will still be affected by the order, it saidREUTERS CJ AE2245 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843467.Xml
Hillary Clinton promised on Monday to bring the "full weight of the law" against people who kill police officers if she becomes the next U.S. president after two recent episodes of gunmen slaying police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate ahead of the Nov. 8 election, made the promise in a speech in Cincinnati at the annual convention of the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored PeopleREUTERS CJ AN2246 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-843474.Xml
NICE, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Yellow flowers are laid next to blood stains on the attack scene at the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, July 16, 2016. The Promenade des Anglais in Nice reopened Saturday after a deadly attack took place here which killed 84 people. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan)
PARIS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- 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 southern city of Nice during France's national day celebrations.
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.
Concerning the questions on the planning and the organization of the Bastille Day firework display in Nice, Valls said, "the investigation will get to the bottom of this. But I do not want unnecessary controversies. The government offices and the city of Nice both planned the Bastille Day celebration, as they did with the Nice Carnival and the UEFA Euro 2016. Three meetings were organized for its preparation."
"64 national police and 42 municipal police officers were deployed for this event, in addition to the normal activities on the rest of the city. If former mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi had the slightest doubt, he could have had the event cancelled. He did not do so," pointed out Valls.
He added: "The Bastille Day terrorist attack is the embodiment of these new operating methods."
"Let me clarify this aspect: right now, it is not possible to tell from the terrorist's background if he was a jihadist. But at the same time, his operating method corresponds point-by-point to the instructions of the Islamic State group: to target a symbolic period (Bastille Day celebration), to cause the largest number of victims, to use any means available (a knife, a car, a truck) to kill innocent people."
Following the Nice attack, three days of national mourning were declared. Meanwhile, the investigation into the attack is going on.
BAGHDAD, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces on Sunday freed three villages from the Islamic State (IS) militants near the city of Heet in Iraq's western province of Anbar, while dozens of the IS militants killed in air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition and Iraq aircraft, security sources said.
The security forces and allied Sunni tribal paramilitary units, backed by international warplanes, managed to liberate three villages in Doulab area in west of the newly-freed city of Heet, some 160 km west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a source from Anbar Operations Command told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The battles resulted in the killing of at least 12 IS militants and the destroying of five vehicles, the source said.
Separately, the U.S.-led coalition aircraft bombarded an IS headquarters in Albu Ali al-Jasim in north of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad, destroying the headquarters and leaving 10 IS militants dead, the source added.
Government troops and allied militias have been fighting for months to reclaim key cities and towns from the IS militants in the province of Anbar, including Ramadi and Fallujah, as militants attempted to approach Baghdad after seizing most of the province.
In northern Iraq, international aircraft carried out air strikes on the IS positions in the IS-held city of Qayyara, some 50 km south of the IS stronghold in Mosul, destroying weapons and explosives caches in a warehouse and killed at least 14 extremist militants, along with destroying nine vehicles, a source from the Iraqi Joint Operations Command told Xinhua.
Meanwhile, the international warplanes hit an IS convoy of vehicles in Hamam al-Alil area in south of Mosul, destroying two IS vehicles and killing eight of its occupants, the source said, adding the warplanes also bombarded a car bomb factory at a village in south of Mosul, killing at least 10 militants.
In addition, Iraqi warplanes conducted air strikes on the IS positions in the IS-held towns of Shirqat and Hatra, killing dozens of IS militants, the source said without giving further details.
The latest air strikes came as the security force are advancing to free the towns of Shirqat and Qayyara are part of a major offensive aimed at liberating the last major IS stronghold in Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad.
Iraq has witnessed intense violence since the IS took control of parts of its northern and western regions in June 2014.
Many blame the current chronic instability, cycle of violence, and the emergence of extremist groups, such as the IS, on the U.S. that invaded and occupied Iraq in March 2003 under the pretext of seeking to destroy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the country.
The war led to the ouster and eventual execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, but no WMD was found.
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Just before the fatal shootings last week of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, blacks in the U.S. were evenly divided over their treatment by police, Gallup has found in a latest poll.
The poll was released as tensions between blacks and police are once again on the rise in the U.S. in the aftermath of the two separate fatal shootings that sparked nationwide protests against racial discrimination against blacks.
A black sniper also killed four white police officers and one Hispanic officer in the city of Dallas, Texas during a protest against police brutality.
The June 7-July 1 poll, conducted before these incidents, found that half of blacks say police in their local area treat blacks and other racial minorities fairly, while 48 percent said they treat blacks unfairly, Gallup found.
Nineteen percent of blacks thought local police treated blacks very unfairly, similar to what Gallup found in 2015, Gallup said.
These results are based on Gallup's Minority Rights and Relations survey. The 2016 poll was conducted by telephone with 3,270 national adults, including large samples of blacks and Hispanics.
Although young black men have been the focal point of recent news stories about police shootings, black women -- along with younger blacks -- are more likely to express criticism of the police than are black men and older blacks.
Fifty-three percent of black women versus 43 percent of black men say local police treat blacks and other minorities unfairly. Similarly, 52 percent of blacks aged 18 to 49 versus 43 percent of blacks 50 and older think police treatment of minorities is unfair, Gallup found.
African Americans' perceptions of how racial minorities are treated by local police are markedly different from the views of Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, according to the poll.
While almost half of blacks believe racial minorities are treated unfairly, only 34 percent of Hispanics and 20 percent of whites agree.
The overall percentage of Americans believing blacks receive worse treatment than whites from the police remains at a record high - 45 percent, up from 43 percent recorded in 2015, Gallup found.
ISTANBUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Clashes erupted on Sunday between Turkish police and the gendarmerie at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport, Turkish media reported.
According to the Milliyet daily, the confrontation arose when the police attempted to detain the commander of the gendarmerie over the coup attempt by some in the military on Friday night.
The gendarmerie section, in charge of security for the international terminal of the airport, has 50 to 60 members, the report said.
In the aftermath of the clashes, the authorities ordered the detention of all the gendarmerie staff, said Milliyet.
CNNTurk reported that the clashes were over with the gendarmerie commander detained by the police.
The management of the airport tweeted that "There is no problem in our terminal, the flights are continuing."
Some 3,000 Turkish officials and troops have been detained over the failed coup, which left at least 161 people dead. Enditem
DHAKA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Bangladeshi government have signed a 275 million U.S. dollars loan agreement for further improving and expanding water supply system in Dhaka.
Mohammad Mejbahuddin, senior secretary of Bangladesh's Economic Relations Division (ERD), and Kazuhiko Higuchi, country director of Bangladesh Resident Mission of ADB, signed the agreements here on Sunday.
Dhaka city is expanding fast, and demand for safe drinking water is rising rapidly,said Kazuhiko Higuchi.This project will help over 7 million people in Dhaka get access to safe, regular, and affordable water services.
Earlier, ADB provided the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) with 400 million U.S. dollars for improving water supply system in Dhaka but physical water losses still needs to be reduced to further improve service delivery in many areas.
According to a statement of the bank, the new ADB assistance under the Dhaka Water Supply Network Improvement Project will be used to rehabilitate water distribution pipelines and set up new district metered areas, with about 5,000 new and legalized connections established in low income communities, and 229,000 connections upgraded for households and communities.
The new project is targeting 24-hour piped water supplies to an additional 6.5 million people in the new district metered areas by 2022, with non revenue water losses cut to below 10 percent from the current approximate rate of around 30 percent, it said.
A range of actions will be taken to boost the capacity of staff to manage and operate the network effectively, including providing training for around 700 staff, with 30 percent of them women, it added.
ADB said assistance will also be given to help the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) prepare an operational and financial improvement plan and to increase public awareness on water conservation.
It said Dhakas demand for water is expected to rise from 2,144 million liters a day in 2015 to around 2,616 million liters a day in 2020, and although the supply authority is taking steps to expand capacity with ADBs help, it will not be enough to meet the projected needs without a substantial cut in ongoing losses.
Climate change, including rising sea levels that could increase salinization of ground and surface water, is also expected to reduce available potable water, it added. Enditem
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 others might be at large. The police are checking the shooting scene with a robot to make sure there are no explosives, according to the local police.
The incident happened around 9:30 a.m. local time and a manhunt was on for the 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.
The shooting happened less than 1 mile from police headquarters.
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. Enditem
AMMAN, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Jordan on Sunday stressed its keenness to boost cooperation with China in the field of media, the state-run Petra news agency reported.
The remarks were made by Minister of State for Media Affairs Mohammad Momani at a meeting in Amman with a delegation from the All-China Journalists Association.
The Jordanian minister said Jordan was keen on increasing ties with China in various areas.
He said China is implementing several mega projects in Jordan in fields of energy and education, adding that the ties between the two countries are strategic and the cooperation in field of media is huge.
The Chinese delegation commended Jordan's experience in the field of media and voiced keenness on increased ties with Jordan.
KIGALI, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- President of the Republic of Chad and rotating African Union chairperson Idriss Deby (4th R, on stage), President of Rwanda Paul Kagame (2nd L, on stage), Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma (4th L, on stage) and Deputy Chairperson of the AUC Erastus Mwencha (1st L, on stage) attend the opening ceremony of the 27th ordinary session of the AU Heads of States, in Kigali, Rwanda, July 17, 2016. African leaders on Sunday gathered at Rwanda's capital Kigali for their biannual meet with the launch of the continent's first-ever African e-passport. A new AU commission will also be elected to replace the one led by Dlamini Zuma since 2012. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)
By Peter Mutai and Zhu Shaobin
KIGALI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- A Senior United Nations official has commended African Heads of States for coming up with a domestic sustainable funding mechanism for the African Union (AU) activities.
Dr. Carlos Lopez, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, observed that the radical decision comes at a time that the continent requires local focus in solving its problems.
"It is important to note that the 15 year old discussions have finally been adopted and all countries are expected to enforce it beginning June next year," Lopez said on Sunday in an exclusive interview with Xinhua on the sidelines of the ongoing 27th AU summit in Kigali, Rwanda.
Late Saturday, the 54 Heads of States approved the taxation of a levy of all eligible goods at a rate of 0.2 percent to help finance the AU activities.
The taxation will avail to the continental body 1.2 billion U.S. dollars per year and will replace the 76 percent of external donor funding.
The taxation will be collected by the member states' revenue authorities and will be deposited in an account that will be opened in all central banks in the continent.
In the 2016 budget, the Heads of States approved 427 million U.S. dollars for the Pan African organization on programs including the peace missions.
Lopez observed that once China's commitment of 60 billion U.S. dollars that was pledged during the Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) conference, Africa will be in better stage of development with better infrastructure, industrialization and information and communication technology.
"China is currently the number one trading partner with Africa and has accomplished tremendous development projects," Lopez said.
He added that the three year time frame for the allocation will help position China well in the continent.
ANKARA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Turkish police launched an operation against coup military at the 3rd Main Jet Base in southern Turkish province of Konya on Sunday, Dogan news agency reported.
Turkish provincial security teams and special operations teams clashed with the coup military who blocked the entrance and exit of the base with buses and trucks.
Pro-government forces got control of the base afterwards and arrested the 3rd Main Jet Base operation commander Mustafa Erturk, together with seven other senior officials and 11 soldiers.
ALGIERS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Algeria on Sunday condemned the coup attempt in Turkey, reiterating its support for Ankara, APS news agency reported.
"My country condemns this coup attempt that violates the established constitutional order and was likely to cause serious damage to peace and stability not only in Turkey, but also to other countries in the region," President Bouteflika said in his message to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to APS.
"I would like to extend to you my sincere condolences for the men and women who sacrificed themselves to defend democracy and the republic institutions," Bouteflika said.
Several Algerian political parties have also condemned this coup attempt, urging the Turkish government, its people and the security forces to stand firm and protect democracy and legitimacy.
Turkey witnessed tense moments on Friday overnight, as a military statement on Turkish media said the armed forces have fully seized power in the country, but President Erdogan said early Saturday the coup attempt failed, urging people to take on streets to protect democracy.
The attempted coup has left at least 290 people dead, half of whom were civilians, Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday. Enditem
BRATISLAVA, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The stability in Turkey is of extraordinary importance for Europe also because of the EU migration crisis, therefore, any attempt at violent overthrow of the Turkish Government must be condemned, announced Slovak parliamentary vice-chair Bela Bugar on Sunday.
"It's necessary to express support to the Government that was formed based on election results, even though we might not agree with all of its actions," stressed Bugar.
It is important to find a way to defuse the situation in Turkey, he said.
"Also in light of a number of controversial measures from recent months that many viewed as having the effect of steering the country towards an authoritarian regime," claimed Bugar.
An army faction attempted to stage a coup on late Friday/early Saturday that was successfully thwarted, according to the Turkish Embassy to Slovakia.
Out of military insurgents, 3,000 individuals were arrested and 100 died during the violent clashes with state forces. Furthermore, 161 civilians lost their lives and some 1,400 were left injured, according to the Turkish embassy.
There are a few thousand Slovak nationals in Turkey at the moment. Foreign and European Affairs Minister Miroslav Lajcak announced that no Slovaks are reported among the injured or missing. Enditem
NAIROBI, July 18, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta speaks during the opening ceremony of the 14th session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 14), in Kenyan capital Nairobi, on June 17, 2016. The 14th session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 14) kicked off in Nairobi on Sunday amid calls from delegates for governments to reduce global economic inequality. (Xinhua/Li Baishun)
NAIROBI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan authorities have beefed up security in Nairobi and its environs as the UN Conference and Development (UNCTAD) began in the city on Sunday.
The thousands of delegates drawn from 194 member countries of UNCTAD are attending the week-long conference on key economic issues including the fall in commodity prices, globalization, economic partnerships and sustainable development.
Leaders including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and over 80 ministers are expected to attend the conference aimed at shaping policy debates to ensure that domestic policies and international actions in trade contribute to sustainable development.
Roads leading to the conference venue have been sealed off as both local and international security officers stationed at strategic locations to vet delegates at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) where the events are taking place.
"We are under firm instructions not to allow any security lapses during the conference. We are here to ensure all bad characters do noT gain access to the meeting venue and ensure all delegates are safe," a police officer told Xinhua in Nairobi.
The police officer said they will be restricting access to vehicles, adding that anyone accredited to attend the conference as a delegate, service provider among others will have to display official badges.
Nairobi traffic police commander Leonard Katana has called on motorists to cooperate with the security officers to ensure free flow of traffic.
"Motorists are urged to comply and obey orders issued to them by traffic police officers at the junctions. Those areas (meeting venues) are out of bounds for vehicles with no official badges for the conference, Katana said.
He said the restrictions on some roads will help to secure the conference that brings together more than 7000 delegates including Heads of State, ministers and business executives meeting to discuss global trade and economic development.
Katana said drivers of heavy commercial vehicles using Nairobi-Mombasa highway will also be diverted to avoid causing snarl-up in the city.
"Heavy commercial vehicle, trailers and articulated vehicles bound for Rift Valley region are advised that they will be diverted at Mombasa Road Southern Bypass to use Southern Bypass to Kikuyu for Nakuru. Similar to those heading towards Mombasa in order to reduce congestion along Uhuru Highway," Katana said.
The quadrennial conference will bring together heads of state and governments, ministers and other high level players from the business world and civil society to discuss global trade and economic development matters.
LONDON, July 11, 2016 (Xinhua) -- File photo taken on June 27, 2016 shows British Home Secretary Theresa May arriving for a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street in London, Britain. (Xinhua/Han Yan)
by Larry Neild
LONDON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Britain's newly installed Prime Minister Theresa May signalled her commitment Sunday to the flagship scheme devised by former Chancellor of the Exchequer to re-balance the north-south divide in England.
George Osborne created the Northern Powerhouse as a strategy to draw together major cities in England's industrial heartlands, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle.
As May continued the task Sunday of assembling her ministerial team, she named Andrew Percy, Conservative MP for Brigg and Goole in Yorkshire as minister to lead on the Northern Powerhouse project.
Percy will carry out his ministerial role within the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
There were fears in the Northern cities that the firing of Osborne by May could threaten the project the chancellor had spearheaded.
The DCLG in London confirmed Sunday that Percy will be the minister responsible for the northern powerhouse under new Secretary of State Sajid Javid.
Percy said: "I've never chased a Ministerial job, I didn't in the last Parliament and I didn't in this one. However, we do live in somewhat bizarre times. I've decided to accept this position and, as a proud Northerner, it is one of the few roles in government I would actually quite relish. I've always championed our area as a backbencher and now I get to champion the North within government."
Downing Street Sunday named nearly 80 MPs and peers from the House of Lords for given jobs, mostly as departmental ministers, as May put the finishing touches to her team.
Her main front bench appointments were announced last week. May's new appointments include five ministers of state to serve in the newly created Department for Exiting the EU and the Department for International Trade, tasked with arranging Britain's "divorce" from Europe, and seeking trade deals with new global partners.
Meanwhile Labour MP Owen Smith Sunday officially launched his bid to become the new leader of the main opposition party, joining Angela Eagle in a challenge to current party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Labour MPs Monday will hear speeches by Eagle and Smith in the hope that one will go forward to challenge Corbyn.
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- President Barack Obama on Sunday condemned the shootings in Baton Rouge in the U.S. state of Louisiana that killed three police officers and injured several others.
Obama said in a statement that there was "no justification" for the violence. "These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one." Enditem
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Sunday strongly condemns the attack on police officers in Baton Rouge that killed three police officers and wounded three others.
"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.
"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," said Obama.
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.
Three police officers were killed, several others injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana.
This is the second serious shooting incident that killed police officers in U.S. 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.
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)
ANKARA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that the failed military coup has left at least 290 people killed.
The death toll includes at least 190 civilians and 100 coup plotters, the statement said, adding that more than 1,400 were wounded in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.
More than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the failed coup, it said.
The statement said it was the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen that staged this coup attempt.
"Our government has been constantly exposing the real motives of this terrorist group and its leader, Fethullah Gulen, to all allies and partners. The foiled coup is the latest criminal act revealing the danger posed by Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization," it said.
ISTANBUL, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chairperson of the 40th session of World Heritage Committee Lale Ulker (L) hosts the meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, on July 17, 2016. The World Heritage Committee recovened its 40th session in Istanbul on Sunday, following one-day suspension over a coup attempt in Turkey. (Xinhua/He Canling)
ISTANBUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The World Heritage Committee on Sunday evening agreed to put 12 new sites on the World Heritage List before ending its 40th session in Istanbul.
Plus nine others already approved on Friday, the session has placed a total of 21 out of 27 nominations for this year on the prestigious list.
With the 21 newly added -- 12 cultural sites, six natural and three mixed ones, the heritage list has now 1,052 sites in 165 countries.
The state of conservation of 155 properties was examined as well during the session, with five in Libya inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger along with one in Uzbekistan and another in Mali.
Meanwhile, one site in Georgia was removed from the list of endangered sites, while the site of Nan Madol, or the Ceremonial Centre of Eastern Micronesia in the Federated States of Micronesia, was simultaneously inscribed on the World Heritage List and on the List in Danger.
The 40th session started on July 10 and was cut short by four days due to the outbreak of a coup attempt in Turkey on Friday night.
The heritage committee, a panel under the UN cultural agency UNESCO, decided to discuss the unfinished items on the agenda at an extraordinary meeting to be held in Paris days later.
The 41st session is slated for July 2017 in Cracow, Poland.
The heritage committee was formed in 1977 to enforce the World Heritage Convention and manage the heritage list created based on the convention.
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) speaks during a memorial service to honor five police officers in Dallas, Texas, July 12, 2016. Barack Obama on Tuesday called on protestors, police and the public to open their hearts and drop their preconceptions to deal with racism and violence in the country. (Xinhua/Xu Xun)
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Americans to avoid making inflammatory rhetoric after the killing of three police officers in the state of Louisiana.
In a speech delivered from the White House on the shooting in Baton Rouge, Obama said that, though divisions exist in the country, everyone should now "focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further."
Three police officers were killed and three others were wounded in a shooting in Baton Rouge Sunday morning. This is the second major incident of police killings that have occurred in the U.S. in the past weeks. On July 7, a black gunman killed five police officers and wounded nine others in a shooting in Dallas, Texas.
The two incidents were preceded by the killings of two black men by police officers, one in Baton Rouge and another in St. Paul, Minnesota. The incidents triggered off widespread black protests against police brutality and racial discrimination in the country.
The motive of the latest police killing remains unclear as investigation is ongoing. The shooter has been identified as Gavin Long, 29-year-old black male from Kansas city, Missouri.
With mind on the upcoming national conventions to be held by the Republican and Democratic parties to select their nominees for this year's presidential race, Obama said that the "political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual."
"We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance the agenda," Obama said.
In light of the latest incidents, gun control and racial tensions are expected to become one of major debate points in this year's U.S. presidential race.
Reacting to the latest shooting, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump blamed it on the "lack of leadership."
"How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order," Trump said.
Trump is expected to be formally announced the Republican presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention to be held from Monday in Cleveland, Ohio.
For her part, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton called the latest police killings as "devastating," adding nothing justifies violence and hate.
"Today's devastating assault on police officers in Baton Rouge is an assault on all of us," Clinton said in a statement.
The Democratic National Convention is to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 25-28.
RIYADH, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Saudi authorities at the request of Ankara detained Turkey's military attache to Kuwait who had been flying through the eastern city of Dammam on Sunday evening, the Saudi-owned TV channel Al Arabiya reported.
The attache, Mikail Gullu, had been en route to Amsterdam, the report said.
Meanwhile, Saudi authorities had followed "with great concern the coup attempt which threatened to destabilize Turkey's security and stability," the state-run press agency SPA quoted a Saudi foreign ministry source as saying.
Turkey's Foreign Ministry said earlier on Sunday in a statement that the failed military coup has left at least 290 people killed.
The death toll includes at least 190 civilians and 100 coup plotters, the statement said, adding that more than 1,400 were wounded in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.
More than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the failed coup, the foreign ministry statement said.
A staff member dusts a machine at a textile company in the Nanxun District of Huzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, Dec. 25, 2014. In order to break out the bottleneck of economic development, a series of technical transformation was launched in traditional manufacturing industry in the Nanxun District of Huzhou in 2014. (Xinhua/Tan Jin)
UNITED NATIONS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present huge opportunities for the business sector and meanwhile asks enterprises to bear more social responsibilities in promoting sustainable development, said Liang Xiaohui, a Chinese expert.
Liang is an analyst with China National Textile and Apparel Council, a national federation of textile-related industries. He has been announced by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as one of ten local SDG Pioneers for his dedication to helping Chinese sectors develop their sustainability initiatives.
In a recent interview with Xinhua, Liang said trillions of dollars will be invested in areas related to SDGs, and those responsible enterprises which can offer means to achieve the goals can benefit from the development trend.
Meanwhile, the implementation of SDGs relies very much on how businesses interpret and integrate SDGs into their business strategies, models and practices, he noted.
The SDGs are 17 goals adopted by UN member states in last September to guide the world's development in next 15 years, which basically redefines how the world works together to end poverty, promote gender equality, and combat climate change.
Liang said SDGs are put forward to tackle the greatest challenges of our age, and are meant to achieve positive and fundamental changes.
"But changes start to happen on the ground and in small places," he noted, highlighting the critical role which can be played by the business sector in promoting social development.
He said enterprises must understand what are the social problems need to be solved under the SDG framework and innovate their business models, products as well as services based on corresponding solutions.
In 2005, Liang started working on China's first industry-based Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative -- a human rights risk-based management system in China's textile industry.
Over the past decade, he has been working to promote CSR to all sectors in China. Nowadays, over 20 Chinese sectors have a standing CSR or sustainability program.
"These happened because pioneering business leaders learned to translate the pressure and expectation from the society or value chain into business practices that deliver social good, as well as new business opportunities," said Liang.
As for sustainable development, what a company can contribute is to well manage the negative impacts it might exert on the environment as well as its employees and customers, he said.
In practice, companies can invest in welfare of the employees, provide them with training programs; they can also develop green and low carbon products and production chains to meet the need of market, he added.
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China says to help developing nations implement UN SDGs
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. Full story
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UNITED NATIONS, July 11 (Xinhua) -- The High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) kicked off here Monday to review the work of countries' efforts to implement the 2030 Agenda and SDGs, UN officials said.
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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) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Americans to avoid making inflammatory rhetoric after the killing of three police officers in the state of Louisiana.
In a speech delivered from the White House on the shooting in Baton Rouge, Obama said that, though divisions exist in the country, everyone should now "focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further."
Three police officers were killed, and three others injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana.
A suspect was shot dead and was later confirmed to be the lone gunman who attacked the policemen after they allegedly acted upon a 911 call, according to the local police.
Police are still investigating the motive of the shooting.
With mind on the upcoming national conventions to be held by the Republican and Democratic parties to select their nominees for this year's presidential race, Obama said that the "political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual."
"We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance the agenda," Obama said.
In light of the latest incidents, gun control and racial tensions are expected to become one of major debate points in this year's U.S. presidential race.
Mayor of Baton Rouge Kip 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."
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.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers have found that while octopuses, squid and other cephalopods are colorblind, their weirdly shaped pupils may allow them to detect color and mimic the colors of their background.
The researchers, a father/son team from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University, believe that the key for cephalopods to be able to see color, just differently from any other animal, is an unusual pupil that allows light to enter the eye through the lens from many directions, rather than just straight into the retina.
The U-shaped, W-shaped or dumbbell-shaped pupil accentuates the chromatic aberration, and may enable cephalopods to judge color by bringing specific wavelengths to a focus on the retina, much the way animals like chameleons judge distance by using relative focus, said UC Berkeley graduate student Alexander Stubbs. They focus these wavelengths by changing the depth of their eyeball, altering the distance between the lens and the retina, and moving the pupil around to change its off-axis location and thus the amount of chromatic blur.
"We propose that these creatures might exploit a ubiquitous source of image degradation in animal eyes, turning a bug into a feature," Stubbs was quoted as saying by a UC Berkeley news release. "While most organisms evolve ways to minimize this effect, the U-shaped pupils of octopus and their squid and cuttlefish relatives actually maximize this imperfection in their visual system while minimizing other sources of image error, blurring their view of the world but in a color-dependent way and opening the possibility for them to obtain color information."
Alexander Stubbs teamed up with his father, Harvard astrophysicist Christopher Stubbs, to develop a computer simulation to model how cephalopod eyes might use this to sense color and published their hypothesis online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The two researchers concluded that a U-shaped pupil like that of squid and cuttlefish would allow the animals to determine the color based on whether or not it was focused on its retina. The dumbbell-shaped pupils of many octopuses work similarly, since they are wrapped around the eyeball in a U shape and produce a similar effect when looking down.
"Their vision is blurry, but the blurriness depends on the color," Stubbs said. "They would be comparatively bad at resolving white objects, which reflect all wavelengths of light. But they could fairly precisely focus on objects that are purer colors, like yellow or blue, which are common on coral reefs and rocks and algae. It seems they pay a steep price for their pupil shape but may be willing to live with reduced visual acuity to maintain chromatically-dependent blurring, and this might allow color vision in these organisms."
"We carried out extensive computer modeling of the optical system of these animals, and were surprised at how strongly image contrast depends on color," said Harvard's Stubbs. "It would be a shame if nature didn't take advantage of this."
Human and other mammalian eyes have round pupils that contract to pinholes to give us sharp vision, with all colors focused on the same spot. But as anyone who's been to the eye doctor knows, dilated pupils not only make everything blurry, but create colorful fringes around objects, what is known as chromatic aberration. This is because the transparent lens of the eye, which in humans changes shape to focus light on the retina, acts like a prism and splits white light into its component colors. The larger the pupillary area through which light enters, the more the colors are spread out. The smaller our pupil, the less the chromatic aberration.
"We believe we have found an elegant mechanism that could allow these cephalopods to determine the color of their surroundings, despite having a single visual pigment in their retina," said the younger Stubbs. "This is an entirely different scheme than the multi-color visual pigments that are common in humans and many other animals. We hope this study will spur additional behavioral experiments by the cephalopod community."
CANBERRA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Australians planning on traveling overseas are being urged to think "very seriously" before heading to Europe, as unrest throughout the continent continues to threaten the safety of tourists in the region.
Following the apparent terror attack in Nice last week, a military-led coup in Turkey has yet again prompted Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to warn Australians traveling overseas to be wary of their surroundings, particularly in tourist 'hot spots.'
Two Australians are still in a French hospital following the attack which killed 84 people in Nice on Bastille Day, and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said it is now a time of global uncertainty, and that no city - no matter how well protected - was safe from terror.
"(The attack) does remind us that no city, no country is immune from terrorist attacks," Bishop told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Monday.
"The Australian government is focused on ensuring that we can do everything we can in our power to keep Australians safe at home and while abroad."
Later, Bishop told the Nine Network that recent attacks, not only in France but at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport and the deadly coup staged in Turkey over the weekend, should prompt many Australians to think "very seriously" about heading to Europe
"These are very challenging times. People need to think very seriously about traveling overseas," Bishop said.
The Foreign Minister said while the attack in Nice appears to be one coordinated by Islamic State (IS), she would wait until local authorities have carried out their investigation before considering changing the travel warning for France.
"We urge Australians to exercise a high degree of caution if they are traveling in France, to take out travel insurance and to listen to the advice of local authorities," Bishop said.
"It took a while for IS to claim responsibility and there were no evident connections between the terror organizations and the truck driver. It's still early days and we await the report from the prosecutor."
Bishop also took the opportunity to warn Australians about traveling to Istanbul and Ankara in Turkey, following the political unrest which erupted into an attempted military coup over the weekend.
Meanwhile David Beirman, adviser to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), said although the government will always give tourists the "worst case analysis", he echoed government sentiments for travelers to take caution in Europe, particularly in crowded tourist hot spots.
"The government's No. 1 priority is the safety of its (citizens overseas)," Beirman told the ABC on Monday.
by Maria Elena Spagnolo
ROME, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Cooperation between Asia and Europe in the last 20 years has enhanced the relations of the two continents in all fields, an Italian expert said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
Nicola Casarini, head of Asia research from the Institute of International affairs in Rome, said Asia and Europe will further their partnership in various areas after the 11th Asian-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit, which was held in Mongolia on July 15-16.
The ASEM meeting, with its agenda ranging from international trade to global economic recovery, infrastructure and migration, has gained good results in its political, economic, social, cultural and educational pillars, the scholar noted.
"Regarding the economic pillar, Asia and Europe have already cooperated in investments and infrastructures" since the biennial summit was initiated 20 years ago, Casarini said.
He explained that "many bilateral trade agreements have been signed. Discussions are ongoing on regional deals."
The scholar said the ASEM primarily serves as a platform for dialogue in terms of the political pillar, where "global problems including security, migration and disarmament are debated."
"Regarding the social, cultural and educational pillar, Asian and European countries have signed agreements in university and business sectors," said Casarini.
Casarini predicted that the cooperation between Asia and Europe would grow especially in the economic sector in the future, adding the EU could play a role in terms of politics, so as to "facilitate dialogue on some issues."
"Nowadays, the European Union (EU)'s interests in Asia are mainly economic," Casarini said, predicting that China, the largest developing country in Asia that has seen remarkable progress in the past 20 years, might become the EU's largest trading partner in the future.
"European countries have economic interests especially in China, our second biggest trading partner currently," he said.
Casarini said that Italy-China ties, among the most prioritized ones in Eurasia, "is one of the best relations because China and Italy collaborate in almost every sector, especially investment."
The scholar said although "Italy and China have different positions" on the EU's rendering of the market economy status to China, the "Chinese investments continue to arrive in Italy and vice versa."
"The recent controversy ... did not affect the Sino-Italian trade relations," he said, noting that the "bilateral economic relations are good."
"The Sino-Italian political cooperation has grown as well. There is also military cooperation, that is positive. Because it allows the two countries to know each other better," said the expert.
In addition, China and Italy cooperate in the university sector, where many projects have been involved in research centers," he added.
LOS ANGELES, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to ramp up in everyday business, with more than three quarters (76 percent) of businesses saying IoT will drive future success, according to a new global study released on July 14.
The mobile operator Vodafone annual IoT Barometer Report, based on 1,096 global interviews with business decision-makers, found that 28 percent of organizations already use IoT and 89 percent of them have increased their use of IoT in the past year because they are seeing the future success and "significant" return on investment of IoT.
Moreover, 63 percent of businesses plan to launch IoT technologies over the next year.
The portion of spending allocated to IoT has now surpassed that of mobile with IoT spending accumulating nearly a quarter (24 percent) of IT budgets.
According to the report, the small IoT projects can perform well, citing as an example one China-based distributor has an IoT project that gathers retail sales data. "This application is small, but the impact has been great," it said.
IoT is a concept in which all tangible objects are connected to the Internet and can identify themselves to other devices in order to exchange necessary data for improved efficiency and convenience.
As IoT moves into the mainstream of business processes, more than half of businesses said they're more concerned about IoT security risks than they were in the past.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- In the case of arbitration unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government, the ragtag arbitral tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration virtually played a madcap role in overstepping the boundaries of international law.
From its establishment, its running process to its personnel structure and the so-called "final award", many loopholes have shown that this temporary body is by no means just or authoritative.
AD HOC TRIBUNAL
After the release of the so-called "final award" in the case of the South China Sea arbitration, some Western media reported that the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) made the ruling, or a U.N.-backed arbitral tribunal issued the award. However, such statements are totally untrue.
The arbitral tribunal for the case of the South China Sea arbitration was actually an ad hoc tribunal set up at the outset of a case and disbanded after the case is closed. It has nothing to do with the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a principal judicial organ of the United Nations (U.N.) founded according to the U.N. Charter.
The ad hoc arbitral tribunal has no direct relationship with the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) either. The only connection between the two is that according to the requirement of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), if parties of the case don't appoint their arbitrators at the ad hoc tribunal, the ITLOS president will appoint the arbitrators.
Neither does the ad hoc arbitral tribunal have direct relationship with the PCA, while the latter only provided revenue and secretariat services to the former.
To sum up, the ad hoc South China Sea arbitral tribunal was neither a permanent arbitration facility, nor a authoritative judicial organ on the international law of the sea. Rather, it is merely a temporary tribunal with temporary arbitration rules.
CARELESS SELECTION OF MEMBERS
Authoritative international judicial bodies all have strict procedures for selecting their members. For instance, judges of ITLOS are voted by a majority of UNCLOS signatory nations. Judges of the ICJ are voted at the U.N. Conference and the U.N. Security Council, and are elected by over half of the attending votes.
The ICJ consists of 15 judges from all continents, and ITLOS has as many as 21 judges.
Quite differently, the arbitrators at the South China Sea arbitral tribunal are appointed, and, there are altogether five of them. It only needs three out of the five arbitrators to give an arbitral award.
What's more, on an important issue like the South China Sea dispute, not only does the tribunal have no arbitrators from Asia, but also the arbitrators lack professional knowledge on the complicated background information on the South China Sea area, making it impossible for them to give objective and independent ruling.
"The representation of the tribunal's members is seriously lacking, causing suspicion to the tribunal's justice," said Kong Lingjie, deputy director at Wuhan University's China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies.
The mastermind of the selection, Shunji Yanai, used to help Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lift the ban on Japan's collective self-defense right and challenge the post-World War II world order. His political leanings rules out the possibility of a fair judgement, and should have been shunned from the case.
"Considering the dispute over the Diaoyu Island between China and Japan, Yanai wasn't be able to keep a basic objective and just attitude," said Wu Shicun, president of China's National Institute for South China Sea Studies.
ARBITRATORS HEAVILY PAID FOR SERVICES
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said at a press conference on Wednesday that the five arbitrators of the South China Sea arbitral tribunal made much money out of the arbitration, paid by the Philippines and maybe others as well.
In judicial practices, an arbitration tribunal is generally set up with agreement of both parties involved who will share the fees for the arbitration.
Yet, the secretariat service for the tribunal once required China and the Philippines three times to pay the fees to keep the tribunal operate. China did not make any payment as it would neither participate in nor accept the arbitration.
In order to keep the arbitration go ahead, the Philippines not only paid its own share but also paid "China's share" in the case. It is learned that the Philippines made an additional payment of 850,000 euros (935,000 U.S. dollars) to the tribunal in April alone.
Some sources concerned revealed that an arbitrator in this case was paid as much as 600 euros (666 dollars) an hour or 4,800 euros (5,330 dollars) an eight-hour workday, and all the expenses related to the arbitration, including travel costs, hotel accommodation and telephone rates, should be paid to them.
According to preliminary estimates, the Philippines has paid a total of over 26 million euros (28.9 million dollars) for the arbitration since it initiated the case in 2013.
Rigoberto Tiglao, a columnist who writes regularly for local English daily newspaper The Manila Times, said in an article on Friday that the Philippines had spent 30 million dollars to hire lawyers for the arbitration, accounting for 0.1 percent of the country's budget for 2015.
The "illegal and ineffective" award of the arbitral tribunal, which was pressed ahead by the former Philippine government led by Benigno S. Aquino III for years, aroused domestic grumbles in the Philippines.
Tiglao said that the United States should reimburse the Philippines for the legal fees and expenses in filing the South China Sea arbitration case against China, as the case gave the United States what it wanted.
It is quite clear that the South China Sea arbitration case had been a political farce "in legal coats" from its very beginning, behind which there was a hidden plot.
WELLINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The New Zealand government said on Monday it had approved the purchase of a new navy tanker from South Korea.
The tanker, costing 493 million NZ dollars (349.63 million U.S. dollars), would support a full range of New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) deployments, including maritime sustainment and humanitarian and disaster relief operations, said Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee.
The vessel would be built by Hyundai Heavy Industries and was expected to be delivered in 2020.
It would replace the 30-year-old HMNZS Endeavour, the NZDF's only tanker which provides fuel to New Zealand navy and partner nations' ships and helicopters, and supplies fuel and fresh water to support land operations overseas.
"This vessel will be significantly larger, will be able to refuel two ships at a time while underway, carry and refuel defense force helicopters, produce and store water, and store and transport bulk goods," Brownlee said in a statement.
Ice-strengthening and "winterization" features would allow it to deliver fuel and other goods to support Scott Base and McMurdo Station, in Antarctica, during summer months once an icebreaker had cleared a path.
"It is important that New Zealand has a significant asset capable of supporting our presence in Antarctica and our interests in the Southern Ocean more generally," said Brownlee.
"It will increase New Zealand's contribution and help further demonstrate our long-term commitment to the Antarctic Joint Logistics Pool with the United States."
The government's Defence White Paper released last month had placed greater emphasis than previous white papers on protection of Southern Ocean resources and supporting New Zealand's civilian presence in Antarctica, he said.
The white paper outlined an overhaul for the military valued at 20 billion NZ dollars (14.17 billion U.S. dollars) over the next 15 years, including plans to replace or enhance existing major capabilities such as the navy's two ANZAC frigates and strategic and tactical airlift capability.
By Ma Yujie, Lin Hao
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua)-- China and the Philippines can set a good example to other Southeast Asian countries in coping with disputes over the South China Sea, if both sides resume bilateral negotiations and aim for pragmatic, positive results, said Dr. Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow with S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University.
Oh made the remarks in an exclusive interview with Xinhua during the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development, which is being held here on Monday.
The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed 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.
An ad hoc tribunal handling the South China Sea arbitration issued its final ruling on July 12, sweepingly siding with Manila's cunningly packaged claims, denying China's long-standing historical rights in the South China Sea and claiming China has no sovereign right on some atolls in the region.
In response, China has reaffirmed its unwavering position of non-acceptance and non-recognition of the award, adding that the South China Sea issue should be solved through bilateral negotiations by relevant parties on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international law, as well as the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).
Unlike its predecessor, the current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has expressed his readiness and willingness to hold bilateral talks with China. He has also said that both countries can work together to jointly develop the South China Sea.
Oh said that both countries expressing their willingness to talks shows that they're not too concerned about the arbitration result, but put more focused on returning to the negotiation table. This in itself is of far more significance than the arbitration, added Oh.
"Bilateral relations between China and the Philippines reached a new low point after Aquino III filed the arbitration, if under such circumstances, the two could resume bilateral negotiations and achieve positive, pragmatic agreements, it would definitely set a good example for other Southeast Asian countries in dealing with disputes over the South China Sea,"Oh said.
Oh went on to say that China and the Philippines, as well as other countries in the region, can work together in areas include fisheries cooperation, anti-terrorism information exchange, joint exploration and development of resources in the South China Sea, as well as disaster relief, which are also in line with the interests and needs of ASEAN countries.
"Countries in the region generally hope to see the South China Sea resources developed in order to assist their economic growth, and China can make use of its own funds and technical advantages, and propose win-win, sustainable development strategies to jointly explore these resources."
"This can help build a deeper and wider friendship with neighboring countries, reaching the ultimate goal of mutual benefits,"the doctor maintained.
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
SEOUL, July 18 (Xinhua) -- South Korea on Monday warned of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s readiness for its fifth nuclear test amid worries about increased activity in its main nuclear test site.
Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told a press briefing that the DPRK appeared to have been in a state of conducting another nuclear test at any time, saying the government is maintaining a full readiness and closely monitoring situations based on a close alliance between South Korea and the United States.
His comments came after Japan's Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday that increased activity has been detected in the DPRK's main Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the country carried out four underground nuclear tests since 2006.
Quoting government sources in Seoul and Tokyo, the Japanese media outlet said the installation of an observatory facility was seen in the test site, raising a possibility for the fifth nuclear test as early as this month.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted multiple government sources as saying on Sunday that lots of trucks and personnel, which hadn't been seen before, started to be spotted in the Punggye-ri test site since July 8 when Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
In response, the DPRK's military threatened to take "physical measures"against THAAD when the deployment site is determined.
After Seoul announced on July 13 that one THAAD battery would be deployed to the Seongju county, some 300 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year, the DPRK's Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement that the THAAD deployment will turn the peninsula into a battlefield between world powers and leave the fate of people in the hands of foreign forces.
Related:
DPRK warns of retaliation against THAAD deployment by U.S, S.Korea
Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, delivers a keynote speech at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The South China Sea issue is a product of contemporary geopolitics amid the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China, Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said on Monday.
Zheng made the remarks in a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development.
He said the United States has made a wrong judgment toward the rise of China, who always understands China based on its own experiences. In fact, China has said it admits and welcomes the U.S. existence in the region, and hopes the United States can play a neutral role on the South China Sea issue.
"If the U.S. can keep its neutral stance, it can play a very good role in promoting China-ASEAN relations. On the contrary, the U.S. chose to strengthen its alliance, which it in turn has been kidnapped by its alliances to some extent," Zheng noted.
Highlighting China and ASEAN countries have established a stable interaction model, Zheng said the U.S. existence in the Asia Pacific region has changed the way China and ASEAN countries get along over the last decades.
With regard to Japan's activeness in the South China Sea arbitration, Zheng said Japan needs to set up its own geopolitical influence, in order to proceed its normalization, and that influence is among the ASEAN countries. That's also why the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has always been active over the South China Sea issue.
Zheng said that China's rise is mainly the rise of economy, and it's hard for China to give up its core national interests such as the South China Sea.
He believed that the South China Sea will largely maintain peaceful as China and the United States in fact maintain a very good relationship.
"The Sino-U.S. relationship is quite different from that between America and the Soviet Union, and the two countries also have no direct geopolitical conflicts," he added.
Related:
Seminar on South China Sea, regional cooperation held in Singapore
SEOUL, July 18 (Xinhua) -- South Korea on Monday warned of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s readiness for its fifth nuclear test amid worries about increased activity in its main nuclear test site.
Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told a press briefing that the DPRK appeared to have been in a state of conducting another nuclear test at any time, saying the government is maintaining a full readiness and closely monitoring situations based on a close alliance between South Korea and the United States.
His comments came after Japan's Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday that increased activity has been detected in the DPRK's main Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the country carried out four underground nuclear tests since 2006.
The latest came in January this year when the DPRK claimed it detonated its first hydrogen bomb, causing the toughest-ever UN Security Council resolutions in response to the nuclear detonation as well as the launch in February of a long-range rocket, which was condemned as a disguised test of ballistic missile technology.
Quoting government sources in Seoul and Tokyo, the Japanese media outlet said the installation of an observatory facility was seen in the test site, raising a possibility for the fifth nuclear test as early as this month.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted multiple government sources as saying on Sunday that the move of a lot of trucks and personnel, which hadn't been seen before, started to be spotted in the Punggye-ri test site since July 8 when Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
The sources were quoted as saying that the DPRK's activities seen over the past week in the Punggye-ri test site have been the most brisk in recent months.
The DPRK's military threatened to take "physical measures" against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
After Seoul announced on July 13 that one THAAD battery would be deployed to the Seongju county, some 300 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year, the DPRK's Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement that the THAAD deployment will turn the peninsula into a battlefield between world powers and leave the fate of people in the hands of foreign forces.
China and Russia strongly expressed objection to and dissatisfaction with THAAD in South Korea as its X-band radar can spot Chinese and Russian territories. Seoul has claimed that it would adopt the terminal mode radar with a detectable range of 600-800 km, but it can be converted at any time into a forward-based mode which spots missiles as far as 2,000 km.
Furthermore, the THAAD deployment indicates South Korea becoming a part of the U.S. missile defense program, the core of the U.S. Pivot-to-Asia strategy.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Japan's meddling in the South China Sea is simply a tactic of distraction, hoping to tie China down so that its island disputes with Beijing in the East China Sea will be downplayed, experts attending the World Peace Forum (WPF) said here on Saturday.
Tokyo's tricks will not pay off, said the experts, adding that the only way for Japan to improve its relations with China starts with making no new troubles.
Speaking at a WPF panel session, Gao Hong, deputy director of the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said Japan is making a serious mistake.
He said the South China Sea and the East China Sea are closely related in a way that when tensions in South China Sea heat up, the East China Sea issue will be more arrestive.
"I personally believe that the easing of tensions in the South China Sea would not reduce the tensions in the East China Sea," he added.
Citing historical and military reasons, Gao also believed that neither side wants to compromise when it comes to sovereignty, thus both are facing a security dilemma.
Also at the panel, Bonji Ohara, an analyst in the National Defense Academy of Japan, said the talk of "territorial disputes will surely bring Japan and China back to war" is only being instigated by a handful of Japan's right-wing forces, while the general public are more concerned about their own lives, instead of the disputes in the South China Sea.
Ohara urged both sides to learn more about each other and try their best to remove misunderstandings, and especially, to enhance communication over the East China Sea issue.
"The East China Sea issue is not a new topic, but it still triggers small scrambles," he said. "So we must set up the Maritime and Air Communication Mechanism."
Nobuhiro Aizawa, an associate professor at Kyushu University who echoed Ohara's remarks, also urged the two countries to clear the air and to better work with each other.
"Both Japan and China need to cooperate with other countries to develop their own economies. Cooperation is a driving force behind economic development," he said.
"So confrontations or tensions between the two would only bring failed cooperation and affect the economy," he said.
Offering his opinion on how to improve China-Japan relations, Chen Jian, a former Chinese ambassador to Tokyo, said Japan should not create new differences between the two sides.
"We have already had differences over the Diaoyu Islands, so the South China Sea issue should not become a new flashpoint," he said.
On Friday in a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the sidelines of the ongoing 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told his Japanese counterpart that Japan should "exercise caution in its own words and deeds, and stop hyping up and interfering in the South China Sea issue.
The Chinese premier called on both sides to step up exchanges on the East China Sea issue via dialogue and consultation based on the four-point principled agreement they reached in November 2014, so as to stave off misinterpretation and miscalculation.
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Up to 16 Taliban militants were killed and six others injured in separate air strikes in Sangin and Marja districts of the southern Helmand province on Sunday, spokesman for provincial government Omar Zawak said Monday.
According to Zawak, 10 Taliban insurgents had been killed in Sangin district and six others injured as the aircraft pounded Taliban hideouts.
Six more Taliban fighters were killed after the aircraft targeted their positions in Marja district on Sunday morning.
Taliban militants who have been fighting the government forces over the past couple of years are yet to make comment on the situation in the districts.
by Bao Xuelin, Ma Yujie
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Former minister of China's State Council Information Office Zhao Qizheng stated unequivocally that going back to negotiations is the only way forward for the settlement of disputes in the South China Sea and that an arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration will not impede the progress of China-ASEAN cooperation.
Zhao made the remarks during a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore on Monday.
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and countries in the region, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
The seminar focused on three main topics, namely settlement mechanism of maritime disputes, solutions to the disputes of the South China Sea, as well as South China Sea and regional cooperation and development.
ARBITRATION "POLITICAL FARCE"
Zhao reiterated China's unwavering position of non-acceptance and non-recognition of the ruling issued by the ad hoc tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration.
"The so-called arbitration was a downright political farce under the pretext of law. It contained serious errors in issues concerning procedure, application of laws, and admission of evidence," Zhao said in his keynote speech.
Zhao added that the ad hoc tribunal handling the South China Sea Arbitration violated the principle that arbitration shall be based on state consent, China's right to choose its own means of dispute settlement, and a bilateral agreement already reached between the Philippines and China, and repeatedly reaffirmed over the years.
He reiterated that the only way to resolve complicated disputes in the South China Sea is through bilateral negotiations and consultations.
The expert on the matter also pointed out that the so-called arbitration also violated the commitment made by the Philippines in the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), to resolve relevant disputes through negotiations and consultations.
BACK TO NEGOTIATING TABLE
In his keynote speech, Zhao went on to explain that China's position on its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interest in the South China Sea is consistent and clear.
"Going back to negotiations is the only way to move forward with disputes in the South China Sea," said Zhao, "China will stick to the dual-track approach, meaning relevant disputes should be settled properly through negotiations and consultations by states directly concerned, and China and the ASEAN countries should work together to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea."
In the wake of the so-called award, Zhao mentioned he has noticed reports that some Philippine people are calling for dialogue and economic cooperation with China, and President Rodrigo Duterte will send delegates to China to talk about the South China Sea issue.
"We sincerely hope that negotiations will be resumed soon, and then China-Philippine relations will be back on track," said Zhao.
PRIORITY ON COOPERATION
The former minister also made some remarks on China-ASEAN relations in his speech, stating that communication and cooperation between China and ASEAN member states has never ceased and have brought great benefits to all countries despite some difficulties.
Zhao said that it is beyond doubt that China-ASEAN cooperation helps maintaining regional peace and stability, and that keeping such developmental momentum is in the best interests of all.
"In view of the current situation, China-ASEAN should overcome interferences and place our priority on cooperation. Strategically speaking, this is the most realistic solution," said Zhao.
Zhao stressed that the disputes in the South China Sea are only a problem between China and some of the ASEAN member states, not all of them. The so-called arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquinio III administration will not undermine the strategic partnership between China and ASEAN, and it will not impede the progress of China-ASEAN cooperation either, he maintained.
Since China and ASEAN established an overall dialogue framework in 1991, the two sides have achieved an deepening cooperation in politics and security, robust cooperation in economics and trade, and made significant headway in people-to-people exchanges.
Based on such progress, Zhao believed that the potential for China-ASEAN cooperation in the South China Sea will be tapped gradually.
"Through extensive cooperation, the two sides will achieve mutually beneficial, win-win outcomes, and the South China Sea will become a sea of peace, cooperation and friendship," said Zhao.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of China-ASEAN Dialogue and Relations. In September, a summit will be held in Vientiane in Laos to celebrate this great event. Zhao said China can take this opportunity to further promote China-ASEAN relations.
SYDNEY, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Japanese shipping company Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha faces a possible 10-million-Australian-dollar fine after pleading guilty to allegations of criminal cartel practices in Australia on Monday brought by the nation's consumer watchdog.
Japan's Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK) have the honour of becoming the first successful prosecution by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) for alleged cartel behaviour after the regulator was given expanded power in 2009.
"This is the first criminal charge laid against a corporation under the criminal cartel provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act," Sims said in a statement on Monday after NYK pleaded guilty in Australia's Federal Court.
"This matter relates to alleged cartel conduct in connection with the transportation of vehicles, including cars, trucks, and buses, to Australia between July 2009 and September 2012."
For their actions, NYK faces the greater of either a 10-million-Australian-dollar (7.59-million-U.S.-dollar) fine, three times the financial benefit obtained from their behaviour or 10 percent of their total turnover on Australian shores.
The ACCC hasn't ruled out further charges to cartel participants as investigations are ongoing.
The global freight has been prosecuted in other jurisdictions, including in Japan and the United States for cartel behaviour over car transport.
WELLINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A carbon tax targeting emissions-intensive industries and a revamp of New Zealand's much criticized emissions trading scheme (ETS) could boost economic growth, according to a study out Monday.
A signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, New Zealand is committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and by half by mid-century, but the country's emissions were up 21 percent from 1990 levels in 2013.
Currently, the ETS was the main economic tool to lower carbon emissions, with industries buying carbon credits according to their emissions levels, said University of Auckland researcher Sina Mashinchi, who worked on the study with economics researchers from Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom.
But the ETS had been criticized for its "lenient application" and trade in "junk" credits from eastern Europe, while agriculture, which was responsible for half of New Zealand's emissions, was entirely exempt from the scheme.
Even if the price of carbon credits was raised from the current 17 NZ dollars (12 U.S. dollars) per ton to 300 NZ dollars (213 U.S. dollars), the country would still fail to achieve the 2050 target with the ETS alone, Mashinchi said in a statement.
Mashinchi said that if the price of carbon credits rose to 75 NZ dollars (53 U.S. dollars) now and by 20 NZ dollars (14 U.S. dollars) a year thereafter, and a carbon tax for non-ETS sectors was introduced at the same levels, the government could use the extra tax take to lower its general consumption tax from 15 percent to 12.5 percent.
That would stimulate the economy, encouraging investment in new technologies, energy efficiency and public transport, which would create jobs and raise gross domestic product (GDP) by an average 2.2 percent per year, while emissions would fall 14.2 percent from current levels in 2030.
"This still falls short of our Kyoto target, but it's a lot better than emissions going up," said Mashinchi.
"Environmental tax reform" (ETR) had been tried in various forms in places such as the UK, Germany, and Scandinavian countries.
The research was more evidence of the need for much stronger action to reduce climate pollution, "not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it means a stronger, cleaner economy, with better jobs," James Shaw, co-leader of the opposition Green Party, said in a statement.
"The government continues to protect polluting businesses, delaying the shift to a cleaner economy, by capping pollution charges at an artificially low price of 25 NZ dollars (18 U.S. dollars) per ton of emissions."
The New Zealand government has been widely criticized for having no comprehensive plan to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions.
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Five people including four insurgents and a local police have been killed as Taliban militants attacked the headquarters of Qala-e-Zal district in the northern Kunduz province Monday morning, local police official Mohammad Nabi said.
"Taliban rebels launched a major offensive to capture district headquarters of Qala-e-Zal in the morning and so far, four insurgents and a local police personnel have been killed," Nabi told Xinhua.
He also warned that any delay in sending reinforcement would enable Taliban to overrun the beleaguered district.
Confirming Taliban offensive on Qala-e-Zal district, district governor Mahboubullah Sayedi told Xinhua that he has informed the central government about the fragility of the situation and reinforcement would soon arrive in the district to dislodge the attacking militants.
Taliban militants who briefly captured Kunduz provincial capital the Kunduz city in September last year, are yet to make comment on the situation in Qala-e-Zal district.
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. space firm SpaceX on Monday launched supplies to the International Space Station, including a crucial docking port for future American commercial crew vehicles, and will also try a rocket landing on solid ground.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft lifted off on the company's Falcon 9 rocket at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) on time from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Among the cargo is the first of two international docking adapters, which will allow U.S. commercial spacecraft to dock to the station while transporting American astronauts in the near future.
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. on Sunday resumed flight operations from a Turkish airbase to launch airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) after Turkey reopened its airspace closed in the wake of a failed coup attempt.
Speaking to reporters aboard his plane after a visit to Afghanistan, Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the reopening of the Incirlik Air Base in southwestern Turkey.
"We resumed flight operations today, and airspace is opened back up -- business as usual," Dunford told Pentagon reporters, adding there are no plans to change the U.S. force posture in Turkey.
"Our relationship with Turkey as a NATO ally is broad -- politically, economically and from a security perspective," he said.
In terms of urgency, the United States is most concerned about the counter-IS fight and its partnership with Turkey in the fight, Dunford said.
The border area between Turkey and Syria is critical, as foreign fighters and money flow across the border, the general noted.
"The Turkish-Syrian border is important to isolate the battlefield in Syria," he said, "and so we're watching that pretty closely, too."
Dunford expressed relief that Turkey "bounced back pretty quickly" in the first 24 hours in terms of facilitating operations in Syria.
Turkey closed the airspace of the Incirlik Air Base and cut commercial power supply to it following Friday's military coup attempt, in which at least 290 people, including 190 civilians, were killed.
The coup attempt appears to have further strained Ankara's ties with Washington, as Turkey accused a U.S.-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, of plotting the coup, while demanding Gulen's extradition by the U.S. government.
Speaking in Luxembourg Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would consider Turkey's request for Gulen's extradition on condition that Turkey proves the cleric's wrongdoing.
Turkey and the United States are NATO allies in fighting terrorism, but their relations had already become tricky before the coup attempt after Turkey tried to repair its relationship with Russia, by offering an apology to Moscow for shooting down a Russian warplane last year.
Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, speaks at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua Photo by Then Chih Wey)
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Former minister of China's State Council Information Office Zhao Qizheng stated unequivocally that going back to negotiations is the only way forward for the settlement of disputes in the South China Sea and that an arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration will not impede the progress of China-ASEAN cooperation.
Zhao made the remarks during a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore on Monday.
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and countries in the region, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
The seminar focused on three main topics, namely settlement mechanism of maritime disputes, solutions to the disputes of the South China Sea, as well as South China Sea and regional cooperation and development.
ARBITRATION "POLITICAL FARCE"
Zhao reiterated China's unwavering position of non-acceptance and non-recognition of the ruling issued by the ad hoc tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration.
"The so-called arbitration was a downright political farce under the pretext of law. It contained serious errors in issues concerning procedure, application of laws, and admission of evidence," Zhao said in his keynote speech.
Zhao added that the ad hoc tribunal handling the South China Sea Arbitration violated the principle that arbitration shall be based on state consent, China's right to choose its own means of dispute settlement, and a bilateral agreement already reached between the Philippines and China, and repeatedly reaffirmed over the years.
Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, speaks at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua Photo by Then Chih Wey)
He reiterated that the only way to resolve complicated disputes in the South China Sea is through bilateral negotiations and consultations.
The expert on the matter also pointed out that the so-called arbitration also violated the commitment made by the Philippines in the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), to resolve relevant disputes through negotiations and consultations.
BACK TO NEGOTIATING TABLE
In his keynote speech, Zhao went on to explain that China's position on its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interest in the South China Sea is consistent and clear.
"Going back to negotiations is the only way to move forward with disputes in the South China Sea," said Zhao, "China will stick to the dual-track approach, meaning relevant disputes should be settled properly through negotiations and consultations by states directly concerned, and China and the ASEAN countries should work together to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea."
In the wake of the so-called award, Zhao mentioned he has noticed reports that some Philippine people are calling for dialogue and economic cooperation with China, and President Rodrigo Duterte will send delegates to China to talk about the South China Sea issue.
"We sincerely hope that negotiations will be resumed soon, and then China-Philippine relations will be back on track," said Zhao.
PRIORITY ON COOPERATION
The former minister also made some remarks on China-ASEAN relations in his speech, stating that communication and cooperation between China and ASEAN member states has never ceased and have brought great benefits to all countries despite some difficulties.
Zhao said that it is beyond doubt that China-ASEAN cooperation helps maintaining regional peace and stability, and that keeping such developmental momentum is in the best interests of all.
"In view of the current situation, China-ASEAN should overcome interferences and place our priority on cooperation. Strategically speaking, this is the most realistic solution," said Zhao.
Delegates pose for a group photo at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua Photo by Then Chih Wey)
Zhao stressed that the disputes in the South China Sea are only a problem between China and some of the ASEAN member states, not all of them. The so-called arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquinio III administration will not undermine the strategic partnership between China and ASEAN, and it will not impede the progress of China-ASEAN cooperation either, he maintained.
Since China and ASEAN established an overall dialogue framework in 1991, the two sides have achieved an deepening cooperation in politics and security, robust cooperation in economics and trade, and made significant headway in people-to-people exchanges.
Based on such progress, Zhao believed that the potential for China-ASEAN cooperation in the South China Sea will be tapped gradually.
"Through extensive cooperation, the two sides will achieve mutually beneficial, win-win outcomes, and the South China Sea will become a sea of peace, cooperation and friendship," said Zhao.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of China-ASEAN Dialogue and Relations. In September, a summit will be held in Vientiane in Laos to celebrate this great event. Zhao said China can take this opportunity to further promote China-ASEAN relations.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The United States should stop meddling in the South China Sea issue to keep its relations with China on the right track, experts have said.
Widely deemed as one of the most important relationships in the world, the China-U.S. ties have recently been overshadowed by the South China Sea issue, in which the United States is not a direct party, experts said here during a two-day international security forum that ended Sunday.
The World Peace Forum, an annual event that groups hundreds of political figures, scholars, experts and journalists from across the world to discuss major security issues, was co-organized by Tsinghua University and the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs.
"The U.S. flexing of military muscles in the South China Sea has deeply hurt the Chinese people," said Chen Xiaogong, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.
Last month, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers in seas east of the Philippines and started monitoring the South China Sea with guided-missile destroyers, a few days before a law-abusing ad hoc tribunal issued an ill-founded award on the South China Sea arbitration case, unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government.
U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed China to accept the award sweepingly siding with the Philippines and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
The award was excessive in its vitriol towards China's presence in the South China Sea, said Chen, who just concluded a tour to the United States, adding that it seems as if Washington had already known the results of the arbitration before the award was issued on July 12.
Meanwhile, he said, although quite a hotspot in recent media coverage, the South China Sea issue simply cannot represent the overall relationship between China and the United States, whose significance has stretched out the realm of bilateral ties.
With critical issues on the agenda such as global economic growth and climate change, it is a collective responsibility for both China and the United States to properly manage their relations, he noted.
Yuan Peng, vice president of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that despite the two countries' continued cooperation in such areas as economy and diplomacy, the South China Sea issue has garnered most attention of the public and media.
Echoing Chen, Yuan called on China and the United States to properly handle the issue.
"The ball is not in our court," he said, adding that the United States should "show sincerity" by not sitting behind the absurd arbitral farce of the South China Sea.
Foreign experts attending the the forum, themed "the Order of Common Security: Cooperation, Inclusiveness, and Open-access," also agreed on the urgency and significance of properly managing the China-U.S. ties.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Robert Carr, who is now leading an Australian thinktank, said at a panel dedicated to the South China Sea issue that the United States should not view the topic as a matter of competition for leadership, dominance and primacy against China.
Even if the United States tries to maintain its allies within the region, he said, defining the South China Sea issue as a matter of competition would generate more conflicts with China.
Related:
U.S. atlas published in 1994 shows South China Sea islands part of Chinese territory
NEW YORK, July 8 (Xinhua) -- An atlas published in 1994 by a renowned U.S. map publisher clearly illustrated that Huangyan Dao and other key islands involved in the South China Sea dispute are part of China's territory.
The 1994 revised edition of the Illustrated Atlas of The World, published by the Chicago-based Rand McNally, clearly shows that Huangyan Dao, Nansha Islands and Xisha Islands fall under China's jurisdiction, Chia-Chi Tsui, a retired Chinese-American professor, told Xinhua on Friday. Full story
China-U.S. relations shouldn't be hijacked by South China Sea issue: Chinese ambassador
WASHINGTON, June 1 (Xinhua) -- The China-U.S. relations are too important that they should not be allowed to be hijacked by the South China Sea issue, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai said Wednesday.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of China (CPC) has published an internal regulation that holds Party officials accountable for poor leadership.
The regulation consolidates the foundation for the CPC to run the Party strictly and sends a strong signal that officials should be accountable for their work.
The new regulation has introduced an internal Party accountability mechanism to be applied across all levels and divisions.
It targets leaders of Party committees and discipline inspection committees at various levels, and holds them responsible for serious consequences caused by negligence or poor performance.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress in late 2012, officials have been held responsible in a series of corruption cases all over the country. Even though in many cases the officials were not directly involved, they were still held accountable for their subordinates' action.
The accountability mechanism has become a powerful tool in Party governance since the 18th CPC National Congress. More than 45,000 Party members and officials have already been held accountable.
However, the mechanism is not perfect. There are 119 documents involving accountability measures among over 500 Party regulations, which mostly focus on accidents and incidents, with few concentrating on poor management.
The new regulation sums up the existing rules and clarifies the subjects, situations and punishments in the accountability mechanism.
For instance, officials and organizations are accountable for failing to implement Party guidelines and policies and discipline subordinates. If corruption is discovered in an official's department, the official will be held responsible, regardless of his or her personal involvement or knowledge.
The accountability rules crystalize the CPC constitution and continue to tighten the cage of regulations to run the Party strictly. With the new rules, Party management will become more effective.
Related:
China to hold Party officials accountable for poor leadership
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of China (CPC) on Sunday published a regulation that holds Party officials accountable for poor leadership.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The recent police-related violence in the United States has unveiled the hard-healing wounds of American society -- racial inequality and violent policing.
VIOLENCE MET BY VIOLENCE
In Baton Rouge, the capital city of the southern state of Louisiana, an ex-Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition killed three police officers and injured another three on Sunday morning, less than two weeks after a black man was killed by the city's police.
The suspect, identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, 29, was shot dead at the scene.
Long was confirmed to be the lone gunman, who attacked the policemen at a gas station along a highway near the local police headquarters after they allegedly acted upon a 911 call, according to the local police.
Police are still investigating the motive of the shooting. It is not known whether the shooting is linked to anger at the police killings of two black men -- Alton Sterling, 37, in Baton Rouge on July 5, and Philando Castile, 32, near St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 6.
Thousands of people have protested Sterling's death, and Baton Rouge police arrested more than 200 demonstrators.
Sunday's shooting is also the second serious shooting incident that killed police officers after a black former U.S. soldier killed five police officers in a peaceful protest on July 7 in Dallas denouncing the Sterling and Castile slayings.
In a speech delivered from the White House on the shooting in Baton Rouge, U.S. President Barack Obama said that, though divisions exist in the country, everyone should now "focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further."
Mayor of Baton Rouge, Kip Holden, described the shooting as "a nightmare" all over again in the city.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards also condemned the shooting, saying in a statement that the shooting was "an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing."
HARD-HEALING SOCIAL WOUNDS
The shootings have escalated the tensions between the black community and police in the United States, where nationwide protests have mounted since a black teenager was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
In Baton Rouge, where more than half of the residents are black and racial problems date back to decades ago, tensions between police and the community especially the black community have long existed before Sterling's death.
Minorities are "very wary of police and often afraid of them," Michele Fournet, a Baton Rouge criminal defense lawyer, was quoted by Reuters as saying.
In recent years, local activists 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.
Local residents said law enforcement officers would have known that Sterling, who had peddled CDs for years, was not a threat if they were more familiar with the area.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters that community policing was the best way to deter crime and protect officers.
UPCOMING CONVENTIONS
Amid national tensions over racial inequality and gun violence, security concerns have heightened across the country, notably in Cleveland and Philadelphia, hosts to this week's Republican National Convention and next week's Democratic National Convention.
The conventions are expected to formally nominate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the Nov. 8 election.
A Cleveland police officer, in an interview with Reuters, 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.
A spokesperson for Kasich said the governor did not have the power to suspend the open-carry law.
Gun control and racial tensions are expected to become one of the major debate points in this year's U.S. presidential race.
"We demand law and order," Trump said in a Facebook posting on Sunday afternoon.
Clinton, in a statement, urged Americans to "stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities."
With mind on the upcoming national conventions, Obama said in his speech on the Baton Rouge shooting that the "political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual."
"We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance the agenda," Obama said.
Related:
Three police officers, one suspect killed in Baton Rouge shooting
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. Full story
Obama calls for avoiding inflammatory rhetoric after police killing incident
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Americans to avoid making inflammatory rhetoric after the killing of three police officers in the state of Louisiana.
SEOUL, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Villagers living near a site in South Korea where one Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery will be deployed have voiced stronger opposition to the installation of the U.S. missile defense system in their hometown.
Right after Seoul's defense ministry said last Wednesday that one THAAD battery will be deployed to the Seongju county, some 300 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year, more than 200 villagers including the county head rode buses to get to the defense ministry's headquarters in the capital city.
The villagers wore a red band around heads or shoulders that read "Absolute Objection to THAAD," demonstrating in a building beside the defense ministry's headquarters against the decision to deploy the U.S. interceptors and hazardous radar without any prior notice and discussion.
The THAAD's X-band radar is known to emit super-strong microwave detrimental to human body. It can also cause an environment hazard, boosting worries among villagers about the oriental melon farming, the economic mainstay of the Seongju county. Villagers returned home almost at midnight after the seven-hour protest.
The next day, President Park Geun-hye told government officials to make efforts to appease concerns among villagers, saying it is time to stop needless squabbling over THAAD. Later in the day, she left for Mongolia to attend the ASEM summit and her first state-visit to the country.
Despite her comments, protests continued. Twelve villagers, including the county head, resumed hunger strikes, while five hog and bee farmers had their hairs shaved to protest against THAAD. Civic groups rallied nationwide, demanding the immediate scrapping of the THAAD deployment decision.
About 30 civic organizations in North Gyeongsang province held a rally in front of the ruling Saenuri Party's headquarters in the region, saying the unilateral decision cannot be tolerated and that there is no optimal site for THAAD in South Korea, according to Yonhap News Agency. The region is a political home turf for the ruling party and President Park.
Fury among villagers peaked on Friday when angry protesters threw water bottles and eggs at Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn and Defense Minister Han Min-koo who visited the Seongju county to appease residents. Some shouted and another hurled abuses, while others violently tussled with security guards, according to TV footage.
The prime minister and other accompanying government officials were trapped for six and a half hours in a bus surrounded by about 3,000 villagers. The bus, in which Hwang sheltered, was made dirty by pelted eggs. The entrance to a parking lot was blocked by two tractors, driven by protesters.
On Saturday, police formed a dedicated team to investigate into residents involved in violence to block the prime minister from escaping from the Seongju county, according to local media reports. Protesters involved in the violence can reportedly serve jail term.
Over the weekend, civic groups held rallies in central Seoul to demonstrate against the THAAD deployment. On the other side, some conservative activists rallied to favor the deployment for national security. Violent conflicts between them didn't happen during their coincident rallies.
Despite strong regional objections, there are more South Koreans in favor of the THAAD deployment than those against it due mainly to misunderstandings about the U.S. missile defense system.
According to a Gallup Korea poll of 1,004 adults conducted between Tuesday and Thursday last week, 50 percent favored the deployment while 32 percent was against it. The remaining abstained from replying.
U.S. interceptors cannot shoot down short-range missiles from the DPRK as THAAD is designed to intercept at an altitude of 40-150 km using a hit-to-kill approach, sadi experts. There is no reason for the DPRK to attack South Korea with a long-range missile that takes much longer to reach targets and are vulnerable to interceptions.
THAAD, if deployed in the Seongju county, cannot cover Seoul and its surrounding metropolitan area given its maximum range of 200km. The DPRK's submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) can be fired away from the THAAD radar's detectable angle in times of emergency, confirming concerns that THAAD is not a cure-all.
The THAAD battery deployed in Guam is scheduled to be disclosed to South Korean journalists on Monday to help South Korea's government appease public worries about the hazardous radar, according to local news report.
However, the disclosure is not expected to ease concerns here as the radar in Guam faces no residential area some 3 km from the site and faces toward the sea in contrast to the radar in South Korea that will face a densely populated region some 1.5 km away.
Related:
News Analysis: South Korean gov't exploits THAAD deployment to draw public attention on security threats
By Yoo Seungki
SEOUL, July 14 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's decision to comply with the U.S. Pivot-to-Asia strategy by deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system may help the government draw public attention on security threats, experts here said.
"The Park Geun-hye government may have approached the THAAD issue in consideration of the lame duck period," said Kim Yong Hyun, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University. Full story
China urges halt of THAAD deployment in ROK
BEIJING, July 13 (Xinhua) -- China on Wednesday urged the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK) to halt the the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system in the ROK.
Earlier in the day, the ROK's defense ministry announced an agreement with the United States to deploy the U.S. missile defense system, called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), to its southeastern region despite continued opposition from neighboring countries. Full story
News Analysis: S.Korea to enter U.S. missile defense network with THAAD deployment
SEOUL, July 13 (Xinhua) -- Experts here voiced serious concern about South Korea entering a U.S. missile defense network by deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to its soil, boosting expectations for escalating regional tensions and arms race amid strong oppositions from neighboring countries.
ISTANBUL, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Uncertainties remain in Turkey in the wake of the failed military coup on Friday, though the Turkish parliament said Sunday that the country's security order has "returned to normal".
In a statement sent to Xinhua, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) praised "the united stance and language of all political party groups at the Parliament in countering this attempt," vowing to "make those who have attacked the nation and its sovereignty to pay a heavy price."
"As of 16th July 2016, life has returned to normal," the statement said, adding "nothing in Turkey will be as it has been in the past."
IN TURKEY: DEATH, DETAINMENT AND CLASHES
In the statement, the GNAT said the Turkish people "have foiled the coup attempt by taking to the streets and standing against the tanks of gang of coup plotters," adding the plotters' attempts to take control of national and private media have also "been quickly disrupted."
Turkey's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that the coup has left at least 290 people killed and around 1,400 wounded.
The death toll includes at least 161 civilians and 100 coup plotters, and over 6,000 have been detained due to their involvement in the failed coup attempt which the government said was staged by Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen.
The GNAT said some 3,000 plotters have been arrested and over 100 of them were "neutralized."
Meanwhile, clashes reportedly erupted on Sunday between Turkish police and the gendarmerie at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport.
According to the Milliyet daily newspaper, the confrontation occurred when the police tried to detain the commander of the gendarmerie over the coup.
The gendarmerie section, in charge of security for the international terminal of the airport, has 50 to 60 members, the report said.
In the aftermath of the clashes, the police detained all the gendarmerie staff, including the commander.
Among the detained people were top army commanders, judges and prosecutors, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to stamp out the "virus" of the putschists within state bodies, according to the state-run news agency Anadolu.
Erdogan even said Sunday that Turkey would now consider reinstating the death penalty, a clear message that the administration will show no mercy to coup-related suspects.
"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.
OUT OF TURKEY: DENIAL, ASYLUM AND TRIAL
The coup was launched and conducted by "a clique of soldiers from different ranks within the Turkish Armed Forces," the GNAT said.
Erdogan has blamed his political enemy Gulen, who lives in the United States, for plotting the coup. However, the latter has denied any involvement in the plot and condemned it "in the strongest terms," suggesting it could have been staged by Erdogan himself to cement his grip on power.
The failed coup has spilled over the borders, as eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece with a Black Hawk military helicopter early Saturday to seek political asylum, would face trial in Greek court, Anadolu Agency reported Sunday.
These soldiers, who landed at the Alexandroupoli airport near the Greek-Turkish border, would face accusations of "illegal entry" and "damaging the friendly relation between Turkey and Greece," according to their lawyer Lia Marinaki.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu "requested the immediate surrender of the eight traitor soldiers," adding "they will expedite the extradition process."
In Saudi Arabia, the authorities, at the request of Ankara, detained Turkey's military attache to Kuwait who had been flying through the eastern city of Dammam on Sunday evening, the Saudi-owned TV channel Al Arabiya reported.
The attache, Mikail Gullu, had been en route to Amsterdam, the report said.
WORLD: CONCERNED
After the coup, the world has voiced support to Turkey's elected authorities.
"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 U.N. General Assembly Mogens Lykketoft said Saturday.
On the same day, U.S. President Barack Obama reiterated the "unwavering support" for the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey. However, he urged Ankara to "act within the rule of law" instead of practicing retaliatory purges after the event.
France also warned Erdogan that the dramatic coup did not mean he had "carte blanche" to silence his opponents. Media reported that the Foreign Ministry even questioned on whether Turkey was a viable partner in the fight against the Islamic State.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called Erdogan to express his wish for a "speedy restoration of strong constitutional order."
On Sunday, Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag urged Washington to extradite Gulen to Turkey, although the United States said it will look at evidence Turkey has to offer against Gulen, and judge accordingly.
"Does one need evidence to prove the existence of the Sun? This is just as clear a matter," he said, adding "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."
Related:
Turkish police clash with coup military in main jet base
ANKARA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Turkish police launched an operation against coup military at the 3rd Main Jet Base in southern Turkish province of Konya on Sunday, Dogan news agency reported.
Turkish provincial security teams and special operations teams clashed with the coup military who blocked the entrance and exit of the base with buses and trucks. Full story
8 Turkish soldiers to face trial in Greece over coup attempt
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.
HANOI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam will host the 10th Asia-Pacific Cooperative Ministers' Conference in its capital Hanoi on April 18-21, 2017, according to Vietnam Cooperative Alliance (VCA) on Monday.
The conference will be held under the theme of Vision toward 2020: Enhancing further cooperation between governments and cooperatives, local Nhan Dan (People) online newspaper quoted the VCA as saying.
At the conference, representatives will focus their discussions on issues including food security, new approach to cooperatives with renovation and innovation and engagement of cooperatives in the region and the world, among others.
The event provides a chance to share experiences to contribute to developing sustainable cooperatives' economy, reported Nhan Dan.
The previous Asia-Pacific Cooperative Ministers' Conference was hosted by Thailand on February 27-29 in 2012.
SINGAPORE, July 18, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Photo taken on July 18, 2016 shows the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore. Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and countries in the region, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and India. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
Click here for more photos >>
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The South China Sea issue and the arbitration case unilaterally initiated by the Philippines against China were hyped up by some international media in attempts to drive a wedge between China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia.
However, many experts from China and Southeast Asian countries believe that relations and cooperation between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has huge potential, and will not be affected by a single issue like the South China Sea.
BIGGER PICTURE OF CHINA-ASEAN TIES
China and ASEAN countries are neighbors linked by mountains and rivers, and win-win cooperation is the mainstream of their relationship, Zhao Qizheng, former minister of the State Council Information Office of China, said on Monday.
Zhao's opening remarks at a think tank seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation and development in Singapore were widely echoed by the participating experts from both China and Southeast Asian nations.
"China and ASEAN have a strategic partnership that has immense potential. This partnership is not - and should not - be defined by a single issue like the South China Sea," said Shahriman Lockman, a senior analyst at Malaysia's Institute of Strategic and International Studies.
"Instead, we need to be mindful of the bigger picture: growing trade and investment links, greater cooperation between our political and security institutions, and deeper understanding between our peoples," he told Xinhua.
Quoting a Chinese idiom which calls for taking the big picture into consideration and working for the benefit of all, Shahriman said this great wisdom should continue to guide the relations between China and ASEAN.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of China-ASEAN dialogue relations. Two-way trade has grown from less than 10 billion U.S. dollars in 1991 to nearly 500 billion U.S. dollars, bringing tangible benefits to the people of all countries in the region.
In 2015, China-ASEAN trade reached 472 billion U.S aollars with China-ASEAN two-way investment amounting to more than 156 billion U.S. dollars. The two sides are targeting bilateral trade at 1 trillion U.S. dollars and investment 150 billion U.S. dollars respectively by 2020.
"Stability, development, security and the improvement of people's livelihood are common quest of China and ASEAN," said Li Guoqiang, deputy director of Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointing out the practical need and huge potential of further development of the relationship.
"Will such relationship be interrupted by the South China Sea issue? The answer is 'No'," he said.
NO NEED FOR OUTSIDE INTERVENTION
China and ASEAN countries have demonstrated their commitment and ability to jointly maintain the peace, security and stability in the South China Sea without outside intervention, experts said.
"During past ASEAN meetings, we could notice that China and ASEAN had good consultations and communications regarding to the South China Sea with many consensus reached," said Li of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Among these was the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) signed in 2002, and they were steadily pushing forward consultations on the Code of Conduct, he said.
"All these demonstrate that China and ASEAN have channels and mechanisms to solve disputes and problems, and seek approaches and effective rules to safeguard the peace and security in the South China Sea," he said.
ASEAN foreign ministers will meet their counterparts from dialogue partners, including China later this month. In September, a summit marking the 25th anniversary of China-ASEAN dialogue relations will be held in Laos where leaders from China and 10 ASEAN members will meet.
"ASEAN and China should use these opportunities to demonstrate to the rest of the world that, as Asian nations, we are able to have a diversity of views and also able to calmly and maturely manage our differences," said Shahriman.
"We should see this as an opportunity to have a new beginning in our relationship, which has benefitted both sides so immensely over the past 25 years."
DIALOGUE REMIANS BEST WAY
Meanwhile, many experts agree that peaceful negotiations remain the best way to solve disputes in the South China Sea and the South China Sea arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines has increased tensions in the region.
"There's no doubt that dialogue, negotiation and consultation remain the best way to solve the disputes," said Li Mingjiang of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore Nanyang Technological University.
"Many cases and practices in international relations have proved that negotiations and consultations are more effective and pragmatic approaches," he said.
China said the ad hoc arbitral tribunal has no jurisdiction over relevant submissions, so the award rendered by it is null and void with no binding force.
As pointed out by Zhao in a pool interview, many people in the Philippines have begun to question the decision to unilaterally initiate the arbitration against China.
Following a series of positive signals in a bid to mend the soured relations with China, newly-inaugurated Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said last week that he was asking former president Fidel Ramos to help start talks with China over disputes in the South China Sea.
Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow with S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said China and the Philippines could set an example in solving disputes if the two sides resume talks and reach concrete agreements.
"Others will follow suit as no one wants to increase tension over the South China Sea," he said.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- China will overhaul its investment and financing system to stimulate market vitality amid the economic downturn, according to a document released Monday by the central authorities.
The government will cut red tape, improve supervision and encourage enterprises to invest, said a guideline jointly released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council.
China will enhance private investment management, reinforce public investment, diversify corporate financing channels and accelerate transforming government functions, the guideline promised.
It also urged implementation of those measures.
The document marked the latest effort from the central authorities to solve entrenched funding difficulties for small companies and inspire the better use of private capital.
Private investment increased only 2.8 percent in the first half of 2016, down from 3.9 percent growth in the first five months and 5.7 percent in the first quarter, official data showed.
The government has started loosening grips on investment and financing, with less investment subject to approval and more decision-making power in the hands of enterprises.
ANKARA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A total of 103 generals and admirals have been detained in investigations and operations against coup attempt plotters across Turkey, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.
The highest-ranking officer among the 103 was former Air Force Commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, Anadolu reported, adding that the courts will determine their fates.
More than 6,000 suspects in the military and the judiciary, including top commanders and Supreme Court judges, have been detained in the wake of the failed coup attempt.
The crackdown on alleged coup plotters has spread to the country's police department, with a total of 7,850 police officers on Sunday.
The failed coup attempt, which began last Friday, was crushed the next day; at least 290 people, including more than 100 "coup plotters," were killed, authorities said.
HANOI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam is facing difficulties in fulfilling target of rice exports this year, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said on Monday.
In the first half of 2016, Vietnam shipped some 2.69 million tons of rice to the world market, earning 1.21 million U.S. dollars, down 9.8 percent in volume and 5.9 percent in value year-on-year.
Price of Vietnamese 5-percent broken rice from summer-autumn crop during the previous week fell to 360-365 U.S. dollars per ton from 360-370 U.S. dollars per ton a week earlier, Vietnam's state-run news agency quoted the ministry as saying.
The decrease in price of Vietnamese rice was attributed to the shortage of new orders as Thailand is clearing its huge stockpile, accroding to the ministry.
The gloomy situation of rice exports since the second quarter of 2016 has prompted the Vietnam Food Association (VFA) to lower rice export target to 5.65 million tons this year.
The figure decreased from the previous target of 6.5 million tons. As such, this will be the first time in many years that Vietnam saw an under-6-million-ton rice export volume, said the ministry.
The ministry also said there is currently no sign of new contracts from rice importers.
In late April, the Thai government announced a plan to sell over 11 million tons of rice in government stockpiles.
In 2015, Vietnam exported some 6.6 million tons of rice, up 4 percent year-on-year.
Vietnam is one of the most important rice producers and exporters in the world. Rice plays the most important role among agricultural commodities in Vietnam in terms of food security, rural wages and employment, as well as export revenues.
Vietnamese rice has been present in 135 countries and regions worldwide.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Twenty years after the creation of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) mechanism, regional leaders attending the 11th ASEM summit charted a new course for bi-continental cooperation in the next decade through promotion of inter-connectivity.
The two-day summit concluded Saturday with the adoption of an Ulan Bator Declaration that stresses the need to promote inter-connectivity.
"As ASEM begins its third decade, all members should bear in mind the mission of building a new type of comprehensive partnership" and actively seek new paths to further promote Asia-Europe cooperation, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said in a keynote speech.
Li noted the need for the 53-member ASEM to re-orientate itself amid deepening changes in the global and regional situation, while hailing unprecedented bi-continental cooperation thanks to the ASEM mechanism.
Its inauguration in 1996 in Bangkok, Thailand, ushered in a new era of equal dialogue, all-round cooperation and joint action against challenges for its members.
As a backbone for maintaining global peace and stability, the Eurasian continent should and can do more, with confidence from a broad prospect for development and cooperation, said the Chinese premier.
His statement also indicates continued contribution and leading role of China with its experiences, ideas and actions.
During the summit, held in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, the Chinese premier urged joint actions against terrorism to root out the global scourge after a deadly truck attack claimed more than 80 lives in Nice, France, last Thursday.
Terrorism poses a common challenge for all countries to tackle for the sake of building open and inclusive society, Li noted, marking China's push for a strong response from ASEM to turmoils and instabilities in the world.
To this end, the ASEM summit issued a chair's statement that pledges strengthened cooperation in fighting terrorism in all forms.
Li made clear the stand of China facing a sluggish recovery of the global economy and setbacks in globalization and regional integration, highlighted particularly by risks and uncertainties from the British exit from the European Union (EU) and the refugee crisis.
On the Brexit issue, Li reiterated China's intention to see a prosperous and stable EU and Britain, and willingness to strengthen coordination with countries to manage risks, stabilize the international capital market and push global economic recovery.
For ASEM members in efforts to steady growth, restructure the economy and create more jobs, Li proposed closer economic and trade ties among them. Measures therefor include faster building of an open and inclusive Eurasian mega-market, freer trade with more facilitations to reject protectionism and trade wars, as well as joint safeguarding of fair and a non-discriminatory trade and investment order.
China looks forward to resuming the ASEM economic ministers meeting in 2017 after a decade-long break, Li said, who proposed the resumption two years ago.
To promote "partnership for the future through inter-connectivity", this year's ASEM summit established an inter-connectivity working group on the basis of a consensus secured by China over the past three years.
According to Li, the Eurasian continent, bordering both the Pacific and the Atlantic, would enjoy a bigger world if turned into a huge passage across it from the east to the west for transportation, telecommunication and energy.
China is expected to host a high-level forum on digital inter-connectivity in its further effort to promote Asia-Europe inter-connectivity in order to pool driving forces for regional economic growth and innovation cooperation.
The ASEM summit also saw common wishes override an attempt by a few countries to divert it to the ill-grounded award in the case of the South China Sea arbitration issued days before it opened.
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The ad-hoc arbitral tribunal lost its own face in the South China Sea arbitration with the lack of political wisdom, and countries would return to negotiations to solve disputes, an Indian expert said here Monday.
Swaran Singh, professor at School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, said the arbitration unilateral initiated by the Philippines is not a victory even for the Philippines itself, as the newly inaugurated president Rodrigo Duterte had shown little trust in the arbitration.
"If the Philippines doesn't believe it, it will have a very limited role to play," he said.
The Chinese government said the ad hoc arbitral tribunal has no jurisdiction over relevant submissions, and awards rendered by it are null and void and have no binding force.
Speaking to reporters during a think tank seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation and development, Singh said the arbitral tribunal lacked political wisdom by not seeking a resolution on the ground.
"The fundamental principle of arbitration is that both parties should submit the case for arbitration, should participate in the arbitration, should give undertakings that the binding outcome will be acceptable to them, which are missing in this case," he said.
"So I think the casualty here is arbitration itself. The trust of people in international relations in arbitration being a solution has been really hit badly by this."
SYDNEY, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Shares in Aussie listed DroneShield rallied on Monday after the drone detection company said it was seeking to become a defence industry player.
U.S. headquartered, but Australian listed DroneShield has developed pre-emanate drone detection technology to protect people, organisations and critical infrastructure from intrusions.
In filing ASX on Monday prior to the local earnings season, the recently floated company said it wanted to become a defence, or a civil defence industry player, an electronics detection manufacturer and a larger distributor, sending shares soaring 11 percent in early trade.
The company develops sensors and software to acoustically detect drones, a capability which will become increasingly necessary with an estimated 12 million commercial drones expected to be in use by 2020, creating issues not just of civil society, but the security apparatus worldwide.
"What we are seeing now is a proliferation of smaller drones, so the types that are likely to be used by say terrorist organizations or any sort of 'lone wolf' attacks ... (from) technologies that could perhaps be purchased over the counter and modified for terrorist purposes," University of New South Wales Indo-Pacific defence researcher Jai Galliott told Xinhua.
Development of key radar detection technologies for small airborne objects such as drones or even balloons with cameras have been lacking, especially for commercial and military aircraft which defence and intelligence agencies are aware of, Galliot said.
"You can imagine how difficult for a military plane's radar detection system to pick up (the object) if it's been designed with evasion in mind," Galliot said.
As the defence and security drone market is expected to grow from 5.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 to 11.1 billion U.S. dollars by 2024, so too the protection market, worth up to 12 billion U.S. dollars, DroneShield said.
DroneShield has rallied since it's initial IPO at 20 Australian cents (15.20 U.S. cents) per share in June, closing 4.35 percent higher to 24 Australian cents (18.25 U.S. cents) on Monday.
ADEN, Yemen, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Suicide bombers attacked two military checkpoints in Yemen's southeastern province of Hadramout on Monday, killing at least 10 pro-government soldiers, a security official told Xinhua.
One bomber drove his explosive-laden car into the military checkpoint located in main western entrance of Mukalla city, Hadramout's provincial capital, causing the death of four soldiers and injury of many others.
The second bomber detonated his car in an attack targeting another military checkpoint in the same area, killing six soldiers, according to the Yemeni source.
A source with the Ibn Sina Public Hospital in Hadramout told Xinhua that more than 29 soldiers were injured in the two bombings.
The death toll was expected to rise further due to some critical injuries, the Yemeni officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the latest suicide bombings that struck Hadramout province, former bastion of al-Qaida militants.
However, the Yemen-based al-Qaida offshoot and the Islamic State group used to launch similar suicide bombings against Yemeni army and security forces in the past weeks.
Last month, the Yemen-based affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a series of suicide bombings that struck military posts and an intelligence compound in Hadramout, leaving more than 48 killed.
The fragile security situation in the country has deteriorated since March 2015 when war broke out between the Shiite Houthi group, supported by former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the government backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition.
ANKARA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- An armed assailant was killed on Monday after reportedly opening fire outside an Ankara court house where hundreds with suspected involvement in a failed coup were held.
The assailant, who was reportedly firing shots from a moving car, was shot and killed by police, local media reported.
A total 103 generals and admirals have been detained in investigations and operations against coup attempt plotters across Turkey, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.
Meanwhile, 30 governors and 52 civil inspectors were removed from posts, CNN Turk reported.
More than 6,000 suspects in the military and the judiciary, including top commanders and Supreme Court judges, have been detained in the wake of the failed coup attempt.
The crackdown on alleged coup plotters has spread to the country's police department, with a total of 7,850 police officers being suspended on Sunday.
The failed coup attempt, which began last Friday, was crushed the next day; at least 290 people, including more than 100 "coup plotters," were killed, authorities said.
KIGALI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The people of South Sudan need to hear the region and the world speak with one voice to end this mindless violence, the UN chief Ban Ki-Moon said.
In a speech to an Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) on the sidelines of Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union Summit in Kigali on Saturday, Ban said now is the time for 'decisive and collective action.'
Renewed fighting in South Sudan past week left at least 300 dead and more than 42,000 displaced.
In attendance at the IGAD meeting were Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Ismail Omar of Djibouti, Sheikh Hassan of Somalia and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.
Others were Chad President Idriss Deby, the AU chairperson, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, South Africa's Jacob Zuma and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, the IGAD chairperson.
South Sudan was represented by Foreign Minister Deng Alor and Presidential Advisor Niyal Deng.
"I welcome the strong condemnation of the fighting and ceasefire violations by the African Union Peace and Security Council and the IGAD Council of Ministers. I thank you for calling on the South Sudanese leaders to assume their responsibility and subject individuals who undermine the peace process to stern measures, including targeted sanctions," Ban said.
The IGAD summit concurred with Ban's three-pronged approach to addressing the South Sudan crisis.
These include an immediate arms embargo on South Sudan, additional targeted sanctions on leaders and commanders working to unravel the peace process and to fortify the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).
The Secretary-General had earlier made the same recommendations to the Security Council last week.
Ban said Saturday he had spoken with South Sudan First Vice President Riek Machar and the Special Envoy of President Kiir, as well as with some leaders of the region.
"I urged them to do everything in their power to bring about an immediate cessation of hostilities and recommit to the implementation of the peace agreement," he said.
The Secretary-General earlier met with President Kagame and discussed various issues.
"The Secretary-General and President Kagame expressed deep concern at the recent escalation of violence in South Sudan, its impact on the civilian population and consequences for the peace process. They called on the South Sudanese leadership to demonstrate the commitment required to bring to an end the tragedy unfolding in their country and fulfill their people's aspirations to peace, security and reconciliation," a statement said.
Ban and Kagame agreed on the need and urgency of renewed international engagement to advance the quest for peace in South Sudan.
The UN chief emphasized the importance for the African Union, IGAD and leaders in the region to provide collective and concerted support to the efforts of the Chairperson of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission, former President Festus Mogae, and the African Union High Representative for South Sudan, former President Alpha Konare."
Senegalese President Macky Sall, Rwanda's Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo and African Union (AU) Commission Chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (from R to L) attend the 35th New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee meeting, in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on July 16, 2016.
KIGALI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- African governments expect that the upcoming G20 meeting under the chairmanship of China will usher in a new industrial take-off in the continent, Senegalese President Macky Sall has said.
Sall said with the latest industrial initiatives in the continent, Africa now is ready than ever before for an industrial revolution and awaits the September 2016 meeting of the G20 countries.
"Our harmonization of country and regional level industrialization policies to ensure synergies with continental policy creates a conducive environment for partnership that is geared at improving lives of populations in Africa," Sall said at the opening of 35th New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee meeting at the 27th African Union Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.
He said that the chairmanship of China is a new opportunity given the partnership between the Asian country and Africa in infrastructural development.
"The resolution is expected to propel Africa's industrialization process through capacity enhancement in science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship," he added.
Senegalese President Macky Sall (L) walks with his Guinean counterpart Alpha Conde to attend the 35th New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee meeting, in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on July 16, 2016.
Sall cautioned African governments to be wary of falling in the trap of over engaging in renewable energy at the expense of fossil fuel.
"We need to balance the mix in developing clean energy and at the same time use fossil fuel since Africa's contribution to climate change is minimal," Sall said.
He called for the introduction of a mechanism that favours technological transfer to Africa to meet the need of people.
African countries have established an industrial development index, a move that is expected to change the business in the continent.
Sall observed that through the adoption of fiber optic that includes information, communication and technology, and the renewed engagement of women and the youths in agriculture, the continent is expected to foresee an increased development.
Twenty heads of state that make up the membership of NEPAD Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee are attending the meeting.
AU Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said that NEPAD is expected to strengthen the implementation of agriculture, agro-processing, infrastructure, science and technology and industrialization programs that are under AU Agenda 2063.
"Our Industrialization strategy must be at the core of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) and Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) as we wait to achieve infrastructure development program," she noted.
She called on governments to engage in a paradigm shift, cultural revolution and change the education systems, mindsets and interconnect with key forces of change.
JUBA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A global charity, HelpAge International on Monday called for unhindered humanitarian access for the elderly who have been affected by recent fighting in South Sudan.
The organization expressed deep concern about the proportion of older people affected by continued violence and internal displacement in the world's youngest nation.
In a statement, the charity called on warring parties to the conflict to allow free movement of people at this time as many seek their lost relatives, assets and other necessities.
"Older people often bear the brunt of conflict and are particularly vulnerable in situations of violence and displacement because of their frailty and reduced mobility," said Dr Prafulla Mishra, Regional Director of HelpAge International.
He added that HelpAge International and their partners are monitoring the situation on the ground and prepare to mobilize themselves to provide the much required support for older people including those living in Protection of Civilian Camps (POCs).
Mishra said the majority of affected people are said to be women, children and older people.
Data on the exact number of older people affected is hard to come by, however, population data from UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) suggests that 5.1 per cent of the population is aged 60 and over.
Fresh fighting broke out in Juba on July 7 as it marked its fifth independence day and left 36,000 people internally displaced in different parts in Juba with a number attempting to cross over to neighboring Uganda.
According to initial government figures at least 272 people have been killed, including 33 civilians. A cease-fire declared by President Salva Kiir on July 11, and seemingly endorsed by Vice President Riek Machar, appears to be holding in Juba.
Humanitarian actors have also raised concern about safety of staff as access and logistics have adversely been affected by restrictions of movements of not only nationals but also humanitarian actors.
PARIS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- French forces overnight destroyed several targets of the Islamic State (IS), also known as Daesh, a few days after a presumed follower of the terrorist cell killed at least 84 revellers celebrating Bastille Day in the southern city of Nice.
"We must continue to move forward in the relentless battle that we lead both outside and at home against Daesh. Our forces continue to strike and did so overnight and a day before," Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Monday after a security meeting in the wake of the Nice attack.
Without giving details on the operation, Le Drian stressed that despite the rising terror threats inside the country, French forces would continue their mission within the U.S.-led coalition combating IS in Syria and Iraq "to definitively eradicate Daesh cancer."
In a previous interview with a French radio, the French minister said that the international coalition fighting IS insurgents targeted to take back by the end of the year Mosul in Iraq and Rekka in Syria, the group's main strongholds in the region.
Since the Paris attacks carried out by IS in November 2015, France has intensified its air strikes against IS in both Iraq and Syria with the participation of its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.
DURBAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Medical experts on Monday called for the eradication of HIV by 2030 in the world through various innovative ways.
The call emerged from the 21st International AIDS Conference which started on Monday in Durban.
UN Secretary-General, Mr Ban ki-Moon told a press conference that progress has been made in addressing the pandemic but said there should not be a backsliding.
Pan said half of the people infected by HIV can't access the treatment.
"If we want to reach the universal health coverage by 2030, we have to break down the barriers to treatment. And we need to develop treatment for tuberculosis, neglected topical disease and other urgent needs. As a global community, we must move quickly and decisively towards achieving the targets that will help us finally bring an end to this pandemic. We should have the right policies, respect for the vulnerable and public health,"he said.
Pan said progress has been made in the diagnosing HIV in about 20 minutes in other countries, putting 17 million people in the world on treatment and having international financing for the HIV/Aids.
Ruth Dreifuss, the core-chair of the high level panel appointed by the UN secretary general to address HIV/Aids, said there should be policy coherence in international human rights law, trade rules and justifiable rights of inventors.
She also said treatment for disease like HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis are still beyond the reach for many. She said, "At the moment the world is struggling to respond effectively to challenges like antimicrobial resistance, tuberculosis, diseases of the poor and rare disease because there is not a clear immediate return on investment. The panel is looking at how to ensure that innovation is sufficiently rewarded, while making progress towards universal health coverage by increasing access to health technologies."
The South African Director General in the Ministry of Health, Malebona Matsoso called on African countries to be innovative in coming up with funding mechanism for HIV/Aids.
She said countries like Chile, Brazil, and Norway have tax to fund the pandemic and said African countries should emulate them. She said with many people using mobile phones in the continent and they can be a way on introducing a funding mechanism using the mobile phones. Matsoso said, "We should have the right mix of policy coherence, public health, intellectual property and the right to access medication. We have to have an innovative financing."
She said there should also be prioritization of children in addressing the HIV/Aids.
Pan said there has been reactionary approach to the Ebola and Zika diseases by the world.
Motsoso agreed that there was a chance to be proactive in addressing the two diseases.
Lorena Di Giano, a member of the high level panel's expert advisory group, also addressed the media, lamenting the high prices of medication. She also saluted those who have died of HIV due to lack of access to the treatment. She said, "Millions of people dies unnecessarily in South Africa and across the world because of HIV and Aids drugs were not available to those who need them. Despite progress on HIV and AIDS, we must re-look the system that does not produce the innovation need to tackle ancient diseases like tuberculosis or indeed ensure health technologies are reaching those that need the most."
Some of the challenges which they raised includes lack of funding for HIV prevention, treatment and research, discriminatory laws and policies. Some who still face challenges in accessing treatment includes men who have sex with other men and sex workers.
BAGHDAD, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces on Monday repelled two attacks by Islamic State (IS) militants targeting a town and an oilfield in the provinces of Anbar and Salahudin respectively, provincial security sources said.
In the western province of Anbar, security forces and allied Sunni tribal units fought back an IS attack on the town of Rutba, some 370 km west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a provincial source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Rutba, on the Baghdad-Amman international road, taken by the IS in 2014, was recaptured but the security forces on May 16.
The attack began in the early morning, when dozens of IS militants with two suicide car bombs and three suicide bombers wearing explosive vests attacked the town from four directions.
They were repelled by the troops, leaving at least nine militants killed, in addition to the three suicide bombers.
The two suicide car bombs were destroyed before reaching their targets, the source said without giving further details about the casualties among the security forces and allied tribal fighters.
Also in Anbar province, security forces and allied Sunni tribal paramilitary units, backed by coalition warplanes, recaptured Doulab area west of the newly-freed city of Heet, some 160 km west of Baghdad, after two days of battles with IS militants, the source said.
According to the source, 50 IS militants were killed in the fighting in Doulab.
Government troops and allied militias have been fighting for months to reclaim key cities and towns from IS militants in the province of Anbar, including Ramadi and Fallujah, as militants attempted to approach Baghdad after seizing most of the province.
Also on Monday, in Iraq's northern central province of Salahudin, IS militants carried out an overnight attack on the positions of security forces and allied paramilitary units, known as Hashd Shaabi, in Allas oilfield in eastern the province, but the troops repelled the attack after Iraqi aircraft intervened in the morning.
At least seven IS militants and three policemen and four Hashd Shaabi members were killed, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The battles in Salahudin province came as security forces tried to free the towns of Shirqat and Qayyara as part of a major offensive aimed at liberating the last major IS stronghold in Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad.
Iraq has witnessed worsening violence since the IS took control of parts of its northern and western regions in June 2014.
Many blame the current chronic instability, cycle of violence, and the emergence of extremist groups, such as the IS, on the U.S. that invaded and occupied Iraq in March 2003 under the pretext of seeking to destroy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the country.
The war led to the ouster and eventual execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, but no WMD was found.
YANGON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's ceasefire non-signatory armed groups, represented by the United Nationalities Federal Council(UNFC), will watch the government's political framework for all-inclusive peace process, said U Khu Rel, representative of UNFC.
Khu Rel made the remarks at a press conference held by UNFC's Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN) in Yangon Monday as an additional clarification following its Sunday press release.
"If the political framework cannot become the one acceptable by the nationalities, there is no certainty for the possibility for the emergence of the 21st Century Panglong Conference," Khu Rel said.
Although the set political framework was agreed between the former government and the ethnic armed groups who signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Accord (NCA), the UNFC proposed to review it with the new government to build mutual trust and ensure all-inclusiveness in the Panglong Conference.
State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi held talks with UNFC's DPN, represented by its chairman U N'Ban La, in Yangon's National Reconciliation and Peace Center(NRPC) Sunday.
The DPN has also vowed to continue negotiation with the government on the peace process especially on the termination of the government's military offensive against ethnic nationalities in northern part of Myanmar.
Meanwhile, a four-day ethnic summit has been planned for July 26-29 in Maijayan, northernmost Kachin state, controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO).
The upcoming four-day Maijayan ethnic summit, reported 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 had announced that it will allow the NCA non-signatories to join the Panglong Conference to ensure access for them to political dialogue.
The former Myanmar government and eight ethnic armed groups out of 15 signed the NCA on Oct. 15, 2015 and there remains seven other armed groups who have yet to sign the accord.
ATHENS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had a telephone conversation early Monday with his Turkish counterpart, Binali Yildirim, on issues related to the failed coup in Turkey, the Greek national news agency AMNA reported.
In the call initiated by Yildirim, Tsipras reiterated Athens' "support for democracy, constitutional legitimacy and elected government in Turkey," according to Greek government sources.
The call was made a few hours before eight Turkish military officers, who fled to Greece in a military helicopter on Saturday after the failed coup in Turkey, appeared before a Greek court in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece on charges of illegal entry.
Yildirim thanked Tsipras for Greece's support as well as for the return of the helicopter on Sunday, according to the same sources.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a similar phone conversation with Tsipras on Saturday evening.
Regarding the issue of the eight officers who are seeking asylum in Greece, the Greek side has repeatedly stressed that their case will be examined as soon as possible and with full respect to international law and conventions on human rights.
The lawyer for four of the defendants told Xinhua on Sunday that their intention was to exhaust all possibilities so that they can avoid extradition, because they fear for their safety. If their asylum claims are rejected by Greece, they are planning to file claims to other countries.
According to the lawyer, her clients as well as the other four officers strongly deny any involvement in the coup attempt.
After a short session in court on Monday, the eight Turkish nationals were also expected to appear before the asylum agency in Alexandroupolis later in the day for interviews to formally launch the assessment of their asylum claims.
Their lawyers on Monday asked the court for a 48-hour postponement of the hearing of the case.
YANGON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Total investment in Myanmar's Thilawa Special Economic Zone (SEZ) reached about 760 million U.S. dollars, according to an announcement of Myanmar Japan Thilawa Development Limited (MJTD) Monday, which is a joint venture between Myanmar and Japan.
Entrepreneurs' interest in the SEZ has been increasing since the new government took office with 73 local and foreign investors having been engaged in Thilawa SEZ at present.
The investment mostly deals with manufacturing of garments, bottles, construction materials, food, steel, fertilizer, auto parts, agricultural machines, medicines and medical equipment.
The Thilawa SEZ is the first special economic zone developed in Myanmar, while development of the other two, Dawei and Kyaukphyu SEZs, are underway.
The zone is located on a 2400-hectare land on the outskirts of Yangon.
The 396-hectare first phase of Zone A in the SEZ was partially launched in September, 2015.
ANKARA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's Constitutional Court has launched disciplinary actions against two judges over alleged links to cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose sympathizers are accused of being behind a recent coup attempt, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.
Judges Alparslan Altan and Erdal Tercan were detained one day after the coup attempt.
A rapporteur, appointed by the high court, will prepare an initial report on the claims, which will be submitted to the General Council of the Constitutional Court, Anadolu said.
If the council approves the launch of a full investigation, the high court will appoint a team of three to conduct the necessary probe.
The move against the two judges is part of a massive purge of hundreds of judges and prosecutors following the coup attempt that started on Friday night.
Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Monday that a total of 208 people, including 145 civilians, were killed by the soldiers of the coup attempt and some 1,491 others were also wounded.
As many as 7,543 people -- 100 police officers, 6,038 soldiers from a number of ranks, 755 judges and prosecutors and 650 civilians -- were detained after the failed coup, Yildirim told a press conference in Ankara.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Interior Ministry has suspended 8,777 officials following the failed coup, including police officers, governors and gendarmerie officers.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A spokesperson for Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday stressed that the country hopes Turkey will remain secure and stable.
Spokesman Lu Kang said in a press release that the situation in the country has an important impact upon peace and stability in the Middle East.
China is glad to see order has nearly returned to normal in Turkey, Lu said, noting China backs Turkey's efforts to safeguard national security and stability.
Turkish government has accused a U.S.-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, of staging the failed military coup on Friday.
All Chinese citizens in Turkey remain safe, according to Lu.
DHAKA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The Bangladeshi government has approved a proposal to amend extradition treaty with India to further ease the process.
The proposal was approved in a cabinet meeting with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair on Monday.
After the meeting, Cabinet Secretary M Shafiul Alam told reporters that in line with the amended proposal extradition of the convicted and under-trial criminals will be possible if a court in any of the countries issues an arrest warrant against them.
Evidence alongside the warrant of arrest was needed to extradite such persons in line with the clause 10/3 of the existing extradition treaty with India, he said.
According to the official, the move to amend the treaty was taken following the India government's request to make the extradition process with Bangladesh further easier.
Bangladesh and India in January 2013 signed a key pact to exchange detainees between the two neighboring South Asian countries.
Also on Monday Bangladeshi Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told journalists that amendment to extradition treaty will benefit both Bangladesh and India as it will pave the way for easy deportation of criminals.
He said Bangladesh and India will sign the amended extradition treaty later this month.
BERLIN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would consequently end the European Union (EU) accession negotiations, said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday in Berlin.
"Germany and the EU have a clear stance: we fundamentally reject the death penalty," he said, adding a country which had the death penalty could not be a member of bloc.
Meanwhile, he called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's considerations of a return to the death penalty as "concerning."
After the failed coup attempt on Friday, Erdogan said Sunday that Turkey would now consider reinstating the death penalty. Turkey abolished the practice in 2002 as part of its pursuit of EU membership.
Parts of the Turkish military had launched a coup on Friday night which was struck down a few hours later. Thousands of people were arrested, among them top army commanders, judges, and prosecutors. The Turkish government has already announced severe penalties for the insurgents.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will have a round-table meeting on Friday with the chiefs of the main international economic and financial institutions, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced on Monday.
They will discuss economic growth, structural reform, employment, finance and trade, Lu Kang said.
The financial leaders include World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, World Trade Organization Director General Roberto Azevedo, International Labor Organization Director General Guy Ryder, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Secretary-general Angel Gurria, and Financial Stability Board Chairman Mark Carney.
PARIS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- One minute's silence was observed all over France on Monday in memory of the people killed in French southern city Nice during celebration of Bastille Day last week.
On the Rivera city, thousands of people gathered in La Promenade des Anglais, a celebrated seaside promenade to pay tribute to the attack victims.
Accompanied with Health Minister Marisol Touraine and several local officials, Prime Minister Manuel Valls observed a one minute silence before being jeered by large crowd angry at the government's failure to preserve citizens' safety.
Video broadcast by BFMTV news channel showed the mass shouting "Criminals" and "Resignation."
Last Thursday, a Franco-Tunisian man drove a heavy truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. His truck careered 2 km through mass of revellers before being stopped by police units.
According to official data, 84 people were killed, including 10 kids, 300 others were wounded with scores remain in serious situation.
The suspect, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a delivery man, had a record of violence and weapons offenses but wasn't on watch list for eventual links with terrorist networks.
Speaking to Le Journal de Dimanche on Sunday, Valls said there was no doubting over the assailant's terrorist motives.
"We know now that the killer was radicalized very quickly," he said.
"But, the investigation will establish the facts," he added.
Since Paris attacks in November 2015, France has raised security alert to the highest level with security measures tightened at transport hubs, religious sites and department stores.
However, the Nice carnage posed new tests to the government's security and raised fears of anti-Islam feelings in France where 5 million Muslims are living, the largest community in Europe.
COLOMBO, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Concerns were raised in Sri Lanka on Monday as a clash in the minority Tamil-dominated north over the weekend threatened to spread communal disharmony.
The clash took place between Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority students in the Jaffna university.
An attempt being made to spread racial hatred using the clash at the Jaffna university was condemned by many groups and political parties.
The Inter University Student's Federation (IUSF), while condemning the incident, raised concerns over attempts by some groups to make use of the incident to incite racial hatred.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) expressed its deep shock over Saturday's clash that took place at the University of Jaffna.
"We regret that several students have sustained injuries and the Sinhalese students had to be evacuated from the University and Jaffna as a precautionary measure," the TNA said.
The TNA appealed to all students not to permit any recurrence of such incidents or anything that will hinder reconciliation among communities in our country.
"We call upon the students and the authorities to work together in creating the right conditions for students from different backgrounds to live and study together in the University of Jaffna in the future," the TNA said.
The clash occurred when a welcome ceremony was held for new entrants to the University of Jaffna.
Some Tamil students had opposed the traditional Sinhalese "Kandyan dance" being staged to welcome the students, which led to the clash.
The IUSF said if clashes take place based on a race or religion it will prevent more important social issues from being addressed in the country.
The IUSF urged university students to join hands against racial disharmony and prevent politicians from gaining the upper hand from such incidents.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- China's television regulator has said it will expedite the integration of TV and radio with new media, setting a target for the country to have a number of competitive multimedia conglomerates by 2020.
The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) said in a circular on Monday that media organizations should develop multiple integrated and interactive information networks including TV and the Internet, supported by cloud computing and big data.
The SAPPRFT will support the integration through improving laws and regulations and granting preferable market access, according to the circular.
The SAPPRFT said in a separate statement that the current integration of TV, radio and new media is still rudimentary, which falls short of central authorities' requirement and public expectation.
DURBAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Monday called for greater efforts to develop and implement an action plan to address the critical lack of access to HIV treatment in West and Central Africa where coverage remains below 30 percent.
The call was made at the ongoing 21st International AIDS Conference taking place in Durban.
While significant progress has been made in South Africa since the first Durban conference in 2000, deadly and unnecessary HIV treatment gaps persist in other countries, MSF said.
Adopting community-based strategies could help expand coverage in West and Central Africa where barely one in four people among the 6.5 million with HIV in the region have access to treatment, according to MSF.
Nearly one third of AIDS-related deaths globally occur in the region, and in order to achieve the global goal of reaching 30 million people with treatment by 2020, agreed by all governments at the UN in June, an additional 13 million people need to be reached with treatment, one third of whom live in West and Central Africa.
New MSF data from Southern Africa suggests that the implementation of "Test and Start" is feasible but that community-led outreach is necessary to test and link people living with HIV to care and support them on lifelong treatment.
This situation in several countries in West and Central Africa is reminiscent of MSF's call at Durban 2000 to expand access to affordable antiretroviral drugs in South Africa, where more people than ever are now living long and healthy lives on treatment.
"As we've seen, civil and community support and affordable medications play a key role in making sure people get and stay on antiretroviral therapies. Failing to reach people in neglected regions puts at risk global goals to reach 30 million people with treatment by 2020 and achieve UNAIDS 90-90-90 targets," MSF said.
The HIV situation in West and Central Africa reminds us of the terrible days over a decade ago in Southern Africa, when people were dying and no treatment was available.
"Solutions to close this massive treatment gap exist; we need a massive booster shot for West and Central African if we're going to get anywhere close to achieving the global treatment goals," said Dr. Eric Goemaere, HIV/TB Unit Coordinator for MSF's Southern Africa Medical Unit.
When there are so many millions of people on treatment today, the right to access that lifesaving treatment should not depend on where people live, he said.
"We cannot leave these people behind,"he stressed.
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- China on Monday called for proper settlement of clashes in Indian-controlled Kashmir, which have left more than 40 people dead.
Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a press release that the Chinese side is concerned about the deaths and casualties caused by the incident.
Stressing that China's position on the Kashmir issue has been consistent, Lu said the Chinese side hopes relevant parties can resolve the issue through peaceful means.
Clashes between civilians and Indian security forces broke out after the killing of 22-year-old Burhan Wani of the militant group Hizbul Mujahideen in Indian-controlled Kashmir during a police operation on July 8.
More than 40 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 others injured so far during the clashes.
NEW DELHI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- India's main opposition Congress party Monday questioned the government's approach in dealing with an ongoing unrest in Indian-controlled Kashmir, saying "should civilians be treated in the same manner as militants?"
The question was raised by Congress party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad while speaking in the upper house of the parliament.
"Please do not push the Kashmiris against the wall by treating civilians like militants," Azad told the lawmakers. "Please do not use disproportionate force against the residents of the valley."
The 20-day "monsoon session" of the parliament began Monday in New Delhi. Azad's remarks came after government had agreed to the opposition's demand to discuss the unrest in Indian-controlled Kashmir following killing of Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) militant leader Burhan Muzaffar Wani earlier this month.
The Congress party leader alleged that bullets and pellet guns had been used on children, old men and women in India-controlled Kashmir.
"Should locals be treated the same way we treat militants. Should the same bullets that are used on militants be used on innocent people of the state?" Azad asked.
Muslim majority areas of Indian-controlled Kashmir are reeling under strict curfew for the past 10 days. Hundreds of Indian police and paramilitary personnel remain deployed in the curfew-bound areas in full riot-gears enforce restrictions.
Resident say they were facing a dearth of eatables, essentials and medicines in the wake of the curfew.
The federal government has sent a team of eye specialists to treat people who have suffered ophthalmic and other traumas. Of the injured according to government 134 persons were hit by pellets in eyes and have undergone eye surgeries.
A media gag is in place in the region to prevent flow of news and information since Saturday after police seized newspapers and ordered a halt on their publishing.
The local government has placed key separatist leaders under house arrest, fearing their participation in demonstrations would intensify anti-India protests and mobilize people in large numbers.
Meanwhile, the separatists extended a shutdown call against the civilian killings for two more days on Monday.
Prior to this in 2010, a similar wave of violence hit the region and claimed over 100 lives during clashes that continued for months.
A separatist movement and guerrilla war challenging New Delhi's rule is going on in Indian-controlled Kashmir since 1989.
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.
People participate in a rally in support of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Ataturk airport in Istanbul, Turkey, July 17, 2016. Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that the failed military coup has left at least 290 people killed and more than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the coup. (Xinhua/He Canling)
BERLIN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would consequently end the European Union (EU) accession negotiations, said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday in Berlin.
"Germany and the EU have a clear stance: we fundamentally reject the death penalty," he said, adding a country which had the death penalty could not be a member of bloc.
Meanwhile, he called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's considerations of a return to the death penalty as "concerning."
After the failed coup attempt on Friday, Erdogan said Sunday that Turkey would now consider reinstating the death penalty. Turkey abolished the practice in 2002 as part of its pursuit of EU membership.
Parts of the Turkish military had launched a coup on Friday night which was struck down a few hours later. Thousands of people were arrested, among them top army commanders, judges, and prosecutors. The Turkish government has already announced severe penalties for the insurgents.
DUBAI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The Brexit vote will only have a limited impact on British investment in Dubai' real estate market, reports said on Monday.
That was because a significant percentage of British investors work and reside in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and therefore do not generate their income in pound sterling, according to a report by global real estate advisory firm JLL.
Data from the Dubai Land Department suggests that British nationals are the third largest group of investors in terms of nationality in the city's property sector, JLL said.
In another report also issued on Monday, Dubai-based property research firm Reidin said the sterling remained at 30-year lows. Over the last 35 years the pound has systematically devalued against the U.S. dollar.
"However, this decline in the currency levels has not hindered the ability of residents to invest in assets abroad, particularly in real estate assets in Dubai," the Reidin report said.
With over 200,000 British nationals living in the UAE, a major oil supplier, expatriates from Britain represent the biggest group of Westerners living in the Gulf Arab state.
The majority of British expats in the UAE live in Dubai, which has a total population of 2.5 million people, more than 80 percent of which are foreigners.
Due to the slump in the price of oil, real estate prices have declined sharply in the UAE. In the second quarter of this year alone, property prices in Dubai slipped by 6 percent, real estate advisory firm Cavendish Maxwell said last week.
BRUSSELS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with European Union (EU) foreign affairs ministers here on Monday morning wherein he reiterated the need for strong unity with the bloc, saying on Twitter, it was "critical we stand together."
"Our cooperation is essential to promoting international peace, stability, security and prosperity," said Kerry at a joint press conference with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini following the meeting.
"The fullness of our agenda is absolutely extraordinary. We are all united in fighting back against terror and we were united today in expressing our grief in the wake of last week's horrific attack in Nice," said Kerry.
Kerry said the act of savagery in Nice only served to strengthen the shared resolve to combat the forces of violent extremism around the world.
"With a new government taking shape in the UK and the negotiations upcoming on Britain's departure from the EU, there is obviously some uncertainty out there, but what came out of this meeting today was a remarkable sense of unity," he said.
According to the agenda issued by the EU side, they discussed EU-U.S. relations and exchanged views on the most pressing foreign policy issues, as well as U.S. President Barack Obama's "leaders" summit on refugees in New York on Sept. 20.
Ministers discussed the political instability in Turkey as well as talked about the next steps to strengthen the government of national accord in Libya, and expressed their combined support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
According to the U.S. State Department, Kerry travels to London on July 18, where he will attend two days of multilateral meetings on Yemen and Syria.
A U.S.-made Turkish military helicopter (Blackhawk) is shown parked on the tarmac of the Alexandroupolis airport, in extreme northeast Greece, on Saturday afternoon on July 16, 2016. The Turkish army aircraft flew from Istanbul with eight military personnel aboard, all of whom requested political asylum in Greece following a reported failed coup attempt on Friday. (Xinhua Photo)
ATHENS, July 18 (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.
CHENGDU, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Officials in Sichuan Province are preparing to open a giant monument to a Chinese naval commander known for his patrols of the South China Sea more than 100 years ago.
The structure memorializing Li Zhun in Linshui County will be opened to the public sometime in 2017, said Huang Wei, head of Linshui's culture, press, publication, radio and television bureau.
Li Zhun, who was born in Linshui in 1871, became commander-in-chief of the navy in Guangdong in 1905.
"We will erect a bronze statue of Li, with the South China Sea the background," said Huang.
"A patriotic militarist, Li's greatest contribution was safeguarding the islands in the South China Sea, where he recaptured the Dongsha Islands and issued names to the Xisha Islands," said He Zhenghua, chairman of the Li Zhun and South China Sea Society.
According to He, Li found Japanese businessmen illegally mining on the Dongsha Islands in 1908. After his negotiation, China got the islands back.
The following year, Li led more than 170 people to inspect the Xisha Islands, giving names to 15 of them. The names are still in use. On Yongxing Island, now the administrative base of the Chinese island city Sansha, Li raised the national flag, erected a monument and fired cannons.
He Zhenghua told Xinhua that Li also drew the first official map of the South China Sea after measuring its islands.
In 1910, Li finished a book on the Guangdong navy. "It was the first time that China had included islands in the South China Sea in its territory for national defense," He said. "It also proved that the islands belonged to China, and the central government retained administrative power over the South China Sea."
The Linshui County memorial is far from the only initiative being planned to honor Li Zhun.
In Li's hometown, Qishan Village of Linshui, a hilltop square is going to be named after him.
The hill is covered with plum trees. In Chinese, the word plum is pronounced "li." "Local people grew the trees in memory of the commander," said Yuan Yingli, a local official.
A play featuring Li has also been staged recently in Guang'an City, which administrates Linshui. Local cultural authorities are soliciting scripts to make a film on the admiral.
SHIJIAZHUANG, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Researchers on Monday started excavation of an ancient port in north China's Hebei Province to help determine where the maritime silk road began.
The excavation, which will last at least six months, is expected to provide more evidence to support the idea that the ancient port of Haifeng was a starting port for porcelain to be transported abroad by ship, said Feng Enxue, an archaeologist at Jilin University.
Located in the port city of Huanghua, the ruins of Haifeng Township cover an area of 2.28 million square meters. In the past three excavations since 2000, archaeologists found the ruins were composed of an ancient port, a cargo collection and distribution zone and a trade zone -- a typical layout for port trading.
"The excavation will help us better figure out the details of the different zones' functions and provide more evidence for the hypothesis that the Haifeng ruins were the northern starting point of the maritime silk road," he said.
Feng proposed in 2014 that Haifeng was the northern starting point of the route during the Song and Jin era (from 960 through 1276) after large amounts of porcelain featuring both southern and northern Chinese styles were unearthed. These artifacts resembled other porcelain discovered in Northeast Asia.
It is widely known that as early as 2,000 years ago, ancient Chinese traders began taking china, silk, textiles and other commodities abroad along the trading route. They left from ports in today's Guangdong and Fujian provinces and sailed to Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe. But the port at the Haifeng ruins has not yet been widely recognized as one of the departure ports.
"Judging from the geographical position and the historical records of Haifeng Township, the porcelain was estimated to have been sold to Northeast Asia, Korea, Japan and even regions beyond," he said, adding he hopes this excavation will strengthen his hypothesis.
Approved by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the project is organized by the Cultural Relics Institute of Hebei Province.
A technician watches the condition of a diamond in Antwerp, Belgium, Nov. 7, 2014. Antwerp is a world diamond trade center where 84 percent of the world's rough diamonds and 50 percent of cut diamonds are traded. (Xinhua/Wang Xiaojun)
by Diao Ze, Gan Chun
BRUSSELS, July 18 (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.
JAKARTA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Defense ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines are to meet in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday in an effort to step up maritime security as the threat of piracy is escalating in the region, an Indonesian minister said on Monday.
Defense Minister Ryamizar Ryacudu said the upcoming talks are expected to finalize their previous discussions and reach an agreement on the way of boosting security of the shipping lane in borders of the nations.
"We will discuss it again on Thursday. When we reach an agreement, I will sign it," Ryamizar said.
A joint military exercise will also be discussed during Thursday's meeting, he added.
The minister said Indonesia has put forward a proposal of the way of escorting ships, which was already agreed by the Philippines.
Under the plan, he said, ships are not allowed to sail alone, but in a group with scores of soldiers on board.
Indonesia has banned ships carrying coals from sailing to the Philippines after the fourth kidnapping of Indonesian nationals in the shipping lanes. So far 24 Indonesian seamen, 14 of them have been freed, have been taken hostages by Abu Sayyaf militants in the waters off southern Philippines and Malaysia in the past six months.
The latest abduction happened after the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines reached an agreement in May to conduct a joint patrol to secure their waterways.
The minister said Indonesian armed forces have been allowed to enter the waters of the Philippines to escort vessels carrying coal from Indonesia.
But, the escort has to be reported to the Philippine authorities, he added.
That allows resumption of the transport of coals from Borneo Island of central Indonesia, the world's largest producer of thermal coal, to the Philippines.
The whereabouts of 10 Indonesian hostages have been located, Ryamizar said.
"Seven Indonesians have been detected in Panama and the rest are in Lapac Island," he said.
The minister reaffirmed that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterje has taken stern actions against the Abu Sayyaf militants by dispatching 10,000 troops.
"Days ago I got information that 40 militants were killed and 37 others sustained injury," he added. Enditem
NAIROBI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- African governments on Monday called for greater partnerships among the international community.
Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta said that as Africa begins to embrace globalization, the rest of the world seems to retreat and become more internal in their own thinking.
"We need to move away from excuses and blame games and partner with each other so that everyone benefits from globalization," Kenyatta said during the World Leaders Summit.
The summit is part of the 14 session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Kenyatta said that Africa's low development levels were often attributed to lack of transparent and accountable governance systems.
He said multilateral agencies including the United Nation organizations have to work with national governments and civil societies to get solutions to challenges facing the continent.
The president said this as he called for a reformed UN to make it more effective.
He said the UN would be more successful in solving conflicts if it worked through national governments and leaders to resolve disputes arising in respective regions of the globe.
"The UN spends billions of dollars on peace keeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and South Sudan, but after spending all these billions what impact do they have?" the president asked.
He also urged the international community not to turn its back to globalization, noting that globalization has also enabled the volume of global trade to expand tremendously in the past several decades.
"Unfortunately, Africa's share of the global trade has remained low because its trade is dominated by primary commodities," he said.
Uganda's Vice President Edward Ssekandi said that greater global partnerships is crucial if the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are to be achieved.
"The SDGs are complimentary to each other and therefore need international cooperation by governments in order for them to fully succeed," Ssekandi said.
"If we fail to deliver the goals we will fail our people," he said. The Ugandan VP urged African states to use the momentum of the Millennium Development Goals to achieve the SDGs.
Namibian President Hage Geingob said that the trend for greater globalization cannot be reversed. "What is required is to ensure that all nations benefit from increased trade and investments," Geingob said.
He noted that for Africa to achieve economic transformation, there is need for greater transparency and accountability. "This way African leaders will win the trust of its citizens," he said. Enditem
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli has stressed that China and the United States have key roles in ensuring peace and stability in the South China Sea, and cooperation between the navies of the two countries is "the only correct option."
Wu made the remarks on Monday while meeting with his U.S. counterpart Admiral John Richardson and his delegation to discuss maritime security.
Describing the current security situation in waters around China as "complicated and sensitive" and noting the escalating South China Sea issue, Wu said Richardson's visit will be beneficial for the two countries to strengthen communication, promote trust, resolve doubts and avoid misjudgments.
"We will never sacrifice our sovereignty and interests in the South China Sea," Wu said, stressing that it is China's "core interest" and concerns the foundation of the Party's governance, the country's security and stability and the Chinese nation's basic interests.
Wu said that China will not recede over territorial sovereignty or fear any military provocation, which the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with.
"We will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway... the Nansha Islands are China's inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful," Wu said.
He stressed that "no matter what country or person applies pressure," China will push forward and complete island construction as planned.
According to Wu, China will never be caught off guard, and the number of its defense facilities is completely determined by the number of threats it faces.
Wu vowed that China will never give up its efforts to solve the South China Sea issue peacefully, despite "many negative factors at present," but also warned that "any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect."
Wu expressed his hope that the two countries' air and maritime forces fully follow the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and the Rules of Behavior for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters to avoid strategic misjudgment or exchange of fire, and to jointly ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.
Wu called on the two sides to promote strategic mutual trust, seek common ground, expand the scope of cooperation and create new momentum for China and the United States to develop a new type of major-power relations between the two countries.
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China's air force conducts combat air patrol in South China Sea
BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force conducted a combat air patrol in the South China Sea recently, which will become a "regular" practice in the future, said a military spokesperson on Monday.
The PLA sent H-6K bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, said Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force. Full story
South China Sea arbitration award won't hamper China-ASEAN cooperation: experts
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The so-called South China Sea arbitration award will not hamper cooperation between China and the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), experts said here on Monday.
The ad hoc arbitral tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration, set up at the unilateral request of the former Philippine government, last Tuesday issued an ill-founded award sweepingly sided with Manila, denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea. Full story
Biased award in South China Sea arbitration has no binding force: expert
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The biased award rendered by an arbitral tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration has no binding force as the ad hoc tribunal violated international law principles and standards, an expert said here on Monday. Sienho Yee, chief expert at the Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies of Wuhan University, said the arbitral tribunal adopted an excessively expansive interpretation of the jurisdictional grant, played a game of words, and distorted the text of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Full story Interview: Expert views negotiation and consultation best way to solve disputes in South China Sea
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Dialogues, negotiations and consultations are the best way to solve disputes in the South China Sea, a Singapore-based expert said on Monday during a seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation.
The final award, issued by an arbitral tribunal on July 12, sweepingly sided with the Philippines and denied China's long-standing historical rights in the South China Sea. Full story
U.S. atlas published in 1994 shows South China Sea islands part of Chinese territory
NEW YORK, July 8 (Xinhua) -- An atlas published in 1994 by a renowned U.S. map publisher clearly illustrated that Huangyan Dao and other key islands involved in the South China Sea dispute are part of China's territory.
The 1994 revised edition of the Illustrated Atlas of The World, published by the Chicago-based Rand McNally, clearly shows that Huangyan Dao, Nansha Islands and Xisha Islands fall under China's jurisdiction, Chia-Chi Tsui, a retired Chinese-American professor, told Xinhua on Friday. Full story
China-U.S. relations shouldn't be hijacked by South China Sea issue: Chinese ambassador
WASHINGTON, June 1 (Xinhua) -- The China-U.S. relations are too important that they should not be allowed to be hijacked by the South China Sea issue, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai said Wednesday.
KIGALI, July, 18 (Xinhua) -- China's economic engagement in Africa has created significant benefits for African economies which is a catalyst for the continent to realize agenda 2063, say top officials at the African Union (AU) in Kigali, capital of Rwanda.
Rwanda hosts the summit from July 10th to 18th under the theme: "2016: African Year of Human Rights, with particular focus on the Rights of Women."
In an interview with Xinhua on Monday, David Bahati, Uganda state minister of finance and planning said that China is playing a crucial role in enabling the continent address the challenges of infrastructure development especially in the areas of roads, railways, ICT and energy.
"In the recent years, we have seen China's foreign aid to Africa increase which has boosted social and economic transformation of the African economies. For instance China is supporting Uganda to have renewable energy sources through the construction of hydro-electricity dams which will enable our country achieve sustainable development goals," he added.
Bahati pointed out that Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE has promoted Africa's digital transformation.
"African countries need more support from China especially in the areas of technology and skill transfer which can boost skills development among young labour force in Africa," he noted.
According to Claver Gatete, Rwanda minister of Finance and Economic Planning, China has greatly increased its foreign aid to African countries in the recent years, a major step towards promoting bilateral relations with recipient countries to enhance economic and trade cooperation.
"China's support to Africa has created millions of jobs to Africans especially in sectors of petroleum, agriculture, ICT, manufacturing and energy among others which has significantly addressed unemployment among youth on the continent," he said.
Gatete stated that China and Africa bilateral relationship is growing strong as the continent looks to achieve Agenda 2063.
Agenda 2063 is the African continent approach to effectively learn from the lessons of the past, build on the progress and strategically exploit all possible opportunities available in the immediate to ensure positive socio-economic transformation within the next 50 years.
Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, Zimbabwe's Foreign Minister stated that China never considers foreign aid simply as a donation, but an important form of cooperation to advance the mutual benefit, win-win and common development of China and African nations.
"China's foreign aid prioritizes poverty reduction and economic development of the African countries. China's contributions to Africa's growth is visible and has expanded economic activity, job creation for local workers, and infrastructural development," he added.
In December last year, China offered a whopping 60 billion U.S. dollars loan and aid package to Africa, top boost the continent's economic transformation and industrialization and technological development.
The Chinese government announced that it will roll out 10 cooperation plans that will strengthen cooperation with Africa within the next three years.
The joint venture programs cover the areas of agricultural modernization, infrastructure, industrialization, financial services, trade and investment facilitation, green development, peace and security, poverty reduction and public welfare, public health and people-to-people exchanges.
ANKARA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. is prepared to work and discuss with the Turkey on the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, U.S. Ambassador to Ankara John Bass said in a statement on Monday.
"With regard to the question of possible involvement in the coup attempt by persons residing in the United States - we have been clear that the U.S. would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting their investigation into the coup attempt," he said.
"If Turkey decides to submit an extradition request for anyone legally resident in the United States, it will be considered under the terms of the U.S.-Turkey extradition agreement," Bass added.
He noted that "to that end, U.S. government officials in the U.S. and in Turkey, including representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice, are prepared to work with their counterparts and to discuss what will be required to meet the legal and evidentiary standards set by our bilateral extradition treaty."
"I underscore that our extradition treaty and U.S. laws have specific requirements that must be met before a suspect individual can be transferred to another nation's jurisdiction," the ambassador added.
Turkish police on Monday started a search of the 10th Air Tanker Base in Adana's Incirlik Air Base in connection with Friday's failed coup attempt, judicial source told Anadolu.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stepped up pressure on the United States on Monday to extradite exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Ankara of being the mastermind of a failed military coup late on Friday which killed over 290 people.
"We would be disappointed if our (American) friends told us to present proof even though members of the assassin organisation are trying to destroy an elected government under the directions of that person," Yildirim said at a press conference in Ankara, adding that "At this stage there could even be a questioning of our friendship." Enditem
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The biased award rendered by an arbitral tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration has no binding force as the ad hoc tribunal violated international law principles and standards, an expert said here on Monday.
Sienho Yee, chief expert at the Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies of Wuhan University, said the arbitral tribunal adopted an excessively expansive interpretation of the jurisdictional grant, played a game of words, and distorted the text of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The wrongful exercise by the tribunal did a substantial damage to the international rule of law, he said, adding that it had failed to consider and respect the limitations imposed by UNCLOS and China's intents and purposes in invoking its explicit right under the convention to exclude disputes concerning maritime delimitation and historic titles.
"It is manifestly clear that the tribunal abuses its power and as a result the award is null and avoid," he told Xinhua during a think tank seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation and development.
Yee also pointed out that the arbitral award was not generally accepted, so they would be with no binding force.
"The large number of states supporting China's positions seems to show that the decisions of the tribunal are not generally acceptable and therefore are without binding force," he said.
The Chinese government said the ad hoc arbitral tribunal established at the unilateral request of the Philippines has no jurisdiction over relevant submissions, and the award rendered by it is null and void with no binding force.
The tribunal had exemplified the philosophy of "the end justifies the means" by excessively expansive interpretation of the jurisdictional grant and the sweeping final award, in a bid to exhibit its determination to settle any dispute that may exist in its view, while disregarding any other issues such as respect for the sovereignty of the states involved, said Yee.
"The danger of this philosophy to the effectiveness and legitimacy of the international legal system, international rule of law and the world order at large is clear, and we must guard against this danger," he said.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (L) shakes hands with Timoleon Jimenez (R), the top leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), next to Cuban President Raul Castro, in the signing ceremony of a historic ceasefire agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC, in Havana, capital of Cuba, on June 23, 2016. (Xinhua/Str)
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.
Residents gather during the broadcast of the signing ceremony of the ceasefire agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group in Havana, in Bogota, capital of Colombia, on June 23, 2016. (Xinhua/Jhon Paz)
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.
A resident reacts during the broadcast of the signing ceremony of the ceasefire agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group in Havana, in Bogota, capital of Colombia, on June 23, 2016.(Xinhua/Jhon Paz)
"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.
Turkey detained general Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, on July 16, 2016, after a bloody coup attempt aiming to oust the government. Turkish authorities wrested back control of the country on July 16, after crushing a military coup by discontented soldiers seeking to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that claimed more than 250 lives. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)
ANKARA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Former Turkish Air Force Commander Gen. Akin Ozturk has confessed to planning the foiled coup, state Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.
A total of 103 generals and admirals across Turkey have been detained for questioning over the Friday's failed coup attempt, as the crackdown on coup suspects continues on Monday.
Anadolu said 41 of the detained military brass had been jailed pending trial.
The 2nd Army Commander, Gen. Adem Huduti, as well as its executive officer and Malatya Garrison Commander, Maj. Gen. Avni Angun, were among the arrested generals.
Dubai's Road and Transport Authority (RTA) chairman, Mattar al-Tayer, holds a press conference on the Route 2020 metro expansion project on June 29, 2016, in the emirate of Dubai. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)
DUBAI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the second largest financial market in the Gulf Arab region after Saudi Arabia, reported mixed results for the first six months in 2016, due to the ongoing headwinds in the oil market.
The UAE's biggest bank Emirates NBD said on Monday it generated a 12 percent increase in net profit in the first six months of 2016, amounting to 3.7 billion dirhams (1 billion U.S. dollars).
The bank will invest 500 million dirhams (136.23 million U.S. dollars) in digital innovation over the next three years as it looks to launch the UAE's first digital bank, according to Shayne Nelson, Emirates NBD's chief executive officer.
However, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank reported a 15 percent profit slide for the same period, amounting to 2.15 billion dirhams (585.21 million U.S. dollars).
The ongoing slump in the price of oil will continue to weigh on economic growth in the UAE, said the International Monetary Fund in April, slashing the expected GDP growth for 2016 to 2.4 percent, down from 3.9 percent in 2015.
United Arab Bank (UAB), based in the UAE's capital Abu Dhabi, said its net income in the first six months reaches 71 million dirhams (19.34 million U.S. dollars), compared to a net loss of 511 million dirhams (139.23 million U.S. dollars) in the second half of 2015.
K2-33b, shown in this illustration, is one of the youngest exoplanets detected to date. It makes a complete orbit around its star in about five days. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- An international team of astronomers using the U.S. Kepler telescope announced Monday the discovery of over 100 alien planets, the largest haul obtained since the space observatory transitioned to a different observing mode.
The team observed a total of 197 planet candidates discovered using data from the first year of the Kepler's so-called K2 mission and verified the existence of 104 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.
One of the most interesting set of planets discovered is a planetary system comprising four planets potentially similar to Earth, according to the team's paper, which was published online in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
The four planets, all between 20 and 50 percent larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light years away in the direction of the Aquarius constellation and less than half the size of the sun and less bright.
The planets' orbital periods range from five and a half to 24 days, and two of them may experience irradiation levels from their star comparable to those on Earth.
Despite their tight orbits -- closer than Mercury's orbit around the sun -- the possibility that life could arise on a planet around such a star cannot be ruled out, according to lead author Ian Crossfield of the University of Arizona.
"Because these smaller stars are so common in the Milky Way, it could be that life occurs much more frequently on planets orbiting cool, red stars rather than planets around stars like our Sun," Crossfield said in a statement.
The researchers achieved this extraordinary "roundup" of exoplanets by combining data with follow-up observations by Earth-based telescopes including the North Gemini telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the U.S. space agency NASA's first mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. It does this by measuring the subtle dip in a star's brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its star.
In its initial mission, Kepler surveyed just one patch of sky in the northern hemisphere, measuring the frequency of planets whose size and temperature might be similar to Earth orbiting stars similar to our sun.
In 2013, it lost its ability to precisely stare at its original target area, but continued to find new planets after a fix that created a second life for the telescope, known as the K2 mission.
"Our analysis shows that by the end of the K2 mission, we expect to double or triple the number of relatively small planets orbiting nearby, bright stars," Crossfield said.
"And because these planets orbit brighter stars, we'll be able to more easily study everything possible about them, whether it's measuring their masses ... or measuring their atmospheric makeup."
People gather to mourn the victims on the attack scene at the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, July 16, 2016. The Promenade des Anglais in Nice reopened Saturday after a deadly attack took place here which killed 84 people. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan)
PARIS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The investigation into the truck attack in the southern French city of Nice, showed the attacker's "certain, recent interest in radical jihadist movements," but no evidence have been found on his links with the Islamic State (IS), Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said on Monday.
"If there are no elements in the investigation at this stage suggesting an allegiance to Islamic State nor links of individuals with the group ... he (Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel) showed certain recent interest in radical jihadist movements," Molins told reporters.
The investigation also showed that the attack was "premeditated." Bouhlel, who drove a heavy truck into crowd celebrating Bastille Day, had planned his action days before July 14 after surveillance cameras showed him rehearsing the path that he would take, the prosecutor added.
With no apparent interest in religion, the Franco-Tunisian man had been growing his beard and told his entourage that it was for religious reasons and that he could not understand why the Islamic State could not have its own territory, the prosecutor said.
Looking at his phone and computer, investigators found internet searches for information on the attacks mainly in Orlando and the Paris suburb of Magnanville.
Molins added six people close to the truck driver were placed under custody with one of them having received a text from the attacker which mentioned gun purchase.
The Islamic State (IS)-linked news agency Amaq has claimed responsibility for the attack in Nice.
"The executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the IS", said Amaq, cited by several French media.
Last Thursday, Bouhlel drove a heavy truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. His truck careered 2 km through mass of revellers before being stopped by police units.
According to official data, 84 people were killed, including 10 kids, 300 others were wounded with scores remain in serious situations.
U.S.-basedclericFethullahGulen, whose followers Turkey blames for a failed coup, is shown in still image taken from video, speaks to journalists at his home in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania July 16, 2016.Gulensaid democracy cannot be achieved through military action. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
ANKARA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- As a faction of the Turkish armed forces involved in the coup attempt was deemed as loyal to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, Turkey firmly demands extradition of the cleric, which may sour bilateral ties, local experts said Monday.
Turkey officially designated Gulen's religious movement as a terrorist group and has repeatedly asked his extradition from the U.S., but the latter says solid evidence is needed to back any extradition request for his alleged leadership of a terrorist organization.
Ankara may question its friendship with Washington if the U.S. fails to meet Turkey's demand, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Monday in a press conference after the first cabinet meeting following a failed coup attempt.
"We will be disappointed, even questioning our friendship may be brought to the agenda if our friends still insist for evidence while members of the organization that tried to destroy will of this elected government and a person who instructs it," Yildirim stated.
The prime minister also said there was no better evidence than the July 15 coup attempt for the extradition of Gulen.
The cleric, however, rejected all accusations that he was behind the coup attempt.
"I condemn, in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey," he said in a written statement on Saturday.
Gulen has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. since 1999 when he fled Turkey amidst accusations of extremist Islamist activities.
Gulen, who leads from exile a movement called Hizmet, was once an ally of Turkish President Erdogan. But the alliance between the movement and Erdogan split after a corruption investigation in 2013 on the then-prime minister Erdogan and those under him.
Erdogan accuses Gulen of forming and heading a terrorist organization -- publicly dubbed as the "parallel structure" -- with the U.S.-based Muslim cleric's alleged sympathizers working in state institutions such as police and judiciary as insiders.
A dossier on Gulen case would be updated with the coup attempt and will be dispatched to Washington for his extradition, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Sunday.
Tolga Tanis, a local daily Hurriyet columnist, believes that a crisis between Ankara and Washington will erupt over Gulen case after the coup attempt.
"From now on, Gulen issue would be the most important topic of the Turkish-American relations," Tanis said, adding that the issue would dominate discussions between officials of the two countries.
The U.S. officials announced Gulen's legal position as Lawful Permenant Resident, he said.
The issue may lead to a crisis in short term, but cooperation between two allies will be restored in mid and long term, Mehmet Yegin, Director of Center for American Studies of International Strategic Research Organization told Xinhua.
Yegin recalled claims by Turkish officials that the U.S. is behind the coup attempt, but said this allegation is not strong yet.
"The alliance between Turkey and the U.S. has faced many up and downs," he said, adding that both countries would in a way eliminate this problem.
"The U.S. administration has already expressed willingness to act whenever the Turkish government presented evidence. I don't think this issue would negatively influence other areas of cooperation between Turkey and the U.S.." Yegin said referring to ongoing efforts against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu recently accused Washington of being behind the coup attempt.
"America is behind the coup. Some magazines published there were involved [in staging the coup] for the last couple of months," Soylu told private broadcaster Haberturk on Sunday, without specifying what publications they were.
The U.S. officials are prepared to work and discuss with their Turkish counterparts about the extradition of Gulen, the U.S. Ambassador to Ankara John Bass has said in a written statement on Monday, denying claims that Washington played a role in staging the coup attempt on July 15. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A senior UN official on Monday urged efforts to implement the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran reaffirmed that it would not seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons.
"Fully implemented, the JCPOA will reinforce global non-proliferation norms, and assure the international community of the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme," Jeffrey Feltman, the UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, said at an open meeting of the UN Security Council.
The JCPOA, also known as the Iran deal, is an international agreement on the nuclear program of Iran reached in Vienna on July 14, 2015 between Iran, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Britain, China, France, Russia and United States -- plus Germany), and the European Union.
Under the agreement, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran will only enrich uranium up to 3.67 percent.
Feltman noted also that lifting sanctions as a result of abiding with the JCPOA will "help to realize the long-awaited hopes and aspirations of the Iranian people to be reconnected to the global economy and the international community."
The 15-nation Security Council endorsed the JCPOA on July 20, 2015 in resolution 2231, calling it a "culmination of diplomatic efforts" by the E3+3 -- which includes Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States -- and Iran.
Presenting the secretary-general's first report on implementation of the resolution, Feltman told the Security Council that since Jan. 16 of this year, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "has not received any report, nor is he aware of any open source information, regarding the supply, sale, transfer or export to Iran of nuclear-related items undertaken contrary to the provisions of the JCPOA."
In addition, since that date, the UN Secretariat has received "no information regarding the supply, sale, transfer or export to Iran of ballistic missile-related items undertaken contrary to the provisions of resolution 2231 (2015)."
However, in early March 2016, during military exercises, Iran launched a series of ballistic missiles. The report includes details from Iranian media and from information provided to the secretary-general from Britain, France, Germany and the United States.
"While it is for the Security Council to interpret its own resolutions," Feltman said, "the secretary-general stressed that we must maintain the momentum created by the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, consistent with its constructive spirit."
"In this regard, he calls upon Iran to avoid such ballistic missile launches which have the potential to increase tensions in the region," he said.
The latest report focused on the restrictive measures in Annex B to the resolution which includes restrictions on nuclear-related transfers and activities, ballistic missile-related transfers and activities, arms-related transfers, as well as an assets freeze and a travel ban.
It did not report on other provisions of the resolution or Annex A (on the JCPOA), nor touch upon the work of the Joint Commission established in the agreement.
The next report of the secretary-general will be submitted to the Security Council in January 2017. Enditem
Pro-Erdogan supporters hold an effigy of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen hunged by a noose during a rally at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 18, 2016 following the military failed coup attempt of July 15. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)
TEHRAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Iran's President Hassan Rouhani on Monday hailed the victory of democracy against the coup attempt in a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Press TV reported.
Rouhani hailed the great political maturity of Turkish people throughout coup as well as the return of stability and security in Turkey. He said it proved that "bullying approaches have no place in our region."
He said that Turkey's peace and stability will strengthen peace and stability across the region, adding that "certain major powers as well as terrorists do not want to see stability in Muslim countries."
Rouhani also said that his country is "duty-bound to feel responsible for the stability and security of neighbors and friendly Muslim countries."
Parts of the Turkish military had launched a coup on Friday night which was struck down a few hours later. Thousands of people were arrested, among them top army commanders, judges, and prosecutors. The Turkish government has already announced severe penalties for the insurgents.
People participate in a rally in support of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Taksim square in Istanbul, Turkey, July 18, 2016. Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that the failed military coup has left at least 290 people killed and more than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the coup. (Xinhua/He Canling)
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government said Monday it has not yet received a request from Turkey for extraditing the U.S.-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who was blamed by Ankara for plotting a failed military coup.
Speaking at a daily briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that "we've not yet received an extradition request from the Turkish government as it relates to Mr. Gulen."
Earnest added that if such request is received, the U.S. "will evaluate that request based on the Extradition Treaty that was signed by the United States and Turkey more than 30 years ago."
After receiving the request, the U.S. will take two steps as follows: first, the request would be evaluated to determine whether or not it was related to crimes that are covered by the Extradition Treaty; second, there would be an evaluation made jointly by the State Department and Justice Department to determine whether or not the evidentiary standard in the treaty is met, Earnest elaborated.
At the same time, Earnest said the suggestion that the U.S. is harboring Gulen "is factually incorrect."
He revealed that U.S. President Barack Obama will make a phone call to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss the U.S.-Turkey ties in the wake of the failed coup in Turkey.
Obama was expected to "renew his call for restraint and urge everyone in Turkey to respect that country's democratic institutions," Earnest said.
"And that's certainly consistent with our forceful support for the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey," he said.
Commenting on the recent massive arrests of suspected coup plotters made in Turkey, Earnest reiterated that the Turkish government should exercise restraint, demonstrate a commitment to due process and a continued commitment to the values that are enshrined in Turkey's Constitution.
More than 290 people were killed Friday in a failed military coup in Turkey, which has strained Ankara's ties with the U.S. amid Turkey's accusations that the U.S. is harboring Gulen, who is blamed by the Turkish government for plotting the coup attempt.
Turkey and the U.S. are NATO allies in fighting terrorism, but their relations had already become tricky before the coup attempt after Turkey tried to repair its relationship with Russia. U.S. lawmakers also expressed deep concern about Erdogan government's clampdown on the opposition and on free journalism.
Turkey cut the power supply to and closed the airspace of the Incirlik Air Base after the Friday coup attempt, forcing the U.S.-led coalition to temporarily halt its flight missions from the base to launch airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
Although the airspace of the base was reopened for resuming the counter-IS strikes on Sunday, the commercial power supply was still not restored as of Monday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told a press briefing.
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Teen riding bicycle shot dead
According to police reports at about 5.30 pm on Saturday, Mickel,19, was riding his bicycle along Charles Street, La Romaine when a white AD wagon pulled up alongside him. Reports said that a man armed with a firearm exited the vehicle and began shooting at the teenager.
Eyewitnesses told police officers that when Mickel fell off his bicycle and slumped to the ground, the gun man drove off. Mickel was rushed to the San Fernando General Hospital where he died while undergoing emergency surgery.
Investigators said that the teenager was shot eight times to his chest and lower abdomen. Speaking to Newsday at the family Nice Street home yesterday and emotional Thomas cried openly. I was told that someone was going to kill my son and I tried to protect him. I warned him to be careful and stay away from certain areas, but they had already planned for him, the mother wept.
Thomas said that she knew her sons life was in danger and warned him to be careful. For the past days I was really uneasy and could not sleep because I knew that there was someone out there who wanted my baby dead. I warned him over and over not to go into certain areas and even stay indoors, but I had no idea why they wanted him dead, she said.
Thomas said that her son also reported the death threats to his life at the San Fernando Police Station. The emotional woman told Newsday that minutes before her son was murdered he had received a telephone call which entailed arrangements to meet someone. I was on work at that time, but I was told that he (Mickel) told the person on the phone that he was leaving home to meet them now to collect barbeque, she said. Thomas added, It was like they had to get him ou t of the house to kill him, so I think they set him up to collect barbeque just to get him out of the house.
My son did not stand a chance, they shot shot him on his bike, she said.
Mickel had six other siblings.
The emotional mother said that her son was working as a mason and also preparing for the birth of his first child in October. He was working hard and making plans for the arrival of this baby, his girlfriend is due in October, she wept. Police officers recovered several spent shells at the scene of the crime. An autopsy is expected to be performed at the Forensic Science Centre. No arrest has been made and police officers from the Southern Homicide Bureau are continuing investigations
73-year-old woman raped by neighbour
According to reports, the woman who was at home alone was walking towards her bathroom when she was accosted by a man known to her.
According to reports, the man began beating the elderly woman about her body and when she fell to the ground, he proceeded to rape her.
Following the rape act the woman contacted relatives who alerted the Chaguanas police.
A party of officers led by WPC Mohan went to the scene along with Crime Scene Officers and the victims was taken to the Chaguanas Health Centre where she was medically examined by a district medical officer.
Officers then returned to the scene of the rape and carried out a search for the suspect who was found hiding at this home, not too far from where the victim lives.
The suspect was handcuffed and taken to the Chaguanas Police Station where he was placed in a cell.
The suspect was able to give his name and address but could not recall how old he is. He said that he never went to school and was not even sure if he had a birth paper.
Charges are expected to be laid against the suspect following an ID parade today.
The victim was taken away by relatives for her own protection and Newsday understands that counselling will be given to her by officers of the Police Services of the Witness and Victim Support Unit.
Yesterday the victim remained unconsolable claiming that she treated the suspect like a son and never expected this sordid attack from him.
Police believe that the suspect broke into the victims home early Saturday and planned his attack.
Neighbours of the victim yesterday remained stunned over the rape attack claiming that within recent times Felicity has been plague with serious crimes such as break-ins, robberies and other crimes as well as a high incident of young persons engaging in alcoholism and drug abuse.
Yesterday, head of the Central Division Snr Supt Jayson Forde commended the team of officers who responded swiftly to quickly apprehend the rape suspect.
He said that crimes committed against elderly persons should never be tolerated. And he advised elderly persons living alone to exercise extreme caution ensuring that their homes are properly secured.
He said only on Saturday ten persons from the Felicity area were arrested and charged with various offenses.
Police hold female toy gun bandit
According to reportsm at about 2 pm on Friday two men and a woman went to Mohazeims cCothing Store pointed a toy gun at the owner and robbed him of a quantity of cash.
However, quick response by a party of officers led by ASP Ajith Persad, Cpl Anthony Williams, PCs Persad, Hoyte, Cobralis and Dopwell from the Task Force resulted in the arrest of the trio and the recovery of the stolen cash.
Newsday understands that the three suspects are wanted in the Eastern Division for robbing a clothing store on Thursday. Yesterday, they were handed over to the Sangre Grande police for an ID parade.
Newsday also understands that several other persons also reported to the CID and Task Force that they were held up and robbed while sheltering from the rain on Friday.
Officers carried out a search for the suspect resulting in six persons being detained for various offenses. Hours later a salesman reported that he was held up and robbed of $3,000 while carrying out sales in the city.
Officers searched the mens vehicle and recovered the cash claimed to be stolen.
The same team of officers also carried out stop and search exercises for illicit weapons, drugs and other
Man beaten with hammer
Yesterday Marlon Harrison, 40, remained in stable but critical condition at the San Fernando Hospital suffering from wound to his head and body.
According to reports after Harrison ran off the roadway a 26-year-old Princes Town man stopped to render assistance.
Harrison and the suspect reportedly got into an argument resulting in the suspect removing a hammer from his vehicle which he used to beat Harrison about the body and head.
Officers of the Comfort Patrol who were on patrol in the area rushed Harrison to the Mayaro Hospital where he was treated and transferred to the San Fernando Hospital.
The suspect reportedly went to the Rio Claro Police station and made a report.
However, while at the station he was detained by Sgt Mahabir and PC Singh of the Mayaro police who took him into their custody.
The suspect appeared to be intoxicated and a breathalyser test was administered on him.
He remained detained at the Mayaro Police Station up until late yesterday.
Checks by Newsday revealed doctors were expected to carry out a CT scan on Harrison as well as other tests.
Mayaro Police are continuing investigation
Cops, lawyer help Guaico family
Campos living room was transformed into a crime scene, with the bloodied body of Khan in her living room and her double-door fridge, couch set, windows having gaping bullet holes.
Coupled with that the vinyl on the floor was destroyed.
The once normally tranquil household was now a scene of chaos with a heavy police presence and doubts in her mind where she would get the money to replace the lost items.
Coupled with that she had to live with the fact that someone had been killed in her living room, something she never expected to encounter. However, after the smoke cleared, and the body of Khan was removed Campo and relatives had the arduous task of cleaning out the house.
Campo felt at the time that there was no one she could turn to to assist in having the lost items replaced and turned to attorney Gerald Ramdeen for legal assistance.
Ramdeen who was accustomed to doing charitable work decided to purchase some of the lost items with his own funds and yesterday he presented Campo with some of the items she lost in the police exercise.
Additionally, officers of the Eastern division under the supervision of Insp Ken Lutchman, Cpl Randolph Castillo and others from the Northern and Eastern Divisions, presented the family with grocery items.
In receiving the items Campo told Newsday that she was overjoyed at the gesture of kindness expressed by both the police and Ramdeen and added that only recently her mother purchased the double-door fridge for $4,000 on hire purchase arrangement and she would have been unsure where she would have gotten the money to replace the fridge, the living room set and torn vinyl.
I am overjoyed because I know that these are hard times ahead and people are being extra careful even about giving charity, but the police and attorney Ramdeen have exhibited that there are still persons around with a big heart and my family and I would forever be grateful.
She told Newsday that she thought that the police would have forgotten about her but now they also demonstrated kindness to her and her family it will be something that will remain etched in her mind for the rest of her life.
She said that on the morning of the police exercise she remembers fleeing the house after she saw Khan with a gun hiding behind her living room set and placing his finger on his lip as if to suggest to her not to tell the police that he was inside the house.
She said that everything happened so fast that she thought it was scenes out of a movie, but is grateful that is it now all over.
Khan was wanted for a double murder and went into hiding for close to two months. He was eventually found last Friday at Guaico Sangre Grande, by a team of police officers.
During officers attempt to arrest Khan he shot police constable Francis in the right hand before he was killed by police. Yesterday, Shelly Campo broke down in tears as she steered at police officers from the Eastern Division who off-loaded from a truck a brand new fridge, a living room set and vinyl to cover the entire flooring of her home. She said that she never expected that in so short a space of time help could come so quickly or the timely invention of Ramdeem and officers from the Eastern Division, as well as Beyond the Tape host Insp Roger Alexander.
However, she remains traumatised and is hoping that counselling is provided to her and her family.
Also yesterday, Ramdeen said that when he was appointed as temporary Senator by Opposition Leader Kamla Persad Bissessar, he vowed to use his salary as a senator to do charitable work, hence his reason for assisting Campo and her family in replacing items lost in the police shoot out with the fugitive.
He said that the public should not only see the police as an organisation which the public depends on to fight crime but to also see the other side of policing in which officers partner with the pubic in unconventional ways.
He called on the Acting Police Commissioner to provide counselling for Campos family as well as all the officers involved in the shoot out with fugitive Khan. And he further called on the public to pray for the swift recovery for PC Francis who was shot in the exchange of gunfire.
Insp Alexander presented a cheque to assist them in purchasing cement to repair the bullet holes in their homes.
He thanked officers of the Eastern Division and Ramdeem for their assistance to the Campos family.
Students get lesson in the seafood industry
The 36 students came from five schools: Vessigny Composite, Mayaro Composite, Guayaguayare Composite, Toco Composite and Manzanilla Secondary.
Garvin Madeira, Chairman of the Digicel Corporation, explained that the hope in having such an event, was that students would become acquainted with the positive aspects of the seafood industry, and their new knowledge would inform their career choices and open them to the possibility of rearing their own food.
Madeira said, The SIDC Youth Fishing Clinic, in Partnership with the Digicel Foundation, began on July 11.
We were very pleased to have five schools participate.
Those schools are Vessigny Composite, Mayaro Composite, Guayaguayare Composite, Toco Composite and Manzanilla Secondary.
At the foundation, youth development is key to us.
We place great emphasis on that. In fact, its also a big victory for us, if were able to tie that in to community sustainability. So we saw this project as a natural fit for us. We saw a natural marriage of the two, and a great initiative for the two going forward.
We would have hoped, that in the clinic, we would have exposed you, the youth to the seafood industry, and really get you acquainted with some of the things that are positive about it, which you could eventually take up careers in it in the future.
Included in that, we also hope that you would have seen the power of rearing your own food, and ultimately think in terms of careers for yourself that might be related to the seafood industry. And Ive referred to careers ranging from engineers to trawlers to fishermen to food specialists etc. Significantly, students Lester Adolfus and Sachelle Dupont won the most outspoken student award, and their prizes took the form of stationery gift hampers.
Nalini Sooklal, Chief Executive Officer of SIDC, was also present.
Prime Minister Rowley, Ramadhar land in Jamaica
Dr Rowley, accompanies by his wife Sharon and a delegation that includes, Foreign Affairs Minister Dennis Moses, Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General Stuart Young, Tobago House of Assembly Chief Secretary Orville London and MP for St Augustine Prakash Ramadhar, arrived to a red carpet welcome in Jamaica shortly before noon yesterday.
The official visit is intended to ease tensions that have arisen from claims by Jamaican business leaders that the CARICOM treaty gives Trinidad and Tobago greater advantage than other CARICOM member states.
Shortly after arriving in Kingston, the delegation met with staff of the Trinidad and Tobago High Commission.
Mixing business with pleasure, Rowley is due to be at Sabina Park later this evening to cheer on the Trinbago Knight Riders who will be taking on the Jamaica Tallawahs in the Caribbean Premier League T20 tournament.
He is due to meet tomorrow with the private sector including Trinidad and Tobago entrepreneurs, Jamaica Chamber of Commerce and the president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica. Rowley will also hold talks with Leader of the Opposition Portia Simpson-Miller.
Karim: Leave GATE open
Garcia said the report would be considered by Cabinet and a decision would be made before the start of the new September semester.
In a media statement yesterday, Karim observed that the PNMs intention was to limit or close down the GATE Programme much in the same way it is doing with the Childrens Hospital and UWI South Campus in Penal/Debe. Despite public assurances from Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley in the run up to the 2015 General Elections that the GATE Programme would not be interfered with all indications suggest that the PNM will renege on its promise yet again, Karim said, and noted that since the September 2015 General Election, the ruling party had stopped laptops in the secondary school system, re-introduced taxes on computers and books and now the GATE Programme is going to be streamlined which will translate into closure sooner rather than later. With thousands of CSE C and CAPE students scheduled to receive results in the first two weeks of August 2016, the PNM has now burdened our young people with undue stress and fear about the future of the GATE Programme. The new academic year is less than two months away.
Why is the PNM compromising the future of our young people, he stated.
Karim questioned how students who had been deemed as ineligible for funding find the thousands of dollars necessary to pay for their tertiary education and would the HELP Programme be expanded to cater for those students who were unable to access GATE.
And regarding the expected Means Test, Karim noted that any investigation into the financial well-being of parents to determine their childrens eligibility for financial assistance should be rejected as no test will ensure objectivity and transparency towards equitable benefit and cited.
What you need to know about the Octagon Art Festival on Sunday in Ames
news
EPA bureaucrats accepted hush money to cover-up extensive fracking dangers for years
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not taken sufficient measures against methane emissions produced by the fracking industry, but why? According to an environmental watchdog group, the reason the EPA has failed to tackle fracking is because at least one EPA researcher accepted money from the oil and gas industry to cover up data centered on toxic emissions produced by fracking.
In an incendiary federal filed by the EPAs Inspector General, the North Carolina-based group NC WARN purported that there has been a persistent and deliberate cover-up that has prevented the agency from requiring the natural gas industry to make widespread, urgently needed and achievable reductions in methane venting and leakage (emissions) across the nations expanding natural gas infrastructure.
Studies relied upon by EPA to develop policy and regulations were scientifically invalid, the group noted.
Under reporting gas readings
In particular, NC WARN said in a press statement, Dr. David Allen, then-head of EPAs Science Advisory Board, has led an ongoing, three-year effort to cover up underreporting of the primary device, the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler, and a second device used to measure gas releases from equipment across the natural gas industry. Allen is also on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been funded by the oil and gas industries for years.
The EPAs failure to order feasible reductions of methane leaks and venting has robbed humanity of crucial years to slow the climate crisis, said Jim Warren, director of NC WARN. The cover-up by Allens team has allowed the industry to dig in for years of delay in cutting emissions at the worst possible time.
NC WARN said they stumbled across the cover up in its complaint when it found out that the creator of the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler, an engineer named Touche Howard, had been trying to expose the EPA for years on a glitch in the instrument. This malfunction caused the instrument to under-report methane emissions by 100-fold, the group stated.
The research revealed the EPA has systematically under estimated methane leaks spurred by fracked gas production for years. Howards research showed the agency had been hugely underestimating methane emissions because of the defective device, according to Common Dreams.
It appears that the goal of the [University of Texas] team was not to critically examine the problems but to convince [Environmental Defense Fund, who co-authored the study], and its production committee members that no problems existed, NC WARN stated.
We believe Mr. Howard was specifically prevented from providing input because the [University of Texas] team knew that he would be able to show that their counterarguments were faulty and the resulting studies scientifically invalid, the group added.
The highlighted issues attached to the measurement device noted multiple times have yet to be taken into consideration, resulting in the failure of the EPA to accurately report methane emissions for more than two years, much less require reductions, stated the complaint. Meanwhile, the faulty data and measuring equipment are still being used extensively throughout the natural gas industry worldwide.
Addressing EPA corruption
NW WARN has asked the EPA Inspector General to look into the chicanery tactics and corruption of Allen and other EPA authorities, revoke Allens research and review all EPA guidelines and policies based upon those studies, perform new studies that assess methane emissions produced by fracking, and scrutinize the EPAs dependence on research fueled by industry bias and conflicts of interest.
Fracking for gas and oil must also be stopped for a host of reasons. Were reaching out to communities, workers, advocates and elected officials to join the call for an investigation into EPAs scientific fraud, Warren argued.
The people of this nation must demand that regulators and politicians reject the pervasive pressure of corporate money, stop coddling the polluters and do their jobs on behalf of the public, he added.
Sources include:
CommonDreams.com
NCWarn.org [PDF]
Science.NaturalNews.com
Submit a correction >>
Gadkari visits Tesla in US: Offers to promote Joint Venture with Indian Automobile Sector for Electric Vehicles
Tesla in US, Sat, 16 Jul 2016 NI Wire
Union Minister of Road Transport, Highways & Shipping Shri Nitin Gadkari visited Tesla factory near San Francisco in USA yesterday and 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 ehicles.
Shri Gadkari said the Indian Government was committed to encouraging alternate pollution free transport in the country by providing incentives to bio-fuel, CNG, Ethanol and electric vehicles.
He proposed to the Tesla senior executives to make India their Asia manufacturing hub and offered land near major Indian ports to facilitate export of their vehicles to South and South East Asian countries.
Tesla senior executive admitted that their manufacturing hub has to be outside the US for markets in rest of the world and appreciated the Indian offer of cooperation which they said will certainly be considered at the appropriate time in future. They said India will definitely be a market for their next generation low cost sustainable model-3
Replying to specific queries from the Transport and Highways Minister regarding manufacturing of electric trucks, buses and two wheelers, Tesla team said they have future plans for trucks and pick up vans but not buses and two wheelers. They evinced keen interest in knowing whether there was any subsidy on electric vehicles in India. Shri Gadkari asked Tesla executives to outline their proposals for entry into Indian market.
Shri Gadkari was informed that 400,000 advance bookings have been done for Teslas model X. There were some bookings from India as . Shri Gadkari apprised Tesla executives of the progress Indian automobile manufacturers have made in the field of electric vehicles and exuded confidence that very soon Indian market will become very competitive in this sector.
The Transport & Highways and Shipping Minister along with accompanying senior officials took a round of the sprawling Tesla manufacturing units and saw the cutting edge robotic auto assembly plant.
Shri Gadkari inquired about the battery packs that can store energy from the power grid and from solar panels.He was told that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his visit to Tesla, too was keen to know how batteries and solar panels could be the future of electricity generation for India, particularly in rural areas. Shri Gadkari was told that Tesla was inviting suggestions for locations in India for demonstrations.
Source: PIB
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Morocco expressed willingness to return to the African Union and to regain its place within its institutional family if legality is restored and mistakes are corrected.
The wish was expressed by King Mohammed VI in a message he sent Sunday to the 27th Summit of the African Union, held in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, confirming thus the recent insistent news about Moroccos imminent return to the African fold.
King Mohammed VI has not made the trip to Kigali as some news outlets had announced, but several Moroccan officials, including Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar and the Kings advisor for Foreign Affairs Taieb Fassi Fihri, were in the Rwandan capital, where the participating heads of State have reportedly held, Sunday, shortly before the official opening ceremony of the AU summit, an in-camera session to discuss, among others, the possible return of Morocco to the pan-African organization.
Today, Morocco wishes resolutely and unequivocally to regain its place within its institutional family and to continue to live up to its responsibilities, with even more resolve and enthusiasm. Morocco firmly believes in the wisdom of the AU and its ability to restore legality and correct mistakes along the way, stated the Moroccan Sovereign in his message that was handed over to Chadian President and current Chairman of the African Union (AU), Idriss Deby Itno, by speaker of the Lower House of the Moroccan Parliament, Rachid Talbi Alami.
Our friends have long been asking us to return among them so that Morocco may take its natural place within its institutional family. That time has now come, pointed out King Mohammed VI, adding that the time for ideology is over. Our peoples need concrete, tangible action.
One cannot change geography, nor can one escape the burden of history, he stressed.
The Sovereign who insisted that Morocco should not remain outside its African institutional family and should regain its natural, rightful place within the AU, pledged that from within, Morocco will contribute to making the AU a more robust organization one that is both proud of its credibility and relieved of the trappings of an obsolete era.
Even when Morocco withdrew from the AU predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1984, it never left Africa, said the Sovereign. In 1984, it simply left an institution in very special circumstances.
Renewing his commitment to the continent, King Mohammed VI pointed out that three decades after it withdrew from the OAU, Africa has never been so much at the heart of Moroccos foreign policy and its international action as it is today.
My country has forged a unique, authentic and tangible South-South cooperation model which has made it possible not only to consolidate cooperation in the traditional areas of training and technical assistance, but also to engage in new, strategic sectors such as food security and infrastructure development.
This process will not be ending any time soonit is irreversible, he asserted, recalling that Morocco is already the second largest investor in the Continent, and ambitions to top the ranking.
After he pointed out that This well-thought-out decision to come back is endorsed by all of the nations forces, King Mohammed VI said Through this historic, responsible act, Morocco seeks to work within the AU to transcend divisions and pledges to make constructive contributions to the AU agenda and activities.
Ferhat Mhenni, the leader and founder of the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylie (MAK), was denied an entry visa on Friday by a Moroccos consulate in Villemomble in France, Algerian media reported.
Mhenni, who holds a passport of a political refugee, was planning to speak at a conference held within the framework of the Timitar festival in Agadir.
The media outlets affiliated with the Kabylie autonomous movement, such as Siwel.info, described the refusal of visa to Mhenni as a volte face by the Moroccan government and denounced what they perceived as an ambiguity by the the Islamist-led government which they have accused of hostility towards Amazighe militants.
This visa denial to a radical opposition movement in Algeria comes at a time a Moroccan delegation was visiting Algiers to hand a message from Mohammed VI to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as part of a Moroccan diplomatic offensive in Africa to campaign for a return to the African Union.
In response to Algerias support for the Polisario separatist, Moroccan diplomats gave Algiers a taste of its own medicine by invoking on multiple occasions the right to self-determination of the Amazigh (Berber) Kabyles. Last October, the Deputy Permanent Representative of Morocco to the UN, Abderrazzak Laassel, denounced the repression by the Algerian regime of the Kabyles whom he described as an eight million people with 9,000 years of existence, entitled to their autonomy and the recognition of their cultural and linguistic identity.
King Mohammed VI has urged the African Union to reconsider the recognition of the pseudo-sahrawi Republic, to restore legality within the pan-African organization and correct mistakes, pointing out that through newfound neutrality, the AU could make a constructive contribution to the settlement of the Sahara issue.
The call came in a strong-worded message King Mohammed VI addressed to the 27th summit of the African Union, which opened in the Rwandan capital Kigali on July 17.
In the message that was handed over to the President of Chad and acting Chairman of the African Union, Idriss Deby Itno, by Speaker of the Moroccan Parliament Lower House Rachid Talbi Alami, the Sovereign expressed his countrys wish to regain its place within the African organization.
Morocco quitted the AUs predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) 32 years ago to protest the illegal admission of the so-called SADR as a full-fledged member.
Today, Morocco wishes resolutely and unequivocally to regain its place within its institutional family and to continue to live up to its responsibilities, with even more resolve and enthusiasm, King Mohammed VI said, adding that Morocco firmly believes in the wisdom of the AU and its ability to restore legality and correct mistakes along the way.
The Sovereign surveyed the reasons that prompted his countrys withdrawal from the OAU, saying that the recognition of a pseudo state was understandably too hard for the Moroccan people to accept.
Indeed, it is difficult to admit that the Kingdom a nation steeped in history could somehow be compared to an entity that meets none of the attributes of sovereignty and that is deprived of any representativeness or effectiveness, he pointed out.
Describing the SADR recognition as an immoral fait accompli, and a coup against international legality, the monarch said, the Moroccan people and the nations driving forces unanimously felt that the admission of a non-sovereign entity, by means of transgression and collusion, was something they simply could not accept.
History will remember this episode as an act of deceit and as a misuse of procedures to serve interests that are yet to be elucidated an act similar to the abduction of a child, since the OAU was fairly unseasoned at the time.
He stated Further The time has come to reject manipulations and funding for separatist movements and to stop sustaining timeworn conflicts in Africa in order to concentrate on one course of action, that of promoting human and sustainable development, combating poverty and malnutrition, ensuring healthcare for our people, providing education for our children and raising the living standards for everyone.
This ethical requirement means we should reject and condemn the misjudgments of the past and whatever acts that go against the course of history, the Sovereign stated, adding that with respect to the Sahara issue, institutional Africa can no longer bear the burden of a historical error and of a cumbersome legacy.
The African Union is out of step with international law since this so-called state is not a member of the United Nations Organization, nor of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League or any other sub-regional, regional or international institution, he explained. He then wondered whether the AU would remain out of step with its own Member States national stances, since at least 34 AU countries have never recognized or no longer recognize that entity.
Even among the group of 26 countries that chose the division camp in 1984, only a small minority of some ten countries remains, he recalled, indicating that since 2000, 36 countries have withdrawn their recognition of that phantom state.
Recalling the UN Security Council-sponsored process to reach a final political solution to the Sahara regional dispute, King Mohammed VI argued that the African Union is thus completely out of step with developments in the Sahara issue and is the only organization prejudging the outcome of that process.
Yet, he said, Through newfound neutrality, it could make a constructive contribution to the achievement of that solution.
Stressing the need for Morocco to regain its natural, rightful place within the AU, the monarch said that from within, Morocco will contribute to making the AU a more robust organization one that is both proud of its credibility and relieved of the trappings of an obsolete era.
By returning to the African family, Morocco aims to keep up its commitment to Africa and strengthen its involvement in all matters it feels strongly about. Morocco pledges to make constructive contributions to the AU agenda and activities, King Mohammed VI stated.
Baltimore cop Brian Rice, left, arrives in court Monday. Photo: Steve Ruark/AP
The fourth officer to face trial in the death of Freddie Gray was cleared Monday of all charges. Lieutenant Brian Rice, the highest-ranking officer accused in the case, was acquitted in a bench trial of manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct for failing to strap Gray into a seat belt after his arrest. Gray, a 25-year-old Baltimore resident, died in April 2015 from injuries he allegedly received during a rough ride while in police custody. His death sparked mass protests against police brutality in Baltimore.
President Obama speaking at last weeks memorial to slain police officers in Dallas. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Last week, President Obama traveled to Dallas, where he addressed a memorial of slain police officers, then met for hours with police and Black Lives Matter activists, and followed with a televised town-hall-style meeting on racism. In all of those forums, Obama articulated the same ideas that have been the core of his worldview since he appeared on the public stage. He acknowledges the persistence of racial bias in policing and the criminal-justice system while also expressing sympathy for the difficulties faced by police. He believes in draining anger and passion from the issues, acknowledging the legitimate points on all sides, and boiling disagreements down to their narrowest possible form, gathering all of the sides around the table.
Obamas pragmatism is a source of frustration for many. Obamas right-wing opposition persistently believes his soothing racial discourse is a facade. Donald Trump exploited that suspicion this morning, when he told Fox News, The words are okay, but you just look at [Obamas] body language and theres something going on. This belief in the sincerity of Obamas stance on racial issues is not Trumps alone, or even the rights alone. Obamas pragmatic spirit has never made his most left-wing supporters terribly comfortable.
Some left-wing critics of Obamas racial politics reject him as a fraud, or a sellout. But others have a more gentle explanation. While retaining their affection for Obama, they explain his moderate racial stances as a political necessity, a necessary pose he must maintain in a majority-white country. The most recent version of this argument was articulated by German Lopez. Obama gave the same middle-of-the-road statements hes given every time he talks about policing and race. It was anything but a candid discussion, writes Lopez, panning Obamas measured town-hall comments. Lopez attributes the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other tone to his belief that Obama seems to feel like he cant discuss issues in ways that satisfy Black Lives Matter and his partys left wing.
One can never be certain what sentiments rest in a politicians heart. But the weight of the evidence points to a different conclusion: that Obamas moderate liberalism on race is not a mere pose but the expression of his true beliefs.
One mistake Lopez makes in dismissing Obamas moderation a characteristic one by his sympathetic critics from the left, across a variety of issues where he disappoints his base is to assume that the modulation of the presidents beliefs amounts to a lack of conviction. Why, asks Lopez, does Obama try so hard to gain the love of both sides in discussions about police, the justice system, and race to the point that it feels like hes saying nothing at all? For better or worse, though, there is a real core and coherence to the presidents ideology. The president believes that emotion hijacks the negotiation and mutual understanding that is necessary for progress. In his Dallas speech, Obama asked police to understand that minorities are correct to believe theyre unfairly treated by police, while asking protesters to understand that most police officers are well-intentioned:
Because with an open heart, we can learn to stand in each others shoes and look at the world through each others eyes, so that maybe the police officer sees his own son in that teenager with a hoodie whos kind of goofing off but not dangerous (applause) and the teenager maybe the teenager will see in the police officer the same words and values and authority of his parents. (Applause.) With an open heart, we can abandon the overheated rhetoric and the oversimplification that reduces whole categories of our fellow Americans not just to opponents, but to enemies. With an open heart, those protesting for change will guard against reckless language going forward, look at the model set by the five officers we mourn today, acknowledge the progress brought about by the sincere efforts of police departments like this one in Dallas, and embark on the hard but necessary work of negotiation, the pursuit of reconciliation. With an open heart, police departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not perfect; that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals.
Obama argues that police reform is good for police it makes their job easier and safer. This belief runs parallel to his economic conviction that spreading the wealth around is good for everybody, as opposed to the zero-sum conflict between the one percent and the people envisioned by Bernie Sanders. The president may be pandering when he claims to speak to police officers and empathize with the frustration they feel at being defined by the actions of their worst members. More likely, he actually believes this because he spends time listening to police officers and genuinely empathizes.
It is obviously true that, as president of the United States, Obama is not free to discuss race in unabashed left-wing terms, so even if he agreed with his partys left, he would have to conceal his beliefs. But does Obama believe this? The evidence suggests otherwise. Long before his political career, Obama became famous as a moderate at the Harvard Law Review bitterly divided over racial politics. Obama bridged the divide between conservatives and leftists on staff, and eventually emerged as a consensus candidate for Law Review president because he subscribed fully to neither view but could empathize with elements of both just as he does with police and protesters. That was not a pose. That was Obama displaying his authentic moderate liberal beliefs.
That same ideology has come through in a series of speeches and remarks Obama has made criticizing the increasing tendency on the left to demonize and shut down opposing points of view. Over the last year, Obama has driven home this theme again and again and again and again. If Obama were hewing to the center merely for fear of alienating the center, it might explain his hesitation to blurt out a provocative comment that might inflame conservatives and blow up into a national controversy. But it would not explain why he has gone out of his way so many times to pick fights with elements of his own base especially in the last quarter of his presidency, much of which has come when he been trying to tamp down a revolt from the left by Bernie Sanders. The far more likely explanation for what Obama says is that he believes it.
The Obama analysis of racism in law enforcement drains the issue of its culture-war ferocity, and reduces it to a technocratic problem. This is frustrating to conservatives itching to pit black against white. It is also frustrating to Obamas critics on the left, who see direct (peaceful) confrontation as the straightest path to correcting long-standing patterns of racism. By dismissing Obamas position as a facade by a black president to soothe jittery whites, they consign it to political oblivion. Obama, concludes Lopez, feels like he needs to be unsatisfying. So as Americas conversation on race moves forward, the presidents voice will by and large stay behind. On the contrary, given that Obama actually believes in what he says, and what he says does amount to a coherent, if complicated, solution, it is also possible that his ideas will live on after he departs the White House.
Photo-Illustration: Daily Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Donald Trump is not a Russian agent in the sense that Philip and Elizabeth from The Americans are Russian agents. Theres no hidden radio in his laundry room where he transmits secrets to the Kremlin. But his relationship with Russia is disturbing and lends itself to frightening interpretations.
Franklin Foer has detailed the connections between the Republican nominee and the Kremlin. In short, it includes a long series of economic and social ties, which fit the pattern Vladimir Putin has used to infiltrate and undermine governments elsewhere including in Ukraine, a coup Putin pulled off through Paul Manafort, who is now Trumps campaign manager. Michael Crowley and Julia Ioffe have both described how the Russian propaganda apparatus has thrown itself behind Trumps campaign. As Foer notes, Trumps lack of creditworthiness makes him unusually reliant on unconventional sources of financing. This makes him vulnerable to financial leverage by an unscrupulous foreign entity.
The evidence of Trumps unseemly affinity for Putin is extensive but circumstantial. Yet the most disturbing explanation for the evidence continues to get more plausible. Today, Josh Rogin reports, the Republican Party officially altered its platform on Ukraine and Russia. The previous platform advocated providing lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, reflecting the virtually unanimous position of the Republican Party Establishment. Trump staffers prevailed on the Platform Committee to replace that language with a milder endorsement of appropriate assistance.
Given how little attention Trump has paid to the substance of the platform, the intervention is striking. At the very least, it suggests that the candidates extensive, fulsome praise for the Russian dictator is more than a passing fancy. Reporters who investigate these ties are being very careful about their conclusions, but this looks really bad.
Mrs. Trump will be tonights keynote speaker. Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images
Just in the nick of time to avoid being preempted by actual events, a skeleton schedule for the Republican National Convention appeared overnight, so we will have at least a vague idea of what will transpire in the evening sessions. A timed schedule has not, however, been released, so its not entirely clear who will speak when.
The theme of the first night (each will be adorned with a Keep America slogan) is Keep America Safe. But anyone expecting a systematic overview of the countrys security needs will be disappointed. The first listed speaker is Willie Robertson of the reality show Duck Dynasty, whose connection to defense policy is not immediately obvious. But the bulk of the evening will apparently be devoted to the retailing of security-related grievances against the Obama administration generally and Hillary Clinton specifically. There will be not one, or two, but three scheduled speakers associated with the Benghazi incident: two Marines who were involved in the 2012 firefight at the Libyan diplomatic compound, and the mother of one of the victims. Enthusiasts for an older administration pseudo-scandal (though it actually began in the Bush administration) the ATFs Fast and Furious gun-running program that put weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels will be pleased to see that there are two speakers on the subject.
War veterans are represented by a former Navy SEAL who fought in Afghanistan and by the mother of another SEAL who was killed in action.
But the Trump campaigns signature conflation of national security and immigration policy is represented as well, by three speakers (interestingly labeled as immigration reform advocates) with family members who were killed by undocumented immigrants (or illegal aliens, as they are called in the GOP platform).
The pols appearing tonight are mostly those known for their association with the military, homeland security, or general ferocity toward Americas alleged enemies, both foreign and domestic. Rudy Giuliani is natural, of course. Senator Joni Ernst, the future GOP star, is a high-ranking member of the National Guard who was deployed to Iraq. Her Senate colleague and other rising star (perhaps on a ticket with Ernst?) Tom Cotton of Arkansas is a veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq and a relentless proponent of higher defense spending. One other senator, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is probably speaking tonight as a mark of honor: He was the first and for a long time the only senatorial endorser of Trumps candidacy, but he, too, is reliably angry and hawkish on all security issues. Rick Perry, the only one of Trumps rivals with a military record, will also speak, as will the bristling-with-medals runner-up in Trumps Veepstakes, former Gen. Michael Flynn.
But the real headliner of the night will be Melania Trump, who will presumably speak about her husbands sterling leadership qualities and his credentials as a family man rather than, say, bristle at Hillarys role in Benghazi! or call for the blood of illegal aliens. This mornings scuttlebutt is that the mogul himself may make a surprise appearance in the hall to watch his wife, or perhaps even to introduce her.
The big question a lot of journalists have here in Cleveland as we await the opening gavel (at 1 p.m. today, for a business session that will include approval of the convention Rules and Party Platform, probably without much incident) is whether the show tonight and for the rest of the week is going to be as tightly wrapped as most conventions are, or instead a free-form slow-motion riot where anything could happen.
Too yuge to fail. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The 2016 Republican Party wants to repeal most of the financial regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 crisis. They also would like to give the wealthiest people on Wall Street an enormous tax cut, while making it legal for financial advisers to gamble with retirees money (again). Oh, and they want to reinstate Glass-Steagalls prohibition on commercial banks engaging in investment business. Which is to say, they want to break up the big banks.
One of these things is not like the others.
On Monday, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told reporters that the GOP platform would include a call for reinstating Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that was repealed under President Clinton in the late 90s. A 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act was a centerpiece of Bernie Sanderss insurgent campaign, and became one of the key dividing lines in the Democratic primary. While the Democratic Partys platform backs the acts reinstatement, Hillary Clinton has yet to embrace it a point Manafort was eager to highlight.
We believe that the Obama-Clinton years have passed legislation that has been favorable to the big banks, which is one of the reason why you see all of the Wall Street money going to her, Manafort told Bloomberg. We are supporting the small banks and Main Street. We talk about legislation that affects, you know, some of the mistakes made in repealing Glass-Steagall and some of the mistakes made in imposing Dodd-Frank. The platform reflects those things.
Its hard not to see the Trump campaigns latest gesture to Sandersism as anything but a wholly cynical political ploy. The chances of a new Glass-Steagall passing a GOP Congress are exceptionally slim. And any legislation that broke up the big banks while repealing all of Dodd-Franks regulations would probably be a net win for Wall Street. Trump isnt embracing Glass-Steagall out of ideological principle, but rather because the Democratic rank and file support it while Bill and Hillary Clinton do not.
Regardless, the fact that the Republican standard-bearer sees a political benefit in pretending to be to the left of Clinton on financial reform is noteworthy. In so many ways, this aint Mitt Romneys party anymore.
Ailes and Murdoch. Photo-Illustration: Daily Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Roger Ailess tenure as the head of Fox News may be coming to an end. Rupert Murdoch and sons Lachlan and James co-chairmen and CEO, respectively, of parent company 21st Century Fox have settled on removing the 76-year-old executive, say two sources briefed on a sexual-harassment investigation of Ailes being conducted by New York law firm Paul, Weiss. After reviewing the initial findings of the probe, James Murdoch is said to be arguing that Ailes should be presented with a choice this week to resign or face being fired. Lachlan is more aligned with their father, who thinks that no action should be taken until after the GOP convention this week. Another source confirms that all three are in agreement that Ailes needs to go.
While Gretchen Carlsons sexual-harassment lawsuit against Ailes sparked the investigation, sources say it has expanded into a wide-ranging inquiry into Ailess controversial management style. The interviews are now being conducted at Paul, Weisss midtown offices because of concerns that the Fox offices could be bugged, sources say. The lawyers are seeking to interview former female employees of Fox News in addition to current staff. They are also looking into the appropriateness of Ailess pressuring employees to speak out on his behalf, against his accusers. For instance, they are focusing on an op-ed written by Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto in which Cavuto called the allegations against Ailes sick. As Cavuto is a manager at Fox News (his title is senior VP and managing editor), his comments could be seen as part of a corporate attempt to silence women who would speak out.
Meanwhile, one Fox host told me that Ailes loyalists are reporting back on the investigation to his attorney, and Fox contributor, Susan Estrich. Theyre scared to death, one Fox anchor told me. The mood is bleak.
21st Century Fox issued the following statement, shortly after this article with originally published: This matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded.
Resistance is futile, say the managers of the Republican convention. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
The general feeling here in Cleveland a day before the formal opening of the 2016 Republican National Convention is that any drama is most likely to occur outside the arena, in some configuration of a three-cornered battle involving pro- and anti-Trump protesters and the Cleveland police. Big competing (and possibly colliding) rallies are planned for Monday afternoon, soon after the convention is gaveled to order so to speak.
Its the general disorder in the planning of this convention that sustains some speculation about the possibility of the unexpected occurring inside the arena. There is still no formal convention schedule available; that could be because the Trump campaign and its RNC allies want to withhold as much information as possible from the much-disdained media or because the schedule is in crazy turmoil as chores usually performed weeks in advance are falling to the very last minute.
But in terms of efforts to loosen the grip of Trump and the RNC over the conventions rules and platform, its probably all over but the shouting, and the shouting will likely be confined to the unacknowledged cry of scattered delegates protesting the convention majoritys decisions one last time.
Last week, a much-discussed initiative to change the conventions rules to unbind delegates pledged to Trump via primary and caucus results not only failed to carry the Rules Committee, but also failed to secure the 28 committee votes (one-fourth of its membership) needed to force a convention-floor vote on a minority report. A separate effort to substitute a 1200-word statement of principles for the long and very socially conservative party platform failed in the Platform Committee. But the committee reports will not be final until Monday morning, which means petitions with 28 votes from the relevant committee could still, in theory, generate minority reports even now.
On the Rules Committee front, a comeback is possible because the anti-Trump unbinding faction could join forces with hard-core conservatives who want rules changes for the next election cycle especially incentives for states to close primaries and caucuses to participation by the Democrats and independents thought to have played a big role in Trumps victory over Ted Cruz. But its not clear that together they have the 28 votes to kick up a fuss.
Dissenters on the Platform Committee at one point claimed 38 names on a minority-report petition to adopt the short statement of principles. But the conservative ideologues who first came up with this idea were horrified to discover they were being hornswoggled into a maneuver to get rid of the homophobic elements of the platform, and have thus been dropping off the petition.
The last-gasp tactic for the dissenters is to force a very visible and time-consuming roll-call vote on the rules and/or the platform, which requires demonstrated support from majorities in seven delegations. In the unlikely event that happens, it would simply slow down the convention and disrupt the intended show of unity.
Failing a roll-call vote, unhappy delegates can do no more than howl as loudly as possible during a Monday afternoon voice vote to adopt the rules and the platform. You can be sure convention chair Paul Ryan will have a lot of trouble hearing the dissenters, even if their decibel level is, by normal standards, ear-shattering.
Thus the many months of Republican angst generated by the unlikely presidential candidacy of Donald Trump will almost certainly expire tomorrow, or become sublimated into the one thing that truly does unite the GOP this year: hatred of the partisan opposition.
According to one persistent report, the first night of the convention will be devoted almost entirely to Benghazi, the pseudo-scandal that puzzles not only Democrats but also any Americans who have not been marinating in right-wing media over the last few years. Whether or not that actually happens, hating on Crooked Hillary, her rape-y husband, the crypto-Muslim Obama, and the whole crew of secular-socialist business-haters and baby-killers is going to reach epic levels in Cleveland. The buildup to this orgy of recrimination has been so relentless since 2012 that it is easy to forget going negative at conventions is generally considered to be a bad idea. Indeed, at one Democratic convention I attended John Kerrys coronation in Boston in 2004 word came down on the eve of festivities that, in accordance with an emphatic focus-group finding that partisanship annoyed undecided voters, all explicit negative references to that other party were to be excised (you may recall that Barack Obamas famous speech at that convention eschewed Red and Blue America; although, the one off-message exception to bipartisanship, Al Sharptons fiery peroration, was the biggest crowd-pleaser).
By most accounts, the least successful Republican convention in recent history was the 1992 event where Poppy Bushs reelection campaign was swallowed up by several days of rage in Houston, featuring Pat Buchanans culture war speech. That speech, and its furious purveyor, are in many respects the spiritual antecedents of the Trump campaign. It will be interesting, and perhaps important, to see if it can work to unite otherwise divided Republicans in this day and age.
Have you ever wondered what Donald Trumps favorite Twitter exclamation Sad! would look like if it became sentient, wasnt a huge fan of LGBT rights, and sold its soul for a very slim chance at assuming the presidency? We got to find out when the presumptive Republican nominee sat down with the guy he grudgingly chose as his running mate for a 60 Minutes interview. The result was even more bizarre than the speech introducing Governor Mike Pence on Saturday, in which Trump mainly talked about himself.
The interview starts with Lesley Stahl noting that after months of hammering Hillary Clinton for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, Trump picked a running mate who voted the same way. Apparently, Trump had no answer prepared for this extremely obvious question. I dont care, he declared, Its a long time ago. And he voted that way and they were also misled. A lot of information was given to people. So does that mean Clintons off the hook? No, shes not, said Trump.
From there, the interview builds to a crescendo of awkwardness, with Trump giving Pence permission not to insult John McCain, declaring that the Constitution doesnt necessarily give us the right to commit suicide, as a country, and finally informing Stahl, I think Im much more humble than you would understand. Through the entire 20-minute interview, Pence is basically only allowed to nod quietly, smile uncomfortably, or call Trump a good man. Chris Christie might have been able to pull off that level of obsequiousness with a certain gusto, but Pence just looks like a hollow, generic Republican-shaped shell.
Photo: Steven Taylor
People get attached to their stuff. Two-year-olds, for instance, have very strong opinions about whats theirs (MINE!), and are suspicious about sharing, no matter what nonsense their adult caregivers spew about this caring thing. And although (most) people eventually learn to follow appropriate social norms, that relationship to stuff and things still matters throughout the life span, and even, in a way, beyond it when youre gone, after all, your loved ones will likely inherit your most prized possessions. If nothing else, at least your memory will live on through, say, a particularly nice set of dresser drawers you once owned.
People express their self-identity through their belongings, a notion that psychologists and neuroscientists are lately finding empirical evidence to support, though the idea itself is of course not a new one. In 1890, William James, the 19th-century scholar who is considered by many to be the founder of modern psychology, wrote in The Principles of Modern Psychology, a mans Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. (Former President Jimmy Carter was a little late to this conclusion, observing in a 1970s speech, Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.)
But this idea that you imbue your possessions with pieces of yourself, like a benign Voldemort becomes especially intriguing when you consider a case study published online last week in the journal Cortex (and first spotted by science writer Rolf Degen), about a woman who, at least temporarily, lost her sense of ownership over her belongings. What can a mind thats lost its sense of that feeling of mine-ness as it relates to stuff and things tell us about our own relationships to our stuff and things?
Heres an overview of the case study:
The patient: Shes not named in the report, but her neurologists all from Lisbon, Portugal do provide some biographical details of the woman at the center of the case study. At the time of the incident, she was 65 years old and widowed, a retired translator who had lived in the same house for more than three decades. She lived alone well, alone save for the eight cats with which she shared her home. She had recently suffered a stroke, which caused her trouble with speaking and partial facial paralysis. After treatment, however, she was once again able to speak clearly.
The problem: The trouble started after she came home from the hospital after being treated for her stroke. Suddenly, and for seemingly no reason, nothing in her home quite felt like hers. When I looked at my belongings, I felt they were not mine, she told her doctors. As I opened my door, I looked at the painting on the wall, had a perfect recollection of it and knew it was mine. However, I did not feel a sense of belonging as before. Then, I realized I had the same feeling with the sofa, the living rooms furniture, the frames with family portraits, the flowers of the balcony everything!
Intriguingly, she told her doctors that she never felt that same sense of detachment toward her own body, or toward the places and the people she knew and loved and yet the eerie feeling did extend to her cats. She recognized them, and remembered each kittys name, but none of the animals quite felt like they belonged to her. I felt as if I was not emotionally attached to my things anymore, she said.
The diagnosis: These symptoms dont really have a name, or a specific diagnosis, at least not yet. But brain scans showed damage to a few particular areas: the left insula, the left anterior cingulate region, and the left supramarginal gyrus. This wouldnt mean much to anyone if it werent for a 2011 neuroimaging study, which found that these areas appear to be associated with a persons sense of ownership; the researchers, from the University of Aberdeen, found changes in brain activity in this network when their study participants were looking at images of their own things, but not at others things. As the authors of that paper note, these brain regions have also been linked with self-referential encoding and memory the formation of a self-concept, in other words.
Some developmental psychologists have theorized that when a 2-year-old insists that anything hes touched (and many things he hasnt) is MINE!, its a first stab at asserting independence, through the beginnings of the formation of self-identity. As psychology writer Christian Jarrett has noted, nearly 25 percent of all day-care squabbles recorded by a team of psychologists in 2008 were about just what belonged to whom the child either defended his or her objects from another child, or wanted to take an object from another child. Children at this age are using their things to build their own understanding of who they are, in other words, and this is something that doesnt exactly diminish as we grow older. Younger drivers, those between ages 18 and 25, are more likely to personalize their cars in some way, as if marking out their territory, Jarrett further observes, and when your self-identity is threatened, research has suggested you may be more likely to try to make yourself feel a bit better by buying fancy stuff. Its as if reflecting on our things restores a fragile ego, he concludes.
This womans story helps shed a little more light on the tangled-up relationship humans have with their things, a subject which has led many to conclude, somewhat cynically, that we are what we own. Fortunately for her, the strange feeling regarding her stuff only lasted three days; one morning she woke up, and everything she owned felt like hers again, as if she were awakening from some fairy-tale curse meant to teach her a lesson about materialism.
When will my reflection show who I am inside? Photo: Disney Productions, Getty Images
Indiana governor Mike Pence is now presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumps running mate. Before that, the Indiana governor was notable for making some terrible decisions about womens health. And long, long before that he was but a humble talk-radio host with some very strong opinions about the animated movie Mulan.
For those in need of a refresher, Mulan is a 1998 Disney film in which the titular character is a young woman who disguises herself as a man so that she can be drafted into the military in the place of her elderly and ailing father. She acquires fighting prowess and impressive upper-body strength during her training and eventually goes on to defeat the Huns. The film also features a particularly soulful ballad by Christina Aguilera.
Mike Pence, however, was not moved by Reflection. No, as BuzzFeed News discovered, he was far too concerned with the hidden liberal messaging in the movie (which was based on a sixth-century Chinese legend) and took to his radio shows website to air his grievances in a 1999 op-ed.
Pence ranted, I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulans story will cause a quiet change in the next generations attitude about women in combat and they just might be right. (Just think about how often we think of Bambi every time the subject of deer hunting comes into the mainstream media debate.)
He also pointed to the ending of Mulan, in which she falls in love with her army captain, Shang, as an example of why women and men couldnt possibly serve in the military together. You see, now stay with me on this, many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually. Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually, he wrote. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan. Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.
Read Pences full op-ed (while blasting Reflection) below:
Her twitter response to the backlash:
pic.twitter.com/fDit1iRvuj Sonia Kruger (@SoniaKruger) July 18, 2016
the
She is fucking trash.Her twitter response to the backlash:the #asamother hashtag is roasting her
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yeah the disconnect is pretty staggering. but she obviously ain't that bright.
Edited at 2016-07-18 05:57 am (UTC)
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It's mostly them wanting democracy for white people. Filthy PoCs obviously don't deserve democracy (/s).
I felt dirty typing that.
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because immigrant children don't exist
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i don't see her caring about the bombings in baghdad earlier this month and the children who probably died there... oh that's right, no one gives a shit about brown children. only white europeans matter. western media ain't shit
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when your reaction to an issue is kneejerk racism then, sorry babe, but you're gonna be called a racist. if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a fucking duck.
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The fact that she doesn't even realize that muslims aren't a race though... Stupidity.
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As a mother
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I hate Taylor Swift too, but she is a victim in all of this.
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lmao sis
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every time i see a gordon ramsay gif i laugh
my jaw is sore
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wow you're just begging to be relevant aren't you
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TRASH.
I wonder if things will be awkward between her and her co host now.
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I'm sure the aboriginals in your country would have loved to close you off too bitch.
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lol mte
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They conveniently forget about that
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Oop
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Shut up. Disgusting pos.
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Who is her Muslim friend? Susan Carland? Don't bring her into this.
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White ppl continue to be.....unfortunate.
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well, colour me unsurprised she feels this way.
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Nothing will happen to Sonia Kruger just like nothing happened to Eddie McGuire. If anything happens to Kruger it'll honestly be because men and the media love to damage a woman's career while men are just 'being boys/telling jokes'.
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ch 9 have already released a statement that says they respect her views and discussion. bastards.
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eddie mcguire has had too many chances.
Edited at 2016-07-18 10:27 am (UTC)
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Fuuuuuuuuuuuck Eddie
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Damn that reminds me of a roommate i had in college. She told her mom her roommate was jewish (me) and her mom replied, "is she a good jew or a bad jew?" Wtffff
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wtf
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lmaoooooooooooo
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what the fuck???
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And lol @ her saying she wants to feel safe on Australia Day. Us poc don't exactly feel safe going out and celebrating on that particular day.
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lol i stay indoors
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Same lol. My brother usually goes to the beach and I'm always worried something will happen to him.
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lol right? i always stay home
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as a PoC i never feel unsafe on invasion day, but that's probably because i live in a big city.
i totally agree with your point though.
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she's completely out of touch
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I have never done anything on Australia Day...
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She's been called out on that point continuasly thankfully.
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"I'm not racist. I have Muslim friends."
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Dude, it's too early in the morning on my side of the world to comment on how messed up this is. I can't. I just can't even at this ignorance. :(
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Edited at 2016-07-18 06:01 am (UTC) Well Australia used to be England's penal county and Australians (the white ones at least) are descended from criminals but okay, continue with your "we ned 2 keep australia safe frm da muzlimzz!!!1" bullshit
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Well, technically a minority of white Australian's are descendence as the white population grew extensively from a result of immigration many years after the arrival of the first invaders.
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only something like 20% of white australians are actually descended from convicts, there was a lot of european immigration post WWII especially
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Thanks. I was only vaguely aware of that. Guess I didn't see how many people came from where.
Edited at 2016-07-18 09:01 am (UTC)
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my ancestor, who stole a horse, would be very disappointed to read this comment
to be real though... muslims have existed in australia since settlement, this is just the new thing that white australians have jumped on since they moved past the "invaded by asians" rhetoric
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from cosmo? damn drag ha racist ass tho
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I've been reading some really interesting pieces from Cosmo lately. IDK what happened but they've put out some really good think pieces.
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probably hired some poc staff lbr
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going back to THEIR ORIGINS!
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right? I'm surprised, it's a good article
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well with what selena said i truly believe they played this angle
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what did she say if you don't mind sharing? i've been at work, i'm just catching up and i feel like i missed everything!! :((((((
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oh lol so that means if I hashtag something I save lives? No-I could give two fucks about 'sides'. You dont know what I do". Here is a link: https://twitter.com/prasejeebus/status/754940266289717248/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
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she was like oh this is stupid people should be talking about things that matter
then a bunch of people dragged her because she never uses her twitter to speak about blm or the orlando shooting
selena then said i don't care about either side when it comes to black lives matter
she is horrible
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Selena deleted this tweet so here she is thinking Black Lives Matter movement means 'taking sides' pic.twitter.com/VtSSBvyK5c laura (@daisyrdley) July 18, 2016
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She tweeted that people need to use their voice to bring light to important issues that matter.
Got called out for not using her voice for issues that matter (BLM, etc) nor singing.
Tweeted (then deleted) that she doesn't care about hashtags because they don't mean shit and that she doesn't take sides.
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She then got called out for not saying shit about gun control or black lives matter but apparently we don't know what she does behind the scenes to help those causes so we're not allowed to judge her, she also doesn't "pick a side".
In a nutshell, she's a fucking idiot, but we already knew this. She acted like there were much more important things to talk about and that people need to focus on real problems. (because humans can't think about multiple things at once)She then got called out for not saying shit about gun control or black lives matter but apparently we don't know what she does behind the scenes to help those causes so we're not allowed to judge her, she also doesn't "pick a side". #alllivesmatter In a nutshell, she's a fucking idiot, but we already knew this.
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Finally. A publication that has the balls to call it out.
SCALP HA!!!!
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And SEXIST.
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This really is the fall of Taylor Swift. They played her up and now they're knocking her down.
(Yes, she's awful, I know. And the racism she thrived on was sick. Everything about this has been awful but good gossip.)
Edited at 2016-07-18 10:27 pm (UTC)
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i love how most of her squad's response was "there are more important things to worry about" only because they didn't want to face the fact that their leader the woman who put them on is being outted as a conniving snake.
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People are being so fucking ridiculous honestly. It's actually really shocking to read. There was always vitriol for Taylor on ontd, ever since the days of the 'What's in your fridge' post when people managed to shit on her for the contents of her refrigerator. But the sheer delusion when it comes to acting like she's a bad person and racist and sexist for literal made up connections. Someone said in another post today that she was more conniving and manipulative than a US politician. I mean really? This community prides itself on feminism and somehow this is one of the most blatant displays of sexism I've ever seen around here.
There's no evidence of lies and they've never been able to provide receipts for this evil manipulative mastermind persona they've crafted for her, so I'm just here reading these comment like yeah, over the top is one way to describe it.
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It's completely ott. I'm confused but I guess everyone is happy now.
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exactly, its p obvious theres no ammo to defend her
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they just had literally nothing else they could say, lol
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The fact that they all started using that line made me wonder if they passed around some memo from Taylor's PR saying that was their damage control strategy, lol. If so it backfired beautifully.
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Did she even do anything for their careers
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Of course there were racial undertones.
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I always found her song "Innocent" to be sick and vaguely racist. Now I have a publication backing up those sentiments on the whole feud
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how is that song racist
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That's why I started disliking her lol, the Imma let you finish incident was just another of the VMA antics, like Borat putting his ass on Eminem's face or that Rage Against the Machine guy that run up on stage and started climbing the decorations. It had always been a silly show full of celebrities acting like idiots but Taylor and the media played it as such a tragedy that had this undertones of destroy the black man that wronged america's white sweetheart and it was just so gross.
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Yesssss, expose this phony racist for all that she is.
Edited at 2016-07-18 10:15 pm (UTC)
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Wildest Dreams director Joseph Kahn, who also directed Swift's Blank Space and Bad Blood videos, has defended the video, saying that it's not racist. In a statement provided to Entertain This! by Swift's representative, Kahn says:
Wildest Dreams is a song about a relationship that was doomed, and the music video concept was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa,1950.
There are black Africans in the video in a number of shots, but I rarely cut to crew faces outside of the director as the vast majority of screentime is Taylor and Scott.
The video is based on classic Hollywood romances like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as classic movies like The African Queen, Out of Africa and The English Patient, to name a few.
The reality is not only were there people of color in the video, but the key creatives who worked on this video are people of color. I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man. We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historicially inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history. This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work.
There is no political agenda in the video. Our only goal was to tell a tragic love story in classic Hollywood iconography. Furthermore, this video has been singled out, yet there have been many music videos depicting Africa. These videos have traditionally not been lessons in African history. Let's not forget, Taylor has chosen to donate all of her proceeds from this video to the African Parks Foundation to preserve the endangered animals of the continent and support the economies of local African people.
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he's so dumb it's just...wow
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& if they wanted to reference the English Patient, they could've had a biracial relationships LIKE IN THE MOVIE
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We collectively decided it would have been historicially inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history.
Gotta maintain that historical accuracy!
Gotta maintain that historical accuracy!
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but is he ever gonna figure out that "Africa" is a huge continent made up of many different countries and people groups tho?
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oh god I remember this mess
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This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa,1950
I get so annoyed when ppl refer to a whole continent this way
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loool
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this willful ignorance...
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damn didn't expect cosmo to show up with the thinkpiece. honestly at this point i could take a college course that explores this feud through the lens of postracial america/white feminism
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the nyt story mentioned the racial aspect of this too, this feud is weirdly complicated when it comes to race and misogyny like obviously the two aren't mutually exclusive but it just makes them both trash so idk how people can cape for Taylor when she was acting like a victim because she just KNEW people would believe her over Kanye (and they did for racist reasons whether they want to admit it or not)
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SO many people are unwilling to allow that she lied, even with video receipts. It all becomes semantics or "Kanye shouldn't have recorded it!" It's blowing my fucking mind.
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just watch, Swifty's team is going to try to turn the narrative to ~how dare he record, it was illegal~ even if it was nothing of the sort.
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even in this post ppl are defending her saying there's no evidence she lied and we're all horrible misoynistic kanye stans. get a grip ffs
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ot but a comment of yours in a previous swiftmas in july post popped up on my tumblr dash
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I think part of it is because Kanye essentially "started" it. Taylor wouldn't have had a side to play up if Kanye hadn't kept giving her shit to react to. Like the whole "victim" thing is played out (Kanye isn't actually a threat to Taylor) but his obsession with her is fucked up.
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Tell it! On the surface it is a celeb fued with one being outted about lies. But honestly, there's levels to this and the conversation needs to be had.
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http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2012/02/white_women_and_blame_a_black_man_syndrome/
Edited at 2016-07-18 10:17 pm (UTC) Part of the racist narrative since 2009
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great article. our society is so sick.
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Who the fuck is writing for Cosmo now?
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Lol mte! Between the Calvin Harris fuckboy article and this I'm like should I be reading Cosmo? Did they finally give up the terrible sex advice and get good articles?
Edited at 2016-07-18 10:18 pm (UTC)
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Right?! Last time I looked at a Cosmo it was the worst.
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http://www.twitter.com/ProfessorCrunk
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/author/13949/brittney-cooper/ late, but Brittney Cooper (amazing scholar and gender studies prof at Rutgers), has been writing for Cosmo a lot lately, and she's incredible. I've been pleasantly surprised by the stuff they've been publishing.
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ooh, where's the calvin harris fuckboy article? (i'd google it but i'm thinking i wouldn't get the desired results if i actually googled 'calvin harris fuckboy article')
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I hate Cosmo
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Why would you say that? They're 100% accurate here.
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Omarosa was named director of African-American Outreach program for Trump.
Her new role is just an extension of the work shed been doing at the National Diversity Coalition for Trump.
Trump basically has 0% approval among black voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
She says in her reality she is surrounded by African Americans who want to see Donald Trump as the next President.
From a People magazine article
she began her career in politics, but was banished from four jobs in two years with the Clinton administration. (LOL)
Source: http://fortune.com/2016/07/18/omarosa-trump-african-american-outreach/
Production at Libyas 100,000-bpd Sarir field has been halted after a protest over unpaid salaries had stopped exports at the eastern port of Hariga, Omran al-Zwai, spokesman for Libyas Arabian Gulf Oil Co, told Bloomberg on Monday.
The sit-in protests at Hariga, initiated by a unit of the Libyan Petroleum Facilities Guard, had already caused a delay of two shipments of crude oil.
The industrial action had impeded a shipment of 600,000 barrels at Hariga en route to Italy, and such shipment has been on hold since Saturday, Bloomberg quoted al-Zwai as saying. Arabian Gulf Oil Co, or Agoco, may see its production halt within a week should the sit-in continue, the official added.
Hariga, which has a daily export capacity of 120,000 barrels, is not the only export terminal frozen by the Guard, whose allegiances are as divided as those of the national oil company, which only recently reunited after its two managements decided to forgo their differences in a bid to restore Libyas oil production and exports.
Hariga was last closed in May, during a dispute between the eastern unit of the National Oil Corporation and the western branch of the company. It reopened relatively quickly, and from then until the start of July, exports from the terminal reached 1.5 million barrels. This is close to what Libyas total daily exports used to be four years ago. Now, the country ships just 300,000 bpd.
Libya has been torn by conflict since the removal of Muammar Gaddafi five years ago. This conflict has had a severe effect on its oil industry, with warring factions blockading oilfields and ports alike.
Libya, which has the largest crude oil reserves in Africa, has now become second from the bottom in terms of output among OPEC members.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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The rise in oil prices over the past six months has come as a blessing for the battered U.S. shale producers. Oil prices have risen more than 50 percent since January, giving a glimmer of hope to the U.S. oil industry that the worst of the oil crisis might finally be behind them. Moreover, it forced the shale producers to adapt by reducing production costs and increasing efficiency.
According to data publicized by Reuters, the decline rates of oil wells in the most productive fields in the U.S. the Permian and Bakken Basins were almost halved over the past several years. In practice, this means that shale people will get more bang for their buck; due to slower decline of the wells, they will have to drill fewer new wells to sustain output and therefore lower their capital demands.
After months of consecutive falls, the number of rigs has been increasing since May and companies expect additional growth if oil prices remain at $50 levels. In addition, Norwegian energy consultancy Rystad Energys newest estimates reveal that the U.S. holds more recoverable oil reserves than Russia or Saudi Arabia. More than 50 percent of reserves belong to unconventional shale oil.
Low oil price has been both a blessing and a curse for the shale industry
The key for the survival of the U.S. shale industry currently lies in its ability to raise money to finance its renewed activity. One of the shales weak spots was always its dependency on capital inflow and high level of debt. In the world of high oil prices and lax capital markets this did not matter so much. However, since the oil price crashed two years ago, financing has become the industrys central problem. Bond sales of U.S. independent energy companies is currently at its lowest level in more than a decade, and the markets are still not convinced enough to devote fresh capital to new energy projects, despite the brighter outlook that came with higher prices of oil. Related: Is Oil Going Back Under $40?
A breath of fresh air could come from another side though. After the slump in prices, many oil giants such as Exxon and Chevron mothballed expensive offshore and Arctic projects and turned their attention towards cheaper and more feasible shale projects in the United States.
No clear winner of the oil price war
So who has won in this war of oil giants after all? It is probably a tie. Although the Saudis caused damage to the U.S. shale, they also hit to global oil industry hard, while they managed to preserve their market share, they paid a heavy price in terms of oil revenues. The real question however, is not whether the House of Saud is able to keep oil prices (and consequently U.S. shale production) subdued for a prolonged period of time, but how long they can do it without endangering fiscal and social stability of the Desert Kingdom and other OPEC members. Despite its ambitious Vision 2030 programme, Saudi Arabia will stay dependent on oil income to subsidize its social programmes for many years to come. Achieving restructuring at $50-60 price levels without swift and potentially painful reforms would prove a real challenge to the Saudi regime.
On the other hand, Riyadh has done a huge favor to the U.S. shale industry by forcing it to adapt and change its business philosophy. OPEC will remain an important, and hopefully responsible, factor in oil markets, but it will have to accept the fact that the circumstances have changed over the past five years. Both the ascent of shale oil, and initiatives to reduce global carbon footprint will impose an enormous strain on the Cartel and its members, which are still a long way from having diversified economies.
By Ante Batovic via Global Risk Insights
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Arab countries exported US$50.4 billion worth of crude oil in the first quarter of the year, local media report. This is US$24 billion less than the value of crude exports by OAPEC in the first quarter of 2015 and reflects the sharp drop in oil prices, which tanked below US$30 in early 2016.
OAPEC noted in its monthly bulletin that Arab oil producers are facing serious challenges as a result of the oil price decline and that these challenges have spiraled out of the energy sector, affecting a range of other industries and facets of their national economies. As a consequence, consumption and public spending have both been affected, OAPEC said.
Measures taken to limit the damage included using public reserves to compensate for budget deficits, and cutting capital expenditure on public projects. Current expenditure, however, has so far remained untouched, as have most subsidies on basic consumer products.
The organization points out that the full effects of these measures may not be felt before the medium to long term, and that there is still urgent need for further measures to prop up the local economies and ensure their sustainable growth. Focus is put on privatization for a range of sectors, from tourism to telecoms, in hopes of increasing government revenues from these industries while reducing the burden that comes with the responsibility of managing these sectors.
In addition, OAPEC members UAE, Qatar and Kuwait are increasingly counting on their sovereign funds, and Saudi Arabia is now planning to join their ranks by setting up the largest sovereign fund in the world.
Related: Big Oil Begins To Worry About Trumps Wall
The Gulf Cooperation Council members are also working on a common tax reform envisaging a unified VAT framework for the organization.
All in all, OAPEC concludes, its members have progressed well along the path of reforms prompted by falling oil prices, but there is still a long way to go, and many obstacles remain, including legislation that needs updating and the need to borrow more, which is not something OAPEC members are comfortable with.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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On the heels of a hydrogen sulfide release in May at the Exxon Mobil plant in Baytown, Texas, which resulted in the workers sheltering in place, a second incident occurred on Sunday. A dilute propylene leak was discovered on Sunday in the pipeline from the oil refinery and chemical plant, which is the largest such facility in the United States.
As in the May incident, there were no injuries reported. The company said on Sunday that it was investigating the incident. At the time, the company shut down a pair of pipelines that carry the product; and issued a statement that it was cooperating with local emergency responders. The cause of the leak was not immediately known.
The leak was discovered around 10:00 a.m. local time. First responders were called out at approximately 10:10, and the Baytown Fire Department shut off the valves feeding the product to the affected areas of the pipeline.
Fire chief Victor Medrano said that fire crews took extra precautions since propylene does not easily dissipate. The substance is highly flammable, and has no odor or color. It is a by-product of the refining process, and can be used in the production of plastics and acetone. At 10:30, the local police department issued a shelter in place warning for nearby residents.
Related: How Will China Impact Oil Prices In The Coming Months?
There were also reports that local authorities had made a decision to evacuate residents.
Residents were asked to remain indoors, close off windows, doors and other ways outside air might reach their homes, and to seal any areas that might permit a leak. By Sunday afternoon, the shelter in place order was lifted.
A spokeswoman for Exxon Mobil, Ashley Smith Alemayehu said that the company would conduct an investigation into the leaks and that the pipelines would not be restarted until conditions were deemed safe.
Lincoln Brown for Oilprice.com
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Protests over unpaid salaries from a unit of the Libyan Petroleum Facilities Guard have caused a delay of two shipments of crude oil from the countrys eastern port of Hariga.
Hariga, which has a daily export capacity of 120,000 barrels, is not the only export terminal frozen by the Guard, whose allegiances are as divided as those of the national oil company, which only recently reunited after its two managements decided to forgo their differences in a bid to restore Libyas oil production and exports.
Hariga was last closed in May, during a dispute between the eastern unit of the National Oil Corporation and the western branch of the company. It reopened relatively quickly and from then until the start of July, exports from the terminal reached 1.5 million barrels. This is close to what Libyas total daily exports used to be four years ago. Now, the country ships just 300,000 bpd.
Libya has been torn by conflict since the removal of Muammar Gaddafi five years ago. This conflict has had a severe effect on its oil industry, with warring factions blockading oilfields and ports alike. Libya, which has the largest crude oil reserves in Africa, has now become second from the bottom in terms of output among OPEC members.
Now it seems there is a glimmer of hope with the unification of the two NOC branches, as the opponents begin to realize that nobody wins from the blockades. Four ports in eastern Libya remain shut down for now Es Sider, Zawiya, Ras Lanuf, and Zueitina but there are hopes they will be reopened soon, after the newly unified NOC said this was its top priority. The combined capacity of the four shuttered terminals is 860,000 bpd.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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History was made at the 2016 Pardeeville Triathlon this past weekend, the third race in the Wisconsin Tri Series that took place in the Village of Pardeeville, 35 miles north of Madison. Team Black Men Run out of Madison with members Anthony Curtis, Joseph Roy and Aaron Perry became the first-ever African-American diabetic sprint triathlon team to finish a triathlon event.
Perry swam a quarter of a mile in 10 minutes before passing the timing chip to Roy, who was off for the 15-mile bike ride which he completed in an hour and four minutes. Roy passed the timing chip to Curtis, who took off on the three-mile run which he completed in 33 minutes.
"He brought it home!" Perry tells Madison365. "And once he crossed the finish line, we knew that we earned a little slice of history. It was really great because I saw the guys really step up and really understand that this was bigger than us. This is the type of accomplishment that could really help a lot of people struggling with diabetes or just struggling with chronic health conditions overall."
Diabetes remains one of the most serious health problems that the African-American community faces, and Perry says that he wants the triathlon teams photo to represent the new faces of diabetes. Curtis is a UW-Madison police detective, Roy is a web developer and Perry is an author, keynote speaker, radio host and fitness guru.
"We hope that with our accomplishment last weekend at the triathlon people of all ages children, teenagers, adults would see African-American diabetic men all over the age of 50 making this history," Perry says. "We were hoping that the ministry of that would help any and every child, teenager, and adult newly diagnosed with diabetes understand that they could live a very healthy lifestyle if they would just commit to that. That was the overarching goal that we hoped would come out of this."
Perry founded Rebalanced-life Wellness Association in 2007 and has been working with businesses, corporations, community-based organizations, health educators and the faith community to create an awareness of the major health concerns affecting African-Americans and to actively promote a healthier lifestyle.
Perry doesnt just talk about fitness; he steps up, and he does everything with the men he helps running, riding the bike, swimming. "That really brings that whole point home of not just walking the walk but talking the talk," he says. "I think thats critically important to be out there with the people that you want to reach. I think thats one of the fundamental reasons why as a grassroots organization we are having success."
Madisons Black Men Run group gets ready for another outing.
Last weekends accomplishments were just another in a series of "firsts" that Perry has accomplished and is planning to accomplish in health and fitness. In 2005, Perry became the first African-American diabetic man to ever finish an Ironman. He says that he started planning for last weekends historic event way back in 2008.
"I found that because there werent many African-American men out training for Ironman and that I was, in essence, forced to train with others on their schedule which was often in conflict with my own schedule," Perry remembers. "If you want to do this, its best to train with a group. In 2008, I thought: wouldnt it be great if I could have guys in my social group train for a triathlon that way our schedules and lifestyles closely mirrored each other?"
At first, he had trouble convincing men to join him.
"I think, initially, people saw that I did the Ironman, and they thought I was some sort of freakish athlete," Perry says. "They soon realized that I am just an average man with great determination. My struggles are the same as yours. As they came out to my events, they realized that I can do this, too.
"I kept doing my mens health event, and I kept talking about disparities and the stage we were at in Dane County having some of the poorest health outcomes for black men," he continued. "Over the years, I kept pushing it and pushing it. I knew that if I kept talking about these health and fitness issues as a diabetic, that it would slowly catch on with other men. Thats exactly what has happened over the last year and a half."
Perry has brought Black Men Run, which originated in Atlanta, Georgia, and has 50 chapters throughout the United States, here to Madison. Black Men Run meet regularly in Madison to run around town, to talk about health and fitness, and to bond.
"Black Men Run has gained the attention of many, many men in our community," Perry says. "Its a great group of men."
"Hats off to all of the organizations that are out spreading the word [about health and fitness issues], but what were really realizing is that you have to go beyond just putting pamphlets in the library and hoping that people see it," he adds. "My Rebalanced-life Wellness Association organization is a grassroots organization, and earlier this year, we organized the largest group of African-American men to run a 5K event the Shamrock Shuffle."
Perry also organizes the annual "Soul Stroll" for Juneteenth and the "Were Off to a Good Start," a yearly physical activity and nutrition kickoff program. The goal of that event is to empower black men ages 10-81 to get healthy and to keep their New Years resolutions by developing attainable goals they can stick with all year long.
"We are getting a lot of requests from people in cities like Milwaukee, Green Bay, Racine and Beloit who are asking us to share some of the things we are doing in Madison with them," Perry says. "Thats really consistent with our vision to help lead Dane County as the healthiest in the state for black men to live. We are turning this into a statewide healthy competition among communities in which black men live."
Grand Master O whose real name is Orlando Glenn Richard grew up in Chicago but came to Milwaukee in 2007 to attend Concordia University. The same year, he started DJing at college house parties, and, during his junior year, he met up with DJ Peace Simon who today is his business and creative partner.
"Peace which is his real name gave me my first shot at a hole-in-the-wall bar in Port Washington called Gopher One," says Grand Master O. "And weve been partners ever since."
Grand Master O, who now lives on Milwaukees East Side, graduated in four years from Concordia with a degree in business communications and a minor in marketing and human resources.
"It really helps having these skills," he says. "It rounds out my businesses."
Grand Master O is a DJ every Thursday night at Cheryls Club in Slinger; Fridays during the Late Night Party Cruise on the Edelweiss Boat and Saturdays at Schooner Pub in Port Washington and The Washington House in West Bend. He also has a booking business that connects Midwest DJs with Wisconsin-based weddings and private events.
OnMilwaukee recently caught up with Grand Master O after his set on The Rebel Stage at Summerfest and chatted about his music, family, goals, hair and definition of happiness.
OnMilwaukee: How would you describe your style of DJing?
Grand Master O: I have a very open format. Being from Chicago, my specialty is electro house, but I love so many different genres of music. Mostly I just like to play to the crowd and engage people.
You started DJing in 2007, but how long did it take you to get good?
Im still trying to get good! Its a never-ending process that requires practice and repetition. As a DJ, you gotta stay fresh because the competition is right on your heels all the time. You gotta bring something new recreate the wheel and make it better.
Were you into music as a kid?
When I was younger wait. I dont even know if I want to admit this. OK, Ill admit this, when I was younger I got my first stereo at 6 years old, and I started blasting Spice Girls. Why would I do this? Why?
Luckily, my family was into music, and I got into a lot of other music. My parents listened to a lot of Motown, one of my brothers liked rock and metal, another brother got me into freestyle 90s and another brother liked everything, like I do today. My familys influence on my music taste is why I am able to be an open-format DJ today. I see the crowd as an opportunity to touch everyones buttons and then bring them together in one melting pot.
You have three brothers?
Actually I have one biological brother and three step brothers, so there were five boys growing up in my house. We take care of momma, though. My step dad is white, and theres a little Indian on my dads side, so my familys a mix; a fun bunch.
You must be a big fan of Grandmaster Flash to pick a name similar to his?
Grandmaster Flash is a pioneer in the industry. He puts on such a powerful yet simple show, and he is the master of engaging people. I really admire him. He is the one who gave me a life.
What are your goals for the future?
I usually don't tell people my goals, but goal No. 1 is to not have a part time job anymore I work at Best Buy and I am back on track on that. Goal No. 2 is to DJ full time and travel around while doing it. Finally, my end goal would be to own a hot club somewhere. Currently, Im working down the line, taking it one day at a time, loving and appreciating life.
Tell me about your hair.
Ah, the story of my hair. Through grade school, high school and college, I had so many different hair styles. But I got this style by accident. I dyed my hair this color but kept it curly I had a fro but one day, I went to pick my hair out, and my pick wouldn't go through my hair so I just let it go and this happened. I didn't pay to have it rolled or anything; it was a natural process.
Do you plan to stay living in Milwaukee?
Milwaukee has treated me well and thats why Ive been here longer than planned. Every time I think it might be time to go somewhere else, another opportunity pops up here.
What makes an awesome DJ?
It comes down to the passion you have for it. It also takes a lot of practice, not just with the music but learning how to work the crowd and be personable. There are some a-hole DJs out there. You also have to stay cool under pressure. When I was younger, this was the hardest part for me. I was sweating bullets before I plugged my tables in. But I learned how to use that adrenaline to channel back into the music.
To be really, really good, I dont think you can fake it. Being happy and really wanting to live this life is the key.
What does it mean to be happy?
Being true to yourself and realizing and accepting what kind of person you are. You have to be able to come back from dark places. There is happiness in the music. Music makes you feel anything and everything and serves as an expression of our emotions. Happiness is the form of sound, not something we can see.
In December of 2002, Congress released its report on the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001." Part of that report, anyway: 28 pages remained classified until July 15, 2016, when they were finally presented to the public with significant redactions.
Why the long wait, and what do the 28 pages reveal?
If we're to believe the headlines in Saudi media (e.g. Al Arabiya) and mainstream American media (e.g. Time and the WashingtonTimes) the big news is what they don't reveal: A "smoking gun" connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.
If we're to believe the 28 pages themselves, the big news is that they do, in fact, reveal a "smoking gun" connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.
Here's the opening sentence from the newly released material: "While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected with the Saudi government."
Among those individuals was Omar al-Bayoumi, who sported a "no-show" job at a company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense (the company reported that he visited their facilities once, thereafter collecting a continuing salary). When 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Midhar arrived in the United States, they stayed with al-Bayoumi until he found them an apartment and someone to help them get drivers' licenses " and locate flight schools.
The two also appear to have received assistance from Osama Bassnan, who lived across the street from them in San Diego. According to the CIA, Bassnan received significant funds from Saudi government sources and members of the Saudi royal family. According to the FBI, Bassnan was a supporter of both Osama bin Laden and New York terror plotter Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Why are we only now finding out all this? Because four words make the whole thing problematic: "The Saudi royal family." In particular, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the US at the time, whose wife appears to have been the conduit through which money was routed to Osama Bassnan -- and then, quite possibly, used to service the needs of the 9/11 plotters.
But Saudi Arabia controls much of the world's oil supply either directly or as the dominant member of OPEC, the Saudi military buys lots of US-manufactured weaponry, and Saudi assets in the US -- which the Saudi government threatened to sell off if the US changed its laws to hold them responsible for their role in the attacks -- top $750 billion.
In other words, unlike Afghanistan's Taliban regime, the Saudi regime carries considerable clout with the US government. In fact, Prince Bandar visited president George W. Bush at the White House immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
In response to those attacks, Afghanistan suffered US invasion, the overthrow of its government, and is now in its 15th straight year of war and occupation.
Saudi Arabia enjoyed not just a 13-year reprieve from the exposure of damning evidence, but seemingly better relations with the US government than ever before. Go figure.
Reprinted from Empire Burlesque
William Arkin has long been an outstanding investigator of the "National Security State," bringing to light many of its sinister operations. But he seems to have looked into the abyss too long, for now, in a recent article in Cryptome, he is offering a counsel of despair that reflects the worst and most extreme stances of the National Security State toward terrorism, while completely overlooking that same State's role -- still continuing today -- in fostering, funding and arming Islamic extremism.
We have not even begun to address this "root cause" of violent Islamic extremism in its modern, organized form. Arkin undoubtedly knows this history. He knows how an international jihad army was shaped, funded and armed by the United States and Saudi Arabia in order to create so much terror and chaos in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union would be forced to intervene to save the secular government there. He knows that the architect of this policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is very open and proud of this. He knows about Reagan's "freedom fighters" who tied their opponents between tanks and tore them to pieces. He knows how Washington fueled extremist jihad for years, until it achieved its aim: giving the Soviet Union "its own Vietnam," as Brzezinski put it to Jimmy Carter. Once the Soviets pulled out, of course, the United States promptly forgot about Afghanistan, leaving it at the mercy of pitiless warlords and extremists.
Arkin knows that the United States facilitated Islamic extremists in the former Yugoslavia. Arkin knows that the United States is helping vicious extremists in Syria right now, including extremist factions allied with Al Qaeda. Arkin knows the United States has a long-standing, no-questions-asked alliance with the greatest purveyor of virulent Islamic extremism in the world: Saudi Arabia. Arkin knows that the United States is directly involved in Saudi Arabia's savage slaughter in Yemen, which has cleared the way for the growth of both al Qaeda and Isis in that country.
Arkin knows that America's chief ally in the region, Israel, is in a tacit alliance with Saudi Arabia to support violent extremists in Syria. He knows Israel treats ISIS soldiers in its hospitals, he knows Israeli officials have said they would prefer an Islamist regime in Syria to Assad's government. Arkin knows that Barack Obama said, with admirable candor, that he held off on taking action against ISIS as it began its rampage through Iraq precisely because he wanted to "put pressure" on the government in Baghdad to change its leadership, which Washington no longer liked. This was said in a much-publicized interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Arkin cannot be unaware of this.
In sum -- and leaving out a much longer history of American and Western and Israeli policies of fostering Islamic extremism to advance various political goals -- the continuing and active involvement of the world's leading democracies in directly and indirectly arming, funding and spreading Islamic extremism cannot be denied. But it is not even mentioned by Arkin. He simply says that ALL "reasonable" approaches to quelling terrorism have been tried, and have failed. Therefore, there is nothing left to do but examine "our enemies" -- with, to be sure, due acknowledgement of their humanity and a careful consideration of their cause -- and then "embrace an uncompromising war" against those unfit for human society. Somehow, he thinks, this will lead to the end of the growing militarization and authoritarianism that he says, quite rightly, is destroying our own freedoms. Somehow, the launching of an all-out, uncompromising, unreasonable war against "pure evil" will cause the militarists and authoritarians to have LESS power in our society. The hyper-militarization of society such a total war would require will somehow, magically, lead us back to our freedom. For surely history has taught us that authoritarians always happily give up their authority once "pure evil" has been defeated.
And of course, such an approach will not solve the problem of terrorism as he outlines it. He says that if, after judicious examination of their cause, we decide "our enemies" are "just pure evil," then we need to steel ourselves and "embrace an uncompromising war to better humanity." Who will make this judgment? (I think we know who.) What if other nations don't agree that this or that enemy is "beyond the pale" and decide to support them instead? And if we embrace this unreasonable, uncompromising war -- which will certainly kill multitudes of innocent people -- why will this not create even more hatred, extremism and thirst for revenge?
Since "terrorism" does not abide in one nation, where will this uncompromising war be aimed? Arkin says his approach doesn't mean "bombs and more bombs" -- what then does it mean? An "uncompromising war" fought with water pistols? How can you eliminate "pure evil" without bombs and more bombs? Or is he advocating the expansion of death squads to take out individuals whom someone somewhere has concluded are "pure evil" and must be eliminated?
I understand where Arkin is coming from. I know he thinks that this will somehow stop the societal rot being caused by the Terror War. But what he is doing, ultimately, is "embracing" the most extremist stance of the Terror Warriors: that we should stop all this pussyfooting around and just slaughter these wretches of "pure evil" with a savage war that "won't be pretty." This, he says -- just like Trump, Cruz and many others -- is a "better path" to peace than our "muddled reasonableness."
But again, he has failed to consider one of the most vital and consequential factors in the growth of violent Islamic extremism: its support by the very forces who claim to be fighting for civilization. You cannot say we have "tried everything" to quell terrorism and now must embrace total war, if we have not even acknowledged this factor, much less tried to deal with it.
Most of us approach a strange puppy, kitten, bunny rabbit or human baby with a smile, maybe even reach out and pet it, talk gently to it, and smile. Occasionally we meet another adult who smiles for everyone they meet, makes friends easily, sometimes even foolishly. More often than not, however, people approach fellow human adults with some reserve, especially those of the opposite race. Over time we've become jaded if not downright paranoid. I think major media bares much of the blame for at least some of our bad public relations, particularly with the way we relate to other races, the police and public officials.
Influencing societal values, has, in the past, been played by Churches, the Bible, the Chiefs of tribes, books, newspapers and magazines. Now societal values have come to be influenced more by major media, mainly the Teeee Veeee, and, more recently, social media over the internet. And these means of brainwashing have become the most effective of all time! Why? Because they are easily, even lazily absorbed and sometimes fun to become involved with.
It is a sad fact that major media is controlled by corporations whose profits are more important than the needs of community. Because of this it is unable to play the most vital role of a 4th Estate in the political arena, to help us keep a truly democratic government. This is why I can so easily blame major media for bad public relations, for pessimistic view of the world, for our fears, for injustice. We need major media to function for the benefit of all of us as a community, not just on behalf of the few. We need to be influenced to do the right thing by our fellow travelers in this "valley of tears" called "life." We need major media to help relieve tension between races, encouraging us to be polite to one another, to respect one another, to hug one another in the face of threats, instead of encouraging conflict. We need fairness in presenting competing views of the most intelligent people in society, experts in their fields. We need honesty in reporting, not cover-ups. At this time, we are not getting the highest standards of reportage and thought. We get just the opposite, another problem with capitalism.
We can't immediately solve that problem, but there are some things I would advocate we do in the meantime. We must all try to get through our problems and protests -- and a revolution -- with some degree of respect for one another. A four letter word is disrespectful. WE should try to remember that it is hard for anyone to hate us when we show them we have high regard for them as for ourselves. If a policeman stops you, show him respect and he will surely think you have good judgment and will want to protect you. To the policeman, I would suggest he or she express anger by presenting a ticket rather than a gunshot. WE, as revolutionaries, need to have the good will of our policemen. Remember, they also feel our pain, they are also victims of the power elite.
The circumstances in America are so dire, people are desperate to hear a sliver of hopeful
news to restore the Union. This is a dangerous position to be in. Donald Trump is sounding
freighting similar to Adolf Hitler, in an era when America is about to fall off the cliff. If we don't
take a lesson from the past, we are doom to repeat it.
Hitler blamed Germany's economic problems on a minority group. Trump said he would deport
illegal immigrants. Trump wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Hitler built walls
around the ghettos.
Trump's eerie bombastic gestures are too reminiscent of Adolf Hitler. Playing on people's base
emotions and fears. Let's face it Trump is a billionaire and has been married three times.
We can look back at the Obama campaign and the promises he made when campaigning. He
didn't live up to his promises and neither will Trump. Our government is beholden to special
interest, not the American people. Why should we think that a Trump administration will be
different? No matter how hopeful we may want to be, the facts, and history speak differently.
Another tell tell aspect of Trump's campaign is that he is soliciting illegal foreign donations,
despite warnings from the FEC. On June 29th the watchdog group Democracy 21, and the
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This is a reprint from NewsBred.
The world has woken up to Fethullah Gulen after Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed him for failed coup of Friday . My book , " HOW UNITED STATES SHOT HUMANITY: Muslims Ruined; Europe Next " has given a detailed background of this feud. Excerpts:
Fethullah Gulen is a 74 years old bachelor of rather sad countenance, despite his white moustaches and strong, wide nose. For 27 years now, he has lived in a self-imposed exile in a tiny Pennsylvania town called Saylorsburg in the US. Here is his "The Camp" consisting of series of houses, a community center, a pond and acres of space. It's the headquarters of a worldwide religious, social and political movement, "The Cemaat" or "The Community".
Gulen leads six million followers who, in the spirit of his name, operate schools, universities, corporations, nonprofit and media organizations around the globe. In a 2008 online poll, devised by the British magazine Prospect and the American magazine Foreign Policy, Gulen was voted as the most significant intellectual of the world. Graham Fuller, a former CIA agent and author of several books on political Islam, termed Gulen as leading "one of the most important movements in the Muslim world today."
Somehow everything in Turkey is linked to Gulen. Whatever you do, buying bakery or filing up gas, it could all be going back to Gulen's network.
Fethullah Gulen was born in 1941 in a village outside the eastern city of Erzurum. He began praying when he was only four years old, and learned Arabic from his father. At school, he joined Kurdish intellectual Said Nursi's movement, which was similar to Sufi brotherhood. He became a state imam in 1958 and after his military service, moved to Izmir. In 1969, he began preaching his own version of Nursi's ideas. Soon his following grew.
In due course, Gulen built schools. He formed "lighthouses" where rural kids who had come to cities to study, could stay. He founded publishing companies. By the 1980s, the statist economy in Turkey had opened up. Restrictions on religious groups had eased. In 1983, Gulen's followers founded a conglomerate Kaynak Holding which today has several companies in retail, IT, construction and food industries. Its' main division, Kaynak Publishing, maintains 28 publishing labels. It controls several TV stations. In 1996, loyal men encouraged by Gulen, established Bank Asya, now Turkey's largest Islamic bank. A charity called "Is Anybody There" gives 5 to 10 per cent of its income to projects.
Schools though remain central to Gulen's orbit. He has them in Central Asia; he runs them in far-flung places like Indonesia, Sudan and Pakistan. Even non-Muslim countries like Mexico and Japan have them. Gulenists' school and universities are spread over 100 countries. They even had schools in Afghanistan in the 1990s.Gulen found a way to ease Islam back into Turkey's mainstream. He played on Turkey's past. "Turkey was once very successful and then it became so badly considered in the world," he said. "You cannot expect to sit in one place and hope things will change. You have to go out, represent your culture and values in a good way."
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How can you teach a farmer or factory worker to perform simple tasks efficiently if he/she cannot read or write? Thus, we have to develop the educational system, and to teach children how to read, mathematics, science, engineering, and programming may achieve material wealth, because technologies depend on education. Therefore, even if we had adequate technologies, we would not even be able to adequately maintain education. And also we need to understand, the use of technologies depends also on the economy of our system.
Subsistence economies, with more advanced economies feature the division of labor, technologies, and trade. However, it will take a long time. Economic-reform programs can survive longer if our workforce become educated. That is why it is important to eliminate the dependable policy.
In summary, the kind of economy and polity determine the ability of the success of effective economic system. As we know, it is clear that a system with an unfavorable geography, or culture, or economy is countries in south eastern Europe enjoyed no such advantage and suffered economic stagnation. Nations with too many mountains and too few navigable waterways: Tajikistan, Nepal, Mongolia, and Bhutan. If Afghanistan and Tibet were included, they would, no doubt, also fall into this group for the same reasons.
Therefore, the geography of a country like in Nepal is an important determinant of its ability to achieve greater economy. The use of technologies depends not only on geography, but also on culture.
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I think you're just great! What a response TD subscribers gave to my recent request for donations in a pitch letter themed for honesty. ("Rest assured, TomDispatch is not down to its last dollar; it's not sinking in a sea of red ink. We're not going to shut down if you don't give us something. We're okay.") It says something about who you are and what this site means to you (and warms my heart). Thanks to so many of you who decided to contribute, TD writers will all get paid a little more this year and I'll have some extra bucks for expenses of all sorts. It's a godsend and I can't thank you enough. If there were any of you who meant to give something and were distracted by life before you did, it's never too late. Just visit our donation page any time. Tom]
Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they've been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways. In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front. As vets have returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment -- including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) -- have poured off America's distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide. And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public.
The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those five white officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases, taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters were wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as "collateral damage.") In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot, built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive, and typical of robots that police departments now possess.
In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by a drone in the United States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the ante. Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade robots -- a burgeoning field for the Pentagon -- are imagining other ways to employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a future in which they will be "useful, cheap, and ubiquitous," and capable of Tasing as well as killing.
Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the country's wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over "the homeland" on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies. So the future stage is set. Once you've used any kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, it's only logical -- given some future extreme situation -- to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed (no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), it's not hard to imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or later. After all, Johnson was already talking about planting "IEDs" (the term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a relatively modest step from there.
So, welcome to the "home front," folks. And speaking of drones, it's worth giving a little thought to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort of example that two administrations have set by turning the president into an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves when it comes to the targeting of distant peoples. In that light, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon considers America's Trojan Horse technology of death and just what it may someday smuggle into "the homeland." Tom
The Trojan Drone
An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance
By Rebecca Gordon Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It's a shiny video game for grown ups -- a Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology. The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved -- whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone -- the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we've had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It's a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them. The Rise of the Drones The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001 in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under Obama, with an actual White House "kill list," the use of drones has again expanded, this time nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones. There's an obvious appeal to a technology that allows pilots for the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, or the Air Force to sit safely in front of video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in the U.S., while killing people half a world away. This is especially true for a president running a global war with a public that does not easily accept American casualties and a Congress that prefers not to be responsible for war and peace decision-making. Drone assassinations have allowed President Obama to spread the "war on terror" to ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S. casualties or congressional oversight and approval. One problem has, however, dogged the drone program from the beginning: just like conventional air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to kill the wrong people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians killed by drones has been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by, although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists have done a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and offering reasonable estimates. Analysis from all these sources suggests that there are at least three reasons why civilians die in such attacks. 1. The intelligence information on the individual targeted is often wrong. He isn't where they think he is, or he isn't even who they think he is. For example, in 2014 a British human rights organization, Reprieve , compiled data on drone strikes that targeted specific individuals in Yemen and Pakistan. According to the Guardian, Reprieve's work
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Family businesses are the oldest kind of companies in the world. For centuries, it was believed that the money is better kept in the family. Now, it is often stated that family companies usually do not go beyond a small business and do not last long because of owners' voluntarism. Both statements are wrong.
One just has to look at the data, gathered all around the world. Nine hundred and twenty family companies, analyzed in The Credit Suisse Global Family 900 ranking, show excellent statistics - 47% outperformance compared to the benchmark MSCI ACWI index.
The family-business model takes its rise at the heart of Europe - particularly, in Italy and France, where strong family ties have always been of great importance. A series of economic and political upheavals that have taken place in the past centuries forced some businesses to shift to self-financing, henceforth proving the idea extremely successful.
Particularly, this tendency has been traced in France, where 65% of the companies are family-owned. They pop up here and there, starting with modest bakeries and private vineyards and ending with huge industrial giants and haughty luxury brands, coexisting peacefully side by side.
The oldest - and perhaps the most pompous of French family enterprises - is a winery Chateau de Goulaine. Incidentally, the company is included in the list of the world's oldest companies. Today, Goulaine family, which have been landowners for almost a thousand years, can be proud of having one of the oldest names in the world, engaged in the production of wine.
The roots and family history of Goulaine are an integral part of Loire Valley legends, its castles and wines. In France, they say that Marquis de Goulaine wine is a reflection of identity, history and heritage of one of the noblest French families. These days, Robert de Goulaine carries on the tradition. He personally supervises the production of wine at all its phases, from the selection of seeds and planting to harvesting and bottling.
Very well, a luxurious and ornate family-business story has a beneficial effect on wine sales -- is here anybody who wouldn't like to have a taste of wine, made out of grapes, harvested in the vicinity of a famous French castle under the control of a Marquis? But what about the others?
Let's go back to luxury. A long-term investment is the best strategy for a luxury brand. Hardly every company can afford this, whereas in contrast, the business cycle of family businesses is less volatile.
This can be demonstrated by comparing growth rates of family and non-family businesses. Starting in 1995, sales growth in family firms has been more stable, including in 2001-2002, when the dotcom bubble burst, as well as during the 2008 financial crisis. In either event, family enterprises showed modest maximum and minimum values -- but have eventually won due to stability, that is, a kind of airbags.
Elisabeth Ponsolle, chief executive of French luxury goods association Comite Colbert, whose members include Chanel, Cartier and Hermes, says:
- If they need to invest for 10 years without receiving a financial return, they do it, like Bernard Arnault at Dior. He invested, and invested, and invested ... investment funds want a return in six months and a sale in three years. Brands talk about having been founded in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries and having a history, but it takes time to develop a brand and you need to invest in the long term to do that.
Indeed, Mr. Arnault can afford a long-term investment. He is the owner of Louis Vuitton - Moet Hennessy Luxury Empire, which covers 60 well-known brands (Dom Perignon, Bulgari, Fendi, Sephora, etc.).
Public now, LVMH had long been a family business. The heir to the fortune, scrapped up on construction industry by his father, Bernard started his own business in 1984, when bought the rights to operate several fashion brands, including Christian Dior, for $ 15 million. Current business revenue is estimated at $ 40 billion, while operational management is gradually being transferred to the children, Delphine and Antoine.
Family businesses are pretty much independent of the restrictions applied to their competitors, public companies, whose shares are traded on stock exchanges, required to submit quarterly reports on its activities, and are in need of a quick payback.
This is crucial in relation to industries such as high technology and latest developments. Family companies' investments in research and development showed themselves effective in relative terms, despite the lower absolute levels.
An excellent example here is the French Oberthur Fiduciaire - a security printing company founded in 1842 by Francois-Charles Oberthur, specializing in banknote-production process, including design and creation, origination, prepress, quality control, printing, finishing, delivery, and traceability. Its know-how protects banknotes from the threats of counterfeiting; and Oberthur Fiduciaire provides services to protect cash, checks, vouchers, and stamps from various types of fraud. The industry is quite specific and requires constant development and improvement - in the broadest sense, this is a combination of high technology and long-term, carefully cultivated design and tradition as explains the CEO of Oberthur Fiduciaire, Thomas Savare.
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Only Civic Driven Voter Turnout Can Defeat Tweeter Trump Well-funded, vigorous voter turnout drives in ten states that are driven exclusively by the civic community. Freed of the shackles of the serial loser DNC, this independent civic drive can easily turn the tide in these key electoral swing states. Friday, July 26, 2019Well-funded, vigorous voter turnout drives in ten states that are driven exclusively by the civic community. Freed of the shackles of the serial loser DNC, this independent civic drive can easily turn the tide in these key electoral swing states.
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Boeing's Homicide Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize o understand the enormity of the Boeingcrashes (Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302) that took a combined total of 346 lives, it is useful to look at past events and anticipate future possible problems. Friday, April 5, 2019o understand the enormity of the Boeingcrashes (Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302) that took a combined total of 346 lives, it is useful to look at past events and anticipate future possible problems.
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Let's Start a Kavanaugh Watch to Check All Five Corporate Judges A new Kavanaugh Watch group -- lean and sharp -- needs to be created to publicize the Five Corporatist Judges. Their unjust decisions, hiding behind stylized plausibility and casuistry, need to be unmasked and regularly relayed to the American people. Their speeches to the Federalist Society and other plutocratic audiences need to be publicized and critiqued. Importantly their refusal to recuse themselves must be reported Wednesday, October 10, 2018A new Kavanaugh Watch group -- lean and sharp -- needs to be created to publicize the Five Corporatist Judges. Their unjust decisions, hiding behind stylized plausibility and casuistry, need to be unmasked and regularly relayed to the American people. Their speeches to the Federalist Society and other plutocratic audiences need to be publicized and critiqued. Importantly their refusal to recuse themselves must be reported
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By Kathryn Hickok
Since 1999, the nonprofit Childrens Scholarship Fund has empowered more than 152,000 low-income children nationwide to receive a quality education in private and parochial grade schools through privately funded partial-tuition scholarships.
Childrens Scholarship Fund parents value high-quality education as the way out of poverty for their children and sacrifice financially to give them that opportunity. It is a feature of the CSF program that all families pay part of their tuition bill themselves, ensuring a family commitment to education.
The investments of both parents and scholarship benefactors are reaping great rewards. Over time, studies of college enrollment and graduation rates of scholarship alumni are showing that, despite coming from socioeconomic backgrounds associated with lower rates of college enrollment, CSF alumni enroll in college at an average rate that is similar to or higher than the general population.
In other words, these students education in private and parochial grade schools, made possible by a relatively modest level of financial assistance, is closing the achievement gap for kids from less advantaged backgrounds.
Childrens Scholarship Fund-Portland is a hand up here in our state that helps Oregon kids to reach for success in school and in life. If you would like to help a lower-income Oregon child to get a better education today, contact the Childrens Scholarship Fund-Portland at Cascade Policy Institute.
Kathryn Hickok is Publications Director and Director of the Childrens Scholarship Fund-Portland program at Cascade Policy Institute. CSF-Portland is a partner program of the New York-based Childrens Scholarship Fund.
Credit: Eurostars
Safe landing in adverse conditions is not only important for big airlines. Partners from Greece, Germany and Italy now developed the technology for a three-dimensional (3D) air navigation database and product for the general aviation sector - that is small and medium sized aircraft used for private use and short-middle range trips.
Pilots of small planes often only have basic compulsory instruments and some added-value navigational aids giving them information on, for example, the aircraft's altitude, speed or location via the GPS display - they still have to rely a lot on eyesight, and to follow visual flight rules (VFR) even in bad weather conditions such as fog.
But that will change thanks to a new product line developed in the framework of the Eurostars project '3D Aerodromes'. The partners developed workflows to produce 2,000 3D airport maps in digital format using available data sources, of which 500+ airports at high resolution and another 400 at a resolution approaching virtual reality. The 3D navigator uses these maps combined with software and hardware developed during the project to safely assist and navigate the pilot during landing and take-off.
"The unique selling proposition of the technology is that it can be used both as a set of navigation instruments and as a safety device that considerably improves pilot visibility in adverse weather conditions," said Prof. Marc Bonazountas, the pilot, engineer and scientist who managed the project on behalf of Epsilon International SA. "Pilots can use the technology to assist take off and landing procedures without having ground-based instrument landing aids."
The Greek company Epsilon International SA, whose business focuses on developing navigational databases, worked with Epsilon Italia and three German companies (ESRI Deutschland, PSU GmbH, Kep 3 AG) and the Italian subsidiary of Wuerth Phoenix GmbH to test and develop the software and prototype hardware. All partners were supported by national funding bodies in their respective country (see info-box). Together they created a spin-off company called avionTek (www.aviontek.com), which was awarded the ESA BIC European Aviation Award in Toulouse, France, in 2012.
A licence agreement for the 3D Pilot's 2D version, including the use of software and databases, has been signed with Germany-based Becker Avionics GmbH. The AirScout 2D navigator made by Becker Avionics is now available for sale throughout Europe.
The potential market for 2D and 3D AirScout navigators is sizeable as there are estimated to be more than 50,000 general aviation aircraft in Europe and more than 45,000 airports world-wide. Other potential customers for the AirScout 3D or related products based on the 3D databases include aircraft and avionics manufacturers, flight schools and training centres, the flight simulator industry, university research and development centres, airports and manufacturers and operators of fixed wing aircraft, helicopters and gyrocopters.
With around 14,000 small airports, the US is a particularly big market for small aircraft. AvionTek GmbH and Becker Avionics GmbH are optimistic to sell their certified multifunction cockpit display (MFD) together with the Aviontek database.
The 3D version of the product, AirScout 3D, which is being tested and prototyped, features a small MFD in the cockpit of the aircraft enabling the pilot to fly using the software. "A corridor is visible on the screen. If the pilot remains in-between the red lines in that virtual tunnel then he/she will safely land on the runway," explains Johannes Gnadinger, CEO, landscape architect, urban planner and GIS expert at PSU GmbH.
"It is an inexpensive solution for VFR pilots approaching the runway, especially in bad weather conditions like in rain or mist, or during the night. We also tested it successfully for navigating the skies in mountainous areas or around islands in the Mediterranean," said Prof. Jorg Schaller, CEO of PSU GmbH Germany.
Explore further NASA, FAA demonstrate wireless communication with aircraft
Provided by Eurostars
Credit: Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology
Flame retardants are invisible assistants in car seats, gasket sealants, furniture and even in aeroplanes. However, their ingredients are not always harmless. Empa researchers developed three innovative flame retardants and tested them for toxicity; not all of them passed the test.
Researchers are constantly striving to develop better and safer flame retardants. For example, Sabyasachi Gaan's team at Empa's Advanced Fibers Laboratory, synthesised three new agents that have the same or improved flame retardancy as existing products. However, before a flame retardant is ready for mass production, it is essential to ensure its safety for humans. The fact that a toxicological evaluation is beneficial prior to use is highlighted by the example of the flame retardant TCCP, which was only classified as toxic to humans after its launch and must now be gradually removed from the market. The newly developed flame retardants from Gaan and his team are derivatives of an existing agent (DOPO) and are called ETA-DOPO, EG-DOPO and EDA-DOPO. Experts at Empa's Particles-Biology Interactions Laboratory subjected the substances to a toxicological cross-check.
Toxicological tests with different cell types
The team, led by Cordula Hirsch, exposed both lung cells and macrophages (scavenger cells) to a number of flame retardants. The Empa researchers could only conclude that there were no toxic reactions for one of the three substances. However, the lungs are primarily affected by flame retardants during production and processing in powder form. Subsequently, the toxic substances enter the body by penetrating the skin and there can give rise to skin damage or even neurotoxic effects.
in vitro culture of human nerve cells (yellow; nuclei: purple) exposed to various concentrations of different flame retardants: PBDE 99 is already in use and suspected to be harmful to health; the substance was thus used as a positive control. At a concentration of 100 M, PBDE 99 as well as ETA-DOPO and EG-DOPO showed significant damage to the cells. In contrast, this was not observed for DOPO and EDA-DOPO. Credit: Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology
Hirsch, therefore, passed the samples on to Stephanie Mathes at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in Wadenswil, who examined the new flame retardants for skin tolerance with her team. Here, the researchers cultivated human skin and exposed it to varying concentrations of the flame retardant. Stefan Schildknecht and his colleagues at the University of Konstanz were responsible for the neurological investigations. He examined the direct impact of the substance on neural effects using tests involving brain cells.
The conclusion of the researchers: two of the three flame retardants failed the tests. Both of these resulted in damage to the test cells used and will thus not be developed further. However, the researchers also showed that the newly developed EDA-DOPO not only has better flame retardancy than previously available products, but also had no toxic effects at all in the tests that were conducted. EDA-DOPO is thus a good candidate to take forward to a next stage of development.
Explore further Potentially toxic flame retardants detected in baby products
More information: Cordula Hirsch et al. Multiparameter toxicity assessment of novel DOPO-derived organophosphorus flame retardants, Archives of Toxicology (2016). Cordula Hirsch et al. Multiparameter toxicity assessment of novel DOPO-derived organophosphorus flame retardants,(2016). DOI: 10.1007/s00204-016-1680-4
Rice University graduate student Shelly Cheng prepares soil samples for testing. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
Rice University researchers have developed gas biosensors to "see" into soil and allow them to follow the behavior of the microbial communities within.
In a study in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science and Technology, the Rice team described using genetically engineered bacteria that release methyl halide gases to monitor microbial gene expression in soil samples in the lab.
The bacteria are programmed using synthetic biology to release gas to report when they exchange DNA through horizontal gene transfer, the process by which organisms share genetic traits without a parent-to-child relationship. The biosensors allow researchers to monitor such processes in real time without having to actually see into or disturb a lab soil sample.
The Rice researchers expect their technique will serve the same purpose for environmental scientists that fluorescent reporter proteins serve for biochemists who track protein expression and other processes in biological systems.
The work by the Rice labs of biogeochemist Caroline Masiello, biochemist Jonathan Silberg, microbiologist George Bennett and lead author Hsiao-Ying (Shelly) Cheng, a Rice graduate student, is the first product of a $1 million grant by the W.M. Keck Foundation to develop gas-releasing microbial sensors.
Prepared soil samples used to test bioengineered tools that will allow researchers to study Earth's microbes from micro- to macroscales. Rice University researchers have developed microbial sensors that release gas to report on specific biochemical reactions. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
"This paper describes a new tool to study how microbes trade genetic material in the environment," said Masiello, a professor of Earth science.
"We care about this because the process of horizontal gene transfer controls a lot of things that are important to humans either because they're goodit's how rhizobia trade the genes they need to fix nitrogen and support plant growthor they're badit's how bacteria trade antibiotic resistance in soils," she said. "It's been much more challenging in the past to construct models of this dynamic process in real soils and to study how horizontal gene exchange varies across soil types. We've created a new set of tools that makes that possible."
The researchers expect scientists will use gas biosensors in the lab to study nitrogen fixing in agriculture, antibiotic exchange in wastewater treatment, gene transfer in conditions where nutrients are scarce and the relationship between gene expression in soil and the release of greenhouse gases.
"There are other technologies that will build on this," said Silberg, an associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology. "The idea of using gases opens up most anything that's genetically encoded. However, we do need to improve technologies for some of the subtler kinds of questions."
He said releasing and sensing methyl halide gas represented an easy proof of concept. "Now we want higher-resolution information about other types of biological events by creating more sophisticated genetic programs using synthetic biology," Silberg said.
Rice University scientists have created programmed bacteria that serve as gas sensors to help them "see" into soil and learn about the behavior of the microbial communities within. When the engineered bacterium receives genetic information from another bacterium, it releases a gas to "report" the transaction. Credit: Jonathan Silberg and Shelly Cheng/Rice University
They expect they will soon be able to test agricultural soil samples to help fine-tune crop growth through more efficient watering and fertilizer use. "How can agriculture get this extra level of efficiency without the waste? Lots of people are coming to that, and there are lots of ways to do it," he said. "We're trying to build high-tech tools that allow us to understand mechanisms to make reliable predictions. That's the long game with these tools."
The researchers emphasized that these are tools for soil studies within lab environments. The synthetic microbes are destroyed once the results are obtained.
The Rice lab tested soil samples from the National Science Foundation's Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research Site in Michigan after adding Escherichia coli bacteria programmed to release gas upon transfer of their DNA to another microbe. Signals from the gas were up to 10,000 times the lab's detection limit.
The gas sensors were effective in anoxicor oxygen-depletedconditions, unlike green fluorescent protein, which requires oxygen to work. It is anticipated the reporter proteins can be used in many kinds of soil microbes, and some are currently being tested, Bennett said.
Explore further Gas sensors promise advances in Earth science
Victoria University of Wellington student Lea Raymond is gaining new insights into a Cook Islands "brain drain", as part of her Master of Development Studies.
Lea's research seeks to understand why Cook Islanders choose to study abroad and how their tertiary education overseas affects the development of their home country. This research is part of a broader projectEducation, Migration and Development in the Pacific Islandsled by Professor John Overton. It is supported by the Marsden Fund, which is managed by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Lea became interested in the motivations of Cook Islanders travelling overseas to study through her family connections.
"My husband is a New Zealand-born Cook Islander and his parents and extended family are back in the islands. I was chatting with them last year and we got on to the issue of studying overseas and the pros and cons of returning home.
"On the one hand, you can earn so much more if you live and work overseas after you graduate. And there's the appeal of seeing the worldit's not all that different to the Kiwi OE.
"But, on the other hand, these graduates have an enormous amount to offer the Cook Islands if they return, in terms of the country's development.
"In some ways, you could almost talk in terms of a Cook Islands diaspora. There are fewer than 20,000 people living in the islands but more than 60,000 Cook Islanders living in New Zealand alone, to say nothing of Australia. Many of these people are university-educated, so there's a real issue for the islands about how to attract these graduates home to use their education to benefit the country."
To investigate the motivations of Cook Islanders studying overseas, Lea visited Rarotonga in June, interviewing people who had studied overseas and subsequently returned home.
Lea says her Pacific-based research methodknown as talanoaaims to create a free-flowing conversation between her and the participants on a broad range of topics.
These topics include discussing how the participants view the concept of "development" of their home country; why they chose to study overseas; their experience of living and studying overseas; and why they chose to return to the Cook Islands, or remain in New Zealand.
"Talanoa is not all that different to a lot of Western interview techniquesit's about letting the interview develop organically, rather than trying to keep it fixed to a list of standardised questions. In fact, it likens the research process to weaving a flower garland. And it's fascinating how it helps people to open up about their experiences, since it's a Pacific cultural form."
Lea is about to embark on the next stage of her research, speaking to graduates who chose not to return home but stay in Wellington. She is looking for more participants and is keen to hear from any Cook Islanders living in Wellington, who graduated more than six months ago, and who travelled overseas specifically to study at university.
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Microsoft says Windows 10 is a hit with its customers. But many Windows users beg to differ.
The company announced that less than a year after it launched, Windows 10 is already running on 350 million devices. Additionally, customer satisfaction with it is higher than for any previous version of the operating system, the software giant said.
That may be, but it's not hard to find customers who aren't happy with the new software. A Sausalito, Calif., woman made headlines recently after she sued Microsoft and won a $10,000 judgment because an unauthorized Windows 10 upgrade basically made her PC unusable. Meanwhile, a simple Google search will turn up numerous other disgruntled users.
I've heard from plenty of upset Windows customers recently after writing several columns about Windows 10. Some lost crucial data or features when their computers made the jump to the new Windows version. Some paid hundreds of dollars to computer support companies to restore their computers to earlier versions of Windows.
Many were simply disgusted at the tactics Microsoft has used to push users to upgrade to Windows 10 or frustrated that their computers were updated without their consent. Chris Wood, 61, was among those upset with Microsoft after his 91-year-old father was "tricked" by the company into upgrading and couldn't figure out how to use his computer afterward.
"It is very disturbing Microsoft would treat paying customers with such disrespect and disregard for what they want," Wood, a software salesman who lives in Pleasanton, Calif., said in an email. "Not giving customers a way to say no is in fact deceitful and an inappropriate business practice."
Microsoft has said it would soon change the upgrade process, making it easier for Windows 7 and 8 users to opt out of Windows 10 permanently.
"Our most important priority for Windows 10 is for everyone to love Windows," Terry Myerson, executive vice president, Windows and Devices Group, said recently in a statement. "We'll continue to be led by your feedback and always, earning and maintaining your trust is our commitment and priority."
Microsoft released Windows 10 last summer. I gave it a positive review because it addresses many of the complaints that I and others had with Windows 8.
The operating system is available as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users until July 29. Microsoft has been heavily promoting it as the most secure version of Windows ever. It has also aggressively attempted to get it installed on consumers' machines, making it difficult for them to decline the upgrade and even going so far as to upgrade their computers without their explicit permission.
But many users have been reluctant to make the jump to Windows 10 or have seen things in it they didn't like. For example, many Windows programs haven't been updated to support Windows 10. And drivers for many peripherals like printers aren't yet available for the new operating system - and may never be.
That's what Hartmut Wiesenthal found when he decided to accept the upgrade offer. Although Microsoft told the 54-year-old engineer his computer was 100 percent compatible with Windows 10, he quickly found that some of his equipment wasn't.
Wiesenthal couldn't print documents on his several-year-old printer after he upgraded. And his Kensington docking station no longer worked with his computer. In both cases, the Fremont, Calif., resident found there were no drivers - the software used by the computer to communicate with particular peripherals - for the devices and none were in development. What's more, when he returned his PC to Windows 7, he found that the old drivers had been wiped out in the upgrade and he needed to find and download them again.
"I searched (for) them online and was lucky to find them," Wiesenthal said in an email. "I share all of this as a warning."
Windows 10 also ditched some features that some users relied on. Most notably, it doesn't include Media Center. So Windows no longer has the built-in ability to play DVDs or tune in or record television programs. Microsoft is offering a separate app to play DVDs for free to some users who upgrade to Windows 10, but others have to pay $15 for it.
Being forced to pay for a feature previously included with his computer - along with all the pop-up messages pushing him to upgrade - irked Terry Grant, 74, who often watches DVDs on his computer.
"It just irritated me," said the Cupertino, Calif., resident who retired from NASA after a long career there. "It seems to me, as per usual, I can expect Windows will not be putting their customers first."
Some people have faced even bigger problems after upgrading to Windows 10. After her company upgraded her computer to Windows 10, one reader said that some 600 files in her My Documents folder had been deleted. Unfortunately, her computer hadn't been set to back up the files and the tech support person at her company couldn't restore the files even after downloading a file recovery program.
Microsoft does offer a relatively easy way to restore PCs that have been upgraded to Windows 10 to the previous version they were running. But users have to take advantage of that method within 30 days of being upgraded or they lose that easy option.
When his computer was upgraded to Windows 10, Tony Daniels found that it no longer worked with his printer and had other, more minor glitches. The 65-year-old retired sales manager ended up paying $150 to a computer repair company to rid his machine of Windows 10.
"Microsoft was doing every underhanded trick possible to get me to accept (Windows) 10," the Antioch, Calif., resident said in an email. "I don't remember where I screwed up and let these guys do this to me."
Daniels added: "If they get a class-action suit against them, count me in."
Explore further Microsoft denies forcing Windows 10 upgrade
2016 The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
On July 16, NASA's RapidScat instrument found Darby's strongest winds (red) greater than 30 meters per second (67 mph/108 kph) around the entire storm with the exception of the southwestern quadrant. Credit: Doug Tyler/JPL
NASA satellite imagery revealed a cloud-filled eye in a weaker Hurricane Darby. Although obscured by clouds in previous days, the eye was apparent in wind data from NASA's RapidScat instrument.
On July 16, NASA's RapidScat instrument measured the surface winds around Hurricane Darby and found the strongest winds all around the storm with the exception of the southwestern quadrant. Sustained winds were greater than 30 meters per second (67 mph/108 kph).
RapidScat flies aboard the International Space Station and is helpful to forecasters because it shows where the strongest winds are in the storm (winds are not evenly distributed).
On July 17 at 09:30 UTC (5:30 a.m. EDT), the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of Hurricane Darby. The VIIRS image showed cloud-filled eye surrounded by a ring of powerful thunderstorms, and bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the low-level center.
The Suomi NPP satellite is managed by NASA and NOAA with support from the U.S. Department of Defense.
At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) on Monday, July 18, the center of Hurricane Darby was located near latitude 18.5 north and longitude 130.2 west. That's about 1,345 miles (2,165 km) west of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. Darby is moving toward the west near 10 mph (17 kph). NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that a westward to west-northwestward motion at a slightly faster forward speed is expected during the next couple of days. Maximum sustained winds have decreased to near 80 mph (130 kph) with higher gusts.
On July 17 at 2150 UTC (5:50 p.m. EDT) the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA-NOAA-DOD's Suomi NPP satellite showed cloud-filled eye surrounded by a ring of powerful thunderstorms, and bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the low-level center. Credit: NASA Rapid Response/NOAA/DOD
NHC forecaster Roberts noted that "Deep convection associated with Darby continues to diminish this morning with a couple of thin, fragmented curved bands located just to the southwest of the center of circulation."
NHC said additional weakening is forecast during the next 48 hours, and Darby should become a tropical storm later today. For updated forecasts on Darby, visit: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov.
Explore further NASA looks at a strengthening Tropical Storm Darby
VANCOUVER, BC(Marketwired Jul 18, 2016) Mobify and Google are teaming up for a live, 30-minute webinar on Googles PaymentRequest technology, which will be an integrated part of the Mobify Mobile Customer Engagement Platform . The technology can be used by any merchant to easily accept different payment methods, make checkout forms less painful, and ultimately eliminate checkout forms entirely. Register for RIP Checkout Forms: Google and Mobify Present the Future of Online Buying, to be held Wed., July 27, 2016, at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST / 6pm CEST.
Nearly half of cart abandonments occur at the payment stage of checkout, making streamlining the checkout process critical to avoid losing customers. Mobify has been working with Google to ensure the Mobify platform is the first to support the new service. Zach Koch, product manager at Google, and Anthony Nicalo, vice president of platform at Mobify will explain:
Googles PaymentRequest API and how to get started
How it is different from Android Pay, Apple Pay and PayPal
How app-style payments will improve the customer experience, boost conversion rates and recover millions in online revenue
Mobifys Mobile Customer Engagement Platform is designed for retailers that want to build better relationships through mobile engagement. It is the first mobile commerce solution to leverage the modern web capabilities of Googles innovative Progressive Web App (PWA) technology, using the latest features designed to make web apps feel and perform more like native apps. Now, with Googles PaymentRequest, retailers can exploit this important technology to stay ahead of consumer buying habits and provide seamless shopping experiences as mobile becomes the main means of shopping for many customers.
Join the Mobify Google webinar Wed., July 27.
About Mobify
Mobify delivers a comprehensive Mobile Customer Engagement Platform to help retailers cultivate powerful relationships with their customers, increasing revenue online and in-store revenue.
Mobify leverages its Progressive Mobile technology to create connected mobile web and native apps linked with legacy commerce platforms to ensure seamless customer journeys across channels and minimize development, operational, and maintenance expenses. With Mobifys Engagement Engine, retailers can tailor content to each customers context, including their real-time physical location and online behavior. The Mobify Connection Center brings everything together in a single interface for managing all mobile customer interactions across web, apps and push notifications.
Ranked by industry analysts as a leader in mobile commerce and engagement, Mobify serves retailers and brands worldwide, including BT, Crocs, Carnival Cruises, Bosch, Superdry, Eddie Bauer, Matalan, and Tommy Bahama.
GLENS FALLS A local woman is organizing a rally Wednesday in support of law enforcement in response to the recent deaths of officers in Dallas and Louisiana.
Kelly Lepley Stevens is holding what she is calling A Time to Reflect at City Park from 7 to 8 p.m. All are invited.
She described her reason for organizing the event in a post to The Post-Stars Facebook page.
With the current events in the news, we thought it would be a great time to show our local law enforcement teams that we truly care. No matter your religion, race, age, beliefs ... please join us Wednesday night in the city park to join hands and hearts to surround our community providers with love and compassion as they well deserve. Lets show the community that we do not have dividers. That we are #GlensfallsStrong#warrencountystrong #washingtoncountystrong #saratogacountystrong."
Three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers were killed and three wounded Sunday when they were shot by Gavin Long of Kansas City.
On July 7 in Dallas, five police officers were killed by Micah Johnson Dallas police officers Sr. Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, Sgt. Michael Smith, Officer Michael Krol, Patrick Zamarripa and Dallas Area Rapid Transit Officer Brent Thompson.
The shootings follow the deaths of two black men at the hands of law enforcement. Alton Sterlin, 37, was killed by Baton Rouge officers outside a convenience store. The following day, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, Philando Castile, was shot several times during a traffic stop in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights.
Inventory needs to be managed and managed well, or you are going to get in recurring trouble, and lose your credibility and hard-earned conversions, whether
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The menace confronting the people of Agogo with regard to the teeming presence of the nomadic cattle-rearing Fulanis on their land is a great cause for national concern.
Read more: 3 women go mad after losing husbands
The problem which has, and continues to, culminate in deaths, rapes of married women, and deliberate arsonous destruction of farms, to the citizens of Agogo.
This situation, according to Nana Akufo-Addo, is unacceptable as other countries across the world have put in place policies, which have meant that, such clashes have been forestalled.
See also: Over 200 Fulani herdsmen escape from Ivory Coast to Ghana
"Brazil has a population of 200 million people, and 213 million cattle. There are more cattle in Brazil than human beings. However, ranching and the implementation of policies have ensured that this situation has not created any problems. Humans do not mingle with the cattle. These are the kinds of policies we are coming to put in place, when, God-willing, we win the elections, to ensure that this Fulani menace is ended once and for all," he added.
Nana Addo made this known when he ended his 5-day tour of the Ashanti Region, with a courtesy call on the Krontihene of Agogo, Nana Kwame Nti.
He also assured that the issue of unsolved murders in Agogo, as a result of the clashes, which has led to some people taking the law into their own hands will be a thing of the past.
On June 29, two panelists on an Accra-based radio show were accused of airing threats against Ghana's judges.
Since then, the host of the show and the two panelists have been questioned by the Bureau of National Investigations. Their subsequent appearance at Accra's Supreme Court caused chaos.
Set to reappear today, Monday July 18, Ghana's security services have also mounted several road blocks to prevent sympathisers of the host of the radio show from besieging the court premises.
The Apex Court is due to determine the fate of the two panelists, Alistair Nelson, Godwin Ako Gunn and the host of the programme on which they made the comment, Salifu Maase also known as Mugabe.
Read also:Attack on Supreme Court JusticesBackground
The two panelists are before the Supreme Court after making threatening comments on Accra-based Montie FM.
Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn, who were panelists on Pampaso, a political programme on Montie FM in Accra on June 29, warned judges of Ghanas highest court to be wary of their conduct in the case involving the Electoral Commission and Mr Abu Ramadan if they did not want to suffer the fate of the three members of the bench who were shot to death and burnt on June 30, 1982 in the era of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).
The Supreme Court adjourned the case to July 18, 2016 after the contemnors argued that they were not served with the writ until the morning of the hearing day, a position which was documented by the court registrar.
The alleged contemnors include two panellists, Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson, talk show host Mugabe, as well as owners of Montie FM based in Accra.
The accused were found guilty for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing it into disrepute by the court presided over by Justice Sophia Akuffo.
Lawyers for the three however pleaded with the court to temper justice with mercy.
The case has been adjourned to July 27 for sentencing.
Meanwhile, one of the Montie FM panellists blamed his comments in which he and another panelist threatened to kill the judges to a disease called kpokpogbligbli.
According to Alistair Nelson, kpokpogbligbli is an unknown disease that takes over a persons body and controls what he says and does."
He made this known when he appeared before the Supreme Court to explain why he and others should not be committed to prison for contempt of court, for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
READ ALSO: Supreme Court plays contemptuous audio tapes
The Supreme Court also played in open court, audiotapes which contained alleged threats issued by two radio pundits Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson against justices of the apex court.
The tapes were played on the insistence of presiding judge Justice Sophia Akuffo, despite pleas from counsel for the alleged contemnors' tapes not to be played.
The two panellists, Nelson and Gunn told the court they were liable to the offence and expressed regret.
The host of the said programme, Mugabe, even though admitting that he was liable to the offence, said that he had an explanation for his conduct.
The court in a letter last Thursday, asked the owners to explain why they should not be committed to prison for contempt of court, for scandalising the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
The Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood, and another judge of the Supreme Court, Sulley Gbadegbe stepped down from the panel hearing the contempt case against owners of Accra-based Montie FM, the host of the stations Pampaso programme, and the two panelists, who threatened to kill judges over their handling of the Abu Ramadan suit on the credibility of the voters register.
"In the nest few weeks, Ghana will be submitting its response to the Ivorian counter memorial and I think it is going pretty well," he added.
Ivory Coast is claiming ownership of the disputed TEN oil field, forcing Ghana to file a suit at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) to ward off Ivory Coast from disputed oilfields.
It filed its suit based on Article 287 Annex VII of the 1982 UNCLOS.
Cote dIvoire in February 2015 filed for preliminary measures and urged the tribunal to suspend all activities on the disputed area until the definitive determination of the case, dubbed: Dispute Concerning Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary between Ghana and Cote dIvoire in the Atlantic Ocean.
The committee held a public forum with some major stakeholders last week to solicit views on the proposed change.
The stakeholders; political parties, civil society groups, governance think tank groups, the clergy, the media, the Ghana Bar Association and the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) recommended that the bill be passed.
The recommendation which is contained in a 15-page document titled: Report of the Committee on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs on the Constitution (Amendment) Bill, 2016, is signed by Eric Owusu-Mensah and Magnus K. Amoatey, the Clerk and Chairman respectively of the Committee on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs.
"The Committee has critically examined the Bill vis-a-vis the advice from the Council of State and the views of the participants at the forum. The Committee is also cautious of the implications of the change in the date of the elections of both the President and Members of Parliament from December to November. It has also taken note of the firm commitment and assurance given by the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission and is of the view that the Bill be passed, the report indicated
Read also:Ghana Parliament
The Committee, therefore, recommends to the House to adopt its report and pass the Bill subject to the amendment, the report read.
READ MORE: Nana Addo pleads with voters to participate in exercise
They claimed they are bing paid GHC400 while their colleagues in other district are taking home GHC720 at the end of the three weeks exercise.
They were also upset about allowances paid to them during a three-day capacity building exercise for today's exercise.
The angry recruits said they were paid GHC30 for the three-day exercise while their colleagues took home GHC60.
The Electoral Commission is beginning the voters register exhibition today to offer registrants the opportunity to verify if their names were properly capture in the provisional register.
The three-week long exercise is to offer registrants the opportunity to verify if their names were properly capture in the provisional register, object to minors and foreigners on the register as well as correct data that were improperly captured.
Some exhibition centers visited by Pulse.com.gh in the Ayawaso West Wougon constituency recorded low turn-out of eligible voters to validate their records.
As at now, the exercise has been very slow, there hasnt been any difficulties anyway, Michael Addo, an exhibition officer said.
Three people had been verified, and one person had his named which was wrongly spelt corrected, Addo added.
Another exhibition officer said his centre verified four people at the time of our visit.
The court has also directed the High Court to give a ruling in line with the determination by the Supreme Court
Defeated incumbent MP for Klottey Korle, Nii Armah Ashietey resorted to court to challenge the eligibility of Dr. Zanetor because she was not a registered voter when she was elected as a nominee.
Nii Armah Ashietey prayed the court to declare her election null and void.
Dr. Zenator on the other hand registered with the Electoral Commission during the Limited registration exercise which was held in April 2016.
But the Apex Court revealed that a person is only deemed a candidate after the Electoral Commission (EC) opens the opportunity for parties to submit the names of their nominees elected from their parties primaries and that has not happened yet hence the argument of her not being qualified cannot hold
Meanwhile, an Accra High Court has dismissed a case filed by some members of the NDC in Klottey Korle constituency which sought to annul the results of the NDCs parliamentary primary in the area for the same reason.
Read also:Issues
The three; Joseph Narku Botchway, Jacob Amin and Reverend Michael Kwabena Nii Adjei Sowah went to court to challenge the eligibility of Dr. Zanetor who they alleged was not a registered voter.
The courts however said the plaintiff did not demonstrate in anyway how their rights had been violated or would be violated.
With the green light given by the Supreme Court on Monday July 18, Dr. Agyeman-Rawlings, daughter of former President Jerry John Rawlings is set to battle the Korle Klottey seat with Lawyer Philip Addison, of the opposition NPP and Madam Eva Lokko of the PPP.
Background
Hon. Nii Ashitey, joined by one other person, filed a suit against Dr. Zanetor Rawlings, the elected parliamentary nominee of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for Klottey Korle after the latter defeated him in a constituency Primaries for the upcoming general elections held in November 2015.
Mr. Ashitey contested that the daughter of former President Jerry John Rawlings at the time of the NDC primaries was not qualified to contest the NDC Primaries because she was not registered as a voter in Ghana by the Electoral Commission.
Africa is a continent with a troubled past of slavery and colonization. Here are three museums in Africa that history and culture lovers ought to visit.
1. The Benin City National Museum, Nigeria:
The Benin Empire was one of the oldest and most advanced and developed civilizations in Africa. Many years, before the arrival of missionaries and colonialists to Africa, the Benin people had made great advancements in artwork, architecture and agriculture.
The Benin City National Museum has a significant number of artifacts and relics from the old Benin Empire such as terracotta, bronze figures and cast iron pieces. The museum started from the Oba of Benins palace in 1940; however, the present structure of the museum today was officially open to the public in August 1973.
2. The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, Egypt:
The Egyptian civilization is unarguably one of the most significant and most advanced ancient civilization. Ancient Egypt has played a significant role in modern day history, culture, architecture and technological advancements.
The museum, established as early as 1835 contains thousands of antiquities and relics of the glorious Egyptian empire of the past. The museum contains important pieces that depict Egyptian history and Pharaonic antiquities. Mummies, pharaohs masks made of solid gold, statues, masks and coffins are some of the priceless historic objects on display at the musuem.
3. Apartheid Museum, South Africa:
The Apartheid period is one of the darkest periods in South Africa and the African continent as a whole. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg illustrates apartheid and the 20th century history of South Africa that is characterised by strife and struggle.
The museum depicts the horrors of racial discrimination that plagued South Africa since the 1940s when the white minority elected into power controlled every aspect of life in South Africa, creating and enforcing laws that legitimized age long discrimination against blacks till 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected president in a revolutionary election.
During the signing of the MoU in Lagos, the Acting Managing Director of BoI, Mr. Waheed Olagunju, said that the partnership would integrate the continent and diversify the nations economy.
Olagunju said that ETI believed that Nigeria was an important market to start the programme and decided that BoI should be its partner for the initiative in Nigeria.
According to him, financial inclusion is vital to achieving inclusive growth for every Nigerian.
"Between 2010 and 2014, Nigerias economy was among the 10 fastest growing economies in the world with an average GDP of 5 to 7 per cent, but however, the poverty indices did not match the rise in GDP.
"We did not achieve inclusive growth and unemployment has continued to rise.
"One of the factors responsible is lack of inclusive growth because there has been no financial inclusion," said Olagunju.
He said that the bank would leverage on the partnership to broaden its reach in providing financial support and capacity building to more Nigerian SMEs.
Olagunju added that the partnership would open wider market for many of the SMEs dealing in exportable products.
Mr. Patrick Akinwutan, Group Executive, Consumer Banking of ETI, said that financial inclusion was crucial to the bank for it to contribute to Africas economic development.
According to Akinwutan, for Ecobank, financial inclusion means making it practical for every Nigerian to have access to support and be able to take their financial destiny in their hands.
He said that ETI would leverage on technology to surmount the geographical impediments and drive the initiative to success.
Akinwutan added that the bank would bring its linkages with International Financial Institutions (IFC), Africa Development Bank (AfDB), knowledge of African market and robust research network into the partnership.
Mr. Charles Kie, Managing Director, Ecobank Nigeria, stressed that SMEs had critical role to play in supporting the growth of the nations economy.
"As a systemic bank, we have a role to play in supporting the SMEs for long term growth.
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Popular for his roles in movies like
His journey to stardom kick-started with a film appearance in "Living in Bondage" as Chief Omego, a role which earned him a cash pay of N1,500.
In 2013, he received a political appointment from former President Goodluck Jonathan as a board member of the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism Studies.
Now a renowned veteran, Kanayo O. Kanayo seeks to inspire the youth to great achievements, and provide a platform upon which they can more easily realize their dreams with a mentorship academy, Kanayo O. Kanayo Mentoring Academy, KOKMA.
In 2011, the actor contested to represent the people of Ahiazu/Ezinihitte Mbaise Federal Constituency at the House of Representatives.
According to Vanguard, the two were severely beaten, stripped naked and would have been burnt if not for the police that arrived at the scene and whisked them away into the safety of their custody.
While confessing how the act has destroyed his life and marriage, Orji said his wife left him after he was caught sodomising a six-year-old boy in their area.
Orji and Ejimeme were nabbed at the Coal Camp area of the metropolis after they allegedly lured two six-year-old boys identified as Chimezie and Sunday, into their room at 78, Industrial Area, and were at the point of raping them before the boys ran out and raised an alarm.
Blaming the devil for his involvement in the act, Orji said he had gone to several spiritualists and native doctors to seek help to no avail.
The State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Ebere Amaraizu, confirmed the arrest of the suspects in a bulletin.
Our men saved them from being lynched by the irate mob, following their involvement in sodomy. The mob had already stripped them naked before the security operatives of the Central Police Station, Enugu, intervened and took them into custody.
One of the suspects, Odinaka, maintained that he is married but his wife has left him owing to these illicit activities which he blamed on Satan. According to him, he has visited many clergies to get him out of the activity without success.
According to the Daily Post, Okafor "used a sharp razor blade to cut the victim on various parts of his body including his abdomen, left buttocks and thigh".
She was arrested in September 2015, by officials of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and other related matters (NAPTIP).
Okafor, who is only 29 years of age, reportedly pleaded guilty to the offence.
Justice N. Ogbonna, the presiding judge, in his ruling on the matter, said her actions is contrary to Section 2 subsection 1 of the VAPP Act.
The judge said Section 2 subsection 1 of the VAPP Act says A person who willfully causes or inflicts physical injury on another person by means of any weapon, substance or object, commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a term of imprisonment not exceeding 5 years or a fine not exceeding N100, 000.00 or both.
Umoru, who was also accused of murder revealed to the Oyo State Police that he believes he was destined by God to rob.
The suspect had an accomplice, Sanda, who was arrested with him along Igangan/Iganna road via Iwere Ile in Oke-Ogun, Daily Post reports.
Adeleye Oyebade, the state Commissioner of Police, said the culprits were arrested for "attacking one Kehinde Rafiu, beating him with a shepherd club and machete before dispossessing him of his motorcycle". report says.
The victim lost his life at the hospital due to injuries resulting from the violence.
According to Umoru, his accomplice was the one that initiated the attack before he joined in.
He said Sanda cut the motorcycle owner with his cutlass and I used the club to beat him. He was seriously injured but not dead. I normally used the club to shepherd cattle."
"After leaving him for dead, we took his motorcycle away to sell. We were later arrested by members of the Odua Peoples Congress who handed us over to the police."
I dont know why I did it. I had no motive. I cannot even ride a motorcycle. I am a herdsman and this is my first time of being arrested or robbing people",
The 45-year-old trader, Margaret Agwu, said for the husbands deceitfulness she was calling it quits after 33 years in Agwu Onus house.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that her husband refused to appear in court after several summonses.
Margaret had filed the suit seeking the dissolution of the union, citing the mans duplicity.
According to Margaret, who had five children for him, her husband also lied to her parents that he had a provision store.
"When I was 12 years old, my husband came to my village to ask for my hand in marriage.
"He told my parents that he lived in a flat and that he is a businessman and owned a provision store.
"My parents told him that they cannot release me for marriage because I was too young and besides I was still schooling.
Margaret regretted that on getting to the city, she discovered that her husband was not what he made her and her parents believe he was.
"When I got to his house, I discovered that he was staying in one-room apartment, selling popcorn at the roadside.
"He also refused to fulfill his promise of sending me to school."
The frustrated woman said she would not have reminded herself of the husbands deceit but because he had turned out to be a brute, who beats her at the slightest provocation.
She added:"My husband turned me into a punching bag; sometimes he will strip me and beat the hell out of me.
"He once punched me in my stomach and I lost my first pregnancy after the fight. I have lived every minute of my life in fear but I cannot go back to my parents because of the bride price."
Margret said also accused her of absconding with their children 16 years ago.
"When I called him after he packed out, he just told me that he was no longer interested in the marriage and since then he refused to pick my calls.
"His relations told me he relocated with the children to Port Harcourt, Rivers State. It is 16 years now that I have not seen nor heard from them.
"I heard that my husband gave our first daughter's hand in marriage without my knowledge and that she had given birth to a baby," she said.
Margaret urged the court to help her to return the N600 bride price paid by her husband and dissolve the marriage, saying "I am no longer in love and I want to move on with my life.
NAN reports that when an official of the court called the man on telephone as directed, he said: "She is no longer my wife.
The President of the court, Mr Adegboyega Omilola, ordered the petitioner (the wife) to pay back the bride price to the court for onward transfer to the estranged husband.
According to the Daily Post, the pair had too much to drink, as a resulted were intoxicated from the huge alcohol intake.
On their way back to their residence, they stopped over to smoke cigarettes at a another local bar when a fight ensued between them.
It was not clear what the quarrel was all about, but the pair soon got into a violent attack against eachother.
They were soon separated by passers-by, but not after they caused serious injuries to themselves.
It was gathered that the threat made his 47-year-old mother, Sarah, to flee from the family house in Eshiamukoko village in Butere district, Kakamega County, in fear that her biological son could carry out the threat.
Malika who is said to be very bitter that his 55-year-old father, Mbinji, could descend so low to have sex with his son's wife, vowed in the open that he would rape his mother to teach his father a lesson as revenge after he caught his dad red-handed with his wife in the act in a maize plantation.
I heard some funny noises emanating from the maize plantation while looking for my goat that had strayed. When I moved closer, I was shocked to find my father engaged in the act with my wife, Malika explained when village elders called him to explain why he threatened to sexually assault his mother.
Malika, whose marriage had only lasted months, said he has all along known his father to be randy but never imagined he would be so shameless to the extent of seducing his wife and sleeping with her.
A village elder, Inzoi Lumbasi, told Standard Digital that everyone is shocked that Mbinji could do such a thing and that it was an abomination for a man to sleep with his son's wife no matter how beautiful and tempting she may be.
It was very unfortunate for the old man to do that. This is not only an abomination, but also an unimaginable disregard of taboo that will require the two to be cleansed in an elaborate ritual. Or get banished from here, lest they bring bad omen and curses to this village, Lumbasi said.
Lumbasi added that Mbinji has been in the habit of seducing and sleeping with women in the area, including other mens wives and widows.
It is not the first time he is doing it; he has been implicated in many other nasty sex scandals around here. The only difference now is that he went for his own daughter-in-law.
What a shame! Surely, something radical has to be done for him to change. We shall be forced to perform elaborate rituals, including slaughtering an unblemished black bull or else something bad could happen to this family.
According to the report, the little infant was picked when the operatives were on a patrol along the New Elelenwo Manifold in Akpajo, Eleme Local Government Area of the state, when they saw the baby tucked inside a carton of noodles and placed in the refuse dump, on Friday, July 15, July 2016.
The statement adds that though the baby who was in a critical condition at the time it was rescued due to the rain and bad weather it had been exposed to, she was doing well after the officials rushed her to a hospital where she was given prompt and adequate medical attention.
H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, has spread across a number of West African countries in the past two years, hitting poultry farms.
Cameroon and Niger have become the latest countries affected in the region, in an outbreak that has hit Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria.
"The virus is already practically endemic in Nigeria and we fear that other countries that don't have the budget, the human resources and the technical capacity adequate to eliminate the disease will face the (same) risk," said Eran Raizman, senior animal health officer at FAO.
"In terms of food security and livelihoods it's a severe issue because it hampers people's efforts to progress economically.
"If the policies are to cull all the infected birds people loose all they have. If the government is not fast enough to pay the compensations they don't have anything to live off," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.
H5N1 bird flu first infected humans in 1997 in Hong Kong. It has since spread from Asia to Europe and Africa and has become entrenched in poultry in some countries, causing millions of poultry infections and several hundred human deaths.
Raizman said despite the urgency to contain the disease, it was "challenging" to raise the funds needed to help countries like Nigeria cope with infections and eliminate the risk of the virus becoming endemic.
Nearly 3.5 million birds in Nigeria have been killed by the virus or culled to stop its spread, the FAO said.
"If we don't act now we'll cry for generations because it will be very difficult, given the growth of the poultry industry in Africa, to control the disease," he said.
The money is believed to be part of the N4.7 billion transferred from the account of the Office of the National Security Adviser to the bank account of Sylvan McNamara, a company allegedly owned by Babajide and Gbolahan Obanikoro, the ex-minister's two sons.
Borodo, according to Punch, confessed to the EFCC during interrogation last week that he flew Obanikoro on June 17, 2014 from Lagos to Akure on an HS-125 aircraft.
The pilot told us that on June 17, 2014, he was instructed by his company around 7am to prepare the aircraft for an 8.30am flight from Lagos to Akure. He was informed that the client was Obanikoro. He said he along with his colleagues including one Capt. Olubiyi Famuyiwa got on the plane," the newspaper quoted a reliable EFCC investigator to have said.
He said Obanikoros aides arrived at the tarmac with some bullion vans and started offloading the contents which were in big green tarpaulin bags. He informed them that the aircraft could only carry about eight or nine bags due to its small size.
The pilot said at that point, Obanikoro intervened and began pleading with him to allow them load all the bags on the plane but he refused and then the minister, his ADC and a friend boarded the plane and the aircraft departed.
On landing in Akure, the source, quoting borodo, said "some soldiers received them and the bags were offloaded and put into a bullion van. He noted that the plane returned empty to Lagos.
He said that the next day, he returned to Akure and then flew Obanikoro to Abuja with his Aide-de-Camp, Lt. Adewale.
It was also revealed that among those who received Obanikoro was Abiodun Agbele, Fayose's associate who is currently in EFCC custody.
The disclosure was made by the Director of the US Office of Assistance for Africa Bureau of Population, Margaret McKelvey to Punch.
I do want to call your attention to and highlight in particular, the situation of Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin countries. This has been called one of the most under-reported crises in the world today, she said.
We are talking about nine million people actually directly affected by Boko Haram and its depredations across the four countries. So, being registered, having a recognised identity, having documentation can be very important in proving who you are and the fact that you exist.
We like to see birth registrations for refugee children for example. On the total number of refugees that are being counted today in the Lake Chad Basin area would be just under 155, 000. In addition, there are just over 77, 000 people who had been living in Nigeria but of Chadian, Nigerian and Cameroonian background who returned to their home countries. So, those people we call returnees.
Now the really big numbers are the IDPs and most of those are in Nigeria itself; just over two million maybe I shouldnt say just over, approaching 2.1 million. There are also people who have been internally displaced in the other three countries by Boko Haram attacks. So, on the Cameroon side, we have close to 191,000; on the Chad side, close to 112,000 and on the Niger side, 167,000. So, hopefully that answers your questions about the numbers.
Boko Haram has attacked IDP camps inside Nigeria. They have attacked villages, most recently in Niger, uprooting another 100,000 people, being secondarily uprooted if you will. So, having secured access to be able to bring in humanitarian supplies and to reach the people in need is clearly the number one challenge, she added.
Adesina, who admitted that Buhari's appointments is more favorable to some regions than others, said other regions would be taken care of.
Speaking on a Channels Television programme on Sunday, July 18, the Presidential aide said there are some (appointments) that are not necessarily subject to federal character.
When it is the turn of a person to hold a certain office and you say because he is from a certain region you then bypass him for another person, you have been unfair to that person and also to the system, he said.
The security system often times operates on hierarchy and efficiency. So if you have a senior person who is also efficient and because he comes from a certain region, you bypass him, I think you are being unjust and unfair to somebody.
Adesina also described as unfair accusations from various quarters over the President's silence on some issues in the country but was quick to make comments on international matters.
He said the life of every Nigerian is a priority to the present administration.
It amazes me when people say they have not heard on this and that. What they expect is that the president will come out personally to talk on those things, which I dont think is the thing to do, he said.
Why does the president have aides? Why does he have ministers? Why do we have officials in government? When they have spoken on those issues, I think we should consider that government has spoken on them.
Yes, the president may have not adopted the style of other leaders, but the life of every Nigerian is precious to him.
On the slow implementation of the 2016 to the crisis in the Niger Delta region, Adesina blamed all on the current economy crisis.
Yes the budget has been passed. The intention is to implement that budget as much as possible but then the circumstances are making it difficult because projections are not being met because of what is happening in the Niger Delta and other parts of the economy, he said.
But as much as possible the government would still adhere to that project as much as revenue will permit and allow," he said.
They are trying to silence me, break me, discredit me and destroy, but as long as Jesus is on the throne this will never work. I am strong and I am bold and the struggle will continue, he said.
Jesus is on the throne, no doubt, but he doesnt associate with unrepentant thieves (allegedly).
Fani-Kayode has been accused of money laundering by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and was only released from detention on Friday, July 15after being in custody for 67 days.
Instead of giving a concrete defence however, the former minister has danced from one rhetoric to the other. First he never touched public funds, then it became a government conspiracy against him.
After that Fani-Kayode admitted that he received a large amount of money but that he had no idea it was stolen. Now, he has placed his troubles completely at the feet of Jesus and is screaming about how nobody can fight the Lord, and thats true, but they can sure fight Femi Fani-Kayode.
If Fani-Kayode truly believed the money he took, which was meant for use in funding the Goodluck Jonathan campaign, was legitimate, why did he spend some of it on a brand new Range Rover for his lover?
If Jonathan had taken the time to raise funds honestly and painstakingly, would it be right for a member of his campaign to spend the money so carelessly and frivolously?
I wonder which Jesus Fani-Kayode was speaking for when he maliciously attacked an unoffending Muhammadu Buhari despite the latters continuous silence. I wonder which Jesus he was representing when he spouted lie after li in a bid to justify Jonathans re-election.
Whos the father of liars? Definitely not Jesus.
Which Jesus was Fani-Kayode representing when he mocked Nigerians for choosing change after a suicide bombing which killed 17 people? Which Jesus is in support of him camping and impregnating a young girl without marrying her? Not the one I know.
Fani-Kayode needs to learn from Olisa Metuhs experience and stop fighting the charges against him, which are most likely valid. Instead, he should do what Metuh eventually offered to do after proving stubborn to his own detriment, refund the money in question.
Usman stated this at the handover ceremony between her and the former Managing Director of NPA, Malam Habib Abdullahi, on Monday in Lagos.
According to her, our ports are the critical arteries of the economy and it is our duty to ensure that the operators deliver ports services in line with the standards deserved in the 21st century.
She said that the new management would support President Muhammadu Buharis agenda of economic diversity.
``We will listen to our customers, importers and exporters and other agencies working in the ports to improve on our service delivery to the nation.
``Anything less than the world class services is simply not acceptable. Attaining such height is the mission to which we can all subscribe to.
``As a team leader, I have come to add my best efforts to yours so that we can collectively achieve result for our industry.
``We must work as a team, pursuing common goals with professionalism and diligence, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) quotes Usman as saying.
She added that the new management would prioritise investments in primary equipment and infrastructure and services with commitment to fulfilling NPAs concession agreement to hasten clearance of imports and exports from the ports.
She noted that collectively, the hard work of staffs could position NPA as a modern agency.
``To function as regulator, all of us at NPA must be committed to the highest standards of performance. Let us uphold the most diligent work ethics in our individual beats as well as collective undertaking to achieve result.
``Everyone at the NPA has a role in promoting best practices in upholding good governance, standards and delivering quality services.
``We would jointly work hard with integrity and zero-tolerance for corruption.
As the new management settles, we would be listening to your concerns and suggestions as we navigate the best options for effectively discharging the NPAs mandate.
``I hope and I believe we would jointly work together as one family to achieve our mandate, NAN quotes Usman as saying.
In his speech, Abdullahi said that since July 2012, when the management came on board, it recorded modest achievements.
He said that NPA under his leadership was able to achieve automation of operational processes, infrastructural development, Greenfield and Brown field developments and building a strong port community system.
Abdullahi explained that the outgoing management also built strong human resources through training and re-training.
In five years time, more than 50 per cent of the top managers will be out and presently they are on the average 55 years old. These are from senior managers to general managers and this is quite challenging.
He urged the new management to come up with succession scheme to ensure that the younger ones take over ``because you are going to miss the experience of the older ones.
Abdullahi said that his administration was proud of putting in place the Command, Control and Intelligence Unit, adding that the administration also installed the e-payment system.
He added that his administration automated the payment systems to create room for transparency.
``We also automated the Ship Entry Notice to create room for transparency, NAN quotes him as saying.
The former managing director said that his administration integrated NPAs operations with other stakeholders like the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to serve a s platform to block all revenue leakages.
``We also dredged and maintained the water channels for smooth navigation. The deeper the channels, the bigger the vessels that will come in.
``Nearly 60 per cent of our revenue goes into dredging and we tries as much as possible to buy tug boats, NAN quotes Abdullahi as saying.
He said that there had been improved port operations and cargo throughput As well as deepening of the port channels.
Abdullahi said that ``Nigeria is the only port in West Africa receiving big WAFMAX vessels.
According to him, we have improved wreck removal operations as well as human and vehicular traffic and we made available 24-hour operations at the ports.
He said that his administration moved toward encouraging non-oil exports to see how Nigeria could explore the possibilities of exports.
``Over 80 per cent of containers that leave this country leave empty.
``NPA is partnering with the Nigerian Export Promotion Council to ensure the containers does not leave empty.
``With the new set of management, I am sure you will come up with fresh ideas that will move the industry further, he said.
Abdullahi recalled that NPA management sent a letter to the Ministry of Solid Minerals to explore the possibility of exporting solid minerals.
Gov. Abubakar Badaru told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Dutse that the money was paid to CGC, the construction firm handling the project.
He disclosed that the project was awarded by the immediate past administration at the cost N11.5 billion but was later abandoned.
He said that the second phase would cover Baturiya-Yelwawa-Abunabo, while the third phase of the road project would run from Chafchafno-Kadira-Are-Guri.
According to him, the project will be completed before May 2019.
The governor said the road, when completed, would impact on the socioeconomic wellbeing of the people and reduce rural-urban migration.
It was gathered that the kidnappers invaded the community in two speedboats at about 10: 30pm on Saturday, July 16, and shot dead one of the palace guards and a motorcycle rider before whisking the monarch away.
The monarch's wife, Kuburat, was said to have sustained gunshot injuries in the process of the shootings, and rushed to the hospital.
According to a resident, Ifayemi Yomi, the assailants, who suspected to be militants, started shooting sporadically when they arrived the community, as everyone ran for cover.
The gunmen came in at about 10pm, shooting indiscriminately. They had earlier gone to the Agbede area of Ikorodu, and tried to abduct some oil dealers; but they failed. They then made their way to Iba through the waterways," the resident told Punch.
They went to the palace and dragged the traditional ruler out. The residents tried to prevent their entry into the palace and one of them, who worked with the Neighbourhood Watch, was shot dead. A motorcycle rider was also killed.
In another account from one Muyiwa, also a resident, it was initially assumed that their familiar vigilantes were carrying out the shootings.
He said: My wife and I initially thought vigilantes were at work, but with the persistence of the shooting, we sensed the community was under attack.
The gunshots woke up my two children. For one hour, I was confused. My wife, the children and I held on to one another. It was this morning (Sunday) that I heard that the king was abducted by militants. They killed his guard and shot his wife in the leg.
According to the monarch's elder brother and the Oloto of Otto, Oba Josiah Aina, the kidnapper have not demanded any ransom.
It was, however, learnt that the woman who was kidnapped with her child the previous day, Friday, alongside a businessman, are still in their captors' den, as N30 million ransom demanded for each of them has not been paid.
The abductors were said to have rejected N3 million they were offered by the man's family.
The Partys National Organising Secretary, Sen. Osita Izunaso, made the announcement in a statement released to newsmen on Sunday in Abuja by Mr Edegbe Odemwingie, APC Assistant Director, Publicity.
Izunaso said the announcement was in line with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended), of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) guidelines and Party guidelines.
The statement pegged the sale of forms at N5 million while intending aspirants are expected to pay N500, 000 to pick expression of interest forms.
It, however, said that the forms would be free of charge for female aspirants.
''Last day for submission of completed forms is Monday, Aug. 8 at the APC National Secretariat and the screening of aspirants will be conducted in Abuja from Aug. 9 to 12.
At the end of its 77th meeting held on Friday, July 15, the Council had suspended and recommended the two Judges to President Muhammadu Buhari for compulsory retirement.
In a statement issued on Sunday, July 17, by the acting Director of Information at the NJC, Mr. Soji Oye, said the action was taken against Justice Yunusa pursuant to the findings by the Council, following the allegations contained in the Petitions written against him by the Civil Society Network Against Corruption.
The judge allegedly granted Interim Orders and Perpetual Injunctions, restraining the Attorney-General of the Federation, the Inspector General of Police, Independent Corruption practices and Related Offence Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from arresting, investigating and prosecuting some persons accused of corruption in seven different cases.
The cases were listed as HC\L\CS\1471\2015:- between Simon John Adonimere & 3 Ors Vs. EFCC; FHC\L\CS\477\14:- FRN V Michael Adenuga; FHC\L\CS\1342\15:- Senator Stella Odua Vs. AG Federation, EFCC, ICPC & IGP; FHC\L\CS\1285\15:- Jyde Adelakun & Anor Vs. Chairman EFCC & Anor; FHC\L\CS\1455\:- Dr Martins Oluwafemi Thomas Vs. EFCC; FHC\L\CS\1269\15:-Hon Shamsudeen Abogu Vs. EFCC & Ors; and FHC\L\CS\1012\15:- Hon. Etete Dauzia Loya Vs. EFCC.
On the part of Justice Oloyede, the Council recommended her compulsory retirement from the Office to Osun State governor sequel to the Findings of its Facts Finding Committee that: 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 members of the State House of Assembly and circulated same to 36 persons/organisations.
On reaching the community after the two-hour journey on the high sea, I met with the members of the communities who told me that their dream was to be included in the Nigerian project, that the education facilities and other basic social amenities are almost non-existent in the communities. They also raised concern of incessant attacks by the Nigerian Military, Dalung said according to Daily Trust.
As a youth minister, I know there the Avengers are mostly youths who have potentials to be great citizens of this country. The issues include the Niger-Delta Maritime University, pipeline community policing which they said the government had denied them, and the inability of the government to continue with the amnesty programme established by former President Umaru Musa YarAdua.
After going round some of the communities, I noticed that government projects were almost non-existent. I saw a secondary school signboard somewhere but the school is yet to be developed, the community has a clinic but still at the foundation level and a borehole that is not functional, he added.
ALSO READ: Niger Delta Avengers warn ExxonMobil not to repair damaged pipeline
The Chairman of the NLC in Anambra, Mr Jerry Nnubia, made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Awka on Monday.
NAN reports that Justice Ibrahim Idris of the Federal High Court in Lagos, on July 13, stopped the agency from implementing the proposed 45 per cent hike in electricity tariff.
Nnubia, who welcomed the judgment as a relief for the people, said the call became necessary because the subsisting court order of May 2015 against the increase was not obeyed.
"It is a welcome development; the court order restraining NERC and DISCOs from increasing traffic until right things are done, is in tandem with natural justice.
"We protested against the hike because we cannot pay higher for services that are not rendered and there were no consultations, the DISCOs are not supplying power because the generation level has gone down.
"The Federal Government, through NERC, cannot be above the law; we are worried about the level of disobedience to the law.
"We want the court order against this increase to be obeyed, he said.
He called for the development of effective electricity infrastructure in the country and training of personnel to boost efficiency in the sector.
Nnubia particularly called on the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) to distribute prepaid meters and supply power to its customers in the southeast, especially Anambra regularly.
"There is nothing to describe the epileptic power supply in Anambra by the EEDC and that is the report we get about the other DISCOs.
"Even after the tariff increase, nothing changed for better, so why should we be paying for darkness?
Senator Melaye allegedly said he will beat up and impregnate Mrs Tinubu during proceeding on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday, July 14, 2016.
Melaye's statement which triggered reactions from Nigerians seems to have taken a new dimension.
In a letter addressed to the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris on Monday, July 18, 2016, Mrs Tinubu requested for police protection from Senator Dino who she referred to as a "threat" to her life.
The letter reads;
I am Senator Oluremi Tinubu representing the Lagos Central Senatorial District of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
During the proceedings of the senate on Tuesday, July 14 2016, I had cause to contribute to a matter of national importance. Apparently dissatisfied with my contributions, Senator Dino Melaye threw caution to the winds, resorted to vulgar abuse of my person and wanted to assault me.
It was the timely intervention of a number of colleagues which prevented Senator Melaye from unleashing physical attack on me. However, as the leadership of the senate did not call him to order in the circumstance, he proceeded to threaten my life without any provocation whatsoever.
In view of Senator Melayes antecedent, particularly in the House of Representatives, where a brawl led by him had led to the untimely death of a member, I have decided not to ignore his threat to my life. Therefore, Im compelled to urge you to use your good offices to provide me with adequate security.
Please accept the assurances of my highest regards and esteem."
Here is a copy of the letter:
A case of was recorded in Akwa-Ibom state where a motorist who refused to part with some amount of money as bribe, was battered by a police officer who used the butt of his gun to break the man's head.
Another case was recorded in Ondo State, when a policeman pushed a nursing mother and her young son off a commercial motorcycle in an attempt to force the 'Okadaman' to part with the sum of N100, causing the woman and the baby to be injured in the process.
Analysts have attributed these incidents to low educational qualification of some officers and the very little attention being paid to issues of their welfare.
Compared to other security agencies like the Army, Air Force and Navy, police officers are the least paid and cared for. A typical example is the housing facilities provided for police officers.
While military officers were allocated houses in Mambilla, Mogadishu, W.U Bassey, Niger, Abacha, Lungi barracks located in Maitama and Asokoro, the police have provided none of these facilities for its officers. The closest to the above listed for police is the M.D Abubakar Barrack located in the Dei-Dei area of Abuja.
Named after a former Inspector-General of Police, Pulse learnt that houses were originally built for the Gbagi people (the original inhabitants of Abuja) by the Mallam Nasir el-Rufai administration in 2003. The federal government took over most lands belonging to them following the relocation of the Federal Capital Territory from Lagos to Abuja in December, 1991.
"It was el-Rufai who built these houses for the Gbagi people but they rejected it because the houses are too small, there was no light and it was too far from the city. After some months, armed robbers began to use the houses as hideout after causing mayhem on the expressway.
"The former inspector general of Police, then sent some officers here to help curb the situation. They stayed here for a while after which they took over the place," a source told our correspondent.
Police officers who live in the 'barrack' work in nearby Divisions like Zuba, Dei-Dei, Kubwa, Madalla and even the Force Headquarters, which houses the office of the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris.
Located in along the Kubwa-Zuba express road, the barrack lacks basic amenities such as potable water, good roads and a hospital.
"We stayed here without electricity for almost ten years despite the fact that there is a high-tension transmission line behind us. We don't have water or hospital here. The living condition here is very poor. We are prone to snake bites because of the bushes here.
"Although we stay here for free, if an officer is moving out, he will give the house to another person for a fee. This fee is usually collected for the renovation he may have carried out in the house before moving in.
Everyday, you keep hearing that a policeman killed someone here and there. How can someone who wakes up daily from such a place be friendly? How can someone here discharge his or her duties effectively? The police is your friend only in words o, not in action," said a serving police who spoke to Pulse correspondent on the condition of anonymity.
Truth be told, Police authorities must begin to pay more attention to the welfare of its personnel for the force to truly become "the friend of the poeple."
Mr Olatunji Oguntoye, the Surulere Unit Commander of the corps in Lagos gave the assurance in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
He said: "In this locality (Surulere), Lagos we are battling with the issue of fake drivers licences in some quarters and this is attributed to the activities of touts in our neighbourhoods.
"But we are doing all we can to see that we overcome it, hence, in our public enlightenment activities, we encourage people not to patronise fake officials.
"That is what led us to transform the old licence to this one. You cannot be issued any licence now without physical capture.
"If we capture your photograph, we also input your data in our system.
"But if you say you are getting a drivers licence today through a third party, can you say it would be properly done? How will the system recognise somebody by proxy?
He said the command often visited worship centres, motor parks, and also enlisted the support of traditional rulers to enlighten the public on the consequences of being in possession of a fake drivers' licence.
"To the best of my knowledge, the corps is not resting on its oars as we try to prosecute whoever is found to be in the web of producing such fake licences.
"So that has been part of the protection that we are putting to ensure the authenticity of the drivers licence,'' Oguntoye added.
On the delay in the collection of drivers licences produced by the corps, the commander said the FRSC had adopted various notification methods to ensure that the backlog of such licences were cleared withoutfurther delay.
"We have gone the extra mile to inform people through both short service messages and phone calls that their licences had been produced.
"As a result, we have been able to clear a lot of the backlog, but we discovered that lot of people are still not ready to come for them.
Oguntoye, however, said drivers whose licences were still being processed by the corps were required to produce a temporary licence, which is also issued by the corps, upon request.
Ortom made the confirmation on Monday in his office while playing host to indigenes of Ugondo in Logo Local Government Area, in Makurdi.
The governor said the arrested suspects were members of his former Amnesty kingpin, Terwase Agwaza, popularly called Ghana.
"I wonder why Ghana has behaved like a pig. It is only a pig that will abandon its food and go back to leak its vomit," Ortom said.
Ortom warned that no evil perpetrators in the state would go unpunished and vowed to fish out Akwaza wherever he was hiding.
NAN recalls that Akwaza was the Chief Coordinator of Ortom's Amnesty Programme, having surrendered his arms to the government.
"What's happening Banters? What is this madness that I hear is going on in the Nigerian Senate at a time when all hands should be on deck trying to figure out how to get this country out of its current quagmire? And for those of you that don't know already, as of July 2016, we're officially in a recession and things are going to get really iffy over the next few months.Anyway, it looks like our man Dino Melaye is now declared himself the poster boy for MILF hunters in Nigeria. According to reports that were exposed by a handful of media houses in Nigeria, Dino Melaye actually threatened Senator Remi Tinubu during a closed door plenary session at the Senate to both physically and sexually assault her - I'm not sure how else you'll impregnate a woman without her consent other than rape.
" Shameful, Mr. Melaye! Completely and utterly shameful! Your mother must have taught you better, Senator. And if she actually did, "I guess your situation is a curious case of one not yielding to basic home training", as my grandma would say. To dare utter profanity like that in the Senate shows your lack of understanding of the institution you represent, the position you hold in society and the responsibility that comes with it. What a shameful act. For the sake of posterity and future leaders who are looking to individuals like yourself for inspiration, it's critical that we set straight in its course this maladious mindset that women can be disregarded and belittled as mere tools of sexual objectification. And for men who think or seek to wield that hammer of sexual dominance, your place is in the caves and not in our towns or our cities and certainly not in the senate. As a generation, we cannot sit by and watch you insult our sense of what is right and fair in Nigeria. Which is why y'all must indulge me as I address this issue.It's time Mr. Melaye shapes up or is shipped out."
Saidi Balogun, Antar Laniyan, Salami Adebayo, Yinka Quadri and Kikelomo Kuojo recently spoke to Encomium on poverty level in the Nigerian film industry, especially the Yoruba sector.
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According to Balogun, he currently hustles to survive. Blaming piracy for the current state, the actor said "Piracy has always been our major problem. Not only in the movie industry, it cuts across everything we do in Nigeria."
Movie industry is not what it used to be. Most of us cant charge professionally again. We just settle for whatever the producers are ready to offer," he added.
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Speaking on the current state of poverty, Laniyan said Yes, there is poverty in the industry, especially the Yoruba sector of it. A lot of us are suffering."
"Our economy also has to improve because no one can think of buying quality movies when they have not fed well. And its when people buy our movies that we can be encouraged to produce more. If we dont work, how do we live? And not everybody can beg. Not even at my age," he added.
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Speaking on the issue, Oga Bello said, "Its worrisome, I mean, the poverty level in the industry due to the activities of pirates and poor economic situation Nigeria is going through now."
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Speaking on solution to piracy, Quadri said "our law makers should make a very strong law against piracy, not the one that a culprit would only pay just N10,000 after having pirated about N20 million worth of movie."
It will air from 8.30pm to 9pm on Tuesdays and Fridays on NTA network, NTA International and Startimes.The opening montage summarizes each character featuring in the sitcom in one word as Professor Johnbull who relishes expressing himself grandiloquently, flips through the pages of one of the piles of books on his coffee table. He describes the characters in the social satire in highfalutin words such as sedulous, gratuitous and philanderer while he simply sees himself as erudite.The story line and progression of events in the debut episode will keep viewers glued to their TV screens.In the episode, Glo ambassador and wave-making superstar, Dbanj's sudden emergence at a local restaurant where they sell the best amala in Enugu, sparks off a frenzy. D'banj fans rush to catch a glimpse of the super star. Olaniyi, the restauranteur, initially thinks he is daydreaming on seeing DBanj at his restaurant.
Let's start with the fact that though undefined it is a badly written script.
The way the story is set up, the understanding of its supposed dramatic situation, dragged on for nine episodes what could have ended in a single episode.
Whatever intrigue and plot twists that "Rumour has it" set out to dish, is ruined by its weighed down script and acting skills.
The web series stars Uru Eke as a popular and successful celebrity blogger who finds herself at the center of a scandal. Her husband of barely two years, whom she has been in love with since she was 18, gets his side chick pregnant. The news leaks on the internet and she finds out about it at the same time as the whole world - probably reminds you of a story we all know.
Well, the supposed twist in the series is the fact that her personal assistant Ranti is the snitch dishing out juicy details of her life to a rival blogger, Sylvia - A twist that didn't come off as a surprise and triggered no bewildering moment.
The series doesn't come with fantastic acting skills. While you would not be wrong to describe the acting as average, it probably would be wrong not to applaud the emotional scene with Obi and her mother in episode eight. From David's confrontation with Wole to Ranti's 'Banana Island' conversation with Sylvia, the eighth episode can be described as the best in terms of acting, directing and conversations.
Who else wished for a crossover episode featuring Obi's mother and Ngozi Nwosu from "Skinny Girl in Transit."
Anne Iche (Before 30) who plays Seyi on show is without doubt a talented actress, and she brought life to her character. Blossom Chukwujekwu was seen in his least flattering role and performance as David - The side guy we all think is in love with Obi. A predictable plot I hope isn't explored in the future.
Nobody will look at Bayo Alawiye as Wole and not think 'oh, he looks like the kind of guy who feels drowned by his powerful wife.'' or "he really does come off as a guy who feeds off his wife's low esteem, and gets a side chick to make him feel better and 'look up to him.' So we probably forgive him for delivering an amateur performance.
The dreary scenes? The first season of "Rumour has it" comes with lots of boring and repetitive scenes. Six minutes for a scene off a 15-minute show? That's a lot of data. some of the episodes had a particular scene take up eight minutes. The scenes were made up of prolonged and unnecessary discussions, especially between Obi and her friends Jennifer (Toni Tones) and Seyi.
Considering the unnecessary scenes from the series, "Rumour has it" came with boring conversations and dialogues not exactly engaging. But we would applaud Jennifer's speech on women in abusive relationships, which seems to be a trending and sensitive issue in the world. "You don't have to suffer and work so hard to be treated well by your husband. You are a queen, and you deserve to be treated well," she said.
The ending of "Rumour Has It" season one is so cliche. We could do without Wole returning to beg Obi. That was so Nollywood in the 90s and early 2000. I just didn't expect that a web series like "Rumour Has It" would go that direction.
Some things just didn't make sense. Does Wole know Ranti? He visits Obi on a regular basis, so was he not able to recognize her as his wife's assistant during her visits to his baby mama in his home? There was a scene where he walked into her while leaving Obi's office, were they meeting for the first time? Was he a part of the snitch gang? Did nothing seem fishy to him.
Two episodes into the show and "Rumour has it" has you confused and deciding if your data is worth a 21-minute story that could comfortably fit its message into a five-minute series without some of its extraneous scenes.
Kashamu said this in a statement he signed and released to newsmen in Abuja.
Kashamu said: ``Therefore, I can only plead with our great leader, Sen. Sheriff, who has been hurt, to soft-pedal and let go, in the interest of the party and our teeming members.
``He has shown that he is a principled man and a courageous person.
``Since he and Sen. Makarfi have said they are not interested in contesting for the office of National Chairman of the party at the National Convention, he should encourage all his people to participate in the process leading to the rescheduled National Convention.
He said it had become necessary to make certain clarifications because no-one was being dumped, disputes and disagreements were part and parcel of any dynamic organization and as true party men and women there must be room for resolution of the disputes and disagreements.
``One thing I took away from the many reconciliation meetings and diplomatic shuttles is the fact that the PDP is blessed with many good leaders among who are Sen. Ahmed Makarfi and Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff.
``Finally, I wish to enjoin all my leaders, elders, associates and supporters in the South West to join hands with all our states, zonal and national leaders to move our party forward.
``Lets sheathe our sword; put an end to recriminations and infighting. Lets move on in one accord as a people united under the Almighty Allah, he urged.
According to him, one certain thing from the many reconciliation meetings and diplomatic shuttles is the PDP is blessed with many good leaders including Sen. Ahmed Makarfi and Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff.
He wrote:
There is a sick individual on fb [Facebook] who has posted some rubbish and attributed it to me.
Kindly note that this is FALSE. It is a total fabrication. I never said any such thing privately or publicly and neither have I ever written it or published it anywhere.
These are desperate and despicable tactics being employed to gather support for themselves by a desperate and despicable government. I remain totally committed to opposing the Buhari administration and the APC and I would NEVER suggest to anyone to join them to move Nigeria forward.
With this investment, Silvertree will provide expansion capital for Pet Heaven , as well as supporting Pet Heaven through synergies with other Silvertree e-commerce companies, such as Faithful to Nature (www.faithful-to-nature.co.za) and Cybercellar (http://www.cybercellar.com/) who have seen substantial growth and market penetration thanks to, amongst other reasons, relationships and guidance from Silvertree (http://silvertree.holdings/).
Pet Heaven's core product is pet food, namely high end and veterinarian-approved ranges such as Eukanuba, Hills and Royal Canin. Subscribers get hassle-free delivery of pet food, on a recurring subscription and at great prices.
Also, Pet Heaven's range of pet accessories is rapidly growing to meet an increasing demand in the market place.
Over the past two years, Pet Heaven's revenue has grown 150% year-on-year with limited marketing spend. With support from the 88mph incubator (Cape Town Garage), Pet Heaven has focused on making the economics of pet food delivery work, despite the small margins and heavy weight of pet food courier deliveries.
The team operates small warehouses in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and focuses continuously on cost and performance of logistics, marketing and product sourcing.
The Silvertree investment will be used for increased marketing, broadening the range of pet accessories and new food brands that the site stocks, further IT investment, and growing the team to support continued market penetration across South Africa. "We've seen huge demand from pet owners for affordable, convenient delivery of pet essentials, and we're excited to be making our offering available to far more customers, with the support of Silvertree," said CEO of Pet Heaven, Schalk Kearney.
Silvertree Director Paul Cook said, "Pet Heaven's subscription model is great for customers, plus it helps Pet Heaven turn once-off customers into lifelong fans. We have been blown away with what the team have already achieved, and we're excited about Pet Heaven's business, as well as the opportunities for collaboration between Pet Heaven and other ecommerce companies in which we have invested. Pet Heaven has already proved that it's entirely possible to make money in niche ecommerce in South Africa, through disciplined, lean execution and there's lots more to come."
At the start of the competition, 32 startups were chosen and voters were asked to choose which startup they would like to invest in. At the end of it all, Printivo, the on-demand online print and design startup emerged winner, beating online hotel booking platform, Hotels.ng.
We are surprised to have come out as most prefered, says Oluyomi Ojo, co-founder and CEO at Printivo. Considering the level of competition the ecosystem presented. The level of love our customers and believers expressed shows we are solving a problem for them. The competition has proved that people are sticking their necks out for us. Whatever we have done to earn that, we will be surely do more of it.
Speaking on the competition, Yele Bademosi, Starta's Country Manager for Starta Nigeria, said, Although the March Madness-style of this game leaves room for uninformed conclusions, we believe the sentiment expressed by the results of the Matchup isnt too far from the reality. Printivo is one of the more transformational homegrown startups with a disruptive and scalable business model."
Zain "is studying a number of investment opportunities available in the region, one of which is the Egyptian telecommunications market as a strategic market in the Middle East and Africa", the company said, adding that it had made the approach through one of its subsidiaries.
According to a report by BBC, the incident happened in Heidingsfeld, a part of the city of Wurzburg in southern Germany.
While it was further reported that police operation including a helicopter is under way, a German media alleged that a suspect appeared to have been shot in the attack.
It was also reported that the train line between Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt has been closed since the attack occured.
DPA reported that the police claimed some of the victims' injuries were life-threatening but no response was given as regards the shooting claims.
UPDATE
The man who attacked passengers with an axe on a train in the German state of Bavaria late on Monday was later shot dead, broadcasters BR and NTV reported.
According to a report by Reuters, a police spokesman declined to confirm the report, saying a police operation was still ongoing.
Vaz appointed Dja in May after sacking then Prime Minister Carlos Correia, a move that further divided the ruling PAIGC party and which Correia denounced as a "constitutional coup d'etat".
"The legal proceedings brought by the PAIGC (against the nomination) are null and void and therefore inadmissible," the court ruled late on Friday, according to a decision broadcast on local radio.
"The presidential decree that appointed Baciro Dja as head the government of Guinea-Bissau is indeed constitutional."
Vaz sacked Correia and his government on May 12, saying they had proved incapable of managing a months-long political crisis, caused partly by the overlapping duties of the president and prime minister in a semi-presidential system.
A bank bailout that was condemned by donors as ill-advised and serving only the ruling elite has prompted the IMF to remove budget support, triggering economic meltdown and a gaping budget deficit.
Adding to its woes, Guinea-Bissau this month confirmed its first three cases of the Zika virus in a group of islands off its coast, a development that risks providing a gateway for the disease to reach the African continent.
The United Nations fears a protracted political crisis will trigger unrest. The former Portuguese colony is notoriously unstable and has seen nine coups or attempted coups since 1980.
Vaz, a former finance minister, was elected in 2014 after the army was forced to hand back power to civilian politicians following a military coup.
If confirmed, the death of Santoso, who was slapped by the United States with an official terrorist designation, would be a victory for President Joko Widodo, who made capturing him a top security priority.
Presidential spokesman Johan Budi said Santoso was believed to be one of two militants killed in an exchange of fire with police on Sulawesi island, where he was thought to be hiding.
"One of the people killed bore resemblance to Santoso, and the body is being transported for identification by the family," Budi said via telephone. Santoso's age was not known.
He had been hunted by Indonesian security forces for several years and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group. His armed faction has attracted militants from other parts of Indonesia and several from the Uighur minority group in China's restive Xinjiang province.
Indonesia deployed thousands of police and military officials to scour the jungles of Sulawesi where Santoso and dozens of associates were believed to be holed up. Santoso was from the most populous Indonesian island, Java.
In March, the United States imposed a special terrorist designation on Santoso, blocking any U.S. assets he might have, banning dealings with him by Americans and opening the way for U.S. law-enforcement action against him.
The suspects are accused of "disturbing the public order and damaging embassy buildings", according to state media. Twelve other suspects were absent from the first hearing, Fars said.
Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic relations with its Shi'ite Muslim rival Iran after protesters stormed the kingdom's embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad following Riyadh's execution of a prominent Saudi Shi'ite cleric.
The Iranian government promptly condemned the assault and Rouhani, keen to improve Tehran's long-strained relations with neighbours and the West, asked the judiciary to punish the protesters and prevent further attacks on diplomatic missions.
Such violence has recurred throughout the Islamic Republic 37-year history and often complicated its foreign policy. Protesters attacked the embassy of the United States in 1979, Kuwait in 1987, Saudi Arabia in 1988, Denmark in 2006 and Britain in 2011 - leading in most case to a breach in diplomatic relations. None of the assailants was convicted.
Iran's judiciary announced in April that more than 100 suspects had been arrested over the attack on the Saudi missions and 48 had been charged. All were released on bail.
At Monday's initial court session, a 25-year-old defendant said he was informed of the protest action against the Saudi embassy by groups on social media which "are said to be linked to the Revolutionary Guards", according to the semi-official news agency ISNA.
The Revolutionary Guards Corps is the elite, strongly anti-Western and most powerful military and security force in Iran. Some Guards commanders condemned the attack as a plot against Iran and suggested "foreign agents" had been behind it.
ATTACK "DAMAGED" IRAN, KHAMENEI SAID
"I didn't know the protest did not have a permit...I am regretful as I broke the heart of the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei)," ISNA quoted the unnamed defendant as saying.
Another defendant at Monday's hearing testified that he was going on an errand to a pharmacy but was arrested by the security forces when he stopped his car to watch as protesters set fire to the embassy building.
Speaking in the judiciary's annual gathering in June, Rouhani said the attackers had been identified and urged the courts to take action.
"People want to know how the judiciary will deal with those who attacked the embassy against the law and Iran's national security," Rouhani said. "They are waiting to hear the verdicts for these rogue elements."
Since reaching a landmark agreement with world powers last year on curbing its disputed nuclear programme, Rouhani has sought to repair relations with neighbours and Western powers.
But the embassy assaults dealt a blow to that effort and caused Saudi allies like Bahrain and Sudan to sever diplomatic relations. The United Arab Emirates downgraded its relations.
Rajapaksa's younger brother, Basil, is on bail after being arrested twice for alleged misappropriation of state funds and a land deal allegedly involving money laundering. Court hearings into the two cases are going on.
Sri Lanka's new president, Maithripala Sirisena, faces pressure to act on allegations of corruption dating back to the Rajapaksa era, especially from civil society organisations who backed his successful bid to oust Rajapaksa last year.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president for a decade until January 2015 and is now an opposition legislator, is popular among many ethnic majority Sinhala Buddhists who credit him with ending a 26-year-war against ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009. He is trying to rally opposition to the current government with the help of Basil.
Basil Rajapaksa's lawyer, Jayantha Weerasinghe, told Reuters police had taken his client to court regarding the supply of building materials to district councils when he was a minister.
Neither Basil Rajapaksa nor his family members were immediately available for comment.
Several members of the Rajapaksa family are facing police investigations for alleged financial crimes. They include Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brothers Basil and Gotabaya.
Mahinda Rajapaksa's eldest son, Namal Rajapaksa, who is also a member of parliament, was released by a court on bail on Monday, media reported.
He was arrested on July 11 for suspected misappropriation of funds in a high-end apartment project.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday there could be no delay in using capital punishment, which Turkey abolished in 2004, and the government would discuss the measure with opposition parties.
Turkey has ambitions to join the European Union, but a revival of the death penalty would freeze any discussion of membership.
EU foreign ministers will on Monday urge Erdogan to respect the law and human rights in dealing with defeated coup plotters, but they have limited leverage over their strategic neighbour.
"There must be no arbitrary purges, no criminal sanctions outside the framework of the rule of law and the justice system," Kurz said. "Austria will push at the foreign ministers' meeting ...to set very clear boundaries for Erdogan."
The suspect, identified by a U.S. official as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, was believed to have acted alone.
The dead included Montrell Jackson, a 32-year-old new father who had served for 10 years with the Baton Rouge Police Department, and Matthew Gerald, at 41 a newly minted law enforcement officer with a military background, the police department said on its Facebook page.
Also slain was Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four, local media reported, citing Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and Garafola's wife, Tonja.
"He loved us so much," Tonja Garafola told the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper. "He didn't deserve this."
Friends and relatives of Jackson took to Facebook to remember him.
"Rest in Peace to my former partner and one of the best cops I've ever known... His name was Montrell Jackson!" Facebook user Marcus Tillman said in a post, which received more than 8,000 likes and 6,000 shares by midday on Sunday. "He was a black life that apparently didn't matter to the one that took it!"
The Facebook page shows several pictures of a baby boy, and comments suggested that the child was Jackson's son.
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.
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 countriesto 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.
The statement from one of the region's main powers, issued over the weekend, came after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Security Council to block arms sales to try and end more than two years of fighting in the world's newest nation.
At least 272 people have died in the latest clashes between forces loyal to South Sudan's President Salva Kiir and his rival, Vice President Riek Machar.
Museveni told Ban he was against the embargo at an African Union summit in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Saturday, officials said.
"When you impose an (arms) embargo on South Sudan you destroy the local force on which you need to build a strong integrated army," a statement from his office read.
He did not say if Uganda would take any more concrete action against the plan for South Sudan, which declared independence from Sudan five years ago.
BEIJING - Negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between China and the United States made "positive" progress in solving "remaining issues," the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Sunday.
The achievement was made during the 26th round of China-US BIT talks in Beijing from Monday to Sunday, according to a brief MOC statement.
Both sides also discussed improvements to sectors off-limits to foreign investment last month.
The two countries will continue to speed up BIT talks to reach a mutually beneficial and high-level agreement, said the statement.
China and the United States started BIT negotiations in 2008 to increase mutual investment.
MITCHELL | There aren't many wolf sightings in central South Dakota, but Mitchell may have once been home to a species of wolf large enough to take down buffalo.
Angela Perri, a Las Vegas-born zooarchaeologist working at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, has been at Mitchell's Prehistoric Indian Village since June 20, identifying canine bones that have been dug up in the past several years, The Daily Republic reported.
Student archaeologists have unearthed bones from dogs, foxes and wolves of various size, but Perri said some of the bones are much larger than expected, even larger than timber wolves found in nearby Minnesota.
"It wouldn't be surprising there would be a plains wolf ... a more robust wolf for taking down large animals, like bison," Perri said.
On the other end of the spectrum, researchers have identified the bones of a known species called the swift fox, one of the world's smallest foxes that has largely been pushed out of the region.
"We've got the whole span. Everything from little baby swift foxes to big ol' wolves," Perri said.
Xuelei Li, a doctorate student from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, arrived on the same day as Perri. As part of her doctoral thesis in environmental archaeology, Li is studying the "loose relationship between human and fox."
After identifying piles of bone fragments unearthed between 2010 and 2015, Li found many belonged to the swift fox.
"It is quite interesting," Li said. "This is quite rare in this area due to the farm land."
Li said the swift fox has recently been reintroduced to the area, but they are still uncommon. In about the year 1000, when Native Americans lived at the village, the swift fox appears to have been more populous than the red or grey fox, which are more common in the Mitchell area today.
Perri and Li were asked to help identify the bone fragments, as bones from all canines, like wolves, foxes, coyotes and dogs, are identical, Perri said.
One distinguishing feature is size, but it is difficult to know if a bone came from a large dog or a small wolf. A mystery yet to be solved by the two canine specialists is the utter lack of coyote remains.
"We haven't found anything that's specifically coyote," Perri said.
One answer goes back to the bone size issue, as some bones that have been identified as medium-sized dogs could actually have come from coyotes.
Perri said the Mitchell site is interesting because it allows researchers to learn about dog species before European breeds were introduced, and the vast amount of canine material shows Native Americans in the village used dogs for a variety of purposes, which may include hauling goods and as food.
"It kind of gives us a more rounded out picture of how humans are interacting with other animals, with their environment, things like that," Perri said. "Mitchell's a great place to do it. It's kind of a unique environment on the Plains. We have a lot of information about dogs from other places like the southwest and the deep south, but in the plains, we don't really know about what's going on with dogs."
According to the Prehistoric Indian Village's archeologist, Adrien Hannus, who also serves as director of Augustana University's Archeology Laboratory, Perri and Li will be going home within a week, but they may request a small grant to return in the future to continue their work.
Before they go, Hannus said the pair will deliver a presentation to University of Exeter students who are taking part in a month-long field school at the Mitchell excavation site this summer.
The village has been the location of a student-sharing agreement between Augustana University and University of Exeter for 13 years. Exeter students are required to complete a month-long field school, and Mitchell is the school's only American site.
Hannus is also proud of the Prehistoric Indian Village's museum, which was renovated during the winter.
"I think the site looks better and is in better shape than it's ever been since I've been involved," Hannus said, who has worked with the facility since 1983.
STURGIS | A former senior care worker will spend nearly 10 months in the state penitentiary after pleading guilty to three counts of elder abuse and neglect of a patient at Sturgis Regional Senior Care.
Donald R. Brown, 62, was a nurse assistant at the nursing home when he hit and manhandled the 66-year-old victim.
The woman is wheelchair-bound and has limited mobility and communication skills. She suffered a brain aneurysm at age 39 and then a massive stroke while on the operating table. She was in the courtroom for a short time Monday.
Sturgis police were alerted to the abuse when Brittany Boyd and Vicki Hullinger decided to place a hidden camera in their relatives room at the senior care facility. The videos were streamed live online using a commercial "nest" cam and archived so that police could view them.
The alleged abuse happened in the fall of 2015. Brittany Boyd said the camera caught Donald Brown hitting and suffocating the victim on numerous occasions.
"I just felt terrified at what I was seeing," Boyd said.
An indictment in the case was handed down in January.
Meade County State's Attorney Kevin Krull characterized the case as "disgusting."
"We played the video for the grand jury when we first indicted this case, and some of them were crying," he said.
This is the first elder abuse case Krull has brought before the court.
"I have been presented with one or two other ones that we ended up not charging, and that was years ago when I worked down in Rapid City," he said.
Originally, there were six counts of abuse or neglect of an elder with a disability. But in a plea agreement, Brown pleaded guilty to three felony Class 6 counts on April 25.
Brittany Boyd spoke at the sentencing hearing Monday before Judge Jerome Eckrich saying the incident is a "surreal nightmare."
"The situation overall has impacted me and my family greatly," she said. "It's been traumatizing."
Boyd said she and Hullinger had suspicion of abuse and wanted to know how their relative was being treated. She said there was nothing Donald Brown said or did that prompted them to install the camera. The victim did have some curious injuries, such as a broken arm in 2010.
"The camera was the only way we would have ever known that he was doing anything to (the victim)," she said.
Boyd said the surveillance laws in South Dakota prohibit putting cameras in private facilities where it could invade patient's privacy.
"I wasn't charged with anything," Boyd said. "I didn't know what I could do with the video evidence or who I could go to with it if it was illegal."
Only three states in the United States Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico have laws allowing hidden cameras in nursing homes. Although not legal in South Dakota, the video evidence was allowed in this case. It's the first of its kind to come through Meade County under Krull.
"I don't know what the nursing home rules are about that, and frankly, don't really care," he said. "This is one of those cases you know that this type of thing happens, but you just fear it."
A growing wildfire burned over 12,000 acres by 8 p.m. Sunday and was moving "very close" to Edgemont. Emergency workers at 3:45 p.m. Sunday evacuated about 60 people on the outskirts of town and warned the Edgemont community to prepare to flee from the Black Hills regions largest wildfire so far this summer.
The mandatory evacuation involved the Cottonwood Addition of Edgemont, as well as homes south of there along Pine Hills Road and Lookout Road.
The Indian Canyon Fire by 4 pm. was estimated at 8,000 to 9,000 acres and rapidly growing, a Great Plains Fire Information Service spokeswoman said. She said the estimate grew by a third just four hours later. None of the fire area had been contained.
Drifting smoke from the lightning-caused fire prompted the Wyoming Department of Transportation and National Weather Service in Rapid City to warn motorists of reduced visibility in the southwestern corner of South Dakota and into northeastern Wyoming.
Investigators told the Great Plains Fire Information Service that thunderstorm lightning apparently started the Indian Canyon Fire around 5 p.m. Saturday. No fire-related injuries have been reported, but spreading flames destroyed two sheds.
The wildfire on government-managed property and private ranch land in Fall River County was feeding mostly on dried grass and ridge timber. Even with weekend storm rains, the countys fire danger ranged from high to extreme.
Seems kind of odd that this summer's annual Dakotafest, which bills itself as "The Northern Plains' Premier Ag Event," won't be hosting debates between South Dakota's U.S. representatives and challengers this year.
The event has had a tradition of providing event-goers and television viewers around the state with a venue that focuses on agricultural issues, which of course are the mainstays of South Dakota's rural economy.
In 2014, Sen. Rounds debated his two opponents and Rep. Noem debated hers at the event. I was looking forward to a similar match-up this year but just learned that there are no plans to hold debates, just a roundtable discussion involving our three Republican congressional reps, Sens. Thune and Rounds and Rep. Noem.
Apparently "The Northern Plains' Premier Ag Event" doesn't deem a brisk political dialogue between opposing U.S. representatives a worthy feature of its schedule this year.
How they come about this decision is the business of event planners, but given that this election cycle will focus on trade policies that are ultra-important to South Dakota's ag producers, it mystifies me as to why a debate between candidates is being shunted aside in favor of a relatively stress-free chum-fest among our Republican representatives.
Paula Hawks, the Democrat running for our lone House seat against incumbent Kristi Noem, and Jay Williams, the Democratic challenger to John Thune, are being shut out of probably the highest-profile ag gathering in South Dakota.
Doesn't seem fair, but I guess it's their venue. Unlike Thune and his hissy-fit over Facebook's management of its news content a couple of months ago, I'm inclined to shrug it off when private enterprises run their businesses the way they want to.
Meanwhile, I'm sorry that we'll miss a confrontation between Hawks and Noem, because Paula Hawks impresses me as an articulate and knowledgeable candidate when it comes to ag issues.
She grew up on a farm and her husband has a background in livestock production. Most pointedly, she'll call attention to Noem's perplexing decision to quit the House Agriculture Committee. I'd also like to hear Noem's (and for that matter Thune's and Rounds') plans for reinstating country of origin labeling, which was unceremoniously dumped at last winter's federal budget deliberations.
And as relevant as ever, trade issues need some airing out. Considering that all the Republicans in our delegation have done their pro forma political duties and endorsed Donald Trump, I'd want to know how that squares with Trump's well-known contempt for trade deals (NAFTA, the TransPacific Partnership come immediately to mind) that are uniformly supported in a big way by all the mainstream farm and livestock production organizations.
I've written here before about how the surge in freer trade via these agreements has led to a substantial increase in South Dakota's ag exports. Now they back the guy that wants to undo all that. Explanations, please?
In the meantime, Dakotafest or no Dakotafest, I hope that some way, somehow, we can get these incumbents on to a stage with their challengers and give South Dakotans some reason to send them back to D.C. or just plain send them packing.
Alleged organizer of 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis to stay in jail till October
MOSCOW, July 18 (RAPSI, Lyudmila Klenko) The Moscow City Court has extended the detention of Khasan Zakayev, an alleged mastermind of the hostage seizure at the Dubrovka theater in southeast Moscow in 2002 that left 130 dead, until October 21, the courts press office told RAPSI on Monday.
Earlier, the Moscow District Military Court returned the case to prosecutors. To date, repeated investigation is completed; the accused is reading case materials.
A group of terrorists led by Movsar Barayev took hostage the audience and participants of the Nord-Ost musical on October 23, 2002.
40 attackers were killed. Zakayev is the only one who was arrested, victims lawyer Igor Trunov said earlier.
The majority of hostages were released in an operation planned by Russian security services.
Chechen separatist leader Shamil Basayev who was reportedly killed in 2006 and Gerikhan Dudayev who is still at large are among the organizers of the attack, according to investigators.
Bill on disclosing crime statistics on the Internet enters State Duma
MOSCOW, July 18 (RAPSI) A bill proposing to disclose crime statistics, gathered by the Prosecutor Generals Office, on the Internet, was filed with the State Duma on Monday, according to the database of the lower house of Parliament.
The author of the initiative was the head of the Duma Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building Vladimir Pligin.
In the explanatory note Pligin pointed out that the Prosecutor Generals Office is accounting statements and reports of crimes, the state of crime, crime detection, the status and the results of investigation and prosecutor's supervision.
However, such information is classified as restricted. Thus, Russian legislation prohibits the disclosure of primary statistical data on crimes, Pligin noted.
The author of the bill believes that proposed changes are going to create the necessary legal basis for the publication of primary statistical data. It will also establish effective mechanisms of civil control in order to ensure independent expertise in the field of studying social reasons for crime and evaluation of crime-fighting organizations in Russia, the documents read.
Dr. Chandra Lal Pandey
Governance is the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented or not implemented. Government is one of the most important actors in governance. Market, non-state actors and civilians are other contributing actors of governance. The management of complex social-political-economic-environmental problems and the associated risks is called disaster goverance. Disasters include widespread human, material, environmental or economic impacts, which exceed the adaptive capacity of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources. In such crises situations, the role of disaster governance becomes critical as it can provide the formal platform for authorities, public servants, security forces, media, private sector, and civil society to coordinate in communities, and national levels to manage, reduce and address the anthropocene or natural disasters. Ensuring that the disaster responding institutions are equipped with resources, capacity and skills is the fundamental task of disaster governance. Promoting the capacity for disaster or crisis management comprise at least four steps: disaster prevention, smart preparedness, immediate relief and resielient recovery. Thus, disaster governance is not only linked with responding against the disasters but also to sustainable development.
The role of disaster governance is becoming increasing important for Nepal as it is one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. Heatwave, coldwave, drought, electric strom, fire, flood, landslide, and earthquake are common and frequently occuring natural disasters in Nepal. Anthropogenic political disasters have historically been affecting Nepalese day to day lives. The most recent one was the six months border blockade resulting from the promulgation of the constitution 2015 followed by protests by the dissatisfied population in Terai and Indian grievances of not addressing Indian interests in the constitution. Regarding natural disasters, every year, many people lose their lives and property. These diasters often badly affect the victims pathology and psychology for long. One of the most recent case of catastropic natural disasters that vehemently attacked Nepal was the 7.8 magnitute mega earthquake of 2015 that killed 8790, and injured 22493 people. According to National Reconstruction Authority, over a million houses collapsed in 14 most affected districts, destroying the entire village of Barpak in Gorkha.
As Nepal did not have enough capacity, skills and technologies to fight against the giant disaster, it appealed international community for assistance. There was a downpour of national and international assistance right after the earthquake (s). The one and only international airport of Nepal known, as Tribhuvan International Airport, was in chaos, unable to handle the pressure arising from aid-flights. However, in the lack of full-fledged disaster act clearly articulating dos and donts there was an unwanted chaos in terms of handling search and rescue teams, aid workers, relief materials and distribution systems. The overlapping roles of sectoral ministries, which I call institutional disaster, in mapping the international aid workers and providing them fast-track visa were also found to be lethargic and messy. However, it also needs to be recognized that the process of screening individuals and granting them short-term aid-work-visa is complicated. Yet, government needs to focus on these areas of shortcomings in the making of disaster governance for ensuring smooth, fast and efficient demand and supply of resources to meet the needs on the ground.
Furthermore, one of the most important issues that the disaster governance act needs to clarify is the roles and responsibilities of the different sectoral ministries to avoid duplication, redundancy and other red-tape complications. One of the most recent examples of the blurred and contested claims of sectoral authority is in the process of addressing the concerns of earthquake victims in the aftermath of SAR. Although the government seems to be committed on lip-service to promptly complete the reconstruction of the structures affected due to devastating earthquake of 25th April and subsequent aftershocks in a sustainable, resilient and planned manner, ensuring social justice by making resettlement and translocation of displaced persons and families, the National Reconstruction Authority, a national body that is said to have an extraordinary jurisdiction in theory, is doing very little in terms of substance as it became victim of institutional disaster, sectorally contested claims, and ill-willed disaster politics. In fact, the poorest and most vulnerable victims are being excluded from the reconstruction process even after a year of the earthquake. On the one hand, tens of thousands of Nepalese are now facing the second climate extreme monsoon season dwelling in temporary shelters, while US$ 4 billion pledged by donors lies almost totally untouched in the government coffers on the other. Not a single home has been rebuilt with the utilization of the aid fund government has received despite billions of dollars pledges followed by transaction agreements. The earthquake victims need actual reconstruction work to happen, and start to happen fast. Nepal's reconstruction remains an opportunity to rebuild not only a stronger country, but a fairer and more equitable one however the NRA faces stiff criticism as thousands of families have endured adverse weather for more than a year and homes of the victims are unlikely to be built before the monsoon rains, owing to delays in victim identification, building assessment duplication, allocated fund disbursement, institutional disaster and dirty politics.
Although the government has announced to provide NRs 200000 grant and an additional amount of soft loan to each homeless family, there has been little progress in disbursing the assistance. We know, as the donors state, that the reconstruction progress is too sluggish and the slumbering process is making all of us doubtful about the performance capacity of our government and bureaucratic institutions. Donors are skeptical about the feasibility of implementing their money so some of them are planning to go ahead with reconstruction on their own which may be an alternative path to handle reconstruction process but their transparency and accountability have also been highly questioned for their perennial failure to achieve any goals in terms of developmental impacts.
International experiences inform that the reconstruction process is very complex and problematic. The mismanagement of recovery process in Haiti and the social security system of New Zealand are different paths of addressing post-earthquake recovery process but they share one same feature that is the post-earthquake recovery process is often time-consuming. Haiti turned out be the center of tardiness and inefficiency in delivering humanitarian response. Likewise in Nepalese context, identifying actual victims, assessing the building realistically, identifying sources of fund for one off payment and additional soft loans for victims in villages and cities are immense challenges marred by institutional failure resulting from the dirty politics of who gets what, when, how and where more than concentrating to address the concerns of the actual victims. The biggest mistakes we have made in handling the reconstruction process is: first we have not yet had a disaster governance act to meet the needs of mega emergencies and second we have mixed up politics with disaster, disaster with monetary gains and victims with non-victims. Making emergency and victim friendly disaster governance equipped with capacity, skills and resources, separating humanitarian disasters away from political, partisan and monetary interests and repairing institutional performance are the only paths to address anthropogenic and natural disasters in timely manner in the future. We must learn from Haitis mishandling of the humanitarian response in the aftermath of mega earthquake 2010 and speed up our reconstruction process with determination striving constantly to improve the quality of service delivery in regard to disaster response.
Dr. Chandra Lal Pandey is public policy expert. He is associated with Institute of Crisis Management and Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies.
BEIJING, July 18: China said Monday that it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the U.S. Navy's top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson is meeting with China's navy commander, Adm. Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao that began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour china's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are "China's inherent territory," and says it could declare an air defense identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippine fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Dennis Blair, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the United States should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunal's decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the country's economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared to his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. China's navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
China's island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, U.S. warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the U.S. of threatening its national security.
Guwahati, July 17 : Three hardcore militants of NDFB(S) were killed during a gun fight with security forces in Assam's Kokrajhar district on Sunday morning, officials said.
Based on specific intelligence, army had launched a series of joint operations with the Assam Pollice in the BTAD district where a militant group was hiding.
Assam Police ADGP Dr LR Bisnoi said that during the course of the operation the troops noticed suspected persons moving through the dense jungles, on being challenged these persons opened indiscriminate fire on
the troops.
The security personnel retaliated with controlled fire and in the ensuing fire fight, three top terrorist of the outlawed group National Democratic Front of Bodoland(Songbijit) got neutralised.
Two of the killed terrorist have been identified as Rahul Basumatari and Ritu Basumatari.
Four Pistols, a large quantity of ammunition, Hand Grenades and other war like stores have beeen recovered from the slain terrorists.*
The neutralisation of these terrorists has come as a major setback for the group, as it is already reeling under the preassure due to the relentless CI/CT operations launched against them by the Army in conjunction with
other Security forces.
'The surgical operation carried out under the prevailing torrential rains, in thick foliage and under growth of the Assam Jungles is highly commendable and a hallmark of the Armys dedicated efforts to usher peace in
the region,' an army official said.
(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Kathmandu, Nepal: The consensus attempt between the major political parties- Nepali Congress, CPN UML and the CPN Maoist Center over the issue of recent political development, particularly on the issue of new government formation, failed to bear any fruit.
The Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has made clear to the Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba and CPN Maoist Centre Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal that he was ready to face the no-confidence motion at the Parliament but not resigns from the post.
He had called the NC president Deuba and Maoist Chairman Prachanda at his residence on Monday evening with intent to discuss about the political situation of the country.
Prime Minister Oli is reluctant to resign from the post even after the no confidence motion was registered in the parliament against the government. There is also a speculation that Prime Minister would dissolve the parliament declaring the new election.
According to the source close to the office of the Prime Minister, Deuba and Dahal asked the Prime Minister to resign from the post and pave the way for formation of new government.
Prime Minister Oli repeatedly asked about the need of the formation of the new government and urged to support him to transform the incumbent government into a national consensus government, but the leader duo Deuba and Prachanda rejected the proposal, the source said preferring anonymity.
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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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Halfway through a year already crammed full of impressive releases (with no sign of slowing down... Dekalog for September!), The Criterion Collection has also taken advantage of the recent 4K remaster of King Hu's seminal A Touch of Zen, adding it to their collection on Blu-ray as spine #825.
Our own James Marsh had a good long look at the good long Zen -- at 3 hours, its running time was so prohibitive that distributors originally chopped it into two films -- a few months ago when it was released in a limited edition by Masters of Cinema - you can find his comments here, along with an extensive review of the film.
For those unfamiliar, though, A Touch of Zen follows a somewhat nerdy scholar who gets caught up in a life-and-death battle when he discovers that his new neighbours (occupying a haunted fort, no less) are actually fugitive warriors. It's impressively long, gets weirder and more awesome with each passing act beat, and the action sequences - besides being influential - remain formidable enough to hold their own against even today's antecedents.
The same 4K transfer of A Touch of Zen, funded entirely by the film's star, Hsu Feng, has been used for both the Criterion and Masters of Cinema Blu-rays. Unlike many of their recent cleanups, this is not a Criterion restoration that "looks like it was filmed yesterday." The distinct palette and grain of A Touch of Zen's original film stock is preserved intact, along with a good deal of camera-original damage that would be in poor taste to remove. In particular, the film was shot on some of the funkiest spherical lenses I've ever seen, which turn lateral pans into vertigo-inducing swirls of curving imagery, and which are - in several sequences - covered in gunk and soot so pronounced that it looks like someone sneezed on the camera immediately prior to filming.
The 47-minute documentary King Hu: 1932-1997, ported from the Masters of Cinema release, is a good primer on the director's whole career and approach, and is worth watching, particularly for the segment dealing with Hu's transition from his relationship with the Shaw Brothers Studio and towards making A Touch of Zen.
Bolstered by a David Bordwell essay in the slipcase (yes, he's the guy who wrote your film textbook), though, the Criterion's exclusive special features are where this release veers away from the Masters of Cinema edition, and where you'll want to make your purchasing choice if you haven't yet added Zen to your collection.
The most formidable exclusive extra on this release is a 34-minute video interview with Asian film scholar Tony Rayns. Rayns is vastly authoritative and knowledgeable, and also very dry... but the segment is impressive in how it frames the context for A Touch of Zen through multiple lenses. You'll either end up watching it immediately before or immediately after watching the feature itself, to fully absorb yourself in the exact moment A Touch of Zen was made.
As Rayns reports, Hu came to directing through a number of disciplines within the Chinese film industry - production designer, actor, writer - and brings those talents to bear on A Touch of Zen's production, where a talent shortage in the Taiwanese film industry meant that Hu was either performing or mentoring many of the production processes himself.
Rayns also charts the thematic progress of the film itself, as it widens from the mundane (the first half-hour focuses primarily on the day-to-day life of the scholar, including his work and the constant nagging from his mother) to the political and ultimately, to the spiritual.
For the aesthetic background for these ideas, Criterion also includes a new interview with Ang Lee, whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is notable for its A Touch of Zen influences, and which Lee freely discusses here. He also relates Hu's interdisciplinary background to his approach to adapting the story for film, via opera, design, and a number of other art forms that can only be brought into unified focus through cinema.
Interviews with lead actors Hsu Feng and Shih Chun are also included, for some ground level recollections of making A Touch of Zen.
Debuting ten years ago, Pan's Labyrinth remains a gorgeous, haunting masterpiece, the best film Guillermo del Toro has directed so far. In October, it will be added to the Criterion Collection with a newly graded 2K digital master and new supplemental features; it should look spectacular.
The film will also be packaged together with two other directorial efforts by del Toro that have previously been released individually by Criterion, Cronos and The Devil's Backbone. The package is titled Trilogia de Guillermo del Toro and includes various new extras; the Blu-ray edition includes a 100-page hardcover book, featuring new essays, production notes and sketches.
Two European classics are also heading for release in October. Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes; it's described as a neorealist look at Italian farm life in the 19th century. Dating from 1963, meanwhile, The Exectioner is described as "a darkly comedic and fiercely subversive political satire by Luis Garcia Berlanga, regarded by filmmaker Pedro Almodovar as 'the true father of Spanish cinema.'"
Fans of Richard Linklater's Boyhood will be able to luxuriate in a wealth of new extras and those who adore Robert Altman can once again sink into Short Cuts, his adaptation of various stories by Raymond Carver.
Here are all the details on the individual discs, as provided via an official statement by Criterion.
PAN'S LABYRINTH
An Academy Award-winning dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan's Labyrinth encapsulates the rich visual style and genre-defying craft of Guillermo del Toro (The Devil's Backbone, Cronos). Eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, in a mature and tender performance) comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather (Sergi Lopez), a sadistic captain in General Franco's army, hunts down Republican guerrillas who refuse to give up the fight. The violent reality in which she lives merges seamlessly with a fantastical interior world when Ofelia meets a faun in a decaying labyrinth and is set on a strange, mythic journey that is at once terrifying and beautiful. In his revisiting of this bloody period in Spanish history, del Toro creates a vivid depiction of the monstrosities of war infiltrating a child's imagination and threatening the innocence of youth.
2006 * 119 minutes * Color * 5.1 Surround * In Spanish with English subtitles * 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
Newly graded 2K digital master, supervised by director Guillermo del Toro, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Audio commentary by del Toro from 2007
New interview with del Toro by novelist Cornelia Funke about fairy tales, fantasy, and Pan's Labyrinth
New interview with actor Doug Jones
Four 2007 making-of documentaries, examining the characters, production, special effects, themes, and music of the film
Interactive director's notebook
Footage of actor Ivana Baquero's audition for the film
Animated comics featuring prequel stories for the film's menagerie of creatures
Programs comparing selected production storyboards and del Toro's thumbnail sketches with the final film; visual effects work for the Green Fairy; and elements of the film's score
Trailers and TV spots
PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 10/11/16
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 10/11/16
TRILOGIA DE GUILLERMO DEL TORO
Throughout a career that encompasses both visually arresting art-house hits and big-budget Hollywood spectacles, director Guillermo del Toro has continually redefined and elevated the horror genre with his deeply personal explorations of myths and monsters. These three Spanish-language films, each a tale of childhood in troubled times, showcase his singular fusion of the fantastic and the real. Drawing inspiration from a rich variety of sources, from Alfred Hitchcock to Francisco de Goya, the gothic-infused stories collected here-populated by vampires, ghosts, and a fairy-tale princess-make evident why del Toro is considered the master cinematic fabulist of our time.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR'S SET FEATURES
High-definition digital restoration of Cronos, 2K digital restoration of The Devil's Backbone, newly graded 2K digital master of Pan's Labyrinth, all supervised and approved by director Guillermo del Toro, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack for Cronos and 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks for The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth on the Blu-rays
Alternate DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround sound-track for Pan's Labyrinth on the Blu-ray
Audio commentaries on all three films
Interviews with del Toro, director of photography Guillermo Navarro, and actors Doug Jones, Federico Luppi, and Ron Perlman
Welcome to Bleak House, a 2010 video tour by del Toro of his personal collections
New piece on Pan's Labyrinth featuring del Toro and novelist Cornelia Funke
Interactive director's notebooks for The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth
Making-of documentaries for The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth
Geometria, a 1987 short horror film by del Toro finished in 2010
Footage of actor Ivana Baquero auditioning for Pan's Labyrinth in 2005
Original Spanish-language voice-over introduction for Cronos
Introductions by del Toro for The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth
Deleted scenes from The Devil's Backbone, with commentary by del Toro
Selected on-screen picture-in-picture presentation of del Toro's thumbnail sketches for The Devil's Backbone
Programs comparing del Toro's thumbnail sketches and production storyboards for The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth with the final films
Piece on The Devil's Backbone's depiction of the Spanish Civil War
Animated comics featuring prequel stories for the creatures of Pan's Labyrinth
Gallery of stills from Cronos, captioned by del Toro
Trailers and TV spots
English subtitle translations approved by del Toro
Deluxe box set for the Blu-ray, featuring new illustrations by Vania Zouravliov
Blu-ray: A 100-page hardcover book featuring an introduction by author Neil Gaiman and essays by critics Michael Atkinson, Mark Kermode, and Maitland McDonagh, along with production notes and sketches by del Toro and illustrators Carlos Gimenez and Raul Monge
DVD: Essays by Atkinson, Kermode, and McDonagh, and production notes for Cronos by del Toro
3-BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $99.95
STREET 10/11/16
5-DVD EDITION
SRP $99.95
STREET 10/11/16
BOYHOOD
There has never been another movie like Boyhood, from director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused). An event film of the utmost modesty, it was shot over the course of twelve years in the director's native Texas and charts the physical and emotional changes experienced by a child named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), his divorced parents (Patricia Arquette, who won an Oscar for her performance, and Ethan Hawke), and his older sister (Lorelei Linklater). Alighting not on milestones but on the small, in-between moments that make up our lives, Linklater fashions a flawlessly acted, often funny portrait that flows effortlessly from one year to the next. Allowing us to watch people age on film with documentary realism while gripping us in a fictional narrative of exquisite everydayness, Boyhood has a power that only the art of cinema could harness.
2014 * 165 minutes * Color * 5.1 Surround * 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 2K digital transfer, supervised by director Richard Linklater, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New audio commentary featuring Linklater and nine members of the cast and crew
New documentary chronicling the film's production, featuring footage shot over the course of its twelve years
New discussion featuring Linklater and actors Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane, moderated by producer John Pierson
New conversation between Coltrane and actor Ethan Hawke
New video essay by critic Michael Koresky about time in Linklater's films, narrated by Coltrane
Collection of portraits of cast and crew by photographer Matt Lankes, narrated with personal thoughts from Linklater, Arquette, Hawke, Coltrane and producer Cathleen Sutherland
PLUS: An essay by novelist Jonathan Lethem
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 10/18/16
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 10/18/16
SHORT CUTS
The work of two great American artists merges in Short Cuts, a kaleidoscopic adaptation of the stories of renowned author Raymond Carver by maverick director Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville). Epic in scale yet meticulously observed, the film interweaves the stories of twenty-two characters as they struggle to find solace and meaning in contemporary Los Angeles. The extraordinary ensemble cast includes Tim Robbins (The Player), Julianne Moore (Far from Heaven), Robert Downey Jr. (Chaplin), Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot), and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Margot at the Wedding)-all giving fearless performances in what is one of Altman's most compassionate creations.
1993 * 187 minutes * Color * 2.0 surround * 2.35:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New, restored 4K digital transfer, approved by cinematographer Walt Lloyd, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate 5.1 soundtrack mix, plus isolated music track
Conversation between Altman and actor Tim Robbins from 2004
Luck, Trust & Ketchup: Robert Altman in Carver Country, a 1993 feature-length documentary on the making of Short Cuts
To Write and Keep Kind, a 1992 PBS documentary on the life of author Raymond Carver
One-hour 1983 audio interview with Carver, conducted for the American Audio Prose Library
Original demo recordings of the film's Doc Pomus-Mac Rebennack songs, performed by Dr. John
Deleted scenes
A look inside the marketing of Short Cuts
PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Wilmington
2-BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 10/18/16
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 10/18/16
THE EXECUTIONER
This masterpiece of black humor, beloved in Spain but too little seen elsewhere, threads a scathing critique of Franco-era values through a macabre farce about an undertaker who marries an executioner's daughter and reluctantly takes over her father's job so the family can keep their government-allotted apartment. As caustic today as it was in 1963, this early collaboration between Luis Garcia Berlanga (Welcome, Mr. Marshall!; Placido) and his longtime screenwriter Rafael Azcona (El pisito, Belle Epoque) is an unerring depiction of what Berlanga called "the invisible traps that society sets up for us." A furiously funny personal attack on capital punishment, The Executioner escaped the state censors who sought to suppress it, and today is regarded as one of the greatest Spanish films of all time.
1963 * 92 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * In Spanish with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interview with filmmaker Pedro Almodovar
New program on director Luis Garcia Berlanga, featuring interviews with his son Jose Luis Berlanga; film critic Carlos F. Heredero; writers Fernando R. Lafuente and Bernardo Sanchez Salas; and director of the Berlanga Film Museum Rafael Maluenda
Spanish television program from 2012 on The Executioner, featuring archival interviews with Berlanga
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film critic David Cairns
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 10/25/16
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 10/25/16
THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS
A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated estate in the province of Bergamo. Filming on an abandoned farm for four months, Olmi adapted neorealist techniques to tell his story, enlisting local people to live as their own ancestors had, speaking in their native dialect on locations with which they were intimately familiar. Through the cycle of seasons, of back-breaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi naturalistically evokes an existence very close to nature, one that celebrates its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledges the feudal cruelty that governs it. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is at once intimate in scale and epic in scope-a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking.
1978 * 186 minutes * Color * Monaural * In Bergamasque with English subtitles * 1.33:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K restoration, created in collaboration with The Film Foundation at L'Immagine Ritrovata and supervised by director Ermanno Olmi, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate Italian-language soundtrack
Ermanno Olmi: The Roots of the Tree, an hour-long episode of The South Bank Show from 1981, featuring an interview with Olmi on the film and a visit to the farm where it was shot
New program featuring cast and crew discussing the film at the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna, Italy, in 2016
Archival interviews with Olmi
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film critic Deborah Young
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 10/25/16
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 10/25/16
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival wrapped its 51st edition and the display of new Central and East European cinema with the award-giving ceremony.
Hungarian filmmaker Szabolcs Hajdu was picked for the Grand Prix in the main competition for his independently produced chamber(s) drama Its Not the Time of My Life, which follows a marital crisis shot in the filmmakers actual apartment. Hajdu, who also stars in the film alongside his spouse and son, returned to the stage to receive another accolade the very same night, the Best Actor Award, for his performance. Arising Russian director Ivan I. Tverdovsky who made a name on the international circuit with the small yet intense drama Correction Class, was picked for the Special Jury Prize for his sophomore feature, the modern fable Zoology, about a lonely middle-age woman and the curious situation when she suddenly grows a tail.
The Best Director Award went to the hands of Slovenian director Damjan Kozole behind the thriller Nightlife. Slovakian actress Zuzana Maurery earned the Best Actress Award for her portrayal of a corrupt teacher in Jan Hrebejks latest effort, the Communist-era satire The Teacher. Two titles shared the Jury Special Mention: Romanian drama By the Rails by Catalin Mitulescu and unconventional auto-biopic The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street by the Czech filmmaker Jan Nemec, who passed away during the shooting; the film had to be finished posthumously.
The top honors in the "East of the West" competition was awarded to Georgian filmmaker Rusudan Glurjidze for his debut drama on war consequences, House of Others, while Estonian first-time feature director Triin Ruumet received the Special Jury Prize for The Days That Confused. This year's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival held 507 screenings of 200 films, consisting of 146 feature-lenth films, 20 short films, 30 feature documentaries and four short docupics.
Browse through the gallery to read about a slew of screened features.
Defense builds case for unconstitutionality of death penalty in federal court in Vermont | Main | Detailing the steady growth in registered sex offenders in Texas
The title of this post is the title of this notable new report from the Center for American Progress. Here is an excerpt from the report's introduction:
Americas four-decade-long experiment with mass incarceration and overcriminalization is widely recognized as a failure. We lock up a greater share of our citizens than any other developed nation, destroying lives and separating families at an annual cost of more than $80 billion. In addition, we do little to prepare individuals behind bars for their eventual release, yet are surprised when some two-thirds return to our jails and prisons.
The crushing impact of the criminal justice systems failure is felt acutely in communities across the United States. Significant and growing research shows how certain populations including communities of color; residents of high-poverty neighborhoods; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, individuals have been particularly hard hit. But rarely discussed is the impact of the criminal justice system on Americans with disabilities.
The past six decades have seen widespread closure of state mental hospitals and other institutional facilities that serve people with disabilities a shift often referred to as deinstitutionalization. The number of Americans residing in such institutions dropped sharply from nearly 560,000 in 1955 to only about 70,000 in 1994. While widely regarded as a positive development, deinstitutionalization was not accompanied by the public investment necessary to ensure that community-based alternatives were made available. As a result, while people with disabilities and particularly those with mental health conditions were no longer living in large numbers in institutions, many began to be swept up into the criminal justice system, often due to minor infractions such as sleeping on the sidewalk. Indeed, federal and state jails and prisons are now home to three times as many people with mental health conditions as state mental hospitals.
People with disabilities are thus dramatically overrepresented in the nations prisons and jails today. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, people behind bars in state and federal prisons are nearly three times as likely to report having a disability as the nonincarcerated population, those in jails are more than four times as likely. Cognitive disabilities such as Down syndrome, autism, dementia, intellectual disabilities, and learning disorders are among the most commonly reported: Prison inmates are four times as likely and jail inmates more than six times as likely to report a cognitive disability than the general population. People with mental health conditions comprise a large proportion of those behind bars, as well. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that fully 1 in 5 prison inmates have a serious mental illness.
Mass incarceration of people with disabilities is unjust, unethical, and cruel. But it is also penny-wise and pound-foolish, as community-based treatment and prevention services cost far less than housing an individual behind bars. According to a 2014 study of Los Angeles County, the average cost of jailing an individual with serious mental illness exceeds $48,500 per year. By comparison, the price tag for providing Assertive Community Treatment, or ACT, and supportive housing one of the most intensive, comprehensive, and successful intervention models in use today amounts to less than $20,500 annually, just two-fifths the cost of jail.
On July 14, Nicolas Leslie, a 20-year-old UC Berkeley environment studies major studying French in Nice, sent a video of himself dancing at Bastille Day celebrations to his friend Mustapha Khokhar according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Fifteen minutes later, Leslie was one of 84 people run over and killed by a truck in attacks that have shaken the international community. Berkeley's office of Pubic Affairs wrote yesterday that Leslie's death was confirmed to campus officials by the FBI.
Leslie was missing as of Friday, when Berkeley officials announced that three other students of 85 visiting the area for a 15-day Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Europe conference had been injured in the attack. Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, suffered a broken leg, Diane Huang, 20, was injured with a broken foot, and Daryus Medora, 21, broke a leg. The New York Times reports that Kostiuk and Huang have been released from hospitals while Medora is still receiving care.
Leslie grew up in Del Mar, California, and after his undergraduate years at Berkeley had plans to continue his studies at the university's Haas School of Business according to the LA Times. When he could not be contacted after the attack, Leslie's mother, an Italian, sent family to search for him in Nice area hospitals.
"All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence, a press release quote UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who is referencing the death of sophomore Tarishi Jain, 19, killed two weeks ago in a terrorist attack in Bangladesh at a restaurant.
William Morrow, Associated Students of the University of California president, writes that a vigil is planned for Leslie today at 4:30 p.m. at Sproul Plaza. Nearly 500 students say they plan to attend according to a Facebook event listing.
Previously: Three Berkeley Students Attending Conference Injured In Nice Attack, One Missing
As some predictable chaos is erupting on the floor of the Republican National Convention over rules votes by the anti-Trump faction on Day 1, Donald Trump is trying to sound a positive, characteristically over-confident note on Twitter as he anticipates introducing his wife Melania, who'll be speaking this evening. And in another corner of Twitter, California's Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom went on an hour-long rant today directed at Trump, his party, and his newly chosen running mate Mike Pence, calling out the hypocrisy of a month-old tweet from Trump claiming he'd be a better candidate for the LGBT community than Hillary Clinton. This is, pretty obviously, false given the recently drafted, virulently anti-LGBT Republican Party platform, not to mention the choice of Pence, who has made no secret of his homophobic views and spoke as early as 2006 about gay marriage leading to "societal collapse."
Newsom, a longtime and consistent supporter of LGBT equality and the first mayor in the US to attempt to legalize gay marriage in 2004, thought today would be a good moment to call out Trump for his hypocrisy, and to berate him on topics from conversion therapy, LGBT suicide rates, and a number of other topics.
This may, in fact, be just a precursor to what we may hear from Newsom at the podium at the Democratic National Convention, which kicks off next week. And, notably, earlier this month, Newsom donated $2,500, the amount of money Trump donated to his own campaign in 2010, to immigrant charities.
Observe. And you go, Gavin.
Related: Gavin Newsom Donates Money He Got From Donald Trump To Immigrant Charities
Kink.com Offers Free Access To Republican Delegates As They Vote To Label Porn A 'Public Health Crisis'
A man was killed and another injured Sunday, following a bar brawl on a troubled block in the Tenderloin.
According to San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Sergeant Michael Andraychak, it was 2 a.m. Sunday when patrons leaving a bar on the 900 block of Geary Street, which is between Larkin and Polk Streets, "became involved in a physical fight."
After "the dispute had subsided," Andraychak says, a black BMW pulled up to the crowd.
"The suspect exited the car and fired several shots...One victim, an adult male, died at the scene."
A second man was also struck, Andraychak says, and was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. He remains in stable condition as of this morning, according to police.
One area resident, Michelle Matheus, tweeted that she heard at least six gunshots during the incident.
Just heard what sounded like 6 gunshots... Hoping it was just fireworks and no one is hurt. #SF #SanFrancisco Mish Matheus (@MishMatheus) July 17, 2016
According to area resident Rob Blumberg, he witnessed a group running from the scene of the shooting, and heard at least one of them say "hide the hammer." (According to the Urban Dictionary, "hammer" is a slang term for a firearm, "used mainly in the south.")
The deceased man, a spokesperson from the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office says, has yet to be publicly identified due to family notification issues.
It's unclear if witnesses have confirmed that the gunman was involved in the earlier altercation, and a call to SFPD to confirm that detail as well as those provided by Matheus and Blumberg was not returned as of publication time.
That area of Geary, especially near the intersection with Polk, has been the site of numerous deaths over the years. In 2011, a man was shot and killed inside Jebena Cafe, then located on that corner. In 2014, 40-year-old Sausalito resident Matt Sheahan was stabbed to death in a hotel on that same block, and this January, an altercation inside a store on that block left one man dead.
Police did not have any additional information on the suspect in this current case to provide at this time, Andraychak says. If you know anything about the case, he asks that you call SFPD's Anonymous Tip Line at 415-575-4444 or to text a tip to TIP411 with SFPD at the beginning of the message.
Two San Francisco Police Department officers were injured Sunday, after a felon who was out on probation allegedly ran from officers suspicious of the shopping bag he was carrying.
Bay City News reports that at 2:53 Sunday afternoon, officers "working to abate auto thefts and auto burglaries" near 20th and Connecticut Streets in Potrero Hill saw a man they knew to be a felon on probation "carrying a shopping bag of the kind used by thieves to conceal stolen goods."
The man, who police have yet to publicly name, ran when police attempted to make contact, SFPD says.
As a condition of his probation, the man was required to submit to police searches when stopped, according to BCN.
The SFPD officers chased the fleeing suspect, police say. When they caught up to him, he "resisted arrest." In the end, both officers say they were hurt in the incident, with injuries police say are not life-threatening.
In addition to his alleged flight, police say that a gun was discovered in his backpack. According to a tweet by Bayview Station Captain Raj Vaswani, the man was booked into San Francisco County Jail, where he remains as of this morning.
Even from the rarefied, double-paned-glass heights of the Ritz-Carlton Residences at 695 Market Street, the NIMBY spirit of San Francisco is alive and well as a determined group of some 35 residents there have been actively fighting a liquor license transfer that would relocate a longtime bar and art gallery in the neighborhood to the ground floor of a building semi-adjacent to theirs. As the Chronicle reports, the fight has been going on quietly for months but became more public at last week's Board of Supervisors Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting, when the three Supes on the committee unanimously voted to approve the transfer to allow DaDa Bar, currently at 82 Second Street, to move to a vacant retail space at the Mechanics Institute building at 65 Post Street.
DaDa Bar opened in 2006, and co-owner Michael Gouddou has focused on the space's art theme, hosting shows in conjunction with the deYoung Museum's student programs. As he told Hoodline back in March, the reason for the move is partly because the bar's lease is up on Second Street, but that the bar and gallery had outgrown their original space and would be moving to a space with triple the square footage at the Mechanics' Institute which itself is a library and membership club that's home to many creative people, as well avid chess players.
While there are already multiple bars in the neighborhood that are even closer to the Ritz building, apparently some elderly residents have taken issue with the relocation of this bar and the potential for noise and one resident mentions something about how "Any stranger at the bar could walk into the garage, and there would be no one there to protect us." It's unclear what direct garage access DaDa patrons would have that any other stranger wouldn't have in the neighborhood.
One resident at the Ritz, Matthew Scanlan, who also serves as president of the Mechanics Institutes board of trustees, points to some sort of arbitrary bias on the part of his fellow residents' obstructionism, saying that he's "ashamed" about the whole situation and that these residents are merely anxious about DaDa's culturally and ethnically diverse clientele.
One speaker at last week's committee meeting was drag queen Emma Peel, outgoing empress of the Imperial Court of San Francisco, who insisted the bar was more "about art and expressing yourself... [and] not about drunkenness or being unruly."
The decision on whether to allow the liquor license transfer now goes to a full Board vote.
Previously: Dolores Park Neighbor Is Sick And Tired Of All The 'Events' In The Park
Pictured Above: The building that nearly became Milwaukee s riverfront prison.
Milwaukee s riverfronts are in the midst of a building boom as condominium and apartment buildings continue to spring up in nearly every available lot near the waterway. But as recently as the 1980s, the land along the Milwaukee River was considered nearly unsalvageable a point made startlingly clear in 1983, when the State of Wisconsin made a major push to convert one riverfront structure into a medium-security prison.
The building was located at 1776 North Commerce Street , presently the site of the Beerline B Apartments. The 8-story factory was constructed in 1909 by Milwaukee s Trostel & Sons Tannery one of several tanneries that operated along the Milwaukee and Menomonee rivers. After Trostel abandoned the plant in 1969, it remained mostly vacant and by the early 1980s was partially occupied by the Loop Cartage Company. The Brewers Hill Neighborhood in which the building sat had suffered similarly in the post-war years, with poverty and home vacancies on the rise as the areas once-plentiful industrial jobs were lost to the suburbs or overseas. The areas most prominent plant the Schlitz Brewery closed in 1982 and dozens of other homes and buildings had already been razed to make way for the Park East Freeway ramps.
Pictured Above: The Milwaukee River near its industrial peak.
Meanwhile, the state had been scouting for new prison sites since the mid-1970s. The existing prison faculties were badly overcrowded and state officials had determined that placing a prison in the heart of Milwaukee where a large portion of the states prison population came from could ease the burden on families of the incarcerated, placing their loved ones much closer to home. Milwaukee mayor Henry Maier vehemently objected, saying the plan of a Milwaukee prison was proof that city of Milwaukee is being dumped on by the State of Wisconsin . Despite the noisy objections of the mayor, a clear majority of Milwaukee state senators and assembly members supported the plan and in May 1983 the state passed a bill authorizing the conversion of the former tannery into a 200 bed prison. A defeated addendum to the bill would have wryly named the facility the Henry W. Maier Rehabilitation Center .
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Mayor Henry Maier opposed the prison plan with such a vehemence that prison proponents vengefully attempted to name the facility in his honor.
Brewers Hill residents also strongly opposed the plan. As the sale of the land was pending, a neighborhood group joined in the city in a lawsuit against the state, claiming the sale was in violation of state law because the required environmental impact study on the new prison had not yet been completed. Despite a court order to delay the purchase of the site until the report was finished, state officials had gone ahead with the transaction anyway. A judge sided with the neighbors and ordered the sale voided.
By the summer of 1983, with the prison plan in flux, the state pressed for a reversal of the ruling. A pro-prison state-issued report on the matter claimed that the neighborhood had already been so badly depressed by the preceding decades of deindustrialization that the prison could not possibly further harm the area. Responding to the claim that the prison might cause residents to leave the neighborhood and depress property values, the state said that property values had already reached their nadir and that the bulk of the local populace was too impoverished to relocate.
The state also used the proposed design of the facility to allay fears. The 16-foot-tall, razor-wire topped fences and twin 30-foot guard towers would secure the prisoners and the added patrols of the grounds, it was claimed, would actually make the neighborhood much safer. The plan also called for the building to be neutrally painted, giving it the look of an unassuming office tower that could blend into its surroundings. And as for the prisoners, it was proposed that tinted or reflective glass could be placed in the windows of each cell, to prevent residents from seeing in, and to obscure any prisoners who might be looking out.
In July, another court ruling gave the state the OK to proceed with planning the conversion, although the transfer of the property remained on hold. The state was pleased with the ruling and announced that their plans for beginning work by the end of the year were still on track. Months later, the state announced that a second Milwaukee prison would be built in the Menomonee Valley near County Stadium . The Brewers responded by threatening their own lawsuit against the state.
The matter dragged on throughout 1984 with the Trostel site held in abeyance and the state official responsible for approving the purchase of the property, despite the court order forbidding it, was charged with contempt of court. In May, an appeals court dropped the charges and reversed the ruling on the sale, but after an appeal by the city, the state placed the Trostel prison project on hold, instead choosing to focus on the Menomonee Valley site. In May 1985, with the prospects dim for the project ever moving forward, a state legislative panel voted 5-4 to remove the Trostel property from consideration for conversion. The Valley prison plan would find a similar end, litigated to death by the interests opposed.
Pictured Above: The Beerline B Apartments (beerlinebapartments.com)
By winning in court, however, the state had been gifted with a property that quickly became a millstone. Soon after dropping the prison idea, routine soil testing at the Trostel site which had been skipped during the purchase process revealed the ground to be severely polluted by decades of tanning chemical spillage. The state tried numerous times to unload the land, but each sale was scuttled by the polluted earth. Finally, in 1992, the Trostel Company agreed to buy back and rehabilitee the land for development. The state sold the plot for less than $200,000 nine years after buying for over $1.3 million. In 2012, after the property had been cleaned of its pollutants, the Beerline B Apartments opened on the site.
SIOUX CITY | Sometimes, kids need superheroes someone whos going to swoop in and kick the bad guys butt.
Thats never more apparent than when theyre lying in a hospital bed and the villain is cancer or diabetes or pneumonia or another health issue that theyd like to hit square in the face. Biff, bam, pow!
Dozens of brave kids will get capes to save the day, thanks to Sewing for Superheroes, a charity created by Sioux City fashion entrepreneur Joi Mahon.
Even if you dont know how to sew, come help out, she said. There are helpers there so you cant mess it up.
The charity sewing project is part of her second annual Sewing Holiday, which features classes for all skill levels in everything from embroidery, quilting and fitting to embellishments and fiber art.
While three-day event registration costs $395, community members can enter for free to sew superhero capes from 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday and 1 to 6 p.m. Friday at Stoney Creek Hotel and Conference Center, 300 Third St.
The capes will be donated to UnityPoint Health St. Lukes Childrens Miracle Network, which cares for more than 21,000 kids each year.
To participate, crafters can leave their fabric scraps, sewing machines and scissors at home.
Springs Creative, a textile manufacturer based in Rock Hill, South Carolina, donated about 400 yards of fabric for the sewing kits, enough to make 200 capes, while Baby Lock has outfitted the entire event with 150 sewing machines. Four are dedicated to making the capes.
There will also be an option to pick up cape-making supplies and instructions to complete the project at home and mail it in.
Last year, more than 350 skirts were made for sick kids through Skirting the Issue, a month-long charity sewing project started by Liz Evans and Elizabeth Evans. The bloggers behind Simple Simon and Co., whose husbands are brothers, had a special booth set up during the event.
Mahon, who is a McCall Pattern designer, author, online instructor at Craftsy.com and spokes-designer for Baby Lock, initially planned on making pillowcases this year, but Anne Holmes, director of the Childrens Miracle Network, made a special request for capes since the local organization claimed 2016 as the Year of the Superhero.
Were looking at all the different ways people can be superheroes because we think our kids show a lot of superhero bravery, Holmes said. We think our doctors and nurses make heroic efforts every day and we think our donors do the heavy lifting by providing their muscle and their money to help us help make some miracles.
As their 2014 wedding approached, Shannon Monte, 28, and Randy Johnson, 30, reviewed their to-do list. Flowers? Check. Venue? Check. Food? Check. Ceremony officiant? Um
A member of the clergy was not an option, said the Kenosha, Wisconsin, couple, because they didnt know a pastor well. So, they asked a friend, Claire Zautke of Milwaukee.
The Johnsons are not alone. Forty percent of couples used a friend or relative to officiate their 2015 wedding ceremonies, according to the Knot Real Weddings Study. Thats up from 29 percent in 2009, when online wedding resource The Knot started keeping track. Most of the other couples used a professional, such as a cleric or a professional wedding officiant.
Zautke, who works in community relations and on a school board, was ordained through the Seattle-based, nondenominational Universal Life Church, which issues free officiant licenses.
The Johnsons chose Zautke because she knew them well. In the ceremony, Zautke recounted the day she knew they would marry. Shannon and I were leaving for a weekend, and Randy was so sad. He didnt want to say goodbye to her, even for a few days.
Couples choose nonclergy officiants (some call themselves celebrants) for several reasons, say those who do this for a living. The couples want their wedding and reception in the same place. They subscribe to different religions. Their church will not marry the partner who was married before. Or they are among the growing number of nonchurchgoers.
Thirty-five percent of millennials (born 1981-96) are religious nones, reported a 2014 Pew Research Center study, and describe themselves as agnostic, atheist or not affiliated with an organized religion. In 2007, 25 percent were nones.
We both grew up Catholic but were lapsed, agnostic adults, said Tim Ritz, 29, who married his wife, Kolleen, 29, in 2015. The Chicago couple were disenchanted with Catholic ceremonies they had attended because they seemed dedicated to extracting a promise to produce lots and lots of babies, he said.
While the Ritzes eschewed the church, they wanted someone with the gravitas and authority of the clergy, Ritz said. They chose the Rev. Anne Styx of New Lenox, Illinois, a nondenominational officiant.
Unlike a friend who gets ordained just for your wedding, a professional can predict pitfalls because shes seen it all, Styx said.
Guests look to the officiant to take charge when a problem occurs. Sometimes Ive had to stop the ceremony, like when a bridesmaid fainted, Styx said. But usually its a matter of stay calm and carry on.
Work with your officiant to write a ceremony script. Then, on your wedding day, youll be prepared, so you can be in the moment and enjoy it, said the Rev. Phil Landers, an Addison, Illinois, officiant.
No need to start from scratch; there are plenty of templates online.
Traditional enough to consider the relatives but fresh enough that its not like every other wedding is how most couples envision their ceremonies, Landers said.
There are certain elements most couples want, Landers said: a welcome, a processional, readings, vows, a ring exchange and a declaration of the couple as married. But its the couples story that makes it personal.
Landers present-tense delivery injects humor into the ceremony. She wants a ring for her birthday, he said at a recent ceremony. He gets her a Crock Pot.
Many couples incorporate cultural traditions in their nuptials, such as jumping the broom or participating in a Chinese tea ceremony.
When Emily Guevera, 23, married Manuel Ramirez, 27, in 2015, the Aurora, Illinois, couple included a lasso ritual that was familiar to their families. Wrapped loosely around the couple, the lasso formed the figure eight, symbolizing infinity.
Some couples honor deceased loved ones with candle lightings, said Wexford, Pa., officiant Pat Carver, whose website lists ritual ideas.
Dont let your script run longer than a half-hour, warned the officiants. After that, your guests eyes glaze over, Carver said.
Heed wedding license rules and officiant requirements, which vary state to state and even county by county. In Colorado, for example, you can be your own officiant.
Listen to advice from well-meaning relatives, Styx tells her couples. Then, she added, Learn to say this: I love you, but this is our wedding.
Jimenez-Hernandez still faces two counts of third-degree sexual abuse in Woodbury County Court. He is accused of fondling his girlfriend's 14-year-old daughter after entering her room while she was sleeping on Feb. 23, 2015, in her Sioux City home. His trial is scheduled for Aug. 30.
Todays top picks from our online calendar. Find more events at siouxcityjournal.com/calendar.
Heathers The Musical: Based on the classic 1989 film. Misfit Veronica Sawyer rejects the evil regime of the Heathers, the hottest and cruelest girls in all of Ohio, for a new boyfriend who plans to put the girls in their place -- six feet under. Presented by Shot in the Dark 8-10:30 p.m. at Evelyn Larson Theatre, 413 Nebraska St., through July 25. Tickets, $18, are available at http://bit.ly/HeathersSITD. Call 712-587-1969 for more information.
Danielle Clouse-Gast: Views from the Gast family's 1946 Cessna 140 airplane have become a point of reference for a series of large-scale works by Spirit Lake artist Danielle Clouse-Gast at the Pearson Lakes Art Center, 2201 Highway 71 N., Okoboji, Iowa. Visit lakesart.org or call 712-332-7013 for more information.
Earth Extremes: A colorful earth science exhibit designed with a comic book theme that is fun for all ages at Sanford Museum & Planetarium, 117 E. Willow St., Cherokee, Iowa. The exhibit is divided into three sections: extreme landforms, extreme atmosphere, and extreme water. Visit sanfordmuseum.org or call 712-225-3922 for more information.
SIOUX CITY | After leaving Dustin Wilder's kitchen to blow her nose, Amanda Schroeder returned to the room, only to have her husband warn her about what was about to happen.
"Tim said you don't want to see this and I turned around and heard a gunshot," Schroeder testified Monday.
She turned back to see Timothy Schroeder holding a handgun, she said, and Wilder was lying on the floor. She left the house, she said, and sat in her car. Her husband joined her shortly and they drove to Sioux City.
Timothy Schroeder, 30, of Sioux City, is accused of fatally shooting Wilder, 29, of Sloan, Iowa, at Wilder's house at 621 Buckley St. and has pleaded not guilty in Woodbury County District Court to first-degree murder, going armed with intent and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Amanda Schroeder took the witness stand during the third day of testimony in her husband's trial, saying she knew Wilder, but her husband did not, when they gave Wilder a ride home from the Sloan Tap in the early morning hours of Jan. 9, 2015. Amanda Schroeder said there had been no argument or disagreement between the two men in the bar or at Wilder's home.
Amanda Schroeder, in custody as a material witness, said she had been drinking Black Velvet whisky during the day and also at the bar. She said she didn't know how many drinks she had, but that she was intoxicated. Wilder, too, was drinking at the bar, she said. Timothy Schroeder did not drink that night, she said.
Wilder and Amanda Schroeder continued to drink when they got to Wilder's house, she said.
While cross examining Schroeder, public defender Jennifer Solberg continually contrasted her testimony with statements she gave in December during a sworn deposition.
Schroeder told lawyers during the deposition she never saw the gun in Wilder's house and only heard gunshots. The amount of alcohol she drank that day and night also varied.
Schroeder insisted Monday that her husband was holding a gun after shooting Wilder, then pointed it at her and told her to leave.
"I seen a gun after I heard gunshots and turned around," she said.
"You don't seem to remember the same thing every day, is that right?" Solberg asked her.
"Yes. I'm just trying to put the pieces together," Schroeder said.
Later in the day of the shooting, Timothy Schroeder turned himself in to his parole officer in connection with an unrelated criminal case. After getting out of jail three days earlier, he had vowed not to turn himself in, said Dustin Duncan, a friend who drove Amanda Schroeder to pick up her husband from jail. Timothy Schroeder "ranted and raved" while sitting in the back seat of the car talking to people on his wife's cellphone.
"He said he ain't going to turn himself in. Next time they were going to get him it would be for murder," Duncan said.
The statement made him feel uncomfortable, Duncan said, and he got out of the car soon after.
Amanda Schroeder said she heard her husband say that "if he was going to go back, he was going to go back for something big." She didn't take the statement seriously, she said.
Medical evidence presented last week showed that Wilder was shot once in the head and had two head injuries consistent with being struck by a blunt object.
Amanda Schroeder said she didn't see Wilder get hit with anything, including a blue kitchen chair pictured with a broken spindle in photos introduced as evidence.
Wilder was found unconscious later that morning by a dog sitter and was declared dead at the scene.
The trial will resume Tuesday morning.
Usefulness Functionality Price The SurePulse Dashboard from SureFire Social aims to help small businesses simplify, automate and centralize their marketing efforts, both locally and beyond, all while saving you money.
One of the best parts of my job is watching the evolution of business solutions with my own eyes. Yep, Im geeky that way.
Over the years, Ive noticed that successful business solutions use one or more of the following principles to make it easier for you to run your company:
Simplification reducing the steps to get something done; Automation enabling solutions to handle tasks for you; and Centralization integrating processes and reporting into one place.
All three of these principles contribute to one goal: reducing the amount of time you need to focus on back-office processes so you can focus on increasing sales and serving your clients and customers.
Rarely have I found all three principles applied in equal force within one solution yet thats exactly what I encountered, and more, when I took a look at SureFire Socials SurePulse Dashboard.
SurePulse Dashboard Helps Keep You On Top of Your Local Marketing Goals
SureFire Socials Founder and CEO, Chris Marentis explained SurePulses mission this way, Using SurePulse, you can win, you can be more visible than your competitors and weve spent the last five years figuring out how to automate most of the processes to do just that.
Visibility is the core concept within SurePulse as the solution aims to put you in front of your target market no matter where they come to meet you online.
One of the features that really stands out of the ability to dig into the data presented within the dashboard to see the information that underlays it all. This is particularly useful in the National to Local tab, however, its super handy all-around.
The three principles mentioned at the top of this post are present in full force in each component of SurePulse and underneath, theres a fourth principle that really sets the solution aside from the rest: the ability to take advantage of economies of scale.
Connections
Before I talk about economies of scale, I need to explain the first component of SurePulse, connections.
Connections are the way SurePulse provides centralization. Each connection is an integration point with an outside source of information.
For example, when you connect to Google Analytics, the solution will automatically display the campaigns you have set up in that tool. In order to track a campaign within the dashboard, you need to add it via a connection:
The connections you currently have access to is driven by your login. More refined user management is coming down the road.
The Fourth Principle Economies of Scale
While the SEO and Social connections are available free of charge, the three Online Presence connections are paid for in one of two ways:
Behind the scenes where the cost is spread while the Visibility and Directory Listings connections are included in your SurePulse fee, third party vendors that are paid by SureFire Social provide them both, the cost of which is spread across all users.
while the Visibility and Directory Listings connections are included in your SurePulse fee, third party vendors that are paid by SureFire Social provide them both, the cost of which is spread across all users. Separately by you at discounted rates if you want to use the phone campaigns connections, you need to pay separately for DialogTech however, if you sign-up for that service through SurePulse you will get a discounted rate negotiated by SureFire Social.
If you were to buy all this separately, says Marentis, It would be $400 or more per month. For $150 per month, SurePulse customers are getting social media and reputation management, and all the other things we bundle in including discounted fees at preferred providers.
For a small business, these economies of scale savings are a big deal and a step towards the next stage of evolution in business solutions where the fourth principle adds a new dimension to the mix.
Whats Coming in Connections?
The team over at SureFire Social has put together an ambitious roadmap. As with all product roadmaps, its hard to promise exact delivery dates, however, Ill be giving you a preview of some highlights throughout the post.
New Social Connections
See Also: Secrets for Using Digital Marketing to Drive More Inbound Sales Calls
In the coming months, connections to the following social media networks will be added to the three already in place:
Pinterest
LinkedIn
YouTube
Foursquare
Instagram
New Integrations
The company plans to open their solution so third party vendors can create apps that connect their solution to the dashboard. The current vision is an app marketplace for SurePulse.
These apps will enable users to connect their dashboard to solutions beyond preferred ones.
While economies of scale may not exist with non-preferred solutions at first, I suspect that the team plans on expanding the number of preferred solutions by negotiating discounts with popular third party vendors.
Main Dashboard
Currently, the main dashboard shows a rollup of all your data or, if youre a marketing consultant using SurePulse for clients, all your clients data including:
Referral sources (whered your traffic come from?);
Search broken down by queries, impressions and clicks;
Visibility; and
Reputation.
If you have more than one location, you can dig down into local views as well more on this in a bit.
Whats Coming in the Main Dashboard?
Top Search Queries
The team plans to surface the Top Search Queries report so it shows on the dashboard. This is a pretty cool word cloud that gives you an at-a-glance view of the searches people are using to find you:
KPIs
Right at the top of the main dashboard, the team plans to add important key performance indexes including:
Cost per lead (CPL) based on organic and paid (though other calculations based on things such as website, social, etc. are coming); and
Cost per sale (CPS) that will be displayed as well if you integrate your CRM.
Leads
SurePulse enables you to track the number of leads you get as well as the source of each leads by integrating Google Analytics goals.
For example, you can run a campaign that utilizes multiple channels (social media, newspaper ad, etc.) and send prospects to different landing pages where they perform an action (e.g. fill out a form, call your business on a certain number). Thus, the specific landing page on which they convert indicates the lead source.
Below the primary leads chart are more details including one that enables you to dig down into phone calls and even access call recordings. Now thats handy!
Traffic
The traffic tab displays a wealth of information collected from Google Analytics. At the top, you have a chart that compares your total traffic to your organic and referral traffic. You can even compare different time periods as shown below (you can see the figures from the different periods in the small pop-up box):
Visibility
Using a number of factors such as keywords and their rank in search engine results, SurePulse calculates your visibility score. I loved the way you can compare your score against specific competitors as well as your industrys average:
Another handy chart on the visibility tab is the keyword search engine comparison which shows how you rank for each keyword across Google, Bing and Yahoo!, as well as any changes in those rankings over time:
Reputation
This tab is all about your online listings and reviews.
Online Listings
SurePulse will synch up your company information with over 65 spots online search engine and other directories. You can adjust your info at any time as well as add images and other pertinent information.
One chart on this tab also shows how much action youre listings are getting in terms of search result impressions and profile views.
Online Reviews
SurePulse consolidates your reviews from different sources so you can get a top-level view of your online reputation:
Whats Coming in Reputation?
Soon youll be able to respond to reviews from directly within SurePulse, a real time-saver for sure.
Content
The content tab enables you to create, schedule and publish content on both your blog and social media profiles. The standout feature here is the ability to setup an approval workflow so content is reviewed before going live.
National to Local
Now this is where things get local! The National to Local tab is where SurePulse takes the key statistics from throughout the system and breaks them into regions and territories:
In addition to Website Stats, you can see the following stats broken out by location:
Goals;
Social; and
Visibility.
Digging In
Perhaps the coolest feature of all is the ability to dig in to the dashboard for any one location. All you need to do is click on the locations name in a chart such as the one above and all tabs in your SurePulse dashboard will now show info for only that location.
Not Only for National Businesses
After seeing the National to Local tab, I asked Marentis if SurePulse was only a local marketing solution for multi-location businesses. Oh no, he replied, a business with only one location will get plenty of value out of SurePulse, especially if they want to track multiple campaigns, results for different product offerings, publish content and all the other features we bundle in.
PPC
The final tab on the dashboard is the pay-per-click (PPC) tab which shows the results of your PPC campaigns (surprise!).
Price
You can get SurePulse for $150 per month as a standalone however, the dashboard solution is also included free with all three tiers of SureFire Socials marketing packages.
Conclusion
The SurePulse Dashboard from SureFire Social aims to help small businesses simplify, automate and centralize their marketing efforts, and track their local marketing goals, both locally and beyond.
By adding a fourth component, economies of scale, the solution also puts powerful functionality in small business owners hands at a much-reduced cost.
This is the next stage of business solution evolution and I cant wait to watch it develop further.
This is a big week for Republicanstheir quadrennial national convention in Cleveland. For Maryland's conventioneers, it's "Donald Trump All the Way." Nary a discouraging word will be heard from themunless they're talking about Hillary Clinton.
The state's GOP delegates' loyalty to Trump, the party's flamboyant and controversial presumptive nominee, was sealed when the New York real estate tycoon thrashed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the April 26 Maryland primary.
Most of the GOP convention-goers from Maryland are chosen by congressional districts. They are bound to the primary winner in that district in the opening rounds of balloting.
Trump made the math easy, though: He won all eight congressional districts handily.
He took the Maryland primary with 54 percent of the vote, scoring a high of 63% in the Eastern Shore-Harford County 1st Congressional District and a low of 46% in the Baltimore City-dominated 7th C.D. and the Montgomery-Frederick counties 8th C.D.
His lowest margin of victory, 14 percentage points, occurred in the liberal 7th Congressional District.
Unity in Cleveland
If there are rumblings of discontent among Maryland's GOP faithful, those dissenters are staying far away from Cleveland.
Gov. Larry Hogan, Jr., who grudgingly told the media he would not be voting for Trump (though he still hasn't explained precisely why), has found an ideal excuse: the annual J. Millard Tawes Crab and Clam Bake in Crisfieldthe can't-miss high point of Maryland's political summer season.
Hogan hasn't been a big fan of building up the state GOP infrastructure, anyway. He has yet to attend a Lincoln Day fund-raiser supporting local central committees. He also skipped the last two big annual Republican fundraisers.
That makes sense, since Hogan was elected after running an outsider campaign on Facebook through his Change Maryland organization. Hogan's novel approach may have set a new paradigm for statewide GOP campaigns and debunked the value of relying on the local party apparatus for support and backing.
Some Maryland conventioneers remain angry at Hogan's "no" vote on Trump and his refusal to give silent assent in Cleveland.
Hogan's sidestep
But he would have done so at a cost. Democrats were itching to tie Hogan to Trump and the nominee's sometimes insensitive broadsides. Hogan safely sidestepped that problem by staying home and announcing he's washed his hands of national politics.
While some die-hard Trump supporters say they won't forget Hogan's snub of their hero, they are small in number next to the horde of Democrats and independents he might alienate through a Trump endorsement.
Maryland, after all, is a heavily Democratic state. For Hogan to win a second term, he can't afford to turn off the state's large pool of centrist voters. They helped him win in 2014.
Hogan's second-in-command, Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, won't be in Cleveland, either. He's made it clear that Trump "is not my choice at all." Rutherford will be joining his boss at the Tawes schmooze-fest.
Kittleman's 'strong feelings'
Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman has been the most prominent Maryland Republican to cite emphatically his disapproval of Trump's sometimes racist comments.
Kittleman, whose father Bob was one of Howard County's most prominent civil-rights leaders, stated that Trump does not represent his "strong feelings" on civil right and diversity. "That's not how I was raised."
Still, those voices of dissent won't be heard on the Cleveland convention floor or in the convention hotel hallways.
This is Donald Trump's moment to shine and he'll get no argument from his staunch delegate supporters from Maryland.
Barry Rascovar's blog is www.politicalmaryland.com. He can be reached at brascovar@hotmail.com
More than 18,000 global leaders, scientists, advocates, and frontline health workers have gathered in Durban for the 21st International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016), the world's largest forum devoted to any single health or development issue. The conference returns to Durban after 16 years and will feature 2,500 scientific abstracts and hundreds of events.
AIDS 2000 in Durban was a defining moment in the history of HIV/AIDS. It is widely credited with ushering in a global movement to bring life-saving HIV treatment to developing countries, and paving the way for passage of the first United Nations Declaration on HIV/AIDS and the creation of The Global Fund and PEPFAR. Today, more than 17 million people living with HIV are on treatment, and both new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths are falling.
AIDS 2016 will focus on the work that remains to be done if the world is to achieve the global goal of ending AIDS by 2030. Despite significant progress, more than half of those living with HIV still do not have access to treatment, new prevention tools such as PrEP remain out of reach for most people in need, and the human rights of vulnerable groups are violated in many parts of the world.
Related: The Science Behind a Cure for HIV
At today's official opening press conference, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned of an immediate need for more action to avoid backsliding on progress made to date: "As a global community, we must move quickly and decisively towards achieving the targets that will help us finally bring this epidemic to an end."
"This conference comes at another crucial time in the HIV epidemic," said Chris Beyrer, AIDS 2016 International Chair and President of the International AIDS Society. "To truly succeed in all places and for all people, we must ensure that every action we take is grounded in science, respects human rights, and is fully funded for success. If we don't make the right strategic choices, we risk reversing hard-won gains. Delay is tantamount to defeat."
"We have made great strides in South Africa and globally in the fight against HIV, but it is still far too soon to declare victory," said Olive Shisana, AIDS 2016 Local Chair and President and CEO of Evidence Based Solutions. "AIDS 2016 will keep attention focused on the actions needed to write the last chapter in the long struggle against AIDS."
The conference theme, Access Equity Rights Now, expresses the need to overcome ongoing barriers impeding real-world progress, including a lack of funding for HIV prevention, treatment, and research, and the existence of discriminatory laws and policies that affect many of those at greatest risk for HIV, such as men who have sex with men, transgender people, people who inject drugs, and sex workers.
Central to continued success is the leadership of government officials, people living with HIV, civil society partners, and advocates. Others speaking at the opening press conference included Cyril Ramaphosa, Deputy President of South Africa, Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, Nkhensani Mavasa, Chairperson of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, and Charlize Theron, Founder of the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project and United Nations Messenger of Peace.
For more information, visit www.aids2016.org
(WB) South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn on Monday described this years election as the most consequential of his lifetime.
I hear people telling me that theyre so upset about what happened in the primaries that theyre going to boycott their voting in November, said the South Carolina Democrat during a voting rights town hall at Cleveland State University that U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) hosted. Just remember this, on Nov. 8 youre going to have national elections. When you wake up on the morning of the 9th, somebody is going to be elected. Now whether or not you participate in that process or not, theres going to be an election and somebodys going to get elected.
This is the most consequential election of my lifetime, he added.
Clyburn specifically pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and cases around voting and abortion rights, the DREAM Act and immigration.
Related: AIDS Healthcare Foundation holds pre-RNC concert
These things are going to end up before the Supreme Court, he said. Who will be sitting on that Supreme Court will be determined by who wins on Nov. 8.
Clyburn did not mention the case of Gavin Grimm, a transgender student who is challenging his Virginia school districts bathroom policy, that could go before the justices during their upcoming term.
Thompson: Voters must promote our interests
MSNBC anchor Joy-Ann Reid moderated the panel that took place on the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Ohio state Rep. Stephanie Howse (D-Cleveland), Julie Fernandes of the Open Society Foundations, Camille Wimbish of Ohio Voice and Mike Brickner of the American Civil Liberties Union were also panelists alongside Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson.
The greatness of this country is that we settle our differences at the ballot box, said Thompson. Nov. 8 will come, you choose your person, others choose theirs. It doesnt matter on Nov. 9 other than who won, but we dont have a coup. We dont burn buildings or shoot people because we are a democracy.
Its inherent upon us to make sure that we promote our interests, he added.
The town hall took place a day after a gunman killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, La. Factions within the Turkish military over the weekend staged an unsuccessful coup against their countrys president.
(AP) Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore should be swiftly removed from office for a second time because he urged the state's probate judges to defy federal courts on gay marriage, a state ethics commission argued Friday.
The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission wrote in the court filing that Moore - who was ousted from the bench in 2003 for refusing to remove a boulder-sized Ten Commandments monument at a state building - was again flouting the rule of law, but this time he was urging 68 probate judges to do so with him.
"Because the chief justice has proven - and promised - that he will not change his behavior, he has left this Court with no choice but to remove him from office to preserve the integrity, independence, impartiality of Alabama's judiciary and the citizens who depend on it for justice," lawyers for the commission wrote in the filing with the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.
The commission said Moore disrespected the judiciary when he told probate judges in January that a state injunction against same-sex marriage remained in "full force and effect" even though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled six months prior that gays and lesbians had a fundamental right to marry and a federal judge had ordered the judges not to enforce the ban.
Related: Gay Marriage: Court Rejects GOP Claim in North Carolina Case
The ethics accusations against Moore are part of a series of scandals engulfing Republicans at the helm of Alabama's three branches of government. House Speaker Mike Hubbard was removed from office in June after being convicted on corruption charges. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether grounds exist to impeach Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley.
The Alabama Court of the Judiciary, a panel of judges, lawyers and citizens who hear misconduct complaints against judges, will decide if Moore violated the standards of judicial ethics. Moore urged the court to dismiss the case; arguments on his motion are set for Aug. 8.
In the response filed Friday, the commission argued there were sufficient grounds to remove Moore from office instead of hashing out the matter in a trial-like proceeding.
Moore had argued the complaint is baseless and he never ordered state probate judges to refuse wedding licenses to gay couples. His attorneys have said that Moore was correctly summarizing the status of a state injunction in answer to questions from probate judges.
"The Administrative Order of Chief Justice Moore expressly said he could not provide guidance to the probate judges because the matter was pending before the Alabama Supreme Court," Moore's attorney Mat Staver said in a statement last month.
The commission responded that Moore was playing "semantic gamesmanship."
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore should be swiftly removed from office for a second time because he urged the state's probate judges to defy federal courts on gay marriage, a state ethics commission argued Friday.
The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission wrote in the court filing that Moore - who was ousted from the bench in 2003 for refusing to remove a boulder-sized Ten Commandments monument at a state building - was again flouting the rule of law, but this time he was urging 68 probate judges to do so with him.
"Because the chief justice has proven - and promised - that he will not change his behavior, he has left this Court with no choice but to remove him from office to preserve the integrity, independence, impartiality of Alabama's judiciary and the citizens who depend on it for justice," lawyers for the commission wrote in the filing with the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.
The commission said Moore disrespected the judiciary when he told probate judges in January that a state injunction against same-sex marriage remained in "full force and effect" even though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled six months prior that gays and lesbians had a fundamental right to marry and a federal judge had ordered the judges not to enforce the ban.
The ethics accusations against Moore are part of a series of scandals engulfing Republicans at the helm of Alabama's three branches of government. House Speaker Mike Hubbard was removed from office in June after being convicted on corruption charges. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether grounds exist to impeach Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley.
The Alabama Court of the Judiciary, a panel of judges, lawyers and citizens who hear misconduct complaints against judges, will decide if Moore violated the standards of judicial ethics. Moore urged the court to dismiss the case; arguments on his motion are set for Aug. 8.
In the response filed Friday, the commission argued there were sufficient grounds to remove Moore from office instead of hashing out the matter in a trial-like proceeding.
Moore had argued the complaint is baseless and he never ordered state probate judges to refuse wedding licenses to gay couples. His attorneys have said that Moore was correctly summarizing the status of a state injunction in answer to questions from probate judges.
"The Administrative Order of Chief Justice Moore expressly said he could not provide guidance to the probate judges because the matter was pending before the Alabama Supreme Court," Moore's attorney Mat Staver said in a statement last month.
The commission responded that Moore was playing "semantic gamesmanship."
Ron Beachley remembers slipping through the side door of a downtown Hagerstown hotel into the Bull Ring, a gay nightclub, in the early 1980s.
"You didn't want anybody to see you," he said, "because sometimes at closing, people would get beat up in the street."
Beachley, now 69, plans to be out in broad daylight Saturday as the western Maryland town of 40,000 holds its first downtown LGBT pride festival, on the same block where the Bull Ring once stood.
He calls it "mind-boggling" that lesbian, gay and transgender people can celebrate openly in the center of the historically blue-collar city 70 miles from Washington, D.C.
Pride events have been held annually in the nation's capital since 1975, but change has come much more slowly in smaller communities. Advocates say that only now, after federal court victories legalizing same-sex marriage and affirming other LGBT civil rights, have lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people been able to live openly without fear of discrimination in many small towns.
The proof can be seen in pride festivals and LGBT resource centers popping up across rural America.
There were 252 pride festivals in the United States in 2015, up from 179 in 2014, said Sue Doster, a co-president of InterPride, which tracks and promotes the events.
CenterLink, a network of LGBT resource centers offering everything from legal aid to youth activities, now reaches across 40 states, with a membership that has nearly quadrupled to 170 in the past decade, said CEO Terry Stone.
Tom Nestor said he co-founded the center in downtown Pocatello, Idaho, in 2012, in response to LGBT teen suicides in southeastern Idaho, a conservative, rural region with a large Mormon population. People can visit discreetly, through a coffee shop in the building, or a back entrance displaying a sign and rainbow flag.
Mormon church policy holds that acting on same-sex attraction is a sin, people in same-sex couples can be excommunicated, and their children cannot be baptized until they're 18 and have disavowed homosexual relationships. Still, Nestor said he's seen little open hostility.
"I was born and raised in the valley here," said Nestor, 60, "I never thought I would see gay marriage and a sign that said LGBT on it in the state of Idaho, and now we have both."
The trend alarms Brian Camenker, executive director of MassResistance, a Waltham, Massacusetts-based group that fights the establishment of gay-friendly student organizations in public schools. He said LGBT centers prey on troubled kids, and pride parades are hyper-sexualized demonstrations by disturbed individuals.
"You'll see all kinds of abnormal and destructive behavior celebrated," Camenker said.
Anti-gay sentiment is more often expressed online now, said Gavin Grimm, a transgender 17-year-old in rural Gloucester County, Virginia, who challenged his school district's bathroom policy and won in federal appeals court. The school district asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to block Grimm from using the boys' restroom when school resumes in September until the high court decides whether to review the case.
"The negative people are cowards," Grimm said. "They sit behind a computer and say whatever they want but that's as far as they go. The people who support me go out of their way to contact me and reach out in a positive manner."
Ty Russ, a 15-year-old transgender girl in Hagerstown, said she was confused by sermons at her family's International Pentecostal Holiness Church.
"Those people were really nice but preached hate," Russ said.
The denomination declared same-sex marriage "contrary to God's will," in a statement last year. Rhonda Smith, business administrator for the church's Appalachian conference, said by email, "We are not haters nor do we wish to comment" for this story.
Russ heard a different message from Hagerstown Mayor David Gysberts, who told her school's anti-bullying assembly that he is gay.
"It was just very cool to see someone like a mayor say that in front of a bunch of kids," she said.
Gysberts said he encouraged organizers to move the pride festival downtown from the county park where it had been held for several years.
"I think this is very good for the community and a positive sign that we're making progress," he said.
Former mayor William Breichner made headlines in 2003 when he likened a proposed drag queen pageant in the city to a Ku Klux Klan rally or a hobo convention because of what he considered negative publicity.
Breichner said he's fine with the pride festival, though: "You know, the times have changed considerably and, naturally, my thoughts regarding that sort of thing of have changed," he said.
Festival organizer Todd Garnand, 29, is a great-nephew of Ron Beachley, He said he's never known the kind of hostility that drove Beachley to hide his sexual orientation, and which prompted many of Nestor's friends to search for acceptance in bigger cities.
"This is my town," Garnand said. "I was born and raised here. I'm not leaving because I'm different."
NASA International Space Station On-Orbit Status 14 July 2016. NASA
A Russian Progress 64 (64P) cargo craft is getting ready for a Saturday launch to the International Space Station. A private U.S. space freighter, the SpaceX Dragon, is also getting prepared for a launch early Monday morning.
Both spacecraft will take two-day trips to the orbital laboratory. Cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Anatoly Ivanishin are practicing manual docking techniques in the unlikely event the 64P is unable to dock automatically Monday night. Commander Jeff Williams is also training for the robotic capture of Dragon when it arrives Wednesday morning.
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins set up hardware in the Microgravity Science Glovebox to prepare for the Heart Cells experiment flying on Dragon next week. The study will explore how living in space affects heart muscle tissue changing its shape and gene expression.
On-Orbit Status Report
Heart Cells Hardware Gather and Setup: The crew gathered and configured the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) life science hardware to support upcoming operations for the Heart Cells investigation that will be performed inside the MSG work volume. The investigation studies the human heart, specifically how heart muscle tissue contracts, grows and changes in microgravity and how those changes vary among subjects. Understanding how heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, change in space improves efforts for studying disease, screening drugs and conducting cell replacement therapy for future space missions.
Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) Hardware Set Up: The crew set up the TReK Demonstration laptop and relocated the high definition camera to view the laptop display which will be used to provide video for Space Conferences. The TReK is a suite of software applications and libraries that can be used to monitor and control assets in space or on the ground.
Dose Tracker: The crew completed entries for medication tracking on an iPad. This investigation documents the medication usage of crewmembers before and during their missions by capturing data regarding medication use during spaceflight, including side effect qualities, frequencies and severities. The data is expected to either support or counter anecdotal evidence of medication ineffectiveness during flight and unusual side effects experienced during flight. It is also expected that specific, near-real-time questioning about symptom relief and side effects will provide the data required to establish whether spaceflight-associated alterations in pharmacokinetics (PK) or pharmacodynamics (PD) is occurring during missions.
Urine Processing Assembly (UPA)Separator Plumbing Assembly (SPA) Samples: The crew gathered and configured equipment in preparation for the collection of a SPA effluent sample to be returned to ground for evaluation to better understand the recent high conductivity and noise observed during UPA processing. The setup included disconnection of the purge line from the distillate line, however, due to a mismatch with the associated fittings, the sample bag could not be installed. The purge line will remain disconnected as part of the configuration to troubleshoot the UPA. Ground teams will continue to investigate methods for installing the sample bag. The next UPA run is expected early next week.
Safety Video Survey: The crew completed a video of the ISS interior volume to allow ground teams to assess current vehicle configuration as well as identify any areas of concern related to ventilation blockage, flammability hazards, emergency egress paths, access to fire ports and safety equipment. This survey is performed approximately every six months.
Russian Segment (RS) Video Survey: Ground controllers completed a survey of the RS using ISS external cameras. This imagery will be used to compare against ground models in preparation for a future Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) walkoff on to the Functional Cargo Block (FGB) Power Data Grapple Fixture (PDGF).
Thermal Radiator Rotary Joint (TRRJ) S1-3 Radiator Panel Survey: Yesterday, ground teams completed the periodic video survey of the damaged panel on the Starboard TRRJ. The face sheet on the S1-3 radiator panel 7 was discovered to be delaminated in September 2008. Ground teams will review the imagery once available.
Systems Operations Data File (SODF) Emergency Update: The crew updated the emergency procedure for Fire Source Location to account for the new Mouse Habitat payload being installed in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM).
Mobile Servicing System (MSS)/Mobile Transporter Status: On July 11 during preparation for MT translation from Worksite 6 (WS6) to WS4, ground controllers noticed that Umbilical Mating Assembly 1 (UMA1) showed a status of both mated and demated on Channel A so the MT translation was performed on Channel B. The unit was power cycled but did not clear the problem. Initial indications are that the UMA 1 IMCA 1 Demate Microswitch is not operational. A workaround was implemented for the issue so there are no impacts to future operations.
Todays Planned Activities
All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.
EarthKAM Experiment in SM, Battery Changeout
Morning Inspection. SM ??? (Caution & Warning Panel) Test
Morning Inspection, RSS1,2 Reboot / r/g 1460
CORRECTSIYA. Logging Liquid and Food (Medicine) Intake / r/g 2769
Emergency Book updates
Soyuz 731 Samsung Tablet Recharge, initiate
SM Ventilation Subsystem Preventive Maintenance. Group ?2
Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) Equipment Gathering
TORU OBT r/g 2787
OBT Dragon Rendezvous Procedures Review
AMO2 Removal from UOP
AMO2 PCS HDD Swap
AMO2 PCS Installation
HRTCEL Hardware Setup
Video Survey of the ISS
Soyuz 720 Samsung tablet charge end
SM Ventilation Subsystem Preventive Maintenance. Group ?2
OBT Self-Assessment Questionnaire
PAO Hardware Setup
Crew Prep for PAO
PAO Event
Food Frequency Questionnaire
TREK Video Setup in Lab
EarthKAM Experiment in SM Battery Changeout
Big Picture Words Review / Separator Plumbing Assembly (SPA)
Progress 432 [AO] Transfers and IMS Ops / r/g 1812, 1832
CORRECTSIYA. Logging Liquid and Food (Medicine) Intake / r/g 2769
Removing two TV cameras ??1,2 and ???-302 light units in Soyuz 731
OBT Dragon Rendezvous Procedures Review
Demate the Outlet line and collect sample
Demate the outlet line from SPA ORU on WRS-2 Rack
DATA TRANSMISSION RADIO LINK (????) ONBOARD MEMORY DEVICE (???) r/g 2788
Crew time for ISS adaptation and orientation
Verification of ??-1 Flow Sensor Position
??? Maintenance
HAM radio session from Columbus
DOSETRK iPad data entry
CORRECTSIYA. NEUROIMMUNITET. Experiment setup / r/g 2783
Psychological Evaluation Program (WinSCAT)
IMS Delta File Prep
WRS Maintenance
Sprint Exercise, Optional
CONTENT. Experiment Ops / r/g 2778
WRS Maintenance
TREK Return camcorder to original location
CONTENT. Experiment Ops / r/g 2779
Robotic Work Station (RWS) Setup
Camcorder Setup to View LAB RWS Monitor 3
CORRECTSIYA. Logging Liquid and Food (Medicine) Intake / r/g 2769
NEUROIMMUNITET. Saliva Sample / r/g 2783
NEUROIMMUNITET. Starting 24-hr ECG Recording BP Measurement / r/g 2783
EarthKAM Experiment in SM, Battery Changeout
Completed Task List Items
None
Ground Activities
All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.
Nominal ground commanding.
Three-Day Look Ahead:
Friday, 07/15: Emergency Roles & Responsibilities review, MSPR VRU SSD replace, Dragon OBT Offset Grapple/debrief conference, GLACIER2 dessicant pack swap
Saturday, 07/16: 64P launch, crew off duty, housekeeping
Sunday, 07/17: SpX-9 launch, crew off duty
QUICK ISS Status Environmental Control Group:
Component Status
Elektron On
Vozdukh Manual
[???] 1 SM Air Conditioner System (SKV1) On
[???] 2 SM Air Conditioner System (SKV2) Off
Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Lab Standby
Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Node 3 Operate
Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Lab Idle
Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Node 3 Operate
Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) Standby
Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) Maint.
Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab Off
Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3 Full Up
Paris, July 18, 2016 (SPS) - France supports United Nations process for a "just, lasting and mutually acceptable solution" to Western Sahara conflict," said Monday the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"France will continue to support the UN-sponsored political process, aiming at finding a just, lasting and mutually acceptable solution" to Western Sahara conflict, said the spokesperson for the French Foreign Ministry, Romain Nadal during his weekly press briefing on Friday.
He also welcomed the return to El Aaiun (the occupied capital of Western Sahara), of the staff of the UN Mission for Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO).
"We welcome the return of the first group of the civilian staff of MINURSO to the headquarters in El Aaiun on 14 July, in accordance with the agreement signed between the UN and Morocco," he said, adding that France "hopes that MINURSO would be able again to carry out its mission, in accordance with the UN Security Council's resolution 2285."
The resolution 2285, adopted on 29 April, has extended MINURSO's mandate until 30 April 2017.
On 20 March 2016, Morocco expelled 75 civilian staff members of MINURSO to exert pressure on UN Chief Ban Ki-moon, who, during his visit to the region, dubbed the situation in Western Sahara as "illegal occupation." (SPS)
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Erdogan now faced the temptation to exercise his power too much and over-react, raising the possibility of another, more serious coup attempt against him in the future, Steinberg cautioned.
"This is not yet over. If Erdogan is intoxicated with power and goes too far too fast, he will alienate some of his current tepid supporters and a next phase coup will be increasingly likely at some point down the line."
Political commentator and author Dan Lazare agreed that relations between Ankara and Washington were bound to deteriorate as Erdogan crushed his remaining rivals.
"Of course, US-Turkish relations will come under strain as a result of Erdogan's crackdown. Obama was obviously hoping for a quiet final few months in office, but now they're turning into a real nightmare."
Lazare expected that Turkey would now be far more unstable and unpredictable to the alarm of US policymakers.
The producer of the Russian-Chinese film Vij: Journey to China Alex Petruhin notes that, In China the most scary thing is the death penalty. Nothing can be scarier than that.
The official censorship in China prohibits showing films touching upon cults and superstitions.
This vague formulation of what is prohibited and what isnt includes a whole new trend, specializing in films about ghosts and other supernatural creatures.
Ten years ago, the country banned the rental of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," because there were images of cannibals and zombies.
The company Sony Pictures stated that the decision to ban Ghostbusters in China is still pending.
Experts claim that the decisive factor regarding the censorship of the movie might be the fact that it may not be so attractive for the Chinese audience, as the first and second part of the movie have not been shown in China.
The third part of Ghostbusters failed to break into the leaders of new releases in the US. In the first weekend it took second place, behind the animated film "The Secret Life of animals". Ghostbusters earned $46 million although the budget was at $144 million.
Chances that the film will pay off in the rental are quite slim, so the only hope is that it will be liked by the fans of the franchise in other countries. However in China it might not be getting any reviews any time soon.
TOKYO (Sputnik) On Saturday, a statement adopted at the ASEM summit strongly condemned North Korea's missile tests and called for vigilance against assistance to Pyongyang's nuclear program.
"Raising chances of a conflict on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. continues to carry out joint military drills and brings nuclear-powered submarines, bombers and other strategic weapons, including the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, into South Korea," the ministry's spokesman said, as quoted by Yonhap agency.
On July 8, Seoul disclosed that it was going to station the THAAD missile defense system in the southern Seongju County. The governments of Russia and China protested the decision, stating that the agreement to deploy the THAAD system will have a highly negative impact on global strategic stability.
The Turkish Interior Ministry has suspended a total of 8,777 officials in the wake of a failed coup in the country, Hurriyet Daily news reported.
Late on Friday, the Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup d'etat took place in the country. The coup was suppressed several hours later.
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 208 people have been killed and at least 1,400 injured during the attempted coup, according to the country's foreign ministry.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Early on Saturday, the Turkish authorities suppressed a military coup. On Sunday, Erdogan told crowds of supporters gathered outside his residence in Istanbul that parliament must consider the public demand for the death penalty to be applied in the case of the coup plotters.
"[Erdogan] said that all the signals coming from society must be considered. I think this is a tactical response. I am absolutely sure that the death penalty in Turkey will not be restored," Isa Gambar, who was acting president of Azerbaijan in the 1990s, said.
Earlier on Monday, the highest level of a terror alert has been declared in Almaty following an armed attack on police officers Monday, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
At least two gunmen engaged in a shootout with Almaty law enfocement earlier in the day with the death toll standing at five killed and seven in critical condition. Both suspects were later detained.
Initial reports suggested three officers and one civilian dead and eight people more wounded.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev ordered his interior minister to visit the southern city of Almaty following a deadly shooting.
A worker checks steel product files at a cold rolling mill of Tangsteel Group Ltd in Tangshan, Hebei province. [Photo/China Daily]
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.
According to witnesses, the accused had repeatedly bullied a six year old junior schoolmate over his "runny nose" for some days. When the younger boy lost patience and retorted the verbal abuses, the older one became enraged, triggering a brawl between the two. The accused reportedly kicked the victim several times in the stomach and testicles. School authorities took the victim to a nearby hospital, where he was administered first-aid and sent back home.
Later, in the evening, the victim complained of sharp pain in his testicles. He was again rushed to the hospital, where he underwent multiple surgeries to stop internal bleeding. However, he succumbed to his injuries.
ASTANA (Sputnik) Kazakh Interior Ministry has earlier put the death toll at four, including three policemen and one civilian.
"As a result of attack, five policemen and civilians were killed, another seven were wounded," the authorities said in a statement.
with
police
are conducting
searches
the
Incirlik base.
The Turkish prosecutor's officeat
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.
On Sunday, the US-led coalition resumed flights from the Incirlik airbase.
According to Sabah newspaper, Ozturk may be linked to Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen staying in self-imposed exile in the United States, who was blamed by Ankara for the attempted coup.
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 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.
Some 208 people were killed and over a thousand wounded in a coup attempt by a faction in the military on Friday. Turkish authorities have arrested over thousands of people, including a number of high-ranking military officials in connection with the failed coup.
The park is a biosphere reserve located in Sikkim, an Indian state located in the Himalayan Mountains. It received its name after the mountain Kanchenjunga which is 8,586 meters tall. The National Park also includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular, snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests. Its total area is 849.5 km
"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," UNESCO's official statement said.
The Ancient university of Nalanda, located in the modern-day Indian state of Bihar, comprises the archaeological remains of a monastic and scholastic institution dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. It includes stupas, shrines, viharas (residential and educational buildings) and important art works in stucco, stone and metal.
"Nalanda stands out as the most ancient university of the Indian Subcontinent. It engaged in the organized transmission of knowledge over an uninterrupted period of 800 years," the statement said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Previously, Candas was in a critical condition after an unknown attacker shot him earlier on Sunday. The assailant has been detained by police.
The Sisli district is run by the opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP).
Now, it all depends on how China would use it. India is well within in rights to open up all the valleys that are there. If you look back 50 years ago, there were hardly any such areas available to India because they were inaccessible. Today, surely, India is moving forward into its own territory and is opening up these areas. Parma valley is also one of those areas which hitherto have been untouched and now when we open this sector, it gives us accessibility to the Western Highway which was opened by China, which India had also objected to that it is unethical on the part of China.
Now, with India opening up the valley, China has no legs to stand down because it is within Indian territory and India will be well within its right to (not exactly to threaten because India does not threaten any country) but certainly to exert its influence, should there be some mischief going on in that area."
Western Highway connects Xinjiang in China's southwest with Tibet after which it branches off near Quilanaldi and becomes the Karakoram Highway. This is the way through which Pakistan and China could launch a joint offensive against India.
India proposed more regular meetings of the Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crimes besides regular meetings under the ambit of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Cyber Security Cooperation signed during the visit of the Indian Prime Minister to Malaysia in November last year.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that the Ministry of Home Affairs is studying the comments of Malaysia on the draft MoU on Combating Transnational Crime and hoped it would be signed expeditiously. India will also fast track the MoU on Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners.
India expressed its concerns regarding terrorists who plan their terrorist activities from abroad and also sought cooperation from Malaysia.
"We appreciate the close cooperation between our security agencies, particularly the Malaysian Special Branch on Counter-Terrorism which has been working closely with the Intelligence Bureau," Home Minister Rajnath Singh said.
India and Malaysia also discussed the issues of Extradition Treaty and Fake Indian Currency Notes.
Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Dato Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi is on a three day visit to India. He will have discussions with Industry Minister of Telangana on Tuesday.
The DPRK has conducted a series of tests in recent months. These have been condemned by the United Nations, with the US, South Korea, China, and Russia urging Pyongyang to tone down its actions. Harsh new sanctions were put in place in response to earlier tests.
Last month, the DPRK claimed to have successfully launched an intermediate-range missile with a range of 3,000 miles.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Earlier in July, media reported about plans of Sofia and Tehran to conduct a deal on purchasing "secondhand" reactors for the needs of Iranian nuclear power plant in southwestern city of Bushehr.
"This claim is completely false since nuclear reactors cannot become secondhand to begin with," Salehi said, as quoted by the Iranian Mehr news agency.
At the same time he added that Bulgaria wanted to sell the equipment it had after the cancellation of project on construction of two reactors with Russia's Rosatom state-owned nuclear energy corporation.
This consolidation of power is raising tensions with the US and European Union, with concerns that the presidents resort to repression will bring his Western partners into disrepute.
The West may be vexed by Erdogans truculence, but the strategic importance of his regime for both the US-led NATO military alliance and the EU suggest that they will turn a blind to his excesses even if those excesses involve further violation of democratic rights.
Washingtons NATO agenda of encircling, undermining Russia; and the EUs desperate need to halt the influx of refugees mean that Erdogan knows he can crackdown at will. The West may mouth misgivings, but in the end their priority concerns have little to do with international law or democratic rights. And the savvy Erdogan knows that.
The statement added that social media rumors that the situation is linked to a start of an unprising are false.
Informed sources told Sputnik that the killed police officer has been identified as Col. Artur Vanoyan. Three more were injured, they have been identified as Col. Aram Ovannisyan, Lt. Col. Grach Hotegyan, Subaltern Gagik Mkrtchyan.
What we see now is a picture of history being rewritten by Islamists, he said, adding that even though the reasons for Fridays attempted coup remain unknown, it was likely to strengthen the hand of President Erdogan and his government.
The Erdogan government will now rule supreme. He is a democratic hero now, the man people came out for, even though urged to do so by the clergy, as you said, Angelos Sigiros noted.
As for speculation about Erdogan allegedly being behind the coup, he said that this is something well never know.
Mentioning the impact the recent events in Turkey could have on relations between Ankara and Athens, Sigiros said he hoped that the Turkish army would be ordered to scale down its violations of the Greek airspace, at least for now.
Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that there had been an attempt to overthrow the government. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged the people to take to the 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 Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters had been detained and the country was returning to normal life.
YEREVAN (Sputnik) A group of armed men has seized a police station on the outskirts of Armenia's capital of Yerevan on Sunday.
"Following lengthy negotiations night to July 18, one policeman was freed, as well as the ambulance driver. The armed group is refusing to free the rest of the hostages, including high-ranking police officers, and to put down weapons and surrender to the authorities," the Security Service said in a statement.
Even though there were hundreds of police officers posted, the driver kept mowing down people along an almost 2-kilometer stretch of the promenade before being shot and killed by police in a blaze of gunfire.
The attack is added to a long list of Islamic terror attacks that began most notably on January 7, 2015, when two gunmen broke into the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, including two police officers.
A member of the al-Qaeda extremist group in Yemen claimed that the organization led the attack and it was carried out in response to the "ongoing desecration" of Muslim shrines in the media, according to a statement spread by media outlets.
On November 13 of that same year a series of suicide bombings and shootings shook Paris. Several extremists launched coordinated attacks across the city, killing some 130 people and injuring over 360 at several locations, including restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and in the vicinity of the Stade de France stadium.
A statement issued by Daesh later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Only 33 percent of respondents expressed confidence in the ability of the states authorities to repel the threat of terrorism and carry out the struggle against it, the survey carried out by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) for the French Le Figaro newspaper showed on Monday.
At the same time, 81 percent of individuals agree to accept more controls and limit their freedom to some extent to ensure safety, the polls results indicated.
YEREVAN (Sputnik) Earlier in the day, local media reported that four individuals, including Armenia's deputy police chief Maj. Gen. Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan's deputy police chief Col. Valeri Osipyan, were held captive.
"The armed group refused to lay down their arms and surrender. They are now holding five hostages. Negotiations are ongoing. We hope for a peaceful outcome," Pogosyan told reporters.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On July 13, May assumed the office of prime minister of the United Kingdom, following David Camerons official resignation.
"PM Theresa May will make her first visits to Europe on Wednesday & Thursday. Bilaterals with Chancellor Merkel & President @fhollande," the press office said via its official Twitter account.
The new May government is expected to trigger Article 50 of the EU Lisbon Treaty, after which the country will have two years to negotiate exit conditions from the bloc.
1. Take preventive measures, primarily aimed at jihadists.
2. Reorganize the domestic and foreign intelligence agencies thrown into a state of chaos by the previous governments.
3. Outlaw the activities of Salafite and Takfirist preachers and their financial donors on the territory of France.
4. Exert strong diplomatic and other pressure on the stimulators of Wahhabi terrorism, above all Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and to discourage some French politicians from being too chummy with these countries.
5. Confiscate the property and other assets of financial tycoons suspected of financing terrorists, and give them back only in case of these peoples unequivocal cooperation with French intelligence.
6. Closely coordinate our actions with Russian intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
7. Reopen the French Embassy in Damascus to facilitate the exchange of information to better track down terrorist groups.
8. Exert maximum diplomatic pressure on Turkey to force President Erdogan to break all ties with Daesh.
9. Terrorists are our enemies who must be eliminated. However, it is useless, often dangerous and even criminal, to wage regular wars against countries terrorists hide in. This is a US strategy aimed at destroying terrorists homes and killing many innocent people.
10. France needs to immediately distance itself from the US and NATO with their militarism and war-mongering.
11. Finally, we should keep in mind that Muslims are not our enemies as they are often the first victims of the abhorring terrorist attacks in Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Libya.
On Thursday night, a truck rammed into a large crowd that was celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. Eighty-four people were killed and dozens of others were injured.
According to ID documents found inside the truck, the driver was a 31-year-old man of Tunisian origin who was a resident of Nice.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) He underscored Moscow's interest in joint work on military and political security in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principle of mutual equality.
"NATO activity on our borders does not contribute to interaction. I want to emphasize in this regard that Russia will always be able to protect its interests, to ensure the safety of its citizens," Lavrov said at a press conference with his Portuguese counterpart.
Since 2014, the alliance has been building up its military presence in Europe, especially in Eastern European countries neighboring Russia, using Moscow's alleged interference in the Ukrainian conflict as a pretext. The Russian authorities have said such moves undermine stability.
The UK's political establishment supports the renewal of Trident, with PM May saying the deterrent is necessary in the current unstable global climate.
"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," the prime minister said in a statement.
#Trident debate will be Theresa May's first appearance in Commons as PM. She'll accuse critics of "reckless gamble" with security Tamara Cohen (@tamcohen) July 18, 2016
"We cannot abandon our ultimate safeguard out of misplaced idealism."
Proponents of Trident also argue that on top of losing international influence and putting the UK's national security at risk, scrapping the project could result in up to 15,000 jobs being lost in the nuclear defense industry.
Very proud to see my union @gmb_union standing up for skilled jobs in #plymouth by backing Trident renewal. I do too. Luke Pollard (@LukePollard) July 18, 2016
Conservative MPs, along with a majority of Labour lawmakers are expected to vote in favor of renewing the system.
Arguments Against
While the political and military establishment supports Trident's renewal, there has been a vocal campaign pushing for the UK to scrap its nuclear weapons, with Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn among the most high-profile critics.
Anti-Trident campaigners argue Britain should set an international example by scrapping its nuclear warheads, pointing to commitments made under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Will join almost every single other Scottish MP in voting against Trident renewal today #WMD pic.twitter.com/eIIJttHRf1 Angus Robertson (@AngusRobertson) July 18, 2016
There are also domestic arguments, with critics saying that costs to renew Trident could be better spent on social projects during this time of UK austerity.
While the UK government estimates replacing Trident would cost US$54 billion (41bn), critics such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) believes costs could be as high as US$270 billion (200bn).
"Many people feel that it's not the best use of taxpayers' money and national resources. They'd rather see it spent on heath, education, jobs and so on," CND general-secretary Kate Hudson told Sputnik.
Im happy to keep Trident as long as we rename it 50,000 New Nurses Or 1 Million Affordable Homes Plus New Schools And Hospitals. David Schneider (@davidschneider) July 18, 2016
While the Labour party is deeply spit on the matter of Trident, it is expected that leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, along with the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Green MP Caroline Lucas will vote against Trident's renewal.
MPs will hold a debate on the issue with a vote expected on Monday (July 18) evening.
With France facing its third terror attack in 18 months, questions are being raised as to whether the government is able to protect its people. The country held a minute's silence on Monday (July 18) in remembrance of the people who died on that fateful day. The crowd, however, openly booed the Prime Minister Manuel Valls as people held up signs calling for President Francois Hollande to resign.
Dr Steve Hewitt, a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham and an expert in security and terrorism, believes that the wider issue of alienation in France needs to be addressed, but in terms of this attack the difficulty lies in stopping lone individuals.
"In terms of the actual attack, there needs to be recognition that little can be done short of creating a police state and France is already in a state of emergency to stop lone individuals or small groups of individuals from carrying out such attacks. This is true in France. It is true in the United States (Orlando). It is true in the UK (Lee Rigby killing). It is true in Norway (Anders Breivik). It is true in Israel (numerous stabbing attacks carried out by individual Palestinians)," Dr Hewitt told Sputnik.
"Security is better at detecting larger plots, although even here there can be failures such as the 2015 Paris attacks and 7 July 2005 London bombings.
"So there is no foolproof security system and there never will be because terrorism is a form of asymmetrical warfare in which anything (a lorry, a kitchen knife) can be used in an attack," Dr Hewitt added.
When Bouhlel mentioned in his text message that he "now" had the weapons, investigators believe he may have been referring to the rented truck or to a deactivated grenade and a 7.65mm caliber pistol, which he used to shoot at the police during the attack and subsequently, to end his own life with.
Europol stands in solidarity w/ French citizens & continues to provide operational support to FR authorities https://t.co/6IgKfhA0Ri #Nice Europol (@Europol) July 15, 2016
France-TV reports Bouhlel procured the weapon from two Albanians, who are among six people currently in custody in connection with the case. Investigators also revealed that he had spent two days driving around Nice in a truck he had rented two days prior to the attack, allegedly looking for the best place to carry it out.
Bouhlel had also emptied his bank account, sold his car and then proceed to rent the white refrigerated truck, weighing 19 tons and which he used to carry out the slaughter of 84 people on Bastille Day in Nice.
The Turkish authorities have so far detained 6,000 people including members of the judiciary following 48 hours of turmoil that saw sections of the military attempt a coup to overthrow Erdogan's government. He has vowed to root out the state bodies at the heart of the revolt.
However, EU foreign ministers have expressed concerns that Erdogan's increasing grip on power and crackdown on opposition groups and the media are set to throw the EU-Turkey migrant deal into chaos. They desperately need Ankara's cooperation to stem the flow of migrants crossing into Europe.
As part of the deal, "irregular" migrants those refused asylum in Greece are relocated back to Turkey, in return on a one-for-one basis for Syrian refugees being relocated to EU member states. The deal includes the acceleration of Turkish accession into the EU and visa-free access for its citizens into the Schengen zone.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) detained an OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) interpreter recruited by Ukrainian intelligence services (SBU) to collect intelligence in the Luhansk Peoples Republic (LPR), the FSB press service said Monday.
"The Russian Federal Security Service unmasked and detained an SBU agent on Russian territory, Ukrainian citizen Artyom Aleksandrovich Shestakov, born in 1984, working as an interpreter of the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Ukraine," the FSB said.
It notes that Shestakov confessed to have traveled to Kiev in the summer of 2015, "where he was recruited into the SBU undercover unit under the alias Svarog by the employee of the department of protecting national statehood, Sergey Mikhailovych Slipchenko."
"[Turkey] cannot be a partner for the European Union if they even think about reintroducing the death penalty that is something we absolutely dont need," Mayer said.
"I dont think we can have a deal with a government like that, because at the end [of the day] it is not a democratic government they have military revolt and on the next day a list of 3,000 judges that you assure were involved in that military revolution, so I dont think the things are really going well there, so there should be no kind of negotiations or deal with that government, and we should think about sanctions," he said.
On Saturday morning, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stated that all coup supporters had been identified and would be apprehended as the country returns to normal. Over 290 people were killed and at least 1,400 injured during the attempted coup, according to the country's foreign ministry.
The rush with which the perpetrators were imprisoned sparked doubts as to whether the coup was real or fabricated.
YEREVAN (Sputnik) Earlier in the day, Armenia's deputy police chief, Unan Pogosyan, said that an armed group has been holding five people hostage in a police building in the capital city of Yerevan since Sunday.
"As a result of comprehensive measures carried out by law enforcement authorities, including negotiations, another hostage was freed from the seized territory," the service said in a statement.
Serious difficulties have been revealed in the German legal system regarding the deportation of refugees rejected by the country's authorities.
Often, illegal migrants can't be sent back to their countries of origin due to lack of necessary documents, the media source wrote, citing the secret data of the German Interior Ministry.
According to experts, asylum seekers in Germany deliberately use the strategy of "lacking documents" to make their deportation from the country difficult or even impossible.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On July 14, 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. The investigation found that the person behind the attack was Nice's 31-year-old resident of Tunisian origins Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel. On July 16, media reported that Daesh (is outlawed in many countries, including Russia) claimed responsibility for the attack.
"The investigation has not yet established the links between Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel and a terrorist group [Daesh]," Cazeneuve told local RTL broadcaster.
He also added that it could not be ruled out, that the attacker was an unbalanced and very violent individual, subjected to "rapid radicalization."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Home Army was the dominant Polish resistance movement in Poland occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was formed in February 1942 and later absorbed most other Polish underground forces with an aim to restore the Polish state with the support of the United Kingdom and the United States. Its allegiance was to the Polish Government-in-Exile.
According to the Gazeta Krakowska, Polish Home Army veteran Zbigniew Radlowski, 92, together with World Association of Home Army Soldiers accused ZDF of the infringement of personal rights, in particular, the right to national identity, the right to national pride and dignity and freedom from hate speech.
He said: "Given the importance of this sector to both of our economies, progress here has been noticeably and painfully slow."
#TTIP Chief Negotiators Dan Mullaney (US) & Ignacio Garcia Bercero (EU) just arrived at the TTIP Stakeholders Event pic.twitter.com/AURuKSXB5X US Mission to the EU (@US2EU) July 13, 2016
The fact that the UK is set to leave the EU leaves a significant hole in the TTIP deal. As Mullaney put it:
"Imagine if the United States said, for instance, 'Well, maybe TTIP will not apply to California?' "
Dispute Tribunal
The TTIP would create the biggest trading zone in the world opening up the EU and US markets to each other. However, the talks have been mired in controversy because of their secretive nature, disagreements over regulatory issues food safety and genetic modification in particular and the contentious Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism.
Time to hit the stop button on #TTIP. Our comment at the end of the 14th negotiation round: https://t.co/DHnP7VQCkU pic.twitter.com/X5aWiYPhi7 Greenpeace EU (@GreenpeaceEU) 15 July 2016
One of the major stumbling blocks has been over the detail of regulatory difference between the US and the EU. A common trade agreement requires commonality of regulatory issues. None is more important than food and farming affecting what people put in their mouths.
Food regulations in the EU and the US are different, with the EU being less open to genetic modification that the US. In order to have a trade agreement, the two sides need to agree on a common regulatory framework.
In the event of a US firm not being allowed to sell is products such as beef and pork treated with growth hormones, chicken washed in chlorine, fruit and vegetables treated with endocrine-disrupting pesticides and genetically engineered and modified foods, as are all currently allowed in the US in the EU, the firm could sue the EU or member states.
Such a situation would trigger the controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which critics say is a secretive trade tribunal system, separate from EU member states judiciary systems.
"It is very difficult for the French authorities to control these people at the moment when they start to radicalize, because thanks to their French passports, they easily enter and leave the country. Many Syrians, Tunisians, Algerians do not need a visa to stay in France. They are its citizens," Kempin explained.
A similar point pf view has been expressed by political expert Alexandre Del Valle. According to him, terrorists are trying to target countries with heterogeneous populations in an attempt to provoke civil wars across Europe.
"The Islamists view France as an unfaithful country that most of all offended the Prophet and Islam, and limited the rights of radical Muslims, or even just those who strictly follow the rituals. Secondly, it is also a country which is home to most Muslims in Europe," Del Valle told Sputnik.
Among other factors, Kempin named poor coordination among secret services and domestic reasons, such as strict separation of church and state.
"France is a secular state. The authorities presume that they should not be involved in religious matters. Therefore, they have for a long time not been interested in what is happening, especially in French Muslim communities. As a result, the radicalization that took place there in the past had not been noticed by the state, because it is simply believed it shouldn't be concerned," Kempin said.
Former adviser to the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Internal Affairs of France, Colonel Alan Korvez also believes that Paris has to start cooperating with Syrian forces to better deal with the militants.
Foreign policy must change; diplomacy does not work anymore, because this is not the first time that France is faced with real threats. EU leaders must objectively respond to what is happening. The reality is that without coordination with Russia and the Syrian army, we will not be able to defeat the terrorists, Korvez told Izvestia newspaper.
He said that it is vital to work more closely with both the Russian army in Syria and the Syrian government forces to exchange relevant information because according to him Syria's secret service is actually better aware of all that is happening on the battlefield and beyond and has the information regarding who and from which countries has joined the terrorists.
France must change its policy, because we are really faced with the strongest threat of terrorism. Russia is making great efforts to deal with the radicals; it has experience in combating terrorism. If we join forces, we will be able to crush the militants, Korvez told the publication.
On July 14, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the city of Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origins Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
On July 16, media reported that Daesh, which is outlawed in many countries, including Russia, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Maybe after Chilcots report they will put Blair on trial, but this is essentially a case of Western democracies committing a crime against peace. And will Iran now be able to bring Britain and the US before an international court? Pavic wondered.
The Chilcot report also raised the question of why the Americans and their British allies were so eager to make war on Iraq resorting to outright lies and violations of international law to make that invasion happening.
During a 1999 meeting with the Pentagons then number three man, Paul Wolfowitz, General Wesley Clark said that after the 1991 Gulf War First Iraq War Wolfowitz told him that America had proved its ability to use military force in the region and that there was nothing the Soviet Union could do to stop that. He said that we have 5 to 10 years to wipe out all this Soviet clientele Syria, Iraq and Iran before another superpower comes along. Alexandar Pavic continued.
He added that after the 9/11 attacks a senior US military officer told Clark that within the next five years we are going to get rid of the government of seven countries. Well start with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran will follow suit.
Dragomir Adnjelkovic, another Serbian political scientist, joined in saying that back in the 1990s The New York Times had learned about the Pentagons plans to control sources of oil and gas.
Hence their move to the oil-rich Middle East and North Africa, he said, adding that was exactly why the Americans needed to get rid of regimes which did not accommodate their interest and could someday join forces with Americas geopolitical enemies.
Those were secular regimes that held the Islamic fundamentalists in check and knew how to prevent the spread of their ideas to Europe. These regimes are gone now and we now have all these terrible things happening in the Old World, Adnjelkovic emphasized.
He added that the West had opened Pandoras Box, that what just happened in Nice will happen again. This process cant be stopped even if the US and the EU agree to fight terrorism. jointly with Russia.
Without the big lie that sparked the war in Iraq and the Wests predilection for dealing with Radical Islamists there would have been no terrorist attacks in Europe, Alexander Pavic joined in, mentioning the Western countries past cooperation with Islamists in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and now in Syria.
On July 14, 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. The investigation found that the person behind the attack was Nice's 31-year-old resident of Tunisian origin Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel. On July 16, media reported that Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Paris prosecutor also said that the Nice attacker was attracted to radical Islam.
"We examined his computer, we were also able to see some other searches on the internet from July 1, 2016, until July 13, 2016, almost on a daily basis he was researching first of all videos with regard to Quran and also religious chants that Daesh in particular use as propaganda," Molins told reporters, adding that the perpetrators ties to Daesh have not been proven.
The lives of 19 people injured in the Nice truck attack are still in danger, the Paris prosecutor said.
"Currently 74 people remain in hospitals, 28 of those are in intensive care units, the lives of 19 are in danger." According to the official, 71 bodies out of 84 have been identified.
ATHENS (Sputnik) The Turkish military brought tanks to the streets and flew attack helicopters and fighter jets low over Turkish key cities last Friday in a failed takeover attempt. The eight service members flew a Black Hawk to Greek city of Alexandropoulis on the Turkish border where they claimed asylum. Ankara wants them extradited.
The men appeared in the Greek court on Monday. They are being tried for illegally crossing into the Greek territory. The judge agreed to give them three more days to prepare the case, according to the Athens news agency. They will remain in custody.
PARIS (Sputnik) Security measures were reportedly strengthened during the event, including a reinforced police presence supported by the military and gendarmes and the entrances to the promenade were blocked.
"I want to thank all the 42,000 people, who came today to the Promenade des Anglais to take part in the mourning rally," he wrote on his official account on Twitter.
Je veux remercier les 42000 personnes presentes sur la Promenade des Anglais pour cet hommage #minutedesilence #Nice06 Christian Estrosi (@cestrosi) 18 2016 .
On July 14, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the city of Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
However, after a surge in US$4 subscriptions, Corbyn was swept to power in 2015. It left him at odds with most of his MPs, a vast majority of whom represent the center ground and who say they have a popular mandate, having been returned to parliament in the 2015 election.
Corbyn known to be a euroskeptik ran a lackluster campaign for Britain to remain in the EU, ahead of the In-Out referendum on Britain's membership of the union, which led to a vote of no confidence, which he lost 172 to 40.
The Parliamentary Labour Party meet Monday evening (July 18) to decide whether declared candidates who have put their names forward to take on Corbyn Angela Eagle and Owen Smith should both stand and potentially split the vote or to call for one of them to pull out.
I'm standing again for Labour's leadership. Register to vote and we can change politics in Britain.https://t.co/mI4tp5FKAK Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) 17 July 2016
Meanwhile, the US$4 registered supporter scheme has been effectively scrapped, with the fee now standing at US$33 to have a chance at voting. When Corbyn stood for leader, 200,000 people joined Labour and another 120,000 have joined in the last month. The current run-off will pitch Corbyn and the left-wing grassroots as well as the unions against the center ground band of MPs.
If Corbyn wins again and there is a real possibility he will gain a higher mandate there are likely to be calls for a split in the party, with Corbyn overseeing the biggest crisis in the party since the 1980s.
BERLIN (Sputnik) Death penalty is incompatible with the European principles, the German Foreign Minister said on Monday, calling on Turkey not to take a step back in the negotiations with the European Union.
"In the talks I will have with Turkey, I will show that the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey became an important step to be made to start the EU accession negotiations. I hope that Turkey will not go back on the chosen path. Anyways, even from a legal point of view the death penalty is incompatible with the European principles," Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters after a EU foreign ministers meeting.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On Saturday, following the Nice terrorist attack which claimed the lives of 84 people, the head of the French government in his address to the nation admitted that "times have changed and we should learn to live with terrorism."
"The scandalous statement by the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls is a mental capitulation to Islamism. The AfD will not tolerate it," Pazderski, who is also a member of AfD's national board, said, adding that terrorism cannot be a normal state for EU citizens.
He also criticized mainstream German politicians that "seem to think the same way" and blasted the "culture of welcome" and "red-carper rolling out" for those returning from the so-called Daesh.
However, Confronting terrorism and renewing the United Kingdoms Trident nuclear deterrent is not a choice in the face of a variety of threats facing the country, British Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday.
It is not a choice. What this country needs to do is to recognize that it faces a variety of threats and make sure that it has the capabilities that are necessary and appropriate to deal with each of those threats, May told lawmakers.
Singling out the perceived nuclear threat from Russia and North Korea, the prime minister argued that threat has not gone away, if anything it has increased.
You cannot develop a deterrent fast enough to respond to a new and unforeseen nuclear threat. So the decision on whether to renew our nuclear deterrent hinges not only on what we face today, but also on an assessment of what the world would be like over the coming decades, she stressed.
May also said she would authorize a nuclear strike as she set out her case for the Trident nuclear deterrents renewal to lawmakers.
"Yes," May said when asked if she was personally prepared to authorize a nuclear strike. "The whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) A NATO summit was held on July 8-9 in Poland's capital and focused on relations with Russia. During the summit, the Alliance decided to strengthen its military presence in Eastern Europe on a rotational basis with four battalions in Poland and in the Baltic nations.
"We are not talking only about a few battalions we are adding[ultra-fast response] forces, the US brigade and missile shield base in Redzikowo. During different periods of time, even 10 thousand NATO soldiers could be placed in Poland. This is significant military support. For us, this is a geostrategic shift in the balance of forces in the East," the minister told the weekly Do Rzeczy.
Since 2014, NATO has been building up its military presence in Europe, especially in Eastern European countries neighboring Russia, using Moscows alleged interference in the Ukrainian conflict as a pretext. Moscow has repeatedly denied the claims and warned NATO that the military buildup on Russias borders is provocative and threatens the existing strategic balance of power.
Yet, according to Coburn, who said he had a meeting with European Parliament President Martin Schulz last week, a deal that maintained Scotlands EU membership would face a multitude of challenges.
"As far as he [Schulz] is concerned, the Scottish nationalists are wasting their time because there would be tremendous problems with Spain, with the Baltic countries et cetera about this and they would veto any Scottish entry. As far as Schulz is concerned Scotland would have to leave the European Union and have to reapply again and in doing that it would have to have the Euro," Coburn explained.
He added that such a move would mean that Scotland would lose the British rebate and that its contributions to the European Union would rise tremendously. "In addition we would have to accept open door migration which the Scots have plainly rejected many times," Coburn noted.
He also criticized the SNPs refusal to accept Junes UK-wide EU referendum result which the Scottish party had fully participated and campaigned in.
"The SNP are always appalling losers. They lost the Scottish independence referendum, theyve never accepted that result and I do not believe the SNP are a democratic party. I think they are an authoritarian party," Coburn said.
Scottish voters took part in an independence referendum in September 2014 that saw 55 percent of voters backing Scotlands continued membership of the United Kingdom which was established in 1707.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On July 14, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the city of Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
According to the La Reppublica, the Digos police started investigation after they have been informed by French colleagues that several Bari residents of Tunisian origins were in touch with Bouhlel, with one of those having a phone call with Nice attacker only several hours before the attack.
On July 16, it was reported in the media that the Islamic State, which is outlawed in many countries, including Russia, claimed responsibility for the attack. According to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a link between the alleged perpetrator and the IS group has not been established yet.
The police officer noted that the French justice system should have a harder stance toward criminals. According to him, judges often have a soft attitude to those who commit crimes in particular foreigners with resident permits and release them on parole instead of deporting them from the country.
On July 14 a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the city of Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old Nice resident of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
"It would be right if the convicts would be deprived of their residence permits, forced to return to their countries and banned from staying in France," he said. "It is necessary that people who commit crimes of ordinary criminal nature, would, at least serve a full sentence. Often, before going to prison, some of them have committed 50 small crimes and still have not been sentenced," the police officer said.
Earlier on Monday, it was reported that one of the Russians, who were wounded in a terrorist attack, has departed from France to Russia. Another woman, also from Russia, is still in the hospital.
On July 14, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the city of Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
"I have informed my colleges on urgent measures which should be taken to support the families of the victims, injured and suffered [from the attack]. Unfortunately, the results are tragic. It [the attack] has hit 27 nationalities. These are French of all descents and religions, who meet dreadful end or having been injuredand also tourists, guests, parents and friends who came to Nice to participate in the event of celebrating the unity of our common values."
Ayrault added that the identification of those who died in the attack was still underway.
According to the Evening Standard, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is holding an "emergency protest" at the Parliament Square, where several peace activists hold speeches and participants hold fabric banners with the inscription "No Trident", "Scotland Says Trident No More" and "Scrap Trident."
Nuclear weapons have catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Powerful @Medact protest at Parliament #stoptrident pic.twitter.com/VAg1QENCaK ICAN UK (@ICAN_UK) July 18, 2016
Earlier in the day, May said that confronting terrorism and renewing the Trident nuclear deterrent is not a choice in the face of a "variety" of threats facing the country. May also added she was personally prepared to authorize a nuclear strike if need be.
On Monday, French leaders held a moment of silence to mourn the 84 killed in the Bastille Day attack last Thursday. In Nice, however, the site of the attack, this moment was bookended by loud cries of protest aimed at Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Gathers chanted "resign, resign," with others also calling for French President Francois Hollande to step down.
"The government promises us things but nothing sticks," Nice city resident Antony Fernandez said. "What have they done up to now to make us feel safe? And yet what do we expect? Every six months were going to mourn for more dead?"
"We are able to confirm now that a third US citizen Nicolas Leslie was killed in last weeks attack," Toner stated.
The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to the deputy minister, Russian and Turkish officials are "in constant talks" and have held several phone calls following the attempted coup.
"We are closely monitoring the situation in Turkey. The Turkish side assured us that all measures are being taken to ensure the safety of Russian nationals staying in that country," Meshkov told reporters.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russians are temporary unable to fly to Turkey following the failed coup attempt in the country, Vice President of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia (ATOR) Dmitry Gorin said Monday.
"Foreign nationals are currently able to fly to Turkey with Turkish Airlines, but Russian nationals are temporarily unable to fly to Turkey not to Istanbul, Ankara, or Antalya not to anywhere," Gorin told RIA Novosti.
He added that this is a temporary measure.
ANKARA (Sputnik) The Turkish Armed Forces should not be confused with the military faction behind an attempt of a coup that unfolded late last week, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday as he thanked supporters.
"Please do not mix up these villains with honor[able] and devoted members of the Turkish Armed Forces, they are the apple of our eye, and our Armed Forces and our police department worked tremendously hard and strived to ensure that Turkey is kept safe and sound," Yildirim said in a televised address.
He argued that the coup plotters "should be seen as villains and members of terrorist organizations presenting themselves as pseudo-soldiers."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. On Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that Turkish airspace was closed due to the coup attempt in the country.
"In this regard, [Russian aerial operation in Syria] in terms of our agreement with Syrians, there will not be any problems," Lavrov said at a press conference.
Russia has conducted an aerial campaign in Syria since September 2015 after the official request by the country's president, Bashar Assad. On March 14, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to withdraw most of the country's military aviation after accomplishing its objective in the fight against terrorism.
The European Parliament condemned Al-Wefaq's suspension calling for "an immediate halt to the suppression of different political opinions in the country and the repression of their leading representatives, regardless of their political or religious affiliation."
Critics Slam 'Repressive Acts'
The latest development to dissolve the group has been slammed by critics, described as a "further repression of freedom" in a joint letter signed by NGOs, including the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD).
"We, the undersigned NGOs, strongly condemn the escalation of the Bahraini government's attacks on political societies, and its repressive acts against all forms of peaceful dissent," the letter reads.
Further Repression of Freedom of Association: Bahrain Dissolves Al-Wefaq, the Largest https://t.co/rVH712i7nz pic.twitter.com/KcEmdS46Hc BIRD (@BirdBahrain_) July 18, 2016
The NGOs have taken aim at legal processes in the Gulf kingdom, which has a Sunni government, but a majority Shia Muslim population, saying that Al-Wefaq representatives had not been given a proper opportunity to defend their case.
"Despite the prevention of proper, or even adequate, legal representation, and the refusal of access to important documents to form defense pleading the Bahraini judiciary took the decision to irrevocably dissolve Al-Wefaq and liquidate its assets after just one month since its closure."
Pressure on UK, US to Act
The criticism has also led to calls for Bahrain's western allies, the US, UK and EU, to publicly denounce the crackdown on political dissidence.
Despite allegations of human rights breaches, Bahrain remains a key ally for the West, hosting the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, while plans have been established for the creation of a British Naval base in the kingdom.
Many western countries have also been criticized for continuing their sale of arms to Bahrain and their refusal to publicly condemn the heavy-handed actions taken by Bahraini security forces in quashing dissent
@BorisJohnson I am deeply concerned by the decision of the Bahraini High Administrative Court to dissolve Al #Wefaq. #Bahrain UK Embassy Bahrain (@UKinBahrain) July 17, 2016
NGO Bahrain Center for Human Rights called upon the US, Britain and the EU to "denounce the government of Bahrain's actions, immediately suspend arms sales to Bahrain, and to urge it to call off the decision to dissolve Al-Wefaq Society, and to respect the rights to freedom of association."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Late on Friday, an attempted coup d'etat took place in Turkey with tanks and fighter jets seen on the streets of the capital, Ankara, and the largest city, Istanbul, as the military tried to take over the country. By early Saturday, the coup has been suppressed.
Following its failure, some social media and Turkish opposition figures claimed the takeover attempt may have been "staged" by the government, so that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could gain more support and consolidate power.
"It is a conspiracy theory, there was a real attempt at a military coup, in which a considerable group of the armed forces took part, " Isa Gambar, who used to serve as acting president of the Republic of Azerbaijan, said.
ANKARA (Sputnik) The pilots were contacted by radio and warned that their flight is illegal, at which point they responded by claiming to be acting on the orders of the air force command and turned off the radio equipment, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported, citing military sources.
The jets were refueled in the air by two tanker aircraft manned by coup supporters from Incirlik Air Base in Adana. The F-16s were later forced to land when pro-government fighter jets arrived from various bases from across the country, according to the news outlet.
The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish authorities stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country returned to normal. Over 290 people were killed and at least 1,400 injured during the attempted coup, according to the country's Foreign Ministry.
BERLIN (Sputnik) This comes after Turkey blocked senior German politicians from visiting the airbase in southern Turkey to meet German soldiers serving there as part of the countrys commitment to fight Islamic State terror group in Syria and Iraq.
"If after a while the Turkish government still stubbornly rejects all efforts and diplomacy and denies access of lawmakers I cannot imagine that the parliament, which is being barred from meetings its own troops, will vote for this [continued deployment to the airbase]," Seehofer said at a press briefing in Munich.
The Bavarian top official added this should be viewed in the context of Germanys surveillance mission in the US-led international operation in Syria and Iraq.
"Squadrons of the seventh army brigade, supported by tribal fighters, international coalition aircraft, [Iraq's] Air Force and artillery, have managed to liberate the ad-Dulab to the West of the Hit city," Zubai told the Alsumaria television broadcaster.
Iraqi troops launched a large-scale offensive against Daesh militants last summer. In December 2015, they drove Islamists out of the Anbar provincial capital Ramadi, in preparation for the operation to recapture the Daesh stronghold in Fallujah.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Late on Friday, an attempt of a military coup took place in Turkey with tanks seen on the streets of the capital of Ankara and the largest city of Istanbul, as the military tried to take control of the country. By early Saturday the coup had been suppressed.
"Turkey is no longer the same country as it was before the coup. Although the democratic[ally] elected leader has prevailed, Turkey is a deeply divided country. Erdogan must seek cooperation and consensus inside Turkey. If he does not do that then Turkeys democratic institutions and sovereignty will be in danger," Takis Hadjigeorgiou said.
Hadjigeorgiou said that such division always leads to crises similar to what Turkey is currently facing.
AP Photo / Bram Janssen In this Wednesday, May 27, 2015 photo, a resident of Eski Mosul, Iraq is seen through barbed wire while passing the former base of the Islamic State group in the town while it was under the militants' control
The broadcaster added that they appealed to the Russian Embassy in Turkey and that the Russian Foreign Ministry is now engaged in clarifying the location Trushnin.
Late on Friday, the Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup was taking place in the country. The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters had been identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal. Nearly 6,000 people have already been detained.
REN TV is one of the largest private federal TV channels in Russia.
Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu went even further, claiming Washington had been preparing the coup for several months: For many months we have sent requests to the US concerning Fethullah Gulen. The US must extradite him."
Washington rejected an extradition request as groundless, saying theres no credible proof of Gulens alleged involment.
The US is not going to extradite this guy and I think he probably didnt have much role in the coup, Ivan Eland, a defense analyst, outlined in an interview with RT.
Eland continued by stating that the deepening contradictions between NATOs two largest militaries will definitely adversely affect the alliance, as well as joint efforts such as the anti-Daesh military campaign.
Turkey, who has long been the key partner of Americans in the Middle East, is no longer seen as a reliable ally by Washington now. The instability that has plagued the country, caused by the policies of its own leader, the analyst added.
NATO counts on Turkey as being an island of stability in that area but, of course, Turkey has been anything but recently with ISIS attacks, Kurdish rebellion, inflamed by Erdogan himself and, of course, you have all these refugees flowing in their tooth.
On the other hand, Turkey will likely to reconsider its relations with NATO that hasnt rushed to help the legitimate leader of one of its member countries when the attempted overthrow was underway.
BERLIN (Sputnik) NATO Summit in Poland's capital was held on July 8-9 and focused on relations with Russia. During the summit the Alliance decided to strengthen its military presence in Eastern Europe on a rotational basis with four battalions in Poland and in the Baltic nations.
"There were major concerns that the relations [between Russia and NATO] would worsen after the NATO summit. I think that the Russian side has accepted the fact that the summit had some sort of a dual outcome," Erler said, explaining that on the one hand the Alliance had decided to enhance its presence in Poland and the Baltic states, but on the other it had "offered a hand" to Moscow.
"It is already known that there is a need for the issues of [Russian] military aircraft flights over the Baltic Sea near NATO's borders and the necessity to put an end to approaching NATO's aircraft by them <> We have proposed for several times that a new meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, which has been held for a second time since April 20, could be used for discussions of technical steps aimed at the de-escalation. And I hope that it is not an end and the discussions would continue," Erler said in an interview.
In April 2014, NATO decided to suspend civilian and military cooperation under the NRC with Russia, however, means of political dialogue and channels for military to military communication remain open, according to NATO's press service.
Crimea's airspace is well protected as it is. The 12 anti-aircraft missile regiment of the 31st Air Defense Division stationed in Sevastopol and the 18th anti-aircraft missile regiment of the 31st Air Defense Division deployed to the port town of Feodosia are currently tasked with making sure that Crimean skies are safe.
The former has the S-300 (NATO reporting name SA-10 Grumble) long range surface-to-air missile system at its disposal. The latter will receive the S-400. Russia's powerful over-the-horizon Podsolnukh (Sunflower) radar capable of detecting and tracking stealth fifth-generation planes has also been deployed to the region.
Crimea's current air defense system might not seem as formidable as the one the Black Sea Peninsula used to have prior to 1991, but this is not the case. "The S-300PM and the S-400 systems are far superior in terms of their efficiency and fire power to those anti-missile systems that used to be deployed to the area" during the Cold War, the media outlet noted.
That is due to the fact that only in the South China Sea, the Chinese navy has a real chance to ensure the safety of its nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles.
However, the JL-2 missiles, which took the Chinese industry a great deal of effort to bring to the stage of being ready for taking into service, has a range of no more than 8,000 km.
According to the analyst, these missiles are not able to reach the US from the South China Sea but they can be useful in attacking any of the US bases and its US allies across Asia.
However, these rockets cannot solve the main problem- the US nuclear deterrent. Hence, China has been working on new missiles with a longer range but, strictly speaking, there is no reason as yet, to believe that such missiles are ready to enter service.
Development of rockets and the design and construction of nuclear missile submarines are sometimes difficult to synchronize. First submarines of project 094 were built a few years earlier than the missiles JL-2 were finished.
Unilateral buildup of missile defense systems could harm stability in the world, while one country cannot ensure its own safety at the expense of other states, the SCO states said in the final declaration of the organizations summit in Tashkent which took place in late-June.
"Talking about a SCO missile defense system, not all the countries can do that, except for Russia and China," Valdimir Evseyev, senior analyst at the Institute of CIS Countries, said.
His opinion was shared by Vladimir Petrovskiy from the Institute for Far Eastern Studies, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"Russia and China could be the driving force for such an initiative. Special attention should be paid to ground-based intercepting systems we have in service," he said.
He also noted that recently the US, South Korea and Japan conducted drills with use of the Aegis missile defense system. According to him, Russia and China could respond to the move with a joint exercise at the Ashuluk training range in Russias Astrakhan Region.
Russia and China has already gained joint experience in missile defense training. For example, in May, Russia and China conducted the first computerized missile defense drills.
The main goal of the Aerospace Security 2016 exercise was to practice joint air defense and missile defense actions against "occasional and provocative missile attacks."
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) In the first of two exercises, named Sea Shield, Charlottetown will practice combat readiness, including anti-submarine warfare, the release explained.
"[C]harlottetowns participation in joint activities and training exercises improves our interoperability with NATO allies and other partners, and better prepares us to meet our collective defense and deterrence obligations," the frigates Commander Andrew Hingston said in the release.
Ankara wants the US to extradite the influential Muslim preacher, whom the Turkish president and his supporters accuse of masterminding the coup. Gulen has denied these charges.
Erdogan made a direct appeal to US President Barack Obama in the hours following the Friday night violence. "I'm once again calling on you, I'm saying: Extradite this man in Pennsylvania to Turkey now," he said.
Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim went further, saying that "any country that stands behind [Gulen] is no friend of Turkey" and "is engaged in a serious war with Turkey." Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu maintained that Washington is to blame for the putsch. "The US is behind the coup attempt. A few journals that are published there have been conducting activities for several months," he said.
"We talked about the EU-US economic relationship. And our shared goal to conclude an ambitious TTIP this year," Kerry said at a joint press conference with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Brussels.
He added that the agreement became more important in light of London's decision to leave the 28-nation bloc and could "act as a counter" to any negative outcomes of negotiations between the United Kingdom and the European Union on the issue of Brexit.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Khan urges all the Londoners to support the campaign sending #LondonIsOpen via social networks, the statement added.
"The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has today launched a major campaign to show that London is united and open for business and to the world following the EU referendum. #LondonIsOpen will show the world that London remains entrepreneurial, international, and full of creativity and possibility, while reassuring the more than one million foreign nationals who live in London that they will always be welcome, and that any form of discrimination will not be tolerated," the statement said.
During his years in power (as prime minister since 2003 and as president since 2014) Erdogan has been known as an advocate of tough measures. In 2013, mass anti-government protests were violently oppressed in Istanbul, eight people were killed.
One the most notable trials under Erdogans rule was the case of an attempted military coup by the Ergenekon, an alleged clandestine ultra-nationalist organization. In 2013, 16 people, including former Chief of the Turkish General Staff Ilker Basbug, were imprisoned for life for the 2013 attempt of a military coup. Military commanders, politicians, teachers and journalists also received different sentences in connection with the case.
When the putsch is finally quelled Erdogan will be free to go with a crackdown, said Vladimir Avatkov, head of the Center for Eastern Studies, International Relations and Public Diplomacy. Now, Erdogan will be able to implement his plan to establish super presidential rule in Turkey.
According to the Turkish constitution, the prime minister has more powers than the president. Erdogan was not allowed to become prime minister for the fourth time. In 2014 he organized the first direct presidential election in Turkey and won it. Since then, he has repeatedly called for a constitutional reform to give more powers to the president.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Earlier in the day, the US delegation of five lawmakers from the Senate and the House of Representatives and headed by Sen. Brian Schatz arrived in Seoul. The delegation held talks with South Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam.
"The Senator mentioned that despite somewhat heated discussions on foreign policy in the US presidential election campaign in 2016, the US Congress, both the Senate and the House of Representatives, renders bipartisan support on the importance of the ROK-US cooperation across the board, including foreign and military affairs, economy and culture, which buttresses the bilateral ties," the ministry said in a statement.
CAIRO/MOSCOW (Sputnik) The latest coup attempt in neighboring Turkey would affect the course of events in the Arab Republic, Samir Nashar said.
"It is now too late for the US administration to come to a political solution for the remaining term," Nashar said.
"We must wait and see the consequences of what happened in Turkey for the Syrian revolution and the nature of the struggle," Nashar stressed.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Speculation that the United States was involved in Fridays failed coup attempt in Turkey is false and damages relations between Washington and Ankara, US Ambassador to Turkey John Bass said in a press release on Monday.
"Some news reports and, unfortunately, some public figures have speculated that the United States in some way supported the coup attempt," Bass stated. "This is categorically untrue, and such speculation is harmful to the decades-long friendship between two great nations."
At the same time, the US would consider extraditing Fethullah Gulen to Turkey under the terms of the existing extradition agreement between Washington and Ankara, John Bass added.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Turkish officials have accused Gulen, a US permanent resident, of orchestrating a failed coup in the country on Friday.
"[W]e have been clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting their investigation into the coup attempt," Bass stated. "If Turkey decides to submit an extradition request for anyone legally resident in the United States, it will be considered under the terms of the US-Turkey extradition agreement."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Moscow-Cairo group, particularly its Moscow platform led by Jamil, proposed the idea of appointing several deputies for Assad, and delegating his full powers to them.
"The appetite comes with eating. When he [Assad] officially states his stance on our proposal [to appoint five deputies] then we will give additional proposals [on Syria's settlement]," Jamil said.
The Geneva talks on Syrian reconciliation were put on hold in early June until the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan after the latest round ended in April.
Moreover, US author Ralph Peters wrote: the "failed coup was Turkeys last hope to stop the Islamization of its government and the degradation of its society."
However, after the coup was thwarted the US stated that it supports the legitimate Turkish government, Pekin noted.
He added that there were signals coming from international organizations, think-tanks and media that there was the risk of a coup in Turkey but the armed forces did not take measures to prevent it.
"It was obvious that a coup attempt would be made. But the military command waited and failed to prevent the putsch," Pekin said.
However, according to him, a new coup attempt can be ruled out.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Turkish officials have accused Gulen of orchestrating a failed coup on Friday and called on the United States to extradite him to Turkey. However, the White House said Monday that there was no formal extradition request from Ankara.
"A formal written request for the extradition of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in the United States, will be submitted within days," Erdogan said in a world exclusive interview with CNN's Becky Anderson.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) The UN-brokered talks on Syrian reconciliation in Geneva were put on hold in early June after the latest round ended in April.
"We dont believe that this should have any long-term adverse effect on the work that we are doing in Syria," Farhan Haq told journalists.
There have been concerns that instability in Turkey could weaken Ankaras control of the border with Syria and the cross-border flow of fighters and weapons.
"Hopefully we can work in a constructive way that prevents a backsliding," Kerry said.
Speaking to Sputnik, director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute Ivan Eland suggested that political instability and an increasingly authoritarian rule in Turkey is "an embarrassment" to the alliance.
"For the United States, whatever they say in public, the end goal is stability in Turkey. I dont think they were happy about [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and his recent march towards authoritarianism," he said.
"But the march towards authoritarianism is now probably going to accelerate, since the military is giving them an excuse to crack down. The US probably is torn, realizing it would be one form of autocracy or the other, and that would be an embarrassment to NATO, which is supposed to be an alliance of democracies."
"Our expectation is that they are," Toner said, when asked whether officials from Turkey are coming to the coalition meeting.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States expects the coalition operations to get back to normal soon after being interrupted by the attempted coup.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) On Wednesday, the United States will co-host a pledging conference in Washington, DC that aims to raise funding for demining, stabilization and humanitarian assistance efforts in Iraq.
"Were [the United States] hoping to raise in excess of $2 billion in what has been a roughly six-and-a-half-week pledging effort," the State Department official stated on Monday. "We believe that we are going to hit that target of $2 billion on Wednesday."
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted military coup took place in the country, which they blamed on a group led by Gulen. Ankara called on the Obama administration to extradite Gulen who lives in self-imposed exile within the United States.
"The guy [Gulen] has to be indicted for a crime," Akerman told Sputnik on Monday. "It is hard to imagine because they [Turkish authorities] suspect him of doing something with a coup that thats enough unless they have him charged with some criminal act."
The major question, Akerman added, is how Ankara is going to prove that Gulen has committed the type of crime that would qualify under the extradition treaty.
On this episode of "By Any Means Necessary" host Eugene Puryear is joined by Anthony Torres to talk about the fight against the TPP and what progressives can expect in the lame duck session of Congress. Jane Kleeb, Chair of the Democratic Party of Nebraska discusses what its like organizing in red states and rural areas.
And a robust roundtable of lawyers and environmental activists from Earth Justice join Eugene to talk about intersections of climate justice, race and class, and continued efforts of to protest the poorest from the ill side effects of fossil and nuclear power plants.
Also, the ACLUs Kade Crockford joins in to breakdown a crucial federal court ruling that could limit how police use cell phone surveillance technology.
And later, author and activist David Swanson takes on the legality of President Obamas war against Daesh, and what the American people have learned about 9/11 following the release of a classified annex from the official Congressional report on the attacks.
VIENNA (Sputnik) The envoy's comment comes ahead of the upcoming IAEA diplomats' visit to Russia's Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant, as well as the uranium-enriching Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant, which will take place on July 19-21. The Beloyarsk power station is the only plant in the world using the innovative sodium-cooled BN-600 and BN-800 fast breeder reactors.
"We have always been saying that the nuclear sector is an area, where politics must not obstruct progress. Nuclear energy is here to stay for a long time, its technological cycle is noticeably longer than any political processes. A nuclear power station built today will work for several generations, our grandchildren will grow old when some of the world's modern-day stations will still be giving electricity," Voronkov, who represents Russia in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in an interview.
"This is one of the key areas of IAEA activity, ensuring sustainable nuclear fuel supply mechanisms for NPPs," Voronkov stressed.
The upcoming IAEA diplomats' visit to the innovative Russia Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) will be attended by a record number of diplomats from around the world, according to Voronkov.
"This will be the fourth visit along the lines of Russia's permanent mission to the IAEA since 2013. This time, a record number is coming, 21 diplomats and nuclear experts, 15 of them are ambassadors. This year, the geography of the visit's participants is broader than last year. Two are international organization staff from the IAEA and the European Union. Asia is represented very well, with ambassadors from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan as well as Qatar coming," Voronkov told Sputnik.
Regular visits by IAEA diplomats to Russia's nuclear enterprises helped to abate global skepticism about nuclear power that emerged in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
"I think that by cooperating with Rosatom, we were able to abate the 'Fukushima syndrome' that threatened the global nuclear industry with collapse. In this context, let's remember the recent skepticism shown by many countries toward the potential of nuclear industry's development and the decisions by the German and Swiss governments about the gradual shutdown of their nuclear power stations. Furthermore, there are regions in Africa and Asia where only nuclear energy is capable of ensuring a sustainable energy supply," Voronkov said.
Ambassadors have an opportunity of seeing the operation of nuclear power stations firsthand, as well as observing the safety standards implemented by Rosatom, Voronkov added, stressing that those diplomats who gain an understanding of the principles of work behind nuclear power can get rid of their fear of the atom.
"Many of them told me about this, this is very important in terms of promoting nuclear technologies on the global market Many people view the nuclear sphere with suspicion as something powerful and sometimes beyond human control. I would call this a sort of demonization of the atom. Given Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the accidents on Three Mile Island, in Chernobyl and in Fukushima, the phenomenon is understandable," Voronkov said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russia is concerned over turbulence in Turkey, Armenia and Kazakhstan.
"Giving similar assessments to events happening in our neighboring countries is hardly possible, because, of course, you need to analyze each particular case. In one case there is a clear attempt to seize power that has led to numerous casualties, in another there are various criminal incidents," Peskov said, answering a question on a possible link between recent events in Turkey, Armenia and Kazakhstan.
"Of course, such turbulence near our borders causes concern. Of course, this creates a need to closely monitor and analyze the situation. The safety of our country and its borders are ensured at an appropriate level, but, of course, considering the latest information, necessary measures are being taken," he added.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) A number of Russian nationals have been stranded in Turkey after Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia) suspended air traffic to Turkey in the wake of late Friday's failed coup attempt. The Turkish Airlines company continues to fly Russians out of Turkey, while Aeroflot announced on Sunday that it will fly an empty SU2134 flight to Istanbul and return with passengers who could not return due to cancellations.
"The Rosaviatsia ban on Russian citizens flying to Turkey is in force. Accordingly, we are canceling tickets for Russian citizens, but foreign passengers who had previously bought tickets, they are flying," the representative told RIA Novosti.
In an interview with Sputnik Moscow-based defense expert Konstantin Sivkov said that THAADs radar is very powerful and that exposure to its electromagnetic radiation could cause serious harm to nearby residents and could contaminate agricultural crops.
Such systems are normally stationed away from populated areas to minimize their impact on people. For a system like THAAD to be harmless to humans, it must be placed dozens or even hundreds of kilometers away, Sivkov said.
When asked whether the risk to the local population was worth it, Sivkov said that since the system was designed to shoot down North Koreas tactical missiles, the risk could be justified from a military point of view, but not from that of people living around it.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) VIAM began working in the 3D-printing area in 2015, when it produced a combustion chamber swirler for the next generation PD-14 turbofan being developed by the Aviadvigatel aeroengine manufacturer.
"The engine is made entirely on the basis of VIAM additive manufacturing using new laser sintering technology and metal powder mixes for heat-resistant and aluminum alloys, which have also been developed by the institute's experts. We were able to print an engine with unique parameters impossible to achieve with conventional casting by using additive manufacture technology. For example, the thickness of the combustion chamber's walls is 0.3 millimeters. Such parameters are only possible with 3D printing," VIAM Director General Evgeny Kablov told the Izvestia newspaper.
The 29-year-old was a native of Kansas City, Missouri and was honorably discharged from the Marines in 2010 after reaching the rank of E-5. He preferred to go by the name Cosmo Ausar Setepenra rather than Gavin Eugene Long.
In a video published on Thursday, the racist shooter says that "If I would have been there with Alton Clap" before promoting a book that he wrote that discusses black liberation ideology.
"I wrote it for my dark-skinned brothers," said Long. "If you look at all the rebels like Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad, they was light-skinned. But we know how hard yall got it."
The shooter also said that he refused to be a part of the protest saying that he preferred education and action rather than demonstrations which he referred to as emotional and for the women.
The assailant also suggested that the black community should buy only from black-owned businesses rather than "working for the white people."
He imagined the scenario of a family member who wanted to buy a carpet, but was forced to buy from non-black business owners saying "Whos she going to f--- with? The cracker, the Arab, the Chinese?"
"These Arabs, these Indians, they dont give two f---s about us," said the shooter.
CLEVELAND (Sputnik) Last week, as the Republican National Committee drafted the rules governing this week's nominating convention, a small group of anti-Trump delegates attempted to include a rule that would allow delegates bound to cast their ballots for Trump to vote their conscience, and potentially vote in a different candidate.
The party is united and its only a few people who are holding out, Manafort told journalists, adding that the anti-Trump faction within the party is much ado about very little.
Long, an active member of the anti-government New Freedom Group, carried out the attack on his 29th birthday.
The shooter was active on social media. He posted several videos on YouTube, saying in one of the last ones that "one hundred per cent of revolutions, victims fighting their oppressors, victims fighting their bullies, 100 per cent have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed."
In a separate video, Long revealed that he used to be a Nation of Islam member, but was not affiliated with any group, including Daesh.
3) Casualties
Six officers were shot during the attack. Three officers were killed. Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers were identified as Montrell Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41. The gunman also fatally shot Brad Garafola, 45, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy.
One sheriff's deputy was critically injured.
4) Reaction
US President Barack Obama condemned 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," he noted, adding that it was an attack on public servants, on the rule of law and on civilized society.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the shootings an "unspeakable, heinous attack" that served no purpose.
#lagov mansion lit up blue tonight to honor the officers shot this morning in Baton Rouge. pic.twitter.com/lMD0i4k22z Gov John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) 18 2016 .
"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.
Following the latest Baton Rouge shooting, Donald Trump described the US as a country that is "divided and out of control," directing fierce criticism at President Barack Obama. "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," he said.
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Hillary Clinton said that the attack on police officers in Baton Rouge is an "attack on all of us," adding that 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."
Hillary's statement on the shooting in Baton Rouge. pic.twitter.com/4a0MVF3025 Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) 17 2016 .
5) Wave of anti-police violence
On July 5, Baton Rouge police officers Blaine Salamoni and Howie shot and killed Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old African-American, outside of the Triple S Food Mart, a convenience store located some five miles away from Hammond Aire Plaza. A day later, on July 6, police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile, a 32-year old African-American, near St. Paul, Minnesota.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On Sunday, at least three police officers were killed and several others injured, including one in critical condition, in a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The alleged gunman was shot dead by the police.
"In light of the tragedy in Baton Rouge and in the best interests of officer safety, all #BPD patrols will be conducted by two-officer units," the Boston Police Department (BPD) said on its Twitter page on Sunday.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The judge found Lieutenant Brian Rice not guilty of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in officer, WJZ news reported.
Rice is the fourth of six officers to face a trial in the death of Gray. The judge acquitted two of them, and the third is facing a retrial after the jury deadlocked.
Gray was arrested by Baltimore police on April 12, 2015. He died one week later after suffering a spinal cord injury while in police custody.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Turkish officials have accused Gulen, who is a US permanent resident, of orchestrating a failed coup on Friday and called on the United States to extradite him to Turkey.
"While we do not discuss extraditions publicly, if Turkey does decide to submit an extradition request for Mr. Gulen, it will be considered under the terms of the US-Turkey extradition agreement, like all other extradition requests," the spokesperson told Sputnik.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Turkish officials have accused Gulen of orchestrating a failed coup on Friday and called on the United States to extradite him to Turkey.
At this point we have not received an extradition request from the Turkish government as it relates to Mr. Gulen, Earnest stated.
Teacher Chen Hong discusses AIDS prevention with students at Longquanyi No 7 Middle School in Chengdu, Sichuan province. YANG WANLI/CHINA DAILY
'The enemy we are fighting is HIV/AIDS, instead of carriers (people who are HIV-positive) and patients (those with full-blown AIDS). Prejudice toward AIDS patients could be more harmful than the disease itself," said Jing Xi, a ninth-grade student at Longquanyi No 7 Middle School in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China.
It was the first time the 14-year-old student had shared her opinions about AIDS with her teacher and classmates. Jing is one of tens of thousands of young Chinese who have benefited from the "Youth Love Station", a project sponsored by the AIDS Prevention Education Project for Chinese Youth, a nonprofit organization that provides education to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among students.
The project uses sex education classes to give students a basic understanding of AIDShow it attacks the immune system, the transmission routes and high-risk behavior, for example unsafe or unprotected sex, among both heterosexuals and homosexuals.
"It's the first time I have spoken about AIDS and sex in front of the students. I used to be very shy," said Chen Hong, the lecturer. After months of training, Chen can now use "sensitive words" such as penis and vagina without feeling embarrassed.
According to UNAIDS, the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, nearly 6,000 new HIV/AIDS carriers are reported globally every day, and one in three are in the 15 to 24 age group.
"In the past decade, the total number of HIV/AIDS carriers has declined globally, but the proportion of young carriers has risen," said Chen Zhongdan, a strategic information adviser with UNAIDS.
From 2011 to 2015, the number of AIDS carriers in China ages 15 to 24 rose by 35 percent every year, and carriers ages 18 to 22 accounted for 65 percent of all cases, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
National focus
"Education about the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, should be introduced for students at high schools and colleges nationally as soon as possible," said Wang Jinxin, director of the Sex Education Center at Chengdu Technological University.
"We cannot force students to withstand their hormonal changes. Sex cannot be prevented, but we can prevent unsafe sex," he said.
Unlike traditional methods of sex education, conducted via pamphlets and leaflets issued by local health centers, the aids education project is taking the initiative to explore new and more effective ways of promoting its message in schools.
Since it was established in 2006, the project has sponsored 681 Youth Love Stations nationwide, especially in regions severely hit by AIDS, including Yunnan, Sichuan and Guangxi. In 2014, they were ranked alongside Henan and Guangdong as the five provinces or regions with the highest number of new AIDS cases.
The project is active in nearly 200 elementary and middle schools in Yingjiang county, Yunnan, which lies on the China-Myanmar border close to the notorious "Golden Triangle", one of Asia's biggest opium production areas. As a result, the county has had a high number of people with AIDS and also used to have a problem with intravenous drug users.
"The county used to have many drug addicts. But now the number of cases is much lower," said Nie Yongxian, a teacher at Yingjiang Third Junior High School who arranges and presents sex education lectures for students.
Nie also travels to nearby villages once a month to give lectures to local residents. She employs a wide range of teaching methods, including movies, stories, dramatic sketches and folk rhymes in the local dialect with lyrics about HIV/AIDS.
Last year, no cases of drug addiction were reported in Hejie New Village, an indication of the success of Nie's lecture, which was attended by a large number of residents.
"The teacher used props to show how the virus attacks our immune systemthe picture she drew was so vivid," said Duan Hongmei, 34, who took several members of her family to the packed lecture.
"The information is very useful. Listening to a lecture in the evening is much more interesting than being a couch potato. Lots of people were unwilling to leave when it ended, even though it was after 10 pm," she said.
Because more than 50 percent of Yingjiang's residents are member of ethnic groups, such as the Dai and the Jingpo, many people have a poor understanding of Mandarin. The language barrier prompted the project's leaders to train a number of bilingual teachers, a move that has been warmly welcomed.
Strong support
In Sichuan, the AIDS prevention and anti-drugs campaign has gained strong support among college students.
The Youth Love Station at Chengdu Technological University runs a club for students called "To Know, To Love", which holds summer camps and regular seminars to spread information about safe sex and disease prevention.
The university is one of a small number in China that offer sex education as an optional course for students.
"However, the course is usually full just a few minutes after notification is posted online," said Zhang Xueyou, a sophomore who leads the club. "Since the number of students who can join the class is so small, we run the club to spread knowledge among a larger number of people."
Zhang Yinjun, president of the AIDS education project, said parents can play a crucial role in safeguarding their children, and the Youth Love Station in Chengdu has invited them to participate in the project.
"AIDS used to be a sensitive topic among adults. They believed that their kids were obedient and well-behaved. Therefore they had little chance of becoming infected," she said.
But after participating in the class, many parents no longer hesitate to ask the teacher questions such as "What do we do if our child gets infected with AIDS?"
"They are willing to teach their children, and that has encouraged us to better implement the program. In the battle against AIDS, we are all in it together," Zhang said.
Contact the writer at yangwanli@chinadaily.com.cn
He further said that John Brennan should have taken a stand which he didnt. He should have set the national tone and he didnt.
We need somebody in the position of the authority to stand up and apparently thats not John Brennan.
Talking about the US policy makers, the former CIA analyst said that Hillary Clintons position on torture is alarming.
We should be very careful on Hilary Clintons position on torture because she is a well-known neo-liberal. Hillary has never seen a war that she hasnt loved and this nonsense about ticking time bomb and imminent threat to the US that only happens in the movies, thats not real life. So to hold that out as a reason or a trigger that would allow the US to engage in torture again, to me is really just a red herring, Kiriakou said.
He said that the US government has this knee jerk reaction of classifying everything so that it cant be discussed so if a whistle blower reveals the information the whistle blower is prosecuted.
He further said that this has happened throughout modern American history.
We need to adhere to the notion that there is a greater good here and that the American people have the right to know what their government is doing in their behalf. We need to have a continuing national dialogue about torture.
We arent talking about torture anymore and when people like Donald Trump do talk about torture the conversation is very one sided: that Donald Trump wants to torture, he wants to bring back water boarding and in his words things that are a lot worse than water boarding and that the American people are just supposed to accept that, the analyst said.
According to Kiriakou such rhetoric harms the US overseas. It really allows our enemies to unify and it allows them to use his ill-advised statements as a recruiting tool, he concluded.
Prior to the attack the shooter had been posting online, asking people to fight back, following the deaths of black men at the hands of police. Officials said in a statement that the shooter was "certainly seeking out police."
LIVE on #Periscope:.@MayorKipHolden, @LouisianaGov and others provide an update on yesterdays fatal shooting of o https://t.co/zb3qBUCDdX City of Baton Rouge (@TheCityofBR) July 18, 2016
Wendy Cukier, vice president of the Research and Innovation Center at Ryerson University in Toronto, told Radio Sputnik that, "in the current environment, given that there are almost as many guns as people, it creates a very volatile situation."
According to Cukier, the militarization of law enforcement is not what America should be worried about at the moment, even though there are consistent issues with police use of guns and other weapons against ordinary citizens. There is a need in better training, she suggested, as well as in the repercussions of the misuse of firearms, but armed civilians is a much bigger cause for concern.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Gen. Van was later arrested by the Turkish authorities, the newspaper adds.
Friday's coup attempt in Turkey 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 crisis, while nearly 6,000 people have already been detained.
Special operation troops are deployed in strategic locations of the city while military hardware is arriving to the city, Anadolu agency said. The emergency provisions are underway in response to at least three helicopters flying over Istanbul that have been hijacked away from the Erdogan government.
Conflict News (@Conflicts) July 17, 2016
As Sputnik News reported earlier, there are at least 42 helicopters that have gone missing in the aftermath of the coup which left many to expect that a second attempt at an overthrow of the Erdogan government was imminent. The Erdogan government has responded by dispatching F-16s to command the airspace and assembling 2000 police officers who are ordered to shoot down the renegade helicopters without warning.
Serdar Tuncer (@Yaziyor) July 16, 2016
The city of Istanbul is now under a state of emergency while the government attends to the ongoing security threat from at least three helicopters that have been snatched from the Erdogan government and are patrolling the skies allegedly with an intent to attack Turkish officials and the public.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The German car manufacturer's officials met with more than 150 US dealers on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Steve Kalafer, a co-owner of a large Volkswagen franchise in the United States, who attended the meeting.
McNabb [senior executive from Volkswagen Group of America Inc.] said the company was working toward a fair settlement and restitution for the dealers. He used the word restitution for the dealers for the first time, Kalafer said, as quoted by the newspaper.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On Sunday, Aeroflot operated flight SU2134 with no passengers on board to carry the ticket holders stranded in Istanbul to Moscow.
According to Aeroflot's statement, another flight will be performed later in the day to take home Russian tourists from Antalya.
On Saturday, Russia's consul general in Turkey said that about 150 Russian nationals cannot depart from the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul to Moscow following the coup attempt suppressed by Ankara earlier in the day. 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.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) He added that the Russian experts will carry out the flights on the Antonov AN-30B over Germany's territory with German observers on board to monitor the use of the equipment and compliance with the treaty.
"From July 18 to 23 2016, as part of the international Open Skies Treaty, a joint US-Ukrainian mission will perform a flight over Russia's territory on a US OC-135B observation aircraft," Ryzhkov said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup d'etat took place in the country. The coup was suppressed several hours later. Soon after the coup attempt, both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that capital punishment could be reinstated in the country.
"Of course, the introduction of a death penalty would be absolutely unacceptable. Turkey should have a clear understanding that preservation of death penalty is rejected by us as a cruel and inhumane form of punishment," Kurz said, as quoted by the Austrian newspaper Kurier on Sunday, answering a question about possible Brussels' response to the potential introduction of capital punishment.
BRUSSELS (Sputnik) EU Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn said Monday he was "very concerned" by the mass arrests of judges following the attempted coup in Turkey.
"Very much," Hahn told reporters, answering a question on whether he was concerned by the string of arrests. "It's exactly what we have feared."
"There was a statement by [EU foreign policy chief Federica] Mogherini and myself immediately after the [attempted] coup d'etat and we already stated that we expect that the follow-up of this event should be along rule of law standards, international rule of law standards, and what we see it's not really met," he added.
The United States urges Turkey to respect the rule of law and democratic institutions in dealing with the perpetrators of late Friday's failed coup attempt, according to John Kerry.
"We also firmly urge the government of Turkey to maintain calm and stability throughout the country, and we also urge the government of Turkey to uphold higher 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 at a press conference after meeting with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.
Kerry stressed that the United States and the European Union will seek to work in a constructive way with Turkey in order to prevent a backsliding of democracy amid the difficult post-coup situation, adding that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has assured him that Turkey's government would respect the democratic process in its dealing with coup perpetrators.
"I spoke with the foreign minister three times in the last days and he assured me that they fully intended to respect the democratic process and the law," Kerry said.
High-ranking US officials, particularly those dealing exclusively with domestic politics, are sometimes "incompetent" when it comes to foreign affairs, Iran Press Editor-in-Chief noted, saying that their statements on global issues often "have no logic."
Abshenas was referring to a recent comment made by retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who currently serves as an adviser on national security to Donald Trump.
"I want the President of Egypt, I want the King of Saudi Arabia, I want the Imam, or I want Khomeini in Iran to stand up and be counted," Flynn told Megyn Kelly, commenting on the deadly truck attack in the French city of Nice. "I want them to be counted tonight and to talk about this radical form of this ideology in their bloodstream, in their DNA."
On the one hand, the White House shows willingness to cooperate with Russia in Syria. On the other hand, Washington is continuing to pursue its own interests in the region, an article on the Russian analytical website Svobodnaya Pressa read.
The US continues to support moderate opposition groups in Syria which are expected to topple President Bashar Assad, sooner or later. In order to make this possible, the US needs to convince Russia to stop airstrikes against those groups.
However, Washingtons game in Syria has been complicated after a military coup attempt in Turkey.
The Turkish turmoil may bury US and Russian efforts to settle the Syrian crisis.
"The coup means whatever bets Washington may have made in Moscow are now even harder to implement. Were not sure whos in charge there," Andrew Tabler, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Wall Street Journal.
The White House has long been disappointed by Recep Tayyip Erdogans policy but Washington still needs Turkey as an ally in the Middle East.
"Turkey is one of three non-Arab countries in the Middle East and a member of NATO that has a decent record of standing up to Russia. It is also increasingly critical for the war against ISIS [Daesh], particularly since Ankara last year agreed to allow US bombers to fly missions into Iraq and Syria from its air base at Incirlik," an article in The Financial Times read.
"Before the putsch, the situation was like this: there is 'good' Syrian opposition backed by a US-led coalition, and there are terrorists this coalition is fighting. In addition, there is Russia who considers both groups terrorists and supports the Syrian government. The landscape is now more complicated," Sergei Ermakov, senior analyst at the Russian Institute for Strategic Research, said.
The attempted coup in Turkey has intensified differences within the coalition and between different opposition groups in Syria, he added.
After the coup was foiled some Turkish officials accused the US of being involved in the organization of the putsch. These accusations give Erdogan the possibility to bargain with Washington, Ermakov said.
The base commander, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other Turkish officers, was detained at Incirlik on Sunday for allegedly supporting the coup. American airbase flights have resumed, but power has not been restored.
Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, claims that the Turkish airbase contains about fifty B-61 hydrogen bombs, more than a quarter of all the nuclear weapons in the NATO stockpile. What separates the B-61 from other weapons is its ability to adjust nuclear yield. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, for example, had the impact of roughly fifteen kilotons of TNT. The adjustable yield of the bombs held at Incirlik can range 0.3 to 170 kilotons, making for a more versatile weapon.
It was reported earlier that at least one of the pilot's responsible for downing the Russian jet took part in last week's failed Turkish coup attempt.
The shooting down of the jet led Moscow led to a crisis in relations between Moscow and Ankara. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident as a "stab in the back" and imposed a number of restrictive measures against Ankara, repeatedly calling on the Turkish government to apologize and cover any material losses to the pilot's family.
The Manitoba Great Western Harness Racing Circuit moved to Holland Fair this weekend and featured the first legs of the Golden Boys and Silk Lace stakes.
Three-year-old Manitoba-sired pacing colts competed in a pair of $4,048 Golden Boy divisions on Saturday, which were won by Western Favor and Heartland Burt. On Sunday, What A Promise inherited the victory in the $4,106 division of the Silk Lace for the fillies.
Roland Rey's homebred Whatayasay colt Western Favor collared race leader Heartland Eclipse off a three-hole to win his division in 2:08.2 over a "good" track. The victory was his first in three career starts. Als Happy Baylor finished 11 lengths behind in third while Copper Cash was a distant fourth in the short field.
The undefeated Heartland Burt dominated his five-horse division winning by 32 lengths in 2:05.2 with Marc Fillion in tow. Rocket Power won the race for place over Wheels Rollin while Johnny Dirtspitter was interfered with by early breaker Cruzininmyjamys resulting in both horses dropping out of contention. Kevin Hildebrandt trains the Armbro Baylor gelding, who is now three-for-three in his career, for owner Allan Drader.
What A Promise and driver Richard Remillard inherited the victory in the Silk Lace split on Sunday as early leader Cordees Whitesocks broke stride near the half-mile mark and caused interference to the rest of the field. What A Promise was left on the lead before Cordees Whitesocks regrouped and reeled her in, however, she was placed sixth for causing the interference. What A Promise's mile time was 2:14.2 over the off track. The homebred daughter of Whatayasay, who earned her maiden-breaking victory in her third career start, is owned and trained by Barry McNaughton. Heartland Spark and Trishas Fantasy were bumped up to second and third, respectively, due to the placing.
In the $1,750 Fillies & Mares Open Pace, Gold Star Sonata came back on to defeat last week's winner Wild Chic in 2:04.1 by a nose on Sunday for driver Don Howlett and owner/trainer Trevor Williams. Smoky Moon finished 13 lengths behind in third.
Live harness racing continues next weekend at Miami, with post time set for 1:30 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday.
To view this weekend's harness racing results, click on the following link: Holland Fair Results.
Ten $40,000 Ohio Sires Stakes divisions for two-year-old Buckeye-bred fillies will be contested on Tuesday, July 19 at Scioto Downs, with a special matinee post time of 2 p.m. ET.
Thirty-nine trotting fillies in four OHSS divisions and 56 pacing fillies in six OHSS divisions will go postward over the five-eighths mile oval.
First leg pacing winnersfrom July 3 at Northfield Parkinclude Gorgeous Hallie (1:57.3), Loreenas Ruffian (1:56.1), Bye Bye Felicia (1:56.1), Big Bad Baby (1:58.4), Rosemary Rose (1:56.4), Zoe Ellasen (1:55.2), Strike A Chord (1:56.3) and Type A Grey (1:57.2).
First leg trotting winnersfrom that same date and trackinclude Chim Swift (1:57.4), Maderia AS (1:59), Emerald City Of Oz (2:01.2), Bamaslastchance (2:01.2), Purple Sona (2:00.4), Amuses (2:01.1).
Ohio trotting stallions represented in these Ohio Sires Stakes contests include: Dejarmbro (15); Triumphant Caviar (7); Break The Bank K (4); Chip Chip Hooray and Neely Dunn (3 each); And Away We Go (2); Full Count, Big Rigs, Iron Duke, His Highness and Homestretch (1 each).
Ohio stallions represented in the six Ohio Sires Stakes pacing events include: Big Bad John (12); McArdle (9); Art Official (8); Charley Barley (6); Santanna Blue Chip, Feelin Friskie, The Panderosa and Manhardt (3 each); Woodstock, Arts Chip and Foreclosure (2 each); Im Gorgeous, World Of Rocknroll and Oaks Enforcer (1 each).
(OSDF)
When Shanghai Sugar won her Ontario Sires Stakes Grassroots division at Clinton Raceway on Sunday (July 17), Travis Henry and his partners experienced a moment of deja vu.
Last season Henry, Craig Wood and Glen Wark watched their two-year-old pacing filly Tempus Seelster win her July 19 Grassroots division at Georgian Downs and then go on to win her Battle of the Belles elimination at Grand River Raceway one week later. Shanghai Sugars schedule is the same, and her connections are hoping she can match her stablemates success.
Its exciting because last year we had kind of the same thing. We bought Tempus Seelster for $10,000 out of the London sale and she took us on a bit of a ride; she won her Battle of the Belles elim and then she was sick in the final actually, explained Henry. So my partner Craig Wood said Battle of the Belles take two, I guess. Hopefully we can get a better result.
So far, Shanghai Sugar has followed the same path as Tempus Seelster. Acquired for just $9,000 from the Canadian Yearling Sale last fall, the daughter of Shanghai Phil and $563,299 winner Fast Lane Cruizin was Henrys best youngster all winter.
I started with three, and she was the best one out of them all, said the Brantford resident, who conditions the filly for Craig Wood of Waterdown, Glen Wark of St. Catharines and his mother Linda Henry of Brantford. She just was like an old racehorse the whole time. She loves her work and she has a really great attitude about everything she does.
Henry and Shanghai Sugar lined up at post five in the first of three $18,000 Grassroots divisions at Clinton Raceway on Sunday and were sitting fourth when Lady Sherri reached the quarter pole in :30.4. With the favourites stacked up behind him, Henry opted to send Shanghai Sugar up the outside and the filly was sitting second at the 1:01.1 half. After reeling in Lady Sherri, Shanghai Sugar sailed on to a 1:31 three-quarters and then accelerated down the stretch to a four and one-half length victory in 2:00. Odysseus and Lady Sherri paced into second and third.
I tried to quiet her down from her [July 1] qualifier because she was really aggressive, and you dont really want them like that, said Henry of the first-time starter. So I added the hood with cups so she could kind of see behind her a little bit, and I put ear plugs in her.
When I popped the ear plugs [today], she kind of just dropped into another gear. She was really good, he added.
The Battle of the Belles eliminations are Monday, July 25, with the final slated for Monday, Aug. 1. Sandwiched in between is Henrys wedding to Maddi McNiven, who is the daughter of Rob and Tammy McNiven of Embros Twinbrook Farms and an equine massage therapist based in Cambridge, Ont.
Thats on the 31st, and Industry Days on the first, so were hoping were racing the day after our wedding, but well see, said Henry.
The other Grassroots winners at Clinton Raceway on Bring A Friend Day were Treasures Pearl and OK Jewel.
Already the owner of a Grassroots trophy earned in the July 8 opener at Mohawk Racetrack, Treasures Pearl was the favourite in the second division. In spite of a field shorted to four when Mach On and Casimir QT were forced to withdraw due to sickness, the fillies delivered a lively battle, maintaining pressure on pacesetter Shewearsthepants through fractions of :30.2, 1:00 and 1:30.4. Finding a clear path in the stretch, Treasures Pearl and driver Sylvain Filion of Milton sprinted to a one-half length victory in 1:59.4. The Joy Luck Club was awarded second and Shewearsthepants was demoted to third as a result of interference in the stretch.
The win put Treasures Pearl firmly atop the two-year-old pacing filly Grassroots standings with 100 points. The Sportswriter daughter is trained by Ron Adams of LaSalle for owner/breeder Donald Leschied of South Woodslee. The filly is the first foal from $209,445 winner St Lads Treasure.
First time starter OK Jewel and driver Bob McClure also used a late sprint to claim the third Grassroots trophy. The filly reeled in pacesetter and fan favourite P L Kaleidoscope and Menagerie to score the one-half length victory in 2:00.3.
Elora resident McClure engineered the win for trainer Tim Jacobson of Midhurst and owner Seaspray Stables Ltd. of Nanaimo, B.C. The filly is a Mach Three daughter of $332,983 winner Whitesand Jewel.
Shanghai Sugar and OK Jewel will go looking for their second Grassroots trophy, and Treasures Pearl will be after her third, when the two-year-old pacing fillies make their third Ontario Sires Stakes start at Mohawk Racetrack on August 11.
Ontario Sires Stakes action returns to Clinton Raceway on Sunday, Aug. 21 when the half-mile oval hosts the three-year-old trotting colts in their fourth Grassroots outing.
To view Sunday's harness racing results, click on the following link: Sunday Results - Clinton Raceway.
(With files from OSS)
"There are smarter people than me out there who say that with every $10 the government has invested in horse racing, they get $100 back with gasoline sales, hotels, ferriers, feed for the horses...there's a lot of money. We're just not getting the support from the government here that they are in other places."
One of New Brunswick's top drivers has gone on the offensive, calling for his government to support the province's harness racing industry in the same mutually-beneficial manner as other provinces.
In an interview with CBC, Todd Trites recalled a time when New Brunswick's racing industry was strong.
"I grew up around the racetrack and I remember the Fredericton card, racing twice a week. They used to race Mondays and Thursdays," he recalled. "Saint John used to race Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Moncton raced Thursdays and Saturday nights."
No longer does New Brunswick have three tracks racing six days per week. Now, with a slashed schedule, tracks are struggling to fill just one card.
Trites points to the province's deal to place a casino not partnered to racing in Moncton as the turning point for harness racing in New Brunswick.
"We were hoping to make a deal to make that racino like they have in Summerside and Charlottetown over on [Prince Edward] Island where the horsemen get a percentage of the take off the casino," he recalls. "When that didn't take place we started taking steps backwards."
To listen to the full interview with CBC's Terry Seguin, click the play button below.
Harry Harvey, the Vermont-born son of a dairy farmer who trained and drove Albatross, one of harness racings most important sires, died on Sunday (July 17) at the age of 92 after a long battle with old age.
One of 12 children, he was born October 22, 1923 in Duxbury, Vt. to Mabel and Harry F. Harvey. He drove his siblings to school in a pony cart, worked the fields with heavy horses, made maple syrup and cut ice from the Winooski River to help sustain the big family in a harsh, hilly climate.
During World War II, he helped his father select green draft horses in Montreal, to be shipped by rail to the family farm. He walked them home from the rail yard with his siblings, leading two in each hand. Harvey helped train and sell the horses, in demand due to war-time restrictions on gas and oil.
He saw harness racing at Vermont fairs and when Little Pat and driver Earl West won a race in 2:01 in 1938 at the Essex Junction Fair, his father confidently told him, Youll never see a horse go faster.
One of the young horsemans duties was to walk the work horses to the farrier over the bridge to Waterbury, where he read every word of Harness Horse magazine. Discerning that Tom Berry was the leading trainer and driver of the 1940s, he launched a job seeking, letter-writing campaign aimed at him that spanned years. He finally got a telegram in 1947 telling him to report to winter training headquarters in Florida. Berry admitted years later that he offered him a job just to stop the letters.
Harvey joined the Delvin Miller Stable in 1951 and was a second trainer in 1953 when Miller entered Elgin and Charles Armstrongs filly, Helicopter, in the Hambletonian. Miller and his other second trainers, the late Jimmy Jordan and Jimmy Arthur, drove horses with better prospects, but in the 23-horse field, going three heats, Harvey and Helicopter prevailed.
The next year, he left the racetrack to manage Millers Meadow Lands (PA) Farm, where Adios was beginning his career as the sports dominant sire. It was Harvey who suggested the mare Countess Vivian be bred to Dale Frost when Adios was battling the effects of laminitis. The mating produced Meadow Skipper.
After Adios died in 1965, Harvey bought the Meadow Lands Farm annex where he lived and started his own Arden Hills Farm and racing stable at nearby Arden Downs, the Washington County fairgrounds. For 54 of their 61 years of marriage, Cornelia Harvey managed finances for the farm and stable, taught the children to ride and rode stallions at both Meadow Lands and Arden Hills Farms.
It was at Arden Downs that Albatross, a son of Meadow Skipper, arrived in November of 1969, and where he was trained until sold in May of 1971 and moved to trainer Stanley Dancer a few weeks before the start of his three-year-old racing season. Harvey drove the colt through a 14-for-17 season and top juvenile pacing colt honours for 1970 and prepared him that winter and the following spring.
Harvey was elected to the Harness Racing Hall of Fame in 2001 and continued to operate a public stable until 2009, driving in distinctive solid maroon colours. His long time patrons included Art and his son Tim Rooney, Saul and his sons Richard and Steven Finkelstein.
He trained the Rooney-bred Hall of Fame broodmare Lismore and many of her $4.1 million winning progeny. In 1994, Rooney homebreds Lisheen (1:52.3, $518,405) and Newbridge (1:53.4, $237,528), out of Lismore and Powerscourt, respectively, also Harvey trainees, were first and second in the Mistletoe Shalee. Harvey referred to the pair, who spent nearly every day of their lives together, as the Ballerina (Lisheen, refined and quick) and the Working Girl (Newbridge, stout but relentless).
Lislea Phia ($542,450 1:50.2), winner of the 2007 Matron Stake, and bred by Tim Rooney, was his last good horse. In his last years, Harvey delighted in watching YouTube replays of her improbable, incredible charge to the wire to win that race, driven by Tim Tetrick.
A skilled woodworker, he made Mission and Shaker style furniture as fundraising items for the Harness Racing Museum and the Standardbred Retirement Foundation. The podium from which inductees to the Harness Racing Hall of Fame accept their honour was made by him from a black walnut tree on his New Jersey farm. Less complex creations included doll beds and fishing pole racks for grandchildren, for whom he also converted wheelbarrows and diaper boxes to makeshift carriages.
He leaves behind his wife, Cornelia Etzel Harvey, who he met when she was a college student riding Saddlebreds at a farm in Goshen, N.Y., daughters Ellen Harvey, Anne Harvey Watson (Admiral James), Kathryn Harvey (Mark Teasdale) and son, Leo Harvey (Kathy Dunn Harvey), as well as grandchildren Elizabeth, Michael, Daniel and Emily Watson, Shawn and Ryan Harvey.
His surviving siblings are Jim Harvey, Helene Harvey and Sister Mary Harvey. He was predeceased by infant daughters Elizabeth and Mary and siblings Irene, Steven, Ruth, Grayce, David, Wayne, Leo, and Mary Ellen.
Funeral services will be private, with a graveside service for friends and family to be held at a later date at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in McMurray, Pa. Expressions of sympathy can be sent to Cornelia Harvey at Tower # 506, St. Dominic Village, 2401 Holcombe Blvd., Houston, Texas, 77021.
Memorial donations to the Harness Racing Museum, 240 Main Street, Goshen, N.Y., 10924 or the Standardbred Retirement Foundation, 353 Sweetmans Lane, Suite 101, Millstone, N.J., 08535 would be appreciated.
Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Harry Harvey.
This story courtesy of Harness Racing Communications, a division of the U.S. Trotting Association. For more information, visit www.ustrotting.com.
Standardbred Canada is pleased to announce the winners for the 2016 Atlantic Bursary program. Each student will receive a $1,000 bursary towards their post secondary education for the 2016-2017 academic term.
The winners are:
Kent Beattie of Fredericton, NB
Jacob MacKinnon of Souris, PEI
MacKenzie MacInnis of Tyne Valley, PEI
Dawn Marie Moore of Milton Station, PEI
Kent Beattie is going into his first year of the Veterinarian program at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI). With both his father and uncle involved in the sport, Kent has made the racetrack his second home, and hopes to continue his involvement throughout his life. A fourth-generation horseman, he has both his trainers and drivers licenses and has driven part-time for the past two years.
Jacob MacKinnon is pursuing a career as a Wildlife Biologist and will be entering his second year in the Biology program at UPEI. Born into a racing family, Jacob was involved in the 4-H Standardbred Program in his community for six years. He has been responsible for stable maintenance, as well as the care of active and retired racehorses for his family and has also worked as a stable hand at Wynfield Farms. Despite working in the background and behind the scenes, Jacob finds it very rewarding to see his work pay off.
MacKenzie MacInnis is pursuing a career in Dental Assisting and is entering her second year at Holland College. The fourth generation horsewoman has been around Standardbreds her entire life and has owned and trained her own horses since she was 17. MacKenzie says that harness racing is a lifelong passion that I couldnt dream of living without, and currently owns and trains a 12-year-old pacing gelding, Night Talker, and a two-year-old pacing filly, Kiss M Sass.
Dawn Marie Moore will be entering her fourth year in the Bachelor of Science program for Nursing at UPEI in September. Three years ago, she moved to PEI from Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, for school and started spending time at a Standardbred farm where she learned how to care for and handle the horses. She has been a groom for two years for trainer Jeff Lilley, and sometimes warms up horses on race days. The feeling I had warming up a mare during Old Home Week is the same warm, happy and loving feeling that I have for harness racing, she shares.
The bursaries were awarded based on active involvement in the harness racing community, academics and financial need. Applicants were also required to submit an essay on one of the following topics:
What unique ways can Standardbred Canada and the host tracks promote the WDC events to the general public in 2017?
How can racetracks celebrate the 250th anniversary of horse racing at their track or in their community in 2017?
Most of the students selected the second topic and some of the ideas on how tracks can celebrate the 250th anniversary of horse racing included:
Having a parade of the evolution of harness, race gear and sulkies throughout the years
Create a travelling museum of racing
Organize a tour of Celebrity Horses
Create vignettes of the different, unique experiences in racing from the different perspectives of the sport owners, horsepeople, fans
Open house events across the country where the public can interact with the horses and horsepeople
The Atlantic Bursary Program is supported and funded by various organizations from the Atlantic Provinces and Standardbred Canada. Partners from the Atlantic Provinces include the Nova Scotia Harness Racing Industry Association, Prince Edward Island Harness Racing Industry Association, and the 'Stretch Drive Fund,' a fund created by the Atlantic Provinces Harness Racing Commissions race officials.
Standardbred Canada and all of the partners from the Atlantic Provinces would like to extend their congratulations to the winners and thank all of the students who submitted applications for bursaries.
Mohawk Racetrack will host three divisions of the $210,000 Ontario Sires Stakes (OSS) for two-year-old trotting fillies on Tuesday, July 19. Janderson, a daughter of Muscle Mass from the Malabar Man mare Gracious Marla, will race in the first division (Race 2) from post two as the 4-1 third choice on the morning line.
I have been involved with hundreds of horses. I dont think weve ever trained a yearling with the stride she has, Dr. Roly Armitage noted. Whether its at the farm or on the track, she sort of floats.
Dr. Armitage, a member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame, owns Janderson in partnership with his son, James Armitage. The two purchased her at the 2015 Canadian Yearling Sale for $14,000.
I was prepared to pay $25,000 for her, Dr. Armitage confessed. I dont understand why she went for only $14,000. She mightve been on the small side, but I didnt see that. She grew well after we got her, and now shes an average-sized filly.
Her pedigree is perfect, Dr. Armitage stated. Theres a million-dollar winner on her dams side [Snow White].
Janderson was the only yearling purchase by Dr. Armitage last year.
Im 91 years old, Dr. Armitage said. Somebody told me at the sale Youre not buying a yearling, are you? I asked What do you mean? Do you mean Im going to die? What difference does it make? The anticipation is better than the win.
Mike Keeling, who also campaigns 2016 Hambletonian hopeful Marion Maurader, is the trainer of Janderson.
Ive always been a Bill Wellwood man, Dr. Armitage said. His daughter, Paula, inherited that from him, and of course Mike is there, and Mike is good, too.
Janderson (PP2, Paul MacDonell, 4-1) enters Tuesday's test off a win in the first OSS leg at Georgian Downs on July 5. She'll face some stiff competition in a pair of equally-impressive filly trotters. Literally (PP5, Dustin Jones, 5-2) won her Grassroots debut on July 10 in 1:58.1f, while On A Sunny Day (PP5, Sylvain Filion, 3-1) captured her two-year-old debut in a OSS Gold leg on the same card as Janderson.
I expected to take what I could get because I didnt understand the other horses, Dr. Armitage said on Jandersons win at Georgian. Ive been in the business so long...I think, particularly two-year-olds, dont know anything yet. If you can keep them concentrated on what theyre doing, youll get a good horse.
Therere a lot of exceptional fillies, Dr. Armitage also said. We know were not going to beat all of them, but we like this filly; shes an exceptional filly. Weve liked her all winter. In the end, well take what we can get.
Janderson is not staked outside of the OSS this year so that focus will stay on the provincial Sires Stakes program.
Were not expecting much, but we know we have the best as far as Im concerned; the best-gaited filly, Dr. Armitage said. We have never, on this farm or in my experience, had a filly who was as smoothly-gaited as this filly as a two-year-old. Its effortless.
Please dont ask me to say I have the best, I dont. But this filly is the filly. I just dont know how fast she can go.
To view the entries for Tuesday's card at Mohawk, click the following link: Tuesday Entries - Mohawk Racetrack
(A Trot Insider Exclusive by Ray Cotolo)
TCT National Broadcast of 23rd Annual Eagles' Wings Conference Proclaims Message of Reconciliation and Healing
Contact: Stephen Jenks, Eagles' Wings, 716-759-1058
ORCHARD PARK, N.Y., July 18, 2016 /Standard Newswire/ -- Tens of thousands across America heard a message of the power of the cross to overcome prejudice as the twenty-third annual Eagles' Wings East Coast Leadership Conference was broadcast live on TCT this past Saturday night.
Tom Nolan, President of TCT television network, along with Bishop Tommy Reid and Bishop Robert Stearns of the Tabernacle in Orchard Park, NY, opened the evening in prayer.
Following over an hour of exuberant worship, Stearns welcomed up international evangelist and speaker Sean Smith of Point Blank International to tell his personal story of how prejudice and hate took the life of his father.
Sean shared how at nine years old, his father, a chemical engineer with IBM, was murdered in a racially motivated hate crime. His father, a black man, was driving home from work when he was pulled over by police for "speeding." Sean continued, "Witnesses at the scene described how my dad was pulled out of the car, had mace sprayed in his eyes and was shot by the officer. When he arrived to the hospital my father had died from his wounds." Sean stressed to the audience, "I have great respect for the men and women who wear the badge. There are many officers who are my friends and I am grateful to all who protect us. Unfortunately it came out in court that this particular officer was involved with the KKK and the incident was entirely racially motivated."
Speaking directly to the nation, Sean shared, "Years later when I was in college, I was still grappling with this loss, and I cried out to the Lord. At three o'clock in the morning Jesus appeared to me and I heard the audible voice of God: 'I am a father to the fatherless.' That night I gave my life to Christ and forgave that officer who murdered my dad. God's love is greater!"
Smith and Stearns then led all those tuning in around the nation who had been affected by trauma such as abuse, racism, neglect, and violence in a prayer of reconciliation and forgiveness for those who had caused the pain, releasing the power and love of God to heal.
That night several received supernatural physical healing in their body as the power of God was released not only to touch the heart but also to restore the body, mind and soul.
The Eagles' Wings East Coast Leadership Conference gathers passionate believers from across the nations each year for times of worship, prayer, and equipping. For more information visit www.eagleswings.to.
New California 'LGBT' Curriculum, Marriage Reality Movement Comments
Contact: Dwight Stephenson, 415-651-4171CORTE MADERA, Calif., July 18, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- On Thursday, July 14, the California Board of Education adopted a framework for a new "LGBT" social studies curriculum that will have national ramifications since textbooks will be written to comply.Starting in second grade, students must be taught about diverse family types in a positive way and must accept having families with children deprived of a married mother and father is a good thing. In fourth grade they must learn about the redefinition of marriage and therefore must accept that marriage has nothing to do with children and families; it is merely a lifestyle choice for adults. By high school the focus is on the right to create one's own sexual identity and how people have been doing that throughout history."The greatest concern is that the framework tends to normalize and reinforce things that have led to negative social and human consequences in society such as fatherlessness and children deprived of married mothers and fathers," said William B. May for the Marriage Reality Movement."Curricula should be evaluated by how well it promotes men and women marrying before having children, discourages conceiving children with the intention of depriving them of the fundamental right of knowing, being loved by, and being in relationship with their own mother, father or both, and helps children understand the value of true friendship that can lead to stable marriages and families rather than friendships based on sexual relationships that are presented as love."May emphasized, "It is not enough to oppose the agenda to provide our children with a corrupted understanding of love, sexuality, marriage and family that affects the choices they make in their own lives, we must provide a positive alternative to reframe the dialogue.""The Marriage Reality Movement starts with reintroducing love and marriage from the beginning to a culture that has forgotten its meaning. It provides parents and others with new ways of explaining the reality of marriage so the young children can understand and explain it to their friends, and it is building a new coalition to take back marriage for our children and family that is defined by clear objectives based on what we are for rather than against."For more information go to www.takebackmarriage.org
BY OLIVIA ROSE
FORMER Premier Michael Misick said he is appalled at the level of crime and the spate of unsolved murders in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
This comes as the lifeless body of Sorineida Moreno Arias, a young woman from the Dominican Republic, was discovered disfigured in bushes in Providenciales after she was reported missing for days.
Misick in a release to the media said the senseless killing of any human being should not be condoned and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
"Last evening the discovery of the body of the latest victim catapulted our need for effective crime fighting to a new state of urgency.
"While not being officially informed of the details of recent homicide investigations, the general feeling is that there is a morbid trend that indicates a possible serial offender or offenders who are preying on vulnerable young woman in this country, this is a matter that should concern us all.
The former Premier in his strongly worded statement said it is quite evident that the British-appointed Governors and Commissioners of Police are incapable of managing the crime situation in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
He said: "They stand accused of only paying lip service to crime and failing to provide the police force with adequate and necessary equipment and resources.
"By their own admission, crime is rising and the detection rate in this country is extremely low. The Turks and Caicos Islands is now paying a very dear price for the gross incompetence of the Governor and the Commissioner.
Misick also called for the resignation of the Commissioner of Police James Smith.
He said: "I therefore call on Commissioner of Police, James Smith, to resign and be replaced immediately by a Turks and Caicos Islander Commissioner, in whom the country can have confidence. The powers of control of the force must be accountable to the people and answerable to the needs of the voters in the TCI.
Misick asserted that it is high time that the Police Force falls within the ambit and responsibility of the local government under a Minster of National Security.
"In the meantime, I am calling on Premier Dr. Rufus Ewing and his government to urgently provide funds for the installation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) throughout the islands in order to protect our citizens, residents and tourists alike.
"I further call on the government to host a crime symposium in order to engage the community so we all can devise and formulate solutions to the crime situation before it spirals completely out of control.
"Now, more than ever, there must be collective effort between law enforcement and the public to combat this worrying crime wave which poses a real and serious threat to the tourism industry which is the countrys economic engine.
"May God give you strength in your time of sorrow and may He provide us with the courage and will power to secure our country and make it safe and prosperous for all.
He expressed his deepest sympathies to all of the families who have lost love ones at the hands of gun violence and any other form of violence in recent weeks, months and years.
ECONOMIC, social, health and environmental issues, as well as the relationship between Overseas Territories (OT`s) and the United Kingdom, will be discussed at the upcoming Pre-Joint Ministerial conference to be held here in the Turks and Caicos islands.
Plans are well underway to welcome the leaders from UK Overseas Territories (UKOT) and their delegations for a series of meetings on areas of mutual interest here in the Turks and Caicos Islands for the first time from 20-21st July at the Palms Turks and Caicos.
The Pre -Joint Ministerial Conference (Pre-JMC) will be a precursor to the Joint Ministerial Council that will be held in London 31 October 4th November 2016 and hosted by the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO).
Ewing who will also chair several of the roundtable discussions said "The Turks and Caicos Government is pleased to welcome the OT Leaders and delegations to our shores.
"While the JMC is the highest political forum between the UK Government and elected leaders and representatives, this forum allows us to first meet and outline a clear strategy to address the challenges OTs face prior to the JMC.
"Following the vote of the UK referendum to leave the European Union (EU) the first session will explore the implication of the result on the OTs and their relationship with the EU.
"I have been attending these meetings for four (4) years now, and I am delighted to welcome all the attendees to our beautiful paradise, while we discuss such pertinent issues, the release read.
Attending the meetings will be the Premier of British Virgin Islands, Dr. Orlando Smith OBE, Premier of Cayman Islands, Hon. Alden McLaughlin MBE, Premier of Bermuda Hon. Michael Dunkley JP, Premier of Monserrat Hon. Donaldson Romeo, Chief Minister of Gibraltar Hon. Fabian Picardo.
Representing, the Government of Anguilla Hon Evans McNeill Rogers Minister of Social Development and representing the Government of the Falkland Islands Hon Roger Edwards MLA.
The Secretary General of CARICOM, Irwin Larocque, will also travel to the Islands to meet with the Leaders of the Caribbean OTs.
The Premier and other OT Leaders will hold a press conference and photo opportunity on the first official day of the conference, 20 July 2016, at the Messel Ballroom, The Palms Turks and Caicos.
The meetings will conclude at the Cabinet Room, Office of the Premier, Hon. NJS Francis Building, Pond Street Grand Turk on 21 July 2016.
tech2 News Staff
Amazons Spanish division might have leaked the pricing and release date of Sonys upcoming PlayStation Neo.
A listing on Amazons Spanish website listed the PlayStation Neo as going on sale for around 399.99 (around Rs 30,000) with a release date of October 13. The PS4 is currently listed at 300 (around Rs 23,000). The listing has since been pulled down and only the release date remains.
This price is actually much lower than we expected, but as you will see from the specifications below, the changes to the system arent that dramatic either.
It was just a few days ago that slides from what appear to be an internal presentation leaked online. These slides highlight the differences between the PS4 and the upcoming PlayStation Neo.
PlayStation 4 PlayStation Neo CPU 8 Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz 8 Jaguar cores at 2.1 GHz GPU 18 CUs at 800 MHz 36 CUs at 911 MHz Memory 8GB GDDR5 8GB GDDR5 Memory bandwidth 176 GB/s 218 GB/s
While it was rumoured that the PlayStation Neo would use a new CPU, the leaks suggest that the device will use the existing Jaguar architecture, but at a higher clock speed. The biggest bump comes in the GPU department, which bumps the CU (Compute Unit) count from 18 to 36 and clocks them slightly higher.
Together with improvements to the RAM modules and other tweaks, the system should be capable of 4K gaming. As can be expected, the leaked slides suggest higher, more stable frame-rates at HD resolutions as well as improved fidelity and more graphics features.
Its long been speculated that the bump in specs is mostly to do with the launch of the PlayStation VR headset (for $400). Given that the VR headset only supports 1080p, its obvious that the need for high-frame rate HD gameplay was more important than higher resolution. Its also important to note that even a $550 Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Rs 64,000 in India) can just barely manage playable frame-rates at 4K, which would lead us to believe that 4K gaming on the PlayStation Neo may not be all that it's hyped to be.
tech2 News Staff
Japan's SoftBank has agreed to acquire Arm Holdings, which is UK's top technology company which licenses chipset designs which are used in majority of the smartphones, for 23.4 billion. SoftBank is betting big on Arm Holdings considering the immense potential presented by the Internet of Things market.
According to Financial Times, this acquisition of the seminconductor company will be the largest-ever acquisition of a European technology business. SoftBank is expected to pay out 17 in cash for each share in Arm which is a 43 percent premium over its closing share price last week.
Arm Holdings designs chips which are ultimately used, not just in smartphones but also in smartwatches, wearables and many other IoT products. According to Arm Holdings, the number of Arm processor sporting chips sold in 2015 reached almost 15 billion, up from 6 billion just in 2010.
SoftBank has been going super aggressive with its investments, thanks to its chairman Masayoshi Son's sound investments in the past which have paid off. SoftBank is worth $68 bn and has majority stake in Sprint, fourth largest US mobile carrier as well as Yahoo Japan which is Japan's most popular search engine.
SoftBank had invested $20mn in Alibaba in 2000, an investment that's worth $65bn today. Also the $15bn acquisition of Vodafone's Japanese arm has made SoftBank the third largest telecom player in Japan.
This is the first major acquisition by SoftBank since Nikesh Arora's departure from the company. Arora, who has been instrumental in a lot of technology company investments, is also said to have been involved with the Arm Holdings acquisition talks. SoftBank has taken part in close to 140 deals worth $82bn in the last decade, most of which have been executed under Arora's tenure.
Arm Holdings is the name that is synonymous with chipset design for mobile devices. The company which was a spin-off of Acorn which was a British company, received significant backing from Apple in the early 80s when Arm's designs were used in Apple's handheld Newton. The business model for Arm has been licensing its technologies to hardware makers such as Apple, Samsung and so on.
As far as India is concerned, in 2014, Softbank invested $210 million in Ola along with existing shareholders, $627 million in Snapdeal and $90 million in Housing.com along with existing shareholders such as Falcon Edge. In 2015, the company invested $120 million in Grofers, $100 million in Oyo Room along with other investors.
Sheldon Pinto
After plenty of waiting, Lenovo India, is finally ready to launch its K5 Note smartphone in India. News about the K5 Note did come as a shocker for many, as the smartphone was announced in China just a day after the K4 Note was launched in India. Six months later, Lenovo has finally decided on bringing in its successor and the date has been set for 20 July.
The Lenovo K4 Note was quite the performer when it was launched in India earlier this year. The device packed in a MediaTek MT6753 paired with 3GB RAM which according to our review made for capable setup that kept up with the software experience. The chipset however did not make it a gaming machine and did heat up, which is where Lenovo's choice with a MediaTek P10 with the K5 Note seems like a bad choice.
The K5 Note is said to be getting a 64-bit octa-core MediaTek Helio P10 processor clocked at 1.8GHz and 2GB of RAM. The 16GB onboard storage is expandable up to 128GB via microSD card slot. There's a 13MP rear snapper with PDAF autofocus, f/2.2 aperture and an 8MP front-facing camera. This is as per the Chinese variant of the device.
While this may sound like a great budget offering, it's the competition coming from brands like Xiaomi, that could rain on Lenovo's parade. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 packs in a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 chipset, which has proved itself in benchmarks and packs in a lot more power compared to the P10. Next up is LeEco's Le 2. We recently reviewed the smartphone that features a top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chipset with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage and found it to be quite the contender in the budget smartphones segment. You also get Marshmallow inside and lets not forget the CDLA audio via the USB Type C port; all priced at a decent Rs 11,999.
Let's hope that Lenovo has made some changes to its hardware else it will be a case of too little too late for a smartphone that seems to ship with older hardware.
tech2 News Staff
Now is not a good time to buy that Motorola Moto X Play that you have been saving up for. This is because its successor is almost ready for showtime and could soon see roll out as well. While we have seen a few leaks after the launch of the Motorola Moto Z series, the only missing member on the day of the announcement was the Moto Z Play. A new leak from MotClub HK finally reveals the bottom end of the mid-range device with a surprise in the form of ports for the USB Type C connector and even a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The image shows all the three models stacked up showing only the bottom end of the devices. In the image, the ultra-thin Motorola Moto Z sits on top, and the Z Force sits below leaving the Z Play sandwiched in the middle. Also visible is the presence of both the 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB Type C port.
While the USB Type C port was an expected change, we were a bit surprised to see Motorola add a 3.5mm jack on the mid-range device. While we do understand that Type C headphones are not the standard mode of listening to audio these days, this could be a hint that the Moto Z Play could be priced a lot lower.
The Motorola Moto X Play is India is currently priced at Rs 15,499. USB Type C earphones and not only an inconvenience these days, but do cost quite a bit as well, which is probably the reason Motorola saw that it would not serve a purpose at a lower price range and decided to throw in a 3.5mm headphone jack as well.
Currently, the LeEco Le 2 that is priced at Rs 11,999 also comes with a USB Type C port for audio. With that said, Motorola could be looking at launching the device with similar specifications but at a slightly higher asking but one that is lower than the Moto X Play's Rs 18,499 price at launch. Let's hope the Motorola pairs it up with the right chipset as the competition coming from the segment below, certainly seems to be heating up. Xiaomi and LeEco offer powerful hardware with prices starting from as low as Rs 9,999. Motorola will need cook up something better and pack in features that offer a bit more than its current range of Moto G4s to get the attention of consumers.
tech2 News Staff
If a recent post from a Weibo turns out to be true, we could soon be seeing the launch of not one, but two new smartphones from Finnish smartphone maker, Nokia. While the company has been on a long sabbatical ever since the acquisition of its mobile devices division by Microsoft, a new piece of information claims that it is planning a big comeback with two new flagship devices.
The leak which was first reported by Phoneradar, comes from Weibo and points to two new smartphones, that will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chipset and will feature 5.5-inch AMOLED displays of Quad HD resolution. The devices will boot to Android 7.0 Nougat with Nokia's Z launcher on top, and will also feature IP68 dust and water resistance, similar to what we have on the Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones.
Similar to Nokia's N1 tablet, both smartphones will feature an all-metal construction. With competition heating up, Nokia is also expected to go low on the price, with the device being priced at 3000 Yuan (approximately Rs 30,000). For now there are no details regarding what would be the differences between the two devices.
As with recent Nokia launches, the devices would first be available to the China market.
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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. 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." 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.
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.'"
AFP
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Even operating at a quarter of its eventual capacity, South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope showed off its phenomenal power Saturday, revealing 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe where only 70 were known before. The image released Saturday was the first from MeerKAT, where 16 dishes were formally commissioned the same day.
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. The images produced by MeerKAT "are far better that we could have expected," the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, Fernando Camilo said at the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town.
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," Camilo told AFP. 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." "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.
AFP
3 Jamalpur war criminals to walk gallows
The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) on Monday handed down death sentence to three war crimes convicts of Jamalpur district and jailed five others until death on charges of crimes against humanity committed during the Liberation War of 1971. The three-member bench of the tribunal, headed by Justice Anwarul Haq, delivered the verdict. Justice Shahinur Islam and Justice Mohammad Suhrawardi are the two other members of the bench. The death convicts are: Ashraf Hossain, Abdul Mannan and Abdul Bari. The other convicts who were given prison until death are: Advocate Shamsul Alam alias Badar Bhai, former ameer of Jamalpur district unit Jamaat-e-Islami, SM Yusuf Ali, Prof Sharif Ahmed alias Sharif Hossain, Harun and Abul Hashem. Of them, Advocate Shamsul Alam alias Badar Bhai and SM Yusuf Ali are in custody while the others are still at large. The ICT found them guilty on three of the five charges pressed against them. The verdict also said the convicts will now get one month to move an appeal before the High Court. Prosecution lawyer Turin Afroz told reporters after the verdict that they were pleased with the verdict. Earlier on July 17, the tribunal fixed today (Monday) for delivering the judgment. On June 19, closing the law-point arguments from both sides in the trial, the ICT kept pending its verdict for any day. A total of 40 witnesses have testified before the court during the trial. Police arrested Shamsul and Yusuf Ali from different parts of Jamalpur following arrest warrants issued by the tribunal on March 3, 2015 against the eight war crimes accused. -- Dhaka, Jul 18 (UNB)
Bangladesh Nari Sangbadik Kendra formed a human chain in front of Jatiya Press Club on Monday in protest against extremists\' attack at Holey Artisan Bakery in the city\'s Gulshan.
Dr Mofazzal receives KIB award
Campus Report :
Prof Dr M Mofazzal Hossain, Department of Horticulture and Director (Student Welfare) of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University (BSMRAU) has been awarded as the best agricultural personality of KIB (Agril.) award 2016. Krishibid Institution Bangladesh (KIB) organized a discussion program and award giving ceremony of its auditorium recently. Dr Hossain received the award from President Md. Abdul Hamid for his outstanding contribution in the field of agricultural research and education.
Dr Hossain who hails from a respectable Muslim family, was born at Srinagor, of Munshigong district in 1953. He obtained his BSc Ag (Hons) and MSc (Ag) in 1975 and 1976, respectively from Sher-E-Bangla Agril. College and Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh. He earned his Ph.D from Kyoto University, Japan. He worked as a Postdoctoral fellow for Agricultural Sciences and Visiting Professor of different universities of Japan.
He has more than 180 scientific papers in the national and international journals in his credit and 5 books. Dr Hossain is attached with various activities of socio-cultural organizations. He is a freedom fighter.
Serbia\'s players, winners of the Volleyball World League Finals, pose with the trophy as they celebrate during the awarding ceremony in Krakow, Poland on Sunday.
Broad-based unity would have helped the government
AT a time when national unity is all the more important to fight militancy and remove its menace now threatening people's life and state security, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's abhorrence to include major opposition BNP in unity process appears to be a policy not based on well justified ground. At a press conference on Sunday at her official residence in the city, the Prime Minister claimed that a national unity has already been built against terrorism and militancy after the Gulshan and Sholakia attacks that killed so many people. She said the matter is totally different when it comes to those who are involved in terrorism and militancy meaning BNP and Jamaat who killed people through arson attacks and are involved in war crimes.
We know that the Prime Minister and her 14-party alliance have strong political reservations to bring the major opposition within the fold of national unity. They want to move alone. But when some BNP leaders have indicated that they are ready to abandon their long time political ally Jamaat to forge the much-needed national unity against militancy, it is definitely indicative of a far-reaching change that may slowly reestablish the country's politics on a new footing. Unless there is a political change, nothing will change for better and things may only worsen. IS and similar militant groups from abroad will continue to take advantage of the deep political division within the country.
If the Prime Minister believes that the unity of her ruling coalition is what means the unity of the nation, she is seriously mistaken. Nobody can accept that the unity of government coalition parties is unity of the whole nation. We do not see how mere unity of political parties will help solve the problem of anarchy being created by threats of terrorism. Because unity has to invariably involve change of politics. But it is so wrong to claim that for unity others are not necessary.
Unity with other parties including civil society bodies would have been good for the government to show the world that both the government and the opposition are working together.
SOBs without Chief Executives
A LEADING daily on Monday reported that three major state-owned banks (SOBs) such as Sonali, Agrani and Rupali Bank are running without their Managing Directors (MD) and Chief Executive Officers for many days. The Managing Directors of Sonali Bank and Rupali Bank have gone on retirement while the post of MD of Agrani Bank remained vacant following his dismissal due to irregular loan operation. Bank management is largely dependent on the Chief Executives of the banks and it is not difficult to understand how these banks are operating without the man on their top management.
The banking sector is facing growing challenges from political instability and business uncertainties. Inefficient bank management, frauds and corruption in loan management and political interference in decision making are some of the very big problems holding the banking hostage all the time. The Managing Directors always handle such problems and often they also succumbed to pressure and take risky decisions. But when these posts remain vacant for weeks and months, it makes those banks more vulnerable to be mishandled by inept persons holding the charge on temporary basis.
According to Banking Company Law, if the post of the MD remains vacant, respective banks must fill up the posts. If three months passed without recruitment, Bangladesh Bank has the authority to recruit an administrator of equivalent status in a public bank. It is worrying that BB has not taken effective action so far in this regard.
It is also frustrating that the Boards of the Banks are reluctant to take necessary initiative to recruit officers as the Finance Ministry exercises power in such recruitment where political consideration works more than qualification of a candidate. If the MD is not a man strongly owning the ruling party politics, he has no chance to be recruited or sustain pressure in his new post. There may be lot of lobbying behind the screen but the posts in the banks remained vacant.
Experts opined that undue interference or wrong policies of the government have made the banking sector vulnerable to sanctioning loans to fictitious business projects or rescheduling loans with longer repayment period when banks are suffering from capital shortage. But absence of MDs is altogether unthinkable for longer period. We agree with experts' suggestions that the government should set up a Banking Commission to clear the mess and make bank management more transparent and accountable.
Moreover the Finance Ministry should hand over recruitment of MDs to the Board of the respective bank or to Bangladesh Bank under strong operational guidelines. The government should not keep MDs' posts vacant in important banks only because of political or such other reasons. Banks must be allowed to function on corporate basis and recruitment must also follow on the basis of corporate rules.
Anti-militant drive launched in Bogra
A combine force of RAB, BGB and Police started special anti-militant drive in Tangrakuta Char in Shariakandi upazila and Nimgachi under Dhunot in Bogra from Monday. This photo was taken from Sonahata High School area.
Bogra Correspondent :
The Rapid Action Battalion [RAB] on Monday announced Tk 10 lakh reward for former militants who are willing to cooperate by providing information to the law enforcers after returning to normal life.
"Besides, an individual who provides information on militant activities will be rewarded Tk 5,00,000 and their identities will be kept confidential. Their families will be provided security, said Benazir Ahmed, Director General of RAB, on Monday.
The RAB Chief was talking to reporters at Tengrakuta, a village at Bogra's Sariakandi Upazila after taking part in a joint drive to find militant training camps at Sariakandi and Dhunat Upazilas, which are Char or shoals.
Members of Border Guard Bangladesh and police also took part in the raid. The RAB Chief said: "Shafikul who had been arrested after the attack in Sholakia said he received training in these Char areas and then sent to Sholakia via Jamalpur. The joint forcers are raiding these areas based on that information."
He also urged the locals to be aware against people choosing the path to radicalism. "People from all sections of society must make sure no-one becomes a radical."
This special drive was conducted at Tangrakuta Char in Shariakandi upazila and Nimgachi under Dhunot upazila.
During briefing at Sonahata Primary School under Dhunot upazila, Lt. Col. Mahbub Alam, Commander of RAB - 5 said, they are trying to uproot militant force. However, nobody was arrested in this drive.
Duty Officer of media cell of Bogra Zila police, Sr. ASP Gaziur Rahman said, they will share all update regarding this drive time to time with the press.
Six richest nations `host just 9pc of refugees`
Tens of thousands of refugees remain stranded as more countries tighten border controls
Al Jazeera News :The six richest countries - which make up more than half the global economy - host less than nine percent of the world's refugees, an aid group has said.The United States, China, Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom hosted 2.1 million refugees and asylum seekers last year - just 8.88 percent of the global total, the report from the Britain-based Oxfam said.Poorer countries, in contrast, have accommodated most of those looking for save havens, Oxfam said."Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa as well as the Occupied Palestinian Territory host over 50 percent of the world's refugees and asylum seekers but account for under two percent of the world's economy," it said. "While Germany has recently welcomed far more refugees than the other of the wealthiest nations, there still remains a major gap with poorer countries providing the vast majority of safe havens for refugees."Oxfam called on governments to host more refugees and to give more help to countries sheltering the majority of them - ahead of two major summits about refugees and so-called economic migrants in the US in September."It is shameful so many governments are turning their backs on the suffering of millions of vulnerable people who have fled their homes and are often risking their lives to reach safety," Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam, said. "Poorer countries are shouldering the duty of protecting refugees when it should be a shared responsibility, but many richer countries are doing next to nothing." An unprecedented 65 million people from around the world have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict, persecution and violence, the report said. More than a third of them are refugees and asylum seekers, Oxfam said, and the remainder have had to move within their own countries."Too many people who have taken treacherous journeys to reach safety end up living in degrading situations littered with abuse, hostility and discrimination, and too few governments are doing anywhere near enough to help or protect them," Byanyima said.
Social media under scanner
I was misquoted on terror news: Kamal
Staff Reporter :
The government has asked the members of law enforcing agencies to scan social media in a bid to thwart creating panic among the people.
Social media like, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn are creating panic among the people through uploading news on terror attacks.
"Social media have become an anxiety-provoking factor. Panic and fear continue to grip people as news on terror attacks are being uploaded on them," Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told journalists at his Secretariat office on Monday
Kamal also said that he was misquoted about his Sunday's comment on the recent militant attacks.
"I said that we had intelligence information that some attacks might happen, but didn't know the whereabouts or when it might be," he said. Replying to a query, the Minister said the social media, including Facebook and Twitter, are now under scan.
When asked about how and in what way the terrors storm the Holey Artisan Bakery in the capital's Gulshan diplomatic enclave, he said the terrors walked into the restaurant.
"Gulshan attackers came on foot in small groups and were carrying arms in rucksacks as seen in CCTV footage," the Minister said, adding they were not riding car or other vehicles to reach the Cafe on that dreadful night.
He said, being informed, police immediately rushed to the spot and took position around the Cafe.
"Sub-Inspector Faruque rushed to the spot within three minutes. And other police forces also went there within 10 minutes," he said.
The same also happened at Sholakia in Kishoreganj district as thousands of lives were saved, he said.
"Our intelligence predicted that terrorists might strike in the city. And our police remained alert. But we didn't have specific information that when and where the terror would launch attack," he said, adding they obtain such intelligence reports everyday
The terror attack at Holey Artisan Bakery in Gulshan diplomatic enclave left 29 people killed, including 17 foreign nationals, two police officers and at least five militant suspects on July 1.
Five of a family including 2 NSU students missing
Staff Reporter :
An entire family of five has been reportedly missing from the city's Khilgaon area for more than one year, police confirm.
Dr Rokon Uddin, his wife Naima Akhtar and their two daughters and son-in-law-Nadia, Ramita and Shisir-had not been seen since they left their home at the city's Khilgaon Chowdhurypara (442/B) on May, 2015.
Nadia and Shisir are husband and wife and were students of the North South University (English Department).
Dr Rokon Uddin was posted to Dhaka Shishu Hospital and his wife Naima Akhtar was a lecturer of Kabi Nazrul College and their younger daughter Ramita was studying in Viqarunnisa Noon School and College when they left country.
Helal Uddin, caretaker of the house, said his landlord left Dhaka for Kuala Lumpur in last year's Ramzan.
"From then they remained missing and did not communicate with me," he added.
Admitting the matter, Abdul Jalil, Officer In-charge of Rampura Police Station told The New Nation yesterday that police are trying to contact with the relatives of the missing family.
"We are also looking for their militancy link," he added.
When asked, he said, none is yet to file a complaint in this connection.
Rana among 41 indicted
Court Correspondent :
The District and Sessions Judge's Court of Dhaka on Monday framed charges against
41 accused, including Rana Plaza building owner Sohel Rana, in the murder case in connection with collapse of the building in 2013.
Judge SM Kuddus Zaman of the court passed the order and fixed September 18 to start trial with the deposition of witnesses. Earlier, the court rejected the discharge petitions of 35 accused where they sought their discharge from the case. Of the 41 accused, seven are now in jail, 27 secured bail from the court, while seven others are on the run. Of the accused, 34 were present during the hearing. On December 21, last year, the court took cognizance of the chargesheet of the murder case.
A total of 1,129 people, mostly garment workers, were killed and about 2,515 others were injured as Rana Plaza came down crushing in Savar on the outskirt of the capital Dhaka on 24 April, 2013.
Over two years after the tragedy, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of police pressed charges against 42 people, including Sohel Rana on June 1, last year in the two cases filed over the collapse of the building.
Of the accused included in the charge sheet, 17 were common in the two charge sheets submitted by the CID. Sohel's father Abdul Khalek, mother Marjina Begum and 12 government officials were made accused in the charge sheet.
On the day, when the complex collapsed, Rajuk filed a case with Savar Model Police Station against Sohel Rana for violating the National Building Code. Police also filed a case accusing six people, including Sohel Rana, on April 25, 2013 on the allegation of committing murder. Police arrested Sohel Rana on April 28, 2013.
Business in Gulshan hit- hard
Staff Reporter :
Unprecedented security measures have made people's life difficult affecting their regular works and business badly in the city.
In the wake of deadly terror attacks in city's Gulshan cafe and Sholakia Eidgah maidan of Kishoreganj district security throughout capital Dhaka especially in Gulshan diplomatic enclave has been tightened.
Setting up check posts at most sensitive points in the city, the members of law enforcing agencies are now engaged in enforcing strict vigilance which in turn is harassing people in the name of ensuring security, it is alleged.
In most of the cases, altercation between the law enforcers and city dwellers, particularity the landlords, are taking place every day. The businessmen are facing the worst as they are being asked to take additional security measures as well as install Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras at their respective business houses.
Besides, police also imposed a restriction on parking vehicles in front of the businesses establishments, including cafes, restaurants, coffee houses etcetera. As a result the business of residential hotels, restaurants, bars, shopping malls, banks, visa processing booths and traveling agencies are being hampered seriously. As the buyers, clients and customers are facing the same situation, they are refraining them from going there. Apart from these, the house owners are also under tremendous pressure by the members of law enforcement agencies as they are being interrogated about their tenants.
Police continued to raid houses, offices, business establishments and educational institutions against what they said 'to curb terrorism and militancy'.
"The law enforcers continue to come my house and interrogate me about my tenants. Besides, they are asking me whether any foreigner resides my house. It is very painful to us," a house owner alleged. He also said such unprecedented security measures also discourage the fresh tenants. "If such situation continues, our houses will remain vacant," he said.
The law enforcer also continued to check all sorts of vehicles. Following the security measures, many people already have stopped going to residential hotels, restaurants, bars, shopping malls, money transaction centers and visa processing points and traveling agency booths to avoid unnecessary harassment of the law enforcers.
When contacted Alamgir Hossain, Assistant Director of Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) of Rajshahi office, said he already has cancelled his booking at Hotel Al Amin International near Bashunshara Residential area due to unprecedented security measures.
"I came to Dhaka to participate at a marriage ceremony at Bashundhara Convention Center but I'm staying at my relative's house," he said.
Ashraful Alam, a security guard of a restaurant in Gulshan 2 area, said people's movement declined in the diplomatic zone, as it is now under scanner.
"The trade and business in the area are also being badly affected due to drastic fall in customers' presence," he said.
A manger of the United Hospital said that the patients and visitors in the hospital have lessened after the cafe attack.
Dilruba Khanam alias Sapna, resident of Mirpur said during her way on the United Hospital her private car was checked at 17 points. Rubel Hossain, an owner of money laundering point at 'Shoppers World Market' at Gulshan, said, "We are facing dull business due to poor presence of customers focusing extra security measures after the cafe attack."
Masudur Rahman, Deputy Commissioner (Media) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) said that the tight security measures also have been taken on the request of different ministries, embassies, foreign organisations and individuals.
He also said that city dwellers must take it easily. The security measures have caused temporary problem to them.
DMP Assistant Commissioner (Gulshan zone) Sirazul Islam said, "We have taken all necessary security steps to ensure the safety of the people."
"We've no alternative way to check the people and vehicles to avert the untoward attack," the police official said.
4 Hindu priests get death threats in Pirojpur
UNB, Pirojpur :Four Hindu priests of different temples in the district received death threats through letters sent by unknown miscreants on Sunday night and Monday morning.Masumur Rahman Biswas, Officer-in-Charge of Sadar Police Station, said general diaries were lodged with Sadar Police Station in this connections. Narendranath Roy, president of Palpara Durga-Kali Temple in the town, said Ruhi Das, priest of temple, found a letter with death threat on the floor on Sunday night.The letter reads-"You could not recognise us, we are in Pirojpur. You Hindus, we'll kill you one after another."Later. he informed the matter to the Deputy Commissioner of the district.Besides, two priests of Central Kali Temple, Sree Sree Kali Temple in the district town and another of a temple in Sikdar Mallik area of Sadar upazila-also got death threats in the same way.
Over 300 militant related cases now pending in SC
M Faruque Hossain :
More than 300 militant-related cases are now pending with the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (SC). But there is no progress to dissolve those cases. As a result, the accused militants are active to make new network, SC official sources said.
On the other hand, Additional Registrar (Law and Administration) M Sabbir Foyez told The New Nation on Monday, "We exactly do not know how many militant-related cases are pending with the Appellate Division. We are preparing a list of those cases."
Among the cases, the Ramna Batamul bombing attack case is now pending before the High Court. Hartkat-ul-Jihad (Huji) leader Mufti Abdul Hannan and 13 other militants were accused in the murder case of the bomb blast at Pohela Baishakh programme at Ramna in 2001.
The appeal of five Huji militants in connection with attempting an assassination of British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury in 2004 is now pending with the Appellate Division while the Udichi bomb blast case is pending before the High Court Division.
According to law experts, the militants continue their network with their organization staying in the jail. They are even making a new network with their fellow jail mates.
Sources at the Home Ministry and the Law Ministry said, about 500 cases of 21 top listed terrorists are pending with the trial courts. The delay of trial process is hindering execution of their punishment.
Disposal of these cases are reportedly delaying because of administrative and cause list complexes. The lawyers representing these cases are extending time for hearing. Since the execution of two top leader of Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) Sheikh Abdur Rahman and Siddiqur Rahman alias Bangla Bhai, no other punishments for the militants were executed.
About 179 death row militants and more than 300 other militants have been staying in different jails in the country in different cases. As the cases are pending for final disposal the execution of their sentences are hindering.
Joint steering body meet held: Project could soon be a reality
Anisul Islam Noor :
Bangladesh has been promoting diversification in electricity generation through a tri- national cooperation among Bangladesh, Bhutan and India to meet the country's growing demand of electricity.
As part of this policy, the country is going to invest in 1,125MW Dorjilung Hydropower Project in Lhuentse, Bhutan. This will enable Bangladesh to re-import electricity in the country. The project could soon be a reality, Power Division officials said.
The project work is expected to speed up after the 11th meeting of a joint steering committee in Dhaka on Wednesday,
Power Division Secretary Monowar Islam told The New Nation yesterday. Power Diviaion Secretary Monowar Islam and India's Power Secretary Pradeep Kumar Pujari led their respective sides at the joint steering committee meeting.
Dhaka and New Delhi have agreed to frame a policy to facilitate a tri-nation investment in hydropower projects in Bhutan. The trilateral cooperation will provide an opportunity for both the countries to diversify their energy markets. Bhutan is dependent on the Indian market for sale of its surplus power, as does Bangladesh for electricity import, Monowar said.
Economic Affairs Minister of Bhutan Lekey Dorji has recently told journalists that the detailed project report (DPR) is almost complete. He said the project is estimated to cost about 83 billion ngultrum ($1.24 billion).
Bhutan has a target of harnessing 10,000MW of hyrdropower by 2020, said Dorji.
Meanwhile, the government of Sheikh Hasina has recently approved $1 billion for the project. Foreign Minister Abul Hasan Mahmood Ali has said the money will be equity investment in the project, and Bangladesh will get a proportionate share of the production from the project.
"We have been dreaming of importing power from Bhutan for a long time," the Foreign Minister said.
The fact that demands for power in both Bangladesh and India will keep increasing, he said, adding it presents a big economic opportunity for Bhutan. Bangladesh currently buys around 600MW electricity from India.
Implementation of this project will not only uplift the relations between Bhutan and Bangladesh but also the trilateral relations. "We are poised to take a big leap in the trilateral cooperation," he said.
In addition to Bangladesh's share of production from the project, the foreign minister said his country is also keen on importing either from the same project or other projects in Bhutan. That will be subject to negotiation among the three countries.
Case filed over attack on Bauls
UNB, Chuadanga :
A case was filed in connection with the hacking to three people of Baul community at Ektarpur village in Jibannagar upazila on Sunday midnight.
Baul Shahidul Islam filed the case with Jibannagar Police Station on Sunday night accusing 7-8 unidentified men, said Humayun Kabir, Officer-in-Charge of the police station. Meanwhile, police arrested three suspected men from Senerhuda village in the upazila early Monday in this connection.
The arrestees were identified as Ariful, 22, son of Jeher Ali, Shahed, 30, son of Shahjahan Ali, and Jamat Ali, son of Niamat Ali.
Earlier, three Baul practioners, Rashida Begum, 60, Abdur Rahim, 65, and his wife Bulu Begum, 50, were hacked by masked miscreants who launched an attack at a Baul Akhda, a social centre of the Baul community, at Ektarpur village. The injured were first taken to Sadar Hospital and later shifted to Rajshahi Medical College Hospital (RMCH) as their condition deteriorated.
Bauls are a mendicant folk sect, generally inhabiting the districts of Kushtia, Meherpur, Chuadanga, Jhenaidah, Faridpur, Jessore, and Pabna and associated with devotional songs known as Baul songs, according to Banglapedia.
SC orders tanners to pay now Tk 10,000 as fine per day
Tanneries in cityas Hazaribagh.
Staff Reporter :The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (SC) on Monday commuted the compensation of the 154 tanneries at Hazaribagh to pay Tk 10, 000 per day as fine to the Government Exchequer until the relocation of their factories at Tannery Estate located in Savar within the stipulated time. The court also ordered to donate fifty percent of the fined money to the National Liver Foundation of Bangladesh. A four-member bench headed by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha passed the order upon a petition filed by the Tannery Owners Association and Bangladesh Leather, Leather Goods and Footwear Exporters' Association. The High Court on June 16, ordered the 154 tannery owners to pay the fine of Tk 50,000 each per day to the government as they were yet to be shifted their factories to the designated site in Savar and causing environmental hazard in the River Buriganga. The Supreme Court stayed the order till July 17 upon an appeal by the trade bodies. The HC order came after the Industry Secretary submitted a list of 155 tanneries still operating at Hazaribagh. The Industries Secretary report suggest that, of the 155 units at Hazaribagh, only Reliance Tannery has moved to Savar and rest of the 154 started the process.Following the report, the HC said each of the 154 tannery owners to pay Tk 50, 000 as fine everyday until their relocation at Savar. The government on April 1, suspended rawhide supply to Hazaribagh tanneries as the tanners failed to meet the March 31 deadline. The government then extended the time till April 10 following a report by the Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation (BSCIC), the implementing agency of the tannery estate project in Savar. Petitioner's lawyer Manzil Murshid said the apex court's verdict is a big progress towards the relocation of the hazardous industry to Savar to ensure the environment of the River Buriganga.
Flow of outside funds so easy: Country so unsafe
According to press report Bangladesh getting regularly millions of dollar. So we have another easy source of foreign exchange earning, but so damaging for the country.
It was found in 2015 that funds are coming from abroad for establishing mosques and madrasas, or as aid to so-called NGOs working for the welfare of persecuted Rohingya Muslims, but in reality they are earmarked for terrorism. A detailed investigation by special anti-terror agencies revealed that militants are taking advantage of the poor Muslim families while recruiting new members.
Militants used to collect funds from different sources, including "well-wishers" - those who believe in similar ideologies. Funds also came from outside the country. Some of the detainees said they consider money and valuables kept in banks are "war spoils". The official further said the arrestees believe that most of the banks in the country do not operate in accordance with the principles of Islamic Shariah and, hence, looting those is not a religious offence.
Even earlier, in 2014 November, the police nabbed Myanmar sectarian outfit Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) Bangladesh Chapter's top leaders Salamatullah and Shafiullah, also an Awami League leader of Naikhyangchhari upazila in Bandarban; and Global Rohingya Centre (GRC) Vice-President Mohammad Alam, also a Pakistani national, among five for funding militant groups.
A local daily reported in 2014 that from London, a Pakistan national had sent 1.5m pound sterling (about Tk. 20 crore in Bangladeshi currency) to a bank account in Chittagong. The account was opened using forged signatures of the members of Maizvandar Sharif Shah-e-Jame Mosjid Directors and Development Committee. Committee President Syed Nazibul Bashar Maizvandari, also a lawmaker of Fatikchhari, said that they had taken legal action against two members of the committee for forging signatures and inspiring radical Muslims.
Meanwhile, after the arrest of banned militant outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh's Chittagong district Commander Ershad Hossain alias Mamun in March 2015, it was reported that the members of outlawed militant groups - JMB, HuJiB, Hizb-ut Tahrir and Ansarullah Bangla Team - were working in concert to establish an Islamic State with the help of international terrorist group Islamic State by 2020.To implement their agenda, four IS members visited Chittagong in October 2014 and sat with the top leaders of the four banned outfits.
So it appears that flow of funds for militants from outside is very easy if the report is to be believed.
The common question: Why some elements among us in Bangladesh who have been peace-loving all along, became too eager to lead a risky life of terrorism? The government has no knowledge so much, yet terrorism is spreading. So where is the success of the government other than concentrating more arbitrary power in the hands of police denying justice under rule of law and keeping persons imprisoned?
Many believe the government is pursuing a wrong policy making lives of our people unsafe and miserable with police restrictions. Not only that the country's economy is being crippled. Everybody is affected, and how this situation helps the government is not known to us. Against terrorism the government has to succeed to give people safety.
"They all offer services to supply users with a token via a computer-voiced phone call, but neglected to properly verify whether supplied phone numbers were legitimate non-premium numbers," Swinnen says in his blog.
"This allowed a dedicated attacker to steal thousands of EUR/USD/GBP/... Microsoft was exceptionally vulnerable to mass exploitation by supporting virtually unlimited concurrent calls to one premium number."
Smart hackers could exploit a loophole that could allow them to steal a significant amount of cash from Google, Microsoft and Instagram using aSecurity researcher Arne Swinnen from Belgium has discovered an ingenious way to steal money from big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Instagram using their two-factor authentication (2FA) voice-based token distribution systems.Swinnen argues that any attacker with malicious intent could create fake Google, Microsoft or Instagram accounts, as well as premium phone services, and then link them together.The attacker could then request 2FA voice-based tokens for all fake accounts using an automated scripts, placing legitimate phone calls to his service to earn him quite a nice profit.Swinnen created accounts on Google, Microsoft Office 365 and Instagram and then tied them to a premium phone number instead of a regular one.As a result, whenever one of these three services would call the account's phone number to send the user their account access code, the premium number would register an incoming call and bill the companies.Although the Swinnen reported the loophole to all the three companies, he calculated that he could have stolen 432,000 per year from Google, 669,000 per year from Microsoft and 2,066,000 per year from Instagram.You can learn more technical details about the hack in Swinnen's blog post.Although no customer data was being put at risk through his hack, Facebook (who owns Instagram) and Microsoft rewarded Swinnen with $2000 and $500 via their bug bounty programs, while Google mentioned his name in the company's Hall of Fame.
Wondering Why is ARM really Worth $32 Billion?
"This is a compelling offer for ARM shareholders, which secures the delivery of future value today and in cash. The board of ARM is reassured that ARM will remain a very significant UK business and will continue to play a key role in the development of new technology."
"We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market-leader in its field. ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the Internet of Things."
Japanese telecommunication giant SoftBank has confirmed that the company intends to acquire UK chip designerfor almost $32 Billion (24.3 Billion) in an all-cash deal.ARM has also agreed to this offer from SoftBank and said that its board would recommend the all-cash deal to shareholders.SoftBank will pay nearly $22.5 per ARM share, which is 43 percent more than ARM's closing share price on Friday and 41 percent more than ARM's all-time high closing share price.The deal is the largest-ever acquisition of a European technology business, first reported by The Financial Times.Founded in 1990, Cambridge-based ARM Holdings designs microchips for a variety of smartphones and powers more than 95 percent of the smartphones in the market.Whether it is Apple's iPhones or iPads, Samsung's Galaxy smartphones, Amazon's Kindle e-readers, the cheapest Nokia phones or Internet-connected devices like Nest's smart thermostats, Fitbit's fitness trackers, Canon's EOS cameras, Ford's cars, and DJI's drones, all are powered by ARM-based chips.Here's what ARM chairman Stuart Chambers said about the acquisition:ARM does not actually manufacture chips, but rather it licenses its semiconductor technologies to a huge variety of device makers. ARM not only dominates the market for smartphones but also used in other consumer gadgets, industrial-like devices and " Internet of things ."So, SoftBank's acquisition of ARM Holdings means the Japanese company is buying the most valuable company in the world of mobile processors.SoftBank said that ARM Holdings, which currently has 4,064 employees worldwide, will remain headquartered in Cambridge, and that the company would retain ARM's senior management team, brand, as well as a lucrative partnership-based business model.The Japanese firm has also promised to double the staff headcount in the United Kingdom over the next five years.Here's what SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said about the acquisition:Son described the ARM acquisition as "one of the most important" acquisitions in the history of its Japan-based business.This is the latest major tech acquisition in last few months. At the beginning of this month, Antivirus firm Avast acquired AVG Technologies for $1.3 Billion in cash and last month; Microsoft made its biggest acquisition by buying LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion in cash.
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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
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[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.
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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.
They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry.
Of course, the latest security is in place, so your information will not be taken out when you use your credit card.
To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy.
ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal.
Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on.
Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture.
Cautions for Indians using sextoy
When using sextoy, keep the following three things in mind
Keep sex toys clean
Watch out for electrical leakage
Beware of the heat generated by the body while using a sex toy
As I mentioned earlier, many sextoy products are used for the delicate zone.
Therefore, it is most important to keep the sextoy itself clean. It is very important to keep the sextoy itself clean, because if a slight scratch is created by friction, bacteria can enter and breed there.
It is safe to wear a condom when using the masturbator, just in case.
In addition, many sextoy devices are powered by a power source, so if they are not waterproof, there is a possibility of electric shock or malfunction due to wetness.
Some may even develop heat during continuous use. If the fever becomes too much, you may get burned, so be careful.
If you get a fever during use, stop driving the sextoy immediately and refrain from using it.
You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly.
Summary
What did you think?
In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India.
The sextoy market is growing rapidly in India and it will continue to grow steadily in the future.
As India is a rather closed-minded country, it can be difficult to be open about ones sexual habits and values.
However, being faithful to ones desires by properly dissolving ones sexual desire is very effective for ones physical and mental health.
If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try?
Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women.
I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it.
CARBONDALE Legislation aimed at bringing harsher penalties to violations of the Freedom of Information Act for municipalities and change the way the statute of limitations is measured in wrongful death lawsuits could be signed Tuesday by Gov. Bruce Rauner in Southern Illinois.
The law has been referred to as Mollys Law, for Molly Young, a Carbondale woman who died in 2012 from a gunshot wound to the head in the apartment of her former boyfriend, Richie Minton, who was a Carbondale police dispatcher at the time. Since Young's death, questions have persisted about whether she committed suicide or was murdered. The manner of her death has not been determined.
Mollys father, Larry Young, sent an email to The Southern Illinoisan, saying at 1 p.m. at the Southern Illinois Airport in the Aviation Center, the governor will sign the bill into law. The governor's office has confirmed Rauner will sign the law, but the location has not been determined.
Sate Rep. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro, introduced the law back in February during a news conference in front of the Carbondale Civic Center. She said the law will bring repercussions to municipalities and organizations who fail to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, such as increasing the fines for not releasing information that has been requested through the Freedom of Information Act to $10,000 plus $1,000 for each day information is withheld.
Also, she said the law will change the way the statute of limitations is measured in wrongful death lawsuits. Under the new law, the two-year statute of limitations is extended to five years.
Both parts of the law were unanimously passed through the House in April.
A judge in May 2015 dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Young, ruling that he failed to file the lawsuit within the two years of Molly Young's death.
If we have a situation again where somebody doesnt get all the information prior to that two years expiring they are still going to have the opportunity to look at the evidence and take that forward in a decent amount of time, Bryant said.
Beautiful, shattering, slashing.....(1995) by David Bowie [Photo provided to China Daily]
"Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own," David Bowie (1947-2016) was quoted saying in a 1998 interview with The New York Times.
"It has always been for me a stable nourishment," said the rock legend who died of liver cancer in January. "The same work can change me in different ways, depending on what I'm going through."
An exhibition tour and sale will reveal David Bowie's less-known side as an art collector and his extensive connection with the art world.
Sotheby's will auction about 400 items from David Bowie's private collection in London in November, featuring modern and contemporary art and designs. A selection of the works will be first exhibited in London from July 20 to Aug 9, and then travel to Los Angeles, New York and Hong Kong.
The musician was born and raised in south London. His collection hence shows a focus on modern British art as his attention was drawn to the chroniclers of London, such as Frank Auerbach, Harold Gilman and Leon Kossoff.
His interest then expanded to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. His purchase of Jean-Michel Basquiat work will also appear in the sale room.
He also acquired contemporary African art, outsiders' art from Vienna and designs of the revolutionary Memphis Design group.
David Bowie's patronage of art was also celebrated in his being on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine and launching an art-book publishing company. He painted throughout his life, and he was immersed in art communities of London, New York and Berlin.
"Eclectic, unscripted, understated, David Bowie's collection offers a unique insight into the personal world of one of the 20th century's greatest creative spirits," Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby's Europe, says in a release.
Related:
Legendary rocker dies after 18-month battle with cancer
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.
No one plans to need trauma care, but an accident makes the need immediate. A traumatic injury is a sudden and severe physical injury that requires immediate medical attention.
Many accidents resulting in traumatic injury can be treated in local hospital emergency departments. Patients with more severe injuries often require a transfer to a larger hospital that specializes in trauma care or a trauma center. All hospitals provide trauma care to injured patients, but designated trauma centers offer specialized care that is not always available at other hospitals.
In Illinois, there are no trauma centers south of Springfield, which puts Southern Illinois in a trauma desert. For many Illinois residents, the nearest trauma center is located in another state.
Melaney Arnold, public information officer for Illinois Department of Public Health, said the process of becoming a trauma center is voluntary.
For a hospital to become a trauma center in Illinois, it voluntarily seeks either a Level I (highest) or Level II (lower) trauma center designation from IDPH. Requirements for designation include certain qualified staff, such as subspecialty surgeons neurosurgeons, cardiothoracic, orthopedic and sophisticated diagnostic and monitoring equipment, Arnold said.
Due to these requirements, costs for operating a Level I or Level II trauma center can exceed $20 million annually. Because of this high financial burden, many hospitals are not able to afford to be designated as a trauma center, and IDPH does not have the legislative, fiscal, or operational authority to require a hospital to become a trauma center.
Illinois offers Level I and Level II designations for trauma centers. Missouri and Indiana also offer Level III Trauma Center Designation, a designation recognized by the American College of Surgeons.
In Missouri, the St. Louis area has seven designated trauma centers and Cape Girardeau has one. Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Mercy Hospital St. Louis and Saint Louis University Hospital are Level I Trauma Centers. Cardinal Glennon and Children's hospitals are Level I Pediatric Trauma Centers. DePaul Hospital and St. Anthony Medical Center are Level II Trauma Centers. St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau is designated a Level III Trauma Center, a designation that currently does not exist in Illinois.
Two hospitals in Evansville, Indiana, Deaconess Hospital and St. Marys Medical Center, are Level II Trauma Centers.
In January 2015, IDPH released a Trauma Center Feasibility Study. One of the things the study looked at was the number of trauma center criteria that hospitals without the designation met, including many that have previously held Level II Trauma Center designation. Three local hospitals were among those surveyed. To receive designation, a hospital must meet 70 criteria for Level II and 85 criteria for Level I.
Memorial Hospital of Carbondale, a Southern Illinois Healthcare facility, met 62 of the criteria for trauma center designation. The hospital met 89 percent of the criteria for Level II and 73 percent of the criteria for Level I. Of the 12 hospitals surveyed, MHC was third closest to meeting all the criteria with only St. Elizabeths Hospital and Memorial Hospital in Belleville meeting more criteria.
Heartland Regional Medical Center met 55 of the criteria, earning readiness scores of 79 percent for Level II and 65 percent for Level I. SSM Health Good Samaritan Hospital in Mount Vernon met 47 of the criteria, earning scores of 67 and 55 percent.
Rose Aldag-McVey, marketing and communications specialist marketing and strategy development, for SSM Health, believes that the hospital would meet more criteria if surveyed today. For example, the hospital now has a neurosurgeon on staff.
The same is probably true for Heartland Regional Medical Center and Memorial Hospital of Carbondale.
During an open house June 30 for an expansion at Memorial Hospital of Carbondale, a nurse manager said he would like to see the hospital pursue Level II Trauma Center status, adding that additional operating rooms allow one operating room to be reserved for emergencies.
Dr. Richard Griffin, head of emergency services at Good Samaritan, has had many years of experience in large trauma centers. The emergency department has the capabilities to deal with many types of traumatic injuries in Mount Vernon. As part of SSM Health, they have a complete unit of resources within 90 miles. The hospital is an anchor hospital, and works closely with nine other hospitals.
When patients must be transferred, interstates provide easy access, and the Mount Vernon airport has helicopters that can do the transfer. Good Samaritan also serves as a hub for the EMS system, and provides training to ambulance crews, police officer and others.
Amanda Throgmorton, ER department manager at Heartland Regional Medical Center, said both Southern Illinois as a region and the Heartland are always looking at ways to provide the best care for patients.
We participate in our regional trauma meetings, and I serve on a subcommittee of trauma legislation where we work to look at rules and regulations. We are constantly working to improve both, Throgmorton said.
She added that the region had a big win with the trauma center funding. They are able to capture trauma funds to improve nursing care, purchase trauma equipment and educate to nursing staff.
The biggest struggle we face in Southern Illinois is getting the specialty physicians that are required to serve on trauma services, Throgmorton said.
Throgmorton said improved trauma care is definitely a need, and Heartland is continuously working toward providing trauma care to patients. The hospital sends nurses and physicians to trauma training, and some new physicians will help move the hospital toward that goal.
Grant Capel, director of Union County Ambulance Service, understands the struggle to provide good trauma care to patients. The closest trauma center is St. Francis in Cape Girardeau, and St. Francis is 28 miles from Union County Hospital.
Capel said smaller emergency departments, like the one at Union County Hospital, are an important link in trauma care. He explained that those hospitals often work to stabilize patients for transfer to a facility with more specialized care.
Our ER out here [at Union County Hospital] does a fantastic job, Capel said.
Union County Ambulance crews also may transport trauma patients to Carbondale or directly to Cape Girardeau, depending on where the accident occurs. He praised all the hospitals.
Its really a tough situation for us and counties south, Capel said. St. Louis is a long way.
Capel added that Southern Illinois does have a need for a trauma center, and he hopes one comes about in the region.
We are the community. We want to make sure our region has the services, and we want to make sure our communities have the services they need, Throgmorton said.
Weve got less than 18,000 people in Union County, but they deserve the same care as someone living next to St. Louis, Capel said.
Southern Illinois Healthcare declined to comment for this story.
BAMBERG -- The Bamberg County C-Fund Committee is forging ahead to get roads in disrepair paved, but it still needs help in obtaining rights-of-way from property owners in order to complete some of the projects.
Bamberg County Council learned during its meeting Monday night that two roads in the city of Bamberg, including Sunnybrook Lane, have been paved and preliminary work is being conducted for the paving of Crouch Circle.
County Administrator Joey Preston said the committee has approved nearly $700,000 of the $900,000 the delegation receives annually to pave a portion of Dally Road in Denmark.
"If I lived on that road, I'd be very happy about it. They've lived in terrible conditions in the past. They're blessed because of this decision," Preston said.
Denmark residents Lee Davis Jr., Barbara P. Beard and Donald Parler addressed the council with concerns about the road's condition, but Preston said the holdup has been obtaining rights-of-way from some property owners who live along the road.
"We're gonna have to have a community meeting. We'll probably do the entire road, but we have to get rights-of-way from the section that's gonna be paved for sure," Preston said.
The community meeting has been set for 2 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 10, at the Dane Theater in Denmark.
Preston said the C-Fund Committee will meet again at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 19, at the new courthouse annex.
"At that meeting, there will be an update on all of the projects that have been approved and consideration for new projects," he said.
County Councilman Trent Kinard said, "Nobody's trying to steal people's property when we want rights-of-way. We're trying to get things done. ... Everybody wants progress, everybody wants change and everybody wants stuff done, but to get things done, you gotta be a part of the team."
In other business, Treasurer Alice Johnson reported that the county's total income for April was $277,756. Expenses came in at $835,251, reflecting a negative balance of $557,495.
"We did end up with a positive bank balance at the end of the month even though we had more expenses than income. ... Usually in June we can reimburse the county for the things that we paid for other departments," she said.
Johnson also gave a report for May, stating that the county's total income for the month was $269,913. Expenses came in at $570,889, reflecting a negative balance of $300,976. "We ended up with a credit bank balance. ... I don't know yet how we're gonna come out for June, but at some point, the county will be reimbursed."
Finance Director T.M. Thomas reported that the general fund generated $6,125,015 in year-to-date revenue as of the end of May. Expenditures stood at $5,988,128, reflecting a positive balance of $136,887, he noted.
"Overall, countywide, all departments continue to operate within their budget and within their expected bounds," Thomas said.
In his report, Preston recognized Bamberg County Office on Aging Executive Director Kay Clary for donating the use of a van so that MAMAS (Mary Ann Morris Animal Shelter) could transport their dogs to Columbia every Saturday.
The administrator also reported that the tentative date for departments to relocate into the new courthouse annex is Aug. 19. In addition, he reported that the county is working to obtain a right-of-way from one property owner so that it can begin tree removal at the county airport and start the runway rehabilitation project.
Also during the meeting, Darrell P. Booker, senior project manager at SouthernCarolina Alliance, presented the council with a sign marking the celebration of SCA's 20th anniversary in service to Bamberg, Allendale, Barnwell, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper counties.
"We look forward to 20 more years of support and building relationships so we can improve the quality of life for the citizens of Bamberg County, but also SouthernCarolina Regional Alliance," Booker said.
In other business:
Following a public hearing where no public comments were made, council approved final third reading to amend an existing agreement for the development of the South Carolina Advanced Technology Park in Barnwell. Tax revenues from the park are distributed between Bamberg, Barnwell and Allendale counties.
Under the amendment, the fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreement with Swiss Krono Group, "or one or more of its affiliates or related companies," would be extended to 25 years.
Swiss Krono Group, one of the world's leading producers of engineered wood products, and its American subsidiary, KronotexUSA Holdings Inc., in December 2015 announced the expansion of its existing facilities in Barnwell County with the investment of $230 million to build a high-density fiberboard mill and expand its laminate flooring production.
According to the company, a total of 105 new jobs will be created over the next few years as a result.
Council gave second-reading approval to an ordinance to "reestablish and redefine" the Bamberg County Airport Advisory Committee, including restating its purposes, duties and authority.
Council gave first reading to an ordinance establishing the policies and terms for the county to be in compliance with the state Freedom of Information Act.
The ordinance stipulates the county must respond to a FOIA request within 15 days; establish uniform fees of 25 cents per copy and $27.45 per hour for searching for and making copies of records; and not charge copy and labor fees for requests involving the copying of 10 pages or less and minimal labor.
Written notice of all public body meetings must also be provided at the beginning of the year.
Council passed a resolution to be presented in memory of the late Councilwoman Alzena Robinson, who died on April 22.
Council passed a resolution to be presented to resident Roosevelt Bryant for outstanding community service.
Council voted to reappoint Councilman Larry Haynes to the Three Rivers Solid Waste Authority board.
If you're looking for a growth industry, check out South Carolinas food and agricultural exports: The number of jobs supported by agricultural exports has been trending upward since the 1990s.
More than 1 million American jobs are supported by agricultural exports, including 7,000 jobs in South Carolina. Thats a substantial part of the estimated 11.5 million jobs supported by exports all across the country.
Agricultural exports help support rural communities across the country, with each dollar of exports stimulating another $1.27 in business activity. Our states agricultural exports support jobs in transportation, processing, packaging and many more areas; roughly 80 percent of these jobs are in non-farm sectors.
So while the benefits of trade for South Carolinas rural farmers and ranchers are clear, there are also positive impacts rippling throughout the entire job market stimulating our national economy.
In South Carolina, were accustomed to producing the best agricultural goods. Our producers keep Americans fed and clothed while contributing to the food security for nations across the globe. Their hard work is a symbol of where we come from, a reflection of our shared values, and an economic driver for our states economy.
For the U.S. economy as a whole, agricultural exports represent a consistent success story through good times and challenges. Agricultural exports have grown much faster over the past decade than even manufacturing exports. In fact, over the past seven years, U.S. farmers and ranchers are responsible for exporting $1 trillion in food and agricultural goods to countries around the world.
At the U.S. Department of Agriculture, were working aggressively to maintain this historic momentum by expanding foreign markets to help drive demand for American-grown goods. Were leading more trade missions and generating more sales as a result than ever before. We have saved U.S. businesses billions of dollars by removing unfair barriers to trade. In 2015 alone, USDA resolved more than 150 trade-related issues involving U.S. agricultural exports valued at $2.4 billion. And weve worked to expand trade relations with many of the worlds fastest-growing nations.
More simply, as the rest of the world continues to become more developed and populations grow, so does the demand for American agricultural exports.
That is why the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is so important to South Carolina. The TPP is a 21st century trade agreement that helps to level the playing field for American businesses while ensuring the highest labor and environmental standards.
U.S. trade with the 11 TPP countries accounted for 42 percent of U.S. agricultural exports in 2014, contributing $63 billion to the U.S. economy. Easier access to these markets with fewer taxes on our goods allows for even the smallest-scale producers to expand their reach.
According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, ratifying the TPP will boost annual net farm income in the United States by $4.4 billion. The TPP also removes 3,900 taxes on U.S. agricultural goods, such as poultry, cotton or soybeans grown right here. Failure by Congress to pass the agreement, however, costs the U.S. economy a permanent loss of $94 billion each year.
With TPP, local products are able to compete on a more level playing field, reaching high-demand markets both at home and abroad. And, most important, TPP provides the United States an opportunity to help write the global rules on trade rather than nations like China. While China moves forward with its own trade deals that dont reflect our interests and our values, TPP promises to make a lasting contribution to the American economy by giving more Americans a fair shot, more higher-paying jobs, and households with paychecks that go further.
Strong trade deals like TPP that meet our standards, reduce taxes and level the playing field for our businesses can power South Carolinas economy for decades to come. Lets hope Congress gets the message.
With the GOP convention finally at hand, team Trump faces the truly daunting task of keeping his brand afloat and maintaining a course to victory in the fall. It appears the GOP is anything but all-hands-on-deck, with splinter factions threatening to abandon the candidate and some delegates actually planning a convention floor revolt.
And yet, despite the apparent disunity and chaos, Trumps polling numbers vs. his challenger, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, have barely taken a hit. Coming out of a widely publicized email scandal in which she was spared criminal indictment, Clinton has been wounded deeply. In a newly released New York Times/CBS poll, 67 percent of voters indicated Clinton is not honest and trustworthy. And the poll also showed the candidates are essentially neck and neck in the race.
The implication is that Trump need not run a perfect race to beat Clinton, just merely a race free of major blunders. But if past is precedent, a mistake-free performance may be a bit much to ask from Trump.
Several times over the past weeks, Trumps antics have snatched headlines away from a major Clinton scandal and turned attention on himself.
The email scandal is a case in point. Rather than focusing on the hearings in which FBI director Comey virtually excoriated Clinton, media attention was drawn away to Trumps tweet featuring a picture of Clinton superimposed over a six-pointed star and a pile of money.
For many, the image conjured anti-Semitic memes. Trump later removed the star and retweeted a similar image with a circle instead, but then went on to double down on his tweet, defending the image in a speech and arguing that he should not have caved to external pressure and removed it.
Coming into the Cleveland convention, the media have virtually turned on Trump. A review of the op-ed section of The Washington Post over the past three months reveals a steady stream of negative articles focusing on Trump, vs. a tepid criticism of Clinton for her various scandals. Most of the media, from the New York Times to CNN, have followed suit.
Thus far, Trump has not demonstrated the organizational capacity to get his own message out. Hes been slow in producing ads, especially in key battleground states such as Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. He will need some of these states to break his way in order to have a viable path to victory in the fall.
Then there is Trumps fundraising apparatus. He raised a dismal $3.2 million in May to Clintons haul of $27 million. Keep in mind that Trump was the presumptive nominee for most of the month of May, while Clinton was still in a heated battle against Democratic rival Bernie Sanders.
Trump fared far better in June, with reported numbers of $52 million, to Clintons $67 million. And while all indications are that Trump has been actively fundraising throughout the beginning of July, one wonders whether the deficit will continue to plague him going forward.
Clintons fundraising apparatus is a well-oiled machine, whereas Trump appears to have to work very hard for his money. To wit, Trump was flying all over the country just days before the convention, attending various fundraising junkets; one wonders whether anyone can muster the stamina to pull off what Trump needs to do in the coming months to unify the party and fuel his campaign.
It seems Trump has thus far relied primarily on media theatrics and free publicity to drum up attention. This served him well in the primaries, but one wonders whether the lack of a ground game may come back to haunt him in the hotly contested battleground states late in the race.
With a party in disunity, a hostile press and a campaign operation that is far from robust, Trump faces a tough road ahead. He will need to unite the party behind him at the convention, and that means more than threatening the alternative of a Clinton White House. Voters need a reason to vote for Trump, not merely against Clinton.
Trump has not laid out a concrete policy agenda, although the GOP platform has been amended to accentuate some of the broad themes on trade and immigration that Trump has touted in his speeches.
With the convention now under way, Donald Trump faces significant challenges in both unifying his own party and reaching out to additional voters that hell need to bring home the presidency. Neither of those tasks are easy ones, and it would be far better if, at this stage of the race, he only had to fight on one front, instead of at least two.
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/By Azernews/
By Laman Ismayilova
An evening of Azerbaijani and French music, organized by Azerbaijan's Friends Association in France took place at Azerbaijan Cultural Centre in Paris, Trend Life reported.
Addressing the event, President of the Association, member of the National Assembly of the French Republic Jean-Francois Mancel spoke about the culture and history of Azerbaijan, its deep traditions of tolerance, multiculturalism, as well as the importance of further development of bilateral cooperation between Azerbaijan and France.
Following the speech, guests were presented a short artistic documentary film by French writer Gonzague Saint Bris "Alexandre Dumas in the Caucasus". The film features the writers visit to Nagorno-Karabakh during his journey through the Caucasus in the mid-19th century.
During his journey, Dumas visited the Atashgah, a fire temple located in the outskirts of Baku as well as Sheki, Quba Ismayilli regions.
What Dumas most remembered about the Caucasus and Azerbaijan was the people and their hospitality.
He recorded his impressions in the book Travels in the Caucasus (Voyage au Caucase).
Gonzague Saint Bris, for his part, shared his impressions about his personal visit to Azerbaijan. The writer stressed the beauty of the Land of Fire, its national cuisine, art and architecture as well as the hospitality of the people.
The presentation featured the performance of French musician Pierre de Tregomain and khanende Gochag Asgerov. The stunning show was greeted with warm applause of the audience.
Armenian armed forces have 15 times violated the ceasefire on the line of contact of the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops over the past 24 hours, said Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry July 18.
Armenian armed forces, stationed in the village of Voskevan of Armenias Noyemberyan district and nameless heights of the Krasnoselsk district, opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the village of Gushchu Ayrim and the nameless heights of the Gadabay district.
Moreover, Azerbaijani positions underwent fire from the positions located near Horadiz village of the Fizuli district and nameless heights of the Goranboy district.
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.
A shootout has taken place in front of a court building in Ankara, where 26 generals, who participated in the military coup attempt in Turkey, are being tried, CNN reports.
The person who opened the fire was neutralized by the special forces guarding the court building, said the report.
The special forces have blocked the street where the court is located.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
According to the latest reports, 265 people have been killed as a result of the coup attempt.
No country can become a member of the European Union if it has death penalty, the Sputnik International news agency quoted the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini as saying July 18.
She made the remarks when asked about Turkeys considering reintroduction of the measure.
Let me be very clear on one thing No country can become an EU member state if it introduces death penalty, said Mogherini.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
According to the latest reports, 265 people have been killed as a result of the coup attempt.
More than 50 women banking professionals will be honoured by the Bahrain Bankers Union in December, reported the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication.
To read further, please visit GDNonline.
Saudi Binladin Group has asked for an extension on an 817 million riyal ($217.8 million) Islamic loan that matured last week and which was being used to fund construction on the kingdom's Grand Mosque site, sources aware of the matter said.
The request to delay the payment, originally due on July 15, was because the Saudi government had yet to reimburse the construction firm for work carried out on Islam's holiest location, the sources said on condition of anonymity due to the subject's sensitivity.
The company has been hit by government spending cuts and by its suspension from receiving new state contracts since September last year, when a crane accident killed 107 people at the Grand Mosque.
Binladin declined to comment. Dubai Islamic Bank, which originally helped arrange the Islamic loan, declined to comment. A spokesman for the Saudi Ministry of Finance couldn't be reached for comment.
Binladin has continued work on the mosque renovations, sources said, despite the delays in government payment and a criminal investigation into the incident.
A state-linked newspaper reported last week that engineers and two government officials will face trial over the deaths.
The ban on Binladin was lifted in May, although the company still has debt of around $30 billion, bankers estimate.
Binladin, a construction firm started by a Yemeni immigrant in the 1940s, has been tasked with a number of sensitive works over the years by the Saudi authorities, including the current expansion of the Grand Mosque in Makkah, which houses the Kaaba, the structure to which Muslims face while praying.
According to sources, Binladin has SR1.071 billion ($285 million) of approved payments on work completed on the project up until December 2015 which are still outstanding.
It has filed a further SR1.3 billion ($346 million) of claims for work covering the period January-April 2016, for which approval is still needed.
In lieu of these receivables being paid, the builder has asked the banks to accept an extension to August 31 on the murabaha facility, a cost-plus-profit arrangement which is compliant with Islamic financing standards.
As well as Dubai Islamic Bank, the consortium of around 8-9 lenders which provided the murabaha were mainly from the UAE and includes Emirates NBD, Noor Bank and Ajman Bank, two of the sources said.
The sources said the creditor banks would likely agree to the extension as they were confident they would eventually be repaid, given the project's importance to Saudi Arabia.
This is not the first time that Binladin has required extra time to meet a debt repayment.
The firm repaid a SR1 billion ($266 million) Islamic bond that matured in late June after a delay, with the payment coming from a SR2.5 billion ($665 million) loan the company secured from two local banks in May to help pay for the costs of laying off staff.-Reuters
The Qatar Finance and Business Academy (QFBA) has signed a MoU with Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK, to offer joint professional and academic programmes starting from September 2017.
Northumbria Universitys Newcastle Business School was named the UK Business School of the Year in the prestigious Times Higher Education Awards last December, and it recently achieved double AACSB accreditation in Accounting and Business (making it the only business school in Europe to earn such an accreditation).
The agreement signed by QFBA and Northumbria University is a great achievement for the academy and the university which will lead to a strategic cooperation in various technical and scientific fields in addition to the exchange of expertise and professors to provide the best accredited academic and professional programmes, said a statement from the Qatari institution.
Meanwhile, Northumbria's innovative programmes for QFBA students provide them with the knowledge necessary to compete in an increasingly globalised economy and boost their employment prospects, through which they can exercise the skills and knowledge gained in the academic and professional programmes offered in partnership with the university, it stated.
Through the technical and scientific programmes that will be presented in partnership with the university, beneficiaries will learn about the latest scientific developments in areas of interest, in addition to the best practices in these aspects, it added.
On the new programmes, Sheikh Fahad Faisal Al Thani, the chairman of QFBA, said: "Our academys agreement with Northumbria University represents a milestone in our tangible contribution to the realisation of the Qatar National Vision 2030."
This agreement is poised to play a key role in harmonising training qualifications with the evolving job market needs, while powering the financial sector in Qatar and the region with an entire generation of well-qualified professionals, capable of elevating the profile of their organisations as well as Qatar as a preferred business hub that attracts investments and businesses, he noted.
CEO Dr Abdul Aziz Al Horr said: Our partnership with Northumbria University opens a world of opportunities for Qatars youth. Through this agreement, we will be presenting a package of various scientific and professional programmes that harmonises with the needs of the labour market in Qatar.
The programmes will sport a qualitative aspect and international recognition for the national and international reputation that the Academy and the University enjoy, he added.
Prof Jon Reast, pro vice-chancellor (International), Northumbria University, said: "We are pleased to embark on this new relationship with QFBA to provide the academys students with state-of-the-art undergraduate and post-graduate courses that will sharpen their knowledge and enable them to compete in the global job market.
Our universitys approach to creating a distinctive learning experience that engages, empowers and inspires achievement is simple but powerful. We have top academics that work with students at every stage, to maximise their potential, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Jarir Marketing, one of Saudi Arabia's largest retailers by market value, missed analysts' estimates on Tuesday as it posted a 17 per cent fall in second-quarter net profit amid a decrease in sales of computers and office supplies.
It made a net profit of SR128.5 million ($34.3 million) in the three months to June 30, down from SR154.9 million in the same period a year earlier, it said in a bourse statement.
Four analysts polled by Reuters had on average forecast Jarir would make a quarterly net profit of SR153.1 million.
Among the reasons given for the earnings decrease was a decline in sales of computers and computer supplies, lower gross profit margin, and an increase in selling and distribution expenses as part of its efforts to expand market share.
Saudi companies issue brief earnings statements early in the reporting period before publishing more detailed results later.
Turnover in the second quarter was SR1.39 billion, down 1.1 per cent on the same three months of 2015.-Reuters
Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has deployed Juniper Networks Contrail Networking to create automated, best-in-class cloud services for its customers.
STC is pioneering the use of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in the region, enabling it to offer customers accessible, dynamic online services and applications rapidly. This approach is also expected to increase STCs business agility and revenue growth.
With dedicated cloud services powered by Contrail Networking, STC now has a fully scalable, flexible resource to sell to subscribers and customers on-demand as their IT requirements evolve and change. Contrail Networking enables full automation, better scalability, security and flexibility for STCs NFV-based cloud computing services.
Juniper Networks Contrail Networking is a simple, open and agile SDN solution that automates and orchestrates the creation of highly scalable virtual networks. It interoperates with an OpenStack cloud orchestration platform, enabling the agile creation and dynamic scaling of service instances with high availability and reliability.
Contrail has been recognized as the most widely used commercially available SDN Controller in OpenStack deployments for the third consecutive year by OpenStack Users Survey.
At STC, we have a customer-first approach. We aim to earn our customers trust and enrich society with comprehensive, innovative services and solutions, said Dr Tarig M Enaya, senior vice president for enterprise at Saudi Telecom Company.
The network, underpinned by advanced NFV and automation capabilities, can deliver substantial value to our customers by providing the agility, speed and simplicity that todays businesses require. Juniper is an ideal partner with the same customer-centric approach, providing us with state-of-the-art technology for our cloud-based offerings.
Using virtualization technologies to build a programmable NFV platform that creates agility and automation can provide the competitive edge for service providers operating in an increasingly competitive market. Juniper Networks is committed to supporting STC at the forefront of the telecom industry in the Middle East by helping to create a differentiated customer experience, said Adrian Pickering, vice president, Middle East and Africa at Juniper Networks. TradeArabia News Service
Ramada Plaza Jumeirah Beach, a leading four-star hotel in Dubai, UAE, has promoted two of its staff members.
Andrea Apala has been promoted from restaurant manager to food and beverage (F&B) operations manager. Previously overseeing Fogueira, one of the hotels signature restaurants and Dubais first Brazilian Churrascaria since 2014, Apala will now be assisting the head of the F&B department with the day to day operations of the restaurants, as well as the planning and forecasting.
The Brazilian native comes with a background deeply associated with the hospitality industry, holding a degree the Bachelors of Hotel Management from Hotel Management College, SENAC, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and working under a range of positions in restaurants and hotels in both UAE and Brazil. Under her guidance, Fogueira Restaurant gained immense popularity, and has been voted a fan favourite numerous times, having even participated in Dubai Food Festivals first ever Restaurant Week. A resident of the UAE since 2007, Andrea Apala is well-versed with the region and boasts of over 14 years of experience in the hotel and restaurant industry.
Chef Prashan Perera has been named the new executive sous chef. Prior to this role, he was the Sous Chef at Ramada Plaza Jumeirah Beach. Chef Perera, who joined the hotel in 2012, is familiar with the region, having previously worked at notable hotels in Dubai.He has amassed more than 20 years of experience in the culinary field in both the UAE and his native Sri Lanka. He garnered several accolades to prove his kitchen skills, and has won 14 medals along with his team from the prestigious Emirates Culinary Guild, UAE. As executive sous chef, Chef Perera will be handling the entire kitchen operations, including the hotels six restaurants as well as room service. - TradeArabia News Service
To celebrate the upcoming wedding season, Rixos the Palm has introduced an exclusive promotion for couples preparing their wedding ceremonies.
On completing a booking with Rixos the Palm before October 15, couples will be eligible for a 10 per cent discount on the total bill. Further discounts will be provided on a minimum reservation of 10 rooms. To celebrate the couple, Rixos the Palm will provide a complimentary three-tier wedding cake. The bride and groom can treat themselves to an exclusive 25 per cent discount at the luxury Anjana Spa and the in-house beauty salon. On a request basis, a professional wedding planner will be awarded to the couple.
Rixos the Palm, located on the Palm Jumeriah crescent, serves a glorious view of the Arabian Gulf and the iconic Dubai skyline. The Rixos property is the perfect property for a fairytale wedding, combining premium Turkish hospitality, a delectable gastronomic experience, elegant decor and the comfortable atmosphere, for all kind of wedding ceremonies.
For information and reservations, please call +971 4 457 555 or email [email protected] - TradeArabia News Service
When a federal judge approved Alpha Natural Resources bankruptcy exit plan two weeks ago, regulators, industry leaders and environmentalists breathed a collective sigh of relief. But while the plan will keep two large coal mines operating and set the stage for a stricter approach to self-bonding, the long-term outlook for Alpha is murkier.
Alpha was the first of three large coal companies operating in Wyoming to file for bankruptcy amid one of the most difficult years for coal in three decades. Arch Coal, which operates the Black Thunder Mine, and Peabody Energy, which runs the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, soon followed.
But as the first company to reach a restructuring agreement with regulators and the courts, Alpha is expected to set a precedent for the other companies. Environmentalist hope Alphas plan will change the states approach to environmental bonding. State regulators want pragmatic deals that preserve Wyoming jobs. However, in a bearish market with hesitant lenders and federal oversight, widespread uncertainty remains about the viability of Alphas financial plan post-bankruptcy.
***
Days after the bankruptcy plan was approved, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement decided that Wyoming broke state law in allowing Alpha to self-bond at the Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines in a deal made last year with Wyomings Department of Environmental Quality.
Companies are required to set aside money for environmental cleanup after mining or drilling. Rather than obtain a third-party bond, some companies engage
in self-bonding, a practice wherein a companys financial assets are held against the cost of eventual reclamation efforts.
Opponents say the practice puts taxpayers at risk when mining companies like Alpha go bust. But the companies maintain they have enough value in their businesses to cover the eventual cost of cleanup.
Wyoming has allowed more than $2 billion in self-bonding, more than any other coal-producing state.
Last weeks decision by federal regulators pleased some of self-bondings biggest opponents in Wyoming.
It sets the standard, said Shannon Anderson, a lawyer for the Powder River Basin Resource Council. Our hope is that Peabody and Arch will be mindful of what OSMRE has said in the case of Alpha.
A state regulator for Wyomings Department of Environmental Quality disagreed. Kyle Wendtland, administrator of the departments Land Quality Division, responded Friday to the federal regulators decision, calling it politically motivated and demanding that it be reconsidered.
At issue is a deal the state department made with Alpha last year. During the bankruptcy, Wyoming and Alpha agreed to make the state a top-priority creditor, if necessary, for $61 million of the companys $411 million in environmental bonding obligations in the state.
Wendtland said Friday that the state agency made the deal in order to keep the mines operating, save jobs and revenue.
Without a compromise made by the DEQ, the two mines would have shut down and the company would have had to go into liquidation, he said.
A better compromise was to help companies develop a timeline for compliance, Anderson said.
Since the beginning weve tried to send a signal that these very basic legal requirements have to be complied with, Anderson said. Bankruptcy cant just be an excuse to avoid the law.
Federal officials declined to comment on the Wyoming letter, saying they needed to review it.
Their finding raises the stakes in Alphas bankruptcy, depending on whether the bankruptcy exit agreement holds. The agreement is expected to go into effect by the end of July.
***
Lingering disagreements aside, the emerging Alpha has an uphill battle in the current market, with wary investors, low prices and watchful regulators.
Investors are willing to place small bets on coal, but they are being cautious, said Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that supports a transition to renewable fuels.
The fact that a mediocre coal company is emerging from bankruptcy in the midst of the worst bear market in generations means one thing: Lenders arent willing to give much money for the new companies emerging from the Alpha bankruptcy, he said. Wall Street mostly has kept its wallets closed to coal. Investors just werent willing to spend a bunch of money to recapitalize the company.
From environmentalists to regulators, coal companies are being watched closely in this time of uncertainty, in a way they werent when business was booming.
A few years ago, no one was paying close attention, said Chiza Vitta, an analyst for S&P. Now we are in a situation when bankruptcies are more likely. There is more scrutiny. Mines are closing down. The rubber is meeting the road. The states and the feds want to make sure that cleanup is going to happen.
According to the bankruptcy agreement, Alpha will emerge as two separate companies. Contura Energy will buy out Alphas most lucrative mines, including those in Wyoming. The other company will take the brunt of the low-performing mines and the large reclamation costs in Appalachia.
The success of this strategy depends on strong coal sales, which analysts say wont happen.
Alpha maintains that Contura, and by extension Wyoming, will be free of the weaker companys risky debt requirements. Thats good for Wyoming, as analysts are reporting a strong possibility that the Appalachian company will fall back into bankruptcy in a few years.
Based on Alphas own projections, available cash for the second company could be as low as $180 million, with only $20 million unencumbered by the end of 2017, according to a report from the investment bank, Cowen and Company.
Investors will likely get their money back after the restructuring, but for both Contura and the new Alpha, projected incomes are too optimistic, according to the Cowen report.
If Alphas agreement holds, Wyoming should have Contura operating and employing hundreds of coal miners this summer, but what that company will do for the states struggling coal sector, and how long it can withstand low coal prices, is yet to be seen.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Before leading the University of Wyoming, Dick McGinitys passion was growing small businesses.
Barely a month after ending his tenure as the 25th president of the states only four-year university, McGinity is re-entering the business field, leading financial operations at McGinley Orthopaedic Innovations, a Casper startup that manufactures medical devices.
Toward the end of his work at the school, McGinity began looking for a way to re-enter the small business world, he told Rotary Club of Casper on Monday.
He wanted to continue contributing to the state by helping the sector flourish, he said.
We all know what Wyoming is going through right now, McGinity said. McGinley Orthopaedic is a case study in what Wyoming can do to diversify its economy.
The state has lost between 7,000 and 10,000 workers due to energys decline, he said.
The startup currently has about 30 employees, building drills for orthopedic surgery. But thats a starting point, McGinity said.
Lets say [McGinley] gets to 100 employees. Well, it doesnt take too many of those companies to get going to really put a dent in that unemployment that happens in energy downturns, McGinity said. The better we figure out how to coordinate the various pieces of this entrepreneurial ecosystem, the more of an impact we can have, not just in the community but across the state.
The company can utilize energy workers who may have assumed their expertise is useful only in the oilfields, he said. Such businesses are becoming increasingly important in Wyoming, as the energy sector sheds thousands of jobs due to low commodity prices.
There is a great opportunity to do retraining of folks who work in the energy industry, he said. Theyve got skills with equipment, machines, design, and so this company creates demand for those same kind of skills with not a whole lot of retraining.
About 40,000 drills are sold every year in the U.S., a market largely dominated by a few main players, said the companys founder, Joseph McGinley.
But the technology hasnt changed in decades. Doctors rely on sight and expertise, the radiologist and entrepreneur said.
McGinleys drill, IntelliSense, has built-in sensors that determine the size and depth of the drill hole as it bores through bone. It also stops automatically before the bit can plunge through the other side.
McGinity praised the technology, which he believes has strong market demand.
This drill will disrupt the whole industry, he said. That is the opportunity, but it doesnt happen overnight. Institutions can be notoriously slow to change those early adopters are the ones you want to find and make the sales.
To date, the company has raised about $10 million, largely from private, and sometimes individual, donors. It is funded through equity, with no debt, he said.
As far as possible, the companys leaders would like to continue with that approach, investing wisely in their own research and development.
More than half of McGinleys revenue comes from parts and replacement parts in the rock mining industry, the founder said.
Thats our vision as we grow, to expand our base business while having alternative sources of revenue leveraging the expertise we have in-house right now, McGinley said.
The company is closely tied to small business opportunities supported by UW and has hired a number of the schools graduates. Its headquarters are at the Wyoming Technology Business Center, and it has worked with the Wyoming Small Business Innovative Research and Technology Transfer Programs.
McGinity was named UWs interim president in 2014, replacing Bob Sternberg, who stepped down after a 137-day tenure riddled with controversy. McGinity was named president soon after and served until June of this year.
McGinity is credited with bringing stability to the school after Sternbergs divisive exit.
The businessman-turned-academic was the Bill Daniels Chair of Business Ethics in UWs College of Business. He has served as research faculty at the Harvard Business School and as chairman of the Wyoming Business Council.
He plans to teach part time at UW beginning in the spring semester.
Saturday morning watercolor
The schedule for the Saturday morning watercolor sessions at ART 321 has been set for July and August. The sessions meet every Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to noon, the cost is $10 per session. All levels welcome. Havent painted before? No problem. This is the place to learn and enjoy art. For information and questions, please call Ellen Black at 265-6783.
July 23, practice session; July 30, Kit Scott, Painting Portraits; August 6, Ellen Schreiner, Importance of Color; August 13, practice session; August 20, Simplify with a Limited Palette; August 27, practice session.
Learn Windows 10
The Natrona County Library will offer a Windows 10 class on Thursday, July 21 at 2 p.m. Whether youre new to computers or have used them in the past, this class will help you become more comfortable using the Windows 10 interface. Feel free to bring your Windows 10 device with you to follow along. Call 577-READ ext. 2 or email reference@natronacountylibrary.org for more information.
Seeking vendors for Caspar Collins Day
Fort Caspar Museum is looking for craft vendors for Caspar Collins Day 2016 on Saturday, July 23. Please help us commemorate the city of Caspers namesake on the 151st anniversary of the Battle of Platte Bridge. This family-friendly event will include living history demonstrations, games, and hands-on activities.
We will have a contemporary craft vendor (hand- or home-made items), non-profit, and food concession area near the fort activities. The cost for a table space (10- by 10-feet) is $30 for vendors and free for nonprofits. The vendor application deadline is July 20, 2016. For an application form or questions, please contact Anne Holman at the Museum, 235-8462 or by email at aholman@casperwy.gov. Forms may also be downloaded from our website: www.fortcasparwyoming.com.
Caspar Collins Day will be on the grounds of Fort Caspar from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 23, 2016, rain or shine. Admission is FREE, and all are welcome.
Again, you may contact the Museum at 235-8462 or visit our website at www.fortcasparwyoming.com. Fort Caspar Museum is located at 4001 Fort Caspar Road.
Painting animals workshop
ART321/ Casper Artists Guild invites you to enroll in the two day workshop, Painting Animals with Passion, with instructor Sarah Webber, a nationally recognized animal artist. She will do a demonstration of her painterly style. Then we will do some drawing and fun exercises in color before jumping into painting your favorite critters. Workshop dates are July 29 and 30, Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Media is Acrylic & Oil. Fee is $285 members /325 non-members, open to all levels. Sarah Webbers Portfolio here: http://sarahjwebber.com
Register in person (321 W. Midwest Ave.), over the phone ( 265-2655), or online here: http://art321.org/workshops.html
Family continues suicide support
Good Grief, Support will continue at 5:30 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month (July 27) at the 12-24 Club, 500 S. Wolcott, by request of attendees. The family of J.R. Hunter, who died from suicide in June 2015 began the support before the especially tough holiday season. Anyone who is grieving a suicide, death, or considering suicide is encouraged to attend. Attendance at the meeting, as well as the content, will be strictly confidential. The Fresh Start Cafe will be open, and you can eat during the meetings. This meeting place was offered by Dan Cantine of the 12-24 Club. You need not be a member to attend.
Monday career
symposiums
The Department of Workforce Services will be holding a Career Symposium for job seekers showcasing career opportunities throughout the State of Wyoming. We are hoping to assist individuals who may be struggling to determine a career pathway or are changing careers due to recent layoffs. Stop by the Casper Department of Workforce Services, 851 Werner Court, Ste. 120, on Mondays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., June 27 through August 8. Opportunities will include statewide college or training options as well as many different career pathways that may not need additional schooling.
Parkinsons support July 19
Rocky Mountain Therapy is offering a Parkinsons Support Group on Tuesday, July 19. We meet at Rocky Mountain Therapy, 2546 East 2nd Street, Building #500, at 5:30 p.m. Our guest speaker for the July 19 meeting will be Dr. Claudio Feler, neurosurgeon. Light refreshments will be served. This support group is open to anyone with Parkinsons or caring for someone with Parkinsons. To RSVP, call 577-5204 and ask for Jerri or Shannon. To find out more about Rocky Mountain Therapy please visit our website at www.rockymountaintherapy.org.
Wyo Prepper Con
Wyo Prepper Con will be held at the Parkway Plaza Hotel in Casper on Saturday, August 27, 2016 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, August 28, 2016 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Admission is $5 for the entire weekend. Visit with exhibitors and attend speeches Saturday by experts in their prepper related fields.
Exhibit space and speaker space is still available but filling up quickly. Go to www.WyomingPrepperCon.com for more information or Find us on Facebook at Wyoming Prepper Convention
Parkinsons exercise
Rocky Mountain Therapy is offering a Parkinsons exercise program. Join us from noon to 1 p.m. Thursdays at Rocky Mountain Therapy, 2546 E. Second St., Building 500. These classes are open to anyone with Parkinsons or caring for someone with Parkinsons.
Thursdays class is tailored for the individual with more advanced Parkinsons and focuses on improving endurance, safety and managing symptoms. We are open to all ages and can tailor the class to meet varying exercise needs. The cost of the class is $5. To RSVP, call 577-5204 and ask for Jerri or Shannon.
Womens Expo booth space
The Casper Events Center, Casper Star-Tribune Communications, and Townsquare Media are pleased to present the 12th Annual Wyoming Womens Expo at the Casper Events Center on Friday, September 30 and Saturday, October 1.
The Expo Tradeshow hours are Friday, September 30, from 4 to 8:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 1st from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The 2016 Tradeshow will feature over 100 displays by a variety of vendors and sponsors. Products and services will include everything from the latest in health and wellness products, beauty and skincare, personal protection, banking and investment education, hot retail items and so much more! Booths start at $205.
The Wyoming Womens Expo offers sponsorship packages with generous print, radio, online, and tradeshow advertising exposure with added perks such as discounted Professional Development Day table rates and complimentary tickets to the expo. For sponsorship information please call 235-8456 or log onto www.WyomingWomensExpo.com.
Womens Expo professional day
Our Professional Development Day gives the working woman the chance to have a conference experience right here in Casper! This is a chance for women to network, be inspired by other women and empowered by dynamic speakers. Join us on Friday, September 30, for a day of Professional Development, sponsored by the University of Wyoming at Casper.
This year, pick the option that best fits your schedule. The full day runs from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and includes continental breakfast, lunch, coffee bar, one martini, all speakers and Girls Night Out ticket for $90. The half day is from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and includes lunch, coffee bar, keynote speaker, two content speakers, one martini and Girls Night Out Ticket for $55. Tables of 8 are available for both Half Day and Full Day.
Visit the new www.WyomingWomensExpo.com for a list and bios of Professional Development Day speakers.
Summer classes at learning circle
The Bart Rea Learning Circle hosts classes every day of the week during the summer. The circle is located inside Amoco Park, 1007 W. First Street, along the Platte River Trails: just west of West First and Poplar intersection; and just east of The Tate Pump House. All classes are free with a canned food donation to Wyoming Food for Thought. No classes on holidays or during inclement weather. For more information visit The Bart Rea Learning Circle on Facebook.
Monday, 5:30 p.m.: Fail Free Drum Circle: Learn the gift of drumming. We all start out as drummers fro the moment we begin .to hear our mothers steady heartbeat. Bring a drum if possible and your mat or seat. Primary instructor: Brett Governanti.
Tuesday, 5:30 p.m.: Strength Training for Seniors: Training and mobility are the tickets to a full and active life for all over 50. Learn strength exercises to build and maintain muscle mass and quality so you can function at your highest level. Strength plus mobility equals freedom and independence. Primary instructor: Neil Short.
Wednesday, 4 p.m.: Storytelling on the Circle: Kids & Kids at heart are welcome. We will explore stories about everything from nature, to our planet, to being good neighbors. Children four and under require adult supervision. Primary instructor: Libby Tedder Hugus.
Thursday, 5:30 p.m.: Yoga on the Circle: Unwind and connect with yourself through a variety of yoga styles. Bring your mat and water. Primary instructors: Nikki Allen, Tracy Campbell, Lizz Cowley, Brittnee Greenlee Miller.
Friday, 5:30 p.m.: Exploring Nature: Learn about our river, animals, plants, trees and insects and their amazing interactions from experts. Bring your inquisitiveness about nature and comfortable walking shoes. Children are welcome and must be accompanied by an adult. Primary Instructor: Donna Hoffman, horticulturalist.
Saturday, 10:30 a.m.: Meditation & Labyrinth Walk: Learn about labyrinths before a mindfullness class. Connect with your senses in the outdoors then stroll the path in a guided labyrinth walk. Last, well sit for calming meditation session. Bring a cushion or yoga mat. Primary instructor: Elliott Ramage.
Sunday, 10 a.m.: Yoga on the Circle: Unwind and connect with yourself through a variety of yoga styles. Bring your mat and water. Sunday morning class is better for beginners. Primary instructors: Nikki Allen, Tracy Campbell, Lizz Cowley, Brittnee Greenlee Miller.
Celebrate Recovery every Friday
Looking for a nontraditional approach to recovery from your hurts, habits and hangups? Celebrate Recovery meets at 5:30 p.m. every Friday at Highland Park Community Church, just south of Elkhorn Valley Rehabilitation Hospital on East Second Street. We start with a family meal, followed by praise and worship. At 7 p.m., theres either a lesson from Celebrate Recoverys planned curriculum or a testimony by a person who has found recovery through Christ. Then, people go to gender-specific small groups until 8:30 p.m., when dessert and fellowship conclude the evening. Child care is available at no cost. For more information, contact Chris at 265-4073.
Here and Now: Dementia-focused monthly art class
Classes are every third Tuesday of the month from 1 to 3 p.m. There is no charge. Here and Now is a program made possible through a collaboration between Wyoming Dementia Care and the Nicolaysen Art Museum. It is designed to provide a supportive environment for people with dementia and Alzheimers and their loved ones.
To register, contact Dani with Wyoming Dementia Care 265-4678, ext. 106, or at wyodementia@casperseniorcenter.com or Zhanna Gallegos at 235-5247 or at zgallegos@thenic.org
Megan Gebhart is 28 and was raised in Gillette, where her parents, Jane (Ostlund) and Gregg Gebhart still reside. She is the granddaughter of Mary Ostlund of Cheyenne and the late John Ostlund. She earned a marketing degree at Michigan State University after receiving a prestigious STARR scholarship, which is presented to six Wyoming students a year. She developed a blog and wrote a book, 52 Cups of Coffee, which is the result of 52 brief interviews conducted throughout the country over cups of coffee or other beverages. Several interviews are with Wyomingites. She introduces each person by including the place the chat was held, what they drank, and one brief bit of advice gleaned.
Gebhart was in Casper last week for a friend raiser for the Wyoming Breast Cancer Initiative, which is a statewide effort to raise money for education and awareness. It replaces the Komen Wyoming program. Judy Murray hosted the morning coffee, which attracted several dozen women from Casper and throughout Wyoming.
What has life been like since the book?
I have been to all seven continents and moved to San Francisco, where I work for Airbnb as a technical recruiting coordinator lead. Airbnb allows you to stay in unique accommodations around the world from homes to castles whatever you want your accommodation to be. Its a platform for people to list their own space, and also to find it.
Why only 52 cups of coffee and how far in advance did you schedule?
Before I started, I wanted it to be a yearlong project, so I ended up with 52 people. A couple were four weeks out to make schedules work and a couple were the day before, so anywhere from 24 hours to four weeks. It wasnt incredibly methodical.
Who was the first and how did it come about?
Our program (Bailey Scholars Program) at MSU (Michigan State University) was getting a new director (Pat Crawford) and I thought I would proactively reach out and get to know her. She was a stranger but it was a nice opportunity to welcome someone into the community. It was definitely a good starting point. I had always been really curious, and so it was really easy for me to ask questions. I have more nerves walking out of the conversation, wondering how do I write about that?
What do you hope people learn from the book?
I think there are a lot of little lessons depending on what the person is going through. I hope the larger takeaway is everybody around you has a story you can learn from, and everybody is going through some sort of battle. The uncertainty of the future can be really overwhelming. If we could just have less anxiety and more trust in the future, that would be a great takeaway.
What did you learn writing it?
A year having coffee was such an independent thing. When I went to write the book, I thought I needed to do it all myself. But what I found was that I was surrounded by experts in different areas who were so supportive and willing to help. Its OK to rely on community, and you dont have to do everything on your own.
And the lesson of the Polish grandma?
When youre hungry, find a Polish grandma. I made a good friend at MSU (Piotr Pasik, Cup 17), so when I was traveling Europe, he begged me to come. We went to his grandmothers home (Janina Pasik, Cup 40), where she fixed lunch that made an American Thanksgiving dinner look like a snack. And then after touring their town of 2,500, she fixed dinner. Her story, with Piotr translating because she doesnt speak a word of English, is amazing (she was 18 when the Germans invaded Poland at the start of World War II) and her advice was simple: Be very friendly to others. Do good things. Help.
A Casper woman was drunk Saturday when she drove her car into the front of someone elses house, a police report alleges.
Alejandra Arriaga is charged with driving while under the influence. Arriaga was born in 1994, the report states.
Police responded about 3 a.m. to a home on South McKinley Street. Arriaga told officers she was driving to a friends house to pick her up, according to the report. She said she had received a text message while driving and began texting back, which was when she drove into the house.
Arriaga had bloodshot watery eyes and her speech was slurred, the report states. She told police she had consumed three beers, a shot of Crown Royal whiskey and one mixed drink. A Breathalyzer indicated Arriaga had a blood alcohol concentration of .13 percent, nearly twice the legal limit for driving in Wyoming, according to the report.
While being taken to the Natrona County Detention Center, Arriaga told officers, You never would have caught me if I wasnt texting and driving. Ive driven drunker than this before, the report states.
The report does not explain the extent of the damage to the house.
A Casper man suspected of selling methamphetamine and who allegedly threatened to shoot police if confronted has been arrested without incident.
The Casper Police Department reported Monday that Joshua Coats had been arrested the day before in Golden, Colorado. Police did not have additional details about the arrest.
Authorities asked last month for the publics help in locating the 29-year-old. Coats had made statements indicating he did not want to return to prison and if confronted by police, he would shoot it out or commit suicide by cop. Those factors prompted police to seek the public's help in finding Coats.
Investigators said they had an arrest warrant for Coats on suspicion of distributing methamphetamine.
Chris Walsh and Darin Crowell spent years patrolling Caspers streets. Now theyve set their sights on City Hall.
The two former Casper police officers are running for City Council. They say their knowledge of the city and its finances would make them exceptional community leaders.
I know this community inside and out, Walsh said. I know the good and the bad. I know multiple different sections of our society and have worked with many people.
Walsh served as Caspers police chief from 2011 to 2013 and now has his own business doing leadership training and consulting. He is is seeking to represent Ward III in Augusts primary election and faces two competitors.
Crowell worked as a Casper police sergeant before retiring last year. Now an investigator for the Wyoming Public Defenders office, he is running for Ward II and faces four opponents.
Walsh feels he has a different focus than many of the current council members, especially when it comes to budget issues. He said he was deeply involved in budget operations as police chief and he knows what to expect when discussing funding.
I disagree with some of the directions that all the spending is going, Walsh said. Its at the expense of the employee base. Were billing significant amenities and expecting staff to maintain what weve got. It just doesnt make sense.
Walsh feels the City Council should be focusing on paying for necessities such as emergency services and trash collection and should not be spending money on luxuries such as the David Street Station.
It looks fantastic, he said. But when we dont have the money to support something new like that, it has to be done realistically, and I just dont see where were doing that.
Walsh said being the police chief also taught him to be straightforward with people, which could aid him as a city leader.
If you know something someone is asking for cant or wont be done, tell them that, he said. If theres a compromise, then reach it. People work better together if they dont think youre just telling them what they want to hear.
Crowell shares Walshs sentiments about the citys budget. He said Casper should not be using money right now to fund a private-type convention center.
We should put that on hold until we see in the next few years if were continuing to go down, or if things start to rebound, Crowell said.
He said the city should be creative in finding new sources of revenue, such as the beer tax.
The biggest issue that we have is how are we as a city going to provide the same level of service as the people of Casper have come to expect and enjoy as they have over the past decade, Crowell said.
He said he believes he has a level of trust with Casper citizens because he was a city employee. Crowell worked for the streets department after he retired from the police force.
Though he has ideas on how to increase revenue to the city, Crowell said he is running for city council without an agenda.
Im not on a crusade to change the city, he said. I want to offer to continue my service to the city of Casper.
Steve Schlager, a former Casper police lieutenant and a Natrona County commissioner, said both Walsh and Crowell have leadership experience that would benefit them in leading the city. Their reputations as police officers may also help them work with the community, he said.
You become intimately involved in the community as a police officer, Schlager said. You dont just know the economic or social group you hang out in. You get to know everybody, and they know you. You develop a rapport with everybody, and that rapport can follow you.
JACKSON Wildfires continued to burn in western and southern Wyoming on Monday, with one blaze threatening Bondurant and forcing evacuations in the area.
The Cliff Creek Fire in the Bridger-Teton National Forest was spotted about 2:30 p.m. Sunday about 5 miles north of Bondurant, a town of less than 100 people in rural Sublette County, and quickly grew to scorch about 3 square miles. The fire, which was ignited by lightning, destroyed one pole barn.
Authorities evacuated a guest ranch, rural residences and a campground in the area while they attacked the fire with airplanes and helicopters dropping retardant and water. The Teton County Sheriffs Department began mandatory evacuations of Granite Creek Road on Monday afternoon between U.S. Highway 189/191 and Granite Creek Hot Springs.
The Red Cross established an evacuation center at Pinedale High School.
U.S. 191/189 between Daniel Junction and Hoback Junction is closed, with the fire burning on both sides of the highway.
Bondurant is about 25 miles southeast of Jackson.
Cooler temperatures slowed the burning overnight Sunday and crews in the area were working to protect buildings. They were expected to receive help Monday from three firefighting helicopters.
A second, smaller fire is burning about 6 miles north of the fire near Bondurant.
The Lava Mountain Fire, meanwhile, is burning in the neighboring Shoshone National Forest. The fire, which was started by lightning, has so far consumed about 280 acres of thick timber northwest of Dubois.
Near the Wyoming-Colorado border, firefighters continued to work a nearly 25,000-acre blaze that began last month. The Beaver Creek Fire grew about 1,900 acres on Sunday, with most of the increase happening on the southwestern corner of the blaze.
The cause of that fire remains under investigation.
LARAMIE A former prosecuting attorney in Wyoming has requested an appeal after being found guilty of misusing county money.
An attorney for Richard Bohling, the former Albany County prosecuting attorney, filed paperwork Friday with the Wyoming Supreme Court requesting a reversal of five criminal convictions.
Prosecutors charged Bohling with using county money to buy cameras and other items for personal use.
Bohling was sentenced to two to four years in prison in February. He was also fined $45,000 and ordered to pay $3,000 in restitution.
Bohling's lawyers had argued he bought the expensive camera gear because photos taken by police often were insufficient to secure convictions.
Neither the unanimous decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, nor Chinas rejection of it, was surprising. The timing of it was, however, as serendipitous as Chinas rejection is ominous. Coming as Republican delegates convene on Lake Eries shore, the tribunals 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 worlds most dangerous cockpit of national rivalries.
Chinas 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 Chinas 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 Chinas. 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 nations 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 Chinas claims and behavior next to the pertinent precedents, the courts 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. Chinas 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 Chinas promises of development projects in U.S. resolve. And confidence in U.S. skill at calibrating the pressure requisite for countering Chinas 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 worlds 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, Chinas 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 Americas position in the worlds most populous, dynamic and perhaps dangerous region, or war. Is any of this on anyones mind in Cleveland?
JOHANNESBURG The first time the world came to South Africa for a conference on AIDS, the countrys 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.
Dont be afraid of us. We are all the same, Nkosi Johnson said. He died the next year.
South Africas 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 countrys 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 countrys 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 Nkosis 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.
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.
YOUTH IS CHARGES WITH STEALING AUTO
Lopez Denies Car Was Taken to Expedite Elopement With Girl
Charged with the theft of an automobile, Jesus Lopez, a Mexican youth 18 years of age, was arrested by the police and turned over to the county officers yesterday. It is alleged that Lopez took an automobile belonging to Shad Bowyer. It was recovered at the time of his arrest.
Lopez was greatly surprised that his friend Bowyer resented his taking the automobile to take a joy ride with three other friends whose names Lopez professed not to know. When interviewed by County Attorney Hilzinger yesterday afternoon, Lopez readily agreed when the officials proposed to send for Bowyer, believing that his friend Bowyer would straighten out the matter and that he would be given liberty. Bowyers answer was to sign a complaint charging he youth with the theft of the automobile.
The story that was first told to the officers was that Lopez had taken the car for the purpose of expediting an elopement with his sweetheart, but this Lopez denied, saying that the parents of the girl had removed her to the country, forty miles from Tucson.
Lopez story of the joy ride in the automobile was that he was out with three friends who suggested the ride to him when they learned that he could drive a Ford. He told the county attorney he did not know the names of his three friends.
Lopez figured in a sensational case in justice court recently when he was charged by the parents of Miss Hortensia Lopez his first cousin, with disturbing the peace of the girl. The girl, however, completely disproved the charge by swearing on the stand that Jesus only disturbance of her peace was in making love to her and that her only desire was that he should disturb her peace some more. In that case Lopez was discharged with a lecture from the court that he must not wed Miss Hortensia, as it would be a violation of the law, she being his first cousin. Lopez left the court room unreconciled, vowing that he would wed the girl despite the law.
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 Arizona Transition Zone, sometimes referred to as the Central Highlands, is a northwest-trending belt or escarpment in the middle of the state that separates the Colorado Plateau to the north from the Basin and Range Province to the south.
Originating during the Laramide orogeny, a period of extreme mountain-building dating back 70 million years, the Arizona Transition Zone was uplifted to higher elevations than the Colorado Plateau, though it has subsequently been eroded to its present elevation.
Composed of a mixture of Precambrian rocks (over 500 million years old) and tertiary volcanics, it acquired its name because it includes geologic features similar to both the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range Province. Its features include qualities of both the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range Province. Examples can be found in the igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary folded and faulted rocks that include flat-lying strata similar to the Colorado Plateau and tilted strata found in the Basin and Range Province.
Formed by heat and pressure, igneous and metamorphic rocks dominate the landscape. As with most of Arizonas ore deposits formed deep in the Earth, most were formed by intrusions or injections of magma that did not reach the surface, in contrast to extrusions, which reached the surface and were free-flowing. Some geologists believe that the forces of extension and volcanism have slowly eroded the Colorado Plateau, further extending the boundaries of the transition zone.
Northwest-trending valleys separate more than 30 different mountain ranges in the transition zone that include forests composed of ponderosa pine and mixed conifers, a trait characteristic of the Basin and Range Province to the south.
Some of these include Chino Valley, Tonto Basin and the Verde Valley, along with the Mazatzal, Pinal, Santa Maria and White mountains. The Mazatzal Mountains produced large quantities of mercury in the early 1900s.
Other features include the Black Hills near Jerome and Prescott, the Salt River Canyon between Show Low and Globe, and the Sierra Ancha Mountains around Roosevelt Lake. The transition zone is 43 to 50 miles wide in Central Arizona, extending northwest-southeast.
A combination of metamorphism, heat, water and pressure impacted the limestone rocks in the transition zone, resulting in the intense mineralization found in many of the well-known copper deposits of Clifton-Morenci, Jerome, Globe-Miami, and Superior.
It also includes the Bradshaw Mountains, considered to be the richest mineralized zone in the state, having yielded over 150,000 ounces of gold.
Mining localities in and around these mountains include Rich Hill, Potato Patch, Stanton, Lynx Lake and Bumble Bee. It contains an area known as the Central Arizona Highlands, sometimes known as the Mogollon Highlands, consisting of long stretches of mountainous, rugged, and at times inhospitable terrain formed by the collision of geologic plates, causing a series of thrust faults and uplifts that formed the Black, Mazatzal and Sierra Ancha mountains along with the Tonto Basin and Chino and Verde valleys.
Some of the principal rocks that make up the transition zone are basalt, granite, aplite, rhyolite and limestone. Chief mineral commodities of the transition zone include copper, silver, gold, lead, mercury and asbestos. Uranium, also found in this province, is located in the Precambrian Dripping Spring quartzite.
The Arizona Daily Stars Sportsmens Fund Send a Kid to Camp program has increased its funding allotment to send more local children to camp this summer because of community need.
We raise money so children from low-income households and military families can attend overnight YMCA, Boy Scout and Girl Scout camps for little or no cost to their families.
Our revised goal is to raise $182,527 to send 670 kids to summer camp. So far this year weve received 1,206 donations totaling $144,610.
Since 1947, the Arizona Daily Star Sportsmens Fund has helped pay for 37,907 children to go to camp. Were one of the oldest 501c(3) charities in Arizona.
Your contribution qualifies for the Arizona tax credit of up to $400 for donations to qualifying charitable organizations. Donations are welcome throughout the year.
Heres an update from Ken Tucker, Scout executive, Catalina Council, Boy Scouts of America:
5 Cub Scouts attended Cub Scout camp with support.
81 Boy Scouts attended Camp Lawton Boy Scout week-long summer camp on Mt. Lemmon with support.
3 Boy Scouts attended week-long National Youth Leadership Training at Camp Lawton this summer.
A total of $17,627.75 was given out in camperships to these 89 Scouts to attend camp this summer. These youth would not have had the opportunity to attend Boy Scout and Cub Scout summer camp without your generous support.
The summer experience becomes the highlight of a young persons year in the Scouting program. Thank you for all you do for the youth of our community.
Recent donations:
John Coffin, $100.
Mel and Molly Cohen, $50.
Janine Contestable, $100.
Cynthia Currie, $100.
P.A. Davis, $50.
Mr. and Mrs. D. DeManuele, $400.
Betty DeWeerd, in memory of Lowell DeWeerd, $100.
Roy Drachman Foundation, $1,500.
Rose and Jim Ewen, $50.
Lela Freiman, $300.
Col. and Mrs. John Goetz, $100.
Jane Greenberg, $50.
Vicki Gricius, $300.
Kathryn Gullen, $100.
John Johnson, $100.
Carol Kemp, $50.
Gail King, $100.
William Konkle, $200.
Joan Lewis, in memory of Dick Lewis, $50.
D. Livingston, $100.
Dolores Loomis, in memory of Jimmy and Cuca Woods, $100.
Diana Lopez, $100.
Kenneth Lyle, $100.
Susan Mann, $100.
Patricia and Jim Martin, in memory of David Ramirez, $50.
Helen Mazziotta, $50.
Marilyn McCrindle, $50.
Cathy McIntosh, $25.
Elton Millikin, $200.
Ardis Noonan, $50.
Barbara OBagy, $30.
Maria Parham, in memory of her brother George Joe Rabon Parham, $200.
Mary Lou Rex, in memory of Brian, $25.
Gary Roth, $30.
Ilene Scannell, in memory of Ted Karnofsky, $50.
Agnes Stahlschmidt, $100.
Lawrence Tagg, $100.
Diana Videtti, $60.
Nancy Williams, $50.
Richard and Constance Zecchin, $40.
Patricia Zwerk, $30.
Three anonymous donations totaling $2,012.
More donations will be acknowledged in the coming week.
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.
Trucks loaded with stones fell into the gap of a broken dike in Huarong county, Hunan province, on Sunday. Drivers had to jump seconds before their vehicles were engulfed by the water. LI GA/XINHUA
It is a little-known fact among general public and politicians that floods cause more damages each year globally than any other form of natural disasters. According to the United Nations, over the 20-year period between 1995 and 2015, 157,000 people died due to floods and another 2.3 billion were affected.
Currently, global average annual flood losses are estimated at $104 billion. The country incurring the highest losses is China, followed by US and India. These losses do not include disruptions to global supply chains when industries located in flood plains are often affected by floods. The 2011 flood in Thailand first brought this problem to global attention. However, the country which has the potential to disrupt the global supply chains the most because of floods is China, followed by Brazil, Russia and India.
Because of topography, high population, urbanization and tremendous economic growth during the past decades, China has had three of the 10 most costly global floods since 1950. Equally, because of population density, all the three Chinese floods resulted in high fatalities compared to the other seven floods elsewhere where deaths were in hundreds.
At global number two is the July-August flood of 1998, which resulted in 3,656 deaths and an economic loss of $43.7 billion in 2014. The sixth costly global flood was also in China, during July-August 2010. It caused 829 deaths and losses of 31.1 billion in 2014. In the 10th place is the flood of June-July 1996 which caused 2,775 deaths and an economic damage of $19 billion in 2014.
Flooding has been a perennial problem in China. Earlier one of the important tests of good rulers was their ability to protect the citizens from the ravages of floods. This requirement continues even today.
The good news is that death toll from floods in China has steadily declined due to government actions such as construction of dams, dikes and levees, early warning systems and prompt evacuation measures. The bad news is, economic costs of floods are steadily increasing and are likely to rise in foreseeable future.
It appears that the 2016 floods are likely to enter in Chinese record books as one of the most severe ones. The floods season is not yet over. Damages incurred are already significant. This is primarily because rainfall in China this year has been 21 percent higher than average. In Yangtze Basin, it has been 27 percent higher than average.
Yangtze is the longest river of China and the third-longest in the world. It is also the most important water artery in terms of economy and development. Thus, a serious Yangtze flood has major implications not only for China but also for the world by disrupting manufacturing and transportation links as well as the global supply chain.
According to the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, as of July 3, 32 million people in 26 provinces have been affected, 186 have died, 26 are missing, and 1.4 million people have been relocated. Some 73,000 homes have collapsed and crops have been lost in 700,000 ha. Direct economic losses already exceed $10 billion. Flood season does not end until August.
The severe flood this year was not unexpected. Vice-Premier Wang Yang had warned in June that El Nino this year was likely to increase flooding risks significantly in Yangtze and Huai basins. In 1998, another El Nino year, the death toll reached 3,556. With better preparedness, human losses this year are likely to be significantly less.
In terms of national policies, flooding was recognized to be a major problem during the post-1995 period when each of the two floods in 1996 and 1998 caused several thousand deaths and billions of dollars on economic damages. While floods became a serious concern, the solutions then proposed went only part way to solve the problem. This main policy was to construct large dams which could effectively store flood waters. After the flood seasons, stored excess water could be used during months of no, or limited, rainfall to generate hydroelectricity and then used for agriculture, industrial and domestic purposes. Major dams like Three Gorges were constructed, having flood control as an important objective.
Help India!
By Aban Abrar Biplob for TwoCircles.net
The recent terrorist attack in Dhaka, allegedly by the Islamic State (ISIS), has seen the Assam Government as well as the media, expresses concerns. On first impressions, these concerns seem valid as Assam has a long border with Bangladesh, along with more than one-third of Muslim population. Even though the Bangladesh government attributed these attacks to local organisations, it would not be surprising if these terrorists try making inroads in Assam. But a deeper look into the issue shows a completely different picture, which makes me wonder what the Assamese media is talking about.
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Despite having 34% population and general grievances over harassment on citizenship issue and ethnic riots in Bodoland, no serious extremist group has ever been reported to have a presence among Muslim youths of Assam. It is interesting to note that almost all ethnic groups or tribes in Assam have had an armed militant group in some point of time; many of them like the Bodo outfit NDFB (Sonbijit) even staged mass killings of Muslims, tea tribes, Bengali Hindus etc. but Muslim youths have never, thankfully, taken up weapons.
But clearly, the Assamese media is not convinced it seems and believes that every terror attack in the world, whether by Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or ISIS has an impact in Assam. And their focus regarding the activities of that particular terrorist organization in Muslim majority areas seem focussed in the Char areas (River islands of Brahmaputra). And sometimes, it borders on the ridiculous. When the US was spending millions of dollar in search of Bin Laden in Afghanistan-Pakistan bordering region, an Assamese daily reported that Bin Laden was sighted in some obscure Char of Assam!
In the current situation, such flights of imagination are taking dangerous trends. Last week, a news channel reported that four dreaded ISIS terrorists entered Assam from Bangladesh through Dawki Border post in Meghalaya. The channel ran a commentary on the journey of the ISIS terrorists, with minute details like which motor bikes they rode, where they stopped, what they ate in which Dhaba. They even reported the zarda pan and brand of cigarette these dreaded terrorists consumed during their journey from the Dawki border to Assam. However, in their so called exclusive big breaking news story the news channel could not divulge any substantial information or any facts. Subsequently, it was revealed that even the state police sleuths and central agencies also are not aware about any such grand entry of ISIS terrorist in Assam.
It is important to point out that these instances of shoddy and reckless journalism are not new in Assamese media. Two such reports in the past week generated a great amount of outrage and furore in the social media. Asomiya Pratidin, the highest-selling Assamese daily. It is often alleged to be the path breaker of Yellow Journalism in Assam and true to this label, they declared on their headline of July 11 that the Char areas (Muslim inhabited river islands) are already under the net of Jehad and full swing arms training is going on in these Chars to perpetrate terrorist attacks on Assam . The only evidence they published was a photo in which few young girls in hijab were shown performing some martial art.
However, Bangalore-based software engineer Rajiv Ranjan discovered that the photo used in the report as evidence is not actually from Assam. It was a photo taken in 2014 during National Girl Child Day celebration in St Maze School, Hyderabad, in which some school girls demonstrated their martial art skill. The photo was published in national media, including The Hindu. Once the lies of the newspaper were exposed, it created a great amount of resentment in social media. Many social organizations are even contemplating to take legal action against Asomiya Pratidin.
But the media house that runs the newspaper was not done here and learnt no lessons from readers pointing out the mistakes in their story. Pratidin Time, the news channel of the same media house was running a video during last two days in which an ISIS terrorist was warning of Jihad in Afghanistan and Al-Sham. For the uninitiated, Al-Sham is the region bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Jordan, usually known as the Levant. But the news channel claimed that ISIS is warning of Jihad in Afghanistan and Assam. Subsequently, the Assam Police on Saturday through a press release clarified that the claim of the News Channel was false. And in the video the terrorist mentioned Al-Sham, not Assam.
Many social activists believe that these are not mere editorial mistakes; rather a deliberate and part of a greater propaganda. The Pratidin group is often alleged as the founder of Islamophobia in Assam. In past also they published photos with catchy captions like Illegal foreigners arrested with deadly weapons in hands. Later on it was found that they were not foreigners but Assamese Muslim labourers and the so-called deadly weapons were nothing but mere agrarian tools of day to day use like sickle and spade. Popular Assamese blogger Muhammad Ibn Batuta believes this hatred towards Muslims was systematically made a part of Assamese psyche since Assam Agitation of late seventies. According to him, the Assam agitation was initially against the Outsiders (All non-Assamese), then the focus changed from Outsiders to Foreigners (including Hindu Bangladeshi and Nepalis). But at this juncture RSS highjacked Assam agitation and the focus changed from Foreigners to Bangladeshis, which was slowly changed from Bangladeshi to Miya, slang used for Bengal origin Muslims in Assam. However, over the years Miya also changed by a plain Muslims. He claims that in the cartoons published in Assamese media, a Bangladeshi is always depicted as a bearded Muslim man with skul cap.
Dr Akash Barua dismisses such social psyche and claims that Assamese society is very tolerant and secular. Assam in popular parlance is called as the land of Shankar and Ajan, after the great Bhakti saint Shankar Dev and Sufi saint Ajan Peer. He explains that, due to influx of illegal Bangladeshis over the years, there is a threat perception among all Assamese irrespective of religion, of losing political power and demographic balance. This perception of threat is being utilized by the vernacular media to sensationalise news to attract more viewership. However, he agrees that in their zeal to create sensation, Assamese media often passes sweeping comments or indulge in over generalization about Muslims which is no less than holding the whole community responsible for a crime which was never actually committed.
At a time when Islamophobia has found acceptance among all mainstream media, the visibility of this trend in Assam is neither shocking nor surprising. It is our duty to expose and challenge these claims so that the truth does not become hostage to rumour and hate mongering.
Help India!
By Umair Azmi for TwoCircles.net
On Saturday, July 9, page 11 of The Indian Express was dominated by Dr. Zakir Naik. In what is arguably a representative sample of the manner in which the issue has been center staged, more than half the page was about reports related to the famous televangelist. The department of dirty tricks at news channels, led by the self-proclaimed voice of the nation have had their hands full, calling for a ban on the basis of reports that did not exist in the first place.
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What do the newspaper reports say?
The statements range from the banal to the ludicrous, but have one thing in common they make no concrete charge. Home Minister Rajnath Singh: As far as the government is concerned, we will not compromise on terrorism at any cost. No specifics are provided. Peace TV is not conducive to the security environment in the country and poses security hazard. Are there any examples of the speeches or actions that are so dangerous for the nations security? None that we know of. Did these alleged activities (if there are any at all) start in the recent past? Or have they been going on since the inception of the channel? If they have a long history, the citizens of this country ought to be more concerned about a government that has been dozing on a matter critical to the nations security.
Information and broadcasting minister Venkaiah Naidu gives us his wisdom The only thing I could understand from the speeches he is making is that he is trying to promote radicalism, which is not good for the country. This is a blanket assertion without any particulars. This is followed by the ridiculous The I&B ministry is trying to get information from those countries as to what action they have taken and under what provisions referring to the ban on Dr. Naik in some countries. It seems the minister does not know that India like all other countries has its own laws. Are not such ministers who seem to be ignorant of the provisions in the Indian legal system, who need advice from other countries on the provisions to apply a greater matter of concern?
There is one specific that is provided. Satyapal Singh, BJP MP and former police commissioner shares his bit I have mentioned an instance where Zakir Naik coverted 12 Hindu children in Mumbai. Five among them were girls. We had also quoted more such instances in the report. Coming from a retired police officer, one wonders whether he has no knowledge of the Indian constitution that declares the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion as a fundamental right. Or more dangerously (but unsurprisingly for a member of the ruling party) he knows but could not care less.
The liberal response and false equivalence
One of the question that begs to be asked is If A claims B was an inspiration, is B responsible for the actions of A? Also, banning an organisation has to have a legal basis, not frivolous reasons such as a ministers likes and dislikes. But did the liberal response interrogate these questions? Hardly. What we had instead was impassioned arguments about Dr. Naiks regressive views. There is no denying the legitimacy of the progressive-regressive debate, but in this context, it serves a very specific purpose to create an environment where it becomes difficult to sympathize with a person who is wrongly targeted; to canvass support for the oppressor instead of the oppressed.
If the idea of a ban on a person who is not known to have indulged in violence is too much for the liberal sensibilities, the opposing of ban is still phrased in a manner as to keep the maximum negative impact intact.
Consider one of the articles opposed to the ban. The title Why banning Islamic preacher Zakir Naik isnt a good way to defeat his bigotry makes it sound more like a question of strategy rather than principle. The article pays the necessary obeisance to freedom of speech and the question of law. Reference is made to the Brandenburg vs. Ohio case, one which involved the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation famous not just for its white supremacist ideology but also for its regular involvements in actual lynchings. So while brandishing his liberal credentials of standing up for free speech, even a bigoted one, and the author establishes the false equivalence between the KKK and Dr. Naik, against whom there is no record of violence, a difference that does not seem to matter for the author.
This false equivalence seems to be the norm. In response to the Prime Ministers address ironically (considering the history of child producing centres, kuttey ka bachcha) warning everyone against preachers of hate, we are told that Naik is far from the only preacher of hate in this country. The names of Sanjeev Balyan, whose claim to fame is his alleged involvement in the Muzaffarnagar riots, and Giraraj Singh, famous for sending critics of Narendra Modi to Pakistan, are added as others threatening the fabric of the society. Once again, Dr. Zakir Naik, whose worst fault may be shallow arguments or a know-it-all attitude are put into the same category as ministers who are alleged riot perpetrators or people whose main concern is the control of the Muslim population in India. That it is packaged into an article ostensibly directed at the right wing forces ensures its acceptability among liberals, never mind the false equivalences.
The neighbourhood bully
Many of us may have experienced a particular type of bully in the neighbourhood, one who relishes attacking a person who is already down and out. Meet the grown-up version, retired judge of the Supreme Court, Markandey Katju. At any other time, a challenge to a debate followed by the charge of chickening out would be playing it fair and square. But to choose a time when the person is being harassed by one of the most powerful states to call for a televised debate it is hard to reconcile that with human decency.
Manufacturing the discourse
To complete the image of the hate-preacher whom no reasonable person could support, we are told that Muslim clerics in India unite against superstar televangelist Zakir Naik. Though everyone has read of the opposition of Kolkatas Tipu Sultan masjids imam to Dr. Naik (the opposition of at least some Barelwi and Shia groups is also well known), we are told that the most surprising condemnation comes from Darul Uloom Deoband followed by extracts from some of the fatwas on their website. That there is an unbridgeable difference between an intellectual attack and a support for criminal action seems to be lost to the author. Why bother with facts (Darul Uloom Deoband is yet to take a stand on the hounding of Dr. Naik and has actually objected to the medias misuse of its fatwas in this regard) when misrepresentation serves the purpose well?
The catch phrase of liberals is the cliched quote attributed to Voltaire I may not agree with what you say but Ill defend to the death your right to say it. In this case, they have proven that it is just that a (meaningless) cliche and nothing more.
A personal note of thanks
As a Muslim, I had always felt that the Indian Muslim community suffered from a sickness that was harmful both materially and morally. As opposed to the liberal forces who speak out against what they perceive as injustice in general, the Muslim community spoke out only when it involved one of their own. The same feeling haunted me during the government attack on JNU till I heard explicit words of support from elements of the conservative Muslim leadership. It led me to the realisation that it was not the lack of concern that made Muslim support to the oppression of non-Muslims invisible; it was more a problem of logistics and organisation. In this instance, a large number of (self-identifying) liberals have shown that the principles they claim to espouse are meant for selective application.
The unsophisticated Muslims, for all their faults, have proven themselves more consistent in their defence of people they disagree with (conservative ulema would surely disagree on social ideology, morality, etc. from the JNU establishment, but that did not stop them from tendering unqualified support, for whatever it was worth) than a large number of the intellectual liberals. For opening my eyes to this realisation, I will be forever grateful to these (pseudo?)-liberals.
The author is an engineer working in Gurgaon, Haryana.
Help India!
By A Mirsab, TwoCircles.net,
Dr Zakir Naik emerged in the 1990s, dressed in suit and a skull cap talking about Islam in English. It was a departure from traditional Muslim preachers who dressed in kurta-paijamas and spoke difficult Urdu. Two decades later, there are innumerable people who he has inspired to their increased understanding of Islam, many who converted to Islam and there are a number of people who not only dress like him but also imitate his style of work and use his debating styles.
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No one can deny Dr Naiks commitment for the cause of Islam and his voluminous contribution for propagating Islam in India and abroad. Those who object him have little logical reasoning in opposing him and they mostly do so because they fall short in explaining their own line of thoughts that is proved wrong or questioned by Dr Naik.
Today Dr. Naik is at the limelight due to all the wrong reasons as investigation of July 1st Dhaka carnage revealed some of the terrorists had once out of context quoted at Facebook wall Dr. Naiks statement that every Muslim should be a terrorist. Dr Naik immediately condemned terrorism and vehemently denied that he inspired any one for terror act. But he has been under the attack from media houses, right-wing organizations, political parties and also from some Muslims who differ with his ideology.
I too have differences with him, in fact major differences but these are not out of enmity but based on logical reasoning. However these differences will not hold me back from coming out in his support when biased and subjective media is running false propaganda against him and thereby defaming Islam. I will enlist certain points where I disagree with Dr Naik and then would explain in spite of those differences why I would support him at this difficult time for him.
I differ with Dr. Naik in terms of his ideology, misplaced logic and his style of working. As far as ideology is concerned I believe what he is propagating is not 100% Islam and at times he hides many Islamic teachings that he is unable to explain to masses. But as a true preacher one should not cover teachings or rulings of the religion that are not explainable or cannot be convinced to normal mind.
While replying to a question of retaliation asked by a person from audience that how would he explain actions of an aggrieved person who kills another for inflicting him losses, such as victims of Gujarat retaliating and killing rioters for raping their women and killing them, Dr Naik said it is not permissible in Islam. He goes on to say that even if a person or group kill one persons sister or rapes her then he should not kill that person if he has complete faith in almighty. However, he says its natural that one would instantly retaliate but according to him if one retaliates then as per Islamic teachings it is wrong. As a remedy, he suggests that the aggrieved Muslim should complain to the authority and even if the culprit goes unpunished then the aggrieved Muslim should be patient and have belief that the almighty will provide him justice hereafter.
Dr Naiks answer makes sense to the masses and people claps and cheers him up. This is how his every answer is met with. However, there is something catchy in this reply of him and it is that he conveniently covered the concept of Qisas in Islam, which was practiced by Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and his companions. He did not quote this ayat from Quran because it would have contradicted his answer:
And We ordained for them therein a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds is legal retribution. But if anyone remits the retaliation by way of charity, it shall be for him an expiation. And whosoever does not judge by that which God has revealed, such are the wrongdoers. (Quran Surah An-Nisa:45)
As the question was very difficult he would not bring in this ayah else audience would have got a controversial side of Islam which he would not have been able to explain in the context of the example of Gujarat riots as quoted by the questioner.
By not discussing Qisas for this question Dr Naik implied that he does not practice or believe in it or he does not know about it. No this is not the case, Dr Naik does know about Qisas but what he did with above answer was that he escaped with a reply which is acceptable to every novice mind and skillfully stopped from discussing Qisas.
There are some similar examples the rulings or teachings of which can never be convinced by him to the Non-Muslims. This is where my differences are with Dr. Naik that while propagating Islam he hides some teachings that are viewed controversial by masses and cannot be explained. If Islam is the true and only religion then he should not shy away from quoting such instances too.
Another point of difference is that his style of logical reasoning has serious flaws where the logic and examples changes for answering different questions so as to suit his answers that can convince audience. For example, he famously quotes example of Hitler for explaining justice. He says as Hitler killed 60 million Jews, as a punishment if he is killed once then it would not be justice and hence Almighty has degree of punishment through which culprit would be given fresh skin multiple times after it get roasted in hell fire. Audience likes this answer as it makes logical sense.
Whereas in another old video, while replying to the question of 9/11 attacks and Osama Bin laden, he did not accept it to be an attack and says it was an insider job. He did not out rightly condemn Osama Bin Laden and says he cannot call him terrorist because he does not know him and as per Islamic teachings he cannot condemn a person unless he knows about that person.
The distinction between these two answers is that he accepts the claim that Hitler killed millions of Jews but raises doubt over 9/11 attack. He accepts former because that suits his answer in justification while he applies reverse logic in latter answer. Contradictory logics to convince audience at different times.
In regards with his style of work he does not stop his followers or students of comparative religion from imitating him in every way the suit, a skull cap with star perfectly in the centre and a tie. People get inspired by him and imitate his style of work and use his methods for debating with non Muslims. There are many youths who watch his debates as if they are themselves into that debate and become happy for every rebuttal provided by Dr Naik. Many people have started the work of dawah (calling people to Islam) after listening to him and are using his techniques. This is where I object him because whoever has listened to him many have started the same work of dawah but none has ever taken up any other work, nonetheless there are many works accomplishing which a Muslim can please almighty and secure a place in paradise.
There is hardly any person who was inspired by Dr Naiks speeches and was spending maximum of his time for social activities or for improving educational standards of Muslims. In fact, the school run by Dr Naik in Mumbai is for wealthy people that charges at least Rs. 5 lakh per annum from every student. Neither he nor any of his followers have ever opened a school for people who are dropping out due to their weak economic conditions.
One good thing about him is that he does not specifically criticize any particular sect but never did he attempt to bridge the gap between different sects by expressly advocating for unity in terms of Maslaki issues. Considering his celebrity status and huge following, he could have played a vital role in uniting Muslim people and bury their differences.
Okay, these are some of the instances of my differences with Dr Naik. However these differences do not stop me from coming out in his support at this point of juncture when he is being viewed by normal person as a criminal due to vilification campaign against him.
I will not let him to the mercy of prejudiced media and biased government. Both parties are responsible for me to take a stand of supporting Dr. Naik Media because it has hyped the matter in a way that it apparently became a fight between Muslims and them, right wing organizations because they have never listened to him but out of enmity towards Muslims want him to be put to trial, political parties because through intimidating internationally famed Dr Naik it is giving a message that any Muslim can be made villain in a fraction and Dr. Naik himself as he turned this into a battle between Muslims and injustice by calling support from Muslims.
Therefore, being a Muslim, I will support him and prove to my conscience that I am an equally good Muslim and just than media, right wing organizations, political parties and section of Muslims who are unnecessarily maligning Dr Naik and thereby posing indirect threat to Indian Muslims.
Help India!
By Raqib Hameed Naik, TwoCircles.net
Srinagar: Four dozen dead. Thousands injured. Hundreds, mostly teenagers, blinded forever. Mobile internet shut; local cable channels off air, local media gagged.
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The year may be different; but it would be safe to say that in the bloodied history of Kashmir, this is just one more chapter where the entire concept and structure of democracy has been put to rest.
In some ways, one may say that the current situation in Kashmir is reminiscent of the 2008 and 2010 unrest, and security forces in Kashmir have once again put an enigma on the concept of democratic India, as stones and anger continue to be retaliated with bullets.
If we go by the death figures alone, it would seem however, that the current situation seems to be more serious than the previous unrests, where a dozen Kashmiri protesters used to get killed in security forces action over a months stretch (in 2010, 120 protesters lost lives over five months of unrest) but the death of over 40 protesters in a span of six days represent something very rotten inside the system.
2 A youth being thranshed mercilessly by Indian Security forces in Maisuma area of Srinagar
The other difference between 2010 and now is of course, that now the state is ruled by the Peoples Democratic Party in coalition with the BJP. In 2010, Mehbooba Mufti spit fire against Omar Abdullah over the deaths and during the run-up to the last elections, the PDP promised a healing touch to Kashmiris. All such promises have now come down crashing in the second year of its rule.
The latest killings in Kashmir after security forces neutralized Hizbul Commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani has once again turned the debate around who should be blamed for repeated unrests. The high-handedness of the security forces? The incompetent government? The failure of the central government to understand the Kashmir issue?
The debate around the Kashmir killings might take different directions when discussed in any Indian state. But in Kashmir and Chenab valley, it revolves around the three factors: the successive state governments inability to learn from the past experiences, the brute use of force on its own people, whom they are supposed to protect and alienation of Kashmiri people by the mainstream Indian media.
Governments yet to learn from experiences of their predecessors
People in Kashmir are of the opinion that the governments, both central and state, have never learnt from the mistakes done by their predecessors. After the unrest of 2008 and 2010, when hundreds of youths fell to security forces bullets, then UPA-led central government and NC-Congress-led state government assured Kashmiri populace of damage control by ostracizing security force personnels involved in the killings and promised measures to resolve the Kashmir issue, which at the time of demitting their respective offices remained largely unaddressed. The governments also decided to appoint a three-member interlocutor and the team visited every part of state and recommended some affirmative measures to be taken to address the growing alienation of Kashmiri people. But what was to follow was not surprising: both the previous and the current NDA government are sitting on the recommendations, which further shook the belief of Kashmiris in the Indian Government.
Appointment of interlocutors was one of the major steps taken by the then UPA government. But six years after its appointment and subsequent filing of report by the three-member team, the recommendations remains largely ignored. I still remember how optimistic people were then about the outcome of possible solution to the problem, but it was only to buy time and let the anger of people die down, Samiullah Khan, a university student from Srinagar, told TwoCircles.net.
When youths were being shot dead in the previous unrests, then opposition leader, now the Chief Minister of the state, Mehbooba Mufti was the vocal face against the state repression and a number of Kashmiris believed in her promises and voted her to power. The present situation however shows how in Kashmir, regional parties indulge in blood politics by deceiving people of the very promises made when out of power. Being a woman, she understands the pain of mother who has lost her son better. If she cant, then she has no right to be on the top chair, Khan adds.
The brute history of the use of excessive force
Ask a common Kashmiri: what is the definition of security forces? The answer is prompt: ruthlessness.
After every killing in Kashmir, the government promises action and forces promise restraint. But now the Kashmiris know that these are to remain mere promises which never see the light of the day.
Is stone such a lethal weapon that needs to be retaliated with bullet? Is it necessary to shoot pellet guns at protesters from close range making them blind? Dont Kashmiri lives matter? asks Khalid-E-Sani Sheikh from Doda district.
The security forces, especially the J&K Police and CRPFs way of dealing with protesters also puts a question mark over the way they are trained to contain the violent situations.
Mehbooba Mufti is the head of unified command and holds the charge of Home Ministry. Yet, in her capacity she has done little to improve the situation in the valley. Pointing and blaming every protest or unrest to vested interests isnt the answer to the problem and she cant hide her shortcomings under the grab of her imaginative reasons for unrest, says Sajid Khan from Baramulla District of Kashmir.
During elections, the political parties appeased the Kashmiris with phrase, Ballot is the answer to bullet. After assuming charge, the same parties change their stance and have implemented the phrase Bullet is the answer to the stones on the very same people who elected them to power.
The Jammu and Kashmir police are very unpopular with people in Kashmir and have been time and again accused of resorting to brute and harsh methods of dealing with public.
While pointing their guns towards people, dont they think twice that they are killing their very own people from the very same society to which they belong? Has power corrupted their vision to such a large extent? asks Mubashir Zargar from Doda.
Indian media and the alienation of Kashmiris
When it comes to Kashmir, the role played by mainstream India media has always been under the scanner.
Go to Kashmir and identify yourself as a reporter from any mainstream Indian news channel. You are mostly likely to be in for a short lecture on how painful it is for them to tune on to a mainstream news channel.
As security forces were aiming shoot to kill in Kashmir for the last one week, mainstream media was busy vilifying Burhan Muzaffar Wani and talking of his love life, the betrayal of an ex-girlfriend, while completely bypassing the important question of human rights violations in Kashmir.
The stories of how security forces were going berserk, ruthlessly attacking ambulances and even hospitals along with injuring the already injured was not reported on even a single mainstream news channel.
See, the mainstream media has always adopted a biased approach towards covering the conflict in Kashmir. By referring to protesters as mobs, rebels as terrorists and never reporting the security forces excesses, they are not resolving any problem. Instead, they are only adding to the alienation of Kashmiris , said Haq Nawaz Nehru, a veteran journalist from Jammu.
The politics over the killings is already in full red bloom, as the pain of the oppressed has now, ironically, been taken over by the National Conference, which is now in opposition. The party issued statements on killings and condemned the actions, conveniently forgetting that hundreds of Kashmiri youths were killed by security forces when it was ruling the state between 2009 and 2014.
Under the young leadership of Omar Abdullah, the Valley saw one of its most-troubled periods, with 120 people, mostly youths shot by security forces, dead in five months of protests in 2010.
Is Kashmir heading towards another year of turmoil? How many more people will fall to the bullets before guns goes silent?
These questions cant be answered right now, but the course can be changed if both the central and state government came out of their rhetorical web and adopted a serious realistic approach aimed at resolving the issues of human rights violation at the hands of forces once for all. But until then, July 2016 will remain just another chapter stained by blood in Kashmirs turbulent history.
As of June 18, 2016, Curiosity has spent 1375 sols (1412 earth days) on the surface of Mars. It landed on the red planet on August 6, 2012. The rover has drilled 12 holes on Mars soil. Its latest sample-12th drilled hole-was made on mudstone bedrock. The rover has performed drills on soft and hard grounds along the route it has followed.
While on the Murray formation, curiosity has examined samples of active sand dunes with its on-board Science equipment. On the Naukluft Plateau, it studied the tenth and eleventh scientific targets, analyzing samples around fractures.
It also used its camera equipment to take self-portraits.
Where is curiosity?
After bordering the sand dunes and rolling its wheels through very rough terrain, curiosity robotic rover has made a turn south getting ready to climb the mountain. This mountain seems to possess eroded sedimentary layers, some of these sediments are thought to have been deposited within bodies of water billions of years ago; therefore, scientists think this region is appropriate for the study of habitability.
Murray formation
This region, which measures an estimated thickness of 200 meters (0.12 miles) has been studied to only one fifth its vertical scope. Although this formation did not seemto provide information about its lobg lived lake formations, it has revealed great data about the composition and chemistry of these bodies of water that existed on the Martian surface billions of years back in time.
Latest drilled sample
The most up-to-date sample namedOudamoccurred on the Naukluft Plateau on June 4. The two previous sample drills were performed nearby; however, one within a halo of bright sandstone close to a fracture and the other away from a fracture.
The Stimson formation bedrock is thought to have resulted from wind that eroded a portion of sand dunes and deposited it over lower Mount Sharp.
It would have occurred just after the main pile of the lower layers formed and partly eroded. Liquid then found its way through the fractures in the sandstone. Further investigations need to be performed to determine the way in which liquid moved through the fractures and transformed adjacent rock.
Curiosity is studying on Mount Sharp the way in which ancient habitable conditions, known from previous findings, have evolved into the present drier and less favorable conditions for the development of life on Mars.
Life and death are our only guarantees in this lifetime. When we enter this world, we are already dying. Since no one has returned from the grave to report what happens after death, we are left with our faith in a higher being. But every so often, we see a picture or video that makes us wonder about what happens to us after we die.Earlier in the week, a driver named Saul Vazquez came upon a crash scene while driving through Powell County, Kentucky.
Was a dead biker's spirit really captured?
A motorcyclist had crashed his bike and was near death. Vazquez snapped a picture of the police officers surrounding the victim.
After viewing the picture, Vazquez noticed a strange mist rising above an officer at the scene.The biker didnt survive his injuries and died at the hospital. In the picture, a strange mist resembling a person is visible. Some think it was the bikers spirit leaving his body. But if he died at the hospital, does this mean his spirit left before his body died? Vazquez posted the picture on Facebook which has since gone viral. Vazquez said he didnt alter the image. Regardless, the picture is fascinating. Viewer comments on Facebook are split on whether its supernatural or something else.
Websites like the Daily Mail have published other pictures of spirits captured on film. For instance, many people have taken pictures at battle scenes like Gettysburg and Little Big Horn.
Many of the photographs captured images of deceased soldiers. Even if the picture of the deceased biker isnt supernatural, its impossible to denounce every picture with a ghostly image. Hundreds of photographs and witnesses have testified to witnessing paranormal activity.
The women of Raynham Hall and Greencastle, Indiana
Two of the more famous ghost photographs are The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall and The Pink Lady of Greencastle. In 1936, the image of a ghost woman appeared in Country Life Magazine. The picture was taken in Norfolk, England and believed to be the ghost of Dorothy Walpole, who married Charles Townshend, lord of Raynham Hall.Legend has it that Townsend locked her away in a room inside Raynham Hall after he had learned she had an affair.
Walpole lived in the room until she died. Its even said that Townsend falsely told acquaintances that his wife had died. No one learned that Townsend had locked her up like a prisoner.
The Pink lady of Greencastle is allegedly the ghost of Irene OHare, a woman who once lived in a former Greencastle, Indiana mansion. Regrettably, no one knows that much about her or if she experienced any misfortunes that would keep her spirit around. And if you are a ghost hunter, you wont find the mansion because it was torn down and replaced with a cornfield.
New life for manufacturing monument Updated: 2016-07-18 09:41 By Liu Ce(China Daily)
Guan Xiyou, president of Shenyang Machine Tool Co Ltd. [Photo provided to China Daily]
The 81-year-old Shenyang Machine Tool Co Ltd will probably be counted as a monument when you review China's industrial history.
Can a monument weather an economic downturn? Fat chance, if signs at a machine tools firm are any indication.
In a 750,000-square-meter industrial park in western Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, the young workers are concentrating on debugging machine tools. Soon, these high-end smart machine tools bearing the logo of "SMTCL" (Shenyang Machine Tool Co Ltd) will be transported to different plants around China.
Most of them will head to plants in the south, where they will be used to improve efficiency of the latter's production lines.
The plants' owners there are becoming increasingly anxious due to lack of funds, backwardness of their technology and outflow of talent.
That has prompted the central government to look for ways to upgrade the manufacturing industry.
SMTCL, located in Northeast China's old industrial base, has already drawn much attention in this regard.
In the past year, the company upgraded its key products to intelligent integrated machine tools and created its machine tool leasing model. It aims to transform itself from a toolmaker to an industrial service provider.
"The key goal of the government's 'Made in China 2025' plan is to shift from a manufacturing-led economy to a service-oriented economy. SMTCL exemplifies the shift in focus," said Qu Xianming, an expert from the Chinese Machinery Industry Federation.
But everyone agrees the transition is not going to be easy.
SMTCL was famous as "the birthplace of Chinese machine tool". At that time, even graduates from famous universities were proud to land a job in the company.
Guan Xiyou, president of SMTCL, was one of them. When he graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai in 1988, he became a worker in the company, just like his father. "It was a glory time to be a worker in the company. It was even easier to find a girlfriend as a worker in the company."
However, with the development of market economy and China opening itself up to foreign investment and technologies, SMTCL entered a "black decade" (1993-2002).
A report by Lu Feng, professor at the School of Government, Peking University, said the number of employees decreased from 27,000 to 11,000 without any new employee joining during the decade.
In 2003, the central government launched efforts to revitalize the Northeast's old industrial bases. The strategy helped usher in the "golden decade" (2003-13) in Northeast China, particularly for the machine tool industry.
In 2011, SMTCL's sales revenue reached 18 billion yuan ($2.7 billion) with an annual output of 105,000 machine tools. Since then, the company's revenue topped the industry worldwide for three consecutive years.
"There were numerous orders at that time. About 80 percent of engineers were also involved in sales support. The trucks always blocked roads near our company. All these forced us to expand production capacity," said Li Wenhua, deputy party secretary of SMTCL.
However, unbridled expansion plunged the tool maker, which was famous for its precision technology, into a vicious circle. "The products were losing their competitive edge due to lack of numerical control technology. Most of our products were mid- and low-end products with little profit," Li said.
Thus, developing high-end products was the only way for the toolmaker's survival.
The i5 series smart machine tool became a straw to clutch. SMTCL developed the i5 smart numerical control system in 2007 by investing 1.15 billion yuan.
The long R&D process tested Guan's patience. "At that time, the tag of 'loss-making State-owned asset' was hanging like a millstone around my neck. There was even a temptation to show fake results. No one can understand what we through."
One night in 2012, Guan, feeling depressed and defeated, stood on the roof of a hotel in Germany and pondered for hours the fact that there has been no progress towards new products despite intensive R&D. "I almost jumped off the building."
Now, that memory seems distant. The success of i5 rewrote the company's history.
The i5 launched in late 2012. It broke the monopoly of companies such as Siemens and Fanuc over machine tool motion control systems, and demonstrated that numerical controlled machine tools could have a "Chinese brain". It is capable of intelligent programming, graphic diagnosis and simulation, and online analysis.
Zhu Sendi, a consultant with the China Machinery Industry Federation, said: "The i5 series has introduced a new dimension in machine tool manufacturing. It has made toolmaking an internet-based technology. That's smart innovation."
Guan said: "i5 has proved to be a game-changer. Customers don't have to buy a machine tool outright. They can rent one or more of them. That way, they could stay asset-light, which is what many small companies try to be these days."
Some 80 percent of i5 users, all Shenyang Machine Tool's clients in the Pearl River Delta area, rent the machinery at an average cost of about 10 yuan per hour.
Guan said: "From being a traditional manufacturer, Shenyang Machine Tool is transforming itself into an industrial service provider."
Zhu agreed. "It's a creative transition from selling tools to selling services. However, not every factory in China can organize production along those lines now. If most of the users accept this new way of production, it would be a revolution for the industry."
The company's new business model is marked by leasing of machine toolmakers and its smart factories.
In 2014, it established its own leasing firm to provide intelligent machine tools for use by medium and small companies, allowing the latter to pay for the service by either the duration of the use or output.
"This model provides a reference for SMEs' transformation and upgradation. This is also valuable for Made in China 2025. Considering China's slowing economy and the absence of a linking thread to connect scientific research, worker quality and enterprise development, the first step toward upgrading China's manufacturing industry may be improving production efficiency, product quality, and automation level," Zhu said.
That's not only a chance for Guan and Shenyang Machine Tool but the nation's manufacturing industry.
For the Chinese tourists, by compatriots, in Spain Updated: 2016-07-18 10:34 By Emma Gonzalez(China Daily)
ChineSpain staff at their office in Madrid, Spain. ChineSpain, a tourism-related startup, has tied up with more than 350 local tourism providers across 22 cities in Spain. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Startups of young entrepreneurs from China are blazing a trail in the Spanish tourism market
The number of Chinese tourists to Spain is expected to surge from this year following the introduction of three new direct flights between the two countries and the inauguration of 12 new Spanish visa processing centers across China.
And a couple of Chinese entrepreneurs who have set up tourism-related startups in Spain expect to profit from the increasing inflow of their compatriots.
Last year, Spain welcomed 300,000 Chinese tourists, up 15 percent from 2014. The Spanish government has set an ambitious target of 1 million Chinese visitors a year by 2020, boosted by improved flight connections and a significant reduction in bureaucratic hurdles for visa applications.
It is as though Zhang Yiming foresaw the boom. In 2013, he went to Madrid to pursue a Master's degree, but ended up setting up a business in Spain's capital to make the most of the opportunities brought by the rising number of Chinese tourists.
Last year, he, Lorenzo Palomares and Antonella Rodogno co-founded ChineSpain, a firm that provides services to independent Chinese travelers to the Mediterranean country.
According to the China Tourism Academy, in 2014, around 70 percent of 100 million Chinese outbound tourists preferred independent travel to package group tours. This created a lucrative opportunity for independent travel agencies.
"Chinese tourists are now asking for better travel experiences. They want to understand other cultures in depth," said Zhang. "However, in most cases, unique local experiences are very difficult because of the language barrier."
So, ChineSpain tied up with more than 350 local tourism providers across 22 cities in Spain. It taught them how to serve Chinese travelers better by paying attention to their wishes and customs.
The firm receives a 15 percent commission from local tourism operators who choose to be part of its network.
The most sought-after services include 10-day routes across popular cities in Spain, featuring visits to vineyards and famous local restaurants.
For travelers seeking typical experiences, the company has developed special packages. Couples wanting to get married in Spain, and those interested in medical tourism, receive personalized travel arrangements.
In 10 months, the startup generated 50,000 euros ($55,000) in revenue. By 2018, it expects to reach its target of 3 million euros.
Like ChineSpain, Njoyspain Consulting is another Chinese-founded startup blazing a trail in Spain's domestic tourism market.
Liu Shaowei founded the self-funded travel consultancy last year. He was born in Zhejiang in East China, but spent most of his life in Spain. His parents had moved to the northern part of Spain in 1990 to work in a family business.
Again, like ChineSpain, Njoyspain Consulting advises tourism players in Spain on how to improve their services aimed at Chinese visitors. "I realized that small and medium-sized companies in Spain didn't have the economic resources to exploit the market spawned by Chinese travelers," said Liu.
Njoyspain now offers special adaptation packages for Spanish hospitality companies. Its offerings include services such as translation of food menus, information brochures, and education courses in Chinese language and etiquette.
The startup, which employs three people and has several partners in Spain and China, is growing fast. Thirty companies have signed up for its packages in Spain.
The firm is also securing contracts from Spanish town authorities to develop promotional marketing campaigns in Chinese social media.
Despite the increasing importance of Chinese travelers to Spain, local entrepeneurs are still reluctant to use Njoyspain's services, said Liu. "Our packages cost only a couple of hundred euros, but investors are still conservative towards this new market."
However, this attitude is gradually changing, thanks to the high sums of money Chinese visitors spend during their travels.
Consultancy Global Blue estimates that Chinese shoppers accounted for 31 percent in sales at duty-free outlets in Spain over the last 12 months.
"Taking into account the new flight connections, shopping spends by Chinese travelers in Spain will increase by up to 20 percent this year," said Luis Jose Llorca Lizaso, managing director for the Spain market at Global Blue, a consultancy.
Liu of Njoyspain said: "It has been very hard to get the business running because many Spanish entrepreneurs did not fully see the benefits of adapting their services to the Chinese tourists. However, the scene is changing quickly and we expect this year to be a turning point for this industry."
Premier urges Japan to stop hyping maritime issue Updated: 2016-07-15 21:49 By ZHAO HUANXIN in Ulaanbaatar and ZHANG YUNBI in Beijing(chinadaily.com.cn)
Premier Li Keqiang told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday that Japan should "be cautious in words and actions" and "should not hype and interfere in the South China Sea issue".
Li and Abe met at the request of the Japanese on the sidelines of the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit, which will run from Friday to Saturday in Ulaanbaatar.
Observers noted that Li made the comments as Tokyo had publicly pressed Beijing recently to accept the Tuesday ruling of an arbitral case unilaterally raised by the Philippines about the South China Sea.
Li told Abe the two sides should properly manage and control contradictions and divergences, and Japan was not a country directly concerning the South China Sea issue.
Abe said although difficulties still clouded Japan-China ties, Tokyo hoped to reinforce exchanges and cooperation and appropriately manage divergences.
China's position on the South China Sea issue "completely abides by international law and the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea", Li said.
The Declaration, a document signed by China and all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2002, requires peaceful resolution of disputes through friendly consultation and negotiation.
On the two-way ties, Li Keqiang said: "In recent years, the China-Japan relationship initiated its process of heading toward improvement, but the pace is sluggish and has been disturbed by some complicated factors from time to time."
Japan should conduct positive and friendly policy towards China, and the two countries should gradually resume dialogues, Li said.
Abe voiced hopes about resuming bilateral high-level economic dialogues.
Both Li and Abe stated their readiness to boost anti-terrorism cooperation.
Forum questions Arbitral Tribunal's ruling over islands Updated: 2016-07-16 07:51 By Luis Liu and Wang Hui in Hong Kong(China Daily)
Conflict is not the way to solve territorial problems, and working together, building trust and friendship, developing mutually beneficial economic activities is the way to move forward, said Tung Chee-hwa, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and former chief executive of the Hong Kong SAR.
Addressing the Public International Law Colloquium on Maritime Disputes Settlement on Friday in Hong Kong, Tung said the decision issued in The Hague on Tuesday is not only incorrect but also complicates the situation and may lead the region to a crisis of enormous consequence.
The two-day event is the first major international forum held after the Arbitral Tribunal appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled on Tuesday in favor of the Philippines in a South China Sea arbitration case it unilaterally filed against China.
"We need to realize that we live in a troubled world. The only area that holds promise for growth and stability is in the vast Asia-Pacific region," Tung said.
The forum, jointly organized by the Chinese Society of International Law and Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, focused on four topics covering substantive and procedural issues of the maritime dispute settlement.
More than 200 legal professionals, academics and government officials from around the world shared their views on the law of the sea and discussed a proper means of resolving maritime disputes.
Li Shishi, president of Chinese Society of International Law, said the settlement of maritime dispute requires the political consensus of the governments and the contribution of scholars in order to forge consensus.
Speaking on the sidelines of the forum, Anthony Carty, a professor at Tsinghua University, and Abdul G. Koroma, a former judge at the International Court of Justice, both questioned the Arbitral Tribunal's ruling.
"The tribunal had unreasonably interpreted the definition of island and had come up with a very peculiar doctrine of assessing geographical features," said Carty, adding that "the ruling had made the situation much worse".
"It is questionable whether the Arbitral Tribunal was entitled to render an award in the particular case as China had already made the declaration in 2006, excluding issues of territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation from the compulsory dispute settlements by any tribunal," said Koroma.
Contact the writers at luisliu@chinadailyhk.com
Two giant pandas, the 9-year-old male "Youyou", and 10-year-old female "Sijia" make their public debut on Monday. The pair was relocated from Southwest China's Sichuan province a few days ago, to settle in their new home in Yabuli ski resort in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, for both public show and scientific research.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Teams widen search for pollution issues Updated: 2016-07-18 09:43 By Zheng Jinran(China Daily)
Pilot effort yields positive results; public invited to aid in supervision
The central government has dispatched high-level environmental inspection teams to eight provincial-level regions to scrutinize local authorities' efforts in tackling pollution.
They are the Inner Mongolia, Guangxi Zhuang and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions, and Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Henan and Yunnan provinces.
Inspections have already begun in seven of the regions and are expected to start soon in Heilongjiang.
This first batch of inspections follows a pilot that was completed in heavily industrialized Hebei province in February. Inspectors will cover 14 provincial-level regions this year and expand to the whole country within two years.
During the pilot, the inspection team exposed 2,856 instances of problems related to pollution, ranging from ineffective enforcement of laws and regulations to rapid ecological degradation. In total, 200 companies were shut down and 123 people were detained.
Hebei has also released a targeted plan to tackle the problems and sources of pollution exposed by the inspection. It said in an official statement that the inspectors' visit facilitated its environmental improvement efforts.
Wu Xinxiong, who led the inspection team in Yunnan province, said on Friday that the experiences of inspectors in Hebei will help with future inspections.
All teams have been staffed with ministerial leaders, including three deputy environmental protection ministers.
They will focus on pollution problems reported by the public and supervise the provincial and city governments' efforts to control environmental degradation, according to statements made by the team leaders.
Li Jiheng, the top official of Yunnan, promised to fully support the inspectors' work and treat the experience as an opportunity to reexamine the province's pollution-control measures.
Hotlines and mailboxes have been set up to receive reports from the public. The inspection teams will carry out field investigations and talk to concerned individuals and companies.
Their findings will be submitted to the central government, and form a key aspect of senior officials' performance assessments.
zhengjinran@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily USA 07/18/2016 page4)
Its peaceful rise not just dependent on China Updated: 2016-07-18 09:44 By Jean-Pierre Lehmann(China Daily)
We live in extremely perilous times.
I take the opportunity of prefacing my remarks by saying how terribly is missed, especially in current situation, the late Wu Jianmin, who tragically died in an automobile accident on June 18. I first met him when he was China's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, then we met on a number of occasions in Paris when he was ambassador to France and later in Beijing when he was president of China Foreign Affairs University. He was truly an exceptional human being in combining great wit, great wisdom and great warmth. He was an ardent proponent of China's peaceful rise.
The person who actually coined the term, China's peaceful rise to great power status, is Zheng Bijian, a major Chinese and global thought leader. Noting that all previous nations that rose to great global power status (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States) did so through war and plunder, China's route should be different and peaceful. A major driver, argued Zheng, is that the country still needed to do so much to develop itself and lift the Chinese people to reasonable standards of living following the devastating experiences China had suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries.
To achieve its peaceful rise to great global power status, of course, an overall peaceful global condition is essential for China. As another thought leader, the late Cheng Siwei was fond of repeating almost like a mantra: "China needs the world; the world needs China."
The reality is that we are living in an increasingly confrontational and lawless world. As the recent publication of the British Chilcot Enquiry report lays out in detail, the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq was a rogue act, flouting the UN. No institution of global governance is functioning properly. The failure of the Doha Round has made the World Trade Organization moribund, with the current global trade regime dangerously adrift. Four nuclear powers - Israel, India, Pakistan and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. While Washington calls on Beijing to abide by the ruling of the arbitral tribunal in the Philippines' case against China over the South China Sea dispute, it has not even ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that it swears by. I could go on.
While there is a global state of uncertainty, there are also specificities that relate to the situation in the Asia-Pacific region. Whereas the first half of the 20th century witnessed warfare throughout the world, following 1945 these chapters in European history have definitely closed. The exit of Britain from the European Union is causing and will continue to cause confusion in Europe, but there is not the remotest possibility of war.
This is alas emphatically not the same atmosphere in the Asia-Pacific where deep historical wounds coupled with multiple territorial disputes poison the atmosphere. To ensure peace in the 21st century, the war chapters of the 20th must be closed. This is why I have argued "to make peace with China, (Japanese) Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should visit Nanjing next year for the 80th anniversary of the massacre" and express national remorse in a manner comparable to former German chancellor Willy Brandt's genuflection at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in 1970.
Although the conflict in the South China Sea and the general state of confrontation and lawlessness in the world clearly jeopardize the chances of China achieving its peaceful rise and indeed prospects for global peace and prosperity, by no means should it then be deduced that war is inevitable.
In her outstanding book on World War I, The War That Ended Peace, historian Margaret MacMillan argued that while war was not inevitable, choices made by world leaders at the time increasingly made it so. There are, as she says, always choices. If the peaceful rise fails, the consequences will be catastrophic, for Asia, for the world, above all for China. Beijing must be very careful in the choices it makes.
All efforts on the part of all parties concerned must be concentrated on conflict prevention and on building regional and global institutions that will enhance dialogue, confidence and peace. We are at, or very near, the eleventh hour.
The author is professor emeritus of international political economy at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and visiting professor at Hong Kong University.
(China Daily USA 07/18/2016 page12)
'Common challenge' for Straits Updated: 2016-07-18 09:35 (China Daily)
The recent ruling made by an arbitral tribunal on a case initiated by the Philippines, which rejects China's Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea as illegal and takes Taiping Island inhabited by Taiwan fishermen as a "rock" rather than an "island", offers an opportunity for both sides of the Taiwan Straits to build up basic mutual trust again.
Taiwan's new leader Tsai Ing-wen's unwillingness to accept the 1992 Consensus and its core principle of one China has dented political trust with the mainland, which was further undermined by the "accidental" firing of a missile from Taiwan in the direction of the mainland.
Any cross-Straits discord will offer an opportunity for outside forces to take advantage of it and thus erode the rights and interests of the Chinese nation in the South China Sea. The establishment of mutual trust will help both sides offer each other mutual support at a critical time and jointly safeguard the interests of the Chinese nation.
The unfavorable award by the tribunal is only the latest stage in the South China Sea disputes. Forcible interventions from the United States and other external forces may further escalate tensions in the region.
Under the pretext of the ruling, the Philippines and Vietnam may raise more unreasonable claims in the sea. For both the mainland and Taiwan, the real challenge following the award has just begun, and so they should deepen mutual trust to make sure they are better braced to defend China's legitimate rights and interests in the South China Sea.
In doing so, this "common challenge", if properly handled, can help both sides, especially Taiwan, to realize the importance of their mutual trust again.
Mary Kane (center), president and CEO of Sister Cities International, blows out birthday candles marking the 60th anniversary of her organization at a reception at the Chinese embassy in Washington on July 15. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser (right) and Minister Li Kexin of the Chinese embassy look on. The reception also featured photo shows and performances. Chen Weihua / China Daily
The relationship between China and the United States could often look depressing if people just read the headlines and listen to the rhetoric by US presidential candidates. But that clearly does not reflect the correct picture at the subnational level.
When Sister Cities International (SCI), a Washington DC-based non-profit organization, celebrated its 60th anniversary in a grand reception at the Chinese embassy on the evening of July 15, it displayed an important dimension of the bilateral relationship that rarely makes for sexy headlines.
Mary Kane, president and CEO of SCI, reminded the more than 400 participants from around the world of the story of one of its famous alumni, President Xi Jinping.
Xi first visited the US in 1985 at the age of 27, going to Muscatine, Iowa, under a sister-city relationship between Iowa and North China's Hebei province. He was then the head of Zhengding county in Hebei and went to Iowa on an agricultural research trip.
"They have been the strongest sister cities ever since," Kane said of the relationship between Hebei and Iowa, set up in 1983.
When Xi visited the US in February 2012 as China's vice-president, he returned to Muscatine to meet his old friends.
In September 2015, when Xi paid a state visit to the US as China's president, he first went to the state of Washington, and made a trip to Tacoma's Lincoln High School to talk to the students.
Tacoma has had a sister-city relationship with Fuzhou, in East China's Fujian province, since 1994. Xi was the Party secretary of Fuzhou in the early 1990s and later became the governor of Fujian province.
"But tonight we are here to sing Happy Birthday to Sister Cities International. It has been six decades, six wonderful decades of peace through people," Kane said.
Her words were followed by song, and a birthday cake soon was cut by her, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and Minister Li Kexin of the Chinese embassy.
The sister-city relationship has blossomed in the past four decades, with Chinese cities and provinces setting up 2,315 pairs of such relationships in 134 countries. That includes 258 with localities in the US.
Bowser, who took office in January 2015, talked about how her first international trip was leading a DC delegation to Beijing last November. Beijing and Washington established their sister-city tie in 1984.
"And I have to tell you that the mayor of Beijing, the Friendship Association, and all of the people in Beijing rolled out the red carpet for us," she said.
"We are very keen on our relationship, the wonderful relationship with the city of Beijing," she said.
Xie Yuan, vice-president of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, described the cooperation between his organization and SCI in the past three decades as a "perfect couple".
The two organizations have joined hands in holding two China-US sister cities conferences in the last two years. A third one will be held in November in Nanchang, in East China's Jiangxi province.
Xie noted the expanding relationship at the sub-national levels, such as with organizations like the National Governors Association and State Legislative Leaders Foundation.
US states and provinces have forged stronger bonds with China, with China being a top trade partner and export destination for US states. More US governors and mayors embark on trade missions to China to expand trade and investment ties.
An updated report this year by the Rhodium Group and the National Committee on US-China Relations showed that Chinese investment in the US grew to a record of more than $15 billion in 2015. The investments extend across more than 80 percent of congressional districts.
About 300,000 Chinese students are studying in colleges and universities across the US, accounting for almost a third of all the international students on US college campuses.
Since November 2014, when the two countries announced visa-extension programs, the number of Chinese tourists to the US has soared. About 2.67 million Chinese visited the US in 2015, compared with fewer than 400,000 in 2007. That number is expected to jump to 5 million by 2025, according to Goldman Sachs.
Karen Richardson, US deputy assistant secretary of state for public outreach, praised the partnership between SCI and the Friendship Association for forging a new relationship that promises to build peace and understanding between the two peoples.
"We at the State Department hope that this effort will continue and encourage US and Chinese cities to come together and build on the long legacy of citizen diplomacy and peace-building of the sister-city tradition," she said.
The US sister-city program started in 1956, when then-president Dwight Eisenhower proposed a people-to-people, citizen diplomacy initiative. Originally a program of the National League of Cities, SCI became a separate non-profit entity in 1967 due to the rapid expansion of the program.
Minister Li of the Chinese embassy congratulated SCI on its 60th anniversary, and he said, that according to the Chinese lunar calendar, 60 years represents a full cycle of time, or Samsara in Buddhism.
"We hope to see more sister cities set up between China and US, as well as other countries and the US. More substantial activities and cooperation can come out among sister cities," he said.
Contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com
Collaboration key on green energy, climate: experts Updated: 2016-07-18 11:01 By Lia Zhu in San Francisco(China Daily USA)
The US and China must work together in developing renewable energy and to battle climate change, said experts attending a green energy summit in Silicon Valley.
"China's rapid economic growth brought increasing pressure on the environment and air pollution, and the US led the world in green energy innovation," said Robert Wu, chairman of the US-China Green Energy Council. "We strongly believe the US and China working together is the golden key to address not only the shared issues of the two countries but also the global challenges."
Wu spoke at the 2016 Green Energy Summit in Santa Clara, California, on July 15, which was hosted by the Silicon Valley-based organization and attracted about 100 experts from China and the US.
The experts all agreed that the climate had been aggravated to an extent that concerted efforts had to be made to fight it. The US and China are the world's largest economies and polluters.
Steven Chu, former US secretary of energy, told the summit that the temperature had increased roughly 1 degree Celsius since 1880, and glaciers were melting.
"If we go 1 degree warmer, which is the UN goal (the United Nations aims to limit the increase by that amount per year) ... there's a large fraction in Shanghai and surrounding area that would be underwater," said Chu, showing a map of Shanghai's sea level.
A 6- to 9-meter rise of the sea level will likely create 500 to 700 worldwide climate refugees and tens of millions of people would be displaced in the Shanghai area alone, according to the map.
The solution for the potential risk is science and technology - energy efficiency in buildings, transportation, the industrial process and elsewhere, Chu said.
Reusable energy, primarily wind, water and solar, could meet 60 percent of the primary energy demand for both the US and China by 2050, Wu said.
The good news was that the price for the technology of solar and wind would continue to decline for perhaps another two decades, Chu said.
"For the next 20 years, you really can expect contracts for wholesale solar and wind being somewhere in the 2-3 cents KWH (kilowatt hours)," he said. "But you need an integrated system that can use these intermittent resources."
Long-distance transmission is another big deal, and China beat the world in the longest transmission, Chu said.
The country has installed about 60 GW (gigawatts) of high-voltage DC and AC lines, and by 2020, more than 2,000 GW will have been installed.
China just started building a 3,200-km 1.1 MV (megavolt) DC line, which loses only 5 percent of its energy while the vast majority of high-voltage lines in the US are below kV AC, and 85 percent of the power will be lost in a 500 kV line, according to Chu.
China leads the world in hydropower capacity, solar PV capacity, wind power capacity and solar water heating capacity, says the report. By the end of 2015, China had 199 GW of renewable power capacities, ranking the first in the world, which had 785 GW in total.
The US, helped by its high technology, got a handle on air pollution problems, particularly in Los Angeles, about 40 years ago. China has intense air pollution now and has a reason to implement high technology, said Jeffrey Ball, scholar-in-residence at Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance.
"But the notion that China is simply a taker of American technology is increasingly an outdated notion. Quite sophisticated research and development are going on in China today," he said.
"There are actually self-interested reasons why both the countries want to collaborate," he said.
liazhu@chinadailyusa.com
Stance on South China Sea backed at ASEM meet Updated: 2016-07-18 09:24 By ZHAO HUANXIN(China Daily)
Beijing says disputes over issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions
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]
Few other trips made by Premier Li Keqiang have been more sensitively and subtly timed than his first foreign journey of the yearan official visit to Mongolia, where he also attended the 11th ASEM Summit that concluded on Saturday.
A new Mongolian prime minister was appointed five days before Li's arrival at Ulaanbaatar on Wednesday, and the South China Sea arbitration award was issued one day before the premier left for the visit and the summit, whose opening was clouded by a terrorist attack in Nice, France.
What many had thought to be a northern journey full of questions and qualms, however, ended with a commitment from China and Mongolia to synergize development strategies, and a summit chair's statement on connectivity.
Analysts were quick to note that neither the statement nor the Ulaanbaatar Declaration, endorsed by Asian and European leaders at the summit's end, contains any words about the South China Sea, but does strongly address terrorism.
"Leaders ... expressed their determination to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism in all their forms," the chair's statement said.
Cui Hongjian, director of the department for European studies of the China Institute of International Studies, said he was not surprised that the statements excluded the South China Sea.
"The Asia-Europe Meeting is a multilateral platform focused on Eurasian development and cooperation. The summit's discussions should not be distracted by bilateral issues," Cui said.
The country consistently has said the South China Sea issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions but that disputes should be settled through bilateral dialogue and consultation by countries directly involved, on the basis of historical facts and in line with international law, he said.
Days before the premier's visit, China's Foreign Ministry had said the ASEM summit was "not an appropriate venue" to discuss the issue.
Japan, however, had intended to bring the issue to the summit, according to a senior Chinese diplomat. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, addressing an informal meeting of the ASEM Summit on Saturday, talked about the South China Sea arbitration.
Li refuted Abe's comments and spelled out China's stance, said the diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous.
Li said China has not participated in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines. Beijing neither accepts nor acknowledges the so-called arbitration award, he added.
The premier had 11 bilateral meetings with other senior leaders during the summit. His effort to promote China's stand on the South China Sea issue received widespread backing and understanding, the diplomat said, adding that except for the Philippines, no other meeting participants echoed Abe's comments at the summit.
Baton Rouge shooter identified as ex-Marine Gavin Long Updated: 2016-07-18 09:44 (Agencies)
A Baton Rouge Police officers patrol pours water on his head on Airline Hwy after 3 police officers were killed early this morning on July 17, 2016 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. According to reports, one suspect has been killed while others are still being sought by police. [Photo/VCG]
WASHINGTON - A former US Marine sergeant who served in Iraq has been identified as the gunman who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday, according to a government source with knowledge of the investigation.
Another source familiar with the investigation said that the suspect, Gavin Long, 29, was from Kansas City, Missouri. The source said there was reason to believe a 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 by investigators.
Officials speaking publicly have not yet released the name of the suspected killer or any details, beyond saying they believed the single shooter was killed in the shootout.
Long, who was black, was affiliated with the anti-government New Freedom Group, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation. A spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, said she had no information about that.
Sunday was Long's 29th birthday, according to the Kansas City Star newspaper.
He served in the Marines for five years, from August 2005 to August 2010, and rose to the rank of sergeant, according to Yvonne Carlock, deputy public affairs officer for the U.S. Marines. Long was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009.
CBS News reported that Long left the Marines with an honorable discharge. Carlock would not confirm that detail.
Public records show Long had lived in Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri, as well as San Diego and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Analysis: South China Sea arbitration panel manipulated Updated: 2016-07-18 10:55 (China Daily)
Four of the five members of the illegal arbitral tribunal on the South China Sea case were appointed by Shunji Yanai, former president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Rightist, hawkish, close to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pro-US, unfriendly to China ... these are tags often associated with Yanai. One member was designated by the Philippines.
Yanai entered the Japanese Foreign Ministry after graduation, following in his father's steps. The younger Yanai became Japanese ambassador to the United States in 1999.
"He is ... bold and some times controversial, and some how gets away with things that would most likely cost someone else his career," said Fumiko Halloran in his review of Yanai's book, 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.
According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, when Yanai was director-general of the Treaties Bureau of the Foreign Ministry during the 1990-91 Gulf War, he helped push through parliament an act allowing Japan to send Self-Defense Forces abroad for UN peacekeeping operations. In 1992, Japan dispatched some 600 soldiers and 75 police officers to Cambodia for peace-keeping operations.
In 2007, Yanai served as chairman of a panel to advise Abe on revising the Constitution to allow military actions overseas. After Abe took office again in 2012, it was also Yanai who in 2014 presented a report advocating lifting the ban. In 2015, Japan enacted laws dropping the ban.
In 2011, Yanai became the first Japanese to be president of ITLOS. After the Philippines unilaterally initiated the case against China in 2013, Yanai created a five-member tribunal.
In August 2013, when he was still choosing arbitrators, Yanai 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.
Japanese political analyst Jiro Honzawa said: "The Philippines was abetted by the US and Japan to apply for arbitration, because the latter two want to contain China."
XINHUA
Chinese tourism to France will 'drop sharply' following terror attack Updated: 2016-07-18 17:32 By Angus McNeice in Nice and Chen Yingqun in Beijing(chinadaily.com.cn)
Burning candles, messages and a drawing pay tribute to victims of the truck attack along the Promenade des Anglais on Bastille Day that killed scores and injured as many in Nice, France, July 17, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
Tired from a day's travel but happy to be on honeymoon in the glamorous French Riviera, Frank Xu and Carina Xie from Yunnan arrived in Nice on Friday, July 15. They went for a romantic dinner then strolled through the warm air down the beach and back to the hotel. Frank turned on the news and saw for the first time the tragedy that occurred the night before in the Mediterranean city.
Zigzagging a truck along the Promenade des Anglais on Bastille Day, Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel mowed down hundreds of people, killing 84 and injuring 202, including two Chinese nationals who are recovering in hospital. He was killed after exchanging gunfire with police.
It was the third large-scale act of terrorism in France in 19 months, and the second for which self-styled Islamic State claimed responsibility. Thursday's mayhem reopens the emotional, social and economic wounds caused by the January and November 2015 killings in Paris wounds that had barely begun to heal.
"If we had known the attack had happened we would have cancelled our trip, definitely," Frank, 28, an engineer from Kunming, Yunnan Province, said. "It's our honeymoon and France is a romantic place. We talked about the terrorism in Europe and thought maybe it's not happening anymore, so we came. But it's still happening maybe we will choose a different place next time."
In 2014, the total contribution of travel and tourism to the economy of France was 289 billion euros, or 9.3 percent of France's total economy, according to Rochelle Turner, research director at the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). Before last year's terror attacks, the WTTC anticipated the sector would grow by 3 percent in 2015. It declined by 0.8 percent to contribute 199 billion euros or 9.1 percent of GDP.
After the attack, Chinese travel operator Ctrip quickly helped Nice-bound clients to change plans and allowed visitors who paid to stay in hotels in the city from July 15-21 to cancel without charge.
Xu Xiaolei, chief branding officer at travel site Aoyou.com, expects the number of Chinese tourists going to France to drop sharply for several months.
"In the past our customers asked us about the best things to see and experience," he said. "Now they ask first whether a place is safe."
The impact on business in Nice was felt straight away. Claude Roques owns the restaurant O'Staff, off the commercial high street Boulevard Dubouchage. Part of his business is made through agencies booking tables for large groups. In the three days that followed the attack, cancellations totaled 400 diners.
Claude's son, Yoann, an associate at accommodation company Century 21 Domus Immobilier, was hit by six cancellations for seasonal rentals on Friday. While we spoke, a seventh came through: "We saw what happened," the email read. "Is it possible to get a refund?"
"People are divided in Nice," Yoann said. "Some are angry because they don't feel integrated."
Yoann references the suburb of L'Arianne and other parts on the outskirts of Nice where youth unemployment is high, especially in the large Arab population. Under-served urban areas like these are established targets for radical recruitment most of those who left France to join now-deceased Islamic State recruiter Omar Omsen came from Nice.
On Friday, President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced three days of national mourning and called for unity, before Valls invited a flood of criticism on social media for saying that France "is going to have to live with terrorism."
Xu Xiaolei says government response is key to lessening the impact of terrorism on the tourism industry in the long term.
"When 911 happened, we all thought that the tourism industry in the US would be destroyed, but it recovered quickly, when people saw the US government and its people's confidence in the situation," he said. "In the long term, I think Europe is still one of the destinations with the best travel resources and security."
There are now seven people in custody after the attack, including Bouhlel's ex-wife.
To contact the reporter: angus@mail.chinadailyuk.com
Naval chief: islands construction will not stop Updated: 2016-07-18 21:47 By ZHANG YUNBI and ZHAO LEI(chinadaily.com.cn)
Beijing "will never give up halfway" over its islands construction on the South China Sea, China's naval chief told a visiting US navy officer on Monday.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson that the Chinese navy had made "sufficient preparations" for any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite existing negative factors, Beijing was still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through mechanisms and rules", Wu said.
Washington militarily pressured Beijing earlier this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude Chinese territorial space on the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing would "advance and complete islands and reefs construction as planned" no matter which country or individual pressures China, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson's first visit to China will run from Sunday to Wednesday. He told Wu on Monday that he was ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea dispute, and its proactive engagement in Asia-Pacific aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at the Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea had become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing at the weekend that:"Although the cooperation between Beijing Washington cannot give an end to all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation."
Cui Shoufeng contributed to this story.
Navy chiefs set for fresh talks on South China Sea Updated: 2016-07-18 09:41 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
3 officers in Louisiana killed, 3 hurt in shooting Updated: 2016-07-18 11:01 By Associated Press(China Daily USA)
Police offi cers armed with rifl es guard the entrance to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital on Sunday after a fatal shooting of three police offi cers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Jeffrey Dubinsky / Reuters
Baton Rouge offi cers shot by ex-Marine with assault rifl e who is then shot dead
Three Baton Rouge, Louisiana,law enforcement offi - cers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifl e were killed on 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. Although he was believed to be the only person who fi red at offi cers, authorities said they were unsure 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 in the nearby town of Addis.
A witness described the gunman as wearing all black and carrying extra clips of ammunition. He was identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, said East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden.
The 29-year-old black man 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.
Long was awarded several medals, including one for good conduct, and received an honorable discharge.His ccupational 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 offi - cers, some with guns drawn,converged on a house listed as Long's.
The shooting, which took place just before 9 am, less than a mile from police headquarters,came amid escalating tensions across the country between the black community and police. Just days earlier, one of the slain offi cers posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.
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 offi cers (fi ve in Dallas),including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians and sparked a national debate over race and policing.
President Barack Obama urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions.
'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.
'Everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further,' he said.
GOP, Trump focus on trade curbs Updated: 2016-07-18 11:01 By Paul Welitzkin in New York(China Daily USA)
Workers hang a Trump-Pence campaign sign as preparations continue on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday. Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
Both parties' candidates expected to criticize China as part of their platform, pundits predict
The 2016 Republican presidential convention opens in Cleveland, Ohio, on Monday, and the city of about 320,000, along with the rest of the so-called Rust Belt, has become a prime target for an anti-trade message of both parties, especially Republican Donald Trump.
After World War II, Cleveland and the northeastern part of the state boomed as plants produced steel, paint, auto parts and tires to fuel a post-war boom. But since 1960, Cleveland's manufacturing base has been shrinking. Over the past decade, manufacturing employment has tumbled with more than 74,500 manufacturing jobs lost.
Though Mexico, Vietnam, South Korea and other countries have been singled out as taking jobs away from Americans, how China is "killing us on trade" has been a mantra in endless anti-trade declarations from Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, including: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive."
He has threatened to impose a 45 percent tariff on goods made in China. "America fully opened its markets to China but China has not reciprocated. Its Great Wall of Protectionism uses unlawful tariff and non-tariff barriers to keep American companies out of China and to tilt the playing field in their favor," says a posting on Trump's campaign web site.
Hillary Clinton, who will be named the Democratic presidential candidate at the party's convention that starts on July 25, has said the problem with trade deals is that the US doesn't force other countries to live up to their end of the bargain. She said America has to "stand up" to China and make it stop unfair trade practices that hurt US businesses and kill US jobs.
Clinton, whose husband Bill, the nation's 42nd president, signed off on legislation creating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), once spoke glowingly about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) while serving as secretary of state. Now she is opposed to the 12-nation trade pact.
"I did hope that the TPP, negotiated by this administration; I was holding out hope that it would be the kind of trade agreement that I was looking for. Once I saw the outcome, I opposed it," she said.
Gary Hufbauer of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, said Clinton and Trump will take different approaches in attacking trade.
"Both Clinton and Trump will be tough on trade. But Clinton will try to show that she's 'smart tough', while Trump will man up and show that he's 'tough tough'. Both will push the phony line that by doing better trade deals they can revive US manufacturing jobs and raise middle class wages.
"Both campaigns will criticize China, mixing trade and geopolitics, but Clinton will voice targeted criticisms - particular industries (steel) or practices (intellectual property rights), while Trump will go for the blunderbuss," he said.
Regardless of who wins in November, there is a chance that China and other US global trading partners may face a changed political landscape. "Most likely there could be some renegotiations on trade terms after the election," said Sung Won Sohn, professor of economics at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, California.
"In the case of China, it will be important to explain to the American public that China's trade surpluses, especially as a percentage of GDP, have declined significantly and the foreign-exchange reserves have fallen close to $1 trillion. China also needs to communicate to the American public that the country is making massive direct investments in America creating jobs and income," said Sohn.
Trade used to enjoy a steady bi-partisan embrace from Democrats and Republicans until this election, and most observers expect trade to be a high-profile issue during the presidential campaign in areas like Cleveland.
"Trade will be an issue in industrial heartland states such as Ohio and Michigan, but not much of an issue elsewhere," said David Dollar, senior fellow at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
"I think the trade issue is mainly a Midwest issue with a little purchase in the Northeast. I don't think the differences between Trump and Clinton will swing the needle on votes in the West or the South," added Hufbauer.
Sohn said trade "is a very hot topic in the Rust Belt. Some people blame trade and globalization for their economic woes. Most people, however, do not expect to return to the good old days".
Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst with the Cato Institute in Washington, said trade is likely to resonate "in certain pockets of the Midwest that have seen manufacturing decline." But he downplays trade's significance in November.
"Trade is probably not as important an issue in the election as it seems. Trump's tough talk might get him a few votes here and there, but it is unlikely to decide the election," he added.
Derek Scissors, a resident scholar on China at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said the US has already taken a step toward exiting from global trade.
"The Republicans have nominated a protectionist for the first time in decades and the Democrats' second-place finisher (Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders) is a protectionist. Clinton is the closest thing to a free trader of the three and she is not at all a free trader," he said.
While the US economy has been recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, there are still certain demographic groups who lag in terms of employment, income and upward mobility. New research has indicated there is a segment of the American populace that questions the previously accepted conventional wisdom about the benefits of free trade.
"It's not about incumbents changing their positions," David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the New York Times in April. "It's about the replacement of moderates with more ideological successors. The China shock isn't the sole factor, but it is something of a missing link."
paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com
New arbitration cases 'unlikely' Updated: 2016-07-19 06:47 By AN BAIJIE/CUI SHOUFENG(China Daily)
A sailor raises signal flags on the Chinese Navy missile destroyer Hefei during a military exercise off the Xisha Islands on the South China Sea on July 8, 2016. [Photo by ZHA CHUNMING/CHINA DAILY]
Most Southeast Asian countries are not likely to follow Manila's suit of unilaterally initiating an arbitration case against China, experts said on Monday at a think tank seminar on the South China Sea issue.
Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, said in his keynote speech that it would be the most practical choice for ASEAN members to focus on cooperation with China.
"The disputes in the South China Sea are only a problem between China and some of the ASEAN member states, not all of them," he said.
Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said most ASEAN countries concerned with South China Sea issues are likely to continue with their traditional call for nonviolent resolution of conflicts and adherence to international law.
"Vietnam is unlikely to institute a similar case, as it always had a unique way of resolving differences with China, sometimes through party-to-party channels," he said.
Mentioning that China and many ASEAN members are working together on infrastructure projects, he called on closer exchanges apart from economic deals.
"What we would not like to see is the escalation of an arms race in this part of the world. If we at least temporarily set aside the disputes, the relationship between many ASEAN countries and China would be more cordial. We do a lot of business together," he said.
Katherine Hui-Yi Tseng, an associate research fellow in the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, said that other ASEAN members have adopted a "wait and see posture" on how China and the Philippines solve the issue.
"They will not undertake actions in near future, because this award is actually unhelpful to their claim (all land features are rocks with no entitlement of 200 nautical miles)," she told China Daily by e-mail before the seminar.
"In the near future, these ASEAN countries are not going to launch litigation against China. Such an announcement may be more like a water-testing tactic, hoping to extract more benefits from China," she said.
Wang Yuzhu, a researcher of China-ASEAN studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that many China-proposed projects, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, could benefit Southeast Asia countries.
"At present, if you work with China, you are better off. I think the political leaders know it. They exaggerate the South China Sea issue just because they have other political calculations. They forget the benefit of the common people." he said.
During the seminar, a Chinese researcher denied the accusation that China is trying to tear up the unity of Association of Southeast Asian Nations through winning support from countries including Cambodia and the Laos in the China-Philippine maritime disputes.
Fan Jishe, a senior researcher at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the US wants to mobilize most ASEAN countries to deal with China in very negative terms, which he said is quite similar to the security architecture during the Cold War.
"It will tear apart the regional integrity formulated in the past decades, and Southeast Asian countries may be forced to take sides. That's not in ASEAN countries' interests," he said.
Four of the five members of the illegal arbitral tribunal on the South China Sea case were appointed by Shunji Yanai, former president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Rightist, hawkish, close to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pro-US, unfriendly to China ... these are tags often associated with Yanai. One member was designated by the Philippines.
Yanai entered the Japanese Foreign Ministry after graduation, following in his father's steps. The younger Yanai became Japanese ambassador to the United States in 1999.
"He is ... bold and some times controversial, and some how gets away with things that would most likely cost someone else his career," said Fumiko Halloran in his review of Yanai's book, 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.
According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, when Yanai was director-general of the Treaties Bureau of the Foreign Ministry during the 1990-91 Gulf War, he helped push through parliament an act allowing Japan to send Self-Defense Forces abroad for UN peacekeeping operations. In 1992, Japan dispatched some 600 soldiers and 75 police officers to Cambodia for peace-keeping operations.
In 2007, Yanai served as chairman of a panel to advise Abe on revising the Constitution to allow military actions overseas. After Abe took office again in 2012, it was also Yanai who in 2014 presented a report advocating lifting the ban. In 2015, Japan enacted laws dropping the ban.
In 2011, Yanai became the first Japanese to be president of ITLOS. After the Philippines unilaterally initiated the case against China in 2013, Yanai created a five-member tribunal.
In August 2013, when he was still choosing arbitrators, Yanai 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.
Japanese political analyst Jiro Honzawa said: "The Philippines was abetted by the US and Japan to apply for arbitration, because the latter two want to contain China."
XINHUA
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HA NOI The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) has proposed the development of large textile and garment industrial zones (IZs) to attract investment in dyeing, and fabric and yarn production.
The 500ha to 1,000ha zones would attract local and foreign investment for high-end products.
The ministry has also proposed that the Government provide full support for the building of textile and garment industrial zones located in provinces and cities expperiencing socio-economic difficulties in order to create conditions for the success of small and medium startup enterprises, according to the ministry.
The proposal also targets the development of transport infrastructure connecting the large industrial zones to ports and logistic centres and reduce transportation costs.
The Viet Nam Textile and Apparel Association (Vitas), which sent to the Government a document detailing the difficulties of textile and garment enterprises and proposed solutions, supports the IZ plan.
The association also suggested the Government provide credit for enterprises to build waste water treatment centres at those industrial zones.
Exports in H1
Textile and garment exports grew in the first half of this year, but local firms face difficulties in obtaining production and export contracts for the second half of 2016, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT).
The ministry reported a six-percent export increase in the first half of this year to US$12.8 billion.
The industry also saw growth in export value to its major markets, including the US, increasing by 5.9 per cent to $4.29 billion; Japan with an increase of 2.9 per cent to $1.04 billion; South Korea with exports 15.58 per cent higher at $764.9 million.
Nguyen Thi Huyen, Director of the Garment 10 Joint Stock Company, said she was not optimistic about production by the end of the year, while Brexit is expected to harm the price competition for garment exports.
According to Tran Van Khang, Director of ong Binh JSC, there has been a lack of export orders since the beginning of the year, triggering stiff competition among domestic manufacturers for customers. Khang said his firm experienced a 30-percent drop in the number of orders in the first five months, for which he blamed overstocking and falling demand in import markets. In addition, export prices have plunged by 10-15 per cent, while the firm still has to pay wages, insurance and transportation costs, which are on the rise, he added.
Phi Viet Trinh, Deputy Director of Ho Guom Garment SJC, said the companys overseas orders fell significantly in March and April, and only started to rebound in June. Several trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Vietnam-EU Free Trade Agreement, have not yet come into effect so that Vietnams garment customers could not benefit from a preferential tax regime and turned to other foreign manufacturers with more tariff advantages.
Many of Viet Nams traditional customers shifted their orders to Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, which enjoy reduced import duties in the US and the EU, the two largest buyers of Vietnamese garments, said the Chairman of the Viet Nam Textile and Garment Association (Vitas), Vu uc Giang.
Viet Nams 2016 textile and garment exports are expected to reach a total value of $31 billion. VNS
HA NOI Viet Nam Infrastructure Development and Finance Investment Joint Stock Company (VIDFI), National Highway 5s investor, has proposed a 10-per cent reduction in tolls for container trucks from next month.
The move aims to harmonise the benefits for road users, particularly transport companies, with the road builders and States budget, according to VIDFI.
The reduced tolls are also expected to encourage truck drivers to use the national highway instead of provincial roads, which run almost parallel to the highway but are free of charge.
Since April, cars with fewer than 12 seats and trucks with a load of less than two tonnes have paid VN45,000 (US$2) per trip.
Trucks with a load of 10-18 tonnes and 20-foot container trucks pay VN140,000 ($6.27) per trip.
Trucks with a load of 18 tonnes or more and 40-foot container trucks pay VN200,000 ($8.96) per trip.
The tolls are 25 per cent higher than those imposed before April in order to generate funds for maintaining National Highway 5 and to reinvest in the Ha NoiHai Phong Expressway Project, which was also developed by VIDFI under a Build-Operate-Transfer contract.
According to VIDFI, the reduction in tolls next month could cause financial difficulties for the company in maintaining the road and extending the time to recoup its investment in the Ha Noi-Hai Phong Expressway Project.
The company wanted no change to toll fees on the Ha NoiHai Phong Expressway as since April, it has offered a temporary 35 per cent discount on tolls for trucks with a loading capacity of 18 tonnes or more and 40-foot container trucks (type 5).
After 2016, VIDFI will use data on traffic flow to request the Transport Ministry for a suitable adjustment of tolls for type 5 vehicles. Accordingly, the highest toll for type 5 trucks, applied from the intersection of Ring Road 3 to provincial road 356 (inh Vu), will be VN760,000.
The company has asked for assistance from the government to overcome its financial difficulties.
Meanwhile, the prime minister approved a proposal by the finance ministry to lower toll fees for container trucks and trucks with loads over 10 tonnes on National Highway 1.
The decision took effect in the middle of this year and is one of the measures intended to help relieve the difficulties of transport companies in light of Government Resolution 35/NQ-CP on supporting enterprises, which is in effect until 2020.
Accordingly, trucks with loads of 10-18 tonnes and 20-foot container trucks will pay VN120,000 per trip instead of VN140,000 when using the national highway in the central provinces of Binh inh and Quang Ngai.
Trucks with a load of at least 18 tonnes and 40-foot container trucks would pay VN180,000 per trip instead of VN200,000. VNS
Authorities in the central Quang Tri Province are seeking ways to create new livelihoods for locals living in coastal communes affected by the Formosa pollution from April this year. Photo thanhnien.vn
QUANG TRI Authorities in the central Quang Tri Province are seeking ways to create new livelihoods for locals living in coastal communes affected by the Formosa pollution from April this year.
Local authorities have assigned staff to 16 affected communes to do SWAT studies in each locality to identify chances of changing local livelihoods from fishing and coastal aquaculture.
According to Nguyen uc Chinh, chairman of Quang Tri Peoples Committee, staff working in agricultural engineering in public agencies would arrive at the communes to do specific studies to examine soil and climate conditions, so as to suggest a proper choice of plants and husbandry species.
Last week, local authorities gathered at a workshop held for those purposes. Tran Huu Hung, chairman of the provinces Vinh Linh District, recommended making sandy hills in the district straight topography and investing in watering systems at the same time, aiming to have more soil for agriculture.
Hung said garlic and peanuts could grow well in such sandy soil. Vo Van Hung, director of the local Department of Agriculture and Rural Development assisted in the utilizing of vast sandy areas left uncultivated, saying that communes should develop farms on the sandy land for production of high economic value plants, fish and animals.
The provincial authorities will supply little fish for breeding as well as a maximum amount of VN80 million (US$3,600) each hectare for other costs of setting up a farm.
For short-term assistance to affected fishermen, the province has supplied 22kg of rice per person a month. Local authorities have paid the entire interest for bank loans signed by the firms working in the affected fields.
There were 44,000 families affected by the Formosa pollution in 16 communes. Operations of almost 2,600 fishing boats were halted, creating unemployment for around 3,000 labourers.
Police and environmental officers in Ky Anh Town, central Ha Tinh Province on Saturday found about 14 tonnes of waste buried at the Ky Tan Communes landfill and a park managed by the Ky Anh Urban Environment Company in Song Tri Ward. Photo vnexpress.net
More illegally buried waste found
Police and environmental officers in Ky Anh Town, central Ha Tinh Province on Saturday found about 14 tonnes of waste buried at the Ky Tan Communes landfill and a park managed by the Ky Anh Urban Environment Company in Song Tri Ward.
The waste was allegedly disposed of by the Hung Nghiep Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Company.
Relevant agencies collected and carried away the illegally buried waste to Ha Tinh Waste Treatment Ltd Company. Local police continued searching suspected areas where Formosa waste was alleged to be buried. Earlier last week, dozens of tonnes of waste that was also allegedly disposed of by the company were discovered buried in a landfill in the provinces Thien Cam Town in Cam Xuyen District.
The Formosa company was found burying 100 tonnes of waste at the farm of Ky Anh Urban Environment Companys director, Le Quang Hoa, in Ky Trinh Ward of Ky Anh Town.
Ha Tinh Province Peoples Committee chairman decided to establish a group that is specialised in overseeing the waste treatment and waste discharges by Formosa.
The group, led by vice director of the provinces Environment and Natural Resource Department, Pham Lan Son, would inspect and oversee Formosas waste release once the company had announced it schemes to operate or maintain its equipment.
The group is allowed to conduct unannounced inspections of the companys waste treatment processes if found needed.
A clip documenting the refusal of security guards to allow an ambulance transporting a dying baby to leave the Ha Noi Paediatrics Hospital early this month has generated public anger. Health workers, officials and patients shared with Viet Nam News their opinions about health service issues, particularly relating to emergency medical aid.
Dr. Tran Van Phuc
Doctor Tran Van Phuc, Saint Paul General Hospital, Ha Noi.
Patient transportation is a very complicated process in which transporters or accompanying medical staff, including doctors, nurses and technicians, play the most vital role. The transporters and health workers should possess high professional qualification so that they can assess whether the patient is in a life-threatening condition. That is the reason why a majority of patients and their families hire ambulances that charge far more than a taxi or any other type of transport.
The incident at the Pediatrics Hospital, as reported in the media and on social networks recently, is proof that the ambulance services are facing serious problems.
Watching the clip, it was obvious that the two hospital guards were wrong in trying to harass the ambulance driver. Police have started to investigate the case, but for me this is analgesic relief - not a treatment for the disease.
Lets take a look at a road accident that occurred in Ai Mo street in Ha Nois Long bien District last February. Three people were killed, including a seven-year-old child. The child might not have died had he been brought to hospital in time, but he had to wait 40 minutes for the ambulance.
The entire ambulance service needs serious examination not just of its quantity, but also its quality.
I appreciate the Ministry of Health allowing private ambulance services. I have been in an ambulance both as a patient and as a doctor, and I myself once paid for a private ambulance to transport a relative back home in the central Nghe An Province. Why do I or other people choose to hire a private ambulance? Because we can choose one that we can afford.
For a patient who needs medical emergency aid, an ambulance is not just a means of transportation to the hospital. He/she could lose their lives in a low quality ambulance with unqualified and ill-trained or inexperienced health workers.
I had opportunities to witness many ambulances in which health workers were experienced and skillful, at the same time very hard working, helping save many lives. They all were skilled in assessing patients condition and knew how to conduct exact and efficient emergency aid during the transportation.
Last but not least important, I appeal to everyone to search for information about ambulance services so that they have the most essential understanding of the issue. This will not only help themselves but also boost the entire health service system.
Luong Ngoc Khue
Although the security guards in question worked for a security company that had a contract with the Pediatrics Hospital, they were hospital staff in the eyes of the patients and society.
Their uncivilised behaviour stained the reputation of not only the National Hospital of Pediatrics (NHP) but the whole health sector.
Though the hospital director claimed responsibility and apologised to the patients family quite late after what had happened, it still won the hearts of the public.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) has asked the hospital to investigate who is responsible, such as the Administration and Management divisions. The security company also has to apologise to the patients family and the hospital.
Hospital ambulances play a key role in transporting patients in time for treatment. The MoH will conduct a comprehensive review of the operations of ambulances and taxis serving the hospital. Hospital ambulances have to run in line with the hospital regulations while providing private ambulances is categorised as a conditional business sector and thus requires an operating licence. The MoH will have to check the licences of each private ambulance to make sure that no substandard ambulances are operating.
The ministry also ordered hospitals not to restrict the rights of the patients to select ambulance services in and out of the hospital, yet it has to go with ensuring security in the hospitals at the same time. The bidding procedures to pick an ambulance service at the hospital have to be transparent, with the fees made public at every department and division to let the patients know.
Regarding the security at hospitals, it is important work as people coming in and out of the hospitals are from all walks of life. As a matter of fact, it is very common for family members of patients to harrass medical workers. Security guards in such cases help to ensure the safety of the hospital equipment and of the patients.
The behaviour of the security guards can affect the patients general satisfaction of the hospital service, so we will do our best to remove the ones with substandard behaviour toward patients, and ask that security guards get training and have a certificate of a behavioural code of conduct as a compulsory requirement to work at a hospital. The hospitals, meanwhile, have to install cameras at the gates to monitor security.
Tran Van Boi, Director of northern Thai Binh Provinces 115 Emergency Centre
Health systems and services consist of three continuous stages: pre-hospital care, inpatient hospital care and rehabilitation. Pre-hospital care plays an important role and affects the two other stages. If a patient is given proper initial medical care and is carried to the hospital in time, medical costs and the time required for treatment are lessened and the rehabilitation can achieve positive results sooner. If not, inpatient care will last longer and be more expensive, making the patient suffer increased disability or even death.
In developed countries, so much importance is attached to pre-hospital care that paramedics are provided sufficient medical equipment and techniques so that they can handle almost all situations, even surgery.
Pre-hospital care is included in the States healthcare system. The Government allocates funding for pre-hospital care within the States budget, healthcare insurance and donations.
In Viet Nam, pre-hospital care usually conducted by 115 Emergency Centres is not given proper attention, for example relating to models of organisation, facilities, medical equipment and policies for staff. Some provinces dont have 115 Emergency Centres.
Viet Nam also allows private companies to provide pre-hospital care services including transportation to an appropriate receiving facility. Some of the service providers fail to meet requirements in expertise or equipment. In some cases, private cars are illegally used as ambulances.
Fake or unqualified ambulances are among health officers concerns, particularly when they pick up patients who have been discharged from hospital but still need medical assistance.
Normally, hospitals will not transfer patients if they find the ambulance unqualified, for example, there is no doctor in the ambulance.
Its necessary to restrict unqualified ambulances, particularly private ones providing service at hospitals. However, some hospitals are unable to control the problem as hospital staff or brokers collude with drivers.
Nguyen Van e
Nguyen Van e, chairman of Viet Nam Private Hospitals Association
Im so sorry to learn about the incident at the Viet Nam National Hospital of Paediatrics that local media reported early this month. The incident revealed problems in managing and controlling ambulances arriving and leaving hospitals. It not only woke up the National Hospital of Paediatrics but also other hospitals about services provided in hospitals which are not medical examinations and treatment, but also parking, canteen, security and transport.
I think that any services provided in hospitals must be at least twice as good as those provided in other places because people who arrive and stay in hospitals suffer illness, pain, worry and stress more than healthy people. They are special clients and special services are needed for them. For example, a guard in a hospital should not only ensure security and order but also be willing to help patients. Ambulance drivers should know medical techniques to offer assistance to health officers. Cooks at hospital canteens are also nutrition consultants and food safety officers to patients and their family.
There is a major difficulty in selecting competent service providers for hospitals as now, we have numerous service providers but few of them are qualified or able to work professionally. When the service providers are not professional plus work in overcrowded environments like Viet Nams public central hospitals, regrettable incidents can happen.
However, on the other side of the coin, we must raise questions about the transparency in bidding for providing such services in public hospitals. Do competent service providers have a chance to win the bidding?
As far as I know, in many private hospitals, the hospitals provide such hospital logistic services by themselves, such as the guards belonging to the Administrative Department, the canteen is part of the Nutrition Department, and the cleaners belong to the Orderly Department.
Such personnel arrangements makes such workers aware that patients are those who pay them.
In order to improve such services at public hospitals where many services now are provided by outsiders, close oversight and clear obligations and responsibilities must be included in their agreements. The hospitals are also responsible in training and testing the staff of service providers. Any one working in a hospital must understand that patients pay them and their work performance could affect to the hospitals prestige.
When it comes to hospital logistic services, private hospitals in Viet Nam have more advantages than public ones.
Luu Thi Phuong
Nguyen Thi Phuong, 31, a patient and mother of two, Ha Noi.
I heard through the media and social networks about how Ha Noi Pediatrics Hospital security guards prevented an ambulance from leaving even though it was carrying a nine-month-old heart patient.
I myself think that it is con sau lam rau noi canh, One scabby sheep is enough to spoil the whole flock.
I myself once had to stay at a hospital for treatment. I have two little children and sometimes I have also brought them to see doctors at the Pediatrics Hospital.
Actually, I am fearful about the overloaded examination facilities is whenever we come.
About the ambulance service, I have a simple opinion. When a patient needs to be taken to an emergency room or moved to a central-level hospital, any ambulance, private or not, is ok, depending on the wishes of the patient family.
However, hospital guards should not interfere.
Ambulance service is important, it can save or kill a person. So, professional knowledge and responsibility of the medical staff in an ambulance must be strictly supervised. I see the health sector has invested a lot in hospital infrastructure and medical equipment in examination rooms, but the quality of ambulances seems be ignored. Many ambulances operating in the provinces, even in Ha Noi, are obsolete.
Many patients and their families are very tired when being treated at overloaded hospitals and facing the pressure of payments. Hospital staff should create favourable conditions to help them.
Although the infrastructure and medical equipment of State-owned hospitals in Viet Nam havve improved, and the quality of health services is better in recent years, I think it still doesnt meet all the residents expectations. I also want to emphasise that I have trust in Vietnamese doctors responsibility and professional knowledge.
All the members of my family and I agree that the earnest and kind-hearted behaviour of doctors, nurses and security guards at hospitals will create great confidence in patients. VNS
HA NOI Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico began his official visit to Viet Nam at the invitation of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc yesterday.
This is Prime Minister Robert Ficos second visit to Viet Nam, which is made after he won local elections again in March 2016.
He is scheduled to meet with Vietnamese top leaders to deliberate ways and means to ratchet up the traditional friendship and multi-dimensional affiliation between the two countries.
Through the visit, the two countries expect to step up connections across economics, trade, investment and education-training.
Regional and international issues of shared concerns will be discussed.
Viet Nam and Slovakia established diplomatic relations in 1950.
The two countries trade hit over US$1.2 billion and Slovakia is currently the biggest Central European investor in Viet Nam.
In 2016, the two countries will organise the second session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Economic Cooperation in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava. VNS
HA NOI The Vietnam News Agency on July 18 refuted untruthful coverage by the Chinese press regarding the East Sea issue, which was discussed at a meeting between Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator, Mongolia on July 14.
Following the meeting, a number of Chinese official media outlets, including Xinhua, the English-language Chinadaily.com and the Chinese-language version of the Peoples Daily quoted PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc as saying that Viet Nam respects Chinas stance on the South China Sea arbitration case, which was unilaterally initiated by the Philippines, and maintains that such disputes should be solved peacefully through negotiations. He was also quoted as saying Viet Nam stands ready to push forward bilateral maritime negotiations and properly manage differences with China, in order to contribute to regional peace and stability.
In fact, PM Phuc asked both sides to seriously implement agreements by senior leaders, including the agreement on the basic principles guiding the settlement of issues at sea between Viet Nam and China signed by Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, in October 2011.
He said the agreement is meant to promote mechanisms of negotiating sea-related issues, manage differences at sea, avoid further complicating the situation, and fully and effectively realise the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea, as well as to reach a Code a Conduct in the East Sea soon, contributing to maintaining peace and stability in the region.
The Vietnamese PM also reaffirmed Viet Nams stance on the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration on July 12, 2016 in The Hague, on the Philippines lawsuit against China in the East Sea issue.
Earlier on July 12, Foreign Ministrys spokesman Le Hai Binh said Viet Nam welcomed the arbitration tribunals final ruling.
Viet Nam once again reiterates its consistent stance on this lawsuit as it was fully shown in the Vietnamese Foreign Ministrys Declaration on December 5, 2014, sent to the arbitration tribunal, he noted.
In that spirit, Viet Nam strongly supports settling disputes in the East Sea through peaceful measures, including diplomatic and legal processes, without the use or threat to use force, as in line with regulations of international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, maintaining peace and stability in the region, security, safety and freedom of navigation in and overflight over the East Sea, and respecting the law-abiding principle in seas and oceans, Binh said.
On this occasion, Viet Nam once again affirms its sovereignty over Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelagos, the sovereignty over internal waters and territorial waters, the sovereign right and jurisdiction over Viet Nams exclusive economic zone and continental shelf as defined in line with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Viet Nam upholds all of its legitimate rights and interests regarding the geographical structures belonging to Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagoes, stated the spokesperson.-VNS
HCM City The Government has made efforts to improve the management of public assets but the task is made difficult by its massive scale and deficient database.
According to the Ministry of Finances Public Asset Management Department, in the first six months of this year 766 different assets -- 69 land plots, 296 houses, and 384 cars -- were sold for a total of VN746 billion (US$33.5 million).
In the period the Ministry took back assets worth VN26 billion ($1.17 million) from 10 State-funded projects.
Another VN35 trillion ($1.57 billion) was raised by rearranging and selling State-owned houses and lands.
To make the management more effective, the Public Asset Management Department should review all existing policies and amend them if necessary, Deputy Minister of Finance Nguyen Huu Chi told Thoi bao Kinh te Viet Nam (Viet Nam Economic Times) newspaper.
He said it should digitise the database on about public assets and improve oversight of them.
The department listed several difficulties in managing the assets.
While they are massive, there is no overall policy on how to use, exploit and manage these assets. Instead, they are found piecemeal in many separate decrees issued by different industries and ministries. As a result, there is no unified and up-to-date database on public assets.
Secondly, though the value of State offices and other assets worth over VN500 million ($22,500) alone is around $47 billion and despite the fact the offices are often in prime locations, they have not been exploited properly.
Many have been approved for sale but the process is stalled because of the lack of detailed plans and persons vested with the authority to go ahead.
Thirdly, the transport infrastructure is not exploited effectively and return on investment is too low. The economic downturn and real estate market slump meant private investors were not keen on investing in roads, and the bulk of the responsibility fell on the Government. Besides, the lands along roads have not been exploited efficiently either.
Fourthly, since the cash-strapped authorities are not able to put clean public lands up for competitive bidding, the price discovery is not effective.
With more resources, they could pay compensation to land owners and auction off lands. Now, since lands are often sold with an encumbrance attached to them, they fetch low prices.
Fifthly, other assets like natural resources, water, forests, and seafood all lack precise information about economic value.
Finally, public assets are often managed by multiple agencies, making their management chaotic. VNS
HCM CITY Poor electrical wiring is considered the most common cause of fire in every household, office, plant and trade complex, the city fire chief warned during a meeting with media on Friday.
Colonel Le Tan Buu, chief of HCM Citys Firefighting and Prevention Police Department, said electricity caused 66.3 per cent of fires in the first half of the year with 220 cases, a reduction of 33.3 per cent in comparison with the same period last year. Two people were killed (four less than the same period a year earlier) and 26 were injured, with total property losses amounting to VN82 billion (US$3.67 million).
The losses of 19 fires havent been estimated yet.
There were 68 rescue missions, a year-onyear reduction of 8.1 per cent. Thirty-eight people were saved from fire and other accidents while 200 others were guided to escape from fire.
In order to increase efficiency in fire prevention, the department will strengthen local firefighting forces abilities, and increase education about fire threats for households.
The municipal Fire Fighting and Prevention Police Department has also conducted fire-safety inspections at 43,275 enterprises, an increase of 9.5 per cent. About 4,313 enterprises have been found to be in violation of fire prevention regulations, an increase of nearly 20 per cent.
The department organised 300 firefighting and prevention training courses for nearly 16,300 people, an increase of 136 per cent.
Over 6,400 fire prevention education classes, a growth of 21 per cent, were held for 124,000 attendees.
The departmentplans a major fire fighting and rescue drill for complicated situations involving chemical storage. VNS
The 27th International Biology Olympiad (IBO 2016) kicked off yesterday at the Hanoi National University of Education in the presence of IBO President Dr. Poonpipope Kasemsap. Photo dantri.com.vn
HA NOI The 27th International Biology Olympiad (IBO 2016) kicked off yesterday at the Hanoi National University of Education in the presence of IBO President Dr. Poonpipope Kasemsap.
This is the first time the country has hosted such a biology competition. The IBO 2016 draws the participation of 264 students and 238 teachers from 71 countries and territories, which is reportedly the highest number of participants in the Olympiad so far, Vietnam News Agency reported.
Addressing the event, the Minister of Education and Training Phung Xuan Nha said Viet Nam hosting the IBO 2016 was vivid evidence demonstrating the recognition of and trust in Viet Nams education development by the international community.
According to the minister, the country had successfully hosted and organised numerous international Olympiads including the International Chemistry Olympiad (2014), International Physics Olympiad (2008), the International Mathematical Olympiad (2007) and the Asian Physics Olympiad (2004).
IBO 2016 is a chance for improved co-operation and sharing of experiences; promoting study spirit, especially the study of biology; and expanded relationships and enhanced scientific capacity of biologists world-wide, minister Nha said.
IBO president Dr. Poonpipope Kasemsap said participants would sit for both theoretical and practical tests compiled by Viet Nam.
The tests are extraordinary, and are related to the host countrys biodiversity, Vietnam News Agency quoted Kasemsap as saying.
Head of the IBO 2016 organising committee and rector of the Hanoi National University of Education, Nguyen Van Minh, said the annual IBO - a science Olympiad for high school students under the age of 20 aims to seek out young talents in the field of biology, and more importantly to inspire them to take their first steps into biological research.
The first IBO was held in Olomouc City, Czechoslovakia (which now belongs to the Czech Republic) in 1990 with six participating countries, namely: Belgium, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, Poland and the Soviet Union. Viet Nam partook for the first time in 1996.
This year, the Vietnamese team has four contestants: Vu Thi Chinh from the Hanoi National Universitys High School for the Gifted in Natural Science, Nguyen Ngoc Minh Hai from Quang Ninh Provinces Ha Long High School for the Gifted, Nguyen ac Hieu from Thanh Hoa Provinces Lam Son High School for the Gifted, and Le Thi Hong Hoa from Ha Noi Amsterdam High School.
The IBO 2016 runs until Saturday, during which participating students and teachers will also have opportunities to learn about Viet Nams culture and beauty spots. VNS
HA NOI (VNS) Police of Ha Nois Hoang Mai District have discovered six sacks containing dozens of elephant tusks in a raid on a house, owned by Phan Trong Kien, in Hoang Liet Commune.
The sacks were found on Sunday in a room on the third floor of the house as well as in a nearby house owned by Kiens relative.
Kien told the police he had bought the tusks for VN8 million (US$351) per kilogram.
Earlier that day, police apprehended three men who were transporting 15 kilograms of elephant tusks on their bikes. They confessed that Kien was the owner of the tusks.
According to initial reports, Kien was a supplier of meat for restaurants.
The case is under investigation.
Last December, Hai Phong customs officials seized more than 2.2 tonnes of elephant tusks--- the largest volume of tusks ever confiscated-- -that had been smuggled into Viet Nam from Mozambique.
The tusks arrived at Tan Vu Port in the northern coastal Hai Phong City. They were sent by an enterprise in Mozambique to an import-export joint-stock company in the city.
Elephants are an endangered species and are listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. International trade in elephant tusks is illegal in Viet Nam. VNS
BINH PHUOC The HCM City Peoples Court on Monday began a two-day court of appeals session, reviewing the trial of a gang that murdered six members of a family in Binh Phuoc Province.
The first instance court in this southern province last December handed down death sentences to two of the men, Nguyen Hai Duong, 24, the ex-boyfriend of one of the slain, charged with orchestrating the murders, and Vu Van Tien, Duongs 24-year- old friend, charged with being his accomplice. Another accomplice, Tran inh Thoai, Duongs 27-year- old friend, was sentenced to 16 years for buying a knife for Duong to kill the victims and for not reporting the conspiracy to commit murder.
The HCM City court was on Monday focussing on reviewing the appeals submitted by the victims family, who are calling for a trial for Duongs aunt, named Trinh, for allegedly offering him a motorbike to drive to the victims house to undertake the massacre.
The victims family also demanded a heavier sentence for Thoai for not reporting Duongs actions and instead buying a knife for him to commit the murder.
Appeals submitted by Tiens family asked for the charges against him to be dropped as he had acted under threats from Duong, who allegedly insisted he accompany him to commit the massacre. These appeals will also be reviewed by the court.
Lawyer Le Van Nam from Binh Phuoc Lawyers Group, who defends Tien, said a death sentence for Tien was too heavy.
Nam referenced three of the five key points that favour the defendant: First, the first instance court did not really consider the levels of influence between the criminals, which followed the hierarchy of a master and his supporters.
Nam said Tien was forced by Duong to take part in the crime, making him only a supporter.
Secondly, Duong had confessed to threatening Tien and forcing him to go with him to the crime scene.
Thirdly, Nam opposed the view of the court that Tien was like the other killers, who possessed a rough, barbaric character---a key factor that had attracted the death sentence. In this case, Tien was actually just a supporter of the killer but did not directly kill anyone.
Many people flocked to the court to follow the trial and hear the review of the case that had shocked the country last year. VNS
Cookbook Cafe Restaurant is a great place to enjoy both Vietnamese and foreign cuisine in Nha Trang, Yen Vy reports.
The restaurant is in the Intercontinental Hotel in the coastal province of Nha Trang. It is located on the first floor beside the hotel lobby.
The elegant restaurant features a cozy atmosphere with lots of warm lighting.
Cookbook Cafe has an open-kitchen style, allowing diners to watch their food be prepared.
We decided to choose a table outside the balcony opposite the beach to enjoy the fresh air and the beautiful ocean-view.
The menu is diverse, featuring local and international favourites in Vietnamese and English.
There are more than 56 dishes in the main a la carte menu combined with one signature premium Wagyu beef menu and one Asian specialty menu, created by executive Australian chef Dennis Barton, who has experience in Australia, Thailand and the Maldives.
I chose Nha Trang, Viet Nam because the country and this particular coastal region offer a wealth of ingredients for culinary discovery, an exhilarating attraction for a chef who wants his skills shiningly honed he told Viet Nam News.
I ordered carpaccio of beef to start, while my two friends chose smokey cream of tomato soup served with garlic cheese bread.
Along with the nice atmosphere, the waiting staff was polite, friendly and attentive. There were both Vietnamese and foreigners, all with good English.
Bands also perform live at the restaurant at night, so diners can enjoy music while they eat.
WASHINGTON A black gunman shot dead three police officers in the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge on Sunday, in the latest spate of violence involving law enforcement.
The shooting, which also wounded three other officers, took place in a city scarred by high racial tensions and numerous protests against police brutality since the death July 5 of Alton Sterling, a black man shot at point-blank range by police.
Two days after the Sterling shooting, a gunman ambushed police officers, killing five, during a demonstration triggered by Sterlings death at the hands of police and that of another African-American man in Minnesota whose dying moments were captured in shocking video footage that went viral online.
Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told reporters the gunman behind the Baton Rouge shootings was killed and there are no suspects at large. The motive was not immediately clear.
One of the wounded officers "is in critical condition fighting for his life as we speak," Edmonson said. The other two officers were in stable condition.
"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," said Edmonson, who like some of his colleagues who spoke in the press conference, was clearly shaken.
"And until we come together as a nation, as a people, to heal as a people, if we dont do that and this madness continues, we will surely perish as a people."
The shooting took place along a highway around 8:40am (1340 GMT), after police responded to a call about a man carrying a rifle.
"Baton Rouge officers at a convenience store observed the individual. He was wearing all black standing behind a beauty supply store holding a rifle," Edmonson said.
Some reports said the suspect was wearing a mask. US media citing unnamed sources identified the suspect as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old African American from Kansas City, Missouri whose birthday was on Sunday.
A recent series of high-profile shootings involving police have exposed deep fault lines through US 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.
"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."
The first African American president of the United States, Obama has made repeated calls for racial unity.
"Regardless of motive, the death of these three brave officers underscores the danger that police across the country confront every single day, and 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."
Obama pledged the federal governments full support in the investigation of the incident.
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.
Witness Brady Vancel told CBS television affiliate WAFB 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 those possible shooters and the police officers involved were not immediately clear.
Multiple shots could be heard as civilian cars quickly backed away during the incident.
Unspeakable, heinous attack
"Today has been a very tough day here in Baton Rouge and in Louisiana and in our country an absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack on law enforcement here in Baton Rouge," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said.
"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.
Sterlings aunt Veda Washington-Abusaleh made a tearful plea for an end to the violence.
"We dont want no more bloodshed. Leave. Go home. Go wherever you come from. This is our house. You cant come in our house killing us," she said in an emotional interview with local television.
"No justice! No peace! Thats what were calling for. Stop this killing!"
Sundays shooting also plays 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. AFP
India will likely sign a (BIT) within the next few months with the US, Canada or Cambodia. That taxation matters have been kept out of the BIT is not a cause of concern, as the nations with which India is negotiating the agreement have been assured that the provisions under Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) are adequate to provide protection to foreign companies operating here, government sources told Business Standard.
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 newspaper in a Communist party-ruled country will not print an article running down a foreign government for its trade action to discourage import of low-priced products harming local manufacturers without official sanction. The target in this case is India and the newspaper pointing an accusing finger is China's Global Times. What is galling about the vitriol against India is that the US and the European Union have been a lot more proactive in building tariff barriers against China's steel exports. The paper complains that New Delhi is using "trade protectionism" to "boost the domestic steel industry". On what basis it finds China as the "primary victim" of "Indian trade investigations" is not clear. Revisions of regular import duty and introduction of safeguard duty and minimum import price here have all been preceded by thorough investigations and review of impact these will have on the users of steel, particularly small and medium industries. In fact, any such trade action unfailingly puts the patience of Indian steelmakers to test.
WATERLOO It was a typical Sunday evening before shots rang out in a Logan Avenue neighborhood in Waterloo killing a man.
Otavious Brown, 21, died at UnityPoint Health-Allen Hospital on Sunday.
He was taken there along with two other gunshot victims Sunday evening after shots fired from a car into a group of four people struck three of them at the 800 block of Logan Avenue, according to Waterloo Police.
Dewon C. Campbell, 17, and Aundrey F. Roberts, 22, both of Waterloo, were treated and released from Allen with non-life-threatening injuries.
The three showed up at Allen around 5:50 p.m. Sunday by private vehicle. Police were called to Allen and blocked off the scene on Logan Avenue. The shooting occurred outside of 817 Logan, according to police.
Witnesses report seeing a green SUV heading north on Logan and hearing four to five shots. Police confirm they seized a green Chevrolet Tahoe suspected to be involved in the shooting. No arrests had been made.
We were just enjoying the day, said one neighbor who declined to be identified.
Next door to 817 Logan Ave. is a daycare center. Homes on both sides of the street have multiple children living there.
We had grandkids here, said Shannon Taylor, 835 Logan Ave., This is a little too close for comfort.
Taylor said the incident makes her concerned for her kids and grandchildren and the other kids in the neighborhood and added her heart goes out to Browns family. Taylor said her kids knew Brown.
Theres a mom somewhere crying for her son right now, Taylor said.
Dan Trelka, Waterloo safety services director, said police have interviewed several witnesses to the shooting, which has yielded good leads.
A lot of our witnesses werent associated with either side, he said. Theyve been forthcoming with some good details.
Investigators were on the scene through Sunday night until about 1:30 p.m. Monday.
That block has been investigated for shooting incidents before, most recently June 29, when officers were called to the area for gunfire and found a shell casing.
The fatal shooting is the first homicide reported in Waterloo in 2016. The last homicide in Waterloo was Aug. 30 last year when Justin Montravious Dollen, 27, was found with gunshot wounds in the parking lot of an adult after-hours club at 1850 W. Airline Highway. Dollen died of his wounds in Iowa city.
Anyone with information about the Sunday incident is encouraged to call 291-4340.
FLOYD A Charles City man was killed Sunday evening when the motorcycle he was riding was struck by a semi just south of Floyd.
According to the Iowa State Patrol, Thomas Houdek, 23, of Charles City, died about 5:15 p.m. when he pulled out in front of a semitrailer being driven by Joshua Brood, 44, of Plainfield.
The report said Houdek, riding a 2004 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, was crossing Highway 18 from Quarry Road, entering Highway 18 northbound. He pulled out from the stop sign in front of Brood, driving a 2001 Peterbilt semi.
Brood applied the brakes and attempted to avoid a collision, causing the semi to roll over and eject him. Brood was airlifted to Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa in Mason City by Mercy Air Life. He was reported in fair condition late Sunday.
Houdek was pronounced dead at the scene, the state patrol reported.
The state patrol was assisted at the scene by Floyd County sheriff and Mercy Air Life.
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 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.
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. President George W. Bush carried the state in 2004 by a margin of less than 1 percent over Democrat John Kerry.
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.
Kaufmann believes Iowa will be a battleground state, and he says hes not along. 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 want 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.
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 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 Jim Kirkpatrick, a former Quad-Citian, may be a prime example for how Mike Pence helps Donald Trump this election with the GOP rank and file.
Kirkpatrick, a financial advisor who now lives near Indianapolis and was a county chair for Ted Cruz in his state, wasnt sold on Trump as the GOP nominee. But thats not the case any longer.
Picking Pence would probably be the only thing that would get me off the fence, Kirkpatrick said while attending the Iowa delegations breakfast reception here.
Now, he said, Trump has his vote.
Kirkpatrick, who lived in Bettendorf from 1984 to 1988 and was having breakfast with his sister, Kay Quirck, an alternate delegate from northwest Iowa, had high praise for Pence. The two go to the same church, and he said the governor is a good balance for Trump.
Kirkpatricks sister isnt yet sold.
Im working through it, she said. Quirk, who is from Alta, said shes waiting for a message from Trump, hopefully about the constitution.
That hadnt happened yet, but Quirk said shes nonetheless excited to be at the convention, her first. This is history in the making, she said.
***************
Elect Trump, protect youth, Grassley says
CLEVELAND -- Most Iowa GOP delegates will be long dead when the social effects of a new U.S. Supreme Court will be truly felt, Sen. Chuck Grassley said Monday. But concern for future generations that should compel Republicans to back controversial presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court has been guilty of legislating from the bench, said the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And the next president is expected to appoint, or nominate, rather three or four new justices.
"Do you want somebody that's going to appoint -- I should say nominate, they're not appointed until the Senate confirms them -- nominate someone who's going to make law instead of interpret it?" Grassley said to applause from Iowa Republican delegates and party officials.
Grassley has for months been a barrier to President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The battle over Scalia's seat comes in the wake of hard-fought victories on liberal social causes, including gay marriage.
The next president could remake the American legal landscape for three decades or more, Grassley said, long after most in the room had succumbed to age. That mean's the 2016 presidential cycle is really about defending future generations from "liberal" justices legislating from the bench, he said.
*****
Wisconsin a 'model' for Iowa, says state GOP chief
Republicans should follow Wisconsin's road map, if the GOP takes the lone seat of Democratic power in Iowa, the state Senate, in November, party officials said Monday.
Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann lauded the tax breaks and right-to-work policies enacted since Republicans seized Wisconsin's Legislature and governor's mansion in 2010.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's administration is a "model" of what one-party control should look like, Kaufmann said Monday morning while introducing Wisconsin's governor to Iowa delegates.
For his part, Walker highlighted sweeping tax cuts, voter ID laws and defunding Planned Parenthood that were only possible under GOP control of of both legislative houses. Iowa could achieve those conservative milestones, too, he said, should the party topple Senate Democrats.
"It would be nice to have just not a speaker," Walker said. "But a Senate majority leader, too."
*****
A big night for Ernst's, national security and Scott Baio
It's day 1 of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. It's Donald Trump's convention, after all. And the master promoter loves himself a theme.
Today's is, unsurprisingly, "Make America Safe Again."
Throughout the day, almost 5,000 delegates and alternates will hear from the likes of Duck Dynasty star Willie Roberts, numerous proponents of a crackdown on the southern border, a Marine who was at the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Oh, and Scott Baio is making speaking, too.
Uh, OK, I'm not sure how "Happy Days" plays into things. But that's happening.
Monday night is a big deal for Joni Ernst, R-Iowa. The freshman senator and combat vet has a huge slot in Monday's lineup.
She'll debrief Tuesday morning with Iowa delegates at their pre-convention breakfast.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is headlining Monday's breakfast.
VINTON The Red Cross and the Salvation Army are helping the dozens of people in Vinton who need a new place to stay. Damaging storms tore through eastern Iowa early Sunday morning.
For the 15 people at the Red Cross emergency shelter in the city, they are first getting their basic needs met. The Red Cross is set up at the Vinton High School.
At least 55 in town will need some type of help. The Red Cross said it will meet with people who were displaced.
During those meetings, workers will provide financial assistance to those with immediate needs.
Winds here in Vinton were so strong Sunday morning, roofs were pulled off buildings.
Gusts even threw pieces of wood through walls and cars. The storm also damaged other homes in that same area and the Benton County fairgrounds nearby.
Though Vinton was under a severe thunder storm warning, authorities said sirens didnt sound. Vinton Police Department said thats because the storm was only expected to have wind gusts of up to 60 mph. Sirens sound with gusts of 70 or above.
On Monday, Gov. Terry Branstad issuesd a proclamation of disaster emergency for Benton, Humboldt, and Wright counties in response to recent severe weather.
The governors proclamation allows state resources to be utilized to respond to and recover from the effects of severe storms that significantly impacted the state beginning July 16. In addition, the proclamation activates the Iowa Individual Assistance Program for Benton and Wright county residents.
The Iowa Individual Assistance Program provides grants of up to $5,000 for households with incomes up to 200 percent of the current federal poverty level, or a maximum annual income of $40,320 for a family of three.
The storm also knocked down a cell tower that was shared by wireless organizations. SpeedConnect High-Speed Wireless Internet said Monday service would be back in 72 hours.
Three juveniles charged with robbing same Paducah store twice in one day
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Canl Bahis siteleri sektoru son derece onu ack ve farkl ozelliklere sahip bir sektordur. Elbette bahis secenekleri arasnda yuksek kazanc getiren alan kuskusuz canl bahistir. Peki, canl bahis nedir?
Canl Bahis Nedir?
Canl bahis adndan da anlaslacag gibi devam eden musabakaya bahis yapmaktr. Bu bahis musabaka devam ederken de yaplabilir olmasdr. Basta futbol olmak uzere voleybol, tenis, hentbol, basketbol, buz hokeyi ve masa tenisi gibi spor organizasyonlarna canl bahisler yaplabilmektedir. Canl bahis siteleri bu oyunlarn hepsine yuksek oranlara bahis yapmanza imkan tanr. En fazla tercih edilen futbol canl bahisleri diger alanlara gore daha fazla on plandadr. Siteden siteye degisen sartlar ve uygulama esaslar soz konusu olsa da kurallar sabittir.
Canl bahisi populer klan ve heyecan katan en onemli ozellikle musabakann basladg ana dek bahis yapabilmedir. Canl bahis icerisinde yer alan secenekler kazanma sansnz da dogrudan arttrmaktadr. Ilk korneri kim kullanr, ilk tac, gol, sar kart, krmz kart gibi futbol musabakas icerisinde olabilecek hemen hemen her seye bahis yaplabilmektedir. Normal bahisegore de son derece yuksek oranda olmas avantajl yonlerini ortaya koymaktadr. Nitekim dogru secenek ksa surede kazancl ckmanza etki edecektir.
Strateji ve dogru analizle 90 dakika gibi bir surede anaparanzkatlayabilirsiniz. Tabi bunu basarabilmek icin mutlaka musabakaya dair ayrntlar iyi degerlendirmek gerekir. Soz konusu musabakann detaylarn inceleyip, cezal, sakat oyuncu veya performans dusen takm oyunu gibi detaylar bilmek canl bahiste kazanc belirleyen onemli unsurdur. Guvenilir Canl bahis hem heyecanl zaman gecirmeyi hem de musabakalar takip ederken para kazanmay saglamaktadr.
Canl Bahis Nasl Oynanr?
Bahislerinizi guvenilir sitelerden gerceklestirdiginiz zaman herhangi bir sekilde para cekme de sorun yasamazsnz. Guvenilir bahis siteleri tespit edip sonrasnda da uyelik islemlerini tamamlamanz gerekmektedir. Belirlenen uyelik sartlarn yerine getirip hesabnza da paray aktardktan sonra bahis islemlerini sorunsuz yapabilirsiniz. Peki, canl bahis nasl oynanr?
Oncelikle bahis konusunda mutlaka dogru site arastrmas yapmalsnz. Yapacagnz arastrma neticesinde buldugunuz site uzerinden canl bahisislemlerini gerceklestirebilirsiniz. Bunun icin uye olup, hesaba para atp, canl bahis bolumune girmelisiniz. Sonrasnda dahil olmak istediginiz musabakann saatini ogrenip, gerekli analizleri yapmalsnz. Tahminlerinizi belirledikten sonra karsnza ckacak olan bahis sayfasndan istediginiz hamleyi yapmalsnz. Bahis tutarn belirledikten sonra musabaka baslayacaktr.
Canl bahis diger normal bahis esaslarna gore farkllklar icermektedir. Bunlardan en onemlisi musabakann gidisatna gore islem yapabilir olmaktr.Ayrca musabakann 2. Yarsna gore hamle yapp ayr bir bahisin soz konusu olmas da ciddi avantajdr. Dogru hamle ile sizde istediginiz bahisi yapp kazanc elde edebilirsiniz. Nitekim canl olarak yapacagnz bahis icin mac oncesi raporlara gore hareket etmek onemlidir. Cunku takmlarn durumlarn analiz etmek tahmin gucunu arttracaktr. Misal tamnn en iyi oyuncusu sakat ya da kart cezals ise takmn performansnda dusus yasanacaktr. Buna ek olarak takmn deplasman performans ile evinde ki performans ayr olacaktr. Burada da takmn musabakay nerede yaptgna bakmak gerekir. Bu ayrntlar da iyice analiz ettikten sonra bahsinizi yapp kazanmann keyfini yasayabilirsiniz.
Canl Bahis Siteleri
Son derece yuksek getiriye sahip bahis sektoru uzun zamandr faaliyet gostermektedir. Cok ciddi rakamlarn soz konusu oldugu bu sektor zamanla sanal ortamlara donusmustur. Elbette guvenli ve bir o kadar da avantajl olan bu siteler cok yonlu frsatlar sunmaktadrlar. Canl iddaa siteleri gerek yeni uyelere gerekse de hali hazrdaki uyelerine bolca bonus frsatlar vermektedir. Yatracagnz tutara gore belirlenen bonuslar site icerisinde rahat hareket etmenizi de saglayacaktr.
Canl bahis sitelerini kullanmadan once mutlaka guvenli olup olmadgna goz atmalsnz. Zira baz kullanclar guvenli olmayan sitelerden yaptklar islemlerden dolay magdur olmaktadrlar. Nitekim guvenli ve sorunsuz hizmet sunan yurt ds site tercih etmek en dogru secenektir. Sektorde uzun yllar faaliyet gosteren siteleri tercih edebilirsiniz. Bu alanda yer alan yabanc siteler musteri memnuniyetine onem vermektedir. Oncelik site kullanclarn sorunsuz sekilde bahislerini yapabilir olmasn saglamaktr. Bahis sitelerinde amac hem daha fazla kullancya hizmet vermek hem de sektorde emin admlarla ilerlemek onceliklidir. Dogru site tercihi ile sizde canl bahislerinizi sorun yasamadan gerceklestirebilirsiniz. Sizler icin hazrlams oldugumuz canl bahis siteleri listesi su sekildedir;
Mobilbahis Tempobet Bets10 Bahigo 1xbahis Betboo Youwin Superbahis
Sralams oldugumuz bu siteler sektorde basarl islere imza atms sitelerdedir. Canl bahis konusunda beklentileri karslayacak olan bu siteler sizlere kolaylk sunmaktadrlar. Bol bonuslu secenekle de sizlere farkl bahis yonlerini sunacaklardr. Sistemsel etki icerisinde her zaman etkin sonuc alabilmek icin surekli olarak faaliyet icerisindedirler.
Canl Bahis Taktikleri
Bahis sektorunun en fazla dikkat edilmesi gereken hususu dogru taktik ve dogru tahmindir. Elbette dogru tahmini yapabilmek icin analizi cok iyi yapmak gerekir. Canl bahis taktikleri arasnda ilk sra analiz gelmektedir. Analiz yapamadgnz zaman basarl tahminlerde bulunmanz pek de mumkun degildir. Cunku bahiste onemli olan konu musabakann analizini cok iyi yaplmas gerektigidir. Canl bahisin ozelliklerini iyi bilmek ve nasl bir hamle yapacagnz bilmek gerekir. Ozellikle riskli maclarda yaplacak degerlendirmeler cok daha onemlidir.
Canl bahis yapacaklarn takip edecegi degerler takmlarn durumlar ile alakal olmaldr. Performans uzerine kurulu bahis sisteminde takm degerlendirmesine iyi bakmak gerekir. Iki takmn son 5 macta nasl bir sonuc ortaya koyduguna bakarak hareket etmek onemlidir. Ayrca hangi takm evinde daha iyi performans sergiliyor diye de ayrca bakmak gerekir.
Analizlerle alakal puan durumlarna da goz atmak cok onemlidir. Puan degerlendirmesinde oncelikle takmlarn ihtiyaclar ile dogru orantl hareket etmek gerekir. Cunku olusturulan performans takmn da durumunu ortaya koymaktadr. Nitekim istenilen sonucu elde edebilmek icin tum ayrntlar bilmek gerekir. Takm ici duzenden tutunda da takmn son durumuna kadar her ayrnt onemlidir. Iki takmn birbirleri arasnda ki sonuclar da incelemek gerekir. Burada dikkat edilecek detaylarn basnda maclarda kac gol oldugu ve gollerin hangi dakikalarda atldgdr. Cekismeli gecen musabakalarda bazen goller ilk yarda daha fazla olurken baz maclarda da ikinci yarda daha cok gol olmustur. Iki takm arasnda ki maclarda gollerin cogunlugu ilk yarda geliyorsa buna gore bahis yapabilirsiniz.
Canl Bahis Siteleri Bonuslar ve Kampanyalar
Bahis yapanlar veya yapmay dusununler sitelerin sunmus olduklar frsatlar merak etmektedirler. Cunku siteler daha fazla kullancya erismek icin her donem kampanyalar duzenleyerek kullanc odakl hamleler yapmaktadrlar. Canl bahis bonuslar ve kampanyalar oldukca populer olup, siteler bu konuda adeta birbirleri ile yarsmaktadrlar. Birbirinden farkl ozelliklere sahip olan kampanyalar size frsatlar sunmaktadr. Daha cok kazanma ihtimalinizi arttran bu bonuslar daha cesur olmanza da dogrudan etki edecektir. Nitekim bonuslar sitelerin cekiciligini ve avantajlarn arttrmaktadr. En cok kazandran canl bahis siteleri bedava bonuslar ve kampanyalar icin http://www.milano2018.com/canli-bahis-siteleri-2022/ linkinden yardm alabilirsiniz.
Hos geldin bonusu ile baslayan ve sonrasnda para yatrdkca bonus veren cok sayda site bulunmaktadr. Canl bahis bonusu veren siteler yeni uyelere sunduklar frsatlar farkl kampanyalarla mevcut uyelerine de sunmaktadrlar. Hali hazrda siteyi kullananlarn da bonus frsatlarndan yararlanmalar icin donemsel kampanyalar olusturmaktadrlar. Boylece baska sitelere gidisler olmayacag gibi site de daha keyifli zaman gecirmek mumkun klnmaktadr. Bu tur eklentiler yapan sitelerde musteri memnuniyeti daha fazladr.
Bahis siteleri ozellik ve uygulama bakmndan farkllklar bunyelerinde bulundurmaktadrlar. Verilen bonuslarn olusturulmas ve kullanclar aktarlmasnda yatrlan para miktarlar belirleyici olmaktadr. 1.000 TL yatran bir kullanc yuzde 20 bonus frsat olan bir kampanyadan 200 TL bonus kazanabilmektedir. Yatracag tutar 10.000 TL oldugunda bu bonustutar 2.000 TL olabilmektedir. Gerceklesen ve uygulanan esaslar tamamen donemsel olarak yaplan kampanyalarla alakaldr. Iyi Canl bahis siteleri bonuslar ve kampanyalar icin sitelerin vermis oldugu oranlar takip edebilirsiniz.
Canl Bahis Siteleri Para Yatrma
Online Canl bahis yapacaklarn merak ettigi konulardan bir digeri de para yatrma islemleridir. Oldukca onemli olan bu konuda hata yapmamak cok onemlidir. Canl bahis sitelerine para yatrma islemi sanlann aksine son derece basittir. Oldukca basit ve uygulama esas dogru etki olusturan bu yapda sizde islemi rahatca tamamlayabilirsiniz. Para yatrma konusunda su yolu izleyebilirsiniz.
Guvendiginiz ve herhangi bir sekilde aklnzda soru isareti kalmayan bahis sitesine uye olmanz gerekmektedir. Uyelik islemini sorunsuz sekilde tamamladktan sonra para yatrma islemine gecebilirsiniz.
Kullanacagnz siteye uye olduktan sonra karsnza kullanc ad ve sifresini gireceginiz yer gelecektir. Buraya giris yaptktan sonra site icerisine islemlere devam edebilirsiniz.
Sitede yer alan para yatrma sekmesine tklayp sonrasnda karsnza gelen sayfay inceleyebilirsiniz. Para yatrma bolumunde yer alan ksma ne kadar para yatracagnz yazp devam tusuna basmalsnz.
Yatrmak istediginiz tutar girip sonrasnda da devam tusuna bastktan sonra karsnza kart bilgilerinizi gireceginiz sayfa gelecektir. Kredi kart kullanarak para gondermek isteyenlerin tercih ettigi bu sayfa tum bilgiler girilip islem onaylanmaldr.
Canl bahis sitelerine para yatrma islemini gerceklestirmek icin hesaba havale secenegini de kullanabilirsiniz. Site icerisinde musteri hizmetleri ile iletisime gecerek banka hesap numaralarn ogrenebilirsiniz. Belirtilen IBAN numarasna istediginiz tutar havale edebilirsiniz. Havale ederken acklama ksmna yazlacak bilgilere dikkat etmelisiniz.
Kredi kart veya banka havalesi ile gerceklesen para yatrma islemi sonucunda site hesabnzdan bakiyenize bakabilirsiniz. Bakiyenize gore dilediginiz sekilde bahislerinizi gerceklestirebilirsiniz.
Canl Bahis Siteleri Para Cekme
Canl bahiste dogru hamleler ve dogru tahminler sonucunda kazandgnz bedeli geri almak isteyebilirsiniz. Kazanclarnz istediginiz banka hesabnza cekebilmek icin uymanz gereken kurallar soz konusudur. Oncelikle bahis sitelerinden para cekebilmeniz icin uye olurken dogru bilgi paylasmnda bulunmanz gerektigidir. Cunku canl bahis sitelerinden para cekme islemi icin kullanc hesab ile talep edilen banka hesap bilgilerinin ortusmesi gerekir. Yani uye olurken verilen bilgi ile banka hesab kime ait ise o bilgiler ayn olmaldr. Bu uygulama sitenin hem kullancsn hem de kendisini guvene alma politikasdr. Ayrca frsatclarn onune gecerek yeni bir uye olusumunun da onune gecmek amac gutmektedir. Uye olan kisi farkl para cekilme talebi verilen hesap farkl oldugunda para cekme islemi gerceklesmeyecektir.
Bahisleriniz sonucunda kazanc elde edebilir ve bu kazancnz da hakknz olarak almak isteyebilirsiniz. Burada son derece basit uygulama soz konusu olurken siteler aras farkl gorunumler soz konusu olabilir. Fakat yine de tum sitelerde uyenin site icerisinde para cekme bolumune girmesi yeterlidir. Burada cekilecek olan tutarn belirlenmesi ve hesap numarasnn girilmesi ile birlikte islem onay gerekecektir. Para cekme taleplerinde sizden gerekli bilgiler istenmekte ve havale islemi istenilen bilgiler esliginde yurutulmektedir. Dogru bilgi paylasmak sorunsuz para cekebilmeniz en onemli kuraldr. Istenilen bilgiler girildikten sonra site sorumlular gerekli kontrolleri yapp herhangi bir sorun yoksa ksa surede hesabnza gerekli paray aktaracaklardr.
Canl Bahis Sitelerinden Para Cekmek Icin Istenen Belgeler
Bahis sitelerine uye olduktan sonra baz kullanclar para cekme taleplerinin karslanmadg konusunda sikayetlerde bulunmuslardr. Bu sikayetlersektorde uzun zamandr bulunan guvenilir bahis siteleri de yer almaktadr. Fakat sikayetlerin dayanaklarna bakldgnda ise islerin tamamen farkl oldugu gorulmektedir. Yasanan bu durum kullanclarn hatal bilgi girmesi ve uyelik bilgileri ile banka bilgilerinin uyusmamas ile dogru orantldr. Birde canl bahis para cekmek icin istenen belgeler eksik ya da hatal olarak sunulmus olabilir. Ortaya ckan karsklar neticesinde para cekme talebinde bulunan kisi istedigini alamadg icin sikayetci olmaktadr. Oysa ki istenilen bilgiler dogru ve istenilen evraklar eksiksiz sunulsa para cekme islemi sorunsuz olacak.
Sitelerin para cekme konusunda dikkatli hareket etmesi hilelerin ve illegal faaliyetlerin onune gecmek adnadr. Cunku baz kullanclar farkl bilgiler vererek ikinci hesap acabilmektedirler. Bazen de bilincsizce hatal bilgi girilebilmektedir. Hatal islemlerin cozumu konusunda islem yaptgnz sitenin musteri temsilcileri ile gorusebilirsiniz. Talepleriniz dogrultusunda para cekme islemlerinde ki sorunlar giderilecektir. Canl bahis para cekmek icin istenen belgeler listesi su sekildedir;
Kullanc bilgileri ile banka bilgilerini karslastrmak icin kimlik fotokopisi
Banka hesap bilgileri
Ikametgah ve kisiye ait herhangi bir fatura.
Kacak Iddaa
Turkiyede dogrudan bahis yapmak icin resmi kanallar kullanlabilmektedir. Fakat tercih edilen ve oran olarak cok daha fazla frsatlar sunan kacar iddaasiteleri bulunmaktadr. Bu siteler kanunlara aykr sekilde yaplmakta olup, yasal bir dayanag yoktur. Elbette bu sitelerin kurulus merkezi Turkiye olmayp, ds ulkelerdedir ve faaliyetler belirlenen siteler uzerinden yaplmaktadr. Kacak Iddaa oldukca riskli olup, cok dikkatli olunmas gerekir.
Kacak Bahis
Kanunlar cercevesinde istediginiz gibi bahis yapamayabilirsiniz. Bahis yapabilmek icin ya kanuni olarak sorun olmayan ulke dsnda ki kumarhanelere gitmeniz veya kacak bahis sitelerinden islem yapabilirsiniz. Zira bu durum tehlikeli olsa da cok sayda site guvenli sekilde bu alanda hizmet vermektedir. Kacak bahiste oldukca fazla secenek bulunurken yuksek oranda kazanc sunuyor olmas da ragbeti arttryor.
Illegal Bahis
Bahisin bircok alanda yasak oldugu Turkiyede bu alanda cok sayda yabanc merkezli siteler hizmet vermektedir. Illegal bahis sektorunde faaliyet gosteren siteler guvenli hizmet anlays ile kullanclarna frsatlar sunmaktadr. Yurt ds merkezli bu siteler sorunsuz sekilde hizmetlerini surdururken bulunduklar ulkelerde kanunlara uygun sekildedir. Elbette faaliyet noktasnda bulunduklar ulkelerde sorun teskil etmese de Turkiyede faaliyet gostermeleri kanunin yasaklanmstr.
Yasads Bahis
Gerek olusturulan etkenler gerekse de ortaya konulan riskler yasads bahis de oldukca tehlikelidir. Kanunlarn mudahil olduklar bu alanlar da hem kullanclar hem de populer bahis yaptranlar tum riskleri goze almaktadrlar. Fakat yasaklardan uzak sekilde guvenli hizmet sunan siteler de bulunmaktadr. Takipler neticesinde kapatlan sitelerin muhakkak alternatifleri kurularak yollarna devam etmektedirler.
Canl Iddaa Siteleri Nelerdir?
Dunya genelinde kabul gormus cok sayda guvenli hizmet veren populer bahis siteleri bulunmaktadr. Elbette bu siteler dunyann bircok ulkesinde faaliyet gosterse de Turkiyede yasaktr. Sektorde yer alan cok sayda legal iddaa siteleri bulunmaktadr. Herhangi bir kanunsuzlugun olmadg bu sitelerden hzl ve guvenli islem yaplabilmektedir. Tabi bu sitelerde uygulanan oranlar yasal olmayan sitelere gore daha dusuktur. Illegal sitelerin tercih edilme sebeplerinin en onemli etkeni de olusturulan oranlardr. Peki, Iddaa siteleri nelerdir? Faaliyetleri ve uygulama esaslar nelerdir?
Turkiyede faaliyet gosteren yasal iddaa siteleri listesi su sekildedir;
Iddaa
Bilyoner
Tuttur
Birebin
Oley
Nesine
Misli
Iddaa
2004 ylnda hizmet vermeye baslayan Iddaa Spor toto tarafndan kurulmus olup, ilk etapta bayilik seklinde calsmaya baslamstr. Elbette zamanla gelisen teknolojiye ayak uydurarak internet uzerinde de populer bahis severlerin hizmetine sunulmustur. Kuruldugu donemde devletin resmi kurumu olarak faaliyet gosterirken gelinen yeni donemde ozellestirilmistir.
Bilyoner
Turkiyede faaliyetine 2006 ylnda baslayan Bilyoner ilk ozel yasal bahis sitesi olma ozelligine sahiptir. Guvenilir bahis siteleri Turkiyede bunlardr. Ksa surede populer olan site halen faaliyetlerini sorunsuz sekilde surdurmektedir.
Tuttur
Ksa surede adndan bahsettirmeyi basaran Tuttur 2009 ylnda faaliyetlere baslamstr. Guvenilir bahis siteleri arasnda yerini almstr. Gunumuze dek bircok alanda populer bahis yapanlara frsatlar sunarken avantajlar ile de begeni toplamstr.
Birebin
Kullanc odakl calsmalar surdurse de 2011 ylnda sektore giren Birebindiger sitelere gore daha az ragbet gormektedir. Bahis oynamak ise bu sitede oldukca kolaydr. Elbette farkl yaklasmlara sahip olmasndan dolay ilerleyen sureclerde adndan sklkla bahsettirecek gibi gorunuyor.
Oley
2009 ylnda Dogus yayn gruplarnn istiraki olarak kurulmus olup yasal olarak herhangi bir sorunu olmayan sitelerdendir. Bahis siteleri arasnda hzl cks yapms bir sitedir. Oley yapms oldugu yenilikler ile kullanclarn da dikkatini ksa surede cekmeyi basarmstr.
Nesine
Birbirini takip eden surecte Nesine de yine 2006 ylnda hizmet vermeye baslamstr. Yasal bahis siteleri arasnda yerini almay basaran firma ksa surede sevilen ve ragbet goren bir site olmustur.
Misli
2009 ylnda sektore cok hzl giris yapan Misli cok sayda reklam filmi ile on plana ckmay basarmstr. Internet uzerinden hem yasal hem de sorunsuz hizmet veren bahis sitelerinden bir tanesi olmustur.
Canl Bahis Siteleri Kayt ve Uyelik Islemleri
Her zaman populerligini koruyan ve surekli gelisim gosteren canl bahis gun gectikce daha da gucleniyor. Bahis oynamak icin ise sitelere uye olunmas gerekir. Yuksek getirisi ve begeni toplayan faaliyetleri ile cok sayda site bu alanda faaliyet gostermektedir. Elbette sorunsuz sekilde uye olmanz ve faaliyetler gostermeniz de oldukca kolaydr. Canl bahis siteleri kayt ve uyelik islemleri dakikalar icerisinde gerceklestirilecek yapya sahiptir.
Uye olacagnz siteyi belirledikten sonra siteye girmeniz gerekmektedir. Girdiginiz sitenin ana sayfasnda uye ol ya da kayt ol bolumu bulunacaktr. Siteler arasnda degiskenlik gosteren bu alanda temel unsurlar bulunmaktadr. Elbette farkllklar olsa da temelinde benzer bilgiler uye olmak isteyen kisilerden talep edilmektedir.
Uye ol bolumune tkladktan sonra karsnza uyelik bilgi formu ckacaktr. Bu formda sizin kim oldugunuzu ogrenmek ve sitenin guvenligini saglamak adna islemler yaplmaktadr. Uyelik formunda yer alan ad soyad bolumunu eksiksiz ve dogru sekilde doldurmalsnz. Sizden bu formda istenen bilgilerin tamamn girmeniz istenecektir. Istenen bilgiler mutlaka dogru ve eksiksiz sekilde olmaldr. Eksik veya hatal bilgi uyelik islemlerinde sorun teskil edebilir. Yine de yanls bilgi girisine ragmen uyelik islemleri tamamlanabilir. Fakat boyle bir yol izleyenler sonrasnda buyuk skntlarla karslasabilirler. Bu skntlarn basnda da para cekme islemlerinde yasanan sorunlardr.
Uyelik islemleri dikkatli ve ozenle doldurulmas gereken yapdadr. Canl bahis siteleri kayt ve uyelik islemleri gerceklestirilirken verilen bilgiler site yonetimi tarafndan muhafaza edilmektedir. Herhangi bir sekilde 3. Sahslarla paylaslmas gibi bir durum soz konusu degildir. Bu faaliyetleri surduren sitelerin guven unsurlar arasnda bu nokta onceliklidir.
Bahis sitelerine uye olurken hatal bilgi paylasmnda bulunmak size faydadan cok zarar verecektir. Diyelim ki bilgileri hatal girdiniz ve uyelik onayland. Uyelik tamamlandktan sonra siteye para yatrdnz ve kazanc elde ettiniz. Kazancnz sonrasnda hesabnza almak istediginizde karsnza banka bilgileri bolumu gelecektir. Para cekme talebi gerceklestikten sonra site uyelik bilgileri ile banka hesap bilgileri ortusmez ise paranz alamazsnz. Boyle bir durumla karslasmamak adna bu hususa ayrca dikkat etmelisiniz.
Jul 18, 2016 | By Tess
CONTEXT, a London-based IT market research company, has just published its latest figures and expectations for the global 3D printing industry, which comprises of the sale of 3D printers, materials, and services. Their report, which forecasts a growth in the overall industry from $4.1 billion in 2015 to $18.4 billion in 2020, also indicates a rise in 3D printer shipments of +9% in Quarter 1 2016 since last year.
Interestingly, the report also lays out figures that suggest that the growth of the 3D printing industry has been largely supported by the sales of sub $4,500 personal or desktop 3D printers, as the number of industrial/professional 3D printers has dropped by 20% since Quarter 1 2015. Despite this drop, however, the industrial/professional 3D printer market still made up for 78% of global additive manufacturing revenues.
Notably, established 3D printer market leaders Stratasys and 3D Systems have experienced revenue declines over the past year, with Stratasys shipping 32% fewer of its 3D printer units over the past year, and 3D Systems an even more drastic 66%. Despite having released exciting new products such as the multi-material, multi-color J750 3D printer (Stratasys), both companies are in the process of overhauling and changing management, an admittedly destabilizing factor.
Chris Connery, VP for Global Analysis at CONTEXT, explains, The 3D Printer market continues to witness a great deal of change. Long time market leaders Stratasys and 3D Systems look to overhaul their businesses while high profile brands like HP, Ricoh and others begin to lay the groundwork for their vision to kick-start the industry.
Despite the overall drop in revenue from the industrial/professional 3D printing market, metal 3D printing has remained a strong growth factor within it. Referred to as the bright side of the industrial/professional 3D printing sector, metal additive manufacturing has experiences a 29% year-on-year growth in the number of metal 3D printing systems shipped over the past year. According to CONTEXT, three out of five of the top earning companies in terms of revenue have established or are establishing metal 3D printer systems. These companies are EOS, German SLM Solutions, and Swedish Arcam AB.
According to their press release, CONTEXT is optimistic but reserved in its forecast in the industrial/professional sector in the near term. That is until potential game-changers like HP and Ricoh along with existing industry leaders can truly demonstrate the benefits and manufacturing potentials of industrial 3D printing in plastics.
As mentioned, the desktop/personal 3D printer market has been an important part of the overall industrys growth, with a diverse and ever-growing number of companies producing new systems. Taiwanese 3D printer manufacturer XYZprinting has remained at the top of the global market in Q1 2016, despite its overall shares dropping to 25%likely because of the emergence of new companies. Also in the top 5 are M3D, Ultimaker, Stratasys, and Flashforge.
The continued growth within the desktop/personal 3D printer market can be attributed in part to a growing emphasis on education, makers/hobbyists, and young engineers. As the technology becomes increasingly integrated into a wide number of industries, including aerospace, medical, architecture, fashion, etc., machines are needed to introduce younger generations to the technology. As Connery explains, Whether it begins with the introduction to the technology by way of a toy as we will see later on this year with Mattels ThingMaker, by way of a few hundred dollar Kickstarter printer, or from leading brands like XYZprinting, MakerBot and others, as generations before had to become familiar with PCs, this generation needs to learn 3D printing.
Posted in 3D Printer
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Jul 18, 2016 | By Tess
The fears of robots replacing humans in the workplace and taking their jobs has been ongoing since the dawn of automated industrial technologies. Now, it seems those fears are may be coming to fruition in South East Asia, where significant textile, automotive, and disk drive manufacturing is done for large companies. According to a report released by the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), more than half of workers in South East Asia may be at risk of losing their jobs within the next two decades primarily because of the rise of 3D printing technologies, wearable technologies, nanotechnologies, and robotic automation.
The study, called ASEAN in Transformation: How Technology is Changing Jobs and Enterprises, has found that around 56% of salaried workers in South East Asia are at high-risk of losing their jobs in the near future. This 56% comprises of about 137 million workers, amongst which those working in the garments industry are the most vulnerable. The garments industry, which includes textiles, clothing, and footwear, employs about 9 million people across South East Asia, of whom the majority are young women.
As we know, technologies such as 3D body scanning, CAD, and 3D printing have opened up new doors within garment manufacturing, allowing for custom-fitted and made-to-order pieces. These technologies have also allowed for increasingly quick production times and more localized manufacturing. Within the footwear industry, for instance, there are already signs that mass production factories are becoming decreasingly important. As the study reads, The footwear industry has begun using 3D printing techniques to open automated shoe factories in key destination markets. If these operations prove profitable, such automated shoe factories will no doubt reduce the need for ASEAN workers.
According to the ILO, 64% of garment industry workers in Indonesia are at a high risk of losing their jobs to automated technologies, while an astounding 86% and 88% percent are at high rish in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively.
Deborah France-Massin, director of the ILO's bureau for employers' activities, explained, "Countries that compete on low-wage labour need to reposition themselves. Price advantage is no longer enough. Policymakers need to create a more conducive environment that leads to greater human capital investment, research and development, and high-value production. These measures include training existing labour forces to work with the new technologies effectively through the development of technical and programming skills.
Within the automotive manufacturing industry, more than 60% of workers in Indonesia and over 70% of those in Thailand could also lose their jobs within the next two decades. In 2015, South East Asian countries were collectively the seventh largest producer of vehicles, and the industry has employed more than 800,000 workers. According to the study, however, the automotive industry has the potential to be one of the most receptive to changes brought about by automation technologies.
The study also addressed the Electrical and Electronics industry, the Business process outsourcing sector, and the retail industry. Of the three, the Electrical and Electronics manufacturing industry was the most at risk of automation-caused redundancies. The sector, which employs 2.5 million people across ASEAN, will primarily be disrupted by robotic automation, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Unlike in the garments industry, which is dominated by low-skill labour intensive processes, the automation within the electronics sector is expected to be more human centric, meaning that robots will likely be brought in to help workers rather than replace them.
The ILO study was based off of findings from over 330 interviews, 4,000 enterprise surveys, 2,700 student surveys across ASEAN, and extensive secondary research. Ultimately, it concludes that in the face of automation, industries and policy makers alike must adjust to the eventual changes in socially and economically sustainable ways.
Additionally, though the numbers of jobs at risk seems grim, the emergence of new technologies has itself created new markets, new jobs, and even new sectors. As Tim Forsyth, a professor of development at the London School of Economics says, Perhaps the longer-term transitions could, arguably, be indicated by experiences elsewhere. For example, in Europe or North America in the 1960s, people worked in factories. Now, fewer people work in factories but many still work there, while service industries have grown and people discovered other ways to generate incomes.
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kb wrote at 7/29/2016 1:39:38 AM:Like in Europe, they're going to create an ecosystem of highly paid unproductive jobs who feeds itself with useless tasks and occupies people 35 hours a week!Jack wrote at 7/23/2016 2:21:19 AM:Yes that day is comingRrim Geeper wrote at 7/18/2016 7:01:53 PM:Going to be mass starvation as populations readjust to less people required... PERIOD.
Jul 18, 2016 | By Tess
3D printing technologies have once again come to the aid of an animal in need, this time in the form of a 3D printed orthotic boot for Purps, an endangered African penguin with a lame leg. The effort to help the animal was brought to fruition through a collaboration between the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut, where Purps is resident, the Mystic Middle School, and ACT Group, a local supplier of 3D Systems 3D printers.
A resident of the Mystic Aquarium, Purps injured her left leg a number of years ago after getting into a fight with another penguin. After examining the injury, veterinarians from the aquarium found that Purps had actually torn her flexor tendon in her ankle and would not be able to walk normally again. Since the incident, and despite a number of different attempts to handcraft a suitable support boot for the penguin (a very time consuming process), Purps has never fully regained the ability to walk and move as normal penguins do.
Thats where 3D printing comes in. After hearing about the design and manufacturing potentials of the emerging technology, the team of veterinarians from the Mystic Aquarium decided to reach out to their partners at the local Mystic Middle School, which had just received its first 3D Systems printer through ACT Group. A group of students were briefed on the penguins injury and what type of boot would be necessary for Purps to walk again. Then, under the guidance of Sue Prince, the library media specialist at the school, they got to work creating a fitting solution.
To help better acquaint themselves with the technology and its potentials, Mystic Middle School reached out to ACT Group for advice on how to best design the boot and what printer to make it on. Seeing potential in the project, not only to help the penguin in need, but to help educate children about additive manufacturing and 3D modeling, ACT Group became a partner and offered the students educational workshops, as well as access to 3D Systems multi-material ProJet MJP 5500X 3D printer.
In the end, the students from Mystic Middle School were able to successfully design a boot based off of a cast of Purps injured foot. The process involved a number of steps including scanning the cast with a Geomatic Capture 3D Scanner to generate a digital model of it, and modifying the digital design to create the boot model. The 3D modeling was done using 3D Systems Geomatic Sculpt software. The final boot was printed as a single piece from a variety of flexible and rigid materials that resulted in a custom-fitted, lightweight, durable, and functional assistive device.
The students truly amazed us in how their creative thinking, imagination and intuitiveness led this process, said Nick Gondek, Director of Additive Manufacturing and Applications Engineer, ACT Group. It was rewarding to provide them with a technology that could keep up with their ingenuity, and to watch them pick up the software so quickly. It further demonstrates the need to have students learning to digitally design and manufacture at a younger age.
According to the students and team at the Mystic Aquarium, when Purps was fitted with her new 3D printed boot, she was able to walk much more easily that with her previous, heavier boot and ran around with it on with ease. The moment of seeing the African penguin regain mobility thanks to the 3D printed boot they had designed was both exciting and inspiring for the young students who made the project a reality.
Our goal is to inspire people to care for and protect our ocean planet through conservation, education and research, said Kelly Matis, Vice President of Education and Conservation at the Mystic Aquarium. In this project we achieved each of these desired outcomes while benefiting the health and well being of one of our endangered species.
Sue Prince echoed that sentiment saying, This project not only helped a member of an endangered species, but gave our students a hands-on understanding of the 3D printing process and how to carry an idea through from a concept to a design to a usable object.
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by Genese Sodikoff
The rabid opposition of American gun owners to stricter gun regulations in the wake of mass shootings is reminiscent of dog owners' opposition to rabies-control measures amidst rashes of mad dog attacks in in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Poodles in the 1920s were especially mad, for some reason).
Every disease has its particular cultural expression. Societies have their unique spins on the causes and treatments of disease and the experience of suffering. And as I read old newspapers about rabies, it struck me how efforts to control the virus in the United States stirred a familiar anti-government, Freedom-loving, dog-loving ethos, along with a deep distrust of policy-makers and their reasons. In the anti-dog-vax, anti-dog-tax days, some doubted that hydrophobia, the clinical term for human rabies, even existed.
Until the 1950s, canine rabies blighted the American cultural landscape and people's inner lives. In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus (2012), Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy explain that the rising popularity of pet-keeping in the West made the threat of rabies an object of disproportionate panic throughout the nineteenth century. Their gripping book follows the the virus from Ancient Greece to modern medical labs, where scientists are exploiting the rabies peptide as a means to penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
Transported from Europe to America during colonization, and then frequently spilling over from foxes, wolves, raccoons, skunks and bats into domestic animal populations, rabies brought wildness into American towns and cities. Before Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux developed the human rabies vaccine in 1885, the virus destroyed families. Children frequently died of mad dog attacks, as did beloved pets and farm animals.
The incubation period between animal bite and the appearance of symptoms, anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, kept bite victims in the limbo of uncertainty. If a victim was positively infected, the virus, once it entered the central nervous system, caused chilling personality changes and tortuous death.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, canine rabies was pandemic in much of Europe and America. From 1855 to 1874, New York City recorded fifty-seven human deaths by hydrophobia. The number sounds low, but the rate of dog infection was high and steadily growing across the nation. It reached crisis proportions in the northeast at different times, as in the 1920s. The sociability of dogs helped to spread the virus among wild canine packs and between wild and domestic breeds.
Newspapers helped to sensationalize rabies with splashy headlines about attacks by mad dogs and the occasional mad cat. Late nineteenth century reports from police blotters made Manhattan and Newark sound like a terrifying funhouses, a frothing canine ready to spring around every corner.
A small sampling of New York Times headlines gives a sense of the degree to which mad dogs infiltrated white social life: A Struggle with a Mad Dog: Miss Berndt's Awkward Position and How She Escaped (1884). A Mad Dog Bites Sixteen Persons (1894). Mad Dog at a Ball: Appears at a College Students' Dance and Bites Three Men (1900); Big Mad Dog Blocks Traffic: Turns up its Nose at Sausage, but Bites Boy and Policeman, and Finally is Shot (1901); Orders Mad Dog Quarantine: Six Towns Up State Must Muzzle or Kill Every Canine (1904); Rabid Bull Terrier Bit Child and a Policeman: Then it Dashes Into a Hall and Breaks Up a Concert 1905). Bull Terrier Bites Six on a Rampage (1909). Mad Bull Terrier Clears Eighth Ave.: Laborers Scatter and Women Run Into Stores and Jump Upon Counters (1910). Mongrel Dog Bites Ten (1915). Pet Chow Goes Mad, 7 Persons Bitten (1921).
The resistance to rabies laws intensified the threat to public health. Scientists faulted the absence of good laws on rabies or lax law enforcement for the spread of the virus. When municipalities tried to pass dog bills to control rabies, officials confronted the fury of dog owners and dog fanciers, who denounced measures they found cruel or onerous.
It did not help matters to have quack scientists deny the existence of hydrophobia. In 1886, a New York Times article reports a Dr. Henry Bergh defending the dubious dog experiments of one Dr. Spitzka that involved, among other things, breaking dogs' spines to see if they would survive:
He is aiming to show what I believe, that there is no such specific disease as hydrophobia. He wants to demonstrate to people who will stop to think that the transmission of rabies from animals to man is a fallacious theory, and that while people may die of fear they are not in danger if they will rid their minds of silly notions on this subject. If he can show this, and can correct popular impressions upon this subject, and thereby prove that Pasteur is a humbug, I shall not consider the sacrifice of a few dogs a great price to pay for this object.
European countries had enacted and enforced muzzling laws in spite of public grousing and, as a result, made significant headway in controlling rabies. In the US, bills that called for quarantining and muzzling dogs or exterminating unleashed ones compelled canophiles to pen emotional editorials and to stand up in town hall-style meetings defending the liberty of dogs. Why should a dog suffer the muzzle, which made eating and drinking nearly impossible, on the basis of an unlikely chance it would infect people with rabies? In 1846, a New York Delegate at a temperance convention at Albany argued,
there was more necessity of shutting up the shops of two-legged animals who sold maddening liquors than there was for muzzling the four-legged of the canine race for fear of hydrophobia.
Another man, a Mr. Leonard of Bristol, MA passionately criticized a muzzling bill in 1849 that, in his view, would effectively exterminate the canine race:
I am fully persuaded, Sir, that if there was an account current exhibited for and against the dogs, in which they shall be charged with every death in the human family which they have caused by hydrophobia, or otherwise, and credited with all the human lives which they have saved, the balance would be greatly in favor of the dog.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in New York in 1866, opposed muzzling as inhumane. Wire muzzles in those days did resemble medieval torture devices. Asserting that muzzles were an unscientific way to control rabies, members of the New York Neurological Society, founded in 1872, resolved instead to endorse taxing dog owners and requiring licensing. They also recommended, curiously, that owners be required to blunt their dogs' incisors and canines with files and nippers, offering detailed instructions on how to proceed.
Summing up what had gone on for decades, Dr. John B. Huber complained in a Scientific American article in 1911 that as soon as a muzzling law is passed owners of dogs are up in arms, using their time, influence and money to secure its repeal, or prevent its enforcement, on the ground of alleged cruelty.
Later bills that proposed mandatory dog vaccinations also faced popular uprising. A dog vaccine was available as early as 1907, but many feared the vaccine would transmit rabies or cause suffering to their pets. On rare occasion, this could occur, but the vaccine was gradually perfected.
In Ridgewood, NJ, in 1926 an ordinance requiring the inoculation and leashing of all dogs brought a huge voter turnout, generating more interest than all the candidates in the New Jersey primary election. The ordinance called for fining owners who failed to inoculate, leash, and muzzle their pets. Petitioners went door-to-door soliciting votes for either the old dog ordinance or the less popular new one, which would simply enforce what was stated in the old one. A reporter wryly describes the scene:
Dog owners organized to resist the tyranny of enforcing an ordinance. Their motto was any sum for campaign expenses, but not one cent for fines for straying.
Vaccination bills drew out the big guns, rich patrons of dog shows, such as Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge (aka Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller), who in 1939 successfully routed a compulsory vaccination bill in New Jersey. She worried the legislation would put a damper on her renowned Morris & Essex Kennel Club dog show.
By 1939, rabies had become so rampant in Newark that Health Officer, Charles Craster, proposed that all dogs in the city, estimated at 25,000, be gotten rid of.' That never happened. Seven years later, he was again sounding the alarm about the rabies epidemic among Newark's dogs, and imploring dog-owners to leash their pets as required by law. City workers in Newark were sent out daily in trucks to penalize owners for letting their dogs roam free, or to destroy and collect the dogs upon the second offense.
When a mad animal did terrorize an area, the pendulum of sentiment about dogs swung the other way. In the country districts of Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1890, a general war against dogs was in force after a series of mad dog encounters, including a harrowing incident in which a whole village took up shotguns, pitchforks, stones, and staves to hunt down a mad dog running amok. The New York Times reported that in some remote hamlets women and children have shut themselves up in their homes; especially at night they dare not venture abroad let a mad dog running at large and foaming at the mouth, may leap upon them out of the darkness.
The fear of mad dogs may partly account for the character of symptoms in hydrophobia victims, who sometimes displayed werewolfish behaviors (this has not been the case for people in, say, the Venezuelan rain forest). Take the case of John F. Bloom, a rabid Chicago man, who at 5 o'clock on July 20, 1900 created terror among pedestrians as he ran from his house snarling and barking like a vicious dog. In Pittsburgh in 1906, a rabid Mr. Garrison, snapping and snarling like a dog while rolling on the ground, bit a policeman.
Through these reports, rabies had engendered a new kind of neurosis, or what anthropologists call a culture bound syndrome. This was false hydrophobia, or lyssophobia, resulting from the bite of a dog presumed rabid. For sensitive types, the disease offered a psychically appealing array of symptoms. Dr. John M. Huber writes in 1911, that a nervous person may have paroxysms in which he says he is unable to drink, grasps at his throat and becomes emotional. The sufferer presented many of the usual symptoms (except for fever) but then miraculously recovered. An editorialist opined in 1874 that hydrophobia was a fashionable new panic that gave ordinary alcoholics some social cachet: Patients who, in other times, would die quietly or obscurely of delirium tremens, now see fit to foam at the mouth, to bark like a dog, and to simulate a sudden aversion to water which in reality has characterized their entire lives, and is the cause and not the effect of their complaint.
After World War II, officials got serious about compulsory dog vaccination. Vaccinations and quarantines eventually reduced rabies infection in household pets and livestock. Reports of rabid dogs declined from around 5,000 in 1950 to 79 in 2006. But rabies still percolates in wildlife populations, and at times balloons into epidemic proportions.
In other countries, canine rabies remains a serious problem, and in 2008, a strange case of rabies with a distinctly American flavor again made US headlines: Rabid Pet is Among the Dogs Flown Here from Iraq.
An SPCA International rescue program, Operation Baghdad Pups, ran into some trouble while organizing reunions between veterans and dogs they had adopted while stationed in Iraq. Although the US military command officially forbids soldiers to own pets, the rule was not enforced in light of the tough conditions of the Iraq war. It was common for service members to adopt strays to boost morale, and through the efforts of animal lovers and the SPCA, veterans were given the green light to have their service animals sent home.
On June 5, a group of 24 dogs and 2 cats were flown from Iraq to the Newark Liberty International Airport, where they were held and inspected in a special quarantine area before being flown out to their former soldier companions. Three days after arrival, one Labrador-spaniel mix, Crusader, became wobbly, agitated, and feverish in the airport quarantine. He was sent to a veterinary clinic. Meanwhile, the other animals were shipped off to 16 different states.
Crusader had to be euthanized in New Jersey, but it took another week to confirm his diagnosis as rabies, a Middle East variant of the virus. Federal and state officials scrambled to track down Crusader's potentially rabid travel mates. A veterinarian at the New Jersey Department of Public Health remembers that some of those animals had been sent off to the homes of soldiers' Significant Others, who had in the war interim become ex-Significant Others.
At times in our nation's history, braving the threat of hydrophobia seemed, for some, the patriotic thing to do. Nationalist sentiment was braided into the bond of loyalty between owners and pets. The defense of dog freedom, the resistance to rabies laws, grew out of the conviction that people and pets had the right to a mutual pursuit of happiness.
A botanist and eke Physician
One very good at composition
That isin mortar he can bray
A cure for hydrophobia;
In other words, with magic mortar
Can cure that mortal dread of water;
Can make of arse-smart, dock and burrage
A mixture to inspire with courage,
Which if apply'd in form unguental
To any c-wd's fundamentals,
Twill make him soon, to fear, a stranger,
And stoutly brave the greatest danger;
Twill raise his sound of lungs the louder
And make him love the smell of powder;
Twill rectify his constitution
To approbate the Revolution;
And not condemn the means and hopes
Of Solon to inspire the troops,
With courage, discipline and reason
To save his native land in season.
Poem excerpt, The Freeman's Oracle or New Hampshire Advertiser
March 25, 1789
by Paul Braterman
Islam Evolving, Taner Edis, Prometheus Books, June 2016
This is an excellent review of an important but difficult subject, and a welcome change from the ill-informed bluster of a Sam Harris, or the limp apologetics of a Karen Armstrong. It is the work of an author who is exceptionally well placed to appreciate the context of the mass of information on which he draws. Lucidly written, it is also a work of broad scholarship (there are more than 500 references and footnotes), and provides an overview of one of the most important developments of our times. Overall, it is a much-needed corrective to the popular view that these times are particularly violent, and that the roots of this violence lie within Islam.
It is also a very disturbing book, and I mean that as a compliment. While fully committed to secular Enlightenment values, Edis recognises that this cannot be the starting position in any worthwhile discussion of committed Islam. Secularism is neither historically inevitable, nor a logical necessity, nor a moral imperative. In his native Turkey, for example, secularism was the founding principle of the modern State, but has lost out to an Islamic pious modernity, whose advocates cannot simply be dismissed as deluded or wicked. Secularism cannot claim to be the more democratic option, where it is not what people would prefer. The secular ideal of rule of an impartial law is not neutral, since it places judges, members of the power elite, as arbiters. Moreover, Edis turns a critical searchlight on the ostensively secular United States, where he now lives and works, finds echoes there of much of what concerns him about Islam today, and challenges the West's air of injured innocence in the face of violence. Ultimately, he regards Islam as a far smaller peril than a rampant neoliberalism that values individuals only as producers and consumers, sells political influence to the highest bidder, and still sponsors the denial of the world's most urgent problem, global warming. He shows how the rhetoric of the war on terror is used, in the West as in his native Turkey, to suppress dissent, and is contemptuous of how western defenders of freedom have accepted the facile and counterfactual narrative of an inherently violent Islam. Most disturbing of all, he critically examines his own Enlightenment assumptions, which his readers, and mine, will generally take for granted. For instance, why do we regard free speech as good? To what extent do our own institutions follow this ideal in practice? And should we not be more aware of the degree of coercion implicit in our own social order?
Taner Edis is a Turkish-American professor of physics. He is also a philosopher, having published highly technical material with Maarten Boudry of the Ghent school of critical analysis, and he manages to bring a philosophical evenhandedness to a worldview as far as possible from his own naturalism. He repeatedly argues that secular liberals need to be more critical of their own positions. Secularist emphasis on the freedom of the individual has left us without defence against the excesses of neoliberalism and the realities of the economic power that has usurped political power. There is much to be learnt by examining thoughtful Muslim alternatives, and indeed, if we are not prepared to learn, there is little point even in discussion.
His parental family were freethinkers, so that his position towards Islam has always been that of the concerned outsider, but one who seeks productive ways of engaging with believers. His earlier books include The Ghost in the Universe (2002), in which he contrasts supernaturalism and naturalism, and discusses critically how his preference for the latter can be justified, and An Illusion of Harmony (2007), concerning the ways in which the Muslim world has reacted to the challenge of scientific modernity.
The present volume pursues these themes in a time where the questions raised have acquired a new urgency. There are times when I would have liked more specific details (how, for example, was Turkey, our ostensive ally, encouraging radical Islamist factions in the Syrian civil war?), but perhaps this would have led to a much longer book. Even as it is, it is not possible to do justice here to the author's detailed arguments, and what follows is an amalgam of some of his main points as I understood them, and my own responses.
The first chapter is entitled Varieties of Islamic experience, and I was surprised to learn how varied these experiences are. As well as Sunni and Shia, we have, among others, Alevi (mainly in Turkey) and Ahmadis, whose right to call themselves Muslims is contested (I would add the Alawis whose presence greatly complicates Syria's current civil wars). Islam can also be linked to national identity, as Shi'ism is to Iranian nationalism, a fact with delicate consequences for Iraq and the other Gulf states.
Next, Edis discusses the special position of the Quran. This is a difficult book, written in the now-archaic Arabic of its time, and with no clear structural or chronological order. Nonetheless, Muslims bestow on it an authority that only the most conservative of Jews or Christians grant the Bible. Part of this enduring appeal of the Quran, Edis argues, is due to its powerful affirmations of monotheism, and to its concern for social justice.
The text of the Quran jumps about, its literary style is inconsistent, and its cosmology, referring to 7 heavens, was already centuries out of date when it was written. Its relationship to the accepted version of the early history of Islam is unclear, and relies heavily on later traditions and histories, even for such important episodes as the Night Journey. It is authoritative, but its application involves interpretation, and there are layers of tradition and legal ruling, of varying authority. Nonetheless, historical or higher criticism of the Quran, in the sense that we have now had two centuries of such criticism of the Bible, is in its infancy. So even modernising Muslims tend to defend their position by reinterpretation of the sacred text, rather than by treating it as a human artefact, product of its time and place. [1] Thus feminist Muslims argue, not that the lesser role of women in the Quran was addressed to an outdated patriarchial society, but that it is overridden by a more general appeal to justice within the Quran itself.
The addition of new layers of commentary is an on-going activity. Attempts like Turkey's Nur movement to hark back beyond tradition to the original meaning of the text end up being theologically quite conservative; I am reminded here of the Reformed religion still very much in evidence in Scotland.
These introductory chapters lay the groundwork for the main theme of the book; the ways in which the Muslim world has responded to its ongoing confrontation with the technologically and militarily advanced West. These responses initially included secularism. The early twentieth century saw the establishment of a secular state in Turkey, whose borrowings from the West had worldwide influence on Muslim elites. Pakistan also was originally a more secular state, with Muslim being more of an ethnic than a religious identity, while the Arab nationalists in the ascendant mid-century restricted orthodox Islamic rules to personal and family law.
[Note added in haste: In the last few days, the already complex situation in Turkey has undergone further dramatic developments. Historically, the army had been the committed defender of secularism, even if this commitment was less thorough than claimed, and has used this more than once to justify imposing military rule. Last week's reported attempt at a miitary coup against the current elected government might perhaps be regarded in this light. Nonetheless, the government blames Fethullah Gulen, whose support for political Islamism is repeatedly mentioned in the book. Gulen, now living in the US, has been at odds since 2013 with the government, which he accuses of corruption. He has denounced the coup, but that was after it had already failed, and if his movement really was involved, then this time the army units concerned were acting on behalf of one religious faction against another.]
This is not how things have since worked out. Modern Islam is a successful religion. Mosques are crowded, televangelists famous, and technology adopted within a world view based on divinely inspired design. Modernisation has not led to theological modernism. The Islamism of the last half-century has adopted Western technology while avoiding what Edis calls the disenchantment of the world spearheaded by modern science. Scientific naturalism offers us an uncaring universe where what happens, happens as the result of physical causes, and not at the bidding of some deity, let alone a deity that pays any attention to us. To a traditional believer, such a view is at best uncomfortable, and at worst blasphemous.
Far easier then to adopt a pious modernity that accepts the fruits of technology while still subordinating the scientific spirit of inquiry to the constraints of religion. This religion need not be theologically modernist. Nor need it be hostile to organisational modernisation. The West has long had a powerful institutions, companies, and corporations, including ultimately the State itself, independent of religion and capable of long-term accumulation of wealth and ideas. Islamic law recognised no such entities. However, today, corporations have been absorbed into the religious framework. In the case of Turkey, this pious neoliberalism is strengthened by relationships with the United States and Europe. It is the ideology of Turkey's ruling party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) whose very name combines the concepts of economic development, and Muslim morality. The disciplined workforce and the (ideally) socially conscious employer will share the same mosque.
In Turkey, urbanisation has meant greater popular knowledge of the more orthodox forms of Islam. At the same time, we have the view that since science and religion both tell the truth, science must be consistent with religion. So the Nur movement finds inspired prefigurings of modern science in the Quran, and embraces Creation science. It was systematic policy, and not, as I had thought, an aberration, that in the 1980s led Turkey's Education Minister to invite contributions from the Institute for Creation Research [2] to the biology curriculum. We now have the spectacle of Turkish creationism, in the form of the Atlas of Creation by Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) uncritically absorbing Christian evangelical creationism of all kinds, including a Young Earth Creationism alien to Islam itself, and feeding it back into the West.
There are important differences in the status of religion between Turkey and the United States, which is the most religious among the advanced nations. Religion is strong in America, but American religion has a long tradition of religious modernism, and indeed the rise of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century was a response to this. Creationism may be popular among the uneducated, but US high culture is almost uniformly supportive of evolution, and regards creationism as disreputable. None of this is true in Turkey. There is not, or has not been for many centuries, an influential modernist movement within Islam, and creationism is common within the academy. Even relatively liberal thinkers are unwilling to accept total disenchantment, and tend towards views such as guided evolution.
The discussions of the role of sharia law, and the status of women, show the range of diversity of Islamic practice. There is general agreement that legal systems should accommodate sharia law. This may be no more than a vague sentiment, akin to the appeal to the Bible as a source of values in the West, but at the other extreme we have the Saudi barbarities of flogging, amputation for theft, and the death penalty for adultery and apostasy. Outside Saudi Arabia, the general attitude is that the Quran was addressing a society that lacked modern law enforcement and penal institutes. It is also worth remembering that the Quran itself does not specify a worldly penalty for apostasy, and that the Quranic penalty for adultery is 200 lashes. But of course everyone knows that the correct penalty for adultery is stoning, so presumably the verse justifying this was lost.
Worldwide, young Muslim women are dressing more traditionally, even as they become more likely to take up employment outside the home, and to dispute traditional patriarchal interpretations of the sacred texts. Fertility rates have been decreasing, and historically this also goes along with weakening of the patriarchy. There is even a specifically Islamic feminism, which appeals to the universal principle of justice that it finds in the Quran, and regards this as overriding specific prescriptions intended for a particular time and place. But all this is in the context of religious politics and cultural conservatism, and such conservatism within Islam (as elsewhere) tends to see the roles of men and women as complementary rather than equivalent. However, as Edis points out, Islamic feminism can help support tangible improvements in the lives of women. This is no small thing.
The distinction between the legal status of religion in Muslim majority countries and the West is less clear cut then we might imagine. With the exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, governments do not attempt to equate general law which sharia law, and even in Iran the identification with Islam, in this case specifically Shia Islam, is a matter of nationalism as well as religion. Moreover, religion has embedded privileges throughout the West, including tax advantages even in the United States, Government collected tax revenues in Germany, involvement with publicly funded education in many countries including the UK, and, I would add, formal representation in the UK's Upper House of Parliament. However, I think that Edis overstates the similarities. Laws against blasphemy, for example, have been repealed or lapsed throughout the West, but remain on the books (and are often supplemented by murderous direct action) in many Islamic countries.
When accusing Islam of justifying barbarity, we should remember that the US has with the approval of most of its citizens indulged in torture, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, surveillance, and entrapment within suspect communities, and that Muslim communities have of late been the victims of these activities. Human rights organisations have gained credibility among Muslims for protesting against these actions.
Moderate traditionalists defend Islamic law as protecting the family, which they regard as a cornerstone of society, and criticise the libertine behaviour condoned by secular legal codes. Individuals are presumed to live within their various religious communities, deriving their human dignity from God, and this is very different from the libertarian concept of individual rights. However, divine law is seen as granting protection to the individual from oppression by the State (and, I would add, the Corporation). Edis contrasts this with the minimal role assigned by western neoliberals to the State, which appears to cripple our ability to collectively decide on and institutionalise moral convictions about the good life. The law becomes a device to make markets run smoothly, and where considerations of economic efficiency are decisive. By contrast, for many believers divine law is inseparably entwined with justice and order.
Here I have a problem with Edis's argument. He repeatedly tells us that modern Islam in countries like Turkey has formed an alliance with the very neoliberalism whose excesses he deplores. So how can he at the same time claim that respect for the divine law helps maintain more humane concerns of justice and order? After all, there is no shortage in the West of politicians who pursue neoliberal policies while loudly proclaiming their devotion to Christianity. And while Edis correctly deplores the hollowing out of public institutions, and the replacement of human by commercial values (here he explicitly mentions the lost ideal of a liberal education), these processes are clearest in the US, which is by far the most devout of all advanced nations. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent socially conscious secularists from arguing, as they do, that the State has a moral duty to safeguard the welfare of its citizens, and should use health and welfare programs, taxation, and minimum wage laws to counteract the brutality of market forces.
Sharia law impinges directly on marriage and family law, and this will be true even for Muslims living in the West, to the extent that they accept the values of their own community. I would point out that the problem is not confined to Islam. Devout Catholics will not consider themselves free to marry after divorce, whatever the law of the land may say, and the ability of a Jewish husband to obstruct religious divorce can lead to serious difficulties. A Muslim testator in the West is free to follow the sharia requirement that sons inherit twice as much as daughters, and defenders of this practice point to dowries as evening out this inequality.
In its treatment of women, the Quran is true to its roots in a fiercely patriarchal society, but once again the realities are more complex than they might appear. For instance, the Quran specifies that a contract may be witnessed by two men, or by one man and two women. However, some Islamic practice, such as the law that allows a man to divorce a wife at will, while a woman requires the consent of a judge to divorce her husband, is not Quranic but based on later traditions. These traditions take the same approach to women as the Victorians; they are more sensitive, more delicate, lest suited to public life, and in need of protection and guardianship. Thus in Victorian England married women did not acquire the right to dispose of their own property until 1882. Iran has public parks that only women are allowed to enter; do we consider this restrictive, or liberating? Pakistan, a fiercely Islamic state, elected a woman head of Government in 1988. [3] The UK had not done this until 1979, and at the time of writing the US has yet to do so. Women's purity is essential to family honour, but the same was true until recently in Sicily. Edis also cites one recent honour killing in Turkey, where the family concerned were Assyrian Christians.
Consider a woman's headscarf. Islam demands modest clothing of both men and women. An observant Muslim man will not wear shorts. Definitions of modest clothing for women vary wildly, and reflect traditions and local attitudes. The Quran speaks of female modesty and covering of breasts, and covering of hair, let alone of the face, goes beyond this. Covering up can be said to make it easier for women to take part in public life, without being relegated to the role of sex objects. So when we ask whether a woman wears her headscarf voluntarily, or as the result of community pressure, the question is not well formulated. What if she is wearing it in response to community norms, but these are the norms of a community whose membership she values?
As Edis points out in a detailed careful discussion, some conflict between the ideal of a secular State, and the demand for religious freedom, is inevitable. And we cannot resolve such conflict merely by appealing to human rights, since actual arrangements must always be a matter for accommodation between competing rights. Should hospitals in receipt of public funds be required to provide contraception and abortion services, in violation of the principles of religious organisations that may be running them? Should State schools teach evolution, or facts about human sexuality, when doing so offends the religious views of some parents and students? And if they respond by retreating to private education, is it right that they are nonetheless forced to pay taxes for a service that they do not use and consider morally objectionable?
One solution is multiculturalism, state sanction of the exercise of power by religious authorities over their adherents. If Muslim parents object to their children learning about evolution or the Holocaust, and to female participation in sports, separate schooling can meet these objections. (Edis does not discuss, perhaps because they are too obvious to mention, the resulting dangers of communal isolation.) In the Netherlands, the state funds Muslim schools where the language of instruction is that of family origin, and separate Muslim housing, and consults with community leaders. In predominantly Muslim countries, multiculturalism would lead to the recognition of diverse communities, which some Muslim political thinkers regard as a strength. In the Ottoman Empire, different people congregated in different areas and managed their affairs as they saw fit. Noam Chomsky sees advantages to this over the very unnatural system of the European nation-state.
For many reasons, Edis is committed to the promotion of secularism, but he regards this as a personal political preference, rather than the expression of a universal ideal. Here many readers, including me, will depart from him. The religious are free to identify as deeply as they choose with their religion, but I see it as tyranny even if, in some times and places, the tyranny of the majority when religious organisations acquire any power beyond the power of persuasion. Moreover, as Edis points out, if the state compromises with private religious beliefs that run contrary to fact, this can cause public harm. People who rely on faith healing, or have religious objections to vaccination, undermine public health. So, I would maintain, are those who would censor teaching about sex, and in Scotland, where this aspect of education in state-funded Catholic schools is under the control of the Council of Bishops, this is not a trivial matter. And as Edis points out, those who, like creationists, feel free to ignore or subvert the scientific evidence for religious reasons may well feel free to do so for political and ideological reasons, like the US Religious Right denying global warming.
One huge difference between Muslim and secular attitudes arises when it comes to freedom of speech and belief. In the Quran, unbelievers are condemned to hellfire, but no earthly punishment is invoked, and Jews and Christians are at times spoken of as allies. Yet even in Turkey today, criticising religion can be classified as hate speech, while blasphemy laws up to and including the death penalty are in place, and widely supported, throughout the Muslim world, cartoons ridiculing Muhammad have provoked assassinations, and an epidemic of brutal assassinations of atheists and secular bloggers has claimed nime lives in Bangladesh since 2013.
Despite the lack of direct Quranic sanction, atheism is widely equated with apostasy, which in all traditional schools of Islamic law is punishable by death. If community cohesion depends on shared religious beliefs, then abandoning those beliefs is desertion. If the State possesses an Islamic identity, then atheism is a direct challenge to its legitimacy, and is indeed now equated with terrorism in Saudi Arabia.
There is also the problem of heresy. as seen in the exclusion of Ahmadis from public life in Pakistan, and the role of separate religious community identities in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
The replacement in the last half-century of nationalist by Islamist politics has not been good for Christians, while the Jewish populations of Arab countries have almost entirely emigrated to Israel. Today in Arab countries there is a vicious anti-Semitism, backed by bloodthirsty traditional (non-Quranic) sayings, but essentially politically motivated, and linked to bizarre conspiracy theories. The attitude of religious leaders towards Jews and Christians is highly variable, with the influential Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) having switched from promulgating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, to reaching out to Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem. (Disclosure: for reasons I never understood, I was at one time on his mailing list.)
For Edis, as I am sure for most readers here, freedom of expression is fundamental. But for many Muslims, disrespect towards religion is an abuse of that freedom, seeking to disrupt the social fabric. The freedom to criticise religion then runs counter to a claimed freedom to participate in public debate without being offended. So by a curious inversion the toleration in the West of criticism of the Prophet is portrayed as violation of Muslims' human rights. And some discussions of Islam are indeed gratuitously offensive, characterising the religion shared by over a billion people as fundamentally and peculiarly evil. We too have our no-go areas, such as desecrating the flag to which American school children regularly pledge allegiance. Edis also cites the example of nudity; nudity does no harm, other than causing an outrage which is its own sole justification, and yet because of this outrage we confine it to restricted designated areas. To some extent, Academia functions in the West as a designated area for free speech, but even here, there are things that cannot be said and words that cannot be used.
Here I feel that he is reaching for a symmetry that does not really exist. The US Supreme Court has struck down legislation against flag desecration, and nowhere in the West is the use of racist rhetoric punishable by death, although in some countries hate speech or Holocaust denial is illegal. He does, however, have one very important point. If I put forward views strongly disruptive of current political and economic arrangements, I will not be censored, but nor will I be widely or sympathetically reported. On the contrary, I can expect to find myself ridiculed, marginalised, or simply ignored by all organs of mass communication, whose owners are, after all, doing very nicely with things the way they are.
Discussion of the treatment of non-believers leads on to the painful topic of sacred violence. This is the topic closest to the surface in the minds of many Westerners. After all, even while I was writing this review there were suicide bombings killing, between them, over 350 people in Istanbul and Baghdad, and as I prepare to post it I learn of more than 80 Bastille Day celebrators murdered in Nice. All the more important, and difficult, to keep a sense of proportion. The deaths at such outrages as those in France are comparable in number those every week there from traffic accidents, and so we might perhaps compare Muslim terrorism with IRA terrorism; nasty, but something that the UK learned to live with. I would unfashionably point out that the numbers murdered in the most spectacular and horrific of these crimes, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, are comparable to the numbers normally murdered in the US in a month. And the Western response completely dwarfed the initial outrage, and has done more to advance the aims of the hijackers than they would have dreamed possible.
What does the Quran say about violence? As usual, the answer is unclear. The bloodthirsty texts quoted by hostile commentators come from later traditions, which are also the only source of accounts of the numbers killed or enslaved by Muhammad's armies, and there are verses in the Quran condemn fighting beyond what is necessary. And yet it is undoubtedly true that Muhammad was a successful military leader. Of course, we are told the same of Moses. Islam does not claim to be a religion of peace, as Christianity does, and Muslim scholars have not until recently devoted much attention to the concept of a just war. However, this has made little difference to either religion in practice, and one could say that Islam is simply less hypocritical.
There are many who criticise the core doctrines of Islam for making violence possible, but would not dream of blaming Judaism as such for reactions of the Netanyahu government, or Christianity as such for the widespread abuse practised by Catholic clergy. One soothing way to deal with this asymmetry is to declare that Islam is a religion of peace, perverted by those who commit violence in its name. It might be more honest to reverse the process; to acknowledge the influence of the Old Testament on Jewish nationalism, and the insult to human nature of the Catholic doctrine of priestly celibacy.
There is a long history of mutual violence in the relations between Christianity and Islam, and as Edis points out it would be futile to keep the score. Islamic terrorists have had links to Chechnya, victim of brutal attack by Putin's (mainly Russian Orthodox) military, and when Greek Orthodox Serbs slaughtered over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, NATO troops failed to protect them. Secular ideologies, both left and right, have also been content to inflict massive death tolls by starvation, as in Ireland and in British India, in Stalin's Russia and in Mao's China. Most recently, the West (and the US in particular) has been responsible for torture, kidnapping and internment without trial, and a war that left at least 150,000 Muslims dead, and probably far more, all with strong public support. For me, claims to have done all this in defence of our values ring hollow while we are selling cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia.
Islam originally expanded through war, and claimed to be legitimised by this military success, as did later Muslim empires. However, the spread of Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia, and until recently in sub-Saharan Africa has been based on influence rather than violence. Within the Muslim heartland, there was generally little occasion to invoke sacred violence, which has most credibility where Muslim majorities live under the control of foreign invaders, as in Kashmir, Chechnya, or Palestine. Its worst excesses are where extreme Islamist movements are seeking to take over power in failed Muslim states, especially Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Iraq, and the vast majority of the victims are their fellow-Muslims.
Suicide bombing may horrify us, but it is a rational way of pursuing asymmetric warfare. As Edis puts it, suicide bombers are the smart bombs of those without the wherewithal to deliver smart bombs. Nor do I find Muslim suicide bombers qualitatively different from the secularist Tamil Tigers or the Japanese kamikaze pilots, or even from those conventional warriors whom we praise for self-sacrificing bravery.
There is no denying the religious zeal of Islamic terrorists. And yet religion is neither necessary, nor sufficient, as an explanation of their actions. Acts of terror are not necessarily linked to religion, as I have already mentioned. And the vast majority of devout Muslims are not terrorists. Perhaps we should see the situation not as a crisis of religion, but of identity, with devotion to the point of self-destruction as the ultimate in selfless identification with the sacred cause.
Religious terrorists have one tactical advantage denied to their secular counterparts. They are much more difficult to infiltrate or subvert, because it is difficult to fake piety. And religious terrorism is frightening for another reason, namely its very unreasonableness. We can negotiate with a political extremist group, or persuade it that terrorism is not helping it attain its objectives (we have seen a mixture of both of these in Northern Ireland). But no such discourse is possible with a group whose aims are apocalyptic. Meantime, in what seems to me a strained comparison, Edis contrasts the situation of a mainstream Muslim with that of a secular liberal in the West. The Muslim will, like most of us, feel that fighting is sometimes justified, and will seek group loyalty and personal self-discipline while avoiding fanaticism. The secular liberal now has no difficulty in rejecting fanaticism, but faces the opposite problem of avoiding the complacency of disillusion, and keeping faith with the ideal of improving the world.
Meantime, we must retain perspective, and consider the effects of our actions on those most strongly affected by them. Our protestations of injured innocence are misplaced. Our visceral reaction to current horrors may well do more harm than good, and aerial bombing wins few allies.
True enough, but it is possible to under- as well as to over-react. Citing a 2009 source, [4] Edis writes of born-again warriors that they are marginal actors who find themselves continually driven further from mainstream Islamic discourse. One would not know from reading him that the intervening period has seen the emergence of a powerful organisation claiming the status of a state or even superstate, describing itself as the restoration of the caliphate, with control over millions of people and large areas in Syria and Iraq and with sympathisers in a dozen different countries, controlling major oil reserves and with sufficient acquiescence from its neighbours and the financial markets to export its oil and enjoy the revenues, and where dissent leads to beheading, homosexuals are thrown off buildings, and women are openly bought and sold as sex slaves. That this organisation is able to recruit by the thousand even (or especially) within Tunisia, one of the least fiercely Islamist of all predominantly Muslim countries. And that its devotees consider it virtuous to immolate themselves if at the same time they can kill a sufficient number of non-Muslims, or the wrong kind of Muslims, or Muslims who just happened to be visiting a mixed Shia-Sunni area of Baghdad. Through the long lens of history, which Edis habitually deploys, this may not amount to much (and for me, when we talk about gratuitous civilian deaths, Dresden comes to mind). But right now, to treat Daesh (a.k.a. the so-called Islamic State) as if it were just one more aspect of fanaticism, seems to me like discussing Europe in the 1930s as if Nazism were just one particular local variant of fascism.
Finally, Edis considers the future, starting from the present state of Islam in countries like Egypt and Turkey. Here Islamism has had no difficulty in coming to terms with neoliberal ideology and the pursuit of wealth. Was not the Prophet himself a successful merchant? While the previous Islamised generation studied science, the present one studies finance. Televangelism flourishes, as does well funded creationism. There is a Muslim management and self-help literature, similar to that based on Christianity in United States, and offering as little resistance to a dominant free-market ideology. Religion of any kind is better at injecting self-righteousness than self-criticism into the power structure.
Imposing our supernatural hopes on our view of the actual world invites disasters, such as creationism, alternative medicine, and climate change denial, which in the US is closely linked to biblical creationism. The denial of reality has consequences. And so, Edis argues, the defenders of scientific fact must shed their political naivety and find ways of relating to a general audience. I agree.
1] In the Shadow of the Sword, by the writer Tom Holland, presents a radical form of this historical criticism, in which both Muhammad and the Arabian origins of Islam are dismissed as political fabrications. For a critical discussion of this book, and references to scholarly work covering the same ground, see Glen Bowerstock's blistering review in The Guardian.
2] The Institute for Creation Research argues that since the Bible is literally true, any science that appears to show the contrary must be misguided, and replaced with better science. And attempts to do so in its publications, in tediously contorted detail.
3] Benazir Bhutto, elected 1988 and 1993; assassinated in 2007 during an election campaign that she would almost certainly have won.
4] Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad, D.R. Springer et al., Georgetown University Press, pp 28-29.
by Jalees Rehman
These terrorists aren't true Muslims is a phrase that I have often heard being used by American Muslims when talking about terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam. Recently, I encountered another version of this comment. Parents at a suburban Islamic Sunday School were encouraged to use this same approach when talking to their children about the recent spate of terrorist attacks. Arguments for denying the Muslim identity of the perpetrators include the moral incompatibility of the atrocities committed by the terrorists with Islamic law, which does not sanction the extrajudicial killing of civilians or suicide, which is frequent element of the attacks. This is an understandable reaction. The views of the perpetrators and their actions seem so abhorrent that it is impossible to reconcile their perception of Islam with those of the vast majority of American Muslims. However, even though one may sympathize with the desire to distance oneself from the terrorists, declaring terrorists to be non-Muslims or not true Muslims is the wrong answer.
The first problem with the arbitrary post-hoc excommunication of terrorists is that it is not really grounded in Islamic law. The process of takfir (excommunication Islam) requires very strong evidence and is difficult to uphold in most Islamic legal traditions if the person in question continues to see himself or herself as a Muslim. Someone may commit a grave sin or terrible crime, but these actions alone do not propel the person outside of the faith.
In fact, many of the terrorists or the organizations that endorse and support them portray themselves as true followers of Islam. Daesh (the so-called Islamic State) claimed responsibility for the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels (March 2016), Dhaka (July 2016), Baghdad (July 2016) and Nice (July 2016). Members of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram detonated bombs in a mosque in Maiduguri (January 2016), killing 22 worshipers and themselves. American-born Omar Mateen who murdered and injured over 100 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando (June 2016)swore allegiance to the leader of Daesh just minutes before his murderous shooting rampage. A group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban targeted the Christian community celebrating Easter Sunday in a Lahore park (March 2016) with a suicide bombing. Even though the precise nature of the involvement of Daesh in each individual attack is not always clear, the attackers and their handlers routinely invoke Islamic justifications for their actions. One may disagree with their logic and interpretations of Islam but this is not sufficient to warrant their excommunication. In fact, extremist groups are the ones which play fast and loose with takfir when it comes to Muslims with differing views on religion and it is important for the majority to resist the impulse of following their example. The second problem with declaring terrorists who view themselves as faithful followers of Islam to be non-Muslims is that it serves as a form of dangerous absolution. If atrocities are committed in the name of Islam, then Muslims need to carefully scrutinize what elements of their faith or the manner by which the faith is taught could have inspired such violence. Such introspection can serve as a starting point for change in approaching and teaching religion within Muslim communities to prevent the spread of Islamist ideologies that promote hatred and endorse violence. On the other hand, if the acts were committed by people who weren't true Muslims, then the community absolves itself of the responsibility to engage in introspection. They had a completely erroneous view of Islam, which is why we do not need to change.
The importance of avoiding false absolution is especially important when it comes to parenting Muslim children. Engaging the youth in introspective analysis of what aspects of religion (or any ideology) can promote supremacist and violent views may allow them to become active partners in thwarting the rise of extremism. As a parent, I discuss terrorism with our children, covering the broader sociopolitical context as well as the aspects within the Islamic tradition and history that are often used to justify atrocities. I am guided in part by my experience of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in Germany. This German composite word combines Vergangenheit (the past) and Bewaltigung (the process of struggling and overcoming) and refers to actively discussing the Nazi past in Germany. It would have been very easy to shrug off the Nazi ideology as not being truly German because it violated many ideals of German culture and absolve Germans of their historic burden but German society instead chose to confront its history. Schoolchildren visit concentration camps, talk to their parents about their grandparents' or great-grandparents' involvement in the Third Reich and are thus sensitized to the re-emergence of supremacist ideologies or fascism.
When I talk to my children about contemporary Islamist terrorist attacks, I try to engage in Gegenwartsbewaltigung (Gegenwart = the present). These discussions do not only revolve around terrorism and violence but also involve broader contemporary issues in ethics, religion, decision-making and responsibility. As a family, we routinely sit together and listen to the inspiring Philosophy Bites podcasts by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton which allows us to then segue into the discussions about philosophy and religion.
Terrorist acts perpetuated by co-religionists require Muslim parents to engage in difficult conversations with their children. Hiding behind false absolution is a disservice to their children and to their community. My hope is that Gegenwartsbewaltigung will foster open-mindedness and introspective critical thinking which is antithetical to the rise and spread of hatred and violence.
by Brooks Riley (who is standing on the bow of the ship above on September 11, 1959)
The freight trains at night are so loud that in my dreams they become horizontal twin towers spewing sound into the air in horrifying percussive bursts. Sometimes they sound like jumbo jets landing beside my pillow. Or a full-throttle matriarch with her brood in tow. Or Wotan at the height of his wrath in Die Walkure. I know these trains now, their varied speeds and decibels depending on the number of cars trailing the locomotive. If Im awake I count freight cars instead of sheep, adding up the metronomic ticks of the wheels as they cross a switch.
When I was growing up on the right side of the tracks, I never imagined I would one day live right beside them on another continent. But I do remember a crossing near Berryville, Virginia where the Baltimore & Ohio, (or was it the Chesapeake & Ohio?) snailed by on its way to the rest of the vast country out there. It took 15 minutes and more than 100 freight cars to pass before the barrier was raised (I counted them then, too).
That may be why this little girl wanted a toy train for Christmas. I got one, nothing fancy, just a circular track, a locomotive and a couple of freight cars. I loved its simplicity, the kinetic pleasure of its motorization. Most of my friends were into horses. I was into mechanisms of the vehicular kind, those that could move me from one place to another in an interesting way, or better, take me somewhere. A horse could also fit that bill, but I was rarely allowed to race my pony through the countryside, hair blowing in the wind. I would really do this only years later in Monument Valley when a kindly Navajo let me canter through an arroyo seco without supervision, just like John Wayne in a John Ford Western.
I have a full-scale model train now, right at the front door. Its nothing to look at, nothing youd want to open up on Christmas morning, just a deadpan locomotive, a chain of grey tank cars and the occasional thread of flatbeds hauling VW Tiguans in an array of colors to places east of here. I get wanderlust every time I hear it go by.
Those trains have traveled well along the synapses in my brain, their siren songs now identifiable as I play name-that-train with my eyes closed. The Sudostbayernbahn is especially witty, with its second locomotive as coda, the extra oomph of base tones filling the air as it mysteriously adds push to pull.
I was always seeking ways to be transported, in the ecstatic sense, and in my early years transportation played a decisive role. I still cannot travel from point A to point B without being buoyed up by rapturous thoughts, or held in the thrall of imagined scenarios suddenly bursting into song out of nowhere. (Ive written about train rides before here and the power of the moving image outside the train window.)
At first, and for a long time, it was ships that cast their spell. Being cradled in that mammoth man-made womb of creaking metal as it swayed through the waves toward a perpetual horizon that made no promises: That was the allure, to be carried into nothingness on a grand scale, exposing a strange wish to get really lost somewhere, in a forest, in a desert, on an ocean.
Ocean liners used to be sleek, streamlined vessels, not the top-heavy mass-transit container ships theyve become in recent years, stacked to pack em in like sardines. Ship design used to be nautically driventhe principles of grace and hydrodynamics outweighing the lure of higher profits that has led to todays grotesque mutations. Liners were big then too, but not at the expense of their fine contours or their modus operandi, sailing full speed ahead instead of wallowing precariously toward a point in the yonder. Back then, aesthetics ruled the waves, not mass-marketing.
On my first transatlantic voyage, at three, I wasnt allowed to see much, forced to enjoy the fresh ocean air in a cage on deck with other toddlers, for safety reasons. According to my mother I cried nonstop the entire voyage.
By my early twenties, Id crossed the Atlantic 8 times, on the Ile de France, the Nieuw Amsterdam, and the Rotterdam, its wild maiden voyage without stabilizers as it rushed to arrive on time for the 350th anniversary of Henry Hudsons own entry into what is now New York Harbor (9/11/1609). I remember seeing the future Queen Beatrix, then a princess in blue jeans, lounging on the upper deck once the ship had finally moved past the nausea-inducing English Channel out into the mercifully and exceptionally calm North Atlantic.
The Rotterdam was the first ocean liner built without a signature smoke stack or two, a heresy of modernism that soon took hold. In New York she received a proper maiden welcome, fire boats spraying water in the air and a fleet of tugboats waiting to guide her into port. I stood with my parents at the railing on the starboard side and marveled at Manhattans approaching skyline in the morning sun.
As exciting as it was, Id rather have remained on board. I could never get enough of these vessels and always made sure I could find my way to forbidden areas by simply ignoring the polite little chain across an access. Sometimes I went up to the bridge just before dawn, to peer into the darkness inside where the infra-red instrument panel cast a faint red glow on the faces of the officers on duty. With tens of thousands of tons of metal under their charge, the crew relied on stars or radar to guide us through the night. In those early hours there could also be fog, a dangerous situation for a vessel whose reaction time might be compared to the sluggish maneuvers of a manatee.
I liked to drop by the cavernous engine room, where vast boilers puffed, clanked and groaned in a continuous, ominous basso profundo: This was Wagners Nibelheim where an oil-stained crew, the maritime Nibelungs, fed the hungry monster of an engine that kept the ship on the move.
It was thrilling to stand on the bow, to see the sharp angle below me cut through the black depths like a knife, displacing volumes and leaving foamy white wakes to the sides.
During my last semester of college, with time on my hands and a deep longing to sail away, Id drive down the Hudson to Manhattan where ocean liners still docked along the west side. In those pre-terrorism days, I was able to sneak on board without much ado and spend whole afternoons exploring these empty floating cities that were preparing to depart the next day for some far destination, newly pregnant with passengers.
It was a reckless thing to do, to go where I would never be found, had someone gotten the notion to keep me on board against my will. But those were innocent times, and although I was mildly chastised for trespassing, I was usually also given a fine tour of the ship. One of them, the MS Berlin, a gem from the 1920s still crossing the Atlantic in 1966, was a late discovery. It had a pedigree, starting out as a Swedish ship, the MS Gripsholm, before ending up as a German ship. Its lines were thoroughbred, its interiorsincluding stain-glass skylights and deep dark leather easy chairslovingly preserved from some faraway era when a crossing meant really going somewhere in grand but not grandiose style. The MS Berlin was small as ocean liners go, but it deserved better than to be scrapped later that year. There should have been a landmark commission for ships.
The world was bigger in those days. To sail to Europe meant having the time to dream of what might be waiting on the other side, and at the same time, to divest oneself of homeland familiarity. Seven days of limbo, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. Seven days of flat horizons, like empty billboards in shades of gray adding up to this: Wherever the ship finally docked would definitely be far, far away from what you might call home. The further the better.
That limbo, the one that exists between the alpha and omega of any journey with a destinationa state of being without a there there, where the absence of experience gives way to unmanned flights of fancythat limbo is gone, replaced by the few necessary hours we spend in the air as spam in a can on our way to wherever, the means to an end reduced to a secular instant.
Those crossings always ended too soon. Docking in a foreign land promised other attractions and limitless adventure, but the meansgetting thereengaged me more than arriving, at least for a time. The sadness at the end of every voyageune petite mort not unlike the end of a good book, a great film, a fine meal or even that 16-hour journey called Der Ring des Nibelungenlingered for days.
I sailed to Europe one last time, on the Leonardo da Vinci, before the high-flying future closed in on transatlantic ocean liners as, one by one, they were sent to their berths to die: to be dismantled, or to eke out their last years as cruise ships to a variety of unreal ports of call. Years later, I persuaded an old friend to join me overnighting on the Queen Mary, which had eluded ship breakers by becoming a hotel in Long Beach, California, permanently docked. The engines were silent, the once noble dame of the high seas now in a state of cosmetic rigor mortis. The thrill was gone. A ship that cant move is dead in the water.
I used to believe that my passion for ships also had to do with moving toward an unknown future, all those blank horizons on the open sea just waiting to be filled, the ship itself a mother carrier to my destiny (the existential version of destination, with the same Latin lineage). But even after that future had begun, I was lured back once more when I decided to make a film about tugboats, those powerful little red engines that could, and still do, maneuver the big guys away from their berths.
Eight hours on a Moran tugboat (Was it the Barbara Moran or the Katie Moran? At that time every tug was a gal.) opened the door to another reality as we escorted freighters in and out of Brooklyn and Manhattan, some of them headed for Vietnam to feed the war. Id borrowed a 16mm camera and bought enough film for the day. My then boss, editor of The Drama Review Richard Schechner, tagged along to take sound.
This time I thrilled at bobbing in the wakes and darting around the hulls of ships, the soaring bows like oncoming blades that could cut us to pieces. It was the reverse shot of the times I had peered over the railing down at tugboats below taking us out to sea or bringing us ina Rashomon variation on a familiar story.
We ate with the crew, boiled beef and potatoes, and saw the great city of New York not only in its circumferential glory but in the nooks and crannies of its once busy maritime life, every ship a small society on the move, every dock a lesson in logistics, every departure a well-rehearsed choreography performed by stevedores and, of course, tugboats.
At the end of every push-pull strategy to get a ship under way, our tugboat would briefly nestle against it like a duckling by its mum, where a door opened in the hull just above sea-level to allow the harbor pilot to debark, his role as midwife to a smooth passage out to sea now over.
The undeveloped film sat in my fridge for years, accusing me of failure to finish what Id started, every time I reached in for a carton of milk. I never seemed to have the extra few hundred dollars to have the footage developed, and after a time my future had so many other priorities that I was content to rely on the memories of that day, at the same time avoiding the certain disappointment over what might been missing from my documentary.
There are many things that transport us, that take us from down here to up there, from right here to way over there. The analog vehicles of transport began to fade in importance when I realized I could move and be moved without leaving town or leaving my seat. Some works of art take us so far away that we have to struggle to get back at all, even if we havent budged.
Transport, epiphany, enchantment, are not the exclusive freehold of solitary souls, but they do tend to be dinners for one. I was good at dining alone. Some things cant be shared. No two people feel exactly alike, or lift off at the same time over the same things: One mans voyage is a revelation, anothers the source of unmitigated boredom.
I dont travel much these days, at least not physically. Still, I listen to the trains next door and allow myself to dream once more as I did then, of where theyll take me, of where Im going, or where Ill still go before Im gone.
Ruling meets strong opposition from both China and abroad
Editor's note: The Public International Law Colloquium on Maritime Dispute Settlement, held in Hong Kong on Friday and Saturday, attracted more than 200 legal experts from a number of countries, including China, the United States, Australia and France. The two-day event was jointly organized by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre and the Chinese Society of International Law. A special panel on the South China Sea arbitration was held on the afternoon of July 16 before the forum concluded.
World-renowned legal experts continued to criticize the South China Sea arbitration ruling, calling it a "dangerous", "one-sided" and "politically-motivated" decision in a major international forum held in Hong Kong on July 15-16.
On July 12, the arbitral tribunal appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in an arbitration case the country unilaterally filed against China. Its ruling absurdly denied China's historic rights over the South China Sea, and it met with strong opposition from both China and many members of the international community.
Myron Nordquist, a professor at the University of Virginia, said a lot of things were wrong about the ruling over the South China Sea dispute, particularly the fundamentally flawed system to begin with.
"It is a bad decision politically and this is a political decision," Nordquist said. "It is a matter of whether Article 298 (which grants a nation the right to declare issues where it will not accept compulsory arbitration) was honored."
Nordquist also said the decision to declare all geographic features within the South China Sea as rocks or low-tide elevations "is not going to be well-received".
In particular, the tribunal ruled that Taiping Island was a rock, instead of an island. This, many believed, would pose a severe challenge to geopolitics and academic conscience.
"Taiping Island is internationally recognized by the academic world as an island," said Michael Sheng-ti Gau, a professor at the National Taiwan Ocean University.
"The Philippines carefully made their case around the delimitation by separating the issues into several portions. However, despite the efforts by the Philippines, it is still, in fact, undeniably, a delimitation issue when the Philippines petitioned to the tribunal over China's right to the South China Sea," said Gau.
But even after this arbitration is over, China may still rely on its inherent right of self-defense to keep Philippine vessels out of the disputed waters, Gau said, adding that allowing hostile Philippines vessels to approach is not an option as China regards it as a serious matter of maintaining territorial integrity.
Gau's remarks, in fact, shed light on some inevitable questions in the wake of the July 12 ruling: How to deal with the aftermath of the ruling and how is the ruling going to impact on the international legal system and international relations?
Pemmaraju Sreenivasa Rao, a former chairman of the International Law Commission, said, as a pragmatic matter, the Philippines at the end of the day would have to return to the negotiating table to settle its dispute with China and achieve a mutually acceptable solution.
Xue Hanqin, a judge of the International Court of Justice, said the ultimate objective for arbitration mechanism is to settle disputes rather than to escalate them.
"However, anyone can easily tell this award will certainly aggravate the dispute between China and the Philippines, aggravate the current military tension between China and the United States and definitely aggravate tension in the region," she said, warning an arbitral tribunal should not have played "such a dangerous game".
Sharing similar concerns, Tung Chee-hwa, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said protecting China-US relations must be the first priority for all of us.
"Unfortunately, because of what is happening in the South China Sea, there is reason to be concerned about the current state of this relationship. It is time for us to rethink and re-evaluate, with urgency, what are the real differences that divide us in the South China Sea," Tung said as he delivered a keynote address to open the forum in Hong Kong on Friday.
Xinhua contributed to the story.
Contact the writer at jasmine@chinadailyhk.com
Nearly 1,000 Chinese protesters gather in London on Saturday against the ruling by the South China Sea arbitral tribunal based in The Hague. Li Wensha / China Daily
(China Daily 07/18/2016 page10)
We seriously cannot contain our excitement.
As reported by Eater SF, a new Champagne bar is set to open in the Momi Tobi's Revolution Cafe space in Hayes Valley later this year. The Ridder, as it will be called, is the brainchild of PR maven Jen Pelka (who also happens to be engaged to neighboring Souvla's Charles Billies), and is completely backed by women investors.
"I love champagne. With this bar I want to create an environment that is approachable, comfortable, but also sexy, where people can drink a good glass of sparkling wine and celebrate their lives," Pelka said.
Pelks is still working on the wine list, but there will be bottles from local producers as well as of international labels from France and Italy.
"We would like to serve and provide an interesting variety of selections, and besides the champagne we are also going to serve still wine," she commented.
There's also plans to serve food, and Pelka is working with a undisclosed female chef to curate a light menu of bites that will pair well with Champers. No set opening date at the moment, but The Riddler expects to welcome customers by the end of the year. We'll be first in line.
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.
Q&A Session with MMJ's Managing Director
Perth, July 18, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - MMJ PhytoTech Limited ( ASX:MMJ ) is pleased to provide its shareholders with the below Company update, in the form of a Q&A session with Managing Director Andreas Gedeon.
MMJ recently achieved a significant operational milestone with its flagship Duncan Facility granted a Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations ("MMPR") production licence by Health Canada. This milestone is considered a key catalyst for the Company in its transition towards becoming a leading supplier of medical cannabis globally.
Managing Director Q&A Session July 2016:
1. Andreas, you recently announced the granting of a MMPR production licence for your Duncan Facility in Canada - can you please elaborate on the significance of this licence and what it means for MMJ moving forward?
The decision by Health Canada to approve MMJ's wholly-owned subsidiary, United Greeneries ("UG"), as an authorised licensed producer of medical cannabis ("MC") is a momentous event for the business across a number of levels.
MMJ is the only Australian-based company to successfully secure a Canadian MC cultivation licence, making us one of only a handful of companies globally with the capacity to commercially produce medicinal grade cannabis. Operating within a highly regulated, federal system also allows for the importing and exporting of narcotics across national borders.
The MMPR licence permits MMJ to immediately commence production of MC at the Duncan Facility, which the team at UG is in the process of doing as we speak.
This will essentially enable MMJ to strategically expand into other regulated cannabis markets globally, as legislation continues to evolve. It also underpins our own internal supply chain for our clinical efforts, which is the key to being able to move forward with clinical trials and studies.
The Duncan Facility is a 16,000ft2 building with a level-8 vault, 3 bays and close to 10,000ft2 of cultivation area. MMJ has invested approximately CAD$8 million to ensure that the facility is of the highest possible standard. The license approval by government regulator, Health Canada, is a tremendous endorsement of the quality of both the facility and the staff who managed the licensing process.
2. The Canadian government continues to progress towards legalising the recreational cannabis market - can you explain how this will impact MMJ?
The recent progress made in Canada relating to the legalization of the recreational cannabis market is undoubtedly a very encouraging development for MMJ and its shareholders.
We view the Canadian recreational market, which has an estimated value of CAD$5 billion, as an enormous growth opportunity for the business in the next 12-18 months.
Although the Company views the penetration of the existing medical cannabis market as highly important, a potentially big opportunity for MMJ moving forward is in the supply to recreational cannabis markets in Canada and possibly other markets.
The Canadian federal regulatory authority, Health Canada, recently created a Task Force on marijuana legalisation and regulation. The Task Force will essentially work with all relevant stakeholders in order to provide advice and structure around the implementation of a new regulatory system for recreational cannabis. The new system will allow regulated personal access for recreational purposes, without the requirement of any medical condition or physician oversight.
It is currently anticipated that the new framework will be introduced in full during H2 FY2017 and the Canadian government has already announced that it will be guided and regulated with the same focus on consumer protection and public health as the current MMPR.
We are therefore confident that current licensed producers under the MMPR system will have a strong first mover advantage and we intend to make this opportunity a 'game changer' for MMJ and its shareholders.
3. Earlier this year, MMJ announced its entry into the emerging medical cannabis market in Australia. With established operations across Canada, Switzerland and Israel, can you outline the advantages of having a multi-jurisdictional business model?
A major focus for the Company to date has been the strategic global positioning of our vertically integrated business model, with each of our wholly-owned subsidiaries operating in jurisdictions with favourable regulatory frameworks already in place.
With regulatory environments continuing to evolve throughout a number of countries, it is imperative that MMJ has the flexibility and dynamism to adapt to changing conditions in order to be best positioned to capture additional revenue building opportunities as they arise.
To highlight this point further, we are committed to boosting sales of Satipharm's (Switzerland-based subsidiary) MC health products throughout regulated markets in Europe to increase near-term revenues.
The Company's Israeli headquartered subsidiary, PhytoTech Therapeutics Limited, is currently focused on the clinical development of cannabis based prescription drugs, having completed its first Phase 1 clinical study earlier this year. Phase 2 trial planning is now well advanced and, to my knowledge, MMJ is the only company, other than GW Pharmaceuticals going forward, with a serious Phase 2 trial based on organically derived Cannabinoids. This is because we have been able to secure the supply chain, which has proven to be extremely difficult for other companies.
We view the Australian MC market as a significant opportunity for MMJ in the medium term, and we are currently working with two Australian businesses to establish a local dispensary framework and to assist with community education and lobbying efforts where required. We are also working with Epilepsy Action Australia in order to focus on a market segment where our products will likely find the highest need and can do the most immediate impact.
As I have just outlined, not being constrained by geographical boundaries has enabled the business to penetrate a number of key target markets, whilst remaining committed to executing our 'Farm-to-Pharma' growth strategy.
4. Andreas, can you please outline some of the key differences between medical cannabis and industrial hemp?
The critical difference between the two is that industrial hemp has only very small trace amounts of the active compounds, or cannabinoids, found in medical or recreational grade cannabis. Industrial hemp can be grown nearly anywhere in the world and is cultivated for fibres or seeds for hemp oil production. It only contains traces of some key cannabinoids, mainly CBD or Cannabidiol. The key compound that provides medical or recreational cannabis with its psychoactive properties is Tetrahydrocannabinol or THC.
In general, industrial hemp, by law, can contain no more than 0.3% THC content whereas medical and recreational cannabis usually contains between 15-30% THC content. Most medicinal applications depend on a combination of all cannabinoids, not just one. This is why it is essential to control the entire supply chain of Cannabis, including its narcotic compounds.
5. Who are some of the operators in the global medical cannabis sector that we can perhaps use as a peer comparison for MMJ?
On a global perspective, a company that is often used to draw peer comparisons is British biopharmaceutical operator GW Pharmaceuticals ( LON:GWP ) ( NASDAQ:GWPH ). The Company is focused on the development of cannabinoid-based prescription medicines used to treat multiple sclerosis and cancer pain. GWP has a market capitalisation of circa US$2bn.
There are also two well-performed Canadian-listed companies who are licensed producers of medical cannabis - Aphria Inc. ( CVE:APH ) (market cap circa A$117m) and Canopy Growth Corp. ( CVE:CGC ) (market cap circa A$295m) - which further highlights how significantly undervalued MMJ is at these prices (market cap circa A$46m).
As we speak, MMJ is the only publicly listed company globally that offers exposure to the four key pillars of the Cannabis value chain, being cultivation, sales, pharmaceutical grade nutritional supplements and meaningful pharmaceutical clinical trials.
We are confident that key catalysts, including the commencement of production in Canada, increased MC product sales throughout Europe and successful clinical trials in Israel, will all result in a significant value uplift for MMJ in the near-term.
6. Finally thanks for your time Andreas, and could you leave us with an overview of some of the near-term milestones that MMJ shareholders can look forward to for the first half of FY2017?
The Company has a very active project development pipeline, and a number of near-term value drivers that will be underway in the next 3-6 months period.
As I have mentioned, the Duncan Facility will play a vital role as production is increased over coming months to underpin the Company's supply chain and to generate near-term revenue streams via supply to the existing Canadian MMPR market.
In conjunction, with the appointment of Stanislav Sologubov as CEO of Satipharm in Switzerland we expect to drive growth in sales of our Gelpell product through Europe, whilst we work to expand on our existing product range.
Our Israeli-based subsidiary, PhytoTech Therapeutics, is also well advanced in its planning towards the commencement of a Phase 2 clinical trial of our exciting Gelpell-CBD capsules and we expect to be able to provide our shareholders with an updated on the trials commencement very shortly.
About MMJ Group Holdings Ltd
MMJ Group Holdings Ltd (ASX:MMJ) is a global cannabis investment company. MMJ owns a portfolio of minority investments and aims to invest across the full range of emerging cannabis-related sectors including healthcare, technology, infrastructure, logistics, processing, cultivation, equipment and retail. For MMJ's latest investor presentation and news, please visit: https://www.mmjphytotech.com.au/investors/
High Grade Intercepts at Wiluna
Perth, July 18, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Blackham Resources Ltd ( ASX:BLK ) ("Blackham") is pleased to announce that all assay results from an extension drilling program at the Matilda Gold Project in Western Australia have now been received. A total of 17 RC holes for 4,067m have been completed targeting extensions to mineralisation at the Wiluna Gold Mine. Holes were designed to test areas within 150m of existing open pits and underground development to ensure that any extensions to mineralisation could be rapidly converted to resources. Results from the first part of the program, testing the Essex deposit, were released earlier in the month (refer to ASX release 1st July 2016).
Successful extensions to high grade shoots at Wiluna Deposits:
- 12m @ 7.52g/t Au from 147m in WURC0011 (Squib)
- 5m @ 13.7g/t Au from 191m in WURC0004 (West Lode)
- 8m @ 3.44g/t Au from 48m in WURC0006 (Happy Jack)
Drilling has returned outstanding results from the West Lode, Squib and Happy Jack deposits. Intercepts include 5m @ 13.7g/t Au from 191m including 3m @ 20.9g/t Au in WURC0004, 8m @ 3.44g/t Au from 48m including 4m @ 5.42g/t Au in WURC0006 and 12m @ 7.52g/t Au from 147m including 2m @ 38.1g/t Au in WURC0011.
Open pit mining at Wiluna ceased in the early 1990's when focus shifted to mining high-grade underground deposits. Significant remnant mineralisation remains that may be profitably exploited in today's higher gold price environment. Follow up drilling is planned and these new results will be incorporated into the ongoing open pit and underground mining studies.
WILUNA SHEAR SYSTEM RC DRILL RESULTS
Historical drilling at Wiluna has predominantly focused on underground mining targets, following mineralisation down plunge with only limited drilling along strike of the known deposits. A program of RC holes has been completed on the Wiluna Shear System targeting extensions at a number of open pits (Figure 1, see link below).
Holes were designed to follow up high grade intercepts in drilling completed by previous operators including 14m @ 10.7g/t Au at West Lode, 19m @ 16.4g/t au at Essex, 35m @ 8g/t at Happy Jack and 8m @ 13.4g/t at Squib. All holes targeted extensions of mineralisation within 150m of existing infrastructure at depths of less than 500m from surface. Due to the proximity to infrastructure, any economic mineralisation intersected will require minimal additional capital development to access and is likely to allow rapid conversion into the mine plan.
Results of all assays received from this program are given in Table 1 (see link below).
West Lode
Drilling at West Lode has extended mineralisation further to the south with an intercept of 5m @ 13.7g/t Au from 191m including 3m @ 20.9g/t Au (Figure 2, see link below). This mineralisation is within 30m of existing underground development and is likely to extend the resource to the south. Limited shallow drilling exists south of west lode and the system remains open along strike.
Happy Jack - North Pit
High grade mineralisation has been intersected at Happy Jack with an intercept of 8m @ 3.44g/t Au from 48m including 4m @ 5.42g/t Au in WURC0006. This mineralisation is within 50m of surface and extends mineralisation at the North Pit at depth and along strike. It will be included in open pit studies which are looking at the potential for further cut backs on the historical pits.
Squib
High grade mineralisation has been intersected at the Squib deposit with an intercept of 12m @ 7.52g/t Au from 147m including 2m @ 38.1g/t Au in WURC0011 (Figure 3, see link below). This intercept confirms extension of mineralisation at depth, down plunge and along strike. The lode remains open in all directions, and will be tested further in the follow-up drill program.
Matilda Gold Resources
The Matilda Gold Project has an updated Mineral Resource of 48Mt @ 3.3g/t for 5.1Moz of all within a 20 kilometre radius of Blackham's 100% owned Wiluna gold plant capable of processing up to 1.7Mtpa for over 100,000ozpa gold production. Measured and indicated resources now total 22Mt @ 3.4g/t for 2.4Moz (refer to ASX release 17th June 2016).
To view tables and figures, please visit:
http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/IDBWJUY8
About Wiluna Mining Corporation Ltd
Wiluna Mining Corporation (ASX:WMC) (OTCMKTS:WMXCF) is a Perth based, ASX listed gold mining company that controls over 1,600 square kilometres of the Yilgarn Craton in the Northern Goldfields of WA. The Yilgarn Craton has a historic and current gold endowment of over 380 million ounces, making it one of most prolific gold regions in the world. The Company owns 100% of the Wiluna Gold Operation which has a defined resource of 8.04M oz at 1.67 g/t au. In May 2019, a new highly skilled management team took control of the Company with a clear plan to leverage the Wiluna Gold Operation's multi-million-ounce potential.
DEMING Planning for the Great American Duck Race is in full swing as committee members meet to line up sponsors and volunteers for the Aug. 25-28 event.
The festival is one of the Demings major events and draws as many as 10,000 visitors for a weekend of activities.
A recent board meeting solidified some of the sponsors as well as established new rules and regulations for some of the favored events of the races.
The races hold various levels of sponsorship that are filled by different companies and individuals to support the events.
They are responsible for the needed costs of operations for the races and many companies have elected to sponsor chosen events such as the Tournament of Ducks Parade, which will be backed by PNM.
Additional sponsors of the event include Mizkan America, Solitaire Homes, Amigos Mexican Food and many others.
With the passing of (longtime organizer) Dave Johnson, we did not have a website, we did not have a telephone and there was no access to us, said Duck Race Treasurer Marie Pinchuk. Now that weve got that operating again, its helping a lot.
One of the biggest sponsors so far is Luna Energy Facility who has donated the $5,000 corporate sponsor level for the event.
Sponsorship levels are ranked for both companies and individuals and Luna Energy Facility has been a prevalent sponsor of the event for some time.
For the past 36 years, the Great American Duck Races has brought thousands of people to Deming to celebrate a lasting tradition.
Events at the festival include a live water and dry duck races, The Duck Royalty Pageant, the Great American Tortilla Toss as well as the Great American Outhouse Race. Vendors of all types will also be present during the festival selling various goods.
For information, go to demingduckrace.com.
WASHINGTON Hillary Clinton summoned contenders to become her running mate to her Washington home on Friday as she closes in on a pick for vice president.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper were seen in separate cars departing the former secretary of states home on Friday afternoon.
A person familiar with the process said Clinton also met with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro at her home. The person would only speak on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
The meetings came a day after the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee campaigned alongside another contender, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, in northern Virginia.
A small group of Clinton campaign confidants have reviewed publicly available information about the potential contenders for more than a month.
The in-person meetings come less than two weeks before Clinton formally accepts her partys nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
On Friday, Secretary Clinton held a series of campaign-related meetings at her Washington home, including several about her vice presidential selection process, spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement.
Campaign chair John Podesta and vice chair Huma Abedin were among the Clinton aides who spent the day at her home.
Since its inception in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement has facilitated the flow of trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
During the past 22 years, U.S. exports to both of its North American neighbors has grown exponentially. In 1993, U.S. exports to Canada were $164.4 billion and to Mexico they were $64.1 billion. In 2015, these rose to $280.6 billion to Canada and $235.7 billion to Mexico. The U.S. depends heavily on trade with these two countries to support American jobs and production.
However, NAFTA has traditionally been a scapegoat for politicians, unions and people who accuse the agreement of destroying jobs and businesses. This is in spite of the opinions of a variety of economists who say that the agreement is responsible for at least as many jobs created as being claimed to be lost. U.S. job losses have been more affected by changes in the global market and rising productivity at home.
However, the bashing of NAFTA has been a central theme in the presidential campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders, who are calling for its restructuring or outright repeal mainly because of the Mexican component of the agreement, not the Canadian. Lets assume for a second that whomever the new president and new congresspeople are, they decide to repeal NAFTA. What would the result be?
The four states on the U.S.-Mexico border have combined exports to Mexico of approximately $130 billion a year. In Texas, the leading state exporter to Mexico, with $92.7 billion in 2015, it is estimated that one in four jobs on its border with its southern neighbor is tied to the maquiladora (twin plant) industry. Midwestern states, such as Illinois ($9.1 billion), Ohio ($6.6 billion) and Indiana ($4.9 billion), also depend heavily on exports to Mexico to support jobs at home.
NAFTA has removed barriers that previously restricted U.S. exports to Mexico, thus causing all of these states to increase their exports to that nation. This has allowed U.S. manufacturers, logistics firms and trade support companies to grow and increase their payrolls. Supplying Mexicos industrial base is worth billions of dollars for U.S. companies, dollars that would be at risk of being severely reduced if trade barriers were re-erected.
Mexico has been very successful in attracting foreign direct investment, particularly manufacturing companies. Driving through the industrial parks in a manufacturing base such as Juarez, Mexico, one can see companies from Germany, Canada, the U.K., China, Japan and the U.S. The overwhelming supply base to these manufacturers is located in the U.S., and U.S. border states benefit when Mexico manufacturing expands. It is estimated that a 10 percent increase in Mexicos maquiladora output in a city such as Juarez leads to an approximately 3 percent increase in employment in border cities such as El Paso, Texas. Juarez residents account for $1 out of every $8 spent in the retail sector in El Paso more than $4 million a day. The U.S. gets very little back related to these two factors for jobs based in China. This symbiotic relationship would be at risk by rescinding NAFTA and creating a spirit of antagonism rather than cooperation.
Smaller border communities, such as Santa Teresa, N.M., have grown because of trade with Mexico. Just a few years ago, the total value of trade passing through the Santa Teresa Port of Entry was around $1 billion a year. Today, this figure is approaching $26 billion and now this little port, whose commercial traffic grew 26 percent last year, is ranked seventh in terms of trade volume on the U.S.-Mexico border.
When we drive our automobiles or turn on our computers, we dont tend to think of the origin of the unit or its components. Mexicos auto industry is growing like gangbusters and is tied in directly to the U.S. auto industry. The manufacturing of components such as engines and wire harnesses in Mexico has allowed U.S. companies to compete against Japanese and European manufacturers. Without this close relationship, the prices of our cars, computers and medical products would become more expensive, thus decreasing Americans spending power and quality of life.
Pulling out of NAFTA would create a vacuum that would be quickly filled by Asian and European companies eager to increase their presence in North America.
Many leading economists are predicting that the Mexican economy will enter the top ten largest world economies in a few years. Turning our back on this growing nation, which has been one of the strongest allies the U.S. has had during its history, would not only be damaging to the U.S. from an economic development standpoint, but also would also demonstrate to the world that we dont keep our agreements or value relationships with our neighbors. This is not the type of image we should be presenting to the world.
Jerry Pacheco is the executive director of the International Business Accelerator, a nonprofit trade counseling program of the New Mexico Small Business Development Centers Network. He can be reached at 575-589-2200 or at jerry@nmiba.com.
While the nation waits for the elusive comprehensive immigration reform, there is no reason for elected officials to delay adopting common-sense pieces of that complex undertaking.
And it would seem that targeting illegal immigrants who already have aggravated felony convictions would be low-hanging fruit. Yet, this month, the U.S. Senate refused, 55-42, to work on a measure sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that could have done just that. Both of New Mexicos senators, Democrats Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, voted against the legislation.
Known as Kates Law, the measure is named for the woman fatally shot in San Francisco last year by a felon who had been released despite being deported five times. The bill needed 60 votes to move forward but stalled on concerns it would have flooded prisons with immigrants who had been convicted more than twice of no other crime than crossing illegally.
That could have easily been addressed in order to save the most important part of the law, the reason it is named for Kate Steinle creating a five-year mandatory minimum for someone who has an aggravated felony before deportation. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the man charged in the shooting, had already been deported from the U.S. five times and spent nearly two decades in federal prison, not only for felony re-entry but also felony heroin possession. At the time of the shooting, he was supposed to face decade-old minor drug charges in San Francisco but was released under that citys Sanctuary City program instead of being turned over once again to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation.
Lopez-Sanchezs public defenders have argued that he found a stolen gun wrapped in a T-shirt and fired it accidentally. That is for the courts to work out. But it is for Congress to work out why someone in the country illegally with aggravated felony convictions can and does walk free, while legal and law-abiding residents like Kate Steinle are gone forever.
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.
The bread is baking, the pork is roasting and the pho is cooking in Albuquerques Mile-Hi District.
Le Bistro became the newest addition to the corridor when the Vietnamese eatery launched earlier this month on San Pedro between Lomas and Constitution.
Neighbors and other passersby had eagerly awaited its debut, one preceded by an eight-month remodel of a onetime strip mall bead store.
But their wait was relatively short considering that Mindy Nguyen, the manager and a part-owner, had been planning the place for five years. She says the idea goes back to her time dishing out chicken tenders at a local mall food court. That job taught her she liked the restaurant business. but wanted one that tapped into her own heritage and the American publics passion for Vietnamese cuisine.
As part of the prep work, Nguyen who had moved to Albuquerque from Saigon in 1990 even returned to her native country last year for months of culinary study.
The result is a long menu of pho, noodle and rice dishes, and banh mi Vietnamese sandwiches dressed with the likes of barbecued pork, grilled chicken, tofu and even fried eggs, and then topped with a mix of pickled radishes, carrots, cilantro, jalapenos, cucumber and Vietnamese mayonnaise. Aside from bahn mis ($5-6),
most menu items fall into the $8-13 range.
Nguyen isnt done yet.
She says she will introduce cake and other baked goods as she hires more staff, but notes that Le Bistro already makes its sandwich baguettes in-house every morning.
Those fresh buns, the real fruit used in the boba smoothies and even the mint plants growing out back are among the features Nguyen touts as she walks around Le Bistro, a 4,500-square-foot space divided as if it were two different restaurants. An orange wall separates a full-service, white-tablecloth dining room from a fast food-esque section. Designed primarily for those just ordering a banh mi or, say, a smoothie, Nguyen says customers on the more casual side can still order any regular entree to go.
She put a lot of work and effort into this, says Nguyens daughter Cynthia. Its a long process, but she thinks it was all worth it for her.
Le Bistros dining room serves 10 a.m.-9 p.m. daily, while the casual side of the restaurant serves 7:30 a.m.-8 p.m. daily.
It is located at 1313 San Pedro NE. The phone number is 266-6118.
Saucy signs off
The Saucy Italian Bistro is no more but Albuquerque likely hasnt seen the last of the well-known restaurateur behind it.
As I recently reported online, Maria Constantine has closed Saucy after three years in business, having sold the property at 2912 Juan Tabo NE to an unnamed out-of-state investor. But she says that she intends to return to the local dining scene by next summer with a new restaurant at a different location. She says the menu would veer more toward the Greek food she served at Mykonos, the Mediterranean eatery she started nearly 20 years ago but has since sold.
Im not done; Im taking some time off, Constantine says. Im not retired by any stretch of the imagination. Im beginning, as I call it, a new chapter.
She says we did very well with Saucy, but that her mother recently died and she wanted some time away from the restaurant business.
Steve Lyon of Pegasus Retail, who represented Constantine in the sale of the property, says he will also help the new owners as they look for ways to utilize the site. Lyon says they could lease to another restaurateur, update and expand the building into a multi-unit retail venue or possibly find a tenant who wants to tear down the building and start fresh.
For your coffee break consideration
Country Club Plaza is about to get a caffeine jolt.
35 North Coffee, a budding New Mexico cafe chain, plans to open its first Albuquerque location this week inside the Old Town-area development.
Founded in 2015 in Santa Fe, 35 North offers a range of buzzy options from drip coffee to nitrogen-infused coffee and a range of espresso drinks. One of the most popular menu items so far is the Latitude Adjustment, a blend of coffee, butter, MCT and coconut oils, says Elizabeth McLeod, director of operations for the cafe brand.
We actually have a roaster on premises at the Santa Fe store and we roast all our coffee beans ourselves, says McLeod, noting that the Santa Fe shop will provide the roasted beans for the new Albuquerque location, as well.
Customers can pair their coffee with a host of breakfast and lunch goodies, such as oatmeal, quiche, sandwiches, salads, bistro boxes, wraps and what McLeod calls the specialty: powdered sugar-dusted beignets with a choice of mixed berry coulis or dark chocolate sauce.
The new cafe is located at 1720 Central SW. Once it opens, the hours will be 7 a.m.-6 p.m. daily. The phone number is 243-1627.
And happy hour too
Speaking of the Country Club area, Vinaigrette has unveiled a new Salad Bar menu featuring six libations ($7-8 each) that keep with the salad bistros overall theme.
They include That Green Drink (celery, kale, jalapeno, lime, ginger syrup and La Paz Agave Wine) and the Cider Cup (hard cider, ginger beer, apples, oranges and raspberries).
Vinaigrette, which has an existing beer/wine lineup, ushered in the new drinks with a few new snack items, too. Think black bean-and-kale nachos ($7) and kale fritters ($6.50).
Vinaigrettes Albuquerque location is located at 1828 Central SW. The menu is also available at the Santa Fe location.
From photography to firearms
The old Kurts Camera Corral in Albuquerques Northeast Heights is now catering to shooters of a different kind.
The building at 1713 Juan Tabo NE emptied by Kurts in late 2015 is now home to Geoffrey Russell Outfitters, according to CBREs Lia Armstrong and Jim Dountas, who brokered its sale.
Geoffrey Russell Outfitters is a new gun shop owned by a local pastor, Luke McKinnon, his father, Doug, and friend Steve Russell.
Luke McKinnon says the business stems from a lifelong interest in hunting and shooting sports, and that the store will be geared toward people with similar hobbies.
Were doing less of the tactical (weapons), and more of the hunting and self defense-, concealed carry-type stuff, he says, noting that the inventory ranges from an entry-level pistol priced around $200 to custom pistol that runs $3,700, plus ammunition and knives.
The shop also has classroom space that the owners plan to use to for concealed carry sessions, first-time buyer lessons and other educational programming.
Geoffrey Russell is open 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays. The phone number is 750-0860.
If you have retail news to share, contact me at jdyer@abqjournal.com or 823-3864. For more regular updates on Albuquerque shopping and restaurant news, visit my blog at ABQjournal.com or follow @abqdyer on Twitter.
The $90 million sale of the Albuquerque-based medical diagnostic technology firm IntelliCyt Corp. in June to a global German corporation is a shining success story for the University of New Mexico.
The startup, which launched in 2006 with technology licensed through UNMs Science and Technology Corp., was acquired by the pharmaceutical firm Sartorius AG, an industry giant with $1.5 billion in annual revenue and operations in 110 countries.
UNM could earn nearly $1 million from the sale after cashing out its stock. And, despite acquisition by a European company, IntelliCyt will continue to operate in New Mexico with its current 55-employee workforce.
Its a big win for us, said STC President and CEO Lisa Kuuttila. Id call it a home run.
It may be a harbinger of a lot more success to come, given that dozens of other startups are now working in New Mexico and other states to commercialize a broad range of UNM technology licensed through the STC.
In the past 10 years, 78 new startups have formed with UNM innovation, about 60 percent of which are still in business. Some 75 percent of them are located in New Mexico.
Now, the pace of startup formation is accelerating. Twelve new businesses formed with UNM technology in the fiscal year that ended in June, according to the latest STC statistics compiled for FY 2016. Thats up from nine startups that formed in each of the past three years and is the largest number of new businesses to launch in a single year since the technology transfer program began in 1996.
Thats the big news for this past year a dozen new startups, Kuuttila said. Until now, the most wed done in a single year was nine.
All told, the university signed 54 licensing deals with companies in FY 2016 to take university inventions to market. Thats up from 50 last year and just 25 a decade ago.
The tech transfer program earned at least $2.51 million in royalties and patent income for UNM this year. Those numbers are still preliminary and are expected to climb as more technology licensees report their sales revenue for FY 2016 to STC in the coming weeks, Kuuttila said. The university earned $2.73 million in FY 2015 and just $938,000 10 years ago.
UNM also reported 69 new patents issued by the federal government last year for university inventions. Thats up from 46 in FY 2015 and is by far the most ever issued to UNM in a single year. In STCs last peak year in 2013, the government issued 51 patents to UNM.
The National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association included UNM again this year on its annual list of 100 universities and research organizations worldwide receiving U.S. patents. Its the third year in a row UNM has made the list, released July 12.
The jump in patents, plus more than 100 invention disclosures by UNM faculty and staff every year, reflects a huge change in university culture that is helping to fuel technology transfer, said Joe Cecchi, dean of the UNM School of Engineering and a longtime member of the STC board, which he chaired for seven years.
We just continue to improve every year, Cecchi said. STC has done a great job of helping faculty to get their intellectual property protected and to get it out into startups. Its led to a real change in culture where faculty and staff are actively participating, because they see everything thats happening and they want to be a part of it.
Thats particularly true at the UNM Health Science Center, where technology innovation led to more than three dozen startup companies in the past decade.
In FY 2016, for example, five of the 12 startups that formed are marketing technology from the Health Science Center. That includes things such as new sensors and molecular compounds for medical diagnostics, and therapies for prostate cancer and inflammatory neurological disorders.
Weve created training programs to help our faculty learn how to work with private companies and what to expect when they do, said Dr. Richard Larson, executive vice chancellor for the Health Science Center. Our faculty are encouraged because this allows their inventions to have societal impact. Thats very motivating for them.
STCs unique collaboration with the New Mexico Angels, a group of about 70 individuals who pool their resources to invest in new companies, is also helping to pull a lot more technology out of UNM labs and into the market.
The Angels created three of the 12 startups this past year. Those companies are commercializing new computer encryption technology, a device from a UNM mechanical engineering professor, that could allow people to temporarily color their hair or create hair designs with the swipe of a handheld wand, and a new drug to ease acute inflammation and slow the progress of multiple sclerosis and other neurological disorders.
Were creating opportunities for our investors with technology from both UNMs main campus and the Health Science Center, said NM Angels President John Chavez. Its a good model thats working to create more technology-based companies in New Mexico.
UNM President Robert Frank and other university and community leaders are hoping the new Innovate ABQ initiative to create a high-tech research and development hub in the heart of Albuquerque will accelerate technology transfer even more. UNM, in cooperation with local government and private-sector leaders, broke ground last week on the first building at the Innovate ABQ site at Central and Broadway Downtown.
President Franks support for technology transfer has been critical in moving these efforts forward, Cecchi said. Our local leaders understand what this can do for economic development and theyre providing key support for it.
One ongoing concern, however, is the low level of early-stage capital available in New Mexico for startups, which may have contributed to five of the 12 startups formed this year being located in other states, such as California, Kuuttila said. Last year, seven of the nine startups that formed chose to locate in New Mexico.
Im worried about more of our startups going out of state, Kuuttila said. Clearly we have great technology and were doing good outreach to investors to take it to market. But we just dont have as much money in New Mexico to help build and grow companies as they do in some other places.
A man who threatened a grocery store employee with a knife sparked a standoff in the University area Sunday afternoon, forcing street closures, according to police.
A criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court alleges that an employee at the Smiths on Yale accused Richard Garcia, 34, of shoplifting. Another employee heard shouting and attempted to calm Garcia down, at which point Garcia pulled out a knife.
An employee told Garcia to leave the store, but he refused, police said, and instead told the employee that he was going to cut him.
Albuquerque police spokesman Simon Drobik said Garcia fled, and when officers located him close to the store, he refused to drop the knife, sparking a SWAT response and the closure of a nearby intersection.
He was very animated, Drobik said. He appeared to be on some type of substance.
Drobik said crisis negotiators also responded. Garcia finally gave up when the departments BearCat, an armored police vehicle, approached him, Drobik said.
Once that BearCat came around the corner and Mr. Garcia saw that, he immediately surrendered, Drobik said. That BearCat possibly may have saved his life, community member lives and patrol officer lives.
Officers took Garcia into custody at a nearby bus stop, according to the complaint. He told police he was inside of the store buying water for a friend when his card was rejected. He called his mother and asked her to put money on the card. He said while he was standing at the customer service desk he was suddenly surrounded, police said.
Garcia is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
WHY CANT I WALK TO TRADER JOES?: Carlos Romero asks in an email what is it going to take to fix Ventura between Paseo and Alameda? Ive lived in this neighborhood for 15 years, and Im always astounded that there wasnt better planning to give us two nice lanes with sidewalks in the first place. Its like the developers did the bare minimum, and the city let them get away with it. Walking to Trader Joes is difficult. I realize these are First-World problems, but it doesnt seem like it would take that much to fix this.
All it takes is a developer improving a vacant property.
Melissa Perez, public information officer for Albuquerques Planning Department, says the east side of the road is unincorporated county, and the west side, which is city, has sidewalk. It looks from the GIS map that the only sections on Ventura between Alameda and Paseo that do not have sidewalk are a small section of undeveloped land at Ventura and Carmel Avenue (Northeast Corner) zoned R-D and a small section of undeveloped land at Ventura and Holly (Northwest Corner) zoned SU-2.
As part of the infrastructure requirements, the developer/property owner is required to put in the sidewalks once the development finishes construction, and they do provide a financial guaranty. Therefore, those sections will have sidewalk once the construction is completed. For the SU-2 zoned property, which will likely be commercial or some sort of mixed use, they would need to put those in by the time they receive their certificate of occupancy. For the R-D zoned property, they can install the sidewalks in stages if they get a deferral. For residential communities the builders often seek a deferral so they only install sidewalks on properties where they have finished constructing. This is done so they dont destroy the sidewalk during construction as heavy trucks and equipment would need to drive over them.
STILL WAITING ON THAT THIRD I-25 LANE: Ron Hendrix, superintendent of Mountainair Public Schools, was recently wondering why the work on expanding the freeway (south of the Sunport exit) on Interstate 25 was done if they were just going to keep it to two lanes?
He emails we live in Los Lunas and suffered through all that construction. We thought it would eventually be worth it by helping make the traffic better. We were surprised to see that there wasnt a third lane added when clearly there is room for one.
Its coming.
Last year Bernadette Bell, public relations officer for the New Mexico Department of Transportations District Three Office, explained that the I-25 construction project between the Rio Bravo and Broadway Boulevard exits included the addition of one lane in both north- and southbound directions to tie into a future interchange project at Rio Bravo Boulevard that includes expansion of I-25 to three lanes in each direction. However, that widening work was still in the planning stages, and construction isnt expected to begin until 2017. Rather than return to the Rio Bravo and Broadway section and add an additional lane later, we determined that we would add the lane now while construction of that area was in progress so that there would be less impact to the traveling public later. The third lane will not be open for public use until the Rio Bravo interchange project is complete to avoid the double-bottleneck effect.
THE COST OF SENIOR LICENSE RENEWALS: Hal emails that he recently reached the age of 75. Question: What are the charges, if any, for license renewal if purchased at MVD Express?
Higher than MVD. But first, you should know that a new law means seniors do not have to renew their drivers licenses every year starting at age 75 now those every-year trips dont start until age 79.
That means drivers up to the age of 79 will have to pay to renew their license like everyone else if you go to a state office its $18 for a four-year license and $34 for an eight-year license. Starting at age 79 they are free.
The state offices do offer express lanes for senior drivers to reduce their wait times. The private offices set their own rates, and its smart to check their websites or call before making a trip. According to their website, MVD Express charges seniors $19.95 plus tax for the annual renewal.
PARKERS DO BETTER WITHOUT THE LINES? Finally, Brian recently noticed something curious when I shopped at the Smiths at Montgomery and Tramway. He emails that as the parking lot was being re-paved, and none of the parking space striping had been done, nevertheless it appeared that shoppers had been able to park their vehicles, with few exceptions, more uniformly and evenly-spaced than they typically did within the lines. Even the rows appeared very straight. I cant explain it should we try laissez-faire parking? Probably not, but it was interesting to see.
Assistant editorial page editor DVal Westphal tackles commuter issues for the Metro area on Mondays. Reach her at 823-3858; road@abqjournal.com; or P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103.
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In the moments after three Louisiana officers were fatally shot Sunday morning, Albuquerque police were alerted and instructed to respond to every call in pairs their second such order in 11 days.
Chief Gorden Eden said Sunday afternoon that the buddy system order means that police response times to lower priority calls may be slower.
Our priority two and priority three calls will have a delay in response for service, Eden said. Please understand that why we have to do this is that our officers are in very much unknown situations every single day.
The Albuquerque Police Department issued the same mandate to its officers shortly after five Dallas officers were shot and killed July 7.
By Friday, the department had lifted the order and was again permitting sergeants to decide if a single officer could respond to a lower priority call.
But Sundays order puts it back in place, and officers are again required to use the buddy system.
APD spokesman Simon Drobik said two officers always respond to each priority one call, but lower priority calls like burglaries and accidents with no injuries are sometimes handled by just one officer.
Eden said Sunday afternoon that he had just gotten off a national security briefing conference call, during which he learned that Baton Rouge officers had been attacked as they responded to reports of a suspicious person.
We literally receive many calls like this every single day, he said. The initial call that threw those officers into what appears to be an ambush was a call over a suspicious person.
Bernalillo County Capt. Justin Dunlap said deputies and their supervisors can always opt to respond to any call in pairs, and many do.
There hasnt been a blanket order, Dunlap said. We do encourage deputies to ride two man when things like this are going on.
APDs buddy system will remain in effect indefinitely, Drobik said. The department will use federal intelligence reports to reassess the policy on a daily basis.
While the decision to dispatch two officers to each call was made on a local level, Drobik said many departments are likely doing the same thing.
I dont think its a specific directive from the feds, Drobik said. I think most proactive departments are doing this around the nation.
Mayor Richard Berry urged the community to thank officers they encounter.
Our wounds have not healed in Albuquerque from the deaths of officer (Daniel) Webster, officer (Gregg) Benner, he said. Each and every day, we just pray that our officers get home safely at the end of their shift.
Gov. Susana Martinez said in a statement that the fallen and wounded officers are in her prayers.
Our law enforcement run toward danger so that we dont have to, she said, and I call on New Mexicans to go out of their way to thank a police officer for putting on the badge every day to protect our families.
The nonprofit insurance cooperatives formed under Obamacare with federal financial backing to compete with private insurance companies have had a rough time nationally, with two more shutting down in the past two weeks in Oregon and Illinois.
According to Kaiser Health News, only seven co-ops will remain next year, down from 20 a year ago and 23 at their peak.
But Martin Hickey, CEO of New Mexico Health Connections says the cooperative here is on sound financial footing with over $63 million in reserves. The co-ops membership has doubled over 2015 and is showing a slight first-quarter profit.
Nevertheless, Hickey said the Albuquerque-based nonprofit insurance cooperative is seeking sharp increases in its individual rates next year because it will have to pay a risk adjustment bill of $14.6 million to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for 2015.
And Hickey said that for long-term financial health, the co-op is considering seeking backing from private investors.
CMS relaxed several rules for co-ops earlier in 2016, making it more feasible for them to obtain outside investments.
While Hickey said the organization had retained an investment banker to source out backers, he didnt provide details.
But according to an article in Inside Health Policy, NMHC plans to work with Raymond James, a New York City-based investment firm, to raise a substantial amount of funding for NMHC. The co-op hopes to have a letter of intent by September 2016, according to the publication.
The risk adjustment issue has been one of the hurdles for start-ups, and organizations like Hickeys have expressed their concern to federal officials over the funding formula and its potentially damaging effects on the market, particularly its impact on small insurers.
Hickey said the organization isnt contesting its risk adjustment bill.
Under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the federal government created a system of risk adjustment payments owed by some insurers to other firms. The program redistributes funds from plans with lower-risk customers to those with higher-risk customers. The goal is to stabilize premiums by reducing the incentive to charge high-risk customers higher premiums.
Nine co-ops still in existence are making the payments for the 2015 business year, according to CMS.
Hickey blamed the risk adjustment payment for a projected 31 percent increase in the insurers individual market rates in 2017. The co-ops small and large group rates will see a 20 percent hike, he said, adding that the insurer will be able to hang on and get a larger share of the market.
NHMC will not be materially impacted by this risk-adjustment fee, said Hickey, who is also a physician. Our plan remains on solid financial footing with strong reserves, and we will continue to offer health coverage for a growing number of New Mexicans who value a company that is an active partner in their health.
This flawed process doesnt take into account plans that do an exceptional job of adopting patient-centered model of care that keeps people healthier at lower costs, said Hickey.
Hickey said NMHCs 47,000 members see 30 percent fewer hospitalizations than other New Mexico insurers due to tremendous medical management.
NMHC had net earnings of $420,000 in the first quarter of 2016, as opposed to a loss of $2.3 million in the first quarter of 2015. NMHC received $66 million in loans from the federal government, which it must pay back.
The co-op, even after writing the risk adjustment check, still is in good financial shape, Hickey said.
By the end of the 2016 open enrollment period, 30,000 of NMHC members were individual policy holders, 19,000 of those through the state health exchange. During the year, the co-op had added several big-name employers on group plans, including Goodwill Industries of New Mexico, Youth Development Inc. and Heritage Hotels & Resorts.
New Mexico Health Connections dropped its PPO plans plans that generally offer a greater choice of providers than managed care plans for 2016 in order to focus on plan designs that allow them to better control costs.
Several big-name carriers around the country have taken a similar approach in 2016, and PPOs are less common than they once were in the individual market.
FARMINGTON A new bill is asking Navajo lawmakers to place a referendum before tribal voters, asking them to approve consolidating the nations 110 chapters into a regional government structure.
The bill, which was posted July 9 on the Navajo Nation Councils website, asks the council to place the referendum on the Nov. 8 general election ballot.
The referendum would require a simple majority of votes in order to pass, according to the bill.
If voters approved the measure, it would consolidate the current 110 chapters into 24 regional governments. It would also eliminate the positions of chapter president, vice president and secretary-treasurer and replace those positions with elected commissioners.
The proposed ballot language explains that chapters with fewer than 1,000 registered voters would be represented by one commissioner, and chapters with more than 1,000 registered voters would be represented by two commissioners.
There are 11 chapters in the Northern Agency that have more than a 1,000 registered voters, according to the Navajo Election Administration office in Shiprock.
The chapters would remain as nongovernmental communities, and the transition would occur within four years, the bill states.
Delegate Leonard Tsosie, who represents the Baca-Prewitt, Casamero Lake, Counselor, Littlewater, Ojo Encino, Pueblo Pintado, Torreon and Whitehorse Lake chapters, is sponsoring the bill.
The bill was assigned to the Resources and Development and Naabikiyati committees and to the council, where final authority rests.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Tsosie said the referendum was developed based on a recommendation from the Title 26 Codification Task Force Committee. The task force was formed by the Resources and Development Committee in May 2015, and membership includes personnel from the Office of Navajo Government Development, the Land Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Auditor General and other entities.
If regional governments were established, the amount the tribe allocates to chapters for administrative and operational costs could be reduced and funds to provide services at the local level increased, Tsosie said.
The total amount of funding distributed in the fiscal year budget is divided among the 110 chapters, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
For the proposed fiscal year 2017 budget, the Budget and Finance Committee recommends approximately $11.8 million for nonadministrative costs, approximately $3.8 million for capital infrastructure and $13.7 million for operational costs, according to figures provided by the OMB.
Chapters also receive sales tax revenue, which is also divided between the 110 chapters, according to the OMB.
Earlier in the year, the Office of Navajo Government Development held public education sessions to present information about amending the chapter government system. Tsosie said he attended a number of sessions and heard several comments opposing the change.
Its an idea, and Ive been telling chapters to give it a chance. We hope the people will give it a serious evaluation, he said.
After the standing committees consider the bill, it could go before the council during a special session in August, Tsosie added.
Noel Lyn Smith covers the Navajo Nation for The Daily Times. She can be reached at 505-564-4636.
2016 The Daily Times (Farmington, N.M.)
Visit The Daily Times (Farmington, N.M.) at www.daily-times.com
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ABILENE, Texas A corrections officer at a Texas prison outside Abilene has been found dead and authorities are investigating the death as a homicide.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark says the officer at the Robertson Unit was found unresponsive about 3 a.m. Saturday near the kitchen area of the prison.
He says life saving measures were initiated and the officer then was taken to Hendricks Medical Center in Abilene where the officer, identified only as a 55-year-old, was pronounced dead.
Clark says investigators from the agencys Office of Inspector General are processing the crime scene.
The Robertson Unit is 10 miles north of Abilene. It can hold nearly 3,000 inmates.
The most recent Texas corrections officer slaying occurred a year ago at the Telford Unit near Texarkana.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. A 30-year-old Navajo Nation woman has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty in an alcohol-related fatal accident in northwestern New Mexico.
A judge sentenced Sheiva Dee Joe of Yahtahey, New Mexico, on Friday in federal court in Albuquerque.
Joe had pleaded guilty on March 16 to involuntary manslaughter, acknowledging that she was intoxicated at the time of the Nov. 18, 2014 crash in McKinley County.
Court documents do not disclose the identity of the man who was killed in the crash but say he was a passenger in Joes vehicle.
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This story corrects the name of the New Mexico community to Yahtahey.
LUBBOCK, Texas Lubbock police say three people, including a 10-year-old, were injured when gunfire was exchanged during an argument involving several people. None of the injuries were believed to be life-threatening.
Police say 22-year-old Kenneth Davis has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault following Saturday nights shooting. Police are continuing to investigate the incident, which started when an 82-year-old man confronted children playing in his yard.
Police say the children left, but returned with several adults and a verbal confrontation ensued. Police say Davis drew a firearm and began shooting at the 82-year-old, who returned fire. Gunfire struck the 82-year-old, his 44-year-old son and a 10-year-old.
Davis was jailed Monday with bond set at $7,500. Jail records dont list an attorney for him.
Work is set to begin this month on a $50 million expansion project at the Santa Ana Star Casino that will include the propertys first attached hotel.
The casino declined to release specific details about the size of the hotel but said construction would take about two years. The expansion project also includes a new casual dining steakhouse and espresso bar, according to a news release.
It is an essential step forward for the Pueblo of Santa Ana and the local community, Santa Ana Star Casino General Manager John Cirrincione said in the release. This project will synergize the Pueblos businesses and create jobs. Most importantly, it enhances our ability to meet the fundamental mission of our companyproviding economic sustainability for the Pueblo of Santa Ana, which supports essential tribal programs and services for its people.
The project is being designed by JCJ Architecture, and Jaynes Construction will be general contractor.
This is not the pueblos first effort to build a casino hotel.
It broke ground on what was supposed to be a seven-story, 288-room casino hotel in 2000 but halted construction in 2002 and never completed it. It later converted some of the finished space for uses that included a parking garage, customer service area and more gaming space.
The new hotel will be east of the casino, said Shannon Guess, the casinos community relations manager.
Santa Ana estimates it will create approximately 120 permanent positions and hundreds of temporary construction jobs.
This expansion is an investment in our people and in our future, said Pueblo of Santa Ana Governor Myron Armijo. We are proud to begin this next chapter and continue building a responsible, innovative business that will benefit our children and our childrens children for many decades to come.
While the states tribal casinos do not report revenue to the state, they do report the net win each quarter. Thats the amount wagered on slot machines less the amount they pay out in cash and prizes and certain fees. Santa Anas net win was $21.43 million in the first quarter of 2016.
Santa Ana Star Casino is off NM 550 at the Jemez Dam Road just north of Rio Rancho. It was the first Indian casino to operate in New Mexico, opening its doors in 1993.
LOS LUNAS Some San Clemente residents objected to a proposed 1,600-acre rail park at a recent planning and zoning meeting here, saying they didnt want an industrial park in their front yard.
You are taking our retirement from us, and I am too old to start all over, San Clemente resident Annette Kaylor said during a hearing on annexation and zoning for the Central New Mexico Rail Park. You put a Santa Fe railroad up there and its going to be so noisy none of us can rest.
The 1,627 acres of Huning Limited Liability Partnership real estate is owned by Rock and Rail, LLC.
Commissioners voted unanimously to recommend the annexation and special-use zoning designation to the village council, which will consider the issue at its July 28 meeting.
The broker, Tim Cummins, owner of Real Estate Investment Opportunities, LLC, which also owns the Merillat facility and Los Morros Business Park, said the project was an opportunity for the village to create another job center, potentially providing 3,000 to 5,000 jobs once completed.
The broker explained that the rail park would not be a rail yard, but rather an industrial park similar to Los Morros Business Park except with rail service.
That would allow us to be competitive with businesses that need rail service to export their goods and services, he said.
The rail park would allow manufacturers to move goods and services on N.M. 6, west to Interstate 40 to California, he said.
Homeowner Ed Chaveux said he was concerned with the number of shipping containers that BNSF would be bringing in.
It could be hundreds of thousands, Chaveux said. In order to move these containers they have to have cranes, they have to have trucks, they have to have extendable trailers that these containers will fit on.
Residents also raised concerns about traffic, air quality and the projects effect on water resources.
A few spoke in favor of the project. Among them was Joseph R. Trujillo, who said the village is in dire need of more jobs.
The whole north side should be industrial, Trujillo said.
BELEN Livestock owners will now have an easier time finding hay dealers, thanks to a new website developed by a pair of New Mexico farmers.
Owners and creators of hayfinders.com, Orlando Castillo and Joey Fresquez, know about the difficulty of locating hay and launched the site to connect the consumer directly to the farmer.
There are more than 24,000 farms and ranches in New Mexico, Fresquez said. Hayfinders.com helps livestock owners in need of hay to access small and large quantities, as well as help the farmers who have hay available.
Castillo and Fresquez, who are brothers-in-law, have explored different career paths, although theyve always had a tie to ranching and farming.
Castillo was born and raised on a small alfalfa farm in Valencia County, while Fresquez grew up in a ranching community in northern New Mexico. Fresquez, married to Castillos sister, now owns the family hay farm.
In addition to farming, Castillo has a background in web development and, with Fresquezs knowledge of the current hay market, creating hayfinders.com was the next step. When the duo knew they were ready to move forward with their venture, they visited the New Mexico Small Business Development Center at UNM-Valencia.
we were just starting out, (needing) guidance and their team was able to step in and help us. We knew we had a good idea, Fresquez said. Orlando had web technical knowledge, we both know the farming community, but we didnt have the business side.
Chris Garcia at the development center helped Fresquez and Castillo by walking them through the process of obtaining a business license, developing a business plan and forming an LLC and partnership agreement.
Right now, Hayfinders is a local venture, but Fresquez and Castillo are confident that farmers throughout the state and eventually the country will soon be using the service.
People from Texas and California already travel to New Mexico to buy hay, Fresquez said. Its our hope that Hayfinders.com makes the process easier for all, helping New Mexico farmers and the overall economy.
Farmers posting to the website receive the first month free, then pay $12.99 a month
AUSTIN, Texas Activists and educators on Monday called a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for use across Texas biased and poorly researched and argued that its contents are especially offensive in a state where a majority of public school students are Hispanic.
A battle over the high school text is shaping up to become the latest ideological clash for the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education. Its members have long waged high-profile debates over the teaching of evolution, climate change and Christianitys influence on Americas Founding Fathers to more than 5.2 million public school students statewide.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on the board, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program. Instead, publishers were asked to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
Texas got one submission: Virginia-based publisher Momentum Instruction offered a textbook titled Mexican American Heritage. But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
What we have now is a deeply flawed and a deeply offensive textbook, Celina Moreno, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said at a news conference in the lobby of the Texas Education Agency, where the board meets.
Moreno and other activists are part of the new Responsible Ethnic Studies Text Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as multiple factual errors. The coalition said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and 70s as adopting a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.
Industrialists were very driven, competitive men, the textbook says, according to excerpts. In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full days work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of manana, or tomorrow.'
A phone number for Momentum Instruction rang unanswered Monday. The liberal watchdog group Texas Freedom Network says the textbook publisher is controlled by Cynthia Dunbar, a former Texas Board of Education member who has advocated for state curriculum standards downplaying the constitutional separation of church and state.
Hispanics now make up 52 percent of Texas public school students, with most being Mexican-Americans.
The education board plans to vote in November on whether to approve the Mexican American Heritage textbook. Texas more than 1,000 school districts dont have to use board-sanctioned classroom materials, but most do.
As a result, Texas has an outsized influence on school textbooks nationally. Its market is so large that edits made by publishers to meet the states curriculum standards can wind up altering content in textbooks sold elsewhere.
David Bradley, a social conservative and veteran Board of Education member, said Monday that activists who forced Texas to solicit proposed ethnic studies textbooks are now angry with the results.
You ought to be careful what you ask for. You got it, Bradley, a Republican from Beaumont, said in a phone interview.
He said Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses.
Im Italian, Irish and French, Bradley said. And I feel like Im being discriminated against when we only have an exclusive minority studies program in Texas.
CHICAGO A racially charged narrative has re-emerged in the U.S. due to fatal shootings of black men by white officers as well as the shooting deaths of eight officers in Texas and Louisiana. This round of violence and protests against such violence began and continued this weekend in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Heres a look at whats happened in the span of less than two weeks in July:
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TUESDAY, JULY 5: ALTON STERLING, BATON ROUGE
The 37-year-old black man had been a fixture for several years outside of a convenience store, where he sold CDs. That night, two white police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II pinned him to the pavement during an altercation and fatally shot him. Police have said Sterling, who as a convicted felon was barred from legally carrying a gun, was armed and an eyewitness said he had a gun in his pocket.
Sterlings death was captured on cellphone video by an anti-violence group and spread quickly online, sparking days of protests in the city where 54 percent of the population is black and more than 25 percent live in poverty.
The U.S. Justice Department has opened a federal civil rights investigation into Sterlings death and has made it clear it does not want a parallel local investigation. The officers are on administrative leave and had prior use of force complaints.
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WEDNESDAY, JULY 6: PHILANDO CASTILE, FALCON HEIGHTS, MINNESOTA
Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria supervisor, was driving in a St. Paul suburb with his girlfriend and her young daughter in the car when police pulled them over. Castile, who was black, was shot by Latino officer Jeronimo Yanez. Castile died at a hospital.
Castiles girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, began livestreaming on Facebook shortly after the shooting and said that Castile was shot while reaching for his ID after telling the officer he had a gun permit and was armed. The next day, Reynolds told reporters that Castile informed the officer about the gun as he reached for his wallet, she told him Castile was licensed and then the officer fired shots.
Yanez and his partner, Joseph Kauser, who was present for the shooting, were placed on administrative leave. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating, while the federal Justice Department is staying on the sideline despite pleas from the governor and other officials.
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THURSDAY, JULY 7: FIVE OFFICERS, DALLAS
Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Dallas to peacefully protest Sterlings and Castiles deaths. Then shots rang out, aimed at police officers. Five were killed and nine were injured, two civilians were hurt. Authorities negotiated with 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a black military veteran who police said told them he was targeting white officers because of the recent shootings, but eventually used a robot-delivered bomb to kill him.
Initially, Dallas authorities said Johnson had a stockpile of bomb-making materials, though two officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity contradicted such claims recently. Johnsons friends and family also disagreed with officials characterization of him as a loner, saying that he was a gregarious, colorblind extrovert at least until he returned from Afghanistan after being accused of sexual harassment.
The Dallas mayor and police chief called for calm in the wake of the shooting. President Barack Obama and wife, Michelle, Vice President Joe Biden and wife, Jill, and former President George W. Bush and wife, Laura, attended a large memorial service for the officers.
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FRIDAY, JULY 8-MONDAY, JULY 11: PROTESTS IN BATON ROUGE
The day after the Dallas shooting, officers in Missouri, Tennessee and Georgia were all shot and wounded, with at least two of them being racially motivated.
Protesters were undaunted, rallying daily in Baton Rouge, outside of governors residences in Minnesota and Georgia and blocking interstates in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Memphis, Tennessee. All were mostly calm affairs, with some arrests.
In Baton Rouge, however, where the city is segregated into the southern white section and mostly black northern part, tensions came to a head the weekend of July 9. Police arrested more than 200 demonstrators over a three-day period and wore riot gear, carried rifles and drove armored vehicles. Protesters claimed authorities became agitated, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana questioned police tactics during peaceful protests.
On July 12, police in Baton Rouge said they had arrested four people who were accused of stealing several handguns as part of a substantial, credible threat to harm police officers in the area.
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SUNDAY, JULY 17: THREE OFFICERS, BATON ROUGE
At 8:44 a.m. Sunday, reports began coming in that officers had been shot less than a mile from police headquarters. Three died and three were critically injured. One of the officers killed was Montrell Jackson, a black man who wrote on Facebook days before I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me.
Louisiana authorities said the suspect, Gavin Long, a black 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, was definitely seeking out police. He was shot and killed Sunday.
Long, who had served in the Marines for five years and been deployed to Iraq, changed his name last year and declared membership in a black separatist group that considers itself beyond the reach of state and federal laws. Online posts by a man using an alias of Longs said people must fight back after the deaths of black men at the hands of police.
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Associated Press writer Nomaan Merchant in Dallas contributed to this report.
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The Institute of Internal Auditors opened its international conference Monday in New York with a pair of reports on the internal audit function and audit committee oversight.
The first report, Voice of the Customer: What Stakeholders Are Telling Internal Audit, co-authored by current IIA chairman Larry Harrington and incoming chair Angela Witzany, examines the competing priorities of corporate executives and board members. The document recommends ways for internal auditors to build better relationships with management and board members.
The second report, Six Audit Committee Imperatives: Enabling Internal Audit to Make a Difference, co-authored by Jim DeLoach, a managing director at the consulting firm Protiviti, and Charlotta Lofstrand Hjelm, chief internal auditor at the Swedish insurance company Lansforsakringar, provides advice to audit committee members on ways to improve internal audit by allowing auditors to move beyond assurance functions and think beyond the scope of the audit plan.
The reports are based on findings from the IIAs Global Internal Audit Common Body of Knowledge (CBOK) Stakeholder Study, which surveyed more than 1,000 respondents across 23 countries.
These first two reports offer a tantalizing glimpse into the wealth of information gathered through the CBOK Stakeholder Study, said IIA president and CEO Richard F. Chambers in a statement. This comprehensive study will provide material for a number of reports in the coming year.
The reports are available via the CBOK Resource exchange at www.theiia.org/goto/CBOK.
The conference coincides with the 75th anniversary of the IIA. Separately, Protiviti also released Monday a new edition of its annual series of "Internal Auditing Around the World" books, profiling 22 companies and executives in different industries and locations around the world. This year, the report focuses on the perspectives of women leaders of each business's internal audit function. To download the book, visit http://www.protiviti.com/iaworld.
In addition, Deloitte Global released its own study on internal audit Monday, "Evolution or irrelevance? Internal Audit at a crossroads," based on a survey of more than 1,200 chief audit executives in 29 countries. Only 28 percent of the respondents to Deloittes survey said they believe their internal audit groups have a strong impact and influence on their organizations, but 64 percent believe they will have a strong impact and influence in their organizations in the next three to five years.
A roundup of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.
Chicago: A federal court has barred preparer Victor M. Crown from preparing returns for others.
According to a civil complaint the U.S. filed in 2014, Crown prepared returns that falsely claimed that recipients of discrimination awards related to a class-action lawsuit could claim large deductions on their federal returns and that falsely inflated the amount of wages that City of Chicago employees claimed were withheld from their paychecks.
Crown promoted two false and fraudulent schemes through which he claimed that his clients could obtain significant federal refunds, the complaint alleged. In the first scheme, he allegedly falsely inflated the amount of income tax withheld from his clients paychecks because the City of Chicago purportedly calculated an incorrect withholding amount.
The second alleged scheme is founded on the 1969 class-action lawsuit Shakman v. Democratic Organization of Cook County et al., a discrimination case against the City of Chicago that alleged that the city improperly used political patronage when hiring and promoting public officials. As part of an agreed settlement order, the city set up a $12 million fund to compensate claimants for violations of the federal district courts orders. Claims were submitted to the court-appointed monitor, who was responsible for evaluating the claims and, if justified, assigning a monetary award amount.
According to the complaint against Crown, he asserted that his clients who were Shakman award recipients were entitled to claim net operating loss deductions for the difference between their claim and the amount they actually received in their award.
In explaining its reasons for enjoining Crown, the court noted that the scope of Crowns misconduct involved at least 2,900 fraudulent tax returns, as well as his failure to accept responsibility and cease his operations.
The courts injunction order forbids Crown from preparing returns for others and from making false statements about securing any tax benefit by virtue of receiving or not receiving an award in the Shakman litigation. It also requires Crown to give the federal government a list of all his prep clients since 2010.
Oxnard, Calif.: Preparer Rodrigo Pablo Paul Lozano, a.k.a. El Profe, 61, has been convicted of conspiracy to file false refund claims and for having signed returns claiming more than $53 million in fraudulent refunds.
Before the IRS was able to identify and stop the scheme, it had already paid out more than $23 million of refunds to the defendant and his co-conspirators.
According to the evidence at trial, Lozanos scheme was based on his applying for ITINs. Co-conspirators provided Lozano with fake ID documents, such as birth certificates and Matricula cards supposedly issued by the Mexican government, which Lozano used to obtain ITINs in the names shown on the fake documents.
He then used the ITINs to file three years of income tax returns based on wage and withholding information contained in fake W-2s; he also listed three or four fictitious dependents in whose names Lozano also applied for ITINs.
All of the schemes returns requested refunds, with most in the $3,000 to $4,000 range, which they requested by claiming the ACTC, with the number of dependents and wage amounts on the returns falsified to maximize the ACTC.
Lozano submitted more than 12,000 false returns in an 18-month period in 2011 and 2012 during which time his employees told him at least five times that the identity and W-2 documents looked suspicious. The IRS sent hundreds of warning notices to Lozano stating that the returns and W-2s were invalid. Despite the repeated warnings, Lozano continued to direct his employees to file the fraudulent tax returns.
Lozano split the refunds with his co-conspirators, including having employees count out tens of thousands of dollars in cash in a bathroom located next to his office space. Lozano operated his prep business, Ayuda, by renting space from businesses that catered to Hispanic clients. He went by the name El Profe, as he was a teacher before he began preparing tax returns.
Fairview, N.J.: Preparer Sharon Ashby, 38, has pleaded guilty to one count of preparing fraudulent returns.
According to court documents and statements in court, Ashby prepared false returns for clients by intentionally including fraudulent employment information on W-2s that showed the clients earning wages from employers where they were not employed or claiming deductions to which they were not entitled. Ashby e-filed these returns with the IRS and kept a portion of the refunds.
Ashby admitted that for tax years 2010 through 2012, she prepared 48 fraudulent returns for $238,877 in phony refunds.
The count of filing false claims with the government carries a maximum of five years prison and a heavy fine.
Sentencing is October 4.
Dayton, Ohio: Preparer Tarralis Mack, 49, of Atlanta, has pleaded guilty after being accused of devising and executing a plan where he filed false claims for tax refunds for his clients, according to published reports.
The scheme was carried out between March 2009 and April 2010, according to court documents. Mack also reportedly owned and operated Metro Tax Advisors between 2006 and 2010 as the only full-time employee and offered his services in Ohio, Indiana and about 13 other states. He also posted fliers at General Motors and its affiliated plants near Dayton and Indianapolis, reports added.
Mack typically charged $200 to $500 per tax return, reports said, adding that according to the court documents he falsely told potential clients that hed previously worked for Fortune 500 companies and a tax consultancy group that assisted taxpayers to reduce debt to the IRS.
Additionally, Mack also told his clients he worked for the IRS, which he never did, reports said.
He reportedly never included his name or signature on federal returns he prepared, guaranteed clients the largest refund possible and claimed false refunds he knew his clients were unentitled to receive. None of Macks clients provided him with false information, according to the court documents cited.
Federal prosecutors reportedly said that Mack cost the IRS $456,594, and as part of his plea agreement Mack agreed to compensate the IRS nearly $280,000 for the loss. He also is prohibited from preparing or filing tax returns for the IRS for anyone but himself, reports added.
New outlets also said that he faces three years in prison.
Dallas: Preparer Kevin Troy Jernigan has pleaded guilty to one count of aiding or assisting in the preparation or presentation of a false or fraudulent individual income tax return.
Since 2007, Jernigan was the owner and a preparer at The Parks 11 prep service. During tax years 2007 through 2012, he prepared and filed more than 1,300 returns that contained false and inflated deductions and credits intended to inflate the refund. These returns cost the Treasury approximately $2,250,780.
In January 2010, Jernigan also prepared and filed with the IRS a 2009 return on behalf of taxpayer, CJ. Jernigan included $27,019 as a Schedule C business loss that he knew to be false. The refund was fraudulently inflated to $5,819 and resulted in a tax loss in the amount of $6,432.
Jernigan faces a maximum of three years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Following his plea, Jernigan was taken into custody following multiple violations of his pretrial release.
Xenia, Ohio: Preparer Robert Coates, 37, has pleaded guilty to filing false income tax returns, according to published reports.
The IRS reportedly said that Coates filed at least 170 false returns for the 2011 tax year, causing a loss of $445,450, with $167,422.63 being directed into bank accounts in Coates name or under his control.
Coates filed fraudulent returns on behalf of people referred to him by other clients or those who responded to a flyer he distributed in the area, according to authorities cited by news outlets. Coates reportedly promised clients that they could get refunds even if they didnt work or were getting disability payments.
The taxpayers reportedly didnt know Coates included fraudulent household help income to maximize the Earned Income Credit and generate a refund. He also knowingly included fake totals of qualified educational expenses.
Sentencing is November 10, reports added, when Coates could face five years in prison and a fine up to $250,000.
Gera Developments first TVC campaign aims to capture the essence of the brands philosophy with an unconventional method of telling their OUTDO story.
Gera Developments has raised benchmarks in the real estate realm with their constant innovation which are way ahead of time - be it India's first developer to offer a 5 year warranty (since 2004) or India's first ChildCentricTM project. The brand also invests in customer delight and community creation, which is also their other main differentiator. Their focus has been on creating value for their customers post sales.
As a part of their extensive brand campaign, Gera unveiled its new positioning - 'Outdo', to the external stakeholders by way of a brand film. It showcases how the brand has always believed in outdoing itself to achieve greater heights and raise the standards for themselves and the stakeholders.
This story is in the form of a 50 second brand film that draws parallel with some of the famous outdoers of the world. It shows examples of how through the course of history certain individuals believed in not being content with the status-quo. The film illustrates the brands philosophy through the OUTDO series by showcasing how these individuals have pushed the existing boundaries and by out-doing have changed the world for better. The film talks about how Geras belief in out-doing, thereby breaking conventional brick and mortar campaigns usually showcased by real estate companies. The 30 second TV commercial will go on air during this week.
Highlighting the essence of the TV commercial, Mr. Rohit Gera, Managing Director, Gera Developments said, A year ago, brand Gera embarked upon a journey to bring about a cultural transformation within the organization and also amongst all its stakeholders. This would also reflect the brand's core purpose and enable the brand to drive itself into newer uncharted territories and we chose the word OUTDO as the distillation of our entire brand philosophy. We wanted to communicate to our customers about our OUTDO journey through service, product quality and brand offerings, and this film encapsulates this very well. We worked with the strategic planning team of Paradigm Plus who highlighted the brand's DNA and the core values which are driving the organization for more than 5 decades in this exceptionally well made and unique film.
Gera has chosen an unconventional route of narrating this story through this film which also lends itself to a 360 degree campaign panning across TV, multiplexes, social media, print, electronic and outdoor mediums. The story is told in a visually rich treatment that uses various paper craft techniques and merges it with stop-motion filmmaking. The whole film takes place on a drawing table, where most of the world-changing ideas begin. The drawing board is used as a metaphor to the companys core business of real estate development. The film graphically depicts stories of how the Wright brothers invented the very first flying machine and how Thomas Alva Edison came up with the bright idea of a light bulb, the stop motion takes us through a flipbook journey of the telephone from its first form to the new age smart phone that not only allows you to talk but also see your loved ones from long distance. Just like all of these, Gera has challenged the status quo of the real estate industry with unique offerings like the 5 year warranty on construction since 12 years. The re-measurement clause in their customer agreements and a week-long free-look period after booking simply inspires confidence amongst the customers. Even their mobile CRM app - GeraWorld has given customers a smarter, easier and faster way to connect with the company. Their community-creation initiatives have built bonds that last a lifetime, weaving thousands of content customers into one beautiful family.
With the Outdo campaign, Gera Developments now aims to inspire all its stakeholders to participate in this cultural transformation to achieve greater heights. The campaign engages the customer, showcasing the brands philosophy by using the hashtag #DareToOutdo through series of print and social media campaigns on all platforms.
Commenting on the concept of the Outdo campaign, Mr. Rajat Sarkar, Founder, Paradigm Plus said, Raising standards of business has always been intrinsic to brand Gera. Since Gera embarked upon a journey for their brand, thus the new positioning was derived called OUTDO. Outdo is a simple word which beautifully and succinctly captures the essence of what the brand has always been about.
The communication campaign led by the TVC faced a challenge to capture this very essence of the brand and inject the target audience with it. The process of Stopmotion, use of Kirigami paper art, mix of illustrations, craft props, computer graphics has been unconventional and enriching. The production process of this film itself reflects the very thought of OUTDO. It pushed us to go all out.
Highlights:
The Outdo film is a narrative of how the world is built by people who Dare To Outdo. The film draws parallel with objects that made their inventors famous but are enjoyed today because outdoers refused to settle with the status quo and kept improving on them.
The original film is of 50 seconds and was released on social media where it met with snowballing success of Likes and Shares. The film crossed 6.7 Lakh views on Youtube and Facebook combined in its first week itself.
The content and highly innovative treatment of the film itself works as a big hook for viewers and it has attracted compliments from all quarters including the advertising fraternity.
Wtach the TVC here: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=zpYmpo0loWg
Campaign Credits:
Creative Agency: Paradigm Plus India
Rajat Sarkar Founder & Director
Ira Gupta Creative Director, Copy
Santosh Joglekar Creative Director, Art
Vinay Joy - Director, Planning
Anuja Paralkar Director, Brand Services
Production House: Bubble Wrap Films
Director: Luv Kalla
Producers: Ketaki Guhagarkar
Animator : Vaibhav More
Paper Artists : Harikrishnan B Panicker & Deepti
Music : Rupert Fernandes
Fans of the unrivalled sci-fi franchise Star Trek will have five more reasons to celebrate along with the release of the much-awaited Star Trek movie. Star Trek Beyond distributed by Viacom18 Motion Pictures, collaborates with Smirnoff, worlds No.1 Vodka to launch a range of exquisite cocktails crafted to appeal to the Trekkie in you.
Traversing through space, the third instalment of the iconic Star Trek Reboot Series: Star Trek Beyond will release in 3D and 2D on July 22nd 2016 in both English and Hindi. The film witnesses the Enterprise crew encountering a mysterious new enemy who puts them and everything the Federation stands for to the test. Directed by acclaimed director Justin Lin, from the famed Fast and Furious franchise, comes the much-awaited Star Trek Beyond.
Commenting on this unique partnership, Rudrarup Datta, Senior Vice President, Viacom18 Motion Picture, Marketing said, Star Trek is one of the most widely followed franchise across the world, and were delighted to bring 3rd installment of the rebooted star trek series with Star Trek Beyond to the Indian audience. We at Viacom18 Motion Pictures are constantly looking to go beyond the conventional means to bring fans and audiences closer to their favorite movies. The collaboration with Smirnoff helps us engage with the young urbane audiences in fun cool way and add a delightful twist to their Star Trek experience.
Smirnoff vodka has always been at the helm of cocktail culture and for our association with Star Trek Beyond, we have crafted an exclusive range of Smirnoff cocktails that add an exquisite twist to the traditional favorites, making it a unique and out of this world experience said Hemant Mundkur Brand Ambassador at Diageo India and celebrated mixologist who has created the Star Trek Beyond Smirnoff cocktails that will be available across top pubs and restaurants.
The choice of cocktails include -
The Spocktail - Begin your voyage into the night and beyond with this electric mix of Smirnoff Vodka, Fresh Red Grapes and Apple Juice with a splash of Lime and Soda.
Vulcan Salute - No more protocols! Smirnoff Vodka, Crushed Ice and Orange and Lime Wedges come together in this tangy mix an excuse to give up reason and logic to have some fun.
Beam Me Up - Transport yourself into a night of fun with this heady mix of Smirnoff Expresso, Butterscotch and Coffee- something that even Scotty would approve!
Warp Driver - Break the barriers with our version of the classic Screw Driver! Try the tropical fusion of Smirnoff Vodka and Pineapple Juice with Coconut Syrup and some blue Curacao.
LIIT (& PROSPER) - Vulcan salute merges with the classic cocktail in this snazzy combo of Smirnoff Orange, Captain Morgan and Gin combined Peach, Cranberry and Lemonade.
These limited edition concoctions are available until July 31st, 2016 at your favorite restaurants across multiple-cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata.
Distributed by Viacom18 Motion Pictures in India, Star Trek Beyond releases on 22nd July in theatres near you.
Edinburgh Airport welcomed the first WOW air flight from Iceland yesterday.
Travellers arriving from the Nordic nation, as well as North America were greeted at the arrival gate by a bagpipe player, providing an authentic Scottish musical welcome.
Flights will depart Edinburgh Airport for the airlines hub in Reykjavik twice-weekly between July and October on Sundays and Wednesdays, with a total flight time of two hours thirty minutes. Passengers travelling through will then have a short stopover before continuing on to one of the airlines North American destinations - Boston, Washington D.C., Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.
Skuli Mogensen, founder and CEO of WOW air, said: Its an extremely proud moment to see the first WOW air plane set off from the runaway at Edinburgh Airport. As our third departure point in the UK, the commencement of this route signifies our continued growth in Britain and our aim to improve accessibility between the two isles. We look forward to welcoming Scottish holidaymakers on board over the course of the summer, en route to memorable adventures in Iceland, the US and Canada.
Gordon Dewar, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Airport, said: Iceland is an increasingly popular destination for Scottish holidaymakers and this new route also increases choice of flying between Scotland and the United States.
WOW air are a very welcome new airline to Edinburgh Airport; they have rightly recognised the increasing demand for connectivity to and from Scotland. This news further bolsters Edinburgh Airports position as the leader for business and tourism connectivity between Scotland and international destinations.
Malcolm Roughead, Chief Executive at VisitScotland, said: Scottish tourism punches above its weight on the world stage and this new service from WOW air, offering flights from Reykjavik to Edinburgh and connecting from five key destinations in North America, will further strengthen our connectivity in this hugely important market.
"The USA is our biggest global market and a diaspora stronghold, so we are delighted to welcome the launch of this low-cost service, which will allow even more Americans to enjoy a holiday in Scotland.
Humza Yousaf, Minister for Transport and the Islands said: Im delighted to see this new service get off the ground and congratulate everyone involved. This link will bring real benefits to Scottish businesses - as well as being the gateway to Iceland, Keflavik is also an important hub airport offering onward travel to important international markets in the United States of America and Canada. It will no doubt prove very popular with tourists too. I wish Edinburgh Airport and Wow air every success with this new route.
The Edinburgh to Reykjavik flight will be operated by an A320 aircraft, with single-class A321 and A330 aircraft operating the connecting routes between Iceland and North America.
Pakistan foiled a gutsy England run chase to win a gripping first test by 75 runs at Lord`s on Sunday.
Having set the hosts a 283 victory target after their second innings was ended on 215 in the morning, Pakistan`s bowlers, led by leg spinner Yasir Shah, provided a masterclass to bowl England out for 207.
Mohammad Amir, back from a five-year ban for spot-fixing, sealed victory when he clean bowled Jake Ball.
England had never chased down such a total at Lord`s and while Jonny Bairstow was at the crease they appeared to still have a chance but he was undone by Yasir when he was two short of his half century.
The end was nigh after that as the final three wickets went down for 11 runs.
Pakistan`s players celebrated victory by doing press-ups in front of their jubilant supporters.
It is one of the top wins as captain and for Pakistan as a team, captain Misbah-ul-Haq said. I am very proud of the team and the way they came out and showed really good skills.
Today, mentally everybody was strong, and were patient. Everyone bowled well, especially Yasir Shah.
England began the chase confidently with Alastair Cook striking a boundary off his first ball, but the skipper was dispatched after he stabbed at Rahat Ali`s delivery and was caught by Sarfraz Ahmed.
There`s a bitter taste in the dressing room, conceded Cook. Some of the shots (were risky) but it`s up to the individuals to change.
I always thought we were two wickets behind where we wanted to be.
Alex Hales soon followed his captain to the pavilion after top-edging Rahat to Mohammad Hafeez before Rahat removed dangerman Joe Root for nine after he played a careless pull shot and was caught in the deep by Yasir.
James Vince (42) and Gary Ballance (43) chipped away at Pakistan`s lead with valuable contributions but Vince got a thick edge driving Wahab Riaz and was caught at the second attempt by Younus Khan at second slip.
A local court on Monday ordered the police to file an FIR against Bengaluru Development Minister K J George and two police officers for abetting the suicide of Deputy Superintendent of Police M K Ganapati.
Mr. George, 58, has resisted quitting on the grounds that there is no direct evidence of his role in the death of MK Ganapathi, who was found hanging in uniform earlier this month after accusing the politician of harassing him in a television interview. The minister, who handles Urban Development, has so far been supported by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.
George declined to comment when journalists sought a response from him.
Following the order, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has gone into a huddle with senior ministers to take a call on whether Georges resignation should be obtained or not. They will also discuss whether or not to appeal to the Karnataka High Court in connection with the FIR over Georges alleged involvement in the suicide.
Ganapathys wife Pavana and Nehal had approached the court, stating the police had rejected a complaint lodged by them with the Kushalanagar police on July 10 against George and IPS officials A M Prasad and Pranab Mohanty.
In his complaint, Nehal had said his father had made a dying declaration naming George and the two officers and their acts amounted to abetting suicide.
Appealing to the court to take cognisance of the offence punishable under IPC section 306 read with Section 34, the complaint also claimed the accused were highly placed and influential people who had prevailed upon police from taking action against them.
Stating that the blatant attacks on defence personnel in Jammu and Kashmir was an extremely alarming matter, the Shiv Sena on Monday hit out at Pakistan for fanning terrorism in the state and asserted that if not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Valley would have been burning.
In a span of 15 days, 20 attacks have happened on the police and the Army. So many defence personnel have lost their lives and it is alarming that so many have gone missing. Its not a new thing that Pakistan is fanning terrorism in Kashmir. Anyway, Kashmir would have burned if PM Modi had not taken control of the situation, Sanjay Raut said.
Lashing out at Pakistan for branding slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani as a martyr, he added Islamabads assertions were of no value as for India, Wani was and will be a terrorist.
Every Burhan Wani still in Jammu and Kashmir must be destroyed, Raut added.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley.
After Burhans death, Kashmir is on boil and about 40 people have been killed and over 3,000 including 1,600 civilians injured in clashes between youth and security men during protests.
Curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest continued on Monday for 10th consecutive day.
The life in the Valley remained paralysed after Burhans killing, due to strike called by the separatists and curfew-like restrictions imposed by the authorities.
Mehr Tarar, the Pakistani columnist who sparred on Twitter with Congress politician Shashi Tharoors wife Sunanda Pushkar days before she was found dead in a hotel suite in 2014, was questioned by the Delhi police earlier this year.
Tarars questioning took place in February at a place of her choice a prominent hotel in New Delhi. She was questioned by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case in the presence of women police personnel, sources said on Monday.
Summons could not be issued to Tarar as she is a Pakistani national but she had earlier stated that she was open to joining investigation into the matter and had also written to a senior official communicating the same.
51-year-old Sunanda was found dead at a suite in a five-star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, a day after her spat with Tarar on Twitter over her alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.
Sources say Ms Tarar also denied exchanging any intimate emails or messages with Mr Tharoor, a Congress parliamentarian from Kerala and a former minister.
A witness close to Ms. Pushkar had said that she had asked her to help retrieve messages that she suspected Mr. Tharoor had deleted from his mobile phone.
Joint Commissioner of Police (South Eastern Range) R.P. Upadhyay confirmed that Ms. Tarar, with whom Ms. Pushkar had a spat on twitter days before her death, was questioned. He, however, refused to divulge further details.
Mr. Upadhyay said Ms. Tarar was told to join the investigation and she was asked to reply to a questionnaire prepared by the investigators.
She had written to then Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi, expressing her willingness to come to Delhi and get examined. The questioning took place at a hotel in the city.
Sources said the members of the Special Investigating Team asked her about the allegations made by Ms. Pushkar prior to her death that the journalist was romantically involved with Mr. Tharoor. She is learnt to have refuted these claims.
Fadnavis has clipped the wings of Pankaja Munde who was a contender for chief ministerial post.
The cold war between Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Minister for Rural Development Pankaja Munde has intensified ever since she has been divested of the important water conservation portfolio in the Cabinet reshuffle. The troubles for Pankaja is not going to end soon as she is likely to be replaced by Sambhaji Patil Nilangekar, Minister for Labour, Earthquake Rehabilitation, Skill Development and Ex-servicemen Welfare as the guardian minister of Latur. Thus, Fadnavis has clipped the wings of Pankaja after the cabinet reshuffle. Even the licence of a sugar factory owned by her has been cancelled. She continues to hold two other portfolios, rural development and women and child department.
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. After being relieved from the water conservation portfolio Pankaja Munde said she was to reach Singapore for attending a global water leader summit but wont do so as she was no longer the minister of that department. Fadnavis nonetheless tried to pacify Pankaja by asking her to attend the event as she is the senior minister from Maharashtra. Even Pankajas supporters were unhappy with her been divested of portfolios as they had burned the effigy of Fadnavis.
According to sources, Both Eknath Khadse and Pankaja Munde were contenders for the chief ministerial post. Earlier Pankaja had even mentioned about her aspirations to become chief minister which didnt go down well with Fadnavis. If Nilangekar is appointed as guardian minister both Pankaja and Congress leader Amit Deshmukh will lose their foothold in Latur.
A close aide said, Munde is furious for being taken out of water conservation. And all of us also voiced our anger.
Referring to the divested portfolio, she said, As minister of the water conservation department, I have taken the work to great heights. I worked tirelessly and made the department popular. She added that even Prime Minister Narendra Modi had lauded her efforts in jalyukta shivar yojna and had said she was the future hope of Maharashtra.
On the other hand, Nilangekar who hails from Latur is a staunch supporter of BJP. He is also a member of RSS and is holding the post of General Secretary of BJPs Maharashtra State Unit. Today, Nilangekar has become one of the strongest BJP cadre and mass leader. Earlier Pankaja and Amit Deshmukh had opposed the induction of Nilangekar in the cabinet.
What a paradox it is as terror strikes all over and France is a fresh target for terrorists. We are there for every other outsider but fail to reach out to a loved one who suffers in silence. All of us care for a violation of rights in the far end of the world but fail to see violation of faith within. We forgive strangers and sworn foes for treason but fail to forgive a lapse in friends. We look at career triumphs of masters yet fail to notice personal triumphs of a dear one.
As World spread terrorism is witnessed, we in India are finding the facts of earlier attacks and try hard to bring zero terrorism in our country through concerted efforts. In the name of Eid terrorism was spread and this time round militants targeted France Streets and we are worried about the next terror target. It is time for retrospection and acting swiftly as the world peace is disturbed through violent methods. Gun wielding attackers, crude bombs and suicide bombers all play havoc and cause heavy casualties through cruel methods. The battle lines are drawn for such fierce attacks in the future as well. It is time to remain prepared with forces trained to combat terror attacks and pay them in the same coin rather than being acting in a cowardly manner. The terror attack must be curbed through time tested methods.
People were aware of the 26/11 attack and its repercussions. No one is there to pity the martyrs in the name of terrorism. The Jawans who take care of our borders have not been provided the best accommodation and they are facing too many harships. The victims kin are unable to receive the funds allotted to them by the State and Central Government. They suffer in harness and face a precarious situation. So, awareness about the terror attacks and its implications is the need of the hour. Mumbai in general and the country in particular should not lag behind in the steps taken in preventing terror attacks. Maharashtra government has beefed up security at vital installations in Mumbai, places of worship and those frequented by tourists as per instructions from the Union Home ministry after the terror attack at the Pathankot Air base in Punjab. A terror alert from Delhi has placed anti-terror agencies in Maharashtra on their toes. It is time to beef up security and do a world of good to safeguard airports and other prime targets in the city.
In the past, owing to terror strikes, it has become clear that the main cities were targeted by the terrorists. For instance the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks claimed 164 lives and properties were destroyed. These terrorists mostly focus on crowded places, religious centres and spots where foreign dignitaries visit. Such incidents create a sense of insecurity among citizens. Its a herculean task to prevent untoward incidents and create awareness among the residents. Police department is organizing an Anti-Terrorism Week for educating people. Such a move at the world level can bring world peace in the wake of several attacks in various countries and France suffers the most in this regard.
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
Turkey has dismissed almost 9,000 officials after a failed coup targeting the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the state-run Anadolu news agency said citing the interior ministry.
A total of 8,777 public personnel including one provincial governor and 29 governors of towns have been dismissed, the ministry said.
Earlier, it was reported that Turkey has detained a total of 103 generals and admirals in the wake of the failed coup.
The top military figures were detained in sweeps across the country after Fridays attempted putsch, the Anadolu state news agency said, in what appears to be a major purge of the armed forces.
They are now being taken to courts to decide on remanding them in custody.
Ten generals have already been remanded in custody ahead of trial, the Dogan news agency said.
Those detained are accused of seeking to violate the Turkish constitution and attempting to overthrow the authorities by force.
They are also accused of belonging to what the authorities call the Fethullahci Terror Organisation (FETO) led by Fethullah Gulen, the exiled US-based preacher who Erdogan blames for the coup.
Gulens supporters say their group, which they call Hizmet (Service), is entirely peaceful.
Blaming federal workers for not being vaccinated against measles is total crap and takes away from a great issue that really is an epidemic of Armageddon scale.
A nationwide public health crisis may be underway as dozens of workers at an Arizona immigration detention facility have refused to get vaccinated amid a large measles outbreak currently, the largest outbreak of the disease anywhere in the United States.
Since the Largest Outbreak in the United States this year, one newspaper headline gushed, took place in May, 102 of the detainees have been released from the facility. But ICE Immigration Court has not resumed trials yet and likely wont reopen until the end of July, according to an Arizona Department of Health press release. All visitors must carry proof of vaccinations to enter. No exceptions.
With 1,900 people exposed, and hundreds going home from the facility on a daily basis, not including relatives, friends and lawyers visiting the detainees, how come there were only twenty-two measles cases?
According to the Montana Department of Healths Infographic on measles, a state that hasnt had a single measles case since 1990, one person with measles can spread the virus to eighteen more people.
To date, twenty-two people have contracted the non-lethal disease. Thats twenty-two over a sixty-day period. That is twenty-two in Eloy, which at the time housed 1,200 detainees, with a staff of 150 ICE agents, and 350 CCA security personnel. All told, there were 1,900 people in the federal detention center at the time of exposure.
The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA ), a private contracting firm, runs Eloy from Nashville, Tennessee. While it provides 24-hour guard and security services, agents for the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE, ) agency care for, manage, debrief, and interview the inmates. The facility, however, doesnt have a single medical doctor onsite.
Sixty days ago an illegal alien carried the measles virus into the Eloy Detention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, and spread the virus to one of the federal workers; from there it spread. The 1,600-bed facility serves as temporary station for migrants and illegals facing trials, deportation hearings, and other bureaucratic processing.
Overreacting by vaccinating workers after measles had spread to others had zero impact on containing the outbreak. One measure that did work to contain the outbreak, which averaged one person getting sick every three days, was ICE froze the flow of detainees, neither accepting nor releasing anyone, at first. That measure, however, created a backlog of cases, as of the writing of this article.
But in the end, the pool of those infected by measles never reached two-dozen people. Some outbreak.
Two Approaches: One Pragmatic, One Deceitful
The temporary lockdown of detainees, and not any machination from CDC or Merck MMR vaccine, is what curbed the measles flare-up at Eloy. But the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which sleeps in bed with Big Pharma lobbyists, will never let pragmatism get in the way of selling fear or force-feeding vaccines on detainees, and federal and contract workers.
In contacting CCA for comment, Jonathan Burns, the director of public affairs, replied by email, writing:
We take the health and well-being of our staff and the individuals entrusted to our care very seriously, and continue to work closely with ICE, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state and local health officials on this issue.
All but a small percentage of CCA employees have been immunized or produced proof of prior immunity. Please refer to our previous statement and I encourage you to contact out partners at ICE, who have ~150 employees at the facility, and whom I believe the (Arizona) health department is including in the facility percentage figures it has released. I encourage you to contact our partners at ICE, as ICE Health Service Corps provides all medical care at the facility.
The Arizona Department of Health had referred this author to Jonathan Burns at CCA; ICE pointed to their past press statements; and the CDC didnt respond to calls to comment. So it appears, the government state-fed trio of agencies is now only talking through press releases on the measles outbreak at Eloy.
Maybe thats because of the paradoxical situation that this measles outbreak has presented the Obama Administration, whose desire for authoritarian control was given a boost when the presidents signature legislation ObamaCare (the Affordable Care Act) passed in 2010.
Its all about control, control, control. But what happens when circumstances throw a knuckleball at control?
Imagine this happening at Gitmo
At Eloy that just happened. A small measles outbreak froze the gears of justice.
For President Obama and the CDC the situation at Eloy is dripping with irony: A tiny, non-lethal measles outbreak has outweighed the rights of illegal aliens to a speedy trial.
Imagine the same scenario occurring at Gitmo? What would President Obama do? Dump the CDCs concern for measles or hold the detainees there, unable to shutdown the prison facility, long the centerpiece of his legacy, or wait for a new president to come into office?
From local TV station KPNX report, Pinal health officials: ICE not cooperative during measles outbreak, by Joe Dana (7-7-16), he wrote: "ICE folks at the leadership level dont really want to share information with us about the vaccination status of their employees, theyre citing privacy regulations that are not applicable to a public health outbreak," Schryer said. "So were working with them and its my understanding that the state is asking the attorney general to work with ICE to force them to comply with our recommendation."
Thomas Schryer is the director of public health at Pinal County, Arizona, in which Eloy operates.
Caught in the throes of this surreal paradox, President Obamas CDC, whether through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the U.S. Justice Department (US DOJ), has stonewalled ICE officialsthose agencies have done a lot of that lately.
So it will be Arizonas attorney general versus ICE, which in reality will be the AG fighting for transparency against CDC, HSS and US DOJ to play ball with the holy grail of Big Pharma: Vaccines. Good luck with that.
Measles and the Broken MMR Vaccine
From CDCs Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on May 10, 1991, and later in 1999, the death rate from measles is: A) provisional; B) 1 in 1,000, or one-tenth of a percent (0.1%). This author had the measles in second grade, like most of my classmates. But after a week of itching, scratching, and redness, my immune system and I were better off in the long run by contracting the disease.
From a variety of sources, the MMR triple shot vaccine, in which Merck holds the sole monopoly in the U.S., the efficacy of the vaccine works three-quarters of the time for those who have been vaccinated. Thats far fewer than 95 percent the Food and Drug Administration requires for vaccine efficacy.
And so word has it that a little more than half of the twenty-two measles patients at Eloy were not vaccinated for measles in the past. But the exact number is hard to come by since ICE (CDC) hasnt been transparent about the outbreak when it comes to their employees. The same was true of the Disney measles outbreak: More than a third of those people, who contracted the virus, were vaccinated.
Drowning and Measles
If twenty-two out of 1,900 people contracted measles over sixty days is an outbreak . . . Then what are some trends we should really be concerned about?
From the CDC, on an average year around 300 people get measles in the U.S. Thats less than one person a day.
Looking at other CDC data from 2005-2014, there were an average of 3,536 fatal unintentional drownings (non-boating related) annually in the United Statesabout ten deaths per day. And additional 332 people died each year from drowning in boating-related incidents.
Since being near water deep enough to bathe in is far more lethal than measles virus ever will be, why is all the media attention focused on a common disease? Oh, right, vaccines cant prevent drowning.
Since Vaccine Court was launched in the late 1980s, 1,197 petitions were filed for death by vaccine, with 58 of them dying from an adverse reaction to the MMR shot, according to author and Vaccine Court researcher Wayne Rohde. That is more than the number of people who died from measles over the same span.
The Cold Reality of the Autism Epidemic
Other numbers should frighten people, from reporters and journalists, teachers and CEOs who are concerned about the lack of qualified people to hire, to county, state and federal health officials is the Autism Epidemic.
From CDCs data, roughly four million babies will be born this year. Using CDC ASD incidence rate of 1 in 45 babies will be diagnosed on the spectrum, that means 88,889 babies will develop some form of autism. When broken down by year to weeks, days, to hours, about one baby is born every 6 minutes on the spectrum in 2016. That equates to 244 babies day.
Over the same period of that non-lethal measles outbreak of 60 days, there will be 14,612 babies who will be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.
If 22 measles patients is a crisis at a detention site, then what do we call an epidemic that is 100 times more lethal with permanent damage to the brain, nervous system, speech, and fine motor, with autoimmune and gastrointestinal issues?
Yes, the MMR vaccine is a lie. Yes, the MMR vaccine doesnt work as designed. Yes, the MMR vaccine doesnt meet FDA safety and efficacy standards.
So why is it still on the market? And why would health officials fight a tiny measles outbreak at a locked down detention center with two out of three shots in the MMR jab not measles?
Its time to break the MMR monopoly the way the federal government broke the Standard Oil monopoly a century ago.
Exploding Costs of Autism
Finally, the costs of the Autism Epidemic will far outstrip the pathetic tiny costs for a non-lethal disease like the measles by the chasm of the U.S. national deficit.
The Autism Epidemic is a double-edge sword. One blade will bleed the costs that will balloon to the trillions by 2030 for care of the disabled adults, according to a UC Davis study. The other edge is the lost opportunity costs of economic productivity to the U.S. economy, since millions of these children will never work. Ever.
Instead of 90 percent of them being productive members of society, they will be a drag both as a cost and as a financial loss. The productivity loss can be estimated to the hundreds of billions of dollars. But the loss of individual creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial vision cannot be so easily rendered.
How many Steve Jobs and Elon Musks will we lose from the pool of millions of children, because the Autism Epidemic cripples them? Incalculable.
For 250 years America separated itself from the world by individual creative spirit. But now that has finally met its match. Not from war or diseasebut from Autism, a disorder with roots in environmental toxins.
No, America has met its match by its own greed and shift toward totalitarianism, a shift from health and education to the Vaccine industrys profit center: Big Pharma.
America, its time to wake up or pay the price for this epic crisis.
James Grundvig is a contributor to AoA and the author of Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement and Government Betrayal at the CDC. He lives and works in New York City, and has one teenage son on the spectrum.
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For over 30 years. Horace Carby-Samuels sought to research and write a book on the value of integrity and empathy in human social and economic relations that he summed up as "man does not live by bread alone." It is therefore shocking that such a very educated man who would actually appreciate the value of empathy would then prevent his own son from seeing his elderly Mom based upon lies. It is furthermore a twisted irony that he used these lies against his very son who finally helped him to get his book, "Qualityofliving and Human Development as the Outcome from Economic Progress published.
Horace had managed to convince the Ottawa Police that his son who got his book published has a mental illness which made him violent and not be able to function properly in society. He also told the police that his same son was holding him and Raymond's Mom "hostage" -- a claim that his Mom vehemently denied in a letter when she could still write.
The Honourable Justice Patrick Smith apparently had recognized Horace's lies when on 11 February 2016 he granted Raymond access to see his Mom. But since that time, Horace has employed Bell Baker as the law firm to enable him to further abuse the courts order while medical condition of Raymonds mother gets worse under the negligence of Horace.
Thanks to Horace, Raymonds Mom can no longer speak, write or talk. Horace denied access to recommended speech therapy by the Gruyere hospital. The extent to which Horace is willing to spew lies just to cover up the fact that he has been constantly abusing his wife, Dezrin even to the point of her becoming bedridden beats human imagination. This makes one to wonder how wicked and callous can a husband be to his own wife and son.
Elderly spousal abuse is very prevalent in our societies these days but it always appears like the greater emphasis is placed on younger couples whilst the aged, who are more vulnerable are completely neglected by these so-called human rights agencies.
If you wont praise me for something good that I have done for you, dont slander me. This is a very old saying in Africa and in this case, Horace has really shown how wicked he can be by forgetting that his son was the same person that made it possible for his book to be published. The million dollar question now is, How on earth can a human so easily forget the good that another person has done to him and slander him this way?
Horaces constant abuse of his wife Dezrin and the subsequent lies he told to the Ottawa Police Department just to make sure that Raymond does not get to see his sick and bedridden mother ever again simply goes on to show the extent to which some so-called humans are willing to go just to have control over the actions of others. With numerous governmental and private agencies constantly organizing campaigns to educate the public on the need to help eradicate domestic violence, it comes as shock that Horaces abusive behaviour towards his wife and son almost has gone unnoticed.
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Date: 15 May, 2015.
Place: Olstykke, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark.
On 19 May, 2015, in the small town of Olstykke, a group of Danish workers discovered what seemed to be an alien skull.
According to YouTube user Strange Mysteries, this skull was brought to a Veterinary College in the capital, Copenhagen, where they concluded: Although resembling a mammal, certain features make it impossible to fit the animal into Linnaean taxonomy. It simply doesn't fit into the Earth's natural animal kingdom as we know it.
About this discovering, UFO researcher and writer Scott C. Waring, of UFO Sightings Daily expressed: the enlarged eyes, the teeth are mind-blowing. It doesn't fit into any known species and is 50% larger than a human skull. Perhaps a half human, half alien hybrid.
Draw your own conclusions
For further information: http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2016/07/danish-workers-find-alien-skull-on.html
Danish workers Find Alien Skull On Denmark's Sealand Island, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of video: May 19, 2015
Makers of video: Strange Mysteries
Here is a great skull found in Denmark and its really remarkable. The enlarged eyes, the teeth are mind-blowing. It doesn't fit into any known species and is 50% larger than a human skull. Perhaps a half human, half alien hybrid.
Scott C. Waring
www.ufosightingsdaily.com
Video states:
Has the an alien skull been found in Denmark? For more information google "Sealand Skull"
A skull that seems to suggest its from another world has been discoveredbut what is it?
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Danish workers on Denmark's Sealand Island, were replacing hundred year old sewer pipes, under a building that once belonged to a butcher, when they dug up an amazing humanoid skull.
It was brought to a Veterinary College in the capital, Copenhagen, where they concluded Although resembling a mammal, certain features make it impossible to fit the animal into Linnaean taxonomy. It simply doesn't fit into the Earth's natural animal kingdom as we know it.
Carbon dating of the skull was conducted at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute for the sciences, where they determined that it was about 800 years old.
However, the workers who found the skull, found it buried above the hundred year old pipes, meaning that it must have been buried on purpose sometime after that. And there's even a good possibility that they know who might have hidden it there.
The island they found the skull on actually has some lore behind it. It is the legendary home of the secretive Order of Pegasus Light, an alleged secret society of poets, sworn to protect a group of unbreakable alien artifacts... and an alien skull... allegedly left behind by extraterrestrial visitors from the constellation Pegasus. The Order of Pegasus Light was formed in the 1300's and has had some of history's most influential writers as it's members, including William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, H.G. Wells, and Ambrose Bierce. In centuries past, the elusive Pegasus skull has been witnessed in Europe's Balkan Mountains, Paris France, and Munich Germany, before being transferred to Sealand Denmark.
The skull is about 50% larger than that of a male Homo Sapiens. Its massive eye sockets contribute to this. With massive eye socketswhatever this thing was must have massive eyestherefore suggesting it had adapted to a very dark environment.
Some have suggested that it could belong a terrestrial creature unknown to science, but the skull's excellent dental condition would seem to indicate that this is no wild beast. Whatever this thing was just remains a mystery
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Qandeel Baloch has been killed by her brother in an apparent 'honor killing' for 'dishonoring' her family and traditions. The 26 year old was strangled in the province of Punjab after she fled from Karachi due to the threats she was facing there.
She had a reputation for posting bold photos and videos as well as comments that often left most people in rage. Before her death she had posted some controversial pictures on social media, including one with a Muslim cleric.
She rose to fame in 2014 after pouting on a video asking "How em looking? It went viral and since then her social media life and posts have been received with both admiration from the younger people as well as disgust from those who saw her as a threat to their beliefs and culture.
Her parents who found the body on Saturday morning said she had, had a heated argument with her brother, Wasim, on Friday before he strangled her and ran. They have since been taken into custody by the police. Family sources have also said that her brothers had been threatening her, telling her to quit controversial modeling on social media.
When it comes to honor killing in Pakistan no woman is ever safe, be it they are posting controversial pictures online or just refusing to marry their rapist. Some have condemned her killing and asked for prosecution of the perpetrator while others are happy and saying it is good news that she is dead. They are even hauling praises to her suspected killer.
Film maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy whose documentary, A girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, won an Oscar earlier this year condemned the death stating that no woman was safe in Pakistan unless they start sending men who kill women to jail as an example to the rest.
Pakistan is a country that is still struggling with sexuality especially where women are concerned. Majority of them especially those from poor backgrounds still lack basic rights like school and consensual marriage. The violence against them is rife and Qandeel Balochs death shows it all.
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Three officers were shot dead on Sunday July 17 at around 9 a.m., as seven others succumbed to injuries in Baton Rouge, La.
In a statement the sheriffs office of East Baton Rouge said that the shooting took place at the Hammond Aire Plaza on Airline Highway. This comes a month after five police officers were killed in Dallas on July 7 as people protested country wide for the deaths of two African-American men, who died at the hands of the police in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis. Both the officers from the sheriffs office and the Baton Rouge Police Department responded swiftly to the scene.
Multiple officers from both agencies sustained injuries and were transported to local hospitals, the statement said.
Mark Clements, who lives near the shopping center, said he heard shots go off from his backyard. I heard probably 10 to 12 gunshots go off, he said in a telephone interview. We heard a bunch of sirens and choppers and everything since then.
The governor of Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards condemned the act stating that it was an unspeakable and unjustified attack. He further added that he will put every resource available to the state of Louisiana to use, so as to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice.
Kip Holden, mayor of Baton Rouge said that he had spoken to White House officials in Washington, who had offered assistance. He also added that the shooting might be somehow connected with that of Alton Sterling. Everythings been anti-police, he said.
There have been countless protests along Airline Highway ever since Alton Sterling was shot in Baton Rouge earlier this month. The Police Headquarters also runs along the highway. And at around 9 a.m. the road was closed in both directions.
So far there have been loads of images and videos going on around social media, mostly from the scene as well as the roads leading to the place where the shooting took place. There were also a large number of police vehicles along the road. Residents have been warned to stay away from the scene.
So far one suspect is dead as two others are still at large.
July 17, 2016
Since early July, the Communications Committee in the Egyptian parliament has been considering a draft bill to levy taxes on advertisements carried by Google and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, in an effort to secure tax returns for the public budget. This proposal was preceded by a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian lawyer, Mohamed Hamid Salim, who called for social media activity in Egypt to be suspended, particularly that of Facebook, to compel them to acquire a license to operate in Egypt and to obtain tax revenue from their advertisements.
Mustafa Bakri, a member of the Egyptian House of Representatives and one of the projects supporters, said in a phone interview with Al-Monitor, The principle goal behind passing this draft is to increase the resources of the public budget through applying Article 60 of Stamp Duty Act 111 of 1968, which was modified in 2008 and compels the state to levy Stamp taxes on private advertisements on television, satellite networks and the internet. He said these laws are applied in many nations, such as Britain and Israel, and they have sought over the last few years to increase their economic resources through the successful application of these laws.
Article 60 of this act grants the state the right to impose a tax on advertisements equivalent to 15% of their costs. This includes advertisements on movie billboards or broadcasts over the radio, and which are disseminated via public roads or building facades. The same applies to advertisements carried on material printed and distributed inside Egypt, including newspapers, magazines, annual calendars, guidebooks, periodicals of all sorts and advertisements broadcast on satellite channels, the internet and various broadcast cables.
Bakri said, Neglecting to apply this law would amount to wasting public funds, and the lions share of responsibility for this waste falls on the finance minister, who has failed to include these companies on the list of tax paying [entities]." He stressed that the law's application bears no relationship to controlling the content displayed by these ads or imposing any additional burden on the user, and that the main goal behind this was purely to serve the country's economic interests.
Bakri added, This issue resembles the Egyptian law that obligates print newspapers in Egypt to pay 15% of the value of the advertisements they carry as a tax to the government. We are simply calling for the same [law] to be applied to major websites as is applied to Egyptian newspapers. Bakri expects that the Egyptian parliament will move to ratify his decision in the coming days, following discussion of the drafts provisions that wont exceed the bounds of what is contained in the Stamp Duty Act.
Jean Talat, a member of the Communications and Information Technology Committee of the Egyptian House of Representatives, largely agrees with Bakri. He told Al-Monitor, Government monitoring of these advertisements stems from parliament members eagerness to pursue their national obligation to serve Egypts supreme interest. This lies within the Communications Committees main specialties, which include the extent of the propaganda capability of social media websites of late, as well as the large role played by different age groups, which in turn contributes to [these companies] massive annual profits. He said the law will find principled agreement from most inside parliament, and the responsibility for the next step in passing it would lie with the governments executive agencies, which would address these companies in order to obtain taxes from the advertisements they carry.
Talat added, Social media sites and Google have, in the recent past, become the primary beneficiary from the advertising market in Egypt. This is an issue whose consequences can be seen in the decline of the role of advertising agencies and Egyptian newspapers, as well as the damage to journalistic institutions for the benefit of these foreign companies that make fantastic profits through carrying these ads.
He said, Collecting taxes due to the state as in every other country on the globe is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is it a crime. On the contrary, the greater crime is being committed against the country that fails to apply its own laws and wastes billions of pounds [that could go to] the public budget due to nonapplication of its own laws."
The Egyptian parliaments perspective, as expressed by two of its representatives, concerning the need to apply the law on these companies runs contrary to the opinion of the head of the Legislative Committee in the Ministry of Communications, Abd ar-Rahman as-Sawi. He stressed to Al-Monitor the difficulty of applying the law on the ground because of several considerations. Among them are the facts that these international corporations do not maintain major headquarters inside Egypt and the services they provide are carried out outside Egypt.
Sawi added, The taxes are levied on revenues coming into companies or institutions registered inside Egypt while the profits of these companies are completely untethered to this. He stressed that the question required in the first place a precise and orderly redefinition of the concept of a tax so that we can dispel the ambiguity and controversy surrounding the matter.
This controversy was raised many years ago in many countries and at the United Nations. The UN was unable to come to a legal settlement on the matter, he said, noting that what might be studied is the imposition of taxes on online commercial transactions.
Concerning the possibility of levying taxes via a law taxing advertisements carried by Google and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, he said, "This is very unlikely. The executive agencies will not be able to move a single step on this matter, for reasons outside their control." He made clear that there was a lack of communication between parliament and the Ministry of Communications regarding this law.
For his part, Rami Ra'uf, a researcher in the field of digital liberties and digital security, also deemed the imposition of a tax unlikely in an interview with Al-Monitor. He said, "The Egyptian government's ability to apply this law [is limited] for both technical and legal reasons." He explained that there have been prior attempts by the Egyptian government to apply similar laws, but they ended in failure.
Rauf added, The companies that are highlighted by the proposed law have no major facilities inside Egypt. Moreover, they are not subject to the tax law that regulates tax collection. He said that another difficulty in applying the law lies in the fact that technical matters impact the manner in which these sites carry their advertisements.
This law like most previous laws that the parliament has recently sought to pass seeks in the first place to widen the authorities of the executive agencies inside the state to observe content published on these sites, he said, explaining that, though the apparent reason was obtaining financial resources through a taxation law, the prevailing thought behind it is to guarantee material control over the content of the advertisements carried on these sites.
Rauf added that the Ministry of Communications has, over the last few years, been subjected to many proposed draft laws similar to this one, and so knows how difficult applying this law will be. He clarified that major companies handle these laws by ignoring them, knowing that it is impossible for the government to apply them.
July 18, 2016
The European Union is taking steps to beef up its struggling efforts against human smuggling and trafficking from Libya, but until the country is politically stable, the changes aren't likely to be sufficient.
The EU naval operation launched in September, called Operation Sophia, is designed to combat people smuggling humans from Libya and surrounding countries to European shores, mainly Italy. Its main stated aim is to "board, search, seize and divert vessels suspected of being used for human smuggling or trafficking on the high seas, in line with international law," as stated on the EU Council website.
However, instead of successfully targeting the smugglers and their networks, the whole operation has turned into a search and rescue effort. More than 50 suspected smugglers had been arrested as of June but they were mainly low-level operatives, not the real ringleaders. Some 80 wooden boats have been confiscated since the operation was launched, but the smugglers have since switched to using more dangerous rubber dinghies.
As the weather is improving with summer, thousands of people are expected to try to reach Italian shores. On just one day recently, June 23, the Italian coast guard rescued 4,500 migrants from dozens of boats, many coming from Libya. According to the International Organization for Migration, as of June, more than 18,000 migrants and refugees had reached Italy so far this year, compared with about 10,000 in the same period in 2015.
A British parliamentary report published in May called Operation Sophia a failure. The report acknowledges that the operations have become mostly rescue work, succeeding in saving some 9,000 migrants.
The main reason the mission has failed is that there is no strong central government in Libya with effective coast guard forces capable of patrolling the country's 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) of ocean shoreline. Libya's ambassador to Italy, Ahmed Safar, was quoted May 31 by London's The Telegraph as saying that the internationally recognized Government of National Accord in Tripoli does not exercise "full control over certain territories," referring to parts of Libya that are under the control of militias, including Sirte on the coast. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have been supporting Gen. Khalifa Hifter, who has established his forces in Tobruk and refuses to recognize the UN-backed government in Tripoli. The rift has allowed the Islamic State to establish itself in Libya.
In accordance with international law, Operation Sophia agents are authorized to board and search any suspected vessels in Libya's waters, and to dispose of any boats or equipment used to help smuggle migrants. But even with the recent arrests and confiscations, it appears Operation Sophia might only be another failed attempt to slow human smuggling.
Recognizing that potential outcome, the EU announced it will augment its current efforts with another force of 1,500 people as part of the EU coast guard. Parliament approved this new force July 6 with a mandate superseding any national member state's sovereignty. The new force will intervene in situations involving EU external borders even if the member state concerned does not ask for help. In addition, at the Government of National Accord's request, the EU is preparing to train Libya's coast guard to help in the effort.
However, it is only logical that such efforts will still have few positive results, even if force is used, for one simple reason: Libya is the main staging ground for migrants making the dangerous trip over the sea in search of better lives or to escape persecution. Unless Libya can be stabilized under the control of a strong central government, little will change. Since the regime of Moammar Gadhafi was toppled in 2011, Libya's successive governments have so far failed to unite the country, let alone control its vast desert borders where most of the migrants are crossing into the country from Niger, Mali, Sudan and even deeper in Africa beyond the great Sahara.
Whatever tools the EU deploys to reduce the flow of people to its southern shores, the operation is bound to fail unless Libya's internal problems are fixed, enabling its government to do its share in fighting the smugglers.
So far, the EU seems to lack the right policy to tackle Libya's numerous security and smuggling problems.
Whether the EU's new security approach to the migration crisis will pay off remains to be seen, but all indicators point to the fact that it takes two to tango meaning that unless Libya, the EU's most important partner in the effort, is capable of governing itself, all other efforts will have limited effects. Any military action within the country's waters is likely to be risky and could draw the weak Government of National Accord into further marginalization to the benefit of the dominant militias.
July 18, 2016
TEHRAN, Iran Turki al-Faisal Al Sauds call for regime change in Tehran, let alone his mere participation at the July 9 Mujahedeen-e-Khalqs (MEK) annual conference in Paris, is an unprecedented move against Iran by a high-ranking Saudi royal.
Prior to Faisals statements at the MEK convention, the Saudi deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, paid a 10-day visit that started on June 14 to Washington and then Paris, during which he stressed the necessity to counter the "Iranian threat. Meanwhile, as has been the norm during his tenure so far, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, who accompanied Mohammed, went even further in his criticism of Iran's regional policy, demanding that Tehran stop exporting its revolution.
This situation has in fact been prevalent ever since King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud was crowned in January 2015. As such, one can assume that there has been a paradigm shift in Riyadh's regional policy, which encompasses relations with Tehran. At this point, Saudi Arabia has crossed so many unwritten rules in its dealings with Iran that some observers anticipate a war between the two nations.
Yet despite all these changes, there are no parallels in Irans policy toward Saudi Arabia. Even with reference to the abovementioned developments, Iran did not bother to reciprocate at least in terms of the level of its reaction. The question as to why it did not react has two logical answers. The first would be that Iran accepts the Saudi accusation that it is the main source of instability and terror in the region. However, given internal debates on regional policy in Tehran, this assumption has no basis. The second possible answer is that Iranian elites do not perceive the Saudi moves against Iran as being of importance, in terms of their effect. This answer is more relevant in Irans internal debates.
In fact, Iranian elites tend to exclude Saudi Arabia from their list of perceived national security threats, even though Riyadh has ironically been the main source of threat against Iran during the past five turbulent years in the Middle East. Iranians have been witnessing aggressive acts on the part of Saudi Arabia in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and now even within Iran. Yet, Iranian elites still refrain from viewing Riyadh as a threat.
In the Iranian debate on Saudi Arabias regional policies, there have always been two viewpoints: The first and most prevalent one stresses the need for dialogue and diplomatic engagement with Riyadh as the best way to stop its hostile attitude toward Iran. Indeed, the majority within Irans diplomatic and political and even security apparatus hold this stance. The second and more marginal viewpoint takes Riyadhs hostility as a threat and advocates the creation of an infrastructure to counter this threat. Notwithstanding its reasoning, this point of view has never made its way to foreign policy decision-making in Iran. Thus, Irans formal bureaucracy has never moved to perceive Riyadh as a threat and hence never dealt with it as such.
This perception stems from a tradition in Irans worldview that divides Middle Eastern states into independent and dependent ones. In the view of Iranian elites, at least in the 1980s and 1990s, Saudi Arabia was dependent and could not initiate nonaligned policies. According to this point of view, even the Saudi support for Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War was not an independently initiated Saudi policy. Thus, Saudi hostility toward Iran at that time was perceived as being somewhat beyond the will of the Saudi state. Even though this understanding of Saudi Arabia has changed in Iran during the past decade, Tehrans approach toward Riyadh has not. As such, within the current framework of the Iranian understanding of Saudi Arabia, differences with Riyadh are seen as manageable via diplomacy. This was the case during the tenures of former Reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) as well as Principlist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13), and has continued under incumbent President Hassan Rouhani since 2013, too.
Another reason why Tehran in the past did not consider Riyadh as a threat was the perception of the latters military as weak and security as fragile. In this reading, a country with limited military might is not considered as a direct threat. Accordingly, Riyadh was perceived as so vulnerable in terms of its military and security that it would be deterred from posing any sort of direct threat against Iran. In other words, the logic behind this perception was that the risk of putting oneself in jeopardy would pre-empt threats against others. Despite Saudi Arabias huge military expenditure over the past decade, this perception has not changed. Indeed, there have even been voices in Tehran who despise Riyadh for what they perceive of as the Saudis' purchasing arms that they cannot use.
Despite all the changes in Saudi foreign policy, Riyadh is still perceived in Tehran almost the same way it was a decade ago. Although the voices demanding a stronger stance and a revision in Irans policy toward Saudi Arabia are getting louder, it seems that Iranian elites, even if they feel a need for change, still stick to the previous policy of preferring diplomatic engagement to resolve differences to avoid yet more escalation with Saudi Arabia. Thus, the main objective in Tehran is to de-escalate the situation or at the very least stop any further escalation.
Hence, despite all the challenges it poses, Riyadhs regional policy and strategic behavior is still not perceived as a threat in Tehran. At this point, the question is thus whether Irans approach to de-escalation will eventually backfire. Indeed, the Iranian perception of Saudi Arabia as not constituting a direct national security threat appears to be well understood in Riyadh and may even be part of Saudi decision-makers calculations in their dealings with Iran. As such, Saudi decision-makers may have latitude that their Iranian counterparts are lacking. Taking developments last year as an example, Riyadh appears to not have missed an opportunity to escalate things with Tehran, in the knowledge that the Iranians will not respond in kind.
Thus, Irans policy of seeking to not create another source of instability in the Middle East by avoiding counterescalation in its dealings with Saudi Arabia may, in fact, very well paradoxically constitute a threat to both regional stability and Iranian national security. By avoiding a shift in policy toward Saudi Arabia, Iran may be inviting Saudi escalation against both Tehran and its allies while at the same time tying its own hands in terms of its responses. In other words, current Iranian policy can best be characterized as an inverse security dilemma that may cause more trouble than it solves.
July 17, 2016
BAGHDAD Iraqi forces are advancing toward the city of Mosul from the four corners of the country. Kurdish peshmerga are moving from the north and east, while government-controlled forces are heading toward the city from the south and west.
In recent developments in the Iraqi arena, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced July 9 the liberation of the Qayyarah air base 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Mosul. But the pertinent question is: How will the Iraqi forces reach Mosul from different directions?
The Joint Military Command had declared March 24 the launch of the first offensive on three axes according to statements by operations command spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yehya Rasul.
The Iraqi forces have seized control of a number of villages near the Makhmur district to the east of Mosul, 50 kilometers south of Mosul, Rasul said.
The military forces began advancing from the Makhmur air base toward the towns stretching along the Tigris River, about 16 kilometers west of Makhmur.
During the first days of the offensive, the army troops including the 15th Division in the Iraqi army, backed by local fighters from Ninevah province managed to liberate the three towns of Kudila, Kharbadan and Karmadi, before the operations came to a halt for over a month given the fierce resistance by the Islamic State (IS) and a string of suicide bombers hitting the military units.
It was announced April 27 that the town of Mhana was liberated, and the town of Kabruk was liberated on May 9. Similarly, in the beginning of June the troops were successful in fully liberating the strategic town of al-Nasr, overlooking the entire area adjoining it and the Kharaeb Jabr village that is adjacent to the seven Hajj al-Ali villages. By July 3, all said villages and towns were indeed completely liberated.
With this, the Iraqi forces now control the entire right side of the Tigris River, awaiting orders to cross the river toward the Qayyarah district.
In parallel, at the height of the battle of Fallujah June 18, the Iraqi government announced in a surprise move the launch of a new offensive on a new axis to liberate Mosul.
The axis stretches from Baiji through the Mosul-Baghdad road all the way to Qayyarah, Hammam al-Alil and Mosul.
The operations were launched from the chemical fertilizer plant, 20 kilometers from the city center of Baiji, with participation of the Iraqi counterterrorism service, the 9th Armored Division, troops of the Salahuddin Operations Command and the Ninevah Operations Command, the tribal mobilization troops as well as the Engineer Battalion.
During the first hours of the offensive, the military units managed to liberate small villages on the way before they were halted at the border of the Mohammed Moussa village because of bad weather, the heavy ambushes and the fact that the liberation plan had been leaked, as was revealed later on by Abadi during a press conference with a number of journalists June 29. We changed the plan following leaks and statements by [parliament members] that put our troops to risk, Abadi said. Mosul will be liberated during this year as promised.
After a three-day hiatus, the operations resumed June 21 with the aim of liberating al-Shirqat district on the northern border of Salahuddin and Ninevah governorates.
On the first day of resuming operations, the towns of Qaryat al Mishak, Mohammed Moussa, Sheikh Ali and some small towns scattered all the way up to the Zawya intersections were also liberated. The next day, military units reached Ain al-Debs area. On June 24, Iraqi troops liberated the Makhoul center and Zawya intersection, which was an important milestone in the operations. With this, the Iraqi forces have been able to cover more than 22 kilometers from their starting point.
The next day, military units crossed the three complexes of Shamar and liberated the entrance of al-Shirqat, which is another strategic point. However, the forces did not head toward al-Shirqat, but rather marched on to the north toward Telol al-Baj, waiting for the support of the counterterrorism forces that were participating in the Fallujah battles after completing their mission there. Telol al-Baj was liberated June 29. The troops continued advancing toward the administrative borders of Ninevah governorate, about 20 kilometers from Telol al-Baj, further crossing 10 kilometers into the governorate.
Military units resumed operations June 9, crossing the al-Hadr intersection toward the Qayyarah air base. The counterterrorism service, the 9th Armored Division in the Iraqi army and tribal mobilization managed to enter the air base from the Ramadniyat town to the west, which was also liberated along with other adjacent towns, namely the town of Soran.
With these developments, supplies to the areas of al-Shirqat, Hawija, the Great Zab and the rest of the areas south of Qayyarah have been completely cut out; the next step would be liberation.
The Qayyarah air base will be the key to moving toward Hawija, al-Shirqat and Mosul, just as the Speicher base was the key to Tikrit and the bases of Tariq and al-Mazraa to Fallujah. The air base lies at 12 kilometers from Qayyarah and 65 kilometers from the center of Mosul. It has an area of 24 kilometers and includes two runways of 3,500 meters each, in addition to aircraft caches, military infrastructure, sniper and protection towers, and a large camp.
The military units stationed south of Qayyarah district are expected to cross the river toward the district to liberate it, where they will join the troops that already entered the Qayyarah camp. Thus, Mosul has become surrounded from the north and east by peshmerga forces, from the west by peshmerga and some Yazidi forces, and from the south in the Qayyarah base.
July 17, 2016
On the night of July 15, Turkey passed a major democracy test that included a coup attempt, an uprising and the worst terror ever against its citizens. Thousands of Turkish citizens who took to the streets that night despite the warnings of the coup plotters to stay indoors and obey the curfew gave the clearest message: Those who came with elections, will leave with elections.
The coup attempt saw the use of tanks, heavy armor, and assault helicopters and warplanes, mostly in Ankara and Istanbul; 161 people were killed, 1,440 wounded and 2,839 soldiers of various ranks, mostly conscript privates, were detained. In addition, 104 coup forces were killed.
On the morning of July 17, as this article was penned, clashes had ended but detentions were continuing. The last bastions of the coup at the Chief of Staff headquarters in Ankara and at Akincilar air base, which is 20 kilometers (roughly 12 miles) from Ankara, were recovered and life was quickly returning to normal.
The first indications that something was happening on the night of July 15 around 10 p.m. local time was when the media began reporting the closure by soldiers and tanks of two bridges in Istanbul that link Asia to Europe. Turkish air space was declared closed and military planes were in the sky. Like everyone else, I first thought that Turkey was experiencing another plane hijacking. But soon reports of clashes at the bridges and strategic points in Ankara and Istanbul indicated that this was something very different. What it was became clearer when Prime Minister Binali Yildirim appeared on major TV networks around 11 p.m. He said it was a coup attempt by a faction of the military in an attempt to take over the political rule of the country. Later, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on live TV that the Fethullah Terror Organization (FETO) led by the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen was behind the coup attempt, and called on the people to take to the streets to save democracy. Civilians responded bravely and came out and marched to the areas where the clashes were taking place, especially in Istanbul and Ankara. As time passed, a more dangerous situation developed. For the first time in its history, Turkey witnessed the bombing of its parliament by F-16s. A Turkish F-16 shot down a Turkish Sikorsky helicopter, and officers in a Black Hawk helicopter sought asylum in Greece.
Chief of General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar was informed about the coup attempt around 5 p.m. but did not want to leave his headquarters. Akar and Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Yasar Guler were seized and then taken into custody by the junta, who locked them up at the Akincilar air base near Ankara. Similarly, Commander of the Land Forces Gen. Salih Zeki Colak, Gendarmerie Commander Gen. Galip Mendi, Commander of the Air Force Abidin Unal and Commander of the Turkish Naval Forces Bulent Bostanoglu were taken into custody by the plotters. A coup declaration on the official internet site of the High Command around 3 a.m. and a communique aired by TRT state TV announced that the military had taken over the rule of the country under its chain of command. Eventually, the street clashes eased and small military groups were arrested by the police. Life began turning back to normal around noon on July 16.
Though the final answer to this crucial question will be known after the legal investigations have taken place, I believe that the clique behind this coup consists of FETO-affiliated officers and a group of officers some of who want to save their military careers and personal interests and some of who are truly dedicated to secular values and who were opposed to Erdogan. Whether Gulen was behind it all will be determined in time, but no doubt he was a source of inspiration. There are serious allegations that Lt. Gen. Metin Iyidil, the head of the Land Forces Training and Doctrine Command in Ankara, and former Legal Counsel of the Chief of General Staff Col. Muharrem Kose, who was removed from his post in May 2016 on accusations of FETO membership, played key roles in the uprising.
The highest-ranking generals who were detained in this coup attempt, which was not backed by Akar and other branch commanders, are Gen. Akin Ozturk, who until last year was the commander of the air force; Gen. Adem Huduti, commander of the second army responsible for combating terror in the southeast; and Lt. Gen. Erdal Ozturk, the commander of the third army corps in Istanbul. In addition, another four-star general, the commander of the third army, was also detained. Roughly one-third of the 220 brigadier generals in the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) and about 10 major generals were detained. These numbers indicate that although they did not have the support of the Chief of General Staff and other key commanders, the plotters had significant support in the ranks of brigadiers and colonels. Large number of majors and lieutenant colonels were also taken into custody.
Among the clique, air force personnel that constitute 8% of the TSK and the gendarmerie that constitute 15% of TSK particularly play an important role. What was missing from the coup forces was adequate participation from the land forces, which make up 65% of the TSK.
According to some reports, if the coup had succeeded, Ozturk, the former air force commander who currently does not occupy a post, was to be appointed as the Chief of General Staff.
Why did the coup attempt fail?
The following developments on the night of July 15 caused the coup attempt to fail:
The fate of the coup was determined by Gen. Umit Dundar, the commander of the first army in Istanbul who called Erdogan, who was on holiday in the Mediterranean resort of Marmaris, to brief him on the events; he persuaded him to come to Istanbul where his safety would be assured instead of trying to reach Ankara . Thanks to this early warning, Erdogan quickly left Marmaris. The coup forces raided his hotel an hour after he had left it. Erdogans quick departure to Istanbul was one of the key elements of disrupting the coup plans.
Ankara
Dundar appeared calm and informative during the press conference that was broadcast live on TV, when he declared the coup illegitimate. He said the attempt was out of the TSK's chain of command and that top commanders were being held hostage by the plotters.
Erdogan took the risk of taking about an hour-long flight from Marmaris to Istanbul, which was a relatively secure location for him given his service as the Istanbul mayor in 1994-98 and the third armys actions to suppress the uprising there.
Most of the soldiers were conscripts who were told they were sent out into the streets because of an exercise or a terror activity. Small units in the streets made up of young soldiers doing their compulsory military service and who were led by junior commanders were surprised and disoriented when confronted with the opposition of the police and the masses of irate citizens. They quickly lost control.
The anti-coup reporting of mainstream TV channels offered the government a psychological advantage.
The efforts of the citizens and police persuaded and compelled the soldiers at strategic points the bridges over the Bosporus, Istanbul Ataturk airport, Ankaras Kizilay Square as well the presidential compound to end their operations. The coverage of this courageous resistance of the people and police by TV channels reinforced the governments efforts.
The opposition political parties refused to support the coup attempt.
The Land Forces Command, which carries the most weight in the TSK, lacked support.
What else may have prompted the coup attempt?
The plotters did not have a proper chain of command and could not coordinate their actions; they did not have an operations center. The junta that appeared to be focused on Ankara and Istanbul could not exploit the element of surprise it had achieved between 10 p.m. and midnight, which gave the impression the coup attempt was a hastily hatched kamikaze effort.
Why now?
The indictment July 14 against the Gulenists within the TSK, as part of the Izmir espionage case, facilitated the coup attempt.
According to reliable sources who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, had there not been a coup attempt July 15 there would have been massive detentions on July 16-17, prompted by the espionage case. These sources claim that the prosecutor of the espionage case in Izmir had already secured Erdogan's approval to order mass arrests before the approaching Supreme Military Council meeting on Aug. 1-4, which would have decided on the next round of promotions and appointments within the TSK. The plotters learned of this plan and launched their sloppy and uncoordinated attempt hastily. In other words, the coup attempt that was planned for a future date was moved up.
What if it had succeeded?
If it had succeeded, the TSK would have split. The shooting down of a Sikorsky helicopter by an F-16 supporting the government was a signal. Moreover, the coup forces did not have any other option than opening fire to suppress the civilians on the streets in response to the government's call. If the coup had succeeded, Turkey could have found itself in a bloody civil war.
The inevitable political uncertainty and instability that would have followed the success of a coup would have had earthquake effects on Turkeys struggle against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Islamic State, and on its foreign relations in general.
Why did the National Intelligence Organization and the General Staff not know about the junta? The existence of the Gulenist structure within the TSK has been known for a long time, including the identities of its key members. While the government was probably planning to launch a massive purge against the Gulenists in the TSK during the Supreme Military Council meeting, providing a sense of comfort to commanders and the government, Ankara obviously did not believe that a junta would undertake such madness. The command level did not expect such a widespread and uncoordinated uprising that included most of the combat brigade commanders.
What is next?
Was it democracy or Erdogan that was the winner on July 15? We will find out when the steps Erdogan plans to take are revealed.
The course of combat against the PKK may change. The only key question asked by pro-Kurdish social media accounts on the night of July 15 was whether the situation would affect their imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
We must take note finally of the phenomenal trauma the TSK is experiencing now. Traditionally, the TSK has been an institution emulating Western modernization with a pro-West and robust secular outlook. Could the current situation cause an identity crisis in the TSK? Can the TSKs secular character be diluted and make the Turkish military more sensitive to religion? And can purges expected after the coup attempt turn the TSK more toward Eurasia and push it toward a more nonaligned and anti-Western orientation?
July 17, 2016
While the Turkish coup was underway, The New York Times was asking me whether I was surprised, expecting my answer to be, Of course I am.
I bluntly wanted to respond No and remind New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise that only two weeks ago, in our lengthy chat in Istanbul, I had told her of the Faustian bargain President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan made with the military, which therefore, in my opinion, opened the way for a coup or a coup attempt to take place in Turkey within the upcoming two years.
But I conceded and told her, Yes, Im surprised. I did not expect that to happen in two weeks.
More surprising for me is the amateurishness of the attempted coup on the night of July 15. As a veteran observer of military coups and coup attempts in Turkey, I have never seen any with this magnitude of such inexplicable sloppiness.
The first coup occurred on May 27, 1960; the most ferocious one was on Sept. 12, 1980. Another military intervention occurred March 12, 1971 I was one of its victims and came to be known as the postmodern coup. I was given the reputation of coining this name thanks to a title I had used in one of my articles about the two aborted coup attempts in February 1962 and May 1963 that led to exchanges of fire in my neighborhood in Ankara, as our house was overlooking the premises of the War Academy, whose cadets had taken part in the failed attempts. Neither one of those occasions seemed so unprofessionally executed and really bizarre as this one.
Everyone observing the last attempt could not help but ask, What is this? Who is behind this? What are they doing? Why?
In no previous military coup or coup attempt in Turkeys history has parliament been bombed by military helicopters and fighter jets.
Why did the coup attempt begin with blocking one side of Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge? Why was the passage from the Asian side to Europe blocked while the passage from Europe to Asia was allowed to flow?
Why did the putschists knowing that Erdogan was neither in Ankara nor Istanbul but instead spending his vacation in the Mediterranean seaside town of Marmaris not move to detain him? They let him travel from Marmaris to the nearby Dalaman airport and then fly to Istanbul on a flight that took over an hour.
Why did the putschists not seize the main TV news channels and instead waste precious time taking over the least-watched state TV channel, TRT, allowing their targets to regroup and use more popular channels and social media effectively to challenge the coup attempt?
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim spoke first on the NTV channel, alleging that it was not a coup but a rebellion perpetrated by a small faction in the military. Erdogan then spoke through CNN-Turk via FaceTime and called on his supporters to take to the streets.
Seemingly a headless and disoriented coup attempt crumbled after a few hours, leaving 265 dead, some 1,440 wounded and at least 2,839 military personnel in custody.
The failed attempt left more questions behind rather than plausible answers as to who perpetrated it and why it was executed so sloppily and poorly.
Although the coup attempt foundered, the damages inflicted are grave. First, the reputation of Turkey as the bastion of stability in a volatile region where military takeovers are a relic of the past is over. The countrys image is tarnished, and nobody can assure impossibility of a coup or a coup attempt in the future.
Erdogan and Yildirim unhesitatingly pointed to Fethullah Gulen, a cleric and former ally who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania for the last 18 years. The Turkish leaders implied that they would seek his extradition from Washington.
I read a tweet from AFP's White House correspondent Andrew Beatty that Kerry offered US help in investigating the coup and urged Erdogan to present evidence against Gulen.
It is a challenging task indeed. It is not very convincing that key positions in the military of Turkey a NATO force second only to the United States in terms of its numbers and believed to be a formidable institution are controlled by an Islamic faction.
Over 40 generals are among some 3,000 putschists arrested. One of them is a four-star general who commands the second army responsible for the regions next to Syria and Iraq. Dozens of brigadiers and major generals commanding mainly combat troops of land forces, gendarmerie units fighting Kurdish insurgents, and combat units of the navy and air force can hardly be classified as Gulenists. Another four-star general a commander of the third army was also arrested yesterday. The first army commander, who is in charge of defending Istanbul and had declared his allegiance to the government on the night of the coup, asked Erdogan to come to Istanbul where his safety would be assured, thereby playing a decisive role in the collapse of the attempt.
Twenty-four hours had not passed after the collapse of the coup attempt when 140 judges judges of the Court of Appeals and 48 judges of the Council of State, two of the highest judiciary institutions were taken into custody. Summarily purged from the judiciary apparatus were another 2,475 judges. A member of the Constitutional Court, the highest institution of the judiciary, was arrested and charged with association with the putschists.
The swiftness and scope of the action of the executive branch was remarkable. It gave the impression that Erdogan and the government were prepared for a coup attempt and had ample intelligence as to who in the state system would be associated with it.
Looking at the 2,839 military personnel under arrest, including scores of generals who commanded the combat units of a NATO army, it is quite bizarre that no security bureaucracy from the military intelligence to the National Intelligence Organization, the General Directorate of Security and Special Forces Command had a clue that a coup was being hatched at such a magnitude.
Such matters awaiting convincing answers naturally aroused conspiracy theories. A particular interesting one is this: "The way you launch a coup is pretty straightforward. First you grab the leader, then the media outlets, then you exhibit the humiliated leader in the media. Instead, these people decided to throw the coup while Erdogan was on vacation and apparently didnt even attempt to secure him. By the time the coup began, he was already taken to a secret location. Then the whole thing went straight to hell very quickly. The coup told people to go home, while Erdogan told his people to go to the streets. So the coup supporters were at home, while the Erdogan supporters were out on the streets. The coup also reportedly fired on civilians, which is also something you definitely do not want to do. That makes even people who were inclined to support it turn against it. In short, the whole thing could not have been better arranged for Erdogan himself, who now looks like a hero of the people. As such, it seems to me the most likely possibility is that Erdogan presumably with the blessing of Western forces worked with some of his own people in the military to arrange a coup hoax."
It sounds outrageous to everybody who is in a mood to celebrate the victory of democracy over a military coup, the victory of the people over a handful of traitors, to suggest that the attempted Turkish coup actually was an arranged coup hoax.
As long as more questions than convincing answers remain and until the dust clears, an abundance of such conspiracy theories should not be surprising.
July 15, 2016
A week of chaos around the world upended the US presidential race and obliterated Democrat Hillary Clintons once-formidable lead over her rival Donald Trump.
Even as Americans were still processing the fallout from the July 7 race-based killing of five white police officers in Dallas, yet another terrorist attack in France the night of July 14 rekindled debate about Muslims and radicalization. Trump responded by postponing a scheduled event to unveil his running mate on July 5 only to end up acknowledging via Twitter that it indeed was Indiana Gov. Mike Pence after everyone in the media had already reported it.
The announcement came just days after Clinton rival Bernie Sanders finally endorsed her at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, theoretically allowing the party to unite behind its standard-bearer but leaving foes of the status quo angrier than ever. Trump wasted no time capitalizing on the endorsement in his bid to attract voters who feel disenfranchised.
Bernie Sanders, who has lost most of his leverage, has totally sold out to Crooked Hillary Clinton, Trump tweeted July 12. "Bernie Sanders endorsing Crooked Hillary Clinton is like Occupy Wall Street endorsing Goldman Sachs."
Adding to the bedlam, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg known as the Notorious RBG for her sharp tongue publicly disparaged Trump as an unsuitable faker, only to immediately regret breaking with a long tradition of judicial neutrality when Trump predictably tore into her and called on her to resign.
None of this has been good for Clinton, who has so far outspent Trump 15-to-1 in TV advertising with very little to show for it.
Her lead over Trump shrank almost by half in just seven days, from 4.7 percentage points to 2.7 percentage points well within the margin of error according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average. The numbers were a hot topic of conversation when Clinton met with Senate Democrats when she stopped by Capitol Hill on July 14.
Some people were freaked out; they were looking down at the polls on RealClearPolitics and asking why it was so close, one senator in the room told congressional newspaper The Hill.
Trump, meanwhile, has been having a field day. While Clinton and President Barack Obama have tried to project an image of quiet resolve in the wake of the recent violence, the brash billionaire has continued to hammer home his message that the country is being ruined by political correct elites who lack the fortitude to make the hard choices needed to keep Americans safe.
We're living in a whole different world. There is no respect for law and order. There is no respect for anything or anybody. And this has to be dealt with very harshly, he told Fox News right after the attack in Nice that killed at least 84 Bastille Day revelers, including two Texans. I would do extreme vetting [of Muslims seeking to enter the country]. I would call it 'extreme vetting' too."
Clinton for her part called on the United States to "stand strongly with France and remain engaged with the world, a shot at Trumps America first approach.
"Events like this," she said, "remind us how vital vital it is in every way not to abandon them. We need to strengthen our alliances, and I include NATO in that.
She went on to tell Fox News that a counterterrorism "intelligence surge" would be one of her top priorities as president.
"We need strong, tough diplomacy starting with our friends," she said, "collectively with the EU, with NATO and with others."
The contrast in outlook and demeanor between the two candidates and the campaigns nastiness and unpredictably will only intensify with Trumps choice of Pence, a darling of social conservatives despised by pro-choice groups for supporting some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country. The July 18-21 Republican nomination convention in Cleveland, Ohio, is sure to deliver yet more fireworks.
A freight transportation and supply chain management company in Tennessee will grow its workforce by more than 1,000 employees over the next four years.
Averitt Express will add 1,200 veteran employees by 2020. Averitt recruiting manager Ken Chrisman said the hiring pledge is a "win-win" for the business.
"Hiring military veterans makes perfect sense for several reasons," he said. "First, they know what it means to work together and value others. They're also dedicated to the work they do and they are committed to outstanding service, which makes them a great fit for our unique culture."
The 45-year-old company, named a "Patriotic Employer" by the U.S. Department of Defense's Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) program, currently has job openings in Birmingham, Dothan, Madison, Gadsden, Theodore, and Vance. Full-time employees have access to medical benefits, dental and vision insurance, 401(k) retirement options, paid holidays and vacation, and more.
Hundreds of employees and executive leaders at Averitt have served or are currently in the military. To learn more about the initiative, visit AverittSalutesYou.com.
China will conduct military training from Tuesday to Thursday in the waters of the South China Sea, according to a navigation alert issued on Monday.
According to the website of China's Maritime Safety Administration, military activities will be conducted in designated waters, and entry of vessels will be prohibited.
The navigation alert issued four coordinates to define the designated area, which is close to Hainan Island.
On July 3, the Hainan Maritime Safety Administration issued a navigation alert, saying that the People's Liberation Army would embark on military exercises in a designated area in the South China Sea from July 5 to July 11.
On July 8, senior Chinese Navy officials attended a naval drill at designated waters near China's Xisha Islands, Xinhua news agency reported.
Also, the Honghu and Luomahu - two supply ships serving long-range missions - officially joined the service in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province on July 15, said the official website of the PLA's Southern Theater Command, which covers the South China Sea.
The City of Athens' largest employer is seeking dozens of new workers this summer.
Steelcase, a furniture manufacturing plant with 841 permanent and 265 temporary employees in Athens, needs to fill 62 temporary production jobs at the facility. A career fair will be held this week to recruit prospective workers.
The Decatur Career Center, Lyons HR, Athens-Limestone Public Library and Steelcase will gather from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday at 603 South Jefferson St. in Athens to meet with candidates. To ask questions before the event, email Felicia Williams at decatur@alcc.alabama.gov or call 256-355-0142.
Steelcase isn't the only local employer hiring workers. Verizon is seeking more than 60 new customer service representatives for its Huntsville-based call center.
The telecommunications provider also will host a job fair from 1 to 3 p.m. Tuesday on 475 Quality Circle at Verizon's state headquarters in Thornton Research Park. No advanced registration is required to attend.
Dallas writer George Getschow wrote the following essay on the Birmingham clergy who carried a cross in Dallas after the shooting of police officers there.
The White Man, the Black Man, and The Cross
by George Getschow
"Who will put an end to it? A white man or a black? A cop or a suspect in the back of a police car? Will it be a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat? A Sunni or Shia? Believer or atheist? Northerner or Southerner or Easterner or Westerner? Who will be the last to pull a trigger, light a fuse, push a button? Them or us? Because someone has to put an end to what Cain started. Someone has to close the last door, hammer in the last nail."
--Facebook post, July 7, the night of the rampage
Bill Marvel, a distraught Dallas writer, captured the gut-wrenching sentiment of residents in the above Facebook post reacting to the murders of five Dallas police officers and the wounding of eleven others assigned to protect a Black Lives Matters protest march in downtown Dallas.
Michah Johnson, an African-American and U.S. Army veteran, hid out in the staircase of a downtown community college - out of sight of the protestors and the police - waiting to take revenge on the white policemen for the killing of black men in several other states.
As the protesters and the police turned the corner toward El Centro College, a hail of bullets rang out, sending the protesters scrambling for cover. Scores of Dallas police raced toward the sound of the bullets, trying to determine where the sniper was posted. As they did, Johnson's bullets ripped through the back of the neck of one police officer, killing him instantly, and four other officers caught in the ambush also perished.
The bullets that ripped through the uniforms of our Dallas police also ripped apart the soul of the community. Dallas residents were left as shell shocked and shattered as they were on November 22, 1963 when John F. Kennedy's head was blown apart by a sniper as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas preparing for the next presidential campaign.
Bill Marvel, the writer, echoed the anxiety of most people in town with his elegiac essay, wondering, "Who will put an end to it? A white man or a black man."
It turns out it was both. Two Birmingham, Alabama ministers - one black and one white - flew to Dallas last Saturday morning in the wake of the bloodletting to offer the grief-stricken community a striking and powerful consolation for their suffering: The Cross.
After arriving at DFW Airport, Rev. William Wilson, an Anglican priest who is now bishop-in-residence at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Mountain Brook, and Stephen Manyama, the African-born pastor of the Family Worship Center in East Lake, borrowed a truck from a friend, drove to the nearest hardware store and spent the next three hours fashioning a 12-by-6-foot cross from the cheapest lumber they could find in the store.
After nailing the two-by-fours together, the ministers glued the purpose of their mission across the vertical face of the cross in big, bold letters:
P
E
A
C
E
By The
B
L
O
O
D
Of His
C
R
O
S
S
The ministers carried their rough-hewn cross past Dealey Plaza and along the six square blocks that constituted the crime scene, cordoned off with tape and barricades. Asthey carried their cross along the crime scene, the white man and the black manwere approached by curious onlookers wondering who they were and why they had come to Dallas. "Only to pray with you, to console you, to help you heal," Rev. Manyama said over and over.
As I watched these ministers carrying their cross along the streets and sidewalks of downtown Dallas, I kept thinking of Bill Marvel's essay. "Someone has to close the last door, hammer in the last nail."
The black man and the white man, I thought, were doing that in their own way -- closing the door to indifference and discord, hammering the last nail into a cross to remind everyone of the power of Christ to transform evil into love for all humanity.
Early Sunday morning, the black man and the white man took their cross to Dallas's downtown Police Headquarters, where a make-shift memorial in the courtyard had sprung up after the melee. The memorial consisted of hundreds of balloons, teddy bears, and letters to the fallen police officers draped over a squad car.
As the black man and the white man slowly entered the courtyard, several hundred mourners looked shocked at the sight of the towering cross being carried, with great care, across the mass of mourners. The black man and the white man carried the cross into a crowd of policemen standing under a banner mounted on the side of the headquarters that said, "We support our Dallas Police Officers."
Now standing under the cross and hearing the black man and the white man invite them to pray with them, the police and the ministers draped their arms around one another, wailed words they remembered from scripture towards the heavens, and wept until the courtyard under their feet became a pool of tears.
"They suffered a kind of crucifixion," Bishop Wilson told a reporter back in Birmingham. "The just man taken down by the violent. That's what the cross represents."
The black man and the white man stationed their cross inside the memorial and waved goodbye to the crowd. The cross is still there, alongside the teddy bears, offering consolation and healing to a community badly in need of salvation.
EPILOGUE:
The author of this story had the privilege of helping and observing the black man and the white man's ministry of mercy to the tormented souls of Dallas last weekend. I saw, first hand, how these compassionate men, carrying their cross, transformed a city and its citizens. What I witnessed was something sacred and holy, an act of love that will live on in me and in the citizens of Dallas forever and ever. Amen.
Heflin police got a scare this morning when the department's five-year-old drug sniffing dog "Jedi" was bitten by a copperhead snake.
Chief A.J. Benefield, said the dog's handler noticed the snakebite this morning at the handler's home.
"Apparently the snake got in his kennel and bit him on his front leg," Benefield said. "It was already pretty swollen when he noticed it."
Jedi, a Belgian Malinois, was rushed to Bowdon Animal Hospital in nearby Bowden, Ga., where he was administered antivenom.
"He should be fine," Benefield said. "We think he'll be back to work by Friday."
Attalla police have arrested a man they say poisoned two of his neighbors' dogs with antifreeze.
Investigator Doug Jordan said Carlos Enrique Guzman, 27, was arrested last Wednesday on two counts of felony animal cruelty.
He was released on $5,000 bond.
Guzman was arrested in connection with an incident that happened July 6. Jordan said a witness said Guzman was seen pouring antifreeze onto the food for two dogs, owned by two different neighbors.
The dogs, a mixed breed of Chihuahua, died overnight of poisoning, Jordan said. According to court documents, Guzman was "involved in the infliction of torture" when he "fed the dog food covered in antifreeze resulting in prolonged suffering and death" of the dogs.
"That kind of poisoning causes a good bit of suffering for a dog," Jordan said.
Police took the dogs' bodies in for analysis, and recovered a container of antifreeze near Guzman's house on Wilson Circle, he said.
Birmingham City Councilwoman Sheila Tyson claims a gun-wielding man accosted her and threatened to harm her because of statements she made critical of city dollars going toward a privately funded Holocaust memorial in the city.
Tyson has not responded to a request for comment made by AL.com on Saturday, but a Birmingham Police Department report was made public today. In that report, the officer said that Tyson filed the report on July 12 at 5:37 p.m.
This is the written statement Tyson provided the officer: "This statement is as a result of an incident that happened to me on Saturday, July 9th, after 2 p.m. I was leaving the Birmingham Zoo when a car pulled up on the side of me on my left. The driver of the car then asked me if my name was Birmingham City Councilor Sheila Tyson and proceeded to say, '(Expletive), I will blow your (expletive) brains out for talking about my Jewish ancestors.'
He then picked up an object from his right and started leaning over to the window. When his hand came up, I noticed the object was a handgun. I didn't really pay attention to the color of the vehicle at that moment, I took off in my car.
As of today, everything after that is still a blur and I still fear for my safety. As I reflect what happened to the officers in Dallas, my safety now is my Number One concern."
The police officer also noted in the report that Tyson provided emails of people threatening her. She also said she received phone calls of people threatening her."
Tyson in June criticized plans by the city to chip in on a privately funded Holocaust memorial downtown after her request to give city money to Shadow Lawn Cemetery, an old African-American cemetery that had fallen into disrepair, was denied.
The Birmingham Holocaust Education Center plans to raise about $500,000 to build the park, alongside a 9/11 memorial near McWane Center in downtown Birmingham. Birmingham's contribution would be to remove existing structures, at a cost of $45,500.
"Dead is dead" Tyson said.
"Isn't it still for dead people," Tyson said. "It is for dead people. Aren't the people they are memorializing deceased?"
"I'm not sure I have the vocabulary or explanatory power to indicate the distinction although it's clear to me from a legal standpoint that there is a distinction," city lawyer Thomas Bentley replied. He went on to say Shadow Lawn is a private entity, while the Holocaust memorial is a public expression of the city's remembrance.
Tyson later criticized AL.com's coverage of the incident, saying her statements during the council meeting were mischaracterized. "My point, however, remains the same: how and why do we choose whom we memorialize, Shadow Lawn Memorial or the Holocaust Memorial? I support both," she wrote on Facebook.
"For the record, I will be clear: I support the use of public funds for the Holocaust memorial. However, I will only vote to allocate these funds when we are provided with clear guidance about the law pertaining to funding memorials."
Birmingham police spokesman Lt. Sean Edward released this statement about the allegations: "A police report was completed by one of our officers who documented the incident reported by Councilwoman Sheila Tyson."
Minamisoma returnees keen to rebuild lives after lifting of evacuation order for first time since 2011 nuclear disaster.
Fukushima, Japan This week, authorities lifted an evacuation order for nearly all parts of Minamisoma city, Fukushima prefecture, allowing more than 10,000 people to return to their homes for the first time since 2011s nuclear disaster.
Tens of thousands of people across the prefecture had to abruptly leave their homes five years ago after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japans northeast wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
The lifting of the evacuation order marked the largest number of people allowed back into their hometown yet only around an estimated 20 percent of Minamisomas 10,807 residents in 3,487 households decided to come back.
READ MORE: How comic books helped fuel Japans love for the atom
Since 2014, the government has been gradually lifting up evacuation orders within a 20km radius of the nuclear power plant, following the progress of some clean-up efforts.
Our team drove to Minamisoma from Tokyo along the countrys northeastern coast.
It was not difficult to spot the on-going clean-up efforts.
A great number of big contaminated waste disposal bags were piled up at temporary holding areas on fields across Fukushima prefecture.
Some holding areas were massive in size, occupying huge chunk of the fields, with a string of trucks constantly dropping off black bags.
Roads into contaminated towns were still blocked by big barricades, and checkpoints were put in place to only allow people with a special permit to enter.
As we drove past contaminated areas, the reading on our Geiger counter, which measures the level of radiation, would from time to time jump above usual levels, reaching as high as 3Sv/h the governments long-term reduction goal for areas within a 20km radius of the nuclear power plant stands at 0.23Sv/h.
Passing through the still largely empty, yet seemingly peaceful streets of Minamisoma, we arrived at the Odaka station in the citys Odaka district.
Although the train service had been resumed for the first time in more than five years on the 9.4km stretch between Odaka and Haranomachi station, only a handful of passengers were seen during the day.
Trains arrived and departed, largely empty.
What caught my attention was a large screen in front of the station, showing radiation levels in real time.
The reading was 0.142Sv/h, which was higher than 0.06Sv/h in Tokyo but still below the 0.23Sv/h government goal.
Such screens were set up across the city to assuage the publics lingering concerns over radiation contamination.
Over the past few years, a growing number of Minamisoma residents settled somewhere else, worried over the potential long-term health effects of a return back home.
However, people who did decide to come back were trying their best to ensure that life in their hometown, albeit slowly, returned to normal.
READ MORE: Tendenko Surviving the tsunami
About a three-minute walk distance from the station, we spotted around 30 young students and residents.
Preparations were under way by a number of local organisations to celebrate the opening of a community centre in a makeshift building, where residents could freely come and talk about their life back in hometown.
An old lady asked passers-by to take a seat as she served local food. Young students were hanging out withtheir friends, doing hula hoop and blowing bubbles.
Many of the returnees told us that despite the uncertainties and doubts, they hoped to restore a sense of community and thus prove to friends and families who were having second thoughts about coming back that it was worth returning home.
Although we cannot bring back Odaka to what it used to be before the disaster, as residents here, we want to bring back its spirit and the community, Yoshiki Konno, a local resident and the head of an NGO, told Al Jazeera.
That is the most important thing we must do.
Survivors tell of horror at the hands of smugglers and say they would rather die at sea than return to Libya.
The anguished faces and the stories of desperate journeys have been supplanted by scenes of bloody attacks around the globe and racial tensions in the United States. But determination for a peaceful and prosperous existence has kept a steady stream of refugees flowing into Europe this year.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) more than 233,000 people have arrived in Europe during the first half of 2016. Most of them made the treacherous trip by sea in smugglers boats.
An Al Jazeera team boarded a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) ship to document something that has, sadly, become a routine: a medical team rescuing people who have been abandoned by smugglers in the dilapidated boats off of the Mediterranean coast of Libya.
Since last year, MSF, a medical charity, said it has rescued more than 25,000 people on boats in the Central Mediterranean.
More than 2,950 people have died or gone missing so far this year while crossing the Mediterranean, according to the UNHCR. More than a million people reached Europe via the Mediterranean, mainly to Greece and Italy, in 2015 alone, and more 3,700 drowned or went missing.
READ MORE: MSF rejects all EU funding over Turkey refugee deal
Those who have survived tell horrific stories. People told MSF they had been enslaved and tortured until they could pay off their debts to smugglers. Women said they were raped and sold to multiple men. Their experiences in Libya were so traumatic, refugees said, they would rather die at sea than return to Libya.
Our journey began in the Port of Augusta in Sicily. The ship will travel 30 hours south to reach just about 25 nautical miles off the coast of Libya. Even getting that close is a security risk. Libya has become extremely unstable since the Arab Spring of 2011 and the death of President Muammar Gaddafi.
There are now two rival governments in two cities, each vying for power. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) is firmly established in the country. MSF said the group has threatened to carry out attacks in the area where our ship will be positioned to launch rescues.
But the MSF team is focused on saving as many lives as they can. They told Al Jazeera the best moment is the transformation they see when people are rescued. Once they know they are safe and have been greeted warmly, their faces soften. They are no longer commodities. They are being treated like human beings again.
The British government officially offers some level of material support to refugees who have reached the UK by their own means to seek asylum. But, there are various circumstances under which this support can be withheld or withdrawn if the state refuses or delays the initial claims for asylum.
In such cases, people seeking asylum can find themselves left destitute and homeless.
Among the many grassroots solidarity initiatives that have emerged within the UKs Refugees Welcome movement, the Hosting movement has grown specifically to address this need for housing people who find themselves trapped within the system.
Made up of different charities, NGOs and grassroots initiatives, the Hosting movement seeks out and coordinates people who are willing to offer shelter to destitute asylum seekers within their own homes. People from all walks of life are participating in Hosting across the UK and thousands of nights shelter are being provided for those in need annually.
People who have opened up their homes to asylum seekers say they took the decision for various reasons but that the shared experience has been mutually enriching.
Al Jazeera met a few of the many hosts and their guests to document their stories and find out more about this initiative.
Vahe* from Armenia is being hosted by Donna Williams in Epsom, Surrey
Vahe was a human rights journalist in Armenia with a large social media following. His work challenged governmental corruption which he says made him the target of state authorities who arrested and imprisoned him many times in Armenia. He says that he was finally threatened and told that he had 48 hours to leave the country.
Vahe had visited Britain before and had a valid multi-entry visa on which he came into the country.
In the airport I claimed asylum and I told them that I could not return to Armenia because I knew that I would be killed if I did. I was put in an immigration reception centre where I was kept for two months before being housed by the Home Office until my case was heard.
My asylum application was rejected.
I appealed but also lost that case in November 2013. They do not believe that I cannot go back to Armenia.
Following the second rejection, I had nowhere to go and came to London where I slept anywhere that I could. I lived for more than two years like that, homeless. I came here to the UK to find freedom but I just found more problems.
Eventually I went to a London migrant and refugee centre and they found me a new solicitor. They also contacted people about Hosting who, through an organisation called Refugees at Home found Donna for me who invited me here to stay at her house.
I felt like I had come to a second home when I met Donna. She has been like a ray of sunshine for me that is helping me to grow again and have some hope back in my life. I had lost more than 16 kilos since I had been in the UK but at last I am eating, sleeping and getting healthy again.
I spend a lot of my time here on the internet reading and keeping up to date with whats happening in Armenia. My mind is always there.
Most of my friends are either in prison or dead now because of our human rights work. I just ask the British government to give me a chance to live in freedom, at last.
Donna Williams, host
I am recently widowed and my children have all moved away so I had space in my home and it felt wrong not to share it with someone who was in need.
Before becoming involved in hosting I didnt quite realise how difficult it was for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. I thought that people must be getting looked after within the system, but now I realise that many are surviving with basically no help from the state.
I am also aware about how important it must be for people who are going through all of this to have a roof over their head and somewhere safe to live. People cannot think about progressing their asylum cases when they have nowhere to sleep at night.
Watching Vahe flourish and develop has been the best thing about this experience. I can see his confidence growing all the time. He has to keep himself busy because of what he has experienced, to keep himself active and to keep his mind occupied. It has not been easy for him.
I am also trying to find Vahe some voluntary work locally. He wants to work and he needs some stability in his life and hopefully his new solicitor can help him to move his case forward.
Arnold* from Sierra Leone is being hosted by Kajsa Soderlund in Lewisham, London
Originally from Sierra Leone, Arnold went to Nigeria to study law where he was arrested for writing an article in a student newspaper exposing corruption in the Nigerian government.
In 1989, Arnold managed to escape from prison and fled to Britain where he immediately applied for asylum. Arnold was given a letter by the Home Office stating that while his application was being assessed he had the right to work although he could not practise law in the UK.
He says that every time he contacted the Home Office he was told that his case was ongoing and a final decision was yet to be made.
I began to learn about IT and got a good job in London, but I still couldnt get my documents back from the Home Office. This went on for 10 years and then suddenly the Home Office sent me a letter saying that I wasnt allowed to work, and they contacted my employers and told them that I was working illegally.
It was a bad time for me and I had a horrible feeling of being wanted. I stayed with friends for a while but eventually became homeless and for many years I was sleeping in the streets or in hostels when I could find a bed.
Everywhere I went I was looking over my shoulder and paranoid.
For a while I was sleeping underneath some stairs near the offices of the Refugee Council in London. One day I was invited inside the offices and I told them my story.
They introduced me to an MP who agreed to help me. She told me to fill in new application forms and write a personal statement explaining my case.
After some further complications, and with the MPs help, the Home Office finally gave me Leave To Remain in the UK for two and a half years, including the right to work. I finally got this official documentation in June last year, 26 years after first arriving in the UK.
Kajsa Soderlund, host
I went to a fundraising night and heard a Syrian refugee speak about being hosted and what it had meant to him. He said that what you can do to help refugees is to tell other people that we are not monsters. This broke my heart.
After hearing this speech I contacted Refugees at Home, the organisation that had found the speaker a place to live, and I registered to become a host.
They sent a social worker to interview me to find out more about me and what I could do. For example, I am not in a position to offer professional support to someone who has gone through severe trauma, but what I can do is offer someone who is quite independent a place to live.
The organisation told me about Arnold and we met for coffee to get to know each other. We got on well straight away and in the last week in February he moved in to my house.
Arnold is such an inspiring person. I have learned a lot about African culture and history, and about the slave trade which I knew little about previously.
I am an immigrant myself. I was born in Sweden but as an EU citizen I can move freely. Its so unfair that I have these rights but Arnold doesnt.
It shows how unfair the world is when things are based on where we happened to be born the accident of nationality over which we have no control. We are all people who are just trying to live a decent and safe life.
Arnold, refugee
Living with Kajsa has helped me to reintegrate in to British society. Every time I had applied for a job after I got LTR [Leave to Remain] my application was refused because I was living in a hostel and had no home address. Now that I have an address people see my differently.
I am studying now for legal exams so that I can become an immigration lawyer and help other people who find themselves in difficult situations like I did.
The hostel where I stayed previously helped me a lot and I still go back there now to help out, but there was no privacy and it would have been impossible for me to study there. I am also volunteering at the Refugee Council now.
Kajsa and I respect each other, we care about each other and we help each other. I could never have found a better friend than Kajsa has been to me.
Hajer ASharafeh, a member of stateless Bidoon community from Kuwait is being hosted by Stephanie Allen and Jeremy Dunham in Sheffield, Yorkshire
As a member of the Bidoon community in Kuwait , Hajer ASharafeh had no ID papers or passport in her home country, as well as no right to work, study or access medical care. ASharafeh reached Britain in 2014 and applied immediately for asylum. ASharafeh was placed in a refugee reception centre before being moved to Sheffield:
I was first moved to a house in Sheffield where 10 other female refugees were also living from Syria, Iran, Eritrea and other countries. Later, Assist [a refugee and asylum seeker support organisation in Sheffield] helped me to find Stephanie and Jeremy.
I have been here 3 months now and I am really happy here. They have been really kind to me. I practise my English with Stephanie and we laugh together a lot.
READ MORE: The women helping refugees in Serbia
I go to weekly English classes and we also study other subjects like beauty therapy which I love. I now have several friends here in Sheffield, but mostly I like to spend time with my friend Kawa who is Kurdish and runs a restaurant near our house.
My aim was not specifically to get to Britain, I just needed somewhere to live and I found a way to get here. If I would have been able to get to any other country I would have stayed there. I just want the right to live somewhere.
My family are all still in Kuwait and that is really hard. I miss them a lot but I call them and speak to them nearly every day.
Stephanie Allen and Jeremy Dunham, hosts
Learning more about the situation here has been a real eye-opener for us. In Sheffield there is a church hall where asylum seekers are allowed to sleep, but it is mixed gender and doesnt open until 10pm and people then have to leave again early in the morning.
So its literally just somewhere to sleep for the night. State support is usually given to refugees when they first arrive until their case is heard in the courts. But if the application is rejected and an appeal also fails people are essentially just left to become destitute.
Many of our friends were surprised at first when we said we were going to start hosting, but now that they have got to know Hajer and learned about the experience they have said they would like to host people themselves.
READ MORE: Part of the neighbourhood: Syrian refugees in Amsterdam
We feel really uncomfortable when people praise us, as though we are making some kind of sacrifice by inviting Hajer to stay here, because its really not like that at all. Its nice to just have made a new friend, she has become part of the family now.
We are both really concerned that this governments policies make the most needy people pay, and suffer. We are in a position to do something small that can help alleviate that in one case.
I think that many people, when they know about the refugee crises in Syria and other places really want to do something tangible to help, but often they dont know what they can do. For us hosting has answered this question.
David and Jan Preedy are hosting an Iranian family, a father, his wife and their son in Headley, Surrey
Although originally Muslim, the Iranian father, his wife and their son converted to become Jehovahs Witnesses in Iran.
The family say this led to them being threatened and their house being attacked. Believing that their lives were in danger the family fled to neighbouring Armenia where they were baptised. While preaching in Armenia, the father was photographed by Iranian Embassy staff, who he states issued a death threat because of their religious conversion.
Unable to return to Iran or remain in Armenia, the 19-year-old son travelled to Britain in October 2015 after secured a student visa to study English in London.
His parents sought the assistance of a visa agent who completed their application for visitors visas and the family were reunited in the UK.
Son, refugee
Once my parents arrived we went to the Home Office and applied for asylum. We had been invited by a Jehovahs Witness to stay in his house whilet he was on holiday, so we told the Home Office this and showed them the small amount of money we had.
The Home Office told us that because we had somewhere to stay and some money that they would not support us then, but to contact them again when we had no money left and nowhere to live.
When we had to leave the house we had nowhere to go and only 13 left ($17). We contacted the Home Office again but they asked us for receipts to prove that we had spent our money. We had spent it on basic foods and bus fares so we didnt have receipts.
They also said that according to my parents visa application they had money and a business in Armenia. We have no business or money in Armenia. We think the agent that applied for my parents visa in Armenia must have written these things on the application to get the visas.
We had been looking on the internet and found the Refugee Council so went to see them for help. It was a Friday and they couldnt find us anywhere to stay so eventually contacted the police and arranged for us to sleep in a police station until Monday.
It was horrible and we were scared. As we were about to be taken to the police station, Jan contacted the Refugee Council, through Refugees at Home, and told them we could stay with her. She saved us.
David Preedy, host
They are getting no state support at all and have absolutely no money left. We are trying to help them with their applications for support from the Home Office.
They are currently stuck in this position, trying to prove that they have not got a business and money as had been stated on their visa application, but how do you prove that you havent got something? They are also being asked to account for every penny which has been spent since they have been here, which again is impossible.
Jan Preedy, host
We got involved with hosting, because we were so deeply moved by the desperate plight of refugees from Syria as well as those from other countries and wanted to do whatever we could to help. I have also become involved with collecting donations for refugees, and have helped out at the refugee camp in Calais. The dignity and resilience of the people I met there was inspiring.
David Preedy, host
One of the best things that I have got from this experience has been the honour of getting to know the family and how genuine they are. It has confirmed my world view that people are people the idea that we should only work to protect our own, I mean local people, is simply ridiculous. This experience has really enriched our lives, this is not about giving but about sharing.
Father, refugee
We had many problems in Iran, then in Armenia, and now also here but we must thank God that we found Jan and Dave.
It is still very difficult for us but at least now we can relax a little bit and feel safer. They have helped us so much. We have learned a lot about love for people and we will never forget these days and this family.
* Name changed for reasons of safety
READ MORE: The refugee crisis through the eyes of refugees
Tens of thousands of demonstrators came out on the streets of Turkeys capital Ankara and other cities to show support for the President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
On Sunday he told crowds of supporters, called to the streets by the government and by mosques across the country, that parliament must consider their demands to apply the death penalty for the plotters.
We cannot ignore this demand, he told a chanting crowd outside his house in Istanbul late on Sunday. In democracies, whatever the people say has to happen.
He called on Turks to stay on the streets throughout the week, and late into Sunday night his supporters thronged squares and streets, honking horns and waving flags.
Turkey gave up the death penalty in 2004 as part of a programme of reforms required to become a candidate to join the EU. Germany said on Monday that Turkey would lose its EU status if it reinstated the death penalty.
Yildirim said Turkey should not act hastily over the death penalty but could not ignore the demands of its people.
The violent act of hostage-taking is a manifestation of significant discontent within Armenia.
Richard Giragosian is the founding director of the Regional Studies Centre, an independent think tank in Yerevan, Armenia.
Early in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, a small group of well-armed gunmen stormed a local police station in Yerevan, forcibly taking several police officers hostage.
After an initial assault on the first day by police seeking to retake the police station and rescue the hostages failed, the crisis quickly turned into a standoff.
The crisis also rapidly escalated as a senior police officer was killed and several wounded, including at least three critically, in the failed assault.
The gunmen, comprising members and supporters of a small, fringe, yet radical, political opposition organisation known for its hard-line policies over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, demanded the immediate release of their jailed leader and called for the resignation of incumbent President Serzh Sarkisian.
In addition to demanding the release of their leader, Jirair Sefilian, who remains in custody following his arrest on weapons charges in June, the gunmen also defended their act as a preliminary move to a nationwide rebellion, although with no sign of popular support or political standing.
A hostage standoff
More than a dozen people seized the police station, taking hostage several police officers, including the deputy head of the national police, Vartan Yeghiazarian, and Yerevans deputy police chief, Valeri Osipian.
The two senior police officials were reportedly taken hostage, willingly or involuntarily, after coming to the scene to negotiate with the group. One police hostage was subsequently released, reportedly for health reasons.
Although the gunmen may have genuinely expected some sort of popular support, they were quickly disappointed. Moreover, the incident and the lack of any popular reaction only confirmed the marginal standing of this radical fringe group within Armenian society.
Yet, this hostage standoff was serious, for two reasons. First, this particular police station was targeted for a reason as one of the largest depositories of police weapons in the capital, with an onsite arsenal that was seized by the attackers.
This absence of any military role in Armenian politics also greatly diminishes any risk of a coordinated coup d'etat. by
Second, the gunmen were veterans of the Karabakh war, with little to lose and with extensive experience in handling the weapons at their disposal.
And after an initial police assault to retake the police station on the first day failed, the gunmen were better prepared, and strengthened their positions, using the hostages as human shields, making any rescue operation especially difficult.
And with police snipers and special police paramilitary units deployed to surround the building, the risk of further deaths in any renewed assault was seen, at least in the first 24 hours, as an unacceptable risk.
The deeper implications
Aside from the radical, yet amateur, nature of this crisis, there are several deeper, more significant implications, however.
First, although the takeover of the police station is in itself a criminal act of desperation, there are undeniable political overtones to the crisis.
The now commonly used and abused use of pre-trial detention and questionable moves by the Armenian authorities against the opposition groups leader tended to undercut the standing of the government.
And a demonstrable political paranoia within the countrys ruling elite has only fostered an inherently dangerous record of overreaction by the police, with the targeting of far too many civic activists and political opponents well beyond any real threat.
Yet, the criminal actions by this group have only reinforced the Armenian governments position, helping to bolster and even justify its crackdown on this fringe group.
But the deeply rooted political issues of entrenched corruption, a record of falsified elections and a general perception of an arrogance of power, defined by a political elite committed to ruling but not governing the country, are also symptomatic of the more significant political backdrop to this crisis.
No military threat
A second deeper implication stems from what did not occur. More specifically, unlike its neighbours, Armenia enjoys a fairly impressive degree of stable civil-military relations, with no record of any involvement in politics by the army.
Although in the countrys violent post-election crisis of March 2008, in which unarmed demonstrators were killed in clashes with the police, former President Robert Kocharian deployed special military units from Nagorno-Karabakh, with no significant involvement of the Armenian armed forces in that tragic episode.
OPINION: Nagorno-Karabakh is not a localised conflict
This absence of any military role in Armenian politics also greatly diminishes any risk of a coordinated coup detat.
Even the forced resignation of the countrys first President, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, was a constitutional crisis which the country successfully overcame, rather than a trigger for outright civil war or domestic discord.
A third factor revealing the broader implications from this crisis is the political context. Notably, the silence and passivity of the countrys traditional opposition parties only magnifies their place as largely discredited and popularly dismissed forces on the Armenian political landscape.
Rather, the emergence of new opposition forces was only confirmed in the move by opposition parliamentarian Nikol Pashinyan one of the leaders of the Civil Contract political party who was the only person accepted by all sides as an interlocutor during this crisis.
Pashinyan was able to open personal negotiations with the hostage takers, seeking to persuade them of the futility of their actions and urging them to surrender.
Thus, as the course of this crisis demonstrates, the violent act of hostage-taking is not only a manifestation of significant discontent within Armenia, but also confirms the reality that the risk of a coup detat in Armenia is only more remote and unlikely.
Richard Giragosian is the founding director of the Regional Studies Center, an independent think-tank in Yerevan, Armenia.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
The convention is likely to gloss over Trumps non-establishment position.
Presumptive Republican party presidential nominee Donald Trump is heading to the party convention in Cleveland, Ohio on July 18 confident that his brand is working despite major misgivings by the party establishment.
Trump has deferred to the latter to draft the party platform to deflect any last-minute revolt against him, but he is likely to continue to chart his own course leading to the November election.
He defied conventional wisdom by being the politically incorrect non-politician during the primary season, winning the most Republican delegates in a crowded field of relatively well-known Republican politicians.
He used insults against his opponents, plus offensive language against Muslims, Hispanics, and others to score points with a major section of the Republican party base that were upset over the inability of politicians to get things done in Washington and who were fearful that the country was changing for the worse.
The right candidate for GOP?
While such tactics and antics worked to get him over the top in terms of winning delegates, his comments worried establishment Republicans who feared that he would hurt the partys chances to win the White House and jeopardise the partys control of Congress.
For example, House Speaker Paul Ryan (Republican from Wisconsin) said Trumps comments disparaging a United States district court judge for his Mexican heritage was an example of textbook definition of a racist comment. And this was the day after Ryan had endorsed Trump for president.
Many Republicans fear that Trump will hurt their partys chances to win over minority groups, who are a growing segment of the population, and are urging him to stop making outrageous and offensive statements.
At the same time, many other Republicans are upset that Trump is simply not conservative enough, and have staked out positions that are against Republican party orthodoxy.
The combination of Trump's appeal to disaffected elements of the American electorate, Republican anger over Clinton, and her vulnerabilities are likely to make the US presidential election in November a closer contest than most observers believe. by
On foreign policy and trade issues, Trump has bucked the Republican consensus. He has repeatedly called the Iraq war of 2003 (led by Republican President George W Bush) a dumb war and a disaster that should never have been fought.
He has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for being a strong leader, has celebrated Saddam Hussein for his so-called efficient killing of terrorists, and has been sharply critical of free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
On domestic issues, Trump has also worried Republican conservatives because he previously supported Democratic party positions on gay rights and abortion. Many of these conservatives still dont trust him even after he changed his positions.
Boycotting the convention
Hence, several prominent Republicans have decided to boycott the convention. These include former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who lost to Trump in the primaries his brother and former President George W Bush.
Other figures, such as former Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Senator John McCain a former prisoner of war in Vietnam whom Trump insulted for not being a war hero and others are also boycotting the convention.
OPINION: Donald Trumps dangerous demagoguery
Jeb Bush stated that I cant vote for Hillary Clinton and I cant vote for Donald Trump, and it breaks my heart. He added that if Trump wins, he would be worried.
Therefore, coming into the Republican convention, much of the party faithful are unsure about Trump.
To stave off a potential party revolt against him at the convention, Trump cleverly allowed establishment Republican politicians and their aides to draft the party platform, which has become a very conservative document.
This exercise also has the effect of bringing about party unity. But Trump is likely to ignore the document once the convention ends.
Anti-Clintonism as unifier
The only unifying message for Republicans is being anti-Clinton. Even many of Trumps detractors in the Republican party are putting out the line that they must vote for him in order to deny her the presidency.
At the Republican convention, nearly all of the speakers are expected to lambast Clinton for her untrustworthiness and unethical and illegal behaviour.
OPINION: Can Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump?
Although Clinton was not indicted for her email usage on unclassified computer servers while serving as secretary of state, there was enough information released by the FBI director in his public testimony about her negligence to give ample fodder to Republicans.
House Speaker Ryan has even published an opinion piece in The Washington Post saying she should be denied access to classified briefings as a presidential candidate because she recklessly mishandled classified information.
And old allegations about her not doing enough to save four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in a 2013 terrorist attack are likely to resurface.
The combination of Trumps appeal to disaffected elements of the American electorate, Republican anger over Clinton and her vulnerabilities are likely to make the US presidential election in November a closer contest than most observers believe.
Still, Trumps high negative ratings are such that he will have to tone down his offensive rhetoric in order to beat Clinton, but that is not in his ego or personality.
Gregory Aftandilian is a lecturer at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and is a former staffer of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Just like successful coups, failed coups can have a major impact on countries foreign and security policies.
Sinan Ulgen is Chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies.
A military coup against an elected government typically unleashes a flood of analysis about the countrys future direction following the break in democratic rule.
But failed coups can be just as consequential. The botched attempt by elements of the Turkish military to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will have far-ranging implications for Turkeys foreign relations and regional role. Turkeys relationship with the United States, in particular, is headed for considerable turbulence.
Gulen links
The coup attempt heralds a new and uneasy phase in the Turkey-US relationship, because Turkish authorities have linked it to Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher based near Philadelphia since 1999 but with a core group of followers in Turkey.
Gulen was previously charged with establishing a parallel state structure primarily within the police, the judiciary, and the military.
More recently, the Turkish authorities classified the Gulen movement as a terrorist organisation a label given new meaning by the failed coup.
But, despite the growing evidence concerning Gulen and his followers, the impression in Ankara is that the US has so far refused to constrain the activities of his network, which includes a range of schools and many civil society organisations.
This network allows the Gulen movement to engage in substantial fundraising, which the authorities claim sustains the nefarious operations of its affiliates in Turkey.
As a result, Gulens continued residence in Pennsylvania has become not only a contentious issue in the bilateral relationship, but also an important source of rising anti-Americanism in Turkey.
The need for more cooperation
The failed coup is set to compound this trend. In the post-coup era, the US will come under significant pressure to reconsider its laissez-faire attitude towards Gulen. The Turkish side already has signalled that it will initiate a formal request for Gulens extradition.
The coup has therefore brought a new urgency to the need for the two NATO allies to settle this important dispute. A failure to find common ground under these changed circumstances would weaken prospects for cooperation at many levels.
The Turkish military will now undergo a painful process of purging its Gulenist elements, and morale and cohesion will inevitably be affected at a time when the armed forces play an instrumental role in Turkey's efforts to combat Kurdish separatists and ISIL terrorism and in strengthening Turkey's border controls, which have helped to impede the flow of foreign jihadists into ISIL-controlled territory in Syria. by
The effectiveness of the joint fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), which relies heavily on air strikes originating from the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, would doubtless be jeopardised.
More broadly, a breach in this key bilateral relationship would weaken NATO cohesion in its policy towards Russia, with Turkey seeking to move beyond the confrontational framework set out at the alliances recent Warsaw summit.
The consequences of the failed coup are also likely to affect Turkeys relationship with Europe. In March, Turkey and the European Union agreed on an ambitious package of measures designed to stem the flow of refugees to Europe.
OPINION: The people defeated the coup in Turkey
But, while the arrangement has been a clear success, it remains politically vulnerable. For Turkey, the biggest prize was the EUs commitment to lifting visa restrictions on Turkish citizens travelling to the Schengen Area, a move scheduled for June.
Instead, visa liberalisation was postponed until October, owing to Turkeys refusal to comply with a few remaining conditions.
A likely diplomatic crisis
At the core of the diplomatic impasse is the EUs demand that Turkey amend its anti-terror legislation to ensure that it reflects more closely the norms established by the European Court of Human Rights.
The aim is to limit the legislations implementation to genuine terror cases and prevent its use as a tool to restrain freedom of expression. But the post-putsch environment will reduce the governments willingness to amend Turkeys anti-terror framework.
IN PICTURES: Turkeys coup attempt captured in dramatic images
As a result, a diplomatic crisis by October is likely, with Turkey claiming that the EU has failed to honour its commitments.
The entire refugee package, under which Turkey continues to host more than 2.8 million Syrian refugees, could then come under threat, with consequences for the flow of asylum seekers.
Finally, the botched coup will have repercussions on Turkeys ability to contribute to regional security.
The Turkish military will now undergo a painful process of purging its Gulenist elements, and morale and cohesion will inevitably be affected at a time when the armed forces play an instrumental role in Turkeys efforts to combat Kurdish separatists and ISIL terrorism and in strengthening Turkeys border controls, which have helped to impede the flow of foreign jihadists into ISIL-controlled territory in Syria.
And weakened trust in the wake of the coup attempt will make interagency cooperation between the military, the police, and the intelligence services particularly problematic.
Just like successful coups, failed coups can have a major impact on countries foreign and security policies. Turkeys botched putsch has already heightened the likelihood that critical milestones soon will be reached in the countrys relationship with the US and Europe.
Sinan Ulgen is Chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels. He is co-editor of the book Turkeys Nuclear Future.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
A judge has acquitted the highest-ranking officer involved in the April 2015 death of a black detainee, Freddie Gray, in Baltimore, the largest city in the US state of Maryland.
The judge on Monday acquitted Baltimore police Lieutenant Brian Rice of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office for the death of Gray, who was 25 when he was killed.
Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams handed down his verdict after a bench trial.
Rice, 42, is the highest-ranking officer charged in Grays death from a broken neck suffered in a police transport van.
Mondays verdict is the latest setback for prosecutors, who have failed to secure a conviction in the trials of four officers thus far.
Rice, who is white, ordered two officers on bicycles to chase Gray, 25, when the police claimed he fled.
Grays death triggered protests and rioting in the city, which has a majority of black Americans, and stoked a national debate about police brutality against minorities.
Prosecutors said Rice was negligent in shackling Grays legs and not securing him in a seat belt, as required by department protocol.
But defence lawyers said Rice was allowed leeway on whether to get inside a van to secure a prisoner. The officer made a correct decision in a few seconds while Gray was being combative and a hostile crowd was looking on, they said.
Williams, who heard the case without a jury at Rices request, said prosecutors failed to show the lieutenant was aware of a departmental policy requiring seat belts for prisoners during transport.
The state did not prove the defendant was aware of the new policy, the judge said in court.
OPINION: Structural racism in the US wont diminish with time
A handful of protesters were at the courthouse for the verdicts announcement.
Williams previously acquitted officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson Jr, the vans driver. A third officer, William Porter, faces a retrial after a jury deadlocked.
Black Lives Matter
Anti-police brutality protests were renewed earlier this month when officers killed African American men in Minnesota and Louisiana, sparking at least two apparent revenge attacks on police.
On Sunday, three police officers were fatally shot and three others injured in Louisianas Baton Rouge.
Baton Rouge became the scene of large protests against police brutality after white 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 and circulated online.
READ MORE: Obama on Dallas shootings a wake-up call for America on racism?
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 state of Minnesota. The aftermath of the shooting was also captured on video and streamed live by Castiles girlfriend on Facebook.
On July 7, five white police officers were shot dead at one such protest in Dallas, Texas.
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.
Thousands of health experts, politicians, activists and researchers converge in Durban to discuss global HIV response.
Durban, South Africa More than 18,000 delegates from around the world have descended on South Africa to attend the 21st International Aids conference and discuss the global HIV response.
Improving access to antiretroviral treatment, reaching priority groups and consolidating a strategy for ending Aids by 2030 are high on the major summits agenda, in what experts describe as a rare opportunity for policymakers to build on some of the big gains of the past decade.
Here is a breakdown of all you need to know about the five-day conference, the largest conference on any global health or development issue, which started on Monday.
The delegates
Doctors, politicians, activists, researchers, public health experts and hundreds of journalists will be in attendance.
RETURN TO DURBAN The city of Durban previously hosted the Aids conference in 2000, a summit widely credited with changing the way experts and policymakers approached the pandemic. For many, the return to Durban is historic. We are dealing with a very different pandemic today compared with the year 2000, and the challenge now is to try to maintain and build on the momentum, Karim said. Access to ARV treatment is on the rise with some 17 million people globally on medication. This is 22 times the number in the year 2000. As a result, Aids-related deaths have reduced by 35 percent and scientists are talking about a possible cure. But the numbers are still staggering. According to UNAIDS, at least 36 million people worldwide are HIV-positive. In 2014, more than 1.2 million people died from Aids. Crucially, while new infections were declining in some regions, they were on the rise in others and among different populations.
People living HIV will feature prominently in many of the sessions.
Some of the keynote speakers include UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africas deputy president.
Organisers say the conference will highlight the latest accomplishments and challenges in a rapidly expanding area of scientific inquiry that few could have imagined at the first Durban conference.
Dr Salim Abdool Karim, director of the Centre for the Aids programme of research in South Africa (CAPRISA), said the hope was that the conference would give the international community an opportunity to take a long hard look at what we are doing in addressing HIV.
We need to come out with a sense of clarity of the gaps and the needs, he told Al Jazeera.
Key groups
Titled Access Equity Rights Now, the conference will focus on a call to reach those still lacking access to treatment and care.
Around 60 percent of people living with HIV still do not have access to antiretroviral therapy.
The UN warns women and girls, transgender people, sex workers and young people remain under-prioritised in national policies and remain most at risk.
In southern and eastern Africa, 75 percent of all new HIV infections for those aged between 10 and 19 are among adolescent girls, according the UN.
You cannot solve HIV if you are not able to address the disproportionate impact on women, Karim said.
The cure
Combination antiretroviral treatment is still considered the most important development in the efforts of tackling HIV and saving lives.
For instance, since South Africa introduced its treatment policy, life expectancy increased from 52 years in 2004 to 62 years in 2014.
We saw life expectancy increasing by 10 years. It is unheard of, and all of this because of treatment, Olive Shisana, co-chair of the conference, told Al Jazeera.
Q&A: Can the AIDS epidemic be eradicated by 2030?
Yet, some scientists are adamant that they are inching toward a possible cure and for the fifth year, experts will be raising one of the most complex matters in the scientific community: a cure for HIV.
According to Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, co-chair of the International Aids Societys (IAS) Towards an HIV Cure initiative, research into a cure is in a formative stage, but significant advances are being made.
But Nkhensani Mavasa, from the Treatment Action Campaign, a South African NGO at the forefront for equal access to treatment in South Africa, said talking about a cure at a time when communities were still struggling with ineffective prevention strategies was farcical.
How can we talk about a cure, when there are still no condoms in rural areas? Mavasa said.
The prevention gap
A new report released by UNAIDS on the eve of the conference, showed that while new HIV infections have declined by more than 70 percent among children since 2001, the decline in new cases among adults had stalled.
The power of prevention is not being realised. If there is a resurgence in new HIV infections now, the epidemic will become impossible to control. The world needs to take urgent and immediate action to close the prevention gap, Michele Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, said in a statement.
On Monday, the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) released a statement saying that Aids was still the number-two cause of death for those aged 10-19 and number one in Africa.
According to UNICEF, there were on average 29 new infections an hour last year among adolescents in the 15-19 age group.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Anurita Bains, UNICEFs regional adviser on HIV for eastern and southern Africa, called for innovation and renewed political will to reach those left behind.
There are a number of issues, including societal structures and power dynamics, that have to be urgently addressed, Bains said.
An Aids-free world
In June, the UN General Assembly resolved to end the epidemic as a public health threat by 2030 within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Despite remarkable progress, if we do not act, there is a danger the epidemic will rebound in low and middle-income countries, Ban said at the time.
But some activists claim that donors and western governments are pushing the end of Aids narrative into the health-developmental lexicon in an attempt to cull funding.
Instead of increasing money, middle-income and rich countries feel that they have done enough, and this concerns us, Mavasa, from the Treatment Action Campaign, said.
While admitting that funding has seemingly been diverted to the SDGs, Shisana said that if countries were able to meet the so-called 90-90-90 targets, set by the UNs HIV/Aids programme, talking about an Aids-free world is very plausible.
If 90 percent of people living with HIV/Aids know their status, 90 percent access treatment, and if the virus is suppressed in 90 percent of patients on treatment, we can go somewhere, Shisana said.
Talking about an Aids-free world only becomes premature if dont do use the knowledge from our past experiences.
For coverage from #AIDS2016, follow Azad Essa on Twitter: @azadessa
One of the three slain officers had written in Facebook of the difficulties being both a policeman and a black man.
Just a few days before he was shot and killed, a US police officer in Baton Rouge had posted a Facebook message sharing his emotional fatigue and expressing how difficult it was to be both a policeman and a black man.
Montrell Jackson, 32, died on Sunday along with two colleagues when a gunman opened fire on them, nearly two weeks after white police in the Louisiana city shot and killed Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man and father of five.
Sterlings shooting triggered nationwide protests, including one in Dallas where five officers were shot dead.
These last three days have tested me to the core, an emotional Jackson wrote on his Facebook page, in an entry posted the day after the Dallas shootings, and just over a week before he was killed.
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, said Jackson, who had served in the Baton Rouge force for 10 years and whose partner recently gave birth.
Describing himself as tired physically and emotionally, he added: These are trying times. Please dont let hate infect your heart.
Police officers killed
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 were no suspects at large.
The motive was not immediately clear.
Also among the dead officers was Matthew Gerald, 41, a rookie with a military background, the police department said on Facebook.
The third officer killed was Sheriffs Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four, local media reported, citing Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and Garafolas wife, Tonja.
A fourth policeman, aged 41, was fighting for his life on Monday, Gautreaux said.
Call for unity
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.
READ MORE: There are two Americas that really need to meet each other
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. Nothing justifies violence against law enforcement, he said.
Widespread protests
Baton Rouge became the scene of large protests against police brutality after the killing of Sterling on July 5.
Police officers killed Sterling outside a supermarket, claiming he had a gun. Sterling had been selling CDs.
Footage of the moment the father of five was killed was captured on a mobile phone and circulated online.
READ MORE: Second US police shooting in two days sparks outrage
His 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.
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.
Protesters from several groups unite to call out Donald Trumps xenophobia as Republican National Convention launches.
Cleveland, Ohio Protesters have lambasted what they called US presidential candidate Donald Trumps bigotry and xenophobia in rallies held on the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Under the watchful eye of police officers on horseback and bicycles, groups with different interests, united in their message against the celebrity tycoon, marched on Monday in the Cleveland area outside the security parameter where the convention was being held under tight guard.
People have already begun arriving from as far as Florida, and we expect to have a large family friendly protest that is truly national in scope, said protester Mick Kelly, as demonstrators nearby chanted Dump Trump.
There is a lot of anger at the bigot, Kelly added.
Approximately a third of Clevelands police officers are assigned to man the convention area, and approximately 2,500 others from other areas were brought in to help, as the city expects 50,000 visitors.
READ MORE: Cleveland braces for protests ahead of GOP convention
Republican delegates attending the convention to officially nominate Trump as their nominee for president should realise that theres another America with a different message against the hate and fear that Trump is spreading, said Tom Burke, spokesman for The Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC a bloc of 40 groups.
We are hoping to impact the election and build a movement that will outlast the elections to oppose racism, to oppose anti-immigration and to stand up for Muslims and other religious minorities in this country, he told Al Jazeera.
Dividing America
Throughout his campaign, Trump has raised the ire of many Americans with controversial statements; he declared he would build a wall at the border with Mexico to prevent immigrants from entering the country irregularly and proposed to ban Muslims from entering the US.
The former reality TV star made his incendiary proposals against Muslims, from banning to scrutinising them, a pillar of his campaign.
Since the Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando and Nice attacks, Trump has sought to cast himself as tough on national security and able to address the issue of terrorism.
In Cleveland, members of the Muslim community gathered to denounce Trumps rhetoric, which some said was dividing American in two.
We are beginning to look like two Americas, said Julia Shearson, executive director of The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Cleveland.
A great leader should not seek to solve problems by offering false problems and evading the truth. Scapegoating the Muslim community will not solve our nations problems. Muslims are part of the solution.
OPINION: Can Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump?
Members of the Muslim group distributed Islamophobin, a chewing gum designed as fake medicine to cure blind intolerance, and irrational fear of Muslims. A warning on the package says that Islamophobin may result in peaceful coexistence.
Trump has proposed registering Muslims in a database, ban Muslim travel to the US, and falsely claimed that Islam hates America, said Nihad Awad, CAIRs National Executive Director.
He lied about Muslims celebrating the events of 9/11. We are asking RNC members: what actions will this lead us towards as a nation? These proposals will lead us anywhere. They do not make us any safer.
Follow Dalia Hatuqa on Twitter: @DaliaHatuqa
More than three decades after leaving in row over membership of Western Sahara, Morocco wants to return to bloc.
Morocco has asked to rejoin the African Union (AU), 32 years after it quit the bloc in protest over a decision to make the disputed territory of Western Sahara a member.
In a message sent to an AU summit in the Rwandan capital of Kigali on Sunday, King Mohammed VI said it was time for Morocco to retake its place.
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, he said in a speech to African leaders as they began a two-day meeting.
The moment has now come.
According to MAP, the official Moroccan news agency, the monarch said that although his country had left the organisation, it never quit Africa.
READ MORE: UN chief regrets Western Sahara occupation comment
Morocco considers Western Sahara an important part of the kingdom. The Sahrawi peoples Polisario Front movement, which demands self-determination for Western Sahara, wants a referendum on independence.
Earlier this year, Morocco ordered the UN to pull out several of its staff members and to close down a military liaison office for the MINURSO peacekeeping mission in response to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moons use of the term occupation to describe Moroccos presence in Western Sahara.
In his message, King Mohammed urged the AU to reconsider its stance on what he called the phantom state, saying that a political solution was being worked on under the supervision of the UN.
Western Sahara is not a member of either the UN or the Arab League, he said, 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 King said.
Through this historic act and return, Morocco wants to work within the AU to transcend divisions.
Moroccos return to the AU would need to be validated by a vote.
At least one suspect arrested after shooting rampage in countrys biggest city, Almaty, that also left a civilian dead.
Three policemen and a civilian were shot dead in Kazakhstans financial capital, Almaty, as authorities said they had launched an anti-terrorist operation.
The Interfax news agency, quoting a police source, said that a religious radical and probably a follower of non-traditional Islam was on the rampage in central Almaty, opening fire from time to time.
At least one attacker had been detained by the police, the RIA news agency quoted a security source as saying. It said several policemen had also been wounded.
Two witnesses told the Reuters news agency they had heard shots in several different areas in the centre of Almaty, the countrys biggest city, on Monday.
OPINION: Kazakhstan FM Overcoming extremism is a priority
We saw a man with a rifle, he passed by, one shop worker said.
Police cordoned off several central streets, including the one near a local office of the KNB security police, where shots were also heard.
I heard one shot, most probably fired from a pistol, said one man standing nearby.
Kazakhstan, an oil-rich nation of 18 million, is far more prosperous than its post-Soviet neighbours in Central Asia.
But the country has recently seen outbreaks of violence, initially triggered by discontent over proposed land reforms.
The national intelligence agency, the KNB, said last month it had detained several members of a group which planned terrorist acts using improvised explosive devices, following a deadly attack in the northwestern town of Aktobe.
In that incident, about two dozen men described by the authorities as sympathisers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, also known as ISIS, attacked gun shops and a national guard facility, killing seven people.
Security forces killed 18 attackers, some on the same day and some during a subsequent manhunt.
Since government forces closed off Castello Road, supplies have dwindled and prices have skyrocketed.
Mercy Corps stockpiled food and other aid in Aleppo, but not medical supplies.
Aleppo, Syria Castello Road is rebel-held eastern Aleppos lifeline.
As the only supply route into the embattled part of Syrias largest city, it plays a crucial role in ensuring that residents of Aleppo, who are largely dependent on outside aid, can receive food, medical items and other essentials.
But after government forces recently cut off the route and attempts by opposition fighters to reopen it failed, residents of Aleppo have found themselves under increasing pressure.
Castello Road is important because its the only way to get food into the city, and there are no good work opportunities, local merchant Ahmed Hamsho told Al Jazeera.
Hamsho and other residents of eastern Aleppo have complained of predatory price hikes since the access road was cut off.
The prices rose because of insufficient supplies and the monopoly sellers have on food. Theyre taking advantage of the siege and selling at obscene prices, Hamsho said. We have no control over this.
READ MORE: Here is what school is like in Syrias Aleppo
Prices of staple foods, gas and other products have skyrocketed as aid organisations struggle to reach the city. Meanwhile, fierce fighting continues throughout the area.
The current impact of the blockade lies in the empty streets and the empty vegetable stalls, independent journalist Abd Alkader Habak told Al Jazeera.
Prices have risen by 300 percent, which is affecting people who already dont work or may have low incomes, Habak said. Castello Road is the citys artery, and its cut-off ended food and medical supplies People are fighting over loaves of bread to feed their families now.
Castello Road is the city's artery, and its cut-off ended food and medical supplies People are fighting over loaves of bread to feed their families now. by Abd Alkader Habak, independent journalist
The situation has been compounded by the fact that Aleppo lacked a strong agricultural economy even before the war, and there has been significant damage to this sector since Syrias civil war broke out in 2011.
Delivering aid throughout Syria was already extremely challenging, but the governments cut-off of Castello Road has made distributing humanitarian aid to eastern Aleppo nearly impossible, aid workers say.
Since mid-May, its been nearly impossible to get in [to Aleppo]. The last few weeks, [Castello Road] looks completely closed, said Christy Delafield, a senior global communications officer with Mercy Corps, one of the most prominent aid organisations operating inside Syria.
Delafield echoed Aleppo residents concerns about the increases in prices for basic goods since the road was closed.
The prices of rice, sugar, flour, bread and other staple foods have increased, and some staple foods are not available. Theres also a limited availability of fresh vegetables, if there are any at all, she told Al Jazeera, noting that Mercy Corps had stockpiled food and other aid in the city for situations like this but it will not last for ever.
Were calling on all parties to allow humanitarian aid to come in, Delafield said, stressing the need for a long-term cessation of hostilities in Syria and protection for aid workers. There have been brief ceasefires, but theyre not helpful. We need something predictable and longer.
The ceasefire observed for Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, ended last week as government planes struck rebel positions near Aleppo.
READ MORE: Medicine in Aleppo, the worlds most dangerous city
Castello Roads significance to both government and rebel forces is clear. For Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who vowed to liberate every inch of Syria in a June speech to parliament, taking the entirety of Syrias prewar economic and cultural hub would be huge, and control of its last entry and exit point is a key step towards that goal.
For rebel forces, a supply route to and from eastern Aleppo is crucial to ensuring the survival of residents and to maintaining the system of government and society they have set up outside of Assads control.
Many of those who still live in eastern Aleppo do so out of a commitment to the Syrian uprising, ties to rebel groups, or attachment to their homes. Hamsho has lived in Aleppo most of his life, but says the economic situation is so bad that he will leave as soon as the road opens up.
In the meantime, residents will continue to brave the bombs, price hikes and shortages that now constitute daily life in eastern Aleppo.
The thing I fear the most is hunger for the children, Habak said. Its a very difficult situation for them.
Aid agency says shameful that richest countries are turning their backs on the most vulnerable people in the world.
The six richest countries which make up more than half the global economy host less than nine percent of the worlds refugees, an aid group has said.
The United States, China, Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom hosted 2.1 million refugees and asylum seekers last year just 8.88 percent of the global total, the report from the Britain-based Oxfam said.
Poorer countries, in contrast, have accommodated most of those looking for save havens, Oxfam said.
Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa as well as the Occupied Palestinian Territory host over 50 percent of the worlds refugees and asylum seekers but account for under two percent of the worlds economy, it said.
While Germany has recently welcomed far more refugees than the other of the wealthiest nations, there still remains a major gap with poorer countries providing the vast majority of safe havens for refugees.
READ MORE: From Syria to Somalia, tales of displacement
Oxfam called on governments to host more refugees and to give more help to countries sheltering the majority of them ahead of two major summits about refugees and so-called economic migrants in the US in September.
It is shameful
It is shameful so many governments are turning their backs on the suffering of millions of vulnerable people who have fled their homes and are often risking their lives to reach safety, Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam, said.
Poorer countries are shouldering the duty of protecting refugees when it should be a shared responsibility, but many richer countries are doing next to nothing.
IN PICTURES: The refugee crisis through the eyes of refugees
An unprecedented 65 million people from around the world have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict, persecution and violence, the report said.
More than a third of them are refugees and asylum seekers, Oxfam said, and the remainder have had to move within their own countries.
Too many people who have taken treacherous journeys to reach safety end up living in degrading situations littered with abuse, hostility and discrimination, and too few governments are doing anywhere near enough to help or protect them, Byanyima said.
More than 100 Taliban fighters launched an attack in northern Kunduz as part of a bid to capture the province.
At least 100 Taliban fighters have attacked a district in Afghanistans heavily embattled northern Kunduz province in an effort to take control of yet another district, officials said.
Fortunately, our security forces have been able to push the Taliban back, Mahbubullah Saeedi, the district governor for Qalai Zal, where fighting is continuing, said on Monday.
Saeedis optimism, however, was contradicted by Amruddin Wali, a provincial council member, who claims the militant group is controlling large parts of the centre save for the district and police buildings.
Wali put the number of Taliban attackers at around 500.
Saeedi said that eight Taliban including a commander were killed, while one Afghan security force member was dead and three others wounded.
Saeedi said most civilians living in the city have fled to more secure areas.
Kunduz is one of the most volatile provinces in the north. The capital of the province fell to the Taliban briefly last year, and most districts have a heavy Taliban presence.
Collapsed peace process
Last week, Afghan President Ashraf Ghanis spokesperson said the government has no plans to revive a peace process aimed at bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table after a four-nation effort earlier this year proved fruitless.
READ MORE: Civilians caught in crossfire of war against Taliban
The four-nation group comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States has met five times since January without the Taliban, which has refused to join any peace talks.
There is no set time for another meeting of the group, spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri told the Associated Press news agency at the time.
US President Barack Obama announced earlier this month that he plans to leave 8,400 American troops in Afghanistan when he finishes his term an increase from his previous plan, reflecting the difficulty of drawing down the US presence in the country.
In response to Obamas announcement, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told Al Jazeera: Whether the US decides to keep [its] troops in Afghanistan or not, whether the numbers are more or less, we will continue to fight them.
Nothing changes for us and nothing can scare us or stop us in achieving what we have been fighting for the past decade. We are stronger than ever and 8,400 troops cannot stop us. So its basically useless for them to make such decisions, a waste of time.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators came out on the streets of Turkeys capital Ankara and other cities to show support for the goverment in the wake of a failed coup that grabbed world attention.
On Sunday, huge crowds carrying Turkish flags streamed into Ankaras Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul, the countrys biggest city, after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant.
A call from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that his supporters should take to the streets in the early hours of Saturday as the coup attempt unfolded proved vital to defeating the army faction behind it.
Speaking on Monday to throngs of government supporters in Kizilay Square, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim thanked the Turkish people for defeating the coup in what he said was a defence of democracy.
No matter their political views, all parties came together arm-in-arm against the coup. They cried out together, Yildrim said. This shows that when the matter at hand is the country, then everything else is incidental.
WATCH: Whats behind Turkeys failed coup?
In an unusual show of unity, Turkeys four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting on Saturday, denouncing the plot to topple Erdogan.
Those who bombed and fired shots against the people, those who attacked the people with arms can not be described as Turks, but they are criminals and terrorists wearing army outfits. They will face justice and pay a heavy price, Yildrim said.
Speaking after a huge purge against members of the army and the judiciary was launched, netting some 6,000 people so far, Erdogan said his government could consider reinstating the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004 as part of reforms aimed at joining the European Union.
The 6,000 people in detention include 29 generals and 2,839 military personnel, a senior Turkish official told Al Jazeera. The state news agency, citing the office of the governor of Ankara, said 149 police personnel have been detained in the capital.
Authoritarian rule
The coup attempt became apparent late on Friday when, in dramatic scenes, tanks blocked bridges in Istanbul, jets were seen in the skies over at least two cities, and the parliament and the headquarters of the intelligences services were straffed with gunfire from attack helicopters.
At least 265 people were killed and more than 1400 wounded.
Erdogan has blamed a high-profile former ally who has since become a bitter rival, Fethullah Gulen, for the attempt. Gulen, who lives in exile in the US state of Pennsylvania, has denied any involvement. Turkey is expected to officially seek his extradition.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said he had no evidence that Gulen was behind the plot and urged Turkish authorities to compile evidence as quickly as possible so the US could decide whether Gulen should be sent back to Turkey.
READ MORE: Turkish political parties unite against coup attempt
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Marc Pierini, a former European Union ambassador to Turkey, said Turkish citizens clearly did not back the attempt and the military leaders involved had not understood that.
What is of worry right now is that the failed coup attempt is likely to be used as an opportunity to reinforce authoritarian rule in Turkey, he said.
Erdogans AK Party, which has won five legislative elections in a row, has long had strained relations with a military that has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism, although it has not seized power directly since 1980.
He has said did not want to seek revenge against those behind the failed coup and that his government would act with reason and experience.
Police taken off jobs as government continues to pursue suspected coup plotters who aimed to topple Erdogan.
Turkey has suspended nearly 8,000 police across the country, widening a major purge on suspected supporters of a failed army coup aimed at overthrowing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The interior ministry said 8,777 people had been removed from their posts, including 7,899 members of the police and security forces, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Monday.
Erdogan has pledged that the cleansing of state institutions will continue, saying a cancer had spread like a virus and needed to be eradicated.
Speaking to supporters on Sunday after attending funerals of civilians killed in the violence, Erdogan also said his government would consider reinstating the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004 as part of reforms aimed at joining the European Union.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Monday that more than 7,500 suspects had been detained in connection with the coup attempt.
So far 7,543 suspects have been detained. The numbers may change. It includes 100 police, 6,038 soldiers, 755 judges and prosecutors and 650 civilians, Yildirim said, adding that 316 of the detainees had been remanded in custody.
READ MORE: Thousands on the streets to show support for Erdogan
The detained suspected military coup plotters included 103 generals and admirals, state media said, while nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors were dismissed in the wake of the weekends events.
Separately, 30 governors and more than 50 high-ranking civil servants were also removed from their posts on Monday, according to local media.
The governments response to the failed coup is widening, Al Jazeeras Zeina Khodr, reporting from the capital, Ankara, said.
At the beginning it was army officers the rank and file, as well as generals who were detained; then it was judges and the judiciary, including the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court; and now the policemen, Khodr said.
It seems the government doesnt want to take any chances.
Exactly what we feared
The swift rounding-up of judges and armed forces, as well as the dismissal of police, came under fire in Brussels, with EU officials calling on the Turkish government to respect the rule of law.
Punishment against the coup plotters must not include measures that could lead to an authoritarian state, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told journalists on Monday.
READ MORE: 6,000 people detained after failed coup
His view was echoed by Johannes Hahn, the European commissioner dealing with Turkeys EU membership bid, who expressed concerns that the Turkish government was exploiting the failed coup to target internal opponents.
It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage, Hahn said on Monday.
Im very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.
Inside Turkey, the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) also said the response must be conducted within the rule of law, adding that the plotters and those who helped them must be tried in the courts.
In a statement on Monday, the CHP also said the military must not be portrayed as the enemy.
Failed coup
The coup attempt became apparent late on Friday when, in dramatic scenes, tanks blocked bridges in Istanbul, jets were seen in the skies over at least two cities, and the parliament and the headquarters of the intelligence services were strafed with gunfire from attack helicopters.
Giving new figures, Yildirim said on Monday that 208 people were killed by the coup bid, including 145 civilians, 60 police and three soldiers. And 1,491 were wounded, he added.
Erdogan has blamed a high-profile former ally who has since become a bitter rival, Fethullah Gulen, for the attempt.
Gulen, who lives in exile in the US state of Pennsylvania, has denied any involvement. Turkey is expected to officially seek his extradition.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said he had no evidence that Gulen was behind the plot and urged Turkish authorities to compile evidence as quickly as possible so the US could decide whether Gulen should be sent back to Turkey.
Turkish officials accuse allies of slow reaction to the coup, as analysts warn such allegations will damage ties.
Istanbul, Turkey Ties between Turkey and its major allies could come under extreme strain after perceived lack of condemnation by the West as Fridays bloody coup unfolded.
Turkish officials have admonished what they say was official silence from world powers as rogue soldiers took to the streets and aircraft bombed key institutions on Friday night through to the early hours of Saturday. The attempted coup left more than 260 dead.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government are unlikely to forget any time soon.
The United States and EU nations have increased their criticism of Turkeys moves domestically and internationally in recent years.
Turkey failed coup: Erdogan supporters on the streets
Many in the AKPs electoral base, already deeply sceptical of Western intentions, will see this alleged inaction as further proof of their animosity, and the government wont have trouble convincing them that fewer ties with the West is a better thing.
Inside Story What will Turkeys failed coup mean for its relations?
Every terrorism incident and this coup attempt can be traced and linked to international power centres, Aziz Babuscu, an AKP parliamentarian from Istanbul, told Al Jazeera. There is no need to name the international power centres This is not the first time Turkey has been targeted by these centres in recent years.
Babuscu said he believed it was too early to say how the Turkish government would react to this perceived lack of support, but added the stance of countries the government considered as allies was crystal clear.
They developed a term for us during Ottoman times and called us the sick man of Europe. They would love for us to fit that definition even now, Babuscu said. These international centres of power find it impossible to stomach a Turkey that is a regional leader.
Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday at an EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels the US was quick to respond to the coup attempt.
We stand squarely on the side of the elected leadership in Turkey, which President Obama and I both stated in the course of events in the early hours as they were unfolding that night, said Kerry.
But we also firmly urge the government of Turkey to maintain calm and stability throughout the country and uphold the highest standards of respect for the nations democratic institutions and the rule of law.
Turkey: Government launches purge after attempted coup
Retired Turkish diplomat Yalim Eralp, who has served as Turkeys ambassador to NATO, Washington, and the United Nations, warned that emotional responses by Ankara would be detrimental.
No government in the world will issue a statement while a coup is under way. It doesnt matter if it is in Turkey or anywhere else. I dont think the Turkish government should be offended by this, Eralp told Al Jazeera.
On Saturday, Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu accused the United States of being directly involved in the coup attempt during an appearance on local television.
According to Eralp, accusing Washington of involvement is a grave error and a diplomatic faux pas.
I hope the Turkish government reacts sensibly, said Eralp. However, my experience tells me that no Turkish government tries to see whether its own shortcomings resulted in a certain situation. They always and always try to put the blame on others.
The people defeated the coup in Turkey
Turkeys relations with the West, particularly the United States, have not been amicable for a few years now.
Erdogan calls on US to extradite cleric Gulen
The divergent approach to the conflict in Syria and in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has created a serious rift between Ankara and Washington.
US support for the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria to aid in the fight against ISIL has angered Ankara immensely.
Turkey sees the PYD as the extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and, therefore, a terrorist entity as well. The United States and the European Union also define the PKK as a terrorist group, but dont extend it to the PYD.
The same tensions exist with the EU. Last week Turkey strongly objected to a photo exhibit inside the European Parliament, which contained images of YPG fighters.
Previously Ankara was ferocious in its condemnation of Brussels in March for allowing a group sympathetic to the PKK to set up a tent as a Turkey-EU summit was about to begin to finalise a vital deal on migrant movement.
But what is likely to cause the most friction between Ankara and Washington for the foreseeable future is the extradition status of Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen.
Erdogan and the AKP see Gulen, who has been living in self-imposed exile in the US state of Pennsylvania since 1999, as the main force behind the attempted coup.
Ankara has tried to extradite him since 2013 when the former Erdogan ally who turned into the presidents main foe after elements in the police and judiciary alleged to be his followers launched a major corruption probe into Erdogans inner circle, including some ministers.
Ankara accuses Gulen of orchestrating a movement seeking to infiltrate Turkish state mechanisms and topple the government from within.
The United States has so far refused to extradite Gulen, but Kerry said Washington would consider an extradition if compelling evidence was presented.
Turks pessimistic about future after coup attempt
Kerry also warned that public insinuations about US involvement in the attempted coup would harm bilateral relations.
Eser Karakas, an economics professor at Istanbul University, said Turkeys future is anchored to good ties with the United States and the European Union.
I dont know who is behind the coup, but I do know that blaming the US will cause great damage to Turkey. For a more democratic, freer, richer and safer Turkey, Ankara needs to remain part of the Western alliance, Karakas told Al Jazeera.
Turkey officials say coup plotters likely to have staged attempt prematurely, after learning they were to be arrested.
The faction in the Turkish army that tried to stage a coup was under investigation before the actual incident took place, and most likely acted out of a growing fear that it was under investigation, according to two Turkish officials.
At least 290 people died and thousands of civilian and military state employees were sacked or detained after rebel soldiers attempted to overthrow the government on Friday, bombing state buildings, including the parliament, and killing civilians and security forces.
The government and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blame US-based Muslim religious leader Fethullah Gulens movement and his supporters within the army for trying to stage the failed coup.
Ankara says the movement has been running a parallel state within Turkeys government, taking orders from outside the state.
Erdogan has urged Washington to extradite Gulen, but the US denies that there has been an official application from Ankara for his extradition.
According to Kani Torun, an MP with Turkeys Justice and Development Party, an investigation into the faction was initiated as a follow-up to so-called espionage and sledgehammer cases, during which hundreds of military personnel were acquitted after standing trial for plotting against the government.
VOX POPS: Turks pessimistic about future after coup attempt
During both cases, tried army members were known to point at Gulen supporters within the army and the wider state institutions, including the judiciary.
The putschists were to be called by prosecutors and arrested by the courts a short time before they carried out their attempted coup, Torun told Al Jazeera.
We believe they moved their attempt to an unusual time such as 10pm in the evening after they heard about this upcoming development. If they carried it out in the morning as planned, they would have had more chance of success.
A very long shot
An official, who asked to remain anonymous, seconded the information Torun shared, saying that for the past several months Turkish authorities had been looking into people who were suspected of conspiring to stage a coup within the military, but a real potential coup was considered a very long shot.
Known members of the Gulen Movement within the military had been under investigation for some time. In our assessment, this group acted out of a sense of emergency when they realised that they were under investigation, he said.
He added that the Gulen Movement is a very secretive and large organisation, operating cells across the government that make it hard to detect.
The chain of command is not hierarchical within individual institutions, but cells typically include members from various agencies What we did realise was unusual activity across the network. But I dont think an actual coup detat was considered likely in pre-July 15 assessments.
Since the attempted coup, the government has cracked down on suspected backers of the plan to topple the civilian government. As of Monday night, more than 8,000 people had been arrested over alleged involvement in the failed coup.
Kani Torun told Al Jazeera that judiciary, military, and police forces were the main target of the crackdown on the Gulen movement, but operations were likely to spill over into other institutions.
READ MORE: Turkish political parties unite against coup attempt
State institutions involved with defence industry and TUBITAK [national agency with stated goal of developing science, technology and innovation policies] have also been infiltrated by them, he told Al Jazeera, adding that spot operations will continue for seven to 10 days.
Torun also warned that the coup supporters, who have left with no hope and are still at loose, might carry out revenge attacks just to create chaos.
I can say there are at least several dozen people at large, Turkish official, who asked to stay anonymous, told Al Jazeera.
Our concern is that, without the necessary precautions, there might be new attacks on government buildings and civilians by members of the failed junta. Hence the call on people to stay at public squares and road blocks in Ankara around the parliament and other places, he said.
WikiLeaks said it would publish data on Turkeys political power structure following the failed coup attempt.
WikiLeaks has said it is planning to release documents on Turkeys political power structure, after a failed coup attempt over the weekend that left hundreds dead, thousands injured and more than 7,500 suspects in custody.
Get ready for a fight as we release 100k+ docs on #Turkeys political power structure, the whistle-blowing organisation said on Monday via its official Twitter feed.
The first batch will contain 300 thousand emails and 500 thousand documents and most of the material will be in Turkish, WikiLeaks said.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/755058456378351616
OPINION: The people defeated the coup in Turkey
The organisation also claimed that the Turkish government will attempt to censor the distribution of the documents, and urged the Turkish public to be ready to bypass any government attempts at blocking access to the material.
Turks will likely be censored to prevent them reading our pending release of 100k+ docs on politics leading up to the coup, the organisation said on Twitter.
We ask that Turks are ready with censorship bypassing systems such as TorBrowser and uTorrent. And that everyone else is ready to help them bypass censorship and push our links through the censorship to come.
WikiLeaks later shared a link for a torrent browser.
READ MORE: Turkish political parties unite against coup attempt
The announcement caused excitement in Turkey with thousands of Twitter users sharing the organisations tweets. But public opinion on the subject was divided.
While many people celebrated the announcement and argued that the leaks may finally shed some light on the coup attempt, others questioned the timing of the release.
https://twitter.com/H4S4ND/status/755030485827543040
Looks like wikileaks will add some fuel to the Turkish fire Questionable timing of course https://t.co/e7RVl61yPA Peter Nut (@nipped) July 18, 2016
Some claimed that the documents will likely be fake, and will be used to make President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP government look weak or even guilty.
https://twitter.com/aslabirdaha/status/755031841904680960
Some Turkish Twitter users also accused WikiLeaks of supporting the coup attempt. WikiLeaks responded by maintaining its neutrality and support for open access to information.
Turks ask whether WikiLeaks is pro or anti-AKP. Neither. Our only position is that truth is the way forward. 100k+ docs serves all sides.
Turks ask whether WikiLeaks is pro or anti-AKP. Neither. Our only position is that truth is the way forward. 100k+ docs serves all sides. WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
A faction in the Turkish military attempted to stage a coup late on Friday night. In dramatic scenes, tanks blocked bridges in Istanbul, jets were seen in the skies over at least two cities, and the parliament and the headquarters of the intelligences services were strafed with gunfire from attack helicopters.
At least 290 people were killed and more than 1400 wounded. Erdogan has blamed a high-profile former ally who has since become a bitter rival, Fethullah Gulen, for the attempt.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Monday that more than 7,500 suspects had been detained in connection to the coup attempt.
Security forces killed and many more wounded as two car bombs target checkpoints in former al-Qaeda stronghold.
Two car bombs went off near army checkpoints in Yemens southeastern city of Mukalla, killing several security personnel and wounding many more, sources have told Al Jazeera.
The explosions on Monday morning targeted checkpoints in the east and west of the port city, a former stronghold of the local al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP].
General Faraj Salemine confirmed the attacks to the AFP news agency, saying terrorists had killed at least five soldiers. Other reports said that at least nine had been killed.
The capital of Hadramaout province, Mukalla had been under the control of AQAP for one year until pro-government troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured it in April.
Mukalla attacks
Yemen has been gripped by a devastating conflict that escalated in March last year when the coalition began air strikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebels after northern and central parts of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, were seized.
The fighting has caused a security vacuum that has allowed groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIL) to extend their influence and attack security forces.
Last month, ISIL claimed a wave of suicide bombings aimed at Yemeni troops in Mukalla that killed at least 38 people.
The Pentagon said in May that a very small number of US military personnel had been deployed around Mukalla to support pro-government forces.
The conflict has killed more than 6,400 people and displaced 2.8 million since March last year.
2005 ..
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Brexit may give the U.S. and other fintech centers some competitive breathing room as London struggles to maintain its fintech edge. The U.S., however, needs more than breathing room. It needs regulators to recognize the fragility of innovation. Simply integrating fintech into our current financial regulatory landscape would be a mistake. Our regulatory regime is too unwieldy.
A big concern about the U.S. regulatory system is that it is fragmented. That leads to confusion about how a firm will be subjected to regulatory oversight. The last thing that a fintech startup needs is more uncertainty. The countries with supervisory certainty will have a distinct advantage in seeing their fintech sectors grow.
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That the U.S regulatory system is too complex is not just my opinion. It is the opinion of no less than the U.S. Government Accountability Office the audit, evaluation and investigative arm of Congress.
In March the GAO released a cogent and readable report titled "Financial Regulation: Complex and Fragmented Structure Could Be Streamlined to Improve Effectiveness." The report does an admirable job of explaining the challenges facing regulators. Along with infographics, the report plainly shows how U.S. regulation has become a perplexing Gordian knot.
The report is focused on weaknesses in the overall regulatory structure. Fintech, of course, represents only a sliver of the U.S. financial institutions industry. However, it is easy to connect this convoluted structure to concerns about fintech startups along with the innovations they foster being subjected to confusing and potentially crippling regulatory supervision should fintechs be incorporated into the current regulatory scheme.
The irony is that regulators do apparently understand the need to nurture this promising new industry. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is certainly making an effort, taking the lead among U.S. bank regulators in addressing fintech-related issues. Comptroller Thomas Curry recently hosted a conference on responsible innovation and is said to be examining the possibility of limited-purpose charters for fintech firms.
In fact, the OCC issued a white paper in March in which the agency outlined how regulators might encourage innovation while ensuring safety and soundness. These steps must sound encouraging to a fintech entrepreneur. The problem is the one raised by the GAO: the current system needs to be streamlined.
While the OCC is working hard to boost innovation, it is just one of the many supervisory bodies that may have a say over financial innovation. I say "may" because it is not entirely clear where the authority to regulate lies. Even in its own white paper, the OCC acknowledges that it needs to collaborate with other regulators, establish regular channels of communication and use best efforts to avoid inconsistent communications.
Besides the OCC, the potential regulatory sphere for fintech disruptors could touch any number of the following financial regulators: the Federal Reserve Board, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That is not to mention the 50 state regulators, many of which already regulate fintech firms. While banks and other financial institutions have multiple supervisors, at least they know who is responsible. With a fintech firm, nothing is definitive at this point.
Even bankers agree that the U.S. lags other countries in the way we regulate innovation. Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association, wrote, "Our regulators can learn much from Britain about how to stimulate new ideas from outside banking and to integrate them under a common set of regulatory expectations."
Most financial regulation was written long before the technological advances driving fintech were created. Even the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was drafted before the recent surge in investment in the area. The solution could be as simple as designating a primary regulator for financial innovation, or perhaps designating a new partnership between agencies.
Until there is clarity on the subject, fintech firms, their management and their investors will remain at risk, and American financial innovation is bound to suffer.
Richard Magrann-Wells is executive vice president for Willis Towers Watson Financial Institutions Group. Follow him on Twitter @banklawguy.
President Obama says the Muslim call to prayer is "one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset." Meanwhile, millions of Muslims are eager to kill, rape, or enslave you at sunset in the name of their faith. There is no contradiction here; in fact, the relationship may be causal. For we cannot understand the murderous extremism of modern Islam without considering the hypnotic quality of its language.
When Islamists stormed several locations in Paris last November, killing 130 people, German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed "shock" at the event, as though she couldn't imagine what might cause someone to do such a thing.
When an Islamist walked into a nightclub in Orlando and killed 49 people, President Obama called it "an act of hate," but claimed the killer's motive was unclear.
Now, once again, France has suffered a massive suicide attack, as a man has driven a truck through holiday crowds in Nice, killing dozens, until he was finally killed. We all knew immediately, from seeing this pattern so often, how the West's leaders would respond: "There is no justification for such horrible acts. We must stand together and reject hatred -- especially hatred directed against Muslims, who are uniformly peace-loving and moderate people. The terrorist was not a real Muslim. No real Muslim would do such a thing."
Muslims, calling themselves Muslims and claiming to be acting in the name of Allah, kill as many infidels as possible. Their supporters or spiritual allies in the Muslim world praise their martyrdom, while the more civilized Muslim commentators insist that the sentiments of the killers do not represent the majority of Muslims, although they often add that non-Muslims should try harder to understand the "root causes" which "drive" some Muslims to commit extreme acts.
In the face of all this Islamism, and the ongoing doctrinal debate within Islam over whether the killers were acting in a manner justifiable on Islamic principles, Western leaders and their bootlicking press steadfastly maintain near-perfect unanimity in denying that the Islamists represent Islam in any way, or that their actions entail any problem for the prospect of integrating millions of Muslim immigrants into Western societies.
More than a thousand German women are sexually molested by Muslim men on New Year's Eve, and the German media, partly under orders from the government, try to hide it, and then deliberately underreport its extent, thus leaving the population insufficiently aware of a public threat. Think about that -- the progressive German government and media knowingly withheld information about criminal behavior that, had it been fully reported immediately, might have prevented hundreds of assaults, in Germany and beyond. In effect, Merkel's government facilitated the mob sexual assault of hundreds of women.
In other words, European women are now, en masse, subject to random acts of molestation by Muslim men, but the perpetrators must never be referred to as Muslims, lest this lead anyone to think that Muslim men are going around molesting women.
A young French woman of my acquaintance told me years ago that there are areas of Paris that women avoid on account of the treatment they will receive there, due to their non-Muslim attire and uncovered heads. If someone told me there were neighborhoods in Saudi Arabia where a French girl should never go, that would be one thing. But that there are areas of Paris where a French girl should never go, and that we are supposed to just quietly accept this -- are we still on planet Earth?
The same, of course, now applies to neighborhoods in Malmo, London, and even Minneapolis. But we must never suggest that the cause of the trouble, the fear, or the sense of restriction and degradation, might be related to the religious inclinations of the perpetrators, although they invariably declare themselves to be Muslims acting on tenets of their faith.
The issue turns on the politically correct refusal to admit that Islam could have an inherently fanatical element, as though such a thought were regressive and culturally insensitive.
But perhaps it is the progressives, with their refusal to acknowledge self-declared jihadists as "real Muslims," who are the culturally insensitive ones. They are denying a sizeable faction of global Islam the violent enthusiasm for Allah that is central to their understanding of their faith, merely because it doesn't comport with our Western, modernized notions of what "real" religious adherence means.
Perhaps our progressives, whose two greatest areas of intellectual deficiency may be religion and common sense, are simply out their depth here. For one of the spiritual founders of their movement, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had this issue figured out over two centuries ago.
Consider the Islamist hostage-takers who systematically release captives who can recite verses from the Koran. This is significant, for Islam is the only major religion in which people may be judged believers or infidels on such a basis. Speaking the Arabic words of the holy book -- speaking them aloud, recitation-style -- is essential to proving oneself a genuine Muslim. The sounds of the words themselves, spoken in their original tongue, are essential to the faith.
In his Essay on the Origin of Languages (John H. Moran translation, 1966), Rousseau criticizes modern European languages for evolving toward practical, rational functionality, and hence away from the quasi-melodic or "natural" representation of passions and imagery, which he believes to be the original purpose of speech. In contrast with the inherently musical characteristics of early language, which allowed ancient generals to move whole armies, and poets whole cities, with mere intonation, most modern languages are not calibrated to communicate easily (without shouting) in large crowds or across long distances. Ours are languages for "murmuring on couches" (p. 73), or for silent reading -- for logic and reflection -- and are therefore less suited to sweeping pronouncements that transport the masses into ecstasies of unreflective action, as powerful music can do.
He cites Arabic as the prime example of a current tongue that has retained its emotional, non-rational core, and therefore speaks first to the passions, rather than to reason. It persuades the feelings, creating what Rousseau calls "moral impressions," merely through its inherent accents and rhythm -- "one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset." Hence it is a most effective language for rallying men to immoderate enthusiasm for a cause, against sober judgment.
And this leads Rousseau to a most striking observation, one which, given its eighteenth-century vintage, never ceases to startle my graduate students when they first encounter it:
Thus, if one who read a little Arabic and enjoyed leafing through the Koran were to hear Mohammed personally preach in that eloquent, rhythmic tongue, with that sonorous and persuasive voice, seducing first the ears, then the heart, every sentence alive with enthusiasm, he would prostrate himself, crying: "Great prophet, messenger of God, lead us to glory, to martyrdom; we will conquer or die for you." Fanaticism always seems ridiculous to us, because there is no voice among us to make it understood. (pp. 49-50, cosmetically edited)
Fanatical tendencies or commands are moderated by the inherently logical, unmusical character of modern languages, which is why "fanaticism seems ridiculous to us." Arabic's intrinsic musical elements, however -- not its grammar and vocabulary, but its melody and rhythm -- actually heighten those tendencies.
Judaism and Christianity had their immoderate or fanatical historical elements, of course. But those religions are grounded in rationalistic languages with their intrinsic appeal to the mind. Urges toward intolerant enthusiasm were therefore responsive, in time, to the rational restraints modernity imposes on all men in the name of civil coexistence. Adherents to religions born of prosaic, logic-based languages may be swayed by practical reason to see the benefit of moderating the extreme urges of belief.
Mohammed, on the other hand, rouses his adherents in the musical voice of enthusiasm and emotional persuasion -- the voice of fanaticism, as Rousseau identified it in 1781. Rational self-restraint, which is necessary in order to quell religious intolerance as modernity requires, is an unnatural fit in a faith proclaimed in Arabic, perhaps the only surviving major language calibrated to "seduce first the ears, then the heart," rather than the logical mind. This might help to explain why "grassroots" jihadism as a mass movement finds its most fertile soil in regions where Arabic is still widely used, rather than in, say, Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, but also (until recently) the least Islamist and most tolerant. (It might also explain our own fanatical religion, progressivism, which has achieved a similar effect from the opposite direction, by systematically weakening the rational grounding of our languages.)
Rousseau, a Genevan, wrote his account in French. Today, the descendants of his primary audience are reeling yet again from the empirical evidence that continues to support his theory. France has become the symbolic heart of global jihad. She faces increasingly restrictive, terrifying prospects of everyday life lived under the cloud of religious fanaticism.
The French people's response to these outrages -- to the seepage of their sovereignty, the periodic sacrifice of dozens of lives on the altar of political correctness, and women's fears of entering Parisian neighborhoods -- will also be symbolic, and send a powerful message to whatever is left of the civilized world. Will the message be yet another in a long line of capitulations to progressive calls to tolerate the intolerable?
The answer is important, as grand symbolic statements often are. We are all Frenchmen today, and it is indeed sunset for modernity.
In my first year with the U.S. Border Patrol, I learned the meaning of "escalation" and contempt for law enforcement. In the good old days of patrolling the border, when coming upon an obvious illegal border crosser, Border Patrol agents could simple say to a fully compliant border crosser and his friends, "Get in the back of the truck." The men always apologized for the trouble and dutifully complied with the agent's directive. The men were driven to the port of entry and were admonished not to try that again, or there would be consequences.
Today's Border Patrol agents are confronted with absolute contempt and astonishing firepower. One of my graduate students, a Border Patrol agent, relayed how the windshield of his patrol vehicle had been blown out by automatic weapons that had been fired from the other side of the border.
In the early 1990s, federal law enforcement officials had noticed the shift in violence along the border and in the cities. What had changed? We elected a new president in 1992.
Border Patrol agents in 1993 experienced something similar to today's Customs and Border Protection agents, who have been told by their superiors they will be terminated if they try to enforce the law. The head of the Immigration & Naturalization Service continually diverted congressionally approved "operations and maintenance" funds into other programs. Border Patrol agents along the southwest border didn't receive the necessary O&M funds to buy spare parts for their vehicles, or new vehicles, or fuel. I recall one of the chief patrol agents lamenting that when the average mileage on a Border Patrol vehicle approached 300,000 miles, they were effectively out of business.
The effect of diverting funds was devastating and obvious. Stories surfaced of some agents, who would not be deterred, siphoning the gas out of the fuel tanks of drug smugglers' vehicles or purchasing fuel with their own money so they could perform the job they were trained for and hired to do.
Under the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, President Clinton was forced to sign several new immigration bills, one of which was to double the size of the Border Patrol. I recall hearing the news at a supervisor's meeting: "we're going to receive a thousand new agents a year for the next five years." Border Patrol infrastructure was recapitalized, as new sector headquarters and station buildings needed to be built for the additional manpower and new patrol vehicles that arrived daily.
I had suggested that illegal alien apprehensions and drug seizures effectiveness would increase with the acquisition of "quiet aircraft." After a flight demonstration, our congressman earmarked $15M for a few surveillance aircraft systems. Unfortunately, the I&NS commissioner diverted the earmarked funds for our aircraft while the decision to terminate the new aircraft program came from, reportedly, the first lady, Hillary Clinton. Somehow she became personally involved and did not approve the Border Patrol's use of surveillance aircraft, as I recall, "on American citizens."
I wasn't the only one who was apoplectic. Senior Border Patrol agents were well versed in the maddening cycle of senior Democrats withholding critical U.S. Border Patrol O&M funds or diverting assets away from the border as a way to execute their agenda of an open border. I was assured that when it was the Republicans' turn to be the ultimate decision-maker, all of the Democrats' policies would be reversed. That was when I learned the Border Patrol is probably the most politicized federal agency in America. They are whipsawed back and forth, depending on which way the political wind blows from Washington, D.C. Whoever controls the White House, the Democrats taketh, and the Republicans restoreth.
Twenty years later, now under the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol agents are told to stay in their buildings. The effect is the same as it was under President Clinton: when you are an agent and cannot execute the laws of the land, there is an administrative abolition of immigration laws. Not leaving a Border Patrol Station means no apprehensions, no drug seizures, no interdictions, no deporting of illegals. There is no law.
The removal of critical resources at key pressure points, by whatever means, to achieve one's political goal is the hallmark of a liberal Democrat in a leadership position. For President Clinton, through his surrogate at I&NS, it was removing funding for Border Patrol agents and equipment along the border. President Obama too has removed funding and personnel at critical times and at crucial pressure points.
There is only one way to look at the collective and systematic removal of Border Patrol agents from their field of operations, and that is to give criminal aliens tactical and strategic advantages. In wartime, these policies could be construed as "aiding and abetting an enemy," to assist in the commission of a crime. No radical or domestic terrorist group has ever had such a back-door supporter and facilitator to target police as the President of the United States.
His contempt for law enforcement knows no bounds. He is not on our side. This is the real Obama legacy.
Mark Hewitt is former Marine Corps officer and U.S. Border Patrol employee and the author of the espionage thrillers Special Access, Shoot Down, and No Need to Know.
Lost in the hyper-escalated news cycle of videos of black men killed by police officers during traffic stops in Minnesota and Baton Rouge is a compendium of dash cam video from police cars of law enforcement officers being gunned down; executed, some in broad daylight. Grizzly and graphic, Armed or Unarmed: How Quickly Can You Make That Decision? puts the kibosh on the Democrats and mainstream medias narrative that every black man pulled over is a saint, that the cops are racially profiling, and that the cops are a racist hate group.
For those equal opportunity perpetrators who just dont come flying out of their vehicles with guns blazing are the sly evil ones, devils with baby faces and a hoodie, and a concealed weapon who strike at point blank range, firing their guns, some into the face of a police officer. The media would never dare to air the video as a counterweight to the demonstrably false narrative of the BLM goon squad.
Its not pleasant to watch a criminal murder a policeman. It fires me up on several levels. My loyalties lie with law enforcement. I spent five years with the U.S. Border Patrol. My son-in-law is a deputy sheriff.
Ive been pulled over several dozens of times in my 60 years. In every case but one, I was doing something I shouldnt have been doing. The other time, a car that looked like mine reportedly had been involved in a local robbery. I was made to get out of the car and walk to the police car with my hands over my head. They pointed their guns at me. They were looking for a mature black male, not some skinny white kid; I was told to leave the area immediately, only to get pulled over again and admonished to get the hell out of the area. From the time I learned to drive, I also learned how to exhibit behaviors to the police that I was not a threat. I might have had a lead foot but I wasnt going to make their jobs more difficult. I knew I was in the wrong; the only thing I didnt know was how much my ticket was going to be.
Maybe others were never taught how to deal with police. Its not something you learn in school, in Drivers Ed. Country music star Coffey Anderson made a video which provided viewers some sound advice if they are pulled over by law enforcement. For his sincere efforts, he was roundly criticized by the Left and fellow African Americans, the complaint was his video was worthless to black people. Is that so? Isnt Coffey Anderson black people?
There is a full-fledged war on law enforcement. It is the only conflict where President Obama hasnt led from behind. His contempt for local and state law enforcement is evident and palpable, and some of his latest comments to federalize the police, much as the federal government federalized airport screening after the 9/11 breach of airport security, would have been considered the ravings of a lunatic if they hadnt come from the mouth of the 44th President.
We should not be surprised at our short memories. In 2009, he advocated for a national police force. At every local tragedy, where a black man is killed by a white policeman, the Obama Administration jumps in and immediately begins to emasculate and disarm the local police force. And he is getting help from a complicit media which super-sensationalizes every white-on-black police encounter. The domestic terrorist groups, the New Black Panther Party and Black Lives Matter are actively engaged to trap and target local police and state law enforcement officers.
Several years ago, during the time when I managed a couple of contracts in Bogota, Colombia, I had to ensure my employees had the appropriate level of personal protection equipment, to include a number of sufficiently armored vehicles to ensure their safe travel, from their living quarters to their place of work. For contractors working in Bogota we always had to be on guard and take into consideration the narco-terrorist group, the FARC -- the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The FARC was notorious for killing Colombian prosecutors and American contractors, believing contractors were assisting the Colombian governments counternarcotics efforts. How they targeted American contractors was simple, efficient, and deadly. In heavy traffic the FARC, on motorcycles, would drive up to a vehicle carrying contractors and hose them down with automatic weapons.
While traveling home one night from a downtown Washington DC event, on the three-lane I-295, a swarm of almost two dozen African-American men on four-wheelers and motorcycles overtook me and others in our vehicles. From my old defensive driving course, I realized I had stumbled into a trap with no escape, and I was soon-to-be a dead man. With no ramp or shoulder and traffic ahead, I had one hope and aggressively moved to the far right lane in the hopes that whoever took aim at me would have a more difficult shot shooting across their body. Several riders did shoot at cars with their fingers as they roared by. As quickly as they came upon us, they were gone. Ive seen the videos of similar encounters. Its not a stretch to think that new hate groups are practicing these old FARC motorcycle tactics.
Some sources cite that 80-90% of terrorist attacks occur while the victims are traveling by automobile. Police are regularly ambushed or attacked while in their cars. Local and state governments need to act and protect their law enforcement personnel and departments. Its time for local police and state troopers to start acquiring armored patrol vehicles. City Councils need to watch, Armed or Unarmed: How Quickly Can You Make That Decision? They need to be aware that law enforcement officers across the country have a bullseye imprinted on their foreheads and that incidents targeting them are more common than they realize, that the media wont report them, and are escalating and becoming more common.
Also, President Obama has banned military equipment to police at a crucial time in America. Following the use of military-grade hardware, tear gas, riot gear, and assault rifles by the Ferguson Police Department, violence against law enforcement officers is trending skyward with no end in sight. The New Black Panthers and the radical hate group, Black Lives Matter, have urged their members to kill police as well as white people. The escalation of direct action against police departments while the Obama Administration has purposely reduced or eliminated military-grade protection for police departments requires immediate local action to offset his disarmament policies.
Theres a reason one of the fastest new businesses is armoring commercial and private vehicles. Cops must get in on the action too.
The president is near the end of an eight year train wreck presidency, the result of which is that every social issue is more divisive, more unsolvable, and more dishonestly framed than ever before. It is no secret that he has done nothing for the black community, whose unemployment and crime rates are rising every day, while he demonizes police and lauds racist activists who condone assassination and lawlessness. Hillary Clinton has promised to be Barack Obama in a pantsuit, which means the downward trend will continue as the Democrat practice of Promise Everything, Deliver Nothing, Blame Others goes on in perpetuity.
The black community allows itself to be played this way each and every election cycle, and reliably elects progressive politicians who care more about the profitability of corruption than about their lives or hardships. Indeed, we know that the majority of these individuals live in Democrat controlled cities and states, where Democrat policies ensure that nothing changes for the better, but will often change for the worse if given minimal time. Somehow, the dots remain unconnected. Nevertheless, the party cant afford to allow the black community to consider other options, including the message of success and advancement via the content of ones character and work ethic. The party motto ought to be Strength Through Failure.
Thankfully for the Democrats, there are groups like Black Lives Matter, the New Black Panthers, and every organization that preaches Black Liberation Theory or Theology. Trinity United Church comes to mind, but the Dallas racist didnt need a church when he had so many other pan-African hate groups to follow. History tells us that nothing stirs the supposedly big hearts and closed minds of leftists like race-based radical hate groups.
It is no longer chic for the party to support the old Klan, which was entirely peopled by Democrats in its heyday, and was used as an enforcement tool by the local Democrats to keep people in their predetermined social places. Fortunately for the Democrats, there is a new Klan on the block: Black Lives Matter. Its still populated by Democrats and is still prepared to use violence and assassination to keep people in their social slots. Ironically, the old Klan and the new Klan are both devices to keep blacks in their predetermined places, just exactly where the Democrat party wants them. The self-inflicted damage being done to the image of black Americans by this group is incalculable, and is ensuring that restoring trust is now generations away, if it happens at all. It is not lost on whites that there is racial hatred toward them for merely existing, hardly a starting point for dialogue. Lies and hatred dont presage a healing process.
In a country of 340 Million people, we periodically see stories on the news about a police shooting, sometimes a couple within a short period, usually of a suspect who we end up finding out was far from random, far from peaceful, and far from innocent. Of course, we dont find that out until well after the left has framed the narrative with lies about the reasons for the confrontation or the risks to the police. Given the extent to which such events, as unfortunate as they are when erroneous, serve the lefts agenda it is safe to conclude that we would hear about more of them if there were more of them. That so much is made of the ones that do occur is testament to the fact that they are not a daily occurrence, as the progressives would have us believe. If such events were as common as they claim, we would hear about them every day, all day, non-stop, and there would be in inexhaustible supply of them.
Needless to say, we already know that. We all live in the same country as the propagandists. If they had evidence of rampant and systemic murder by police, they would do anything to publish it. When such evidence does not exist, however, it becomes necessary to lie. This is a tactic of other leftist special interest groups, as well. There are countless stories of activists for gay rights, or womens rights, or race frauds, who fabricate stories of abuse, violence, gang rape, etc. because there are so few truthful examples of these events occurring in a country the activists hate for the bigotry it continually fails to demonstrate. Sometimes its a Tawanna Brawley scam, other times a slur on a cake from Whole Foods, and yet other times its college gang rapes that never happened. If the systemic hatred and violence was so common, the elaborate frauds would be needless overkill.
We also know that elitist progressives are nothing if not master liars and puppeteers. They have spent years tailoring and refining their manipulation of the black communities, inflaming their resentment, bitterness and hopelessness by reminding them of how little progress they have been able to make, without reminding them that the Democrats have led them for decades to this dead end and made sure they stayed there. You will never hear the Democrat mayor or governor of a blue city or state admit that they have been so busy nurturing and feeding their own corruption that they simply never got around to bothering to try to make things better. You will certainly never hear them remind their dependents that black men and women occupy the highest offices of the country, proving systemic racism has long since been defeated, and the fault lies elsewhere. Something must be done to distract them, to prevent them from pausing long enough to think, to discourage them from any critical thinking whatsoever, hopefully while enraging them. They must be played.
So, here we go again. An election is coming up, and the Democrats cant afford for their minority captives to stray. What better way to ensure allegiance than to fabricate a false narrative of wholesale murder, support it with infuriating lies and half-truths that will eventually be dispelled too late to make a difference, and step back while the inevitable violence escalates? The president can claim to support police because he mouths words to that effect, while actually throwing his entire support behind the radicals, whose leaders he entertains at the White House, and whose actions he enables by faulting the police for his loyalists violence and murder. He can claim to have the cops backs, while elevating Al Sharpton, and holding planning conferences with professional agitators, protestors and anarchists, as he has done throughout his presidency, whether during the Occupy phase, or the Ferguson phase, or now.
Of course, those emotional votes are paid for with the innocent lives of Honest to God American patriots. The president is coldly unconcerned that the upheaval and violence he condones brings with it the loss of selfless American men and women who do more in one day to serve their country and the presidents voters than this president has done in his entire life. They risk their lives, and their families futures, while the president risks being exposed as nothing more than the radical community organizer and race profiteer he never stopped being. If the president did nothing for a day, the world would be a better place. If the police did nothing for a day, it would take years to catalogue all the crimes that would be done by those who will vote for the Democrat party candidates this fall. At the hands of this presidents voters, more police will die to irreparably change America. It is a price the president is prepared to have others pay.
The police were ambushed again in Baton Rouge on Sunday, three dead and three seriously wounded. A dozen cops were ambushed in Dallas on 7 July, five of those died.
Police nationwide are literally in the crosshairs. Baton Rouge is just the latest killing field. Whats happening here?
Cops are often called many things, but for most folks theyre peace officers or lawmen. They are, indeed, the thin blue line between us and the worst among us.
Somehow that paradigm has been turned on its head. Punks, thugs, and religious cults are now portrayed as victims whilst cops have become the bad guys. Even the last Super Bowl featured a twerking, faux blond, rap mannequin attacking cops.
We might start with culture, the Beltway culture of racial parsing, where crime is rationalized by skin tone. Take the other day when the president ran off a string of irrelevant statistics about the likelihood of black Americans being stopped or searched by cops. The reasoning here is astounding! Are we to believe that fewer traffic stops in high crime favelas would mean fewer confrontations, fewer misdemeanors, or fewer felonies?
Mister Obama had nothing to say about the incidence of felony crime among his black brothers in high risk, self-segregated schools and ghettoes, the hood if you will. He failed to mention the abject sexism, violence, anti-Semitism, and racism in rap and hip-hop quarters. This is a street culture where mothafucker is the all-purpose epithet and nigga is the noun used to describe a black president at National Press Club galas.
The president also failed to mention that cops have confrontations in black neighborhoods because thats where the crime is. If you are an elderly white in the wrong neighborhood, you might be the prey in a polar bear hunt, aka the knockout game.
Mister Obama also forgot to note that many urban traffic stops are made by black cops. The president failed to tell us how many traffic stops bag creeps with long rap sheets, if not active felony warrants.
A punk or thug with a criminal past is unlikely to be a model driver. Good cops know these things. Apparently the President of the United States does not. Mister Obama seldom uses crime statistics to illuminate social pathologies among his robotic constituents, the good citizens of Chicago or, better still the District of Columbia.
The presidents children go to pricey white private schools in pricey white neighborhoods. Mister Obama is not schooling his kids in the crime ridden, largely black, DC public school system. Daughters Malia and Sasha will not be attending the University of the District of Columbia or Howard University either.
When it comes to personal preferences and family associations, the president favors his mother, the white side of Americana. You would think that some feminist would remind wife Michelle that the personal is political.
The presumption that there are excuses or immunities to be found in melanin is absurd. Most folks, black or white, are mutts; including the family in the White House.
Rather than expanding the racial divide with nonsense numbers about cop stops, you might think that Obama would use the bully pulpit to condemn the hate-cop movements like Black Lives Matter. Its no surprise that Micah Johnson was gunning for white cops at the Dallas BLM hate rally.
Dallas police came to protect an anti-cop street demonstration and in doing so provided a target. A dozen cops were shot. At least one NPR commentator, also black, celebrated the Texas shooter as a martyr. Martyr rhetoric in now the coda for all terrorists.
BLM shills and media sympathizers would have America believe that social riot, arson, and crime is a function of police, not punk, behavior. So let us, for the umpteenth time, review some real world facts about black behavior in America for Mister Obama and his BLM hate hustlers.
As much as ninety-two percent of children fathered by black fathers are born out of wedlock and 82 percent of these end up on welfare . Numbers may vary from study to study, but theyre all bad.
Seventy-two percent of black children are raised by a single parent (the woman), up from 25 percent when the Moynihan report was written.
Half of black males who attend high school do not graduate . Albeit; tuition, transportation, and meals in public schools are still cost-free to black parents.
One in three black males will spend some time in prison in their life time. Black women are three times more likely than whites to be incarcerated
Recidivism among black males is as high as 40 percent.
Even the Washington Post study of crime by race had to concede: a disproportionate amount of murders and other violent crimes are committed by black Americans.
In many cities, New York for example, black women abort more babies than they bring to term. A woman of color is five times more likely to have an abortion as her white counterpart.
Black unemployment rates are twice those of whites. The District of Columbia has the highest black unemployment rate in the country. The unemployment rate for illegals is lower than that of blacks.
Black women earn two thirds of African Americans bachelors degrees and seventy percent of masters degrees.
One of three black Americans in prison converts to Islam each year. The converts are not moderates by any stretch based on behavior and affiliation. Black men gravitate to the dark side of the Ummah; Salafists, Wahhabis, and Louis Farrakhans cult, the Nation of Islam. Hard to believe that black American men are suckered by religious cults where slavery thrives and women are treated worse than they are treated in American public housing.
The cop/perp violence dilemma now has an economic dimension too. Every incident creates a plaintiff lawyers feeding frenzy. Cities like Baltimore will cough up serious cash even before a grand jury sits. Cops accused in the Freddie Gray case have been exonerated to date, yet the city has already paid thrice with riot, arson, and a seven million dollar payday for lawyers and the criminals family. None of this augers well for citizen restraint.
Black America seems to have entered a moral and cultural void with no exits. Withal, the bollixed black majority actually believes that Barack Hussein has done a good job.
Nevertheless, few if any of the pathologies in so-called minority communities have anything to do with white fright or cops. The bleeding hood in America is a self-inflicted wound. Too many blacks, especially males, have embraced the punk life and cant find the exits.
The prevailing ethos is closer to the twisted martyr logic at Public Radio or in modern Islam. The jihadist and the militant black thug are not absolute bedfellows, but the two are getting closer, cultural wingmen on parallel tracks.
Neither seems to be capable of reflection or adult civic behavior. Both cling to historical injury, real or imagined, and each insists on cultural infancy, a dependent or victims status that denies dignity, respect, and opportunity. American racist punks and their Muslim counterparts are fond of blaming some other, often women, for their plight or condition. How many times do we need to hear the words bitch, ho, motherfucka, or nigga from the mouths of idiots who cant spell an insult?
Values like personal responsibility are lost on losers who refuse to behave, learn, or grow up. A ghetto mentality is a tight space. Cultural cliches about black men have little to do with whites, bias, or cops. Behavior is always the acid test. BLMs best investment for change or justice might be a mirror.
Sartre was probably correct: Hell is other people. Indeed! Culture is just another word for the company you keep, brother. If your crew or neighbors have a bad rep, you probably earned it. Truth isnt biased by definition.
Alas, if the past is prologue, there will be no reflection or remorse in black America or at the White House this summer. Withal, lawmen and soldiers will still honor their duty. Cops are indeed the new centurions, all that stands between us and the abyss. Our prayers are with all those who serve and protect, all those men and women who go in harms way.
G. Murphy Donovan comes from a family of cops in the East Bronx. He writes about the politics of national insecurity.
The head of the Cleveland police union is asking Ohio governor John Kasch to restrict the open carry rights of GOP convention goers in the wake of the killing of police in Baton Rouge.
CNN:
"We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something -- I don't care if it's constitutional or not at this point," Stephen Loomis, president of Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, told CNN. "They can fight about it after the RNC or they can lift it after the RNC, but I want him to absolutely outlaw open-carry in Cuyahoga County until this RNC is over." So-called "open carry" gun laws in Ohio allow for licensed firearm owners to wear their weapons in public. With the exception of a small "secure zone" inside and around the Quicken Loans Arena, residents, delegates and protesters are legally permitted to walk around the city -- including within its 1.7 square mile regulated "event zone" -- with any firearm not explicitly banned by the state. Kasich, responding to the request, said: "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," he said.
Loomis may not care if the restrictions are constitutional "at this point," but thank goodness Governor Kasich does.
I fail to see the logic in trashing the Constitution for some nebulous gain in security. Besides, there have been events attended by thousands in states like Texas with open carry with absolutely no trouble at all.
Of course, the convention is different because of all the left-wing radicals who will also be on hand to counter Trump supporters. They, too, are likely to be armed. More to the point, they are set on embarrassing the GOP and Donald Trump.
While you can understand the concerns that Loomis has for his officers, the answer is never to deny the rights of protesters or attendees to defend themselves. The large presence of armed officers should deter anyone except the mentally ill from engaging in dangerous behavior.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy has ripped into the government of France for failing to stop terror attacks and suggested measures for dealing with the jihad threat that should be eye-opening for Americans. Via the BBC:
Speaking to French television, Mr Sarkozy said "Democracy must not be weak, nor simply commemorate. Democracy must say 'We will win the war'." He said he supported stronger measures like expulsion of radicalised Muslims, and electronic tagging for those at risk of radicalisation. France's government has said it is at war with violent jihadists.
France is already far ahead of the United States in acknowledging the nature of the threat it faces. And France, unencumbered by the First Amendment of the American Constitution, has already forbidden the public wearing of religious head cover for Muslim women.
The revelation that the Nice jihad killer was a bisexual drinker makes the identification of at risk pretty difficult. Maybe that means putting ankle bracelets on every Muslim? Hmmm.
Germany has become a Roach Motel: Muslim migrants check in, but they dont check out, even when asked politely. The state of Saxony, for instance, chartered an airplane to fly 49 Tunisians home, but when it took off, only 13 were on board, according to an article in the U.K. Express.
A secret report by interior ministers of all of Germany's 16 states says tens of thousands of migrants scheduled to be flown to their homelands in the past few months are still in the country being cared for by taxpayers. The problem centres on incomplete paperwork, migrants lying about where they come from and the country's own medical profession. It is reported that hundreds of doctors are refusing to sign certificates stating that those intended for expulsion are fit to fly.
The Germans are being very polite, even insisting that they take care not to endanger anyones health through complementary air travel to their homelands. Leftists have taken over practically every professional body, so of course the doctors take it in their hands to veto the application of a law through withholding signed certificates. Sooner or later, doctors who will sign the requisite certificates can be found, I suspect, but in that case, other ruses and dodges will be found.
Maybe the German public will just put up with it and remain polite.
Or maybe not.
We are counting down to the end of the Obama presidency. Only six months remain.
I wonder who voted for Obama in 2008 thinking that Iraq and race relations would dominate the front pages at the end of his presidency. In other words, this is not what "hope and change" had in store for year eight.
Over in Iraq, reality is forcing President Obama to send U.S. troops, even if in a support role, as reported by the New York Times:
President Obama will send 560 more troops to Iraq to help retake Mosul, the largest city still controlled by the Islamic State, a deployment intended to capitalize on recent battlefield gains that also illustrates the obstacles that Mr. Obama has faced in trying to wind down Americas wars. The additional troops, announced here on Monday by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, are the latest escalation of the American military role in Iraq by Mr. Obama, who withdrew the last American soldiers from Iraq at the end of 2011.
On race relations, the situation is even more disastrous. Like many, President Obama reacted irresponsibly to the killing of Michael Brown in Missouri, as Ron Christie wrote:
Turning to the ginned-up cauldron of race that is now Ferguson, the president was once again quick to offer his opinion on local matter on which he knew nothing of the facts at hand. Days following the shooting the president assured the press that he had sent both the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown. Of particular relevance, Mr. Obama offered: Of course, its important to remember how this started. We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old. His family will never hold Michael in their arms again. And when something like this happens, the local authorities including the police have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death, and how they are protecting the people in their communities. The circumstances under which Brown lost his life are both heartbreaking and tragic -- but not in the manner implied by the president. Rather than waiting for local authorities to complete their investigation, the president took sides -- particularly with the his family will never hold Michael in their arms again line. The implication here is that a white police gunned down a young black man in a manner that was irresponsible and opaque.
With race relations, polls tell us that things are really bad. Over in Iraq, U.S. troops will face combat again.
This is not what they predicted back in 2008!
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
Did John Kerry assume that nobody would challenge him on the Obama administrations stubborn claim that it is winning the fight against ISIS? In the face of bloodshed at home from ISIS, the claim deserves questioning. But somehow, John Kerry appeared to flounder when Jake Tapper of CNN presented an obvious critique to him. Via Tim Hains of RCP:
In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper Sunday morning, Secretary of State John Kerry gave an assessment of how the war against ISIS is going. "Daesh," Kerry said, referencing an alternative name for the group, "is under great, great pressure... They are shrinking. Weve taken back 40 percent and 45 percent of the territory they held in Iraq and were squeezing town after town." "With all due respect, sir," Tapper interjected. "Im not sure it looks that way to the public that ISIS is on the run... In the last few weeks we have seen a series of ISIS inspired attacks and 49 killed in Orlando and 45 killed in Istanbul and more than 200 killed in Baghdad and 84 in Nice." "It depends on where you mean ISIS," Kerry responded. "If youre saying that one person standing up one day and killing people is a reflection of ISIS moving in Iraq and Syria, I think youre dead wrong."
It depends on where you mean ISIS is not quite as bad as It depends on what the meaning of is is, but it is too close for comfort.
The babble from Kerry offers no response, much less comfort, to Americans worried about being mowed down by a truck at a beach, shopping mall, or other location not yet imagined. Of course, the basic facts do not offer Kerry a lot of material to work with. Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, allowing ISIS to rise, and now, instead of ending the war, Obama has succeeded in bringing the war to the Western countries.
Here is the video:
Ponder a moment the possibility that, but for the Swift Boat Veterans standing up and making their voices heard, Kerry might have been president.
Hat tip: iOTWReport
In keeping with Islams hellish history of conquest, the current Muslim invasion of the West upholds a tradition of evil. The West, however, hardly seems to mind. In fact, the elites trip over themselves to welcome the enemy with open arms. Western civilization be damned. Make (more) room for the barbarians!
As we witness the steady transformation of civilized societies into lawless, Islamicized lands, it appears that madness has taken hold on a mass scale. And so, for example, we read about gangs of savages (otherwise known as refugees or migrants) raping shocking numbers of European women. The situation is dire, with no end in sight.
And if the rapes werent enough, the authorities abandon female citizens while making sure the rapists are hardly punished, if at all. (One wonders how anyone can be a guest in another country and not be immediately deported if he has so much as a speeding ticket, but thats a topic for another day.)
Daniel Greenfield has written a brilliant piece at Front Page Magazine addressing the current state of affairs, bringing to the fore how we are headed down the same path:
The UN Commission of Experts identified 1,600 actual cases of rape in the Bosnian War that took place in the former Yugoslavia over a period of years. In Germany, 2,000 Muslim migrants sexually assaulted 1,200 women in a single night in cities across Germany. The former was considered one of the worst war crimes of the decade. Its perpetrators were bombed and then faced war crimes trials. The perpetrators of the latter received a slap on the wrist. [snip] The majority of the Muslim rapists came from North African countries. Half of them had been in Germany for less than one year. If there were a UN tribunal to be held for the war crimes committed by Muslim migrants against European women, Frau Merkel should be sitting in the dock. It was her decision to open the borders that led to the horror inflicted on 1,200 women in one night. And 1,200 women is just a single episode. We dont know the full total numbers. And we may never know them. Yet at this rate its entirely possible that the total of Merkelicide might exceed even the wildest inflated estimates from the Bosnian war. And yet its considered indelicate to discuss such things because this time around Muslims arent the victims, they are the perpetrators. [snip] Halina Wawzyniak, a lawmaker from the Left Party, insisted that while she usually supported stronger sexual assault laws, she worried that these particular sexual assault laws would lead to a disproportionate effect on Muslim migrants committing minor sexual offenses who might then be deported. And so, given a choice between protecting women and sexual predators, the left chooses rapists. From Cologne, Germany, where the authorities have done far more to crack down on people making critical remarks about Muslim migrants than on the Muslim rapists, to Twin Falls, Idaho, where United States Attorney Wendy J. Olson warned anyone spreading inflammatory statements about the Muslim perpetrators that they might be violating federal law, the priority is protecting Muslim rapists at any and all costs.
The Idaho case to which Greenfield refers is this: On June 2, a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls was raped by a gang of three Muslim invaders. I will not go into the details of the attack. Suffice it to say, it was pure evil. The response to the rape has been in line with Europes now predictable, reprehensive, downright criminal responses to the rape of their women: protect Muslim savages, cover up the truth, and marginalize victims.
Pamela Geller has provided exceptional coverage of the story of this child in Idaho, including Gellers most recent piece, which chronicles how events unfolded, from the rape early last month to ongoing attempts to cover up the truth. I hope AT readers will take the time to read Gellers piece (here). It is a chilling window into the path we are on the same deadly path that Europe is on regarding how we are dealing with (or not dealing with) the profoundly serious implications of importing more Muslims.
(And as an aside related to this child and her family, I know that many of us may be weary of how GoFundMe pages crop up for all manner of needs, but this case is of great importance. The family is poor and desperately need help moving, since they still live next door to the rapists. They also need money for legal fees. If you would like to donate, please go here.)
Just a few weeks after this rape, large gangs of Somalis rampaged through an upscale neighborhood in Minnesota for three consecutive days, driving trucks over peoples lawns, shooting off bottle rockets, playing recordings of women being raped, screaming Jihad!, and threatening to kidnap and rape women in the neighborhood. A couple of days later in a suburb of Boston, a Syrian man who had been in the United States for two months stalked and fondled a 13-year-old girl at a public swimming pool.
And thats just been the past few weeks. Prior to this summer, there were many more examples (here, here, here, here, and here).
And so it goes as the left embraces barbarians while silencing those who speak the truth. As for the fabricated war on women they accuse the right of, progressives (aka communists) seem perfectly comfortable with looking the other way when their favorite exotic group does the raping.
Hat tips: Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, World Net Daily, and the Lowell Sun
Whitney Plantation is located near Wallace, in Louisiana, on the historic River Road in St. John the Baptist Parish, less than an hour from New Orleans. Founded in the days before the Civil War, this former sugar cane plantation is today Americas only museum dedicated entirely to slavery.
The property was originally known as Habitation Haydel, after its owner Ambroise Heidel, a German immigrant, who came to Louisiana and bought this tract of land in the 1750s. Heidel originally grew indigo before his son Jean Jacques converted the plantation to sugar in the early 1800's. It was Jean Jacques who built the historic French Creole raised-style main house. Back in those days, sugar plantations, just like any other plantation in the country, employed mostly African slaves as labor. Some 350 slaves are recorded to have lived, sweated, toiled and beaten here.
Photo credit: Corey Balazowich/Flickr
It wasnt until after the property was sold to a Northerner, Bradish Johnson, after the Civil War, that the property was named Whitney by the new owner in honor of his grandson.
In 1999, the plantation was bought by New Orleans lawyer named John Cummings. For the next 15 years Cummings invested $8 million of his personal money and time to develop the property into Americas first museum of slavery, in an effort to unlock the grim story of Americas greatest shame.
There are a number of memorials and exhibits on the grounds of the museum, as well as art works and sculptures. There is one "Wall of Honor" engraved with the names of the 350 slaves who spent their lives in the plantation. There is another memorial dedicated to 107,000 people enslaved in Louisiana. In the middle of a field in another corner of the property is a bronze sculpture of a black angel carrying a baby to Heaven. Surrounding the sculpture are granite slabs with the names of 2,200 Louisiana slave children who died before their third birth date. While no records of death rates were kept in the plantation, historical documents reveal that 39 children died on this plantation from 1823 to 1863, only six reaching the age of five.
It was at Whitney Plantation where the 2012 Quentin Tarantino movie Django Unchained and the 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave were filmed. The historic property now contains an overseer's house, the rare French Creole main house, a plantation store, a two story tall pigeon-house, slave quarters, and other structures. Parts of the land are still used to grow sugarcane.
Photo credit: Corey Balazowich/Flickr
Photo credit: Corey Balazowich/Flickr
Photo credit: Corey Balazowich/Flickr
Photo credit: Mississippi Snopes/Flickr
Photo credit: SC Cunningham/Flickr
Photo credit: Michael McCarthy/Flickr
Google and LinkedIn have recently struck a deal and have agreed to swap properties in Mountain View, California; a decision that could allow Google to build its futuristic new campus. Last year Google submitted a plan to the Mountain View City Council to develop four new building expansions in North Bayshore, designed by Danish architect Biarke Ingels. However, last year the proposal was not approved by the Mountain View City Council and instead, the Council awarded most of the North Bayshore property rights to LinkedIn. However, earlier this month, Google and LinkedIn have agreed to swap properties, allowing Google the possibility to expand its office space in North Bayshore to an additional 1.4 million square feet.
Googles last year proposal for North Bayshore was to create a new futuristic campus and build lightweight block-like structures which can be moved around easily, as opposed to constructing immovable concrete buildings. According to the companys initial blog post, Google chose Mountain View [] 15 years ago because the company likes the beauty of the bay, the family-friendly environment, and the fact that there are great universities in close proximity. With Googles plans to expand further into North Bayshore, the company wanted to create office spaces that would provide not only a great home for Google, but that would also work for the city that has given us so much. Their plan was to create four new sites, each covered by large translucent canopies which would control the climate inside while allowing for light and air to pass through. The companys vision was to blur the distinction between our buildings and nature by creating a campus with trees, cafes, landscaping, and bike paths weaving through these structures. But Googles proposal was denied by the Mountain View City Council because the council apparently wanted to maintain diversity in Mountain Views business footprint, and thus, most North Bayshore property rights have been passed along to LinkedIn.
However, following the new deal between Google and LinedIn, the latter will acquire two properties of Google totaling 460,000 square feet, as well as two building leases in Sunnyvale California, formerly used by Palm Computing as their headquarters. On the other hand, Google will acquire a 370,000 square-foot building from LinedIn, as well as the companys development property in North Bayshore, accounting for 1.4 million square feet of new office space already approved by the Mountain View City Council. Aside from swapping their properties, LinkedIn had to pay an additional $331 million to Google, while the search engine giant had paid LinkedIn $215 million.
Theres not a shred of a doubt that Google is and has been the worlds number one search engine for quite some time. That didnt happen by chance, though, and people working on developing the tool today are keen on maintaining their market domination. Thats precisely why Google is constantly adding new features into an already quite robust search engine. So, not long after giving mobile users the ability to quickly search, install, and discover apps directly from their phones browser, the Mountain View-based tech giant has ennobled its search engine with a feature that shows the average time its users have spent on a location.
The goal of this new addition is to help you make travel and vacation plans by seeing how long on average do people stick around in a location youre interested in. Lets say youre visiting a national park youve never been to and have a hard time estimating how much youll need to pack for your visit. By clicking on the Plan your visit item in the location card shown in Googles search results, youll be able to see how long do people usually stick around your place of interest which means youll have the necessary information to plan and pack accordingly. At least, thats the basic idea and it goes without saying that whenever individual peoples preferences are concerned, your usage may vary greatly so this information isnt to be taken as gospel. While Google didnt go into great detail regarding supported locations, this feature is presumably available for all popular tourist destinations worldwide or will be in due time.
Earlier this month, Google has updated its search engine with more features focused on tourists which allow travelers to quickly find and book flights and hotels that best suit their needs and financial resources. Google search is now also highlighting discounted hotel rates in its results and earlier this year, the US tech giant has also launched the Destinations feature designed to help its users plan their vacations. All in all, its a good time to be a tourist with a functioning Internet connection and Google is promising that more related improvements to its services are coming soon.
ARM Holdings may not be the most widely recognized name in technology amongst mainstream consumers, but the company is one of the main driving forces behind the smartphone revolution of the twenty-first century. The company designs the vast majority of chips that go into modern day smartphones, but it is far from a one-trick pony. The UK-based company also designs microprocessors for a wide array of devices, ranging from smartwatches to televisions and Wi-Fi routers to Bluetooth headsets. While ARM played second fiddle to Intels x86 architecture throughout the latter half of the last century, the increasing adoption of smartphones around the world over the past several years has now made ARM architecture the predominant computation platform in the world, with almost 15 billion devices shipped last year powered by chips designed by the Cambridge, England-based company.
With mobile platforms expected to rule the roost for some time to come, ARM has now become a highly-valued technology company, which can be gauged by the fact that Japanese tech major SoftBank reportedly offered around $32 billion to buy the British company. At that price, the company is being valued at 70 times ARMs net income last year, which gives it a PE ratio similar to that of American internet major, Facebook. While that already is a significant premium to the companys current valuation, online speculations seem to suggest that companies like Apple or Intel might have also been interested in snapping up the independent British firm as manufacturers start embedding microprocessor chips into everything from wristwatches to clothing. That trend is only likely to intensify in coming years with the expected increase in IoT devices, which are being tipped to become more common in a few years time.
SoftBank, of course, is no stranger to making big-ticket purchases abroad, having acquired a 72% stake in American telecom company, Sprint, back in July 2013. The acquisition, however, has been a fairly contentious one, with SoftBank shareholders getting increasingly restless in recent times with Sprints continued underperformance against its nearest rival, T-Mobile USA. SoftBank, meanwhile, has gone through some turbulence in recent times, with its board President, Mr. Nikesh Arora, leaving the company recently for greener pastures elsewhere, although the latest developments are being speculated to have been his brainchild while he was still at the company.
Meizu has been one of the most interesting China-based companies to pay attention to in the last couple of years. This companys growth rate is truly staggering, theyve managed to become quite a serious player in China in a really short period of time, mainly thanks to the quality and pricing of their devices. Meizu had sold only 4.4 million smartphones in 2014, and theyve managed to sell 20.5 million a year later, which comes down to a 350% increase (approximately) in device sales, and at the same time the companys profit as well. Now, do take into consideration the fact that Meizu had sold significantly less devices in 2013 compared to 2014, and youll get an even better picture of how much the company has managed to grow. It is also worth mentioning that Meizu mostly sells their devices in China, even though some of them are available via Amazon in specific countries, though theyre quite a bit more expensive than in Meizus homeland. Theres always a reseller alternative as well, a number of China-based resellers sell Meizus devices, and even though theyre not as affordable as they are directly from the company, theyre mostly still worth the money.
The company had introduced a number of interesting smartphones in the last year or so, though some people feel like the design of those smartphones is starting to blend together in a way. Since Meizu introduced the Meizu MX4 Pro back in December 2014, we havent seen much change in the design of the companys smartphones. The Meizu MX4 Pro, Meizu MX5, Meizu M2 Note, Meizu M3 Note, Meizu PRO 5, Meizu PRO 6 all of those devices resemble each other quite a bit in terms of the design, even the Meizu MX4 and Meizu M1 Note, though unlike other listed devices, these two phones dont sport the multifunctional physical mBack button up front. Many people would say that Meizu doesnt have to change anything because other companies do the same thing and they succeed despite that, like Samsung for example, or Xiaomi. Well, I do tend to agree with that, to an extent that is. I do believe that companies can push one design language for a certain period of time, and then they have to change things around, and Samsung is a living, breathing example of that. This company has been introducing tons of devices per year, and at some point all of their devices started to look alike, and the companys sales (and profit) fell significantly. Samsung then decided to redesign their flagship line of devices last year in order to bring back their customers, they actually did the same with some mid-range offerings as well. That turned out to be a great choice, not only is their flagship line of devices above everything else they sell in terms of the design, but the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note devices are quite recognizable at this point.
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On the flip side, Xiaomi did something similar with their Mi 5 flagship. Xiaomis devices all looked alike up to Mi 5s release, no matter if we talk about low, mid or high-end units, but the Mi 5 changed that. Xiaomi opted to introduce a smartphone made out of glass and metal, and for the first time they included a physical home button. This might not mean a lot for other companies, but it sure does for Xiaomi, the Mi 5 is now a truly recognizable smartphone, and looks nothing like the rest of Xiaomis lineup. The Mi Note will probably resemble the Mi 5, which is okay, considering that is the companys flagship phablet, and the rumored Mi 5s might differ from both devices, which might also be a good choice by the company. My point in all this is, at some point, you need to differentiate your devices in order to make them stand out, some customers care less about the design, and more about functionality, or something else, but the design is important to everyone, at least to some extent. The last thing you want to do is make your consumers bored with your product, and I believe youd all agree with me on this one.
On that note, I do believe its time for Meizu to differentiate a bit more, their mid-range and high-end offerings look way too similar, theyre all made out of metal, and offer the same general shape and looks to an extent. The companys CEO, Huang Zhang (also known as Jack Wong), said recently in an internal memo that hes not satisfied with the design of the upcoming Meizu MX6 smartphone. Now, based on leaks weve seen, the Meizu MX6 will blend in with the rest of Meizus devices, and will resemble the Meizu PRO 6, in particular, way too much. The companys CEO did not say that it will be a bad product, or anything of the sort, Meizu MX6 will quite probably offer great build and everything, but the general looks of the device doesnt seem to be right as far as Huang Zhang is concerned. That makes all the sense in the world if you factor in everything Ive said in the previous paragraphs.
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So, what should Meizu do? Will sticking to what they know hurt their profits? Well, it is possible that it will, but on the other hand, it really doesnt have to be, but in either case, they should step into the unknown and take some risks. Speaking of which, the company is rumored to be working on a new PRO flagship which will be announced later this year, and if leaks are accurate, that smartphone will resemble the Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and Vivo XPlay 5, mainly because of the Dual Edge display. So, is that what Meizu needs? Well, it might just be, the Meizu PRO 7, if leaks are accurate, will still be made out of metal, but it will ship with a curved display, which will bring that phone to a whole new level, and differentiate it from the rest of the pack, because after all, this will be the companys new flagship. It is possible Meizu will turn to metal and glass in order to build the PRO 7, we still dont know for sure, but either way, that device might truly push the company even more forward, not to mention it will, almost certainly, going to be fueled by the Exynos 8890 SoC which can be found in the Galaxy S7 devices. It remains to be seen what happens by the end of the year, but Im convinced that Meizu will take some time in order to think about what comes next, and that theyll start differentiating more.
Although Google has reportedly scrapped development of a standalone virtual reality (VR) headset, a new report indicates that their VR hardware plans have not halted altogether. While the headset they were working on may have been cancelled, and may not be tied to the same device that is currently under development; an anonymous source reported to Engadget that a headset is still coming.
The headset in question will not employ VR exclusively, but will rather use both VR and augmented reality (AR) to create a mixed reality experience. Current virtual reality hardware typically requires the use of an accompanying computer or smartphone, but this device will be a standalone headset, so it wont require any additional hardware to operate. It will include a built-in display, cameras, and sensors for head tracking. The device will very likely integrate with Daydream, the upcoming virtual reality platform from Google. Reports say that as far as design, Googles headset will be closer to Microsofts Hololens than Oculus Rift. Googles investment in Magic Leap, a company with various mixed-reality projects in the works, likely has something to do with their plans for the development of this headset.
The focus here appears to be more on the integration of AR and VR rather than creating a VR experience. And integrating AR is something that could stand to make this project incredibly successful; While VR separates the player from reality, AR immerses them in it. A great example of the impact this has on players is Pokemon Go. The recently released Android and iOS app, which uses GPS mapping and augmented reality to create a unique game experience, recently became the most popular mobile game in U.S. history just one week after its release and is already used more than Snapchat. Players cant get enough, and it is clear that augmented reality is providing an experience that people find highly unique and appealing. And when combining that with virtual reality, it will create a whole new world of endless possibilities. Google has not made any comments on the matter, and a release date for the headset has not been announced yet, but Daydream will be available this fall, and should give some preview of what they are capable of with this new technology.
Economic revival hot topic at UN convention
The 14th Session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development opened in Nairobi, Kenya on Sunday.
Addressing the opening ceremony, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged participants to focus on strong collaboration, equality and inclusion in trade, finance and investment in order to better align action with agreed-upon sustainable development targets and help restore trust in the global economy.
The theme of the Conference is "From decision to action: moving toward an inclusive and equitable global economic environment for trade and development."
The Conference will feature ministerial debates, high-level round tables, thematic events, a World Investment Forum, a Global Commodities Forum, a Youth Forum and a Civil Society Forum, among other events.
UNCTAD 14 takes place as governments operationalize the 17 Sustainable Development Goals under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by world leaders at the United Nations summit for the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda in September 2015, and in the wake of the Paris climate change deal.
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Kenya President Kenyatta has also asked for a solution to high commodity prices which he says are a burden to developing countries.
Earlier in the morning, the 14th Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 11 and China was held. Liu Xianfa, Chinese Ambassador to Kenya, delivered a speech on behalf of the Chinese delegation.
Liu said under the situations thatthat considering the world economy is was under adjustment, the in-depth impact of the international financial crisis hads not been eradicated, a lack of impetus in and the global growth is lack of impetus, and that the goals proposed by the Group of 77 at its establishment in 1964 hads not been achieved, the group therefore should strengthen cooperation and further enhance its role.
He urged the Group of 77 to enhance its agglomeration forces, cohesiveness and bring new vitality and energy to consolidate its role.
The Group of 77 should better realize its historical task for the co-development of the developing countries, he said. It should uphold the spirit of equally mutual trust and benefits to forge the "Community of Shared Destiny".
He urged the Group of 77 should to strengthen its cooperative mechanism to follow issues of global economy, trade, investment, finance and others to bring positive energy to global economic affairs.
The ministerial meeting of the G-77 is a tie to be pragmatic and result-oriented with respect to the current negotiations, said Joakim Reiter, Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD to the Fourteenth Ministerial Meeting of the Group 77 and China.
Dutchman jailed for insulting King Willem-Alexander
To Holland, where a Dutchman has been locked up for 30 days for insulting King Willem-Alexander. Did he mention the ears? The chin? That gap-year incident with the chicken? No. The criminal insulted the king on a Facebook post, accusing the regent of being a murderer, thief and rapist.
The 44-year-old idiot also stuck the kings face on images of peoples being executed.
Said the Dutch courts This behaviour is unacceptable in our society and demands that a penalty be imposed on the suspect.
Amsterdam is now twinned with Riyadh.
Spotter: DutchNews
Anorak
Posted: 18th, July 2016 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
(ANSA) - Brussels, July 18 - Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Monday he was "confident we will win" an autumn referendum on overhauling Italy's political machinery. "Victory will be another step in what we are doing: modernising Italy through reforms," he said, answering a British journalist's question on whether Premier Matteo Renzi had gambled on calling the Constitutional referendum. In Italy, Gentiloni said, "in the past we have had very difficult years for our economy and the functioning of the institutions, we are gradually emerging from the economic difficulties but we need institutional reforms too." He said "that is why we are having the referendum and I'm confident that we will win". The referendum asks Italians to say Yes or No to a reforms that ends Italy's unusual 'perfect bicameralism' by turning the Senate into a regionally based body with limited powers.
(ANSA) - Ivrea, July 18 - A city court on Monday sentenced former Olivetti chief Carlo De Benedetti to five years two months in prison over 12 asbestos-related deaths at the company's Ivrea plant near Turin. The workers, who did jobs ranging from assembling typewriters and machine maintenance to painting, died after their retirements between 2003 and early 2013, had been employed between the 1960s and 1990s in areas of the plant that were allegedly contaminated with asbestos fibers.
They were subsequently diagnosed with illnesses including mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos. The prosecution had requested six years and eight months for manslaughter and personal injury.
Trial Judge Elena Stoppini - who in May ordered a review of medical samples from the 12 victims - also sentenced Franco Debenedetti to five years two months (six years and four months requested) and ex-minister Corrado Passera to one year 11 months (three years and six months requested).
Passera served as Italy's transport and industry minister from 2011 to 2013 in the emergency technocrat government of ex-premier Mario Monti.
The judge handed down a total of 13 sentences, of which three acquittals including that of former Alitalia president and erstwhile Olivetti CEO Roberto Colannino, who was on trial for one count of culpable injury.
(ANSA) - Turin, July 18 - Carabinieri police on Monday detained four members of a single family on suspicion of committing dozens of robberies in Italy's Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany and Valle d'Aosta regions.
The suspects are a man aged 60, his 57-year-old wife, their 36-year-old daughter and her 37-year-old husband.
Two more suspects are being sought by police, who also seized cash, watches and jewelry worth over 30,000 euros and which came from a robbery in Piedmont, as well as assets worth 600,000 euros. These included a villa, an apartment, cars, and a laundromat in Turin province.
(ANSA) - Rome, July 18 - The government made a firm commitment to tighten national security against terrorism in a meeting with parliamentary whips Monday, the whips from the ruling Democratic Party said Monday.
"It was a very important meeting with a clear political value which affirmed the government's commitment on the great question of national security, said Senate Whip Luigi Zanda and Lower House Whip Ettore Rosato.
"Faced with international fundamentalist terrorism we need the utmost unity of the country and the maximum cohesion of the democratic political forces," they said.
"The majority and the opposition can debate and differ over everything.
"But when faced with the terrorist threat and the violence of extremists they cannot resort to pretexts and polemics which would end up weakening Italy's position and undermining all strategies to defend citizens and fight terrorism". photo: Zanda
(ANSAmed) - CAIRO - The bloodshed underway for almost two and a half months in Sirte continues, after an operation launched by Libyan militias answering to the government under Prime Minister-Designate Fayez Al-Sarraj to liberate the city from the Islamic State (ISIS). The website Alwasat quotes a source from the Al-Bunyan Al-Marsous operation as saying that the death toll from clashes on Sunday evening was at two dead and nine injured from among the militias, but that the toll had not been updated. The forces said that they had pushed back attacks by ISIS in the perimeter of the Ouagadougou center, in the nature reserve and the port, leading to ''a large number of deaths among the jihadists''. (ANSAmed).
Online photo campaign against Moroccan women in bikinis Covert photo operation criticises and threatens women
(ANSAmed) - RABAT, JULY 18 - Moroccan police have undertaken an investigation to determine those responsible for posting photos online of Moroccan women in bikinis on beaches throughout the country.
The photos were taken secretly and posted on a Facebook profile under the false name Aicha Amal, in a campaign calling on the women to turn to religion.
The group said it has taken 10,000 photos and has threatened to publish them all online.
In captions accompanying the photos it has already published, the group wrote: "rediscover the high road and turn to God"; "this is what happens in Morocco, land of Islam, principality of believers"; and "watch out, young Moroccan women, we have eyes that are filming you on the beaches and we will show your photos to prevent the deterioration of the country".
The photos were taken on beaches in Rabat, Sale, Kenitra, Agadir and Casablanca.(ANSAmed).
Tension rises over Jerusalem Gay Pride Rabbis lash out, Labor supporters to attend parade
(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, JULY 18 - Tension is rising in Jerusalem ahead of the 15th edition of the Gay Pride Parade slated for Thursday.
Police will be present in mass to protect participants. Influential rabbis from religious-nationalistic groups have in recent days been ever more fervent in their public condemnation of homosexuality, including a rabbi that is part of the military hierarchy. Last week, the Gay Pride Parade of Beer Sheva in the Negev was called off after a local rabbi complained and the police expressed concerns that the event would lad to acts of violence.
Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade last year was attacked by a hardline Orthodox Jew who stabbed and killed an adolescent and injured other participants. In light of the latest polemics, Labor leader Isaac Herzog on Monday called on those in his party to take part in the parade.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett has criticized the hardline rabbis, though he is also a practicing Jew. (ANSAmed)
(by Patrizio Nissirio) (ANSAmed) - MOUNT ATHOS (GREECE) - An Orthodox monk wearing sunglasses drives the off-road vehicle down a bumpy dirt track with occasional asphalted sections, checking messages on his two cell phones.
The location is Mount Athos, the 'theocratic republic' in Greek territory where monastic Orthodox communities from different countries have been living since the 10th century and where time seems to have stopped. But appearances can deceive. Father Epifanios is very much of the modern world, an international celebrity due to the wines produced in Mylopotamos and his book 'The Cuisine of the Holy Mount Athos'. An eminently charming individual, the monk seems to straddle the world of spirituality and that of his worldly passions for taste. There is no contradiction in this, he insists. ''Faith is closely linked to passion for our products, tradition, cooking styles and even how and where we eat, in tranquility and peace, as we have for centuries,'' Epifanios said, who has been living in this remote paradise for 43 years but who ravels around Europe to speak about cuisine and the Orthodox faith. ''I wrote this book out of love and passion for our earth and what it produces, to preserve a way of cooking as well as of seeing the world. A world in which you can resist fast food with our slow food consisting of vegetables, oil and tomatoes that we grew.'' Women cannot enter Mount Athos - the border is guarded by Greek police, even though the 'republic' answers to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and not the Athens government - and one must arrive via sea. From Ouranoupolis, the last Greek town, visitors take a boat and about 20 minutes later arrive in the tiny port of Daphne, which boasts 35 inhabitants. Access is only via a 'Diamonitirion' permit, which costs 30 euros and allows for a few days' stay in one of the monasteries. An invitation is the only way to avoid having to wait for months for permission to be granted. Father Epifanios, whose hand is routinely kissed by all in the Orthodox manner due to his status as 'ieronda' ('elder'), is one of two monks in Mylopotamos, a monastic residence that is part of the larger Megisti Lavra monastery, one of about twenty (including Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians and Romanians) represented in the parliament in the 'capital' of Mount Athos, Karyes, where there are a few small shops and a restaurant. The friendly and ever-smiling Epifanios orders an 'astakomakaronada' (linguine with lobster) and a 'tsipouro' ( a drink similar to grappa and popular in northern Greece). Father Ioachim joins him, the other monk living in Mylopotamos, and notes that the nearby Protaton church has frescoes from the 13th-century icon painter Manuel Panselinos, ''who was better than Giotto, in my opinion'', he says. Mylopotamos is above a small bay in the northern Aegean and was in ruins until a few years ago, when Epifanios rebuilt it and gave new life to a nearby vineyard, which now produces high-quality wines available for online purchase. Epifanios and Ioachim begin to cook as soon as the evening descends on Mount Athos. ''We are making fried fish that was brought in only last night and tomato salad,'' Ieronda says in the small kitchen. Father Palamas from Karyes is also a guest for the evening meal. A radio broadcast on the history of a monastery in the area is listened to and all the food is good, including the wine. Afterwards, silence reigns under a starry sky on a small porch overlooking the sea: this is what pilgrims seek most on Mount Athos. Epifanios and Ioachim get up very early and their days are marked by a great deal of prayer, beginning with morning rites in a tiny church in Mylopotamos. However, there is also the need to deal with daily chores, and Epifanios must go to Salonika. On the motorboat he takes to return, he ignores the waves as he looks through sunglasses at the messages on his two cell phones. (ANSAmed).
(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL - Mass purges by the Turkish government following an attempted coup against those allegedly behind it or supporters of it continue, as does the unstable situation in the country. A man in a military uniform has been killed after opening fire near the Ankara courthouse, while Istanbul deputy mayor Cemil Candas is dead after two people shot him in the head in the central Sisli area, according to the state-owned Anadolu new agency. Turkish authorities are meanwhile rounding up and arresting vast numbers of police after similar purges in the military and judicial sector. Following the failed coup, Turkey has introduced a role prohibiting state employees from leaving the country unless they have special passports with prior approval from the institution for which they work, reports NTV. Estimates say that the regulation affects almost 5% of the Turkish population. Turkish authorities have suspended 30 out of 81 total prefects and 8,777 employees of the interior ministry have been relieved of their positions, including (in addition to the prefects) some 7,899 policeman, 614 gendarmerie and 47 provincial district governors. In addition to the almost 12,000 people suspended from the police and judiciary, about 1,500 employees have been removed from their positions in the finance ministry. Amid this tension, the EU and the US have called on Turkey to respect democracy, fundamental rights and the rule of law after the attempted coup d'etat. The spokesperson for German chancellor Angela Merkel, Steffen Seibert, has spoken out against arbitrary justice and revenge against soldiers suspected of having taken part in the attempted coup, calling the acts ''unacceptable''. (ANSAmed).
BRUSSELS - The European Union Foreign Affairs Council has added a discussion on broadening anti-terrorism efforts in Europe and internationally to its meeting agenda on Monday, following the attack in Nice last Thursday, said French Foreign Minister Jean Marc Ayrault.
The meeting will open with a working breakfast with US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Ayrault said international anti-ISIS coalition partners would meet in Washington, DC this week. "We need to continue this fight, more than ever, and unite our forces," Ayrault said.
"France is committed, but we also want the international community to be. It's an effort that must be led by the Europeans, who have to show increased solidarity, together," he said.
France confirms new anti-ISIS air raids Defence minister said raids carried out overnight in Syria, Iraq
(ANSAmed) - PARIS, JULY 18 - French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Monday said the country's Air Force conducted new raids against ISIS overnight Sunday in Syria and Iraq.
Following the lorry attack in Nice last Thursday, French President Francois Hollande said the country would intensify its fight against the Islamic State. (ANSAmed).
(by Stefania Fumo).
(ANSAmed) - Rome - The government is to set up a panel of experts to study Islamist radicalization in Italy, Left Ecology Freedom (SEL) Senate Whip Loredana De Petris and Sinistra Italiana (SI) House Whip Arturo Scotto reported following a summit with Premier Matteo Renzi and caucus leaders from across the political spectrum on Monday. "The need emerged for greater cooperation in Europe at the level of (secret) services and intelligence," Scotto said.
"Furthermore, we propose building a pact with Italian Islam for deradicalisation and to isolate extremists and terrorists". The summit was held to talk about strategy in the wake of last week's Bastille Day terror attack in Nice that left at least 84 dead and a number of missing, including five Italian nationals.
Whips from the ruling Democratic Party said the government has made a firm commitment to tighten national security against terrorism. "It was a very important meeting with a clear political value which affirmed the government's commitment on the great issue of national security," said Senate Whip Luigi Zanda and Lower House Whip Ettore Rosato. "Faced with international fundamentalist terrorism we need utmost national unity and maximum cohesion from democratic political forces," they said. "The majority and the opposition can debate and differ over everything. But when faced with the terrorist threat and the violence of extremists they cannot resort to pretexts and polemics that would end up weakening Italy's position and undermining strategies to defend citizens and fight terrorism".
The rightwing anti-immigrant Northern League was the sole party abstaining from today's summit.
Interior Minister Angelino Alfano reported that in the past six months, law enforcement has received 308 possible terror threats, checked over 150,000 people and more than 30,000 vehicles,placed over 800 suspects under investigation, made 500 arrests, and expelled 100 individuals, including seven Muslim imams who preached violence.
Premier Matteo Renzi, who called the summit, said there are no "specific" terror threats against Italy right now but attention remains "at the highest level". He urged political parties to exert "prudence and balance" in addressing the public on terrorism, while doing all they can to help fight it.
(ANSAmed).
TUNIS - The Libya Dialogue meeting at the Tunis-Gammarth Golden Tulip Hotel has gone into a third day on Monday, after the complexity of the items on the agenda required more time for discussion, meeting organisers said.
The meeting, mediated by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), on Saturday saw the presentation of a new Libyan Constitution with 221 articles, which will undergo a referendum vote before going into effect.
On Sunday, meetings were held regarding the creation of a unified military, which is facing difficulties due to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, head of the self-proclaimed National Libyan Army. The meetings also focused on broadening consensus for Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj's UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA).
The GNA is attempting to bring together the country's east and west, including Tobruk Parliament President Ageela Saleh, who has blocked a parliamentary vote to hand over power to the unity government.
"The discussions have been frank, transparent and open" Sarraj said. "We have discussed all the challenges facing the GNA and we have agreed on future coordination and meetings to find solutions to tackle all these issues".
Sarraj cited frequent black-outs in some Libyan cities, lack of cash in banks, and reduced oil production, all of which he said are attempts to slow progress for the GNA, which was instituted in Tripoli in March.
Turkey govt reaction 'cannot be revenge', Italian FM says Gentiloni urges moderation in coup attempt wake
(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, JULY 18 - Turkey's government must not exact revenge in the wake of a failed military coup attempt at the weekend, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Monday at a meeting of EU-28 foreign ministers with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Brussels. The arrests of thousands of judges over the past 12 hours smack of "cleansing" and reinstating the death penalty in Turkey "would be one of the symbols of that which Europe cannot accept," Gentiloni said.
"We've been very clear in condemning the attempted military coup, but at the same time we are very clear in saying the reaction to this coup cannot be one of vengeance," the minister said.
"I have spoken personally with colleagues in the Turkish government (and) we received reassurances that their response would be oriented towards respect of the law and the rule of law, but to be honest we are seeing signals that go in the opposite direction," Gentiloni said. (ANSAmed).
ROME - Terrorist attacks are creating dramatic changes in the Mediterranean tourist landscape, especially in Turkey, Tunisia, and across the Maghreb region, all of which are largely off the tourist map, especially following this weekend's attempted coup in Turkey.
Meanwhile, however, Greece is seeing a recovery following the migrant crisis, and Spain and Italy are seeing growth due to shifting tourism patterns.
Numerous tourism operators have confirmed a shift in travel patterns following attacks like the one in Nice, France, and said that holidaymakers are often waiting until the last minute to depart.
Gianni Rebecchi, president of Italian travel agency trade association Assoviaggi-Confesercenti, said that Turkey hasn't been a tourist destination for his association's members for over a year, except when it's for transit on routes to Asia or across the Indian Ocean.
"North Africa is, by now, also a closed market," Rebecchi said.
"And although Greece is rather stable compared to 2015, with signs of crisis on some islands, requests are up by 30-35% for Spain, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and even Italy, (places) which are seen as safer," he said.
Rebecchi said bookings for France dropped by 50% after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, with weekends down to zero.
He said that although there's still a desire to travel, there's also a more day-by-day approach.
Pier Ezhaya, vice president of tourism trade association Astoi Confindustria Viaggi, said the overall impact of the attempted coup in Turkey is rather muted because in 2016 tourism to that country from Italy had already experienced an 80-90% drop compared to 2015.
He said there hasn't been a decrease in travel to the French Riviera following the attacks in Nice.
"After the attacks in November, and after the downing of the Russian jet at the Syrian border, on the other hand, there was a complete halt in departures," he said, adding that departures for Paris Disneyland dropped at Christmas by 40%.
He said travel to Tunisia is nearly non-existent.
Bernabo Bocca, president of hoteliers' association Federalberghi, said his organisation is "moderately optimistic" in its estimates regarding Italian tourism.
"Italians are tending more often to stay in the country, rather than going to Turkey, Greece or Egypt," Bocca said, with Puglia and Sicily particularly in demand.
He said following a promising start to the year, now the effects of attacks and other events like Brexit would have to be evaluated. "If by the end of the year the total tourism business reaches 2015 levels, 170 billion euros, we'll be satisfied," he said.
Matteo Pennacchi, founder of NomadCommunity, said that one type of trip that hasn't seen any impact from geopolitical events is that of flexible-itinerary "round-the-world" tickets.
Pennacchi said that Italy was recently at seventh place worldwide in terms of tourist destinations.
"I'm convinced it will be back in the top five," Pennacchi said.
At the same time, the company, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, is looking to emulate the sight-seeing success in Abu Dhabi with the companys Chief Operating Officer, Captain Raman Oberoi citing a need to find the right partner.
Dubai is targeting a tourist intake of 20 million by 2020 with Abu Dhabi citing more conservative goals in its 2030 plan of 7.3 million visitors.
Tony Tyler, IATAs director general and CEO, and Huxiang Zhao, president of FIATA, signed the agreement, and the programme will replace the IATA Cargo Agency Programme.
The IATA-FIATA Air Cargo Programme moves decision-making on the rules governing the airline-forwarder relationship away from an airline-led conference to the IATA-FIATA Governance Board (IFGB), jointly managed by forwarders and airlines.
The IFACP provides a framework to ensure that industry standards are relevant, pragmatic and fit for purpose. These standards cover the endorsement of freight forwarders and more broadly the safe, secure and efficient transportation of air cargo shipments, said Aleks Popovich, IATA, senior vice president, Financial and Distribution Services.
The programme will begin rolling out early next year, using Canada as a pilot country, with global rollout expected by the end of 2018.
Airline managing director Rezai Niyarak said the added aircraft would allow Naft Airlines to expand its local and regional operations while boosting its on-time dispatch rate.
Organisers say the 2016 Summit will draw attention to the interdependent roles the aviation and tourism sectors play in contributing to the regions greater economic development.
Key Summit findings and outcomes are compiled into a white paper report which is later presented to regulators and decision makers from both public and private sectors.
The flight was carrying 158 passengers and six crew members on board from Muscat, and no one suffered any injuries during the incident.
"All the passengers, however, were deplaned safely without any injuries. The airline has ordered a probe into the incident. The flight departed from Muscat International Airport at 7:15pm on Saturday," said Oman Air from its Twitter account.
Officials from the carrier are currently saying that an object on the runway caused the incident.
"Possibility of an object on the runway is very little, almost nil because we inspect the runways in mornings, afternoons and evenings. We are watchful for anything on the runways," said The JNIA acting director, Vedastus Fabian.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. General Bekir Ercan Van, the commander of Turkeys Incirlik airbase, which is used both by the Turkish Air Force and NATO forces, has been detained by Turkish authorities accused of complicity in the attempted coup, RT reported.
The senior Turkish military commander was arrested along with over a dozen lower ranking officers at the base, AFP reported. A government official has confirmed with Reuters that the general has been detained.
Earlier on Saturday, movement in and out of the base in southern Turkey was blocked by local military authorities.
The US has reportedly denied asylum to General Bekir Ercan Van, the commander of Turkeys Incirlik airbase, who was arrested for plotting the failed military coup in Turkey, The New York Times reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Earlier, American officials were reportedly approached by General Bekir Ercan Van, asking for asylum.
According to an agreement between Ankara and Washington, Incirlik is used by NATO and stores US tactical nuclear weapons. The airbase is also being used by the US to launch airstrikes on Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in neighboring Syria, which temporarily ceased following Fridays military coup attempt.
On Sunday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook announced that the US coalition had resumed its anti-IS air operations in Turkey. According to the press secretary, this was made possible by close coordination with Washingtons Turkish allies. Yet, the electric power supply to the base is still cut off, TASS cited the military official as saying. The power outage has not affected operations, he claimed, adding that American objects at the air base work off an internal power supply.
In the wake of the failed military uprising, the Turkish authorities have been conducting anti-coup operations at the base. Some members of the Turkish Air Force have been arrested on suspicion of having supported the coup. Authorities have also claimed that at least one of the planes hijacked by the coup plotters was refueled at Incirlik, according to AFP.
Ankara has arrested some 6,000 people believed to have been involved in the attempted coup and the number could surpass 6,000, as the cleansing operation is ongoing, Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said in a television interview, as cited by AP.
Addressing his supporters after the first victims of the uprising had been laid to rest, President Erdogan said on Saturday that the parliament may discuss reintroducing the death penalty in Turkey, Reuters reported. The remark reportedly came in response to the crowd, which was chanting for the perpetrators to be executed.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. President Barack Obama on Sunday condemned violence against law enforcement and called on Americans to "temper our words and open our hearts," in the wake of the slaying of three Louisiana law enforcement officers, reports CNN.
"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," Obama said, speaking from the White House press briefing room. "We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda."
The tensions between police departments and the communities they serve have consumed much of the president's time over the past week. He traveled to Dallas Tuesday for a memorial service held after five police officers were gunned down. Later he gathered law enforcement professionals at the White House for talks on how to improve relations between officers and citizens.
In remarks following that meeting, Obama warned that the violence wasn't likely to immediately end. Those words seemed prescient Sunday, when the President arrived in the briefing room for a rare weekend appearance.
"Only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided," he said. "And we're going to have to keep on doing it again and again and again. That's how this country gets united."
The President said a fourth police officer in Baton Rouge remains in critical condition and that the killer's motive was still unknown.
In his brief remarks, Obama stressed the importance of staying away from divisive rhetoric and actions, particularly ahead of two weeks of the Republican and Democratic conventions where he predicted that political rhetoric would be "more overheated than usual."
"Around the clock news cycles and social media sometimes amplify these divisions," Obama said. "That is why it is so important that everyone: regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organizations you're a part of, everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further."
The President also stressed -- as he did after a police ambush in Dallas -- the danger that police face day-to-day.
"The death of these three police officers underscore the danger that police across the country confront every single day," he said.
Unlike after his most recent remarks following U.S. shooting incidents, Obama did not make any calls -- overt or otherwise -- for tighter gun control laws. Following last week's Dallas shootings, Obama did lament the ease with which Americans can access high-powered firearms.
And he also didn't attempt to balance his praise of law enforcement with an insistence they change some of their tactics.
Instead, Obama offered full-throated support for departments and officers, some of whom say they feel under siege.
"I've spent a lot of time with law enforcement this past week," Obama said. "I'm 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 today is the respect and the gratitude of the American people for everything that you do for us."
The shooting deaths of the three law enforcement officers, with three more injured, came in Baton Rouge -- a city already on edge after an African-American man recently was shot and killed by police.
Obama's remarks Sunday afternoon drew scorn form Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. Within minutes he issued a series of critical tweets.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. 6 people were wounded and hospitalized in the ambush and hostage situation in a police station in Yerevan. One of the wounded was discharged from hospital I the morning of July 18, the Healthcare Ministry told ARMENPRESS.
Two people with gunshot wounds are currently under intensive care. Medical personnel say their conditions are serious but stable. Both underwent surgeries.
Another person has been diagnosed with heart failure. Emergency medical personnel were able to stabilize his condition.
5 people are currently hospitalized. Another three received medical assistance in ambulatory conditions.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. In an interview with Armenpress, former MP of the Israeli Parliament, founder of the Israel-Armenia inter-parliamentary friendship group Alexander Tsinker said the military coup attempt in Turkey was more like a performance.
If we analyze these failed coup attempt in Turkey, we can conclude that the only person who received the maximum benefit from these events was Erdogan. This dubious military rebellion attempt reminds a poor stage performance where the process and the content are not so important than the conclusions which followed the end of the process. 2839 rebels, generals, senior officials, soldiers are arrested, an order was given also to arrest additional 2745 judges and prosecutors, cleansing started against Gulens supporters. Erdogan demands the US the extradition of Gulen to Turkey without excluding the possibility of imposing a death penalty against the coup initiators, the MP said. He said Erdogan will definitely use this coup attempt.
This is definitely a victory for Erdogan. He had a lot of interior political mistakes, the situation was already explosive in the country, but today not only his supporters, but also those who are against him went out to the streets. Erdogan dreamed of restoring the Ottoman Empire and he will definitely use this failed coup in order to strengthen pressures on Turkeys opposition which is against the Islamization of Turkey. Today the country is turning into an authoritarian sultanate where the democratic freedoms will be gradually eliminated under the slogans of the fight against rebels, terrorists and traitors, Alexander Tsinker said.
Nearly 290 people were killed in the failed military coup in Turkey on July 15. According to official data, the number of wounded reaches to 1440.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. The U.K. will continue to be an active participant on the European stage even after leaving the European Union, Boris Johnson said in Brussels on his first overseas trip as Britains new foreign secretary, Bloomberg reported.
We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union, Johnson told reporters as he arrived for a meeting with his 27 EU counterparts on Monday. That in no sense means were leaving Europe; we are not in any way going to be abandoning our leading role in European cooperation, participation of all kinds.
Johnson, who once compared the EU to Adolf Hitler, said the events of recent days in France and Turkey, which foreign ministers will discuss at Mondays talks, underscored the benefits of working together.
When you look at the discussion on the table this morning over Nice, the horrific events in Nice, and Turkey where we have to work very closely together, you can see the importance of that, Johnson said. On Nice, clearly well be assuring that we coordinate our response to terror and on Turkey I think its very important, in view of the failed coup, that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and thats what Ill be calling for.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. Relations with Great Britain will not remain the same after Brexit, Armenpress reports German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the reporters in Brussels.
The relations between Great Britain and the EU will not be the same, like with all non EU member states. It cannot happen so that Great Britain preserves majority of its rights but does not share responsibilities, the German Foreign Minister said.
He added that the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain Boris Johnson has announced that Great Britain does not cease to remain part of Europe. Johnson also mentioned that his country will continue to make efforts for the settlement of crises in Syria, Libya and other conflicts.
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Thanks to various sponsors, our agency has donated 25 thousand Euros to contribute to the travel and accommodation costs. Meanwhile, the young boys and girls are preparing for the event with prayer meetings and retreats. Fr. Samir of Amadiya to our readers: "Thank you for your help", young Iraqis "are praying for you." Tomorrow they leave for Wroclaw, for a week of missionary animation.
Erbil (AsiaNews) - A group of Iraqi Christian refugees who fled from Mosul and the Nineveh Plain in the summer of 2014 with the rise of the Islamic State (SI), are preparing with prayers and meetings for World Youth Day (WYD) scheduled to take place in Poland July 27 to 31. In recent weeks, AsiaNews has been active through our sponsors and has donated a sum of 25 thousand euro to the Church of Iraq, to contribute to the travel and accommodation costs for these young people.
Fr. Samir Youssef, pastor of the diocese of Amadiya (Kurdistan), which cares for 3,500 displaced Christian, Muslim and Yazidi families thanks our sponsors and agency on behalf of the boys and girls "for the concrete help", without which "it would have been very difficult to make this pilgrimage."
"I thank you all so very much - adds the Chaldean priest, originally from Mosul - and pray for you. I will remember you in a special way in my prayers".
Tomorrow, July 19, the young Iraqis will leave for Wroclaw for a week of programed missionary animation, in preparation for World Youth Day and the meeting with Pope Francis. At the end of the week they will travel to Krakow, where the young Iraqis will participate in the Stations of the Cross and recite the "Our Father" in Aramaic.
There will be over 200 young Iraqis - boys and girls - attending the event, coming from all the dioceses of the country. The delegation will be led by Msgr. Warda, Msgr. Basil Yaldo (deputy to Chaldean Patriarch Raphael Louis Sako), a dozen priests and a group of nuns.
by Thanh Nhan
Patriots and nationalists demonstrated in the capital and in Ho Chi Minh City. The protest Beijings failure to respect the ruling on the disputed territories in the South China Sea. Hanoi fears that the demonstrations may turn against government. Vietnamese broadcaster cancels Chinese TV series: the actors signed a pro-Beijing petition.
Hanoi (AsiaNews) - The Vietnamese security forces arrested dozens of activists who organized anti-Chinese demonstrations in the capital and in Ho Chi Minh City, the southern metropolis of the country. The nationalist groups and Vietnamese patriots protest Beijings decision not to enforce the Permanent Court of Arbitration (CPA) ruling on the Law of the Sea. Hanoi authorities fear that the demonstrations against China might lead to a protest movement against the Vietnamese communist government, still tied hand in glove with its big brother China.
Last week the judges of the Hague Tribunal have established that China "has no right" to sovereignty over disputed territories in Asia-Pacific. However, the government in Beijing announced on several occasions not it will not abide by the arbitration judgment promoted by the Philippines, because issued by a "failed" court.
Hence the decision of activists and nationalist groups in Vietnam to launch protests against China. Yesterday demonstrations were held in different points of Hanoi suppressed by force by the authorities. Dozens of plainclothes policemen patrolled the streets of the capital, ready to intervene in case of any gatherings.
In the morning at least 30 activists who had gathered near Lake Hoan Kiem,wher many past protests took place, were forcibly loaded on board buses and cars. Some of them were shouting "Down with China" during the arrest.
A few hours later another nine activists were taken as they demonstrated outside the Philippines embassy. One of them brandished a sign that read "Thank you Philippines. You have a courageous government. "
In the past, the Vietnamese nationalist groups and ordinary citizens took to the streets to protest against Beijing's "imperialist" policy in the region's seas. The Hanoi government has repressed the demonstrations on several occasions, while countering the Chinese designs on the region and raising international protests over the disputed missile installations on the atolls.
Meanwhile, TV broadcasters in Binh Thuan province have decided to suspend a popular TV series, because its actors have expressed public support for the Beijing positions on the South China Sea. The TV series "New Port of Tianjin", produced in China, was discontinued on July 6 after transmitting 20 of the 40 planned episodes.
ang K., deputy station manager, confirms that the two lead actors and other people in the cast "have signed a petition in support of the Chinese government" in contrast with "the CPA decision. The actors and actresses who support China's position, says the head of Binh Thuan province TV, "have every right to love their country" as "we have the right and the will to protect ours".
by Mathias Hariyadi
Catholic leader and shrine promoter Cahyo Binuko receives threats and is the victim of intimidation. Local authorities issued a building permit months ago, but local extremists have tried to stop the construction, accusing Catholics of playing games with local residents minds. Now they are putting pressures on the authorities to withdraw the building permit.
Jakarta (AsiaNews) Islamic extremists have undertaken a campaign of intimidation against a Catholic family in Yogyakarta province, Indonesia, to stop the construction of a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
In recent days, some members of a fundamentalist group stormed the house of Cahyo Binuko, a Catholic leader in Gunung Kidul District, ordered him to stop the work, even though he has a building permit issued by the authorities.
The Binuko family has been involved for some time in building a place of worship dedicated to the Virgin on their own land. According to the promoters, the Giri Wening shrine would be open to everyone and would promote worship and prayer.
The project began in September 2009, accelerating in 2012, following the visit of the former Archbishop of Semarang Johannes Pujasumarta. The area became popular in March of that year, when dozens of Islamic extremists set fire to the shrine site bringing everything to a halt.
Stubbornly, Catholic leaders, led by Cahyo Binuko, continued the project. In February, they obtained the building permit (Izin Mendirikan Bangunan, IMB) from local authorities.
Building non-Muslim places of worship in Indonesia is complicated and may take five to ten years before permits are issued.
This is even more difficult for Christians who need to get the signatures of (at least) 60residents in a particular area, plus the local chiefs consent, before they can apply.
Often "unspecified reasons" lead officials, under pressure from radical Islamic movements, to stop projects.
This is why Christian leaders tend to remain silent over building permits, taking a cautious approach that is often not enough to prevent attacks and intimidation by Muslim extremists.
The latest episode unfolded Wednesday of last week when a mob forced its way into the house of Binuko family, accusing them of playing games with the minds of local residents in order to build their shrine.
Under pressure from extremists, local leaders and police chief forced Cahyo Binuko to sign a statement saying that he would stop building the shrine until the authorities ruled on the building permit.
Meanwhile, radical groups have already contacted local officials to get them to withdraw the permit.
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation. Catholics number seven millions or about 3 per cent. In Jakarta, they are about 3.6 per cent. They play an active role in society, the countrys development, and emergency situations.
Court claims the group has fomented violence and encouraged sectarian discord. During the trial, defense lawyers denounced intimidation, limitations and obstacles. US and the UN criticize judgment. Satisfaction of Prime Minister Khalifa well Salman al-Khalifa: Measure essential "to preserving security and stability."
Manama (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The Bahrain judiciary (Sunni monarchy) has ordered the dissolution of the main opposition group (Shiite) and the confiscation of all its assets. The judgment is criticized by the UN and the United States, following last month's decision by the executive to suspend all Wefaq National Islamic Society activities.
In addition, funds hitherto available to the movement that led the pro-democracy protests of 2011 will be made available to the Government.
Yesterday the Administrative Court judges ruled that the al-Wefaq movement has "stirred up violence" and encouraged demonstrations aimed at causing "sectarian strife" in the country. And its leaders have "criticized state institutions".
The jury issued the verdict after a trial in which the movement has not been able to benefit from the assistance of the lawyers; the defense team had stepped down in a previous hearing, in protest against restrictions and obstacles imposed by the authorities.
The Prime Minister of Bahrain Khalifa ben Salman al-Khalifa welcomed the ruling and confirmation of the hard line adopted by the government, calling them essential measures "to preserve security and stability.
In February, groups of protesters had taken to the streets to demand more political rights and an end to discrimination against the Shiite majority. The following month, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa called for the help of other Gulf nations - mostly Sunni - to restore order and stop the dissent. 30 civilians and five policemen were killed in the clashes.
In June, the court of appeal of Bahrain has more than doubled the sentence against Wefaq secretary-general Ali Salman Ahmed Salman, from four to nine years in prison. The judges also said he was guilty of trying to overthrow the government with use of force. Activists and pro human rights associations denounced "manufactured and false" evidence and "sham trial".
Bahrain is a Gulf monarchy ruled by a Sunni dynasty in a country where the majority of the population (at least 60-70%) is Shia and want constitutional changes and social and economic rights.
In 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, riots broke out that the king of Bahrain a US ally supported by Riyadh put down with Saudi military aid.
In recent weeks, the authorities have arrested and sentenced Shia activists and religious leaders and suspended the activities of Al-Wefaq, the main Shia opposition group, on charges of terrorism, extremism and violence as well as ties to a foreign power (i.e. Iran).
The new confrontation between Iran and a Gulf monarchy combined with religious, political, and diplomatic tensions between Riyadh and Tehran is a source of major concern in the West, especially the United States.
Demosisto president Nathan Law says he would not sign any confirmation, but would instead take legal action in favour of those excluded from the vote for refusing to sign.
Hong Kong (AsiaNews) Demosisto, a group set up this year by student leaders involved in the 79 days of protests of 2014, has joined those who refuse to sign a statement now required by the government from candidates in Hong Kongs upcoming September election that the city "is an inalienable part of mainland China."
The group's president, Nathan Law (pictured right), said not only that he did not want to sign, but that he plans to take legal action in favour of anyone excluded from the elections for refusing to sign.
Submitting his application for candidacy on Hong Kong Island, Law said, I will not sign the confirmation form because I would not allow the Electoral Affairs Commission to impose such a term unlawfully.
If the commission bars any candidate from running because he or she did not sign the form, I will consider filing a judicial review, he added.
Law or no law, at least 12 pro-democracy candidates have refused to sign the confirmation form, which they deem a form of political censorship.
People Power, the League of Social Democrats, Hong Kong Indigenous and the Kowloon East Community Concern Group announced that they would seek judicial review if a candidate was disqualified for this reason.
by Kamran Chaudhry
Zakir Naik, a major Salafist advocate, is the founder of Peace TV and a well known TV preacher. His network has broadcast in Pakistan since 2009. Dhaka massacre investigators found a direct link between his sermons and one of the attackers.
Lahore (AsiaNews) Catholic Church leaders are calling on the Pakistani government to ban Peace TV, which is headed by Zakir Naik, an Islamic preacher who inspired the perpetrators of the massacre at the Holey Artisan Bakery Cafe in Dhaka.
Born in India, Naik champions the most radical Islamic Salafist positions, which he promotes on Peace TV. The network has broadcast in Pakistan in Urdu since 2009.
Speaking to AsiaNews, Fr Qaiser Feroz, executive secretary of the Commission for Social Communications of the Pakistani Bishops' Conference, said, We demand a complete ban on Naik and similar preachers who promote hate and discrimination. He never plays a role in bringing together the followers of different religions and presents a distorted image of Islam. We have plenty of such clerics in madrassas (Islamic seminaries).
Millions of people watch Peace TVs Urdu broadcasts every day. On its website, the network claims that its goal is to promote inter-faith dialogues, common teachings of scriptures of major religions and world peace. In reality, the investigation into the attack in Bangladesh, which left 20 people dead, shows the preachers dark side.
Police found a direct connection between his speeches praising the most radical views of Islam and Rohan Imtiaz, one of the gunmen who took part in the attack in Dhakas Gulshan diplomatic district.
On his Facebook page, the young man quoted a speech from the preacher "urging all Muslims to be terrorists."
Bangladesh has now banned the network. India is monitoring its sermons and the activities of its Islamic Research Foundation. Authorities in Canada, the United Kingdom and Malaysia have banned his sermons.
Religion must be a source of peace and harmony, not conflict, said Fr Feroz. Religious leaders should avoid misleading the people. We admire Naik for his vast knowledge of sacred scriptures but hate how he looks down upon other religions and humiliates them. He is a fundamentalist and has contributed in increasing terrorism.
Fr Morris Jalal, board member of a Lahore-based Catholic TV, endorses the Churchs call. Naik is anti-society as well as anti-religion. Though a scholar, he has instigated violence and unrest, especially among youth, he said.
Harmony is possible with understanding, not diatribes, he added. Peace TV is an extremist channel whose founder does not believe that Osama bin Laden was a terrorist.
Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The Chinese Communist Party today issued new rules under which executives can be charged with mismanagement, corruption, negligence, breach of austerity. In an effort to boost popular consensus of its leaders at a low point - officials will be punished for bad or poor leadership and lack of loyalty to the Party. The rules will apply to all levels of the organization.
Since becoming Secretary General of the Party, in 2012, Xi Jinping has taken a very tough stance against corruption and waste, trying to stop the avalanche of criticism accusing the members of the leadership of living like kings off corruption and bribes .
The new rules are even more stringent: the Central Committee will punish not only those who tarnish the image of the Party with their behavior, but also those who seek to divide the organization with different factions. The penalties include resignation from office and expulsion from the Party.
Since coming to power, Xi Jinping (to the foreground in photo) has been locked in a bitter struggle with the various factions within the Party, especially the Shanghai gang, headed by former president Jiang Zemin (center, in the photo), and the Communist Youth League, headed by his predecessor Hu Jintao (left in the photo).
by Nina Achmatova
The Synod rejects meetings Pan-Orthodox status, but recognises it as "important event". The Patriarchate of Antioch distances itself making it clear it that it does not consider the documents approved at the Council as binding.
Moscow (AsiaNews) The Council which took place in Crete on 19-25 June with the participation of 10 out of 14 Orthodox Churches was an important event in the history of the Orthodox Church Council process, but it cannot be regarded as Pan-Orthodox, said Vladimir Legoyda, head of the Synodal Department for Church, Society and Media Relations.
The Moscow Patriarchate along with the Churches of Georgia, Bulgaria and Antioch were absent from the Crete meeting, which was 50 years in the making.
The Holy Synod determined that the Council and the documents it approved do not express a Pan-Orthodox consensus since it failed to uphold the principle of conciliarity. Now it wants the documents to be sent to the Synodal Theological and Biblical Commission to reach its own conclusions.
The four churches that stayed away from Crete had asked for a postponement of the meeting to resolve differences and disagreements on draft documents to be approved.
The Patriarchate of Constantinople in charge of organising the event rejected the request, insisting on respecting the agreed timetable. For this reason, Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Antioch refused to send their representatives.
In a statement, the Synod of Antioch said that the Crete meeting was a preliminary meeting towards the Pan-Orthodox Council, thus to consider its documents not final, but still open for discussion and amendment upon the convocation of the Great Pan-Orthodox Council in the presence and participation of all the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches.
In Crete, the Pan-Orthodox Council focused on a number of issues, including the Orthodox Church's relations with the rest of the Christian world, fasting, marriage, its mission in the modern world, the Orthodox diaspora and ways of proclaiming the autocephaly.
Differences of opinion centred on the sacrament of marriage, the Orthodox Churches and the contemporary world and the relationship to other Christian denominations.
Detractors criticised the ecumenical position in the texts and insist that Catholic and Protestant heretics cannot be defined as "Churches".
by Mark Abernethy
The corporate regulator has scolded IPO issuers and their advisers for low quality due diligence of documents which it says results in defective disclosure.
Between November 2014 and January 2016, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) conducted reviews of the due diligence practices of 12 IPO issuers, ranging across small, mid-sized and larger offers and a sample of offers from emerging market issuers.
ASIC says its review outlined in REP 484 focused on the practices and processes adopted by issuers in producing a prospectus with the IPO.
Due diligence is not a process prescribed in the Corporations Act 2001 (Corporations Act), REP 484 states. Rather, it has emerged as a market practice to ensure that the prospectus is accurate and complete.
ASIC Commissioner John Price said the purpose of the review was to observe market practices. He said due diligence mitigated the risk of future liability from a poor-quality prospectus. Due diligence also ensured the prospectus was not misleading and included all information necessary to make an informed investment decision.
There are clear benefits in conducting a thorough due diligence process and significant consequences for poor quality due diligence, Price said.
The report makes it clear that while company directors have to stand by the accuracy of a prospectus in an IPO, their legal advisers must support the due diligence. It is important for these parties to engage in a robust and thorough due diligence process supported by their advisers to satisfy themselves that this information is not defective.
ASICs review concluded that the issuers who demonstrated poor due diligence practices produced prospectuses with defective disclosure, such as misleading and deceptive statements with no reasonable basis. These prospectuses also omitted material information that would have been included had the issuer conducted all reasonable investigations.
Even in instances where a number of due diligence processes had been adopted and followed, ASIC observed a number of issuers using a box ticking approach to the due diligence rather than focusing on the disclosure in the prospectus.
The key observations of REP 484 include not only that poor due diligence practices often produced prospectuses with defective disclosure, but that low-cost due diligence may often lead to delays, further work and ultimately be more costly to an issuer.
A new service pioneered in the country by the Legal Services Commission of South Australia (LSC) has been cited by the American Bar Association (ABA) for furthering legal assistance access.
The LSCs Legal Chat service has been featured in this months edition of the ABA Journal.
The first-of-its-kind service for a legal aid commission in Australia which uses a website-based chat window for people to talk to an LSC lawyer is a reaction to the record volume of calls their advice hotline is receiving.
The digital meteorite has landed and technology is reshaping the delivery of legal assistance, said Chris Boundy in a statement sent to Australasian Lawyer.
The USA is very large and the American Bar Association was particularly keen to know how we use Legal Chat to provide greater access to justice for people in remote areas, added the lawyer and manager who oversaw the creation of Legal Chat.
The Legal Chat service has been warmly received by the South Australian community as it has revived over 3,000 enquiries since being launched nine months ago.
On particularly busy days, the service tackles more than 50 enquiries. On a weekly basis, it receives an average of 100 enquiries with Mondays and Wednesdays usually being the peak days.
Were harnessing this web chat technology because it helps us provide access to justice. The law can be expensive but Legal Chat is free to all South Australians, said Boundy.
Boundy noted that South Australia has a total land area of almost 1 million square kilometres and that some communities and towns are more than 1,300 kilometres from the Adelaide office where the Legal Chat lawyers are based.
Digital transformation must extend to the delivery of free information to people in all parts of our vast State, Boundy said.
According to the LSC, the service has attracted interest from interstate and overseas legal aid commissions.
Legal Chats enquiries are broken down to 60 percent being civil law matters, 20 per cent being family law issues and 20 per cent being criminal law concerns.
Civil law concerns include fencing disputes, landlord and tenancy disagreements, wills and estate matters and concerns about neighbourhood trees. Family law deals with issues such as the division of property upon separation and the care of children. Criminal law enquiries the service hands often are about traffic offences, the LSC noted.
Meanwhile, the commission also revealed that the service is particularly popular with the under-30 demographic.
Many among the under-30 group are more comfortable with online dialogue rather than a telephone call, Boundy said.
He also said that those with communication challenges tend to prefer the written format of the service while people in open-plan workplaces appreciate not being overheard while seeking legal information using the Legal Chat service.
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The deal being talked about by the worlds equity markets on Monday was the U$34.1 billion bid by Japans SoftBank Group Corp for UK-based chipmaker ARM Holdings plc.The law firms advising on the deal include Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Morrison Foerster on the SoftBank team; and Davis Polk & Wardwell and Slaughter and May for ARM.The deal is the largest outbound acquisition from Japan and the largest ever cash investment from Asia into the UK according to the countrys new chancellor of the exchequer.MoFo is lead counsel for SoftBank and its team is led by Tokyo managing partner Ken Siegel, alongside head of corporate Graeme Sloan who is London-based.The team also includes Tokyo partners Ivan Smallwood, Noah Carr, Leo Aguilar and James Robinson (all corporate) and finance partner Dale Caldwell.There are also MoFo partners from Washington DC, Brussels and Berlin working on the deal.Investment service IJ Global has named the H1,2016 leading law firm for project finance globally and in Asia Pacific.The title goes to Norton Rose Fulbright which was number one globally in the first half of 2016 in terms of volume of completed deals (28) and value (U$27.5 billion). NRF also topped the Asia Pacific rankings by deal value.The head of King & Wood Mallesons finance practice in Europe and the Middle East has joined international firm Cadwalader in the City of London.Jeremy Cross has a globally recognized and market-leading practice in funds finance, acting for lenders, borrowers and fund sponsors; along with real estate finance and other areas of loan finance.
A court ruling that Microsoft must hand over emails stored on a server in Ireland has been overturned in a decision that could have widespread repercussions.In 2014 a US court ordered Microsoft to provide the US government with email communications from a suspected drug trafficker. The firm said that a judgment in favour of the feds would trigger similar action by foreign governments to obtain data held in the US; the government argued that criminals would exploit the legal loophole created by a ruling for the tech firm.A judge at the US Court of Appeals in New York said that the law did not enable the government to demand data held exclusively on foreign servers. Microsoft said that the ruling will help people trust in the technology they use as they must have confidence that their personal information will be protected by the laws of their own country".Revenue at Ince & Co is down 4 per cent in the 2015/16 financial year. Its the third consecutive year of declining income following decline of 8 per cent and 7 per cent in the previous two years.The global revenue for the latest financial year was 76.2 million (equivalent of AU$132.76 million at current rates) with the largest share coming from the firms UK operations, where revenue was down 9 per cent.The firm has recently revamped its remuneration, launched a consulting arm and seen a number of high-profile partner departures.Global law firm K&L Gates has continued its expansion with the opening of a new office in Munich, adding to existing German offices in Berlin and Frankfurt.The new location is being staffed by a team of three who have joined from King & Wood Mallesons, headed by investment partner Dr. Hilger von Livonius, with further expansion expected in the coming months.First year associates at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe will get help with their student loans with the launch of a new scheme at the firm. Payments of $100 a month will be made until trainees become eligible for the firms bonus scheme after a year.Large US firms have been ramping up remuneration in an attempt to deter the brightest talent from jumping ship and Orricks new scheme follows similar ones launched last year by Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis.
The continuing legal skills shortage in the UK has been helped along by less staff leaving firms, a new study revealed.According to legal recruitment consultancy firm Clayton Legal, a majority of firms involved in their most recent study said that they saw decreased staff attrition in the last 12 months.The study, which involved over 2,000 firms, also found that 13 per cent of the respondents said they were losing more staff this time last year.This was one of the more surprising outcomes from our latest legal salary survey and highlights both the reluctance of firms to move staff on and that of the professionals themselves to change employer, Lynn Sedgwick, Clayton Legal managing director, said.A number of factors are behind this, including the uncertainty over the referendum result and what this will mean for organisations. However, the lack of movement in the market is certainly contributing to the skills shortages, as practices have struggled to source the candidates they need.Sedgwick noted that evidence that theres an unusual trend going on is that home counties, which traditionally see professionals lured by big city firms, are seeing record-low staff attrition.The managing director noted that as a result of the trend, firms may need the help of specialists if they are struggling to find and attract people with the skills that they need.We all know that people are what makes firms tick and without the right people, growth prospects are essentially non-existent, Sedgwick said.In another recent study, Clayton Legal found that the legal industry in the UK is currently facing a talent crunch
Written by Dr. Ian Musgrave on July 18 2016.
The headline image of the University of Melbournes Facebook link to its press release about recent research on Bisphenol A (BPA) is of a takeaway coffee cup. The kind that does not have any BPA in it at all [1]. The headline Obesity Link to BPA directly below the image of the cup is guaranteed to cause unwarranted consternation in consumers of our favourite takeaway beverage which Im sure the researchers did not intend.
Bisphenol A (BPA) is one of the most recognizable chemicals to the general public. A component of some kinds of hard plastics, plastic liners for tins (but not paper cups) and certain kinds of thermal paper, it has generated quite a lot of concern as BPA is a mimic of the hormone estrogen.
However, it is a very weak mimic of estrogen (and some other hormones). BPA is typically 10,000 to 100,000 times weaker than estrogen (see for example here). BPA may also act through some other pathways, but again it is not very strong. Studies of our exposure to BPA have consistently shown that we have a safety margin of about 100-1,000 fold between the threshold for BPA to produce biological effects and the levels in our bodies.
Still, we are not cavalier about BPAs presence in our environment and studies continuously reevaluate BPAs potential for harm, which is where this latest study from the University of Melbourne comes in.
So what did the researchers do?
They took cow embryos and placed them in tissue culture conditions. They then exposed them for four days to either BPA at 1 or 10 nanogram per millilitre of tissue culture solution (1ng/mL) or estrogen at 1 or 10 ng/mL [2]. To make sure that BPA was working through estrogen receptors they also exposed some of the embryos to a combination of BPA and a specific blocker of estrogen receptors.
What did they find?
Both 10 ng/mL BPA and estrogen reduced the number of 8 cell embryos that progressed to blastocysts by around 7% (1 ng/ml of BPA and estrogen had no significant effect). Roughly 10% fewer of the 10 ng/mL treated blastocysts were of implantation quality.
What about obesity where does that fit in?
In embryos treated 10 ng/mL of either BPA or estrogen, there was a roughly 50% increase in glucose uptake and lactate production. This increase was prevented by the selective estrogen receptor blocker (the 1 ng/mL concentration of BPA had no effect).
Thats it?
While there is no direct evidence that increased glucose uptake and utilisation in the embryo will cause obesity later in life, it is at least plausible that this could somehow predispose organisms to obesity later in life.
So should we be worried?
Not really, as well as the link being weak, there are two key issues which means that the relevance to humans is limited.
One is that the concentrations used in the study are very unlikely to be achieved in the human body under normal conditions. 10 ng/mL is a really tiny quantity, and it is hard to visualise this [2], but the quantities in the human body are even smaller, on the order of picograms/mL (that is a thousand times less).
Measuring the levels of BPA in blood and biological fluid accurately is very difficult. BPA is very rapidly metabolised, most of BPA in the circulation is inactive metabolites. Not only do the low levels stretch the limits of our measuring devices, but BPA present in the plastics that are used to draw and store blood and other biological fluids can contaminate these fluids, giving spuriously high readings.
Very careful measurements and studies using BPA where the hydrogen atoms have been replaced with a heavier isotope of hydrogen (deuterium) have shown that levels of BPA in blood (and hence other body fluids) are well below the 1ng/mL concentration that had no effect in this study (see also here). This is backed up by back calculation from measurement of urinary excretion of BPA and its metabolites.
Another check is calculation of intake from foods and the environment. These show that intake of BPA is 100 to 1,000 times less than the new, temporary European Food Safety tolerably daily intake of 4 micrograms per kilogram body weight (which is 1,000 times lower than the lowest levels that show no effect in animal studies).
Recent studies of food exposure from Australian foods showed very low intake levels (with the new limits, you only need to consume 10 cans of soup a day of the soups with the highest BPA content to reach the tolerably daily intake).
So, altogether the evidence is that human levels of BPA are well below the levels that produce these metabolic effects in these cow embryos.
Another issue is the response to BPA. Remember how I said that BPA is 10,000-100,000 times weaker than estrogen? This has been shown in numerous receptor and functional studies, including studies on human estrogen receptors. In the current cow embryo studies BPA and estrogen were approximately equally effective, and the blocker study confirmed that the effect of BPA was through the estrogen receptor, not some novel mechanism (as in this study).
This implies that cow embryo estrogen receptors are different to human receptors and that any extrapolation to humans must be made very carefully.
The take home message?
Dont panic over BPA and obesity. You are very unlikely to reach the bodily levels of BPA that will cause disruption of glucose metabolism in early embryos. Of course, as I have said before, the best way to reduce BPA intake is to eat fresh, rather than pre-prepared foods, especially fresh fruit and vegetables as Australians in general do not eat enough fresh fruit an vegetables (and eat too many calories, and dont exercise enough).
Another take home message is to make sure the containers you use to illustrate your press release actually do have BPA in them. You may be consuming too many calories from the milk and sugar in your takeaway coffee, but BPA? No.
[1] I cant link directly to the Facebook advertisement. The main illustration on the University of Melbourne press release webpage is cans of soft drink, these do not measurably contribute to BPA intake. It also has the takeaway coffee cup, which is lined with polyethylene, not BPA containing plastic.
[2] A milligram will cover the head of a pin, a microgram would be a single speck on the head of a pin, you would need a microscope to see a nanogram. In contrast, a teaspoon full of sugar is around 4 grams, one teaspoon in a 250 mL coffee will result in 20 milligrams per millilitre (mg/mL) coffee. Now dilute that a million times and you will get 20 ng/mL.
Disclosure
Ian Musgrave receives funding from the National health and Medical Research Council to study contaminants in herbal medicines. He has recieved ARC funding for studying Alzheimer's disease in the recent past.He is a member of the Science Communicators South Australian Branch.
Ian Musgrave is Senior lecturer in Pharmacology at The University of Adelaide. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Hi everyone,
I am just curious on other's thoughts as to whether my partner and I should register our relationship as I am a little "in the middle" about going through the hassle of it....
My partner (Kenyan) and I (Australian) were living together for 12 months in Kenya before separating. We have been apart for 8 months now. We have very little in the way of evidence of living together as we were living in the family house with no rent and groceries, etc were in cash at the local market.
We were to get married last year and both organises a NOIM for marriage but it didn't happen (long story involving corrupt govt entities.. let's not go there..). To me, I consider this an okay proof to officially start our "12 months". This was organised in Aug 2015.
I am heading back to Kenya in Oct/Nov and we are to marry. We will then continue on with evidence collecting before submitting our Partner application. This very well may take another 12 months from when I arrive in Kenya (ahh, Africa time..) but I would like to be able to submit the application as soon as we possibly can.
I am not sure if we should register our relationship in QLD while I am still here or not. It will not be that easy - he will have to DHL the paperwork (because it will more than likely get lost) which is expensive and we have absolutely nothing with his address on due everything being cash in hand. We obviously need something with his address on to have all the correct paperwork to Register the relationship.
Do you think the marriage certificate and following Kenyan Dependant Pass for me (this allows me to stay in Kenya permanently without a visa) will be enough or should we go through the hassle of trying to get the relationship registered?
I would obviously have to discuss with QLD BDM on what we can do for them to accept....
Many thanks for any advice that will assist us in our decision
Hi guys,I was completing form 47 for my 820 visa,and having some questions so I'd hope someone can give me definite answers to those.1.On page 3, supporting documents section says "Do not provide originals unless you are asked.", it means if I translate my birth certificate to English from NAATI, then I should not have to include the originals? I was thinking of certifying originals and english translations both, but am confused now..2.Question 24If I choose 'Second stage processing address' option, I should write the residential address as my current one, as I don't really know where I would move if I do.... Is this correct?3.Question 14/37Could I include my English name or my partner's nickname as it will be shown a lot more than our real name on any kinds of evidence we are showing??4.Question 76I have given some money from WORKCOVER QLD as I got hurt at my workplace, should I include them??5.Part J - Document checklistThere are many parts that are not relevant to me, for example, "If you, your fiance or partner.... has been married... " or children matter. Should I check them to show that I have checked that I need to submit the documents in that case or write N/A or not doing anything??As I go through, I admire those again who have been through any kinds of visa by themselves. It is very demanding, and need to be very tolerant, and need to be super careful as well. I hope everyone who is reading this or anyone applying for genuine visa will get the good result on their application.Thank you for your answer in advance, thanks for taking time to read this
AMG
As simply put as possible, what Mike spied here is probably the last hurrah of the 5.9-liter naturally aspirated V12. Codenamed AE28, the twelve-cylinder debuted in the Aston Martin lineup at the 1999 Geneva Motor Show, the venue where A.M. presented the DB7 V12 Vantage. Back then, the N/A V12 was good for 420 horsepower (426 PS) and 400 lb-ft (540 Nm).In the case of the 2018 Aston Martin Vanquish S and the Vanquish S Volante, we expect the AE28 V12 to produce 592 horsepower or 600 PS, the same output the Aston Martin Vanquish Zagato prides itself on. In the case of the Vanquish S, the Touchtronic III eight-speed automatic is definitely on the menu. A seven-speed dog-leg manual such as the one in the V12 Vantage S could also make the cut if Aston Martin finds demand for such a thing.Aesthetically speaking, the 2018 Aston Martin Vanquish S Volante differs from the fixed head coupe where its obvious. Of course, Im referring to the triple-layered fabric top. In the case on the non-S Vanquish Volante, Aston Martin promises that the roof takes just 14 seconds to fold. Be that as it may, the tell-tale detail that makes the difference between a regular Vanquish and a Vanquish S is the more gung-ho rear diffuser and the four exhaust tips sticking out the back. Looks rather sporty for a grand tourer, doesn't it?The 2018 model year will also see Aston Martin debut an next generation of the Vantage . Spoiler alert: the entry-level model will pack the 4.0-liter biturbo V8 from the Mercedes-GT, while the range-topping V12 Vantage will borrow the 5.2-liter twin-turbo unit from the DB11. All things considered, the future looks bright for the coolest British automaker of them all.
NHTSA
After all the buzz created by the fatal Tesla Model S crash that took place on May 7, and discussions which followed the incident, European safety regulators are reportedly interested in discovering more about the system. According to several reports, Hollands vehicle regulatory agency, called RDW, has begun an informal exchange of information with the NHTSA Along with the discussion started with the, the RDW is also talking to Tesla Motors representatives. They want to look into the system, and the regulatory body must be sure that Autopilot is safe to use, as long as it is operated correctly. Tesla has received European approval of roadworthiness from the RDW, as this organization is responsible for certification for all of Europe so that you can understand the agencys concerns regarding the system.However, the RDW does not seem to want to shut down Autopilot. Instead, the regulatory body believes the system is similar to many others that are allowed for multiple automakers, and the functionalities of the tech are not dangerous to its users or other traffic participants.Hans Lammers, RDWs manager for vehicle certification and supervision, explained in an interview with Reuters that he thinks that there is nothing wrong with Autopilot if it is correctly used. Lammers was the one to say that Teslas Autopilot is not much different from other systems approved for use on European roads.As with other smart cruise control technologies, Tesla asked drivers to keep at least one hand on the steering wheel. In the case of equivalent systems from other OEMs , the system deactivates its operation and cuts the throttle when it discovers that a users hands are not on the wheel.At the same time, Germanys KBA, the Federal Office of Motor Vehicles, has stated for the Welt am Sonntag paper that it would not have approved Teslas Autopilot system if it were up to them. The KBA explained that this point of view only applies if the beta-phase means that the system is incomplete, Autoblog notes.
While potentially higher taxes on cars sold in the EU could harm automakers and consumers alike, companies have also invested billions in their facilities in Great Britain, which makes the decision to close them extremely challenging.You do not have to be an automotive analyst to see that automakers like Honda, Nissan, Toyota, General Motors , and others have made significant investments in their facilities, and risk facing a choice between higher taxes on cars sold in the EU and abandoning a plant that has seen millions of pounds in the form of investment.According to a report from LMC Automotive, the automaker that is most likely to close at least one of its factories in the United Kingdom after Brexit is completed was General Motors.The automaker has two facilities in the country, Automotive News as notes, but the Ellesmere Port facility is under a high risk if the UK does not secure a mutually favorable trade deal with the European Union. Vauxhall representatives have stated that it is business as usual for them until the UK signs an accord with the European Union on their future connection.According to Garel Rhys, emeritus professor of motor industry economics at the UKs Cardiff Business School, only 25% of the parts used by the Ellesmere Port factory are sourced from the United Kingdom. This is not a problem today, when the UK is an EU member, but could become an issue after the country leaves the European Union.Analysts believe that the plant closure would likely happen around 2021, when Opel and Vauxhall would launch the next generation of the Astra compact car . The same model is also built in the Gliwice facility, located in Poland.As explained above, the Ellesmere Port facility is at risk if a trade deal is not reached with the EU because it has the lowest parts localization out of any volume maker that operated in the country.
SUV
Happily, however, GMC is back on track with doing what it does best. In 2009, the truck andbrand sold just 253,053 vehicles. In calendar year 2015, sales skyrocketed to 558,697 vehicles. Luxed-up automobiles are selling like hot cakes these days, and so is the entirety of the GMC Denali lineup.More than that, the average transaction price for a GMC has climbed to $42,621. Given the circumstances, GMC is rumored to work on a body-on-frame SUV to compete with the hottest American automaker of the moment.As per a report published by Automotive News , sources in the industry believe GMC is drawing up plans for an SUV based on the same body-on-frame platform that serves as the bones of the GMC Canyon and Chevrolet Colorado mid-size pickup. Somehow, Im not surprised by this.The report tells that the GMC body-on-frame SUV is in its early stages, having not been sourced to suppliers yet. Estimated time of arrival? 2020 or later than that, apparently. If the new model gets the green light for production, then the SUV will try to snatch customers from the Jeep Wrangler . At least thats what Sam Fiorani of AutoForecast Solutions thinks it will happen. "Jeep is on such a growth path. GMC is the obvious one to go after them," he declared. "A body-on-frame sport utility is a prime candidate [to rival Jeep].Even GMC chief executive officer Duncan Aldred mentioned that the Jeep brand is in his crosshairs. "I do think GMC has got the brand equity and brand character in many respects to give customers a really good alternative to Jeep products," he declared. When all is said and done, 2020 is still far, far away.Before anything materializes in the GMC stable, Jeep will bring to market the JL Wrangler . As a brief refresher, the next-generation Wrangler will spawn a pickup truck body style, will use aluminum in its construction, and will get a 2.0-liter turbocharged engine expected to develop around 300 ponies.
Daimler went live on Facebook earlier this morning to showcase the performance of CityPilot during a 20 kilometer run in Amsterdam, the capital city of Holland. Described as a semi-autonomous function, the CityPilot can work unaided on specially marked bus lanes, even though a bus driver must be at the wheel at all times.It was a double-event for Daimler and Mercedes-Benz as the vehicle on which the CityPilot made its debut was also a special one. Called the Mercedes-Benz Future Bus, the concept vehicle more than lives up to its name borrowing some design cues from recent passenger concept cars and mixing them together with architectural elements and innovative ideas. The result? "A symbiosis of form and function," says Mercedes, but since we haven't ridden in it yet, we can only vouch for the former.The most striking features of the exterior of the bus are its bone-like shape, the two double central doors, and the two lit-up stripes just under the windshield. Described by the designers as "paddles" due to their shape, they serve more than just an aesthetic function, lighting up in different colors depending on the vehicle's current operational mode (white for normal, blue for autonomous).The interior is designed to maximize passenger flow, as well as their well-being. By today's standards, it could be described as a waste of space, but let's not forget this is a concept, so anything goes. The number of seats is probably half of those in a regular Citaro bus, but the individual quality is doubled. The grab rails have a tree-like aspect with the lighting sources acting as the leaves. Additional light is coming from the ceiling, imitating a natural light source.The driver's cockpit reflects the reduced role he has to play in controlling the vehicle, and so the displays in front of him focus more on the route and less on the vehicle itself. With the introduction of CityPilot, Mercedes-Benz is looking to make the first steps toward a full automatization of public bus transport. For now, the system has been tested on a 20 km section of the longest bus rapid transit (BRT) line in Europe, and this looks like the most suitable implementation of this technology at the moment, with the Mercedes-Benz Future Bus looking like the most suitable vehicle to do it.
This time, a dealership from San Antonio says that Saleen Automotive has breached a contract with them and has committed fraud. According to Red McCombs Ford, Saleen Automotive was six months late on delivery for three modified 2015 Ford Mustang models.Furthermore, the dealer accuses Saleen Automotive of not fitting upgrades that were paid in advance, and the costs add up to $22,000. Because it has not received a refund for the missing equipment, or the extra months of waiting, the dealer from San Antonio has decided to sue Saleen Automotive.Meanwhile, another Ford dealership is pointing fingers at Saleen, after ordering a Yellow Label Mustang 302 that was ordered over a year ago. It was supposed to be delivered to the Friendship Ford dealership in Bristol, Tennessee, by the end of 2015, but the dealer says it has not been presented yet, even though Saleen representatives claim they shipped it in early June, Automotive News reports. Steve Saleen , the founder and CEO of Saleen Automotive , says he is unaware of the lawsuit, which was filed at the beginning of June. When asked about his opinion on the matter, he stated that all of the cars ordered by the Red McCombs Ford dealership had been delivered, and sees the legal action as a little frivolous.On the other hand, Steve Saleen complains that dealers do not understand his business, and claims that each car is built with parts made from scratch. Because of this, Saleen says, delays are created. Furthermore, with the companys current financial situation not in the clear, Mr. Saleen feels it is a small miracle that Saleen Automotive is still operational.The company was first founded in 1984, after the race car driver started tuning cars, but he had to restart after leaving the original company and even losing the rights to the name. Eventually, Saleen got the right to use his name for a car company again, but regulatory filings show that the company only made a quarterly profit once, in 2014, and is now in debt
A Canadian performer was killed Sunday in the crash of his T-28 Trojan at an Alberta airshow. Bruce Evans, of Calgary, died when the aircraft apparently failed to pull out of a loop while performing at the Cold Lake Air Show, about 100 miles east of Edmonton. It looked like he was attempting a loop and he came in a little too low, newspaper editor Peter Lozinski told CTV News. There wasnt a fireball but a big puff of debris went up into the air.
Evans owned a mineral exploration company but spent much of his free time involved in aviation pursuits. He had an ATP and was a frequent participant in airshows and formation flying events. The crash occurred just before 2 p.m. local time at Canadian Forces Base Cold Lake, one of two major fighter bases in Canada. Base commander Col. Eric Kenny said the military is helping with the aftermath of the crash and the Transportation Safety Board is sending an investigative team.
Now there are two. At approximately 8:30 AM CDT on Sunday morning, the worldwide fleet of flyable B-29s doubled when Doc lifted off from McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas culminating a restoration project that began sixteen years ago at the factory where the airplane was built initially in 1944. Piloted by the Commemorative Air Forces (CAF) Charlie Tillman and co-pilot David Oliver, Doc joined the CAFs Fifi as the only two Superfortresses of the 3,888 produced between 1943 and 1946 which are airworthy. Doc returned to the air 60 years after its last flight in 1956 when it was ferried to China Lake in California, decommissioned and hauled into the desert where it was used as a target for Naval bomber training until 1987 when Cleveland, Ohio printing executive Tony Mazzolini discovered it, largely intact, acquired it and moved it to Wichita.
Mazzolini, members of DOCs Friends, a non-profit group formed to raise funds to support the airplanes restoration and dozens of the volunteers who began restoring the airplane in 1991 were joined by hundreds of onlookers early on July 17, including Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell, Kansas Fourth District Congressman Mike Pompeo, to witness the takeoff. The airplane completed high speed taxi tests on Saturday evening at around 8 PM in preparation for the first flight.
The flight itself lasted approximately 15 minutes encompassing one takeoff, climb out to pattern altitude, and a return and landing. The crew chose to land after circling the field when a precautionary chip light, indicating the possibility of metal pieces in one of the engines illuminated. The short duration of the flight didnt dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd or their positive outlook.
I never thought Id see this day when I started working on this airplane 16 years ago, said Connie Palacios, who at 92 years of age, remembers working on serial number 44-66992 when it came down the assembly line the first time in 1944. I prayed for good weather and a good flight when I woke up this morning. I just dont have words to describe how I felt when I saw it in the air. It was wonderfulbut a little bit sad, too, because of the volunteers who worked on it that have passed without getting to see this.
Wichitas Mayor called the event a Wright Brothers moment for Wichita, and even though the flight wasnt as long as we had hoped, it was still longer than their first flight! It was a perfectly fitting event for the Air Capital of the World and Doc now serves to unify our community and to demonstrate that we can come together and our visions can take flight. Lets continue to work hard to keep Doc in our community. We think its important to our rich history and we want make sure that future generations of Wichitans have a chance to see Doc fly.
This is truly an achievement that our community that can be proud of for decades, said Congressman Pompeo.
Tony Mazzolini summed up the celebration by saying, This restoration is a special effort aimed at wanting to honor our veterans, and wanting to honor our veterans and wanting to honor those who worked on these airplanes on the home front and I just want to say thanks to all of the people who made it possible for this event today.
Two pilots who spent almost 24 hours swimming for shore from the airplane they ditched have been released from the hospital. David McMahon and Sydnie Uemoto put down in the ocean between Oahu and Kona, on the Big Island, after unspecified technical problems with the plane. They issued a Mayday about 3:15 p.m. Thursday and prepared for the ditch by popping a door and putting the life vests within reach. Coast Guard crews found them on Friday afternoon, apparently none the worse for wear after their long swim.
What a way to celebrate aloha Friday, Coast Guard spokeswoman Petty Officer 2nd Class Tara Molle told local media. We all had big smiles on our faces in the office when we heard the news. The Coast Guard flew them to Kona Airport where they were met by their families. Rescue swimmer Kevin Cleary said, Ive never been able to be part of something like that. To be able to see the families reunited with their loved ones after thinking the worst, it was a special moment. It was pretty surreal.
The following was heard as my wife and I were flying our Mooney over the northern tip of the Great Salt Lake a few days ago and communicating with Salt Lake Center.
Transient aircraft: Center, do you have time for a question?
SL Center: Sure, go ahead.
Transient aircraft: OK, this is the $65 question. Looking below, we can see a train track, shoreline and a reddish area with what look like waves. What is that all about?
Silence for a short while, then a response from an airliner: My daughter is a PhD biologist and explained to me that the red color comes from Halobacteria growing in the salt water.
Transient aircraft: Thank you very much! You win the $65 prize and we greatly appreciate the explanation!
SL Center: Thats a whole lot better than any explanation we could come up with here at Center.
Another short pause
Airliner: That PhD cost a lot more than $65.
The exchange is somewhat paraphrased, other than the punchline. We were laughing too hard by the end for me to copy the exact dialogue.
Dan Roberston
18 July 2016 12:04 (UTC+04:00)
By Rashid Shirinov
A group of armed persons, who captured the regiment of a police patrol department in Erebuni district of Yerevan and took hostage its police officers on July 17, still refuse to give up the hostages, RIA Novosti reported.
One person was killed and three wounded as the armed group seized a police station in Yerevan. Seven hostages, including the deputy chief of Armenian police major-General Vardan Yeghiazaryan and the deputy chief of Yerevan police, Colonel Valeri Osipyan, are still being held by the attackers.
The attackers demand the release of Armenian opposition figure Jirair Sefilyan, who was detained after authorities allegedly uncovered a plot to seize several buildings and telecommunication facilities in Yerevan.
Last October, Serfilyan and his opposition movement, New Armenia, announced that they would launch a process of the civil disobedience and change of power. Then he was arrested but released shortly after. He was again arrested this June.
They also demand resignation of President Serzh Sagrsyan, calling on Armenians to support them. The group released a video on Facebook, calling on Armenians to take to the streets against the government.
Inspired by the attack, some activists tried to organize a protest at the Freedom square in Yerevan , however, they were quickly taken to police stations.
The countrys authorities called the attackers terrorists, noting that their demands cannot be realized.
Following the capture, the Armenian police detained some 200 people to check them for relationship with the attackers.
The Armenian opposition party Heritage considers that the Armenian authorities are to blame for the armed attack. Not allowing to solve the problems of the country through the electoral process and in the framework of the law, the authorities follows path of lawlessness and violence, the party claims.
Sargsyan has been president of Armenia since winning a vote in 2008 that was followed by violent clashes between police and supporters of the defeated opposition candidate in which 10 people died.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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18 July 2016 14:25 (UTC+04:00)
By Rashid Shirinov
The armed group that seized a police station in Armenia's capital of Yerevan on July 17 is holding five people as hostages, RIA Novosti quoted Armenian deputy police chief, Unan Pogosyan as saying on July 18.
The hostages include the deputy chief of Armenian police major-General Vardan Yeghiazaryan and the deputy chief of Yerevan police, Colonel Valeri Osipyan. During the attack, Colonel Arthur Vanoyan was killed, and four police officers were injured.
The armed group refused to lay arms down and surrender to the authorities. Currently they hold five hostages. The talks continue. We hope for a peaceful outcome, Pogosyan told journalists.
From the morning of July 17, a group of armed men seized the police station and took hostages demanding release of opposition activist Jirair Sefilyan, who was arrested nearly a month ago on charges of illegal possession of arms. The attackers also demanded resignation of the Armenian president.
The life and health of people, illegally detained in the attack, remains under threat. The terrorists, who have already committed several crimes, present a clear and immediate threat not only for the hostages, but also for society, the Armenian National Security Service said.
ARMENIAN police detained about 200 people to check them for relationship with the hostage takers.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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18 July 2016 09:49 (UTC+04:00)
By Sean B. Carroll
Picture this. It is 1966. You are standing in a government office in Washington, DC, watching a uniformed official tell a man in business attire, Your mission is to eradicate an enemy that has killed more people than both world wars combined. You will have a paltry budget, a small team, and should you fail, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
It sounds like a scene from a Hollywood movie. And, indeed, it mirrors the opening scenes of the Mission: Impossible television series that premiered that year. But it really happened, if not in precisely those words. The official was Assistant Surgeon General James Watt; the man with the mission was Communicable Disease Center (CDC) scientist Donald Henderson; and the enemy was smallpox.
The mission certainly seemed impossible. At the time, smallpox was killing as many as two million people, and infecting another 15 million, each year. Yet, like in the series, Henderson and his team at the World Health Organization defied expectations. In just over a decade, smallpox became the first and, so far, the only infectious human disease ever to be fully eradicated.
The key to this tremendous medical achievement was not, as one might expect, some major health breakthrough (the smallpox vaccine had been around since the eighteenth century). It was diplomacy, flexibility, and cooperation.
From the beginning, the WHO lacked faith in a vaccination campaign. Many, including the WHO director-general, believed that, to stop smallpox, all 1.1 billion people in the 31 affected countries, including those in remote villages, would have to be inoculated a logistical nightmare.
That is why WHO delegates debated for days before agreeing, by the slimmest margin ever, to provide a measly $2.4 million per year for the effort too little to cover the costs of whatever vaccine was not donated, let alone fund the necessary logistical support. Many donors shared this pessimism, believing that their money would be better spent on, say, health-care infrastructure. Even UNICEF decided against contributing to the campaign.
In fact, the decision to assign Henderson to the unenviable job of spearheading the campaign stemmed from the WHO director-generals decision to put an American in charge, so that the United States, not the WHO, would take the blame for the programs failure. (Henderson tried to refuse the role, but there was no should you choose to accept it in this episode.) Yet Henderson managed to turn a bad hand into a winning one, with a key insight.
Henderson recognized that the Soviet Union which had been pressing for an eradication campaign for several years, and had already pledged to donate 25 million doses of vaccine annually would not be enthusiastic about an American leading the charge. So he reached out to the Soviet deputy health minister, Dimitri Venediktov, with whom he established a rapport that enabled the two sides to work together on strategy and logistics, in addition to their vaccine donations (the US had agreed to provide 50 million doses each year). The two most unlikely allies ended up leading the fight together.
Hendersons knack for diplomacy was matched by an eye for talent and leadership. He insisted that all of his staff spend at least a third of their time in the field, working with local officials and visiting villages, so that they could see firsthand the challenges of mass vaccination.
Among those personnel was William Foege, a Lutheran missionary doctor working as a consultant for the CDC in Nigeria. One day in December 1966, Foege got word of a smallpox case in another village and immediately traveled there to vaccinate the victims family and other villagers.
But Foege was worried that a wider outbreak might be unfolding, and he did not have enough doses to vaccinate everyone in the area. So he adopted a different tactic: he sent runners into all villages within 30 miles to check for more cases, and then vaccinated people only in the four places where cases turned up. This created a ring of vaccination around infected people that broke the chain of infection.
Foeges strategy was extended to eastern Nigeria, then introduced to other parts of West Africa, and ultimately applied to the most challenging environment of all: India, with its half-billion people. It took 130,000 trained health workers 20 exhausting months, but they eliminated the scourge of smallpox that had tormented India for millennia. Then, in spite of natural disasters, the kidnapping of WHO personnel, and civil war, health workers repeated that success in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Finally, in 1980, the world was officially free of smallpox.
Fifty years after the launch of this daring mission, the tremendous achievement that emerged from it is fading from memory. But the lessons it carries for galvanizing a fractious international community to tackle a shared challenge could not be more important, especially at a time when urgent problems like environmental degradation demand global solutions.
As Foege has pointed out, the eradication of smallpox proves that global efforts are possible. We do not have to live in a world of plagues, disastrous governments, conflict, and uncontrolled health risks. Instead, the coordinated action of a group of dedicated people can bring about a better future.
Humanity cannot live in a world of polluted air and water, empty seas, vanishing wildlife, and denuded lands. The ecological challenges we now face are matters of public health and welfare, just as smallpox was. Our mission, whether we want to accept it or not, is to summon the collective will to halt our self-destruction.
Copyright: Project Syndicate: Mission: Save the Environment
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18 July 2016 12:40 (UTC+04:00)
By Nigar Abbasova
Azerbaijan has criticized 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 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, Samir Sharifov, Azerbaijans finance minister, told the Financial Times.
The minister believes that the Fund could provide cheaper loans to Azerbaijan, saying that the country has a little debt and a sovereign wealth fund with the worth of $34 billion.
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.
In the wake of the collapse of global oil prices, a growing number of governments have shunned the IMFs emergency lending in favor 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.
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. 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. 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, 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, 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, he said.
Lower oil prices have reduced growth, opened up large budget and trade deficits, and increased financial stability risks.
Azerbaijan has been one of the countries hardest hit by the decline in oil prices, suffering a 3.4 per cent economic contraction in the first half of 2016 after a devaluation of its currency by almost one-third in late December. The country has been working on diversification of economy for many years. Drop in oil prices made the issue a main priority for the country.
Earlier the IMF has recommended Azerbaijan to tighten the supervision over the financial sector and continue structural reforms.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was established in 1945 is an organization of 189 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world. Azerbaijan joined the IMF in 1992.
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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova
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18 July 2016 17:52 (UTC+04:00)
By Rashid Shirinov
Even if relations between Ukraine and Europe do not promise bonuses in the near future, the country could receive economic support from Azerbaijan, said Ukrainian expert Volodymyr Tsybulko commenting on the current Ukrainian-Azerbaijani relations.
The visit of Azerbaijani Prime Minister Artur Rasizade to Ukraine on July 14 can be regarded as a very favorable sign for the development of foreign export policies, believes the expert.
Following the recent meetings, Tsybulko expects the recovery of the GUAM project and its free trade area, where the two countries cooperate. That is very positive for Ukraine, the expert told reporters on July 18, Trend reports.
GUAM project was established in 2001 to enhance the cooperation between Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
Lately, Russia prohibited transportation of Ukrainian goods through its territory. Therefore, Ukraine needs another corridor to Asia bypassing Russia Azerbaijan is a great option for realizing that purpose.
Moreover, Azerbaijan can assist Ukraine in reaching its economic aims by using the opportunities of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway and the North-South transport corridor.
Azerbaijan is a highly powerful country that will help us in diversification, particularly in the delivery of goods to Asia. That is very important to us, the Ukrainian expert noted.
The trade turnover with Ukraine in January-May 2016 amounted to $137.68 million, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.
Recently, Baku welcomed Ukrainian delegation headed by President Petro Poroshenko.
The two countries discussed the prospects of bilateral relations in political, economic, energy, transport and humanitarian fields.
The same day, the future directions for developing the mutual relations were set at the fifth meeting of the Council of Azerbaijani and Ukrainian Presidents, where a series of documents were signed for enhancing bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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18 July 2016 16:39 (UTC+04:00)
By Laman Ismayilova
An evening of Azerbaijani and French music, organized by Azerbaijan's Friends Association in France took place at Azerbaijan Cultural Centre in Paris, Trend Life reported.
Addressing the event, President of the Association, member of the National Assembly of the French Republic Jean-Francois Mancel spoke about the culture and history of Azerbaijan, its deep traditions of tolerance, multiculturalism, as well as the importance of further development of bilateral cooperation between Azerbaijan and France.
Following the speech, guests were presented a short artistic documentary film by French writer Gonzague Saint Bris "Alexandre Dumas in the Caucasus". The film features the writers visit to Nagorno-Karabakh during his journey through the Caucasus in the mid-19th century.
During his journey, Dumas visited the Atashgah, a fire temple located in the outskirts of Baku as well as Sheki, Quba Ismayilli regions.
What Dumas most remembered about the Caucasus and Azerbaijan was the people and their hospitality.
He recorded his impressions in the book Travels in the Caucasus (Voyage au Caucase).
Gonzague Saint Bris, for his part, shared his impressions about his personal visit to Azerbaijan. The writer stressed the beauty of the Land of Fire, its national cuisine, art and architecture as well as the hospitality of the people.
The presentation featured the performance of French musician Pierre de Tregomain and khanende Gochag Asgerov. The stunning show was greeted with warm applause of the audience.
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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova
Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
18 July 2016 18:21 (UTC+04:00)
Azerbaijan has immediately responded to the terrorist attack in Nice, France, at the level of government and ordinary citizens, and this support is an evidence of the friendship between the two countries and peoples.
French Ambassador to Azerbaijan Aurelia Bouchez made the remark on July 18 during opening of a book of condolences at the French embassy in Baku.
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev, First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and other officials expressed condolences to France in connection with the terrorist attack in Nice, said the ambassador. In such a difficult moment, they expressed their support for us.
A gunman at the wheel of a heavy truck plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice on July 14 night, killing over 80 people and injuring more.
The attacker, identified by a police source as a 31-year-old Tunisian-born Frenchman, also opened fire before police shot him dead.
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18 July 2016 10:44 (UTC+04:00)
Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has signed a decree on abolishing the State Agency on Management and Use of Hydrocarbon Resources.
Under the decree, the state agencys assignees are Turkmengaz, Turkmennebit (Turkmenoil) state concerns.
The Turkmengaz State Concern will become an assignee according to the production sharing treaty (PSA) on the Bagtyyarlyk contract area signed with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and PSA on Block 1 contractual territory, signed with Petronas Company (Malaysia), according to the decree.
The funds from the foreign currency account of the state agency will be transferred to Turkmengazs special account in the central bank.
The state concerns together with the Turkmen Ministry of Justice within a month should prepare proposals to amend the laws of the country and submit for consideration to the countrys Cabinet of Ministers.
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18 July 2016 11:08 (UTC+04:00)
Iranian transport ministry and Airbus, the French aircraft manufacturer, will meet in Tehran on July 17 for further talks on the Islamic Republics purchase of civil aircraft.
Asghar Fakhrieh-Kashan, an Iranian deputy transport minister, has said that the talks on the purchase of civil aircraft will resume in Tehran on Sunday, ILNA news agency reported July 17.
The deputy minister further added that Iran has conducted talks on passenger airplane purchases with four manufacturers.
Fakhrieh-Kashan, however, did not disclose further information on the manufactures.
He said Iran and Airbus in this round of talks will discuss adding an article on compensation in the final contract for purchasing air craft.
According to an existing MoU between Iran and Airbus, Tehran is expected to acquire 118 civil aircraft worth at $10.5 billion.
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18 July 2016 13:36 (UTC+04:00)
By Nigar Abbasova
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in Turkmenistan amounted to 6.1 percent in January to June 2016, the Ministry of Economy and Development of Turkmenistan reported.
The GDP growth in industry and the sphere of construction amounted to 2.1 and 4.4 percent respectively. The growth in the sphere of communication made up 9.9 percent while the growth in trade amounted to 16 percent in the reported period. The growth in agriculture and sphere of services was 6.9 and 9.7 percent respectively.
Growth rates of output have increased by 3 percent. Retail turnover has increased by 16.1 percent while the increase of average monthly wage amounted to 9.5 percent as compared to the same period in 2015.
Earlier, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) forecast GDP growth of Turkmenistan at the level of 6.5 percent and 7.1 percent in 2016 and 2017 respectively. The bank's experts noted that the growth of Turkmen economy was 6.5 percent in 2015, as compared to 10.3 percent in 2014. GDP in Turkmenistan slowed in 2015 compared due to declining natural gas export and lower public investment. Russia bought just 4 billion cubic meters of gas in 2015 compared to 40 billion cubic meters in 2008. The country stopped importing gas from Turkmenistan in 2016.
The improvement which is expected in 2017 is linked to the fact that the country is a largest exporter of energy raw materials.
GDP growth of Turkmenistan in the next three years (2016-2018) is forecasted at 5 percent, according to the Global Economic Prospects, June 2016 of the World Bank (WB).
EBRD report said that the risks include continuing political tensions, as well the possibility of a sharp deceleration in growth in China, as well as a prolonged weakness in commodity prices and a possibility of further drop in the price of oil. Recession in Russia and weak commodity prices are considered to be the main features that put pressure on the economies of Central Asia.
Profitable part of the state budget was implemented with the volume of 8.1 billion Turkmen manats ($2.30 billion) while non-profitable part was executed by 8.6 billion manats ($ 2.44 billion) in the first half of 2016. As much as 78.7 percent of budgetary funds were allocated for the development of social sphere in the reported period.
Profitable part of the state budget is mainly formed due to the spheres of oil and gas, energy and construction. The country takes measures to develop the agricultural sector, the sphere of transport and communications as well as textile and food industry.
Turkmen state budget revenues in 2016 are expected to amount to 102.479 billion manats ($ 29.134 billion) while expenses will be 104.879 billion manats ($29.816), according to the state budget for 2016 which was adopted by the the Majlis (Parliament) of Turkmenistan.
The state budget of the country for 2016 is aimed primarily at maintaining the stable growth of the national economy, implementation of major investment projects, widespread introduction of innovative technologies, latest achievements of science and technology in all spheres, as well as providing high efficiency of public spending.
Turkmenistan holds one of the key positions in the region on natural gas supplies. The country ranks fourth in the world in terms of the volume of natural gas reserve, according to the BP report.
Ashgabat pursues the policy of economic diversification. The country devalued its national currency, manat, in January 2015, reduced the investment spending and subsidies and strengthened the regulation and supervision over the banking sector.
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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova
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18 July 2016 13:19 (UTC+04:00)
By Rashid Shirinov
At least two armed men attacked the Almaly district police station and Kazakh National Security Committee (NSC) in the center of Almaty in he early hours of July 18, the Kazakh media reported.
One attacker has been detained, and his identity was established. The 27-year-old man is suspected of murdering a woman last weekend. The second gunman is still at large, the Almaty Department of Internal Affairs states.
Three policemen and one civilian died and several others were injured following the attack. At least five victims were taken to hospital, and the total number of those injured is currently being determined.
Almaty witnesses speak about at least 10 shots fired. At first, there were three or four single shots fired, and then there were several. The unknown attacker ran away with the machine gun, and the police ran after him, employees at nearby offices told Bestnews.kz.
Kazakh Internet users also spread this information an unknown person shot with a machine gun at police, trying to stop their car. Gunfire was heard in three districts of Almaty, Kazakh security sources state.
Currently, a special Siren plan is held by Almaty police. The areas near police Departments, as well as near the Department of the NSC have been blocked off by police. The railway station was also closed in Almaty.
The police announced a red level anti-terror alert in the city, which means the level of danger is critical. It is declared only when authorities know that a terrorist act has been committed, and when there is a possibility that further attacks will take place.
When setting red level of terrorist threat, the police are allowed to make personal inspection and examination of things and vehicles of population and to temporarily limit or prohibit their movement. The police can also freely enter living and other premises.
The local Department of Internal Affairs says an anti-terror operation is underway in the city, urging Almaty residents not to leave their apartments and avoid public places. They were also asked to inform police of any suspicious people, and treat the situation with understanding.
The public will be additionally informed about any changes in the situation, the department said.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate has given details of its Christmas bakery range.
Products include a snowman chocolate cake, which is hand decorated with soft icing and filled with chocolate buttercream and raspberry preserve.
Other items include the Christmas fondant fancy party cake - 16 dainty Genoese sponge cakes, sandwiched with buttercream and raspberry preserve and covered with a layer of marzipan. Each one is coated in ivory fondant and decorated with a parcel design for Christmas.
As well as cakes, seasonal biscuits have also been developed for the festive period, with a variety of selection boxes filled with rich, buttery shortbread and Continental choices including chocolate and orange, and Swiss hazelnut.
Bettys is a family-owned business with a unique Swiss-Yorkshire heritage, which opened in 1919.
In February last year, the craft bakery was visited by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
Allied Bakeries, the company behind Kingsmill, Allinson and Burgen, plans to shut a distribution centre in Flintshire, which will put 53 jobs at risk.
Allied said the decision to close the Chester Road site in Saltney was part of an efficiency review.
The depot is due to shut in November. The company has started formal consultations with staff and unions, and said it hoped jobs could be found in other parts of the business or the wider parent company, Associated British Foods (ABF).
Alyn and Deeside MP Mark Tami said the company was working to keep job losses to a minimum: I was very disappointed to hear the news. My thoughts are with all the employees during this unsettling time.
"I must commend the representatives of Allied Bakeries for all their efforts to keep the site open. Unfortunately it is a very competitive market and now we must focus on offering the employees who will be affected by this the necessary support something Im sure they will receive from Allied Bakeries and the relevant bodies.
Some staff will be offered the opportunity to relocate to work at the firms Stockport site.
A spokesperson from Allied said: We are currently consulting with our employees and their union representatives about these proposals, which if accepted would, regrettably, result in 53 people being placed at risk of redundancy.
We understand that this will be a difficult and unsettling time for our employees and their families. If the proposals are accepted, every effort will be made to help those people affected secure alternative employment, either within other parts of Allied Bakeries operations, or externally in the local area.
The company added that the decision in no way reflects the commitment and efforts of those affected.
The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) said it would be meeting management from Allied Bakeries on Wednesday (20 July).
In March, Sunblest pancake production was overhauled at Allied East Belfast plant.
Leading UK speciality bakery manufacturer Finsbury Food Group has reported a rise in sales revenue of 24.8% to 319.7m for the full financial year ended 2 July.
Within that, sales in the companys UK bakery division increased 3% on a like-for-like basis, with sales to the foodservice channel accounting for 21% of total UK bakery sales and rising 5.3% on a like-for-like basis.
The integration of its Fletchers Bakeries and Johnstones Just Desserts subsidiaries, acquired in October 2014 and June 2015 respectively, also resulted in growth of 5% to 12.8m.
The company said strong trading had continued into the second half of the year after a positive first-half performance.
Finsbury Food Group chief executive John Duffy said: Delivering significant growth across all divisions on a like-for-like basis is a true achievement and we are very pleased to see our sales revenues ahead of the markets we operate in.
He added: This growth is underpinned by capital investment and our continued focus on innovation, maintaining our position as one of the UKs largest speciality bakery groups. More than ever we are well placed to continue our solid performance and drive growth.
The company added that while it was still too early to fully understand the impact of the UKs exit from the EU, the board believed that as a large diversified speciality bakery group, it was well equipped to manage the potential effects of this outcome and continue to deliver growth and improved shareholder value over the coming years.
In April, the Finsbury Food Group made changes to its board, after appointing non-executive director Zoe Morgan and Edward Beale stepping down from his position as the non-executive director position.
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The secret epidemic: mental health in Afghanistan
An estimated 50 per cent of Afghans over the age of 15 suffer from a mental health disorder. A BMS World Mission doctor is trying to help them
Afghanistans history is marred by war and conflict
When I used to work in the north of Afghanistan I didnt know a woman who hadnt lost a child, or a close relative, to the fighting, says Catherine*, a BMS doctor who is working with a partner to improve the provision of mental health care in the country.
The exposure to violence is really quite phenomenal.
Fighting in conflict after conflict; losing your husband, your father, your son; living with and trying to love a traumatised and (as a result) often violent husband; having flashbacks of the corpses you saw on the streets of your childhood these things have a devastating effect.
It can take generations to get over trauma of the kind experienced by Afghans who have lived through decades of war. And violence is far from a thing of the past. Statistics from the World Bank suggest that half of Afghan people over the age of 15 suffer from anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Most Afghans are like you and me. They really want to have a life for their children, they want to have a job and they want to do well, says Catherine. She works alongside many people who are doing remarkably well given their stories, but who are not experiencing the fullness of life God desires them to have. They are scarred by the trauma they have experienced.
One of the major barriers to working through mental health issues in Afghanistan is the huge stigma surrounding it. People struggling with mental health issues often feel embarrassed or ashamed and so are unwilling to go to a doctor to get help.
Catherine heads up the mental health work of our partner organisation in Afghanistan. Raising awareness of the issues is key to their approach. Helping people to understand that they are not alone that others they know are experiencing the same things helps to break the isolation and fear that those suffering from a mental health disorder in Afghanistan might experience.
One woman came to counselling ready to kill herself
As well as challenging deeply rooted preconceptions, Catherine and our team of partners are training medical students and doctors in the delivery of mental health care both at a basic and at a more specialist level. Theyre also directly supporting traumatised Afghan people through counselling.
Their work is already transforming lives. Catherine tells the story of one woman who came to counselling ready to kill herself. Her husband had divorced her and taken away her child. She was left alone, her status in Afghan society very precarious, and feeling like she didnt have any rights. She was having a lot of suicidal thoughts, says Catherine. She had hit the bottom and didnt think there was any hope.
Through the counselling, this woman realised she did have choices. That she did have a life. Since receiving counselling, she has decided to get some more education and to pursue a career. She wants to become a mental health counsellor and help other people trapped in despair like she was.
When we look at fullness of life, at good life, just having your physical needs met which is most Afghans first aim isnt enough, says Catherine. BMS wants to transform whole lives, and Afghanistan is just one of the places were working to do that. Through the mental health projects Catherine is working on, were helping people to break free from depression, anxiety and isolation and training up health professionals to make an even greater impact.
You can help us bring hope and healing to people in Afghanistan and beyond right now by making a one-off donation or becoming a 24:7 Partner.
Thank you.
Help wanted
The needs in Afghanistan are huge but so is the opportunity to help transform the lives of people who have suffered from a lifetime of violence. We are currently looking for people to fill a number of vital roles in our Afghanistan team. If you have expertise or experience in mental health, health, development, finance, HR, operations or admin, we could be looking for you!
Please check out our vacancies in Afghanistan today and pray with us for God to call Christians to come forward to fill these roles and serve the people of this beautiful, war-ravaged
*name changed
This article first appeared on the website of BMS World Mission and is used with permission.
BMS World Mission, 18/07/2016
Thousands of bikers rolled into Cleveland on Monday for the Republican National Convention.
The "Bikers for Trump" rally started with a prayer for police.
Ronald Pittman and Bernadette Luke rode in from Milton, Florida. The Panhandle residents support Donald Trump on trade. Pittman said bad trade deals have hurt his trucking business.
I owned a large trucking company in Florida, when the North American Free Trade Agreement came in to be, Pittman said.
Pittman said his trucking business was hurt by the trade agreement that heavily regulated U.S. truckers and favored Mexican trucking companies.
"I had 15 trucks when I retired, he said. My road use tax was almost $7,000 a year per truck. The Mexican trucks were not enforced with that tax. The Mexican trucks put a lot of truckers out of business. They're still doing it."
Ronald Pittman, from Milton, Florida, said bad trade deals hurt his trucking business.
It's frustration like this which Trump is counting on in the Rust Belt: blue-collar workers, including Democrats, fed up with watching factories close, feeling left behind in a global economy. Steel mills and coal mines are shut down in Ohio and into battleground Pennsyvannia.
I've seen that firsthand, Luke said. My ex-husband was a coal miner. They shut the mines down. All of these people were affected by it."
Bikers for Trump is a confederation of motorcycle enthusiasts estimated at 70,000 strong nationwide.
What Really Happened with the Crashed B-17 Bomber on N. Oregon Coast's Cape Lookout
Updated Periodically
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff
(Tillamook, Oregon) One of the more spectacular bits of Oregon coast history indeed Oregon's World War II history - lies shrouded in the mists (and the dense trees) of Cape Lookout, along the Three Capes Loop. (Above: view of Cape Lookout from the state of the same name).
About a quarter mile down the largest trail atop Cape Lookout, you'll spot a plaque commemorating a downed World War II bomber and honoring the ten men aboard the aircraft nine of which died. About 500 feet from that spot the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber went down, leaving trees shorn off in its wake and a massive debris field.
It also left a mark on Oregon history.
It was August 2 of 1943 when it hit Cape Lookout, after leaving the military airbase at Pendleton, Oregon. In the end, only one man survived. It took a day and a half for rescue to arrive, with some of the nine dying on the spot or a short while later.
The bomber was on a training run out of Pendleton that day, with a mission to fly around the north Oregon coast on its way to Cape Disappointment on the Washington coast, fly another 200 miles out to sea, and then head back to base. But fog and other inclement weather set in, and the pilot lost his bearings. He flew too low, according to official reports. Another 50 feet and the aircraft would've cleared 900-foot-high Cape Lookout, but instead it slammed into the forest at 200 miles an hour.
The bomber hit the southern side of Cape Lookout, leaving a wreckage trail 500 feet long and 150 feet wide. Flames could be seen as far south as Pacific City, and at least one military lookout post saw and reported the downed craft as well.
Bombardier Willie Perez wound up the only survivor of the crash. Initially, he was ejected from the plane upon impact, sending him flying through trees. He ended up hanging from one, just shy of a sheer drop. After falling from the precarious perch, he could hear gunfire in the distance, back then believing it was a crewmate trying to call for rescue.
Those who survived were in much worse shape, and there are nightmarish accounts of Perez nearly falling off that steep cliff, then having to listen to his mates dying in the dark as he crawled along, following the sounds.
Meanwhile, several search parties were eventually sent out, but these were delayed due to misunderstandings. These included a military blimp from Tillamook. Perez was spotted by that blimp a full day and a half after the crash, making for about 36 hours of grueling survival.
In the mid '60s, about 23 years later, Perez and his family went back to that north Oregon coast site. His teenage son was the first to find parts of the wreckage since the rescue. One of the revelations Perez had then was that the gunfire he heard didn't come from the crew: it was because fires caused the ammunition to explode.
Some wreckage had been pilfered over the years, but eventually the crash site was hidden from the public. One group has captured some images of the last remnants of the wreck in recent years. It's an area of deep, dangerous ravines and skin-ripping plants, however, so it's not something you want to try and find yourself.
The author that recounts her expedition there has nothing but horror stories to tell about her injuries while trying to find the objects.
There is at least one account (and photos) of airplane parts found at the bottom of Cape Lookout, a beach accessed by walking a couple miles either down a winding, steep trail from the top of the cape or about two miles from the Sand Lake beach access area. It's unclear whether these are actual chunks of the wreckage, however. See the documentary on Perez here.
If you look closely at the trees, you may see some damaged specimens left over from the crash. Pacific City Hotels, Lodging in this area - Where to eat - Map and Virtual Tour
More on the area below and at the Three Capes Loop Virtual Tour, Map. MORE PHOTOS BELOW
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Chris Richter, former music director of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Beaumont, turned on the blower, the only electric part in the 1,029-pipe organ, for perhaps a final run through the joyous "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."
Since last August, when Bethlehem Lutheran dissolved its congregation because too few families remained, Richter worried that the rare Otto Hofmann-built organ in 1964 would be stilled. La Iglesia Apostolica, which bought the building at 777 N. Fourth St., didn't want the instrument.
"I wanted it to sing someplace else," Richter said. "It would be sad if it fell into disrepair and was scrapped."
The church thought it had an interested party - Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx, New York, had been looking for one like it for years - but the organ's price was too much in addition to the cost of disassembly, shipping and reassembly.
The solution was simple, Richter said, though he didn't hit on it for some months: Donate the organ to the New York church.
Then it was Redeemer's turn to approve spending what will amount to about $100,000 for a New York-based organ builder to take it apart, send it to the Bronx and reassemble all the pipes, assorted reeds, pulleys and other mechanical connections.
Disassembly is to begin today and be complete later this week. The organ is expected to clear its voice at Redeemer by late September.
"We're a singing congregation here," said Redeemer's pastor, the Rev. Dien Taylor. "We're a vibrant, growing church and we hope to carry forth its legacy."
Redeemer uses a Baldwin electric organ, as did Bethlehem before it received the gift of the $15,000 organ from the M.E. Suehs (pronounced "cease") family of Beaumont in 1964.
"There is no comparison," Taylor said. "A pipe organ sings. With an electric, you're singing with a radio."
The organ will be in the capable hands of the Port Chester, New York, firm of Meloni and Farrier, organ builders, who will take apart the Hofmann, carefully pack it for shipment and reassemble it at Redeemer.
The company's web page shows it has worked on scores of organs all over New York, including restorations of 19th-century instruments and maintenance of organs in historic churches.
Richter thought the disassembly would be a daunting task. He was reassured by a nonchalant wave from Anthony "Tony" Meloni. Piece of pizza. That soothed all of Richter's worries.
"It's good to know it (the Hofmann) will be going to another congregation and it will be enjoyed," he said.
DWallach@BeaumontEnterprise.com
Twitter.com/dwallach
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A Texas Rangers investigation into Orange County's former emergency management chief's paychecks during spring flooding has magnified issues at the heart of policy changes and political fighting following the devastating disaster.
Orange County Judge Stephen Brint Carlton in May fired the coordinator, Ryan Peabody, for being absent without notice and lying about it, according to his termination paperwork.
Multiple county officials said the Rangers' investigation, which started near the time of Peabody's dismissal, is unrelated and concerns time sheets he submitted during and after the floods.
The embattled ex-official was the focal point of a showdown between the district attorney and commissioners court last week and the impetus for wholesale changes to how workers are paid during a disaster.
The now-state investigation into Peabody's time sheets started with the sheriff's office, who passed it to the Texas Rangers, according to the district attorney. The Rangers confirmed the investigation in a written statement last week.
Peabody, who denied wrongdoing, said no county or state officials ever asked him to clarify or explain the records he submitted.
As the issue unfolded, it exposed a generous disaster-pay policy with little oversight on the coordinator's time sheets and vague guidance as to when it should be in effect, Carlton said.
From March 12 to April 15, Peabody received $23,410 in disaster pay, which would equate to more than one-third of his roughly $61,000 annual salary, according to time sheets obtained by The Enterprise through a public records request. For three weeks, Peabody was the only Orange County employee receiving the disaster pay rate, the county's treasurer said.
Peabody, as the coordinator, decided who received the higher pay rate, which was double the regular wage for every hour worked.
Inquiry turns political
When Carlton became county judge in 2015 as a 32-year-old Orange County prosecutor, he selected Peabody to oversee emergency management. They met in law school.
Peabody had no emergency management experience, but as a lawyer he was expected to handle the grant paperwork and contracts and coordinate with FEMA officials on disaster-related issues, Carlton said.
News of the criminal investigation surfaced last week when District Attorney John Kimbrough challenged commissioners court to justify a pay cut for his investigator they had previously approved.
Kimbrough, who said the investigator assisted in the Peabody probe when requested, implied the $10,000 salary reduction was retaliation.
"I'm not saying that's retaliation," Kimbrough said he told commissioners. "All I'm saying is that's the factual timeline."
The pay was restored following a 3-2 vote.
Carlton, who voted to dock the pay, called Kimbrough's implication a "baseless accusation." He said the reduction was meant to put the position in line with investigators at nearby law enforcement agencies.
"I let the guy (Peabody) go as soon as I knew he was doing something wrong," Carlton said. "I don't know why I would retaliate against someone investigating him."
Peabody, who ran unsuccessfully for Orange County commissioner earlier this year, suggested during an interview Friday that political infighting may have contributed to his downfall.
"I'd like to see people in this community lifting each other up rather than tearing each other down," Peabody said. "I hate to see people attacking one another for small personal gains rather than coming together as a community and lifting each other up."
Disaster pay beyond flood
Three county officials, including Carlton, said they believe the Rangers' investigation is focused on Peabody's compensation during and following Sabine River flooding of homes and businesses in Orange.
The circumstances of Peabody's pay - how long he received the county's double-pay rate and the time sheets he submitted - were in line with the county's disaster pay policy and how it was previously used, Peabody said.
Disaster pay stopped for all previously qualified county workers on the day the emergency operations center closed but continued applying to Peabody, Orange County Treasurer Christy Khoury said.
"After the 21st, beginning March 22, nobody that I have record of was receiving disaster pay other than Mr. Peabody," Khoury said.
Peabody said "a handful of county employees" deemed essential to recovery and mitigation efforts continued to draw double pay after the center closed. He did say, however, that he was the only worker paid on the disaster rate toward the end of that phase.
Commissioners Court has since overhauled that 2006 policy by reducing the disaster pay rate, setting firm start and end dates for the policy to go in effect and introducing oversight of the emergency management coordinator's time sheets.
The old policy left wiggle room about when greater pay was in effect, Carlton said. It could be interpreted to extend to disaster recovery and efforts to prevent another one, known as mitigation, the judge said.
"That's why we changed the policy," he said. "In the future we won't even have a question."
In one four-week span, Peabody averaged 90 hours a week, his time sheets show. His highest total was March 15, at 19 hours. Peabody said his deputy position was vacant at the time, which left more work for him to complete.
Included with the time sheets are handwritten and electronic notations of how he spent his time. Examples include presentations, hearings, meetings, listening to voicemails and preparing the debris-removal plan.
"I filled out my time sheets just like everybody else did," Peabody said. "I would think if there would have been an issue with any of the time sheets, somebody would have asked me about it."
Peabody's time sheets did not require approval from Carlton, his supervisor. They were instead filed directly with the auditor's office and forwarded to the treasurer for payment.
Going forward, the coordinator must have two members of commissioners court sign off on the sheets, Carlton said.
Carlton said he can't verify the time sheets Peabody submitted were accurate but he believes he worked long hours.
"Do I believe he was working 14, 15 hours a day? Yes, I do," Carlton said.
The difference in pay rates, meanwhile, could mean several thousand dollars over the course of a month.
Peabody earned $29.30 per hour. For 90 hours under the previous policy, he would earn $5,274 per week, or $21,100 monthly. Under the new policy, the same hours would equate to $11,720 monthly.
In total, Orange County paid $468,000 in disaster pay to workers in the March flood, payroll reports show. During Hurricane Ike, which was covered by the same policy, overall disaster pay totalled $1.6 million.
Fired for leaving, lying
Carlton fired Peabody May 12 for reasons unrelated to the time sheet investigation: insubordination, lying to a supervisor and being absent without notice, according to termination records. All three reasons were violations of the county's personnel policy.
Carlton said Peabody notified the judge that he would be out of town for the weekend but reachable by phone. Peabody left early and lied to Carlton the first time he was confronted, the judge said.
Peabody said he had vacation time but acknowledge he didn't have "express consent" to leave one day early. Previously, Peabody said, leaving early for a vacation did not draw trouble.
"It seems as though the political environment had become more difficult," Peabody said. "There became a higher level of political scrutiny after the flood event because of the attention that it had gained."
On Peabody's desk were unfinished documents that were nearly due. Carlton farmed out the work to the Southeast Texas Regional Planning Commission and a state official. All the paperwork was submitted on schedule, but it was a close call.
"It wasn't late, but it was much closer to the deadline than I would have liked," Carlton said. "I feel responsible for that. (Peabody) was supposed to come in for that very purpose."
EBesson@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/EricBesson_news
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Pam Vickery grew up with guns, firing off rounds from shotguns and handguns and using a rifle to take down a deer.
Vickery, who said she went years without even touching a firearm, decided recently to get out to a gun range for target practice.
It's not because the 69-year-old woman wanted a new hobby. Vickery said she wants the protection that comes with her new .380-caliber Smith & Wesson, which is equipped with a laser.
The Lumberton woman said she and her husband, George, view the world differently now.
First came Orlando, where a gunman armed with a Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle and pistol killed 49 people and injured 53 in a gay nightclub.
Then came Dallas, where a sniper armed with an assault rifle killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest.
The Vickerys said they were motivated to buy the new Smith & Wesson out of concern over possible reforms to gun laws.
George Vickery, like his wife, grew up hunting with guns but said this is his first handgun.
"With all the talk of gun control in politics, it's evident that somewhere down the line it will be made harder to purchase firearms," said George Vickery, 81. "We just felt like it was time to get one while we're still able to."
Requests nationwide to buy guns are skyrocketing as America grapples with violence.
The FBI reports that nearly 14 million requests for background checks to purchase a gun were made in the first half of this year - a 25 percent increase compared to the same period in 2015.
More requests have been made in the first half of 2016 than in entire years from 1998 through 2008.
Texas, which has long been among the top states in the nation for gun ownership, has notched more than 800,000 requests so far this year but trails California and Illinois.
"No matter your politics, there is an overwhelming fear the world is becoming less safe," said Chuck Joyner, a retired FBI agent and Houston-based law enforcement consultant.
"You see people who are presumed to be innocent shot by police; you see police shot by snipers; you see terrorist acts throughout the world," he said.
"Most people are thinking, 'What can I do to protect myself? What can I do to protect my family?'"
The Dallas police officers were gunned down on July 7 by sniper Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old Army veteran who told police during an hours-long standoff that he hated white people and wanted to kill white officers. He eventually was killed by police.
In Orlando, Omar Mateen, who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State, opened fire in a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old was killed by police.
Guns doubled
Nearly 11,000 federally licensed firearms dealers operate in Texas, far more than any other state. Many of them are concentrated in Southeast Texas.
"People love their guns in Texas," said Special Agent Nicole Strong, with the Beaumont field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Guns sold by licensed dealers require a background check, which is conducted electronically and includes questions about a person's criminal history, mental health, immigration status and other information, such as who will be the actual owner of a gun.
Guns sold by private individuals - including private sales at gun shows - do not require background checks.
The FBI operates the computerized background check system, but the government is prohibited by federal law from releasing details about the checks or gun ownership.
Gun buyers can purchase as many firearms as they can afford, but if they buy two or more in any five-day period, the ATF will be notified as part of an effort to curb gun trafficking, Strong said.
The number of guns manufactured each year in the United States more than doubled - from 5.4 million to 11 million - between 2010 and 2013, the latest year for which figures are available, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Similarly to last fall, when Southeast Texans braced for a new state law that allows licensed handgun owners to openly carry, classes at the Lone Star Gun and Indoor Range in Lumberton are full for the several weeks, said manager Rhonda Bennett.
"A lot of new shooters are coming in, wanting to know more and it's mostly for safety," Bennett said.
Pam Vickery said Bennett taught her how to properly hold, load and unload a gun during a one-on-one training session last week.
University of Houston sociology instructor Luis Salinas said the emotional reactions to traumas large and small are natural.
"It has this sort of emotional effect on people, this emotional, comforting effect where, 'I feel safe if I know I have a gun around me,'" he said. "We understand that response."
Still, Salinas cited data suggesting that more guns may not be the best answer. Having a firearm brings an increased risk of injury or death, he said. And in a nightclub setting, a person might not even be allowed to carry a firearm.
"The hyperbole has gotten really high on that," Salinas said.
Houston Chronicle reporter Mike Ward contributed to this report.
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U.S. Rep. Randy Weber has introduced legislation that would require the government to hire more border patrol agents and build "fencing" along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Weber, a Republican who's running for re-election, said Monday in a prepared statement that his bill would "effectively halt the flow of illegal aliens and combat the domestic criminality associated with our current lack of border security."
The Protect our Southwestern States Enforcement Act, or "POSSE Act," would direct the chief of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to hire more border patrol agents and officers and order construction of double-layer fencing along all 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The bill does not specify how many new agents and officers are needed. It would simply direct the government to "hire a sufficient number of" agents and officers "above the number of such agents and officers in existence" when the bill is enacted.
"My legislation will put Americans first by restoring common sense border security on our southern border," said Weber, whose district includes Jefferson and Galveston counties.
Michael Cole, a Democrat, is challenging Weber in the November general election. Weber is seeking his third term.
"It would be nice if Randy Weber were just as committed to building walls to protect the people of his District from hurricanes and flooding as he is in pandering for votes in an election year," Cole said in a prepared statement.
Presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to build a "great, great wall" along with border if he wins election. Trump has said he would make Mexico pay for the wall's construction.
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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.
Central Indiana Orthopedics in Muncie plans to build a new medical campus including an outpatient surgery center, according to the Indiana Business Journal.
Here are five things to know about the medical campus:
1. The medical development campus MedTech Park would cover 37 acres in Fishers. The space would include a clinic and surgery center as well as additional medical office space.
2. The investors plan to spend $13 million to start the medical campus, including land acquisition and building. However, the final campus will cost much more and the investors expect it will be worth $52 million when completed. Central Indiana Orthopedics plans to purchase the entire property and construct a 50,000 square-foot facility that includes imaging and physical therapy services.
3. Central Indiana Orthopedics current Fishers-based operations and employees at St. Vincents Hospital will move to the new office. An estimated 25 new employees will be hired at the building.
4. The MedTech Park will include innovative medical services; Central Indiana Orthopedics designed the campus as a regional destination for orthopedic care.
5. There will be space for three other medical buildings on the campus and a road connecting the center to St. Vincents campus.
Norwich, Conn.-based William W. Backus Hospital is seeking to acquire Constitution Surgery Center East in Waterford, Conn., according to the day.
Here are five things to know:
1. Since its inception in 2001, the ASC has offered ophthalmology services. The center expanded its services lines to add orthopedic services in 2011.
2. Seventeen physicians currently own Constitution Surgery Center East and would hold a 49 percent ownership of the ASC if state regulators approve the acquisition. The hospital would own a 51 percent share pending regulatory approval.
3. To acquire the ASC, William W. Backus Hospital proposed to pay $16.7 million.
4. If the deal comes to fruition, Constitution Surgery Center East would be the hospitals' second healthcare facility in Waterford. The hospital currently operates the Backus Family Health Center.
5. The hospital plans to maintain the center's existing range of services, as well as maintain current staff members as managers.
More healthcare news:
7 things for ASC leaders to know for Monday July 18, 2016
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Million-dollar losses & thousands of uninsured: Will the remaining 7 co-ops persevere or fall prey to the turbulent payer marketplace?
Some payers have accused Houston hospitals of offering out-of-network patients competitive, in-network rates for medical services, then hitting their insurance companies with higher out-of-network bills, reports Statesman.
In the Houston area alone, at least a dozen lawsuits have been filed in recent years against private hospitals that offer patients competitive, in-network rates by upping rates to insurers, reports Houston Chronicle.
A recent lawsuit involved insurance giant Aetna and North Cypress (Texas) Medical Center. Aetna filed suit against the hospital in February 2015, accusing North Cypress of implementing a fraudulent billing scheme.
The complaint alleged North Cypress implemented an out-of-network strategy that waived Aetna policyholders' out-of-network responsibilities through a prompt payment discount plan and grossly overcharged the insurer for reimbursement. The suit claimed North Cypress committed healthcare fraud in more than 44,000 claims, causing the insurer to overpay North Cypress by $120 million.
Aetna said it filed suit against NCMC after it noticed a spike in patient claims from the hospital, in which patients were charged in-network rates and the insurer was billed out-of-network rates, according to Statesman.
U.S. Senior Judge Kenneth Hoyt of the Southern District of Texas ruled in favor of NCMC in a decision issued June 15. The judge dismissed Aetna's allegations and denied the insurer's request for damages.
Too often in healthcare, people are out shopping for products before their organization has aligned around a defined need. At least that's what Bruce Brandes thinks. It's also what his startup, Lucro, aims to change.
"What Lucro wants to do is allow users to focus first on the challenge or opportunity they seek to address," he says as Founder and CEO. "We want to turn the tables around and prioritize the problem first, then invest time to discover specific products that will solve and address it. Lucro is a place of opportunity, a place to privately discover, organize and collaborate to help users make the most efficient and effective decisions."
Backed by Martin Ventures, HCA Insight Capital and Heritage Group, Lucro is an online marketplace that reinvents how buyers and sellers of innovative healthcare solutions connect. It works a bit like Pinterest combined with other familiar applications. Healthcare leaders can identify, compare, collaborate and evaluate different solutions with a community of industry peers, "pinning" solutions they think would best fit their organization's needs. Solution providers can raise their visibility to connect to healthcare leaders with relevant products and services to fulfill buyers' needs. The online marketplace, funded through investors, can be accessed by healthcare leaders and vendors at no cost. Premium services are available for a cost.
Since its launch in November 2015, Lucro's mission to rethink the healthcare solutions marketplace remains unchanged. However, Lucro is looking ahead with refined clarity. In a recent executive summary, Mr. Brandes reflected on Lucro's first months and the company's intention to listen to industry leaders. Mr. Brandes spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about the executive summary and Lucro's path forward.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How have Lucro's initial goals guided the company throughout the past year? Have any of those goals changed?
Bruce Brandes: We officially launched in November 2015, after working on the company throughout 2015. Since our launch, Lucro's high-level goal and mission has not changed. We want healthcare to accelerate innovation, and we want to reinvent how buyers and sellers in the healthcare industry connect.
However, our clarity regarding how to go about this has sharpened. We built a multi-sided platform after learning from other platforms that reinvent how people shop, like Airbnb and e-Harmony, and gained greater clarity to how these platforms can apply to healthcare. By working with leading health systems throughout the country such as Nashville, Tenn.-based Hospital Corporation of America, Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems, Brentwood-based Lifepoint Health, Texas Health Resources in Arlington, Dignity Health in San Francisco, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, St. Luke's University Health Network in Bethlehem, Penn., among others we are understanding how limited time is. Leaders from these organizations informed us the time it takes to discover, decide and purchase the tools is about 18 months. But we don't have 18 months anymore. We need take action now.
So while our mission is the same, we've gained greater clarity and are disclosing how this works through idea boards, solution boards and a smart algorithm that makes better use of all of our collaborators' energies. Of all the areas of innovation in healthcare, we have focused initially on healthcare IT, to provide clarity to common areas of priority such as population health, patient engagement, telehealth, value-based care, interoperability, care coordination and more.
Q: What are idea boards, and how do interested healthcare leaders create and interact with them?
BB: When we launched in November, we engaged the Silicon Valley tech design firm that built multi-sided platforms like Airbnb, Nike+ and eHarmony. They knew little about healthcare. So we had them collaborate with two dozen innovators in healthcare who knew little about tech. As the two began to understand the others' challenges, Lucro began to understand the use of idea boards.
Idea boards provide a better way for individuals and groups to organize thinking and simplify collaboration, minimizing in-person meetings, emails, spreadsheets and PowerPoints. They evolve through three stages as an idea progresses.
The first stage starts when an individual, like a chief innovation officer, wants to tackle a specific problem. That individual creates an idea board outlining what he or she wants to accomplish, and can pin products and services the individual thinks may work well for his or her specific problem. Collaboration can be bolstered by inviting specific colleagues to privately participate on that idea board.
In the second stage, once the idea is more fully baked, the idea board can be published internally across their hospital or health system, driving awareness to coordinate and align potentially disparate efforts within the same organization, or to drive understanding of already defined corporate standards. In the last stage, to ensure decision-makers are aware of all the latest and best potential solutions to that problem, the idea board can be published, anonymously, to the entire Lucro marketplace. This allows vendors to give all the idea boards a look (without identifying the health system) and suggest specific solutions to the problem for efficient, private consideration.
Q: Can you talk about the algorithm Lucro uses?
BB: Our algorithm plays matchmaker for buyers and sellers. The algorithm gets basic objectives regarding the problem an organization is trying to solve and the concise facts about a particular product. Lucro gains an understanding of the buyers' profiles and can learn from what similar organizations have evaluated. Vendors can "knock" to the owners of idea boards, and these owners can privately consider the vendor's solution cards, get basic facts and respond if they are interested or not. In essence, it works like eHarmony to make more applicable connections.
This acts as a much more qualified opportunity for consideration, as the conversation is not a cold call. A vendor is specifically reaching out to solve the healthcare organization's problem. It's an effective use of time, and it's efficient. The more clear and specific the vendors are, the more likely they are to find a possible match. To claim "we are a synergistic partner" doesn't mean anything, but "we can reduce cardiac readmissions by 20 percent" does. And as we move forward, the power of the community and the value for everyone will only grow with more and more users.
Q: How do healthcare leaders, innovators and organizations get involved?
BB: Healthcare organizations can join by invitation. The system is far enough along now that we have the clarity to selectively invite health systems to Lucro. As the right people begin with us now and once we invite the next wave of systems, ultimately the content will be robust enough to make it available nationally in the coming months and globally after that. We currently have a couple international health systems on our waiting list.
Q: What trends do you see affecting the healthcare in the future, and how will Lucro adapt?
BB: The industry is certainly not lacking opinions regarding a rapidly-expanding market of offerings from both new and established vendors. So much noise leads to confusion and perceived risk that delays decision making. We believe Lucro is uniquely positioned to synthesize and provide context to the array of third party data points. Trusted sources of insight, such as certain industry associations, GPOs, consulting firms and industry analysts are potentially strategic partners to align with Lucro in this effort.
Q: How has your philosophy adapted throughout Lucro's first months?
BB: Philosophically, we know what we know and what we can be good at. But we are also aware we can't do this alone. We have been trying to be as inclusive as possible to align with other industry thought leaders. We want to collaborate with trusted, established organizations, as well as new innovators across of the industry.
Q: Where do you envision Lucro in a year from now? Five years from now?
BB: A year from now, Lucro should become a standard. That is, anyone in healthcare seeking innovative healthcare IT solutions to solve a problem will look to Lucro first.
Further out, I think about all the data we gather as a byproduct of how the platform is used. We capture every idea, search, pin, rating, etc. Without ever compromising information specific to an individual or organization, the meta-data can provide invaluable industry and market insight that frankly doesn't exist in healthcare right now. This type of education of the market, on both the buyer and seller side, can be transformational.
More articles about health IT:
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An internal audit in May revealed a former employee may have inappropriately accessed the medical records of 5,400 patients at Providence Health & Services in Oregon, reports KGW.
The employee was based in Portland, and the audit indicated the employee accessed health records between July 2012 and April 2016. Potentially compromised information includes demographic and medical treatment information. The report also indicates the employee may have viewed insurance information and Social Security numbers. However, Providence Health & Services does not believe the employee used or disclosed any of the information.
The health system fired the employee upon learning of the breach.
Providence did not immediately return Becker's Hospital Review's request for comment.
More articles on data breaches:
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Culture. Productivity. Strategy. Execution. These ideas will never go out of style for hospital and health system leaders.
The following leadership articles were published by Becker's Hospital Review in the last week.
1. Michael Dowling: 10 questions CEOs should ask themselves each year
Hospital and health system CEOs deal with a myriad of responsibilities every day of their long work weeks. It's critically important not to get bogged down in the daily distractions. Instead, we must keep our eye on high-level objectives, such as ensuring the organization is on track financially and supporting our clinicians as they provide high-quality care. At the same time, we strive to promote a positive and engaging culture for the workforce.
2. Study: Millennials poised for work stress, burnout ahead of other generations
Older generations often dismiss the "quarter-life crisis" lamented by their millennial counterparts, but studies have found people in their twenties and early thirties do indeed experience a sharp increase in job-related stress, negative emotions and overall angst. Taken together, these effects heighten millennials' risk for burning out at work and poor emotional well-being, according to the Harvard Business Review.
3. 12 healthcare companies on Diversity MBA Magazine's most diverse workplaces list
Diversity MBA Magazine published its tenth annual list of "50 Out Front: Best Places to Work for Women and Diverse Managers," and 12 healthcare companies made the cut.
4. Voters more trusting of Democratic Party than Republican party on healthcare issues, poll finds
American voters give presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton a clear advantage on healthcare issues over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds.
5. 7 hospitals with 100k+ 'likes' on Facebook
Here are seven hospitals on the top of their social media game; each hospital has more than 100,000 "likes" on their Facebook page as of July 15, 2016, and one has more than 1 million.
6. The corner office: Sharp HealthCare's Mike Murphy on modeling a classic yet timeless piece of advice
Mike Murphy didn't intend on becoming a health system executive. As a certified public accountant, he didn't plan on working in healthcare at all. However, once introduced to the business, his drive to support and empower the people who deliver care has never wavered.
7. How do CEOs spend their time?
A CEO's job isn't easy to categorize. It cannot be defined in terms of the average job description; rather, it encompasses a vast array or responsibilities and priorities, many of which can change from day to day. Across organizations and industries, CEOs oversee different types of businesses, but according to various studies, top dogs allocate their time in similar ways.
8. Save money with employed physicians: Capturing site scale economies
As health systems move through the aggregate assimilate integrate stages of their physician strategies, large cost savings can be generated with assimilation strategies harnessing site scale economies.
9. 28 hospital leaders and physicians to follow on Twitter
Social media revolutionized the way news and opinions are shared. Sites like Twitter give healthcare leaders an unprecedented opportunity the shape the national healthcare conversation by connecting with industry professionals, patients and the wider public.
10. Quint Studer: Are you wearing out your boss or coworkers?
About 30 years ago I started a new job on the same day as my boss. He was the executive director and I was in marketing. We went through orientation process together and developed a strong bond.
11. How to admit defeat: 4 lessons from Bernie Sanders
It wasn't long ago that the media and general public disregarded Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) as a serious contender to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. But as the primaries rolled on, Sen. Sanders captured the hearts, minds and votes of many, tightening the race. However, we will not be feeling "the Bern" in November; the Senator endorsed Ms. Clinton Tuesday, effectively ending his campaign for the presidency.
12. Which states are the best for business?
CNBC published its tenth annual ranking of the best states for business. The list is based on a variety of metrics, including each state's workforce, cost of doing business, infrastructure, economy, quality of life, technology and innovation, education, business friendliness, cost of living and access to capital.
13. 5 questions with HSHS CEO Mary Starmann-Harrison
Springfield, Ill.-based Hospital Sisters Health System is expanding its reach. On June 11, the health system revealed it signed a letter of intent to enter a minority interest affiliation with Ministry Door County Medical Center in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., a partnership HSHS CEO Mary Starmann-Harrison says will allow the systems to better coordinate high-quality care.
14. 'Ever-ready': 3 nurses discuss Orlando Regional Medical Center's mass shooting response
On June 12, 49 people were killed and 53 were injured when a shooter opened fire inside Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., less than half a mile from OrlandoRegionalMedicalCenter. Suddenly, nurses at ORMC found themselves on the front lines of responding to the largest mass shooting in American history as they cared for dozens of victims and comforted patients' families.
15. 7 CEOs name the one healthcare issue they wish they could eliminate overnight
The healthcare industry faces a fair share of challenges. Between the ever-changing policies and regulations, evolving laws and new reimbursement models, healthcare providers and administrators are constantly seeking ways to stay ahead. If we could give healthcare CEOs a magic wand, which issue would they choose to do away with?
16. Fine-tuning the hospital board: 5 steps to better governance
Many board directors believe their peers could do a better job. In fact, almost 40 percent of board directors say someone on their board should be replaced, according to PwC's "2015 Annual Corporate Directors Survey."
A man entered a patient's room at Parrish Medical Center in Titusville, Fla., early Sunday and opened fire, killing an elderly female patient and a hospital employee in what appears to be a random attack, authorities told CNN.
Two security guards restrained the shooter moments after he opened fire around 2 a.m. Sunday. The guards were not armed and held the suspect down until police arrived to take him into custody, according to the report.
The victims are Cynthia Zingsheim, 88, a patient, and 36-year-old Carrie Rouzer, a Parrish Medical Center employee who was patient sitting with Ms. Zingsheim, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
The 29-year-old suspect, David Owens, of Titusville, is being held without bond in the Brevard County Jail on two counts of first-degree premeditated murder.
"Investigators have not been able to determine a motive at this time, nor any connection to the victims," said Commander Todd Hutchinson. "They are continuing to investigate this tragic incident."
Mr. Owens entered the 210-bed hospital through the emergency room and went to the third floor, where he then entered Ms. Zingsheim's hospital room, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Hospital spokesperson Natalie Sellers said hospital security, staff and volunteers followed the hospital's active shooter policy.
"Parrish Medical Center did have a plan," Police Chief John Lau said during a news conference, according to the report. "And there's no doubt that their action saved lives."
Mr. Owens' record shows he was found guilty of battery to a police officer in 2011. In 2012, a judge twice ordered him to undergo a psychological evaluation. Court records also show prior arrests for possession of cocaine and marijuana and domestic battery were dismissed, according to the report.
Parrish Medical Center has resumed normal operations.
Ozarks Community Hospital in Springfield, Mo., will lay off 200 employees as the organization closes its surgery and emergency departments, according to a Springfield News-Leader report.
Here are three things to know about the layoffs.
1. OCH blames the layoffs on a federal government decision. Hospital CEO Paul Taylor said in a memo that CMS has "published notice that it is terminating our Medicare agreement because we do not satisfy the federal definition of a hospital," according to the report. CMS confirmed to the Springfield News-Leader that the decision was made. Mr. Taylor plans to appeal CMS' decision.
2. The hospital will no longer admit to the inpatient unit, effective immediately, and plans to close its surgery and emergency departments July 29.
3. An OCH spokeswoman told the Springfield News-Leader Springfield clinics including the OCH Medical Offices Clinic, OCH Primary Care Clinic and OCH Northside Behavioral Medicine Clinic will continue to operate as usual, along with the OCH Evergreen Clinic.
For many residents of Illinois, the nearest designated trauma center is in a neighboring state. With no trauma centers south of Springfield, Southern Illinois is a trauma care desert, according to The Southern Illinoisan.
The process for becoming a trauma center is voluntary, and its high costs dissuade many hospitals from the undertaking, said Melaney Arnold, public information officer for the Illinois Department of Health.
"For a hospital to become a trauma center in Illinois, it voluntarily seeks either a Level I (highest) or Level II (lower) trauma center designation from IDPH. Requirements for designation include certain qualified staff, such as subspecialty surgeons neurosurgeons, cardiothoracic, orthopedic and sophisticated diagnostic and monitoring equipment," said Ms. Arnold, according to the report. "Due to these requirements, costs for operating a Level I or Level II trauma center can exceed $20 million annually. Because of this high financial burden, many hospitals are not able to afford to be designated as a trauma center, and IDPH does not have the legislative, fiscal, or operational authority to require a hospital to become a trauma center."
Although there are no designated trauma centers in the southern part of the state, three Illinois hospitals meet a majority of the criteria for Level II and Level I trauma centers, according to an IDPH Trauma Center Feasibility Study published in January. To receive designation, a hospital must meet 70 criteria for Level II and 85 for Level I.
However, when ambulances are dispatched for serious trauma cases, they sometimes transport patients directly to designated trauma centers in Cape Girardeau, Mo., St. Louis or Evansville, Ind., according to the report.
After more than 70 years of nursing, Alice Graber, the oldest nurse in South Dakota, has retired, according to The Daily Republic.
Ms. Graber's final post was at the Salem Mennonite Home in Freeman, S.D., where she worked for more than 20 years. Though she's retired, Ms. Graber continues to serve patients by delivering food to the home.
Shirley Knodel, RN, was trained by Ms. Graber when they both worked at the former Freeman Community Hospital, which is now called the Freeman Healthcare Center. Ms. Knodel now directs nursing at the Salem Mennonite Home and helped organize Ms. Graber's retirement party. According to the Republic, Ms. Knodel described Ms. Graber as being full of energy and ever-willing to help in any way she could.
The retirement party displayed the impact of Ms. Graber's nursing career. In attendance were adults Ms. Graber had help deliver as newborns and former patients from both the Mennonite home and other facilities she once worked at.
Ms. Knodel said, "How many of us would have 150 people in a small town come to our retirement party?"
In 2015, Ms. Graber received the 2015 Millie of the Year award, a recognition bestowed by the South Dakota Healthcare Association to honor individuals working in long-term care facilities.
Police and firefighters were called to Saratoga Springs, N.Y.-based Saratoga Hospital Friday in reference to two alarms, but they ended up facing a bomb threat, according to a Times Union report.
Police told media that authorities initially responded to a simultaneous fire alarm in the hospital's ICU and burglary alarm in the emergency room. The alarms were deemed false, but as police prepared to leave the facility, a man came into the emergency room, claiming he had a bomb in his bag, police said, according to the report. The man left the emergency room and dropped the bag near the entrance.
Saratoga Springs Assistant Chief of Police John Cantone told media the man continued walking west from the hospital, but was eventually stopped and held by officers.
Due to the nature of the threat, the hospital emergency room area and nearby Myrtle Street were closed to vehicles and pedestrians.
A bomb sniffing dog came in and searched the emergency room and duffle bag, but nothing was found.
The hospital activated its internal emergency plan during this time, and no patient care was interrupted, according to the hospital.
The man, who was brought to the emergency room by a clergy member, was not being identified Friday as he was receiving a mental health evaluation, according to the report. He is not believed to be linked to the initial false alarms.
Federal officials will now have a chance to practice what they preach when it comes to managing rising premiums under the Affordable Care Act, according to The New York Times.
Large healthcare insurers like Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Humana are fighting to increase premiums to combat rising medical costs in several states where federal officials are responsible for reviewing rates instead of state appointed insurance commissioners.
In Texas, Blue Cross and Blue Shield is requesting rate increases of nearly 60 percent in 2017. In Oklahoma, the insurance magnate proposed increases averaging 49 percent. In Missouri, Humana has filed for a 34 percent increase.
All three carriers claim to have lost profit on numerous policies sold to individuals and families under the ACA. For every dollar collected in premiums in 2015, documents released by Blue Cross and Blue Shield said they paid $1.26 in Texas and $1.38 in Oklahoma amounts that, the insurers claim, are not sustainable, according to The New York Times.
Federal and state officials and insurers also point to a plethora of other factors contributing to increased premium costs, including the recent surge in prescription drug costs and the termination of two temporary programs meant to stabilize premiums.
The current political climate also puts pressure on federal officials to decrease rates. Insurance providers must notify consumers of potential premium hikes in the weeks just before Election Day on Nov. 8.
Obama administration officials have said that the "sticker price" shouldn't worry consumers because most people in the public insurance exchanges receive subsidies to help pay for premiums. Among those receiving subsidies, the average individual's premium rose by just $4 a month in 2016, according to The New York Times report.
But many people buying into public insurance plans do not receive subsidies. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 12 million people will receive tax credits, but an equal number will have to pay the full, unsubsidized price.
More articles about payer issues:
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72% of workers received employment-based coverage in March
Young New Yorkers will start seeing messages with emojis as NYC Health + Hospitals promotes its sexual and reproductive health services, The New York Times reports.
The emojis include an eggplant and a peach that will appear with the words: "Need to talk to someone about 'it'?" A monkey emoji with its hands over its mouth will offer advice on how to get confidential access to emergency contraception, according to the report.
New York City's public hospital system is part of a new YouthHealth public awareness campaign aimed at promoting the healthcare services at neighborhood centers most utilized by New Yorkers between the ages of 12 and 21.
The campaign, which focuses on sexual and reproductive health and will use the hashtag #NYCYouthHealth, features a new youth health services website and an extensive social media component utilizing emojis on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms expected to reach the social news feeds of up to 2.4 million New York City young adults in the next three months.
In 2015 at NYC Health + Hospitals, about 15,000 adolescents were diagnosed with depression, more than 38,000 were tested for sexually transmitted diseases, 30,000 were tested for pregnancy and some 2,400 gave birth, according to the hospital system.
"Under New York State law minors have the right to consent to certain kinds of healthcare on their own," Warren Seigel, MD, chairman of pediatrics and director of adolescent medicine at NYC Health + Hospitals/Coney Island, said in a prepared statement. "This care includes pregnancy tests, STD tests and treatment, mental healthcare and post sexual assault care. Many teens feel that they cannot turn to the adults in their lives for help with these services and it's important that teens know that they can come to us and we will help them."
In addition to the social media campaign and the new website, the YouthHealth campaign includes posters, brochures, wallet-size cards with the website address and ad panels that will be posted in city hospitals, according to NYC Health + Hospitals. Community-based organizations near NYC Health + Hospitals health centers are partnering with the system to distribute the materials.
The goal of the campaign is to increase use of youth health services at NYC Health + Hospitals by 25 percent by the year 2020.
A family contact of the first Zika-related death in the U.S. has contracted the Zika virus, but apparently not by a mosquito bite or through sexual transmission, according to state and federal officials.
"The new case in Utah is a surprise, showing that we still have more to learn about Zika," said Erin Staples, MD, PhD, CDC's medical epidemiologist on the ground in Utah. "Fortunately, the patient recovered quickly, and from what we have seen with more than 1,300 travel-associated cases of Zika in the continental United States and Hawaii, non-sexual spread from one person to another does not appear to be common."
A CDC Emergency Response Team is in Utah working with state and local public health officials. They are investigating how the second infection was transmitted by interviewing and testing family members and healthcare workers who had contact with the deceased, as well as trapping and testing mosquitoes to assess the risk of local transmission.
"We have found no evidence that mosquitoes here in Utah are transmitting the Zika virus," Angela Dunn, MD, deputy state epidemiologist at the Utah Department of Health, told The New York Times.
The deceased patient in Utah had uniquely high levels of the virus in his blood more than 100,000 times what was seen in other people with Zika infections, according to the CDC.
The deceased patient was treated at University of Utah Health Care in Salt Lake City. Ed Clark, MD, the associate vice president for clinical affairs at University of Utah, tells Becker's he is "confident that the appropriate protective measures were employed by all staff" at the hospital.
However, in light of the new infection and "in the spirit of overabundant caution," University of Utah Health is interviewing its staff and offering appropriate testing as necessary, Dr. Clark says.
As for how the subsequent Zika infection occurred, Dr. Clark says people are "stumped," hence the ongoing investigation.
As of July 13, there are 1,306 Zika cases in the United States.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America gained five new members last Friday.
Three biopharmaceutical research companies joined the association as members, while two others transitioned from research associates to full members.
Among the new affiliates is Teva Pharmaceutical Industries. The Israel-based drug company a generic rival to a majority of the companies that form PhRMA surprised the pharmaceutical industry when it requested to join the association earlier this month.
The four other new initiates are New Haven, Conn.-based Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Waltham, Mass.-based AMAG Pharmaceuticals, and Lake Forest, Ill.-based Horizon Pharma.
The new members will aid in PhRMA's efforts to advocate for policy solutions to deliver innovative treatments to patients, modernize the drug development process, promote value-driven healthcare, engage consumers and address market distortions.
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Zimmer Biomet, a Warsaw, Ind.-based orthopedics company, recently acquired Medtech, a French company specializing in surgical robots.
Ally Bridge Group, a private equity firm that invested in Medtech in December 2015, sold its entire stake of the company to Zimmer Biomet for an undisclosed amount.
Medtech currently offers two FDA-approved surgical robots that allow for minimally invasive brain and spine procedures.
Zimmer Biomet expects the acquisition will boost its presence in the musculoskeletal market.
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These spine surgeons excel outside of the operating room, driven by their entrepreneurial spirit into the business of medicine.
Please send nominations of spine surgeons excelling in business endeavors to sbecker@beckershealthcare.com and mwood@beckershealthcare.com.
Todd Albert, MD, Hospital for Special Surgery, New York City. As surgeon-in-chief, medical director and Korein-Wilson Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at HSS, Dr. Albert has a strong presence in treating cervical spine disorders and performing minimally invasive and image-guided techniques. He is a former president of Rothman Institute in Philadelphia. Dr. Albert has various industry relationships, designing DePuy Synthes' Expedium Spine System and Swift and Eagle Anterior Cervical Fixation Systems. He is the designer, inventor and consultant for Facet Link's Expandable Cage for Lumbar Spine and serves on Gentis' medical advisory board. Additionally, Dr. Albert invented and helped design Zimmer Biomet's Solitaire Cervical Cage as well as invented the patented Lieum Cervical System and Polaris Spinal System. Dr. Albert completed his spine surgery fellowship at Minnesota Spine Center in Minneapolis.
John Caruso, MD, Parkway Neuroscience & Spine Institute, Hagerstown, Md. A co-founder of "Save Our Doctors, Protect Our Patients," Dr. Caruso helped present liability reform in Maryland, resulting in a special legislative session. He is a leading advocate for physicians to dedicate more time to healthcare economics and policy, and has become immersed in the economic, financial and business components of the industry. Dr. Caruso completed his residencies at University of New Mexico Medical School in Albuquerque and Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.
Michael Gleiber, MD, Michael A. Gleiber MD PA, West Palm Beach, Fla. Dr. Gleiber founded a concierge spine surgery practice in Florida focusing on minimally invasive and motion preserving spinal procedures from simple to complex disorders. His practice is listed among the top 21 physicians in the United States by Concierge Medicine Today and he is the Concierge Spine Surgery trademark owner. He has been featured in Forbes Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and Inc.com, and he has been published in the Huffington Post. Dr. Gleiber also recently became a brand ambassador for Rolls Royce. Dr. Gleiber earned his medical degree from The George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC and completed his residency at Columbia University in New York City. His additional training includes the Kenton D. Leatherman Spine Surgery Fellowship. He is a member of several professional organizations and participated in the American Orthopaedic Associations Emerging Leadership Program.
Richard Guyer, MD, Texas Back Institute, Plano. Dr. Guyer co-founded Texas Back Institute and director of the Spine Fellowship Program. He is also the co-director for the Center for Disc Replacement at TBI and previously served as the chairman of the board for the Texas Back Institute Research Foundation. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Guyer is a past president of the North American Spine Society and an editorial board member for several professional publications. Dr. Guyer earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, where he also completed his residency in orthopedic surgery. His additional training includes a spine fellowship under Henry Bohlman, MD, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Stephen Hochschuler, MD, Texas Back Institute, Plano. As co-founder of Texas Back Institute and founder of Dallas-based risk management company Back Systems, Dr. Hochschuler has made his mark in medical business. He served as a founding chairman of Mansfield, Mass.-based Innovative Spinal Technologies as well as on DePuy Spine's business advisory board. In addition to his 30 years of medical experience, specializing in the lumbar spine, Dr. Hochschuler is a founding member and past president of the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery formerly known as the Spine Arthroplasty Society. He also served as past chairman of SpineMark, for which he currently serves on the board of directors. Dr. Hochschuler completed his orthopedic surgery residency at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.
Jim Lynch, MD, SpineNevada, Reno. Founder of SpineNevada, Dr. Lynch has positioned himself as a minimally invasive spine surgery and outpatient spine surgery expert. A partner and director of Regent Surgical Health's Spine Services, Dr. Lynch helps the company develop ambulatory surgery centers and hospitals. Dr. Lynch also serves as an Orthopaedic Implant Company board member, contributing to spinal device innovation. Additionally, Dr. Lynch gives back to the community by serving as the medical director for High Fives Organization, a Truckee, Calif.-based nonprofit foundation raising money for injured athletes. Dr. Lynch completed his neurosurgical international fellowship and spine fellowship at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic as well as a spine fellowship at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, and Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, all in London.
Dan Murrey, MD, Transformant Healthcare Solutions. Dr. Murrey was a founding member of OrthoCarolina in 2005 and served as CEO for eight years. He stepped down as CEO earlier this year to focus on his work with Transformant Healthcare Solutions, a management company focused on value-based care with seven clients in addition to OrthoCarolina. During his time with OrthoCarolina, the practice grew to around 130 physicians and moved toward value-based care by implementing bundled payments. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Murrey was the chairman of the Charlotte host committee for the Democratic National Convention in 2012.
Frank Phillips, MD, Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, Chicago. A pioneer in minimally invasive spine surgery, Dr. Phillips is a founder, former president and current board member of the Society of Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery. He had participated in various MIS spinal technique developments and continues to lecture on the topic nationally and internationally. He also served as a principle investigator in FDA trials for cervical disc replacement. Dr. Phillips completed his orthopedic surgery fellowship at Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University.
Ralph Rashbaum, MD, Texas Back Institute, Plano. Dr. Rashbaum is co-founder of Texas Back Institute and concurrently founded one of the first back schools in the United States. He is involved in the Texas Back Institute Spine Fellowship Program and member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Rashbaum focuses on research and received the Volvo Award for low back pain research. Dr. Rashbaum earned his medical degree at Chicago Medical School and completed his fellowship in spine surgery at Philadelphia Hospital under Richard Rothman, MD, and Frederick Simone, MD.
Thomas C. Schuler, MD, FACS, Virginia Spine Institute. Dr. Schuler founded Virginia Spine Institute in 1992 to advance the development of contemporary neurological and orthopaedic spinal surgery. As the Founder and CEO of this multi-disciplinary specialty practice his knowledge, leadership and innovative techniques have revolutionized spinal healthcare and restored the lifestyles of thousands nationwide. In addition, his visionary leadership as President of the Spinal Research Foundation (a national 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization) fosters the pursuit of improving spinal healthcare for all Americans through research, education and patient advocacy. Dr. Schuler is also an Officer for the World Presidents' Organization, a global community of leadership. He demonstrates his thought leadership through speaking engagements on a national platform as well as published articles in medical journals and online sources.
Stefano Sinicropi, MD, Midwest Spine & Brain Institute, Stillwater, Minn. Dr. Sinicropi joined Midwest Spine & Brain Institute in 2006 and was named president and CEO in 2012. Under his leadership, the practice has expanded its vision of Right Diagnosis allows the Right Treatment. Since 2006, Dr. Sinicropi has performed more than 5,000 spine surgeries. He has a professional interest in minimally invasive outpatient surgery and total disc replacement and built his reputation on giving real answers to patients, even those who are diagnostically challenging. Dr. Sinicropi earned his medical degree at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons Medical School and completed his residency at Columbia Universitys Presbyterian Hospital. His additional training includes a spine surgery fellowship at the University of Louisville (Ky.).
David Schwartz, MD, OrthoIndy, Indianapolis. Dr. Schwartz found his entrepreneurial spark when he invented the Antares, Legacy Dual Rod, Leverage Cervical Laminoplasty, Archon Cervical Plate and Anterior TLIF Implant. Surgeons use these various systems when treating spinal fractures, scoliosis, tumors and cervical myelopathy and when performing spinal fusions. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Schwartz is director of the OrthoIndy Spine Fellowship. He also conducts research and received the North American Spine Society's Outstanding Research Award in 1994. Dr. Schwartz completed his spine fellowship at the Leatherman Spine Center, Kosair Children's Hospital and the University of Louisville (Ky.).
Nick Shamie, MD, UCLA Spine Center, Santa Monica. Dr. Shamie commits much of time educating medical students, residents and fellows in addition to participating in spinal disorder clinical research projects. He received the Scoliosis Research Society's Dawson Traveling Fellowship and UCI School of Medicine Award for Excellence in Research. In addition, Dr. Shamie has a presence in his state as a Qualified Medical Evaluator for the State of California and is an Expert Reviewer for the Medical Board of California. He completed his two fellowships in spine surgery and biologics at the UCLA School of Medicine.
John Shim, MD, Florida Sports, Orthopaedic & Spine Medicine, Westchase, Fla. Dr. Shim is in private practice specializing in outpatient spine surgery. He created the website, Shim Spine, to offer educational materials on spine surgery for patients. He stresses the site contains no medical product advertisements, but rather offers patients comprehensive information about neck problems, back problems and scientific research. Dr. Shim completed his spine surgery fellowship at New England Baptist Hospital and Tufts University School of Medicine, both in Boston.
Kern Singh, MD, Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, Chicago. Dr. Singh teaches minimally invasive spinal surgery techniques to surgeons around the world, and serves as co-director of Rush's Minimally Invasive Spine Institute. A surgeon entrepreneur, Dr. Singh co-founded Avaz Surgical in 2010 to develop next-generation neural guidance and quantitative imaging techniques. Through Avaz Surgical technology, Dr. Singh and his colleagues are currently striving for a footprint in the lateral spine surgery market. He principal researcher in FDA trials focused on cervical disc replacement and motion-preserving spinal technology. Dr. Singh also actively participates in MIS spine instrument design. Dr. Singh completed his orthopedic and neurosurgical spinal surgery fellowship at Atlanta-based Emory University.
Paul Slosar, MD, SpineCare Medical Group, San Francisco. Equipped with an entrepreneurial mindset, Dr. Slosar serves as president and partner of SpineCare Medical Group. Dr. Slosar also lectures on spine care nationally and internationally, and is involved with various spine companies developing new spinal technologies. He conducts clinical research with the San Francisco Spine Institute. Dr. Slosar completed his spine surgery fellowship with SpineCare Medical Group and San Francisco Spine Institute.
Gil Tepper, MD, Miracle Mile Medical Center, Los Angeles. Dr. Tepper is director of the Valley Spine Center in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and The Spine Institute at Miracle Mile Medical Center. He is CEO of Miracle Mile Medical Center. He speaks and lectures nationally and internationally on spine technique and is CEO of the new start-up Prime Surgeons. He has been a principal clinical investigator in several FDA investigations for spinal fusion and disc replacement devices. Dr. Tepper earned his medical degree at Chicago Medical School and completed his orthopedic residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
Larry Teuber, MD, South Dakota. Dr. Teuber founded and served as physician executive of Black Hills Surgery Center. He has spent time as president of Medical Facilities Corporation and managing partner of The Spine Center in Rapid City. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Teuber provides consultative services and speaks to physician organizations and developing surgical facilities and centers of excellence. He earned his medical degree from the University of South Dakota and completed a neurosurgery residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Alexander Vaccaro, MD, PhD, MBA, Rothman Institute, Philadelphia. Dr. Vaccaro is president of the Rothman Institute as well as the Association for Collaborative Spine Research president and American Spinal Injury Association past president. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Vaccaro is the Richard H. Rothman Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University, and Chairman of Orthopedic Surgery at Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, co-director of the Spinal Cord Injury Center and co-chief of spine surgery. He received the North American Spine Society's Leon Wiltse award for his leadership and research excellence. Dr. Vaccaro completed his spine fellowship at the University of San Diego, and obtained a doctorate degree in spinal trauma.
Richard Wohns, MD, JD, MBA, NeoSpine, Puyallup, Wash. Dr. Wohns earned his master of business administration degree from Seattle-based University of Washington in 1997. He founded NeoSpine in 2001, after he established an outpatient spine surgery program in Puget Sound. Following Symbion's acquisition of NeoSpine in 2008, Dr. Wohns became a chief consultant to Symbion for developing outpatient spine surgery centers. In addition to these business endeavors, Dr. Wohns also co-founded U.S. Radiosurgery, which develops Gamma Knife and Cyberknife Radiosurgery centers. Outside of his clinical practice, Dr. Wohns dedicates much of his time to lecturing on the business, legal and clinical components of outpatient spine surgery. Dr. Wohns completed his neurosurgery residency at University of Washington.
Anthony Yeung, MD, Desert Institute for Spine Care, Phoenix. Founder of DISC, Dr. Yeung began performing endoscopic spine surgery in the 1990s. Dr. Yeung is among the first surgeons to use endoscopic-guided lasers and developed the Yeung Endoscopic Spine System. He teaches this unique procedure to fellows in the practice's Squaw Peak Surgical Facility. Dr. Yeung served as a past president of the World Congress of Minimally Invasive Spine Surgeons and is the executive director of the International Intradiscal and Transforaminal Therapy Society. Dr. Yeung completed his orthopedic surgery residency at Maricopa County General Hospital in Phoenix.
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Northern Ireland's biggest motor retailer Charles Hurst has acquired motorbike brand Belfast Honda for an undisclosed sum.
And Belfast Honda has now been renamed Charles Hurst Honda Motorcycles as part of the deal. It will remain at its current home of Prince Regent Road in Castlereagh until early next year, when it moves to a showroom inside Charles Hurst on Boucher Road.
Staff at Belfast Honda will remain as part of the purchase by Charles Hurst - which is part of UK plc Lookers.
Colin McNab of Charles Hurst said it was an important investment for the company: "The business is a fantastic addition to our range and offers a great extension of our existing motorcycle offering which currently includes both Yamaha and BMW retail units."
The operations director added: "Charles Hurst is committed to offering our customers the highest quality vehicles with the best customer service possible and the acquisition of Charles Hurst Honda Motorcycles will enable us to continue to deliver on that promise."
Charles Hurst recently opened a new 500,000 BMW Motorrad retail unit at its Boucher Road base. The company was founded in 1911 and is now Northern Ireland's biggest car dealer, with 20 brands on seven sites.
The Boucher Road base is the biggest automotive car park in Europe. Last year Charles Hurst announced a 45% jump in pre-tax profits to over 8.7m.
Turnover at the company, which has been part of Lookers plc since 1996, was up 13.2% to 448.2m in the year to December 31, 2014 - up from 396m the year before.
Its annual report said the good times should continue. "The company has made a good start to the current financial year and we continue to outperform the new retail car market," it read.
Rain kept shoppers away from Northern Ireland's high streets and malls during June, resulting in a 2.5% drop in footfall, it was claimed today.
By the last few days of the month, the shock referendum result appeared to have put even more shoppers off, leading to a 7.3% drop in footfall, according to the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium (NIRC).
However, Northern Ireland's drop in footfall across the month as a whole was lower than the UK-wide decline of 2.8%.
And in the week of the referendum itself, shoppers in the province were out in greater numbers than the week before.
But June's figures were still a contrast with May, when footfall in Northern Ireland went up by around 3%.
Diane Wehrle, marketing and insights director at Springboard, which carried out the NIRC research, said June had seen "a political and economic storm" formed by the referendum result "against a backdrop of downpours and generally inclement weather throughout the month".
"While poor weather will explain some of this, it is more likely consumers held off spending in the immediate aftermath," Mrs Wehrle explained.
"The issue for retailers is how quickly shoppers will return to their usual behavioural patterns."
The referendum was a once-in-a-generation event and the effects of the result are still quite unpredictable.
"We have never been in this situation before of having a referendum of this magnitude, so attention may have been diverted from shopping over that week," Mrs Wehrle said.
And she told the Belfast Telegraph that while footfall may be down, Belfast shops were reporting that customers were spending more, and that shops would now be focused on shifting unwanted summer stock.
But Ms Wehrle said policy varied from retailer to retailer on whether they could instead bring out unsold spring stock, which may be more suited to the present temperatures.
Aodhan Connolly, director of the NIRC, said: "The recovery in shopper numbers witnessed in May proved short-lived, with footfall in Northern Ireland's shopping destinations easing back again last month.
"The dip in footfall numbers was less marked than that of the UK as a whole last month, but was a touch weaker than the average monthly decline seen over the past year as a whole."
But Mr Connolly also added that it was too early to say what impact the Brexit vote would have on consumer and business confidence.
"What is clear is that the devolved administration ought to re-double its efforts to keep down the cost of living and the cost of doing business," he said.
Retailers were already grappling with additional costs, including the apprenticeship levy, a higher national living wage, higher employer pension constructions and increasing rates.
It is thought the new technologies could replace air traffic control towers as a bricks and mortar installation
Several major British airports are considering scrapping air traffic control towers in favour of digital technology, according to a Swedish defence and security company.
Saab claims the use of cameras and sensors for air traffic control could make traditional towers "obsolete" by 2025.
The firm has already already tested the technology in the US, Sweden, Australia, Norway and Ireland.
Cameras are used to relay information about what is happening on the runway to a remote control room.
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) is trialling the use of digital towers at Cork and Shannon airports, with air traffic managed at a control centre hundreds of miles away at Dublin airport.
Nats, Britain's air navigation service provider, told the Press Association it is considering a number of potential digital projects in the UK.
Ornskoldsvik Airport in Sweden was the first in the world to get such as system approved.
Since 2015 flights have been controlled by a remote tower in Sundsvall, 110 miles away.
Leesburg Airport in Virginia, US, is also testing the technology.
Saab said the installation and operation of digital airport systems - which were showcased at last week's Farnborough International Airshow in Hampshire - come at a fraction of the cost of a traditional tower, without affecting safety.
A number of major airports across Europe are considering utilising the system, the company added.
Per Ahl, vice president for sales traffic management at Saab, commented: "Digital towers have the potential to be transformational for many British airports and are testament to the way technology is transforming our airports.
"For almost a century the control tower has physically been at the centre of airports as a bricks and mortar installation, but digital technology is ushering in a new age, where air traffic controllers are pooled together to create efficiencies.
"We are in conversation with a number of British airports who are interested in our technology and I am confident that in a decade the traditional tower will become obsolete as digital technology becomes the norm."
Steve Anderson, head of transformation at Nats, said: "Remote towers are an exciting technological development for our industry.
"Delivering airport air traffic services remotely from centralised locations could be transformational for our business and we are actively exploring a number of potential opportunities in the UK."
Stephen Nolans mum Audrey shopping in her dressing gown in Comber with her friend Betty
Stephen Nolans mum Audrey shopping in her dressing gown in Comber with her friend Betty
Stephen Nolans mum Audrey shopping in her dressing gown in Comber with her friend Betty
Stephen Nolans mum Audrey shopping in her dressing gown in Comber with her friend Betty
Nolan's mum told him off for following her around the supermarket with a camera
He may be one of the BBC's top names - but it doesn't spare Stephen Nolan a telling-off from his mum.
Nolan got on the wrong side of his mother after he followed her around a supermarket while she shopped in her dressing gown - and streamed it live on Facebook.
The BBC heavyweight posted the video of his tortured mum Audrey and her friend Betty as they picked up some groceries.
But his clearly-irked mother was not in the mood for any larking about, telling him to "p*** off".
Audrey has been mostly housebound in the last few weeks.
She has been seen going in and out of Kingsbridge Private Hospital on the Lisburn Road with Nolan, where she has been treated for a sore shoulder.
Nolan was anchoring Radio 5 Live's coverage of events in Nice and Turkey on Friday and Saturday, but flew home yesterday morning to take Audrey out for lunch... in her dressing gown.
He told the Belfast Telegraph: "Now that she has a walking stick, I think I need police protection.
"Big Audrey likes to hit me with it, especially when I call her Vera Duckworth. I can't imagine why.
"Let's put it like this, I'm not too sure the posh Strangford residents knew what had hit them on Sunday with the sight of a 75-year-old woman in a dressing gown telling a BBC presenter to p*** off and hitting him over the head with her walking stick.
"But that's why I love Big Audrey so much. She doesn't change who or what she is for anybody. Hopefully I can live my life like that too."
Nolan explains to viewers: "I've just got back from London and my mum hasn't been too well.
"She's out in her dressing gown and she said 'Don't let anyone see me in my dressing gown' so I'm putting her on Facebook Live and she really, really will go ballistic.
"She'll probably hit me or something."
As he goes into the store in the search for his mum, he adds: "You'll probably hear her before you see her. She's walking around in her dressing gown like Vera Duckworth."
As he pushes the camera into her face, she tells him to p*** off and tries to escape.
He laughs and says: "I do love her. She hasn't been well and has had a really sore shoulder and has been really sore so this is my attempt to get her out and have a laugh today.
"I just torture her non-stop."
His mum tries to get her own back with a few subtle jibes.
Nolan asks her to tell his 65,000 Facebook followers how much weight he's lost and she shouts that he's put weight on.
Then when his mum comments on the price of washing powder, Nolan says: "You can't call Tesco a 'dear hole'."
She quickly responds: "You're paying for everything so you can call it what you like."
The seizure of a dog in Belfast on suspicion of it being a pit bull has prompted calls for the law governing dangerous dogs to be changed.
East Belfast MLA Naomi Long said it was time that breed-specific legislation was ended for good and urged the minister responsible, Michelle McIlveen, to act quickly.
"As someone with a dog, it is unthinkable the distress that their removal and potential destruction would cause," she said.
"Hank's owners Joanne and Leonard have been in touch and we are looking to see what more, if anything, can be done to ensure that Hank can return home as soon as possible to his family and that breed-specific legislation is ended for good.
"I have argued alongside colleagues for some time that the law needs to change to focus on behaviour and responsible ownership, not on the type of dog - it should be the deed, not the breed, that matters.
"Sadly, it remains, and animals such as Hank are at risk due to nothing more than vague criteria about how they look. I hope that the new minister in DAERA will act urgently to make changes and that the legal case to save Hank is a success."
Owners Leonard Collins and Joanne Meadows have launched a social media campaign to save Hank and more than 5,000 has been raised in less than 24 hours through a crowdfunding appeal.
They also won a lot of support when they attended a rally against anti-breed specific legislation in Belfast at the weekend.
"This outpouring of support is far beyond anything I could have comprehended. It shows it's an incredibly emotive subject and people have very strong opinions and want to help," Leonard said.
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He has called on Belfast City Council to use DNA analysis to investigate Hank's breed, saying that measuring his shape is too vague a criterion.
"The legislation is a very grey area. There are no standard tests carried out at all, other than the subjective opinion of one person - it seems insane," he said.
If the dog warden decides that Hank is a pit bull, the onus is on his owners to prove that he doesn't pose a threat and the cost is likely to run into thousands of pounds, Leonard added.
"I have no faith at all that these measurements will come out in our favour," he said.
"If they assume he's pit bulltype dog, it seems to me that the next legal step will be to apply for a contingent destruction order, which would suspend the council putting him down if we can prove he isn't dangerous."
Belfast City Council said there was no DNA or blood test that can determine if a dog is of pit bull origin. "The assessment is based on physical characteristics and temperament," it said.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has dismissed the Government's insistence that Brexit will not prompt a vote on Irish unity, claiming the EU referendum has left the island facing an "entirely new dispensation".
The veteran republican also welcomed remarks from the leader of the Republic of Ireland's main Opposition party - Fianna Fail's Micheal Martin - voicing support for a potential border poll in the context of Northern Ireland voting to remain in the EU.
Mr Adams reiterated the need to examine "new relationships on the island" after newly appointed Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Brokenshire used his first engagement in Belfast to stress that the referendum result in the region - 56% backing Remain - did not provide adequate reason to call a vote on reunification with the Irish Republic, an EU member state.
"They ruled out lots of things in the past which are now a reality," said Mr Adams in response.
"The fact is we are now in an entirely new dispensation given the vote to leave the EU and given the fact that the people in this part of the island voted to Remain."
After a visit to Belfast City Hall, Mr Brokenshire, a Remain campaigner in the referendum, also rejected the suggestion that Scotland or Northern Ireland could somehow maintain their relationship with the EU, despite the rest of the UK leaving.
"I think it's difficult to see how that would work, we do need to move on now, I think that we do need to focus on the best possible outcome for Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom outside the European Union," he said.
Stormont's Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said Mr Brokenshire needed to understand that people in Northern Ireland and Scotland voted in "big numbers" to stay within the EU.
"That cannot be disregarded and under no circumstances do we intend to backtrack from the strength of that vote," he said.
On a visit to Scotland last week, Prime Minister Theresa May stressed the need for a "UK approach" to be agreed before Brexit was triggered. Asked if she interpreted Mrs May's remark as a potential Scottish veto on Brexit, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland was now in a "very, very strong position".
Mr McGuinness referred to the same comments as he flanked Mr Adams outside Stormont Castle, Belfast on Monday.
"Theresa May said in the aftermath of the meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, and Nicola quoted her over the course of the weekend, that she would not trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty unless people in these areas were content," he said.
"Well I can tell Theresa May, and I did tell her when I spoke to her on the telephone last week when she rang me, we are not content."
He added: "The people of Scotland have made their position clear, we have made our position clear - that needs to be respected."
While a majority backed Remain in Northern Ireland, the region's largest party and Sinn Fein's partners in government - the Democratic Unionists - campaigned for a Leave vote.
That has rendered it virtually impossible for the Stormont Executive to adopt a united approach on the issue.
First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster insisted Brexit had opened up great opportunities for Northern Ireland.
"Instead of trying to cause instability we should look at this as an opportunity for Northern Ireland to do things differently and indeed the whole of the United Kingdom," she said.
"That's what I think is a very exciting part of where we are now in politics in the United Kingdom."
Mrs Foster and Mr McGuinness are due to speak with Brexit minister David Davis on the phone on Tuesday.
Under the terms of 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, the power to call a border poll rests with the Secretary of State. But the accord stipulates that such a vote can only be called if there is evidence of a clear shift of public opinion in favour of Irish unity in Northern Ireland.
Mr Brokenshire said that was not the case.
"There is a clear constitutional settlement in relation to the border poll and it's also clear to me that opinion does not support a change," he said.
"Clearly we act on the basis of consent, but I strongly believe in the Union - the real strength that the countries of the United Kingdom have together."
Mr Brokenshire said he acknowledged that different parts of the UK voted to Remain, but he said the outcome of the vote as a whole had to be respected.
On Sunday, Fianna Fail's Mr Martin said he hoped Brexit would move Ireland closer to reunification.
He said a "reunification referendum" should be called if it became clear a majority want to see an end to Irish partition over the UK decision to pull out of the EU.
Mr Adams welcomed the comments.
"I think it's important that he has taken up that position," he said. "All of us who want Irish unity need to become persuaders for that.
"I think there are opportunities for everyone to look at new relationships on the island."
Mr Adams also encouraged Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to push ahead with his plan for an all-Ireland forum to discuss the fall-out from the Brexit vote.
NUS/USI president Fergal McFerran talks to Rebecca Black about the moment he came out to his parents and how he received support from Christians... and some criticism too.
Q. You were concerned about Queen's vice chancellor Patrick Johnston's comments about society not needing a 21-year-old who was a sixth century historian?
A. I am very proud to have gone to Queen's University and graduated from the humanities side. The specific comment that society does not need a 21-year-old sixth century historian, and also the wider language that he quite often uses - he talks about the university producing graduates and that students are seen consumers, international students have a price tag attached to them.
I think that there is a competing vision of what a university is for, here. For me, our members and so many others including academics and staff at Queen's, a university is not a factory to pump out graduates, it's not about the spin-off companies, it's not about balancing your books. It is as Professor Johnston himself talked about, producing citizens who can contribute to society, but to do that we need to ensure that all aspects of academia are respected and valued.
It is shown throughout society there are people in leadership roles regardless of what they studied. I do have genuine concerns about the direction of travel that the university - of which I am an alumni - is taking. I just hope that he takes the time to carefully and genuinely speak to the concerns not just of the current students and staff, but to those who so proudly hold an attachment to Queen's.
Q. Tell me about your background?
A. I come from a small village in north Antrim called Dunloy, attended a local Catholic primary school as a child and then went on to secondary school in Ballymena. I am the youngest of three and was the first in my family to graduate from university. I was always one of the kids in school who kept their head down and got on with work - I didn't want to get into trouble.
My dad has retired now, he was a car mechanic and always had a big interest in cars, rallying and all that. When I was younger he would always be taking me to get a new boilersuit in the hope I would get involved as well, but I haven't even learned how to drive yet, so he's maybe a bit disappointed in that! My mum has worked in the residential care of the elderly and driven school buses for kids who are disabled.
Mum and dad have worked hard all their lives, they are the kind of people who like to keep busy; I think they are probably the people that instilled my work ethic in me, they certainly never let me sit still.
Q. Did you have any specific ambitions when you were younger?
A. The thing I always thought I really wanted to do when I was growing up was to be a religious studies teacher. When I was younger I would have been involved with the church back home. I was always interested in religion, when I was making choices for A-levels at school I chose to do religious studies and the specific course because of the module about ethics; I found it really interesting because every class was different, there was always something new to debate.
I think the interest for me was that maybe some day I could be the teacher in the classroom that made people feel comfortable to debate and discuss things. That was why I went on to study theology at university. That was the only thing I was really firm about when I was younger. It hasn't transpired that way, but that's the way it goes.
Q. You went to Queen's University?
A. Yes, I arrived at Queen's in 2010 to study theology, I thought I'd get my degree and then do a PGCE and become an RE teacher. But in second year I decided to leave theology, and part of it was because it was around the time that I had kind of started to come to terms with the fact that I was gay, and at the time I was really struggling with it.
For someone who had been involved with the Church, I thought I had a strong faith and there was a lot of conflict there for me, so I needed to try and figure it all out. The one thing I was certain about was that theology was not where I needed to be at that point.
It was the officers of the Students' Union and the advice centre that supported me through the process of changing from theology and coming back to study politics, economics and philosophy (PPE). It was another three years from then that I came out to my family, which is another reflection of just how my experience at Queen's has really shaped me as a person, and helped connect me to who I am today.
Q. It must have been a tough time coming to university in Belfast, firstly from a rural setting to a city and then going through that personal development as well?
A. Yes, I think quite often people from Northern Ireland go to Liverpool or Coventry to get away; for me, going to Belfast was probably on the scale of things not that much different to that - particularly because I came to Belfast for uni and got a job, so I stayed, rarely went home.
I worked probably too many hours alongside my course every week. It was a brand new experience for me being in Belfast, meeting people from different backgrounds, and it was really healthy because it made me talk about issues that I maybe hadn't talked about before, it made me understand other people's experiences, it challenged my perceptions of them as well as myself, and, to be honest, if it hadn't been for that holistic experience I probably wouldn't have been in a space last year where I felt comfortable and confident enough to be so public whenever I did come out.
Q. You were very brave to speak out at the time about your personal journey. Did you experience any negative response?
A. I hadn't planned to speak out. I had been in London for work and decided to go home that weekend and speak to my mum and dad. So I flew home that evening and phoned my brother - someone I felt I could be quite open with and talk it through. I spoke to him, got on the first train home the next morning, and he met me off the train. I hadn't told my mum and dad that I was coming home, so I walked in the back door and they asked what I was doing there. I sat them down and said: "I have something I want to talk to you about."
It's difficult to articulate, but I have never felt relief like it. It's hard to put into words the scale of the feeling at the time. Even more so because their reaction was so positive. It was so overwhelmingly supportive, and I think the message in that is, of course it was going to be, they are my parents, they love me. But the issue is that society is structured in such a way that we are told we should expect to be afraid of it, because we are seen as unnatural or different.
Then I took a couple of days over that weekend and wrote about it for Slugger O Toole, and then ended up on the Nolan Show as well. I had Presbyterian ministers, Catholic priests, childhood friends and people I didn't even know getting in touch.
It was overwhelmingly positive, a lot of people seemed to resonate with the story I told, but there was of course some of the usual stuff - emails, tweets and letters from people, people who sent clippings, messages from Heaven and highlighted certain things.
I was very lucky in that I had lots of people around me, both within the student movement and other organisations, friends and family, who were supportive and helped me filter some of that stuff out and deal with it in a constructive way. I was lucky, there are people who don't have that support.
I know people say it was a brave thing to do, but there are lots of people who aren't in that situation, who can't be so public and open, who don't have that support network, for whom the brave thing to do every day is just to survive and carry on.
Q. Were you NUS-USI president at the time?
A. Yes,I started my first term on July 1, 2015, so I had been in post for about half of my first term and it was a couple of weeks just before the marriage equality vote in the Assembly, which I think is why it gained so much extra momentum at the time.
I think, for me, it did show a side of some of our politicians that we don't often see or talk about in that so many of them - even if they were uncertain about the issue of marriage equality or didn't agree - so many of them took the time to respond to me, write to me or talk about what I had talked about.
They had started to see beyond the label, they saw the human experience and realised there are issues there to be dealt with. From that perspective, it also gave me an insight into some of our politicians; that gave me a bit of hope.
It was the first vote that passed with a majority, even though it was blocked by a petition of concern. I am fairly confident now. If you look at who has been returned in the last Assembly election - the vast majority have said they are in favour in marriage equality. There is an outright majority there.
I have been proud that the student movement this year has joined forces with the Rainbow Project, Amnesty, LGBT charities and trade unions to say with one collective voice to civic society that this is about nothing more than equality.
Q. How concerned are you that student fees in Northern Ireland might increase?
A. I think we have done an awful lot of work in the last year to very articulately make the case that tuition fees are not just ideologically bad, but, if you look at the state of play in England, they actually economically do not work. If you raise fees all you are doing to putting students in immeasurable levels of debt, but doing it in such a way that those loans will never be paid off.
The system does not sustainably fund itself anyway. If you raise fees, more students can't pay them off, you have to raise fees again to make your balance books look as if they check off, it doesn't work in practice and all they are doing is delaying the inevitable - breaking the system. For me, I think our work has resonated with people that if higher and further education is something that is inherently important - not just to the economy but in enhancing social mobility and social cohesion - then it should be free at the point of access. Students shouldn't be deterred from entering into it.
Tuition fees can act as a deterrent to those from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds, so the challenge is not should we raise fees or should we not, the challenge is how do we fund things properly so people can access education.
For us, it is about ensuring everyone who is in a place to contribute should do so fairly, to ensure that the system that so many of them benefited from is affordable to everyone else.
Kevin Shortt was last seen in the Woodside Walk area of Dunmurry
Police and the family of missing Kevin Shortt from the Dunmurry area are becoming increasingly concerned for his welfare.
The 35-year-old was last seen in the Woodside Walk area of Dunmurry on Friday 8th July and was wearing a grey Superdry jacket, grey trousers and black slippers.
Kevin is described as being 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.
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.
The scene of the fatal accident on the Lone Moor Road in Londonderry in which two-year-old Ronan McGavigan died
A toddler who died after being struck by a car is believed to have run out onto the road while chasing a ball.
Two-year-old Ronan McGavigan, passed away at Londonderry's Altnagelvin Hospital yesterday.
He had lived at Lone Moor Road near Derry City's Brandywell stadium and died despite the best efforts of medics to save his life.
Police said the accident happened at Lone Moor Road at around 1.15pm yesterday and involved one car.
Stunned local people last night gathered at the family home to express their condolences to the toddler's family and said his mum Laura and her partner John were "devastated".
Sinn Fein councillor Patricia Logue was amongst those who expressed their sympathies following the death.
Speaking ahead of visiting the family home last night, she said: "I want to express my sympathy to the family and friends of this young boy.
"It is a tragic and very personal loss for them.
"They are in our thoughts and prayers at this time, as they are trying to come to terms with such dreadful news."
"It was a pure accident, the wee boy ran out after a ball in between cars and unfortunately there was a car coming along."
Independent councillor Sean Carr also passed on his condolences and said the family were distraught.
Fr Eamon Graham, the family's parish priest from the Long Tower parish in Derry, who visited the scene of the accident, told the Belfast Telegraph: "It is terrible, it is a tragedy.
"I was speaking to neighbours and people are very upset and very saddened.
"It is just a tragedy. I will be with the family later on tonight.
"Nobody seems to know what happened.
"Obviously the child was hit by a car but what exactly happened I don't know.
"I assume the child ran out into the road.
"The thoughts of parishioners are with them and in our prayers.
"Nobody expects to lose a child, it is just a very sad time.
"There are no words adequate for a situation like this but we will try to support the family as best we can in the next days and weeks."
Ronan was a brother to Dylan, Michael and Selina and half-brother to Cadan and Conal.
Fr Michael Canny from the Waterside parish in Derry was with Ronan's family at Altnagelvin Hospital yesterday.
He said paramedics had tried their best to save the little boy's life - but unfortunately, it was in vain.
"The staff worked very long and hard and did everything they could but it wasn't possible to save the child and the family and grandmother were absolutely shocked and in total disbelief."
A PSNI spokesman said: "The collision occurred at around 1.15pm and involved a silver coloured Citroen Picasso car.
"The driver of the car has been spoken to by police and enquiries are currently ongoing."
The Lone Moor Road was shut in both directions at its junctions with the Brandywell Road and Southway.
PSNI Inspector David McIlwaine appealed to anyone who witnessed the collision or who had any information which could assist police with their enquiries to contact Strand Road on 101."
Funeral arrangements have yet to be finalised.
Meanwhile, one of Northern Ireland's main roads was closed last night due to a road traffic collision.
Police and ambulance personnel were called to the scene of a collision at the Sydenham by-pass in Belfast.
It is understood the accident involved a lorry and at least one car - a Hyundai Tucson - which was seen lying on its roof.
Diversions were in place but traffic going to George Best Belfast City Airport was being facilitated, a PSNI spokesman said.
A man with serious head injuries is fighting for his life in hospital after being attacked by a number of people in north Belfast
A man with serious head injuries is fighting for his life in hospital after being attacked by a number of people in north Belfast.
The victim, who is in his 40s, was set upon outside licensed premises on Flax Street in Ardoyne at around 5.25am on Sunday.
Police said he suffered serious head injuries and was taken to hospital where he is critically ill but stable.
They said "a number of unknown persons" were involved in the attack, which took place just outside the Shamrock bar.
In 2013, dissident republicans took to the stage of the Shamrock to issue death threats against two men and claim responsibility for the murder of a drug dealer.
Detective Inspector Heather Whoriskey has appealed to anyone who was in the area at the time of the assault and who has any information which may be of assistance to the investigation to contact detectives in Musgrave on 101, quoting reference 335 17/07/16.
Information can also be given anonymously through the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 18th July New Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire makes his first official appointment at Belfast City Hall where he signed a book condolence for the victims of the Nice terrorist attack attack in France. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye
Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 18th July New Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire makes his first official appointment at Belfast City Hall where he signed a book condolence for the victims of the Nice terrorist attack attack in France. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye
Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 18th July New Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire makes his first official appointment at Belfast City Hall where he signed a book condolence for the victims of the Nice terrorist attack attack in France. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye
New Secretary of State James Brokenshire has signed the Belfast City Hall book of condolence for the victims of the Nice terror attacks on his first official visit to Northern Ireland.
Brokenshire was made Secretary of State for Northern Ireland on Thursday following Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle.
The Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup took over from Theresa Villiers after she left the post and reject another role in May's cabinet.
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His first official engagement in Northern Ireland was to sign the book of condolence at Belfast City Hall.
"I wish to express my condolences to all of those affected by the appalling tragedy in Nice," he said.
"It is an unimaginable horror and as my first official engagement to sign the book of condolence is very fitting.
"It enables people to express their thoughts, condolences and also to underline how we stand together with the people of France and the people of Nice at this terrible time of loss."
Belfast Lord Mayor Brian Kingston said people in Northern Ireland had been shocked by the events in France, where 84 people were killed when a lorry ploughed through crowds celebrating Bastille Day.
"These were families and people out enjoying a celebration and we can barely comprehend how someone could so callously carry out such wanton taking of life," he said.
"We have very much responded to the public mood, we know people wish to express their sympathy to those who have been bereaved and injured - but also to show our solidarity to the French people and all those affected by this terrible atrocity."
The book opened at 11am to allow the people of Belfast to pay tribute to the victims of the attacks in Nice.
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On Monday night, a vigil will be held outside the City Hall at 6.30pm to remember the 84 people who died.
Those who attend are encouraged to wear black and bring French flags or banners.
A similar book of condolence was also opened at the Guildhall in Londonderry.
Mayor of Derry City and Strabane District Council Alderman Hilary McClintock said: "On behalf of the people of the city and district, I would like to extend our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to the people of France following the indiscriminate act of terror that was inflicted on the people of Nice who were out and about enjoying what should have been a day of celebration.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the families who have been bereaved and all those who have been injured."
Sinn Fein has been accused of hypocrisy after it declined to comment on whether Martin McGuinness had received a commemorative medal for IRA veterans.
The medal was struck by former IRA members for those who were part of the terror group in Londonderry between 1969 and 1972.
It is understood it was sent out this year to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising.
The Sunday Independent reported the story and said Sinn Fein had been silent on whether Mr McGuinness received a medal.
Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt said it was "hypocritical".
"The people of Northern Ireland need honesty if we are ever going to move forward," he said.
"Martin McGuinness was very clear in his evidence to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday when he revealed there were certain facts about his past he would not disclose 'under any circumstances'.
"It is hypocritical and undermining of the peace and political processes to refuse to disclose whether he received one of these so-called medals.
"Either he was proud of commanding what was then the world's deadliest terrorist organisation or he was not."
Unlike Gerry Adams, Mr McGuinness admitted being a member of the IRA but said he left in the mid-1970s - a claim gardai who served during the Troubles dispute.
The period marked by the medal covers the beginning of the IRA's no-warning bombing campaign in which the 'Derry Brigade' set off a car bomb in the mainly Protestant village of Claudy, killing nine people including a nine-year-old girl, Kathryn Eakin, in July 1972.
The Derry Brigade carried out hundreds of sniper and bomb attacks in the period and killed 22 British soldiers. Eight members of the unit also killed themselves either through accidental discharge of guns or premature bomb explosions.
Its campaign includedd concerted sectarian attacks on the small Protestant Diamond enclave on the west bank of the city, during which William King (49) was kicked to death by a mob of nationalist rioters.
Among those in the Republic who joined and travelled north to take part in the IRA activities was the then Dublin student radical Kieran Conway, who also received one of the commemorative IRA medals.
He was arrested while helping a group of IRA members including, he says, Mr McGuinness escape during a raid by British soldiers on a premises they were using for weapons training.
East Londonderry DUP MP Gregory Campbell said: "I don't see it as surprising given the nature of violent Irish republicanism - they live in a separate universe which seems to justify the unjustifiable.
"I have no doubt that some of the relatives of people who were terrorised will be equally traumatised that these people are being lauded by their organisation 40 years on."
A Republican charged with the murder of prison officer Adrian Ismay was among a group of protesters who shouted abuse at police during an Orange Order parade in north Belfast.
Christopher 'Christy' Robinson was pictured holding a GARC 'March Where You're Welcome' poster as loyalists walked past the Ardoyne shops on the morning of the Twelfth. At the weekend North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds called on police to investigate whether the 45-year-old had breached his strict bail conditions.
The DUP man said: "Robinson's presence at this protest merits an immediate investigation."
Prison officer Mr Ismay died of a heart attack in March, just 11 days after a New IRA booby-trap bomb exploded under his van in east Belfast. The following month Christy Robinson was charged with his murder and possessing explosives, but later freed on bail under strict conditions.
These include not being allowed to travel in private vehicles and wearing an electronic tag to monitor his movements.
The courts also banned Robinson from leaving his address in the Twinbrook estate in west Belfast between 9pm and 8am.
But despite these restrictions he was able to show up in Ardoyne at 8.30am on the morning of the Twelfth - eight miles away from his home - to take part in the anti-parading protest.
The DUP MP has demanded answers as to how he was able to take part in the GARC protest, and whether he breached his bail conditions by doing so.
He added: "It would seem that the concept of 'Greater Ardoyne' now extends as far as Twinbrook." Mr Dodds also queried how "Robinson could have travelled approximately eight miles across Belfast on public transport on the 12th morning to be at this protest whilst keeping the conditions of his bail".
Witnesses at the Ardoyne shops said Robinson was among republicans who shouted insults at Orangemen and PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton, who was there overseeing the policing operation.
Theresa May has launched a veiled attack on Jeremy Corbyn as she led moves to renew the UK's Trident nuclear deterrent.
The Prime Minister said some members of the Labour frontbench appeared to be the first to "defend the country's enemies" and the last to accept what the UK needs to protect itself.
Mrs May also told the Commons she was sure many Labour MPs, who will have a free vote on the motion tabled, would join the Government in voting to replace the submarine fleet which carries the Trident missiles.
Labour leader Mr Corbyn and key allies, including shadow chancellor John McDonnell, are set to vote against the motion.
Speaking in the Commons, Green MP Caroline Lucas (Brighton Pavilion) told Mrs May: "If keeping and renewing our nuclear weapons is so vital to our national security and our safety then do you accept that the logic of that position must be that every other single country must seek to acquire nuclear weapons?
"And do you really think that the world will be a safer place if it did? Our nuclear weapons are driving proliferation - not the opposite."
Mrs May replied: "No, no I don't accept that at all.
"I have to say to you that sadly you and some members of the Labour Party seem to be the first to defend the country's enemies and the last to actually accept the capabilities that we need."
David Cameron entered the Commons chamber and took his seat on the fourth row shortly before Mrs May made her first speech at the despatch box since succeeding him as Prime Minister.
Opening her remarks, Mrs May said the motion would allow the UK to "get on with the job of renewing an essential part of our national security for generations to come".
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She went on: "The threats we face are serious and it is vital for our national interest that we have the full spectrum of our defences at full strength to meet them.
"That is why, under my leadership, this Government will continue to meet our Nato obligation to spend 2% of our GDP on defence, we will maintain the most significant security and military capability in Europe and we will continue to invest in all the capabilities set out in the strategic defence and security review last year."
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Tory former minister Andrew Selous said Ukraine would have been "less likely to have lost a sizeable portion of its territory to Russia" had it continued to keep its nuclear weapons, adding there were lessons for the UK in this situation.
Mrs May replied: "You are absolutely right, there are lessons.
"Some people suggest to us that we should actually be removing our nuclear deterrent. This has been a vital part of our national security and defence for nearly half a century now and it'd be quite wrong for us to go down that particular path."
Labour MP John Woodcock, whose Barrow and Furness constituency is where the existing submarines were built, told Mrs May: "Will you be reassured that whatever you're about to hear from our front bench, it remains steadfastly Labour Party policy to renew the deterrent while other countries have the capacity to threaten the United Kingdom?
"And many of my colleagues will do the right thing for the long-term security of our nation and vote to complete the programme that we ourselves started in government."
Mrs May said Mr Woodcock was "absolutely right", adding: "The national interest is clear."
She also read out a section from the Labour Party's 2015 general election manifesto which committed it to support a "minimum, credible, independent nuclear capability" delivered by a continuous at-sea deterrent.
Mrs May welcomed the commitment offered by Mr Woodcock and many of his colleagues.
Mrs May insisted that threats to the UK from countries such as Russia and North Korea "remain very real" while also warning about the possibility of future threats.
She said: "We must continually convince any potential aggressors that the benefits of an attack on Britain are far outweighed by their consequences and we cannot afford to relax our guard or rule out further shifts which would put our country in grave danger.
"We need to be prepared to deter threats to our lives and our livelihoods and those of generations who are yet to be born."
SNP MP Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) said that 58 of Scotland's 59 MPs will be voting against renewal.
He asked what message it would send to the people of Scotland who were demonstrating through their elected representatives "we don't want Trident on our soil" if MPs backed the motion for renewal.
Mrs May replied: "I have to say to you that that means that 58 of the 59 Scottish members of Parliament will be voting against jobs in Scotland which are supported by the nuclear deterrent."
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Northern Ireland MPs
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During Monday's debate on Trident, DUP MP Ian Paisley gave support towards the renewal of the Governments nuclear weapons programme.
Speaking in Parliament today on Trident Ian Paisley said: "Could I congratulate the Prime Minister for her sure footedness today on bringing this motion before the House and at last allowing Parliament, in this session to make a decision.
"We will proudly stand behind the government on this issue tonight."
He further added, Could I encourage her to encourage the Scottish Nationalists, that if they dont want Trident jobs in Scotland, they will be happily taken in Northern Ireland."
SDLP
SDLP South Down MP Margaret Ritchie spoke against renewal of Trident.
She said: "The renewal of Trident is about status, not security. The elephant in the room today is that Trident only exists to further the image of the UK as a first-tier world power, not to make citizens safer.
"Leaving aside the party political timing of the vote today, the Governments commitment to nuclear weapons betrays a deep insecurity over the UKs role in the 21st century.
"The Motion tonight shows that the new Prime Minister is not committed to even multi-lateral nuclear disarmament. I fear renewing Trident will make the world less secure by increasing tensions and by increasing the risk of potentially catastrophic mechanical and human error.
"Trident also puts Northern Ireland at greater risk by making both the North and the Irish Sea potential targets in future conflicts. That is why I and the other SDLP MPs will be voting against renewal this evening."
UUP
Danny Kinahan, Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim, reiterated that the renewal of the UK's nuclear deterrent is essential.
South Antrim MP Danny Kinahan said: "Members of Parliament have been asked once again to decide how best to defend our nation and the role we play in avoiding the total warfare we saw in the last century. My colleague Tom Elliott MP and I will vote this evening to renew the Trident nuclear weapons programme. This is a decision that the Ulster Unionist Party has never taken lightly and one that we have always been confident in making.
"Tom and I both served our country in the Armed Forces and know what it is like to be on the ground during conflict. I strongly believe that our nuclear deterrent has and will continue to prevent many conflicts that would place our service personnel in mortal danger. Those who oppose our nuclear capabilities often argue against their cost as if they were a luxury that we could do without. They are not a luxury, they safeguard our nation and ensure that we play our part as a leading global peacekeeper. As our former Prime Minister indicated in 2013, Trident costs us less than 1.5% per cent of our annual benefits bill.
"As we are all acutely aware, Northern Ireland has a proud and long standing tradition of service in the Armed Forces. If the Scottish Government does not want to keep the weapons at HM Naval Base, Clyde then Im sure we will be more than happy to house the Trident programme and all of the thousands of jobs that go with it in our province."
Theresa May has signalled her support for the UK's nuclear deterrent
UK MPs have backed the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme, voting 472 to 117 in favour in House of Commons
The decisive result was returned in support of a Government motion which also included backing the plan to replace the existing submarine fleet carrying the missiles with four new Successor submarines.
Renewal of the continuous-at-sea deterrent is predicted to cost 31 billion, with a 10 billion contingency fund also set aside.
Labour MPs were subject to a free vote, with leader Jeremy Corbyn declaring he would oppose the motion - a stance which led to strong criticism from some of his backbenchers.
The SNP, the third largest party in the Commons with 54 MPs, also opposed the Government's plan.
Earlier Theresa May declared without hesitation that she would order a nuclear strike to kill hundreds of thousands of people if she thought it was necessary.
The Prime Minister gave the blunt reply during a parliamentary debate on the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme, which many suspect was staged by the government for the sole purpose of drawing attention to the rift between Jeremy Corbyn and a majority of Labour MPs.
Ms May was challenged by the SNPs George Kerevan, who asked: "Are you prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?
Ms May replied with one word: Yes.
She also told MPs that it would be "an act of gross irresponsibility" for the UK to scrap its nuclear weapons and accused opponents of the UKs Trident missile system of being "the first to defend the country's enemies".
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Previous prime ministers have avoided answering the hypothetical question of whether they would ever press the nuclear button. Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was Foreign Secretary in the closing years of the cold war, said it was a question no prime minister should ever answer directly.
But Ms May knew that the Labour leader was prepared to state his position, which is the opposite of hers. Without being asked, Jeremy Corbyn volunteered the statement that Im not making the decision that kills millions of innocent people.
He added: I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations.
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The decision to stage Monday's vote was made by David Cameron, who sat three rows back saying nothing while his successor addressed the Commons.
Officially, Parliament was being asked to agree to spend up to around 30 billion renewing the four Trident submarines that are equipped with nuclear missiles and warheads. Every hour of the day or night, there is always one submarine patrolling the sea.
Trident was originally bought from the USA by Margaret Thatcher as a last ditch defence in case the armies of the former Warsaw Pact, which was disbanded in 1989, overran Europe.
Since 1989, it has been the official policy of the Labour Party to support the retention of Trident, to which Jeremy Corbyn, as a back bench MP, was consistently opposed.
He announced that he would vote against Trident again, but as he spoke, he was constantly interrupted by Labour MPs who demanded that he should defend the partys policy instead of giving his own opinion. His response was that there is a review of Labour defence policy being carried out by the newly appointed Shadow Defence Secretary, Clive Lewis.
Independent
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Northern Ireland MPs
DUP
During Monday's debate on Trident, DUP MP Ian Paisley gave support towards the renewal of the Governments nuclear weapons programme.
Speaking in Parliament today on Trident Ian Paisley said: "Could I congratulate the Prime Minister for her sure footedness today on bringing this motion before the House and at last allowing Parliament, in this session to make a decision.
"We will proudly stand behind the government on this issue tonight."
He further added, Could I encourage her to encourage the Scottish Nationalists, that if they dont want Trident jobs in Scotland, they will be happily taken in Northern Ireland."
SDLP
SDLP South Down MP Margaret Ritchie spoke against renewal of Trident.
She said: "The renewal of Trident is about status, not security. The elephant in the room today is that Trident only exists to further the image of the UK as a first-tier world power, not to make citizens safer.
"Leaving aside the party political timing of the vote today, the Governments commitment to nuclear weapons betrays a deep insecurity over the UKs role in the 21st century.
"The Motion tonight shows that the new Prime Minister is not committed to even multi-lateral nuclear disarmament. I fear renewing Trident will make the world less secure by increasing tensions and by increasing the risk of potentially catastrophic mechanical and human error.
"Trident also puts Northern Ireland at greater risk by making both the North and the Irish Sea potential targets in future conflicts. That is why I and the other SDLP MPs will be voting against renewal this evening."
UUP
Danny Kinahan, Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim, reiterated that the renewal of the UK's nuclear deterrent is essential.
South Antrim MP Danny Kinahan said: "Members of Parliament have been asked once again to decide how best to defend our nation and the role we play in avoiding the total warfare we saw in the last century. My colleague Tom Elliott MP and I will vote this evening to renew the Trident nuclear weapons programme. This is a decision that the Ulster Unionist Party has never taken lightly and one that we have always been confident in making.
"Tom and I both served our country in the Armed Forces and know what it is like to be on the ground during conflict. I strongly believe that our nuclear deterrent has and will continue to prevent many conflicts that would place our service personnel in mortal danger. Those who oppose our nuclear capabilities often argue against their cost as if they were a luxury that we could do without. They are not a luxury, they safeguard our nation and ensure that we play our part as a leading global peacekeeper. As our former Prime Minister indicated in 2013, Trident costs us less than 1.5% per cent of our annual benefits bill.
"As we are all acutely aware, Northern Ireland has a proud and long standing tradition of service in the Armed Forces. If the Scottish Government does not want to keep the weapons at HM Naval Base, Clyde then Im sure we will be more than happy to house the Trident programme and all of the thousands of jobs that go with it in our province."
The 29-year-old man pleaded guilty to three counts of defilement of the child
A man who blackmailed a 13-year-old girl from his community into having sex with him using a compromising photograph has been jailed for six years.
The Republic's Central Criminal Court heard the photograph did not involve nudity and was not especially compromising but due to cultural differences it would have caused problems for the girl if her family became aware of it.
The girl had sent the picture to a different man but the accused had come into possession of it.
The 29-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect his victims identity, pleaded guilty to three counts of defilement of the child on dates between September and November 2012.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the offences had a squalidity about them and noted they had caused considerably difficulty for the young woman. He said he was taking into account that the victim had failed to receive family support to the extent that one might have hoped.
He noted the accused man's guilty plea and that he was not likely to re-offend.
Mr Justice McCarthy imposed a two year sentence on each of the three counts. He made the sentences consecutive to each other, noting if they were not consecutive the accused would have been punished for only one offence despite repeating the wrongdoing.
A local garda told Kerida Naidoo SC, prosecuting, that the accused man had been a family friend and had become jealous when the girl got a boyfriend. He came into possession of a compromising photograph of the girl that she had sent to someone else.
The garda said the accused man used the photograph to blackmail her into having sex, by telling her he would show it to her parents.
On three occasions he arranged to pick her up from school and brought her up to the Dublin mountains where he had sex with her. The girl did not want to have sex and told him so.
During one of the incidents he made a video. It was not explicit and the girl could be heard telling him to stop. On the final occasion he told her he would delete the image if she agreed to have sex.
The matter was reported to gardai in December and the man arrested and interviewed.
Sean Gillane SC, defending, said the accused man had a difficult enough background and a lot of responsibly had fallen on his shoulders as he grew up. He had a good work record and contributed to his family.
He handed in a number of reports and testimonials. He said his client was someone who was in general of a good nature, worked hard, was relatively quiet and responsible. He said he was not taking the impact on the victim lightly and had written a letter of apology.
Mr Gillane said the issue of jealousy should never have arisen and it seemed to trigger a response that was criminal and wrong. He submitted his client was otherwise of good character.
Irish Independent
Irish Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said she would "make no apology" for deporting individuals
Suspected jihadists face being expelled from the Republic of Ireland - even if the evidence against them would be deemed insufficient to support a criminal prosecution.
Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald said the State had a right to protect its citizens and that she would "make no apology" for deporting individuals in cases where intelligence suggested they were supporting Islamic extremism.
Ms Fitzgerald also said that while Ireland was "not likely" to face attack, the authorities are keeping tabs on "a limited number" of suspected extremist sympathisers and need to be vigilant.
The minister said a 'lone-wolf' attack, such as last week's terror atrocity in Nice, was "always a possibility".
Her comments, in an interview with the Irish Independent, come less than a fortnight after a 52-year-old man - alleged to be the foremost Irish-based facilitator of Isil fighters - was deported to Jordan, despite claims that he had previously been tortured by security services there. Ms Fitzgerald would not comment on the case specifically.
Read More: 'I admire anyone who survives in politics, its rough'
However, she said such deportations were justified in order to protect Irish citizens.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the man who mowed through a crowd with a truck and killed 84 Bastille Day revellers in Nice had phoned home just hours earlier and sent a picture of himself laughing from the French city.
The revelation was made by his brother, as 18 more victims continued to fight for their lives.
The attack by delivery man Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plunged France into new grief and fear, just eight months after jihadists killed 130 in Paris.
Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Forensics officers and policemen look for evidence near a truck on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 15, 2016. AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Killer: Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel AP A sign reading "Liberty, equality, fraternity, let us unite against barbarism" is placed on July 15, 2016 at a makeshift memorial near the site in Nice where a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day, killing at least 84 people. AFP PHOTO / BORIS HORVATBORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A woman places flowers on July 15, 2016 near the site in Nice where a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day, killing at least 84 people. AFP PHOTO / BORIS HORVATBORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - A woman looks at a truck stand guarded by the police on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 15, 2016, hours after it drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display. An attack in Nice where a man rammed a truck into a crowd of people left 84 dead and another 18 in a "critical condition", interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said Friday. An unidentified gunman barrelled the truck two kilometres (1.3 miles) through a crowd that had been enjoying a fireworks display for France's national day before being shot dead by police. / AFP PHOTO / ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULATANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images People stand on July 15, 2016 in front of flowers and candles placed near the site in Nice where a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day, killing at least 84 people. AFP PHOTO / BORIS HORVATBORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Forensic police work on the scene of a truck attack in Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) AP The truck which slammed into revelers late Thursday is seen at the site of the attack in Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) AP Forensic officers stands near a truck with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Claude Paris) AP The truck which slammed into revelers late Thursday, July 14, is seen near the site of an attack in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) AP A forensic officer stands near a van with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. At least 80 people were killed before police killed the driver, authorities said. (AP Photo/Claude Paris) AP Forensic officers at the scene of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Claude Paris) AP Twitter feed video grab courtesy of @harp_detectives of people running away after dozens of people are believed to have been killed when a lorry ploughed into a Bastille Day crowd in Nice. Photo credit: @harp_detectives/PA Wire PA Fire department ambulances and vehicles are parked near the scene of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Christian Alminana) AP Police officers, firefighters and rescue workers are seen at the site of an attack on July 15, 2016, after a truck drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Emergency services vehicles work on the scene after a truck, left, plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP) AP Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP) AP Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP) AP Ambulances line up near the scene of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Claude Paris) AP A man runs near the scene of an attack after a truck drove onto the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) AP Police officers seal off the area of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Ciaran Fahey) AP Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers stand near a van, with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers and rescue workers arrive at the scene of an attack on July 14, 2016, after a van ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers stand near a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers and firefighters arrive near the site of an attack on July 14, 2016, after a van ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers stand near a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers speak with a soldier after a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A soldier stands guard near the site of an attack in the French Riviera town of Nice, after a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A man walks with his hands up as police officers carry out checks on people in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images / Facebook
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Whatsapp Forensics officers and policemen look for evidence near a truck on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 15, 2016. AFP/Getty Images
And Turkey intensified its crackdown in the wake of Friday's failed coup, detaining 6,000 people - as world leaders and opposition politicians raised concerns that Recep Tayyip Erdogan would use the coup attempt as a pretext to consolidate his power.
Irish Independent
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has called for a commitment to a united Ireland to be included in the final Brexit treaty
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has for the first time opened the door to a future referendum on Irish unity.
In a significant move, Mr Kenny called on the European Union to prepare for the prospect of Northern Ireland seeking to join the Republic.
The Fine Gael leader said a future border poll was now possible in light of the decision by Britain to leave the EU.
And Mr Kenny even likened it to West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"The discussion and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered," he said, "in that if there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic, that should be catered for in the discussions.
"Because if that possibility were to happen, you would have Northern Ireland wishing to leave the United Kingdom, not being a member of the European Union, and joining the Republic, which will be a member of the EU."
The Taoiseach made the remarks to reporters following his speech at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal.
He alluded to the prospect of a border poll during off-script comments and agreed to clarify the remarks afterwards.
The Taoiseach told an audience that the North-South trade links were more important in terms of volume to the North, which would suggest an appetite for such a vote there.
Mr Kenny also suggested that the Common Travel Area had a "legal status" and officials were working to clarify this.
He later said there had once been the view that it would "impossible" for Britain to leave the EU but this had now been thrown on its head. The Taoiseach said the matter of a border poll must now be considered in negotiations on Brexit.
"So in the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, was able to be absorbed into West Germany and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union," the Taoiseach said.
"So when Northern Ireland voted to stay (in the EU), who knows what might happen in the time ahead? I am just making the point that these are the kinds of things that should be looked at in the broadest of ways in discussions that take place.
"People said it would be impossible that Britain would leave the European Union; that has taken place now."
He said discussions would take place about the "connections between the Republic and Northern Ireland, between Northern Ireland and the UK and the EU and our relationship with both" and "these are things that should be looked at in the context that they might happen in some time in the future".
The decision by Mr Kenny to throw open the prospect to a border poll will set him on a collision course with the DUP.
A fortnight ago, Mr Kenny was left humiliated after the Government's attempts to establish an all-island forum was shot down by First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster.
The newly appointed Secretary of State to Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, has also ruled out a border poll.
Sinn Fein has embarked on a campaign to have such a vote, but Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said a vote was unlikely in the near future.
Earlier, Mr Kenny said a second secretary-general in the Department of An Taoiseach would be appointed to deal with the Brexit talks.
Irish Independent
Boris Johnson has talks lined up with US secretary of state John Kerry and EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini
Theresa May's efforts to forge a close relationship with Washington got off to a bumpy start as US secretary of state John Kerry appeared to bang his head on the door of Number 10.
Mr Kerry, visiting the new Prime Minister in Downing Street, posed for photographers before turning to enter the famous black door - unaware it had been partially shut behind him.
But there was no sign of discomfort inside Number 10 as Mr Kerry and Mrs May chatted ahead of their meeting.
Mr Kerry will also hold talks with his counterpart Boris Johnson during the visit to London as the Government attempts to shore up its global status following the Brexit vote.
It hopes the meeting will demonstrate that Washington still values the "special relationship" between the two countries after the European Union referendum result.
After that engagement, Mr Johnson is hosting talks on Syria with his counterparts from the US, Germany, France and Italy, along with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Mr Johnson will also attend a meeting with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to discuss the conflict in Yemen.
Speaking ahead of the meetings, Mr Johnson said: "We must be more active, more engaged and more outward-looking, so I am delighted to have this early opportunity to welcome my international counterparts to London for important meetings on the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
"I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this."
Mr Johnson will travel to Washington DC on Thursday for talks on combating Islamic State.
Following the talks in Number 10, Mr Kerry said the Prime Minister was committed to a "calm, thoughtful, reasonable" way to deal with Brexit.
He said: "The Prime Minister and I had an excellent discussion and I'm very grateful to her for her restatement of the commitment to the very strong transatlantic partnership.
"We talked particularly about efforts to try to deal with counter-terrorism, the importance of our co-operation continuing.
"We also talked about Ukraine and Syria in particular.
"Most importantly we affirmed the imperative for the United States, Great Britain and the European community to work together to maximise the economic opportunity, minimise the disruption, deal with this in a way that has the wellbeing of the citizens of all of our countries and regions in mind in order to move our economies as fast as possible.
"I think the Prime Minister is very much committed to finding a calm, thoughtful, reasonable way forward that meets those needs.
"So I was encouraged by it and I look forward to conveying her very best wishes to the American people and President Obama."
Mr Johnson was urged to use his meeting with Saudi officials to express concern at the country's intervention in Yemen.
Amnesty's UK arms programme director Oliver Sprague said: "As the new Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson has a chance to show that he intends to bring a fresh approach which puts people before profit in British foreign policy.
"Mr Johnson should immediately stop the appalling sale of British-made weapons to Saudi Arabia - which are being used to commit atrocities in Yemen, in violation of international law.
"This is a chance to reflect on the morality of the hard-sell strategy the UK has been pursuing."
The Prime Minister's official spokeswoman said: "The No 10 custodians team, those doorkeepers, have done an excellent job over the last few weeks in particular of having to open that door to a lot of people arriving into Downing Street and we are proud of the way they do their role."
Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to be falling behind in their language skills by the time they start school, putting their chances of being successful in life at risk, according to a report.
In the last decade, nearly a million boys were not achieving the level expected of them at age five, often struggling to follow simple instructions or speak a full sentence.
The study, by Save The Children, warns that unless action is taken to ensure all youngsters have access to good quality early education, then almost a million more young boys could be left behind in the next 10 years.
In the last academic year alone, around 80,000 boys in England were behind in language and communication when they started school - equivalent to four boys in every reception class.
"The gender gap is well-documented," the study says, "It has hardly changed for five-year-olds over the past decade, despite a dramatic improvement in overall results.
"The difference in outcomes for boys and girls is having a devastating impact; nearly a million boys have fallen behind with their early language skills since 2006.
"That is nearly a million five-year-olds who may struggle with skills like explaining what they think and how they feel, and engaging with the adults and children around them."
Lagging behind at the start of their school career is often an indicator that these youngsters will continue to be behind later on, the children's charity said.
Overall, one in four boys were behind in language at age five in 2014/15, compared to 14% of their female classmates. Poor white boys performed the worst, with around 38% falling below the expected standard.
The study, which draws on official data and analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study, calculates that those who are not reaching the expected level at age five are four times more likely to be lagging behind in reading by the end of primary school.
Poor language skills also prevents young children from being able to express themselves and engage in the world around them, while in the long term it can affect their earnings, literacy skills and mental health as adults, it argues.
The report goes on to say that girls are out-performing boys in every area of the country, with the biggest gender gap in St Helens, Merseyside, where boys start primary school 17.3 percentage points behind their female classmates in language and communication.
At the other end of the scale, in Richmond, south west London, the gap is 5.4 percentage points.
The report calls for the government to help develop a well-qualified workforce, with an early years teacher in every nursery.
"We cannot wait for disadvantaged children and boys to get to school before they receive the support they need," it says.
"By this time many will have already fallen behind, with negative consequences for their childhoods, school attainment and life chances. We must invest in the best early years provision, led by early years teachers and supported by skilled staff at all levels, particularly in the most deprived areas."
Gareth Jenkins, of Save The Children said: "Every child deserves the best start in life. But in England, too many children, especially boys, are slipping under the radar without the support they need to reach their potential.
"They're falling behind before they even get to school and that puts their life chances at risk. In 2016, this is unacceptable. A whole generation of boys is being failed."
Andy Bowden, St Helens Council's cabinet member for education said: "We're very aware of the gender issue, but it's important to point out that the data used in this report is up to two years old (from 2014/15).
"Since then, great efforts have been made to encourage nurseries to narrow the very evident gaps in children's development when they start nursery or school.
"We're also doing all we can to encourage parents and carers to help prepare their children for school with initiatives like Read and Rhyme Time in our network of local libraries."
A Department for Education spokeswoman said: "We are making a significant investment in the early years sector and the number of qualified staff is rising with more trained graduates in the workforce and a record number of providers rated Good or Outstanding.
"This investment is paying off, latest figures show more than 80% of children are reaching the expected communication and language skills by age five, but we will continue working with the sector until every child gets the high-quality education they deserve."
Baton Rouge officer Markell Morris holds a bouquet of flowers and a Superman action figure left at the Our Lady of the Lake Hospital where the police casualties were brought (The Times/AP)
A gunman who murdered three Louisiana police officers in an ambush "was seeking out police", investigators have confirmed.
State police also officially identified the Baton Rouge gunman as former US Marine Gavin Long, who was killed at the scene.
The shooting on Sunday also left three officers injured, one critically.
Col Mike Edmonson said Long's " movements, his direction, his attention, was on police officers".
Mr Edmonson also said investigators have interviewed people who had contact with the gunman in Baton Rouge, but officials are still asking any others who might have known him 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.
Long, from Kansas City, Missouri, turned 29 on Sunday, the same day he opened fire.
Just days earlier, one of the murdered officers posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.
US President Barack Obama urged people 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," he said.
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.
He had no known ties to any extremist groups.
Although he was believed to be the only person who fired at officers, authorities said they were unsure if 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 but were later released without charge.
Mr Cain said authorities planned to continue investigating whether the gunman had any assistance "indirectly, directly here or at home".
While in the military, Long was awarded several medals, including one for good conduct, and received an honourable discharge. His occupational expertise was listed as "data network specialist".
It is 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.
Baton Rouge police run from the emergency room as a man is taken into custody after a gun was found in his vehicle near the entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center yesterday
Three US police officers have been killed and three others were wounded after a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Police said the suspect was shot and killed at the scene. Authorities initially believed that two other assailants might be at large, but hours later said that no other active shooters were in the city.
President Barack Obama said the killings were attacks "on the rule of law and on civilised society, and they have to stop".
He said there was no justification for violence against law enforcement and that the attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one.
The shooting - which took place just before 9am, less than a mile from police headquarters - came amid escalating tensions across the US between the black community and police. The races of the suspect and the officers were not immediately known.
It was the fourth high-profile deadly encounter in the United States involving police over the past two weeks.
The violence has left 12 people dead, including eight police officers, and sparked a national debate over race and policing.
The attack began at a petrol station on Airline Highway. The shooter's body was next door, outside a fitness centre.
Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards rushed to the hospital where the officers who were shot during the attack were taken.
"Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice," Mr Edwards said.
A witness said he saw a masked man in black shorts and shirt running from the scene where the three officers were killed. Brady Vancel said the man looked like a pedestrian running with a rifle in his hand, rather than someone trained to move with a rifle.
Mr Vancel said he had gone to work on a flooring job near the petrol station when he heard semi-automatic gunfire 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".
Yesterday afternoon, more than a dozen police cars with lights flashing were massed near a commercial area of car dealerships and chain restaurants on the highway.
That area was about a quarter of a mile from a petrol station, where almost nightly protests had been taking place.
Five officers were rushed to Our Lady Of The Lake Regional Medical Centre. Of the two who survived the shooting, one was in a critical condition and the other was in a fair condition.
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 officers on July 5 after a scuffle at a convenience store.
Attack took place when the train was near the city of Wurzburg (File photo)
German police have shot dead a man who injured multiple passengers on a train near the German city of Wurzburg.
The dpa news agency reported that Wuerzburg police said the man attacked passengers on a regional train in Bavaria with "blunt and slashing" weapons and several people possibly had life-threatening injuries.
They would not comment on the German media reports that the man had attacked passengers with an axe.
The Bavarian interior ministry confirmed that police had shot and killed the attacker.
Several of the injured were said to be in a critical condition, Bayerischer Rundfunk radio reported.
Trains running between Wurzburg and Ochsenfurt were cancelled.
A man stands in front of a tank at the entrance to Istanbul's Ataturk airport
Mourners pray in front the coffins of policemen killed during the attempted coup
Turkish anti-riot police officers stand next to an armed vehicle at Taksim Square in Istanbul
A sense of normality has started to return to the streets of Turkey, according to Northern Ireland holidaymakers caught up in the drama of the failed military coup.
At least 290 people were killed and more than 1,400 injured in the unrest which swept through the country over the weekend.
Flights from Dublin were cancelled on Saturday and the US Federal Aviation Administration has upheld an order that no Turkish flights land in the country.
But Northern Ireland tourists appeared to be determined to make the most of their holiday in Turkey's resorts.
And Irish tourists have already started flowing back into the country again.
Yesterday, Turkish Airways took two flights from Dublin to Istanbul - one of the cities at the centre of Friday's failed coup - with several more flights scheduled for the rest of the week.
And Aer Lingus also began to reinstate its route between Dublin and Izmir on Saturday.
Tanks rolled through the streets of Istanbul and Ankara on Friday night as the country's army attempted to seize control.
And the disturbances crept to other parts of the country including Marmaris, where the Palmer and Kaya families from Millisle and Newtownards will be staying for another week.
Despite the city being around six hours south-west of Ankara - the country's capital where the coup's main efforts were focused - international media has reported tourists hearing gunfire on the street in Marmaris, a coastal town popular with British tourists.
Paul Higgins, a journalist from Northern Ireland, is staying in the city.
He described how an extra prayer call in the middle of the night alerted him to the fact that something was amiss.
"Everyone was glued to their laptops, tablets and phones trying to find out what was going on," he said.
"People were called to the street by the president, but the coup wasn't brought down by the gendarmerie or the president but by the people here - the civilians.
"There have been pictures of Turkish citizens surrounding the army."
But despite the weekend's disturbances, the mood among the region's holidaymakers is generally upbeat.
Speaking from Greenpark apartments in the Armutalan district of Marmaris, Millisle man Andrew Palmer said: "No one's going to drag me home early."
The father-of-three has been in the city for a week and has another week left of the holiday - and said he is happy for his family to stay in Turkey.
"Today things have been back to normal - there are around 12 British families playing in the pool and we were out sightseeing yesterday.
"My wife and I explained what was happening to our eldest daughter but our youngest two children - aged 8 and 10 - seem to be oblivious to it. They haven't asked us any questions about it."
Mr Palmer explained that hotel staff had tried to shield tourists from what was going on, telling them to stay inside and not to worry.
"The staff in the hotel have been fantastic, they just want to protect us from it and not worry us," he said.
"In the bar there were pictures on the news of it.
"It was in Turkish so I couldn't understand it, but I could see from the pictures what was happening. The barman just turned it off so that it wouldn't worry anyone."
Dungannon woman Rebecca McSorley is in Kusadasi, a town on Turkey's west coast. She said she was "terrified" as she watched cars circling the streets, lights flashing and blaring their horns while men shouted.
She said not being able to understand what was going left her and her mum frightened.
"We were out shopping and suddenly we noticed the mood began to change, so we decided to leave and go back to the hotel. We looked out the balcony window and people were blocking the road in their cars and shouting.
"We were distraught, because we had no idea what was happening.
"The hotel staff told us the men were shouting, 'Stay out all night. Don't sleep to support the president,' but because they were working they too were confused about it.
"Things are back to normal now.
"There's still a bit of an atmosphere, as if people are still taking it in. Before, people were always saying hello to us and chatting, but now it's a lot quieter in town.
"We're going home tomorrow so we've been back at the hotel packing, but we wouldn't have any worry about going outside of the hotel."
Reports suggest the deal will allow Iran to expand a key nuclear programme in little more than a decade
Key restrictions on Iran's nuclear programme imposed under an internationally negotiated deal will start to ease years before the 15-year accord expires, advancing Tehran's ability to build a bomb even before the end the pact, according to reports.
The document obtained by The Associated Press is the only text linked to last year's deal between Iran and six foreign powers that has not been made public, although US officials say members of Congress have been able to see it.
It was given to the AP by a diplomat whose work has focused on Iran's nuclear programme for more than a decade, and its authenticity was confirmed by another diplomat who possesses the same document.
The diplomat who shared the document with the AP described it as an add-on agreement to the nuclear deal. But while formally separate from that accord, he said that it was in effect an integral part of the deal and had been approved both by Iran and the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, the six powers that negotiated the deal with Tehran.
Details published earlier outline most restraints on Iran's nuclear programme meant to reduce the threat that Tehran will turn nuclear activities it says are peaceful to making weapons.
But while some of the constraints extend for 15 years, documents in the public domain are short on details of what happens with Iran's most proliferation-prone nuclear activity - its uranium enrichment - beyond the first 10 years of the agreement.
The document says that as of January 2027 - 11 years after the deal was implemented -Iran can start replacing its mainstay centrifuges with thousands of advanced machines.
Centrifuges churn out uranium to levels that can range from use as reactor fuel and for medical and research purposes to much higher levels for the core of a nuclear warhead. From year 11 to 13, says the document, Iran can install centrifuges up to five times as efficient as the 5,060 machines it is now restricted to using.
Those new models will number less than those being used now, ranging between 2,500 and 3,500, depending on their efficiency, according to the document. But because they are more effective, they will allow Iran to enrich at more than twice the rate it is doing now.
The US says the Iran nuclear agreement is tailored to ensure that Iran would need at least 12 months to "break out" and make enough weapons grade uranium for at least one weapon.
But based on a comparison of outputs between the old and newer machines, if the enrichment rate doubles, that breakout time would be reduced to six months, or even less if the efficiency is more than double, a possibility the document allows for.
The document also allows Iran to greatly expand its work with centrifuges that are even more advanced, including large-scale testing in preparation for the deal's expiry 15 years after its implementation on January 18.
A US official noted, however, that the limit on the amount of enriched uranium Iran will be allowed to store will remain at 300kg for the full 15 years, significantly below the amount needed for a bomb. As well, it will remain restricted to a level used for reactor fuel that is well below weapons grade.
"We have ensured that Iran's breakout time comes down gradually after year 10 in large part because of restrictions on its uranium stockpile until year 15," the official said.
"As for breakout times after the initial 10 years of the deal, the breakout time does not go off a cliff nor do we believe that it would be immediately cut in half, to six months."
The document does not say what happens with enrichment past year 13. That indicates a possible end to all restrictions on the number and kind of centrifuges even while constraints on other, less-proliferation prone nuclear activities remain until year 15.
Iran insists it is not interested in nuclear weapons, and the pact is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA says Tehran has essentially kept to its commitments since the agreement was implemented, a little more than six months after Iran and the six powers finalized it on July 14, 2015.
Marking the agreement's anniversary on Thursday, President Barack Obama said it has succeeded in rolling back Iran's nuclear program, "avoiding further conflict and making us safer."
But opposition from US Republicans could increase with the revelation that Iran's potential breakout time would be more than halved over the last few years of the pact.
Also opposed is Israel, which in the past has threatened to strike Iran if it deems that Tehran is close to making a nuclear weapon.
Alluding to that possibility, David Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security is a US government go-to resource on Iran's nuclear programme, said the plan outlined in the document "will create a great deal of instability and possibly even lead to war, if regional tensions have not subsided."
The deal provides Iran with sanctions relief in exchange for its nuclear constraints. But before going into recess, US Congress last week approved a bill to impose new sanctions for Tehran's continuing development and testing of ballistic missiles, a programme the White House says is meant to carry atomic warheads even if it is not part of the nuclear agreement.
It also approved a measure that calls for prohibiting the Obama administration from buying more of Iran's heavy water, a key component in certain nuclear reactors.
The White House has said removing the country's surplus heavy water denies Tehran access to a material that may be stored for potential nuclear weapons production. But critics note that the purchase was made only after Iran exceeded heavy water limits proscribed by the nuclear deal and assert it rewarded Tehran for violating the agreement.
AP
Mourners pray in front the coffins of policemen killed during the attempted coup
A man stands in front of a tank at the entrance to Istanbul's Ataturk airport
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)
Flights to and from Turkey have started returning to normal after at least 265 people died in an attempted military coup.
Britons were advised to stay indoors in Ankara and Istanbul as unrest began to unfold on Friday night.
British Airways cancelled all flights to and from the country on Saturday, but the airline said flights are now taking off again.
The Foreign Office said the security situation in the country "remains potentially volatile", and advised people in Ankara and Istanbul to avoid public places, in particular demonstrations, and to remain vigilant.
It said coastal resorts do not appear significantly affected.
The UK's largest travel association, Abta, said the situation was "fluid", adding: "The vast majority of British travellers to Turkey will fly direct to beach resorts on Turkey's south coast which are hundreds of miles from Istanbul and the capital Ankara."
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.
On Sunday evening a British Airways spokeswoman said flights would be operating today.
Thomson and First Choice flights to Dalaman, Antalya, Izmir and Bodrum are as normal.
Airline easyJet flies from the UK to Antalya, Bodrum, Dalaman and Ismir in Turkey.
"Current advice from the British authorities is to continue our flying programme. This will be under continuous review," it said.
On Saturday, Thomas Cook had been advising customers to "stay in their hotels until further notice", but a later statement from the company said its flight and holiday programme is operating as normal and customers are enjoying their holidays.
Advice on the Foreign Office website said: "The situation in Turkey appears to be calming following an attempted coup overnight on July 15-16. The security environment, however, remains potentially volatile.
"If you are in Turkey, please follow the advice of authorities, monitor travel advice and contact your airline or tour operator.
"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.
Turkey could fall foul of Nato's "requirement with respect to democracy" if it fails to uphold the rule of law in the wake of an attempted coup, the US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned.
The Turkish government's response to the failed coup has alarmed both the US and the EU, after it described the plotters as a "cancer" which had to be "cleansed" from public institutions.
A State Department spokesman has suggested it is "too soon to say" if a clampdown by the Erdogan government could jeopardise Turkey's membership of Nato.
But Nato's leadership has made it clear that a commitment to "uphold democracy, including tolerating diversity" is one of the five core requirements for members of the alliance.
Around 8,000 police officers have been suspended across Turkey following the failed coup, with more than 6,000 people in the army, the judiciary and other state bodies arrested as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response to Friday's events.
Erdogan has said the people who attempted the coup "must pay," and that the government will consider introducing the death penalty for people beleived to have committed traitorous acts against the state.
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At a joint news conference with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that America stands "squarely on the side of the elected leadership in Turkey," but that "we urge the government of Turkey to to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions and the rule of law".
While Ms Mogherini warned that countries that allow the death penalty cannot joing the European Union, Mr Kerry added that "Nato also has a requirement with respect to democracy," Washington Post reported.
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Members of Turkey's armed forces said they had taken control of the country, but Turkish officials said the coup attempt had been repelled early Saturday morning in a night of violence, according to state-run media. (Ismail Coskun/IHA via AP) AP A tank moves into position as Turkish people attempt to stop them, in Ankara, Turkey, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. Members of Turkey's armed forces said they had taken control of the country Friday as explosions, gunfire and a reported air battle between loyalist forces and coup supporters erupted in the capital. President Erdogan remained defiant and called on people to take to the streets to show support for his embattled government. (AP Photo) AP A tank is parked in the entrance to Istanbul's Ataturk airport, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. Members of Turkey's armed forces said they had taken control of the country, but Turkish officials said the coup attempt had been repelled early Saturday morning in a night of violence, according to state-run media. (Ismail Coskun/IHA via AP) AP Police officers and ambulances are seen outside the military headquarters in Ankara, Turkey, late Friday, July 15, 2016. Members of Turkey's armed forces said they had taken control of the country, but Turkish officials said the coup attempt had been repelled early Saturday morning in a night of violence, according to state-run media. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) AP Turkish soldiers secure Istanbul's Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) AP Turkish soldiers are seen on the Asian side of Istanbul, Friday, July 15, 2016. A group within Turkey's military has engaged in what appeared to be an attempted coup, the prime minister said, with military jets flying over the capital and reports of vehicles blocking two major bridges in Istanbul. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told NTV television: "it is correct that there was an attempt," when asked if there was a coup. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) AP 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) AP A tank crashes a car as people take streets in Ankara, Turkey during a protest agaist military coup on July 16, 2016. 42 dead in Ankara coup attempt clashes: TV citing prosecutor. Turkish military forces on July 16 opened fire on crowds gathered in Istanbul following a coup attempt, causing casualties, an AFP photographer said. The soldiers opened fire on grounds around the first bridge across the Bosphorus dividing Europe and Asia, said the photographer, who saw wounded people being taken to ambulances. / AFP PHOTO / ADEM ALTANADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images EDITORS NOTE: Graphic content / People celebrate after they take over military position on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. At least 60 people have been killed and 336 detained in a night of violence across Turkey sparked when elements in the military staged an attempted coup, a senior Turkish official said. The majority of those killed were civilians and most of those detained are soldiers, said the official, without giving further details. / AFP PHOTO / Bulent KILICBULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A tank drives on streets in Ankara, Turkey as people protest agaist military coup on July 16, 2016. 42 dead in Ankara coup attempt clashes: TV citing prosecutor. Turkish military forces on July 16 opened fire on crowds gathered in Istanbul following a coup attempt, causing casualties, an AFP photographer said. The soldiers opened fire on grounds around the first bridge across the Bosphorus dividing Europe and Asia, said the photographer, who saw wounded people being taken to ambulances. / AFP PHOTO / ADEM ALTANADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A car burns during firefight between Turkish army and Turkish police, in Istanbul's Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. Members of Turkey's armed forces said they had taken control of the country, but Turkish officials said the coup attempt had been repelled early Saturday morning in a night of violence, according to state-run media. (AP Photo/Cavit Ozgul) AP A Turkish police officer talks on a phone during clashes in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. At least 60 people have been killed and 336 detained in a night of violence across Turkey sparked when elements in the military staged an attempted coup, a senior Turkish official said. The majority of those killed were civilians and most of those detained are soldiers, said the official, without giving further details. / AFP PHOTO / Bulent KILICBULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Turkish anti riot police officers use water cannon on people as a police bus carry detained Turkish soldiers after they took over military position on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. The number of dead from a coup attempt in Turkey has risen to 90, the state-run news agency Anadolu reported on July 16, 2016, adding that 1,154 people were wounded. Nearly 200 unarmed soldiers at the Turkish military headquarters have meanwhile surrendered, an official said, adding that special troops were currently securing the complex. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images ISTANBUL, TURKEY - JULY 16: Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture anTurkish Army APC after soldiers involved in the coup surrendered on Bosphorus bridge on July 16, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul's bridges across the Bosphorus, the strait separating the European and Asian sides of the city, have been closed to traffic. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced an army coup attempt, that has left atleast 90 dead 1154 injured in overnight clashes in Istanbul and Ankara. (Photo by Gokhan Tan/Getty Images) Getty Images TOPSHOT - Turkish solders stay with weapons at Taksim square as people protest agaist the military coup in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. Turkish military forces on July 16 opened fire on crowds gathered in Istanbul following a coup attempt, causing casualties, an AFP photographer said. The soldiers opened fire on grounds around the first bridge across the Bosphorus dividing Europe and Asia, said the photographer, who saw wounded people being taken to ambulances. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - A Turkish police officer talks on a phone during clashes in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. At least 60 people have been killed and 336 detained in a night of violence across Turkey sparked when elements in the military staged an attempted coup, a senior Turkish official said. The majority of those killed were civilians and most of those detained are soldiers, said the official, without giving further details. / AFP PHOTO / Bulent KILICBULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images ISTANBUL, TURKEY - JULY 16: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech to his supporters in Istanbul, July 16, 2016, Turkey. Istanbul's bridges across the Bosphorus, the strait separating the European and Asian sides of the city, have been closed to traffic.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced an army coup attempt, that has left atleast 90 dead 1154 injured in overnight clashes in Istanbul and Ankara. (Photo by Defne Karadeniz/Getty Images) Getty Images Turkish anti riot police officers detain Turkish soldiers who allegedly took part in a military coup as they are leaving in a bus the courthouse at Bakirkoy district 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images 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) AP A piture taken in a bus leaving the courthouse at Bakirkoy district in Istanbul on July 16, 2016 shows a handcuffed Turkish soldier who allegedly took part in a military coup. 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A Turkish special force police officer guards the site where Turkish President attends the funeral of a victim of the coup attempt in Istanbul on July 17, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pakistani protestors shout slogans during a rally held in support of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Karachi on July 17, 2016. Turkish authorities on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / RIZWAN TABASSUMRIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Turkish anti-riot police officers stand next to an armed vehicle at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 17, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images ISTANBUL, TURKEY - JULY 17: International passengers wait for flight information after flights to Ataturk Airport were delayed or cancelled on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt which claimed the lives of more than 250 people. In raids across Turkey 6,000 people have been arrested in relation to the failed coup including high-ranking soldiers and judges, Turkey's Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said. (Photo by Kursat Bayhan/Getty Images) Getty Images 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) AP TOPSHOT - A woman hugs a man as he cries near the flag-draped coffin of a relative as they mourn in Istanbul on July 17, 2016, during the funeral of seven victims of the July 15 coup attempt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / ARIS MESSINISARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A police officer stands next to an armoured vehicle that was used by soldiers during the coup attempt at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 17, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / ARIS MESSINISARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacts after attending the funeral of a victim of the coup attempt in Istanbul on July 17, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed today 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. / AFP PHOTO / BULENT KILICBULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan rally outside the White House in Washington, DC on July 17, 2016. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty after the attempted coup. / AFP PHOTO / YURI GRIPASYURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A police officer stands next to an armoured vehicle that was used by soldiers during the coup attempt at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 17, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / ARIS MESSINISARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan rally outside the White House in Washington, DC on July 17, 2016. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty after the attempted coup. / AFP PHOTO / YURI GRIPASYURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pro-Erdogan supporters wait for Turkish President at Kizilay square in Ankara on July 17, 2016 during a demonstration in support to the Turkish government following a failed coup attempt. Turkish authorities pressed on July 17 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 also said Turkey could consider reinstating the death penalty following the putsch bid, despite concerns in the international community. / AFP PHOTO / ADEM ALTANADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images ISTANBUL, TURKEY - JULY 17: Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they gather in Istanbul's main Taksim Square on July 17, 2016, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt which claimed the lives of more than 290 people. In raids across Turkey 6,000 people have been arrested in relation to the failed coup including high-ranking soldiers and judges, Turkey's Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said. President Erdogan calls on supporters to stay in streets, public squares all week. (Photo by Kursat Bayhan/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 17: People wave Turkish flags at a rally on the streets of Kizilay Square in reaction to the failed military coup on July 17, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt which claimed the lives of more than 250 people. In raids across Turkey 6,000 people have been arrested in relation to the failed coup including high-ranking soldiers and judges, Turkey's Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 17: People wave Turkish flags in front of an electronic billboard displaying the face of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a rally on the streets of Kizilay Square in reaction to the failed military coup on July 17, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt which claimed the lives of more than 250 people. In raids across Turkey 6,000 people have been arrested in relation to the failed coup including high-ranking soldiers and judges, Turkey's Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images Demonstrators wave Turkish and Ottoman flags at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 17, 2016 during a rally in support to the Turkish government following a failed coup attempt. 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Demonstrators rally at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 17, 2016 in support to the Turkish government following a failed coup attempt. 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A colleague cries as friends carry the coffin of a police officer killed in a failed military coup last Friday, during his funeral at 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) AP TOPSHOT - Demonstrators wave Turkish flags at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 17, 2016 during a rally in support to the Turkish government following a failed coup attempt. 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. / AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - An armed Turkish police officer stands guard during a funeral ceremony for victims of the failed July 15 coup attempt at Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara on July 17, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on July 17 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. / AFP PHOTO / ILYAS AKENGINILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - Pro-Erdogan supporters wave Turkish flags at Kizilay square in Ankara on July 18, 2016 during a demonstration in support to the Turkish government following a failed coup attempt. Turkish authorities pressed on July 17 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 also said Turkey could consider reinstating the death penalty following the putsch bid, despite concerns in the international community. / AFP PHOTO / ILYAS AKENGINILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - Women react during the funeral of a victim of the failed July 15 coup attempt in Istanbul on July 17, 2016. 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. / AFP PHOTO / GURCAN OZTURKGURCAN OZTURK/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - A boy is wrapped in a flag of the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on Taksim square on July 17, 2016, following a failed coup attempt. Turkish authorities pressed on July 17 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 also said Turkey could consider reinstating the death penalty following the putsch bid, despite concerns in the international community. / AFP PHOTO / DANIEL MIHAILESCUDANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Turkish ambassador to Kuwait Murad Tameer speaks during a press conference at the Turkish embassy in Kuwait City, on July 18, 2016. Saudi authorities have detained the Turkish military attache to Kuwait for his suspected involvement in a foiled coup against the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, local media reported July 18. The attache, identified as Mikail Gullu, was arrested at an airport in the eastern Saudi city of Dammam as he attempted to board a flight to Germany, the reports said. / AFP PHOTO / YASSER AL-ZAYYATYASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images A Turkish police points his gun at a vehicle driver in front of courthouse on July 18, 2016, in Ankara. Turkey has detained more than 7,500 suspects involved in the coup plot seeking to oust the government, the prime minister said on Monday. Giving a new toll, he said 208 people were killed by the coup bid, including 145 civilians, 60 police and three soldiers. 1,491 were wounded, he added, In addition, the authorities have said more than 100 coup plotters were killed. / AFP PHOTO / ILYAS AKENGINILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images TOPSHOT - A Turkish police points his gun to a woman, asking her to leave the package she is carrying, in front of the court house in Ankara, on July 18, 2016, as some 7500 people have been detained in Turkey and almost 9000 officials sacked three days after a failed coup which has stunned the country. / AFP PHOTO / ILYAS AKENGINILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Family members and relatives carry the body of Murat Inci, 43 who was killed in Friday's failed coup attempt during a funeral service at Kocatepe Mosque on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Turkish special forces personel guard the entrance to the Ankara Courthouse where a hearing for generals and military personel involved in Friday's failed coup attempt was taking place on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Family members and relatives carry the body of Murat Inci, 43 who was killed in Friday's failed coup attempt during a funeral service at Kocatepe Mosque on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Turkish special forces personel guard the entrance to the Ankara Courthouse where a hearing for generals and military personel involved in Friday's failed coup attempt was taking place on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: The mother of Murat Inci, 43 grives over the coffin of her son who was killed in Friday's failed coup attempt during a funeral service at Kocatepe Mosque on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Family members and relatives assit the mother of Murat Inci, 43 who was killed in Friday's failed coup attempt during a funeral service at Kocatepe Mosque on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Family members and relatives assit the brother of Murat Inci, 43 who was killed in Friday's failed coup attempt during a funeral service at Kocatepe Mosque on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Family members and relatives carry the body of Murat Inci, 43 who was killed in Friday's failed coup attempt during a funeral service at Kocatepe Mosque on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images A Turkish man holds a Turkish flag as he stands inside a metro carriage at Kizilay metro station, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) AP ANKARA, TURKEY - JULY 18: Turkish special forces personel guard the entrance to the Ankara Courthouse where a hearing for generals and military personel involved in Friday's failed coup attempt was taking place on July 18, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Clean up operations are continuing in the aftermath of Friday's failed military coup attempt. Latest figures according to Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim raises the death toll to 208 with 1491 wounded. Continuing raids across the country have seen 7543 people detained and 316 arrested including high ranking soldiers, judges and police officers. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Getty Images A Turkish policeman, left, holds his weapon as he walks in front of damaged cars at the scene where the Ankara governor's office says a military officer was detained after he shot and killed the driver of a vehicle that he hijacked, at Ulus district in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. In a brief statement Monday, the governor's office said the officer whom it described as being mentally disturbed was caught by the security forces following a brief shoot out. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) AP A Turkish boy, right, dives in a fountain to cool himself from the heat at park in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) AP Turkish policemen stand guard at the scene where the Ankara governor's office says a military officer was detained after he shot and killed the driver of a vehicle that then officer hijacked, at Ulus district in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. In a brief statement Monday, the governor's office said the officer whom it described as being mentally disturbed was caught by the security forces following a brief shoot out. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) AP TOPSHOT - People carry the coffin of Sehidmiz Murat Inci, victim of the coup attempt during his funeral ceremony, at Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara on July 18, 2016. Support from the highest echelons in the army helped keep President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in power after the failed coup but July 15's events risk further undermining the military's status as a key player in Turkish politics. Turkey has detained 103 generals and admirals as well as more than 2,800 soldiers accused of supporting July 15's attempted power grab, but most of the military's senior figures stayed loyal to Erdogan. / AFP PHOTO / DIMITAR DILKOFFDIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images / Facebook
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Whatsapp A man stands in front of a tank in the entrance to Istanbul's Ataturk airport, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. Members of Turkey's armed forces said they had taken control of the country, but Turkish officials said the coup attempt had been repelled early Saturday morning in a night of violence, according to state-run media. (Ismail Coskun/IHA via AP)
The US "will certainly support bringing the perpetrators of the coup to justice," he said, "but we also caution against a reach that goes beyond that and stress the importance of the democratic rule being upheld".
The Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has insisted that President Erdogan's government will respect democracy, while Mr Kerry responded that Nato would "measure" its actions. "Obviously a lot of people have been arrested and arrested very quickly," Mr Kerry added, "The level of vigilance and scrutiny is obviously going to be significant in the days ahead. Hopefully we can work in a contructive way that prevents backsliding."
Ms Mogherini said the indcident "is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that."
The pair spoke after a meeting in Brussels that also included the bloc's 28 foreign ministers.
US officials have since denied Mr Kerry's comments on Nato were a warning to Turkey. State Department spokesman John Kirby told the Washington Post that Nato will be watching Turkey carefully, but added it was "too soon to say" its membership was at risk.
A senior official from the US embassy in Ankara told the Daily Sabbah, "Secretary Kerry didn't say anything at all about Nato membership being in jeopardy. There is nothing in his actual statement that indicates the US believes Turkey is in a danger in this sense."
In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said talks on Turkey's bid to the join EU would end if Ankara restores the death penalty.
Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said "the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member" of the bloc.
Both Ms Mogherini and Mr Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically-elected government.
But they illustrated deepening frustration with the Erdogan government's response to the failed coup, which has even included allegations by ministers of US complicity in the violence.
Independent
Members of Turkey's armed forces suspected of involvement in the attempted coup arrive at the court in Mugla (Depo Photos/AP)
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 detained following clashes in which 265 people were killed.
President Erdogan has said that Parliament will consider introducing the death penalty to deal with those believed to have committed traitorous acts against the state. And Turkeys 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 streets 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.
Funerals were held for some of those killed in the coup attempt, including Mr 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.
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 said European ministers meeting today in Brussels would reiterate that Turkey must conform to Europes democratic principles.
The coup, launched on Friday night by members of the military, has also increased tensions with the US, with Turkeys 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 and foreign ministries, 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, Turkeys 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 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 must present legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny.
Yesterday, the commander of the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey 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.
A man walks with his hands up as police officers carry out checks on people in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
A soldier stands guard near the site of an attack in the French Riviera town of Nice, after a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers speak with a soldier after a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers stand near a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers and firefighters arrive near the site of an attack on July 14, 2016, after a van ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers stand near a van that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers and rescue workers arrive at the scene of an attack on July 14, 2016, after a van ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers stand near a van, with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers carry out checks on vehicles in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice, after a van drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display on July 14, 2016. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Police officers seal off the area of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Ciaran Fahey)
A man runs near the scene of an attack after a truck drove onto the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Ambulances line up near the scene of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP)
Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP)
Emergency services vehicles work on the scene after a truck, left, plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP)
Police officers, firefighters and rescue workers are seen at the site of an attack on July 15, 2016, after a truck drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice. AFP PHOTO / Valery HACHEVALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Fire department ambulances and vehicles are parked near the scene of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Christian Alminana)
Twitter feed video grab courtesy of @harp_detectives of people running away after dozens of people are believed to have been killed when a lorry ploughed into a Bastille Day crowd in Nice. Photo credit: @harp_detectives/PA Wire
Forensic officers at the scene of an attack after a truck drove on to the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A forensic officer stands near a van with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. At least 80 people were killed before police killed the driver, authorities said. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
The truck which slammed into revelers late Thursday, July 14, is seen near the site of an attack in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Forensic officers stands near a truck with its windscreen riddled with bullets, that plowed through a crowd of revelers who'd gathered to watch the fireworks in the French resort city of Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
The truck which slammed into revelers late Thursday is seen at the site of the attack in Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
People stand on July 15, 2016 in front of flowers and candles placed near the site in Nice where a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day, killing at least 84 people. AFP PHOTO / BORIS HORVATBORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images
TOPSHOT - A woman looks at a truck stand guarded by the police on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 15, 2016, hours after it drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display. An attack in Nice where a man rammed a truck into a crowd of people left 84 dead and another 18 in a "critical condition", interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said Friday. An unidentified gunman barrelled the truck two kilometres (1.3 miles) through a crowd that had been enjoying a fireworks display for France's national day before being shot dead by police. / AFP PHOTO / ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULATANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP/Getty Images
A woman places flowers on July 15, 2016 near the site in Nice where a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day, killing at least 84 people. AFP PHOTO / BORIS HORVATBORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images
A sign reading "Liberty, equality, fraternity, let us unite against barbarism" is placed on July 15, 2016 at a makeshift memorial near the site in Nice where a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day, killing at least 84 people. AFP PHOTO / BORIS HORVATBORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images
Forensics officers and policemen look for evidence near a truck on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 15, 2016. AFP/Getty Images
The bells pealed from churches all along the sunny Mediterranean coastline yesterday morning calling the faithful to worship and signifying the third and final day of mourning for the victims of Nice.
However, life was returning to near normality everywhere after the shock and horror of Bastille Day on the Riviera.
In the village in south-west France where I have holidayed in peace for the past decade, the market stalls were busy as usual but there was little or no talk of what had happened.
Unlike Northern Ireland where violence at its height became an obsessive topic of conversation, people here are strangely detached, as if Nice had little or no direct bearing on their lives at all and they have concluded it couldnt happen to them.
On the day after Nice I took the train to Montpellier, arguably the youngest, fast-growing city in the south of France, with 400,000 citizens, half under the age of 25.
That evening it was as if nothing had changed other than the cancellation of a major outdoor concert, not because of any security concerns but out of respect for the victims.
The Place de la Comedie, the magnificent pedestrianised square, was packed as usual as were the cafes, tapas bars and restaurants which line the narrow streets and spill out from every corner. As I looked at the crowds of mostly young people I couldnt but help contrast the undeterred vibrancy of the place with the lockdown atmosphere which pervaded Belfast and so much of Northern Ireland when the threat of terror was never far away.
It seems as if the French see this threat in an entirely different light, no doubt in part because their country is so vast that it takes six hours good driving to go from Nice in the east to Perpignan on the Spanish border to the west.
Whatever President Hollande means by a continued and extended state of emergency was not apparent in Montpellier on Friday night. The streets and squares were packed and there were very few police in sight.
Though clearly security has tightened in Nice after the attack and at transport terminals and areas of France such as Paris and Marseille, where the multi-cultural differences are most in evidence, elsewhere there is little or no sign of any clampdown or reduction in normal life activity.
Expand Close The scene of the Enniskillen bomb seconds after the blast / Facebook
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Perhaps, it is simply not possible to provide the kind of security precautions which Northern Ireland experienced because France with its population spread over such an expansive land, could never be policed in such an intense and restrictive way.
No wonder President Hollande has called up 12,000 reservists he needs them all and probably many more to provide more overt security.
The coming month will be the biggest test of all for the security of southern France in particular.
At least a million Parisians decamp to the Mediterranean resorts each August. Along with holidaymakers from far beyond France, they throng every beach and attend nightly open air festivities such as concerts and fireworks displays on as large a scale as Bastille Day in Nice.
As I watched the crowds out in force as ever in Montpellier at the weekend, I couldnt but help think they were either foolhardy or bravely defiant.
It is defiance which defines the French today, deeply hurt that terrorism should blight so barbarically the message of Bastille Day liberty, equality, fraternity.
In the context of Northern Ireland, the Bastille Day massacre in Nice on such an important day in the French calendar could be likened to the Remembrance Sunday bombing at Enniskillen.
Like so many tens of thousands last week, I watched the Bastille fireworks exploding over the River Herault and stood in the village square as the mayor in his red, white and blue sash laid a wreath, old soldiers and local citizens stood to attention and the local band played a rousing rendering of the La Marseillaise.
It was a scene played out all over France, but just as with Remembrance Sunday in Enniskillen, in future years Bastille Day will have an added reason for commemoration, one that no one could have anticipated or believed could ever happen in the land of liberty, equality and fraternity.
As to whether there is another Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, or even more, lurking in the shadows of this vast country, no one can be sure.
Given all that is known to date about him and those who carried out the attacks in Paris, it seems likely that Nice will not be the last act of the terrorists.
Totally thwarting such a threat in such a sprawling country seems a well-nigh-impossible task. People may feel apprehensive but they are showing little or no outward sign of unease and are continuing to go about their lives normally in the immediate aftermath of Nice.
It is as if they prefer to run the gauntlet of any threat rather than adjust their lifestyle in any safety conscious way.
The next month on Frances sun-kissed beaches and resorts will be a massive security test for the hard-pressed Hollande.
It will not be easy given the level of public complacency which even events in Nice do not appear to dent.
As Theresa Villiers leaves her post as Secretary of State, it is worth noting that her departing comments expressed optimism about overcoming final logjams so that a legacy process to deal with the past can finally proceed. Welcome though political progress is in Northern Ireland, her positive outlook should also, however, be considered in the light of two key and as yet unanswered questions: is there public appetite for such a process, and will it help ensure greater stability and a better future for Northern Ireland?
Of course, the response to both depends on what the public thinks "dealing with the past" means as well as how the mechanisms proposed will facilitate this.
But if the public mind is not strongly oriented to probably, or yes, on both counts then Northern Ireland has problems.
Villiers' acknowledgment that the viability of a legacy process will require "sufficient consensus" (a well-known phrase among civil servants throughout the peace process and better understood as "critical minimum") across the "whole of the community to enable us to go ahead" is obvious enough, but what are the key principles driving a legacy process around which such a consensus must coalesce?
And, indeed, in the absence of such a consensus, can a legacy process command public confidence and provide a foundation for a more confident, less anxious and less divided Northern Ireland?
Of course, the mechanisms of the Stormont House Agreement will need to have the required latitude to tolerate differences of expectation, but, apart from Eames-Bradley (yet to be bettered as a coherent overview of potential problems and how to handle them), there has been no real engagement with wider society about how a legacy process will help Northern Ireland move away from the pain of its troubled past.
Sinn Fein's primary concern is clearly to further expose the brutality and illegality of actions carried out by the British State, and unionists will no doubt want Sinn Fein to provide truthful and detailed accounts of republican violence perpetrated throughout the conflict.
On that basis alone one can see that a legacy process is likely to be a highly contested affair and so become the new terrain of conflict.
It will also be disputed territory when it comes to questions about responsibility and integrity, with varying definitions of truth used and abused to support tactics of defence and attack.
The polarisation of communities and groups who see themselves as representative of those communities highlights the more glaring difficulty in finding and shaping consensus, but this distance could become even greater without some powerful centralising force to handle the disputes and friction that a legacy process will inevitably create.
The mechanisms of the Stormont House Agreement, whatever their designers call them and whatever their remit, may individually have considerable merit, but there appears little means by which to ensure coherence or consistency of purpose across and between those mechanisms.
Without a critical centre of control and influence there is a real danger that these disparate structures will allow parties and individuals to selectively pick from each for self-serving and divisive political purposes.
Further, the absence of a collective narrative, which explains how society as a whole is being helped by a legacy process and which people can see is the case, increases the possibility of outcomes being used to antagonise and beat opponents.
This, along with dissatisfaction about confronting the past, increases the likelihood of retaliatory demands.
The problem could be manageable - if the public knew and accepted that short-term disadvantages are both inevitable and necessary for long-term social gain. But without that sense, pessimism and doubt sets in, reinforcing anticipations of failure and the hardened win/lose conflict politics that Northern Ireland needs to move away from.
One recommendation is for academic projects to document new historical accounts which may emerge from testimony and documentation.
This is undoubtedly useful (although likely to cast academics as sympathetic to unionism, or republicanism) if it illuminates unknown, or less-known, influences and consequences. However, academic projects, too, can use new material to sustain old ideological positions and so lend support to condemnation of one side or the other.
Though necessary to indicate change, historical revisionism is less likely to encourage creative thought or experimentation with regard to exploring how the hopes and aspirations of individuals have been crushed by the weight of conflict. Nor in all probability will it help provide the space where ownership of narratives and the importance of social responsibility can be examined and discussed without fear of selling-out to the other side. On this, ponder how interesting it might be not just to see all the documentation that Sinn Fein has of the many meetings its leaders had with government officials from the inception of the peace process in a book, but performed as a play, where the lessons of changed thinking through engagement can be applied to other contexts and situations.
But perhaps one measure to help evaluate if a successful legacy process has benefited society as a whole comes from assessing whether it has created conditions and opportunities for reconciliation (better and more tolerant relations), or reinforced attitudes and expectations of conflict.
Interestingly, however defined, reconciliation does not appear to register in the current logjams where the participants remain preoccupied with justice and truth recovery.
This may be because it is seen as largely irrelevant - even though it provides a reference point for thinking about the success or failure of the entire process.
However ambiguously conceived or understood, reconciliation at least provides a constructive viewpoint by which to consider the mechanisms of investigation overall.
Framed by this aspiration communities, parties, individuals and society just might have a better chance of viewing the past more through the need to create a better future.
Sinn Fein has produced much material on dealing with the past, putting forward suggestions on a "public coalition" along with a "common act of acknowledgement" on reconciliation, but unionists have overwhelmingly ignored the issue.
The loyalist Progressive Unionist Party, in its two papers about transforming the legacy of conflict, has done more for thinking about this than the other unionist parties combined, yet this contribution was basically ignored - presumably because of perceived associations with paramilitarism.
The PUP papers talk about reconciliation as a process of social conversation based on equality and integrity, rather than using it as part of some political blame game. In that sense they see the merit of process over detail and even talk about the common good.
An emphasis on process means that the end result is more important than the short-term establishment of fact, but for some facts are more important than process. Such obsession will almost certainly keep Northern Ireland shackled to accusations about truth and lying over the past.
All of this points towards difficulty when it comes to achieving the "sufficient consensus" Villiers thought necessary for a workable and beneficial legacy process, but on which there has been no public consultation.
If asked, most people would have little idea what value the investigative mechanisms of the Stormont House Agreement are supposed to provide.
They would have even less of an idea about how the process envisaged will help Northern Ireland move on and put a line between the past and the future.
This is not a reflection of public apathy, but rather the reluctance of politicians to openly discuss the advantages of the process they are proposing and legislating for. Perhaps the short of it is they don't know how or whether it will work, and are fearful of the consequences.
Perhaps, too, they are unable to visualise a Northern Ireland that can deal with its past, because they are representative of the very divisions and polarisation that sustained that past.
James Brokenshire, the new Secretary of State, should be very concerned about such problems and vigilant to the potential they have to obstruct the emergence of a better future at practically every turn.
Whether he is up to that task and can see Northern Ireland though a new phase, where the political battleground is now about gaining control of the past, only time will tell.
Gene Pranger, CEO of Financial Town, at Waterfront Hall Belfast, as filling out a mortgage application with your banker over the internet from the coffee shop could soon become reality with developments in mobile video calling, a technology start-up said. PA
Filling out a mortgage application with your banker over the internet from the coffee shop could soon become reality with developments in mobile video calling, a technology start-up said.
Car loans may be arranged through a tablet or smartphone using a connection controlled by a bank representative a continent away, a company pioneering the mobile application said.
Utah-based Financial Town said its platform allowing a live video stream in part of the screen and signing or scanning of documents in another part was unique.
Chief executive officer Gene Pranger said: "You can get quick and easy access to a financial service representative.
"When you go for your first mortgage or want to buy another car you don't have to walk somewhere, you can just do it from the coffee shop and have a personal discussion with your banker.
"That is going to be a lot more efficient and easy for you as a consumer, so that is what will force the issue for me."
He said he expected to have 40 institutions using his BankOn Mobile Video system by next year.
"In 10 years you will probably find this is very commonplace, all financial institutions are going to be forced to move in this direction.
"Branch infrastructure is very expensive, expanding to new branches is prohibitive and probably not the first choice for financial institutions.
"Consumers are not going into the branch, how is a financial institution going to maintain the personal relationship, especially with the millennium generation, how are they going to maintain and grow business with you over time?"
Mr Pranger demonstrated his system at the World Credit Union's annual conference in Belfast.
Delegates chatted to a customer service representative in Salt Lake City using a tablet.
The software can also take pictures of documents like passports and handle e-signatures. Tax forms or applications for driving licences may be processed.
Mr Pranger claimed video call platforms like Facetime did not offer the level of interactivity which his system enjoyed.
"What we have patent pending now is the ability to have a live video stream going on in one screen and a second screen will be controlled by a person in a video call centre.
"He can send me any form that you would want and I would have the ability to fill it out. He also has the ability to accept signatures.
"If I am taking a loan application I can get through the entire process without ever having to sit down face to face with a bank representative.
"You can just do it over the system."
Mark Sievewright, the Welsh president of credit union solutions at the US financial services company Fiserv, said a host of small firms were ironing out problems in the banking experience with laser-like focus.
"Every notable start-up has been focused on delivering a frictionless experience."
Xbox One S will arrive in select regions, including the US and the UK, at the beginning of August
Xbox has announced the release date for Xbox One S - the slimmer, much improved console will go on sale from 2 August, the company has said.
But not everyone might want to buy the new console, since Microsoft has already teased that a new Project Scorpio Xbox will be launched next Autumn. That console will feature huge amounts of power that will allow it to play virtual reality games.
Pre-orders for the console have already opened, and all that have already been made will be shipped before that date. They are still open, and the new console can be ordered for 349.99.
In the US, the Xbox One S will cost $399. It will arrive in select regions, including the US and the UK, at the beginning of August.
In all markets, only the 2TB launch edition of the console will be available at launch. The 1TB and 500GB version of the console will sell for 299.99 and 249.99, and Microsoft said it would announce when they would be available soon.
Microsoft released a new teaser trailer for the console alongside the announcement of the release date. The new video shows little about the console itself beyond another look at its design but includes a round-up of some of the features that will come with it.
The Xbox One S is 40 per cent smaller than the original Xbox One. It also adds support for 4K and HDR videos.
Alongside the new features, Microsoft will ship the new Xbox with the updated wireless controller, which has a textured grip and a better wireless signal for pairing with the Xbox. That controller will be available separately for 49.99 and will be released on the same date.
Independent
I saw the tragedy in Nice yesterday and like everyone else with a conscience, I despaired. My prayers are humble but I offered them regardless for the victims and their families, and the people of France. I hope that the investigation concludes with real answers as to why the driver of the lorry acted and provides a path forward to prevent such a horrific tragedy again. This was Frances Oklahoma City.
Newt Gingrich saw the tragedy in France and thought to himself, how can I leverage this tragedy for my own ambitions? The result was an impromptu audition for Donald Trumps VP on Fox News, where he called for deporting Muslims who believe in Sharia:
You have to monitor the mosques, Gingrich said Thursday evening on Fox Newss Hannity. Where do you think the primary source of recruitment is? We should test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Shariah, they should be deported 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.
Since he is a valid contender for the office of the Vice President of the United States, we are obligated to respond to him rather than dismiss him as the unprincipled opportunist that even his political allies know him to be. So, a few thoughts.
1. Which Sharia?
Gingrichs knowledge about Sharia likely comes from Fox News. If we are going to establish a test, then we need to define what Sharia means in context. If we are talking about the actual Sharia that Muslims follow, it has 4 sources, in the following rank of priority: The Quran, The actions and words of the Prophet Mohammed SAW (The Sunnah), consensus from the community of scholars, and legal reasoning. At every stage of this chain of authority, there are different interpretations, compilations, schools of jurisprudence, and analyses. The result is not a linear, black and white ideology as some fringe Muslim sects insist, but a diverse tapestry of thought and practice, that spans the globe and time and race and culture.
When you ask a Muslim if they believe in Sharia, they will probably answer yes, not because they support ISIS but because they are part of that global tapestry and they have their own unique position within it. The only answer is yes.
2. The First Amendment
It is painful to admit that a potential candidate for the Vice President of the United States needs schooling on this, but here is the full text of the First Amendment, which is part of the Bill of Rights ratified as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States on December 15th, 1791.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
3. Which Muslims?
Gingrich did not specify which Muslims he would subject to his test. Donald Trumps infamous Muslim Ban only applied to Muslim non-citizens, either seeking immigration status or already here. But taking Gingrich at his word, given his reputation as the thinker and intellectual he is, suggests no such distinction. Without clarification from him, we must assume given the context of his remarks about incompatibility that he means all Muslims, regardless of citizenship status.
4. The Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified after the US Civil War, on July 9, 1868. The relevant part of the Amendment is the Due Process clause, which reads as follows:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note that any person within its jurisdiction applies to citizens and non-citizens alike.
5. Which mosques?
Gingrich blithely states that mosques are the centers of radicalization, but the truth is that Muslims are radicalized online, not in mosques. Muslims with access to mosques are exposed to the full scope of the tapestry of Sharia and traditional teachings by trained imams and scholars, which overwhelmingly condemn terrorism and violence. Further, Muslim American communities in the United States are cohesive and a bulwark against radicalization in fact, Muslims themselves have a long history, gratefully acknowledged by the FBI, of assisting authorities and informing on radicals to prevent terror attacks. Contra Gingrichs assertion, having a mosque next door full of Muslims who will say they believe in Sharia, is a good thing for preventing terror.
6. Which Western civilization?
Todays terrorist attack in France is a horrific reminder of the threat facing Western civilization. This must end. Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) July 15, 2016
Western civilization survived two global wars and nuclear brinkmanship. (And McVeigh who killed 168 with a truck). https://t.co/pfLez1olLh Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) July 15, 2016
ISIS and other radical Muslim groups are not acting randomly. They are acting deliberately. To paraphrase Marco Rubio, lets dispel once and for all with the fiction that ISIS doesnt know what they are doing, they knows exactly what they are doing. ISIS is undertaking a systematic effort to change this civilization, to make the West more like the rest of the world it is a systematic effort to change the West by eliminating the Gray Zone.
Fools like Gingrich play right into ISIS hands. Comments like his are the true fifth column in our midst.
7. Muslim Go.
To Newt Gingrich, this is all an augmented reality video game, like Pokemon Go. Gingrich thinks he can just run around and capture all the Muslims in his Poke-ball. It wont be as easy as all that. The United States fought a war of Independence and a Civil War for the Amendments that he so casually tramples on he devalues an immeasurable sacrifice paid in blood by true American patriots for these rights.
I stated it in the title of this essay and I conclude with it here. Mr. Gingrich, I believe in Sharia. Come at me, then, and make your attempt to deport me or do unto me as you will. My ally is the Constitution and the American People. Yours is Donald Trump and a legion of red hat-wearing racists and xenophobes. Even if you prevail over me, you wont prevail over America or the West, because you dont understand what America is, or what the West really is. For all your erudition and intelligence, you dont understand what the Founders or the North or the Allied Powers were really fighting for. And that is why you will lose. Im honored to be your target. Lets play Muslim Go, Mr. Speaker. Your turn.
UPDATE:
Well, Mr. Gingrich, looks like your hail-Mary gambit backfired:
Whether Christian or not, questions concerning suffering often show up during grief and tragedy. In times of great distress, we often want to know that our suffering matters to God and that He cares about our pain. We also wonder in these dark times how God relates to human pain, injury, violence and involuntary suffering. When it comes to emotional suffering, many Christians wonder about mental illness. There are many people braving mental illness such as depression or bipolar disorder in silence because so many churches teach that these individuals have a sin problem and dont address the mental illness. How does God view suffering? How should we respond to it? There is no better place to find these answers than the Bible.
There are countless biblical passages involving Gods suffering. One key passage is in Genesis 6:5-6 which says, Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of His heart was only evil continually. The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. We see in this passage that God is greatly affected by the events in His world. The word sorry indicates the emotional anguish of God. We see grief in Gods judgment. While pre-flood humanity had a scheming heart, God responded with a wounded heart, filled with pain. Walter Brueggemann, an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian explains that Gods commitment is costly: It has effected an irreversible change in GodIt is now clear that such a commitment on Gods part is costly. The God-world relation is not simply that of strong God and a needy world. Now it is a tortured relation between a grieved God and a resistant world. And of the two, the real changes are in God. Humans were intended to act differently. Gods judgment is not a detached decision but a very personal decision, with the mixed sorrow and anger that go into the making of decisions that affect the people whom He loves.
Another key passage is Exodus 3:7-10: I have surely seen the affliction of my peopleand have heard their cryI know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver themThe cry of the people of Israel has come to meCome, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring My people, the children of Israel out of Egypt. When God address Moses in this passage, there are three key words that highlight Gods intimate attention: seen, heard and know. God is physically mobilized into the very midst of their trouble. The severity of Israels oppression provokes a radical intervention from God. He is a God who is willing to come down to deliver to Moses, and through Moses, who even has the staff of God in his hand. God is present.
We can also look at the life of Job and see how suffering produces intimacy with God. Job 42:5 which says, My ears had heard you but now my eyes have seen you. We see through this passage that intimacy with God is often born in affliction. During times of stress and suffering, our soul opens up to God and we experience Him at deep, profound levels. We also see that suffering equips us to comfort others. 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 tells us, Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. Suffering gives us compassion for others who are hurting. This enables us to minister better to others.
When it comes to profound suffering, a key passage is Revelation 5:6: And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain. John hears the conquering Lion but when he turns to look, he sees a slaughtered lamb. Though the Lion doesnt appear again in the Bible, the Lamb appears countless times in the Bible to designate Christ. The Lamb now stands, resurrected, highlighting His sacrificial role. The Passover Lamb in 1 Corinthians 5:7 is ready to lead a new Exodus. The Lion and the Lamb together form a new symbol conquest by sacrificial death. Instead of evil being conquered by military conquest, it is defeated by sacrificial death. This is a powerful picture of power redefined in weakness. We see through these images that Christ joined humanity in His suffering. Through this we see that suffering, not force was a key to His victory.
God has always chosen to be vulnerable, from Creator to Savior. In His freedom and demonstration of His love toward all creation, especially humankind, He has shown us a spectrum of His own suffering. There is no greater demonstration of suffering than Jesus death on the cross. There is plenty of time spent in the Gospels describing the torture that led to Calvary and the pain Jesus suffered while nailed to a piece of wood. Jesus paid for our salvation. Through Jesus pain and suffering, we see a God who is relationally intimate with all creation. We also see that Jesus experienced very human emotions, just like us. Gerald W. Peterman and Andrew J. Schmutzer, authors of Between Pain and Grace discuss biblical suffering and stress the importance of seeing Jesus life and ministry in a real way.
Just as we consider ourselves obligated to imitate Jesus positive emotions such as love and joy, so also we should consider ourselves obligated to imitate His negative emotions, such as sadness anger and discontent, the authors explain.
Christ, the eternal son of God in whom the fullness of God dwells, lived on earth as a human being and endured hunger, thirst, temptation, shame, persecution, nakedness, bereavement, betrayal, mockery, injustice and death. When you ask how much God cares about the problem of suffering, you can point to the cross and say, That much. Jesus experienced the same suffering as many people do today who are feeling isolated from Gods favor and love. God is personally involved in our pain and suffering.
If suffering in life has left you unconvinced that God in heaven cares about you, consider again the suffering of the One called by the prophet Isaiah, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). Think about His bloody body, His nail-rippled hands and feet, His pierced side, His agony in the Garden and His cry of abandonment when He breathed His last breath. Christ was suffering not for His sins but ours. The Bible says Christ died to pay the price for our sins, and that those who believe in their heart that God has raised Him from the dead will be saved (Romans 10:9-10). This is not a reward but a gift to all that put their trust in Him.
Lesli White is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth with a Bachelors degree in Mass Communications and a concentration in print and online journalism. In college, she took a number of religious studies courses and harnessed her talent for storytelling. White has a rich faith background. Her father, a Lutheran pastor and life coach was a big influence in her faith life, helping her to see the value of sharing the message of Christ with others. She has served in the church from an early age. Some of these roles include assisting ministry, mutual ministry, worship and music ministry and church council.
An Indian paramilitary officer stands guard during the ongoing curfew in Srinagar, the day after police seized thousands of newspapers and detained printing press workers, ramping up an information blackout, July 17, 2016.
People in Indian-administered Kashmir awoke on Monday for the third straight day without newspapers, amid widespread criticism of a temporary media ban imposed by the government in the disputed region.
Kashmir has been gripped by a wave of violence since the killing of a top separatist earlier this month.
Describing the press gag in Kashmir as an attack on the freedom of the media, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) on Monday said such a move was unacceptable in the worlds most populous democracy.
The formal action of the government of India to shut down the media for three days is a blatant attack on press freedom and freedom of expression, the IFJ said in a statement released on its website, while urging officials in Jammu and Kashmir state to stop the crackdown immediately and allow the free flow of information.
Although the three-day ban officially ended Monday, newspaper owners will not be publishing on Tuesday.
All the newspapers have decided not to publish on Tuesday. All owners and editors will meet tomorrow and then take a decision, Hayat Ahmad, owner of Kashmir Reader, told BenarNews.
Held overnight
The clampdown began late Friday when police teams raided several printing presses in Srinagar, stopped the printing, seized all published newspapers and even allegedly detained press employees overnight, according to reporters for some of the regions prominent local dailies.
At 1 a.m. Saturday, a team of uniformed policemen entered our printing press and stopped the machines. They detained four of our employees and released them only in the morning, Arshad Kaloo, senior editor of Greater Kashmir, told BenarNews.
Raja Mohidin, who owns K.T. Press, which publishes eight Srinagar-based newspapers, told the Indian Express that more than one-half dozen employees were detained by the police overnight on Saturday.
Since Saturday morning, no daily newspapers English, Urdu and Kashmiri have been available at doorsteps or on newsstands in the region, which has witnessed large-scale violence after Burhan Wani, a top commander of separatist faction Hizbul Mujahideen, was gunned down by Indian security forces on July 8.
As of Monday, at least 40 people, including a policeman, have died and more than 3,000 have been injured in ensuing clashes between stone-hurling crowds and security personnel.
Mobile, internet, cable TV blocked
While mobile and Internet services have remained suspended across the region since Wanis killing, the state government also blocked cable television through Saturday.
Initially, we were asked to show restraint while airing news bulletins. When we didnt agree, the transmission was taken off air by the government administration, Ishfaq Gowhar, an employee of J-K Media Network Group, a leading cable TV provider, told BenarNews.
The government doesnt want to show the exact situation to the people, he added.
It is extremely unfortunate that the state government, under fire for its poor management of the law-and-order situation, has sought to shoot the messenger, the Editors Guild of India said in a statement on Sunday.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday hinted that the ban on newspapers in Jammu and Kashmir was entirely the state governments decision.
We are hoping the ban will be lifted soon. Only the state government can provide more clarity as to when exactly [that would happen], Singh told parliament.
An emotional lot
In Kashmir, state government spokesman Naeem Akhtar told BenarNews that the decision to halt newspaper production in the valley, which has been in the midst of a separatist insurgency since the late 1980s, was taken reluctantly.
Some young protesters, who are an emotional lot, get charged by what is published in the media, Akhtar said, adding, it is only a temporary measure to diffuse a volatile situation.
But residents, who were already angered by the killings of civilians, rejected the governments defense.
On one side the government forces are killing Kashmiri people, and on top of that, they have now started blocking any information of it. If they think such a move will diffuse the situation, they are completely wrong, Mir Faizan, a software professional from Srinagar, told BenarNews.
Ahsan Ahmad, a postgraduate student at the University of Kashmir, agreed.
The government wont achieve anything by banning newspapers. The only way the situation can be brought under control is if security forces stop opening fire at protesters who have full rights to hold peaceful rallies. This ban on the press is a result of the governments failure to control the situation, he said.
Police escort Rana Plaza owner Sohel Rana to a court appearance in Dhaka, July 7, 2015. On Monday he was formally charged with murder in connection with the collapse of the garment factory complex that killed more than 1,100 people in April 2013.
The owner of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex and 37 other people were officially charged Monday with murder over the buildings collapse that killed more than 1,100 people in April 2013, in Bangladeshs deadliest industrial accident.
The court has, for the first time, heard a full hearing on the murder case against the building owners, the factory owners and others, prosecutor Khandker Abdul Mannan told BenarNews.
A Dhaka court charged 38 defendants with murder and three others for helping building owner Sohel Rana flee soon after the collapse of the multi-story complex, according to news reports.
He was arrested a few days later as he tried to cross the border into India.
Rana and 34 other defendants appeared in court on Monday while six are fugitives and will be tried in absentia, according to Reuters.
All the defendants who were in court on Monday pleaded not guilty to the charges against them, Mannan said. If convicted, they could face the death penalty.
Last year, authorities said they were considering charging the defendants with culpable homicide, which carries a maximum seven-year prison sentence.
Thirty-eight of the defendants were charged with murder because they allegedly forced workers to enter the nine-story building despite safety concerns. Cracks in the building were discovered a day earlier.
Most of the workers came out of the building, but they [the 38 defendants] compelled them to enter the building, threatening termination, Mannan said. They killed innocent people.
The court set Sept. 18 for witness depositions, the prosecutor said.
Rana and 17 others, including some of the defendants who were in court on Monday, were charged in June with building-code violations linked to the collapse.
Anwar Kabir Babul, who is prosecuting the building-code case, said Rana had a permit to construct a six-story building, but colluded with town planning officials, engineers and others to add three floors to the structure.
As many as 1,135 people were killed and more than 2,000 were injured in the collapse of Rana Plaza on April 24, 2013. The building in the Dhaka suburb of Savar housed five factories that produced ready-made garments for international brands.
The tragedy focused international attention on unsafe and exploitative working conditions at Bangladesh's 3,500 garment factories, which employ nearly 3 million people mostly women and it forced global retailers to address deficiencies in Bangladesh's garment sector, which represents a huge slice of its export economy.
Duty-free access to Western markets and low wages for its workers helped turn Bangladesh's garment exports into a $28 billion-a-year industry, Reuters reported. The minimum monthly wage for garment workers in Bangladesh is $68, compared with about $280 in mainland China, which remains the world's biggest exporter of clothes.
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Media Advisory, July 18, 2016 Contacts: Regina Romero, Center for Biological Diversity, (520) 343-4038
Gabrielle Villarreal, Latinos for Parks, (520) 647-4013 July 20 Hike Celebrates Latino Conservation Week in Tucson Public Event Links Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument to History,
Culture at A Mountain TUCSON, Ariz. The heats not stopping Arizonans from hiking in 100+ degrees Fahrenheit to support efforts to create the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument during the 100-year anniversary of both the National Park Service and the A on Sentinel Peak, one of Tucsons most cherished urban natural areas. What: Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument Hike at A Mountain When: Wednesday, July 20, 5:30 p.m. Meet at Mercado San Agustin, 100 S. Avenida Del Convento Seis Mexican Restaurant. At 6:30, join our 3.8-mile round-trip hike up from the Mercado to Sentinel Peak A Mountain. Background
An effort led by Congressman Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) calls on President Obama to use his authority under the Antiquities Act to permanently protect public land surrounding the Grand Canyon from uranium mining. Momentum is building just two weeks after the delivery of more than 550,000 petition signatures and comments in support of the monument designation, including more than 20 tribal nations and tens of thousands of businesses, outdoor recreation and conservation groups, and national and local elected leaders. Advocates from the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of A Mountain, Latino Outdoors and Latinos for Parks have been working to recruit more advocates for the measure in Arizona. Recent polling shows that 86 percent of Latinos across Arizona and 4 out of 5 Arizonans favor a national monument designation. We are excited to join efforts to support increased protection for our public lands, rich with outdoor experiences and opportunities for all our communities, said Jose Gonzalez, founder of Latino Outdoors. We want to increase access for all and want to ensure the Latino voice is present in this effort. Latino Conservation Week: Disfrutando y Conservando Nuestra Tierra was launched by the Hispanic Access Foundation and is supported by many organizations working to get Latinos into the outdoors and participating in activities to protect natural resources. Its our moral responsibility to care for our land, water and wildlife, with a commitment to collaboration and inclusivity, said Regina Romero, director of Latino engagement at the Center for Biological Diversity. #GrandCanyonHeritage #Latinos4Conservation #MonumentsforAll
Speaking on the violence of some civilians perpetrated against young soldiers who had surrendered during the attempt, Klcdaroglu said, Not the young soldier who went out on the ground with orders, but the ones giving these orders must be tried. The situation that the young soldiers were put in is really not nicee. It must be justifiable.
Giving statements to Sayg Ozturk, from Sozcu newspaper, Klcdaroglu made these comments:
If Turkey wants to be a country believing in the rule of law or reassuring, it has to carry out the decisions and enforcements after this coup attempt lawfully. We should all know that the state does not hold on grudges; cannot breed hatred; cannot and should not be prejudgemental. Those who are guilty must be tried in due process.
The situation that the young soldiers are put is really not nice. Afterall, we trust our army, so, we dont find lynching and degrading of soldiers right.
If a judge or a prosecutor wants to follow along with orders given from a certain point of authority, their status should right away be interrogated. I mean, if he/she gives way to certain injustices, this is not right, either.
Source: http://www.birgun.net/haber- detay/kilicdaroglu-linc- edenler-de-yargilansin-120443. html
NAIROBI, Kenya - Uber, the app that connects riders with drivers, launched a global campaign on Friday, 15 July 2016, to bring #UberIceCream to its commuters.
Image by 123RF
The Uber drivers in Nairobi were part of a global campaign, with riders in 69 countries and 400 cities, who were able to request an ice cream at a push of button, delivered by your Uber driver.
Uber partnered with Delias All Natural Ice Cream to deliver Ubers uniquely labelled dessert called Bits and Atoms. At the tap of a button, riders in Nairobi and Mombasa were also able to request two servings of Delias Natural Ice Cream.
#UberIceCream is a global promotion that celebrates what we have in common, and gives us an opportunity to come together. We are thrilled to bring our riders this exciting experience and we hope riders will take a moment and indulge together, said Alon Lits, general manager for Uber Sub-Saharan Africa, last week.
To get the scoop, all riders had to do was:
Open the Uber app on Friday, 15 July, between 11am 3pm.
Slide across to the Ice Cream view, set your pick-up location and request Ice Cream.
Within minutes your Uber would arrive to deliver two Servings of Delias Natural Ice Cream for only KES 200.
As Nigeria embraces a challenging economic diversification process, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG-F) is working in Kaduna to pilot an innovative approach aimed at revamping the food sector to creating new jobs for young people, increase farmers' revenues, improve productivity, enhance nutrition and reduce food loss through more sustainable production practices.
UN Goodwill Ambassadors, brothers Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca of restaurant 'El Celler can Roca', ranked among the best chefs of the world; UN Agencies; the Sahara Group; and Nigerian government authorities, will partner on the Food Africa project. Launched in Jere, the initiative is set to revolutionise the food industry in Kaduna and beyond.
For the project kick-off, Josep Roca met with young women and men that will be the driving force of this programme. A Center of Excellence, specialising in agriculture and agro-processing training, will contribute to expand it to other regions in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa through regional exchange of best practices.
Food for SDGs
Nigeria has been a proponent and early adopter of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which were approved at the United Nations in September. Under the leadership of Princess Victoria Orelope-Adefulire, senior special assistant to the President on SDGs, plans and policies are now underway to achieve these goals by 2030.
In Africa, agriculture remains a vital source of employment and income generation. In Nigeria the sector contributes to an estimated 70% of employment in Nigeria, but only 22% of GDP, thus indicating a significant potential for productivity gains. Despite a strong reliance on farming and agriculture, malnutrition is often prevalent in many regions and invariably an estimated 50-70% of harvests can be lost due to the lack of appropriate storage facilities and limited market information.
On top of that, climate change could result in falls in output of up to 30%, according to the World Bank estimates. The recent state of emergency declared in Kaduna over tomato shortages and soaring prices caused by the moth tuta absoluta, exemplifies climate and environmental pressures to agricultural production to come.
Revolutionising the food industry
In order to tackle these pressing challenges, the SDG Fund, a mechanism established by the UN to advance the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is engaging governments, UN Agencies, civil society and the private sector on issues critical to enhancing food security and nutrition.
The pilot Food Africa project in Kaduna will provide a backward and forward integration approach for food supply chain management. The program will introduce more sustainable practices in the value chain, reduce crop waste and improve smallholder farmers profitability.
Recognising the link between the gaps in skills and structural unemployment in the region, the project will promote income generating opportunities and technical support to promote trade of local goods and services.
The program will feature an agro processing facility and serve as a Center of Excellence to increase farmers receipts and reduce food loss. The centre will provide training in the food industry on issues linked to food safety, business planning and product diversification. Designed as a hybrid public-private facility, the program will eventually be sustained and managed by the communities local farmers.
Unique collaboration
UN Goodwill Ambassadors and master chefs, the Roca Brothers, will contribute their valuable knowledge in sustainable conservation, food preparation and distribution techniques. The Rocas will provide skills training for young women and men as well as providing technical oversight and sharing best practices. The renowned chefs will play a key role in showcasing how local food production can be cultivated for new markets and consumers.
It is an honour for us to be part of this vibrant, promising and collective project and contribute with our cooking, our imagination and our passion to advance the sustainable development goals, Josep Roca affirmed while in Jere. He added, We are doing this on behalf of all chefs, not only ourselves.
#MandelaMonth: Sparrow Schools marketing takes flight
DUO Marketing recently partnered up with Sparrow Schools to offer pro bono digital consulting services. The school delivers specialised education for learners between 7 and 18 years of age.
As an initial 12 month contract, DUO Marketing will elevate the digital brand of the School and support campaign and marketing efforts for Sparrow Schools. We chatted to Dominique Pienaar, regional manager for Gauteng at DUO Marketing + Communications, to find out more about the partnership and how important it is for corporate organisations to have a CSI strategy. Dominique Pienaar How did you get connected with Sparrow Schools? How did you get connected with Sparrow Schools?
Some of our DUO employees had worked with Sparrow Schools in previous roles, and when their marketing team was looking for a digital/social media partner, they approached us and our relationship began. It did not take us long to decide that we really wanted to work with the team at Sparrow Schools, and that our digital capabilities would be a good fit for their needs.
Tell us more about Sparrow Schools Tell us more about Sparrow Schools
Sparrow Schools was founded by Jackie Gallagher in 1989 with the aim of providing quality education to learners that have varying degrees of educational backlog, remedial problems and other barriers to learning.
The school caters for approximately 600 learners annually, and currently has 221 learners in the foundation school and a further 184 in the high school.
How important is it for companies to have a CSI strategy in this day and age? How important is it for companies to have a CSI strategy in this day and age?
We believe it is critical to have a CSI strategy - not because it is a growing requirement for BEE certification, but because giving back to the communities in which we live and work is rewarding for the recipients, and the teams participating in the initiatives.
Changes in legislation and BEE requirements are compelling corporates to consider a CSI strategy and each organisation will evaluate its causes and investment based on its own priorities.
At DUO, our strategy for CSI is not only about BEE. We believe we have a social and moral obligation to contribute to society and we love making a difference to projects and initiatives where our skills can enhance existing efforts. This, combined with an alignment of values and integrity make for a mutually rewarding partnership.
Will your digital marketing strategy differ in the CSI space? Will your digital marketing strategy differ in the CSI space?
Because we dont sell cookie cutter solutions, our ability to tailor the digital marketing strategies across industries and business types, will be as beneficial in the CSI space, as it would be for corporate clients.
We worked closely with the Sparrow Schools marketing team to understand the schools challenges, opportunities and priorities, and developed a customised plan for their digital marketing efforts. We have built the strategy around leveraging existing PR efforts, as well as creating a robust messaging and engagement plan across its digital assets.
What does Mandela Day/month mean to DUO Marketing? What does Mandela Day/month mean to DUO Marketing?
Our aim as a business, is to give back every month through sustainable and longstanding CSI partnerships - and we encourage participation and involvement throughout the year. For us, Mandela Month is about giving that little bit extra.
In addition to supporting Sparrow Schools this Mandela Month, we have partnered with Harrington House in Cape Town, to raise funds for much needed equipment that needs to be replaced after the childrens home, run by Mrs Barrett, burned down. We are once again leveraging our media relations and digital expertise to extend the reach for fundraising for the childrens home.
The service also extends to service providers and suppliers for agencies, allowing ad agency execs to find project partners, based upon skill sets, to expand project capacity. This should result in growth for small agencies and start-ups. The service is offered to smaller and mid-sized brands, as well as larger brands with very hands-on marketing executives.
The service is expected to evolve into a business-acquisition tool for ad agencies and also allows them to inform the market as they expand their own service portfolios.
A lot of marketers are only familiar with a handful of ad agencies and, while databases with information on possible agency partners do exist, they are generally walled in as paid-for services," says Ramify.biz founder, Herman Manson, who is also the publisher and editor of the South African advertising and marketing industry news site, MarkLives.com.
Ramify.biz allows agencies to create a database-driven listing that will assist marketers in picking communication partners, such as information on services offered, BBEEE scores and the size of the agency. Marketers then specify their partner requirements using the Ramify.biz search function and matching results are returned. Marketers may then shortlist agencies/suppliers and pull comparative data for review.
Ramify.biz offers its search functionality free of charge. Agency profiles are free, too, encouraging the inclusion of the broadest possible range of agencies in the database.
The site is also intended to make the job of procurement easier when it comes to pitching; instead of very broad requests of interest, marketers may now submit a pre-compiled shortlist to their procurement departments to start the process.
The use of Spanish throughout the day is encouraged with many creative activities like games, songs, arts and crafts, photography, video editing, theater, dance and more.
!Aventuras descubriendo el Mundo Hispano! is a Spanish Immersion Summer Camp for kids from 6 - 11 years old. Our Camp starts on July 11th through the 29th (3 weeks). Schedule: Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. Cost: Sliding Scale, you decide how much you can pay between $349-$749. Spots available. Call 505-724-4777 or e-mail us adxabq@cervantes.es Visit our website: http://albuquerque.cervantes.es
The use of Spanish throughout the day will be encouraged with many creative activities. Our Spanish Summer camp has a total of 45 spots available for children aged 6 to 11. Children are divided into 3 groups with one teacher and one assistant per 15 children. Six to eight year old children are generally grouped in the same class.
From 9am to 3pm, children will be involved in a variety of classroom and outdoor activities including games, songs, arts, crafts, photography, video editing, theatre, dance and much more! Lunch is taken from 11:30am to 12:30pm and also includes a fun activity. In the first week of camp, each class will take one of the major activities listed below and then will alternate weekly.
Story building through video animationArt and designMusic and movement
In the story building group, our Spanish teacher will work with students to create short animated scenes in Spanish, with narration as well as using theatre based games and activities. Our teacher has a background in dance, performance and art and has been teaching with the Instituto Cervantes for 5 years.
The art and design class will focus on building basic design skills, drawing, building props and integrating them with our story building activities. Our art teacher is an architect with several years of experience teaching Spanish and art classes to children and adults alike.
Our music and movement class will focus on developing rhythm with hands, feet, and voice. The class will be taught by professional dancers at Casa Flamenca. This class proved popular in 2014, providing both exercise and coordination of both upper and lower body in an environment facilitating the acquisition of Spanish.
Communications doyen and former business journalist, Ruth Golembo, passed away suddenly on Thursday, 14 July 2016. She was 54. Her funeral on Sunday, 17 July 2016, at Cape Town's Jewish Cemetery, was well-attended by media, communications professionals and business stalwarts alike.
Ruth Golembo
Ruth has been described as a remarkable woman and her death is a great loss, not only to her family and friends, but to the broader media and communications industry in South Africa, where she made a huge contribution in a career spanning over 30 years.
She was from Cradock in the Eastern Cape and attended Rhenish Girls High School, Stellenbosch, before studying law at the University of Pretoria and going into journalism.
She started her career as a journalist at the Sunday Times, later, after adding a financial qualification to her law degree, she worked as a senior investment columnist on Business Times and for the Financial Mail investment section.
She joined Lange PR over 25 years ago, later acquiring the majority shareholding and rebranding to Lange 360. Lange was acquired by Meropa Communications in 2015, in a deal which saw Ruth taking up a special strategic role in the business. She took semi-retirement shortly after the merger.
At the time of the merger, in June 2015, Meropa CEO, Peter Mann, said he greatly admired what Golembo and her team had achieved in the communications and public relations arena, according to Fin24.
In a statement, Meropa described Ruth as a hard-working, entrepreneurial communications professional who not only built up a successful public relations consultancy (creating many long-term jobs) but who gave unstintingly of her time and expertise to sector organisations such as the Cape Town Press Club.
Ruth was an often-quoted thought leader in the strategic communications arena. She was acknowledged by clients, team members and industry professionals for her unwavering commitment to the broader communications industry.
Ruth was incredibly generous in both sharing her knowledge and skills and inspired everyone with her enthusiasm and insights.
In a statement, the Cape Town Press Club, expressed deep sadness at Ruths sudden passing. She was a former vice-chair of the Cape Town Press Club. Ruth has been one of the clubs longest serving and most loyal committee members, and helped arrange some of the club's most successful club events and was also much involved in fundraising activities.
Her commitment to the ideals for which the Club stood for, and her energy, work-ethic and talent will remain an inspiration to the rest of us. We will miss Ruth deeply, and send our condolences to her friends, family and colleagues.
On various Facebook forums, friends expressed their shock at her sudden death, lauding her as a wonderful mentor and inspiration in the industry; an industry stalwart, gone far too soon; a big smile and a heart to match; an inspiring and dynamic lady; and much more in the same vein.
She truly was an icon in our industry. She will be sorely missed. Wishing her family long life, commented recruitment specialist, Viv Gordon.
Cape Town Press Club secretary-general, Donwald Pressly, said Ruth was one of the most vibrant people I have ever encountered.
PR industry specialist, Brian Berkman, writing on Bizcommunity.coms Tribute Wall for Ruth Golembo, described her as kind and generous with her time and someone who was passionate about PR being a results-driven profession.
And her former business partner at Lange 360, Shelly Stamatiadis, now with Meropa Communications, expressed her heartbreak at the news. Her tireless enthusiasm, love of life, generosity and inspiration infected all who met her. She opened her heart and home to all she knew, enveloping them into her circle of light and love. Ruth inspired and enabled so many to follow successful careers in both the media and PR industries and will be sorely missed.
Ruth is survived by her husband Dr Bob Mesarcik, who she met when they were both students, and sons Paul, Misha and David, the youngest of whom is in Matric.
*Bizcommunity.com has set up a Tribute Page for anyone to pay tribute to Ruth.
Bluegrass Digital recently developed a new website for Justmoney.co.za built on the Umbraco CMS platform. Justmoney.co.za is a leading, online guide to personal finance for South Africans, offering trusted advice and comparison tools.
The aim was to make the website more visual by creating a clear layout for easy navigation, an improved user experience and better features for users.
Bluegrass Digital worked with the JustMoney.co.za team in carrying out the UX, design and planning phases. Once approved, we delivered the technical build and quality assurance phases in a series of sprints, which included integration with a number of APIs.
Justmoney.co.zas website was designed to be responsive therefore providing visitors (using a tablet or smartphone) an optimal viewing and interaction experience. Other key features of the Justmoney.co.za website include online loan application forms, user forums and Ask an Expert features, online calculators and comparison tools, polls and competitions. Users can also create a profile to access further content and site functionality.
Our free to use tools and calculators will really help empower the South African consumer to make sense of and track their spending habits as well as calculate what they need from retirement and insurance products. The forum where users can discuss personal finance issues and get responses and tips from our experts is one of the many additional features of our new website. Weve also retained popular functions such as the Ask the Expert function where users can pose their personal finance conundrum at experienced finance specialists. Ultimately, Justmoneys platform is easy to use and the answer for South Africans looking to improve their financial state of being, said Angelique Ruzicka, editor and acting general manager of Justmoney.co.za.
Bluegrass continues to manage the hosting and provide ongoing support for the website.
About Bluegrass Digital
Bluegrass Digital is a leading provider of creative technological solutions and digital production services for mobile, web and social platforms. With offices in London, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Lagos, our highly-skilled team offers a diverse pool of knowledge and expertise, bringing together creativity and innovative technology that delivers top-notch results for our clients.
Our expert knowledge in creative technology and development means that we are able to deliver a unique offering, centred on service delivery excellence. Bluegrass has a proven track record of delivering high-quality projects on time and within budget.
www.bluegrassdigital.com
Tracy Lynn Chemaly on Business of Design and other things
Business of Design is really for everyone from retailers and trend analysts to marketing and brand executives, and other industry entrepreneurs; even people from law and financial backgrounds...
The two-day conference takes place in Johannesburg on 16-17 August at The Forum in Bryanston, followed by Cape Town on 23-24 August at Inner City Ideas Cartel, 71 Waterkant Street. Photographer: Adam Letch As head of programme, Tracy Lynn Chemaly tells us what differentiates it from other stuffy, formal events is that it provides a more relaxed, yet still professional platform for exchanging ideas. Business of Design is not simply an inspirational conference; it is a great combination of both this and learning, she says. It is also a conference focused on local stories. All our speakers are working within the South African landscape and so the advice they are imparting is relevant and immediately useful. We also place a strong emphasis on networking with our ABSOLUT Networking sessions at the end of each day, allowing delegates to interact with industry insiders and fellow creative entrepreneurs and businesspeople, to expand their networks, gain new contacts, secure collaborations, source partners and make new friends." What is your involvement in the conference? What is your involvement in the conference? I run the conference from beginning to end from approaching speakers and liaising with them pre-conference, to dealing with delegate bookings, doing the marketing and social media, dealing with media around the event, sourcing venues and caterers and corresponding with partners.
Together with Business of Design founders, Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Laurence Brick and Cathy OClery, we decide on who we want as speakers, and then I run with it, obviously consulting with them all along the way and getting their insights and inputs from their years in business and the design industry. I have gained many lessons from them over the past two-and-a-half years.
How has the conference changed/improved since inception two years ago? How has the conference changed/improved since inception two years ago?
Its been wonderful for us (and a stamp of approval) to have delegates who have attended previous conferences return for another one. Our original plan was to host the conference twice a year, as we did in 2015, but this year we have decided to focus our energy on only one annual conference, so as to bring our delegates the best speakers possible and not have to have people choose between and autumn or spring conference.
Our network has grown too. Now we have people recommending speakers to us, advising friends and colleagues to book on for the conference, and register group bookings rather than just one person coming on their own from a company. Even previous speakers are booking and paying to join us now that is a great compliment!
The conference is relevant to industries other than design itself, such as marketing, architecture, retail, advertising, etc. How do you market the conference to these other industries? The conference is relevant to industries other than design itself, such as marketing, architecture, retail, advertising, etc. How do you market the conference to these other industries?
We started Business of Design thinking it would just be for design businesses, but saw that other people were equally interested in what we were offering everyone from retailers and trend analysts to marketing and brand executives, and other industry entrepreneurs. Even people from law and financial backgrounds have been booking.
We have had talks at ad agencies and various trade shows, visited retailer head offices, met with HR and training decision-makers and pushed the variety of speakers at the conference through our social media channels.
For architects, we have been accredited by the Gauteng Institute for Architects and so all members of the South African Council for the Architectural Profession (SACAP) who attend receive Continuous Professional Development (CPD) credits. The Institute of the Interior Design Professions (IID) has also accredited us with CPD credits.
What has been the delegates general response to date? What has been the delegates general response to date?
We have had an unbelievable return rate. Our alumni delegates are rewarded with a discount offer, but I really feel like they would book on again regardless, as the feedback received after every conference always makes everything we put into it so worthwhile. It seems Business of Design is a forum people have been needing for a few years in this country, and its wonderful to offer people this opportunity to learn, exchange ideas and grow their businesses with the advice of industry leaders and design professionals.
Does this years conference have a theme? Does this years conference have a theme?
No, but we do tend to find that when we look back at the end of the two days, there is always a strong theme that seems to have evolved. At the last conference, it was very much about the significance of working on the African continent at this time and left us all with great pride for being African. Let us see what emerges from this next conference
What are some of the major issues currently facing the industry/business, and how does BoD hope to address these? What are some of the major issues currently facing the industry/business, and how does BoD hope to address these?
Many creatives have had training in design fields, but have never been trained in business strategy, marketing, financial areas and the like. So Business of Design, through our expert speakers, addresses these issues and many more, and it is not just aimed at business owners, but at employees too anyone who wants to revolutionise the way they work.
Many people want to exhibit at international trade shows, but do not know how to begin; others are curious about how to align social-media campaigns with their current marketing; while other people just want to learn about the latest trends and ways in which businesses are running in a modern world. We try to answer many questions in these two days.
How do you go about selecting the speakers? Comment on this years speaker lineup. How do you go about selecting the speakers? Comment on this years speaker lineup.
We make sure theres a good balance between business strategy, marketing, design thinking and general inspiration. This years speakers range from founders of large national and international businesses (such as Ian Fuhr from Sorbet Group and Robbie Brozin from Nandos) to the owners of young entrepreneurial success stories (like Kate Schrire from The Creamery and Paul Ballen from Pauls Homemade Ice Cream), to top-name architects (Stefan Antoni from SAOTA and Sean Mahoney and Pierre Swanepoel from StudioMAS) and innovative thinkers, such as Conn Bertish from Cancer Dojo and Scott Gray from Quirk.
What are you most proud about with regard to this years event? What are you most proud about with regard to this years event?
The lineup of speakers is one of the best we have had, and I think this really has to do with us having built a strong reputation that makes speakers say yes the minute I approach them. I really love how successful local businesspeople are so willing to share their time and knowledge with our delegates and us. It is refreshing.
I am also very excited that we are offering refreshed networking sessions, called ABSOLUT Networking. We have partnered with ABSOLUT ELYX to make our 5-7pm networking sessions (at the end of both days of talks) even more enjoyable. I always love the stories of collaboration that emerge after these sessions. People do make new connections at our conference.
What are you most looking forward to? What are you most looking forward to?
I am most looking forward to hearing chef proprietor Luke Dale-Roberts talk. I have been a fan since he first started in South Africa at La Colombe, so have followed his restaurant success with great national (and foodie) pride!
Bizcommunity readers qualify for a R450 discount to attend the conference, making tickets R3,500. To claim your discount, email az.oc.ngisedfossenisub@ycart with Bizcommunity as the subject.
For more on Business of Design, go to businessofdesign.co.za.
Delivering the 2016 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria on Sunday, 17 July, Bill Gates said he was optimistic about the future of the continent - because of its young people.
By World Economic Forum - Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
Africas future rests in the hands of its youth and every effort must be made to ensure they thrive, said the philanthropist and entrepreneur.
Pointing out that Africa was demographically the worlds youngest continent in the next 35 years, it is estimated that 2-billion babies will be born in Africa and by 2050, 40% of the worlds children will live in Africa Gates said he believed Africas youth can be the source of a special dynamism.
Demographic dividend
Economists talk about the demographic dividend. When you have more people of working age, and fewer dependents for them to take care of, you can generate phenomenal economic growth. Rapid economic growth in East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s was partly driven by the large number of young people moving into their work force.
But for me, the most important thing about young people is the way their minds work. Young people are better than old people at driving innovation because they are not locked in by the limits of the past. The real returns will come if we can multiply this talent for innovation by the whole of Africas growing youth population, he said.
Gates used the platform of the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture the Nelson Mandela Foundations flagship programme to honour its founder, Nelson Mandela, and to raise topical issues affecting South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world to lay out his vision of how to create a better world. The theme of his speech was Living Together.
Gates said he had admired Mandela, whom he had met on many occasions. He said that one topic that Nelson Mandela came back to over and over again was the power of youth.
He knew what he was talking about, because he started his career as a member of the African National Congress Youth League when he was still in his twenties. Later on, he understood that highlighting the oppression of young people was a powerful way to explain why things must change. There is a universal appeal to the conviction that youth deserve a chance. I agree with Mandela about young people, and that is one reason I am optimistic about the future of this continent, said Gates.
But to exploit Africas potential, its young people need to be given every opportunity to thrive.
Clear away the obstacles
We are the human beings who must take action, and we have to decide now because this unique moment wont last forever. We must clear away the obstacles that are standing in young peoples way so they can seize all of their potential, he said.
Added Gates: If young people are sick and malnourished, their bodies and their brains will never fully develop. If they are not educated well, their minds will lie dormant. If they do not have access to economic opportunities, they will not be able to achieve their goals.
But if we invest in the right things if we make sure the basic needs of Africas young people are taken care of then they will have the physical, cognitive, and emotional resources they need to change the future. Life on this continent will improve faster than it ever has. And the inequities that have kept people apart will be erased by broad-based progress that is the very meaning of the words: living together.
The co-founder of software giant, Microsoft, said issues that needed to be tackled to ensure Africas youth thrive are:
Health and nutrition;
Education;
Productivity and economic opportunity; and
Governance
He said health and nutrition were a top priority because when people arent healthy, they cant turn their attention to other priorities. But when health improves, life improves by every measure.
Next was education without which children cannot develop the knowledge and skills to become productive contributors to society, said Gates.
Then, Africas youth need to have the economic opportunities to channel their energy and their ideas into progress.
But Gates said good governance was vital to ensure that this happens and he urged governments to play their part.
All of these things advances in health, in education, in agricultural productivity, in energy wont happen on their own. They can only happen in the context of governments that function well enough to enable them, he said.
Gates concluded his lecture by insisting he believed that Africa could achieve the future it aspired to.
He said Africas young believe in themselves, and they believe in their countries and the future of the continent.
The priority now is to make sure they have the opportunity to turn those beliefs into action. Because young people with this sense of purpose can make the difference between stagnation and more and faster progress. Nelson Mandela said, Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom. But our duty is not merely to arouse; our duty is to invest in young people, to put in place the basic building blocks so that they can build the future. And our duty is to do it now, because the innovations of tomorrow depend on the opportunities available to children today.
Read Bill Gates' full address at the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.
BIM or building information modelling is one of the relatively few buzzwords you'll hear in the construction industry that continues to dominate conversations - and there's a very good reason for that.
Fuelled by government initiatives and industry momentum around the world, BIM empowers companies to plan infrastructure more effectively while reducing the cost and complexity of building and maintaining assets.
At the heart of BIM is a computer-aided design-driven model that enables you to visualise assets in all three dimensions. This means that the model is no longer simply a design tool it becomes the master data source of an asset and the foundation for driving all business functions related to it.
So you would think that construction and contracting companies should be falling over each other in their haste to implement end-to-end business systems, right?
Unfortunately, that isnt the case. Perhaps more than anything, what BIM has brought about is a realisation that in many ways ours is an old-fashioned industry, still hampered by archaic, Excel-based processes and departmental silos. It has also reminded us that businesses need to act now to remain competitive.
The second lives of assets
Assets have a second, far longer life after construction. As such, the industry is increasingly looking at the total lifecycle of an asset, from construction expenditures to operation costs something thats forcing construction, engineering, and infrastructure companies to adopt a much more joined-up, data-driven approach.
But many in the construction industry are still operating with non-integrated systems across lots of manually maintained Excel spreadsheets. Typically, project plans are developed in a software tool such as Microsoft Project, Primavera, or Asta, which are rarely integrated with other business systems for engineering, procurement and construction.
What is more, todays computer design model is not typically integrated with the rest of the project and maintenance processes. This in turn creates the problem of transferring information from the design tool into the procurement, construction and maintenance systems.
According to Kenny Ingram, global industry director for IFS, this is the primary fault line that BIM has uncovered.
When processes are not joined up or automatically integrated, companies are overburdened with high overheads and cost inefficiencies, says Ingram. They can incur damages by failing to keep to the key parameters of time and budget. Whats more, they risk being overtaken by competitors with smarter systems who can offer better prices and deliver a better asset more quickly.
ERP with a twist
This is why were continuing to see a significant shift to deploy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the sector. More and more construction and contracting companies see the value in partnering with integrated project solutions experts for managing budgets, time and risk.
But is ERP really the right term to use?
Synonymous with finance and human resources in many large enterprises, ERP is fundamentally a product-centric solution which grew out of mass production manufacturing.
Specialists in project-based business systems like Kenny Ingram would argue, however, that highly-specialised, project and asset lifecycle-based versions of ERP solutions built for real-time management of complex projects are where ERPs strengths lie in our industry.
True ERP is a fully-integrated software solution covering all the business processes and functions involved in building or maintaining assets. That gives you a single framework to consider how a BIM model integrates with other business processes such as procurement, project management, project cost control, sales and sub-contract management, variation control, estimating, bid management, material control, plant and equipment hire, construction management, asset and facilities management.
Its become too inefficient to look after different IT systems across different architectures with no natural flow of data through a business. In todays competitive environment, uninformed decision-making is simply not an option.
With a project-based solution combining the integrated enterprise benefits of ERP, but designed specifically to support the complex business processes of project-centric organisations (the twist), its possible to address the data flow problem, and to profitably manage and maintain contracts over the entire asset lifecycle.
The time to act is now
As numerous governments around the world are formulating and launching strategic plans for BIM, theres never been a greater emphasis on moving construction from a document-driven process to an integrated, data-driven one.
If there is one thing that BIM has made clear, it is that companies that engineer, construct and fabricate complex assets and infrastructure need integrated business software to effectively manage time, cost and risk.
And as the pressure to deliver affordable, timely projects mounts, now is the time to integrate business processes and streamline data flow.
The next vehicle to drive on the moon could very well be a Suzuki, if the team from Hukato, Suzuki and ispace technologies has its way.
Preliminary model of the Suzuki lunar craft.
Hukato is competing for Googles Lunar XPRIZE, often called Moon 2.0, and it aims to be the first privately funded lunar exploration team. It has received a significant boost this month as Suzuki announced its support of this all-Japanese team. The Lunar XPRIZE of $20 million will be awarded to the first privately funded team of space explorers that can safely land a lunar rover on the surface of the moon and have the vehicle travel at least 500 metres, while recording high resolution images.
The deadline for this feat is 31 December 2017, although teams must have booked a space flight before the end of 2016 to remain in contention.
For the trip to the moon, Hukato has enlisted the support of ispace technologies, a high-tech startup that develops interconnected micro-robots that will one day explore space for exploitable resources. Once on the moon, however, the task will fall on Suzuki to help design and build a craft that can manoeuvre the rocky and powdery surface in one sixth of the gravity of the earth.
Sharing expertise
According to Hukato, they enlisted the help of Suzuki because of its globally recognised expertise in building highly manoeuvrable compact vehicles, often with four-wheel drive. Suzuki, in turn, was enthused by the Hukatos bold vision and the opportunity to contribute to the future of society, as it has done since its inception 107 years ago.
Suzuki has already started working with Hukato on weight-saving and drivability. Weight-saving will be crucial for the launch and transport phase and is seen as the primary concern for keeping the cost of the launch as low as possible. Here Suzuki has contributed its knowledge of weight-saving design and the use of modern materials, such as carbon fibre. To aid the rovers drivability on the powdery surface of the moon, called regolith, Suzuki will utilise its knowledge of traction control and four-wheel-drive and its ability to build these technologies into very compact vehicles.
Hukatos current rover design is called the Pre-Flight Model 3 and it features solar panels for energy, high-definition 360 degree cameras, a full carbon-fibre hull and custom-designed wheels designed for grip.
NEW YORK, USA: Boeing, creator of some of the world's most iconic aircraft of the 20th century, commemorated its centennial on Friday facing multiple challenges to remain at the forefront of global aerospace innovation.
Jeff McNeill via Wikimedia Commons - Boeing 747-8
At the top of the list is European archrival Airbus, which has topped Boeing in commercial orders in recent years and made inroads into the American market by building planes on US shores. Boeing also faces tough going in defense, having lost a US contract for the long-range strike bomber to Northrop Grumman, and another from the US and allies for a joint strike fighter to Lockheed Martin.
That leaves Boeing with only the delay-plagued KC-46 tanker program for the US Air Force, a deal it controversially wrested out of Airbus' hands. "Boeing's biggest challenge is Airbus," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute. "Whether Boeing keeps up or beats Airbus will determine the future of the company."
To stay strong in defense, Boeing must beef up its operations in maintenance of military vehicles, analysts say.
Space travel sector
In space travel, another longtime core activity, Boeing faces upstarts like SpaceX, which has been aggressive on price.
"Technologically they are positioned, but they are not well positioned in terms of pricing" in space travel, said Marco Caceres of Teal Group. "They are going to have to figure out how to become leaner, or otherwise they won't be able to compete for much longer."
Boeing insists it will stay at the top. Chief executive Dennis Muilenburg told USA Today in June that it is building a rocket that will let man set foot on Mars. "It's about 50 percent bigger than the Saturn V that took humans to the moon," he said.
Boeing also faces obstacles on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have sought to block a controversial contract to sell some $25 billion in planes to Iran. That came after a lengthy fight over the Export-Import Bank weakened an institution that has long supported Boeing.
Still a global icon
Still, analysts say Boeing continues to have cache as a "global icon," as Teal Group's Richard Aboulafia put it.
Boeing had revenues of $96 billion in 2015 and has a multi-year backlog of orders for a civil aviation market that it believes will be worth nearly $6 trillion over the next 20 years.
First founded July 15 in 1916 in Seattle by William Boeing as the Pacific Aero Products Co., Boeing has evolved into the biggest exporter in the United States. The company grew rapidly during and after World War I, expanding into air transport, but was broken up by the US government in 1934 on antitrust grounds. William Boeing sold his holdings in the company.
The company's ability to survive without its founder positioned it for growth when World War II sparked huge demand for its B-17 and B-29 bombers. Strong US military demand for the subsequent B-47 and B-52 bombers boosted Boeing during the Cold War.
Growth was then fueled by a succession of popular commercial planes unveiled in later decades, especially the famous Boeing 747. But today's competitive landscape also includes smaller rivals, such as Canada's Bombardier and China's Comac.
Source: AFPM
[Newsmaker] Lerato Tshabalala - editor of The Afropolitan
Lerato Tshabalala has been appointed as the new editor for The Afropolitan magazine. She's set to bring a fresh new editorial outlook to the publication, which readers have been enjoying for the past 10 years.
Tshabalala, who has 15 years' editorial experience having started her career at Fairlady, will be taking over the editor role from Brenda Nyakudya. Image by Victor Dlamini What will your first order of business be? What will your first order of business be?
Tshabalala: Its been a decade since The Afropolitan magazine first hit shelves and in that time the country, and the world, has changed quite considerably. In 2006 there was no Instagram or Snapchat, the world has become a smaller place because of social media. My editorial goal is to update the look of the magazine by doing small cosmetic changes so we reflect the future and our reader even more. The magazine already has great editorial pillars and as they say, if it aint broke, dont fix it and I dont intend to change, I intend to add to what is already a good product. That said though, these days communities are created and harnessed largely through social media so The Afropolitan magazine will be upping the anti when it comes to our social media strategy.
What is your core strategy as editor of Afropolitan? What is your core strategy as editor of Afropolitan?
Tshabalala: My approach is rather simple; we need to consistently provide content that reflects The Afropolitan readers lifestyle needs and aspirations; to consistently produce content that solidifies the magazines pillars and to use new media resources (like social media, newsletters and lifestyle events) to make sure the magazine is constantly in conversation with our readers. The Afropolitan magazine is already a great product and my mandate is to make sure that we keep doing what we promise with each issue, and thats to be the signature of African sophistication.
What is your definition of an Afropolitan and who are your core readers? What is your definition of an Afropolitan and who are your core readers?
Tshabalala: At the risk of sounding incredibly trite, I would say someone like me. I grew up in Meadowlands and Soweto, went to a Model C school in high school and found myself working in Cape Town for Fairlady magazine at the age of 20. Im an urban citizen but Ive had to straddle two worlds which means both culture and my career are equally important to me. The Afropolitan reader is proud of their African roots but lives a cosmopolitan lifestyle, theyve worked hard for the luxuries they now enjoy but leaving a great legacy is just as important to them. Its not just about acquiring wealth, its about celebrating the great strides black people have made (our readership is 95% black). We have an almost equal male and female split with a slightly higher number for our female readership.
The biggest trend in your industry? The biggest trend in your industry?
Tshabalala: The merging of new media (that is blogging, social media, etc) with time-tested media ideals has been the biggest trend and will probably be for years to come. Social media in particular has changed the way stories are tackled in newsrooms. I often say that these days pitching a story is about more than just a good idea, its about thinking of the lifespan of the article. How long can it capture the readers attention? Simply duplicating content online doesnt work anymore. The story has to have a unique angle on every platform (using the magazines behind the scenes content for a Youtube channel for instance).
What is your main business challenge? What is your main business challenge?
Tshabalala: Staying relevant to your reader in a time where they can access almost everything they desire (from how to decorate their houses using the Houzz app to curating their own lifestyle content via Pinterest) is becoming an increasingly perilous balancing act for magazines and newspapers, in particular. But at the risk of sounding dangerously naive, I do believe that print will rise to the occasion. There are rules that we need to stick to in media, for the sake of the law and the constitution, so where new media treats news with reckless abandon, old media rules can guide. In essence, the two can serve each other well if used properly.
Most important attribute needed to do your job? Most important attribute needed to do your job?
Tshabalala: You mean besides nerves of steel! I would say the ability to trust your instincts is the one thing every editor must have. Being able to spot a good idea and knowing how to turn that into a great story that will appeal to readers involves you having an instinct for what will work, its alchemy, theres no formula so if you dont trust yourself, youll fumble and make rookie mistakes.
What inspires you? What inspires you?
Tshabalala: Being able to curate content for people who look like me, who understand my challenges but have the same lifestyle aspirations I have (which at the moment include a fantasy of enjoying a vintage bottle of bordeaux at the Chateau Margaux vineyard in the south of France!) is a total honour for me. And because The Afropolitan magazine is not a commercial product we can take risks, be controversial (Ive just recently wrote a controversial book called The Way I See It!) and most editors will tell you that creative licence is what makes us excited.
Tell us something about yourself not generally known? Tell us something about yourself not generally known?
Tshabalala: I have terrible habit of talking to myself. When you first interact with me you will find it disconcerting and mildly peculiar (apparently its a sign that perhaps your sanity is starting to leave you) but after a while you get used to it. I surely do hope people dont think Im insane though! *laughter*
What's at the top of your bucket list? What's at the top of your bucket list?
Tshabalala: So much! But Ill just count five things for now: 1) to finally see the sphinx and pyramids in Egypt 2) to go to a Beyonce concert 3) own a Gerard Sekoto original artwork 4) meet and hopefully have some tequila cocktails with Oprah Winfrey and lastly 5) go to the Met Gala and be dressed by Public School for DKNY!
The Motor Industry Workshop Association (Miwa) recently took an issue regarding over-counter parts to the office of the Motor Industry Ombudsman and, according to Miwa chairman Les McMaster, the response sets the record straight for dealerships looking to hold their customers to ransom when it comes to replacing parts.
Les McMaster
McMaster said a member in Kwa-Zulu Natal recently forwarded him this notification sent out by a motor dealership in the area. "Parts supplied over the counter can only be returned for claims via our workshop. The vehicle has to come to the selling dealer and the customer must pay for diagnostic [attention] and also pay for a new part.
"Only once the claim is processed and approved by [dealer name] South Africa, will the selling dealer reimburse the customer for a part supplied."
Consumer Act contravention
McMaster said in response: "Our immediate concern was that this practice is in breach of the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) and, if allowed, will affect all independent workshops. Miwa represents the interests of some 2,500 independent workshops in South Africa and this is a good example of the concerns we address to protect those interests."
He said Miwa was elated to have its suspicions confirmed when the Deputy Motor Industry Ombudsman responded by saying that the particular supplier was indeed contravening several sections and sub-sections of the CPA.
"This wholly supports Miwa's promotion of right to repair in South Africa," McMaster said. "Our new car market still burdens consumers with warranties which dictate the use of genuine parts. But in many first-world countries this is a thing of the past, and consumers are free to use aftermarket parts in their vehicles without affecting warranty."
McMaster said Miwa was at the forefront of lobbying for change and legislating the right to repair initiative in South Africa. Right to repair has been advocated and legislated in developed countries globally since the early 1980s. It promotes consumers having the right to choose where their vehicles are serviced, maintained and repaired at competitive prices in the workshop of their choice.
Source: Herald
We're barely halfway through 2016 and people want it to end. A hashtag started up over the weekend, #2016in3words, trending globally as well as in South Africa - and many people want this seemingly continuous loop of tragedy on a global scale, to stop.
The endless bloodshed at mass shootings, by terrorists or madmen, wars, coups, divisive politicians, corruption, global tragedy, pop icons dying, Brexit, Donald Trump its all too much for the collective psyche.
It seems as if the Nice, France, massacre by a monster driving a truck into crowds celebrating that most important French holiday, Bastille Day - which ironically represents freedom, liberty and equality on the evening of 14 July, was the last straw.
And this was before yet another fatal mass shooting this Sunday, this time targeting police again, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the scene of yet another fatal police shooting of a black man in the United States, just over a week ago.
People seem wrung out emotionally as tragedy after tragedy dominates the news. The danger is that we are becoming desensitised to death and destruction and war as it bombards us on an almost daily basis via the news.
Death streamed live
What has happened of course is that social media has amplified everything and brought it to our doorstep. It is almost impossible to switch off if you want to be a fully functioning member of society, plugged in to what is happening.
With all our instant video apps and broadcast tools available now, we have death streamed live. It might be news, but it is also damaging as it is brought right to us with our always-on, always-on-us, mobile devices; or as the news channels endlessly dissect the latest celebrity death or mass shooting or terror attack - however, it is defined - death is at our door.
Humour is a great foil, as we see on social media, as people try to put overwhelming tragedy into context, by poking fun at how they feel about it or the mass memes that start up. Irony helps too.
A writer on Medium wrote a piece entitled: We regret to inform you that the remainder of 2016 has been cancelled. Kimberly Harrington (@honeystaysuper) writes: We regret to inform you that due to extremely low approval ratings and disappointing performances in almost every category, the remainder of 2016 has been cancelled. We understand that this may cause some confusion as well as rebooking of vacation plans, but were going to go out on a limb and assume that like us, youve just f*cking had it with this already.
That about sums it up. And she goes on to detail all the terrible things that have happened already this year, not including our own uniquely South African news, which is a challenge all on its very own.
This meme which asks whether shock movie director Quentin Tarantino is directing the year 2016, is one of them that has done the rounds this past month, along with others. The recurrent theme is that this is a terrible year of seemingly endless death and destruction and it needs to stop many other memes ask if we can just reboot 2016 and start over
We need this button!
Psychologists will tell you that it is important not to lump things together, as you will then feel overwhelmed and depressed about the state of the world; instead to focus on the small things, the good things in your own life, your loved ones, doing the things you enjoy.
People are struggling though, as the #2016in3words meme over the weekend attests. These were some of the top tweets
#2016in3words is now trending in South Africa https://t.co/RRb6EHG2md Trendsmap SthAfrica (@TrendsSthAfrica) July 16, 2016
The #2016in3words hashtag will make you even more emotional about the state of the world https://t.co/fvwtOOrjLb pic.twitter.com/YqTZmIJIpd indy100 (@indy100) July 16, 2016
Taste the sad #2016in3words Arrested Development (@bluthquotes) July 16, 2016
#2016in3Words Black Lives Matter . Lil Nei Jr. (@_KingStacks_) July 17, 2016
#2016in3words stay safe everyone Maria (HBD 27 Jul) (@mariisays789) July 17, 2016
Of course, there are some people for whom only a game dominates their days, as the Pokemon Go craze takes off worldwide. This social media post about a guy who is annoyed with Pokemon Go people in his backyard, sums it all up!
The final leg of an unprecedented world tour by a solar-powered plane was postponed Saturday, 16 July, 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.
Piccard had completed the 6,765 transatlantic flight in 71 hours.
The plane is being flown on its 35,400km (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 8,924km (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. But they do not expect commercial solar-powered planes any time soon.
Source: AFP
Small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs) around the world drive the economy, yet they often lack advice pertinent to their small business model. Dr Sibongiseni Tunzelana, a successful business owner, shares some of her experiences in starting and eventually operating a successful business to give aspirant owners of SMMEs local insights on getting started.
Dmitriy Shironosov via 123RF
In 2011, Tunzelana, together with Matsepo Matloporo Africa, founded Flavalite Innovations, an ICT service provider, specialising in innovative ICT services and focusing specifically on digital innovation, digital analytics, cyber security, e-ticketing and e-commerce.
Having proved its potential in the local ICT space, the company was welcomed into the Innovator Trust Enterprise Development Programme.
Tunzelana says, Since joining the Innovator Trusts Enterprise Development Programme, the company has received guidance and mentorship which has been instrumental in improving the profile of the company. Through this process, we have improved our sales presentations, refined our sales pitches and been linked with corporate buyers. This has created valuable investor leads and business opportunities. In addition, the company has continued the development of skills and capabilities which have allowed us to streamline and optimise business operations.
Five planning tips for SMME business owners
1. How to choose a business incubator - Its a great advantage to your fledgling business to find a mentoring partner that fits the profile of your particular business. This results in more informed business decisions.
The Small Business Connect website lists a number of business incubators in South Africa.
Useful information about the South African business start-up ecosystem is available on Ventureburn.
The Innovator Trust also partners with Kulea, Shanduka Black Umbrellas, Raizcorp and GIBS, among others.
2. Do your research - SMME owners should be aware of the legal compliance requirements, which guide the operation of businesses in South Africa:
Registration of companies, co-operatives and intellectual property rights (trade marks, patents, designs and copyright) and the required maintenance;
Compliance with relevant legislation;
Monitoring compliance;
BBBEE Affidavits; and
Tax clearance certificates
Information sources for documentation, business processes and legislation affecting SMMEs include:
3. Get the right partner on your side - The following companies and organisations offer support for SMMEs, from tailor made services and solutions to training and skills development.
4. Networking - For small business owners in particular, the importance of networking cannot be emphasised enough. The following events, groups and forums suit the ICT business.
5. Mobile presence and cyber attacks - A mobile presence is extremely important to small businesses, especially with increased mobile access to the internet in South Africa. With this, of course comes the increased risk of cyber attacks. As businesses, big and small migrate data to the cloud; financial data, customer details, and other sensitive information becomes an opportunity for cyber criminals.
Poor security and a lack of awareness and training can leave SMMEs ill-prepared for attacks, making them "easy pickings" for cyber criminals. To avoid this:
Secure your data and dont forget about your customers;
Control access, but don't overdo it; and
Stay up to date with current trends around connection, and safety issues.
As an SMME, you need to engage with the right organisations and individuals, to help you steer towards the right direction. My experiences and views on the challenges and benefits of being an entrepreneur in the South African financial ecosystem, guide and inform every decision I make for my business. The rules of the game are changing daily, and the successful SMMEs are not the most pedantic, theyre the ones who are willing to throw out the rule book and go against their theoretical knowledge when a new or a better way of doing something comes about, she concludes.
For more information, go to www.innovatortrust.co.za.
There is a debate in South Africa about who Nelson Mandela belongs to , as though he is the property of someone, a political party or a faction of the African National Congress.
Added to that, there is a new generation of young people the born frees who never lived under apartheid who now reject the political pacts he made during negotiations to end minority white domination. They see his compromises as selling out, entrenching white privilege and failing the black majority.
When celebrating Nelson Mandela Day on July 18, it would benefit South Africans to reflect on what his legacy means for the nation. It would also help to reflect on how South Africans are living up to his dreams for the country.
Three issues that are important to think about are the problems inherent in liberalism, gender oppression and precarious living conditions for the majority of South Africans.
The limits of liberalism
The parties that negotiated the final constitution and the form of South Africas democracy between 1991 and 1994 made democratic pacts or compromises that constituted a liberal democracy, with many civil liberties and human rights embodied in the constitution.
The constitution, for example, includes 17 grounds for no discrimination of which race, gender and sexual orientation are three, making it one of the most progressive constitutions in the world.
The problem with liberalism is that it focuses on the individual and individual rights, not the community. But people live in communities and not as atomistic individuals without social relations. This is specifically relevant for Africans who adhere to a philosophy of ubuntu that you are a person through your relationships with other people.
Liberalism also embodies Cartesian dualism the distinction between mind and body. This means that we have to think of mind and body as two separate entities that do not affect each other. It also means that the mind is abstracted from the body and viewed as superior to the body.
But what the new generation is telling the world with its protests on campuses is that the body matters very much. And the body matters because it is the embodiment of peoples experience. If your body is black you have a very different experience of the world than if your body is white.
If your body is that of a woman you have a very different experience of the world than if your body is that of a man. This generation has made lived experience central in its engagement with the world. Black pain is real. This is an existential pain caused by feelings of exclusion, not being taken seriously and feelings of alienation in institutional cultures that treat these individuals as other. In this regard the country needs a process of the decolonisation of the mind.
Gender oppression
The founding provisions of the constitution state that South Africa is a non-racial, non-sexist democracy that values human dignity. But South Africans are neither non-racial, or non-sexist. Putting the body and experience at the centre is actually a feminist strategy. Feminists were among the first to argue that the personal is political.
The student campaigns have also put the notion of intersectional feminism centre stage, where intersectionality means the dynamic relationship of interlocking oppressions of gender, race, class and other markers of identity. Young women, the majority of them black, are at the forefront to say that second-class citizenship for women is not acceptable. Women students have said they will no longer tolerate a rape culture. This is a culture in which women are objectified, sexually harassed, disrespected and unsafe.
Women students were prepared to use their bodies in topless marches to bring the point across that women should be able to walk the streets, even when they are topless, without being harassed. They embody the struggles against sexism, homophobia, the harassment of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) community and gender-based violence.
Presently South Africa has one of the highest levels of gender-based violence in the world and women are still discriminated against at work. Also, women bear the brunt of HIV infection, while those in the rural areas are often exposed to harmful cultural practices such as ukuthwala and virginity testing.
Precarious lives
We live in what can be called precarious times. The world is an unstable place with thousands migrating from the Middle East to Europe, where urban terror has increased. The global economy is wreaking havoc with those living in developing countries and xenophobic violence is on the increase everywhere.
Judith Butler, the American feminist theorist, talks about precarious lives, where conditions of uncertainty mean that through violence, uncertain income or no income and inequality, many are never sure that they may survive another day. Apartheid South Africa was the cause of precarious lives for most black South Africans. The operation of law was precarious and more often than not did not result in justice.
Conditions of precariousness in South Africa are fuelled by the lack of moral authority in our political leadership. This can be viewed in the treatment of the Public Protectors findings on the misappropriation of funds for the presidents private home at Nkandla, as well as forms of censorship exercised by the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
South Africans will have to reimagine the possibility of community if they want to live together peacefully in this country. They have to start in a sense, as Butler says, with the questions: who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? What makes for a liveable and a grievable life?
South Africans need to think back and remember that point of embracing the constitution 20 years ago. They have to continue to understand the impetus of reconciliation that is embodied in the constitution. They cannot afford to forget this and they owe it to Mandela, who supported a version of liberalism that is inclusive and accepting of diversity, not to do so. He was a man who believed in all forms of equality be it race or gender or other forms of identity. And he worked towards ending precarious conditions.
In these efforts all South Africans have a role to play.
This is a shortened, edited version of a keynote address delivered at the Nelson Mandela Colloquium recently.
The World Food Programme is outraged by the looting of its main warehouse in Juba. Despite that serious setback, WFP staff have already been distributing vital food assistance to people displaced by the violence in the South Sudanese capital.
Image by 123RF
At WFPs request, UNMISS peacekeepers did an assessment of the warehouse on the western edge of Juba last week and reported extensive looting of food. WFP staff have not yet been able to reach the warehouse to confirm the extent of the losses.
Before the fighting started at the end of last week, more than 4,500 metric tons of food was in the warehouse, enough to provide lifesaving food and nutrition assistance to about 220,000 people for a month. It also held trucks, generators and other relief items.
WFP strongly condemns the theft of food intended for the poorest and most vulnerable people of South Sudan, said WFP deputy regional director Vernon Archibald. While the extent of the looting is not yet clear, we fear that the loss of these vital food supplies will severely hamper WFPs ability to assist the tens of thousands of people who have fled their homes because of the violence.
Regardless of the theft, country director Joyce Luma noted that WFP has already provided urgently needed food assistance to thousands of displaced people sheltering at UN peacekeeping bases, using stocks from a smaller warehouse in another part of town.
In addition to providing food assistance to displace people in Juba, which is our normal role, WFP has also sheltered some 3,000 people in our main office compound, mostly women and children who fled for their lives as fighting raged around us, said Luma. A new mother fled to our compound with her baby son just hours after giving birth.
Luma added, At the same time we cannot forget that the dire humanitarian crisis in other parts of South Sudan has not abated, and our teams throughout the country are still providing lifesaving support to millions of people who face severe hunger.
The warehouse on the west side of Juba serves as WFPs main logistical hub inside of South Sudan, and is used to supply WFP operations in the rest of the country.
In past incidents of large-scale looting, WFP has been able to negotiate the return of looted food when those who took it recognised the importance of the humanitarian assistance that WFP provides, Luma said. We hope that the parties responsible for this devastating loss will show their humanity and return the relief supplies so they can be used to assist thousands of innocent civilians who have been caught up in this brutal conflict.
Trade is in Africa's blood. Its rich resources, numerous societies and access to the world have created a hotbed of trade civilisations. One could go back millennia to the early kingdoms around the continental horn - the forefathers and peers of the Ancient Egyptian world - or the mysterious Kingdom of Nok in West Africa as examples.
But even in the last 2,000 years Africa never shied away from trade. The Kingdoms of Ashanti and Kongo were world-famous business hubs. In Libya vast desert cities can be found where ancient Berbers built elaborate irrigation systems. The Zimbabwe ruins and South Africas Mapungubwe had yielded evidence of extensive trade with Asian and Middle Eastern nations.
But most striking is the legacy of kingdoms that existed along the Sahel: the transitional area between the Sahara and the rest of the continent. Here numerous societies sat shoulder to shoulder, controlling the vast trade moving between Eurasia, West and Central Africa for ages.
Birthplace of business networks
Today the world is shifting gears into a new revolution, creating an opportunity for Africa to assert its legacy as the birthplace of business networks. Computational power and connectivity is shrinking the globe, changing how we compete and cooperate. Mastering pace, scale and complexity, creating channels and fostering partnerships have never been more achievable. Some have called this the 'network revolution' and it is Africas greatest business opportunity yet.
The continents recent historical deficit ironically puts it in a very convenient position. Whereas other regions have paid the expensive price of being early adopters, African companies and states can readily adopt the best in modern technology, resulting in real gains on the ground. If there are any doubts about this, just look at the spectacular penetration of mobile devices in Africa: more than any other region in the world. Consider the remarkable growth of Rwanda, which thanks to savvy technology investments has tripled its GDP since 2000.
Three-step transition
Success and growth is almost a given when developing markets jump onto the network revolution bandwagon. The real question is how to go about it. Below are three steps defining the transition.
From manual to electronic and internet-based: The network revolution is a shift from manual processes kept separate in silos. Automation and accessibility are among its pillars, opening both resources and the ability to cross-pollinate ideas. South Africas Department of Home Affairs has dramatically improved its service, auditability and turnaround times by going paperless. It captures all data electronically, which is shared across its footprint. This not only made for happier citizens, but opened the way to adopting the countrys award-winning Smart ID cards.
From an entity and chain to a network: Business networks are the oldest and most vital components to any enterprises survival. These are jealously guarded because of their fragility; all it takes is for that proverbial weak link in the chain to break. But today digital sourcing marketplaces such as Aruba are making it easy to find suppliers, partners and buyers. The mobile phone is a cornerstone to these networks: Africa is currently undergoing a farming revolution in countries such as Kenya and Tanzania, where mobile services help farmers get daily prices, share advice and even gain micro-insurance for their crops across a web of networks, not flimsy top-down chains.
From need to reach and fusion: The biggest impact of the network revolution is being born from data. We are increasingly able to quantify aspects of the world through data, be it consumer behaviour, environmental shifts, mechanical maintenance or anything that generates information about its behaviour. That may soon become everything as the Internet of Things brings sensors to every nook of our world. And fusing the resulting data in creative ways to offer new insights will be the differentiator between the haves and have-nots of tomorrow. This is extending the reach and proactivity of companies and governments beyond their traditional boundaries. One example is the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, which has accelerated its delivery and boosted efficiency by adopting data-centric thinking.
One element underpins all of the above: the platform. For any business or government to take advantage of the network revolution, it must consolidate its processes into a unified software platform: a powerful foundation where everything ties together. Called the 3rd Platform, this is the next step in digital technology, taking advantage of the power and scale provided by modern data centres and connectivity.
This consolidation pays dividends. Research from McKinsey & Company shows that networked enterprises using collaborative technology to connect processes to customers, suppliers, and partners outpace their peers in nearly every category of business performance. Africa is primed to take the network revolution by the horns and reassert itself as the birthplace of business.
This year shows the gap in online travel sales between North America and the APAC region closing with a forecast $191 billion in online travel sales for North America and $178 in APAC.
By next year, however, while North America is forecast by eMarketer to reach $200 billion in 2017. for the first time ever online travel sales in the APAC region are forecast to exceed this, reaching $216 billion.
By 2020, eMarketers forecast sees the gap widening with online travel sales reaching $320 billion in APAC versus $226 billion in North America.
Chinas booming digital travel market, driven in part by the emergence of a growing middle class that is keen to travel the world, coupled with high levels of mobile adoption, are what is behind the surge in online travel sales in the APAC region, says eMarketer.
Consumers in China are now able to take advantage of the rising disposable incomes and simplified visa policies that have been progressing over the past few years, says eMarketer analyst Chris Bendtsen. And its the digital companies that are benefiting.
The Burma Army is currently engaged in an escalating conflict in both northern Shan and Kachin states. The situation has left several dead, including a 22-year-old man killed by a landmine, and others injured, such as a 39-year-old mother wounded by shrapnel and incapacitated. Free Burma Rangers said in its latest report.
In another incident, a 21-year-old student was killed at a checkpoint in the Kachin State capital of Myitkyina by government soldiers.
The conflict has seen a spike in human rights violations, including rapes, killings, the use of civilians as human shields and forced labor, with the majority of reports pointing the finger at government forces.
There are currently three major conflicts in Shan and Kachin State, pitting government troops against ethnic armed groups, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Shan State Army North (SSA-N) and the Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA).
FBR has documented at least 33 armed skirmishes since May, which have left 11 dead and 9 missing, although the real casualty figures could be much higher as it is difficult to get figures of Government losses. The skirmishes have also seen the use of at least six airstrikes by government forces, and 11 heavy artillery strikes.
Thanks to public awareness campaigns launched by environmentalists, protest campaigns launched by CSOs, and media coverage about the dangers of the dam, protests against it construction were launched. The Myitsone dam project consists of building seven dams with the main dam at the confluence (Myitsone) of the Maykha and Malikha Rivers, five more dams on Maykha and a dam on Malikha Rivers will also be built for power generation.
The estimated installed capacity of the project is 21,600 MW. According to 2015 statistics, Myanmar is currently generating just over 5,000 MW in the entire country so the installed capacity of the Myitsone dam will be over four times that of total power generation in the country. The then military regime and China Power Investment Corporation signed a MoU to build the dam in 2006.
After completion, 90% of the power generated will be sold to China and Myanmar will receive the remaining 10%.
At that time, the deafening sounds of protest against Myitsone and calls for Save the Irrawaddy echoed throughout the entire country. As a result, in 2012, President Thein Sein made the stunning announcement that the project would be suspended during his five-year tenure and he won the hearts of the people.
However, more protests against other dam projects on Thanlwin River were heard in early 2015. The MOUs of these dam projects were signed by the then military regime too. In these campaigns, local people, NGOs and local MPs and legislators joined hands in protest.
These proposed dams on the Thanlwin River are Konlong, Naungpha and Tasang or Mongton dam in Shan State, Ywathit dam in Kayah (Karenni) State and Hatgyi dam in Kayin State.
The hydropower dams to be built on the Thanlwin River will generate electric power 40% of which will be sold to China, another 40% to Thailand, and the remaining 20% will be for Myanmar.
In the 2015 general elections, National League for Democracy (NLD) party led by Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory and the new government led by President HtinKyaw was installed in 2016. A few days after the swearing-in ceremony, a challenge was issued to the new government by the Chinese government which raised the question of how it would handle these dam projects.
Chinese Ambassador to Myanmar Mr Hong Lian told reporters at a press conference held at his residence on March 4: We hope the new government will settle this issue patiently and it will not reach the stage of paying compensation. We will explore ways for getting an acceptable negotiated settlement with the new government.
China Power Investment Corporation (CPI) issued its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report on the Myitsone dam project during the term of President Thein Sein. BBC news on December 27, 2013, reported that CPI Managing Director Li KwamHua said these dam projects had full safety measures, have international standards and provide good benefits. He said CPI was one of 500 reputable companies in the world in meeting international standards, and Myanmar should proceed with these projects to meet the growing demand of power in the country.
But local people staged demonstrations against this dam project as they could not accept it. Jar On who was born in Tanphe village near the proposed dam site and brought up there said: We rely on the confluence of Maykha and Malikha Rivers for our livelihood so we dont want this dam project to be built here. Not only me,this is the wish and desire of all Tanphe people. We absolutely dont want it. We absolutely object to it.
Tanphe is the nearest village to the dam site. The entire village was forcibly relocated to the newly built Aung Myin Thar village in 2011 by the government. Without choice, they have to live in the new model village where there is a school and a hospital but for their livelihood, the villagers still rely on the area of old Tanphe village.
Local people need not worry about food as soon as we enter the forest. First, we put our rice pot on the fire and then enter the forest to find vegetables and fish for our meals. Moreover, the forest is for our livelihood too. We can pan for gold in the stream. In this way, we can manage to feed our family and both ends meet. Myitsone gives us everything we need and it is so good for us, Jar On added.
Environmentalist Win Myo Thu once wrote an article which says the dam projects proposed in the Myitsone area will not only have an impact in Myitsone but also downstream and up to the delta region. These dams will have an environmental impact and will affect the sustainability of the ecology and environment. These dams may create the greater probability of earthquakes and further analysis of the impact on freshwater fisheries and subsequent escalation of fish prices in the country is needed.
Similarly, proposed dams to be built on Thanlwin River in Shan, Kayin and Kayah States, will have an impact on Mon State too. Former Lower House MP and current Mon State Parliament Deputy Speaker Aung Naing Oo said, An MP from Shan State asked a question in parliament in 2014 regarding the dams to be built on Thanlwin River and relocation of villagers from submerged areas. The government confirmed the projects and they are almost certain to be built. We cannot accept them.
He also said, My constituency Chaungsone is at the mouth of Thanlwin with a mix of fresh and sea water. The people in my constituency rely on the river and forest for their livelihood. They earn their income from fishery and forest produce. If we lose these rivers and forests, fish species will become extinct and the forest will be damaged. So our constituency cannot accept these dam projects.
A report released by Myanmar Rivers Network on January 19, 2015, says local people are being forcibly relocated because of these dam projects and government troops give security cover for these forced relocations.
Myanmar Rivers Network spokesman Sai Khay Sai once said, Right to ownership of natural resources will be the source of conflict in the country. If we continue these controversial dam projects without negotiations between the two sides it will pour oil on the civil war conflict fire.
The building of such dam projects should be decided by political choice. But decision-making power should be given to all the people too. At least six million people living along the Irrawaddy valley should be informed and educated on these projects. Then let them decide by themselves. Only with this sort of co-decision making power should dam projects be carried out, Win Myo Thu said in an article entitled, Myitsone filled with traps.
Ministry of Electricity and Energy, Assistant Secretary (Electricity) San Yuu told Mizzima, We are doing these projects for domestic consumption only. Myitsone has been suspended. Thanlwin dams are still in the feasibility study stage. We have not yet received all reports on them. Anyway, we will carry out the projects that are accepted by the people. We will not carry out projects which are unacceptable to the people.
Win Myo Thu wrote in his article that the new government was expected to work in accordance with the wishes of the people. The people put all their hopes in this NLD government.
89-year old octogenarian environmentalist U Ohn, who devotes his whole life to protection and conservation of the forest and environment said with full confidence, after hearing the governments plans for the future of Myitsone, I believe Aung San Suu Kyi will not do what people dont like.
Derelict house where the local youth gambled and
used drugs (Photo: Kyaikmayaw/Mudon News/
Facebook) Derelict house where the local youth gambled andused drugs (Photo: Kyaikmayaw/Mudon News/Facebook)
The incident took place near the Kanni Village cemetery on July 14. NMSP raid infantry were informed of young locals using drugs in a run-down house. The raid began around 1:30 PM on July 14. There, five young locals were arrested, while one of them was shot and killed.
Five persons were using drugs and 3 were playing cards when our soldiers arrived at the house. However, when they saw the soldiers, they jumped out of the house and ran away. The soldiers ordered them not to run and proceeded to open fire into the sky. We arrested five people. [.] But the wounded person died on the way, said Nai Kyi San, secretary of Thaton District of New Mon State Party.
The victim was Ko Tun Myint, and he is Mon national, aged 30, and from Kanni Village.
Nai Kyi San continued that NMSP troops handed over four arrestees to Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) No. 546, which is based in Kyun Do area, as requested, on July 15.
The villagers were playing cards at the cemetery outside of the village. So, the NMSP men raided the place. Due of that, the villagers ran away and there were shots fired. One of them was shot in the back once and died, said U Tun Tun, Police Chief of Kyun Do Police Station.
The NMSP troops only decided to raid after the local people and youth groups had informed them several times that there were young people using drugs near the cemetery as if they were licensed to freely drug deal and consume narcotics, according to Nai Kyi San.
On the day, it was a confusing situation in the village. Now it has become clear. However, we are not sure how the NMSP will handle this case yet. They have not commented on the case. We know for a fact it is still under investigation, said a Sayardaw [senior monk] in Kanni Village.
Sayardaw added that although NMSPs troops were informed that the young locals were playing cards and using drugs at the cemetery, when the incident took place they were only playing cards.
According to Police Chief U Tun Tun, the man who shot the deceased ran away and is in hiding. The NMSP is currently searching for that person. The accused is charged with article of 302/364/114.
As part of its national project, the NMSP has been conducting anti-drug campaigns and providing education concerned with drug danger and rehab services to locals.
Blueprints were originally laid down for six dams to be built on the Salween River in Burma.
In addition to the 1,200 megawatt hydro-dam in Nongpha, proposals have been set for three other hydropower dams in Shan State: a 1,400MW project on the Upper Kunlong; a 2,000 MW dam in Man Tong; and a 7,100 MW dam in Mongton. Plans are also afoot for a 4,500MW project in Ywar Tit, Karenni State; and the 1,360 Hatgyi Dam in Karen State.
Financing for the hydro-electric projects comes from three main sources: Chinas Three Gorges Corporation; the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand; and Burmas Ministry of Electric Power.
According to a Myanmar Times report on July 8, the Ministry of Finance and Planning announced that it was suspending the Nongpha hydropower project, which is slated for construction in northern Shan States Tangyan Township.
Ministry representative Soe Nyunt Lwin said that the government would have to look into the costs and benefits of such projects, and the impact they will have on people and the nation.
According to Sai Hor Hseng, a spokesperson for the Shan Human Rights Foundation, all the dam projects should be suspended, particularly the Mongton Dam due to its enormous size and impact.
Villagers properties and roads were already damaged by the construction work, he said. But victims have never been compensated.
The construction company told local residents that there is construction everywhere, so they cannot pay out compensation.
Speaking before the Shan State government on July 13, Sai Kham Aung, an MP from the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD) who represents Hsipaw Township, the public must be made aware of who is responsible for their security and any damage caused by dam construction.
Will local villagers receive any benefits from the hydropower project? asked Sai Kham Aung. In Kyaukme Township, there is the Yeywa Dam. If the construction continues, who will take responsibility? Does the government share the concerns on these issues?
In August last year, Shan Herald reported that more than 23,000 people in Shan State voiced concerns over dam construction on the Salween River, also known as the Thanlwin.
There simply are no policies concerning electricity in Burma, said Sai Wan Leng Kham, an Upper House MP from SNLD who attended a two-day energy policy workshop in Taunggyi last week. We must try to find methods from the workshop to submit policies and laws in parliament related to electricity.
Photo by SZM Mansome: More than 1,000 protesters held a rally in Lashio town on 16 July 2016 to demand an end to the killing of innocent civilians.
According to Sai Pha Seng, who was present at the event, the demonstration started at 9am, and included participants from Lashio, Kutkhai, Hsenwi, Tangyan, Mongyai, Kyaukme and Hsipaw townships, The peaceful protest was conducted through the streets of Lashio city.
Innocent civilians have been killed arbitrarily, but no group is taking responsibility, he said. The Tatmadaw and ethnic armed groups must work together through the peace process and show respect for human rights.
Led by the Tai Youth Organization, Kachin Youth Organization, Taang Womens Organization and Taang Students and Youth Union, the demonstrators demanded justice for the recently murdered civilians in northern Shan State. Seven persons were shot dead, allegedly by Burmese government troops, in Mong Yaw sub-township in late June, while a man was murdered by an unknown group in Namkham Township last week.
Please stop killing innocent people, said protester Sai Tuen Thor. These human rights abuses must end.
Shan Herald reported on July 6 that civic groups had published a statement urging the National League for Democracy-led government to take the lead in investigating the Mong Yaw case and bring the culprits to justice.
By: Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN)
The peace process: Shwe Ohns 6 Ifs
In December 1992, a month before the National Convention (NC) set up by the military rulers of the country ostensibly to lay down principles for its third constitution, Shan politician U Shwe Ohn (1923-2010) was detained and sentenced to a years imprisonment.
His offense: writing and distributing an essay which made suggestions to the NC about how the new constitution should look like. The 101-page essay titled Toward the Third Union of Burma/Myanmar (When, Why, and How), when it came out in a booklet form, published by SHAN, in 1998, was, along with The Village of the Generals by TNT, one of the news agencys bestsellers.
In it are 6 hypothetical suppositions, which are highly thought provoking.
Also despite the years, it is still very much relevant to what is taking place today under the leadership of U Thein Sein (2011-2016) and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. (2016 ).
Perhaps going through them may help todays leaders to reduce their pride and prejudice. So here they are:
If there were no Aung San..
Considering the non-Burmans sentiments in 1947, it would be hard to imagine that they would have agreed to proposals by any Burman leaders for a union. The reason that they had agreed to was because Burma had a leader like Aung San who was clean, honest, genuinely patriotic, patient and had foresight.
If there were no SSPFL..
The Shan State Peoples Freedom League (SSPFL), set up by Shan youths in 1946, had steadfastly advocated joint independence with the Burmans. It was through its vigorous campaigning that the hesitating ruling princes of Shan States finally gave the go-ahead for the idea.
(Despite its tireless efforts at Shan-Burman friendship and solidarity, the SSPFL was destroyed by the AFPFL government following independence).
If no agreement were not reached at Panglong
There would be no Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry (FACE) to sound out the non-Burmans wishes. And there would have been no Union of Burma/Myanmar. Instead, Burma Proper, also known as Ministerial Burma, would become independent and the rest remain under British rule.
If the Right of Secession were not provided in the 1947 Constitution
On 16 June 1947, the Prince of Mongpawn Sao Sam Tun protested that Aung Sans directives for the constitution did not include the non-Burmans right of secession, as promised at Panglong. We think theres only one thing left for us to do, he reportedly told U Nu, and that is to pack our bags and go home.
The AFPFL leaders, in response, assured him since the principle had been accepted, there should be no lingering doubts. The result was the incorporation of Chapter 10. Right of Secession in the constitution.
It is crystal clear that no Union of Burma/Myanmar would have emerged without it.
If Part Scheduled Areas were not included in Kachin State..
(Myitkyina and Bhamo districts at that time were designated as Part Scheduled Areas, where the Ministerial Burma government could advise but the final decision rested with the British Governmentauthors note)
Without them, there would be no Kachin State and Kachin leadership would have objected. Plans for the formation of a Union would then be in jeopardy.
If there were no Union of Burma/Myanmar
As said in If #3, Burma and the Frontier Areas would have been separated, with the former becoming independent, and the latter still under British rule. But for how long would that be?
The Federated Malay States, on which the Federated Shan States had modeled itself in 1922, became an independent dominion in the British Commonwealth in 1957. And since 1963, it has become known as Federation of Malaysia.
Similarly, the Frontier Areas would, in all likelihood, become independent by that time. And afterward, probably the Republic of Burma and the independent Frontier Areas will agree to form a Union on equal footing.
No doubt something to chew upon, though the mill never grinds on the water that is past. But it may help to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
Finally, U Shwe Ohn showers all the praises on Aung San, who said on 16 June 1947, with regards to the Panglong Agreement and the FACE recommendations, We not only accept the letter of the agreement but also the spirit of the agreement.
He later declared, I have heard that some ethnic leaders are worried whether we are going to deviate from the spirit of the agreement (in Burmese, he used the words, original concept). What I would like to say here is if they still harbor such doubts, they are insulting both our sense of honor and sense of pride.
If those words do not epitomize the Spirit of Panglong, what does?
A file photo.
BHOPAL (PTI): Three indigenously-developed 155 mm 'Dhanush' artillery guns have been handed over to the Indian Army by the Jabalpur-based Gun Carriage Factory (GCF).
"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.
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 (OFB), 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 (ToT) 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 fulfil 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 (MoD) over allegations of graft.
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This article was published 18/07/2016 (2292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Doors Open Brandon paid tribute to the areas aboriginal history for the first time this weekend by offering an indigenous pit-stop among its list of regular heritage properties.
With the addition of lawn bowling, geocaching, and musical performances, the 15th annual Doors Open event was much different from last years.
And the changes didnt go unnoticed.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Beverly Cochran looks over one of the Brandon Fire and Emergency Services pumpers at the No. 1 Firehall on 19th Street North during a tour as part of Doors Open Brandon on Sunday afternoon.
I heard the drum and wanted to check it out, said Whitney Hodgins, who had altered Sundays plans to swing by Clark Hall, where two teepees had been set up. Its almost like one heartbeat, and it calls you.
The Brandon Urban Aboriginal Peoples Council had been approached by the events planning committee three weeks ago with an invite to join the weekend lineup.
Despite the short notice, BUAPC arranged for an indigenous-themed site to be set up at the university campus.
I think its very important that the aboriginal history be recognized. We were here long before Brandon became a city, BUAPC representative Roberta MacKinnon said.
Visitors had the opportunity to enter the teepees and learn how they are constructed, as well as view a PowerPoint presentation, listen to the Sweetgrass Ojibway Drum Group, or partake in a beading lesson.
For the city and Heritage Brandon committees, the weekend was a chance to do the things they only talked about previous years.
This is kind of trying just to encourage or add part of the aboriginal heritage to our city, said organizer Riley Morningstar.
With 24 sites nine more than last year the weekend was bigger than usual.
However, the committee hopes to recognize the countrys and citys birthdays next year too, and Morningstar said planning for 2017 will begin shortly.
aantoneshyn@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @AAntoneshyn
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This article was published 18/07/2016 (2292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Since he dropped the band name 4 Hole Punch, Brendan Lyons has had a lot more success in the music industry.
Its not a great name, the Brandon-born drummer said with a laugh.
Great name it was not, but 4 Hole Punch was the name of one of Lyons early bands. A group of friends who were going to Brandon University at the time, 4 Hole Punch played at Westman festivals and The 40 when they could. Later in their career 2011, to be exact the friends decided to pursue a music career and degrees in Edmonton.
Now, that hes one of 2016s Fred Sherratt Award recipients, Lyons is glad he made the move.
After leaving Manitoba in 2012, he enrolled in MacEwan Universitys bachelor of music in jazz and contemporary popular music program.
Five weeks ago, he graduated as part the programs second class with a major in drumset performance.
Class starts at eight and were there till midnight every day, so, you know, I think thats like 14-hour days every day for four years, rehearsing, playing, (and) there was performances all the time, Lyons said of his workload.
Although the program was intense, Lyons drew the attention of faculty members who later nominated him for the MusiCounts award.
At a presentation in Toronto on June 28, Lyons and 11 other winners were presented with the Fred Sherratt Award as well as $2,500.
As the trip sets winners up with members of the music industry, Lyons met members from Universal Music Canada and Gavin Brown, who helped produce the Tragically Hip and Barenaked Ladies.
An opportunity to kick-start their career like that is considered invaluable to young artists like Lyon, who isnt always confident what his future will look like.
I could tell you what Id like it to look like. Id just like to play music for a living play music, produce, engineer, write. As long as I can sustain some sort of, you know, living doing that, I think thats all I can ask for, really.
For now, he is playing in Edmonton bands Vera, Push and Pull, and the Madi Allen Band, and teaches 25 students a week.
He hopes to visit the Wheat City soon now that school is officially over.
aantoneshyn@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @AAntoneshyn
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This article was published 18/07/2016 (2292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Audience members at the Westoba Agricultural Centre of Excellence this weekend found the RCMP performance to be magical as well as musical.
The RCMP Musical Ride drew a crowd of roughly 700 Saturday night, with an audience of similar size anticipated for Sunday.
Some attendees were local while others had travelled from out of town, but they all shared one common passion.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Members of the RCMP Musical Ride perform at the Westoba Agricultural Centre of Excellence on Saturday evening.
Ive always loved horses. Never owned one, but have always loved horses, and we just came as a family to watch the musical ride, Sharon Dutchak recalled of her first RCMP show in the late 1970s.
On Saturday, she and her 13-year-old daughter, Chelsey Dutchak, came from Strathclair for the show.
It was Chelseys first time seeing the performance, but she wasnt hesitant about the part she was looking forward to most: Trick riding.
The Canadian Northern Lights Drill Team, consisting of 12 riders, warmed up the crowd. With four riders from Brandons division, the team showed off their precision drill skills, which make use of synchronization and musical routines.
Shelby Thue, a trick rider from Saskatchewan, were next up in the arena.
She and her horse, Smokey, wowed the crowd as Smokey raced around the ring and Thue dangled from a single stirrup.
Tim Smith/Brandon Sun Fans meet trick rider Shelby Thue and her horse Smokey after her performance during the RCMP Musical Ride on Saturday.
Finally, a troop of 32 horses and their riders marched into the arena.
The contrast created by the stark red of the Mounties serge and the glistening coat of their horses was a sight that awed the audience.
Their routines spread the contingent throughout the arena, sometimes weaving riders through each other, and at other moments holding them in a single line.
Once they had finished, both riders and horses were wet with sweat, but it was only to the satisfaction of those both in the stands and in the ring.
Winnipeg-raised Const. Janis Kelly entered her second year with the RCMP Musical Ride in January, but had been posted in Nova Scotia for almost seven years prior to that.
Tim Smith/Brandon Sun Ashley Laus, 9, watches the RCMP Musical Ride performance on Sunday.
Always in the back of my mind (I) wanted to do the ride. Its a tradition, the history of the force, the mounted police, Kelly said.
Im very proud to be Manitoban right now.
The glory was not lost to those in the crowd.
I respect all that (the RCMP) do for our country and I just think its phenomenal that they can get together and put on such a performance, Sharon Dutchak said.
Its part of our countrys heritage.
Tim Smith/Brandon Sun Members of the RCMP Musical Ride perform on Sunday.
aantoneshyn@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @AAntoneshyn
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This article was published 18/07/2016 (2292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
As of today, 195 kilometers of Highway 10, from the U.S. border to Riding Mountain National Park, will officially be recognized as the John Bracken Highway in honour of Manitobas longest-serving premier.
The Ontario-born agronomist made an unlikely politician, having gone to school at the Ontario Agricultural College and the University of Illinois before teaching at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1920, after 10 years there, he became the president of the Manitoba Agricultural College and moved eastward once again.
It was only then that Bracken was recruited by the United Farmers of Manitoba in 1922. At first he expressed reluctance at accepting a position, but eventually agreed to stand as UFMs leader and premier-designate, launching the beginning of his 26-year political career.
File photo John Bracken is still Manitobas longest-serving premier, holding the post from 1922 until early 1943.
With a victory in a deferred election in The Pas constituency, Bracken succeeded Liberal Tobias Norris to become Manitobas 11th premier.
I guess thats kind of a different approach, you know. Most people go to the Parliament Buildings and work their way up and things like that, not just show up at the door, chuckled Brackens grandson, Michael, who will be standing in the former premiers place during the naming ceremony today.
After two or three times they tried to talk him into being premier, which he didnt really want to I guess my grandmother sort of said, John, if these men need you, you should go, Michael explained.
Michael was born three years after his grandfather retired from federal politics but 18 years before his passing in 1969, and remembers the former premier taking him to visit the parliament buildings.
It seemed that although John Brackens accession into the political realm was undesired, it went unhindered by any disinterest.
He served under the Progressive Party of Manitoba until 1943 halfway into his 21st year at the provinces helm when he was elected as leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party.
Bracken became known in several ways. Often, his political reign is described as cautious or careful. He oversaw the government that created a provincial income tax, and introduced a pension for seniors over the age of 70.
An alliance between Brackens Progressives and the provincial Liberals resulted in their merging, and he again led a coalition in 1940.
At the federal level, Bracken and the Progressives lost the 1945 election, but won the Neepawa seat. He remained the leader of the Opposition and of the Conservative Party until his resignation in 1948.
Evidence of his influence is seen today by Brackens family, who, spread throughout Canada and the U.S., is still recognized for their last name.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Vehicles makes their way along Highway 10 in the Souris River valley south of Brandon on Saturday afternoon. The 195-kilometre stretch of Highway 10 from the U.S. border to Riding Mountain National Park will today be named after former Manitoba premier John Bracken.
On a ski trip and out of money, Michael Bracken recalled asking a drug store owner to cash a cheque for him. Upon learning Michael was Johns grandson, the owner said, Well, you could write any amount of money you want, even the whole building.
He had that much trust in our family, you know, not even my grandfather, to do that I didnt buy the building, by the way, Michael said.
Family from Winnipeg, Manotick, Ont., and Cincinnati, Ohio, will join Michael for the ceremony this morning.
Minister Cliff Cullen will be representing the Government of Manitoba.
aantoneshyn@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @AAntoneshyn
Opinion
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This article was published 18/07/2016 (2292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
We saw it in last years federal election. We have seen it in recent American presidential campaigns. Now we see it confirmed in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. We are in a new political reality, with a dividing line between young and old. A new generation gap.
A generation gap in our 2015 election was a no-brainer. Obviously, older voters identified with the old-fashioned and stodgy Stephen Harper. And younger voters flocked to the stylish and cool Justin Trudeau.
In the U.S., young voters were instinctively drawn to Barack Obama, and they helped ensure his two election victories. And rebellious youth were naturally attracted to Bernie Sanders and his radical message. And as a lagniappe, there was the Sanders promise of free college education!
But the Brexit vote was something different. Young people favoured remaining in the EU. But that was also the establishment position; the Remain in the EU campaign was led by that straight-laced Conservative, former prime minister David Cameron.
Whats going on here? Here are five themes that run through this new generational reality.
NEW WORLD
The young are at home in the 21st century global village. They have grown up with the Internet, smartphones and other mind-blowing technologies. They are comfortable interacting with different ethnic groups and different cultures. They see as normal the new rights and roles for women and LGBT individuals. In other words, the young are at ease with the future.
NEW PARADIGM
The new emerging politics goes beyond the traditional split between the right wing and the left wing. In the Brexit campaign, both Conservative and Labour were on the same side. In the current U.S. election, often Donald Trump is to the left of Hillary Clinton.
For today and into the future, many big issues defy a right-left breakdown. When dealing with global challenges like climate change, terrorism or the refugee crisis, we will need new approaches that are innovative and non-ideological.
LEARNING
Young people are better educated than old people. And young people put more stock in learning, research and evidence-based thinking. The young are curious and they look forward to what is coming: new scientific breakthroughs in genetics, new technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Whatever. Bring it on!
In contrast, look at politicians who appeal to older voters: like Stephen Harper or Donald Trump. Those politicians dismiss facts, science and university types. They are openly anti-intellectual; they revel in shallowness and simplicity.
COMPLEXITY
Young people know that things are complicated. For example, take the EU. Britain remaining in the EU means regulation, taxation and international entanglements. It means cultural diversity. It means more co-operation and more competition both with those who live in foreign countries and with those who immigrate to Britain. Youth in Britain are OK with that complexity. For young people, the EU spells opportunity: to live and work not only in a vibrant U.K., but also in 27 other countries. Like, if you were young, wouldnt you want to be more European?
INVOLVEMENT
Brexit highlights the importance of actually getting out to vote. In the Brexit referendum, 72 per cent of those eligible voted. But only 36 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 voted. Yet the young have to live the longest with electoral consequences. Kids, remember that you are citizens. Vote!
One proposal to increase youth participation is to lower the voting age to 16. In a poll done after the Brexit vote, more than 80 per cent of those aged 16 and 17 favoured remaining in the EU. If the voting age had been lowered, the Brexit result might have been different.
One supporter of lowering the voting age to 16 is Richard Branson British billionaire, EU booster and hip old guy. Because of new media, he says, young people are, more than ever, interested, motivated and informed. Teenagers, he says, are, time and again on the right side of history.
One British teen interviewed after the Brexit vote put it more bluntly. Its very frustrating for me as a 17-year-old to see decisions being made by people who will, no doubt, die within the next 10 years while I am unable to have a say, he said.
The future belongs to us, the youth.
Opinion
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/07/2016 (2292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Smoke of any kind not good for you
The political cartoon of July 11 is right on the money! For years now, the government has spent millions on trying to get people to stop smoking because of the health problems it causes. Now we are going to legalize another smoking habit of marijuana on the fictitious idea it is healthy. When are we going to get it through our heads that any kind of smoke is not good for our lungs. We recently saw our prime minister participating in a smudging ceremony. Even this ritual is as unhealthy for people as any other smoke; whether cigarettes, campfire, forest fires, a grass fire or a burning building. It is time that everyone comes to reality and says no to any intentional exposure to smoke.
Leave the bridge alone
Why would the Eighth Street bridge be torn down? Leave it alone as a walking bridge. Brandon would never agree to a new walking bridge because it means too many tax dollars.
Priming them for PM
Isnt that charming, the prime minister taking his son on his high-level diplomatic missions to Poland and the Ukraine? I am sure the other world leaders were impressed. Well, I guess its never too early to start grooming Xavier for his bid for the leadership of the Liberal Party in about 2045. Got to keep the Trudeau dynasty going, right?
Who is watching the watchdog?
If I remember correctly, the Canadian Senate is supposedly the watchdog of Parliament so who is watching the watchdogs? If there were only two reasons for an elected Senate with term positions, it would be Duffy and Brazeau. Both these individuals give a whole new meaning to the definition of arrogance, not to mention their criminal behaviour. What is the criteria for appointing a Senator, simple payback or supporting a political party? How about electing Canadians with some credentials, such as former judges, law professors, industrialists or political science professors? In doing so it may restore some dignity and respect for the Upper House.
Who should be held responsible?
Why is a bank letting someone withdraw money from a cheque that they have not cleared? If they did clear it and the money was withdrawn, should the bank not be liable? This was $19,000 not just a few bucks. I think they have a few holes in a process somewhere.
The smell is atrocious?
Regarding the smell from the fish flies piling up in the town of Gimli. Now you can be somewhat more conscious of how despicable the continuous odour of the hog barn factories is in many areas of rural Manitoba. There is no retreat or safe haven to protect you. You cannot enjoy an evening outside with family and friends when those never-ending wafting stenches are present. Our governments have an important role to play in solving this situation. Unfortunately, it is government that has allowed and encouraged such activities that increase emissions that are unhealthy. Our governments are supposed to be accountable for their actions, to regulate and make decisions that protect the public interest, environment and the air. Human health and survival depends on a healthy environment. Todays governments, however, are unduly influenced and controlled in too many ways by industry and corporations with their promises of investments, development, technological solutions and globalized trade.
Guess the job is not being finished
Here we are in the middle of July and the last five blocks to be resurfaced on Victoria East is not being done. I hope I am wrong, but I venture a guess that this may be one of the Tories cutbacks. This being the case where is our newly elected MLA who said he would work for Brandon? With saying this and if the completion of the project is on hold by the provincial government perhaps the city could come around and patch the rough areas in these five blocks.
Where did this money come from?
I see where the school board has seen $2.2 million pop out of nowhere. A year or so ago, $5 million seemed to pop up as I remember, and where did it go? Seems this happens after we taxpayers have paid our increased taxes. I think there should be an answer to this.
An Irish MEP is warning that Ireland could be "sleepwalking" its way into a major energy crisis.
Sean Kelly says that most of our natural gas is supplied via a single inter-connector from Britain.
Mr Kelly says that when the UK leaves the EU, Ireland will have no security of supply unless measures are taken now.
The Ireland South MEP said that the European Commission has approved the Ballylongford site on the Shannon Estuary as a Liquid Natural Gas storage terminal.
This means that cheap gas can be imported from the USA via huge tankers, and he is calling for immediate Government action to advance this project.
He said: "We have an opportunity to build in Ballylongford, it has all the necessary licences, etc. and all it needs now is the go-ahead from the Irish authorities to ensure we can have the investment, and also the support financially from Europe, which is there if we decide to build it.
"We have to do it now and do it quickly."
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has dismissed the British government's insistence that Brexit will not prompt a vote on Irish unity, claiming the EU referendum has left the island facing an "entirely new dispensation".
The veteran republican also welcomed remarks from Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin - voicing support for a potential border poll in the context of Northern Ireland voting to remain in the EU.
Mr Adams reiterated the need to examine "new relationships on the island" after newly appointed Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Brokenshire used his first engagement in Belfast to stress that the referendum result in the region - 56% backing Remain - did not provide adequate reason to call a vote on reunification with the Republic, an EU member state.
"They ruled out lots of things in the past which are now a reality," said Mr Adams in response.
"The fact is we are now in an entirely new dispensation given the vote to leave the EU and given the fact that the people in this part of the island voted to Remain."
After a visit to Belfast City Hall, Mr Brokenshire, a Remain campaigner in the referendum, also rejected the suggestion that Scotland or Northern Ireland could somehow maintain their relationship with the EU, despite the rest of the UK leaving.
"I think it's difficult to see how that would work, we do need to move on now, I think that we do need to focus on the best possible outcome for Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom outside the European Union," he said.
Stormont's Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said Mr Brokenshire needed to understand that people in Northern Ireland and Scotland voted in "big numbers" to stay within the EU.
"That cannot be disregarded and under no circumstances do we intend to backtrack from the strength of that vote," he said.
On a visit to Scotland last week, Prime Minister Theresa May stressed the need for a "UK approach" to be agreed before Brexit was triggered.
Asked if she interpreted Mrs May's remark as a potential Scottish veto on Brexit, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland was now in a "very, very strong position".
Mr McGuinness referred to the same comments as he flanked Mr Adams outside Stormont Castle, Belfast on Monday.
"Theresa May said in the aftermath of the meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, and Nicola quoted her over the course of the weekend, that she would not trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty unless people in these areas were content," he said.
"Well I can tell Theresa May, and I did tell her when I spoke to her on the telephone last week when she rang me, we are not content."
He added: "The people of Scotland have made their position clear, we have made our position clear - that needs to be respected."
While a majority backed Remain in Northern Ireland, the largest party and Sinn Fein's partners in government - the Democratic Unionists - campaigned for a Leave vote.
First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster insisted Brexit had opened up great opportunities for Northern Ireland.
"Instead of trying to cause instability we should look at this as an opportunity for Northern Ireland to do things differently and indeed the whole of the United Kingdom," she said.
"That's what I think is a very exciting part of where we are now in politics in the United Kingdom."
Mrs Foster and Mr McGuinness are due to speak with Brexit minister David Davis on the phone on Tuesday.
Under the terms of 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, the power to call a border poll rests with the Secretary of State. But the accord stipulates that such a vote can only be called if there is evidence of a clear shift of public opinion in favour of Irish unity in Northern Ireland.
Mr Brokenshire said that was not the case.
"There is a clear constitutional settlement in relation to the border poll and it's also clear to me that opinion does not support a change," he said.
"Clearly we act on the basis of consent, but I strongly believe in the Union - the real strength that the countries of the United Kingdom have together."
Mr Brokenshire said he acknowledged that different parts of the UK voted to Remain, but he said the outcome of the vote as a whole had to be respected.
On Sunday, Fianna Fail's Mr Martin said he hoped Brexit would move Ireland closer to reunification.
He said a "reunification referendum" should be called if it became clear a majority want to see an end to Irish partition over the UK decision to pull out of the EU.
Mr Adams welcomed the comments.
"I think it's important that he has taken up that position," he said. "All of us who want Irish unity need to become persuaders for that.
"I think there are opportunities for everyone to look at new relationships on the island."
Mr Adams also encouraged Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to push ahead with his plan for an all-Ireland forum to discuss the fall-out from the Brexit vote.
A young man who was convicted of manslaughter was taken from his drug-addicted mother as a baby and suffered the death of both his foster parents as a child, the Central Criminal Court heard today.
Ross Allen (aged 26) from Clara, Co Offaly was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter last June for his part in the killing of Christy Daly at Bog Lane in Clara.
He will be sentenced next Wednesday, July 27.
At a sentencing hearing today, Detective Sergeant Jer Glavin told Patrick Marrinan SC that Mr Daly was beaten and shot to death beside the caravan where he lived on December 29, 2013.
He said the drug gang that Mr Allen worked for suspected that Mr Daly had found a bag of cannabis belonging to them.
The bag had been stashed on the laneway by Mr Allen but he could not find it when sent to retrieve it.
Two Dublin gang members, described by Mr Marrinan as "serious criminals", were sent for, setting in chain the events that would lead to Mr Daly's death.
Mr Allen's part in the killing was to retrieve a shotgun that he believed would be used to scare Mr Daly.
He then acted as lookout on Bog Lane while the other two men savagely beat and then shot Mr Daly eight times.
Allen said he did not know that Mr Daly would be killed and told gardai he believed he would get nothing more than a "hiding".
Defence counsel Blaise O'Carroll SC said his client's background was unsettled.
He said his biological parents were both drug addicts and as a newborn he was in "dire straits".
He was immediately taken into care but did not find a permanent home until the age of seven.
He became close to his foster father who then died of cancer on Allen's ninth birthday.
His foster mother died when he was a teenager. Despite these setbacks, Mr O'Carroll said Mr Allen had tried to lead a productive life.
He completed his junior certificate exams and then learned carpentry and worked for a local firm. In 2009 he was let go but soon found a job working in landscaping. When he lost that job in 2012 his life took a turn.
He was a cannabis user and without a proper income he became indebted to a local drug dealer.
He would do odd-jobs to repay his drug debt and "entered into a dark place," according to Mr O'Carroll.
One of those odd jobs was hiding the bag of cannabis on Bog Lane, a job that led to the death of Christy Daly.
Since the killing of Christy Daly in 2013, Mr O'Carroll said his client has become involved in a landscaping business that is highly successful.
"He is a decent human being," he said, who was sorry for what happened to Christy Daly and who revealed his role in the killing voluntarily.
He supplied a number of testimonies to Justice Patrick McCarthy, which he said show how highly he is thought of by his former employers and his partner.
He said Allen has also availed of addiction counselling while in custody and accepts that he will have to pay the price for his involvement in Mr Daly's death.
Det Sgt Glavin added that Allen has 25 previous convictions, none of which carried a custodial sentence.
Justice McCarthy said he will sentence Mr Allen on Wednesday July 27.
Two teenagers remain in Garda custody this morning in connection with a fatal stabbing.
A man in his 20s died after he was stabbed at a flat complex in Crumlin in Dublin on Saturday afternoon.
It happened at Seagull House on Rutland Avenue.
A man and a woman - both 18 years old - were arrested and are being held at Crumlin and Sundrive Road Garda Stations.
Gardai are appealing to anyone with information to contact them.
A 30-year-old man has been left in a critical condition following a serious assault in Co Leitrim.
The man was rushed to Sligo University Hospital after he was found lying unconscious on Main Street in Carrick-on-Shannon early early Sunday morning.
A Sinn Fein TD says it's "quite possible" that his party will have a new leader within the next five years.
However, Eoin O Broin says he doesn't think Gerry Adams will step down as party leader within the next two years.
Social Justice Ireland wants to see the 1bn in next year's Budget spent on housing and broadband.
The group's director, Dr Sean Healy, believes it will be better spent in these areas to help boost Ireland's productivity and competitiveness.
Dr Healy says investing the money in social housing and helping rural Ireland will be more useful than tax cuts.
He said: "Government should spend 1bn fiscal space on infrastructure to improve productivity and competitiveness.
"This would be a far better use of resources than giving tax cuts as incentives to attract Brexit refugees from the City of London to Dublin."
Dr Healy said the country needed investment to "address Irelands infrastructure deficits" and "to deliver a vibrant, productive, competitive and sustainable economy and a just society".
Michelle Murphy, Research and Policy Analyst at Social Justice Ireland, said: "Investing 400m of the fiscal space to deliver broadband to rural areas will have a much better impact on productivity and competitiveness than tax cuts. It will create jobs, support rural entrepreneurs and local business and rejuvenate rural towns and communities.
"It will also demonstrate Governments commitment to rural Ireland and to ensuring a more balanced spread of job creation."
Dr Healy said: "The social housing crisis is a further example of the need to prioritise investment in infrastructure and we propose that Government allocate 600m of the fiscal space to social housing in Budget 2017. We also set out proposals for Government to access substantial additional resources for social housing within the fiscal rules.
The think-tank's main proposals are:
The summer is back as temperatures are set to hit the mid-20s in some places this afternoon.
Met Eireann have said it will be warm, dry and sunny for the day with highest temperatures of 21C to 26C - warmest in the Midlands.
A woman became her elderly neighbour's carer before stealing over 41,000 from her and spending it on home improvements, clothes and holidays, a court has heard.
Laura Pennick (aged 29) with an address in Bride Street, Dublin 8, pleaded guilty to the thefts totalling 41,935 from Marie McNally between January 2010 and December 2012.
Garda Colin Rourke told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today that Pennick, a single mother, befriended Ms McNally when she was living two doors away from her in Finglas.
She became Ms McNally's unofficial carer and started collecting her pension and paying her bills.
She had access to Ms McNally's ATM cards and two bank accounts, including one which contained Ms McNally's inheritance from the sale of her late mother's house.
Gda Rourke said Pennick made a number of withdrawals ranging from very small amounts up to 600.
She spent the money on home improvements, fashion purchases, home furnishings, home appliances and holidays, the court heard.
When questioned by gardai following Ms McNally's discovery of the loss, Pennick said she had financial worries of her own and needed to do it, Gda Rourke said.
She has 29 previous convictions including five theft convictions, Gda Rourke said. One of the convictions was for the theft of 1,000 from her previous employer, JD Sports, he said.
The court heard Ms McNally was extremely upset when she discovered the loss and her financial position was now perilous.
She did not wish to give a victim impact statement.
Damien Colgan SC, defending, said Pennick owed money at the time to individuals who made real threats against her.
He said Pennick regretted her actions and had told gardai that if there was any way she could repay the money, she would.
She had 3,900 to give Ms McNally as a token of her remorse, he added.
Judge Melanie Greally adjourned the matter to allow for a probation services report.
This is a serious offence involving a serious breach of trust and the accused has a history of dishonesty, Judge Greally said.
Pennick will be sentenced on November 7.
A gunman who murdered three Louisiana police officers in an ambush "was seeking out police", investigators have confirmed.
State police also officially identified the Baton Rouge gunman as former US Marine Gavin Long, who was killed at the scene.
The shooting on Sunday also left three officers injured, one critically.
Col. Mike Edmonson said Long's "movements, his direction, his attention, was on police officers".
Mr Edmonson also said investigators have interviewed people who had contact with the gunman in Baton Rouge, but officials are still asking any others who might have known him 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.
Long, from Kansas City, Missouri, turned 29 on Sunday, the same day he opened fire.
Montrell Jackson, one of the police oficers shot dead in Sunday's attack, posted a Facebook message about police work just days before he was shot dead.
Just days earlier, one of the murdered officers posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.
US President Barack Obama urged people 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," he said.
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.
He had no known ties to any extremist groups.
Although he was believed to be the only person who fired at officers, authorities said they were unsure if 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 but were later released without charge.
Mr Cain said authorities planned to continue investigating whether the gunman had any assistance "indirectly, directly here or at home".
While in the military, Long was awarded several medals, including one for good conduct, and received an honourable discharge. His occupational expertise was listed as "data network specialist".
It is 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.
China has said it is closing off part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week.
The move comes days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area south-east of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defence Ministry had no immediate comment.
The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navy's top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson is meeting China's navy commander, Admiral Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao which began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour China's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are "China's inherent territory", and said it could declare an air defence identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on the disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippines fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that America should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Mr Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunal's decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the country's economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Mr Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared with his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. China's navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
China's island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, US warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the US of threatening its national security.
The European Union and the United States have expressed alarm at Turkey's response to the failed coup, insisting the country must uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues those behind the plot.
At a joint news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the incident "is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that".
Mr Kerry said Turkey must "uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law".
While he recognised the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Mr Kerry added: "We caution against a reach that goes beyond that."
The pair spoke after a meeting in Brussels that also included the bloc's 28 foreign ministers, and after a weekend when Turkey's government responded to the coup attempt by rounding up some 7,500 people, including hundreds of judges and prosecutors.
In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said talks on Turkey's bid to the join EU would end if Ankara restores the death penalty.
Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said "the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member" of the bloc.
Both Ms Mogherini and Mr Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically-elected government.
But they illustrated deepening frustration with the Erdogan government's response to the failed coup, which has even included allegations by ministers of US complicity in the violence.
Meanwhile, the EU commissioner leading negotiations with Turkey on its bid to join the union has suggested Mr Erdogan is exploiting the crisis to eliminate opponents who may or may not have been involved in the coup.
"It is exactly what we feared," Johannes Hahn said.
It appears, he added, as if Turkey had "prepared" arrest lists of political opponents and was waiting for the right time to act.
France has marked a national moment of silence in memory of the 84 people killed in the Nice truck attack, as thousands of people massed on the city's waterfront promenade.
With flowers in their hands and tears in their eyes, crowds stood on the rocky beach for several minutes looking towards the Promenade des Anglais, the road where the attack targeting Bastille Day celebrations occurred.
Driver Mohamed Lahouiaej Bouhlel sped his truck through the crowd, killing 84 people including several children and leaving more than 300 others injured.
Among those at the ceremony in Nice was French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and people fell silent across the nation to remember the victims.
12 noon - all ASO staff observing moment of silence for the third day. Respects for victims of #NiceAttack pic.twitter.com/wk7fdQeFLk Michael Tomalaris NOM (@miketomalaris) July 18, 2016
Ireland is also paying its respects as all tricolours on Government buildings here are flying at half mast.
The President Michael D. Higgins has added his name to a book of condolences in Dublin's Mansion House.
President Michael D Higgins has called for people to make a stand for democracy in the face of those who abuse sacred texts.
Mr Higgins signed a book of condolences in the Mansion House in Dublin for the victims of the Nice attack and called for patience in trying to understand the motivation behind terror atrocities.
The book at the Mansion House is open to the public on Monday and Tuesday.
Book of Condolence opened in Dublin for victims of #NiceAttack. President Higgins signed this morning pic.twitter.com/6U18hGAkp4 Sean Defoe (@SeanDefoe) July 18, 2016
President Higgins said: "We are in a period of time where, for a whole series of different factors, people are seizing and distorting and very often using pieces of text, often sacred texts, massively abusing these in a way that it would be absurd if it did not have such a violent outcome.
"What we all have to do is take a stand for democracy, prepare for democracy."
The President noted statements made in the aftermath the Nice about the value of education and what he called the "public world".
He also said it is important to recognise the need to address great problems across Europe - including unemployment, access to education and feelings of hopelessness and alienation.
"In terms of insecurity for economic reasons, people may abuse difference, people may seek to whip up opposition to accepting diversity," the President said.
Mr Higgins described the lorry attack in Nice as an appalling, cowardly and incredible act on children and people celebrating France's national day.
With Turkey attempting to restore order after the weekend's failed coup, President Higgins said he hoped the country's leaders and security chiefs would respond with values of democracy and human rights.
"The quality of your response always defines your democracy," he said.
"The quality of response in France so far - threatened so often and so frequently recently - has been to say we will not be dislodged for our way of life, we are the home of democracy, there will be democracy to be expected in our streets."
In Cork, Alliance Francaise de Cork will hold a silent Vigil at 6pm this evening at the National Monument on Grand Parade.
The city's Lord Mayor has also opened a Book of Condolences in the offices of Alliance Francaise de Cork, and it will stay open until July 29, 2016.
It came after Bouhlel's uncle claimed his nephew was indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice.
Sadok Bouhlel said that given his nephew's family problems - he was estranged from his wife and three children - the Algerian "found in Mohamed an easy prey".
@MaxFosterCNN captured this powerful footage of people spitting where the #NiceAttack terrorist was killed pic.twitter.com/J7O0NbFaGN Cameron Stewart (@cameronstewart_) July 18, 2016
Bouhlel's rapid radicalisation has puzzled investigators. Friends and family said he had not been an observant Muslim in the past.
IS has claimed responsibility for the attack, but French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said investigators have found no sign yet that Bouhlel had links to a particular network.
Meanwhile, the French government has defended its efforts to fight IS abroad and at home, announcing new air strikes against their strongholds in the past two days.
President Francois Hollande's Socialist administration has come under blistering criticism from opposition conservatives after the attack in Nice, with former president Nicolas Sarkozy accusing the government of bad policies that he says have failed to prevent three major attacks in the past 18 months.
But Mr Cazeneuve hit back on Monday, listing a series of laws and extra police forces created under Mr Hollande's presidency ''to face a threat that France was not prepared for'' when he took over from Mr Sarkozy in 2012.
After a special security meeting, defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French forces in the US-led coalition struck IS targets again overnight and on Saturday. French war planes have been involved in the operation in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Syria.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, a minute's silence is being held in memory of the victims of the Nice truck attack after European foreign ministers gather for meetings.
Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan said: "We will remember the victims who lost their lives in this cruel event, those injured and their families and loved ones."
Mr Flanagan will also have talks for the first time with Britain's new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.
The Republican National Convention is taking place this week in Cleveland, Ohio.
After a long and often heated primary campaign, Donald Trump is to be named as the Republican Party nominee for the next US president during the convention.
Meanwhile there are fresh concerns over the use of guns in the country after a number of incidents over the last few weeks.
On Sunday, three officers were shot and killed in an attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana just days after a shooter claimed the lives of five police officers in Dallas.
The deaths of Anton Sterling and Philando Castile have heightened tensions further as the nation prepares to head to the polls in November.
Despite the growing calls for legislation that would introduce more stringent background checks, Republicans have been at the forefront of efforts to protect US citizens' right to bear arms.
On their website, the party says: "Washington liberals, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are intent on limiting your Second Amendment rights and core constitutional liberties. Republicans have crushed every single attempt from the Democrats to limit the Second Amendment."
Newstalk reporter Shona Murray is in Ohio, where there have been some calls to suspend the state's open-carry gun laws as a result of the violence that has erupted in the last few weeks.
Speaking about the recent tension, Mayor of Cleveland, Frank G Jackson told Newstlak that "theres always tension regarding guns. I dont know in Ireland what your laws are, but in America its pretty liberal in terms of Second Amendment rights and right to bear arms.
Mayor of #Cleveland Frank Jackson tells me "there's always tension regarding guns" no desire to restrict open carry pic.twitter.com/b2m8rRu2di Shona Murray (@ShonaMurray_) July 17, 2016
As you know, safety and security is a city, state and federal concern, so those who are involved in that aspect... theyll know what to do, when to do it and how to do it, he observed.
Randy Markson is the head of a National Rifle Association (NRA) group in Michigan, and told Shona why he believes everyone should carry a gun in the city.
Everybody in Cleveland should be carrying a gun - including you, he argued. You should be fully trained and capable of defending yourself. Because if you were, we wouldnt have to rely on the police - we could do it ourselves.
As a result, the bad guys would not be shooting people in this country if they knew other people were shooting back. Period. End of discussion.
Because youre here, and youre not even a citizen, you have those rights. Youre on our soil - you want me to pull it out and show you how to shoot it? We could - thats America.
He also suggested that you need to be able to protect yourself from any bad guy, because you know what? You cant carry a cop - you can carry a gun.
Al Baldasaro, a delegate for Donald Trump and his spokesperson on veteran affairs, also spoke to Shona, and stated that citizens carrying guns helps to ensure the government doesnt "take over" the country.
If you look at the climate you guys in Ireland hide, you have a lot of knife murders, he said.
Theres some hatchet stuff going on over there, you got people being killed in Ireland with their hands. Whats the difference? Did you ban knives in Ireland?
Only those Democrat liberal areas have restrictions on law-abiding citizens. The criminals have guns."
If we have a government that wants to go communism or socialism, itd be a cold day in hell, he stated.
Theres a lot of us; Im a retired marine, Id never in a million years let it happen.
I served my country to protect others, put my life on the line. If they try to go communism or socialism, Id be a fighting son-of-a-gun.
H/T: Newstalk.com.
Around 1,800 special forces police officers have arrived in Istanbul as Turkey reels from the failed coup attempt that plunged the city and the capital Ankara into a night of violence.
The state-run Anadolu news agency said the officers took up positions in critical locations and were also patrolling the city.
Istanbul police chief Mustafa Caliskan had ordered the shooting down of any helicopters flying overhead without warning, the report said.
The extra security comes as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered F-16 fighter jets to patrol Turkish airspace, according to Anadolu.
Meanwhile, Sunday marked a day of funerals for some of the victims amid arrests of scores of alleged coup supporters within the military and judiciary.
Prime minister Binali Yildirim praised the solidarity displayed among the country's rival political parties in the wake of Friday's coup bid.
Speaking to throngs of government supporters in Ankara's central Kizilay Square, he thanked the Turkish people for defeating the coup. The crowd chanted the name of Mr Erdogan in tribute to the president.
Mr 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.
In an unusual show of unity, Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting, denouncing the coup attempt.
Tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators held night-time rallies in cities across the country.
Anadolu, citing the office of the governor of Ankara, said 149 police members had been detained in the capital. It also reported that 70 generals and admirals, including former air force commander General Akin Ozturk, have been arrested.
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, said 42 police officers were dismissed from duty in the south-eastern province of Batman.
The death toll from the coup attempt stands at 294. A Turkish official said more than 190 citizens, most of them military, were killed and more than 1,400 people were wounded during the violence.
The official 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.
Turkey's justice minister says his government expects Washington to extradite US-based Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating the attempted coup.
Speaking to state-run news channel TRT Haber, Bekir Bozdag said keeping Mr Gulen "wouldn't befit the solidarity, co-operation, alliance and friendship between Turkey and the United States".
US secretary of state John Kerry said earlier that Washington might consider extradition, but required evidence proving wrongdoing.
Mr Bozdag said there was not a single person in Turkey who doubted Mr 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 US would extradite Mr Gulen without waiting for the paperwork.
Hillary Clinton has condemned the killing of three Louisiana police officers, and declared: "This madness has to stop."
The Democratic presidential candidate said police represent the "rule of law" and the shootings amount to taking aim "at all of us".
Mrs Clinton spoke at the NAACP national convention in Cincinnati a day after the fatal shootings in Baton Rouge.
She added that the recent killings of police officers in Dallas and now in Baton Rouge threaten the ability of the nation to make progress.
The former US Secretary of State said that anyone who kills a police officer or acts as an accomplice must be held accountable.
Recent violence has cost the lives of eight officers, including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians, and it has sparked a national debate over race and policing.
Mrs Clinton has proposed a series of reforms to the criminal justice system, including developing national guidelines on the use of force by police, new investments in bias training, legislation to end racial profiling and funding for body cameras.
She has also pushed for cutting mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for drug offences, and providing better support to help the formerly incarcerated find jobs after prison.
"We have difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and our communities and between and among each other," she said.
Mrs Clinton spoke as Republicans gathered for the first day of the party's national convention in Cleveland.
Mrs Clinton referenced presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's decision not to speak at the NAACP convention.
"My opponent may have a different view but there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here with all of you," she said.
Boris Johnson insisted Brexit will not see the UK "abandon its leading role" in Europe as the UK's new Foreign Secretary made his debut on the international stage.
Arriving for his first meeting of the EU's Foreign Affairs Council, Mr Johnson also called on the Turkish government to show "restraint" after the crackdown following the attempted military coup.
Mr Johnson said he had had a productive 45-minute meeting with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini on Sunday and was looking forward to presenting a positive case for Brexit.
He said: "It's very, very good to be here for my first overseas trip.
"The message I'll be taking to our friends in the Council is that we have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union.
"But that in no sense means we are leaving Europe. We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European participation and co-operation of all kinds.
"I had a very good conversation to that effect with High Representative Mogherini and she very much agreed that is a role Britain should continue to play.
"When you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice, and Turkey where we have to work very closely together, you see the importance of that.
"On Nice, we will be ensuring that we co-ordinate our response to terror.
"On Turkey, it is very important in light of the failed coup that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and that is what I will be calling for.
"In the meantime, I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues from other European countries."
Mr Johnson, whose RAF aircraft had to be diverted to Luton Airport en route to Brussels, after technical problems, is expected to face turbulence on the ground at the summit as other EU countries seek answers on the UK's "divorce deal" stance, which is expected to be raised on the margins of the gathering.
As British Prime Minister Theresa's May's surprise choice to head Britain's post-Brexit diplomatic efforts, Mr Johnson is in the international spotlight as never before.
US Secretary of State John Kerry was holding breakfast talks with Mr Johnson and the other EU foreign ministers as the situation in Turkey and the aftermath of the Nice atrocity drew attention away from Brexit.
But the issue of EU migrants rights triggered debate again as Brexit Minister David Davis warned that any surge in immigrants before Britain formally leaves the EU could lead to new curbs.
Mr Davis, who is in charge of exit arrangements, insisted that a cut-off point may need to be imposed on when newcomers to the country gain full residency rights if the UK's impending withdrawal sees migrant numbers increase.
The foreign ministers' summit came as Mrs May was visiting Wales, which joined England in voting for Brexit, to underline her commitment to withdrawal, and the embattled steel industry.
Mrs May was meeting First Minister Carwyn Jones at the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff and reaffirming that she will "fully engage" with the Welsh Government on Brexit negotiations.
The visit was taking place as leaders from the North of England demanded a place at the Brexit negotiating table with the PM.
Ms Mogherini sidestepped questions about whether it would be "awkward" dealing with Mr Johnson after he compared the EU's ambitions to those of Hitler during the referendum campaign, saying that the two had a "very positive exchange" at their meeting.
The EU foreign affairs chief said Mr Johnson would be welcomed "as a new member of the family".
But Ms Mogherini stressed negotiations could not start on Brexit details until London formally triggered withdrawal under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
"There are no negotiations before the notification of Article 50 is tabled. Until that negotiation comes to an end, the UK is a full member of the EU so our common work on foreign and security policy continues," she said.
French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he has already had "frank" exchanges with Mr Johnson as he urged early negotiations.
"I had a telephone conversation with him on Saturday. This exchange was frank, but useful. I think it is important that we, together, work for the future of relations between the EU and Britain.
"Regarding France, we always have exceptional bilateral relations with Britain that we want to continue, especially in defence, immigration... economically and in particular the nuclear issue.
"There is much to do with Britain. I always speak to Boris Johnson with the greatest sense of sincerity and frankness. This is how we must move forward, and in the case of France with a purpose: to prevent Europe moving into a situation of uncertainty as regards the future of relations with Britain. So the earlier negotiations begin, the better," he said.
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Canberra's iconic Gus' Cafe in Civic will re-open within about a month with new owners. The first cafe in Canberra to introduce outdoor dining in the 1960s, Gus' Cafe in Garema Place, has been closed for three weeks. Then general manager, Jamie Morris, at Gus' Cafe in Civic in 2014, when the outdoor area was enclosed with timber-sash windows. Credit:Jeffrey Chan Owner Janice Glenn says negotiations with new owners are continuing. "They want to refurbish it before it re-opens," Ms Glenn said. Property manager Savills has covered the cafe in "watch this space" signs. The owner's lobbying in 2011 led to Gus' Cafe being heritage listed. There are two leases, the cafe building and the outdoor area, which was enclosed with timber-sash windows in 2014.
Gus' Cafe on the corner of Bunda Street and Garema Place in Civic ... future unclear. Credit:Graham Tidy Then general manager Jamie Morris said the cafe's upgrade was unlike anything else in Canberra and took a year to get through the planning process. "The weather is so unpredictable, we needed to adapt to create an outdoor space for all kinds of weather. Some people like a window. Some like to open it, others like to leave it shut." Mr Morris said said it was essential cafes work together. "Everyone is fighting for the takeaway trade, everyone has their regulars. I don't like that word competition, everyone has to want to work together." The ACT Heritage Council says Gus' Cafe is an example of one of Canberra's cultural heritage places, illustrating intangible heritage values. It is not the physical fabric of the building that represents its heritage value. It is the history of the place and the activity conducted there over many years that gives the Gus' Cafe site its strong historic cultural and social heritage significance for the local community. From 1960 a cafe has operated on the site and since 1970 it has included outside dining, pioneered by original owner Gus Petersilka. Subsequent owners retained the name.
The ACT government has come under fire for pulling out of a meeting with Dickson residents to discuss newly approved plans for the Coles and Doma development.
The claim was there was a "risk that community members would be dissatisfied with a public meeting where 'there was no new information'".
Tokyo was baffled at why the world was so cross with it. As it kept pointing out, it was only following the example of the Western colonists. "The US," says Campbell, "has helped create an operating system in Asia that combines trade, openness, peaceful resolution of disputes, and the rule of law that has been very good for Asia, and particularly China. "The big question is whether China embraces its 21st-century potential or clings to a 19th-century spheres-of-influence approach." The number one concern in the region today is not China, it's the US. There are questions about the durability of American power, and it's the first time I've experienced this. Kurt Campbell, former Pentagon official But for all the questions about China, Campbell says there is bigger one looming over the Asia-Pacific.
"The No.1 concern in the region today is not China, it's the US. There are questions about the durability of American power, and it's the first time I've experienced this," says Campbell, a senior Pentagon official in the administration of Bill Clinton and the topmost Asia policy official in the State Department when Hillary Clinton was its secretary. He doesn't think that the US is inherently exhausted; the problem is its politics, and especially the movement led by Donald Trump. "The US campaign has raised more questions about the US role in the world than at any time since the end of the Vietnam War," says Campbell, who advises the Clinton campaign on foreign policy and could expect a senior post in the event that Hillary should win the November election. He lists four of them: "The debates now are;
1. Do we believe in alliances?
2. Do we believe in trade?
3. Do we believe in forward deployment?
4. Do we believe in American purpose?" Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders both championed protectionism, but it's Trump who's gone to extremes of racism and isolationism.
It was Trump who, point for point, challenged the long-standing US consensus on the first three of Campbell's questions. It was Trump who threatened to dismantle the US alliance system. Trump said in March that the two big US allies in North East Asia, Japan and South Korea "have to pay us" or "have to protect themselves". If they wanted to arm themselves with nuclear weapons to do so, that'd be OK too. These countries are bulwarks of stability and the US alliances have helped make them so. Apart from anything else, their US alliances have restrained them from greater antagonism to each other. And the US nuclear umbrella that extends protectively over them, as it does over Australia, means that they haven't had to go nuclear themselves to defend against their nuclear-armed neighbours, China and North Korea.
"I shudder to think what might happen to our alliances and to the stability of the Asia-Pacific if Donald Trump were to become president," Tom Schieffer, US ambassador to Australia under George W. Bush, told me. "I'm voting for Hillary." If Trump were to dump America's Japan and Korea alliances, the credibility of Australia's alliance with the US also comes into question. Why? Because the US maintains big military forces in both Japan and South Korea this is a vital part of the US system of forward deployment. If these bases close, American ability to project power into the Asia-Pacific falls dramatically. And, just for the record, Trump's demand that Japan and South Korea pay more for the bases? Tokyo and Seoul already pay for most of the costs of the US bases on their soil, other than the salaries of the American troops there. Campbell says that the US election has exposed that, while American elites have supported US trade and military engagement with the world, it's turned out to be an establishment veneer concealing a popular vacuum: "Until recently, we've been able to discuss defence and security almost detached from the US domestic political debates. We've taken it for granted, but the American people are raising foundational questions. Someone came up to me recently and said, 'Tell me why we have alliances?'"
Talent shows such as The Voice culminate each year in exactly the same way.
There's confetti and screaming fans and a blaze of aggrandisements about how the winning contestant is going to be the next big thing.
Just last week, Sydney architect Alfie Arcuri was crowned the winner of The Voice in exactly the same way, but fast forward several days and Arcuri's single has been met with an abysmal reception.
Pauline Hanson has made a controversial appearance on ABC's Q&A as police clashed with a handful of protesters who demonstrated for and against her on the street outside, arresting up to six people.
About 100 protesters began gathering at the ABC's headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Ultimo from 8pm on Monday night, ahead of the senator-elect's appearance on the live television show.
As Ms Hanson prepared to go to air, demonstrators - including Nick Folkes the head of the Party For Freedom, who notably fought unsuccessfully in the Federal Court for the right to hold a rally commemorating the Cronulla Riots stood holding signs including "welcome back Pauline" and "multiculturalism has utterly failed".
Rearranging a ministry after an election is a bit like sorting out the seating arrangements at a wedding.
Where guests sit has less to do with whether or not the bride and groom harbour any real affection for them and more to do with complicating factors such as which side of the family they are close to, where someone comes from, who is best friends with the groom's parents and whether people can be prepared to behave politely.
Malcolm Turnbull juggled all these considerations when forming his new cabinet which he announced on Monday.
Those who have been moved closer to the head table include the irrepressible Christopher Pyne and Josh Frydenberg, whose energy and sales skills see them move into more prominent roles.
Beginning with "personally I think Andrew Bolt has a point here," Kruger went onto agree when asked if she wants Muslims banned. [Watch] While the intellectual class will continue to laugh at Hanson and Kruger there is no denying their messages will continue to provide the backdrop for the already difficult debate around migration that fuelled Brexit and is contributing the rise of the far-right in Europe and of course in America. In other political news: The Turnbull government will endorse but not campaign for Kevin Rudd's bid to be United Nations Secretary General. [Greg Sheridan/The Australian] Malcolm Turnbull says the superannuation changes, curbing concessions for the rich, will "go through the backbench committee" before heading back to the partyroom. Read: Changes up for negotiation to appease angry base. [ABC]
Interesting details from the partyroom meeting on Monday. Federal Director Tony Nutt is described as looking "sheepish." Pollster Mark Textor "confessed" they picked up that the Mediscare campaign was hurting the Coalition. And Liberal MP Ann Sudmalis boasted about how tampering with Labor party election signage at one particular booth led to a good result. [Sarah Martin/The Australian] Barnaby Joyce,Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop during a joint party room meeting. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Kelly O'Dwyer and moderate Marise Payne were both demoted in Malcolm Turnbull's post-election reshuffle. [James Massola/Fairfax] Matthew Canavan was deservedly promoted into Cabinet. Watch out for him, he has a big future ahead of him. And Zed Seselja will now have the chance to show publicly why he's so often referred to as a "rising star." The trouble with getting written up as "future first female PM" and "well-regarded" is that you have to live up to the hype generated (often by MPs themselves and always by their factional supporters). Kelly O'Dwyer is finding out just how much bigger that makes a small demotion appear. Seselja may find he falls in the eyes of his colleagues as his backbench bolshiness gets substituted for that climb up the greasy pole. He has backed down on his position to support changes to the Racial Discrimination Act. [ABC] 3. 'This madness has to stop'
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Credit:Pete Marovich/Bloomberg The politics of race also dominated US politics with Hillary Clinton calling for the shooters of the the police shot dead in Baton Rouge to be held accountable saying police represent the rule of law. Clinton called for end-to-end reform of the US criminal justice system. [The Hill] In Ohio, the Republican Convention is underway. [Livestream] Cleveland police have asked the state governor to suspend open-carry gun rights for the period of the convention, but he has denied the request, saying it is not within his power. [BBC] 4. Russia sanctioned widespread doping Russia's cheating at the 2104 Sochi Olympics was state-sanctioned, a report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency has found. The cheating was elaborate and systemic and involved paying Russia's intelligence services to break into what are meant to be tamper-proof bottles containing urine samples. WADA has called for Russia to be banned from Rio.[Rebecca Ruiz/New York Times]
Russia Today is providing the predictable response dismissing the NYT report as an "exercise in creative writing." [RT] 5. I would go nuclear New British PM Theresa May has said she would authorise a nuclear strike capable of killing 100,000 people if it were required. [The Telegraph] MPs are voting on whether to replace four nuclear submarines, which is splitting the already divided Labour party. Jeremy Corbyn is a pacifist and opposes renewing Britain's nuclear submarine capacity. Corbyn's leadership rival Angela Eagle supports the government's position, which is also Labour's official position and subject to a long-running review. [The Guardian] 6. Versailles' Canberra soiree
Joe Biden enjoys his folksy wisdom, and offers a friendly yarn about the time he spent chatting with China's President Xi Jinping.
"He looked at me and said, 'Can you define for me America?'," the US Vice-President told several hundred workers gathered on Monday in Port Melbourne in the cafeteria of a local factory for US aircraft giant Boeing.
US Vice-President Joe Biden tours the Boeing factory in Port Melbourne where wing flaps are made for the 787 Dreamliner. Credit:Mark Stewart
Nestled in the industrial canyons beneath the West Gate Bridge, the factory is the largest Boeing facility outside the US, employing about 1200 Victorians to manufacture wing flaps for the 787 Dreamliner aircraft.
"I could have said the same thing if he asked me about Australia," Mr Biden said, continuing his story about Mr Xi.
The NSW government wants to transform the harbourside Bays precinct into a bustling technology hub, but it is western Sydney's health hub that should be the state's innovation engine, business leaders say.
Westmead health precinct, already one of the largest in Australia, could become the state's silicon valley of health innovation, generating up to 50,000 jobs during the next two decades, according to a new report that hopes to convince the government and the private sector to redirect their focus, and money, west.
With a further 1 million people set to call western Sydney home during the next 15 years, Sydney Business Chamber's western Sydney director David Borger said Westmead, near Parramatta, had the "magical mix" of research facilities and healthcare services from which to build a brain hub.
"Westmead is the mothership of medical science in NSW," Mr Borger said. "It stands out as possibly the biggest opportunity for intensive knowledge job growth in the region."
Queensland Cabinet will on Monday release a report into the decision by the previous state government to close the state's only live-in mental health facility for adolescents.
Three teenagers, who were former patients of the Barrett Adolescent Centre at Wacol, committed suicide after being transferred to other facilities.
The Barrett Adolescent Centre was closed in January 2014. Credit:iStock
The report could contain adverse findings.
In January 2014, the previous government closed the Barrett Centre, which provided live-in care and a school, as it was putting in place alternative mental health care strategies.
Australians are being warned to be wary of cold call investment scams because law enforcement agencies find it difficult to shut down the sophisticated syndicates.
Queensland Police are tracking 11 of the syndicates, also known as boiler room scams, which have fleeced investors of an estimated $175 million over the past decade.
Australian investors lose $50 million to scammers each year. Credit:Robert Rough
The scams are most active in Queensland, with many operating from the Gold Coast, but are targeting investors all over the country.
Many have direct links with Australian crime identities and bikie gangs.
Six years after first being granted permission, south-east Queensland bus commuters will be the first in the nation to enjoy tax-free travel to and from work, potentially saving eligible travellers hundreds of dollars in transport costs each year.
Salary packaging provider RemServ won its own class ruling from the Australian Tax Office earlier this year, which, once given the go-ahead from Translink, will mean employees from the 300 or so organisations signed up to RemServe can salary sacrifice their work bus commute.
But while RemServ won its own class ruling, the government has had one for its own employees for the past six years with the department still to put it into action, despite its potential to lower public transport for thousands of public servant commuters, as well as increasing patronage.
While the department received its ruling under the Bligh government, Palaszczuk government Transport Minister Stirling Hinchliffe said he was assured the technology to make it a reality was almost ready to be rolled out.
Eighteen people have been charged with drug and firearm offences after a series of raids in Toowoomba.
Police seized methylamphetamine, ecstasy, LSD and cannabis during the weekend raids, along with ammunition, replica weapons, cash and stolen property.
Police seized cannabis and other drugs in raids on the Darling Downs. Credit:Rohan Thomson
In all, 63 charges were laid and those charged will appear in the Toowoomba Magistrates Court in the coming weeks.
Among those charged was a 30-year-old man who is facing drug supply and possession charges as well as allegedly being in possession of stolen property and ammunition.
More than $1 million worth of jewellery has been stolen from the Toorak mansion of millionaire businessman and former Liberal Party powerbroker Andrew Abercrombie, who had hosted Lucy Turnbull at the St Georges Road property days before the burglary.
Less than a week after the heist in Melbourne's most exclusive street, thieves are understood to have broken into another residence owned by Mr Abercrombie on Portsea's clifftop.
Andrew Abercrombie's palatial home on St Georges Road, Toorak.
Police are yet to determine if the two raids are linked, but are understood to have obtained closed-circuit television footage of three men leaving the Toorak property in a blue Holden wagon on June 25.
China will cut off access to part of the South China Sea for military drills, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's broad claim to the waters.
Starting today, China will host military exercises off the east coast of its Hainan island province, its maritime administration said on its website, AFP reported.
China has also conducted combat air patrols in the region, which are slated to become a "regular" practice in the future, according to state newsagency Xinhua.
On Monday, the People's Liberation Army sent H-6K bombers, fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs that include Huangyan Dao, according to a spokesman for the PLA air force.
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.
Seoul: 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 portrayed as the epitome of corruption among its elite.
The prosecutor, Jin Kyung-joon, a vice ministerial-level official, is the most senior prosecutor ever arrested while in office in modern South Korean history.
Senior South Korean prosecutor Jin Kyung-joon is surrounded by media upon his arrival for questioning at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office in Seoul, South Korea. Credit:Yonhap via AP
His case has rocked the country for months, at a time when public grievances run deep over growing income inequality and the way justice is pursued here. The local media has reported it as the latest example of how some of the country's business and government elites promote one another's interests through collusive ties.
On Sunday, Justice Minister Kim Hyun-woong, who is in charge of prosecutors, apologised to the people, saying he was "embarrassed and despaired" over Jin's "corruption and crime".
Washington: Not since Joan of Arc has so much been asked of one woman. On Monday night, the usually reticent Melania Trump has been assigned a task that to date has defeated her husband that is to craft a portrait of Donald Trump that might induce Americans to see the presumptive Republican nominee as a believable president.
And on successive evenings through the week, the adult children of Trump's various marriages will swing in behind her, to flesh out a family portrait of Trump as dad, neighbour and friend; as businessman and American.
With the domestic and international media as hostages at the GOP convention, it will be as though they are talking to the thousands of delegates. But if they're here as delegates, they are pretty well committed and it is to the tens of millions of likely voters watching at home to whom the Trumps will be making their pitch.
The conventions are a wonderful American political tradition, the value of which has diminished over time save as a tightly and, hopefully, an orderly scripted plea to those who couldn't be here.
Its the showdown weve all been waiting for: Odin Quincannon leads his men into battle against Jesse Custer for the church land in this episode of Preacher, El Valero. But Jesse isnt about to go down without a fight. Meanwhile, Jesse is facing another dilemma is it time to give up Genesis?
Preacher Recap: Is Jesses Power Really as Effective as He Thinks? >>>
Quincannons Tragic Past
Remember that flashback we saw of little Jesse waiting outside an office marked Quincannon while his father talked inside? As it turns out, John Custer was talking to the same Quincannon we know and hate Odin and the mans life was in total disarray after a terrible tragedy that claimed the lives of his whole family.
The episode opens on a family enjoying a ski trip, with the whole clan riding up a ski lift, and a woman commenting on how her husband, presumably Odin, couldnt pull himself away from his company to join them. But before the group makes it to the top, a cable snaps, and the whole thing falls into the emptiness below, their descent masked by the tumultuous snow blowing around them.
Later, Odins office is filled with the bodies of his family members when he demands that John come see him, as something terrible has happened. When John gets there, Odin is covered in blood and holds up two different sets of entrails in his hands one belonging to his daughter and one belonging to a slaughtered cow before him.
What Quincannon wants to know is, which is which? He cant tell the difference, and he doesnt sense any sort of spirit or soul from the one that is his daughters remains. As a result, Odin has totally turned on his faith, and he demands that John denounce God entirely as a result of his revelation. John Custer, of course, will do no such thing, and Odin screams after him to denounce Him! as John collects Jesse and leaves.
So we now know why Odin Quincannon has no faith pun intended in Jesses work or in the value of church at all. Later, when the Sheriff makes a comment to him about how its shameful for him to be trying to take the church since it is holy ground, Odin shoots back that its no such thing, that thats all a lie. I think its safe to say he wont be joining in on a psalm recitation anytime soon.
First Try, Second Try
When Odin leads his men to the church grounds to take over the land, the men are cocky and go in with extreme confidence. We dont see what happens next, but they all come back out, and most of them dont have their weapons and have been beaten up by Jesse. Donnie demands to know what was said to them, but they claim Jesse didnt say anything; he just beat them up good.
After preparing with a gun and a molotov cocktail, when the men next charge on the church after a pep talk from Quincannon, Jesse is more than ready for them and starts shooting from the top floor of the church. Most of the men run after he starts shooting, but the one in a bulldozer keeps advancing until Jesse throws the incendiary device and it hits the machine, causing a giant fireball just as the man jumps out to safety.
One man keeps running towards the church, with the promise of a food court in the new facility Odin plans to build fueling his bravery. And this time when Jesse shoots, he doesnt fire a warning shot meant to miss. No instead, poor Clive literally gets his penis shot off a fact that he seems in total denial about when he walks calmly back to the other men with the appendage in his hands. Ouch.
Bringing Back Eugene
Meanwhile, before the second assault on his church, Jesse sits in the church with the weapons left from the first attack and begs God to bring back Eugene. He promises to never use his power again, and just then, he hears scratching below the floorboards. He rushes over to the hole in the floor he dug and digs until a hand breaks through, a hand that is soon followed by the rest of Eugene.
At first, Eugene thinks this is all a trick because, as he explains to Jesse, they have tricked him before. After Jesse gets Eugene multiple glasses of water, Eugene explains that he dug his way back up after hearing Jesses voice commanding him to come back and that Hell is actually not that far away at all.
After calling Eugenes father, Jesse tells the boy that he was right what happened with Eugene and Tracy is not his to judge, its up to God and that what hes doing with his powers is like cheating. He was told that thered be consequences, he says, and, referring to the group outside, he believes theyve already started.
But when Jesse says he should give it back, and Eugene brings up the men at the motel, Jesse quickly realizes that he never told Eugene about the angels and that maybe its not Eugene being tricked at all. He realizes that the water glass he brought Eugene is still full, and the young man isnt there at all; its all in Jesses head.
After the Sheriff drives up and tells Odin that Jesse called him because he has Eugene, Jesse yells through the speaker he has set up outside that he wants to speak to the agents, and the Sheriff knows who hes referring to. Fiore and DeBlanc are called in, but are they too late?
Comic-Con 2016: Friday Schedule for TV-Related Events Preacher and More >>>
No More Trying
The angels have to be commanded to come into the church by Jesse, since they had previously been commanded to stay away from him, but they show up nonetheless. Outside, the crowd has a sort of tailgating party while they wait to see what happens, and Odin waits impatiently for Jesse to give in.
Jesse admits to the angels what happened with Eugene that it was an accident and he shouldve listened to them and quickly realizes that they cant see the boy at all. When he asks if its possible to bring someone back from Hell, he gets a mixed response. Its possible but difficult. But Fiore and DeBlanc refuse to help him with Eugene until he gives up Genesis, so Jesse agrees to do so.
Even as they tell Jesse to lie down on the altar, he continues to ask questions and wonder aloud whether God actually wants him to have Genesis. But when DeBlanc asks him what good hes actually done with his abilities since he gained control of them, Jesse has no answer.
Finally, after DeBlanc sings to Genesis and the men get Jesse to let go of the last of his resistance, the force makes its way out of the preacher and into the coffee can they use to house it. The angels start to pack up, and Jesse asks about Eugene. They basically blow him off, saying theyll look into it and that they never actually made a deal. Understandably, this pisses Jesse off.
And as Jesse gets angry at the angels, the coffee can bursts open, and Genesis seems to shoot its way back into the preacher, causing him to fall backwards. The can is destroyed, and Fiore and DeBlanc are resigned. They leave with all their tools, despite Jesses protests, saying theres no more trying. Jesse is left alone because not even Eugene is there anymore.
Drastic Measures
Elsewhere, when Miles shows up at Emilys house and lets her know that Jesse is giving the church to Odin as a result of their legally binding verbal agreement, she storms out to make her way to the church with the rest of the town. After seeing for herself whats going on, Emily keeps defending Jesse, saying hes just fighting for his home like anyone would.
But Miles, who joins her after dropping her kids off at school, tells her that the whole deal will be good for the town and that maybe this is a sacrifice that has to be made for the good of the community. He then goes one step further and says that they all thought Jesse was a criminal anyway; this is just proof.
Speaking of sacrifices, after witnessing the two attempts by the men to take the church, Donnie quietly makes his way to the trunk of his car away from the crowd and methodically takes off parts of his outfit. He then sticks his head in the trunk, points a gun at his head and shoots.
I really thought the guy had shot himself, but as we quickly learn, he just shot his eardrums which are very vital when it comes to Jesses ability to command someone to do something, you see.
Jesses Last Stand
Before Odins men make their way to the church for a third time, Jesse is sitting in the church alone, getting drunk, when he hears a noise and turns around with his gun to find Donnie in the church with him. And since hes deaf, it doesnt work when Jesse commands him several times to drop the gun. But instead of shooting him, like Jesse asks him to, Donnie just pistol whips him into unconsciousness.
After Jesse wakes up, Odin meets up with him, along with all his men. He has the papers for Jesse to sign to turn over the church, and Jesse questions once more why Odin isnt serving God as he told him to. Quincannon tells him he is serving God but not the God that Jesse refers to. Odin believes in the God of meat, of whats tangible, in reality, so in a way he is serving God in what hes doing.
When Odin tells Jesse that its insane to follow a God who is silent, at first Jesse agrees and goes to sign the papers, but he stops. He then requests just one more Sunday before signing, claiming that all this time hes been trying to bring the townspeople to God, and now? He wants to bring God to the town instead.
Jesse tells them all that theyre going to talk to God and ask him questions, and if they dont like His answers, then he swears hell denounce God right then and there. Odin apparently agrees to Jesses deal because hes driven away in the Sheriffs car as the people of Annville swarm the vehicle.
Alarming
Theres also a subplot in this episode of Preacher involving Tulip adopting a bloodhound named Brewski at the pound and bringing it home, only to feed it to a mysterious creature in a room that I want to say is probably Cassidy, critically hurt after Jesse let him burn in the previous episode. But I wont go into it any further because the whole thing is pretty upsetting. Why a dog, Preacher?!
Finally, some sort of alarm seems to go off in a control room at the end of the episode, but it seems to be taken care of by a worker in the same room. Is the alarm in Quincannon Meat and Power? What does it mean? With only a few episodes left in this season of Preacher, it shouldnt be long before we find out.
Preacher airs Sunday nights at 9pm on AMC.
(Image courtesy of AMC)
Campus News
Acclaimed artists named to CAI residencies
UB's Creative Arts Initiative is bringing world-class creative and performing artists in all fields to UB for on-campus residencies.
By BERT GAMBINI
UBs Creative Arts Initiative (CAI), an innovative program launched earlier this year dedicated to creating and producing new artistic work, has announced its first class of residencies and a full schedule of events for the 2016-17 academic year.
The inaugural class of nationally and internationally recognized artists and performers represents a university-wide commitment to creative expression by offering on-campus residencies tied to programs and events that extend to arts, cultural, community and educational organizations throughout Western New York.
With the cooperation of many community partners, these residencies are part of CAIs effort to enhance the standing of UB and the wider arts community as pioneering leaders in the creative arts by presenting unique opportunities for students and residents to meet and interact with world-class artists.
UB faculty members Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson have pledged a $1 million bequest in their mothers names to support undergraduate and graduate studies in creative and performing arts at UB through the Julia Jackson Scholarship in Creative Arts and the Ruth Christian Graduate Fellowship in the Arts.
This years artists-in-residence are:
News / Africa
by Staff reporter
Zimbabwe's controversial ban on importing certain products has forced Zambian manufacturers to urge their government to consider increasing taxes on imports from Zimbabwe in order to create a "level playing field" for trade.Malawi is also reviewing its import regime to Zimbabwe protesting the decision to restrict imports.According to Zambian media, the Zambia Association of Manufacturers said manufacturers were not happy with Zimbabwe's decision to impose import restrictions as it was being unfair to other countries."We do not welcome that move. If they cannot retract on that, I think it's time our government also retaliates because we cannot be accepting their products here whilst they are imposing certain restrictions on the imports in their country," Roseta Mwape, the association's president was quoted saying by the local Daily Nation.Mwape said Zambian businesses with dealings in Zimbabwe have lost out following the imposition of the restrictions.
News / National
by Staff reporter
Maseru - Zimbabwean-born editor of the Lesotho Times newspaper, Lloyd Mutungamiri, has been transferred to a South African hospital in Bloemfontein as fears about his safety mount, reports said on Friday.According to the state owned Herald newspaper, the veteran journalist was moved from the Queen Mamohato memorial hospital in Maseru to an unidentified hospital in Bloemfontein, South Africa.This came after reports early this week indicated that the veteran journalist was in a critical condition at the hospital after he was attacked on Saturday night in the driveway of his Maseru home.According to Nehanda Radio, Mutungamiri was reportedly under a 24 hour police surveillance, as fears about his safety mounted.His wife accused the country's military for the assassination attempt.She said that she was convinced that the attempted murder of her husband was linked to a recent story that his newspaper published.The newspaper published a story recently in which it revealed secret negotiations about an exit package for Lesotho's army commander Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli.The report claimed that the army chief was not happy over the story as it suggested that he was demanding more than R40m for his exit.Following calls for a thorough investigation by regional media organisation, and the human rights group, Amnesty International, police in Lesotho launched a probe into the attempted murder.
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The 2022 Phillies are back in the World Series against Houston but where are the members of the 2008 team?
A Northamptonshire-based environmental consultancy has fallen into administration, with a buyer now being sought for its assets. Challen Commercial Investigations, which traded as Ensafe Consultants, provided asbestos, compliance and environmental consultancy services. The company had recently attempted to seek a buyer prior to entering administration, but was unable to secure a sale. A number ...continue reading
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The Delhi High Court has directed to pay Airports Authority of India (AAI) arrears of Rs 258 crore in relation to the land leased by the airport operator near Mumbai airport.
Jindal Steel & Power Ltd will move its registered office from Hisar in Haryana to Raigarh in Chhattisgarh. It will also take over 920 Mw of captive power from Jindal Power Ltd (JPL), its wholly-owned subsidiary, and turn it into a independent power producer as part of a restructuring exercise.
The company today announced it got shareholder approval through a ballot vote for the two proposals. Besides, the shareholders also approved transfer of 1,000 Mw power unit of JPL to a special purpose vehicle (SPV) for the purpose of transferring the same to Sajjan Jindal-controlled JSW Energy Ltd..
Tata group chairman would be meeting the chief executive officers of all Tata group on July 29 - the birthday of its former chairman J R D Tata - in Mumbai to prepare a blue print for the road ahead.
Minister for Industries, Government of Tamil Nadu, M C Sampath, today visited Amway's manufacturing facility at Nilakottai in Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu.
C V Sankar, Additional Chief Secretary to Government-Industries was also present on the occasion.
Recent terror attacks and political turmoil in France and Turkey would hardly have any significant effect in the growth of outbound travel sector, claimed leading tour operators.
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.
Paris-based Indian filmmaker, scriptwriter and novelist Vijay Singh's film "Farewell My Indian Soldier" -- titled "Mademoiselle France pleure" in French -- will be premiered at the French embassy here on Tuesday.
The screening is being hosted by Alexandre Ziegler, Ambassador of France to India. The film is a docu-fiction on Indian soldiers, who came to France and Belgium to fight in World War .
Singh, accompanied by actress Paloma Coquant, will make a presentation of the film, which will be followed by a question and answer session.
Dedicated to the 1,40,000 Indian soldiers and civilian workers who defended France against invasion, the film is co-produced by Silhouette Films and Rajya Sabha Television, and supported by the Embassy of France in India.
"This is the first time that such a film has been made on this subject," Singh said in a statement.
"Indeed, it would seem both unbelievable and intriguing how the experience of 1,40,000 Indian soldiers and civilian workers on the Western Front, part of the 1.4 million soldiers mobilised worldwide, could have escaped the attention of any television in the world," Singh said.
"In fact, even in terms of the contemporary film footage available in the archives, there is very little on Indian soldiers. Again, much fewer Indian troops were awarded for their bravery than their British counterparts. In many ways, this film is a re-write of this part of the history of the Great War," he added.
"Farewell My Indian Soldier" uses rare archive, historical testimonies, old Indian war songs and 600 insightful letters written home by soldiers to tell the fascinating story of Indian soldiers, of whom 10,000 were never to return to their motherland.
Following its market screening at the Cannes Film Festival 2016, this film is expected to travel to international film festivals worldwide.
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) legislator Mohammad Khalil Bandh was injured after a crowd allegedly attacked his vehicle when he was on his way to Srinagar.
He was taken to the Hospital in the Badami Bagh cantonment.
Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti rushed to the hospital to meet the injured MLA.
The attack comes at a time when the Valley is boiling over violent protests following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani earlier on July 8.
A civilian was killed yesterday when the army personnel fired at the protesters attacking its camp in Bandipora district of Jammu and Kashmir.
Earlier on Saturday, three militants were killed as the Army foiled an infiltration bid in Poonch.
This was the first infiltration attempt by militants from across the LoC in the state after the protests broke out in the Valley following Wani's killing.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley.
After Burhan's death, Kashmir is on boil and about 40 people have been killed and over 3000 including 1600 civilians injured in clashes between youth and security men during protests.
Curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest continued today for tenth consecutive day.
The life in the Valley remained paralysed after Burhan's killing, due to strike called by the separatists and curfew-like restrictions imposed by the authorities.
Stating that the blatant attacks on defence personnel in was an extremely alarming matter, the Shiv Sena on Monday hit out at Pakistan for fanning terrorism in the state and asserted that if not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Valley would have been 'burning'.
"In a span of 15 days, 20 attacks have happened on the police and the Army. So many defence personnel have lost their lives and it is alarming that so many have gone missing. It's not a new thing that Pakistan is fanning terrorism in Kashmir. Anyway, Kashmir would have burned if PM Modi had not taken control of the situation," Sanjay Raut said.
Lashing out at Pakistan for branding slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani as a 'martyr', he added Islamabad's assertions were of no value as for India, Wani was and will be a terrorist.
"Every Burhan Wani still in must be destroyed," Raut added.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley.
After Burhan's death, Kashmir is on boil and about 40 people have been killed and over 3,000 including 1,600 civilians injured in clashes between youth and security men during protests.
Curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest continued on Monday for 10th consecutive day.
The life in the Valley remained paralysed after Burhan's killing, due to strike called by the separatists and curfew-like restrictions imposed by the authorities.
A trial court in the National Spot Exchange (NSEL) payments scam case has sent Jignesh Shah, its former promoter, to judicial custody till August 1. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had sought further custody, to interrogate him on what it said were new leads, but the court wouldn't agree. It also told the ED to reply on Tuesday next week to his application for bail. It has directed the other 38 accused to be present in court on August 23 and 24 for formal framing of charges.
Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Monday called Delhi Chief Minister a Pakistani agent after he slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government for creating 'India-Pakistan like situation' in Centre-state relations.
Badal said the people of the nation should fear leaders like Kejriwal, who without any inhibition called the capital 'Pakistan'.
"Today I read in the newspapers where he has said that politics of Delhi and the Centre is like India-Pakistan affairs. What is he trying to say, does he want to make Delhi another Pakistan? I fear when he can dub Delhi as Pakistan then our Punjab is on the border of Pakistan. This man seems like a Pakistani agent, who will sell Punjab to the hands of Pakistan and we will never know. We should fear such people," said Badal.
The Union Minister also unleashed an attack on the AAP supremo for equating his party's manifesto with the holy Shri Guru Granth Sahib and printing its symbol, the broom, on the cover of the document alongside a picture of the Sikh shrine.
"The way AAP has hurt the Sikh sentiments by comparing his false manifesto with the holy Shri Gurugranth Sahib ji whom we worship. His business is to fool the people. Like he fooled the people of Delhi, he wants to fool people of Punjab too. The people of Punjab will give an answer to this act and so will God," she added.
Badal dubbed Kejriwal's act of cleaning utensils at the Golden Temple as an apology for his 'unintentional mistake' and said the AAP chief does not regret anything.
"He does not regret the comparison he made. Moving on, he does not even regret posting a picture of our holiest place inside the golden temple with a mark of broom on it. This man is making a fool out of everyone, he went to that part of the Golden Temple where the people come and clean utensils as a mark of confession and he cleaned the plates which were already clean, sad Badal.
Kejriwal yesterday during an interactive two-hour online session, 'TalkToAK' accused the Centre for not allowing his government to work and said that the BJP is creating "India-Pakistan like situation" in Centre-state relations.
The AAP earlier stirred a controversy after it published a youth manifesto that uses the image of the Sikh shrine with the party's symbol the broom.
Earlier this month, a complaint was filed against the party's spokesperson Ashish Khetan, who was accused of hurting Sikh sentiments by comparing the manifesto with religious books.
"This is our bible, our Gita and our Guru Granth Sahib," Khetan said during an event where he unveiled the manifesto.
Separatist Kashmiri groups have held demonstrations outside the premises of India's Permanent Mission to the UN here protesting against the Indian forces in the Valley and demanding UN intervention in the Kashmir issue.
The Kashmir American Council led the three-hour protests yesterday attended by women and children as well.
Holding banners and placards that read 'Indian Forces Out of Kashmir', 'No Democracy Without Self-Determination' and 'Time to Resolve Kashmir Dispute Now', the protesters shouted slogans demanding "freedom" for Kashmir and its people.
The demonstrators also shouted slogans in support of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, who was killed this month by Indian forces in Kashmir.
"The US and other western countries must intervene to stop the human rights violations in Kashmir," Shaheen Khalid Butt, Chairman of the Kashmir Mission USA, said.
Ghulam Nabi Fai of World Kashmir Awareness said India and Pakistan must sit at the negotiating table "without any condition from any party" and keep "their horizon open" to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute.
Fai has served two years' imprisonment in the US on the charges of working on behalf of Pakistan's ISI.
The protesters, demonstrating a few yards away from the UN headquarters, also demanded intervention by the world body to settle the Kashmir issue.
Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday hit out at the Centre over "brutalities" inflicted on civilians in Jammu and Kashmir, asking if civilians should be "treated in the same manner as militants".
"The situation in J&K has never been so bad. Why has the situation in Kashmir worsened since 2008-09? Even our government, Omar Abdullah's government and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's government saw such incidents, but we have never seen such brutalities on the civilians ever," said Azad.
"They have used bullets and pellet guns on the children, old men and women. Should locals be treated the same way we treat militants? Should the same bullets that are used on militants be used on innocent people of the state," asked Azad.
Azad further said: "We are with the government in ending militancy, but can't support this treatment of civilians. No one supports militants. But there should be a difference between militants and common people," he said.
"People have been killed in all 10 districts of the state, the maximum damage was done in four districts of south Kashmir," he added.
Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, who was involved in a spat over Twitter with Congress leader Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar hours before her death, has been questioned by Delhi Police in connection with the murder case.
Tarar's questioning took place in February at a place of her choicea prominent hotel in New Delhi. She was questioned by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case in the presence of women police personnel, sources said today.
Summons could not be issued to Trar as she is a Pakistani but she had earlier stated that she was open to joining investigation into the matter and had also written to a senior official communicating the same.
51-year-old Sunanda was found dead at a suite in a five-star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, a day after her spat with Tarar on Twitter over her alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.
Tarar was questioned about her relation with the Congress leader and his wife, her fight with Sunanda over Twitter, and other issues revolving around Sunanda's mysterious death. So far she has refused any proximity on personal terms with both Tharoor and Sunanda, the sources said.
The questioning stretched beyond two hours and Tarar was also asked to fill a questionnaire prepared by the SIT, they said.
Tarar also figured prominently in a statement by journalist Nalini Singh, believed to be the last person to have spoke to Sunanda over phone hours before her death.
Singh had said that Sunanda had mentioned to her about Tharoor deleting Tarar's messages from his Blackberry phone and had asked her if she could help her in retrieving the same. Singh had further said that Sunanda also told her she was unhappy following a meeting between Tharoor and Tarar in Dubai.
In January 2015, Delhi Police had registered a case of murder in connection with the death of Sunanda. An AIIMS medical board had earlier found poisoning as reason for her death following which the police had sent her viscera samples to an FBI lab in US.
The FBI lab report, sent to Delhi Police In November 2015, endorsed the findings of the AIIMS Forensic report. As police could not firm up about cause of the death based on the FBI report, they requested a medical board of AIIMS to analyse the contents of the report.
Several persons including Shashi Tharoor have been questioned in connection with Sunanda's death.
The police have also conducted polygraph test on six persons, all prime witnesses in the case, including Tharoor's domestic help Narayan Singh, driver Bajrangi and Sanjay Dewan, a close friend of the couple.
The Tamil Nadu government on Monday filed an appeal in the Madras High Court challenging a trial court order acquitting Jayendra Saraswathi and eight others accused of all charges, including attempt to murder, in the 2002 Radhakrishnan assault case.
Justice R Subbiah, before whom the appeal came up, ordered notice to all the accused, including 80-year old Jayendra Saraswathi, on maintainability of the plea and adjourned the matter for hearing after two weeks.
The appeal challenged the April 29 last order of First Additional Sessions Judge P Rajamanickam acquitting Sankaracharya and eight other accused.
According to the prosecution, former auditor of the mutt, S Radhakrishnan was assaulted by a gang in his home here on September 20, 2002, following a conspiracy hatched by the accused assuming that he was writing letters in the pseudo name of Somasekhara Ganapadigal highlighting alleged 'irregularities' in the Kanchi Sankara Mutt.
It had contended the attack was a consequence of Jayendra Saraswathi allegedly expressing frustration over such letters and asking mutt manager Sundaresa Iyer and Raghu, brother of his junior Vijayendra Saraswathi, to do something about it.
A case was registered against 12 persons but two of the accused had died during the pendency of the case while Ravi Subramaniam had turned approver.
However, during the trial, he was declared a hostile witness.
Amitav Ghosh, the author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, speaks to Nitin Sethi about the language of concealment in which the Paris agreement was scripted. Edited excerpts
You make an argument that turning it into a moral issue will not work to resolve climate change. But that is the argument globally civil society deploys. Do you think it's the failure of civil society to use the moral argument better or the argument is inherently built to fail?
I think it is an approach that is very ill suited to this particular problem. This whole issue of presenting it as a moral issue to my mind that actually is a capitulation to a kind of neo-liberal ideology which tries to reduce all collective action to cases of individual choices. As I say in the book, I think that you can actually argue the morality of it very easily. What are the dominant parameters of morality, especially in the English-speaking world in neo-classical economics of one kind or another? Looking at a lot of literature on the justice literature on climate change, which was very striking to me. How many approach it from a Rawlsian perspective. Essentially within that perspective the results that you get in relation to morality are not at all what you and I would imagine.
Leading wind producers are facing problems over payments and demand that affect close to 11,000 Mw, or 40 per cent of the wind generating capacity in the country.
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.
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram G Rajan today said the country has come a long way as far as financial inclusion is concerned, but still has a way to go. He suggested a comprehensive set of approaches and measures to help fully accomplish the goals of financial inclusion while addressing a national seminar on 'Equity, Access and Inclusion-Transforming Rural India through Financial Inclusion' organised by the National Institute or Rural Development and Panchayat Raj and learning partner Crux.
"We have been trying for decades to expand credit. We have focused much less on easing payments and remittances, on expanding remunerative savings vehicles, or on providing easy-to-obtain insurance against crop failures. In the emerging financial inclusion paradigm, the Government and the RBI are trying to expand inclusion by encouraging these other products, allowing credit to follow them rather than lead," Rajan said while suggesting moving away from credit as one of the three approaches with other two being mandates and subventions and transforming institutions.
Opposition parties and the government agreed on Monday, opening day of Parliament's monsoon session, to allocate five hours for a discussion on the goods and services tax (GST) Constitutional amendment Bill in the Rajya Sabha.
The central government on Monday showcased its various initiatives towards achieving greater ease of doing business in the country to a visiting World Bank delegation.
The World Bank team is in India as part of the multilateral development banks annual assessment of the levels of ease of doing business in different countries. The team was briefed by officials from the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP), Central Board of Direct Taxes, department of financial services, and the law ministry. The team will spend the next two weeks talking to various stakeholders in Delhi and Mumbai.
Officials from DIPP said they were confident of securing a higher ranking for India in the World Banks annual Doing Business Report, the 2016 edition of which placed India 130th among 189 countries.
The global ranking of countries is based on certain indicators such as how easy it is to start a business, register a property, get credit, pay taxes, and resolve insolvency. India had performed the best in protecting minority shareholders category (eight rank) and the worst in dealing with construction permits (183rd rank).
After the last report in October 2015, the government had streamlined existing norms to improve its score on these indicators, especially on building permits, enforcing contracts, and resolving insolvency. We have to convince the World Bank delegation of the same, said a DIPP official on the condition of anonymity.
He was confident the two areas where the country had made significant strides according to the last report - starting a business and providing electricity - would help the government secure a higher ranking since bureaucratic and legal hurdles have been eased further in these areas.
The government has integrated about 20 services provided by various central government ministries on its online e-biz platform. These include those for securing employer registration, industrial licence, getting permanent account number (PAN), transferring shares in foreign currency, and getting custom duty concessions on project imports, etc.
The ministries of finance and corporate affairs have also pushed for paperless application for PAN and tax deduction and collection account numbers (TAN) as well as seamless exchange of data to provide newly incorporated companies with the same within a day.
Furthermore, 30 different services by Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Delhi were integrated as on June 7. The government is also keen to showcase the ground level implementation of reforms by various states, the official mentioned above said.
States had been given a set of 340 issues to work on, whose implementation details were to be submitted by July 7. As on that day, Uttarakhand and Telangana led the pack of states in implementing reforms on the issues. However, the window for the re-submission of clarifications by states would be open until July 31, according to the DIPP.
The Centre has asked the World Bank to rank states on the ease of doing business for the next three years, as it strives to ensure a high level of professionalism in and non-partisan nature of such an exercise. The first ranking of states came out in September last year which saw Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand leading. This time, the role of the DIPP in this exercise is mostly limited to facilitating the interactions between states and the World Bank.
However, the various initiatives might be missed by the World Bank since only the cities of Mumbai and Delhi are covered by it. Sources privy to the developments had earlier suggested that the government might push for the inclusion of other cities across the country, especially state capitals such as Chennai, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad.
Major initiatives by the government under specific indicators of World Bank Doing Business ranking
Parliament is set to meet for the from Monday and the government has a slew of Bills listed for consideration in both the Houses, with the all important Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill top on the agenda.
India and Malaysia have agreed to proactively engage to combat the menace of ISIS activities. In his delegation level meeting with the visiting Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Dato Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi here today, the Union Home Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh said that we are concerned about the danger of enhanced activities of ISIS in democratic countries like India and Malaysia. They have started using our countries as recruiting ground and attract our youngsters with their extremist ideology, he added. .
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Shri Rajnath Singh said that if we do not address it internally, and if we do not cooperate with each other through strong intelligence sharing, we will find it increasingly difficult to stop this ideology from poisoning the minds of our youngsters. India is also interested in knowing more about Malaysias deradicalisation programme, he added. .
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The Union Home Minister proposed more regular meetings of the Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crimes besides regular meetings under the ambit of the MoU on Cyber Security Cooperation signed during the visit of the Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi to Malaysia in November last year. Shri Rajnath Singh said the MHA is studying the comments of Malaysia on the draft MoU on Combating Transnational Crime and hoped it would be signed expeditiously. Shri Rajnath Singh also hoped that the MoU on Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners will be fast-tracked. .
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Seeking Kaula Lumpurs support, the Union Home Minister said that India continues to be concerned about terrorists who plan their terrorist activities from abroad. Expressing satisfaction at the close bilateral security cooperation especially on counter-terrorism, Shri Rajnath Singh lauded the Malaysian Government for its cooperation over the last few years in apprehending some of the terrorists who are wanted in India. We appreciate the close cooperation between our security agencies, particularly the Malaysian Special Branch on Counter-Terrorism which has been working closely with the Intelligence Bureau, he added. .
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The two sides also discussed the issues such as Extradition Treaty and Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN). The visiting delegation presented a copy of the Integrated Rehabilitation Module for Detainees in Malaysia. .
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The Indian delegation comprised the Ministers of State for Home Affairs Shri Gangaram Hansraj Ahir and Shri Kiren Rijiju and Senior Officers of MHA while the Malaysian delegation included Deputy Secretary General (Bilateral Affairs), Dato Muhammad Shahrul Ikram Yaakob, High Commissioner of Malaysia to India, Datuk Naimun ashakli Mohammad and other Officers. .
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The Doing Business team of the World Bank Group is on a two week mission to India for interacting with various stakeholders and to validate data for the upcoming Doing Business Report (DBR), 2017. A Kick-off meeting, chaired by Additional Secretary (Investment), Department of Economic Affairs to interact with the Doing Business mission team of the World Bank Group was held on July 18, 2016 at New Delhi. The meeting was also attended by the representative from Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP). .
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Additional Secretary (Investment) informed that Government of India accords highest priority to the improvement in the ease of doing business in the country. The Government has undertaken various reforms to bring improvements in legislative and administrative structures and to improve Indias environment for doing business. Government has partnered with all States to improve regulatory environment pan-India and beyond indicators of Doing Business Report. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has been notified which creates a framework for resolving insolvency in the country. The Doing Business team was urged to note the initiatives of the Government in the upcoming DBR 2017. Additional Secretary (Investment) requested the doing business team that while validating the data from the private sector respondents, if the information is found at variance with the information shared by the Government Departments, the team may cross check the information for factual accuracy with Government Departments concerned. Additional Secretary (Investment) also offered support for facilitation, if required, by the Doing Business Team. .
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The Doing Business Team also met the representatives from different Central ministries and Departments during the day and propose to meet the Departments in the NCT of Delhi and Government of Maharashtra. The team will also interact with the private sector respondents for a feedback on the reforms implemented in the areas of doing business, during their two weeks mission in India from July 18-29, 2016. .
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NITI Aayog is organizing an Expert Consultative Group Meeting on Creating a Framework for Operationalizing 500 Atal Tinkering Labs, ATL at Faculty Development Centre, Shankar Vihar in New Delhi tomorrow on July 19, 2016. The consultations during 9:30 am till 12:30 pm will provide a platform for exchange of ideas and knowledge among the experts to help create and put in place a framework for the 500 Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) that will be established in schools all across the country. The technical support for the consultations is being provided by the Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd. This meeting will be followed by NITI Aayog signing a Statement of Interest (SoI) with Intel to further innovation among school children during 3.30-5 pm at Niti Aayog . Atal Tinkering Labs initiative is a part of thewhich is an umbrella platform to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in India. ATLs are workspaces where young minds can work with equipment and kits to understand the concepts of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The objective of setting up these labs is to foster curiosity, creativity in young minds; and inculcate skills such as design mind set, computational thinking and adaptive learning. .
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Makers, practitioners, schools and civil society are invited to discuss, deliberate and help create a Tinkering Lab Framework (TLF) which would act as the guideline for all the selected schools to establish Atal Tinkering lab. The discussion topics would range from what needs to be there in a lab; do-it-yourself activities; content; engagement with the community; a hands-on workshop to series of educational lectures. Through the open forum, NITI Aayog will look forward to attempt to understand how the makers community can assist the ATL to accomplish the mission of fostering an innovation ecosystem at the school level. .
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CEO, NITI Aayog, Mr. Amitabh Kant, Secretary, Department of School Education & Literacy, MHRD, Dr. S. C. Khuntia, Senior Advisor, NITI Aayog, Dr. C. Muralikrishna Kumar, Vice President - Corporate Affairs at Intel Corporation, and President of the Intel Foundation, Rosalind Hudnell, and Director of Corporate Affairs Group, Intel South Asia, Kishore Balaji, will be present at the meeting. .
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Government of India had constituted a Committee under the Chairmanship of Shri N. Gopalaswami, Chancellor, Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, Tirupati to suggest a long term vision and road map for the development of Sanskrit. The Committee has, inter-alia, recommended the following: .
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(i) National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) may collect data of the number of sanctioned posts of teachers in every state, number of posts filled and the number of vacant posts in all the Government schools, Aided schools and Private schools. .
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(ii) NCERT may prepare a status report of the Text Books of all the classes of all the States on the following issues: When were the existing Text Books of Sanskrit prepared? How many times these Text Books were revised and when they were last revised? What are the innovative designs included during the last revision? .
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(iii) NCERT and SCERTs may ensure that free tutorials for all Sanskrit text books are available online. This will help the students of Sanskrit to utilise the online resource as well in understanding their course contents and Sanskrit language in a constructive and encouraging environment. .
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The report of the Committee has been sent to NCERT for appropriate action. .
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The Committee has observed that making available free tutorials for all Sanskrit text books online would help the students of Sanskrit to utilize the online resource as well in understanding their course contents and Sanskrit language in a constructive and encouraging environment. .
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This information was given by the Union Human Resource Development Minister, Shri Prakash Javadekar today in a written reply to a Lok Sabha question. .
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During the financial year 2015-16, Ministry of HRD allocated a sum of Rs. 5 crore for Media Campaign to UGC for undertaking a publicity campaign against ragging in Higher Educational Institutions in the country. The UGC has spent an amount of Rs. 4.78 crore on various activities, including preparing and broadcasting of TVCs on Anti-Ragging by Doordarshan, making of films by NFDC, coverage through FM Radio and printing & mailing of posters by DAVP and broadcasting on All India Radio by Prasar Bharati. The UGC had also announced a competition for students, teachers and general public for wide publicity and promotion of Anti-Ragging measures which include Poster designing, Logo/Icon/Slogan designing and Essay competition. .
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390 cases of ragging, including death or maiming of students, were reported in different colleges of the country during the last year, including the States of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh which have reported higher number of cases. .
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UGC has sent letters dated 28.7.2015 and 10.2.2016 to the Chief Secretaries and the Education Secretaries of the concerned States where the ragging cases reported are high. .
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UGC is taking action on punishment for ragging as per UGCs Regulation on Curbing the Menace of Ragging in Higher Education Institutions, 2009. In cases and situations where the provisions of the Indian Penal Code are attracted, appropriate action is also taken. The UGC has also recently expanded the definition of ragging by bringing out the Third Amendment of its Anti-Ragging Regulations on 29.6.2016. .
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This information was given by the Union Human Resource Development Minister, Shri Prakash Javadekar today in a written reply to a Lok Sabha question. .
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Three Islamists were handed down death penalty while five jailed until death by a special tribunal in for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 liberation war with Pakistan.
A three-member panel of judges of Bangladesh's Crimes Tribunal, led by Justice Anwarul Haque, pronounced the judgement as two of the convicts appeared on the dock while six were tried in absentia as they were on the run to evade justice.
The verdict came as the prosecution accused all the eight of five charges relating to crimes like mass murders, abductions, tortures and lootings.
Prosecution lawyers said six of the convicts were members of the infamous Al-badr auxiliary force of the Pakistani troops during the war and carried out atrocities in northern Jamalpur district.
The two belonged to Razakar, another Bengali-manned armed group raised by Pakistanis during the war.
Manned by activists of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, which was opposed to Bangladesh's 1971 independence from Pakistan, the Al-Badr appeared as an extremely notorious force by carrying out ruthless atrocities siding with Pakistani troops.
The verdict came amid a nationwide tension following the recent two back-to-back Islamist terror attacks in the country, following which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hinted that Jamaat could be behind the assaults.
has so far executed four war crimes convicts since the process began to try the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Hasina in 2008.
At least three police officers were killed and three 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 amid the ambush on Dallas police officers where a sniper killed five officers. The races of the suspects and the officers involved in today's shooting were not immediately known.
Officials confirmed that three law enforcement officers died while three were wounded during an early morning shooting on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over a kilometre away from police headquarters.
The city was on high alert, officials said.
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.
"It's my understanding that they (the officers) had responded to an initial shooting incident," Hicks said.
Police were looking for anyone wearing army fatigues, all black or possibly a mask.
A witness told WBRZ-TV that a man, dressed in black with his face covered, was shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash.
"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.
United States Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps General Joe Dunford, has said that peace prospects in will increase when the Taliban realises they have no chance of winning on the battlefield.
Concluding a three day visit to Afghanistan, General Dunford said the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) have significantly increased their capabilities and made important gains by going on the offensive.
He added the Afghan forces went to the enemy first rather than waiting for this year's fighting season.
"I think there's a degree of optimism that the Afghan forces have the momentum this summer.. But I think the Taliban have proven to be resilient in the past, and I think there's still a fair amount of fighting ahead," Khaama Press quoted him, as saying.
He met with the senior US and Afghan leaders to assess progress in NATO's Resolute Support mission and held talks with with President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, Defence Minister Abdullah Khan Habibi among .
He described the meetings as "very positive," with a focus on reforms of the Afghan security forces and continued support for the Afghan security forces to 2020 and beyond.
Noting the Afghans have a "very good" plan this year, he said, "We've seen peaks and valleys in the Taliban before, but certainly on the ground right now, the Afghan forces have the momentum."
He said that Washington will keep supporting the Afghan forces and making sure that the governance continues to mature.
Pakistan Prime Minister who returned to the country from London on July 7, on Monday failed to reach Islamabad due to health problems.
Sharif could not travel to Islamabad from Lahore city due to an infection in his leg and fever, the News International quoted his spokesperson as saying.
The premier would travel to Islamabad after his fever subsides, the spokesperson said.
Sharif returned to Pakistan after 45 days in London where he went under an open heart surgery on May 31.
Pakistani politicians had called it an imprudent decision to leave the country at a time when opposition parties were exerting pressure on the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government in the wake of the Panama Paper leaks.
However, a PML-N officer-bearer said Sharif's medical condition necessitated the visit.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Secretary General Jahangir Khan Tareen last week said the party's preparations for launching a "massive protest movement" over the leaks soon after Eid ul-Fitr were in full swing.
An investigation published on April 3 by an coalition of more than 100 media outlets, based on information drawn from the internal database of Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, detailed how wealthy people use offshore shell companies to hide their assets.
According to the documents, Sharif's children Maryam, Hasan and Hussain were owners or had the right to authorise transactions for several companies.
A Dhaka court on Monday indicted 41 persons, including Rana Plaza owner Sohel Rana and his parents, for murder over the collapse of the building in 2013 killing at least 1,136 garment workers.
Dhaka District and Session Judges' Court Judge S M Kuddus Zaman passed the order in the case.
The court fixed September 18 to start the trial, The Daily Star reported.
Owner Sohel Rana and 33 other accused who were present at the court pleaded not guilty after the charges were read out to them.
Of the accused, Rana and six are in jail while seven are on the run and 27 are on bail.
The accused persons include: Rana's parents, owners of four factories, the mayor of Savar municipality and 14 government officials.
On June 1, 2015, The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) submitted the case charge sheet accusing the 41 people involved in the incident, The Daily Star reported.
The city development authority, RAJUK, filed another case against 13 people, including Rana, with Savar police, charging them with flouting the National Building Code, bdnews24 reported.
Another Dhaka court on April 28 took the charges into cognizance against the 41 people.
At least 1,136 people, mostly garment workers, were killed and more than 2,500 injured when the Rana Plaza collapsed in Savar on April 24, 2013.
The incident turned the world's focus on the poor and unsafe working condition in factories in Bangladesh, the second largest exporter of Ready-Made Garment products.
Prominent Pakistan cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi, who made headlines in June for appearing in a video with Qandeel Baloch, will be included in the murder investigation of the slain social media star, a police official said on Monday.
"We have decided to include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the murder investigation," said a police official in Multan where Baloch was killed, Geo news reported.
On Sunday, Qandeel's brother Muhammad Waseem admitted to strangling her to death for the "honour of the family". Waseem said he gave a "tablet" to Qandeel to sedate her and then strangled her in their family home over the weekend.
"The scope of the investigation has been widened. The victim's brother, Aslam, will also be investigated. We are waiting for the forensic reports," said the police official.
"According to our initial investigation, 'honour' is the motive of murder," the police official said earlier.
Waseem admitted that he killed his sister due to her activities on social media, including a series of posts with prominent cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi in which one video showed Qandeel shaking hands with Qavi as she sat on the arm of a sofa by his side.
Qavi, who was suspended from the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee as a result of the controversy following the posts, told the local media after Qandeel's death that he had "forgiven her" and the matter was now in God's hands, Geo news reported.
Prior to her death, Qandeel, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, spoke of worries about her safety and had appealed to the Pakistan Interior Ministry to provide her with security for protection.
No help was provided and the Pakistan Interior Ministry has not commented on her death.
In Facebook posts, Qandeel, 26, spoke of trying to change "the typical orthodox mindset" of people in Pakistan. She faced frequent abuse and death threats but continued to post provocative pictures and videos.
The so-called "honour-killing" has sent shockwaves across the country and triggered an outpouring of grief on social media for Qandeel.
First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon on Sunday said, she would consider a second referendum on Scottish independence in the first half of next year, if British government started the formal process of leaving the European Union without Scotland's position being safeguarded.
Her comments follow a Friday meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, in which May assured Sturgeon that she would listen to any options brought forward by the Scottish government, BBC reported.
May, however, appeared unwilling to consider a second referendum on Scottish independence, saying people in Scotland sent a "very clear message" in 2014.
May also said she would not trigger article 50 the formal process of Britain leaving the EUuntil there was a "UK approach and objectives", which, according to the First Minister, meant Scotland had been put in a very, very strong, strong position.
On the BBC's Sunday Politics Scotland programme, when asked about her position if article 50 was triggered in December and the Scottish government was not "on board", Sturgeon said that was why she was making preparations for a second independence referendum.
"Of course at that point that would be an option and a decision that I would have to consider," she said.
She also suggested, Scotland could stay in Britain as well as the EU.
She said: "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."
"I think 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 that the Scottish government would bring forward to give effect to how Scotland voted and we will certainly bring forward options," BBC quoted her as saying.
She said that in Brussels she had encountered "a warmth, an openness a great sympathy to the position Scotland finds itself in".
Britain voted to leave EU in June 23 referendum by 52 per cent to 48 per cent while Scotland voted to remain by 62 per cent to 38 per cent.
Around 1,800 Special Forces troops joined police in securing Istanbul on Monday, as part of strong measures enacted in the aftermath of a failed military coup, the media reported.
Extraordinary security measures have been observed in the metropolis, as Special Forces and police personnel accompanied by armoured vehicles patrolled avenues and streets, Xinhua news agency reported.
Special teams have also taken their positions at key installations across the city, reports said.
On Monday morning, the Turkish Air Force Academy located near Ataturk Airport was raided by a large number of security forces, with four high-ranking soldiers reportedly taken away over their links to the failed coup attempt on Friday night.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in Istanbul since early Saturday, ordered overnight patrols across the country by F16 fighters, CNNTurk said.
According to the broadcaster, Erdogan made the order over unusual aerial activities observed over northwestern cities of Canakkale and Balikesir.
In the meantime, Istanbul's police chief Mustafa Caliskan ordered his teams to shoot down all unidentified helicopters flying over the city, the Hurriyet daily reported.
All the tarmacs for choppers in Istanbul have been put under police control, and flights over the city have been restricted, CNNTurk said.
A harsh crackdown was underway in following the foiled coup, with the arrest of thousands of suspects from the military, the police and the judiciary.
China on Monday said it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Turkish security forces today carried out new raids against suspected plotters of the botched coup against the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as concern grew over the scale of the crackdown.
The authorities have said around 6,000 people have been detained so far in the investigation into Friday's coup which Erdogan has blamed on his arch enemy the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.
Special Istanbul anti-terror police units this morning raided the prestigious air force military academy in the city in search of new suspects, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Meanwhile, authorities have also detained General Mehmet Disli, who conducted the operation to capture Turkey's chief of staff Hulusi Akar during the stand-off, a Turkish official said.
Reports had said that a total of 36 generals had been detained so far. The Dogan agency reported today that 10 of them had now been remanded in custody by the courts.
Erdogan has urged citizens to remain on the streets even after the defeat of the coup, in what the authorities describe as a "vigil" for democracy.
New demonstrations of support were held throughout the country last night, AFP correspondents said.
Thousands of pro-Erdogan supporters waving Turkish flags filled the main Kizilay Square in Ankara while similar scenes were seen in Taksim Square in Istanbul, AFP photographers said.
According to Anadolu, 1,800 additional elite special police forces have been drafted in from surrounding provinces to ensure security in Istanbul.
Eleven soldiers suspected of involvement in the coup were detained Sunday at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of the city in an operation that saw shots fired in the air, Turkish television reports said.
Leaders including US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have urged Turkey to follow the rule of law in the wake of the coup.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said on Monday that the rule of law needed to be protected for the sake of the country.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty after the attempted coup.
"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.
Advanced Enzyme Technologies, one of the largest enzyme makers in the world, is raising Rs 400 crore via an initial public offering (IPO), which is largely an offer for sale by promoters and other investors. While only Rs 50 crore of the IPO is through fresh issue of shares, which will be used to repay debt at the companys US subsidiary, there are reasons that make the IPO attractive including good business prospects, strong track record, niche limited competition segment the company operates in, higher entry barriers, and reasonable valuations.
India's benchmark stock index dropped from an 11-month high after the nation's largest telecom companies cut rates and quarterly profits from the biggest consumer company disappointed investors. Mobile-phone operators Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular were among the worst performers on the MSCI Asia Pacific Excluding Japan index after lowering data prices before billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocomm launches its services. Reliance Industries, which operates the world's biggest refinery complex, erased gains of as much as 2.7 per cent. Hindustan Unilever tumbled the ...
The Bangladesh Cabinet has approved the proposal to amend the extradition treaty signed between New Delhi and Dhaka dealing with deportation of people accused or convicted in a crime.
As per the amendment proposal, the two countries will be allowed to deport the accused if a trial court has issued an arrest warrant against him.
Earlier, the treaty only allowed the extradition of a person after verifying the evidence found against the accused.
The decision in this regard was taken in a regular Cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at the Secretariat on Monday, reports the Dhaka Tribune.
After the meeting, Cabinet Secretary Shafiul Alam told the media that the proposal seeks to amended Section 10 (3) of threat.
He said that both countries would after the amendment be allowed to extradite anyone against whom a trial court has issued an arrest warrant.
The treaty was signed on October 23, 2013.
In the wake of ongoing protest-violence in the Kashmir Valley, China on Monday called for "proper settlement of clashes", which have left more than 30 people dead.
According to Xinhua, the official press agency of the People's Republic of China, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang in a press release said the Chinese side is concerned about the deaths and casualties caused by the incident.
Stressing that China's position on the Kashmir issue has been consistent, Lu said the Chinese side hopes relevant parties can resolve the issue through peaceful means.
Clashes between civilians and security forces broke out after the killing of 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani during a police operation on July 8.
More than 30 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 others injured so far during the clashes.
To celebrate their romantic three-years of togetherness, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are currently on the Italian vacation reliving the fateful moment where "it all began" for them.
'Back to where it all began,' the 30-year-old presenter captioned the selfie, reports the Daily Mail.
"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," she added.
The new parents, who welcomed daughter Luna on April 14, first met on the set of the Ohio-born R-and0B belter's 2007 music video for Stereo.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has confirmed that former prime minister Kevin Rudd has put his name forward for the post of UN secretary general.
Bishop told Sky News that Rudd had requested that the Australian government to nominate him for the role.
"Kevin Rudd has requested that the Australian Government nominate him and, as the Prime Minister has indicated on a number of occasions, that'll be a matter for Cabinet," abc.net.au quoted her as saying.
She said that it was now for the cabinet to consider whether to support Rudd's candidacy for the UN's top job or not.
The United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon chair will become vacant when his term expires at the end of this year.
His successor will take office on January 1, 2017.
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has urged the Coalition to back Rudd, saying he was "suitably qualified".
"I think Turnbull should put the national interest first and support an Australian," he said.
South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi had previously urged Bishop not to endorse a "dysfunctional", "vengeful", "unstable", "megalomaniac" like Rudd.
Her had said in February that "the Australian public would be very disappointed if we endorsed such a person for this significant role".
Rudd if nominated will face former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, who announced her candidacy earlier this year.
The Supreme Court will from today begin its hearing in the appeals filed by the four accused in the December 16 gang rape case.
A special bench of the apex court hearing the plea of death convicts in the case has decided to sit two hours beyond its working time to ensure speedy disposal of the case that has been pending in the court for more than two years.
The convicts Vinay Sharma (23), Akshay Thakur (31), Mukesh (29) and Pawan Gupta (22) were awarded death sentence by a trial court in September 2013 and six months later the Delhi High Court upheld their conviction and sentence. All the convicts then approached the Supreme Court which had in 2014 stayed their execution and the matter is pending in the top court since then.
The Delhi High Court had upheld their conviction and award of death penalty by terming the offence as 'extremely fiendish' and 'unparalleled in the history of criminal jurisprudence' and said the 'exemplary punishment' was the need of the hour.
Though arguments started in April before a three-judge Bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra, arguments will have to be made afresh since the combination of judges in the bench has been changed.
The bench comprises Justices Dipak Misra, C. Nagappan and Ms. R. Banumathi.
23-year old Nirbhaya was brutally assaulted and gang-raped by six people in a moving bus in south Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012, and thrown out of the vehicle with her male friend. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.
The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) has conferred L&T Technology Services Limited with the exclusive Company of the Year award at the 12th Indo-American Corporate Excellence (I-ACE) Awards 2016.
This is the highest distinction conferred by the IACC to any company.
IACC further honored L&T Technology Services' by awarding the company the 'Green Office Space of the Year'.
The awards were first established in 2004 to highlight and celebrate outstanding performance by the Indian and American companies who have excelled in both trade and commerce between both countries. These awards have grown from strength to strength since its inception.
Rajya Sabha MP, former union law minster and Chairman of Bar Council of India Ram Jethmalani was the chief guest, while the guests of honor were Ms. Deanna Hanek, Acting Consul General, U.S. Consulate General, Mumbai and; Dr. Mukund Rajan, Brand Custodian and Member, Group Executive Council, Tata Sons.
Dr Keshab Panda, CEO & Managing Director at L&T Technology Services received the award for the company of the Year. Mr Paneesh Rao, Chief Human Resources Officer and Mrs Divya Bhatt, Global Head of Process Industries at L&T Technology Services together picked up the trophy for Best Green Office Space of the Year.
An eminent jury comprising of leaders and bureaucrats from US government examined the applications and selected the awardees. The event was attended by representatives from the Indo-US community, IACC Members, US and other diplomatic community, expatriates and celebrities.
"Winning an award in a category is no simple feat and winning the 'Award for Company of the Year' is truly commendable. It is our privilege and pleasure to bestow this award upon L&T Technology Services Ltd. as they have outdone their competition on multiple levels. One needs to excel in all respects and that is exactly what they have done!" said Mr. Sunder Advani, President, Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, West India Council.
Dr. Keshab Panda, CEO & MD, L&T Technology Services, said, "At L&T Technology Services, we strive to deliver the objectives that our clients desire for and the Company of the Year Award is a testimony to our efforts in providing solutions to our Fortune 500 customers. The Green Space Award further reiterates our belief in providing green innovation and technology.
As soon as Saif Ali Khan confirmed his wife Kareena Kapoor Khan's pregnancy, the news spread like wildfire with loads of speculations associated to it; but looks like the would be-mommy is disappointed with the news.
According to Hindustan Times report, being irritated by the news and the speculations, the 35-year-old actress said, "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 continued.
"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," she added.
For the unversed, it was reported that the 'Ki and Ka' actress, who is due in December, will complete the shoot of her next 'Veer DI Wedding' with Sonam Kapoor and also the shoots for some magazine covers by October before she goes on maternity leave.
Apparently, Bebo is currently associated with over 18 brands and is planning to shoot for the campaigns in the upcoming months.
In this regard, she said, "It is great. they will love me for what I stand for, what I represent, and my talent."
Meanwhile, Kareena were spotted yesterday with her baby bump and pregnant glow at the Mumbai airport with hubby Saif, while returning from their Eid vacation in Pataudi.
Hours after a court ordered registration of a case against him in connection with the suicide of a senior police officer, Karnataka Home Minister K.J.George step down from his post on Monday evening.
A Judicial Magistrate of a First Class court (JMFC) on Monday ordered the registration of cases against Karnataka Minister K.J. George and two senior police officers for abetting the suicide of Deputy Superintendent of Police M.K. Ganapati.
Answering the media regarding the court's order, George said he is hundred percent sure that he will come out clean.
"Whatever the court decides, we will abide by it. I am hundred percent sure I will come clean," he added.
Responding to a question on why the opposition was demanding his removal, he said, "The opposition is not asking for my resignation today, they have been asking for it from the day I have become a Minister."
Following the order, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will take a call with senior leaders on whether George's resignation should be obtained or not.
They will also discuss whether or not to appeal to the Karnataka High Court in connection with the FIR over George's alleged involvement in the suicide.
Meanwhile, the opposition has demanded George resignation.
Holding a media conference, Leader of the Opposition Jagadish Shettar said that an impartial investigation could not be conducted as long as George was still a minister. He also said that the two police officers named in the complaint should be suspended to ensure a fair investigation.
Ganapathy was found hanging from a ceiling fan in a lodge in Madikeri, Kodagu district on July 9.
Blaming the incompetency of the Centre and the Government for the present unrest in the valley, the Congress Party on Monday said the communal approach of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created a sense of alienation among the people in the state.
Expressing grave concern over the present state of affairs in the Kashmir Valley, Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit said the people are misguided by a few separatists.
"What is happening in the Kashmir Valley is very saddening, a result of completely incompetent Government of India and the state government. Whenever there is a political vacuum, obviously these kinds of separatist tendencies will play this kind of muddy game and that is what they are doing," Dikshit told ANI.
"The failure of Narendra Modi and the Chief Minister of Kashmir to continue to win over the hearts of the people of and this situation is a sorry mess," he added.
The Congress leader alleged that the incumbent government in thinks only about the Hindus, adding this has brought in a sense of alienation in the people there.
"The BJP leaders are completely communal and for them there is no Kashmir, but only Jammu. So, they live in a very bigoted atmosphere and this has created a sense of alienation in the people of Kashmir. What is happening actually in the last two years is that there is a government that is doing nothing. So, there is alienation in the valley with regard to development and welfare works," he added.
Pronouncing Kashmir as the integral part of India, he said the state has been largely peaceful especially in the last 10-15 years because of the development that has taken place there.
"Kashmir after its integration into India gradually over time became part of India, but now there are few separatists who may be 4,000-5,000 in number excite others," he said.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley. After Burhan's death, Kashmir is on boil and about 40 people have been killed and over 3,000 including 1,600 civilians injured in clashes between youth and security men during protests.
Curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest continued on Monday for tenth consecutive day.
The life in the Valley remained paralysed after Burhan's killing, due to strike called by the separatists and curfew-like restrictions imposed by the authorities.
Srinagar, July 18 (ANI): The tears never stop, the untimely funerals are endless, the valley never seems to see long periods of peace. Kashmir is on the boil once again.
The cycle of violence and perfidy never ceases of those who do not want Jammu and Kashmir to ever prosper. Many are now saying that separatists and terror outfits are very close to pushing Kashmir back to the nineties.
The anarchy on the streets of Kashmir is alarming. It is reminiscent of that dark period when India was almost losing the battle to keep Kashmir and Kashmiris part of India. It is events following the death of Burhan Wani now; it was the kidnapping of Rubaiya Saeed then.
What a twist of fate that Rubaiya's sister is now the chief minister of the state and what a trial by fire for her! Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's sister Rubaiya Sayeed was kidnapped by militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) on December 8th 1989.
Her father Mufti Mohammad Saeed was the Home Minister of India in the V.P.Singh government. As ransom, the JKLF demanded the release of four of their imprisoned comrades. The 23 year old medical intern, Rubaiya, was released from captivity after five days when New Delhi agreed to set free the militants.
As the then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah had warned, Rubaiya's release emboldened terrorist organizations and it led to the resurgence of militancy in the state with separatists seeing it as a huge victory.
Pakistan trained militants ruled the roost for several years as Jammu and Kashmir hurtled towards political chaos and social unrest. The Hindu minority community left Kashmir in droves and the Hizbul Mujahidin took over the reins of militancy from the JKLF and began calling the shots. Pakistan sponsored proxy war was working against India in Kashmir on the ground and internationally as far as psy-war was concerned India was on the backfoot.
Many of us who were then part of the informtion mechanism to deal with Kashmir proxy war, worked hard to demolish Pakistan's disinformation campaign. It wasn't easy then and it isn't going to be easy now.
On the ground, Pakistan trained hundreds of 'Mujahids' from its own provinces and from Kashmir in the nineties to wage war against India and on the international front, they raised the issue at every forum, exactly as they are doing now?
In one voice Pakistani politicians are today flooding social media and traditional media with pictures and commentary against what they term as Indian atrocities in Kashmir. Journalists from Pakistan are bombarding spokespersons in EU, UN, USA and elsewhere demanding responses to "human rights violations in Kashmir".
They are retweeting and hitting the 'like' button in thousands for any and every tweet or Facebook post that is critical of the Indian government. This naturally gives the impression to journalists, both Indian and foreign, that they are probably doing unbiased reporting.
In Kashmir, journalists are finding themselves stuck in hotels or homes, unable to venture out and report. The people in the Kashmir valley are angry with a slant in reporting by some TV channels and the anger is being vented out on all reporters.
In the nineties too, media organizations were attacked by militants. Reporters were threatened.
All India Radio started functioning from New Delhi. Most newspapers were functioning from Jammu.
There was no internet in those days. Whatsapp hadn't percolated in one's life nor had Facebook taken over the young generation's consciousness. But today with internet cut and cable services down, the youth is even more angered at these freedoms being taken away.
Journalists have to now rely on hearsay and briefings from separatists on the one side and the law enforcement officials on the other.
There are no binaries in the Kashmir imbroglio but reporting often becomes that. There is no one right way of reporting, especially when fact and fiction are so difficult to separate.
However, there are some basics that everybody should be quite clear about. India will never give up Kashmir.
Not one inch. No government has the mandate to compromise on that. Not at the state level, nor at the centre. On the security level it will use optimum force if necessary to quell violence. I
t will pull back and allow people to heal. It will provide succour. It will negotiate, placate, cajole, bribe, threaten and do everything in its power to douse the fires.
And on the parallel front it will meet Pakistan at every forum with equanimity and conviction.
There is a feeling of 'been there done that'. The Indian bureacracy has a vast experience of dealing with Pakistan's psy-war tactics. That doesn't mean that India wins in every psy-war battle with Pakistan and Pakistan's proxies. Quite the contrary. India fights with it its back to the wall.
India being a democracy has a din of voices, even when it comes to matters of security. Its media and civil society will not speak in one voice unlike in Pakistan where now the Army doesn't even need to crack the whip. It is a slow climb from the abyss but climb out we will.
Mr. I. Ramamohan Rao is a former Principal Information Officer of the Government of India. He can be reached on his e-mail raoramamohan@hotmail.
The political leaders affiliated to the Madhesi Morcha, an alliance of various Madhesi-centric parties, have accused Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal of favouring his desires over the welfare of others.
The Madhesi Morcha took a jibe at Dahal, saying he is a person who does not stick to his words and alleged he is skillful at altering his decisions repeatedly to favour his will, reports the Kathmandu Post.
Speaking at a function organised to mark the end of Sanghiya Gathabandhan's 16-day long relay hunger strike in Rajbiraj on Sunday, Sanghiya Samajbadi Forum Nepal Vice-Chair and former education minister Renu Kumari Yadav said Dahal is known for changing his words to suit his desires.
Dahal had reached Khullamanch in Kathmandu on Saturday to express solidarity with the Gathabandhan's leaders, who were staging relay hunger strike in protest of the Constitution.
Yadav said it depends on Dahal whether his solidarity to our protest was just a show-off or he is truly positive with the demands of Madhesi, Adivasi and Janajati.
Similarly, Sadbhawana Party vice-chairman Mrigendra Kumar Singh remarked it is to be seen in the future as to how Dahal will play his role in addressing Madhesis grievances in the changed political context.
After toppling the incumbent government led by Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, the Maoist Centre and Nepali Congress seek to form a new government led by Dahal.
Madhesis had earlier accused the Oli-led government of ignoring their demands and depriving them of their rights.
Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho has praised newly-signed Eric Bailly, saying the Ivory Coast international has the potential to be a world-class centre-half.
Bailly, who was Mourinho's first signing as the United manager, was brought from Villarreal for 30 million Euros. He went on to display an impressive performance during his club's debut in 2-0 friendly win at Wigan.
"Of course, he's a very young boy coming from a completely different environment, but you could see what he is at this moment," the Portugal was quoted as saying by goal.com.
Although Bailly had played only 40 La Liga matches before joining the Old Trafford club, Mourinho remains adamant he would turn the player into a world-beater in his position.
"I will give him everything to try to make him better and better, like I did with other central defenders I've had in my hands. Like, for example, [Raphael] Varane, and I will try to make him the best I can," he added.
Bailly played 82 minutes of Mourinho's first friendly game in charge ahead of the United's trip to China, where the side will face Borussia Dortmund and Manchester City.
The Shan State parliament has approved an urgent proposal requesting government intervention to bring an end to a simmering conflict between the Myanmar National Army (Tatmadaw) and ethnic armed groups, which has displaced thousands of civilians in the northern region of the state.
Nang San San Aye, a Shan Nationalities League for Democracy MP representing Thibaw/Hsipaw township, put forward the urgent proposal citing the suffering faced by affected populations, reports the Myanmar Times.
"Villagers have had to abandon their homes and businesses. Children have lost their right to study because of conflict. This conflict needs to stop for the benefit of all ethnic people in Shan State," said Nang San San Aye during the fourth session of the regional legislature.
However, the state border and security affairs minister on July 15 advised Shan State lawmakers to put the proposal on record, a less forceful parliamentary motion, but MPs voted instead on an up-down ballot on the matter.
"Mostly the (motions to put on) record are not implemented. That is why I wanted the proposal approved by the hluttaw. We were able to approve the proposal with 76 votes," said Nang San San Aye.
The legislature's militarily appointed MPs voted unanimously against the urgent proposal.
On July 16, thousands of ethnic Kachin, Shan and Ta'ang youths staged a protest march in Lashio town to demand respect for their human rights and peace in the region.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today downplayed the Congress' criticism over the recent unrest in Kashmir Valley post the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani and called for united efforts to counter the separatists.
Participating in the debate in the Rajya Sabha on the present situation in Kashmir, Jaitley said that he fully agreed with Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad's assertion that the situation in the valley is very serious.
"It is true that the situation there was very good and normal for the past many days. The tourist season was bumper and it is evident that a message goes to the world that the situation was normal there. As a result, trade and commerce was also benefitted. After a very good tourist season, during which as he (Azad) said 40 aircrafts were going there daily and thousands of people were visiting there by road also," Jaitley said.
"Thereafter, there was the Amarnath Yatra and it was expected that there would be very good numbers (of yatris) during the yatra and arrangements were also made accordingly," he added.
The Union Minister also rubbished criticism that the PDP-BJP government in the state was not able to bring the situation under control and said this could be a political thinking.
"Today, the time is not conducive that I repeat Azad Saheb's party's history and its affairs with Kashmir. It is the job of historians. Today, there prevails a truth that the BJP is a prominent political party in Jammu. We also have support in Leh and Ladakh, in the valley it's not that much. In the valley, PDP and NC have base, while the Congress party has bases in both the regions. And this truth is a political reality there," said Jaitley.
"But the political struggle there is in between the country and the separatists. The battle is between this country and the separatists. And when the election results were declared, it was evident that the main stream parties of the valley, the PDP and NC, will have to work with the parties," he added.
Stating that there could be ideological differences as well, Jaitley said, "The mathematics of the poll result was such that there could emerge only one government- if the Congress and PDP would have joined there would be no government, same was the case with the Congress and NC and NC and PDP, and the two parties that got maximum numbers in the two regions, only their coalition had the majority."
Jaitley said that this coalition was dictated by the election results.
"The option was very clear. You (Congress) too experimented with that as you made governments with both the PDP and NC because you too were aware of the fact that if we have to fight with the separatists then we will have to work with the democratic mainstream forces in the valley. And if we take the same position, it will become objectionable. I fail to understand," he added.
Jaitley further said it is well known to the PDP and BJP that there are many ideological differences, adding the Congress witnessed the same when it formed a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir.
"But for the sake of the nation a compromise was reached. However, it was not the main reason for deterioration of the present situation there," he added.
The Union Minister also lashed out at Pakistan, saying the Asian neighbour never reconciled to the idea of Jammu and Kashmir being a part of India.
"And because Pakistan never accepted this and carried out its political agenda on the basis of a negative agenda, and to carry out that politics, it took several steps. One step was after three conventional wars, Pakistan understood it well that it could not win conventional wars with India to win Kashmir then it resorted to terrorism for almost 27 years," he added.
Jaitley stated that the security forces were also killed along with innocent people in that war on terrorism.
"But there came a phase when in the entire world understood that noting could be gained through terrorism. Terrorism will never be a fruitful. And the second, there is a global appetite against terror," he added.
Jaitley said the separatists also made changes in their policies in the past 8-10 years.
"They started calling the Amarnath agitation and the 2010 stone pelting agitation as mass action in the form of civil disobedience. But there was violence. If a mob of thousands starts pelting 5-10 stones at a police post, that stones act as an arm and what alternative security agencies have when thousands of people attack a police post. We have seen it in 2008 and 2010," he added.
Stating that the situation in the entire world has changed in the past few years and the people are misled by a stream which was led by the ISIS, Jaitley said, "Earlier 10-15 years, we used to say that India is the only country where not a single person was associated with al-Qaeda. It's correct that as compared to other countries of the world we are in a better position, but there are sporadic instances and examples," he added.
Jaitley said the separatists' agitation was also affected by this changing stream of the world.
"The main reason was that on July 8, the Jammu and Kashmir Police received information about some terrorists and an encounter ensued in which terrorists were killed and policemen were also injured. In today's changed world where the social media wields so much influence and communication is so fast, it was a new kind of terrorism, which was being glorified," he added.
Jaitley further said the terrorist has assumed a character where he used to mislead and inspire youth and an image was created that the entre security force of India and the Kashmir Police could not reached to that person.
"And if a unit of the Jammu and Kashmir Police arrest and counter him, then was it a protest against the formation of the government there or against a statement of a minister. The protest was against the liquidation of a person, who was personified a hero of terrorists by a unit of police during an encounter," Jaitley said.
"And that is why the entire anger was not against tourists, yatris or the common man but was against the Jammu and Kashmir police and the CRPF. And, it's obvious that when thousands of people attacked and set police posts and police stations on fire and started creating terror, there would be some action," he added.
The Finance Minister said no country can give permission to attack its unity and would act as a mute spectator.
"The quantum of force used could be a matter of debate and the accountability for which lies on the force and police tackling the situation. And it is obvious that when an innocent person is injured we all feel the pain," said Jaitley.
"There is also a political logic behind that our fight is with the separatists, in that fight if the people of Jammu and Kashmir are standing with the country then it's in the favour of the country. And, therefore, any injury to them or their sentiments is not in our favour. And thus, the security forces too will have to exercise patience in using force," he added.
Jaitley, however, said the effort today should be to speak in unison for the peace.
"We have also seen valley's youth, and in the past few years the valley's students are joining the civil services, which is a good signal. Their joining the mainstream is a good signal. And, therefore, nobody in this House would like their alienation. And thus, we have to end a situation where youth of the valley get inspired by a terrorist, who was motivated by from across the border," said Jaitley.
"If we want to end this, we will have to assess the reason behind it with utmost honesty. We should understand the fact and appeal to the youth in unison that they should absolve themselves from such agitations so that police or security forces have not to use force," he added.
Azad, who earlier initiated the debate on the violence in Kashmir, said that he was deeply hurt with the present state of affairs in Kashmir.
He lashed out at the Centre for treating civilians like militants and asked the ruling dispensation not to rule the Kashmir Valley at gunpoint.
Curfew continued in Kashmir for the tenth consecutive day today. Cellphone and internet services have been blocked in many parts of the state to prevent volatile rumours and newspapers have also been restricted.
Almost a week after Manoj Bajpayee zeroed in on Censor Board chief by terming him 'spent force', the latter has now hit back at the actor.
According to a DNA report, the CBFC chief said that he is still waiting for Bajpayee's career to start.
"Bajpayee saab feels so strongly about me? He is such a busy actor. And he still has time to study my career graph. I am deeply moved. But if I am a spent force and I need to retire, then it means I've been working all these years- nearly 45 years as a producer and filmmaker. I am still waiting for Manoj Bajpayee's career to start," he stated.
"Apart from Satya, which was a very good film, Manoj has not featured in any hits in the 10-12 years of his career. Who is he to talk about my career? He should worry about his own. Manoj is talking about the CBFC to promote his new film. This is his desperate method of getting media space," continued Nihalani.
Further, attacking the filmmakers like Hansal Mehta, Tigmanshu Dhulia and Anurag Kashyap, he said, "There's a group of filmmakers in Mumbai comprising self-styled geniuses like Hansal Mehta, Tigmanshu Dhulia and above all, Anurag Kashyap, who make films that are praised to the skies by their colleagues and a handful of learned critics."
"However, the theatres showing their films open empty and close empty. Are you aware of how much money Anurag Kashyap lost to his producers close to '300 crore have been lost through his flop pictures like Ugly, Bombay Velvet and Raghav Raman 2.0. He still continues to make films!" he added.
This came after the film industry raised its voice against censorship, especially 'Udta Punjab,' and now the piracy rumours.
Bajpayee, during a recent promotion of 'Budhia Singh: Born to Run,' said Nihalani's time is over and it's time for him to retire.
His earlier movie 'Aligarh' too faced trouble from the Censor Board.
'Raees' has not only Shah Rukh Khan, but also some other reasons to pull the audience and that is Sunny Leone's sizzling number. And now, it looks like Pakistan won't get the chance to enjoy it.
According to a report, the film producers have decided to release 'Raees' in Pakistan, but without Sunny's item number, the Dawn reported.
She is said to have danced with the 'Dilwale' actor on a faster version of the '80s classic 'Laila O Laila' in the sequence.
According to source, the makers feel that the 35-year-old actress' sequence "may be a little risque for the Pakistani audience."
"Raees has a deep Pakistan connection. The film's leading lady Mahira Khan is from Pakistan and the protagonist is a Muslim businessman," source added.
However, Sunny's item number was a late addition to the script to add some extra masala to the film.
Speaking about it, the source further said, "Everyone from Shah Rukh, to director Rahul Dholakia and producers Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani felt that the film needed that sizzling number, that tadka. And that's how Sunny Leone came into the picture."
'Raees,' which also stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui, will apparently be released in January, next year.
Set in 1980s Gujarat, the film narrates the story the bootlegger Raees Khan, played by SRK, whose business is highly challenged and eventually thwarted by a police officer, played by Nawaz.
According to SRK, though the movie is almost ready, he has still not given his last shot for it.
Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday asked all political parties to work cohesively and put forth their arguments in a constructive manner.
"In order to spur development and to take the nation forward, the discussions should be of constructive nature so that the nation develops at a rapid pace. For this, everyone should work together in the Parliament to guide the nation," he told the media outside the Parliament here.
Prime Minister Modi expressed confidence over the consensus built across all parties and hoped that everyone would take the apt decision to ensure that India develops at a rapid pace.
"As per the talks held with various political parties, I am confident that everyone is in consensus and would take the right decision to ensure that the nation moves ahead on the development path," he added.
Stating that the nation is set to celebrate its 70th Independence Day this year, the Prime Minister asked all parties to work unitedly keeping the same in mind.
The Monsoon session of Parliament began earlier in the day. A total of 25 bills, including the crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, are expected to come up for consideration and passage during the session.
The session will have 20 working days and will conclude on the 12th of next month.
The government yesterday called an all-party meeting at the Parliament House to seek the support of Opposition parties in the passage of pending legislations during the session.
During the meeting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the political parties to keep interests above any other consideration.
He sought their support in the passage of the GST Bill, saying it was of importance. He said it is immaterial which government takes credit for rolling out the GST.
The Prime Minister said all political parties are representative of the people and, therefore, issues should be kept above everything else.
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Monday brought out a protest march in Agartala against the Manik Sarkar led Left Front government in failing to address the ongoing fuel crisis in the state continuing for the last more than one month which has led to the government imposing fuel rationing and casketing affect on the price of daily necessary commodities.
They suggested that if the government is failing to transport fuel through the highway via Assam then the it should think of alternate way through Bangladesh.
TMC spokesperson Sushanata Chowdhury said for the last almost two months the people of Tripura have been suffering due to acute scarcity of petroleum products.
"Every time both the government at the centre and the state have come with the plea to save their face and Lowerpoua road condition has been adopted as the face saving plea. But no positive approach, what so ever, has not yet been initiated by the government seriously with the government of Assam to give respite to the people of the state. So, we vehemently protest and oppose this approach by the government of Tripura and demand immediately to address this crisis that the people of Tripura have been confronting since long," he added.
He also said if necessary the government should take step to get petrol and diesel via Bangladesh and for which the state and the centre should take immediate step.
"Alternate transportation of petroleum products via Bangladesh may be ensured to give respite to the people of the state. With this demand we will hand over a memorandum to the director of food and civil supply," the TMC leader added.
The protest march started from the Vivekananda stadium and ended in front of the director office of food, civil supply and consumer affairs. A delegation of TMC leaders also submitted a memorandum to the director.
Meanwhile, in view of the stalemate in the Assam-Agartala highway and the alternative highway, the Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) is planning to bring petroleum products through Bangladesh.
The IOCL is contemplating to use Dwaki (Meghalaya) or Akhaura to bring petroleum products like petrol, diesel and LPG.
Following the shortages caused by the disruption of both rail and road traffic, prices of essential commodities has also increased in Tripura.
It may be recalled that petrol is being sold at Rs 200-250 per litre in Agartala through black marketing.
US presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he would declare war on ISIS and send "very few" U.S. troops to the Middle East to combat the terrorist group.
He made the remarks on Sunday, while speaking in his first interview alongside his new running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, reports the CNN.
"We're going to declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS," said Trump.
Trump alleged that right now the US doesn't have a good intelligence system in place to combat the terrorist organisation, but, added that he will amend it if chosen president.
"I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We're going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don't have. We don't have the people over there," he said.
Trump added: "We're going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. We have to wipe out ISIS."
Trump tweeted on Sunday, "We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police. Our country is divided and out of control. The is watching."
Trump also blamed the rise of ISIS on Hillary Clinton, who was President Barack Obama's secretary of state during his first four years in office.
"Hillary Clinton invented ISIS with her stupid policies. She is responsible for ISIS. She led Barack Obama -- because I don't think he knew anything; I think he relied on her," Trump said.
Eyeing upon the support of the Opposition in the Monsoon Session of Parliament, the Centre today expressed hope that the expectations of the nation would be fulfilled with the passage of the crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill this time.
"We have said it many a times that the government is ready to discuss any issue. We are expecting we will be able to pass the GST Bill and fulfill the expectation of the people of the nation," Minister of State in Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh told the media here.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier today asked all political parties to work cohesively and put forth their arguments in a constructive manner.
"In order to spur development and to take the nation forward, the discussions should be of constructive nature so that the nation develops at a rapid pace. For this, everyone should work together in the Parliament to guide the nation," he told the media outside the Parliament here.
Prime Minister Modi expressed confidence over the consensus built across all parties and hoped that everyone would take the apt decision to ensure that India develops at a rapid pace.
Stating that the nation is set to celebrate its 70th Independence Day this year, the Prime Minister asked all parties to work unitedly keeping the same in mind.
The Monsoon session of Parliament began earlier in the day. A total of 25 bills, including the crucial GST Bill, are expected to come up for consideration and passage during the session.
The session will have 20 working days and will conclude on the 12th of next month.
The government yesterday called an all-party meeting at the Parliament House to seek the support of Opposition parties in the passage of pending legislations during the session.
During the meeting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the political parties to keep interests above any other consideration.
He sought their support in the passage of the GST Bill, saying it was of importance. He said it is immaterial which government takes credit for rolling out the GST.
The Prime Minister said all political parties are representative of the people and, therefore, issues should be kept above everything else.
Women's rights activist and lawyer Abha Singh on Monday said it was shocking to hear how a 14-year-old was gang raped and physically mutilated in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district, saying that it reminded her of the brutal December 2012 Nirbhaya case.
Demanding strict administrative action, Singh said such incidents were taking place in spite of very strict rape-related laws that could also lead to imposition of a death sentence.
"It is very shameful that no action was taken for three days in the Ahmednagar incident. The Maharashtra government wakes up when media creates a hue and cry... it clearly shows that law and order situation has broken down in Maharashtra," she told ANI.
Referring to the repeat rape of a gang rape survivor in Rohtak, Haryana, Singh said, "The rape victim is re-raped by the same rapist because she refuses to do an out of court settlement; because she refuses to take the case back after being threatened by this rapist.it clearly shows that there is no fear of law in Haryana. The local officers need to be suspended. And, the chief minister of Haryana must come onboard and show and tell why this has happened, or is it his political patronage to the rapist that has led to this case or otherwise," she added.
Former Commission for Women (NCW) member Nirmala Samant said, "This incident it raises a very big question to its law and order situation in Maharashtra. Police should catch hold of the culprits and punish them so that they can set an example. It is also a good thing that the CM is taking personal interest in this. no one should be spared in this. Police has to be very active so that they can nab the culprits. They should take it very seriously," she added.
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.
According to the police, the incident is said to have taken place on July 14 in the district's Karjat tehsil when the girl, who was visiting her grandparents did not return home. Anxious search parties found her bicycle, and later her mutilated body in a nearby farm.
Irate villagers and activists took out a protest march on Sunday in Kopardi village, the site of the murder, demanding stiff action against the accused.
Reports indicated that violence had been inflicted on the minor, whose flesh from all over her body, including her genitals, was badly mutilated.
In a separate incident, a 20-year-old Dalit woman was raped by five men and left to die in the bushes in Haryana's Rohtak, around 60 km from Delhi, this week.
But what is even more shocking is that the men who are accused are the same five who had raped her earlier in 2013.
According to reports, the survivor's family, the men, who are all in their twenties and out on bail, wanted them to settle the case and were punishing the woman for pursuing it in court.
On 16 July 2016
Bharat Heavy Electricals will hold a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company on 16 July 2016.
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On 28 July 2016
Gujarat Intrux will hold a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company on 28 July 2016.
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ICICI Bank rose 0.64% to Rs 266.90 at 14:30 IST on BSE after its subsidiary company, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, filed a draft red herring prospectus with market regulator for an initial public offer.
The announcement was made during market hours today, 18 July 2016.
Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 64.12 points or 0.23% at 27,900.62.
On BSE, so far 6.31 lakh shares were traded in the ICICI Bank counter as against average daily volume of 13.21 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 271.25 and a low of Rs 264.50 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 321 on 17 July 2015. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 180.80 on 26 February 2016. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 15 July 2016, rising 6.78% compared with 4.15% rise in the Sensex. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, gaining 10.04% as against Sensex's 8.62% rise.
The large-cap private sector bank has equity capital of Rs 1163.38 crore. Face value per share is Rs 2.
ICICI Bank announced that its subsidiary company, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, has filed a draft red herring prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Board of India for a public offer of up to 18.13 crore equity shares of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, representing approximately 12.65% of its equity share capital, for cash, through an offer for sale by ICICI Bank. The offer includes a proposed reservation of up to 1.81 crore equity shares or 10% of the offer for individual and Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) shareholders of ICICI Bank.
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance is a joint venture of ICICI Bank and Prudential Corp. Holdings. The company began operations in 2000. As per the shareholding pattern as of 31 March, ICICI Bank reportedly held 67.6% stake in the life insurance firm, while its foreign partner Prudential held 25.9%
ICICI Bank's net profit declined 76% to Rs 701.89 crore on 14.5% growth in total income to Rs 18590.86 crore in Q4 March 2016 over Q4 March 2015.
ICICI Bank is one of the leading private sector banks in India.
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IDFC Bank rose 2.72% to Rs 52.90 at 10:10 IST on BSE after the Reserve Bank of India allowed foreign investors to enhance investment in the bank from the existing 24% to 46%.
Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 168.06 points, or 0.60%, to 28,004.56.
On BSE, so far 1.25 lakh shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average volume of 11.65 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 52.95 and a low of Rs 51.80 so far during the day. The stock hit a record high of Rs 73.45 on 6 November 2015. The stock hit a record low of Rs 43.15 on 21 January 2016. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 15 July 2016, rising 8.99% compared with 4.15% rise in the Sensex. The scrip had, however, underperformed the market in past one quarter, falling 4.72% as against Sensex's 8.62% rise.
The large-cap bank has an equity capital of Rs 3394.90 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.
The Reserve Bank of India on Friday, 15 July 2016 notified that foreign institutional investors (FIIs)/registered foreign portfolios investors (RFPIs) can now enhance investment from existing 24% to 46% of the paid up capital of IDFC Bank under the portfolio investment scheme (PIS). The RBI further notified that the total foreign investment from all sources i.e. foreign institutional investors (FII)/registered foreign portfolios investors (RFPIs)/foreign direct investment (FDI)/non-resident Indians (NRI)/persons of Indian origin (PIO)/American depository receipts (ADR)/Global depository receipts (GDR)/ in IDFC Bank shall not exceed 46%. The RBI has stated that IDFC Bank has passed resolutions at its board of directors' level and a special resolution by the shareholders, agreeing for enhancing the limit for the purchase of its equity shares by FIIs/RFPIs. The purchases could be made through primary market and stock exchanges.
IDFC Bank reported net profit of Rs 165.06 crore on operating income of Rs 1953.20 crore in Q4 March 2016.
IDFC Bank is a subsidiary of IDFC. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) granted a universal banking license to IDFC on 23 July 2015. IDFC demerged on 1 October 2015, transferring all assets and liabilities of its lending business to IDFC Bank. IDFC Financial Holding Company holds 52.95% stake in the bank as per the shareholding pattern as at 5 July 2016. Shares of IDFC Bank listed on the stock exchanges on 6 November 2015.
IDFC Bank is a universal bank, offering financial solutions through its nationwide branches, internet and mobile. IDFC Bank will focus on serving the rural underserved communities and the self-employed, while continuing to support the country's infrastructure sector. IDFC Bank provides customized financial solutions to corporates, individuals, small and microenterprises, entrepreneurs, financial institutions and the government.
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LT Foods jumped 6.5% to Rs 302.90 at 12:26 IST on BSE after the company said it has acquired 817 Elephant brand of rice through its UK subsidiary to further strengthen its existing presence in Canada, USA and Israel.
The announcement was made on Saturday, 16 July 2016.
Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 147.31 points or 0.53% at 27,983.81.
On BSE, so far 31,000 shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 8,333 shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 306.85 and a low of Rs 288.90 so far during the day. The stock had hit a record high of Rs 314.40 on 24 November 2015. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 144 on 25 August 2015. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 15 July 2016, gaining 20.66% compared with Sensex's 4.15% rise. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, advancing 27.25% as against Sensex's 8.62% rise.
The small-cap company has equity capital of Rs 26.66 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.
On consolidated basis, LT Foods' net profit fell 74.4% to Rs 5.55 crore on 14% growth in net sales to Rs 805.13 crore in Q4 March 2016 over Q4 March 2015.
LT Foods offers branded basmati rice, value-added staples and organic food. L T Foods operations include contract farming, procurement, storage, processing, packaging and distribution. It is also engaged in research and development to add value to rice and rice food products.
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Sets financial and non financial targets for FY 2016-17
National Aluminium Company has signed an MoU with Ministry of Mines, Govt. Of India regarding financial and non-financial targets for FY 2016-17.
As per the MoU, the target for revenue from operations, excluding excise duty, has been fixed at Rs 7100 crore. The MoU has also set higher targets for production of both alumina and aluminium as compared to the previous fiscal. Nalco has set an annual production target of 21.30 lakh tonnes of alumina and 3.85 lakh tonnes of aluminium. It may be mentioned that the Company has produced 19.53 lakh tonnes of alumina and 3.72 lakh toones of aluminium in 2015-16.
Nalco has also set a capex target of Rs 1021 crore, which includes projects like development of Utkal D & E Coal Blocks, wind power projects of 50 MW each in Maharashtra and Rajasthan, addition of 5th stream in the existing Alumina refinery at Damanjodi, Koraput, a 20 MW Solar Power Project in Madhya Pradesh and other modernisation activities.
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Reliance Industries rose 1.77% to Rs 1,030.50 at 9:30 IST on BSE after consolidated net profit rose 18.1% to Rs 7113 crore on 13.4% decline in turnover to Rs 71451 crore in Q1 June 2016 over Q1 June 2015.
The result was announced after market hours on Friday, 15 July 2016.
Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 136.95 points or 0.49% at 27,973.45.
On BSE, so far 1.02 lakh shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 2.56 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 1,038.15 and a low of Rs 1,025.10 so far during the day.
The large-cap company has equity capital of Rs 3242.71 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.
Reliance Industries (RIL)'s earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) margin rose by 2.41% to 10.7% in Q1 June 2016 from 8.29% in Q1 June 2015. Decline in revenue was led by the 26% decline in benchmark Brent crude oil price which averaged at $45.6 per barrel in Q1 June 2016 as compared to $61.9 per barrel in Q1 June 2015. Impact of lower prices was partially offset by higher volumes in refining and petrochemicals segments. Gross refining margin rose to $11.5 per barrel in Q1 June 2016 from $10.4 per barrel in Q1 June 2015. Profit before depreciation, interest and tax (PBDIT) increased by 16.7% to Rs 13589 crore in Q1 June 2016 over Q1 June 2015. Strong operating performance from refining and petrochemicals businesses coupled with favorable exchange rate movement enhanced the operating profit. This was partially offset by lower contribution from Oil & Gas business due to lower volumes and weak price environment. Other income was higher at Rs 2378 crore in Q1 June 2016 as against Rs 1584 crore in Q1 June 2015 due to higher interest income and profit on sale of investments.
Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJIL), a subsidiary of RIL, is rolling out a state-of-the-art pan India digital services business. The test program of RJIL's digital services will be progressively upgraded into commercial operations in coming months.
RIL is a diversified firm having presence in oil exploration, petrochemicals, retail and telecom sectors.
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Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) on Monday held eight Al-Badr men guilty of crimes against humanity during the 1971 Liberation War and sentenced three of them to death.
Five others were sentenced to life in prison.
Ashraf Hossain, Sharif Ahammed and Abdul Bari were awarded death term while SM Yousuf Ali, Shamsul Haque, Abdul Mannan, Harun and Abul Hashem were sentenced to imprisonment for life.
Among the eight convicts, only Ali and Haque are in custody. The others are missing and presumed to be on the run. They were tried and convicted in absentia.
A three-member bench of the special court headed by Justice Anwarul Haque delivered the 289-page verdict in the presence of the two convicted in custody, the Daily Star reported.
The prosecution levelled five charges of murder, abduction, torture, arson and loot, and three of these charges have been proven beyond doubt, the court said in its verdict.
They were said to have committed murder, abduction, torture, confinement and arson between April 22 and December 11, 1971.
The special tribunal directed the Inspector General of Police and the Home Secretary to arrest the fugitives immediately and seek help from Interpol if necessary.
Prosecution lawyer Tureen Afroz said her team was satisfied with the 100 per cent conviction, whereas defence lawyer Gazi M H Tamim said they would appeal against the sentences.
The three-member tribunal bench had tried the eight accuses on June 19, and kept the verdict pending.
Ashraf is believed to have fled to India while the rest are on the run in Bangladesh, according to the tribunal's investigation agency.
According to the agency, Jamalpur and Sherpur were the birthplace of Al-Badr in Bangladesh.
Ashraf Hossain, along with executed war criminal Muhammad Kamaruzzamann and Kamranall leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami's then student wing Islami Chhatra Sanghaorganised Al-Badr in greater Mymensingh.
Sharif, Mannan, Bari, Harun and Hashem were also involved in Islami Chhatra Sangha and turned into Al-Badr members, the probe agency said.
Sharif was the Director of Islami Bank Bangladesh Ltd between 1987 and 2003 and Executive and Managing Director of Bangladesh Publications Ltd, which owned the Daily Sangram, between 1999 and 2013.
Shamsul contested the provincial assembly elections in the 1970s as a Jamaat candidate from Jamalpur but was defeated. Yusuf, also with Jamaat's ticket, tried for membership in the National Assembly and he too was defeated.
However, Yousuf became a National Assembly member through a "so-called" by-election in 1971, the agency said, adding that the duo, Shamsul and Yusuf patronised Al-Badr in Jamalpur.
On October 26, 2015, the tribunal framed five charges and the prosecution presented 25 witnesses, including the investigation officer of the case, along with some documentary evidence. The defence declined to bring forward any witness, the Daily Star 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.)
Akshay Kumar will be seen playing the role of a lawyer in the sequel to the 2013 popular courtroom comedy drama "Jolly LLB". The actor took to Twitter to share his look which has a traditional touch to it.
After a teaser via a caricature, the actor revealed his look on Monday. In the image, Akshay seems to be in a pensive mood.
He tweeted: "New day with a new look for a new film, let the mayhem begin! 'Jolly LLB 2' it is! Judgement day 10th February, 2017."
Akshay is seen wearing a lawyer's outfit, and is sporting a moustache with a red vermilion (tika) on his forehead.
The sequel will reportedly be shot in Lucknow and Varanasi.
The 2013 film, directed by Subhash Kapoor, told the story of Jolly, a struggling lawyer, who comes across a hit-and-run case and decides to fight for the victims.
--IANS
sug/nn/bg
Like in the alphabet, in Uttar Pradesh politics, C precedes D: Caste before Development. And so, even as all the major parties in the ring here say that they are here for developing the country's most populous state, their action on the ground paint them otherwise.
Sample this: The Congress, which has been pushed to the sidelines of the state's politics, once its crucible of electoral successes, has gone full throttle to regain its lost glory or at least come in reckoning by craftily balancing the caste matrix. For now, it has appointed Sanjay Singh, a Thakur, to head the campaign committee for next year's assembly elections; Sheila Dikshit, a Brahmin by marriage as its chief ministerial candidate and Raj Babbar from the backward caste as the state unit chief.
The social engineering, as party insiders say, has been the brainchild of election strategist Prashant Kishor, who has successfully convinced the party top brass to play to the caste tune if it was not to be an also ran in a state that has been successfully tapped by regional parties for over a decade on caste-based voting.
"While this combination of castes cannot be said to be a potent force in the assembly polls, we sure are being talked about now and hope to come with better numbers than last time," a senior leader told IANS.
With 78-year-old Dikshit as their CM face, the Congress leadership is trying to woo back its traditional Brahmin vote which has slowly and majorly shifted to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and in fragments to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP).
Things are no different with the BJP, which is trying its hardest in the last one decade to return to power after a hiatus of 14-plus years.
The saffron strategists pitchforked a hitherto unknown Keshav Maurya, the Lok Sabha MP from Phoolpur, as its state unit chief largely because of his OBC credentials.
With the OBCs other than the Yadavs being in large numbers in UP, BJP president Amit Shah, sources say, wants to repeat the 2014 Lok Sabha election success of the party tapping big time into OBC, SC and ST votes to romp home with 71 of the 80 seats.
The caste factor also dominated the BJP's recent naming of state office-bearers, with Thakurs (Pankaj Singh), Brahmins (Vijay Bahadur Pathak) and other caste combinations being delicately balanced.
Sending a veteran, Shiv Pratap Shukla, to the Rajya Sabha also was meant to tell the Brahmins that the BJP still was their best bet. It has also stitched up alliance with OBC majors like Apna Dal and Bharatiya Samaj Party.
"Whatever prime minister Narendra Modi and his team may tom tom about development, in our party too everything comes down to caste," averred a senior party functionary, on condition of anonymity.
As for the regional parties, thy name is caste. Nothing moves in the SP and BSP without caste affiliations.
In the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP), senior minister Manoj Pandey was dropped recently as Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav rejigged his cabinet as he "was not able to fetch Brahmin votes as was expected". Incidentally, during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Pandey was the only cabinet minister given a chopper to attend rallies and seek votes.
The SP's largest base remains Muslims and Yadavs and the party is leaving no stone unturned to reach out to them.
The list of candidates announced for the 2017 polls so far has a heady cocktail of these two. However due to the drubbing in the 2014 general elections, largely owing to its outreach to minorities and the subsequent polarisation it triggered among the Hindus, the party is now careful in its "alignment with a certain caste and community".
Akhilesh Yadav's talk of development, opposition leaders say, belies the basics of his party.
The Bahujan Samaj Pasrty (BSP), which is under seige for now due to desertions by many senior and long-standing party leaders, has also rolled out a slew of caste-balancing acts. Known to be a party of the Dalits, Mayawati, aided by leaders like Satish Chandra Mishra and Brijesh Pathak had won a majority in UP in 2007 with a crafty alliance of Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims.
It is once again raring to go and repeat the same success mantra. Will the people of the electorally crucial state bite the bait for caste or prefer development for a change, only time will tell.
(Mohit Dubey can be contacted at mohit.d@ians.in)
--IANS
md/vm
The annual resumed on Monday from south Kashmir's Pahalgam route for the first time since violence started in the Valley on July 9.
On Sunday, 4,510 offered prayers inside the cave shrine.
An official of Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB) that manages the affairs of the pilgrimage told IANS "Yatra through the traditional Pahalgam route has been resumed today (Monday)."
"Due to the law and order situation in the Valley, the Yatra continued only via north Kashmir's Baltal route only following the July 9 aftermath."
"Since the Yatra started on July 2, so far 1,72,851 pilgrims have visited the cave shrine," the official added.
There were also reports of casualties, 12 pilgrims died on the way due to natural causes.
The 48-day long Yatra will end on August 17 coinciding with Shravan Purnima and Raksha Bandhan festivals.
Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver still haven't divorced -- despite splitting up five years ago.
The former couple broke up in July 2011 after it emerged the "Terminator" actor had fathered a son with their housekeeper and although they have both moved on with their lives, neither are keen to make the split official.
According to tmz.com, the pair didn't have a pre-nuptial agreement and had already worked out how to split their $400 million fortune.
As their children -- Katherine, 26, Christina, 24, Patrick, 22, and Christopher, 19 -- are all adults, there are no custody issues.
Sources claim that one of the reasons could be that neither wants to walk away from $200 million and other insiders have speculated that Shriver, 60, doesn't believe in divorce.
--IANS
ank/nn/
Arjen Robben will be out of action for six weeks after suffering a groin injury, the German giants confirmed in an official statement.
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, reports Xinhua.
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 2016-2017 on August 26.
--IANS
tri/vm
Leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday lashed out at the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), saying the party was a "misfit" for and blamed it for the current violence in the state where more than 40 people have died in clashes.
"The current Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-BJP coalition government is a contributing factor in the current situation in Kashmir. BJP is a misfit and will take ages to create its space in the sensitive area," Azad said during a short duration discussion in the house on the situation in .
"It took us (the Congress government) and other governments, 70 years to try and bring peace to Kashmir. We had a healing touch policy towards people but this government makes no difference between treating common people and militants," he said.
Azad quoted former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's statement where he had said that he "learnt" from his "mistakes".
"We knew the difference between militants and civilians. There were bad situations during the regime also but we dealt with it carefully," he added.
Azad, a former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir blamed the current government for using "excessive force" which led to the killings of dozens and injuries of thousands of people.
"Government should look at people as they look at their own children..but the situation in the hospitals which are full of injured people narrate it all".
He questioned the government for using "excessive force" to disperse the mobs protesting the death of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani and asked "why were the protesters in Haryana treated differently than in Kashmir".
China on Monday said it was "concerned" over the clashes in restive Kashmir, calling for a "proper handling" of the situation in the valley.
Bejing also described Kashmir "as left over from history", where unrest has claimed 43 lives in the past 10 days.
"China has taken note of relevant reports. We are equally concerned about the casualties in the clash, and hope that relevant incident will be handled properly," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said here.
"The Kashmir issue is left over from history. China holds a consistent stance and hopes relevant parties will address the issue peacefully through dialogue." Lu added. '
Clashes broke out between civilians and the security forces after the killing of 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen militant group leader Burhan Wani.
--IANS
gsh/pgh/bg
US presumptive Democratic presidential candidate promised on Monday that if elected to the White House, she will promote reforms so that African Americans no longer fear the police, but also said she will make sure that anyone who attacks law enforcement officers is brought to justice.
"This madness has to stop," Clinton said about the death of three police officers at the hands of an ex-marine in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday, 10 days after another five policemen lost their lives in a shooting in Dallas, Efe news reported.
Clinton gave a speech at the annual NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Convention and dedicated her first words to condemning the murders of police officers at Baton Rouge and to insist that the country has some "difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and communities".
Killing a police officer is a "terrible crime"... and "as President I will bring the full weight of the law to bear in making sure those who kill police officers are brought to justice. There can be no justification. No looking the other way," she told the NAACP gathering in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Though she said that guaranteeing police safety will be her priority as President, she acknowledged that many black Americans, like her audience at the convention, are also frustrated by the cases of African Americans being slain by law enforcement.
"Many African-Americans fear the police," the ex-Secretary of State said, but added, "we have to make it right. That means end-to-end reform in our criminal justice system, not half measures, but a full commitment with real follow-through."
Clinton said there is "clear evidence" that blacks die at the hands of police much more often than members of other groups, and are likely to be "sentenced to longer prison terms than white men convicted of the same offences".
"Something is profoundly wrong. We can't ignore that, we can't wish it away," Efe news quoted Clinton as saying.
"So I pledge to do you I will start taking action on day one and every day after that until we get this done," she said.
Clinton also criticised her presumptive Republican rival in the November election, Donald Trump, for turning down the NAACP's invitation to speak at its convention and because he "plays coy with white supremacists".
"My opponent in this race might have a different view, but there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here with all of you," she said about Trump, currently in Cleveland at the other end of Ohio for the Republican National Convention.
The Congress state unit on Monday accused the Samajwadi Party government of turning a 'blind eye' to the sale of illicit liquor in the state and demanded a judicial probe into last week's hooch tragedy in Etah district.
Newly appointed Uttar Pradesh Congress President Raj Babbar said it was most unfortunate that many deaths due to consumption of spurious liquor had occurred during the Akhilesh Yadav government's rule.
"Hundreds of people have died after consuming spurious liquor but nobody in the state government seems to be bothered," Babbar said.
As many as 28 persons have died after the consumption of spurious liquor in Jouhari Darwaza under Aliganj circle in Etah. The victims had consumed the liquor late Friday night.
Demanding a judicial probe into the hooch tragedy, the Congress leader said a thorough probe will expose the nexus behind the manufacture and sale of illicit liquor in the state.
The party also demanded adequate compensation for the affected families.
Even as such tragedies were occurring, the Chief Minister and other Samajwadi Party leaders were busy trying to figure out ways to return to power in the 2017 assembly elections, the yesteryears actor said.
--IANS
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Officially imposed curfew and a shutdown called by the separatists paralysed normal life for the 11th consecutive day in the Valley on Monday.
Officials told IANS that Sunday was the first day without any civilian casualty since the violence engulfed the Valley on July 9, following the killing of Hizbul Commander Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces on July 8.
"A violent mob attacked a camp of the Rashtriya Rifles in Saderkot area of Bandipora district on Sunday forcing the soldiers to open fire in self-defence."
"Four protesters were injured in the incident."
"Except for stray incidents of stone pelting at some places, the overall law and order situation remained calm on Sunday across the Valley," a senior police officer told IANS.
Over a week long cycle of violence has left 40 protesters and two policemen dead in .
Authorities have officially confirmed that newspaper owners were asked not to publish newspapers till July 19.
Cable television services have, however, been resumed after service providers took off all Pakistan TV channels and two private Indian channels.
All mobile phone services including Internet and call facilities have been snapped across the Valley.
Limited call facility continued on post-paid cell phones provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
All schools, colleges and universities have been closed till July 24.
All job interviews by the state Public Service Commission (PSC) have also been postponed.
Closure of the strategic Jammu-Srinagar Highway for over a week has caused shortage of essential items in the Valley.
All supplies of essentials of life are routed into the landlocked Valley through this highway.
Train services between Baramulla town in the Valley and Bannihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended for the 11th day on Monday.
Separatist leaders continue to remain under house arrest and preventive detention in summer capital Srinagar.
The centre has rushed another 20 companies of paramilitary forces to assist the state government in maintaining law and order in the trouble-torn Valley.
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Monday launched a 24x7 helpline - 1077 - to lodge complaints of water-logging in the national capital.
The government called a high level meeting to review water-logging problems after two days of continuous rainfall in Delhi. "I have directed all agencies to conduct joint inspections at severely affected areas and submit reports by tomorrow (Tuesday)," Sisodia said in a tweet.
In another tweet, he said, "Dial 1077, 24x7 Helpline for registering complaints regarding water logging is functional now. Kindly register your complaint."
He also asked Delhi Police to send separate report on spot for water-logging in Delhi and the cause of it.
Vehicular movement was affected in Delhi due to continuous rainfall for the past two days. The city has been witnessing traffic jams at various intersections due to heavy rains and water-logging it caused.
--IANS
av-vd
Milan-based designer Marcelo Burlon has lent his creativity to a special limited edition line of watch brand Casio India Private Limited's bestselling model G-Shock GA-100.
Marcelo, a multi-talented artiste, is a popular disc jockey, event planner, photographer and designer. He founded his label in 2012, and the brand has extended across culture, fashion, music, nightlife, cosmetics and clothing.
The latest timepiece, priced at Rs 10,995 is the first collaboration model of G-Shock with Burlon's fashion brand, County of Milan, read a statement from Casio.
The watch features and overall coral snake pattern design. The base colour is bold black monotone and on the buckle, back cover and metal band ring there is a black ion-plated finish.
The strap and case are made up of resin to offer extreme strength and flexibility while fitting to both technical as well as stylistic requirements. The timepiece features ultra-shock resistance, a full auto LED display, snooze function, an automatic calendar and a battery that lasts at least two years.
Casio is looking forward to working with Burlon to design more such exotic watches in the near future, which will suit a wide range of different personas and modern lifestyles.
--IANS
namit/rb/bg
The Crime Branch of Delhi Police on Monday claimed to have arrested Salman Tyagi, one of the most wanted criminals of west Delhi who was externed from Delhi for two years along with his three associates.
Tyagi, 26, a resident of Hapur district in Uttar Pradesh, was arrested on Sunday along with his three associates from Dwarka area of west Delhi when the gang was allegedly going to commit a crime in their car, police said.
The police also recovered one sophisticated pistol, two magazines and six live cartridges from their possession.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ravindra Yadav in a statement said: "We received information regarding the gangster coming in the area. We laid a trap and arrested all the four criminals."
"Tyagi even whipped out his loaded pistol and pointed it at the police in order to escape but the police team overpowered him," the officer said.
Along with Tyagi, Parvej Shaukat aka Shakeel, 21, Rajjudin aka Anna, 30, and Somin aka Irshad, 40 were arrested.
According to a senior police officer, Tyagi is a "bad character" and was externed from Delhi in 2015 for two years. However, he again reorganized his gang and started taking protection money from the illegal satta operators in the area.
"Tyagi had created terror in West Delhi and no one dared to file a complaint against him," the officer said.
According to police, nine cases of murder, attempt to murder, and rape were registered against Tyagi at various police stations.
A case has been registered against the arrested accused. Further investigation is on, police added.
--IANS
aks/rn/bg
French troops on Monday bombed new Islamic State (IS) targets in Iraq and Syria as a response to the July 14 Nice attacks that killed 84 people, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.
Le Drian said the new incursion against the jihadi group occurred on Sunday evening, EFE news reported.
"Our forces continue to strike, like the day before yesterday (Saturday) and last night (Sunday night), to contribute, within the coalition, to eradicate this cancer," he said.
The announcement came at the end of the third security council to occur in four days in France, and coincided with the final day of national mourning for the attack by Tunisian national Lahouaiej Bouhelel in Nice when he rammed into crowds gathered to watch the fireworks on the occassion of Bastille Day. The carnage also injured over 300 others.
The minister said he was convinced that the French army's anti-terrorist Sentinelle mission, which has 10,000 troops guarding the national territory, meets its function of "protecting and dissuading".
He also assured that the government was fully mobilised to guarantee French security.
"We need to continue advancing in the implacable fight we are waging against the IS at home and abroad," he said.
On July 16, the IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
Judicial investigations have not yet been able to connect the attacker with any terrorist networks, though eight people have been arrested, two of which have subsequently been released, including Bouhlel's ex-wife.
--IANS
ksk/dg
The German would grow strongly in the third quarter this year despite risks resulting from Britain's decision to leave the European Union, said German central bank on Monday.
"It is currently difficult to estimate effects of Brexit on the German economy, but it could remain limited, at least in the short term," said the Bundesbank in its monthly report, forecasting that the German would grow strongly in coming months following a slowdown in the second quarter.
"The underlying trend is still quite strong, and a significant increase in economic output can be expected for the summer quarter," Xinhua news agency quoted it as saying.
According to the central bank, the driving factors of domestically supported upswing, including the excellent labour market, rising real wages and an expansionary fiscal policy, remain intact.
"The continued favourable business and household sentiment suggests a purely temporary breather in the second quarter," it said.
Europe's biggest grew by 0.7% in the first quarter of 2016. Economists expected the growth to have slowed in the second quarter.
The Union Health Ministry, in collaboration with Unicef, has launched a communication campaign through which it aims to enhance the coverage of its Routine Immunisation (RI) programme Mission Indradhanush.
The RI communication campaign was conceptualised based on the findings from a formative research carried out by the Unicef last year, which found out that many skipped the immunisation due to fear of adverse effects, low awareness about the benefits and lack of information about vaccination centres, among others.
The 360-degree communication campaign was launched last week. Noted actor Amitabh Bachchan has agreed to be the brand ambassador of the campaign.
"The multimedia campaign is designed to reinforce the message of complete immunisation through the tag line (Paanch Saal, Saat Baar). This indicates the importance of seven visits for immunisation during the first five years of life," said a Unicef statement.
--IANS
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Amid a continuing curfew and media lockdown, the Valley on Monday stayed calm barring a few stray incidents of stone throwing at security forces as India squarely blamed Pakistan for the unrest that has claimed over 40 lives in the past over 10 days.
Curfew remained in place all across the valley, hitting normal life for the 11th day. Shops, businesses, banks, private and government offices remained closed. People complained of severe hardships due to the security restrictions and separatist-called shutdown.
In New Delhi, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Parliament refuted the charges of use of excessive force on protesting civilians and stressed that on the contrary, the security forces had been asked to use maximum restraint and the least force.
Singh, as well as Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, blamed Pakistan for the situation in Kashmir, and said Islamabad has never reconciled to Jammu and being part of India.
The Home Minister, responding to a nearly four-hour-long discussion, said he particularly instructed the chiefs of security forces, including the CRPF and BSF, to "use as little force as possible".
"We will be tough on militants and have sensitivity towards the people," he said.
Jaitley refuted Congress' charge that the state government had mishandled or failed to handle the bloody unrest triggered by the July 8 killing of 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, the social-media-savvy poster boy of new age militancy in .
"To think that because BJP-PDP coalition is ruling there and that's why there is this problem, is not correct," Jaitley said in the Rajya Sabha, replying to opposition charges.
"Pakistan never reconciled the fact that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India," he said, adding it would be wrong to think that the situation deteriorated because of anything else, but Pakistan supporting terrorism in the violence-ravaged state.
The Finance Minister said that in Jammu and Kashmir it was the battle between the country and Pakistan-sponsored separatist forces.
"The battle in Jammu and Kashmir is between the separatists and the country. In the fight against separatism, people of Kashmir are with the country."
As the opposition decried the state and central governments' role in handling the situation, the media ban continued and no newspapers were published for the third day on Monday. The gag is expected to continue on Tuesday.
The information blackout has led to very little being reported from parts of the valley, particularly from south Kashmir which has been the worst hit in the turmoil. Most of the 40 deaths have occurred in this region.
Authorities have imposed a blanket ban on newspapers, asking their editors and owners not to publish till July 19. Journalists fear that the ban may be extended till there is some "semblance" of normalcy on Kashmir streets.
All mobile phone services, including internet and call facilities, have been snapped across the valley. Limited call facility continued on post-paid cell phones provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
A policeman told IANS here that except for some stone throwing incidents calm prevailed all over the valley on Monday.
One such protest erupted in Khrew area of south Kashmir's Pulwama district where at least five people were injured. One of the wounded is said to be critical.
Earlier, a ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lawmaker was seriously injured when his vehicle met with an accident following an alleged mob attack, also in Pulwama.
Mohammed Khalil Bandh was travelling from his home in Pulwama to Srinagar "in the dead of the night" when the accident occurred, a police spokesperson told IANS here, adding that there was "some confusion" about the incident.
People, who have been restricted to their homes due to the curfew and shutdown, complained of severe hardships. They say they have not been able to buy and stock essentials due to incessant restrictions.
Closure of the strategic Jammu-Srinagar National Highway for over a week has caused shortage of essential items. All supplies of essentials items are routed into the landlocked valley through this highway -- the only road link that connects Kashmir with the rest of India.
Train services between Baramulla town in the valley and Banihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended for the 11th day on Monday.
Separatist leaders continue to remain under house arrest and preventive detention in summer capital Srinagar.
The central government has rushed another 20 companies of paramilitary forces to assist the state in quelling the street unrest.
--IANS
sar/rn/bg
Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar will on 'Guru Purnima' on Tuesday felicitate all MPs having an academic background, an official source said here.
The source said the brief function will be held at the Parliament House complex here.
Generally regarded as a festival of the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists, the solemn occasion is used to show respect to one's teachers and express gratitude to them.
The festival -- popular in India and neighbouring Nepal -- is celebrated on the full moon day (Purnima) in the Hindu month of 'Ashadha', that is in June-July period.
Javadekar was elevated to the cabinet minister rank and made the HRD Minister by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5.
--IANS
nd/tsb/vd
US Secretary of State John Kerry, in a meeting on Monday with European Union foreign affairs ministers here, reiterated the need for strong unity within the bloc, saying it was "critical we stand together".
"Our cooperation is essential to promoting international peace, stability, security and prosperity," Xinhua news agency quoted Kerry as saying at a joint press conference with Federica Mogherini.
"The fullness of our agenda is absolutely extraordinary. We are all united in fighting back against terror and we were united today in expressing our grief in the wake of last week's horrific attack in Nice," said Kerry.
Kerry said the act of savagery in Nice only served to strengthen the shared resolve to combat the forces of violent extremism around the world.
"With a new government taking shape in the UK and the negotiations upcoming on Britain's departure from the EU, there is obviously some uncertainty out there, but what came out of this meeting today (Monday) was a remarkable sense of unity," he said.
According to the agenda issued by the EU side, both the leaders discussed EU-US relations and exchanged views on the most pressing foreign policy issues, as well as US President Barack Obama's "leaders" summit on refugees in New York on September 20.
Ministers discussed the political instability in Turkey as well as talked about the next steps to strengthen the government of national accord in Libya, and expressed their combined support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
According to the US State Department, Kerry travels to London on July 18, where he will attend two days of multilateral meetings on Yemen and Syria.
--IANS
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A ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lawmaker was seriously injured on Monday when his vehicle met with an accident following an alleged mob attack in the restive Valley where curfew was imposed for the 11th consecutive day, police said.
Mohammed Khalil Bandh was travelling from his home district of Pulwama to Srinagar "in the dead of the night" when the accident occurred, a police spokesperson told IANS here, adding that there was "some confusion" about the incident.
"We don't know if it was really a mob attack. We have a report that his vehicle was chased by an unruly mob, causing the accident. But another version says people gathered after his vehicle overturned," said the police spokesperson.
Some pictures on social media showed a white sedan, believed to be of the lawmaker, lying overturned.
Bandh was rushed to the Army's 92 Base Hospital in Srinagar where he underwent orthopaedic surgery on his back, the police spokesperson said. His condition was stated to be critical.
The confusion over the incident follows a complete information blackout on local newspapers in the Valley, battling one of the deadliest of street violence that has left more than 40 people dead and over 2,000 injured in the last 11 days.
The unrest was triggered by the July 8 killing of 22-year-old Burhan Wani of Hizbul Mujahideen, the social-media-savvy poster boy of new age militancy in .
Authorities have imposed a blanket ban on newspapers, asking their editors and owners not to publish till July 19. Journalists fear that the ban may be extended till there is some "semblance" of normalcy on Kashmir streets.
Cable television services have, however, been resumed after service providers took off all Pakistan TV channels and two private Indian channels.
All mobile phone services, including internet and call facilities, have been snapped across the valley. Limited call facility continued on post-paid cell phones provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
Curfew and a shutdown called by the separatists paralysed normal life for the 11th consecutive day in the valley.
Officials told IANS that Sunday was the first day without any civilian casualty since the stir broke out.
"A violent mob attacked a camp of the Rashtriya Rifles in Saderkot area of Bandipora district yesterday (Sunday) forcing the soldiers to open fire in self-defence. Four protestors were injured in the incident," a police officer said.
"Except for stray incidents of stone pelting at some places, the overall law and order situation remained calm yesterday (on Sunday) across the valley."
Closure of the strategic Jammu-Srinagar National Highway for over a week has caused shortage of essential items in the valley. All supplies of essentials items are routed into the landlocked valley through this highway -- the only road link that connects the valley with the rest of India.
Train services between Baramulla town in the valley and Banihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended for the 11th day on Monday.
Separatist leaders continue to remain under house arrest and preventive detention in summer capital Srinagar.
The central government has rushed another 20 companies of paramilitary forces to assist the state in quelling the street unrest.
--IANS
sar/rn/dg
Amid uproarious scenes in the Maharashtra assembly, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday made a detailed statement on the gangrape and murder of a schoolgirl which evoked memories of the gruesome December 2012 Delhi gangrape case, and assured stringent action against those responsible.
While the government rejected an adjournment motion sought to be moved by Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, of the Congress, in the assembly, protests were held in several parts of Maharashtra condemning the incident which occurred on July 13 in Kopardi village of Ahmednagar district.
In his statement in the assembly, Fadnavis announced that Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam would lead the trial and assured stringent action against the accused persons.
He also announced an aid of Rs 5 lakh from the Chief Minister's Relief Fund and another Rs 3 lakh under the Manodhairya Scheme, besides allocating the case to a fast track court.
Senior Congress leader Narayan Rane and others demanded a debate in the legislative council, while senior Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar sought a debate in the assembly. But the demands were rejected by the government, which said a discussion could be held on Tuesday.
"Compared to all such incidents, this case is very different and akin to the Nirbhaya case of Delhi. The manner in which the schoolgirl was gangraped and her body parts brutalised makes us shudder and shameful. Leave aside and give justice to her as if she was our daughter," Pawar told Fadnavis.
Top opposition leaders squatted on the steps of the Vidhan Bhavan and shouted slogans against the government.
Congress leader Nitesh Rane later said that Fadnavis can have dinner with Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray but has no time to visit the victim's family.
Moving an adjournment motion in the Council, Leader of Opposition Dhananjay Munde said there is outrage in the minds of the people over the incident, but the government does not appear serious enough to address it.
"The Chief Minister and guardian minister have no time. The Chief Minister is merely interested in protecting his colleagues and attempts are being to cover up the incident. Now young girls dread of going to their schools," Munde said.
Supporting the motion, Narayan Rane attacked the state government for the law and order situation and alleged that the home department was in a total mess.
Earlier on Monday, Maharashtra State Commission for Women Chairperson Vijaya Rahatkar visited the victim's family and offered all help to them.
Protests, road blocks, shutdowns, processions were held in Kopargaon, Ahmednagar, Beed, Osmanabad, Pune and other parts of the state to condemn the crime, in which at least two state transport buses were damaged in stone pelting.
On Sunday, the opposition parties launched their agitation when they boycotted Fadnavis's customary assembly session-eve tea party.
Bhumata Brigade President Trupti Desai and other women's groups on Sunday met the family and demanded resignation of the Chief Minister and Guardian Minister Ram Shinde for lapses leading to the crime.
On July 13 in Kopardi, the family of the 14-year-old schoolgirl found her badly-mutilated, blood-splattered body under a tree in a field.
She was gangraped by at least three persons, her teeth and arms were broken and she was strangulated.
The incident ignited a major political storm in Maharashtra with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party targeting the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government.
Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi said three persons have been arrested and the investigations have been handed over to the Crime Branch.
Among those arrested are Jitendra alias Pappu B. Shinde, Nitin G. Bhailume and Santosh G. Bhaval. Police is on the lookout for at least two others who may be involved, Tripathi added.
The accused were presented before a local court and remanded in police custody for seven days each.
Activists of various parties and groups including Sambhaji Brigade, Maratha Seva Sangh and Jijao Brigade took out a procession to the collector's office and demanded compenstation of Rs 25 lakh for the victim's family.
The protesters raised slogans against Minister of State for Home Deepak Kesarkar when he visited Kopardi village on Sunday and threw eggs at him.
--IANS
qn/vd
More than 20 people in have been injured after a man with an axe went on the rampage on a train, German media report late on Monday night.
A police operation including a helicopter is under way in Heidingsfeld, a part of the city of Wurzburg in southern Germany, BBC reported.
Local media (in German) wrote that 21 people had been injured and a suspect appeared to have been shot.
The train line between Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt is closed.
The German news agency DPA reported that the police said some of the victims' injuries were life-threatening.
Heavy rains continued to pound Uttarakhand on Monday causing most rivers to breach its danger mark, an official said.
Officials informed that Saryu, Sharda, Gori and Bhagirathi rivers are flowing above the danger mark while Alaknanda and Mandakini are in spate and could breach the danger mark any time.
Seven persons were killed in rain-related mishaps and three persons were washed away in Haridwar late Sunday.
According to the Disaster Management Cell, over 900 pilgrims on the 'Chaar Dham Yatra' route were stranded at different points due to the incessant rains.
At many places the roads have caved in, with land slides blocking vehicular movement, the official told IANS.
The connection of Yamuna valley in Uttarkashi has been completely snapped with the state capital as a result of which more than four lakh people were left to fend for themselves.
Rail traffic was also hit as boulders had come tumbling on the Haridwar-Dehradun route tunnel.
More than a dozen houses were reported to have collapsed in the hill areas of the Kumaon division but no loss of life was reported.
Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Oli on Monday met Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba and Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) Pushpa Kamal Dahal and said he will not resign until the 2016-17 budget got the House approval.
The Oli government is facing a no-confidence motion in Parliament after the Maoists withdrew support. Reduced to a minority, it is facing the problem of garnering enough votes to get the budget passed.
The no-trust motion moved against the Oli government by the Nepali Congress and the Maoists will be discussed in Parliament on Thursday.
According to Bishnu Rimal, Chief Political Adviser to Oli, the latter made it clear that either the Nepali Congress and Maoists should carry on with the no-trust motion or should stick to the demand for his resignation.
"The no-trust motion and resignation cannot go together. So I am going to face the no-trust motion," Oli told Deuba and Dahal, adding that they have to choose one of them.
"I will not go against the Constitution. I am ready to face the no-trust motion, but tell me what I should do -- resign or face the no-trust motion."
He also told the two former Prime Ministers that the new government can be formed only after removing the constitutional complexities.
Rimal said that during the meeting, the Prime Minister said there is no clear-cut provision in the Constitution on the new government's formation.
"We need to amend the Constitution. To amend the Constitution, we have to agree on some kind of a political agreement. If you try to sack me in guerrilla style, it is not acceptable; so there must be an honourable pact," Rimal quoted Oli as saying.
Though there are constitutional complexities for the formation of the new government, Oli made it clear that he will not dissolve the House.
Parliament's term will expire after 18 months and constitutional provisions mandate the government to hold elections within this period.
The meeting was called by the Prime Minister as legal experts in Nepal are divided over the formation of the new government as per the constitutional provisions.
The pro-government legal experts have said that the new Constitution is silent over the formation of the new government during the transitional period while those in the opposite camp say there is enough room in the Constitution to form the new government under any political circumstances.
After the meeting, Dahal said: "We advised the Prime Minister to step down since his government has been reduced to a minority."
--IANS
giri/tsb/bg
The introduction of the death penalty in would consequently end the European Union (EU) accession negotiations, said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday in Berlin, a view which was later shared by Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern.
"Germany and the EU have a clear stance: We fundamentally reject the death penalty," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying. He added that a country which had the death penalty could not be a member of the bloc.
Meanwhile, he called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's considerations of a return to the death penalty as "concerning".
Austrian Chancellor also warned saying that a reinstatement would mean "a departure from the basic democratic consensus", and as a result, " could not be a partner" in the union.
According to an Austria Press agency report, he said that for now, one must wait and observe further developments in Turkey, and he hopes for the stabilisation of presently turbulent situation.
"Turkey can also not afford to close its doors. We need Turkey as a stable partner," he said.
After the failed coup attempt on Friday, Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey would now consider reinstating the death penalty. Turkey abolished the practice in 2002 as part of its pursuit of EU membership, Xinhua news agency added.
Parts of the Turkish military had launched a coup on Friday night which was struck down a few hours later. Thousands of people were arrested, among them top army commanders, judges, and prosecutors. The Turkish government has already announced severe penalties for the insurgents.
The government has been riding roughshod over the farmers while acquiring land in Chandauli and Mirzapur districts of Uttar Pradesh for the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor rail project, an extreme Left outfit has alleged.
Ramji Rai, state secretary of the CPI (ML) Liberation, said his party has been supporting a local farmers' agitation against land acquisition, which is being carried out against all norms and rules.
"Farmers of the Cheeto village in Chandauli have been staging a sit-in from February 25 against land acquisition and our party workers, led by Shashikant Kushwaha, are also on a hunger strike from July 11 at the District Magistrate's office," said Rai.
He said the agitation would be scaled up if land acquisition was not stopped right away.
"Rather than listening to the protestors' pleas, the officials have been trying to muzzle the voice of the farmers," said Rai, who is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation politburo.
He said an Additional District Magistrate had assured the farmers, who are set to lose their land, that they would get a job with the Railways, compensation at market price, and proper rehabilitation.
"Since these things have not been implemented, we have been forced to take the path of agitation", Rai said.
The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor is being implemented by the Indian Railways.
The project envisages construction of a 1,839-km broad gauge rail line from Ludhiana in Punjab to Khurja in Uttar Pradesh for transporting industrial goods -- with subsequent development of more industries along the route on both sides.
Uttar Pradesh accounts for 1,049 km, passing through 18 districts, of the 1,839 km of the project which has been funded by the World Bank.
The state government has projected Rs 42,000 crore of investment coming through the project which, it says, will herald an "industrial revolution" in Uttar Pradesh.
--IANS
md/kb/dg
Superstar Rajinikanth along with his daughter Aishwarya visited Satchidananda Ashram, also known as Yogaville, in Virginia.
They visited over the weekend.
"Appa and I at his guru Satchidananda's Lotus all faiths temple" 30th anniversary Yogaville Virginia," Aishwarya wrote on her Twitter page on Monday.
She also posted two photographs.
The 65-year old actor left for the US nearly a month ago. He's believed to return to India later this week, according to a source.
"He should be back home this week. He's yet to watch the final copy of 'Kabali'," a source close to the actor told IANS.
In "Kabali", which releases this Friday, Rajinikanth plays a don who fights for equal pay rights for Malaysian Tamils.
--IANS
hp/nn/vm
Former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's brother, former Economic Development Minister Basil Rajapaksa was arrested by investigators on Monday over the misappropriation of funds amounting to millions, the police said.
Rajapaksa appeared before the Financial Crimes Investigations Division to record a statement and was arrested after he was questioned by the officers, Xinhua news agency reported.
He will be presented before a court later on Monday.
Rajapaksa was arrested on charges of misappropriating millions of rupees of the Divi Neguma funds which came under his ministry during the previous government.
This is the third time he has been arrested after his brother's defeat in a presidential election early last year.
--IANS
py/vt
A man claiming to be a North Korean citizen was found wandering around the Japanese port town of Senzaki this weekend, police told CNN on Monday.
Officials from Yamaguchi prefecture said the man was interviewed by police, but did not disclose any further information.
According to a report Japan's public broadcaster NHK, the man travelled from North Korea across the Sea of by boat, saying "the man was drenched (in water) when police took him into custody".
The man, believed to be in his twenties, told police that he left Chongjin, the capital of North Korea's Hamgyong provice, on Friday night in a wooden boat, NHK reported.
He claimed to have jumped from the boat into the sea with a plastic container and drifted to Senzaki by Saturday morning.
The man said he was fleeing North Korea because he was being chased by police after he was caught watching South Korean videos, Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun reported.
The man was transferred to Omura Immigration Centre in Nagasaki on Sunday, where immigration officials will decide his future based on confirmation of his identity and claims of defection.
South Korea's Foreign Ministry told CNN it was "working to confirm the situation".
The first Tata STRIVE Skill Development Centre (TSSDC) centre was launched here on Monday.
Spread over 17,000 square feet, this state-of-the-art centre will skill youth in Telangana in the BPO, banking, financial services, insurance and retail industries.Tata STRIVE, an initiative of Tata Community Initiatives Trust, and the first Group CSR programme of the Tata group, addresses the need of skilling youth for employment, entrepreneurship and community enterprise.
The facility was inaugurated by state Information Technology and Industries Minister K. Taraka Rama Rao along with Madhu Kannan, Member-Group Executive Council, and Group Head for business development and public affairs, Tata Sons, and Anita Rajan, COO, Tata STRIVE and Vice President, Tata Sustainability Group.
With the mission to build capacity to train youth for employment, entrepreneurship and community enterprise, Tata STRIVE transforms youth into an employee/entrepreneur through behaviour change, knowledge acquisition and skill development, said a statement.
Located at Kukatpally, the centre has ten classrooms/labs which can accommodate up to 240 studentsAat any given time. The training programmes range from 6 to16 weeks, and includes on-the-job training. At the end of the course, successful candidates are presented with a certificate, which is recognised by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), and is aligned with various Sector Skill Councils and Tata STRIVE standards. These candidates are also assisted to get livelihood opportunities.
Tata STRIVE is present in 13 Indian states across 70 centres through partner centres as well as Tata STRIVE Skill Development Centres in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Mohali, Pune and Aligarh.
--IANS
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Bangladeshi soldiers and security personnel sit on top of armored vehicles
Bangladesh police arrested a college teacher close to Shafiqul Islam Ujjal, one of those who attacked a Dhaka cafe on July 1 leaving over 20 dead, officials confirmed on Monday.
Milon Hossain, a teacher of Piyar Ali School and College, was whisked away on Saturday night, bdnews24 reported.
Milon was produced before a court that granted police five days to investigate him in custody, a police officer said.
Milon, who hails from Lalmonirhat, worked at Madbar Memorial School in Ashulia area near Dhaka.
Milon had helped Ujjal get a job as a teacher at the school, the officer said.
Ujjal was among six attackers killed by security forces to free the cafe siege hostages.
The Islamic State terrorist group published photos of five gunmen and claimed they killed over 20 persons in the cafe, bdnews24 reported.
Ujjal, a madrasa student from Bogra, was among the five IS fighters.
He had left home six months before the attack, his family said.
At least 22 persons, including an Indian women were brutally killed during the siege on July 1 in the popular hangout, Holey Artisan Bakery and O'Kitchen Restaurant, in Dhaka's Gulshan area.
Trinamool Congress parliamentarians led by the party's floor leader in the Lok Sabha Sudip Bandyopadhyay on Monday staged a demonstration in the Parliament House complex against rising prices of essential commodities across the country.
Displaying posters, the lawmakers raised slogans against the central government.
"Our protest is against the price rise. All over the country, there is no control over the rising prices," Bandyopadhyay later said.
The party said it had given a notice in the Lok Sabha for discussion on the price rise.
The TMC leader, however, asserted that during the ongoing monsoon session of parliament, it will play the role of a "responsible opposition".
"During the monsoon session, the Trinamool Congress will play the role of a responsible opposition in Parliament," he said.
The Trinamool members also attacked the Centre over the situation in the Kashmir Valley in the wake of July 8 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani by security forces.
Bandyopadhyay said his party also supported the passage of the Goods and Services Tax Bill in the Rajya Sabha.
--IANS
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Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has strongly rejected claims that Turkey's government had prepared arrest lists before Friday's failed coup attempt, Anadolu agency reported on Monday.
Speaking in Brussels on Monday, European Union's Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn was quoted as saying: "It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage."
He was speaking after the failed coup attempt in Turkey on July 15 which claimed more than 200 lives and injured thousands. More than 6,000 suspects have been arrested in connection with the plot, including military figures and judges.
Cavusoglu later tweeted that Hahn "is far from thoroughly comprehending what is going on in Turkey". He added that Turkey's "primary expectation" from its European allies was their "support [for] the democratic process in Turkey and strong condemnation of the coup attempt".
"Turkey will never compromise on human rights, the rule of law and democracy," Cavusoglu said, adding: "Therefore, no one, including Mr Hahn, can prejudge the ongoing legal process regarding the bloody coup attempt in Turkey."
Meanwhile, Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic also strongly rejected the claims, describing them as "prejudiced".
"We strongly condemn and reject implications that arbitrary treatment could be performed against political opponents and violations of the rule of law [?] about a terror organisation which fired on our citizens, attacked the Turkish parliament and other state institutions with the Turkish people's tanks, airplanes and other heavy weapons," Anadolu agency quoted Bilgic as saying.
The coup-plotters are accused of having links to US-based Fetullah Gulen, who is said to have pursued a long-running campaign against the government through supporters within the Turkish state.
A total of 8,777 personnel were dismissed from their duties, including 30 governors, 52 civil inspectors and 16 legal advisers, Turkey's interior ministry has said.
Abu Dhabi, July 18 (IANS/WAM) The UAE Space Agency celebrated its second anniversary, reflecting on its remarkable achievement since its establishment, said a top official.
The achievements include developing and integrating the United Arab Emirates national space sector, launching the agency's strategy and signing several important agreements with prominent global space industry players, Chairman Khalifa Al Romaithi said on Sunday.
"With our solid foundation, we reaffirm our absolute commitment to the nation, and to raising the UAE's profile within the global space sector. We are determined to fulfill the leadership's decision to become a leading nation in space sciences, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the UAE by reaching Mars," said Al Romaithi.
Established under federal law, the agency has a mandate to organise, regulate and support the national space sector. It also encourages the development and use of space science and technology in the country, and advises the sector in this regard.
Also, the space agency has successfully established relationships with several global space industry organisations and agencies that have a common vision for space exploration.
This includes signing agreements with the US space agency NASA and also space agencies of France, Russia, Japan, China and the UK.
The space agency was also successful in gaining membership to the International Space Exploration Coordination Group, thus making the UAE the first Arab country to join the prestigious global organization.
Al Romaithi said the agency attracted global attention and strengthened the national standing in the international space community with the organisation of a mission to observe and study the entry of an artificial space debris into the Earth's atmosphere in November 2015.
--IANS/WAM
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The US is prepared to work and discuss with the Turkey on the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, US Ambassador to Ankara John Bass said in a statement on Monday.
"With regard to the question of possible involvement in the coup attempt by persons residing in the United States we have been clear that the US would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting their investigation into the coup attempt," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.
"If Turkey decides to submit an extradition request for anyone legally resident in the United States, it will be considered under the terms of the US-Turkey extradition agreement," Bass added.
He noted that "to that end, US government officials in the US and in Turkey, including representatives of the US Department of Justice, are prepared to work with their counterparts and to discuss what will be required to meet the legal and evidentiary standards set by our bilateral extradition treaty."
"I underscore that our extradition treaty and US laws have specific requirements that must be met before a suspect individual can be transferred to another nation's jurisdiction," the ambassador added.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stepped up pressure on the United States on Monday to extradite exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Ankara of being the mastermind of a failed military coup late on Friday which killed over 290 people.
"We would be disappointed if our (American) friends told us to present proof even though members of the assassin organisation are trying to destroy an elected government under the directions of that person," Yildirim said at a press conference in Ankara, adding, "At this stage there could even be a questioning of our friendship."
With reference to "India negotiates on mandatory change of refrigeration technology" (July 16), the evolution of industrial refrigerants began with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) which later became notorious for damaging the ozone layer. Having realised this danger in 1985, the first Montreal Protocol of 1987 called upon the world to phase out CFCs in favour of HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons).
To understand our eastern neighbour's faltering attempts at coming to terms with new forms of Islamist violence, it is illustrative to recall its handling of the first attack in Bangladesh for which ISIS claimed credit: the shooting to death in September last year of Cesare Tavella, an Italian aid worker. Discarding the ISIS claim as bogus, the police arrested and charged seven local men for Tavella's death, including a member of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the country's main opposition front, casting the killing as a conspiracy by Sheikh Hasina's rivals to discredit the country. By sticking to the political conspiracy motive (rolled out as a response to almost every instance of targeted violence predating Tavella) the government seemed to have ignored, deliberately or otherwise, the shift signalled by the killing of the Italian - it was the first time in Bangladesh's wave of targeted attacks of the past three years that a foreigner had been killed, and that a gun had been used to commit the crime. (Till the Tavella murder, the targets were in most cases Bangladeshi-origin secularists or atheists, hacked to death with cleavers.)
And yet, even after ISIS went on to claim credit for eight more attacks since the Tavella incident, not to mention claims by an alleged Bangladeshi affiliate of Al Qaeda for a parallel set of killings pre- and post-dating the Tavella attack, the government's response, both in its rhetoric and in arrests, showed no signs of budging. In every case, blame was placed on the usual suspects - either the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) or another home-grown outfit called, interchangeably, Ansarullah Bangla Team or Ansar ul Islam; the "inspiration", it was alleged, came from the BNP.
K J George, a senior resigned on Monday after a local court in Madikeri directed the police to register a complaint against him in a case of suicide of a police officer, who had blamed the minister of driving him to death.
Delhi Chief Minister on Monday morning washed dishes at Amritsar's Golden Temple as an apology for what he called an 'unintentional mistakes'- his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)'s youth manifesto that uses the image of the Sikh shrine with the party symbol, the 'broom'.
"We made some unintentional mistakes while issuing the youth manifesto.
To apologise for that, we performed sewa at darbar today. I have peace of mind now," he said.
With folded hands and a handkerchief covering his head, the Delhi Chief Minister went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the 'Langar hall' which serves food to more than one lakh people in a single day.
AAP leader Ashish Khetan, senior lawyer HS Phoolka, AAP MPs Bhagwant Mann and Sadhu Singh, actors and party members Gul Panag and Gurpreet Ghuggi were among the other leaders present with Kejriwal.
The Delhi Chief Minister had promised to come to the Golden Temple and seek forgiveness for AAP's political gaffe after the party's 'youth manifesto' carried a picture of 'Harmandar Sahib' along with AAP election symbol of a 'broom'.
Khetan was also booked by the Punjab Police on charges of hurting religious sentiments of the Sikhs by equating the manifesto with Guru Granth Sahib, the Bible and the Gita. Click on the link below to watch him perform the seva: #WATCH: Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal performs 'sewa' at Golden Temple in Amritsar (Punjab)https://t.co/rXMcvphG4R
The Opposition in the Assembly on Monday moved a no-confidence motion against Speaker Haribhau Bagde for not allowing a debate on an alleged rape and murder of a 15-year girl at Kopardi village in Ahmednagar district.
Union Minister on Monday called Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a 'Pakistani agent' after he slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government for creating 'India-Pakistan like situation' in Centre-state relations.
Badal said that the people of the nation should fear leaders like Kejriwal, who without any inhibition called the national capital 'Pakistan'.
"Today I read in the newspapers where he has said that of Delhi and the Centre is like India-Pakistan affairs. What is he trying to say, does he want to make Delhi another Pakistan? I fear when he can dub Delhi as Pakistan then our Punjab is on the border of Pakistan. This man seems like a Pakistani agent, who will sell Punjab to the hands of Pakistan and we will never know. We should fear such people," said Badal.
The Union Minister also unleashed an attack on the AAP supremo for equating his party's manifesto with the holy Shri Guru Granth Sahib and printing its symbol, the broom, on the cover of the document alongside a picture of the Sikh shrine.
"The way AAP has hurt the Sikh sentiments by comparing his false manifesto with the holy Shri Gurugranth Sahib ji whom we worship. His business is to fool the people. Like he fooled the people of Delhi, he wants to fool people of Punjab too. The people of Punjab will give an answer to this act and so will God," she added.
Badal dubbed Kejriwal's act of cleaning utensils at the Golden Temple as an apology for his 'unintentional mistake' and said the AAP chief does not regret anything.
"He does not regret the comparison he made. Moving on, he does not even regret posting a picture of our holiest place inside the Golden Temple with a mark of broom on it. This man is making a fool out of everyone, he went to that part of the Golden Temple, where the people come and clean utensils as a mark of confession and he cleaned the plates which were already clean, sad Badal.
Kejriwal yesterday during an interactive two-hour online session, 'TalkToAK' accused the Centre for not allowing his government to work and said that the BJP is creating "India-Pakistan like situation" in Centre-state relations.
The AAP earlier stirred a controversy after it published a youth manifesto that uses the image of the Sikh shrine with the party's symbol the broom.
Earlier this month, a complaint was filed against the party's spokesperson Ashish Khetan, who was accused of hurting Sikh sentiments by comparing the manifesto with religious books.
"This is our bible, our Gita and our Guru Granth Sahib," Khetan said during an event where he unveiled the manifesto.
Kerala Chief Minister on Monday came down heavily on the Social Democratic Party of India, a political arm of the Popular Front of India, saying such organisations were training people to "commit murder."
Such forces are a "danger" to the state, Vijayan said, replying to an adjournment motion moved by Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) legislator, Parakkal Abdulla, seeking a debate on the recent murder of a league activist at Kuttiyadi in Kozhikode district.
The government had an open mind on the issue. The murder was "pre-planned" and a thorough investigation was needed, he said, adding, the matter should be treated seriously.
"There are some organisations, like SDPI, in our state who train people to commit murder. Their aim is not to indulge in any political activity, but to teach how to murder people," he said.
"We will also look if SIT (Special Investigation Team) is needed to be constituted. If there are any lapses on the part of police on investigation of the case, strict action will be taken," Vijayan said.
On the allegation that police had hosted lunch for some of the accused in the case at a police station, Vijayan said the allegation needed to be probed.
"If such an incident did happen, action will be taken. Government will not compromise on the issue, which is a serious matter," he said.
Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala said the attack on the IUML worker was "well-planned."
Alleging that RSS and SDPI are giving leadership to such violence, he said "they are two sides of the same coin."
He also alleged that the chief minister was taking a 'soft stand' towards SDPI in the Kuttiyadi incident.
"IUML is taking a stand against extremism and all political parties should unitedly fight against such forces in the state," he said.
Alleging that police had been 'inactive' since LDF came to power, he said there has been 40 murders, 48 murder attempts and over 400 attacks on women, he said.
Abdulla alleged that the IUML worker Nasaruddeen was killed in broad daylight by SDPI activists."Government is shying away from taking action against SDPI, which is allegedly supporting IS activities in the state."
After Speaker P Sreeramakrishanan declined permission for a debate on the issue, Opposition Congress-led UDF walked out.
Suicide bombings killed 11 people today at two army checkpoints in Al-Qaeda's former stronghold in southeastern Yemen, officials said, in attacks claimed by the jihadist group.
One attacker drove his bomb-laden truck into a checkpoint in a western district of Hadramawt's provincial capital Mukalla, security officials told AFP.
The second attacker simultaneously blew up his vehicle at an army checkpoint in the nearby town of Hajr, some 15 kilometres (nine miles) to the west of Mukalla, the sources said.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the two attacks in a report on its Telegram account.
AQAP said "dozens were killed and wounded" from forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and it posted photographs of the two bombers.
The commander of Hadramawt's second military region, General Faraj Salmeen, had earlier told AFP that the second bombing struck the centre of the city, blaming the attack on "terrorists".
Eleven people were killed and 18 were wounded in the twin bombings, said Riad Jariri, head of the health department in Mukalla.
Four civilians were among those killed, he told AFP.
Mukalla and surrounding towns were under the control of AQAP for one year until pro-government troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured the city in April.
In March, a US air strike on an Al-Qaeda training camp in Hajr killed more than 70 jihadists, provincial officials said.
Yemen has been gripped by a devastating conflict that escalated in March 2015 when Saudi-led air strikes began against Iran-backed Huthi rebels after the insurgents seized northern and central parts of the country including the capital, Sanaa.
The violence has allowed extremists such as AQAP and the Islamic State group to extend their influence and launch scores of attacks on security forces.
Last month, IS claimed a wave of suicide bombings targeting Yemeni troops in Mukalla that killed at least 42 people.
A local court today sentenced three persons to rigorous imprisonment for 21 years for raping a 17-year-old at Gangapur in Odisha's Ganjam district three years ago.
District and Sessions judge Malaya Ranjan Das while passing the order also directed the government to pay Rs one lakh as compensation to the survivor.
Besides, the judge slapped a fine of Rs 10,000 on each of the convicts.
Babur Swain (32), Kartika Gouda (30) and Sanatan Rout (30) of Gangapur village had raped the girl on its outskirts on October 23, 2013 after one of them lured her with marriage proposal.
As many as 88 per cent of the Republican voters support the party nominee Donald Trump against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in US presidential elections in November, a latest survey has found.
This is quite a significant jump in support for Trump in the past one year.
Pew Research Centre said when it had asked Republican voters their preference for the Republican presidential candidates in March 2015, just one per cent of them supported Trump.
"Thirteen months later, Trump was the first choice of 44 per cent of Republican and Republican-leaning Republican voters, more than any of his rivals. Today, as the Republican convention begins in Cleveland, 88 per cent of these voters back him in the general election against Hillary Clinton," Pew said.
At an overall level, Trump's rise may appear linear - his support increased in the aggregate with each survey over the course of the primary - but in actuality, voters' preferences over this period were remarkably fluid, it said.
According to Pew, even most Republican voters - 79 per cent - who did not support Trump through the primaries are backing him in the general election against Clinton.
However, only 53 per cent of these Trump "skeptics" say they are "certain" they will support Trump over Clinton; that compares with 91 per cent of those who consistently supported Trump between December and April.
"These Trump "skeptics" were more likely to be better educated and more religiously observant than GOP (Republican) voters who backed him consistently throughout this period," it said.
Pew said that by April, even as Trump moved toward an insurmountable delegate lead, he was not the first choice of more than half of Republican voters, and 44 per cent did not support him in any of the three surveys between December and March.
AAP today dubbed the BJP-led Maharashtra government as "anti-Dalit" for giving go-ahead for demolition of a decades-old building and a printing press here associated with Babasaheb Ambedkar.
The Ambedkar Bhavan in Dadar, which also housed the Buddha Bhushan printing press started by the Dalit icon, was demolished late last month by Peoples Improvement Trust (PIT).
The trust, founded by Ambedkar, owns and manages the affairs of Ambedkar Bhavan. PIT said the structure, which was associated with Ambedkar's movement for social reforms, was in a "dilapidated" state and it was razed after receiving a notice from the BMC, the local civic body.
The way the historically important Ambedkar Bhavan was demolished shows the current government led by BJP is "anti- Dalit", Preeti Sharma Menon, national spokesperson of the party, said at a press conference here.
All norms were set aside and permission was given to demolish the building, which was part of Ambedkar's rich legacy, she said.
"Had this government had even a little respect for Babasaheb, this shameful act would not have taken place," she said.
The AAP leader alleged that a BJP MLA was eyeing the property and wanted to develop it commercially.
"Commercial development is not going to restore the dignity of Babasaheb, which has been torn apart by this government. Now this government should build memorials across the state to control the damage," she said.
Menon said properties associated with Ambedkar were part of his legacy and also national assets. Therefore, the state government and civic body should have taken opinion from the common people and other stakeholders of the building before permitting the demolition.
"Both Prakash Ambedkar (Ambedkar's grandson) and Anand Ambedkar (a leader of Republican Sena) are carrying forward the legacy of Babasaheb in rightful way. This is why we are going to extend our support to their rally (against the demolition) tomorrow," said Sharma.
Another AAP leader Satish Jain said it was really sad that at a time when "we have gone extra mile to preserve Ambedkar's property in London, his property in our own city has been razed.
A group of activists today said they will step up their resistance to approval of GM mustard and demanded fixing liability on crop developers for providing "false" evidence to the country's biotech regulator.
At a specially-convened meeting, farm activists, scientists and others presented fresh evidence on the "fraud and hazard" of GM mustard.
They made detailed presentations to Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) and said they will not allow Indians to be made "lab rats" in an "irreversible and irresponsible experiment".
The Environment Ministry after seeing the presentations said a high-level committee will "look into" all the aspects raised by them.
"The demands put forward by the team include rejection of the current application in toto and immediately of all the three genetically modified organisms (GMOs), fixing liability on crop developers for false and incorrect evidence provided wilfully to regulators...
"... Blacklisting such applicants in the regulatory system and putting out all documents pertaining to DMH-11 R&D from its inception into the public domain immediately," they said.
Last month, the activists had severely criticised the Ministry for "not giving" enough time to them to raise concerns regarding commercialisation of transgenic mustard, whose research and testing, they alleged, was done in a "fraudulent and unscientific" manner.
Delhi University's Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants (CGMCP) has sought permission for environmental release of its transgenic mustard variety from the GEAC.
The activists said the Delhi University's CGMCP had in its application asked for approval for "environmental release" of three GMOs in one dossier.
All the three GMOs being considered for approval are 'Herbicide Tolerant' with serious ecological and health implications apart from socio-economic ones, they said.
"They made presentations on various issues including that of data inadequacy. We will look into it. We told them that GEAC looks after only the biosafety issue. The other issues like agronomy and seeds is looked after by other committees.
"We assured them that a high level committee will look into their presentations," an Environment Ministry source in the know of the proceedings told PTI.
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The Ministry said Assessment of Food and Environmental
Safety (AFES) for Environmental release of GE Mustard (Brassica juncea) hybrid DMH-11 and use of parental events (Varuna bn3.6 and EH2 modbs2.99) for development of new generation hybrids has been placed on the website for comments by stakeholders and general public for a period of 30 days.
The Coalition had also alleged that K Veluthambi who is the chair of sub-committee and co-hair of GEAC was a "GM crop developer" till his retirement recently, working on GM rice development for disease-resistant transgenic rice, with DBT and Rockefeller support.
It had alleged that another member of the sub-committee S R Rao, Advisor DBT is also on the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, funded by Syngenta.
According to the minutes sent by the Coalition, the committee granted leave of absence to six of its members including B Sesikeran during its 128th meeting while it granted leave of absence to Sesikeran in its 127th meeting held in February this year.
The autopsy report of a 26-year-old Junior Resident Doctor at AIIMS, who was found dead in his rented flat in south Delhi on July 10, has stated that he did not commit suicide.
According to a senior doctor at AIIMS, the autopsy report said there was no external or internal injury.
"Also there was no substantial evidence of presence of drugs where his body was found. We are also waiting for the toxicology report which may take a few months' time," he said, adding that they will, however, consult the police before arriving at a conclusion.
Meanwhile, parents of the deceased, Sarvanan Ganeshan, who hailed from Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, have sought intervention of the Centre and the state government for thorough probe into his death.
Ganeshan, who was pursuing MD at AIIMS, was found dead on July 10 at his rented flat here under mysterious circumstances.
Actress Alicia Vikander, who has been romantically linked to Hollywood star Michael Fassbender, says she likes to keep "a bit of mystery" around her personal life.
The publicity shy couple confirmed their romance at the Oscars this year by sharing a kiss on the cheek after Vikander won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in "The Danish Girl".
"When I go to the movies and see the actors and actresses I look up to, I like knowing as little as possible about them, so I can see them becoming these different characters. If you can find a way to keep a bit of mystery, that's good for the work," she told Sunday Style.
The 27-year-old star, who will next be seen in "Jason Bourne", says she even stays away from social media.
To maintain that mystery, she stays off social media.
"I tried - I got a bit stressed out that I had to post things. If you enjoy doing it, it's a great way to keep in touch with audiences. But I didn't have that drive to do it just privately with my friends, so I wouldn't be very good at it.
Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister N Chinnarajappa today said the Government was going to support 1,000 MSME units for the benefit of entrepreneurs from Kapu community.
He was speaking at an awareness program organised by the AP KapuWelfare and Development Corporation at Kakinada.
The Government would provide Rs 10 lakh as subsidyand abank loan of Rs 10 lakh, he said.
Apple cultivation in has become the mainstay of over 1.7 lakh families in the state as the orchards now cover 1,09,533 hectares, around 49% of the total area under fruit cultivation.
The area under apple cultivation was meagre 40 hectares in 1950-51 and 3,025 hectares in 1960-61 but today it counts for 49% of total area under fruit production and 85% of total horticulture produce which has touched 8.19 lakh at present, an official spokesperson said.
The diverse agro-climatic conditions, topographical variations, altitudinal differences coupled with fertile, deep and well drained soils favoured cultivation of temperate to subtropical fruits in the state.
"With sustained efforts of the government, the area under fruit cultivation has increased from 792 hectares in 1950-51 to 2.25 lakh hectares and apple was main crop grown in Shimla, Kullu, Kinnaur, Mandi, Chamba and Sirmaur districts and now, even in the tribal Lahaul-Spiti district, people are taking to apple plantation on a large scale," the spokesman said.
"Rs 3,500 crore apple economy of the state was not only its backbone but also involved thousands of stakeholders such as transporters, carton manufacturers, Controlled Atmosphere Store/Cold Chain owners, wholesale fruit dealers, fruit processing unit owners etc. From other states," the spokesman added.
Apple cultivation is providing gainful employment to millions of people of the region and the living standards of people has improved enormously and the government was providing high yielding varieties of apple and better marketing infrastructure to the growers, he said.
In order to safeguard the interests of the growers against adverse climatic conditions, the state government has introduced several schemes like weather-based Crop Insurance Scheme for protecting the crops of horticulturists from natural vagaries.
A World Bank funded horticulture development project is also being implemented in the state with an outlay of Rs 1,115 crore.
The project spread over a period of seven years would focus on providing new technologies to the horticulturists for increasing their crop productivity and capacities.
To protect fruit crops, especially apple from hailstorm, the government has enhanced the subsidy on anti-hail nets to 80 per cent, the spokesman said.
Further, in order to provide better marketing facilities to the farmers, ten market yards and collection centres had been made operational during past 43 months by incurring an expenditure of Rs 27.45 crore, he added.
Assam Assembly's Budget session began on a stormy note today as both Opposition and ruling party members raised slogans against each other over the auction of 12 oilfields and price rise following hike in VAT, leading to a brief adjournment and walkout.
As soon as the Question Hour ended, members from Congress and AIUDF sought permission from the Speaker to discuss the proposed auctioning of 12 oilfields in Assam in view of the ongoing agitation across the state against it.
Leader of Opposition Debabrata Saikia and AIUDF MLA Hafiz Bashir Ahmed submitted two separate adjournment motions to discuss the issue along with a notice by former minister Ajanta Neog.
Speaker Ranjeet Kumar Dass accepted Neog's notice, which does not give any scope for discussion or debate. At this, Opposition members urged the Speaker to allow a discussion by accepting any one of the adjournment motions by the two members.
When the Speaker stuck to his stand, Congress and AIUDF MLAs went to the Well pressing for their demand. "Speaker sir, please be neutral for the sake of Assam and in the interest of people of Assam," Congress MLA Abdul Khaleque said.
Suddenly, first-time BJP MLA Suman Haripriya, who was sitting on the second last row in the House, ran into the Well claiming that the Opposition members are going to attack the Speaker. Other BJP MLAs also rushed to the well.
Both sides started sloganeering with the Opposition members displaying placards against the proposed auction and price rise.
At this, the Speaker adjourned the House for five minutes. As soon as the House reassembled, Congress and AIUDF members again pressed for their demands leading to resumption of noisy scene.
"I will follow the books. A Speaker can disallow a matter even if it is of a public interest if he thinks that way," Dass said.
The Opposition legislators again walked into the well with their placards, while the ruling party members kept shouting against them from their respective seats.
When the Speaker moved ahead with the scheduled business of the day, the entire Opposition walked out of the House for the day.
The truck which slammed into revelers is seen near the site of an attack in the French resort city of Nice, southern France.
The truck driver who caused carnage in the French city of Nice showed "recent interest" in jihadist activity, investigators said today, four days after a massacre that sparked fierce criticism of the government's security record.
Emotions are running high in France after the third major attack in 18 months.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls endured a humiliating chorus of boos and heckles at a ceremony of remembrance for the victims during a visit to the Riviera city Monday.
The Islamic State group claimed the attack by 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said there was no evidence of Bouhlel's allegiance to IS but that a search of his computer "showed a clear, recent interest for the radical jihadist movement."
He also confirmed the attack was "premeditated".
In the two weeks prior to the attack Bouhlel carried out near-daily internet searches for IS propaganda videos and readings from the Koran, Molins said.
The father-of-three also searched for information about the terror attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead, and the Paris suburb of Magnanville where a police couple were killed last month. Both attacks were linked to IS.
His computer contained pictures of corpses and fighters posing with the IS flag.
The revelations came on the third day of mourning over the grisly attack.
A sea of people thronged the seafront in Nice for a solemn minute's silence. Similar ceremonies were held across the country, accompanied by the ringing of church bells.
In a sign of the mounting frustration over a string of attacks that have killed over 230 people since January 2015, Valls and two of his ministers were heckled by mourners who booed and shouted "Murderers" and "Resign"
Valls said the "disgraceful" display reflected the "attitude of a minority" in the city, which is run by the opposition Republicans party.
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.
Unlike the perpetrators of those attacks, Bouhlel, a petty criminal with a history of violence and depression, did not travel to the Middle East for training or jihad.
Molins said acquaintances described the Tunisian as "someone who did not practise the Muslim religion, ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had an unbridled sexual activity".
About eight months ago ago, however, he snapped a picture of a news story headlined: "Man deliberately rams car into cafe terrace."
And earlier this month, he stopped shaving his beard.
On the day of the attack he appeared to have spent much of the national holiday on the promenade, taking selfies.
Bangladesh Cabinet today approved a proposed amendment to an existing extradition treaty with India, easing legal formalities to repatriate wanted criminals in their respective countries.
"The amendment would ease the extradition process... It would just require a warrant to be issued by any court or tribunal of either of the countries which seek to get a suspect back home," cabinet secretary Shafiul Alam told a media briefing after a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
"If a judge, magistrate or a tribunal in our country, or any other authority of this nature issues a warrant against a person who is Indian, then we can seek extradition.
"A person from Bangladesh, who has a warrant against him here, may be living in India. India in that case will hand him over to Bangladesh for trial. In the same way, we will hand over to India, if it wants, someone who has a warrant against him there," said Alam.
Until now, he said the extradition procedure demanded evidence of wanted persons' guilt along with the warrant to be returned to their own country.
The top bureaucrat of the government said the proposed amendment was approved on a proposal by India which suggested the complicated provision of furnishing evidence of guilt should be dropped from the treaty signed three years ago.
The deal was inked on January 28, 2013 and came into effect 10 months later but the complexities barred it to be enforced in cases of two major subsequent cases when both the governments preferred to repatriate two wanted criminals bypassing the treaty.
Bangladesh extradited Indian separatist ULFA leader Anup Chetia in November, 2015 after he had spent 18 years in incarceration in the country while around the same time, India returned a wanted mastermind of seven synchronised murders at home, Nur Hossain, who was detained in a West Bengal prison. In neither of the cases, the treaty was enforced.
The landmark treaty was aimed at deporting wanted "criminals" hiding or lodged in jails in each other's country to evade criminal charges and only persons with charges like murders, culpable homicide and other serious offences would come under the purview of the deal.
But officials earlier said offenders of petty crimes awarded with imprisonment of less than a year would not be wanted under the treaty while persons accused in political crimes would also not come under its purview.
During the signing of the agreement, they said the treaty would benefit Dhaka more as the number of convicted or suspected Bangladeshi criminals hiding or staying in India was more than that of Indian criminals lodged in jails or hiding in Bangladesh.
Indian vice-captain Ajinkya Rahane feels that the batsmen will have to show a lot of patience if they are to find success in the upcoming four-Test series against the West Indies. The first Test begins in Antigua on July 21.
"We have discussed about all these factors as a batting unit," said Rahane on Monday.
"We have talked about how to bat on the slower tracks. Patience will be the key here and it is not going to be easy to score runs for the batsmen. But if you focus and concentrate well, once you get settled it will be very easy to bat on. Even the bowlers have to bowl very disciplined line and lengths here and be patient here."
In his pre-departure press conference, skipper Virat Kohli had admitted the team needed to learn from the last Test series against South Africa. And perhaps they have started in earnest, with training underway three days before the first Test, under the watchful eyes of Anil Kumble.
"I think as a batting unit we have been doing really well. As much as we are learnt from the South Africa series, it is all about focussing on this series now. Patience will be the key as a batting unit.
"Once you get set it is important to make each and every session count, because we will have to give time for our bowlers. It is not easy to take 20 wickets on these slower tracks. As a batting unit we will have to take responsibility and I think one or two batsmen will have to get set and score big here," said the middle-order batsman.
"You cut out certain shots because technically. But I don't think we will have to change anything really. We will have to cut out some shots initially, and after that when you get used to the conditions, you will play your shots. But initially it is important to give time."
When he speaks about patience, Rahane meant that instead of trying to get a century off 150 balls, they might have to wait for 250 balls to score one.
"If you are used to getting 100 off 150 balls, maybe here you will have to get 100 off 250 balls. So, as a batsman it is important to play atleast 200-plus balls here," he added.
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Of course, the pitches to be laid out for this series will be focus too. On Monday, the wicket at the Sir Viv Richards Stadium here bore a brownish hue, with only a sprinkling of patches of fresh grass to hold it in together. If it retains its look, it will be in keeping with the wickets turned out for the two practice games in St. Kitts.
"I think we will get similar tracks (in the Tests) but here we will have to wait until July 21 to see how the wicket finally looks like. But in St. Kitts it was a really slow track, a bit similar to Indian wickets and we are preparing for slow tracks in the series. So the two practice matches were really crucial for us and this first game will give us momentum," said Rahane.
Rahane praised the bowlers for their persistence during the two warm-up games.
"I think all the boys did really well in the two practice games, especially bowlers because wickets were slightly on the slower side. It was very challenging for the bowlers but I felt they bowled really well. Even the spinners did well, Amit Mishra in the first game, then R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja bowled in partnership in the second game. I think the bowlers will have to be consistent in their line and length, as well as be patient. They will have to bowl in partnerships on these slow wickets," he added.
The West Indies team arrived late in Antigua on Sunday night, and after their training camp in Barbados last week, opted not to practice on Monday.
Their preparations will begin in earnest on Tuesday, and even if the current squad might not bear the aura of the past, the young visiting Indian team is under no illusion about the upcoming series.
"It is important to give respect to each and every opponent. I think West Indies have a decent attack in Jason Holder, Shannon Gabriel, Carlos Brathwaite and Devendra Bishoo. It is important to give respect to them and play according to the merit as a team.
"You cannot take anyone lightly and as long as we play to our strengths and potential, it will help us in this Test series," Rahane signed off.
Andhra Pradesh government agency on Monday initiated an international competitive bidding process through the 'Swiss Challenge' approach for development of "start-up area" of the state's new capital city .
The area is spread over 6.84 sq km (1,691 acres).
Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) has invited competing counter proposals from eligible prospective bidders for selection of the master developer for the capital city.
The Andhra Pradesh government entered into a memorandum of understanding with the government of Singapore in December 2014 for development of the new capital city on the banks of the Krishna river, between Vijayawada and Guntur.
Singapore, in turn, nominated Ascendas-Singbridge and Sembcorp Development Ltd to participate in the development of as the master developer.
The Singapore consortium on March 12 submitted a suo motu proposal, through 'Swiss Challenge' approach according to the Andhra Pradesh Infrastructure Development Enabling Act-2001, to be the master developer of .
The consortium estimated the cost of developing infrastructure in the "start-up area", which includes a central business district, commercial hubs, business parks and high-density residential zones, at Rs 3,137.3 crore.
It proposed to undertake development of the area in three phases over a period of 15 years (five years for each phase).
The state Cabinet, on June 24, approved the Singapore consortium's proposal and it was subsequently notified by a government order (GO) on July 4.
Based on the GO, the APCRDA on Monday invited international competitive bids from eligible developers to counter the Singapore proposal.
Under 'Swiss Challenge' route, a developer is asked to presents a bid. Then, other prospective developers would be asked to present counter bids. If the latter is lower, the first bidder will be asked to submit another bid. If the first bidder comes up with lower bid, then he gets the right or if he fails, the one with lower bid gets the project.
September 1 has been set as the last date for submitting the competing counter proposals.
Filmmaker Ivan Reitman says if "Ghostbuster 3" had happened it would have featured Bill Murray's character Peter Venkman dying.
The 65-year-old actor wasn't interested on revisiting the franchise after the 1989 sequel, so the only way of getting him to return was to ensure his character would be killed off, reported Contactmusic.
"Bill and Sigourney's kid, Oscar, is a postgrad student, and weird things start to happen. Bill Murray dies in the first scene, because he always said, 'I won't do it unless I die'
"And I said, 'Okay, you got it.' It was a father-son story, with him as a ghost. By the way, the studio green-lit it. Everything was ready to go. I couldn't get his attention, and in the midst of that, Harold got really sick. And that was pretty much it," Reitman said.
Apart from Murray, the rest of the original cast was up for coming together again.
"Bill was always the holdout. I think he was just not interested. He loves 'Ghostsbusters,' and he appreciated all the good that it did for all of us, but he just wanted to pursue different things as an actor. And at the same time he didn't want to do anything that would sully the other movies," the 69-year-old director said.
Bollywood celebrities may be featuring in short films more often but Naseeruddin Shah feels it is best if the big stars stay away from the medium as they bring in their own baggage.
The veteran star says it will be both good and bad if young filmmakers get the chance to make big budget movies with the stars.
When asked if more Bollywood stars should feature in short films to encourage the medium, Naseeruddin told reporters, "Probably not. Because Bollywood stars bring a lot of baggage with them and they alter the odour of films. In a way it will be sad and good that young filmmakers get an opportunity to make big budget movies.
"Of course it will be good for them (directors) and their careers but it will be sad because somewhere they will lose contact with their real strengths, as has happened over and over in the past," he added.
The actor was speaking at at launch of "Interior Cafe", a short film which stars him alongside actress Shernaz Patel. The movie has been directed by Adhiraj Bose.
Naseeruddin, who has featured in several path-breaking films, believes even if young directors opt for big movies, they should continue making short films as they are "very important" and have a future.
"There is a future (for short films) because there are so many other outlets now for films which people want to make which may not get the promotional release. What is important is all these young people are actually making films and not just talking about it."
The "Masoom" actor's son Imaad Shah recently said he has a few scripts ready but is looking for producers to back the projects.
When asked if it is easy for star kids to get a foothold in the industry, Naseeruddin said he will never go out of his way to make movies for his son.
"I don't consider him a star kid and I don't think he considers himself one either. I cannot make films for him and even if I could, I won't because I would like him to do it on his own...
"Bohot saari misaaley hai jinko zabardasti maar-maar kay star banaya gaya hai (There are many cases where people became stars under pressure). But their stardom didn't last because they didn't have anything. I believe in letting them (his children) find their own way and make their own decisions."
"Interior Cafe", which has been released by 'Royal Stag Barrel Select- Large Short Films', also stars Naveen Kasturia and Shweta Basu Prasad.
Theresa May today announced Germany and France will be her first foreign tour destinations as British Prime Minister later this week as her country prepares to leave the European Union.
"The prime minister will make her first overseas visits this week. This will be an opportunity to discuss the bilateral relationship, cooperation on a range of global challenges, and of course how the UK and Germany can work together as the UK prepares to leave the EU," a Downing Street spokesperson said.
With Brexit at the heart of her premiership, it came as little surprise that May chose the two leading EU economies to kick-start talks over the UK's future relationship with the economic bloc.
May, 59, will begin talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday, soon after she addresses her first Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons.
After her "bilateral meeting and a working dinner" in Berlin, May will head to Paris on Thursday for talks with French President Francois Hollande during her two-day trip.
The Downing Street spokesperson said Thursday's meeting with President Hollande at the Elysee Palace would cover Brexit "as well as Thursday's attack in Nice and counter- terrorism cooperation".
Last Friday, May made her first trip as prime minister to Scotland, where she held talks with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Brexit negotiations were again at the centre of their dialogue.
Meanwhile, star Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson arrived in Brussels todayfor talks with his EU counterparts in his new role as foreign secretary.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union but... We are not going in any way to abandon our leading role in European participation," Johnson told reporters.
Britain had voted in favour of Britain's exit from the EU in a historic referendum on June 23.
It triggered a series of seismic changes in the UK political establishment, with David Cameron resigning as Prime Minister for May to take charge.
BSF today apprehended two Bangladeshi miscreants allegedly involved in a robbery attempt in Petrapole border area and handed them over to the police.
A BSF official said a patrol party of the force apprehended the two young Bangladeshi miscreants who had opened fire on the owner of a money exchange counter at Petrapole when he was on his way to his shop.
He said miscreants had snatched a bag from the man and tried to escape from the spot when a BSF patrol party, who were nearby, chased and caught them.
Following this, one country made pistol, a sharp weapon and one bag containing Rs 1,73,750, 89,369 Bangladeshi Taka and 175 US Dollar, which was snatched from the trader were seized from the culprits.
"The two along with the seized items have been handed over to Bongaon police station for further legal action," the BSF official said.
Rajya Sabha witnessed a brief adjournment on the opening day of Monsoon session as BSP members trooped into the Well alleging atrocities on dalits in BJP-ruled Gujarat.
Soon after laying of papers when the Question Hour began, BSP chief Mayawati raised the issue of recent incident in which some members of the dalit community, engaged in skinning dead animals, were beaten up in Gujarat.
She said some anti-social elements tied their hands, stripped them and beat them up in a market in broad daylight. The police did not take immediate action and the crowd too did not intervene, the BSP leader alleged and blamed the state government too for not taking prompt action against the culprits.
Accusing the ruling BJP of being 'anti-dalit', she said the state police swung into action only after the incident was highlighted by the media.
This shows the "anti-dalit mindset" of the BJP, she said and alleged that such incidents of atrocities against dalits have increased ever since the BJP-led government has come to power at the Centre.
Countering the allegations, Urban Development and Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the "saviour" of the entire country and said that as per convention, name of any political party should not be taken while raising issues.
As Mayawati was speaking on atrocities against dalits, some BSP members trooped into the Well raising slogans.
Chairman Hamid Ansari adjourned the House for ten minutes.
Earlier, Sitaram Yechury (CPI-M) pointed out that he has given a notice for adjournment of Question Hour for taking up the issue of rising prices.
China on Monday said it is closing off a part of the for military exercises this week, days after an tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defence Ministry had no immediate comment.
The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navy's top admiral to discuss the dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm John Richardson is meeting with China's navy commander, Adm Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao that began on Sunday.
He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour china's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration.
It has responded by asserting that islands in the are "China's inherent territory," and says it could declare an air defence identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippine fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the United States should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines.
Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunal's decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the country's economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared to his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
The tribunal ruled that China violated maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
China on Monday waded into the unrest in Kashmir, voicing concern over the casualties due to clashes as it called for "proper" settlement of the Kashmir issue through "peaceful" means.
"The Chinese side is concerned about the deaths and casualties caused," Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a statement.
China's position on the Kashmir issue has been "consistent", Lu was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.
"The Chinese side hopes relevant parties can resolve the issue through peaceful means," Lu said.
The rare comments on the situation in Kashmir came in the wake of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following killing of Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces a day earlier in Kokernag area of Anantnag district.
In rare comments on the unrest in Kashmir that could cause unease in India, China today hoped that the situation there will be "handled properly" and "relevant parties" will address the issue peacefully through dialogue.
"China has taken note of relevant reports. We are equally concerned about the casualties in the clash, and hope that relevant incident will be handled properly," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in his remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry website.
"The Kashmir issue is left over from history. China holds a consistent stance and hopes relevant parties will address the issue peacefully through dialogue," he said in response to a question on the recent Kashmir unrest.
Lu's comments come as a surprise to observers here as it is rare for China to comment on the developments relating to Jammu and Kashmir.
The standard line followed by China in recent years on issues relating to Kashmir was that it is an issue between India and Pakistan left over from history and should be properly handled by the two sides through dialogue and consultation.
The rare comments on the situation in Kashmir came in the wake of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following killing of Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces.
China today closed a part of the South China Sea for military manoeuvres as it moved quickly to assert control over the disputed waters after an international tribunal struck down its claims over the region.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force has conducted a combat air patrol with long range bombers in the South China Sea recently, which will become "a regular practice" in the future, a military spokesperson said.
The PLA sent H-6K long range strategic bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, state-run Xinhua agency quoted Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force as saying.
During the mission, the aircraft carried out tasks including aerial scouting, air combat and island and reef patrol, fulfilling the patrol's objective, Shen said.
The air force aims to promote real combat training over the sea, improve combat abilities against security threats and safeguard China's sovereignty and security, he said.
"To effectively fulfil its mission, the air force will continue to conduct combat patrols on a regular basis in the South China Sea," he said.
Shen pointed out that the South China Sea islands have been China's territory since ancient times, and China's rights and interests in relevant maritime areas should not be infringed upon.
"The PLA Air Force will firmly defend national sovereignty, security and maritime interests, safeguard regional peace and stability, and cope with various threats and challenges," he said.
Separately the maritime administration in Hainan province, which overseas China's expansive claims over the South China Sea said it is closing off a part of the sea for military exercises this week as China simultaneously moved on both air and the sea to establish firm control over the area which was awarded by the tribunal to the Philippines.
The maritime administration said that an area southeast of the island would be closed until July 12 without providing details about the nature of the military exercises.
Beijing's moves followed after the tribunal appointed by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration last week quashed China's claims of historic rights over the vast expanse of the South China Sea and upheld the Philippines' claims under the UN Convention on Law of Seas (UNCLOS).
China which boycotted the tribunal angrily rejected its verdict and said the award would not impact its claims over 90 per cent of the resource-rich sea.
Besides the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also firmly contest China's claims in the region.
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As China moved in with its military to assert its claims, the US which is backing the smaller states in the area to stand up to Beijing's bid to forcefully establish control asked China to implement the verdict and settle the row peacefully with its neighbours who have counter claims over the area.
The new military manoeuvres by Beijing came in the midst of the visit to China today by the US Navy's top admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, to discuss the South China Sea dispute in the aftermath of the verdict and ways to boost interactions between the two militaries.
Richardson met the head of the Chinese navy, Admiral Wu Shengli and held talks with him.
"It is very helpful for us to strengthen communication between us and build confidence. Of course it can help to improve our working and personal relationship," Wu said.
Earlier, Sun Jianguo Chief of the Joint Staff Department of the China's all powerful Central Military Commission, said the freedom of navigation issue "was bogus and one that certain countries repeatedly hyped up".
Without directly mentioning US, he warned that freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end "in disaster".
Reiterating China's stand that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea has never been affected, he said there won't be a problem in future "as long as nobody plays tricks".
Terming China as the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea he was quoted as saying at a meeting here that Beijing won't let anybody damage it.
But at the same he said China consistently opposed "so-called military freedom of navigation" referring a number of US military vessels passing through waters close to artificial islands built by China in the South China Sea.
"This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way," he said.
Days after Kolkata Police asked petrol pumps not to sell the fuel to motorbikers without helmets, the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) here has taken an initiative to spread awareness among students commuting on two-wheelers.
"We are requesting school authorities to issue a circular requesting parents to ensure that students who come riding motorcycles come wearing proper size helmet," Secretary of Association of Schools for the Indian School Certificate, West Bengal Chapter, Nabarun De told PTI today.
"We have verbally asked every school to start talking to students about this. Soon a circular will be issued from the Association to individual schools regarding this," he said.
"We have noticed that road accidents have recently gone up and most of them involve those riding motorbikes ... So we thought of starting this initiative to ensure that children do not ride pillion without helmets," De, also principal of Central Modern School in the city, said.
According to him campaigns by schools on the issue are already on for some time.
CISF officials at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) here returned a lost bag containing cash and jewellery worth Rs 4.5 lakh to a woman flier.
The incident was reported yesterday at the airport. After the bag was found lying unattended outside the terminal area, it was handed over to her, officials said.
"The woman said that she forgot the bag in a hurry," a senior official said.
In a separate incident yesterday, CISF personnel at Race Course Metro station, prevented a 24-year-old man from committing suicide, an official said.
A CISF personnel, who was monitoring CCTV footage of the station, alerted his colleagues after he saw that a man had got down on the rail tracks.
"He was quickly removed from the track and was handed over to Delhi Metro authorities," the official said.
Hillary Clinton today called for an end to the "madness" after the death of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saying that if she is elected president she will use all her powers to hold those who kill police officers legally accountable.
"They represent the rule of law itself if you take aim at that and at them you take aim at all of us," Clinton told civil rights activists at the annual convention of the NAACP. "There can be no justification, no looking the other way."
The Democratic presidential candidate condemned the killing of three Louisiana law enforcement officers, the latest in a recent string of shootings involving black men in Louisiana and Minnesota and police officers in Dallas. She said anyone who kills a police officer or acts as an accomplice must be held accountable.
"This madness has to stop," Clinton said.
A former Marine ambushed police in Baton Rouge yesterday, killing three law enforcement officers in the attack. Three other officers were wounded, one critically. The shooting, the fourth high-profile deadly encounter involving police over the past two weeks, added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police.
Recent violence has cost the lives of eight officers, including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians, and it has sparked a national debate over race and policing.
Country's coal imports have declined 5 per cent in the first two months of 2016-17 and the number is expected to reach 160.16 million tonnes in the ongoing fiscal, Parliament was informed today.
"The trend of fall in import of coal has continued in 2016-17 wherein for the period April-May 2016-17, coal imports have reduced by around 5 per cent as compared to the corresponding period of the previous year.
"Import of coal is projected for the year 2016-17 by Niti Aayog is 160.16 million tonnes," Power and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal informed Rajya Sabha.
On account of increased production by Coal India Ltd (CIL), which produces around 80 per cent of coal in the country, the import of fossil fuel has fallen from 217.78 million tonnes in 2014-15 to 199.88 million tonnes in 2015-16.
CIL has undertaken a mix of strategies for narrowing the domestic demand-supply gap that address short to medium-term imperatives and also technological and human resource related issues, the minister said.
Coal India has envisaged to produce one billion tonne of coal in 2019-20 from the level of production of 538.75 million tonnes in 2015-16.
For evacuation of such huge coal to destination, CIL has planned for construction of three major railway infrastructure projects to be executed by Indian Railways in growing coalfields of Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. Positivity of such steps have already manifested themselves in decline in imports in 2015-16 (since 2014-15), Goyal said.
In a separate reply, the minister said that up to June, the supply of coal to the power plants was at 142 million tonnes.
Unique online 'fingerprints' left behind while using your device in public locations can reveal your identity, and can be used to track your movements, say scientists who are trying to find ways to protect against the fingerprinting of personal computers.
People's leave behind online browser "fingerprints" at each location they visit on their internet browser, researchers said.
Almost like a regular fingerprint, a person's browser fingerprint - or "browserprint" - is often unique to the individual. Such a fingerprint can be monitored, tracked and identified by companies and hackers.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia are working to find new methods of protecting against the fingerprinting of personal computers - and are now giving members of the community the chance to see their own computer browserprint.
"Fingerprinting on computers is invisible to most people but there are companies out there who are already using these techniques to learn more information about individuals, about their interests and their habits," said Lachlan Kang, PhD student at the University of Adelaide.
"This can be quite powerful information to have, especially if it's used to tailor advertising to you," Kang said.
In countries that are less benign, it could also be used to spy on people, he said.
"Computer users generally are growing in awareness of privacy issues, but currently there's little that can be done to counter fingerprinting," Kang said.
"This is because fingerprints build up in between the websites you're visiting - your browsing history and personal information can be pooled in the gaps between those websites," he said.
"Simply clearing your browsing history won't make any difference to this, because the information is already out there," he added.
Kang is seeking the public's help to better understand which fingerprinting techniques are the most powerful, so that he can help to build defences against them.
"We need to analyse a large number of online fingerprints - as many as 10,000 of them would be helpful. Currently we have 2500, which is a great start," he said.
Congress today alleged a "scam worth crores" of rupees by BJP government in Madhya Pradesh in organising Simhastha Kumbh fair and demanded a High Court-monitored probe.
However, BJP has rejected as "baseless" the charges by Congress, which it said does not have any substantial issue against the "popular government".
"Scam worth crores (of rupees) took place in organisation of Simhastha mela at Ujjain in which the state government spent Rs 5,500 crore. We demand a high-level probe under the monitoring of the High Court," Congress state unit president Arun Yadav told reporters on the opening day of the monsoon session of the state Legislative Assembly.
Congress members have submitted as many as 87 questions related to Kumbh before the House, he said.
The Simhastha Kumbh, a massive Hindu congregation, organised once in 12 years, was held on the banks of Kshipra river in Ujjain in April-May this year.
Yadav further alleged, "a pitcher which is available in market for Rs 150 was purchased at an highly inflated rate of Rs 750 per unit. The government had spent Rs 7 crore alone on this account (for purchasing pitchers).
"Similarly, for providing medical facilities to devotees, relevant items including gloves, glucometer with strip, X-ray film, urine analyser etc were purchased for Rs 60 crore while their actual cost should not be more than Rs 5 crore as per the government rate," he added.
The Congress leader claimed that state government spent Rs 127 crore on "Vaicharik Kumbh" during the Kumbh mela in order "to make Prime Minister Narendra Modi happy".
A string of dignitaries from various fields, including Modi, had addressed the 'vaicharik kumbh'--a gathering of religious and political leaders to discuss various issues concerning people and society.
"In order to turn a religious event into a BJP event, the ruling government had spent Rs 600 crore alone in organising welcome events and branding of (Chief Minister Shivraj Singh) Chouhan at airports, stations and other places in the country and also abroad," Yadav said.
Rejecting the charges against it, MP BJP spokesperson Deepak Vijaywargiya said, "Congress has become politically bankrupt and in the absence of any issues against the popular BJP government, the party leaders are levelling baseless allegations that have no substance."
"In the past also they have made such allegations but people have given them befitting reply on a number of occasions," he added.
Lashing out at the PDP-BJP government in J&K for "mishandling" of the situation,Congress today held a demonstration here to express resentment over the prevailing situation in the Kashmir.
Led by J&K Congress Vice President Raman Bhalla, Congress activists and workers held the protest demonstration near Press Club Jammu to lodge protest over the situation which has arisen in the Valley.
Congress leaders expressed strong resentment over the prevailing situation in the Kashmir Valley due to "mishandling" of the situation by the State and Central Government beside failure of the Government to ensure fool proof security and adequate arrangements to Amarnath Yatris.
They blamed Pakistan for its role in recent periods especially attempts to foment trouble in Kashmir and described it as a direct interference aimed at instigating the troubled Valley.
The police prevented them from marching ahead as they raised slogans against Pakistan and denounced terrorism.
"We criticise the Centre and State Government and hold them responsible for the present situation ....", Bhalla said.
Insisting on "ring fencing" of the GST rate, Congress today said it was "constructively engaged" with the government on the issue but wanted to prevent the executive from "tinkering" with the proposed tax reform.
"The Congress has insisted on a cap on the GST rate. We are very clear that there has to be a cap and there should not be any tinkering with that rate of GST. We will not leave it to the Executive or the Government of the day on its own to change that. That is why we have said it has to be firmly ring-fenced," senior Congress spokesman Anand Sharma said.
He said the GST bill will bring about unprecedented, sweeping changes in the taxation structure and the manner in which indirect taxes like excise, service tax, sales tax or VAT are levied.
"We need to have clarity therefore about the levies of these taxes. The threshold which is acceptable to Indian economy, the consumer and the industry, that is why the Congress Party has insisted on capping it. We hope the government has registered a very legitimate demand of the Congress Party which has rich merit," he said.
Noting that his party is "constructively engaged" with the government on the pending tax reform legislation, Sharma said, "Discussions with the government on the Bill are ongoing and we are waiting for the next meeting on the issue. Government, on its part, was to reach their own internal decision about the nature of response on Congress' concerns and demands."
Sharma said the party will now wait for the next meeting which will be a formal consultation where the government would give a concrete response to take forward the matter.
A meeting is likely between Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma tomorrow. Sharma, however, said he was yet to hear from the government about the meeting.
Asked whether Congress was softening its stand on GST, he said, "Congress is inherently pragmatic" and that it had never said it would not support the Bill.
The Business Advisory Committee of Rajya Sabha today allotted five-and-a-half hours for discussion on the bill but it is yet to decide on the date.
Sharma accused the BJP of having opposed the GST Bill in the past due to its "partisan politics". He also said the Modi government had been "non-engaged, confrontationist and arrogant" on the issue but Congress' stand was "principled" and had "merit".
"We have also said that unlike the present ruling dispensation-the BJP- which opposed it for partisan politics, the Congress' opposition is principled and has rich merit on all the issues that we have raised. And that is why we are now engaged constructively," he said.
"The government was non-engaged, confrontationist and arrogant. Instead of seeking our support, the PM and his senior colleagues were insulting and berating our leaders. Their attitude is changing," he said.
Sharma said the government agreed to discuss the unrest in Kashmir, an issue of national importance, in Rajya Sabha on the first day and "this is good start for consensus building".
Sharma said Congress' demand for scrapping one per cent
surcharge to manufacturing states was equally important. "We won't accept this. It will have a cascading effect," he said.
"We are in favour of the GST, we want to give a GST which is meaningful which brings down India's transaction cost, makes our industrial produce globally competitive, brings down the burden on the Indian consumers and the producers i.E. The Industry. That is the objective," he said.
Congress wants one per cent additional levy allowed to manufacturing states in the current GST Bill scrapped. It also wants an independent dispute redressal mechanism instead of the proposed GST Council as provided for in the current bill.
Noting that Congress party had authored the bill, Sharma said," Please take out the bill which we cleared- UPA Cabinet- and which we gave to Parliament. We are very clear, you will not find any departure from our side."
Sharma said when negotiations are held, the intention is to find a solution in a spirit of accommodation.
The Supreme Court today sought responses from six states on a petition seeking release of nearly 300 persons, who are still languishing in mental hospitals in Uttar Pradesh despite being cured of their ailments.
A bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice A M Khanwilkar issued notices to Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal Rajasthan, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir and Meghalaya on a PIL seeking release of persons, who are now fit for discharge from mental hospitals and steps to ensure their social security post-discharge.
Advocate Gaurav Kumar Bansal, who has filed the PIL in his personal capacity, said underprivileged persons are still languishing in mental hospitals despite being cured of their ailments and there was no policy in place to ensure their well being after the release.
The plea also referred to responses received under RTI with regard to release of persons who are languishing in mental hospitals at Bareilly, Varanasi and Agra in Uttar Pradesh even after being cured from their ailments.
The queries, which were posed under transparency law to Mental Health Hospital, Bareilly, Institute of Mental Health and Hospital, Agra and Mental Hospital, Varanasi, pertained to names, residential address and age of the patients who are now normal and waiting for their discharge from hospitals.
Bansal had also sought information about the year in which the patients were declared fit for the discharge.
The plea has sought issuance of directions to the states and others to "forthwith make arrangements to shift the patients, who are absolutely normal and are fit for discharge, from the mental hospitals to any other secure place like Old Age Home etc."
"Issue appropriate Writ/Orders/Directions to the respondents to formulate effective and proper guidelines for the relief and rehabilitation of such normal female and male patients," it said.
Earlier, the apex court had refused to accord an urgent hearing to the plea during the summer vacation.
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In response to a query as to why the petitioner did not approach the High Court, Bansal said he approached the apex court as there were patients from six states who are normal and fit to be discharged.
In his plea, the petitioner has said he had filed applications under Right to Information Act in three mental hospitals of Uttar Pradesh seeking information about the patients who are normal and fit for discharge.
He claimed to have taken legal interviews of some of the patients admitted in the Bareilly hospital and found these persons to be as normal as other human beings and wished to live free.
"That this court in its various judgments had observed that the Right to Life includes 'right to live with dignity' and in the present case the patients who are absolutely normal are forced to live with the mentally ill persons since last many years and hence their fundamental rights are infringed by the respondents," the plea said.
It said that the "inability of the government to provide social security to such persons is also questionable and thus needs urgent intervention from this court."
The plea said the living conditions of patients who were absolutely normal, along with the mentally ill patients, was "totally unsatisfactory", "unethical" and "unconstitutional" and infringed the fundamental rights of the individual.
It sought direction to the Uttar Pradesh government and the hospitals to make arrangements to shift the patients who are normal and fit for discharge from the hospital to any other secure place like old age homes.
Dalit youths attempted suicide at two places in Rajkot district of Gujarat on Monday to protest the brutal assault on fellow community members for allegedly killing a cow at Una last week.
At Gondal, five Dalit youth Rajesh Parmar, Ramesh Pardhi, Jagdish Rathod, Bharat Solanki and Anil Maghad tried to end their lives by drinking poison near Babasaheb Ambedkar's statue in market area of the town. At Jamkandorna in the district, Kishor Solanki (30) and Amrit Parmar (25), tried to commit suicide.
All seven are now being treated at a hospital in Gondal.
Inspector Vijay Chaudhary said the five youths who tried to commit suicide in Gondal had threatened to take such a step and police had deployed adequate security to prevent it, but they still managed to consume a poisonous substance.
"They were protesting the brutal assault on fellow Dalit youths in the Una town of the Gir Somnath district," he said.
Deputy Superintendent of Police, Gir Somnath, K M Joshi said nine persons have been arrested in the Una assault case. Inspector N U Zala and three constables have been suspended.
The incident at Una, where Dalit youths were paraded and flogged for allegedly killing a cow, caused nation-wide outrage after its video went viral. The victims' contention was that they were skinning a dead cow and had not killed it.
In Surendranagar, some 300 Dalits on Monday carried a dead cow and held protest outside the office of the Collector. They gave a memorandum to the collector demanding action against the culprits in the Una case.
Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya today met central trade unions to apprise them about steps taken with regard to their 12-point charter of demands.
Central trade unions are pushing for the 12-point charter of demands and have proposed a nationwide strike on September 2 to press for the demands, including minimum monthly wages of Rs 15,000 and minimum assured pension of Rs 3,000.
The minister, who met unions after a gap of 10 months on the issue, told the representatives that the government was working on eight of their demands and had progressed well on seven issues.
The Labour Ministry has also indicated that it may soon organise meeting of the ministerial panel on labour issues headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to deliberate on the demands.
The panel had several rounds of meeting with trade unions in August last year to understand their view point on various labour issues, including amendments in labour laws.
As many as 10 central trade union excluding RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) have give a call for a day-long nationwide strike to protest against unilateral labour law amendments and not paying heed to their charter of demands.
The unions have been asking government to consider their key demands, including minimum monthly wage of Rs 15,000, assured pension of Rs 3000, no foreign direct investment in sectors like railways, defence and insurance, among others.
After the meeting, Dattatreya said, "We have spoken to trade unions. They have 12 demands. We are working on their eight demands and progressed well on seven demands."
The minister further said, "We have met some of their demands like Bonus Act, minimum monthly pension and also about minimum wages where we are at advance stages."
During the meeting he told unions that their are certain court cases regarding implementation of amendment in Bonus Act, which will soon be transferred to the Supreme Court for speedy disposal.
Explaining further he said, "The proposal regarding minimum wages has been sent to Law and Justice Ministry. We will sent this proposal for Cabinet approval to fix a universal minimum wage."
About providing relief to contract workers, he said, "We have also worked on social security of workers. We will also work on providing job, wage and social security to contract workers."
However, the trade unions gave no assurance to the Labour Ministry regarding their strike call on September 2.
The representatives of BMS said that they will take a call on joining the strike in its meeting scheduled on August 10.
Last year, BMS had opted out of the strike observed on September 2, 2015, in view of government's assurances to meet certain demands out of 12-point charter of demand.
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon says Britain will have to work harder to maintain its military and political influence on the global stage because of its decision to leave the European Union.
Fallon said today Britain's June 23 vote to leave the EU will force it to intensify bilateral relationships and strengthen existing alliances to demonstrate it has no intention of stepping back from its long-established international role.
"We'll do more in NATO to compensate, we'll work harder at the key alliances within NATO, the United States but also France, and we have already signaled our intention to do more with Germany," he told several US reporters before a long-planned trip to Washington to deal with counter-terrorism strategy.
Speaking from his spacious Ministry of Defense office, featuring an oversize photograph of Winston Churchill and Defense Intelligence maps of Libya and South Sudan, Fallon said Britain "absolutely" plans to meet commitments made to NATO allies on defense spending.
He said freeing Britain from EU procurement rules may give Britain more flexibility to pick and choose the equipment it needs.
"We are still around, and we have to demonstrate that leadership all over again, so we have double down on our NATO commitments," he said. "That's why we're putting a whole battalion in Estonia and an additional company of troops into Poland."
Fallon said the UK recently decided to add 250 troops to Iraq for the same reason.
The defense secretary was the most senior minister to retain his position last week when new Prime Minister Theresa May installed her Cabinet. Fallon noted with approval that the Treasury chief Philip Hammond, a key figure in budget decisions, was a former Minister of Defense.
Fallon said he has set up a small team to study Brexit-related defense issues, including the future of EU missions Britain is participating in.
Chief among these are the Royal Navy-supported mission in the Central Mediterranean designed to rescue migrants at sea and disrupt people trafficking gangs and the EU's anti-piracy operation off the Horn of Africa. Britain is also heavily involved in EU missions in Bosnia.
"We go on being members of Europe until we leave, so we're not going to pull the ships out," Fallon said. He said it was "too early" to know if Britain would still have a role in these EU operations when it leaves the 28-nation bloc.
A draft National Forest Policy has been submitted by a forest management institute under the Environment Ministry and it is under consideration, Rajya Sabha was informed today.
Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave, in a written reply, said "The Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal under the Environment Ministry was asked to prepare a draft National Forest Policy. IIFM has submitted the draft policy document which is under consideration."
He was replying to a question on whether the Ministry has come out with a draft national forest policy proposing levy of green tax.
The Ministry had earlier said it had uploaded a "study" and "not issued" any draft policy on its website.
It said it was a study done by IIFM that was "inadvertently" uploaded on its website as draft forest policy and "not issued" any draft forest policy.
Delhi University teachers today called off after 55 days their boycott of evaluation of undergraduate exams in protest against the new UGC norms to ascertain their academic performance.
The General Body (GB) of Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) today ratified the decision of the teachers to end the boycott, claiming that the ministry and UGC officials agreed to setting up a committee to consider their demands.
"The GB noted that negotiations have begun and the administration has agreed to our minimal demands of setting up a committee to resolve our long-standing issues. In this context, to continue a sustainable movement to ensure resolution of pending matters, the teachers resolved to withdraw the boycott of evaluations and boycott of Staff Council Committees," an official statement said.
Teachers were 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, 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 alteration of 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 academic performance indicator system of promotions for teachers "till it is completely withdrawn".
A court here today directed police to register an FIR against Karnataka minister K J George and two top police officials in connection with the alleged suicide of Deputy Superintendent of Police M K Ganapathy, which has raised a huge storm in the state.
The order by Additional Judicial Magistrate First Class Annapurneshwari came on a private criminal complaint filed by the deceased police official's son Nehal Ganapathy requesting the court to direct the Kodagu police to take up investigation against the minister and two officers for allegedly abetting his father's suicide.
Ganapathy's wife Pavana and Nehal had approached the court, stating that the police had rejected the complaint lodged by them with the Kushalanagar police on July 10 against George and IPS officials A M Prasad and Pranab Mohanty.
In his complaint, Nehal had said his father had made a "dying declaration" naming George and the two officers and their acts amounted to "abetting the commission of suicide."
Appealing to the court to take cognisance of the offence punishable under IPC section 306 read with Section 34, the complaint had also claimed that the accused were highly placed and influential persons who had prevailed upon police from taking action against them.
Nehal's counsel M T Nanaiah said that the Investigating Officers would have to question George and the two police officers and take a call on whether to arrest them or not depending on their probe.
Reacting to the court's directive in Bengaluru, Opposition BJP leader Jagadish Shettar said the minister should resign immediately and the two IPS officers suspended to pave the way for an impartial probe.
Ganapathy (51) was found hanging from the ceiling fan in a room at a lodge in Madikeri on July 7, prior to which he gave 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." The case is currently being investigated by CID.
Coming under attack from the Opposition, which has been stalling Assembly proceedings since Monday last, the Karnataka government has constituted a judicial commission headed by K N Keshavanarayana to inquire into the alleged suicide.
The commission would inquire into the "circumstances and events" leading to the "unnatural death" of Ganapathy.
The Opposition BJP and JDS have rejected the judicial probe and been insisting on a CBI inquiry and resignation of George.
Seeking improvement in India's ranking in the ease of doing business index, government officials today gave a detailed presentation to a World Bank team on the steps being taken to improve the country's business climate.
Officials from ministries including finance, commerce and industry and law informed about the reform measures which have been taken during June 2015 to May this year.
These initiatives are likely to be taken on board by the World Bank, which will come out with its ease of doing business report on October 25, an official said.
The World Bank team, which is on a two-week mission to the country, will also visit Mumbai during July 25 to 31 and interact with different stakeholders.
According to a Finance Ministry statement, the Doing Business team of the World Bank Group is interacting with various stakeholders and to validate data for the upcoming Doing Business Report, 2017.
The ministry officials informed that India accords highest priority to the improvement in the ease of doing business in the country.
"The government has undertaken various reforms to bring improvements in legislative and administrative structures and to improve India's environment for doing business," it said.
Government has also partnered with all states to improve regulatory environment pan-India and beyond indicators of Doing Business Report.
"The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has been notified which creates a framework for resolving insolvency in the country," it added.
The team was urged to note the initiatives of the government in the upcoming report.
"The Additional Secretary (Investment) requested the team that while validating the data from the private sector respondents, if the information is found at variance with the information shared by the government Departments, the team may cross check the information for factual accuracy with government departments concerned," the statement said.
The team also met the representatives from different central ministries and departments during the day and propose to meet the Departments in the NCT of Delhi and Government of Maharashtra.
It will also interact with the private sector respondents for a feedback on the reforms implemented in the areas of doing business.
India's rank in the Doing Business Report 2016 was improved to 130th from 134th in the previous year. Government has emphasised on the importance of ease of doing business and it is a major pillar of 'Make in India' initiative.
The World Bank team would again meet the officials of the
Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) on August 1 to give their feedback.
The World Bank carries out this exercise every year for the purpose of ranking countries on their ease of doing business, from 1-189.
The steps taken by the centre and the states in the recent past include increasing validity of environment clearance from 5 years to 7 years; doing away with environment clearance for 36 white industries and introduction of online registration of VAT with real-time Tax Identification Number (TIN).
Besides, Mumbai has also removed the requirement of inspection to make registration of Shops and Establishments real-time.
Improving the position in ease of doing business reflects investor friendly climate and easy regulatory environment for domestic and foreign firms. High ranking helps in attracting investments.
The Doing Business Report of the World Bank ranks a country on 10 parameters that assess areas such as starting a business, construction permits, getting electricity and conducting trade across borders.
The entities, which received in-principle approval for setting up small finance banks, today met a Reserve Bank official and discussed concerns related to regulations.
"They have been given in principle approvals subject to their meeting certain conditions to become a small finance banks. We reviewed what they are doing as part of this journey to meet those requirements and also what would be the regulatory framework. Whatever clarifications they wanted, I gave them," RBI's newly appointed deputy governor N S Vishwanathan told reporters here after meeting the entities which have received the in-principle approval.
However, he did not give further clarifications on the discussion.
In September last year, RBI had given in-principle approval to 10 entities for setting up small finance banks. The 10 entities included Au Financiers, Capital Local Area Bank, Disha Microfin, Equitas Holdings, ESAF Microfinance and Investments, Janalakshmi Financial Services, RGVN (North East) Microfinance, Suryoday Micro Finance, Ujjivan Financial Services, Utkarsh Micro Finance.
So far, only one entity Capital Small Finance Bank has started operations.
Recently, Reserve Bank has given final licence to Equitas Holdings to launch a small finance bank.
Chennai-based ESAF Microfinance has applied for the final approval to Reserve Bank.
The European Union and the United States expressed alarm today with Turkey's response to a failed coup, telling the NATO member and EU aspirant that it must uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.
"This is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a joint conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
The top American diplomat said Turkey must "uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law."
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Kerry said: "We caution against a reach that goes beyond that."
Kerry and Mogherini spoke after a meeting in Brussels that also included the bloc's 28 foreign ministers, and after a weekend when Turkey's government responded to a coup attempt by rounding up some 6,000 people, including hundreds of judges and prosecutors.
In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said talks on Turkey's bid to the join EU would end if Ankara restored the death penalty. Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert told reporters that "the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member."
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities on Friday night. But the rebellion wasn't supported by the military's top brass and was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded.
Both Mogherini and Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically elected government.
While they illustrated the deepening frustration with his government's response to the failed coup, which has even included allegations by Turkish government ministers of U.S. complicity in the violence.
Going farther than any other diplomat, the EU commissioner leading negotiations with Turkey on its bid to join the union suggested Erdogan was exploiting the crisis to eliminate opponents who may or may not have been involved in the coup.
"It is exactly what we feared," Johannes Hahn said. It appears, he added, as if Turkey had "prepared" arrest lists of political opponents and was waiting for the right time to act.
Mogherini expressed concern about the possibility of other changes, noting that no country could join the EU if it reintroduces the death penalty.
Fans accused Jim Carrey's ex-girlfriend Cathriona White's family for her death.
The hateful letters were sent to her family by the fans, who blamed relatives for her demise after it emerged the Irish make-up artist had an argument with her mother before committing suicide last year, reported Mirror.
But the real reason behind her death only came out when letters from White, who was just 28 when she died, were revealed last month in which she had mentioned about feelings of hopelessness following her break-up with the 54-year-old "The Mask" star.
"We've had a terrible few months since Cathriona's death. There's been death threats and angry letters," Cathriona's stepfather Brian Sweetman said and they felt "huge relief" that letters were released.
"We're just glad it's reached a conclusion and that the truth has finally come out," he added.
A 60-year-old farmer was murdered in Nadiyali village near Ambala City, police said today.
A dispute between two families over supplying water in a field apparently led to the killing, they said.
Police has registered a case against five persons at Naggal police station this morning.
The body was brought to civil hospital here for postmortem examination.
No arrest has been made so far in connection with the incident, which took place last night.
Civilians in rebel-held parts of Syria's Aleppo expressed fears today of a lengthy government siege, as food supplies dwindled after regime troops seized the only road into the city's east.
The advance by the government, which has been backed by a Russian air offensive, is seen as a major setback for opposition forces in Syria's second city.
The United Nations says about 600,000 Syrians already live under siege throughout the country, most encircled by government forces, though rebels and the Islamic State group have also used the tactic.
A US-backed alliance of Kurds and Arabs has also surrounded the IS stronghold of Manbij about 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Aleppo city.
Air strikes by the US-led coalition killed at least 21 civilians in and around the jihadist bastion today, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.
In Aleppo city itself, food and fuel shortages had already hit rebel-held eastern districts that are home to at least 200,000 people, after government forces advanced to within firing range of the key Castello Road supply route on July 7.
Regime forces seized the road itself at the weekend, completely severing the rebel-held portion of the city from the outside world and raising fears of a potentially devastating siege.
"I don't know what is going to happen to us," said 38-year-old Mohamed Rukby, an unemployed father-of-four in the Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood.
"We have nowhere to go. All the roads are closed and we've been suffering for days with shortages of bread, food and basically everything."
In the city's opposition-controlled Al-Mashhad district, mechanic Mohamed Zeitun said his work had dried up because a shortage of fuel meant residents were not driving anywhere.
"The idea of the siege keeps me up at night," the 44-year-old told AFP.
"I don't have supplies to last me more than a week, and if there is no food in the markets, there could be a famine," said the father-of-five.
Five people were today gunned down in attacks on a police station and a security building in Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty with security forces arresting two men in connection with the assaults.
Kazakhstan's National Security Committee (KNB) declared its "anti-terror" operation over in the financial capital after detaining the two suspects.
Three police officers and two civilians were shot dead in what President Nursultan Nazarbayev called "a terrorist act".
KNB security chief Vladimir Zhumakanov said one of the suspects may have "connected" with followers of the ultra-conservative Salafi strain of Islam while in jail on theft and weapons charges.
"We are checking this information," Zhumakanov said at a televised meeting of Nazarbayev's security council, without providing further details.
The KNB announced "the conclusion of the anti-terror operation" and lowered the terror threat level from "critical" red to "moderate" yellow shortly after detaining the second of the two men.
The first suspect is accused of killing a local resident during a carjacking and attacking the police station in broad daylight, then shooting dead a police officer and seizing his gun, the interior ministry said.
A civilian also died during the shooting at the police station.
The suspect then shot dead two officers as they gave chase, before he was arrested.
"According to preliminary information, the detained man is a 27-year-old man with previous convictions," the ministry said, adding that he was also suspected of murdering a woman at the weekend.
The ministry did not immediately make public any details about the second detained suspect.
The health ministry said eight people had been admitted to hospital.
Two videos were widely shared on social networks showing a black-clad man roaming the streets of Almaty armed with a machinegun.
"I clearly heard shooting. Several shots were fired in quick succession. I was driving close to the police station at the time," a 40-year-old man who only gave his first name, Kanysh, told AFP.
Kazakh media reported a shootout at the national security committee building, but said the attack was repulsed and the building cordoned off.
Police called on Almaty residents to stay in their homes and several major banks and supermarkets closed their doors, while the city's airport tightened security during the attacks.
Kazakhstan had already been on a "yellow level" threat alert after deadly shootings shook a town in its northwest in June.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today exhorted the youth to religiously follow the teachings of their teachers in everyday life and strive to become better citizens.
In his message on the occasion of Guru Purnima festival, which will be celebrated across the nation tomorrow, he said despite proliferation of modern technologies, the importance of teachers remains intact.
"As we move ahead in times of technology, one should not forget our teachers, who gave us valuable lessons in life. India has a rich cultural heritage, where according to age old traditions, teachers are considered only next to God."
"If the youth today strikes a balance between technology and teachings of their teachers, they will surely become better citizens and would be able to contribute in a much better way to development of the nation," Fadnavis said.
Meanwhile, on the occasion of Guru Purnima, a 'Vedic yagya' (fire ritual) will be conducted at Dhyan Ashram in New Delhi at 6 pm tomorrow.
The ritual aims to deal with aspects like keeping the body fit and healthy and also accessing dimensions and energies that control the body, said Dhyan Foundation which is organising the event.
"On Guru Purnima day, the energy of the moon is at its peak and so the generation of nectar is the most and the volatility of the elements is also at its maximum.
"The elements and the som are energy channelised by the guru. When the guru touches the moon element in the body, automatically they go to maximum and there is an awakening that happens inside you," Yogi Ashwini of Dhyan Ashram said.
"So if you want to awaken to reality, and understand what these elements are all about, what this creation is all about, the energy behind workings of creation, and if you want to have the maximum benefits of som, then Guru Purnima is the day to do it," he said.
Spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, meanwhile, will lead Guru Purnima celebrations from The Art of Living Retreat Center at North Carolina in USA.
Guru Purnima is traditionally celebrated by Hindus, Jains and Buddhists to pay respects to their teachers and express gratitude to them.
A 23-year-old former Air India employee has been arrested for allegedly hacking into the airline's internal system for managing frequent fliers accounts, redeeming miles to convert them into tickets and selling them off to travel agents, police said today.
The accused, Anitesh Giri Goswami, is a graduate in Computer Application and has worked for leading airlines, including Air India and now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines.
He was running the racket from Jodhpur, Additional Commissioner of Police (Economic Offences Wing) Arun Kampani said.
"The accused was well versed with online ticket booking system and functioning of intranet and internet-based systems of Air India. He first understood the functioning of the ticketing system as well as the points/miles system of the airlines and then hacked into the Loyalty Plus programme website of Air India," he said.
After hacking into the system, he verified and upgraded hundreds of dormant accounts of Frequent Flyer members by allegedly uploading forged documents.
"Thereafter, the accused used these membership accounts and the Frequent Flyer miles/points accumulated in these accounts for booking airline tickets. These tickets were then sold to various travel/ticketing agents based in cities like Pune, Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai," he said.
The accused worked as Load and Trim Officer at Jodhpur airport when he was with Air India. Later he left the job and started exploiting the loopholes in functioning of the Frequent Flyer Programme. He was arrested from his rented accommodation in Jaipur on Friday, Kampani said.
A black US Marine veteran killed three police officers in Baton Rouge before being shot dead, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man in the city that sparked country-wide protests and led to the massacre of five law enforcement officers.
The African-American gunman, identified by the media as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, shot the police officers in an "ambush-style" attack yesterday.
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 amid the ambush on Dallas police officers where a sniper killed five officers.
Officials confirmed that three law enforcement officers died while three others were wounded during the shooting on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over a kilometre away from police headquarters.
The gunman, a decorated former Marine sergeant who served in Iraq, was shot dead minutes later in the gunfight with police.
The shooter appeared to have attacked police officers on his birthday, police said.
Authorities initially believed that two other assailants might be at large, but hours later said that no other active shooters were in the city.
"The dead suspect in the Baton Rouge shooting was wearing all black and a mask," Baton Rouge Police Department Sgt Don Coppola said.
A witness told WBRZ-TV that a man, dressed in black with his face covered, was shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash.
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.
President Barack Obama condemned the shooting as "cowardly" assault and called for national unity, urging Americans and political leaders to avoid inflammatory words and focus on "uniting the country rather than dividing it".
"It is so important that everyone regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organisations you are a part of, everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further," Obama said in an address to the nation from White House after the shooting.
"Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible," he said.
"...I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None," Obama said.
According to reports, the gunman, served in the US Marines for five years starting in August 2005 as a data network specialist, and attained the rank of sergeant.
His Iraq tour lasted from June 2008 to January 2009.
Turkey has sacked almost 9,000 officials in its relentless crackdown against suspected coup plotters, authorities have said, as the former air force chief denied masterminding the weekend's failed putsch.
With Western allies expressing alarm over fears Ankara that could reinstate the death penalty in response to Friday's dramatic coup bid, General Akin Ozturk appeared in court, looking haggard and with his ear bandaged.
"I am not the person who planned or led the coup. Who planned it and directed it I do not know," state-run agency Anadolu quoted him as saying in his statement to prosecutors.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to wipe out the "virus" of the putschists, whose attempted power grab left more than 300 people dead.
But the United States, European Union and United Nations have sternly warned him against excessive retribution as authorities round up the alleged perpetrators.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman denounced "revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets" after disturbing pictures emerged of the treatment of some detained suspects.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said over 7,500 people have been detained, including 103 generals and admirals, over the coup bid which Erdogan has blamed on his arch-foe, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.
The interior ministry said almost 9,000 people, including almost 8,000 police but also municipal governors and other officials, had also been dismissed in a widening purge.
Early yesterday, special Istanbul anti-terror police units raided the prestigious air force military academy, detaining four suspects, Anadolu reported.
Authorities have also detained General Mehmet Disli, who conducted the operation to capture chief-of-staff Hulusi Akar during the coup, an official said.
Erdogan has urged citizens to remain on the streets even after the defeat of the coup attempt, in what the authorities describe as a "vigil" for democracy.
Public servants' annual leave has meanwhile been cancelled until further notice.
With Turkey's big cities still on edge, Turkish security forces killed an armed attacker who shot at them from a vehicle outside the Ankara courthouse where suspected coup plotters were appearing before judges.
Western leaders have pushed Turkey to follow the rule of law as the massive retaliatory purge adds to existing concerns about human rights and democracy in the strategic NATO country.
"We also urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions," US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters after talks with EU foreign ministers.
Government has released Rs 100 crore towards its co-contribution for Atal Pension Yojana (APY) for 2015-16.
Under the scheme, individuals who have registered before March 31, 2016, will get a co-contribution from the government, which will be 50 per cent of the subscriber contribution up to a maximum of Rs 1,000. The co-contribution will be for 5 years from 2015-16 to 2019-20.
"Government of India through PFRDA has released co-contribution for 2015-16 for 16.96 lakh eligible APY subscribers amounting to Rs 99.57 crore," a finance ministry statement said.
It said subscribers who have any pending contributions in their APY accounts till March 2016 won't be paid with co-contribution.
"They have been advised by PFRDA to regularise their APY accounts so as to get the Government of India co-contribution in September," it added. PFRDA is the pension fund regulator.
Government's co-contribution is payable only when accounts are regular and the admissible co-contribution is paid into the savings bank account of the subscribers.
The government is implementing Atal Pension Yojana (APY) through banks and the Department of Post.
The total number of subscribers registered under APY as on June 30, 2016, has crossed 30 lakh and every day, nearly 5,000 new subscribers are added, the statement said.
Only those users who are not income tax payers and not part of any other social security schemes are eligible for the central government co-contribution.
APY provides minimum guaranteed pension ranging between Rs 1,000 to Rs 5,000 per month for the subscriber from the age of 60 years. The same amount of pension is paid to the spouse in the case of the subscriber's demise.
After the demise of both -- the subscriber and the spouse -- the nominee would be paid the pension corpus. It also provides an option to the spouse to continue contribution in the APY account of the subscriber for the remaining period, on premature death of the customer before 60 years so that pension can be availed by the spouse.
Haryana government today authorised Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation (HMRTC) to review agreements made in the past with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) and explore the possibilities of increasing metro connectivity in Gurgaon.
The decision was taken at a meeting held here under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar to review expansion of metro rail network in the state. He also approved extension of Delhi Metro from Sector-21 in Dwarka to IFFCO Chowk in Gurgaon, an official release said.
It was decided that agreements made earlier regarding revenue collection will be reviewed in case the 3.4 km stretch falling in Delhi under the 12.631 km expansion of Delhi Metro from Sector-21 to IFFCO Chowk gets completed by HMRTC at its own level, it said.
Khattra said that HMRTC can prepare its own network to improve metro connectivity in Gurgaon, the release said.
The Madras High Court today dismissed the bail plea of a woman, who allegedly mowed down a 45-year-old man while driving her luxury Audi car in the city earlier this month.
Dismissing the bail plea of Aiswarya Wilton, Justice S Vaidyanathan in his order said "Section 185(a) of the Motor Vehicles Act is very clear that Breath Analyser Test (BAT) is an immediate way of detecting consumption of alcohol.
The judge said the presence of alcohol in the blood of the accused exceeded the permissible limit.
Noting that Aiswarya was not entitled for bail, the Judge said "If the petitioner is let out on bail, there is every possibility of her threatening the witnesses and hampering the investigation."
On the early morning of July 2, Aiswarya had allegedly mowed down Munusamy, a carpenter, while speeding in her car at Rajiv Gandhi Salai, killing him on the spot. The public gave her a chase and managed to intercept the car.
She was arrested and remanded in judicial custody the same day for alleged offences of rash driving and culpable homicide not amounting to murder under IPC sections read with Sec 185 (drunken driving) of the Motor Vehicles Act.
Aiswarya first approached the High Court on July 5 for bail. The petition was disposed of giving her liberty to approach the lower court first.
After the Principal Sessions Court dismissed her bail plea on July 14, she approached the High Court again.
Delhi High Court today refused to grant an interim stay on AAP government's order imposing fine of Rs 17.86 crore on Dharamshila Cancer Hospital for allegedly not providing free treatment to poor patients as per its land allotment lease condition, saying the hospital will have to first deposit some of the amount.
Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva asked the lawyer appearing for the hospital to take instructions on whether it was willing to deposit some amount and listed the matter for hearing on July 21.
"If you are seeking stay, deposit some money," the judge said and added "If there was no stay, then you (hospital) will have to comply with the recovery order. Take instructions."
A special committee, appointed to look into the affairs of the hospitals as per a High Court order of 2007, had imposed a fine of over Rs 32 crore on Max Super Specialty Hospital (Saket), Rs 36.30 on Shanti Mukand Hospital, Rs 10.6 on Pushpawati Singhania Research Institute and over Rs 100 crore on Fortis Escorts Heart Institute.
The hospitals were directed by the AAP government to deposit the "unwarranted profits" got out of allegedly refusing free treatment to the poor.
During the hearing, the lawyer appearing for Dharamshila hospital contended that the decision to recover the amount was taken by the special committee prior to giving it a hearing.
The lawyer argued the hospital has partially complied with the High Court's 2007 direction to provide free treatment to poor patients, as 10 per cent beds were reserved for them.
The Delhi government, on the other hand, disputed the claims saying there was no partial compliance as the hospital was charging patients for medicines and other disposables and thus, no free treatment was being provided.
To this, the hospital said that cancer medication is very expensive and this cannot be provided free to patients, adding it was charging discounted rates for drugs and disposables.
The court on July 15 had refused to pass an ex-parte order in the matter.
Earlier, the court had refused to grant immediate relief
to Fortis Escorts Heart Institute saying it would have to deposit some amount on an "ad-hoc basis" if it wished to insist on a stay on the government's order.
The plea of Fortis against the government order is listed for hearing tomorrow.
Dharamshila hospital has moved court seeking stay on AAP government's decision, claiming they were not given proper hearing by the health department before issuing the show cause notice.
It has also said that the department should explain how it had arrived at the figure.
The health department had earlier told the court that the hospitals were provided land at concessional rates between 1960 and 1990on the condition that they will treat the poor free of cost, but they did not abide by it.
"The penalty has been imposed on the basis of a High Court order passed in 2007 on a PIL demanding implementation of the provision of free treatment to poor and action against the erring hospitals. And the fine amount has been calculated accordingly," the government had said.
43 private hospitals in Delhi were allotted land at concessional rates on condition that they will keep 10 per cent of their in-patient department capacity and 25 per cent of out-patient department capacity to treat economically weaker section patients free of cost.
The Delhi High Court on Monday reserved its verdict on a plea challenging its single judge Bench order rejecting a petition to restrain the Supreme Court collegium from recommending appointments to the higher judiciary.
"You (petitioner) file your written submissions. We will consider it and pass an order," a bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Sangita Dhingra Sehgal said.
Delhi-based lawyer R P Luthra, who has filed the plea, told the bench he was not arguing for removing the judges who were recently elevated to the apex court.
"I am not for removing judges. This is not my grievance. I have come here for protection of my fundamental rights which are given to me under the Constitution. Fundamental rights of the citizens have to be protected. I am against the system which is in function," he told the bench.
He alleged that the collegium system for recommending appointments to the higher judiciary was "unconstitutional".
During the hearing, when the petitioner argued that his fundamental right was violated, the bench asked, "Tell us how your fundamental rights have been violated."
Responding to this, he said that recommendation of the collegium was not transparent as only some of the lawyers were considered for elevation.
Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Sanjay Jain said that all the lawyers cannot be considered to be appointed as judges in the higher judiciary.
"The comparative study which he (petitioner) is making is beyond the purview of judicial review," the ASG said.
Earlier, a single judge of the high court had in May this year had dismissed two separate pleas, out of which one was filed by Luthra, which had also sought to put a restraint on the government from acting on the collegium's recommendation for elevating three high court chief justices and a senior lawyer to the apex court.
The four new judges, whose names were recommended by the Supreme Court collegium and was approved by President Pranab Mukherjee, were administered the oath of office by Chief Justice of India T S Thakur in May this year.
The four justices sworn in were -- A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and L Nageshwar Rao.
Days after two groups of students clashed on the campus of Hyderabad University here following a meeting on "Kashmir situation", ABVP leader N Susheel Kumar and others have been booked for allegedly assaulting an M Phil student.
The M Phil student, Amol Singh, claimed that the attackers mistook him for a Kashmiri.
Police also booked Singh after Kumar, accused of abetting the suicide of dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on the campus in January, alleged in his cross complaint that Singh had attacked them.
Gachibowli police have booked Kumar and 30 others under sections 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means), 341 (wrongful restraint) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of IPC after Singh alleged that some ABVP students "brutally" attacked him on Saturday evening, a senior police officer told PTI today.
Similarly, based on a complaint lodged by Kumar, a counter case has been registered against Singh with Miyapur Police under sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and other relevant sections of IPC, he said, adding that both the cases are under investigation.
On July 16 evening, a scuffle had broken out between two groups of students after a meeting was conducted to "condemn" the police action against protesters in Jammu and Kashmir, at the shopping complex on the varsity campus.
In his complaint, Singh alleged that Kumar and others rained punches and kicks on him on the campus after mistaking him for a Kashmiri student while he was returning after attending the meeting. Singh had claimed that he was attacked again near a hospital.
In a counter complaint, Kumar accused Singh and his friends of assaulting him and other ABVP members.
Kumar alleged that the group of students raised separatists slogans after the meeting on "Kashmir issue" following which they objected to it.
"The university has received complaints from students groups and (that) laid down procedures will be followed in dealing with the same," University Pro Vice-Chancellor 1 and official spokesperson Professor Vipin Srivastava said.
Meanwhile, in a related development, the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH), which is spearheading the protests over Vemula's death, today condemned the "assault" on Singh.
"In this incident, the nexus of ABVP with (Vice Chancellor) Appa Rao Podile-led HCU administration is clearly visible. N Susheel Kumar and Podile Appa Rao are amongst the prime accused in the SC&ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and abetment to suicide of Rohith Vemula and harassment of four other dalit research scholars," the JAC stated in a release.
According to JAC, a group of students had conducted a
"public discussion on the current situation in Kashmir on July 16 evening and the ABVP cadres took out a bike rally in the middle of the night as a reaction to that programme."
"They mistook Amol (Singh) for a Kashmiri student and thrashed him while shouting anti-Muslim slurs and abuses. Susheel Kumar was one of the leaders of this ABVP gang," the JAC alleged.
UoH, also known as HCU, has been witnessing sporadic protests since Vemula's death with a section of students demanding dismissal of Vice-Chancellor Podile who is amongst those booked for abeting the dalit scholar's suicide.
"Kumar, who has been accused of abetting suicide of dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula, is once again on a spree of attacking students on campus and this has been made possible because he and his brother with others enjoy impunity because of the BJP and RSS support.
"The University administration and Podile Appa Rao are part of the same nexus. This incident again exposes the BJP/RSS nexus that operates in the University. The fact that action has not yet been taken upon Podile Appa Rao, is responsible for facilitation of such violence," the JAC alleged.
It stated that the struggle put up by students seeking justice for Vemula has been going on even after six months despite "constant harassment from university."
"Podile Apparao and University administration, along with ABVP students, are deliberately creating controversies to divert the attention from Rohith Vemula issue and to victimise students.
"This step towards providing social justice to Rohith will also ensure that the University remains a democratic space where people can debate and discuss freely without the threat of any violence," JAC added.
Heavy rains lashed many areas in Himachal Pradesh even as two bridges and a major portion of the helipad at Sangla were damaged by flash floods triggered by cloudburst at Kharogala Nalla in Sangla valley of Kinnaur district.
Flash floods damaged two bridges resulting in closure of Chhitkul link road while three power projects were closed for some time due to high silt level in Sutlej river.
Heavy rains lashed Sirmaur, Mandi, Solan, Shimla and Una districts and Paonta Sahib was wettest in the region with 104 mm rains while Jogindernagar, Berthin and Dharampur recorded 43 mm, 39 mm and 38 mm rains, followed by Kasauliand Sundernagar 35 mm, Una 30 mm, Mehre 29 mm, Mashobra 28 mm, Sarkaghat 26mm, Dharamshala- 24 mm, Jubbal 22 mm and Nagrota Suriyan 20 mm.
Shimla and Kufri recorded 18.5 mm rains while Solan received 17.5 mm rains, local MeT office said.
The local Met office has predicted rains or thundershowers at few places in lower, mid and higher hills over next six days from tomorrow.
The water level in Sutlej river has suddenly increased due to flash floods triggered by cloud burst. Sub Divisional Magistrate of Rampur, Nishant Thakur sounded an alert, advising the people not to go near the banks of river Sutlej to avoid any risk.
There was no loss of life but an aged couple struggled for life throughout the night and rested on a cliff in Kalpa sub-division, with gushing waters flowing underneath and were rescued this morning.
The couple cried for help and sent signals by flashing torch light and the rescuers and officials of local administration also reciprocated the signals with flash lights.
The Rescue operations were delayed due to darkness at night and the couple was rescued this morning said Sub Divisional Magistrate (SDM), Kalpa Arvind Sharma.
In view of inclement weather, the local administration has cautioned the peopleagainst going near the banks.
Senior IAS officer B K Prasad, who probed the Ishrat Jahan missing files case, has got two- month extension with Prime Minister Narendra Modi reducing the three-month period sought by Home Minister Rajnath Singh.
In a letter to Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha, Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi has said that finding Prasad's replacement will not be easy and changing the officer, who was recently in for allegedly 'tutoring' a witness, will set the clock back by almost three months.
While seeking the three-month extension, he also said that the probe is "highly sensitive" and the report may be discussed in Parliament.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has then processed the request for Prasad's extension which was approved by the Prime Minister for only two months till July 31.
Prasad, a 1983 batch IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, was due to retire on May 31. The government has recently appointed Maharashtra cadre IAS officer Bipin Bihari Mallick as his replacement.
In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the issue of missing papers from the file dealing with the filing of affidavit in Ishrat Jahan case, the Home Ministry had ordered an enquiry by Prasad on March 14, this year. The panel has submitted its report on June 15.
"Since this is highly sensitive enquiry and there is all likelihood that the report will be discussed and analysed in several forums including, perhaps, in Parliament.
"It is imperative that the enquiry may be completed by B K Prasad himself, because to change the enquiry officer at this stage will set the clock back by almost three months. Also, finding a replacement will not be easy; the officer doing this enquiry has to be fair-minded and with experience of having worked in the MHA," Mehrishi has said in the letter written on May 3, which also cited Prasad's retirement in that month-end.
Considering these circumstances and the public interest involved, the Home Minister has approved the proposal for granting extension in service to Prasad for a period of three months, beyond May 31, 2016, i.E. Up to August 31, 2016, the Home Secretary had said and requested approval of the competent authority.
19-year-old Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed in an alleged fake encounter in Gujarat in 2004. The Gujarat Police had then claimed those killed were LeT terrorists and had gone there to assassinate the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
The papers, which disappeared from the Home Ministry, include the copy of an affidavit vetted by the then Attorney General and submitted in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 and the draft of the second affidavit vetted by the AG to which changes were made by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram.
The ACB today arrested head of the Sociology Department in Sardar Patel University in Anand district for allegedly accepting Rs 90,000 cash to "clear" the PhD degree of a student.
A complaint in this regard was filed by a PhD student, who had already paid Rs 2.10 lakh to the accused H N Patel, the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) said.
"The professor and HoD of Sociology department, Patel, was caught red handed, when he was accepting money from his PhD student. The trap was laid after the student complained that a demand of Rs 6 lakh was made by the professor to clear his thesis and confer the degree," an ACB release said.
In the complaint, the student, whose identity has been withheld by ACB, alleged that Patel first demanded Rs 6 lakh from him and then agreed to grant him the degree for Rs 3 lakh.
"The student has already paid Rs 2.10 lakh to Patel, who kept of demanding the remaining amount of Rs 90,000 from the student," the ACB said.
After receiving the complaint, the ACB laid a trap and asked the student to call Patel at the common parking of a bank at Vallabh Vidyanagar, where he was nabbed, the release added.
The death toll in the hooch tragedy today climbed to 33 and more than two dozen people were battling for life after consuming spurious liquor in Etah and Farrukhabad districts even as the authorities launched a crackdown on bootlegging arresting 1,621 people across Uttar Pradesh.
Twenty-nine people have died in Etah district and four in neighbouring Farrukhabad, officials said, adding 21 deaths had occurred till yesterday and eight more died overnight in Etah.
Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kayamganj in Farukhabad Ajit Kumar said four persons have died in the district after consuming hooch.
Senior police officers in Lucknow said the main accused, Sripal Lodh, is among those arrested and 11 officials of the Excise Department and police have been suspended in connection with the tragedy.
An ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh each will be given to the families of the deceased.
Meanwhile, the condition of over two dozen people admitted to various hospitals in Etah and Saifai was stated to be serious.
DGP Javeed Ahmed issued strict directives to officials to carry out a drive against manufacture and sale of illicit liquor. Under this drive, 1,621 people were arrested and 1,585 cases lodged all over the state.
As many as 36,121 liters of illicit liquor and seven vehicles were seized while 197 illegal liquor producing units were destroyed under the drive, police said.
Agra IGP Durgacharan Misra said Sripal has been slapped with charges under the stringent National Security Act and is being interrogated about location of the liquor producing units.
Raids are being conducted within Aliganj police circle on the basis of information about location of the factories. Circle officer of Police (Aliganj) D S Garbyal said raids were conducted at 15 locations and four factories were unearthed.
Meanwhile, a team of BJP leaders, including five MPs, an MLA and general secretary, today met the families of the deceased.
BJP MPs Ram Shankar Katheria, Rajvir Singh, Devendra Singh, Mukesh Rajput, Ashok Doharey, MLA Jagan Prasad Garg and party General Secretary Pankaj Singh met the families of the victims in Aliganj town even as locals protested and accused the police of being hand-in-glove with the accused.
BJP demanded that the compensation amount be enhanced to Rs 10 lakh and sought dismissal of the Samajwadi Party government.
"There is no law and order in the state and criminal elements are having a field day," BJP alleged.
(REOPENS MDS10)
Consumerfed later issued a press release clarifying that it would not deliver liquor via courier or postal department at the doorsteps of consumers.
What Chairman Mehboob said was that there would be special counters at liquor outlets for those who do booking in advance via email or phone, Consumerfed Managing Director M Ramanunni said.
It is being done to avoid long queues at Consumerfed outlets during festival seasons, he said.
The clarification was issued after some media reports suggested that Consumerfed has decided to deliver liquor at the doorsteps of the consumers, Consumerfed added.
Jaidev Thackeray, the son of the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, today told the Bombay High Court that he had tried to maintain cordial relations with his brother Uddhav, particularly in the last few years, but the latter was unresponsive.
Jaidev has challenged before the High Court Thackeray's will of December 2011, which bequeaths a substantial part of the estate to Uddhav and does not give Jaidev anything.
"We have not met or talked to each other since the petition was filed. Uddhav does not return my phone calls or reply to my text messages though I have tried to keep our relations cordial," he said during a cross-examination by Uddhav's lawyer Rohit Kapadia before Justice Gautam Patel.
Being unwell, Jaidev appeared in a wheelchair and replied to all the 53 questions put to him while seated.
The cross-examination focused on his two statements in an affidavit. Jaidev has said that his father, Bal Thackeray, once told him that Uddhav handed him a set of documents and he signed them. Jaidev has also contended that his father had told him that he wanted to give him a share in the family property.
During cross-examination, Jaidev said he had not discussed these (alleged) facts with Uddhav, because his father did not want any discord between the brothers.
Asked why he did not find out what documents Uddhav had given to his father to sign, Jaidev said Bal Thackeray had said he did not want a discord between the brothers, so he (Jaidev) did not pursue the matter.
Replying to a question as to why he left 'Matoshree', the Thackeray residence, to never return, Jaidev, whose relations with his father were strained, said it was due to an incident in the family which he would not like to talk about now or even in future. This incident had nothing to do with his father, he added.
Imports of solar cells and modules are on the rise, with in-bound shipments surging over three times to Rs 15,523 crore in 2015-16 from Rs 5,051 crore in 2014-15, Parliament was informed today.
In April of the first quarter alone, the import of solar modules and cell stood at Rs 936 crore, New and Renewable Energy Minister Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.
The imports stood at Rs 4,317 crore in 2013-14.
"Manufacturers from the US, China and other countries are supplying solar cells and modules in India and in some cases, the price is much lower than what is being offered by domestic manufacturers," Goyal said.
Because of international competition, the domestic manufacturers are impacted, he added.
On the government not imposing anti-dumping duty on such countries, the minister said: "Indian manufacturers gave in writing that they are not interested in continuing with the anti-dumping petition."
Director General of Anti-Dumping and Allied Duties (DGAD) had recommended imposition of anti-dumping duty on imports of solar cells and modules from China, Chinese Taipei, Malaysia and the US in May 2014.
While the government is concerned about domestic manufacturers, it is also worried about the price of power which has to be borne by common users, he explained.
The government is providing support to domestic manufacturers through a provision of reserving some capacities for domestic cells and modules, which gives assured market to them, he said.
Besides, the present domestic manufacturing capacity will not be able to take care of the government's yearly targets, he said, adding that the government has set a target of increasing solar power generation to 1 lakh mega watt by 2022 from 20,000 mw.
Indian general insurers do not see any negative impact of Brexit, the UK vote to leave European Union, on their business.
The country's general insurance sector largely depends upon the London market for their specialised and reinsurance needs. Over USD 2.5 billion of Indian reinsurance business is transacted in the London market every year.
Some of the major energy insurance and aviation deals involving ONGC, Indian Oil, Air India and Jet Airways are placed in the London reinsurance market every year.
"I don't think Brexit will impact our operations in anyway. Indian economy is on the verge of transformation and we want expertise from the London market to manage risks in various segments," GIC Re Chairman and Managing Director Alice Vaidyan told PTI.
Vaidyan recently attended an insurance event held in London.
GIC Re has got a profitable branch operation in London, where it is planning to set up a syndicate. The company underwrote a gross global premium of Rs 18,436 crore during 2015-16, registering a growth of 21.41 per cent over the previous fiscal.
Their premium split between the domestic and overseas business during the year was 55 per cent and 45 per cent respectively.
"We are in London since 1920 and have branches here besides reinsurance business of over Rs 1,000 crore in Lloyd's market. We will continue to operate here and expand our business," New India Assurance chairman and managing director G Srinivasan said.
According to Srinivasan, the country's general insurance industry will provide great deal of opportunities to the overseas insurance and reinsurance companies to set up their business here.
General insurance companies will significantly diversify from the current mix dominated by traditional areas like motor, fire and health even though a significant chunk of premium currently remains extremely under penetrated.
Moreover, micro/rural insurance would witness a massive growth aided by Government initiatives, he said.
British lawmaker Alok Sharma has been named Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), becoming the second Indian- origin minister in Prime Minister Theresa May's Cabinet.
The 48-year-old MP for Reading West, who had previously served in a special role of Infrastructure Envoy for India in the David Cameron led government, was named in the latest set of junior ministerial posts announced by Downing Street yesterday.
He was first elected to the British parliament in May 2010 and was re-elected in May 2015 from Reading West.
In his new role in the FCO, Sharma will work closely with newly-appointed foreign secretary Boris Johnson and is likely to be handed the charge of Indian affairs.
The minister who previously held the position, Hugo Swire, has resigned from the government along with Indian-origin peer Baroness Sandip Verma, who had served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for International Development (DfID) in the Cameron government.
The new Secretary of State in charge of DfID had been announced as Priti Patel last week.
While Patel had been a vocal supporter of Britain's exit from the European Union (EU), fellow Indian-origin MP Sharma had campaigned for Remain and even set up a cross-party group called British-Indians for IN.
Their presence in the Cabinet reflects May's broader attempt at balancing her Cabinet with pro and anti-Brexit campaigners as her government begins the process of the UK leaving the economic bloc.
MIT scientists have developed an inexpensive, solar-powered water treatment sytem for rural Indian villages, which lack affordable potable water and electricity.
The researchers have designed, built and tested their prototype system, and their next step is to implement it in a village outside of Hyderabad.
They found that thousands of people in the Mhasawad village in Maharashtra regularly drink water with a salinity level above 1,200 parts per million (ppm). The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends levels under 600 ppm.
"Excessive salt intake can be quite detrimental to one's health, both in the short and long term," said Maulik D Majmudar, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
In order to design a water treatment system that was affordable and would actually work in the context of rural Indian villages, assistant professor Amos Winter, and PhD candidate Natasha Wright first tried to develop an in-depth understanding of the problem by talking directly to the residents themselves.
"I realized that everyone was complaining about salt, even though I never even asked about it. They said it tastes bad, leaves marks on their pots and pans, and makes their stomachs hurt," Wright said.
Wright and Winter believe that by designing a community system that can provide tasty, desalinated water at an affordable price, all villagers will be more likely to consistently drink water that is clean and healthy, even if they have to pay for it.
RO (reverse osmosis) systems, installed in many villages, work by utilizing a high-pressure pump to push water through a membrane; the saltier it is, the more energy that is required to move the water through.
The problem is that after the first pass through an RO membrane, the now-pure water has been removed and what is left is concentrated saltwater.
It requires even more power to move this water through the membrane - so much more that the cost of the power outweighs the benefits, and manufacturers forgo a second pass to keep the costs down. This leads to wastage of water.
The researchers instead chose electrodialysis reversal (EDR), because at the area's typical salinity level of 500 to 2,000 ppm, it requires 25 to 70 per cent less energy than RO and can recover more than 90 per cent of the feed water.
They then replaced grid electricity with solar power, decreasing operational and capital costs at the same time.
Since EDR uses stacks of exchange membranes that only have to be replaced every 10 years, and that don't require any filters, they cut down on the maintenance costs by eliminating the need to replace membranes or filters often, researchers said.
UNESCO has named Iraqi marshlands once ravaged by dictator Saddam Hussein as a World Heritage Site, a bright spot for a country where jihadists have repeatedly sought to wipe out history.
The area named "is made up of seven sites: three archaeological sites and four wetland marsh areas in southern Iraq," UNESCO said.
"The archaeological cities of Uruk and Ur and the Tell Eridu archaeological site form part of the remains of the Sumerian cities and settlements that developed in southern Mesopotamia between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE," it said.
"The Ahwar of Southern Iraq -- also known as the Iraqi Marshlands -- are unique, as one of the world's largest inland delta systems, in an extremely hot and arid environment," UNESCO said.
Iraq has been seeking World Heritage status for the marshes since 2003, and its government hailed the move.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated the Iraqi people on UNESCO's decision, and thanked "all those who contributed to this success".
Abadi also said that culture in the country will continue "despite the destruction and demolition of Iraqi heritage and antiquities by barbaric terrorist gangs".
He was referring to Islamic State group's destruction of artefacts at the Mosul museum and the ancient cities of Nimrud and Hatra, the latter of which is a World Heritage Site.
IS has sought to couch the destruction in religious terms, saying it was targeting idols, but that has not stopped it from selling artefacts to fund its operations.
The marshlands once stretched across some 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles), but they were devastated after Saddam ordered them drained in the 1990s to stop them being used as hideouts by Shiite guerrillas opposed to his regime.
Many dams and canals ordered built by the dictator have now been demolished, allowing waters from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to flood back, fish and fowl to return and humans to settle once again.
A powerful Iraqi Shiite cleric whose militiamen battled US forces after the 2003 invasion has said that hundreds more American troops being sent to Iraq are "a target for us".
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter announced on a recent visit to Baghdad that 560 extra military personnel would be sent as part of efforts to combat the Islamic State group, which overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014.
"They are a target for us," Moqtada al-Sadr said in a statement on his website on Sunday, responding to a question about Carter's announcement.
There are already thousands of American military personnel in Iraq as part of the anti-IS fight, meaning that Sadr's forces have had ample opportunities to target US troops if they were going to do so.
Sadr's Mahdi Army militia was one of America's main foes in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, engaging in fierce fighting with US troops in Baghdad and the city of Najaf to its south.
Sadr's forces - now called Saraya al-Salam - have taken part in operations against IS, but one of their main tasks has been the defence of shrines and other religious sites.
Iraqi forces - including pro-government paramilitaries groups, of which Iran-backed Shiite militias are the most powerful - have regained significant ground from IS.
A US-led coalition is carrying out air strikes against the jihadists and also providing training and other assistance to Iraqi forces.
With Carter's announcement, a total of more than 4,600 American military personnel are now authorised to be in Iraq.
An Iraqi woman who went to a hospital here for treatment was allegedly molested and sexually harassed by a staff of the hospital.
In her complaint to the police the woman alleged that she was molested and sexually harassed by a unknown person in the hospital premises during the course of treatment while she was admitted to the hospital.
The police on Monday said the incident occurred on May 5, 2016 when the woman went to the Fortis hospital for check-up.
The (Previously known as Gurgaon) police received a letter from Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to conduct investigation into the matter after registering a case, PRO of Gurgaon Police, Hawa Singh said.
Police said the Police Commissioner's Office received the MEA letter on Monday.
A complaint has been made to the Embassy of Iraq by a female Iraqi that she was sexually harassed while she was admitted in Fortis hospital, . MEA has informed Gurgram Police about this," the PRO said.
After receiving the letter from MEA, Gururam Police have registered an FIR in this connection at Sushant Lok police station.
"Although FIR has been registered in Sushant Lok, police station, Gurgram Police is yet to receive the original complaint made by the lady.
"Further investigation will be carried out upon receiving the lady's complaint", said Deepak Saharan, DCP-East Gurugram.
An official Spokesperson of Fortis Memorial Research Institute said, this is a case dating back over two months back allegedly involving a contractual worker employed by an external agency.
The worker was immediately relieved of his duties.
The external agency is co-operating fully with the concerned authorities who are looking into the matter, the Spokesperson added.
A Jain monk was injured in an alleged attack by unidentified person in the wee hours today inside his ashram in Alwar district, police said.
The incident occurred at Divya Dham on Alwar-Bhiwari mega highway in Tijara where Saurabh Sagar was asleep when he was hit by a sharp object, they said.
He received mild injury in the attack and was rushed to a hospital, SHO Tijara police station Hemraj Singh said.
Police are yet to identify the attacker and ascertain the motive behind the incident, he said, adding the statement of the injured monk, was under treatment, could not be recorded so far.
Tamil Nadu government today launched the free bus pass scheme for school and college students for the year 2016-17, with Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa giving away smart cards to five beneficiaries.
The government scheme, aimed at benefiting students from poor backgrounds, covered 28.05 lakh students in 2015-16, an official release said.
This year, 31.11 lakh students will be provided free smart card bus passes at an estimated Rs 504.31 crore, it said.
To mark the launch, Jayalalithaa gave away smart cards to five students at the Secretariat here, it added.
Meanwhile, the CM launched a pension scheme for beneficiaries of her RK Nagar constituency and gave away pension orders to five persons.
A total of 1248 beneficiaries will receive a monthly pension of Rs 1000 starting this August, the release said.
Jharkhand Food, Public
Distribution and Consumer Affair Minister Saryu Roy today said about a month-long massive campaign would be launched tomorrow to identify those ration card holders who were not eligible for the government benefits.
The campaign will be launched across the state till August 15 to ask such beneficiaries to surrender the ration card as well as the benefits (subsidized foodgrain) availed, Roy told a press conference here.
The department will be forced to register FIR against those beneficiaries, who will not return the ration card as well as the foodgrains they availed, he said.
Over one lakh such beneficiaries have already returned their ration cards following our warning issued recently, he said adding that the distribution of ration cards among the new bonafide beneficiaries will start from tomorrow.
The department has started linking the beneficiaries with Aadhar Card to check ineligible beneficiaries from taking the benefits, he said adding that around 92 per cent population have the Aadhar cards in the state.
The minister said the department had decided to monitor supply of foodgrain through GPS system in vehicles carry it, he said adding that as soon as these vehicles would leave from the FCI godown, the concerned public distribution system dealer would get SMS on his mobile.
To further strengthen the Ration Card Management system, he said a meeting of all Deputy Commissioners and Officials of the department had been convened at Ranchi on July 23.
More than 2.59 crores members from 57.50 lakh households from 22 district of total 24 distircts of the state will get the benefit under National Food Security Act following the approval of the union government from next month, he added.
The two leading Indian-Americans in the Republican party -Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley- are not on the list of speakers at the Republican National Convention which would culminate on Thursday with the formal nomination of Donald Trump as the party's presidential candidate.
Once a leading star of the party, former Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal, who was a sharpest critic of Trump as the presidential primary candidate, is not among the list of speakers invited to attend the GOP convention.
Jindal, the two term-Governor of Louisiana, who was the first Indian-American Governor of an American State, has said that he would not be attending the convention.
However, he plans to vote for Trump in the November general election being a dedicated party member.
South Carolina Governor Haley, who is a favorite of Tea Party and considered to be a rising star of the party, has declined an invitation to speak at the Republican National Convention, her spokesperson said.
Her differences with Trump is well-known.
Notably she was one of the leading national speakers at the RNC Convention in Tampa in 2012.
During the primaries Haley had supported Trump's two opponents. However, she would be attending the convention but maintaining a low profile.
But a small contingent of Indian-Americans are attending the four-day extravaganza in various capacities.
Topping the list is the RNC delegates Dr Sampat Shivangi from Mississippi, Harmeet Dhillon and Dilip Bhutani from California. Notably, Dhillon is the first vice chairman in California Republican Party history, while Dr Shivangi is now a regular feature at the RNC conventions.
Young and energetic Raj Shah is attending the convention in his capacity as the heading the department of research against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Republican Hindu Coalition, which was formed last year, today announced that they are in attendance at the Cleveland Convention.
The coalition is being led by Shalabh 'Shalli' Kumar and Abhay Patel, the GOP Senate candidate from Louisiana.
"The Republican Party is the party of the future," said Kumar.
"We will continue to represent the interest of Indian- Americans in the Republican Party and help advance conservative causes like free enterprise, with limited and smaller government; fiscal discipline; family values; and a firm foreign policy of strength against radical Islamic terrorism and policies that keep in mind America's security," he said.
As per a recent poll, an overwhelming majority of Indian Americans support Clinton and the Democratic party.
Indian Americans have been appointed at key positions in the Democratic party and have been given key positions in the Clinton campaign.
Kolkata-based JIS University, which has recently become part of the United Nations Academic Impact, today announced it will soon start offering courses in technology, pharmacy, education and media.
Professor B C Mal, vice chancellor of JIS University which had started operations last year, said they will gradually move beyond traditional engineering courses to venture into areas like aerospace engineering.
"We will offer programmes in applied sectors of science, technology, medicine and management. From the 2016-17 academic session we will roll out programms in pharmacy, education and media besides technology," Mal told reporters here.
The private university is already offering courses in physics, chemistry, geology, biotechnology, management, hotel and hospitality management and law.
Realising the importance of skills in getting jobs and becoming entrepreneurs, he said they have planned to make skill development an integral part of all undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum.
Officials said recently the varsity has got membership of the prestigious United Nations Academic Impact which has more than 1000 top universities and institutions from all over the world.
On collaboration front, JIS University has already tied-up with Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok.
"Talks are on with many other American and European institutes for academic collaborations and mutual co-operation," the VC said.
Sajjan Jindal-promoted JSW Energy will acquire Jaiprakash Power Ventures' 500 MW thermal plant at Bina in Madhya Pradesh at base enterprise value of Rs 2,700 crore.
"The company has agreed to acquire the 500 MW (2X250 MW) thermal power plant located at Bina, district Sagar in Madhya Pradesh from Jaiprakash Power Ventures Ltd," JSW Energy said in BSE filing today.
After JSW Energy announced purchase of Jindal Steel & Power's Chhattisgarh thermal power plant for around Rs 6,500 crore in May, this is the second purchase of a power plant by the company.
JSW Energy envisages an electricity generation capacity of 10,000 MW by 2020.
JSW Energy also said that it has agreed to consider acquisition of 100 per cent equity in Minerals & Energy Swaziland (Pty) Ltd. It has prospecting rights over a coal bearing area admeasuring 8000 hectares in Swaziland.
JSW proposed to acquire 100 per cent share capital of Minerals & Energy Swaziland (Pty) Ltd for a lump sum consideration of not more than USD 1.5 million.
In a separate filing, Jaiprakash Power Ventures said that its board has accepted the recommendations of the committee of directors as well as the audit committee to hive off and transfer of 500 MW Bina thermal power plant as a going concern basis to its subsidiary Bina Power Supply Ltd (BPSL) through the scheme of arrangement approved by the board subject to all requisite regulatory and other approvals.
It further said, the board approved the securities purchase agreement with JSW Energy Ltd "regarding the sale of entire securities...Of BPSL...To JSW subject to satisfaction of conditions precedent including the scheme of arrangement becoming effective and all such regulatory and other approvals as may be required."
The consideration to be received from JSW is linked to a base enterprise value as on September 1, 2015 of Rs 2,700 crore for sale of 100 per securities of BPSL subject to mutually agreed adjustments, it said.
The requisite shareholders approval for the sale of securities shall be obtained, it added.
Attacking the ruling PDP-BJP dispensation in Jammu and Kashmir over its "calculated silence" on the ongoing unrest in the Valley, the CPI has asked the Centre to call an all-party meeting to restore normalcy in the state as it contended the situation there is "not merely of law-and-order".
In a resolution passed on the issue by its National Council, which met here between July 15 and 17, the CPI also reiterated its demand for a judicial probe into the incident.
"The calculated silence by the ruling alliance in the state and central government, for the reasons best known to them, has done great damage to peaceful environment of the state.
"...CPI strongly condemns the PDP-BJP government's handling of the situation and reiterates our demand for calling all party meeting to restore normalcy in the state," the resolution reads.
The CPI demanded security forces to restrain their "repressive" methods on protesters and demanded stopping immediately use of pellet guns, which the Left party found to be "most reprehensible".
On the other hand, the CPI said, people of Jammu and Kashmir too should work for restoration of peace and harmony.
Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces a day earlier in Kokernag area of Anantnag district.
In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 people including a cop have been killed, while nearly 3,200 people including 1,500 security force personnel have been injured.
Rejecting 'plebiscite' demands as an "outdated" idea, the government today asserted that Kashmiris are "our own people" who are being "misguided" as it blamed Pakistan for the unrest in the valley and said all parties will be taken along in dealing with the situation.
The issue of 10-day-old unrest in Kashmir resonated in Rajya Sabha on the opening day of the Monsoon session, with the House taking up urgent discussion during which the opposition slammed the government and pressed for holding an all-party meet while pitching for a political solution rather than using "barrel of the gun".
The opposition, while attacking Pakistan for fanning trouble in Kashmir, asked the government to initiate a political process and direct security forces to exercise restraint while dealing with protests.
Replying to the debate, Home Minister Rajnath Singh affirmed that while militancy will be dealt with sternly, there should be "no instant" use of bullets while dealing with mobs which should first be tackled by the use of teargas and water cannons.
The use of pellet guns, which have been blamed for most civilian injuries, would be looked into, regarding which he will talk to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, he said.
Singh said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he himself had asked security forces to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with mob violence which started after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
The Home Minister said he had, on Saturday last, expressed desire to visit Kashmir and have a dialogue with the people directly. Mehbooba, while welcoming the offer, told him that after the situation normalises a bit, she will come to Delhi and have a meeting with him to discuss in what format talks can be held, he said.
"Whatever is happening in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored. The name is 'Pakistan', but its acts are 'na-pak' (not pious)," Singh said.
Referring to the demands for 'plebiscite', he ruled it out, saying it is "outdated" and people of Kashmir are being "misguided" on this issue.
"Kashmiris are our own people. We will bring them on the right path... We will make them aware of the reality," he said.
Invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee's famous remarks of 'Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat and Insaniyat' (kashmiriyat, democracy and humanity), he said "If there is any place for Kashmiriyat in 'Jamhooriyat' (democracy), it can be only on the basis of 'Insaniyat' (humanity) and not 'Haivaniyat' (devilish acts). Those believing in Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat, cannot give space to haivaniyat.
Earlier, initiating the discussion, Leader of Opposition
Ghulam Nabi Azad said while his party stands with the government and the PDP-BJP coalition in the state in dealing firmly with militancy, the "excessive use" of force against the common citizens, including children and women, is not acceptable.
For the current unrest, the Congress leader blamed a number of reasons including BJP's participation in government with PDP in the state, provocative statements made by some leaders of BJP and RSS besides Pakistan, "whose existence is the root cause of all problems."
He underlined that Kashmir cannot be ruled "through the barrel of the gun or bullets" and demanded that responsibility be fixed for "excessive use" of force.
Azad said the "bullets that are meant for militants should not be used against our own people in Kashmir". He even questioned why such bullets and pellet guns were not used in Haryana which had witnessed large scale Jat violence over quota in February.
Azad also demanded all-party meeting on the issue, a sentiment echoed by almost all other parties. Some demanded sending of an all-party delegation to Kashmir.
Azad also blamed TV channels for whipping up passion through talk shows. This sentiment was echoed by members of various other political parties also.
Leader of House Arun Jaitley admitted that the situation in Kashmir was a "matter of concern" but rejected the contention that the violence in the valley was a result of the BJP getting into power at the state.
Asserting that efforts are underway to restore normalcy at the earliest, he said the entire country should speak in one voice at this time and common man should not be made to suffer there.
Asking the youth to stay away from the agitation which is being held against the killing of a militant, he said, "When thousands of people attack the police, then understandably, there will be action. The fight is between the country and the separatists and common people are standing with the country which is in national interest.
"We want everybody and every party's support on Kashmir.
We will engage with all parties and take everyone along on bringing normalcy in Kashmir," the Home Minister said, while welcoming all statements by leaders to bring normalcy in the valley.
With regard to pellet injuries, particularly the eye injuries, he said he will look into the damage caused by it but could not say anything off-hand.
He, however, cited some study which had said that in the year 2010, six people had been killed, 198 were injured and 5 blinded because of the use of pellet guns.
He said a team of eye specialists has already been sent to Kashmir and the central government is ready to send even a special plane to airlift any number of people requiring specialised treatment for eyes as also other injuries.
Singh said the Centre is ready to extend all help to the state government in meeting the situation, including the provision of essential commodities in the curfew-bound valley.
With regard to prohibitions on newspapers and mobile internet in Kashmir, he said it should not happen and that he will discuss this issue too with the Chief Minister.
He asserted that militancy will be dealt with sternly and Pakistan should not interfere in India's internal affairs.
Jaitley, the Minister for Finance, said he agrees with Azad that Kashmir situation is "serious" and that things were fine till recently.
"But, thinking that everything is wrong only since the formation of the PDP-BJP government is incorrect," he said.
Referring to Azad's contention that PDP-BJP government was a "misfit", Jaitley, the Minister for Finance, said mathematics of the poll results were such that only two parties (BJP and PDP) could join to form a government.
"You (Congress) also joined hands with National Conference and PDP because you knew that national parties need to work with these regional parties. We have differences with the PDP just like you (Congress) did with PDP and NC... But for the idea of India, we joined hands," he said.
Attacking Pakistan, Jaitley said ever since Independence, it has "never reconciled to the fact that Kashmir is an integral part of India. And hence they go to every extent to disrupt India and Kashmir's progress. When they (Pakistan) saw that they couldn't win a conventional war, they resorted to terrorism and militancy."
Rajnath Singh, while slamming Pakistan for its "irresponsible" role, questioned its claim to be the "protector of Islam", asking "How can a country claim to be protector of Islam when it was born on the basis of religion, when it is witnessing bloodshed in the name of religion."
He questioned how Pakistan could claim to be concerned about Muslims in India when it itself could not remain united despite being a Muslim nation.
Asking Pakistan to lay off, Singh said, "It is for the government of India to look after minorities of India and we will do so, whether it is Muslims, Sikhs, Christians or anybody."
He asked the minorities to "keep faith" in the government, cautioning that there are a "lot of people out to misguide them.
Ohio Governor John Kasich is "embarrassing" the Republican party by not speaking at the national convention here, the Trump campaign said today as it called for unity in the party ahead of the November polls.
"The party is unified. Certainly, the Bush family we would like to have them. But they are the past. We are dealing with the future," Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort told reporters at a conference here when asked about the absence of top Republican leaders including those from the Bush family -- from which the party has had two US Presidents -- George H W Bush and George Bush.
"We would like to have them. But they do not reflect the future of the party. Many of the delegates supporting Jeb Bush are supporting Donald Trump now at this convention. Conventions are a healing time. We feel that the healing time is happening and when we leave here, it is going to be by and large a united party," Manafort said.
Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who is the vice presidential nominee of the party, would "certainly" help do that, he said.
The decision by Kasich, who is not attending the Cleveland convention despite it being held in his home state, to not attend the Cleveland convention despite it being held in his home state is "embarrassing", Manafort said.
He said Kasich, a former White House contender, was invited to speak at the Convention but he declined to do so.
"He did not want to participate (in the convention). We did not make that decision. We invited him. He chooses not to. This was his decision. We think, this was wrong decision. We wanted him to speak at the Convention. He chooses not to," Manafort said in response to a question.
Several top Republican leaders are not attending the Republican convention which is seen as their opposition to Trump. Prominent among them being 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Indian-American former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
Manafort said the party is united behind Trump.
Several of the former primary rivals of Trump including Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are speaking at the Convention.
On the first day, the convention would approve the platform, which is similar to the party election manifesto in India.
Kasich not attending the convention is "unusual", said John Green, Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, The University of Akron.
"This could have a very big impact (on Trump's prospects in Ohio)," he said at a conference.
"May be many Ohio voters would be inclined not to vote either Trump or Clinton," he said.
On the Republican side, there is a good bit of a tension between the Trump campaign and the Republican party.
With Kasich not supporting Trump, this could have a big impact on election prospects given that the latest polls indicate that it is a very tight race between Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
The Kerala Legislative Assembly passed a resolution on Monday, against the merger of State Bank of Travancore (SBT) with State Bank of India, stating it would adversely affect the state's economic growth.
The resolution, introduced by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, asked the Centre and Reserve Bank of India to rescind the decision to amalgamate SBT with State Bank of India (SBI).
However, the lone Bhartiya Janta Party member in the House, O Rajagopal, opposed the resolution, saying it was with a political motive. The Congress and Left parties were opposing the merger because of their hatred towards the BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said.
The chief minister said people of the state viewed the merger development with anxiety. Speaking during the two-hour debate, Finance Minister T M Thomas Issac termed Rajgopal's attitude 'narrow minded' and against the state's interest.
The ruling CPI-M-led LDF and Congress-headed UDF supported the resolution, which pointed out that the merger was against the state's interest. The resolution said SBT was the biggest bank in the state with 846 branches and Rs 8,000 crore of deposit. It said the Kerala government's major transactions were also with the bank.
SBT's agriculture development loan has played a key role in the economic growth of the state, the resolution added.
The Kerala Assembly today passed a resolution to take over four financially unviable schools which had been closed by respective managements.
AUP School at Malapparamba in Kozhikode, AUP School at Palatu in Kozhikode, AMLP School at Mangattumuri in Malappuram and PMLP School at Kiraloor in Thrissur were the institutions taken over by the government under sub-section (1) of section 15 of the Kerala Education Act, 1958.
Education Minister C Raveendranath, who introduced the resolution, said government would not in future take over any schools.
Raveendranath also said compensation would be given to the owners after assessing the value of assets.
Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala, who supported the resolution, wanted to know from government the total cost that would be incurred by the state exchequer in taking over the four schools.
The resolution was introduced in the wake of managements of these institutions having closed their schools after obtaining favourable judgments from the High court and Supreme court.
However, the resolution pointed out that closure was against the interest of public and students studying in these schools.
The state cabinet had earlier decided to take over these schools.
The closure of the 140-year old AUP School at Malapparamba, considered to be a heritage school, had evoked widespread protests in the area.
The LDF government in Kerala is planning to launch a comprehensive insurance scheme for more than 25 lakh migrant labourers in the state which would also serve as a database of them, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said today.
The scheme, titled 'Awas', would not only ensure social security to the migrant workers but also act as their database and registry, he told the state assembly noting that the number of crimes involving them were also on the rise along with their population.
"The Labour Department is mulling implementation of an insurance scheme, Awas, for them. Besides ensuring them safety and security, we can complete their registration also as part of that," Vijayan said, adding a residence mapping would be held to collect their exact whereabouts and other details.
He was replying to a Calling Attention by Congress member V P Sajeendran to the challenges and social problems reportedly being faced by the state due to the growing number of migrant labourers and their "increased involvement" in crimes.
Detailing the government's other welfare plans for the migrants, Vijayan said the government was planning to carry out periodical medical camps at the labour units to keep a tab on the health status of the migrants, in view of complaints about the reporting of many fatal diseases among them.
Quoting a study conducted by the Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation (GIFT) in 2013, he said there were 25 lakh migrant labourers working in the state and their number surely had gone further up in the last three years.
"The increasing inflow of migrant labourers poses a great challenge to the state. The number of crimes, they are involved, are also on the rise along with their total number. Besides gruesome murders, they are also allegedly involved in burglary and theft," he said and referred to the recent rape and brutal murder of a Dalit law student in Perumbavoor.
However, it was difficult to place restrictions on their entry into the state, he said, adding that police, labour contractors and owners of rented houses were given strict directions to keep the registry of migrant labourers in their respective areas.
Police were also keeping an eye on the criminal background of migrant labourers and whether any terror elements had infiltrated among them, he said.
The Chief Minister also added that majority of migrant labourers were coming to Kerala in search of better wages and peaceful environ and the government was committed to ensure them security and hygiene.
The gangrape and killing of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district rocked the Maharashtra Assembly on Monday, as the monsoon session of state legislature got underway.
Making a statement after ruckus by the Opposition in the Lower House, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said the accused in the gangrape and killing of the girl in Kopardi village of Ahmednagar district, have been arrested and the matter will be heard in a fast-track court.
Ujjawal Nikam will be the public prosecutor, he said.
The state government has given Rs 5 lakh financial help to the victim's family, Fadnavis said.
DNA samples of the victim and the accused have been sent for forensic tests, he said.
Raising the issue in the Lower House, Nationalist Congress Party legislator Ajit Pawar said the Kopardi case was more heinous than the Nirbhaya gangrape in Delhi.
"I request CM Fadnavis to take action against the guilty, considering the victim as your and our daughter," Pawar, a former deputy chief minister, said.
Former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan insisted that the House discuss the issue on Monday itself.
Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, who raised the issue through an adjournment notice, said the matter was serious and the House should discuss it.
Fadnavis said the matter could be discussed in a meeting of party group leaders in the House, before it is discussed in the Assembly.
The House was later adjourned after transacting other items on the agenda, which included paying condolences to former members of the House and introduction of new ministers.
A 15-year-old girl was brutally raped last week, allegedly by three men who inflicted injuries all over her body and broke her limbs before throttling her in the village in Ahmednagar district, sparking outrage as well as political slugfest, with the Congress demanding Fadnavis' resignation on "moral grounds".
The gangrape and murder case of a minor girl in Ahmednagar's Kopardi village has been handed over to the district's crime branch and an Additional Superintendent of Police-rank officer will probe the matter, police said today.
The 15-year-old girl was brutally raped on July 13, allegedly by three men who inflicted injuries all over her body and broke her limbs before throttling her at Kopardi village in Ahmednagar.
The incident sparked public outrage as well as a political slugfest, with the Congress demanding Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' resignation on "moral grounds".
Fadnavis today said in the state Assembly that noted lawyer Ujjwal Nikam has been appointed as public prosecutor in the case and the government has given Rs five lakh solatium to the victim's family.
"Looking at the seriousness of the case, now we have transferred the investigation of the case to our local crime branch which will be investigated under the direct supervision of an officer of Additional Superintendent of Police rank," Ahmednagar Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi said.
Several organisations today held demonstrations demanding stern action against the accused and also sought that the trial in the case should be done in a fast track court for speedy conviction.
"We have communicated the development so far in the case to the organisations (which held protests)," the SP said, adding the demonstrations were carried out in a peaceful manner and there was no law and order violation.
A senior Ahmednagar police officer said there were three persons allegedly involved in the crime and they have already been arrested.
"There are lot of rumours going on about one or two more suspects involved in the case. However, there is no other suspect in the case besides the three accused, who have already been arrested," the official said.
He said that even the girl's family members have named the three arrested persons as accused in the case.
Meanwhile, Santosh Gajre Patil of Sambhaji Brigade, which led today's demonstration in Ahmednagar, said the protest was carried out in a peaceful manner. Over 1,000 people participated in a rally at the collectorate office.
"We submitted a memorandum to the Collector demanding speedy trial with appointment of Nikam as government pleader and also sought compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the kin of the victim," he said.
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Meanwhile, Maharashtra Women's Commission said it had taken a very serious note of the incident and recommended to the government that an ex-gratia Rs three lakh be given to the girl's family under the 'Manodhairya' scheme meant for women victims.
Chairperson of the Commission Vijaya Rahatkar told
Refusing to join work in Kashmir citing the ongoing unrest and alleged stone-pelting on their transit camps, Kashmiri Pandit employees today continued their protest demanding evacuation of members of their community from the Valley.
As the protest entered fifth day today, they alleged that the state government has failed to reach out to over 500 KP employees serving in the Valley, who escaped from Haal transit accommodation in Pulwama, Bramulla, Kupwara transit camps, Vessu and Mattan KP employees colonies inAnantnag district and managed to reach Jammu.
Angry employees, including women and their children, continued their sit-in protest in the compound of Relief Commissioner's Office (RCO).
Leaders of Kashmiri Pandits- All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference (ASKPC), Zeishta Devi Prabandik Committee (ZDPC), All India Kashmiri Samaj (AIKS), All Party Migrant Coordinations Committee (APMCC) have extended full support to displaced KP employees posted in the Valley under Prime Minister's Special employment package in Kashmir.
The protesters said the "stone pelting attack" has created fear among migrant employees living in areas like Haal, Pulwama, Vessu and Mattan in Anantnag and other places in north and central Kashmir.
An alliance of Madhesis and other ethnic minority groups in Nepal today decided to vote against Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli-led government during a no-confidence motion in the Parliament this week.
A two-day meeting of the Federal Alliance here that ended today made the decision to this effect, according to the alliance spokesperson Om Gurung.
The Parliament is scheduled to begin discussion on the no-trust motionon Thursday.
Nepali Congress and the Maoists tabled the no-trust motion in the parliament last week against Prime Minister Oli, accusing him of not honouring his past commitments.
The motion was registered by Nepali Congress, CPN-Maoist Centre and CPN-United, whose combined strength is 292 seats in the 598-member Parliament.
The Madhesi parties' combined strength comes around 50 seats and their support will be crucial for passing the no-trust motion against the Oli government.
The meeting of the alliance, however, has not decided on joining the new government to be formed after the Oli government's dissolution, Gurung said.
Madhesis, mostly Indian-origin, 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.
Meanwhile, the alliance has decided to continue peaceful protests in support of its demands throughout the nation.
The form of the protest has been softened as the alliance has decided to hold 10 'extensive interactions' on its demands in 10 cities of the nation including Kathmandu Valley from third week of July 20 to mid- September.
The health of eminent litterateur and social activist Mahasweta Devi, who is in critical condition due to old age complications, is showing slight signs of improvement.
She, however, continues to be critical and on ventilation, doctors attending on her at the Belle Vue Clinic, where she is admitted for about 50 days, said.
The 90-year-old writer-activist, who is known for her dedicated service for the welfare of tribals in different parts of India, is suffering from kidney and lung ailments besides blood infection and urinary tract infection.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said she is keeping track of Mahasweta Devi's health and wished her speedy recovery.
"This is the first time that she won't be with us at our 21st July programme. We want her to stay well and stay healthy," she said at Nabanna, the state secretariat.
The Jnanpith, Padma Vibhushan and Magsaysay awardee has been suffering from age-related illness for a long time.
Cracking down on extortionists running the 'Syndicate Raj' in the real estate sector and rowdies, West Bengal police has arrested over a thousand people in specific cases and around 8,000 under preventive sections.
Additional Director General of Police (law and order) Anuj Sharma said all districts and police commissionerates in the state conducted an operation together yesterday to nab rowdies and extornists.
Altogether 1,023 people were arrested in specific cases while 7,972 were held under preventive sections, he said adding that they executed 1520 warrants.
A number of firearms, ammunition, bombs, illegal crackers, ganja and heroin were also seized.
Around 26000 litres of illicit liquor were also seized.
"There is a tendency among culprits that when we have a crackdown in one district they run away into another. So we conducted this in all districts," Sharma said.
Among the arrests, the largest number was from Burdwan followed by Nadia and North 24 Parganas near Kolkata.
Sharma said they would continue to do such crackdown in future also.
During the day, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee asked police to take strict action against the 'Syndicate Raj'.
She also had meetings with the top brass of the police including DGP and Kolkata Commissioner of Police.
A 40-year-old man allegedly committed suicide after killing his wife and two children in a village in Haryana's Sonepat district, police said today.
The incident occurred last night in Khwera village of Rai when Mukesh allegedly strangled to death his 7-year-old son, 5-year-old daughter and wife, they said, adding he hanged his wife's body from the ceiling after killing her.
Police said the accused then committed suicide by hanging himself, adding it is not clear what led to the crime.
A case has been registered in this regard.
A carpenter here claims to be running from pillar to post to get a loan sanctioned under Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) in spite of the Prime Minister's personal recommendations.
Sandip Soni, a resident of Barra area here, claims it took him three-and-a-half years to inscribe all the 18 episodes and 706 shlokas of Bhagavad Gita on 32 wooden sheets.
He claims on March 8, he had shown his work to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had not only praised it but also uploaded his photo with Sandip on Twitter.
The Prime Minister had also assured to help Sandip who told him of his wish to start a factory where he would train unemployed youth in the craft, claims the carpenter.
Subsequently, he met an official at the Prime Minister's Office who explained the procedure of obtaining loans under PMEGP.
Five days later, he got a call from a National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC) official in Kanpur who asked him to prepare a project report.
On July 14, the bank sanctioned a loan of Rs 25 lakh to him but there was no mention of PMEGP on the document. As a result, NSIC officials refused to grant him the subsidy, claims Sandip.
When contacted, NSIC officials said the bank was the authority concerned. Bank officials said they were looking into the matter.
The brutal gangrape and murder of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district rocked both the houses of Maharashtra Legislature as its Monsoon session got underway today with the Congerss-NCP opposition targeting the Devendra Fadnavis Government on a host of other issues as well.
A 15-year-old girl was brutally raped last week allegedly by three men who inflicted injuries all over her body and broke her limbs before throttling her at Kopardi village in Ahmednagar district.
The incident has sparked outrage as well as political slugfest, with the Congress demanding Fadnavis' resignation on "moral grounds".
Making a statement after ruckus by the Opposition in the Assembly, the Chief Minister said the accused in the heinous crime have been arrested and the case will be heard in a fast-track court.
Noted lawyer Ujjawal Nikam has been appointed as the public prosecutor in the case and the government has given Rs five lakh solatium to the victim's family, Fadnavis said.
DNA samples of the victim and the accused have been sent for forensic tests, he said.
The issue also figured in the Legislative Council, where, backing an adjournment motion by Leader of Opposition Dhananjay Munde (NCP), senior Congress member Narayan Rane hit out at the government saying that state Home department is in shambles.
The Upper House agreed to a short-duration debate on the issue tomorrow after the matter led to a 10-minute adjournment of the proceedings.
Taking a dig at Fadnavis who performed puja at Lord Vitthal temple in Pandharpur on the occasion of Ashadi Ekadashi last week, Rane said, "It seems as though the chief minister has entrusted the task of maintaining law and order to the Lord almighty."
"Women are not feeling safe and the chief minister is only making statements," he said.
He said that giving solatium and the appointment of Nikam as public prosecutor in the case will not bring back the girl to her parents.
Moving the adjournment motion, Munde said the Kopardi incident is scarier than the Delhi gangrape case.
"The anger among the people is palpable. The government is not serious, Chief Minister and Guardian Minister have no time to visit Kopardi," he said, adding that the CM shows haste in defending his Guardian Minister.
"Girls are scared of going to school. Attempts are being made to suppress the case as the statements were recorded late," he alleged.
Council Chairman Ramraje Nimbalkar later ruled that the
House would take up debate on the issue for a short duration tomorrow after the question and answer session.
Raising the issue in the Lower House, NCP legislator Ajit Pawar said the Kopardi case was more heinous than the Nirbhaya gangrape in Delhi.
"I request CM Fadnavis to take action against the guilty, considering the victim as your and our daughter," the former deputy chief minister said.
Former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan insisted that the House discuss the issue today itself.
Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, who raised the issue through an adjournment notice, said the matter was serious and the House should discuss it.
Fadnavis said the matter could be discussed in a meeting of party group leaders in the House, before it is discussed in the Assembly.
The Assembly later adjourned after transacting other items on the agenda, which included paying condolences to former members of the House and introduction of new ministers.
The session commenced amid vociferous protests by opposition against the BJP-led government also on issues like corruption and agrarian crisis.
Slogan-shouting Congress-NCP legislators staged a protest on the steps of Vidhan Bhawan complex alleging that tainted ministers have been inducted in the cabinet by the CM during the recent ministry expansion and reshuffle.
Moroccan King Mohammed VI announced that his country wanted to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member.
"For a long time our friends have been asking us to return to them, so that can take up its natural place within its institutional family. The moment has now come," the monarch yesterday said in a message sent to an AU summit taking place in Kigali, the MAP Moroccan news agency reported.
quit the grouping in protest in 1984 when the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was admitted as a member.
But although 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.
Morocco has occupied the sparsely populated Western Sahara area since 1975 in a move that was not recognised by the community.
It maintains that Western Sahara is an integral part of the kingdom even though local Sahrawi people have long campaigned for the right to self-determination.
In 1991, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire between Moroccan troops and Sahrawi rebels of the
Algerian-backed Polisario Front but a promised referendum to settle the status of the desert territory has yet to materialise.
In his address to the African Union, King Mohammed urged the bloc to rethink its position on the "fantom state" of Western Sahara, saying that a political solution was being worked on under the auspices of the UN.
Madhya Pradesh Assembly's monsoon session began here today with the House paying rich tributes to sitting and former MPs and MLAs who passed away recently.
As the House assembled on the opening day, Speaker Sitasharan Sharma mentioned about the deaths of some sitting and former MPs and MLAs.
Leading the House in paying tributes to the departed leaders, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan recalled the contribution made by sitting MLA Rajendra Shyamlal Dadu and MP Dalpat Singh Paraste.
Chouhan said Dadu was from a very highly educated family.
Referring to Paraste, the Chief Minister said he had maintained very good relations across the parties and was a popular leader who always won polls from whichever party he contested.
He also paid rich tributes to former Assembly speaker Yagyadatt Sharma, former MPs Laxminarayan Pandey, Rajesh Nandini Singh and Ranbahadur Singh, and others.
Besides Chouhan, acting Leader of Opposition Bala Bachchan, BSP Legislative Party Leader Satyaprakash Sakhwar and Women and Child Development Minister Archana Chitnis also paid rich tributes to the departed leaders.
The House also remembered former ministers Satyendra Pathak and Ibrahim Qureshi, former MLAs Narnaryan Singh and Kamta Prasad Kushwaha and retired principal secretary of Vidhan Sabha, Dr A K Payasi.
Later, Assembly observed two-minute silence following which the Speaker adjourned the House for a day as a mark of respect to the departed leaders.
The mother of slain Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch today alleged that prominent cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi, who made headlines for appearing in a controversial video with the social media star, "provoked" her son into murdering her daughter.
The 26-year-old model's mother's statement came on the same day when police announced that Mufti Qavi would be included in the murder investigation of the slain social media sensation.
Police had arrested Qandeel's brother Muhammad Waseem on Saturday. He has admitted to strangling his sister to death for the "honour of the family". Waseem said he gave her a tablet to subdue his sister and then strangled her in their family home over the weekend.
Waseem said he killed his sister due to her social media activities, which included a series of risque video posts with the prominent cleric, Mufti Qavi.
Qavi was suspended from the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee in the controversy following the video posts.
Speaking to Geo today, Qandeel's mother accused Mufti Qavi, her daughter's former husband Ashiq Hussain, and a man name Shahid of being involved in the murder.
She claimed her son Waseem carried out the murder on the advice of Mufti Qavi, and that the cleric "provoked" him into killing Qandeel. She claimed Waseem was also in contact with Qandeel's former husband Ashiq Hussain.
Earlier today, police announced that Mufti Qavi would be included in the murder investigation of Qandeel.
"We have decided to include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the murder investigation," said Azhar Ikram, the police chief in Multan where Baloch was killed.
"The scope of the investigation has been widened. The victim's brother, Aslam, will also be investigated. We are waiting for the forensic reports," Ikram said.
Reacting to the move of the police, Mufti Qawi said that he was willing to cooperate if approached by the police.
However, he said that it was "ridiculous" that he had been included in the murder investigation when the murderer had already confessed to the crime.
Prior to her death, Qandeel Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, spoke of worries about her safety and had appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security.
No help was provided and the interior ministry has not commented on her death.
In Facebook posts, she, spoke of trying to change "the typical orthodox mindset" of people in Pakistan. She faced frequent abuse and death threats but continued to post provocative pictures and videos.
The so-called 'honour-killing' has sent shockwaves across the country and triggered an outpouring of grief on social media for Baloch.
As Republican National Convention began here today amid tight security and tensions following a series of shootings in the US, Muslim doctors in this city have said they will provide medical help to Donald Trump's fans if needed despite his anti-Muslim rhetorics.
Trump, 70, who has encouraged a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US - from a complete ban of Muslims to "extreme vetting" - would be formally nominated as the party's presidential candidate at the convention.
Thousands of Trump's supporters from across the US have started arriving in the city along with the party delegates. Several thousand protesters along with the anti-Trump movement have also come to the city to hold protest rallies every day.
Cleveland's hospitals are already prepping for violence.
"But even as his most ardent supporters arrive for the Convention to cheer on his nomination, the city's Muslim doctors stand ready to provide them with medical help," The Daily Beast reported.
While 'Land is known for its high-quality hospitals, what's less well-known is that Muslims make up a substantial proportion of the city's medical professionals, it said.
In response to anti-Muslim rhetoric, Dr. Bryan Hambley helped found a Cleveland protest organisation of doctors, nurses, and medical professionals called Stand Together Against Trump, or STAT-which is a medical term from the Latin word "statim," meaning immediately or right away, it said.
"Muslim Doctors Save Lives In Cleveland" is one of the group's mottos. There are about a dozen Muslim medical professionals affiliated with the group, Hambley said, and he estimated that the medical residency programs he has been part of have included between 10 to 20 percent Muslim students.
"There's this running stereotype amongst Muslims that your parents expect you to either become a doctor or engineer. That's the way we see it," said Dr. Fatima Fadlalla, a resident physician in internal medicine who grew up in Cleveland and then returned for her residency.
She estimates that there are thousands of Muslim doctors in Cleveland, and that among her Muslim friends, around 90 per cent are physicians or in the medical field.
"We have a lot of Muslim doctors in this city. If they stopped working for a day, the whole medical system might come to a halt in the Cleveland area. We save lives every day," said Isam Zaiem, a retired medical technologist who has lived in Cleveland since 1974 but hails from Syria.
"I would just treat them like anybody else, if (a Trump supporter) needs my help. I would help without hesitation. It's no problem to have disagreement on issues," she was quoted as saying by the Daily Beast.
The protests, marches, and demonstrations planned for this week in Cleveland have the potential for a toxic mix: extremists from white supremacists to the New Black Panther Party have indicated that they will be attending.
has fired three ballistic missiles, South Korea's military said, just over a week after issuing threats to respond to the planned deployment of a US anti-missile system in the South.
The missiles, launched early today from the western city of Hwangju, flew between 500 and 600 kilometres (311-373 miles) toward the Sea of Japan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) said in a press statement.
The range of what were believed to be SCUD missiles is enough to reach all of South Korea, the JCS reported.
South Korea's military is keeping close tabs on the North's movement, it added.
Tensions have soared since Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, followed by a series of missile launches that analysts said show the North is making progress toward being able to strike the US mainland.
last week threatened to take an unspecified "physical action" after Washington and Seoul announced they would deploy a sophisticated US anti-missile defence system to counter the growing menace from Pyongyang.
Seoul and Washington earlier this month revealed their decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, in the South following recent North Korean missile and nuclear tests.
As we wait for Juno's first close-up images of Jupiter, NASA continues to explore our solar system to help answer fundamental questions about whether we are alone in the universe.
"There are many uncharted, promising worlds and objects we are eager to explore with our current and future missions," said NASA Planetary Division Director Jim Green.
The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, can observe not only faint objects across the universe, but also all of our neighboring planets and their moons within our solar system.
With Juno exploring Jupiter, NASA is also intrigued by its largest moons. Io's intense geological activity makes it the most volcanically active world in the solar system.
NASA has selected nine science instruments for a future mission to study whether Europa - a mysterious moon that scientists believe to have a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface - hosts habitable environments.
The Hubble Space Telecope has captured Jupiter's auroras and found evidence of saltwater on Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft continues exploring Saturn, its rings and moons, since 2004. In 2017, during the final phase of its long mission, Cassini will complete 22 dives through the narrow gap between Saturn's outer atmosphere and its rings. This exciting set of orbits is called the Grand Finale.
Titan is one of the major satellites of Saturn, with a rich atmosphere and surface chemistry that has been observed extensively by Cassini.
On July 14, NASA celebrated the one-year anniversary of New Horizons' flyby of Pluto, which brought the world unprecedented views of the dwarf planet and its moon, Charon.
The mission has been extended to study an object in the Kuiper belt, an icy field of early building blocks of the solar system packed with primordial organics.
NASA's Dawn mission set out to investigate the solar system's two largest asteroids remaining intact since their formation - Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres.
NASA will launch OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) in September, the first US mission to a near-Earth asteroid to collect a sample for return to Earth in 2023.
OSIRIS-REx will help unlock secrets of the history of our solar system, and shed light on how life may have come to be on our planet.
On our journey to Mars, we are closer than ever before to sending astronauts to the red planet, NASA said.
The Opportunity and Curiosity rovers are traversing Martian soil, while MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Odyssey are cruising the Martian skies above.
They are helping uncover Mars' past, present, and future by searching for clues in both the surface and the atmosphere.
The next Mars rover scheduled for launch in 2020 is under construction, and NASA's InSight Mission to study the interior of the Red Planet is scheduled to launch in 2018.
The Union HRD ministry today said that a National Fee Committee headed by Justice B N Shrikrishna has submitted its report recommending upper limits of fee that can be charged by professional colleges, which shall not include capitation fee.
The ministry said that there had been been complaints of charging of capitation fee by some professional colleges.
In order to regulate this, and in accordance with the Supreme Court of India's directions, a National Fee Committee under the chairmanship of Justice B. N. Shrikrishna was constituted for fixing norms and guidelines for charging of tuition and development fees in case of professional courses.
The Committee submitted its report recommending upper limits of fee that can be charged by the professional colleges, which shall not include capitation fee.
"Therefore, any Institution reported to be charging capitation fee shall be liable for punitive action under the AICTE Approval Process Handbook," the ministry said adding that this information had been given by HRD minister Prakash Javadekar today in a written reply to a Lok Sabha question.
A one-day-old baby girl was today found abandoned in a bag at a field in Chandreshar village here, police said.
The baby girl was found abandoned on the outskirts of Chandreshar village by the villagers in a bag when they had gone to defecate in the open field, said Bahadur Singh, ASI at Borekheda police station.
The baby, who was exposed to rain, was rushed to a hospital by police and members of Child Line and is undergoing treatment at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Singh said.
Child Line member Bhupendra Singh said the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) was informed about the baby's rescue.
A case has been registered against unidentified persons under relevant sections in this connection, the ASI said.
NIA today filed a charge sheet against the chief recruiter for the banned ISIS terror group in India Shafi Armar alias Yusuf-Al-Hindi and three others for allegedly being involved in various terror activities in the country.
The NIA filed the charge sheet against Armar, Rizwan Ahmed, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and Ayaz Mohammed before a special court here under various sections of Indian Penal Code and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
While Armar and Mohammed are absconding, the two others are in judicial custody.
The NIA said it found during the probe that Armar and his three accomplices hatched a conspiracy between July and December 2015 to "influence, instigate, motivate and radicalise the young vulnerable Muslim youth from Malwani area of Malad, Mumbai, to join the ISIS."
All the four had used numerous social networking platforms for waging jihad by violent means to attract the attention of like-minded persons and motivate vulnerable youngsters to indulge in terror activities for the banned international terrorist organisation, ISIS, with an intent to threaten the integrity of the nation.
According to the NIA, Ayaz Mohammed went to Iraq via Afghanistan and joined the ISIS. He was in contact with Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and a few other youths from Malwani, whom he tried to radicalise and motivate to join the ISIS.
Sayyed tried to spread his network and motivated youths to participate in the activities of the ISIS in India, and for this purpose, he was in close contact with Rizwan 'Nayab Ameer' of the organisation which was affiliated to the ISIS.
Rizwan Ahmed, who was also a member of SIMI, Jundul Khilafa Al Hind (JKH), Indian Mujahideen and Ansar-Ut-Tauheed (AUT), had made elaborate preparations and went to Chennai for collecting money for Jihad.
NIA said they prepared fake identity cards and used assumed names to conceal their identities. They extensively used different social media platforms like Facebook, Trillian, WeChat, Whatsapp, Surespot and Telegram, to communicate among themselves, besides exchanging e-mails.
The NIA said there was evidence to establish that Armar was the on-line handler in this conspiracy and was involved in motivating and radicalising the "vulnerable" Muslim youths all over the country.
A resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka, Armar was believed to have been killed in a US drone attack in March this year but the proved wrong after he started getting in touch with youths again in May this year.
Three members of a gang including, a Nigerian national and two women from Assam and Manipur, have been arrested for duping a woman of around Rs 2.5 lakh after befriending her through a social networking site, police said today.
Sunday Udubor (29), a Nigerian national living here on expired Visa for the last three years, had befriended Deepa, a resident of Pitampura and offered her a job of CEO in his UK-based company, Vijay Singh, DCP(northwest) said.
The complainant then received a message from Sunday that he had sent her the job offer letter and a gift. Deepa was called up by a girl claiming to be a courier company agent and asked her to deposit Rs 27,500 for courier charges of the gift. She deposited the amount in a specified account, the officer said.
Next day, she was told by another girl that her gift comprised 30,000 UK Pounds and demanded Rs 2.10 lakh as exchange fee which she again paid, Singh said.
However, she suspected cheating when Rs 4 lakh was demanded from her and she filed a complaint on the basis of which a case was registered at Maurya Enclave Police Station.
Sunday had formed a gang along with another African, who is yet to be arrested, and the two girls who befriended people on Facebook and duped them offering jobs in foreign countries, police said.
The other two accused Jasmine Vanlalhrietpui (24) from Assam and Wanshim Chithung (29) from Manipur, came in contact with Sunday through Facebook, the officer said.
The three accused were arrested yesterday from Uttam Nagar and a case of fraud was registered against them, the DCP said.
The Environment Ministry had issued notifications declaring three wildlife species as vermin in five states on their request, the government said today.
"Section 62 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act empowers the central government to issue notifications declaring any wild animal, other than those specified in Schedule I and Part II of Schedule II, as vermin for any specified area and a specified period by including the species in Schedule V of the Act.
"The Ministry has issued notifications under this provision of the Act based on the request of states," Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave said in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha.
Bihar had sought a notification declaring Nilgai and wild pigs as vermin in 31 districts and 10 districts, respectively. Uttarakhand had asked for a notification for wild pigs in 13 districts, he said.
Himachal Pradesh had sought a notification for Rhesus Macaque in 10 districts, Gujarat for Nilgai in 19 districts and Maharashtra for Nilgai in one district, and wild pigs in four districts.
The notifications are not applicable to forest areas of the respective states and only cover selected areas outside forests. They are valid for one year from the date of their publication, he said.
"The notifications do not prohibit enforcement of any law related to welfare of animals. As such, the existing animal welfare laws continue to be in force," the minister said in reply to another question.
Dave said that representations were received from several organisations pursuant to the Ministry's notifications declaring Nilgai, wild pig and Rhesus Macaque as vermin in specified areas of these states.
Recently, Union ministers Maneka Gandhi and Prakash Javadekar had locked horns over culling of animals with the former saying there was "lust" for killing in the Environment Ministry.
Javadekar, who held the post of the Minister for Environment and Forests before the Cabinet reshuffle, had defended animal culling, insisting it is done on the request of states to protect crops.
Animal rights bodies had also expressed "shock" over the Environment Ministry's stand, saying such killings will not help mitigate human-animal conflict.
With civic issues becoming a matter of slanging match between the AAP government and BJP-controlled MCD in Delhi, North Delhi Mayor Sanjeev Nayyar today challenged Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to show if any drain of PWD has been desilted.
"The situation of water-logging in the area is due to Delhi government's ill-preparedness as the drains falling under the corporations are almost desilted and that too before the monsoon season. But most of the bigger drains which belong to PWD or Irrigation and Flood Control department are not desilted which are outfall for smaller drains," Nayyar alleged.
Several parts of Delhi have been getting waterlogged for the last few days due to rains, triggering blame game between the AAP dispensation and municipal corporations.
The North Delhi mayor today inspected Nangloi, Mundka, Bawana and Narela areas for monsoon preparedness.
"During the inspection from Nangloi till Tikri Border, none of the points out of almost 20 visited were found to be desilted. Drains were either encroached or were overflowing resulting in water stagnation," Nayyar claimed in a statement.
"During the inspection, it was found that PWD drain adjacent to Delhi Police Residential Colony and A-Block in Nangloi is not desilted at all," he alleged.
In a bonanza to oil producing states like Assam, the government has ordered state-owned ONGC and OIL to pay royalty to them on the gross price for crude oil and not the net rate they actually realise.
As per government mandate, ONGC and OIL offers discounts on crude oil to make up for a part of the losses refiners suffer on selling cooking gas (LPG) and kerosene at government controlled rates. These discounts also covered diesel till October 2014, when the price of the fuel was deregulated.
So in effect, ONGC/OIL would raise a gross bill based on the prevailing international oil price but its actual realisation was less than that after accounting for the subsidy discount.
However, producing states felt ONGC and OIL need to pay royalty on gross billing. Gujarat High Court in November 2013 ruled in favour of the state government and ONGC was asked to pay about Rs 10,000 crore in past royalty dues.
This prompted other oil producing states, particularly Assam, to demand a similar treatment. Till the time Congress ruled Assam, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan maintained that the state government will have to approach the judiciary to get similar relief.
Now with a BJP government coming to power in the state, his ministry last week issued orders asking ONGC and OIL to pay royalty at pre-discount rates effective February 1, 2014.
"It has been decided that ONGC Ltd and Oil India Ltd will pay royalty to all similarly placed crude oil producing states at pre-discount prices effective February 1, 2014, pending the outcome of the Special Leave to Appeal (Civil)... Filed by ONGC Ltd before the Supreme Court (against the Gujarat High Court order)," the ministry order said.
With this order, Assam stands to get more than Rs 1,400 crore as additional royalty from ONGC/OIL. Andhra Pradesh will get about Rs 72 crore extra royalty from ONGC due to this decision.
According to the Oil Field Act, ONGC/OIL are required to pay 20 per cent royalty on price of crude oil it extracts from onland oil blocks to the state governments.
ONGC till 2004 paid royalty on gross billing. But, in 2004, the Union government asked it to provide crude to refiners like Indian Oil Corp Ltd at discount as per burden-sharing mechanism.
Since then ONGC paid royalty on discounted price, resulting in reduction of royalty paid to Gujarat and other states. The state also complained to the Centre in this regard.
Gujarat government in 2011 filed a petition before the High Court, stating that it should be paid royalty at market rate and the difference in royalty payment since 2008 at pre- discount rate (in comparison to market rate) was computed at Rs 9,000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore. The High Court ruled in its favour in November 2013.
A 30-year-old man was killed and four others, including two women, were injured when the car in which they were travelling collided with a speeding truck on NH-27 near Dhabi town in Bundi district.
The accident occurred last evening in which Narendra Singh was killed on the spot, while Aakash (25), Pavan (23) Pinki (23) and Sita (18), all residents of Kota, were injured, Dhabi police station SHO Ram Vallabh Meena said.
The body was handed over to family members after postmortem, he said, adding three of the injured were shifted to Maharao Bheem Singh (MBS) hospital where Sita's condition is stated to be critical, whereas Pavan was taken to a private hospital by his family.
A case has been registered against the absconding truck driver and his vehicle was also seized, Meena said.
More than a thousand residents of Prahladnagar locality in Kheda district were asked to vacate their houses today following chlorine gas leak from a tanker belonging to the city's civic body, officials said.
"One of the three tankers parked at a water supply department's storehouse at Prahladnagar leaked, causing breathing problem to residents of nearby locality. We ordered evacuation of around 1,200 people living in nearby residential societies as precautionary measure till the situation is brought under control," Kheda Collector Kuldeep Arya said.
"As many as 22 persons complained of breathing problem and were admitted to the government hospital. Some of them have already been discharged," Arya said.
Around six fire-brigade vehicles were called in from Nadiad, Anand and Ahmedabad to control the leak, he said.
"The leaking portion of the tanker, which contained around 900 kilolitre of chlorine, was eventually sealed and chlorine that escaped in the air has subsided and settled," Arya said.
The chlorine tankers belonged to the city's civic body and it is used as a disinfectant.
A Palestinian stabbed two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank today before being shot and arrested, months after his brother was killed while carrying out an attack, the Israeli army said.
"An assailant armed with a knife stabbed two IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers during routine activity near Al-Arroub," an army statement said, referring to an area south of Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.
"Forces shot and detained the assailant," it added.
An army spokeswoman said the two soldiers' wounds were not life threatening.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the man shot as Mustafa Baradeah from Al-Arroub refugee camp.
His brother Ibrahim was killed in April after carrying out an attack with an axe that left a soldier lightly wounded, the Israeli army and a Palestinian security source said.
Al-Arroub is located about halfway between Bethlehem and the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron, where many of the attackers in a recent wave of violence have come from.
Violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories since October last year has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese.
Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.
Others were shot dead during protests and clashes, while some were killed by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
For greater ease of doing business in India, the CBDT today said it has put in place new protocols which will ensure that corporates are allotted PAN and Tax Deduction Account Number (TAN) within a day.
Interacting with reporters here, Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) Chairman Atulesh Jindal said the Income Tax department had recently introduced the facility for corporates allowing them to apply for TAN using digital signatures, while individuals can now get a new PAN through Aadhaar-based e-signature facility which will reduce the effective time in allotment of the unique I-T department issued number by half.
"CBDT has agreed to seamless exchange of data with Ministry of Corporate Affairs to ensure that upon incorporation of a company by MCA the PAN and TAN number are allotted within a day. The process of getting a PAN or TAN has been fast-tracked for all category of taxpayers," he said.
Jindal said the new measures are specifically aimed to ensure "ease of doing business in the country" and help taxpayers in getting PAN quickly.
"The PAN number has been made the unique business identifier for all different categories of businesses not only for assessees of the Income Tax department but also for other organisations.
"We have taken certain steps for easing the allotment of the PAN number and the process has been made totally digitised. Besides this, the corporate assessees who are filing applications on e-biz platform and the corporate who is coming to us for allotment of PAN, now such a corporate can file such an application online using the digital signature. No physical document is required to be attached along with the application," he said.
The CBDT boss said for normal taxpayers and those in the non-corporate category, these processes have also been digitised.
"They (taxpayers) can also file the application without any annexure using digital signature. Besides that, we have also introduced another facility, a convenient facility for those who do not have digital signature. They can file using Aadhaar-based e-signature facility," Jindal said while talking about processes that will be available to individuals seeking a PAN.
As many as 20 central government services including industrial licence and employer registration have been integrated with the e-Biz platform, in a move aimed at improving ease of doing business.
The e-biz project has started with the objective of providing government services through a single-window portal.
About a crore Aadhaar numbers have been linked with the I-T department issued Permanent Account Number (PAN) on the e-Biz portal till now.
(Reopens DEL-66)
A senior I-T official said the e-signature needed for obtaining PAN using Aadhaar can be obtained in a one-time fashion by a taxpayer and it will cost around Rs 5-7.
"These measures will simplify things. In this e-biz portal we have prioritised everything. The time that is being cut is with regard to the submission of the physical documents for obtaining PAN or TAN by any category of taxpayer, whether corporate or individual," the official said.
He said the department, over the last few years, has weeded out over 11 lakh duplicate PANs and the possibility of issuing two PANs to one person is remote now.
Talking about direct tax collections, which registered a growth of 24.79 per cent to Rs 1.24 lakh crore during April- June period mainly on account of early advance tax mop-up, Jindal acknowledged that these numbers are "not the actual indicator" of revenue collections.
He said Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) collections is showing a growth of more than 16-17 per cent at present.
"Only concern for us today is the corporate sector collection. That is not up to the mark. Personal income tax has shown a very good growth," he said.
Jindal said the tax department is "very very serious" about increasing the tax base for which it is using non-intrusive methods and technology.
He said with the help of a special electronic project called Non-filers Management System (NMS) to identify non-filers or stop-filers, the I-T department has identified over a crore taxpayers and collected Rs 6,000 crore in taxes last year.
"We get information from various sources and under different heads under the NMS and we are making this system more robust," the CBDT chief added.
On the first day of the Monsoon session, Rajya Sabha today passed a bill providing for setting up a regional centre for Biotechnology, which will act as a mentor institution and focus on training of skilled manpower as well as work on research and development.
Lok Sabha had passed the bill in April this year.
The government through an executive order in April 2009 had established the Regional Centre for Biotechnology Training and Education at Faridabad. Now with approval from Parliament, the institute would be able give Masters and Phd degrees, just like the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
Science & Technology and Earth Sciences Minister Harsh Vardhan today introduced the Regional Centre for Biotechnology Bill, 2016 in the Upper House and within half an hour, it was passed by voice vote.
The bill provides for establishing a regional biotechnology centre that will work on education, training and research, under the auspices of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the National Capital Region and declare it to be an institution of national importance, he said introducing the bill.
"This centre will take up research and innovation as well as impart education and training in new areas of biotechnology at the interface of multiple disciplines of science creating a hub of technology expertise," Harsh Vardhan added.
Bio-technology is a new and growing field with immense potential for societal benefit and economic transformation. It has been considered as a powerful enabling technology that can revolutionise agriculture, healthcare, industrial processing and environmental sustainability, the Minister said.
Participating in the brief debate, S C Mishra (BSP) asked the Minister to specify whether the government will follow the reservation policy while making appointments in this institute.
Harsh Vardhan said there is a mandate by Parliament on such institutions which will be followed.
To this some members from the BSP, Congress, DMK and TMC demanded that the Minister should clarify the government's stand on reservations on appointments on this issue.
Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman P J Kurien intervened and said that Harsh Vardhan has already said that the institution will be run as per the rules.
But the members demanded further clarification, to which the Minister said reservation policy will be followed as per the prescribed rules.
During a short discussion on the Bill, N K Swain (BJD) said similar institutions should be opened in other parts of the country.
Derek O' Brien (TMC) claimed that the government and Congress are talking among themselves on various issues and other parties are being left out.
To this, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi quipped: "We are not doing anything chori chori chupke chupke (quietly).
Police today unearthed two minigun factories in Bardah village and arrested two persons in this connection from Bihar's Munger district.
Superintendent of Police Ashish Bharti said that the police arrested two persons namely- Mohammad Jasim and Mohammad Sabban- while they were making pistol during the raid in the village.
Police recovered one each semi-made automatic pistol from their possession, he said adding that two drill machines along with equipment to manufacture arms have also been seized.
A new research into gender differences in academic achievements in school has called on boys to be treated more like girls in pre-school years to prevent them from falling behind in studies.
Researchers from Bristol University found that literacy based activities in the early years - reading books and using the library - have a protective effect for both boys and girls.
While boys mostly experience the same levels of these activities as girls, there are other activities like songs/nursery rhymes, drawing/ painting and learning letters that girls experience more frequently.
Parents are advised to also read more story books to boys and reward them with stickers or hugs to boost their concentration, the British academics concluded.
"We do not know how far gendered expectations of boys' versus girls' behaviours are driving some of these differences in social interaction. We do know that both boys and girls will benefit from a rich language and literacy environment in which adults extend children's language and engage their interest in a wide range of pre-literacy activities.
"These are important protective factors that lay the building blocks for success in schooling,"said Prof. Gemma Moss from Bristol University.
The risk of falling behind at the age of five is much higher for both boys and girls from lower socio-economic backgrounds, the report found.
"We cannot wait for disadvantaged children and boys to get to school before they receive the support they need. By this time many will have already fallen behind, with negative consequences for their childhoods, school attainment and life chances," it said.
It added: "The gender gap is well-documented. It has hardly changed for five-year-olds over the past decade, despite a dramatic improvement in overall results. The difference in outcomes for boys and girls is having a devastating impact; nearly a million boys have fallen behind with their early language skills since 2006.
"That is nearly a million five-year-olds who may struggle with skills like explaining what they think and how they feel, and engaging with the adults and children around them."
Overall, one in four boys were behind in language at age five in 2014/15, compared to 14 per cent of their female classmates in Britain.
In the last academic year alone, around 80,000 boys in England were behind in language and communication when they started school.
The report for Save the Children charity also says that children who start school behind often never catch up.
"Latest figures show more than 80 per cent of children are reaching the expected communication and language skills by age five, but we will continue working with the sector until every child gets the high-quality education they deserve," a Department for Education spokesperson said in reference to the report's findings.
A pregnant woman on way to a hospital was killed and five others were injured when an ambulance hit a road side tree near Shankarakhole in Odisha's Kandhamal district early today, police said.
The accident took place as the ambulance lost control and dashed against the tree on its way from Raikia to the district headquarter hospital at Phulbani for the woman's delivery, they said.
The injured persons, including the driver of the ambulance, ASHA worker and relatives of the woman, were rescued and admitted to hospital with the help of locals, police said.
Congress leader Narayan Rane today raised strong objection to the ordinance moved by BJP-led government in Maharashtra for creating MMRDA-like authorities in Pune and Nagpur.
He contended that the government was violating the spirit of the 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1993, which granted more powers to civic bodies and strengthening them.
Raising a debate in Maharashtra Legislative Council, the Congress MLC argued that the government was trying to encroach upon the powers of municipal corporations.
He demaded that ordinance be withdrawn and redrafted after removing the contentious points.
Replying to the debate, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis clarified that the development and planning authority for Pune and Nagpur, on the lines of Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), was meant for regions excluding the civic limits of Pune and Nagpur municipal corporations.
"The government has no intentions to curb the powers of the civic bodies. The ordinance was vetted by the law and judiciary department and then by the office of the Governor," Fadnavis said.
State Minister for School Education Vinod Tawde said the issue before the House was only limited to tabling of the ordinance and recording it in the proceedings.
The newly appointed deputy governor N S Vishwanathan today met the entities that have received in-principle approval for setting up small finance banks and discussed their concerns over the regulatory requirements.
"They have been given in-principle approvals subject to their meeting certain conditions to become small finance banks. We reviewed what they are doing as part of this journey to meet those requirements and also what would be the regulatory framework. Whatever clarifications they wanted, I gave them," RBI's newly appointed deputy governor N S Vishwanathan told reporters here after meeting the entities.
However, he did not give further clarifications on the discussion.
In September last year, the RBI had given in-principle approval to 10 entities for setting up small finance banks. The 10 entities included Au Financiers, Capital Local Area Bank, Disha Microfin, Equitas Holdings, ESAF Microfinance and Investments, Janalakshmi Financial Services, RGVN (North East) Microfinance, Suryoday Micro Finance, Ujjivan Financial Services, Utkarsh Micro Finance.
So far, only one entity Capital Small Finance Bank has started operations.
Recently, the Reserve Bank has given final approval to Equitas Holdings to launch a small finance bank.
The Chennai-based ESAF Microfinance has applied for the final approval to Reserve Bank.
The Republican convention, which will formally coronate billionaire as the party's presidential candidate, will kick off here amid tight security and heightened tensions following a series of shootings in the US.
Sleuths of security forces and secret service agents have converged on the city and huge make-shift iron walls have come up several blocks around the Quicken Loans Arena where the Republican National Convention would be held over the next few days July 18 to July 21.
The convention is aimed at Americans to "get to know the man" rather than Trump the candidate, his top campaign aide said here yesterday.
A different and new image of Trump, a successful businessman and a great human being, would be narrated through the personal stories of people who have known him and worked with him throughout the past several decades and along with his own family members, his campaign manager Paul Manafort said.
Manafort said the line to speakers have been selected in such a way which so that "Americans would get to know Trump the man" and not the candidate.
"They're going to see more of the man. I mean, they've seen him on the campaign trail, but they haven't seen him in the back, in the boardrooms. They haven't seen him up close and personal. They have a perspective of the man, but this convention is going to focus on the whole part of the personality," Manafort said.
Trump, 70, is scheduled to arrive in the city on Monday, but is unlikely to address the convention which would have a theme beginning with "Make America Safe Again".
Main speakers as per the list announced are Melania Trump, Lieutenant General (ret) Michael Flynn, Senator Joni Ernst, Jason Beardsley and Congressman Ryan Zinke.
"A administration will listen to and learn from our nation's heroes who have put themselves in harm's way and pursue a national security strategy and foreign policy that will strengthen our military and make America safe again," the Republican Convention said in a statement.
"You're going to have his family speaking. You're going to have friends who have known him speaking. You're going to have people who have worked with him both inside the company and outside of the company. And so you're going to see how he's built his successful empire," Manafort said.
Strongly refuting the allegations that the party is divided, Manafort said the Republican was united under Trump.
"It is a Trump convention. The delegates on the floor are going to be his delegates. More importantly, the message is going to be his. The platform that was passed in this past week that will be adopted by the convention," Manafort said.
Trump will deliver the acceptance speech on Thursday night when the theme is "Make America One Again." Other speakers on that day are Peter Thiel, Tom Barrack and Ivanka Trump.
"America faces serious challenges at home and threats from abroad. In order to turn our challenges into opportunities and keep America secure, we need leadership that will focus on what unites us, not what divides us," a statement said.
"Donald Trump will move our country beyond the divisive identity that have been holding us back by restoring leadership, building trust, and focusing on our shared love of country and our common goal of making America great again," it said.
Thousands of Republican supporters from across the country have started arriving in the city along with the party delegates.
Several thousand protesters along with the anti-Trump movement have also come to the city to hold peaceful protest rallies every day.
A Multi-Agency Coordinating Center has been set up which is staffed by representatives from participating law enforcement and public safety agencies.
A total of 74 different agencies providing security have been pressed into service. They would serve as the central 24-hour communications and coordination hub throughout the event.
While no official figures are available, it is estimated that several thousand law enforcement officials and those from security agencies have been roped into the city for the event to help the Cleveland Police.
The Department of Homeland Security has deployed nearly 3,000 personnel from more than two dozen components and subcomponents, including Transportation Security Administration, US Customs and Border Protection, the National Protection and Programs Directorate and the US Coast Guard.
These personnel will work closely with federal, state and local partners, including the Cleveland Police, to ensure the safety and security of convention, a statement said.
The activities in the city are also being monitored through satellite and helicopters.
Anticipating that there would be scores of protests in various parts of the city, during which they expect that a number of people would be arrested, all pending municipal court cases have been suspended to make way for near round-the-clock arraignments of protesters.
A 29-year-old African American gunman shot three police officers dead in Baton Rouge in Louisiana yesterday.
Micah Johnson, a black military veteran, killed five police officers and injured nine others in another shooting incident in Dallas on July 7.
Grammy-winning Indian musician Ricky Kej has received the prestigious Excellence and Leadership award as a global humanitarian artist, from the United Nations General Assembly recently.
"It was an absolute honor, and the greatest milestoneof my life to perform at the United Nations General Assembly,"Kej said immediately after his performance and acceptance ofthe prestigious award.
Kej performed at the United Nations General Assembly Hall, as part of the opening of the first ever annual NOVUS Summit, at the special event held during the United Nations High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.
"Every single great leader across the globe has graced these hallowed halls, and all major historic decisions andtreaties have been initiated here.
"I am truly humbled that my music and activism found a place here, and it was a trulyemotional moment for me to hear my music echoing within thesewalls," he said.
Joining him at the venue were vocalist, performance artist, composer and humanitarian activist, Sussan Deyhim, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Premik Russel Tubbs and keyboardist, Lonnie Park.
Kej ended his performance by saying, "To end I want to state the obvious ... Climate change is real ...Climatechange is human induced. Climate change is affecting us all... And our actions affect countries on the other side of theworld."
The summit served as a global platform to inspire innovators and humanitarians from around the world to come together to create plans and strategies that will have a positive impact on the world, and promote the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The event was witnessed by delegates, globalleaders, conservationists, activists andhumanitarians from various parts of the world and it was streamed live across the world on the web.
Roche Diagnostics India has appointed Shravan Subramanyam as the Managing Director for its operations in India and the neighbouring markets such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan.
He succeeds Guido Sander, who has shifted to Singapore, to head high growth markets for Roche Diagnostics' Asia Pacific business.
Commenting on the development, Sander said: "His wide experience covering pharmaceuticals and diagnostics in countries which are at different stages of healthcare evolution will be valuable for the growth plans of the Roche Diagnostics India and neighbouring markets business."
"I look forward to being a part of this journey, where Roche Diagnostics' globally renowned solutions are made available in India, to bring patients and their loved ones health and peace of mind," Subramanyam said.
Roche Diagnostics India started its India operations in January 2002 and provides diagnostic testing for early detection, evaluation and monitoring of diseases.
today condemned "senseless and barbaric" acts of violence in various parts of the world, including France and Bangladesh, and called upon the global community to unitedly combat terrorism.
Chairman Hamid Ansari referred to terror attacks in various parts of globe in June and July, which claimed several lives and left several others maimed and injured.
Manifestation of terror in the form of gunfights and bomb explosions in Istanbul, suicide bomber attacks in Kabul and Baghdad, terror attacks in Nice, Dhaka, Jeddah, Qatif and the holy city of Madinah have stunned the world, he said.
"These senseless and barbaric acts of violence across the world have shaken the conscience of humanity at large and are a grim reminder that the tentacles of terrorism are slowly spreading all over the globe. These growing terror acts are deplorable and deserve to be condemned," Ansari said.
He said such acts only re-affirm "our resolve to fight terrorism with determination and to reiterate our call to the global community to unitedly combat and eliminate the scourge of terrorism from the world".
The loss of innocent lives and injury to hapless people in all these tragic incidents is indeed outrageous and condemnable, the Chairman said.
"This House joins me in expressing our deep sorrow and sympathy and heartfelt condolences on the losses suffered by the friendly people of Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and France and reiterate India's stand of solidarity with the government and the people of these countries in their hour of grief," he said.
The House also expressed grief over several deaths due to natural calamities like cloudbursts, floods and lightning strikes in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and some other parts of the country during June and July.
The members rose in their places and observed silence as mark of respect to the memory of those who lost their lives in these tragedies.
With an aim to make the Real Estate Investment Trusts (Reits) more attractive to investors and real estate players, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Monday proposed relaxed norms for related party transactions and allowed these Trusts to invest more in under-construction assets.
Sebi also proposed removal of restrictions on Reits relating to investment in special purpose vehicle (SPV) structures while norms relating to related party transactions would also be eased.
The proposed move would allow up to 20 per cent investment by Reits in under-construction projects, up from a maximum of 10 per cent allowed currently.
Besides, relaxations would be made to provisions relating to compliance of minimum public holding norms as also for investments by associate entities of trustees, according to the consultation paper. The draft papers have been put in place after Sebis board last month approved a proposal for issuance of a consultation paper to amend the Reit regulations.
Sebi has sought public comments on the consultation paper till August 7 and final norms will be framed after taking into account suggestion of all the stakeholders.
Sebi had notified the REIT Regulations in 2014, allowing setting up and listing of such Trusts, which are very popular in some advanced markets. However, no single Trust has been set up as yet as investors wanted further measures, including tax breaks, to make these instruments more attractive.
While the government provided for certain tax benefits in the Budget this year, Sebi has now proposed to relax the rules.
India's real estate sector has grown rapidly in recent years and the growing scale of operations of the corporate sector has increased demand for commercial buildings, office spaces, shopping centres, warehouses and conference centres.
For such assets, REITs have been preferred investment vehicles globally and can be so in India too.
One of the major proposals relates to allowing REITs to invest up to 20 per cent in under-construction projects while at least 80 per cent should continue to be invested in completed and rent-generating properties.
"REIT may be permitted to invest up to 20 per cent of value of the REIT assets in under-construction assets, securities of companies or body corporate in real estate sector, government securities, money market instruments etc. Further, the current requirement of at least 80 per cent investment in completed and rent generating properties shall continue as it is," the draft paper noted.
The proposal would provide greater flexibility to the REIT manager in determining the composition of REIT and also help widen the portfolio and the size of REIT by adding projects that are at various stages of construction.
A case of sedition has been registered against the management of a private school in Budhar town in the district for allegedly marking Jammu and Kashmir incorrectly on India's map in the school diary.
Acting on the complaint of Shrikrishna Gupta, the case was registered against Green Wales School, its director Mohammad Sharif Niyazi, principal Govind Chand Das and publisher of the diary Arun Kumar Agrawal.
Budhar police station in-charge Satish Dwivedi said the three men were arrested and a local court sent them in judicial custody for 14 days today.
The case was registered under IPC sections 124A (sedition), he added.
An SUV seized by police during a raid on illegal liquor smugglers was stolen from outside the Ranhola police station in West Delhi.
The SUV and a large quantity of illegal liquor was seized and an alleged liquor smuggler Amit was caught in a raid by Excise department and cops from Ranhola police station on July 16, a police officer said today.
The vehicle which parked outside the police station was stolen by someone while the cops were busy keeping the seized liquor in Malkhana of the police station, he said.
A case has been registered and efforts are being made to identify the vehicle lifter through CCTV footage, the officer added.
A senior South Korean prosecutor has been arrested for allegedly pocketing millions of dollars following shady stock transaction deals with a leading online game maker.
The Justice Ministry said today that Jin Kyung-joon, a vice ministerial-level official, was arrested and put to a detention facility yesterday. He is the most senior-level prosecutor to be arrested in the country.
South Korea, a vibrant, liberal democracy, is one of the leading economies in Asia, but high-profile corruption scandals still routinely take place.
Jin faces allegations that he bought unlisted Nexon shares with the money he borrowed from the company in 2005 before selling them back to Nexon at a much higher price. He also allegedly made about USD 11 million of profits from a sale of Nexon Japan shares.
President of 89th national Marathi literary meet Shripal Sabnis today demanded setting up an exclusive university for Marathi language either here or in any other city in Vidarbha which he said will at least remove "cultural backlog" of the region striving for separate statehood.
Sabnis said he had written to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis regarding his suggestion.
"By establishing the university in Nagpur or somewhere in Vidarbha, at least the cultural backlog of the region would be removed," he told reporters.
Sabnis said the demand for separate Vidarbha state being raised for years was the manifestation of the perception that injustice was done to the region over the years.
"I personally believe that splitting of the State would be a disregard to the supreme sacrifice of 105 people who lost their lives during the 'Samyukta Maharashtra' (united Maharashtra) movement," the noted litterateur said.
He said the developmental backlog of Vidarbha and other backward regions in the state should be removed on a priority basis.
Sabnis had presided over the Marathi literary summit held at Pimpri-Chinchwad in Pune earlier this year.
With several parts of the city experiencing waterlogging due to heavy rains, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today held a high-level meeting to review the situation and directed all agencies concerned to conduct joint inspections and submit reports by tomorrow.
At the meeting, it was decided that the helpline number, recently launched to complain about waterlogging, will function 24x7.
"Dial 1077, 24x7 Helpline for registering complaints regarding water logging is functional now. Kindly register your complaints. Directed all agencies to conduct joint inspections at severely affected areas & submit reports by tomorrow (sic)," Sisodia tweeted.
The Public Works Department (PWD) which is in-charge of 1,260 km roads in the national capital, was put on the dock as a number of areas was waterlogged leading to traffic jams.
As many as 50 officials, including those from PWD, DMRC, New Delhi Municipal Council, all three civic bodies, Revenue department, Urban Development department, Delhi Cantonment Board and DJB, attended the meeting. PWD minister Satyendar Jain and Water minister Kapil Mishra were also present.
Officials told Sisodia that construction works by agencies like DMRC, National Building Construction Corporation (NBCC), are causing waterlogging, mostly in south Delhi.
The Deputy Chief Minister directed officials to take strict action against any department or individual for negligence of duty.
It was pointed out that waterlogging in and around AIIMS flyover is due to the ongoing construction work by NBCC. He directed the sub-divisional magistrate of the area to issue challans against the NBCC.
A senior government official said several areas in south Delhi were waterlogged and government has asked DMRC, PWD and South MCD to conduct a joint inspection on the worst-affected area and submit their report by tomorrow.
"The report to be submitted by different agencies will be studied by the government. If construction work by any agency is found to be causing waterlogging, it will be prosecuted by the area SDMs," he said.
In the morning, south Delhi was the worst hit with severe traffic congestion due to waterlogging at the stretch between IIT-Delhi and Munirka, Moti Bagh, Chirag Delhi, Saket, Modi Mill, Moolahchand, South Extension, Yusuf Sarai, AIIMS, Lodhi Road, Andrews Ganj, Greater Kailash, Nehru Place and Jasola.
Civic agencies had traded charges and indulged in a blame-game over desilting of drains when a similar situation was witnessed in the national capital on Saturday morning.
Water stagnated mostly in the mouths of flyovers, underpasses and low-lying areas, giving commuters, especially office goers, a harrowing team in the peak morning hours.
Officers of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence here have arrested two employees of on charges of smuggling gold.
Acting on intelligence report, the officers seized 22 pieces of gold biscuits weighing a total of 2566.05 gm from a aircraft which landed at the Mangaluru International Airport (MIA) from Dubai on July 15, DRI Deputy Director, Vinayak Bhat said on Monday.
The total value of the gold seized is estimated at Rs 75,26,225, he said in a release here.
The gold biscuits were smuggled into the country by concealing them under a seat of the aircraft during its international flight from Dubai to Mumbai by a carrier hired for the job. Thereafter, once the aircraft was deployed on its assignment in the domestic sector, it operated between Mumbai and Mangaluru, Bhat said.
The arrested employees of working at MIA who were part of the conspiracy were passing on advance information to the smugglers regarding the itinerary of the aircraft, he said.
They helped the smugglers by retrieving the gold from the aircraft upon its landing at Mangaluru and delivering them outside later misusing their position to smuggle gold out of the airport by avoiding customs check, he said.
The two employees confessed to their crime on interrogation and admitted that they were doing it for the lure of hefty money offered by the smugglers. They also admitted that they had done it on six occasions earlier, the release said.
Meanwhile, Spicejet said in a statement here said the two employees had been suspended "with immediate effect pending complete inquiry and investigation by agencies."
The suspended employees were Mohammed Haneef from city (senior CSE, Airport Services) and Muddayya from Kodagu (Security Officer).
A seven-year old boy was injured in a misfire by a Forest Department employee in Kaziranga National Park (KNP) following which two forest guards were suspended today.
The boy, identified as Akash Orang, was injured when the guard was trying to chase away a rhino at Mihimukh-Holmora area under Kohora Range of Kaziranga National Park (KNP), the police said.
Akash received a gunshot on his thigh and was immediately rushed to Jorhat Medical College Hospital after which he was referred to Guwahati Medical College Hospital, the police said.
Two Forest guards were suspended for the firing incident and they were Manas Borah, who handled the rifle when the incident took place and Anil Kalita, a KNP forest guard deputed at Mihimukh-Holmora camp, for illegally allowing Manas to handle his loaded his service rifle, KNP officials said.
According to Kohora Range Officer Manoranjan Barman, Manas had joined the Range's Mihimukh-Halmora (Tongi camp) two days back on deputation from Dibrugarh district.
Manas, who was new to Kaziranga, saw a rhino making movement near the KNP Park at Mihimukh point and picked up the rifle of Anil Kalita who was out from the camp for shopping, to fire and scare away the rhino, Barman said.
On thinking that the rhino might stray outside to the adjacent village, Manas tried to stop the rhino, but his finger touched the trigger of the loaded rifle and a bullet hit Akash, who is from the village and regularly visits the camp, the police said.
Irate locals from the Kohora area gheraoed Kohora Range office today demanding justice, proper investigation and Akash's medical treatment and also blocked the NH-37 at the Kohora Range point.
Tata STRIVE, an initiative of Tata Community Initiatives Trust today launched its first skill development centre in Hyderabad.
Spread across 17,000 sq ft, the Tata STRIVE Skill Development Centre (TSSDC) will skill youth in Telangana in BPO, banking, financial services, insurance and retail industries, a company statement said here.
Tata STRIVE, the first Group CSR programme of the Tata Group, addresses the pressing need of skilling India's youth for employment, entrepreneurship and community enterprise.
Located at Kukatpally, the centre has ten classrooms/labs which can accommodate up to 240 students at any given time. The training programmes range from 6 to16 weeks, and includes on-the-job training, it said.
At the end of the course, successful candidates are presented with a certificate, which is recognised by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and is aligned with various sector skill councils and Tata STRIVE standards. These candidates are also assisted to get livelihood opportunities.
30 graduates have already been trained at the centre and were felicitated with their certificates today.
Anita Rajan, Chief Operating Officer, Tata STRIVE and Vice President, Tata Sustainability Group said, "Tata STRIVE is a cohesive effort of the Tata group to train and empower people while facilitating quality benchmarks."
"While we aim to train a large number of youth by 2022, this Hyderabad center is one-step forward in that direction. This sustained community effort will help the youth of Telangana leverage and build their talents on a platform based on behavioural change, knowledge acquisition and skill development," he added.
Tata STRIVE is present in 13 Indian states across 70 centres through partner centres as well as Tata STRIVE Skill Development Centres in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Mohali, Pune and Aligarh.
It actively builds partnerships with Tata companies, non-profits, non-Tata companies, government agencies, foundations, trusts and banks to form well-crafted courses to hone the skills of the youth.
Till date, Tata STRIVE has impacted 43,000 students across India and helped them realise their true potential, it claimed.
Kolkata Police today summoned Trinamool Congress leader and MLA Iqbal Ahmed in connection with its probe into the operation.
According to a senior officer the TMC MLA has been asked to appear before the Economic Offences Wing at the Kolkata Police headquarters at Lalbazar tomorrow evening.
Iqbal, the younger brother of TMC MP Sultan Ahmed, was purportedly shown accepting money in a controversial tapes.
Kolkata Police sleuths had last week questioned IPS officer S M Hussain Mirza twice in connection with the investigation into the sting operation.
Mirza's statements were recorded and video graphed during his long hours of grilling.
On June 17, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had ordered a probe by police into the sting operation and had claimed her party had not taken "a single penny" from anyone in the Saradha chit fund scam and the operation.
A Special Investigation Team under Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar was formed to conduct the probe.
The next day, Kolkata Mayor and Minister Sovan Chattopadhyay's wife Ratna filed a complaint against Narada News CEO Mathew Samuel, who was then booked under IPC sections 469 (forgery for purpose of harming reputation), 500 (defamation), 505 (statements conducing to public mischief), 171 (G) (false statement in connection with an election) and 120(B) (criminal conspiracy).
An investigation into the Narada sting operation is on by the Lok Sabha Ethics Committee, while a case on the issue is pending in the Calcutta High Court.
In a fresh attack on Donald Trump, the Clinton Campaign has said the Republicans themselves are not happy with the controversial tycoon and are avoiding his candidacy which proves he is "temperamentally unfit" to serve as president.
"Two years ago, Republicans were envisioning a united Republican convention in Cleveland that would help them win a critical presidential battleground. But that dream never came to fruition," Chris Wyant, Hillary for Ohio State director, said.
This week, the choice facing Ohio voters in November will crystallise as and his "divisive rhetoric, dangerous ideas, and record of selling out American workers to profit personally" descends on Ohio, he said yesterday.
"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," Wyant said in his memo issued on the eve of the beginning of the four-day Republican convention which would culminate on Thursday with the coronation of Trump as the party's presidential candidate.
"Elected and Republican Party officials are using phrases like 'condescending and simplistic', 'very deep reservations', 'embarrasses me', 'the opposite of how my husband and I are trying to raise our children,' 'total disaster', 'hasn't impressed me at all', 'a very dangerous president', and 'not fit to hold office anywhere in this country' to describe the man set to formally accept their party's nomination in Cleveland," he said.
Wyant said Ohio Republicans, just like Americans across the country, were looking at Trump and deciding that they are better than this.
"The negative reviews of the Republican's nominee are far from outliers, and Ohio Republican operatives and consultants have been similarly blunt in assessing how Trump has squandered his first months as the presumptive nominee," Wyant said.
"Local Republican activists have been dismayed by the lack of a Trump organisation, many Ohio operatives have refused to work for him, and even now Trump is relying completely on the state Republican Party's field efforts," he said.
This same group helped defeat him in the primary and has 75% fewer staff than expected, Wyant said.
"While Trump is creating disunity and exasperation with Republicans here, Ohioans are uniting behind Hillary Clinton's candidacy, driven by the shared belief that we are stronger together," he said.
"More than 2,000 individuals from more than 300 towns, cities and municipalities across Ohio have shared their own personal stories for supporting Hillary Clinton with us many are now engaging their friends and neighbours online," he wrote in his memo.
Turkey has dismissed almost 9,000 officials including a massive number of police officers after a failed coup targeting the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the state-run Anadolu agency said citing the interior ministry.
A total of 8,777 public personnel including 7,899 police, one provincial governor and 29 governors of towns have been dismissed, the ministry said.
They also include 614 members of the police force that looks after domestic security, it added.
Turkey has cracked down on coup plotters that left over 290 dead, as Erdogan pointed the finger of blame at the supporters of US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is believed to wield influence in the police and judiciary.
Two acting chief prosecutors, accompanied by police, have started searching a key air base in southern Turkey used by the United States for air raids on the Islamic State group, the state-run Anadolu agency reported today.
Authorities had earlier detained a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup at the Incirlik air base in the Adana province close to Syria, officials said at the weekend.
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 report did not specify what evidence the investigation team was seeking.
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.
Washington said yesterday that strikes had resumed from the base, after Turkish authorities imposed a security lockdown on the base and closed airspace in the surrounding area.
Two acting chief prosecutors, accompanied by police, have started searching a key air base in southern Turkey used by the United States for air raids on the Islamic State group, the state-run Anadolu agency reported today.
Authorities had earlier detained a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup at the Incirlik air base in the Adana province close to Syria, officials said at the weekend.
Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies days after a failed coup, officials said today, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over.
A senior official said F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight, after a faction within the military launched an attempted coup late Friday against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.
The state-run agency, Anadolu Agency, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s "for the control of the airspace and security."
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion which was not supported by the military's top brass was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets.
At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in the rebellion that took the government and much of the world by surprise.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life had returned to normal. But he and other officials also urged people to take to streets at night, saying risks remained in its aftermath.
At nightfall, thousands of flag-waving people rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere. Erdogan remained in Istanbul despite statements that he would return to the capital and address crowds in Kizilay Square. reports said close to 2,000 special forces police officers were deployed in Istanbul to guard key installations.
The government moved swiftly in the wake of the coup to shore up its power and remove those perceived as enemies, detaining some 6,000 people including a number of generals.
As the cabinet prepared to meet for its first regular session since the attempt, security forces continued raiding military facilities in search of suspected plotters. They searched the Air Force Academy premises and residences in Istanbul early on Monday, Anadolu reported. It was not clear if any arrests were made.
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.
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.
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.
Turkey's Interior Ministry has fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others and detained thousands of suspected plotters following a foiled coup against the government, local media reported today.
of the firings and detentions came as the U.S. And European Union urged the government to uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the coup attempt.
The state-run Anadolu agency said a total of 8,777 employees attached to the ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers.
Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty. The government has blamed Friday's failed coup which it says killed 208 government supporters and 24 plotters on backers of a U.S.-based Muslim cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's chief opponent.
The situation creates a sticky diplomatic situation Turkey is a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group, but the EU and U.S. Expressed alarm today about its response to the coup.
Even before the weekend chaos, Turkey 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.
"This is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a joint conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said a total of 7,543 people had been detained since Friday, including 6,030 military personnel. On Monday, according to Anadolu, prosecutors entered Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, which is key to the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State group. A Turkish brigadier general at the base has already been detained for his alleged role in Friday's uprising, and news reports say refueling aircraft that took off from the base helped keep F-16s used by the coup-plotters up in the air.
Though government officials offered reassurances that life has returned to normal, warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat was not yet over.
Anadolu said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s "for the control of the airspace and security" after a faction within the military launched the attempted coup.
Suicide bombers today attacked two army checkpoints in a former stronghold of Al-Qaeda in southeastern Yemen, killing 11 people, health and security officials said.
One attacker drove his bomb-laden truck into a checkpoint in a western district of Hadramawt's provincial capital Mukalla, security officials told AFP.
The second attacker simultaneously blew up his vehicle at an army checkpoint in the nearby town of Hajr, located some 15 kilometres to the west of Mukalla, the sources said.
The commander of Hadramawt's second military region, General Faraj Salmeen had earlier told AFP that the second bombing struck the centre of the city, blaming the attack on "terrorists".
Eleven people were killed and 18 were wounded in the twin bombings, said Riad Jariri, head of the health department in Mukalla.
Four civilians were among those killed, he told AFP.
No group has yet claimed responsibility.
Mukalla and surrounding towns were under the control of Al-Qaeda for one year until pro-government troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured the city in April.
In March, a US air strike on an Al-Qaeda training camp in Hajr killed more than 70 jihadists, provincial officials said.
Yemen has been gripped by a devastating conflict that escalated in March 2015 when Saudi-led air strikes began against Iran-backed Huthi rebels after the insurgents seized northern and central parts of the country including the capital, Sanaa.
The violence has allowed extremists such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group to extend their influence and launch scores of attacks on security forces.
Last month, IS claimed a wave of suicide bombings targeting Yemeni troops in Mukalla that killed at least 42 people.
The Pentagon said in May that a "very small number" of US military personnel had been deployed around Mukalla in support of pro-government forces.
Washington considers the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be the network's deadliest franchise and its drone strikes have taken out a number of senior AQAP commanders in Yemen over the past year.
Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel today ordered a CID probe into the alleged assault on Dalit community members for allegedly killing a cow at Una last week, and also announced to set up a special court for "speedy" trial of the case.
"The probe into the Una Dalits thrashing case has been handed over to CID (Crime). Also a special designated court will be set up for speedy trial of the case," an official statement listing the orders given by the Chief Minister said.
Terming the incident as "unfortunate", Patel also ordered appointment of a special public prosecutor, who will be required to submit the charge-sheet within sixty days, it said.
In addition, Patel announced that the state government will bear all the medical expenses of the seven Dalit youths, who were injured in this incident and are undergoing treatment at various government hospitals in Una, Junagadh and Rajkot.
"Rs one lakh each has been given to the victims as compensation," it said.
The order from the Chief Minister's office came even as the Rajya Sabha today witnessed a brief adjournment on the opening day of Monsoon session as BSP members trooped into the Well of the House alleging atrocities on Dalits in BJP-ruled Gujarat.
According to the official release, nine persons have been arrested in this case so far, while three policemen have been suspended for dereliction of duty.
The incident at Una town in Gir-Somnath district, where Dalit youths were paraded and flogged for allegedly killing a cow, caused nation-wide outrage after its video went viral. The victims' contention was that they were skinning a dead cow and had not killed it.
Justifying their act, the accused alleged that these youths were involved in cow slaughter.
Several elected leaders of Gir-Somnath met the Gujarat CM at Gandhinagar and demanded action against the culprits.
She assured that officials have been given instructions to take all necessary action in this regard, the release added.
Respect for fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and due process is critical to preserve Turkey's democracy, the United Nations said today as the Turkish authorities pressed ahead with a crackdown following a failed coup.
More than 7,500 people including senior military officials have been detained and nearly 9,000 officials sacked from their posts in the crackdown following the attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday.
"The constitutional order needs to be fully preserved in accordance with the principles of democracy and fundamental rights, including through the full respect of freedom of speech and assembly and adherence to due process," UN spokesman Farhan Haq said.
"These steps are critical to preserve Turkey's democracy and its future stability," he added.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had called on Friday for a quick and peaceful return to civilian rule in Turkey.
"The United Nations continues to stand firmly by Turkey and its democracy during this difficult moment," Haq said.
The United Nations reaffirmed its opposition to capital punishment, saying countries that have abolished it should not reverse course.
Erdogan yesterday said he would consider reinstating the death penalty, abolished in Turkey since 2004.
A US-developed weapon system that strikes the atmosphere with a focussed electromagnetic beam may cause global warming, the government said on Monday and acknowledged that climate change is likely to reduce the yield of major crops like wheat and maize in India.
"The US has developed a type of weapon called High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme (HAARP).It strikes the upper atmosphere with a focussed and steerable electromagnetic beam," Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.
"HAARP is an advanced model of a super powerful ionospheric heater which may cause the globe to warm and have effect," he said.
Dave was replying to a question on whether the government is aware of HAARP, capable of effecting devastating impact on the world's climate including that of India and resulting in destabilisation of agricultural and ecological systems.
He said a study conducted by Indian Council of Agricultural Research has projected the impact of climate change to be adverse in terms of reduction of yield of major crops including wheat, maize, mustard, potato and sorghum.
Recognising the adverse impact of climate change, the minister said that the government launched the Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in June 2008 to deal with climate change-related issues.
NAPCC comprises eight missions in areas of solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, habitat, water, sustaining Himalayan ecosystems, forestry, agriculture and strategic knowledge of climate change.
It also addresses the issues relating to mitigation of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change on environment, forest, habitat, water resources and agriculture.
Dave said 32 states and union territories (UTs) have also prepared a State Action Plan on Climate Change (SAPCC).
The United States and European Union today sternly warned Turkey to respect the rule of law after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government launched a massive crackdown following the failed coup.
Germany and the EU also said any move by Turkey to reinstate the death penalty for the coup plotters would derail Ankara's long-stalled membership bid.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in Brussels that Friday's attempted putsch was "no excuse" for excessive action, as Turkish authorities said they had arrested over 7,500 people and sacked more than 9,000.
"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 told a press conference with Mogherini.
The EU and US "urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions and the rule of law", he added.
Mogherini said as EU foreign ministers met that the "rule of law has to be protected in the country, there is no excuse for any steps that take the country away from that", adding that it was "for the sake of the country."
The EU commissioner dealing with Turkey's long-stalled bid for membership of the bloc said it appeared that the government had already prepared a list before the coup of people to be rounded up.
"I mean, (that) the lists are available already after the event indicates that this was prepared and at a certain moment should be used," enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn told reporters.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman denounced "revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets" after disturbing pictures emerged of the treatment of some detained suspects.
After Erdogan said yesterday that Turkey would consider a return of capital punishment, spokesman Steffen Seibert said such a move "would mean the end of EU membership talks".
Mogherini was quick to echo the German position.
"Let me be very clear... No country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty," she said.
Turkey has called on Washington to hand over exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, Erdogan's chief foe, over the failed coup, but Kerry said Ankara must produce proof.
He said he had told Turkey's foreign minister "to make certain that in whatever portfolio and request they send us, they send us evidence, not allegations".
Turkey's attempts to join the 28-nation European Union have been hobbled in recent years by concern over the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan's record on human rights and press freedom.
But the EU agreed to speed up its membership bid and give visa-free travel to Turks as part of a migrant crisis deal in which Ankara agreed to take back people landing in the Greek islands.
An American student who was among those missing following a deadly truck attack in Nice has been confirmed dead, the University of California, Berkeley said.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, had been studying in the southern French coastal city as part of Berkeley's study abroad program. The toll from Thursday's devastating attack during a fireworks display on Bastille Day has stood at 84 dead and about 300 wounded.
"This is tragic, devastating news," Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks yesterday said after the FBI informed campus officials.
"All of us in the UC Berkeley family - both here on campus, and around the world - are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence," he added in a statement.
"I join Nick's parents, friends and the entire campus community in condemning this horrific attack, and in mourning the loss of one of our own."
The environmental sciences major had planned to start studying at the Haas School of Business next term.
A vigil was planned for 4:30 pm (2330 GMT) Monday on the Berkeley campus. Memorial service details were due to be announced later.
Three Berkeley students were also wounded in the attack, the school said. Two have been released after medical treatment. A third, 21-year-old Daryus Medora, whose leg was broken, remains in hospital.
The Allahabad High Court today asked the Uttar Pradesh government to explain why squatters were allowed to occupy Jawahar Bagh for more than two years even though permission was granted to use the public park in Mathura for staging protests for only two days in 2014.
A Division Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Ravindra Nath Kakkar, hearing a PIL seeking a CBI probe into the incident, also sought details of correspondence between the Mathura district administration and the state government regarding the encroachment and action taken thereupon.
Pressing for a CBI probe into the incident, BJP leader and Supreme Court lawyer Ashwini Upadhyay, who is also one of the petitioners in the case, alleged before the court that Ram Vriksh Yadav, the self-styled leader of the cult whose followers had occupied Jawahar Bagh until their eviction on June 2, was unduly favoured by the ruling Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.
"The state government did not act against Ram Vriksh Yadav though as many as 16 FIRs had been registered against him and his followers during the period Jawahar Bagh remained under his occupation.
"He had campaigned extensively for a top leader of the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and the state government was apparently trying to return the favour by handing over the sprawling public park to him," alleged the petitioner.
The court asked the state government to submit its reply and fixed August 1 as the next date of hearing.
Clashes between squatters and police left 29 people dead, including two police officers, at Jawahar Bagh on June 2 following an eviction drive launched pursuant to a High Court order.
A huge cache of firearms, ammunition and explosives was recovered from the park where the squatters had erected huts and maintained a steady supply of items of daily use such as edibles and cooking gas.
The Uttar Pradesh government has set up an inquiry commission, headed by a retired High Court judge, to investigate the matter.
China will not stop construction on the islands in strategic South China Sea which was awarded to the Philippines by an international tribunal, a top Chinese admiral today said, dismissing the pressure from Washington.
"We will never stop our construction on the Nansha (Sparatly) Islands halfway. The Nansha Islands are China's inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful," commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli told his US counterpart Admiral John Richardson during their meeting here.
A tribunal appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration acting on a petition from the Philippines quashed China's claim of historic rights on the South Chinas Sea last week and upheld Manila's claims over the islands.
China, which boycotted the tribunal's proceedings, rejected the verdict questioning its legality.
Describing the security situation in waters around China as "complicated and sensitive", Wu said Richardson's visit will be beneficial for the two countries to strengthen communication, promote trust, resolve doubts and avoid misjudgments.
"We will never sacrifice our sovereignty and interests in the South China Sea," Wu was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua agency.
He stressed that it is China's "core interest" and concerns the foundation of the ruling Communist Party's governance, the country's security and stability and the Chinese nation's basic interests.
Wu said that China will not recede over territorial sovereignty or fear any military provocation, which the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with.
He stressed that "no matter what country or person applies pressure," China will push forward and complete island construction as planned.
Wu said China will never be caught off guard, and the number of its defence facilities is completely determined by the number of threats it faces.
He vowed that China will never give up its efforts to solve the South China Sea issue peacefully, despite "many negative factors at present," but warned that "any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect."
The Chinese admiral hoped that the two countries' air and maritime forces will fully follow the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and the Rules of Behavior for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters to avoid strategic misjudgment or exchange of fire, and jointly ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.
Wu called on the two sides to promote strategic mutual trust, seek common ground, expand the scope of cooperation and create new momentum for China and the US to develop a new type of major-power relations between the two countries.
In the wake of heavy rains in the capital over the past few days, the Delhi government has banned road-cutting work by different agencies till September 15 in the national capital.
The decision was taken at a recent meeting chaired by Chief Secretary where directives were issued to departments concerned, including the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), Public Works Department and civic bodies, in this regard.
"The government has directed all agencies concerned not to take up any road-cutting work till September 15 in view of monsoon season in Delhi," said a senior government official.
Last month, the Delhi Cabinet had approved a proposal to grant online permission to various agencies to dig and cut the roads.
A woman has mortgaged her 'mangalsutra' to construct a toilet in her house at Barahkhanna village here following which Rohtas district administration made her the brand ambassador of total sanitation programme recognising her effort.
Phool Kumari took the step after she had failed to raise adequate money by working as a cook at a local primary school as her farm labourer husband's income is meagre, the local panchayat said.
She also braved the opposition of male members of her family while mortgaging her 'mangalsutra' to arrange the required money, they said.
Rohtas District Magistrate Animesh Kumar Parashar said, "On Wednesday, I and other district administration officials would participate in the inauguration of construction work for a toilet at Kumari's house in the presence of her husband and father-in-law."
The woman was made brand ambassador of the total sanitation programme in the district to inspire others, the District Magistrate said.
"We will ensure that the toilet is constructed within 10 days," he said.
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India's leading hospital chain Apollo Group's new facility coming up in Navi Mumbai is likely to take off next month. The 65th hospital in its chain is the first full-fledged hospital of Apollo in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai.
The 473-bedded tertiary care super-specialty hospital is being set up at an investment of nearly Rs 600 crore. The facility will have 13 advanced operation theatres and 120 advanced ICU beds. Apollo is investing close to Rs 600 crore in this facility, said sources.
Dr Pratap C. Reddy-led Apollo currently has about 6,800 operating beds and in the last three years, the group has added 11 new hospitals with around 1,725 beds, including two hospitals in Bangalore and one at Visakhapatnam. Further, a total of around 1,045 beds are expected to be added in Mumbai, Chennai and Indore within the next three years at an investment of over Rs 1,500 crore.
The public-listed Apollo Hospital Enterprises had revenues of Rs 5,409 crore in March 2016, which includes its pharmacies contributing over Rs 2,300 crore.
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 on Sunday 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 on Sunday 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.
The S&P BSE Sensex on Monday wiped off entire gains to settle the day 90 points lower, while the broader Nifty50 ended just a tad above its key 7,500-mark.
The headline indices slipped amid concerns whether the government will be able to pass the goods and services tax bill that is now stuck in the Rajya Sabha.
The 30-share index ended the day at 27,746, down 89.84 points, while broad-based 50-share index quoted 8,508, down 32.70 points at close.
ONGC was the worst performer on both the benchmark indices and fell over 5 per cent on the bourses.
Reliance Industries was among the leading gainers, rising as much as 2.62 per cent.
Hindustan Unilever, Exide Industries and MindTree are among the companies that are scheduled to report later in the day.
Meanwhile, Axis Bank, India's third-biggest private sector lender, rose after the Reserve Bank of India on Friday raised the limit for foreign shareholding in the bank to up to 74 percent.
Sectors such as consumer cyclicals, financials and industrials gained, while technology and telecom services fell.
The Nifty IT Index was flat after falling as much as 4.17 per cent on Friday following a cut in annual revenue growth target by Infosys. Infosys, Wipro and MindTree were down 0.3 per cent, 0.97 per cent and 2.75 per cent, respectively.
Buoyed by strong stock markets, Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya has said the Employees Provident Fund Organisation 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 BSE's Sensex and the other to NSE's Nifty - and as of now the market value of the investment stood at Rs 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 Bombay and National Stock Exchanges also. The investment will certainly increase (over last year).
"The Finance Ministry gave us clearance to invest from 5 to 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," Dattatreya told PTI.
The Finance Ministry has given its consent to the EPFO to invest from 5 per cent to 15 per cent of the investable income of the organisation every year.
Investable income is the net income of the organisation from the investments it had already made in various forms, fresh contributions among others.
This year, the investable income would be Rs 1.35 lakh crore, said an official.
The minister had earlier indicated that the investment would over 5 per cent this year.
Replying to a query, he said the ministry is all set to restructure its flagship unit EPFO keeping in view the growing number of subscribers and services it should offer.
"We are creating 21 zones in place of the existing 10 zones. Factors such as extension of EPFO service in the coming days and reducing the employee strength (for firms) from the existing 20 to 10 for EPFO (contribution) eligibility, bringing the rural, semi-urban, unorganised, contract workers into the fold of EPFO social security may result in increase of PF subscribers from existing 6 crores to about 9 crores in the country, prompted reorganisation of the EPFO," the minister said.
He further said that an amendment to the EPF Act in Parliament is proposed and the Cabinet approval is in the process.
The European Commission will grant an additional 500 million euros to help farmers tackle a long-lasting crisis linked to low prices, mainly in the dairy sector hit by the scrapping of production quotas and a Russian import ban on Western products.
The Commission, the EU executive, presented the package at an EU Agriculture Council gathering of member states' farm ministers, it said in a statement.
It mainly included a plan to reduce milk production, worth 150 million euros, and 350 million of subsidies that would come on top of aid granted by member states, thus potentially doubling the support being provided to farmers, it said.
The EU executive had granted a package of 500 million euros in September, targeting mainly cash-flow difficulties and market stabilisation, as well as a plan in March allowing producers to freeze milk output, relaxing EU limits on subsidies and effectively suspending EU rules on fair competition. (Reuters)
Source: www.businessworld.ie
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Friends wearing "Blue Lives Matter" t-shirts and black and blue striped wrist bands while serving burritos to local law enforcement.
LOGAN A group of friends spent Saturday serving meals to officers and deputies at Willow Park, as a way of showing their love and support for local law enforcement.
Deann Birch helped organize the event and said after the recent police shootings, she wanted to do something to say thank you.
After the Dallas incident, I just thought we needed to do something to support our law enforcement, said Birch. So I said to my friends, Hey, what do you guys think about making some burritos for our guys? And it turned into 300 burritos.
During the past week-and-a-half, Birch and others went to local businesses and grocery stores, asking for donations. The friends began preparing all the food Friday night and finished just before midnight.
Saturday morning they woke up early to reheat the burritos so they could begin serving at 9 a.m. They wore shirts that said Blue Lives Matter and black and blue striped wrist bands, as they served the meals on the west side of the park.
Eric Orahood and his wife Sara were two of the friends who helped. Five-years ago, Eric retired from being a police officer in Orange County, California, moving here to manage security for a local hospital. He said he continues to stay close to those in law enforcement.
These guys here in this valley, they do the same thing that cops do in Dallas, in Oakland and Orange County, said Orahood. They face the same risks.
The friends started the day serving the staff at the Cache County Jail. They continued throughout the morning serving officers as they would stop by. They also delivered meals to dispatch operators at the 911 call center and the USU Police Department.
Birch said it was gratifying for them to see how thankful the men and women were.
Its been just really rewarding, said Birch. Everyone is very appreciative. We have had people say how much this means to them.
The friends continued to serve meals until 5 p.m. and said they appreciated all of the local businesses who helped support them.
will@cvradio.com
By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times
West Oso Independent School District trustees voted late Monday to put the superintendent on administrative leave.
The board called the special meeting to discuss and consult with legal counsel on Elizabeth Saenz's contract and possible resignation agreement, according to the meeting's agenda.
The vote came after the board spent about fours in closed session.
Doris Phillmore attended Monday night's meeting to speak in favor of Saenz leaving the district. Fourteen of her grandchildren attended West Oso schools, and two attend West Oso High. She said she's a spokeswoman of sorts for parents and students who go to her when there are problems. She brings their information to the board during public meetings.
Phillmore expressed frustration over the effects high turnover rates and budget cuts have had on students.
"Last year, 25 teachers left (the high school) and this year, less than 10," she said. "There are not enough computers in classrooms when in the past everyone had their own."
Before the meeting, Saenz, who has led the district since 2011, told the Caller-Times the discussions related to her possible resignation were prompted by "a difference in philosophies" with some board members.
"I am ready to (continue to) work for the kids if I am afforded the opportunity," she said.
Susie Luna-Saldana, president of the Corpus Christi Association of United School Employees, said the association doesn't want Saenz to work for the district any longer. She said communication with officials about grievances have for the past five years has been "a hassle."
"We've learned to work around (Saenz's office) instead of with them," she said Monday. "It's a shame because the only ones that suffer are the children."
Trustee Velma Rodriguez said the turn of events came as a surprise to her. The board called two special meetings last week.
During a training session last week, the board discussed plans to have a "team building" workshop to prepare goals for the upcoming school year. Later that week, some board members reached a consensus that the district "needs to move in a different direction," Rodriguez said. Plans for the Thursday meeting shifted. That agenda states Saenz's employment contract was discussed in closed session. No action was taken by the board, Rodriguez said.
"I don't understand how it went from (training and a planned team building workshop) to (discussing her employment contract) in four days," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez lamented the possibility of losing Saenz as superintendent. She credited Saenz with leading the district out of an academic decline and her role in establishing the district's first early college high school.
"(State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) scores have gone up ... we now have some of the highest in the district's history," Rodriguez said. "I don't want West Oso to go back to (low scores).
"We have to work with (Saenz) in getting further ahead."
Rodriguez referred to the series of events as an injustice. She and board vice president Martha V. Ruiz filed separate complaints with the Texas Education Agency on Friday "because of everything that's been happening."
"Something needs to be said," she said.
The Caller-Times requested copies of the complaints from TEA, grievances on the district level filed against Saenz and annual evaluations by board members.
TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said there are no prior or pending complaints against Saenz on the state level.
Twitter: @CallerBetty
Caller-Times file Tony Pantoja, a vector control officer, identifies and counts female mosquitoes collected at one of several collection sites across the city on Tuesday, March 26, 2016.
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By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times
The Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District announced a Spanish-language Zika information hotline.
Spanish-speaking only residents in Nueces County can call 361-826-7210 for record information about mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has been collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Texas Department of State Health Services and the health district.
The hotline, announced Monday, also provides callers with information on preventing mosquito bites and mosquito breeding on their properties. The recorded message will be frequently updated as more information becomes available on the virus.
As of Friday, Texas has had 64 reported cases of Zika virus. That count includes three pregnant women, one infant infected before birth and one person who had sexual contact with a traveler, according to TexasZika.org.
So far, all of the cases have originated from people traveling outside the country.
Twitter: @Caller_Jules
Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times After an Aransas Pass man killed his wife, stepdaughter and himself last month, Aransas Pass officials are looking into solutions to curb domestic violence.
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By Krista M. Torralva of the Caller-Times
Aransas Pass officials are looking for solutions to end domestic violence.
A roundtable discussion with area leaders, law enforcement and policymakers is scheduled for Tuesday.
The community was shaken last month when Corpus Christi firefighter Steven Dolan fatally shot his wife, Brenda Luera Dolan, and her 10-year-old daughter Madelyn Rychetsky in their Aransas Pass home. Steven Dolan then killed himself.
While that murder suicide is the city's catalyst for the meeting, leaders from neighboring cities and counties are expected to attend, said Aransas Pass City Manager Sylvia Carrillo.
"Our goal is we're all a safe community, not just whoever was recently (affected)," Carrillo said.
In Corpus Christi, two recent domestic violence deaths showed the spurred reaction from residents and officials.
On June 8, Noemi Villarreal was found strangled, stuffed in a trash can and burned in Corpus Christi. Police arrested her boyfriend, Lance Taylor, on suspicion of murder. The week of her death, Villarreal reported Taylor had kept her captive for two weeks, all the while beating and threatening her.
In late June, Carina Catellanos' mother reported her missing. Corpus Christi police searched for her and on July 7 arrested her boyfriend, Nigel Green, on suspicion of aggravated assault in connection with a report Castellanos made of abuse about a month earlier. Corpus Christi police have said Green admitted to killing Castellanos and led them to her body near a Mathis cornfield.
In Robstown, a coalition to crack down on sexual assault and domestic violence launched in April after the Women's Shelter of South Texas worked for more than a year to bolster awareness and prevention in the city of less than 12,000. A similar group, the Coastal Bend Coordinated Community Response Coalition, started in Corpus Christi nearly a decade ago. On July 7, more than 100 policymakers and concerned citizens packed the coalition's meeting. A continuation of that meeting is slated for 7 a.m. Thursday at Sugarbakers Bistro and Bakery, 2766 Santa Fe St.
Last year, the Caller-Times started the Behind Broken Doors series that examines the effects of domestic violence and explored solutions effective in other communities to curb the deadly trend.
Twitter: @CallerKMT
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By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times
Two people are continuing to recover at a San Antonio hospital after an engine fire in the Port of Corpus Christi.
According to Coast Guard Sector Corpus Christi, a towing vessel called The Admiral caught fire in the engine room on Thursday. Details on how the fire started were not available, but the fire was extinguished.
The Admiral was docked in the Sherwin Alumina dock in the La Quinta channel, said Lt. Karl Alejandre, public affairs officer for the Coast Guard.
Two crew members were treated by local emergency medical services for severe burns. They were later taken to the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Their names and conditions were not released Monday.
Twitter: @Caller_Jules
CALLER-TIMES ARCHIVE Harbor Playhouse
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By Chris Ramirez of the Caller-Times
Local police, firefighters and other first responders emergency medical service personnel got to see a special performance Sunday at the Harbor Playhouse.
The community theater's seven-week run of "The Little Mermaid" was supposed to have ended with a 2:30 p.m. Sunday showing. Organizers, however, said they arranged for an unscheduled 7 p.m. performance for police officers, fire crews and emergency medical technicians, along with their families.
Cars could be seen filing into the theater's parking lot around 6:30 p.m.
Based on the 19th-century fairy tale by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen and the 1989 Disney film, "The Little Mermaid" follows the adventures of Ariel, a mermaid who is willing to give up her life in the sea to become human.
Twitter: @Caller_ChrisRam
The week end was a happy one for many parents following the publication of the results of the 2016 session of the First School Leaving Certificate Examination. The FLSC being the first official certificate in the life of every child, many candidates of the Centre Region waited impatiently for the publication of their results. In Yaounde , anxious parents thronged the seven sub divisional delegations on Friday July 15, 2016 to check the results of their kids.
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Joan Orock, a happy mother, who lives in the Biyem-Assi neighbourhood, told Cameroon Tribune that her daughter passed the examination at the age of 10 and that was her first attempt. She said her daughter was able to make it thanks to hard work. I personally supervised her work each time she came back from school. I am so happy, she said. She said she will now start preparing her daughter for college since she had already passed the interview into a boarding school. The story is similar to that of Pauline B. She said her twins passed the examination and were all ready to go to a government bilingual high school in the city.
This year, a total of 11,962 candidates; 5600 boys and 6,360 girls registered for the examination, 11,845 (5542 boys and 6303 girls) sat for the examination. According to the final results published by the Centre Regional Delegation for Basic Education, 5164 boys and 5936 girls passed. The total number of successful candidates for the Centre Region stands at 11,100. Percentages pass stands at 93.17 per cent for boys and 94.17 for girls making 93.71 per cent. Last year, 10,378 candidates registered for the examination, 10,306 sat and 9912 passed giving a successful rate of 96.17 per cent. Apart from that, the results of the Certificat dEtude Primaire (CEP) and the Baccalaureate Technique were equally published over the
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The suspects were arrested on Friday July 15, 2016 in Nkolfoulou, Soa, in the Mefou and Afamba Division.
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Four suspected fake price controllers are presently in detention at the Special Unit for the Control of Services at in the General Delegation of National Security in Yaounde. The suspects who are yet to be identified were arrested at 2:00 p.m. on Friday July 15, 2016 in Nkolfoulou, Soa, in the Mefou and Afamba Division of the Centre Region. Some of the traders immediately informed the Control Brigade of the Ministry of Trade in the Mefou and Afamba Division who immediately informed the police.
Reports say, the suspected fake price controllers who claimed to be on an official mission of the Ministry of Trade harassed traders in the area and seized some of their goods such as cartons of whisky, wine, and other household goods. According to the reports, the fake price controllers produced fake documents showing their belonging to an Association for the Protection of the Rights of Consumers. The group is made up of two men, one woman and was accompanied by a police officer who works in the Centre Region.
One of the suspects disappeared into thin air while at the police station. A man hunt was immediately put in place to get the fugitive. Sources in Soa said the suspected fake controllers have been harassing traders in the Mfoundi Division for the past three weeks and were only caught in the fourth week in the Mefou and Afamba Division.
The Centre Regional Delegate for Trade, Ombele Nama Alain called on traders to be vigilant and to always verify whether the service note provided by the controllers have been signed by the chief of brigade for trade before attending to them. He said traders should always be in direct contact with the chief of brigade so that each time there is a control team before them they will be able to contact the brigade to be sure that the team is legal. He also called on the public to report to the services of the Ministry of Trade in case of any fake products for action to be taken.
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"For me, the links are easy to make, and I think it's particularly interesting that an exhibition from Versailles can come to Canberra, a contemporary city with a modern museum, to show collections in a contemporary setting in the same way we show contemporary artists in Versailles."
"I mean it is always horrible when something like this happens, but especially so recently after the attacks in November last year in Paris, leaving the country just devastated obviously, and so are we all as humans."
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UPES team grabs first position in Europe and Asia at CanSat 2016
Competition organised by American Astronautical Society (AAS), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
New Delhi, July 18, 2016: Team Astral of UPES (University of Petroleum and Energy Studies), grabbed first position in Europe and Asia at the recently concluded CanSat Competition 2016. CanSat is an annual design-build-fly competition with space related themes organized by American Astronautical Society (AAS) and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). 73 teams from across the world participated in the competition this year, held at Burkett, Texas, USA.
CanSat 2016 mission was to simulate a sensor payload traveling through a planetary atmosphere sampling the atmospheric composition during flight. The overall CanSat system is composed of two primary components, a glider and a re-entry container that protects the glider during ascent.
Team Astral comprising of students from Aerospace Engineering, Mechatronics Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Material Science Engineering, Computer Science Engineering and Design Studies perfectly demonstrated the working of their CanSat system as per stated guidelines and were appreciated by officials of AAS, AIAA and NASA. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) is an annual sponsor to the competition and is involved in evaluation process as well.
Team Astral achieved this feat under the guidance of Dr. Ugur Guven and Prof. Zozimus Labana. The glider designed for the CanSat system was 3D printed by School of Design Studies, UPES under the guidance of Dr. Soumyajit Ghoshal and Prof. S.V. Savarkar.
The competition saw participation from many prestigious universities including University of California, Princeton University, Manchester University, University of Alabama Huntsville and Carleton University. Globally, UPES team grabbed fourth position.
The CanSat Competition is a design-build-fly competition that provides teams from across the Globe with an opportunity to experience the design life-cycle of an aerospace system. The competition is designed to reflect a typical program on a small scale and includes all aspects from the preliminary design review to post mission review.
The mission and its requirements are planned to reflect various aspects of real world missions including telemetry requirements, communications, and autonomous operations. Each team is scored throughout the competition on real-world deliverables such as schedules, design review presentations, and demonstration flights. A team has to design and fabricate the Mission Statement provided by the Competition and finally launch it at the competition site.
About UPES:
University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) was established in the year 2003 through UPES Act, 2003 of the State Legislature of Uttarakhand. UPES is recognized by University Grants Commission (UGC) under Section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956 and accredited by National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). UPES offers 87 graduate and post graduate courses in the high-growth sectors like oil and gas, power, infrastructure, information technology, transportation, electronics, high technology, design, business, planning and architecture, public policy, legal studies and more.
BBA, MBA, B Tech, M Tech, B Des, M Des, LLB, LLM, B Plan, M Plan, MA and many more are offered under these schools and colleges. Because of its multi disciplinary courses, UPES graduates are a preferred choice for the companies. UPES has maintained a consistent placement track record of 85% placements year on year. This demonstrates UPES' commitment, quality of students, and the holistic approach of its dedicated faculty.
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Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has revealed that the Autopilot system blamed in a recent Pennsylvania crash involving a Model X wasnt even enabled.
Musk said on Twitter that Onboard vehicle logs show Autopilot was turned off in Pennsylvania crash. Moreover, crash would not have occurred if it was on.
Immediately after the crash, Tesla said it was unable to determine if Autopilot was or wasnt activated during the incident, due to a damaged antenna. Seemingly however, further investigation into the crash was conducted by the electric automaker to determine if Autopilot was indeed to blame.
Earlier in the month, a silver Model X hit a guard rail, was thrown across a number of lanes, into a concrete median barrier and then flipped onto its roof. The driver, Albert Scaglione, also blamed Autopilot for the crash.
This crash was the second blamed on Autopilot after a fatal accident involving a Model S in May. Investigations into this crash have found the Autopilot was partly to blame, as it failed to recognise a white trailer against the brightly-lit sky.
Despite calls from some consumer groups to halt public testing of the firms autonomous driving system, Elon Musk is standing behind the technology and refusing to disable it.
Onboard vehicle logs show Autopilot was turned off in Pennsylvania crash. Moreover, crash would not have occurred if it was on. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2016
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Clarkson, May and Hammond have completed the first studio shooting of the new Grand Tour show in Johannesburg, South Africa.
We all knew that the new show would be shot inside a tent but the first images reveal a very impressive construction, with not only enough space for the audience but also with a very welcoming cabin-like atmosphere going on.
The three presenters were sitting on the central stage of course, around a table with the audience surrounding them in the same fashion with their previous show, you know, the one shot in an airfield somewhere in Britain.
We still dont have any details of what they are up to though, with Amazon being really protective about their new show and its content. All we know so far is that The Grand Tour will air 12 episodes in its first season, with three seasons already signed for.
The movable tent studio is also expected to visit the United States, United Kingdom and Germany while the debut episode will air this fall at a yet undisclosed date.
So, today we opened our new office. In South Africa this week. Next week ? pic.twitter.com/xmlsK8tTfg Richard Hammond (@RichardHammond) July 17, 2016
A recent report says that out of all manufactures building cars in UK, General Motors is the one mostly likely to move its operations to mainland Europe after Brexit.
GMs Vauxhall is currently building the Astra hatchback in Ellesmere Port and the Vivaro van in Luton, but there is a high risk of the company shifting production to Germany or Poland according to a forecast issued by LMC Automotive.
This would protect GM if the EU decides to impose import tariffs on UK exports as a result of the United Kingdom leaving the Union, with the forecast saying that this most likely would happen around 2021, when the Astras replacement is going to enter the market.
According to Autonews, Ellesmere Port is in danger of closing because it has the lowest parts localization of any volume car maker in the country, at around 25 per cent. It has a low anchorage, so in that sense, its the most vulnerable, said Garel Rhys, emeritus professor of motor industry economics at the UKs Cardiff Business School.
GM has been making cars in the factory there since 1964. A Vauxhall spokesman said it is business as usual until the UK government signs an agreement with the European Union on their future relationship.
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Theres a fight taking place in Italys motor racing community over which circuit will get to host the 2017 Italian Grand Prix. The head of the countrys racing federation wants it to stay at Monza, but Bernie Ecclestone is ready to switch it back to Imola.
The Gran Premio dItalia, as its known in to locals, has been held at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza every year since 1949 (and many times before that) with one notable exception. That was 1980, when it was held at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari better known as Imola (due to its location).
That was not, however, the only time that Imola held a Formula One race. Following its hosting of the Italian Grand Prix, it held the San Marino Grand Prix every year from 1981 to 2006, when it was dropped from the calendar. The race took its name from (even though it was not actually held in) the nearby independent republic of San Marino.
Also nearby is the Maranello headquarters of Ferrari, as well as several other performance vehicle manufacturers that do not currently compete in F1. Maserati and Pagani are located nearby in Modena, with Ducati and Lamborghini just down the autostrada near Bologna. That makes the Emilia-Romagna region (where Imola is located) the epicenter of Italian performance, whereas Monza is located closer to Milan, the countrys largest city.
Ever since they lost the San Marino Grand Prix, officials have had a plan in place to renovate the circuit and bring it up to spec. Now that the prospect is back on the table, theyre shifting the refurbishing program into high gear, installing new media and medical centers and upgrading the track itself based on plans drawn up by leading architect Hermann Tilke.
With an agreement now in place between Ecclestone and Imolas management, and the support of the local government, all thats needed now is for Angelo Sticchi Damiani, president of the Automobile Club dItalia, to give his consent. However as Motorsport.com reports, his support reportedly lies at present with keeping the race at Monza despite the circuits apparent financial troubles.
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Photo: DriveBC
Highway 12 is closed in both directions 38 km south of the junction with Highway 99 near Lillooet because of a mud slide.
No detour is available, but an alternate route is available via highways 99 and 1.
An assessment of the situation is ongoing and there is no estimated time of reopening the road.
Photo: CTV Click here to view gallery Photo: CTV Photo: CTV Photo: CTV It was a close call in North Vancouver Monday morning as fire crews raced to rescue several residents and their pets from an apartment blaze.
Flames broke out in the low-rise apartment building at East 2nd Street and St. Patrick's Avenue around 5 a.m., with flames shooting through the roof.
One older resident was helped off her balcony and carried down a ladder after yelling to firefighters for help.
The same member went back up to save a small dog, grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and helping it down to a lower level.
Some residents in the building say they're just thankful to make it outside.
"I heard people in the hallway yelling 'fire, fire' and I just grabbed my dog and got out of there," said resident Paul King.
"Flames were shooting out of the front and the back of the building."
The fire chief said about 30 residents were removed from their homes and a neighboring building was evacuated as a precaution.
One person was transported to hospital and several people were treated on scene.
Smoke from the fire was visible from downtown Vancouver and knocked out power to some area residents.
The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
Photo: Contributed
Country legend Dwight Yoakam is coming to Kelowna.
Yoakam will bring his signature sound to the stage at Prospera Place on Oct. 27.
He's a 21-time nominated, multiple Grammy-Award winning artist who gained gold status on 12 of his albums, platinum on nine and he took five of his albums to the top of the Billboard's Country Albums chart.
In 2015, Yoakam released his latest album, Second Hand Heart, and will be bringing old and new tracks off his latest to the show in October.
Meghan Patrick and Washboard Union are the opening acts.
Tickets start at $49.50 from selectyourtickets. They go on sale Friday at 10 a.m.
Photo: Contributed
A long-stalled condo project in downtown Kelowna is set to be resurrected.
Kerkhoff Construction announced today that as of last month it has assumed full control of the former Lucaya highrise site.
Under Kerkhoffs direction, the project has been renamed 1151 Sunset Drive, based on its street address.
Construction on the 21-storey highrise will begin as soon as possible.
According to Kerkhoff Construction, the condo project will be the second-largest by unit count in downtown Kelowna.
It will include 117 condos and seven townhomes, designed to provide housing at Kelownas most prestigious address to both the local market and specifically those impacted by the rising costs of living in Vancouver.
The site, which has been dormant since 2008, will soon be bustling with construction activity.
Kerkhoff plans to launch its presentation centre by mid-August at the former Waterscapes Sales Centre located at 1001 Manhattan Drive.
We have heard from many Kelowna residents that they are happy to finally see construction taking place, as they have been patiently waiting for progress at the site for a number of years, says Leonard Kerkhoff, vice-president of Kerkhoff Construction.
Kerkhoff is well-known in the area as it built the first highrise condo in Kelowna, Executive House, in 1980.
It has brought on the help of Fifth Avenue Real Estate Marketing Ltd. to promote 1151 Sunset Drive, as they specialize in marketing and sales of new residential communities for developers throughout B.C.
There is a substantial market to draw on for Kelowna both from an investment perspective but also for people wanting to make Kelowna their permanent residence, says Fifth Avenue president Scott Brown.
Furthermore, in the condominiums surrounding this project, a large number of homes are rentals as opposed to owner occupied, so 1151 Sunset will provide a new opportunity for people to make the area their permanent home.
Additionally, Kelowna-based Epic Real Estate Solutions Inc., a real estate project marketing & sales brokerage, is working as a Preferred Cooperating agent in the local market.
We see 1151 Sunset as a milestone development that will set the stage for the consistent and sustainable urban development of Kelownas downtown, says West.
1151 Sunset Drive is being designed by Meiklejohn Architects, one of the leading architectural practices in the Okanagan Valley.
For more details check out the website here.
Photo: CTV
The British Columbia government has hired a special advisor to lead a forensic audit and full review of the Vancouver School Board.
Education Minister Mike Bernier says the government hired Peter Milburn, a recently retired deputy minister of finance, after trustees failed to pass a balanced budget last month.
School trustees rejected a plan proposed by the province to help the board address its $21.8-million budget shortfall and then it failed to submit a balanced budget by a June 30 deadline.
The Ministry of Education had proposed the sale of some school board property to help it reach its budget goals, but board chair Mike Lombardi said that the sale didn't offer adequate, stable or predictable funding.
School districts in the province are required by law to pass balance budgets and the Vancouver board is the only one that didn't meet that requirement this year.
The forensic review and audit are due back to the Ministry of Education by Sept. 30.
Bernier said that close to half a billion dollars is invested in the Vancouver School Board and that money needs to be going to services that directly support students.
"This refusal to follow the School Act and pass a balanced budget to stop cuts while at the same time claiming that staff are implementing cuts is confusing for parents and students," Bernier said in a statement.
"Worst of all, it's part of an ongoing pattern in Vancouver where claims of budget shortfalls have preceded the board adding to its accumulated surplus almost every year. This has to end."
The ministry said there are 6,500 fewer students in Vancouver than there were in 2001, a 10 per cent drop, yet funding has gone up by 20 per cent in that same period.
Lombardi has said he welcomes the audit and that the board will fully co-operate.
Photo: Wayne Moore - File photo Police stand watch out front of the Kelowna Hells Angels clubhouse during a raid in August of 2012.
The Kelowna Hells Angels clubhouse will remain frozen pending a 2017 trial.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Barry Davies sided with the B.C. director of civil forfeiture in his ruling released Friday to freeze the Hells Angels assets in Vancouver and Kelowna until the end of the trial, scheduled to start in May 2017.
This means all the lands and structures situated at 3598 East Georgia Street in Vancouver and the lands and structures situated at 837 Ellis Street in Kelowna, along with any proceeds from the two locations, must remain frozen.
The 2017 trial will represent the final stage of a nine-year civil forfeiture battle between the Hells Angels and the B.C. government.
The case stems from legal action by the Director of Civil Forfeiture office, seeking the forfeiture of three HA clubhouses under the Civil Forfeiture Act.
The director alleges that three clubhouses, the Nanaimo Clubhouse, the East End Clubhouse and the Kelowna Clubhouse are likely to be used by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club as instruments of unlawful activity.
In Justice Davies' ruling, he states that Hells Angels may sell both properties, but that any net proceeds from the sale would have to be held for the court to stand in place of the property.
This decision rejects an attempt from defence lawyers to allow their clients to sell the clubhouses and keep the profits for themselves to do with as they wish.
Davies argued that any order otherwise could jeopardize the upcoming trial.
While still owning the property, the HA group must maintain the condition of both the East End and Kelowna clubhouse and keep the property taxes, mortgages and other bills paid in full.
No party and no person with notice of this order may cause, allow, agree to or facilitate damage to the Kelowna Clubhouse property or any fixture attached to the Kelowna Clubhouse property in such a way to reduce the value of Kelowna Clubhouse property, reads part of the ruling.
Davies notes that they can continue to use both clubhouses.
Subject to this order, the defendants Hans Federick Kurth and Richard Christain Goldammer shall continue to enjoy their ordinary rights to use and possession of the Kelowna Clubhouse property pending disposition of this action.
The ruling also states that several Hells Angels members involved in the case must now turn over some records about the gang, including minutes of international, national and regional meetings, and any presently operative structural charts of the (Hells Angels Motorcycle Club) in Canada and in respect of the East End and Kelowna chapters.
To the extent that such documentation exists, it may assist in proving or disproving the allegation that the clubhouses serve as bases of operation for the unlawful purposes pleaded by the director, Davies notes in his ruling.
Read the full ruling here.
Photo: The Canadian Press - File photo A ceremony was held in 2014 to commemorate the anniversary of six First Nation chiefs being hung to death in Quesnel.
Members of a British Columbia First Nation are expected to gather at a memorial service today to honour a warrior chief who was hanged 151 years ago after a wrongful trial.
The service will be held at the site of a high school in New Westminster, which was built atop a former cemetery where the remains of Tsilhqot'in war Chief Ahan may have been buried after he was executed on July 18, 1865.
Joe Alphonse, tribal chairman of the Tsilhqot'in national government, says there are no records to indicate if Ahan's remains were taken there after originally being buried at a courthouse square in the city.
The province says a new high school will be built adjacent to the existing run-down structure constructed in 1949 and an archeologist will ensure that any artifacts are appropriately recorded.
Alphonse says he wants protocols in place about the proper handling of any bones that could be found or the First Nation will mount blockades and shut down construction.
Premier Christy Clark apologized nearly two years ago for the hanging of Ahan and five other chiefs in Quesnel, B.C., in 1864 during a bloody dispute known as the Chilcotin War.
CDC Media Availability: Support for Utah investigation of Zika
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Archived: This Page Is No Longer Being Updated
Media Advisory For Immediate Release: Monday, July 18, 2016
Contact: CDC Media Relations
404-639-3286
What
CDC will host a media availability to answer questions from reporters about the case of Zika reported by Utah health officials.
Who
Satish Pillai, M.D., Incident Manager, CDC Zika Response
Denise Jamieson, M.D., M.P.H., Medical Epidemiologist, CDCs Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities
Michael Bell, M.D., Medical Epidemiologist, CDCs Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion
Ingrid Rabe, MBChB, MMed, Medical Epidemiologist, CDCs Division of Vector-Borne Diseases
Robert Wirtz, PhD, Microbiologist, CDCs Division of Emergency Operations
When
Monday, July 18, 2016, at 2 pm. ET
Dial In
Media: 800-857-9624
Non-Media: 888-566-6136
INTERNATIONAL: 1-312-470-0194
PASSCODE: CDC Media
Important Instructions
If you would like to ask a question during the call, press *1 on your touchtone phone. Press *2 to withdraw your question. You may queue up at any time. You will hear a tone to indicate your question is pending.
Transcript
A transcript of this media availability will be available following the briefing at: www.cdc.gov/media.
###
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICESexternal icon
July 5 October 25, 2016
Photographer James Mollisons breathtaking photography series, Where Children Sleep, captures deeply personal portraits of children from around the world, alongside images of where they sleep each night. The photographs are arresting in the shocking disparity they portray. The viewer is also reminded of the vulnerability of all children, and their need for safe, stable and nurturing environments. So much of these childrens experiences, their daily lives, and their most quiet moments before drifting into sleep are shaped by their circumstances and by conditions beyond their control. The environments in which they are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, age, and sleep affect a wide range of health functioning and quality of life outcomes and risks that affect their entire lives.
At CDC we work to ensure that no matter where children are born, or lay their heads at night, their health is protected and sweet dreams follow. The health and well-being of todays children is a down payment on the health and well-being of the adults they will become, as well as that of their children. There is no better way to assure the health of future generations than to improve conditions for todays children and their families.
Where Children Sleep: Photographs by James Mollison is organized and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Pasadena, California. In Atlanta, Where Children Sleep is presented by CDCs David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Office of the Associate Director for Communication, with support from the Office of the Chief Operating Officer.
Image Credit: Indira, 7, Kathmandu, Nepal, James Mollison
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Luxury hotels in the historic center for a Catholic family. Only luxury hotels can provide a paradisiacal vacation for a big Catholic family. A high-level vacation for families, children and not only. The gorgeous views, divine service, and the best location are all luxury hotels. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and more. Everyone will find their place in this corner of paradise.
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Breckenridge, CO, United States
In Breckenridge, Colorado, there are plenty of places to visit, whether you're a nature lover or thrill seeker. For nature lovers, the Blue River runs right through town and there are plenty of trails to explore. If you're looking for a thrill, Breckenridge is home to some of the best skiing and snowboarding in the country. There's also plenty of shopping and dining options in town, so you'll never run out of things to do.
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Savannah, GA, United States
Savannah, Georgia is a beautiful city with lots of places to visit, including Forsyth Park, River Street, and the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace. Another place to visit is the Savannah History Museum, which is jam-packed with interesting exhibits on the history of the city.
Savannah Luxury Hotels
Naples, FL, United States
Naples is known for its stunning white sand beaches and crystal-clear waters. Its also home to a wide variety of attractions, including world-class golf courses, vibrant nightlife, and interesting cultural experiences. Here are five places to visit in Naples, Florida: Naples Pier: Stroll along the pier and enjoy panoramic views of the Gulf of Mexico. Fifth Avenue South: This popular shopping and dining district is home to eclectic boutiques, award-winning restaurants, and lively bars. The Ritz-Carlton, Naples: This luxurious resort is set on 26 acres of pristine waterfront property and offers superb amenities, including a world-class spa and championship golf course. The Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens: This zoological park is home to more than 700 animals representing 150 species, including flamingos, lemurs, and tigers. Tin City: This eclectic shopping and dining district is housed in a series of restored waterfront warehouses and features eclectic shops, galleries, and award-winning restaurants.
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Louisville, KY, United States
Louisville is in the heart of Kentucky and is known for being the home of the Kentucky Derby. There are a lot of great places to visit in Louisville, including the Louisville Zoo, the Muhammad Ali Center, and the Frazier History Museum. There are also a lot of great restaurants and bars in Louisville, and it's a great place to visit for a weekend getaway.
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Galveston, TX, United States
Galveston is a Texas coastal town that is rich in history and offers visitors a variety of places to visit and things to do. Some of the most popular attractions include the Moody Gardens, Schlitterbahn Waterpark, and Historic Downtown. There are also a number of museums and other historical landmarks, as well as plenty of shopping and dining options.
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Omaha, NE, United States
The birthplace of Warren Buffett, Omaha, Nebraska, is a great place to visit. There are plenty of things to see and do in Omaha, from touring the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium to visiting the Durham Western Heritage Museum. Other popular tourist destinations in Omaha include the Joslyn Art Museum, the Ak-Sar-Ben Aquarium, and TD Ameritrade Park.
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Columbus, GA, United States
Columbus is a charming small town in Georgia that is worth a visit. There are several places to visit in Columbus, including the Riverwalk, the Chattahoochee River, the National Infantry Museum, and the Coca-Cola Space Science Center. The Riverwalk is a beautiful walkway along the Chattahoochee River that is perfect for a relaxing stroll or a bike ride. The Chattahoochee River is a great place to go fishing, swimming, or kayaking. The National Infantry Museum is a museum dedicated to the infantry of the United States Army. It is a must-see for history buffs. The Coca-Cola Space Science Center is a museum dedicated to space science. It is perfect for kids and adults alike.
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Anchorage, AK, United States
Anchorage is a great place to visit if you're looking for an adrenaline rush. From skiing and snowboarding in the winter to rafting and fishing in the summer, Anchorage has something to offer everyone. In addition to its outdoor activities, Anchorage also has a variety of cultural and historical attractions, including the Anchorage Museum and the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.
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Portland, OR, United States
Portland is a city that is located in the US state of Oregon and it is known for its art scene, food, and coffee. There are a lot of interesting places to visit in Portland, such as the Portland Art Museum, where you can see a variety of art from all over the world. Another place to visit is the Powell's City of Books, the largest independent bookstore in the world. If you're looking for a place to eat, Portland has no shortage of amazing restaurants, such as Pok Pok, which serves Thai cuisine, and Le Pigeon, which serves French cuisine. And, of course, no trip to Portland would be complete without trying some of the city's famous coffee, such as Stumptown Coffee Roasters.
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Florence, Italy
No trip to Italy is complete without a visit to Florence. This historic city is home to some of the country's most famous attractions, including the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, and Michelangelo's David. There's also plenty to see and do outside of the city center, including the picturesque Tuscan countryside and the vibrant university town of Arezzo.
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Asheville, NC, United States
Asheville is a city in western North Carolina. It is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Buncombe County. Asheville is home to the Biltmore Estate, the largest private home in the United States. The city of Asheville proper had a population of 84,236 in 2010. The city is known for its art deco architecture, mountain scenery and outdoor activities, and as the birthplace of American novelist Thomas Wolfe. It is also home to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, the second largest craft brewery in the United States.
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Long Beach, CA, United States
There's plenty to do in Long Beach, California without ever having to leave the city limits. If you're looking for a little adventure, head to the Aquarium of the Pacific for a glimpse of the ocean's creatures or take a walk on the boardwalk at Rainbow Harbor. If you're more of a history buff, the Queen Mary is a must-see. This retired ocean liner is now a hotel and museum with plenty of stories to tell. And no trip to Long Beach is complete without a visit to the iconic Vincent Thomas Bridge.
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Cincinnati, OH, United States
Cincinnati is a city located on the Ohio River in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Ohio. The city was founded in 1788 and named after the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War officers. Cincinnati is a major U.S. city and the metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million people. The city is well-known for its German heritage, Oktoberfest celebration, and its variety of chili dishes. Cincinnati is home to three major sports teams: the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals, MLB's Cincinnati Reds, and the NBA's Cincinnati Cavaliers. The city is also home to the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. The city's historic neighborhoods include Over-the-Rhine, Mount Auburn, and Hyde Park. Cincinnati is a popular tourist destination and offers a variety of attractions and places to visit, including the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, the Newport Aquarium, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Laughlin, NV, United States
Laughlin, Nevada is a great place to visit if you're looking for a fun and affordable vacation. There are plenty of casinos and resorts to choose from, as well as plenty of outdoor activities and attractions. Be sure to check out the local nightlife, and don't forget to take a trip down the mighty Colorado River.
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Anaheim, CA, United States
Anaheim, California is home to both Disneyland and California Adventure Park. The parks are just a short walk away from each other, and make for a great day of exploration. Anaheim is also home to the Anaheim Angels and the Anaheim Ducks, so there's always a game to catch. If you're looking for something a little more low-key, Anaheim has a great shopping district and a variety of restaurants to choose from.
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Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Santa Cruz is a great place to visit! There are so many places to see and things to do. Some of my favorite places to visit are the Boardwalk, the wharf, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Boardwalk is a great place to go for a walk, ride on the amusement park rides, and eat some of the delicious food. The wharf is a great place to go for a walk, eat some seafood, and listen to the street performers. The University of California, Santa Cruz is a great place to visit to learn about the history of the area and to see some of the beautiful architecture. I highly recommend visiting Santa Cruz if you are looking for a fun and interesting place to visit!.
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Eugene, OR, United States
Eugene, Oregon is a great city to visit with a lot of places to see and things to do. One of the most popular attractions is the University of Oregon campus, which is home to a number of museums and a large football stadium. The city also has a vibrant arts scene, with a number of theaters and art galleries. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy the dozens of parks and hiking trails in the area, and there are also a number of wineries and breweries in the area.
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Branson, MO, United States
There's plenty to see and do in Branson, Missouri, from state parks and amusement parks to theaters and shopping. Here are some of the most popular places to visit: Silver Dollar City is a theme park with rides, shows, and craftsmen demonstrations. is a theme park with rides, shows, and craftsmen demonstrations. The Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Theatre puts on a variety of shows, including "The Legend of the Shepherd of the Hills" and "The Catfish Fry." puts on a variety of shows, including "The Legend of the Shepherd of the Hills" and "The Catfish Fry." Table Rock State Park has fishing, swimming, and hiking trails, as well as a nature center. has fishing, swimming, and hiking trails, as well as a nature center. The Titanic Museum features a half-sized replica of the ship, along with exhibits about the history of the Titanic. features a half-sized replica of the ship, along with exhibits about the history of the Titanic. Branson Landing is a shopping and entertainment complex on the waterfront. There's something for everyone in Branson, Missouri come visit and see for yourself!.
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Panama City Beach, FL, United States
The white sand beaches and emerald waters of Panama City Beach, Florida, are a popular tourist destination. The city is home to numerous hotels, resorts, and restaurants, as well as amusement and water parks. Visitors can also enjoy fishing, kayaking, and surfing.
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Monterey, CA, United States
Monterey is a coastal city in Monterey County, California, United States. It stands at the southern end of Monterey Bay, on the Pacific coast. The city is also the home of the Naval Postgraduate School. Monterey is the largest city in the Central Coast region of California. The main attractions in Monterey are the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Fisherman's Wharf, Cannery Row, and the downtown area.
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Norfolk, VA, United States
Norfolk, Virginia is a great place to visit for its historical places and military bases. Some places to visit in Norfolk are the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Botanical Garden, and the Norfolk Naval Station.
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Palm Springs, CA, United States
Palm Springs is a vibrant city located in the Coachella Valley and is known for its year-round sunshine, resort atmosphere and Mid-Century Modern architecture. Top places to visit include the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, Palm Springs Art Museum, Indian Canyons and Moorten Botanical Garden. For a truly unique experience, be sure to check out the Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale the worlds largest vintage furniture and design event.
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Rochester, NY, United States
Rochester is a city in western New York State and is the county seat of Monroe County. Rochester is known for its annual festivals, including the Rochester International Jazz Festival, the Rochester Fringe Festival, and the Holiday Folk Fair International. Places to visit in Rochester include the George Eastman Museum, the Strong National Museum of Play, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, and the Seneca Park Zoo.
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Pigeon Forge, TN, United States
Visit the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge for a unique experience. This museum is dedicated to the Titanic, one of the most infamous ships in history. Tour the ship and learn about the passengers and crew who were on board. You can even see the actual artifacts recovered from the shipwreck. If you're looking for a little more excitement, head to Dollywood. This amusement park is home to roller coasters, a water park, and plenty of other rides and attractions. Plus, the park is themed around the life and music of Dolly Parton. No trip to Pigeon Forge is complete without a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains. These mountains offer a variety of activities, including hiking, fishing, and horseback riding. Plus, the natural beauty of the area is simply breathtaking.
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Jacksonville, FL, United States
Jacksonville is less than an hour's drive from the beaches of Amelia Island and St. Augustine, and a little more than two hours from Orlando. The city has a lot to offer visitors, including a riverwalk, museums, and a vibrant arts scene. Jacksonville is also home to the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL team.
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Minsk, Belarus
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, is a city that has something for everyone. If you're looking for a little history, Minsk has plenty of it, with churches and monuments dating back to the 12th century. If you're looking for a lively nightlife, Minsk has that, too, with plenty of bars, clubs, and restaurants. And if you're looking for a little nature, Minsk has parks and gardens to enjoy. Here are just a few of the places you can visit in Minsk: The Holy Spirit Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in Minsk, is a must-visit for history buffs. The National Library of Belarus is a huge library with more than 18 million items in its collection. The Opera and Ballet Theatre is a beautiful building that hosts performances of both opera and ballet. The Victory Park is a large park with a war memorial, a children's playground, and a lake. And for a little bit of nature in the heart of the city, the Botanical Garden is a great place to relax and take a break from the hustle and bustle of Minsk.
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Jaipur, India
Jaipur is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. It is the capital of the state of Rajasthan and is known for its palaces, forts and temples. Some of the places to visit in Jaipur include the Amber Fort, the City Palace, the Jantar Mantar Observatory and the Hawa Mahal. Jaipur is also a great place to shop for traditional Indian handicrafts.
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Chicago, IL, United States
Chicago is a city full of culture and history. There are plenty of places to visit, such as the Willis Tower, Buckingham Fountain, and the Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago is also home to many restaurants and bars, so there is something for everyone.
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Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland is a beautiful city located on the north island of New Zealand. There are many places to visit in Auckland, including the Sky Tower, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the Auckland Domain. The beaches in Auckland are also worth visiting, especially Karekare and Piha. Auckland is a great place to visit, and I highly recommend it!.
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Auckland Luxury Villas
Amsterdam, Netherlands
If you're looking for a city that's got it all, Amsterdam should be your go-to destination. From the city's lively and vibrant nightlife to its charming and quiet neighborhoods, Amsterdam has something for everyone. Be sure to check out the Anne Frank Huis, the Rijksmuseum, and the Van Gogh Museum, as these are some of the most popular attractions in the city. And if you're looking for a little bit of nature, be sure to take a walk or bike ride through Amsterdam's many parks.
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Berlin, Germany
There are so many great places to visit in Berlin that it can be hard to know where to start. From the iconic Brandenburg Gate to the fascinating Reichstag Building, there's something for everyone in this vibrant city. If you're looking for a bit of history, make sure to check out the Berlin Wall Memorial or the DDR Museum. And for those looking for a bit more fun, there's always the Alexanderplatz Christmas Market or the Zoologischer Garten. No matter what your interests, Berlin is a city you won't want to miss.
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Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is a city of contrasts with its gleaming temples and skyscrapers, chaotic markets and tranquil canals. While it's a popular tourist destination, Bangkok is a city that can be enjoyed by visitors of all ages. Some of the top places to visit in Bangkok include the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, the floating markets and the Chatuchak Weekend Market.
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Bruges, Belgium
Bruges is a city in Belgium that is worth visiting. It is full of medieval charm and there are a lot of things to see and do. Some of the places to visit include the Markt, the Belfry, and the Begijnhof.
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Brussels, Belgium
Brussels is a city in Belgium that is best known for its chocolate, waffles, and beer. But there is much more to see and do in Brussels than just indulge in the local cuisine. There are a number of interesting historical landmarks to visit, such as the Grand Place and the Atomium, as well as a variety of parks and gardens. And, of course, Brussels is also a great city to explore on foot.
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Budapest, Hungary
Budapest, Hungary's capital, is a city of thermal baths and medival, baroque and art nouveau architecture. Crowded with tourists, the city is bisected by the Danube River into the hilly Buda and the more developed and flat Pest. Among the main places of interest are the neo-Gothic Parliament, the Chain Bridge linking Buda and Pest, the Matthias Church and Fisherman's Bastion on the Buda bank, and the State Opera House and Heroes' Square on the Pest side.
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Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Home to some of the best beaches in Mexico, Playa del Carmen is a favorite tourist destination for visitors from all over the world. With its lively nightlife, gorgeous coastline and ample shopping opportunities, there's something for everyone in this tropical paradise. Don't miss the opportunity to visit some of the area's most popular attractions, such as the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum and Coba, or the eco-friendly Turtle Beach. With its friendly people, delicious food and stunning scenery, Playa del Carmen is a place you'll never want to leave.
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Denver, CO, United States
Denver is a great city for visitors. There are so many places to see and things to do. Some of the top places to visit include the 16th Street Mall, the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Art Museum, and the Colorado State Capitol. There are also plenty of great restaurants and shops to explore. Denver is definitely a city worth visiting!.
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Dublin, Ireland
Dublin is a city located in Ireland. It's a city full of culture, with plenty of places to visit. Some popular tourist spots are the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College, and the Dublin Castle. There are also plenty of pubs and restaurants to discover.
Dublin Luxury Hotels
Dusseldorf, Germany
Dusseldorf, Germany is a city with many different places to visit. The city has a mix of old and new buildings, and a variety of activities to do. The best places to visit in Dusseldorf are the Konigsallee, the Rhine Tower, and the Oktoberfest. The Konigsallee is an open-air shopping mall that has many high-end stores. The Rhine Tower is the tallest building in the city and offers great views of Dusseldorf. The Oktoberfest is a week-long festival that celebrates German culture and food.
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Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Edinburgh, Scotland is a beautiful city to visit. The architecture is very old and unique, and there are plenty of historical places to visit, like Edinburgh Castle. There are also plenty of parks and gardens, and lots of shops and restaurants.
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Rome, Italy
Rome is a city rich in history and filled with beautiful places to visit. Make sure to stop by the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Pantheon. Also be sure to visit St. Peters Basilica and the Sistine Chapel while in Rome. If youre looking for a little more nature in your trip, head to the Villa Borghese gardens or the Janiculum Hill for some wonderful views of the city. And of course, no trip to Rome is complete without a gelato!.
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New York, NY, United States
There are many amazing places to visit in New York State. Some of my favorites are the Niagara Falls, the Adirondack Mountains, and the Finger Lakes. If you're looking for a city break, New York City is definitely worth a visit. There's endless things to see and do, from touring the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to visiting world-famous museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. No matter what your interests are, you'll be able to find something to enjoy in New York State.
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London, United Kingdom
London is a city rich in history and full of amazing places to visit. Some of my favorite places are Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Tower of London. There is so much to see and do in London, you could spend weeks here and never run out of things to do. If you're looking for a city full of culture and history, London is the place for you.
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Madrid, Spain
Madrid is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich cities in the world. From the Royal Palace to the Prado Museum, theres plenty to see and do in Madrid. If youre looking for a little bit of nature, Madrid has plenty of parks, like the Buen Retiro Park, to relax in. And dont forget to try some of the delicious tapas and wine while youre in town.
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Memphis, TN, United States
The birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Memphis is a city rich in history and culture. From Graceland to Beale Street, there are plenty of places to visit in Memphis. Be sure to check out Sun Studio, where rock 'n' roll was born, and the National Civil Rights Museum, which tells the story of the African-American civil rights movement. Memphis is also home to some amazing food, so be sure to try some of the city's famous barbecue and soul food.
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Miami Beach, FL, United States
There is much to explore in Miami Beach, from the famous Art Deco district to the vast beaches and crystal-clear waters. Outdoor enthusiasts will love the opportunities for fishing, kayaking, and paddleboarding, while history buffs can explore the ancient burial mounds at Miami Beach. Shoppers and foodies will find plenty to keep them busy, with vibrant neighborhoods like Lincoln Road and Ocean Drive offering unique boutiques and award-winning restaurants. And of course, no trip to Miami Beach is complete without a visit to world-famous South Beach.
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New Orleans, LA, United States
You can't visit New Orleans without trying some of the local food. Beignets, Po' Boys, and gumbo are just a few of the must-try dishes. While you're in town, be sure to check out the French Quarter, Jackson Square, and St. Louis Cathedral. If you're looking for some nightlife, Bourbon Street is the place to be. And, of course, no trip to New Orleans is complete without a visit to Mardi Gras!.
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Milan, Italy
Milan is a city located in the Lombardy region of Italy. It is a popular tourist destination because of its historical and artistic heritage. Some of the places you should visit while in Milan are the Duomo, La Scala, and Castello Sforzesco.
Milan Luxury Hotels
Naples, Italy
Naples is one of the most beautiful and historic cities in Italy. There are countless places to visit, such as the Royal Palace, the Museum of San Martino, and the Church of Gesu Nuovo. Naples is also home to excellent shopping and dining options. Be sure to enjoy a cup of coffee at one of the city's many cafes and take a stroll through the picturesque streets.
Naples Luxury Hotels
Paris, France
Paris is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. It's home to iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum, as well as a thriving nightlife and restaurant scene. If you're looking to explore all that Paris has to offer, here are some of the top places to visit: The Eiffel Tower: This iconic landmark is a must-see in Paris. Climb to the top for stunning views of the city, or take a ride on the elevator to the bottom for a closer look at the structure. The Louvre Museum: This world-famous museum is home to some of the most famous works of art in the world, including the Mona Lisa. The Notre Dame Cathedral: This beautiful cathedral is one of the most famous landmarks in Paris. Make sure to climb to the top for some amazing views of the city. The Champs-Elysees: This famous avenue is a popular destination for shopping and dining. Be sure to wander down the street and take in all the sights and sounds. The Arc de Triomphe: This towering arch is another iconic landmark in Paris. Climb to the top for some amazing views of the city.
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Paris Luxury Villas
Prague, Czech Republic
Prague is a city rich in history and culture. There are plenty of places to visit, including the Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge, and the Old Town Square. There are also plenty of restaurants and bars to enjoy, and the nightlife is vibrant. Prague is a truly unique city and a must-visit for anyone traveling to the Czech Republic.
Prague Luxury Hotels
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Located on the easternmost tip of the Dominican Republic, Punta Cana is known for its beautiful beaches and turquoise waters. This paradise is a favorite destination for travelers looking for a Caribbean getaway. Punta Cana is home to a wide variety of resorts and activities, from enjoying the sand and surf to golfing, spas, and shopping. Nature lovers can also explore the areas jungles, caves, and waterfalls.
Punta Cana Luxury Hotels
Punta Cana Luxury Resorts
Punta Cana Luxury Villas
Marbella, Spain
If you're looking for an idyllic and luxurious Spanish escape, look no further than Marbella. Located on the country's Costa del Sol, Marbella is home to stunning beaches, top-notch resorts, world-class golfing, and much more. A visit to Marbella is the perfect way to experience all that Spain has to offer.
Marbella Luxury Hotels
Marbella Luxury Villas
Marrakesh, Morocco
Marrakesh is a city in Morocco that is full of culture and history. There are several places to visit in Marrakesh, including the Palace of the Bahia, the Ben Youssef Madrasa, and the Saadian Tombs. The souks (markets) are also a must-see, where you can find everything from souvenirs to spices to traditional clothing. Be sure to enjoy a meal in one of the many restaurants or cafes in Marrakesh; the food is delicious and the atmosphere is always lively. Marrakesh is a wonderful city to explore and definitely worth a visit!.
Marrakesh Luxury Hotels
San Francisco, CA, United States
San Francisco is a popular tourist destination, and for good reason. There are plenty of things to see and do in this vibrant city. Here are some of the top places to visit: 1. Fisherman's Wharf: This neighborhood is home to a variety of shops and restaurants, as well as a popular pier where you can enjoy views of the bay. 2. The Golden Gate Bridge: This iconic bridge is a must-see for any visitor to San Francisco. 3. Alcatraz Island: This former federal prison is now a popular tourist attraction. It's a must-see for fans of history and crime dramas. 4. Chinatown: This colorful neighborhood is home to some of the best food in San Francisco. Be sure to check out the Dragon Gate entrance. 5. The Mission District: This trendy neighborhood is home to hip restaurants, bars, and art galleries.
San Francisco Luxury Hotels
Moscow, Russia
Moscow, Russia is a beautiful city with plenty of places to visit. Some of the most popular tourist attractions are the Kremlin, Red Square, and Saint Basil's Cathedral. Other great places to see include the Bolshoi Theatre, Gorky Park, and the Tretyakov Gallery. There are also many churches and other historical buildings to explore. Moscow is a lively city with a lot of culture and nightlife. There is something for everyone to enjoy in Moscow.
Moscow Luxury Hotels
Venice, Italy
Venice is one of the most beautiful places on earth. The city is built on a lagoon in northeast Italy and is known for its canals and gondolas. There are many places to visit in Venice, including the Grand Canal, St. Marks Square, and the Rialto Bridge. Venice is also home to many museums, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Venice Luxury Hotels
Vienna, Austria
Vienna, Austria is a city with a long and rich history. There are many places to visit in Vienna, including the Hofburg Palace, the Ringstrasse, and St. Stephen's Cathedral. Vienna is also home to some of the world's best shopping, including the Karntner Strasse and the Graben. Finally, no visit to Vienna is complete without experiencing the city's world-famous nightlife.
Vienna Luxury Hotels
Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich is a marvelous city located in the heart of Switzerland. It is a city that has something to offer for everyone. From amazing restaurants and beautiful architecture to exciting nightlife and gorgeous parks, Zurich has something for everyone. Some of the most popular places to visit in Zurich include the Bahnhofstrasse, which is the city's most famous shopping street, the Lindenhof, which is a beautiful park with amazing views of the city, and Grossmunster, which is a stunning Romanesque church. Zurich is also home to some of the best museums in the world, including the famed Museum of Art and the Swiss National Museum. With its mix of old-world charm and modern amenities, Zurich is a city that is definitely worth exploring.
Zurich Luxury Hotels
Acapulco, Mexico
If you're looking for a Mexican vacation spot with plenty of history and culture to explore, Acapulco is a great option. From the archeological wonders of the ancient city to the stunning coastal views, there's something for everyone in Acapulco. Plus, with its temperate climate, it's a great escape from colder winter weather.
Acapulco Luxury Hotels
Acapulco Luxury Resorts
Acapulco Luxury Villas
Nashville, TN, United States
One of the United States' most interesting places to visit is Nashville, Tennessee. There's plenty to see and do there, from the Grand Ole Opry to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Music is a big part of the city's history and culture, so be sure to catch a show while you're in town. Other popular attractions include the Ryman Auditorium, the Parthenon, and the Jack Daniel's Distillery. Nashville is also a great place to eat, with a wide variety of restaurants serving up everything from barbecue to Mexican food. So if you're looking for an exciting and diverse city to visit, be sure to add Nashville to your list.
Nashville Luxury Hotels
Nashville Luxury Villas
Atlanta, GA, United States
What's not to love about Atlanta? From the iconic Georgia Aquarium to the World of Coke, from the Fox Theatre to Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta offers a wealth of destinations for tourists. Sports fans will want to check out the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and history buffs will enjoy the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. Braves fans can take a tour of SunTrust Park, and shoppers will enjoy the many boutiques and malls in the city. There's also a great restaurant scene in Atlanta, and music lovers will want to check out the many venues offering live music. Whether you're looking for a fun family vacation spot or a place to explore on your own, Atlanta is a great choice!.
Atlanta Luxury Hotels
Miami, FL, United States
The Magic City is a top tourist destination for a reasonthere are endless things to do in Miami! From exploring the trendy neighborhoods and dazzling beaches to soaking up the Latin culture and nightlife, Miami is jam-packed with amazing places to visit. Here are a few of our favorites: 1. Wynwood Walls: This outdoor art exhibit is a must-see for any art lover. The colorful murals are awe-inspiring and definitely Instagram-worthy. 2. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens: This estate is dripping with luxury and opulence, from the grandiose architecture to the expansive gardens. It's the perfect place for a day of relaxation. 3. South Beach: This world-famous beach is a must-visit for any sun-seeker. The crystal-clear water and soft sand make for the perfect day-long beach getaway. 4. Little Havana: Experience Cuban culture at its best in Little Havana. From delicious food to lively music and dance, there's something for everyone in this vibrant district. 5. Art Deco District: This district is home to Miami's most iconic architecture. Take a stroll down the charming streets and admire the colorful buildings that make Miami so unique.
Miami Luxury Hotels
Miami Luxury Villas
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is a must-see destination in Japan. There are endless places to explore in this city - temples, shrines, gardens, and more. The Shinjuku district is a great place to start, with its neon-lit streets and myriad shops and restaurants. For a taste of traditional Japan, visit the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa or the Imperial Palace. Nature lovers will enjoy the Hamarikyu Gardens or the Hama-rikyu Teien Garden. And for a unique experience, take a trip to Mount Fuji.
Tokyo Luxury Hotels
Tokyo Luxury Villas
Buenos Aires, Argentina
There are plenty of places to visit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some popular tourist destinations include the obelisk, the Casa Rosada, and the Puerto Madero district. Every barrio (neighborhood) has its own unique culture and flavor. San Telmo, La Boca, and Palermo are some of the most popular barrios. There are also many parks and plazas, such as Plaza de Mayo and Plaza de la Republica, that are worth checking out.
Buenos Aires Luxury Hotels
Hamburg, Germany
One of the most popular tourist destinations in Germany is Hamburg. From the lively and colorful harbor district to the grandiose City Hall, there is plenty to see and do in Hamburg. Some of the other popular places to visit include the Reeperbahn district with its pubs and nightlife, the Planten un Blomen botanical gardens, and the architecturally stunning Rathausmarkt square.
Hamburg Luxury Hotels
Lisbon, Portugal
The capital of Portugal, Lisbon is a city of fascinating contrasts. From its coastal location, visitors can enjoy stunning ocean views, while its hilly, narrow streets are home to a maze of charming traditional homes and lively nightlife. A city of 7 hills, Lisbon is a bustling metropolis with something for everyone. Here are some of the top places to visit: The Belem Tower, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of Lisbons most iconic landmarks. This 16th-century fortress and lighthouse is a must-see for visitors. The Alfama district, with its winding streets and tile-roofed homes, is the oldest district in Lisbon. This is the perfect place to get lost and explore the citys history. The Lisbon Zoo is a great place to enjoy a day out with the family, with over 2,000 animals from around the world. The Christ the King statue, located atop a hill in the suburb of Almada, offers impressive views of Lisbon and the river Tagus. The Lisbon Oceanarium, located in the Parque das Nacoes district, is home to more than 12,000 marine creatures and is one of the largest aquariums in Europe.
Lisbon Luxury Hotels
Lisbon Luxury Villas
Malaga, Spain
Malaga is an attractive seaside city in southern Spain with a long history. There are many places to visit in Malaga, including the Gibralfaro Castle, the Alcazaba fortress, and the Malaga Cathedral. Malaga is also home to a variety of museums, including the Picasso Museum. The city is well known for its beaches, and there are many delightful places to relax and enjoy the sun and the sea.
Malaga Luxury Hotels
Malaga Luxury Villas
Munich, Germany
When planning a vacation to Munich, Germany, be sure to include these top places to visit: The Marienplatz is a must-see square in the city center, featuring a beautiful Glockenspiel show and the Old and New Town Halls. The Englisher Garten, Europes largest city park, is a great place for a relaxing stroll or a picnic. OlympiaPark is home to the famous 1972 Olympic Stadium as well as a huge amusement park. The Frauenkirche is a stunning church in the old town with a Glockenspiel of its own. Beer lovers will want to visit the Hofbrauhaus, the worlds most famous beer hall. For a bit of history and culture, check out the LudwigMaximilians-University and the Deutsches Museum. There is so much to see and do in Munich these are just a few highlights!.
Munich Luxury Hotels
Granada, Spain
Granada is a city in southern Spain that is known for its Moorish architecture and history. The city is home to the Alhambra, a palace and fortress that was constructed in the late 1300s. Visitors can also enjoy the citys many churches, including the Cathedral of Granada. Granada is also a convenient base for exploring the other cities and towns in Andalusia.
Granada Luxury Hotels
Bucharest, Romania
Bucharest is a city full of history and culture. There are many places to visit, such as the Palace of Parliament, which is the world's largest civilian building. Other places to visit include the old city center, which is full of charming streets and buildings, and the Botanical Garden, which is the largest botanical garden in Romania.
Bucharest Luxury Hotels
Bologna, Italy
Bologna, Italy is a beautiful city with plenty of places to visit. Some popular tourist destinations include the Piazza Maggiore, the Tower of Asinelli, and the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca. There are also plenty of museums and churches to explore, and the city is full of charming restaurants and cafes. Bologna is an excellent destination for a vacation, and there is something for everyone to enjoy in this amazing city.
Bologna Luxury Hotels
Porto, Portugal
Porto is a port city in Portugal that is well known for its wine. It's also a city with a long and rich history. There are many places to visit in Porto, including the old city center, the Dom Luis I Bridge, and the Clerigos Tower. Porto is also home to the famous Port wine caves, which are a must-visit for wine lovers.
Porto Luxury Hotels
Cologne, Germany
Cologne, located on the Rhine River in western Germany, is a city well worth visiting. The city has a long and rich history, dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. Some of the city's most popular tourist attractions include the Cologne Cathedral, Hohenzollern Bridge, and the RheinEnergieStadion. Additionally, Cologne is home to a wide variety of museums, shops, and restaurants. In fact, the city has been ranked as one of the best places to live in Germany. So, if you're looking for a great European city to visit, be sure to add Cologne to your list.
Cologne Luxury Hotels
Istanbul, Turkey
If you're looking for an exotic and affordable vacation destination, look no further than Istanbul, Turkey. Filled with historical places to visit and bargains to be found, Istanbul offers something for everyone. Be sure to visit the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and the Blue Mosque while you're there. Don't forget to bargain for the best prices when shopping in the bazaars, and enjoy some delicious Turkish cuisine while you're at it. Istanbul is sure to leave you with a lasting impression.
Istanbul Luxury Hotels
Istanbul Luxury Villas
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is a fascinating and exotic city that offers visitors a mix of traditional Middle Eastern culture and modern, cosmopolitan life. There are plenty of places to visit in Dubai, from the towering skyscrapers of Downtown Dubai to the luxury shopping malls and luxurious hotels of the Palm Jumeirah. Don't miss a chance to experience an Arabian night out on an epic dhow cruise, or take a trip out into the Arabian Desert to see the stunning sand dunes.
Dubai Luxury Hotels
Dubai Luxury Resorts
Dubai Luxury Villas
Antwerp, Belgium
Antwerp is a city located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital of the province of Antwerp and has a population of over half a million people. Antwerp is a popular tourist destination due to its many historical buildings, museums, and art galleries. Some of the most popular places to visit in Antwerp are the Cathedral of Our Lady, the City Hall, the Rubenshuis, and the Antwerp Zoo.
Antwerp Luxury Hotels
Lyon, France
Lyon is a beautiful city in the south of France that is full of culture and places to visit. Some of the most popular places to visit in Lyon are the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere, the Place Bellecour, and the Vieux Lyon. The Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere is a beautiful cathedral that is a must-see when visiting Lyon. The Place Bellecour is a large square in the heart of Lyon that is full of restaurants and cafes. The Vieux Lyon is a district in Lyon that is full of old buildings and is a great place to wander around and take in the sights.
Lyon Luxury Hotels
Athens, Greece
If you find yourself in Athens, there are definitely some spots you won't want to miss. The Acropolis, Parthenon, and Olympic Stadium are all essential stops, but there are plenty of others, too. If you're looking for a bit of history, the National Archaeological Museum is a must-see, while nature lovers will enjoy a visit to the botanical gardens. If you're looking to relax, take a walk along the beach in Glyfada or head to the Plaka district for a charming and picturesque setting. No matter what you're interested in, Athens has something for you.
Athens Luxury Hotels
Athens Luxury Villas
Helsinki, Finland
While in Helsinki, make sure to visit these popular tourist destinations: The Senate Square and Lutheran Cathedral The Sibelius Monument Ateneum Art Museum Market Square Helsinki Zoo.
Helsinki Luxury Hotels
Vilnius, Lithuania
The capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, is a picturesque city with a rich history. The old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is full of charming churches, narrow streets, and pretty squares. There are also lots of museums and other places of interest to visit, including the Hill of Crosses, Gediminas Tower, and the Presidential Palace. Vilnius is a great city to explore on foot, and there are plenty of cafes, restaurants, and bars to enjoy in the evening.
Vilnius Luxury Hotels
Reykjavik, Iceland
A city of remote beauty, Reykjavik is teeming with interesting places to visit. One of the worlds most northern capitals, Reykjavik offers stunning landscapes and a wealth of cultural experiences. From the iconic Hallgrimskirkja church to the popular Golden Circle tour, theres plenty to see and do in Reykjavik. Be sure to check out the citys lively nightlife scene, too you wont be disappointed!.
Reykjavik Luxury Hotels
Glasgow, United Kingdom
Some of the most popular places to visit in Glasgow include the Gallery of Modern Art, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the Riverside Museum, and the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. There are also many wonderful parks and gardens to explore, including the Botanic Gardens and Glasgow Green. For those interested in history and architecture, there are many fascinating old buildings to see, such as the Glasgow Cathedral and the University of Glasgow. And for those looking for a lively nightlife, Glasgow has no shortage of pubs, clubs, and restaurants.
Glasgow Luxury Hotels
Los Angeles, CA, United States
As the birthplace of Hollywood and home to some of the world's most recognisable landmarks, there's no shortage of places to visit in Los Angeles. Start by exploring the city's iconic neighbourhoods like Beverly Hills and Hollywood, then venture out to attractions like the Griffith Observatory, Venice Beach and Disneyland. And don't forget to savour the city's world-famous cultural scene, with its abundance of museums, theatres and restaurants.
Los Angeles Luxury Hotels
Los Angeles Luxury Villas
San Diego, CA, United States
San Diego is a city located in California and is a major tourist destination. One of the main reasons people visit the city is for its many beaches. Coronado Beach, Mission Beach, and Pacific Beach are some of the most popular and are all within close proximity to the city center. Other attractions in San Diego include the San Diego Zoo, SeaWorld San Diego, and the USS Midway Museum. Restaurants, bars, and shopping can be found throughout the city, and world-renowned museums, like the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, are also located in San Diego.
San Diego Luxury Hotels
San Diego Luxury Resorts
San Diego Luxury Villas
Washington, DC, United States
Washington, D.C. is a city full of history and places to visit. Some popular places to visit are the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the Smithsonian. D.C. is also home to a number of monuments and memorials, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial. There are also a number of museums in D.C., like the American History Museum and the National Air and Space Museum.
Washington Luxury Hotels
Cancun, Mexico
Cancun is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Mexico. Aside from its beautiful beaches, there are plenty of places to visit and things to do in Cancun. Some of the most popular attractions include the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza, the eco-park Xcaret, and the nightclubs and bars in the resort district.
Cancun Luxury Hotels
Cancun Luxury Resorts
Cancun Luxury Villas
Virginia Beach, VA, United States
Virginia Beach is one of the top tourist destinations on the East Coast. From the Virginia Beach Boardwalk to the miles of sandy beaches, there's something for everyone to enjoy. There are also plenty of restaurants, shops, and other attractions to keep visitors busy. Some of the most popular places to visit in Virginia Beach include: The Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center : This aquarium is home to more than 20,000 animals, including sharks, dolphins, and rays. : This aquarium is home to more than 20,000 animals, including sharks, dolphins, and rays. The Virginia Beach Boardwalk: This 3.5-mile boardwalk is one of the most popular attractions in Virginia Beach. It features a wide variety of shops, restaurants, and amusements. This 3.5-mile boardwalk is one of the most popular attractions in Virginia Beach. It features a wide variety of shops, restaurants, and amusements. First Landing State Park: This park offers miles of hiking and biking trails, as well as a beachfront area for swimming and sunbathing. This park offers miles of hiking and biking trails, as well as a beachfront area for swimming and sunbathing. Cape Henry Lighthouse: This lighthouse is one of the oldest in the country and offers stunning views of the Chesapeake Bay. There are plenty of other things to do in Virginia Beach, including dolphin and whale watching tours, kayaking, and golfing. Whether you're looking for a fun family vacation or a romantic getaway, Virginia Beach is sure to please.
Virginia Beach Luxury Hotels
Virginia Beach Luxury Resorts
Beijing, China
If you're looking for an amazing cultural experience, be sure to add Beijing, China to your travel bucket list! With beautiful temples, charming hutongs (traditional alleyways), and a lively food scene, there's something for everyone in this bustling city. Plus, Beijing is home to some of the most iconic attractions in China, like the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. So if you're looking for an unforgettable East Asian adventure, be sure to add Beijing to your list!.
Beijing Luxury Hotels
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul is a metropolitan city that is home to over 10 million people. It is a city full of culture, history, and a vibrant nightlife. There are plenty of places to visit in Seoul, including the Gyeongbokgung Palace, Changdeokgung Palace, and N Seoul Tower. The Jeongdongne district is a must-see for anyone interested in art and culture, and the Itaewon district is a great place to go for a night on the town.
Seoul Luxury Hotels
South Lake Tahoe, CA, United States
Known for its dramatic lake and mountain scenery, South Lake Tahoe offers visitors plenty of places to visit and things to do. Some of the most popular attractions include floating down the river on a tube, hiking the trails in the summer and skiing or snowboarding the slopes in the winter. The city also has a variety of restaurants and nightlife options, as well as casinos for those looking to try their luck.
South Lake Tahoe Luxury Hotels
South Lake Tahoe Luxury Resorts
Daytona Beach, FL, United States
Daytona Beach is a city in Volusia County, Florida, United States. It is approximately 40 miles northeast of Orlando, and 85 miles southeast of Jacksonville. The city is known as "The World's Most Famous Beach." Daytona Beach is a principal city of the Fun Coast region of Florida. The Daytona Beach area is a popular tourist destination. It is well known for its beaches, sports events, and motorsports. Daytona Beach was the birthplace of NASCAR and home to its first track, Daytona International Speedway. Dayton Beach also features a large number of tourist-oriented businesses, such as motels, restaurants, and bars.
Daytona Beach Luxury Hotels
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The coastline of Rio de Janeiro is breathtaking, and the views from Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf Mountain are unforgettable. Rio's world-famous beaches are the perfect place to relax and enjoy the sun and the surf. The city's rich culture and history can be experienced in its many museums and in the lively nightlife. Rio is also a great place to shop for souvenirs.
Rio de Janeiro Luxury Hotels
Rio de Janeiro Luxury Villas
Jaco, Costa Rica
Jaco is a town on the Central Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. It's about an hour drive from San Jose and is a popular spot for surfers, sunbathers, and tourists. There are a number of beaches in the area, as well as restaurants, bars, and hotels. If you're looking for a place to relax and enjoy the Costa Rican sun and beaches, Jaco is a great option.
Jaco Luxury Hotels
Oslo, Norway
Oslo, Norway is a city with plenty of places to visit. You can find the peace and tranquility of nature parks and green spaces, experience the city's vibrant nightlife, or take in the historical and cultural sights. Here are a few of the top places to visit in Oslo: The Royal Palace: Oslo's Royal Palace is the official residence of Norway's king and queen. The palace is open to the public year-round, and offers a glimpse into the lives of the royal family. Oslo's Royal Palace is the official residence of Norway's king and queen. The palace is open to the public year-round, and offers a glimpse into the lives of the royal family. Vigeland Park: Considered one of Oslo's most popular tourist destinations, Vigeland Park is home to over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. The park is a great place to spend a sunny day outdoors. Considered one of Oslo's most popular tourist destinations, Vigeland Park is home to over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. The park is a great place to spend a sunny day outdoors. The Maritime Museum: This museum is home to a variety of exhibits on Norway's maritime history. Visitors can explore everything from Viking ships to modern submarines. This museum is home to a variety of exhibits on Norway's maritime history. Visitors can explore everything from Viking ships to modern submarines. The National Gallery: The National Gallery is Norway's largest art museum, and home to a vast collection of paintings and sculptures from the country's most famous artists. The National Gallery is Norway's largest art museum, and home to a vast collection of paintings and sculptures from the country's most famous artists. Aker Brygge: Aker Brygge is a popular waterfront district in Oslo, home to a variety of bars, restaurants, and shops. The area is a great place to people watch and enjoy the view of the Oslo Fjord.
Oslo Luxury Hotels
Lima, Peru
If you're looking for a city that's bursting with culture and flavor, Lima, Peru is the place for you! This vibrant destination is home to some of the most amazing places to visit in all of South America. From ancient ruins to lush rainforests, there's something for everyone in Lima. Here are just a few of the must-see attractions in this amazing city: The Larco Museum is one of Lima's top tourist destinations. This incredible museum is home to one of the largest collections of pre-Columbian art in the world. The Historic Center of Lima is a must-see for any history lover. This vibrant area is home to some of the oldest architecture in Lima, including the iconic San Francisco Monastery. If you're looking for a little bit of jungle in the city, head to the Parque de la Reserva. This lush park is home to beautiful gardens, a zoo, and even a butterfly farm! No trip to Lima would be complete without a visit to Machu Picchu. This ancient Inca citadel is one of the most iconic sites in all of South America.
Lima Luxury Hotels
Ankara, Turkey
Ankara is the cultural and political center of Turkey. The city is home to many museums, including the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and is a popular destination for tourists. The Citadel, the Ataturk Mausoleum, and the War of Independence Museum are all popular tourist destinations in Ankara. The city is also home to a vibrant nightlife and is a popular destination for students.
Ankara Luxury Hotels
Birmingham, United Kingdom
There are plenty of great places to visit in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Some of the most popular places to go include the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Black Country Living Museum. These places are all great for tourists, as they offer a variety of attractions, including beautiful gardens, interesting art, and a recreation of an old-fashioned town. Additionally, there are plenty of other great places to visit in Birmingham, such as the Jewellery Quarter and the German Christmas Market.
Birmingham Luxury Hotels
York, United Kingdom
With a rich history that spans back over 1,000 years, York is a must-visit destination in the United Kingdom. Explore the city's medieval architecture and narrow cobblestone streets, or enjoy a leisurely walk along the River Ouse. Visitors can also enjoy a variety of cultural experiences, such as the York Minster cathedral, the Jorvik Viking Centre, and the National Railway Museum. There are also plenty of shops and restaurants to enjoy in York.
York Luxury Hotels
Inverness, United Kingdom
Inverness, Scotland is a must-see destination on any traveler's list. Filled with rolling green hills, historical sites, and plenty of outdoor activities, there's something for everyone in this charming town. Start by exploring the city center, which is home to a variety of shops and restaurants. Make sure to check out the Inverness Castle, which offers commanding views of the area, and the Inverness Cathedral, a beautiful example of medieval architecture. Outside of the city center, there are plenty of other attractions to explore. The Loch Ness Monster is said to make its home in the loch here, and visitors can take boat tours to hunt for the mythical creature. If you're looking for a more active adventure, take a hike in the hills or go fishing on the loch. No matter what you choose to do, Inverness is a beautiful and welcoming town that is sure to charm you.
Inverness Luxury Hotels
Marseille, France
The Vieux Port (Old Harbor) is the oldest port in France. It is a beautiful place to visit with its sailboats, restaurants, and cafes. The Notre Dame de la Garde Basilica is also worth a visit. It offers stunning views of the city. If you're looking for a more lively atmosphere, head to the La Canebiere. It's a wide avenue with plenty of shops and restaurants.
Marseille Luxury Hotels
Marseille Luxury Villas
Honolulu, HI, United States
Honolulu is a city located on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, United States. It is the most populous city in the state of Hawaii and the county seat of the City and County of Honolulu. Honolulu is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Hawaii. Waikiki Beach is one of the most famous beaches in the world and is located in Honolulu. Other places to visit in Honolulu include Diamond Head, the USS Arizona Memorial, and Hanauma Bay.
Honolulu Luxury Hotels
Honolulu Luxury Resorts
Honolulu Luxury Villas
Bar Harbor, ME, United States
Famous for lobster and stunning ocean views, Bar Harbor is a popular destination in Maine. There are plenty of things to do in the town and its surroundings, including hiking, biking, whale watching, and exploring Acadia National Park.
Bar Harbor Luxury Hotels
Colorado Springs, CO, United States
There are many places to visit in Colorado Springs. Garden of the Gods is a popular park with beautiful rock formations. Pike's Peak is a 14,115 foot mountain that offers great views and outdoor activities. The Broadmoor is a world-renowned resort with lovely gardens and a championship golf course. Royal Gorge Bridge is the world's highest suspension bridge and a popular tourist spot.
Colorado Springs Luxury Hotels
Fort Myers Beach, FL, United States
Just an hours drive from the Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach is a popular tourist spot, especially in the winter when the snowbirds migrate down. The seven-mile-long beach is known for its white sand and clear water and is a popular spot for swimming, sunbathing, fishing, and kayaking. There are also a number of restaurants and bars in the area, as well as a few stores.
Fort Myers Beach Luxury Hotels
Biloxi, MS, United States
There are plenty of places to explore in Biloxi, Mississippi from the citys iconic Beaches to the picturesque Bay Saint Louis. Venture into the citys downtown area to check out the many shops and restaurants, or take a walk along the shoreline. No matter what you choose to do, youre sure to have a great time in Biloxi.
Biloxi Luxury Hotels
Palermo, Italy
If you're looking for a city with a rich and diverse history, Palermo is the place for you. This coastal city in Italy is teeming with medieval architecture, churches, and cathedrals. Be sure to check out the Teatro Massimo, the largest opera house in Europe, and the Palazzo dei Normanni, the seat of the Sicilian government. Don't miss out on the city's vibrant nightlife and vast array of restaurants that serve up some of the best food in the country.
Palermo Luxury Hotels
Palermo Luxury Villas
Manila, Philippines
The capital of the Philippines, Manila is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant culture. There are plenty of places to visit in Manila, including the walled city of Intramuros, the Rizal Park, and the Manila Bay. The city is also home to a large number of churches, including the Manila Cathedral and the San Agustin Church. Manila is a great city to explore on foot, and there are plenty of restaurants and shops to enjoy.
Manila Luxury Hotels
Zermatt, Switzerland
Zermatt is an alpine village in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. It is famous for its ski resort, mountaineering and hiking trails. The views of the Matterhorn from Zermatt are iconic. The village is car-free, making it a cyclists' and pedestrians' paradise. There are many places to visit in Zermatt, including the village's beautiful churches, impressive museums, and great restaurants.
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Basel, Switzerland
Basel is a city located in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine. Basel has a population of about 176,000 and is the third most populous city in Switzerland. Basel has many interesting places to visit, including the Basel Munster, the Basel Rathaus (town hall), the Basel Zoo, and the Munsterhof, the old town square. Basel also has a number of art museums, including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Fondation Beyeler, and the Schaulager. Basel is a great city to visit, and I highly recommend it!.
Basel Luxury Hotels
Copenhagen, Denmark
There are a number of places to visit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some of the most popular tourist destinations include Tivoli Gardens, Nyhavn, and the Rosenborg Castle Gardens. Tivoli Gardens is a beautiful amusement park that has something for everyone. It is perfect for a day of fun with family or friends. Nyhavn is a charming canal district that is popular for its brightly colored houses and lively atmosphere. Visitors can enjoy a relaxing cruise down the canal or take a seat in one of the many cafes and restaurants. The Rosenborg Castle Gardens are home to a majestic castle as well as beautifully landscaped gardens. There is plenty to see and do in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Copenhagen Luxury Hotels
Steamboat Springs, CO, United States
Steamboat Springs is located in northwestern Colorado. The town is named for the steamboats that traveled up the Yampa River in the 1800s. Today, the town is a popular tourist destination, known for its skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and rafting.
Steamboat Springs Luxury Hotels
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates and is home to many tourist attractions. Some popular places to visit in Abu Dhabi include the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Ferrari World Theme Park, and the Yas Island Waterpark. There are also a number of museums and shopping malls in Abu Dhabi, making it a great destination for those looking for a mix of culture and leisure.
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Bogota, Colombia
There's a lot to see and do in Bogota. Some of the top places to visit include the historical La Candelaria district, the cobblestone streets of Plaza de Bolivar, the Monserrate mountain, the Bogota Botanical Garden, and the Gold Museum. La Candelaria is home to many brightly-colored colonial buildings, churches, and plazas. Plaza de Bolivar is the center of Bogota and is surrounded by important landmarks like the Presidential Palace and the National Capitol. The Monserrate mountain is a popular tourist destination due to its stunning views of Bogota. The Bogota Botanical Garden is the largest in Colombia and features a wide variety of plants and trees. The Gold Museum is home to the largest collection of Pre-Columbian gold artifacts in the world.
Bogota Luxury Hotels
Cebu, Philippines
Due to its location and its rich history, there are plenty of places to visit in Cebu. Some of the most popular tourist destinations include the Cebu Taoist Temple, the Fort San Pedro, the Yap-San Diego Ancestral House, and the Magellan's Cross.
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Lagos, Portugal
Lagos is a small town in Portugal with a population of around 22,000. It's located in the Algarve region and is a popular tourist destination. Some of the places to visit in Lagos are the beaches, the old town, and the Marina. The beaches are beautiful and there are a lot of them to choose from. The old town is a maze of narrow streets and alleyways with lots of shops and restaurants. The Marina is a great place to walk around and watch the boats.
Lagos Luxury Hotels
Medellin, Colombia
Some places to visit in Medellin, Colombia are: the Botanical Garden, the Ethnographic Museum, the Jardin Botanico, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Park of Lights, and the San Pedro Claver Church.
Medellin Luxury Hotels
Genoa, Italy
While there are many places to visit in Genoa, one of the must-sees is the city's cathedral. Dedicated to San Lorenzo, the church features an intricate Gothic facade and a Renaissance interior. If you're looking for a place to take in some stunning views, head to the Genoa Aquarium, which is located on the promenade stretching along the city's harbor.
Genoa Luxury Hotels
Hoi An, Vietnam
Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Vietnam. Its a bridge town thats best explored on foot. The narrow streets are a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese architecture. There are tailors, artisans, and lantern shops galore. The food is also some of the best in Vietnam. Be sure to try the local specialties, like Cao Lau and White Rose dumplings.
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Baku, Azerbaijan
Baku, Azerbaijan is a city with a lot of culture and history. There are a lot of places to visit, like the Palace of the Shirvanshahs and the Maiden Tower. There are also a lot of great restaurants, like the Flame Club, which has a great atmosphere and delicious food.
Baku Luxury Hotels
San Luis Obispo, CA, United States
San Luis Obispo is a city located in the central coast of California. It's known for its natural beauty, relaxed vibe, and abundance of things to do. Some of the top places to visit in San Luis Obispo include the Madonna Inn, Hearst Castle, and the Paso Robles wine country. The city is also home to a variety of beaches, parks, and other attractions. In addition, San Luis Obispo is a great place to live, with plenty of restaurants, shops, and other amenities.
San Luis Obispo Luxury Hotels
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Colombo is the largest city and commercial capital of Sri Lanka. The city is located on the west coast of the island and is the administrative, commercial, and industrial center of Sri Lanka. Colombo is also the center of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, with numerous Buddhist temples. There are a number of places to visit in Colombo, including the Galle Face Green, the Dutch fort, the Pettah Bazaar, and the Sri Lankan National Museum.
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Yogyakarta, Indonesia
The city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia is home to some of the most stunning temples and historical landmarks in the country. The city is also a great place to enjoy traditional Javanese culture and cuisine. Some of the must-see places in Yogyakarta include the Borobudur Temple, the Prambanan Temple, and the Sultan's Palace.
Yogyakarta Luxury Hotels
Cefalu, Italy
Looking for a beautiful and historic place to visit in Italy? Look no further than Cefalu. This town is teeming with history and stunning architecture, and its location on the coast makes it the perfect place to relax and take in the stunning scenery. Don't miss the Duomo di Cefalu, a 12th century Norman church that is definitely worth a visit, or the Palazzo dei Normanni, a former royal palace.
Cefalu Luxury Hotels
San Jose, CA, United States
San Jose, California, is home to a variety of tourist destinations. Some popular places to visit include the Winchester Mystery House, the Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. There are also a number of lovely parks, such as Kelley Park and Plaza de Cesar Chavez, that are well worth a visit. San Jose is also home to a number of great restaurants, so be sure to check out the local cuisine. Whatever your interests, San Jose has something to offer visitors.
San Jose Luxury Hotels
Hong Kong, China
Hong Kong is one of the most popular destinations for tourists in China. There are many places to visit in Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort, Victoria Peak, and the Temple Street Night Market. Hong Kong is also a great place to shop, with many high-end malls and markets.
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Orlando, FL, United States
Orlando is a city in the central region of Florida, in the United States. The city is the county seat of Orange County, and the center of the metropolitan area also known as Greater Orlando. Orlando is well known for its theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort, and SeaWorld Orlando. Other tourist destinations in Orlando include the Holy Land Experience, the Orlando Science Center, and the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. Orlando is also home to the University of Central Florida, one of the largest universities in the United States.
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Philadelphia, PA, United States
If youre looking for a place thats rich in history and culture, Philadelphia is the place for you. The city is home to numerous iconic landmarks, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Theres also a great variety of museums and other attractions to explore, such as the Philadelphia Zoo and the Please Touch Museum. And, of course, Philly is the birthplace of Americas favorite sandwich, the cheesesteak. So why not visit Americas most historic city and see for yourself what all the fuss is about?.
Philadelphia Luxury Hotels
Nice, France
France is known for its many beautiful places to visit, and Nice is no exception. With its stunning coastline and mild climate, Nice is a popular tourist destination. Some of the most popular places to visit in Nice include the Promenade des Anglais, the Castle Hill, and the Old Town. There is also a wide variety of shops and restaurants to enjoy in Nice. If you're looking for a beautiful and relaxing place to visit in France, Nice is definitely worth considering.
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Singapore, Singapore
Singapore is a popular tourist destination, brimming with cultural and natural attractions. From award-winning restaurants to serene gardens and pristine beaches, there is much to explore in this diverse city-state. Here are some of the top places to visit in Singapore: 1. Marina Bay: This iconic waterfront district is home to stunning architecture, world-class landmarks, and a vibrant nightlife. 2. Gardens by the Bay: These stunning gardens feature a mix of plants from around the world, as well as towering sculptures and a biodome. 3. Chinatown: This lively district is home to traditional Chinese shops and restaurants, as well as vibrant street markets. 4. Little India: This neighborhood is known for its vibrant culture and colorful temples. 5. Sentosa Island: This resort island is home to sandy beaches, lush rainforests, and a variety of entertainment options.
Singapore Luxury Hotels
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Nottingham, United Kingdom
Nottingham is a city in the East Midlands of England. It is one of the United Kingdom's major cities, with a population of over 321,000. The city is home to two universities, Queen's Medical Centre, and seven football grounds. Nottingham is known for its lace-making and bicycle manufacturing. The city has a rich history, dating back to the Bronze Age. There are plenty of places to visit in Nottingham, including the Nottingham Castle, the Sherwood Forest, and the National Ice Centre. The city also has a lively nightlife, with a variety of pubs and bars.
Nottingham Luxury Hotels
Cannes, France
Cannes is a city located in the south of France. Some of the places to visit in Cannes are the Palais des Festivals et des Congres, the Boulevard de la Croisette, and Le Suquet.
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Park City, UT, United States
Park City, Utah, offers visitors a wealth of places to visit and things to do. Main Street, with its charming shops and restaurants, is a must-see. The Park City Museum tells the town's fascinating history, and the Park City Utah Temple is a beautiful sight. For outdoor enthusiasts, there's plenty of skiing and snowboarding in the winter and hiking and mountain biking in the summer. And don't forget to visit the Olympic Park, where the 2002 Winter Olympics were held.
Park City Luxury Hotels
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Port Angeles, WA, United States
If you're looking for a quaint, small town to visit in the US, Port Angeles is worth a stop. Located in the state of Washington, it's right on the Pacific coast with stunning views of the Olympic Mountains. There's plenty of things to do in the area, from hiking and fishing to whale watching and enjoying the local restaurants and breweries.
Port Angeles Luxury Hotels
Fort Lauderdale, FL, United States
If you're looking for a fun-filled Florida getaway, look no further than Fort Lauderdale! With its miles of pristine beaches, world-famous shopping and vibrant nightlife, there's something for everyone in this seaside city. Here are some of the top places to visit in Fort Lauderdale: Las Olas Boulevard: This popular shopping and dining district is home to some of Fort Lauderdale's most upscale boutiques and restaurants. The Beach: With its wide, sandy beaches and crystal-clear waters, Fort Lauderdale's beach is a major draw for visitors. The Everglades: Just a short drive from Fort Lauderdale, the Everglades are home to an abundance of wildlife, including alligators, bald eagles and manatees. The Broward Center for the Performing Arts: This world-class performing arts center is home to a variety of theater, dance and music performances. So what are you waiting for? Book your trip to Fort Lauderdale today!.
Fort Lauderdale Luxury Hotels
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Myrtle Beach, SC, United States
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is a popular tourist destination. There are plenty of places to visit in the area, including amusement parks, beaches, and golf courses. Myrtle Beach also has a lively nightlife, with plenty of bars and restaurants.
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Salzburg, Austria
Salzburg is one of the most visited places in Austria. It is a city rich in history and culture. There are many places to visit, such as the Hohensalzburg Fortress, the Mirabell Palace, and the Salzburg Cathedral. There are also many hiking trails and parks to enjoy.
Salzburg Luxury Hotels
Pattaya, Thailand
Pattaya is an amazing city with plenty of places to visit and things to do. One of the most popular tourist destinations in Thailand, Pattaya offers something for everyone. There are lovely beaches, interesting temples, great shopping, and exciting nightlife. With its moderate climate and affordable prices, it's no wonder Pattaya is a favorite destination for tourists from all over the world.
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Dallas, TX, United States
Dallas is a city located in the U.S. state of Texas. It is the ninth most populous city in the United States and the third most populous city in the state of Texas. Dallas is also the main city of the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. The city's prominence arose from its historical importance as a center for the oil and cotton industries, and its position as a major transportation hub for the South. Dallas is home to the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League and the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association. The city's economy is primarily based on banking, commerce, telecommunications, technology, energy, healthcare and medical research, and transportation. The city is home to the world's largest airline hub and the third largest cargo airport in the United States.
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Kolkata, India
Kolkata, also known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. The city is located on the east bank of the Hooghly River. It is the second most populous city in India, after Mumbai, and the third most populous metropolitan area in India, after Mumbai and Delhi. The city is notable for its colonial architecture, art and culture, and for its overwhelming poverty. Kolkata is home to the Indian Museum, the Calcutta Stock Exchange, the National Library of India, and the Indian Statistical Institute.
Kolkata Luxury Hotels
San Antonio, TX, United States
San Antonio is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Texas. There are plenty of places to visit in this city, from the well-known River Walk to the exquisite Spanish missions. If you're looking for a fun place to spend the day, you can't go wrong with San Antonio.
San Antonio Luxury Hotels
Seattle, WA, United States
There are many wonderful places to visit in Seattle, Washington. Some of the most popular attractions include Pike Place Market, the Seattle Space Needle, and the Museum of Pop Culture. There are also many parks and gardens, such as Volunteer Park and Seattle Chinese Garden, as well as plenty of restaurants and shops. Located on the other side of the world, Western Australia is a great place to visit for those looking for something different. Some of the most popular attractions include Rottnest Island, the Margaret River region, and Monkey Mia. There are also plenty of beautiful parks and gardens, such as Kings Park and Botanic Garden, as well as restaurants and shops.
Seattle Luxury Hotels
Liverpool, United Kingdom
Liverpool is a city located in North West England and is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom. The city is known for its football teams Liverpool and Everton, The Beatles, and its maritime history. Liverpool is a popular tourist destination and is home to various tourist attractions including Mersey Ferry, Liverpool Cathedral, and Albert Dock.
Liverpool Luxury Hotels
Malmo, Sweden
Malmo is Sweden's third largest city with a population of over 310,000. It is located in the province of Scania on the country's southern tip. Malmo is a vibrant city with a strong arts and cultural scene. There are plenty of places to visit in Malmo, including the Malmo Castle, the Botanical Gardens, and the Turning Torso skyscraper. Malmo is also home to a large shopping district and a lively nightlife.
Malmo Luxury Hotels
Gothenburg, Sweden
Goteborg, Sweden's second largest city, is a major port on the country's west coast. It's a popular tourist destination, known for its lively nightlife, beautiful architecture and delicious seafood. Some of the city's highlights include the Liseberg amusement park, the Botanical Garden, and the charming old town district. Goteborg is also home to a large number of museums, including the Volvo Museum, the Maritime Museum and the Universeum science center.
Gothenburg Luxury Hotels
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Ljubljana is the capital city of Slovenia and is a city full of culture and history. There are many places to visit in Ljubljana, such as the castle, the old town, and the cathedral. The city is also home to many museums, art galleries, and parks. Ljubljana is a great city to explore on foot, and there are many restaurants and cafes to enjoy.
Ljubljana Luxury Hotels
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Australia is a vast country with plenty of stunning places to visit, but Sydney is undoubtedly one of the most popular tourist destinations on the continent. From the iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge to the beautiful beaches and lush national parks, there's something for everyone in this lively city. There's also a thriving food and nightlife scene, so you'll never run out of things to do in Sydney.
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Melbourne, VIC, Australia
There's a lot to love about Melbourne its lively arts and culture scene, its parks and gardens, its diverse range of restaurants and cafes, and its stunning architecture. Here are some of the best places to visit in Melbourne: - Federation Square: This iconic square is a great place to people-watch and take in the city's impressive architecture. It's also home to a number of museums and galleries, including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria. - Queen Victoria Market: This vibrant market is a must-visit for foodies and shoppers alike. It's the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere, and offers a vast array of fresh produce, meat, seafood, and souvenirs. - Melbourne Cricket Ground: If you're a sports fan, be sure to check out the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is the largest cricket stadium in the world. It's also home to the Australian Football League, and has hosted a number of major sporting events, including the Commonwealth Games and the Rugby Union World Cup. - Royal Botanic Gardens: These beautiful gardens are a great place to relax and take in some of Melbourne's natural beauty. They're home to a number of different gardens, including the Australian Garden, the Sculpture Garden, and the Japanese Garden.
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Vancouver, BC, Canada
The top places to visit in Vancouver are Stanley Park, Granville Island, Gastown, and Chinatown. These are all must-see attractions that offer an array of activities, scenery, and history. Stanley Park is a world-famous urban park that features greenery, beaches, gardens, and a stunning view of the North Shore Mountains. Granville Island is a vibrant neighbourhood with unique shops, restaurants, and art galleries. Gastown is the city's oldest neighbourhood and is home to charming cobblestone streets and funky boutiques. Chinatown is one of the largest and most vibrant Chinatowns in North America and offers delicious food, interesting history, and vibrant culture.
Vancouver Luxury Hotels
Toronto, ON, Canada
From the CN Tower and Hockey Hall of Fame to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Distillery District, there are plenty of amazing places to visit in Toronto, Canada. With something for everyone, Toronto is a great city to explore. So what are you waiting for? Start planning your trip today!.
Toronto Luxury Hotels
Montreal, QC, Canada
Montreal is a vibrant city with something for everyone. There are plenty of places to visit, including the Notre Dame Basilica, the Olympic Stadium, and Mount Royal. The city is also home to a lively arts and culture scene, with theatres, art galleries, and music venues. Montreal is a great place to visit year-round, with festivals and events happening throughout the year.
Montreal Luxury Hotels
Seville, Spain
Seville is one of the most visited places in Spain for a plethora of reasons: its stunning architecture, tapas bars, flamenco and great weather. The Giralda Tower is a must-see when in Seville as is the Plaza de Espana. Andalusian culture is heavily present in the city and is best experienced by wandering the narrow streets and alleyways, popping into a lively tapas bar for a drink and some snacks or enjoying a flamenco show.
Seville Luxury Hotels
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Ocean City, MD, United States
Ocean City is a seaside resort town in Worcester County, Maryland, on the Atlantic coast. It is well known for its long promenade, its fishing, and its crab cuisine. There are plenty of places to visit in Ocean City, including the boardwalk, amusement rides, shopping, and restaurants. You can also visit the Assateague Island National Seashore, which is home to wild horses, or head to the nearby town of Berlin for more shopping and dining options.
Ocean City Luxury Hotels
Cambridge, MA, United States
If you're looking for a quintessential New England town to visit, Cambridge, Massachusetts is the place for you. With its elaborate architecture and Colonial history, Cambridge is a lively town with plenty of things to see and do - perfect for a weekend getaway. Some of the places you won't want to miss include the Harvard University campus, the charming and lively shops and restaurants in Harvard Square, and the leafy paths of the Cambridge Common.
Cambridge Luxury Hotels
Laguna Beach, CA, United States
Laguna Beach, California is a place known for its stunningly beautiful coastline, excellent restaurants, and art galleries. But there's more to Laguna Beach than meets the eye. Here are some of the best places to visit in Laguna Beach: Crystal Cove State Park: This state park is known for its coves, tidepools, and bluffs. It's a great place to go hiking, swimming, and snorkeling. Heisler Park: This park is a great place for a walk or a picnic. It's also home to some of the best views of the Pacific Coast. Downtown Laguna Beach: This charming downtown area is home to art galleries, boutique shops, and excellent restaurants. Aliso Beach: This beach is known for its excellent surfing and swimming conditions. It's also a great place to take a walk or enjoy a picnic.
Laguna Beach Luxury Hotels
Hot Springs, AR, United States
In downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, you'll find historic buildings, antique shops, and art galleries. For nature lovers, there are also plenty of places to visit, including the Garland County Arboretum, Ouachita National Forest, and Hot Springs National Park. Spa enthusiasts can enjoy a relaxing day in one of the area's hot springs. And no trip to Hot Springs is complete without a visit to the world-famous Bathhouse Row.
Hot Springs Luxury Hotels
Sedona, AZ, United States
There are many places to visit in Sedona, Arizona. Among the most popular are the Chapel of the Holy Cross, Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, and Boynton Canyon. The town's unique red-rock formations and ancient ruins offer plenty of photo opportunities. Visitors can also enjoy hiking, biking, and horseback riding. Sedona is a great place to relax and take in the natural beauty of the Southwest.
Sedona Luxury Hotels
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Boulder, CO, United States
Boulder, Colorado is a breathtaking city nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The city is home to stunning views, ample outdoor recreation, and a lively arts scene. Outdoor enthusiasts will love exploring the city's many trails, parks, and open spaces. History buffs will enjoy checking out the city's museums and historic sites. Culture seekers will appreciate the city's many theaters, art galleries, and restaurants. No matter what your interests, you'll find something to love in Boulder.
Boulder Luxury Hotels
Key West, FL, United States
Key West is a small island off the coast of Florida that is filled with history, charm, and fun places to visit. Its lush tropical setting and the laid-back vibe of the island make it a popular destination for those looking for a relaxing getaway. There are plenty of places to explore in Key West, from the charming historic district to the crystal-clear waters of the Florida Keys. Here are some of the top places to visit in Key West: -The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum: This iconic museum is dedicated to the life and work of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West for over 20 years. -Duval Street: This lively street is the heart of Key West's nightlife and is home to many bars and restaurants. -The Southernmost Point: This landmark is located at the end of Duval Street and is the southernmost point in the continental United States. -The Key West Lighthouse: This picturesque lighthouse is a popular spot for tourists and offers stunning views of the island. -The African American Heritage House: This museum is dedicated to the history and culture of African Americans in Key West. -The Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory: This attraction is home to over 2,000 butterflies and a variety of other tropical plants and animals.
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Stockholm, Sweden
Stockholm, Sweden is a city with many places to visit. One place is the Vasa Museum, which is home to a ship that sunk in 1628 and was raised from the ocean floor 333 years later. The ship is preserved and on display in the museum. Another place to visit is the Royal Palace, the official residence of the Swedish monarch. The palace is open for tours, and visitors can see the royal apartments, the throne room, and the Hall of State.
Stockholm Luxury Hotels
Destin, FL, United States
Looking for a place to visit in Florida? Look no further than Destin! This city is home to beautiful beaches, wonderful restaurants, and plenty of places to shop. No matter what you're looking for, you can find it in Destin. Be sure to check out the Destin Harbor and the fishing pier for amazing views and plenty of things to do. If you're looking for a place to relax, head to the beach and enjoy the sun and sand. There's something for everyone in Destin, so be sure to visit this amazing city!.
Destin Luxury Hotels
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Ashland, OR, United States
There are many places to visit in Ashland, Oregon. Some of the most popular places are the Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and Mt. Ashland. The Shakespeare Festival is a great place to see some of the best plays in the world. Lithia Park is a beautiful park with a river running through it. Mt. Ashland is a great place to go skiing in the winter.
Ashland Luxury Hotels
Seaside, OR, United States
One of the most beautiful places on the Oregon Coast is Seaside. With its wide, sandy beach and majestic promenade, Seaside is a popular tourist destination. There are plenty of places to eat and shop, and the Seaside Aquarium is a must-see. Visitors can also enjoy fishing, whale watching, or just taking a leisurely stroll along the beach.
Seaside Luxury Hotels
Newport, RI, United States
Newport is a picturesque town located in southern Rhode Island that is home to some of the most visited tourist destinations in the United States. The city is known for its miles of beaches and historic mansions that line the coast. Some popular places to visit in Newport include the Cliff Walk, the Breakers Mansion, the Museum of Yachting, and the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
Newport Luxury Hotels
Siena, Italy
Siena, Italy is a popular tourist destination, thanks to its well-preserved medieval city center. The city is famous for its art, food, and wine. Siena is located in the heart of Tuscany, making it the perfect base for exploring this beautiful region of Italy. Don't miss the Duomo (cathedral), the Piazza del Campo, and the Torre del Mangia.
Siena Luxury Hotels
Reno, NV, United States
Home to the University of Nevada, Reno and a wide variety of cultural and natural attractions, Reno is a great place to visit. Some of the top places to see in Reno include the Nevada Museum of Art, the Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center, and the Reno Events Center. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy hiking and skiing at Lake Tahoe and biking and kayaking on the Truckee River. In addition, Reno is home to a diverse array of restaurants and nightlife venues.
Reno Luxury Hotels
Atlantic City, NJ, United States
Atlantic City is a popular East Coast tourist destination, known for its boardwalks, beaches and casinos. There are plenty of places to visit in Atlantic City, from the Boardwalk Hall and the Absecon Lighthouse to the Atlantic City Aquarium and Lucy the Elephant. For a more thrilling experience, head to one of the city's casinos, where you can try your hand at blackjack, slots, roulette and more. Atlantic City also offers a wide variety of restaurants, from seafood spots to pizza places, so you're sure to find something to your taste. And if you're looking for some nightlife action, the city has you covered there too. Atlantic City is definitely a place worth visiting!.
Atlantic City Luxury Hotels
Atlantic City Luxury Resorts
Lake George, NY, United States
Looking for a place to visit in upstate New York? Look no further than the stunning Lake George. This picturesque locale is located in the heart of the Adirondacks and is known for its pristine beauty and terrific recreational opportunities. Visitors can enjoy hiking, biking, boating, fishing, and skiing, among other activities. Don't miss the chance to take in the spectacular views from the summit of Prospect Mountain or from the water's edge.
Lake George Luxury Hotels
Buffalo, NY, United States
If you're looking for a city that has it all, Buffalo is the place to be. From its vibrant downtown district to its abundance of parks and nature preserves, there's something for everyone in Buffalo. Here are some of the top places to visit in Buffalo: 1. The Buffalo Zoo - One of the top zoos in the country, the Buffalo Zoo is a must-visit for animal lovers of all ages. 2. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery - Buffalo's answer to the Louvre, the Albright-Knox is home to some of the world's most famous paintings and sculptures. 3. The Buffalo-Niagara Heritage Village - This living history museum offers a glimpse into what life was like in Buffalo in the 1800s. 4. The Buffalo River - Take a walk or bike ride along the Buffalo River, one of the city's most picturesque areas. 5. Delaware Park - This large park is home to a variety of attractions, including a zoo, a golf course, and a nature preserve.
Buffalo Luxury Hotels
Rochester, MN, United States
Rochester, Minnesota is a city with plenty of places to visit. There's the Mayo Clinic, the Apache Mall, and several other shopping areas, as well as a variety of restaurants. There are also a few parks and golf courses. For those who love the outdoors, Rochester is also close to several state parks and the Mississippi River.
Rochester Luxury Hotels
Duluth, MN, United States
If you're looking for an amazing place to visit, Duluth, Minnesota should definitely be at the top of your list. This city is home to some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States, and there are plenty of things to do here that will keep you entertained for days on end. Some of the most popular places to visit in Duluth include the Aerial Lift Bridge, the Glensheen Mansion, and Chester Creek Park. Additionally, there are a number of excellent restaurants and shopping areas in the city, so be sure to explore everything that Duluth has to offer.
Duluth Luxury Hotels
Maputo, Mozambique
Maputo is the capital of Mozambique and a city full of culture and history. There are many places to visit in Maputo, such as the Jose Eduardo dos Santos Museum, the Maputo Cathedral, and the Rua da Independencia. Maputo is also home to the Maputo Bay, which offers beautiful beaches and great seafood.
Maputo Luxury Hotels
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, located on the northeast coast of Spain, is a renowned tourist destination and one of the most popular cities in the world. There are plenty of places to visit in Barcelona, such as the Gothic Quarter, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Parc Guell, La Sagrada Familia, and more. The city is also home to a lively nightlife and some of the best restaurants in the country.
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Split, Croatia
Split is a city on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea. It is the second-largest city in Croatia and the largest city in Dalmatia. It has a population of over 200,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area, which includes the City of Split and the surrounding towns, has a population of over 330,000. Split is a popular tourist destination and is the home of the Diocletian's Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Other popular tourist destinations include the Riva, the Peristyle, the Cathedral of Saint Domnius, and Sustipan.
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Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik is a city on the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean Sea, a seaport and the administrative center of Dubrovnik-Neretva County. Dubrovnik is nicknamed "The Pearl of the Adriatic".
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Byron Bay, NSW, Australia
Byron Bay is a magical place. It's no wonder that it's one of the most popular destinations in Australia. The town is set in a beautiful location, surrounded by rolling green hills and the bright blue ocean. There's plenty to do in Byron Bay, whether you're looking for a relaxing beach holiday or an adventure-filled trip. Some of the top places to visit in Byron Bay include the iconic lighthouse, the stunning beaches, and the lush rainforest. There's also a great nightlife and plenty of restaurants and cafes to enjoy. If you're looking for an amazing Australian getaway, be sure to add Byron Bay to your list!.
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Wellington, New Zealand
If you're looking for a little slice of heaven on earth, look no further than Wellington, New Zealand. With its gorgeous landscape and plethora of activities, there's something for everyone here. Whether you're a nature lover or a city slicker, Wellington has something special to offer. Top Wellington attractions include the Zealandia eco-sanctuary, the cable car up to the Botanic Gardens, and the sprawling Te Papa museum. For those who love getting out into the great outdoors, there are plenty of hiking and biking trails, as well as lovely seaside towns and villages to explore. And of course, no trip to Wellington would be complete without trying some of the delicious local cuisine be sure to sample a traditional Maori hangi feast! So what are you waiting for? Book your flight to Wellington today and start planning your perfect holiday!.
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Saint Louis, MO, United States
If you're looking for a fun place to visit with a rich history and plenty of things to see and do, look no further than Saint Louis, Missouri. This vibrant city is home to a variety of interesting attractions, including the Gateway Arch, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. There's also no shortage of restaurants and shopping options in Saint Louis. So, whether you're looking for a place to explore new cultures and cuisines or you're just looking for a place to have some fun, Saint Louis is a great option.
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Bloomington, IN, United States
The city of Bloomington, Indiana is home to a variety of attractions and places to visit. The Indiana University campus is a popular destination, as is the city's historic downtown district. Monroe County Courthouse
Safe Kids Dalton, which is coordinated by the Whitfield County Fire Department, received a 2016 Buckle Up, America! Award at the Awards Ceremony in Macon on July 13.
The award was presented by the Georgia Traffic Injury Prevention Institute (GTIPI), a unit of the University of Georgias College of Family and Consumer Sciences Extension, and the Governors Office of Highway Safety.
The Buckle Up, America! Awards recognize those individuals, agencies, communities, and civic groups who work to reduce injuries and prevent fatalities in Georgia through involvement with traffic safety, seat belt, and child safety seat awareness and enforcement initiatives.
The 2016 Awards Ceremony was designed to recognize and publicly thank traffic safety advocates for all they have done to support safer travel in Georgia, said Don Bower, the institutes project director.
These award winners focus on seat belts, child passenger safety and teen driving programs in the local community and across the state of Georgia. Traffic-related injuries and deaths are down significantly in Georgia, due largely to these efforts," he said.
Mr. Bower presented the awards with Harris Blackwood, director of the Governors Office of Highway Safety, and Frankie Jones, GTIPI director.
To be considered for an award, a nomination was made with supportive documentation that identified impact in the following areas: Community Involvement, Injury Prevention Activities, Advocacy, Leadership, and Merit.
Safe Kids Dalton demonstrated how to effectively address traffic injury prevention and involve other organizations in a community effort, Mr. Blackwood said.
Safe Kids Dalton was nominated in the Fire/EMS/Medical category.
This years nominees were also recognized for taking an active role in promoting injury prevention in the field of traffic safety, including legislative activities, injury prevention initiatives, and through media.
Safe Kids Dalton demonstrated a strong leadership at a level of merit in 2016, Mr. Blackwood said.
He congratulated recipients after the ceremony, saying, we are extremely proud of the work these professionals and volunteers do to save lives on Georgias roads and highways.
For more information about the Buckle up America! Awards, or for more information about traffic safety, child safety seats, teen driving, and older driving resources, visit the University of Georgia Traffic Injury Prevention Institutes website at www.ridesafegeorgia.org.
The Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services says that is optimistic it will receive as much as $24 million dollars over the next two years to expand treatment options for Tennesseans struggling with an addiction to prescription pain killers and other opioid-based narcotics.
Administered through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) the anticipated funds are part of President Obamas $1.1 billion expansion of opioid treatment. The effort is aimed to help Americans, who want treatment, to once and for all beat their addiction.
Tennesseans are hurting, said E. Douglas Varney, Commissioner for the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. These additional resources would have the potential to help thousands of our loved ones, friends, and neighbors struggling with an addiction, and get the treatment and counseling they desperately need.
Prescription opioids are the number one most abused substance in Tennessee. In 2015 more than 30% of those surveyed acknowledged their use of prescription pain relievers. The rate of prescription opioid use in Tennessee is significantly higher than the national average and drug poisoning deaths in the state also surpass the U.S. average.
With the potential infusion of federal money, qualified physicians would have the opportunity to increase the number of patients they can treat through a combination of FDA-approved buprenorphine treatment and counseling. The dual approach is designed to provide a whole-patient experience by changing an individuals behavior and treating their opioid dependency.
Under the care and supervision of qualified physicians, we are hopeful that more Tennesseans who want treatment will get it and end their substance use addiction, said Commissioner Varney. Buprenorphine treatment along with counseling represents the latest advance in what we call medication-assisted treatment. By addressing the whole person and not just dispensing more narcotics, we look at this as a real chance for Tennesseans to beat their opioid addiction for good.
Tennessees anticipated funding amount to expand buprenorphine treatment is ultimately dependent on action by the U.S. Congress, the strength of the states application and the strategy to combat the opioid epidemic.
Tennessee Economic and Community Development Commissioner Randy Boyd will lead Tennessees delegation at the 39th Annual Joint Meeting of the Southeast U.S./Japan and Japan-U.S. Southeast Associations (SEUS-Japan) in Tokyo from Sept. 20-22.
The joint conference of the two associations celebrates longstanding economic and cultural ties between Japan and the Southeast U.S. The prestigious gathering brings together Japans top CEOs, corporate executives and government officials alongside governors and economic development leaders from southeastern states.
Boyds trip comes on the heels of a ten-day visit TNECD officials and Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam made to Japan, China and Korea this spring.
I look forward to bringing Team Tennessees story back to Tokyo again later this year, Boyd said. The strong bond Team Tennessee has developed with Japanese businesses over the years has transformed our states economy. More than 170 Japanese-owned companies have together invested over $16 billion in Tennessee, directly employing 44,280 Tennesseans.
This trip gives us a chance to continue the fruitful face-to-face meetings weve had with leading Japanese companies and also forge new relationships as we look for future partners to make Tennessee the No. 1 state in the Southeast for high quality jobs, Boyd added.
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy is scheduled to attend the annual conference, which will feature networking alongside sessions on energy, investment, trade and the environment.
Tennessee companies last year exported $1.9 billion worth of products to Japan, which has long been a leading trade partner for the state as well as the top country for foreign direct investment in Tennessee.
To request more information about becoming a member of the Tennessee Delegation with Commissioner Boyd this fall and a special pre-conference study mission, contact Leigh Wieland with the Japan-America Society of Tennessee at jastninfo@jastn.org.
Snapchats privacy policy for Lenses claims it uses object recognition, not facial recognition, when analyzing a users face. (Blue Sky photos )
Two Illinois men filed a lawsuit against Snapchat earlier this year alleging the social media company violated state privacy laws with the technology it uses for its "Lenses" feature. Now, the case has landed in federal court.
The class-action suit claims Snapchat has illegally collected, stored and used users' biometric information features like iris scans, fingerprints or face geometry that are biologically unique to each person and are used to determine someone's identity and thus violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
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A Snapchat spokesman said no biometric information is collected or stored through the feature in question and called the lawsuit frivolous.
Jose Luis Martinez and Malcolm Neal filed the suit in May in a superior court in Los Angeles County, where Snapchat is based. Last week, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
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The suit claims Snapchat collects biometric information when users take photos of themselves using the Lenses feature, which identifies the size and shape of a user's face and overlays animations like dog ears or a mustache. The suit estimates Snapchat has created, collected and stored "tens if not hundreds of millions" of face templates, which it says are detailed geographic maps made by extracting and analyzing data from points and contours of user's faces.
The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, enacted in 2008, regulates how companies and individuals collect and use biometric data. The act says no private entity can gather and keep an individual's biometric information without prior notification and written permission from that person.
Snapchat's privacy policy for Lenses claims it uses object recognition, not facial recognition, when analyzing a user's face.
"Object recognition is an algorithm designed to understand the general nature of things that appear in an image," the privacy policy says. "It lets us know that a nose is a nose or an eye is an eye. But object recognition isn't the same as facial recognition. While Lenses can recognize faces in general, they can't recognize a specific face."
In an email to Blue Sky, a spokesman for the company said no biometric information is collected or stored through Lenses.
"Contrary to the claims of this frivolous lawsuit, we are very careful not to collect, store or obtain any biometric information or identifiers about our community," the spokesman said.
The suit seeks damages of $5,000 for "each and every intentional and reckless violation" of the privacy act, or $1,000 if the court finds a violation was negligent. According to the notice of removal filed by Snapchat's attorneys, the amount in controversy exceeds $5 million.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs could not be reached for comment Monday.
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mgraham@tribpub.com
Twitter @megancgraham
A United Airlines airplane lands near the International Terminal at O'Hare International Airport on March 16, 2016, in Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
Don't know about you, but I don't want my airline pilots to get worked up over anything. I expect the full-on Chuck Yeager treatment from the cockpit unruffled, unexcitable, half-amused by whatever is out there, good or bad.
The kind of brutally callous rhetoric increasingly common among politicians isn't what you want from the guy who might have your fate in his hands slashing through the skies at more than 500 mph, more than 6 miles above the ground.
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You want someone utterly unfazed by anything, someone with a been-there, done-that, nothing-to-worry-about perspective.
That's why United Airlines had to suspend pilot Michael Folk for tweeting Hillary Clinton should be hanged for treason.
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Whatever the blowback Folk might have faced in his other job, as a Republican West Virginia lawmaker, it's nothing compared with the backlash he has brought to United and himself.
United Airlines can ill-afford to be associated with sentiment that's so polarizing. Few businesses can.
But beyond that: Airline passengers shouldn't have to wonder whether there's some hothead in the cockpit so lacking in self-control he doesn't know or care the trouble he's dragging his bosses into with him.
Michael Folk's tweet about Hillary Clinton has ignited controversy and led to the suspension of the United Airlines pilot. (Twitter)
What does an employee owe an employer when it comes to self-restraint, and what does the employer owe workers in regard to allowing self-expression? What should the expectations be? It's not always easy to know.
"There are situations in private life and public life when expressions of one's beliefs have to be modulated," said Al Gini, a professor of business ethics at Chicago's Loyola University. "I didn't say regulated, but modulated. Sometimes it's best to keep your opinions to yourself because people are only concerned with your technical expertise."
Just because, say, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has views about the upcoming election, is it appropriate for a sitting Supreme Court justice to share them? Ultimately, she concluded too late it probably isn't.
"I don't think you can legislate something like that, but I do think there are rules of civility and acculturated rules of proper conduct with regard to certain professions," Gini said. "It's amorphous, but it's also about decorum. What are we comfortable with when it comes to certain professionals? How much do we really need to know from them?"
(Side note: I'm always surprised by the occasional reader who sends a note rife with vulgarities and/or what one might interpret as prejudice from a work email address. It seems unwise from a business standpoint, but what do I know? I'm apparently a &?$!#@.)
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Folk tweeted that Clinton "should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the" U.S. Constitution "then hung on the Mall" in Washington, D.C.
Having ignited a controversy, Folk later told West Virginia's Charleston Gazette-Mail that the part about hanging was hyperbole, though he was steadfast about prosecuting Clinton for her handling of classified emails.
"What I called for is for her to be tried and the maximum penalty for treason is death," Folk said, according to the paper. "Technically it's not death by hanging."
Folk's Twitter account had gone private by Monday.
The airline has tweeted it is "appalled" by Folk's "threatening comments."
This pilot has been removed from flying pending our investigation. We are appalled by his threatening comments. https://t.co/H1teA2nqsj United Airlines (@united) July 17, 2016
United spokeswoman Mary Clark said by email Monday that the Chicago-based carrier's social media policies require employees "avoid posting comments that could damage United's reputation." Employees also must make clear the views they express are not necessarily the company's.
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But, Clark said, there are "no restrictions against employees participating in political activities or holding political office."
Given the heated political climate and often-toxic rhetoric of late, however, it seems as though an employee holding elected office as Folk does would be destined to cause a headache at some point or another.
If United hadn't considered that, it surely is now.
philrosenthal@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
For all the criticism of political parties, the GOP ticket can count on overwhelming Republican support in November. Just as Democrats can rely on partisans to back their fall ticket in huge numbers. (Associated Press)
This summer of discontent seems a perfectly awful time to hold a national political convention.
The two presumptive White House nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, have record-high disapproval ratings. Polls show their respective parties are held in similarly low regard.
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Yet come November, as surely as summer turns to fall, the overwhelmingly majority of voters probably 80% or more will cast ballots for the two candidates marching beneath their respective party banners.
Donald Trump or Donald Doe: It wouldn't matter who Republicans nominate this week in Cleveland. The same goes for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic convention next week in Philadelphia; anyone with the "R" or "D" beside his or her name can count on the overwhelming support of fellow partisans.
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Indeed, for all the talk of fading political allegiances, about the two major parties dying off, about the rise of independent voters, party labels are still the single best predictor of voting behavior. They telegraph how an individual will cast a ballot far better than age, income, gender, education, sexual orientation or whether someone lives in a big city, the suburbs or the countryside.
"No matter what the race looks like, you've got about 2 out of 3 voters already predestined as soon as the nominees come out of their conventions," said Peter Hart, a Democratic strategist who has been sampling voter opinion for decades. The level of party loyalty rises from there.
Roughly 9 in 10 Democrats voted for President Obama in his two White House campaigns, and 90% or more of Republicans backed the GOP nominee in both contests. Trump may struggle to achieve that level of support, given widespread disaffection within his party, but he undoubtedly will win the vast majority of Republican votes.
Part of the reason is habit. Once individuals form their political views, usually sometime in their 20s and often based on how their parents voted, they tend to stick with that party and support its candidates for the rest of their life.
Part of it is human nature; we tend toward like-minded individuals, and once we find them we stick together, warts and all. (When it comes to self-described independents, most, in fact, habitually vote for one party or the other, though they prefer not to think of themselves as partisan.)
A great deal of it owes to the country's political polarization and how the two major parties are increasingly defined by their opposition to one another, which influences the way voters think and behave.
"Even when they're not thrilled by their own side, they're much less thrilled by the other side," said Gary Jacobson, a UC San Diego political scientist who has long studied Washington's partisan divide.
The sentiment is articulated in the oft-heard statement from people who can't stand Trump but consider Clinton even worse. Or vice versa.
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The lesser-evil attitude is reflected in a spring survey taken by the Pew Research Center.
Among Republicans, nearly 7 in 10 said a major reason they identify with the GOP is that "the Democratic Party's policies are harmful to the country" while fewer than two-thirds said it was because they felt Republican policies helped the country.
Democrats were more positive. Just about 7 in 10 said a major reason for their party affiliation was because they thought Democratic policies helped the country. But more than 6 in 10 still cited negative feelings toward the GOP as one of their reasons for being a Democrat.
"What was a line in the sand" between the parties "has become a chasm," said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic pollster. "That's increased animosity and negative feelings but also increased loyalty to one's own group."
As partisan divisions have deepened, the old notion that seeing is believing has been inverted.
In 2013, Mellman and Republican pollster Whit Ayres conducted a survey for USA Today and the Bipartisan Policy Center in which respondents were presented with two supposedly different education plans.
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The exact same elements were presented with identical wording, but as soon as one was labeled the Democratic or Republican plan, support and opposition rose or fell accordingly. Democrats who backed the "Democratic" plan rejected the "Republican" plan, and vice versa.
The importance of issues in driving voter behavior may be overrated, anyway.
Donald Green, who teaches political science at Columbia University, has extensively researched partisan attachments and suggested that most voters aren't like politicians, political consultants or, for that matter, political journalists.
"The ordinary person doesn't have a kind of well-articulated ideological vantage point," he said.
Rather, he went on, they rely on notions some going back decades of which party is, say, friendlier to business or working-class people, which attracts environmentalists, or Christian conservatives, or blacks, or Southerners, and then gravitate where they feel they best fit in.
"What they know about the parties often has less to do with a detailed assessment of a platform vis-a-vis issues, and more about the sense of social stereotypes that go with the parties," Green said.
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Trump, of course, has scrambled many of the conceptions surrounding the GOP, not least by challenging its orthodoxy on free trade and the party's chummy relationship with Wall Street.
But come election day, reflexive party loyalty is likely to overpower any doubts or concerns the overwhelming majority of Republican faithful have about their nominee, just as the overwhelming majority of Democratic faithful will snap into line and rally behind Clinton.
Forget all the lofty talk of promise and principles flowing from the convention podiums. The reason, suggested Tom Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, is downright primitive.
"It's much more tribal," he said, "than philosophical."
mark.barabak@latimes.com
Twitter: For more political news and analysis follow me @markzbarabak
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China Mieville's The Last Days of New Paris is an alternate history set during the Nazi occupation and beyond, plus two more new science fiction books reviewed. (Chicago Tribune)
The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville, 208 pages, Del Rey, $25
China Mieville gained a huge following for his dense, baroquely imagined fantasy novels, but lately he's demonstrated his skill in shorter forms as well the collection "Three Moments of an Explosion," the novella "This Census-Taker," and now "The Last Days of New Paris." Ostensibly another novella, it's really a short novel with two distinct plot lines, and, paradoxically, it's both a fine introduction to his unique imagination and a marked departure from his earlier work.
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The departure involves the novel's form: an alternate history set partly in the Nazi-occupied Paris of 1941 and partly in a 1950 in which the occupation still continues. Mieville is less concerned with the mechanics of alternate history than with the opportunity it provides to explore his knowledgeable fascination with the Surrealist movement. The 1941 chapters include well-known Surrealists like Andre Breton, but more centrally involve lesser-known historical figures such as journalist Varian Fry, rocket scientist Jack Parsons, and Chicago socialite Mary Anne Gould, any of whose real-life stories alone could make a fascinating novel. All are connected to Fry's efforts to rescue artists and intellectuals from occupied France, but they also become involved in an occult scheme to develop a mysterious weapon called the S-bomb.
By 1950, the S-bomb has long since been deployed, and we see its effects: monstrous figures from the actual Surrealist drawings and paintings of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and others have begun to manifest themselves throughout Paris, helping the Surrealist resistance although the Nazis have tried to counter them by summoning figures from their own kitschy propaganda "art." The result is a novel both unhinged and utterly compelling, a kind of guerrilla warfare waged by art itself, combining both meticulous historical research and Mieville's unparalleled inventiveness.
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The Race by Nina Allan, 448 pages, Titan, $14.99
The "race" in Nina Allan's first novel is a relatively modest science fiction idea: "smartdogs," greyhounds genetically modified to increase intelligence, are matched with human "runners" with brain chips implanted to establish empathic connections with the dogs. But what Allan unfolds from this simple premise is a dazzling tale that shifts narrators, reveals stories within stories and portrays a bleak future in which nothing is quite as it seems. Allan, something of a metafictional trickster in her earlier short fiction, develops at novel length a cumulative power that short fiction simply can't achieve.
The novel opens in a dying resort town in southeast England, an area nearly destroyed by environmental depredations such as fracking. The town's economy now depends on the nominally illegal sport of smartdog racing, and the narrator, Jenny, has some serious family problems: she was abandoned by her mother as a teenager, and her unpredictable drug-dealing brother Del keeps her on edge. Del's only moderating influence is his daughter Luz Maree, who can psychically connect with the dogs even without the implants. But when Maree is kidnapped because of Del's drug debts and he decides to race a favorite dog to win ransom money, things go horribly wrong.
This opening is cast in an entirely new light by the second chapter, told by a writer named Christy whose life oddly parallels that of Jenny, and who suspects that her brother Derek may have killed his girlfriend after she dumped him for a new lover. The point of view shifts again, to that new lover and later to the now-older Maree, in a still bleaker world in which even sea travel is threatened by "whale convoys." Allan hints at a secret government research project and the possibility of extraterrestrial communications, but mostly "The Race" is an ingenious puzzle-box of a narrative that works both as a haunting family saga and as a vivid picture of a future worth avoiding.
Drowned Worlds: Tales From the Anthropocene and Beyond edited by Jonathan Strahan, 336 pages, Solaris, $14.95
Jonathan Strahan's newest theme anthology brings with it a sense of immediacy that deserves the attention of more than the usual genre enthusiasts. For all we hear about the reality of global warming, only fiction can bring to life its potential costs in terms of the daily lives of those forced to seek ever-inventive, ever-desperate ways to survive. Perhaps most disturbing about the stories here is that nearly all of them are based on processes already well underway.
Several present us with haunting, and often oddly poetic, visions of our own world submerged: Ken's Liu's undersea Harvard, Rachel Swirsky's New Orleans, Kim Stanley Robinson's "Venice Drowned" (the only reprint in the book, and a deserved classic). Nina Allan's story takes place after tsunamis and other disasters have caused the loss of a fifth of the world's land mass, resulting in something ominously called the "Remapping," an idea reflected in other stories as well. Fairbanks, Alaska, becomes a new megacity in the hands of Charlie Jane Anders, and another megacity stretches from Cancun to Texas in Christopher Rowe's story. Even Antarctica is colonized in Paul McAuley's cleverly titled "Elves of Antarctica," and so is that famous Pacific Ocean garbage patch, grown to epic proportions, in Catherynne Valente's story, whose young narrator believes it about the coolest place anyone has ever lived. The grimmest story in the book, however, reminds us that ecological disaster isn't all about water: Jeff Ford's "What Is" takes place in a desert Oklahoma destroyed by fracking and earthquakes, with scattered survivors turning to brutal violence over the scarce resources. It may be too much to ask for our current crop of politicians to read any books at all, but someone should tell them what's in this one.
Gary K. Wolfe, a professor at Roosevelt University, is a contributing editor at Locus magazine.
Dozens of fishing boats moored in the harbor at Valdez attest to the importance of commercial fishing. Salmon is the summer catch, while crews fish for halibut and shrimp during the winter months. (Jay Jones / Chicago Tribune)
VALDEZ, Alaska Six-week-old David McAlister might have been the only person in town who actually enjoyed the shaking as the biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States wreaked havoc on this coastal town in southern Alaska.
His mom, 18-year-old Gloria McAlister, remembers the irony that it was Good Friday and nothing good about it. The house was rocking around her, her husband, Tom, and their baby. From the nearby harbor, a ship's whistle sounded six emergency blasts before the vessel slammed into the shore.
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"It was just deafening, as if the sound came from the bowels of the earth," she recalled.
The couple had experienced brief earthquakes in the past, but nothing could compare to March 27, 1964.
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"It was a five-minute shaker," Tom McAlister said. "This one didn't quit."
When the loud rumbling finally ceased, Valdez was a wreck. Thirty people were dead. Homes were flooded. And in a town that relies on fishing, the waterfront docks and buildings had washed away.
Over three years, the town was rebuilt on firmer ground about 4 miles away. That's where the local museum's "Remembering Old Valdez" exhibit recounts that fateful event.
Nearly 25 years later to the day and, coincidentally, also on Good Friday another disaster, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, struck. It, too, is documented by the Valdez Museum (www.valdezmuseum.org).
Clearly, Valdez is a town that refuses to throw in the towel. Curious visitors may be drawn to its colossal catastrophes, but its stunning setting on glacier-studded Prince William Sound is what creates modern-day memories.
Tourists don't stumble upon Valdez. It's five hours by car, or 45 minutes by air, east of Anchorage, site of the nearest Walmart. A half-hour before arriving in Valdez, motorists traverse waterfall-laced Thompson Pass, one of the snowiest places on the planet.
The snow, averaging 551 inches (that's 46 feet) a year, begins falling in September and doesn't stop until May. Crews who live in dormitories atop the pass do a remarkable job of keeping the Richardson Highway open, but nearby Valdez, which also gets dumped on, is primarily a summer destination.
Visitors can easily spend a morning getting intriguing doses of history at the museum. The town's close relationship with the sea is obvious, and as guests enter the museum, they're greeted by what could be considered a work of art: the giant Fresnel lens from Cape Hinchinbrook Lighthouse. Made of brass and 68 glass prisms, the light once guided mariners to the entrance of the beautiful but treacherous sound.
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Over the years, many ships have run aground on the rocky reefs, but the Exxon Valdez is the one most folks remember. The reef ripped open the tanker's crude-laden hull in the early morning darkness of March 24, 1989.
The ship-to-shore radio transmission that launches the museum's 12-minute film is an oversized understatement.
"Evidently (we're) leaking some oil, and we're going to be here for a while," a crew member reported.
A sheared-away panel from the tanker's hull is displayed near one of the ship's life preservers. The exhibit also explains the lingering legacy of the ecological disaster.
"Exxon maintains that 10.8 million gallons were spilled; some critics maintain an estimate as high as 38 million," a display panel points out.
"The oil coming out of the tanker was probably 2 feet thick," said Mike Wells, whose fishing boat and crew were drafted for the cleanup efforts. "It was pretty apparent we were in for a pretty long siege."
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"We went through some pretty lean years in terms of returning numbers of fish," he added.
As manager of the Valdez Fisheries Development Association, Wells now helps keep the commercial fishing industry afloat. Across the harbor from town, the nonprofit fish hatchery (www.valdezfisheries.org/the-hatchery) is where millions of salmon are raised. It's a popular attraction, as both locals and out-of-towners come to watch the salmon spawn and to witness wildlife coming to the waterfront for a meal.
Passengers aboard the handful of tour boats operating out of Valdez are sure to spot fishermen lifting their nets from the water, hoping to find them full of pink salmon. As the day trips head toward the glaciers, they also pass giant tankers laden with Alaskan oil.
The grounding of the Exxon Valdez on Bligh Reef is bound to be mentioned during the sailings. Capt. Alan Steed of Stan Stephens Glacier & Wildlife Cruises (www.stephenscruises.com) provides a condensed version of the story.
"I hate to drone on and on and on, especially when some people are just not that interested," he told his guests one summer afternoon as sea lions sunbathed atop a yellow navigation buoy.
Indeed, many passengers appeared far more intrigued by the floating icebergs as the tour boat approached the remote Columbia Glacier.
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"Five to 7 million tons of ice a day come off the glacier," Steed said. "That's a number I can't seem to get my head around."
Back on land, a gravel road leads visitors to Old Town, where Valdez residents lived and worked until the earthquake 52 years ago. While most of the buildings were still standing when the shaking stopped, many of them were uninhabitable and therefore condemned. The Valdez Museum hosts a cellphone walking tour that's linked to informative markers standing amid fireweed and brush.
The town's been painstakingly restored, in miniature, at "Remembering Old Valdez." Each house has been re-created, with family names beside each one. Tom and Gloria McAlister's home on McKinley Street is among them.
Visitors can eye a calendar from the Pinzon Bar and Liquor Store that still displays the page for March 1964.
Nearby, there's a quote from Bruce Woodford, the then-mayor: "We are down on one knee, but we are going to get back up."
Jay Jones is a freelance writer.
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Members of the Dallas Police Honor Guard follow the horse-drawn chamber carrying slain police Officer Patrick Zamarripa for a ceremony at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery on July 16, 2016. Zamarripa was one of five officers killed by a lone gunman during a protest march in Dallas. (Tom Fox / AP)
Five law enforcement officers shot to death in Dallas. Three officers killed in Baton Rouge.
Let's not pretend that the Black Lives Matter movement is responsible for these murders. The real culprits are assault weapons.
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The National Rifle Association's argument that semi-automatic firearms aren't a threat to law enforcement has been ripped to shreds in recent weeks. Weapons that can fire rounds powerful enough to tear through protective vests and even penetrate a squad car clearly endanger our police officers.
For the second time in 10 days, we are mourning the deaths of public servants who were murdered while doing their job of keeping us safe. Yet all we seem willing to do about it is observe a few moments of silence and offer our condolences to their families.
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It is easy to get sidetracked and misplace our anger on the peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters who are simply exercising their rights under the First Amendment. Ironically, much of that anger comes from people who adamantly support the Second Amendment as if one section of the Constitution is more important than another.
After years of reporting about gun laws for the Tribune, I have come to accept the rights of citizens to arm themselves for protection. But like many Americans, I have to draw the line at assault-style weapons that were intended only for the military.
One of the things I've learned is that there are sensible people on both sides of the firearms debate. Many of those who strongly support the right to arm themselves at home and in the public understand that assault rifles, which are designed to kill humans quickly and efficiently, have no place in a civilized society.
On that issue, the American public isn't all that far apart. If anything, the murders of five officers and wounding of seven more in Dallas, followed by the killing of three officers in Baton Rouge and the wounding of three, should serve to unify our stance.
We don't need to keep debating how to stop such atrocities from occurring. The question is, "When are we going to do something about it?"
As the GOP gathers in Cleveland this week to anoint Donald Trump as its official presidential candidate, I can't think of a better time to let Republican lawmakers know just how serious we are about protecting the lives of our police officers.
The opening night's theme on Monday is "Make America Safe Again." We don't need former teen throbs like Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato Jr., two of the celebrity speakers at the convention, to tell us how to do that.
We already know the answer. We can never be safe from outside attacks until we have figured out how to protect ourselves from within. That means ridding our cities of semi-automatic rifles, pistols, shotguns and large capacity ammunition magazines.
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Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to pass sensible gun legislation, opting instead to bow to the pressures of the NRA. After such a history of inaction, they should be ashamed to talk about international terrorism without addressing domestic terrorism.
We should be flooding their email boxes and burning up their phone lines with messages letting them know that the first line of defense begins at home.
No Americans need to be able to walk around with rifles equipped with telescoping stocks, barrel shrouds and detachable magazines.
Perhaps there isn't much that could have been done to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of Micah Xavier Johnson, the shooter in Dallas, or Gavin Long, the gunman in Baton Rouge. Both were highly trained military veterans who didn't need loopholes to obtain high-powered weapons. Though clearly they suffered from mental disorders, there likely was nothing in their medical history that would have presented a red flag.
Indeed, law-abiding citizens, such as Johnson and Long, are the ones Second Amendment laws are designed to protect. Only a federal ban on assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons could have kept them from obtaining such high-powered weapons.
Mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., the Columbine High School massacre and the Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooting weren't enough to push Congress to action.
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If our elected officials care about the safety of our police officers as much as they proclaim, there is no excuse to allow this terrorism against them to continue.
And if we as citizens sit back and allow Congress to do nothing, then we are as much to blame.
dglanton@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @dahleeng
President Barack Obama addressed the fatal shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge July 17, 2016, saying, "We need to temper our words and open our hearts." (White House) (Chicago Tribune)
CLEVELAND National political conventions are often full of angry air, with heat of the righteous exhorting the political tribes to take or defend what belongs to them, all of it measured by puppet masters with eyes as cold as river stones in February.
But here in a humid Cleveland July for the Republicans, and later for Democrats in Philadelphia, we just might begin to realize how fragile things are.
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The killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday and the earlier assassinations of five officers in Dallas drives this home.
And only the most ruthless partisans would refuse to acknowledge it.
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President Barack Obama definitely can see the danger, now, finally, coming out to make his statement after what happened in Louisiana. Obama didn't play politics with this tragedy.
He didn't use the deaths as he has in the past to politic for gun control or give wind to the anti-police grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement.
This time, the president offered a warning to Americans to tone down the rhetoric.
"And we as a nation have to be clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement," the president said. "Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible."
He recalled that after the killings of police in Dallas, he said the assassin "would not be the last person who tries to make us turn on each other, nor will today's killer.
"It remains up to us to make sure that they fail. That decision is all of ours," he said. "That decision to make sure that our best selves are reflected across America, not our worst. That's up to us."
As statements go, the president's comments hit just the right tone. His words were welcome and responsible and wise.
Unfortunately, America has become numb to its history of minorities killed by police.
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But cops singled out and sniped and killed by angry black men, not in some shootout at a crime scene, but in cold blood?
That's dry wood, oiled and waiting for a madman of any race or political stripe to put a flame to it all. And by again carefully warning that there could be more police killings, Obama acknowledges the danger.
So the president's commentary, his admonition to his nation that we reflect our best selves, not our worst, was necessary as we go into the convention season.
Although on second or third reading, the fact that he felt it necessary to come out and condemn murder against police seems somewhat defensive. He's viewed with suspicion by many police officers from the time of that awkward Beer Summit years ago. But what he did Sunday, abandoning his historic impulse to politicize the tragedy was credible and demonstrated leadership.
But he's not just the president. He's a political creature, as are Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, who hope to replace him. And all rhetoric including a call to tone the rhetoric down is political.
After Sunday's slaying of police in Louisiana, most Americans would pray or at least think about praying if they could remember a prayer. But politicians have another obligation to all those who support them:
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To offer the right response, delivered at just the right time, to influence the most voters.
So as the Republicans gather here with parties to open their convention Monday, it should be understood that the killings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge put Mrs. Clinton at a disadvantage.
She represents what remains of the American political establishment as it crumbles, now on the Republican side but eventually, and soon, among the Democrats. And hers is an odd coalition that includes Wall Street meat eaters and former Republican neocons and Black Lives Matter groups of the hard left.
But how long can Wall Street and BLM remain under Mrs. Clinton's Democratic umbrella? Not long. Perhaps an election cycle, but not much more.
And after Dallas and Baton Rouge, she's in a terribly awkward place. Clinton needs to keep energizing black voters who are the core of the Democratic Party. But angry protests from the hard Democratic left against Trump and the Republicans in Cleveland won't help Hillary at all.
Instead, after the president's admonitions against violent rhetoric, protests in Cleveland may hurt her.
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Any violence in Cleveland after the killings of police officers will only feed Trump, who has cast himself as the "law-and-order" answer. That was made clear Sunday by his Tweet that America "is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse."
Clinton defenders will seize upon Trump's law-and-order talk and demonize him for lurching, Nixon-like, after votes. But will they change any minds by preaching to Hillary's choir?
No. Clinton's Democratic voters loathe Trump almost as much as the Republican Party bosses.
"With God's help, we will get through this," said East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux II on Sunday. "To me, this is not so much about gun control as it is about what's in men's hearts, and 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."
We're not about to perish. But we're not ready to heal, either, not just yet.
That's what elections are for.
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jskass@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @John_Kass
Robin Cottrell makes up to $625 a month trusting strangers with an asset some people would not even lend to their kids her car.
"It helps you with the car payments and the insurance," said Cottrell, 48, of the West Englewood neighborhood, who rents out her 2015 Nissan Versa about 10 days a month. She has been working part time while taking her mother to doctor visits, so the extra income comes in handy.
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Cottrell is one of a growing number of Chicago-area drivers who rent out their cars, or rent others' cars, through peer-to-peer sharing services. The services, which have exploded in popularity in the region over the last year, offer a low-cost alternative to rental companies like Hertz and Budget, or car-share businesses like Zipcar. Instead of renting a car that is part of a company fleet, you borrow one from a private owner.
Cottrell rents out her car through the San Francisco-based company Getaround. Since its launch last summer, Getaround renters and owners in the Chicago area have more than doubled from 8,000 to 20,000 faster than in any other market, said Mohammed Al-Shawaf, head of business development for Getaround.
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Also expanding locally is 6-year-old Turo, formerly known as RelayRides, which launched in Chicago in 2012 and has seen its revenue here grow three times in the past year, said spokesman Steve Webb.
"Chicago has been wonderful, especially in the busy travel season, when it thaws out and people want to go on trips," Webb said.
A newer entry is HyreCar, which launched here in March and markets to drivers who want to work for car-share companies but lack a car of their own. HyreCar has 6,000 drivers here looking to rent, but at this point lacks the cars to meet demand, said CEO Marciano Kim.
Car-sharing officials compare the peer-to-peer concept to Airbnb on wheels people turn an expensive asset that mostly sits idle into a source of cash.
"After owning a house or paying rent, a car is the most costly monthly item (people) have," Al-Shawaf said. "If you have a way to seamlessly rent out your vehicle, it's really passive income."
He said one reason peer-to-peer car sharing seems to be growing here is that Chicago has strong public transit people don't always need a car, so they are more willing to rent one for occasional use, or lend their own.
"It's really changing the car ownership equation," said Webb, whose company offers a wide range of cars from a humble Hyundai Elantra at $35 a day to a snazzy Jaguar SJ for $400. He said the average cost is about $40 a day 30 percent less than the average for conventional car rental companies.
Long-term vs. hourly
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The car-sharing companies vary by type of use. Turo focuses on longer-term rentals like vacation trips.
Getaround is aimed at hourly or daily rentals, for people without cars who need to lug home groceries or ferry kids to the beach. Getaround cars rent for an average of $8 an hour in Chicago, and there's no membership fee, compared with a base-rate of $8.75 an hour with a $70 per year Zipcar membership.
Because it's for longer-term rentals, Turo has the "host" and "traveler" meet to exchange keys.
"Our community wants to meet the person who would take their car for a week," Webb said.
Getaround had previously used the key-exchange model but found it impractical for hourly rentals, so an initial 2012 launch in Chicago had fizzled. It relaunched here last summer and now installs an electronic device under the dashboards of cars, which renters can use to unlock the car using a mobile phone application. Keys are typically left in the glove compartment.
To sign up for Getaround, which also has programs in San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., owners pay a $99 startup fee and $20 a month for the electronic device that allows access to the car. Turo does not charge owners to sign up.
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Getaround got a boost in Chicago last year from a $475,000 Federal Highway Administration two-year grant that will test three models of peer-to-peer car sharing: in low- and moderate-income communities, in large residential developments and in suburbs not usually served by traditional car-sharing services.
The Shared Use Mobility Center, a nonprofit group that develops transportation choices in urban areas, is promoting Getaround in the suburb of Evanston and in four Chicago neighborhoods Bridgeport, Bronzeville, Pilsen and Rogers Park. The grant helps reduce the costs of participation in those areas and is persuading residents to sign up, Mobility Center CEO Sharon Feigon said.
Renters and owners
Car-share companies inspect cars to make sure they're in good condition and check renters' driving records. The companies also handle insurance coverage for the time the car is being rented.
How much people make depends on how much the cars get used. Getaround owners make about $200 a month, Feigon said. Turo hosts can make about $600 a month, Webb said. HyreCar owners, whose vehicles are being used by car-share drivers picking up fares, average about $1,000, Kim said.
Cottrell started renting cars a few years ago, when her old car died and she needed a way to get to family functions in the southwest suburbs. She was able to buy her own car again last year.
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She said she has not had a problem with people bringing back the car messy, but users have racked up a few red light camera tickets. She got that resolved through the company, which made the drivers pay.
Another problem Cottrell has is that people near her home aren't signed up for the service, so to get customers, she has to park her car in a lot near downtown at the cost of $175 a month, which cuts into her earnings.
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The sharing concept also works for luxury cars. Brian Rose, 31, of Wheeling, bought his electric Tesla last year for $96,000. Renting it through Turo brings in about $1,000 a month which takes a big bite out of his $1,400 monthly car payment.
"When I tell people at work I'm renting out my Tesla, they say 'You're crazy, I'd never do that.' But it makes the car more affordable," Rose said. A big Tesla devotee, Rose also said he likes letting a lot of people experience his car "to get the word out there about how great it is."
On the renting side, Roger Fierro, 31, of Logan Square, likes Getaround in part because it's cheap unlike car-share companies like Zipcar or Enterprise, there's no annual fee. He uses it when his job as a digital communications consultant requires a day with multiple trips from Midway Airport to Little Village to Logan Square that would be tough to make on public transit.
"One thing millennials are really good at is the co-op model," said Fierro, who favors a particular rental its owner has christened "Jane Fhonda." "Material property is not as important for us as for our boomer parents it's more a sharing culture." He noted that the older generation was not so burdened with student loans.
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"I don't have to own a car, and if I do own a car, I'll make money from it during the week," Fierro said.
mwisniewski@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @marywizchicago
Jury selection got underway Monday in the trial of a man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend, entombing her body in his McHenry County house and skipping town.
William Ross, 64, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Jacqueline Schaefer, whose decaying remains were found in 2013 inside garbage bags in his home along the Fox River near McHenry.
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Authorities have said they believe the maggot-infested remains were in the house for about 18 months when they were discovered underneath a tarp in a room whose door appeared to have been sealed with fresh caulk, new molding, nails and screws.
Ross was arrested at a Las Vegas motel shortly after the grisly discovery and is being held in McHenry County Jail on a $5 million bond. Police said he told them at the time of his arrest that he had left his home to travel two years before, and he denied any knowledge of how Schaefer's remains wound up inside his house. He said he had last seen Schaefer in 2011 when she left his home to go to Missouri where she had family, according to officials' account.
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Before leaving town, authorities said, Ross asked another woman to keep an eye on his house but never to enter it. That woman eventually found the body, authorities said. They said Schaefer died of a gunshot wound.
Court records show that Ross was charged twice in 2007 with misdemeanor domestic battery against Schaefer. His former lawyer, Henry Sugden, acknowledged the two had a volatile relationship and has said police were called to the home multiple times for domestic altercations between the couple. But he maintained Ross had no idea how the woman ended up dead in his home.
On Monday, prospective jurors were asked questions about whether they would be able to look at gruesome crime-scene photographs, their views on guns and whether they have known people with drugs or alcohol problems.
Last week, Judge Sharon Prather denied requests from Ross' new lawyer, Stephen Richards, to delay the trial and to bar the jury from hearing evidence indicating Ross had access to firearms.
If found guilty, Ross faces 20 to 60 years in prison.
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Amanda Marrazzo is a freelance reporter.
Chicago police are searching for a man who tried to lure a 12-year-old girl in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side a week ago.
The girl was walking north in the 500 block of North Monticello Avenue around 8:55 a.m. July 11 when she noticed a silver minivan following her, according to a news release from the Chicago Police Department.
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The van driver, a white man between 25 and 35 years old, called out to her, "Come here little girl," the release said. The girl ignored him.
The man then turned, driving east on Garfield Square Drive, and blocked the girl's path. The man told her, "Get in the car." The girl was able to run away to a friend's house and notify the police, according to the release.
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The suspect is a bald white man wearing a dark blue suit and driving a newer silver minivan of an unknown make or model, the release said.
Anyone with information about the suspect should call Area North detectives at 312-744-8200.
When an officer arrived at the maximum-security Pontiac Correctional Center to collect a DNA sample from William Carini, he couldn't understand what the prisoner hoped to accomplish.
Carini had been pushing for years to have the evidence retested in his 1992 rape conviction in Lake County. Yet even if he is cleared of that crime, there's still the matter of the two people Carini was convicted of killing in north suburban Cook County and the life sentence he is serving for that.
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"You've already served the time for the rape. You're already doing life now," Carini recalled the officer saying as he took the DNA swab. "What's the point?"
Carini's remembers his terse response: "I didn't do the crime. So let's set the record straight."
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Even by the standards of convicts trying to prove their innocence, Carini's unwavering quest to clear his name seems like the longest of judicial long shots. He's seeking not only to prove he did not rape a woman in her car along the Tri-State Tollway in 1991, but also that he did not murder his uncle and a young woman in a separate case years earlier even though their bodies were discovered in a storage garage that Carini had rented.
Yet authorities in Cook and Lake counties have agreed to take a fresh look at both convictions. Lake County officials have revealed exclusively to the Tribune that results of the newly completed forensic testing found no matches between Carini's DNA and the crime-scene evidence. Prosecutors are now considering how to proceed with the new information, including whether they will support a new trial for Carini, State's Attorney Mike Nerheim confirmed.
If Carini, now 53, is exonerated of the sexual assault, his would be the latest in a series of rape and murder cases in Lake County prosecuted under Nerheim's predecessor, Michael Waller that have been upended in recent years by DNA evidence. It would also mean that the rape of a northwest Indiana woman, who had fallen asleep in her car near Gurnee, is unsolved.
The particulars of Carini's situation only add to its improbability: His biggest advocate in his fight to prove his claim of innocence has been his 73-year-old mother who herself was convicted of murder decades ago. And Carini had nearly exhausted his avenues for appeal when a chance meeting at a north suburban restaurant where his mother worked eventually led to Nerheim agreeing to re-examine the case.
Mother's murder trial
Turmoil pervaded Bill Carini's life at an early age. At 10, he was called to testify at the murder trial of his mother, Ruthe Wille, who in 1971 shot and killed her husband, Joseph Carbona, Carini's stepfather, who was a Cook County sheriff's lieutenant, according to court documents and media accounts.
Wille, who then went by Carbona, had told authorities that her husband had drunkenly beat her the night before in their Mount Prospect home. When another argument turned violent the next morning, Wille said the two struggled over his gun before it went off accidentally, though prosecutors at the time questioned how, in that scenario, one of the bullets ended up striking him in the back.
For Wille's young son, having to testify at his mother's trial "kind of damaged me psychologically ... and I became fearful of authority," Carini said in a recent interview at Pontiac prison.
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The prosecutor "twisted around my words trying to say I loved (my stepfather)," Carini recalled. "How can you love someone who beats your mother unmercifully in front of your own eyes?"
Wille was convicted and would spend more than a decade in prison, during which time Carini lived with his ailing grandparents in their home outside Glenview. But both died shortly after Carini left high school, and in what would prove to be a fateful turn, his uncle John Kuba moved in.
At first, it wasn't clear that the disappearances of Kuba and another Carini acquaintance childhood friend Joanne Seaquist, 19, of Vernon Hills might be related. In fact, when Seaquist was reported missing in April 1983 after telling a family member that Carini was picking her up from work prompting wide-scale searches with helicopters there was no indication authorities were searching for Kuba too.
But months later, a foul odor led to the discovery of both bodies in the trunk of Kuba's 1968 Chevrolet Impala, parked inside a Northfield-area garage that Carini had rented. Autopsies showed Kuba had been shot seven times while Seaquist had been strangled with a necktie.
Carini, 20 at the time, was the immediate suspect.
Over the years, he has told different versions of how the bodies ended up in the car but asserts his involvement did not amount to first-degree murder. He initially said that he had been hanging out with Seaquist and his uncle when he fell asleep and was later awakened by gunshots and loud voices. He said he hid in a crawl space for an hour, and when he emerged, Kuba and Seaquist were gone. Carini claimed to have received several anonymous calls over the next two days directing him to "get rid of the Chevy," so he moved it to his rented garage.
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At the time, authorities determined they didn't have the evidence to charge Carini with murder, but he was convicted of concealing Kuba's and Seaquist's homicides. During the 2 1/2 years Carini spent in prison, his mother was paroled.
Back in handcuffs
When Carini too was released from prison in 1987, things seems to be looking up. He got a job and started a relationship with a woman with whom he would have a son. They moved in with Wille and her third husband in Prospect Heights, hoping to save money to buy their own house.
But Carini was soon back in handcuffs, this time accused of sexual assault.
The victim had been returning to her Indiana home from a family gathering in Milwaukee on June 3, 1991, when she grew tired and pulled onto the shoulder of I-94 near the Grand Avenue exit in Lake County. She fell asleep with the car doors unlocked and the windows rolled down, and woke up about 3 a.m. with a knife pressed against her throat. She fought back during the assault, biting her attacker and driving off after he tumbled out of the car, according to court records.
The woman had described her assailant as a white, clean-shaven man in his late 20s or early 30s, about 5 feet 7 inches tall with "dark fuzzy" hair and a quarter-inch scar above the right side of his lip.
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From that description, authorities came up with a list of 100 possible suspects and focused on Carini in part because he lived somewhat near where the rape occurred, according to court documents. Lake County authorities also acknowledged that Carini raised suspicion because he had a criminal record and had served time for the concealment conviction.
Yet there were problems with their case. Though Carini's build roughly matched the victim's description, his scar is on the left side of his face. His stepfather, Lawrence Wille, testified that Carini had always worn a mustache.
And Carini's advocates would also later claim that, when the victim identified him as her attacker among an array of photos of possible suspects, she was misled by the fact that all the other men appeared to be Hispanic.
On appeal, Carini's lawyer also claimed an investigator improperly told the victim during the photo identification about Carini's criminal background.
Lawrence Wille also provided Carini's alibi. The stepfather testified that, on the night of the attack, he and Carini had watched movies from midnight to about 3 a.m. at Wille's home in Prospect Heights, about 25 miles from where the rape occurred.
Also, prosecutors lacked forensic evidence, as a hair and two fingerprints found in the car were determined to match neither Carini nor the victim.
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Despite it all, Lake County Judge Christopher Starck found Carini guilty of aggravated criminal sexual assault.
Carini claims authorities wrongly targeted him because of his past run-ins with the law.
"It's easier to investigate someone who already has a criminal history and try to pin other crimes on them that they've not done than actual find out the true suspect for it," he said. "That's a fact."
Starck later sentenced Carini to 26 years in prison.
It would not be the last of his legal troubles.
An old murder mystery, resurrected
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A few years into his rape sentence, in 1995, the mother of Carini's child contacted Lake County authorities from prison, where she was serving time for a burglary conviction, court records show. She said she wanted to share things her former boyfriend had said about the deaths, some 12 years earlier, of Kuba and Seaquist.
That tip would eventually lead to Carini being formally accused again in Kuba and Seaquist's deaths only this time he was brought up on charges of first-degree murder.
At that trial, Carini's ex-girlfriend testified that he told her he killed Kuba because he "deserved to die," court records show.
In his own testimony in a version of events different from the one told at his first trial Carini said that his uncle was attacking Seaquist and that he intervened. He said he wrestled a gun away from Kuba and shot him several times but not in time to stop Kuba from strangling Seaquist.
During the prison interview with the Tribune, Carini did not elaborate further on what happened to Kuba and Seaquist. But he continued to assert that he killed Kuba in defense of Seaquist.
Cook County Circuit Judge Patrick Morse convicted Carini of the murders. Carini's mother said she begged the judge not to sentence her son to death, even though one of the victims was her own brother.
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"I said ... 'He has a son. He has me. We're not going to quit until we prove him innocent,' " Ruthe Wille recalled.
A relative of Seaquist, reached by the Tribune for this story, declined to comment about Carini's efforts to prove his innocence.
Carini was seeking to have his Lake County rape conviction overturned while he was fighting the murder charges.
In seeking years ago to win Carini a new trial in Lake County, one of his lawyers not only raised questions about the photo identification but submitted a sworn statement from the victim saying there was "definitely reasonable doubt" about whether Carini was her attacker.
The appeals lawyer also underscored his client's eagerness to have the fingerprint evidence retested, saying that Carini was "either ... an idiot, or he's innocent."
But Starck in 2000 denied Carini's request for a new trial. The judge said he determined the woman only signed the statement because Carini's mother had "hunted, searched, tracked and frightened" her, and that she was scared of Wille after learning she had been convicted of murder, according to the Tribune's coverage at the time.
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The sexual assault victim declined to comment when reached by the Tribune. Starck retired from the bench earlier this year.
A mother's quest
Wille denies she pressured the woman into signing the statement. She does acknowledge that not everyone has been won over in her quest to prove her son's innocence, which she says has become the central purpose of her life.
A self-described "tough old broad," Wille said she has spent thousands of dollars over the years on attorneys for her son, but has sometimes ended up arguing with them and has fired at least two.
When she could no longer afford to pay attorneys' bills on her waitress earnings, Wille, then 70, enrolled in community college paralegal classes. She filed Freedom of Information Act requests, arranged to retrieve samples for DNA testing and tracked down the rape victim through the woman's parole officer.
"She's not an attorney but she's accomplished and done more than attorneys I've paid to work on my case," Carini said. "My mother's tenacity pointed out the facts and discrepancies ... that showed my innocence."
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Sheer luck also contributed to her getting the attention of the Lake County state's attorney. That happened after she told her son's story to Lake County undersheriff and former Mundelein police Chief Ray Rose when he happened to dine at the Mundelein restaurant where she worked for many years. That led to a meeting with Nerheim, who agreed to put her case in front of his newly formed conviction review panel in 2013.
Nerheim initially agreed to examine the case after Wille told him the victim had recanted. When doubt was cast over that claim, Nerheim was ready to close the book on Carini's rape case, but Wille implored him to test the remaining evidence and even offered to pay for it.
Unbeknownst to Nerheim at the time, the evidence had been sitting in a box in Wille's closet for at least a decade, having been mistakenly mailed to her by a Baltimore forensics lab that has since shut down. Uneasy about turning it over to authorities for fear it would be destroyed, Wille shelved the box at her home.
Years later, she brought the materials to Nerheim's office, where she watched investigators inspect it for signs of tampering. Nerheim confirmed that the materials and their seals appeared to be in tact and that he eventually agreed to authorize retesting.
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With that testing now completed, and the results showing nothing that ties Carini to the crime, Lake County authorities are considering whether they will agree to a retrial. Nerheim stressed that a new trial is just one possible outcome, and that he is weighing the options after having met with his review panel about the case last week.
"It's important to keep an open mind," Nerheim said. "We never object to forensic testing when science changes. We understand she's a mother who's very motivated to help her son, as well."
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Wille said she has drained her resources fighting to clear her son's name. She said she had to file bankruptcy and short-sell her house, and she has moved out of state.
Even if her son is cleared of rape, she knows she must still prove he didn't commit murder if he is to regain his freedom. But she said she must remain optimistic, as her own mother encouraged her to be during her own time in prison.
"My mom always told me, 'Don't let them take your smile,' " Wille said. "And that's why I don't give up on Bill."
tbriscoe@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @_tonybriscoe
Longtime Wrigley Field vendor William Griffin delivers flowers to the gravesite of his longtime friend, Ho Pun Padgett, at Ridgewood Memorial cemetery in Des Plaines, on July 12, 2016. The gravestone was paid for by a Chicago executive who reached out to Griffin after reading about him in the Tribune. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
He stood in the parched and browning grass at the back of the cemetery, gazing down at the red granite gravestone.
For two years the grave in Section 15 of Ridgewood Memorial Park in Des Plaines was an unmarked, unremarkable patch of earth next to the road.
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That has changed. As a hot summer wind kicked up dust this week, William Griffin stared down not at a bare plot of cemetery lawn, but a marker engraved with the name of his cherished friend and a final message to her.
"I never gave up on you in life. I never gave up on you in death."
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Tears welled in Griffin's eyes. He looked up from the ground and peered into the distance.
"That's the truth," Griffin said. "I wanted it known. I didn't give up on her."
Griffin, 85, one of the longest-serving vendors at Wrigley Field, was the subject of a Tribune feature story during the Cubs' pennant chase last fall. In the article, Griffin mentioned that he still mourns the death of his longtime friend and that he was upset he did not have enough money to buy her a gravestone.
The friend, Ho Pun Padgett, died Feb. 17, 2014. She was 72. Padgett, it turns out, was also a recognizable vendor at Chicago's ballparks, especially popular among a small group of White Sox fans who referred to her as "the hot dog lady."
After the story was published, several readers touched by his tale offered to help Griffin. One of them, Chicago business executive Sonny Garg, called Griffin and the two met for lunch. Garg said he would pay for the gravestone (costing about $1,500) and made arrangements with the cemetery after Griffin selected the style and message.
The permanent gravestone was placed at Padgett's grave this spring. Garg drove Griffin to the cemetery, where they examined the marker in the rain.
"She was really important to him," Garg said. "The gravestone was the missing piece, and it was painful for him to not have some final recognition for her life being lived."
Griffin befriended Padgett, whose last name is spelled in some records as "Padzett," during their time at a transient apartment and hotel on Ohio Street years ago. Griffin helped Padgett land a vendor job, and the two enjoyed spending time together before and after their ballpark jobs. Padgett, Griffin said, was estranged from her family and struggled with health issues and periods of homelessness.
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"I knew I was going to be friends with her the first time I set eyes on her," Griffin said.
The two were not romantically involved, Griffin said, just friends who enjoyed each other's company. Griffin said he once got in trouble for allowing her to stay at his senior living tower apartment when he was on a trip out of town because she had no place else to stay.
Padgett died of hypertensive arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Griffin said he received a call on his cellphone asking if he could come to the hospital that day because Padgett was ill. Griffin arrived and asked to see his friend, but the nurses told him she didn't make it.
"I still remember that day," Griffin said. "I dropped everything when I got that phone call."
Griffin scrambled to arrange her burial, but couldn't come up with enough money. Padgett's body, the medical examiner's office confirmed, remained at the morgue for more than a month.
Friends suggested Griffin try to enlist the help of the local Korean community, since Padgett was of Korean descent, and one of the local Korean newspapers helped drum up enough money for a casket and burial.
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But there wasn't enough money for a gravestone, Griffin said, and so Padgett was buried at Ridgewood with nothing to mark her remains.
"If I had the money to get her a proper marker, I would," Griffin, who has worked at Wrigley Field for more than 60 years, most recently hawking scorecards, said in the fall.
Garg, 49, read Griffin's remarks and said he was struck by the man's honesty and the rawness of his emotions.
"I was really taken by his personal story and also how he's built his own life, but also I was taken by his brutal honesty about the mistakes he's made in his life and about how he's ended up," Garg said. "And I was taken with his commitment to her."
Garg did not know Griffin before the story was published and, though he's a Cubs fan who visits Wrigley Field, didn't recognize him from the vendor's perch hawking scorecards inside the ballpark's main entrance.
"I never buy scorecards," Garg said. "I go straight for the beer."
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The two are friends now. Garg invited Griffin over to his house to have Thanksgiving dinner with his family and the two have made a few trips to the cemetery together to visit Padgett's grave. Garg was impressed with Griffin's continued dedication to his friend, something crystallized in the gravestone message.
"I thought it was so beautiful how it captured all of the complexities of their relationship, their individual experiences and their friendship," Garg said. "It brought tears to my eyes. To have that kind of devotion and commitment to somebody, when you have so many struggles of your own."
Griffin continues to work at the ballparks on both sides of town although his health is deteriorating and his stamina lacking. He keeps working, he said, because he needs the money to cover his rent and expenses.
He's hoping the Cubs have another postseason run in them this season and hopes the fans will finally be able to watch playoff success. Until then, Griffin will keep punching in at the ballpark and making trips to the cemetery when he finds a friend to take him there.
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"I don't really like going home," he said. "There's no one there. I get too lonely."
On the most recent trip to Padgett's grave, Griffin purchased a bouquet of overpriced plastic flowers from the cemetery office.
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Griffin said he likes sunflowers, but settled on an arrangement of pink roses. The woman at the office asked if he really wanted to spend so much money on the bouquet. He said he did.
Slowly approaching the gravesite, Griffin clutched the fake flowers, nearly stumbling over a bump in the land near Padgett's headstone.
With the flowers precariously planted in the dry ground, Griffin stood silently, spending time with his friend.
poconnell@tribpub.com
Twitter @pmocwriter
Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plan to allow some Chicago homeowners property tax rebates to somewhat offset the impact of his massive tax increase should be expanded to help protect renters and working-class families in gentrifying neighborhoods, aldermen and community groups said Monday.
Activists from the Northwest Side gathered at City Hall to press for a much broader rebate program than the one Emanuel announced shortly after tax bills with big increases began turning up in Chicagoans' mailboxes. But aldermen who called for renters to get some relief offered no specifics on how to pay for it.
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Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, said only that the added cost could be "built in" to the city's 2017 budget.
"It can be a cost the city is ready to pay," he said. "That's why it's so important that we continue to have conversations about property tax relief for renters, because we also want to ensure that as we work toward the 2017 budget, we're finding dedicated sources of funding for a program that would provide relief for renters as well."
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Emanuel unveiled the details of the long-discussed tax rebate program last week. His administration said it would cost up to $21 million if everyone eligible took advantage. But Ramirez-Rosa pointed out Monday that many eligible homeowners likely won't take part. He said an expanded rebate program might cost around $35 million if it included renters.
An administration outline of the specifics of the Emanuel package said renters would not get a break because a "rental rebate will be difficult and costly to administer and enforce."
In part, administration officials have said adding renters would greatly increase the program's cost and come with no guarantee any rebates given to landlords would be passed on to tenants. Nonetheless, city spokeswoman Molly Poppe said Monday that the administration plans to "work with aldermen to address these concerns and discuss a possible structure for a rental rebate."
Ramirez-Rosa said it could be done. Landlords could get incentives to not raise rents, or renters could apply for rebates themselves if their rents were raised, he said.
The danger of a dedicated funding source to pay for tax rebates is that the city will simply increase some other tax to raise that money, said Daniel LaSpata, of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association.
"One of the biggest challenges that LSNA wants to see faced is making sure this is a tax rebate and not a tax shift, that we're not saving you $200 to $300 in one place just because we're passing it on to you somewhere else," LaSpata said Monday.
For homeowners, the mayor's package allows a maximum rebate of $200, but pegs that to household income. Only households with adjusted gross incomes of less than $25,000 with a property tax increase of $350 or more would be eligible for the full amount.
The rebates would decline as incomes climb, with a limit of $75,000 in annual earnings per household to be eligible. Rebate amounts also would be lower for folks who had lesser tax increases.
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The city estimates that about 155,000 of the city's 425,000 or so homeowners would qualify for a rebate, with an average check of $150. It would cost the city $21 million if everyone took advantage. The mayor has not said how he'd pay for it. Poppe said Monday that "the administration is having ongoing discussions with the aldermen on possible funding sources for the rebate proposal."
It seems likely the city won't have to pay out that much money. When then-Mayor Richard M. Daley offered rebates in 2010, more than 160,000 eligible homeowners didn't apply. Only 36,621 got rebates under a plan that cost the city less than $4.5 million.
Emanuel originally wanted to get the state to double the homeowners exemption. That would have spared the city from any additional cost, but shifted about $190 million in property taxes from owners of less-expensive homes to owners of commercial property and higher-end homes, according to a Tribune analysis. The plan stalled in Springfield, as many predicted it would during the budget standoff there. The mayor instead will push to enact the much more modest rebate plan.
Emanuel aides said the rebate plan would be considered Tuesday by the Finance Committee and potentially by the full council Wednesday.
jebyrne@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @_johnbyrne
Welcome to Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield.
Topspin
During the height of the drama surrounding the George Lucas museum, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Lucas' wife Mellody Hobson demonized Friends of the Parks as out-of-touch elitists whose wrongheaded position would end up costing the city a sizable financial and cultural investment.
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Now that Friends of the Parks has won the fight, with Lucas packing up his spaceships and heading west, the group is touting in a fundraising push its successful effort to keep the museum off the lakefront and its resulting higher profile.
"We say (a) very heartfelt thank you to the many of you who have continued to write, call, and donate to support Friends of the Parks in our efforts to do all we can to protect our lakefront," reads an email sent out by the group last week. "We have been so encouraged by the recent surge in new members and donors."
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"We currently have a matching grant challenge of $5,000 to meet by the end of the month," the note reads. "All individual donations and memberships up to $5,000 will be matched one-to-one during July! Will you help us reach our goal?" (John Byrne)
What's on tap
*Mayor Rahm Emanuel will unveil an industrial development program with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
*Gov. Bruce Rauner will make a couple of stops in Taylorville, where he will sign legislation "curbing the sale of addictive bath salts."
*The Chicago City Council health and zoning committees meet.
*A group of Chicago aldermen including Proco "Joe" Moreno, 1st; Deborah Mell, 33rd; and Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, will hold a City Hall news conference to suggest property tax relief also be extended to renters. Did the advisory include a way to pay for such a move? It did not.
* The week ahead : Monday through Thursday: Illinois delegation at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland; Tuesday: City Council Finance Committee meets; Wednesday: Chicago City Council meets; Thursday: Judge in Independent Maps redistricting referendum lawsuit expected to rule by this date.
What we're writing
*Stopgap budget failing to erase damage of state impasse.
*Unorthodox Illinois Republican delegation heads to Trump convention without Rauner, Sen. Mark Kirk.
*"Happy warrior" Mike Pence's team-up with Donald Trump brings out hopes, fears in home state.
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*Mothers of Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland to speak at the Democratic National Convention.
*Obama Foundation lists latest round of donors.
*Man who threatened state Rep. Jeanne Ives gets probation.
*City Hall tab on police misconduct lawsuits this year: $18.6 million.
*Special prosecutor could be named soon to probe Laquan McDonald police shooting.
*IPRA says Chicago police should tighten rules on deadly force.
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*More gates at O'Hare could mean less crowding.
*Illinois PARCC testing violated federal law, U.S. Education Department says.
What we're reading
*Chicago's bid for 2016 Olympics leaves pricey legacy seven years later.
*Modern journalism: Win Pulitzer, play Pokemon Go for a week.
*Our bottles of this precious, Chicago-made beer were not affected by this recall.
From the notebook
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*IllinoisGO goes bye bye: A multi-million dollar political organization that backed Democrats supportive of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's union-weakening agenda has abruptly pulled the plug on its operations.
Illinoisans for Growth and Opportunity, known as IllinoisGO, has closed its political action committee and its independent expenditure committee after spending millions of dollars in the Democratic primary with little success.
"In Illinoistrust and confidence has been deeply damaged. The (independent expenditures were) intended to protect incumbent Democrats, in the primary and in the general elections, who take tough votes to help restore this trust. We are ending operations, as this did not occur," the group said in a statement.
The group spent more than $2 million in an unsuccessful effort to back Democratic Rep. Ken Dunkin of Chicago against union-backed challenger Juliana Stratton in the March 15 primary. Stratton won with about 67 percent of the vote.
The group's effort in the contest included a near $1 million transfer to the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, which then used the money for ads that backed Dunkin. Dunkin had backed Rauner over Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan on several votes, helping to thwart the Democratic veto-proof majority in the chamber.
The group closed out by refunding $4.6 million, minus ancillary expenses, to its donors. Its top donation was $5 million from John and Laura Arnold, a billionaire Houston couple backing changes in public worker pensions that unions oppose. The Arnolds are getting a $3 million refund.
The group also refunded $600,000 of the $1 million donated by Helen Zell, the wife of Sam Zell, a Rauner supporter who led a heavily leveraged but doomed buyout of then-Chicago Tribune parent company Tribune Co. in 2007.
The group's executive director was Greg Goldner, who ran Emanuel's first congressional campaign in 2002 and owns a consulting firm that helped promote the expansion of automated traffic camera programs around the country.
Scott Kennedy, who operates Illinoiselectiondata.com, was the first to report on IllinoisGO's demise.
Rauner still has his own personal resources and his political fund that contains nearly $15.3 million after giving the state GOP $5 million in May that has been used for advertising against Democratic legislative targets. There's also $2.2 million in the Rauner-backed Turnaround Illinois independent expenditure PAC. (Rick Pearson)
*IL-10 fundraising: In the 10th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Bob Dold had nearly $1.36 million more in the bank on July 1 than Democratic former Rep. Brad Schneider, new Federal Election Commission reports show.
Dold, from Kenilworth, had more than $2.3 million in cash on hand; Schneider had $969,000. Schneider, from Deerfield, emerged after a March 15 primary against Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering, while Dold had no primary opponent.
Overall, Dold has significantly outraised his rival with receipts of $3.96 million to Schneider's $2.95 million since the last election. From April through June, Dold collected $858,000 to Schneider's $681,000.
It's the third race between the two. Dold, elected in 2010 in a win against Democrat Dan Seals, was defeated by Schneider in 2012, a presidential year with home-state President Obama at the top of the ticket. Dold won the seat back from Schneider in 2014, a non-presidential year. (Katherine Skiba)
*Swag: A look at what's inside the Illinois Republican delegation goodie bag.
Included in the Illinois delegation swag bag for the RNC: Ibuprofen. pic.twitter.com/ZfgE95fu8H Monique Garcia (@moniquegarcia) July 17, 2016
*The Sunday Spin: This week's guests were David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale; Mark Fratella, 5th Congressional District delegate for Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention; and Pat Brady, former state GOP chairman and 6th Congressional District delegate for Ohio Gov. John Kasich at the RNC. Listen to the full show here. The "Sunday Spin" airs from 7 to 9 a.m. on WGN-720 AM.
Follow the money
*Track campaign contribution reports in real time with this Tribune Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ILCampaignCash
Beyond Chicago
*Iraq war vet kills three cops, injuries three more in Baton Rouge, officials say.
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*Erdogan emerges stronger in Turkey after failed coup.
*Trump's creativity with the truth in business deals.
*Trump, Pence agree to disagree on "60 Minutes."
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 Illinois Republicans kicked off the first day of the Republican National Convention searching for unity, demonizing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan as reasons to support the GOP ticket.
The pep talk came as the delegation convened for the first time at a breakfast, a chance for GOP leadership to convince Donald Trump delegates that the Illinois Republican Party was firmly behind the presumptive presidential nominee.
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At one point, Illinois Republican Party Chairman Tim Schneider asked attendees to raise their hand if it was their first time attending the Republican National Convention. When more than half of the room responded, Schneider reached for common ground.
"Guess what, it's mine too. I'm a newbie too. We need to work together. All of us together as the Illinois Republican Party. We're not you're enemy, we're your friend," Schneider said.
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"We're the balance, we're the structure, we're the backbone of the Illinois Republican Party that's going to help you elect your candidates along with our candidates," Schneider said. "All people that will do a far better job than any Democrat would do."
State Rep. John Cabello, an at-large Trump delegate who is co-chair of the delegation, also sought to assure Trump delegates that the party was behind them, saying he's heard "rumors" to the contrary, calling them "absolutely false."
"We have all locked arms to make sure crooked Hillary is not the next president of the United States," said Cabello, of Machesney Park near Rockford.
Trump delegates are using the prospect of a Clinton presidency as a rallying cry to unite behind the controversial real estate mogul and reality TV star as he assumes the GOP nomination this week. The outreach was welcome by Trump delegates, though they noted there's still a ways to go before the party is united.
"I think they are in the process of doing that. They are certainly working to help people understand where Mr. Trump is on the issues," said Phil Chapman, of downstate Highland.
But the absence of Gov. Bruce Rauner and U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk did not go unnoticed.
"Everybody is saying there is unity, but it would really be nice if Gov. Rauner and Sen. Kirk came by to really show that unity," said Jim Ignatowski, of Chicago. "I would love to see those guys here, just to support us. Support me. Support Trump. Nobody agrees with anybody on everything."
"Rauner came in the same way as Trump did. Outsider, they played that whole money thing on him too," Ignatowski said.
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Ignatowski's assessment of party unity?
"In Illinois, not so much," he said.
Asked if Rauner and Kirk's lack of enthusiasm for Trump would affect their support for the Republican leaders at the ballot booth, some delegates took a wait-and-see approach.
"We'll have to see what their response is going to be, maybe they will change their minds and support him after the convention, as they should," said Chris Hilliard, a Trump delegate from Oak Forest. "Republicans should be supporting Republicans."
U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, of downstate Taylorville, said Republicans must do more than gather behind Trump but work to defeat Democrats at every level of government, particularly in the Illinois House, where longtime speaker Madigan has been locked in a battle with Rauner.
"We can't forget the fight back in Illinois," Davis said. "If we don't give Gov. Rauner a better majority of members in the Statehouse in Springfield, you will see Mike Madigan to continue to be able to run roughshod over every single person in Springfield."
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mcgarcia@chicagotribune.com
rap30@aol.com
Pakistani civil society activists carry placards during a protest in Islamabad on July 18, 2016, against the murder of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch by her own brother. (Aamir Qureshi / AFP/Getty Images)
"I was determined either to kill myself or kill her."
This was the explanation a Pakistani social media star's brother gave reporters Sunday when he confessed to strangling her to death.
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"Money matters," he continued, "but family honor is more important."
The brother confirmed what the reports suspected: Qandeel Baloch, 26, died in an "honor killing," a homicide of a woman who has brought "shame" to her family. Baloch's name and photo spread across the news, bringing her a notoriety in death she had been seeking in life. She was far from a household name in the United States, but her prominence in Pakistan -- and the controversy around it -- was beginning to gain attention around the world.
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Baloch, whose real name is Fauzia Azeem, first caught the public's eye in an audition for "Pakistan Idol," a singing competition show spun off of "American Idol." She didn't win, or even make it past the first audition in front of the three judges. But the fit she had upon hearing the news of her rejection was enough to launch the video on Facebook, where she was mostly mocked for her reaction.
In the age of social media, those five minutes of fame can be leveraged -- soon enough, Baloch was attracting thousands of fans to her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts, where she regularly posted pictures and videos of herself. They were risque: Often she can be seen laying in a bed, wearing bold red lipstick or bearing her cleavage.
Such a maneuver would hardly make most social media-savvy Americans bat an eye. But in Pakistan, a country with strict conservative values -- especially for women -- Baloch was shocking. She was called every slut-shaming name in the book, from people who were just annoyed with her self-involvement to those deeply offended by her show of sexuality.
In her mind, she was taking a stand for women.
"I am an inspiration to those ladies who are treated badly by society," she once said. "I will keep on achieving and I know you will keep on hating."
Perhaps her persistence was the product of her unsettling past, of which her fans and critics only recently learned. When she was 17, she was forced to marry a much older man who she claims was abusive. They had a son together.
"The kind of torture he has inflicted on me, you can't even imagine," she told Pakistani lifestyle magazine Dawn.
Her former husband denies these claims. Baloch eventually left him, and was estranged from her son. This revelation made waves, but it was another recent scandal that seemed to lead to her killing.
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During Ramadan, she posted selfies on her social-media accounts with Mufti Abdul Qavi, a prominent Muslim cleric. It appeared the two were together in a hotel room. One photo even showed Baloch wearing the cleric's traditional fur-lined hat.
They said they were meeting for Iftar, the meal that breaks a day of fasting during Ramadan. Qavi claimed he was there to discuss the teachings of Islam with Baloch. But the Pakistani government punished him, removing him from the committee that decides when Ramadan begins and ends. Baloch felt the backlash on social media. She petitioned the government to provide her with security because of all the death threats she was receiving.
Little did she know, the real threat was in her own family. Though they seem like a relic of a far-ago time, "honor killings" are still rampant in Baloch's country. An estimated 1,000 Pakistani women are killed this way every year. In June, a father lit his daughter on fire because she eloped. When a 19-year-old schoolteacher refused to marry a man twice her age, she too was burned alive. In May, 14 tribal leaders were arrested for burning a teenage girl to death -- not because she eloped, but because she helped her friend do so.
Baloch's younger brother, Waseem Azeem, said his motivation was the taunting and embarrassment his sister brought upon their family. He covertly slipped her a sedative, then strangled her.
Many honor killings go unpunished because the law in Pakistan allows for a victim's family to pardon her killer. But on Monday, police changed the type of report registered in Baloch's death, according to Dawn. Now her case will "be taken as a murder against the state," meaning her family cannot stop the government from prosecuting her brother.
Meanwhile, the cleric who appeared in Baloch's selfies is saying her death is a warning for those who humiliate clerics like she did.
"People should realize that religious clerics are the pious face of Islam," he said in the New Indian Express. "They should not dare to play with their reputation or try to malign them otherwise they will face the curse of God."
ST. LOUIS A suburban St. Louis police officer shot in the neck during a traffic stop is paralyzed from the neck down due to "catastrophic damage to his spinal cord," Ballwin Police Chief Kevin Scott said Monday.
Officer Michael Flamion, 31, was shot on July 8 after stopping a man for speeding in Ballwin, a well-to-do St. Louis County town of about 30,000 residents. Police said Flamion was shot in the neck from behind.
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Antonio Taylor, 31, of St. Louis was arrested later that day following a foot chase in nearby Manchester, Missouri. He is jailed on $500,000 bond on several charges, including first-degree assault of a law enforcement officer. Taylor, who has an extensive criminal record, faces a court hearing on July 27 and does not yet have an attorney.
The shooting occurred one day after five police officers were killed in Dallas, but Missouri officials have not discussed a possible motive for Flamion's shooting. Flamion is white, and Taylor is black. Scott, speaking at a news conference, declined to discuss the investigation.
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Scott said Flamion remains in intensive care. He is alert and able to recognize family, friends and co-workers, Scott said.
The chief said Flamion's life is forever changed, but he remains a part of the community and the police department.
"Although it's evident he will not be able to serve in the same capacity, I will assure that Officer Flamion is engrained in the Ballwin police family and will forever be a Ballwin police officer, no questions asked," Scott said.
The Ballwin department has been overwhelmed by support from the community, including people who have come to police headquarters to express their concern and others who have simply offered hugs to officers on the street, Scott said.
Flamion's injuries qualified him for financial assistance from the Catastrophic Injury Fund of the Backstoppers, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to the families of slain first responders. He's also getting financial help from the community.
A GoFundMe page set up for Flamion, who is married, raised more than $193,000 by Monday afternoon. A children's lemonade stand raised $4,000, and several restaurants are banding together for a fundraiser in which proceeds from dinner will go to the family.
Associated Press
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., during a campaign event to announce Pence as the vice presidential running mate on, Saturday, July 16, 2016, in New York. (Evan Vucci / AP)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has routinely assailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for voting in 2002 to authorize military intervention in Iraq, but in a television interview broadcast Sunday night, he gave his running mate, Mike Pence, a pass for doing the exact same thing.
The interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" highlighted a challenge Trump will face now that has put the Indiana governor on the GOP ticket: dealing with questions about where the two have disagreed. On trade, foreign policy and other areas, the two have parted ways many times.
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In in the interview, Trump was confronted with Pence's vote to authorize force in 2002 as a member of the House.
"I don't care," Trump responded.
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"What do you mean you don't care?" asked Lesley Stahl, who conducted the interview.
"It's a long time ago. And he voted that way, and they were also misled. A lot of information was given to people," Trump said.
The real estate mogul said Pence was "entitled to make a mistake every once in a while."
But Clinton?
"No. She's not," Trump said.
During a June 22 speech, Trump slammed Clinton's "bad judgment" for supporting the Iraq War as a senator. Clinton has said that in retrospect, she voted the wrong way.
In the CBS interview, Trump repeated a claim he often makes: that he opposed the war from the start. The Washington Post's Fact Checker has found no sign that Trump opposed the invasion or was vocal about it beforehand.
Trump also said that as president, he would dispatch "very few troops on the ground" to fight the Islamic State in the Middle East. And he appeared to want to recast his controversial proposal to ban most foreign Muslims as a territorial prohibition.
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"Call it whatever you want, change territories, but there are territories and terror states and terror nations that we're not going to allow the people to come into our country," he said.
"Please don't let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better. I'm working on these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family, whatever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you."
Baton Rouge police Officer Montrell Jackson in a July 8 Facebook post after the fatal police shooting of an African-American man. Jackson, also African-American, was one of three officers killed Sunday in Baton Rouge, La.
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Louisiana state representative identified one of the slain officers as Montrell Jackson, who had a 4-month-old child. In this 2016 photo provided by Trenisha Jackson, her husband, Baton Rouge Police Officer Montrell Jackson, holds his son Mason at a Father's Day event for police officers in Baton Rouge, La. (Trenisha Jackson)
This time, unlike in Orlando, Fla., or Dallas, the killings tore at a city already uneasy. Baton Rouge has reeled since July 5, when police responding to a call of a man brandishing a gun shot to death a black man outside a convenience store. Alton Sterling's three-hour funeral Friday brought some calm to Baton Rouge.
Sunday morning, though, a firefight erupts in the Louisiana capital. A police radio band crackles: "Shots fired, officer down! Shots fired, officer down!" Six officers down, actually. And, moments later, an officer pleads with dispatchers: "We need the BearCat!" an armored personnel carrier of military lineage to collect the wounded police.
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Once again in this summer of slaughter, Americans struggled to parse helter-skelter fragments of information: A rifle-wielding shooter clad in black near Baton Rouge police headquarters. A robot searching for explosives. "Seventeen or so" people huddling for protection in a bathroom at Benny's Car Wash. Even a rush of officers to lock down Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center as surgeons operate on the casualties. And a sobering radio request that cops on the scene look for still more victims: "I need eyes to see if we have any other officers down, so check around and see what else is around you."
See what else is around you. A fair synthesis of what many rattled Americans are telling themselves.
Another day's bloodshed surely compounds grief and suspicion in a country buffeted more intensely than usual by issues of race, policing, firearms and, most recently in Orlando, internationally inspired terrorism. Arguably the most sensible words of a mostly senseless Sunday came from Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards: "This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing."
The agony here is that repeated calls for reconciliation from President Barack Obama, other politicians, religious leaders, talking heads on TV are falling flat.
In the minds of many Americans, the murders of cops in Baton Rouge now will conflate not only with those burning issues of policing and race, but with starkly rising homicide tolls in Chicago and other cities. That may not make perfect sense, yet given the steady percussion of lawlessness, it's understandable. Otherwise level-headed people look askance at one another, less with hostility than with wariness. See what else is around you.
Repeat assassinations of police only add to the perception that this summer belongs to violence. Baton Rouge, like Dallas, raises tensions in a tense U.S. populace. That these latest killings come on the cusp of our national political conventions by nature they are magnets for emotional speeches and emotional protesters won't help anyone step back from anger and resentment.
Instead, Baton Rouge becomes a fresh weapon for, yes, more anger and resentment: Whatever the killer's motive, many among us already have tucked him into their preferred narratives of what's wrong with America.
After the shootings of 12 officers in Dallas on July 7, we wrote that ours is a country increasingly transfixed by the distinctions between Them and Us supply your definitions if you must.
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Yet Dallas should have been instructive. During a peaceful march to protest killings of black men by police in other cities, a black sniper set out to kill white cops. Dallas police Chief David Brown, himself African-American, reacted to the mix of motives with blame-free wisdom: "This must stop this divisiveness between our police and our citizens."
Not everyone listened. And here we are again.
Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
Northern Illinois Academy, which has been operating for more than three years at Church Road and Corporate Boulevard on Aurora's Northeast Side, wants to expand. (Steve Lord / Chicago Tribune)
The Northern Illinois Academy, a psychiatric residential treatment facility, is seeking to expand its Northeast Side location at 998 Corporate Blvd. in Aurora.
The City Council Planning and Development Committee recently unanimously recommended the facility get a revision to its special use, as well as approval for its final plan, to expand from 64 beds to 84 beds.
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The academy already has approval from the Department of Children and Family Services to add the beds because it has been full for between six months to a year. As part of the expansion, the facility also would add bedrooms and classrooms. Youth residents at the academy live and go to school there.
Carolyn Willandt, academy executive director, said the addition would add more people of the same kind the facility currently treats youths age 10 to 21, from children with autism to young people with complex mental health and behavioral problems, to older teens in danger of dropping out of school or going to jail. She said all the residents have "special needs," most with neurological problems and also psychiatric issues.
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"We're not planning on changing the nature of the population," she told aldermen on the Planning and Development Committee. "We get a lot of kids from throughout the state."
The academy offers many programs, including weekly individual, family and group therapy, recreational therapy, social and life skill development, educational services, psychiatric services and medical services.
The programs are run by Sequel Youth and Family Services, which currently operates in 17 states and serves clients from 41 states and territories, according to its website.
The Northern Illinois Academy opened about 3 years ago at the current location at Church Road and Corporate Boulevard.
Dan Dolan, of Dolan and Murphy, Inc., which operates the corporate subdivision the academy is in, said the original project brought in 160 employees, and is now up to about 250. The addition would add another 60 to 70 jobs, he said.
"That's a 50,000-square-foot building providing about 300 jobs," he said.
With the committee's recommendation, the whole City Council will look at the expansion request when they meet as a Committee of the Whole at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the 5th Floor Conference Room at City Hall, 44 E. Downer Place.
slord@tribpub.com
A 22-year-old man who allegedly sold marijuana to high school students through a window in the basement of his Brookfield home was arrested Friday and charged with several crimes, police said.
Cory T. Dokousian, of the 3600 block of Vernon Avenue, was charged with the manufacture and delivery of marijuana, possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and resisting arrest, according to a news release from the Riverside Police Department.
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An investigation that began in 2014 found that Dokousian was allegedly selling marijuana to students from Riverside Brookfield High School, which is located in Riverside, police said.
"He was supplying the majority of the cannabis to students who would come to a window in the rear basement of his home where the transaction would take place," Riverside police Chief Thomas Weitzel said in the news release.
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Riverside police and personnel from the west suburban Major Case Assistance Team, including police from Brookfield, executed a search warrant at Dokousian's home at 9 a.m. Friday and found 70 grams of marijuana about 2 1/2 ounces packaged and ready for delivery, according to the news release. They also found drug paraphernalia and tools for processing, preparing and cutting the marijuana for resale, police said.
When police arrived at the home, Dokousian allegedly tried to dispose of the marijuana in the sump pump in his basement. He also allegedly fought with police and attempted to flee.
Weitzel said Dokousian lives with a relative who rents the residence where the arrest was made.
Weitzel said none of Dokousian's alleged drug transactions took place on the grounds of the school.
The chief said the arrest "will have a significant impact on the sale of cannabis in the Riverside-Brookfield area." He said the police investigation was continuing.
According to Cook County court records, bail for Dokousian was set at $10,000. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.
Many artists never see their work widely displayed.
But at age 17, Angelica Zavala's work recently got broad public exposure.
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Zavala, a senior at Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, took first place in the Friends of Community High School District 218 Education Foundation Design Contest to create the cover for the district's sixth annual Arts Extravaganza program.
The foundation's annual Arts Extravaganza was held April 11.
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In the contest, designs for the program were to include references to theater, music, artistic and mechanical art. The event was both a fundraiser and night to recognize the talents of students in drama, speech, music, visual and culinary arts.
"I had to incorporate all of them and I didn't want to separate them as was recommended," Zavala explained. "I wanted to group them all together so that's how I made the logo to represent arts as a whole incorporating all the elements."
Her design was chosen in February. Leading up to April 11 event, Zavala designs were at schools throughout District 218, which includes Eisenhower, Richards High School in Oak Lawn and Shepard High School in Palos Heights.
"I've saw it on the program and as a big poster outside of school and on the website," Zavala said. "I was shocked when I first saw it. Is this actually real? Then, I saw a poster and saw it replicated around the school, and though, 'Oh, yeah, that's mine.' And I remind myself that I did that and I am happy and proud."
Zavala said several relatives are artists.
"I've always been interested in art because my family is very artistic," she said. "My grandfather was a geneticist, but as a hobby he would paint all the time. My dad made jewelry for a living and did art. My aunt paints and teaches classes for art and my oldest cousin is majoring in art."
Zavala, the daughter of Esther and Carlos Zavala of Blue Island, said she often watched her father create art.
"I became interested in art when I saw him drawing," Zavala said. "I would draw and my mom would watch me. She put me in arts classes at the Beverly Arts Center.
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At Eisenhower, Zavala is ranked 14th in her class and has received Honors with Distinction, the highest academic honor a high school student can receive at the school. She is a member of the National Honor Society, mathletes, and the television production broadcast news program at Eisenhower.
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This summer, she recently wrapped up a two-week University of Chicago summer session program to study a course in arts and sciences that focuses on the humanities and human relations.
At Eisenhower, Zavala has made five minute dramatic films as part of various competitions, including the South Suburban College Annual Video Competition, where she took home several awards.
After high school, Zavala hopes to pursue degrees in business and film at DePaul University or the University of Chicago.
"I really want to make films that would go into theaters or be a director," she said. "It is what I wanted to do since I was young."
Zavala said her parents have the biggest influence in her life.
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"They are immigrants in this country," Zavala said. "My mom went to college in Mexico and my dad is getting his graduate degree in accounting. They work very hard, go to school and leave early in the morning to get everything done. They inspire me. They came from practically nothing to a very good life here in the U.S."
Cheryl Dangel Bartolini is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
Pastor Chris Hanley, Susan Flanagan, the council president at Resurrection Lutheran Church, and Edin Cubic, the secretary of the Society of American Bosnians and Herzegovinians (left to right) are shown at the Franklin Park trustee meeting on July 11. ( Alex V. Hernandez / Pioneer Press)
The Society of American Bosnians and Herzegovinians recently was granted village approval for a location in Franklin Park.
"We've been kind of like nomads," said Edin Cubic, the secretary of the society. The Muslim congregation has been a registered not-for-profit religious and charitable organization since 2011 but had not had a permanent home until now.
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"We'd rent here and there, have events like our Saturday school in Rolling Meadows," Cubic added. "But then if we any kind of prayers, we would be in a center in Mount Prospect, which let us be there. And then if we had any really large events, we'd rent out a banquet hall. So we've kind of been everywhere and nowhere. It's nice to have a home."
The owners of Resurrection Lutheran Church put the property at 9920 Grand Ave. for sale in April. By June, the society was under contract to purchase the church for an undisclosed sum and applied for a conditional permit from the village.
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The Society of American Bosnians and Herzegovinians primarily serves community through the facilitation of religious, educational and cultural programs and has an estimated 160 members that include individuals and families, Cubic said.
"We were just looking at what was available, and then this property came on the market and fit our needs," he said. "It's got everything we need as far as the building being ready, and we also have members, about 60, that already live in the community. So that made this an easier decision. And it's really perfect as is, other than for prayer, just because we don't have pews. That would be the extent of our changes, removing those and putting down carpet. But everything else, it's kind of perfect and ready to go."
The zoning board of appeals considered the application on July 6 and recommended the society's application to the village's board of trustees with some conditions, said John P. Schneider, the village's director of community development. The first condition was that the home on the property be either subdivided or used by the new congregation by Dec. 31. The second condition is that the occupancy of the property will not exceed 80 people, with any larger events being held at banquet facilities in the general area.
Resurrection Lutheran Church's first Sunday services began in Jan. 23, 1944, and by April 2 of that year a charter was signed with the Rev. Samuel Besecker as the congregation's first pastor. The original building at Grand and Hawthorne streets was completed and dedicated on Dec. 8, 1946. A parsonage was built next to the church in 1948, and by 1950 a steeple was added to the original building. By 1954, because the congregation needed more space, the ground was broken for an addition to the church building to allow for new educational and office space. And by 1962, a completely new building was built and dedicated as the main building on Grand Avenue while the original building was regulated to housing first-, second-, and third-grade Sunday school classrooms.
"It's too large; if you've seen the building, it's really a large building. So we probably started this process a few years ago," said Susan Flanagan, the council president of Resurrection about the sale. "What we're doing is looking at a few places we can possibly rent and search for a new place in the area. We want to stay as close as possible from where we're currently at, and we will be making a decision soon on that now."
Once the society finishes moving into the building, Cubic said that the plan is for the Muslim congregation to meet every week on Friday afternoon. Additionally, the congregation plans to offer daily prayer services for smaller groups and host Saturday school for children. Additionally Cubic said the society plans to continue the charitable activities that Resurrection offers, like the clothing closet and food pantry for people in need as well as weekly AA meetings.
"That was a relief for me, to know that another religious group was going to inhabit that space," Resurrection Pastor Chris Hanley said. "It's clear that we deeply value the same things worshiping and serving people in the community. Those are two of the things that ... at the core for us are the same for them. ... So this is an opportunity to have new neighbors to do it with, that new energy, it's a real gift."
Alex V. Hernandez is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Franklin Park hosted a forum last week to put business owners in touch with training agencies to address the ongoing issue of a dwindling manufacturing workforce.
"The problem is that manufacturing employers need people, and there are people who are unemployed who need jobs," said Liz Doyle, a business relations specialist with Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, a nonprofit government agency formed in July 2012 under the joint leadership of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. The partnership administers federal funding and workforce development grants to fulfill the job training needs of workers and employers throughout the Chicago area.
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"But it's not just about getting people trained," Doyle said. "It's also about attracting candidates to careers in manufacturing. We have a marketing problem, and we can't get candidates because in today's world, manufacturing just doesn't have the same sex appeal that maybe it used to have in terms of people pursuing careers in this field."
According to the Illinois Consortium for Advanced Technical Training, about 83 percent of U.S. manufacturers say they can't find local skilled workers to fill the number of open positions they have. By 2025, it's estimated that there will be 3.4 million skilled manufacturing positions that will need filling.
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One Franklin Park business that's attempting to address that challenge is Mandel Metals, a full-service, family owned and operated aluminum distributor. Mandel is looking to hire 15 people but is struggling to find qualified, reliable candidates, says Mike Ward, the company's executive vice president.
"We can't get folks who want to do that, especially on a second shift in the afternoon," Ward said. "We're having to hire a lot of temporary workers, who will show up one day but not the other. ... I mean we have folks in our facility that are sharp, that have been there four or five years and are making more money than I did coming out of college. We have these career paths that you want to take people and just say, 'We just want sharp people who will show up, and the sky's your limit here.' "
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage is $25.96 an hour as of June of this year. Yet manufacturing jobs in the United States have been in the decline since the 1960s, with a decline of about 5 million jobs since the year 2000, according to an analysis of the bureau's data.
"We've found that workforce development is such a huge issue; it's become 50 percent of what we do when we assist companies," said Pam McDonough, president of Alliance for Industry and Manufacturing, an employer-led organization serving Northeast Illinois, works directly with 300-400 companies annually to develop and implement business solutions. "I mean, finding the right people for the right positions with the right skills has become more and more challenging."
Based on her experience, she says that training programs provide incentives for the participating employers to hire the person they're teaching because of the time they've invested.
Other organizations in attendance included Triton College, German American Chamber of Commerce, the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center, the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership and the Franklin Park-Schiller Park-River Grove Chamber of Commerce. Information about these organizations can be found at villageoffranklinpark.com/workforce.
Alex V. Hernandez is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Siblings Mia Bella, 5, Enzo, 2, and Vincent Allegra, 7, look around the Hinsdale Farmers Market with their babysitter Caitlin McLaughlin. (Mike Mantucca / Pioneer Press)
This is the peak of the local summer produce season, said Chris Hildreth of Hildreth Organics.
"Beans and zucchini are coming in strong. The peppers have started, and tomatoes and corn started this week," Hildreth said.
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When he says locally grown, he means grown on his family farm in Steward, Ill., about 20 miles southwest of DeKalb. Everything is grown there by organic and sustainable means, Hildreth said. "We put nothing synthetic on the crops."
Hildreth sold out of haricots verts Monday at the Hinsdale Farmers Market, but he had other beans, squash, potatoes, garlic and pea pods.
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The Hinsdale market, which is in its 40th year, consists of at least 16 stands selling fresh fruit, vegetables and food products, such as chutneys, salsa, honey and bakery, plus other vendors.
Linda Boggess and her daughter Amy live in Elmhurst, but came to Hinsdale for the market.
"We are going to different farmers markets this year," said Amy Boggess. She encouraged her mother to buy some rhubarb.
"You dip it in sugar and bite it off like celery," Amy Boggess said. "It's tart."
Her mother also makes strawberry rhubarb pies.
Linda Boggess raved about the flavor in the locally grown produce, compared to what is sold in grocery stores.
"Just the smell of everything is so good," Linda Boggess said. "You can tell the musk melon is fresh. I brought one home and cut it up. We ate it in 10 minutes."
She also bought blueberries for snacking and peaches to use in a pie.
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"I love making pies," Linda Boggess said.
On a previous Monday in July, Marjorie Sutton of La Grange was picking out zucchini.
"I like the nice little ones because they are very tender and not so seedy."
She was shopping with her teenage grandson Joe Solar.
"I am pretty much the guy who carries everything," Solar said.
The two had already enjoyed lunch together at the market.
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"We had those luscious crepes for lunch," Sutton said, referring to Gotta B Crepes food booth. Sutton and her grandson recommended the Chicken Florentine crepes, made with crimini mushrooms and caramelized onions.
Anne Zick comes regularly to the Hinsdale markets and favors the produce of Evergreen Farms, which has the spot at the eastern end of the market.
"She always has the best and the parking is close," said Zick, who lives in Hinsdale.
Zick was buying tomatoes, ears of corn, blueberries, a muskmelon and green peppers.
She was stocking up, after being out of town attending a quilt show in Sisters, Ore.
"The cupboard is bare," she said.
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Steve Freeman from Nichols Farm & Orchard in Marengo, which sells a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, said the farm participates in about 15 farmers market a week. He gets many more customers in Chicago, but the customers at the suburban markets buy more.
"The average customer at a farmers market in Chicago buys $10, not $25," Freeman said, which makes sense, since most workers downtown have to carry their purchase home on public transportation, so they will not want to weigh themselves down.
K&K Farms from Coloma, Mich. had tables filled with cartons of cherries, blackberries, black raspberries and currants. Her customers tell her they snack on the berries, makes smoothies with them and some make their own jam.
Erin McNeive was buying her family's favorites at the Cheese People stand.
"I get apricot Brie every week. My kids are obsessed with it," McNeive said. She also buys the aged natural sweet Swiss.
"It makes the best grilled cheese ever," she said.
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Gregory Clayton, who manned the Cheese People stand, said the fresh cheese curds are the most popular cheese he sells based on the weight sold.
But whatever he offers as samples on any given day sells well, too.
"Usually, if you give people something good, they buy that," Clayton said.
Other vendors at the Hinsdale market include a knife sharpener, juice bar, pizza maker and olive stand.
The Hinsdale Farmers Market runs from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Monday through Oct. 24 on Chicago Avenue between Garfield and Washington streets.
kfornek@pioneerlocal.com
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Twitter @kfdoings
In 1995, Mark Spreyer came to Stillman Nature Center in South Barrington to work as its naturalist and caretaker. He became executive director in 2005.
The environmental education center sits on 80 acres of woods, prairie, lake and marsh, offering wild animals nesting sites.
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From 1 to 4 p.m. July 30, Spreyer will be signing his new book, "Natural Digressions: A Natural History for the 21st Century," at Round Lake Beach Cultural and Civic Center, 2007 Civic Center Way. The book features essays on raptors, insects, trees and wildflowers. All proceeds benefit Stillman Nature Center.
Q. How did you get interested in nature?
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A. I grew up in Barrington, and Barrington Hills has a lot of countryside. It gave me a chance to look around and explore, like walking down railroad tracks looking for turtles and frogs. A lot of our family vacations were at natural areas, historical sites and nature parks like the Grand Canyon. Nature is everywhere. People around here go up to northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but nature is right here, too.
Q. Have you taken a nature vacation lately?
A. In March 2015, I was in South Africa for a month. I looked for birds, which are remarkable there. They have penguins in South Africa, and I was a kid again because I was rediscovering new birds without being an expert. South Africa has a bird, the gymnogene or African harrier-hawk, which has jointed legs that can bend in all directions. It can reach into cavities like long nests and grab out prey. You won't see that around here.
Shout Out is a weekly feature in which we introduce our readers to their fellow community members and local visitors throughout suburban Chicago. Check out more online at ChicagoTribune.com/ShoutOut.
tshields@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter @tshields19
From left, Craig and Julia Peters of Harwood Heights are with their daughter Nicole Saineghi, 19, of Harwood Heights and USA National Miss Illinois. Next to Nicole is her sister Gina Peters, 21, and grandmother Josephine Saineghi. (Karie Angell Luc / Pioneer Press)
Harwood Heights resident Nicole Saineghi is the reigning USA National Miss Illinois. The 19-year-old placed in the top 15 of 42 contestants on July 16 in the USA National Miss pageant in Boca Raton, Fla.
Saineghi, a 2014 Resurrection High School graduate, was the pageant's first runner up in the role model competition. But even after earning all of those accolades, she said of the experience, "I think it's not so much about the crown."
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"It's about what you do with the crown," Saineghi said. "It's like a microphone."
During pageant week, Saineghi received the President's Volunteer Service Award, gold level, and the pageant's Dedication to Service Award.
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"I'm extremely proud of all of her volunteer work," said Nicole's mother Julia Peters, a Pennoyer School of Norridge middle school social studies teacher. "When she has a goal, she runs with it and gets other people involved."
Saineghi's USA National Miss Illinois platform includes spreading awareness about animal rights and the need for no-kill shelters. The family's rescue pup is Mimi, 3, a female Chihuahua and dachshund mix. Saineghi also walks homeless dogs at Chicago Canine Rescue.
"We are very lucky to have a very diverse and dedicated group of volunteers," said Anna Johnson, Chicago Canine Rescue shelter manager. "It means the world to the dogs to get outdoors with people of all different backgrounds."
Saineghi, a Northeastern Illinois University junior, also supports Project Baby Blankets Inc., which was founded by Niki Musial of Chicago, a Union Ridge School District 86 of Harwood Heights elementary teacher.
"I'm just amazed that Nicole is so passionate," Musial said. "It's a pretty awesome trait to have in a young girl. It's very rare for someone her age."
"She's just always been very hospitable, even when she was 3," said Saineghi's grandmother Josephine Saineghi of Chicago.
Saineghi recently delivered rolls of yarn and blankets, which Musial's organization had earmarked for a local hospital. Project Baby Blankets assists more than a dozen area hospitals. Saineghi is also active with the Theta Chi Omega National Multicultural Sorority and is a student government senator.
With other volunteers, Saineghi also helps to deliver food to the homeless.
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"She helps people who need it," said Saineghi's sister Gina Peters, 21, of Harwood Heights.
Saineghi has competed in other pageant systems. The USA National Miss Illinois title was awarded when Saineghi was selected after an application process.
"USA National Miss is excited to have young women from all over the country, such as Nicole Saineghi, represent their states at our national competition," said Jackie B. Watson, founder and national executive director of USA National Miss.
Saineghi said she is not certain about what might be next, but she said "one thing I know is that I am going to finish out my reigning year as USA National Miss Illinois 2016 strong."
For information, contact Saineghi via email at missillinois2016@gmail.com.
Karie Angell Luc is a freelance photographer and reporter for Pioneer Press.
Irma Dominguez of St. Charles uses the Oakbrook Center landscape to take a photo of her nephew, Stefan Lazo; daughter, Sofia Dominguez; and niece, Samantha Lazo. (Chuck Fieldman / Pioneer Press)
Fifty-four years after opening, Oakbrook Center continues to make changes and attract shoppers from across the Chicago area.
And despite a brief consideration in the early 1980s of enclosing the mall, it remains committed to welcoming the outdoors.
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""We take advantage of the park-like atmosphere," said Chuck Fleming, senior general manager.
The mall, which has more than 160 stores, restaurants and services, underwent a major common area renovation in 2012-13. Construction is underway to open 12 luxury movie theaters in November, followed a month later by the opening of a food district and three new sit-down restaurants in early 2017.
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Being an open-air mall is part of the experience. While not having the climate control of an enclosed shopping center means visitors must brave the elements when it rains, snows or is extremely cold or hot outside, not having a roof over the has its upside, Fleming said.
He said the center's village green area, which includes a large screen on which free family movies are shown during the summer, a weekly seasonal farmer's market, the popular Adventure to Santa that has taken up residence the past two winters, a large fountain that operates year-round and lots and lots of flowers planted throughout the mall all make a trip to Oakbrook Center more than going shopping.
Fleming said Oakbrook Center has about 125,000 each of tulips and annuals, along with 30,000 fall mums. Each planting cycle takes five to seven days, he said.
"It's all about understanding what our customers want," Fleming said. "Our shopper has changed. For many years we chased the baby boomer. But now, it's the millennial that makes up a large part of our shoppers, and we have to adjust to try to connect with them."
The Wednesday night Movies on the Green program was started a couple of years ago to attract more shoppers, but is at the mercy of the weather. A scheduled July 13 showing of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was canceled because of storms and won't be made up. Fleming said arrangements to show movies make them available for a limited time.
When it snows, while plows attached to vehicles clear the parking lot, blowers, brooms and shovels are the tools used in mall common areas to get snow out of the way.
"It's mostly done by hand," Fleming said. "Our priority while the mall is open is for shoppers to be able to get from store to store, so we create pathways. Once we're closed, we clear the snow from curb to curb."
Liz Holland, chairman of the International Council of Shopping Centers, said staying relevant is a major key for successful shopping centers.
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"You have to make sure you're meeting the needs of customers," she said. "Oakbrook Center has done a great job making sure the goods and services they have are what their customers want."
Holland, who also is the chief executive officer of Abbell Credit Corporation and Abbell Associates in Chicago, a private real estate acquisition, development and management company with an approximately 3.5 million square-foot portfolio comprised of shopping center, office and enclosed mall properties, said General Growth Properties, which owns Oakbrook Center, has done a good job of making the mall a community center.
"In retail, you want to provide everyone with the experience they are looking for," she said. "While Oakbrook Center is a community center, keep in mind that it isn't just Oak Brook; it brings in people from all over."
Julie Brown, 46, of Winfield, said she has been shopping at Oakbrook Center for more than 15 years and, for the most part, likes that it is an open-air mall.
"It's beautiful," she said. "It definitely makes for a better shopping experience because it's so nice walking around in the mall areas."
Brown said bad weather, whether a summer storm or winter cold and snow, does effect her shopping.
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"I'll still go and shop there when the weather isn't nice, but I won't spend as much time," she said. "I'll go and get something I need when it's not nice outside, but I won't spend extra time walking around and maybe doing more shopping."
Irma Dominguez of St. Charles isn't a regular visitor to Oakbrook Center, but was there recently because she and her daughter, Sofia, wanted to bring Dominguez's niece and nephew, Stefan and Samantha Luzo, visiting from Texas.
"I'm trying to show them different places to shop while they're here, and it's different here because it's outdoors," Dominguez said. "Other malls are enclosed."
Samantha Luzo said she was impressed by the appearance of Oakbrook Center.
"It's really pretty here," she said.
That brief discussion about enclosing the mall in the 1980s, when similar malls such as River Oaks in south suburban Calumet City were enclosed, was never a serious consideration, Fleming said.
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"It was never anything that was going to happen," he said. "Our customers like what we have here, and we use the outdoors to our advantage with many of the things we have and do here."
cfieldman@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter @chuckwriting
The Valparaiso Redevelopment Commission OK'd a move to refinance bonds that will bring in an estimated $280,000, but now members have to decide how to deploy that money if the move is similarly approved by the City Council.
Members put off a vote on a spending measure last week, giving them time to seek more information. The two choices are to use the money to pay down the bonds they are refinancing or reinvest the money in city projects.
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City Council member and commission liaison Matt Murphy said he favors spending it on projects because "we're seeing a big return" as businesses respond with their own development.
Other Commission members favored using the surplus to help pay off the 2006 and 2009 bond issues.
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The 2006 are bonds for a general area, and the 2009 bonds are for improvements along Calumet Avenue, and both were to be paid off via returns from tax increment financing districts established in those areas.
Based on a timeline provided by Karl Cender of Cender and Associates of Merrillville, the City Council will vote Aug. 8 on the refinance measure. The refinancing wouldn't affect TIF districts.
Also at the meeting, Commission members also approved two potential redevelopment projects for the planned transportation oriented district southwest of the downtown.
An appraisal for the Smith Ready Mix concrete property at 251 Brown Street will cost $2,500.
The Commission plans to use that land and some of the Von Tobel land toward building a transportation oriented district and move the ChicagoDash bus line depot there for more room and parking.
Commission Executive Director Stu Summers said Valparaiso could buy the property by next summer, but there still needs to be a price agreement, relocation of the business and funding from the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority.
The Commission also voted to allow Indiana Department of Environmental Management access to the old Anco factory on South Campbell Street and inspect it for chemical and other contamination.
This is the second step in finding a grant to test to property, which is on the west side of the transportation district, city attorney Patrick Lyp said.
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He said the city isn't aware of any contamination there, but having a clean test will help in trying to sell the property.
James D. Wolf Jr. is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Survivor and the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center's first president, Sam Harris (left), visits with survivor Ralph Rehbock during the museum's memorial event last week for Elie Wiesel. The survivor, author, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner died July 2. (Mike Isaacs / Pioneer Press)
More than seven years after Elie Wiesel spoke near the yet-to-open Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, christening the new institution on a cold and relentlessly rainy April afternoon, his words rang out at the museum once again.
Wiesel, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, author, respected humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, died July 2 at age 87. During its memorial commemoration for him last week, the museum replayed his speech from April 19, 2009 at least a generous portion of it.
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"Has the world learned the lesson?" he asked at the museum's grand opening in Skokie. "Sadly, I must confess, the answer is no."
"Had the world learned the lesson," Wiesel continued, "there ought to be no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia and no racism ... and no Nazi marches here in Skokie."
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Wiesel left the thousands bundled up against the cold underneath a sprawling tent that day with what he considered a simple lesson: "Whatever happens to one community affects all communities," he said.
Revisiting Wiesel's 2009 speech last week was only one way in which the museum engaged in what the humanitarian always said was vital in approaching the Holocaust: Remembering.
"Those of you here in Illinois have courageously shown to your fellow Americans the importance the essential obligation of memory," Wiesel said during his Skokie speech.
Those at the museum last week said the power and eloquence of Wiesel's words will allow infinite future generations to remember the Holocaust as well as the survivor and leader who refused to let the world forget.
"He was one of the first leaders that was able to stand up and speak up -- speak up for all of us survivors, speak his thoughts," said survivor and museum president Fritzie Fritzshall. "He was not told to be quiet like the rest of us."
Fritzshall said that Wiesel's early words were especially important because so many survivors were told to forget and concentrate on starting a new life. "We couldn't and we didn't," she said.
"Elie Wiesel in those days had the privilege ... of having a mike and standing up and speaking up and speaking for the rest of us and speaking for humanity and speaking for the world," Fritzshall said.
When the museum first announced the commemorative event for Wiesel, museum officials said, the response was so great that it had to be relocated to a much larger downstairs room. Hundreds packed in there Thursday to pay tribute and, of course, to remember.
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"Elie Wiesel seemed like the living embodiment of the every-person Holocaust survivor for so many around the globe who don't have the privilege that we do as part of our museum family here to know and hear from our cherished survivors," said museum CEO Susan Abrams. "Elie Wiesel really was that voice for the world at large."
Storyteller and associate professor at Northwestern School of Communication Rives Collins read a passage from Wiesel's sparse and seminal memoir "Night," which plunges the reader into the tragedy and horror a teenage boy faced in the Nazi death camps where he would lose his family, and his life would change forever.
Iroquois Community School teacher Kristin Gottschalk expressed just how important "Night" has been for her students.
"Facts and figures are important, but students can't seem to grasp the sheer magnitude of numbers," she said, adding that "Night" is the one Holocaust book her students "cling to, remember most."
"His honest and raw details engross the students," she said about the author. "As adolescents, my young students identify with young Elie and the relationship he has with his father. The detailed writing helps the students experience the struggles to understand the horrors he faced and his will to survive."
The teacher said her students vividly remember the many details Wiesel writes about in the book -- Moshe the Beadle, the journey in a crowded cattle car, the eight words that separated his family forever "men to the left, women to the right."
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Last week's commemoration included personal audience reflections, too a former fourth grade social studies teacher on why it was so important to her that her students hear Wiesel's voice; the reading of an eighth grade student's letter to Wiesel on how his book "changed my outlook on life" and the assurance that "people will see the world differently because of you"; a Holocaust survivor's gratitude to Wiesel for helping her break her silence; a good friend of Wiesel's who said he enriched the lives of all he knew.
Leo Melamed, Wiesel's longtime friend and chairman emeritus of CME Group, read a somber poem in both Yiddish and English in memory of Wiesel; seven survivors each lit a candle after reading a short and memorable reflection that Wiesel wrote or spoke some time in his life.
A short distance away from the museum, just before its doors had officially opened seven years ago, Wiesel told people that "life is not made of years, but of moments." He told them we need to embrace life, make it count, stand up for those in need.
"We must think of the living, and therefore, whenever and wherever living human beings suffer, we must do something to honor their dignity," he said. "Whenever people live in fear, we must be there."
misaacs@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter @SKReview_Mike
Elsa Villegas is pregnant with her third child and is receiving prenatal care at Community Nurse Association, a La Grange-based agency that's been providing health care in Cook County for 95 years.
"I like the service and it's close by my house," said Villegas, 31, of Countryside. "I'm pretty happy with my appointments."
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Providing health care to low-income or uninsured patients is nothing new for the agency that was founded in 1921 when a small outpost of the Bureau of Social Service of Cook County was established in La Grange and began to provide services.
One of their first goals was to bring in a nurse.
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"Cook County had no health care presence out here," said Angela Curran, CEO and president. "They wanted to bring a community nurse here.
The agency supported the hiring of the first school nurse for the village and contributed financial support toward her salary.
The need for health care in Cook County has only grown over the decades, Curran said. The agency provided health care to 4,200 patients and completed 21,000 patient visits for the fiscal year that ended in June, she said.
"We've more than doubled our patients in the last four years," she said.
She added that 35 percent of the people in the area in Cook County that the agency serves are low income. Sixty-five percent of those receiving its services are Hispanic, she said.
To qualify for services, a family of four cannot have an income of more than about $41,000 a year and an individual cannot earn more than about $19,000.
The communities or portions of communities that are served include Bridgeview, Broadview, Brookfield, Burr Ridge, Countryside, Hickory Hills, Hinsdale, Hodgkins, Justice, Indian Head Park, La Grange, La Grange Highlands, La Grange Park, Lyons, McCook Summit, Westchester, Western Springs and Willow Springs.
The types of health issues that the agency's patients have are not unlike those faced by the general population and include diabetes, hypertension, depression and anxiety, asthma and obesity.
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Curran said one of the agency's goals is to ensure that patients receive preventative care and to encourage them to regard the agency as their medical home.
"The whole idea is that you want to keep them at the medical home they're familiar with," she said.
Turning to the emergency room for on-going health care is "not good for the patient and not good for the health care system," Curran said.
The agency has two physicians, three dentists and a nurse practitioner. It started in January to offer obstetrical visits on site. It also partners with volunteer physician/specialists in the community.
Building a rapport with patients and making them feel like the agency is their medical home increases the chances they will receive preventative care and that they will not make costly emergency room visits, Curran said.
Mary Murphy, chief nursing officer at Adventist Midwest Health, which operates La Grange Memorial Hospital, said people who don't have a medical home tend to go to the emergency room when any health issue, large or small, arises.
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"Their first reaction is to go to the emergency room. The Community Nurse Association fills that gap and they can get a high level of care," she said.
Patients benefit because they don't rack up high emergency room bills and it ensures that the emergency room is utilized by people with acute emergencies, Murphy added.
She noted that her hospital also provides in-patient care, surgery and testing for patients referred by the nurse association. Those services are done for free or at a greatly reduced cost, she said.
To ensure that patients turn to their agency when they need medical help, Curran said her agency does a lot of outreach. It keeps electronic medical records and follows up with patients about their appointments. The clinic is open Monday through Saturday.
It also works with other organizations that assist people in need such as BEDS Plus, an agency that aids the homeless.
"We send a nurse to the (BEDS) day program to triage and engage with clients and then they come back here for regular care," she said.
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As the nurse association has grown over the decades it has added and expanded ancillary services such as vision and dental care, both of which are particularly important for children. Curran noted that an oral health problem is often cited as a top reason for why kids miss school.
One of their newer efforts of offering on-site obstetrical services makes it more convenient for expectant mothers to receive prenatal care, she noted.
Villegas, who stopped working in a hair salon early in her pregnancy because of morning sickness, said she feels at ease at the Community Nurse Association.
"It's comfortable," she said. "I like the people who work there. I like the doctors."
amannion@tribpub.com
Twitter: triblocalam
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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.
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 US$40 million 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 US$1.5 to 3 million) 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 US$60 million financing round for US 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.
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Workers install a heavy truck at a production base of Aviation Industry Corporation of China in Xingtai, north China's Hebei Province, Sept. 11, 2015. [Photo: Xinhua/Zhu Xudong]
China will overhaul its investment and financing system to stimulate market vitality amid the economic downturn, according to a document released Monday by the central authorities.
The government will cut red tape, improve supervision and encourage enterprises to invest, said a guideline jointly released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council.
China will enhance private investment management, reinforce public investment, diversify corporate financing channels and accelerate the transformation of government functions, the guideline said.
It also urged implementation of the measures.
The document marked the latest effort by the central authorities to solve entrenched funding difficulties for small companies and encourage better use of private capital.
Private investment increased only 2.8 percent in the first half of 2016, down from 3.9 percent growth in the first five months and 5.7 percent in the first quarter, official data showed.
Startups will see stronger financial support, while companies will be encouraged to raise funds through bond issuance, according to the document. Domestic firms and financial institutions will be granted easier access to foreign capital.
Controls on insurance capital will be relaxed to facilitate projects in infrastructure, livelihood and urbanization.
Additionally, China will launch pilots to allow financial institutions to hold corporate equities.
The government has started loosening its grip on investment and financing, with less investment subject to approval and more decision-making power in the hands of enterprises.
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A dike in Central China's Hubei province breached Sunday afternoon, causing substantial flooding and resulting in the relocation of residents, local authorities said.
A dike in Huangmei county, Central China's Hubei province, breaches in the early morning on July 17, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]
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 pm, 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.
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An avalanche in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region on Sunday morning buried nine people, local authorities said.
An avalanche in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region on Sunday morning buried nine people, local authorities said. [File photo]
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."
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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.
A smuggling suspect surnamed Huang is escorted back to China on Sunday after being in Peru for 18 years. [Photo/China Daily]
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.
The Chinese economy showed signs of improvement during Q1 this year, reflecting that the financial and monetary stimulus measures have started to take effect in the real economy. But for this ostensibly positive news, the domestic reactions have been rather mixed.
Despite the dipping PPI, the prices for steel, aluminum and coal climbed drastically, resulting in a rising CPI, whose reading was already above 2 percent. Although some economists believe in and advocate the correlation between stimulus packages and China's potential growth rate, more are worried that the government may wish to achieve growth via expanding investment and credit.
On May 8, the People's Daily reported the opinion of an "authoritative person," whose controversial conclusion on China's economy projected that the economic development curve shall not be a U-shape, let alone a V-shape, but an L-shape. In other words, he deemed that China's low-growth rate shall continue for a while. By the same token, this person strongly opposed seeking growth through financial and monetary policies, but through structural reform.
This "authoritative person" sent a mixed signal to the market, since the public believed he reflected the central authorities' interpretation of the current Chinese economy. But concerning the fact that this opinion contradicts the central government's Q1 stimulus measures, the market has been left clueless about the government's intentions.
This "authoritative person" has many reasons to worry. Amid a slowdown in the growth of private investment, local government investments have been central for economic growth. But this also triggered debt to expand rapidly. In Q1 the monetary supply increased by 8.61 trillion yuan (US$1.29 trillion). This may be evidence that the Chinese economy is repeating its old growth model, which featured a heavy dependence on local debts.
But this speculation should be put in the context of the Chinese economy's conditions. The "authoritative person" may be backed by the opinion that China's economy is undergoing a permanent structural transformation, during which the slowdown from a two-digit growth rate to one-digit one is becoming the new normal.
While most economists have accepted the "new normal," some still remain unsure about how much China's growth will slow down in the new normal. Many Chinese economists are predicting that China's growth rate will be kept between 6.5-7 percent in the coming years. The official data puts China's 2015 annual growth rate at 6.9 percent; many doubt the figure's validity, believing that the real rate will certainly be lower than that.
The Chinese economy is in recession, although with Chinese characteristics; there is both deflation and a positive growth rate. Therefore, one shouldn't blindly deny China's financial and monetary expansions in Q1 of this year.
Noticeably, issues identified by this "authoritative person" were more related with the structure of China's local debt and public financing. Local governments in China are still the main market participants, but they don't always act on market rules and aren't always responsible for voters. Instead, they issue debts on local financing platforms to avoid the supervision of local lawmakers.
As for financial policies, there is a mismatch between the Chinese government's efforts to boost infrastructure and its means of fund collection in that a large portion of local debts go to the construction of infrastructure only to have a fairly low return rate. It's true that in many cases, such investments' values are beyond financial returns themselves, because their social benefits should also be taken into consideration. In such circumstances, market-based financing may fail to reach the target, and this is when government debts are issued.
Therefore, the Chinese government ought to distinguish short-term response measures from long-term reforms. For China, recovering the growth speed is its short-term target while restructuring the economy and persisting with reforms are its long-term objective. The two goals aren't necessarily in conflict.
The Chinese economy features a high leverage rate, mostly resulting from the slowdown. What we learned from the recessions in developed countries is that further recessions will take place if a government tries to ease its high debt by slowing down credit growth.
But for China, raising the government leverage is a possible way out of easing the corporate sector's leverage level. In doing so, a proposed method is to transform the government's market debts into its financial debts, while not necessarily raising the overall level of the government debt.
China's economy is experiencing some turbulence at the moment, so the government's policies should strike a balance between long-term restructuring and short-term growth. The challenge is to find the actual method so that the two objectives can be met at the same time.
Yao Yang is the director of the China Center for Economic Research of the National School of Development at Peking University.
The article was translated by Chen Boyuan. Its original version was published in Chinese.
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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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.
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African leaders on Sunday gathered at Rwanda's capital Kigali for their biannual meet with the launch of the continent's first-ever African e-passport.
President of the Republic of Chad and rotating African Union chairperson Idriss Deby (4th R, on stage), President of Rwanda Paul Kagame (2nd L, on stage), Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma (4th L, on stage) and Deputy Chairperson of the AUC Erastus Mwencha (1st L, on stage) attend the opening ceremony of the 27th ordinary session of the AU Heads of States, in Kigali, Rwanda, July 17, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]
The Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma announced the launch and presented the first two e-passports to rotating AU chairperson Idriss Deby, President of the Republic of Chad, and President of Rwanda Paul Kagame at the opening ceremony of the 27th ordinary session of the AU Heads of States.
According to AU, the first group of beneficiaries of the e-passport will include AU heads of state and government; ministers of foreign affairs; and permanent representatives of AU member states based at the AU Headquarters in Addis Ababa.
"We are agreed to create conditions in the member states to issue the passports to their citizens within their national policies as in when they are ready," said Dlamini-Zuma.
More passports will be given to heads of states and governments during the two-day summit, she said.
AU members agreed the idea of a pan-African passport in 2014, as part of the plan to realize the goal of free movement of people within the continent.
The two-day summit is themed; "2016: African Year of Human Rights, with particular focus on the Rights of Women", but African leaders are largely expected to discuss a wide range of topics particularly peace and security, in the wake of a deadly violence that erupted in South Sudan between forces loyal to two rivaling political camps.
A new AU commission will also be elected to replace the one led by Dlamini-Zuma since 2012.
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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 southern city of Nice during France's national day celebrations.
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.
Concerning the questions on the planning and the organization of the Bastille Day firework display in Nice, Valls said, "the investigation will get to the bottom of this. But I do not want unnecessary controversies. The government offices and the city of Nice both planned the Bastille Day celebration, as they did with the Nice Carnival and the UEFA Euro 2016. Three meetings were organized for its preparation."
"64 national police and 42 municipal police officers were deployed for this event, in addition to the normal activities on the rest of the city. If former mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi had the slightest doubt, he could have had the event cancelled. He did not do so," pointed out Valls.
He added: "The Bastille Day terrorist attack is the embodiment of these new operating methods."
"Let me clarify this aspect: right now, it is not possible to tell from the terrorist's background if he was a jihadist. But at the same time, his operating method corresponds point-by-point to the instructions of the Islamic State group: to target a symbolic period (Bastille Day celebration), to cause the largest number of victims, to use any means available (a knife, a car, a truck) to kill innocent people."
Following the Nice attack, three days of national mourning were declared. Meanwhile, the investigation into the attack is going on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
Members of Israeli security forces examine debris of Patriot air defense missiles in Ayelet Hashahar, northern Israel, on July 17, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]
"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.
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Clashes erupted on Sunday between Turkish police and the gendarmerie at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport, Turkish media reported.
According to the Milliyet daily, the confrontation arose when the police attempted to detain the commander of the gendarmerie over the coup attempt by some in the military on Friday night.
The gendarmerie section, in charge of security for the international terminal of the airport, has 50 to 60 members, the report said.
In the aftermath of the clashes, the authorities ordered the detention of all the gendarmerie staff, said Milliyet.
CNNTurk reported that the clashes were over with the gendarmerie commander detained by the police.
The management of the airport tweeted that "There is no problem in our terminal, the flights are continuing."
Some 3,000 Turkish officials and troops have been detained over the failed coup, which left at least 161 people dead.
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Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday called on South Sudan leaders to maintain peace in the world's youngest nation.
Addressing a joint news conference in Nairobi, Kenyatta said regional leaders have a primary responsibility in maintaining peace in the region and called on the international community to support their efforts.
"We have all watched events in South Sudan with sorrow. Our youngest brother has fallen, yet again, into division and violence. It is our responsibility, all of us, but especially those in the region, to restore peace, and to restore it durably," Kenyatta said.
"Let me be clear: those of us in the region have primary responsibility for peace and security here. But that responsibility is also collective, all of us must think carefully, and work hard, in the cause of peace."
He called for a review of the mandate of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan so that it can robustly enforce it in the country.
"The UN Security Council would be well advised to vary the mandate of UNMISS so that it can separate those who have turned to violence, so that it can protect the infrastructure South Sudan has built, and so that it can enforce the peace," he said.
The Kenyan leader also commended South Sudanese leaders for agreeing to cease hostilities, saying it needs to be enforced fully without any delay.
"Collective responsibility also means that they must immediately commit to the complete implementation of the peace agreement, including the permanent ceasefire and redeployment of military forces from Juba," he said.
Kenyatta said all parties to the conflict have to submit themselves to the joint security agreements, especially those establishing the joint integrated police units to patrol Juba.
"Equally, all parties to the conflict had better direct their energies to empowering and directing the Joint Military Ceasefire Commission to operate continuously so as to address issues as and when they arise," he said.
The fighting between the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) loyal to President Salva Kiir and the SPLA in Opposition, which backs First Vice-President Riek Machar, reportedly killed some 272 people, including 33 civilians, and displaced at least 36,000 civilians.
The mass displacements have sparked renewed concerns about the prospects for peace and stability in the country.
Humanitarian partners are closely monitoring the evolving situation in several locations across the country, including Yei, Wau and Leer in order to deliver much needed food aid.
Regional leaders held a meeting in Rwanda on Saturday to seek a lasting solution to the conflict in South Sudan.
Speaking at the joint news conference, Ban thanked Kenya for the pivotal role it is playing in ensuring peace and security in the region, lauding Kenyatta for playing a leading role in managing the renewed crisis in South Sudan.
He said he is encouraged by the unified voice of African leaders on regional security issues crisis.
"I thank President Kenyatta for his leadership and personal engagement. We are working together to ensure that peace returns to Juba and the rest of South Sudan. I appreciate Kenyan efforts to continue to impress on the parties in South Sudan to strictly abide by the cessation of hostilities and return to the peace process," Ban said.
The UN chief also thanked the Kenya government and its citizens for their hospitality in hosting refugees from Somalia and other troubled nations within the region.
"Kenya has a long and remarkable tradition as a welcoming and generous nation. As civilians fled the renewed fighting in South Sudan to neighboring areas, including Kakuma camp in Kenya, I commend the hospitality of the Kenyan people," he said.
The UN secretary general also urged the Burundi government to be more inclusive so as to end the crisis facing the country.
He said the world body will continue to support the political process in Burundi led by the East African Community.
"It is critical that the region sends a united call for Burundian stakeholders to fully commit to an inclusive dialogue to solve the crisis," Ban added.
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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.
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. [Photo/Xinhua]
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.
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Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that the failed military coup has left at least 290 people killed.
The death toll includes at least 190 civilians and 100 coup plotters, the statement said, adding that more than 1,400 were wounded in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.
More than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the failed coup, it said.
The statement said it was the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen that staged this coup attempt.
"Our government has been constantly exposing the real motives of this terrorist group and its leader, Fethullah Gulen, to all allies and partners. The foiled coup is the latest criminal act revealing the danger posed by Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization," it said.
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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.
Turkish officers escorted by Greek police officers leave the courthouse of Alexandroupoli after appearing before a Greek prosecutor, on July 17, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]
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.
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U.S. space firm SpaceX will on Monday launch supplies to the International Space Station, including a crucial docking port for future American commercial crew vehicles, and then try a second rocket landing on solid ground.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is scheduled for liftoff on the company's Falcon 9 rocket at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Among the cargo is the first of two international docking adapters, which will allow U.S. commercial spacecraft to dock to the station when transporting American astronauts in the near future.
Its first users are expected to be the Boeing Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, which are now in development in partnership with the U.S. space agency NASA's Commercial Crew Program and expected to begin test flights in 2017 and 2018.
The adapter, a metallic ring big enough for astronauts to fit through, also represents the first on-orbit element built to the docking measurements that are standardized for all the spacecraft builders across the world, which means other spacecraft will also be able to dock there in the future, NASA said.
"It's really good we have an international standard now that anybody can build against and come dock to the station or to anything that has the same standard," David Clemen, Boeing's director of Development and Modifications for the space station, said in a NASA statement.
SpaceX tried to deliver one international docking adapter last year, but the equipment was destroyed during a launch accident.
Overall, the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft is loaded with about 5,000 pounds (2,268 kilograms) of cargo for its ninth Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA.
Included in the payload is a pocket-size device that will allow DNA sequencing in space for the first time. The samples in this first test will be DNA from a virus, a bacteria and a mouse.
Meanwhile, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt an experimental landing on a landing zone, also at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, minutes after Monday's launch.
"I'm pretty optimistic at this point in time that we land it, but I would always knock on wood," Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability at SpaceX, said during a prelaunch news conference Saturday. "That's part of the nature of this maneuver, it's pretty challenging."
The California-based company achieved a soft landing on a land-based pad at Cape Canaveral last year. Since then, it has also had three successful landings on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Koenigsmann said the reflight of the company's recovered rocket could occur this fall.
SpaceX is one of two U.S. companies that provide space station cargo services for NASA. The other company is Orbital ATK, whose next space station cargo launch is targeted for August.
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South Korea on Monday warned of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s readiness for its fifth nuclear test amid worries about increased activity in its main nuclear test site.
Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told a press briefing that the DPRK appeared to have been in a state of conducting another nuclear test at any time, saying the government is maintaining a full readiness and closely monitoring situations based on a close alliance between South Korea and the United States.
His comments came after Japan's Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday that increased activity has been detected in the DPRK's main Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the country carried out four underground nuclear tests since 2006.
The latest came in January this year when the DPRK claimed it detonated its first hydrogen bomb, causing the toughest-ever UN Security Council resolutions in response to the nuclear detonation as well as the launch in February of a long-range rocket, which was condemned as a disguised test of ballistic missile technology.
Quoting government sources in Seoul and Tokyo, the Japanese media outlet said the installation of an observatory facility was seen in the test site, raising a possibility for the fifth nuclear test as early as this month.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted multiple government sources as saying on Sunday that the move of a lot of trucks and personnel, which hadn't been seen before, started to be spotted in the Punggye-ri test site since July 8 when Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
The sources were quoted as saying that the DPRK's activities seen over the past week in the Punggye-ri test site have been the most brisk in recent months.
The DPRK's military threatened to take "physical measures" against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
After Seoul announced on July 13 that one THAAD battery would be deployed to the Seongju county, some 300 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year, the DPRK's Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement that the THAAD deployment will turn the peninsula into a battlefield between world powers and leave the fate of people in the hands of foreign forces.
China and Russia strongly expressed objection to and dissatisfaction with THAAD in South Korea as its X-band radar can spot Chinese and Russian territories. Seoul has claimed that it would adopt the terminal mode radar with a detectable range of 600-800 km, but it can be converted at any time into a forward-based mode which spots missiles as far as 2,000 km.
Furthermore, the THAAD deployment indicates South Korea becoming a part of the U.S. missile defense program, the core of the U.S. Pivot-to-Asia strategy.
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The U.S. on Sunday resumed flight operations from a Turkish airbase to launch airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) after Turkey reopened its airspace closed in the wake of a failed coup attempt.
Speaking to reporters aboard his plane after a visit to Afghanistan, Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the reopening of the Incirlik Air Base in southwestern Turkey.
"We resumed flight operations today, and airspace is opened back up -- business as usual," Dunford told Pentagon reporters, adding there are no plans to change the U.S. force posture in Turkey.
"Our relationship with Turkey as a NATO ally is broad -- politically, economically and from a security perspective," he said.
In terms of urgency, the United States is most concerned about the counter-IS fight and its partnership with Turkey in the fight, Dunford said.
The border area between Turkey and Syria is critical, as foreign fighters and money flow across the border, the general noted.
"The Turkish-Syrian border is important to isolate the battlefield in Syria," he said, "and so we're watching that pretty closely, too."
Dunford expressed relief that Turkey "bounced back pretty quickly" in the first 24 hours in terms of facilitating operations in Syria.
Turkey closed the airspace of the Incirlik Air Base and cut commercial power supply to it following Friday's military coup attempt, in which at least 290 people, including 190 civilians, were killed.
The coup attempt appears to have further strained Ankara's ties with Washington, as Turkey accused a U.S.-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, of plotting the coup, while demanding Gulen's extradition by the U.S. government.
Speaking in Luxembourg Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would consider Turkey's request for Gulen's extradition on condition that Turkey proves the cleric's wrongdoing.
Turkey and the United States are NATO allies in fighting terrorism, but their relations had already become tricky before the coup attempt after Turkey tried to repair its relationship with Russia, by offering an apology to Moscow for shooting down a Russian warplane last year.
China Aid
Reported in Chinese by Qiao Nong. Translated by Carolyn Song. Written in English by Brynne Lawrence.
(Huaqiu, GuizhouJuly 14, 2016) On June 23, a local government office in Chinas central Guizhou province delivered an ultimatum to parents who attend a house church: if children do not stop attending church, they will be barred from attending college or entering the military. Additionally, violators of the new regulation will be sued.
This notice was sent to all of the schools in Huaqiu, Mou, the person in charge of Huaqiu Church, said. They (public security) intend to cleanse us and ask us to join the Three-Self Church.
After issuing the notice, government personnel coerced members of Huaqiu Church to sign a document saying that they would no longer take minors to church. Any children who attend the church will be ineligible for the college entrance exam or admittance into a military academy, and parents who bring their children to church will be sued.
Because of this ruling, an elderly church member was forced to endorse a document forbidding him from attending church services so that his grandsons acceptance into a military academy would not be withdrawn.
The notice forbidding children from
attending church. (Photo: China Aid)
According to Chinese legislation, children under the age of 18 may not receive any religious education. The government sanctioned Protestant church, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, specifically forbids its members from brainwashing teenagers with religious beliefs and bringing children to religious activities.
Mou said, Yesterday morning, I questioned a government official in our township, saying, We do not accept the way you handled our churchs public meetings What regulations does the central government have prohibiting [church] meetings? Let us see them. He said, The higher level leadership ordered us to do this; we are just doing [as they say]. Huaqiu is in a dark place.
When other Christians asked whether or not the central government had ordered this legislation, local officials refused to answer. In addition, officials prevented the church from conducting its Sunday services on June 28 and July 5.
A translation of the notice is forthcoming.
China Aid exposes abuses, such as those experienced by Huaqiu Church, in order to promote religious freedom and rule of law in China.
China Aid Media Team
Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985
Email: [email protected]
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Many economists have lowered growth forecasts for Britain and broader EU after the referendum vote, and some predicted a recession in Britain by early 2017, as consumers and businesses might postpone spending and investment due to uncertainty, according to the Office of Financial Research in the US Department of Treasury. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Britain's last month vote to leave the European Union (EU) could have spillover effects for years, according to a recent report released by the Office of Financial Research in the US Department of Treasury.
"Although the immediate market volatility has subsided, the policy uncertainty and the ultimate financial and political spillovers may last for months or years, leaving markets vulnerable to further confidence shocks," the Office of Financial Research said earlier this week in a report on the markets monitor of the second quarter.
The report said the British government is expected to respect the result of the country's referendum vote on June 23 and formally move to exit the EU, but "uncertainty remains about if, how, and when Brexit will be implemented."
The referendum vote has already led to political turmoil in Britain and affected the political landscape in other EU member countries.
Former Conservative Party leader David Cameron announced his resignation as British prime minister on June 24, just hours after the Britons voted by a 52-48 majority to leave the EU.
After weeks of the Conservative leadership contest, former British Home Secretary Theresa May became the Conservative Party leader on Monday and took over as new prime minister on Wednesday.
May said on Friday that she would not trigger Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, a procedure through which a country withdraw from the EU, until her government has "a UK approach and objectives for negotiations."
"Negotiations will not begin immediately. Once they do, the UK and EU have two years to negotiate an exit under the Lisbon Treaty, which sets the procedures," the report said, noting that Brexit negotiations may have "far-reaching legal and economic implications" for the large cross-border financial industry and foreign investment in Britain.
Many economists have lowered growth forecasts for Britain and broader EU after the referendum vote, and some predicted a recession in Britain by early 2017, as consumers and businesses might postpone spending and investment due to uncertainty, the report said.
The International Monetary Fund has warned that significant uncertainty surrounding Brexit was likely to dampen economic growth in Britain, Europe and the rest of the world, and the British economy could shrink 0.8 percent in 2017 if it leaves the EU.
Brexit's full effects on British and European economies and financial systems will depend on those policy decisions, unfolding over the coming months and years, the report said.
In a severe scenario, shocks from Britain and Europe could affect US growth and financial stability through trade linkages, large direct financial exposures, or confidence and indirect effects, according to the report.
The Shanghai Futures Exchange has vowed it won't tolerate any abuse of trading rules after the unprecedented boom-bust episode in Chinese commodities markets earlier this year, adding that its products aren't for mom and pop investors.
"Futures isn't a mass market but a professional one," the nation's biggest raw materials exchange said in comments to Bloomberg News. There'll be "zero tolerance" of any activity that violates regulations, according to the statement, which said more than 900 cases of what it called abnormal activity were settled in the first five months.
Raw-material futures in China in everything from steel to feed surged then swooned in the period from March through to May as retail investors were caught up in a frenzy that drew parallels with the nation's $5 trillion stock-market rout last year. The exchange said that well-functioning markets are a key support for policy makers' drive to achieve supply-side reforms that aid price-discovery and hedging, and that it also plans to press on with opening up to overseas investors.
The exchange will "serve industrial development, especially at a key stage of supply-side reform," it said, referring to the government's drive to rein in excess capacity and shift the economy toward consumption as growth slows. "The Chinese commodity market so far has a low level of foreign participation, so we will continue to push for opening up in an active and steady manner."
Trading in steel reinforcement bar was emblematic of the rise and fall, as retail investors first jumped into commodity markets, lifting prices, then fled as the country's top regulator and exchanges tackled the bubble by raising margins and tightening rules. Turnover in the rebar market on April 21 exceeded the value of all Chinese stocks traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen equity markets combined. It also topped China's actual rebar production.
Steel and iron in China surged earlier this year as there was a "lot of liquidity looking for a place to speculate" after the central bank pumped in liquidity, independent economist Andy Xie told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. In the long term, the trend for iron ore is still down, Xie said.
"In the public mind, there's still insufficient understanding of the futures market," the exchange said in the statement, which was received late last month. "The Chinese futures market is still in its infant stage after 20 years of existence. Therefore there are many misunderstandings."
At the height of the craze in April, the London Metal Exchange described volumes in China as phenomenal, and said it's possible some traders didn't know what they were buying or selling. Chief Executive Officer Garry Jones said: "Why should rebar be one of the world's most actively-traded futures?"
"Unlike many competitors overseas, we are a non-profit organization catering to industries," the Shanghai exchange said, without identifying rivals by name. "The SHFE will continue to uphold our rule of serving industrial development, especially at a key stage of the supply-side reform in the country."
The exchange said its unique advantage is its role in developing markets in the world's largest trading nation, citing the "sheer mass" of commodities that change hands. Still, there is a need to raise liquidity in its less-traded contracts, it said, without listing any particular products.
A Greek man introduces a made-in-Greece red wine to Chinese visitors at a recent imported wine exhibition in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. [Photo/China Daily]
Local winemakers on the Greek island of Lesvos are promoting their products as far away as China, seeking a breath of fresh air from the burden of the economic crisis that has hit their island.
Thousands of bottles of wine produced by local family wineries on Lesvos, have already been exported to Shanghai in recent years.
Xinhua reporters visited a winery located at Mytilene, the capital of Lesvos, to witness the production process and talk with owner Prodromos Paterellis who recently welcomed Shanghai's Zhang, who imports Greek wines to China.
Speaking shortly after presenting the winery at a conference on innovation and business development, Paterellis explained why one should choose Lesvos' wines.
The third largest Greek island and the seventh largest in the Mediterranean Sea, it is considered one of the richest ecosystems in the Mediterranean.
Here, the locally produced wine tastes like "liquid gold," the locals claim.
The bottling line at Paterellis family's winery includes a range of machines. In the stainless wine fermentation tanks the temperature should be maintained between 15 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius in order to achieve optimum fermentation.
"This is the most critical point of wine making, when the sugars are converted into alcohol, which is controlled by the stabilizer," Paterellis explained.
Regarding the grape varieties, the local red variety of Lesvos grape is cultivated in the crater of the volcano that created the petrified forest of the island about 20 million years ago.
In the northwestern part of the island, one can find grape varieties such as Fokiano Kalloniatis and Muscat. In the mountainous regions of Megalochori, Plomari, and other villages, the most popular grape varieties cultivated are Mandilaria, Athiri, Assyrtiko and Muscat white.
"Seeking excellent quality, we chose the best areas of Lesbian land to cultivate varieties of unique character to highlight the special characteristics of Lesvos' vineyards," Paterellis said.
The winemaker works at the family winery with his father, sister, and uncle.
Paterellis' father is a pharmacist by profession, but it had been his dream since he was a student to create a winery.
"In 2003, my father started making the building and preparing the field and in 2009 we had our first vine harvest," Paterellis said.
Besides the family vineyards in the villages of Karionas and Megalochori, their winery co-operates with 70 local grape growers.
The winery produces 80 to 100 tons of wine annually and exports 20,000 bottles to California in the United States and 30,000 bottles to Shanghai in China.
"Since 2014, we have participated in wine exhibitions in Shanghai and have received very good reviews," Paterellis said.
Zhang said that during his visit to Lesvos he chose to import the local wine because it correlated with the history and the tradition of the island.
He added that although Greek wines had only reached the Chinese market in recent years, they were becoming more and more popular.
Two Shanghai Jahwa United Co Ltd employees step into the company's office in Shanghai. Earlier this month, the Chinese cosmetics company inked a deal with online retailer JD.com in Beijing to sell its personal care products online. [Photo/China Daily]
China's cosmetics makers are shifting focus to digital marketplaces from stores
Chinese cosmetics makers are increasingly taking their battle with global competitors online, where digital marketplaces have been outpacing brick-and-mortar stores in selling cosmetics and personal products.
Earlier this July, Shanghai-based Jahwa inked a deal with online retailer JD.com in Beijing to sell and market its cosmetics and personal care products on JD's marketplace.
The deal will also see Jahwa working with the online retailer to figure out consumer preferences, tailor its own digital marketing program accordingly and participate in JD's programs to reach out to China's increasingly wired consumers.
It entered into a similar deal with JD's arch rival Alibaba last year, setting up its own shop on Alibaba's online marketplace Tmall and running digital campaigns from there.
Both international and domestic cosmetic brands have long regarded department stores and shopping malls as the primary sales channels in China. But as the country's e-commerce revolution sweeps brick-and-mortar stores, cosmetics and personal care products are chief among a list of consumer goods witnessing sales migrating online.
According to consulting firm Bain & Company, products ranging from biscuits and chocolate to shampoos and personal cleaning agents have experienced annual growth of no less than 30 percent in online sales over the past four years.
Jahwa, which traces its roots to a daily-use chemical products maker in the late 1890s, is a household brand in China for its mosquito repellent Liushen and hand cream Maxam.
The company has been seeking to break global brands' dominance of premium cosmetics in China with its own Herborist line, inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and herbal ingredients.
In recent years, Jahwa has sought to put a global spin on Herborist by selling it in Europe through cosmetic retailers Sephora and Douglas.
In 2015, Herborist was the only Chinese name to make the top 10 cosmetic brands by market share at department stores in China, at number eight, according to China Market Monitor.
But like its peers, Jahwa's reliance on traditional channels has weighed on its performance. Revenue growth in 2015 shed 5 percentage points from five years earlier to 9.58 percent. Excluding non-recurring items, profit growth slid for the first time in a decade.
Jahwa said the slowdown in its own business has come largely as a result of overall weakness in the cosmetics sector. Cosmetics retail sales growth moderated from 13.3 percent in 2013 to 8.8 percent in 2015, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
For skin care products in general, growth at department stores has almost stagnated, Jahwa said in a response to an inquiry over its 2015 financial results by the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
As a result, domestic cosmetics brands including Jahwa have been the most active in embracing e-commerce, where they see a chance in overtaking global titans that have been slow to adapt to China's increasingly digitalized retail scene.
Very few international cosmetics brands can make the monthly list of top 10 best-selling cosmetics on Alibaba's e-commerce site. Domestic brands such as Pechoin, Hanhoo, Chando and KanS lead cosmetics sales online.
As a result, foreign brands have been losing share in skincare and makeup to Chinese competitors, by roughly 2 to 5 percent during each of the past two years, according to Bain.
Jahwa is hoping that 20 percent of its sales of cosmetics and personal care products sales will be made online by 2018. Last year, its e-commerce revenue stood at 557 million yuan ($83.3 million), or 9.5 percent of the company's total.
Xinhua
Randeep Grewal, CEO of Green Dragon Gas. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Green Dragon targets classical elements to ignite 20-year quest for clean-burning fossil fuel in China
Earth, water, air and firefew personal histories are as clearly defined by the classical elements as that of Randeep Grewal.
A trained aeronautical engineer, a second-generation miner and the son of India's first female pilot, Grewal has spent the past decades of his life extracting coal bed methane from beneath the subsurface of Central China.
His company, Green Dragon Gas, is the largest independent producer of methane in China and a key protagonist in the country's quest to diversify its energy mix, from about 5 percent to 25 percent gas, which is more in line with developed nations.
Grewal's proprietary drilling technology does away with the chemicals infamously associated with fracking, so the water produced when coal is depressurized is of sufficient quality for irrigation. Developing this technology was a long-term personal priority for Grewal, who spent his childhood in rural, drought-prone southern Africa.
"We said the only way to do this right is to keep it clean," he said. "I grew up in Africa with little water. We had to collect water from dirty streams, heat it and filter it. I'm water-sensitive because I grew up in that environment."
Cleaner air for China is another obvious motivation for Grewal. Having relied heavily on coal and oil during its industrial boom, China's energy mix has an extremely low proportion of gas, which is by far the cleanest-burning fossil fuel.
With strong support from the government, the industry goal is to increase the proportion of gas in the energy mix by 10 percent over the next four years. Residential customers and industrial players are expected to more than double their demand for gas by 2020, and domestic companies like GDG are essential to lessening reliance on imported gas as demand increases.
The fact that GDG exists and can actually perform this role is impressiveout of the five companies that entered China in the 1990s in search of coal bed methane, Grewal's is the only one that continues to operate in the country.
"It's not been an easy road," Grewal said. "Last year was the first year of profit for our group in 20 years. It's complete madness. A reporter said to me recently, 'You gave your youth to China,' and I did. I got there and I was a young chap with lots of black hair, and now I'm an older chap with lots of white hair. But it has been a wonderful journey."
Grewal attributed much of his perseverance to the "engineer nerd" in him. Geologically, China's coal beds are among the world's most challenging for miners, but such problems excite Grewal.
"The technical side has just been fun. The technical challenge never really frustrated me."
While some foreign companies have had trouble finding their bearings after entering a new market such as China, he said his years living in the developing world meant the adjustment was relatively straightforward.
"People have always quizzed me on how I got comfortable in China. My answer to them is the word 'simplicity'. In China, I found the same simplicity I grew up with in the middle of nowhere. Dad was scoping for minerals (in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia), and the government was very keen for him to do so. So, it was a simplistic plan that he was executing."
In addition to a similarly clear directiveto help unlock the many billion cubic meters of gas trapped in coal beds beneath Chinese soilstability has been key to the success of GDG.
"I can say with comfort that from the first day in the mid-1990s, when we first started having conversations about coal bed methane in China, to today, it's been a consistent policy. It was clear back then, and it's clear today."
Grewal entered into production sharing contracts with the government that granted several concessions to his company. In the early '90s, as there was no infrastructure to deliver natural gas to domestic consumers, China gave GDG the right to export its product. For every cubic meter of gas the company sells, the government provides a cash subsidy, and whatever China pays for imported oil and gas, that weighted average is translated across to GDG from a pricing standpoint.
"It eliminates the crystal ball effect. It eliminates the unknown. It eliminates the chance that you might wake up one morning to a policy that erodes your economics," Grewal said of his long-term arrangement with the government. "The central government said, 'We have a domestic energy resource, we've got lots of it, we can't get it out of the ground, we see that the Americans are succeeding at it and we'd like to get that technology along with capital; we'll give you economic stabilization, we'll give you a subsidy, just like what the Americans are doing, we'll do the same'. "
And in January this year, the government doubled that subsidy. There's no country in the world ... that has that degree of stability. Hence the success.
By 2003, every company except GDG, including Texaco, Arco, Phillips and Enron, had pulled out.
"The corporations rightfully made good economic decisions at that time. They decided that the complexity of the geological conditions did not support commercialization of the resource. We, on the other hand, were investing our personal capital, so we were already, in many regards, fully invested.
"It was a difficult call. Frankly, at that point, it could have gone either wayeither you take a complete write-off and exit, as the corporations did, or you dig in and commit yourself to deliver what you promised to deliver. And we did."
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co made a non-binding offer to buy 96 percent of India's Gland Pharma Ltd in May. The country's pharmaceutical industry is likely to continue pushing overseas. [Photo/China Daily]
China's health-care companies are on an acquisition tear, attempting to buy their way into international markets like never before.
Chinese firms have announced more than $3.9 billion in overseas acquisitions in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and health-care sectors this year, a pace on track to exceed last year's record total and a tenfold increase from the amount spent in all of 2012, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
That surge is driven by Chinese tycoons and businesses seeking to diversify in the face of slowing growth at home and a government push to upgrade the "Made in China" brand. In the domestic market, many of these companies are grappling with a fragmented drug industry with close to 5,000 manufacturers and aggressive competition that is pushing down generic drug prices. Success overseas would allow them to expand their portfolios, find new areas of growth and provide a ready-made entry into developed markets that have high regulatory standards.
Among recent deals, China's Creat Group Corp, founded by businessman Zheng Yuewen, agreed in May to acquire Bio Products Laboratory Ltd, a maker of human blood plasma products in the United Kingdom, for $1.2 billion in the largest international pharma acquisition by a Chinese company, according to the Bloomberg-compiled data. Also in May, Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co, backed by billionaire Guo Guangchang, made a non-binding offer to buy 96 percent of India's Gland Pharma Ltd, which is focused on injectable drugs.
The Chinese industry is likely to continue pushing overseas. "There are a few Chinese companies that have been investing in pharmaceutical products that are getting close to being approved in the United States and Europe," said George Lin, head of Asia consumer, retail and healthcare investment banking at Bank of America Corp. "If those are approved, then the Chinese are likely to be much more interested in pursuing overseas targets in similar areas that have a strategic alignment."
Chen Qiyu, chairman of Fosun Pharma, one of the most active buyers in China's health-care sector, said in an interview last year that he hoped to increase overseas revenue to as much as 40 percent of the total over the next five years via acquisitions.
Last year, Fosun Pharma was part of a consortium that acquired Ambrx Inc, a protein therapeutics R&D company in the United States for an undisclosed amount. In its May statement it said its Gland offer was still part of a bidding process and a deal wasn't guaranteed. But if successful, it could improve the company's "degree of internationalization."
Indian drugmakers with strong generic drug expertise and commercial presence in developed markets offer a good platform for globalization for Chinese firms, said Franck Le Deu, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co.
While Chinese companies are emerging more often on the list of bidders for health-care businesses, they also face fierce competition for prime assets. In March, people familiar with the matter said Luye Group Ltd, which controls a Chinese drugmaker and health-care provider, was among bidders for French pharmaceutical company Ethypharm SA. Ultimately, another bidder, European private equity firm PAI Partners ended up agreeing to buy the French drugmaker.
In a March interview, Luye Group Chairman Liu Dian Bo said the group is also looking for hospital deals in overseas markets including Australia, Singapore, Southeast Asia, the US and Europe, and is putting a special focus on those with treatment specialties that can be useful for China.
In July last year, people familiar with the matter said the China Grand group, controlled by businessman Hu Kaijun, was among bidders for Belgium's UCB SA's US generics business. UCB eventually sold the business to US-based Lannett Co.
Lin at Bank of America said Chinese companies can fit in very well when there's no big logical strategic player and buyers are down to private-equity firms in an auction.
"The really attractive products, the biotech products, those are going to be highly sought after by the mega caps," said Lin. "So the Chinese are not going to be competitive."
China's pharma industry is still lagging far behind other sectors and multinational peers on the size of international acquisitions. China National Chemical Corp, also known as ChemChina, in February agreed to buy Swiss pesticide and seeds maker Syngenta AG for about $43 billion. And the global health-care industry has seen mammoth deals like Allergan Plc's $40.5 billion agreement to sell its generic drug business to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd last year.
In health-care, the Chinese companies tend to target companies with $100 million to $300 million in sales and valued at about $300 million to more than $1 billion, said John Wong, chairman of Greater China at Boston Consulting Group.
Chinese companies also tend to look at businesses that complement their existing areas of expertise. Creat's chairman also jointly controls Shanghai RAAS Blood Products Co, a blood plasma company and the largest listed health company in China. Among other deals, China's Humanwell Healthcare Group, which makes anesthetics and contraceptive drugs, spent $550 million buying Laurelton, New York-based generic drug maker Epic Pharma LLC this year.
In rushing to get a foothold overseas, Chinese companies may run the risk of buying a company "that has a weak portfolio and the local management team disappears after the sale," said BCG's Wong. "Then the Chinese company is left with a declining asset."
Bloomberg
David Wang (right), Luo Mingning (center), and Rebuzzi (left), members of the Beijing Bamboo Bicycle studio, pose for a photo in Langjia Hutong in Beijing, July 14, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]
David Wang came to China to learn about youth subculture after graduating from anthropology major in the United States in 2010.
He started to renovate bicycles with the consent of the owners after he found a lot of them scrapped in the shed. In 2013, he spent half a year making a bicycle with bamboo as the main frame, equipped with metal components. He then quit his job in 2014 and rented two single-story rooms in Langjia Hutong in Beijing, where he established the Beijing Bamboo Bicycle (BBB) studio.
Wang held workshops at weekends, teaching people to learn how to make bamboo bicycles. Now he has held 64 sessions of workshops, some of which were organized in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and also cities in Laos, Japan and the United States. The workshops have attracted more than 400 people who successfully made over 300 bicycles.
People visit the stand of Qihoo 360 during the 2015 Appliance and Electronics World Expo in Shanghai, Mar 13, 2015.[Photo/IC]
A $1.24 billion agreed takeover of Norwegian online browser and advertising company Opera Software by a Chinese consortium of internet firms has failed, Opera said on Monday, after warning last week the deal had yet to win regulatory approval.
As an alternative, the consortium, which includes search and security business Qihoo 360 Technology Co and Beijing Kunlun Tech Co, a distributor of online and mobile games, will take over certain parts of Opera's consumer business for $600 million, Opera said in a statement.
The Norwegian firm did not specify the reasons on Monday for the scuttling of the deal other than to say that conditions to close the public offer were not met.
The deal had needed the approval of Chinese and US authorities, but last week Opera warned that regulatory approval had yet to be received, without specifying whether approval from China, the United States, or both, was lacking.
BEIJING - China will overhaul its investment and financing system to stimulate market vitality amid the economic downturn, according to a document released Monday by the central authorities.
The government will cut red tape, improve supervision and encourage enterprises to invest, said a guideline jointly released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council.
China will enhance private investment management, reinforce public investment, diversify corporate financing channels and accelerate the transformation of government functions, the guideline said.
It also urged implementation of the measures.
The document marked the latest effort by the central authorities to solve entrenched funding difficulties for small companies and encourage better use of private capital.
Private investment increased only 2.8 percent in the first half of 2016, down from 3.9 percent growth in the first five months and 5.7 percent in the first quarter, official data showed.
Startups will see stronger financial support, while companies will be encouraged to raise funds through bond issuance, according to the document. Domestic firms and financial institutions will be granted easier access to foreign capital.
Controls on insurance capital will be relaxed to facilitate projects in infrastructure, livelihood and urbanization.
Additionally, China will launch pilots to allow financial institutions to hold corporate equities.
The government has started loosening its grip on investment and financing, with less investment subject to approval and more decision-making power in the hands of enterprises.
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The interior of a Tesla Model S driven in Autopilot mode in San Francisco , California, United States, in April. [Photo/Agencies]
Consumer Reports said Thursday that Tesla Motors is misleading car owners by calling its semi-autonomous driving system "Autopilot," potentially giving them too much trust in their car's ability to drive itself.
The influential magazine said Tesla should drop the Autopilot name and disconnect the automatic steering system until it's updated to make sure a driver's hands stay on the wheel at all times. The system currently warns drivers after a few minutes of their hands being off the wheel.
In an email, a Tesla spokeswoman said the company has no plans to change the name, and that data it collects show drivers who use Autopilot are safer than those who don't.
With its statement, Consumer Reports joined a debate over autonomous driving technology that escalated after authorities revealed that Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, died in a May crash in Florida with the Autopilot on in his 2015 Model S. The system didn't detect a tractor-trailer that had turned in front of the car in bright sunshine, and Brown also failed to react.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the wreck and the functioning of the Autopilot system. After the crash, critics accused Tesla of giving drivers access to a system that wasn't ready, while supporters contended the company was improving automotive safety.
Tesla's Autopilot system uses cameras, radar and computers to detect objects and automatically brake if the car is about to hit something. It also can steer the car to keep it centered in its lane. The company says that before Autopilot can be used, drivers must acknowledge that it's an "assist feature" that requires both hands on the wheel at all times. Drivers also must be prepared to take over at any time, Tesla has said.
Yet Laura MacCleery, Consumer Reports' vice-president of consumer policy, said naming the system Autopilot gives drivers a false sense of security. Autopilot, she wrote, can't actually drive the car, but it lets consumers keep their hands off the steering wheel for minutes at a time.
"We're deeply concerned that consumers are being sold a pile of promises about unproven technology," she said in a statement.
Last week Tesla disclosed that a Model X SUV crashed recently in Montana while the driver was using the autosteer feature on a two-lane road, which is not recommended by the company. Tesla, which gets information from its cars over the internet, said the car warned the driver at least once to place his hands on the steering wheel before it crashed.
MacCleery called on the Palo Alto, California, company to disable automatic steering until it updates the computer program to ensure a driver's hands are on the wheel.
Consumer Reports also said Tesla should issue clearer guidance on how Autopilot is used and what its limitations are. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said in a blog posting he'll provide more thorough guidance and the spokeswoman said that was coming.
Tesla released Autopilot last fall and says the system is still in a "public beta," or testing phase. Critics have complained that Tesla is using drivers as "guinea pigs"a sentiment echoed by Consumer Reports.
Tesla said Autopilot underwent millions of miles of internal testing and is updated constantly. "We will continue to develop, validate, and release those enhancements as the technology grows," the company's spokeswoman said.
Associated Press
Carsten Breitfeld, Future Mobility's chief executive officer. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Future Mobility CEO says China will dominate the international electric car industry
Future Mobility Corp Ltd, the Chinese electric and smart car startup backed by Tencent Holdings and Foxconn Technology Group, plans to launch its first model before 2020 in an attempt to compete with German premium brands Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi.
The company's chief executive officer, Carsten Breitfeld, said in an interview last week that it would concentrate on purely electric-powered cars and would come up with a technological platform for "a whole family of cars" from the beginning, not just one model, so it will be able to increase quickly to a large production volume.
"Our core competitors will be traditional car companies, such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, instead of emerging electric vehicle companies like Tesla," Breitfeld said. "We are really targeting their market share. We will be a premium, international and affordable brand. We are targeting middle-class customers."
The three German premium brands, which all have local production plants, control 80 percent of China's premium car market.
Daniel Kirchert, Future Mobility's chief operating officer, said the company will reveal the brand of its vehicles in the first half of next year. He said the company's first model would be priced at around 300,000 yuan ($44,865).
Huge global market by 2025
Future Mobility was launched in February this year. It plans to produce cars in China and sell them worldwide. It will have its research and development base in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, and also have R&D units in Munich and Silicon Valley, focusing on powertrain and autonomous driving respectively.
Breitfeld said the company is evaluating two different paths for production. One is to build up its own factory, and the other is "to do contract manufacturing" because "there's a lot of production capacity stored in China".
"We are discussing detailed steps in both directions," he said. "We are going to make a final decision by the end of this year. But in the long run, it's pretty clear that we are going to come up with our own plant as we are going for big volume. Contract manufacturing could be an intermediate step to minimize our (investment) risk."
The company aims to achieve a volume between 250,000 and 400,000 units in "a couple of years", and the range is what it has to go for to be profitable, he said.
Breitfeld predicted that there would be a purely electric car market of 1.5 million units annually in China by 2020.
Daniel Kirchert, Future Mobility's chief operating officer. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Boosted by government subsidies, sales of purely electric vehicles in China rocketed by 450 percent to 247,482 units last year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
"If you look to 2025, electric cars will be very strong products taking over the market," Breitfeld said.
Thanks to the rosy market potential, lots of startups have emerged in China to produce electric and smart cars in collaboration with traditional car producers.
Heavyweight support
Besides Tencent and Foxconn, Future Mobility also has backing from China Harmony New Energy Auto Holding Ltd, a major car dealership group. Tencent is one of the biggest internet companies in Asia and Foxconn is a main assembler of Apple Inc products.
Breitfeld said Future Mobility is in discussions with the three investors to finalize its first round of strategic funding in this quarter.
"After the A round, we will have the B round and possibly a C round," he said. "We are definitely prepared to open up to the capital market and financial market where there is high interest in our company."
Before joining Future Mobility earlier this year, Breitfeld was the project manager of BMW's i8 electric sport cars. He worked at BMW for two decades.
"I really think the future of the automotive industry will be shaped in China as the country has a combination of innovation, entrepreneurship, and the market and political framework to drive the industry," he said. "This is why I decided to take the offer to run a company like this in China."
Compared with traditional carmakers, he said, Future Mobility's big advantage is that it has a small team and its decision-making is very quick "from idea to market launch of a car".
According to COO Kirchert, the company plans to grow its staff to 600 by the end of next year from a core team of around 50 at present.
"In the internet era, we are seeking close links with customers through the internet and giving them real product experience," Kirchert said.
"We should take customer ideas into consideration from product development to sales and marketing."
Kirchert, who speaks fluent Mandarin, previously ran the China operations of Nissan Motor's premium marque, Infiniti. Prior to Infiniti, he was vice-president for sales and marketing of BMW's joint venture in China.
Hyundai Motor's imported Rohens Coupe is displayed at an auto show in Haikou, Hainan province. [Photo/China Daily]
After suffering years of losses, Hyundai Motor's imported car dealers across the country have joined hands to seek compensation from the automaker, claiming it had failed to offer sufficient products.
Almost all of the current 41 dealers established a working group to "safeguard their rights" earlier this month, as they were unable to reach an agreement with Hyundai Motor Group (China) Ltd.
The China Auto Dealers Chamber of Commerce has said it will support the dealers.
"We saw no bona fide in the talks with the heads of Hyundai imported car business unit and Hyundai China," said Wang Rongzhen, chairman of Nantong Hyundai Sales and Service Co in Jiangsu province, who is head of the working group.
"All of the 41 dealers had insufficient stock to sell," Wang said. "There were nine models in 2013, and six in 2014. The menu was shortened to three last year. I can only offer one model, the Hyundai Veloster, in my shop now."
According to Wang, the South Korean auto brand refused to supply the widely accepted Hyundai products towards the end of last year, and would only supply dealers with the high-end Genesis series.
Hyundai China raised the wholesale price for the Genesis series by 30,000 yuan ($4,491) at the end of 2015, similar to that of the BMW 5 Series, according to a local media report earlier this month. The report cited a dealer in Hubei province as saying that the Genesis' wholesale price left no room for the dealers to make profits, as customers expected a hefty discount.
The Korea Herald reported in June that the marketing divisions of Hyundai China and Beijing Hyundai Motor Co have been integrated and Hyundai China is going to market only the Genesis models as a high-end brand, with the Beijing Hyundai sales division providing both imported and domestically made Hyundai branded cars.
The most popular model last year among Hyundai China's imported products was the Santa Fe, which contributed 4,957 units, 57.6 percent, to the total 8,610-unit annual sales volume, according to statistics from LMC Automotive Consulting (Shanghai) Co.
The Hyundai Santa Fe went into local production by Beijing Hyundai Motor Co at the end of last year, so the model went to Beijing Hyundai's dealership network, and was delisted from Hyundai China's imported car network.
Paying price of merger
The 4S dealership network for Hyundai China imported cars shrunk from 79 in 2014 to 60 in 2015, and now there are only 41 left.
Some Hyundai imported car dealers tried to join the Beijing Hyundai Motor Co's network but were rejected, according to Wang.
John Zeng, managing director of LMC Automotive Consulting, suggested there might not be sufficient communication between Hyundai China and Beijing Hyundai.
"Beijing Hyundai will consider the benefits of its current dealers, and it is reasonable for it to reject some Hyundai China dealers," Zeng said.
"When there is such a merger of existing dealership networks, there will be a price to be paid. Some dealers might have no choice but to switch to other brands," Zeng added.
"They are forcing us to drop the claim and quit quietly and voluntarily. One dealer who quit received just the 300,000 yuan that was paid to Hyundai China to join the network,+" said Waang.
Besides paying the 300,000 yuan deposit, a dealership has to build the showroom in accordance with the brand's requirements.
"The refurbishing and decoration of my shop cost more than 20 million yuan," Wang said.
If a dealership quits the network and switches to another brand, the showroom needs another refurbishment to meet the new brand's requirements.
"Hyundai China should have compensated us, but they didn't," Wang said.
A robot services a hotel in Xi'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi province, May 10, 2016. [Photo/IC]
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 ($1.5 to $3 million) 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 financing round for US 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.
FUZHOU -- Three officials were sacked for their inadequate response in coping with Typhoon Nepartak which has caused huge casualties and economic losses in East China's Fujian province.
As of Sunday afternoon, the typhoon has left 83 people dead and 19 missing in Fuzhou, the provincial capital, according to the city government.
Over 200,000 people from the city's five counties and districts were affected, with nearly 10,000 houses collapsed over the past week. The direct economic losses amounted to over 7.1 billion yuan ($1.1 billion).
Minqing County, one of the worst-hit regions, saw cutoff of electricity power and telecommunication services in its 11 towns and townships. One third of the county's population were affected. A total of 73 deaths and 17 missing were reported there.
As a result, Huang Shiyang, deputy Party chief and acting government head of Minqing county, Lin Yuanhui, Party chief of Bandong Town, and the town's deputy Party chief Zhan Qiaoying were suspended from their duties.
The provincial government has earmarked 170 million yuan in relief fund to the disaster-hit areas.
Typhoon Nepartak, the first to hit this year, made landfall in the province on July 9.
Police officers prepare to patrol the area around the Three Gorges Dam reservoir on July 13 in Yichang, Hubei province. The reservoir can hold 39.3 billion cubic meters. [Photo by Sun Ronggang/CHINA DAILY]
While downpours continue to threaten Chinese towns and cities, the Three Gorges Dam, widely seen as the solution to frequent flooding along the Yangtze River, is braced for potentially bigger surges this year.
Lu Chun, chairman of China Three Gorges Corp, which operates the dam, said the company is preparing for major flooding along the Yangtze that could be exacerbated by freak weather conditions.
Floods have already killed more than 200 people and affected about 60 million in China this year, with the lower reaches of the Yangtze among the hardest hit. Yet the worst could still be to come, according to Lu, who predicted an "extremely high possibility" of basin-wide flooding when he met with officials from the Ministry of Water Resources.
Those in charge of the giant dam believe the project is ready to pass its biggest test since it was completed in 2009, which could occur in the coming weeks, although they have also attempted to manage public expectations about the dam's role in flood control.
Wang Yuhua, deputy chief engineer with the corporation's cascade dispatch and communication center, said the dam is "fully capable" of controlling floods in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, although he added "within its design standards".
At 2,309 meters long and 185 meters high, the world's most powerful dam reduces the risk of flooding by trapping large amounts of water from the upper reaches of the river and reducing the flow downstream.
While the dam places flood control above its other functions, including power generation, executives said it is intended mainly to ease flooding in Jingjiang River, a winding branch of the Yangtze in Hubei province that is close to important industrial and agricultural bases with dense populations.
In the event of the worst flooding in 100 years, with a water flow of 83,700 cubic meters a second, for example, the dam would guard Jingjiang River by cutting the flow to 56,700 cu m a second. In the event of a stronger flood, the dam would need to work with other local flood-diversion measures to reduce the flow to 80,000 cu m a second to protect dams and cities further down the river.
Wang said the most fierce floods this year were on July 1, when water gushed into the dam at a rate of 50,000 cu m a second, which it then pumped out at 31,000 cu m a second.
On Friday, as heavy rain battered the Yangtze, the inflow to the reservoir was recorded at 32,000 cu m a second, with the outflow 18,900 cu m a second.
Wang shrugged off public concern about the dam's ability to cope with severe flooding like that seen in 1998, the worst in recent memory, which left about 1,800 people dead and affected more than 100 million.
"If the dam had been built earlier, the 1998 disaster could have been averted," said Wang, adding that the dam had handled bigger floods in 2010 and 2012, with peak flows of 70,000 and 71,200 cu m a second respectively. Statistics show the peak during the 1998 floods was 66,800 cu m a second.
Flood control officials on the front lines agree the dam is the main reason the situation along the Yangtze has remained under control this year.
Chen Min, director of the Yangtze River Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, said that on July 8, eight hours after the dam reduced outflows, flood levels ceased to rise near Jianli, a key monitoring post on Jinjiang River. The pressure also began to ease further downstream at Chenglingji in Hunan.
"The Three Gorges Dam has played the part of an unsung hero," Chen said. "It quietly keeps the water flowing at levels that people on the lower reaches can handle."
Last week, Huang Xianlong, an official with the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, dismissed media reports that claimed the dam is useless and counterproductive.
"In fact, the more critical the situation, the more obvious and positive the dam exerts its role," Xinhua News Agency quoted him as saying.
Wang said the biggest challenge for the dam in terms of flood controls is getting early and accurate weather and hydrological forecasts along the upper reaches of the Yangtze. "The more in advance we're able to forecast, the better we can schedule floodwater storage and release," he added.
When asked what would happen if the floodwaters exceeded the dam's design capacity to hold 39.3 billion cu m of water, including 22.15 billion cu m for flood control, Wang said the dam would have to ensure its own safety first.
Teen mothers are a common sight in Lingao county, Hainan province. LI JINHONG/CHINA DAILY
Young sex not taboo for children of fishermen; pregnancy poses problems
Sixteen-year-old Pan Hong is expecting her second child. Five months pregnant, she spends most of her time watching TV while caring for her 2-year-old daughter.
"Eating, feeding the baby, watching TV, that's all I do every day," she says calming her crying baby with one hand while switching channels with the other.
Like other teenagers, Pan likes playing with her smartphone, watching Korean TV series and eating latiao, a spicy snack favored by kids. She lives in a fishing village on China's island province of Hainan. The new baby's father, who is 17, works as a fisherman with his own father every day. His mother, 40, stays at home with Pan and the toddler.
A pseudonym is being used to protect the pregnant teen's privacy.
In China, the legal age of marriage is 20 for a woman and 22 for a man. Yet teen parents such as Pan are not unusual in Hainan's Lingao county. According to the county hospital, 20 girls under 16 delivered babies during a 10-month period beginning in May 2015. That's an average of two to three per month. The youngest mother was only 13.
As underage marriage is illegal, there are no official statistics on the true size of the problem.
Fruit not forbidden
Pan and the young father of her child met at an internet cafe when she was 13, and a relationship soon developed.
As Pan tells it, underage sex is "no big deal". Many of her classmates "did it" already, she said. She dropped out of high school when she was three months pregnant.
"I was vomiting every day, I had no idea what was wrong until the doctors told me I was pregnant," she said, laughing.
Supported by her parents, she moved into the home of her boyfriend's family and the couple started their life together, albeit without any legal recognition of marriage.
Her father-in-law owns a boat and employs a dozen fishermen. The trade brings the family almost 10 times the local average per capita incomearound 8,800 yuan ($1,300) a year.
"I'm pleased with my life, and I think I'm a good mother," she said.
According to Chen Jideng, principal of Xinying Township High School, underage sex is not rare, as children are often left at home alone when their parents are away fishing for long hours. The school has banned public displays of affection on campus, yet female students like Pan continue to drop out of school after becoming pregnant.
Many parents turn a blind eye, and some even expect their children to produce a grandchild as early as possible, Chen said. To secure an ideal daughter-in-law, parents are even known to wait at the school gate to identify a perfect match for their sons.
"If they see a girl they like, they will visit her family to talk about an engagement," Chen said, adding that many people consider a girl to be "leftover" if she is not married by the time she is 20.
"Others will get the best girls if we don't act fast," said one parent who was waiting outside the school.
Call for intervention
Wang Chenghui, deputy head of Diaolou Township Health Center, said childbirth at a young age not only harms the young mothers, but also increases risks for the babies. For example, teen mothers are more likely to experience hemorrhaging and difficult labor, he said.
Population control officials have tried education, but to no avail.
"What can we do about it once they are already pregnant?" asked an official at the county's population and family-planning bureau, who asked not to be named. "All we can do is fine them."
Xinying township generated more than 1.2 million yuan last year in fines collected from the teenage parents of 210 babies. All lacked marriage permits.
The official added that because they lack legal protection, many young couples separate before reaching marriage age, resulting in many single parents.
"Some find a new partner, while others just leave for the city and never come back," he said.
Liao Hui, head of the Hainan Lawyers' Association, said local officials were to blame for the number of underage mothers and the unregistered marriage-style relationships.
He called on the authorities to improve their education strategies to protect girls.
"Motherhood is too heavy a burden for such young shoulders," he said.
Deng Huaning of Xinhua contributed to this story.
It has only been a year and a half since Wang Zhenfeng started painting, but now the villager from East China's Shandong province is about to host her own exhibition in Beijing.
Her work has been compared to that of Zhou Chunya, one of the most well-known living Chinese painters, but Wang would likely still be unknown if it hadn't been for all the online attention.
Netizens first began comparing Wang's paintings of peach blossoms with Zhou's work in March.
One key difference: Wang's paintings sell for 200 yuan ($30) each, while one by Zhou fetched a staggering five million yuan in 2013.
Before she became an online celebrity, Wang was just an ordinary villager in Ma'erqiu, Pingdu city. She toiled in a field of around 1.3 hectares and also worked in a small shoe factory.
Early last year, Wang's daughter, an art teacher, returned to the village and launched a campaign called "Everyone is an artist". She encouraged her mother to pick up a paintbrush, but Wang wasn't sure at first.
"How do you expect a farmer to become a painter," she said.
Wang's curiosity was piqued, however, and after several weeks of training she finished her first ever painting of a bucket in her house. The piece eventually sold for 200 yuan online to an artist from Hebei province.
"I never thought paintings could help me make money," Wang said.
"In the past, I thought a person's life was all about getting married, having babies and raising children, which was quite tedious. Painting enlightened me."
Her fellow villagers would sometimes mock Wang for her new hobby, but she did not let it bother her. Her life slowly began to revolve around paintingshe would even get up in the middle of the night if inspiration struck.
Her artwork centers around subjects that evoke the countryside: fields, dogs and farm machinery.
"There are so many lively subjects in rural China, and I have painted only a few," she said.
In March, she began painting the village's peach blossoms. Some villagers, warming to her work, posted pictures of the paintings online, which sparked the comparisons to Zhou Chunya. Wang said she does not know Zhou, nor has she followed the online discussions. But one thing is for sure: her life has changed for the better.
Her art has attracted many fans, with admirers from Shanghai and Beijing coming to purchase her depictions of rural life. Not all the attention is welcome, however.
"There are too many people coming to buy my paintings these days," Wang told the Fujian Daily News in an interview. "It's too much pressure, and I cannot even concentrate on painting right now."
In mid-April, Wang traveled to a town in Southeast China's Fujian province with the help of an official from her daughter's painting center. It helped her to concentrate on her painting, gaining new inspiration from the narrow alleyways, fish ponds, fields, mountains and streams.
To her delight, Wang's paintings have been praised by professionals in the art industry. She has even established a small studio of her own in Fujian. Many social media accounts have promoted her work free of charge, while local galleries have offered to display her art.
An exhibition of Wang's work, hosted by the artist, will be held in Beijing's 798 Art District in September.
Villagers of the Tibetan ethnic group attend the Ongkor Festival celebration in Qiongjie county, Southwest China's Tibet autonomous region, July 16, 2016. The Ongkor Festival, or Bumper Harvest Festival, is celebrated annually by local farmers praying for good harvests of their crops. [Photo by Li Zhou and Tsewang/Asianewsphoto]
Research vessel Zhang Qian arrives at target waters in South China Sea, July 17, 2016. The vessel, named after ancient Chinese diplomat Zhang Qian (164 BC-114 BC), will test the ship's navigation abilities and equipment during its two-month voyage to the Southern Pacific. The destination is the waters near the New Britain Trench, which is more than 8,000 meters deep in the Solomon Sea near Papua New Guinea. The ship is 97 meters long and 17.8 meters wide. It has a designed displacement of around 4,800 tonnes and an endurance of 15,000 nautical miles. The ship is the first of its kind in China that is designed and built for deep-sea exploration.[Photo/Xinhua]
Six men have gone on trial in Beijing for allegedly participating in the illegal ivory trade.
Two of the men, both surnamed Zhao, are suspected of selling more than 100 kilograms of ivory to the other four defendants in Weihai, Shandong province, in May last year, according to a statement issued by Beijing Xicheng District People's Procuratorate.
On May 21, 2015, Beijing police received a report that a white car would be delivering ivory to a location in the capital's Daxing district.
That night, police found the car, seized three boxes of ivory and arrested two suspects, the statement said.
The other four suspects were detained between May and August last year, and the money involved in the case could be more than 2.6 million yuan ($388,163), according to the statement.
The six suspects made the deal in early May 2015, and the four buyers allegedly drove to Shandong to see the ivory on May 20, it added.
Wang Zhaohua, a prosecutor responsible for the case, said that all the suspects knew that they were trading in endangered wildlife products and had a clear division of labor.
"So this has been identified as a joint offense and they should be prosecuted at the same time," he said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) are aware of reports of the suspected leak of confidential information about people living with HIV in China over the last week.
Chinese health and public security authorities are investigating what appears to be a serious case of fraud, whereby someone posing as a government official contacted people living with HIV and promised they would be provided with financial allowances in exchange for provision of personal information. Health authorities are also investigating how patient information systems were able to be breached and the personal details of people living with HIV were able to be accessed.
All patients have the right to know that their personal health information is confidential and secure. The right to confidentiality of personal information is especially important in the HIV response because lack of confidentiality can deter people from getting tested for HIV and for accessing both HIV treatment and prevention tools that they need.
The leak of personal information of people infected with HIV is a violation of the fundamental right to patient confidentiality.
WHO and UNAIDS welcome the Chinese health authorities and Community Based Organizations' swift response to this incident including the investigations currently underway into the alleged fraudulent activity which appears to have occurred, as well as the information security breach which enabled information about people living with HIV to be accessed by people without authority to do so.
WHO and UNAIDS also welcomes the National Health and Family Planning Commissions (NHFPC's) and China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) commitment to strengthening HIV-related information security. WHO and UNAIDS agree that it is crucially important to strengthen existing systems so that this kind of breach does not occur again. Security of personal and health information of people living with HIV is crucial for an effective HIV response at every stage of the HIV response: from surveillance, prevention, testing, and treatment, to the provision of other care and support services.
WHO and UNAIDS stand ready to provide any support necessary to Chinese government health authorities and civil society groups in responding to this incident, and in the implementation of subsequent remedies to strengthen HIV-related health information security in light of this incident.
The statement is made by Dr Bernhard Schwartlander, WHO Representative & Dr Catherine Sozi, UNAIDS Country Director
Rickshaw Boy is among the opera films being screened in cinemas this summer. Photo provided to China Daily
Blockbusters may not be the only option for Chinese movie fans this summer.
Opera productions are being screened in theaters in eight Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Jinan in Shandong province and Dalian in Liaoning province, through Aug 7.
Titled the International Opera Film Exhibition, the event will bring 13 opera films produced by six renowned theaters, including Carmen and La Boheme by Metropolitan Opera of the United States, Tosca and La Traviata by Royal Opera House of the United Kingdom, The Tales of Hoffmann by the Paris Opera and Tchaikovsky's Iolanta by Mariinsky Theater in Russia.
According to the organizers, the National Center for the Performing Arts and China's Ministry of Culture, this event is the first of its kind in China, which will help promote the art form among Chinese audiences.
"Opera in cinema is a phenomenon in the West. But it's still very new in China. We hope these screenings will introduce opera films to Chinese audiences," says Yang Jingmao, vice-president of the National Center for the Performing Arts.
"For many audiences, opera is a kind of 'high art'. By bringing opera to cinemas, it will help the art form get connected with the general public."
Yang adds that the 13 productions are world-class, which will be "a good beginning for people, who rarely watch opera live".
"The comfort and convenience of local cinemas seems to outweigh the attractions of a trip to the opera house," he says.
One of the highlights is a Chinese original opera The White-Haired Girl. First staged in 1945, the opera was produced as a 3-D film last year.
Another Chinese opera is Rickshaw Boy, one of the Chinese operas commissioned by the NCPA.
Premiered in 2014, the opera is based on Chinese writer Lao She's novel of the same title, which is known for its strong old Beijing local culture.
"Hopefully, we're attracting a new generation of fans by making opera more accessible," says Yang. "Imagine yourself wearing jeans and eating popcorn while watching an opera film at the cinemait will be a fresh experience."
The opera films to be shown will be done at theaters owned by Broadway Cinema, the cinema management brand of Hong Kong's Edko Films.
"We want to offer movies with diversified content to the audiences, not just commercial movies," says Wang Jie, manager of programming at Broadway Cinema. "With the technology, it's not only a revolution for opera but also for cinema."
Li Xiaotian/China Daily
Sales of instant noodles have been on a five-year decline in China, which may be the outcome of many unrelated factors. Higher purchasing power and more sophisticated palates are two obvious culprits, but so is the law of gravity.
Instant noodles are called "convenience noodles" in the Chinese mainland. The latest report that its annual sales dropped 12.5 percent in 2015 does not really come as a shock. It has been on a long and painful decline for past several years.
What's not convenient though, is the explanation, or rather, explanations.
Three decades ago when an American businessman was calculating how much he would make by selling one pair of sneakers to every Chinese, I simply laughed.
A pair of Nike shoes could set an ordinary Chinese back a month's salary at the time. To use 1.3 billion as the base of one's market size was simply a misunderstanding of massive proportions.
Instant noodles, however, may fit into the equation. Other than convenience, affordability is a major attraction. But not at the very beginning.
My first encounter with the precooked and dried noodle block was in 1982, when a richer classmate from a big city brought a packet. The whole dorm room was flabbergasted. It had a bling-bling effect.
Soon, it appeared in a movie scene, along with a refrigerator, where it was touted as a sign of new wealthvery much like characters in The Tiny Times movies speaking of their ultraexpensive mugs.
I guess the days of instant noodles as a luxury food item were short-lived. When I returned to China a decade later, it was everywhere. Actually 1992 was the year Master Kong, the reigning beverage champion, first entered the mainland market, which has seen an average of 20 percent annual growth since.
The most concentrated consumption must be in long-distance trains where instant noodles were the staple by default. For many years it must have been the most democratic food of all. It was slurped with equal gusto in the soft-berth section and the hard-seat section.
Then I heard that the sales of instant noodles were used as an indicator for the living and moving pattern of migrant workers. It made sense.
This demographic had the highest need for this form of food. So the downturn in sales volumes could well speak volumes of a corresponding decrease in the number of workers who leave home for faraway jobs.
But there are other factors at play.
A British passport is pictured in front of an European Union flag in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, June 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
When the European Union foreign ministers hold their regular monthly meeting in Brussels on Monday, they will have many pressing issues to discuss.
One of which, the United Kingdom's severing of ties with the bloc, will be highlighted by the attendance of the UK's new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who was a key supporter of the campaign to leave the EU.
But it's not just the fast-changing political landscape in the UK that the EU foreign ministers will be concerned about. They will also have the failed military coup in Turkey and the bloody terrorist attack in France to discuss.
After the terrorist attack in Nice on Thursday, the latest in a series of violent attacks by extremists in the country, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France must now live with terrorism, which has become an increasingly serious threat to western European countries as the Islamic State group loses ground in the Middle East and urges its supporters in Europe to attack where they are.
The worsening security situation within and around Europe coupled with the high level of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa, which is exacerbating the unemployment in some countries, particularly among young people, is making for difficult times for the bloc.
In addition, an arbitral tribunal in The Hague issued a justice-damaging ruling on Tuesday, supporting the Philippines in its dispute with China.
When the EU foreign ministers meet on Monday, they will discuss their strategy toward China in the wake of the ruling. At this juncture, what Brussels needs most is a visionary and pragmatically ambitious foreign policy toward China.
The ministers should carefully review the constructive and friendly messages Beijing has repeated at China-EU summit and the Asian-European Leaders Meeting.
EU leaders concluded talks with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing before they flew to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to participate in the two-day ASEM, which began on Friday.
Speaking in an informal meeting during the summit, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China had exercised its right in accordance with international law not to participate in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines and neither accepts nor acknowledges the ruling.
He said, China remains committed to settling the South China Sea disputes via dialogue and consultation with the countries directly involved.
Regarding the EU's stance on the South China Sea, Brussels says it does not take sides in the sovereignty disputes but it urges Beijing "to obey" international rules. The reality is that the EU leaders preoccupied with all the other issues they face, are not willing to engage with the rules related to the disputes and are looking to take the easy option of following the United States' lead.
In light of the fast-evolving circumstances, US Secretary of State John Kerry is due to have a breakfast meeting with the EU foreign ministers on Monday before they get down to discussing their agenda.
Beijing has repeatedly criticized Brussels for looking to Washington for guidance when it comes to the EU's China policy. Although it is still unknown how Kerry will exert influence at the breakfast meeting it is likely that the South China Sea will be a topic for discussion.
Facing all the complex problems that threaten to tear the bloc apart, the EU leaders should change tack when dealing with China. This should include granting China market economy status, getting down to talks on a free trade area, materializing setup of joint funds to fund each other's mega projects and encouraging people-to-people exchanges.
The list of course is even longer, but that would be a start.
The author is the deputy bureau chief for China Daily in Europe.
fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
A man walks out of a China Vanke development in Tianjin. [Photo/China Daily]
The recent plunge in China's real estate giant Vanke should come as no surprise. The inherent instability of Vanke became clear late last year when its major competitor, privately-owned Baoneng Group, acquired enough shares to become its largest shareholder.
Daggers have been well and truly drawn between Vanke and Baoneng after the former announced a major asset-restructuring plan with Shenzhen Metro Group. If the restructuring goes through, Baoneng will no longer remain Vanke's major shareholder. No wonder the already rocky relationship between Vanke and Baoneng has now descended into an open and internecine warfare.
Baoneng considers it acceptable to call publicly for the removal of the entire Vanke senior management. It has been less than complimentary toward its archrival on many previous occasions, too.
But while these apparently unhelpful, petulant and public comments could easily be dismissed as just that, they highlight the root cause of this most unwanted and public spat, which is the lack of maturity in the senior management of many of China's top companies and a share-trading system that lies exposed when such rivalries boil over.
The Chinese mainland doesn't seem ready for the sort of open trading system and set of rules that characterize Western models. In the corporate rivalry case, it appears that Baoneng's move to become Vanke's largest shareholder had little to do with shrewd, strategic and financial management. Instead, the motivation appears to be the stabilizing of a major competitor. In the West, the United Kingdom in particular, such an aggressive and hostile acquisition of shares would almost certainly have been referred to the authorities and quite possibly judged anti-competitive and prevented from taking place.
Chinese authorities should learn from the Vanke-Baoneng case and take measures to prevent such ugly scenarios. And an updated and transparent set of rules and regulations is needed to guide the share-trading activities of major competitors.
For some guidance the Chinese regulatory authorities could look to the UK's recently formed Competition and Markets Authority, which takes full responsibility for any possible anti-competitive practices such as price fixing, bid rigging and share trading.
Major competitors across the mainland should retain as much freedom to trade in shares as possible but should be prevented from acquiring major shareholding stakes in archrivals.
Also, better corporate governance should be encouraged and, where necessary, a regulatory body should have sufficient powers to intervene in any escalating dispute. Simply suspending all share trading will not help.
Many of China's largest companies are spearheaded by prominent leaders with an even more prominent ego. This seems to playing a big role in this internecine share-trading warfare. So greater devolution of strategic management responsibility is the way forward.
The author is a visiting professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing and a senior lecturer at Southampton University.
One of the injured victims leaves the hospital in Nice, France after a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing 84 who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday in the French resort town on July 15, 2016. [Photo by Angus McNeice/China Daily]
At least eighty-four people were killed and more than 200 injured in the French city of Nice late on Thursday when a man plowed a truck through a crowd that had gathered on a promenade to watch the fireworks' display on Bastille Day, France's national holiday. More than 50 of the injured are in a critical condition and many of the victims were children, according to media reports.
The driver of the truck, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was neutralized by police on the promenade, had been earlier booked for violence and use of weapons. The 31-year-old Bouhlel was born in Tunisia but lived in the French Riviera city of Nice and had dual French-Tunisian citizenship.
In a phone call to French President Francois Hollande on Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his condolences for the victims of the barbaric attack and offered his sympathies to their families. Xi also said China opposes terrorism in all its forms, and is willing to deepen its anti-terrorism cooperation with France to safeguard global order.
France is not the only victim of terrorism. The whole of Europe is on high alert in the wake of increasing terror attacks. And France appears to be an easy target for terrorist attacks not because it lacks the incentive to fight terrorism, but because of its adherence to political correctness and its large Muslim population (more than 5 million).
For an answer to the question of "why always France", one has to be aware of ethnic minority groups in the country, especially those of North African origin, who have for long been marginalized. Like many European economies, France was hit hard by the global financial and sovereign debt crises in 2008 and 2009, making it even harder for many French Muslims to make a living.
The frustrations of such people have been exploited by terrorists skilled in recruiting vulnerable youths to wage war on peace and human rights. The earlier attacks in Paris and Brussels, which claimed the lives of scores of innocent people, are cases in point, because they proved the killers' "power" to the disgruntled Muslim youths in France and Belgium.
Moreover, French police and intelligence officials are always overly cautious when dealing with security threats posed by minorities for fear that their actions would overstep the boundaries of political correctness.
That France has suffered several terror attacks in recent years has cast a shadow over the European Union's immigration policies, especially at a time when refugees from the Middle East are still swarming to EU countries to seek asylum. Many who voted for the United Kingdom to leave the EU apparently did so because of the refugee factor.
Brexit is very high on the agenda of the new British Prime Minister Theresa May, but the refugee issue hardly justifies the referendum's result, because people from India and Pakistan comprise the largest minority group in the UK owing to British colonial rule in the two countries. By tightening its control over migrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, the UK is actually aiming to create more jobs for local blue-collar workers. In other words, the refugee crisis plaguing many EU countries is not of much concern to the UK at all.
But instead of falling apart, the EU is expected to keep itself together as it has done in the face of earlier terrorist attacks. The EU, however, has little room for imposing harsher restrictions on asylum-seeker nor does it have any reason to do so, because many of the terrorists that have targeted EU countries were born in European countries.
Chu Yin is an associate professor at the University of International Relations, and a research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization. The article is an excerpt from his interview with China Daily's Cui Shoufeng.
Its peaceful rise not just dependent on China
We live in extremely perilous times.
I take the opportunity of prefacing my remarks by saying how terribly is missed, especially in current situation, the late Wu Jianmin, who tragically died in an automobile accident on June 18. I first met him when he was China's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, then we met on a number of occasions in Paris when he was ambassador to France and later in Beijing when he was president of China Foreign Affairs University. He was truly an exceptional human being in combining great wit, great wisdom and great warmth. He was an ardent proponent of China's peaceful rise.
The person who actually coined the term, China's peaceful rise to great power status, is Zheng Bijian, a major Chinese and global thought leader. Noting that all previous nations that rose to great global power status (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States) did so through war and plunder, China's route should be different and peaceful. A major driver, argued Zheng, is that the country still needed to do so much to develop itself and lift the Chinese people to reasonable standards of living following the devastating experiences China had suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries.
To achieve its peaceful rise to great global power status, of course, an overall peaceful global condition is essential for China. As another thought leader, the late Cheng Siwei was fond of repeating almost like a mantra: "China needs the world; the world needs China."
The reality is that we are living in an increasingly confrontational and lawless world. As the recent publication of the British Chilcot Enquiry report lays out in detail, the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq was a rogue act, flouting the UN. No institution of global governance is functioning properly. The failure of the Doha Round has made the World Trade Organization moribund, with the current global trade regime dangerously adrift. Four nuclear powersIsrael, India, Pakistan and the Democratic People's Republic of Koreaare not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. While Washington calls on Beijing to abide by the ruling of the arbitral tribunal in the Philippines' case against China over the South China Sea dispute, it has not even ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that it swears by. I could go on.
While there is a global state of uncertainty, there are also specificities that relate to the situation in the Asia-Pacific region. Whereas the first half of the 20th century witnessed warfare throughout the world, following 1945 these chapters in European history have definitely closed. The exit of Britain from the European Union is causing and will continue to cause confusion in Europe, but there is not the remotest possibility of war.
This is alas emphatically not the same atmosphere in the Asia-Pacific where deep historical wounds coupled with multiple territorial disputes poison the atmosphere. To ensure peace in the 21st century, the war chapters of the 20th must be closed. This is why I have argued "to make peace with China, (Japanese) Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should visit Nanjing next year for the 80th anniversary of the massacre" and express national remorse in a manner comparable to former German chancellor Willy Brandt's genuflection at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in 1970.
Although the conflict in the South China Sea and the general state of confrontation and lawlessness in the world clearly jeopardize the chances of China achieving its peaceful rise and indeed prospects for global peace and prosperity, by no means should it then be deduced that war is inevitable.
In her outstanding book on World War I, The War That Ended Peace, historian Margaret MacMillan argued that while war was not inevitable, choices made by world leaders at the time increasingly made it so. There are, as she says, always choices. If the peaceful rise fails, the consequences will be catastrophic, for Asia, for the world, above all for China. Beijing must be very careful in the choices it makes.
All efforts on the part of all parties concerned must be concentrated on conflict prevention and on building regional and global institutions that will enhance dialogue, confidence and peace. We are at, or very near, the eleventh hour.
The author is professor emeritus of international political economy at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and visiting professor at Hong Kong University.
The 40th session of World Heritage Committee, which was scheduled to run from July 10 to 20 in Istanbul, Turkey, ended on Sunday evening according to a statement on UNESCO's website. Social organizations from China, the Republic of Korea and several other Asian countries and regions jointly applied to include the historical facts of the Imperial Japanese Army forcibly recruiting "comfort women" to provide sex to its troops during its war of aggression as part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
The organization's Memory of the World program has been collecting important world documents since 1992.
This is the second bid to include "comfort women" in the register. China in 2014 applied for "comfort women" to be included in the register along with the Nanjing Massacre, the mass murder and rape of the inhabitants of Nanjing by Japanese troops over six weeks starting in December 1937. The massacre was included but the bid to include "comfort women" failed because of lack of sufficient materials.
The Japanese government, however, is doing everything it can to prevent the bid from being successful. Yet as Kyodo News said, if Japan continues denying the historical facts and preventing them from being listed in the Memory of the World project that will truly ruin its international image.
TURKISH PRESIDENT RECEP ERDOGAN REMAINS in power after the failure of an attempted coup on Saturday. Thepaper.cn analyzes the possible effects on Turkish politics and diplomacy:
Since the 1960s, military officers have successfully staged four coups in Turkey and they all defended the secular regime and civil reform afterwards. Yet all these coups had something in common, namely the military was united, they had popular support, and they responded to the threat of religious radicalization; none of these applied this time and that's why the coup failed.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan has blamed his political rival Fethullah Gulen for having planned the coup. Gulen, now residing in the United States, advocates mild religion and supports Turkey's cooperation with the West. Erdogan has asked the US to extradite him for trial, indicating the reported power struggle between the two political figures will likely continue.
The failure of the coup will accelerate the political reforms advocated by Erdogan, who hopes to empower his presidency by ending the current presidency neutrality principle in the Turkish Constitution, so as to create a powerful presidency in place of its traditional figurehead role. Actually, he has already got enough power through a series of measures, but he wants the support of the Constitution and the law. After the unsuccessful coup, Erdogan is expected to accelerate the constitutional reform process.
Turkey's geographic location and its membership in NATO mean it must play a major role in fighting the Islamic State group and other terrorists. Many fear the failure of the military coup might curb that, but that worry is unnecessary, because democratic reform and secularism remain the commonsense of the nation. The public that opposed the coup has shown its support for civil progress in the country.
It is not the right time to be talking about "post-arbitration" just yet.
But, galvanized by Manila's sweeping "triumph" in its arbitration case, the Shinzo Abe administration of Japan is reportedly deliberating such an option for its disputes with Beijing in the East China Sea.
Throughout the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting Summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, against the theme of the eventPartnership for the Future through Connectivitythe Japanese leader went out of his way to rally participating countries to mount pressure on Beijing to "respect" the arbitral decision, though to little avail.
To make his case high-sounding, Abe resorted to his customary tactic of what is known to the Chinese as "stealing the beams and pillars and replacing them with rotten timbers".
The rule of law is "a universal principle that the international community must firmly maintain", he argued. So he "strongly hopes the parties to the dispute comply with the award and lead to a peaceful solution of the dispute in South China Sea".
Which sounded impeccable, but had an obvious logical fraud: He confused the rule of international law with this specific award, although they are intrinsically different.
His argument would have been more convincing had it concluded with a categorical call for "respecting", or "abiding by", universal international law, as the summit's final document did.
As Beijing has repeatedly stated, each and every step it has taken thus far is in compliance with international law and practice. And it is out of respect for and commitment to international law that it has refused to accept and acknowledge the arbitral award.
Contrary to the notion Tokyo is tirelessly peddling, this is not a headstrong China flexing its muscles against the existing world order. It is rather a wronged party's justified fight for justice, against the outrageous abuse of international law.
The arbitral panel disregarded due procedure in accepting the unilaterally initiated case, acted ultra vires in affirming its jurisdiction. And most ridiculous of all, it turned out to be incapable even of distinguishing an island from a reef.
It does not take an expert in international maritime law to see the abusive nature of the ruling.
As many have observed, a ruling like this is too biased to be credible, not to say executable. But that will hardly compromise its effect as a mighty shot in the arm for Abe and his like.
Abe talked with Vietnamese and Philippine officials during his "consensus-building" session on the sidelines of the ASEM summit, pledging to help boost maritime "law-enforcement".
It is certain he will not stop there.
IN SHUANGLIU DISTRICT OF CHENGDU, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province, the local government recently introduced a list of 11 "symptoms" of mental health problems, and promised to give a reward to anyone who reported a person based on these symptoms once a mental health problem was confirmed. However, the symptoms given by the government are debatable, says Southern Metropolis Daily:
Considering the various incidents of mentally ill people threatening the safety of others, it is necessary to send those with violent tendencies to hospital for treatment. Screening is necessary and Shuangliu district has done a creative move by offering rewards.
However, many of the symptoms it listed are rather ambiguous. For example, "those staying at home all day" should be reported as possibly being mentally ill. First, it is one's legal right to stay at home; second, staying at home does not mean one is isolated. Those running an online business or doing programming work could well be at home all day working; should they be treated as mentally ill?
Other symptoms include talking to oneself and being cold to others, which might easily victimize many people who are mentally healthy but prefer to be a little distant toward the outside world. Some experts have already published their comments online, criticizing the list of symptoms for being too vague.
Mental illness is a health issue, so medical experts must be involved in any policies concerning people with mental health problems. The local authorities of Shuangliu district might have been well-meaning with their creative approach, but they need to be more careful or else will only cause more problems than they solve.
Official statistics for the second quarter of 2016 have now been released, showing the headline GDP growth rate at 6.7 percent, exactly equal to the level achieved in the first quarter.
Despite the slowdown in private sector investment at an annualized rate of 2.8 percent, the growth rate of total social investment reached 9 percent in the first half of the year. The volumes of total trade and exports expanded 0.1 percent and 1.2 percent respectively in the second quarter compared to the first quarter, arresting the declining trend in Chinas global trade.
The volume of imports dropped by 1.2 percent in the same period, improving by 7.2 percentage points from the first quarter. For China, this is a very good sign as international trade has been a strong pulling force on economic growth.
Although it is a relative low level of economic growth compared to the past, China managed to create 7.17 million new jobs in the first half of the year, a level admirable by any international standards and an encouraging sign that economic structural change has started to generate excellent results.
Reflected by the changing composition of the three economic sectors, agriculture, industry and services, the structure of the national economy continues to improve, with the services industry growing much faster than manufacturing and agriculture. In the first half of 2016, the services industry, manufacturing and agricultural value-added grew respectively at 7.5 percent, 6.1 percent and 3.1 percent. The services industry has now accounted for 54.1 percent of the countrys GDP, which is 14.7 percentage points higher than the share of the manufacturing sector.
Both rural and urban incomes have maintained a steady pace of improvement. In the first half of 2016, urban per capita disposable income was 17,000 yuan ($2,543), growing by 5.8 percent, and rural per capita net income 6050 yuan, growing by 6.7 percent, showing a narrowing trend of urban-rural income disparity. The urban-rural per capita income ratio has declined from its peak of over 3.3 before the world financial crisis to 2.8 today. Although this is still a high level of urban-rural income inequality, the current economic reform has benefited the rural population more than its urban counterpart.
It is obvious that the uncertainty in the world economy, especially the decision of the UK to leave the EU, has imposed significant challenge to Chinas economic growth, as international trade and the pressure on RMB exchange depreciation are now the most serious factors hindering Chinas ability to export and import. However, China has entered a development stage where future growth has to come from its ability to stimulate domestic growth, through reducing the gap between the rich and poor regions, integrating the urban and rural sectors, and providing essential stimuli in public investments, particularly the high-speed train railways network and other infrastructure which are essential for the private economy.
Domestic challenges cannot be undermined, as the pressure to reduce industrial overcapacity, assets as well as housing bubbles, and to up-grade technologies is high, and the process of change is slow.
From the newly released statistics, what is encouraging is that the growth rate of value-added of the high-tech and newly emerging industries, including medicines, aerospace and ICT, are growing much faster than the traditional ones. The value-added of these industries increased 11.8 percent, compared to 6 percent of the entire manufacturing sector in the first half of 2016.
Consumer demand continues to become the most powerful driving force of economic growth in China. The volume of retail sales expanded by 10.3 percent in the report period. As a result, the services industry contributed 73.1 percent of economic growth in the first half of 2016, or 13.2 percentage points higher than the same period in 2015. The contribution of investment to GDP growth was 37 percent, but the contribution of net exports was minus 10.4 percent.
There are a few important features in the Chinese economy in recent years under the new normal. First, the slowdown in economic growth has been caused by the slowdown or even negative growth in the external sector, and steady economic growth has to rely on domestic investments and consumption. Second, there is a significant shift from manufacturing to services as the main engine of economic growth. Third, there is a clear trend of regional economic convergence and the narrowing of the urban-rural income disparity. Last, but not least, the energy/electricity intensity, measured by the requirements of energy/electricity for each additional unit of GDP, has declined sharply.
The narrowing of regional development and urban-rural income disparities is critically important for China in its ambition to realize domestic endogenous growth, and to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020. The declining energy/electricity intensity is also important for China to sustain its long term economic growth without further deteriorating the natural environment.
China may not be able to achieve a much higher level of economic growth in the short and medium terms, but the growth rates in the most recent four quarters at 6.9 percent, 6.8 percent, 6.7 percent and 6.7 percent means that the bottom of economic growth may have been reached. This also suggests that if the world economy can recover well in the aftermath of the world financial crisis and the European debt crisis enabling China to trade more with other countries, it is possible that future growth can be higher than the current level.
However, even when the world economy is not recovering well, China has demonstrated its strong resilience to the very harsh external and internal conditions in the first half of 2016. In other words, the worst may not be over, but Chinas ability to achieve this level of growth in GDP, employment and people incomes should provide strong confidence for the rest of the world. It also shows China is clearly on the right track to fulfill the development targets set by the 13th Five Year Plan, as one of the key goals is to maintain a growth rate of not less than 6.5 percent.
The author is professor of economics at Chongqing University and Nottingham University.
The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and don't represent views of China Daily website
Fang Ling and her son with their family's recreational vehicle. Fang and her husband have traveled in the RV since 2014 when they started by taking their then-14-month-old boy to tour southern China in their new RV. Provided to China Daily
Caravanning event highlights tourists' drive to get away from it all, Xu Lin reports.
Fang Ling's family drove their recreational vehicle to visit Beijing's All in Caravanning 2016, China's largest exhibition of RVs and motor homes.
The 32-year-old and her husband have traveled in the RV since 2014, when they sold their clothing store in Zhejiang province. They started by taking their then-14-month-old boy to tour southern China in their new 250,000 yuan ($38,000) RV.
"RVing allows us to spend more time together," Fang says.
"Being with family is most important."
They hoped to broaden their boy's horizons by traveling, yet giving him a place that felt like home on the journey.
"It doesn't matter what he'll remember," the mother says.
"These experiences will imperceptibly influence him."
The parents' experiences inspired them enough to drive their RV to this year's AIC. The event, from June 18-20, attracted a record number of visitors and exhibitors, continuing its growth since its 2012 founding.
Nearly 530 exhibitors from home and abroad showed products.
"Chinese tourists can go around to see their beautiful country and live in nature. What is easier than to travel in a motor home to decide where to park and stay?" says Stefan Koschke, director of Caravan Salon Dusseldorf, one of Europe's largest RV exhibitions and co-sponsor of the Beijing event.
The AIC draws European brands eyeing China's market.
"While Europeans have a long history of caravanning, Chinese are still learning what advantages caravanning brings," he says.
"But the Chinese market is developing fast."
Policemen block a street after group of armed men seized a police station along with an unknown number of hostages, according the country's security service, in Yerevan, Armenia, July 17, 2016. [Photo/VCG]
YEREVAN/MOSCOW - 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.
Beijing says disputes over issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions
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]
Few other trips made by Premier Li Keqiang have been more sensitively and subtly timed than his first foreign journey of the yearan official visit to Mongolia, where he also attended the 11th ASEM Summit that concluded on Saturday.
A new Mongolian prime minister was appointed five days before Li's arrival at Ulaanbaatar on Wednesday, and the South China Sea arbitration award was issued one day before the premier left for the visit and the summit, whose opening was clouded by a terrorist attack in Nice, France.
What many had thought to be a northern journey full of questions and qualms, however, ended with a commitment from China and Mongolia to synergize development strategies, and a summit chair's statement on connectivity.
Analysts were quick to note that neither the statement nor the Ulaanbaatar Declaration, endorsed by Asian and European leaders at the summit's end, contains any words about the South China Sea, but does strongly address terrorism.
"Leaders ... expressed their determination to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism in all their forms," the chair's statement said.
Cui Hongjian, director of the department for European studies of the China Institute of International Studies, said he was not surprised that the statements excluded the South China Sea.
"The Asia-Europe Meeting is a multilateral platform focused on Eurasian development and cooperation. The summit's discussions should not be distracted by bilateral issues," Cui said.
The country consistently has said the South China Sea issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions but that disputes should be settled through bilateral dialogue and consultation by countries directly involved, on the basis of historical facts and in line with international law, he said.
Days before the premier's visit, China's Foreign Ministry had said the ASEM summit was "not an appropriate venue" to discuss the issue.
Japan, however, had intended to bring the issue to the summit, according to a senior Chinese diplomat. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, addressing an informal meeting of the ASEM Summit on Saturday, talked about the South China Sea arbitration.
Li refuted Abe's comments and spelled out China's stance, said the diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous.
Li said China has not participated in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines. Beijing neither accepts nor acknowledges the so-called arbitration award, he added.
The premier had 11 bilateral meetings with other senior leaders during the summit. His effort to promote China's stand on the South China Sea issue received widespread backing and understanding, the diplomat said, adding that except for the Philippines, no other meeting participants echoed Abe's comments at the summit.
Related analysis: South China Sea arbitration panel manipulated
Police officers use bicycles to create cordons around a protest march by various groups, including "Black Lives Matter" and "Shut Down Trump and the RNC," ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, US, July 17, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
CLEVELAND - Cleveland's police union called for the suspension of a state law allowing people to carry firearms during the Republican National Convention but Ohio's governor said he was powerless to act despite heightened security concerns with the killing on Sunday of three police officers in Louisiana.
Republican Donald Trump seized on the shooting deaths in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to bolster his case the United States is leaderless and he is the better candidate in the Nov 8 US presidential election to restore law and order than his rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
It was not immediately clear there was a link between Sunday's shootings and recent unrest countrywide over police killings of black men, one of them a shooting in Baton Rouge about two weeks ago.
Despite a lack of clarity about the motive and specifics of Sunday's incident, Trump said President Barack Obama "doesn't have a clue" on how to handle the problem after Obama voiced concern about inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.
"Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse!" Trump said.
He issued statements on Twitter on Sunday, a day before the start of the four-day Republican Convention in Cleveland this week due to formally nominate him for the White House.
After the shootings in Baton Rouge, in which three other police officers were wounded, the head of Cleveland's police union, Steve Loomis, asked Governor John Kasich to suspend state laws allowing people to openly carry firearms, but Kasich said he lacked the authority to do so.
Kasich, a Republican who lost his bid for the White House to Trump, issued a statement through his spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach, saying:
"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."
Clinton called the shootings "devastating" and urged the country to work together. "We must not turn our backs on each other. We must not be indifferent to each other," Clinton said in a statement. "We must all stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities."
There is ample evidence for China to reject the ruling in the South China Sea arbitration established at the unilateral request of the Philippine government.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has provided its signatories with the option to make an exception in cases concerning maritime boundary delimitation. More than 30 countries have taken the option, including UN Security Council permanent members Britain, France and Russia.
On this basis, China ratified the convention in 1996, when it made a declaration reaffirming its sovereignty over all its archipelagoes 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 China declined to attend the arbitration proceedings was that, in 2002, a Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea was agreed, promoting bilateral negotiation among 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 with 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 Chee-hwa, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
The modern system of the law of the sea consists of not only the UNCLOS, but also rules of general international law, which are complementary to each other. It is wrong to overstress the importance of the UNCLOS, while negating rights such as historic rights in general international law.
The UNCLOS is a "package-deal instrument" reached upon by the negotiating parties. Only by interpreting and applying the convention in good faith and in a comprehensive and integral manner, can its inherent balance be maintained and its authority be upheld.
Disputes on the sovereignty over land territory are clearly beyond the purview of the interpretations or application of the UNCLOS. Any attempt to settle such disputes by mechanically applying the procedures under the UNCLOS is manifestly an abuse of the procedures.
Li Shishi, president of the Chinese Society of International Law
Some of the legal findings presented by the tribunal are controversial to say the least. I was surprised that the case had made it to the court.
It is questionable whether the Arbitral Tribunal was entitled to render a ruling in the particular case as China had already made the declaration in 2006 excluding issues of territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation from the compulsory dispute settlements by any tribunal.
According to international law and international jurisprudence, when a third-party settlement is concerned, it must be based on the consent of the states involved.
Negotiations are open to all the parties. If you want to reach a settlement that will eliminate tensions, there is no point to have an award which is going to increase tensions.
Given the nature of the issue, bilateral negotiation remained the best way to resolve the dispute.
The ultimate aim should be the peaceful settlement of a dispute. Judicial settlement is not an end in itself. It is the means of an end, and that is what we should strive for.
Abdul Gadire Koroma, former judge at the International Court of Justice
As some big powers were clearly behind the case and pulling the strings, it is easy to predict that the ruling would be in favor of the Philippines. But I was still shocked to learn the tribunal did not admit any of the rights that China should enjoy in the South China Sea. The ruling is apparently unfair.
The tribunal had even ruled beyond what the Philippines had put before them - the Philippines had only filed an application to reconsider nine geographical "features", but the tribunal made interpretations on all the geographical features on the Nansha Islands.
The Chinese government should get ready to face various challenges that it may encounter in such fields as foreign diplomacy and military confrontation.
Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies
In the aftermath of the arbitral ruling presented by The Hague's Arbitral Tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration on July 12, John Anthony Carty, a professor at Tsinghua University, is among a number of international academics and maritime experts who are now questioning the decision's denial of Chinese rights in the South China Sea.
Carty said that he has studied centuries worth of records produced by European nations and the United States. These official accounts - excepting a period in the 1930s when France unilaterally seized individual South China Sea islands under Chinese protest - recognize China's historic sovereignty over the islands.
The British scholar spoke on the topic of historic rights at a two-day international forum on maritime dispute settlement held in Hong Kong on Friday and Saturday.
Historic titles and rights are recognized in the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, and China declared in 2006 that under Article 298 it would not be party to arbitration regarding historic bays and titles.
"I have found my research in the archives quite astonishing," said Carty, referring to his findings. Among the records he said he has uncovered is a legal opinion by the British Foreign Office from the 1970s. The report, which is now digitally available, was presented to the British cabinet and then prime minister, James Callaghan.
Carty said the British record proves there is no dispute regarding the Nansha Islands and that China is the sole titleholder.
"This British record is not just the opinion of an individual lawyer - this is the product of an immense amount of research that the foreign ministry did in London. They investigated all of their archives and all of the correspondence they had with other countries for a period of 100 years," he said.
He said, however, that any claims that China must produce historic administrative papers and state acts to explain a "connection with (their) own homeland" is something that "makes no sense". He further asked how "natives" - as Chinese were referred to in the British and French texts - were expected to "notify themselves" about holding their own lands for centuries.
Nearly 1,000 Chinese protesters gather in London on Saturday against the ruling by the South China Sea arbitral tribunal based in The Hague. Li Wensha / China Daily
Ruling meets strong opposition from both China and abroad
Editor's note: The Public International Law Colloquium on Maritime Dispute Settlement, held in Hong Kong on Friday and Saturday, attracted more than 200 legal experts from a number of countries, including China, the United States, Australia and France. The two-day event was jointly organized by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre and the Chinese Society of International Law. A special panel on the South China Sea arbitration was held on the afternoon of July 16 before the forum concluded.
World-renowned legal experts continued to criticize the South China Sea arbitration ruling, calling it a "dangerous", "one-sided" and "politically-motivated" decision in a major international forum held in Hong Kong on July 15-16.
On July 12, the arbitral tribunal appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in an arbitration case the country unilaterally filed against China. Its ruling absurdly denied China's historic rights over the South China Sea, and it met with strong opposition from both China and many members of the international community.
Myron Nordquist, a professor at the University of Virginia, said a lot of things were wrong about the ruling over the South China Sea dispute, particularly the fundamentally flawed system to begin with.
"It is a bad decision politically and this is a political decision," Nordquist said. "It is a matter of whether Article 298 (which grants a nation the right to declare issues where it will not accept compulsory arbitration) was honored."
Nordquist also said the decision to declare all geographic features within the South China Sea as rocks or low-tide elevations "is not going to be well-received".
In particular, the tribunal ruled that Taiping Island was a rock, instead of an island. This, many believed, would pose a severe challenge to geopolitics and academic conscience.
"Taiping Island is internationally recognized by the academic world as an island," said Michael Sheng-ti Gau, a professor at the National Taiwan Ocean University.
"The Philippines carefully made their case around the delimitation by separating the issues into several portions. However, despite the efforts by the Philippines, it is still, in fact, undeniably, a delimitation issue when the Philippines petitioned to the tribunal over China's right to the South China Sea," said Gau.
But even after this arbitration is over, China may still rely on its inherent right of self-defense to keep Philippine vessels out of the disputed waters, Gau said, adding that allowing hostile Philippines vessels to approach is not an option as China regards it as a serious matter of maintaining territorial integrity.
Gau's remarks, in fact, shed light on some inevitable questions in the wake of the July 12 ruling: How to deal with the aftermath of the ruling and how is the ruling going to impact on the international legal system and international relations?
Pemmaraju Sreenivasa Rao, a former chairman of the International Law Commission, said, as a pragmatic matter, the Philippines at the end of the day would have to return to the negotiating table to settle its dispute with China and achieve a mutually acceptable solution.
Xue Hanqin, a judge of the International Court of Justice, said the ultimate objective for arbitration mechanism is to settle disputes rather than to escalate them.
"However, anyone can easily tell this award will certainly aggravate the dispute between China and the Philippines, aggravate the current military tension between China and the United States and definitely aggravate tension in the region," she said, warning an arbitral tribunal should not have played "such a dangerous game".
Sharing similar concerns, Tung Chee-hwa, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said protecting China-US relations must be the first priority for all of us.
"Unfortunately, because of what is happening in the South China Sea, there is reason to be concerned about the current state of this relationship. It is time for us to rethink and re-evaluate, with urgency, what are the real differences that divide us in the South China Sea," Tung said as he delivered a keynote address to open the forum in Hong Kong on Friday.
Xinhua contributed to the story.
Contact the writer at jasmine@chinadailyhk.com
BEIJING - The United States should stop meddling in the South China Sea issue to keep its relations with China on the right track, experts have said.
Widely deemed as one of the most important relationships in the world, the China-US ties have recently been overshadowed by the South China Sea issue, in which the United States is not a direct party, experts said here during a two-day international security forum that ended Sunday.
The World Peace Forum, an annual event that groups hundreds of political figures, scholars, experts and journalists from across the world to discuss major security issues, was co-organized by Tsinghua University and the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs.
"The US flexing of military muscles in the South China Sea has deeply hurt the Chinese people," said Chen Xiaogong, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.
Last month, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers in seas east of the Philippines and started monitoring the South China Sea with guided-missile destroyers, a few days before a law-abusing ad hoc tribunal issued an ill-founded award on the South China Sea arbitration case, unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government.
US officials have repeatedly pressed China to accept the award sweepingly siding with the Philippines and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
The award was excessive in its vitriol towards China's presence in the South China Sea, said Chen, who just concluded a tour to the United States, adding that it seems as if Washington had already known the results of the arbitration before the award was issued on July 12.
Meanwhile, he said, although quite a hotspot in recent media coverage, the South China Sea issue simply cannot represent the overall relationship between China and the United States, whose significance has stretched out the realm of bilateral ties.
With critical issues on the agenda such as global economic growth and climate change, it is a collective responsibility for both China and the United States to properly manage their relations, he noted.
Yuan Peng, vice president of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that despite the two countries' continued cooperation in such areas as economy and diplomacy, the South China Sea issue has garnered most attention of the public and media.
Echoing Chen, Yuan called on China and the United States to properly handle the issue.
"The ball is not in our court," he said, adding that the United States should "show sincerity" by not sitting behind the absurd arbitral farce of the South China Sea.
Foreign experts attending the the forum, themed "the Order of Common Security: Cooperation, Inclusiveness, and Open-access," also agreed on the urgency and significance of properly managing the China-US ties.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Robert Carr, who is now leading an Australian thinktank, said at a panel dedicated to the South China Sea issue that the United States should not view the topic as a matter of competition for leadership, dominance and primacy against China.
Even if the United States tries to maintain its allies within the region, he said, defining the South China Sea issue as a matter of competition would generate more conflicts with China.
A European Union flag is held in front of the Big Ben clock tower in Parliament Square during a 'March for Europe' demonstration against Britain's decision to leave the European Union, central London, Britain July 2, 2016. Britain voted to leave the European Union in the EU Brexit referendum. [Photo/Agencies]
The European Union's foreign policy chief said on Monday that UK will remain a "full member" of the bloc until the negotiations over leaving EU are concluded, but so far the talks have not been requested.
"Until those negotiations come to an end - and they have not even started, nor have they been requested - the UK is a full member of the European Union," said High Representative and Vice-President Federica Mogherini upon arrival at the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels on Monday.
"So our common work on common security and foreign policy continues and today we will welcome him (Boris Johnson) as a new member of the family."
Foreign ministers of the bloc are convening their monthly meeting against the background of a new UK government, terrorist attacks in Nice, France and a failed military coup in Turkey. Turkey started negotiations to become an EU member in 2005.
Mogherini held a delayed dinner meeting with the UK Secretary for Foreign Affairs Boris Johnson, leader of the Leave EU campaign, on Sunday.
"I met him yesterday as I tend to meet all the ministers that join the family. We had a good exchange on the main issues on the agenda today," said Mogherini.
"So as I said several times, there are no negotiations before the notification of the Article 50 is tabled."
Article 50 in the Lisbon Treaty is the system which initiates the process under which a member leaves the union. Some predicated that the complicated procedure may help keep UK as a member for at least two years or longer. British ministers have said it could be as long as five years.
In late June, European Union leaders gathered for the first time without the UK's presence after the outcome of the June 23 Brexit referendum was announced.
On the European Council's agenda, the 27 leaders of European Union, without that of UK, are scheduled to meet on 16th September, though Johnson is attending Monday's meeting.
Before the meeting, the ministers had a breakfast with US Secretary of State John Kerry. The EU foreign chief said it is a perfect occasion to exchange views on the most pressing issues, mainly events in Turkey, Syria and the Middle East.
On the Foreign Affairs Council agenda, the situation in Turkey and counter-terrorism measures will be debated.
Mogherini said that the union's relationship with China will also be discussed. "I am just back from Beijing where we had important discussions with the Chinese leadership," she said.
To contact the reporter: fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
Beijing "will never give up halfway" over its islands construction on the South China Sea, China's naval chief told a visiting US navy officer on Monday.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson that the Chinese navy had made "sufficient preparations" for any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite existing negative factors, Beijing was still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through mechanisms and rules", Wu said.
Washington militarily pressured Beijing earlier this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude Chinese territorial space on the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing would "advance and complete islands and reefs construction as planned" no matter which country or individual pressures China, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson's first visit to China will run from Sunday to Wednesday. He told Wu on Monday that he was ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea dispute, and its proactive engagement in Asia-Pacific aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at the Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea had become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing at the weekend that:"Although the cooperation between Beijing Washington cannot give an end to all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation."
Cui Shoufeng contributed to this story.
Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admiral Wu Shengli (right), points out the layout of the Chinese Navy Headquarters to Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, during a welcoming ceremony in Beijing on Monday.[Photo/Agencies]
China's naval chief told a visiting US Navy officer on Monday that Beijing "will never give up halfway" the construction of its islands in the South China Sea.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, that the Chinese Navy has made "sufficient preparations" to deal with any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite negative factors, Beijing is still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through rules and mechanisms", Wu said.
Washington has militarily pressured Beijing this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude on Chinese territorial space in the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing will "advance and complete island and reef construction as planned", no matter which country or individual pressures China to do otherwise, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson began his first visit to China on Sunday and will stay until Wednesday.
He told Wu in Beijing on Monday that he is ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea disputes, and its proactive engagement in the Asia-Pacific region has aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea has become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing over the weekend that "although cooperation between Beijing and Washington cannot end all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation".
On Monday, Chinese Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said the PLA Air Force recently conducted a combat readiness patrol in the South China Sea, including sending its H-6K bombers to patrol around Huangyan Island.
Such combat readiness patrols in the South China Sea "will continue on a regular basis", Shen said.
Meanwhile, a navigation alert issued on Monday at the website of China's Maritime Safety Administration said military activities will be conducted from Tuesday to Thursday in designated waters in the South China Sea.
The alert gave coordinates to define the designated area in which entry by other vessels will be prohibited. The area is southeast of Hainan Island.
A sailor raises signal flags on the Chinese Navy missile destroyer Hefei during a military exercise off the Xisha Islands on the South China Sea on July 8, 2016. [Photo by ZHA CHUNMING/CHINA DAILY]
Most Southeast Asian countries are not likely to follow Manila's suit of unilaterally initiating an arbitration case against China, experts said on Monday at a think tank seminar on the South China Sea issue.
Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, said in his keynote speech that it would be the most practical choice for ASEAN members to focus on cooperation with China.
"The disputes in the South China Sea are only a problem between China and some of the ASEAN member states, not all of them," he said.
Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said most ASEAN countries concerned with South China Sea issues are likely to continue with their traditional call for nonviolent resolution of conflicts and adherence to international law.
"Vietnam is unlikely to institute a similar case, as it always had a unique way of resolving differences with China, sometimes through party-to-party channels," he said.
Mentioning that China and many ASEAN members are working together on infrastructure projects, he called on closer exchanges apart from economic deals.
"What we would not like to see is the escalation of an arms race in this part of the world. If we at least temporarily set aside the disputes, the relationship between many ASEAN countries and China would be more cordial. We do a lot of business together," he said.
Katherine Hui-Yi Tseng, an associate research fellow in the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, said that other ASEAN members have adopted a "wait and see posture" on how China and the Philippines solve the issue.
"They will not undertake actions in near future, because this award is actually unhelpful to their claim (all land features are rocks with no entitlement of 200 nautical miles)," she told China Daily by e-mail before the seminar.
"In the near future, these ASEAN countries are not going to launch litigation against China. Such an announcement may be more like a water-testing tactic, hoping to extract more benefits from China," she said.
Wang Yuzhu, a researcher of China-ASEAN studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that many China-proposed projects, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, could benefit Southeast Asia countries.
"At present, if you work with China, you are better off. I think the political leaders know it. They exaggerate the South China Sea issue just because they have other political calculations. They forget the benefit of the common people." he said.
During the seminar, a Chinese researcher denied the accusation that China is trying to tear up the unity of Association of Southeast Asian Nations through winning support from countries including Cambodia and the Laos in the China-Philippine maritime disputes.
Fan Jishe, a senior researcher at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the US wants to mobilize most ASEAN countries to deal with China in very negative terms, which he said is quite similar to the security architecture during the Cold War.
"It will tear apart the regional integrity formulated in the past decades, and Southeast Asian countries may be forced to take sides. That's not in ASEAN countries' interests," he said.
Peng Qinxuan [Photo/Provided to China Daily]
Just take a look at what happened in the world while I was burying myself in the project of allowing the voices of professional young people be heard over the South China Sea arbitration case in The Hague.
Terrorist attacks just hit Nice, a very tranquil little city in France, and then the failed military coup in Turkey hit the headlines. On top of that, the uncertainties brought by the British vote to leave the European Union, the US presidential election, all coupled with struggling African countries and the interfered Asian harmony, are all there.
What will the world be like?
I suppose the answer lies in the hands of young people. As a representative of Chinese youth studying in western society, I have direct experience of how people in the west perceive us and vice versa.
Having traveled in more than 60 cities in 13 countries throughout Europe, I have been deeply impressed by the rich culture and history presented through architecture and museum displays. The academic setting with professional training and the international environment with colleagues from diversified backgrounds has opened my horizons and enriched my perspective. For me, the information is overwhelming each and every day.
However, communication is not always mutual. What we know about the west is disproportionately far more than what the west know of us. Chinese people are often stereotypically seen as reserved and shy, even mysterious and unpredictable.
This mostly attributed to the teaching of Confucius that "a man of integrity acts smart but speaks cautiously."
Teachers in master class will find Chinese students good at homework, but less impressive during class debates, which are simply not part of our culture.
Indeed, we Chinese find it amusing and innovative when the presidential candidates debate fiercely over political issues and deliver public speeches on their political beliefs.
This is not the way to do politics in China. To speak on a platform to attract attention is not always the proper thing to do in the Chinese context, especially when you are not senior enough.
So we kept quiet when we started work on an open letter to the South China Sea panel three months ago. We polished our wording at least ten times before it took shape shortly before the tribunal announced the ruling on 12th July.
We concluded in the 12-page open letter that this was a political drama instead of a professional arbitration.
To my utmost surprise, I have received much encouragement from senior professors and practitioners in the field, including one professor of law from Cambridge University, after the news about the open letter spread domestically and internationally.
Within 24 hours, the full text of the open letter received nearly 10,000 hits on our WeChat platform. More than 70 other student associations and media, including the Los Angeles Post, have publicized the full text. Our websites, established under volunteer help, have attracted over 20,000 signatures on line within several hours. It was an unexpected hit.
Our team, composed of PhD candidates and Masters students in international law from all over the Netherlands, received instant attention from domestic and international media.
Now the award of the tribunal has been issued, and our understanding of the case has also been delivered to the world. Some people ask, what is the use of your letter knowing that the result would not change anyway?
Well, I have to say that it is the categorical imperative of a scholar to do research and to let the voice be heard, no matter that it will make a change or not.
But undoubtedly, we indeed have made a difference by stirring people's interests in this case, calling for attention to international law, spreading our understanding of the situation, and engaging over millions of people in this action. It is no longer our open letter. It has become the open letter of millions of people.
This maybe the end of the arbitration, but it signified a beginning of professional youths' participation in global governance, using our courage and our knowledge, to think critically about what is considered to be authority, to challenge the mainstream thoughts, and to doubt the judicial expansion in the international society.
A true democratic international society requires the participation of young people with diversified backgrounds, with professional perspectives, and with passion and capabilities.
You will witness an increasing number of professional young people stand up beyond their own culture and comfort zone, like we do, to actively participate in the democratization process of the international community, to alleviate the existing stereotypes and bias, and to enhance cross-culture commendation and mutual understanding.
Then you will see a world with less violence and less hatred.
The author is a PhD candidate on international law at the Netherlands' Utrecht University and she initiated the Open Letter against South China Sea Arbitration, which obtained signing support from 30,000 young people across the world within two days.
(Photo : Getty Images.) Leaders at the 11th AsiaEurope Meeting (ASEM) failed to mention the South China Sea issue in their final statement.
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Leaders at the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) issued a final statement on Saturday before concluding the annual regional summit in Mongolia. The regional summit, which brings together key European and Asian countries together, did not directly mention the critical South China Sea issue in the final statement.
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However, the statement did make an indirect reference to the South China Sea row by calling all parties to resolve the maritime dispute by adhering to international law.
According to Japan Times, in the final statement, the leaders stated that they "agreed on the critical importance of confidence building measures, of refraining from the use or threat of force and of disputes being resolved in accordance with principles of international law, the U.N. Charter and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea."
Reuters reported that the South China Sea issue dominated the summit, as the two-day annual summit was preceded by the verdict on maritime dispute given by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration earlier this week.
Several important leaders from Europe and Asia told reporters that China must uphold the verdict handed down by the arbitration court, which invalidated Beijing's claim over almost entire South China Sea.
Germany, France, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea are among the prominent countries that have called on China to respect the verdict. The Foreign Minister of the Philippines Albert del Rosario reportedly did not conduct any bilateral meeting with his Chinese counterpart at the summit. China had expressed a desire for a bilateral meeting with the Philippines during the summit.
Meanwhile, China allegedly managed to win the support of many countries during the ongoing summit. Laos and Cambodia have lent their complete support to China in the South China Sea dispute, the South China Morning Post reported. Many small European countries like Hungary and Greece are allegedly hesitant to take a bold stance against China, signaling a crack in the European Union's front.
China has stated that it would not accept South China Sea verdict under any circumstance. The Chinese government has labeled the verdict as a ploy by Western forces to weaken its control over the South China Sea.
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TagsAsiaEurope Meeting, ASEM, South China Sea, china
(Photo : Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images) Foreign passengers wait for their luggage at the new terminal building T3 (Terminal Three) at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China.
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The construction of the Beijing Daxing International Airport is set to commence in September and is expected to be completed in 2019.
According to China Radio International, a blueprint of the construction site shows a futuristic appeal mixed with a minimalist design and architecture. Many who have seen the airport's design have said it is unique. At least one person has said the design resembles a vagina.
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The airport would be one of China's grandest edifice. It includes seven run ways that can accommodate 100 million tourist, visitors, and passengers annually. The airport would have a bullet train platform and a train station. Beijing Daxing International Airport would be the first airport in the world to have its own bullet train.
The train station will occupy the underground level of the airport, and would allow people to travel between Beijing and Kowloon at an estimated time of only 30 minutes.
The air haven and terminal of the Beijing Daxing International Airport will be the largest in the world upon its completion in three years. The terminal will be a 5-storey building which will be divided into two levels for departures, another two levels for arrivals, and the abovementioned underground level for the bullet train terminal.
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TagsBeijing Daxing International Airport, Beijing International Airport, Beijing Daxing, daxing international airport, Beijing airport, daxing airport, beijing daxing airport
(Photo : Reuters) Tencent-backed Future Mobility aims to produce 250,000 to 400,000 electric self-driving cars annually.
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Future Mobility, an auto startup backed by internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., plans to launch an electric self-driving car before 2020.
The four-month-old auto company plans to sell several hundred thousand fully electric, highly automated, China-built vehicles yearly. Chinese luxury-car dealer Harmony New Energy Auto and Foxconn Technology Group are also backing Future Mobility.
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The new venture of the company aims to produce premium cars like Tesla, but it would employ a different strategy from the U.S. company. The company is currently closing its Series A round of funding, which includes dealership chain China Harmony New Energy Auto.
The startup has already poached 50 engineers from companies like Google, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Future Mobility has said that the company it would have nearly 600 engineers from around the world within a year. The company plans to produce 250,000 to 400,000 electric self-driving cars annually, Fortune reported.
Right from the beginning we define the platform, right from the beginning we define the production process to be mass production and right from the beginning we think of more than one model, a family of models, defined by this platform, CEO Carsten Breitfeld said.
Future Mobility is not the first start-up automaker to set a bold target. Chinese-invested Atieva aims to launch an electric car by 2018 and LeEco has a proposal to develop smart electric cars that will eventually be free - the company plans to make money from in-car content and other services. Even Elon Musks company now target to manufacture 500,000 cars annually by 2018, according to Reuters.
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TagsChinese automaker, Future Mobility, Tencent-backed company, Tencent, Self-driving cars, smart-electric cars, Self-Driving Cars by 2020
(Photo : Getty Images) A group of Chinese nationalists have allegedly protested against the Permanent Court of Arbitration's ruling against China's territorial claims in the South China Sea.
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China's journalism watchdogs have censored news that a small group of people protested against The Hague's dismissal of China's territorial claims in the South China Sea, Financial Times reported.
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The move was apparently meant to hush any efforts to bring international pressure to bear on China to bow to the court's ruling.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague rejected China's claims of sovereignty over disputed South China Sea territories that the Philippines is also claiming.
China's territorial claims in the South China Sea is based on its "nine-dash line." The South China Sea is not only as a busy maritime highway, but is also rich in oil and marine products.
China did not partake in the proceedings since the Philippines took the territorial dispute to the international tribunal and insisted that it does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court.
Aside from rejecting the court's ruling, Beijing is allegedly also quelling nationalist street demonstrations which could hamper its diplomatic campaign against the Hague ruling.
Beijing positioned a police force on the streets surrounding the Chinese Embassy in Manila in anticipation to any protests in the Philippines.
Last Sunday, news about a nationalist protest of a few dozen people in Laoting County near Tianjin was posted online but was eventually deleted.
The protesters were photographed carrying a banner that says: "Down with the US, Japan, Korea and the Philippines! Love our Chinese people!"
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(Photo : Getty Images) Former Philippine President Fidel Ramos. Ramos is likely to head to Beijing soon to start negotiations with China on the South China Sea dispute following the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA).
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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he welcomes Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's announcement on Thursday that he plans to send former President Fidel Ramos as a special envoy to China to negotiate with Beijing after an international arbitral court ruling rejected China's territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea.
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Mainland analysts say Manila and Beijing hope to decrease tension by holding talks through their respective envoys after the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling dealt a major blow to China. There have been concerns that Beijing would opt to use force to stake its claims in the disputed territory.
Beijing has since denounced the ruling saying that it will resolve the South China Sea dispute only through bilateral talks and negotiations with Manila and other claimants which will not be based on the recent ruling of the Hague-based court.
Provocative moves
As it seeks to de-escalate tensions, Beijing has called on all parties to refrain from any provocative actions in the South China Sea region.
Duterte said Ramos was the 'perfect choice' to initiate talks with Beijing on the dispute insisting that war was not an option.
Although Ramos is yet to accept the offer, Lu said he looked forward to negotiations with the Philippines 'very soon.'
"The door to settling the issue through dialogue and negotiation has never been closed," Lu stressed.
PCA
The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) last Tuesday ruled that China has no legal basis to its claims to the South China Sea under its nine-dash line. The court said that China's territorial claims violate the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the sovereign rights of the Philippines.
However, Beijing has said that it does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court, dismissing the ruling as 'null and void' and a 'farce.'
Political analysts said the impending talks between the two nations would ease tensions and would improve bilateral relations dramatically since Manila filed the case before the arbitral court in 2013.
Analysts said there has been no 'high-level contact' between the two sides for quite some time since ties have been frayed following Manila's filing of the case three years ago.
Suitable envoy
Zhang Mingliang, a Southeast Asian affairs expert at Jinan University, said Ramos would be a suitable special envoy considering his knowledge of Sino-Philippine ties and his vast experience in the dispute.
"By publicly making the suggestion, Duterte indicated Manila was aware of the need to launch talks," Zhang said.
Su Hao, China Foreign Affairs University professor, said that President Duterte could still send someone else if Ramos declines the offer.
"But the priority now is to ease tensions first before finding solutions to the South China Sea dispute," Su said.
Su said that as Duterte wanted, Beijing's discussions with Manila on China's assistance to build a high-speed railway could start 'any time.'
Su said Manila and Beijing would likely start the talks when they see eye-to-eye in future meeting of foreign ministers in Laos next week.
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TagsManila envoy, South China Sea, PCA ruling, President Xi Jinping, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, china
(Photo : YouTube) Yidao has accused WeChat of blocking is service on the website messaging platform.
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Yidao, the Chinese ride hailing service backed by tech giant Baidu, has complained about the alleged blocking of its service on the messaging platform WeChat, a company operated by Tencent, which is widely considered as Baidu's rival.
To make its concerns be known to the public, Yidao founder Hang Zhou wrote an open letter to Tencent chief executive officer Pony Ma on Weibo. Zhou accused the Tencent CEO of intentionally blocking Yidao's services on the social media platform due to competitive reasons.
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It is important to note that Tencent operates Didi Chuxing, China's most popular ride hailing service and a direct competitor of Yidao.
According to Tech Node, users complained about not being able to access the Yidao app on WeChat since July 13. Hours after Zhou posted his open letter, the blockade on Yidao was temporarily lifted only to be reestablished again the following day.
In a statement, Zhou said "I just do not understand why WeChat blocked the application. Moreover, Uber and SHenzhuo type apps have also been blocked, Didi is the only exception."
As a response to Zhou's open letter, Tencent released a statement decrying Yidao for sharing promotional material on its service in return for cash rewards. Tencent added that Yidao's practice was the reason why its service was blocked.
According to All China Tech, Uber China protested about the same kind of treatment on WeChat in December 2015.
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TagsWeChat, WeChat news, WeChat reports, WeChat taxi service, wechat update, Tencent, Yidao, Yidao news, Yidao update
(Photo : Getty Images.) China is set to conduct a three-day military drill in the South China Sea from June 19 to June 21.
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China will be conducting a three-day military drill in the South China Sea this week, Chinese state media said, citing the Maritime Safety Agency (MSA).
The three-day military exercise will be conducted from June 19 to June 21. The announcement comes just days after a ruling by the Hague-based international tribunal invalidated China's claim over almost the entire South China Sea.
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The military drill is likely to be seen as China's effort to assert its claim over contested maritime territory in the wake of the global backlash over the South China Sea verdict. The Chinese government has categorically stated that international tribunal's verdict would not affect the country's claims over the maritime territory.
According to ABC News, the three-day military drill will be conducted in an area that is not considered very highly sensitive. The area will be completely cordoned off during the military drill.
The hotly contested South China Sea region frequently witnesses military exercises conducted by China and other claimants. Last year, the US and its allies started conducting freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea in a bid to counter China's assertive claim over the maritime territory.
The announcement of China's latest military exercise comes amid the visit of top US Navy Admiral John Richardson to China. Richardson is likely to discuss the South China Sea verdict with Chinese officials during his visit.
China is claiming sovereignty over a large portion of the South China Sea. Brunei, Taiwan, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam have competing claims over the maritime territory.
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TagsSouth China Sea, china, Hague Tribunal, South China Sea Case Permanent Court of Arbitration, South China Sea Militray Exercise
Africa's largest city shuts down 70 churches for 'noise pollution' Guest Reviewer | 18 July, 2016 by Michael Foust
LAGOS, Nigeria (Christian Examiner) Africa's largest city shut down 70 churches and 20 mosques in late June over what it said was excessive noise.
The move by the city of Lagos, Nigeria which has a population approaching 20 million has startled church members, although the controversy dates back to 2007, according to the Vanguard, a Nigeria newspaper. The city had shut down 10 churches by 2009 and in 2014 alone closed 24 churches.
Bola Shabi, an official with the Lagos Environmental Protection Agency, said it is part of a goal of making the city "noise free" by 2020.
"We've been so strict now that we are not going to even allow make-shift churches in the state any longer," Shabi told the Vanguard. "What I mean by make-shift, using tents and uncompleted building, we are not going to allow that any further in the state."
The government investigates incidents when it gets complaints from neighbors, the Associated Press reported.
The city also has shut down hotels and night clubs, although churches make up the majority of buildings that have been shuttered.
"It is not right for mosques and churches to disturb other people with noise from their activities, simply because they are worshipping God," Tunji Bellow, the city's then-Commissioner for the Environment, told the Vanguard in 2014. "Worshipping God should not come with so much discomfort to others. The ugly situation we have in some parts of the state is between four and five churches and mosques on one street blaring so much noise at the same time, thereby disturbing the peace of others. This is unacceptable and we can no longer tolerate this."
Another attack leaves three officers dead in Louisiana 17 July, 2016 by Reuters , |
BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) - A gunman killed three police officers and wounded three others in Louisiana's capital on Sunday, nearly two weeks after another gunman shoot five Dallas policemen to death following a Black Lives Matter protest there.
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. The attacker was later identified as Gavin Eugene Long, a 29-year-old black man from Kansas City, Missouri.
Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriff's deputy died at the scene, 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.
Col. 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.
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, but Long had an affinity for several black power and separatist groups and claimed in an Internet video to have once been a member of the Nation of Islam.
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.
Sunday's shootings occurred about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of people were arrested this month while protesting the death of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old African-American father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers. Sterling has a lengthy criminal record and was resisting arrest when shot by police officers. Officers said Sterling was armed, but an investigation is ongoing.
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.
* By Sam Karlin, with reporting by Lisa Lambert, Ian Simpson, Tim Gardner and Julia Edwards, Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball in Washington; additional writing by Paul Simao; additional editing by Christian Examiner.
'Praying' is important when tragedy strikes, counselors stress after police shootings 18 July, 2016 by Tammi Ledbetter/Jane Rodgers , |
DALLAS/BATON ROGUE (Christian Examiner) Strains of "Amazing Grace" wafted through the sanctuary of Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Farmers Branch at the private memorial service for Sgt. Michael Smith, one of five Dallas Police Department officers slain last week.
Yea-Mei Sauer, Smith's sister, spoke at the July 13th service, expressing her rage at Smith's murder. Sauer revealed how her brother would have responded: "He would have told me to pray. Use the brain in that head of yours. And listen to your heart."
STORY CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO:
Prayer is not only a legitimate means of dealing with grief, it is highly recommended.
In an interview airing July 14 on Dallas station WFAA, reporter Sonia Azad questioned psychologist Trevicia Williams, Ph.D., regarding how to best deal with physical manifestations of grief and stress.
"Stress is a silent killer," Williams said. "After all we experienced last week, it is important to destress," and to "restore balance in our lives."
Williams recommended taking a "break from all the news, whether it's via television, the Internet or social media." Watching traumatic events repeatedly makes one relive them. "It's like opening the wound all over again. You are working against the brain's natural ability to heal."
When asked by Azad how to "shake off" grief and despair, Williams affirmed the value of prayer. "Praying is very important. Research has shown that...people who have a sense of faith tend to bounce back more quickly. They have a sense of hope and peace about them that all things work together for the good so praying is very important."
Williams also recommended exercise, stretching, not watching the news before bedtime, taking warm baths and avoiding afternoon caffeine to deal with the effects of grief-related stress. Talking through the tragedy with loved ones is also important, Williams noted.
Grief counseling becomes necessary, Williams said, "when you really can't just naturally shake it. Healing is a process. It's going to take time to overcome it, but when you find yourself constantly thinking about it and even maybe resorting to negative behavior, and negative thoughts, then it's important to seek professional help."
Pat Bicknell, retired psychology professor from Howard Payne University, also affirmed the value of grief counseling: "Grief counselors can play a big role as people go through shock, unbelief, why is this happening? Just none of it makes sense. [Tragedy] crates a really scary world for people."
Dealing with grief effectively begins with prayer, said Bicknell, who started the HPU counseling center and was involved in counseling at three colleges.
"Prayer invites the Lord into this whole circumstance where He has amazing healing power. He really heals," Bicknell said. In counseling, prayer is the first thing Bicknell does.
"Even if the person couldn't go there and pray, I would just quietly pray and ask the Lord to surround" the grieving person.
In offering grief counseling to people from various backgrounds and traditions, Stephanie Castillo of Farmington, N.M., first tries to understand where they are in the process and find out whether they have any faith background.
A graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Castillo used her training in counseling to reassure grieving employees at a large industrial plant where she served in the human resources department. "Their feelings of confusion, anger, sadness and disbelief were normal," she shared, recognizing that everyone experiences and processes grief differently.
While some grief counselors approach their job from a secular approach devoid of any faith element, Castillo spoke to employees about the benefit of connecting with their spiritual beliefs, and journaling their thoughts. "Just getting their feelings out of their heads and onto something tangible gives them something they can look back at," she explained.
With thousands of people attending each of the funerals of the five Dallas policemen who were killed at the hands of an assassin, the stress of a grieving community weighs heavily on residents. "God leads other believers and unbelievers to us as they are going through these experiences, and we need to be faithful to pray and ask God to enter into their struggles and let them know God is not separate from their pain."
Help those who are grieving realize that God understand loss, Castillo advised, encouraging Christians to share the sacrifice God made through the loss of his own Son, Jesus Christ, opening the door to further witness to the salvation only God can offer.
As Baton Rouge mourns the loss of three police officers July 17, the head of the Louisiana State Police clearly stated his dependence on prayer. "We want and need your prayers," Col. Mike Edmondson shared at an afternoon press conference. "Baton Rouge is in need of your prayers right now."
Three police officers were shot and killed in Baton Rouge on Sunday after they responded to an emergency call. Their deaths follow a series of recent tragedies involving police violence.
ABC News reports that the three officers were killed by a gunman when they responded to a 911 call. Three other officers were wounded in the shooting.
The officers were Montrell Jackson, 32, Matthew Gerald, 41, and Brad Garafola, 45. They were part of the East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Department.
The gunman has been identified as former U.S. Marine Gavin Long, 29. Long reportedly drove from his home in Kansas City, Missouri to target the officers in Baton Rouge. He was killed during the shooting.
Two other suspects were apprehended after the attack, but were later released. Police believe Long was responsible for the shooting, but they are still investigating.
"We believe the person that shot and killed our officers, that he is a person that was shot and killed at the scene," stated Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson.
This tragedy follows in the wake of another Baton Rouge shooting of African-American man Alton Sterling by a police officer. This event, along with the police shooting of Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, led to widespread protests against police violence.
Police themselves were then targeted in the deadly Dallas shooting which took the lives of five officers.
The nation was again thrown into mourning after Sundays shooting.
"This is truly a sad day in Baton Rouge," Mayor Kip Holden said. "We continue to ask the question and continue to make the statement, let peace prevail in Baton Rouge and this parish. We must look ahead. We thank our officers who have fallen in the line of duty, we pray for their families and we pray for peace everywhere."
Baton Rouges Catholic Bishop Robert Muench is calling for a week of fasting and prayer following the shooting.
Photo courtesy: Wikipedia
Publication date: July 18, 2016
UPDATE (18 July): A court in Nairobi has charged four police officers in connection with the murder of a lawyer and two of his companions.
Willie Kimani, Josephat Mwenda and their driver, Joseph Muiruri, went missing in June after Mr. Kimani filed a case against a police officer on behalf of Mr. Mwenda. Their killing has provoked widespread protest against extrajudicial killings in Kenya.
The four pleaded not guilty but the judge ordered they remain in custody. They face three counts of murder for the deaths of Kimani, Mwenda and Muiruri.
Previous story (7 July):
The human rights lawyer, Willie Kimani, whose alleged murder by "rogue elements within the [Kenyan] police" has sparked mass demonstrations in Nairobi, was working for a Christian charity, the International Justice Mission (IJM).
Kimani, 32, a Christian and father of two, was helping defend a claim by Josephat Mwenda in a case dating from April 2015 about an incident where an officer from the Administration Police (AP) shot Mwenda during a traffic stop. Mwenda went on to file a complaint against the police officer responsible for the shooting, only to then be charged with traffic offenses and illegal possession of drugs.
The two men and their driver, Joseph Muiruri, went missing shortly after visiting a Nairobi court house on 23 June. Eight days later, on 1 July, the bodies of the three men were found in the Ol-Donyo Sabuk River. Initial reports suggest that AP officers, one of whom Mwenda was defending himself against in court that day, may have abducted them.
IJM, which works with Kenyas Public Prosecutor to bring criminal charges against corrupt police officers, opened its office in Kenya in 2001. They have helped secure the release of around 200 people imprisoned on false charges.
Its CEO, Gary Haugen, said on Twitter: If they thought killing my brother Willie would end his fight, they didnt know him, or us. Haugen, driven by his Christian faith, founded IJM as an organisation inspired by Gods call to love all people, and seek justice.
The organisation said on its website: We strongly condemn the perpetrators of these murders and the horrific violence inflicted upon these men. IJM exists to protect the poor from violence, and Willies life was taken while courageously pursuing that mission.
As we work to provide comfort and support for the familieswe are as committed as ever to our IJM Kenya team and to their struggle for justice in their nation. We will seek justice for Willie, Josephat, and Joseph, and will not cease in pursuit of this case until that end is secured.
IJM has launched an online petition on Avaaz, the global online campaigning platform, to demand that Kenyas president, Uhuru Kenyatta, secures justice for the murders. It has collected more than 33,000 signatories so far.
Anti-police corruption protestors, demonstrating in Nairobi since Monday, continued on 6 July when Law Society members marched on police headquarters. Rallying in their hundreds, they called for the resignation of the Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Samuel Arachi, who is in charge of the Administration Police, four of whose members have been arrested in connection with the murder of the three men.
IJM says the corrupt judicial and political systems in Kenya allow police officers to carry out numerous abuses on innocent citizens, who very often end up in prison with no way out and no lawyer to fight for their release.
According to a Kenyan government report, crimes reported to the police in 2015 involving the police increased by 34 per cent.
Through its online petition, IJM is calling for the Kenyan government to ensure the identification and "meaningful" prosecution of everyone involved with the murders; and also the "immediate" removal of Arachi from his post, on behalf of every innocent person abused by his police force.
Lawyers have come out in support of their murdered colleague.
The Law Society of Kenya said Willie Kimani's death was a "dark day for the rule of law in Kenya".
The Nigerian Bar Association said people in the profession should not be harassed. All lawyers must be allowed to represent their clients without fear, molestation and harassment from state agents or any other persons.
Post-mortem:
A post-mortem report into the deaths of the three men showed they were brutally beaten before they were killed.
The pathologist found that Kimani was hit on the back of his head repeatedly with a heavy blunt object until his skull fractured. His genitals were also crushed. Taxi driver Joseph Muiruri also had injuries to his head and was strangled.
Mwenda, who was the most badly beaten of the three, had injuries to his head, neck and chest. His skull was fractured and blood was also found in his chest cavity.
Kenya's police have often been accused of brutality and blamed for a series of extrajudicial killings.
On Wednesday, protesters torched the camp where the four policemen were based, jeopardizing the collection of potential evidence.
Courtesy: World Watch Monitor
Publication date: July 18, 2016
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will be presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumps running mate.
Trump made it official Friday (July 15) fittingly, in a tweet.
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
Pence became governor of the Hoosier State in 2013. Previously, he had worked as a lawyer, president of the Indiana Policy Review, political talk radio show host and U.S. congressman.
He has described himself as a pretty ordinary Christian and as a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.
But he also once said, I made a commitment to Christ. Im a born-again, evangelical Catholic. Thats not a combination you hear every day, as journalist Craig Fehrman, who has covered the Indiana governor for Indiana Monthly, has pointed out.
Here are five faith facts about Pence and how his unusual faith mix has shaped him as a politician.
1. He was raised Catholic and later attended an evangelical megachurch.
Growing up in an Irish Catholic family that reportedly revered the Kennedys, Pence served as an altar boy and went to parochial school in Columbus, Ind., according to Fehrman.
Pence has said he made that commitment to Christ while taking part in a nondenominational Christian student group in college, according to the journalist. Pence had told The Indianapolis Star that he and his family attended Grace Evangelical Church in the 1990s, but by 2013, he told Fehrman they were kind of looking for a church.
2. He supported causes important to evangelicals as a congressman.
As a member of the U.S. House from 2000 until his election as governor, Pence had a reputation as a culture warrior (that) was unsullied, according to Roll Call. The website lists his bona fides: He opposed the expansion of abortion rights and federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, pushed a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage and briefly cut off new federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
3. He clashed with the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis over refugees.
Late last year, Pence clashed with the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis when he halted state support for efforts to relocate refugees, citing security concerns.
The archdiocese defied him by welcoming a Syrian family to the city anyway. In the end, the governor said that while he disagreed with the archdioceses action, he would not block food stamps and other state aid for the family.
On the other hand, he came out against Trumps plan to halt all Muslim immigration to the U.S., tweeting last December that calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.
Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional. Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) December 8, 2015
4. He supports Israel.
Pundits have said one reason Trump may pick Pence is that the governors strong pro-Israel sentiment would shore up Trumps shaky relationship with Jewish voters. Speaking before AIPAC in 2009, then-Rep. Pence linked his support for Israel with his faith:
Let me say emphatically, like the overwhelming majority of my constituents, my Christian faith compels me to cherish the state of Israel.
He backed that up last December at the Republican Jewish Coalitions conference when he said: Israels enemies are our enemies, Israels cause is our cause. If this world knows nothing else, let it know this: America stands with Israel.
5. He signed Indianas controversial religious freedom law.
Last year, Pence found himself at the center of a storm when he supported Indianas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would have allowed businesses and individuals to refuse to do business with some people based on their own religious beliefs. In his 2016 State of the State address, he added:
I will not support any bill that diminished the religious freedom of Hoosiers or that interferes with the constitutional rights of our citizens to live out their beliefs in worship, service or work. No one should ever fear persecution because of their deeply held religious beliefs.
His stance on the issue made him the darling of evangelicals and other conservatives, and he signed the bill into law in March. But a week later, he had to sign a revised version after major corporations, organizations and celebrities vowed to boycott Indiana.
Courtesy: Religion News Service
Photo: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, left, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wave to the crowd during a campaign stop at the Grand Park Events Center in Westfield, Ind., on July 12, 2016.
Photo courtesy: REUTERS/John Sommers II
Publication date: July 18, 2016
Over 90 people were killed and thousands were wounded in a military coup to overthrow President Tayyip Erdogan's government in Turkey. However, the public came out in support of the President and confronted the rebel army on the streets, due to which the coup lost much of its strength.
Pictures on social media showed civilians standing in front of the tanks, one man on cycle stood before the tank raising his arms, and still another one laying outstretched before a tank. At some places there were clashes between the military and the people, where several civilians were killed or wounded, but the people managed to outnumber the army and were photographed climbing on and taking over the tanks.
Over 1,500 armed personnel in the armed forces have been detained, and about 200 unarmed rebel soldiers surrendered to police.
The coup started on Friday in capital Ankara and Istanbul but by Saturday morning, the government appeared to be gaining an upper hand.
Explosions rocked the cities, and the air force used F-16s to carry out attacks against the rebel army tanks stationed outside the presidential palace in Ankara.
Reuters reported that the parliament building in Ankara was also fired at three times by the tanks, wounding several people.
Rebel army helicopters launched missile attacks on special forces headquarters in the outskirts of the capital, killing 17 police officers.
The helicopter that fired missile on Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), was downed by air force.
Turkish Weekly quoted First Army commander Umit Dundar as saying that the coup-plotters were a minority in the army.
"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," Dundar said.
Erdogan said that the rebel group was part of FETO/PDY terrorist organization, which had also tried to usurp the government three years ago.
On Friday at about 2 pm, military announced that it had taken control over the country.
"The power in the country has been seized in its entirety," a rebel military spokesman read the statement on NTV television.
But the presidential sources told AFP that the statement did not represent Turkish army.
"The statement made on behalf of the Armed Forces wasn't authorized by the military command. We urge the world to stand in solidarity with the Turkish people," a source told AFP.
Military Chief of Staff General Hulusi Akar was taken hostage by the rebel section of army at the defense headquarters, but was rescued from an airbase at the outskirts of Ankara by the military loyal to the President.
Massive damages in the city of Ankara were reported by the eyewitnesses. One of the scenes was described as "massive, massive death" by Diego Cupolo, an Italian American photographer.
"Everybody is stressed. There's a lot of broken glass and people are scared," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I heard people coming around with megaphones calling people into the streets: 'Come support your country!'
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry issued a joint statement asking all parties to side with 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 Whitehouse statement said.
People all over the world have observed prayer vigils in honor of the victims of the barbaric attack in Nice which killed 84 people and injured more than 50.
Prayer vigils were observed in various parts of the world on Friday, including in Toronto, Moscow, Sydney, London and in San Francisco where a candlelight vigil was organized.
People gathered outside the French embassy in Moscow, carrying posters such as 'Pray for Nice,' and 'Stay Strong.'
Many people mourned for the victims of Nice attack in Sydney, and the French flag was also raised over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
France had announced a national period of mourning for three days.
In the U.S., a prayer vigil was also held in Lakeway, Texas, where people mourned for 51-year-old Sean Copeland and his 11-year-old son Brodie, who were among the Nice victims. The family, friends, and community of the Copelands also gathered for prayer for them.
The River in the Hills Church also held a prayer vigil for the father and son. They were not members of the church yet, but Pastor Glenn Hubbard kept the vigil for them.
"When I realized it's right here, it's someone maybe a mile away from my own home I thought this is tragic, this is horrible, but I also thought we need to come together and show our love for this family," he said.
An interfaith prayer vigil also took place at Louisvilles Islamic Center, at which the Muslim community condemned the terrorist attack.
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.
New Book from Mississippi Author Hits a Sore Spot 'When Christians Hurt Christians' has international release
Contact: Gina Burgess, 601-798-3298,
PICAYUNE, Miss., July 18, 2016 /
"When Christians Hurt Christians" will help anyone suffering hurt from anyone and wants to protect against further hurt, but is focused on dealing with hurt within the Christian heart. It's jam-packed with scripture to guide and instruct you on applying godly principles when you are wounded by your fellow brother or sister in the body of Christ. A must read that is highly recommended if you truly want to let go of the bitterness, anger, and feelings of powerlessness. This book is for you if you want to learn how to protect against hurts and betrayals.
"When Christians Hurt Christians" has been published in America, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and other countries around the world. It is available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.com and other online book retailers.
About the author: Gina Burgess earned her Master's from Spring Arbor University, and is a professional author, editor and illustrator working freelance in her home town of Picayune, MS. Teaching bible studies, Sunday School, and Discipleship Training since 1972 has blessed Burgess with extensive knowledge of God's word. She infuses her writing with godly light speaking to your heart as she would to a beloved friend and soaking it all with her authenticity. Other books by Burgess include: "The Crowns of the Believers," "Refreshment in Refuge," and "Weep Not for the Dead." She is available as a speaker for conferences, seminars, and 1 or 2 day Bible studies.
For more information about "When Christians Hurt Christians" you can reach the author at 601-798-3298, by email at
Share Tweet Contact: Gina Burgess, 601-798-3298, GLBurgess@gmail.com PICAYUNE, Miss., July 18, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- Betrayal, cruel actions, or spiteful words hurt most coming from trusted friends and family. Gina Burgess offers enlightened insights into handling trusted, but difficult, people in the workplace, at church, and at home in her newest release, "When Christians Hurt Christians." Illustrations and case studies as well as personal experiences blended with Scripture highlight and confirm strategies to protect against hurtful words and deeds. Burgess collected numerous nuggets of advice from Christian leaders, and compiled them in the last chapter she calls "Advice from Sages.""When Christians Hurt Christians" will help anyone suffering hurt from anyone and wants to protect against further hurt, but is focused on dealing with hurt within the Christian heart. It's jam-packed with scripture to guide and instruct you on applying godly principles when you are wounded by your fellow brother or sister in the body of Christ. A must read that is highly recommended if you truly want to let go of the bitterness, anger, and feelings of powerlessness. This book is for you if you want to learn how to protect against hurts and betrayals."When Christians Hurt Christians" has been published in America, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and other countries around the world. It is available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.com and other online book retailers.About the author: Gina Burgess earned her Master's from Spring Arbor University, and is a professional author, editor and illustrator working freelance in her home town of Picayune, MS. Teaching bible studies, Sunday School, and Discipleship Training since 1972 has blessed Burgess with extensive knowledge of God's word. She infuses her writing with godly light speaking to your heart as she would to a beloved friend and soaking it all with her authenticity. Other books by Burgess include: "The Crowns of the Believers," "Refreshment in Refuge," and "Weep Not for the Dead." She is available as a speaker for conferences, seminars, and 1 or 2 day Bible studies.For more information about "When Christians Hurt Christians" you can reach the author at 601-798-3298, by email at GLBurgess@gmail.com , or by Skype reginaburgess.
Christian Leaders, 'Stuck in Denial' Contact: Chaplain E. Ray Moore (Lt. Col.), USAR Ret., President, Frontline Ministries, Inc., and the Exodus Mandate Project, 803-714-1744, exodusmandate@gmail.com
COLUMBIA, S.C., July 18, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Frontline Ministries, Inc., and the Exodus Mandate Project announced today that a "Mass Exodus" of children from the public school system is the only logical response to the transgender bathroom edict by the Obama Administration. Sadly, the response of many Christian leaders and pastors has been silence or simply whining or complaining that cannot change the situation to protect the children. These leaders offer weak solutions or advocate "conservative school reform" rather than call for an exodus of children into the sanctuary of K-12 Christian schools and homeschooling.
The longtime family leader, Dr. James Dobson, is typical of the response of national Christian leaders who fight "symptoms" while neglecting "root causes." On March 28, 2002, during a Focus on the Family radio broadcast, Dobson stated the correct solution upon recognizing the seriousness of the homosexual agenda in California's public schools: "In the state of California, if I had a child there, I wouldn't put the youngster in a public school.I think it's time to get our kids out."
This begs the question: How was Dr. Dobson on the right track in 2002, but as this issue became exceedingly more pervasive in subsequent years, he and other leaders did not strengthen and reinforce this stance? Even though the acceptance of homosexuality is now firmly entrenched in the public schools in ALL 50 states, his May 2016 article for WND is unclear about HOW to protect the children. In the article, titled "Protect Your Kids from Tyrant Obama," he states this advice, "I urge you to protect your boys and girls from those who are espousing these views. Shield them from gender feminism and from those who would confuse their sexuality. We must fight to protect our homes and families from politically correct politicians. There is no time to lose. Our children hang in the balance."
One might think that Dr. Dobson is urging parents to get their children out of public schools because of such words as "protect," "shield," and "fight." It would have been helpful to clarify WHAT the right thing to do is. He did better in 2002, even though he was only referencing the state of California. Now that we know the problem is nationwide, Christian leaders should boldly state that it's time for all Christians to get their children out. In 2002, Dr. Dobson also admitted "I'm going to get hit for [saying] that." What did he mean by getting "hit"? Dr. Dobson has a radio program with a listening audience of millions worldwide. The issue is that Christian leaders need to accept criticism for saying and doing what is right in God's sight.
Dr. Dobson is not the only one who is weakly addressing the real solution to the public schools. On 6/7/16, in an article titled "NYC Doubles Down in Arrest Rooms," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, recognized the threat of government schools. Instead of calling for Christians to get their children out, however, he stated, "Contact your local schools and school boards and take a stand on this critical issue." This is a similar approach to leading family advocate, Tim Wildmon, president of American Family Association. The organization urges parents nationwide to boycott Target stores due to their stance on the transgender bathroom issue, yet they issue no call to boycott (leave) the government schools, where much worse is happening to innocent children every single day (under LGBT-oriented curriculum).
Christian leaders must abandon any fear of repercussions, and speak the truth in love. The situation is dire and Christian leaders can no longer simply "kick the can down the road."
Chaplain E. Ray Moore states, "Christian and conservative leaders are complaining about the bathroom edict, but what about the other issues that have slowly crept into the public schools, such as evolution, Common Core State Standards, Howard Zinn's Marxist interpretation of America, Planned Parenthood, Islamic studies and the LGBT agenda, all of which exist in most public school curricula. Public school children are being indoctrinated in secular humanism and a socialist worldview with impunity. The Obama transgender bathroom edict, while egregious, is mild in comparison to the indoctrination of the minds and capturing the souls of children, which have been going on for decades." While the bathroom edict is certainly appalling, God can use it for good if the national Christian leaders, pastors and families awaken from their slumber and leave government schools for the promised land of K-12 Christian schools and homeschooling. Genesis 50:20 says, "And as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive." Some conservative writers disagree with these major Christian leaders and strongly urge parents to abandon the public schools. National newspaper and USA Today columnist Cal Thomas sees the bathroom edict as the 'last straw" and an opportunity to "end the education monopoly in the U.S." (USA Today 5/16/16). Also, author Daren Jonescu in a 5/13/16 American Thinker magazine article said, "The good newsis that the solution to this final degradation is both available and actually quite obvious. Get your children, your children's children, and your friends' children out of public school now, and keep them out."
Exodus Mandate (www.exodusmandate.org) is a leader in advancing homeschooling and/or private Christian schooling. Its slogan is, "Christian children need Christian education."
Educational options available include: Homeschooling There are many homeschool co-ops and support groups in each state that can assist families in making this change (i.e., www.homeschool.com, www.hsroadmap.org, etc.). Not only is it affordable, but teaching children at home and watching them thrive and produce outstanding educational results are tremendous blessings and benefits you will never regret!
Private/Christian schools Another great option. If there isn't a Christian school in your community, talk to your pastor about starting a Christian school in your church facilities. If you can't afford private/Christian schooling, scholarship funds may be available via private institutions, philanthropists, Christian businesses, churches, etc.
Christian online schooling Online learning provides an abundance of options and gives students freedom to work at their own pace at any time and place with a Christian worldview (i.e., abekaacademy.org, Alpha Omega Academy (aoacademy.com), Freedom Project Academy (fpeusa.org), Liberty University (Libertyonline.com), TheDigitalTutor.com, Sevenstar.org, etc.) Just make sure you don't sign up for "public school" online services. Contact information for Frontline Ministries, Inc.: Chaplain E. Ray Moore (Lt. Col.), USAR Ret., President, Frontline Ministries, Inc., and the Exodus Mandate Project, PO Box 12072, Columbia, SC 29211, email: exodusmandate@gmail.com, 803-714-1744, www.exodusmandate.org. Facebook: Exodus Mandate Community, Exodus Mandate Forum
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If Black Lives Matter, Why are 3,154 Times as Many Blacks Killed by Abortion Each Year Than are Killed by the Police? Contact: Walter B. Hoye II, President, Issues4Life Foundation , 510-225-4055 ext. 4
Neither should be ignored.
Totaling 20.4 million since Roe v. Wade and 429,000 in 2015, that's 3,154 times as many Black lives taken by abortion each year as are killed by the police. Yet pro-choicers scream at the thought of defunding Planned Parenthood and its $550 million dollar a year government subsidy for its genocidal mission.
Meanwhile, the media ignores the contradictions between this harsh reality and the promises of the left, who fail to notice the suicidal implications for their own political futures.
, President of the Issues4Life Foundation interviews
Howard, who has written extensively on abortion demographics and shares his research with Black Pro-Life leaders, says: "Since 1992, Blacks have consistently voted 90% or more for Democratic candidates, delivering majorities of 10 million votes or more for the Democrats in presidential years. Which means that for their opponents to win, they have to garner 65% or more of the rest of the vote."
"That's next to impossible, as both McCain and Romney found out."
"The flaw in this strategy is that abortion has taken such a huge toll on future Black voters that the chances of continued success of this strategy are dim. More than half of those 20.4 million innocent Black babies killed by abortion would be of voting age today. That means at least 10 million missing young Black voters, and a serious dent in future Democrat margins."
Still, Howard's concern is not politics, but life. Howard says, "It is simply ironic that, without abortion, the Democrats would be a shoo-in. So why do they persist in supporting what is clearly a genocidal policy? I once was a lifelong Democrat, but they lost me when the Clintons came along and signed on to their pro-abortion platform, which I saw as disastrous not just for Blacks, but for the whole country."
From Hoye's perspective, ending abortion is a matter of survival now: "I can't quit, the future of my people depends on meeting the needs of our women and children." UNION CITY, Calif., July 18, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- In the past year, 136 young Black men have been killed in confrontations with police. However, the hypocrisy of the left is revealed in that, they ignore the continuing slaughter of innocent Black babies.Neither should be ignored.Totaling 20.4 million since Roe v. Wade and 429,000 in 2015, that's 3,154 times as many Black lives taken by abortion each year as are killed by the police. Yet pro-choicers scream at the thought of defunding Planned Parenthood and its $550 million dollar a year government subsidy for its genocidal mission.Meanwhile, the media ignores the contradictions between this harsh reality and the promises of the left, who fail to notice the suicidal implications for their own political futures. Walter B. Hoye II , President of the Issues4Life Foundation interviews Dennis Howard , President of the Movement for a Better America, one on one to dig deeper. The conversation was eye opening.Howard, who has written extensively on abortion demographics and shares his research with Black Pro-Life leaders, says: "Since 1992, Blacks have consistently voted 90% or more for Democratic candidates, delivering majorities of 10 million votes or more for the Democrats in presidential years. Which means that for their opponents to win, they have to garner 65% or more of the rest of the vote.""That's next to impossible, as both McCain and Romney found out.""The flaw in this strategy is that abortion has taken such a huge toll on future Black voters that the chances of continued success of this strategy are dim. More than half of those 20.4 million innocent Black babies killed by abortion would be of voting age today. That means at least 10 million missing young Black voters, and a serious dent in future Democrat margins."Still, Howard's concern is not politics, but life. Howard says, "It is simply ironic that, without abortion, the Democrats would be a shoo-in. So why do they persist in supporting what is clearly a genocidal policy? I once was a lifelong Democrat, but they lost me when the Clintons came along and signed on to their pro-abortion platform, which I saw as disastrous not just for Blacks, but for the whole country."From Hoye's perspective, ending abortion is a matter of survival now: "I can't quit, the future of my people depends on meeting the needs of our women and children."
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home US Baton Rouge shooter identified as Gavin Long: Ex-U.S. Marine kills three policemen in Baton Rouge
A decorated ex-U.S. Marine sergeant opened fire on police in Baton Rouge on Sunday, killing three officers, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man there sparked nationwide protests, one of which was shattered by the massacre of five Dallas policemen.
The suspect, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was himself shot to death minutes later in a gunfight with police who converged on the scene of a confrontation that Mayor Kip Holden said began as an "ambush-style" attack on officers.
Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriff's deputy were killed, and one sheriff's deputy was critically wounded. 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, told a news conference the gunman was believed to have acted alone, contrary to early reports that police may have been looking for other shooters.
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.
Police did not name the suspect. But a U.S. government official told Reuters the gunman was identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri. Long, who was black, was reported by other media to be 29 years old.
According to Long's military record, released by the Pentagon, he served in the Marines from August 2005 until August 2010, achieving the rank of sergeant. Listed as a data network specialist, he was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 until January 2009, earning several medals and commendations.
Authorities declined to offer a possible motive for Sunday's attack in Louisiana's capital, a city with a long history of distrust between African-Americans and law enforcement that was further inflamed by Sterling's slaying.
Social media postings linked to an individual named Gavin Long and a Kansas City address cordoned off by police on Sunday included a YouTube video saying he was fed up with mistreatment of blacks and suggesting only violence and financial pressure would bring about change. He also said he had been to Dallas to join in the protests there.
"It's only fighting back or money. That's all they care about," he said to the camera. "Revenue and blood, revenue and blood, revenue and blood."
PANDEMONIUM CAUGHT ON RADIO
A second government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators had reason to believe an emergency 911 call may have been used to lure Baton Rouge police into harm's way.
Edmonson said several officers came under fire as police were responding to a report of a man dressed in black standing behind a store holding a rifle shortly before 9 a.m.
In the ensuing pandemonium caught on a recording of emergency radio traffic, police are repeatedly heard reporting: "Officer down" and "deputy down" as officers swarmed the area searching for and ultimately confronting the gunman.
The episode was over in about eight minutes, according to Edmonson's account. At least one of the three officers killed was known to be black.
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 has also 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 Nov. 8 election.
WORRIES AROUND CONVENTION
"We demand law and order," Trump said in a Facebook posting on 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 father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers.
A witness to the Baton Rouge shootings, Brady Vancel, told CNN he saw a man dressed in black clothing and a ski-type mask running through a parking lot amid a hail of gunfire.
Vancel said the gunman "looked up and saw me. We stopped. I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction."
home US Baton Rouge shooting news: Louisiana gunman targeted and ambushed cops
The black U.S. Marine Corps veteran who shot dead three police officers in Louisiana's capital specifically targeted them, police said on Monday, as the United States reeled from the latest deadly violence involving police and black people.
Another officer who was wounded in Sunday's shootings in Baton Rouge was fighting for his life, the state's governor said. The city had been the scene of repeated protests against police violence following the July 5 fatal shooting by officers of Alton Sterling, a black man outside a convenience store.
The Baton Rouge gunman has been identified as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who served in the Marines for five years, including a 2008 deployment in the Iraq war. Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was shot dead on Sunday morning in a gunfight with police.
Racial tension in the United States has been especially high since a black former U.S. Army Reserve soldier fatally shot five Dallas police officers who were patrolling a protest over the police shootings of Sterling and another black man in Minnesota.
"It's a very tough situation here, an attack on the very fabric of society," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told MSNBC on Monday.
Louisiana State Police spokesman Lieutenant J.B. Slaton told the New York Times on Monday that a preliminary investigation shows the Baton Rouge gunman "definitely ambushed those officers."
"We are still trying to find out what his motive was, and that's going to be part of our investigation. But we believe he was targeting those officers," Slaton said.
Social media postings linked to an individual named Gavin Long and a Kansas City address, which was cordoned off by police, included a July 10 YouTube video saying he was fed up with mistreatment of blacks and suggesting only violence and financial pressure would bring change.
The dead officers were identified as Montrell Jackson, 32; Matthew Gerald, 41; and Brad Garafola.
Edwards said one of the wounded officers was fighting for his life while a second underwent surgery and needed further surgery on his neck. A third officer who had a graze wound to his neck was released from a hospital on Sunday.
"RESTORE TRUST"
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in remarks prepared for a conference of black law enforcement officers in Washington, said federal law enforcement agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service were on the scene in Baton Rouge.
"At the Department of Justice, we are determined to do everything we can to bridge divides, to heal rifts, to restore trust, and to ensure that every American feels respected, supported, and safe," Lynch said in her remarks.
Louisiana's capital is a city with a long history of distrust between black residents and law enforcement that has been inflamed by Sterling's death. For many in Baton Rouge, the police have been viewed as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of a city where more than half the 230,000 residents are black.
Lynch, who is black, quoted remarks by Jackson, a black officer killed in Baton Rouge, that he got "nasty, hateful looks" in uniform and felt that some people considered him a threat when he was out of uniform. She quoted him as saying, "Please don't let hate infect your heart."
Lynch said that "if we are truly to honor his service and mourn his loss - and the loss of his friends and colleagues, and of too many others who have been taken from us - we must not let hatred infect our hearts."
At the same event, Lynch's predecessor as attorney general, Eric Holder, said that "an attack on a police officer is an attack on society itself and can simply not be condoned." With America's permissive gun policies, Holder also noted U.S. police often find themselves confronted by people armed with military-grade weapons. He urged law enforcement authorities and others to "speak up" about the need for gun control.
"We live in troubled times, beset by violence directed at those who are sworn to protect us, necessary community law enforcement relations that are frayed, awash in high powered weapons of war and subject to rhetoric that is too often overheated and factually inaccurate," Holder said.
On the July YouTube video attributed to Long, he said he was speaking from Dallas after going there to protest.
"It's only fighting back or money. That's all they care about," he said to the camera. "Revenue and blood, revenue and blood, revenue and blood."
In a separate video, he hinted that should anything happen to him, he wanted viewers to know he was not affiliated with any particular movement or group.
The violence also has heightened security concerns, notably in Cleveland, where Donald Trump is expected to get the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, and Philadelphia, where Democrats are to nominate Hillary Clinton for the Nov. 8 election.
home World Christian minors in China told to quit house churches or be barred from college entrance exam, military academy
China would bar minors from college entrance exams and military academy unless they quit Christian house churches as the state steps up its religious clampdown on churches in Guizhou province.
According to China Aid, a watchdog for Christian persecution in China, authorities in Guizhou province announced June 23 the state's new strategy to tighten its grip on house churches that refuse to join the state-backed Protestant church, Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM).
In addition to the ban, the state also threatens to take legal action against violators.
"This notice was sent to all of the schools in Huaqiu," Mou, overseer of Huaqiu Church, told China Aid. "They (public security) intend to cleanse us and ask us to join the Three-Self Church."
Mou said that authorities then instigated the regulation by taking on their house church and forcing members to agree with it by signing a document.
"Yesterday morning, I questioned a government official in our township, saying, 'We do not accept the way you handled our church's public meetings ... What regulations does the central government have prohibiting [church] meetings? Let us see them,'" recounted Mou. "He said, 'The higher level leadership ordered us to do this; we are just doing [as they say].'"
TSPM follows the atheist state's legislation that forbids indoctrination to those less than 18 years of age. It considers the act of imparting religious beliefs with minors as "brainwashing."
"Huaqiu is in a dark place," declared Mou, whose church lost against officials who blocked their Sunday services on June 28 and July 5.
Several house churches in Guangdong province may also find themselves in dark places as authorities have also forced them to join TSPM or face continued harassment.
The Vineyard Church in Foshan reported that authorities had stolen their religious supplies and even cut off the church's access to water and electricity.
Zhongfu Canaan Church had also refused to join TSPM and was subsequently forced to move out of their church building.
home US Kim Davis contempt order upheld, But Kentucky clerk who refused to issue gay marriage licenses celebrates 'final victory'
The court upheld the contempt order against Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk who refused to issue gay marriage licenses on religious grounds, even after it dismissed her appeals.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled Wednesday, July 13 that the federal district court's contempt order last year does not hold any legal grounds and consequently cannot be vacated.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who represented four gay couples who filed the case against Davis, hailed the court's decision.
ACLU's Project Staff Attorney Ria Tabacco Mar translated the significant meaning behind the court's ruling to uphold Davis' contempt order "for defying the law and denying our clients the marriage licenses they were legally promised."
"It will serve as a reminder to other government officials that placing their personal views ahead of the Constitution and the rule of law is not acceptable," Mar said in a statement.
In addition, the Court of Appeals also ruled that the lower court's injunctions and appeals against Davis are rendered "moot" because of Senate Bill 216 that's bound to take effect Friday.
Kentucky's new law, approved by state legislature and Gov. Matt Bevin, no longer requires a county clerk's name or any identification and authorization to appear in a marriage license.
Davis' lawyer, Mat Staver, considered this particular ruling as a "final victory" and proof that the court "sided with Kim Davis" on the grounds that the "injunctions are gone" and that his client "received the accommodation that she requested."
"County clerks are no longer forced to compromise their religious liberty and conscience rights," said Staver, founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel firm.
Mar also agreed that "the court correctly dismissed Kim Davis's appeals" while praising Kentucky's new marriage law that allows "all loving couples" to acquire marriage licenses "without fear of discrimination."
home US Who is Mike Pence? Donald Trump's choice for vice president known for pro-life, anti-gay marriage political positions
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump selected for vice presidential running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a Christian conservative with a pro-life and anti-gay stance and is opposed to Common Core.
Born Catholic to an Irish family, the 57-year-old governor confessed that he became a Christian during his college years.
"Standing at a Christian music festival in Asbury, Ky., in the spring of 1978, I gave my life to Jesus Christ and that's changed everything," Pence told CBN News.
He also said he placed the moral truth first, his philosophy of government second, and politics last. Apparently, his record of legislation reflected the values of a religious conservative and earned the ire of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups and pro-choice advocates.
Aside from defunding Planned Parenthood, Pence also passed into law HB 1337 that in his own words "prohibits abortions that are based only on the unborn child's sex, race, color, national origin, ancestry, or disability, including Down syndrome."
"Pence's pro-life stance is more than a talking point," said Mike Fichter, president of Indiana Right to Life, in a statement to LifeNews.com. "Gov. Pence has put his pro-life position into action time and time again."
Pence came under fire from LGBT advocates when he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) last year and then forced to amend it after opponents criticized that it allowed business entities to uphold their religious freedom and discriminate against the homosexuals.
When Pence signed Indiana Senate Bill 91 two years ago, the Hoosier State became the first to revert back from the Common Core education standards, which many conservatives criticized.
"I believe when we reach the end of this process there are going to be many other states around the country that will take a hard look at the way Indiana has taken a step back," the Associated Press quoted Pence as saying then.
According to Time, Trump's announcement Friday, July 15 could help him win over those undecided Republicans and conservatives. Not only is Pence a veteran politician; he's also highly favored by Republican insiders and the party's billionaire donors.
home Faith 'God's Not Dead 2' ad rejected for using the phrase 'judged by God'
A billboard for "God's Not Dead 2," which was supposed to be displayed at the GOP convention, was rejected by a company for including the phrase "judged by God."
The billboard company, Orange Barrel Media, reportedly rejected the ad promoting the film's DVD release because it was "too political and "way too incendiary."
"I'd rather stand with God and be judged by the world than stand with the world and be judged by God," reads the line that was supposed to have been in the ad. The whole banner, which featured a photo of actress Melissa Joan Hart, would have measured 32 feet by 60 feet.
Inside information claimed the company considered even the film's title as controversial, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
On the other hand, a billboard featuring a quote from former Pres. Ronald Reagan, which appeared to be anti-religion, was approved.
"We establish no religion in this country," the quote said. The ad was bought by the atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation.
"I'm perplexed. They dragged us along for weeks," said Steve Fedyski, the CEO of Pure Flix, which made the sign. "Now, right up against the convention date, they say we aren't approved, and they give us no logical rationale."
Pure Flix would have paid Orange Barrel $64,100 to put up the ad.
"My speculation is that someone, somewhere didn't want our message out," Fedyski said.
Orange Barrel explained that they and Pure Flix were not able to "move forward with the campaign," and that the decision was mutual.
Orange Barrel also reportedly cited problems with the ad's size and placement.
"We offered to work with them on placement at an alternate venue, but Pure Flix declined to engage in these discussions," Orange Barrel told CNN.
The movie is about a high school teacher who ended up discussing about Jesus in class. The discussion became too complex and led to a controversial court case.
home World Hindu extremists attack Christians, women and children in India
A group of Hindu extremists, numbering about 50 in all, attacked a Christian congregation in a village in east India, beating even women and children with rods.
According to Erik Morsehead of Mission India, an organization that helps equip believers through discipleship, the extremists told the Christians to leave the village and warned that if they refuse to do so, they would experience even worse consequences.
The Christians quickly left the village and went to another village to escape the extremists.
Morsehead said the police was not of any help to the Christians. On the contrary, they too warned the Christians of further beatings if they don't stop worshiping Jesus.
"With all this going on, the police refused to offer any assistance. In fact, they said the church planter himself, if he continues to lead people to Christ, they will beat hi worse than the extremists did," Morsehead said, according to Mission Network News.
India is 80 percent Hindu and about 14 percent Muslim. Christians belong to the minority, comprising only about 2 percent of the population.
Although India does not prohibit religious freedom for Christians, radical Hinduism has been encouraged since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came into power, according to Open Doors.
Modi is a part of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Under his rule, minorities have experienced regular attacks from Hindu extremists. The frequency of attacks could be driven by the government's refusal to condemn such actions.
Morsehead said Christian persecution in India is "more common than people realize" and happens "on a regular basis." He said it is more intense in some areas compared to others.
However, in spite of the attacks, Morsehead said God has been doing great things in India through the churches.
"We just ask everyone to join us in prayer as many of our sisters and brohters just go through unbelievable amounts of persecution," he said.
home World Free health care to Rome's impoverished, provided by Vatican's medical van
A donated camper van from the Vatican now serves as a mobile medical unit that transports volunteer health professionals and free health care straight to Rome's impoverished.
According to Catholic Herald, the Papal Almoner's office donated to a group of medical volunteers an RV-style vehicle transformed as a mobile medical unit. The vehicle transports medical supplies and free health care directly to the poor and homeless seeking shelter in shanty towns and abandoned buildings.
Driving around Rome's outskirts, the white and blue-striped camper van carries the license plate of the Vatican City and the markings of the Holy See's coat of arms. According to Supportive Medicine Association's Director Dr. Lucia Ercoli, this makes it easier to bring "the closeness of the Pope and the Church" to the migrants "who live in truly inhumane conditions."
These migrants, Ercoli noted, are those who have suffered the trauma and loss of loved ones when they embarked on a perilous journey to Italy by sea. Most of those receiving the free health care are children, women and expectant mothers.
The doctor also reported treating more than 2,000 people since they started using the camper van.
Last year, the Vatican provided the needy with free access to showers, bathrooms, barber shops and even a dormitory for the homeless, Catholic News Agency reported.
Earlier this year, the Vatican set up near the Bernini colonnade a clinic that provided free medical treatment for the poor.
"It seemed right to also provide free medical visits an indispensable service to the health of the poor who live among us," the papal almoner, Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, told the Vatican Radio.
Ercoli said that hundreds show up Saturday mornings for the medical services at the colonnade.
"We are grateful to Pope Francis for having wanted, once again, to give a concrete sign of mercy in St. Peter's Square for persons without a fixed residence or who are in difficulty," she said.
Archbishop from Africa appeals for help for thousands of displaced people in South Sudan
The armed conflict that has been the result of political tension in South Sudan has displaced thousands of residents, and a Roman Catholic official is desperately calling for aid to help his people stay alive.
In an interview with Vatican Radio, Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro of Juba--the capital and largest city of South Sudan--estimated that some 36,000 people have already been driven away from their homes because of the conflict between the African nation's president, Salva Kiir, and his rebel-turned-vice-president James Wani Igga.
"In our Catholic Churches and communities we have more than 16,000 displaced people with many more in Mosques and in other faith based communities" he told Vatican Radio's Linda Bordoni in an interview.
The archbishop explained that while the internally displaced residents are keeping calm inside their temporary shelters, there is a big possibility that "they are not going back home."
He added that residents like him are not sure if the cessation of hostilities recently agreed upon by the conflicting parties will hold for a long time.
"The situation is calm, but on the ground the humanitarian situation is one of misery," Archbishop Lukudu explained, saying that most residents lost all their properties when they lost their homes.
Because of this, the Roman Catholic official issued a desperate call for help, stressing that "a lot of people will die" if assistance in the form of food and other essential needs does not reach Juba and other parts of South Sudan immediately.
"If there is anyone at all that can help us, this is the moment to save lives," the archbishop said.
"I know there are many sufferings in the world but ours in this moment was not expected and if we can be rescued and helped, we would be very grateful, and I want to thank anybody who will do that," he added.
British man prosecuted after confronting priest who abused him as a boy
A British man who says he was abused by a Catholic missionary almost 50 years ago is being prosecuted in the Italian courts after he travelled to Verona to forgive his abuser.
Mark Murray (60) was one of 11 men who settled out of court with the Comboni missionary order for abuse suffered during the 1960s and 1970s at Mirfield in Yorkshire. They received sums of between 7,000 and 30,000, paid by the order. He is now married with two children but has suffered years of psychological problems because of what was done to him.
However, Murray sought out his abuser, Fr Romano Nardo, at the Comboni order's Verona headquarters last April with a view to confronting and forgiving him. In an encounter filmed with the help of Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he says: "You have had a massive negative impact on my life."
Nardo sinks to his knees and replies: "If it is my fault that you bear a heavy cross, I believe I should ask the Lord for forgiveness for having erred. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. If what happened in your life was caused by me, and if what you are saying is true, I am truly sorry and ask for forgiveness."
The film shows shows Murray entering the Verona Mother House, asking for Nardo, then waiting quietly in the order's chapel.
However, according to the Observer, last week he received a summons to court in Verona on counts of "trespassing, stalking and interference in private life".
He told the paper: "The Combonis know these 'crimes' are not true. They are trying to intimidate me," he said. "It's all about power and control. They are trying to send out a message, 'Don't dare take us on'."
He said: "When I was sitting in that church, I was in control. I was no longer a child. For the first time in my life, I had total control and it was so powerful that I was able to forgive him."
Murray added: "What the Combonis are doing now is re-victimising me and compounding the abuse I experienced as a child. It's the opposite of what Pope Francis has said about treating abuse victims with understanding and compassion. Why are they doing this to me and my family?"
La Repubblica journalist Marco Ansaldo has now also been contacted by police and is expecting to be charged. He told the Observer: "I checked my sources. We had three journalists on the case. What can the Combonis say? I think their objective is to pull down Mark Murray and because he was listened to by La Repubblica, they would like to bring us down too. It will be a battle and we will see what the outcome is."
Deep divisions over homosexuality as UMC elects first openly gay bishop
The first openly lesbian bishop has been consecrated in the United Methodist Church (UMC), despite the denomination technically forbidding the ordination of "self-avowed practising gay people".
Rev Karen Oliveto, senior pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, was elected to the position of bishop on July 15 by delegates at the Western Jurisdictional Conference and was consecrated a day later.
The 55-year-old, who is married to a deaconess in the Church, said of her election: "Today we took a step closer to embody beloved community and while we may be moving there, we are not there yet. We are moving on to perfection."
The UMC does not permit same-sex marriages, but activists have long sought to promote the advancement of LGBTQ rights in the Church.
They have argued for "discriminatory language" in the Book of Discipline the law and doctrine of the UMC to be removed, for gay and lesbian ministers to be ordained, and for same-sex weddings to be performed in UMC churches.
A day before the UMC's General Conference in May, 111 clergy came out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and inter-sex in an attempt to force the issue into the light.
No doctrinal decisions have been made as yet. The Church has created a commission to discuss its stance on homosexuality, and has said it may hold a special session on the subject in 2018 or 2019.
In the meantime, some churches are actively disobeying UMC law. Bishops are elected by jurisdictional conferences, rather than a central body, and some of these are openly ordaining gay ministers and passing resolutions that affirm transgender people.
Following Oliveto's election, the president of the UMC Council of Bishops, Bruce Ough, said the move "raises significant concerns and questions of church policy and unity".
He said that the council does not have authority to intervene in the election, but that it is "monitoring this situation very closely".
"Our differences are real and cannot be glossed over, but they are also reconcilable," he said of the growing fracture in the Church over homosexuality. "We are confident God is with us, especially in uncharted times and places."
Some church leaders immediately condemned Oliveto's consecration. President of evangelical UMC organisation Good News, Rev Rob Renfroe, accused the Western Jurisdiction of pushing the Church "to the brink of schism".
Vice president of Good News, Rev Thomas Lambrecht, said it was a "grave breach of unity".
Others, however, welcomed Oliveto's election.
Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), which advocates for LGBTQ people in the UMC, said it was a "historic moment".
"Officially barred from so many churches and positions of spiritual leadership, queer persons may now see themselves as leaders of the body of Christ in the largest mainline protestant denomination in the United States," a statement from RMN read.
"Today is cause for great celebration and joy in the lives of LGBTQ people and United Methodists everywhere. Not only has God seen fit to raise excellence in leadership to the level of a bishop in Rev. Dr. Oliveto, but we are all privileged to be living witnesses to the work of the Spirit who is animating resurrection in the body of Christ a sign of great joy and great hope."
Egypt: 15 arrested over arson attack on Christian homes
Police have arrested 15 people after an arson attack on homes belonging to Coptic Christians in an Upper Egyptian village, in the latest of a series of attacks on Christians in the country.
The arson attack on five houses in Abou Yaboub in the Minya governate came on Saturday after rumours spread about a church being built in the area. The arrests reportedly came hours later.
The incident is the latest in a string of attacks against Christians, especially in the Minya region, home to a relatively high proportion of Coptic Christians. Last week, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of Minya, Anba Makarios called on police to enforce the law protecting citizens from sectarian violence, saying that attacks are taking place at an average of one every 10 days.
Elsewhere, on 5 July an Orthodox Christian nun from Mar Girgis Monastery in Old Cairo was killed after reportedly being hit by a stray bullet on the Cairo-Alexandria Highway.
Recent weeks have also seen the assault on homes of Christian families in the village of Karm el Loofy, the burning of a kindergarten run by Christians in Minya, and the murder on 30 June of Rafael Moussa, a Coptic Orthodox priest of the church of St. George. The murder was carried out in Al Arish, a coastal city in North Sinai that is only a few miles away from Gaza. So-called Islamic State (IS) took responsibility for the killing, describing Moussa as a "disbelieving combatant."
Also in Minya in May, a 70-year-old Christian woman alleged to be the mother of a man who was romantically involved with a Muslim woman was stripped naked by a mob of 300 Muslims and paraded through the streets of her village.
Tensions between Christians and Muslims have intensified after the Arab Spring of 2011.
The worst single incident came in February 2015, with the beheadings by Islamic State of 21 Egyptian Christian migrant workers.
Egypt has an estimated population of nine million Christians. Mostly Orthodox Copts, they account for about 10 per cent of Egypt's population, which is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.
Baton Rouge: Calls for week of prayer and fasting after more fatal shootings
The Catholic Bishop of Baton Rouge has called for a week of prayer and fasting following the fatal shooting of three police officers on Sunday.
"Words cannot express the emotions we feel for those who have lost loved ones in the tragic events of this day. Their entire lives have been unexpectedly and terribly turned upside down," Bishop Robert Muench said in a statement.
"In visiting this afternoon with two of the families affected by these shootings, Fr Tom Ranzino and I shared prayer and support in the midst of their shock, horror and grief. Prayer is a powerful path to follow when tragedy happens, but even the most devout of us sometime question: 'What good could come of this?' Only the Word of God has the answer to the questions that shake our faith: The answer is our Lord Jesus Christ. In Jesus, hope ultimately triumphs over despair; love ultimately triumphs over hate; and resurrection ultimately triumphs over death.
"Standing firmly on the pillars of these eternal truths, we look to his words of promise in the Sermon on the Mount, and we recall two beatitudes that speak to the hope we should hold, especially today: 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God,' and 'Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted' (Matthew 5:9,4). We renew our call for a diocesan-wide week of prayer and fasting as we reflect on the events of the last several days, and as we work toward a lasting peace in our communities."
A former US Marine sergeant opened fire on police in Baton Rouge, Lousiana yesterday, killing three officers. The attack came nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man there sparked nationwide protests, one of them shattered by the massacre of five Dallas policemen.
The Baton Rouge suspect, who has been identfied as 29-year-old Gavin Long, was himself shot to death minutes later in a gunfight with police who converged on the scene of a confrontation that Mayor Kip Holden said began as an "ambush-style" attack on officers.
Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriff's deputy were killed, and one sheriff's deputy was critically wounded. 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, told a news conference the gunman was believed to have acted alone, contrary to early reports that police may have been looking for other shooters.
Sunday's bloodshed followed days of 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.
Long had posted videos online in which he urged African Americans to "fight back" against unjust treatment by the US police force.
A YouTube video posted on July 10 showed Long saying he was fed up with mistreatment of blacks and suggesting that only violence and financial pressure would bring about change. He also said he was speaking from Dallas, where he had gone to join protests.
"It's only fighting back or money. That's all they care about," he said to the camera. "Revenue and blood, revenue and blood, revenue and blood."
In a separate video, he insists that should "anything happen" to him, he wanted his viewers to know he was "not affiliated" with any particular movement or group.
"I'm affiliated with the spirit of justice, nothing more nothing less," he said. "I thought my own thoughts, I made my own decisions."
According to Long's military record, released by the Pentagon, he served in the Marines from August 2005 until August 2010, achieving the rank of sergeant. Listed as a data network specialist, he was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 until January 2009, earning several medals and commendations.
Authorities declined to offer a possible motive for Sunday's attack in Louisiana's capital, a city with a long history of distrust between African-Americans and law enforcement that was further inflamed by Sterling's slaying.
A government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators had reason to believe an emergency 911 call may have been used to lure Baton Rouge police into harm's way.
Edmonson said several officers came under fire as police were responding to a report of a man dressed in black standing behind a store holding a rifle shortly before 9am.
Chaotic moments caught on video
In the ensuing pandemonium caught on a recording of emergency radio traffic, police are repeatedly heard reporting: "Officer down" and "deputy down" as officers swarmed the area searching for, and ultimately confronting, the gunman.
The episode was over in about eight minutes, according to Edmonson's account. At least one of the three officers killed was known to be black.
President Barack Obama condemned the attack, vowed that justice would be done and urged Americans to focus on rhetoric and actions that united the country, rather than divided it.
"We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us," he 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 policemen killed by a black former US soldier who opened fire July 7 at the end of an otherwise peaceful protest denouncing the Sterling and Castile slayings.
Those two killings and the reprisal attack on Dallas police by a suspect who embraced militant black nationalism renewed tension 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.
Additional reporting by Reuters.
Germany: Steep decline in Catholic church attendance
Almost 200,000 Catholics left the Church in Germany last year, according to figures which show an ongoing, steady decline in church attendance in that country.
There are 23.7 million Catholics in Germany, comprising 29 per cent of the population of 80 million, making Catholicism the largest religious group. But figures released at the end of last week by the German Bishops' Conference show that in 2015, a total of 181,925 people left the Church, while 2,685 people became Catholic, and 6,474 reverted to Catholicism.
When compared to the official statistics of 20 years ago, average church attendance is down from 18.6 per cent in 1995 to 10.4 per cent in 2015, while the number of baptisms has declined by more than a third, from almost 260,000 in 1995 to just over 167,000 in 2015.
The decline in marriages is even steeper, with 86,456 couples marrying in church 21 years ago, and almost half that number 44,298 couples tying the knot in church last year.
Despite the figures, the head of the conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising described the Church as a continuing "strong force, whose message is heard and accepted".
Cardinal Marx added: "We need a 'sophisticated pastoral practice' that does justice to the diverse lifeworlds of people and convincingly passes on the hope of the Faith. The conclusion of last year's synod of bishops and the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia by Pope Francis are important signposts...Pope Francis gives us courage... when he tells us that the way of the future Church is the way of a 'synodal church'. That means: All faithful are called upon, laypeople and priests! Together we will continue to give convincingly witness to our Faith and the Gospel."
Critics of the Church in Germany point to the Kirchensteuer, or church tax system which raises very large sums for the Church.
In 2013 for example, the Catholic Church in Germany received almost 5.5 billion (4.6 billion) via the tax.
The tax is believed to put Catholics off practising their faith, and only around a third of German Catholics actually pay the levy, which originates from the 19th Century and is paid as a supplement to income tax.
The wealthy nature of the German Church was illustrated by Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, the notorious "Bishop of Bling" removed for his lavish spending by Pope Francis in 2014.
Johnson amendment: Trump's 'greatest contribution to Christianity'?
Donald Trump has said that if elected president he will abolish the "Johnson amendment" which prevents churches and other religious bodies from campaigning politically.
Introducing his Catholic running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence in New York on Saturday night, the presumptive Republican candidate said: "We're going to get rid of that horrible Johnson amendment and we're going to let evangelicals, we're going to let Christians and Jews and people of religion talk without being afraid to talk".
Trump has excited evangelicals with the move, which comes amid a growing tilt for the Christian vote. An appeal which, so far at least, appears to be succeeding.
OK, so what exactly is this Johnson amendment?
It was sponsored by former Democrat president Lyndon Johnson in 1954 when he was a Texas senator, and it's an amendment to the federal tax code which limits political activities for non-profit organisations that are classified as tax exempt.
The Johnson Amendment states that bodies which are exempt from federal income tax cannot: "Participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office."
The IRS says on its website: "Section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office."
Supporters of the amendment argue that it helps cement the separation of church and state in the US, and prevented minorities such as blacks from being discriminated against during the civil rights movement.
Opponents say that Johnson was attempting to silence pastors who may have been critical of his agenda, including on civil rights.
Did Trump just come up with this to coincide with announcing his running mate?
Not quite, to be fair. Trump may be relatively new to the debate, but he has mentioned it a few times on the campaign trail and last month he heralded his plan to abolish the amendment as "my greatest contribution to Christianity".
Trump said: "I think maybe that will be my greatest contribution to Christianity and other religions is to allow you, when you talk religious liberty, to go and speak openly, and if you like somebody or want somebody to represent you, you should have the right to do it".
So, Trump's pretty fired up about it then?
You could say that. Last week, he excitedly called Jerry Falwell Jr, the Liberty University president and a long-time opponent of the amendment, and woke him up with news of his plan.
"He was so excited," Falwell said. "After 30 years of the so-called conservative leaders who have been elected by evangelicals, none of them thought to advocate for the repeal of the Johnson amendment, giving evangelical leaders political free speech. ... He thinks it is going to be a revolution in the Christian world."
But what's he really up to?
It is all part of a strategy if that's not too flattering a word to win over the evangelical vote ahead of the presidential election in November.
Polling suggests that so far Trump's approach is working, with four-fifths of white evangelicals apparently planning to vote for the maverick Republican, albeit somewhat reluctantly and despite his colourful private life and controversial, confrontational style.
"This [the proposed abolition of the Johnson amendment] is something that could make a difference with Christian voters in the fall," Falwell told Time magazine. "It is almost as important for Christians as the appointment of Supreme Court justices."
Falwell is an open, early supporter of Trump, and when he endorsed former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential race, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State complained to the IRS and called for an investigation of Liberty University.
OK. But will the amendment actually be abolished?
That depends, of course, on whether Trump defeats Hillary Clinton, who has not questioned the amendment. Conventional wisdom is against that happening, but with the increasing rise of populism and divisive politics throughout the world, all bets, surely, are off.
Kenya: Four police officers charged with murder of Christian lawyer
Four police officers have been charged in connection with the murder of a Christian lawyer, his client and their taxi driver in Kenya which sparked widespread protests.
Willie Kimani, Josephat Mwenda and their driver Joseph Muiruri disappeared last month in the capital city of Nairobi after Kimani filed a case on behalf of Mwenda against a police officer who allegedly shot him.
Their bodies were found north-east of Nairobi on 1 July after an extensive search led by Kenyan police and IJM staff.
Kimani, a 32-year-old human rights lawyer who worked for the Christian charity International Justice Mission (IJM), was himself a practising Christian and father of two. He was defending a claim by Mwenda in a case dating from April 2015 over an incident where an officer from the Administration Police (AP) shot and injured Mwenda at a traffic stop. Mwenda went on to be charged with traffic offenses and the alleged illegal possession of drugs.
The two men and Muiruri, their driver, went missing shortly after visiting a Nairobi court house on 23 June, and eight days later, on 1 July, the bodies of the three men were found in the Ol-Donyo Sabuk River.
IJM, which opened its Kenya office in 2001, works with Kenya's Public Prosecutor to bring criminal charges against corrupt police officers and have helped secure the release of around 200 people imprisoned on false charges.
Its CEO, Gary Haugen, said on Twitter: "If they thought killing my brother Willie would end his fight, they didn't know him, or us". Haugen founded IJM as an organisation "inspired by God's call to love all people, and seek justice".
IJM said on its website: "We strongly condemn the perpetrators of these murders and the horrific violence inflicted upon these men. IJM exists to protect the poor from violence, and Willie's life was taken while courageously pursuing that mission. As we work to provide comfort and support for the families...we are as committed as ever to our IJM Kenya team and to their struggle for justice in their nation. We will seek justice for Willie, Josephat, and Joseph, and will not cease in pursuit of this case until that end is secured."
IJM has launched an online petition on Avaaz, the international online campaigning platform, to demand that Kenya's president, Uhuru Kenyatta, secures justice for the murders. The petition has collected more than 33,000 signatories so far.
Multiple healings, salvations amid revival fires in America: 'God is forgiving our sin and healing our land'
Amid the endless stream of tragedies happening all over the world, bright rays of hope are emerging from the darkened sky.
These rays are the revival fires breaking out in American cities, indicating that "God is forgiving our sin and healing our land," says Christian author Jennifer LeClaire.
In her op-ed piece for Charisma News, the director of the Awakening House of Prayer cites at least four major events in America this year where God manifested and is still manifesting His glorious presence by way of healing and other miracles.
She calls these events the "San Diego's Fire and Glory Outpouring" (in San Diego, California), "The West Coast Rumble" (in Seattle, Washington), "The Appalachian Awakening" (along the West Virginia-Kentucky border)" and "Azusa Now Ripples" (in Los Angeles, California).
During the San Diego conference in January this year, LeClaire says miracles were reported including several cases of stage 4 cancer, birth defects and glaucoma healed.
Miracles also happened during the Seattle Revival Center gathering in Newcastle, Washington early this year. In one of the reported miracles, a woman who had her breast removed in cancer surgery felt it growing back.
Meanwhile in the so-called "Appalachian Awakening," the revival going on at the West Virginia-Kentucky border is leading to the salvation of thousands, LeClaire says. In two weeks of preaching, at least 3,000 youngsters responded to one evangelist's salvation message and became evangelists themselves. They are now Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to encourage other youth to join the revival party.
LeClaire considers April 9 as the "turning point for the nation" since on that day "something shifted" in Los Angeles, California, with the holding of Lou Engle's Azusa Now prayer event. On the same day, United Cry gathered 30,000 pastors in Washington, D.C.
Cal Pierce, director of the International Association of Healing Rooms in Spokane, Washington, told LeClaire that "prior to Azusa Now, the body of Christ was so concerned about the future and looking at the elections and global economies."
Pierce said he saw more miracles in the 30 days after Azusa Now than he did in the first 16 years of the Healing Rooms ministries.
One of these miracles happened to a little boy who was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Doctors had already given up hope of saving the boy. But a Healing Rooms team prayed and Little Wyatt was healed, Pierce said.
One thing remarkable, LeClaire says, is that when Pierce preaches, people begin to testify of healings without anyone laying hands on them.
"We're seeing these types of miracles now on a continuous basisthings our eyes haven't seen and things our ears haven't heard before," Pierce said.
Nigeria: 200 Muslims storm and destroy Catholic church
A group of several hundred Muslim youths have stormed and destroyed a Catholic church in Nigeria, days after a female pastor was hacked to death and a week after the similarly brutal killing of another, male evangelical pastor.
The latest attack came on St Philip's Catholic Parish, Baki Iku, close to Zuma Rock in Niger State, where worshippers were told on Friday that the day was for Muslims to pray and not Christians, who could only do so on Sundays.
The Vicar-General of the church, Revered-Father Gobep Luka Sylvester, confirmed the attack to Nigerian newspaper This Day and said that numerous pieces of church property had been destroyed.
Sylvester told This Day: "Sometime around 2pm, some Muslim youths in numbering 200 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."
Sylvester said that the incident had been reported to the police, who claim to have made some arrests and said they will investigate further.
In 2012 Alhaji Kabiru Sokoto, a suspected member of terrorist group Boko Haram, detonated a bomb on Christmas day that killed several Catholics and passers-by at St Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla, close to St Philips that was destroyed on Friday.
Sylvester added: "Just last week, Mrs Eunice Olawale, a mobile preacher of the Redeemed Christian Church of God was killed by some fanatical Muslims in Kubwa, FCT. How long are we going to continue like this?"
Last week, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) condemned the Muhammadu Buhari administration over increasing violence against non-Muslims and warned Christians to defend themselves following the killing of Olawale last weekend.
Olawale, a pastor for the Redeemed Christian Church of God, was hacked to death in the Gbazango area of Kubwa, Abuja, by suspected Muslim fanatics, while preaching on the morning on 9 July.
Prior to that, a male pastor was also hacked to death by armed Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria's central state of Nasarawa, according to World Watch Monitor (WWM).
Rev Joseph Kurah, of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) in Obi town, was reportedly killed on 30 June after going to his farm at around 7pm to cut down trees for roofing wood.
Rowan Williams warns of growing violence in South Sudan
Rowan Williams has spoken out against the recent eruption of violence in South Sudan, highlighting the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable who "as so often" are hit hardest by the loss of lives, loved ones and homes.
Speaking in his capacity as chair of Christian Aid, Dr Williams who visited South Sudan with the charity in 2014 said he was praying for peace in the country, where 300 lives have been lost and thousands displaced from their homes in the capital, Juba.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury said: "The recent escalation of violent conflict in Juba since July 7 has caused yet more appalling suffering for the people of South Sudan who have over the past two and a half years endured the terrible consequences of a return to war and the bitter disappointment of hopes denied or deferred. It is as so often the poorest and most vulnerable who bear the brunt of the violence, who have lost lives, loved ones and homes. Thousands of people have been displaced by the recent violence. Many have sought refuge in church compounds across Juba, seeking safety and protection. These people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. For too long, women, children, and men in this nation have struggled to continue with their daily lives against the threat of food shortages, widespread displacement, economic crisis, and the trauma of murderous conflict."
Dr Williams added that the international community must hold South Sudan leaders to account over the implementation of a fragile peace agreement. "The recent hostilities have demonstrated the fragility of the peace agreement," he said. "They have underscored the need for the international community to call the leaders of South Sudan to account in implementing the promise of peace. They have shown just how much is at stake in this for future generations in South Sudan: if the next generation is to inherit anything more than devastation, resentment and failed hopes, urgent action is imperative in ending this conflict. As they did through decades of civil war, the churches once again stand as one of the few signs of hope, giving voice to the needs of the people of South Sudan... Their commitment to working for peace and reconciliation is as strong as ever. As the South Sudan Council of Churches says in its statement, 'The time for carrying and using weapons has ended; now is the time to build a peaceful nation.' I affirm and echo their cry for peace. I stand with them in praying that parties, communities and leaders do everything in their power to 'create an atmosphere where violence is not an option'."
As Christian Today has reported, fighting erupted in Juba between troops loyal to rivals President Salva Kiir and vice-president Riek Machar, amid rising fears that the country could slide back into civil war. South Sudan has already only just survived one internal battle since its secession from the North in 2011 the anniversary of which it celebrated earlier this month and a second would be catastrophic for the world's youngest country.
Songs of Praise shows how churches are trying to heal Brexit divisions
Residents in one port town on the eastern coast of England have been "bewildered" and "overwhelmed" by the number of immigrants to their town, the BBC's flagship Songs of Praise programme was told this week.
Pam Rhodes presented Songs of Praise from Boston in Lincolnshire because it was the town recorded the highest proportion of "leave" votes in the country in the EU referendum.
The town is home to a large Eastern European population, which has massively boosted attendance at St Mary's Roman Catholic Church, but the congregations meet separately and St Mary's now holds three Masses in Polish and two in English every weekend.
The direction of travel was once in reverse. Boston in Massachusets in the United States was named by 17th century emigrants from the town. Now, with the narrative more one of immigrants to Boston, the town has more eastern European immigrants than anywhere else in England and Wales.
"Our first hymn reminds us that whatever might be changing around us, nothing changes the love of God," said Rhodes, introducing In Heavenly Love Abiding from St German's Church, Cardiff.
However, Father Alex Adkins of St Mary's in Boston, who described his parish as a microcosm of the town, said people had felt "bewildered" and "occasionally overwhelmed" by the sheer numbers that had arrived in a short time.
Neal Mugglestone, of Churches Together in Boston, who voted "out" because he believed it would benefit business, said that as more and more Europeans had arrived in Boston to seek a better life, that had caused tension and this had been heightened since the vote.
"There have been comments on Facebook saying that people are going round to European peoples' doors and saying, 'Would you like us to help you pack?' It shouldn't be like that at all."
He urged the churches in the town to lead the healing and to spread their work had to spread into the European community.
Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols urged people to ask themselves the question of whether they are treating others how they would like to be treated.
UKIP counsellor Yvonne Stevens, who attends St Mary's, said: "I feel like a foreigner in my own town. If the sunshine was there all the time, one would assume one was on holiday. Because when you shop on Saturday, the place is full of people with a different tongue to mine, doing their shopping as well." She added: "The amount of immigrants that we have got is excessive. I feel that we have got to draw a line and say, ok, if you've got the skill that we need, then welcome. But we can't en masse just say, in my opinion, carry on coming and swamp us."
The programme also showed a moving reunion between Sally Magnusson and Biniyam, a journalist from Ethiopia who she met while filming the controversial Songs of Praise from the migrant camp in Calais and who expressed then his determinaton to reach the UK.
Sally caught up with him again at Bethel Church's The Sanctuary project in Wales, where the Home Office sends many refugees and asylum seekers. He explained he had been forced to flee Ethopia because of death threats as a result of his work and has been able to claim asylum and the legal right to stay in the UK. He has applied to study nursing.
Venezuela: Archbishop decries government block on church aid for suffering Venezuelans
Thousands of people in Venezuela are experiencing severe hunger due to the economic meltdown that hit the South American country, yet their own leaders will not allow Roman Catholic organisations to send help.
The move to block aid by the Venezuelan government under President Nicolas Maduro has prompted a top prelate from the country to openly criticise their leaders.
In a speech at the Venezuelan Conference of Catholic Bishops' recent plenary assembly, Archbishop Diego Padron of Cumana slammed Maduro's administration for preventing the Church and other groups from assisting in solving the country's food crisis.
"The interests of the government are not the interests of the country," Padron said, as quoted by the Catholic News Agency.
The Roman Catholic official also said that the Venezuelan government had no "moral authority" to lead the country in this time of need.
"The ungovernability, aside from the brutal repression, the lack of serious and stabilising responses that would be more than improvisational and provisional, create the widespread perception that the global crisis is getting more acute and is being prolonged with no end in sight," he added.
He claimed that instead of creating hope, the government is creating "uncertainty, hopelessness, depression, anger and social violence."
Padron said Roman Catholic groups like Caritas Venezuela could do a lot to help alleviate the suffering being experienced by Venezuelan people now, for example by bringin in much-needed medication.
"The ability of Caritas Venezuela to pull together resources and the cooperation of private institutions and not of government entities makes us capable of receiving and adequately distributing the many offers we receive daily from the outside," the Archbishop said.
"This is not the ultimate solution but it would provide relief that we shouldn't be waiting for any more," he added.
Mexican music star Gerardo Ortiz was arrested by the Federal Police Saturday night at the Guadalajara Airport in Mexico, according to multiple media outlets.
The Mexican government recently issued a warrant for Ortiz's arrest which charged him with criminal exaltation in the music video for his single "Fuiste mia," which translates to "You Used To Be Mine."
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When Oveta Culp Hobby was in the sixth grade, her teacher said the student with the highest grades in spelling at the end of the school year would receive a new Bible.
"You might as well put my name on that Bible right now," young Oveta responded. Sure enough, she won the prize.
Her confidence was part of her brilliance. Years later, it allowed her to create opportunities for women while commanding the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II, serving as the nation's first secretary of health, education and welfare and running a media company that included the Houston Post and KPRC-TV.
Hobby once said her career wasn't by design. And she often credited her husband, former Gov. William P. Hobby, for making everything possible.
More Information THE HOBBY FAMILY William P. Hobby (1878-1964) Editor, publisher and Texas governor (1917-21). When Hobby became governor in 1917 at age 39, he was the youngest man to hold the office. Oveta Culp Hobby (1905-1995) Editor, publisher and first secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and first commanding officer of the Women's Army Corps. William P. Hobby Jr. (1932-present) Lieutenant governor of Texas, chancellor of the University of Houston System, Navy officer and journalist. The Democrat served a record 18 years as the state's lieutenant governor before leaving office in 1991. Jessica Hobby Catto (1937-2009) Conservationist, writer, publisher and philanthropist. She was married for 51 years to Henry Catto Jr., who was tapped by four Republican presidents for high-profile jobs, including ambassador to Britain and El Salvador. See More Collapse
But he knew better.
When asked if his wife was the smartest member of the Eisenhower Cabinet, he said, "Course she is. But if she weren't, she'd have them thinking she was."
Oveta Culp Hobby and the man she called "Governor," although he had been out of office a decade by the time they married, were a formidable couple and equal partners as Houston was coming of age. Their son, William P. Hobby Jr., served as lieutenant governor from 1973 to 1991, and their daughter, the late Jessica Hobby Catto, was a noted conservationist, publisher and wife of San Antonio-born diplomat Henry Catto Jr.
These days, the Hobby name is found on a major airport, a performing arts center and an elementary school in Houston. But none of them is named after Oveta Culp Hobby despite a legacy that many say eclipsed her husband's. Her name is on an elementary school and a family center at Fort Hood, a residence hall at Texas A&M and a library in her hometown of Killeen.
"People know the Hobby name, but unless you're in your 60s or older, you aren't aware of what she did," said Debra L. Winegarten, an Austin-based author who wrote a 2014 biography of her. "That's a shame because she was an amazing woman."
"She was the first woman to do a lot of things," her son, Bill Hobby, now 84, said in a recent interview.
Born in Killeen on Jan. 19, 1905, Oveta was the second of Ike and Emma Culp's seven children. Her father was a lawyer who was elected to the Texas House, and she would join him for legislative sessions in Austin, where she served for five years as House parliamentarian. Her mother also was active in politics, campaigning for the man Oveta would later marry.
Will Hobby, a longtime newspaperman, served as lieutenant governor from 1915 to 1917 and ascended to the governorship after the impeachment and removal from office of Gov. Jim Ferguson. During his tenure, women gained voting rights, the state began to regulate oil and gas operations and schoolchildren received free textbooks. Hobby left office in 1921 and returned to journalism, managing the Beaumont Enterprise and later the Houston Post, then called the Post-Dispatch.
After his first wife died in 1929, he began to date Oveta Culp, who had come to Houston to work on political campaigns. They married two years later, when she was 26 and he was 53. She then worked at the Post as a columnist and copy editor before joining the executive ranks.
The Hobbys eventually bought the newspaper, using a loan from Jesse Jones, who owned the competing Houston Chronicle. From a shared office, the couple built a media empire that included newspapers and radio and TV stations in six states.
In 1941, she was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting at the Federal Communications Commission when Gen. David Searles asked her to organize the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. At the time, the War Department was receiving some 10,000 letters a day from women wanting to serve.
She declined the offer to work in Washington because she had a husband, two children and a job in Houston, she said in an oral history.
Months later, Searles called during a Sunday dinner to ask again, and she said no. She told her husband, and he said she shouldn't have made the general ask twice. "Any thoughtful person knows that we are in this war, and that every one of us is going to have to do whatever we are called upon to do," Hobby told her, according to the oral history.
Winegarten, the biographer, said some might view his response as patriarchal, but it wasn't. "He knew Oveta would do an amazing job," she said. "He once said, 'I always knew how smart she was. I just wondered how long it would take before the rest of the country found out.'"
After a stint in the War Department, she was appointed director of the WAAC, later the Women's Army Corps.
Under her leadership, the number of congressionally approved Army jobs for women increased from 54 to 239. She also fought dishonorable discharges for women who became pregnant out of wedlock, arguing that the same rules didn't apply to the fathers.
Exhausted, then-Col. Hobby resigned from the post in 1945, received the Distinguished Service Medal for outstanding service "without guidance or precedents in United States military history" and returned to Houston.
She later served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's HEW secretary, making her only the second woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. During her tenure, she oversaw development and distribution of the first polio vaccine.
She left the administration after her husband became ill in 1955. He died in 1964 at age 86, leaving her in charge of the Post and other family businesses.
The newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for exposing government corruption in Pasadena. Two years later, Hobby's KPRC-TV hired future U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison as a reporter at a time when there were no women on the air in Houston. She credited Hobby with giving her career a boost.
Station manager "Jack Harris later told me he talked to Mrs. Hobby, who was enthusiastic about a young woman with a law degree working for the station," Hutchison wrote in 2012. "Jack said that having her television station put the first woman on broadcast news was right up her alley."
By the time Hobby died at age 90 in 1995, all of the family's media properties had been sold. Winegarten said Hobby was one of the unsung heroes of the feminist movement even though she didn't claim to be a part of it.
"She wanted equal opportunity for people," he said. "Her thinking was, if someone can do a job, then you should give them the job. That opened doors for women."
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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
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Hundreds gathered to celebrate the life Monday of fallen Bellaire police officer Marco Antonio Zarate.
As the investigation continues in Baton Rouge of the fatal shooting of three police officers there, law enforcement officers turned out in force in Houston for the funeral of Zarate at Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
Zarate, 52, a seven-year veteran of the Bellaire Police Department, was killed last week when his motorcycle crashed during a high-speed chase. He is survived by his wife and three daughters.
At the funeral Monday, Zarate's family and colleagues remembers him as a man who was passionate about his family, career and anyone who crossed his path.
RELATED: Suspect in officer's death appears in court
"We're called to live nobly," said the Rev. Salvatore DeGeorge, who celebrated the Mass. "Marco lived a noble life; he lived a blessed life."
On July 13, Zarate was flagged outside a Target store in the Meyerland shopping center by a loss prevention officer who had chased two men out of the store for allegedly stealing items. Zarate approached the men, then followed them after they raced away.
Zarate lost control of the motorcycle and crashed into a trailer. He was pronounced dead at a Memorial Hermann Hospital-Texas Medical Center.
The day after the crash, the suspected shoplifter turned himself in to police. Dante Jerel Moore, 27, admitted he was driving the vehicle that led police through Bellaire at speeds up to 80 mph.
TRAGEDY: Motorcycle crash kills Bellaire officer pursuing suspects
Moore is charged with felony murder as an habitual offender. He has a long list of arrests in Harris County, convictions for burglary in 2007, felony possession of cocaine in 2011 and evading arrest in 2013.
If convicted, he faces up to life in prison, with a minimum punishment of 25 years in prison if classified as an habitual offender.
A Corpus Christi woman pleaded not guilty Monday to shining a green laser at a Houston police department helicopter last week.
Emily Ann Hunter, 23, was arrested in the early morning hours of July 10 after an HPD pilot said a woman with black hair and a white shirt used a laser three times to distract him, prosecutors said in court.
Lasers can disorient pilots and make them incapable of flying. Green lasers are stronger than red lasers and are considered more damaging to pilots.
Harris County Court at Law Judge Jay Karahan advised Hunter to hire an attorney and said she was facing a year in jail if convicted of the class A misdemeanor.
HPD spokesman Kese Smith said the helicopter was on patrol about 2 a.m. when the pilot first saw the green laser.
He tracked down the source of the light to several people near a car in a well-lit parking lot in the 5900 block of Richmond on the west side of Houston. Smith said the pilot saw four people get into a car to leave and called for a patrol officers. The police on the ground arrested Hunter, who was a passenger in the car, after seeing that she had black hair, a white shirt and finding the laser in the glove compartment.
In court, prosecutors said Hunter admitted responsibility by telling police at the scene she would "take the charge."
Hunter said little during her arraignment Monday and a plea of "not guilty" was filed with the clerk. She is free on a $1,000 bail.
brian.rogers@chron.com
twitter.com/brianjrogers
AUSTIN Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday he will push to enhance the punishment for attacks on law enforcement officers and allow them to be treated as hate crimes, citing the "heroes lost in Dallas" to a mass shooting.
"At a time when law enforcement officers increasingly come under assault simply because of the job they hold, Texas must send a resolute message that the state will stand by the men and women who serve and protect our communities," Abbott said. "While our state and the nation continue to mourn the heroes lost in Dallas, it is time for us to unite as Texans to say no more."
Five Dallas officers were killed following a peaceful protest earlier this month, and police said the sniper in part talked about his desire to kill white officers in the wake of recent incidents in which black men were killed by police in Minnesota and Louisiana. State police in Louisiana said a man who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge was targeting officers.
RELATED GALLERY: The front pages of newspapers across the country the day after the Dallas Police shooting
Similar proposals have been lofted around the country after police officers have been killed. Some have pointed out that crimes against law enforcement already may be enhanced. In Texas, for example, the murder of an officer who is performing duties of the office can qualify for the death penalty.
Abbott's office said he will ask lawmakers who meet in regular session in 2017 to approve the proposed Police Protection Act.
His proposal would make it a hate crime to commit a crime against a law enforcement officer if the offense is rooted in bias against the police. It also would increase criminal penalties for any crime in which the victim is a law enforcement officer, regardless of whether it's a hate crime.
RELATED: Dan Patrick blames Black Lives Matter for Dallas shooting
Abbott's office, as an example, said that assault with bodily injury now is generally punishable as a Class A misdemeanor. If a public servant such as a law officer is assaulted, the crime is escalated to a third-degree felony. Under Abbott's proposal, someone assaulting a law enforcement officer would face in a 2nd-degree felony charge.
The governor's proposal also would organize a campaign to "educate young Texans on the value law enforcement officers bring to their communities."
In releasing his proposal, Abbott included comments from several law enforcement interests praising the idea.
"As a 26-plus year police officer in Houston, I'm extremely encouraged by Governor Greg Abbott's legislative priority to make the state of Texas a national leader in protecting the lives of law enforcement officers," said Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Association. "The attacks on law enforcement in Texas and the rest of our nation are unprecedented. Governor Abbott's solution is the right approach for Texas law enforcement officers and the people of Texas who support them."
Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, applauded Abbott. So did Ron Pinkston, president of the Dallas Police Association.
"Now is the time for our elected leaders across our state and country to do the right thing and join our governor in his call to better protect police officers," said Pinkston.
U.S. Sens Ted. Cruz and John Cornyn of of Texas earlier introduced a federal measure aimed at violent offenders who target police officers.
Christopher Soloya Jr., a 30-year-old convicted sex offender with ties to a Houston-area gang, has been listed as one of Texas' most wanted sex offenders.
Soloya was arrested by Houston Police in June 2007 for burglarizing an apartment with the intent to sexually assault a female inside. He was later convicted of burglary of a habitation with intent to commit another felony, sentenced to jail and required to register as a sex offender for life, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
A South Texas man who allegedly made threats to Pokemon Go players on Friday was arrested over the weekend.
Nathan Cerda, 29, of Palmview said he was going to "purge" people playing at a Pokemon Go event near him, according to the Harlingen Police Department. Cerda threatened to use modified paintball guns and warned people to "not be walking around."
AUSTIN -- Calling a proposed Mexican American history book "offensive" and "riddled with factual errors," history professors and a coalition of ethnic education activists demanded the state reject the controversial textbook Monday.
The proposed book, titled "Mexican American Heritage," sanitizes discussions about Mexican American contributions to society and whitewashes American history, they said.
"The authors don't even seem interested enough in the subject to know the difference between Mexican Americans and other Latino communities or the fact that their histories in this nation are completely different from each other," said Dr. Jose Maria Herrera, an assistant professor in education at the University of Texas at El Paso.
RELATED GALLERY: Controversies, key battles fought over Texas' school textbooks
Professors who reviewed various sections of the group based on their specialty said they found three to seven errors per page of the nearly 500-page book.
"The excessive factual interpretation and omission errors render the proposed textbook useless and even counterproductive as a textbook for Mexican American history," said Dr. Emilio Zamora, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. "I found an average of five to seven serious, serious errors per page."
The book is the sole Mexican American history text up for approval before the Texas Board of Education this year after the state approved courses in the subject. The company that published the book is headed by Cynthia Dunbar, a former member of the State Board of Education who has condemned public education as "tyrannical" and a "tool of perversion" and opposed teaching students about the separation of church and state.
READ MORE: The most controversial excerpts from the proposed textbook
History professors joined with organizations across the state to create the Responsible Ethnic Studies Textbook (REST) Coalition, which includes the Texas Latino Education Coalition, the Rio Grande Valley Coalition for Mexican American Studies and the Mexican American School Board Members Association.
The Board of Education is expected to hear public testimony about the text book in September and make a final decision to adopt or reject the book for Texas classrooms in November.
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CLEVELAND The Republican National Convention was halted by chaos for a time on Monday after party leaders sidestepped demands by critics of Donald Trump for a roll call vote on adopting the convention rules.
After days of maneuvering by delegates and a written demand for a vote by several states, U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., declared the rules adopted on a voice vote.
Boos and shouting quickly brought the convention to a standstill. Womack and other party officials left the stage, a highly unusual move as the chaos continued.
Supporters of the roll call shouted "Vote. Vote. Vote," as Trump supporters cheered, "We Want Trump" and brought out campaign signs, leaving the convention in chaos for nearly 10 minutes.
THE LATEST: Get updates from the convention in Cleveland
Party officials then backed up. A Utah request for a roll call vote was then acknowledged, and supporters of the vote cheered with a deafening roar.
A second voice vote was taken, with 'ayes" and 'nays' sounding about even. Womack ruled the 'ayes' had won, and gaveled the rules approved a second time.
Opponents of the rules erupted in loud protests again while Trump supporters worked to out-shout them.
A roll-call vote on the rules would have quickly thrown the convention into a frenzy with delegates who supported a vote hoping to deny Trump the nomination by allowing a rule change to let them vote for someone else. The convention has 2,472 delegates.
To force a vote, signatures from a majority of delegates from seven states were needed. Names from nine states were submitted, but Womack said three states had withdrawn from the call leaving supporters short of their goal.
FUNNY POLITICS: Political cartoons that perfectly sum up the GOP primary
The nine were identified as Colorado, Washington state, Utah, Minnesota, Wyoming, Maine, Iowa, Virginia and the District of Columbia. Alaska delegates said they had provided signatures, as well.
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Consider Donald Trump.
He's a 70-year-old man who made a name for himself in the real estate world, catapulting him to moderate fame as the rich guy with orange hair, hosting "The Apprentice" where he dubbed "you're fired!" a catchphrase most Americans associate him with, and recently, he became the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States.
Over the course of his unconventional campaign, where he is in reportedly charge of his own Twitter account, Trump has insinuated some Mexican immigrants are rapists, said Mexico has "taken advantage" the country and needs to pay for wall to go up along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."
Trump will now have to tie it all together to prove himself to his party this week at the Republican National Convention, something Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based GOP consultant, said will involve the "most important speech" of the billionaire's political career next Thursday night.
"The bigger, over-arching goal (of the convention): execute a convention that shows (Trump) to be a serious candidate for president and give voters who maybe don't think he's credible, a reason to give him a second look," Mackowiak said in a phone interview with MySA.com Thursday.
RELATED: Ivanka Trump would be a great vice presidential candidate, Eric Trump says
Trump announced his vice president pick Friday, an event that Mackowiak says will kickoff what should be "a very good 10 days" for the campaign.
The biggest news that will come out of the convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio this year, is the official nomination of the party's candidate for president. The Democratic National Convention will be held July 25, four days after the RNC concludes, until the 28th in Philadelphia.
Mackowiak said Thursday there will be two huge things to watch for during the event: the "conscience clause," which failed Thursday night, and if Trump can prove himself as a serious, professional play for president.
The conscience clause would have allowed delegates to vote however they wanted, including against the presumptive nominee.
RELATED: The Republican convention is $6 million short of its fundraising goal and Trump may be to blame
Had the clause gone through, Mackowiak said it could have prevented "Trump from winning the nomination on the first ballot."
Other than Trump, the party's platform is "fairly standard and fairly conservative," he said, adding the only business of the convention is really, to officially nominate a candidate for president.
Trump will be expected to unite the party at the convention, something proving difficult by the number of prominent Republicans not attending, including the two most recent Republican presidents: George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, who both threw support behind Mitt Romney in 2012.
RELATED: Open carry law will be upheld during Republican convention
The former presidents announced in May they had no plans to endorse Trump.
Mackowiak said the Bush family are taking cues from Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the race for president in February.
"Trump has said some nasty things about the Bushs," Mackowiak said, especially his comments concerning the Iraq War.
The "unconventional" candidate's former opponents Marco Rubio and Rand Paul are not expected to attend and neither are Romney and John McCain, the two most recent Republican nominees for president who Trump has also been critical of.
A vital moment for Trump will be his speech the final night of the convention, Mackowiak said, on whether he can bring the party together before heading into the general election. If he doesn't give a good speech Thursday, "there are some risks there," as far as fusing the party together, he said.
"What people will take from this (convention) is, 'Is Trump a serious candidate for president and what trajectory is his campaign?'" Mackowiak concluded.
kbradshaw@express-news.net
Twitter: @kbrad5
When the Republican National Convention convenes Monday morning, the party is expected to officially tap Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee. And as 2,500 delegates and 2,300 alternate delegates descend on Cleveland, Ohio, most have one word in mind: Finally.
It's been a long road to this year's convention with a lot of highs and lows along the way. Remember that time Ben Carson jumped ahead of Trump in the polls? Or when Rick Perry sported some snazzy new glasses? Or how about that time Mike Huckabee rushed to Kim Davis' side to support her?
-- WELCOME TO CLEVELAND The Chronicles Mike Ward (@chroniclemike) and Kevin Diaz (@diazchron) are at the Republican National Convention. Follow them on Twitter for updates throughout the day, and you can follow along with the program and list of speakers HERE.
-- Start off by reading Kevin Diazs curtain raiser : Trump aims to heal GOP divisions; Dissension still torments party ...
Trump has promised it will not be a typical boring political convention. Republican dissidents say he will have little to worry about on that score. Outside protesters also are a concern, as they are for the upcoming Democratic convention in Philadelphia. While Trump has promised a good show, his campaign also will have to guard against the potential chaos of about 400 conservative insurgents determined to open the convention to an alternative nominee.
The alternative many of those delegates have in mind is Cruz, the runner-up of the GOP primaries. The holdouts in his conservative base believe they all but forced Trump to give him a speaking role without the up-front promise of an endorsement. For Cruz, the speech could be the foundation of another White House bid in 2020.
-- And theres this, per the AP CLEVELAND 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 when it opens on Monday.
But even if the rebels succeed in even getting such a roll call to occur, it's one they seem very likely to lose. What will happen on the floor, if there's any attempt, is the party and Trump are going to rise against it, Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, told reporters on the convention floor on Sunday. MORE
-- POLITICO: Trump, Pence agree to disagree, more or less The stark differences, both stylistically and on policy, between Donald Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, were on display in their first joint interview, broadcast on 60 Minutes on CBS on Sunday night. And Pence, in particular, demonstrated a willingness to massage past positions so that they better conform with Trumps.
>> Meanwhile ... Manafort: Pence not a yes man ( Politico )
*** FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE ... Join Chronicle bureau chief Mike Ward and Scott Braddock, editor of Quorum Report, every Friday for a new episode of Texas Take: The Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and rate it!
-- ICYMI: Texas Monthlys Erica Grieder on what to expect in Cleveland
Im not expecting major surprises. For example, I see no reason to think that Ted Cruz, who has yet to endorse Trump, will change his tune. The fact that he is speaking at the convention raised speculation that he might, but it is the Republican National Convention, not some kind of ball being given in Trumps honor. And Cruz is the only candidate other than Trump who won more than eight states during this years primary; under the RNC rules, that means hes qualified to be nominated from the floor and therefore, at least in theory, to speak. It makes sense that he would do so; despite being defeated in his first bid for the presidential nomination, he is pretty obviously interested in laying the groundwork for the next one.
-- Texas, the Biggest Red State, Isnt Feeling GOP Love, by The Texas Tribunes Ross Ramsey
The largest red state of them all is effectively sitting on the sidelines as Republicans begin their national convention in Cleveland. Texas is an essential piece of a Republican win. On the other hand are some wistful Democrats who imagine what a lock they would have on national politics if Texas could be flipped to their side.
It would be expensive to win, however, even though it has proved to be cheap to hold. National Republican campaigns dont have to advertise here, which is great for them since Texas is big and expensive. And Democrats cant afford to advertise here; their money is better spent in swing states where their chances are better.
>> On Eve of G.O.P. Convention, Law and Order Takes the Floor, by The New York Times Alex Burns
-- Texas college leaders' pay leads U.S. public universities, by the Chronicles Ben Wermund
Texas universities are shelling out more to lure the nation's best college leaders, in what many in higher education have referred to as an academic arms race. But the salaries at the top have increased much faster than most faculty and staff salaries. And colleges are paying more to their top administrators, even as they make perennial pitches to the state for more education funding and charge students higher tuition and fees to attend.
-- DO NOT MISS THIS Change in state law hides rise in 2nd trimester abortions, by the Chronicles Andrea Zelinski
Texas quietly changed the way it records abortion statistics, skewing the amount of time a woman is considered pregnant by two weeks and adding a new layer of confusion as lawmakers seek to rewrite abortion rules struck down this summer by the U.S. Supreme Court. Medical professionals contend the change is unscientific, but anti-abortion advocates say the new measure more accurately details the age of the fetus. Advocates on both sides were caught off guard by a lack of clarity in recent abortion data from the state.
QUOTE TO NOTE
Its Thursday night. Its Donald Trump giving that speech, the balloons coming down, and people saying, I can see him in the White House. Its what Reagan needed to overcome, and when he did, the bottom fell out of Jimmy Carter. We're in the same place.
-- Reince Priebus on Fox News Sunday anticipating Trumps Thursday night speech when he accepts the nomination
SPEED READ
Large majorities on both sides of border oppose a wall, poll finds, The Washington Post
Houston-area officers on high alert following Baton Rouge, Houston Chronicle
A party that does not recognize itself convenes in Cleveland, The Washington Post
Austin area mourns father and son killed in Nice attack, Houston Chronicle
Large majorities on both sides of southwestern border oppose a wall, poll finds, The Washington Post
U.S. Rep. Hurd wont say if hell vote for Trump, El Paso Times
Former Alamo library to be used for exhibits, San Antonio Express-News
Abbotts Pre-K Gold Standard is Showing Some Rust, Texas Observer
Vulnerable Senate Republicans outpolling Trump, Politico
Baton Rouge shooting casts shadow over GOP convention, CNN
Split-screen reality: Trumps convention and a world of tragedies, The Washington Post
CAPITOL DAYBOOK:
HOUSE: 10 a.m. -- Appropriations - S/C on Articles VI, VII & VIII [ E 1.030]
RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
-- Donald Trump and Mike Pence: One Ticket, Two Worldviews, by the NYTs Steve Eder and Thomas Kaplan
From the use of force to free trade to diplomacy, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence hold very different views of the United States role in the world, and reconciling them as they enter the heart of the campaign may prove to be a challenge.
A chief difference between Mr. Trump and his running mate is experiential: Mr. Trumps worldview is shaped by his business dealings, and his policy views have been tested only in speeches, interviews and political debates, while Mr. Pence participated in policy deliberations, hearings and briefings in Washington as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
>> These are some of the controversial extremists expected to be outside the GOP convention, by the Los Angeles Times James Queally
-- Trump panic drives progressives toward Clinton, by POLITICOs Benjamin Oreskes
The lingering bitterness among many activists, candidates and elected officials who backed Sanders wasnt far from the surface. But in more than a dozen interviews, nearly all of these progressives mentioned the urgency of defeating Trump. Theyll worry about Clinton later. For most of them, the idea of sitting out the election isn't an option a promising sign for Democrats who worried that many of Sanders supporters might not return to the party fold after the contentious primary.
>> Scrambling, Planners of the Republican Convention Put Showbiz Off to the Wings, The New York Times
>> As Clinton launches registration effort, community groups focus on Asian Americans, The Washington Post
>> Jeb Bush trashes Trump on eve of GOP convention, CNN
-- NBCs Mark Murray: Clinton keeps 5-point lead over Trump heading into conventions On the eve of the GOP convention, Hillary Clinton maintains a five-point national lead over Donald Trump even after a period of negative news for the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Clinton leads the presumptive GOP nominee 46 percent to 41 percent in a poll that finds both candidates facing sizable disadvantages and challenges ahead of the party conventions which kick off Monday for the GOP in Cleveland and a week later for Democrats in Philadelphia.
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.
First-time filmmaker Jamie M. Dagg directs Rossif Sutherland in this Canadian crime-thriller as American volunteer and doctor John Lake, whose residency at a Laos hospital is cut short after disobeying his superior. He later encounters a sexual assault on a local beach and intervenes, which leads to staggering and life-altering consequences as he attempts to reach the Thai border. River begins with Lake constructing a patient leg amputation, confirming from the get-go that this is a rebellious, no-holds-barred American that we are dealing with here. Its lead actor derives from a long line of acting royalty most notably brother Kiefer and father Donald, who remains one of cinemas most commendable and cult veteran actors.
However, this time around, its Rossifs turn to shine, which he does in an impressive and subtle fashion; leaving an impact on the viewer throughout he duration of the film. River bodes a somewhat Nordic quality accentuating certain elements from the likes of The Bridge and The Killing met with a grindhouse feel through its graphic medical scenes and grotty setting. In addition, one of the films most commendable features is undoubtedly its impressive cinematography with director of photography Adam Marsden strongly contributing to the films subdued and gritty tone and, notably, making the most of Laos sombre yet beautiful surroundings.
The film premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and went down well with its native audience receiving the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television Claude Jutra Award for Best Film by a First-Time Director. Sutherland was too the recipient of a Best Actor nomination at the 4th Canadian Screen Awards after receiving critical praise for his portrayal of Lake.
Any hopes that the nations first black president could uplift the nations black underclass went up in smoke Sunday when Barack Obama doubled down on his blaming of Americas police for the recent cop massacres that amount, as Heather Mac Donald rightly says, to a war on cops.
I argued two decades ago in The Dream and the Nightmare that changes in elite culture during the 1960s had a catastrophic effect on the most disadvantaged Americans in ghetto neighborhoods. That decades sexual revolution removed the stigma from out-of-wedlock pregnancy. An explosion of inner-city illegitimacy ensued, with between 70 and 90 percent of black children born to single mothers, depending on the city. The elites youthful interest in drug taking petered out, but in the ghetto, tolerance of drug taking resulted in a deadly crack cocaine epidemic. Elite cultures wholly praiseworthy political push for black civil rights ended in a destructive turn, with intellectuals arguing that punishing black crime, as one bestsellers title had it, was blaming the victim. In other words, centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, giving way to lingering racial discrimination, made young black men justifiably angry and rebellious, and their anger, along with the barriers the larger society placed between them and gainful employment, resulted in criminal behavior that was understandable and almost justifiable. So by the early 1990s, murders in New York, for examplemostly by young black men killing other blackswere occurring on average every four hours, every day.
The same spirit of elite racial contrition made generous welfare payments, with virtually no questions asked, seem like appropriate reparations for the long mistreatment of African Americans. In this way, government ended up enabling the spread of out-of-wedlock childbearing, which the culture had legitimated. But those fatherless welfare families proved far from ideal for raising successful, law-abiding children. What came to be called the cycle of povertysingle parenthood, school dropout, drug use, crime, non-work, welfare dependencywent into overdrive.
This was a cultural problem, a problem of beliefs, worldview, values, and attitudes. Elite culture had defined the ghetto underclass as victims and validated self-destructive attitudes and behavior. Ultimately, that inner-city culture took on its own inventive life, with rap music dismissing women as mere sexual objects, glorifying drugs and the conspicuous consumption that drug dealing could finance, celebrating gangsta behavior, and rejecting all authority. The anthem for this impulse, so to speak, was N.W.A.s 1988 track Fuck tha Police.
It seemed to me that Obama had a unique opportunity to speak about values and virtues to this minority of African Americansto tell them that his own life exemplified how in twenty-first century America you could get an education, work hard, get married, be an attentive husband and father, and maybe even become president of the United States. How disappointing that he chose the other tack, stoking grievance and resentment over supposed victimization by all authority, whether from teachers, cops, or potential employers. He and his attorneys general went sniffing out evidences of racism everywhere, and demonizing the police. Even after five officers were assassinated by an enraged black murderer in Dallas, he said, inaccurately, falsely, and callously: There are legitimate issues that have been raised, and theres data and evidence to back up the concerns that are being expressed by these [Black Lives Matter] protesters. And if police organizations and departments acknowledge that theres a problem and theres an issue, then that, too, is going to contribute to real solutions. And, as I said yesterday, that is whats going to ultimately help make the job of being a cop a lot safer. It is in the interest of police officers that their communities trust them and that the kind of rancor and suspicion that exists right now is alleviated.
So he is justifyingeven fanningthe resentment that impelled psychopaths to murder two officers in New York, five in Dallas, and now three more in Baton Rouge. Its hard not to see his statement as blaming the police for their own deaths, and its hard not to condemn such a statement as among the most irresponsible and incendiary presidential utterances in our national history.
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Perhaps it will turn out that the latest assassination of police officers, this time in Baton Rouge, is unrelated to the hatred fomented by the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps the gunmen were members of militia groups aggrieved by federal overreach, say. But the overwhelming odds are that this most recent assault on law and order, taking the lives of three officers and wounding at least three more, is the direct outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, less than two weeks ago. That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.
President Barack Obama bears direct responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Missing from Obamas address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out . . . across our criminal justice system.
Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric and express his unqualified support for law enforcement? No, he doubled down, insulting law enforcement yet again even as it was grieving for its fallen comrades. In a memorial service for the Dallas officers, Obama rebuked all of America for its bigotry, but paid special attention to alleged police bigotry:
When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that if youre black, youre more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officeryes, sir; no, sirbut still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door; still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy. When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.
The irresponsible zealotry of this rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to prosecuting his crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other. Of course, Obama also uttered the mandatory praise for officers who do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally, and he warned against paint[ing] all police as biased, or bigoted. This was self-indulgent hypocrisy. A passing denunciation of stereotyping hardly compensates for the insane accusation that black parents rightly fear that any time their child walks out the door, that child could be killed by a cop.
It is possible that the Dallas killers and the Baton Rouge killers had not heard Obamas most recent speeches on criminal-justice racism, or even the many that preceded them. But even if the cop murderers had not encountered Obamas exact words, the influence of his rhetoric on the hatred in the streets is absolute. Obamas imprimatur on the Black Lives Matter demagoguery gives it enormous additional thrust and legitimacy, echoing throughout public discourse into the most isolated corners of the inner city.
The media bear equal responsibility for the ongoing carnage. The press immediately slotted the shootings of Sterling and Castile into the racist-cop paradigm, though the facts about what the officers saw and whether the victims were in fact reaching for their guns were unknown. The New York Times went into cop-calumny overdrive, with an editorial entitled When Will the Killing Stop? and a series of back-to-back op-eds decrying the brutal oppression of blacks in America. One of those op-eds, by an assistant professor at Purdue University, bemoaned that blacks were up against a world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people. The professor was presumably not referring to the thugs who shot a three-year-old boy in Chicago on Fathers Day this year, leaving him paralyzed for life, or who shot a five-year-old girl, a seven-year-old boy, and an 11-year-old boy in Chicago on the Fourth of July. She was probably also not referring to LeVonte King Jason, a two-year-old boy killed on July 8 in Minneapolis, a few miles away and two days after Philando Castile was shot by police during a traffic stop. Jason was in a car driven by his father that was peppered with bullets in a drive-by shooting; the gunfire hit his 15-month-old sister as well. Except for a local columnist, the press ignored Jasons funeral, in contrast to the media scrum that inundated Castiles funeral on the same day.
Even before this latest attack on the police, officers across the country have been reeling under the prejudice directed against them. A police trainer meeting with officers on July 7, hours before the Dallas carnage, reported to me that the cops were out of their minds that the default [in the Castile and Sterling shootings] is racism, without one iota of fact. Officers have already been backing off of proactive policing under the constant charge that they are racist for making pedestrian stops and enforcing public-order laws in black neighborhoods. In June, I spoke with police officers in Dallas about the 75 percent increase in homicides the city has experienced this year. The officers chalked it up to de-policing. Officers are now leery of doing their job, a cop who runs warrants in the high-crime Five Points area told me. Why make stops in the first place? This summer of blue bloodshed will deter officers from discretionary policing even more. Expect violent crime, already on the rise since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in summer 2014, to spike further.
Between the Dallas assassinations and todays, officers have been shot at and ambushed in Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. Authorities have been circumspect in identifying the reasons behind those shootingsunlike the alacrity with which racial motives are assigned to cops when they shoot someone in the line of duty and the incidents have been brushed under the rug. But we are quickly reaching the worst days of the nightmare 1960s, when it seemed that the very foundation of society was breaking apart. The difference between the 1960s and today is that the hatred of law enforcement and of whites is being stoked by the highest reaches of the establishment. Universities sometimes seem like little else than factories of desperately ginned-up racial grievance. That the cop killer in Dallas and apparently in Baton Rouge as well came out of the military is an indication that the happy talk about how the military is an engine of racial reconciliation is naive. The country has been pretending that the main source of racism today comes from whites. Anyone who has spent time in the inner city and even more middle-class black precinctssuch as college campusesknows differently.
It may be too late to stop this fire from spreading. But Obama has one more chance to try to put it out. He failed that opportunity in his remarks hours after the Baton Rouge carnage, delivering instead an anodyne call to heal our divisions and discard inflammatory rhetoric thrown around to advance an agenda. Implication: Blame for inflammatory rhetoric is equally shared by those who attack cops and those who defend them. Sorry, Mr. President, those who tell the truth about crime and policing are not part of the problem and they bear no responsibility for the massacre of cops. The killing of cops is furthered exclusively by those peddling a false narrative that cops harbor lethal bias toward blacks. Obama should call for the Black Lives Matter movement to fold its tentand he himself should start telling the truth about inner-city crime.
Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images
Achizitie de Servicii Tehnice de creare a plantatiilor forestiere de protectie din cadrul primariei Andrusul de Jos si a primariei Vadul lui Isac, r. Cahul
You say EE-ther, and I say EYE-ther, Fred Astaire sang to Ginger Rogers. One modern equivalent is You say JIF and I say GIF.
And even though one developer of the GIF has weighed in on the pronunciation, no one, it seems, wants to call the whole thing off.
GIF, of course, is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, a way of sharing images. It was developed in 1987 to allow photos, graphics, or short animated clips to be easily embedded in email or Web pages.
It caught on immediately. The debate about its pronunciation was not far behind.
The pictures are transmitted in a special computer code called GIF (pronounced jif), which is short for Graphics Interchange Format, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in 1993. Animated GIF (pronounced with a hard g), The Dallas Morning News wrote in 1999. In between, in 1997, The Sydney Morning Herald noted that there is endless debate about whether it is pronounced with a hard or soft g.
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In 2012, GIF was named the USA word of the year by the Oxford dictionaries, which, sadly, did not wade into the pronunciation at that point.
The debate seemed to peak in 2013, when numerous news outlets discussed how one of the developers of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, has always insisted it has a soft g, and was really an homage to the peanut butter brand Jif. (Choosy developers choose GIF, he was often quoted as saying, riffing off Jifs slogan Choosy mothers choose Jif.)
Youd think that would settle it, but no. Even as the debate raged, Gizmodo insisted that Wilhite had no right to tell people how to pronounce words. Sir, why did you not name it JIF like the peanut butter then! Gizmodo said, noting that the G in GIF stood for graphics, with a hard g. And, anyway, others argued, we are already so used to words beginning gi being pronounced with a hard g that its a hard habit to break (think gift and gizmo). But what about gin, or giraffe? Sigh. (That g is silent.)
You can still find people in both camps, each equally adamant. Theres even a website How to really pronounce GIF (with a hard g) and a Web page The GIF pronunciation page (with a soft g).
Dictionaries arent any help: Oxford now includes both pronunciations, though the hard g is first, as does Merriam-Webster. While The American Heritage Dictionary puts the hard g first in its pronunciation list, the recording uses the soft one.
Websters New World College Dictionary, the one preferred by The Associated Press and many news organizations, has no entry for GIF at all, and APs pronunciation guide is silent on it as well.
Were not going to solve that one here, so lets move on to URL, which stands for either Universal Resource Locator or Uniform Reference Locator. Otherwise known as a Web address.
Most people pronounce URL as an initialism, you-are-ell. But a growing number of people, especially in the tech industry, seem to have turned it into an acronym that sounds like Earl.
Theres even a black Labrador retriever named URL, pronounced Earl, who has been trained to find external data storage devices like thumbdrives that might contain illicit material.
This discussion hasnt spawned quite so much passion. The debate on Gizmodo was less about whether one was more correct than the other than to note the difference between an initialism and an acronym (which weve already done) and which article to use with which pronunciation. (A you-are-ell but an earl.)
Once again, turning to dictionaries is not much help. Merriam-Webster lists both pronunciations, but records just the initialism. American Heritage goes solely with you-are-ell, as does WNW.
But weve recently attended presentations by people who work at places like Google (and thus are closer to the subject), and they have been using earl. While it would be noble to declare one or another correct, it would also be folly to jump into the middle of an evolution in language.
This debate, of course, also is not new. Do people really pronounce URL as earl? someone asked in 2010 on a discussion board that looks like it was put together by grade schoolers. Among the oh-so-helpful answers like Ive been saying earl since the Web started and I havent heard anyone call it an Earl since 1999 was this:
They are the same people who pronounce GIF like jiff.
NOW lets call the whole thing off.
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Merrill Perlman managed copy desks across the newsroom at the New York Times, where she worked for twenty-five years. Follow her on Twitter at @meperl.
A man who lost a leg at age 15 when he was struck by a vehicle as he sat on a Las Vegas, Nev., bus stop bench is suing for damages, saying that the shelters were built dangerously close to busy roads.
Conan Obenchain alleges in a federal lawsuit that putting a shelter 3 feet from the curb creates a foreseeable danger to the public.
Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada spokeswoman Angela Castro and Clark County spokesman Erik Pappa declined Friday to comment on the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas. Both cited policies against commenting on cases in court.
But Castro acknowledged the RTC knows that many bus stop benches and shelters are close to the road.
The agency has about 3,400 bus stops in and around Las Vegas, including about 2,000 with shelters or a bench. About half are less than 5 feet from the curb.
Castro said the commission has spent almost $22 million since 2008 to upgrade and move shelters back 5 feet from the curb, and another 150 shelters are slated to be moved this year. But she said many cant be moved because of block walls and uncooperative property owners.
We are now working to go a step further by investigating technology options to improve pedestrian safety, she said.
A Las Vegas first-grade teacher, now 30, is serving a six-to-15 year prison sentence after pleading guilty to drunken driving in the crash that injured Obenchain in February 2012.
The lawsuit doesnt name the driver as a defendant. It was first reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It seeks unspecified medical costs and compensatory and punitive damages greater than $10,000.
Obenchains attorney, Leslie Mark Stovall, declined Friday to comment.
The filing focuses on the positioning of the bus stop on Spring Mountain Road, a little under 2 miles west of the Las Vegas Strip; points to at least one other crash involving the same shelter; and cites a significant and forseeable risk.
It says officials conducted at least one previous safety study about bus stops, and that continuing to use the shelter where Obenchain was hurt demonstrated a deliberate and conscious disregard of the dangerous condition, and violated Obenchains 14th Amendment rights to be free from danger created by the agency and county.
There have been several deadly crashes at RTC bus stops in recent years, including two in 2016.
On Feb. 4, Jason Donahue, 68, died after a car veered over a median and hit him at a bus stop on West Lake Mead Boulevard. Donahue was in a wheelchair.
On Jan. 9, Jooyoung Do, 39, was struck and killed by a bus that plowed through a passenger shelter on Tropicana Avenue. The bus driver, Jamal Nichols, 22, was fired and has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter and failure to maintain his lane charges.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Sax Man Kris Allen Composes and Performs for the Most 'Beloved' Ones of His Life [REVIEW]
Kris Allen writes for the 'Beloved' in his life. (Photo : Jay Corey)
Jackie McLean disciple Kris Allen's Beloved (Truth Revolution Records) proves his writing chops are as etched in stone as his ability to lead a band, and insinuate his sax voice in, over, under and around that of his bandmates. The result is 10 original tracks of startling creativity that underscores his distinct sense of jazz history as he quotes not only from his favorites, but the favorites of his favorites.
Allen, from the Hartford, Connecticut area (he's now artist-in-residence at Williams College in Massachusetts) plays alto and soprano on this, his sophomore effort, with tenor man Frank Kozyra, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Jonathan Barber.
The decision to seriously compose without use of a piano to ease the psychic pain and fill the spaces in the final mix didn't come easy. He had his precedents from which he drew inspiration: the Branford Marsalis Trio and both versions of a two-horn Elvin Jones band with no piano (like on Black Hope) where horns play in unison and, as Allen says in the liner notes, "where the melodies really speak."
Beloved starts with the groove-laden "Lowborn" before "Mandy Have Mercy" quotes Charlie Parker's solo for Sarah Vaughan's "I'd Rather Have a Memory Than a Dream." "Lord Help My Unbelief" was originally written for a church service. "Flores" is in tribute to Charles Flores, a Cuban bassist and friend who passed away. The playful "One For Rory" is for his daughter. "Bird Bailey" quotes Cannonball Adderley quoting Parker during a solo Adderley took during "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" on an Ernie Andrews date. Allen stuffs snippets of at least 10 Parker songs in the course of one 4:25 blockbuster while he solos over the top of everything. Suffice it to say, it's a stunner.
Kris Allen has learned his lessons well from Jackie McLean who learned his own lessons well from pianist Bud Powell. Beloved is solidly "in the tradition."
2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
TagsKris Allen, REVIEW, Truth Revolution Records, Jackie McLean
euclid police car new.jpg
Detectives are investigating a shooting that happened late Sunday at Sims Park in Euclid, according to multiple reports.
(File photo)
EUCLID, Ohio -- Euclid police are investigating a shooting that happened late Sunday at Sims Park, according to multiple reports.
Three people were injured in the shooting, according to Fox 8.
No other details were immediately available.
The Euclid Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Officers are currently at the scene investigating the shooting, a police dispatcher said.
This is a developing story. This post will be updated.
If you'd like to comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments section.
Officer on motorcycle hit by van
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams speaks to his officer on the scene of a crash that involved a police officer.
(Adam Ferrise, cleveland.com)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cleveland police officer was injured Sunday after he was sideswiped by a van pulling out of a downtown hotel, according to police.
The crash happened about 8 p.m. Sunday on Ontario Street outside the Justice Center, about a half-block from Lakeside Avenue.
The officer suffered minor injuries to his hand and leg, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said. He was taken to an area hospital.
"It was just someone not paying attention," Williams said, after riding his bike up to the scene.
The large white van struck the motorcycle as it drove on Ontario. The van appeared to be turning out of the Hilton Hotel across the street. The impact left scuffs on the front left part of the van, near the headlight.
It ripped a metal container off the right side of the motorcycle. The container landed on the sidewalk and the motorcycle ended up on its side about 20 feet away.
Cleveland police are still investigating the crash to determine a cause, Williams said. It was not a hit-skip, police said.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The head of the union that represents Cleveland's rank-and-file police officers told Fox News that President Barack Obama has 'blood on his hands' after the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"It's absolutely insane that we have a president of the United States and a governor of Minnesota making the statements they made less than one day after the police-involved shootings," Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association President Steve Loomis said in the interview on the network shortly after the shooting.
"And those police-involved shootings, make no mistake, are what absolutely have triggered this rash of senseless murders of law enforcement officers across this country," he added. "It's reprehensible. And the president of the United States has blood on his hands that will not be able to come washed off."
His statement makes reference to statements made by the president and Mark Dayton, the democratic governor of Minnesota, a day after Philando Castile was shot to death in a car by a police officer in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb.
Loomis has become known for his provocative statements to national and local media in the wake of police-involved shootings and killings in Cleveland. He has defended his officers in the shooting deaths of Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell, the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the death of Tanisha Anderson, a mentally ill woman who died in the custody of two officers.
The Tamir shooting resulted in no charges against police. Michael Brelo, the only officer to face a felony charge after he and fellow officers fired 137 shots at the unarmed Williams and Russell, was acquitted of manslaughter charges. The investigation into Anderson's death is in its 20th month.
Most recently, Loomis threatened to pull police officers from security details at Cleveland Browns games after running back Isaiah Crowell posted a photo on Instagram of a hooded figure cutting the throat of a police officer. Loomis withdrew his protest of the team after Crowell apologized and agreed to donate a week's salary to a memorial for the five police officers killed at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.
"When incidents like this occur, there's a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts, and that should trouble all of us," Obama said in a statement the following day. "This is not just a black issue, not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue that we all should care about."
Loomis asked Gov. John Kasich Sunday to suspend open carry in during the Cleveland Republican National Convention in the wake of the Baton Rouge shooting. Kasich's office responded saying that it does not have the authority to suspend state's open carry law.
A visitor tries out the Oculus Gear VR virtual reality goggles at the Facebook Innovation Hub on February 24, 2016 in Berlin, Germany.
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 VRtools for companies to build apps, games and services on smartphones that use the nascent mediarather than expensive hardware.
Google declined to comment.
In May, the company released Daydream, a platform and reference design for new VR hardware that's a more advanced version of its thrifty Cardboard headset. (Google also said it would be releasing its own Daydream headset.) The Daydream platform is built on the latest version of Google's Android operating system.
Meanwhile, a different VR project was germinated inside the X research lab (now a separate Alphabet company) with around 50 employees working on it, according to one source. More critically, that project was creating a separate operating system for the device, unique from Android.
Read more from Recode:
Pokemon Go's creators say they didn't mean to spy on Google accounts
Verizon has hired a former YouTube exec as it moves further into original video
The Senate is ditching BlackBerry phones -- and BlackBerry is trying to ditch phones
Donald Trump has dismissed Mike Pence's support for the Iraq war, saying his vice presidential pick was "entitled to make a mistake every once in a while."
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presumptive presidential candidate, however, was not, Trump told CBS's Lesley Stahl in his first joint interview with running mate Pence.
Trump, the Republican presumptive candidate, has repeatedly attacked Clinton over her support for the war in Iraq, saying it was a sign of her "bad judgment."
To read the full CBS report, click here.
But, as NBC News pointed out in a fact-check after the GOP pair announced their partnership on Saturday, Indiana Gov. Pence was a strong supporter of the Iraq War, going so far as to co-sponsor and vote in favor of a bill authorizing the conflict when he was a House representative from Indiana. He also opposed measures to set a timeline to withdraw troops, NBC News reported.
But, according to a transcript of Stahl's interview with the pair, Trump told CBS, "I don't care," when asked about Pence's support for the war.
When pressed by Stahl on the issue, Trump added, "It's a long time ago. And he voted that way and they were also misled," apparently alluding to bad intelligence employed by the U.S. government to push for an attack on Iraq.
Stahl said, "Yeah, but you've used that vote of Hillary's that was the same as Governor Pence as the example of her bad judgment."
Trump responded that, while Pence was "entitled to make a mistake every once in a while," Clinton was not.
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Against a backdrop of heightened concern spurred by a spate of recent shootings across the country, Cleveland is beefing up its security for this week's Republican National Convention.
Along with the city's spending of a special $50 million federal grant for convention-related security, businesses are shelling out hefty amounts of cash for private security firms, and the Cleveland police union has even taken the unusual step of asking for the suspension of open-carry gun laws in the city during the convention.
With about 50,000 people expected to descend on Cleveland for the GOP gathering and the nominating of Donald Trump, security concerns have played a prominent role in convention planning.
Following Sunday's shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which left three police officers dead, Steve Loomis of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association asked Ohio Gov. John Kasich to ban the open-carrying of 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."
Kasich's office said the law could not be suspended.
However, public officials are actively taking other steps. The city has purchased extra supplies including 10,000 sets of extra plastic handcuffs and 2,000 sets of riot gear. The roughly 500 Cleveland police officers assigned to the convention will be assisted by 3,000 federal officers, and 2,000 nonfederal officers from out of state who are being sworn in to assist the Cleveland police.
In addition, 1,000 beds have been cleared in local jails and overflow locations for potential mass arrests, and 2,500 interlocking steel fences have been purchased for use downtown.
While open-carry gun laws will not be suspended across the city, they will be suspended inside the smaller security zones overseen by the U.S. Secret Service, including the convention arena itself.
In addition, a long list of items are prohibited in both the special security zones and larger event zones, including whole fruit and umbrellas.
The security concerns are due in part to the divisive nature of Trump, the Republican's presumptive nominee, whose rallies are often emotionally charged and have occasionally led to violence.
Along with party loyalists, thousands of protesters are expected in Cleveland. Organizers for permitted events told the city they estimate 11,300 demonstrators to show up for their respective rallies during the four-day convention. Several organizers did not provide numbers and many unpermitted demonstrations will also take place.
NBC News' Tracy Connor, Jacob Rascon and Shaquille Brewster contributed to this report.
Benchmark 10-year Treasury notes edged lower to yield 1.5887 percent, having closed the previous session at 1.59 percent. Bond prices move inversely to yields .
U.S. sovereign bonds traded higher on Monday, as the Wall Street rally petered out and risk aversion rose following a failed coup in Turkey.
German bunds , which are perceived as a safe-haven asset akin to Treasury notes, also rose on Monday.
Tensions were high in the U.S. after three police officers were shot dead in the city of Baton Rouge by a gunman on Sunday. President Barack Obama condemned the killings and called for a measured response ahead of party conventions.
The U.S. dollar fell back slightly against the Turkish lira and traded flat against a basket of currencies early on Monday. This followed an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan late on Friday.
The European Central Bank also published its first weekly list on who its bought corporate bonds from under its expanded asset purchasing program.
The heavy part of second-quarter earnings season will get underway on Monday, with numbers expected from Charles Schwab , IBM , Netflix and Yahoo .
Both Bank of America and Hasbro posted quarterly earnings that trumped expectations before Wall Street opened on Monday.
A man wears a Donald Trump costume as he walks near the Quicken Loans Arena, site of the 2016 Republican National Convention on July 17, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio.
All three polls show presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with leads. Clinton now leads Trump by slightly more than President Barack Obama led Mitt Romney at this point in 2012. Romney narrowed the gap after his convention and Trump may well do the same. But Romney still went on to lose to Obama by 4 points, which is now about the baseline Democratic advantage in presidential campaigns.
In the latest ABC/Washington Post poll , 64 percent view Trump unfavorably. Underscoring the challenge, 52 percent have a strongly unfavorable view, suggesting nothing Republicans do in Cleveland will move the numbers in Trump's direction in a major way. In the latest CNN/ORC poll , Trump is at 59 percent unfavorable.
But just because it's simple does not mean it will be easy. Or indeed even possible. According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll , just 27 percent of Americans view Trump favorably while 60 percent view him negatively. That's the worst score for any presumptive nominee in the history of the poll.
And it is difficult to see Trump outperforming Romney in any demographic group except noncollege educated white males. Trump now leads Clinton among this group by 69-27 percent, according to the ABC/Washington Post poll, ahead of Romney's 64-33 percent win total in 2012. But there is a big problem with Trump's white support. It falls off a cliff with college-educated whites, who are more likely to vote.
Among white voters with a college degree, the race is essentially tied, 43-42 percent in favor of Clinton. Romney won this group by 14 points in 2012.
And Trump's performance among non-white voters is abysmal. In the NBC/WSJ poll, just 14 percent of Hispanic voters say they will support Trump and 82 percent say they view him unfavorably. This will hurt Trump in swing states including Florida and Colorado.
Among black voters, Quinnipiac recently had Trump at 1 percent. In recent polling in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Trump had zero percent black support. Literally none. According to the Cook Political Report, black voters provided Obama's winning margin in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada and Virginia.
To attempt to soften Americans' views of him, Trump in Cleveland will rely in large part on members of his own family. On Monday night, Trump's wife, Melania, will address the nation in prime time. On Tuesday it will be his children Tiffany and Donald Jr. and on Wednesday Eric Trump will speak. To round things out on Thursday, Ivanka Trump will introduce her father for his acceptance speech.
These family members could very well help improve Trump's image, especially among white women, where he is now essentially tied with Clinton. Romney won white women by 14 percent.
But look elsewhere in the Cleveland speakers list and you will find many conservative white men speaking who are unlikely to boost Trump among demographic groups where he needs to perform much better to have any chance of winning. Monday night's speakers include Willie Robertson of "Duck Dynasty," Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sens. Tom Cotton and Jeff Sessions and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
These speakers will likely thrill Trump's base but do little to broaden his appeal. The following nights run along similar lines, though there are several women speakers and at least a few minorities.
But if Trump comes out of Cleveland with a poll bounce that is mainly driven by increased enthusiasm among noncollege educated whites, he will have achieved very little. And that bounce will almost certainly get wiped out by Clinton's convention in Philadelphia, which will include addresses from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Obama, whose approval ratings now routinely top 50 percent.
The general election polls that really matter will emerge in August, after the convention bounces fade and the race settles ahead of the debates. If Clinton is still close to Trump among white women and college-educated whites overall, the outcome in November is not likely to be close. Because she is going to run up the score among minority voters in possibly historic ways.
Ben White is Politico's chief economic correspondent and a CNBC contributor. He also authors the daily tip sheet Politico Morning Money [politico.com/morningmoney]. Follow him on Twitter @morningmoneyben.
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Donald Trump is once again shifting the parameters of his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, calling Sunday for "extreme vetting" of persons from "territories" with a history of terror though not explicitly abandoning his previous across-the-board ban.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday, Trump zeroed in on people from suspicious "territories" as those who will receive deep scrutiny when trying to enter the United States. He did not directly repudiate his previous call for an outright ban. "Call it whatever you want," Trump told CBS when asked if he was changing his previously released policy. More from NBC News:
Trump's Immigration Ban Ensnares a Third of the World
Kaine: Pence Record is 'Anti-Civil Rights'
Poll: Clinton Keeps 5-Point Lead Over Trump Heading Into Conventions "Change territories, but there are territories and terror states and terror nations that we're not going to allow the people to come into our country," he said.
Donald Trump Chris Goodney | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Trump continued: "We're going to have a thing called 'extreme vetting.' And if people want to come in, there's going to be extreme vetting. We're going to have extreme vetting. They're going to come in and we're going to know where they came from and who they are."
Syrian refugees, however, appear to still be on Trump's list of those people not allowed into the country. The presumptive Republican nominee, who heads to the convention this week for his official coronation, remained consistent on his calls to "not let people in from Syria that nobody knows who they are." This ban appears more country-based than religious-based. Trump's initial proposal for a ban came in December of 2015. He called for a temporary yet "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." The 2015 policy proposed a blanket ban on Muslims based on what Trump called "hatred" of the West he said was innate in Islam.
The language around the ban later shifted when Trump traveled to Scotland, spurring questions when he told a reporter it wouldn't "bother" him to allow a Scottish or British Muslim to come into the United States in light of his proposed ban. When asked moments later by The Daily Mail to further clarify those remarks, Trump responded: "I don't want people coming in I don't want people coming in from certain countries. I don't want people coming in from the terror countries. You have terror countries! I don't want them, unless they're very, very strongly vetted."
People wave Turkish flags during a march around Kizilay Square in reaction to the attempted military coup on July 16, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey.
In Turkey this weekend, the fight for control of both traditional and social media was, in some ways, just as fierce as the clashes taking place on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara.
And, although the coup against President Tayyip Erdogan did not succeed, the outcome could have been very different had it not been for internet-enabled technology that instantly mobilized citizens against the military, according to experts.
"Twitter and social media may have prevented the coup from taking place," Andrew Selepak, director of the social media master's program at the University of Florida, told CNBC.
"Clearly the military didn't take into account that Erdogan didn't have to be there to still speak to the people, military and police, and believed that taking control of the media would block his message from being heard."
Former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker agreed that, if social media didn't carry the day for Erodgen, it certainly played a significant role.
"Twitter and the like enabled he and his followers [military included] to counter-punch and react effectively," he said.
"Time and time again we see situations around the globe where normal communication modes are compromised and social media comes through as a vehicle for mass communication," he added.
This was particular apparent during Erdogan's remote appearance on CNN Turk, where a television anchor showed that the President - who declined to reveal his location - was talking to her via FaceTime, allowing him to transmit a call to the public to take to the streets, public squares and airports to protest the coup. The incident later prompted the military to storm the building and shut down the studios.
Erdogan also called on the public via Twitter to combat the uprising.
Episodes of political upheaval, such as the Arab Spring in 2010 and the Hong Kong protests of 2014, are usually marked by heavy coverage on social media, but the situation in Turkey was particularly unusual because Erdogan has in the past been referred to as "one of the world's most determined internet censors."
In 2014, he demanded Twitter shut down accounts after two anonymous accounts released secretly recorded conversations during a corruption scandal. He later pledged to "root out" social media.
YouTube, meanwhile, remains partially blocked in Turkey.
That hasn't prevented the President gaining popularity on social media, however. Erdogan has more than eight million followers on Facebook, so could in theory have used Facebook Live to address the populace as effectively as he had by appearing via FaceTime on mainstream station CNN Turk.
"It is much easier for the government or military to take over traditional media, but as we saw in Turkey, the military was unable to shutdown the internet," the University of Florida's Selepak said.
With more than 1.6 billion users on Facebook, Selepak predicts much greater use of Facebook Live ahead for events that traditionally would have remained the domain of terrestrial television.
"No traditional media outlet can broadcast to that sizable of an audience at one time where world leaders and politicians can directly reach the people unfettered by traditional media," he added.
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Investors will be watching President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response to last week's failed coup attempt in Turkey, according to Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
Contentious politics, instability and recent terror attacks have led to a loss of tourism and the view that risks in Turkey are rising, said Haykel.
"People I think are wondering, look, if this guy Erdogan, who has these very authoritarian tendencies, doesn't get the country back in order, it's a risky place and don't invest there," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box."
On Monday, the iShares MSCI Turkey Exchange ETF was down 5 percent in premarket trading. The recovered against the U.S. dollar after dropping to a multimonth low on Friday.
Turkey suspended thousands of police officers on Monday, widening a purge of the armed forces and judiciary and raising concern among European allies that it was abandoning the rule of law.
While Erdogan is democratically elected and most Turks prefer him to military rule, he has also placed his supporters into key positions of power while ridding himself of "any form of opposition," Haykel said. The faction of the military that launched the coup was seeking to block that process, he added.
He also raised the possibility that the plotters were motivated by a perception that Erdogan would soon purge the military of supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Turkish cleric with whom Erdogan was allied until the country's 2013 government corruption scandal.
Erdogan says Gulen orchestrated Friday's coup attempt, and Turkey is saying it is preparing to request Gulen's extradition. On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said U.S. compliance would require that Turkey present evidence.
Haykel said the United States should check Erdogan's power and ensure he does not overreach in managing purges, but ultimately the European Union Turkey's largest economic market has the most influence over the nation of 80 million people.
Reuters contributed to this story.
A clue to Hillary Clinton's running mate pick might lie with the possible vice presidential choices not scheduled to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week in Philadelphia, Howard Dean told CNBC on Monday.
The convention committee released the initial speakers list Friday, slotting on the first night Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who fiercely fought Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. But two names were notably missing.
"Two people who were not on it were [Sens.] Elizabeth Warren and Tim Kaine," said Dean, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. "The tea leaves on this ... are so interesting."
"[That] means, they haven't been given speaker slots because they may be saved for a much bigger speaker slot," he told "Squawk Box."
Warren of Massachusetts, a champion of the far left, is seen a someone who would be acceptable to the supporters of Sanders. But as a vocal critic of the financial industry, many Wall Street donors have expressed outrage over Warren as a possibility.
While Warren might give Clinton more credibility with voters who supported Sanders, Kaine from Virginia is viewed as the safe choice. Even Bill Daley, former commerce secretary for Bill Clinton and chief of staff for Barack Obama, said on "Squawk Box" last month that Kaine is a "solid former governor from a swing state."
Whomever Clinton chooses, Dean said it would be smart to wait until this week's Republican National Convention is over.
"It's unlikely you're going to upstage the Republican National Convention with a VP pick," he said. "We want the VP pick to have the maximum exposure. My guess is it's either over the weekend or early in the [Democratic] convention week, next week."
Asked whether he'd be chosen by Clinton, Dean said, jokingly, "It won't be Howard Dean."
With the GOP convention starting Monday, Clinton has a 5 point lead nationally over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Dean, an ex-governor of Vermont and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said he lobbied for Clinton's VP pick to be under the age of 50. "I just think it's time we turned the country over to the next generation."
"It's not going to happen this election. But I think we can prepare for the future," Dean said.
International Business Machines reported quarterly earnings and revenue that beat analysts' expectations on Monday.
The enterprise technology company posted fiscal-second-quarter earnings per share of $2.95, compared to $3.84 a share in the year-earlier period.
Revenue for the quarter came in at $20.24 billion, against the comparable year-ago figure of $20.81 billion. This quarter marks IBM's 17th straight quarterly decline in revenue.
Shares edged slightly higher in after-hours trading following the earnings report.
Analysts expected IBM to report earnings of $2.89 per share on revenue of $20.03 billion, according to a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate.
The earnings come as Big Blue, founded in 1911, continues its transition from a legacy technology company to the cloud. The company's data intelligence play, Watson, is branded as "cognitive," or artificial intelligence plus, and aims to add value compared with its cloud competitors.
"IBM Cloud grew 30 percent to $3.4 billion in the quarter, and over the trailing 12 months were $11.6 billion," according to the company's spokesperson. "So cloud is becoming more important to the overall IBM storya sign of how the transformation is taking hold."
IBM said it is seeing benefits from increased R&D investments, including the close of 25 acquisitions in the past 18 months, mostly around what CEO Virginia Rometty dubs "strategic imperatives": cloud, analytics, security, and social and mobile technologies.
-CNBC's Anita Balakrishnan contributed to this report.
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Turkey's roundup of thousands of people after Friday night's failed coup is necessary to restore security to the country, a senior advisor and counsel to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Monday.
"The country's just had a coup a violent coup. A coup where tanks literally trammeled over civilians. There were hundreds of deaths, hundreds of injuries," Robert Amsterdam said in an interview with CNBC's "Power Lunch." The broad crackdown by Turkey and its calls to reinstate the death penalty for plotters drew concern from Western allies who said the government must uphold the rule of law in the country, a NATO member that is one of Washington's most powerful Muslim allies. Some voiced concern Erdogan was using the opportunity to consolidate his power and further a process of stifling dissent which has already caused tensions with Europe.
People gather for celebration around Turkish police officers, loyal to the government, standing atop tanks abandoned by Turkish army officers, against a backdrop of Istanbul's iconic Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul, July 16, 2016, Turkey. Getty Images
However, Amsterdam said it's important to note that this was the sixth attempt to overthrow the government of Turkey. "I'll tell you from having to survive a coup in Thailand that what happens to a country after those coups is far worse than rounding up people, interrogating them and trying to figure out what happened and trying to avoid the next anti-democratic coup," he said. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander, said it is important that Erdogan not seek personal vengeance but follow the rule of law to sustain the democratic government in Turkey. "We are doing everything we can to persuade Erdogan not to continue to centralize power," he told "Power Lunch." "Ultimately it's Turkey's choice and if that's what their people want, the United States is not going to be able to stand in the way of that."
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If Donald Trump was hoping a large number of angry and disillusioned Bernie Sanders supporters would vote for him, Mike Pence just crushed that dream.
Trump's choice of Pence, a Swiss-cheese Republican who evokes little emotion positive or negative as his running mate was clearly a play to appease an establishment base still in denial that a brash, anti-trade, anti-neocon, anti-kiss-the-Koch-Brothers'-ring reality star has taken over their regular order of pushing money around for the plutocrats.
But Pence, who is governor of Indiana a state Trump won handily during the primary, and will likely win in the general election offers nothing to the lost-at-sea Sanders voter whose frustration with the status quo makes them open to Trump.
"I was gonna vote for Trump if he picked a more moderate VP," Sanders supporter Shahid wrote on Facebook following the announcement of the Trump-Pence ticket on Saturday. "But now I'm all in for [Jill] Stein," the Green Party candidate for president.
Another user wrote that the possibility of a President Pence, should something happen to Trump, was one step too far.
If Trump "had picked a more moderate person instead of the devil incarnate, he would have been more appealing,"Javiera C wrote. "We all know Trump will probably get impeached in the first year so his VP will be president."
Another Facebook user suggested Trump's pick of an establishment Republican like Pence taints his credentials as an anti-establishment outsider, while yet another vowed that Pence only increased her opposition to Trump.
Sure, a few social media comments don't represent a trend, but this kind of reaction only confirms existing tepid poll numbers for the Donald among #FeeltheBern-ers.
A recent Pew Research poll found just 9 percent of Sanders backers would vote for Trump; he did slightly better in a separate poll from Yik Yak, a location-based social media network, drawing 13 percent.
But picking a deeply religious, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights, old white male probably won't boost those sagging numbers among a Sanders coalition made up, in large part, of young professional and millennial voters less religious and in favor of gay marriage and LGBT equality.
Even more toxic in Trump's quest to sway fed up Sanders supporters: Pence's religious-freedom law, that would have given business owners the right to refuse service to gay customers, which he was forced to retreat from after a political firestorm.
That mess will now be thrust back into the national spotlight.
This level of discrimination will only disqualify Trump even further in the eyes of Sanders supporters, who are furious enough at political corruption and neoliberalism to vote against the Democratic Party, but, won't turn a blind eye to the type of discrimination their champion has fought against for decades.
In the end, Sanders supporters open to Trump won't be making their decision based on Trump or Pence; the majority of those I've met who are open to Trump have nothing nice to say about him. A vote for Trump would be nothing less than a protest vote against Hillary Clinton.
But the notion of a vice president, or potentially, President Pence, does nothing to close the deal with them.
Despite reporting Q2 subscriber rates that missed expectations, most analysts think Netflix 's growth trajectory will improve sooner or later.
The company reported in its Q2 letter to shareholders on Monday that it added 1.7 million subscribers, a steep drop from its forecast of 2.5 million. The U.S. added 160,000 subscribers compared to projection of 500,000, while international subscriber additions totaled 1.5 million compared to the 2.0 million forecast. The stock, already down year-to-date, sank in after-hours trading, dropping more than 15 percent, prompting CEO Reed Hastings to apologize in a Monday conference call with investors.
"We apologize for the volatility. I know it's not easy on everyone. The big picture is very much intact and we're very excited about it, so we're continuing to execute on growing the business," Hastings said.
The company said that while total additions were on target, the unsubscribing rate was "up slightly and unexpectedly." Netflix claimed the churn was tied to press coverage in April around its plans to raise prices for long-term members, saying that consumers thought the price effect would occur immediately instead of over a longer period. (The price increase should be completed by the end of the year, the company said on its earnings call.)
Despite missing its guidance, Netflix's quarterly earnings beat expectations. It posted second quarter earnings of 9 cents per share, compared to 6 cents per share year over year. Revenue was at $2.11 billion, compared to $1.65 billion the year prior.
Thompson Reuters consensus estimate was $2.11 billion in revenue, with the company expected to post earnings of 2 cents a share.
And there is worse. This man also warned the French parliamentarians that large-scale terrorist attacks could be expected from some 400 to 500 terrorist operatives trained in Syria and Iraq who were now on the loose in France.
That seems to have been an underestimate of the actual danger: The French media are currently reporting that in the southeastern administrative region that includes Nice alone there are between 2,000 and 3,000 "sympathizers of radical Islam," and that more than 500 people in that area were suspected of being "active duty" terrorists.
That is the sad background to likely new tragedies in the months ahead.
Tourism hurt
The fallout from this latest attack will deal a serious blow to euro area's fragile economic recovery. The business and consumer sentiment will be adversely affected, and people planning their holiday travel may think again about their destination.
That is particularly dangerous for France, the most visited country in the world. Some 85 million visitors from abroad are expected this year. The French tourist industry provides jobs and incomes for 1.2 million people and accounts for 4.2 percent of the country's payrolls. The World Bank estimates that in 2014 foreign visitors to France spent $66.8 billion.
With an average growth rate of 1.2 percent in the year to the first quarter, the French economy's forward momentum remains weak and quite sensitive to possible demand reversals during the peak tourist season and in the traditionally strong consumer spending months toward the end of the year.
Other major euro area economies also face dangers of terrorist attacks. According to British media reports on Friday, the Foreign Office considers that Germany, Spain and Belgium are in a group of countries exposed to a high risk of terrorist attacks.
Germans would probably agree with that assessment, because their own intelligence networks have been warning for months of a highly probable large-scale terrorist event. That would raise the country's security alert to a whole new level. So far, Germans had to deal with relatively low-intensity scuffles with migrants and other forms of migrant-related social unrest, including Bavaria's claims to independence. None of that is good for a nation used to social and political stability.
Like France, Spain is a country where heightened terrorist threats can do great damage to its booming tourist industry. With 68 million tourist arrivals last year, Spain was the third most visited country in the world. Tourism provides livelihoods to 900,000 people and accounts for 5 percent of total employment.
CLEVELAND Anti-Donald Trump protesters marched here on Monday, urging voters to 'dump Trump' as the Republican National Convention kicked off.
Chanting "No KKK, no racists," the marchers weaved their way toward the city's Quicken Loans Arena in sweltering heat. At least 100 people or more walked through the city's downtown, holding signs decrying Trump, police-involved shootings and deportation of immigrants.
Dozens of police flanked the peaceful demonstration, riding on bikes alongside and behind protesters amid heightened security around the convention area. More than 40 trade unions, immigrant rights, student and anti-war groups joined in on the rally, organizers said.
The marchers eventually encountered groups protesting the Black Lives Matter movement, prompting police to separate the two sides as they shouted back and forth.
Three bills sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Katko were part of a larger aviation package signed into law Friday by President Barack Obama.
Katko's measures the Checkpoint Optimization and Efficiency Act, the PreCheck Expansion Act and SAFE GATES bill were included in the short-term reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. The legislation received bipartisan support in Congress before being sent to Obama's desk.
"Since being elected to represent central New York in Congress, I've worked tirelessly to ensure that we're taking action to keep the traveling public safe in the current high threat environment," Katko, R-Camillus, said in a statement.
"(On Friday), the president signed into law critical legislation to strengthen security for travelers both domestically and internationally, make travel more efficient at airport checkpoints and ensure that the Transportation Security Administration is ready to protect our transportation infrastructure."
Katko introduced the Checkpoint Optimization and Efficiency Act to address long lines at some of the nation's busiest airports.
Before introducing the legislation, he held a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security hearing on the problems posed by long lines at security checkpoints.
The House passed the legislation in June, but the Senate didn't act on it until the measure was part of the FAA bill.
The PreCheck Expansion Act sponsored by Katko seeks to improve the expedited screening program available for low-risk air travelers. The bill was introduced last year and approved by the House in July 2015.
In March, Katko rolled out the Securing Aviation from Foreign Entry Points and Guarding Airports Through Enhancing Security Act. The goal of the legislation is to bolster security at international airports with direct flights to the U.S.
The measure requires the TSA to conduct security assessments at last point of departure airports and the agency would be permitted to provide security equipment to foreign airports.
The House passed the SAFE GATES bill in April before the measure was attached to the larger FAA legislation.
"In the current high threat environment, it is critical that we take action to secure our aviation sector and work to prevent attacks like those in Istanbul and Brussels," Katko said in a statement last week. "These three measures provide greater efficiency, enhanced safety and a reformed TSA that is better prepared to protect our transportation infrastructure."
Katko has made aviation security a top priority in Congress. He's already two airport security bills signed into law by Obama and he was chair of a task force that examined the threat posed by foreign fighters.
The task force's report generated several findings and recommendations, many of which have inspired legislation to address various security-related issues.
Since taking office in January 2015, Katko has had 12 bills approved by the House. Five have either been signed into law or part of larger bills that have been approved by Obama.
While undocumented workers are tucked into every state and nearly every corner of the U.S. economy, states with more unauthorized workers would be hit hardest by a so-called Trump wall and fewer illegal migrants. The idea to deport millions of immigrants and erect a wall along the southern border of the United States with Mexico is an anchor in Donald Trump's presidential run. Extracting millions of unauthorized workers from the U.S. labor force and making it harder for Mexican consumers to travel to the United States to spend money are policies of concern to economists.
Immigrant advocacy members pray at the U.S.-Mexico border fence on May 1, 2016, in Tijuana. John Moore | Getty Images
"The impacts wouldn't be uniform," said Timothy Kehoe, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota and an advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Some states, some industries would be hurt more than others. But it would be tremendously disruptive."
States with the highest population of unauthorized migrants, from one to five, are: California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Some 58 percent of all unauthorized U.S. migrants live in the top five states, said Jeanne Batalova, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
While the total number of unauthorized migrants in the United States (including both workers and non-workers) is around 10.2 million, roughly 7.2 million unauthorized workers are in the U.S. labor force, according to January 2015 data from the Migration Policy Institute. (The data is based on analysis from the Census Bureau's 2013 American Community Survey.) That's roughly 5 percent of the U.S. workforce. In California, Texas and Illinois more than 70 percent of all undocumented migrants come from a single country Mexico. And across the United States, including the top five states, some 49 percent of unauthorized migrants have lived in America for more than a decade. "It's an established population," Batalova said. "They're ingrained in the economy in the states of which they reside."
Where they work
Unauthorized workers in the top five states work in industries that rely on low-skilled cheap labor to drive down costs and keep consumer prices lower, from food to housing. Here's a snapshot:
California: Predominately in hospitality (the grouping includes accommodation, food services and tourism), manufacturing, construction and agriculture.
Texas: Typical for the South, construction is a big employer. Other key employers are hospitality and other services.
New York: Hospitality, construction, education and health care.
Florida: Construction, professional business services (for example, as a janitor in a research facility) and hospitality.
Illinois: Like other Midwestern states, manufacturing employs many unauthorized workers, followed by the hospitality sector.
Source: Migration Policy Institute, U.S. Census Bureau
The economic consequences of removing these workers from the labor force could be potentially dire. "Without new workers who would take their jobs, it could cause havoc in those industries, at least in the near term," Batalova said. Beyond the threat of a Trump wall, a deadlocked Supreme Court in June failed to revive President Obama's plan to protect roughly 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. "It put us back into legal and political limbo," Batalova said. If and when deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants is triggered by a Supreme Court ruling or a so-called Trump wall, the mere possibility of enforced deportation could influence many undocumented workers to not show up for work in key industries and derail state economies, Batalova said. This trend already has emerged in education and schools as undocumented parents hold back their children from school, perceiving a threat of immigration raids. "It's that perception of threat that is still real for many people," she said.
Beyond cheap labor
Trump's political rise shows that a top concern for many Americans is that immigrants take jobs and depress the wages of similarly skilled, native workers. Immigration economist George Borjas at the Harvard Kennedy School has analyzed how much immigration can lower the wage of competing workers. A 10 percent increase in worker supply can reduce wages by 3 percent to 4 percent, according to his influential research.
But the debate goes beyond wages. Research conducted by William Olney, associate professor of economics at Williams College, has found the availability of more low-skilled workers can prompt existing U.S. businesses to expand operations. Immigration also increases the number of small businesses in mobile, low-skilled intensive industries, such as manufacturing, wholesale trade and transportation and warehousing. Total immigrants, both legal and unauthorized, comprise roughly 17 percent, or more than 26 million, of the civilian U.S. workforce. "It's very difficult to imagine the economy functioning without this workforce, which has grown so large over a long period of time," said Pia Orrenius, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Fewer immigrants could mean lowered rates of U.S. productivity, less innovation and fewer small businesses that are created. "It would create enormous problems that economists would call a recession," Kehoe said.
It's very difficult to imagine the economy functioning without this workforce. Pia Orrenius senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
U.S. innovation can also get a boost from immigrant college graduates. Given immigrants' strong grounding in science and engineering education, they patent at a higher rate than native workers. A 1 percentage-point increase in immigrant college graduates' population share increases patents per capita by 9 percent to 18 percent, according to research published in the "American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics in 2010." Even immigrants who do not patent themselves may increase innovation by providing complementary skills to inventors, such as entrepreneurship.
Olney and other entrepreneurship researchers have found high levels of business creation among immigrants, especially first-generation immigrants who were born elsewhere and later moved to the United States. First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs launch and run new businesses at twice the rate of even second-generation immigrants, according to a 2012 U.S. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, led by several researchers, including Donna Kelley of Babson College in Massachusetts.
The Mexican fallacy
For all the talk about cracking down on unauthorized Mexicans crossing the border, illegal crossings have been declining amid intensified enforcement and rising smuggling fees. The probability of an undocumented migrant taking a first trip to America has dropped to near zero, according to the Mexican Migration Project. They track Mexican migration to the United States. The number of Mexican immigrants living illegally in the United States has also declined, down by roughly 1 million since 2007 to around 5.6 million in 2014, according to data from the Pew Research Center. In more recent years, Central Americans are among those apprehended along the border. More non-Mexicans than Mexicans were apprehended at U.S. borders in 2014, the first time on record this has happened, according to Pew.
The border fence along the lower Rio Grande Valley between McAllen and Harlingen, Texas. The Weslaco Border Patrol Station is responsible for 40 miles of river boundary. John Moore | Getty Images
Two huge terror attacks in a year would be enough to challenge the spirit of any country.
As if the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015 and the Paris attacks in November were not enough, a third episode of carnage in Nice on Bastille Day, July 14, has shaken France to the brink of a terrifying escalation.
An isolated immigrant population and a strident right-wing political faction in a country awash with guns has created a toxic and explosive mixture. France, a nation long considered a beacon of liberty and stability, may be on the edge of something resembling a civil war.
I wish I could say this was just hysterical exaggeration. But the evidence does not support complacency. Just down the road from me on the outskirts of Montpellier on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, there's long been a gun club where enthusiastic game hunters can polish their skills during the off-season. Unlike in Britain, it is perfectly legal for members of such clubs to own pistols and semi-automatic rifles.
In the last few months, since the wave of terrorism has intensified, the membership of the gun club has quadrupled, from 200 to 800 members. The new members are not all motivated by the love of shooting sports. Benoit, a local olive farmer who owns more than a dozen rifles, pistols and shotguns, as well as an AK-47 assault rifle, admitted to me this weekend something much darker.
"They're getting ready for a war," he said.
This sounds crazy, but last week, even before the latest atrocity in Nice, it was revealed that Patrick Calvar, a senior French intelligence official, had told a parliamentary committee that one more incident could provoke a bloody civil conflict in this country.
Netflix shares have been on the decline, off more than 14 percent this year, and down 26 percent from the all-time high set last year, dragged down by a wave of negative analyst sentiment.
Where the stock goes next hinges on what kind of subscriber numbers and forecasts the company reveals when it reports earnings after the bell Monday.
The company projected in its last earnings release that it would add 2.5 million new subscribers in the quarter half a million in the U.S. Analysts are projecting slightly stronger growth a total of 2.63 million new streaming subscribers in the quarter. But even those stronger Wall Street projections are a significant decline from the year-ago quarter, when the company added 3.28 million new subscribers as it ramped up its international rollout.
Perhaps even more important than this quarter's numbers is what kind of outlook CEO Reed Hastings provides for the third quarter. In Q3, analysts anticipate the addition of 774,000 U.S. subscribers and 2.85 million overseas. The stock could swing in either direction depending on how the numbers come in compared with these Wall Street projections.
Then there's the questions of whether Netflix's market is getting saturated, with Hulu and Amazon investing more in original content, and Amazon launching its stand-alone video app. But many analysts are still bullish. JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth says his longer-term thesis remains unchanged despite all the volatility since its last earnings report. Anmuth believes the company's guidance for international additions could be conservative, in light of the follow-through from launches in Japan, Spain, Portugal and Italy, as well as the huge popularity of its French original "Marseille."
"Netflix has been in heavy investment mode and still growing profit through scale, with a commitment to global profitability in 2017," Anmuth wrote.
Turkish stocks plunged Monday, but the country's currency recovered some of the decline it saw during the short-lived coup effort Friday night. Turkish debt sold off, and its 10-year bond is yielding an attractive 9.5 percent, about 2.5 percentage points above U.S. high-yield debt.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government responded to Friday's attempted overthrow by arresting thousands in the military and judiciary. Nine thousand government employees were also fired from their jobs.
The failed military coup and the Turkish government's sweeping crackdown makes Turkey a more difficult investment destination, but the global hunt for yield could lure investors who might otherwise have stayed away.
"We've been negative on Turkey for quite some time and recent developments make us more concerned," said Gulen Tuncer, director, responsible for corporate and emerging markets bond research at Conning.
U.S. and European Union officials condemned the coup attempt and said they supported the democratically elected government. But on Monday EU foreign ministers warned Erdogan that his government needs to respect the law and any effort to reinstate the death penalty would end any chance the NATO country has of joining the EU.
"Right now if you're a businessman thinking about investing, you probably have to wait and see what Erdogan will do. All the assumptions are that he will tighten the grip. He had shown some authoritarian bent already. The coup may reinforce those trends. On the other hand, there's an off chance that reforms could be accelerated to try to offset some of the bad sentiment," said UBS Jorge Mariscal, emerging markets chief investment officer at UBS Wealth Management.
He expects GDP to grow 3.5 percent this year as a result of the coup, down from a previous forecast of 4 percent. Mariscal is also sticking with his call to overweight Turkish stocks, which are still up about 7 percent year to date.
"The economy was in good shape coming into this, and it's going to have a little bit of a negative shock," Mariscal said. He expects the coup to impact the country's effort to regain tourism, which could in turn dent economic growth.
Turkish stocks fell 7 percent, but the lira recovered some of the losses made Friday night. The ishares MSCI Turkey ETF TUR was down more than 6 percent, recovering several percentage points from its earlier losses in U.S. trading.
"So far, the reaction on the economy seems to be the right one. On the political front, it remains to be seen in his crackdown of the opposition," said Mariscal. "This time around, he had a lot of popular support. The coup largely failed in part because people came out to the street in support of Erdogan."
While Erdogan's government is retaliating against those viewed as enemies, it has also been reassuring the global investment community that it would provide all the liquidity needed to keep markets and the economy functioning. The Turkish central bank meets Tuesday and could cut the overnight rate to 8.5 percent but would hold rates steady after that, according to UBS.
Turkish bond yields spiked back to late June levels, and they had benefited less than some emerging markets from the global bond rally that sent U.S. yields to record lows this month. The reaction to the coup in Turkey initially spread to other emerging currencies late Friday, but that has reversed and Turkey is being treated as an isolated concern in emerging markets.
"Right now the concern is and I think it's a valid concern that all of this is creating an opportunity (for Erdogan) to consolidate power," said Tuncer. She said there's a risk that Erdogan will move the country toward a presidential system where he personally has a lot more control. "If that doesn't happen, it would be positive."
Tuncer said the performance of Turkey's economy belies one of its fundamental weaknesses a dependence on foreign crude oil, which many energy analysts expect to get more expensive as the years goes on. "Our view is fundamentally, Turkey has not been doing so strongly, but with the low commodity prices, it has seen some improvement in its current account," she said.
But still while she views the Turkish bonds as an investment to avoid, they may attract some investors.
"Speaking form a fixed income investment standpoint, yield is so low Emerging markets have been a good alternative. When we have a risk-on sentiment, complacency takes hold," she said, adding some investors overlook the risk. "I would expect investors to focus more after this weekend, and they'll start paying more attention but it's hard to tell. Investors have proven me wrong. Again, you're chasing yield. You're trying to put money to work."
Mariscal said Turkey had been mending relations with Russia, and that should have given it a tourism boost, with Russians returning to one of their favorite holiday destinations. "In the last couple of weeks, there were statements on both sides that were mending the rough patch. The coup came at a bad time, for things were about to recover in that industry," he said. Relations between Turkey and Russia became stressed after Turkey shot down a Russian war plane near the Syrian border last year.
"On the margin, the economy will suffer a little bit," he said. "When it comes to the market, the market was cheap already. We have Turkey as one of our most preferred equity markets. It was cheap. Earnings were recovering. It's getting a little cheaper today so we're monitoring the situation. For now, it's an overweight."
He said the stock market had been performing well over the last couple of weeks, and this may in fact be just a short-term headwind. "One important thing to remember is the AKP party, the government's party has been quite respective of the economy so given that there has been on the political front a move toward more authoritarianism, the basic economic tenets are to foster growth The basic economic remains supportive of the market. Politics have been more volatile."
Mariscal said there could be a pause in investment in the country until it is clear what Erdogan will do. Erdogan has attempted to lead the country towards being a more Islamist state.
"The majority of the population is Islamic, so I would say he's quite popular for an Islamic leader. He's well received. I would say the majority of the population supports him. Turkish people value their political freedom and among Muslim states, it's the most open. If he threatens to undo that freedom, there's an important segment of the population that will come out in resistance to that. That's the uncertainty how far he goes in his retaliation efforts," he said.
Turkey has been a critical player in the fight against ISIS, and as a result has suffered from ISIS-led attacks, including a major bombing at its airport. It has also been at the center of the Syrian refugee problem, which has divided Europe. The European Union has been discussing a deal that would grant the Turkish government aid for the refugees in its country, in exchange for stopping the flow of migrants crossing into Greece.
Fitch, in commenting on Turkey's sovereign debt Monday, pointed to concerns about the government crackdown and said the coup underlines the poltical risks to its credit profile. Turkey's debt is rated BBB-.
"Whether this translates into sovereign ratings pressure will depend on the extent to which the government's reaction deepens political divisions and weakens institutional independence. This could undermine policy coherence and heighten the risks that external financing stresses materialize," Fitch said.
Marc Chandler, chief currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, said Turkey is not so important to the world's economic channels, as it is politically. He said Turkey is not attractive to many of his clients, who have viewed it as too risky. While many were shocked that the military attempted a coup, Chandler said the Turkish military has had a tradition of taking a stand against elected governments and that it views itself as a defender of secularism.
"Turkey was not a favorite even before this, partly because of the terrorism, and partly because people don't like Erdogan, and the encroachment on journalism and the judiciary branch," he said. But he too said some investors may look past those problems.
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Turkey is the only majority Muslim member of the NATO alliance. Here's a closer look at the country.
Location
It is in a strategic geographic location, straddling the Asian and European continents, and sharing borders with Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Greece, and with Bulgaria Romania, Ukraine and Russia across the Black Sea to the north.
Population
Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture an Turkish Army APC after soldiers involved in the coup surrendered on Bosphorus bridge on July 16, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey. Gokhan Tan | Getty Images
Seventy-nine million is 99.8 percent Muslim, with the remainder Christians or Jews, according to the CIA World Factbook. About three-quarters are considered Turkish and a quarter belong to the Kurdish ethnic group. Tensions with the country's Kurds have erupted into a insurgency that claimed tens of thousands of lives, especially in the 1980s.
Military
Turkey's military, which in the past has seen itself as protecting a secular state, has staged four previous coups since 1960, the last in 1997. The nation has since elected its leaders in democratic elections.
Government
Turkey's current President Recep Erdogan has ruled for 13 years. He was first served two terms as prime minister, before being elected to the more ceremonial role of president in 2014, with 51.79 percent of the vote. His Islamist AKP party gained control of parliament in parliamentary elections the following year. During the coup attempt, military personnel seized state-controlled media sites, confiscating phones and forcing broadcasters to stream weather forecasts. Erdogan, who had been vacationing earlier Friday in the coastal town of Izmir, called one of the remaining stations on his iPhone and called on his followers to hit the streets and block the coup.
Relationship with US
Erdogan has been a critic of U.S. policy in Syria, accusing the U.S. of not doing enough to support rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. Yet Turkey has been a crucial ally in the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. military has been using Turkey's Incerlik air base as a staging ground for air strikes and other operations against the terror group.
Terrorism
As more and more Republicans jump on likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's bandwagon, one central New Yorker isn't and there's no indication he will between now and November's general election.
There was a time when U.S. Rep. John Katko was asked which of the GOP presidential candidates he was supporting in the New York primary. He declined to say, but did announce he would back the GOP nominee.
Now that the presumptive nominee is Trump, Katko, R-Camillus, has been put in an awkward position: Support Trump, a candidate he's criticized for months, or don't.
Politically, it's a no-win situation for Katko. If he endorses Trump, Democrats will pounce and ramp up their attacks against him. They won't miss an opportunity to link the freshman Republican congressman to his party's standard-bearer. (They're already doing this to some extent, but Katko is using his wait-and-see approach as cover.) If he doesn't endorse Trump, some of the more conservative GOP members in central New York may reconsider their support of his re-election bid.
There is a possibility Katko will publicly support Trump. But don't be surprised if he doesn't.
During an Auburn Rotary Club luncheon held in June, Katko was asked for his opinion on the presidential race and whether he supports Trump. Katko repeated his earlier position that he's concerned with Trump's rhetoric and positions on a range of issues and also added a fresher critique.
Katko said he was concerned with Trump's ability to work in a bipartisan manner. This provided the GOP congressman with the perfect segue a chance to highlight his record of working with Democrats on issues in Congress.
And that's ultimately why Katko probably won't endorse Trump. This isn't about Trump as much as it is Katko's own record. He says he's looking forward to running on his record in this election. If he's spending a lot of time answering questions about Trump questions that will become more frequent if he chooses to support the GOP presidential candidate then the race will be less about his record and more about his endorsement in the presidential race.
That's not what he wants. He wants to be able to talk about the bills he's introduced that have been approved by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama. He wants to be able to talk about his work to combat the heroin epidemic and efforts to designate Fort Ontario in Oswego as a national park.
If he endorses Trump, he'll get less of an opportunity to do that. In a district that Obama won by double digits in 2008 and 2012, he'll be put in a position where he has to defend his endorsement at nearly every turn.
In short, whether it's fair or not, his record won't matter.
FLEMING After a weekend of red carpets, a film screening and VIP parties, the star-studded benefit event Come Together: We Will Find a Cure came to a close on Sunday with a concert by the Mersey Beatles, a world-renowned Beatles tribute band.
Buses were running from the Auburn High School parking lot taking fans to the Springside Inn for the weekend's final event.
"It's a beautiful day and I am a huge Beatles fan," said Kim Wilson, who leisurely lounged with her friends, Lorraine Wilson and Dale Hilliard, on the front lawn of the inn, where the concert was held. "I can't think of a better way to spend a beautiful afternoon than with good music and supporting a great cause. I have had a few friends who have lost their battle with breast cancer and a few who have survived. Supporting this cause is very dear to me."
The four-member group, who all hail from Liverpool, England, covers all of the original Beatles works and undergo several costume changes throughout their performance.
The weekend-long benefit event that included private fundraisers, started publicly with a red carpet movie showing of "The Lennon Report," a feature film that focuses on the events of the night that John Lennon was assassinated. The movie is due out in theaters this fall.
Sunday brought an end to the activities with a Beatles themed concert event. The whole effort was to raise funds for the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund. Although a final fundraising figure is still being determined, organizers said it will be in excess of $100,000.
And the Baldwin fund is the reason why producers of the upcoming feature film "The Lennon Report" had chosen The Merry-Go-Round Playhouse and Cayuga County to hold a special showing of the film.
"It's a wonderful cause," producer Rafael Francisco said. "And breast cancer actually has a sad tie with the movie. The two nurses who tried to help save John Lennon the night that he was shot actually both had breast cancer within months of each other."
The cause was equally powerful for actor Stef Dawson, who plays the part of Annie Preston in the "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay" and the role of Barbara Kammerer, in "The Lennon Report."
"It's such a touching thing," she said. "There is no one out there who hasn't been touched by cancer at one point or another."
Producers, writers and actors from the film, along with members of the famous Baldwin family, mingled with patrons of the concert.
Besides the Mersey Beatles, the afternoon concert also included performances by the Joe Whiting Band, Sabrina Kennedy of MTV's reality show "The Real World," and the Diana Jacobs Band.
'Wendell & Wild' is great to look at, not much fun to watch
A plan submitted by the Cayuga Community Health Network to make local laundromats more kid-friendly has been selected as a finalist in a $1 million national funding competition.
The nonprofit is one of 200 finalists including 13 others from New York eligible for prize money through the Play Everywhere Challenge hosted by KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit agency focused on encouraging balanced and active play for children.
Health network representatives said more than 1,000 applications were submitted for the Play Everywhere Challenge, an initiative designed to make unassuming places more fun for children particularly children from low-income families.
Winners will be selected in the fall. Fifty entrants will be selected to win shares of the $1 million, according to contest regulations.
For its application, the Cayuga Community Health Network submitted a plan to install wall-mounted play boards at several local laundromats, said Jessica Soule, director of the community health network. The plan, called Fun Board for Bored Kids, could also involve window clings showing poses children could do while they wait."
According to the health network's finalist entry on the KaBOOM! website, Auburn laundromats were identified by plan designers because they are often used by low-income renters and attended to by parents with their children.
"We're excited to be named as a finalist. This was an idea that grew from hoping parents don't first reach for phones or tablets when their children are bored," Soule said. "We want to support families and make parents' jobs a little easier, especially in places that aren't necessarily meant for children."
July 18, 2016 - New owners of 158 Madison plan to convert it to a 70-room, boutique hotel with a street front restaurant called Teller and a rooftop bar called Errors & Omissions. (Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal)
SHARE The rooftop bar will be named Errors & Omissions (Rendering courtesy: Chris Pardo Design: Elemental Archtecture The new owner of 158 Madison, the former Downtown branch of Regions Bank, plans to convert the building into a boutique hotel and restaurant. (Rendering courtesy Chris Pardo Design: Elemental Architecture)
By Thomas Bailey Jr. of The Commercial Appeal
The new owners of a 54-year-old Downtown bank building plan to convert it into a 70-room, boutique hotel with a streetfront restaurant called Teller and a rooftop bar called Errors & Omissions.
The building at 158 Madison is considered one of the city's finest examples of mid-century modern architecture. Erected in 1962 as Leader Federal Savings and Loan, the building lost its most recent anchor tenant earlier this year when Regions Bank moved to another Downtown site.
"We are very excited about the project and being involved in the downtown Memphis resurgence,'' architect Chris Pardo said by email.
The principal of Seattle-based Chris Pardo Design: Elemental Architecture is involved with the ownership group Wessman Holdings LLC, which purchased the 60,000-square-foot building late last week for $1.1 million.
The building stands directly across Madison from the First Tennessee Building. Nearby are two other boutique hotels that inhabit historic buildings: The soon-to-open, 58-room Hotel Napoleon at the southeast corner of Madison and B.B. King Boulevard and the 110-room Madison Hotel at 79 Madison.
The five-floor (plus basement) former Leader Federal building had been on the market only 30 days before being snatched up, said Brian Califf, broker with NAI Saig. He represented the Chicago-based sellers, 158 Madison LLC. Leader Federal, a former savings and loan founded in Memphis, was acquired by Union Planters National Bank, which in turn was absorbed by Birmingham-based Regions Bank.
The Mid-South Minority Business Council remains a tenant in the building. The former owner sold it because Regions left for a new Downtown office.
"There was a lot of demand,'' Califf said. "When we put it on the market, ServiceMaster announced their big deal Downtown,'' he said of ServiceMaster's decision to move its headquarters of more than 1,000 workers to Peabody Place.
"That created some buzz Downtown,'' Califf said, putting the market on the radar screens of a lot of out-of-town investors.
The building was featured in the 2010 book about local mid-century modern architecture, "A Survey of Modern Public Buildings in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1940 to 1980."
"This building is an excellent example of the classical hypothesis that a building should express a bottom, middle and top as interpreted in the vernacular of modern architecture principles,'' the book states.
"The bottom level is firmly anchored on its recessed glass wall pedestal, the next three floors are expressive of the office function which they accommodate and the top level recessed glazing provides a modern interpretation of cornice found in traditional design,'' the book states. "The precast concrete facade is impeccably detailed....''
Pardo said he was drawn to the building's mid-century modern look "and feel it is a real jewel in downtown.
"We are very excited to restore and rejuvenate the building with an active use,'' Pardo said.
"Our plans consist of a change of use from office/retail to hotel mixed-use.I have designed the project to accommodate a 70 room luxury boutique hotel along with a front facing restaurant named Teller drawing from the original use of the building as the Leader Federal Savings and Loan,'' he said. "The hotel will also include a coffee shop, meeting space and a rooftop bar named Errors & Omissions.''
The new owners have been working with Montgomery Martin and his team Adam Moore, Randy Bratton of Montgomery Martin Contractors. Montgomery has been essential in the early stages of evaluating and planning the adaptive re-use of 158 Madison. They expect to complete the renovation before the end of 2017.
Montrell Jackson
Next time you see a police officer, think of Montrell Jackson.
Picture that now-viral Facebook photo of Jackson, in uniform, sunglasses pushed back on top of his head, holding his baby boy, Mason, and flashing a big smile.
A young father beaming with pride and joy.
Or the photo of Jackson, M JACKSON embroidered in gold on his uniform, wearing sunglasses, a wedding ring and a half-smile, and flashing a peace sign.
A peace officer flashing a peace sign.
Remember the message he posted July 8, the day after five police officers were assassinated in Dallas, nine days before Jackson and two other officers were assassinated in Baton Rouge.
"I'm working in these streets, so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever," the 32-year-old officer he wrote on his Facebook page, "if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you."
Police officers need more than a hug, and it's beginning to feel like they don't have a prayer.
"We're asking cops to do too much in this country," Dallas Police Chief David Brown said last week.
"Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding let's give it to the cop. Here in Dallas, we've got a loose dog problem let's have the cops chase loose dogs. That's too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems."
Police were feeling the pressure long before they were being targeted for assassination.
Last summer, I rode with several Memphis police officers who patrolled streets in Frayser, North Memphis and Hickory Hill.
It had been a particularly brutal summer for police/community relations in Memphis.
Last July, Darrius Stewart, a young black man, was shot and killed by a young white police officer in Hickory Hill.
Two weeks later, Sean Bolton, a young white police officer, was shot and killed by a young black man in Parkway Village.
"One bad cop or one thug does something stupid, and people seem willing to throw us all under the bus," Lt. T.R. Wilson, a 27-year MPD veteran who grew up near Ferguson, Missouri, told me.
"We do this job because we care, but there are a lot of guns out there, and a lot of people who don't care if they go to jail. We do a good job, despite all that, but we can't do it all."
Certainly not when everyone they encounter might have a gun, or an assault weapon, along with a drug or mental health issue, and/or a deep anger about or hatred of police.
That doesn't excuse or justify any police shooting. But no police shooting justifies the assassination nor the guilt by association of any police officer.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," Jackson posted on Facebook, speaking for officers in Baton Rouge, Dallas, Memphis and every city in America.
"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 3 days have tested me to the core. When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they don't know you at all."
We know some of them now.
We know Montrell Jackson, the 32-year-old African-American husband and father who died in Baton Rouge.
We know Patrick Zamarrippa, a 32-year-old Mexican-American, Navy veteran and married father of two, who survived three tours in Iraq only to be killed in the line of duty in Dallas.
Find the Twitter photo of Zamarripa, in a T-shirt, his newborn daughter, Lycoln, now 2, resting on his chest.
"Daddy's got you," he wrote in one tweet. "My new reason for life," he wrote in another.
We know Michael Krol, a 40-year-old white American who moved from his family in Detroit to Dallas to become a police officer.
Look at the photo of Krol, in full uniform and grin, proudly holding his Dallas Police Academy certificate the day he graduated in 2008.
"He wanted to do more, that's kind of how he was. He wanted to make everything better," Krol's uncle Jim Ehlke told WDIV Detroit. "It was probably the most frustrating thing for him he couldn't solve it all."
Next time you look at a police officer, see the father, husband, son and brother or mother, wife, daughter and sister behind the badge.
"These are trying times," Jackson posted on Facebook. "Please don't let hate infect your heart."
Beach Boy Brian Wilson will mark the 50th anniversary of "Pet Sounds" with a concert in Tunica in July.
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By Bob Mehr of The Commercial Appeal
Brian Wilson is a man of few words. Perhaps not always, but certainly on the summer day when he calls to discuss his upcoming tour a 50th anniversary celebration of the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" which will bring him to the Mid-South this week.
It's not that Wilson is difficult or unaccommodating, quite the opposite. He replies to every question amiably, directly, but he's not one to expound on his answers, leaving most reporters (certainly this one) grasping for ways to engage the once troubled, now happy, but still enigmatic pop genius. The truth is that the power of Wilson's music has been one of introversion and isolation: a man lost in the melodies in his head, the sonic world that only he can hear, resulting in sublime songs that have always served as his best and truest expression.
That expression certainly found its apotheosis in "Pet Sounds," the 1966 masterpiece routinely included in or at the top of most "best albums" lists of the rock era. Wilson will showcase the record during his set Friday at the Horseshoe Casino's Bluesville in Tunica.
In advance of the tour, his handlers have put Wilson on the phone with journalists to tout the upcoming jaunt. The 74- year-old seems game, but he burns through a long list of specific questions in a matter of minutes with short answers. Then it's on to the more open-ended queries. Still, Wilson doesn't take the bait, whether it's asking what music he's currently listening to ("I usually listen to oldies but goodies"), if he's still discovering new things in "Pet Sounds" a half-century on ("No, actually not"), what he does on the tour ("I hang out in my hotel room"), or whether he has any memories of Memphis ("I think I was there once or twice").
Despite his reticence as an interview subject, Wilson has been a prolific figure since he returned to making music and touring at the start of the '00s, enjoying both a professional rebirth and a sense of creative closure. In addition to releasing seven new studio albums, including 2015's "No Pier Pressure," he's also tied up several personal loose ends.
He re-recorded a version of his abandoned masterpiece "Smile" in 2004 (the original also finally saw release in 2011). He reunited with the Beach Boys for a successful 50th anniversary reunion album and tour in 2012, and watched the story of his life make it to the big screen last year in "Love and Mercy," which juxtaposed the "Pet Sounds" period with his midlife crisis in the '80s, as he struggled with mental health issues and the presence of domineering caretaker Dr. Eugene Landy.
To cap it all, this fall, Wilson will publish his autobiography, "I Am Brian Wilson" (technically it's his second memoir, following the 1991 effort "Wouldn't It Be Nice," written while he was still under Landy's control).
"It was a very tough thing," says Wilson. "It brought back a lot of bad memories, from when I took drugs and stuff. So it was a rough book to write, but we've got it written."
After a rapturously received run of dates this spring in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Europe, Wilson has returned to the U.S. for a summer "Pet Sounds" tour. He's supported by a skilled and sympathetic 11-piece backing band that includes longtime Beach Boy Al Jardine a veteran of the original "Pet Sounds" sessions and '70s-era Beach Boy member Blondie Chaplin.
The shows are presented in two distinct sets, a first half mixing Beach Boys material (hits and rarities) with Wilson solo songs, before a presentation of "Pet Sounds" in its entirety which is usually followed by an encore of more hits and favorites.
The reviews of Wilson's tour have acknowledged his physical limits as well as the power of the performances. Fellow Gannett critic Ed Masley witnessed a recent performance at the Celebrity Theater in Phoenix and noted of Wilson that "it's clear he'll never sing the way he sang in 1966 again. As the melodies approach that part of Wilson's upper register that once defined his vocal style, they're handed off to Al's son, Matt Jardine, occasionally breaking up a line just to accommodate the limits of his range."
"And yet, for many fans, myself included, it's a magical at times transcendent night," wrote Masley, "an opportunity to witness Wilson reconnect as best he can with 'Pet Sounds' in a 50th anniversary celebration of an undisputed masterpiece whose legacy hasn't endured so much as blossomed with each passing year."
The Los Angeles Times' Randy Lewis echoed that assessment after observing Wilson's show last week at the Hollywood Bowl.
"The biggest difference, of course, is Wilson's voice, which at age 23, when he composed, arranged, orchestrated and sang lead on most of the songs, was a miraculous instrument that seemed to have no limit, especially in the high melodies and harmonies that were a defining part of the Beach Boys' sound," wrote Lewis, noting the difficulties Wilson had in carrying the songs as he once did. "Thus the passage of time was felt, yet the core beauty of Wilson's effortless melodies, intricate harmonies and expansive instrumentation still shined."
Ultimately, it will be Wilson who will have the final word on how the Tunica appearance will be remembered and in his inimitable way he promises fans won't be disappointed.
"When we do the concert, the band members can duplicate the sound exactly like the album of 'Pet Sounds.' We've got it down pat," says Wilson. "You'll like what you hear."
Brian Wilson Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary Tour. 8 p.m. Friday at Horseshoe Casinos Bluesville. Tickets: $42 to $62. Available at all Ticketmaster outlets, ticketmaster.com or (800) 745-3000.
July 17, 2016 - DeVante Hill with One Memphis leads a prayer with Memphis Police officers at Martin Luther King Jr. Park Sunday night during a short vigil for peace. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)
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By Jody Callahan of The Commercial Appeal
Be wary. Remain hypervigilant. Watch your back, and your partner's, too.
Those are just some of the words being used to describe the mood of area law-enforcement officers as they patrol the streets after the recent shooting deaths in the U.S. of two civilians by police, followed by two incidents in which a total of eight police officers were killed in apparent retaliation.
"Everybody is just really trying to be careful now," Memphis police union head Michael Williams said Sunday. "And just more vigilant, trying to watch your surroundings. Watch your back. Watch your partner. Be careful of the environment. Make sure that you're, I guess you would call it, hypervigilant."
The Memphis Police Department is at a Level Three alert status, MPD Interim Director Michael Rallings confirmed in a press conference Sunday night.
That means that vacation and days off are canceled until further notice. That status is somewhat uncommon; it was previously used during the "Blue Flu" strike epidemic of 2014.
"Officers are definitely at a heightened level of preparedness. You'll see a notable increase of police presence in Memphis. You'll see officers posted up at various locations," Rallings said. "We'll remain at Level Three until it's determined that this posture is no longer needed."
This latest spasm of violence began on July 5, when police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shot and killed Alton Sterling outside a convenience store. The next day, police in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, opened fire on Philando Castile after a traffic stop, killing him. In each case, the victims were black; the officers were not.
On July 7, Army veteran Micah Johnson in apparent retaliation for those killings opened fire on police in Dallas, killing five officers before he was himself killed.
Early Sunday, a Missouri man named Gavin E. Long opened fire on Baton Rouge police, killing three officers and wounding several others. Long was also killed.
"It saddens me that my administration has to send out another email to our officers telling them that they have to continue to wear their black bands (of mourning)," Rallings said. "It saddens me that our flags will have to remain at half staff."
In Memphis, a Black Lives Matter protest last Sunday shut down Interstate 40 for more than four hours, but no one was injured and no one was arrested.
To help protect officers, MPD has started doubling up on cops in patrol cars where possible. Bulletproof vests are also mandatory for most officers on the streets. Rallings confirmed that security has been increased at precincts as well.
"A man that is not afraid is a fool," Williams said. "But you take your fear, you turn it into courage and you work through the situation. To say that somebody is afraid is not a bad thing. What that does is makes them more cautious and careful."
In DeSoto County, Sheriff Bill Rasco said that, beginning Sunday, he is requiring that his deputies have backup before approaching a crime scene.
"Guys have to wait for backup before they make the scene. They've got to have a second car with them before they approach residences and businesses to make sure we don't have a call like they did this morning," Rasco said. "We've got to be aware of every situation we're facing. Any call we make now, we have to make sure our guys are going to be protected."
Spokesmen for some local police departments were reluctant to talk about what measures they may be talking for fear it could give information to someone with bad intentions.
"We really don't want to get into it specifically what we are doing. We don't want that to get out to people who might harm us," Bartlett Police Capt. Tina Schaber said. "We're just trying to tell offices to be extra vigilant. Take that second look at something. Take that third look at something if something is telling you it's not right."
Efforts to speak with individual Memphis officers Sunday also failed. Even when promised anonymity, one officer would not speak, saying he feared his supervisors would find out and fire him.
Rallings conceded that it's a difficult time for his officers on the street.
"It's tense. It's tough, but our officers are resilient," he said. "I was out talking with some of them yesterday. They are in good spirits. But every time one of these situations happens, it makes it tougher."
Several area law-enforcement agencies did not respond to requests to talk about officer safety, including the Shelby County Sheriff's Office, the Germantown Police Department and the Collierville Police Department.
Sen. Mark Norris, R-Collierville, and his wife, Chris, welcome the Tennessee delegation to Ohio for the Republican National Convention Sunday. (Joel Ebert / The Tennessean)
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By Joel Ebert USA Today Network - Tennessee
The death of three Baton Rouge police officers and overall security in Cleveland were among the topics of discussion as Tennessees delegates gathered Sunday afternoon to kick off the Republican National Convention.
Kicking off a reception at the Radisson Inn and Suites in Eastlake, Ohio about 15 minutes from downtown Cleveland state Sen. Mark Norris, R-Collierville, brought up the Louisiana shooting while reminding the delegation of the importance of safety.
Its really a strange challenge to be happy and kicking off a convention of this importance against the backdrop of whats happening again in Baton Rouge, Norris said, calling the shooting tragic.
The Senate Majority Leader said state governments are going to save the day.
Its states in our republic that are carrying the water for this beleaguered nation, he said. Your participation here in this process is of critical importance to our freedom and our security going forward.
Norris reminded a room full of delegates that included Sen. Mae Beavers, R-Mt. Juliet, and John Ryder, who is serving as the general counsel for the RNC, that theres a connection between the process that delegates are participating in this week and the overall safety of the United States.
Our objective in keeping Tennessee strong, by keeping Tennessee safe, is furthered by our ability to keep the nation safe. And law enforcement, law and order, is going to be one of the primary focuses of this gathering and youre a critical part of it, he said.
Norris reminded the group of Tennessees slogan - America at its best - which the state adopted in 1965.
Were going to show that to these folks this week with our team from Tennessee as we go forth and show them what the Volunteers are all about, he said.
Despite the pall of the Baton Rouge shooting hanging over the convention, which is believed to see thousands of protesters, Beth Campbell, a Rubio delegate, said she had been in Cleveland for other committee activities prior to Sunday and she felt very safe.
SHARE Luke Elliott, 19, the youngest Tennessee delegate. GOP delegate Michael Hensley. (VICTOR ASHE/SPECIAL TO THE NEWS SENTINEL)
By Tom Novelly, USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee
CLEVELAND Among Tennessee's 58 delegates to the Republican National Convention this week, Luke Elliott and Michael Hensley clearly stick out.
Look for the two blonde-haired, blue-eyed, well-dressed men that people keep approaching to shake their hands. Fellow Republicans are impressed. Because at ages 19 and 21, respectfully, Elliott and Hensley are the youngest Tennessee delegates at the convention.
"This is our opportunity," Hensley said. "This our chance to showcase our party to the nation, and we need to do it in a positive and uplifting manner."
Elliott and Hensley were both elected delegates for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Elliott, a Nashville native and sophomore studying finance, said that Rubio captured his and Hensley's vote because of his appeal to a hopeful future, unlike what they called Trump's highlights of a fearful past.
"I hope Trump will adjust his tone to the people of my generation," Elliott said. "I came to vote for Rubio and his positive message of making a better generation."
At the Republican National Convention, delegates will go through three rounds of voting. Delegates vote for the candidate they are bound to for the first two rounds, and then for the final remaining nominee on the last vote.
Although Rubio dropped his bid for the presidency in March, he still has not released his delegates. That means Elliott and Hensley will vote for Rubio in the first two rounds and then for Trump. They said they wish that wasn't the case.
"I felt like my arm was twisted a bit," Hensley said. "I don't know if I would've run as a delegate for anyone else. I have had many, many, differences with Trump. But I'm just trying to be a realist. There will be two different paths: one with Clinton and one with Trump. So, I'm trying to look at the big picture."
The two are in rare company at the convention. Since 1968, only between 3 and 8 percent of all GOP delegates have been under 30, according to the American Enterprise Institute. And while participating in national-level politics is new for Elliot and Hensley, they've been steadily involved with politics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and have volunteered for their local representatives.
Hensley has also been actively involved with Young Americans for Freedom, a nationwide activist group founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. back in the 1960s. Hensley brought the organization to the University of Tennessee's campus in 2014 and brought in conservative speakers such Lt. Col. Allen West, a former Florida congressman, to speak about hot-topic issues on campus.
"Michael demonstrated a strong talent for branding and marketing conservatism," said YAF spokeswoman Emily Jashinsky. "His expertise earned him speaking slots at YAF seminars where he instructed other students on how to promote their activism. We expect him to do big things in the future."
Hensley grew up in Thorn Hill, Tenn., about an hour outside of Knoxville and immersed himself with the local Republican Party there. He served as an intern for several years to Rep. John Duncan Jr., R-Tenn., and now serves as a staff assistant for his office.
But Elliott just started his involvement in politics. During his first year at the University of Tennessee, he got involved with College Republicans. By his sophomore year, he became the group's vice president.
It was through a friend in College Republicans that Elliott learned about an opening to work on Ron McDow's state senate campaign for Tennessee's 20th District. He was hired on as a campaign manager helping plan everything from his events to social media posts.
Both young men said they knew they were conservatives from an early age. For Elliott, he said his introduction to conservative principles started at 8 years old when he started a business house sitting and doing lawn work for his neighbors.
When Hensley was in fourth grade, his friends decided to go to trick or treating as Star Wars characters for Halloween. But Hensley strapped on a top hat and fake beard. He went as Abraham Lincoln.
"I mean he was the founder of our party," Hensley said. "Perhaps there was some foreshadowing there."
Both young men walked with confidence as they interacted with delegates and others here in Cleveland easily gliding from one political conversation to the next.
"I love the interesting people I've met so far," Elliott said of his first days in Cleveland. "A lot of times in politics, older people can look down on you, but I don't see that in our state. Our leaders are breeding young people to take on the future."
During the 10 minute interview with Hensley in the lobby of his hotel, he was interrupted by eight delegates who wanted to meet him, discuss the future of our country and shake his hand.
"They give me hope," Tennessee delegate Karen Brown said. "I get disappointed in the younger generation sometimes because of their lack of hard work and motivation. But not these boys. They have enthusiasm, passion, a knowledge of American history, and a willingness to want to make the change. They are the future."
July 13, 2016 Dacavien Reeves works on a spreadsheet at the Benjamin Hooks Library for his internship with the Memphis Music Initiative. Reeves recently graduated from Overton High School and will attend Morehouse College in the Fall. He overcame many challenges including homelessness and caring for family members. (Brandon Dill/Special to The Commercial Appeal)
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By Tom Charlier of The Commercial Appeal
During those long, difficult days when he lived in a homeless shelter, Dacavien Reeves would return from jobs in fast-food restaurants to care for his sick mother, then awaken early the next morning to get his younger brother and sister ready for school and on the bus.
Then, and only then, could he get himself to school.
Often stumbling in tired, well after class had started, Reeves could sense what other kids at Overton High were thinking:
Why is he always late?
Why is he absent so often?
Why is he even here?
The struggle to keep his grades up amid all his other responsibilities often became almost unbearable. "I just rolled over on my bed and cried," he said.
It would've been easy, understandable, even, for Reeves to drop out. But he persevered, graduating with honors this spring, with plans to attend Morehouse College in the fall.
Reeves' success, dramatic though it may be, is far from unique.
Census estimates for Shelby County over the past decade show a significant increase in the percentage of African-American adults who have earned a high school diploma. As a result, the gap between the percentage of black and white adults who have a high school diploma has narrowed considerably.
As of 2014, an estimated 85.1 percent of African-Americans aged 25 and older in the county had graduated from high school up from 77.9 percent in 2006. For non-Hispanic white residents, the percentage of those aged 25 and older with a diploma rose from 92.4 to 94.8 percent. Nationally, 86.3 percent of 25-and-older people of all races have graduated from high school.
"We have been moving the needle slowly, but we have. It's very encouraging," said Elena Delavega, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Memphis, who has been tracking the trends in educational achievement among African-Americans, who make up about 53 percent of the county's population, and other groups.
The trend is important for a variety of economic and social reasons.
Earning power is among the most obvious. The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that, for the first quarter of 2016, workers who hadn't graduated from high school earned an average of $494 a week, compared to $679 for those who had a high school diploma but no college experience. That difference in pay amounts to $9,620 a year.
"If people have more money, restaurants do better, shops do better, the economy in general does better," Delavega said.
The social benefits of staying in school are immense, as well. The incarceration rate among dropouts is 63 times higher than that for college graduates, according to a study by Northeastern University.
The census estimates reflect steady improvements in graduation rates locally and nationally.
Tennessee Department of Education figures show the four-year graduation rate for Shelby County Schools for the 2014-15 academic year was 75 percent. Two years earlier, the rate for the legacy Memphis City Schools, which was absorbed into SCS after surrendering its charter, was 67.6 percent. And those figures don't include the students who take longer than about four years to graduate.
Nationally, the dropout rate fell from 15 percent in 1970 to 6.8 percent in 2013, federal figures show.
SCS officials have tried a number of programs to keep kids on track to graduate. Among the most successful is an initiative adopted at Whitehaven High School called "Eighth Period." It's a 90-minute session on Tuesdays and Thursdays when students can engage in enrichment or remediation studies. Kids who have fallen behind in a class or are lacking credits needed to graduate can make that work up during the school day, said Whitehaven principal Vincent Hunter.
As measures of the program's success, 451 of Whitehaven's 468 seniors graduated this spring, and the promotion rate among 11th-graders was 97.4 percent.
"It's had a tremendous impact," Hunter said.
For kids like Reeves, academic success resulted more from a support system that included mentors, teachers, and in a less-obvious way, his mother. After his grades fell amid his struggles, he worried about failing his mom, who had worked hard to support the family before falling ill.
"I know she would want me to do my best," said Reeves, who is 18.
The family twice was evicted from apartments and had a car repossessed after his mom's health prevented her from earning enough money. Twice they landed in the Salvation Army homeless shelter, for about a month each time.
Still, Reeves studied intensely and watched his grades rise. He enjoyed the sense of accomplishment and decided he wanted other students to have that feeling, as well. He founded BASIC the Brothers and Sisters Improvement Club. It's a group in which kids can develop self-esteem and leadership skills and talk about problems such as bullying or family turmoil.
"I saw that as a need," Reeves said. "That experience right there can make or break you."
Reeves did more than survive, he excelled. In addition to graduating with honors at Overton, he was Prom King and Homecoming King.
"He's a born leader," said Michael Hoots, a teacher at Overton and faculty sponsor for the Family Career Community Leaders of America and the Student Government Association.
Reeves is working an internship this summer at the nonprofit Memphis Music Initiative. With his mother now able to work again, the family is renting a home in East Memphis.
One of the students who joined Reeves' group was Derrick Dailey, who had been torn by anger and feelings of rebelliousness after his mother died in September 2010, when he was 12. He and his twin sister had to move in with their grandmother.
"I was very depressed and angry," said Dailey, now 18. "That's when my grades dropped."
With help from BASIC, for which he became vice president, he improved his grades to the point he was taking Advanced Placement and honors classes. He's working at the FedEx hub this summer, with plans to attend Mississippi State University in the fall.
Hoots said that although the SCS officials and the school board work hard to improve graduation rates, social factors also are involved.
"Kids show up for school when they're involved," he said. "When they have something like this (BASIC), it's other kids getting them there."
July 15, 2016 Quinton Tellis exits the Hernando courthouse, where he entered a not guilty plea in the Jessica Chambers case. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal)
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By Ron Maxey of The Commercial Appeal
Quinton Tellis pleaded not guilty Friday to killing Jessica Chambers, setting in motion what is sure to be a lengthy and emotional courtroom process.
The arraignment was at the DeSoto County Courthouse in Hernando, where the trial has been moved from Panola County. Though a short and uneventful hearing in terms of what happened in the courtroom, the proceeding attracted the families of both Chambers and Tellis as well as local and national media.
It gave an early glimpse of the intense scrutiny that's certain for the trial, scheduled tentatively for September but unlikely before next spring.
Curtis Wilke, a journalist and author who now teaches at the University of Mississippi, has seen his fair share of Mississippi courtroom dramas. He covered the 1994 retrial of Byron De La Beckwith for the shooting death of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Wilke also spent two years researching court records and conducting some 200 interviews to write about Richard F. 'Dickie' Scruggs, a trial lawyer and brother-in-law of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Wilke expects the Chambers case to generate "National Enquirer-type" media attention, and he's probably correct given all the rumors and sensational details that swirled around the teen's 2014 burning death along a roadside in Courtland, Mississippi.
Let's hope, though, the main focus remains on the case and ensuring a fair outcome. A 19-year-old who lost her life deserves nothing less.
GREG DAVIS UPDATE
Might the state's criminal case against former Southaven Mayor Greg Davis for allegedly defrauding the city be near an end?
It seemed so last week, but then maybe not.
A notice telling Davis to make himself available for surrender to authorities on Tuesday went out from the Mississippi Court of Appeals last week, but then was withdrawn. Steve Farese, Davis' lawyer, said no new notice was issued, leaving him unsure where the matter stands.
Tuesday is the next date for the appeals court to release decisions, so we'll know then if the court has ruled on Davis' appeal of his 2014 conviction by a DeSoto County jury on two felony charges related to a city-owned vehicle and mileage reimbursement.
Davis would serve 2.5 years (it could be less) of a 15-year sentence if the appeals court upholds the jury decision.
Stay tuned to see what happens as appeals decision are handed down this week.
IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
We knew it was coming, but the split between Governor Phil Bryant and Attorney General Jim Hood over Mississippi's "Religious Freedom" law became obvious last week when Hood announced he would not join Bryant in appealing the law's rejection by a federal judge.
Hood, a Democrat, called the law "divisive and expensive" and said the state's time and money could better be spent elsewhere. Bryant, a Republican, said Hood "abandoned his duty" by not joining the appeal.
Whatever the outcome on the controversial law, camps on both sides now clearly and publicly have an elected statewide official to cheer.
After careful review of the law, and the social and fiscal impacts of HB 1523, I have decided not to appeal the... https://t.co/VSL9lblpwP Jim Hood (@AGJimHood) July 13, 2016
MML CERTIFICATION
Board of Aldermen members in two DeSoto cities have earned certification from the Mississippi Municipal League's Certified Municipal Official (CMO) program.
In Hernando, Alderwoman Cathy Brooks and Alderman Mike McClendon completed the Advanced level certification, while Alderman Jeff Hobbs earned the Professional level.
In Southaven, Alderman Scott Ferguson completed the Basic level.
The voluntary program is designed to improve officials' understanding and management of municipal issues. It has three levels.
The Basic level requires 60 hours of training focused on the basics of municipal organization, law, finance and land use. To receive Advanced certification, an additional 40 hours are required, focusing on community and economic development. The Professional Development level requires another 40 hours of course work encouraging improvement of skills such as public speaking, writing and interpersonal communications.
Joanna Graves gives a hug to Sgt. Wesley Fullilove Sunday. (Ron Maxey/The Commercial Appeal)
SHARE DeVante Hill with One Memphis leads a prayer with Memphis police officers at Martin Luther King Jr. Park Sunday evening during a short vigil for peace. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)
By Ron Maxey of The Commercial Appeal
A rumored Black Lives Matter gathering outside Tanger Factory Outlets in Southaven Sunday failed to materialize, but police still met with a group that had a message for officers.
And in Memphis, a planned rally at Martin Luther King Jr. Park fizzled. An organizer who goes by the name Frank Gottie posted on Facebook, asking people to come to the park at 5 p.m. A couple dozen people were there, but it was difficult to tell how many were just park visitors and how many came for the rally.
More than a dozen Tennessee Highway Patrol officers showed up in force to emphasize that any gathering must remain peaceful and that organizers couldn't block streets, THP Capt. Jimmie Johnson said. There seemed little chance of that, since it appeared that the THP outnumbered those in the park for the rally.
There was a short vigil for peace at the park, however, with DeVante Hill of One Memphis leading a prayer with police officers.
Earlier, at the Southaven Police Department, about a dozen people who identified themselves simply as police supporters gathered shortly after noon to hug officers and thank them for their service. The event was organized before Sunday morning's Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police shootings, but the latest incident gave the show of support added meaning for those gathered.
"It just seemed like the one thing I could do," said Joanna Graves of Horn Lake, who organized the loosely knit gathering through social media.
Only a handful of officers were at the station to greet them. Most were several miles down Interstate 55 at Tanger, where a heightened police presence that included Chief Steve Pirtle kept watch in case demonstrators showed up. Pirtle said no one ever contacted the department seeking a permit for a gathering, so police weren't really expecting any activity.
Still, as a precaution, added patrols monitored the mall at I-55 and Church Road throughout the afternoon. Police set up cones in a section of the grassy right-of-way along Airways where protesters could gather if they showed up. But by late afternoon, the only traffic was from shoppers.
At the police station, Graves said she felt she had to do something to offset the bad news of recent days and weeks.
"I just kept seeing negative, negative, negative, and I felt like I had to do something positive," she said. "So this is all I knew how to do. Just simply to be here and show some love."
In the station's lobby, officers and dispatchers came out one by one to greet the group of well-wishers, several with young children, and accept their words of encouragement. They exchanged long hugs and whispered words of support, and officers gave out goody bags to the kids. Officers then joined the group in a prayer circle.
"It means everything," Sgt. Wesley Fullilove said of the group's appearance. "With everything going on, it's good to get the support."
Pirtle said his department hasn't changed its policies so far in response to police shootings elsewhere, but he's keeping a close eye on the situation.
"At this point, we're telling officers to be cautious," Pirtle said, "but we're still following our standard procedures."
Staff reporter Jody Callahan contributed to this story.
On election night in 2010, Republican Stephen Fincher (middle) won his first term in Congress. He is retiring, and 20 people are running to fill his 8th Congressional District seat. The Republican who emerges from the Aug. 4 primary will be the heavy favorite in November. (Mark Weber/ The Commercial Appeal files)
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By Tyler Whetstone, USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee
West Tennesseans can begin to whittle down the lengthy list of candidates vying for Rep. Stephen Fincher's congressional seat when early voting, which began Friday.
To help educate readers and give all 20 candidates a chance to get their message out, The Jackson Sun sent questionnaires to each candidate, with a 75-word limit per question (19 replied). The 8th Congressional District takes in much of West Tennessee, including Jackson, the suburbs of eastern Shelby County and part of East Memphis.
The winners of the Aug. 4 primary will set one Republican against one Democrat and a few independent candidates. However, whichever Republican wins the primary will be heavily favored in one of the reddest districts in the state during the Nov. 8 general election. Fincher, who is not running for another term, won his last re-election race with more than 70 percent of the vote.
Below are Q&A's with the candidates, listed by party in alphabetical order of their last names.
Ken Atkins (R)
Age: 59
Occupation: Correctional officer in Mason
Education: I attended Mississippi State and Oregon State.
Current hometown: Fayette County
What makes you qualified to run? So-called "qualified" politicians have made horrible trade deals resulting in 55 million jobs lost; made unbearable regulations pushing more jobs overseas; made an open border bringing illegals in (who take) jobs and lower labor cost; made a powder keg in the Mideast and terror in Orlando, San Bernardino and Boston; made open season on police; made $19 trillion in debt.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? Shelby (County) and rural Tennessee have more in common than not. It's all about jobs. I will work daily to bring industry and large and small businesses into our district. Every man and woman deserves a good paying job so they can take care of their families with dignity.
What's district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? Issues are an overreaching, out-of-control, bloated federal government with high corporate taxes, costly regulations, political correctness, etc. We need a simplified tax code, 10 to 15 percent across the board. Regulations should originate in Congress. Presidents cannot make laws, according to the Constitution. We need to abolish many federal departments and drastically cut the rest except Defense.
Hunter Baker (R)
Age: 45
Occupation: College professor
Education: Bachelor of Science Economics and Political Science (double major, Florida State), Master of Public Administration (University of Georgia), Juris Doctor (University of Houston Law), Ph.D. in Religion, Politics and Society (Baylor University)
Current hometown: Jackson
What makes you qualified to run? I have written, spoken and taught in the area of politics for over 20 years (three books, dozens of articles). My activity in conservative media has gained profiles or endorsements in National Review, American Conservative, Redstate and more. I am a former public policy director who lobbied federal and state legislators and testified against Planned Parenthood.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I am not running to be a distributor of Washington budgets to the different communities of West Tennessee. I will be going to protect West Tennesseans from the attention of Washington. D.C. just keeps getting bigger and more important. My goal will be to make Congress less important rather than more.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? The people of this district are traditional, religious people. Their values and beliefs are under attack by aggressive secularists in the government and corporate worlds. It is critical that we act now to protect religious liberty from this assault.
Dave Bault (R)
Age: 39
Occupation: (I'm) just an ordinary guy with a service-driven life working with abandoned and abused children as well as success in retail management.
Education: B.A. Christian Life College
Current hometown: Jackson
What makes you qualified to run? We continually send professional politicians and millionaires to Congress. I'm an ordinary guy who has chosen a life of service working with abandoned and abused children. I have turned around failing retail stores and exceeded expectations in opening new stores. I am a strong communicator with fire necessary to be true to my values and be heard in Washington.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? The needs of people are really pretty close no matter if you live in the city or country. You have to have a passion to listen and have a knowledge of the different distinct communities in the district and the challenges they face. People in West Tennessee need good paying jobs, security and a representative in Washington that will fight.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? It is economic opportunity. Creating jobs and a low-tax, low-regulation environment is key to jobs relocating here. The underused resource is going local. Support entrepreneurs with a local stake in the economy. New ideas create new industries.
George Flinn (R)
Age: 66
Occupation: Radiologist, owner of Flinn Broadcasting
Education: University of Mississippi, B.S. in electrical engineering; University of Tennessee Medical School, M.D.; Fellow of the American College of Radiology; Fellow of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine
Current Hometown: Memphis
What makes you qualified to run? The people of the 8th District are tired of being courted by candidates who are career politicians. I have built businesses from the ground up. I know what environment small-business owners need to help foster job growth and stimulate local economies.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I've talked with people across West Tennessee for years now, not just in Shelby County and certainly not just in this election cycle. I've been listening to what the needs of voters are, and many of them (agree) that politics is broken. It's something they agree on regardless of the county they live in.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? The biggest issue is jobs. Our small-business owners are hindered by government regulation and interference. As a leader and successful businessman, I'm the only candidate that knows what environment small-business owners need to put them in the best position to succeed, which will in turn allow (them) to create jobs and boost the local economy.
Brad Greer (R)
Age: 47
Occupation: Owner, advertising agency
Education: Union City High School, 1987; Union University BSBA Management Marketing/Political Science, 1991; Union University Masters classes in Christian Studies
Current Hometown: Jackson
What makes you qualified to run? Career "proven" politicians are the problem today. I know the 8th District far better than any candidate running because I am a small-business owner who has worked throughout the district for 30 years. I am acutely aware of the issues facing rural West Tennesseans and am prepared to be the voice for our district.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? Operating a business in the rural and urban parts of the district has made me acutely aware of challenges facing West Tennesseans from all 15 counties. I'm committed to having the best constituent services the district has ever had.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? Jobs. I will remove government regulatory obstacles that hamstring economic development. I'll work with local officials to complete the I-69 corridor, Port at Cates Landing, the (Memphis Regional) Megasite in Haywood County and begin cleanup and repurposing of the Milan Arsenal facility. A vital part of my plan is to increase workforce training and development in West Tennessee.
Raymond Honeycutt (R)
Age: 72
Occupation: Retired banker
Current hometown: Bartlett
What makes you qualified to run? What makes me qualified to be a candidate for Congress is my education, experience in banking, military experience, non-politician status, the fact that I lived on a dairy farm and two crop farms and lived in three large cities, as well as having managed people and computer systems. I am social and like to meet new people and share ideas and knowledge.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I will balance the needs of Shelby County versus those of the other counties on a 40/60 percent basis, depending on the importance of the needs of both, which could alter the amount of time for both.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? The district's rural area has less jobs and more farming, which means it needs more tax revenue for infrastructure improvements and to maximize assets it has, which is farm crops with a thin margin. I know how to do this from financing to construction of facilities. Shelby County is a monolith lacking in manufacturing with similar problems as the rural parts of the district. I will do everything I can to help farmers and attract manufacturing.
George Howell (R)
Age: 60
Occupation: Manufacturing management
Education: B.S. Industrial Engineering, Oklahoma University; M.B.A. Indiana University
Current hometown: Jackson
What makes you qualified to run? I have 35 years in manufacturing management, solving problems, reducing costs in the millions, supervising and implementing difficult and large projects. Will use same tools applied in manufacturing to cut costs and improve efficiency in the federal government. (On my website, I have a) three-year plan to go from $503B deficit to $300B surplus.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? People have the same needs, whether in Shelby County or rural West Tennessee. All need to regain their God-given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I will fight to return to constitutional law, cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 17.5 percent to get all areas of the economy growing, and remove corporate subsidies that typically go to large corporations.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? The hubris and largeness of our federal government and feckless Congress have led to fiscal, moral and constitutional bankruptcy. I will be an ardent enforcer of legislative role to create laws and limit executive power and judicial opinions (not laws), and reduce size of government.
Brian Kelsey (R)
Age: 38
Occupation: State senator, small-business owner
Education: B.A. with honors, University of North Carolina; J.D., Georgetown University
Current hometown: Germantown
What makes you qualified to run? Tennessee House of Representatives 2004-09, Tennessee Senate 2009-present. I am the only person in the state's history to draft and have two constitutional amendments adopted. One forever banning a state income tax in Tennessee, the other changing our judicial appointment to a model that mimics the Founding Fathers' original intent.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? When I was growing up, Collierville was smaller than Brownsville. I have seen the effect conservative economic policies can have on a town. Under Reagan, Collierville underwent an economic boom. Those principles, which are lacking in Congress, are what this district needs.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? By far, (it) is bringing in good-paying jobs and jump-starting an economy that has been left behind. Solving this issue is simple. I will work to undo and fight liberal policies wherever, whenever they arise, whether from establishment Republicans under the guise of cooperation or from Obama's unconstitutional executive actions.
David Kustoff (R)
Age: 49
Occupation: Attorney, private practice; former United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee
Education: BBA, University of Memphis; J.D., University of Memphis
Current hometown: Germantown
What makes you qualified to run? Having served as United States Attorney and a small-business owner, I understand the need to keep our community safe, secure and prosperous. I am not a career politician and will fight to shake up Washington, D.C. As United States Attorney, I oversaw the majority of the Tennessee Waltz trials that led to sending (state) Senator John Ford to prison.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I will be traveling, listening and learning to ensure I'm hearing every voice across the 8th District.
What's the biggest issue facing the district? How will you try to solve it? Securing our borders, destroying radical Islamic terrorism and repealing Obamacare. I will always stand for conservative principles. I will never compromise our values.
Tom Leatherwood (R)
Age: 59
Occupation: Shelby County Register of Deeds
Education: B.S., geology, Memphis State University, 1979; Teaching Certificate, Middle Tennessee State University, 1988
Current hometown: Arlington
What makes you qualified to run? I defeated an incumbent state senator who sponsored a state income tax. Later, I stood up to the governor and defeated it a second time. I kept a promise to serve only eight years. As Register of Deeds, I run the office exclusively on fees, using no taxpayer dollars.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? As state senator, I represented rural West Tennessee counties. As the only candidate who has served both areas, I will listen and represent the whole district effectively. Despite differences, residents desire reduced taxes/regulations on farms and other businesses, manufacturing jobs, economic projects, protection for the Second Amendment and the unborn, balanced budgets and secure borders.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? The economy. I will work with the Freedom Caucus, other conservative groups, and use my legislative experience to balance the budget, reduce job-killing taxes/regulations and control illegal immigration.
Mark Luttrell (R)
Age: 68
Occupation: Shelby County Mayor
Education: B.A., Union University; MPA, Memphis
Current Hometown: Memphis
What makes you qualified to run? Sheriff of Shelby County, 2002-10; Shelby County Mayor, 2010-present
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I was born and raised in a farming community in Crockett County. I moved to Shelby County as a teenager, then attended Union University. Having both a rural and urban background, I have studied the issues of the 8th District from both perspectives.
What's the biggest issue facing the district? How will you try to solve it? Workforce development in conjunction with supporting economic development to ensure that education goals and workforce needs are aligned.
David Maldonado (R)
Age: 35
Occupation: Zone manager, Ford Motor Company (2013-present).
Education: MBA (2007); BS, Legal Studies (2004)
Current hometown: Collierville
What makes you qualified to run? Legislative assistant, Florida House of Representatives (2004); Legislative aide, Hawaii House of Representatives (2000); Staff assistant, U.S. House of Representatives (1999); Internship, U.S. Senate (1998). I opened a family-orientated movie rental and gaming store in Florida while seeking an MBA. I went on to a management post with Frito-Lay. In 2013, Ford moved me to Tennessee.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I will balance my time, resources and staff across the district to ensure the needs of all of West Tennessee are met. Legislatively, my focus will be to increase jobs (end unnecessary costly regulations, tax credits, infrastructure improvement), hold the administration accountable for transforming the veteran experience, and tax reform.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? Age-appropriate religious education should be taught in public schools; schools should be managed locally, not by Washington. Our health care system needs a complete overhaul, but managed by doctors and patients, not lawyers, insurance companies or the federal government.
David Wharton (R)
Age: 54
Occupation: I am pursuing a CPA license. I work as a staff accountant for a firm in Halls.
Education: I am a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Martin. I have a BSBA in accounting and finance and another BSBA in economics.
Current hometown: Union City.
What makes you qualified to run? I have never held political office, but have been engaged in politics all my life. What makes me qualified is that I am not a politician; I am an accountant and a citizen of West Tennessee. I am concerned with the direction of our great country.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I will (focus) my efforts on rural West Tennessee. When rural West Tennessee does well, Shelby County will do well. I will seek to work with the representative of the 9th District, which is most of Shelby County, but I will focus on what is good for the majority of West Tennessee, which is rural West Tennessee.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? It is jobs and the economy. The tax code has to be reformed or replaced; regulations and agencies that slow growth of business have to be addressed. We have to provide an environment for people to grow businesses that lead to jobs and wage growth. I want to see I-69 completed through West Tennessee.
Gregory Alan Frye (D)
Age: 46
Occupation: I operate a forklift in a car parts manufacturing warehouse.
Education: Bachelor of Integrated Studies from University of Tennessee at Martin concentrating in political science and communications. Master's classes from UTM (currently attending)
Current hometown: Newbern
What makes you qualified to run? Governor Haslam appointed me to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission for 2011-2013. I interned for six months in the legislature with an area state representative. I served four years in the Student Government Association advocating for older students and veterans.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? My goals are to continue to support the progress of Shelby County while advocating for the rest of District 8. The legislature has done well in its funding for interests in Shelby County; there is no need to disrupt this progress. Meanwhile, we will pursue avenues at the federal level (for) the rest of our district.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? The deteriorating economy of our smaller towns and rural areas is of grave concern for me. I will pursue all acceptable options to tackle this problem. Our district has a rich history of successful small towns and family businesses. We should (move) in that direction.
Rickey Hobson (D)
Age: 49
Occupation: Distribution manager
Education: Bachelor of Science Degree, University Tennessee at Martin; Master's Degree from Dowling College, Oakdale, New York
Current hometown: Hickory Withe
What makes you qualified to run? I'm qualified because I understand servant leadership and how it works, and I know how to work with people that have a difference of opinion.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? The issues facing our country are issues facing both Shelby County residents and rural residents. Security of our country, education, jobs, taking care of our veterans and balancing the budget.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? One of the biggest issues facing our district is the lack of good-paying jobs that will allow citizens to provide for their families. I will approach this issue by working with high schools, along with colleges and community colleges, to help better prepare students with a (better) skill set. This will help to attract more companies to this area. This will also allow a pool of ready skilled workers.
Shelia Godwin (I)
Age: 59
Occupation: Educator, youth care worker, community organizer
Education: Lane College, B.S. in business administration. Tennessee Licensed Affiliate Broker
Current Hometown: Oakfield
What makes you qualified to run? I have 28 years-plus working in and with successful political campaigns. I was involved in the Willie Herenton-(Dick) Hackett campaign for mayor of Memphis. Mr. Herenton became the first African-American mayor.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I have been actively involved in Memphis and Shelby County since 1988. I am a product of rural West Tennessee, having been a farmer's daughter and granddaughter. I understand and have the personal experience of being involved in urban and rural community living and being involved in issues and concerns of people regardless to their economic status, religious belief, color, gender and or political association.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? Crime. There is no easy solution. First, I would reach out through community outreach conversational meetings. Second, I would assist in helping organize educational conflict-resolution strategic planning events encouraging community participation and organization. Last, I would encourage more positive interaction through community task forces.
Adrian Montague (I)
Age: 39
Occupation: Sales representative at Steve Marsh Ford in Milan.
Education: BA in history, University of Tennessee at Martin, 2004; MBA, University of Tennessee at Martin, 2013
Current hometown: Jackson
What makes you qualified to run? I'm not a politician. I'm an everyday, working citizen who understands the struggles of those I hope to represent. I've served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army officer, so service to this nation isn't new to me. It's time we had an independent voice in Washington who will look for common-sense solutions to (our) complex problems.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? We are one district. We're all concerned about jobs, and about our tax dollars being spent efficiently. However, I understand that Bartlett problems aren't Huntingdon problems, which aren't Tiptonville problems. Balancing these diverse needs will take old-fashioned approachability. This means engaging with people and working together to find solutions.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? Jobs. We need to make West Tennessee attractive for businesses. Part of that would come from investment in our schools and infrastructure. I favor incentivizing businesses that want to work here rather than other countries.
Mark Jeffery Rawles (I)
Age: 62
Occupation: Business owner, Westtn Conexxions; vice chairman, Constitution Party of Tennessee
Education: A.S. JSCC, BA Psychology, BSW Memphis State University
Current hometown: Jackson
What makes you qualified to run? I have not held political office. The problem with politics is that it is full of politicians. I am fully versed on the U.S. Constitution, political processes and Republican and Democrat ideology. I recognize the failures created by our national leaders trading, selling and regulating away the people's opportunities; and therefore their sovereignty, freedom and liberty.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? The basic needs of the people of Shelby County and rural West Tennessee are the same: They want to live their lives without government telling them how or where. The opportunity for work that provides a way to care for themselves, their family and their futures. The security to live without fear. To have a voice in the education of their children.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? It's the same one facing our nation: the polarization of political ideologies. Economic issues can be addressed by rewriting trade agreements, thus creating more U.S. jobs, but our leaders must unite the people by concentrating their efforts on shared needs and goals of the people.
Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane (I)
Age: 43
Occupation: Business owner, Free Spirit Creations; also office manager at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.
Education: College language major.
Current hometown: McLemoresville
What makes you qualified to run? Chief of the Cherokee Wolf Clan. I also was council member for eight years.
How will you balance representing the needs of Shelby County with those of rural West Tennessee? I will balance the needs of each county by getting involved in the communities, talking and listening to the people about needs and problems that each area or district is facing. Having lived in both city and rural areas throughout my adult life, I have a great understanding of the problems that each type of community faces, rural or city.
What's the district's biggest issue? How will you try to solve it? Talking to the people, I have learned many feel our leaders are not listening to or taking the best interest for the people and problems we are facing, especially for the working-class and lower-income families. I am an average person. I am empathetic and strong-willed. I will listen to people. I will try my best to understand the problems, and work with people and our leaders to solve any issues we may face.
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By Clarence Page
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was still learning the ways of Washington, he says, when he saw a police officer following his car near Capitol Hill.
"I took a left...," he recalled in a speech Wednesday on the Senate floor, "and as soon as I took a left, a police officer pulled in right behind me."
That was his first left turn. His second came at a traffic signal. The patrol car was still following him. Scott took a third left onto the street that led to his apartment complex.
It was his fourth left, turning into his apartment complex, that brought the blue lights on.
"The officer approached the car," Scott recalled, "and said that I did not use my turn signal on the fourth turn. Keep in mind, as you might imagine, I was paying very close attention to the law enforcement officer who followed me on four turns. Do you really think that somehow I forget to use my turn signal on that fourth turn? Well, according to him, I did."
Oh, did I mention that Tim Scott is African-American? He's the only black Republican in the Senate and the first to be elected from the South since 1881.
He did not get there by being a liberal or a Black Lives Matter radical. He's a "pro-life," anti-Obamacare and NRA-endorsed conservative.
He is also, whatever else you may think of his politics which are more conservative than mine a very likable and thoughtful businessman from North Charleston whose family, as he says with patriotic pride, "went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime."
Yet, issues such as police conduct and public safety have become personal for Scott. It was in his hometown, North Charleston, S.C., last year that a cellphone video showed Walter Scott (no relation), an unarmed 50-year-old black man, shot to death by a police officer from whom he was running away.
Two months later, a gunman fatally shot nine people, including friends of Scott, at Charleston's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Scott calls for a halt to abuses by police, but he also wants fairness for police and improved law enforcement.
One tragedy illustrated the dangers of bad policing. The other illustrated why we need good police.
So when Scott stood on the Senate floor to declare and decry a "trust gap" between law enforcement officers and black communities, he was worth hearing.
"Please remember that, in the course of one year, I've been stopped seven times by law enforcement officers," Scott declared in the widely covered and retweeted speech. "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.
"I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell," said Scott, "no matter the profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life."
A young former staffer of Scott's grew so frustrated over being stopped by District of Columbia police, the senator said, that he replaced the car with "a more obscure form of transportation. He was tired of being targeted."
"There is absolutely nothing more frustrating, more damaging to your soul," said Scott, "than when you know you're following the rules and being treated like you are not."
On that note, Scott asked for nothing in his speech, except empathy, a sincere effort to understand what others are going through which in itself is asking a lot from some people.
"Today," he said, "I simply ask you this: Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean that it does not exist. To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It simply leaves you blind and the American family very vulnerable."
Well said. Folks who respond to complaints of racial discrimination by police by bringing up black-on-black crime need to hear what Tim Scott is trying to tell them.
Fighting crime without fighting police misconduct leads to more crime. We need to get rid of both.
Contact Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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By Fred Hiatt
Now that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has taken herself to the woodshed, it's worth asking what her brief bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome says about our system's 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 man's 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 that 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 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. He was bitterly disappointed, no doubt, but acceded to the judicial decision.
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 Trump's 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 and could they oppose him while remaining true to principle and not descending to his level?
On the first question, the evidence from Trump's 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 Ryan 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 Trump's 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?
Fred Hiatt is editorial page editor for the Washington Post.
Japans SoftBank will acquire UK chip design company, ARM Holdings, to cash in on growing demand for processors and other technologies for the internet of things and mobile markets.
SoftBank is paying 24.3 billion (US$32 billion) in cash for the chip company that licenses its designs to a large number of chip suppliers to smartphone makers and to the emerging IoT market.
The Japanese company will retain ARM's headquarters in Cambridge and plans to double the number of employees in the U.K. over the next five years, when it will also increase the company's headcount outside the U.K.
ARM, with 4,064 employees, will be an independent business within SoftBank, which will pay for the acquisition from existing cash resources and a loan facility. SoftBank said it intends to retain the current ARM organization including the existing senior management team, brand, and partnership-based business model and culture.
SoftBank has invested in a number of media and technology companies, including Internet retailer Snapdeal in India and ride-hailing app company Didi Chuxing in China. It also acquired Sprint Nextel in 2013.
The acquisition of ARM would place the company in a market where it would be an upstream supplier to some of the biggest names in the tech industry as licensees of ARMs designs like Qualcomm gear up to supply chips to the connected devices market.
"ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the 'Internet of Things,'" said SoftBank Chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son, in a statement Monday.
ARM and partners have been looking at new opportunities in markets such as robotics, connected vehicles and smart cities. It acquired recently Apical, a provider of imaging and embedded computer vision technology for next generation devices to understand and act intelligently on information from their environment. Apical's technology will complement the ARM Mali graphics, display and video processor roadmap, ARM said in May.
ARM has been successful in the small devices market, which requires low-power processors that consume far less battery than traditional microprocessors used in bigger gear like PCs, a market in which Intel has been dominant.
"ARM has long-term contracts with its customers so I wouldn't expect anything to change quickly, but all bets are off for the next generation architecture," said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies. In the long-term SoftBank could restructure anything they wish and could invest more than ARM did to drive the enterprise products forward, he said.
"This could ultimately impact mobile tech giants Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung. I'm surprised ARM wasn't purchased sooner," Moorhead added.
Not many are using smartphones with Microsoft's Windows 10 Mobile, but HP's flagship Elite X3 -- which ships this month -- could boost the OS's sagging fortunes.
The premium smartphone will be priced starting at US$699 in the U.S. It feels more like a phablet, but HP believes it could also be a PC in a pinch with its top-line mobile processor, OS and innovative accessories.
HP first announced the Elite X3 at the Mobile World Congress trade show in February.
It has a 5.96-inch AMOLED screen that can display images at a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, matching top smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy S7 and LG's G5. The rugged screen has Gorilla Glass 4 technology.
The device weighs 194 grams and is 7.87 millimeters thick. Other features include dual-SIM slots, a 16-megapixel rear camera, an 8-megapixel front camera, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, 64GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for expandable storage up to 2TB.
The Elite X3 has Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chip, which has a graphics processor capable of processing 4K video. The smartphone also has biometric authentication features like iris detection and a fingerprint reader.
The launch signals HP's re-entry into the smartphone market, which hasn't been kind to the company. HP's last big play in smartphones came with the ill-fated 2010 acquisition of Palm, which it jettisoned in 2014.
Re-entering the competitive smartphone market wasn't an easy decision for HP. But as a premium device, Elite X3 fits into HP's plan of selling high-priced, high-margin devices to professionals and businesses. There are no plan to sell budget handsets.
The Elite X3 can deliver a PC-like experience when the mobile version of Windows 10 is in Continuum mode. It's much like the experience Microsoft has portrayed with some of its Lumia handsets. The Snapdragon 820 chip can deliver adequate processing power, though it doesn't match the capabilities of Intel's Core PC processors.
It'll be possible to connect an external display and accessories to the smartphone via a Desk Dock accessory, which HP will sell with the Elite X3 for $799. Users get the desktop feel when browsing the web or editing Microsoft Office documents. The dock has a DisplayPort port, an Ethernet slot, and USB-A and USB-C ports to attach a keyboard, mouse or external storage.
HP will also sell an accessory called Lap Dock to turn the smartphone into a laptop. The laptop accessory has a 12.5-inch full HD display and keyboard, and it can be hooked up to the Elite X3 wirelessly or through a USB Type-C cable.
Over time, HP will help companies export desktop applications into Microsoft Azure cloud as it tries to make Elite X3 a more viable PC alternative. Elite X3 users will be able to run cloud-based desktop applications via HP Workspace, a virtualized desktop program.
The smartphone will ship in many countries including the U.S., HP said, without providing specific details.
Windows phone shipments totaled 2.4 million in the first quarter of 2016, which gave the OS a meager 0.7 percent market share, according to Gartner. That's a decline from 8.27 million units shipped in the same quarter in the previous year, which was a 2.5 percent market share. Windows was behind Android smartphones, which held a 84.1 percent market share with 293.8 million units shipped, and iOS, which held a 14.8 percent market share with shipments of 51.6 million units.
City
Jason J. Silversmith, 47, 36 Franklin St, Auburn, was charged July 17 with possession of a hypodermic instrument.
Marcus J. Sylvester, 21, 29 Grove Ave., Auburn, was picked up on a warrant July 15 and charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief and petit larceny.
James B. Dorsey II, 28, 136 Hatch St., Syracuse, was charged July 17 with driving while intoxicated second offense, first-degree aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle and aggravated driving while intoxicated.
Kenneth C. Shelton, 60, 114 Norris Ave., Auburn, was charged July 17 with seventh-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.
Nathan A. Smith, 27, 618 West State St., Ithaca, was charged July 16 with two counts of second-degree obstruction of governmental administration and resisting arrest.
Joshua C. Morrison, 23, transient, Auburn, was charged July 16 with fourth-degree criminal mischief.
Derilda L. O'Connor, 59, 1306 Birch Drive Lane, Farmington, was picked up July 16 on a bench warrant.
State
Leigh R. Rusin, 32, Syracuse, was charged July 15 with second-degree criminal trespassing.
Daniel K. Carter, 20, Auburn, was charged July 17 with seventh-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance.
Joseph N. Corr, 46, Syracuse, was charged July 17 with driving while intoxicated first offense and aggravated driving while intoxicated.
John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector who has written two books on the teaching of reading and spelling.
Theresa Mays excision of Neo-Conservatives from the front bench on Wednesday and Thursday was followed by what I will call Quiet Friday. Nothing much happened, and the Prime Minister was off to Scotland to build bridges with Nicola Sturgeon. For education, this was good news. Justine Greening steps into a department with an experienced and hard-working team who have carried through significant changes in the school curriculum; (as late as Tuesday, Nick Gibb announced a 41m extension of mastery approaches in mathematics) and who know the ground.
She was fortunate, also, that the controversy over Sir Michael Wilshaws replacement as HMCI, a position that has become almost as important as that of Secretary of State, had been handled by Nicky Morgan. The Select Committee was right to question her closely on all areas of the brief, but might have adopted Matthew Arnolds inspection principle and put themselves in her place.
I know of no-one who has the depth of understanding of the full range of Ofsteds work that the post appears to require, and Amanda Spielman is frank about what she does and doesnt know. She has the intellectual capacity and managerial skills to do the job to a high standard, and it is in the national interest that she should succeed.
The Committees comments on Ofsted itself are absolutely correct, and Ms Spielmans biggest task is to restore professional respect for the organisation. Its budget has been cut too hard to enable it to do its job properly, with its inadequacies most harshly shown by Trojan Horse and Haringey. It needs either to do less, and do it better, or to have its budget raised to a sensible level. Both Labour and ourselves have put inspection a long way behind management in educational priorities, and inspectors are not paid enough to attract the top talent. Above all, we need to rid ourselves of Labours idiotic notion that any inspector can inspect anything. Ofsted needs a serious and urgent injection of professional expertise.
But what can we expect from Ms Greening? We know that she attended a comprehensive school (Oakwood, Rotherham, followed by a sixth form college) that she has a strong interest in the education of girls, and that she has tried to help the most disadvantaged, but I can find no comments on British education that will give a hint as to policy. Conservative Home has been highlighting the contributions of Nick Timothy, sometime director of the New Schools Network and Theresa Mays Chief of Staff. I recommend this one as a guide to the new governments principles.
Governing in the interests of ordinary, working people is not only the right thing to do, but essential to the future of Conservative government. My offer of help with educational problems is taken up by parents from all parts of society, and the difficulties faced, for example, by parents who are both working, in even finding time to bring a child for help are sometimes close to insuperable. Work five and a half days a week as a hairdresser and run a house, and you need a rest rather than more work in your time off. Bring up a teenager as a single parent, have to send him or her to the only school in town, which you know is third-rate, with a dressed-down, obfuscating headteacher, and the burden can be overwhelming. These parents and their children have no hope without good schools.
For Nick Timothy, my wife and myself, this meant a grammar school. Today, it may mean a Harris or Ark academy. The secondary modern comprehensive will not do, and we can expect much more from the new schools movement.
Andrew Kennedy is the Group Agent & Campaign Director in West Kent. He blogs at www.votingandboating.blogspot.com.
An unexpected consequence of the recent EU Referendum has been a remarkable surge in membership. During the first three days after it took place, we were being notified of around 100 new members a day between the five Associations in the West Kent Group, and even though the rate soon slowed we have had a steady trickle ever since. Our count is now 500-plus new members the most intense period of recruitment I have ever witnessed.
At first many of us were suspicious. Was this influx something organised by one of the left-wing pressure groups protesting about the EU vote? Or perhaps an exercise by jubilant UKIP supporters riding a post-referendum tidal wave and landing on our shore?
Our priority was to process the applications, record them on VoteSource, and send the new members a welcome letter. In that letter, I also had to deal gently with the fact that they would not have a vote in the leadership election, which I knew would cause anger from many who clearly had enrolled for that reason. I am pleased that CCHQ put a note to this effect on the enrolment page, thus managing expectations.
My next task was to try to understand who our new members actually were. Why did they join? What was their background? Why did they join now, and not in response to our previous invitations to do so? What did they expect from their membership? And what might they be willing to do to help us win future elections?
Last week, we sent each new member an online survey asking these very questions, and it was satisfying that by Saturday over 50 per cent had responded. Admittedly the sample has not been weighted by age, gender or social group, but a sample of 250 from a pool of 500 is probably sufficiently large to be meaningful. It is also worth noting that the responses do not significantly vary from one Association to the others, so it is fair to assume that they will not differ significantly nationwide.
First of all, I was interested in whether these were brand new people, or if they had been politically active previously. So they were asked: Have you ever been a member of a political party previously?
I then asked, If you have been a member of a political party previously, which one was it?
(N.B: The figures do not add up to 100 per cent as several respondents selected more than one party. What is interesting to note, however, is that none identified as being previous members of UKIP.
I was then keen to explore in some detail the factors that motivated them to join. Rather than a simple quantitative Yes/No, I provided a sliding scale resulting in a score of between 0 and 100 for each of the options presented. These may not have been exhaustive but certainly covered the main areas. Obviously, the higher the score, indicated the stronger the factor for joining.
Concern about leaving the EU was a bigger motivational factor than those celebrating our departure from it, and only 7.8 per cent had identified as previously supporting UKIP.
From these figures, I see no evidence of any form of entryism, though our main concern must be managing the disappointment of the biggest group (75.8 per cent) who cited the opportunity to vote for the new party leader as being a motivational factor.
ComRes and YouGov have already published polling on how Conservative supporters and Party Members voted on 23 June. I thought it would be interesting to see how our new members compared, so I then asked, Out of interest, which way did you vote in the EU Referendum?
Suspecting that many members would be extremely disappointed at not being allowed to vote in the leadership ballot, I thought it was worth measuring this factor and their likely response to being excluded: If you had been aware at the time of joining that members were only allowed to vote after three months membership, would you still have joined the Conservative Party?
Clearly, we have some disappointed people, and several have already emailed to say that they have resigned in protest, but the overwhelming majority have accepted our explanation of the three month rule and, with a bit of TLC, there is no reason to assume they will not become long-term participants in our activities.
Finally, I asked if our new members were willing to do more than pay an annual subscription to help the Conservative Party succeed in the years ahead. 76 per cent answered yes, and 24 per cent said no (those answering negatively were almost identical to the group who said they wouldnt have joined the Party if they had known that they wouldnt get a leadership vote). Of the 76 per cent willing to do more ..
From our survey, it is obvious that our new members are moderate, politically engaged and (with encouragement) could reinvigorate our Associations and replenish our pool of potential Local Government candidates.
It would be a tragedy if a lack of communication or poor organisational ability allowed resulted in our new army to drift away. In West Kent, we have already developed a plan to engage and encourage; each of our MPs will be hosting a New Members drinks party, and each Association will have a designated person to phone and welcome them to the Party.
There was one final question not dealt with above. I asked, If there had been a leadership ballot and you had been able to participate, which of the candidates would you have been most likely to support? Interestingly, over 70 per cent said Theresa May.
There is clearly huge goodwill both for our new leader and for what she is planning to do. It is our duty to seize this opportunity to rebuild our grassroots in the constituencies. It might be decades before we get an opportunity like this again.
Tony Blairs memo urging eye-catching measures with which I, personally, should be associated captured the flavour of New Labour. It lived on in David Camerons Downing Street grid and programme of announcements.
Theresa May and her team will doubtless find their own way of organising Government activity, but the start of her first full week as Prime Minister suggests that the spirit of the Blair era has finally come to an end.
For just as last weeks sacking of George Osborne and Michael Gove, together with the demotion or dismissal of the former Chancellors lieutenants, marks a break with what came before, so does the beginning of this one.
Today the Commons votes on Trident renewal. Today, the new Prime Minister plans to visit Wales. A trip to Northern Ireland will follow later. May wants to draw both, with Scotland, into her Brexit plans and find out how the land lies.
On Wednesday, she faces her first PMQs. Jeremy Corbyn is unlikely to cause her any serious problems, but the same may not be true of the session as a whole.
David Cameron and Osborne are PMQs veterans: indeed, Cameron was part of the team that prepared John Major for them the best part of 25 years ago.
The new Prime Minister, by contrast, is used to the relatively narrow field of Home Office Questions. She will have to build a new team to advise her on PMQs from scratch. She may find herself wondering how on earth preparation for half an hour can consume so much time.
And amidst the run-up to all this, there is no blizzard of policy announcements, no shock-and-awe offensive of eye-catching initiatives. The sweeping changes to the Governments structure and personnel find no policy parallel yet.
May clearly wants a more understated, less media-focused, more show-not-tell style of government. Cynics claim that Gordon Brown attempted the same and rapidly came unstuck. But it is the right course to take and is rather cheering to see.
Myanmars expanding food palate creates opportunities for Australia
Increasing demand for premium food, an influx of western restaurants and the rapid expansion of the tourism industry are creating growing opportunities for Australias food and beverage exporters.
Ross Bray, Austrades Senior Trade Commissioner for Myanmar, said since the countrys political and economic transformation, dining options have diversified for locals, expatriates and tourists.
This has seen local consumers eating habits and food preferences change, forcing producers and retailers to upgrade their products, Bray said.
They are also importing higher quality raw materials to remain competitive.
Yangon, the commercial capital, is attracting regional and global food chains such as Tony Romas, Gloria Jeans, Pizza Hut, Manhattan Fish Market, KFC, Astons Steakhouse, Harrys Bar and Ya Kun Coffee & Toast.
International hotel groups with fine dining establishments such as Kempinski Hotels, Pan Pacific, Sheraton and The Peninsula, are all set to open hotels in the coming year, helping to meet the growth in tourism which is expected to top three million by 2020.
The local food service sector is also responding to the growing demand and challenges by seeking out new suppliers of premium food from across the world, said Bray.
Australias strong reputation for exporting clean, green and safe foods is a major attraction. This is why Australian produce ranging from meat, fruit and vegetables, dairy products, to condiments and wines are in demand and are supplied to the food sector and upmarket retail outlets.
Austrade promotes Australian meat in Myanmar
Throughout June 2016, the Australia on the Menu promotion showcased Australian produce by encouraging diners to experience Australian beef and lamb menus prepared by Myanmar chefs across 17 participating hotels, restaurants and bars throughout Yangon.
The initiative also built relationships between local retail chain operators and Australian suppliers to the food service and hotel sectors, with participating suppliers including Mulwarra Exports, Argyle Premium Meats and Jacks Creek all experiencing an increase in sales.
While Myanmars modern retail sector is still small in regional terms, it is growing strongly. With the increasing number of new hotels and restaurants, opportunities across the food sector will continue to emerge for Australian exporters over the next 18 months due to the change in consumer demographics, a growing expatriate community and increasing tourism, said Bray.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, beef and sheep meat exports from Australia to Myanmar have grown from a tiny AUD $303,000 in 2014 to AUD $1.33 million in 2015 with further growth expected for 2016.
Myanmar is also a member of the ASEAN Australia New Zealand Free Trade Area (AANZFTA), with tariffs falling on many food items progressively from 2015 through to 2022.
Companies interested in Myanmar business opportunities can contact Austrade on 13 28 78.
Just in time for the new school year, a new teaching and education supply store has opened in the Flagstaff Mall.
Theresa Bundgaard opened Teaching & Learning Stuff in the Phoenix area, shortly after retiring as a sixth-grade teacher to take care of her children full-time.
It was a natural fit, she said.
The business currently has three locations and just installed its fourth location in Flagstaff at the mall.
Ive always had my eye on Flagstaff, Bundgaard said, adding that the family has frequently taken trips to Flagstaff to ski in the winter or cool off in the summer.
While there are some other teaching and educational supply shops in Flagstaff, Bundgaard said hers has one of the largest breadth of educational items. The inventory includes educational toys for all ages, bulletin board supplies for teachers, pens, flash cards, pencils, markers, hall passes, workbooks, rulers, paint, poster boards and more.
The shop is open to anyone who has a child in their life: parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers and tutors. Bundgaard tries to hire employees who are retired teachers or have worked in the education field. This allows the store to give shoppers better advice on what toys, workbooks, flash cards and other supplies might best help their child.
One of Bundgaards favorite teaching aids is Dice in Dice, a set of clear dice that have numbers printed on them that have a second die inside them. The idea is that children and parents can use the dice to create a multitude of math problems.
For example, you could add, subtract, multiple or divide the two numbers or use one number as the numerator and the other as a denominator to help with fractions. They can also be used for probability questions or simple counting. Because theyre so versatile, they can be used for math problems at multiple grade levels.
Teachers can set up a list of class supplies on Teaching & Learning Stuffs website. Once a teacher signs up and creates their list, they can split the list into classroom supplies and student supplies. Parents can then purchase the supplies needed and have them packaged and shipped directly to the teacher.
Each student supply kit is also packaged and shipped to the teacher, so when the kids arrive on the first day of school their supplies are waiting at their desk. The program helps make sure teachers get the exact supplies they want for their classrooms and avoids fights over who gets the sparkly pencils, Bundgaard said.
The store offers an Extra Credit program where shoppers earn 5 percent back for every dollar they spend. The points can be redeemed for discounts on future purchases of regularly priced items in the store. Members also get special email offers.
There is plenty of time to reflect during a visit to the Sept. 11 Memorial Museum, which sits in the footprint of the twin towers adjacent to the new World Trade Center in New York City.
On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists who had hijacked four commercial aircraft flew two into the 110-story towers which dominated the Manhattan skyline, another into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and had another apparently aimed at the White House before they were overcome by passengers and crew and the plane crashed in the woods of Pennsylvania.
The twin towers fell and nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed in an act of terrorism unmatched on U.S. soil.
We took in the museum a week ago Saturday, after a disturbing drive from Evansville to New York.
The day before we left, a second black man was shot and killed by police in the same week. In neither instance, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or in Saint Paul, Minnesota, did the deadly use of force appear justified.
When we stopped for the night along the way, we caught up with the horrible news that Dallas police officers had been ambushed, with five of the officers killed.
Madness.
Yet, while in NYC, we witnessed police again protecting protesters, both on Friday night in the middle of Times Square and on Saturday night along 42nd Street, outside of the Grand Central Terminal. Those officers could not have been happy with the protesters, but like those who lost their lives in Dallas they were doing their jobs of protecting and serving.
Small-minded people say that if you support protesters such as Black Lives Matter, then you're against law enforcement. Small-minded people say that if you support Blue Lives Matter, then you're against equality.
But this support does not have to be mutually exclusive.
The 9/11 museum devotes much space to the firefighters and police who ran into trouble, not away, in an attempt to save lives, just as the officers in Dallas did last week.
But it does not bypass the other victims, noting that as remains were discovered weeks later, one rescue worker's appeal led to each being treated with the same dignity and care as any. In other words, all were created equal.
There is no easy answer to the current atmosphere of anger and distrust that has enveloped our nation. But we always have overcome, whether it be British rule, the Civil War, the Great Depression, internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and the tumultuous 1960s.
In the 9/11 museum you see crumpled firetrucks, helmets destroyed by falling metal, a staircase of rubble where first responders directed citizens to safety before dying as it collapsed. You hear cellphone messages from victims who soon will perish, on the upper floors of the twin towers and on Flight 93 that was crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, likely saving many other lives in Washington, D.C. You watch videos of survivors and victims' families, telling their personal stories. You see a businessman's wallet, replete with corporate credit cards and pictures of kids who lost their father that day.
As a plaque says as you prepare to exit, as a bagpipe plays "Amazing Grace," "though grief was undiminished, the country faced forward."
We must face forward.
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Alzheimer's Association Program: "Living with Alzheimer's disease: Middle Stages," 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association, 701 N. Weinbach Ave., Suite 510 ($5 donation suggested). Registration is required by calling 800-272-3900.
NAMI Dubois County family support group: Meeting 6:30-8 p.m. Thursday at Jasper Memorial Hospital.
Fall Prevention Seminar: Seminar and balance screening by ProRehab at 10:30 a.m. July 28 at Oak Meadow Country Club. The cost is $15 per person covering the cost of lunch that will be served following the seminar. Reservations and payments must be received by Thursday. Checks can be made out to Fall Prevention Seminar, 68 Oak Meadow Road, Evansville, IN 47725.
FA (Families Anonymous): a 12-step fellowship for the family and friends of those individuals with drug, alcohol or related behavioral issues. Meetings are at 10 a.m. Saturdays at Methodist Temple, 2109 Lincoln Ave. Use the Kelsey Avenue entrance, second floor. Information: 812-550-5777.
Bereavement support group: Meeting 5:30-7 p.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month in the large group meeting room, second floor of Central Library, 200 SE MLK Blvd.
Men's bereavement support group: Meeting 9-10:30 a.m. the second Monday of each month in Room 204 at Deaconess VNA Plus, 610 E. Walnut St.
Support group for bipolar/manic-depressive disorder: Meeting 7 p.m. the first and third Wednesday of each month, Kempf Bipolar Wellness Center, third floor of St. Mary's Rehabilitation Institute, 3700 Washington Ave. Information: 812-485-4934.
Survivors of Suicide support group: Meeting 6:30 p.m. the first and third Monday of each month, Methodist Temple, 2109 Lincoln Ave. Information: Mental Health America at 812-426-2640.
Mending Hearts pregnancy loss support group: Meeting 6:30 p.m. the first Tuesday of each month, Gift Conference Room, off the lobby of St. Mary's Hospital for Women & Children, 3700 Washington Ave. Information: 812-485-4204.
Men's cancer support group: Meeting 5:30 p.m. the second Tuesday of each month, St. Mary's Epworth Crossing Community Conference Room, 100 St. Mary's Epworth Crossing, Newburgh. Information: 812-485-5725.
Stroke support group: Meeting 10 a.m. the fourth Wednesday of each month, St. Mary's Community Education Room at Washington Square Mall, 5011 Washington Ave. Information: 812-485-5607.
ALS support group: Meeting 6:30 p.m. the second Tuesday of each month, Meeting Room E, Deaconess Gateway Hospital. The support group is for patients, caregivers and survivors who have lost someone to Lou Gehrig's disease.
Women's cancer support group: Meeting 5:30 p.m. the second and fourth Monday of each month, St. Mary's Epworth Crossing Community Conference Room. Information: 812-485-5725.
Pulmonary fibrosis support group: Meeting 4 p.m. the second Tuesday of each month, Room 1420, Deaconess Hospital, 600 Mary St. Information: 812-450-6000 or deaconess.com/calendar.
COPD/asthma support group: Meeting 4 p.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month, Room 1420, Deaconess Hospital, 600 Mary St. Information: 812-450-6000 or deaconess.com/calendar.
Parkinson's support group: Meeting at 5:30 p.m. the first Tuesday of each month, Room 350, Deaconess Physician Center, 600 Mary St. Information: 812-450-6000 or deaconess.com/calendar.
Tri-State Multiple Sclerosis Association support group meetings: 10 a.m. the second Saturday of each month, Tri-State MS Association Office, 971 S. Kenmore Drive, Evansville (contact Nita Ruxer at 812-479-3544 or Sharon Omer at 270-333-4701); 10 a.m. the fourth Saturday of each month, Gibson General Hospital, fifth floor, first room on the right, 1808 Sherman Drive, Princeton, Indiana (contact Alice Burkhart at 812-782-3735); 11 a.m. the second Tuesday of each month, Twilight Towers, in the cafeteria, 1648 10th St., Tell City (contact Terri Hasty at 812-649-4013 or Gayle Taylor 812-719-2417); 10 a.m. the third Saturday of each month, Daviess Community Hospital, Washington, Indiana (contact Cindy Kalberer at 812-254-6735 or Fran Neal at 812-259-1565); 10 a.m. the first Saturday of each month, Calvary Missionary Baptist Church, 2360 Green River Road, Henderson, Kentucky, (contact Meg Burnley at 270-826-9507 or Debbie Whittington at 270-827-8298); 6 p.m. the second Monday of each month, Owensboro Health Healthpark, 1006 Ford Ave., Owensboro, Kentucky; and 11 a.m. the first Saturday of each month, Fairfield Memorial Hospital in the board room of Horizon Clinic, 303 NW 11th St., Fairfield, Illinois (contact Kathie Hill at 618-847-8452).
Compiled by Leah Ward,
leah.ward@courierpress.com.
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By Megan Erbacher of the Courier and Press
This year's list of National Merit Scholarships includes a recent addition of students receiving college-sponsored awards.
This year, 176 public and private high education institutions in 45 states and the District of Columbia sponsored more than 3,800 merit scholarships. The scholarship amounts are between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship.
Local winners include:
Maria Belen del Valle Coello, Signature School, plans to attend Indiana University to study physics.
Five Castle High School recipients are: Mitchell Cron, Justin Banks, Richard Gerst, Jeremy Server and Laura Jane Titzer. Cron plans to study physics at Purdue. Banks and Gerst plan to attend the University of Evansville for computer science and physics, respectively. Server is going to the University of Alabama for chemical engineering. Titzer is going to Purdue for engineering.
Isaiah Hopf, Jasper High School, plans to attend Indiana University for computer science.
Miranda Phipps, Henderson County High School, plans to attend the University of Kentucky for environmental science.
More than 7,300 students are 2016 National Merit Scholars, including three other local students who are among 2,500 recipients of one-time awards of $2,500, most of which are financed by the National Merit Scholarship Corp. They are Philip Eykamp and Abigail Plump, both Signature School graduates.
Eykamp plans to pursue engineering, and Plump plans to pursue actuarial science.
Donald Trump waves goodbye at Michael Pence's side as he leaves the governor's residence on Thursday. (Photo: IndyStar / Mykal McEldowney)
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By James Briggs, USA TODAY NETWORK, IndyStar
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has made it through the easy part.
The Sean Hannity interview Friday on Fox News. The introduction speech Saturday in New York. A joint "60 Minutes" interview with Donald Trump that aired Sunday. Pence was self-confident, clear and passionate while introducing himself to Americans over the weekend.
The toughest tests, though, begin this week. The rollout of Pence as Trump's running mate will continue during the Republican National Convention, which begins today in Cleveland. Pence will deliver the most scrutinized speech of his career at the convention on Wednesday. Then it's off to the campaign trail and perpetual national media coverage.
Pence's performance during the coming weeks will determine, to some extent, whether Trump's presidential campaign is successful. His 12 years in Congress and nearly four years as governor of Indiana suggest he should be ready for the challenge. Pence has been a calm, steady voice for conservatives in Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis. But his time as governor has included unforced errors in high-profile moments that some political analysts say raise doubts about his fitness for a presidential campaign especially under a candidate as unorthodox as Trump.
Kevin Madden, a top adviser to past Republican presidential campaigns, said no amount of political experience offers training for the job Pence has accepted.
"It is very difficult to prepare even some of the most seasoned campaigners for the level of scrutiny and white-hot glare of the national spotlight," said Madden, who worked on Mitt Romney's 2008 and 2012 bids for president. "Even those that think they're prepared, I think, will always find the first few steps out onto that stage quite daunting. And I think the question then is does the campaign have an organization and operation designed to help through some of the stumbles that are inevitable."
The Trump campaign so far has limited Pence's exposure. Trump surrogates spoke on behalf of Pence during the Sunday morning news shows. Soon, though, Pence will find himself alone in front of the cameras and microphones. Madden thinks he can handle it.
"He has a reputation for being very savvy and accessible with the media," Madden said, citing Pence's relationships with reporters while in Congress. "He's been exposed to Sunday show scrutiny having been in the middle of a lot of pitched battles over policy between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill."
That reputation has changed since Pence became governor. Pence has exasperated reporters by deflecting questions on topics such as the impact of proposed tax cuts and by seeming caught off guard by the response to administration initiatives such as a scrapped idea for a state-run news outlet.
Pence's jump to the Republican presidential ticket will expose some of his greatest strengths and weaknesses, which have been on display in Indiana. He is known for staying on message, a valuable trait in politics, yet has been criticized for sticking too closely to the script at times when improvisation might be more suitable.
Ed Feigenbaum, editor and publisher of the Indiana Legislative Insight newsletter, said Pence's style was jarring to reporters following former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who came across as "sincere and candid, without going through filters." Feigenbaum thinks Pence's recent perceived media struggles can be attributed to the difference between being a member of Congress and a governor.
"In Congress, you're one of 435 (members)," Feigenbaum said. "When you're dealing with national media, you're looking to define yourself and develop relationships and distinguish yourself from your other colleagues. When you're governor, you're the point person. And a lot of times, the answers that you are called upon to give are often defensive more than anything else."
Pence took a defensive posture during an oft-criticized March 2015 interview on ABC's "This Week," which many political observers say demonstrated Pence at his worst.
The governor repeatedly declined to say whether the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow Indiana businesses to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. Its just a question, sir," host George Stephanopoulos said incredulously. "Yes or no.
Pence never answered and later acknowledged he could have done better in the interview.
"That was not a good performance," said Jeff Roe, who managed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's unsuccessful presidential campaign. "He said so."
Yet, Roe added, one stumble during a Sunday news show isn't indicative of a candidate's ability to perform well in a national campaign.
"You only get better by doing it," Roe said. "Politics is like umpiring. You have to start perfect and get better."
Roe, who has been critical of Trump's run for president, said he thinks Pence will bring a "healthy dose of the boring" to the campaign.
"He knows why he's there and what he's there to accomplish," Roe said. "He has great conviction and faith that can carry him through those types of moments. I think he's a profoundly qualified candidate."
Republican strategists almost unanimously agree that Pence's resume makes him a sound candidate for vice president. They're less certain about the top of the ticket, though, where Trump could heap additional pressure on Pence with his hallmark unpredictability.
Pence will be expected to support Trumps positions and statements on a wide range of topics, including some for instance, recent remarks in defense of Saddam Hussein and a tweet about Hillary Clinton that included what was thought to be a Star of David that will defy easy explanations.
Pence already has been at odds with Trump at times. Pence in December called Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S. "unconstitutional." Pence also criticized Trump's recent attack on Indiana-born U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Pence almost certainly would not be able to distance himself from similar remarks by Trump while serving as his running mate.
"I'm not quite sure how much he aligns with Mr. Trump's views on just about anything," said Dan Parker, a former Indiana Democratic Party chairman.
Parker added he doesn't think there's much Pence can do to help the Trump campaign.
"He may be viewed well nationally from the right, from the Republican Party, but that's also part of the reason why he's being rejected in the general election in Indiana, which is traditionally a pretty reliable state for the Republican Party," Parker said, referring to polling that showed Pence virtually tied with Democrat John Gregg before Pence dropped his re-election bid for governor.
Pence has an opportunity to redefine himself. Few people outside of Indiana are familiar with the governor. A CBS News/New York Times poll this month found 86 percent of voters were undecided or didnt know enough about Pence to have an opinion.
Pence's past speeches, writings and even old radio and television shows will begin to fill some of the void as people research him. Pence, for instance, argued in a 1990s op-ed about a proposed settlement with tobacco companies that "smoking doesn't kill." The article has been heavily shared on social media in recent days.
But past speeches Pence made to Congress also demonstrate a level of excitement and enthusiasm that seems to have returned for Pence in recent days. The governor's appearances with Trump in Westfield and New York have been filled with uncharacteristic emotion and passion.
Andy Downs, director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, said video clips of Pence speaking during his congressional days show a different type of politician than Indiana has seen during his time as governor.
"I think what some people may be surprised by is how animated he got at some of the talks he gave," Downs said. "We're used to seeing this very calm, sedate guy. He's referred to himself, when he was a talk radio guy, as 'Rush Limbaugh on decaf.' It's a humorous way to describe himself. But he got a little fiery in the CSPAN-type days."
Downs expects Pence to be a "very good opening act for Donald Trump when they appear together."
Pence's early performance has been well received. But Madden, the former Romney adviser, said most vice presidential nominees look good during the first few days after they're introduced. The weeks that follow challenge them in ways they can't even imagine, Madden said.
"If you are a governor or senator or mayor or congressman, take your worst day and multiply it times a hundred," Madden said. "That's what every day is like on a presidential campaign. You have hordes of media following you from one event to the other all day every day, hanging on every single word. They put a magnifying glass on every single mistake.
"There's also an entire operation on the other side, in the opposition campaign, whose single job it is every day to exploit every mistake you make and dig deeper into your background and elevate every comment you made in the last 10 to 20 years. Getting used to that does require a very high level of perseverance and some very thick skin."
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By Richard Gootee of the Courier and Press
There are a lot of emotions going through Indiana State Police Sgt. Philip Hensley right now.
Days after going to Dallas to serve in an honor guard for one of the five police officers slain by a sniper targeting cops, the spokesman for the Jasper post challenged society as a whole to work toward a peaceful solution to stop the much publicized streak of violence toward law enforcement.
"Until we get some serious actions of people wanting to step up and wanting to make a difference, this is going to be a cycle that does not stop," Hensley told the Courier & Press on Monday. "If it does not stop what we're going to end up with is complete chaos. We can't have that. This is America. We cannot live in fear, we cannot live in chaos. We have to get this fixed."
Law enforcement, too, needs to make sure it's part of the resolution, Hensley said. His comments came less than 24 hours after the shooting of three Baton Rouge, Louisiana-area law enforcement officers. Baton Rouge is the same city where Alton Sterling was killed by police earlier this month. A day after Sterling's death, another black man was killed by law enforcement in Minnesota during a traffic stop. The two deaths led to renewed nationwide protests about the treatment of the black community by police.
It was at one of those rallies that the five Dallas police officers were gunned down July 7. Hensley traveled to the funeral of Dallas Police Department Sgt. Michael Smith as part of the Indiana State Police honor guard. Three Evansville officers were also in Texas last week to pay their respects. That group included Jeff Kingery, who was on the Dallas force from 1991 to 1996. Evansville police Sgt. Brian Hildebrandt and officer Nick Winsett were the other two from Evansville who went.
"I've never seen that many officers there showing their support in one place at one time," said Henlsey, who called it "humbling" and "an honor" to be at the funeral. "It really puts things in perspective with yourself. Every single officer who's there has family, has friends, has people who care and love them and them to come home at the end of their shift. The reality is that every time that we go out to work, we may not come home. And in this case, five guys didn't."
Hensley said he and other law enforcement officers need to keep doing the right thing and honor the oath they have taken to protect all members of the public in the face of recent events. He also said that police should not be immune to criticism when they deserve blame. Hensley said he will always be proud of his job as an Indiana State Trooper and realizes that status means he represents something that "transcends" himself because he and his fellow officers have "pledged to be the ones who stand between the bad guys and everybody else."
"If we as law enforcement will do that, society will pick up on our lead. If we are out here doing our thing and doing it right, that will change things on our end," he said. "We need people out here doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do."
Hensley said he believes local and regional law enforcement agencies have good relations with the community. But he encouraged groups and individuals who have issues with police to come forward and speak to officials so the situation can be remedied in productive manner.
"Approach us, come to us with your problems," Hensley said. "If you think you're not being treated fairly, let us know so we can try to figure out what the deal is."
That kind of open communication is exactly what the local chapter of the NAACP has had with the Evansville Police Department for the last few years. The Rev. Gerald Arnold has had regular meetings with Evansville Police Chief Billy Bolin since Bolin assumed the chief post in 2012. The day after the Dallas shooting, Arnold met with police officials and Mayor Lloyd Winnecke and then encouraged other leaders around the state to do the same hours after that meeting.
The Evansville Police Department will also be hosting its monthly Coffee with a Cop program on Tuesday from 7-9 a.m. at the Lincoln Avenue Donut Bank. The program, started a few years ago, gives the public an opportunity to meet and discuss issues with members of the police department.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald TrumpTuesday, July 12, 2016, in Westfield, Ind. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
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By James Briggs, USA TODAY NETWORK, IndyStar
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has made it through the easy part.
The Sean Hannity interview Friday on Fox News. The introduction speech Saturday in New York. A joint "60 Minutes" interview with Donald Trump that aired Sunday. Pence was self-confident, clear and passionate while introducing himself to Americans over the weekend.
The toughest tests, though, begin this week. The rollout of Pence as Trump's running mate will continue during the Republican National Convention, which begins today in Cleveland. Pence will deliver the most scrutinized speech of his career at the convention on Wednesday. Then it's off to the campaign trail and perpetual national media coverage.
Pence's performance during the coming weeks will determine, to some extent, whether Trump's presidential campaign is successful. His 12 years in Congress and nearly four years as governor of Indiana suggest he should be ready for the challenge. Pence has been a calm, steady voice for conservatives in Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis. But his time as governor has included unforced errors in high-profile moments that some political analysts say raise doubts about his fitness for a presidential campaign especially under a candidate as unorthodox as Trump.
Kevin Madden, a top adviser to past Republican presidential campaigns, said no amount of political experience offers training for the job Pence has accepted.
"It is very difficult to prepare even some of the most seasoned campaigners for the level of scrutiny and white-hot glare of the national spotlight," said Madden, who worked on Mitt Romney's 2008 and 2012 bids for president. "Even those that think they're prepared, I think, will always find the first few steps out onto that stage quite daunting. And I think the question then is does the campaign have an organization and operation designed to help through some of the stumbles that are inevitable."
The Trump campaign so far has limited Pence's exposure. Trump surrogates spoke on behalf of Pence during the Sunday morning news shows. Soon, though, Pence will find himself alone in front of the cameras and microphones. Madden thinks he can handle it.
"He has a reputation for being very savvy and accessible with the media," Madden said, citing Pence's relationships with reporters while in Congress. "He's been exposed to Sunday show scrutiny having been in the middle of a lot of pitched battles over policy between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill."
That reputation has changed since Pence became governor. Pence has exasperated reporters by deflecting questions on topics such as the impact of proposed tax cuts and by seeming caught off guard by the response to administration initiatives such as a scrapped idea for a state-run news outlet.
Pence's jump to the Republican presidential ticket will expose some of his greatest strengths and weaknesses, which have been on display in Indiana. He is known for staying on message, a valuable trait in politics, yet has been criticized for sticking too closely to the script at times when improvisation might be more suitable.
Ed Feigenbaum, editor and publisher of the Indiana Legislative Insight newsletter, said Pence's style was jarring to reporters following former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who came across as "sincere and candid, without going through filters." Feigenbaum thinks Pence's recent perceived media struggles can be attributed to the difference between being a member of Congress and a governor.
"In Congress, you're one of 435 (members)," Feigenbaum said. "When you're dealing with national media, you're looking to define yourself and develop relationships and distinguish yourself from your other colleagues. When you're governor, you're the point person. And a lot of times, the answers that you are called upon to give are often defensive more than anything else."
Pence took a defensive posture during an oft-criticized March 2015 interview on ABC's "This Week," which many political observers say demonstrated Pence at his worst.
The governor repeatedly declined to say whether the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow Indiana businesses to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. Its just a question, sir," host George Stephanopoulos said incredulously. "Yes or no.
Pence never answered and later acknowledged he could have done better in the interview.
"That was not a good performance," said Jeff Roe, who managed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's unsuccessful presidential campaign. "He said so."
Yet, Roe added, one stumble during a Sunday news show isn't indicative of a candidate's ability to perform well in a national campaign.
"You only get better by doing it," Roe said. "Politics is like umpiring. You have to start perfect and get better."
Roe, who has been critical of Trump's run for president, said he thinks Pence will bring a "healthy dose of the boring" to the campaign.
"He knows why he's there and what he's there to accomplish," Roe said. "He has great conviction and faith that can carry him through those types of moments. I think he's a profoundly qualified candidate."
Republican strategists almost unanimously agree that Pence's resume makes him a sound candidate for vice president. They're less certain about the top of the ticket, though, where Trump could heap additional pressure on Pence with his hallmark unpredictability.
Pence will be expected to support Trumps positions and statements on a wide range of topics, including some for instance, recent remarks in defense of Saddam Hussein and a tweet about Hillary Clinton that included what was thought to be a Star of David that will defy easy explanations.
Pence already has been at odds with Trump at times. Pence in December called Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S. "unconstitutional." Pence also criticized Trump's recent attack on Indiana-born U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Pence almost certainly would not be able to distance himself from similar remarks by Trump while serving as his running mate.
"I'm not quite sure how much he aligns with Mr. Trump's views on just about anything," said Dan Parker, a former Indiana Democratic Party chairman.
Parker added he doesn't think there's much Pence can do to help the Trump campaign.
"He may be viewed well nationally from the right, from the Republican Party, but that's also part of the reason why he's being rejected in the general election in Indiana, which is traditionally a pretty reliable state for the Republican Party," Parker said, referring to polling that showed Pence virtually tied with Democrat John Gregg before Pence dropped his re-election bid for governor.
Pence has an opportunity to redefine himself. Few people outside of Indiana are familiar with the governor. A CBS News/New York Times poll this month found 86 percent of voters were undecided or didnt know enough about Pence to have an opinion.
Pence's past speeches, writings and even old radio and television shows will begin to fill some of the void as people research him. Pence, for instance, argued in a 1990s op-ed about a proposed settlement with tobacco companies that "smoking doesn't kill." The article has been heavily shared on social media in recent days.
But past speeches Pence made to Congress also demonstrate a level of excitement and enthusiasm that seems to have returned for Pence in recent days. The governor's appearances with Trump in Westfield and New York have been filled with uncharacteristic emotion and passion.
Andy Downs, director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, said video clips of Pence speaking during his congressional days show a different type of politician than Indiana has seen during his time as governor.
"I think what some people may be surprised by is how animated he got at some of the talks he gave," Downs said. "We're used to seeing this very calm, sedate guy. He's referred to himself, when he was a talk radio guy, as 'Rush Limbaugh on decaf.' It's a humorous way to describe himself. But he got a little fiery in the CSPAN-type days."
Downs expects Pence to be a "very good opening act for Donald Trump when they appear together."
Pence's early performance has been well received. But Madden, the former Romney adviser, said most vice presidential nominees look good during the first few days after they're introduced. The weeks that follow challenge them in ways they can't even imagine, Madden said.
"If you are a governor or senator or mayor or congressman, take your worst day and multiply it times a hundred," Madden said. "That's what every day is like on a presidential campaign. You have hordes of media following you from one event to the other all day every day, hanging on every single word. They put a magnifying glass on every single mistake.
"There's also an entire operation on the other side, in the opposition campaign, whose single job it is every day to exploit every mistake you make and dig deeper into your background and elevate every comment you made in the last 10 to 20 years. Getting used to that does require a very high level of perseverance and some very thick skin.
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Jane Scott
Princeton, Indiana
Jon Webb's snarky editorial on the selection of Mike Pence as VP is a prime example of the vitriolic liberal bias that permeates the media these days. It's what we've come to expect from newspapers like The Courier & Press.
Webb's hateful rhetoric and infantile attempts at humor are certainly a poor excuse for legitimate journalism. His writing is clearly driven by his extreme biases against those nasty Christians and awful conservatives. Would Webb would ever apply that same passion to a scathing expose of Hillary Clinton's well-documented life of corruption? Would he ever refer to her as an "infectious disease" that is spreading across America? I doubt it.
To be fair I must admit that I do continue to purchase this newspaper on a regular basis for several reasons. The crossword puzzles are entertaining, the TV guide is very helpful, the obituaries and anniversaries are informative, and the paper itself works great for washing windows.
A man wanted in connection with an attempted murder in Page is now in the Flagstaff jail.
According to Flagstaff Police Department, local officers arrested Kyle Tso, 28, of Phoenix at approximately 7:30 p.m. Sunday on a probation violation. Page Police Department was already looking for Tso as a person of interest in an attempted homicide and kidnapping reported earlier this month.
According to information from Page Police Department, officers there responded to Page Hospital July 4 after a woman reported her boyfriend had held her against her will and tortured her for two days. The woman told Page police the suspect had assaulted her, strangled her and stabbed her multiple times. Family members told the Daily Sun the suspect also tried to saw off the victims foot with a steak knife.
The victim escaped and went to the hospitals emergency room. She was transported to Flagstaff Medical Center, where she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries and released. Her family said she was in hiding.
Page police announced they were pursuing charges against Tso, including aggravated domestic violence, kidnapping and attempted murder. However, Tso went on the run. Page Police Department received unconfirmed reports that he had fled to the Navajo Nation, although other anonymous tipsters told the family he was later spotted in Flagstaff and that he might be trying to flee to Mexico.
On Sunday, Flagstaff Police Department received information form a citizen that Tso was indeed in Flagstaff. The tipster reported seeing Tso enter an apartment in the 200 block of West High Country Trail in Flagstaff. Police officers found him at that location.
According to Flagstaff police, officers approached Tso with their firearms drawn because they had been warned that Tso had been known to carry weapons. However, no weapons were seen when Flagstaff officers arrested him.
Officers did Tase Tso. According to Flagstaff Police Department, they decided to use a Taser because Tso was initially not compliant and reached for his waistline. He then became compliant. He was taken into custody without further incident. Flagstaff Police Department also notified Page police about his arrest.
Tso is being held at the Coconino County Detention Facility in Flagstaff on multiple charges, including aggravated assault, kidnapping and a probation violation.
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Rod Penfield
Evansville
I offer a few comments on the very long July 16 opinion piece by Jon Webb, "Trump's VP pick spreads Indiana's annoying rash.." At least, you are now printing columnist Webb's masterpieces where they belong: on the opinion page rather than in the news section. It's readily apparent that columnist Webb has little use for Mike Pence, Donald Trump, or just about anyone even slightly to the right of Karl Marx. He sometimes does make a noteworthy comment, though, once you wade through the quagmire of other stuff written, unconvincingly, in an attempt to demonstrate his wit.
Yes, it is otherworldly to imagine that "The Donald" will actually be a candidate for President. Yes, Mike Pence is far from a perfect VP candidate. Yes, Pence did really "step in it" concerning the RFRA debacle and a few other issues. No disagreement here. I haven't yet experienced Indiana's annoying rash. If it really is that bad, I would consider relocating to, say, Illinois, where employers and citizen taxpayers are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. (It's not that far, Mr. Webb)
Voters this year face "Sophie's Choice": one candidate with the blood of at least four Americans on her hands who has lied time and time again, sometimes under oath, to the American people on a variety of topics; and a bloviating billionaire who regularly roams between reality and fantasy. That being said, it is possible for an opinion writer to make a point without worrying about impressing the Comedy Club set. I'll bet columnist Webb has it in him. Or, perhaps he is paid by the word.
Operations are winding down on the 2,660-acre Scott Fire 11 miles east of Tusayan on the Kaibab National Forest. The fire is 85 percent contained and crews are entering the rehabilitation stage.
The fire was initially allowed to burn as a managed fire but as conditions accelerated fire behavior, crews shifted to a strategy of suppression.
The closure order that was applied on the Arizona Trail south of Grandview Tower has been rescinded and the trail has been reopened to the public. Road stabilization maintenance will continue along the section of Forest Road 307 adjacent to the fire perimeter. Visitors are asked to avoid traveling through the area until work is completed.
Fire officials stated they are pleased with the overall results of this fire which met several land management objectives that were specified in the early stages of planning.
A poignant graph goes with this article. It doesn't transfer well, so see here. Washington Post by Lazaro Gamio and Tim Meko
Since the beginning of 2015, the Middle East, Africa and Asia have seen nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas.
Thursdays attack on Bastille Day celebrations in Nice is the third mass-casualty assault to hit France in 18 months, and the largest single attack on a Western country since November of last year, when gunmen rampaged through Paris, killing 130. More than a month ago, a gunman stormed into a gay nightclub in Orlando and killed 49 people. The gunman, Omar Mateen, spoke with a 911 operator on the phone and pledged his loyalty to the Islamic State. The event was both a terrorist attack and the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The death tolls of attacks in Western countries pale in comparison to daily attacks in other parts of the world. In a few frenzied days in late June and early July, three Islamic-State-linked attacks killed over 350 people. On June 28, three attackers detonated their suicide vests at Istanbuls Ataturk Airport and killed 45 people. On July 1, Bangladesh suffered its worst terrorist attack in history when gunmen killed 20 hostages at a Dhaka restaurant. On July 3, nearly 300 died in a busy Baghdad shopping district.
The geography of terrorism
Terrorist attacks with at least five non-militant deaths since Jan. 1, 2015
[Please view the original story. Here it shows another poignant graph.]
The Middle East and northern Africa account for over two-thirds of terrorism deaths since January 2015, with multiple attacks occurring daily, each claiming on average at least a dozen lives.
HOTBEDS OF TERRORISM
In northeastern Nigeria, Islamic-State-affiliated Boko Haram has been forced out of much of the territory it once controlled, but it continues to carry out suicide bombings in the region. The group has carried out increasingly deadly campaigns in recent years, with 2015 being the deadliest.
In Syria and Iraq, the local populace bears the brunt of the Islamic States brutality, with suicide bombings and armed assaults a common occurrence. The group has stepped up attacks in recent months, as its territory in northern and western Iraq has diminished.
In Afghanistan, an increasingly fragmented Taliban is stepping up its operations. On June 30, two suicide bombers attacked a convoy entering Kabul and killed 30 police cadets, one of many attacks against security force convoys. Just over a week prior, a suicide bomber killed 14 Nepali and Indian security guards; both the Taliban and the Islamic State took credit for the bombing.
Outside large attacks in France and Belgium, attacks in eastern Ukraine account for most terrorism casualties in Europe, according to Janes Terrorism and Insurgency Center. In the Americas, recent Islamic-State-inspired mass shootings make up the lions share of the terrorism-related deaths. Aside from that, a few scattered attacks from guerrilla groups in Colombia and Peru and some scattered violence in the Caribbean caused a handful of deaths.
Considering the importance of transfusions, every donor should ideally be greeted with a hug from their favorite celebrity when they decide to show up and literally bleed for a complete stranger. But for decades, male donors have instead been greeted with intrusive questions like "Have you ever had another man's dick inside you?" and were shown the door if the answer was yes.
AndreyPopov/iStock
"Door is on your left. Would you prefer to leave to the sound of whispered accusations, or quiet glaring?"
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"Since 1977, the FDA has not allowed men who have had sex with other men, even once, to donate blood," Dr. Matthew told us. "This was the result of the AIDS epidemic and the lack of knowledge and testing limitations. Well, now we've got a really good handle on HIV testing. Your chances of contracting HIV through transfusion is like one in two million." In others words, you have better odds of getting struck by lightning, and then discovering that the scar formed the shape of winning lottery numbers.
The ability to reliably test for HIV came about in 1985, and all blood donors are screened for it, so the FDA somewhat relaxed the rule prohibiting men who've had sex with men from donating ... in December 2015. "If haven't had sexual contact with a person at risk for HIV within the past year, they can donate."
CNN
"FINE! But this counts as your social progression for next Christmas, too."
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Yep, monogamous, sexually active gay and bisexual men who use protection still can't donate, while heterosexuals who have nonstop nasty, unprotected sex can. This is despite the fact that modern tests only need a waiting period of 25 days after sex to detect signs of HIV, although that would still rule out any same-sex couples who weren't going through a bit of a rough patch. But to be fair, maybe the rules wouldn't be so strict if not for the fact that ...
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I. Overview
The 500km line of separation between Russian-supported separatist districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the rest of Ukraine is not fit for purpose. The ceasefire negotiated at the February 2015 Minsk talks is being violated daily and heavily. Tens of thousands of well-armed troops confront each other in densely populated civilian areas. The sides are so close that even light infantry weapons can cause substantial damage, let alone the heavy weapons they regularly use. This presents major risks to civilians who still live there about 100,000 on the Ukrainian side alone, according to an unofficial estimate often next door to troops who have taken over unoccupied houses. It also heightens the risk of an escalation. Kyiv, Moscow and the separatists all bear responsibility for the security and well-being of civilians living along the front line. Likewise, Kyivs European allies, Washington and Moscow all have crucial roles to play in addressing the overall situation. They should insist that both sides withdraw their heavy weapons, as Minsk requires, from the front line to storage areas monitored by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). They should also press their respective allies the Ukrainian government on one side, and the self-proclaimed Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR and LNR) on the other to separate troops from civilians and to substantially widen the line of separation. Russias role in this is vital. It insists it is not a party to the conflict, but its military intervention in early 2014 triggered the crisis; two major incursions by its armed forces in 2014 and 2015 deepened it; and it is now the sole source of military, economic and other assistance to the two entities. Its officers train and largely command the separatist forces, and it continues to assure the separatists that it will intervene again if Ukraine attacks. Given Russias continued role in the conflict, international sanctions need to be maintained. There is little doubt that the death toll is significantly higher than either side admits. Fighting takes place daily along large parts of the line, much of it unreported. Both sides often use howitzers, heavy mortars and rocket systems or park them menacingly in the centre of large urban areas where they risk at the least becoming targets for the others artillery. The Minsk agreement to withdraw heavy weaponry, meanwhile, is violated daily. Both sides should take urgent measures to address the security and humanitarian, including health, needs of the civilians stranded along the front line. Troops and military equipment should be moved out of civilian buildings and settlements. It would be helpful if the OSCE, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) specifically identified in their public monitoring reports those locations where civilians and military are intermingled. Ukraine also urgently needs to address the humanitarian fallout of the conflict, including clear signs of psychiatric distress in front-line villages. If it is unable to do this, an experienced international organisation like Doctors without Borders should be encouraged to survey the needs. And the Ukrainian government should order local civil administrators, most of whom seem to have abandoned settlements on the front line, to return to work and at least be in contact with the population concerned. The humanitarian crisis on the front line is also a political one. President Poroshenkos poll ratings in the east, including those areas Kyiv controls, have declined substantially. One oft-cited reason is the sense that the countrys leadership is not interested in the east. Ukraine, whose sovereignty over the occupied territories is internationally recognised, needs to take the lead in addressing these problems. Doing so would not be a sign of weakness, as some Ukrainian voices argue, or imply equal guilt with Moscow for the damage inflicted by the conflict. On the contrary, it would be proof that Kyiv was acting as a legitimate and responsible member of the international community that cares for the well-being of all its citizens. The government-controlled areas of the two oblasts are also the stronghold of one of Ukraines main opposition parties, the Opposition Bloc. Widely described as pro-Russian and oligarch-funded, the Bloc is running nationwide ahead or neck and neck with the presidents party in many polls. Failure to help its own citizens on the border thus could well have political cost for the Kyiv leadership and fuel conflict by strengthening anti-government feelings in Luhansk and Donetsk. This briefing, based on travels along the Kyiv-controlled side of the line of separation in April-May 2016, focuses on the intermingling of civilians and military in front-line areas on the Ukrainian side. It also surveys the views and outlook of Ukrainian military officers stationed along the front line. The officers are younger and more confident than those encountered two years ago. But their opinions were bitingly critical of the countrys political and military leadership, including President Petro Poroshenko. The president and other top leaders would be well advised to pay more attention to the mood of what is in essence the next generation of Ukrainian military commanders. All officers interviewed described the Minsk process as dead and strongly supported the idea, floated by some leading politicians, to seal off the separatist enclaves for the foreseeable future a policy move the international community should caution against in no uncertain terms.
II. Home on the Front
A. Elusive Statistics
Government officials in Kyiv and in the east were unable to provide figures for the number of civilians still living in the many villages and settlements that are now part of the front line. Staff of the Agency for the Restoration of Donbas, the very theoretical government lead for work in the east, said they knew of no consolidated data. The Donetsk governors office, Donetsk police, internal affairs ministry and state statistical service, among others, were unable to provide up-to-date figures. Enquiries to local military or civil administrators in the combat zones yielded some estimates: 10,000 highly vulnerable in the Luhansk district of Popasna; 1,500 in the industrial town of Avdiivka, whose suburbs are part of the front line; a substantial portion of the population of Marinka, a small front-line town with a pre-war population of over 9,000; and 1,500 out of a village of 3,000 in a position close to Mariupol. The UN Humanitarian Response Plan for 2016 estimates the civilian population in Ukrainian-controlled front-line areas at 200,000. Other specialised international organisations feel this may be an overstatement. Given a pre-war population of approximately 230,000 in these areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, it seems reasonable to assume that the most at-risk population those living in government-controlled areas where front-line military units are based, and which are frequently subject to attacks number around 100,000. Crisis Group was not able to conduct research on the separatist side of the front, as access to much of the separatist-controlled territory is becoming increasingly difficult. However, earlier visits to the self-proclaimed Peoples Republics and reports from major international organisations leave no doubt that the intermingling of civilians and military is also prevalent there. There is no distinction between military positions and civilian dwellings in many front-line settlements. Combat units are embedded in villages, usually scattered in houses beside civilian dwellings. In Marinka, a town just beyond the western edge of Donetsk city, many civilians still live in Matrosova Street, once a quiet area of pleasant small houses and large gardens. Military units now occupy abandoned houses, and the beginning of the front line is marked by a heavy machine gun position on the street corner. Separatist positions are 150 metres or less away. During firefights, which usually happen at night and are frequent, casualties are evacuated along Matrosova and parallel streets. An officer who coordinated casualty evacuations noted that he preferred to use small passenger cars rather than ambulances, as those drew heavy incoming fire that left civilians pretty scared. In the hamlet of Zaitseve, military armour pokes out of the bushes, and visitors observed fresh craters from a 152mm howitzer and an 82mm mortar on the edge of a newly tilled vegetable plot. Local people said the shells had dropped short of a military position. On Kirova Street in Avdiivka, a Ukrainian military observation post is on high ground behind residents gardens. Just across the road, troops occupy houses, one of which had been seriously damaged in fighting a few weeks earlier. The front line is only 50 to 100 metres away.
B. Those Who Stay
Those who remain in the front-line area usually have nowhere else to go or lack the means to leave. They are more likely women than men, are often pensioners and sometimes have to care for family members too infirm to leave. Moving requires considerably more financial outlay than pensioners can afford. A one-bedroom apartment in Kramatorsk, the temporary seat of the Ukrainian governments Donetsk regional administration, costs approximately 1,500 hryvnia ($60) per month, about three quarters of a monthly pension. Utilities would add substantially to this. With schools closed or on the other side of the line and mines everywhere, families have usually left or sent children to relatives. Schools and health facilities in Horlivka, some 15km from the front, used to service a significant part of the area, but the large industrial town is now on the separatist side of the front, a strategic part of the defences of Donetsk city and frequently subject to shelling and attacks. Few if any civilian males of military age have stayed not surprisingly given military suspicions that locals are separatist sympathisers (see below). Often one person, usually a woman, has remained to ensure that the family home is not sequestered by the military or damaged. The military takeover of temporarily uninhabited homes and other buildings seems ad hoc and arbitrary. In many places, the houses have become billets for small units or fire positions. As a soldier explained, a house is more comfortable to live in than a trench. In some places, residents have protested, usually with little success. People living along the front line have drastically simplified their daily routine. Most sleep in cellars for all or part of the night, remaining close to their house and shelter through late morning. Firing usually tapers off around noon or early afternoon, before residents edge closer to shelters. Work prospects in the villages have largely disappeared. Those previously employed outside them are unable to travel, most local mines are closed, and farming has become dangerous. The front line has cut through some of eastern Europes richest farmland and vegetable gardens, bringing agriculture to a halt in most places and making even subsistence farming dangerous. Large fields are mostly untilled, for fear of shelling or mines (see below). Any planting is usually limited to potatoes in vegetable patches close to the house in some cases the small green space outside village houses where in quieter times the elderly would sit. Even these relatively sheltered areas are vulnerable. In Avdiivka, the coke-smelting town whose suburbs flow into the front line, a 75-year-old woman was killed by what locals say was an incoming shell while working on her potatoes. The police report attributed her death to careless handling of ammunition. The military on both sides carries out hit-and-run raids from largely civilian areas. Several front-line residents in Avdiivka related how a small Ukrainian unit recently sped in, strafed its foes, then pulled back. These actions inevitably trigger retaliation, well after the soldiers have left. Donetsk residents described separatist mortar teams using the same tactics and provoking the same response. Given the volatility of the situation, few who have left show any sign of wanting to return permanently to the villages. Residents of Zaitseve reported a family briefly returning to plant potatoes, in case there is peace later this year. Villagers said that even occasional visits from relief agencies offer little hope. An international organisation explained to Avdiivka residents that it was too early to distribute roofing and other building materials, as they would only have to be replaced again in a few months. Those able to leave are among the 1.7 million officially registered internally displaced persons (IDPs). About one million are registered as living in other parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, though it is quite possible that many have moved elsewhere or even returned home on the other side of the line. Most IDPs are said to live with relatives, friends or in rental accommodations in larger towns that offer more safety and work opportunities.
C. Military-civilian Relations
Civilians in the east agree that the Ukrainian militarys behaviour has improved substantially since the grim days of 2014, when its troops were a byword for indiscipline, drunkenness and sometimes violence. But there are lingering suspicions on both sides. Some civilians, echoing a line favoured by many separatist propagandists, discreetly remarked to visitors that if the troops were not living next door, their homes would not be under fire. The military has its own preconceptions regarding the locals. One holds that civilians have chosen to remain at the front because of separatist sympathies. Quite often, in Avdiivka for example, residents reported allegations by soldiers that local people helped DNR sabotage teams that slipped into the area at night. Another frequent comment offered by the military was that local people were getting what they had asked for in the May 2014 separatist-organised referendum on self-determination. Some senior officers were more direct: 50 per cent of my civilians are separatists, claimed a battalion commander; in another area, an officer estimated hard-core sympathisers at about 10 per cent of the population. Soldiers said they could hear separatist radio stations from their civilian neighbours homes, which reinforced their suspicion. One of the few local officials on the ground remarked that, on the rare occasion he or his colleagues were able to achieve something for the local population, separatist media claimed credit, and the news quickly spread among locals. Separatist media are ubiquitous, because in the vast majority of settlements along the front line, towers carrying Ukrainian broadcasting were destroyed in the early days of the fighting and have not been replaced. The only choice for most civilians are local radio stations from nearby separatist-controlled towns. The governor of Donetsk acknowledged the problem but noted that repair of transmission equipment is the central authorities responsibility.
D. Mines
Visitors to a hamlet in Zaitseve are instructed on arrival to use only well-trodden paths between houses, never shortcuts. Mines anti-personnel and anti-armour have been laid all across the front line. Both sides recently added trip wire devices. Few have been mapped, so regular troop rotations mean that any institutional memory of the mines location has been lost. Inhabitants of the front-line villages often cite mines as the main reason for sending children to relatives. The shelling is bad enough, but at least we see or hear the risk: with mines you had to keep children in prison, a woman explained. On Kirova Street in Avdiivka, a resident said his five dogs had gone, probably killed by mines just beyond his back garden, which opens out on the front. Demining specialists believe that clearing all mines once hostilities end will take a minimum of five years and up to twenty if sufficient funding is not available. Large-scale demining cannot begin, however, until the Ukrainian parliament passes legislation determining which government authority oversees the removal of mines and unexploded ordnance, and establishing national technical standards, including a framework for the accreditation and quality. Meanwhile, the number of mines and explosive remnants of war is increasing daily. Western diplomats say the legislation is so far moving slowly.
E. Distress and Alcohol
The sheer terror of living in a war zone, the highly limited opportunity of moving even a few miles away, the lack of work, the separation of families and general social disruption have for two years subjected the remaining inhabitants of front-line areas to inordinate social pressure that has disproportionately devolved upon women. The state has done little or nothing to address these problems, and visits by international monitors and aid organisations are rare. Residents are mostly anxious and depressed: few conversations continue for more than a few minutes without an interlocutor showing signs of this. Alcohol abuse has long been an engrained feature of village life in Russian and Russian-speaking areas, but usually among men. In villages along the front line, alcohol consumption by women is widespread. Church volunteers in Marinka, as well as members of other local groups working with villagers, expressed concern that constant military activity was leading to an increase in serious diseases. After particularly heavy attacks in mid-June, a pastor reported pathologies among the local children: their hair starts falling out, their legs and arms shake, and some stop speaking. None of the villagers recalled visits by psychiatric health professionals. A senior regional government official shrugged off the question when asked if such visits had been made. There is urgent need for a survey of the psychiatric health needs on the front line by a competent international body.
F. Where Are the Officials?
A number of local government officials recently joined a delegation of the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) Human Rights Committee on a visit to Marinka. The committee chair, Hrihoriy Nemyria, recalled that local people were surprised they were from the district administration. No one recognised them: local officials left with the onset of war and have been handling administrative affairs from the small resort town of Kurakhove, a good distance from the front. Zaitseve residents said they did not recall any visits by officials. A military commander in Dokuchayevsk mentioned that civilian administrators initially joined him on front visits. They would note requests, leave and not follow up. People here are abandoned by the local government, he said. There is no sense of interest in their problems, and the quality of civilian officials is very low. The result is that people on the front line are left to fend for themselves.
G. Holes in the Line
There are six official vehicle-crossing points between Ukrainian and separatist-controlled territories, while mostly local people use a hastily-repaired bridge in Stanitsia-Luhanska, the single official pedestrian crossing. Over 700,000 passed through the official checkpoints in May, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). They tend not to live along the front line, are usually relatively affluent, own vehicles, can pay for fuel and food and have a certain sophistication in dealing with the sometimes intimidating military or security personnel. Even so, the crossing is challenging. Waits of ten hours or more often overnight are common. Crossing points are usually close to military installations, increasing the danger of shelling or mines. Many who live on the front line, on the other hand, have neither the money nor experience required to deal with men in uniform. Some complain that they are asked at Ukrainian checkpoints for proof they are registered as displaced, which they are not. On rare occasions, local officials on both sides have unofficially created crossing points. These purely local initiatives, distinct from the officially stipulated crossing areas, allow front-line residents to visit nearby settlements on the other side to buy food considerably cheaper on the Ukrainian side visit relatives and, when possible, collect pensions. They must show proof of registration in a settlement close to the border: despite the current armed conflict, all Ukrainian citizens remain required to register in their place of permanent residence. Two such informal points were known to exist as of early 2016. One, in Popasna, remains functional while another, near Marinka, has reportedly closed. There are other ways to get across, but not for simple residents. Ukrainian soldiers know the village of Verkhnetoretskoye as a smugglers crossing. Some contraband is for local consumption, but much is part of the major smuggling operation of coal, scrap, weapons and probably drugs that is enriching officials on both sides of the line. A prominent blogger and volunteer supporter of the armed forces, Yuriy Kasyanov, described watching a goods train passing through the village and into the separatist-controlled area of Donetsk oblast. Fighters from the ultra-nationalist Right Sector prepared to attack the smugglers train, but were stopped, Kasyanov said, by Ukrainian soldiers. There has also been at least one instance of soldiers on both sides cooperating to improve conditions on their part of the front. Ukrainian troops said that sometime in May 2016, they contacted the troops facing them; one of their number crossed to the opposing front line and over a bottle of vodka suggested they might shoot at them less often. The separatists explained that military service was one of the few ways to earn money in the entities a frequently heard complaint in the DNR. They reportedly agreed, however, that on those days when they were on duty they would fire away from their targets. They added that they could not answer for the Russian troops on duty the other days.
III. The Military
Around 90,000 troops face each other across the 500km-long line of separation. The Ukrainian government says it has 69,000 troops in its Anti-Terror Operation (ATO) zone, not all of whom are based directly on the front line. Kyiv and its allies usually estimate the separatist military strength at 35,000, though this is probably high. In addition, Ukrainian officials say, more than 8,000 Russian troops remain inside the separatist entities, with a much larger force permanently stationed just the other side of the border, ready to intervene. Moscow denies any such plans, just as it does having ever intervened militarily in Ukraine over the past two years. Separatist officials say the permanent Russian military presence is considerably less than Ukraine claims, but they stress that Russian troops on the border could deploy throughout the entities in hours if needed.
A. Officer Politics Criticism of the President, Support for Sealing-off the Separatists
Most observers agree that the Ukrainian military is very different from the poorly led, often demoralised force sent into action two years ago. Many battalion commanders and their deputies are in their early thirties. A lieutenant colonel who hopes to leave soon for staff college said most of his peers in neighbouring front-line positions were between 29 and 32. At 34, he is feeling old, he joked. In private, the officers are deeply critical of their countrys military and political leadership. One started his analysis by describing the deadlock in the conflict as beneficial to both Russian and Ukrainian leaders: The Russians can maintain pressure on us, and our president has an excuse for not carrying out reforms. All expressed belief that the Minsk process is dead. This line has been increasingly echoed by Ukrainian officials, Western diplomats and many Russian commentators. As a result, the officers said, the crisis could only be solved by military means. None, however, felt this would happen soon. There is wide agreement among analysts and the military that while the front-line advantage has shifted moderately in favour of Ukraine (see below), the key factor remains Russias readiness to intervene militarily in support of the separatists. As long as this holds, the officers felt, Ukraine would not attack to regain control of the entities. The idea to seal off the separatist entities from the rest of Ukraine, cutting political and economic ties and excluding their population from elections, has been floated since January 2016 by political leaders in Kyiv including such prominent figures as the secretary of national security and defence, Aleksandr Turchynov, and Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy. It has gained some support, but also considerable criticism. Officers interviewed along the line of separation were unanimous in their support for the idea. People in the separatist areas are totally brainwashed. They still live in the Soviet Union, one said. Maybe, just maybe, they will one day come to their senses, and they will return to us, but until then we should close them off. Another officer, who hails himself from a separatist-occupied area, was equally blunt: Let the people who want to be Russian go to Russia; we will help them leave. In the meantime, the separatist districts should be fenced off, and Russia left to support them. Proponents of sealing the border see a number of advantages, both political and economic. The Minsk agreement obliges Ukraine to pay for the restoration and rehabilitation of the entities, an endeavour that would cost billions of dollars. Sealing the enclaves off would in their view shift the whole financial burden onto Russia, which for months has already been paying salaries and pensions. This would intensify economic pressure on Moscow at a time when it is hard pressed by international sanctions and declining revenues. The assumption behind this line of thought, however, is questionable Moscow has not formalised ties with the entities, and while it has provided social support, it has not indicated it would provide reconstruction or rehabilitation funding. Ukraine is preparing for a difficult transition with any luck to a modern Westernised state, and the entities allow Russia to maintain military pressure that forces it to divert major budgetary resources from economic development to defence. Elections during the transition period are likely to be tense and volatile. Removing the entities from the voting process for several years would neutralise the votes of a million or more Ukrainians who, many politicians and analysts believe, would be little inclined to support the countrys present leadership. Proponents of the idea, who say they briefed senior Western ambassadors early this year, maintain that Poroshenko privately is sympathetic to the idea but cannot be seen as in essence amputating part of the country. Opponents fear sealing off the separatist enclaves would accelerate their slide into organised crime and contraband. Moves to close off the separatist entities from the rest of the country would concern several of the countrys most influential oligarchs, who have extensive holdings in the separatist areas. Many made their fortunes during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, and most Rinat Akhmetov, Sergei Lyovochkin and others are heavily invested in the areas oil, steel and natural gas. Further limited access would be financially deeply painful to these businessmen. Ukraines Western allies should stress to all in Kyiv that isolation would be a risky policy choice that could exacerbate the conflict, create new tensions and deepen the sense of many inhabitants of separatist-controlled areas that Kyiv has abandoned them.
B. Combat, Casualties
A. Ukrainian strategy: erode and probe
Front-line commanders are more confident than in the past that their troops could make serious inroads into separatist territory, or even destroy the entities, but the main factor stopping such an attempt is the threat of another major Russian invasion. Front-line Ukrainian forces consequently seem to be probing separatist territory in order to gradually erode military manpower. Local commanders noted that separatists are not only less well-trained than Ukrainians, but that it is much harder for them to replace lost equipment or personnel the latter because of their very small recruitment pool. Many analysts sympathetic to the separatists agreed. Ukrainian troops have edged forward along most of the line into the so-called grey zone a thin stretch of land between the fronts which both sides had until recently refrained from entering. By occupying this zone, Ukrainian troops have strengthened their positions along the border modestly, by inhibiting vehicular traffic on the other side, or gaining better forward observation positions. Asked whether this was a new strategy, officers sidestepped the question. In some cases, the troops are going further. In an area along the Mariupol sector, a battalion commander said his men had moved 1.5km into separatist-controlled territory. Similar movements have been reported elsewhere. Around Debaltseve, the site of a major Ukrainian defeat in February 2015, a military volunteer from one of the many groups that raise money to equip troops reported that a unit of the 54th Mechanised Brigade had advanced 1.5km and dug in. This could be, as an officer suggested, pure opportunism; it might also be that some units are trying to gauge Russian patience with such incursions. Officers routinely refused to comment on operational matters, but a senior government security adviser and avowed hawk in the confrontation with Russia described the penetrations as efforts by some commanders to maintain morale, combat preparedness and discipline. The static, often trench warfare saps morale, the adviser suggested, and when this happens, the Ukrainian army drinks.
B. A ceasefire ignored
Both sides complain that they are under instructions not to violate the ceasefire. Ukrainian troops said they are told to observe and report violations and only respond if their lives are threatened. That is an instruction that only a staff officer could think up, a Ukrainian senior lieutenant complained. Everything we fire is life-threatening, for f***s sake. Separatists have complained for months that their Russian military handlers (kurators) have strictly enforced the ceasefire. In fact, both sides have violated the ceasefire daily for several months, most commonly with light weapons, but also with artillery rocket batteries and armour that should have been withdrawn many months ago. Ukrainian front-line officers all described Russias current military posture in the same terms. Its troops have pulled back from the front line: any remaining Russians are usually commanders of the separatist units or small groups of special forces. The Ukrainians portrayed many of their adversaries as poorly trained locals, with little inclination to fight and drawn more by the pay. Monthly salaries for separatist troops reportedly range from 15,000 roubles ($230) for a private to 46,500 roubles ($715) for a colonel. Some Ukrainian officers, however, singled out several separatist units for grudging approbation: the Viking battalion, named for its founders radio call-sign, and Vostok, which has been involved in some of the most intense fighting around Avdiivka.
C. Hiding the casualties
Both armed forces play down the intensity of fighting and often under-report casualties. Ukrainian troops on a section of the front line which has not figured extensively in official combat reports stated that they have been involved in almost 60 engagements since deployment in late 2015. Another officer in the same unit said his troops have taken heavy loses but that the figure has been classified the General Staff does not want to be embarrassed. Civilian volunteers who help resupply Ukrainian troops have at times denounced the official military spokesman for disinformation or covering up the real situation. In March 2016, a volunteer juxtaposed on his social media site a photograph of the burial of elite Ukrainian troops with a military spokesmans announcement that there were no casualties that day. The same thing happens on the separatist side. The commander of DNRs Viking battalion resigned in December 2015 along with a number of staff officers in protest at a high command decision to reclassify military casualties as victims of civilian accidents. Supporters of the separatist militia, usually Russian nationalist groups, have on occasion leaked much higher death tolls than officially admitted. For instance, a supportive website revealed that in late March and early April 2016, separatists had lost at least 90 fighters along a small stretch of the front line around Avdiivka. More recently, a well-informed Russian nationalist blogger quoted a DNR officer saying that a regiment heavily involved in late May fighting no longer had two companies.
D. A message from Moscow?
Separatist civilian and military officials have admitted privately for some time that the Russian military exercises complete control over militias. Russian officers command units, handle operational planning and oversee the military. Given regular separatist complaints that they are not allowed to respond to Ukrainian fire without the permission of their Russian minders, analysts on both sides have posited that sudden spikes of violence along the line are explicit reminders from Moscow that war could quickly escalate if deemed necessary. I think we sometimes dial up or down the pressure as needed, a veteran Russian analyst remarked. A recent burst of costly attacks on Ukrainian positions in late May followed signals of Moscows frustration with the Minsk process. Shortly before the escalation, a Kyiv politician with close links to Moscow expressed concern the situation could turn ugly.
C. Unpaid Bonuses, Understrength Front-line Positions
Ukrainian military confidence and morale may be higher in 2016, but many problems remain. Most are connected to what front-line troops see as incompetence at best, venality at worst among the countrys top military and political leadership. Mid-level officers, in particular the deputy commanders responsible for troop morale and related matters (zampolit) in several places raised the same problems. They said troops rarely received the 1,000 hryvnia (approximately $40) bonus they were promised for every time they were engaged in combat. Other promised bonuses for destruction of enemy heavy weapons or armour, for example have also not materialised. Instead, troops have been warned they must reimburse the defence ministry for damaged uniforms and equipment on demobilisation. Delays in demobilisation are another source of resentment. Troops said they had to stay on the front line for weeks in one case several months after their eighteen-month rotation had officially ended. An officer in an affected unit remarked that such delays had drastically reduced the number of conscripts willing to remain in the army under contract at the end of their service. Six months ago, half my company were ready to sign contracts and stay in the army, he said. Now the number planning to stay is in single figures. Shortages of equipment are another regular complaint. Many units still depend to some degree on volunteer groups who raise funds, providing them with anything from electrical cable to night vision gear, binoculars and food. Troops seem most concerned, however, about the clumsy and chaotic process of bringing front-line units back up to strength when a cohort of conscripts has ended its service and left for home. This often leaves front-line positions dangerously understrength and lacking in combat experience for weeks. Our specialists have had two years to get this right, an officer said, and it is still a cock-up. These delays can have lethal consequences. Lieutenant-Colonel Andriy Zhuk, 32-year old commander of the 3rd battalion of the 72nd independent mechanised brigade (72OMBr ) stationed in the area of Dokuchayevsk, was killed on 28 May in a brief clash. An investigative journalist who specialises in military affairs interviewed his fellow officers immediately after. The officer had spent much of the past eighteen months on the front line, and his battalion was desperately short of armour and troops: most of his men had been demobilised in April and he was reportedly left with 100, 20 per cent of a full-strength battalion, to control a 15km stretch of the line. Given the lack of experience of his remaining men, the journalist wrote, he took it upon himself to investigate reports of unidentified armed men and was killed. An informal 72nd brigade Facebook page posted photographs of Zhuks funeral. Just under that posting was a message urging any would-be volunteers to make their way directly to brigade positions on the front line, bypassing recruitment centres.
D. A Non-functioning Pullback
The persistent and regular violation by both sides of a key part of the Minsk agreements withdrawal of all heavy weapons from the front line has further deepened military insecurity and tension. Their ample inventories of heavy weaponry seem to rotate almost permanently from storage areas to front-line positions and back. Most OSCE daily monitoring reports note the absence of tanks, rocket systems and artillery from storage areas and, more occasionally, their return. Weapons covered by the agreement have been extensively used in recent fighting, most often tanks and artillery. Others are relocated to major population centres, usually Luhansk and Donetsk cities. On 5 June, a relatively typical day, monitors checking Ukrainian government sites and positions inventoried a number of forbidden systems, including two surface-to-air SA-8 missile systems, six 152mm towed howitzers, and three 100mm anti-tank guns. They also noted 33 howitzers missing from two storage sites. The next day, monitors recorded Grad missile batteries and anti-aircraft systems in the LNR and DNR areas. OSCE monitors complain regularly that their teams are harassed and on occasion refused access to areas. They also report that their drones have been shot down and monitoring equipment shut down. They continue to do a thorough job under very difficult circumstances. However, their reports have no tangible consequences for the violator. Until Europe and Washington on one side and Russia on the other are willing to force their allies to observe the pullback by withholding military or other aid, for example the situation will remain highly volatile.
IV. Conclusion
Cunards Commodore Club, a cocktail bar, has revealed a new and distinguished menu "sharing the unique story of the Knighted Cunard Commodores."
Cunard said: "Each historic and decorated story is infused into the cocktail experience with a modern menu design, illustration and superb new signature cocktails. These new and fresh additions to the renowned bar, found in prime locations on each of the Cunard Queens, highlight the incredible craftsmanship that has gone into each drink. Cunards talented onshore and on board bar teams have carefully mixed ingredients reflective of the personalities of these celebrated men."
One such example is the Punch Romain a la Carpathia, believed to be the last drink served on the Titanic. The cocktail is inspired by Commodore Sir Arthur Rostron who led the safe rescue of all survivors of Titanic features Advocaat as the signature ingredient.
Cunard worked with illustrator Lauren Crowe to bring to life these seven rejoiced men, creating intricate pencil illustrations of each of the knighted Commodores, inspired by their history and stories.
Cunard has continued to receive recognition as a leader in world exploration within its more than 176-year history, said Richard Meadows, President, Cunard North America. We are proud to recognize seven of the most decorated Cunard Commodores in Queen Mary 2s iconic Commodore Club, who have led the Cunard fleets and flagships throughout the companys illustrious past. Inspired by character and history, each cocktail has been thoughtfully created to honor their remarkable stories.
Privacy-minded people have long relied on Tor for anonymity online, but a new system from MIT promises better protection and faster performance.
Dubbed Riffle, the new system taps the same onion encryption technique after which Tor is named, but it adds two others as well. First is what's called a mixnet, a series of servers that each permute the order in which messages are received before passing them on to the next server.
If messages arrive at the first server in the order A, B, C, for example, that server would send them to the second server in a different order, such as C, B, A. The second server would them reshuffle things again when sending the messages on. The advantage there is that a would-be attacker who had tracked the messages points of origin would have no idea which was which by the time they exited the last server.
A mixnet used with onion encryption is protected against passive adversaries, which can only observe network traffic. But active adversaries, which can infiltrate servers with their own code, are another matter. If one has commandeered a mixnet router and wants to determine the destination of a particular message, for instance, it could simply replace all the other messages it receives with its own, bound for a single destination. Then it could passively track the one message that doesnt follow its own prespecified route.
That's where Riffle's third protective measure comes in. Essentially, it takes a two-pronged approach to validating the authenticity of messages using techniques called verifiable shuffle and authentication encryption. Verifiable shuffle keeps things secure while each user and each mixnet server agree upon a cryptographic key; authentication encryption, which is much more efficient, then takes over for the remainder of the communication session.
The overall result is that Riffle remains cryptographically secure as long as one server in the mixnet remains uncompromised, according to MIT. Meanwhile, Riffle also uses bandwidth much more efficiently than competing systems, its creators say. In experiments, it required only one-tenth as much time as similarly secure experimental systems to transfer a large file between anonymous users.
Riffle was developed by researchers at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. The system isn't yet available for public use, but the researchers will present a paper describing their work at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Germany next week.
The idea of mixnets has been around for a long time, but unfortunately, its always relied on public-key cryptography and on public-key techniques, and thats been expensive, says Jonathan Katz, director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. One of the contributions of this paper is that they showed how to use more efficient symmetric-key techniques to accomplish the same thing. They do one expensive shuffle using known protocols, but then they bootstrap off of that to enable many subsequent shufflings.
In the latest attack that shows how hard it is for users to identify phone numbers with premium call charges, a researcher has found that he could have earned millions by abusing the online phone verification systems used by Google, Microsoft, and Instagram.
Many websites and mobile apps allow users to associate a phone number with their account. This can be used for two-factor authentication or as an account recovery and verification option. Many of these systems rely on codes sent via text messages, but also offer the option to call the user and dictate such codes.
Last year, a Belgian IT security consultant named Arne Swinnen started wondering if such systems test if the numbers entered by users have premium charges attached to them and set out to test several popular services.
Swinnen started out in September with Instagram and quickly found out that the service will call user-supplied, premium-rate numbers, if the Instagram security codes sent to those numbers via SMS are not entered within a three-minute window. He also found a way to trigger such Instagram calls, which are made from California and last 17 seconds, through an API (application programming interface) every 30 seconds.
Swinnen set up a phone number that costs 0.06 British pounds per minute and was able to earn 1 pound in 17 minutes by abusing Instagram's system. The attack could have been automated by registering additional numbers and Instagram accounts to earn thousands of pounds per day.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, initially told the researcher this was not a vulnerability, but part of the way the service was intended to work. The company said it monitors and blocks abuse attempts, and those slipping through represented an accepted risk.
Facebook later fine-tuned some call-rate limits, made changes to its outbound calling service, and decided to reward the researcher with a US $2,000 bug bounty.
In February, the researcher reported a similar attack to Google. Its phone-based two-factor authentication service was also open to abuse, although using a more difficult process.
Swinnen calculated that he could steal 12 euros a day with a single Google account and a premium rate number, a sum that could be multiplied by registering more numbers and accounts.
Google responded by saying it has mitigations in place, but because of how the telecommunications industry works, its impossible to completely prevent such abuse from happening.
Microsoft's Office 365 trial registration, which requires phone verification, was the most ripe for abuse. The researcher found two methods of bypassing the website's existing call rate limits, allowing him to theoretically make more than 13 million calls to the same premium number.
Additionally, the service allowed concurrent calls, each lasting around 23 seconds. With a phone number that charges 0,15 euros per minute, the researcher was able to earn 1 euro in less than a minute.
Microsoft said that the actual impact of this vulnerability would have been to a third-party partner the company uses for the calling service. The vendor decided to award a $500 bounty, nevertheless, and worked to fix the issue.
While this type of attack has now been mitigated for Instagram, Google ,and Microsoft, there are more online services and apps likely to be vulnerable. Swinnen's research, which he made public Friday in a blog post, highlights how hard it is in general -- for both companies and consumers -- to differentiate between regular and premium rate numbers.
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CLEVELAND At the start of the Republican National Convention on Monday, a faction of traditional Republicans from Connecticut embodied a political lesson: never say never.
Two of the most influential women in the state GOP, House Minority Leader Themis Klarides, of Derby, and top fundraiser Leora Levy, of Greenwich, are among a group that has had to make a sharp turnaround in order to embrace their partys nominee, Donald J. Trump.
Klarides and Levy are among Connecticuts 28 GOP delegates all of whom are for Trump.
Certainly, he wasnt my first choice, Klarides said. You end up with what you end up with.
The road from never to embrace was the only choice, some Republicans said. The real estate mogul, they say, gives them a path to victory against a foe that unites everyone in the GOP Hillary Clinton.
Right now, the only candidate who can defeat Hillary is Donald Trump, Levy said. I am very enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump today because the proof is in the numbers, and the numbers are terrific.
More Information Notable absentees at the GOP convention State Rep. Dan Carter, of Bethel, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate State Rep. John Shaban, of Redding, the party's nominee in the 4th Congressional District Clay Cope, Sherman first selectman and the party's nominee in the 5th Congressional District See More Collapse
Not everyone in Cleveland Monday was as accepting.
There was loud dissent on the arena floor Monday as anti-Trump delegates tried to force a roll-call vote on convention rules, with the aim of allowing delegates to endorse any candidate they choose.
Call the roll, call the roll, opponents shouted, while Trump supporters responded with chants of USA, USA.
The insurgent group lost a voice vote on the matter, however, and the drama subsided.
Last August Klarides dismissed Trump as a B-team player following his debut on the GOP debate stage in Cleveland. It was here in the same Quicken Loans Arena where he will accept the partys nomination Thursday night that Trump alienated some in the GOP with his comments about women and Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.
Klarides owned her prior criticism of Trump, but now only talks about his strengths.
Ive certainly been publicly critical of some of the things hes said and will always be, said Klarides, who plans to arrive at the convention on Tuesday. (But) I do respect the fact that hes a successful businessman. Hes got backbone.
For Levy, a Republican National Committee member-elect who has raised millions of dollars for the party and its candidates, the transition took some time. Levy was an early supporter of Jeb Bush, who Trump frequently insulted as a low energy lightweight in GOP debates.
I havent forgotten those and I dont like them, Levy said. But were here now. I would still support Jeb first, but he lost.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Betsy McCaughey. The former lieutenant governor of New York and Greenwich resident was an early supporter of Trump and is part of Connecticuts delegation.
Ive been a woman all my life and Im for Trump, McCaughey said in the lobby of the delegations hotel Monday. You hear Hillary urging women to make history by electing a woman. She does not represent liberated women. Shes enabled her husbands infidelities.
Trumps landslide in the April 26 Connecticut primary over Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ensured that all of the states delegates would go to him.
Former Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia, who now resides in Ridgefield, was an early supporter of Kasich, until he lost a little bit of his mojo.
Its a marriage of convenience, but all of them are, said Moccia, a Trump delegate. Is Bernie (Sanders) and Hillary a marriage of convenience?
Otherwise engaged
Connecticut Republicans downplayed the absence of several of those on the ticket with Trump, including the partys nominee for U.S. Senate, Dan Carter. The state representative is back home in Bethel.
For me, its basically because I need to be here where my voters are, Carter said in a phone interview. Ive already got the people out in Cleveland. The delegates are gonna vote for me.
Carter, who is challenging Democrat Richard Blumenthal, said Trump didnt factor in his absence.
With such a short campaign for me, I just figure my time is better spent, Carter said.
The GOP nominees for Congress in the 4th and 5th Districts state Rep. John Shaban, of Redding ,and Sherman First Selectman Clay Cope are also skipping the convention.
They want to win, said J.R. Romano, the state GOP chairman, as he waited for an Uber ride from the hotel to the convention.
State Rep. John Frey, a RNC member from Ridgefield, was in the audience for Trumps debut in Cleveland last summer and had measured criticism for Trump then.
At the time, Frey said, We spent a lot of time, effort and money working to build our womens base and weve made great strides there. Someone like Donald Trump lets say his message isnt nuanced has said things that hes going to be held accountable to.
Fast-forward 11 months and Frey is back in Cleveland as a delegate and one of three convention sergeant-at-arms. RNC members automatically get to be delegates.
Hes certainly said things that Ive been uncomfortable with, Frey said. Hes toned down some of the unconventional rhetoric. Hes certainly going to be his own man.
neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
Down by the shore scores of houses have been jacked up to survive storms now a street is going to get the levitation treatment, too.
Last week, dity officials said about a quarter-mile stretch of Milford Point Road in the citys southwest corner will be raised more than a foot in places because it usually floods when theres a full moon, new moon or when the skies turn angry.
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.
Over the last half century, modern Turkey has lurched from democracy to military rule with depressing regularity. The key players change but the basic narrative normally remains the same.
The military declares that it must step in to restore the rule of law.
In response, the government of the day appeals to the people to take to the streets in defence of democracy in vain.
But President Erdogan has bucked this historic trend by surviving. The reason? Although many millions loathe the hardman president, most Turks felt that military rule would be worse.
Modern Turkey has lurched from democracy to military rule with depressing regularity. The key players change but the basic narrative remains the same. The military declares that it must step in to restore the rule of law. In response, the government appeals to the people to take to the streets in defence of democracy
So, for almost the first time in Turkish history, a civilian government wins a showdown with a once all-powerful army.
For centuries, the army has been Turkeys central institution. From the earliest days of the Ottoman Empire, the state apparatus was structured around a vast army whose duty was to conquer as much neighbouring land as possible.
The Ottoman war machines invading forces rolled invincibly across the Middle East, North Africa and Balkans only being stopped at Vienna.
But the end of World War I saw the Ottoman Empire collapse. Stability was needed so ruling sultans began to reform the military, introducing modern political ideas and a Western-style officer class.
One of those officers was Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who later called himself Ataturk. In 1923, he founded the modern Turkish republic and remained leader until 1938.
Seeing Islam as a barrier to progress, he ousted it from its central role and replaced it with the army.
Quickly, the influence of Islam in public life shrank drastically. Religious courts and schools were closed, the alcohol ban was lifted and European-style law codes introduced. Ataturk said: The civilised world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.
Turkeys generals took their role very seriously. Twice in 1971 and 1980 the Army sent tanks onto the streets to restore order after civilian administrations lost control and when battles between the political left and right threatened civil war. Twice more, in 1960 and 1997, it intervened to remove civilian governments that Army chiefs deemed too Islamist. It is no coincidence that Adnan Menderes, the Islamist-leaning populist PM ousted and hanged in the 1960 military coup, is Erdogans hero. And Necattin Erbakan, the Islamist premier forced out in 1997s bloodless coup, was Erdogans mentor.
For centuries, the army has been Turkeys central institution. From the earliest days of the Ottoman Empire, the state apparatus was structured around a vast army whose duty was to conquer as much neighbouring land as possible
How terribly ironic if the Turkish people who so bravely defended their democratic government by taking to the streets and confronting the army coup leaders should find that the result is to entrench further a tyrant who seems intent on dismantling the countrys democracy
For his part, Erdogan has learnt the lessons of history and is the first Islamist Turkish leader to be challenged by the generals and to win. After every previous successful coup, the generals handed back power to the civilians voluntarily but with a caveat that fundamentals of the secular state pioneered by Ataturk should be respected. Yet hardline Islamist Erdogan has ignored that and embedded religion into national life.
Not since Ataturk has a man dominated Turkish politics for so long. To those who treat him as a mini-god, he has presided over a rosier economy, better healthcare and infrastructure improvements.
However, he has also changed the constitution to give himself greater powers leading to accusations that he is ruling as a sultan rather than as a democratic leader.
He lives in the worlds biggest residential palace. It cost 384million, has 1,000 rooms and has a total floor area four times the size of Versailles, home of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France. When he was photographed posing with warriors dressed in uniforms dating back as far as 200BC, comparisons were made with TVs Game Of Thrones.
As a boy, he attended a religious school. Later, he was jailed for sedition after reading a religious poem to a political rally.
Erdogan has learnt the lessons of history and is the first Islamist Turkish leader to be challenged by the generals and to win
When his conservative AK (Justice and Development) Party came to power in 2002, Erdogan dismantled the generals stranglehold and removed them from top state councils. They ceded their role quietly, believing that Erdogan wanted to take Turkey into the EU and build a stable, democratic state.
But Erdogan purged them from their posts and attacked the Press, another potential bastion of opposition. Since 2014, 1,845 journalists and writers have faced charges of insulting the president. All Erdogans enemies faced persecution.
Lawyers, military chiefs and academics were among those arrested and charged with sedition.
All the while, 15 years of AK party rule have led to a steady and continued Islamisation of public life.
Alcohol has been restricted; Ramadan is a major event; women in Islamic headscarves, until 2004 banned from attending university and working in State offices, are commonplace on television, in Parliament and in the civil service.
Small wonder, then, that Ataturk loyalists in the military believed the old secular order was under threat.
And so, just like in 1960, a small group of radical mid-ranking officers decided to put a stop to Erdogans Islamism by launching a coup.
The reason they failed was that they were using antiquated tools against a modern government.
For example, while the rebels had tanks, the government used mobile phone networks to send citizens text messages from the president.
And whereas the rebels got their hands on a couple of state TV stations, the government used the private Sky TV networks to broadcast Erdogans video message via a FaceTime app on an iPhone assuring the country that he was still in control.
Unfortunately for the 79million Turkish people, Erdogans response has been to crack down hard on his enemies real and imagined, guilty and not guilty.
Even before the attempted coup, he was growing increasingly authoritarian, paranoid and thin-skinned. Now, he is free to give his worst instincts a free rein.
Most chillingly, there has been talk of reinstating the death penalty, while Turkeys deputy PM vowed a purge of traitors and enemies, even if they infiltrated into the tiniest veins of the state.
Yes, its been a bit of wait a lot of waiting, actually but at last my generations time has come.
While much has been made of the replacement of David Camerons Old Etonian gang by Theresa Mays Cabinet of ex-grammar-school pupils, there has also been a generational changing of the guard.
Supreme political power has been taken by people in or about to enter their seventh decade: Cameron has left 10 Downing Street at the age of 49 (the youngest to do so since 1895) and George Osborne, after six years as Chancellor, is still a mere 45 easily enough time for a full second career.
While much has been made of the replacement of David Camerons Old Etonian gang by Theresa Mays Cabinet of ex-grammar-school pupils, there has also been a generational changing of the guard
By contrast, Theresa May, who will turn 60 on October 1, is the oldest incoming PM since James Callaghan in 1976. The new Chancellor, Philip Hammond, is 60. And, with an office at 9 Downing Street, 67-year-old David Davis has the crucial role of Secretary of State for Brexit. The wily Davis was Minister for Europe during the 1992-97 Conservative government, when he was known in Brussels as Monsieur Non.
Others of similar administrative vintage who have been called back to Government by Mrs May after being exiled to the backbenches under Cameron are 60-year-old Damian Green and Sir Alan Duncan, 59.
Heres where it gets (a little) personal. Hammond, Green and Duncan were all exact contemporaries of Mrs May at Oxford and so was I. The young Damian Green and Alan Duncan were fellow Conservative members of the Oxford Union with the then Miss Theresa Brasier (whose boyfriend and later husband, Philip May, succeeded Duncan as president of that illustrious political debating society).
Experience
That may look like cronyism. But I prefer to think of it as a restoration of the natural order of things: men (and women) with a much greater depth of experience of the world have been put in charge.
While I was never part of the Oxford Union gang of young Conservatives circa 1977, I still felt for those of my generation who saw the so-called Notting Hill Set led by David Cameron sweep past them and grab all the glittering prizes. It didnt help that George Osborne openly marvelled at how easy it had been for him and Cameron to seize control of the Tory Party.
What annoyed my generation still more was the impression that none of the Cameroons had ever done a proper job. They had, more or less, done nothing except politics: and they seemed almost to see it as a game.
Theresa May, however, spent many years working at the Bank of England while Philip Hammond spent the best part of two decades in business making himself a multi-millionaire in the process.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this difference can be seen at the lower levels of political office.
Over the weekend, the new PM appointed Richard Harrington as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Harrington was born in 1957 and did not enter Parliament until 2010. He, too, was an active Young Conservative at Oxford University at exactly the same time as May, but he spent most of the intervening years building up a successful leisure business, which by the time he left was employing more than 2,000 people.
Contrast that with Camerons decision to appoint a 29-year-old MP, Chloe Smith, to the important role of Economic Secretary to the Treasury in 2011. Apparently, Cameron had been under the impression she was a trained accountant (she wasnt).
That it was not just premature but even unfair to appoint so inexperienced a person to such a position was made cruelly clear by Jeremy Paxman when he subjected the young woman to a characteristically brutal interrogation (about fuel duty) on Newsnight. Her political career never recovered.
Admittedly, Cameron did have one very close colleague of my age: his trusted factotum Oliver Letwin, whom Mrs May has just let go as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Oliver could be quite amusing about his bosss youth. I recall having lunch with him, when No 10 called on his mobile. Oliver put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to me: Its the young master.
Though Letwin was sometimes described as Camerons brain, the young master and his inseparable even younger brother-in-political-arms, George Osborne, are formidably intelligent, able to assimilate enormous amounts of information with extreme rapidity.
But there was a superficiality about some of their decision-making, which I do see as the result of their relative youth. When an ambitious man is in his 30s, he has too little sense of the risk and danger which a longer experience of life tells us: beware!
I can see this in myself. I was appointed editor of a national newspaper at the age of 38 and made a number of errors that stemmed from a lack of appreciation of what could go wrong in certain sorts of situations.
And I was also ignorant of so much about people and politics. Somehow, I succeeded despite this, but that was as much down to good luck as good judgment.
Maturity
During those years, Tony Blair came to power, also as a relatively young man. He introduced a completely new approach to governing, characterised by manipulation of the media and a way of making policy subservient to the message and the image, rather than their master.
Cameron and Osborne were entranced and mesmerised by this, as it seemed so successful (until it failed). Thus it was that Cameron described himself as the heir to Blair and Osborne referred to the former Labour leader as the master.
For those of my generation who came to full political consciousness during the Thatcher era, before Blair and Alastair Campbell invented the idea of governing by the next days headlines, the new approach seemed not quite grown-up and at times even childish.
So the news that Theresa May has decided the Government will no longer be introducing its policies on Twitter as if such matters can be summarised in 140 characters is a welcome indicator of greater maturity and seriousness.
Thats what my generation wants and expects.
The real reason Boris got stuck
You can probably guess which image of Boris Johnson was used across the world to illustrate the news of his appointment as Foreign Secretary.
Yes, it was the one of the then London Mayor during the 2012 Olympics suspended in mid-air from what seemed a malfunctioning zip wire, helplessly waving a Union flag in each hand.
As David Cameron observed at the time: If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip wire, it would be a disaster. For Boris, its an absolute triumph.
Boris fibbed about his weight. Perhaps thats too harsh: lets just say he inadvertently failed to give the zip wire operators the true extent of his poundage when they asked him, prior to setting the zip wire at the necessary tension to carry its burden
But what no one seems to have asked either then, or subsequently, is: why did Boris get stuck? Now is the time to reveal what one of his aides told me a few months later.
Boris fibbed about his weight. Perhaps thats too harsh: lets just say he inadvertently failed to give the zip wire operators the true extent of his poundage when they asked him, prior to setting the zip wire at the necessary tension to carry its burden.
This makes his triumphant escape from so public a misadventure all the more characteristic: Boris was cavalier with the facts, but in the end got away with it.
On Thursday, the Lord Chancellor Michael Gove was briskly given the heave-ho by the new Prime Minister, Theresa May. He arrived at her parliamentary office in his chauffeured ministerial car and left two minutes later in a black cab.
The sight of tanks on the streets and helicopter gunships attacking the Parliament buildings of any country would send a shudder through the civilised world.
When that country is as strategically vital as Turkey a Nato member and a key ally in the fight against Islamic State fanaticism the effect is positively terrifying.
The coup attempt against president Recep Erdogan may have failed but Turkey remains dangerously unstable. That is extremely bad news for the West.
Mr Erdogan is a deeply divisive leader, who has been pushing secular Turkey towards becoming a more fundamentalist Muslim state. His regime has been synonymous with vanity (his 1,000-room presidential palace is four times the size of Versailles), corruption and ruthless repression of media opposition.
The sight of tanks on the streets and helicopter gunships attacking the Parliament buildings of any country would send a shudder through the civilised world. When that country is as strategically vital as Turkey a Nato member and a key ally in the fight against Islamic State fanaticism the effect is positively terrifying
And now the insurrection has failed, hes out for vengeance, ominously pledging to cleanse the army and the liberal judiciary and bring back the death penalty for his opponents. Further bloodshed and civil strife seem virtually assured.
Quite apart from the military implications, this instability could have a chilling effect on the EUs desperate bid to control the influx of migrants, coming via Turkey and the Greek islands.
In March for a bribe of 5billion and the promise of visa-free travel for Turks within the EU Mr Erdogan agreed to close his porous borders and take back any migrants who tried to enter Greece.
But there is now a huge question mark over that deal. If Turkey descends further into political violence, can migrants be returned there with any guarantee of safety? And isnt it highly likely that a new stream of Turkish refugees will join those from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq already seeking to cross into Europe many en route to Britain?
The shambles of EU migration policy illustrates once again why Britain was so right to vote Leave. This country has a proud record of giving sanctuary to genuine refugees from around the globe and that will not stop.
But, in an increasingly dangerous world with millions on the move, we must be able to control numbers and decide for ourselves who is and who isnt entitled to come here. The only way to do that is outside the EU.
Schools of distinction
The Mail has long argued that grammar schools provided a tremendous engine of social mobility for generations of children from modest backgrounds. So we heartily welcome signals from newly-appointed Education Secretary Justine Greening that the ban on building new selective schools may be lifted.
The fact that existing state grammars have up to 13 applicants per place shows this reform would be hugely popular and also begin to redress Britains slide down international league tables for educational achievement.
We heartily welcome signals from newly-appointed Education Secretary Justine Greening that the ban on building new selective schools may be lifted
In a last act of patronage before leaving Number 10, David Cameron recommended his Old Etonian former chief of staff Ed Llewellyn for the plum job of British ambassador to France, even though his main qualification seems to be having a French wife. But Theresa May has yet to agree the appointment and given her ruthless purging of the chumocracy so far, the Llewellyns might be wise not to measure up the opulent ambassadors residence for new curtains quite yet.
Bouncers can have a reputation for being burly and no-nonsense.
But one kind-hearted security guard came to the rescue of a mother, generously giving her money to buy food for her family when she lost her credit card.
Tiffany Forbat went out for a walk with her two-year-old daughter Poppy early on the evening of Saturday, July 10 to buy dinner on King street in Newtown, and along the way accidentally dropped her black credit card.
Ms Forbat told Daily Mail Australia that she was anxious to find it fearing that someone might have picked it up to use in the wrong way.
Hero of the night: Earls Juke Joint bouncer David (right) helped mother-of-two Tiffany Forbat (left) with getting her dinner for Saturday night on busy Kings Street in Newtown
Mum's little helper: When Tiffany realised her credit card was missing she and Poppy retraced their steps back to their home, keeping an eye out for the card
Anxious: She approached David and asked him if he had seen her card, he responded by giving her $40 so that she and her daughter could buy dinner
She and Poppy retraced their steps back home to find it but where unable to find it.
That same evening David was working as the bouncer at Earl's Juke Joint and noticed a worried looking woman with a child walking nearby.
'I saw her up the road, she looked anxious and she came back towards me and approached me with her daughter and asked if she had seen it [her credit card],' he said.
Ms Forbat asked if he could keep an eye out for the card.
She said: 'he straight away he told me to cancel the card and asked me how much I needed... then he ran across the road came back with $40,' she said.
Act of kindness: Ms Forbat went back to the Earl's Juke Joint to give back the change which David refused to take
Act of kindness: Ms Forbat said she eventually found the card that same night about five metres away from the bar (Poppy pictured with her little sister Edie)
The 27-year-old bouncer said she refused to take the money but he insisted she take it particularly because she was with her daughter.
After reluctantly accepting his money to buy their dinner, Ms Forbat went back to return the $10 change but he refused to take back.
On her way back home Ms Forbat luckily found the card about five metres away from the bar.
The following day she donated the change to a nearby not-for-profit restaurant Lentil As Anything and went back to thank him for his generosity.
'He's such a lovely guy, he even made time to speak with me. It's quite rare for that to happen. You dont expect that with a bouncer,' she said.
Charitable: In another act of kindness Ms Forbat (pictured holding daughter Edie, alongside her partner William with Poppy) donated the $10 to a nearby not-for-profit Lentil As Anything
Helping people: David has worked as a bouncer for eight years and hopes to put a positive face Sydney bouncers and security guards (Ms Forbat pictured with her partner William and daughter Poppy)
David, who has worked in the security industry for eight years, hopes that his act of kindness will put a more positive face to the bouncers of Sydney.
'One of the points that goes unsaid is that there's a bad image of bouncers in the security industry,' he said.
'There are a lot venues who have good bouncers out there and it's import to not judge a book by its cover.'
Aside from being legally and professionally obliged to help patrons in need, he said helping people was important to him.
YouTubers such as Zoella and Tanya Burr have amassed millions of teenage followers thanks to their wholesome personalities and vlogs about make-up, shopping and baking.
But in Spain, one of the biggest hits with younger viewers is Chusita Fashion Fever who specialises in pop song covers and sex advice videos.
And now the 29-year-old vlogger, whose real name is Maria Jesus Cama is following in the steps of Zoella by bringing out her own book - an illustrated sex guide for teenagers to arm them with the knowledge they need once they become sexually active.
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Spanish vlogger Chusita Fashion Fever, whose real name is Maria Jesus Cama is following in the steps of Zoella by bringing out her own book - an illustrated sex guide for teenagers
The vlogger has almost half a million followers across social media and is famed for her candid sex advice
Esto No Es Un Libra De Sexo, which translates as This Is Not A Sex Book, includes a chapter: 'Start practising masturbation' and it certainly doesn't hold back on the graphic detail.
One of the tamer passages reads: Its not just a matter of relief or something that should be done routinely. You should connect with pleasure, progressing slowing and discovering YOUR BODYS DIFFERENT REACTIONS.'
It also includes a guide to how to masturbate, slang terms and a picture story about a girl pleasuring herself in the shower.
'When I was 14 or 15 it never would have crossed my mind to ask my mother how to masturbate.
Esto No Es Un Libra De Sexo, which translates as This Is Not A Sex Book, includes a chapter entitled 'start practising masturbation' and it certainly doesn't hold back on the graphic detail
Chusita is following in the footsteps of fellow popular vlogger Zoella, aka Zoe Suggs (pictured), by publishing a book
'And at school...well, I went to a Catholic school run by nuns, so it wouldve been considered a sin,' she told The Times.
'I wish Id had a book like this when I was growing up. My parents never once talked to me about sex. Well, aside from the usual "make sure you wear a condom".
Other chapters include tips on how to carry out oral sex, how to have gay and lesbian sex and advice about sexting.
In an age where information about sex is readily available over the internet, This Is Not A Sex Book aims to arm youngsters with the information they need to know to 'enter sexuality without complexes or taboos'.
The vlogger is known for her candid videos about orgasms, penises and not getting pleasure from sex
The social media star began vlogging for friends in 2008 as an escape as she battled depression brought on by the stress of juggling her drama degree with a job as a receptionist
The book has been inspired by the many questions she's received from fans of her YouTube channel.
Every Tuesday Chusita reads out messages from followers and gives advice in answer to problems such as 'I don't enjoy sex with my boyfriend' in her popular 'If I were you' videos.
She's also posted vlogs about orgasms, penises and sexting.
From the comments left on her videos and messages full of doubt about how to handle intimate matters, she realised 'that young people are badly lost in sexuality issues'.
Chusita has posted vlogs about orgasms, penises and sexting, and talked about losing her virginity at 18
While she makes no claim to be a 'sexpert' or psychologist, the vlogger believes advice from an impartial adult you don't know very well can be helpful
Chusita started vlogging in 2008 while studying for her drama degree and working as a receptionist.
The stress of juggling both left her battling depression and she started posting videos for friends as a form of escape.
Following the tried and tested format of stars such as Zoella, the vlogs were filmed from her bedroom where she'd perch in front of the webcam and open up about her life.
The channel took off and Chusita started receiving requests for advice after posting candid videos with her followers, including an account of losing her virginity at the age of 18.
Following the tried and tested format of stars such as Zoella, the vlogs were filmed from Chusita Fashion Fever's bedroom where she'd perch in front of the webcam and open up about her life
Now she boasts almost 500,000 followers across social media.
While she makes no claim to be a 'sexpert' or psychologist, she believes advice from an impartial adult you don't know very well can be helpful.
'What I do have is life experience that someone of 16 doesn't have,' she said.
Fellow vlogger and author became the fastest selling debut novelist since records began with her book Girl Online, released in 2014.
Since the day they were born, quintuplets Keith, Ali, Penelope, Tiffany and Beatrix have had their lives planned down to the minute.
Each day is an endless cycle of feeding, nappy changes, bath time and naps, run with military precision by their doting parents, Kim, 26, and Vaughn Tucci.
But the adorable babies recently took a break from their busy schedule to pay a visit to Baby Spa Perth, Perth Now reported.
Adorable: Quintuplets Keith, Ali, Penelope, Tiffany and Beatrix Tucci visited Baby Spa Perth
Peaceful: The adorable babies, who will be six months old at the end of July, floated peacefully in the indoor spas
Three in the spa: Spa staff assisted the babies to float, with three of the siblings together in one pool
The quintuplets, who will be six months old in July, took part in a hydrotherapy session that saw them float in an indoor spa, their tiny heads supported by specially designed flotation devices.
HYDROTHERAPY BENEFITS Muscular and skeletal strength is increased through water resistance. Positive effect on the digestive and circulatory systems, which can reduce meconium levels and lowers the risk of jaundice three or four days after birth. Subtle water pressure on the chest can increase lung capacity. Swimming reflexes are stimulated and co-ordination is developed. Source: Baby Spa Perth Advertisement
Photos show the babies being tended to by staff, who gently held them on their backs in the water or helped them float in the soft purple rings.
On their website Baby Spa Perth said floating in warm water puts babies at ease.
It also has a number of health benefits, including improved muscular and skeletal strength and digestive and circulatory systems.
The babies' mother Mrs Tucci took to her Facebook page Surprised by Five to thank the spa for treating them.
'We all left feeling very relaxed and pampered,' she wrote.
Line up: The adorable babies were lined up on the change table to be dressed back in to their onesies
Learning to swim: One of the quins spent time in the water without their flotation device
Bliss: One of the babies floated on their back in the still water, and seemed totally at ease
In addition to the quintuplets, Mrs Tucci, 26, has a one nine-year-old son from a previous marriage and two daughters aged five and three with her husband.
She fell pregnant with the quintuplets naturally and had a C-section at 30 weeks.
The logistical challenges the family face on a daily basis have been taking their toll on the young mother, with Mrs Tucci previously telling Channel Nine's 60 Minutes she sometimes 'locks herself in the bathroom and cries on the floor' as she adapts to life with seven children all under five years of age.
Cute: Hydrotherapy is said to have a number of benefits for babies, including improved muscular and skeletal strength
Worn out: The pool session proved too much for one of the babies, who fell asleep in the arms of one of the staff
All smiles: Mrs Tucci's story of falling pregnant naturally with quintuplets has warmed the hearts of Australians
Military precision: The family previously said they change 350 dirty nappies a week and feed each infant eight times a day
Learning to cope: 'We don't have a choice when it comes to coping, we try to embrace what life has given us,' Mrs Tucci said
Mrs Tucci previously said they change 350 dirty nappies a week and feed each infant eight times a day with the help of volunteers.
She told Perth Now they were 'learning to manage as the days go by'.
'In fact we don't have a choice when it comes to coping, we try to embrace what life has given us,' she said.
'We no longer say we have volunteers, we have lifelong friends.
With Instagram flooded with pictures of fit mums and tiny baby bumps each day, it comes as no surprise that women are feeling more pressure than ever to have a 'flawless' body.
But Sonia O'Bree, from Kempsey, New South Wales, hopes to show women that all body shapes are beautiful and encourage people to ignore the pressure to look a particular way - pregnant or not.
To prove her point, the 32-year-old shared a number of photos of herself at 34 weeks from a nude maternity shoot she had with Michelle Hamze Photography.
Beautiful: With Instagram flooded with pictures of fit mums each day, women are feeling more pressure than ever to have a 'flawless' body... but Sonia O'Bree (pictured), 32, hopes to change that mindset
'I recently dared to bare my mummy curves': She hopes to show women that all body shapes are beautiful and encourage people to ignore the pressure to look a particular way - pregnant or not
Not only did the brave mother share them on her own Facebook page, but with mummy blogger Constance Hall's 735,000 followers.
'I recently dared to bare my mummy curves to celebrate my womanly figure in all of its glory,' Ms O'Bree, who is now 36 weeks pregnant, wrote on Facebook.
'I was very lucky to find a wonderful photographer in my local area who was willing to join me in a journey out of our comfort zones to make this shoot happen.
'I'm in love with my own image...I never thought I'd say that about my curve': Not only did the brave mother share photos from the shoot on her own Facebook page, but with mummy blogger Constance Hall's followers
'Tonight she has revealed some of these images, and I honestly could not be happier with them. I'm in love with my own image, I never thought I'd say that about my curves, but I did and I am.'
I can't stop looking at them and I am suddenly in love with my body.
Ms O'Bree said there is 'so much pressure on women to look a certain way' and a belief that 'skinny is to be sexy or beautiful.'
But Ms O'Bree said 'I have never felt more beautiful and sexy than I do right now.'
'I hope my photos will encourage more women to feel positive and beautiful in their mummy curves... even if they are not mummy curves, find comfort and beauty within yourselves,' she continued.
'We are, each of us different from the rest. Each of us unique and beautiful. This life is so short, and oh so precious, embrace all that you are, slim or curvy, tall or short.
On a mission: 'I hope my photos will encourage more women to feel positive and beautiful in their mummy curves... even if they are not mummy curves,' she said
'Dare to bare.'
Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Ms O'Bree said she wanted to have a nude maternity shoot six years ago ahead of the birth of her first child, but her son came early.
'I thought I looked amazing, I was very slender for my first pregnancy,' she said.
'This time around I was 20 kilograms heavier and I was reluctant to have the shoot at first.
'But I spoke to Michelle [the photographer] about it and in the end I talked myself into it. I was both excited and nervous going into it.'
Ms O'Bree said once she was with the photographer it was 'completely comfortable.'
'I thought I looked amazing, I was very slender for my first pregnancy': Ms O'Bree said she wanted to have a nude shoot for her first pregnancy (pictured) but her son arrived earlier than expected
'Basically I figured I needed to embrace what I am at the moment and I am so very happy with that. After seeing the photos I have a whole new outlook on my body shape,' she said.
'She sent me two of the photos as a preview and I looked at them and I was just amazed. I told her "you make my chubby bits look beautiful" and that's the way I feel.
'I can't stop looking at them and I am suddenly in love with my body. I love my baby bump of course and I just feel very empowered by the whole situation.'
Ms O'Bree said she shared the photos on such a large platform because she wanted to share the change in her beliefs.
'This time around I was 20 kilograms heavier': Ms O'Bree (pictured during her first pregnancy) said she 'can't imagine feeling anything other than beautiful anymore'
'There is so much pressure on women in general and especially now there are so many fitness fanatics posting photos and fit mums working out with their teeny tiny beautiful baby bumps,' Ms O'Bree said.
'Whether it's natural or not, not everyone is like that and the vast majority of us have curves.'
'One lady commented asking if I had a big baby or twins and it got under my skin so in posting the photos I felt like it was a "stick it to them" kind of moment.
You would think that even when customers fail to spell-check their designs, their tattoo artist would.
But apparently not always, as some of these photos shared online show; where we see examples of everything from phrases featuring awkward spelling mistakes to an inking of a pink flamingo that looks rather more like something else.
Quite how they ever came about remains a mystery, but it's safe say that some of them will have triggered some serious regret.
One thing nearly everyone can agree on, it is never a good idea to get a face tattoo, even when you might simply just be trying to better define your eyebrows
In many of these snaps, it's hard to believe the inkings ever seemed like a good idea - and yet here we are.
One man has a sizable penis forever branded on his forearm.
Another has a thong tattooed on his back poking out from above his trouser-line.
Men aren't the only ones to exercise poor judgement at the tattoo parlour, though.
One woman has the phrase 'my mom is my angle' scrawled across her skin, presumably meant to be 'angel', a celestial being, rather than 'angle', a geometric term.
Keep scrolling for a treasure trove of other very questionable body art.
Was this pink flamingo intended to resemble a male sex organ, or could it just be an unhappy coincidence?
No confusion here, this is undoubtedly a sizeable penis which appears to have found itself a home on this man's forearm
One woman has the phrase 'my mom is my angle' scrawled across her skin, presumably meant to be 'angel', a celestial being, rather than 'angle', a geometric term
This tattoo-bearer is clearly absolutely 100 percent invested and unapologetic about his favourite slogan
Exhibit six, a ladies thong tattooed above the trouser-line, way to draw attention to your builder's bum
This intended portrait of Marilyn Monroe looks more like a sneering woman in her 60s with a very bad facelift
Sadly for these poor doomed pair of puzzle pieces, it looks like their romance will just never work out
It takes a bit of closer inspection, but 'than' has been misspelled here as 'then', though at least it could be fixed
To be fair, this tattoo probably looked like it was on-track right up until the artist got to the last two letters
At least this tattoo-trainee is proud of their work, although who the owner of the new inking is remains unclear
Just in case you were in any doubt at all - this man is prejudiced against humans who do not share his race
The law won: Several people with face tattoos have been, unsurprisingly, featured in mug shots
Radical! Rapper Gucci Mane has several face tats, the most prominent one being of a lightening-struck ice cream cone
Walking billboard: We doubt this man got paid by Monster energy drinks to get this tattoo of its logo
What were they thinking? All of that tattoos show incredibly bad judgement
Found him! Tats like these make it quite easy to track down a suspect
You wanted that forever? Some tattoos are incredibly offensive (like Snooki after getting assaulted, left), while others are just strange (like Patrick Swayze from his SNL Chippendale's sketch as a centaur, right)
Taste the rainbow? This woman thought getting a tat of Skittles poured down her cleavage was attractive
Girls do it, too: While most of the sexually explicit tattoos are on men, a few women also have them
Nipple art: Using one's nipple as part of the tattoo seems surprisingly popular
Oh, really? This person claimed to regret nothing though he probably regretting having 'nothing' misspelled
No English? Grammar is not the forte of some of these tat subjects
Raunchy: A few sexual tattoos seem like they'd scare off women
Dumb and racist: Some just have spelling errors (left), while others proclaim their ignorance proudly (right)
Double negative: Technically, this tattoo says a person should always give up since they never shouldn't give up
Has to be a joke: Not only are the lyrics to this Bon Jovi song written incorrectly, but the artist's name is also woefully misspelled
Great idea, guys! Many of these men wouldn't been better off playing with Sharpies
Texan with extra cheese: This person combined his love of Texas with his love of pizza
Confusing: This 'F*** racism' tattoo features a monkey thinking about evolution
The coolest: Mr. Cool Ice can't really be much of a hit with the ladies
Graphic: This man has actually used a piercing to elongate his nipples so they look like the arms of his muscular man tattoo
OTT: Many of the tattoos use body parts like ears, nipples - or in this case a belly button
Shocking: One person got a tattoo of a baby which made it look as though the child has its nose pierced
Then, there are the head-scratching tattoos that use body parts in the design, including nipples, armpits, and belly buttons. One grotesque tat see's a man's belly button filling in as a cat's anus, while another positioned his ink so his left nipple would fill in as a man's eye.
There's bad grammar 'never don't give up', 'it's gets better', 'it's is my life' by 'Jon Bovi' and spelling errors, like 'regret nohing', instead of 'nothing'.
Finally, there are the incredibly large back and chest tattoos that could only have been considered amusing when the person was drunk.
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Charles proved that he truly is Prince Charming this afternoon as he was pictured chatting to various swimsuit-clad women by an outdoor pool in Penzance, Cornwall.
The royal was seen leaving several bathing beauties blushing as he officially re-opened the Jubilee Pool following structural damage caused by the 2014 winter storms at the Promenade on his first day of his annual tour to the South West.
Dozens of well-wishing women turned out to greet the prince, but two ladies who made a particularly special effort having dressed in matching Union Jack printed bathers in celebration of his visit.
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Prince Charles was pictured chatting to various swimsuit-clad women by an outdoor pool in Penzance, Cornwall on his first day of his annual tour of the South West
The royal officially re-opened the Jubilee Pool following structural damage caused by the 2014 winter storms at the Promenade
Ever joking Charles appeared to have received a rather soggy handshake from one of the bathers at the outdoor pool today
Two ladies who made a particularly special effort having dressed in matching Union Jack printed bathers in celebration of his visit. Right, Camilla arrives at the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Lord-Lieutenant's Fund for Youth
Be careful with that Camilla! The Duchess holds a sword aloft during the reception
The Lord-Lieutenant Fund for Youth was established in 2006 by Lady Mary Holborow and Michael Galsworthy
The Fund provides support for some of the most talented young people in Cornwall, who have been held back from fulfilling their potential through lack of resources
As he toured the exterior of the pool Charles greeted many more female fans as well as group of younger swimmers who met the royal in their swimming gear including swimming caps and goggles.
Charles and Camilla began a whistle-stop three-day tour of Cornwall this morning, starting their annual trip with a visit to a farmer's market in Penance.
With temperatures in the South West hovering around the 25 degree mark, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall looked delighted to be there, if not a little hot under the collar.
While Charles, 67, donned a pale grey suit with pink shirt and matching cravat, Camilla, 69, perfectly matched her husband in a silver checked dress to the knee and smart honey-coloured court shoes.
Later this afternoon the Duchess of Cornwall added some detail to one of the blue commemorative plaques which are created by the Ashworth family for English Heritage at their studios in Lanteglos-by-Fowey
Camilla was accompanied by Frank Ashworth who taught her how the process worked at his family studio in the Cornish town
The Duchess added detail to a plaque designed to commemorate international footballer Laurie Cunningham's home
Charles also greeted some younger swimmers this afternoon who were fully kitted out for a day by the lido
As he took a tour of the exterior of the pool Charles, also known as the Duke of Cornwall, spotted a yoga group enjoying the weather
Earlier today Prince Charles slurped a curry dish at an Indian stall - complete with samosas and bhajis - at the Farmer's Market in Penzance as Camilla, dressed in a checked silver dress with dragonfly brooch looks on
Hot stuff! Charles begins his annual visit to Cornwall - which will take on a foodie theme - with a stop at a curry stall
A red-faced looking Charles, dressed in a suit despite the hot weather, browses the Indian food on offer
Are they hot? A sun-baked Charles points at the stall holder as he prepares to sample the wares
Camilla glammed up the sensible frock with a dragonfly brooch and beige leopard print purse.
Later this afternoon the Duchess of Cornwall added some detail to one of the blue commemorative plaques which are created by the Ashworth family for English Heritage at their studios in Lanteglos-by-Fowey.
Accompanied by Frank Ashworth the Duchess added detail to a plaque designed to commemorate international footballer Laurie Cunningham's home.
It's set to be a busy few days for the royals, who plan to squeeze in 14 engagements over three days.
While the pair are committed to promoting more serious causes in the county, this visit will centre largely around local food and drink as well as a chance to witness some of Cornwall's theatrical talent.
The Prince, who's also known as The Duke of Cornwall when in the region, will also privately visit Duchy farming tenants and offices.
The morning started in bright sunshine, with the couple enjoying some pre-lunch tasters at the farmer's market outside St. John's Hall in Penzance.
Charles appeared to be sharing a joke with the stallholder at an Indian food stand before he slurped on a curry dish.
Make for the Minnack: The royals have already ticked off the Minnack Theatre, the oudoor venue that is precariously placed on the cliff-edge at pretty Porthcurno
Better bring the sunscreen! Charles and Camilla get the best seats in the house at the Minnack as a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream plays out
The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall are joined by local theatregoers - and a sea of photographers - at the dramatic theatre
Charles seemed in high spirits laughing and joking with cast members as he waved his sunglasses in the air, much to their amusement
Prince Charles seemed giddy as he chatted to some of the performers of A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon
Camilla appeared full of questions for the colourfully dressed actors this afternoon. She was seen pointing at one actor's Toms shoes perhaps suggesting they weren't very Shakespearean
Charles arrives at the historic Jubilee Pool, Penzance, Cornwall which is re-opening after being spruced up
More well-wishers gather to greet the Prince as he arrives at the sea's edge to re-open the art deco pool
Perfect day for a swim: The prince meets local bathers who've taken advantage of the warm weather
Fancy a dip, Charles? The Prince watches swimmers as they take to the waters of the popular art deco pool
The couple's three-day visit will see them visit 14 different places within the region, with the theme for their trip being local theatrical talent and the foodie scene
Striding forth, Camilla looked happy to be in Cornwall again. Tomorrow, Charles and Camilla will mark the 25th anniversary of Taste of the West, a membership organisation for food and drink producers, at a food fair in Exeter, Devon
Pleased to wheat you: Camilla heads to a bread stall bearing the Cornish and GB flag
Elegant: Camilla wore a pair of dragonfly brooches on her dress with some pearl drop earrings
The Duchess of Cornwall purchases a Cornish pasty during a visit to a farmers' market outside St. John's Hall in Penzance
Crowds of well-wishers gathered to greet the royals as they began their first day whistle-stop tour of the region
The couple will also recognise some of the environmental and charitable work taking place across the South West.
Their visit will begin at a farmer's market in Penzance, Cornwall, before Camilla celebrates the re-opening of St John's Hall - the largest granite building in the country.
Charles will officially re-open the beachfront Jubilee Swimming Pool, which was seriously damaged in severe storms in February 2014.
Later, Camilla will host a reception for the Lord Lieutenant's Fund for Youth, which provides support for talented young people in Cornwall.
On Tuesday, Charles and Camilla will mark the 25th anniversary of Taste of the West, a membership organisation for food and drink producers, at a food fair in Exeter, Devon.
Camilla will also attend a service of thanksgiving at Exeter Cathedral for more than 700 supporters, staff and families for Children's Hospice South West.
Camilla meets local schoolchildren from St. Mary's Church of England Primary School at St John's Hall, the largest granite building in the country
The Duchess of Cornwall receives a colourful posy from local schoolgirl Ila Meredith Mulholland
The children show Camilla about how they're learning to plant plants at St. John's Hall in Penzance
Charles is to visit new residents on an affordable housing development in Bradninch, which has been delivered by The Guinness Trust in partnership with the Duchy of Cornwall.
He will meet representatives of community initiatives supported by the Duchy of Cornwall at Brimpts Farm.
The visit will conclude on Wednesday, when Charles and Camilla will be in Plymouth.
Charles will attend a power plant which converts household waste into energy before meeting Naval personnel at Her Majesty's Naval Base, Devonport.
Meanwhile, Camilla will officially open the new headquarters of BBC South West.
Being stood up is never fun, but one brave 21-year-old decided to make the best of a bad situation - by treating herself to the date she'd been dreaming of.
Scottish Mimi Black, 21, was meant to meet a man in Glasgow - but he 'couldn't even show up or call'.
Instead of getting the next train home in defeat, the defiant blonde decided to have the date anyway - on her own.
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Being stood up is never fun, but brave 21-year-old Mimi Black, from Scotland, decided to make the best of a bad situation - by treating herself to the date she'd been dreaming of
Mimi posted a series of her Snapchats documenting the solo date on her Twitter feed.
'Ya girl went all the way to Glasgow for a boy who couldn't even show up or call,' she wrote. 'Oh bae treated me #datenight'.
The pictures shared by Mimi show her eating a McDonald's wrap, drinking a sundae, perusing a sale at Ann Summers, enjoying a Sex on the Beach cocktail and finally smiling from bed.
The final picture is captioned: 'People will f*** you over. It's up to you what you do about it. Night lads.'
Mimi posted a series of her Snapchats documenting the solo date on her twitter feed
The pictures shared by Mimi show her eating a McDonald's wrap, drinking a sundae, perusing a sale at Ann Summers, enjoying a Sex on the Beach cocktail and finally smiling from bed
The final picture is captioned: 'People will f**k you over. It's up to you what you do about it. Night lads'
Mimi's sequence of photos has received an outpouring of support on social media - and nearly 5,500 retweets.
'You have yourself. And that's amazing,' wrote Chris Gray, to which Mimi replied: 'Exactly! It took courage for me to even go so instead of getting upset I wanted to joke about it and enjoy myself!'
She added: 'At the end of the day, I'll always have myself! And I don't mind having a drink in a bar myself!'.
'You have yourself. And that's amazing,' wrote Chris Gray, to which Mimi replied: 'Exactly! It took courage for me to even go so instead of getting upset I wanted to joke about it and enjoy myself!'
Mimi clearly won herself a number of fans by posting her honest story on social media.
'Love this! And you're so pretty oh my god,' wrote a Twitter user named Emma Watson - although not the famous actress.
'I would so go for cocktails with you, glad you still had a good time,' added another tweeter.
And Faz wrote: 'Wow, he don't deserve you. You're very pretty.'
The real estate agent was previously engaged to interior designer Colton Thorn, although it is unclear when they officially split
Instagram official in April when he posted a photo of them kissing at a resort in Mexico
Josh Flagg is engaged to his new boyfriend Bobby Boyd after getting down on one knee during his elaborate proposal in Paris.
The 30-year-old real estate agent enlisted a 40-person flash mob to perform dance routines to Bobby's favorite songs at the Four Seasons Hotel George V before he popped the question.
'Bobby and I are truly over the moon happy,' Josh told People. 'Very seldom do couples share what Bobby and I share.'
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Next step! Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles star Josh Flagg proposed to his new boyfriend Bobby Boyd in Paris last week
Going out all out: The 30-year-old real estate agent enlisted a 40-person flash mob to perform dance routines to Bobby's favorite songs at the Four Seasons Hotel George V before he popped the question
'What makes our partnership complete is we are most importantly best friends,' Josh said of their whirlwind romance. 'We are both extremely happy and excited for the next chapter.'
Josh first took his relationship with Bobby public in April when he shared a sweet photo of his beau giving him a tender kiss on the tip of his nose a the Costa Careyes resort in Mexico.
'Who would have thought?' he captioned the image, which prompted many fans to ask what happened to his former fiance Colton Thorn.
Josh had been in a relationship with the interior designer since 2008, but its unclear when or why they officially called it quits.
Courtesy Zen Film Works
Parisian romance: Bobby took to Instagram on Friday to share this sweet picture of them kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower
All together: Josh and Bobby were joined by his parents Michael and Cindy Flagg. The family is pictured at the restaurant Tour d'Argent Paris
The television personality still referred to Colton as his partner in a Los Angles Times article that was published last March.
In the piece, Josh named the formal living room that Colton had designed for his parents' Beverly Hills home as his favorite room.
However, Josh has made it clear that he has moved on. Not only will his unforgettable proposal be featured on the new season of the Bravo reality series this fall, but Josh frequently gushes about his new love in the heartfelt posts he shares on his Instagram page.
And while fans will have to wait until the new season of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles to see Josh get down one knee, both he and Bobby have shared plenty of photos from their European adventure.
'Who would have thought?' Josh made their relationship public in April when he shared this photo on Instagram
Past love: The real estate agent was previously engaged to interior designer Colton Thorn, although it is unclear when they officially split. The two are pictured in Thailand in December 2014
Honeymoon stage: Josh shared a photo of the sweet card Bobby left for him in the bathroom in May
A week ago, the two kicked off their vacation by flying to Positano, Italy, where they lounged by the pool at the Le Sirenuse hotel.
Two days later, they enjoying cocktails and kisses in the City Light.
'Finding my best friend and soul mate is a gift I will never take for granted,' Bobby captioned a photo of him and Josh kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Josh's parents Michael and Cindy joined the couple for the trip and the happy family is pictured posing together at the Four Seasons Hotel George V Paris and the restaurant Tour d'Argent Paris for what he called a 'Flagg Family Affair.'
Euro trip: Before they headed to Paris, the couple enjoyed some fun in the sun in Positano, Italy
Perfect getaway: The happy couple enjoyed martinis in Antibes, France, on Sunday afternoon
'Our fantasy continues': Bobby shared this photo of them posed in front of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes over the weekend
After their Parisian engagement, they traveled to Antibes, a resort town between Cannes and Nice, where they posed poolside at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.
'I love you honey,' Josh captioned the sweet picture, which sees them enjoying martinis while lounging in the sun.
Meanwhile, Bobby posted a photo of them standing in front of the stunning hotel on Saturday.
Pippa Middleton did little to quell the rumours about an engagement to multi-millionaire beau James Matthews as she attended a charity fundraiser tonight.
Attending the the Frost Summer party in aid of the British Heart Foundation, the Duchess of Cambridge's glamorous sister kept her left hand resolutely hidden in every photo.
The 32-year-old managed to either smile for the cameras with her arm behind her back, or by standing with her right side facing the lens.
It certainly denied onlookers the chance of spotting whether she had any eye-catching jewellery on her left hand, just hours before it was revealed that in fact, her millionaire beau James Matthew, had popped the question - and she said 'yes'.
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Pippa Middleton poses with her left hand behind her back as she attends the Frost Summer Party
Looking elegant in an LK Bennett dress and nude strappy sandals, Pippa poses with her right hand side facing the camera so that only her left arm and hand is in view
Pippa Middleton poses for pictures with Princess Eugenie but her left hand is hidden from sight
Pippa joined royals including Princess Eugenie and her mother Fergie at the charity event
Pippa, who wore a floor-length 325 LK Bennett Karo gown, held her clutch bag in her right hand.
Despite the heat, she wore her hair long and loose and completed the look with a pair of nude strappy sandals.
The party planner braved the heat as she joined other royals at the Frost Summer Party Fundraiser in Burton Court, London.
However, Pippa's hedge fund manager other half, who she lives with in Chelsea, was nowhere to be seen.
Other A-list guests included Princess Eugenie who was blooming in a red floral print 200 Alice + Olivia cocktail dress that showed off her shapeley pins.
Pippa poses with her left hand behind her back as she sparks engagement rumours
Eagle-eyed observers might have been able to spot a glint on Pippa's left hand as she walked into the party
Pippa was all smiles as she attended the Frost Summer Fundraiser; he looked perfectly dressed for the hot weather in a flowing dress and summery sandals
The Duchess of York, another longtime supporter of the British Heart Foundation, also joined the throng, held in honour of Sir David Frost's son who died aged 31 in 2015 from an inherited heart condition he didn't even know he had.
Pippa has long supported the British Heart Foundation and is Ambassador for Prevention for the charity.
British Heart Foundation ambassadors are high profile supporters who are passionate about the charity and who support them on an ongoing basis.
In June 2014 Pippa took part in an epic 3,000-mile bike ride called Race Across America. Alongside her brother and six friends, Pippa conquered the ride across 12 states and 88 counties in just eight days in a bid to raise funds.
In January 2015, Pippa cycled from London to Brighton in four hours to raise money for the charity.
Pippa joins stars in heading home from the annual British Heart Foundation fundraiser
The brunette beauty headed home after a glittering fundraising bash in aid of a worthy cause
And although attending the bash solo tonight, Pippa is very much coupled-up with Matthews - the brother of Made In Chelsea love rat Spencer Matthews.
The pair were first seen together in October when Matthews was seen arriving at his Chelsea home with Pippa late one evening, shortly after she was left broken-hearted by the end of her three-year relationship to banker Nico Jackson.
She was then photographed there again the next morning, holding a bunch of red roses.
They spent eight days together over New Year in St Barths, an upmarket Caribbean holiday island where Jamess parents, David and Jane, run a renowned hotel called Eden Rock.
Bachelor James has also been introduced to Pippas mother Carole. They were photographed together at a carol service in Chelsea, and then again outside an Indian restaurant in January.
Even when grabbing a taxi to return home, the party planner's left side was out of sight
The Duchess of Cambridge's sister looked tanned and relaxed as she headed home in a black cab
Pippa opted for a 325 Karo silk dress by LK Bennett which she wore with nude strappy heels
As a schoolboy, he was one of Britains most promising young motor-racing drivers achieving acclaim in the nineties on the Formula Renault circuit.
More recently, he has competed in ultra-marathons and other exotic endurance races.
Often, he takes part to raise money for a charity set up in memory of his brother, Michael, who died in 1999, shortly after becoming the youngest-ever Briton to scale Mount Everest.
His body has never been found and the family has set up the Michael Matthews Foundation in his memory, which helps provide childrens education in Nepal, Thailand and Africa.
James and Pippa come from similar backgrounds, families that do not have aristocratic heritage but have made their own wealth.
Mr Matthews is the grandchild of a coalminer from the north of England.
Carole Middleton is a former air hostess who grew up in a council flat, while Jamess father David made millions in the car trade after starting out as a trainee mechanic in Rotherham.
Eugenie's dress was from designer brand Alice + Olivia and costing 200, the printed silk dress had a high neckline but was sleeveless, allowing her to keep cool
Sarah Ferguson Duchess of York was also in attendance, wearing a plain black dress and patent black flats
The couple went on holiday to Corsica in May and then moved into Mr Matthews' 17million home in west London.
The property, bought by James in 2014, boasts a gym, an underground cinema, a lift and a staff room, as well as six bedrooms
Her previous two boyfriends, Nico Jackson and Alex Loudon, were also multi-millionaire City bankers.
Mr Matthews made his own millions by establishing the City hedge fund Eden Rock Capital Management after a brief dalliance as a racing driver.
Those who know him say the 40-year-old is exceptionally polite and, most importantly, discreet.
The Duchess of Cambridges potential future brother-in-law can be relied upon to keep the inner workings of the Royal Family to himself, they say.
Princess Eugenie turned heads as she mingled with fellow A-listers at the Frost Summer Fundraiser.
The Princess of York, 26, looked stunning in a red floral print 200 Alice + Olivia cocktail dress that she paired with elegant black heels.
Her shoulder-length chocolate-brown hair looked glossy and natural, and her light eyes were offset by striking black eyeliner.
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The Princess of York, 26, looked stunning in a red floral print 200 Alice + Olivia cocktail dress that she paired with elegant black heels
Princess Eugenie's long-term boyfriend, nightclub boss Jack Brooksbank, 29, was also at the star-studded party
Eugenie turned heads in the floral print dress that showed off her shapely pins as she left the Frost Summer Fundraiser with boyfriend Jack Brooksbank
The celeb-packed party was held by the Frost family to raise money for the Miles Frost Fund in partnership with the British Heart Foundation.
Sir David Frost's son, Miles, died aged 31 in 2015 from an inherited heart condition he didn't even know he had.
Eugenie is a longtime supporter of the British Heart Foundation, along with Pippa Middleton, who also attended the party.
The Duchess of Cambridge's glamorous sister, 32, kept her left hand resolutely hidden in every photo just hours before it was revealed that she is engaged.
Her shoulder-length chocolate-brown hair looked glossy and natural, and her light eyes were offset by striking black eyeliner
Eugenie is a longtime supporter of the British Heart Foundation, along with Pippa Middleton
The Duchess of Cambridge's glamorous sister, 32, kept her left hand resolutely hidden in every photo - sparking rumours that she is engaged
Princess Eugenie's long-term boyfriend, nightclub boss Jack Brooksbank, 29, was also at the party, as well as Derren Brown, Michael Parkinson, Lord Frederick Windsor, Esther Rantzen, Made in Chelsea's Stevie Johnson and Tara Palmer Tompkinson.
Wearing her hair in a symmetrical bob, Tara - who is a goddaughter of Prince Charles - also seemed to go light on the make-up for a natural finish.
Interestingly, she has just launched her all-in-one bodysuit called the Kubbi, which she hopes will become a staple in womens wardrobes around the world.
A longtime British Heart Foundation supporter, the Duchess of York also joined her daughter Eugenie at the charity event raising money for the cause
Michael Parkinson (left) and Lord Frederick Windsor (right) also attended the celeb-packed party
Wearing her hair in a symmetrical bob, Tara - who is a goddaughter of Prince Charles - also seemed to go light on the make-up for a natural finish
The Duchess of York is an ardent supporter of the British Heart Foundation and has done everything from attend the charity's parties to strutting down the catwalk to help raise funds for the cause.
So it was no surprise to see the philanthropist attend a summer soiree with a host of A-listers and royals for the Miles Frost Fund, set up to honour the son of Sir David Frost who died from a heart condition he didn't know he had.
The mother-of-two looked elegant in a sleeveless dress in her customary black as she posed for pictures with a male friend, who was dressed for the balmy evening temperatures in a lightweight cream suit.
The Duchess of York posed for pictures at the Miles Frost Fund party with a mystery guest
The duo entered the Frost Summer Fundraiser to join the celebrity throng raising money for the cause
Fergie was all smiles as she posed for pictures with her male friend, who looked dapper in a cream suit
The duo then set off to join the celebrity throng gathered to raise money to pay for genetic testing for close relatives of people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the condition that tragically proved fatal for Miles Frost at just 31 years old.
The Duchess of York joined her daughter Princess Eugenie, 26, who looked stunning in a red floral print 200 Alice + Olivia cocktail dress that she paired with elegant black heels.
Her shoulder-length chocolate-brown hair looked glossy and natural, and her light eyes were offset by striking black eyeliner.
The art gallery executive was accompanied by her longterm boyfriend Jack Brooksbank, 29.
The Princess of York, 26, looked stunning in a red floral print 200 Alice + Olivia cocktail dress that she paired with elegant black heels
Princess Eugenie's long-term boyfriend, nightclub boss Jack Brooksbank, 29, was also at the star-studded party
Eugenie turned heads in the floral print dress that showed off her shapely pins as she left the Frost Summer Fundraiser with boyfriend Jack Brooksbank
Eugenie is a longtime supporter of the British Heart Foundation, along with Pippa Middleton, who also attended the party.
The Duchess of Cambridge's glamorous sister, 32, kept her left hand resolutely hidden in every photo just hours before it was revealed that she is now engaged.
She managed to face the cameras from her right side and to hold her left hand behind her back to defy any eagle-eyed onlookers.
Yet although her jewellery may not have revealed the truth about her new status, her constant smile and glowing looks must have been a giveaway.
And it emerged tonight that her beau of less than a year, James Matthews, popped the question during a holiday in the Lake District after asking her father Michael for permission.
Her shoulder-length chocolate-brown hair looked glossy and natural, and her light eyes were offset by striking black eyeliner
Eugenie is a longtime supporter of the British Heart Foundation, along with Pippa Middleton
The Duchess of Cambridge's glamorous sister, 32, kept her left hand resolutely hidden in every photo - sparking rumours that she is engaged
Other guests included Derren Brown, Michael Parkinson, Lord Frederick Windsor, Esther Rantzen, Made in Chelsea's Stevie Johnson and Tara Palmer Tompkinson.
Wearing her hair in a symmetrical bob, Tara - who is a goddaughter of Prince Charles - also seemed to go light on the make-up for a natural finish.
Interestingly, she has just launched her all-in-one bodysuit called the Kubbi, which she hopes will become a staple in womens wardrobes around the world.
A longtime British Heart Foundation supporter, the Duchess of York also joined her daughter Eugenie at the charity event raising money for the cause
Michael Parkinson (left) and Lord Frederick Windsor (right) also attended the celeb-packed party
Wearing her hair in a symmetrical bob, Tara - who is a goddaughter of Prince Charles - also seemed to go light on the make-up for a natural finish
Esther Rantzen (left) and Derren Brown (right) came to show their support for the British Heart Foundation
It is an increasingly common part of everyday life for millions.
Stress is becoming more and more prevalent as we face one of the most challenging factors for the human psyche - change, uncertainty and a lack of knowledge.
And as a result watching for some really common stress-related symptoms is a good barometer to acknowledging when we need to step back for some self-care.
There are some quick-fire ways to address your body showing you it is in survival mode, but paying attention in the longer term can help us ride the waves of change and keep our sanity intact.
From the fear-based place of the fight-or-flight response, finding ways to let your whole mind-body know it is safe in this moment is the route to calming excitation that spreads into muscles, mind and affects our capacity for sustainable sleep, mood and energy.
With stress affecting more and more people, here, writing for Healthista, Charlotte Watts reveals the five key signs to look out for, and how to combat stress in the short- and long-term
1. RACING MIND, WORRY AND ANXIETY
It's natural for our inner dialogue to go to full-on protection mode when we perceive danger is afoot.
It doesn't matter that the threat might not be of a full-on physical nature, we are set to track for dangers on the periphery and this constant vigilance running along in the background can go a little crazy when stress becomes the usual way of living.
If we've had trauma in our lives or if we are currently living in a situation where we don't feel fully safe, the voices can pipe up to keep us on our toes.
Safety within a job, money, family and how kindly we are treated featuring high as basic needs for us to be able to relax into each moment.
Those inner voices are playing out old strategies designed to keep us safe, even if these can seem misguided.
So self-criticism and negative thinking might pop up to keep us from trying new things where we run the risk of being hurt or disappointed for instance.
This language-based warning system comes from the left sides of our brains where we tend to view the world from interpretation, analysis and comparison.
Self-criticism and negative thinking might pop up to keep us from trying new things where we run the risk of being hurt or disappointed for instance. This language-based warning system comes from the left sides of our brains where we tend to view the world from interpretation, analysis and comparison
We can get caught up in this cyclical inner dialogue particularly when we don't understand a situation, have decisions to make, things on our mind.
Anywhere we might want to get answers and feelings of control.
This can be especially true in the wee hours of the morning when we may be waking from stress affecting our ability to drop into and maintain deeper sleep cycles.
If highs and lows of blood sugar in the day feed into dropping levels in the night, we can even wake from a shot of adrenaline preventing us dropping into a hypoglycaemic coma.
Because this is the fight-or-flight response it is natural for our fears to come up and feed into the inner narrative.
How to help in the short-term:
Audio books, podcasts and any spoken word audio can satisfy our left brain's want for language and intercept our own voices very effectively.
Guided meditations can help (see my meditation series here) to calm as a voice other than your own is letting your subconscious know it is safe to relax.
These can be particularly helpful in the middle of the night when we can feel starkly hemmed in to the world in our heads in the dark.
Listening to stories, novels, Dessert Island Discs and my personal favourite, podcasts about quantum physics, can give our attention an alternative to mind-bending loops.
Letting yourself just listen and enjoy the experience in your lovely, warm, cosy bed rather than try to get to sleep can send you off without even noticing.
This 15 minute sequence can also intercept mind racing; firstly with body focus to bring you down out of your head, then doodling to switch attention from left to the more creative right brain and then a healthy almond snack to provide the nutrition satisfaction that can stop us adding sugar cravings into the mind racing mix; they have the highest protein content of any tree nut.
Guided meditations can help (see my meditation series here) to calm as a voice other than your own is letting your subconscious know it is safe to relax. These can be particularly helpful in the middle of the night when we can feel starkly hemmed in to the world in our heads in the dark
Almonds also provide essential B vitamins, zinc, magnesium and omega oils that our brains need to regulate our nervous systems and stabilise mood.
Longer term:
Mindfulness meditations and practices help us learn to experience the present moment, just as it is, without judgment or interpretation.
In this space we can see that mind ruminations are of things that are often not with us at that moment and that we don't need to keep up a heightened response to these vigilant patterns.
Long-term practice has shown to decrease levels of the stress hormone cortisol, increase compassion and self-compassion (including how we objectively view ourselves), improve neuroplasticity (more flexibility in different situations) and increase axonal density, which can determine how well our brains signal.
2. EYE STRAIN
Eye fatigue is a common feature of our screen-heavy society and can involve tired, burning and itching sensations in the eyes.
With the stress response including a widening of pupils to take in more peripheral information in the face of perceived danger, it can also include sensitivity to light when chronic and long-term stress is in the mix.
The constant, flicking movements our eyes do to watch information moving across screens is not like anything we might watch in the wild.
When our eyes don't get to rest in between these demands, the muscles can tire.
Eye fatigue is a common feature of our screen-heavy society and can involve tired, burning and itching sensations in the eyes
When this moves to headaches, double vision or changed vision, it is important to get this checked out by a doctor or optician.
According to a survey of 2,000 British adults by Innocent Smoothies last year, a fifth of us feel separation anxiety from our mobile devices.
This reliance on tech is seriously detrimental to our mental health, driving us to distraction and, in the worse instance, anxiety.
According to WebMD, screen-related eye strain is known as computer vision syndrome and affects about 50-90 per cent of computer workers.
They report that 'Research shows that people hold digital devices closer to their eyes than they hold books and newspapers.
That forces their eyes to work harder than usual as they strain to focus on tiny font sizes.'
Blinking up to half the usual 18 times a minute when looking at a screen also dries out eyes and adds to itching and irritation.
Screen-time late in the evening and at night also has adverse effects.
A 2012 study reported that 'light level and duration of exposure determine the impact of self-luminous tablets on melatonin suppression'.
This study showed a reduction in melatonin levels of about 22% when someone is exposed to backlit screens for two hours.
As the hormone melatonin allows us to go to sleep, this can further tire us and steal sleep time that we need to feed vital nutrients to the eyes.
How to help in the short-term:
Avoid your smartphone in breaks, closing your eyes and rubbing the lids to encourage lubrication if need be.
Cucumber slices can cool and refresh tired eyes as the inside of a cucumber is about 5 degrees lower in temperature than the air around.
Used chamomile tea bags may also bring down any irritation and have a soothing effect.
Longer term:
Give your eyes, brain and nervous system a rest by getting away from screens as often as possible.
Ban technology from the bedroom and pick up a book, swap TV for radio or music as often as possible, resist picking up your phone as soon as you awake and make clear boundaries for checking emails, social media etc.
Learning to be without your phone can allow the work time you need to be at a screen to cause less issues.
3. JAW TENSION AND HEADACHES
Clenching in the jaw is a basic part of the stress response as it primes us for self-protection, increasing blood flow to the temples to create the heightened vigilance that our primal selves perceive we need for survival when life is challenging.
It gives us a sense of motivation and forward thrust, but when it becomes set as default it can add into neck and shoulder tension, keep sending the signals to keep up stress and agitation and even lead to symptoms like headaches and teeth grinding.
With workplace stress on the rise phrases like 'gritting our teeth through it' can seem more literal and part of your body's 'normal' setting.
Clenching in the jaw is a basic part of the stress response, which can lead to headaches
If you practice yoga, you may have noticed your yoga teacher saying lines like 'release your jaw', 'soft jaw' or my personal favourite; 'allow space between the back teeth'.
This is one of the most important physical observations we can use in both our yoga practice and our life, to gauge how much tension we may be carrying and a route in to letting release and relief flood back into the whole system.
How to help in the short-term:
Chewing slowly and mindfully can unlock all kinds of muscles in and around your jaw and into your face.
Chewing celery is not only a good jaw workout but it also contains the nervous system soothing chemical apigenin, so can help bring you down from the signals that keep up jaw stress.
If you can gurn, make faces, stick out your tongue, gargle and unstick your usual set ways of expressing through your face!
Also cranial osteopathy and auricular (ear) acupuncture may provide immediate relief.
The head rolls and shoulder release in Step One of the WIN sequence above can also help if you allow your jaw to slacken as you do them.
Longer term and for immediate relief:
Help the tension locked into your TMJ, temples and forehead by pinching the muscles that have got stuck in contraction.
This gives them the signal that they can release and allow you to feel that you can move your jaw around to create space. this exercise can help relieve stress held from holding stress body patterns chronically:
Start by pinching the middle of your eyebrows, taking your time to move out to their edges and across the temples, massaging and exploring any way that feels right to you.
Work out from the temples around the skin covering the bony protuberances behind the ears and even the ears themselves, with a gentle but firm pinching and kneading action.
Move down the outer back line of the neck down from the skull behind the ears; here you can massage the big scalene muscles that create head turning movements. These are not designed to hold up the head as they are not postural muscles, but can end up doing this job when we tense the shoulders, hunch on chairs and then lift the chin to look forwards.
Continue down to the upper back and shoulders, anywhere that simply feels good and that it is calling out for this attention.
Finish by opening the jaw and face and moving into neck and shoulders to feel fully loose.
4. CRAMPING AND/OR PAIN IN THE ABDOMEN
Feeling stress in the gut isn't simply descriptive, our bellies are in constant communication with our brains to guide how we respond to external (and internal) stimuli.
As I explain in my book The De-Stress Effect, much stress research has been directed towards the gut, where the enteric nervous system (ENS, aka 'The Second Brain') is a complex mass of nerve cells running the entire length of your digestive tract, from mouth to anus.
About the size of a cat's brain, it can operate separately to the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) but is in continual dialogue with the brain.
Feeling stress in the gut isn't simply descriptive, our bellies are in constant communication with our brains to guide how we respond to external (and internal) stimuli
With research now showing that 90 per cent of information flows from gut to brain and only 10 per cent 'top-down', simply attempting to soothe ourselves by talking to the mind and staying up in our heads can only get us so far.
Gut feelings are to be listened to; these 'somatic markers' are communications about how safe or unsafe are immediate surroundings, situation or people feel to us.
These signals can start as whispers, but if not listened to or we are unable to change our situation, then we can feel this as anxiety in the gastro-intestinal tract as cramping or tightness in the belly or the nerves that feed in such as knots in the solar plexus area below the breastbone.
Stress also causes immediate cessation of digestive function, so if you're partially through digesting a meal, a challenging event or communication (or even simply worry) can leave partially digested food hanging around in the gut and this may create gas that causes pressure, pain and/or flatulence.
Feeling stress in the gut isn't simply descriptive, our bellies are in constant communication with our brains to guide how we respond to external (and internal) stimuli
How to help in the short-term:
Calming your whole nervous system can start by connecting with and signalling safety your belly region.
If you can lie down with legs bent, but sit comfortably (away from a screen) if you need and place your hands comfortably onto your lower abdomen; with loose fingers and so that you allow the natural rise and fall of your belly as you breathe.
It can take a while to feel this motion of rise on the inhale, drop on the exhale if stress has you breathing up into your upper chest and shoulders, but if you exhale fully into these areas too, you can start to feel release down into the lower body.
Releasing the jaw (see above) and sighing out on the exhalation can also signal the space that calming needs to happen.
Longer term:
Research is beginning to understand how looking after our gut environment helps to signal back up to the brain to either keep the stress response going or allow us to calm back down the other side.
Beneficial bacteria in the form of a good quality probiotic and fermented foods like sauerkraut, kefir and apple cider vinegar can help feed them and support the right pH balance for them to flourish.
Ensuring adequate levels of the mineral magnesium can help our ability to calm smooth muscle, including that in the bowel, so plenty of green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds and fish can help redress how we use up lots of magnesium in the stress response.
Anger is a normal response to pain, threat and injustice. It is a healthy response to be able to express it in a calm and reasonable manner. But if this moves into the territory of snapping or lashing out at others, this can create the kind of happiness around us that comes straight back towards us
If other potential magnesium deficiency symptoms are present anxiety, insomnia and depression for example taking 200-400mg magnesium citrate a day may help.
Vegetables, fruits and nuts also have a prebiotic action, which feeds beneficial bacteria, particularly artichokes, onions, leeks, bananas, kiwi fruit and almonds.
5. GETTING IRRITABLE, INTOLERANT OR ANGRY
Anger is a normal response to pain, threat and injustice.
It is a healthy response to be able to express it in a calm and reasonable manner.
But if this moves into the territory of snapping, lashing out at others or sending out blame out in all directions, this can create the kind of happiness around us that comes straight back towards us.
Being left feeling frustrated, irritated, or resentful eats away at our mental and physical health.
We often feel intolerant or angry when we are low on resources, are not feeling heard or respected or (particularly if of an introvert nature) have not had enough time to ourselves for recovery.
Giving yourself a hug can help ease stress in the short-term, helping to release the 'love' hormone, oxytocin
If you've been putting others first or struggle to say no to expectations from family, friends or work colleagues, having a short fuse is a red warning to create good boundaries for yourself and others.
How to help in the short-term:
Remove yourself from the situation and find a place where you can see the possibility of space.
Place one hand on your heart and the other on your belly.
Connecting in to these places we associate with compassion for the heart and intuitive wisdom in the belly (those gut feelings again) in a palpably physical way can help us come down from heightened responses that may be inappropriate for the level of stress presented.
Breathing here and allowing looseness in the jaw can bring a sense of unlocking the tight head we feel in anger and dissipating the intense emotions involved.
You can even give yourself a hug; touch, massage and pressure from a warm body is soothing to the nervous system and lets us know that we are safe.
A hug from ourselves just as from others produces the 'love hormone' oxytocin when over 20 seconds, which has the nurturing effect that can mean a different route to anger or seeing another's point of view may suddenly seem possible.
Longer term:
According to the late psychologist and creator of Non-violent Communication (NVC) Marshall Rosenburg, anger is one of the expressions we can have when we felt we're not having our basic needs met.
His book of the same name is a very helpful guide to finding a language with others and our inner voices to navigate communications with compassion and solve conflict where everybody feels heard and respected.
Inhaling steam won't help clear your sinuses when you're bunged up, scientists say.
They found that the popular practice of breathing in the steam from a bowl of recently-boiled water had little or no benefit.
The Southampton University study follows other research which found steaming doesn't help with colds and can even cause burns.
The Southampton University study found that the popular practice of breathing in the steam from a bowl of recently-boiled water had little or no benefit - and can cause burns
Millions of Britons suffer from sinusitis, in which the sinuses small air-filled cavities behind the cheekbones and forehead- become inflamed and blocked.
This leads to difficulty in breathing through the nose, tenderness and headaches and can have as big an effect on quality of life as an ailing heart.
Antibiotics are of limited help, and with over-prescription contributing to antibiotic resistance, many GPs recommend steaming instead.
Nasal irrigation, in which the inside of the nose is cleaned with a salt water solution, is also often recommended.
Researcher Professor Paul Little compared the health of almost 900 Britons with sinusitis.
Some were prescribed steam inhalation, others nasal irrigation or nasal irrigation combined with steaming.
A fourth group had their usual treatment.
After six months, only those who did nasal irrigation showed any real improvement.
The study revealed nasal irrigation, in which the inside of the nose is cleaned with a salt water solution, was the best treatment for sinusitis and colds (file photo)
These patients felt better, took fewer pills and said they would be less likely to seek help from their doctor in future.
Steaming did help a little but only in easing headaches, the Canadian Medical Association Journal reports.
Professor Little said: 'The threat of global antibiotics resistance is very real and we need to find alternative ways of educating and treating people who do not need to have antibiotics.
'We have found that even a very brief intervention of a video showing patients how to use saline nasal irrigation can improve symptoms, help people feel they do not need to see the doctor to manage the problem and reduce the amount of over-the-counter medication they get.
'We found potentially important changes in other outcomes, for example the belief in the need to see the doctor in future episodes.
Hoped the joints will last a lot longer than the prosthetics currently in use
New replacement joints to be grown from fat taken from stomach in future
Patients with creaky and painful hips could one day be given new joints - grown from fat taken from their own stomach.
The two-in-one therapy would treat arthritis, while trimming bulging bellies and would address two of the curses of advancing age in one go.
It is hoped the new joints will last for decades, unlike the prosthetics in use today, which have to be replaced over time.
This will make them particularly valuable for people in their 40s and 50s, who are increasingly suffering joint damage but are considered too young for conventional surgery.
The new joints will be made from stomach fat. It it is hoped they will last for decades, unlike the prosthetics in use today, which have to be replaced over time
A modern-day obsession with high-intensity weight-bearing exercises and personal training is blamed for growing numbers of middle-aged people suffering joint damage normally only seen in old age.
Around 80,000 Britons have hip replacement surgery each year, with many going through the operation because arthritis has worn away the cartilage that cushions the joint.
Scientists around the world are searching for a way of growing new cartilage that could be used to repair the damage.
The technique, from Washington University in Missouri, centres on stem cells, master cells capable of turning into different types of tissue.
Researcher Professor Farshid Guilak began by extracting stem cells from fat left over from liposuction and placing them on a thin frame, designed to fit over the ball of the patients joint.
He then used a cocktail of proteins to turn the stem cells into cartilage cells and over six weeks, they grew and spread over the frame, forming a thin layer of healthy cartilage.
He envisages placing this over the ball of the patients joint, restoring it to a youthful state.
Excitingly, the professor has also hidden an anti-arthritic gene in the replacement cartilage.
This pumps out a chemical which calms the inflammation behind the disease and so should prevent the new joint from getting damaged.
This should increase its lifespan and prevent or reduce the need for a second operation.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Guilak describes how he has made living joints in a range of sizes.
Around 80,000 Britons have hip replacement surgery each year, with many going through the operation because arthritis has worn away the cartilage that cushions the joint
Some are already being tested on lab animals and the first human trials could start in as little as three years.
He expects the main beneficiaries to be people aged between 40 and 65, many of whom are considered too young for conventional replacements.
However, the technique would also be ideal for children with joint disease, because the new cartilage would grow as they do.
HOW THE PROCEDURE WORKS The technique, from Washington University in Missouri, centres on stem cells, master cells capable of turning into different types of tissue. Researcher Professor Farshid Guilak began by extracting stem cells from fat left over from liposuction and placing them on a thin frame, designed to fit over the ball of the patients joint. He then used a cocktail of proteins to turn the stem cells into cartilage cells and over six weeks, they grew and spread over the frame, forming a thin layer of healthy cartilage. He envisages placing this over the ball of the patients joint, restoring it to a youthful state. Excitingly, the professor has also hidden an anti-arthritic gene in the replacement cartilage. This pumps out a chemical which calms the inflammation behind the disease and so should prevent the new joint from getting damaged. This should increase its lifespan and prevent or reduce the need for a second operation. Advertisement
The fat could be taken from the stomach, thighs or buttocks and it may be possible to also grow living knee, shoulder and wrist joints.
Professor Guilak said: Our hope is to prevent, or at least delay, a standard metal and plastic prosthetic joint replacement.
Once the process is optimised, we are hoping it will cost about the same as a standard joint replacement.
We are very excited about this.
Dr Natalie Carter, from Arthritis Research UK, said: Using stem cells to repair and regenerate damaged cartilage has enormous potential.
However, this study is still very much in its experimental stages and will need further research to be carried out on humans before we can know if its a viable option.
Over 8 million people in the UK live with the pain and disability of osteoarthritis.
Delaying or negating the need for total joint replacement surgery could benefit people with arthritis of all ages, but particularly younger people who are at greater risk of a replacement joint wearing out over time and repeated surgeries needed.
Regenerative medicine is a really promising and exciting area of research and we have invested more than 5 million into this area.
Is a midlife crisis real, or is it a common myth that you may feel significant uncertainty or discontent at a certain point in your adult life?
'People often wonder if someone can have a midlife crisis,' says Jennifer Wickham, a licensed professional counselor for Mayo Clinic Health System.
'It's a good question to ask, as all of us go through personal issues and transitions in our lives.'
Occasionally, midlife transitions might invoke depression. There are a few tell-tale signs to watch out for
The term 'midlife crisis' was coined in 1965 by Elliot Jacques, M.D., Ph.D., a Canadian psychoanalyst, to describe challenges during the normal period of transition and self-reflection many adults experience from age 40 to 60.
During these years, adults may commonly question who they are in this world and in their life, what their purpose is, and how have they used their time thus far.
These questions can be triggered by the realization of the passage of time or changes that may occur with the physical body, such as a health scare or a diminished ability to perform physical tasks.
'Your midlife crisis, or transition, may occur around significant life events, such your youngest child moving away or finishing college,' says Wickham.
'You may feel it when you're entering a new decade or after the death of a parent.'
Wickham explains the emotions these questions and changes prompt may cause you discomfort, stress and confusion, and may lead you to feel that you are in a crisis.
Despite this stress, you might experience this time as the beginning of a new and exciting stage of life.
Occasionally, midlife transitions might invoke depression, and Wickham says it's important you recognize these symptoms if you're not feeling quite like yourself:
Have your eating or sleeping habits changed, or are you feeling tired and run-down?
Do you have feelings of pessimism or hopelessness?
Do you have feelings of restlessness, anxiety or irritability?
Are you feeling a loss of interest in activities that you once enjoyed, including sex and hobbies?
Are you having thoughts of suicide or attempts at suicide?
Do you have physical symptoms, such as headaches or other physical aches or pains, that don't respond to treatment?
Yoga is a good way to combat feelings of depression and confusion by staying active and meditating
Wickham offers tips to help:
Stay active: Go for daily walks and get some fresh air.
Stay social: Stay engaged with friends and family.
Meditate: Take a yoga course, or learn how to meditate to clear your mind.
Delhi has been placed on high alert as low-lying residential areas close to the Yamuna river brace themselves for flooding.
Water levels near the national capital have reached a critical point after authorities in Haryana discharged 1.7 lakh cusecs of water from Hathini Kund Barrage situated in Yamunanagar district on Saturday evening.
It is expected the water will reach Delhi in 72 hours, crossing the 204m 'danger' level.
Low-lying residential areas close to the Yamuna riverbed are braced for flooding as water levels reach a critical level near the national capital. (Pictured: The Yamuna floodplain during a 2013 deluge).
Residential areas including Mayur Vihar phase 1, Geeta Colony, Okhla, Usmanpur, Garhi Mandu, Badarpur, Khadar, ISBT Bridge, and Shakarpur will be the worst affected.
VK Kamboj, superintending engineer of Hathini Kund, told reporters: Water reaches Hathini Kund barrage via Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Due to incessant rain in the area the water level of the barrage has increased and we have no option other than to discharge excessive water into the Yamuna to control the situation.
He added: It is a regular exercise during monsoon every year. If the weather continues to remain same, it will be repeated in future as well. We have already alerted deputy commissioners of northeast, northwest, central and east districts to take precautionary measures and evacuate people living in low lying areas.
Residents of low-lying areas on the Yamuda floodplain are being evacuated
Meanwhile, at least 21 people were killed in rain-related incidents in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Assam, with the monsoon gaining momentum in several parts of North and Northeast India.
Many areas of the country have already experienced flooding, and at least 10 people have died in Uttarakhand from rain-related landslides and flash-floods.
Four people lost their lives in Tehri district as their car was hit by debris falling from a hillside in the wake of a landslide.
Many areas of the country have already experienced flooding, and at least 10 people have died in Uttarakhand from landslides and flash-floods. (Pictured: Locals battling the monsoon rains)
Two men were also killed in Uttarkashi district when a tree fell on their house following heavy rains in the area.
Incessant rain has 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.
Authorities have responded by evacuating those living nearby.
Heavy rain is forecast in Uttarakhand for another 24 hours, especially in Udham Singh Nagar, Haridwar, and Dehradun districts where extremely heavy rains are expected, a state MeT office said.
Delhi witnessed light rain, keeping the mercury within comfortable levels with the maximum temperature at 30.1 degrees Celsius, five notches below the normal.
According to the meteorological department, 2.5 mm rainfall was recorded between 8.30am and 5.30pm at Safdarjung observatory, while weather stations at Lodhi Road and Ridge recorded 2.6 mm and 0.6 mm rainfall respectively.
The minimum temperature settled at 26.4 degree Celsius, one notch below the normal, and humidity level oscillated between 81 and 97 per cent in Delhi.
The world is changing. Power is shifting eastwards towards China and India, and is being diffused downwards to non-state actors - including NGOs and terrorists.
But what we are witnessing these days is something far more dramatic, and frightening.
The events in Turkey, the massacre in Nice, Brexit, and the verdict against China in the UNCLOS tribunal, are just the latest evidence that the world is not just changing, but being turned upside down.
While India is largely an oasis of calm, alarm bells are now ringing after the death of Burhan Wani in J&K
This could well be the first sign of a different, more difficult world, with jobless growth, a broken global trading system, and Islamism going rogue across the world.
Even worse, its also about being blindsided, as people certainly were with Brexit and the rise of the Islamic State.
However, India - even with its usual chaos - is an oasis of calm where economic growth still means growth above 6 per cent. Where it is politics as usual, though with a dangerous edge of majoritarian grievance.
Alarm bells are certainly ringing across the country, but none so loudly as the ones in Jammu & Kashmir.
Glance
A superficial glance would suggest that the events rocking the state have become routine.
After a bout of curfew and repression, things will settle down to the kind of uneasy peace that has prevailed through the past decade and a half.
But the eruption that took place after the killing of Burhan Wani needs to be analysed in careful detail.
The death of popular rebel leader Burhan Wani sparked clashes in which more than 3,000 people, including 200 police officers, have been injured
The significant pockets of separatist activity across the Valley are well known.
They have manifested their presence in the markedly lower voter turnout of constituencies in and around Srinagar, Sopur, Baramulla or Anantnag, and separatist leaders can bring the Valley to a halt through strike action.
Men carrying guns are still a regular sight in the Valley, despite a reduction recently.
Besides the neo-Hizbul Mujahideen, with its penchant for self-publicity, there are small groups of Pakistanis who are remote-controlled by the ISI.
Events in 2008 - the protest against the land transfer to the Amarnath yatra shrine board, and in 2010 - the Machhil fake killing of three innocents by army personnel - led to a popular upsurge where protesters adopted the dangerous tactic of pelting security forces with stones.
Eventually more than 150 people were killed in the police shootings that were used to control the protesters.
Protest
In both instances, there appeared to be reasonable grounds for civil protest, which was subsequently manipulated by militants like Masrat Alam to become violent.
In the latest instance, the death of a militant has triggered the clashes.
Wani lived by the sword, and perhaps unsurprisingly died by it. There are all kinds of dark hints to suggest that he was extra-judicially executed.
But Kashmir is a place where rumours flourish, often because of the ham-fisted way the government attempts to control the narrative.
The latest clashes are the worst to hit J&K since 2010, with stone-pelting and tear gas a frequent feature
The danger that we see is not so much from Wani and his associates, but the mood that has persuaded thousands of protesters to brave the security forces' bullets.
In an era where Islamist radicalism has mutated so sharply in states like Iraq and Syria, you cannot be too careful.
That is why New Delhi needs to pay more attention to J&K than it has previously.
There are three elements of the Kashmir problem: one is the need for a discussion with Pakistan to resolve the outstanding dispute, and a second is the vital need for New Delhi to address the sense of grievance in the Valley.
In both areas, little or nothing is happening on the NDA-II watch.
Thirdly, the security forces have done all they can to bring armed militancy to heel in the state.
Forces
But despite the experience of 2008 and 2010, the governments in New Delhi and Srinagar have not been able to develop a professional police force equipped and trained to deal with crowds.
A CRPF constable trained to fight Maoists armed with AK-47s cannot switch personalities when dealing with a civil protester throwing stones at him in J&K.
Each of these elements is linked to the other.
Non-lethal policing could help New Delhi make a deal with Islamabad to return the state to normalcy
Tough but non-lethal policing could enable an environment in which New Delhi can make a deal with Islamabad and Srinagar to return the state to normalcy.
The difficultly lies in synchronising the three.
We often find that the Pakistan part moves ahead, and Srinagar gets forgotten - or some event like Wanis shooting triggers an uprising which undermines the first two elements.
A glance at those injured by pellets would show that most were born after 2000, with little or no memory of the dark days of the state in the 1990s. And like all teens, they seldom really think through consequences.
However, they do create them. And thats why we need to move with some urgency in the state.
A 15-year-old girl is alleged to have been brutally raped and killed by three men in Kopardi village, in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra.
Police have been stationed in the locality to ease tensions, after furious locals held a road blockade and other protests to demand the arrest of the rapists.
The teenage victim had reportedly been mutilated, and local accounts suggest she was found with her hair pulled out, and hands and teeth broken.
A 15-year-old girl is alleged to have been raped and killed by three men in Ahmadnagar. The accused were said to have been drinking under a tree before carrying out the assault. (File picture)
The crime has sparked demonstrations in Karjat taluka, where villagers took to the streets demanding action against the accused, while the Congress demanded the resignation of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on moral grounds.
The police confirmed that all three of the accused were arrested by the local crime branch after the incident on July 13.
According to police, the victim was a student in year IX.
The incident took place on July 13 between 6.45pm and 7.30pm, when the teenage girl was returning from meeting her grandfather.
She was allegedly accosted by three men, who gang-raped her before strangling her.
The crime has sparked protests in Karjat taluka, where villagers from Kopardi took to the streets demanding action against the culprits
The accused have been booked under IPC sections 376 (punishment for rape), 302 (murder) and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
Ahmednagar Superintendent Saurabh Tripathi confirmed that one of the accused was arrested on July 14, while the other two were arrested later that day.
The SP also alleged that the victim was found with both shoulders dislocated.
Giving details about the incident, another police officer stated that the attackers were consuming liquor under a tree to celebrate buying a new motorcycle when they saw the girl passing by.
The Congress has demanded the resignation of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on moral grounds
A witness who claims to have been the first at the scene stated that he saw one of the accused with the girl lying behind a tree.
The witness told police that the girl was naked with wounds all over her body, and her nose was bleeding. When the witness attempted to apprehend the man, he reportedly fled.
Villagers then rushed the girl to a public health centre in Kuldharan, but doctors declared her dead on arrival.
Close to 5,000 CRPF personnel will soon be guarding the streets of Kashmir, after the Government rushed a further 2,000 troops to the violence-hit Valley.
Clashes between police and protesters have left 39 people dead and over 3100 wounded over the past week.
Violence erupted in the Valley following the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani, who had become a poster boy for militancy in the state.
On the streets: Paramilitary troops march back to their base during the curfew in Srinagar, J&K
Officials said the 20 additional companies will add to the 2,800 CRPF sent to assist the state police last week.
The additional reinforcements will be deployed to further enhance the security arrangements in the Valley. Some fresh units will exclusively work to secure the movement of security forces convoys, a senior official said.
About 60 battalions, each with about 1,000 personnel, are already stationed in the state as part of a counter-insurgency grid.
A curfew remained in force in Kashmir and normal life was paralysed for the ninth day on Sunday.
Clashes: A Kashmiri protester throws back an exploded tear smoke shell at Indian police and paramilitary soldiers during clashes in Srinagar
Cows feed from a pile of garbage lying unattended on a road during the ninth straight day of curfew in Srinagar
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed satisfaction that political parties were speaking with one voice over the developments in Kashmir, and asserted that it has sent the right message to the country.
His comments came during an all-party meeting convened ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament.
Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh on Sunday said the government was taking various measures to restore peace in the Valley.
He said only a handful of people are involved in fomenting trouble, and there is a need to isolate and expose them, while interacting with the members of various social and religious organisations.
Still no internet in J&K
Only BSNL mobile services are presently connecting stricken Kashmir with the rest of the country.
Inter-exchange calls have been suspended on all telephone connections, except the mobile services of the public sector, due to the prevailing law and order situation.
Landline telephone connections in three districts were snapped on Saturday, and inter-exchange calls for all landline connections in the Valley ceased on Sunday.
Customers are unable to make calls to any phone outside their home district.
Broadband internet services have also been downed across the Valley. No police or civil administration official was willing to comment on the development. PTI
Schools stay closed in the Valley
Schools and colleges in the Valley, which were scheduled to reopen on Monday after a 17-day summer vacation, will now open on July 25, after the Jammu and Kashmir government extended the vacation by one week.
Education Minister Naeem Akhtar said that the decision to extend the holiday was taken in view of the ongoing law and order problems in the Valley.
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.
An Iraqi woman patient was allegedly molested by an employee at a prominent hospital chain, Fortis Memorial and Research Institute (FMRI), in Gurugram.
The police registered a case only after the Iraqi Embassy intervened, however.
The incident reportedly occurred on the hospital premises, where the woman was admitted for a liver infection after suffering abdominal pain.
The alleged incident occurred on May 5, 2016, while she was an in-patient at the hospital.
An Iraqi woman who was allegedly molested inside Fortis Hospital in Gurugram wrote to the embassy for help, after local police reportedly refused to register an FIR. (File picture)
The victim contacted the police station to register her complaint but was turned down by the local police, she claimed. The woman then approached the Iraqi Embassy, which took note of the matter.
The embassy shot a letter to the External Affairs Ministry, which in turn wrote to Gurugram Police recommending an FIR.
The hospital, though a high-security zone, is in the Millennium City, which police sources say has always been vulnerable to crimes against women. However, they say this was a new low.
When contacted, an official spokesperson of FMRI Gurugram said: This is a case dating back two months, allegedly involving a contractual worker employed by an external agency. The worker was immediately relieved of his duties. The external agency is co-operating fully with the concerned authorities, who are looking into the matter.
FIR Hawa Singh, the PRO of Gurugram police, confirmed that an FIR has been registered under the IPC section 354A at the Sushant Lok police station on the basis of a letter received from the MEA Headquarters in New Delhi.
In a letter received from the External Affairs Ministry, the victim has claimed that she was molested inside the hospital by an unknown employee. It was an old incident, still we have been verifying with the hospital officials, Hawa Singh told Mail Today.
Delay
He added: The victim has not approached the local police following the incident, which was reported in May. The investigation is underway and the management of Fortis hospital has been asked to submit the CCTV footage of that day."
The victim has been asked to record a statement about the case before a magistrate.
It is alleged that although the hospital knew about the claims against the employee and he was relieved of his duties, Gurugram Police have still registered an FIR against an unknown person.
Sources have even suggested that the local police deliberately delayed registering the FIR in order to have the CCTV evidence destroyed automatically.
The government has reached out to the Kashmiris who clashed with security forces after the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani, saying people in the state are being willfully led astray.
The government admitted that the situation in Kashmir was a matter of concern, but rejected the claim that violence in the Valley was a result of the BJP getting into power in the state.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh made clear in the Rajya Sabha on Monday that while terrorism needs to be dealt with sternly, the use of bullets on protesting mobs is not an option.
Patients' attendants stand in a queue for food at Kashmir's lone maternity hospital
An Indian policeman removes burning tyres set up as barricade by protesters during clashes in Srinagar
Kashmiris are our own people. We will bring them on the right path...We will make them aware of the reality, he said.
Recalling former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayees famous remarks of Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat and Insaniyat (kashmiriyat, democracy and humanity), he said: If there is any place for Kashmiriyat in Jamhooriyat (democracy), it can be only on the basis of Insaniyat (humanity) and not Haivaniyat (devilish acts). Those believing in Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat, cannot give space to haivaniyat.
The home minister said Pakistan has been fanning trouble in the state. The country's name is Pakistan, but its acts are na-pak (not pious), Singh said.
Singh said he would look into the use of pellet guns, which is blamed for most civilian injuries. He said he would talk to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti about the concern.
Kashmiri Pandits hold a demonstration against the clashes in the Valley
The home minister said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he himself had asked security forces to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with mob violence, which started after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
Singh said he had expressed his desire to visit Kashmir and start a dialogue with the people last Saturday.
The state's chief minister Mehbooba Mufti told him she welcomed the offer, and that when the situation normalises somewhat she will come to Delhi and meet him to discuss in what format talks can be held.
Slamming the government, the Opposition pressed for an all-party meeting to discuss the issue and pitched for a political solution rather than the violence.
Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said that while his party stands with the Modi government and the coalition in the state to deal firmly with militancy, the excessive use of force against the common citizens, including children and women, is not acceptable.
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.
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.
As the drug lords relaxed by the pool sipping cocktails, they took turns to congratulate the friend who had invited them all to his wedding party.
Wealthy businessman Bob Musella worked the crowd of traffickers in 1988, who trusted him implicitly after he had laundered millions of their dollars from the heroin trade.
But the party was actually a rouse, the wedding was a fake and the 'couple' were both undercover US Customs agents who had spent the last two years duping them.
Even the 50 'family and friends' sipping drinks and making polite conversation were federal agents in disguise.
By the end of the night dozens of Colombian cartel bankers and high-ranking dealers had been arrested in one of the biggest takedowns in the history of US Customs.
Scroll down for video
US Customs agent Bob Mazur posed as a wealthy businessman in the 1980s to get in with drug lords from South America
Mazur's extraordinary story has been turned into a film with Bryan Cranston (left, with co-star John Leguizamo), the star of Breaking bad, in the lead role
Musella was actually Bob Mazur who had just been acting the part by partying in $1,000-per-night hotels, driving in a Rolls-Royce convertible and flying around on private jets.
He and his 'wife', undercover agent Kathy Ertz, were at the center of Operation C-Chase which led to the arrest of 85 people associated with the cartels in Medellin, Colombia.
In one night they also shut down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), then the seventh largest bank in the world, which laundered much of their money.
Mazur's extraordinary story has been turned into a film with Bryan Cranston, the star of Breaking bad, in the lead role.
Not that Mazur will be seen in any promotional material for 'The Infiltrator', which is directed by Brad Furman.
To this day he refuses to be photographed for fear the cartels will come after him - and will only give interviews with his face blacked out.
Mazur grew up in a blue collar Italian American family on Staten Island in New York and majored in business at Wagner College.
The only way to make the case work was for me to lie to them over and over. I had tricked myself into thinking I liked them, and I was paying the emotional price for it. - Bob Mazur
He married his high school sweetheart Evelyn and got a job with the Intelligence Division of the IRS because he thought it sounded exciting.
Mazur soon realized it was far more dangerous than he had realized.
During an early encounter a drug gang enforcer who told him about his 'hit kit', a Mac-10 machine gun with silencer, a hand grenade, a .380 automatic, and surgical gloves.
The same enforcer once threw a drug dealer who owed him some money into a freshly dug grave and started throwing dirt on him. The man paid up.
Mazur's first assignment was a three-month detail to Tampa, Florida, as part of a taskforce with US Customs.
His first fake identity was Robert Mangione; his cover was that who kept the books for another agent called Buddy Weinstein who was posing as a cocaine dealer.
Their first target was Bruce Perlowin who was importing 40,000 tons of heroin a year worth $30million from Thailand and Columbia into the United States.
A year and a half of undercover work produced enough secret recordings to convict him.
But the day before agents raided their business, one of Perlowin's accountant's invited Mazur to his home and thanked God for 'bringing this wonderful human being' into their lives.
In his book, The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel, Mazur writes that after they were all arrested, he wrestled with his betrayal.
Mazur and another undercover agent staged a fake wedding to take down drug lords who associated with the cartels in Medellin, Colombia
Seized cash from a cartel salesman during one of Mazur's busts was hidden in multiple suitcases
When panels were pulled back, thousands of dollars in cash belonging to the cartel salesman was revealed
He writes: 'The only way to make the case work was for me to lie to them over and over. I had tricked myself into thinking I liked them, and I was paying the emotional price for it.
'I had betrayed their deepest trust... but I was just doing my job.
'I never lost sight of who I was and why I was there, and yet the gravity of interacting with them so closely made me susceptible to their pain.
'To some degree, I did care about them; you can't fake that - not for months or years. Some see this as a weakness, but for me it's the cost of doing the right thing, a kind of collateral damage. It was my willingness to expose myself to that pain that allowed me to win the hearts of my targets.'
Such anxieties would plague him through his biggest assignment, spending two years infiltrating the Colombian drug cartels in his new role working undercover for US Customs.
Mazur adopted the identity of Musella, a dead man that he found in a graveyard and chose because his birthday was close to his own.
With the help of some friends in banking and business he spent 18 months creating his fake identity, a millionaire with interests in an investment company, a mortgage firm and costume-jewelry who wanted to launder drug money.
The film starring Craston was released in theaters in the United States on July 13
To look the part he splashed out $1,000 on Italian suits and rented a Colonial style house with a huge TV, bar, pool and walk in safe in the closet.
Their entry point into the cartels was Gonzalo Mora Jr, a small time money broker in Medellin, who they figured would be interested in a financial backer with money to spend.
But they nearly blew it right at the start of the operation at an informant's house when Mazur became trapped in a closet while trying to record Mora's father.
Mazur ended up staying there all night and urinating in empty beer cans.
At one point Mazur Sr tried to open the closet door thinking it was the toilet but the deadbolt held.
Right away the cash started coming in from Mora Jr with payments between $25,000 and $250,000.
In their dealings they used codes for each city; La Playa (the beach) was Miami, Los Torres (the towers) was New York and La Tia (the aunt) was Los Angeles.
And soon they were dealing with one of Mora's superiors, a man called Roberto Alciano who gave him the chilling warning on their first meeting: 'We don't allow mistakes. Mistakes are costly. Sometimes they cost a lot more than money.'
Mazur began laundering even larger amounts for Medellin cartels - more than $10million a month - through their account at BCCI bank in Panama, which was so corrupt it helped them to do so.
To Mazur's shock he also discovered it was also the personal bank of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who was in power at the time.
Mazur writes: 'We were deeper inside the cartel hierarchy than any undercover agents had gone before, and had made the only covert entry ever into a $40billion bank operating as the world's largest money-laundering machine'.
Mazur's job took over his life and on the rare occasions where he got to see his family the calls from work were constant.
Once while driving he says that his wife 'stared out the window, her body language screaming her unhappiness'.
His children knew not to say a word when their father was on the phone.
Meanwhile the job was getting him deeper and deeper into the cartel.
As the US authorities began to investigate the links to Noriega, Amjad Anwan, an executive at the BCCI bank, suggested that Mazur get $750,000 that was stuck in Panama out of the country by chartering a plane and flying it to Uruguay.
The plan was rejected by his superiors as too risky.
On a trip to Disneyland Mora asked to take Mazur's picture which he could not allow in case it got into the hands of the cartels.
So when Mora wasn't looking he opened the back of the camera and exposed the film roll, meaning that the pictures were useless.
Mazur was eventually invited to San Jose, Costa Rica, to meet Javier Ospina, a lieutenant of Gerardo Moncada, the right-hand man to Pablo Escobar.
A trip to Paris sealed the arrangement; Mazur would launder $100million from the traffickers through BCCI - and he had it all on tape.
Mazur (Cranston's portrayal pictured above) even staged a fake wedding to take down drug lords who associated with the cartels in Medellin, Colombia
The staged wedding led to the arrest of 85 people associated with the cartels in Medellin, Colombia. Pictured above is Cranston's portrayal of Mazur in The Infiltrator
There was only one major hiccup before they decided to wrap the whole thing up, but it could have ruined everything.
Speaking to the New York Daily News, Mazur said that during a meeting with a member of the cartel who was already suspicious of him, a Velcro strip holding the recording device to a hidden compartment in his briefcase fell off.
He had seconds to fix it before the drug runner - who would have killed him if he saw it - stood up to accept the Swiss Bank records inside.
Mazur writes: 'He was on the other side so he could only see the top of the briefcase, so he couldn't see what was happening inside.
'The top of the hidden compartment fell down, exposing the recorder and a nest of wires and I was trying to remain calm trying to put this thing together while trying not to look like I was putting it back together
'I got it back in position, just before he reached over to get the records. And my heart was pounding because if I didn't get that back in time it would have been a major problem'.
Mazur's bosses told him it was time to wind things up, so he staged the fake wedding in October 1988 near Tampa, Florida.
I got my high obtaining information that nobody else could. - Bob Mazur
In his memoir Mazur writes that the wedding was due to take place under a white canopy at Innisbrook's Harstan Lawn in Florida.
Among the gifts from his drug lord friends were $20,000 of red Colombian roses and a $40,000 antique Persian rug that had been flown in from Panama.
White Greek columns lined the property along with dozens of Boston ferns to guarantee privacy.
The night before the wedding Mazur hosted the cocktail party and one of his colleagues announced that there would be a bachelor party at a club nearby.
Limos had been arranged to take all the men there there in small groups to which nobody objected.
But when they arrived they were met by the 'maitre d' who was actually Mike Powers, the agent in charge of the Tampa DEA office.
Instead of going up to the bar on the 26th floor, he took them to the third where each group and was met by armed agents shouting: 'Down on the ground! You're under arrest'
When all the arrests were done, Mazur spent 18-hour days transcribing 1,400 field recordings he had made, and in March 1990 he testified against the six BCCI executives who had laundered the cartels' money.
By that point Mazur had a $500,000 contract on his head, his family had been relocated and they were living under an assumed name.
On the day of the first of the trials Mazur was led into the US District Court in Tampa and had to face the families of those he had betrayed, their look saying: 'How could you?'
But for him, doing the job was worth it.
Mazur never touched any drugs and instead simply loved living the life of an undercover agent.
Thailand's infamous sex industry is under fire as its first female tourism minister vows to shut down the country's brothels and go-go bars.
Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul wants rich holiday-makers to flock to Thailand for its beauty and luxury and not its seedy red light districts.
But those working 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.
Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul wants rich holiday-makers to flock to Thailand for its beauty and luxury and not its seedy red light districts
The tourism minister is 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.
Thailand is predominantly Buddhist and deeply conservative, but is home to an extensive sex industry, largely catering to Thai men, while 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.
Tourism Minister Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul played down the role of the sex industry in drawing visitors.
'Tourists don't come to Thailand for such a thing. They come here for our beautiful culture,' Kobkarn said.
'We want Thailand to be about quality tourism. We want the sex industry gone.'
Prostitution is illegal in Thailand but the law is almost invariably ignored.
Experts say it will be hard to rid Thailand of an industry that is so entrenched and that provides pay-offs to untold numbers of officials and policemen.
Those trying to promote the welfare of sex workers say Kobkarn's goal is unrealistic.
Her push comes amid an attempt by the country's tourism authorities to transform Thailand into a luxury destination to attract rich holiday-makers.
The military government is in denial about the proliferation of prostitution and its contribution to the economy and tourism, said Panomporn Utaisri, country director of NightLight, a Christian non-profit group that helps women in the sex trade to find alternative work.
'There's no denying this industry generates a lot of income,' said Panomporn.
There are no government estimates of the value of Thailand's sex industry, or how much of the income from tourism comes from sex tourists.
But those working 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
There are about 123,530 sex workers in Thailand, according to a 2014 UNAIDS report, compared with 37,000 sex workers in neighbouring Cambodia.
There are about 123,530 sex workers in Thailand, according to a 2014 UNAIDS report, compared with 37,000 sex workers in neighbouring Cambodi
Last month, police raided dozens of brothels in major cities in what they said was a routine operation.
Police said they were looking to prosecute venues employing underage and illegal migrant workers, but only one of the venues raided was shut down.
There was no link between the tourism minister's aim to rid Thailand of its sex tourism industry and the raids, a police spokesman said.
The tourism sector accounts for about 10 percent of gross domestic product and sex worker groups said the minister's vision of a prostitution-free Thailand would dent that.
'The police presence already drives off a number of clients who come to relax or drink at bars,' said Surang Janyam, director of Service Workers in Group (SWING), which provides sex workers with free medical care and vocational training.
'Wiping out this industry is guaranteed to make Thailand lose visitors and income.'
Many sex workers come from the impoverished northeast and see selling their bodies as a way out of poverty.
One former sex worker from the northeastern province of Maha Sarakham, who declined to be identified, saids she entered Bangkok's sex trade at the age of 19 and earned up to 5,000 baht ($143.14) a night, nearly 20 times the minimum wage of 300 baht ($8.59) per day.
'No one wants to work in this business, but it's fast and easy money,' she said.
NightLight and SWING said they would welcome the sex industry's closure if the government had a plan to ensure that sex workers could support themselves without falling back into the business.
A man claiming to have escaped North Korea was taken in by police after he was found walking the streets in drenched clothing more than 500 miles away from his home.
The unidentified man was wandering in Nagato city on Saturday morning saying he had left the capital of North Hamgyong, Chongjin, on a wooden boat.
Having left on Friday to escape police who were chasing him for watching South Korean videos, he is said to have jumped into the sea clutching a plastic container and floated ashore.
The unidentified man was wandering in Nagato city on Saturday morning saying he had left the capital of North Hamgyong, Chongjin, on a wooden boat
The suspected North Korean defector is understood to be in his 20s, according to CNN, and was fleeing police who were chasing him after Asahi Shimbun say he was caught watching the South Korean videos.
He was found on Saturday morning, 523 miles from Chongjin, wearing a sodden black t-shirt and trousers.
Although he told officials he was born in 1990, he had no identification to prove who he was.
Nearly 30,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression at home under Kim Jong-un (pictured) to settle in the capitalist South
After questioning, the police will hand him over to immigration authorities to determine whether he is a North Korean defector who needs protection and assistance, Kyodo News said.
A local police spokesman declined to confirm the reports.
Nine North Koreans were picked up by Japan's coastguard in 2011 after spending five days at sea.
They then travelled to South Korea to settle there.
A plane carrying four people who were going home after attending an upstate New York party crashed, killing three people and leaving one injured.
A single-engine Piper PA-28 crashed about 6.45pm Saturday in a heavily wooded area and was destroyed by fire, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The three victims were pronounced dead by county coroner Matthew Coltrain on Saturday night, Schoharie County Sheriff Tony Desmond said. Autopsies are scheduled for Monday.
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A plane carrying four people who were going home after attending an upstate New York party crashed, killing three people and leaving one injured
A single-engine Piper PA-28 crashed about 6.45pm Saturday in a heavily wooded area and was destroyed by fire, according to the Federal Aviation Administration
Desmond said that a fourth person was transported to a burn unit at Westchester Medical Center. Details on the survivor's condition weren't immediately available.
Desmond said the plane was taking off from a private airport in the town of Esperance when it crashed about 1,000 feet from the facility.
He said it's believed it was headed for Connecticut.
Esperance Fire Chief Matthew Deffer told News10 the group of out-of-staters had flown in to attend a party held by the Hogan Airport owners -- and the crash happened during the group's flight back.
Deffer said: 'They did fly in on that plane and joined the family for a gathering and then they were just taking off to go home.'
The three victims were pronounced dead by county coroner Matthew Coltrain on Saturday night, Schoharie County Sheriff Tony Desmond said
Desmond said the plane was taking off from a private airport in the town of Esperance when it crashed about 1,000 feet from the facility
Fire Chief Matthew Deffer has said the group of out-of-staters had flown in to attend a party held by the Hogan Airport owners. A photo from the Albany Times-Union shows a hangar at the airport
He told News10 that he thinks the pilot is in his 40s or 50s and was the lone survivor.
Deffer told TWC News: 'It sounded like the engines lost power and that the plane started to decrease in the air. And it went down into the trees and that's when we received the call.'
According to the TV station, flames demolished the aircraft.
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.
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.
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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.
Queensland senator Pauline Hanson has urged Aboriginal elder Murrandoo Yanner to contact her office so the pair can 'work together' after he slammed her as a 'racist redneck' at an art fair.
Video emerged on Saturday of Ms Hanson and her staff being verbally abused by Mr Yanner at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in Far North Queensland, with the Gulf Aboriginal leader accusing her of 'kicking the Muslims around'.
On Sunday, Ms Hanson posted a video to her Facebook page saying while the incident was a 'shame,' the pair could 'make a big difference' if they joined forces.
'This man stands for a lot of issues that I stand for as well and I have spoken out about 20 years ago,' Ms Hanson said in the clip, while reading off an iPad and sitting on a picturesque beach.
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Queensland senator Pauline Hanson (pictured) has urged Aboriginal elder Murrandoo Yanner to contact her office so the pair can 'work together' in a two-minute clip posted to her Facebook page on Sunday
Video emerged on Saturday of Ms Hanson and her staff being verbally abused by Mr Yanner (pictured) at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in Far North Queensland
'He doesn't like politicians. Well, neither do I, because I don't trust them and we need to work together on that. Let's bring accountability'.
Ms Hanson also said she has received ongoing support from well-known Indigenous artist Ken Thaiday and has spoken on Aboriginal radio.
'[They were] very happy to see me elected to the senate and we're going to have a working relationship,' she said in the two-minute clip.
'I've had photos with a lot of Aboriginals'.
The Queensland senator said she has spoken out about violence and alcoholism in Aboriginal communities, but claims to have not received the same support as when Aboriginal lawyer and rights activist Noel Pearson discussed the same issues.
On Sunday, Ms Hanson posted a video to her Facebook page saying while the incident was a 'shame,' the pair could 'make a big difference'
Murrandoo Yanner told Ms Hanson she was a 'racist' - he is pictured here at a protest for Aboriginal deaths in custody
The controversial senator elect smiled and walked away as she was being called a 'redheaded racist'. She is pictured here at a news conference in Brisbane on July 4
'I got called racist and Noel Pearson comes out and says it and gets a pat on the back,' she said.
'In 1998 I had a conference with the media and I had 12 women with their kids holding up my hand above their heads, saying: "We've been hoping and praying for someone like Pauline Hanson to come along and help us",' she said in the clip.
She ended her speech by placing the iPad on the ground beside her and reminding Mr Yanner she is his 'representative' and to contact her.
'This man stands for a lot of issues that I stand for as well and I have spoken out about 20 years ago,' Ms Hanson said about Mr Yanner, while reading off an iPad and sitting on a picturesque beach
Ms Hanson walked away with a smile as onlookers applauded Mr Yanner on his verbal tyrade
On Saturday, Mr Yanner thrust his water bottle into the air in anger as he told the senator to 'go back to Ipswich and your fish and chip shop'.
'You are intellectually dishonest and you are not welcome here,' he said.
As Ms Hanson and her team walked away from the confrontation Mr Yanner was congratulated with cheers and clapping from the crowd.
A spectator caught the rant on camera and uploaded it to Facebook where it quickly went viral.
Mr Yanner is well known for being outspoken about the rights of Aboriginal people and their culture and is currently the directer of the Carpentaria Land Council Aboriginal Corporation.
Snack bars with 'healthy-sounding' names and pictures of fruit on the packaging trick customers into thinking they contain real fruit, consumer advocacy group Choice says.
Their latest review of 224 cereal, muesli, nut, seed and raw snack bars available in Australian supermarkets found some products were packed with added sugars but masked their contents with references to 'natural' ingredients such as fruit and yoghurt.
The Choice report said often, the packaging on many bars projected a healthy image with images whole grains, fruits and nuts, as well as names like 'All Natural Bakery, Be Natural and Go Natural'.
People would be surprised that many were in fact loaded with saturated fat and sugar, comparable with confectionery, according to the report.
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The packaging on many bars projected a healthy image with images whole grains, fruits and nuts, as well as names like 'Nature Valley'
People would be surprised that many were in fact loaded with saturated fat and sugar, comparable with confectionery, according to the report
Many snack bars had misleading packaging including names, the Choice consumer group report said
Kellogg's Raspberry & Apple K-Time Twists contain just four per cent raspberry juice concentrate and no raspberry whole fruit
Aldi's Hillcrest Chewy Muesli Bars show strawberries but only contain 'strawberry flavoured fruit pieces'
Choice's Tom Godfrey says the real fruit content in some snack bars was 'farcical', with Kellogg's Raspberry & Apple K-Time Twists containing just four per cent raspberry juice concentrate and no raspberry whole fruit.
For example, Aldi's Hillcrest Chewy Muesli Bars in Strawberry & Yoghurt flavour had a picture of a strawberry on the box, but the bars actually contain 'strawberry flavoured fruit pieces'.
Spokespeople from both defended their products, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Aldi's spokesperson said it was 'proud of [its] truthful and transparent on-pack labelling' and said it encouraged consumers to look at ingredients stated on packaging.
A Kellogg spokesperson pointed out the K-Time Twists box said 'raspberry and apple flavour... Any images of fruit are to show the flavour you can expect'.
They also said they had recently began using new packaging for the product that showed 'minimal' fruit.
Kellogg's LCM's Split Stix Yoghurty were rated by Choice as some of the least healthy snack bars, with a health star rating of one
Coles Nut Bars Choc Coated Nut and Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Bars also scored one on the health star rating
But Mr Godfrey told the Sydney Morning Herald : 'It's a stretch to depict actual fruit on pack'.
Obesity Policy Coalition executive manager Jane Martin said brands had a responsibility to be honest about what was in their products.
'The use of a real raspberry on a product suggests to consumers that the product contains real fruit.'
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that sugars could be listed on packaging under 40 different names.
That had resulted in calls for legislation to require the disclosure of added sugars.
Among some of the healthiest bars reviewed by Choice with high health star ratings about 4.5 or five were Food for Health Cinnamon Hazelnut and Chia Bars, Soma Bite Goji and Chia and Emma and Tom's Chia Bar Cacao.
Some of the least health, which received health star ratings of one, were Coles Nut Bars Choc Coated Nut, Fontelle Oven Baked Mini Meal Choc Chip and Hillcrest (Aldi) Chewy Muesli Bars Strawberry and Yoghurt.
A Coles spokesperson told the Sydney Morning Herald its products had detailed ingredient lists and also had health star ratings.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE HEALTHIEST AND LEAST HEALTHY SNACK BARS? TYPE HEALTH STAR RATING (1-5) SATURATED FATS(g/100g) SUGARS(g/100g) SODIUM(mg/100g)
Emma & Tom's Chia Bar Cacao
5 1.1 21.4 43 Uncle Toby's Farmer's Pick Roasted Macadamia & Almond 4.5 1.9 13.3 21 Soma Bite Goji & Chia 5 3 27 3.4 Food for Health Cinnamon Hazelnut & Chia Bars 4.5 2.2 8.1 35 Go Natural Almond Cashew Peanuts & Seeds 4.5 4.8 10 87 Coles Nut Bars Choc Coated Nut 1 16.6 30.4 85 Kellogg's LCM's Split Stix Yoghurty 1 12 34.2 225 Hillcrest (Aldi) Chewy Muesli Bars Strawberry & Yoghurt 1 11.7 28.1 74 Fontelle Oven Baked Mini Meal Choc Chip 1 18.8 28.7 156 Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Bars 1 7.6 36.6 255
These dramatic images capture the destruction caused to Turkey's central parliament building after it was ripped apart by bombs and gunfire during the country's failed military coup.
The Grand National Assembly was bombarded by rebel jets as helicopters fired into crowds and tanks barrelled through the streets of Ankara.
MPs who were inside the main chamber ran for cover as a bomb blast shook the building while parliament was still in session. Many then remained as a show of loyalty towards President Erdogan.
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Blown apart: Images taken inside Turkey's parliament reveal the damage caused to the prime minister's office
Destroyed: The building was struck by missiles and machine gun fire during the failed military coup last week
Carnage: Shattered glass and debris covers the floor of the parliament building in the centre of Ankara
Sky News cameras were given an exclusive tour of the parliament building as the fallout of the failed military coup continued today.
Videos and images shows debris and rubble strewn across the halls of the grand building. Outside, a fallen tree lies just feet from a massive bomb crater.
Sky News spoke to Mehdi Eker, a prominent MP and co-chair of the ruling Law and Justice party.
He said: 'This attack to the identity of the nation because this building symbolises the unity of the Turkish nation', adding: 'This type of attack is brutal, totally brutal you know, it is very sad'.
Mr Eker showed the news team around the parliament building. At one point he gestured towards the prime minister's office, on one of the parliament's upper floors.
The wall and windows of the room were completely destroyed in the attack, blown apart by the first bomb to strike the building.
The prime minister was not injured in the attack because he was on holiday at the time.
Left in ruin: Footage taken inside the building shows chunks of ceiling on the floor and debris on the carpet
Safety tape has been put up around the building since the attack. Pointing to one of the damaged walls, Mr Eker said: 'It is not safe to go over there. There are places where bombs directly hit'.
Meeting rooms are completely covered in debris while wires dangle from the ceilings. Speaking from inside one bomb blasted room, Mr Eker described how he and his fellow MPs remained on site in the wake of the strikes.
'We stayed for the whole night to defend and to do whatever is necessary,' he said.
The dramatic footage emerged as Turkeys president 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.
Former Turkish President Abdullah Gul, right, President Erdogan, second from right, Grand National Assembly President Ismail Kahraman, centre, and former PM Ahmet Davutoglu attend the funeral service for victims
Thousands of pro-Erdogan supporters gathered in Taksim Square in Istanbul on Sunday night
Pro-Erdogan demonstrators wave the flag of the Syrian opposition at Taksim square in Istanbul
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.
Previously released images show the damage at the Grand National Assembly after it was bombed
The courtyard of the government building, pictured, was covered in debris in the wake of the attack
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.
A toddler is dead after drowning in the bath at his family home on Sunday afternoon.
Police have been called to the property at least five times in the past four months, neighbours said.
One neighbour said a man was wheeled out of the house on a stretcher shortly after the child's body was carried out, Adelaide Now reported.
A toddler drowned to death in a tragic incident at his family home in south Adelaide (pictured)
Neighbours said they had been forced to call police to deal with arguments at the property (pictured) at least five times in the past four months
The house, in southern Adelaide, is believed to belong to a couple and their two young children aged 10 and 12 months.
A neighbour said they had called police a number of times to deal with arguments at the property.
Police said the toddlers death was not suspicious but they would not be releasing any more information.
Emergency services were called to the property in Tracy Way, Morphett Vale, around 1.45pm on Sunday.
Image of a couple performing sexually explicit acts is open on the screen
He appears to be looking at
A shopper took a photo of the man and uploaded it to
A middle-aged man has been caught casually browsing an X-rated website on a public computer at Sydney's Apple Store.
A shopper snapped the culprit and uploaded the image titled 'Spotted this guy in the Sydney Apple Store... NSFW [not safe for work]' to Reddit on Monday.
The man appears to be browsing the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist - a classified advertisements website - while inside the busy Apple store on George Street, in the middle of the city.
A middle-aged man has been caught casually browsing an X-rated website on a public computer at Sydney's Apple Store (pictured)
The man appears to be browsing the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist - a classified advertisements website - while inside the busy Apple store on George Street (pictured)
'Nothing like browsing the casual encounters section of CL on a public computer,' one user posted in reply to the picture.
The image shows a middle-aged man with glasses hunched over a laptop, resting his hand on his cheek as he casually browses through porn as if no one is watching.
'Don't you just love the classic, nonchalant "oh, I'm just reading the news" expression on the guys face?,' said one user.
An image of a man and a woman performing sexually explicit acts is open on the screen as he sits directly across from another man on a laptop and shoppers walk past.
It seems the public porn browser doesn't value his privacy very highly.
'I hope you or someone else that noticed called him out for being a freak, I can understand like a library, way back in a corner, but out in the open like that?,' another Reddit user wrote.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Apple for comment.
The image shows a middle-aged man with glasses hunched over a laptop, resting his hand on his cheek as he casually browses through porn as if no one is watching (stock image)
Thousands of British families with holidays booked in Turkey are scrambling to cancel their trips following the bloody attempted coup.
Travel agents say they have been deluged by calls from worried tourists wanting to cancel after seeing shocking footage emerge from the holiday hotspot.
Specialist Turkish travel agents are ruing the 'huge financial impact' that the attempted coup has had on their business over the weekend.
Travel agents say they have been deluged by calls from worried tourists wanting to cancel after seeing shocking footage emerge from the holiday hotspot
Many travelers have sought to change, delay or even cancel their trips altogether in the wake of Friday night's attempted military takeover.
The latest shock came on the back of a terrorist bombing of Ataturk airport in Istanbul last month that killed more than 40 people and left hundreds injured.
And the political turbulence is having a massive impact on the livelihoods of travel agents in the UK that specialise in travel to Turkey.
Itir Sokmen, of Tulip Holidays based in Harringay, north London, said: 'It's been a very, very busy weekend.
'We've had dozens of people on the phone since 7am wanting to delay their flights, some wanting to cancel their flights - it's been terrible.'
Many travelers have sought to change, delay or even cancel their trips altogether in the wake of Friday night's attempted military takeover
Tulip Holidays specialises in Turkish destinations as well as those in northern Cyprus and has seen a knock in new business and disruption to booked holidays since Friday night.
Ms Sokmen added: 'When the bombs went off in Istanbul last month, we had lots of British people wanting to delay or cancel their holidays.
'But now, with the coup, we have Turks and Kurds even wanting to change their trips.'
More than 2.5 million Brits travel to Turkey every year, according to the Foreign Office.
But with the current political turbulence in the country, those numbers are likely to diminish.
Ms Sokmen said: 'We've had almost no new inquiries this weekend about travel to Turkey.
'It's having a huge financial impact on us, and because the Foreign Office has not yet told people not to travel to Turkey, there are many flights that we cannot change.'
The latest advice from the Foreign Office states: 'The situation in Turkey appears to be calming following an attempted coup overnight on July 15-16.
The Foreign Office advises that the resort locations 'do not appear to be significantly affected at present' by the attempted coup
'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.'
Ms Sokmen added: 'Istanbul Ataturk Airport is a particular concern for most people, so many of the routes we use that change there are the ones people want to avoid.
'Others are not so bad - for example out flights to Cyrus and other destinations are not being effected so badly, but it's been a busy, busy weekend for us.'
British Airways cancelled all flights to and from the country on Saturday, but the airline said flights were now taking off again
The Foreign Office advises that the resort locations 'do not appear to be significantly affected at present'.
However Ms Sokmen said: 'We do use the resorts, we work with Thomas Cook, British Airways, EasyJet - and people are still concerned.
'Their biggest worry is avoiding Istanbul Airport. The resorts have been easier for us to deal with, but the concerns are there.'
Flights to and from Turkey are returning to normal after 294 people were killed in the attempted military coup.
The Foreign Office said that apart from Marmaris, the coastal resorts did not appear to be significantly affected but urged people to 'exercise vigilance in resort areas'.
Britons were advised to stay indoors following gunfire and explosions in Ankara and Istanbul as the unrest began to unfold on Friday night.
British Airways cancelled all flights to and from the country on Saturday, but the airline said flights were now taking off again.
The Foreign Office said the security situation in the country 'remains potentially volatile', adding that security operations were taking place and there were reports of gunfire.
Advice on the Foreign Office website said: 'Security operations to detain alleged perpetrators continue across the country, with reports of gunfire.
'We are aware of such action in Konya, Marmaris, Van and at Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul (which remains open and operating as normal). You should continue to exercise caution.
'Apart from Marmaris, 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.'
The Foreign Office said flights to and from airports in Turkey were returning to normal, but added that some disruption remained and people should check with the airline or tour operator before travelling.
The Foreign Office said flights to and from airports in Turkey were returning to normal, but added that some disruption remained and people should check with the airline or tour operator before travelling. People were still on the streets last night in reaction to the failed coup
It 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.'
A British Airways spokeswoman said flights would be operating on Monday, adding: 'Our flights to Turkey have resumed but we recommend that customers visit ba.com to check the status of their individual flight.'
Thomson and First Choice flights to Dalaman, Antalya, Izmir and Bodrum are operating as normal.
Airline easyJet flies from the UK to Antalya, Bodrum, Dalaman and Ismir in Turkey and said it had 12 flights to and from Turkey scheduled for Sunday, adding: 'Current advice from the British authorities is to continue our flying programme. This will be kept under continuous review.'
On Saturday Thomas Cook had been advising customers to 'stay in their hotels until further notice', but a later statement from the company - which offers holidays to places such as Marmaris, Bodrum and Antalya - said their flight and holiday programme was operating as normal and customers are enjoying their holidays.
The UK's largest travel association, Abta, said the situation remains 'fluid', adding: 'The vast majority of British travellers to Turkey will fly directly to the beach resorts on Turkey's south coast which are hundred of miles away from Istanbul and the capital Ankara.'
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.
A Korean woman was violently raped in the Cairns CBD in the early hours of Friday morning, and a Japanese woman was attacked by the same man just an hour later.
The 18-year-old attacker, who appears to be targeting Asian tourists, is facing charges of rape, torture and deprivation of liberty after he was arrested, found hiding in the mud near the Esplanade.
About 1am, Queensland Police allege a 21-year-old Korean woman was walking down Aplin Street when she was grabbed, dragged into bushes and sexually assaulted.
Police will also allege the tourist was choked until she was unconscious, according to the Cairns Post.
Just an hour later, a 28-year-old Japanese woman was riding a bicycle down the same street, when the same man grabbed her, pushed her off her bike and on to the ground.
After the horrific rape of a 21-year-old Korean woman, the attacker moved to his next victim, a 28-year-old Japanese woman
The man is accused of then punching her in the head and face, and is said to have fled on foot when a bystander came to the woman's rescues after hearing her scream.
The attacker then fled on his victim's bike, before a police manhunt found him hiding in mud near the Esplanade boardwalk.
Both women were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
The Cairns man, originally from Aurukun, was charged with five counts of common assault, four counts of rape, and one count each of attempted rape, deprivation of liberty, torture, sexual assault, assault with intent to commit rape, and robbery using personal violence.
He will face the Cairns Magistrates Court on Monday morning.
An LAPD officer confirmed that Playboy model Dani Mathers is under investigation after she shared a photograph of a naked gym-goer on Snapchat, sparking a massive backlash against the 'body shaming'.
Captain Andrew Neiman said officials from LA Fitness, where Mathers took the photo, reported the 'illegal distribution' to police, the LA Times reported.
Mathers, a 29-year-old who was crowned Playmate Of The Year 2015, shared an image of the unsuspecting woman along with a photo of her face with her hand over her mouth with the caption: 'If I can't unsee this then you can't either!'
She deleted the post and apologized, but critics raged on as Mathers was fired from her job at a radio station and banned from all LA Fitness gyms.
Mathers, 29, from Los Angeles, shared the image of the unsuspecting woman on her Story along with a photo of her face with her hand over her mouth with the caption: 'If I can't unsee this then you can't either!'
She has been suspended indefinitely from a regular radio show gig on The Heidi and Frank Show (pictured center with the hosts) on Los Angeles's 95.5 KLOS and banned from all LA Fitness facilities
'Her behavior is appalling and puts every member at risk of losing their privacy,' Jill Greuling, the company's executive vice president of operations, told the LA Times Friday.
'Our written rules are very clear: Cellphone usage and photography are prohibited in the locker rooms.'
Officials at LA Fitness went to police after seeing Mathers's snap, saying she 'egregiously violating a member's right of privacy by taking a pic of her while naked in the shower', TMZ reported.
Mathers is accused of disseminating private images of the unidentified woman who has been listed as 'Jane Doe' in the criminal report.
If the woman comes forward, Mathers could face up to six months in prison, otherwise the model may be off the hook.
Regardless, Mathers has already lost a radio show job and has been banned from all LA Fitness clubs.
On Friday, she was suspended indefinitely from a longtime radio show gig on The Heidi and Frank Show on Los Angeles's 95.5 KLOS, TMZ reported.
Meanwhile, an LA Fitness spokesman told TMZ that Mathers, who was confirmed as a member of the gym, 'is not permitted back at any club, ever.'
Following the incident, the gym notified police after verifying Mathers took the photo.
After the model sparked a firestorm of rage, Mathers quickly deleted the image and apologized for her actions.
Caya Hefner, Dani Mathers, Crystal Hefner, Carly Lauren, Amanda Vanderpool with Joanna Krupa and Marta Krupa in 2014
On Friday, she also sent an email to her fellow Playboy Playmates apologizing for her 'thoughtless and mean-spirited' Snapchat post, according to TMZ.
In the email, she reportedly called her actions a mistake, apologized for the 'negativity and hate that this has brought forward,' and said there was no excuse for her behavior before announcing she would lay low.
TMZ suggests she sent the apology email to her fellow Playmates because Mathers is worried that Playboy might take away her title.
After posting the photo, one Twitter user slammed her actions. Hollie Taylor wrote: '@DaniMathers it's people like you that make others feel uneasy about changing openly in locker rooms. appalling.'
Priscilla Sanchez added: '@DaniMathers that poor woman's naked body is now circulating the internet when she never intended it to. It's really heartbreaking.'
The Random Man tweeted: 'You owe that girl an apology!'
Bonnie Reynolds wrote: 'Stop. You aren't sorry you did it, you're sorry you got caught and are getting blasted.'
Holly Taylor added: 'Im grossed out you would post a photo of a naked woman's body in a locker room saying 'you can't unsee this' wow.'
Police Sausager said: 'This woman was at a m***********g GYM, the hell you looking at her body like it's deplorable?'
Mathers, who was crowned Playmate Of The Year 2015, quickly deleted the image and apologised for her actions after sparking a huge backlash
Mathers, who has 553,000 followers on Instagram, more than one million on Facebook and 75,100 on Twitter, was believed to have posted the picture after a workout session in LA Fitness Universal City.
In a video on her Snapchat Story after the controversy, she said: 'I just want to acknowledge a photo that I accidentally posted.
'It was absolutely wrong and not what I meant to do.
'I chose to do what I do for a living because I love the female body and I know body shaming is wrong, that's not what I'm about and this is not the type of person I am.
'The photo was taken as part of a personal conversation with a girlfriend and because I am new to Snapchat I didn't realize I had posted it, and that was a huge mistake.
'I know I have upset a lot of people out there but please believe me this is not the type of person that I am. I have never done this before and I will never do this again, you have my word.'
Alana Campos, Michelle McLaughlin, Raquel Pomplun, Ashley Doris, Dani Mathers and Hiromi Oshim in 2015
The model deleted the image and took to Snapchat once more to state how sorry she is about her mistake
She claimed the Snapchat story was meant to be private, which infuriated social media users even more. Mathers apologized on numerous platforms before saying she would take some time to reflect on her actions
She also posted an apology message on Facebook - which has now been deleted - including a plea for forgiveness.
'Women make my world go round, I have nothing short of respect for women, I surround myself with women and work hard at empowering our community... and I completely understand how terrible this was and is.
'Please please know how upset I am with myself for this and take my word that it won't happen again.
'I love and appreciate every one of you and know that everyone is beautiful in their own way, that's what makes us all so special.
'I can't undo this mistake, although I would give anything to, but I ask your forgiveness.
'This has truly made me realize that some of the things that we do or say can seem silly in the moment or in (in this case,what was meant to be) a private conversation, aren't necessary.
'All I've done here is spread negativity and hatred when that isn't who I am or what I've ever been about.'
Mathers also took to Twitter to apologize, reiterating her message before ending with: '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. Goodnight.'
A University of California, Berkeley, student has been confirmed as one of the 84 victims of last week's terror attack in the French Riviera.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was a junior at the university's College of Natural Resources and was studying technology entrepreneurship at the European Innovation Academy in the Mediterranean city of Nice as part of Berkeley's Study Abroad program.
Leslie, from the San Diego area, and two other foreign students enrolled in the academy were reported missing after Thursday's massacre, which occurred on Bastille Day, a national holiday.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, (seen left on the July 14th - Bastille Day - hours before the attack) was confirmed as having been killed in the Nice attack on Thursday evening in France
In a statement, the university said Leslie's death was reported to campus officials by the FBI.
'This is tragic, devastating news,' said university chancellor Nicholas Dirks. 'All of us in the UC Berkeley family - both here on campus, and around the world - are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence.
'I join Nicks parents, friends and the entire campus community in condemning this horrific attack, and in mourning the loss of one of our own,' he added.
Leslie's death was confirmed after an extensive search by his family, friends and fellow students, who had been distributing fliers in Nice asking for any information on his whereabouts.
His family had hoped he dodged the truck and was one of the injured victims in hospital after he failed to return to his student housing unit.
He is the third American to be confirmed dead in the attack.
Leslie, who was born in Italy and moved with his family to the San Diego suburb of Del Mar, was watching Bastille Day fireworks on the seafront when a mass murderer deliberately drove a truck into a crowd.
Two other students enrolled in the European Innovation Academy program are still unaccounted for, said Annie Seneard, a spokesman for the Nice branch of the academy.
They are Misha Bazelevsky, a 22-year-old Ukrainian national who is studying at MacEwan University in the Canadian city of Edmonton, and 21-year-old Estonian Rickard Kruusberg.
Nicolas Leslie, pictured with his mother, was a junior in UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources
Leslie (right) is pictured above with his uncle and an unidentified woman on the beach in Nice in 2015
Three other UC Berkeley students were injured in the massacre on the crowded Promenade des Anglais.
Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, a senior computer science major in the College of Letters and Science, sustained a broken leg, and Diane Huang, 20, a senior majoring in environmental economics and policy in the College of Natural Resources, suffered a broken foot.
Both have been released from hospital.
A third student, 21-year-old Daryus Medora, who suffered a broken leg, remains in hospital. He is an undeclared sophomore in the College of Letters and Science.
They, along with Leslie, were among 85 students on a 15-day study abroad trip.
Police shot and killed the truck driver, 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was born in Tunisia and moved to Nice when he was a child.
The attack left 84 people dead - including at least 10 children - and more than 200 injured.
Texas father Sean Copeland, 51, and his 11-year-old son, Brodie, were among those killed. The family was from the Austin area and was traveling through Europe on a summer vacation.
Leslie (second from right) was watching the Bastille Day fireworks on the seafront when he was killed
Leslie (left) was born in Italy and moved with his family to the San Diego suburb of Del Mar
Texas father Sean Copeland, 51, (left) and his son, Brodie, 11, (right), were also killed in the attack in Nice
UC Berkeley said Leslie was an environmental sciences major who had been planning to begin studies at the Haas School of Business in the fall.
It said counselors are offering support to some 60 Berkeley students who are still in Nice. A vigil is planned for Monday afternoon at the Berkeley campus.
Leslie, an avid outdoorsman who grew up near the ocean and loved surfing and scuba diving, was a senior associate at Net Impact, a student-run group that provides consulting to non-profit organizations, social enterprises and businesses focused on environmental sustainability.
The Nice attack is the second tragedy this month involving UC Berkeley students who were studying or working abroad.
Tarishi Jain, an 18-year-old sophomore, was among the hostages killed in a terror attack at a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh, two weeks ago.
Jain, an Indian national, was working on e-commerce growth at Eastern Bank Limited in Dhaka through an internship with UC Berkeleys Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, the university said.
Sonia Kruger has called for Australia to stop Muslim immigration because she wants to 'feel safe'.
During a fiery Today Show panel discussion Monday, the TV host argued there is a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks.
'Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day,' the media personality said.
The television host said she had 'a lot of very good friends' who were Muslims and peace-loving, beautiful people. 'But there are fanatics.'
The remarks have sparked a social media firestorm but in response Kruger said 'it was vital to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled racist'.
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Passionate call: Sonia Kruger said Australia should close the borders to further Muslim immigrants
Kruger's Today Extra co-host David Campbell objected to her remarks - saying freedom of religion was important
She told the panel Japan has a population of 174 million people and 100,000 Muslims and the country never suffers terrorist attacks.
Her remarks drew a passionate response from the morning program's co-host David Campbell, who interrupted her as she began to talk about journalists being 'threatened' and freedom of speech.
Hands waving, Campbell replied: 'I'd like to see freedom of religion as well! As well as freedom of speech! They both go hand and hand!'
WHAT SONIA KRUGER SAID: TV HOST'S KEY QUOTES 'Personally I think Andrew Bolt has a point here that there is a correlation between the number of people who are Muslim in a country and the number of terrorist attacks. 'I have a lot of very good friends who are Muslim who are peace-loving, who are beautiful people. But there are fanatics...' 'Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day' Advertisement
'We're talking about immigration, David,' Kruger replied. She then asked if people were allowed to talk about the issue.
Campbell said the article they were talking about - written by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt in News Corp newspapers - 'breeds hate'.
'So you're not allowed to talk about it?' Kruger replied. 'You're not allowed to discuss it?'
'I would venture that if you spoke to the parents of those children killed in Nice then they would be of the same opinion.'
She argued 'good Muslim people' were dying as a result of terrorist acts, pointing out the first person to die in the Nice terror attacks last week was a Muslim woman.
When host Lisa Wilkinson asked her directly whether she wanted the borders totally closed to Muslim migrants, Kruger said: 'Yes, yes I would'.
When host Lisa Wilkinson pointed out Kruger's views were similar to the 'Donald Trump approach', she replied: 'Well perhaps it is. 'For the safety of the citizens here I think it's important'
Kruger is the host of Today Extra and is the face of music program The Voice
Wilkinson pointed out closing the borders to Muslims was the 'Donald Trump approach'. 'Well, perhaps it is,' Kruger said. 'For the safety of our citizens here I think it's important'.
The US presidential candidate has called for a 'complete shutdown' on Muslims entering the United States 'until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on'.
Kruger's remarks sparked fierce debate on social media, with viewers writing in criticism, praise and mockery.
And she responded to the criticism in a combative statement on Monday afternoon, writing: 'Following the atrocities last week in Nice where 10 children lost their lives, as a mother, I believe it's vital in a democratic society to be able to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled racist'.
Lisa Connor said it was 'refreshing to hear someone voice their honest opinion #concerned #notracist'.
Nic Ashman said: 'Whether you agree with Sonia Kruger or not on border control, appreciate she is only looking out for Australian safety and that took guts!'
Another user told Kruger: 'I can't believe you can make such racist and horrid remarks about immigration on national television. That is disgusting'.
Jonathan Brown said: 'Oh @SoniaKruger. Creating division is exactly what the extremists want. You've just handed them exactly the commentary they want'.
Added another: 'Wow, @SoniaKruger, you are a RACIST.'
Other viewers were just surprised by the debate altogether.
'Never thought I'd see @SoniaKruger and #DonaldTrump in the same sentence!' quipped Gerard Payne.
One Twitter user created a 'Strictly Ballroom' meme out of the TV star's remarks. Kruger first rose to fame playing Tina Sparkle in the 1992 film
Kruger is a media personality who first came to fame playing the role of Tina Sparkle in the 1992 Australian film, Strictly Ballroom.
She has worked as a dance teacher, a Seven Network entertainment reporter and long-time host of Dancing With The Stars.
In 2007, Seven apologised 'unreservedly' after Kruger made derogatory comments about a 'sweatshop full of immigrants' working on her Melbourne Cup dress.
'How's the family, Chong? All right?' she asked, referring to the Dancing program's musical director Chong Lim.
Most recently Kruger has worked for Nine as the host of hit series The Voice Australia and Today Extra, which was formerly known as Mornings.
Daily Mail Australia approached a Nine spokeswoman and Kruger for comment.
Gay: Terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej used dating sites to pick up numerous male and female lovers
Bastille Day killer Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's favourite lover was a 73-year-old male pensioner, it has been revealed.
The 'sexually obsessed' 31-year-old had numerous male and female conquests that he found on dating sites.
But the pensioner was described as his 'principal' lover by detectives who have unearthed details of his personal life by examining his mobile phone.
The father-of-three also regularly viewed sites showing violent sex as well as propaganda and graphic scenes of torture and beheadings.
As well as being a practising homosexual, Bouhlel drank alcohol and smoked drugs, despite claims he had been recently radicalised into a strict Muslim.
Officers discovered the phone inside the cab of the lorry he used to massacre 85 people on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday.
Police were only able to stop Bouhlel's murderous rampage by shooting him dead.
But the phone is proving more vital to the investigation than the seven suspects currently being questioned over links to Bouhlel.
These include two Albanians suspected of supplying a pistol to Bouhlel, and others whose phone numbers appeared on the phone.
The device itself is full of messages, videos and photographs, including ones of men and women Boulel had recently slept with.
He took frequent selfies and would record all of his relationships with other people, however brief.
He even took a selfie of himself inside the truck just moments before heading off on his killing spree, sending it to family members in his native Tunisia.
'The testimony which investigators are relying on most is that of the mobile phone,' reported the BFM TV news channel, basing their report on evidence leaked to them.
Some 200 officers are now working exclusively on enquiries related to data found on the phone.
It has also emerged his estranged wife was planning on heading to the fireworks display but pulled out at the last minute citing 'personal reasons', according to local media.
Both his wife and her mother had been the victims of his domestic abuse, according to French detectives.
Bouhlel visited gyms and salsa bars regularly, and would also visit website 'showing pictures of executions', said BFM TV.
'The busy sex life of a man who had recently discovered a religious faith is shown by the data on the device,' BFM added.
The phone has also revealed chilling details of how the divorced father-of-three prepared his attack - revealing his delight in obtaining a 7.65 pistol and his hope for getting other weapons.
'Bring more weapons. Bringing in 5,' read one text, according to judicial sources.
An earlier text said: 'It's good. I have the equipment.'
Practising homosexual: Despite claims that he had recently been radicalised into a strict Islamist - Mohamed was a practising homosexual
Boulel loved sending selfie photos to people, and would record all of his relationships with other people, however brief. Picture right shows tourists on the beach in Nice just three days after the attack
The last text was sent at 10.27pm to one of the men now in custody following police raids over the weekend. It ended 'Bringing in five to C'.
Most of those arrested had been in contact with Bouhlel on a number of occasions, added the judicial source.
I was completely sure what was happening. I saw a shadow emerge from the driver's side. He had a weapon. I aimed for the head that's all I could see. Unnamed officer who shot Bouhlel
One theory being looked at was that Bouhlel was 'intent on committing suicide' and had designed his death 'in the style of a terrorist attack'.
This theory is supported by information gleaned from those in custody, according to the source.
These included Ramzie Arifa, 22, who 'spent time talking with Bouhlel before the attack'.
One of the police officers who shot Bouhlel dead has also spoken about the ordeal for the first time.
'He had stopped. The front of the vehicle was completely torn to pieces. The motor was off,' the unnamed officer revealed.
'I was completely sure what was happening. I saw a shadow emerge from the driver's side. He had a weapon.
'I aimed for the head that's all I could see. He disappeared in the cabin and then reemerged.
'I shot twice more. His head fell back.
'Without knowing whether he was dead, I heard the order "stop shooting".'
Three of the six still in custody have been transferred to Levallois-Peret near Paris for further questioning by the Directorate of Internal Security (RPS).
Bouhlel also talked of his delight in obtaining a 7.65 pistol and his hope for getting other weapons. Pictured his family home in Tunisia
His phone was picked up by police officers after they shot him dead last Thursday in a lorry that he had used to kill 85 people on the Promenade des Anglais, in the French city of Nice
Hundreds of people pay their respects to the 85 people killed by Mohamed on his rampage in the port city
But France's Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, said today that the links between the killer and 'terrorist networks' had not yet been established.
However, he said: 'The MO is borrowed completely from that of Daesh [ISIS].'
Speaking on RTL he added: 'We cannot exclude that an unbalanced and very violent individual, as his psychology shows he was, in one moment, rapidly radicalised and then committed this absolutely appalling crime.'
But he said it was clear from the first moment it had all the elements of a suicide attack and initial inquiries seem to show premeditation.
'There are people who are in custody, in the entourage or among those who at some point were in contact to supply him with arms.'
I clung to the handle. I tried three or four times to open the door. I could see he was looking for something as the truck slowed down. Alexandre Migues
Meanwhile a modest hero has come forward to tell how he tried to stop killer Bouhlel's rampage.
Alexandre Migues said he saw the truck as it neared the end of the promenade.
Throwing his bike to one side he ran for 20 metres to catch up with Bouhlel, who had now slowed the truck to between five and 10km.
'I clung to the handle,' he told MBF TV. 'I tried three or four times to open the door. I could see he was looking for something as the truck slowed down.
'He pulled up a weapon. He waved it at me looking me straight in the eyes. I let go of the door handle.
'He was in command of that truck, that wheel. He was the master of the vehicle.'
He continued: 'I'd seen a person get crushed in front of me so my reaction was to follow and run.
'I tried to do my best to slow it down. But when he threatened me with his pistol, I let go of the handle.'
He said that he had also seen the motorcyclist caught on camera trying to stop the vehicle, but didn't know what had happened to him.
Carnage: Bouhlel's attack left a trail of devastation, killing at least 84 people including 10 children, on the Promenade des Anglais before he was shot dead by anti-terror police in France
Horror: The Nice terrorist parked on the promenade for nearly nine hours yesterday before launching his horrific attack, but was allowed to stay because he told police he was delivering ice cream
Massacre: Bodies were left scattered over the road in the wake of the attack, after the lorry ploughed through crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the promenade
The man has never come forward or been found.
He added: 'You can see on video we managed to slow the truck. I wish i could have clung on longer to force him into the central reservation or at least to slow him down enough so that people could flee.
'From where we started to slow down the truck for 150 metres there were no victims. I was so relieved.'
In addition, a leading Nicois politician has lashed out at being treated like a 'nobody' in his own city by President Hollande in the wake of the attack.
Christian Esoril, president of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region, launched his tirade as Mr Hollande, Prime Minister Manuel Valls and other politicians and dignitaries arrived for the memorial.
'I was treated like a subordinate. A nobody,' said the flamboyant right-winger.
'I had become invisible when everything that was happening in my city concerned the people of Nice.
Clare Marx: Call for stricter English language tests
Brexit will make the NHS safer for patients by improving poor English skills among foreign staff, one of Britain's top surgeons said last night.
Clare Marx, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, has urged the NHS to 'seize the moment' and insist on stricter English language tests for foreign doctors and nurses applying to work in Britain.
Miss Marx also said that surgeons could now receive thousands of extra hours of training and that leaving the EU could open the door for a better standard of equipment.
Discussing the effect Brexit will have on the NHS, she said: 'We are concerned that the current testing remains insufficient and risks patient safety.
'We do language testing but we don't do medical language testing. That language test is often just simply talking about everyday life.'
The current language test set under EU legislation and taken by all doctors and dentists who come to the UK from other member states, is based on everyday scenarios.
But national regulators are not allowed to insist that applicants from other EU countries prove their technical vocabulary in a clinical setting.
After the death of a patient who was given ten times more medication than he should have been in 2008, a coroner demanded clearer guidance in relation to checking doctors' language skills.
Miss Marx added that leaving the EU working time rules would significantly improve patient safety by allowing surgeons to have thousands of hours more training.
'Because of the working time regulations it's been extremely difficult to get surgeons enough training,' she said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. 'We have progressively seen doctors anxious because they are not getting enough hours.
The current language test set under EU legislation and taken by all doctors and dentists who come to the UK from other member states, is based on everyday scenarios (stock image)
'To get good at something you need repetitive experience in a training environment. The gold standard of testing and regulation is in Great Britain.'
On the issue of medical equipment, Miss Marx said: 'We would like to see proper standards on medical devices imported from other countries.
Her parents were told they couldn't go in with her backpack of medicine
A three-year-old girl with cancer couldn't see a movie at her local cinema
A cinema has been forced to close its doors after recieving social media threats for turning away a three-year-old cancer-stricken girl because she was wearing a backpack filled with medication.
Addison Wilson-Mitchell, from Batemans Bay on the NSW south coast, was in isolation for 43 days following a bone-marrow transplant as part of her intensive cancer treatment.
When she was allowed to venture to the movies to see Ice Age on Friday, the young cancer sufferer was refused entry into the Bay City Cinemas because her backpack was against house policy.
Her bag contains her medication, a change of clothes and vomit bags in case Addison suffers a side effect from her treatments. She is battling the life threatening condition neuroblastoma - a rare cancer of the nervous system.
The family tried to enter the theatre room after purchasing their movie tickets but were told by staff they couldn't take the bag in because the cinema has a strict 'no backpack policy'.
'Due to OH&S requirements - Backpacks CANNOT be taken into the cinemas or any other items that could endanger the health and safety of other patrons,' the cinema's website claims.
Addison Wilson-Mitchell (pictured) was refused entry into the Bay City Cinemas because her backpack, which was carrying her medication, was against house policy
Staff told the Wilson-Mitchell family they couldn't take this backpack into the cinemas because of a policy against the bag-type and said they couldn't make an exception even though it only had medicine, spew bags and a change of clothes in case Addison got sick
The cinema has been shut since the weekend, with a handwritten sign on the gate explaining the closure
The cinema has pinned a handwritten sign on the gate, claiming the decision to close since the weekend was: 'Due to threats against our business and staff members.
'We can no longer guarantee the safety of our patrons or staff. So sadly, we will be closed until further notice.'
Following the cinemas's closure, Addison's mother Kristen Wilson-Mitchell told Fairfax Media, the threats made on social media were 'absolutely unacceptable'.
'It was not our intention for the business and their staff to receive this type of response,' she said.
Cinema manager Glenda Churchill said the staff were only made aware of the little girl's condition after the tickets were refunded.
'This could have been avoided if they had contacted us beforehand and let us know about the situation,' she told the Bay Post.
'I do feel bad for the sick little girl.'
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Kristen Wilson-Mitchell and Bay City Cinemas for comment.
The three-year-old is currently fighting an aggressive and rare form of paediatric cancer and has just come from 43 days of isolation after receiving a bone marrow transplant (pictured here before diagnosis)
Addison was excited to be spending time with her family outside of a hospital setting
This comes after Addison and her family were turned away from the cinema last week after being told they were not allowed to take the bag into the theatre room.
'My husband, who bought the tickets, tried to explain the backpack only had medicine, a change of clothes and vomit bags in case she spewed which she can as a side effect of her treatments,' Mrs Wilson-Mitchell told Daily Mail Australia.
'When the staff member refused to bend the rules I called the manager who told me backpacks were not allowed into cinemas and that it was part of the businesses policy.
'I explained my daughter had cancer and offered to show them exactly what was in the bag but they said there were no exceptions allowed.'
The staff told the family they could take the 'items from the bag and hold them in the movies' and that if the backpack was 'a nappy bag it would be allowed in'.
The family before their world was turned upside down when Addison was diagnosed with cancer
Addison was with her brothers Ethan, nine and Bailey, five (both pictured) when the family found out they couldn't go on their planned outing
'I couldn't understand what the difference between using a nappy bag and a backpack was,' Mrs Wilson-Mitchell said.
Addison who was dressed in a bright pink jumper and a beanie to keep her bald head warm broke down in tears in the street when she realised they wouldn't be seeing the movie after all.
'She stomped her feet and cried "I just want to go to see the movie why can't I have my medi bag" and I just watched nearly in tears,' Mrs Wilson-Mitchell said.
The distraught little girl cried: 'but you told me we could go, I hate you mummy you told me we could go see a movie.'
Addison has been home twice in six-months and was looking forward to the few days she could spend with her family outside of hospital conditions
The little girl was looking forward to being able to see the movie and saw it as a goal she would reach at the end of her isolation
Addison has only been home from Sydney twice since she was diagnosed with Neuro Blastoma, a rare paediatric cancer, in January.
She only has two more days, Saturday and Sunday, before she has to be back in hospital for more tests and treatment which her mum says 'will make chemo look easy'.
'If everything goes well we will be spending the next three weeks straight doing radiotherapy treatment.
'Then we will have six-months travelling between Bateman's Bay and Sydney for immunology treatment.'
The family has been split since the diagnosis with the boys staying in Bateman's Bay with their grandparents so they can continue with their schooling while their little sister fights the cancer.
Addison has only been allowed out of the house on a few occasions because of her ever-fluctuating immune system
The three-year-old is pictured here on her first day out in Bateman's Bay clutching on to a tissue and crying because she 'couldn't go to the movies'
The cinema at the centre of the disagreement with Addison's parents said they are 'looking into their backpack policy'
'She was so excited to be able to spend time with her brothers out of the house or hospital.'
Mrs Wilson-Mitchell's sister Stacey Jeffery was so angry about what happened to her niece she wrote about it on Facebook alongside a photo of Addison crying on the footpath.
The post has been shared more than 1,600 times in ten hours and attracted more than a thousand comments.
A spokesperson said the 'no backpack policy' was implemented to 'protect everybody in the cinema'.
'The policy is implemented to keep our patrons safe,' the spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Saturday.
'We will be reviewing this policy to see if backpack refusal should be on a case-by-case basis.
'We are currently looking into where we stand on checking backpack belonging to patrons.'
Fiona Southwell, 59, who was well known for her love of horses and artistic skills, was described by friends as a kind woman who 'would not hurt a fly'
Detectives have been granted more time to quiz a man arrested on suspicion of murder after a horse trainer was found dead on her farm.
Fiona Southwell, 59, who was well known for her love of horses and artistic skills, was described by friends as a kind woman who 'would not hurt a fly'.
Police cordoned off Grange Farm in Hornsea, East Yorkshire, on Sunday after the discovery of her body.
A man, aged 21, named locally as Daniel Edwards, has been arrested on suspicion of murder and is in police custody but detectives are appealing for further information.
Detective Chief Inspector Tony Cockerill who is leading the investigation said: 'The major incident team is continuing the investigation into Fiona Southwell's murder and detectives are continuing to piece together how she died.
'I am aware that this incident will be a shock to those living in the local area given its remote and rural location.
'It is important to re-iterate that murders are extremely rare and crime in general remains very low in area, so I would urge people not to be fearful.
'We are committed to identifying those responsible for Fiona's death and anyone who hasn't spoken to the police with anything pertinent to the investigation should call the force on 101.'
Close friend of Fiona, Craig Seddon, who grew up with her and her family, spoke of his devastation at her loss.
He said: 'I have known her for 40 years.
'I used to go up to the farm where she lives when we were kids and ride motorbikes with her brother.
'She was lovely, just a really nice, kind girl. Who could do such a thing to such a lovely person?
'She kept herself to herself, but would always wave and say hello whenever she saw you.'
Pictured, Daniel Edwards, 21, who has been named locally as the man arrested on suspicion of Fiona Southwell's murder
He added: 'I am devastated - it's so quiet around here. Things like this just don't happen.'
Fiona was a member of Hornsea Art Society and enjoyed painting.
Tributes were paid to her on Facebook. Vicky Clappison said: 'Fiona was a caring person who would not harm a fly. An excellent horse trainer and instructor.'
Margaret Atkin posted: 'We will miss her. I can't believe that anyone would harm her. May she find peace with all her beloved horses.'
Detectives now want to speak to anyone who used the old railway track between Hull and Hornsea, which is close to Grange Farm, between 7am and 7pm on Friday.
DCI Cockerill said: 'I would specifically like to speak to anyone using the old railway track between Hull and Hornsea between 7am and 7pm on Friday, July 15, who may have seen something suspicious.
'The track passes the farm and is well used by cyclists and walkers and we would urge people using the track to call us if they think they can help.
'Your information, no matter how small, could hold the key to establishing the circumstances of Fiona Southwell's death.'
Stephen and Annmarie Sharp, from Kirk Ella, were walking on the track back from Hornsea.
Mrs Sharp told The Yorkshire Post: 'We were walking back from Hornsea and saw police with sticks searching. It's such a shame, how awful it is. This is such a family orientated place and so peaceful.'
'But I was just saying I wouldn't come here on my own, it is too isolated,' added Mrs Sharp.
They're known as some of the most inspirational businessmen in history.
But the success of industry giants such as Sir Richard Branson and Lord Sugar is actually putting working-class boys off of further education.
A number of high profile celebrities who have gone on to make their fortunes after dropping out of education or choosing to not go to university are inspiring young men to following in their footsteps, according to a new report.
Inspiration: The success of industry giants such as Sir Richard Branson is putting working-class boys off of further education
A new report, that is released today, has analysed why so few young white working-class men now choose to go on to higher education - but that didn't hold Lord Alan Sugar back
White working-class males have been highlighted as the group least likely to go on to higher education and it is now thought that they no longer see further study as a vital tool to build a successful career.
During her first speech as Prime Minister, Theresa May described the issue as a burning injustice.
A new report, that is released today, has analysed why so few young white working-class men now choose to go on to higher education.
According to The Times, the report, commissioned by Kings College London, suggested that one method of increasing the number could be to target parents.
It also said that efforts to encourage white working-class boys to attend further education should begin at primary school.
The report quoted one head teacher who discussed the influence of celebrities.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of university, is also cited as an inspiration to many.
A number of high profile celebrities, including Mark Zuckerberg, are inspiring young men to following in their footsteps, according to a new report
He said that white working-class boys at his school are exposed to two messages, via the media and peer networks, that have a particularly strong influence on their perceptions of university, the report said.
Firstly, they are aware of highprofile cases of entrepreneurs who have not gone to university, or who have not completed their courses, and have still gone on to achieve success.
Secondly, they have friends who have gone away to university and returned to the same low-paid jobs they were doing before they left for their studies, only now saddled with debt.
White working-class males have been highlighted as the group least likely to go on to higher education (file photo)
The issue of so few choosing further study has been made worse by the fact that there is no agreed definition of the term white working class, making it difficult to monitor the group.
According to The Times, a manager at another school explained that the positive financial benefits of further education were not always known: One of the really important things for white working-class students . . . is to be able to see what the earning potential of their next step is.
'They simply cannot see how its a worthwhile trajectory to pick A levels.
Horrifying dash cam footage has captured the moment two motorcyclists were thrown from their bikes and into the air after they crashed into a car zipping through a break in heavy traffic.
The accident took place just before 2pm on Sunday along Raleigh Road in Maribyrnong, Melbourne.
The two motorcyclists were travelling along the outside lane when they collided with a maroon sedan that sped through a small gap in traffic to cross the four-lane road.
One rider flips over the bonnet harshly and lands flat on his back in the middle of the road, while the other can be seen cartwheeling through the air with flailing limbs before landing on the nature strip.
Dash cam footage has captured the horrific moment two motorcyclists (pictured) collided with a car
A maroon sedan zipped through a break in traffic from the other side of the road, appearing directly in front of the motorcyclists
After a few seconds of delay, shocked onlookers raced to the motorcyclists help as smouldering pieces of their bikes lay scattered along the road.
A witness named Kate told 3AW that she initially feared one of the riders may have died upon impact.
'I only saw the one rider and he was so high in the air,' she told the radio station.
'When he landed, I was waiting for him to start moving basically.'
The two riders were thrown over the car and into the air before landing on the ground. They were taken to Royal Melbourne Hospital in stable conditions
A Victoria Ambulance spokesperson confirmed that both motorcyclists were taken to Royal Melbourne hospital in a stable condition.
One of the riders, aged in his 30s, suffered a leg injury, while the other rider, aged in his 40s, suffered injuries to his pelvis.
Paramedics also assessed the driver of the car, a woman in her 20s, but she didn't suffer any injuries.
Daily Mail Australia contacted Victoria Police but they were unable to confirm whether any charges had been laid over the incident.
The man driving the car with the dash-cam said that he believed both motorcyclists were travelling at a speed much lower than the road limit.
The flesh-eating drug that is so rancid it makes users look like rotting zombies will soon reach Australian shores, police warn.
Krokodil, or 'crocodile' in Russian, is made from paint thinner and petrol and is so corrosive it rots the skin around the site where users inject it.
It swept through Russia 10 years ago as a cheap alternative to heroin and police said it was inevitable it would show up in Australia, the Daily Telegraph reported.
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Krokodil, or 'crocodile' in Russian, is so toxic it rots the flesh around the site where users inject it
The drug, which swept through Russia 10 years ago as a cheap alternative to heroin, causes the flesh to rot (pictured)
Krokodil addicts take on a zombie-like appearance as their flesh rots away and exposes their bones.
It is so harmful it has been dubbed 'the drug that eats junkies'.
A senior police source told the Daily Telegraph: 'What's so scary about it is the precursors are readily available and they can cook it up at home, you don't need sophisticated clandestine labs.
'And it's more addictive than ice [methamphetamine]. It's two years from addiction to death.'
A spokeswoman for NSW Police said: 'While we are aware of the drug there have been no reported cases of its manufacture or use in NSW.
'Like any illicit drug the biggest danger is that there is no way of knowing exactly what you are consuming.
'The is no quality control in the production process so any time you consume an illicit drug you are gambling with your life.'
Krokodil has been dubbed 'the drug that eats junkies' because of the way it rots users' flesh
Users of the drug come to resemble zombies as their flesh rots and starts to fall off their bodies
Up to 2.5 million people use the drug in Russia and in 2013 the first cases were found in the western United States.
By 2015 the drug had spread to the east coast of the United States and had also been found in Mexico.
In Russia, the rapid spread of Krokodil addiction has been described as an epidemic.
Some users in Russia developed brain damage and speech impediments in addition to the horrific scars.
'THE DRUG THAT EATS JUNKIES' Krokodil originated in Russia but has spread across the world at an alarming rate. It has become so popular because it is three times cheaper to produce and buy than heroin. Continual use of Krokodil causes blood vessels to burst, leaving skin green and scaly among addicts - eventually causing gangrene and rotting flesh. The condition can lead to limbs being amputated and life expectancy for addicts is two to three years at the most. The majority of users die within a year. Krokodil is a sickening cocktail of over the counter painkillers, paint thinner, acid and phosphorus. In some cases, petrol is also added. Advertisement
Krokodil has the same physiological effect as heroin.
It is produced with over-the-counter codeine and mixed with gasoline, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid and even red phosphorous scraped from the tips of matches.
Prevalent in Siberia and the Russian far east, the explosion of users began in 2002 and has trebled over the past decade.
In 2011 alone, Russia's Federal Drug Control Service confiscated 65 million doses.
The flesh rotting that is specific to Krokodil occurs directly at the injection site.
Continual use of Krokodil causes blood vessels to burst.
It leaves skin green and scaly among addicts, eventually causing gangrene and the decaying of flesh.
American user Amber Neitzel, 27, told MailOnline in 2015 that the drug had left 'revolting' scars on her body.
She said: 'We thought it was just normal heroin, in fact it was actually better because it was cheap and it gave a really intense high, much, much stronger than normal dope.
'But it didn't take long before we both started to get these horrible deep sores on our bodies, particularly our arms and legs.
'You can get marks and bleeding from shooting up heroin, but nothing like this. They are deep holes and the skin is just rotting away. It's hard to describe how revolting they are.'
A man who was killed after an NYPD officer charged with drunk driving plowed his SUV into four people has been identified as Andrew Esquivel, 21, an MIT student on a full scholarship.
Esquivel was working as a software engineering intern in New York over the summer when he was hit in Williamsburg on Saturday and taken to the hospital where he later died.
Officer Nicholas Batka, 28, who joined the NYPD just 18 months ago, tried to flash his police badge to bystanders who rushed to the scene after the crash, according to witnesses cited by the NY Daily News.
Batka, who reportedly asked 'Did I kill anyone?' to responding police, is also accused of hitting James Balchunas, 24, Divya Menezes, 23, and Sophia Tabchouri, 20, although they are expected to survive.
Andrew Esquivel, 21, (pictured) a wrestler attending MIT on a full scholarship, died after an NYPD officer charged with drunk driving plowed his SUV into the sidewalk in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Esquivel (left) was an Eagle Scout who created his own app as a high school student in Healdsburg, California. He died after he was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan
Rookie cop Nicholas Batka (pictured) who asked 'Did I kill anyone?' to responding police, is also accused of hitting James Balchunas, 24, Divya Menezes, 23, and Sophia Tabchouri, 20, although they are expected to survive
Batka was speeding down Bedford Avenue near N 8th Street when he lost control of gray Dodge Durango (pictured)
The rookie cop had been drinking with his coworkers and was found with the bar's receipt in his pocket, according to sources cited by the NY Post.
Batka crashed into the victims on Bedford Avenue near N. 8th Street shortly after 3am on Saturday.
He was speeding down the street when he lost control of the vehicle and struck the group of four, police said.
Batka was charged with manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, three counts of assault, driving while intoxicated, driving with impaired ability and driving on a sidewalk.
Ryan Carpenter, 27, who had been walking home when he saw the chaotic scene, later described the horror of trying to calm one of the screaming victims whose leg was seriously injured.
Videos of the aftermath showed a large crowd gathered around the victims, three of whom had gone to MIT.
Esquivel died at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where Menezes and Tabchouri were also taken.
Tabchouri was in stable condition, while Menezes, an NYU graduate, was in critical condition and underwent surgery for her two broken legs.
Balchunas was transported to New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital, where his condition is unclear.
Batka is pictured being led into a squad car following his arrest for plowing into four pedestrians while driving drunk in Brooklyn. He posted $300,000 bond and has been released, although the NYPD has suspended him
A witness described the scene of the crash and said neighbors held the door of the officer's Dodge Durango so he wouldn't escape, according to the The Post.
Batka had reportedly moved from behind the wheel to the passenger's seat, and Brandon Smith told the newspaper: 'People were trying to stop him.'
Batka, a former corrections officer who was scheduled to report for duty with the Manhattan Transit Task Force at 7am on Sunday, refused to take a breathalyzer test at the scene, the NY Daily News reported.
He was taken to the hospital in police custody and has been suspended from the force.
Batka was arraigned early Sunday, and had his driver's license suspended before he was released on $300,000 bond.
Assistant District Attorney Adam Wolk asked for bail to be set at $1million arguing that Batka had tried to flee, but defense lawyer Jeff Grodon said Batka was in the midsts of trying to adopt his 15-year-old niece after his brother died.
On social media, most of Batka's pictures feature him drinking, such as these two post on his Facebook page
Batka is due in court on July 21.
His uncle Walter Leonick, a retired NYPD officer, called Batka a 'mellow Jell-O' but acknowledged that he was 'in a lot of trouble' now, the Daily News reported.
Batka's Facebook page included a photo of himself in 2013 posing with eight shots of alcohol, captioned: 'And all for me.'
Esquivel was an Eagle Scout who created his own app as a high school student in Healdsburg, California.
He was involved in drama, wrestling, swimming, and politics before he received a full ride to MIT, where he was expected to graduate in 2017 with a degree in computer science.
Ryan Carpenter, 27, had been walking home when he saw the crash and rushed to help, later describing the horror of trying to calm one of the screaming victims whose leg was seriously injured
A man has been photographed urinating on a Muslim prayer mat as a social media campaign has been launched in an effort to track him down.
The offending post emerged on social media on Sunday morning after anti-Islamic Facebook group 'Extremely Fed Up Aussie Patriots' shared the image to more than 22,000 followers.
The photograph shows the back of a man who is wearing a maroon T-shirt and grey cargo shorts, standing over the mat with a wet patch in a prayer room, believed to be taken in Queensland.
'Good Morning good friends. Next time you go to the Goldcoast (sic) leave them a small momento by marking your territory. Have a blessed day,' a caption accompanying the photo read.
A man has been photographed urinating on a Muslim prayer mat, believed to be taken in Queensland
Facebook group 'Extremely Fed Up Aussie Patriots' shared the offending post to more than 22,000 followers
The group claims to raise awareness in an attempt to 'inform Aussies about the very real threat of Sharia law being implemented in Australia'.
The post has prompted activist group Islamophobia Watch Australia to republish the image on Facebook, seeking to expose the man responsible and identify the prayer room.
'Idiocy. Anyone who recognises the prayer room in QLD or the individual, please let us know,' the page wrote on its caption.
An Islamophobia Watch spokesman told Daily Mail Australia they were 'horrified by the very deliberate and calculated desecration that this act represents'.
'Were disturbed that an individual, any individual would do this and then publicly post their commission of the act,' the spokesman said.
'In short, the team at Islamophobia Watch is disturbed and dismayed by incidents like these, but not very surprised. Were willing to bet the vast majority of Muslims in Australia share this view.'
The offending post emerged on social media on Sunday of a man standing over a mat in a prayer room
Facebook group Islamophobia Watch Australia has called on anyone to help identify the suspect or location
The post has sparked criticism on social media, with many people describing the act as a 'disgrace' and 'coward' move.
'Disgraceful behaviour. He is the misfit in our society,he and anyone who thinks this is ok,' one person wrote.
'You should be ashamed of your self!' another posted.
Another person wrote: 'Only cowards like this b*****d would do this.'
And another said: 'What a disgrace. People like this have no morals in life.'
California may have given us the hottest fugitive known to man, but Florida now has the cutest criminal on its hands.
An adorable deaf dog who wandered away from her foster home became a viral star earlier this week after she was discovered by officers, who decided to have a little fun.
Since Willow had no identifying tags and there was no way to contact her owners, the Tarpon Springs Police Department decided to release her 'mugshot' on Facebook instead.
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Willow became the cutest criminal in Florida after she wandered away from her foster family and was found by the Tarpon Springs Police Department, who decided to find her owners by releasing her 'mugshot'
The 11-month-old hound mix got the full booking treatment at the station, where she got her paw prints taken and was written up for her 'crime'
The 11-month-old hound mix got the full booking treatment at the station, where she got her paw prints taken and was written up for her 'crime'.
'Willow refused to tell officers where she lived so she was taken to the PD where she was booked and photographed,' the department wrote on a Facebook post titled 'FUGITIVE K9 CAPTURED'.
'She was very cooperative and probably one of the most friendly prisoners we've ever had in custody.'
Since Willow was 'just a little sort for her booking photo', an officer gave her a lift for the camera.
O'Harra said she decided to create the cute Facebook post with the hope it would bring a 'smile to people's faces' during an 'intense' time nationally for police departments and their communities.
Willow was found in a residential neighborhood and a resident called the department's non-emergency line, police dispatcher Juanita O'Harra told ABC News.
After Willow's photo was posted, a member of local rescue center In Our Hands Rescue of Florida recognized the pup and 'bonded her out'. She visited the same week with doughnuts for her 'probation check-in'
After Willow's photo was posted, a member of local rescue center In Our Hands Rescue of Florida recognized the pup and 'bonded her out'.
Willow was then reunited with foster mom Amy Scarlett, who said it was a 'lesson learned' that the sneaky dog could jump fences.
'Hopefully this will be her last offense,' Scarlett commented on the department's Facebook post. 'We really appreciate everyone of you for keeping her safe!'
Scarlett and Willow showed their appreciation to the officers by going on a doughnut run.
'Willow went in for her weekly probation check-in,' Scarlett joked. 'And she did not want to leave!'
Scarlett said Willow's deafness does not affect her, writing that the pup loves sleeping and going running and is 'very very sweet and goofy'.
'And she promises not to get arrested again.'
A 60 tonne truck smashed through the railings and plunged into the sea during a ferry crossing on Monday.
The chains securing the truck snapped and it slid overboard as the Bluebridge Ferry was battered by eight metre waves during a crossing of New Zealand's notorious Cook Strait.
The truck was carrying two trailer loads of frozen food between New Zealands North and South Islands, Stuff.co.nz reported.
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The 60tonne frozen food truck slid overboard and plunged into New Zealand's Cook Strait
Witness Maya Captijn told Stuff.co.nz: We saw the chains snap and then the truck and trailer started to slide. It hit the rail and then the trailer tipped over, taking the truck with it.
It was quite scary, actually. My girls were panicking and crying.
We were ordered back inside and not allowed to go back out.
Jordan Matchitt, 26, said passengers were screaming as the boat reeled in heavy seas and the truck rolled overboard.
He told the NZ Herald: All of a sudden, when we started turning, one big wave hit us side on, then we heard a big snap, looked back, and the truck had started to move and had slid toward the barrier.
It went back down to the other side of the waves, then slid back, hit another wave, then the trailer went off through the barrier, and it ripped the other trailer and truck off and snapped the second chain.
Guards inspect the railings of the Bluebridge Ferry after it completed the crossing and moored in Wellington. The truck smashed through the side rail and toppled overboard
The ferry continued its 8am crossing but would not be sailing again until next week, Bluebridge said.
The Cook Strait is a notorious stretch of water between the city of Wellington, in the North Island, and the town of Picton, in the South Island.
It is one of the roughest stretches of water in the world.
It is also one of the major transport routes in New Zealand and frequently sailed by passenger and cargo ferries.
An ex-inmate at a Sydney jail says he feared for his life when four prison guards allegedly beat him up for being a 'smart arse'.
Prison guards Paul David, Saomaauga Faitua, Paul Hammond and Daniel Curry have all pleaded not guilty to assaulting the 46-year-old prisoner at Silverwater Correctional Complex in Sydney's west in April 2015.
The ex-prisoner, Michael Scott Quinn, appeared at Burwood Local Court on Monday to tell his version of events in front of a packed public gallery, including the accused and their supporters.
Prison guards Paul David, Saomaauga Faitua, Paul Hammond and Daniel Curry have pleaded not guilty to assaulting a prisoner at Silverwater Correctional Complex in Sydney in April 2015
Mr Quinn, who is no longer in jail, said he was walking back to his cell on the afternoon of April 27 from the jail's medical clinic where he often went for treatment of his severe asthma.
He stopped briefly in a corridor to catch his breath and to fix his radio, which had slipped from where it was clipped to his shirt.
Mr Quinn told the court a corrections officer suddenly grabbed him and ordered him to keep moving.
'I looked up at him and said, 'sorry chief I didn't think I was in anybody's way',' he said.
'He pretty much ripped the headphones out of my ears and said: 'Don't worry, I'll come see you later'.'
Mr Quinn didn't expect to be personally threatened by a prison guard and asked why the guard spoke in that way.
'He said: 'Because you're a f***ing smart arse',' Mr Quinn said.
The ex-prisoner, Michael Scott Quinn, told a court on Monday that he was walking back to his cell on the afternoon of April 27 from the jail's medical clinic where he often went for treatment of his severe asthma
Mr Quinn said the guards were in a group of five or six.
Concerned for his safety, he set out in the direction of the area manager to report what had happened, but several guards stopped him and told him to 'f*** off'.
Later he was summoned to a manager's office where the group of guards he had met in the corridor were waiting for him.
'When I walked in the office it didn't feel right,' Mr Quinn said.
The same guard who had spoken to him in the corridor punched him.
'I was dazed,' Mr Quinn said.
He said another guard then did a 'superman punch'.
Mr Quinn said he ended up in a foetal position against a window where more officers, hands clad in black leather gloves, continued to punch and hit him.
Mr Quinn said he ended up in a foetal position where more officers, hands clad in black leather gloves, punched and hit him in a manager's office
'I thought I was going to die,' Mr Quinn said.
He asked why he was being bashed but got no answer.
The guards then ordered Mr Quinn to leave and he crawled to the door.
The alleged bashing left him with a bruised and swollen face and he was taken to Campbelltown Hospital for treatment.
The four prison guards have pleaded not guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm and affray in relation to the incident.
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British Airways bosses were told their new computer check-in system was 'not fit for purpose' earlier this month before Phillip Schofield had an online meltdown after missing his British Airways flight on one of the busiest flying days of the year.
The TV star, 54, waited for two hours after the airline's new check-in computer system 'FLY' stopped working at the flagship Terminal 5, before having to go home again.
The IT glitch also hit Gatwick and caused huge queues as hundreds of thousands of families start going away for their summer holidays and is the fourth system failure in the past month.
Long queues snaked across terminal buildings yesterday as irate passengers said BA workers were nowhere to be seen or 'pretending to be on the phone'.
British Airways introduced its new IT system earlier this year but one source has said it crashes 'all the time' and claimed check-in staff have been reduced to tears by regular glitches. Some staff fear it may not be able to cope with the summer holiday rush.
Earlier this month union leaders have said that BA staff say FLY 'is not fit for purpose'. A survey by GMB of 700 staff in June found that 89 per cent said training was poor, 94 cent suffered delays or system failures and 76 per cent said their health had suffered because of stress or anger aimed at them by frustrated passengers.
Upset: Phillip Schofield took a selfie of the chaos at Heathrow yesterday and said on Instagram: 'In the queue two hours and not one member of staff to talk to. Love you usually, today you are s***'.
Upset: Long queues snaked across terminal buildings yesterday (pictured) as irate passengers said BA workers were nowhere to be seen or 'pretending to be on the phone', some caught up in the Heathrow chaos yesterday, pictured, said
Delays: BA has asked passengers to expect slower check-ins but some have missed flights completely because of IT glitches, which caused huge queues at Heathrow yesterday (pictured)
Panorama: Queues snaked around Heathrow's Terminal 5 yesterday as check-in ground to a halt again - the fourth time in a month
Scathing: Phillip Schofield was not the only upset person at Heathrow yesterday, with many blasting staff
Mr Schofield live tweeted the chaos at Heathrow Terminal 5 yesterday. Like him some passengers missed their flights because of delays at check-in and either went home or had to stay in hotels.
WHY IS BA'S NEW CHECK-IN SYSTEM SUCH A FAILURE? British Airways introduced its new 'intuitive, legacy replacing' FLY system earlier this year but one source has said it crashes 'all the time'. The software is believed to be for every aspect of a passenger's check-in, from the seats they are allocated and the baggage they are allowed to bring on. It is also believed to handle the checking of documents like passports - or photo ID for UK flights - as well as visas for countries like the US. But desk staff are said to have complained about a so-called 'doughnut of doom' which can appear when they try to work through the system. And as they wait for the system to catch up queues will form - and only gets worse if the system crashes completely. Some staff are said to be completely stressed out by the check-in software and even cry on the way to work because they fear what will happen if there are more problems. A union survey of 700 staff showed workers blamed the introduction of the new system for greater stress. 91% said FLY was not equipped to do the tasks it is meant to, 94% had suffered long delays using the system and 89% felt trainng was insufficient. Meanwhile 94% thought management hadn't listened to staff concerns and 76% said their health had suffered because of it. One source told The Sun last month that a couple heading to Japan for their own wedding were bumped off a flight. It is claimed that that the new system had failed to allocate seats properly because of a glitch. BA has a number of outsourcing deals for IT systems, including one with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), run by the Indian giant now selling off its British steel plants. Advertisement
In a series of social media posts he said: 'In the queue two hours and not one member of staff to talk to. Love you usually, today you are s***'.
He added: 'There's no announcements, no info when the planes left, no help at all'.
A few hours later, having given up, he said: 'On our way back home then @British_Airways'.
It is also the fourth BA systems failure in a month, with similar problems on June 19, July 7 and again on July 13.
One BA source told The Sun that the new IT system could cause a 'summer of holiday chaos'.
The source added: 'The system isn't robust enough for an airport like Heathrow. It's a nightmare'.
Passengers arriving at Heathrow yesterday were confronted with new signs, that say: 'We are currently upgrading our check-in system and with more than 700 flights a day, it's a big change for us. We would like to apologise in advance if it takes longer than usual to drop your bag today.'
Phillip Schofield was among several people who poured scorn on the message, saying: 'What are you upgrading too(sic)? Windows 2.1?!!!'
The software is believed to be for every aspect of a passenger's check-in, from the seats they are allocated and the baggage they are allowed to bring on.
It is also believed to handle the checking of documents such as passports - or photo ID for UK flights - as well as visas for countries including the US.
But desk staff are said to have complained about a so-called 'doughnut of doom' which can appear when they try to work through the system.
And as they wait for the system to catch up queues form, which only gets worse if the system crashes completely.
Some staff are said to be completely stressed out by the check-in software and even cry on the way to work because they fear what will happen if there are more problems.
One source told The Sun last month that a couple heading to Japan for their own wedding were bumped off a flight. It is claimed the new system failed to allocate seats properly because of a glitch.
British Airways began installing its new system at airports across the world in October and the roll-out was completed around two months ago.
BA, which is run by parent company IAG after it merged with Spanish giant Iberia in 2011, is in the process of cutting costs, including across its IT department.
Last month it emerged hundreds of staff at British Airways are set to lose their jobs after an Indian firm was hired to manage its computer systems.
A raft of IT workers were already made redundant in February when Tata signed the contract with BA.
The company, which also owns Ireland's Aer Lingus, has been amalgamating the buying, IT and finance departments as a cost cutting measure.
It has set up a new division of its business in Krakow, Poland, and the airline has begun flying in staff from India to replace UK workers after signing a contract with Tata Consultancy Services to provide IT support, the GMB union claims.
IAG's Global Head of IT Operations is Adrian Steel, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a 'transformational leader with the experience, energy, enthusiasm'.
He also says he is 'responsible for driving the creation of a world class shared services' between BA and its other airlines including Iberia, Vueling and Aer Lingus.
Mr Steel, who lives in Spain, posted a picture of himself with Kylie Minogue at a charity gala, and is a football fan who secured tickets for several of England's Euro 2016 games and travelled to France in June.
He has regularly flown to Krakow and India to work with the company's business partners there.
Steve Harding is Head of IT Operations and Infrastructure at British Airways.
He describes himself on LinkedIn as a 'charismatic leader with excellent communication and motivational skills'. He has worked for BA's IT department since at least 1999 and is based in London.
It is not known if either Mr Steel or Mr Harding are in charge of the problematic check-in system and BA said today: 'We would never confirm details of individual members of the company'.
Upset: Mr Schofield sent a series of scathing tweets before giving up and going home after missing his flight
Top brass: IAG's Global Head of IT Operations is Adrian Steel, pictured with Kylie Minogue, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a 'transformational leader' while Steve Harding, right, is Head of IT Operations and Infrastructure at British Airways
Yesterday passengers said it was 'mayhem' and said Terminal 5 'is starting to resemble a 3rd World country domestic airport.'
Reporting problems at Gatwick another BA customer said: 'BA systems down at Gatwick. Even more down than usual. Very harrowing.'
Last week some passengers had to be turned away from their flights despite arriving on time due to the computer glitch.
Two-hour, seven-lane queues formed at all BA check-in gates at Terminal 5 as staff struggled to deal with the huge numbers of people, with first and business class passengers the worst affected.
The check-in system also failed in June, causing chaos at Gatwick and Heathrow, and was only implemented earlier this year.
A number of other disgruntled passengers also expressed their frustration to BA on Twitter.
Ben Middleton said he had received no apology for the 'awful queues' at Gatwick, while Rachel Carter pledged to travel with easyJet in future due to BA's 'shocking service' at the West Sussex airport's north terminal.
Marcus Walker described how the 'utter chaos' at Heathrow meant his flight to Rome landed after the last train had left the airport.
Angela Barratt added: 'The service at Heathrow Terminal 5 right now is appalling. I have never seen anything so disorganised in my life.'
British Airways said today they have rebooked people who missed flights and put stranded passengers in hotels if needed.
A spokesman told MailOnline: 'Since last October, we have rolled out a new worldwide check-in system, and so far more than ten million customers have used it successfully.
'The new system replaces outdated software, and provides a more user friendly platform for our staff, which in turn will result in a smoother journey for our customers.
'We have seen some short-lived issues with the new system during our busiest ever summer and our IT teams are working very hard to enhance the system's overall performance.
'We are confident that the new system will benefit our customers in the long term and improve their journey through the airport'
He added: 'We contacted Mr Schofield to resolve the situation and we are very sorry for the disruption to his travel plans'.
In New York in May there was also chaos at a terminal at JFK Airport's Terminal 7, which is owned by BA.
A queue containing 1,500 people formed when the terminal's internet server went down, leaving staff writing boarding passes by hand - and was still broken eight hours later.
BA has a number of outsourcing deals for IT systems, including one with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), run by the Indian giant now selling off its British steel plants.
In an attempt to cut overheads by 75m by 2018 BA bosses were encouraged at the end of June to ask staff to 'volunteer' to take unpaid leave, according to The Register.
Busy times: The summer holiday rush continued at Terminal Five in Heathrow Airport today as BA said its IT problems were resolved
Troubles: BA's new check-in system has caused problems and delays at Heathrow, pictured today, ahead of the start of the school holidays - to the fury of some passengers
The Northern Territory wants to ensure the 'wrong people' are kept out of Australia but is happy to take 'non-Muslim' Syrian refugees, the Chief Minister said.
Chief Minister Adam Giles told Mix FM on Monday the NT would welcome non-Muslim refugees from war torn Syria because they could not be radicalised.
The comments were dismissed as 'repugnant and horrific' by Opposition Leader Michael Gunner.
The Northern Territory's Chief Minister Adam Giles (pictured) said he welcomed non-Muslim refugees fleeing war torn Syria
Mr Giles said the Northern Territory would happily take refugees fleeing war-torn Syria as long as they could not be radicalised
Mr Giles said: 'We'd be happy to take some of those persecuted Syrian women and families who were from a non-Muslim background.
'People who couldn't be radicalised, people who weren't radicalised, and people who had major security checks.
'We still take that position that we will support people from the right backgrounds to support them from a humanitarian point of view, but we've just got to be vigilant and make sure we're not letting the wrong people in Australia.
'There are people out there who are doing their best to harm our way of life in western society... it's not all Muslims, so I'm not saying that.'
Opposition leader Michael Gunner said the stance sent a 'horrific message' to the Muslim community. Pictured are Syrians evacuating the injured after an air strike in Aleppo
Mr Giles replied 'of course' when he was asked whether Muslim refugees were welcome in the NT as well.
He said: 'Of course. There are many Muslims in our community.'
Opposition Leader Michael Gunner said Mr Giles' comments were 'repugnant'.
Opposition leader Michael Gunner (pictured) said Mr Giles' comments were 'repugnant'
Mr Gunner said: 'You're making a mistake if you set someone up at the gate and say, 'sorry, you're not allowed in, we're going to take that person and not this one, you both might be in danger but we're only taking non-Muslims.
'I think it sends a horrific message to our vibrant multicultural community.
Roland Fryer2.5Fryer
Fryeracting white
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a-massive-new-study-on-police-shootings-of-whites-and-blacks-is-so-controversial/
How a controversial study found that police are more likely to shoot whites, not blacks
Roland Fryer Jr. never cared much for the cops. When he was growing up, his family dealt crack in Daytona Beach, Fla., and while Fryer was on his way to becoming a celebrated economist at Harvard University, many of his cousins and closest friends were serving mandatory sentences in prison. During his childhood, encounters with police were fraught with danger.
"As a kid, I didn't like the police at all," Fryer said. "I grew up on one side of the story."
Fryer said that after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and other recent cases in which police killed unarmed black civilians, Fryer felt he had to know more. "My emotions are flaring," he recalled. He spent a year not only gathering data with teams of research assistants, but also riding along with officers and completing several days of law-enforcement training himself.
The economist published his findings this week in a draft paper that is already causing controversy.
On the one hand, the study shows that, nationwide, black and Hispanic civilians are indeed more likely to be manhandled, handcuffed or beaten by the police even if they are compliant and law-abiding. Fryer writes that prejudice in law enforcement is real and harmful in many ways, causing cynicism and disillusionment especially among boys of color.
When it comes to police killings, though, Fryer has painstakingly reviewed evidence from Houston that suggests the police there are not racially biased in how they use lethal force. This is a surprising finding that challenges a widespread view that the police disproportionately shoot black suspects. In Houston, at least, that might not be the case.
Some economists have criticized the report. They argue that Fryer has not overcome one of the fundamental challenges of studying bias in police shootings: To detect if police fire on suspects in racially prejudiced ways, researchers must examine comparable situations involving white and black suspects. Compared with previous research, Fryer's study collects much more detail on individual shootings, but some say it is not enough to ensure his comparisons are fair.
It's unclear what this research implies about policing in other places. What is true in Houston a large, multicultural city with a diverse police force might not be true elsewhere. Despite its narrow purview, the study still offers one of the first comprehensive and rigorous examinations of some of the most detailed data that exists on police shootings.
In his career so far, Fryer has achieved notoriety that is unusual for an economist by coming up with clever ways to answer uncomfortable questions for example, collecting data that shows that black children with a 4.0 grade-point average have fewer black friends than those with a 3.5, which wasn't true for white children with white friends. Last year, Fryer, 39, became the first African American to win the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, which is awarded annually to the top U.S. economist under the age of 40.
In his latest paper, Fryer partly focuses on violent encounters in which officers didn't fire a gun. He uses two sources of data that show police are more likely to use higher levels of force on minorities.
First, using records collected by the New York Police Department from its stop-and-frisk program, he finds that officers were about 53 percent more likely to use force on black and Hispanic civilians than against white civilians. The police were more likely to push and shove minorities, handcuff them, use batons and pepper spray them.
How civilians behaved could not completely account for the large disparity. Where officers found contraband while frisking someone, they were 11 percent more likely to use force if the civilian was black than if they were white. Even in cases where the officer described the civilian as perfectly compliant with questioning and instructions, officers were 21 percent more likely to use force against black civilians than against white civilians.
Second, Fryer looked at a federal survey of civilians nationwide about their contacts with law enforcement. That data suggested that black and Hispanic people were about three times more likely than white people to be treated with force by an officer.
These findings on the use of nonfatal force are consistent with a white paper also published this month by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles. The authors likewise found that officers were more likely to use a Taser on or manhandle black civilians, even accounting for the difference in the rates at which black suspects are arrested in connection with violent crimes.
Such incidents "happen thousands of times a day. Theyre so much more frequent than the shootings," Fryer said. "Its important. I think it speaks to dignity."
Startling data on police shootings
The data from New York and the federal survey did not contain enough information about killings by police for Fryer to draw conclusion about the lethal use of force. He collected records on police shootings in 10 major police departments between 2000 and 2015. The data showed that officers reported shooting before being attacked more frequently in encounters with white suspects, while officers said that they were attacked first more frequently in encounters with black suspects.
What to make of this pattern was not clear. Without more detail about the individual cases, Fryer could not determine whether there was racial bias in their decision to shoot.
So the economist took a closer look at incidents in Houston, the city that provided the greatest amount of detail. In addition to shootings, he considered cases in which an officer reported that the suspect reacted violently or resisted arrest, but the officer did not shoot. In these potentially violent encounters with suspects, there was no disparity in how likely officers from the Houston Police Department were to shoot black suspects and white suspects.
Here's how Fryer came to his conclusions. He began with the data on all 507 officer-involved shootings that happened in Houston the last 15 years. About 52 percent of those shootings involved a black suspect, while 14 percent involved a non-black, non-Hispanic suspect.
Since Houston is 24 percent black, the fact that more than half of the police shootings involved black people might seem like a sign of racially biased policing. Yet it is also possible that Houston police more frequently encounter black residents in dangerous situations.
To account for this possibility, Fryer analyzed encounters with police in which the suspect was arrested on a charge that indicates a potentially dangerous situation. He analyzed arrests in which officers accused the suspect of one of the following charges:
Aggravated assault on a peace officer
Attempted capital murder of a peace officer
Resisting arrest
Evading arrest
Interfering in an arrest
About 58 percent of such arrests involved black suspects, while about 12 percent of these arrests involved non-black, non-Hispanic suspects. Those statistics are pretty similar to the statistics from the officer-involved shootings. So, while its true that more than half of police shootings involved a black suspect from the perspective of the Houston police, more than half of the dangerous situations they encountered also involved black suspects.
[Arent more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no.]
This approach is not perfect, of course, and Fryer readily points out that his research has limitations.
Police officers have a lot of leeway in deciding whether to book people on certain charges. For instance, in some cities, nearly any minor pretext is enough for an officer to arrest a suspect on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. In New York, police are twice as likely to accuse suspects in misdemeanor drug cases of resisting arrest if the suspects are black.
Fryer's analysis assumes that the people charged with those five crimes posed similar levels of danger to police. But if officers are more likely to accuse peaceful black civilians of resisting or evading arrest or attacking a cop, then encounters involving black civilians would be less dangerous than the arrest charge makes them appear. An ideal study would look at how police officers respond to identical situations involving black and white suspects, but of course, that's impossible.
Fryer attempted to correct for this problem by reading the officers statements about each arrest, which gave him more information about the danger level of each arrest. This required thousands of hours for his team to pore over police records, but it allowed him to control for hundreds of factors, including whether the suspect attacked, how many officers were at the scene, whether the suspect brandished a weapon and so on. He also noted if the officer was responding to a report of a violent crime. Even after taking all these factors into account, Fryer did not find any major differences in how officers treated black and white suspects.
This approach has shortcomings too; it relies on police write-ups, which only tell one side of the story and might not be completely accurate. There are many well-documented cases of perjury by law enforcement, and studies in the laboratory show that police officers view black people as being more criminal and more dangerous than white people.
"At the end of the day, biases . . . will still be possible," Fryer said. "We can't randomly assign race, and we don't have the perfect social science experiment here."
In the coming months, these and other parts of the paper will be debated among academics as the study undergoes peer review.
A Washington Post database of fatal police shootings nationwide has yielded a widely cited statistic: Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be shot dead by police. Looking specifically at the 93 fatal shootings of unarmed civilians recorded by The Post, one scholarly analysis concluded those civilians were significantly more likely to be black than white, even after taking into account the level of violent crime in the neighborhood of the killing.
Fryer's study goes a step further, looking at a broad range of details of individual cases in attempt to determine the level of danger the officer might have confronted. Fryer, however, still does not have the answers he wants, he said.
"To make progress, we have to elevate the discussion here," Fryer said, adding that he welcomes critiques of his study.
Speaking of Sonia Kruger's remarks, Islamic community advocate Mariam Veiszadeh said 'peddling such views is feeding ISIS propaganda'
A leading Muslim advocate has criticised Sonia Kruger's call for Australia to stop Muslim immigration, saying the TV host is peddling views that 'feed ISIS propaganda'.
The TV personality sparked controversy when she told a breakfast TV panel there was a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks.
'Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day,' Kruger said.
The remarks have sparked criticism and praise on social media, with some calling her remarks 'horrid and racist' while others praised her for speaking her mind.
Mariam Veiszadeh, a Muslim community advocate, told Daily Mail Australia Kruger's remarks were divisive and concerning.
'Putting aside the fact that such proposals are potentially unconstitutional and in breach of our international legal obligations, peddling such views is feeding ISIS propaganda.'
Ms Veiszadeh said the terrorist group wants a world where Muslims are vilified by the West and it is 'us and them'.
'ISIS have specifically said that they want to eliminate the grey area; they want a world that is black and white, that is us and them.
'Let's not give them that. Let's have a genuine facts based discussion about the evils that threaten us all.'
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Kruger's remarks sparked a fiery response from her on-air co-host David Campbell
Ms Veiszadeh - who is leading a new effort to 'fact check' One Nation policies - said she would like to have coffee with Kruger and address her concerns.
Speaking on the Today Show on Monday, Kruger said: 'I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day.'
She said while she had 'very good' Muslim friends who were 'beautiful, peaceloving' people - 'there are fanatics'.
When host Lisa Wilkinson asked her directly whether she wanted the borders totally closed to Muslim migrants, Kruger said: 'Yes, yes I would'.
Kruger did not resile from her remarks later in the day as she was deluged with waves of criticism and support on social media.
Kruger issued a defiant statement referring to her daughter, Maggie, and the deaths of 10 children in Nice
She issued a defiant statement on Monday afternoon which referred to her one-year-old daughter Maggie McPherson and the terrorist attack in the south of France last week.
'Following the atrocities last week in Nice where 10 children lost their lives, as a mother, I believe it's vital in a democratic society to be able to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled racist,' she said.
The EU's foreign ministers have urged Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to respect the rule of law in dealing with coup plotters - and warned him against reinstating the death penalty.
Ministers condemned the weekend coup but expressed alarm at Erdogan's public comments on Sunday that there could be no delay in using capital punishment.
Their warning came as the US urged all parties to show restraint and act within the rule of law after the failed plot.
'The United States strongly supports Turkey's democratically elected civilian government and that country's democratic institutions,' White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a news briefing.
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President Tayyip Erdogan ordered F-16s to patrol the skies over Turkey following a failed coup
Earlier, foreign ministers from across the EU has said in a statement: 'The EU recalls that the unequivocal rejection of the death penalty is an essential element of the union acquis.'
The statement was agreed by all 28 EU ministers, including Boris Johnson, attending his first EU Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels.
Germany, Austria and France also warned separately that bringing back the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004, would undo years of membership talks that began in 2005.
Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU,' said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a position echoed by his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in less direct terms.
Meanwhile, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned the Turkish government against taking steps that would damage the constitutional order following a failed weekend coup, as F-16 fighter jets patrolled Turkey's skies and the military carried out fresh raids.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini (pictured with US Secretary of State John Kerry) warned the Turkish government against taking steps that would damage the constitutional order
'We were the first... during that tragic night to say that the legitimate institutions needed to be protected,' she told reporters on Monday on arrival at an EU foreign ministers meeting, which was also to be attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
'We are the ones saying today rule of law has to be protected in the country,' she said in Brussels. 'There is no excuse for any steps that takes the country away from that.'
She also said: 'The democratic and legitimate institutions needed to be protected. Today, we will say together with the ministers that this obviously doesn't mean that the rule of law and the system of checks and balances does not count.'
'On the contrary, it needs to be protected for the sake of the country itself. So we will send a strong message.'
Other ministers also expressed concerns about events after the coup. Mogherini's fellow EU commissioner, Johannes Hahn, who is dealing with Turkey's membership request, said he had the impression that the government had prepared lists of those such as judges to be arrested even before the coup took place.
'It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage,' Hahn said. 'I'm very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.'
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said he was also concerned about the arrests of judges and also about President Tayyip Erdogan's suggestion of reintroducing the death penalty for plotters. That, Reynders said, 'would pose a problem with Turkey's ties with the European Union'.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities. Pictured are workers inspecting the Grand National Assembly, which was bombed by rebel jets
Abolishing capital punishment, as Turkey did in 2004 before it could open the formal process of accession negotiations with the EU, is a prerequisite for holding talks on membership.
Reynders said: 'We cannot imagine that from a country that seeks to join the European Union. We must be very firm today, to condemn the coup d'etat but the response must respect the rule of law.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said: 'We cannot accept a military dictatorship but we also have to be careful that the Turkish authorities do not put in place a political system which turns away from democracy ... The rule of law must prevail ... We need authority but we also need democracy.'
Meanwhile, NATO's chief this afternoon joined others in calling for Turkey's leadership to respect the rule of law.
'I have spoken to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the aftermath of the attempted coup in Turkey,' NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday in a statement.
'I welcomed the strong support shown by the people and all political parties to democracy and to the democratically elected government. The Turkish people have shown great courage.'
As he did early on Saturday, Stoltenberg condemned the attempted coup in Turkey and reiterated his full support for Turkey's democratic institutions.
'Being part of a unique community of values, it is essential for Turkey, like all other allies, to ensure full respect for democracy and its institutions, the constitutional order, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms,' the NATO chief said.
The EU's Foreign Ministers condemned the weekend coup attempt, but expressed alarm at public comments by Erdogan (pictured) that there could be no delay in using capital punishment
He called Turkey a 'valued NATO ally,' and offered his condolences to the families of the innocent people who lost their lives in the takeover attempt.
In a sign that authorities fear that the threat against the government is not yet over, warplanes continue to patrol the skies over Turkey.
A senior official, speaking anonymously, said on Monday that F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight. Turkey also carried out fresh raids.
Judges and military commanders are among 6,000 people who were arrested over the weekend.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded.
The state-run news agency, Anadolu, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s.
He said he will keep 'playing up' unless he is
A former abattoir worker dubbed Australia's Hannibal Lecter said he will continue 'playing up' until he is moved from Darwin prison where he is kept in solitude for the protection of other inmates.
Andrew Albury, 54, is serving life without parole for the violent 1983 murder of 29-year-old Aboriginal woman Gloria Pindan in Darwin.
He stabbed her 28 times and used a broken beer bottle to cut off her nipples and gouge out her eyeball.
Andrew Albury (pictured in 1983), 54, is serving life without parole for the violent 1983 murder of 29-year-old Aboriginal woman Gloria Pindan in Darwin
A former abattoir worker dubbed Australia's Hannibal Lecter said he will continue 'playing up' until he is moved from Darwin prison (pictured) where he is kept in solitude for the protection of other inmates
On Monday in the Northern Territory Supreme Court Albury said he had been 'waiting to use the right weapon' to hurt someone in prison since he was transferred from Alice Springs Correctional Centre.
Albury has been in prison since he was 21 and said that he would prefer to be in Alice Springs where his brother would bring him a Coke and a Mars bar when he visited on Sundays.
He told the court he had better conditions at the Alice Springs prison and that he would 'play up' if he was not taken back, ABC News reported.
'I play up on Monday and Tuesday, then by Wednesday I'm back to normal... then on Sunday I'm looking forward to my brother visiting,' he said.
'You know how many people I've hurt in prison... I'm just waiting for the right weapon.'
Justice Stephen Southwood adjourned the review until September.
Andrew Albury (left) being interview by Northern Territory police after the murder of Gloria Pindan in Darwin in 1983
A furious cruise passenger shared a video of the view from his room - and claims workers will be repairing a lifeboat most of the day right outside his cabin on his dream honeymoon trip.
The footage, published on YouTube Sunday, shows a man wearing protective gear, working close to a window.
At one point, the man appears to look straight through the window and into the camera. The noise made by his tool can be heard distinctly.
'This is our view for our wonderful European cruise,' the caption reads. 'The crew said they will be working during the day the entire time. Thanks for telling us when you up charged us $600 extra for the window guys.'
A furious cruise passenger shared a video of the view from his room - and claims workers will be repairing a lifeboat right outside his cabin on his dream honeymoon trip on Holland America's MS Zuiderdam (pictured)
The footage, published on YouTube Sunday, shows a man wearing protective gear, working close to a window (pictured). The noise made by his tool can be heard distinctly
The man, identified on YouTube as Nate Zemanek, claims he is on a Holland America cruise across Europe.
He said on Reddit, under the nickname zmannate, that he and his wife knew the view would be impaired - but that he doesn't want construction workers to be able to look inside the room while they enjoy their honeymoon.
The poster said on Reddit Sunday that he went to the front desk to complain and was told the workers would be there for the duration of the cruise from 9 to 5.
The workers are repairing a lifeboat outside his room, he added. The cruise is still ongoing according to the man, who says he is on board the MS Zuiderdam.
A spokesperson for Holland America told the DailyMail.com: 'The ships management has been working with the guests on board to remedy the situation and ensure they have an enjoyable cruise.'
The poster signed off after posting several updates on Reddit Sunday and said he and his wife had plans to hit the hot tub and maybe get a drink.
He returned several hours later saying Holland America has agreed to refund the $600 upgrade he paid for the room.
The company will also offer him and his wife a nice dinner on the cruise ship, the posted said. They cannot move them to a different room because the ship is full.
Holland America told several people on Twitter Sunday that the team was in touch with the guest and handling his request directly.
The poster now has plans to tour Norway with his wife as part of the cruise.
'This has not ruined our trip,' he wrote on Reddit in the early hours of Monday. 'We intend to have a blast and have another two weeks to do so.'
A delivery driver has described the moment he punched Bastille Day terrorist Mohammed Bouhlel through the lorrys window in a desperate bid to stop the massacre.
Bouhlel mowed down revellers as they watched Bastille Day fireworks on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Thursday night, killing 84 - including 10 children - and injuring dozens more.
Now a 26-year-old named locally as Gwenael Leriche, has claimed he chased the 19-ton truck down the seafront, armed with nothing but a small pocket knife.
A 26-year-old named locally as Gwenael Leriche claims he chased Mohammed Brouhel (pictured) in his 19-ton truck down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice armed with nothing but a small pocket knife
Riddled: The phone with the final text messages was found in the bullet riddled cab of the truck, alongside Bouhlel's id card
Police initially arrested him over fears he was linked to the attack, which killed 84 people, but he said he was trying to stop it.
Mr Leriche said he tried to punch mass killer Bouhlel through the lorrys window, and was shot by him.
He told French newspaper Nice Matin: The area behind the truck was a field of dead people, blood and flesh. I had to step over corpses to keep trying to get to him.
It was carnage. He then accelerated again, and got ahead of me. I then saw the extent of the damage. I wondered in a split second what I could do. But it was too late, I had to catch up with him.
Accomplices: Details of text messages Bouhlel sent from the phone found in the bullet-riddled cab emerged after seven people were arrested in connection with the attack
When Bouhlel slowed down, Gwenael said a second man grabbed the drivers door and he was then able to catch up and tried to punch Bouhlel.
But he said the killer started firing out of the window with his pistol, and police then opened fire.
Gwenael still had his knife in his hand and said police arrested him, but released him a few hours later in the early hours of Friday.
It emerged yesterday that Bouhlel spent two days driving up and down the Promenade des Anglais working out how to cause the greatest amount of damage.
Yesterday French police 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 yesterday afternoon by police in Nice. He is the eighth person to be taken into custody since early Friday.
Grief: Mourners gathered to day to pay their respects as two more people were arrested in connection with the terror attack, taking the total taken into custody to seven
However, the number of people being held has fallen to six after Bouhlel's estranged wife Hajer Khalfallah - who was among those arrested on Friday - was released this morning.
The mother of three was in hiding today after fleeing to her mother's apartment following her release from custody shortly before lunchtime on Sunday.
Bouhlel was on a cocktail of drugs for schizophrenia, alcoholism and depression, it has also emerged. The Bastille Day mass murderer was prescribed the medicine to control increasingly violent rages.
The 31-year-old had been on medication since the age of 12 a year before he left his hometown in Tunisia to move to Nice.
His father Mohamed Mondher showed the Daily Mail a prescription from 2004 that pointed to his disturbed mental state.
Neighbours have said Bouhlel was a petty criminal who spent his time drinking alcohol, bodybuilding and trying to pick up women.
They added that the 31-year-old Tunisian showed no signs of radicalisation until recently and never made it onto the radar of intelligence services.
One of nine siblings, Bouhlel had two brothers - Jaber and Haroun. and five sisters Sarrah, Asma, Rabeb, Assia, Emna and Zayneb.
His is neighbours have said Bouhlel (left and right) 'drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs' in the wake of the attacks
He enrolled at the University of Monastir, some 30km from his home in Msaken, north eastern Tunisia, to study engineering.
However he dropped out after two years to marry his cousin, Hajer, and move to France.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack and described the father of three as a 'soldier' who had responded to 'calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting (IS)'.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the picture emerging during questioning of scores of friends and relatives was of someone who 'seemed to have been radicalised very quickly'.
His father Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who lost touch with his son years ago, said his son had shown no interest in religion as a youth.
Mr Bouhlel, who still lives in Tunisia, said: 'He didn't pray, he didn't fast, he drank alcohol. He even took drugs.'
One former neighbour, who also asked not to be named, described him as violent man who had lashed out after his wife requested a divorce.
He said: 'He cut up his daughter's teddy bear and slashed the mattress.
'I don't think there was a radicalisation issue, I think there was a psychiatric problem.'
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should not be made the UN Secretary General because he is 'a psychopathic narcissist', according to ex NSW Premier Kristina Keneally.
Ms Keneally used her role as a political commentator on Sky News to insist her former Labor counterpart was not right for the high-ranking international position.
'That's not just my opinion, that's the opinion of a whole range of people who are currently sitting in the parliament,' she said.
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Former Labor colleagues Kristina Keneally (left) and Kevin Rudd (right). She has labelled him 'a psychopathic narcissist' and says he shouldn't be made the UN Secretary General
Kristina Keneally (right) on Kevin Rudd (left): 'I can think of 12 Australians off the top of my head who would be a better secretary-general, and one of them is my Labrador'
Speaking with political journalist Peter van Onselen, Ms Keneally said there were plenty of other options.
'I can think of 12 Australians off the top of my head who would be a better secretary-general, and one of them is my Labrador,' she said.
Her claims go against the push by other senior Labor officials.
While Mr Rudd was turfed from the top job by his own party and labelled a 'megalomaniac' some ALP members want the Turnbull government to back his bid to lead the United Nations.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed the former prime minister has asked the government to endorse his nomination for UN Secretary-General.
FOR: KEVIN RUDD AS UN SECRETARY-GENERAL Being a former prime minister is considered a plus He has diplomatic experience Mr Rudd is also fluent in Mandarin which is seen as an advantage Highly regarded in Asia Friendly with UN Security Council's permanent members - China, Britain, Russia, France and the US The backing of those countries is crucial Advertisement
AGAINST: KEVIN RUDD AS UN SECRETARY-GENERAL Most recent UNSG Ban Ki-moon is from Asia Before him UNSG was from Latin America/Caribbean and Africa, which means it's Europe's turn There's never been an Eastern Europe UNSG There have been calls for a female UNSG Kevin Rudd has not yet received Australia's endorsement for the role Advertisement
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (centre) should not be made the UN Secretary General because he is 'a psychopathic narcissist', according to ex NSW Premier Kristina Keneally Left). They are pictured together in 2009 with Gail O'Brien, widow of Chris O'Brien, at the sod-turning ceremony at the Lifehouse site
She insisted the decision will be a matter for the cabinet.
But Opposition Leader Bill Shorten - who was instrumental in replacing Mr Rudd with Julia Gillard in 2010 - has called on the government to back his former boss, insisting he is suitably qualified.
'If they're going to be a government for all Australians they'll support the Australian on the international stage,' he told reporters in Melbourne on Monday.
'If they're just going to be a petty Liberal government then they won't back the Australian for petty political reasons.'
Mr Rudd took to Facebook to declare his respect for the internal processes of the government.
'I respect the fact that the government has many other priorities at this time, having just been returned to office,' he wrote.
'This is a matter for the prime minister, the foreign minister and their colleagues at a time of their choosing.'
Then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd (right) and then NSW premier Kristina Keneally pose after signing the National Health and Hospitals Network Agreement during a visit to Blacktown Hospital in 2010
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and NSW Kristina Keneally meet at Kirribilli House in Sydney in 2010
Under the UN charter, the secretary-general is chosen by the general assembly, which meets in September, on the recommendation of the 15-member security council.
In the past, the position has been rotated between global regions.
Asia's Ban Ki-moon took the position it up in 2007 and there are expectations Europe will get the gig this time.
There is also a strong push for the position to go to a female candidate for the first time.
One of the frontrunners is the head of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, who hails from Bulgaria.
Mr Rudd, a former diplomat and foreign minister, has been engaged in low-key lobbying of the UN Security Council's permanent members - China, Britain, Russia, France and the US - whose endorsement is crucial.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in May if an Australian candidate came forward, 'the cabinet will consider it and give it due attention'.
He said earlier this year it was more likely the next secretary-general would come from eastern Europe.
'Last I looked, my name is not Ruddovich,' Mr Rudd said.
Disturbing footage has emerged of the moment a man pushing a dog's head to the ground with full force as she squealed in pain throughout the ordeal.
Trent Matthew Hassum, 30, has been sentenced to community service and banned from owning an animal for three years after he was caught abusing a small dog in a backyard.
The Brisbane man was captured on camera pulling a Dachshund dog named Aubree by the collar from her enclosure before pushing the dog's head to the ground in May.
Aubree, believed to belong to Hassum's partner, can be heard yelping in terror as a woman's voice screams out: 'you're going to kill her!'
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Disturbing footage has emerged of the moment a man pushing a dog's head to the ground with full force
Trent Matthew Hassum, 30, (pictured) has been sentenced to community service and banned from owning an animal for three years after he was caught abusing a small dog in a backyard
Hassum then used his body weight to hold the pet down to the ground as she struggled to be released before holding her up in the air by the collar.
Appearing in the Sandgate Magistrates Court on Monday, Hassum told magistrate Jennifer Batts that he 'did not want to hurt her [Aubree] in any way', The Courier Mail reported.
Hassum pleaded guilty to animal cruelty after the RSPCA received footage of the incident.
He was sentenced to 150 hours community service, prohibited from owning an animal for three years and ordered to pay $750 in legal costs for the RSPCA.
The Brisbane man was captured on camera pulling a Dachshund dog named Aubree by the collar in May
Hassum pleaded guilty to animal cruelty after the RSPCA received footage of the distubring incident
RSPCA Queensland spokesman Michael Beatty said the community service order showed the magistrate took the deliberate act of cruelty seriously.
'It was a pretty disturbing footage,' Mr Beatty told Daily Mail Australia.
It was one of the hardest moments of his policing career, an inquest heard
He suspected that Man Haron Monis may have had a backpack with a bomb
After sending police to storm the Lindt cafe, the officer in charge at the forward command closed his eyes and braced for an explosion, an inquest has heard.
The forward commander, who can't be named, said deciding to send police into the Sydney cafe where he believed Man Haron Monis was holding hostages with a shotgun and a suspected backpack bomb was one of the hardest moments of his long police career.
'I was sending those police in to die,' he told an inquest into the December 2014 standoff on Monday.
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After sending police to storm the Lindt cafe (pictured), the officer in charge at the forward command closed his eyes and braced for shockwaves from an explosion, an inquest has heard
It was heard that 'political pressure' had been discussed between the forward commander and Mark Jenkins at about 11pm, three hours before Man Haron Monis murdered cafe manager Tori Johnson.
But on Monday he denied any such conversation had happened with Mr Jenkins, reported The Sydney Morning Herald.
Notes written at the time of the December 2014 siege read that the commander had said 'political pressure?' which he said was in reference to the role of the government in setting broad policy and strategy.
But it had been 'quite the opposite' with Mr Jenkins having responded with 'nervous on DA, not sure what's in the backpack', the inquest heard on Monday.
A deliberate action plan, or DA would have involved a surprise tactical assault, but police were worried Monis had a backpack bomb.
Counsel assisting the inquest, Jeremy Gormly, SC asked: 'you needed a DA approved?'
The forward commander sent his troops in after cafe manager Tori Johnson (right) was shot dead. Later Katrina Dawson (left) was killed by a police bullet fragment that had ricocheted
'Yes', the forward commander said. But the plan would not pass the first of a two-stage approval and he was not briefed on the action plan until three hours into his shift.
'Contain and negotiate' remained the preferred strategy of police, despite their failure to directly contact Monis.
The forward commander had said that he felt a 'tug of war' between the negotiations team and the tactical commander, who wanted to mount the surprise attack.
'It excluded you from the decision making, didn't it,' Mr Gormly asked.
The commander, who can't be named, said deciding to send police into the Sydney cafe (pictured) where he believed Man Haron Monis had a backpack bomb was one of the hardest moments of his 35 year police career
'Yes,' the forward commander replied.
He eventually sent his men into the cafe after Mr Johnson was shot dead commenting that it had been the 'hardest bloody decision I've made in 35 years of policing'.
Monis, who did not have a bomb, was shot dead by police at 2.13am and Katrina Dawson killed by police bullet fragments that had ricocheted.
The inquest continues before Coroner Michael Barnes.
The Sydney siege, occurred between December 15 and 16, 2014 when a lone gunman, Man Haron Monis, held hostage ten customers and eight employees of a Lindt cafe hostage.
Ms Hanson, leader of One Nation, is against halal certification
Belleville said the batter is 'beer flavoured' and is also halal
But some said the dish is not halal because the chips are beer battered
It is inspired by the halal snack pack - with chips, lamb, cheese and sauce
A restaurant is serving a halal snack pack inspired meal called The Pauline Hanson to dish some cheek to the anti-halal Senator-elect.
Belleville at Melbourne's Globe Alley in the CBD added the temporary dish to their menu last week, combining the controversial One Nation leader's favourite potato chips with lamb kebab, mint yoghurt, chilli sauce and cheese.
The restaurant said The Pauline Hanson was 'inspired' by the iconic halal snack pack, but critics aren't so sure the dish meets the Islamic classification.
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Melbourne restaurant Belleville added a dish called The Pauline Hanson to their menu, inspired by the halal snack pack
The dish combines the One Nation leader's favourite potato chips with lamb kebab, mint yoghurt, chilli sauce and cheese
Some have said the dish is in fact not halal because the chips are beer battered. Alcohol is not halal, and any food contaminated with alcohol is not considered halal.
But a spokesperson for Belleville told Daily Mail Australia 'the beer flavouring is not alcohol based'.
'So we feel very comfortable with it as do most of our Melbourne customers.'
'Restaurant tries to rip off Halal snack packs but uses beer battered chips Beer isn't halal mate,' Sydney-based writer Osman Faruqi said on Twitter.
'Beer isn't halal you full-sleeves brioche pulled pork artisanal dips***s,' another said.
'Mate. How's being a chip nerd working out for you?' the restaurant replied over Twitter.
Others on Facebook called the dish 'haram' the opposite of halal.
The spokesperson said Monday had been 'a busy day selling the Hanson special'.
One Nation Senator-elect Pauline Hanson (pictured earlier this month in Brisbane) is against halal certification
Belleville restaurant was criticised because the hot chips are beer battered. However, the restaurant said it was 'beer flavoured'
A spokesperson for Belleville restaurant (pictured) said The Pauline Hanson has been 'selling like hot cakes'
'The dish is selling like hotcakes.'
The restaurant wrote about The Pauline Hanson on Facebook last week:
'Mate. The Pauline Hanson in all it's glory. Lamb kebab roasted to perfection in the rotisserie, mint yoghurt, chilli sauce, cheese, beer battered chips.
'Starts today. Finishes on a Royal Commission.
'Please Explain how good this is?'
The restaurant was referencing One Nation's policy of an inquiry into Islam with the 'Royal Commission' quip.
Manager Dave Mills told Courier Mail the dish tasted just like a halal snack pack.
Ms Hanson is yet to comment on The Pauline Hanson.
The newly launched meal comes after Labor Senator Sam Dastyari invited Ms Hanson to share a halal snack pack with him in western Sydney on Seven Network on election night.
'Pauline, right now I will invite you to join me in Sydney, and I will take you out for halal snack pack out in Western Sydney, whenever you want,' Mr Dastyari said.
'It's not happening, not interested in halal, thank you,' she said on the live television cross.
'I don't believe in halal certification,' she said.
The newly launched meal comes after Labor Senator Sam Dastyari (left) invited Ms Hanson to share a halal snack pack with him (right) in western Sydney on Seven Network on election night
Pictured: a halal snack pack, with hot chips, meat, cheese and sauce - generally garlic, barbecue and chilli sauces
Bastille Day mass killer Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was not at all religious but a violent misfit obsessed by terrorism, Pariss most senior prosecutor said today.
Francois Molins, who is leading the investigation into the atrocity, portrayed the murderer as a disturbed loner who planned his crimes with chilling precision.
Bouhlel, 31, carried out a premeditated crime that saw 84 people, including 10 children, run down and killed by a 19-tonne lorry hired for the equivalent of just over 1,330 pounds.
As details emerged about the ease with which Bouhlel struck, senior French politicians including Prime Minister Manuel Valls were roundly booed as they attended memorial services.
Bernard Cazeneuve described mass murder Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (pictured) as 'an unbalanced and very violent individual' - but said there was no link between him and any terror groups
Many in France are furious at the way a known criminal with clear psychological problems was allowed to cause such carnage last Thursday, while thousands were enjoying the Bastille Day public holiday.
ISIS has claimed Bouhlel was as one of their soldiers, but Mr Molins said there was no evidence whatsoever of him having any links with the terrorist group.
Rather than a holy warrior, he regularly broke all the laws of Islam, while attacking his estranged wife and three young children.
He was not at all religious, said Mr Molins. He did not practice the Muslim religion, he ate pork, drank alcohol, and had an out-of-control sex life.
In the days leading up to the Nice attack, Bouhlel had developed an interest in the jihadi movement and regularly looked up terrorist atrocities online.
After being shown a decapitation video, he told a friend: Im used to it. Photos of dead bodies, ISIS flags, and the late terror mastermined Osama Bin Laden were all found on a computer at his flat in Nice.
Passers-by gather on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, three days Bouhlel drove a truck through revelers
Bouhlel also grew a beard, in the manner of jihadis, and could not understand why ISIS, which is currently mainly based in parts of Syria and Iraq, shouldnt be allowed its own country.
He also regularly consulted an article and photo from his local newspaper, Nice Matin, from January about an HGV that had accidently driven onto a cafe terrace.
Bouhlel, who was bisexual and regularly picked up lovers of both sexes, had also searched the Internet for details of the Orlando nightclub shooting in June, in which 49 people were murdered and 53 wounded.
The American outrage was the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 in 2001.
Boulhel carried out reconnaissance visits to the Promenade des Anglais on the two days leading up to July 14th, and took four selfie photographs of himself on the day. .
He also looked for information about the July 14th festivities, and Googled terms such as horrible accident, terrible fatal accident and shocking video not for sensitive souls.
Commenting on Bouhlels apparent motives, Mr Molins said: Radicalisation can take place rapidly when people are disturbed and fascinated by violence.
A view of the famed Promenade des Anglais, scene of the Thursday's attack in Nice
Before the Paris press conference, where Mr Molins spoke, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve had described Bouhlel as an unbalanced and very violent individual who was on a social services watch list.
Both Mr Cazeneuve and Mr Molins said six people currently in custody in relation to the case have no links with ISIS either.
Two a man and a woman are an Albanian couple said to have provided a 7.65mm pistol to Bouhlel, while the rest were connected to the killer simply because their numbers appeared on his mobile phone.
It also emerged today that 13 of the dead remain unidentified, because of reasons including bodies being mutilated out of all recognition.
French soldiers patrol on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice
There were also revelations about how concerned neighbours had reported Bouhlel for attacking his own children, aged five, three and 18 months.
Social services were concerned about what he was doing to the youngsters, and wanted to keep him away from them, said another investigating source.
Two particularly unpleasant incidents saw Bouhlel defecate on his daughters bed, and also rip open another childs favourite cuddly toy with a knife.
The source added: Evidence of these attacks was provided in the form of photographs, and the suspect soon moved out of the family home.
Bouhlel, a Tunisian national, was originally given a 10-year residency permit in France in 2009 after marrying his cousin, Hajer Khalfallah, in Nice.
She was arrested and questioned by antiterrorism judges after her former husbands death, but has now been released without charge.
Bouhlel regularly beat up his estranged wife, and she too had applied for protection from the authorities.
It also emerged today that only 35 of the dead have been formally identified, because of reasons including bodies being mutilated out of all recognition.
A huge number of people gathered on Monday on the Promenade des Anglais to observe a minute of silence on the third day of national mourning
A French flag is seen as people gather to observe a minute's silence at the Jardin Albert 1er on the Promenade des Anglais
Solemn: People gather at a makeshift memorial during the minute of silence in Nice
Mr Cazeneuve told RTL radio today that Bouhlel's alleged links with radical Islam currently relied solely on ISIS's claims of responsibility for the Nice carnage, which they released on a website at the weekend.
'We can not ignore the fact that he was an unbalanced and very violent individual, and it seems that his psychology demonstrates these traits,' said Mr Cazeneuve.
If Bouhlel had indeed become an Islamist in the last days of his life, then it was due to 'rapid radicalisation', said Mr Cazeneuve.
A spokesman for Paris prosecutors, who are leading the investigation into the Nice slaughter, said 49 victims remained critical in Nice, with 18 of them still fighting for their lives.
The total number of injured was 249, and they included 35 children. Only 35 of the 84 dead have been formally identified, the spokesman added.
Authorities say Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in Nice, had become recently and rapidly radicalized.
Cazeneuve said 59 people are still hospitalized after the attack Thursday, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall. Many of the dead and injured were children watching a fireworks display with their families.
Military officials accused of masterminding the failed coup in Turkey have been paraded on camera with their hands bound and ordered to give their name and rank before being taken to be interrogated.
The footage was allegedly filmed at a police station in Ankara where the men are being held in custody before they appear in court later today.
The release of the video comes after an EU official suggested the swift rounding up of nearly 3,000 judges and military officials after the failed coup in Turkey suggests the government had a list of names prepared beforehand.
The full group, totalling 27 men, then were forced to stand on a staircase with their hands bound as they were paraded for the cameras
Five of the suspected coup members who were parade on camera at a police station in Ankara after being rounded up
The footage was allegedly filmed at a police station in Ankara where the men are being held in custody before they appear in court later today
After being ordered to give their name and rank in an attempt to humiliate them, the men were then ordered to leave the room
Pictures from the footage show several high ranking generals being led into a room with their hands tied behind their backs and one with a bandage over his ear.
As they stand there, one man shouts: 'Are you happy you failed?' before they are all ordered to give their names and ranks in an attempt to shame them.
And once they have finished, they are then ordered to leave the room by a man shouting 'get out' before another group are brought in and expected to do the same.
Meanwhile later footage showed the men all standing on a staircase as they are paraded in front of the cameras.
Among them is Akin Ozturk, head of the air force until 2015 and a member of High Military Council (YAS), who was pictured looking dishevelled wearing a striped polo shirt.
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.
Among those arrested is Akin Ozturk, pictured, head of the air force until 2015 and a member of High Military Council (YAS), who was pictured looking dishevelled wearing a striped polo shirt
The detainees, including Ozturk were rounded up and had their hands bound by police with cable ties
As well as looking dishevelled Ozturk was also pictured with cuts to his face and a bandage over his ear
Ozturk, pictured in his military uniform, was due to be retired this August at a meeting of the YAS, which convenes twice a year
This afternoon two private broadcasters contradicting a state media report that said Ozturk had not confessed to playing a role in the failed military coup.
Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency said earlier that Ozturk had confessed to helping to plot the coup. However, Haberturk and NTV cited what they said was his testimony to prosecutors, reporting that he denied playing a role.
'I am not someone who has planned or directed the coup attempt that was carried out on July 15 and I don't know who did,' NTV cited him as saying in his testimony.
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.
Another commander detained was General Bekir Ercan Van, the leader of the Incerlik airbase used by the US-led coalition to launch strikes on ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
However, the Pentagon confirmed on Sunday that the airspace had reopened and operations against the terror group were continuing.
The alleged coup members were brought to a police station on a special bus and led into the building
Meanwhile Turkey's state-run news agency says the Interior Ministry has sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country, following Friday's foiled coup attempt.
Anadolu Agency says a total of 8,777 employees attached to the ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers.
Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty.
Following the failed coup attempt on Saturday, Turkish authorities arrested those it suspected of trying to topple the government ranging from top military commanders to foot soldiers, and judges and prosecutors.
However, Johannes Hahn, the EU commissioner dealing with Turkey's membership bid cast doubt on the speed at which the arrests were made.
A number of Turkish coup members in Marmaris are led into a court house in Mugla following the coup on Saturday
The swift rounding up of nearly 3,000 judges and military officials before the failed coup in Turkey suggests the government had a list of names prepared beforehand, EU commissioner Johannes Hahn has said
In the coastal resort of Marmaris, soldiers who tried to attack Erdogan at a hotel in the town appeared in court
Turkish security forces have been launching fresh raids in a relentless crackdown against the suspect coup plotters
He explained: 'It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage.
'I'm very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.'
Turkey's foreign minister described the remarks as 'unacceptable' today.
On his Twitter account, Mevlut Cavusoglu also said Turkey would never take a step back from its civil democratic achievements and rule of law.
Cavusoglu added in English: 'It seems that (Hahn) is far from thoroughly comprehending what is going on in Turkey. Our primary expectation from the EU and our allies is to support the democratic process in Turkey and strongly condemn the coup attempt.'
Hahn's claims come after a US-based Turkish cleric accused of plotting the coup to overthrow the Ankara government has said President Erdogan staged the rebellion himself to justify a major clampdown on opposition forces.
Fethullah Gulen, who was a former key ally of Erdogan has been blamed by the politician of using his contacts to develop a 'parallel structure' to overthrow the state.
Today Turkish security forces are launching fresh raids in a relentless crackdown against the suspect coup plotters.
The incident left over 290 dead as President Erdogan mooted reintroducing the death penalty to punish them.
Erdogan faced down the coup bid late on Friday by elements in the military disgruntled with his 13-year rule.
Protesters turned up at the courthouse in Mugla to demonstrate and shout abuse at the alleged coup members
A woman holds up and sign and shouts as the alleged coup members are led into the courthouse near Marmaris
But Turkey's allies have warned him against excessive retribution as the authorities round up the perpetrators.
The justice minister has said around 6,000 people have been detained so far in the investigation into Friday's coup which Erdogan has blamed on his arch-enemy, Gulen.
Meanwhile in the coastal resort of Marmaris, soldiers who tried to attack Erdogan at a hotel in the town appeared in court.
They had their hands bound behind their backs and were forced to lower their heads as they were escorted into the courthouse in Mugla.
It comes after it was revealed that at the height of the coup, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had Erdogan's plane in their sights.
The justice minister has said around 6,000 people have been detained so far in the investigation into Friday's coup which Erdogan has blamed on his arch-enemy, US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen
The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from a holiday in 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.
A senior Turkish official confirmed 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.
Three police officers and a civilian were killed in a morning attack on a police station in Almaty, the Interior Ministry said on Monday.
Two gunmen, understood to be Islamic radicals, attacked a police station late Monday morning, killing three police officers in a gun battle and critically injuring seven more.
While fleeing from the police station, one of the gunmen shot and killed a local resident before hijacking his car.
Two gunmen, one pictured being detained, attacked a police station late Monday morning, killing three police officers in a gun battle and critically injuring seven more
While fleeing from the police station, one of the attackers shot and killed a local resident before hijacking his car, the police said
The attack comes a month after 20 people were killed in the Kazakh city of Aktobe when groups of gunmen attacked a military base and a gun shop
The Interfax news agency, quoting a police source, said 'a religious radical and probably a follower of non-traditional Islam' was shooting in central Almaty.
Five witnesses said they heard shots in three different parts of central Almaty, the mainly Muslim country's biggest city.
'We saw a man with a rifle,' one shop worker said by phone.
Police cordoned off several central streets in Almaty, including one near an office of the KNB security service, where shots were also heard.
'I heard one shot, most probably fired from a pistol,' said a man standing nearby.
The police said it has detained one suspect, identified as a 27-year-old former convict who was wanted for the murder of a woman.
The other man remained at large.
The attack comes a month after 20 people were killed in the Kazakh city of Aktobe when groups of gunmen attacked a military base and a gun shop.
Authorities in Kazakhstan then described the violence as a terrorist attack and blamed it on radical Islamists.
Seven police officers are still fighting for their lives in hospital after the attack
The police said it has detained one suspect, identified as a 27-year-old former convict who was wanted for the murder of a woman
Officials on Monday raised the terror threat level to red after the attack but would not immediately identify the affiliation of the attackers
Energy-rich Kazakhstan, arguably one of the most prosperous former Soviet republics, is a predominantly Muslim but largely secular nation.
Officials on Monday raised the terror threat level to red after the attack but would not immediately identify the affiliation of the attackers.
Leading news website Tengrinews.kz, reporting from a local hospital, said seven police officers were in critical condition.
Boris Johnson cut a 'humble' figure as he entered the lions' den of his first Brussels summit, but failed to apologise for comparing the EU with Hitler, his French counterpart revealed tonight.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, who branded Mr Johnson a liar last week over his referendum claims, said he did not take the Hitler remarks personally.
The pair sat opposite each other at today's meeting of the EU's Foreign Affairs council - less than a week after Mr Ayrault's accusations of Britain's new Foreign Secretary.
Arriving for his first meeting of the bloc's Foreign Affairs council, Mr Johnson - who was delayed after his plane had to make an emergency landing - had said it was 'very very good to be here for my first overseas trip'.
But the Foreign Secretary warned his EU counterparts the Government would implement the 'will of the people' by pressing on with Brexit.
US Secretary of State John Kerry also attended the summit - his first appearance at an EU foreign ministers meeting - and said he agreed with Mr Johnson that Britain would remain a 'vital component' of Europe.
Mr Johnson, who appeared to have had a haircut for the occasion as he sought to impress his European counterparts, said Brexit 'in no sense means the end of Britain's part in Europe'.
The new Foreign Secretary seemed to be having a good time as he joked with his fellow politicians at his first Brussels summit since entering Government
Jean Marc Ayrault, Mr Johnson's French counterpart pictured at the summit today, said Mr Johnson had show 'humility' but not apologised for comparing the EU to Hitler
Mr Ayrault said the Foreign Secretary had shown 'humility' at the summit.
He said: 'He did not apologise. I did not feel it targeted me when he said that, nobody around the table did.
'Everyone knows what the EU is. Everyone knows, who discusses it reasonably, that the EU presents a great opportunity for freedom, democracy and for prosperity.
'So Boris Johnson, I would say, came to this council with some humility.
EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini side-stepped the question when asked if the Hitler comments would make Monday's gathering, which included talks with US secretary of state John Kerry, 'awkward'.
Mr Johnson caused widespread anger when he compared the ambitions of the EU with those of Hitler, in the Brexit campaign.
Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders said everyone was waiting to see if Mr Johnson still had the same views on Hitler.
Boris Johnson has been holding talks in Brussels with counterparts including (left to right) Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo of Spain, Bert Koenders of Holland, and George Vella of Malta
Mr Johnson, who speaks fluent French and was previously a journalist based in Brussels, was much in demand among the other ministers
Mr Kerry insisted the EU was a force for good as he pointed out that America and Europe together had defeated fascism.
The Hitler spat came as Brussels warned that EU nationals in the UK must be treated with dignity as the Government continues to refuse to guarantee their status.
With Brexit Minister David Davis floating the idea of bringing in a pre-withdrawal cut-off point, after which migrants will not be allowed full rights, the EU called for 'calm'.
European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker's spokesman said concerns around the 1.2 million Britons living in the EU and the three million EU nationals in the UK could only be sorted out once the UK triggered formal exit negotiations.
'In the meantime I think that when dealing with these issues we have a common interest to appeal for calm and dignity.
'We are talking about people now, so all sorts of statements and acts should be firmly anchored in the law,' he said.
The spokesman emphasised that all citizens across the Brexit divide retained their full rights for as long as the UK remained a member of the EU.
Mr Johnson used his debut on the world stage to insist Britain would not 'abandon' its leading role in Europe.
Arriving in Brussels this morning for his first overseas trip since his surprise appointment as Foreign Secretary, Mr Johnson told reporters: 'The message I'll be taking to our friends in the Council is that we have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union.
'But that in no sense means we are leaving Europe. We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European participation and co-operation of all kinds.'
The meeting comes as the government starts gearing up moves towards Brexit after Theresa May was installed as Prime Minister last week.
Potential flashpoints with the EU include the timing of invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - the formal mechanism for leaving the Brussels club.
Mrs May and new Brexit Secretary David Davis have indicated that the two-year exit process will not be activated until next year.
But senior figures in Brussels have insisted negotiations will not start in earnest until we have actually left.
Mr Johnson said he had had a productive 45-minute meeting with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini on Sunday and was looking forward to presenting a positive case for Brexit.
Mr Johnson has had a haircut since becoming Foreign Secretary as he adapts to his new status
Mr Johnson stressed that the UK wanted to keep cooperating closely with the EU after we leave
Mr Johnson was deep in conversation with his counterparts before the formal session began
'I had a very good conversation to that effect with High Representative Mogherini and she very much agreed that is a role Britain should continue to play.
'When you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice, and Turkey where we have to work very closely together, you see the importance of that.
'On Nice, we will be ensuring that we co-ordinate our response to terror.
'On Turkey, it is very important in light of the failed coup that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and that is what I will be calling for.
Mr Johnson donned his spectacles and tousled his hair as things got serious in Brussels
EU High Representative Federica Mogherini chats to Mr Johnson at the meeting today
Mr Johnson appeared to be much in demand by his fellow ministers during the session
'In the meantime, I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues from other European countries.'
Mr Johnson's RAF aircraft had to be diverted to Luton Airport en route to Brussels, after technical problems.
He is expected to face turbulence on the ground at the summit as other EU countries seek answers on the UK's 'divorce deal' stance, which is expected to be raised on the margins of the gathering.
As Mrs May's surprise choice to head Britain's post-Brexit diplomatic efforts, Mr Johnson is in the international spotlight as never before.
US Secretary of State John Kerry was holding breakfast talks with Mr Johnson and the other EU foreign ministers as the situation in Turkey and the aftermath of the Nice atrocity drew attention away from Brexit.
Mr Johnson, seen chatting to Belgian counterpart Didier Reynders today, has been offering reassurance that Britain will not withdraw from the world after leaving the EU
Mr Johnson still appeared to be struggling to get his famous tousled locks under control in Brussels despite his haircut
Mrs Mogherini, EU High Representative, arrives for the gathering in Brussels today
But the issue of EU migrants rights triggered debate again as Brexit Minister David Davis warned that any surge in immigrants before Britain formally leaves the EU could lead to new curbs.
Mr Davis, who is in charge of exit arrangements, insisted that a cut-off point may need to be imposed on when newcomers to the country gain full residency rights if the UK's impending withdrawal sees migrant numbers increase.
The foreign ministers' summit came as Mrs May was visiting Wales, which joined England in voting for Brexit, to underline her commitment to withdrawal, and the embattled steel industry.
Mrs May was meeting First Minister Carwyn Jones at the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff and reaffirming that she will 'fully engage' with the Welsh Government on Brexit negotiations.
The visit was taking place as leaders from the North of England demanded a place at the Brexit negotiating table with the PM.
Mr Johnson turned on the charm as he glad-handed his way through the meeting with EU ministers
US Secretary of State John Kerry, pictured with Ms Mogherini, is also in Brussels as EU foreign ministers meet
Secretary of State John Kerry says a spate of terror attacks that have left scores dead is proof that ISIS is 'on the run' in its territories in Iraq and Syria.
In response to last week's truck massacre in Nice, France, Mr Kerry claimed the terror group is losing ground in battles around its strongholds and growing desperate, despite a spate of fresh attacks outside its home bases.
Mr Kerry offered the comment to CNN as he discussed why there has been a number of mass killings involving ISIS militants or apparent fanatics, including the gunman in the Orlando nightclub massacre in June.
Secretary of State John Kerry (pictured last week) said ISIS is 'on the run' after losing ground in Iraq and Syria
Kerry claimed forces have taken back 45% of ISIS' territory in Iraq and are advancing on Mosul
'What we believe this indicates... is that Daesh, ISIL in Syria and Iraq, is under great, great pressure and people are acting out in various places, but they are not growing in their ability to do things,' Mr Kerry told CNN's Jake Tapper. 'They are shrinking'
He claimed forces have taken back 45 per cent of ISIS' territory in Iraq and are making progress on advancing on its stronghold in Mosul.
'They are on the run and I believe what we are seeing are the desperate actions of an entity that sees the noose closing around them,' said Mr Kerry.
Mr Kerry was challenged by Tapper, who said the public may not agree with his view, given the high number of deaths in the last few weeks.
Mr Kerry pointed out that some of the attackers have not been confirmed as having actual ties to ISIS and may have been inspired and acted alone.
'If people are inspired, they are inspired,' said Mr Kerry. 'But ISIL, which is based in Iraq and Syria, is under huge pressure, and that is just a fact.'
ISIS claimed the Nice attack - where a truck was deliberately driven into a crowd, killing 84 people - was carried out by one of its 'soldiers', Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, and have threatened more bloodshed.
However, authorities in France have not confirmed any links between Bouhlel and extremists.
Omar Mateen, the gunman in the gay nightclub shooting in Orlando, pledged allegiance to ISIS during a rampage that left 49 people dead and more than 50 injured. Authorities have not yet revealed the motive for that attack.
Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (left) paid tribute to the Nice victims in Moscow last week
Mr Kerry previously claimed that ISIS' 'days are numbered', but since then thousands have been killed in attacks carried out by extremists or mass murderers apparently inspired by the terror group - from Orlando, Paris and Brussels to Istanbul, Jakarta and the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.
He told CNN that recent attacks beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria don't reflect the group's weakening state in its home bases.
ISIS claimed responsibility for a number of attacks that killed upwards of 1,000 people during the holy month of Ramadan.
Medicare, said time was running out to save it
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has vowed to crack down on unauthorised texts and robocolls after the 'Mediscare' campaign on the day of the federal election.
The Prime Minister lashed out at the use of fake Medicare text messages in the first post-election Coalition party room meeting in Canberra on Monday, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Queensland Labor party was allegedly behind texts sent to voters on election day which said 'Mr Turnbull's plans to privatise Medicare will take us down the road of no return. Time is running out to Save Medicare'.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) has vowed to crack down on unauthorised texts and robocolls after the 'Mediscare' campaign where texts were sent to voters on the day of federal election
The text (pictured) was allegedly sent by the Queensland Labor party to voters on the day of the federal election. It condemned plans to privatise Medicare
On election night Mr Turnbull described the 'Mediscare' texts as 'an extraordinary act of dishonesty'.
On Monday, Mr Turnbull said if the use of fake Medicare texts sent to voters before the election wasn't a crime, then it should be one.
Foreign minister Julie Bishop also noted that Labor had boasted of the success of the campaign.
Mr Turnbull said the use of the texts and households being bombarded with robocalls raised 'fundamental questions about the operation of Australia's democracy'.
He said that changing the rules to, for example, require a declaration of party affiliation following a text message or robocall - which is required for other advertising - was 'something on people's minds', but not yet formally on the government's agenda.
The party room meeting also discussed proposed superannuation changes, but a foreshadowed revolt against the changes did not take place.
Only one MP raised the issue and argued that while the proposed $6 billion in savings affected just four per cent of people, it had created uncertainty in the community and upset the party's base.
The texts sent to voters said 'Mr Turnbull's plans to privatise Medicare will take us down the road of no return. Time is running out to Save Medicare'. Pictured is a Medicare branch
The meeting followed a gathering of Liberal MPs where the party's federal director Tony Nutt and pollster Mark Textor fronted the MPs on the election result.
Mr Turnbull said they had much to learn from the campaign.
'This has to be a term of delivery, we are not going to hit the ground reviewing, we are going to hit the ground doing ... what we must do is ensure that in 2019, people will see that we have delivered,' he siad.
Mr Nutt said he took full responsibility for the result as director and that the Prime Minister's personal standing with voters had been crucial to the Coalition's win.
He said a far-reaching review of the campaign would take place.
Several MPs complained about the Coalition's campaign strategy, arguing there was too much focus on the innovation agenda and on jobs in the 'new' economy.
A British mother who hid with her children under desks as bullets fired through the windows of an Istanbul airport during the failed Turkey coup has told how she feared they were 'being bombed'.
Saima Alvi, 47, from Manchester, was forced to seek shelter under check-in desks with her severely disabled daughter Musayba, 12, and her 10-year-old son Muddathir, during the coup on Saturday.
She said her two children were terrified when bullets were fired at the window of the transit lounge at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport prompting them to cower under desks as they feared for their lives.
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Saima Alvi, 47, from Manchester, was forced to seek shelter under check-in desks at Istanbul Ataturk Airport with her severely disabled daughter Musayba, 12, and her 10-year-old son Muddathir, during the failed coup
Ms Alvi said her two children were terrified when bullets were fired at the window of the transit lounge at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport on Saturday prompting them to cower under desks as they feared for their lives
Ms Alvi was travelling with her two children and her daughter's nanny, Naseem, to visit her husband in Qatar. She is pictured above in video footage taken while at the airport during the failed coup over the weekend
Amidst the 'mad panic', the teacher said both Muslim and non-religious passengers joined in with a communal prayer as four fighter planes rocketed over the airport throughout the early hours.
She said the smell of gunpowder hung heavy in the air as she and her children tried to find a safe place to hide. Dramatic pictures show them huddled in the lounge area among hundreds of others.
Ms Alvi, 47, from Altrincham, described seeing military tanks rolling across the runway during the chaos. The young family were holed up at the airport for hours after passengers were advised to remain there by the Foreign Office.
'When we were hearing that the coup was thwarted we heard the president was landing here at the airport,' said Ms Alvi. 'There were about four military jets which sounded like explosions. We thought we might be bombed.
'One man got up and started a big communal prayer with about 15 of us. It brought out the best of humanity as everyone was trying to help each other.'
Ms Alvi was travelling with her children and Musayba's nanny Naseem to visit her husband in Qatar. She was due to spend two hours in Istanbul but soon realised she could not continue on her journey.
She said: 'We just landed as everything happened. Lots of people were congregated around the TV screen. I was in London for the 7/7 bombings so I remember the same thing happening then.
'We were seeing on the television that the military were taking over the bridges in Istanbul but we didn't think they would take over the airport.
'After about an hour we could see military tanks.
Ms Alvi, a teacher, said the smell of gunpowder hung heavy in the air as she and her children tried to find a safe place to hide. Dramatic pictures show them huddled in the lounge area among hundreds of others (above)
The young family were holed up at the airport for hours after passengers were advised to remain there by the Foreign Office. Pictured: Bullet holes are seen in the windows of the lounge area of the airport at the weekend
'Just as we moved away from the window there were gunshots and the window behind me was hit by 12 bullets, one window shattered.
'There were no airport staff around. We could smell the gunpowder. Other people started screaming and there was a mad panic. I thought the military were shooting at us.
'I told my son to get under a chair and I was so worried about what to do next to protect them. People were crying. I was trying to work out what to do next.'
Ms Alvi, who is vice chair of the British Muslim Heritage Centre, said she worked hard to think of escape routes in case the building collapsed or the airport was bombed.
She said: 'We saw a lot of people chanting with a flag and military tanks on the runway. I found a safe place under a check-in desk and put the children there. My son was saying 'I'm scared mummy, I'm scared' so I gave him prayers to read. But he then said 'this will make a good story if I survive'.'
Ms Alvi said she was so convinced the situation was life-threatening that she even performed the last rights prayers.
Ms Alvi and her young childre, from Altrincham, Greater Manchester, hid for shelter under desks when fighter jets screeched over the airport in Istanbul during the attempted coup on Friday and the early hours of Saturday
A man stands in front of a Turkish Army tank at Istanbul Ataturk Airport during the failed coup at the weekend
Military officials accused of masterminding the failed coup were forced to stand on a staircase with their hands bound as they were paraded for the cameras today (pictured). It came as they were interrogated by officials
Despite her terrifying ordeal, she said she was heartened by the kindness of strangers who offered food and comfort to each other.
She added: 'Everybody there was trying to help each other. It was a great show of humanity. When I called the British consulate I almost broke down. I am quite stoic but I didn't realise the gravity of what happened. We are lucky to be alive.
'We have been told to stay here. We are afraid to leave the airport. We are in limbo.'
At least 265 people were killed in clashes between the armed forces and police during the failed coup over the weekend. Scores of civilians were among the dead.
Rebel leader General Erdal Ozturk, who commands armed forces in Istanbul has since 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 had also been detained.
Many soldiers who participated in the coup have been beaten up by Erdogan's supporters.
Turkey's state-run news agency last night said authorities had issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr Erdogan's top military aide, Colonel Ali Yazici.
A sea of people: Brandishing flags, singing patriotic songs and snapping selfies, thousands of Turks took to the streets lats night to rally in support of the country's president just 48 hours after a failed coup attempt
The girlfriend of a man who died in a work accident will receive a payout of $200,000 after his death because she was listed as his emergency contact.
Kahlia Boyd, who was in a relationship with Ben Catanzariti when he died in Canberra in 2012, lodged a successful claim for his worker's compensation, reported Perthnow.
The pair had been in a relationship for eight months at the time of his death.
Mr Catanzariti mother Kay Catanzariti, who is not entitled to a cent, said she is upset Ms Boyd has claimed the money when she does not believe the young woman should be entitled to it.
Kahlia Boyd (pictured) has been awarded his $200,000 workers compensation because she was listed as Mr Catanzariti's emergency contact at work. The pair had been together for eight months when he passed away
Ms Boyd (pictured), who lives in Queanbeyan, NSW, has since had a child and is engaged to another man
The 21-year-old concreter was crushed when a boom from a concrete pouring machine collapsed on him at a Kingston building site in Canberra on July 21, 2012, Fairfax Media reported.
Because Mr Catanzariti didn't have a will at the time of this death, his family were not able to claim any of the worker's compensation.
Ms Boyd, who lives in Queanbeyan, NSW, has since had a child and is engaged to another man.
Documents from the ACT Magistrates Court show the decision was made to award Ms Boyd the payout because she was financially dependent on Ben and the pair had plans to spend their lives together.
Ben Catanzariti, 21, (pictured with his mother on his 21st birthday) was crushed when a boom from a concrete pouring machine collapsed on him at a Kingston building site in Canberra on July 21, 2012
Ms Boyd (right) is pictured with her new partner (left). To back up her claim for the compensation money, she showed the court letters and cards from Mr Catanzariti saying he wanted to marry her and make a life with her
The court found Ms Boyd was living with Mr Catanzariti in a unit in Canberra at the time of his death and they were domestic partners who shared the cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping.
Ms Boyd told Perthnow that she loved Ben, the feeling was mutual and everyone who knew them as a couple knew that.
Ms Boyd also showed the court letters and cards from Ben that said he wanted to marry her and make a life with her.
On the basis of this evidence, the court ruled in Ms Boyd's favour and awarded her the compensation payout of $200,000.
However, court documents show Ms Catanzariti denied Ms Boyd was living with her son and said she saw no female possessions around his house.
Mr Catanzariti's landlady also told the court she did not see any signs a woman was living at his house.
His mother Kay Catanzariti said she is not upset about the money, but the fact Ms Boyd would claim it when she is not entitled. She is pictured holding her son's ashes outside the ACT Magistrates Court in May
A friend also told the court he had never met Ms Boyd and it did not appear they had a serious relationship.
Ms Catanzariti told Perthnow she is not upset about the money, but the fact Ms Boyd would claim it, despite her not being entitled to it.
She has since launched the website Will It Your Way to encourage young people to clearly state their wishes.
In May, Ms Catanzariti broke down outside court when prosecutors dropped the charges over her son's death in the ACT Magistrates Court.
Because Mr Catanzariti (pictured) did not have a will and Ms Boyd was listed as his emergency contact, his family were unable to claim any of the compensation money awarded after his death
The prosecution documents alleged the failure of bolts was not caused by an incorrect tightening but was due to a 'metallurgical phenomenon called stress corrosion cracking'.
Ms Catanzariti - who was wearing her son's jumper in court that was worn on the day of his death - said her family has felt 'abused by the process' after the case reached a shocking decision.
'In our extreme grief, our inexperience has meant we needed to rely on those who know the system. Today I feel they have failed us,' Ms Catanzariti said in a statement to Fairfax Media.
'It has given me a death sentence, we have been taken advantage of in our lack of knowledge in the legal system when our minds aren't in our bodies.
A woman who was gang-raped three years ago has alleged that she was raped again by the same five men, with her family accusing them of carrying out the attack in revenge for bringing the 2013 case to court.
The unnamed girl was found unconscious by a roadside with torn clothes last Wednesday in Rohtak, near New Delhi.
She was rushed to Rohtak Civil Hospital, where she told police that she was kidnapped in broad daylight as she returned home from college by the same men who raped her in 2013.
A woman (pictured) who was gang-raped three years ago has alleged that she was raped again by the same five men
A noose hangs demanding death penalty for rapists, as Indians participate in a candlelit vigil protesting violence against women in New Delhi
The men, she alleged, put her in their car, drugged her and then raped her again.
Two of the accused were arrested for the 2013 rape in Bhiwani and released on bail, the other three had not been arrested but a case against them had been filed by the victims family.
The victims brother told the Hindustan Times that their pursuit of a court case against the accused resulted in a revenge attack.
He said: 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. Thats why they have attacked her again.
Indian Dalit women shout slogans during a protest against a gang-rape of four Dalit girls in New Delhi, India
The accused - Amit, Mausam, Raju, Akash and Sandeep all from Bhiwani, are being hunted by police but have absconded, the officer leading the investigation said.
Deputy superintendent of police Pushpa Khatri told the Hindustan Times: We have raided their houses, but they are on the run. I cant reveal more right now.
Its the belief of the victims brother that the accused are able to escape justice because of their ranking in society.
The victim is from the lowest caste or class called Dalit and the accused are from the upper caste.
He added: It seems they can do whatever they want.
The fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 shone a global spotlight on frightening levels of violence against women in India.
It also led to major reform of India's rape laws, including speeding up of trials and increased punishments for offenders, but horrific attacks continue to be reported in the media on a daily basis.
A row has broken out over Channel 4's decision to use a Muslim reporter to front its coverage of the Bastille Day terror attack, with some accusing the show of 'tokenism' and others leaping to the presenter's defence.
Fatima Manji, who has been with the programme for four years, presented the coverage of the Bastille Day massacre in Nice on Friday night from the studio in London.
But a minority of viewers took exception to a woman in a hijab hosting the show and took to Twitter to voice their complaints.
Some accused Channel 4 of 'tokenism' - although Manji and Channel 4 have both said she had been scheduled to work that Friday evening before events in Nice took place.
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Journalist Fatima Manji, who has been with the programme for four years, presented the Channel 4 News coverage of the Bastille Day massacre in Nice on Friday night from the studio in London
Some accused Channel 4 of 'tokenism' - although Manji and Channel 4 have both said she had been scheduled to work that Friday evening before events in Nice took place
Lithlad wrote: '#C4News use a Muslim in a headscarf to read the news in the studio. Bless their cotton socks.'
Stevesearcher added: 'Why don't #C4News put a woman in a Burka reading the News and while they are it she should be chaperoned by a male relative beside her!'
But many more Twitter users leaped to the reporter's defence, accusing those who criticised her role as presenter as 'Islamophobic'.
Myriam Francois wrote: 'Shocked by this blatant bigotry directed [at Manji] - Muslim journos apparently not objective - only older white males are.'
Pam Smith said: 'Fatima Manji is very good at presenting the news. What have her clothes got to do with it?'
Manji (pictured presenting Channel 4 news on Friday) faced some criticism online - but also a lot of support
But many more Twitter users leaped to the reporter's defence, accusing those who criticised her role as presenter as 'Islamophobic'
Hifzha Shaheen added: 'So, basically Muslim communities are to blame for the Nice attack? Much love to @FatimaManji. Keep doing your thing x.'
WHO IS JOURNALIST FATIMA MANJI? She joined Channel 4 News in January 2012 and has worked on a number of stories including NatWest banking problems, Apple unwittingly encouraging phone theft and returning to her own school to look at job prospects for school leavers. She previously worked as a reporter, presenter and video journalist for the BBC in the East of England. Advertisement
Shalini Austin said: 'Fatima Manji is very good at her job, that is all I care about. Her religion & what she wears is none of my business.'
Frances Ryan added: 'So bloody sorry to see what you're having to deal with today. You are brilliant x.'
Manji wrote on Twitter following the show: 'To those asking, yes my presenting tonight was long planned - had thought it might be a quiet Friday, instead very tragic.'
A spokeswoman for Channel 4 News said: 'It is wrong to suggest that a qualified journalist should be barred from reporting on a particular story or present on a specific day because of their faith.
'Fatima Manji is an award-winning journalist. We are proud that she is part of our team and will receive, as ever, our full support in the wake of [the] comments.'
Manji wrote on Twitter following the show: 'To those asking, yes my presenting tonight was long planned - had thought it might be a quiet Friday, instead very tragic'
Nicola Sturgeons office has admitted Scotland does not have a veto on Britains Brexit negotiations after she appeared to suggest Theresa May had given her a say over when to trigger Article 50.
The new Prime Minister told Scotlands First Minister on Friday she would not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until she had agreed a UK approach.
Asked whether this meant Scotland had been given a veto, Ms Sturgeon told the BBC yesterday that it certainly appeared to be an interpretation that some put on the Prime Ministers remarks and said they had put Scotland in a very, very strong position that she would use as well as I can.
Today Downing Street then dismissed any suggestion that Mrs May had offered Ms Sturgeon a veto and insisted the Prime Minister would have the final say on when Britain starts the Brexit process.
Ms Sturgeons spokesperson admitted tonight: Were not going around saying we have a veto, because frankly, we dont.
Theresa May (pictured meeting First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones in Cardiff today) will move to dismiss suggestions from Nicola Sturgeon that Scotland will have a veto over Brexit negotiations
Nicola Sturgeon (pictured visiting a community centre in Newton Stewart in Dumfries and Galloway today) suggested Theresa May had given a veto over when Britain triggers the formal process of leaving the EU
Ms Sturgeon has pledged to do everything she can to keep Scotland in the EU and has said a second independence referendum is 'highly likely' if the UK Government fails to secure an agreement that allows Scotland to stay in the EU.
Her spokesperson said Mrs May was 'willing to listen to any proposal we bring forward to keeping Scotland's membership of the EU,' he said.
The Prime Minister's spokeswoman clarified that Mrs May had committed to involving the devolved Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish administrations in discussions on Brexit.
But making clear this was not a veto, she said: The point I would make is that the PM has been clear that leaving the EU is what the British people voted for.'
The spokeswoman added that Mrs May's comments on Friday 'should not be interpreted that she was suggesting Scotland had some kind of block on this [Brexit negotiations].
Mrs May visited Wales First Minister Carwyn Jones in Cardiff today to discuss Brexit - her first trip to Cardiff since becoming Prime Minister.
The new Prime Minister will embark on her first foreign trip on Wednesday to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel - a key meeting ahead of Brexit negotiations
Today she opened a key debate on renewing Britain's nuclear deterrent in Parliament.
She exploited Labour divisions over Trident as she urged MPs not to take the 'gamble' of getting rid of the at-sea deterrent at a time of 'increased' threats to Britain's national security.
Theresa May, pictured visiting First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones in Cardiff today, told Nicola Sturgeon on Friday she would not start the Brexit process until she had agreed a 'UK approach' with leaders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
Theresa May, pictured on a visit to Wales today, will seek to exploit Labour divisions over Trident as she urges MPs not to take the 'gamble' of getting rid of the at-sea deterrent at a time of 'increased' threats to Britain's national security
The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (pictured visiting a community centre in Newton Stewart in Dumfries and Gallowaytoday) 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
Ms Sturgeon's suggestion that she will have a veto over the timing of Brexit infuriated Tory Eurosceptics, 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.
David Davis, the newly-appointed Brexit Secretary, said that despite a majority of Scots voting for Remain, 'they can't have a veto because there are 17.5 million people who have given us a mandate'.
The Prime Minister pictured heading back to London this evening after her visit to Wales earlier today
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.'
Nicola Sturgeon (pictured visiting a community centre in Newton Stewart in Dumfries and Galloway) has suggested she has a veto over when Britain triggers the formal process of leaving the EU
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
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.
Theresa May will kick off her push for Brexit this week by holding talks with Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande.
The new Prime Minister will make her first overseas visits to Germany and France, where she will set out her vision for how the UK can extricate itself from the Brussels club.
The trip will be closely watched for signs of whether the leaders can navigate a way through what could potentially be a difficult and damaging process for both sides.
Theresa May is due to hold talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin this week as she starts the push towards Brexit
Mrs May was in Wales today for talks with First Minister Carwyn Jones on how to proceed with Brexit
Potential flashpoints with the EU include the timing of invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - the formal mechanism for leaving the Brussels club.
Mrs May and new Brexit Secretary David Davis have indicated that the two-year exit process will not be activated until next year.
But senior figures in Brussels have insisted negotiations will not start in earnest until we have actually left.
A Downing Street spokesman said: 'The Prime Minister will make her first overseas visits this week.
'On Wednesday, following Prime Minister's Questions, she will travel to Berlin for a bilateral meeting and a working dinner with Chancellor Merkel. This will be an opportunity to discuss the bilateral relationship, co-operation on a range of global challenges, and of course how the UK and Germany can work together as the UK prepares to leave the EU.
'Then on Thursday, the Prime Minister will visit France for a bilateral meeting with President Hollande at the Elysee. The talks are likely to cover similar issues as those in Berlin, as well as Thursday's attack in Nice and counter-terrorism co-operation.'
Boris Johnson urged EU counterparts to respect the 'will of the people' on Brexit and pledged to keep close cooperation with the continent as he made his first visit to Brussels as Foreign Secretary today.
Arriving for his first meeting of the bloc's Foreign Affairs council, Mr Johnson - who was delayed after his plane had to make an emergency landing - said it was 'very very good to be here for my first overseas trip'.
But the ex-mayor could face a rough ride as some ministers are furious about his role in the referendum battle, accusing him of 'lying' to the UK public.
Mrs May will meet both Mrs Merkel and French president Francois Hollande this week
The meeting comes as the government starts gearing up moves towards Brexit after Theresa May was installed as Prime Minister last week.
Mr Johnson told reporters today: 'The message I'll be taking to our friends in the Council is that we have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union.
'But that in no sense means we are leaving Europe. We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European participation and co-operation of all kinds.'
Mr Johnson said he had had a productive 45-minute meeting with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini on Sunday and was looking forward to presenting a positive case for Brexit.
'I had a very good conversation to that effect with High Representative Mogherini and she very much agreed that is a role Britain should continue to play.
Boris Johnson is making his first overseas visit since becoming Foreign Secretary, attending talks with EU counterparts in Brussels
Mr Johnson has urged EU ministers to respect the 'will of the people' from the referendum
'When you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice, and Turkey where we have to work very closely together, you see the importance of that.
'On Nice, we will be ensuring that we co-ordinate our response to terror.
'On Turkey, it is very important in light of the failed coup that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and that is what I will be calling for.
'In the meantime, I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues from other European countries.'
Mr Johnson's RAF aircraft had to be diverted to Luton Airport en route to Brussels, after technical problems.
Police say this note was left near a firebombed squad car in Daytona Beach, Florida
A squad car in Florida was set on fire with a Molotov cocktail in what appears to be more anti-cop backlash following the shootings of two black men that have sparked protests throughout the nation.
The police cruiser was parked in front of the Islamic Center of Daytona about 2:30am Sunday when it was set on fire.
The car was fully engulfed in flames when police firefighters arrived.
Fire crews responded and put the fire out. No one was injured.
Police said a note was found at the scene.
'BLACK LIVES MATTER. A. Sterling. P. Castile,' the note said, referencing the shootings of Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota.
'F--k the police!!!' the note concluded.
The burning comes amid rising tension nationwide following the shootings which were the impetus behind the massacre of five cops in Dallas.
Also Sunday, a gunman shot and killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge.
Despite the note, police Chief Mike Chitwood cautioned against assigning blame until a thorough investigation takes place, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.
Detectives are yet to conclude if this firebombing was the work of actual anti-police protesters.
This police cruiser car was set on fire while parked outside the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach. Detectives are yet to determine who was behind the firebomb
'I really do believe in my heart of hearts that we have a really great rapport with our community overall they know that if there's a problem, they can come and talk to us,' Chitwood told the newspaper.
'But there is a radical, small percentage that I think is trying to drive a wedge between all of us.'
Chitwood says the attack caused more than $20,000 in damage to the cruiser.
The chief added the cruiser had been stationed to protect the Islamic Center from potential backlash following the June 12 massacre at an Orlando night club, in which gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people in the name of the extremist group Islamic State.
'If you notice what's going on in America today, it's like they're taking a page out of ISIS,' Chitwood told the News-Journal.
'Find the disenfranchised folks that don't want to fix things the right way, and have them be fanatical in their attacks and it's sad.
A German schoolgirl who is believed to have fallen into the hands of ISIS posed as her mother to buy a ticket to Istanbul.
Police believe 15-year-old Linda Wenzel had fallen in love with a Muslim man she met online who persuaded her to move to Syria via Turkey to join him.
Friends of the teenager from Pulsnitz in Eastern Germany told police she had suddenly started learning Arabic, taking the Koran to school, wearing conservative clothing and becoming fascinated with Islam before she disappeared.
Police believe 15-year-old Linda Wenzel had fallen in love with a Muslim man she met online who persuaded her to move to Syria via Turkey to join him
Linda told her mother Catherine she was going to stay with friends.
Instead, she had forged a letter from her mother that allowed her to withdraw money from the bank.
She then used the counterfeit bank authorisation and her mother's forged identification papers to buy the ticket to Istanbul.
When her mother noticed she was missing, the teenager had already flown to Turkey and vanished.
Friends of the German teenager told police she had suddenly started learning Arabic, taking the Koran to school, wearing conservative clothing and becoming fascinated with Islam before she disappeared
Speaking from the schoolgirl's hometown of Pulsnitz in Eastern Germany, Catherine said she was devastated.
She said: 'When she did not come back and then I found out she had never even been there, I called the police.
'In her room they found a print of a plane ticket to Istanbul under the mattress.
'I was shocked, my daughter has never stolen or lied about anything before.
'I am devastated by the fact that she was apparently completely brainwashed and persuaded to leave the country by someone and that she managed to hide it from me.'
The flight tickets were bought by Linda using a counterfeit bank authorisation and the stolen identity papers of her mother
Classmate Jule, 16, had noticed her best friend change over time, and said: 'More and more Linda shied away from the rest of us. She suddenly dressed in long clothes, was learning Arabic and reading the Koran.'
The criminal police of the state of Saxony are heading an international search for the girl.
A New York billionaire is suing a British watch expert who he claims sold him $700,000 worth of Rolexes which were either fake or overvalued, according to a lawsuit.
J. Darius Bikoff, who sold his company, Energy Brands, to Coca-Cola in 2007, making $325million, began collecting timepieces after a friend introduced him to British expert James Dowling.
Mr Dowling, author of Best of Time: Rolex Wristwatches, went to the International Watch Show in New York in 2011 and over the next two years sold Mr Bikoff several watches, including a Rolex 6538 Submariner for $94,000 and a Rolex Tektite GEV for $395,000.
J. Darius Bikoff (pictured) sold his company, which made vitamin water and energy drinks, to Coca-Cola in 2007 and used a small amount of the proceeds to become a watch collector
According to his website Mr Dowling prides himself on only buying watches which are between 15 and 90 years old, and avoids 'run-of-the-mill pieces'.
But Mr Bikoff said when he tried to sell on the watches he was told they were either overpriced or counterfeit.
One watch expert, who is quoted in the lawsuit, was asked by Mr Bikoff to advise on the value of the Rolex 6538 Submariner.
Mr Bikoff has questioned the bona fides of the Rolex Submariner watch (left) which he bought from James Dowling (right) but Mr Dowling says: 'I stand 100 per cent behind the watches in question'
He told him: 'In my professional opinion, after significant research, the watch was purchased with a restored dial, a modern reproduction dial and hands that had been artificially aged fitted (sic) and then incorrectly advertised/sold as a genuinely very rare Rolex product.'
A man accused of being part of a paedophile ring and sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl has told a court her father said she was 'about 17 or 18'.
Troy Phillip Milbourne, 41, pleaded guilty on Monday to four counts of indecent dealings with a child under 13 and three counts of sexual penetration of a child under 13.
Bunbury District Court in Western Australia was told Milbourne responded to an online advertisement on Craig's List from the Perth girl's father who was seeking other middle-aged men for friendship, WA Today reports.
Troy Phillip Milbourne, 41, is accused of taking part in a paedophile ring and sexually abusing a 12-year-old Perth girl
Milbourne pleaded guilty on Monday to four counts of indecent dealings with a child under 13 and three counts of sexual penetration of a child under 13
The court heard how Milbourne met up with the father and daughter before going to their home in Perth where the offences took place sometime between January 1, 2014 and November 24, 2014.
Defence lawyer Simon Freitag said the girl's father told Milbourne his daughter was 'about 17 or 18' and that he could have sexual intercourse with her.
Mr Freitag added that his client, who appeared via video link from Hakea Prison, had 'some doubts' about the age of the girl.
'My client instructs me he had some doubts but ultimately trusted what her father said,' WA Today reports.
Eight men were charged in July last year with more than 500 offences against the girl after the paedeophile ring was uncovered by police.
The 12-year-old girl's father was jailed for 22-and-a half years for sexually abusing his daughter and offering her to men for sex while he watched or participated.
Judge Michael Bowden adjourned the case until September 30.
Defence lawyer Simon Freitag said the girl's father told Milbourne his daughter was 'about 17 or 18' and that he could have sexual intercourse with her
The 12-year-old girl's father was jailed for 22-and-a half years for sexually abusing his daughter and offering her to men like Milbourne (pictured) for sex while he watched or participated
Eight men were charged in July last year with more than 500 offences against the girl after the paedeophile ring was uncovered by police
The family of a policeman left in a permanent coma by a novice driver has questioned her remorse - claiming she had been on a 'non-stop parade of nights out, events, gigs and parties' since the accident.
Chelsea Rowe, 27, was jailed for 12 months for swerving onto the wrong side of the road and colliding with PC Paul Briggs, 42, as he rode his motorcycle to work.
The officer now lies in a coma, needing round-the-clock care, and has a life expectancy of just nine years.
A police picture of Rowe, of Prenton, Merseyside, showed her in tears and at Liverpool Crown Court Rowe's barrister said she was the 'embodiment of contrition, the embodiment of remorse'.
A photo of Rowe (left) showed her in tears, while Rowe's barrister said she was 'the embodiment of remorse'. But PC Brigg's family claim otherwise, based on her social media activity ahead of her sentencing (right)
But PC Briggs' relatives strongly dispute that claim, and say Rowe's social media activity over 12 months between the horrific collision in July 2015 and her sentencing tells a different story.
Rowe's Twitter shows her posing for photos at the Grand National Festival at Aintree, at a Will Young concert, on holiday in Prague and Turkey, and enjoying other social nights and days out in the run-up to her scheduled trial.
Rowe changed her plea at the last minute in June when she admitted causing serious injury by dangerous driving.
Just a month before her sentencing, Rowe was telling her friends about tickets she had bought for a horror and sci-fi convention in London called Walker Stalker due to take place in March next year.
Rowe wrote: 'Thinks it's funny while everyone scrambles to get there Walker Stalker tickets...I'm just sitting her like yeahhhhh bought them months ago.'
Other messages showcased her trip to a Deacon Blue concert, in pubs on St Patrick's Day and even taking photos with bobbies on the beat on New Year's Eve.
Tony Garvey, Mr Briggs' brother-in-law, said Rowe's constant updates of her social media accounts did not fit with her contrition over the crash.
PC Paul Briggs, 42, now lies in a coma, needing round-the-clock care, and has a life expectancy of just nine years
The 31-year-old told the Liverpool Echo: 'Rowe's social media activity is, essentially, a non-stop parade of nights out, events, gigs, parties, even booking event tickets weeks before the trial - I can only assume she thought she would be available.
'We cannot in good conscience resolve this lifestyle with someone supposedly feeling regret and remorse.'
Mr Garvey added: 'The day in court is just a small snapshot of reality. Paul and his family have spent the last year with him in a coma.
'Meanwhile, Rowe is booking gigs, retweeting jokes and having plenty of laughs on nights out. It doesn't seem right. As a family, we were put through an even tougher time by Rowe insisting she was innocent, before a complete 180 degree U-turn, and a guilty plea before trial.
'I know people are entitled to nights out but the amount of good times we see on her social media does not fit in with this supposed remorse.
'It feels like Paul is being pushed to one side. We are content with the sentence but no sentence affects Paul's medical situation.'
Tony Garvey, Mr Briggs' brother-in-law, said Rowe's constant updates of her social media accounts did not fit with her contrition over the crash
Rowe, described in court as a novice driver, was arrested after her Nissan Micra collided with PC Briggs on the approach to the Birkenhead Tunnel
Rowe, described in court as a novice driver, was arrested after her Nissan Micra collided with PC Briggs on the approach to the Birkenhead Tunnel.
His wife Lindsey, 39, told the court in an impact statement: 'We have never received good news about Paul's medical condition.
'We have recently been told to expect no recovery, that he will remain permanently comatose and that his life expectancy is vastly reduced. He will never know any of his family again.
'He will have no quality of life, imprisoned in a hospital bed, up until his death. No one can say if he feels pain or if he is suffering, although it certainly looks that way to us.
'The person paying the highest price of this collision is Paul and our daughter Ella. She lost her dad on July 3 last year when she was only four years old.'
Lindsey said in an earlier interview: 'When you vow to love someone in sickness and in health, for better or worse, you never imagine what that worst will look like.
Paul Briggs, who is in an indefinite coma, is pictured before the accident with wife Lindsey and daughter Ella
'You never imagine the man you love more than life itself reduced to a shell. You certainly don't imagine willing him to die because you can't stand to see him that way.
'But I have felt all of that. And I can't do anything about it. I've had to watch my brave, strong Paul become a shell of the man he was after 12 months in a coma.
'As a war veteran, Paul survived six years in the Gulf War and Northern Ireland before going into the police force for another 11.
'If he ever wakes up, he'll be brain damaged and need round-the-clock care. Every day, I watch more of his dignity slip away and I know he would want to die too.
'But the law won't let me stop medics from keeping him alive because he didn't put his wishes in writing. As his spouse and next of kin, I know him best.
'Now I'm in limbo. I'm a single mum of 39, juggling medical secretary shifts with caring for Ella and managing my grief.
Turkey has been warned by Germany that it will kill its chances of joining the European Union if it reinstates the death penalty in the wake of a failed military coup.
World leaders have also threatened the country with expulsion from Nato.
More than 6,000 people, mainly military personnel and workers in the interior ministry have been arrested since the coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities on Friday night.
But the rebellion wasn't supported by the military's top brass and was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan has been warned by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that if he reinstates the death penalty in the wake of the military coup, it will kill Turkey's chances of joining the EU
After the Turkish government said they had took back control of the country, they pledged to severely punish those responsible for the uprising.
And while responding to crowds of supporters calling for the death penalty for the plotters on Sunday, President Tayyip Erdogan said such demands could not be ignored.
However in Berlin today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said Turkey's bid on joining the EU would end if Ankara restored the death penalty.
Steffen Seibert told reporters that the EU is a 'community of values, therefore the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member.'
After the Turkish government said they had took back control of the country, the pledged to severely punish those responsible for the uprising. Pictured are military commanders accused of being the coup masterminds
For the moment, he says that Germany and other EU countries are watching the internal Turkish debate on whether to institute the death penalty, but that the EU's position is clear.
'In the first hours after the failed coup, we witnessed revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets. That cannot be accepted.
'We categorically reject the death penalty and an institution of the death penalty would mean an end to the negotiations to join the EU,' he added.
His comments follow those of the head of EU foreign affairs Federica Mogeherini, who also said Turkey would be barred from joining the block if they reinstated capital punishment.
'Let me be very clear... no country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty,' Mogherini said when asked about the possible impact on long-stalled accession talks with Ankara.
While US Secretary of State John Kerry called on Turkey to uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.
The top American diplomat said Turkey must 'uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law.'
While responding to crowds of supporters calling for the death penalty for the plotters on Sunday, President Erdogan said such demands could not be ignored.
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Kerry said: 'We caution against a reach that goes beyond that.'
But both Mogherini and Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically elected government.
Both the EU and the U.S. need a stable Turkey right and Washington is working with its NATO partner to fight the ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Kerry credited Turkey for reopening a key air base in the south of the country and Brussels is counting on Turkey to stem refugees from reaching the continent.
Erdogan is demanding that Washington hand over an exiled cleric he blames for orchestrating the violence.
Kerry said no extradition request for the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, has arrived yet. But he stressed that the U.S. needed to see 'evidence, not allegations' of Gulen's responsibility.
US Secretary of State John Kerry called on Turkey to uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot
Meanwhile Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said it was for the country's parliament to decide whether to restore the death penalty but that if it did so he would sign such a measure into law.
Turkey scrapped capital punishment in 2004 as part of its push to join the European Union but calls for its reinstatement have grown following an abortive military coup on Friday evening in which more than 200 people were killed.
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Paul Ryan's recent selfie with more than a hundred Capitol Hill interns has swept the internet - but not for the reason he was hoping.
The GOP speaker posted a picture on Instagram captioned: 'I think this sets a record for the most number of interns in a single selfie.'
But the photo has sparked outrage because the House hopefuls are overwhelmingly white. In fact, just three people of color can be seen in the entire picture of more than 100 interns.
The photograph has been widely mocked online for its 'embarrassing' lack of diversity with commenters even comparing it to a Where's Waldo? puzzle.
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The GOP speaker posted a picture on Instagram captioned: 'I think this sets a record for the most number of interns in a single selfie'
One Twitter user wrote: 'That picture of Paul Ryan with the GOP interns is so white that I had to put on sunglasses to look directly at it.'
Instagram user rikkiforrest simply asked 'why is everyone WHITE?' while another wrote 'Good lord! That is embarrassing- NO diversity !!!wow!'
Other social media users compared the photo to a scene from Where's Waldo?
Thatsmetiffany wrote: 'This is like where's Waldo. I think I see one Black person. Right side, toward the back. Looks like he/she doesn't want to be there. That, in itself, says a lot.'
Matthew Cherry said on Twitter: 'Finding a POC in this image is like playing Where's Waldo. I did manage to find one tho.' Mike Rylander added: 'The Internship program for the US House of Representatives is whiter than Idaho. #InternsSoWhite.'
Others have posted mocking pictures, replacing the interns with jars of white mayonnaise or crackers.
One Instagram user sarcastically wrote: 'There's a bunch of diversity here...blondes, brunettes, red hea---...oh sorry, no red heads. But look at blue, white, and red scarfs, shirts, and ties.'
And nycalfredo said: 'Another attempt at deceiving the public FAILED. SO glad the GOP is catastrophically failing and revealing the fraud that it is.'
Others have posted mocking pictures replacing the interns with mayonnaise or crackers over the lack of diversity
The event was held in the Capitol Building, on July 14, as part of a summer GOP intern seminar titled 'Interns Today, Leaders Tomorrow' arranged by the House Republican Conference.
While the 'overwhelming majority' of the 150-200 who attended were Republican, the session was open to everyone and sources at the event report there were also several Democratic interns in attendance.
Republican intern Emily Larsen, 19, of Boise, Idaho, defended the seminar saying it that money, not race, was the reason that there were almost no minorities at the event.
'Neither the GOP or the Democratic offices are intentionally seeking to fill their internship spots with white college students,' she told DailyMail.com.
'These are just the students that overwhelmingly apply. They apply because they are statistically in a better financial situation to invest thousands of dollars into the expenses associated with an unpaid internship.
'The real issue is money, not race.'
Congress has long been criticized over its lack of diversity. Currently, less than one-in-five members of the House and Senate are a racial or ethnic minority, compared to the 36 per cent of people of color who make up the US population.
White people still account for 83 per cent of Congress membership, while they only make up 63 per cent of the population.
And the gap is widening as even though diversity among congressional members is growing, it cannot keep pace with the changing population.
Currently, around 35 per cent of the nation's black population is represented by a congressional representative who is black, while just 22 per cent of Hispanics, 12 per cent of Asians and 8 per cent of Native Americans are represented by someone of the same racial or ethnic group
The picture is said to show that the Party's so-called 'minority outreach' goals, proposed after the 2012 electoral defeat, are failing.
The criticism comes after a recent poll revealed that zero per cent of African-Americans in Ohio and Pennsylvania would vote for Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
One twitter user wrote: 'That picture of Paul Ryan with the GOP interns is so white that I had to put on sunglasses to look directly at it'
People complained about the lack of diversity among the Capitol Hill interns, with one describing it as a 'sea of white'
In Ohio, where Trump and Clinton are tied, 11 percent of the 848 registered voters in the poll were African American, and they broke for Clinton, 88 percent to 0 percent.
And in Pennsylvania, where Clinton was ahead by nine points, 10 percent of the 829 voters are African American, and they went for Clinton, 91 percent to 0 percent.
Ryan has previously criticized Trump after he claimed an American-born judge was biased against him because of his Mexican heritage, describing it as 'the textbook definition of racist comments.'
'I do absolutely disavow his comments I think they're wrong,' Ryan said last month, according to the Washington Post. But he said he will still support Trump because his agenda is more likely to get enacted under him than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Theresa May has appointed fewer women to her frontbench than David Cameron's last government, despite claims she would promote a string of female Tories to top jobs.
The new Prime Minister appointed eight female politicians to her full Cabinet - equalling Tony Blair's record for the number of women in the Cabinet in 2006.
But after finishing appointing her full ministerial team yesterday, her government contained just 28 women - two fewer than Mr Cameron's final ministerial team.
The finalised list of Government appointments indicated Chancellor Philip Hammond was Mrs May's de facto deputy, ahead of Home Secretary Amber Rudd - but nobody has formally been made the Prime Minister's deputy or first secretary of state.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon rank higher than the newly created positions of Brexit Secretary, held by David Davis, and International Trade, run by Liam Fox.
Theresa May (pictured meeting First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones in Cardiff today) has appointed fewer women to her frontbench than David Cameron's last government, despite claims she would promote a string of female Tories to top jobs
After finishing appointing her full ministerial team yesterday, Theresa May's government contained just 28 women - two fewer than David Cameron's final ministerial team, pictured during his last Prime Minister's Questions last week
Mrs May's brutal reshuffle saw a number of prominent female Cabinet members sacked and demoted, including former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, while Theresa Villiers, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, quit the Government after only being offered a junior ministerial role.
Anna Soubry, the former business minister who attended Cabinet under Mr Cameron, was expecting a promotion but also chose to quit after only being offered a junior ministerial role.
Other prominent women in the Government, such as former rail minister Claire Perry and former pensions minister Baroness Altmann also left posts.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston was replaced as Leader of the House of Lords by Baroness Evans of Bowes.
Mrs May's official spokeswoman said today: 'There were seven full members of Cabinet that were women under the last David Cameron Cabinet, so it's one more than that.
'There were 10 that were attending Cabinet but it was also a bigger Cabinet table - so it was 10 out of 30, it's eight out of 22 and eight out of 27 (including all those who attend Cabinet).'
On Cabinet seniority, she added: 'It largely reflects the precedence of previous Prime Ministers and governments in terms of the order of the Secretaries of State.
'Let's not overdo the interpretations of this - the Prime Minister sees each and every member of her Cabinet as having a vital role to play in delivering the agenda in their policy area.'
Mrs May's brutal reshuffle saw a number of prominent female Cabinet members sacked and demoted, including former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (pictured left), while Anna Soubry (right) also left the Government after she turned down a more junior ministerial role than her previous job, which gave her the right to attend Cabinet
Baroness Altmann (pictured right) left her job as pensions minister but there was a promotion for Amber Rudd (left), who was appointed the new Home Secretary
There were reports the new PM Theresa May (pictured on a visit to Wales today) was going to appoint the record number of women to the Cabinet but she only appointed eight
Theresa May visited the First Minister of Wales today, pictured, as the pair held bilateral meetings at the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff
And despite promoting the likes of Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Andrea Leadsom, the most important posts in Government have been filled largely by men.
Philip Hammond was appointed Chancellor, while the key Brexit posts went to Boris Johnson, the new Foreign Secretary, David Davis, appointed to the new department in charge of Brexit negotiations, and Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary - another new role.
However Mrs May did promote Amber Rudd to the key Cabinet job of Home Secretary.
It makes her the third female to take charge at the Home Office in the last four Home Secretaries.
And Justine Greening, a supporter of Mrs May's leadership bid, was given a big promotion to replace Ms Morgan as Education Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities.
She becomes the first Tory Education Secretary to have spent all her education at state schools.
Another woman promoted was Karen Bradley, who worked under Mrs May at the Home Office and is now the Culture Secretary.
Meanwhile Ms Truss became the first female Justice Secretary, Mrs Leadsom was appointed the new Environment Secretary while Ms Patel may have been hoping for a bigger role than International Development Secretary considering she once described the the department as a 'low priority' for government.
However Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, told The Times that the failure to appoint more women to government positions was 'really disappointing'.
THERESA MAY EQUALS TONY BLAIR'S RECORD OF EIGHT CABINET MINISTERS - BUT WHO ARE THEY AND WHAT ARE THEIR NEW JOBS? Theresa May will continue appointing her Cabinet today on her first full day as the Prime Minister. This is what we know so far: Theresa May, Prime Minister Mrs May replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister much quicker than expected last week after Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the Tory leadership race. She is one of the most experienced ministers in Parliament having spent more than six years as Home Secretary - the longest stint at the Home Office since 1951. Mrs May, MP for Maidenhead in Berkshire, moved into No 10 with husband Philip on Wednesday before wielding the axe on a number of Cameron and Osborne supporters, sacking the Chancellor, Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan within her first hours in the job. Home Secretary: Amber Rudd Ms Rudd came to politics later in life than most, having worked as an investment banker, venture capitalist, and financial journalist. The former Secretary of State for the department of Energy and Climate Change was a loud voice for Remain during the EU referendum. She appeared to support the new PM over her own junior minister Andrea Leadsom in the race for the Tory leadership. Education Secretary and Women and Equalities minister: Justine Greening She replaces sacked Nicky Morgan at the Department of Education, which has acquired the new responsibility for universities - previously covered by the Business Department. Ms Greening moves across from International Development Secretary and she also served briefly as Transport Secretary. She becomes the first openly LGBT Equalities minister after last month revealing she was in a same sex relationship. Lords Leader: Baroness Evans of Bowes An almost complete unknown, Baroness Evans has been catapulted from Government whip in the House of Lords to the Cabinet in a single move. Just 40 years old, the former think tank director is one of the youngest and newest members of the unelected chamber. As leader of the Lords, Baroness Evans will have a crucial and difficult job steering Mrs May's legislation through a chamber in which the Tories do not have a majority. International Development Secretary: Priti Patel Prominent Brexiteer Ms Patel was employment minister before being taking on the international development role. The 44-year-old studied at Keele and Essex universities and began work in the Conservative Central Office in 1997. She also worked in consultancy before she became MP for Witham, Essex, in 2010. But Ms Patel may have been hoping for a bigger role than considering she once described her the Department for International Development as a 'low priority' for the Government. Environment Secretary: Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom was rocketed to prominence in the aftermath of the EU referendum after she decided to run for leader. A junior energy minister and middle ranking Brexit campaigner, she came to public attention in the final TV debate before polling day. Mrs Leadsom defied expectations by winning through to the second round of the Tory leadership contest but toxic comments about how being a mother qualified her for the top job blew up her campaign and she quit the race within days to hand the keys to No 10 to Theresa May. Culture Secretary: Karen Bradley She was parliamentary under secretary of state in the Home Office from 2014, but now Mrs Bradley will take on the culture portfolio. She will oversee arts and culture, broadcasting and creative industries, amongst others. Mrs Bradley, 46, is a mathematics graduate of Imperial College London and went on to work as a tax manager. Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor: Liz Truss She moves over from her previous job of Environment Secretary to become Britain's first female Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, replacing the sacked Michael Gove. She will have a busy in-tray and her and Mrs May will swiftly have to decide whether to press ahead with her predecessor's sweeping reforms to the penal system, such as letting inmates out of jail during the week and creating an academy-style reform of prisons where failing jails are taken over by more successful institutions. Advertisement
Boris Johnson's new deputy is Sir Alan Duncan, who mocked his new boss as 'Silvio Borisconi' just last month as he compared him to the 'comical antics' of the former Italian PM
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.
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'
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.
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
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.
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.
Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox are to share a grace-and-favour residence, it was revealed today.
The Foreign Secretary, the Brexit Secretary and International Trade Secretary - who have been dubbed the 'Three Brexiteers' - will split usage of Chevening in Kent.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that Theresa May and husband Philip have opted to move into the flat above Downing Street renovated by David and Samantha Cameron, instead of George Osborne's old home at Number 10.
Chancellor Philip Hammond will use his predecessor's residence, and also be able to retreat to the luxury of Dorneywood at weekends.
The arrangement over Chevening was quickly branded 'Brexit Towers' - in reference to classic comedy Fawlty Towers.
Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: 'The three Brexiteers sharing Chevening is a bit like Brexit Towers.
'The next question is which of the trio is going to mention the war and will they get away with it - and is David Davis going to make Manuel get a visa.'
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will have use of the Chevening residence in Kent, it has been announced
But Mr Johnson will have to share Chevening with Cabinet colleagues David Davis and Liam Fox
Details of the arrangements for Mrs May's top team were released by her official spokeswoman alongside a full list of government posts - crucially indicating the seniority of each individual.
Mrs May has stopped short of naming a First Secretary of State - effectively a deputy who will take PMQs when she is out of the country.
Chevening was bequeathed to the nation by Lord Stanhope in 1967, with the PM having the power to nominate who can use it.
The estate consists of around 3,000 acres stretching between Sevenoaks and Biggin Hill in Kent.
The gardens alone run to around 40 acres and include a lake and a maze.
CHEVENING'S FAMOUS RESIDENTS 1973 - Anthony Barber 1973-4 - Lord Hailsham 1973-74 1974-80 - The Prince of Wales 1981-2 - Lord Carrington 1982-3 - Francis Pym 1983-89 - Sir Geoffrey Howe 1989 - John Major 1989-95 - Douglas Hurd 1995-97 - Malcolm Rifkind 1997-2001 - Robin Cook 2001-2006 - Jack Straw 2006-7 - Margaret Beckett 2007-10 - David Miliband 2010-14 - William Hague 2010-15 - Nick Clegg 2014-16 - Philip Hammond 2016- Boris Johnson, David Davis, Liam Fox Advertisement
Prince Charles lived at Chevening for six years in the 1970s, but more recently it has been granted to Foreign Secretaries.
Philip Hammond was benefiting from it until he was promoted to Chancellor by Mrs May last week.
During the coalition government William Hague and deputy PM Nick Clegg shared the retreat.
Alongside use of Chevening, Mr Johnson will be able to reside at Number 1 Carlton Gardens.
The grace-and-favour properties may go some way to offsetting the massive financial hit Mr Johnson took when he joined the government.
The former journalist has given up a newspaper column that was earning him around 275,000 a year, as well as delaying publication of a book.
The allocation could cause tensions between the Brexit champions - amid fears about squabbling over who should be in charge of the process of taking us out of the Brussels club.
As well as the Number 11 flat, Mrs May can head for the Chequers country pile when she is not needed in London.
MailOnline revealed last week that the running costs of the Buckinghamshire estate - where Mr Cameron famously enjoyed 'chillaxing' and playing tennis - were 690,000 last year.
The PM's spokeswoman said the decision to allocate Chevening jointly 'reflects the fact that all of these secretaries of state will, as part of their work, be needing an opportunity to host foreign visitors and leaders'.
Mrs May is continuing her push for Brexit today by holding talks with First Minister Carwyn Jones in Wales, after visiting Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland last week.
Mrs May has been in Wales today holding talks with First Minister Carwyn Jones as the Brexit process gets under way
Mrs May has use of the Chequers country retreat in Buckinghamshire, where David Cameron famously liked to 'chillax' by playing tennis
In the coming days Mrs May will also hold crucial talks with Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande in Berlin and Paris respectively.
The trips - her first overseas since taking over from David Cameron - will be closely watched for signs of whether the leaders can navigate a way through what could potentially be a difficult and damaging process for both sides.
Potential flashpoints with the EU include the timing of invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - the formal mechanism for leaving the Brussels club.
Theresa May and husband Philip are moving into the flat above 11 Downing Street that was used by the Camerons. They were said to have been particularly proud of the kitchen (pictured above at a charity event)
Lib Dem leader Tim Farron likened the house-share arrangement to classic sitcom to Fawlty Towers
Mrs May and new Brexit Secretary David Davis have indicated that the two-year exit process will not be activated until next year.
But senior figures in Brussels have insisted negotiations will not start in earnest until we have actually left.
A Downing Street spokesman said: 'The Prime Minister will make her first overseas visits this week.
'On Wednesday, following Prime Minister's Questions, she will travel to Berlin for a bilateral meeting and a working dinner with Chancellor Merkel.
'This will be an opportunity to discuss the bilateral relationship, co-operation on a range of global challenges, and of course how the UK and Germany can work together as the UK prepares to leave the EU.'
Use of Chevening, near Sevenoaks in Kent, has traditionally been granted to Foreign Secretaries
Theresa May and David Davis chat over the Cabinet table. He has been made Brexit Secretary
Boris takes a big financial hit to enter government
Boris Johnson has quit his lucrative newspaper column, and a commission to write a book on Shakespeare has been put on hold.
The Foreign Secretary has ended his contract to write a weekly article for The Daily Telegraph - thought to have been earning him 275,000 a year - following his appointment to the Cabinet.
Hodder & Stoughton has postponed publication of Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius - which had been due out in October, but it expects to release the work in the future.
Mr Johnson received an advance of around 90,000 for the book.
The financial hit will have been offset by a Cabinet salary of 140,000, instead of the 75,000 for a lowly backbencher.
Mr Johnson's outside earnings from writing saw him pay nearly 1 million in tax in four years, documents he released earlier this year showed.
Over four years, he was paid 987,097 for his Daily Telegraph column - while book royalties brought in a further 469,385.
Boris Johnson was in Brussels today holding talks with counterparts including (left to right) Spanish foreign Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, and Maltese Foreign Minister George Vella
Mr Johnson brought his 20 years of work with the newspaper to end in a conversation with group editor Chris Evans, who is understood to have thanked him for his service.
He is expected to write opinion pieces for a wide-range of newspapers in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, but will not be paid for the articles.
Hodder & Stoughton said Mr Johnson's book on Shakespeare would not be published for the 'foreseeable future', but it is believed to be unlikely that the company will ask for the advance back as it still wants to release it at a later date.
In a statement, it said: 'Hodder & Stoughton confirm that they are postponing publication of Boris Johnson's Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius.
A tourist was caught on camera taking off his shoes and donating them to a homeless man in Guatemala before walking off down the street barefoot.
The video was shot by a bystander in the city of Antigua and the Good Samaritan was unaware he was being filmed.
It was later shared on social media where it has been seen more than 116,000 times.
The tourist approaches the homeless man, who is sitting in the doorway of an old building. He appears to offer him his sneakers
The user who posted it wrote: 'This happened at around 6pm yesterday, what a heart he has.'
The images show a man standing over the homeless man who is sitting in a doorway.
He can be seen taking off his shoes and handing them over.
The tourist pats the homeless man on the shoulder and walks off down the street shoeless, while the vagrant can be seen putting on his new shoes.
He takes off his shoes and then pats him on the shoulder although it is not clear whether they spoke to each other in Spanish
The tourist then walks off barefoot while the homeless man tries on the shoes. They appeared to fit
The clip has garnered admiring comments from social media users.
One user commented: 'What a beautiful gesture. My respect to this foreigner.'
Another wrote: 'Few people would do this, we must follow in their footsteps.'
According to the World Bank, severe poverty in Guatemala is widespread, with around 75 percent of the population living below the poverty line and nearly 58 percent unable to purchase food.
Joshua McCarthy, 21, (pictured) became aggressive on a flight from Dubai to Heathrow Airport
A drunk electrician on board a flight called an air hostess a 'f***ing red-haired Nazi b***h' and left a fellow passenger infected after biting him on the arm for two minutes, a court heard today.
Joshua McCarthy, 21, was sat next to his parents on a flight from Dubai to Heathrow Airport and became aggressive after he drank five small bottles of wine.
A court heard McCarthy 'lost it' about 90 minutes from the London airport and spat on the passenger in front of him, Steven Cheek.
The cabin crew got involved as he shouted 'I'm going to kill you' and when told to calm down on the British Airways flight by stewardess Hayley Morgan, he called her a 'f***ing red-haired Nazi b***h', the court heard.
He then sank his teeth into Christopher McNerlin's forearm - breaking the skin which left a deep bruise - after the fashion industry worker bravely intervened.
Today McCarthy, from Sidcup, Kent, narrowly escaped jail when he was given a suspended prison sentence at Isleworth Crown Court, west London.
Douglas Adams, prosecuting, said: 'The flight was full of families and young children returning from the Easter holidays in Dubai.
'The defendant was sat next to his parents. With around 90 minutes of the flight remaining, the crew were bringing around breakfast boxes and that sort of thing.
'A short time later the passenger in the seat in front said he felt uneasy when McCarthy started waving his hands at a young black woman waiting by the toilet with her baby.
'He wasn't sure whether they knew each other or not, but he says he ignored what was going on.
'He says he shuffled in his seat to make it known that he had noticed the defendant knocking into his seat.
'He says he turned and looked at Mr McCarthy and then looked forward.'
Mr Adams said at this moment, McCarthy - who is self-employed - spat in the passenger's hair.
He added: 'He felt a spit of air being blown on the back of his head and felt spit on his hair - a wet substance.'
He was sat next to his parents when he spat at a passenger in front of him and then called an air hostess a 'Nazi b***h'
Victim Christopher McNerlin was left with a 'complete jaw scar' on his arm after he intervened on the flight
The passenger in front asked 'what are you doing' and told him to 'f***ing sit down and shut up'.
In a victim impact statement to the court, Mr McNerlin said he had 'received an incredibly vicious bite'.
He said: 'Despite wearing a jumper, it broke my skin. Since the bite, the anxiety has been unbearable.
'I am left with a complete jaw scar on my arm.'
After the attack McNerlin, who works for a 'trend forecasting' company, posted pictures on social media of the bite mark, along with one of himself giving the 'thumbs up' as he sat in the cockpit once the plane had landed safely.
He wrote: 'That time when you help restrain and handcuff a nutter at 40,000ft. He bites you, but it's all OK because Captain Kendal lets you sit in the cockpit.'
And he added: 'At A&E after helping the British Airways stewardesses restrain a violent passenger on board yesterday's BA0104.
'Incredible team on the flight, especially Hayley, who put herself in harm's way to protect passengers.
Police had to escort Joshua McCarthy off the plane after he became aggressive at a fellow passenger on board
'Thanks to British Airways Captain Kendal for showing me the cockpit. The bite and A&E were almost worth it.'
The court heard the flight attendant said she had 'had trouble sleeping' since the attack and that she 'cannot be alone around men, or be in the presence of drunk men'.
Judge Sandeep Kainth told McCarthy: 'Your behaviour with respect to what took place was absolutely disgraceful.
'Firstly, you were intoxicated to such an extent that a member of the public aboard that flight had to intervene to assist the crew.
'Second, there were families present. Thirdly, there were young children present as well.
'The bite lasted for two minutes, which is quite substantial. With regard to the spitting, that is outrageously disgusting.
'The transfer of spittle to another, well that's absolutely disgusting.
'You've let yourself and your family down and turned what was a wonderful experience for those travelling home with a sour taste in their mouths.'
A 34-second video showed the moment McCarthy was arrested by officers who removed him from the plane at Heathrow Airport.
Mr McNerlin posted pictures on social media of the bite mark, along with one of himself giving the 'thumbs up' as he sat in the cockpit once the plane had landed safely
McCarthy was heard constantly shouting: 'C***, b***h, f***' during the disturbance and he was eventually handcuffed and secured to his seat.
Miss Morgan was left with bruising to both legs, her left arm and ached down her right side.
Nicholas Robinson, defending, told the court: 'This was extremely out of character, he feels utter shame and is deeply remorseful.He went from tipsy to very drunk in an instant.'
McCarthy admitted assaulting Mr McNerlin and Mr Cheek, being drunk on an aircraft and using threatening behaviour on the seven-hour flight.
He was given two months for spitting, nine months for being drunk on an aircraft and four months for assaulting Christopher McNerlin.
The sentences are to be served concurrently, and were suspended for 18 months.
Emojis have become a language in their own right - and now New York's public hospitals are using them to encourage young people to practise safe sex.
Facebook ads featuring emoji images of birds, bees and a suggestive eggplant are appearing on the feeds of young people with the accompanying headline: 'Need someone to talk about "it"?'
It's part of a new push by health officials to connect with youth who are fluent in 'mobilespeak' while promoting birth control for sexually active teens and preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
The online campaign features Facebook ads with emoji images of birds, bees and a suggestive eggplant
NYC Health & Hospitals launched the online campaign this week on social media platforms and its youth health website, which features an emoji of a monkey with its hands over its mouth, and the words 'Nobody to talk to?'
The campaign is intended to educate young people about the confidential sexual and reproductive health services offered at New York's YouthHealth centers, and position them as safe and understanding environments.
'Were taking away all of the excuses for adolescents not to enroll in health care,' said Dr. Warren Seigel, chairman of the department of pediatrics and director of adolescent medicine at Coney Island Hospital, in an interview with the New York Times.
Services at YouthHealth centers include testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy tests and emergency contraception.
An image on the YouthHealth website shows an emoji monkey with its hands over its mouth
Last year, more than 150,000 adolescent patients sought testing or treatment from NYC Health & Hospitals, including more than 38,000 for sexually transmitted diseases and 30,000 for pregnancy.
Around 2,400 gave birth.
Richard Zapata, outreach and education manager for population health, told the New York Times the centers could have treated even more patients.
Many teens are afraid to seek testing, treatment or information out of embarrassment or the fear that their parents or others will find out.
But children under the age of 18 can receive confidential care for sexual and reproductive health services in New York.
'This means the doctor cannot tell anyone without your permission,' the YouthHealth website assured visitors.
A mummy-blogger whose toddler has brain cancer has spoken about her heartbreak at wishing she could 'give him the death he deserves', as The Project host Carrie Bickmore breaks down in tears.
Isabella Darch faced an online backlash in April when she wrote in a blog post that she wanted her three-year-old son Bede to die.
But the Perth mother-of-three has moved The Project's Bickmore to tears explaining the family's struggles through the 'brutal assault' of brain cancer that he has survived thus far with love.
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A mummy-blogger whose toddler has brain cancer has spoken about her heartbreak at wishing she could 'give him the death he deserves'
Bede has outlived most life-spans experts have given. Though he's now been given just six more months after four successive scans found the growth has developed.
'The tools Bede has fought with isn't necessarily this arsenal of meds - but the love that we give him and that he gives us,' Ms Darch told Bickmore on Channel Ten's The Project, which aired on Monday.
'And we always say that Bede's life is a miracle of medicine and love because they've fought hand in hand.'
It was those words which brought Bickmore, who lost her husband to brain cancer, to tears.
The interview with the Perth mother-of-three left The Project host Carrie Bickmore wiping tears from her face (pictured)
'And we always say that Bede's life is a miracle of medicine and love because they've fought hand in hand': It was those words which brought Bickmore, who lost her husband (pictured) to brain cancer, to tears
Her late husband, and father of her first child, Greg Lange, tragically passed away from brain cancer in 2010.
Explaining the controversial blog post, Ms Darch said 'brain cancer can be a horrible, protracted death'.
'I wish that I could give my son the death I want for him. Whoever thought they'd say those words?
'Brain cancer is an all-out brutal assault.
Ms Darch had spoken about the doctor giving six months to live in her April blog post saying that her 'heart is raw ... because I want my son to die'
Isabella Darch pictured with her daughter faced an online backlash in April when she wrote in a blog post that she wanted her three-year-old son Bede to die
'It's not a gentle drifting. It's not a nausea that can be medicated. It takes the core of a person and twists. And I wish I could spare my son that. Because he's phenomenal. And he doesn't deserve it.'
Bede was diagnosed with brain cancer when he was three-months-old after displaying unusual signs from about six-weeks-old.
The little boy cries sometimes 23-hours a day, his father Roy told The Project.
He wakes four or five times a night, and can't speak, see, walk or eat without a stomach tube.
Bede (pictured) has outlived most life-spans experts have given. Though he's now been given just six more months after four successive scans found the growth has developed
Bede was diagnosed with brain cancer when he was three-months-old after displaying unusual signs from about six-weeks-old
Bickmore again broke down as The Project panel spoke about Ms Darch's struggle.
The host said people shouldn't have criticised the mother-of-three over her blog post, because you can't judge 'until you've walked in someone's shoes'.
Ms Darch had spoken about the doctor giving six months to live in her April blog post.
'My heart is raw. Because the truth is I want my son to die. I'm tired. He is tired. I want peace for him, rest,' she wrote at the time.
A GoFundMe page was launched earlier this year to help the family pay for a carer, and raised more than $185,000.
As if New York City politics weren't dramatic enough, Mayor Bill de Blasio has imported the Canadian-equivalent of Anthony Weiner to head the city's new streetcar project.
Disgraced former Toronto city councilor Adam Giambrone starts work Monday overseeing the creation of the Brooklyn-Queens connector - a job that will pay him a whopping $160,000 a year.
The 39-year-old ended his bid for Toronto's mayor in 2010 after his mistress published steamy details about their City Hall sexscapades.
Adam Giambrone, 39, starts work Monday as the new head of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, a streetcar that will link Astoria, Queens to Sunset Park, Brooklyn
At the time, Giambrone was in a long-term relationship with his live-in girlfriend Sarah McQuarrie, who is now his wife.
His mistress, Kristen Lucas, was reportedly in the dark about Giambrone's relationship, and when she learned that McQuarrie would start campaigning as his girlfriend, she exposed their affair in an interview with the Toronto Star.
Lucas said that their relationship started when she was just a 19-year-old college student, and that they would often have sex on a sofa in his City Hall office.
'I still think of you when I need . . . um . . . stimulation,' Giambrone wrote to Lucas in one of the text messages.
'I like you because youre smart and interesting. Youre also good-looking naked,' another messages reads.
In another exchange, Lucas grows angered when she learns about Giambrone's girlfriend for the first time.
The 39-year-old former Toronto city councilor dropped his bid for mayor in 2010 when his affair with 19-year-old university student Kristen Lucas (pictured) was revealed
Giambrone pictured above with Sarah McQuarrie, who he married in 2011 - a year after the scandal
'You know I will be announcing I have a partner,' Giambrone messaged Lucas on December 27, 2009.
'It is someone named Sarah, who Ive been involved with in the past. It is important for the campaign...I had to have someone political.
'I really wanted to tell you [about McQuarrie] when we met. I hope this does not change things.
'Were still going to meet like we said next week, right?' he wrote.
'No, it changes everything,' Lucas replied. 'Why couldnt it have been me?'
'You HAD to choose someone good for your campaign. Thats f****** ridiculous,' she wrote.
After the text messages were revealed, Giambrone dropped out of the mayoral race and decided against running for reelection for his city council seat.
In a recent interview with New York magazine, Giambroke said he 'didn't handle the situation very well' at the time.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's (pictured) office has touted Giambrone's expertise in transit
Since the announcement of his new position, De Blasio's administration has declined to comment on his scandals while talking up his expertise in transit.
'We welcome Mr. Giambrones expertise planning and launching new streetcar lines,' City Hall spokesman Austin Finan said, according to the New York Post.
'The BQX will be the first streetcar to ply New York City streets in roughly 70 years, and having someone with hands-on experience from North Americas largest streetcar system will be valuable as we undertake the project. Were excited to have him join the team.'
Two men are missing in Lake Michigan after high waves swept them from a pier in eastern Wisconsin.
Keith Risse with the Sheboygan Fire Department says the men were fishing on South Pier on Sunday afternoon when they were washed from the pier.
A third man who also was knocked into the water was rescued and taken to a hospital.
Risse told Fox 6 Now: 'They were actually standing on the pier. They were fishermen on the pier that got washed in by the waves.'
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Facebook user Dylan Abeyta (pictured left and right) described the scary incident that also involved Adam LaLuzerne, Jeremy David Wheat, and Kurt Ahonen. Abeyta said he was saved by the Coast Guard
Abeyta was seeking prayers for Adam LaLuzerne (left) and Kurt Ahonen (right), who he said are missing
Facebook user Dylan Abeyta, whose profile says he attended Saint Norbert College, described the scary incident that also involved Adam LaLuzerne, Jeremy David Wheat, and Kurt Ahonen.
Abeyta wrote online: 'Today at around 3:00 this afternoon while myself, Adam, Jeremy, and Kurt were walking down a treacherous pier in Sheboygan, on our way back to safety, a massive wave swept us from behind, forcing three of us, including Kurt, Adam, and myself to be swept into Lake Michigan.
'The last one, Jeremy, was able to quickly get help out there to retrieve us, while us three were trying to not drown in the current.'
US Coast Guard used a helicopter and a Milwaukee rescue boat to search for the men. The Sheboygan County dive team suspended operations Sunday evening because of the rough water. Fire officials say the search resumed Monday morning
Abeyta said Jeremy David Wheat 'was able to quickly get help out there to retrieve us, while us three were trying to not drown in the current'
Abeyta continued: 'I was separated from the other to getting swept by the current in the lake, and barely keeping my head above water not knowing where I was or how long I would last.
'Just as I was losing hope, a coast guard boat pulled me from the water and I was transported there and I'm still here as I write.
'While I'm lucky to be alive, there is no word on the whereabouts of both Adam and Kurt, and as the chances for their survival get slimmer, I ask that you send your prayers and thoughts to them, whether they are dead or alive.'
US Coast Guard used a helicopter and a Milwaukee rescue boat to search for the men.
The Sheboygan County dive team suspended operations Sunday evening because of the rough water.
Fire officials say the search resumed Monday morning.
Mayor Michael Vandersteen told WISN: 'It's very unfortunate.
'Our hearts go out to the families of these two individuals that got swept into the water and appear to have drowned.'
The pier in Sheboygan, 55 miles north of Milwaukee, was closed because of the dangerous conditions.
A vigil for LaLuzerne and Ahonen is scheduled to take place Monday at 6pm in Sturgeon Bay.
A US Coast Guard helicopter is seen up in the air. Mayor Michael Vandersteen has said: 'Our hearts go out to the families of these two individuals that got swept into the water and appear to have drowned'
The pier in Sheboygan, 55 miles north of Milwaukee, was closed because of the dangerous conditions
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Amazing photos show 3,500 Chinese students taking the same physics lesson in preparation for the graduate entrance examination.
The students in Jinan, China's Shandong province, are all preparing to take the test which will allow them into China's top universities to complete a Master's degree.
Pictures show the students sat in a giant hall, copying notes projected onto a big screen on the stage.
Now that's a lot of people! These photos taken in Jinan, east China's Shandong province shows students revising Physics for the exam
How do you find your seat? More than 3,500 students sat in the hall as part of preparation for the Chinese Graduate Entrance Examination
A giant classroom! The exam takes place in December and is usually taken during a student's final year of undergraduate degree
Summer holidays are a good time to try and cram in extra preparation time for the exam with many organisations offering refresher courses
Photos taken on July 18 show the students taking part in a special class for those who want to take the Chinese graduate student examination to enable them to go to some of China's top universities and complete a Master's degree.
Pictures show students crammed into a giant hall, almost like a theatre, taking notes and listening to the lecture.
A blue banner could be seen hanging inside the hall, which read: 'If you love him, tell him to take the graduate entrance examination, because it's heaven; if you hate him, tell him to take the graduate entrance examination, because it's hell.'
The hall is so packed that there are even students sat behind the overhead projector, reports ce.cn.
Summer holidays are a good time to try and cram in extra preparation time for the exam with many organisations offering refresher courses.
The number of applicants for the exam is continuing to rise mainly due to a growth in university graduates and the increasing struggle to find a job in the country.
According to CCTV News, in 2016 there will be 7.6 million college graduates in China making it the highest number ever.
One of China's recruitment websites said that recruitment demand only went up 4 percent in the first quarter this year, far less than expected.
A report issued in April by the China Institute for Employment Research said that internet-related industries and finance are among the best job markets.
The examination is usually taken during the last year of an undergraduate's degree.
The test is set to be held this coming December.
If students pass the exam then they gain access to some of the country's top universities to do their master's degree
Can you hear me at the back?Students pay attention to the lecture and take notes in probably the biggest class they have ever been in
The number of applicants for the exam is continuing to rise due to a growth in university graduates and increasing struggle to find a job
A Brit allegedly pushed a stag do friend off a boat on a Lisbon river while he was 'unconscious and without a life jacket', it emerged.
The reveller has been made an arguido or official suspect after witnesses identified him as the author of the drunken prank.
Police divers and a Portuguese air force helicopter were mobilised at dawn on Monday morning for the third day of an ongoing search for the missing 32-year-old, who is also British.
A Brit allegedly pushed a stag do friend off a boat (pictured) on a Lisbon river while he was 'unconscious and without a life jacket', it emerged
The unidentified man, part of a stag do group of 12 Brits and an Australian, was on board a chartered sailing boat on Lisbon's River Tagus when the incident occurred just after midday on Saturday.
Around 30 rescuers are involved in a sea and air search, which is being conducted during the daytime and suspended at nightfall.
An investigating judge has now been put in charge of a criminal probe into the disappearance after receiving a written report from Maritime Police in Lisbon, who are coordinating the search.
A source close to the case said officers held out little hope of finding the missing Brit alive.
His stag do friends spent the weekend holed up in a hotel in central Lisbon.
The revelation one of the stag do party had been made an arguido emerged on Sunday following police quizzes of the other revellers and four crew on board the boat, which is owned by a firm based near the dock where the vessel set sail from.
A major sea and air rescue was launched after the 32-year-old went overboard in the area around Alges, Portugal. Pictured is the back of the boat the stag group had chartered
A helicopter crew pictured on Monday scouring the water for the missing Brit
Maritime Police chief Malaquais Dominguez said the statements taken from witnesses had enabled them to 'determine that the incident was the result of a prank gone wrong and the alleged author had been made an arguido'.
A leading state broadcaster said the police had reached the conclusion that the suspect had pushed the missing man off the boat while he was 'unconscious and without a life jacket'.
There is no suggestion the act was a deliberate attempt to do the Brit any harm, but if the allegation is proved it will leave the Brit facing a possible manslaughter charge if a body is found.
The suspect is understood to be subject to 'terms of identity and residence' restrictions.
These are automatically applied to an arguido under Portuguese law, and require them to give police their address and notify officers if they are away from home for more than five days.
It was not immediately clear if the Brit suspect would be required to appear in court.
Pauline Hanson faced a grilling on Monday night's Q&A program but the fiery politician hit back defiantly at her critics during heated debates about Islamic terrorism and radicalisation.
Ms Hanson was repeatedly questioned by Islamic members of the audience during the Q&A episode featuring panellists from the newly-elected Senate.
She was asked about the cause of her Islamophobia, whether she would join an Islamic family for dinner, and was left stunned when fellow panellist and Labor Senator Sam Dastyari told her he was a Muslim.
The One Nation leader and Senator-elect arrived at the ABC studios in Sydney as about 200 protesters gathered outside the ABC headquarters - including her supporters and anti-racism activists.
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Controversial One Nation leader Pauline Hanson appeared on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday
Ms Hanson is pictured next to ABC's Q&A host Tony Jones on Monday night
She was welcomed by about 200 people outside the ABC office in Ultimo, central Sydney, made up of those who support her (pictured) and those who oppose her
One audience member, Cindy Rahal, said Ms Hanson was pushing an agenda of fear 'and making people like myself and my friend here worried to come into the studio because of protesters outside'.
But Ms Hanson rejected any responsibility for the clash.
'The protesters are nothing to do with me,' Ms Hanson said. 'Protesters were against me because I choose to speak up against this matter so I have protesters which are trying to shut down freedom of speech.'
She also defended Sonia Kruger when Mr Dastyari said the pair were playing 'the politics of fear and division' for wanting to ban Muslims from entering Australia.
Ms Hanson said of Nine Network's Today Extra host: 'Go Sonia.'
'I think it's great that someone is standing up, because she's expressed her feeling about it,' Ms Hanson told the audience on Monday night.
'She's referred to Japan, for a population of 127 million people, they don't have terrorism on their streets
'You've got Brussels now the biggest Muslim state there with 300,000 in there, you've got 10 per cent in France, you have the problems on the streets of France,' Ms Hanson said.
Brussels is a city of Belgium, not a state.
Ms Kruger caused controversy earlier on Monday for saying she 'would like to see it [Muslim immigration] stop now for Australia'.
Ms Hanson asked the Labor Senator 'Are you a Muslim? Really?' during their fiery debate on Monday night
'I'm concerned for every one of you here in this audience tonight and everyone at home because I want safety on our streets,' Ms Hanson said
The One Nation leader arrived at the ABC studios in Sydney as about 200 protesters gathered outside the ABC headquarters. Five were arrested for breach of the peace
Two groups of about 200 protesters had clashed in front of the ABC office prior to the program and at least five were arrested for breach of the peace
Early on in the program, Ms Hanson found herself engaged with fellow panel member Sam Dastyari and was shocked to learn he was a Muslim.
'Are you a Muslim? Really?' Ms Hanson said.
Mr Dastyari said: 'Yeah, and I have never hidden it away.'
She continued to ask details about his religious beliefs and asked if he was 'sworn in under the Koran?'.
'I was born in an Islamic nation and by being born' Mr Dastyari said.
Ms Hanson: 'So you're a Muslim.'
'By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country' Mr Dastyari said.
Ms Hanson: 'You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting.'
'I'm surprised. I did want know that about you,' she added.
Greens Senator Larissa Waters then said, to laughter and applause: 'Why, because he doesn't have three heads?'
Another questioner went on to ask Ms Hanson if she would share a meal with his family so they could learn from each other, after the One Nation leader rejected Labor Senator Sam Dastyari's (pictured) offer to share the meal in western Sydney
Early on in the program, Mr Dastyari had pushed Ms Hanson to clarify whether she would have liked him to have been banned from entering Australia as a five-year-old boy who moved with his family from northern Iran
The Labor senator had earlier pushed Ms Hanson to clarify whether she would have liked him to have been banned from entering Australia as a five-year-old boy who moved with his family from northern Iran.
PAULINE HANSON ASKS SAM DASTYARI IF HE'S MUSLIM Hanson: 'Are you a Muslim? Really?' Dastyari: 'Yeah and I have never hidden it away.' Hanson: 'Were you sworn in under the Koran?' Dastyari: 'I was born in an Islamic nation and by being born Hanson: 'So you're a Muslim.' Dastyari: 'By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country' Hanson: 'You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting.' Dastyari: 'Ms Hanson: 'I think you're trying to make a joke of what is a serious' Hanson: 'I'm surprised. I did not know that about you.' Dastyari: 'Would you have allowed five-year-old Sam Dastyari into this country? He came to this country on 16 January, 1988, two weeks before the Bicentenary celebrations and my family has done nothing but contribute to this country since they've been here.' Hanson: 'Muslims have been a part of Australia for a long, long time, many, many years. You go back to the Gold Rush days and they were in Australia but it is only in the last 10, 20 years that we have seen a rise of terrorism on the streets.' Advertisement
'When I look at Ms Hanson's policy document that turns around and says we should be banning Muslims from country to this country, I have to ask - does that mean that a five-year-old Sam Dastyari should never have been able to set foot in Australia because somewhere in Tehran there's a document that says beside my name the word 'Muslim' because of where I was born?'
Eventually after their exchange, Ms Hanson thanked him and said she was 'happy' he came to Australia.
Another questioner, Khaled Elomar, told Ms Hanson his 11-year-old son was watching the program from home and had recently asked what Islamophobia is.
'I said Islamophobia is one or a combination of three things hate, fear or ignorance. I promised him that I will ask you this question so he can hear your answer directly. So, with all due respect, what is the basis of your Islamophobic feelings? Hate, fear or ignorance?'
Ms Hanson replied that it was 'none of the above' and then proceeded to ask him why there was an increase in Islamic radicalisation.
He said Ms Hanson and others like her used 'extremely dangerous and disturbing rhetoric'.
'Almost every day I get called a Muslim pig because of you. I really do thank you for that because it just shows how much of a better person I am that I can choose to ignore these guys and remain the person that I am,' Mr Elomar said to applause.
Q&A host Tony Jones then asked Ms Hanson whether she could offer Mr Elomar's 11-year-old son 'any hope that you regard him as an equal Australian along with all other citizens?'
One audience member, Cindy Rahal (pictured), said Ms Hanson was pushing an agenda of fear 'and making people like myself and my friend here worried to come into the studio because of protesters outside'
Another questioner, Khaled Elomar (pictured), told Ms Hanson his 11-year-old son was watching the program from home and had recently asked what Islamophobia is
Another questioner (pictured) asked Ms Hanson if she would share a meal with his family so they could learn from each other
Another questioner went on to ask Ms Hanson if she would share a meal with his family so they could learn from each other, after the One Nation leader rejected Mr Dastyari's offer to share the meal in western Sydney.
Mohammed Attai said he believed 'the best way to increase understanding and mutual respect is through interaction.
'Senator Hanson, I understand you declined Sam Dastyari's offer for a halal snack pack,' he asked.
Mr Dastyari then interrupted to say she was 'reconsidering'.
'No, I'm not,' Ms Hanson replied as the audience laughed.
Mr Attai continued: 'Would you be willing to take my offer to inviting you for lunch or dinner, whichever suits you best, with me and my Muslim family? And in respect to you and your beliefs, while we have something halal, I'll ensure what you have is something not halal a haram snack pack. Would you kindly accept my invitation?'
After the pair went back and forth, Ms Hanson eventually said: 'We can talk. You can get in touch with my office and see what happens, yeah.'
Shortly after her appearance, Ms Hanson wrote on Facebook asking how she'd performed
The One Nation leader had remained defiant throughout the program. She said her words weren't to blame for terrorism and that she was asking for a debate to find the answers, which she admitted she didn't have.
'I'm concerned for every one of you here in this audience tonight and everyone at home because I want safety on our streets, I want to find the right answers and it's important for each and every one of us and for the future generations,' she said.
'To ignore is not the answer to it. To think we can find the easy answers, it's not, but pulling together as a community and as a nation to debate the issue, then we can find the right answers.'
Shortly after her appearance, Ms Hanson wrote on Facebook asking how she'd performed.
Two groups of about 200 protesters had clashed in front of the ABC office prior to the program and at least five were arrested for breach of the peace.
Both groups waved banners and chanted slogans during the fiery demonstration.
'Pauline Hanson don't you dare, Muslims welcome everywhere,' anti-racism protesters chanted.
Supporters of Ms Hanson waved banners reading: 'Multiculturalism has utterly failed' and 'welcome back Pauline'.
Pauline Hanson supporters and anti-racism protesters have clashed in Sydney ahead of Pauline Hanson's appearance on the ABC's Q&A program
Pro Pauline Hanson supporters wave anti-Islam banners outside the ABC office in Sydney
Writer Benjamin Law wrote on Twitter he had 'family friends bashed in the 1990s, I still palpably feel the rage of these Muslim audience members'
Another writer, Jill Stark, said it was 'telling' that Ms Hanson 'insists on 'integration'' but baulked at the offer to join a Muslim family for dinner
'Anyone going to mention how many young white racists are being radicalised by Pauline Hanson?' stand-up comic Aamer Rahman said
Police managed to separate the two groups and said they removed a 'small number of protesters' from the area.
Cat Rose, an anti-Hanson protest organiser, said Ms Hanson's appearance on the program promoted racism.
'I think people are legitimately angry and want to show their opposition to Pauline Hanson and her vile racism being given more airtime,' she told Daily Telegraph.
'She already has had far too much coverage and to have the ABC advertise her as someone who is just ''fighting for equality'' on its promos is totally warped.'
Nick Folkes, from the Party for Freedom, said he was frustrated that the two groups were being kept apart by police.
'I'd much prefer to be closer so we can have some banter between each other but it's still good to be here,' he told the ABC.
'It's a psychological win for us and just to let Pauline know that we are here for her ... and we'll continue to support her.'
A police spokesperson said no charges have been laid.
The response to Ms Hanson over Twitter was overwhelmingly negative, while her supporters flooded her with congratulations on Facebook.
'You did really well considering all of the loaded questions thrown at you,' one person wrote on her page.
Police managed to separate the two groups and said they removed a 'small number of protesters' away from the area
'I'd much prefer to be closer so we can have some banter between each other but it's still good to be here,' he told said
A NSW police officer removes a protester outside the ABC's office in Ultimo
Officers are pictured restraining two protesters. Police said no charges have been laid
Both groups waved banners and chanted slogans during the fiery demonstration. At least five people were arrested
Those protesting against Ms Hanson carried banners to 'stop black deaths in custody'
Cat Rose, an anti-Hanson protest organiser, said Ms Hanson's appearance on the program promoted racism
Officer Brandon Baranowski, 31, had been responding to reports of a domestic violence dispute in the early hours of Sunday morning when the gunman walked up to the vehicle and fired at the cop multiple times
Milwaukee police will be sent out in two person teams after a suspect shot an officer as he was sat in his squad car - the same day that three cops were gunned down in Baton Rouge.
Officer Brandon Baranowski, 31, had been responding to reports of a domestic violence dispute in the early hours of Sunday morning when the gunman walked up to the vehicle and fired at the cop multiple times.
Baranowski was rushed to hospital with serious injuries but is expected to survive.
The shooter, 20, who has not yet been named but is believed to be the suspect in the domestic violence dispute, shot himself dead a short time later.
'This is just another example of the risks our officers take each and every day to protect these citizens,' Assistant Police Chief William Jessup said during a news conference.
Law enforcement all over the country are on edge after recent attacks on police officers.
Baranowski was shot just a few hours before former Marine Gavin Long, of Kansas City, opened fire in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, killing three officers.
Less than two weeks prior to that attack, five cops were killed at a Dallas Black Lives Matter protest over the police shootings of two black men.
Assistant Chief Jessup has since issued a notice to all seven police districts that officers should not patrol alone, but should be in two-person squads 'effective immediately and until further notice.'
Sgt. Tim Gauerke says officers had responded to several calls in the 3500 block of South 17th street, Milwaukee, early Sunday, including two domestic violence-related calls. But when police arrived, the suspect was no longer there when the officers arrived.
Baranowski, a 13-year police veteran, had been waiting in his squad car when the suspect approached and shot him at around 2am.
The married, father-of-three's life was saved by his police vest the close range shot to the chest and shot in the arm.
About 30 minutes later, officers heard a nearby gunshot and found the gunman who had apparently shot himself in the head, killing himself.
The shooter, 20, who has not yet been named but is believed to be the suspect in the domestic violence dispute, shot himself dead a short time later (pictured are police at the scene)
Law enforcement all over the country are on edge after recent attacks on police officers (pictured are police at the scene in Milwaukee)
Milwaukee police will be sent out in two person teams after a suspect shot an officer as he was sat in his squad car - the same day that three cops were gunned down in Baton Rouge
The uncle of the suspect, from West Allis, has since released a statement saying that his nephew had not had a politically or racially charged agenda against police but was simply 'suffering from profound emotional distress.'
'We are deeply saddened by his desperate and misguided actions and would like to express our most heartfelt apologies to Officer Brandon Baranowski and his entire family as a result of this tragic incident,' he added to TMJ.
'We would like to thank the entire Milwaukee Police Department for their efforts to perform lifesaving measures and their efforts to protect and serve in our community.
'He was a loving father, son, brother, grandson, nephew, uncle, cousin, and friend and he will be profoundly missed. The family is asking that you respect our privacy while we grieve the loss of our dear loved one.'
Family and friends are mourning the loss of a North Carolina teen who drowned Friday evening after trying to save two young boys who had fallen into a river.
Preston Johnston, who is from Spindale, was with four children when they decided to go to a rock in the middle of Rocky Broad River at Chimney Rock, according to WSPA.
Two of the children started having difficulties in the river and the 19-year-old jumped in to save them, Rutherford County deputies said.
Preston Johnston (left and right), who is from Spindale, drowned Friday evening after trying to save two young boys from a North Carolina river
Two of the children started having problems in the Rocky Broad River (file photo) and the 19-year-old jumped in to save them, Rutherford County deputies said
Johnston, who has been hailed a hero, had been able to help one of the children before going under water and never resurfacing.
Rescue crews responded to the area just before 6pm Friday.
Johnston's body was recovered around 8pm by a dive team from the Henderson County Rescue Squad, according to the station.
None of the four children were injured and they were all returned to their families, according to the Rutherford County Sheriffs Office
Johnston was a 2015 graduate of RS Central High School in Rutherford, NC.
And according to his Facebook, he studied at the Universal Technical Institute.
The Rocky Broad River, which is a 3.6 mile extension used to form Lake Lure, is known for its large boulders.
It's rated a class IV-V by American Whitewater for level of difficulty when kayaking or whitewater rafting.
The rating means the river has intense and powerful rapids and continuous drops.
A Macedonian woman is stirring up controversy in the Balkan nation after she entered herself into an international beauty pageant and was recently sat behind the country's president at a VIP cultural event.
Dunavka Trifunovska, 34, was ridiculed after she appeared at the Miss Grand International contest last October and left people scratching their heads after she appeared at the summer festival alongside several dignitaries.
Trifunovska, who works as a chemist in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, has carved out a more glamorous lifestyle even though she became the butt of jokes in her home nation after she awkwardly strutted around the stage at the beauty pageant in Bangkok.
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Dunavka Trifunovska, 34, was ridiculed for this awkward pose at the Miss Grand International contest
Trifunovska works as a chemist in Macedonia's capital, but has sought a more glamorous lifestyle
Trifunovska was wearing her Macedonian beauty crown and a revealing pink dress at the cultural event
When Trifunovska learned that her country was not represented at the Miss Grand International, she set up a fashion company and obtained a licence to organise a national event in Macedonia.
However, she sent herself as the official Miss Macedonia 2015.
She had everyone back home wondering who she was when she strutted around the stage, made an awkward heart symbol with her hands and posed for the judges.
Video of her appearance went viral on the internet, where it was then seen by a large majority of the Macedonian public.
Trifunovska entered herself in the Miss Grand International competition and represented Macedonia
She had everyone back home wondering who she was when she strutted around the stage in Bangkok
Trifunovska failed to win the competition, which was awarded to the Dominican Republic's Anea Garcia, who was dethroned last March.
Macedonians were confused again recently when Trifunovska turned up at a summer festival at an amphitheatre on the shores of Lake Ohrid, near the country's border with Albania.
Trifunovska was pictured wearing her Macedonian beauty crown and a revealing pink dress.
Video of Trifunovska's appearance went viral on the internet, where it was then seen by most Macedonians
Trifunovska (pictured at the beauty contest) sat in a VIP area behind Macedonia's president at the festival
She sat in the presidential lodge right behind Macedonian President Gjorje Ivanov, his wife Maja Ivanova, Minister of Culture Elizabeta Kanceska Milevska and Nikola Bakraceski, the mayor of Ohrid, local media reported
She had turned up at the event with a male companion, although local media did not know his identity.
Donald Trump thinks something was off with President Barack Obama's response to the Baton Rouge police shooting.
'I mean, you know, I watched the president and sometimes the words are okay,' Trump said Monday on Fox and Friends. 'But you just look at the body language. There's something going on.'
Repeating himself, Trump, who called into the show during a live broadcast from Cleveland, the site of the GOP's convention this week, said, 'Theres something going on and the words are not often okay, by the way.'
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Donald Trump thinks something was off with President Barack Obama's response to the Baton Rouge police shooting. 'You just look at the body language. There's something going on,' he said
Watch his body language: Trump suggested that the president's words and how he delivered them were different
White House statement: The public statement by the president on Sunday in the wake of the Baton Rouge atrocity was questioned by Trump who said: 'There's just a bad feeling, a lot of bad feeling about him.'
Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy asked Trump, 'What does that mean, theres something going on?'
'There's just a bad feeling, a lot of bad feeling about him,' Trump replied. 'I see it too. There's a lot of bad feeling about him. We have a country that has not been like this since I can remember it.'
Trump seemed to be arguing that Obama's condemnation of police shootings hasn't been strong enough - a complaint other Republicans have made.
Yesterday Obama said, 'Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible.'
The president said in a statement from the White House press briefing room: 'These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes.
'I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge,' he said.
On Sunday Trump also blasted the president while paying tribute to three police officers killed in Baton Rouge.
The officers were killed by suspect Gavin Eugene Long at a gas station along Airline Highway in the Louisiana city on Sunday morning. Three more officers were wounded in the assault.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, used Facebook to pay tribute to the fallen officers, and took 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.'
On Twitter, the 70-year-old businessman 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.'
Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to blast President Barack Obama once again while paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge
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!'
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 9 a.m. 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.
The sister of one of the black police officer slain in Baton Rouge has revealed she was sitting in church when she learned her beloved brother had died when the pastor asked the congregation to pray for her family.
Montrell Jackson, 32, was one of three officers killed by shooter Gavin Long, on Sunday morning.
Unaware that her brother had died, Joycelyn Jackson arrived at an afternoon church service after the pastor had been informed of Jackson's death by her other brother, the Washington Post reports.
When the pastor asked other churchgoers to direct their prayers to her family, she was devastated to realize what had happened.
I didnt want to break down in church, but it was just something I couldnt hold, she said. Its coming to the point where no lives matter, whether youre black or white or Hispanic or whatever.'
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Joycelyn Jackson (left) revealed she was sitting in church on Sunday when she learned that her brother Montrell Jackson (right) had died because the pastors asked the congregation to pray for her family
The 49-year-old says that although she understands the anger that fuels the Black Lives Matter movement, God gives nobody the right to kill and take another persons life.
Joycelyn, who lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, described her younger brother as a wonderful person.
Asked if she could speak to the man who killed her brother or anyone else considering harming police officers she said she would urge them to get their lives right with God.
She added: Hell is a horrible, horrible place to be.
Despite her brother being a 10-year veteran of the police force, Joycelyn said she was never concerned for his well-being until the recent tensions between law enforcement and the black community.
Baton Rouge has seen a wave of protests over the treatment of black people by police since the death of Alton Sterling, 37, a black man who was killed by two white officers on July 5.
Jackson was a 10-year veteran of the police force and had recently had a baby son named Mason (above)
Jackson recently shared a poignant message on Facebook about the struggles of being a black police officer in Baton Rouge after a sniper attack in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter protest left five cops dead
Jackson himself recently shared a poignant message on social media about the struggles of being a black police officer in the city shortly after a sniper attack in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter protest left five officers dead.
He said he was both physically and emotionally drained by it all.
I swear to God I love this city, but I wonder if this city loves me, Jackson wrote. In uniform, I get nasty 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.
Gavin Long (above) was named as the gunman who killed three police officers and wounded another three on Sunday
'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.
He added: These are trying times. Please dont let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better.
Jackson was a new father who adored his four-month-old son. He and his wife Trenisha welcomed baby Mason in April.
The new father towered over most people at 6ft 3, but Joycelyn remembers him as the little boy who was a picky eater.
Lonnie Jordan, Jackson's father-in-law, said he was also at church when he learned about his death when he received a text message.
Jordan described his son-in-law as a gentle giant tall, stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition. He was always about peace, Jordan said.
He said his son-in-law had been working long hours since the death of Sterling and the resulting protests but if the work was a strain, Jackson didn't let it show.
Jacksons younger half-brother Kedrick Pitts, 24, said the pair were very close.
With him it was God, family and the police force, Pitts said outside his mother's house in Baton Rouge, where family was gathered on Sunday. He went above and beyond. He was a protector.
He said his brother joined the police force in 2006 and had risen to the rank of corporal.
Pitts said he woke up on Sunday to find his mother crying as news broke about the shooting.
He drove his mother to the hospital and it was there that they discovered that Jackson had been shot.
Jackson and his family were planning to go to Houston soon for a vacation, Pitts said.
Matthew Gerald (pictured left) and Brad Garafola (right) were also killed in Sunday morning's attack
Pitts was stunned by his brother's death, but 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.
He described his older brother as someone with a humorous streak but a serious side as well as a hard-working police officer who often worked seven days a week.
He said he was fond of shoes and had a collection of more than 500 pairs - such as special Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan sneakers. He said his brother was a big fan of the New Orleans Pelicans and the Dallas Cowboys.
A GoFundMe page set up by a family member to raise funds to help Jacksons widow and newborn son Mason described him as a hero.
Words cannot describe the devastation we fell right now, a post on the page said. Rest in peace, Montrell, you will always be our hero.
Friends and family have also paid tribute to the other officers slain by a gunman who opened fire on officers after they responded to a call to a gas station along Airline Highway.
Jackson's fellow Baton Rouge police officer Matthew Gerald, 41, and Brad Garafola, 45, of the East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Office, both died.
Three other officers were shot, with one said to be in critical condition.
Gerald, 41, was a married father-of-two and joined the force last year after serving in the Marines and the Army. He had been deployed to Iraq three times.
Father-of-four Garafola, 45, had worked at the sheriffs office for 24 years.
California police are trying to track down a man who allegedly stabbed two dogs during a park dispute last week.
The attack occurred at a dog park in Oakland where local Robert Selhorst was taking his three dogs for a walk.
According to Selhorst, one of the pups crawled under the park's cyclone fence and started sniffing a dog that was walking past with its owner.
That is when, Selhorst claims, the owner 'flipped out' and produced a nine-inch blade.
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Attacked: An Oakland man has described how two of his three dogs were attacked by a man with a knife at a dog park last week
Wounded: This is one of Selhorts's dogs, Caroleena, who was stabbed last week and had to undergo surgery
Selhorst said the man on the other side of the fence stabbed the first dog and when his other dog came over, the man stabbed it too
Being treated: This dog, Ruth, remains in an Oakland animal hospital recovering from the vicious attack
The dog is currently at the Oakland Animal Shelter, where she is healing slowly under a doctors care
Selhorst told KPIX 5: 'My dog's tail was wagging. He was just sniffing his dog and the guy, like night and day, flipped out.'
Selhorst said the man on the other side of the fence stabbed the first dog and when his other dog came over, the man slashed it too. The third dog, Otis, stayed back.
'I look at my other dog and it was cut up real bad,' he said.
'From one shoulder down to the other side of his body.'
The dogs, Caroleena and Ruth, were wounded all over their bodies
Ruth remains in the animal hospital recovering. Otis was not injured.
'He just flipped out': Dog owner Robert Selhorst described what happened to his pets in an interview
Scene: The attack occurred at this parking lot in Oakland that is used as a dog park last week
Three best friends: The dogs are seen here in a 'family photo' before the attack last week
Selhorst said the stabbing suspect quickly picked up his own dog after the attack and ran away.
The man was described as dark and about 6-feet tall. He was wearing shorts and a Panama hat.
Police were still searching for the suspect at the weekend.
A GoFundMe account has been set up for the more than $3000 in vet bills.
Cerda is on the sex offenders' registry for sexually assaulting a girl, 14
The Palmview resident said he would use 'modified paintball guns'
He said he, his friends and sister would attack Pokemon Go players
A registered sex offender in Texas has been arrested on charges of making terroristic threats after he threatened to 'purge' Pokemon Go players.
Nathan Cerda, 29, of Palmview, apparently posted a Facebook message Friday in which he said he, his friends and his sister would use 'modified paintball guns' to attack Pokemon Go players they found outside.
Harlingen Police Department opened a criminal investigation into Cerda and arrested him at his home the following day, Digital Trends reported.
Arrested: Police arrested Nathan Certa, 29, of Palmview for allegedly threatening to attack Pokemon Go players with a 'modified paintball gun' on Friday. He was previously convicted of sexually assaulting a girl, 14
'Warning': This is the post that appeared on Cerda's Facebook page, threatening Pokemon Go players with a 'purge.' Police have arrested him on suspicion of making terroristic threats
'Terroristic': Texas law says that threats to commit violence with intent to place people 'in fear of serious bodily injury' are 'terroristic.' Cerda is awaiting a court date
'WarningAll u Pokemon Go people tomorrow me and some friends are taking out our modified paintball guns and we gonna Purge,' the now-deleted Facebook post said, according to Kotaku.
Pokemon Go has players walk around their local area, using their phones to find digital monsters located at specific GPS co-ordinates indoors and outdoors. They can then 'catch' the Pokemon on their phones.
The threat continued: 'I know you stupid people are walking all over the place looking at the phone trying to find these Pokemon.
'Tomorrow we are going to be everywhere so be aware of your surroundings.
'We going to have some fun tomorrow so f*** it. Even my sister is going to purge tomorrow ... so your a** better not be walking.'
Police said that Cerda was arrested 'due the credibility of the threat and in the interest of public safety.'
According to Texas law, a terroristic threat is a threat to 'commit any offense involving violence with intent to place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury (or) place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury.'
Cerda was already on the sex offender's registry in Texas after sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
His Facebook profile includes photos of .45-caliber handgun and a table piled high with marijuana, and amateur images of a woman in lingerie sitting handcuffed on a bedroom floor.
There is also a photo of a young child wearing Elmo shoes and holding a gun, with the caption 'My babyboy.'
A recent image shows an older man, which Cerda says is 'my dad locked up in federal, coming out in two more years.'
Cerda is now awaiting a court date.
The FBI is hunting for a 27-year-old man wanted for killing his Army soldier wife stationed in North Carolina.
Authorities believe Jason Armstrong Jr brutally killed Iris Armstrong in their Fort Bragg home in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on July 1, according to the Fayetteville Observer.
He was caught on surveillance video using his wife's debit card at an ATM just hours after the murder.
The FBI is hunting for 27-year-old, Jason Armstrong Jr, who they say allegedly killed his wife, Iris Armstrong, who was an Army soldier stationed in North Carolina
The FBI said that shortly after the murder, Armstrong (pictured) was caught on surveillance video using his wife's debit card at an ATM. The agency is offering a $5,000 reward for any information leading to his arrest
Iris Armstrong's body was found on July 6 in their Nijmegen neighborhood home on the base. She had been stabbed and beaten.
Her death was caused by sharp and blunt force injuries, according to the state medical examiner.
The couple had two children together, who are safe, the FBI confirmed.
A federal arrest warrant was issued for Armstrong on July 8, two days after his wife's body was discovered by Army officials.
He was then charged with murder in the Special Territorial Jurisdiction of the United States.
Federal law provides that a murder occurring within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the US is a federal crime. Fort Bragg lies within the territorial jurisdiction of the US.
The FBI is offering a $5,000 reward for any information leading to his arrest.
Iris Armstrong, 24, who was from Columbia, South Carolina, was the human resources specialist assigned to the 189th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division Sustainment Brigade, according to the Observer.
Armstrong has ties to South Carolina; Atlanta; New Orleans; Amarillo, Texas; Phoenix and Los Angeles, according to a wanted poster released by the FBI.
Her body was discovered on July 6 in their Nijmegen neighborhood home on the base. The state medical examiner ruled that her death was caused by sharp and blunt force injuries
Iris Armstrong (far left with another soldier) was the human resources specialist assigned to the 189th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division Sustainment Brigade. She had two children with Jason Armstrong (right) The FBI confirmed their children are safe
Authorities have described him as a six-foot-tall black man who weighs between 150 and 160 pounds.
Armstrong is considered armed and dangerous, according to the FBI.
Lt Col Jeremy St Laurent, commander of the 189th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, told the Fayetteville Observer that 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.
Iris Armstrong joined the Army in 2012 and had earned several awards, including the Army Achievement Medal.
Iris Armstrong (center) joined the Army in 2012 and had earned several awards, including the Army Achievement Medal
Authorities have described Armstrong as a six-foot-tall black man, who weighs between 150 and 160 pounds. Armstrong is considered armed and dangerous, according to the FBI
The planet's six wealthiest countries take on less than one in 11 of the world's refugees, according to a new report.
The study shows that the six richest nations - Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan and the US, which make up more than half the global economy, host less than nine per cent of refugees.
While Germany has recently welcomed far more refugees than the other richest nations, there remains a major gap with poorer countries hosting the vast majority, according to the Oxfam report.
Migrants walk next to the razor wire fence at the Serbia-Hungary border. Oxfam claims that the planet's six wealthiest countries take on less than one in 11 of the world's refugees
The study shows that the rich six host 2.1million refugees and asylum seekers between them, or 8.9 per cent of the world's total.
The UK hosts 169,000 refugees and asylum seekers, less than one per cent of the world's total.
In sharp contrast, Jordan, Turkey, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Pakistan and Lebanon host more than half the world's refugees and asylum seekers - despite the fact that those countries make up less than two per cent of the world's economy.
More than 65million people have fled their homes because of conflict and violence, 40.8 million within their own countries, 21.3million as refugees and 3.2million awaiting asylum decisions.
These are the highest numbers since records began and while the conflict in Syria has been a major factor, people are also fleeing violence in South Sudan, Burundi, Iraq and Yemen, among other countries.
Ahead of two major summits on the global refugee and migration crisis in New York in September, Oxfam is calling on governments to host more refugees and commit to do more to help poorer countries sheltering the majority.
Mark Goldring, chief executive of Oxfam GB, said: 'Many governments are turning their backs on the suffering of millions of vulnerable people who have fled their homes and shirking their duty to protect them.
'Thousands are risking their lives to reach a safe haven.
A small Turkish ferry carrying migrants deported from Greece to Turkey, arrives on April 4, 2016, in the port of Dikili district in Izmir. Jordan, Turkey, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Pakistan and Lebanon host more than half the world's refugees and asylum seekers
'Those lucky enough to survive often end up living in squalid conditions without enough clean water or food and face hostility, discrimination and abuse with too many governments doing little to help or protect them.'
Mr Goldring added that the refugee crisis was one of the greatest challenges of our time, yet poorer countries were left to shoulder the responsibility.
He said: 'It is a complex crisis that requires a co-ordinated, global response with the richest countries doing their fair share by welcoming more refugees and doing more to help and protect them wherever they are.
'Now more than ever, the UK needs to show that it is an open, tolerant society that is prepared to play its part in solving this crisis.
'It is shameful that as one of the richest economies the UK has provided shelter for less than one per cent of refugees.'
The recent deal between European Governments and Turkey, which has left thousands detained in Greece in appalling conditions, goes against the spirit of international law, according to Oxfam.
It also set a dangerous precedent - announcing the closure of the Dadaab refugee camp, the Kenyan government said if Europe could turn away Syrians, then Kenya could do the same for Somalis.
Reed is accused of pretending to help the woman so he could
Paul Reed, 55, allegedly dressed as an elderly woman so he could grope a drunken passenger as he helped her off the train, a court has heard
A 5ft-tall transvestite allegedly dressed as an elderly woman so he could grope a drunken passenger as he helped her off the train, a court has heard.
Paul Reed, 55, allegedly assaulted the woman in January this year after she fell asleep on a train from Charing Cross to Orpington, south east London.
Westminster Magistrates Court heard how Reed allegedly pretended that he wanted to help the woman get home safely and wrapped his scarf around her as they got off the train.
Prosecutor Felicity Lineham told the court that the womans breast was then left exposed under Reeds scarf.
The female was intoxicated and barely able to stand and the defendant was huddled into her covering her breast that had protruded from her dress. she said.
The court heard how railway staff initially believed them to be a couple.
But they became suspicious and stopped the pair before they left the station.
Reed, from Chatham, Kent is charged with two counts of breaching a sexual harm prevention order.
The offences allege he approached a female while dressed as a woman while he was prohibited from doing so by the prevention order.
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."
Prime minister refused to answer, but said it would later be
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has brushed off questions about his financial donations to the Liberal Party during the election campaign.
It was reported last week Mr Turnbull made a $1million donation to the Liberal campaign, and it was later revealed that figure could be well over $2million, according to The Australian.
In a fiery interview with Leigh Sales on the ABC's 730 program, the presenter pushed the prime minister to reveal exactly how much money he put towards the campaign.
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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (right) has brushed off questions about his financial donations to the Liberal Party during the Federal Election campaign in a fiery interview with Leigh Sales (left)
Mr Turnbull refused to answer the question and said the extent of his donations would be made clear in the coming weeks
Mr Turnbull refused to answer the question and said the extent of his donations would be made clear in the coming weeks.
'All of the donations that I've made in the past to the Liberal Party and any donations that will be made or have been made will all be disclosed in accordance with the Electoral Act,' Mr Turnbull said.
'So there is a very straightforward legislative arrangement or provision for disclosing donations to political parties and I've always complied with it.'
Seemingly avoiding the question, Ms Sales interrupted: 'Why can't you just answer it now though?'
Mr Turnbull replied: 'Because the disclosures are made in accordance with the act and they will be made in accordance with the act.'
'All of the donations that I've made in the past to the Liberal Party and any donations that will be made or have been made will all be disclosed in accordance with the Electoral Act,' Mr Turnbull said
Mr Turnbull has not revealed how much he donated to the Liberal Party during the election campaign. Above, to the media at Parliament House on Monday announcing his new look ministry
Ms Sales suggested the fact the Liberal Party was dependent on Mr Turnbull for donations may mean party members could be reluctant to speak their minds.
Mr Turnbull deflected that question and launched an attack on the Labor Party's relationship with trade unions.
'The question of the real issue about financial dependence should be addressed to the Labor Party - which has come increasingly under the domination of militant trade unions, under the domination of the CFMEU.'
'Look at the example in Victoria with Premier Andrews where at the behest of, really at the direction of a militant trade union, he sought to subvert the autonomy and independence of 60,000 volunteer fire-fighters.'
Miles Donnelly viciously killed a woman he met through an online dating agency
A career criminal stabbed and strangled a woman to death in a sadistic attack after arranging to meet for sex on an online dating website.
Miles Donnelly, 35, faces a life sentence for the murder of Usha Patel, 44, after dramatically admitting to killing her in a drunken rage today.
The single mother was asphyxiated, repeatedly knifed in the stomach and beaten during the ferocious attack at the flat she shared with her five-year-old son in Cricklewood, north London.
The victim had arranged to meet Donnelly on the Oasis Dating website, which boasts of having more than 14 million users worldwide.
The Old Bailey heard she was left with stab wounds to the stomach as well as bruising to the face, neck and mouth.
A pathologist concluded the bruises were consistent with punches while abrasions to her upper lip suggested Donnelly had tried to silence her screams.
Wearing grey tracksuit bottoms, and a white T-shirt, balding Donnelly, also known as Miles Ryan, appeared in the dock with a shaved head and light beard.
He showed no emotion as he pleaded guilty to Ms Patels murder on what was due to be the first day of his trial.
David Hislop QC, defending, said: The defendant pleads guilty to the murder of Usha Patel on the following basis:
Usha Patel was murdered by the defendant as a result of a momentary loss of temper in a drunken rage following a brief argument. It was not a murder involving sexual or sadistic conduct.
Usha Patel met her killer at Oasis Dating. He murdered her after coming to the home she shared with her son
But Judge Rebecca Poulet QC, said: There is a sexual context in the facts of this case and I do not think that can be in any doubt.
But I have to say the injuries are such as to suggest to me a terrible ferocity and I have to say possible sadistic conduct over and above violence used to kill.
Donnelly also pleaded guilty to attacking a second woman, on the day after Ms Patels murder.
Jeffrey Lovell, 42, is charged with murder after police say he shot through the door of his house at a teen who thought his friend lived there
A man is being charged with murder after shooting a 15-year-old teen who knocked on his door by accident, thinking it was the home of a friend.
Jeffrey Lovell, 42, of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was home when he heard banging on his door. Three teens were outside, trying to get in around 3:40pm Saturday.
Lovell retrieved his firearm called in a burglary in progress.
Cops say he tried to communicate with the victim through the door but when he heard a pane of glass break, he shot once through the door, hitting the teen in the abdomen.
The teen, identified as Dylan Francisco, according to WWLP, later died at the hospital.
Police determined that the three teens had been drinking alcohol at a nearby location and decided to visit a friend. They became confused and knocked on the wrong door.
It's unclear how the pane of glass broke.
The teen was rushed to Baystate Medical Center where he later died on the same day.
Lovell is expected to be arraigned on murder charges today. He is being held without bail, according to the Chicopee Police Department.
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Suspect Jeffrey Lovell, 42, appeared Monday in Chicopee District Court to answer to murder charges
Lovell was arraigned in court Monday morning, charged with first degree murder - he will be back in court August 19
The teen, identified as Dylan Francisco of Chicopee, died at a hospital after allegedly being shot by Jeffrey Lovell, who apparently mistook him for a burglar
Lovell heard the teen banging on his door (above) - the teen and two friends had reportedly been drinking and became confused
Police responded to the call of a burglary in progress and when they got there found the 15-year-old boy shot through the abdomen
The boy was rushed to Baystate Medical Center but passed away on Saturday
'We knew something tragic happened but we did not know until later on that something so devastating happened,' neighbor Betty Riel told WWLP.
Gray, 25, suffered a broken neck in the back of a police van in April, 2015
A Maryland judge has acquitted Baltimore police Lieutenant Brian Rice over the death of black detainee Freddie Gray.
Rice, 42, became the third cop to walk free in the high profile case which sparked riots and protests across the country.
Six police officers were charged after police suspect Gray, 25, suffered a broken neck in the back of a police van in April, 2015.
But prosecutors have been unable to get a convictions against any of the four cops who have already stood trial. Three earlier hearings resulted in two acquittals and a mistrial.
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Lt. Brian Rice (pictured left, arriving at court, Monday, and right, in his booking photograph) one of the six members of the Baltimore Police Department charged in connection to the death of Freddie Gray, arrives with attorney Mike Davey, center, on Monday. He has been acquitted
Rice ordered two officers on bicycle to chase Gray, 25, when he fled unprovoked in a high-crime area. He suffered a broken neck while in police custody and later died
The court heard that Rice, who is white, had ordered two officers on bicycle to chase Gray, 25, when he fled from officers, unprovoked, last year.
Prosecutors said the lieutenant was negligent in shackling Gray's legs and not securing him in a seat belt, as required by department protocol.
They argued that simply failing to secure Gray with a seat belt, considering the dangerous circumstances, was a crime in itself.
Deputy State's Attorney Janice Bledsoe, said during closing arguments that Gray's death 'cannot be blamed on poor judgment or error,' the Baltimore Sun reports.
She added that Rice's actions started a chain of events which led to Gray's death.
However, lawyers for the Baltimore officer had argued that their client's actions were 'professional' and 'correct' when considering the suspect's hostile behavior and a growing crowd looking on.
Rice, 42, became the third cop to walk free in the high profile case which sparked riots and protests across the country (pictured leaving a Baltimore court after his acquittal verdict)
Lt. Brian Rice's fellow Baltimore police officers who were also charged over Gray's death, Garrett E. Miller and Edward M. Nero (left picture, L-R) and Caesar Goodson, (right) arrived at court to support him
On trial: The six officers who faced charges in Gray's death, clockwise from top right: Caesar R. Goodson Jr., Garrett E. Miller, Edward M. Nero, Alicia D. White, Brian W. Rice, William G. Porter
Rice faced charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Williams previously dismissed a second-degree assault charge, and prosecutors dropped a second misconduct charge.
He had selected a bench trial rather than a jury trial, putting his fate in a judge's hands and on Monday, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams acquitted him of all charges.
Williams, who heard the case without a jury at Rice's request, said prosecutors failed to show the lieutenant was aware of a departmental policy requiring seat belts for prisoners during transport.
'The state did not prove the defendant was aware of the new policy,' the judge said in court.
On Monday, he handed down from the bench an acquittal of all charges.
The verdict is the latest setback for prosecutors, who have failed to secure a conviction in the trials of four officers thus far.
Gray was arrested April 12 after running from an officer on bike patrol outside a public housing project not far from the Western District station house. A neighbor's video showed him handcuffed behind his back and hoisted into the police van.
The vehicle made a total of six stops that day, and Gray was unresponsive on arrival at the station house 45 minutes later.
Gray was arrested April 12 after running from an officer on bike patrol outside a public housing project not far from the Western District station house and neighbor's video showed him handcuffed behind his back and hoisted into Goodson's van
The officers were seen on camera loading Gray into the van. The vehicle made a total of six stops that day, and Gray was unresponsive on arrival at the station house 45 minutes later
Prosecutors at police van driver Caesar Goodson's trial said the injury happened somewhere between the second and fourth stops, when Goodson and Porter lifted Gray off the floor.
Officers should have checked on Gray during the third and fourth stops, they added. If procedure was followed, they would then have known he was in distress.
An expert testified that Gray could not possibly have broken his own neck.
Porter testified previously that Gray was lethargic, but could breathe and speak, and didn't seem injured. Prosecutors countered that the initial injury became critical as the trip continued.
Last month, Goodson, who was charged with 'depraved-heart' murder over the death was acquitted.
The acquittal of Goodson, 46, was another blow to State Attorney Marilyn Mosby's efforts to hold police accountable for Gray's death.
In May, the same judge acquitted Officer Edward Nero of misdemeanor charges, and in December, he declared a mistrial after a jury failed to agree on manslaughter and other charges against Officer William Porter.
Protests and rioting after Gray's death on April 19, 2015 set the city on fire, forcing Maryland to bring in the National Guard (pictured are protesters outside a courthouse in Baltimore on Monday)
After last year's riots, only a handful of protesters were at the courthouse for the verdict's announcement (pictured)
Porter faces a retrial in September while officer Garrett Miller is scheduled to go to trial on July 27 and Sgt. Alicia White's trial is due October 13.
All of the officers have pleaded not guilty.
Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby had vowed to seek justice for Gray when she brought charges against the six cops last year.
But she has failed to get the charges to stick in court, and is currently being sued for defamation by five of the officers.
Gray's family received a $6.4 million settlement from the city.
Protests and rioting after Gray's death on April 19, 2015 set the city on fire, forcing Maryland to bring in the National Guard.
The unrest forced the city's mayor to abandon her re-election campaign, and the Department of Justice opened an investigation into allegations of widespread police abuse.
However, only a handful of protesters were at the courthouse for the verdict's announcement.
US Coastguard says they must hire a local pilot, costing $400 an hour
But a plan to sail across the Great Lakes has been stifled by bureaucracy
After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean the largest Viking ship in current existence has reached North America - but it can go no further because of US bureaucracy.
The Draken Harald Harfagre is a reconstruction of one of the longships from the Norse Sagas.
The ship left Haugesund in Norway in April and battled its way through harsh weather and unexpected troubles, following the ancient route, via Iceland and Greenland, used by Viking sailors 1,000 years ago.
The ship, a reconstruction of an ancient Viking longship, followed the route of 11th century Viking explorer Leif Eriksson, although he never sailed inland
It reached St Anthony in Newfoundland, Canada, last month, en route to Chicago.
The expedition was designed to follow in the footsteps of Viking explorer Leif Eriksson, who discovered America over 500 years before Christopher Columbus.
Their route takes them through the Great Lakes.
The website Loopnorth said the Canada-based Great Lakes Pilotage Authority had told the expedition's curator, Sigurd Aase, he would not need to pay for a pilot on the Great Lakes because the ship was not big enough to qualify.
But he has now been told he must have a local pilot on board - at a cost of $400 per hour - to navigate the boat through Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
The ship sailed through the harsh waters of the North Atlantic, off the coast of Iceland and Greenland (pictured), on its way to Canada
Mr Aase estimates the total of hiring a pilot to navigate to Chicago and back would be around $400,000.
Mr Aase said the fees were beyond them and added: 'We are a non-profit project with the intention to spread knowledge about the Vikings seafaring and to inspire people to pursue dreams and look beyond the horizon, as modern Vikings.'
DRAKEN HARALD HARFAGRE: RETRACING THE VIKINGS' STEPS The project started in 2010, and the longship was built from historical knowledge of the Norse Sagas. This was combined with archaeological findings and Norwegian boatbuilding traditions. Now, Draken Harald Harfagre is the largest Viking vessel in modern times. It is 35m long and 8m wide, with a mast that stands 24m high. Draken Harald Harfagre can reach a speed of up to 14 knots. The longship sailed in the wake of the infamous Viking, Leif Eriksson. It left Haugesund, Norway on April 26, stopping at the Shetland Islands and then the Faroe Islands before reaching Iceland, Greenland, and, in June, Canada. Draken Harald Harfagre officially completed its crossing of the North Atlantic Ocean, anchoring in Newfoundland. It then sailed along the St Laurence Seaway across Lake Ontario and through the Welland Canal to reach Lake Erie Advertisement
The ship's captain, Bjorn Ahlander, said the $400 hourly rate was what a commercial freighter would be charged.
He said: 'It is very disappointing. The people in the harbors around the lakes are expecting us and we have been warmly welcomed in every port we have visited. It is a pity if we cannot pursue this expedition.'
The CEO of the Great Lakes Pilotage Authority, Robert Lemire, said the problem was that after crossing Lake Ontario and passing through the Welland Canal it had entered American waters and was under the jurisdiction of the US Coast Guard.
The 35m-long, 8m-wide wooden ship has 33 crew members and uses a mix of modern and historical navigational tools, including log lines and magnetic and solar compasses.
The ship has just entered Lake Erie and Captain Ahlander says while they cannot afford to make it to Detroit, let alone Chicago, they are determined to keep their promise to the people of Bay City, Ohio.
He said: 'There is not room in our budget to go further west into the Great Lakes but we cannot let the people in Bay City down.
'The Tall Ships Celebration in Bay City is just days away and the planning is in its final stages. It would be great disappointment for us and, more importantly, to the people we already committed to.'
A Norwegian insurance company, Sons of Norway, have been trying to raise money to help pay the pilotage fees. They have raised $40,000.
The company's CEO Eivind Heiberg said: 'The Drakens voyage has stirred the imagination of so many people around the world and inspired the hearts of those within our organization, too.'
'Its urgent need fits with Sons of Norways mission to promote and to preserve the heritage and culture of Norway.'
Turkish prosecutors accompanied by police have started a search of an air base used by US troops, which contains nuclear weapons.
The Incirlik base in the Adana province close to Syria is used by the US-led coalition forces as a launch pad for raids on ISIS and is NATO's largest nuclear weapons storage facility.
Now in the wake of Fridays failed military coup, authorities have begun a search of the base, according to state-run media.
The Incirlik base in the Adana province close to Syria, pictured, is used by the US-led coalition forces as a launch pad for raids on ISIS and is NATO's largest nuclear weapons storage facility
The authorities have already arrested a Turkish air force general from the base who was suspected of plotting the coup.
General Bekir Ercan Van, ten other soldiers and one police officer from the Incirlik base were 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.
News reports say refueling aircraft that took off from the base helped keep F-16s used by the coup-plotters up in the air.
The Turkish 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 Tayyip Erdogan of staging the coup himself to justify his purge.
However, Turkey has reopened the base to U.S. planes, used to attack Islamic State, following an attempted coup.
'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
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 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.
A bitter dispute between an angry landlady and her elderly tenants has reached its breaking point after she bricked up the entrance to their home and walled them in.
The retired couple had to call the fire department to break down the wall in front of the door, and are now preparing to move into a new home.
The landlady resorted to drastic measures and claimed she had no other choice, blaming the couple for a dispute that couldn't even be resolved with police intervention.
An elderly couple's landlady had a friend build a brick wall in front of their door in an ongoing dispute
The retired couple had to call the fire department to break down the wall in front of the door
The bitter dispute has played out on a quiet residential street in the German town of Bochum, near Dusseldorf.
The tenants, identified by local media as retired optician Joerg, 79, and his wife, Anita, 77, have rented the ground floor flat since 2012.
They wanted to spend their retirement years in peace and quiet, but they've been anything but thanks to the ongoing battle with their landlord.
Joerg said: 'I have had major heart surgery, I cannot take this much longer. Every day was something new - the mailbox got suddenly removed or I was verbally abused of being a fraud.
'Such things all happened over the past months, each time over again.'
Joerg, who lives in the home, said he has had major heart surgery and 'cannot take this much longer'
The landlady, identified by local media as Christine, claims the retired couple has been throwing loud parties
Inge Briegert, a friend of the couple, said their landlady, identified by local media as Christine, 54, has made life a living hell.
Briegert said: 'She suddenly cut off the hot water in December and when visitors want to come over, she tries everything to block their access to the house.
'Things reached a new low when Joerg tried to leave the house last weekend, and suddenly found himself barricaded by a wall in front of the door.
Joerg said: 'I was speechless. As a student I witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall. I felt exactly the same as I did back then.'
The landlady, who is reportedly a lawyer, told local media she had been forced to do these things because the couple were always having noisy parties.
Joerg, who witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall, said he 'felt exactly the same as I did back then'
Anita (left) and her husband, Joerg, have found another home and will be moving out later this summer
She said: 'I wanted to make the public aware of the situation I am in. That is why I asked a friend to build a wall in front of the door.'
She told the couple they could go through the cellar if they wanted to get in and out, and offered to give them stepladders so that they could climb in through the windows, if needed.
She warned them removing the wall would constitute wilful damage to the property.
In the end, the Bochum fire department was called in to break down the wall.
Police are very familiar with the landlady and her tenants, saying they had been called out 26 times in the last 18 months.
A Walt Disney World intern is back on the job after she was briefly fired for tweeting a photo of a sign telling employees how to respond to questions about alligators in the theme park's waters.
Shannon Sullivan was fired last week after posting the photo on Twitter, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
The sign read: 'If guests ask whether there are 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 it removed."'
Disney intern Shannon Sullivan briefly lost her job last week after tweeting this photo offering advice to employees who are confronted with questions about a fatal alligator attack at the resort
Incident was in response to the death of a two-year-old boy at the resort, who was killed by an alligator (scene of the lake where the attack happened above)
Sullivan told her bosses that the sign was misleading. She said a manager confronted her Thursday about the tweet and told her that her program would be ending early. However, Sullivan was given her position back by Magic Kingdom Vice President Dan Cockerell. Pictured is an area of a beach at a Disney World hotel
It also asked employees to 'not say that we have seen them before'.
Sullivan told her bosses that the sign was misleading.
'I was very offended by it and I was pretty vocal about it,' Sullivan, a Disney College Program participant working in Magic Kingdom restaurants, told the Orlando Sentinel.
Sullivan told the Sentinel that a manager confronted her Thursday about the tweet and told her that her program would be ending early.
Disney said it does not know who posted the sign and no one else is being disciplined over the incident. The incident comes just a month after two-year-old, Lane Graves was killed by an alligator
Lane (pictured) had been paddling ten feet from the shore of the Seven Seas Lagoon at the upscale resort on June 14 when he was attacked by the predator and dragged into the water
Her Disney identification was taken and she was escorted from the park.
Disney said the sign wasn't authorized and was removed.
Magic Kingdom Vice President Dan Cockerell personally offered Sullivan her job back on Friday morning, the newspaper reported.
She will return to work until later this month, when her internship was originally scheduled to end.
Disney employees are advised to tell visitors that parts of the theme park does attract wildlife and that guests should notify security when they see alligators.
Sullivan told the Sentinel that she knew she could face getting into trouble for sharing the photo on social media, but she said she had to choose between her 'morals and my integrity and what I believe in'.
Disney said it does not know who posted the sign and no one else is being disciplined over the incident.
The incident comes just a month after two-year-old, Lane Graves was killed by an alligator.
Authorities found his body 'intact' in the water 17 hours later. Pictured is an official during an ongoing search for two-year-old Lane in June
Disney employees are advised to tell visitors that parts of the theme park does attract wildlife and that guests should notify security when they see alligators
He had been paddling ten feet from the shore of the Seven Seas Lagoon at the upscale resort on June 14 when he was attacked by the predator and dragged into the water.
His body was found 'intact' in the water 17 hours later.
Lane's father, Matt Graves, told authorities he was desperately trying to save his son when a second alligator attacked.
But even after fending off his own attack, Graves was unable to pry his toddler from the jaws of the first animal's grasp - and the creature disappeared underwater, taking the child with it.
Florida wildlife officials later announced that they had removed and killed five alligators from the lagoon - including the one they believe dragged the Nebraska toddler to his death, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
The beaches have all since been reopened but a fence has now been erected and signs put up warning of alligators and snakes in the area.
President Erdogan has wreaked revenge on nearly 18,000 people across the country with more than 7,500 military personnel, police and judges arrested for plotting the coup that failed to topple him in midnight raids last Friday.
A further 10,000 police officers, judges, state governors and civil servants from the Interior and Finance Ministries were suspended in a series of shock announcements throughout the day.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is the Turkeys first president to survive an armed challenge to power, was in Ankara today attending funerals of some of the 208 people who died during the attempted power grab.
Nationwide: One third of all the countrys military and navys generals and admirals have been detained and almost every major military unit across the country has lost a commander
Broken: Senior military officers across the country - including former air force commander General Akin Ozturk (front centre) - have begun appearing in court facing charges of establishing an armed terrorist group
Detained: Among the thousands rounded up across the country, troops and officials were detained in Marmaris, the southern Turkey resort where Erdogan was on holiday at the time of the coup
Retribution: One hundred high-rank officers have been charged with high-treason and are currently testifying to prosecutors for what might become a trial for their lives
Yesterday Erdogan made clear his intention to cleanse the country of the cancer that had plotted to overthrow him and today his will came into full effect.
Senior military officers from across the country have begun to appear in court facing charges of establishing an armed terrorist organization, attempting to abolish the constitutional order and intentional killing.
One third of all the countrys military and navy generals and admirals have been detained and almost every major military unit across the country has lost a commander.
One hundred high-rank officers have been charged with high-treason and are currently testifying to prosecutors for what might become a trial for their lives.
The iconic Ataturk Cultural Centre in Istanbuls Taksim Square is now draped with huge pictures of the President and a Turkish flag
Thousands of supporters came onto the streets and squares across the country as President Erdogan warned the danger of a second coup had not passed and urged people to remain in the streets all week
Amid a backdrop of pulsing music used in Erdogan's Presidential campaign in 2014 crowds shouted for the coup plotters to be publicly executed
Mr Erdogans loyal Prime Minister Binali Yildirim addressed reporters in Ankara after a cabinet meeting that discussed public demands to reinstate the death penalty.
'There are 208 people who have been unfortunately martyred in this coup attempt: 60 of them police officers, three of them soldiers and 145 civilians are our hero martyrs,' he said.
Adding that 7,543 people have been arrested over alleged ties to the failed putsch, he said that the numbers were liable to change.
'A hundred of them are police officers, 6,038 of them are soldiers of different ranks, 755 judges and prosecutors, and 650 civilians.'
Thousands of supporters waving red Turkish flags and chanting Allahu Akbar came to the streets and squares across the country as President Erdogan warned the danger of a second coup had not passed and urged people to come out to the streets all week.
Amid a backdrop of pulsing music used in Erdogan's Presidential campaign in 2014 crowds shouted for the coup plotters to be publicly executed.
Captive: Eight soldiers - including a major - fled to Greece on a Blackhawk helicopter and claimed asylum but were quickly detained and appeared in court
Questions: The speed and depth of the purge has led to questions if the failed coup had merely provided President Erdogan with the excuse to clean house of non-conforming sections of government
The iconic Ataturk Cultural Centre in Istanbuls Taksim Square is now draped with two huge pictures of the President and a Turkish flag, and lies in stark contrast to the secular Gezi Park movement in 2013 when it was covered in colourful banners and standards.
The speed and depth of the purge has led to questions about if the failed coup had merely provided President Erdogan with the excuse to clean house in the institutions he says has links to his former ally and now rival in self-imposed exile Fetullah Gulen.
As of today the coup was prevented, but we cant say the threat is gone.
"It looks at least as if something has been prepared, said Johannes Hahn the EU commissioner dealing with Turkeys membership bid.
The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage, Reuters reported Hahn as saying.
Erdogans plea to the people was repeated by Turkeys Defence Minister Fikri Isik outside of the Presidents Istanbul home this morning.
As of today the coup was prevented, but we cant say the threat is gone, Isik said according to state news agency Anadolu Agency.
That is why dear Istanbulites we ask you to closely follow every statement of Mr. President, and stay at the squares until Mr. President says, Ok, you can return home now.
Fears of a resurgence grew yesterday as clashes intensified at an airbase in Konya, southern Turkey, although officials have now said the situation is under control.
Holiday spot: Rebel troops who tried to target Erdogan while he holidayed in the southern resort of Marmaris were also brought to court in nearby Mugla
Surrender: Those loyal to Erdogan have spent little time rounded up the many rebel factions within government
Failure: Abandoned helmets, guns and jackets belonging to rebel Turkish soldiers were left discarded on the Bosphorous bridge in Istanbul - now more than 7,500 military officials and judges have been detained
Turkish media reported that mobs attacked Syrian refugees in the city, whose presence has become synonymous with President Erdogans rule.
In the east of the country more than 100 soldiers were arrested at the Diyarbakir air force base.
The city is at the centre of the violent unrest that has plagued Turkeys southeast as Kurdish PKK militants fight the army, and also hosts tensions between the Islamist Kurdish Huda Par (Party of God), and the Kurdish PKK.
Isaac Moore (pictured) told reporters he scaled the shopping centre roof 'for a bit of a laugh'
A labourer climbed onto the glass roof of a shopping centre and passed out after downing six pints to celebrate landing a new job, a court heard.
Isaac Moore, 27, was celebrating with friends when he climbed onto the roof of the Grand Arcade, Cambridge, on Saturday.
He managed to scale the curved glass roof without injuring himself, before falling asleep face down as shoppers looked up at him in disbelief.
Members of the public called the emergency services, resulting in firefighters having to climb up and wake him up, before safely lowering him to safety.
CCTV footage shows him getting onto the roof of Barclays Bank and he would have had to hop across buildings to get onto the roof - which is 75ft high.
However, Moore could not remember how he got there when asked at Peterborough Magistrates Court today.
Prosecutor Giles Beaumont told Peterborough Magistrates' Court that Moore had been drinking in a nearby pub shortly before the incident.
He said: 'When he was interviewed he first denied the offence, but when asked if he had caused the public nuisance he said 'yeah I was found on the roof so I supposed I did'.
'He told officers he had had a few drinks, perhaps five or six pints but could not be more specific then he said he went for a walk before ending up on the roof.'
According to witness accounts read by Mr Beaumont, Moore showed little regard when he was arrested.
'When he was being escorted away he did not seem to take it seriously, he thought the response was an overreaction,' said the prosecutor.
The centre's manager, John O'shea was said to have been shocked that anyone could think this was laughable.
Duty solicitor, Simon Millburn, said: 'The suggestion that Mr Moore thought this was a joke was perhaps a reaction which came as a result that he was drunk at the time.
'He is very embarrassed and ashamed of his behaviour and in no way does he seek to diminish or minimize the impact of his actions on the public and the emergency services.
'He had gone out on Saturday to celebrate a new job, clearly he drank too much and has no recollection how he ended up on that roof.'
The court heard how once the emergency services were called 11 shops had to be evacuated and a cordon put up directly underneath him where around 200 people had been gathered.
A labourer climbed onto the glass roof of a shopping centre and passed out after downing six pints to celebrate landing a new job, a court heard
Mr Moore, 27, was celebrating with friends when he climbed onto the roof of the Grand Arcade (pictured, left), Cambridge, on Saturday then passed out (right)
Two of Cambridge's fire engines were sent to the scene with the third out on another call leaving none available to respond to any other potential emergencies.
Four paramedics and four police officers were also dispatched to deal with the disturbance.
CCTV suggested a route he may have taken involved climbing the fire escape of a nearby Barclays Bank and then crossing a number of buildings before reaching the centre's glass roof.
Moore, of Huntingdon, Cambs., pleaded guilty to causing a public nuisance at Peterborough Magistrates Court this morning.
Magistrates heard he has a previous conviction for aggravated vehicle taking dating from May of this year.
In January Moore had taken a friend's car keys and driven their car whilst drunk before crashing it into a village wall for which he was given a 12-week sentence suspended for a year and a compensation order.
He managed to scale the curved glass roof (top left, during rescue) without injuring himself, before falling asleep face down as shoppers looked up at him in disbelief (right)
It is believed that Moore scaled a Barclays bank and would have had to hop between buildings to get onto the roof of the centre (pictured) but he can not remember what happened
Mr Beaumont urged the court to consider the impact his actions had on the public and emergency services when passing the sentence.
He said: 'He may have been up there 20 minutes before people realised he was there.'
Moore was today handed a 24-month conditional discharge after a probation officer told the court he didn't believe there were any sinister motives.
Magistrates also extended his suspended sentence for an extra six months for his previous conviction of aggravated vehicle taking and ordered he pay court costs of 85 and a victim surcharge of 20.
Passing sentence, chairman of the bench Mark Cross told Moore he needed to send a message that this kind of behaviour would not be tolerated.
Mr Cross said: 'I hope it is starting to sink into your head you came here as a result of your actions and you need to be aware of their consequences.
'I hope we do not see you again, I hope you reflect on your time in custody and focus on not seeing us again.'
Four paramedics and four police officers were also dispatched to deal with the disturbance but Moore thought the response was an 'overreaction' at the time, the court heard
Speaking outside court, Moore told reporters he had scaled the shopping centre roof 'for a bit of a laugh'.
He said: 'I just went out for a few drinks, climbed on top of the roof, I was just watching the views go by, fancied a bit of sleep on top of the glass roof but then I got woken up by the emergency services and I've been sweating out in a police cell for three days straight.
'I did it for a bit of a laugh, innit.
'I was just having a few drinks because I got a new job and I thought I'd go on the roof, have a little climb about.
'I didn't expect to be woken up by all the fire engines and ambulance.
RALEIGH The arrival of summer means vacation time for many, and airports stay busy. While we think of domestic airline service as being deregulated, the reality is that government decisions still play a role in where airlines fly.The most obvious case of government involvement comes in awarding international routes. While the U.S. Department of Transportation has done a good job of pushing "Open Skies" agreements that allow airlines to fly to foreign destinations as often as they want, some countries do not allow such deals.In those cases, the DOT allocates the limited number of flights that are available. These route award proceedings often are contested hotly; an airline can make a lot of money by being one of the few allowed to serve a popular destination.Flight rights to Cuba, China, and Tokyo's Haneda Airport are among the routes that the DOT will hand out this year. There's a North Carolina link here, as American Airlines wants to fly from Charlotte to Havana daily, but the current U.S. agreement with Cuba allows only 20 flights a day, and various airlines have requested more than 60 daily flights to Havana.If you're flying to Washington or New York City, government policy influences your travel options. Four key airports - Newark, John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Reagan National - are heavily congested.The DOT has responded by imposing capacity limits,assigning airlines a fixed number of takeoff and landing slots. In addition, LaGuardia and Reagan National both allow only nonstop flights within a limited geographic radius to encourage usage at alternative airports.Federal law also limits capacity at Dallas Love Field, the airport used by Southwest Airlines. Local politicians wanted Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to be the airport for the entire Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and set limits on Love Field's usage before Southwest was formed.In 2014, the restrictions on Love Field changed from geographic - nonstop flights could serve only some nearby states - to a hard cap on the number of gates at Love Field. The change has allowed Southwest to offer one flight a day from Love to both Charlotte and Raleigh, but also limits future growth severely.On the other end of the spectrum are routes that are subsidized by either the federal or local governments. When airlines were deregulated in the late 1970s, the feds established a subsidy program for places that lost air service as a result of deregulation - the Essential Air Service program. It guarantees local airports could maintain access to cities they served in 1979, when deregulation came into effect.Currently, more than 100 cities use the EAS program at a total cost of about $250 million a year. None of these cities is in North Carolina, though Beckley, W.Va.'s twice-daily EAS flights are to Charlotte.The federal government also has a grant program for smaller cities to attract new flights. Unlike EAS, the Small Community Air Service Development Program requires communities to put up some of their own money to get a grant. Among the communities that applied for a SCASDP grant are Greenville, which wants to lure Delta Air Lines with flights to Atlanta, and Concord, which is seeking federal money to help market its existing flights to Florida on Allegiant Air.Local airports often also offer financial incentives for new routes, sometimes in conjunction with an SCASDP bid. Raleigh-Durham International Airport is paying Delta up to $2.2 million, primarily with public money, to help cover first-year losses on the airline's RDU-Paris flight.Enjoy your vacation this summer. But as you're flying to wherever you're going - New York City, Dallas, Paris, or someplace else - keep in mind that government policy still can influence how you get there.
And he says he's given all recent royalties to charity
Trump wasn't running for office, Schwartz said he would have kept quiet
He also admits to lying in book in order to make Trump 'more appealing'
The co-author - or, as he has it ghostwriter - of Donald Trump's bestselling book The Art of the Deal has come out guns blazing against the presumptive presidential candidate.
Tony Schwartz, who was hired by Trump himself to co-write the memoir-cum-business guide, says that Trump is a 'sociopath' who could 'lie about anything' and cannot be trusted with the Oval Office.
'I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization,' he told The New Yorker.
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Regretful: Tony Schwartz (pictured) says that he regrets co-writing 'The Art of the Deal' and making Donald Trump 'more appealing.' He believes Trump is an insecure sociopath who will lie about anything
'Liar': Schwartz also says lying is 'second nature' to Trump and that he can 'convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true'
'I put lipstick on a pig,' he said of his work on The Art of the Deal. 'I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.'
On Monday he elaborated on his apocalyptic comments to ABC: 'You know, it's a terrifying thing, I haven't slept a night through since Donald Trump announced for President because I believe he is so insecure, so easily provoked and not particularly-- nearly as smart as people might imagine he is.
'And in the face of somebody like Putin provoking him cleverly - because Putin's a whole heck of a lot smarter than Donald Trump - I do worry that with the nuclear codes he would end civilization as we know it.'
Schwartz first met Trump in 1985, when he interviewed him for New York magazine in a piece titled A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story that portrayed Trump as a bumbling, bullish thug who tried to evict rent-control residents by putting homeless people in their building.
Much to the writer's shock, Trump actually liked the article.
'Trump only takes two positions,' Schwartz explained to The New Yorker. 'Either youre a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or youre the greatest. I became the greatest. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.'
During a second interview, for Playboy magazine, Trump, then 38, offered Schwartz the opportunity to ghostwrite his upcoming autobiography.
Schwartz, a lifelong liberal who was worried about the damage to his career and credibility, ultimately agreed - provided he got half the $500,000 advance, a co-author credit and 50 per cent of the royalties. Trump agreed - without negotiating.
And so, in 1986, Schwartz began shadowing Trump for a book that he now says he would title 'The Sociopath.'
Not that it was easy, he says, claiming that Trump's tiny attention span left him squirming 'like a kindergartner' when asked to recall his childhood or talk in depth on most topics.
Schwartz told The New Yorker that 'its impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes.'
He added: 'If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, its impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.'
Eventually, Schwartz claims he had to sit down and listen in on Trump's phone calls to actually hear his subject talk for any length of time.
And that, he said, led to him overhearing Trump lying with abandon.
'Lying is second nature to him,' he said. 'More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.'
One alleged lie from around that time, according to an expose by The Village Voice, was a false claim spread by Trump that Prince Charles of Great Britain wanted to buy apartments in Trump Tower.
'He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it,' Schwartz said, something that 'gave him a strange advantage' over people who were 'constrained by the truth.'
Schwartz himself claims he had to shake off the truth while to make Trump attractive to audiences.
The opening of The Art of the Deal, allegedly written by Schwartz in Trump's voice, says 'I don't do it for the money ... I do it to do it ... That's how I get my kicks.'
Speaking 30 years on, Schwartz says that's a complete falsehood: 'Of course hes in it for the money. One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that "Im richer than you."'
Trump, he said, is powered by a need for 'money, praise, and celebrity' - so much so that when Schwartz went home to his wife after a day with Trump, he would exclaim, 'Hes a living black hole!'
And he says that Trump would tell him tall tales of his casinos - which are now known to have been failing: 'the greatest percentage of Trumps assets was in casinos, and he made it sound like each casino was more successful than the last. But every one of them was failing,' Schwartz said.
'I think he was just spinning. I dont think he could have believed it at the time. He was losing millions of dollars a day. He had to have been terrified.'
Denial: Trump (pictured left in 1988, one year after the book was released) told The New Yorker Schwartz 'didn't write the book, I wrote the book' - but the former head of the publishing house denied that remark
According to The New Yorker, in a phone call about Schwartz's remarks, Trump initially said Schwartz 'was very good. He was the co-author.'
But later, the magazine claims, he said: 'He didnt write the book, I wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a number-one best-seller, and one of the best-selling business books of all time.'
However, Howard Kaminsky, head of publisher Random House, told the publication: 'Trump didnt write a postcard for us!'
Schwartz - now founder and CEO of The Energy Project, which helps companies run sustainably - admits that he was 'selling out' with The Art of the Deal, and has donated all royalties from the book since Trump announced his candidacy to immigration charities.
'We had a successful experience together, Schwartz told ABC when asked why he'd held his silence for so long.
'I never in a million years thought he would have run for president. If i had through that 30 years ago I wouldn't have written the book. But for 29 years I didn't think he would and it didn't seem like it was important to speak out. I now feel it's my civic duty.'
He added: 'I this is a man who has more sociopaths tendencies than any candidate in my adult life that I've observed and so, yeah, I do regret writing the book.'
The 37-year-old said to have invited the victim to talk during lunch breaks
The teacher repeatedly raped an underage schoolgirl in a classroom during lunch breaks, a court has heard.
Geography teacher Kato Harris, 37, allegedly attacked the teenager three times over a two-month period after inviting her to stay for chats.
Harris, a department head at the all-girls private school in north London, had invited the victim to talk in the classroom before raping her, Isleworth Crown Court heard.
Geography teacher Kato Harris (pictured), 37, allegedly attacked the teenager three times over a two-month period after inviting her to stay for chats
Sally Hales, prosecuting, said: This took place in a geography classroom at a school where the defendant was a teacher and the complainant a pupil.
It occurred during the autumn term of 2013, and happened during the lunch break where it was unnoticed and at the time undetected.
At the time the victim told no one what happened to her.
The allegations emerged after she moved to a new school and staff became concerned about her unhappiness, panic attacks and eating habits.
In 2014, when a housemistress told the girl she suspected sexual abuse, the teenager replied: Maybe.
The girl finally came forward after visiting the heads office later that year.
Miss Hales said: She wanted to tell her about it, but couldnt speak. The teacher told her she would leave the room, and that she should write it down.
Harris, a department head at the all-girls private school in north London, had invited the victim to talk in the classroom before raping her, Isleworth Crown Court heard
When she came back in, the teacher was handed a piece of paper with three words on it: I was raped.
Jurors were played the alleged victim's police interview detailing the three incidents.
Speaking to an officer on January 19 last year, the alleged victim nodded when asked if Harris was the culprit.
She said: 'He was a geography teacher. He never taught me, apart from cover lessons.
'I was walking down the corridor and he asked me to talk to me.
'I went in the classroom and was just talking and then it was all of a sudden, he raped me.
'Afterwards he just stopped. I was shocked, he didn't say anything. I then ran to the toilet to get myself together.'
She told the officer after being approached for a third time by Harris she had known what would happen, but went into the classroom anyway.
She said: 'I knew it was going to happen because it had happened two times before, I just went with it.
Harris, a department head at the private school in north London, had invited the victim to talk in the classroom before raping her, Isleworth Crown Court heard (stock photo)
The allegations emerged after the girl moved to a new school and staff became concerned about her unhappiness, panic attacks and eating habits (file picture)
'I was doing nothing, and I had been having a tough time, I thought he might be asking about it.'
She refused to tell officers the name of her attacker but described him as tall, with dark curly hair, a geography teacher, and in his 40s.
Miss Hales said: She then confirmed his name when asked.
Harris denied the allegations strenuously after his arrest, the court heard.
Miss Hales told jurors: He said he didnt teach her, and would struggle to put her in a year group.
He also told officers he had been taking Citalopram because he was suffering from anxiety. He said one side effect was complete loss of libido.
He is in meetings with university officials to discuss his future
A Yale dishwasher who smashed a stained-glass window depicting slaves working in the cotton fields says he wants his job back.
Corey Menafee, who is black, resigned last month after taking a broomstick to the window inside the dining hall at Calhoun College.
He apologized for damaging the property but said the window's portrayal of slaves in a cotton field was offensive. Yale has since asked state prosecutors to drop charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief.
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Corey Menafee, who is black, resigned last month after taking a broomstick to the window inside the dining hall at Calhoun College
Now Menafee is meeting with university officials to try to ask for his job back.
His attorney Patricia Kane said her client only quit as part of a deal with Yale not to seek restitution for the window.
But after eight years working at the university's dining services, he is keen to return to his job to support his family.
'The important thing is the parties want to resolve this in everybody's best interest,' Kane said.
The case has stirred a long-running controversy over the name of the residential college honoring former Vice President John C. Calhoun, an 1804 Yale graduate and an ardent defender of slavery.
In April, after a round of protests by students and others who wanted the name changed, Yale President Peter Salovey announced the college would continue to carry Calhoun's name and said Yale would take other steps to address its history with regard to slavery.
Menafee, who worked at the Ivy League school's Calhoun dining hall, drew the support of student activists.
He apologized for damaging the property but said the window's portrayal of slaves in a cotton field (pictured) was offensive
The dishwasher said he acted impulsively and independently of the students' debate about Calhoun's legacy at Yale.
'I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high, and I climbed up and reached up and broke it,' he told the New Haven Independent.
'It's 2016, I shouldn't have to come to work and see things like that,' he added.
'I just said, 'That thing's coming down today. I'm tired of it.' I put myself in a position to do it, and did it.'
YALE'S STAINED GLASS WINDOWS One panel, titled 'Negro with a watermelon' was removed from the Sterling Memorial Library after employees complained in the 90s. Another panel at the library references 'Heathen Chinee', a narrative poem that was intended as a satire, but instead reinforced racist sentiments. A stained glass depiction of a shackled slave kneeling before Calhoun was removed from the dorm's common room in 1992 following a student campaign. Menafee broke a stained glass panel showing two slaves carrying picked cotton in the fields. Advertisement
The 38-year-old has since apologized for breaking the glass, which fell on a woman walking past, and has been replaced by a clear pane. The woman was not injured.
'It could be termed as civil disobedience,' Menafee said. 'But there's always better ways of doing things like that than just destroying things. It wasn't my property, and I had no right to do it.'
Menafee, could face one to five years in prison along with a fine up to $5,000 for criminal mischief.
The reckless endangerment charge carries a sentence up to two years in addition to fines up to $1,000.
The college will not push for prosecution or seek restitution for the glass, a spokesperson said.
But it appears his actions successfully spurred the school to a few concessions, after a longstanding debate among students failed to strike Calhoun's name from the dormitory.
An email issued by the Head of Calhoun College Julia Adams last Tuesday stated the stained glass windows depicting the slave owner would be removed from the common room.
Menafee worked at the Ivy League school's Calhoun dining hall, named after the seventh Vice President of the United States John C Calhoun, who was an avid supporter of slavery
The glass panels will be stored at the Yale University Art Gallery and replaced with tinted panes until the school commissions an artist to create new designs.
The dining hall will also be renamed after Roosevelt Thompson, an African American Yale alum who died shortly after his graduation in 1984.
Adams told the Yale Daily News: 'Placating people wasn't in my mind.
'Rather I hope that the specific mingling of old and new, in which the students and broader Calhoun community will have a hand, opens to the future as well as the past.'
In April, it was announced Yale would not be heeding the year-long campaign to change the dormitory's name.
Yale president Peter Salovey defended the decision and was reported by the NYTimes saying: 'Universities have to be the places where tough conversations happen. I don't think that is advanced by hiding our past.'
The college removed a glass panel in the common room showing a slave kneeling at Calhoun's feet after a student campaign in 1992, according to the Yale Daily News.
Menafee is a father of two who graduated from Virginia Union University in 2001 and previously worked as a substitute teacher.
A scuba diver who lost her camera three years ago was stunned when it was finally found after it washed up 600 miles away in Sweden - and still worked.
Adele Devonshire, 37, was diving off St Abbs in Berwickshire, Scotland, when the clip holding her Fuji camera snapped.
She searched the shore in July 2013 but gave up hope when she couldn't find her device or the waterproof case the camera was inside.
But she was astonished when she saw an online post last week by Lars Mossberg, 57, who found it perched on a rock on the shore of a small Swedish island.
This is one of the photographs of Adele Devonshire's father that Lars Mossberg found on her camera in Sweden
Her Fuji camera was lost in 2013 off the coast of Scotland and was remarkably found last week on a Swedish island
The plastic housing was covered in scratches, but despite having travelled across the North Sea, the camera turned on first time - without even being charged.
Father-of-two Lars tracked down Adele by posting some of her photos - of her father and her husband - to a 'Lost at Sea' Facebook group where they were seen by a friend.
And it took just five hours to find Adele, after the pictures were recognised by a friend who had been on the dive when she lost it three years earlier.
Mrs Devonshire, an ecologist from Manningtree, Suffolk, said: 'It's mad really - I'm still shocked.
'To think that it had presumably been bobbing around in the sea for all that time - and still works - is remarkable.
'It just goes to show the power of the internet and the kindness of people.'
Mr Mossberg, a management consultant, added: 'The more I think about it and the journey it has been on, the more exciting it is.'
Mrs Devonshire, a mother of two, only realised she had lost the camera when she surfaced following a dive, and was devastated when she could not claim it back on her insurance.
The camera travelled a staggering 600 miles from St Abbs in Scotland to Gullholmen in Sweden (pictured)
Mrs Devonshire (pictured) only realised she had lost the camera when she surfaced following a dive
Mr Mossberg lives in a fishing village called Gullholmen, which is on a 31 hectare island of the same name, and home to just 90 people and no cars - just boats.
He spotted the camera amongst sea grass and shells on the rock coastline during his daily morning stroll a couple of weeks ago.
He added: 'I don't know why I looked down at it but I saw something orange.
'I left it for a while when I took it home because I didn't believe it would work.'
After leaving it to dry out, he prised open the waterproof cover to find a perfectly unharmed camera inside which turned on without a problem.
He added: 'But it did and there were 400 to 500 photos, from all different places.
Mr Mossberg (left) found the camera on a Swedish island and was pictured holding it when it was still in its waterproof case (right)
'I could see the last photo was from around July 2013, and a diving trip, so was amazed it had reached me.'
After listening to the voice on movies on the camera he thought it must belong to a British person, so posted a few photos of Mrs Devonshire's husband Paul and father Roger to Lost At Sea.
The photos were posted at around 5.30pm on Friday, and remarkably were spotted by Adele's friend by 10.30pm the same evening.
Astonishingly she had only joined the 2,500 member group that day.
Mr Mossberg verified Mrs Devonshire was the owner by asking her some questions about the photographs, and was set to post it back to her on Monday.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ZIKA
WHAT IS ZIKA?
The Zika (ZEE'-ka) virus was first discovered in monkey in Uganda in 1947 - its name comes from the Zika forest where it was first discovered.
It is native mainly to tropical Africa, with outbreaks in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.
It appeared in Brazil in 2014 and has since been reported in many Latin American countries and Caribbean islands.
HOW IS IT SPREAD?
It is typically transmitted through bites from the same kind of mosquitoes - Aedes aegypti - that can spread other tropical diseases, like dengue fever, chikungunya and yellow fever.
It is not known to spread from person to person.
Scientists have found Zika can be transmitted sexually. The World Health Organisation recently warned the mode of transmission is 'more common than previously assumed'.
And, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued first-time guidance, saying couples trying to conceive should abstain or wear condoms for six months if the male has confirmed or suspected Zika.
Additionally, the CDC said couples should abstain or wear condoms for eight weeks if the female has confirmed or suspected Zika, or if the male traveled to a country with a Zika outbreak but has no symptoms.
During the current outbreak, the first case of sexually transmitted Zika was reported in Texas, at the beginning of February.
The patient became infected after sexual contact with a partner diagnosed with the virus after travelling to an affected region.
Now, health officials in the US are investigating more than a dozen possible cases of Zika in people thought to be infected during sex.
There are also reported cases in France and Canada.
Prior to this outbreak, scientists reported examples of sexual transmission of Zika in 2008.
A researcher from Colorado, who caught the virus overseas, is thought to have infected his wife, on returning home.
And records show the virus was found in the semen of a man in Tahiti.
So far, each case of sexual transmission of Zika involves transmission from an infected man to his partner. There is no current evidence that women can pass on the virus through sexual contact.
The World Health Organization says Zika is rapidly spreading in the Americas because it is new to the region, people aren't immune to it, and the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries it is just about everywhere - including along the southern United States.
Canada and Chile are the only places without this mosquito.
Scientists revealed a molecular map of the Zika virus, which could help scientists develop new treatments for the disease
ARE THERE SYMPTOMS?
The majority of people infected with Zika virus will not experience symptoms.
Those that do, usually develop mild symptoms - fever, rash, joint pain, and red eyes - which usually last no more than a week.
There is no specific treatment for the virus and there is currently no vaccine to protect against infection, though several are in the developmental stages.
WHY IS IT A CONCERN NOW?
In Brazil, there has been mounting evidence linking Zika infection in pregnant women to a rare birth defect called microcephaly, in which a newborn's head is smaller than normal and the brain may not have developed properly.
Brazilian health officials last October noticed a spike in cases of microcephaly in tandem with the Zika outbreak.
The country said it has confirmed more than 860 cases of microcephaly - and that it considers them to be related to Zika infections in the mother.
Brazil is also investigating more than 4,200 additional suspected cases of microcephaly.
However, Brazilian health officials said they had ruled out 1,471 suspected cases in the week ending March 19.
Now Zika has been conclusively proven to cause microcephaly.
The WHO also stated that researchers are now convinced that Zika is responsible for increased reports of a nerve condition called Guillain-Barre that can cause paralysis.
A team of Purdue University scientists recently revealed a molecular map of the Zika virus, which shows important structural features that may help scientists craft the first treatments to tackle the disease.
The map details vital differences on a key protein that may explain why Zika attacks nerve cells - while other viruses in the same family, such as dengue, Yellow Fever and West Nile, do not.
CAN THE SPREAD BE STOPPED?
Individuals can protect themselves from mosquito bites by using insect repellents, and wearing long sleeves and long pants - especially during daylight, when the mosquitoes tend to be most active, health officials say.
A Tommy's incredible archive has revealed that German pilots risked their lives to deliver letters from British flyers shot down over Syria in the First World War.
The Germans performed the daring diplomatic missions to let the comrades and loved ones of their enemies know that they were being treated well.
The revelation was made when the great-nephew of an officer who served in the Royal Flying Corps discovered the compelling archive.
Pictured, captured pilots Lt Palmer (third right) and Lt Floyer (fourth right) stand alongside the remains of their wrecked plane and German pilot
Lieutenant Charles Cotterill was never captured by the enemy but collected some of the letters and photos they later delivered.
His archive contains a written account titled 'Sporty Huns' Lt Cotterill wrote in 1929 in which he described the missions.
On one occasion a German pilot was seen to wave over the fuselage of his plane at the British below after completing a sortie.
Another time, a native Bedouin was sent by the Germans to a British outpost on the frontline at the Battle of Gaza with a letter for the British commanding officer.
The missive informed him that a 'brother officer' whose plane had crashed over Turkish-German lines was safe and well.
Lt Cotterill wrote: 'On Monday 5th March 1917 Lieut. Floyer and Lieut. Palmer set off from our aerodrome to do an aerial reconnaissance over the Turkish lines, on the border of Sinai and Syria.
'Their aeroplane was brought down by Turkish gun fire and upon landing safely are taken prisoner.
'On the following Thursday (8th March) a Turkish aeroplane, piloted by a German, comes over our aerodrome and drops a packet which contains letters from Floyer and Palmer saying they were prisoners.
Pictured, the impressive medal haul belonging to Lt Cotterill who served in both the army and the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War
'On Sunday 18th March another Turkish aeroplane appears over our aerodrome and is subjected to gun fire from our machine guns. The pilot as we afterwards found out was a Hun, circled above us and threw out a message bag which we momentarily thought was a bomb, caused us to lie on the ground.
'However, he turned tail and waving his hand over the fusilage (sic) of the machine, went back to the Turkish aerodrome.
'Upon the message bag being picked up it was found to contain letters from our brother officers who were prisoners and a photograph of Floyer and Palmer amongst German and Austrian Officers.
Among the incredible archive of Lieutenant Charles Cotterill is an account titled 'Sporty Huns' that recalls the chivalry of the German pilots while flying over Allied lines in Northern Africa
'The Huns had marked the photograph showing that Hun No.1 came over on 8th March and it was Hun No.2 that came over and dropped the photograph with letters.'
Lt Cotterill's archive also contained over 800 photos charting his career, firstly in the British Army with the Cheshire Regiment and then in the Royal Flying Corps.
The snaps depict his time flying on sorties in Egypt and aerial views of the trenches, downed British aircraft and RFC officers relaxing.
There is also a collection of postcards that carry images of scenes at Ypres, two of his campaign medals and two German Iron Crosses that he picked up during his military career.
Pictured, an account by Royal Flying Corps officer Lt Cotterill of the immense chivalry shown by German pilots when delivering correspondence from their British prisoners
Simon Nuttall, of auctioneers Wright Marshall of Knutsford, Cheshire, said: 'The archive has come from the great-nephew of Charles Cotterill and he now wants it to be out there for others to see.
'Cotterill was an observer in the Royal Flying Corps and was never captured but his Sporty Huns account documents what he saw.
'These men were gentlemen of the skies and there was a tremendous amount of chivalry displayed by both sides towards each other.
'Members of the Royal Flying Corps didn't have parachutes and were lucky to survive if they crashed.'
A black man named Montrell Jackson was executed in cold blood in America yesterday.
A hooded assassin drove hundreds of miles to deliberately shoot him and two of his white co-workers dead in the street with an AR-15.
It was a senseless, callous, horrific act of violence that left a wife without a husband and a baby 4-month old son without a father.
Montrell was by all accounts a decent, generous and loving man.
A gentle giant who was always about peace.
Colleagues said he worked hard, often seven days a week.
Friends spoke of his humorous streak and addiction to shoes.
He was a big fan of the New Orleans Pelicans and Dallas Cowboys.
Montrell Jackson was executed in cold blood yesterday. Montrell was by all accounts a decent, generous and loving man and the father of a baby boy
Beyonce stopped her Glasgow concert to read out a rally-cry for justice for the men who had been killed weeks earlier, but Montrell has gotten none of that support or rage
Yet today he is dead.
Snuffed out in the prime of his life, aged just 32.
Last week, after two black men of similar age were shot dead, there was national outrage.
The black community rose as one to demand action against the perpetrators.
There was fury in the streets from New York to Los Angeles.
Men, women and children marching as one, baring placards screaming Black Lives Matter!
Beyonce even stopped a concert to read out a rally-cry for justice for the men who had been killed.
Yet for THIS black victim, there was a very different reaction from that same black community.
Where are the protests?
Where are the placards?
Wheres the incendiary Beyonce statement?
Wheres the RAGE?
Sadly for Montrell Jackson, he simply didnt matter as much as those other two men to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Why?
Because he was a police officer.
This, to many Black Lives Matter activists, made him the enemy.
When two black men of similar age were shot dead in recent weeks, there was national outrage. The black community rose as one to demand action against the perpetrators. Yet for THIS black victim, there was a very different reaction
In an eloquent Facebook post he wrote on July 8, the day after five other police officers were shot dead in Dallas, Montrell spoke of the difficulties he faced as black law enforcer.
Im tired, physically and emotionally, he said. Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments. I still love you all because hate takes too much energy, but I definitely wont be looking at you the same.
Montrell thanked those who had reached out to him and his wife.
In an eloquent Facebook post he wrote on July 8, the day after five other police officers were shot dead in Dallas, Montrell spoke of the difficulties he faced as black law enforcer
It was needed and appreciated, he said. 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. 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.
He then issued a heartfelt plea: 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 protestors, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you.
Today, just ten days later, Montrell Jackson is dead, targeted as he worked by another black man, a former Marine named Gavin Eugene Long from Kansas City who believed the only way to successfully protest was through bloodshed.
Such was Longs hatred of the police that he didnt care that one of the men he was killing was black.
So a black man full of hate and violence murdered another peace-loving black man because he wanted to exact revenge for the deaths of black men.
This is how twisted the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement has now become in the wrong minds and the wrong gun-toting hands.
Montrell Jacksons sister found out he was dead when she was sitting in church and the pastor asked the congregation to send prayers to her family.
Jocelyn Jackson, 49, instantly broke down.
Later, she spoke out and said she understood the anger behind the Black Lives Matter movement, but added: God gives nobody the right to kill and take another persons life. Its coming to the point where no lives matter, whether youre black, or white, or Hispanic or whatever.
Shes absolutely right, it is.
When the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag first sprang up on social media, I responded by tweeting #AllLivesMatter and got roundly abused for exercising my supposed racist white privilege.
But my issue with the movement was not born from any notion that blacks dont get an unfair deal from American society, because they absolutely do.
Centuries of institutional racism have left African-Americans with higher poverty rates, worse education due to poorly funded schools, appallingly higher rates of incarceration and a far greater statistical likelihood of being targeted by police.
No, my issue was born from a serious concern that this particular movement, named as it is, would lead to more, not less division in an already race-charged country.
The original premise of Black Lives Matter is not that black lives matter more than anybody elses, its that black lives should matter as much as anybody elses.
As comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey put it: Its OK for a movement to focus on issues specific to one marginalized group. Gay bars arent unfair to straight people. Save the Rainforest isnt saying you hate all other trees.
The problem with Black Lives Matter is that the movements been hijacked by those with a more violent concept of how to achieve justice, egged on by angry rhetoric theyre hearing from high profile people
But the problem with Black Lives Matter is that the movements been hijacked by those with a more violent concept of how to achieve equality and justice.
And I fear theyve been inspired and egged on by the angry rhetoric theyre hearing from high profile people in their own community.
After the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Beyonce demanded justice.
We are sick and tired of the killings of young men and women in our communities, she said. Its up to us to take a stand and demand they stop killing us. Were going to stand up as a community and fight against anyone who believes that murder or any violent action by those who are sworn to protect us should consistently go unpunished.
I knew what she meant, but did Gavin Eugene Long?
Or did he think this gave him licence to go kill a cop?
Last night, during another concert, Beyonce dedicated her song Halo to the victims of the Turkey uprising.
She said nothing about Montrell Williams.
Black Lives Matter was a well-intentioned idea thats gone bad very quickly and now represents a real and present danger to all police officers, of all colours.
The bottom line is this: if black lives matter so much, why are black Americans executing black Americans?
It makes no sense.
Its time we come together to agree that All Lives Matter equally, and strive to achieve that goal.
Or as Montrell Jacksons sister said: No Lives Matter.
It has been three weeks since Sam Dastyari offered Pauline Hanson a halal snack pack and the flame-haired politician isn't planning to budge on her decision not to take him up on the offer.
Ms Hanson's strict 'no halal' policy was thrown back into the spotlight when a Muslim member of ABC's Q&A audience invited her to attend dinner with himelf and his family.
But Mohammed Attai's invitation for a meal remained unanswered when the Queensland senator awkwardly brushed it off telling him to get in touch with her office.
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Pauline Hanson's (pictured) strict 'no halal' policy was thrown back into the spotlight when she was a Muslim member of ABC's Q&A audience invited her to attend dinner with him and his family
Mr Attai opened his question to Ms Hanson by telling her that some of the greatest influences for him and his family came from becoming 'hard-working' citizens.
He said: 'I believe the best way to increase understanding and mutual respect is through interaction.
'Senator Hanson, I understand you declined Sam Dastyari's offer for a Halal snack pack.'
Mr Dastyari made a tongue-and-cheek response commenting that Ms Hanson was 'reconsidering' to which Ms Hanson responded firmly: 'No I'm not.'
In a bid to bridge the gap between Australians who 'dislike Islam and all Muslims' Mr Attai added that he would extend his invitation to anyone who hoped to increase their understanding of his culture.
He said: 'Would you be willing to take my offer to inviting you for lunch or dinner, which ever suits you best, with me and my Muslim family I'll ensure you have something that is not halal.
But Mohammed Attai's (pictured) invitation for a meal remained unanswered when the Queensland senator awkwardly brushed it off telling him to get in touch with her office
Sam Dastyari (left) made a tongue-and-cheek comment that Ms Hanson was 'reconsidering' the halal snack pack to which Ms Hanson (right) responded: 'No I'm not'
'Would you kindly accept my invitation?'
Floundering on her answer, Ms Hanson settled on telling Mr Attai that they could talk in the future - not settling on the date.
She said: 'You can get in touch with my office and see what happens, yeah?'
Host of Q&A, Tony Jones concluded the question commenting that it was a 'nice piece of reconciliation in what has been a tough argument'.
The controversial episode comes just weeks after Ms Hanson was elected in the Queensland seat of parliament on July 3 and was questioned by the New South Wales Senator whether she would join him in Sydney's west to eat a halal snack pack.
Host of Q&A, Tony Jones (left) concluded the question commenting that it was a 'nice piece of reconciliation in what has been a tough argument'
This comes just weeks after Ms Hanson (right) was elected in the Queensland seat of parliament on July 3 and was questioned by Dastyari (left) whether she would join him in Sydney's west to eat a halal snack pack
'Pauline, right now I will invite you to join me in Sydney, and I will take you out for halal snack pack out in Western Sydney, whenever you want.' Mr Dastyari said.
'It's not happening, not interested in halal, thank you,' she said on the live television cross.
'I don't believe in halal certification,' she said.
The question spurred a social media frenzy of pictures mocking Ms Hanson with memes and snack packs named in her honour.
One of the memes satirises the One Nation leader's infamous catchphrase: 'Please explain why they taste so GOOD!'
Another meme suggests Ms Hanson is queen of 'dingoes' a slang term for people who foolishly order their halal snack pack with tomato sauce.
The remains of a woman who disappeared 10 months ago was found on an Ohio farm.
Owners of a farm in Madison Township found Lindsay Bogan's bones on their property and notified police, according to FOX 19.
The 30-year-old, who went missing in September 2015, was last seen by her boyfriend 48-year-old Eric Sexton.
Sexton reported Bogan missing on September 14. He told cops he last saw her getting into an SUV in downtown Middletown.
The remains of 30-year-old Lindsay Bogan (pictured) were discovered on an Ohio farm. Bogan went missing in September 2015 and was last seen by her boyfriend Eric Sexton
Eric Sexton (pictured) told police that he last saw her getting into an SUV in downtown Middletown, Ohio. He is the father of Bogan's now 19-month-old daughter. Sexton is also a person of interest in Bogan's disappearance, according to police
He is the father of Bogan's now 19-month-old daughter.
Detectives said Sexton is a person of interest in her disappearance and they've been investigating her case as a homicide since March, the station reported.
Bogan's remains were identified through dental records confirmed by a forensic odontologist, Butler County Sheriff Richard K Jones and Middletown Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw, told the Hamilton Journal News.
Detectives went back to the farm where Bogan's remains were discovered on Friday night to recover more evidence.
'No one should be thrown away like this,' Butler County Sheriff's Office Lt Todd Langmeyer told the Journal News.
'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.'
Authorities charged Sexton with promoting prostitution and acting as Bogan's pimp.
He pleaded guilty to the prostitution charge and served nine months in jail, according to the paper.
He 'supervised, managed and/or controlled the prostitution activities of Lindsay Bogan by offering her sexual services in exchange for money to others,' according to information obtained by the Journal News.
Authorities charged Sexton with promoting prostitution and acting as Bogan's pimp. He pleaded guilty to the prostitution charge and served nine months in jail. Authorities gave him a lie-detector test but said he 'showed deception'. Sexton told police he had nothing to do with her disappearance and that the two planned to marry
Sexton was released on July 8. Members of Sexton's family are also being investigated.
Middletown Police Maj Mark Hoffman told the Journal News that detectives gave Sexton and his brother, Steve, a lie-detector test.
They 'showed deception,' he said.
Hoffman said Sexton and his brother remain persons of interest in the disappearance.
Sexton told police he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
Bill Cosby will be allowed to sue a woman who accused him of rape for breaching the terms of a confidentiality agreement she signed with him years before, a judge declared Monday.
Former Temple University employee Andrea Constand was allegedly drugged and raped by the 79-year-old disgraced comedian in 2004, but after police said in 2005 there wasn't enough evidence to press charges, she sued him instead.
He settled out of court in 2006, with one of the conditions being an agreement not to speak publicly about her claims - an agreement that he says she broke,The Hollywood Reporter said.
Lawsuit: Andrea Constand says Bill Cosby date-raped her in 2004. She settled out of court in 2006, and agreed not to discuss the case. But Cosby is now suing her for talking to the press in 2015, among other items
Going to court: Cosby said Constand broke the agreement a number of times, including on Twitter and in interviews with newspapers. He also says her lawyers leaked a deposition from her suit, though they deny it
Cosby says in the suit that in 2015, Constand and her lawyers helped leak a deposition in which Cosby admitted to giving Quaaludes to young women with the intent of having sex with them.
That deposition, along with claims being made by other women, led to police reopening her case - at which point she and her mom spoke to officers, allegedly in breach of the agreement.
He also accused her of talking to a number of media companies.
Constand said that Cosby had breached the agreement himself due to the deluge of claims that emerged against him in 2014 and 2015.
However, that argument failed to pass muster, according to US District Judge Eduardo Robreno.
And as Cosby's suit, filed in February, hits Constand with an 'unjust enrichment' claim, she may have to return the money that she claimed during the 2006 settlement if she loses.
Also named in the suit are Constand's lawyers, Delores Troiani and Bebe Kivitz, who are alleged to have helped release Cosby's decade-old deposition.
Denied: Judge Eduardo Robreno denied Cosby's claim that Constand broke the agreement by talking to cops after they reopened her criminal case, which they closed in 2004 citing lack of evidence
Troiani and Kivitz say they should be excluded from that decision, arguing that they were not involved in the release of the deposition transcript nor with the court-reporting service that leaked it.
But Robreno said that would have to be established at trial.
The judge also ruled that Cosby can sue the National Enquirer's parent company, American Media, for reports about Constand and Cosby made in that paper.
And the judge said that the suit could proceed for two tweets Constand made in 2014, as well as an interview she performed with the Toronto Sun.
One tweet said, 'I won't go away, there is a lot more I will say,' and the other said, 'It's not that everybody just forgot about it, truth is nobody cared.'
Since it's not immediately clear that Cosby was the person being referred to, that would have to be established in court, the judge wrote.
However, Robreno refused to allow Cosby to sue Constand, her mom and her lawyers for talking to police once her case was re-opened.
The judge said that the contract was unenforceable in this case, since it breached public policy by stopping people from telling law enforcement about alleged criminal conduct.
Cosby's lawyers argued, unsuccessfully, that it shouldn't apply to voluntary disclosure, only disclosures made through a subopena.
A pre-trial conference is scheduled for September.
GOP nominee for state auditor says in either instance prosecution could have affected outcome of election, so feds backed away
Chuck Stuber, Republican candidate for state auditor, shown speaking in March at the Civitas Institute's Conservative Leadership Conference, said Thursday the FBI normally would not comment publicly on criminal investigations. (CJ photo by Dan Way)
Republican state auditor candidate and former FBI special agent Chuck Stuber says he was puzzled that the agency's investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server did not follow standard protocol on several fronts, though he said FBI Director James Comey may have performed a "stroke of genius" by releasing publicly details of the probe.During a Thursday news conference at state Republican Party headquarters, Stuber, who has been involved in investigations that resulted in prosecutions against some of the most powerful politicians in North Carolina, said he was not surprised that Clinton was not charged. He even predicted that outcome based on his work on the 2008 case of former North Carolina U.S. senator and one-time Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.One of the "big concerns" the Department of Justice had in the FBI investigation of Edwards was that the allegations about the former senator's illegal use of campaign funds to hide his pregnant mistress came forward in August 2008, the election was in November, and Justice Department officials didn't want to affect the outcome.Stuber said."So I would have been very surprised if an indictment would have come forward against Hillary Clinton so close to the [2016] election," Stuber said.He believes ComeyDemocratic Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Democratic President Barack Obama would not recommend indicting Clinton,Stuber said he seesby presenting facts to the American public to consider as they vote for president.Stuber is concerned about the national security implications of Clinton keeping classified information on her personal computer server, and her denial that she sent or received classified information, which the investigation concluded was untruthful. He said that calls into question her trustworthiness to be president.Clinton's popularity has slipped in opinion polls conducted since Comey outlined her numerous infractions, and Stuber said the possibility of another FBI investigation into Clinton's conduct could boost his candidacy against incumbent State Auditor Beth Wood.A May poll by the Civitas Institute that had Wood leading among likely voters by a 35 percent to 30 percent margin, with 33 percent undecided,Stuber said.The FBI could investigate whether Clinton lied to Congress under oath about the secret email servers and other matters, or legal questions surrounding the Clinton Foundation's receipt of millions of dollars from foreign governments while Clinton was dealing with them in her former role as secretary of state. That wasStuber said.And former President Bill Clinton's unusual meeting with Lynch on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport at the conclusion of the FBI investigationStuber said.All of that could affect down-ballot races in his favor, Stuber said."Without conducting my own investigation, without personally reviewing all the evidence gathered, without any oversight from my office of the evidence gathering process, to comment in any way would be conjecture at best, and irresponsible at worse," Wood said in response to Stuber's comments about the Clinton investigation."The Office of the State Auditor has worked hard to assure that every report, every finding, every conclusion, and even comments coming from this office are supported by hard evidence. No one, other than those FBI officials who worked the case, has enough knowledge and evidence to support any statements being made about the Clinton email situation," Wood said.Stuber admitted he wasabout the Clinton investigation because as a rule the FBI doesn't advocate for or against the filing of criminal charges.Typically the agency remains mum, and refers results of an investigation to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Department of Justice, or a district attorney's office, "and that's what I expected would happen in the Hillary Clinton case," Stuber said.Although he has noStuber said based on his FBI experience it is possible Comey rejected recommendations to charge Clinton.News that FBI agents working the Clinton case were directed to sign nondisclosure statements seemed odd to Stuber.he said.Stuber said he has no way of knowing whether Donald Trump would help or hurt him if the likely nominee is at the top of the Republican presidential ballot.he said.Stuber said, and while there may be some disadvantages to running an insurgency campaign,with fresh perspectives, energy, and ideas.Stuber says his career as an FBI agent and chief investigator for the State Board of Elections gives him the ability to take the Auditor's Office toand in using his broad network of law enforcement contacts to help prosecute criminal activity. He already is getting tips on high-level cases he would investigate, he said.Wood's campaign noted that she was endorsed on Wednesday by the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association.
Killer: Robert Kay, 49, has been jailed for life for the murder of Ian Dollery
A schizophrenic man who went on a drugs binge before murdering an innocent father-of-three has been jailed for life.
Robert Kay, 49, was walking past Ian Dollery's home in St Annes, Lancashire, when he launched a brutal and savage attack, stabbing Mr Dollery in front of his wife, Andrea, and their 22-year-old daughter, Grace.
The murder took place just hours before the family were due to go on holiday.
The killer was armed with a large kitchen knife and had injected himself with amphetamines and drunk eight cans of Tennent's Super lager before the attack.
Prior to the murder, Kay told friends he was 'the son of Satan' and had been given 'a list of things to do'.
The court heard Grace Dollery managed to use a broom to force Kay out of the garage of the detached property, where the attack took place.
A former engineer, Mr Dollery had cut back his working hours to help his wife run a bookselling business from their garage.
The father-of-three, who had worked at aerospace company BAE Systems all his life, suffered more than 30 stab wounds, some 'made with considerable force', and later died in hospital.
Kay - who had never met his victim - had admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but a jury at Preston Crown Court convicted him of murder.
The defendant was suffering from a long-standing illness at the time of the killing but had failed to co-operate with mental health services over the years, the court heard.
In her victim personal statement read in court, Mrs Dollery said: 'My life, and that of my family and friends, has been shattered into tiny pieces never to be restored
'I am only here today because of my daughter's courage and quick thinking.'
She said they had moved to the north west in October 2013 having spent some 18 years in Germany.
Mrs Dollery described her husband as 'kind, compassionate, intelligent, patient and witty'.
Ian Dollery, 51, (pictured with his wife Andrea) was at his home in St Annes, Lancashire, when he was brutally murdered by Kay
She added: 'For me, life without Ian is a daily torture. My life is unrecognisable, I miss his daily humour and zest for life
'Ian was one of the good guys. His loss is felt by many, especially me.'
She revealed her last words to him in the garage were: 'Please don't die, I love you.'
Mr Dollery's daughter Grace said the actions of Kay had been 'catastrophic' and had forced her to give up her architecture studies.
She said: 'I did not just lose my father that night. My mother can never be the person she was.
'I may have saved a life that night but I am fully aware she would rather have died with my father.
'I strongly believe he (Kay) should never be able to walk in society again. Not just because of what he has done but what he has taken away from us.'
She described her parents as 'the perfect team'.
Kay, of North Promenade, St Annes, must serve a minimum custodial term of 23 years before he can be considered for parole.
The court heard how Kay stabbed Mr Dollery in front of his wife Andrea and their daughter Grace, who used a broom to get him out of the garage at their home (pictured)
Sentencing him, Judge Mark Brown, the Honorary Recorder of Preston, said: 'Very quickly, in almost an instant, fate changed everything when you attacked Ian Dollery in his garage.
'This was a savage and brutal attack on a wholly innocent man who just happened happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
'Although you have a long-standing mental illness, you have failed to co-operate with the mental health services over the year and have continued to take drugs despite knowing they were bad for you.'
The court heard that Kay had previous convictions for violence and had served prison sentences.
Following sentencing, Detective Chief Inspector Jonathan Holmes, of Lancashire Police said: 'This is a tragic case in which Ian Dollery was murdered in a random and senseless attack.
'He was cruelly taken away from his family by Robert Kay, a man who he did not know and had never met.
'Kay has now been brought to justice for his actions but I am aware that it will not bring Mr Dollery back and nothing will ever compensate his family for their loss.
A mother-of-two is dead after she was gored by a heifer at a festival she was attending with her husband and one of her children.
Sofia Lopez Gonzalez had tried to escape the animal behind railings after it was let loose in the streets of Moratalla in Murcia in south east Spain.
But the 47-year-old was caught on its horn and suffered a fatal injury to her abdomen. She died a few hours later in hospital.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Sofia Lopez Gonzalez had tried to escape the animal behind railings after it was let loose in the streets
The 47-year-old woman was caught on the heifer's horn and suffered a fatal injury to her abdomen
Gonzalez's husband and one of her two children, aged 15 and nine, witnessed the tragedy.
The dead woman was from Moratalla and alhough she lived in the nearby village of El Palmar with her family, returned every year with relatives to celebrate the week-long Cristo del Rayo festival.
Town hall chiefs announced after her death was confirmed on Sunday night that they would declare three days of mourning. Her funeral is due to take place on Tuesday.
The incident happened on the final run of the week-long festival.
The death was the first of a fatal goring of a woman during a festival involving animals this year in Spain.
Last year 12 people died at bull festivals across Spain. The vast majority of gore victims in festivals of its kind are men.
Two men died last Saturday after being gored during Pamplona-style bull runs, the same day matador Victor Barrio was killed in the ring in front of his wife.
Gonzalez's husband and one of her two children, aged 15 and nine, witnessed the tragedy in Murcia
The dead woman attended the week-long Cristo del Rayo festival every year to celebrate with her family
A 65-year-old man was gored during a bull run in Fuentesauco in the province of Salamanca.
He was gored after a bull broke through a fence and attacked a group of men during the town's annual festival.
The tragedy happened around 9pm, shortly after 29-year-old Barrio was killed in front of hundreds of spectators including his wife Raquel in a bull ring in Teruel east of Madrid.
He was transferred to hospital with another man who was also seriously injured but died shortly after arrival. The town hall later suspended the festivities.
In the early hours of the same Saturday, a 29-year-old died after being gored to death by a heifer during an annual festival in Pedreguer near Valencia on Spain's east coast.
He was named as Ruben Frasquet Morant.
The gunman who killed three police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday may have spent days stalking cops in the city and staking out the gas station where the shooting unfolded, police sources say.
U.S. Marine Corps veteran Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, set out to ambush officers in the attack, authorities said on Monday.
He 'targeted them and assassinated them', Louisiana State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said on Monday.
Police believe Long had been in Baton Rouge for several days, Edmonson said, and spent time looking for locations to target cops.
Ultimately, the 29-year-old opened fire at the B-Quik gas station along Airline Highway, killing three police officers and wounding a further three, before he was killed.
Longs movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers, Edmonson said at an earlier conference. He wouldnt elaborate, but said Long was definitely seeking out police.
However, a picture of the gunman's cross-country road-trip in the days leading up to the deadly assault on cops is beginning to emerge from his social media postings and YouTube ramblings.
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Gaving Long (pictured in a still from his YouTube page), the gunman who killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, may have spent days stalking cops in the city and staking out the gas station where the shooting unfolded
Police sources say Long drove a rental car from Kansas City to Baton Rouge after the deadly sniper attack on Dallas police on July 7 - but his posts on YouTube and social media indicate he took a detour to Texas
After spending days in Baton Rouge, Long knew that officers frequented the gas station where he opened fire, Fox News reports.
One of the cops shot by Long - who dressed in black, wore body armor and carried extra ammunition at the time was vacuuming his car at the time.
He got a rental car in Kansas City after the Dallas shootings on July 7 and drove it more than 700 miles to Baton Rouge, law enforcement sources told CNN.
But he appears to have spent some time in Texas first.
He posted a video on his YouTube channel on July 10 claiming to be speaking from Dallas, where Army veteran Micah Johnson killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Its justice. You know what Im saying? he said in the video, defending Johnsons attack, according to the Daily Caller.
Surveillance footage released by authorities on Monday showed the gunman (left) opening fire on a police cruiser from a distance as officers responded to the scene
Gavin Long dressed in black, wore body armor and carried extra ammunition as he stalked police officers at the scene of the shooting on Sunday. Above, CCTV images show him at the scene
Police believe Long had been in Baton Rouge for six days and knew that officers frequented the gas station where he opened fire. Above, the B-Quik gas station after he shooting
During the video, he also discusses the protests in Baton Rouge and what he perceived as oppression.
Youve got to fight back. Thats the only way a bully knows how to quit, he said in the video.
He also shared body cam footage purportedly taken in the city, which he also uploaded to Twitter on July 10.
'My bodycam footage of me in Dallas out in them streets educating our people,' he wrote on the social media platform.
On the way to Baton Rouge, Long may have taken a detour to visit Houston as another video posted on his YouTube account on July 12 was reportedly filmed from the city.
In that video, Long discusses his time as a Marine, the Daily Caller reports.
Three guns were recovered from the shooting in Baton Rouge, authorities told a press conference Monday
One of the weapons recovered from the scene was an IWT Tavor semi-automatic 5.56 caliber rifle
A pistol was also recovered from scene at the gas station where three police officers were killed
After reaching Baton Rouge this week, he posted a video from there on July 14, in which he called for violence after Alton Sterlings death.
If I would have been there with Alton clap, Long said in the clip.
Sterlings death at the hands of police officers on July 5 sparked a wave of protests in the city and escalating tension between the black community and law enforcement.
Ultimately, Long opened fire on six police officers after ambushing them at the gas station.
Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola were killed. Three other officers were shot, with one in critical condition.
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.
Former Marine Gavin Long (pictured) was identified by authorities as the gunman who killed three police officers on Sunday
Long shared body cam footage on his Twitter page on July 10, claiming to be in Dallas 'educating' people
In all, the violence has cost the lives of eight officers, including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians - Sterling and Philando Castile - and sparked a national debate over race and policing.
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.
And although Long is the only person who fired at officers, authorities are investigating whether he had any help.
We are not ready to say he acted alone, state police spokesman Major Doug Cain said on Sunday.
He was not alone during his stay in Baton Rouge, CNN reports.
Two persons of interest were detained for questioning in the nearby town of Addis. They were later released without any charges being filed.
Edmonson confirmed investigators have interviewed people Long had contact with in Baton Rouge, but stressed that the interviews do not mean they were involved in the shooting.
He urged anyone else who might have information to come forward.
Police officers are seen near the gas station where three police officers were gunned down in Baton Rouge
The Republican Party opened its national convention Monday, kicking off a four-day political jamboree that will anoint billionaire Donald Trump as its presidential nominee.
Some 2,000 delegates descended on a tightly secured Cleveland arena where Trump's wife will take center stage later in the day to make a personal pitch to voters that her billionaire husband is the best candidate for the White House.
The tough-talking mogul whose rise to lead the Republican White House ticket has been one of the more improbable journeys in American politics seeks to unify a party deeply split by months of bitter campaigning and divisive rhetoric.
The Republican National Convention kicked off Monday inside the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio
Delegates filed in and grouped themselves by state or territory before hearing anthems, pledges and prayers
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus gaveled the convention open Monday morning
'This convention will come to order,' Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told cheering delegates.
The opening-day theme is 'Make America Safe Again' a play on Trump's slogan 'Make America Great Again.'
Priebus swiftly addressed the unrest that has rattled American communities, calling for a moment of silence for officers killed in the line of duty, including those gunned down in two attacks in the past 10 days.
'Before we begin the official business of this convention, I would like to take a moment to recognize the fallen police officers in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and elsewhere,' he said. 'The men and women who protect our safety and well-being, who put their lives on the line every day, they're our genuine heroes.'
'We also want to recognize the families who lost loved ones during these troubling times,' he said. 'Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings.'
Following a moment of silence, the presentation of flag colors, recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and singing of the National Anthem, Rabbi Ari Wolf a police chaplain in Cleveland led an invocation.
The earliest speakers at a political convention are often among those of least national consequence, including local officials and young activists.
Alex Smith boasted that she was the first female chair of the College Republicans, and said the GOP was the forward-looking party of diversity and youth.
Charlie Kirk, the boyish founding executive director of Turning Point USA, mocked Sen. Bernie Sanders as 'like, three times my age!' Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination until last week.
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will make his case all week, and draw on the help of surrogates to defend him, in Cleveland
Hailing from Illinois, where four of the last seven governors have been convicted in corruption trials, Kirk quipped: 'The cool thing about Illinois is that we have term limits. One term in office, and one term in jail.'
Young Republicans president Dennis Cook mocked the Democrats as 'the party of unicorns and fairy tales.'
'We know free markets are better than free stuff,' he jabbed.
Trump, the man of the hour, told Fox News early Monday that his wife would be 'speaking about her love of the country,' adding that he will attend the evening session and may even say a few words a sign that the convention will be anything but politics as usual.
'I will be there. I want to watch. It's going to be very exciting,' Trump said.
A spate of race-tinged police-involved shootings and cop killings, including the fatal shooting of three officers in Louisiana on Sunday has put the country on edge.
President Barack Obama has urged Americans to temper their words and show stronger common resolve, but Trump is instead highlighting divisions.
'Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching,' Trump tweeted shortly after the Baton Rouge shooting.
Trump has portrayed himself as a sheriff who can fix things.
The convention is only partially about nominating Donald Trump it's also about denigrating Hillary Clinton
The convention's invocation came from a Cleveland rabbi as evangelical Christians from the Texas delegation bowed their heads in prayer
'We have to bring law and order back to this country, whether we like it or not,' he told Fox, as he bemoaned the ragged state of race relations in America.
Trump believes that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should be jailed for using a private email server to handle sensitive government documents while serving as secretary of state, something the FBI said was careless but not criminal.
On Monday, Trump will call on retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn and tough-talking Senator Joni Ernst as convention speakers to back up his point
After his wife, the candidate's team will send his son and daughters to the convention stage in the coming days in an attempt to humanize The Donald.
Polls show that Trump struggles badly with moderate voters, and his campaign will want to project a more positive image to the general electorate.
But several party luminaries will be absent the entire Bush family, Mitt Romney and reportedly even John Kasich, host state Ohio's sitting governor.
Trump's choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate could help shore up his position among conservatives, although the real estate billionaire seemed tepid about his decision.
In a remarkable first joint appearance on Saturday, Trump eventually got around to talking about Pence and explained why he was picked, in less-than-enthusiastic terms.
Cleveland has become a Republican melting pot full of traditional GOPers and Trump-flavored newcomers like biker gangs
Lake Erie was the backdrop for a Sunday night reception, including fireworks and a concert by the '60s-era rock band Three Dog Night
'One of the reasons is party unity so many people have said, 'party unity.' Because I'm an outsider.'
Pence will address the convention on Wednesday.
Inside the convention arena, it remains to be seen if the 'Never Trump' camp will make themselves heard.
Outside, however, law enforcement is bracing for a wave of protests, including on Monday, when demonstrators began gathering downtown and chanting 'dump Trump.'
As the GOP convention kicked off, Clinton blasted Trump's candidacy as a 'threat to our democracy,' and accused him of stoking racial and ethnic tensions with his rhetoric.
Trump 'plays coy with white supremacists, Donald Trump insults Mexican immigrants,' she told the NAACP, America's largest black civil rights organization, at a meeting in Cincinnati.
'Donald Trump cannot become president of the United States,' she said, to huge applause.
The Murdoch family has reportedly decided to sack Roger Ailes from his job as chairman and CEO of Fox News, less than two weeks after former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against her former boss.
Ailes could be out of the job as early as this week, three sources who spoke with New York Magazine said.
The sources say 21st Century Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and his two sons Lachlan and James are in agreement that Ailes must go.
James Murdoch reportedly wants to offer Ailes the choice of resigning this week, while his brother Lachlan and their father believe the offer should be presented after the GOP convention, which ends Thursday night.
Officially, Fox News's parent company, 21st Century Fox, says there has been no resolution to its probe into Ailes.
'This matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded,' 21st Century Fox said in a statement.
The Murdoch family have reportedly decided to force Roger Ailes (left) out of his position as chairman and CEO of Fox News, less than two weeks after former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson (right) filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him
James Murdoch is the chief executive officer of 21st Century Fox and Chairman of Sky plc., while his older brother Lachlan is the executive chairman of Nova Entertainment and the executive co-chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox.
Carlson sued network chief executive Roger Ailes on July 6, claiming she was cut loose after she refused his sexual advances and complained about harassment in the workplace.
Ailes, in a statement, denied the allegations and accused Carlson of filing the lawsuit in retaliation for her contract not being renewed.
Carlson, the former host of a daytime show at Fox who had worked at the network for 11 years, was abruptly let go on June 23.
Three sources who spoke to New York Magazine say Rupert Murdoch (center) and his two sons Lachlan (left) and James (right) are in agreement that Ailes must go
Nine months earlier, during a meeting with Ailes she called to address her feelings that she had been discriminated against, she alleged he told her that 'you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago.'
The 50-year-old Carlson, who was Miss America in 1989, alleged in her lawsuit that Ailes, who is 76, ogled her, repeatedly commented about her legs, urged her to wear clothes that enhanced her figure and told her she was sexy but 'too much hard work.'
Carlson said she was fired as a host of the morning show 'Fox & Friends' in 2013, and her pay reduced with the transfer to a daytime slot, because she had complained about sexual harassment.
Ailes said that Carlson began to 'conveniently' pursue a lawsuit when she became aware that Fox was not renewing her contract, citing poor ratings. Ratings for her program, 'The Real Story,' were lower than for any other show on the network in June, the Nielsen company said.
Carlson said that Ailes punished her by cutting back on political interviews that she conducted and ending a regular appearance she made on Bill O'Reilly's prime-time program, generally Fox's highest-rated show.
In the lawsuit, Carlson alleges that Ailes did not provide her with anywhere near the network support and promotion provided to other Fox hosts 'who did not complain about harassment and rebuff his sexual advances.'
Ted Cruz is slated to speak at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, but all signs point to the Texas senator still not endorsing his former rival, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Conversing last night from Washington, D.C., to Politico's Glenn Thrush, Cruz hinted that he planned to use his convention speech to talk about the future of the Republican Party a future that doesn't necessarily have Trump at its head.
As for whether he's technically supporting Trump, Cruz remained tepid.
'In this election I am where a great many voters are, which is that I am listening and watching and coming to a decision,' Cruz told Thrush.
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While Sen. Ted Cruz, photographed holding court on Capitol Hill, will be speaking at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday he might withhold his endorsement of Donald Trump
Sen. Ted Cruz returned to congress in May after giving up his presidential ambitions after losing the state of Indiana to Donald Trump
Throughout the interview Cruz signaled that while his run for the presidency was over, he wasn't over his loss.
The Texas senator pointed fingers at the media, and not his appeal, when assigning the blame.
'[Trump would] lose state after state after state and the media would say that he can't be beaten ... and the media liked to paint me as some whacked-out theocrat,' Cruz said.
He noted how near the end of his campaign he was on the up-and-up and could possibly even win.
'Four weeks before we dropped out, we were winning the race,' Cruz said. 'Eighty percent of [Marco Rubio's] supporters came to us and the party was unifying behind us .. In the 30 days before Indiana's primary, Trump got $500 million in free media, 90 percent was positive.'
'What the media said on every station is, "Trump is unbeatable, he can't be beaten while he's losing,' Cruz said.
Cruz surmised this was because reporters are predominantly Democrats and behind Hillary Clinton.
'They believed Donald was the easiest candidate for Hillary to beat. And I think many of them wanted him to win the nomination,' Cruz said.
'I don't think it was innocent decision-making behind this,' Cruz added.
The Texas senator suggested that his political opposite, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also got the shaft.
'I think Hillary's nomination and I think Donald Trump's nomination, I think the media played decisive roles in both of them,' Cruz said.
'We saw media as decision makers in primaries in a way we have never seen before,' Cruz said.
As he closes the book on this election, it's clear that Cruz hasn't given up his ambitions.
'What I'm looking forward to is changing the course this country is on,' Cruz said. 'I don't know if that happens in this election cycle or not.'
In the interview, Cruz revealed that he is still paying his primary campaign staff.
He's enlisted their help in delivering to him a detailed post-mortem of how he fell short of the nomination, including how badly his quip about Trump's 'New York values' hurt him.
Derrick Hudson, 19, is accused of urging people to kill white police officers in a Facebook post
A 19-year-old Georgia man has been charged after he urged people to kill white police officers, authorities said.
'Just kill all white cracker cops,' wrote Derrick 'De De' Hudson, of Macon, in his online response to a Facebook post by station WGXA-TV last Wednesday
His comment was posted on a station video showing Alton Sterling's 15-year-old son speaking out about his father's death.
Sterling is the 37-year-old black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store on July 5.
Prosecutors say Hudon's post was 'constituting murdering law enforcement officers both locally and abroad by reaching out to the public on a social platform in a matter that requests, commands and importunes another person' to kill, The Telegraph reported.
WGXA's news director declined to comment Monday.
Hudson was charged with criminal solicitation, his arrest warrant says.
Bibb County Jail records do not list an attorney for him.
This is the second time in a little more than a month that someone in Georgia incites violence against law enforcement in Georgia.
On June 9, Kasheema Tachel Wadley was charged with making threatening online posts against Emanuel County police, The Telegraph reported.
Naz Shah, the Labour MP who was suspended by the party over her comments about Jews, has admitted her remarks were anti-Semitic
Naz Shah, the Labour MP who was suspended by the party over her comments about Jews, has admitted her remarks were anti-Semitic.
The Bradford West MP said that she didnt get anti-Semitism as racism.
She denied that she had a hatred of Jewish people, despite once signalling support for Israelis to be transported to the United States as a solution for the Middle East conflict.
Mrs Shah told BBC Radio 4s World At One: I wasnt anti-Semitic, what I put out was anti-Semitic.
The truth is some of the stuff I have since looked at and understood, I didnt know at the time.
I didnt get anti-Semitism as racism. I had never come across it. I think what I had was an ignorance.
The mother of three said she had had to have tough conversations with herself since being sacked as a personal aide to shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell.
One of the tough conversations I had to have with myself was about, God, am I anti-Semitic? she said.
And I had to really question my heart of hearts. Yes, I have ignorance, yes everybody has prejudice, sub-conscious biases, but does that make me anti-Semitic? And the answer was no, I do not have a hatred of Jewish people.
Mrs Shah, who beat George Galloway for the Bradford West seat at the 2015 election, shared an image on Twitter in August 2014 which called for Israel to be relocated to the US and claimed this would be the solution for Israel-Palestine conflict.
She also shared posts comparing Israel to Hitlers Germany.
One of the links pointed to an article hich claimed Zionism had been used to groom Jews to exert political influence at the highest levels of public office.
In July 2014, at the height of the Gaza conflict, she posted a link on Facebook to a newspaper poll asking whether Israel had committed war crimes.
She wrote: The Jews are rallying to the poll before urging people to vote yes.
Naz Shah, who beat George Galloway for the Bradford West seat at the 2015 election, shared an image on Twitter (pictured) in August 2014 which called for Israel to be relocated to the US and claimed this would be the solution for Israel-Palestine conflict
Jeremy Corbyn (pictured in the Commons today) instigated an anti-Semitism inquiry into Labour led by human rights lawyer, Shami Chakrabarti following a string of allegations of anti-Semitism in the party
Mrs Shah admitted yesterday that she had hurt people.when I said, the Jews are rallying.
She made an apology to the Commons in April this year when her remarks were highlighted but was suspended from the party for more than two months and was reinstated on July 5.
In an article for Israeli news website Haaretz yesterday MON, Mrs Shah wrote how anti-Semitism was more dangerous than other forms of discrimination because instead of painting the victim as inferior, anti-Semitism paints the victim as, in a way, superior and controlling.
The MP said she found it tragic - as an ethnic minority Member of the British Parliament who is Labour to the core - that some Jewish people now tell me that the UK Labour party is no longer their natural political home.
Jeremy Corbyn instigated an anti-Semitism inquiry into Labour led by human rights lawyer, Shami Chakrabarti.
However he caused outrage at the inquiry launch when he likened the actions of the Israeli government to Isis.
Mr Corbyn has also given evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in parliament's own inquiry into anti-semitism at the start of this month.
However the Labour leader may be recalled after two MPs said he needed to clarify some of his answers.
They could be any Tube commuters - battling the summer crowds on a blistering hot day beneath central London, taking selfies and uploading them to social media.
But these two chaps are not your average Oyster Card users, ramming up against you with their luggage en route to Heathrow in peak hour.
The man seated on the right is His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai.
His co-rider seated on the left is his son, Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai.
Mind the pap: Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, photographed today taking the London Underground with his son Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai
Time and Forbes have put his father's wealth in excess of $4 billion, though note he gifted $10 billion in 2007 to set up the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, which aims to help future generations develop sustainable solutions in the Arab world.
During their Tube ride, Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Al Maktoum appears to have taken a selfie with his father - and other Tube riders - and uploaded it to his Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat accounts.
Unlike normal traditional arab dress, the pair were dressed down casually for summer like many other Londoners enjoying the warmer weather.
UAE royalty on the London Tube. A photographer, possibly connected to the pair, stands nearby
It is unconfirmed which line the pair were travelling on but one user has identified it as the Central Line.
The pair appeared to be travelling with an entourage, with one man pictured sitting between them in some photos.
They also possibly had a professional photographer with them, with a man pictured standing alongside commuters holding a large camera.
Ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum attends the American University Dubai 2013 Graduation Ceremony on May 12, 2013 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
The pictures and a video were then distributed through the son's social media accounts.
The Crown Prince has 1.84 million followers on Twitter while he has 3.8 million followers on Instagram.
'From #londonunderground,' he said on Twitter while posting the pic.
Crown Prince of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, attends the tenth edition of Art Dubai 2016 on March 15, 2016 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Hillary Clinton forcefully condemned the murder of three law enforcement officers killed Sunday in the line of duty in Baton Rouge in an speech today before black leaders, telling them the 'madness' must stop.'
Anyone who takes aim at a police officer takes aim at all of us, she told them. 'Anyone who kills a police officer and anyone who helps must be held accountable.'
As president the White House hopeful said she'd 'bring the full weight of the law to bear' on anyone who harms an officer of the law.
'There can be no justification, no looking the other way,' she declared in a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Hillary Clinton forcefully condemned the murder of three law enforcement officers killed Sunday in the line of duty in Baton Rouge in an speech today before black leaders, telling them the 'madness' must stop'
Three officers were killed and three more were injured in the Sunday morning ambush at a gas station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Police have identified the suspect as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long.
'Watching the news from Baton Rouge yesterday, my heart broke, not just for those officers, and their grieving families, but for all of us,' she said. 'We have difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us.'
To repair America's communities, 'We need one another,' she asserted. 'And we need leaders like the NAACP.'
Clinton said it makes her ill to think about how many more families 'would be paying the price' if those officers hadn't responded to a call that day about a man wielding a gun at the gas station.
'That's why I'm haunted by the image of what the police officers in Dallas were doing,' she said, referring to the maiming of five officers last week in Texas.
Those officers were killed in retaliation for incidents in Minnesota and Louisiana in which police shot and killed black men who did not have weapons drawn.
She told the civil rights group she understands they're 'sick' about the shootings and 'fearful' that vital questions about race in the country will go unanswered.
'All of this tells us very powerfully that we have to change,' she proclaimed.
Clinton told attendees of the NAACP's convention she understands they're 'sick' about recent shootings of black men and police and 'fearful' that vital questions about race in the country will go unanswered
Clinton said, 'Many police officers across the country agree with that, but it can only happen if we build trust and accountability.'
'And let's be honest, that gets harder every time.'
That is why everyone in America must 'speak out loudly and clearly' about these issues, she said.
The country's criminal just system must also be reformed 'because everyone is safer when there is respect for the law and when everyone is respected by the law,' she stated.
Republican Donald Trump is not delivering a speech at the annual gathering of black community leaders in Cincinnati, Ohio, because his party is holding its nominating convention this week in another part of the state.
'We all know about that other convention happening up in Cleveland today,' Clinton said at the top of her remarks. 'My opponent in this race may have a different view, but there's no where I'd rather be than right here, with all of you.'
Clinton commended civil rights leaders in the room for sitting in and standing up for their rights and bringing the races closer to parity.
'We have made progress, we can see the results,' she said, noting that children of all races now share classrooms and the country currently has its first black president.
She said, 'So as the president has said, indeed as he exemplifies, we've come a long way. But you know and I know that we have so much further to go,' she said.
'We were cruelly reminded of that with the recent deaths' in Louisiana, Minnesota and Dallas, she said, as well as Baton Rouge, were law enforcement officers were 'murdered in an apparent premeditated ambush.'
'This madness has to stop,' she said.
Republican Donald Trump is not delivering a speech at the annual gathering of black community leaders in Cincinnati, Ohio. 'We all know about that other convention happening up in Cleveland today,' Clinton said at the top of her remarks. 'There's no where I'd rather be than right here, with all of you'
Clinton commended civil rights leaders in the room for sitting in and standing up for their rights and bringing the races closer to parity. 'We have made progress, we can see the results,' she said
Clinton pledged that she would 'start taking action on day one and every day after that until we get this done.'
When the media moves on from these deaths, she said, 'I won't.'
'This is too important, this goes to the heart of who we are, this is about our character as Americans.'
Clinton said she'd push to end a differentiation in the way the law applies to crack cocaine and power cocaine, dismantle the school to prison pipeline and ban the box. She also advocated for stricter gun laws.
Rosa Parks' courage allowed blacks to sit at the front of the bus. 'Our challenge now,' she said, is to get everyone jobs so they can afford the fare and to make sure every bus route reaches every community and connects every family with safe schools.
'And in times like this we need a president who can help pull us together and not split us apart. I will work every day to do just that,' she said.
'I say with no satisfaction the Republican nominee for president will do the exact opposite, he might say otherwise if he were here but of course he declined your invitation,' she added.
Press Release:
About Connect NC
Contact: Crystal Feldman
Crystal Feldman govpress@nc.gov
Raleigh, N.C. All three major bond rating agencies-Moody's Investor Services, Standard and Poor's and Fitch Ratings-have assigned an AAA bond rating, the highest rating possible, to North Carolina's first issuance of the $2 billion Connect NC bond. Approved overwhelmingly by two-thirds of North Carolina voters in March, the Connect NC bond will provide much needed statewide investments in education, parks, agriculture, the National Guard and water and sewer infrastructure.said Governor McCrory.Rating agencies attribute the strong bond rating to North Carolina's continued and diverse economic expansion, ample reserves and long history of conservative financial management.Under Governor McCrory, North Carolina has one of the fastest growing economies in the nation. Since 2013, unemployment is down in all 100 counties and the private sector has added more than 275,000 jobs.When Governor McCrory entered office, the state's savings reserve account, also known as the rainy day fund, had been depleted to $419 million, or 2.2 percent of the budget. Through fiscally responsible budgeting, the rainy day fund has been restored to an all-time-high of more than $1.6 billion or nearly 7 percent.The Connect NC bonds are expected to sell by the end of July.The Connect NC bond will invest $980 million into the state's 17 universities. The vast majority of these improvements will build facilities that will improve teaching and research in the science, technology, engineering and medical fields. An additional $350 million will go to the community colleges, primarily for new construction, repairs and renovations on its 58 campuses.Another $309.5 million will be awarded to smaller cities and towns to build and repair water and sewer systems. These investments are crucial to retaining and attracting new jobs outside of the state's metro areas.Agriculture and consumers will also benefit from Connect NC. Approximately $94 million will be spent to construct a new Agriculture and Consumer Sciences Lab for veterinary, food, drug and motor fuel testing. An additional $85 million will go toward a new Plant Sciences Research Complex at NC State University.The National Guard will receive $70 million to rehabilitate Regional Readiness Centers in Burke and Wilkes counties as well as construct a new readiness center on Guilford County. Another $9 million will go toward the completion of the Samarcand Corrections and Law Enforcement Training Center in Moore County.To improve North Carolina's quality of life and help preserve the state's environment and natural beauty, the Connect NC bond will invest $75 million into our state parks. An additional $25 million will go the North Carolina Zoo for upgrades to service support facilities, trails and exhibits.
Poor African-American men in the United States face nearly three times the risk of dying as black men above the poverty line, according to research published on Monday.
African-American men in poverty saw a 2.7 times higher risk of death than African-American men living above poverty status, the researchers found.
The main causes of death were heart disease and cancer.
Poor African-American men in the United States face nearly three times the risk of dying as black men above the poverty line, according to research published on Monday (file image)
The same disparity was not seen among white men. Poor white males faced about the same risk of dying as white men above the poverty line, the study found.
Among women, both blacks and whites in poverty were about twice as likely to die young as those who were not poor.
The findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine are based on a study of healthy aging in diverse neighborhoods that recruited 3,720 participants, including black and white men and women of various incomes.
Their average age was 48.
The study, led by Alan Zonderman of the National Institute on Aging, set the poverty line for a family of four at $24,000.
The government defines poverty as earning less than $24,300 for a family of four or $11,880 per year for a single person.
He told USA Today: 'Many studies that have been done in the past have looked at poor blacks and rich white, and they have sort of ignored the other combinations.
'We can make comparisons, can look at race, socioeconomic status, and how those two things interact.'
African-American men in poverty saw a 2.7 times higher risk of death than African-American men living above poverty status, the researchers found. The main causes of death were heart disease and cancer (file image)
Zonderman said: 'African American males are feared and marginalized in American society.
'This lifelong ostracism facilitates cascading negative outcomes in education, employment and in interaction with the criminal justice system.
'The resultant poverty is a virulent health risk factor for African American men.'
He told The Guardian: 'We asked people:'How do you feel about going to the doctor? How do you feel about the way youre treated?''
China has displayed its willingness to play war games with the US after Beijing sent a nuclear capable bomber over the disputed Scarborough Shoal.
Pictures tweeted by the People's Liberation Army Air Force show the country's latest H-6K bomber flying high above the island in the South China Sea.
The move comes in the wake of a series of similar patrols in recent months carried out by the US using B-52 bombers.
Pictures tweeted by the People's Liberation Army Air Force show the country's latest H-6K bomber flying high above the island in the South China Sea
Huangyan Dao, known in English as Scarborough Shoal, is disputed with the Philippines and is seen as a particular flashpoint
Images of the Chinese bombers, which are capable of delivering nuclear weapons across Asia, were posted along with the message: 'Some photos brought by PLA Air Force: bomber H-6K fly over Huangyan Island.'
Tensions are high in the region after the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague last week ruled that there was no legal basis for Beijing's claims to much of the sea, embodied in a 'nine-dash line' that dates from 1940s maps and stretches close to other countries' coasts.
Manila - which lodged the suit against Beijing - welcomed the decision but China dismissed it as a 'piece of waste paper'.
Huangyan Dao, known in English as Scarborough Shoal, is disputed with the Philippines and is seen as a particular flashpoint.
Earlier today, a senior Chinese admiral said freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end 'in disaster' - a warning to the US after last week's ruling.
Images of the Chinese bombers, which are capable of delivering nuclear weapons across Asia, were posted along with the message: 'Some photos brought by PLA Air Force: bomber H-6K fly over Huangyan Island'
China has refused to recognise the ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague that invalidated its vast territorial 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 adherence to the decision.
China has repeatedly blamed the US for stirring up trouble in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually.
China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have rival claims, of which China's is the largest.
The United States has conducted freedom of navigation patrols close to Chinese-held islands, to Beijing's anger, while China has been bolstering its military presence there.
A Chinese navy officer pulls the hat over a member of a honour guard during a welcome ceremony for US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, at the Chinese Navy Headquarters in Beijing today
U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson (centre left) is escorted by Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admaral Wu Shengli (centre right) during a welcome ceremony in Beijing
China's Maritime Safety Administration said on Monday that an area just off the east of the island province of Hainan would be a no-sail zone from July 19-21 while military drills take place.
China generally describes its exercises in the South China Sea as routine.
China's air force also said on its microblog it had recently carried out 'normal battle patrols' over the South China Sea involving bombers, spy planes and flying tankers, including over Scarborough Shoal.
An assortment of gun fanatics, anti-Islamists and Trump lovers and haters combined with heavy police numbers and demonstrators from across America to mark the start of the Republican National Convention today.
Gun-toting men exercising their rights under the Second Amendment and making their point showed off their weapons while supporters of civil rights campaigners group Black Lives Matters gathered in their hundreds close by.
Thousands of police personnel were drafted in from as far as California and Indiana to try and prevent trouble with the advice from senior officers to be 'especially cautious' against the threat of sniper fire.
The open-carry activists defied a plea by the Cleveland police patrolmen's union for no guns in the vicinity of the RNC.
The union wrote to Ohio Governor John Kasich asking him to temporarily suspend the state's open carry laws for the four-day convention fell on deaf ears.
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Open Carry: Steve Thacker, of Westlake, Ohio, a Marine Corps veteran carries an AR-15 chambered in .556 and a handgun during an open carry rally in downtown Cleveland on Sunday. More activists demonstrated on Monday
On show: Jessey Rodriguez stands with his AK-101- rifle on his back outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Monday as open carry activists make their stand
Specialized grip: Jessey Rodriguez's AK-101 has been adapted with a specialized grip. He told Daily Mail Online he was proud to exercise his Second Amendment rights
Open display: Ohio law allows open carrying of legally-held weapons, allowing one pro-Trump activist to make his Second Amendment point in Cleveland on Monday
Upholding the law: Police in Cleveland appealed for John Kasich, the Ohio governor, to suspend open carry laws but he said he was unable to do so
Making their position clear: Open carry advocates took part in a pro-Trump rally in Settlers Lading Park in Cleveland on Monday
However Kasich, who helped create the state's open-carry law, said he could not do so because he did not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws.
The result was the emergence of several people openly showing off their weapons despite the heightened fears of violence following the murder yesterday of three police officers in Baton Rouge and the killing of two black men by officers in Louisiana and Minnesota the week before.
One man Jesse Rodriguez, 26, of Lakewood, Ohio, slung his AK-101 rifle - a variant of the AK-47 assault rifle - over his shoulder and walked into the main square outside the Quicken Loans Arena.
Asked why he had chosen to bring his weapon to the area, he said: 'Because I can.
'It's my right under the Second Amendment and I am carrying that out right now.'
He denied that his action could enflame tensions created by the police murders and the shootings of black men which has angered police unions and civil rights supporters.
'I ain't threatening no one. I have got ammunition but my gun isn't loaded and I only use it for target practice. I've been keen on guns since the age of five.'
Rodriguez added: 'There is no license required to carry a gun openly and I bought this probalby two years ago for $500.
'If you wanna know something really cool about the United States I bought this on the internet.
'That is amazing because if you can trust your citizens to do that it is hugely important. It is not the state's job to consider whether you are trustworthy or not. It is about whether or not you will commit a crime.
'I think as a standard we should be trusted to own firearms. I just like target shooting.'
He said he had walked into the area to show off his weapon at the RNC to make his point about the Second Amendment.
'I think it is important to own guns because basically it removes force from the equation,' he said.
'If you see somebody on the street and you have a firearm they can no longer coerce you into behaving in a particular way.
'If somebody wanted my wallet, I could say 'No'. If they were bigger or stronger than me I could still say 'No' and physical contact would be out of the equaton.
'An 80-year-old woman could be on the same safe playing field.'
Police watched Rodriguez roam through crowds and looked away as he became the center of attention.
One officer told Daily Mail Online: 'It is his right. If he acts in a way which is threatening or appears to be trying to shoot with itthen we'll deal with it.'
David Bills of Minneapolis had a pistol on his side as he rode his motor bike around the convention area.
Committed: David Bills of Minneapolis rode his motorcycle solo to Cleveland to support Trump at the RNC and openly wore his pistol for self protection
On show: David Bills' pistol, carried openly legally, which he says is for self-protection and to support the police
Proud of the Second Amendment: Donald Trump supporters Michelle and Robert Ludolph pose for a photograph before the start of an 'America First' unity rally on the opening day of the RNC
First Amendment: Jim Gilles was demonstrating outside the RNC and said: 'No Muslim is a friend of mine. I have read the Koran and it says hate all non Muslims and that would mean me to. So I hate them.'
First amendment: Preacher Jim Gilles was spoken to by senior officers but not arrested. He said he intended people to be offended by his anti-Muslim message.
Making their point: Muslim Sahar Alsahlani of New York said she wanted to counter 'Islamophobia' while Trump backer Vivian Childs of Robbins, GA, said: 'Donald Trump will make America Great again.'
Anti-Clinton message: Demonstrators against the Democratic candidate included this adapted pick-up truck which was on a tour of downtown Cleveland
He has the right: Elan Stoltzfuz holds his rifle up at Settlers Landing Park after an attempt by police to stop open carry of weapons failed
Tension: One of the anti-Trump protesters in Cleveland's Public Square was moved away by officers from the local Cleveland force, who were being backed up by other officers from outside the city
Ready to roll: An officer from Akron Police, deployed to Cleveland to back up the local force, used his bike to move back anti-Trump protesters outside the RNC
Reinforcements: Bicycle officers from Columbus, Ohio, were on duty as a small number of anti-Trump protesters made their way through downtown Cleveland
He said he had it with him and wore it openly 'for protection' and feared there could be 'a copycat killer out there' like the attacker in Baton Rouge yesterday.
One man walked around with a T-shirt bearing the slogan 'Allah is Satan' and shouted anti-Islamist slogans.
Jim Gilles ,54, who said he was a preacher, said he was exercising his First Amendment rights.
When it was suggested that the majority of Muslims might be seen as decent law abiding citizens who paid their taxes and as American as he was, he said: 'They are all sleeper cells as we have seen in places like San Benardino.
'No Muslim is a friend of mine. I have read the Koran and it says hate all non-Muslims and that would mean me too. So I hate them.'
When it was suggested his shirt could offend many people, he said: 'That is why I am here.'
He said he had a gun, but had not brought it with him to the convention, but declined to say which church he officiated at.
A Muslim woman Saher Alsahlani from New York approached him and berated him for his appearance.
She gave him a packet of gum which jokingly said would help cure his 'Islamophobia, blind intolerance and unthinking bigotry.'
'He needs to be cured and he should engage with me and learn that everything he stands for is wrong.'
Gilles , of Evansville, Indiana,added: 'We are a bunch of preachers and we came to preach to the protesters, mainly the Muslims and the Black Lives Matters people.'
He agreed his shirt was offensive and inflammatory and said he was exercising his First Amendment rights and added: 'This world needs to be offended.
'I am offended by Muslims cutting off Christian people's heads in other countries. I am offended by Muslims blowing up buildings and driving cars into crowds.'
He refused to accept his remarks were racist and insisted it was his mission to offend.
But when repeatedly asked to name his church, he refused saying he was scared about repercussions.
Later Gilles was spoken to by senior officers, but was not arrested.
A Republican activist, Lyric Gillette, 24, from Houston, Texas, said she preferred to talk about the real issue of whether Donald Trump was right for the Presidential candidacy.
She said: 'I don't think he is right for it. He is not morally suitable and I would have wanted a real Republican like Cruz up there.'
Federal deployment: A Secret Service officer is part of the massive display of city, state and federal law enforcement in action at the RNC
Joint task force: A uniformed Secret Service officer with a sniffer dog and an Ohio state trooper taken off highway patrol duties are part of the 5,000 law enforcement personnel deployed in Cleveland
Deployed: Cleveland Police has deployed much of its force in protection of the center of the city, including mounted units on bicycles.
Search: A uniformed Secret Service officer checks a driver's identity near the Quicken Loans Arena which is home to the Republican National Convention
Mounted officers: Police on horseback are among those who have been called in to keep the peace
But African-American Republican Vivian Childs from Warner Robbins, Georgia, said: 'Donald Trump will make America Great again and put Americans first.
'He will being a new energy to the country that hasn't been seen for years.'
Security at the convention is tighter than at any previous gathering since the riots of 1968 which hit the Democratic national Convention in Chicago.
More than 5,000 law enforcement officers are deployed, with the Secret Service uniformed branch on the streets, and other federal forces including the FBI present.
Cleveland's own police force has called in officers from across the state and from other urban forces including some from as far away as California as a precaution against disorder.
to be in Cleveland on Wednesday, appearing at an event off-campus with GOP groups who are pro-LGBT rights
Sen. Tom Cotton, an emerging Republican leader, sees a GOP that's big tent enough to include members of the LGBT community, like reality star Caitlyn Jenner.
Cotton was presented with the question by the Atlantic's Steve Clemons who was interviewing the Arkansas senator from Cleveland today.
'I think we want to appeal to every American of all stripes in all 50 states,' Cotton said.
'Trans Americans?' Clemons prodded.
''Gay, straight or trans Americans,' Cotton replied.
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Sen. Tom Cotton, an emerging leader of the Republican Party, said today at an event at the Republican National Convention that the party is big enough to fit trans Americans like Caitlyn Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner, a Republican, first supported Sen. Ted Cruz, but now likes Donald Trump after he voiced a more pro-trans position in regard to North Carolina's controversial bathroom bill
Cotton's comments come at a heated time between the trans community and the GOP, as the party has largely backed North Carolina's House Bill 2, which mandates that people use the bathroom that aligns with the gender on their birth certificate.
It's considered the most anti-trans legislation in the country.
Enter Jenner who first expressed interest in backing Sen. Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, but then moved over to support the presumptive nominee Donald Trump, once the New York billionaire said trans Americans should 'use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.'
Jenner gave Trump some good PR by heading over to the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan in April to test out the Republican's hospitality.
'A trans woman in New York, I gotta take a pee. Anyways, Oh my God, Trump International Tower, I love this,' Jenner said in an online video.
She was filmed walking into the women's room off Trump Tower's lobby and then coming out.
'By the way, Ted, nobody got molested,' she said.
Now Jenner plans to make her way to Cleveland this week to provide the Republican National Convention with some counterprogramming and with her presence one-ups the star power attending the convention itself.
She's attending a 'Big Tent Brunch' Wednesday morning, hosted by several pro-LGBT rights Republican groups.
Caitlyn Jenner will bring some star power to the Republican National Convention by appearing at an event outside the actual political confab, hoping to get the GOP more on board with LGBT rights
Among the Republicans' 'showbiz' type speakers, Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato Jr. are the biggest names showing up.
And while plenty of Cotton's Senate colleagues are skipping this year's convention, the Arkansan happily attended and defended Trump.
At 39, he's the youngest member of the Senate, who is both a Harvard grad and a veteran and felt that Trump would do right for that group.
Also, as a vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he suggested that the Republicans could retain the Senate with Trump at the top of the ticket, while appealing for a broader-based party.
'Now it's clear that we don't always appeal to ever Republican in a state like, say, California,' Cotton said, name-dropping Jenner's home state. 'We've had some tough times even though it used to be a Republican state.'
'But we want to be the party of all Americans,' Cotton continued. 'the Democrats over the last several decades has been a party that has been very eclectic and diverse group of voters, some of whom don't always share the same common themes, but they find a way to stick together in election after election.'
A suburban St. Louis police officer shot in the neck during a traffic stop 24 hours after five cops were slain in Dallas is paralyzed from the neck down.
Michael Flamion, 31, was gunned down from behind on July 8 after stopping a man for speeding in Ballwin, an affluent Missouri town of around 30,000 residents.
Antonio Taylor, 31, was arrested on suspicion of shooting the nine-year department veteran the same day after cops chased him down nearby.
He is believed to have fired and hit Flamion as he walked to his squad car to run a check.
Michael Flamion, 31, has been paralyzed from the neck down after he was shot in the back during a traffic stop in St. Louis, Missouri - just 24 hours after five police officers were slain in Dallas
Taylor, who has an extensive criminal record, is behind bars on a $500,000 bond and is facing several charges, including first-degree assault of a law enforcement officer.
He faces a court hearing on July 27 and does not yet have an attorney.
In his mugshot, a crucifix is seen tattooed just below his right eye.
Career crmininal Antonio Taylor, 31, was arrested on suspicion on shooting the nine-year department veteran that day following a foot chase in nearby Manchester
The shooting occurred one day after the horrific shooting in Dallas, but Missouri officials have not discussed a possible motive for Flamion's shooting.
Scott said Flamion remains in intensive care. He is alert and able to recognize family, friends and co-workers, Scott said.
The chief said Flamion's life is forever changed, but he remains a part of the community and the police department.
'Although it's evident he will not be able to serve in the same capacity, I will assure that Officer Flamion is engrained in the Ballwin police family and will forever be a Ballwin police officer, no questions asked,' Scott said.
The Ballwin department has been overwhelmed by support from the community, including people who have come to police headquarters to express their concern and others who have simply offered hugs to officers on the street, Scott said.
Flamion's injuries qualified him for financial assistance from the Catastrophic Injury Fund of the Backstoppers, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to the families of slain first responders.
The department has also set up a GoFundMe page to help with the medical bills.
By Monday afternoon, they had raised more than $193,000.
A children's lemonade stand raised $4,000, and several restaurants are banding together for a fundraiser in which proceeds from dinner will go to the family.
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The latest lavish Russian wedding on the Cote d' Nuptials sees an intriguing alliance between the daughter of a major Russian property dynasty with the scion of deposed Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's 'right hand' man Massoud Abdelhafid.
Glamorous Anastasia Fuks, 21, wed Massoud Abdelhafid - a namesake of his infamous grandfather - at a poolside location bedecked by flowers at a villa in France's Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the Cote d-Azur.
The bride - who studied in London at Regent Business School - is daughter and heiress to Pavel Fuks, 44, a significant development magnate in Vladimir Putin's Moscow.
The gorgeous sunset over the French Riviera as the couple wed outside the villa used for the expensive wedding
The bride wore a $5,000 white dress designed by Zuhair Murad, and boasted an 'impressive' diamond ring
Anastasia Fuks, 21, wed Massoud Abdelhafid - at a villa in France's Cote d-Azur. Her dress was designed by Zuhair Murad and cost $5000
She wore a $5,000 white dress designed by Zuhair Murad, and boasted an expensive and 'impressive' diamond ring.
The groom's forebear was interior minister and loyalist servant to the ruthless despot Gaddafi, aka his 'right hand man' and 'walking encyclopedia'.
After Gaddafi was overthrown, Massoud senior escaped to Cairo where he was reported to have died from illness in 2015.
No expense spared: the happy couple were wed on a path in the middle of a floating pool looking over the French Riviera coastline
Despite the lavish occasion in a villa described as being 'smothered' in flowers, it is reported that the bride's family did not go out of their way to advertise the identity of the groom's lineage at a wedding where the guests enjoyed 'exceptional European cuisine and elite alcohol drinks'.
In one account he was described merely as 'her long haired darling'.
The ceremony ended with a 'mesmerising fireworks display', said Russian reports.
The French Riviera provided the backdrop to the expensive nuptials between the wealthy bride and groom
The French villa was decorated in minute detail for the wedding celebrations - including plenty of flowers and lights
Wedding guests enjoyed live music courtesy of a band playing by the pool well into the night. Several celebrities from Russia attended
Flower arrangements for tables at the French villa wedding reception were far from subtle
The 10-foot wedding cake took centre stage at the nuptials. But how to start cutting slices for your guests?
The bride and groom during the reception enjoy their first moments together as man and wife
The bride's dress for the wedding was believed to be worth more than $5000. It was designed by Zuhair Murad
Guests enjoyed shelter from the warm weather on the French Riviera - and a mirrored dancefloor
The guests enjoyed 'exceptional European cuisine and elite alcohol drinks', according to Russian media
The bride and groom held hands. The ring was described as an 'impressive' diamond ring while her designer dress cost $5000
It is stated that in the bride's Instagram account there is just one picture of Massoud - and she is covering his face with her hand.
The picture - if it exists - is not publicly visible.
Yet happy images of the latest money-no-object Russian society wedding have appeared on the web, including a cake almost 10 ft in height.
The bride's father owns development company MosCityGroup that is noted for building an elite residential block Sky House in Moscow city centre, and other landmark addresses.
Pavel Fuks was born in Kharkiv, in Soviet Ukraine in 1971, graduating from the local university where he studied economics.
Later he switched to Moscow and studied 'world economy'.
Even the umbrellas oozed money at this French Riviera wedding of a Russian property heiress and the grandson of a Gaddafi henchman
Guests enjoyed the delightful sunset and long summer evening lit by candles scattered around the villa
Pavel is listed number 150 in Finans Magazine's table of self-starting Russian businessmen, who founded their businesses themselves.
He is one of the biggest developers in Moscow-City, a Western-style skyscraper district of the Russian capital, two miles from the Kremlin.
He is an ex boxer.
In one interview, he told how his first steps in business involved selling cigarettes one by one in the dying days of the Communist USSR.
He stressed how he came from from an ordinary Soviet family and it was 'the street' that pushed him towards capitalism.
The wedding was attended by some Russian A-list celebrities. Guests enjoyed 'exceptional European cuisine and elite alcohol drinks'
Guests enjoyed a photo or two with the expensive floral decorations at the summertime wedding on the French Riviera
The ceremony ended with a 'mesmerising fireworks display', said Russian media reports
Meanwhile, Tatiana Fuks, Pavel's wife and Anastasia's mother, is the founder and owner of the TAJ jewellery brand.
The French wedding was attended by a number of Russian A-list celebrities, it is reported.
Among them were reported to be composer Igor Krutoy and his family and also Galina Yudashkina, wife of an 'elitny' fashion designer.
In 2011, the groom's grandfather was among a number of top Libyans on whom sanctions were imposed by the United Nations Security Council .
After two deadly attacks on police in as many weeks, one North Carolina cop was touched by a few simple supportive messages written on Post-it notes and stuck to his patrol car.
Officer J. Wall had been working a shift at his second job at Best Buy in Fayetteville on Sunday.
That morning, a gunman shot dead three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and wounded a further three.
But when Officer Wall emerged from his shift, he found several handwritten notes stuck to his cruiser, with messages such as Thank you for always coming when we call and We appreciate all that you do!
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After two deadly attacks on police in as many weeks, one North Carolina cop was touched by a few simple supportive messages written on Post-it notes and stuck to his patrol car
Another added: 'Thank you for your sacrifices! God bless you!'
The Fayetteville Police Department posted pictures on Facebook on Sunday evening showing the notes.
In a message to their followers, the department said that it is grateful for the continued support from the community.
It added that the people who posted the notes of appreciation on Officer Walls vehicle had asked if they could all pray together and he was honored to do so.
This is yet another example of the outpouring of support from the community and we cannot thank the Fayetteville community enough for the continued support.
One note said Thank you for always coming when we call and another said We appreciate all that you do!
On the same day as a gunman shot dead three police officers in Baton Rouge, notes were left on a North Carolina officer's car. This one said: 'Thank you for your sacrifices! God bless you!'
The Fayetteville Police Department posted pictures of the notes on Facebook along with this message
We are, without a doubt, #OneAgencyOneCommunityOneFamilyONE!
Fayetteville residents had a similar response after five Dallas police officers were killed in a sniper attack in Dallas, Texas, on July 7.
They bought meals for officers, placed signs and flags in front of police headquarters and thanked cops as they entered and left the building.
A teenage mother whose newborn baby was discovered in a backyard, crawling in maggots and umbilical cord still attached, has been tracked down by police.
The teen, who name has not been released as she is under 18, had abandoned her baby in an Indiana backyard just hours after giving birth last week.
Lake County Sheriff John Buncich says that the Special Victims Unit has been in contact with the mother of the baby.
The newborn was discovered by nine-year-old Elysia Laub who thought one of her family's baby pigs had escaped from its pen when she saw something small and pink that was crying and kicking its little legs in the backyard of her Lowell, Indiana home.
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Smart girl: Elysia Laub (above) discovered a newborn baby abandoned in the backyard of her Lowell, Indiana home last week
Lifesaver: The young girl is now being called a ' guardian angel' after saving the newborn's life, (Laub home above)
But as soon as she got close, she saw that the 'baby pig' was in fact a tiny newborn baby and ran to get her mother and called 911.
Doctors say that if the young girl had been left out in the yard for a couple more hours she would have died. But thanks to Elysia, she will make a full recovery and will eventually be moved into foster care.
The case has since been turned over to the Indiana Department of Child Services.
Indiana's Safe Haven Law allows parents to leave a child between one and 30 days old anonymously at a hospital emergency room, fire or police station without fear of arrest.
However, it is unclear if charges will be brought against this infant's mother her child was left for dead in the rural backyard.
By the time Elysia found her, the newborn was covered in maggots and was sunburn. She still had its placenta and umbilical chord attached when she was found.
Helping hand: Elysia quickly got her motherHeidi (above) who saw that the baby still had its placenta and umbilical chord attached, and was covered in maggots
Confusion: Elysia said that at first she thought the baby was one of the family's piglets who had escaped from its pen (above)
'I knew it was alive and I knew we had something. I could not second guess myself. I knew we had to get help,' said Elysia of the moment she spotted her.
The young girl ran inside and got her mother who immediately had her daughter call 911.
'I thought it was a robotic doll. Then I ran to the baby and scooped it up and I said, 'Elysia run to the house and call 911 as soon as possible,'' Heidi Laub, Elysia's mother, told NBC Chicago .
'I got to the house and we put one of our baby blankets around her.'
The baby only suffered a minor sunburn, but would have likely died had she spent a few more hours in the yard undiscovered, which has earned her the nickname 'Miracle Jane Doe.'
Elysia meanwhile is being called her 'guardian angel.
The baby, dubbed 'Miracle Jane Doe', is still being treated in the hospital.
'It's obvious that this child, from the medical reports, was born just a few hours before it was found,' said Sheriff John Buncich, who added that she could have been left out overnight.
Dawn Geres of the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation spoke to ABC Chicago after the discovery of the newborn and urged mothers who did not want their children to do the responsible thing.
Thousands of commuters were left stranded in sweltering conditions on packed trains and platforms today after a giant sinkhole appeared at a London railway station.
The hole, which was around 50 feet deep and six feet wide, appeared at Forest Hill station in South East London during the afternoon and disrupted dozens of Southern and London overground trains.
It came as temperatures climbed towards 30C during rush hour on the hottest day of the year.
Thousands of commuters were left stranded in sweltering conditions on packed trains and platforms after a giant sinkhole appeared at a London railway station
Dozens of trains were cancelled as temperatures climbed towards 30C during rush hour on the hottest day of the year
Trains were blocked due to the enormous hole, which opened up shortly after 1pm. All lines between London Bridge and East Croydon, south London, were taken off service.
According to Southern Rail, trains were still able to run northbound between East Croydon and London Victoria, but rail replacement buses were being put in place for stations between East Croydon and London Bridge.
A signalling fault had already forced trains to run at reduced speeds southbound between East Croydon and Gatwick Airport in the morning and resulting delays were expected to last until 3pm.
The appearance of the hole, which was classified by Network Rail as a 'hole' rather than a 'sinkhole', further delayed trains for the operator which has been plagued by problems for several months.
There were severe delays from central London train stations amid sweltering conditions in the capital today
Commuters took to Twitter as they struggled in the sweltering conditions during rush hour this afternoon
Twitter users described the stifling conditions on trains and buses in London
Strike action and high levels of staff illness has meant that several services have been cancelled on a nearly daily basis.
The disruption to the service led to staff being sacked for constantly arriving late to work, and eventually even rail minister Claire Perry resigned over the farce.
Disgruntled passengers took to Twitter to complain of the latest setback to the company's services.
Richard Grange said: 'You couldn't make it up. Southern Rail now hit by a giant sinkhole. I'm almost grateful to be shackled to Thameslink.'
HEAT WILL LEAD TO TRAIN DELAYS Network Rail said it will impose speed restrictions to prevent rails buckling. Speeds are expected to be halved on affected stretches of track, as some commuters face delays on Monday evening and Tuesday. Personal trainer Bex Healy, from Essex, tweeted: 'Wrong kind of heat breaking my train. #Delays #Greater Anglia.' A Network Rail spokesperson said: 'We will need to impose speed restrictions at some locations. 'Track temperatures are predicted to exceed 50C in many places. 'Warm weather causes steel rails to expand. 'Slower trains exert lower forces, reducing the risk of buckling.' Greater Anglia said: 'Network Rail imposes speed restrictions, not us.' Advertisement
Another user going by the name of Iain said: 'Can someone please throw the Southern Rail management in the Forest Hill hole so at least some good comes out of it?'
Administrator Abi Olowe, 27, was trying to get home from London Bridge to Sydenham in south east London.
She said: 'Southern Rail are wholly unreliable and often late. I'm seven months pregnant and I've been waiting for an hour and a half. It's not good enough. Staff are often off sick or going on strike. Clearly they need more staff.'
Bank manager Tracey Iles, 50, said: 'Its been nightmare with Southern Rail and Thameslink over the past three months. Its appalling and something needs to done. I'm going to have to Uber it home.'
A young mother tried to claim back her expenses after again being left to find an alternative route home.
Anna Tugay, 31, of Coulsdon, Surrey, said: 'I applied for a refund for my travels to and from Coulsdon as I had been waiting for over an hour with my four month old baby.
'They failed to respond to any of my requests and completely ignored me.'
Rail replacement buses have been put in place for stations between London Bridge and East Croydon
A spokesman for Network Rail said: 'A hole next to the railway line has appeared near Forest Hill.
'It is 50 feet deep and six feet wide. Staff are on site.
A fashion brand is in hot water after their decision to use child models in a recent fashion show.
Hot As Hell, a California-based clothing company, debuted their 2017 line at Miami Fashion Week on Friday.
During the show, elementary school-aged models strutted down the runway in the brand's line of children's swimsuits - some of them in skimpy bikinis.
When photos of the fashion show surfaced online over the weekend, several social media users voiced their outrage that little girls would be dressed just like their adult counterparts.
California-based fashion line Hot As Hell is under fire for dressing children in bikinis for their fashion show last Friday
The girls in the fashion show were elementary school-aged and were led down the catwalk by adult models
The above Instagram user was one of many that expressed scorn for the company's decision to use child models
Other Instagram users didn't find anything wrong with the presentation of the child models
'Kids are never too young to be taught that their only worth is their physical appearance,' one Instagram user wrote as a comment on one of the brand's pictures, showing three girls in varying yellow swimsuits.
'This is seriously awful,' the user added.
Others found no issue with the image, such as model Hannah Kirkelie who walked in the show.
Kirkelie proudly posted a picture of her with three of the models, writing: 'Thanks for letting me close your show @WE_ARE_HAH walking with these little HAHTIES was a dream'.
That led one angered Twitter user to respond: 'So you think these little girls are hot?'
Model Hannah Kirkelie proudly posted a picture of herself with three of the child models. Twitter user Matthew Kramer responded by asking 'So you think little girls are hot?'
A child psychiatrist spoke with Yahoo after the fashion show and said that children wearing bikinis is usually innocent, but could have a different effect on them once they are paraded around on a runway.
What Parents, Students And Higher Ed Leaders Are Saying
Contact: The Pat McCrory Committee
The Pat McCrory Committee media@patmccrory.com
"The $500-per-semester tuition plan has 'real possibility,' she said. 'So I'm excited about it as an innovation, and I really think it can be a game changer... We can't simultaneously rant and rave about that and then say, 'Wait a minute, please don't provide relief for students and families.''""While we honor our heritage, we are proudly among the most diverse universities in the nation. And the North Carolina Promise Tuition Plan will allow us to be among the most affordable. UNC Pembroke has always been distinctive. There is no campus in the nation like ours. This opportunity will allow us to further distinguish ourselves and serve as a role model for the future of high-quality, accessible higher education. This is a tool we can use for even greater impact. Together, we are writing a new chapter for UNC Pembroke and Southeastern North Carolina.""Anything that we can do to help families better plan and afford college I think is great for every citizen of the state""Predictability is probably the No. 1 (priority)... You can manage your costs a little bit better. Knowing it's not going to go up makes the decision process a little bit easier.""I think it's a great idea in terms of making education costs predictable for not only parents, but also for students who are putting themselves through college. Education expenses have been rising exponentially in recent years and legislation like this is a big help to students and their families.""We find at Western Carolina that people are very concerned about affordability and access for higher education. This is an opportunity for us.""We see this as a positive""New $500-per-semester tuition plan helps N.C.families""Promise push for lower tuition has merit"
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The heroic Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy killed by a gunman died trying to save a colleague from the cop killer who 'targeted and assassinated' the, authorities revealed on Monday.
Father-of-four Brad Garafola, 45, 'went down fighting,' East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux told a news conference. 'He returned fire to the very end.'
He was killed along with Baton Rouge police officers Montrell Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41, by former Marine Gavin Eugene Long, 29, at the B-Quik gas station on Sunday morning.
Long ambushed officers, killing three and wounding a further three before a SWAT team shot him dead from a 100 yards away before he tried to attack the police headquarters less than a mile away from the scene.
Gautreaux said surveillance video showed Garafola returning fire from a prone position as bullets hit the concrete around him. Only after the deputy died did the shooter return to the wounded officer and kill him with two more bullets, at close range.
'Deputy Garafola died attempting to get a fallen Baton Rouge officer and render aid,' he said. 'Deputy Garafola died as a hero protecting and serving. So did the other officers. They are gone but they are not forgotten. We will be forever grateful for their service.'
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Heroic Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola (right) died as he tried to save a colleague from the cop killer (left) who 'targeted and assassinated' the, authorities revealed on Monday
'We're trained to take care of our own,' Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said.
Baton Rouge police chief Carl Dabadie added that he has no doubts that the gunman would have gone next to police headquarters to take more lives if it weren't for the long-distance shot that killed him.
'That shot that our SWAT team made was a helluva shot but it had to be made,' he said.
Dabadie says police have been questioned about militarized tactics, but says these killings show that 'we are up against a force that is not playing by the rules.'
'They did not play by the rules in Dallas and they did not play by the rules here,' he added.
Meanwhile, a terrifying video shows the chaos of the shooting - captured by a witness who found himself trapped in his truck and right in the line of fire, Inside Edition reports.
The driver, who asked not to be named, was getting his car washed when gunfire erupted around him and police raced to get the gunman.
'The first thing I saw was the actual gunman walking behind my truck,' he told Inside Edition. 'He had on a ski mask, black clothes all the way down, and was holding a beige-colored gun.'
The shaky cell phone video shows police move in as shots rings out, while another civilian caught in the crossfire speeds away from the scene in his SUV.
A SWAT team shot Long dead from a 100 yards away before he tried to attack the police headquarters less than a mile away from the scene
A video captured the chaos of the shooting - captured by a witness who found himself trapped in his truck and right in the line of fire
Deputy Garafola died as he tried to render aid to a fallen office, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said. Baton Rouge police officers Matthew Gerald (left) and Montrell Jackson (right) were both killed
A voice over the loudspeaker at the car wash is heard asking police officers called to the scene to report to the lobby: 'Everyone report to the lobby. Attention police supporting, report to the lobby.'
More gunshots ring out and yelling is heard, before you see police officers move across the gas station.
'That's when I got scared. I didn't know where the gunfire was coming from, 25-30 rounds,' the witness added. 'You can see me duck into my truck and basically just drop my phone, like, 'Oh my God, this is really happening.'
But he kept his cellphone video rolling until the gunfire ended and he heard that the suspect was down.
'I heard over the announcer, through one of the dispatchers, 'Suspect is down,' and that's when I kind of stopped filming, got everything, put my truck in drive, drove across a ditch, and got out of there,' he added.
The 'most compelling' piece of evidence that Long targeted police and had plans to commit further atrocities is evident in a video of the attack, Louisiana State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said.
Father-of-four Brad Garafola, 45, 'went down fighting,' East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux (pictured left, with Louisiana State Police Col. Mike Edmonson) told a news conference
'Deputy Garafola died attempting to get a fallen Baton Rouge officer and render aid,' Gautreux (pictured above) said on Monday afternoon
Louisiana State Police Chief Colonel Michael D. Edmonson goes over the timetable of the shooting during a press conference Monday
Wearing a black balaclava and holding his gun, he cut a chilling figure in the moments before he opened fire
He was captured on camera taking up position and aiming at a patrol car from long rage during Sunday's attack. Police have since revealed that he kept pumping bullets into one of the officers as he lay dying on the floor
One camera picked up Long as he walked along the side of a building. Police say he spent days in Baton Rouge staking out cops who and figuring out where they would be
He is seen strolling next to one of the patrol cars near the scene where the shooting unfolded
Long, 29, is then seen taking position to keep firing. Authorities also believe he may have spent days stalking cops in the city and staking out the gas station where the shooting unfolded
Three guns were recovered from the scene - two rifles and a pistol - and he was dressed all in black, wearing body armor and carrying extra ammunition.
Edmonson also said the gunman 'had been in our community for several days' and had spent time scouting locations frequented by cops before launching his ambush at the gas station along Airline Highway.
But much was left to be learned about the attack, including the gunman's social media footprint, Edmonson told reporters.
Now, federal investigators are working out if Long had any associates or support for his plan to come to Baton Rouge and kill police.
FBI Agent Jeff Sallet said the agency is committing all resources necessary to identifying any co-conspirators or facilitators and bring them to justice.'
He cited what he called seven key words from the Pledge of Allegiance: 'One Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice For All.'
Indivisible, he said, means 'Baton Rouge unified, Louisiana unified, America unified.'
He added: 'This will only make us stronger; We will work tirelessly to ensure safety in this community and throughout the nation.'
Former U.S. Marine Gavin Long (pictured), of Kansas City, Missouri, targeted and assassinated police officers, authorities said
Three guns were recovered from the shooting in Baton Rouge, authorities told a press conference Monday
A pistol was also recovered from scene at the gas station where three police officers were killed
A day after the United States reeled from the latest deadly shooting involving police, one of three officers wounded in the shooting is still fighting for his life after being hit in the head and stomach. Two other officers were treated for their wounds in hospital and released.
Long, a black U.S. Marine Corps veteran planned his attack for days and then assassinated the officers - including one who was also black - in Baton Rouge, the scene of repeated protests against police violence after the fatal shooting by officers of Alton Sterling, a black man, outside a convenience store on July 5.
Racial tension in the United States has been especially high since Micah Johnson, a black former U.S. Army Reserve soldier, fatally shot five Dallas police officers who were patrolling a Black Lives Matter protest over the police shootings of Sterling and Philando Castile, another black man in Minnesota.
'There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated,' Edmonson said at the news conference. 'It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day.'
Surveillance footage released by authorities on Monday showed the gunman (left) opening fire on a police cruiser from a distance as officers responded to the scene
Gavin Long dressed in black, wore body armor and carried extra ammunition as he stalked police officers at the scene of the shooting on Sunday. Above, CCTV images show him at the scene
Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, served in the Marines for five years, including a 2008 deployment in the Iraq war.
The suspect said he wanted to change his name from Gavin Eugene Long to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra in May 2015, according to Jackson County, Missouri, public records. But court officials said he never completed the process of legally changing his name.
A website, social media accounts and YouTube videos that appeared tied to Long included complaints about police treatment of black people and praise for killings of officers in Dallas.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told Monday's news conference that Long 'came to do harm.' The governor says killing police officers 'doesn't accomplish anything, it's not constructive. It's just pure unadulterated evil.'
Long also affiliated himself with the Washitaw Nation, an African-American offshoot of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, a group whose members view the federal government as illegitimate.
The growing movement originated among white supremacists and adherents believe they're immune to most state and federal laws, including paying taxes and getting driver's licenses.
Hundreds of homeless people have been relocated from a makeshift camp by a California river and into a transitional housing facility.
The 14 Forward Homeless Shelter opened last week in Marysville featuring 20 'tiny' houses on land owned by Yuba County.
On Friday, scores of homeless people who have lived - some for years - in the Horseshoe area of the nearby river.
The homes are modified Tuff Sheds that measure at 8-foot by 14-foot home. They have no running water or electricity, but provide a safe and clean temporary stay for people without anywhere to live.
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Goodbye shanty town: Yuba County decided to clean up a camp refuge by the side of the Marysville river after a build-up of sewerage and garbage was reported in the area
The spot has long been home to homeless people who have set up camp in the area, some for years
Rotten: However locals reported that, with no infrastructure, the area has become over-run with rubbish
All new: The 14 Forward Homeless Shelter opened last week in Marysville featuring 20 'tiny' houses on land owned by Yuba County and provides temporary housing for people with nowhere else to live
The opening of the facility at Habitat For Humanities was prompted by a build-up of sewerage and garbage in and around the long-established river refuge.
'One thing about being out here, there's a certain kind of freedom,' Bobby Clyde-Wells, who has lived in the Horseshoe area of the river for four years, told Fox 40.
'There's no pressure to make money to pay bills you're not accountable to anybody.'
However Clyde-Wells admitted that what was once a nice spot by the river had descended into filth.
'It's is no way to live. Too much garbage,' he said.
Clyde-Wells also said that the environment encourage residents to become too comfortable in their surrounds.
'Ten years, I haven't accomplished a darn thing since I've been down here, and it's not good enough for me anymore,' he said.
'It's is no way to live. Too much garbage,' said Bobby Clyde-Wells, who has lived in the area for four years
The county estimates there are between 240 and 300 homeless living along the banks of the Feather River
Sherish Balderaz, who was homeless with three kids until a year ago, believes the small village will provide some people with what they need to get back on their feet.
'You can't really get yourself together because you're always worried about what's going to happen to you,' Balderaz told KCRA.
The facility cost Yuba County kept taxpayers under $100,000.
The housing complex was also conceived and built within six months and is designed to be temporary housing.
The aim is to provide a home for roughly 30 days while social service workers and community groups help move tenants into permanent housing.
More homeless people will be moved in this week.
ISIS has released a chilling video of the Afghan refugee who went on an axe rampage on a German train where he says he will attack the country in revenge for airstrikes against the terror group.
The attacker, who is named in the footage as Muhammad Riyad, was gunned down by armed police after fleeing the scene near the city of Wurzburg, 70 miles north of Nuremberg last night.
He is believed to be 17 years old although in the video, it appears he could be much older.
It has been revealed he moved to Germany two years ago and had been living with a foster family in Ochsenfurt for the past two weeks.
He shouted 'Allahu Akbar' during the incident and ISIS has claimed responsibility, making it the first attack by the terror group in Germany.
The 17-year-old attacker, who has been named as Muhammad Riyad by ISIS, was gunned down by armed police after fleeing the scene near the city of Wurzburg, 70 miles north of Nuremberg last night
As many as 19 passengers needed hospital treatment while three victims are fighting for their lives after being attacked with 'cutting and stabbing weapons'.
An eyewitness said the train, which had been carrying around 25 people, looked 'like a slaughterhouse' after the rampage, with blood covering the floor.
In the video released by ISIS and filmed before the stabbing, the teenager says he will carry out the attack and threatens 'infidel' countries.
Knife in hand, he then announces in Pashto, an Afghan language, he would carry out an 'operation' in Germany, and presents himself as a 'soldier of the caliphate'.
He says: 'I am one of the soldiers of the Islamic Caliphate, and I am going to conduct an attack in Germany. It is about time to stop you from coming to our homes, killing our families, and getting away with it.
The axe that Riyad used to injure his victims is recovered by police at the scene of the attack earlier today
Gruesome pictures taken in the hours after the attack show the blood-soaked interior of the train
German police carry the body of the Afghan train attacker is carried from carriage and into a hearse after he was shot dead by police
'Our apostate politicians have never tried to stop you, and Muslims have never been able to fight you back or even speak against what you do. But these times are gone now.
'With the Islamic Caliphate now instated in Iraq, Sham, Khorasan, Libya and Yemen, its soldiers will be able to attack and slaughter you in your homelands, and they will take your nations as homes and military bases for them.
TRANSCRIPT OF ATTACKER'S CHILLING RANT I am one of the soldiers of the Islamic Caliphate, and I am going to conduct an attack in Germany. It is about time to stop you from coming to our homes, killing our families, and getting away with it. Our apostate politicians have never tried to stop you, and Muslims have never been able to fight you back or even speak against what you do. But these times are gone now. With the Islamic Caliphate now instated in Iraq, the Levant, Khorasan, Libya and Yemen, its soldiers will be able to attack and slaughter you in your homelands, and they will take your nations as homes and military bases for them. They will also target you wherever you are, in every village, city or airport. And I here warn you, that the Islamic Caliphate is now powerful enough to target your parliaments, and I am the proof of how powerful it became. I have been living with you all the time while planning an attack that will be stronger than the Paris attacks that continue to horrify you to this day. I will keep fighting you as long as I am alive, I will slaughter you with this knife, and I will decapitate you with an axe. And to the Muslims all over the world, I say: 'How long are you going to remain that passive. The Islamic Caliphate is now well established, so this is the time to declare your loyalty to the Caliph Abu Bakr Al Baghdady, and to migrate to Khorasan as well as the other Islamic State cities. 'There are also Islamic State cities all over the world, so if you cant go to the Levant (Sham), then start killing all of the apostate armies in your countries.' Advertisement
'Know this, that the Islamic State is powerful and has your parliaments in its sights.
I would advise you not to forget the spectacular attacks in France. I will fight you so long as I live and I will slaughter you with this knife and I will cut through your throats with this axe.'
Police have now recovered the axe the teenager used in his assault and removed his body from a field, where it had been left since he was shot dead last night.
However, officers have yet to confirm if he is indeed called Muhammad Riyad. But they did say the attacker had learned over the weekend that a friend had been killed in Afghanistan.
German authorities said they had found a hand-painted ISIS flag and what they called a suicide letter among the asylum seeker's belongings
The flag and the note are believed to have been discovered in the house he was living in with a foster family.
There were also books in English and German about Islam found in his room and a written farewell to his father among his possessions.
It said: 'Pray for me that I can take revenge on these infidels and pray for me that I will go to heaven.'
He had been placed with a couple just two weeks ago after living for nearly two years in a hostel run by the Catholic Kolpingwerk charity.
Bavarian interior minister Joachim Hermann said that the teenager came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor, and applied for asylum in March.
He lived in a home for teenage refugees until he was placed with the foster family.
Neighbours in the street adjacent to the centre recalled a 'confused' young man who never marked himself out as a fanatic of any stripe.
'He always looked worried' recalled Hannelore Lenz.
'But then the Afghans here often did. The government changed the rules about offering their asylum and they were always perpetually worried about if they were going to be allowed to stay.'
Another who would not give her name said: 'The relationship with the refugees was always harmonious here.
'I do remember seeing this young man around town - not very tall, very intense dark eyes, always a little troubled looking. But I never thought him capable of this.'
People in Ochsenfurt said he was seen in a nearby mosque on 'high days and holidays' but was by no means regarded as deeply religious.
A stain of blood and the remains of a bandage lie on the pavement close to where the axe attack happened in Germany
Investigation: Police stand by the regional train on which a teenager wielding an axe attacked passengers
A 17-year-old Afghan refugee went on the rampage with an axe and a knife on a train in Germany. He was later shot dead by police
Edmund Au Yeung (right) suffered severe injuries as he tried to protect his girlfriend Tracy Yau Hiu-tung (left). They are shown together in picture on Edmund's Facebook page
Police have refused to reveal the names of his foster parents but they are known to be worshippers at the Catholic Kreuzkirche in the centre of the town and registered with the charity that had looked after the youngster to provide a home for him.
The case is likely to deepen worries about so-called 'lone wolf' attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.
German officials didn't identify the victims, but Hong Kong's immigration department said among those wounded were four members of a family of five from the southern Chinese city.
The dpa news agency reported the attacker wounded the 62-year-old father, the 58-year-old mother, their adult daughter and her boyfriend. The teenage son was not hurt.
The father and the boyfriend had tried to defend the other family members, dpa said.
Eyewitnesses said Riyad swung the axe into the stomach of one of his victims in a bid to disembowel him after going into the bathroom and arming himself.
Local reports said it was the 31-year-old boyfriend of the Hong Kong victims' daughter who was most gravely injured as he slashed at passenger's bodies and heads.
The South China Morning Post named Edmund Au Yeung as having suffered severe injuries as he tried to protect his girlfriend Tracy Yau Hiu-tung.
This morning police officers search for evidence in a field near to the railway station close to Nuremburg
Germany had thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week
Meanwhile an eyewitness, who declined to give his name, said he saw people crawl from the carriage and ask for a first-aid kit as other victims lay on the floor inside.
The onslaught started on the train from Treuchtlingen to Wurzburg as the service stopped at Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld.
The attacker boarded the train in Ochsenfurt at 8pm for the hour long journey.
Apparently Riyad chose that train because it was often used by a female social worker who had helped him in the past.
Someone pulled the emergency cord when the train was in the Wuerzburg suburb of Heidingsfeld, just behind a quiet street called Roethenweg.
Melanie Gottle and Gunter Karban heard screams in their garden shortly after 9.15.
Their garden borders on the tracks and the pair ran out through a narrow gate to try to aid the wounded who were screaming.
The rampage onslaught started on the 9pm train from Treuchtlingen to Wurzburg as it stopped at Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld
Germany's best-selling newspaper, Bild (left) carries the story at the bottom of its front page under the headline: 'Rampage on the train! Suspect shot', while the Bielefeld-based Neuw Westfalische carried the story at the top of its front page under a headline which said 'Travellers attacked on a train'
'The paramedics brought the injured on stretchers through our garden to the ambulances,' said Miss Gottle.
She, her husband and neighbors helped as best they could, bringing out blankets and towels.
'We gave them hot sweet drinks before police sent most of us back into our homes,' said Melanie.
'The Asian man looked quite terrible,' she added Melanie. 'I hope so much that he survives the attack.'
As well as the two critically injured victims, one other passenger is believed to have non life-threatening injuries while 14 others suffered minor injuries or shock.
A police spokesman said: 'Shortly after arriving at Wuerzburg, a man attacked passengers with an axe and a knife.
'Three people have been seriously injured and several others lightly injured.'
As well as the three critically injured victims, one other passenger is believed to have non life-threatening injuries while 14 others suffered minor injuries or shock
The Bavarian interior ministry confirmed that police had shot and killed the attacker and a special task force has been dispatched from Wurzburg
He added: 'The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him.'
There were no further details on the circumstances of the teenager's death, and police declined to suggest what the motive was for the attack.
'At this time everything is possible,' the spokesman said.
Train services had come to a halt between Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt and a police helicopter circled the area.
The Bavarian interior ministry confirmed that police had shot and killed the attacker and a special task force has been dispatched from Wurzburg. Police believe the attacker worked alone.
The train line near the city of Wurzburg in southern Germany has been closed and police have descended on the scene
The teenager was eventually shot dead by police after he tried to attack them with a 'knife or hatchet'
Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of Bavaria state, said the attacker was a 17-year-old Afghan who had lived in nearby Ochsenfurt
Germany had thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people in an attack claimed by ISIS.
In May, a mentally-unstable 27-year-old man carried out a similar knife attack on a regional train in the south, killing one person and injuring three others.
Early reports suggested he had yelled 'Allahu Akbar' but police later said there was no evidence pointing to a religious motive. He is being held in a psychiatric hospital.
Germany let in a record nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, with Syrians the largest group followed by Afghans fleeing ongoing turmoil and poverty in their country.
The number of refugees arriving in Germany has fallen sharply as a result of the closure of the Balkans migration route and an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow.
Police, fire and ambulance crews were all dispatched to the scene of the axe attack this evening
There were no further details on the circumstances of the teenager's death, and police declined to suggest what the motive was for the attack
In April, May and June, the number was around 16,000 each month, less than a fifth of the tally seen at the start of the year, according to official figures.
Bavaria is governed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats.
The CSU has been loudly critical of Merkel's welcoming stance toward asylum seekers, a split that threatened the unity of the ruling coalition in Berlin and sent the government's approval ratings plunging.
It has also lent support to a right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany, which was founded as a Eurosceptic protest party in 2013 but now mainly rails against Islam and Germany's refugee influx.
He will continue his duties as an MP and threw support behind Mrs May
Mr Osborne was dumped out of Government by new PM Theresa May
Ex Chancellor said he fought as hard as he could during EU referendum
George Osborne told an audience at the Guildhall in London that he had no regrets over his dire warnings regarding a Brexit
George Osborne insists he has no regrets over his dire warnings on Brexit despite admitting that his gamble of putting everything on the line had cost him his Cabinet career.
The former Chancellor, who was dumped from Government less than a week ago, said that not for a moment did he wish he had acted differently.
This is despite the criticism he received from Tory MPs for making a series of doom-laden predictions about Brexit, even threatening an emergency Budget of tax rises and spending cuts if the country voted out.
These tactics, nicknamed Project Fear, made him toxic to Tory MPs and culminated in the decision by Theresa May to sack him.
Mr Osborne told an audience at the Guildhall in London: As you all know, I fought hard as hard as I could for a different outcome to the referendum on our membership of the EU.
'I didnt do it by half-measures: I couldnt on an issue like that. I put everything on the line, and dont regret for a moment that I did.
But while I dont resile from any of the concerns that I expressed in advance of that vote, nor do I intend to re-run the arguments now the vote has passed.
Mr Osborne said he would be staying on as an MP and pledged his full support to Mrs May despite being summarily sacked and ushered out of Downing Street by the back door last Wednesday.
However, Mr Osborne warned the new PM that she must maintain the countrys fiscal stability and urged her to seek the closest possible new ties with our European neighbours.
He added: They are, on the economy and on security, our friends not our foes.
In the Margaret Thatcher lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, he also made the hugely controversial claim that the decision by MPs not to bomb Syria in 2013 was worse than the vote to invade Iraq a decade earlier.
Mr Osborne said he fought as hard as he could during the run up to the EU referendum and defended his tactics, which were nicknamed Project Fear,
In comments that will enrage some Tory MPs he said: My political generation knows the cost of intervention. The lives lost. The controversy caused. The protest marches and the damning post-mortem reports.
It seems so much easier to stay out. Splendid isolationism is what they used to call it.
But my generation is also starting to learn about the cost of non-intervention. The lives lost in the Syrian civil war. The rise of ISIS. The instability across North Africa.
A rogues' gallery of ten alleged con-artists wanted in relation to fraud cases across Britain has been released by the National Crime Agency.
The album was compiled ahead of fresh figures that are expected to reveal the huge scale of fraud in the UK - leaving people out of pocket by nearly 200billion-a-year.
Details of the alleged criminals, published today by the NCA and the City of London Police, will be shared widely in the hope of snaring those wanted in connection with dozens of crimes nationwide.
Wanted: Alex McKenzie (left) is accused of targeting victims using the gay social networking app Scruff, gaining their trust by claiming to work for MI6. Sandeep Arora (right) allegedly claimed 4.5 million in VAT and Film Tax rebates for movies that either did not exist or with which he had no involvement
On the run: Adam Stagg (left) and Alexia Thomas (right). The album was compiled ahead of fresh figures that are expected to reveal the huge scale of fraud in the UK - leaving people out of pocket by nearly 200billion-a-year
They include Alex McKenzie, 33, from London, who is accused of targeting victims using the gay social networking app Scruff, gaining their trust by claiming to work for MI6.
It is claimed he conned two former lovers and one of their parents by taking out credit cards, bank accounts and loans worth a total of 300,000 in their names.
Another is Bollywood film producer Sandeep Arora, 42, from Beckton, east London, who allegedly claimed 4.5 million in VAT and Film Tax rebates for movies that either did not exist or with which he had no involvement.
There is also Bayo Lawrence Anoworin, 41, from Lagos, Nigeria, who is wanted by Lincolnshire Police over an alleged scam by a gang that stole more than 12million from NHS Trusts in the UK and Guernsey between January 2011 and July 2012.
This comes ahead of annual crime figures due for release by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday, that will include a full year of fraud and cybercrime for the first time.
Preliminary figures released in October 2015 found that there had been 5.1 million incidents of fraud in England and Wales in the previous year, affecting an estimated one in 12 adults and making it the most common form of crime.
Mugshots: Levi Coyle, Marius Anton and Felix Rooney. Details of the alleged criminals, published today by the NCA and the City of London Police, will be shared widely in the hope of snaring those wanted
Offences: Faisal Butt, Bayo Anoworin and Naeem Ahmed. Anoworin, 41, from Lagos, Nigeria, is wanted by Lincolnshire Police over an alleged scam by a gang that stole more than 12million from NHS Trusts in the UK and Guernsey between January 2011 and July 2012
Donald Toon, director of the NCA's Economic Crime Command, said: 'The annual losses to the UK from fraud are estimated to be more than 190 billion. Behind this headline figure lie the actions of criminals like the wanted fraudsters highlighted in this appeal, who have caused distress and loss to people and businesses up and down the country.
'Law enforcement cannot tackle this problem alone. It is only by working together, individuals, law enforcement, Government and the private sector that we can protect the UK against fraud.
Donald Trump's campaign team has been involved in a crash on the way to a New York airport, according to reports.
One of the presidential candidate's vehicles was involved in a collision as he headed to catch a flight from LaGuardia to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Monday.
Staff were believed to be in the car when it was hit, while Trump was travelling separately.
Members of Donald Trump's campaign team have been involved in a crash on the way to LaGuardia Airport in New York. He was heading to catch a flight to Cleveland for the Republican National Convention, where his wife Melania (right) will be making a speech on Monday
The billionaire was not injured.
Trump's Press Secretary Hope Hicks told Daily Mail Online: 'Everyone is okay. it was a staff car accident, totally separate from Mr. Trump's motorcade. We're all just fine.'
Initial reports suggested his official motorcade was involved, but the Secret Service later confirmed that the cars were being driven by campaign staff members.
The incident unfolded following a chaotic first day at the party's convention in Ohio and just hours before his wife Melania was due to make a speech on Monday night.
He was scheduled to introduce her to the crowd at the Quicken Loans Arena.
Earlier on Monday, he tweeted: 'Looking forward to being at the convention tonight to watch all of the wonderful speakers including my wife, Melania. Place looks beautiful!'
Trump's four adult children will also take to the stage during the week. He will make his high-profile speech on Thursday night.
The Convention, which will end with Trump being officially named as the Republican nomination for president, started with protests on Monday.
Anti-Trump demonstrators in the party demanded a roll call vote, which would have allowed them to show discontent for the real estate mogul.
This is the moment Pauline Hanson was left stunned when Labor Senator Sam Dastyari told her he was a Muslim during a fiery exchange on ABC's Q&A program.
The One Nation leader was sitting beside Mr Dastyari during Monday night's Q&A panel discussion as they butted heads over Muslim immigration and the radicalisation of young Australians.
They were debating if Ms Hanson would have allowed a five-year-old Sam Dastyari to enter Australia - like he did when he immigrated from Iran 28 years ago - when she appeared shocked by the notion the man sitting next to her was Muslim.
'Are you a Muslim? Really?' Ms Hanson said.
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This is the moment Pauline Hanson was left stunned when Labor Senator Sam Dastyari told her he was a Muslim during a fiery exchange on ABC's Q&A program
Mr Dastyari said: 'Yeah, and I have never hidden it away.'
She continued to ask details about his religious beliefs and asked if he was 'sworn in under the Koran?'.
'I was born in an Islamic nation and by being born' Mr Dastyari said.
Ms Hanson: 'So you're a Muslim.'
'By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country' Mr Dastyari said.
Ms Hanson: 'You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting.'
'I'm surprised. I did want know that about you,' she added.
Greens Senator Larissa Waters then said, to laughter and applause: 'Why, because he doesn't have three heads?'
The Labor senator had earlier pushed Ms Hanson to clarify whether she would have liked him to have been banned from entering Australia as a five-year-old boy who moved with his family from northern Iran.
During the program, Mr Dastyari explained how comments made that day by Channel Nine TV host Sonia Kruger on banning Muslim immigration effected his family - given they migrated from Iran in 1988.
'When I look at Ms Hanson's policy document that turns around and says we should be banning Muslims from country to this country, I have to ask - does that mean that a five-year-old Sam Dastyari should never have been able to set foot in Australia because somewhere in Tehran there's a document that says beside my name the word 'Muslim' because of where I was born?'
Eventually after their exchange, Ms Hanson thanked him and said she was 'happy' he came to Australia.
Ms Hanson asked the Labor Senator 'Are you a Muslim? Really?' during their fiery debate on Monday night
The One Nation leader was sitting beside Mr Dastyari during Monday night's Q&A panel discussion as they butted heads over Muslim immigration and the radicalisation of young Australians
Mr Dastyari had pushed Ms Hanson to clarify whether she would have liked him to have been banned from entering Australia as a five-year-old boy who moved with his family from northern Iran
Ms Hanson was grilled by panel members and those in the audience during her appearance on Q&A but the fiery politician hit back defiantly at her critics.
PAULINE HANSON ASKS SAM DASTYARI IF HE'S MUSLIM Hanson: 'Are you a Muslim? Really?' Dastyari: 'Yeah and I have never hidden it away.' Hanson: 'Were you sworn in under the Koran?' Dastyari: 'I was born in an Islamic nation and by being born Hanson: 'So you're a Muslim.' Dastyari: 'By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country' Hanson: 'You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting.' Dastyari: 'Ms Hanson: 'I think you're trying to make a joke of what is a serious' Hanson: 'I'm surprised. I did not know that about you.' Dastyari: 'Would you have allowed five-year-old Sam Dastyari into this country? He came to this country on 16 January, 1988, two weeks before the Bicentenary celebrations and my family has done nothing but contribute to this country since they've been here.' Hanson: 'Muslims have been a part of Australia for a long, long time, many, many years. You go back to the Gold Rush days and they were in Australia but it is only in the last 10, 20 years that we have seen a rise of terrorism on the streets.' Advertisement
Ms Hanson was repeatedly questioned by Islamic members of the audience about the cause of her Islamophobia and whether she would join an Islamic family for dinner.
It came as about 200 protesters gathered outside the ABC headquarters - including her supporters and anti-racism activists.
One audience member, Cindy Rahal, said Ms Hanson was pushing an agenda of fear 'and making people like myself and my friend here worried to come into the studio because of protesters outside'.
But Ms Hanson rejected any responsibility for the clash.
'The protesters are nothing to do with me,' Ms Hanson said. 'Protesters were against me because I choose to speak up against this matter so I have protesters which are trying to shut down freedom of speech.'
Ms Hanson also defended Sonia Kruger when Mr Dastyari said the pair were playing 'the politics of fear and division' for wanting to ban Muslims from entering Australia.
Ms Hanson said of Nine Network's Today Extra host: 'Go Sonia.'
'I think it's great that someone is standing up, because she's expressed her feeling about it,' Ms Hanson told the audience on Monday night.
'She's referred to Japan, for a population of 127 million people, they don't have terrorism on their streets
'You've got Brussels now the biggest Muslim state there with 300,000 in there, you've got 10 per cent in France, you have the problems on the streets of France,' Ms Hanson said.
Brussels is a city of Belgium, not a state.
Ms Kruger caused controversy earlier on Monday for saying she 'would like to see it [Muslim immigration] stop now for Australia'.
Ms Hanson was grilled by panel members and those in the audience during her appearance on Q&A but the fiery politician hit back defiantly at her critics
Ms Hanson defended Sonia Kruger (pictured), who on Monday said she wanted Muslims to be banned from moving to Australia
Another questioner, Khaled Elomar, told Ms Hanson his 11-year-old son was watching the program from home and had recently asked what Islamophobia is.
'I said Islamophobia is one or a combination of three things hate, fear or ignorance. I promised him that I will ask you this question so he can hear your answer directly. So, with all due respect, what is the basis of your Islamophobic feelings? Hate, fear or ignorance?'
Ms Hanson replied that it was 'none of the above' and then proceeded to ask him why there was an increase in Islamic radicalisation.
He said Ms Hanson and others like her used 'extremely dangerous and disturbing rhetoric'.
'Almost every day I get called a Muslim pig because of you. I really do thank you for that because it just shows how much of a better person I am that I can choose to ignore these guys and remain the person that I am,' Mr Elomar said to applause.
Q&A host Tony Jones then asked Ms Hanson whether she could offer Mr Elomar's 11-year-old son 'any hope that you regard him as an equal Australian along with all other citizens?'
She was welcomed by about 200 people outside the ABC office in Ultimo, central Sydney, made up of those who support her (pictured) and those who oppose her
The One Nation leader arrived at the ABC studios in Sydney as about 200 protesters gathered outside the ABC headquarters. Five were arrested for breach of the peace
Two groups of about 200 protesters had clashed in front of the ABC office prior to the program and at least five were arrested for breach of the peace
Another questioner went on to ask Ms Hanson if she would share a meal with his family so they could learn from each other, after the One Nation leader rejected Mr Dastyari's offer to share the meal in western Sydney.
Mohammed Attai said he believed 'the best way to increase understanding and mutual respect is through interaction.
'Senator Hanson, I understand you declined Sam Dastyari's offer for a halal snack pack,' he asked.
Mr Dastyari then interrupted to say she was 'reconsidering'.
'No, I'm not,' Ms Hanson replied as the audience laughed.
Mr Attai continued: 'Would you be willing to take my offer to inviting you for lunch or dinner, whichever suits you best, with me and my Muslim family? And in respect to you and your beliefs, while we have something halal, I'll ensure what you have is something not halal a haram snack pack. Would you kindly accept my invitation?'
After the pair went back and forth, Ms Hanson eventually said: 'We can talk. You can get in touch with my office and see what happens, yeah.'
One audience member, Cindy Rahal (pictured), said Ms Hanson was pushing an agenda of fear 'and making people like myself and my friend here worried to come into the studio because of protesters outside'
Another questioner, Khaled Elomar (pictured), told Ms Hanson his 11-year-old son was watching the program from home and had recently asked what Islamophobia is
Another questioner (pictured) asked Ms Hanson if she would share a meal with his family so they could learn from each other
The One Nation leader had remained defiant throughout the program. She said her words weren't to blame for terrorism and that she was asking for a debate to find the answers, which she admitted she didn't have.
'I'm concerned for every one of you here in this audience tonight and everyone at home because I want safety on our streets, I want to find the right answers and it's important for each and every one of us and for the future generations,' she said.
'To ignore is not the answer to it. To think we can find the easy answers, it's not, but pulling together as a community and as a nation to debate the issue, then we can find the right answers.'
Shortly after her appearance, Ms Hanson wrote on Facebook asking how she'd performed.
Two groups of about 200 protesters had clashed in front of the ABC office prior to the program and at least five were arrested for breach of the peace.
Both groups waved banners and chanted slogans during the fiery demonstration.
'Pauline Hanson don't you dare, Muslims welcome everywhere,' anti-racism protesters chanted.
Supporters of Ms Hanson waved banners reading: 'Multiculturalism has utterly failed' and 'welcome back Pauline'.
Shortly after her appearance, Ms Hanson wrote on Facebook asking how she'd performed
Pauline Hanson supporters and anti-racism protesters have clashed in Sydney ahead of Pauline Hanson's appearance on the ABC's Q&A program
Pro Pauline Hanson supporters wave anti-Islam banners outside the ABC office in Sydney
Police managed to separate the two groups and said they removed a 'small number of protesters' from the area.
Cat Rose, an anti-Hanson protest organiser, said Ms Hanson's appearance on the program promoted racism.
'I think people are legitimately angry and want to show their opposition to Pauline Hanson and her vile racism being given more airtime,' she told Daily Telegraph.
'She already has had far too much coverage and to have the ABC advertise her as someone who is just ''fighting for equality'' on its promos is totally warped.'
Nick Folkes, from the Party for Freedom, said he was frustrated that the two groups were being kept apart by police.
Writer Benjamin Law wrote on Twitter he had 'family friends bashed in the 1990s, I still palpably feel the rage of these Muslim audience members'
Another writer, Jill Stark, said it was 'telling' that Ms Hanson 'insists on 'integration'' but baulked at the offer to join a Muslim family for dinner
'Anyone going to mention how many young white racists are being radicalised by Pauline Hanson?' stand-up comic Aamer Rahman said
'I'd much prefer to be closer so we can have some banter between each other but it's still good to be here,' he told the ABC.
'It's a psychological win for us and just to let Pauline know that we are here for her ... and we'll continue to support her.'
A police spokesperson said no charges have been laid.
The response to Ms Hanson over Twitter was overwhelmingly negative, while her supporters flooded her with congratulations on Facebook.
'You did really well considering all of the loaded questions thrown at you,' one person wrote on her page.
Officers are pictured restraining two protesters. Police said no charges have been laid
Police managed to separate the two groups and said they removed a 'small number of protesters' away from the area
'I'd much prefer to be closer so we can have some banter between each other but it's still good to be here,' he told said
A NSW police officer removes a protester outside the ABC's office in Ultimo
A well-off village has hired a private security firm to deter criminals after it was abandoned by police who scrapped local beat officers.
Crime levels have soared in well-to-do Tiptree, Essex, since its police station was closed five years ago, leaving the elderly and vulnerable scared to leave their homes.
The explosion in burglaries, petty crime and anti-social behaviour happened after Essex Police insisted resources must be targeted at high priority offences such as violent crimes and domestic abuse.
Tiptree, Essex, which is paying 12,000 a year to employ a private security firm to patrol their streets amid claims that policing in the village has dropped to 'zero'
Regular foot and vehicle patrols will now be carried out by community marshalls from Regency Security Group (RSG) at an annual cost of 12,000 the equivalent of just 1.20 for the 10,000 residents of the villag.
The town is famed for its Wilkin and Sons jam factory.
The firm would provide staff with powers similar to those of community support officer.
RSG business director Paul DeAngelis said: Our operatives will be targeting anti-social behaviour using CCTV and bodycams.
Those individuals acting in an anti-social manner and/or breaking the law will be filmed and they will face the full legal ramifications of their actions.
Police and fire officers share the same building in Tiptree, Essex after the police station closed 5 years ago
Tiptree's duckpond. Many of the elderly and vulnerable are now scared to leave their homes
The village is home to 10,000 residents and is famed for its Wilkin and Sons jam factory
But locals accused the force of retreating from front line law enforcement, leaving itself aloof and out of contact with the people it is meant to protect.
Grandmother Dawn Lawrence, 56, who owns a fashion shop, said: We should have police officers here. Its just ridiculous we already pay for them, I dont understand why we are paying twice.
James Petrie, 28, added: Its a lot of money to spend on something that probably wont have any effect.
Crime has gone up. I have had four friends who have had their cars broken into in just four months. We call the police and they dont do anything about it.
A charity shop worker said: We need our PCSOs back in Tiptree. Its a disgrace.
Another Essex community, Frinton-on-Sea, began paying for private security last year after it, too, lost police patrols.
Residents of fellow Essex village, Frinton have also paid for security guards to make up for the shortfall in police. Here, AGS Security boss, Stephen Beardsley (right) and his colleague Darren stand in front of one of their patrol vehicles on Frinton promenade
But provider AGS cancelled the service after some residents accused it of running what amounted to a protection racket.
The firm apologised for heavy-handed tactics, including cold-callers banging on doors after dark and exaggerating the risk of crime.
A senior officer insisted at the time that partnerships would continue with similar companies due to shrinking resources.
The force which needs to save 60 million over five years due to budget cuts last week announced teenagers were being drafted in to patrol Basildon town centre.
Tiptree had just 103 reported crimes between June and August 2011. But during the same period last year that had risen to 140.
Shocking figures for January and February this year revealed 95 crimes had already been reported.
Burglaries have also gone up 250 per cent in the space of a year.
St Luke's Church in Tiptree. Tiptree had just 103 reported crimes between June and August 2011. But during the same period last year that had risen to 140
The Tiptree windmill. Shocking figures for January and February this year revealed 95 crimes had already been reported
Parish council chairman Steve Bays said he and his colleagues had been forced to hire in outside help to tackle the crisis.
We have not taken this decision lightly but we felt we could no longer just talk about this issue, he said.
We had to act to protect our village and its residents from the growing problems we have been experiencing with anti-social behaviour.
Having consulted with Essex Police on several occasions, it has become clear that they no longer have the resources to properly deal with issues such as vandalism, graffiti, youths starting fires and the harassment of residents who live near the council recreation facilities.
He added: I must emphasise the community marshalls are not a replacement for the police, they are a deterrent.
RSG was formed in 1993 and provides doormen, event security, private security and training.
It describes itself as the premier national security consultant company in the UK that provides a complete range of security services to an ever-changing marketplace.
Its staff are signed up to the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme, meaning they have powers similar to those of community support officers.
But residents said it was still a downgrading of a service they pay for and police officers would have to be called in from Colchester 12 miles away if there was the need for back-up.
A police spokeswoman said: We need to put our frontline officers where the most harm is being caused in our communities.
Some people choose a car or in some extreme cases a horse and carriage to get to and from their wedding but this couple's choice of transportation didn't quite seem to go to plan.
Footage posted by the People's Daily Online shows a bride and groom riding a motorcycle in China before the bride topples off the vehicle.
People can see coming to her aid after the groom continues travelling, not even realising his bride is missing.
Nice ride: At the start of the footage, the couple can be seen riding through the streets on the electric scooter
That must have hurt! When travelling over a speed bump, she takes a tumble and falls to the floor
In the footage, the bride and groom can be seen travelling on a motorbike on a street in China.
The bride is in her wedding dress riding side saddle and carrying a giant bouquet of flowers wrapped in blue paper.
As soon as a speed bump comes along the bride loses her balance and grip and face plants on the ground.
The groom continues into the distance, not realising that his bride has disappeared.
The woman can be seen looking a little dazed by what has just happened.
A man can be seen stopping on his bike and coming to the woman's aid.
Oops! The woman was filmed while wearing her wedding dress and carrying a giant bouquet of flowers
Wait for me! In the footage, she faceplants to the floor as her groom continues on unaware he's missing a bride
The video has proved popular online.
On the People's Daily Online's Facebook page, people have been discussing the video.
A user named 'Chris Curley' wrote: 'Did he ever stop and realize she had fallen off?'
While 'OoMyint Swe' commented: 'Surprised! Why doesn't he know the woman fell from his motorbike? He'll never take care of his baby, sweet-heart, clearly!'
And 'Jawad Raza' said: 'He should have slow down on speed breaker. So sad for bride.'
This isn't the first case of wedding accidents in China.
In 2015, a bride was left unconscious after she was tossed into the air by a group of groomsmen who failed to catch her.
The ceremony was stopped and the injured bride was taken to hospital.
Bad husband? People have criticised the groom for failing to realise that he had lost his bride
With their assorted hues, varied shapes, and pungent aromas, flowers arrangements can brighten up any room.
And it appears that flowers themselves are also concerned about their arrangement.
New research has shown that plants can maximise their chances of reproduction by taking advantage of how insects move between flowers when they track down nectar.
The results could also help explain why about half of all flowering plants produce flowers that can have female or male characteristics at different times
THE BEES KNEES Honey bees - wild and domestic - perform about 80 percent of all pollination worldwide. A single bee colony can pollinate 300 million flowers each day. Grains are primarily pollinated by the wind, but fruits, nuts and vegetables are pollinated by bees. Seventy out of the top 100 human food crops, which supply about 90 percent of the worlds nutrition are pollinated by bees. Advertisement
Scientists from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Calgary have found that the way in which plants arrange their flowers affects the flight patterns taken by bees.
This could have an impact on how plants reproduce, as the researchers suggest that plants have evolved to take advantage of it.
It has previously been known that variation in shape, size and colour of flowers can influence how pollen is spread by insects and birds.
But this is the first study that has looked at how arrangements of flowers can affect pollination.
The team studied the flights of bumble bees as they collected nectar from wild tall larkspur flowers in Alberta, Canada.
They found that when the plants' flowers were present on only one side of the stem, bees would more often fly vertically between flowers.
In contrast to this, when plants had flowers all around their stems, it appeared that bees would be less likely to fly upwards.
Dr Crispin Jordan, who led the study, said: 'Plants and their flowers exist in all shapes and sizes, and our finding that the arrangement of flowers can influence how bees forage might go some way to explaining how plants, which rely on others species to spread pollen, can influence their own reproduction.'
When the plants' flowers were present on only one side of the stem, bees would more often fly vertically between flowers. In contrast to this, when plants had flowers all around their stems, it appeared that bees would be less likely to fly upwards
These findings could influence the development of plant crops with high yields, by allowing scientists to understand how plants can transfer pollen most efficiently.
The results could also help explain why about half of all flowering plants produce flowers that can have female or male characteristics at different times.
These arrangements may maximise the plants' chances of reproduction.
Rumours have been circulating about Samsung's next Galaxy Note phone.
And there is good news for those eagerly anticipating the new device, as Samsung has revealed its launch date.
Samsung will host an event on August 2nd in New York where it will officially reveal the Note 7 smartphone.
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A set of images were also leaked on The Verge earlier this month, which show the phone in three colours - Black Onyx, Silver Titanium and Blue Cora
RUMOURED FEATURES Dual curved display
Iris scanner for security and authentication purposes
Three colours - Black Onyx, Silver Titanium and Blue Cora.
5.7-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display
6GB of RAM
3,600mAh to 4,000mAh battery
12 megapixel camera
Type-C USB port Advertisement
The firm announced on Twitter that they will be hosting an event called Unpacked, which will be live-streamed on its website.
While the previous model was the Galaxy Note 5, Samsung is not releasing a Note 6, and is instead jumping straight to the Note 7.
Explaining why on their website, Samsung wrote: 'Firstly, the Galaxy Note 7 will complement our Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, and unify our product portfolio.
'Second, the Galaxy Note 7 will minimise confusion about the latest mobile technology from Samsung, and provide full alignment with Galaxy S smartphone.'
Although full details on the device have not been released, Samsung said that there will be the added functionality of the S pen and a large screen.
However, leaks have suggest that the phone will have a dual curved display, much like the existing Galaxy S7 Edge.
There is also expected to be an iris scanner for security and authentication purposes, which has been hinted at in the event's logo, which features an iris-like image.
Your next big idea is right around the corner. Tune in to #Unpacked live on August 2. pic.twitter.com/H7gDH73gdR Samsung Mobile (@SamsungMobile) July 12, 2016
Like its predecessors, the S6 Edge+ (pictured left), and the Note 5 (right), the Note 7 is rumoured to have a 5.7-inch screen
A set of images were also leaked on The Verge earlier this month, which show the phone in three colours - Black Onyx, Silver Titanium and Blue Cora.
In terms of the phone's specifications, it is expected to have a 5.7-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display, as well as 6GB of RAM, a 3,600mAh to 4,000mAh battery, and a 12 megapixel camera.
A video from Vietnam posted on YouTube yesterday also suggests that we will see a Type-C USB port on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.
Every time you Instagram a picture of the foam art on your coffee or leave a comment on a YouTube video, it contributes to the more than a billion gigabytes of new data we produce every day.
As this number continues to increase, we are starting to run out of space to store the data; even the tiniest data storage element uses thousands of atoms to store one piece of information.
Now for the first time, scientists have created a way to store information atom by atom to produce the smallest hard disk ever made, which could lead the way to much more efficient data storage.
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In traditional computers, data is expressed in one of two states known as binary bits which are either a 1 or a 0. In this new design, each bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that can be slid back and forth between these two positions
HOW DOES IT WORK? In traditional computers, data is expressed in one of two states known as binary bits which are either a 1 or a 0. In this new design, each bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that can be slid back and forth between these two positions. If the chlorine atom is in the top position, there is a hole beneath it - this is a 1. If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is therefore on the bottom, then the bit is a 0. Advertisement
Cloud storage systems require large spaces and a lot of energy, particularly to keep up with the increasing amount of information produced by society.
Decreasing the number of atoms needed to store information would help solve the problem.
In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman speculated that if a platform could arrange individual atoms in an exact orderly pattern, it would be possible to store one piece of information per atom.
Now a group of scientists from Delft University in the Netherlands think they have found a way to do exactly this.
They built a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom.
'In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp', said lead scientist Professor Sander Otte.
The researchers reached a storage density of 500 Terabits per square inch (Tbpsi), 500 times better than the best commercial hard disk currently available.
Scientists have created a way to store information atom by atom to produce the smallest hard disk ever made, which could lead the way to much more efficient data storage. STM scan shown (96 nm wide, 126 nm tall) of the 1 kB memory, written to a section of Feynman's lecture 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom'
The team used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), in which a sharp needle probes the atoms of a surface, one by one.
This lets the scientists see the atoms as well as using the probes to push the atoms around.
'You could compare it to a sliding puzzle', Professor Otte said.
'Every bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that we can slide back and forth between these two positions.
'If the chlorine atom is in the top position, there is a hole beneath it - we call this a 1. If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is therefore on the bottom, then the bit is a 0.'
The only problem is that for the technique to work, a temperature of almost -200 degrees Celsius (-328F) must be reached in a near-perfect vacuum.
Despite this, the scientists believe that further development of the ground-breaking technique could massively reduce the size of our ever growing need for vast data centres.
If the chlorine atom is in the top position, there is a hole beneath it - this is a 1 (circled). If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is therefore on the bottom, then the bit is a 0
The new approach offers excellent prospects in terms of stability and scalability.
But shoppers should not expect these tiny memory cards to be available on the shelves any time soon.
Professor Otte said: 'In its current form the memory can operate only in very clean vacuum conditions and at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K or -195C), so the actual storage of data on an atomic scale is still some way off.
'But through this achievement we have certainly come a big step closer'.
Babies as young as nine months already prefer toys that are traditional for their sex, a study has found.
Trucks were the preferred choice for baby boys in a test, while baby girls chose to play with cooking pots.
As girls got older they took more of an interest in typical boys toys like cars and balls.
Babies as young as nine months already prefer toys that are traditional for their sex, a study has found. Trucks were the preferred choice for baby boys in a test, while baby girls chose to play with cooking pots (stock image used)
The researchers suggest this may be because parents encourage girls to play with a wider variety of toys.
But the little boys were still less inclined to dabble with dolls possibly because it is still considered less socially acceptable.
The researchers argue that because the differences appear so early on, biology must be playing a significant role in how boys and girls develop.
Researchers from University College London and City University studied 101 infants in three groups: nine to 17 months the earliest age that infants can demonstrate which toys they like best - 18 to 23 months and 24 to 32 months.
The tests were carried out at four multicultural nurseries in London.
The seven toys chosen to evaluate the childrens preferences were a doll, a pink teddy bear and a cooking pot for stereotypical girls toys, and a car, a blue teddy a digger and a ball for the boys.
Testing took place in a quiet corner of the nursery, at a time when all the boys and girls were engaged in free play.
As girls got older they took more of an interest in typical boys toys like cars and balls. The researchers suggest this may be because parents encourage girls to play with a wider variety of toys (stock image used)
The children were seated at a meter away from the toys, which were arranged in a randomised order in a semi-circle around the child.
The experimenter encouraged the child to play with the toys by saying You can play with any of the toys that you want to.
A record was then kept of which toys were touched at intervals of five seconds for three minutes.
The researchers, led by Dr Brenda Todd of City University write: In general, the boys played with male-typed toys for longer than with female-typed toys and, conversely, the girls played with female-typed toys for longer than with male-typed toys.
They said that there were six boys and eight girls in the very youngest age group, aged between nine and 12 months.
All of these boys played with the ball, and play with the ball accounted for 53.2 per cent of their time playing with the toys.
Overall the girls aged 12 months or less chose the cooking pot most frequently: seven of these eight girls played with the cooking pot, and their play with this toy accounted for 49.8 per cent of the time playing with the toys.
The researchers argue that because there is a clear difference at such a young age this probably is a biological effect, as the babies have yet to have had extensive exposure to gender stereotypes.
The researchers found that as boys got older, they became even more interested in toys typical of their sex although it was less true of girls.
The trends suggest that as boys grow older, they increasingly prefer male-typed toys, and although girls initially much prefer female-typed toys, this preference settles to a merely strong preference, the authors said in the study published in Infant and Child Development.
GENDER PLAYS NO ROLE IN VIDEO GAME TALENT Contrary to the stereotype, researchers have found that player gender itself does not cause performance differences. Instead, the perception of women as poor gamers is fuelled by other factors. For example, found women spent less time playing overall than men and chose more assistive character classes, such as Priests, who fare better healing group members than fighting on their own. When they took such factors into account by statistically controlling them in the analyses, the gender performance gap disappeared; women advanced at least as fast as men did in both games. They also realised different players are interested in different aspects of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, and a few of those differences may correlate with gender. There's some empirical evidence that men tend to focus more on achievement in video games levelling up rapidly, gaining in-game status and competing against others while women are drawn to social interactions, whether it's helping other players or forming long-term relationships. This suggests that men should advance faster than women. However, researchers found the opposite: Women advanced at least as fast as men did. So taking into account different play motivations likely only strengthens their conclusions. Advertisement
They add: Thus, it is interesting that not only are there sex differences in preference but also sex difference in the development of preference over time.
They said their findings contradicted studies of US children aged between 14 and 35 months, which found girls increasingly showed a greater interest in female-typed toys but this may be a difference between the US and the UK or a difference in the relative appeal of the particular toys in the study.
Explaining the results, the researchers say that the early preferences may be caused by exposure to male hormones in the womb.
This is supported by findings that show girls exposed to higher levels of male hormones are more likely to be tomboys.
And research has also shown even baby monkeys show sex differences in the toys they prefer with male monkeys also preferring cars while female monkeys prefer the cooking pots.
Dr Todd said: I think the thing that is interesting is that children are very young to be showing different preferences for different toys we offered them to play with.
Even in that youngest group of children we were still seeing sex differences in their preferences.'
She added: 'The other interesting thing is that as they get older, boys get more and more interested in boy toys, whereas that wasnt the case for the girls.
'I think stereotypes are much more rigid for little boys, and even older boys, than little girls. It's OK for girls to play with pretty much everything, we see more pressure for girls to widen their use of toys.
For millions of years the island of Madagascar remained an untouched paradise of lush rainforests, giant baobab trees, strange birds and a unique group of primates called lemurs.
Around 2,000 to 1,000 years ago the first humans arrived on the enormous and eccentric island of Madagascar, just off the east coast of Africa, dramatically altering the country's forests.
Now scientists have found evidence the island was not as tree-covered as it had been thought when humans first arrived, by studying the DNA of mouse lemurs.
Around 2,000 to 1,000 years ago the first humans arrived on the enormous island of Madagascar, just off the east coast of Africa, dramatically altering the country's forests. Scientists have found evidence the island was not as tree-covered as thought when humans first arrived, by studying the DNA of mouse lemurs (pictured)
THE HISTORY HIDDEN IN DNA Mouse lemurs are the world's smallest and fastest-reproducing primates. By studying how the native mouse lemurs evolved in different areas of the island, the researchers were able to see how the island changed itself. The researchers looked at 100,000 sites across the genomes, which represented 500,000 years of genetic change within five species of the mouse lemur family tree. Advertisement
The tiny primates helped researchers discover that two ecologically different portions of the east African island were once linked by a patchwork of forest.
The teacup-sized mouse lemurs are the world's smallest and fastest-reproducing primates.
Because of this, their collective DNA reflects changes in their surroundings at a faster rate than many other mammals.
By studying how the native mouse lemurs evolved in different areas of the island, the researchers were able to see how the island changed itself.
'This study shows the landscape was changing thousands of years before humans arrived,' said study co-author Dr Steve Goodman, from the Field Museum in Chicago.
'The mouse lemurs are forest dependent-as the forest changes, they change,' Dr Goodman said.
'By studying how mouse lemurs evolved in different areas of the island, we're able to glimpse how the island itself changed and learn whether those changes were caused by humans.'
Today, the 226,000 square mile (585,337 square km) island is flanked by forests along the coasts with vast open grasslands in the middle.
The teacup-sized mouse lemurs are the world's smallest and fastest-reproducing primates. As a result, their collective DNA reflects changes in their surroundings at a faster rate than many other mammals. A new study uses mouse lemur genomes to reconstruct Madagascar's forests before human arrival
THE FAST-CHANGING DNA OF THE TEACUP-SIZED MOUSE LEMUR Teacup-sized mouse lemurs are the world's smallest and fastest-reproducing primates. Because of this, their collective DNA reflects changes in their surroundings at a faster rate than many other mammals. For millions of years the island of Madagascar remained an untouched paradise of lush rainforests, giant baobab trees, strange birds and a unique group of primates called lemurs. By studying how the native mouse lemurs evolved in different areas of the island, the researchers were able to see how the island changed itself. Mort the mouse lemur features in the animated films Madagascar 1, 2 and 3. Advertisement
Previous studies looking at aerial photography and satellite images showed from 1950 to 1985, human activity wiped out half of the country's remaining rainforests.
Professor Anne Yoder and colleagues from Duke University studied the DNA from mouse lemurs, the world's smallest and fastest-reproducing primates.
This fast breeding means collective DNA reflects changes in the animals' surroundings at a faster rate than many other mammals.
'Their genomes are like historical tape recorders of environmental change,' Professor Yoder said.
The data spanned 100,000 sites across the genomes, and represented 500,000 years of genetic change within five species of the mouse lemur family tree.
Mort the mouse lemur features in the animated films Madagascar 1, 2 and 3, which are about a group of animals living on the island.
The researchers found for roughly two million years before humans arrived, the centre of the island was a patchwork of grasslands interspersed with woodlands and shrubs, rather than continuous forest.
Many of Madagascar's original forests have been cut and burned to make way for rice paddies and grazing cattle. A new study suggests the island's trees began their retreat tens of thousands of years before humans arrived
Mort the mouse lemur (pictured) features in the animated films Madagascar 1, 2 and 3
The patchwork was a transition zone between the lush rainforests of the east and the dry forests of the west, the researchers said.
'Madagascar wasn't completely covered by forests when humans arrived,' Professor Yoder said. 'We need to integrate that into our understanding of the 'natural' evolution of Madagascar's biota.'
'For a long time, scientists weren't sure how or why Madagascar's biogeography changed in very recent geological time, specifically at the key period around when humans arrived on the island a few thousand years ago,' said Dr Goodman.
'This study is important because it sheds light upon the long-term life history of Madagascar, before human colonization.
'It helps us understand change.'
The research could also help explain why extinct animals like the 350-pound giant lemurs and the 10-foot-tall elephant birds all died out within a thousand years of human arrival.
It stole the show in the most recent Star Wars film and left audiences wondering how it worked.
Now the engineers behind the iconic BB8 robot from The Force Awakens have revealed for the first time how they were able to create a working version of the spherical droid.
Josh Lee, BB8 design engineer and Matt Denton, electronics software engineer on movie have given the public the first glimpse at the inner workings of the tiny robot.
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The inner mechanics of Star Wars BB8 have been revealed for the first time, revealing a pendulum structure at sits inside the ball that forms the droid's body. The head is thought to be attached using a magnets that allow it to sit on top of the ball and can be moved by the disk at the top of the pendulum (pictured)
HOW BB8 WORKS The engineers behind BB8 said when they were first presented with the challenge of creating a spherical robot by the Force Awakens director JJ Abrahms, they found several ways of creating the robot. One they settled on was to create a pendulum that sites inside the main body of the robot. The spherical body is driven by a rotating hub that spins the ball gyroscopes keep the pendulum upright at all times. At the end of the pendulum is a disk with magnets fitted to it. This allow the head to be magnetically attached on top of the body yet move freely while the body rotates under it. This pendulum set up also explains why the head tilts forward when the robot is moving forward. The centre of mass inside the body shifts, and the pendulum tilts forward. Advertisement
By introducing a motor-driven pendulum inside a ball, they were able to create the large spherical wheel that the character sped about on.
At the top of the pendulum appears to be a plate fitted with magnets that allow the droids head to be attached so that appears to float on top of the main ball.
They said they had been able to get the robot to a maximum speed of 4.3mph (7km/h) about the average walking pace for humans.
With control over subtle movements like pitching to one side and tilting the ball when stationary, they were able to give BB8 his dinstinctive onscreen personality.
However, they revealed the full working version of the robot was only created as an after thought.
Instead, for the actual movie shoot, the robotics engineers created seven different versions that could work under different conditions.
These included a robot that could be fixed to the floor with a metal plate and then wiggled from side to side.
They also created a puppet version that could be driven around by puppeteers on the end of a specially built stick that was later removed in post production.
Another version was built like a trike with two wheels at the back to enable BB8 to drive around on sand during filming in the desert outside Abu Dhabi.
After first building their prototype for BB8, the engineers send a working prototype of the droid (pictured) to director JJ Abrams to see if he wanted them to continue. Although it was not used in filming, the fully working droid was later used in publicity and for red carpet appearances for the film
He said: 'We got through the shoot really well with those versions but we were still thinking about how you could do it without the trolley on the back or without holding the puppetting sticks.
'I really wanted to figure how you could do it if it was possible.'
Mr Lee, who was speaking at the Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 in London, said the fully working version only became possible due to the on set accident that broke actor Harrison Ford's left leg.
He said: 'Due to some unfortunate circumstances with Harrison Ford and his ankle, we were all given a month off.
'Unfortunately I can't stop thinking about it and my wife was frustrated that I couldn't' stop thinking about as while we were on holiday I was still sketching out how it might work.
BB8 stole the carpet at premiers around the world for the Force Awakens by trundling down the carpet, proving the droid had not been created using CGI trickery
'Over that month I figured out it was possible. In the weekends and evenings we started building a prototype of how it could be done for real.
'There are a few ways of doing this. A pendulum robot is what we chose.'
The pair then sent video of their working prototype to director JJ Abrams to ask if he wanted them to continue.
For many who saw the most recent Star Wars film, it was assumed that BB8 was CGI like many of the robots in some of the earlier films in the series created by George Lucas.
The engineers revealed that they created seven different versions of BB8 (pictured during the film) for use during filming, including a stationary robot that could waggle, one that was driven by a puppetteer and another that had wheels like a trike
BB8 stole many of the scenes and provided a lot of comic relief in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (pictured)
But when BB8 appeared at the Star Wars Celebration last year and later on red carpets around the world, it blew fans of the film away.
However, exactly how the robot was created has remained a tightly guarded secret.
Mr Denton said: 'The one thing we have never been able to talk about is how we built the red carpet BB8 because we have been keeping it under wraps.
The pair didn't reveal exactly how the head was attached but said they had repeated problems getting it to stay on while BB8 moved around.
But they said they might consider publishing the schematics in the future to allow school children to build their own robot.
Mr Lee said: 'A lot of the technology you need you can get now, like the gyroscope sensors you need, the motors.
An international team of astronomers have discovered a treasure trove of new worlds.
So far they have reported finding 197 planet candidates, with 104 planets confirmed by scientists.
The planets, which are all between 20 and 50 per cent larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light years away.
A crop of more than 100 planets, discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, includes four in Earths size-range orbiting a single dwarf star. Two of these planets are too hot to support life as we know it, but two are in the stars 'habitable' zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface. These small, rocky worlds are far closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun.
KEPLER'S HISTORY OF PROBLEMS In 2012, Kepler lost use of the first of two failed gyroscopic reaction wheels. Four wheels are used point the telescope in a specific direction, according to NASA, and in May of the following year, the second wheel broke. After months of work, engineers were unable to restore them. The Kepler telescope was reborn in 2014 as 'K2' with a clever strategy of pointing the telescope in the plane of Earth's orbit, the ecliptic, to stabilize the spacecraft. The probe has been mining the cosmos for planets by searching for eclipses or 'transits,' as planets pass in front of their host stars and periodically block some of the starlight. Advertisement
The scientists, led by the University of Arizona, say that the possibility of life on the new planets around such a star cannot be ruled out.
Four of the planets discovered have been found to be rocky, and could host alien life.
They are thought to be between 20 and 50 per cent more massive than Earth, and they orbit a star smaller than our sun.
Two of the worlds could have radiation levels that are similar to Earth.
The huge finding of planets was found by combining data with follow-up observations by earth-based telescopes including the North Gemini telescope and the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Both Kepler and its K2 mission discover new planets by measuring the subtle dip in a star's brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its star.
In its initial mission, Kepler surveyed just one patch of sky in the northern hemisphere, measuring the frequency of planets whose size and temperature might be similar to Earth orbiting stars similar to our sun.
In the spacecraft's extended mission in 2013, it lost its ability to precisely stare at its original target area, but a fix created a second life for the telescope.
After the fix, Kepler started its K2 mission, which has provided an ecliptic field of view with greater opportunities for Earth-based observatories in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
Because it covers more of the sky, the K2 mission is capable of observing a larger fraction of cooler, smaller, red-dwarf type stars.
An international team of scientists discovered more than 100 planets based on images from Kepler operating in the 'K2 Mission'. This image montage showing the Maunakea Observatories, Kepler Space Telescope, and night sky with K2 Fields and discovered planetary systems (dots) overlaid
Such stars are much more common in the Milky Way than sun-like stars, which means that nearby stars will predominantly be red dwarfs.
Professor Ian Crossfield, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, who led the study, said: 'An analogy would be to say that Kepler performed a demographic study, while the K2 mission focuses on the bright and nearby stars with different types of planets.
'The K2 mission allows us to increase the number of small, red stars by a factor of 20, significantly increasing the number of astronomical 'movie stars' that make the best systems for further study.'
To validate the candidate planets, researchers studied high-resolution images of the planet-hosting stars as well as high-resolution optical spectroscopy data.
This data gives an idea of the physical properties of a star, such as mass, radius and temperature, which in turn gives an idea of the physical properties of the planets orbiting around it.
Dr Steve Howell, project scientist for Kepler and K2 at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California, said: 'This bountiful list of validated exoplanets from the K2 mission highlights the fact that the targeted examination of bright stars and nearby stars along the ecliptic is providing many interesting new planets.'
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It could change the way we fly - and help take man to Mars.
Aviation specialists have revealed a glider capable of reaching altitudes of 90,000ft (27,430 metres) using nothing but wind.
They plan to use natural weather conditions over Argentina to set a new world record and become the highest that any winged vehicle, powered or otherwise has gone.
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Experts plan to use natural weather conditions over Argentina to set a new world record and become the highest that any winged vehicle, powered or otherwise has gone. Here, the plane is show high over Nevada in an earlier test.
THE PERLAN PROJECT PLANS Because it lacks an engine, Perlan 2 can explore the edge of space without polluting the atmosphere it will study. Uses for the pressurised sailpaine include: Understanding weather: Perlan II plans to see how what happens at the highest levels of the stratosphere impacts weather globally. Predicting climate change: Perlan II will collect and share data with atmospheric scientists worldwide, to improve climate models and more accurately predict climate change and its potential solutions. Diagnosing the ozone layer: Perlan II can take untainted air samples from the stratosphere to measure the levels of ozone-damaging chemicals and assess whether the ozone layer is replenishing or still depleting. Future of space travel: The glider will operate in atmospheric conditions roughly similar to those on Mars, providing insight into how wingborne aircraft could operate above the Martian surface. Advertisement
The Perlan 2 glider is a pressurized sailplane designed to ride updrafts called 'mountain waves' that, in certain regions near the north and south poles, can reach into the stratosphere.
For a brief period in August and September every year, the weather in the Andes mountains near El Calafate is often just right to generate these elusive stratospheric mountain waves.
Perlan 2 is designed to ride these waves up to 90,000 feet without requiring the two-person crew to wear pressure suits.
Although this summer's research program will likely focus on lower altitudes, project pilots may still break the world gliding altitude record of 50,671 feet, set in 2006 by Steve Fossett and Perlan Project founder Einar Enevoldson in the unpressurized Perlan 1 glider.
'The extraordinary vision of the Perlan Project is to soar at heights where even powered aircraft can't maintain level flight, and it's been our privilege to help them get from a vision to a flying aircraft capable of reaching that goal,' said Allan McArtor, CEO of Airbus.
'We're all very proud this week to see this unique sailplane begin this next important part of its amazing journey.'
The craft has gone to sea, departing the United States aboard a container ship on the first leg of a journey that will end in El Calafate, Argentina, by mid-August.
The journey marks a transition from a successful six-month flight test program in Minden, Nevada, to mission flights in Argentina's Patagonia region, where wind conditions will allow the team to begin high-altitude aerospace and climate research.
'The project has achieved its test flight objectives in the U.S. and now we're ready to head to Argentina, where we will attain critical knowledge about our atmosphere.
'During our research flights we hope to set a new world altitude record for gliders,' said Ed Warnock, CEO of the Perlan Project.
'We're incredibly thankful for all the volunteers, sponsors, friends, plus product and service providers who have helped us reach this important milestone.'
Lacking an engine that would contaminate air samples, the Perlan 2 glider is uniquely able to collect data on upper-level weather patterns and the condition of the atmosphere, yielding new insights into climate change.
The aircraft will carry experiments from earth scientists around the globe, as well as from school and university classrooms. Its flights in the upper atmosphere will also provide Airbus valuable data on high-altitude flight.
If it succeeds, it will be the highest that any winged vehicle, powered or otherwise has gone.
it could will attempt to reach its optimal cruising altitude of 90,000 feet as early as this coming June in Argentina.
Aviation specialists have built a glider capable of reaching altitudes of 90,000ft (27,430 metres) using nothing but wind - and are set to attempt to become the highest plane in history in June.
Airbus says that any insight gained into flight at increasingly higher altitudes also has implications for the future of both sub-sonic and supersonic or hypersonic aviation, where given the right technology, higher operating altitudes could provide a range of potential advantages.
'Airbus recently filed a patent for hypersonic passenger craft that will go to suborbital space and back down again,' Allan McArtor, the Chairman and CEO of Airbus Group, which is sponsoring the craft, told Forbes.
'It's in that region of suborbital space that Perlan 2 will be flying.'
Glider pilots have surfed so-called mountain waves since 1932. The process is similar to surfing on a wave in the ocean, except the glider is in the wave rather than on the surface of the wave. Winds in the Polar Vortex can reach speeds of 260 knots and upwards allowing the mountain waves to propagate upwards into the stratosphere. An infographic revealing more about the project is pictured
The goal of the project is to 'open up a world of new discoveries related to high-altitude flight, climate change and space exploration', explained the firm.
The Perlan II is a pressurised sailplane designed to ride air currents that, in certain mountainous regions near the north and south poles, can reach into the stratosphere.
Despite having no engine, the glider's true flight speed at that altitude will be more than 400mph (643km/h) and the air density will be less than two per cent of what it is at sea level.
The crew will breathe pure oxygen provided by a rebreather system, similar to what astronauts use in space.
In addition to its two-person crew, the aircraft carries scientific instruments to provide new insight into climate change and the upper atmosphere.
Because it lacks an engine, Perlan II can explore the edge of space without polluting the atmosphere it will study.
Airbus says that any insight gained into flight at increasingly higher altitudes also has implications for the future of both sub-sonic and supersonic or hypersonic aviation, where given the right technology, higher operating altitudes could provide a range of potential advantages.
Glider pilots have surfed on so-called mountain waves since 1932.
The process is similar to surfing on a wave in the ocean, except the glider is in the wave rather than on the surface of the wave.
Mountain waves form when winds of at least 15 knots cross over a mountain range perpendicularly and the atmosphere is 'stable' waves will form on the lee side of the mountains.
A glider uses the upward moving part of this wave system to climb.
But the maximum altitude of a mountain is typically at the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, and this is because the cold air of the mountain wave encounters warmer air at the boundary and can't rise further.
Einar Enevoldson, a Nasa test pilot and founder of the project, saw evidence that in regions closer to the Poles in winter, the waves could extend above the troposphere and well into the stratosphere.
Previously, no-one had searched for waves in the stratosphere in sub-polar regions in winter.
From 1992 until 1998, he gathered more evidence that these waves existed, and found they might be strong enough to lift a sailplane to high altitudes.
Then, in 1998 Dr Elizabeth Austin joined Mr Enevoldson in the search for an understanding of stratospheric mountain waves.
She found that the Polar Vortex, and one of its principal components, the stratospheric polar night jet that only exists in winter, provided the high speed wind in the stratosphere that powered incredibly high waves.
The Perlan II glider is the world's first engineless aircraft designed to reach altitudes of 90,000ft (27,430 metres) by riding so-called 'stratospheric mountain waves'. Earlier this week, the glider made history by soaring to 5,000ft (1,525 metres) during its maiden flight over Roberts Field, the Redmond Municipal Airport in Oregon (pictured)
The Perlan II (pictured) is a pressurised sailplane designed to ride air currents that, in certain mountainous regions near the north and south poles, can reach the stratosphere. Despite having no engine, the glider's true flight speed at that altitude will be more than 400mph and the air density will be less than two per cent of what it is at sea level. The crew will breathe pure oxygen, similar to what astronauts use
Winds in the Polar Vortex can reach speeds of 260 knots and upwards allowing the mountain waves to propagate upwards into the stratosphere.
The Perlan Project was formed to explore these waves and soar them to the edge of space.
In August 2006, Steve Fossett and Einar Enevoldson soared the Perlan 1 glider to 50,722ft (15,460 metres) using these 'stratospheric mountain waves.'
'Airbus Perlan Mission II is an historic endeavour in the truest spirit of aviation's earliest pioneers,' said Tom Enders, chief executive officer of Airbus Group which sponsors the project.
The goal of the project is to 'open up a world of new discoveries related to high-altitude flight, climate change and space exploration', explained the firm.
'The knowledge gained from this project will impact how the world understands and addresses climate change. But it will also help Airbus continue to innovate ways to fly higher, faster and cleaner, on Earth and possibly beyond.'
This week's maiden flight was piloted by Jim Payne and Morgan Sandercock.
The next step is to take the glider to various altitudes over a series of tests before the pair attempt to reach the edge of space in Argentina in 2016.
These flights are expected to exceed even the altitudes achieved by the U-2 and the SR-71.
The craft took the the skies for the first time last year.
The flight, which took place over Roberts Field, the Redmond Municipal Airport in Oregon, was the first test flight of the craft which next year will attempt to set a new world altitude record for any airplane.
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Honeymoons are usually exotic affairs, but not quite as jet set as this Polish couple's celebration.
For the last 200 days, Karolina and Bartek Wudniak have been travelling the world and they have no intention of stopping. Hence, the pair have named their expedition the never-ending honeymoon
Since jetting off in 2015 the duo have visited Panama, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Argentina. And they have plans afoot to venture to a further two continents: Australasia and Asia.
Married couple Karolina and Bartek Wudniak have been travelling the world since they first met and have now visited 40 countries in total, including Mancora, Peru (above)
Since they got married and embarked on a never-ending honeymoon they've photographed themselves with their bridal veil and wedding bow-tie, like in Cordillera Blanca, Peru (above left and right)
Their honeymoon officially started on 26th November 2015 and since they have visited Peru (above), Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Argentina
The pair loved Peru (pictured above by the Amazon River) and said: 'We enjoyed trekking the Peruvian Andes, specially near Ausangate mountain and in Cordillera Blanca
The couple first met in 2007 and after a few months together they started to scratch their travel itch.
Following their first couple's holiday to Sweden they continued to visit Scandinavia, drove around most of Europe and jetted off on short-stay, long-haul trips. Seven anniversaries later and they had hatched a plan for a once-in-a-lifetime world tour.
In 2014 Bartek proposed in Italy and a year and a wedding later they kicked off 'stage one' of their journey on 26th November 2015. Now nearing the end of this, they will embark on 'stage two' later this year.
Speaking to the MailOnline Travel, Karolina said: 'In November were going to New Zealand where we have working and holiday visas, so well work there for the next part of the trip, then it's on to New Zealand, Australia and Asia.'
They've recorded their whole trip on a blog and Instagram so that people can see where they are each week, like the Huacachina desert, Peru (above)
The couple have been together since 2007 and took their first holiday together only a few months after meeting. They are pictured above in Colca Canyon, Peru
Karolina, is a freelance journalist and Bartek has retired from his corporate job. They are pictured above kissing on the peak of the Vinicunca mountain, Peru
Karolina is a freelance journalist so was able to bring her work with her, but Bartek had to quit work to free up enough time for their epic plans.
Though he is a passionate film fan, has a Master in European studies and can speak Quenya (an elf language) fluently he found himself living like a typical corporate worker. After saving for years he had to let go of the role so that the pair could jet off.
Picking a favourite destination is hard for them.
The couple said: 'We enjoyed trekking the Peruvian Andes, especially near Ausangate mountain and in Cordillera Blanca. But, Galapagos (Ecuador) is like a paradise. In Bolivia, Salar De Uyuni is amazing.
'From all the cities weve visited we like Buenos Aires the most. It has a great, unique vibe!'
The duo hiked up to Peru's famous Incan citadel, Machu Picchu (above) and got a photograph of themselves wearing maching tops printed with their blog's tagline
Though they miss their friends, family and their favourite Polish food they love travelling and visiting places like Machu Picchu, Peru (above)
They look to meet new people wherever they go and have been lucky to make fast friends with locals.
Karolina recalls: 'We met a Colombian artist in Buenos Aires, after a quick chat she invited us for a dinner and we had a great time. Now we've got a new friend. We have a lot of that kind of histories.'
Though they miss their family, friends and Polish cuisines (especially perogis) they have no idea when they will return home, an uncertain Karolina said in maybe two years, or five.
The couple took a break from trekking and enjoyed a cool glass of beer overlook the beautifully placid Lake Titicaca, Bolivia (above)
They take a couple of days to get to know each destination properly before moving on and have seen Valle de la Luna, Bolivia (above left) and Canyon del Inka, Bolivia (above right)
They've travelled by foot and by bike. Karolina can be seen cycling through the flat, dirt roads of the vast Atacama desert, Chile above
The pair take in the dramatic site of geysers in Eduardo Avaroa Nationa Park, Bolivia (above) letting off their natural gas explosions
The nomadic Polish pair take in the beautiful, tranquil landscape of the mountainous Atacama desert in Chile above on an overcast day
They've stopped by popular destinations like the Bolivian salt flats (above left) and the Pichincha Volcano in Ecuador (above right)
The duo took a break on the much-marvelled destination of Galapagos Islands, Ecuador (above) where it's renown for its delicate eco-system
After hundreds of days travelling together, the pair remain truly in love with exploring and each other, they are seen above by Lake Titicaca, Bolivia
Their journey has a popular online forum with friends, families and admirers keeping up with them on Facebook, Instagram and their blog. Pictured above at Templo del Sol near Mitad del Mundo, Ecuador
The pair couldn't pick a favourite destination but said: 'Galapagos (Ecuador) is like a paradise. In Bolivia, Salar De Uyuni is amazing. From all the cities weve visited we like Buenos Aires the most. It has a great, unique vibe!'. Both pictures above are of Ecuador
Talking about what's next on the horizon, Karolina said: 'In November were going to New Zealand where we have working and holiday visas, so well work there for the next part of the trip, then it's on to New Zealand, Australia and Asia.' Pichincha Volcano, Ecuador is pictured above
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This series of stunning postcards re-imagined using the Photocrom process sheds a different light on what the city of Venice looked like in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
The photographs of Belle Epoque Venice were printed by the Detroit Publishing Company using what was a brand new form of technology at the time, invented by Hans Jakob Schmid, an employee of Swiss printing company Orell Gessner Fussli.
Photochrom was a complex system where a photographer would take detailed notes of the colours present when the picture was being taken, then black and white negatives were then hand coloured using limestone printing stones as colours required in the final image.
So from a distance, the prints look deceptively like colour photographs but actually artificial colour has been added to black-and-white images.
The pictures of famous Venetian landmarks such as St Mark's Square, the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal are given an extra lifelike quality thanks to the added boost of colour.
Elsewhere, Victoria-era tourists are seen feeding the pigeons or taking a gondola ride, while locals attend daily business like selling their wares from their front door.
A view of the Grand Canal has been given a boost of colour using the Photocrom process, where black and white photos are hand coloured
The Ponte Del Paradiso is teeming with life in this multi-coloured picture from the last 19th century
Children feed the pigeons in the famous St Mark's Square, which is usually heaving with visitors nowadays
A view of the Rialto Bridge from the Grand Canal, with water taxis taking customers to their destination pier
A woman takes a moon-lit gondola ride on the Grand Canal - a tourist attraction that is still popular today
Gondoliers wait for customers near the Doge's Palace- a palace built in Venetian Gothic style
A surprisingly empty canal featuring just a couple of gondolas and a tour boat, with a view of the Rialto Bridge in the background
A woman takes a boat ride past the Ca' Pesaro, which was once a grand home but is now used as a museum of modern art
Young Venetians keep a look out over the canal, as luggage and goods are delivered from a boat to the steps of a nearby row of houses
A church procession makes its way over a bridge on the Grand Canal on a summer's day as tourists wait to continue their gondola rides
A view of the San Giorgio Maggiore - one of the islands of Venice that lies south of the main island group
A view of the Doge's Palace, a palace built in Venetian Gothic style that sits on St Mark's Square
A view Venice and the Veneto region, which sits in the Adriatic Sea, on the north-east coast of Italy
The inside of the Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark, which is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice
A church procession makes its way out of the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark, onto the busy square
Tens of gondola boats queue up to attract business from tourists in the nearby St Mark's Square
Scores of tourists congregate in the busy St Mark's Square, which remains a popular destination for visitors nowadays
A view of the Doge's Palace on the left, with the lagoon in front and San Giorgio Maggiore in the background
A couple from Hartlepool are planning to fly to Turkey on Monday for their wedding, determined that the failed coup last weekend will not spoil their plans.
Rachael Wray, 29, and Graham Ryan, 36, are travelling to Marmaris ahead of their wedding on July 26.
Some flights to the country were cancelled at the weekend but the couple were told it would be safe to go - and warned they would lose the 3,500 cost of their trip if they cancelled.
Rachael Wray and Graham Ryan are travelling to Marmaris on Monday ahead of their wedding on July 26
Some flights to the country were cancelled at the weekend but the couple were told it would be safe to go - and warned they would lose the 3,500 cost of their trip if they cancelled
This weekend explosion and gunfire were heard in Marmaris where Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been on holiday
The couple are planning to tie the knot at the Imperial Hotel in Marmaris, exactly three years to the day since they first went there.
Ms Wray, who teaches RE at English Martyrs School in Hartlepool, says they will not allow anything to stop them getting married at a venue that is close to their hearts.
She said: 'When we heard the news about what was happening over there, we were very shocked.
'We thought that was it and that our wedding would have to be cancelled.
'When I got in touch with my wedding planner, who is in Turkey, she was busy on a clean-up mission picking up machine gun bullets.
'Eventually, we got the advice yesterday that it was safe to travel, and were told that we wouldn't get a refund if we decided to cancel.'
Ms Wray, who teaches RE at English Martyrs School in Hartlepool, says they will not allow anything to stop them getting married at a venue that is close to their hearts
The couple are planning to tie the knot at the Imperial Hotel in Marmaris (pictured), exactly three years to the day since they first went there
Close to 300 people are reported to have died during the failed takeover in Istanbul and the capital Ankara.
Explosion and gunfire were also heard in Marmaris where Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been on holiday.
The news was particularly upsetting to the couple, both from Hartlepool, who have grown to love it there.
Ms Wray added: 'It's our special place - the wedding had to be there.
'We fell in love at that hotel and had our first holiday there. We're determined to go and enjoy it and won't be scared.
'This is our wedding and no one is going to stop us getting married.
'We know that the people in Marmaris are fantastic.
Visiting France can be a minefield for American tourists, with numerous potential pitfalls regarding etiquette, fashion and food, but it seems that the French are equally baffled when making a trip to the US.
In fact, some find aspects of the culture so confusing that there are several guides on manners for people planning a trip across the Atlantic, with tips ranging on how to greet someone to the intricacies of asking for a doggy bag.
With hilariously French bluntness, several bloggers who made their home in the US have shared their do's and don'ts, with plenty of amazement at the American way of life, including the constant consumption of food and obsession with punctuality, we've rounded up some of the best here...
French bloggers have released guides on American etiquette for anyone from France who plans to visit the US
Don't even think about kissing someone hello
The French are famous for their tactile displays when greeting people, so one of the top instructions for visiting the US is avoid the famous hello kiss.
An article on Le Blog De Mathilde revealed: 'You can hug people you know, but don't ever try to kiss an American, it would be close to aggression.
If a hug seems too familiar, the website French District suggested that the favoured form of greeting among colleagues is a firm handshake, they said: 'Feel free to make his knuckles grinding for a sign that you have confidence in yourself.'
Don't be surprised if strangers talk to you in the street
It seems the French are baffled by the American habit of making conversation with strangers - much like the Brits, in France, people keep themselves to themselves when out and about.
French District revealed: 'It is not uncommon for a stranger in the street to ask where you go your coat from.'
The website French District warns that it is not uncommon for strangers to start conversation with you, and the supermarket cashier could well ask what you'll be doing at the weekend
They continued: 'People walking past will often cheerfully greet you hello, your neighbour might compliment you on the curve of your biceps and the supermarket cashier could well ask what you'll be doing at the weekend.
'These friendly familiarities never exceed the limit of propriety though - the bus driver isn't expecting to become your best friend because he called you 'baby'.
Always be on time
The French have a habit of turning up late, but the opposite is said of Americans, who thrive on punctuality.
French District revealed: 'The punctuality is very important to the United States and whether at work, at school or in your private life, you should be on time.
'Forget the Angevin hour do not even think about cancelling appointments at the last minute, make sure that you are ready to welcome your guests at the agreed time, or even before.'
Always look happy to see children and pets
Le Blog De Mathilde advises that to avoid insulting parents and animal owners, a person should always 'rejoice in the presence of children or pets'
According to Pamela Druckerman, the author of French Children Don't Throw Food, a child is rarely considered an equal in France, whereas in America they are treated like little princes and princesses.
As a result, Le Blog De Mathilde advises that to avoid insulting parents and animal owners, a person should always, 'rejoice in the presence of children or pets'.
They said: 'This is the same as the principle of smiling to strangers.
Coughing into your hands became undesirable in America several years ago
'It is obligatory to make a smile or a ruffle of the head if you meet a child or a pet, even if there are ugly.'
Do not cough into your hands
Apparently, coughing into your hands became undesirable several years ago.
Le Blog De Mathilde revealed: 'If you cough into your hands you will be considered disgusting.
'Here, coughing into your elbow - which gives the impression that embraces his biceps - is the approved fashion.
'Beginners should be careful not to make the sleeve of your sweater a place teeming with bacteria of all kinds.'
Learn to ask for a doggy bag without being embarrassed
The French and the Americans have very different portion sizes when it comes to eating out, but nobody is actually expected to finish their food in the US.
French District encourage men and women to get over their embarrassment and ask for a doggy bag for their leftovers, they said: 'It not embarrassing to ask for a doggy bag to take home half of a barely touched plate, or even the rest of tortilla appetizer.
'The art of asking for a doggy bag (or 'box' in common parlance) can be a fine art when undertaken alongside waiters who clear faster than their shadow and the dread of appearing stingy.'
French District encourage men and women to get over their embarrassment and ask for a doggy bag for their leftovers, left, while Le Blog De Mathilde does not agree with Americans' love of constant grazing, which means they cup holders everywhere, right
Don't succumb to the American habit of eating everywhere, even if they do
Although they is trying to help French people to assimilate into American culture, there is one aspect that Le Blog De Mathilde does not agree with - their love of constant grazing.
They said: 'American people eat and drink everything, at any hour of the day, whether they are in the street, in a work meeting, in the car, on the subway in the elevator or at the movies.
'So, there are cup holders everywhere; on cinema seats, baby strollers, shopping carts at the supermarket, in cars and even on some bike handlebars.'
Use plenty of positive language in your everyday speech
According to Le Blog De Mathilde, the French have a habit of moaning, which they believe is the opposite to the American attitude.
The writer revealed: 'When in America, do not scrimp on superlatives: say 'great' and 'awesome' on all occasions
'I realised when I arrived here that telling a waiter that your meal was 'Yeah, okay' implied that it sucked, I therefore now express my enthusiasm by a thunderous 'great.'
As the situation in Turkey calms following the attempted coup at the weekend, travel agents have been inundated with requests from holidaymakers about changing their travel plans.
But given that the UK's Foreign Office doesn't currently advise against travelling to the region, thousands of worried British families are told they will lose their money if they want to cancel holidays to Turkey, and few tour operators offer alternatives as clashes continue.
MailOnline Travel has been in touch with some of the biggest companies that organise travel to the region to find out what their policies are.
The airlines
Many tourists were left stranded in Istanbul following the failed coup. Above Argyro Gountsiou from Melbourne, Australia, rests as she waits her flight in Ataturk Airport on July 17
TRAVEL FROM THE US TO TURKEY The US government's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned all flights to the US from Turkey, either direct or with a stopover. On July 18, the status has not been updated.
US citizens in Turkey needing emergency assistance should call +90-312-455-5555 (Ankara) or +90-212-33-59000 (Istanbul) Advertisement
Following the coup, there were severe delays at Ataturk International Airport with cancellations to flights and delays of up to 48 hours.
Many airlines have now resumed their service.
British Airways
'Our flights to Turkey have resumed but we recommend that customers visit ba.com to check the status of their individual flight.
'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.
'Any customers who have bookings to/from Turkey up to and including Sunday July 24 can re-book to a later date or use the value of their ticket towards an alternative destination on our network.'
Thomson and First Choice
'As the Governments Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) advice for travel to Turkey has not changed, Thomson and First Choice flights to Dalaman, Antalya, Izmir and Bodrum are operating as normal.
'All flights departing today (Monday 18th July 2016) are due to operate as normal.
'We are continuing to closely monitor the situation, together with the relevant authorities.
'The safety and security of our customers and crew is our highest priority and we follow the advice of the UK Government and the FCO.
'Normal booking conditions apply for all travel dates to Turkey.'
Passengers have started to arrive from Turkey. Above, travellers arriving at Heathrow airport from Istanbul
EasyJet
'EasyJet flies from the UK to Antalya, Bodrum, Dalaman and Ismir in Turkey.
'Given the attempted military coup on Friday, we are liaising with the Turkish and British authorities. The safety and security of our passengers and crew is the airlines highest priority.
'Current advice from the British authorities is to continue our flying programme. This will be kept under continuous review.'
TRAVEL EXPERTS WARN CONSUMERS MAY BE LEFT OUT OF POCKET IF THEY WANT TO CANCEL TRIPS TO TURKEY Bob Atkinson, Travel Expert from Travel Supermarket Unless your airline or tour operator is allowing you to cancel, or change your holiday without observing the normal booking conditions (which could be that you lose up to 100% of what you have paid) then you have no rights to a refund. You can of course look to delay your trip to another time or to change destination and you should check with your travel arranger about these options. However there will be administration charges for this and possible increases in holiday cost. If you decide not to travel you should contact your travel arranger and advise them. The FCO has not deemed the vast majority of Turkey (which includes the beach resorts and Istanbul as unsafe to travel to and unless that advice changes then the travel companies are under no obligation to assist you. You cannot claim anything back from travel insurance for you cancelling for disinclination to travel. And you cannot charge back your holiday costs on a credit card or debit card either. Those in resorts (with the exception of the Marmaris area where there was some gunfire on Friday night into Saturday) have not experienced any changes or amendments to their holiday and reports are that the resorts are quiet and its business as usual. In fact many Brits on holiday did not even know something was going on until worried friends and relatives in the UK range them to tell them through the weekend. Frank Brehany, travel expert and Consumer Director of HolidayTravelWatch A significant change has arisen within holidays that are about to start to Turkey. There is no question that British holidaymakers scheduled to travel to Turkey in the next few days will be concerned as to their safety, particularly as the effect of this coup is likely to last for some weeks ahead. In a region that is already under stress from conflict and the refugee crisis, it is time for Travel Companies to recognise their obligations under Regulations 12 & 13 of the Package Travel Regulations. Holidaymakers must now be offered those rights under the Regulations; refunds without penalty and/or the offer of changes of holidays without cost to UK holidaymakers. I do not make this call lightly and have every concern and sympathy for those in Turkey who rely upon tourism for their income. But we must recognise that 2016 has not been a happy year for Turkey and this attempted coup and the uncertainty that will surely follow is not the ideal time for mass tourism. Advertisement
Thomas Cook
'Following the events in Turkey over the weekend, we have received a high volume of calls from customers due to travel, the majority of which were from customers seeking reassurance and have not translated into cancellations. To date, cancellations have been minimal.
'There has been no change to Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) advice regarding travel to Turkey and our flight and holiday programme is operating as normal. Our staff on the ground in resort tell us is that everything is calm and customers are enjoying their holidays.
'We will continue to monitor the situation closely.
'We offered free amendments and cancellations for all customers due to fly to Turkey on Saturday (16 July) and Sunday (17 July). As of today, normal booking conditions apply for customers due to travel to Turkey.
'For details on booking conditions please visit our website.'
Turkish Airlines
'Our flights have started as of Saturday July 16th; 2:00 PM local Istanbul time.
'We are working keenly to remove the operational inconveniences relating to our delayed/cancelled flights occurred due to this extraordinary situation.
'All the reservations/tickets of our passengers who could not find the opportunity to travel are secured by Turkish Airlines.
UK's FCO has relaxed its advice on travelling in the region. Above, a passenger pulls her bag as she arrives at Sabiha Gokcen Airport on July 17, 2016
'Their travel will be completed safely and under the complete service quality of Turkish Airlines, in the shortest time possible.
'We are kindly asking our esteemed passengers to check the latest information on their bookings/flights on our website www.turkishairlines.com and our social media accounts before coming to the airport and also to carry the minimum baggage possible to facilitate our operations.'
Pegasus Airlines
'As of 16th July 2016, our flight operations have resumed and as Pegasus Airlines we are doing everything possible to ensure that our flights continue to operate through Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen airport as normal.
'However, we are also offering our guests the option to make cancellations or changes to their flights for free of charge up until 24th July 2016.
'For guests who wish to avail of this option please visit www.flypgs.com/en/manage-my-booking2, contact your official Pegasus sales agent or call 0090 850 250 67 02.'
Cancellation policies vary from operator to operator. Above, passengers pull their bags as they arrive at Sabiha Gokcen Airport on July 17
The cruise lines
Carnival Group
Cunard's Queen Victoria is the only ship from the Carnival Group and it's scheduled to dock in Mamaris on Wednesday.
The cruise line said: 'We are monitoring closely the situation in Turkey.
'We are considering possible alternative options should it be necessary to review the itinerary, which we can do at short notice.'
Fred Olsen
'We are monitoring the situation in Turkey closely and we are taking advice from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office regarding our forthcoming cruise calls in the country.
'At all times, the safety of our guests and crew is of paramount importance.
'We are not aware of any of our guests cancelling their cruises due to the situation in Turkey.'
Royal Caribbean
'After reviewing all of the available information, Royal Caribbean International has decided to cancel our next two calls to Turkey.
'Vision of the Seas and Brilliance of the Seas will now call on Chania (Souda) Crete, Greece on Tuesday, July 19 and Wednesday, July 20 (respectively).
'As always, the safety of our guests and crew is our first priority and we will continue to closely monitor the situation in Turkey.
'Should any additional modifications be made to future itineraries, we will contact guests or their travel agents directly.'
Tourism in Turkey
A series of terror attacks in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey has already dampened tourism in the country.
Earlier this year, economists forecasted that tourism revenue will tumble by a quarter this year, costing the country around $8billion (6billion).
Overall visitor numbers to Turkey fell a relatively modest 1.6 percent last year, according to Tourism Ministry data.
Unfortunately for Turkey, tourists from the richest countries, who tend to be the biggest spenders, are also the most easily spooked by security worries.
Last year, for instance, the number of Italians visiting Turkey decreased by 27 percent while Japanese dropped off by nearly 40 percent.
German travel group TUI has reported a 40 percent drop in summer bookings for holidays in Turkey and the picture for Britain, the number three market, is uncertain.
A series of terror attacks in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey has already dampened tourism in the country. Above a file photo of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul where a suicide attack took place earlier this year
But some experts are optimistic.
Ben Carey from Dunira Strategy told MailOnline Travel: 'As someone who has been working in Turkey for 25 years, I think it's very positive that the Foreign Office and the US State Department is not advising against travel to the country.
'However, peoples geography isn't always that good. They're going to be nervous about travelling to Turkey. The country is going to have a tough few years.
'Turkey is building bridges with Israel and Russia, who are going to plug the holes left by Western Europe, which means they will be recovering.
'Everyone is watching closely to see how the Turkish government is going to react to dissent. If they overreact then Turkey is in trouble.'
Carey also thinks that the future of Turkey's tourism lies in its inland offerings, comparing the country to Spain in the 90s.
He told MailOnline Travel: 'It will take a while but there are a number of organisations that are developing very interesting rural tourism programmes at the moment.
'In terms of tourism destinations being targets for terrorists, the beach tourists will have that risk but community based ones will be insulated from anything like this as they well be making genuine contributions towards society.'
She's been sunning herself in Miami the past few days.
So it was time for Chantel Jeffries to show off her bronzed physique on Saturday night as the model headed out for a glam night out.
The 22-year-old ex-girlfriend of Justin Bieber donned a risque cage dress for the outing which highlighted her curves.
All glammed up: Chantal Jeffries displayed her amazing figure in a mauve dress as she enjoyed a night out on Saturday
Chantel shared snaps of the look on Instagram as she posed in front of a gold pillar and tropical looking plants in the lobby of Edition Hotel where she's staying.
Under her revealing cage dress the Instagram beauty wore a two-piece bodysuit in the same mauve shade.
She even matched her ribbon tie heels and handbag to her frock.
Why so serious? The 22-year-old model pouted as she captioned this snap 'Sad gurlz club inc'
Au naturel: The model posed sultrily in a black swimsuit top with sheer panels as she enjoyed a leisurely day on Sunday
In another photo Chantel pouted sultrily at the camera and wrote alongside it 'Sad gurlz club inc'
Meanwhile, TMZ has confirmed that Bieber's hit Love Yourself is about Chantel.
Originally fans had suspected the track was about his ex-girlfriend Selena, however, with lyrics like 'all the clubs you get in using my name' was a hint that the girl in question wasn't as famous as the star.
Beach babe: Chantel looked gorgeous in a black multi-strap bikini in this image she shared on Saturday
Chantel and Bieber dated in 2014 and she was in his car when he was arrested for a DUI in Miami.
Earlier this month the brunette beauty was pictured at the US launch of the retail brand PrettyLittleThing and was spotted wearing the same dress as reality star Kylie Jenner.
The Keeping Up The Kardashians star, 18, wore a low-cut orange dress with asymmetric hemline while Chantel sported the same but in a shade of lilac.
Last week, Today co-host Sylvia Jeffreys announced she got engaged to Peter Stefanovic while the couple were on holiday in Europe.
And the 30-year-old journalist couldn't resist showing off her flashy diamond ring upon her return to the Channel Nine breakfast show's panel on Monday.
Sylvia beamed with pride while flaunting the large, expensive-looking accessory as she gushed over the 'exquisite' work of Sydney's Nader Jewellers.
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She said 'Yes'! Sylvia Jeffreys couldn't resist showing off her flashy diamond ring from fiance Peter Stefanovic on Monday upon her return to the Today show panel after their romantic European holiday
Speaking of the proposal in France, Sylvia told her colleagues: '(It was) completely by surprise to be honest! He got me alright.'
She added: 'Thank goodness he didn't propose to me at the Euro 2016 Game. It would have been a rejection I think!'
Meanwhile, Sylvia could hardly stop smiling as co-host Lisa Wilkinson encouraged her to flaunt her stunning engagement ring for the cameras.
Showing it off: Sylvia (left) could hardly stop smiling as co-host Lisa Wilkinson (right) encouraged her to flaunt her stunning engagement ring for the cameras
Sylvia also revealed how Peter collaborated with luxury high-end jewellers Nader to make the perfect design.
She even claimed they delved into her Instagram account 'to look at the structure of (her) fingers' and the kind of jewellery she wears.
'So thank you to (jeweller) Patrick Nader and thank you, Pete!' she said. 'Because it's exquisite and I can't believe it's on my finger.'
The perfect ring: Sylvia revealed Peter collaborated with high-end jewellers Nader to make the luxury design
'It was completely by surprise!' Last week, Sylvia revealed that she and Peter (right) got engaged in France
True love: Peter and Sylvia began dating in late 2013 after co-hosting the weekend edition of Today together
Looking happier than ever, the Brisbane-born TV personality claimed that she 'would have accepted a burger ring from Pete!'
But the glowing expression on Sylvia's face left no doubt that she was particularly pleased with the decision her fiance made.
On Monday, Patrick Nader told Daily Mail Australia that they had been designing the ring with Peter for around two months.
'He wanted something perfect that Sylvia would love for the rest of her life, but that also wasn't over the top,' said Patrick.
'It's exquisite': Jeweller Patrick Nader confirmed they delved into Sylvia's Instagram account to study the details of her hand and finger because Peter didn't want to spoil the surprise by asking her any questions
He also confirmed that Nader did look through Sylvia's social media accounts to study the details of her hand and finger.
'Peter did not want to ask her about anything because he wanted to surprise her,' Patrick added. 'We decided an oval shape was best suited for her body.'
Last Monday, Sylvia revealed on Instagram she was engaged to Channel Nine journalist Peter, the younger brother of Today co-anchor Karl Stefanovic.
Wedding bells! The glowing expression on Sylvia's face left no doubt that she was pleased with Peter's choice
The genetically-blessed couple had been travelling around France and Italy and got engaged 'a couple of weeks ago', but postponed the announcement.
When Lisa heard her younger protege's good news, she was almost reduced to tears of happiness.
She said: 'I'll tell you why everyone's so excited Sylvia. You are an extraordinary woman and Pete is an absolutely beautiful man.
'And from the very first moment that people started hearing that you two were an item, everyone just said, "Of course".
'You are an extraordinary woman': When Lisa (right) heard her younger protege's good news last week, she was almost reduced to tears of happiness
One big happy family! Peter (right) is the younger brother of Sylvia's Today colleague Karl Stefanovic (centre)
'You guys are absolutely meant to be together and we're just... we couldn't be happier. I've got tears in my eyes, I'm so excited for you.'
Peter and Sylvia began dating in late 2013 after co-hosting the weekend edition of Today as summer replacements for the regular panel.
The early months of their relationship were long distance as Peter travelled overseas as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network.
She withdrew her hopes for gold at the Rio Olympic Games in April.
But the elite athlete is gearing up for a different type of race as she reveals she is pregnant with baby number three.
Speaking to Woman's Day magazine, the 33-year-old says 'motherhood is my new Olympics' as she confirms she's 13 weeks pregnant - from the same sperm donor with whom she had 15-month-old daughter Emily.
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Bump alert! Jana Pittman has confirmed she's 13 weeks pregnant with her third child, who was conceived using an IVF sperm donor
'It was amazing - I cried tears of joy,' said Jana, who has already picked out the name Matilda for her baby girl.
Having previously struggled with fertility issues, the Sydney-born star had 14 eggs harvested during the IVF treatment, with only one deemed viable with a 30 per cent chance of 'taking'.
The former world champion 400m hurdler says she doesn't know who the sperm donor is, but her daughters will be able to meet their father one day if they so choose.
Maternal: The 33-year-old elite athlete already has a son Cornelis, nine, and daughter Emily, 15-months
Jana also has a son, Cornelis, nine, from her previous marriage to English athlete Chris Rawlinson.
Without revealing his identity, the sportswoman also admits she's rekindled a romance with a former love.
'I might even have another [baby] with my man, who knows!' she revealed.
Jana is currently half way through a medical degree at Western Sydney University and plans to specialise in gynecology so she can help other women like herself who struggled with fertility issues.
New dream: Jana won the 400m hurdles in the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, but reveals 'motherhood is my new Olympics'
Last year, the mother-of-two welcomed her daughter Emily by delivering the baby herself.
The elite athlete and medical student told Woman's Day in an interview that her daughter was 'far more slippery than I thought' when she reached down and put her hands on her baby's head as she was crowning.
'I'd always wanted to deliver my own baby,' Jana explained to the magazine.
'It's definitely one of the most beautiful things I've ever done.'
Behati Prinsloo is expecting her first baby with rocker husband Adam Levine on September 20.
And she's already lining up friends for her little girl.
On Sunday the 27-year-old posted an adorable photo of her model pal Shannan Click's three-year-old daughter stroking her baby bump.
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Baby's first play date: On Sunday Behati Prinsloo posted a cute snap of her model pal Shannan Click's three-year-old daughter stroking her baby bump, captioned, 'Sage talking to her future best friend'
She captioned it: 'Sage talking to her future best friend' and added a string of question marks.
All that was visible of Behati in the selfie was her burgeoning belly covered in a blue dress with white circular flower patterns.
The blonde cutie, who was wearing a blue sleeveless frock had both her hands on the Namibian-born beauty's tummy as she stared up at her mum's friend.
Bathroom selfie: The 27-year-old, who is expecting a baby girl with rocker husband Adam Levine on September 20, has been sharing her pregnancy on social media and posted this selfie on Friday
Shannan, 32, also shares a son, six month-old baby Cypress, with British actor Jack Huston.
Behati and Shannan are both Victoria's Secret Angels.
Prinsloo has been documenting her pregnancy on social media and she posted another stunning Instagram snapshot on Friday.
Sense of humour: The Victoria's Secret Angel decorated this fun snap of her baby bump as she lay by a pool
The model held her blossoming baby bump as she snapped a photo of herself in a blue printed frock in a bathroom.
Meanwhile, she and Adam, the British frontman for the band Maroon 5, will celebrate their second wedding anniversary on Tuesday.
The couple were together for two years before tying the knot.
She's been busy in Ischia for the past few days as she attended the island's film festival.
And model Petra Nemcova continued to enjoy the delights of the Italian paradise as she headed to the beach on Sunday.
The 37-year-old model looked stunning in a semi sheer black kaftan, covering her matching bikini set.
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Composed: Petra Nemcova continued to enjoy the delights of Ischia as she headed to the beach on Sunday
Mindful of the bright weather the Czech beauty wore a pair of oversized sunglasses to keep out the glare.
Completing her casual outfit were a pair of simple sandals embellished with jewels, showing off her red pedicure.
Slung over one shoulder was a stylish metallic silver bag to hold all her essentials for her day by the sea.
Petra appeared in high spirits and positively beamed for the cameras as she walked to the idyllic beach and took her place on a lounger under a straw umbrella.
Revealing: The 37-year-old model looked stunning in a semi sheer black kaftan, covering her matching bikini set
Beaming: Mindful of the bright weather the Czech beauty wore a pair of oversized sunglasses to keep out the glare
Enjoying herself: Completing her casual outfit were a pair of simple sandals embellished with jewels, showing off her red pedicure
Her long blonde tresses were worn slicked back in a casual style - perfect for her time relaxing in the sun.
Earlier in the week Petra had attended the annual Ischia Global Film & Music Fest, which celebrates its 14th anniversary this year.
It is a special occasion for the model in 2016, as she was 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.
Resting: Her long blonde tresses were worn slicked back in a casual style - perfect for her time relaxing in the sun
Exposed: Earlier in the week Petra had attended the Ischia Global Film & Music Fest takes, which takes place every year and this will be the 14th year of the arts celebration
It has now been running for a decade, having been launched two years after her fiance, British photographer Simon Atlee, 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.
The model spent eight hours clinging to a palm tree as the waves wrecked the Thai landscape and when taken to hospital she was told that her injuries were so appalling she would never walk again.
Long legs: Aside from her prominence in the modelling world, Petra is known for founding and chairing the Happy Hearts Fund
Excited: Petra appeared in high spirits and positively beamed for the cameras as she walked to the idyllic beach and took her place on a lounger under a straw umbrella
She's renowned for experimenting with her personal style.
And Caitlin Stasey has proved she's still a chameleon as she debuts a wild new look on social media.
Taking to Instagram on Monday, the 26-year-old shared snaps of her new permed tresses while flashing her cleavage in a robe.
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Professional poser: Caitlin Stasey, 26, showed off a newly-permed hairstyle on Instagram along with plenty of cleavage
The former Neighbours actress wore a printed dressing gown as she provocatively posed for the camera.
The garment was pulled down to expose her shoulders and cleavage as she pouted for the snap.
In another photo, the self-proclaimed feminist actress turned her head to show off the new hairstyle from a different angle.
Covered up: The actress, who is known for sharing provocative snaps of herself, has opted to remain fairly modest in her recent post
Caitlin, who is known for showing plenty of skin on social media, appeared to be topless underneath her gown.
The Melbourne-born star is a proud supporter of the 'Free The Nipple' campaign, an ongoing protest against Instagram's 'no nipple policy' when it comes to women's breasts.
Over the past few years, she has made a habit of finding unusual ways to obscure her nipples in provocative nude online snaps.
Bed head: The actress shared another photo to reveal how she achieved her curly locks
Rising up: The 26-year old starred as Rachel Kinksi on popular Aussie soap Neighbours before leaving in 2009
The actress has been dating actor beau Lucas Neff for over a year, however she has been open about her mixed sexual orientation.
She previously described casual consenting sex as 'empowering', while admitting she regards marriage as 'an archaic institution, its just awful...'.
The actress surprised many last year when speaking about her past, describing herself as a 'lesbian'.
Outspoken: The actress has made a habit of finding unusual ways to obscure her nipples in provocative nude online snaps
Loved-up: Caitlin has been dating actor beau Lucas Neff (pictured) for over a year, however she has been open about her mixed sexual orientation
She explained to fans: 'I know it troubles people for me to refer to myself as a lesbian considering I have a male partner.
'Ive known I was mostly gay ever since I can remember... Im happier being fluid. I'm happier being honest.'
The opinionated star launched her own website, titled Herself, which is aimed at empowering women in areas of sex, gender roles and body image.
MARTINSDALE This summer, the Charles M. Bair Family Museum will display ledger drawings from MSU Billings Librarys Barstow Collection.
The collection consists of 66 drawings by members of the Crow (Apsaalooke) and Hidatsa (Gros Ventre of the River), who were together on the Crow Agency Reservation in the 1880s and 1890s.
Elizabeth Guheen, director and chief curator of the Bair Family Museum, said the ledger drawings in this summers exhibition speak to a specific time in the life of Native people in Montana and in the U.S. The artwork contains many different messages because they are communicating across time and history and through many generations.
The Indian schools on the reservations focused on the governments goal of 'Americanizing' the Indian population on the youngest members of the tribes. Students were required to cut their hair, speak only English, and wear American clothing," Guheen said.
Schools required that the children change their names to more American ones. A few of the drawings appear to be signed by the artist because they had been sent to school.
In answer to the implied question, Who are you? the scrawled signature written in pencil I am the Indian Boy is a defining metaphor for children taken from their parents and their way of life, Guheen said.
Major Charles Barstow was chief clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Crow Agency from 1879 to 1897. He provided Indian warriors materials and encouraged them to paint and draw.
The ledger drawings mimic the function of traditional buffalo hide painting narrative of social status, youthful adventure from capturing horses and counting coups to dancing and courtship. Barstows collection was rediscovered in 1930 in Roundup and came to MSU Billings through the efforts of Ruthann Wilbur Hines.
The Bair Family Museum in Martinsdale is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week through Labor Day. Visit www.bairfamilymuseum.org.
It's been 35 years since she lost her younger brother Yoris to T-cell leukaemia.
But actress Marta Dusseldorp still remembers the profound sense of grief she felt, which has affected the way she monitors the health of her own children.
The mother-of-two revealed to TV Week magazine her daughters Grace and Maggie are constantly checked for any health irregularities, saying she's 'very vigilant'.
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Attentive mother: Actress Marta Dusseldorp admits she's 'vigilant' about monitoring her children's health after losing her brother to childhood cancer
The 43-year-old actress admits losing her brother when she was just eight-years-old 'makes you feel older than you need to be at that age and more weighted - burdened.'
Marta said: 'There was a part of me that tried to be strong for my parents, because I could see the devastation in them.'
Nowadays, the Janet King star is doing her part to promote cancer awareness in children.
Family: The 43-year-old regularly checks her children Grace, nine, and Maggie, six for ailments
She's currently promoting the Cancer Council's Daffodil Day on August 26 while also juggling her television career.
Last month, the blonde beauty revealed her age has not had an effect on her career opportunities.
'I was in LA in February and I felt completely nurtured, appreciated, they were really excited to have me there,' she told Daily Mail Australia at the Sydney Film Festival Closing Night Gala.
'It doesn't matter how old you are any more, it's the feeling I get...maybe I'm naive.
Busy: The mother-of-two is currently promoting the Cancer Council's Daffodil Day to raise awareness of childhood cancer
'They're certainly writing roles for us and it means that people want to see that,' the star admitted, following a recent trip to discuss opportunities Stateside.
The actress was coy, however, when asked if she would be making the move to Los Angeles in the coming months with her husband Ben Winspear and their children off the back of the positive trip.
The actress said she is set to film the next season of Janet King in November, before hopefully, Season Five of the Foxtel drama A Place To Call Home 'and then we'll see'.
Mariah Carey and her fiance James Packer have spent the last few days soaking up the sun on the French Riviera.
And the couple looked in suitably good spirits as they arrived for a private dinner with friends in Saint-Tropez on Sunday night.
The 46-year-old pop diva stole the spotlight in a plunging tight pink dress while billionaire James, 48, was spotted beaming with pride.
Stealing the spotlight! Mariah Carey (left) looked suitably glamourous on holiday in Saint-Tropez, France on Sunday night, while her fiance James Packer (right) took a notably more casual approach
It is understood the couple were walking to an evening soiree with Hollywood director Brett Ratner and James' friend Ben Tilley.
James looked like he'd caught the sun recently as he displayed a reddish tan, while Mariah flaunted her beautifully bronzed glow.
Meanwhile, the Without You star showed off plenty of cleavage in her stylish bodycon dress which featured a low-cut neckline.
No wonder he's smiling! Mariah, 46, displayed plenty of cleavage in tight pink dress with a plunging neckline
You're a lucky man, James! The Australian billionaire couldn't stop smiling next to his glamourous fiancee
Mariah gave onlookers a glimpse of her sun-kissed decolletage and also displayed her shapely legs in a pair sheer tights.
She styled her sleek brunette hair loosely and accessorised in typically extravagant style with several statement rings.
Her partner James, however, took a notably more casual approach in a dark, loose-fitting ensemble.
Summer days: James looked like he'd caught the sun recently as he displayed a reddish tan, while Mariah flaunted her beautifully bronzed glow
Busty: The US singer displayed plenty of cleavage in her bodycon dress which featured a low-cut neckline
The 6ft 6in-tall businessman opted for a navy long-sleeve top with a scooped neck and black trousers.
Meanwhile, Mariah and James got engaged back in January after a whirlwind romance of less than a year.
The son of late media tycoon Kerry Packer presented her with a diamond ring with an estimated value of US$7.5 million.
A sheer delight! Mariah gave fans a glimpse of her sun-kissed decolletage while flaunting her shapely legs
Keeping it casual: James took a more laid back approach in a navy long-sleeve top with a scooped neck
She's overjoyed to be celebrating her youngest child's first birthday.
And Jaime King also celebrated one of the most important figures in her son Leo Thames' life on Sunday as the actress gave a shout out to his godmother Taylor Swift.
The 37-year-old actress shared a collage of special moments between the songstress and her precious tot on Twitter with a message for the Blank Space hitmaker.
Special moments: Jaime King shared a cute collage of Taylor Swift who is godmother to her son Leo in honour of the tot's first birthday on Saturday
'Wow! @taylorswift13 LT's 1st bday already?! He sends kisses & a bangin' 2 teeth smile to his Godmother in Oz. We [love] u!'
In one of the snaps Taylor can be seen peering over her BFF's shoulder to gaze at her pregnant belly.
In another she sits with Leo on her lap and lets him suck on her fingers.
The 37-year-old actress captioned this snap: 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY BEAUTIFUL BABY LEO THAMES! I can't believe you are one today. My [love] my miracle'
Too cute! The doting mum shared passport snaps of her boys on Sunday writing 'Mugshots'
Taylor, 26, is currently in Australia with her new beau Tom Hiddleston while he films Thor: Ragnarok.
Jaime has been married to director Kyle Newman since 2007 who she also shares James, two, with.
The actress is currently finding the perfect balance between motherhood and her career.
She will soon be seen in a new sketch comedy show called Attention Deficit Theater on CW Seed, which she is also producing.
The actress has also joined Kristin Nystrom of clothing company Gardner and the Gang to create a line of gender-neutral clothing for children, The Lion's Heart.
She's one of Hollywood's most glamorous exports, and never fails to make a glamorous statement on the red carpet.
So it was little surprise to see Eva Longoria pulling out all the stops in the style department at the Global Gift Gala in Marbella, Spain over the weekend.
Slipping into a figure-hugging midnight blue gown, the 41-year-old actress showcased her incredible figure and slender curves as she hit the red carpet solo.
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Stunning: Eva Longoria pulled out all the stops in the style department at the Global Gift Gala in Marbella, Spain over the weekend
But with her playing a pivotal role in the evening's proceedings, being the hostess of the benefit ball, Eva ensured that she was nothing but glamorous.
Slipping her svelte hourglass figure into a figure-hugging, floor-length gown, the brunette beauty flaunted her trim and toned form.
Featuring an asymmetrical neckline, which featured metallic detailing, the dark clinging gown allowed Eva to show a hint of skin whilst retaining her modesty.
Form-fitting fashion: Slipping into a figure-hugging midnight blue gown, the 41-year-old actress showcased her incredible figure and slender curves as she hit the red carpet solo
Wearing a slim black leather belt around her waist, the Telenovela star further highlighted her toned waistline.
She rounded her look off with a pair of heels, which helped to accentuate and define her figure.
Keeping her look utterly effortless and stylishly sparse, Eva made sure non of her accessories clashed with her ensemble; only opting for a few pieces of simple jewellery and a pair of sparkling earrings.
Figure-flashing fashion: Slipping her svelte hourglass figure into a figure-hugging, floor-length gown, the brunette beauty flaunted her trim and toned form
Subtle yet sassy: Featuring an asymmetrical neckline, which featured metallic detailing, the dark clinging gown allowed Eva to show a hint of skin whilst retaining her modesty
Wearing her tresses pulled back in a sleek and shimmering up do, the actress allowed her striking and pretty looks to shine through.
Opting for a minimal palette of make-up, the stunning star only chose to define her eyes with a flash of mascara, whilst she subtly added some volume to her lips with a flash of nude lipstick.
But Eva's savvy display of sartorial sass didn't end there, as earlier on in the weekend, the stunning star stole the limelight on Saturday night in a plunging azure gown.
However, the tinsel town star wasn't the only famous beauty on the red carpet at the event, as supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio was also present for the event.
Another star turn : Eva's savvy display of sartorial sass didn't end there, as earlier on in the weekend, the stunning star stole the limelight on Saturday night in a plunging azure gown
The Desperate Housewives and the stunning Brazilian beauty star shared several snaps together during their charitable evening together.
Eva was dressed in plum evening gown that featured a one-shoulder strap, beaded neckline.
The Latin beauty wore her signature, trademark smokey eye, which featured blue and purple colouring to match her dress.
The Eva's Heroes founder wore her hair parted down the middle in a low updo.
Hanging out: However, the tinsel town star wasn't the only famous beauty on the red carpet at the event, as supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio was also present for the event
'My husband can't do snapchat!': Eva was undoubtedly happy to see her pal Alessandra Ambrossio, and the two posed together for videos and pictures
Eva was undoubtedly happy to see her pal Alessandra. The two posed together for videos and pictures, which appeared to have been filmed by Eva's husband, Jose Baston.
'My husband can't do snapchat!' joked the star, either hinting that he was camera shy, or was simply not a good photographer.
As for Alessandra, the model mother-of-two wore a light-coloured gown complete with a ruffle neckline and accessorized with a beaded necklace and hoop earrings.
Such a beauty: Eva was dressed in plum evening gown that featured a one-shoulder strap, beaded neckline
Happiness: Eva proved that the evening was more than just catching up with her celebrity pals. She is pictured with a boy named Adrian Vega, who later performed at the gala that night
Eva proved that the evening was more than just catching up with her celebrity pals.
The star, who also is the founder of the Eva Longoria Foundation, spent the earlier part of the day with children who will benefit from the Global Gift Foundation.
It appears that she visited a house that would host those in need.
'Casa Global...is an amazing house which...helps kids with rare and chronic diseases,' she noted.
Eva, who is honorary chairwoman of the Global Gift Gala, travels all over the world for the Gala, with the most recent event taking place in Cannes in May.
The Global Gift Gala is a non-profit organisation focused on making a positive impact on the lives of children, women and families.
His stage: Talented Adrian gave a heartfelt performance during the evening
She is a ballroom dancer and Dancing With The Stars performer by trade earning a decent salary by all accounts.
And while Kym Johnson is not short of cash, the 39-year-old is reportedly poised to sign a prenup prepared by her Shark Tank star fiance Robert Herjavec barring her to his millions.
A source has told Woman's Day that the effervescent blonde 'has agreed to sign a prenup that gives her next to nothing' in the event of them splitting up.
Careful: Robert Herjavec and Kym Johnson, pictured at the Entertainment Weekly & People Upfronts bash in New York in May, will marry imminently and his lawyers have 'drawn up a prenup' safeguarding his cash
The publication reports that Canadian Robert was left burned when his wife Diane Plese claimed half his $263million fortune when they divorced after 25 years of marriage.
The insider tells the magazine: 'It's a case of once bitten twice shy for Robert.
'But Kym loves him with all her heart and she couldn't imagine life without him.'
Dazzling: Kym is said to not be worried about signing the agreement because of her deep love for him. Pictured at the Babes For Boobs Auction Benefit in Los Angeles in June
The smitten couple met during season 20 of ABC's Dancing With The Stars and became engaged a year later.
'I still can't believe that a year after walking into a dance studio of all places, my life has changed this much,' 53-year-old Robert told People magazine shortly after.
'Kym is an incredible woman and I'm just so excited for what the future brings for us.'
He put a ring on it! The dashing Canadian popped the question to Australian beauty Kym, and sealed the deal by presenting her with a 6.5-carat ring
'My life has changed this much,' 53-year-old Robert told People magazine shortly after asking Kym for her hand in marriage
He popped the question to the Australian dancer and sealed the deal with a 6.5-carat ring.
They then celebrated their engagement with about 30 family members and friends, including Kym's mother who travelled from Australia.
For her part, the ballroom dancer and TV personality told People: 'I'm just overwhelmed and so happy.
'He's a wonderful man and I'm so lucky.'
Hosting role: Kym says she feels complete since finding love with Robert
They were friends and drinking buddies for decades before starting their Casamigos tequila brand.
And Hollywood heartthrob George Clooney and restaurant mogul Rande Gerber are excited to launch their liquor line in Australia in August.
Announcing the news on Monday, the business partners said in a statement: 'Our idea was to make the best-tasting, smoothest tequila whose taste didnt have to be covered up with salt or lime. So we did.'
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In good spirits: Rande Gerber (left) and George Clooney's (right) Casamigos tequila brand is launching in Australia in August
Founded by their combined love of tequila, the longtime friends joined forces with Discovery Land Company CEO Mike Meldman to create the range of premium tequila, made from 100% Blue Weber agaves.
Rande, 54, is the husband of supermodel Cindy Crawford and the couple have been friends with George, 55, for many years.
In fact, the pals even had twin villas in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, which they sold to a Mexican billionaire for a whopping $131 million in April.
Drinking buddies: George and Rande drank Casamigos for years among friends before making it available to the public to buy
The handsome pair struck up a friendship after meeting at a New York bar owned by Rande over 20 years ago.
'We had a couple of drinks,' Rande told The Times.
'We started hanging out. We just enjoyed each other's company.'
When George met his now wife Amal, the human rights lawyer was a welcomed addition to their friendship group.
Family: Rande and his supermodel wife Cindy Crawford both approve of George's wife Amal, whom they reveal is a great addition to their friendship group.
'I think [Amal] was the right woman for him. It wasn't timing, it was meeting the right person,' Rande said.
Meanwhile, Rande's wife Cindy also gushed about Amal.
Fifi Box was spotted relishing in quality bonding time with daughter Beatrix 'Trixie' Belle Box on Saturday.
The 39-year-old Australian radio presenter was spotted out and about in Melbourne, enjoying a leisurely stroll with her three-year-old little girl.
Opting for a casual chic ensemble, Fifi was seen wearing a grey coloured coat layered over a light blouse.
Mother and daughter time: Fifi Box was spotted spending quality bonding time with daughter Beatrix 'Trixie' Belle Box in Melbourne on Saturday
She had slipped her legs into a pair of fitted black trousers, while a pair of black ankle leather boots were her footwear of choice.
Proving her penchant for accessorising, the media personality added a few more items to take her look to the next level.
A black handbag was slung over her left arm, while she completed her look with a pair of sassy shades.
Special moment: The Fox FM host was seen keeping very close to her daughter
Out and about: The 39-year-old Australian radio presenter was spotted out and about in Melbourne, enjoying a leisurely stroll with her three-year-old little girl and her mother
With her golden locks worn out sleek and straight, Fifi appeared to be in high spirits as she enjoyed her daughter's company.
Trixie looked very cute and all dressed up for the occasion.
She sported a leotard printed with a swan design, teamed with a pale pink tutu.
Keeping it cool: Radio and television personality Fifi opted for a casual chic ensemble on the day
Casual chic: Fifi was seen wearing a grey coloured coat layered over a light blouse
Strutting it: She had slipped her legs into a pair of fitted black trousers, while a pair of black ankle leather boots were her footwear of choice
A navy spotted jacket was also added to the ensemble, as well as a pair of tights.
With a pair of running shoes and a silver bag in her hand, Trixie had her look complete with a purple coloured ribbon.
Earlier this month, during the winter radio ratings break, Fifi enjoyed some time in the sun with her daughter.
The proud mother-of-one shared a series of images from the idyllic trip to Instagram, but it was one particular post that got fans in a whirl about it being a family holiday.
Blonde beauty: Fifi wore her golden locks out sleek and straight
Cuddles: The Australian celebrity took the time to hug and kiss her little girl
Sweet style: Trixie looked very cute and all dressed up for the occasion
One adorable snap showed Trixie jumping into the arms of a man, which fans believe to be Lisa Curry's ex-husband, Grant Kenny, who was confirmed as Trixie's father just months ago.
Alongside the image of the toddler jumping into the mystery man's arms without her floaties on, fans were quick to comment beside the sweet snap, saying: 'And into Dads arms. How AWESOME! Onya Grant!'
One fan asked 'who's catching?', while another noted: 'With her dad , precious'.
Looking cute: She sported a leotard printed with a swan design, teamed with a pale pink tutu
Cheeky: Trixie was seen pulling on her famous mother's hair at one stage
Precious: No doubt Fifi was making the most of her time with Trixie, who she welcomed back in 2013
Although there wasn't mention of who the man was and part of his face was cropped from the photo, it appeared to be the 53-year-old former athlete.
The Ironman also appeared to be the one behind the camera for an adorable mother and daughter shot, also posted on Sunday by the radio personality.
Fifi shared a lovely photo of herself cuddling up to Trixie as they relaxed by the pool, captioned: 'Poolside shnuggles'.
Earlier in the day, the blonde star shared another holiday happy snap - a mother and daughter selfie.
Shady lady: Fifi shielded her eyes with a pair of sassy sunglasses on the day
Natural look: Fifi sported relatively little makeup, with just a soft lip stick and a hint of mascara accentuating her stunning facial features
Little treasure: Fifi usually doesn't have time to see her daughter first thing in the morning as she is the breakfast host on Fox FM's Fifi & Dave show during the week
'Best holiday with my best girl,' Fifi captioned the image of herself smiling with little Trixie posed beside her.
Fifi flaunted her holiday glow and sported a cream straw hat with a colourful pair of sunglasses in the snap.
Her daughter meanwhile, looked sweet in a pink floral swimsuit and a turquoise hat to shield her skin from the sun.
Family matters: Trixie's father is Grant Kenny, with the news being confirmed earlier this year
Television star: Fifi also makes regular appearances on Channel Ten program The Project
The true relationship between Trixie and Grant was only confirmed in April, when Fifi posted the first ever photo of the toddler and her father together.
'Bouncing castle daddy cuddles,' the caption read alongside a photo of Grant hugging his little girl.
Fifi and Grant were an item and reportedly split in 2012, shortly before Fifi announced she was expecting.
Appearing on The Project in April, the popular radio personality denied and laughed off rumours she would tie the knot with her former flame.
She just returned from an 'official hiatus' for two weeks in Fiji.
But it was back to work for Shay Mitchell as she as she posed in several gorgeous styles for a Smashbox Cosmetics photo shoot over the weekend.
The 29-year-old star took on an alter ego 'Svetlana' in an ensemble as she decided to forgo a blouse altogether and put on a busty display in a plunging blazer.
'Meet Svetlana': Shay Mitchell took on an alter ego for her photo shoot with Smashbox Cosmetics over the weekend
The Pretty Little Liars actress left little to the imagination in the revealing garb and paired the fitted suit jacket with skintight black trousers to showcase her endless stems.
She slicked her long silky tresses back into a high sleek and sexy ponytail as to not draw any attention away from the main attraction.
As she modelled for the cosmetics brand, she whipped her ponytail back and forth and captioned the video: 'Look of focus and pure hair flipping determination.'
Eye-popping! The 29-year-old Pretty Little Liars actress put on a busty display as she decided to forgo a blouse and opted for a plunging blazer instead
Slim pins: The Freeform star paired the fitted suit jacket with skintight black trousers to showcase her endless stems
'Pure hair flipping determination:' As she modelled for the cosmetics brand, she whipped her ponytail back and forth
Another look saw Mitchell with long, stick straight bright pink hair and a low-cut white top with lace-up sides.
She lip-synced to Drake's One Dance while posing up a storm in the pretty pastel wig.
The Canadian-born cutie shared several videos and images of herself throughout Saturday and Sunday on set for the beauty line.
Pretty in pink: The Canadian-born cutie shared several videos and images including one in a low-cut white sleeveless top
Pretty as a petal: Another look saw Mitchell with long, stick straight bright pink hair as she used a floral garland Snapchat filter
Mitchell looked angelic as she used a hot pink Snapchat filter with flower crown in another video.
The brunette beauty - who stars as Emily Fields on the hit ABC series - recently documented her getaway on Instagram.
She began an 'official hiatus' on July 2 and traveled throughout Fiji and posted various gorgeous images of herself on holiday.
Picture perfect: Mitchell clearly had a ball using a handful of selfie filters on the popular social media mobile app
White hot! Shay lip-synced to Drake's One Dance while posing up a storm in a revealing top with lace-up sides
It's widely been hinted that the seventh season of Pretty Little Liars - which kicked off last month - will be its last.
But Shay recently insisted there is a chance that the hit Freeform show will continue beyond that.
Last month Time magazine asked her if this season would be the last, to which she responded: 'It's not official - I don't think anything is ever official, especially in Rosewood.'
Who's that girl? The beauty also poked fun at herself using different filters which left her unrecognisable
Last month, Samantha Harris said 'life has been really good' since her fiance Luke Hunt was released from prison.
But the fashion model certainly did not look in positive spirits as she was spotted shopping with her jailbird partner in Sydney this week.
The 25-year-old brunette appeared tired and downcast as she held hands with Luke on Oxford Street on Monday.
Feeling down? Fashion model Samantha Harris (right) looked tired and downcast as she held hands with her jailbird fiance Luke Hunt (left) in Sydney on Monday - two months after he was released from prison
Despite this seemingly affectionate display, Samantha's unhappy facial expression perhaps betrayed her true feelings.
With her hair styled in a simple updo, there was no disguising her possibly bleak mood during the couple's day out.
They were seen leaving a shoe shop together, but when out in the street Samantha promptly replaced her dark sunglasses.
Meanwhile, Luke maintained a neutral expression as he carried a bag and also displayed a flashy gold watch.
Arms crossed: The 25-year-old did not look in positive spirits as the couple were spotted browsing a shop
Samantha famously supported Luke after he was sent to prison for two years for causing the death of a grandfather following a fatal car crash in 2012.
In May, she was even photographed collecting Luke from St Heliers Correctional Centre upon his release, joined by his mother.
But the next day, Samantha was spotted at Sydney Airport before flying to Queensland alone for a modelling job.
A representative told Daily Mail Australia at the time that Luke was not able to travel with her under his parole conditions.
Meanwhile, the pair were seen last month engaged in what appeared to be a tense conversation as they walked along Woolloomooloo Wharf.
Holding hands: Despite the seemingly affectionate display, Samantha's unhappy facial expression perhaps betrayed her true feelings
On display: There was no disguising Samantha's possibly bleak mood during the couple's day out
In May 2014, Luke was sentenced to four years in prison, of which he served two years, after his speeding car ran a red light and collided with another, killing 78-year-old Kenneth Lay.
Luke pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death, and the court heard he had been speeding in the 60km/h zone, driving at 95km/h.
Luke had been trying to change lanes at high speed when his Commodore collided into Mr Lay's Hyundai Lantra at the intersection of Warringah Rd and Alfred St, Narraweena.
Meanwhile: Luke maintained a neutral expression as he carried a bag and displayed a flashy gold watch
Loyalty: Samantha notably supported Luke after he was sent to prison for two years for causing the death of a grandfather following a fatal car crash in 2012
The couple have been engaged since December 2010, after first meeting at a Gold Coast shopping centre when Sam was 17.
The model doesn't often speak publicly about their relationship status, but was spotted wearing her engagement ring while her partner was behind bars.
Speaking of their wedding plans last month, Samantha told The Courier Mail: 'Things are going very slowly, but surely'.
'It is great. Life has been really good,' she concluded.
Dangerous driving: In May 2014, Luke was sentenced to four years in prison, of which he served two years, after his speeding car ran a red light and collided with another, killing 78-year-old Kenneth Lay
Just a few days after being released from prison Teresa Giudice managed to upset her old friend Jacqueline Laurita as well as HER sister-in-law Melissa Gorga and cousin Rosie Pierri.
The feisty ex-con on Sunday's episode of The Real Housewives Of New Jersey accused Melissa of being disingenuous and failed to invite Rosie and Jacqueline to her lavish New Year's Eve party.
Melissa, 37, said her relationship with Teresa was superficial.
New start: Teresa Giudice managed to upset an old friend, her sister-in-law and cousin on Sunday's episode of The Real Housewives Of New Jersey
'Sometimes I feel like it's surface, like we can't really get there all the way,' she said.
'Believe me, if you are genuine, I can feel it,' snapped Teresa, 44, with irritation.
Melissa proclaimed that she loved Teresa 'like a sister'
'Then show it to me,' spat Teresa, who later managed to paper the cracks with Melissa for the sake of the NYE party.
Mixed emotions: Jacqueline Laurita wasn't sure how to feel when Teresa called her on New Year's Eve after not inviting her to the party
Candid conversation: Teresa and sister-in-law Melissa Gorga addressed unresolved tension
Meanwhile, Jacqueline was grieving the loss of their friendship.
'Old Teresa, I want old Teresa,' she said.
'Well that person is still inside her,' said her husband Chris.
Party time: Jacqueline and husband Chris celebrated New Year's Eve with their closest
'It feels like a different era, we've both said so many things that were bad about each other, it's hard to get past that,' she complained.
While Teresa enjoyed her own New Year's Eve bash, Rosie and Jaqueline were at a separate party with Kathy Wakile and her husband Rich.
'So why weren't you at Teresa's?' Jacqueline asked Rosie.
Not invited: Rosie admitted that she was surprised that she wasn't invited to Teresa's party
'We weren't invited either, and you know what? I'm a little surprised,' said Rosie.
Adding: 'Maybe I'm not good with my cousin? I don't know. When Teresa was away Joe [Giudice] and I would text...we'd crack up laughing'.
'Do you really think your relationship with Joe is better, with Teresa not being around?' asked Rich.
Relationship status: Joe Giudice and Rosie kept in touch when Teresa was in prison but not so much after she was released
'Yeah, it's true,' she responded.
'Since Teresa came home Joe doesn't call me or whatever, we don't have that kind of fun anymore,' she said.
Admitting: 'Yeah it bothers me, it makes me feel sad'.
She's back: Teresa was hoping to improve the dynamics of her relationships after being in prison
The brother: Teresa's brother Joe worried about his wife and Teresa getting along
Teresa called Jacqueline to awkwardly wish her a happy new year.
'This is a little f***ing weird, I'm not going to lie,' said Jacqueline after she put down the phone.
'I thought I'd feel differently when I heard from herbut she's like ''hey I'm having a party with 35 of my closest friends and family but you weren't invited''.
On the phone: Teresa made an effort and reached out to Jacqueline from her party
Kind of weird: Jacqueline thought it was odd that Teresa called her from a party that she wasn't invited to
'She's taking time out of her New Year's Eve party to call me but then she acts cold and distant, I don't know how to respond to her,' she said.
'I still don't understand what I did to her,' said Rosie.
'What is this f***ing high school? F*** you,' she huffed.
Good times: Rosie was upset at being snubbed but still had a good time
Therapy session: Dolores was shown talking to her therapist
'I'm pissed off,' continued Rosie, who vowed to become the 'biggest b**** on wheels' to protect herself from further hurt in the future.
Teresa's eldest daughter Gia, then 14, was insisting she go out with her friends to ring in the New Year.
Joe was livid.
Not happy: Joe Giudice was upset that teenage daughter Gia was going to a New Year's Eve party
'It's New Year's, she should be at home with her family,' he raged.
Yelling: 'And get me an aspirin, I have a headache now'.
'Having a teenager is tough, but she has been through a lot this year,' said Teresa, as Gia screamed her dissent.
Feeling guilty: Teresa felt guilty that Gia had to endure nearly a year without her mom in the house
'I want to make her happy because I do feel a little guilty that I haven't been here for the past eleven and a half months,' she conceded.
'Teresa's Achilles heel is not the IRS, it isn't prison, it's her children, she can't stand to see them upset for one second,' said Dolores Catania.
Gia bitterly fought against the midnight curfew before splitting to be with friends.
Weak spot: Dolores Catania noted that Teresa's weak spot was her children
After returning at 12.15am, Gia sobbed at the thought of her father going to prison.
'I pushed you to do the right thing while mom wasn't here, and now you've got to do the right thing while I'm not here,' Joe told her.
The Real Housewives Of New Jersey continues next week on Bravo.
Big hug: Gia was home by a quarter after midnight and gave her father a big hug
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She recently made the move from Sydney to Byron Bay with her partner Darren Robertson and their son Archie.
And Magdalena Roze seems right at home as she poses in a series of Bohemian-inspired designs for Spell & The Gypsy Collective.
The photoshoot sees the 34-year-old posing alongside her baby boy and even serenading him with a ukulele at one point.
Stunning: Magdalena Roze poses in designs by Spell & The Gypsy Collective alongside her baby son Archie
Wearing a white lace dress with a tan fringed jacket, the weather presenter flashes her gorgeous smile as she strums the ukulele.
Seven-month-old Archie meanwhile, is looking cosy and stylish in his own right in a cream cotton onesie and a knitted cardigan.
Another shot sees the blonde beauty frolicking in the ocean as she shows off her svelte figure in the semi-sheer dress.
Bohemian beauty: The blonde stunner can be seen showing off a series of designs from the Byron Bay label
Ethereal: The 34-year-old flaunted her svelte figure in a semi-sheer white lace dress as she frolicked in the ocean
The meteorologist's blonde locks are worn in tousled waves while her makeup is kept to a minimum to accentuate her naturally flawless complexion.
Other images in the shoot shows Magdalena posing in a colourful off-the-shoulder dress with brown cowboy boots.
Last week, the blonde beauty gushed about her son in an interview with the same brand.
'I'm enjoying rediscovering things through his eyes, simple things like looking at the leaves or trying a new food for the first time, it's magic,' she said.
She went on to explain that the move from Sydney to Byron Bay was planned before the arrival of Archie.
'Wed always wanted to start a family but it happened a little sooner than what we planned!'
'I'm enjoying rediscovering things through his eyes': Magdalena gushed about her seven-month-old son Archie, who was a surprise for herself and partner Darren Robertson
Cute: The new mother, who splits her time between Sydney and Byron Bay, reveals her schedule has to work around her son
The family are now based in the coastal town with Darren opening his second Three Blue Ducks restaurant on The Farm At Byron Bay.
Magdalena splits her time between the two cities, although she revealed: 'When Im in Byron, the day works around Archies routine so when he naps I either take him for a walk, do work calls/emails, work on my blog or write my book.'
Earlier this year the television presenter spoke to The Grace Tales about how motherhood has impacted her life since welcoming Archie.
'Motherhood has expanded the spectrum of my emotions to limits I never knew and in the case of love, its limitless,' she told the publication.
'It has also taught me to relax, slow down, trust my own instincts and shown me how resilient we are!
'The first few weeks of motherhood were such a blur. It was hectic, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. But we got through it as all parents do, and you realise that everything gets better, each day is a new day and it doesnt need to perfect,' she continued.
Learning curve: Speaking about motherhood, Magdalena says the first few weeks were 'such a blur'
The Bachelorette's Georgia Love may be trying to find love with a lucky guy on the show.
But on Friday, she got a little distracted on her one-on-one date with a hunky contestant, by giving attention to a handful of adorable Dalmatian puppies.
The TV presenter could be seen doting over the spotted pooches, but also ensured she packed on some PDA with her love interest, wrapping her arms around him after they got out of a helicopter.
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Puppy love! The Bachelorette's Georgia Love doted over some puppies on a date with a hunky contestant on Friday
Georgia was dressed causally for the day in a navy floral dress, that featured long sleeves, a plunging neckline and two thigh splits.
She teamed the look with a black high-waisted belt to cinch in her waist and wore the look with a cream jacket and black boots.
The brunette had her dark locks left loose over her shoulders and wore natural looking makeup.
Getting swept off her feet? She also ensured she packed on some PDA with her love interest, wrapping her arms around him after they got out of a helicopter
Flower power: Georgia was dressed causally for the day in a navy floral dress, that featured longsleeves, a plunging neckline and two thigh splits
So tiny! The wind sometimes caught her dress but she didn't seem to mind, instead being unable to take her eyes off the puppies
Georgia and her love interest stood on the grass in an area that was done up to include a white picket fence.
The puppies were sitting in the cane baskets in the area and had one blue, pink and red collars and leashes.
Georgia couldn't wipe the smile off her face as she and her friend played in the pen and picked up the puppies.
At one point her pal - who looked smart in a blue shirt and dark jeans - grabbed the leashes of the puppies as they attempted to walk them around.
Like a movie: Georgia and her male pal stood on the grass in an area that was done up to include a white picket fence
Sweet: The puppies were sitting in the cane baskets in the area and had one blue, pink and red collars and leashes
In her element: Georgia couldn't wipe the smile off her face as she and her friend played in the pen and picked up the puppies
That'll help them bond: At one point her pal - who looked smart in a blue shirt and dark jeans - grabbed the leases of the puppies as they attempted to walk them around
Georgia enjoyed cuddling one particular puppy and held it close to her neck, as it played with her hair.
She and her pal first landed in the grassy field in a helicopter, having taken in the views of Sydney from the sky.
He was ever the gentleman and hopped out first before taking her hand to help her out of the helicopter.
It seemed terribly windy when they landed, with her dress blowing between her legs, before she jumped to hug him and fix her fashion mishap.
Touchdown: Georgia and her pal first landed in the grassy field in a helicopter, having taken in the views of Sydney from the sky
It's cheeky! Georgia enjoyed cuddling one particular puppy and held it close to her neck, as it sweetly played with her hair
Good move: He was ever the gentleman and hopped out first before taking her hand to help her out of the helicopter
Whoops: Georgia showed a little more leg than she hoped for when the wind blew
The pair then walked off together and holding hands.
This date comes after Georgia was spotted earlier this month enjoying taking the contestants to an outdoor trapeze lesson.
While there, she shared a smooch with a mystery blonde.
Falling in love? It seemed terribly windy when they landed, with her dress blowing between her legs, before she jumped to hug him and fix her fashion mishap
Going well then: The pair then walked off together and holding hands
Dressed to impress: Her companion wore a blue denim shirt and jeans and looked smart
Quest for love: In June, Georgia confirmed she was the new Bachelorette, taking the reins from Sam Frost
In June, Georgia confirmed she was the new Bachelorette, taking the reins from Sam Frost.
Based in Tasmania, the WIN News personality and former trapeze artist has revealed she quit her job so she can find love.
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.'
Giving it her all: Based in Tasmania, the WIN News personality and former trapeze artist has revealed she quit her job so she can find love
Looks like its paying off: She said she quit her job because doubling up on television 'wouldn't have worked for either party'
Will it be a success? She also admitted that leaving her job in the hopes of snagging a man is risky, with 18 men competing for her affections
She also admitted that leaving her job in the hopes of snagging a man is risky, with 18 men competing for her affections.
'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 also told the publication she has never shacked up with a boyfriend and has a hard time dating being in the 'public eye' with her TV career, because people think they know her.
Candid: She also told the publication she has never shacked up with a boyfriend and has a hard time dating being in the 'public eye' with her TV career, because people think they know her
Hot to trot: Georgia's dress had a back slit that gave a glimpse of her black bra
She did it: New Idea magazine first reported Georgia was chosen to star in the Channel Ten reality show after a 'rigorous casting process'
New Idea magazine first reported Georgia was chosen to star in the Channel Ten reality show after a 'rigorous casting process'.
The brunette beauty, who has previously worked as a dance teacher, is ready to find love according to some of her close pals, but has struggled so far due to the travelling involved with her journalism career.
One friend told New Idea magazine: 'Georgia's been unlucky in love, but she's a hopeless romantic'.
All in it: One friend told New Idea magazine: 'Georgia's been unlucky in love, but she's a hopeless romantic'
Meanwhile another source told the publication that producers were keen to cast a fresh face on the show this year, instead of a previous Bachelor contestant like Louise Pillidge, or Lana Jeavons-Fellows, who finished second in Sam Wood's season, though recently revealed she has found a new man.
'A lot of the girls from Sam's season have either moved on or have been throwing themselves at the spotlight, and it was something they wanted to move away from,' the source told New Idea.
It is believed the show will air later this year.
Upcoming: It is believed the show will air later this year
She's one of Victoria's Secret's most famous faces.
And on Sunday, Alessandra Ambrosio lived up to her lingerie model status as she put on a busty show at the Global Gift Gala in Spain.
The Brazilian supermodel, 35, showed off her cleavage in a floaty pink gown as she joined her pal Eva Longoria at the charity bash in Marbella.
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Pretty in pink: Alessandra Ambrosio looked fabulous as she put on a busty show at the Global Gift Gala in Spain on Sunday
The mother-of-two's dress featured a high-high split, which highlighted her bronzed legs.
She completed her look with a pair of silver strappy sandals, a sparkling clutch bag with her hair tied back in a loose updo.
Meanwhile, Eva was dressed in plum evening gown that featured a one-shoulder strap, beaded neckline.
The Latin beauty wore her signature, trademark smokey eye, which featured blue and purple colouring to match her dress.
Showing some skin: The mother-of-two completed her look with a pair of silver strappy sandals, a sparkling clutch bag with her hair tied back in a loose updo
A leggy show: The Brazilian model's dress featured a high-high split, which highlighted her bronzed legs
During the event, the South American beauty and former Desperate Housewives actress shared several snaps together during their charitable evening together.
The two posed together for videos and pictures, which appeared to have been filmed by Eva's husband, Jose Baston.
'My husband can't do snapchat!' joked the star, either hinting that he was camera shy, or was simply not a good photographer.
Dazzling: Alessandra's trip to Spain follows her recent holiday in another European hotspot Mykonos in Greece
Babe in blue: The event was hosted by the Global Gift Gala's honorary chairwoman Eva Longoria, who looked lovely in a blue asymmetrical dress
Helping hearts: Eva and Alessandra cosied up together during the benefit ball for the Global Gift Foundation in a Snapchat video
Eva proved that the evening was more than just catching up with her celebrity pals.
The star, who also is the founder of the Eva Longoria Foundation, spent the earlier part of the day with children who will benefit from the Global Gift Foundation.
It appears that she visited a house that would host those in need.
Hanging out: The former Desperate Housewives and the stunning Brazilian beauty, 31, star shared several snaps during their charitable evening together
'My husband can't do snapchat!': Eva was undoubtedly happy to see her pal Alessandra. The two posed together for videos and pictures, which appeared to have been filmed by Eva's husband, Jose Baston
Getting some exercise: Earlier on Sunday, Alessandra was seeing cycling around the seaside resort on a rented bicycle
'Casa Global...is an amazing house which...helps kids with rare and chronic diseases,' she noted.
Eva, who is honorary chairwoman of the Global Gift Gala, travels all over the world for the Gala, with the most recent event taking place in Cannes in May.
The Global Gift Gala is a non-profit organisation focused on making a positive impact on the lives of children, women and families.
Summer lovin': Alessandra was joined by her long-term fiance, American businessman Jamie Mazur, father of her two children
She divides her time between her fashion empire and being a doting mum.
And Rachel Zoe proved just how much of a family woman she was when she headed out for lunch in Los Angeles on Saturday with her husband Rodger Berman and her two little boys Skyler, five, and Kaius, two.
The 44-year-old stylist looked her boho best as she as she kept a watchful eye over her kids who put on a lively display.
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Stylish family! Rachel Zoe, 44, headed out for lunch in Los Angeles on Saturday with her husband Rodger Berman and her two little boys Skyler, five, and Kaius, two
Wearing a floaty blue and white summer dress, Rachel went on to add her personal touch with a statement gold necklace.
She sported a large brown handbag across the front and made sure to add to her frame with chunky brown wedges.
And while she resides in sunny California, there proved to be a slight breeze as her luscious blonde hair billowed in the wind, while she shielded herself with cool shades.
Her sons have already seemed to forge a strong bond which was evident as they gripped on to each while swinging on their parents hands.
Boho babe: Wearing a floaty blue and white summer dress, Rachel went on to add her personal touch with a statement gold necklace
The elements: While she resides in sunny California, there proved to be a slight breeze as her luscious blonde hair billowed in the wind, while she shielded herself with cool shades
It was evident that Rodger has incorporated Rachel's love for fashion as he looked super cool in roll up khaki trousers, plain top and summer hat.
The smitten couple- who first met in 1991 during their college years- have been married for twenty years.
And the duo have been keeping a proud tab on their children and most recently couldn't help but gush over Skyler graduating from pre-school.
Clinging hold of his 'diploma' in June, the youngster is now ready for big school - much to his parents' delight.
Having fun: Her sons have already seemed to forge a strong bong which was evident as they gripped on to each while swinging on their parents hands
So cute! A smile never forewent their faces as they looked super adorable in the outfits and hats
In love: The smitten couple- who first met in 1991 during their college years- have been married for twenty years
Posting a picture of her boy on Instagram, the designing talent wrote: 'Today was a big milestone for my big boy as he graduated Preschool.'
Speaking on behalf of herself and her husband, the stylist continued: 'Me and my @rbermanus have never been so proud of this magical fearless angel. #skylermorrison #kindergartenherewecome #sogratefulforyou.'
Rachel made a name for herself after becoming then stylist to stars such as Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and The Backstreet Boys.
Since then she has designed her own clothing lines, had a successful reality show and is now the editor of the fashion, beauty and lifestyle bible The Zoe Report.
Sylvia Jeffreys flashed her diamond ring on TV today after getting engaged to beau Peter Stefanovic during a romantic European getaway last week.
And it seems the lovebirds are busy making a new nest for themselves, with the newsreader spotted directing movers into their new Sydney house - while wearing the huge rock prominently on her finger.
The couple dressed down from their usual studio suits to help get their boxed-up things inside the eastern suburbs pad over the weekend.
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Love nest: Lovebirds Sylvia Jefferies and Pete Stefanovic are busy making a new nest for themselves, spotted directing movers unpacking into their new Sydney house
The Today Show newsreader threw on a white turtleneck cardigan, tight activewear leggings and sensible Nike trainers and get the sun off her makeup-free face with a New York Yankees cap.
Her Weekend Today host fiance wore well-worn blue jeans with a grey hoodie over a green printed shirt and new-looking trainers, rocking a bushy beard from their European holiday.
Sylvia was seen walking around on her mobile phone, flashing the glittering ring as she held the phone in her left hand.
Big rock: Sylvia was seen walking around on her mobile phone, flashing the glittering ring as she held the phone in her left hand
Dressed to go: The Today Show newsreader threw on a white turtleneck cardigan, tight activewear leggings and sensible Nike trainers and get the sun off her makeup-free face with a New York Yankees cap
Getting things done: She looked to be doing a fair bit of organising for their big move, which may not have been going completely smoothly, during the long call outside their new home
She looked to be doing a fair bit of organising for their big move, which may not have been going completely smoothly, during the long call outside their new home.
The 30-year-old was also seen talking to a burly mover next to a huge wooden container, while holding a form, before jumping back on the phone again.
A skateboard was oddly positioned on the ground between them, though no one seemed to be using it to get around the site.
Directing traffic: The 30-year-old was also seen talking to a burly mover next to a huge wooden container, while holding a form
On ya skate: A skateboard was oddly positioned on the ground between them, though no one seemed to be using it to get around the site
Organiser: She then jumped back on the phone again
It is understood the couple recently bought the multi-storey white brick home, which has at least one balcony complete with a sliding door.
Sylvia, still on the phone, was seen on the upper floor with a box of their possessions, and later talking to another mover.
Back in the studio, the blonde beauty couldn't resist showing off her flashy diamond ring upon her return to the Channel Nine breakfast show's panel on Monday.
Not back in work mode yet: Weekend Today host Pete wore well-worn blue jeans with a grey hoodie over a green printed shirt and new-looking trainers, rocking a bushy beard from their European holiday
Moving clothes: The couple dressed down from their usual studio suits to help get their boxed-up things inside the eastern suburbs pad over the weekend
Sylvia beamed with pride while flaunting the large, expensive-looking accessory as she gushed over the 'exquisite' work of Sydney's Nader Jewellers.
Speaking of the proposal in France, Sylvia told her colleagues: '(It was) completely by surprise to be honest! He got me alright.'
She added: 'Thank goodness he didn't propose to me at the Euro 2016 Game. It would have been a rejection I think!'
Starting to unpack: Sylvia, still on the phone, was seen on the upper floor with a box of their possessions
Taking shape: She was later seen talking to another mover as they start to arrange their new home
Meanwhile, Sylvia could hardly stop smiling as co-host Lisa Wilkinson encouraged her to flaunt her stunning engagement ring for the cameras.
Sylvia also revealed how Peter collaborated with luxury high-end jewellers Nader to make the perfect design.
She even claimed they delved into her Instagram account 'to look at the structure of (her) fingers' and the kind of jewellery she wears.
New pad: It is understood the couple recently bought the multi-storey white brick home, which has at least one balcony complete with a sliding door
Heavy lifting: Movers get to work on the upper floor
'So thank you to (jeweller) Patrick Nader and thank you, Pete!' she said. 'Because it's exquisite and I can't believe it's on my finger.'
Looking happier than ever, the Brisbane-born TV personality claimed that she 'would have accepted a burger ring from Pete!'
But the glowing expression on Sylvia's face left no doubt that she was particularly pleased with the decision her fiance made.
She said 'Yes'! Sylvia couldn't resist showing off her flashy diamond ring from fiance Peter Stefanovic on Monday upon her return to the Today show panel after their romantic European holiday
Showing it off: Sylvia (left) could hardly stop smiling as co-host Lisa Wilkinson (right) encouraged her to flaunt her stunning engagement ring for the cameras
On Monday, Patrick Nader told Daily Mail Australia that they had been designing the ring with Peter for around two months.
'He wanted something perfect that Sylvia would love for the rest of her life, but that also wasn't over the top,' said Patrick.
Last Monday, Sylvia revealed on Instagram she was engaged to Channel Nine journalist Peter, the younger brother of Today co-anchor Karl Stefanovic.
'It was completely by surprise!' Last week, Sylvia revealed that she and Peter (right) got engaged in France
True love: Peter and Sylvia began dating in late 2013 after co-hosting the weekend edition of Today together
The genetically-blessed couple had been travelling around France and Italy and got engaged 'a couple of weeks ago', but postponed the announcement.
When Lisa heard her younger protege's good news, she was almost reduced to tears of happiness.
She said: 'I'll tell you why everyone's so excited Sylvia. You are an extraordinary woman and Pete is an absolutely beautiful man.
The perfect ring: Sylvia revealed Peter collaborated with high-end jewellers Nader to make the luxury design
One big happy family! Peter (right) is the younger brother of Sylvia's Today colleague Karl Stefanovic (centre)
'And from the very first moment that people started hearing that you two were an item, everyone just said, "Of course".
'You guys are absolutely meant to be together and we're just... we couldn't be happier. I've got tears in my eyes, I'm so excited for you.'
Peter and Sylvia began dating in late 2013 after co-hosting the weekend edition of Today as summer replacements for the regular panel.
The early months of their relationship were long distance as Peter travelled overseas as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network.
Golnesa 'GG' Gharachedaghi waged war on Reza Farahan on Sunday's episode of Shahs Of Sunset and openly challenged his manhood.
The fiery hair extension doyenne was livid because Reza, a real estate agent, had accused her of exaggerating her autoimmune disease.
'How is he this big expert on my life and what's going on with my disease? Beats the f*** out of me,' huffed GG, 33, as she met with her friend Shervin Roohparvar in Los Angeles for the first time since her explosive bust up with Reza in Belize.
Still steaming: Golnesa 'GG' Gharachedaghi remained livid with Reza Farahan on Sunday's episode of Shahs Of Sunset
GG was hurt that openly gay Reza was doubting her illness, which included chemotherapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis.
'He's not a man, I bet if I pulled his pants down he'd have a bigger vagina than the biggest prostitute I know,' she told Shervin.
'Right now I want nothing to do with Reza, I really don't give two f***s,' she raged.
The show opened with Reza having lunch with his mother who despite her strict Muslim upbringing in Iran was pleased about his gay marriage to Adam Neely.
Not a fan: Reza was criticized by GG after he openly doubted her illness
Mexican food: GG went off on Reza while having Mexican food with Shervin in Hollywood
Dramatic recreation: Shervin watched as GG recreated Reza mocking her
'She deserves some f***ing recognition,' Reza said gratefully.
'My mom, she got an A, her kids adore her,' he said tearfully.
Meanwhile, Mercedes 'MJ' Javid, 43, was 'nesting' with her boyfriend Tommy.
Mother and son: Reza opened the episode having lunch with his mother
Thumb up: Mercedes 'MJ' Javid after Belize was nesting with her boyfriend Tommy
'You have to nurture the relationship,' she proclaimed.
The voluptuous real estate agent made some double entendres at the batting cage while on a date with Tommy.
'I'd rather be batting the ball than catching it, unless I'm catching it in my mouth,' she quipped.
Batting cage: Tommy and MJ went out on a date to the batting cages
She was considering artificial insemination because of her age.
'It's not something to leap into,' warned Tommy.
'Our kid would be so gorgeous it would be illegal,' she said, before deciding to wait a bit longer.
In his element: The batting cage was a perfect spot for Tommy to show his athletic prowess
Adding: 'Get that turkey baster away from my vagina right now'.
Reza relaxed in Palm Springs with Adam and Asa.
They checked out some property for an investment.
Property check: Reza, husband Adam and Asa checked out property in Palm Springs
'The more things that Adam and I do together to invest in our future the better,' said Reza, calling their union 'solid' and 'legit'.
Asa was also gooey about her boyfriend Jermaine Jackson, Jr.
'I love himwe're the perfect yin and yang,' she grinned.
Yin and yang: Asa gushed about her relationship with Jermaine Jackson Jr
She took Adam and Reza out into the desert for a photoshoot.
'I'm very shocked that I'm loving marriage as much as I am,' smiled Reza, who later admitted that he still has a problem with the word 'husband'.
'That's very white, that's also very American,' Mercedes assessed.
Happily married: Reza also gushed about the state of his marriage
Meanwhile, Mike Shouhed, 37,was spending 'too much money' while designing his line of shoes.
He met Asa to talk about his 'progression' since cheating on his wife Jessica Parido, who has since left him.
'Babe you've got to go and get your wife back,' she advised.
Good advice: Asa urged Mike Shouhed to get his wife Jessica Parido back
'I've called her, she's blocked my calls, I sent her flowers, no response,' he said sadly.
They composed an email to persuade her to meet him.
'I really love her,' he said.
Loves her: Mike proclaimed his love for his wife Jessica who left him
Unbeknownst to Mike Reza's cousin had seen Jessica out and about.
'Looking fine as f***, [breasts] out, smokey eyes, coochie cutters,' gossiped Reza.
Adding: 'I don't think she's coming back'.
Gossip guy: Reza shared gossip about Jessica with MJ
On the phone: MJ decided to call Jessica but her phone was disconnected
As Mike was due to launch his collection he discovered Jessica had disconnected her phone.
His shipment then got stopped at customs, so he raced to the border by car to try and salvage them.
'My anxiety levels are going through the roof,' he fretted.
Anxiety levels: Mike's anxiety levels were soaring as he tried to get his shoes ready for a launch party
They managed to retrieve the shoes but were horribly late to the launch party.
'I'm going nuts in my headI'm losing it,' he agonised.
When he finally arrived, he mourned the loss of his 'love' Jessica.
'I wish she was hereI did this for ustonight was bittersweet,' he said.
The Shahs Of Sunset continues next week on Bravo.
She has reportedly put her divorce with Ben Affleck 'on hold'.
But Jennifer Garner showed no signs of her personal life taking prominence as she attended the So The World May Hear Awards Gala in Minnesota on Sunday.
The 44-year-old actress opted for simple elegance in a form-fitting black gown with a plunging asymmetrical strappy neckline as she was honoured on the night.
Star attraction: Jennifer Garner, 44, stole the show as she attended the So The World May Hear Awards Gala in Minnesota on Sunday alongside a fellow guest
In shape: The classy garment skimmed her curves and showed off her enviable figure
She looked incredibly radiant with her glossy pout and lash heavy eyes as she took to the stage as the main woman of the night.
According to its website, the gala 'showcases the tremendous impact of reflecting caring and sharing to the lives of others and gives us the opportunity to celebrate the amazing things being done to make this world a better place'.
And a medal was bestowed upon Jennifer for her advocating work on early childhood education.
The Alias star has travelled the US to talk to policymakers and government officials about programmes relating to this particular issue.
Gorgeous: The actress opted for simple elegance in a form-fitting black gown with an asymmetrical strappy neckline
All about her: She looked incredibly radiant with her glossy pout and lash heavy eyes as she took to the stage as the main woman of the night
Honoured: A medal was bestowed upon Jennifer for her advocating work on early childhood education
Great message: According to its website , the gala 'showcases the tremendous impact of reflecting caring and sharing to the lives of others'
And the stunning brunette reaped the rewards as she made a heartfelt speech where she put on an animated display.
It also looks like things could be taking a turn for the better in her tumultuous relationship with Ben Garner as well.
Last week a source close to Garner told US Weekly: 'Jen mentioned that the divorce was going through very soon, and then a few weeks ago, things changed.
'It does not seem to be moving in that direction,' they said. 'Jen seems to still be in love with Ben but doesn't allow her mind to go there. She just focuses on the kids.'
Taking it seriously: The Alias star has travelled the US to talk to policymakers and government officials about early childhood education
Hearing a pin drop: All eyes were on her as she gave a speech
Needing company: The mother-of-three also put on a lively display where she called someone to join her on stage
The couple are still living together with their three children - Violet, ten, Seraphina, seven, and four-year-old Samuel - in their five-bedroom mansion, and the actor is said to be keen to get their marriage back on track.
They split on June 30 last year, one day after their ten-year anniversary. Reports at the time suggested the split was over Ben's infidelity with the family nanny, although Jennifer has since come out and they were 'separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny'.
Jennifer is set to be busy on the career front as well with dramas The Tribes of Palos Verdes and Wakefield and comedy Nine Lives scheduled to be released later this year.
She spent her 40th birthday surrounded by her loving family.
And Elsa Pataky literally jumped for joy as she disembarked from a private plane while her husband Hollywood hunk Chris Hemsworth watched on.
The actress took to social media to thank everyone for their well wishes on Monday, writing: 'Best birthday ever, thanks for all the birthday wishes!'
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'Best birthday ever': On Monday, Elsa Pataky literally jumped for joy as she disembarked from a private plane while her husband Hollywood hunk Chris Hemsworth watched on
The post cheekily continued: 'Not sure if Chris Hemsworth is attempting to catch me or push me out of the plane here but fun either way!!! #bestimes #love #birthday'.
Elsa gracefully jumped with her arms outstretched and her pink Bohemian printed maxi skirt dramatically billowed out around her.
Chris sat perched in the doorway of the plane with his arms reached out while his wife floated through the air.
The fitness fanatic, yoga enthusiast and natural beauty is a mother to four-year-old India Rose and twin sons, Tristan and Sasha, two, and has been married to actor Chris for six years.
The big 4-0! Elsa turned 40 on Monday and her Hollywood husband Chris wished his wife a happy day, posting this photo to Instagram
Flaunting it! Elsa looks fabulous for her 40 years, whether she's working it on a red carpet or lounging in her bikinis
And despite celebrating the big 4-0, Elsa's glowing looks appear as youthful as ever, and there's not an inch to pinch on the pint-sized stunner.
Chris, who is currently filming Thor: Ragnarok on the Gold Coast, took to Instagram to wish his beautiful wife a happy birthday, alongside a photo of the pair of them blowing out burning candles.
'Happy birthday to the world's best wife, greatest mum and all round stunning human!! Love you loads and thanks for letting me help blow out the candles,' he wrote cheekily.
Loved-up: The couple met in early 2010, after being set up on a blind date, and later that year were married while on holiday with both of their families
The beginning: Elsa said she wasn't initially keen on starting up a relationship with the rising star, as she presumed 'girls were going crazy about him'
Elsa was born in Madrid, and after spending the first few years of married life with Chris in Los Angeles, the pair permanently relocated to Australia in 2015 with their children.
They now spend their time in Byron Bay, where they purchased a home for their family of five, with the couple expressing their desires to raise their children in Australia.
In a blog post for Spain's Glamour magazine, Elsa said their new home on the east coast of Australia is 'special' and that her style has been influenced by her new surroundings.
'As there is a tropical climate and a hippie lifestyle, you often see people walking barefoot on the street.'
Adding: 'I was quite surprised at first, but now even I walk barefoot sometimes!'
Sought after: However, Chris was persistent and the couple started dating, marrying only months later
Happy family: The doting parents now have three children - four-year-old India Rose and twin sons, Tristan and Sasha, two
Elsa regularly shares snaps to Instagram with her near 900,000 followers.
Her love of the beach and wildlife are evident and it's clear her husband and children are her world.
And aside from being the doting mother of three that she is, she often appears to be busy working on acting and modelling projects of her own.
In 2014, she released her own fitness book titled Intensidad Max, co-written by fitness trainer to the stars Fernando Sartorius.
Picturesque: Elsa regularly shares family snaps with her nearly 900,000 Instagram followers
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They started work on their $6million waterfront mansion in Sydney's Northern Beaches more than a year ago.
And it looks as though Jennifer Hawkins and her husband Jake Wall's dream home may soon be nearing completion.
New images show how far construction on the home has progressed in the past few months alone, with floor to ceiling panes of glass fitted on the second floor of the four-storey home.
Construction workers could recently be seen assessing the site of the 3,261 square metre mansion when the former Miss Universe and her husband will soon be settling.
Making progress: It looks as though Jennifer Hawkins and her husband Jake Wall's $6million waterfront mansion in Sydney's Northern Beaches may soon be nearing completion
Scaffolding could still be seen in place and sturdy sandstone was layered across the front of the spacious beach-side home.
The couple bought the Pittwater site, which already had an existing home on it, for $4 million in 2014.
They have since bulldozed the property in an effort to build their new dream home and are planning to spend at least $2million on construction.
Plans for the structure show it will stretch over four levels and include five bedrooms and a massive garage with room to house four cars.
Cute couple: Jennifer Hawkins and her husband Jake Wall, who own the property development company J Groups Constructions, are both working on the home
Renovation: Scaffolding could still be seen in place and sturdy sandstone was layered across the front of the spacious beach-side home
Rebuild: New images show how far construction on the home has progressed in the past few months alone, with floor to ceiling panes of glass fitted on the second floor of the four-storey home
A personal home theatre and gym are also listed as inclusions while the outdoor area appears to be just as impressive.
Dominating the outside space will be a large L-shaped pool and accompanying open-air entertaining area that will both sit on the extensive block of land that fronts onto the water.
According to Jake's construction costs list, made to the council for the development, it will cost $350,000 alone for landscaping, including the pool.
A further $300,000 is expected to be spent on concrete footings, slabs and retaining roofs as well as $160,000 for electrical and $200,000 for plumbing.
The construction is being conducted by property development company J Groups Constructions, which is owned by Jake and Jennifer.
The couple are reportedly planning to enjoy one of four proposed floors as their master bedroom.
Hard at work: Construction workers could recently be seen assessing the site of the 3,261 square metre mansion when the former Miss Universe and her husband will soon be settling
Stunning view: The mansion in Sydney's Northern Beaches boasts a breathtaking view over the ocean
In addition there will be four more bedrooms, an office area, home cinema and a gym on the site, which they paid $4 million for last year.
A luxurious sunken lounge on a lower level by the water is also on the cards.
Jennifer has revealed that she is indeed very hands on with the project.
'I always walk through the building site in a bikini and heels,' the 32-year-old previously on The Morning Show.
During the chat, the Australian model explained that she and her builder husband Jake Wall work together on the massive undertaking.
'It's kinda fun - I do the interiors more so and he builds the place - we just enjoy it!'
The Myer ambassador went on to add: 'It's kind of a side project for me, but Jake's main gig - so it kind of works well.'
Shaping up to be a hot property: Wooden frames could be seen in the interior of the sprawling Sydney mansion
Project: The construction is being conducted by property development company J Groups Constructions, which is owned by Jake and Jennifer
Plenty of space: They will be able to build their own pier for boat access to the water if they wish
His personal life is in turmoil following the recent death of his mother and his impending divorce from wife Amber Heard.
However, Johnny Depp is certainly keeping busy with his career and charity work as he attended a fundraiser in Minnesota on Sunday evening.
The father-of-two looked younger than his 53 years with his partially-shaved head and 'guyliner' as he joined his Hollywood Vampires bandmate Alice Cooper at the Starkey Hearing Foundation gala.
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Focused on work: Johnny Depp and his Hollywood Vampires bandmate Alice Cooper arrived at the Starkey Hearing Foundation gala in Minnesota on Sunday evening
The Pirates Of The Caribbean star looked in good spirits as he posed on the red carpet at the River Centre in St Paul.
He was joined by English rocker Alice - the frontman of the Hollywood rock supergroup Hollywood Vampires - who wore his signature black.
The pair were also spotted chatting to William F. Austin, founder of Starkey Hearing Foundation, before later taking to the stage to perform.
Rocking out: The 53-year-old later took to the stage to perform for the attendees
Focused on his music: The father-of-two has been throwing his attention of his music since his recent turbulent personal life
Johnny's band partnered with Starkey earlier this year in a bid to raise awareness of the charity's work.
The Foundation helps impoverished people suffering from hearing problems by giving them hearing aids.
In May, Johnny was seen visiting pensioners to help them get fitted with hearing aids in Lisbon, Portugal before the band's gig.
Doing his bit: Johnny and Alice were joined by William F. Austin, founder of Starkey Hearing Foundation
Important work: Johnny and Alice spoke about the importance of the sense of hearing as they discussed the charity's work
Johnny has had a difficult couple of months following his high-profile split from actress Amber, who has allegedly the actor was physically abusive to her during their marriage, which he has strenuously denied.
The couple split after 15 months of marriage on 22 May, with the actress filing divorce papers the following day.
Their parting came just two days after Johnny's beloved mother Betty Sue Palmer passed away.
Bringing some glamour: Actress Jennifer Garner was also in attendance at the charity bash
A man convicted of sexually molesting children in Oregon was charged Monday with committing more sexual assaults while living as an unregistered sex offender in Yellowstone County.
Jerrod Jay Schalk, 32, appeared before Yellowstone County District Court Judge Russell Fagg and was charged with three new felony charges including two counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted sexual intercourse without consent.
Schalk pleaded not guilty to the new charges and to failing to register as a sex offender.
Schalk, convicted in Oregon of sodomy and rape in 2003, was arrested in Wyoming earlier this year after police responded to a report of criminal activity at the residence where he was staying. Schalk was last registered as a sexual offender in 2013 while he was living in Oregon.
This year, a 9-year-old girl told another student at her school that Schalk had molested her while he was staying with her and her mother, according to initial charges filed against Schalk.
After a school counselor heard what the 9-year-old had said, the counselor reported the abuse to Child Protective Services. Schalk was living with the girl from December 2014 until March 2015 and from October 2015 through January of this year, according to Schalk's initial charges.
The 9-year-old told police Schalk had touched her and tried to force her to perform oral sex. Schalk threatened the girl, according to charging documents, and told her if she told anyone what was happening she would be taken away and she would never see her mother again.
Schalk was being held at the Yellowstone County Detention Center Monday, in lieu of a $25,000 bond.
She's a bubbly character who's never short of things to say.
And Josie Gibson gave MailOnline a glimpse inside her mindset as she gave a blow by blow account of what was in her handbag.
From sunglasses to deodorant, the former Big Brother star appeared to be prepared for any occasion, as she emptied out her belongings onto her lap.
And she revealed that she was always prepared for a smooch as she proudly showed off her cherry Carmex, stating that she carried it, 'Just in case I get a snog', while rubbing it onto her lips.
The 31-year-old giggled as she also had essentials such as tampons, Black Opium perfume and even a phone adaptor to hand.
And she showed off her posher side, as she flaunted both her Holland and Barrett and Waitrose cards, announcing: 'I'm a secret toff'.
Revealing! Josie Gibson gave MailOnline a glimpse inside her mindset as she gave a blow by blow account of what was in her handbag
Pucker up! She revealed that she was always prepared for a smooch as she proudly showed off her cherry Carmex, stating that she carried it, 'Just in case I get a snog', while rubbing it onto her lips
Vibrant as ever, Josie didn't care about showing off her personal possessions to the camera and even offered others to try on her new sunglasses.
She justified her classy purchase with the phrase: 'A bit of Michael Kors never hurt anybody.'
And she even revealed that the summer months were a struggle for her as she had to carry around a roll-on deodorant as a result of being 'a sweaty b****r.'
Prepared! From sunglasses to deodorant, the former Big Brother star appeared to be prepared for any occasion, as she emptied out her belongings onto her lap
Brand new! Josie didn't care about showing off her personal possessions to the camera and even offered others to try on her new sunglasses
'Sweaty b*****r': She even revealed that the summer months were a struggle for her as she had to carry around a roll-on deodorant
However, she was slightly bemused when she found a rogue paperclip in the bottom of her bag, questioning what its use could have been.
As she made her way into the offices, Josie epitomised summer in an eye-catching aqua-marine dress.
'I'm a secret toff': She showed off her posher side, as she flaunted both her Holland and Barrett and Waitrose cards
Ready for action! The 31-year-old giggled as she also had essentials such as tampons, Black Opium perfume and even a phone adaptor to hand
Mystery! Josie was slightly bemused when she found a rogue paperclip in the bottom of her bag, questioning what its use could have been
She oftens laments about the struggle to find a dress to fit her 5'11" frame but Josie had managed to find the perfect maxi dress when she stepped out on Thursday night.
The health and fitness fanatic, 31, looked stunning as she also wore the dress when she headed to Boohoo's Christmas in July fashion party in London.
Wearing her preferred boho style choice, she wowed in a colourful creation which her good friend had made for her.
Looking hot to trot: She oftens laments about the struggle to find a dress to fit her 5'11" frame but Josie had managed to find the perfect maxi dress when she stepped out on Thursday night
Mates in high places: Wearing her preferred boho style choice, she wowed in a colourful creation which her good friend had made for her
The sky blue creation was off-the-shoulder in design, with Josie telling MailOnline: 'It's great because I can show a bit of shoulder and go braless in it.'
With a rope belt cinching her in at the waist, the number had contrasting colourful ruffles which fell down to the floor.
Shunning heels, the former Big Brother star wore a pair of gold flat sandals which gave a summery festival vibe.
Ruffles: With a rope belt cinching her in at the waist, the number had contrasting colourful ruffles which fell down to the floor
Two's company: She held hands with a female companion as they made their way to the London venue
She wore her hair in a side ponytail, opting for a pair of gold statement earrings which dangled as she walked.
With a couple of friends in tow, Bristolian Josie looked like she was looking forward to letting her hair down in style at the glitzy bash.
Last week she revealed she developed a fear of flying, ironically while presenting a segment on the phobia some years ago.
Speaking to therapists on This Morning last week, Holly Willoughby admitted she'd been going through counselling sessions to conquer her anxiety.
And the therapy seems to have paid off, as on Monday ITV shared a snap of 35-year-old Holly giving the thumbs-up from a plane as she headed abroad on a family holiday.
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Conquered! Holly Willoughby admitted she'd been going through counselling sessions to conquer her anxiety- and the therapy seems to have paid off, as ITV shared a thumbs-up snap of Holly from a plane on Monday
It all started on TV: Introducing a segment on last Tuesday's This Morning to help people conquer their phobia, she revealed she actually became afraid of flying presenting a show on the very same fear
'I felt so much more relaxed I could look out of the window without seeing the ground coming towards me! So so happy and such a relief to travel with the children knowing I'm not passing on any of my anxiety to them! Thank you so much', she added with the snap.
Meanwhile co-presenter Phillip Schofield has been having his own flight drama, tweeting his rage at British Airways on one of the busiest flying days of the year.
The TV star, 54, waited for two hours after the airline's new check-in computer system stopped working at the flagship Terminal 5, before having to go home again.
'I felt so much more relaxed I could look out of the window without seeing the ground coming towards me! So so happy and such a relief to travel with the children knowing I'm not passing on any of my anxiety to them! Thank you so much' Holly told ITV
In a series of social media posts he said: 'In the queue two hours and not one member of staff to talk to. Love you usually, today you are s***'.
He added: 'There's no announcements, no info when the planes left, no help at all'.
A few hours later, having given up, he said: 'On our way back home then @British_Airways'.
Upset: Phillip Schofield had his own flight drama, sending a series of scathing tweets as British Airways suffered delays due to a computer fault, before he gave up and went home after missing his flight
Last Tuesday Holly appeared on the show to talk about the wide-spread fear.
Introducing a segment on This Morning to help people conquer their phobia, she told therapist couple Nick and Eva Speakmans, that it was a presenting job a few years ago that had triggered her fear.
Chatting to the Speakmans - who appeared on the show to talk about the subject - and her co-host Phillip Schofield, she admitted: 'I did a show called, Fear of Flying, and my fear of it started there.'
And explaining the bizarre turn of events, she revealed: 'My mum used to be an air hostess and I used to love flying. But when we got up there and did all these barrel rolls and dives it terrified me!'
Appearing slightly amused at the irony of Holly's predicament, Phillip asked incredulously: 'So the show gave you a fear of flying?!'
'I did a show called, Fear of Flying, and my fear of it started there': Her glittering career hasn't always been beneficial for Holly , as she revealed a TV show she presented made her afraid of flying
To which Holly replied: 'Watch this and find out!' before introducing a clip of her in a stun plane on the show.
Showing a youthful Holly strapped into the passenger seat of the propeller plane, Holly could be seen screaming as a pilot pushed them into what appears to be a flat spin.
Yelling as she clutches at a joystick she can be heard howling: 'Please make it stop. No! No! No!'
During the short clip, which saw the plane fly out of the spin and proceed to barrel role and dive towards the ground, a small heart rate counted could be seen in the corner of the screen rocketing up to 224 BPM.
It wasn't always this way: Introducing therapist couple Nick and Eva Speakmans, Holly explained that she hadn't always been afraid of being airborne - admitting a presenting job had actually triggered the fear
It all started on TV: Chatting to the Speakmans - who appeared on the show to talk about the subject - and her co-host Phillip Schofield, she admitted: 'I did a show called, Fear of Flying, and my fear of it started there'
It's all down from here: Showing a youthful Holly strapped into the passenger seat of the propeller plane, Holly could be seen screaming as a pilot pushed them into what appears to be a flat spin.
Cutting back to the studio, a rattled Holly admitted: 'Honestly, watching that makes me feel upset.
'When I go on a plane, I feel like were going to go towards the ground. Thats where Im at.'
However, it seems that Holly has taken steps to try and beat her phobia, as Nick and Eva spoke about the progress they'd made with Holly in sessions.
Nick explained; 'It was interesting talking to you, finding that thing that made it [the fear] all click.'
Terrified: Yelling as she clutches at a joystick she can be heard howling: 'Please make it stop. No! No! No!'
Heart-racing: During the clip, which saw the plane fly out of a spin and proceed to barrel role and dive towards the ground, a small heart rate counted could be seen in the corner of the screen rocketing up to 224 BPM
Oh the irony: Appearing slightly amused at the irony of Holly's predicament, Phillip asked incredulously: 'So the show gave you a fear of flying?!'
While Eva added: 'Its all about understanding where it comes from. You had an instillation which was really apparent, so through addressing that we can change your fear.'
And revealing that the therapist couple had helped to change her perception of her fears, she said: 'It was just me that had pegged onto the plane... As soon as they said it was more about the pilot it's like a switch went off in my head.'
Before she added: 'Im actually flying soon, so that will be the test.'
Phillip interjected, mischievously adding: 'You have to take a picture of yourself on the plane and send it in to us.'
Geordie Shore's Marnie Simpson and Chloe Ferry stole the show as they attended a foam party in sunny Ayia Napa on Sunday with their co-stars.
Marnie, 24, looked incredible in an 'Above Average' red swimsuit as she got a good soaking before later enjoying a passionate smooch with Aaron Chalmers.
21-year-old Chloe Ferry cooled herself down as she was drenched in emerging waters alongside Marnie , causing her white top to bare her ample bust.
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Baywatch babe: Marnie Simpson went wild in her 'Above Average' red swimsuit as she joined her Geordie Shore co-stars at a foam party in Ayia Napa on Sunday
In it to win it! Chloe Ferry, 21, bared her busty cleavage as she looked like she had stepped out of a wet T-shirt competition while sipping on a drink
Clearly enjoying the attention, the reality sensation continued her racy display as she twerked on the dance floor surrounded by on-lookers as her every move was captured by a film crew.
Meanwhile, Marnie, putting on her Baywatch best, the brunette emerged from the waters and seemingly ran in to the arms of tattooed hunk Aaron Chalmers.
The pair engaged in a deep conversation before sharing a passionate kiss, which seems to bring some truth to recent rumours of a reunited romance.
Back together? Marnie shared a very passionate kiss with her on/off again lover Aaron Chalmers
Party trick: Clearly enjoying the attention, Chloe continued her racy display as she twerked on the dance floor surrounded by on-lookers
Time to get serious: Between their smoochy display they also enjoyed a deep conversation
A few days earlier they couldn't keep their hands off each other as they enjoyed a day long boat party.
Marnie recently revealed she was furious at the way Aaron reacted to the news she was bisexual, telling The Sun, 'Aaron's being a d*ck about it, actually.
'He's friends with a girl I've got with and he's not happy about it. Am I bothered?
'He had about two and a half or three years to get with me and did he? No. He's a d**ck.'
Getting wild! Chloe didn't have a care in the world as she partied away in the foam party
Be careful: Gary 'Gaz' Beadle looked uncomfortable as he got some foam in his eye
All good things must come to an end: Chloe had enough later on and decided to cover up
Sun-soaked: Marnie and Chloe later took to Instagram to show off her topped up tans
And while the ladies did their best to hog the spotlight, Gary 'Gaz' Beadle also put on a high spirited display as he joined the foam party.
And naturally the raunchy shenanigans were caught on camera as filming for the thirteenth series has been well under way in the Cypriot town.
Last week the gang was spotted indulging in ice-cream and also taking a bunch of scooters out for a spin, where Chloe once again almost spilled out of her dress.
However, the partying antics proved too much for original cast-member Charlotte Crosby who confirmed her exit from the show earlier this year.
And action! Naturally the raunchy shenanigans were caught on camera as filming for the thirteenth series has been well under way in the Cypriot town
She's been making jaws drop with her glamorous outfit choices at the Global Gift Gala, in Spain.
So it's no surprise that Alessandra Ambrosio wanted to dress down for the day as she went for a bike ride with her husband, Jamie Mazur, in Marbella.
The 35-year-old put on an extremely leggy display for the outing in a pair of black satin hotpants that skimmed the very top of her toned thighs.
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Getting some exercise: Earlier on Sunday, Alessandra was seeing cycling around the seaside resortn of Marbella, on a rented bicycle
The wide-legged design of the tiny shorts left little to the imagination as they showed off a hint of Alessandra's pert posterior.
And the pants were lined with a pretty white fringe detailing along the bottom, that perfectly coordinated with her casual T-shirt.
Alessandra looked holiday ready as she slipped on the laid-back graphic tee, that featured a design in tropical shades of blue.
Summer lovin': Alessandra was joined by her long-term fiance, American businessman Jamie Mazur, father of her two children
Perfect pins! The 35-year-old put on an extremely leggy display for the outing in a pair of black satin hotpants that skimmed the very top of her toned thighs
Relaxed! It's no surprise that Alessandra Ambrosio wanted to dress down for the day as she went for a bike ride with her husband, Jamie Mazure
The Victoria's Secret model made sure that she was perfectly coordinated as she slipped on a pair of white flipflops and proudly toted a blue and white clutch bag that came with a pretty pineapple design.
But she didn't forget to stay safe in the sun as she covered her brunette tresses with a grey cap and shielded her eyes with some quirky blue shades.
Despite the sizzling heat the model still managed to keep her cool as she rode her bike along the blissful golden mile.
Nice view: Alessandra and Jamie cycled alongside Marbella's famous Golden Mile alongside the Mediterranean Sea
Riding high! Alessandra's pants were lined with a pretty white fringe detailing along the bottom, that perfectly coordinated with her casual T-shirt
Holiday ready! The Victoria's Secret model made sure that she was perfectly coordinated as she slipped on a pair of white flipflops and proudly toted a blue and white clutch bag
Meanwhile, her beau looked equally relaxed in a plain white T-shirt and coordinating cream chinos.
Maintaining his summery look, Jamie rounded off his style with a pair of well-worn Converse trainers that he tied in place with a neat bow.
Hotting up! Alessandra didn't forget to stay safe in the sun as she covered her brunette tresses with a grey cap and shielded her eyes with some quirky blue shades
Mobile man! Jamie made sure that he was easily accessible at all times as he scrolled through his phone
She's one of Victoria's Secret's most famous faces.
And on Sunday, Alessandra Ambrosio lived up to her lingerie model status as she put on a busty show at the Global Gift Gala in Spain.
The Brazilian supermodel, 35, showed off her cleavage in a floaty pink gown as she joined her pal Eva Longoria at the charity bash in Marbella.
Pretty in pink: Alessandra Ambrosio looked fabulous as she put on a busty show at the Global Gift Gala in Spain on Sunday
The mother-of-two's dress featured a high-high split, which highlighted her bronzed legs.
She completed her look with a pair of silver strappy sandals, a sparkling clutch bag with her hair tied back in a loose updo.
Meanwhile, Eva was dressed in plum evening gown that featured a one-shoulder strap, beaded neckline.
The Latin beauty wore her signature, trademark smokey eye, which featured blue and purple colouring to match her dress.
Showing some skin: The mother-of-two completed her look with a pair of silver strappy sandals, a sparkling clutch bag with her hair tied back in a loose updo
A leggy show: The Brazilian model's dress featured a high-high split, which highlighted her bronzed legs
During the event, the South American beauty and former Desperate Housewives actress shared several snaps together during their charitable evening together.
The two posed together for videos and pictures, which appeared to have been filmed by Eva's husband, Jose Baston.
'My husband can't do snapchat!' joked the star, either hinting that he was camera shy, or was simply not a good photographer.
Dazzling: Alessandra's trip to Spain follows her recent holiday in another European hotspot Mykonos in Greece
Babe in blue: The event was hosted by the Global Gift Gala's honorary chairwoman Eva Longoria, who looked lovely in a blue asymmetrical dress
Helping hearts: Eva and Alessandra cosied up together during the benefit ball for the Global Gift Foundation in a Snapchat video
Eva proved that the evening was more than just catching up with her celebrity pals.
The star, who also is the founder of the Eva Longoria Foundation, spent the earlier part of the day with children who will benefit from the Global Gift Foundation.
It appears that she visited a house that would host those in need.
Hanging out: The former Desperate Housewives and the stunning Brazilian beauty, 31, star shared several snaps during their charitable evening together
'Casa Global...is an amazing house which...helps kids with rare and chronic diseases,' she noted.
Eva, who is honorary chairwoman of the Global Gift Gala, travels all over the world for the Gala, with the most recent event taking place in Cannes in May.
The Global Gift Gala is a non-profit organisation focused on making a positive impact on the lives of children, women and families.
She has just obtained a coveted new role as a brand ambassadress for Lancome.
And Taylor Hill looked to be fulfilling her duties as the face of the prestigious cosmetics company during a visit to Barcelona, Spain, on Saturday.
The 20-year-old Victoria's Secret Angel was spotted mid-photo shoot, sitting on a male model's shoulders as she held up a wand of mascara.
Getting a boost! Taylor Hill was given a lift by her co-star during a photo shoot presumably for Lancome in Barcelona, Spain on Saturday
Clad in a long-sleeved striped shirt and beige mini skirt, Taylor looked immaculately done-up with a winged slick of eyeliner brushed on for a dramatic edge.
The model accessorized the look with several gold cuff bracelets, and her mini skirt was belted at the waist to accentuate her toned figure.
Having some fun, Taylor also playfully pinched her co-star's cheek, as he leaned away in reaction.
Also joining Taylor in on the fun in Barcelona was fellow Lancome ambassador Lily Collins, who took a selfie with the new recruit during their photo shoot together in Spain on Wednesday.
Cheeky! The 20-year-old playfully pinched her co-star's cheek
'What a beautiful, energetic day of shooting with Lancome's newest ambassadress. Welcome to the family Taylor! #lilyloveslancome #thanksforthememoriesBarcelona...,' the image was captioned.
Taylor's new role as the new brand ambassador for Maison Lancome, the beauty brand's collection of fragrances, was announced last week.
'I am very excited and honored to join Lancome,' she said of her new role in a press release. 'I love the vision behind this feminine brand. This new role of ambassadress is a major step in my career, a dream that has become reality.'
Look who's here! Also joining Taylor in on the fun in Barcelona was fellow Lancome ambassador Lily Collins, who took a selfie with the new recruit during their photo shoot together in Spain on Wednesday
Dream come true: Hill shared a snap of herself holding a bouquet of roses as she announced her new role with Lancome to fans last week
And it seems the beauty brand is just as pleased to have her on board.
Francoise Lehmann, Lancomes International General Manager, added: 'We are delighted about this new collaboration with Taylor, who represents a modern Lancome, in harmony with its time, with a subtle mix of sensuality, ingenuousness and sweet yet striking beauty.
'She is a very inspiring young woman for her generation: she is immensely curious, open-minded and has a positive outlook on life.'
Taylor shared the good news with her fans on Instagram, writing in a snap of herself holding a bouquet of roses: 'This an amazing day and I cannot believe one of my biggest dreams has come true!!
She's the Australian model who's walked down plenty of international catwalks.
And Shanina Shaik showed off her striking features and incredible figure as she attended the Daily Front Row's Philipp Plein Dinner in The Hamptons, New York on Saturday.
The 25-year-old beauty wore a breezy Aztec print inspired gown which featured a daring split at the front to flash her seemingly endless legs.
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Statuesque beauty! Shanina Shaik showed off her striking features and incredible figure as she attended the Daily Front Row's Philipp Plein Dinner in The Hamptons on Saturday
The maxi dress featured an intricate pattern in a slightly darker shade of blue to the main fabric and a plunging neckline.
Her slim figure was emphasised by a clinched waist and billowing sleeves which boasted a cuff that fastened tight around her wrists, adding more shape to the garment.
The Australian model wore her dark chocolate tresses effortlessly swept behind her right ear and full of volume with a curl through the lengths.
Keeping it simple: The 25-year-old beauty wore a gown that featured an intricate pattern in a slightly darker shade of blue to the main fabric and a plunging neckline
She's a natural: For makeup she went with a very simple look with a sheer layer of foundation paired with lashings of mascara and a pale muted pink lip and wore her dark locks curled and swept to one side
For makeup, she went with a very simple look with a sheer layer of foundation, lashings of mascara and a pale muted pink lip.
The minimal makeup look reflected not only the relaxed nature of the event but also showed off her naturally pretty features.
She accessorised with a black and gold choker necklace and finished her ensemble with a pair of sky high stilettos that were seen when she flashed her leg through the frocks daring split.
In good company: At one point during the evening she posed flashing her pins beside the man of the moment desinger Philipp Plein (centre) and fellow model Cindy Bruna (right)
At one point during the evening. Shanina posed beside designer Philipp Plein and fellow model Cindy Bruna - who also showed off her trim legs.
Taking to social media, the stunner also posted a snap as she sat back and placed her hand seductively on her thigh while revealing plenty of leg while pouting towards the camera.
Her seemingly endless legs were the clear focus of the snap which she simply captioned: 'Attending the Daily Front Row dinner last night in the Hamptons'.
Jason Bourne director Paul Greengrass hopes his old mate Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will be alright after the disappointing election result.
'Send my love to your prime minister, he told the News Corp on Monday. 'Were old mates. Hows he getting on?'
The pair met almost 30 years ago when the 60-year-old was a London journalist and had co-written a tell-all memoir with former MI-5 officer Peter Wright.
'Send my love to your Prime Minister': Jason Bourne director Paul Greengrass hopes his old mate Malcolm Turnbull will be alright after the disappointing election result. Pictured with Matt Damon at Paris premiere
The book, Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, was suppressed by the UK government and Turnbull represented its Australian publisher in court.
The future PM won the case in 1987 and again on appear the following year.
Fighting the protected proceedings together forged a bond with the now-A-list director that prompted Greengrass to vouch for him as the embattled leader faces an unhappy caucus this week.
Brothers in arms: The pair met in 1987 when the director was a London journalist and had co-written a tell-all memoir with a former MI-5 officer. Turnbull defeated a UK government suppression order against it
Court battle: The book, Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, was suppressed by the UK government and Turnbull represented its Australian publisher in court
'We had a lot of adventures together,' he said. 'Hes a good guy. He definitely has my vote.'
Greengrass did not get similar support from his friend when he and the film's stars Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander and Tommy Lee Jones hit the Sydney premiere.
Turnbull could probably be forgiven for not showing up despite it being in the electorate neighbouring his, as it was July 3 - the night after the cliffhanger election.
Earlier the director and star Damon, who played Bourne in all four films, teased there could be a fifth installment in the hugely successful series.
The 45-year-old actor has returned to the role of the special agent for a fourth time for Jason Bourne following a nine-year break, and is sure the franchise will continue but thinks he'll eventually be too old for the role.
Spy theme: Greengrass directed the four main Bourne, all starring Damon, films after swapping journalism for film
Journalist-turned-director: Greengrass at the London premiere with stars Julie Stiles (left) and Alicia Vikander (right)
Under fire: Fighting the protected proceedings together forged a bond with the now-A-list director that prompted Greengrass to vouch for him as the embattled leader faces an unhappy caucus this week
'My guess is it will be a while before well even get around to doing another one. They might reboot me before I bow out,' he told The Guardian on the weekend.
Greengrass added: 'Its got to continue.'
The latest film required Damon to undertake 90 minute high-intensity gym sessions every day for 10 weeks and eat only vegetables and protein for months before filming.
The actor explained: 'Paul said early on, "Look, if we open the film and in the first frame of Jason Bourne we see your face and you look like youve lived well these past 10 years, we do not have a movie.
'"You have to look like youve suffered. And the only way to do that is to suffer."'
First this one has to come out: Bourne, starring Damon and Julia Stiles, will hit theaters in the US on July 29
But Damon and Greengrass have a great working relationship, which made making the movie so much easier, and would love to work together again, they both said.
Greengrass said: 'Every film is a big gamble, large or small... You can come on set some days and feel, "I dont know about this."
'The anxieties are very profound. Thats why its such a stressful undertaking. When youve got someone like Matt whos going to sell it for you, whos going to be brilliant and is committed, the feeling of empowerment is so intense.
'And love. Hes a fantastic man to make a film with. And weve been in the trenches before. Weve been in the deepest sh** that its possible to be in on a film set.'
Ruby Rose has taken a stand against online bullying after trolls told her girlfriend's mother that she should have had an abortion.
The Orange Is the New Black star made an impassioned plea on her social media accounts after Harley Gusman's family were targeted by trolls.
She took to Twitter on Sunday to vent her frustration, saying: 'Trolls.. TROLL ME. Do not troll family members of my friends it's so sad and disgraceful. There is enough hate in the world. Stop.'
Taking a stand: Ruby Rose (left) has spoken out against online bullying after trolls told her girlfriend Harley Gusman's mother that she should have had an abortion
The Australian actress elaborated on Monday, saying: 'I posted this yesterday after someone told my partner's mum she should have aborted her... Hence my post today.'
Ruby, who has been dating Harley for the past month, also shared a positive and powerful message on her Instagram.
She penned a list of the questions she asks herself whenever she is trolled or receives hateful messages online.
Speaking out: The Orange Is the New Black star made an impassioned plea on her social media accounts after Harley Gusman's family were targeted by trolls
Staying strong: Ruby highlighted the fact that the internet has the ability to bring people closer together - but it is often misused
The star wrote: 'When I get attacked or hate online before I let it into my energy I think the following: Am I a good person? Do I have a family that loves me? Do I have amazing friends?
'Am I loved by those who matter to me? Do I have an amazing career I never dreamed of?
'Then I think of who the other people are on the other end and realise they dont affect my answers to any of the above.'
Ruby highlighted the fact that the internet has the ability to bring people closer together - but it is often misused.
'The Internet/social media has endless possibilities, positive possibilities,' she said.
Positive thinking: She penned a list of the questions she asks herself whenever she is trolled or receives hateful messages online
Cute couple: Ruby, who has been dating Harley for the past month, also shared a positive and powerful message on her Instagram
'But it's sadly more often used to bring people down. With everything going on in the world.. Maybe we need to adjust our priorities.'
She also tweeted: 'Nobody likes being bullied or made to feel worthless.. Yet so many people will go above and beyond to make others feel that way.'
Ruby was forced to point out that her tweets were not written in defence of her new best friend Taylor Swift.
'My little piece of writing is literally zero percent about Taylor but my own experience and process,' she tweeted.
Her series of posts came immediately after she leapt to Chloe Moretz's defence after Khloe Kardashian posted an X-rated photo on Twitter of a woman she mistook for the actress.
New BFFs: Ruby was forced to point out that her tweets were not written in defence of her new best friend Taylor Swift
The reality TV star, 32, posted a screenshot on Twitter of the 19-year-old in a bikini filming Neighbours 2 last October, alongside another image of an unwitting mystery woman with her bare bottom exposed.
Khloe took the feud to a new low with the explicit image after Chloe complained on the social media site about people focusing on the ongoing row between the former's sister Kim, Kanye West and Taylor Swift.
Tara Reid rocked another incredible outfit on Sunday as she continued her promotional tour for Sharknado 4 in New York over the weekend.
The actress stopped by a party celebrating the one year anniversary of the launch of The Fat Jew's White Girl Rose on Sunday night at The Dream Downtown, hosted by Elite Daily.
The 40-year-old lit up the event in an electric blue sleeveless top and neon yellow wraparound skirt with matching pumps.
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Blonde and bright: Tara Reid put her superslim figure in display in a sleeveless blue top with a plunging neckline and a yellow wraparound skirt that formed an above-the-knee split at the front
The blonde beauty showed off her superslim figure in the eye-catching ensemble.
Her top featured a plunging v-shaped neckline while her skintight skirt came together in a 'v' at the front, creating an above-the-knee split with its asymmetrical hemline.
Tara left her hair loose and sleekly styled and accessorized with a simple heart-shaped pendant necklace and some statement rings.
Mix and match: The actress, 40, wore her signature blonde hair loose and paired her colorful ensemble with a dark shade of pink lip color and emphasized her eyes with plenty of kohl liner and mascara
Wine event: Tara, who is busy promoting her new film Sharknado 4, joined social media personality The Fat Jew AKA Josh Ostrovsky at a party Sunday night celebrating one year since the launch of his White Girl Rose
Made a statement: Ostrovsky wore an interesting jacket and shorts ensemble that formed an ode to pop culture with a pattern of celebrity images
The American Pie and Scrubs star paired her colorful outfit with equally colorful lips, choosing a dark pink shade that complimented the blue and yellow of her clothing.
She lined her eyes top and bottom with black kohl and added black mascara and dusted her cheeks with a dark blusher.
Tara seemed upbeat as she happily posed for photos with The Fat Jew AKA Josh Ostrovsky, a social media personality and model.
It was a different story two days earlier when the 40-year-old had walked out of an on-air interview at SiriusXM following an icy exchange of words with host Jenny McCarthy.
Walked out: Tara, 40, made headlines when she walked out of an interview with Jenny McCarthy on her SiriusXM show on Friday after trading barbs. She's pictured in New York on Saturday
The spat between the two blondes made headlines as they went tit for tat in a series of barbed comments about plastic surgery and relationships.
During the interview on Jenny'a show, the former Playboy PLaymate of the Year asked about Tara about her fitness regime for Sharknado 4, before seguing into her plastic surgery, a 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.
'I didn't hear that a hundred times, I'm so sorry,' Jenny apologized.
Mood: The Sharknado star stepped out in Manhattan in lack skinny jeans and very low-cut black tank top and some eye-catching scarlet red stiletto ankle boots
'Maybe you only read the bad things, but I've made that really clear so many years,' Tara went on. 'But read what you want to read. But it was really nice talking to you and really good luck with your show.'
'Good luck to you too, and I'm so excited about Sharknado,' Jenny said, before firing off a final dig: 'And I hope your knees get a little wobblier than they already are.'
'Oh, my knees?' Tara retorted before storming out of the studio. '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!' 'Yes, same guy. Love you Tara, good luck with Sharknado 18!' Jenny delivered as a final parting shot.
On air spat: Tara and Jenny's icy exchange included mutual digs about plastic surgery and their love lives
They've been working together for over 30 years on their fashion label Dolce & Gabbana.
But even on their down time, it appears designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana still like to spend time together.
The pair were spotted enjoying a weekend off work as they relaxed with friends on a boat off the coast of Portofino.
Time to relax: Stefano Gabbana (far left) rinses off after swimming in the Mediterranean on a day on his boat with business partner Domenico Dolce (2nd left) and pals near Portofino
While Domenico, 57, was happy to lie back in the sun and tan, Stefano, 53, was in the mood for exercise and plunged into the refreshing Mediterranean Sea.
The fashionistas, who split as a couple 11 years ago, are still firm friends and still socialise together away from their studio.
The Italians have worked together for 34 years and were a romantic couple for 23 years before their 2005 split.
Chilling out: Domenico preferred to work on his tan as he relaxed on the back of the boat with some pals
Action man: The 53-year-old looked refreshed after cooling down with a swim in the Mediterranean Sea
Despite ending their coupling, they decided to stay together professionally and continue to design their Dolce & Gabbana range.
In a 2012 interview with the Financial Times, Stefano said: 'The worst time for us was when we broke up but kept working together.
'We thought about splitting up, but no. And the truth is, everything is exactly the same. But no sex.'
This is the life: Domenico was enjoying time away from their fashion studios in Milan
Still friends: The Italians have worked together for 34 years and were a romantic couple for 23 years before their 2005 split
He went on to say he couldn't imagine working without his creative partner: 'I cant work without him. Maybe one day there will be a Dolce collection and a Gabbana collection... Never say never.'
Last year, the duo hit the headlines when they shocked the gay community by declaring they didn't agree with homosexual couples having IVF children.
Dolce told Italian magazine Panorama: 'You are born to a mother and a father, or at least thats how it should be. I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog.'
Socialise: The designers and their friends enjoyed an afternoon of conversation, sunshine and wine on their boat
Keep designing: Despite ending their coupling, they decided to stay together professionally and continue to design their Dolce & Gabbana range
His comments outraged Sir Elton John, who has two sons conceived through IVF via a surrogate with his husband David Furnish.
Sir Elton wrote on Instagram: 'How dare you refer to my beautiful children as "synthetic".
'And shame on you for wagging your judgmental little fingers at IVF a miracle that has allowed legions of loving people, both straight and gay, to fulfill their dream of having children.
'Your archaic thinking is out of step with the times, just like your fashions. I shall never wear Dolce and Gabbana ever again. #BoycottDolceGabbana.'
Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke and his Democratic 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, 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-term 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 a 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 American Indian 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 show just a handful of stories that mention both Zinke and Juneau compared to dozens about the gubernatorial candidates.
But when Juneau and Zinke do start 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 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 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.
She has been unlucky in love when it comes to her celebrity former flames.
So maybe Charlotte Crosby's dream man could be Joe Public?
The former Geordie Shore star - who quit the show earlier this year over her tumultuous romance with on/off beau Gaz Beadle - is reportedly returning to reality TV on a new dating show.
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Back on the scene: Charlotte Crosby - who quit Geordie Shore earlier this year over her tumultuous romance with on/off beau Gaz Beadle - is reportedly returning to reality TV on a new dating show
The project by Lime Pictures - the team behind The Only Way Is Essex - will match fans up with their dream celebrities, according to The Sun Online.
Producers are currently looking for applicants, who must be over the age of 18 to appear on the show, but filming is reportedly set to kick off later this week.
The advert reads: 'We are currently making a NEW CELEBRITY DATING SERIES for a major UK broadcaster.
'The programme will feature a celebrity cast who are looking for love and would like to date members of the public.
'Therefore, we are looking for single guys and girls (18 or over) that would like to date our celebrities!! KNOW ANYBODY WHO WOULD LIKE TO DATE A CELEB? WE CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN!!'
A representative for Charlotte gave no comment on the reports.
Meanwhile, news that Charlotte is signing up to a new dating show will unlikely sit well with Mario Falcone as it seems a romance could be emerging between the reality TV stars.
Looking for love: The new show - from the people behind TOWIE - will see stars including Charlotte matched with members of the public, according to reports
Finally over: The pair became a couple once again but split earlier this year amid claims he had cheated on Ex On The Beach. They fell out after Charlotte revealed she had suffered a miscarriage after falling pregnant by Beadle and she quit the MTV show
Does he have a say? The star has sparked romance rumours with her longtime friend Mario Falcone after swappin flirty tweets
More than pals? The pair have been close since they appeared on Celebrity Big Brother together in 2013
Charlotte set tongues wagging over the weekend when she referred to the hunk as 'the best human on this planet' and begged him to meet her.
She wrote on Twitter: 'Sooooo @Mario_Falcone is the best human on this planet very happy to see him today wish it had been for lingered (sic).'
Mario then replied: 'Haha as soon as your back from your holiday we will hang out (sic).'
Charlotte hasn't had the best of luck when it comes to love over the years as she's spent the last half a decade pining over her co-star Gaz.
Despite pouring her all into their turbulent relationship, things finally came to a permanent halt earlier this year when the pair locked horns over Charlotte's decision to publicly announce she'd suffered a miscarriage with Gaz' baby without informing him beforehand.
She's about to get busy as the host of the Teen Choice Awards, which will take place later this month.
But work was far from the mind of Victoria Justice on Saturday as the pretty brunette was seen relaxing poolside with friends in Miami.
The 23-year-old former Eye Candy actress showed off her incredibly fit figure in a plunging bohemian print bathing suit with spaghetti straps.
Eye candy! Work matters were far from the mind of Victoria Justice on Saturday as she relaxed by a swimming pool in Miami with a friend
Duty calls: Justice will appear in the upcoming TV movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show opposite talent such as Christina Milian, Adam Lambert, and Tim Curry
The bathing suit highlighted Victoria's envy-inducing, gym-honed legs to perfection.
Standing out with her gold flip flops from Ipanema and tangerine orange nails, Victoria was the very embodiment of festive summer fashion.
She also had on a nice pink mani/pedi that was perfect for summer.
Ooh la la: The bathing suit highlighted Victoria's envy-inducing, gym-honed legs to perfection
She had her dark brunette locks pulled back into a no-fuss bun, a hair 'do which put her makeup-free and radiant complexion on full show.
The actress also had a convenient and protective plastic bag for her phone slung around her neck.
Victoria strolled poolside as she flipped through her phone, and at one point re-hydrated herself with a sip from a fruity beverage.
In the loop: The iCarly actress rocked mettalic Ipanema flip flops and tapped through her phone as she stood on a patterned carpet
Yum: The 23-year-old took a hydrating sip from her fruity beverage
Later that day, the Victorious actress joked about what a 'rough day' she had.
The actress shared a photo of herself sunbathing atop an inflatable pink flamingo beside a view of the nearby skyline.
'Rough day... #miami,' Victoria captioned the image.
'Rough day': The photo the actress shared on Saturday was one of herself sunbathing atop an inflatable pink flamingo beside a view of the nearby skyline
Aside from hosting the upcoming Teen Choice Awards on July 30, Victoria is set to appear on both the small and big screens soon.
She will appear in the upcoming TV movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show opposite talent such as Christina Milian, Adam Lambert, and Tim Curry.
It was widely buzzed by Trekkies this weekend after a tweet emerged breaking the news.
And on Monday Paramount Pictures confirmed that Chris Hemsworth will be in Star Trek 4.
The studio announced in a statement: 'Captain Kirk will cross paths with a man he never had a chance to meet, but whose legacy has haunted him since the day he was born: his father.'
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Space hero: Chris Hemsworth may return to Star Trek 4 as George Kirk, Jame's T. Kirk's father, who gave his life to save more than 800 when his ship crashed in the tragic opening sequence of the 2009 reboot
Chris played starship captain George Kirk who died heroically in the heart stopping opening sequence of then director JJ Abrams' rebooted Star Trek in 2009.
The 32-year-old actor's character gave his life to stay at the helm, giving his 800 crew time to abandon the doomed ship after it was attacked by aliens.
Through the miracle of modern technology he was able to talk to his wife who had just given birth to their son, in a poignant scene as the star ship disintegrated around him.
The news of Chis's casting was tweeted by Access Hollywood's Scott Mantz.
'BREAKING!! #JJAbrams confirms to me that a 4th #StarTrek movie will bring together #ChrisPine & #ChrisHemsworth!! Scott tweeted at the Star Trek Beyond junket along with a photo of him with his arm around the now executive producer in Los Angeles on Friday.
Presumably this will involve some sort of time travel, not outside the realm of possibility since the first film's plot was driven by the concept..
JJ hinted about it during the press conference, saying, 'Theres something that hopefully were figuratively minutes away from talking about,' according to Collider. 'The answer is 100 percent yes, and its incredibly exciting.'
Breaking news: Access Hollywood's Scott Mantz tweeted the exclusive at a junket in Los Angeles for Star Trek Beyond on Friday
Chris has yet to comment about his casting in the space franchise on his Instagram or Twitter accounts.
The Australian actor, who stands 6ft 3ins, is best known for his roles as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
He is presently onscreen as the hunky but clueless secretary in the reboot of Ghostbusters.
Suiting up: The 32-year-old Australian actor at the premiere of the rebooted Star Trek at the Chinese Theater on April 30, 2009 in Hollywood
Star Trek Beyond will premiere during Comic-Con in San Deigo on Wednesday.The space adventure bodly goes on wide release on Friday with returning cast members Chris as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Karl Urban as Bones, John Cho as Sulu and the late Anton Yelchin as Chekov.
New additions to the cast include Idris Elba, Sofia Boutella, Joe Taslim, Lydia Wilson and Shohreh Aghdashloo.
Paramount has yet to reveal a release date for Star Trek 4.
Diane Kruger and Joshua Jackson have announced they have split after 10 years together.
The pair were last pictured together on Saturday - one day after her 40th birthday.
'Diane Kruger and Josh Jackson have decided to separate and remain friends,' a spokesperson told People Magazine.
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Split: Diane Kruger and Joshua Jackson were pictured together on Saturday - one day after her 40th birthday. The pair announced their 10-year relationship is over on Monday
The pair have been plagued by rumours of relationship problems in recent months.
Diane started dating Josh, 38, after she split from her husband of five years, French director Guillaume Canet.
In March, Diane revealed she had moved to New York to be with Joshua while he was appearing in off-Broadway play Smart People, but admitted she was unsure about tying the knot again.
Asked if she would consider marrying again, she said: 'Welcome to my dilemma.
Throwback: The couple had been together for 10 years but consistently dismissed reports of engagements
Amicable: 'Diane Kruger and Josh Jackson have decided to separate and remain friends,' a spokesperson told People Magazine (pictured at the Golden Globes in January 2015)
'I just moved to New York. I need to unpack and buy some house stuff, like candles and books.
'[Moving here] was a major commitment. That's a big step into adulthood for me, to allow that time for someone else out of my time.'
And Josh, who stars in The Affair, previously revealed Diane hated watching his sex scenes.
He said: 'I go home and I'm like, "Babe, I had a great day today. I had sex with two different women and I felt like it went really well".
Going solo: The stunning actress (here in May) turned 40 at the weekend
Moving on: Diane started dating Josh, 38, after she split from her husband of five years, French director Guillaume Canet (Pictured May 2015)
Life imitating art: In December it was reported that Kruger had been spotted in a New York bar with The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus
'I think she's a little conflicted on that. She's OK if I look a little schlubby ... Keep the good stuff at home.'
In December it was reported that Kruger had been spotted in a New York bar with The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus.
The two starred in the 2015 drama Sky, in which Kruger leaves her husband before hooking up with a cowboy stranger, played by 47-year-old Reedus.
Joshua was also spotted having coffee with former Teen Wolf actress Crystal Reed in Los Angeles last month.
Mere hours before, she reportedly carried her dress from the night before to the morning after.
Yet Rita Ora was in an entirely fresh ensemble as she stepped out in Tribeca on Monday, shortly after it was claimed she spent the night partying with newly-divorced Chris Martin.
The 25-year-old songstress was flashing her abs in a skin-tight crop top - and for eagle-eyed passersby, she also showed a hint of nipple pasties, which sat criss-crossed on each boob.
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Abs-tastic: Rita Ora was in an entirely fresh ensemble as she stepped out in Tribeca on Monday, shortly after it was claimed she spent the night partying with newly-divorced Chris Martin
Known for her wild fashion sense and flesh-flashing antics, Rita looked phenomenal in her white ensemble comprising of high-waisted jeans and a crop top.
Her tight bralet was semi-sheer, leading to the exposure of her nude nipple pasties, which acted to protect her modesty in the light coloured look.
Adding in a funky addition, the Hot Right Now hitmaker's jeans were skin-tight at the waist before extending into a straight, wide-cut base with frayed tips.
Keeping things casual, Rita paired the look with flat metallic sandals which coordinated with the gold accents in her aviator specs and delicate god jewellery.
Oops! The star's choice of nipple tape was on clear display as she emerged on the city's sunny streets
Fresh: The 25-year-old songstress was flashing her abs in a skin-tight crop top after she was allegedly spotted leaving his hotel in the same getup she sported for dinner the night before
A tale of two dresses: Rita headed out for dinner in a flirty number as she partied with Chris Martin in New York on Sunday, and was reportedly seen leaving the musicians' hotel the next morning in the same number
Stunner: The stunning look kept thing stylish in her white ensemble which showed off most of her sensational frame
Ever the style chameleon, she wore her tresses in her favoured look of late - wild natural curls with a softer blonde shade than her trademark peroxide tresses.
While many aspects of her ensemble had changed than the start of her day, Rita still toted the same quilted black Chanel handbag in a sack shape with a classic chain strap.
Just a night before her latest outing, Rita joined newly-divorced Chris for dinner after catching Coldplay's concert in New Jersey.
All white: Known for her wild fashion sense and flesh-flashing antics, Rita looked phenomenal in her white ensemble comprising of high-waisted jeans and a crop top
All white in the daylight: Rita's chic look encompassed her unique flare for fashion and her sexy edge
She initially sported a tight white look, proving her favoured angelic hue of the moment, as she departed the gig yet she made a quick transformation.
Sporting a second flirty number for the afterparty, it seemed Rita didn't have the same luxury of transforming when she was allegedly spotted leaving the musician's hotel the morning after.
Initially spotted before the gig in a cream midi dress teamed with a leather biker jacket and white trainers, the star opted for something a little more formal for the after party.
On his way out: Lewis Hamilton, 31, was spotted leaving Rita's apartment building on Monday
His take: The race car driver updated the classic white polo and khaki shorts with added designs and patches
Low key: He kept his face hidden behind a pair of shades
Chic: Her white look made the most of her sensational physique
Strutting her stuff: While many aspects of her ensemble had changed than the start of her day, Rita still toted the same quilted black Chanel handbag in a sack shape with a classic chain strap
As she made her way to the Spotted Pig restaurant in the West Village, Rita had changed into an elegant white striped dress with a daring thigh split.
Her blonde highlighted tresses were worn pulled back into a high ponytail tied with a fun rainbow ribbon tied in a bow.
Chris, whose divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow was finalised this week, was also seen heading to the upmarket eatery for the post-gig party in a more casual outfit.
Relaxed: Chris, whose divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow was finalised this week, was snapped heading to the Spotted Pig restaurant in a casual outfit for the after party at the same time as Rita
All change! Initially spotted before the gig in a cream midi dress teamed with a leather biker jacket and white trainers, the star opted for something a little more formal for the after party
Fit of giggles: Rita seemed unable to control her laughter as she walked along the street with her phone in hand at the concert in New Jersey
The Coldplay star, 39, rocked an all blue ensemble, comprising a sweatshirt emblazoned with a yellow lightening bolt, jogging bottoms and his trademark quirky trainers.
The following morning Rita is said to have left Chris' hotel in the same elegant white gown and a pair of vintage gold rimmed glasses framed by her tousled hair, which was worn down.
MailOnline has contacted Rita's spokesperson for comment.
Last week, Formula One champ Lewis Hamilton was spotted leaving Rita's home just moments after she did following a wild night on the town to celebrate his Grand Prix victory.
Lewis, 31, clutched what looked like the white top and gold necklace he had worn the night before, when he and Rita hit the town with celebrity pals including Ellie Goulding and model Winnie Harlow.
It's the latest rendezvous between the pair which has set the rumour mill in motion that they are now more than platonic.
They were seen flirting up a storm during a recent jaunt to Montenegro, allegedly being spotted cosying up by the river, with reports suggest they are keen to take things to the next level.
More than friends? Just last week, Rita sparked rumours she had struck up a romance with pal Lewis Hamilton after he was seen leaving her home in London after a wild night out
A source had told The Sun: 'Things have been heating up between Rita and Lewis for a while, and now they have taken them up to the next level.
'They clearly enjoy each others company and seem closer than ever.'
Meanwhile, Rita has been linked to a string of well-connected men, including Calvin Harris, Rob Kardashian and Tommy Hilfiger's rapper son, Ricky Hil, whom she split from in 2015.
Lewis famously dated another pop star, Nicole Scherzinger, for several years on and off before they called time on their romance for good last year.
Support: The pair were seen out the evening before to celebrate Lewis' Grand Prix triumph
She has also been busy on the studio front, and confirmed in a recent interview with Capital FM that a second album is in the works.
'OMG Im so so excited,' she said. 'So basically Ive just signed a new global record deal with Warner Music. Completely ecstatic about the family and amazing team.
Ive already started recording theyve definitely put me to work straight away. Its amazing to just be back where I started, even though obviously Im in a different position than I was in when I first started, but Im so excited to mix all these things Ive got together.
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She stripped down to her bikini every day to soak up the sun in Ibiza with several of her closest friends as well as her ex Matt Bellamy in what looked like a dream vacation.
And on Monday Kate Hudson, 37, revealed she found her gorgeous Spanish rental on Booking.com. The pad goes for $80,000 a week.
The lush property, named Twin Palms, boasts stunning views of the Mediterranean Sea and a long pool which the Oscar nominee was seen dipping into frequently.
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A view to kill for: Kate Hudson stayed in this posh rental in Ibiza that she found on Booking.com for $80,000 a week
The spread appeared often on the Almost Famous star's Instagram account.
She was seen doing a handstand in the pool and also dancing in a nude-coloured bikini on the back patio. It's also where she flashed her abs as she posed next to a comely female friend.
On Monday Hudson thanked Booking.com for the place. 'Thanks for finding us this amazing house @BookingCom for our girls/family vaca! What a blast ! Till next time Ibiza #BookingYeah.'
Party on: The Oscar nominee (left) has been holidaying with some very glamorous girlfriends on her Ibiza getaway
Zen and now: The lush property boasts stunning views of the Mediterranean Sea and a long pool which the Oscar nominee was seen dipping in frequently
This is where Hudson let her hair down: There was plenty of space for her and her pals to have a ball in style
There was plenty of space for her and her pals to have a ball in style. The home has five bedrooms and even more bathrooms with an open plan living room.
But it's the outdoor area that astonishes.
There are broad views of the mountains on the side and sea below. And there is ample space to throw a party on the concrete patio that is decorated with white lounge chairs and matching umbrellas.
Breathtaking in Spain: There are broad views of the mountains on the side and sea below. And there is ample space to throw a party on the concrete patio that is decorated with white lounge chairs and matching umbrellas
Roomy even by Texas standards: The home has five bedrooms and even more bathrooms with an open plan living room
Where the beauty slept: The bedroom offered a King sized bed on an elevated platform with turquoise throw pillows and a concrete floor. At the foot of the bed were throw rugs which led to a sink and oversized mirror
The roomy master bedroom offered a King sized bed on an elevated white platform with turquoise and striped throw pillows and a concrete beige floor.
At the foot of the bed were throw rugs which led to a sink and oversized mirror.
he room also had floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the sea below as well as the lounge chairs and living room set up on the patio by the pool.
At night there was space for a movie: The living room had leather sofas and chairs with large white coffee tables and a bench. The centerpiece was a large flat screen TV that pulled down but did not totally eclipse the view of the pool
The spacious living room had soft leather sofas and chairs with large white modern coffee tables and a bench that could easily seat a party of eight. Also nearby was a 1970s inspired covered chair in white as well.
The centerpiece was a large flat screen TV that pulled down but did not totally eclipse the view of the pool.
Next to the living room was a generous dining room with a wood table and 10 white chairs. That room also had floor to ceiling windows offering a look at the great outdoors.
For those who want to break a sweat: An outdoor gym was available. That included a punching bag, treadmill, workout bench and a full rack of hand weights. There were also oversized workout balls to the side
Over the weekend, Kate was seen with her ex Matt.
They got engaged in 2011 - the same year their son Bingham was born - but sadly split back in 2014.
However, it seems they are on very good terms, as the ex-couple enjoyed a family day out on the beach in Ibiza on Sunday with their son and his older brother Ryder.
Proving that there's no bad feelings between them, the actress and Muse rocker, 38, looked relaxed and happy as they enjoyed a stroll along on of the island's many famous beaches.
The couple - who called off the engagement in 2014 - looked to be perfectly at ease with the slightly unconventional family dynamic, and Matt in particular looked to be in high spirits as he doted on model Elle, 26.
Meanwhile Kate - how has recently been linked to Nick Jonas - looked in a serene mood, flashing a beaming smile as she sauntered along the sands with her two sons in tow.
Kate's next film is Deepwater Horizon with Mark Wahlberg. The story is about the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded during April 2010 and created the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Peace now: On Monday Hudson thanked Booking.com for the place. 'Thanks for finding us this amazing house @BookingCom for our girls/family vaca! What a blast ! Till next time Ibiza #BookingYeah'
Arnold Schwarzenegger is bringing the story of his bodybuilding youth in Venice Beach, California, to the small screen.
He and creator Michael Konyves have signed with CBS Television Studios to develop the 1973-set drama series Pump, which Arnie will produce, Deadline reported on Monday.
Now 68, Arnie spent his early years at Gold's Gym in the boho ocean-side town and on the sand at the open air Muscle Beach Venice, building the physique that won him multiple bodybuilding titles.
Muscled up: Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, pictured showing off his incredible body as an 18-year-old in Santa Monica in 1966, is set to produce Pump, a TV drama series loosely based on his early body building days
The Austrian native was named Mr. Universe as an amateur in 1967 and again as a professional in 1968, 1969 and 1970.
He also nabbed Mr. Olympia seven times.
Paired with his square-jawed good looks, he soon caught the attention of girls who flocked to watch him work out on the beach - and Hollywood.
New move: Now 68, the former Mr. Universe-turned-Hollywood-action-hero and former Governor of California will produce the series with creator Michael Konyves for CBS Television Studios
Checking out the opposition: Set in 1973, Pump will focus on a group of bodybuilders working out at Muscle Beach Venice as Arnie used to do, as seen in this picture taken n 1977
Arnie appeared in a series of small roles that played off his powerful frame, finally breaking through in 1982's Conan The Barbarian, followed four years by The Terminator.
That role earned him the jokey nickname The Governator when he became Governor of California.
Pump, which will run eight hour-long episodes, was first sold to Showtime in 2013 and then moved to Hulu.
Grabbing attention: Arnie quickly drew a crowd when he lifted weights on Muscle Beach Venice in 1977
No network is attached as of yet.
Arnie said in a statement: 'I feel so passionate about this project because today its easy to take our gyms and culture of fitness for granted.
'But it all started with this wild group of bodybuilders as a tiny subculture in a little dungeon gym in Venice Beach. I cant wait to get to work with our great team.'
From Mr. Universe to cybernetic assassin: He translated his success as a bodybuilder into a career as a Hollywood action hero, notably in 1984's The Terminator, which quickly became a franchise
She's spent the last week in the idyllic setting of Bali in a romantic getaway with her boyfriend Tyson Mullane.
But Pia Miller has returned to her family on Monday night, attending a Cronulla Sharks game with her beau and son Lennox.
The 32-year-old Home And Away star shared a sweet snap to Instagram from Allianz Stadium in Sydney as her boys cuddled in close.
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'Up up!': Pia Miller and her son Lennox enjoyed a Cronulla Sharks game with her boyfriend Tyson Mullane on Monday
The Chile-born beauty appeared to be wearing a denim jacket over the top of a grey hoodie, wearing a long brown tresses with a sweeping side-parting.
She was showing off her natural looks with very little makeup, and boasted a luminous visage with subtle pink lips.
Her younger son, 10, rested his head on his mother's shoulder and grinned widely for the selfie which appeared to be taken by Tyson, who was wearing a black beanie and a grey sweatshirt.
Romantic getaway: Pia Miller was back to reality at the weekend after spending a week in tropical Bali with her boyfriend
'Ah take me back': She shared a flashback snap of her sitting by their swimming pool on Monday
Pia Miller was back to reality at the weekend after spending a week in tropical Bali with her boyfriend, having confirmed their romance on Valentine's Day in February.
Clearly missing the stunning island, she shared a flashback snap of her sitting by their swimming pool with the caption: 'Ah take me back.'
Her bronzed skin, clearly sunkissed after her Indonesian holiday, was on full display and her long brown locks fall easily down her back.
Family: Pia has two children, Isaiah, 13, and Lennox, 10
She was wearing a pair of skimpy white bikini bottoms and a white top that tied in a cute bow at the back, revealing her tiny waist and enviable curves.
The pair had spent most of their trip sharing snaps from their hotel room and appear to be spending most of their time indoors.
Pia announced her shock split from former AFL star Brad Miller in October, after ten years of marriage.
These days, he's one of Hollywood's biggest action stars.
So it was no surprise to see a shirtless, chiselled Chris Hemsworth showing off his best martial arts moves on Tuesday during a much-needed break at the idyllic Qualia Resort on Hamilton Island.
'Channelling my Kung Fu Panda,' wrote the 32-year-old on Instagram.
'Channeling my Kung fu panda,' wrote Chris Hemsworth on Instagram as he holidayed on Hamilton Island on the Australian east Coast
The Australian hunk's impromptu Kung Fu session comes just one day after his return to the popular Star Trek franchise was announced.
On Monday, Paramount Pictures confirmed that the Thor actor will be in Star Trek 4.
The studio announced in a statement: 'Captain Kirk will cross paths with a man he never had a chance to meet, but whose legacy has haunted him since the day he was born: his father.'
Space hero: Chris may return to Star Trek 4 as George Kirk, Jame's T. Kirk's father, who gave his life to save more than 800 when his ship crashed in the tragic opening sequence of the 2009 reboot
Chris played starship captain George Kirk who died heroically in the heart stopping opening sequence of then director JJ Abrams' rebooted Star Trek in 2009.
The 32-year-old actor's character gave his life to stay at the helm, giving his 800 crew time to abandon the doomed ship after it was attacked by aliens.
Through the miracle of modern technology he was able to talk to his wife who had just given birth to their son, in a poignant scene as the star ship disintegrated around him.
The news of Chis's casting was tweeted by Access Hollywood's Scott Mantz.
'Captain Kirk will cross paths with a man he never had a chance to meet, but whose legacy has haunted him since the day he was born: his father,' said Paramount Pictures in a statement
'BREAKING!! #JJAbrams confirms to me that a 4th #StarTrek movie will bring together #ChrisPine & #ChrisHemsworth!! Scott tweeted at the Star Trek Beyond junket along with a photo of him with his arm around the now executive producer in Los Angeles on Friday.
Presumably this will involve some sort of time travel, not outside the realm of possibility since the first film's plot was driven by the concept..
JJ hinted about it during the press conference, saying, 'Theres something that hopefully were figuratively minutes away from talking about,' according to Collider. 'The answer is 100 percent yes, and its incredibly exciting.'
Breaking news: Access Hollywood's Scott Mantz tweeted the exclusive at a junket in Los Angeles for Star Trek Beyond on Friday
Chris has yet to comment about his casting in the space franchise on his Instagram or Twitter accounts.
The Australian actor, who stands 6ft 3ins, is best known for his roles as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
He is presently onscreen as the hunky but clueless secretary in the reboot of Ghostbusters.
Karlovic lifts ATP Newport trophy at last
The third time was the charm for Croatian Ivo Karlovic, who lifted the ATP Newport title at last with a 6-7(2/7), 7-6 (7/5), 7-6 (14/12) victory over Gilles Muller.
In his third straight appearance in the final on the grass courts of Newport on Sunday, the 37-year-old Karlovic grabbed his seventh ATP Tour title and at 37 became the oldest winner in the tournament's history.
In fact, he's the oldest ATP singles champion since Marty Riessen in 1979.
In his third straight appearance in the final on the grass courts of Newport, the 37-year-old Ivo Karlovic grabbed his seventh ATP Tour title and at 37 became the oldest winner in the tournament's history Carmen Jaspersen (AFP/File)
"After all these years when I was losing in the final and now I was finally able to do it," Karlovic said. "And I was down a match point. That makes it even nicer."
Karlovic's usual monster serve again made the difference. The former world number 44 fired 27 aces and won almost 90 per cent of his first-serve points.
But both he and Muller began the match battling nerves. Karlovic, who had been broken once in Newport heading into the final dropped his first service game.
Muller then held to lead 3-0, but Karlovic broke back to set the course for what would be the first of three tiebreakers.
Neither player mustered a break point in the third set. Muller earned the first match point at 6-5 in the tiebreaker but couldn't convert.
Muller saved four match points on his own serve, but Karlovic gave himself a fifth chance on his serve and made no mistake -- denying the 33-year-old Muller a first career ATP title.
The Billings City Council will spend most of its work session Monday discussing a pair of issues not included in its Friday packet.
The meeting begins at 5:30 p.m. in council chambers at Billings City Hall, 220 N. 27th St.
Neither a discussion on upcoming state legislation nor proposed changes in the citys growth policy was included in the Friday packet, which is posted on the citys website Friday mornings.
Planning and Community Services Director Candi Millar was working on incorporating council members changes to the proposed growth policy throughout last week.
On July 11, the city council tabled considering the growth policy, for which Millar is the principal author, to allow council members to submit changes they want to see in the policy to Millar.
She said Friday she expected to complete that process by the end of the week, or perhaps over the weekend.
The city council is expected to vote on the growth policy during its July 25 regular business meeting.
Millar said council changes which came from Ryan Sullivan and Larry Brewster are substantial, but there arent a whole lot of them.
As it stands now, the growth policy says that bodies and individuals making land-use decisions should base them incorporating these seven guidelines: essential investments, place making, community fabric, strong neighborhoods, home base, mobility and access, and prosperity.
In an email to his fellow council members, Sullivan raised concerns about the growth policy that included whether it will require renewable energy projects, water conservation criteria, potentially costly landscaping and streetscaping, transit as a must have part of the plan, and what the plan means by the term living wage.
Millar said she plans to incorporate the suggestions into the growth plan. The changes should be published Monday on the city websites page for city council emails, www.ci.billings.mt.us/1538/City-Council-E-mail-Messages.
State legislation
A preliminary discussion with the citys lobbyist, Ed Bartlett, on bills hell be following once the Montana Legislature convenes on Jan. 9, 2017, typically occurs during the summer preceding the opening of the session. Council members discuss with Bartlett any ideas for bills theyd like to see passed or not passed and Bartlett then writes a report on the citys legislative priorities, which he typically presents to the city council in the fall.
Among the monthly reports included in the Friday packet:
Code enforcement officers resolved 664 of the 677 or 98 percent of the complaints they received during the month of June.
Of the seven Volunteers in Service to America members completing their service this summer, five completed more than one service term and five have chosen to remain in the Billings area.
During the month of June, 79 volunteers completed 573 hours of work in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Public Lands. Thirty volunteers staff the bike patrol and park rangers programs.
The seasonal employee hired to paint as many of the citys 4,345 fire hydrants as possible has managed to coat about 800 hydrants to date.
Ex-Australia PM Rudd wants top UN job
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd Monday revealed he wants to succeed Ban Ki-moon as the next UN secretary general, asking Canberra to endorse his nomination.
A growing list of candidates have declared their interest in becoming the world's top diplomat, including UNESCO chief Irina Bokova of Bulgaria and former New Zealand prime minister and head of the UN Development Programme Helen Clark.
The Mandarin-speaking Rudd, who is based in New York as head of the policy institute Asia Society, served as Labor prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013.
Kevin Rudd is based in New York as head of the policy institute Asia Society and served as Australian prime minister from 2007 to 2010, and again in 2013 Ness Kerton (AFP/File)
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Monday he had officially asked for government backing, with the cabinet to consider the request.
"Kevin Rudd has requested that the Australian government nominate him and, as the prime minister has indicated on a number of occasions, that'll be a matter for cabinet," she told Sky News. "I'll certainly put the matter forward."
Candidates must be nominated by their governments, with Ban due to stand aside on January 1.
For decades, the choice of the UN chief has been in the hands of the Security Council and its five permanent members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- in a process largely kept behind closed doors.
But the General Assembly last year voted to shake up the process, asking candidates to send a formal application letter, present their resumes and appear at hearings.
The final decision still rests with the Security Council, but the new openness could put some pressure on big powers to pick a nominee with broader appeal.
Rudd was elected Australian prime minister in the 2007 general election in a landslide defeat of John Howard, but in his first term was dumped by colleagues fed up with his style of management. He became foreign minister in Julia Gillard's government.
He remained popular with the electorate and Labor returned to his leadership in June 2013, making him prime minister for a second time.
However, he announced an end to his political career in November 2013, two months after losing elections won by conservative Tony Abbott.
Trump show rolls into Cleveland as convention opens
Thousands of delegates descended on a tightly secured Cleveland arena Monday for the opening of the Republican National Convention, with Donald Trump's wife playing character witness as the tough-talking mogul locks up his party's presidential nomination.
Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, will headline the opening night of the 2016 convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which takes place against a backdrop of fear over racial violence and unrest abroad.
The four-day confab will end Thursday with a speech from the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul, whose rise to lead the Republican White House ticket has been one of the more improbable journeys in American politics.
An overall view of the convention floor the before the opening of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio Robyn Beck (AFP)
Trump told Fox News early Monday that his wife would be "speaking about her love of the country," adding that he will attend the opening session and may even say a few words -- a sign that the convention will be anything but political as usual.
"I will be there. I want to watch. It's going to be very exciting," Trump said.
The theme of Monday's proceedings, which will also feature former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, is "Make America Safe Again" -- a play on Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again."
A spate of race-tinged police-involved shootings -- and cop killings, including the fatal shooting of three officers in Louisiana on Sunday -- has put the country on edge.
Deadly attacks overseas, most recently in Nice, and an attempted coup in Turkey, have only stoked an overall sense of instability.
President Barack Obama has urged Americans to temper their words and show stronger common resolve, but Trump is instead highlighting divisions.
"We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police," Trump tweeted shortly after the Baton Rouge shooting, referring to the Islamic State group.
"Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching."
Trump has portrayed himself as a sheriff who can fix things.
"We have to bring law and order back to this country, whether we like it or not," he told Fox, as he bemoaned the deteriorating race relations in America.
He believes that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should be jailed for using a private email server to handle sensitive government documents while serving as secretary of state, something the FBI said was careless but not criminal.
On Monday, Trump will also call on retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and tough-talking Senator Joni Ernst as convention speakers to back up his point.
- Internal affairs -
Of more immediate concern for Trump however is a split among Republicans.
The reality TV star's unorthodox style and hard-right message have left the party more divided than it has been in a generation.
After his wife, the candidate's team will send his son and daughters to the convention stage in the coming days in an attempt to humanize The Donald.
Polls show that Trump struggles badly with moderate voters, and his campaign will want to project a more positive image to the general electorate.
But several party luminaries will be absent -- reportedly including John Kasich, host state Ohio's sitting governor.
Kasich battled Trump and others unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination, and kept himself out of contention to be Trump's vice presidential running mate.
"He's making a big mistake," Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said of Kasich's absence.
Trump's choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate could help shore up his position among conservatives, although the real estate billionaire seemed tepid about his decision.
In a remarkable first joint appearance on Saturday, Trump eventually got around to talking about Pence and explained why he was picked, in less-than-enthusiastic terms.
"One of the reasons is party unity -- so many people have said, 'party unity.' Because I'm an outsider."
Manafort insisted Republicans were shoulder to shoulder. "This is a Trump convention. The party is united," he said.
"It's a few people who are holding up and they don't reflect anything other than their personal opinion."
Pence will address the convention on Wednesday.
- Protests -
Inside the convention arena, it remains to be seen if the "Never Trump" camp will make themselves heard.
Outside, however, law enforcement is bracing for a wave of protests, including on Monday, when protesters aim to march close to the heavily protected venue.
Cleveland's roads are lined with concrete barriers and metal fencing, and helicopters buzz overhead.
The Midwestern city of nearly 400,000 has taken out $50 million in protest insurance.
Ohio's open-carry law, which allows people to carry loaded weapons on the streets, is adding to fears of violence.
Police Chief Calvin Williams said officers were on alert after the Dallas and Baton Rouge killings.
"Officers are more keen to things that are happening and our officers are told to be especially cautious during their tours," Williams said.
US Presidential election: Trump Pence ticket Simon Malfatto, Marc Antoine Guilbault (AFP)
Volunteers organise pamphlets outlining the Republican party platform before the opening of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio Andrew Caballero-Reynolds (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)
Lebanon tradition of celebratory gunshots comes under fire
Whether it's joy, political passion or grief, for many Lebanese, there's only one way to show it: by lifting a gun and firing off rounds into the air.
But the deadly practice, a tradition in many Arab countries, has attracted new scrutiny and police attention following a spate of deaths and serious injuries in incidents involving indiscriminate gunfire.
"It felt like a fire had burst into my chest," said 15-year-old Hussein Azab, whose chest was pierced by a bullet fired during celebrations after municipal elections in May.
Whether it's joy, political passion or grief, for many Lebanese, there's only one way to show it: by lifting a gun and firing off rounds into the air Anwar Amro (AFP/File)
One person was killed and three others were wounded in celebratory gunfire that day.
The following month, a child was killed and a woman wounded in separate incidents by people firing guns to celebrate official exam results.
"I was with my mum, my brother and my aunt on our way to my grandfather's house at around 8:30 (pm) when I was hit," said Azab, who was shot in southern Beirut.
"The blood started pouring out of my chest and I was very afraid. I thought I would die," he said, struggling to recount his ordeal as he gazed at the 15-centimetre (six-inch) scar running down his chest.
The experience has also scarred him psychologically, leaving him afraid of loud noises, particularly fireworks.
"My life changed. I've become irritable and afraid all the time. I can't sleep, and if I do, I wake up from panic attacks," he said.
Hussein's mother Wafaa was angry and tearful. "They were celebrating winning elections while we were crying blood."
- 'A sick phenomenon' -
With the deadly incidents making headlines, Lebanon's police force says it has made more than 130 arrests of people firing in the air since early June.
It is also encouraging people to report shooters via a special hotline.
Police spokesman Joseph Mousallem called the practice "a sick, fatal phenomenon".
"Civilians must come together to stop shooting and not be silent about the shooters," he told AFP.
"This isn't an issue of tradition. It is a crime that leads to death."
Officially, celebratory gunfire is illegal in Lebanon, where firearm ownership remains widespread more than two decades after the end of its 1975-1990 civil war.
A 1959 law states "anyone firing in residential areas or in a crowd, whether their gun is licensed or not" faces up to three years in prison or a fine.
But the fine has not increased since it was set at 500 Lebanese pounds in 1959, an amount now worth just 60 US cents.
Shopowner Qassem, a resident of the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon, is undeterred by the legislation.
He first fired into the air 14 years ago, to celebrate the birth of his daughter.
"It was our first joy and I shot about 75 bullets into the air. I started firing every year on my daughter's birthday, which is Lebanese Independence Day," he said.
He insisted he takes precautions before firing, refraining from shooting in packed residential streets and asking those around him to step away before he lets loose.
- 'Sky hasn't swallowed a bullet' -
In a bid to deter people like Qassem, one member of parliament has submitted a draft law increasing the jail time for such gunfire to up to 20 years, and the maximum fine to the equivalent of $12,500.
The bill has received support from various political parties, but it has yet to be voted on because Lebanon's parliament is paralysed and not meeting to legislate.
In the interim, the powerful Shiite militant group Hezbollah has taken the initiative to curb indiscriminate shooting in neighbourhoods under its control.
The issue is more pressing for the group because its supporters often fire bursts of bullets into the air when Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gives one of his frequent speeches, or during the funerals of fighters killed in the Syrian conflict.
Nasrallah himself has publicly criticised the practice, telling his supporters in June that celebratory gunfire "will be enough for us to expel someone from our ranks".
The decision would apply to everyone, even senior Hezbollah members "who have been fighting Israel for 30 years", he warned.
Fadi Abi Allam, who heads the Permanent Peace Movement, an NGO, called for tighter regulations and better implementation of existing gun laws.
"I know that firing weapons is an expression of joy or sadness, but the sky has never once swallowed a bullet," he said.
Exacerbating the issue is the sheer number of weapons in Lebanon.
An estimated four million guns are licenced as personal firearms in Lebanon, which has just four million citizens, according to Abi Allam.
"Some households don't own any weapons -- others own dozens," he said.
Abi Allam urged families, schools, religious figures, civil society and the state to combine their efforts and work together to put an end to the practice.
Lebanese men carrying a man who was injured with a ricochet bullet fired during a funeral Joseph Eid (AFP/File)
11 dead in Yemen bombings claimed by Qaeda
Suicide bombings killed 11 people Monday at two army checkpoints in Al-Qaeda's former stronghold in southeastern Yemen, officials said, in attacks claimed by the jihadist group.
One attacker drove his bomb-laden truck into a checkpoint in a western district of Hadramawt's provincial capital Mukalla, security officials told AFP.
The second attacker simultaneously blew up his vehicle at an army checkpoint in the nearby town of Hajr, some 15 kilometres (nine miles) to the west of Mukalla, the sources said.
Yemenis run for cover as smoke rises following a car bomb attack at an army checkpoint at the entrance to the town of Hajr on July 18, 2016 Abdulabbar Bajubair (AFP)
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the two attacks in a report on its Telegram account.
AQAP said "dozens were killed and wounded" from forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and it posted photographs of the two bombers.
The commander of Hadramawt's second military region, General Faraj Salmeen, had earlier told AFP that the second bombing struck the centre of the city, blaming the attack on "terrorists".
Eleven people were killed and 18 were wounded in the twin bombings, said Riad Jariri, head of the health department in Mukalla.
Four civilians were among those killed, he told AFP.
Mukalla and surrounding towns were under the control of AQAP for one year until pro-government troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured the city in April.
In March, a US air strike on an Al-Qaeda training camp in Hajr killed more than 70 jihadists, provincial officials said.
Yemen has been gripped by a devastating conflict that escalated in March 2015 when Saudi-led air strikes began against Iran-backed Huthi rebels after the insurgents seized northern and central parts of the country including the capital, Sanaa.
The violence has allowed extremists such as AQAP and the Islamic State group to extend their influence and launch scores of attacks on security forces.
Last month, IS claimed a wave of suicide bombings targeting Yemeni troops in Mukalla that killed at least 42 people.
The Pentagon said in May that a "very small number" of US military personnel had been deployed around Mukalla in support of pro-government forces.
South Korean auto, shipbuilding workers to go on strike
Tens of thousands of South Korean auto and shipbuilding workers are set to launch partial strikes this week after negotiations over wage increases stalled.
Employees at Hyundai Motor -- the South's top automaker -- are set to walk off the job for at least four hours a day from Tuesday to Friday, a labour union spokesman told AFP.
About 75 percent of the firm's 48,800 unionised workers voted last week for the stoppages after months-long negotiations with management failed to meet their demand for a 7.2-percent pay rise and other benefits.
Employees at Hyundai Motor are set to walk off the job for at least four hours a day from Tuesday to Friday, a labour union spokesman said Jung Yeon-Je (AFP/File)
It would mark the fifth straight year of industrial action at the automaker. Hyundai, along with its smaller affiliate Kia, forms the world's fifth-largest carmaking group.
At the same time, workers at Hyundai Heavy Industries -- the world's largest shipbuilder by sales -- are set to walk off the job for at least four hours a day on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.
Some 60 percent of the 15,000 unionised workers approved the partial stoppage to demand a bigger wage rise and bonuses.
Workers of the two firms will hold a joint rally Wednesday in the southeastern industrial city of Ulsan, where both companies have their biggest plants, a Hyundai Heavy union spokesman said.
"We happened to go on strike at the same time so we decided to do this together," he told AFP.
It will be the first time in 23 years that workers in both firms have staged industrial action at the same time.
The planned strikes could cost both firms heavily. Hyundai Motor has suffered drops in quarterly profit for nearly two years due to slumping sales in China and currency swings.
Hyundai Heavy has been forced to shed thousands of jobs in recent years as part of state-led restructuring of the country's once-mighty shipbuilding industry.
The Ulsan-based firm has reported a net loss for two straight years totalling $4.4 billion, after a prolonged slump in oil prices and the global economic slowdown sapped demand for tankers and container ships.
Iraqi cleric Sadr says new US troops 'a target'
A powerful Iraqi Shiite cleric whose militiamen battled US forces after the 2003 invasion has said that hundreds more American troops being sent to Iraq are "a target for us".
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter announced on a recent visit to Baghdad that 560 extra military personnel would be sent as part of efforts to combat the Islamic State group, which overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014.
"They are a target for us," Moqtada al-Sadr said in a statement on his website on Sunday, responding to a question about Carter's announcement.
Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's forces have taken part in operations against IS, but one of their main tasks has been the defence of shrines and other religious sites Haidar Hamdani (AFP/File)
There are already thousands of American military personnel in Iraq as part of the anti-IS fight, meaning that Sadr's forces have had ample opportunities to target US troops if they were going to do so.
Sadr's Mahdi Army militia was one of America's main foes in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, engaging in fierce fighting with US troops in Baghdad and the city of Najaf to its south.
Sadr's forces -- now called Saraya al-Salam -- have taken part in operations against IS, but one of their main tasks has been the defence of shrines and other religious sites.
Iraqi forces -- including pro-government paramilitaries groups, of which Iran-backed Shiite militias are the most powerful -- have regained significant ground from IS.
A US-led coalition is carrying out air strikes against the jihadists and also providing training and other assistance to Iraqi forces.
Indian rape survivor gang-raped again by same men: police
An Indian student was recovering in hospital after being gang-raped by a group of men including some charged with sexually assaulting her three years earlier, an officer said Monday.
Police in Haryana state were hunting for the five, accused of abducting the 21-year-old student of the lowest Dalit social caste from outside her college before drugging and raping her in a car.
The student was found unconscious in bushes on the side of a highway last Wednesday night in Haryana which borders New Delhi, in the country's latest shocking sexual attack.
The fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 shone a global spotlight on frightening levels of violence against women in India Indranil Mukherjee (AFP/File)
Haryana deputy superintendent of police Pushpa Khatri said the student, who is still in hospital, has identified all five men -- two of whom are currently on bail awaiting trial for raping her in 2013.
"She has identified the five accused and two of them were involved in the gang-rape of the student in Bhiwandi district in 2013," Khatri told AFP.
"We have formed several teams to arrest the accused."
The woman's family has accused the five of threatening them in the lead-up to Wednesday's attack, demanding that they withdraw the rape case lodged after the 2013 assault.
"The accused were constantly threatening us to compromise outside the court. They even offered us a hefty amount for settlement. But we didn't agree," the victim's brother was quoted by the Hindustan Times as saying.
The family also alleged they were forced to move to Rohtak district in the state from a neighbouring district after the 2013 attack because of harassment by the accused.
Members of the Dalit caste held small protests in Rohtak on Sunday to demand justice for the victim.
The fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 shone a global spotlight on frightening levels of violence against women in India.
It also led to major reform of India's rape laws, including speeding up of trials and increased punishments for offenders, but horrific attacks continue to be reported in the media on a daily basis.
Clashes as Israel destroys Palestinian home over deadly attack
Clashes erupted Monday as Israel's military demolished the home of a Palestinian accused of involvement in a February attack outside Jerusalem's Old City that killed a policewoman, officials said.
The family home of Bilal Abu Zeid in Qabatiya, in the north of the occupied West Bank, was destroyed by a bulldozer around 2:00 am (2300 GMT), Israel's army said.
Clashes erupted when the military convoy arrived, with Israel's military saying soldiers responded after being targeted by Molotov cocktails and fire from improvised guns.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year expedited home demolitions of Palestinian attackers in a bid to deter violence Jaafar Ashtiyeh (AFP/File)
The army confirmed three Palestinians were hit.
Palestinian officials reported six Palestinians wounded, including two by live fire and four by rubber bullets.
Israel regularly destroys the homes of Palestinian attackers in what it says is a deterrent.
Rights groups and Palestinians condemn the practice as collective punishment that forces family members to pay for the crimes of others.
Abu Zeid is accused of having assisted three Palestinian attackers in the February 3 incident that killed the police officer and badly wounded another outside the Old City's Damascus Gate.
He is currently imprisoned by Israel. Details on how he allegedly assisted the attackers were not provided.
The three Palestinians were armed with rifles, knives and explosives, Israeli authorities said at the time, and the policewoman died from a gunshot wound to the head.
The three attackers were killed at the scene and their family homes were demolished two months later.
Since October, around 10 Palestinians from Qabatiya have been killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.
Violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories since October has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese.
Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.
Others were shot dead during protests and clashes, while some were killed by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
Before leaving Washington for a seven-week vacation, Congress agreed that prescription drug abuse is a serious problem for the nation. With only two senators and five House members dissenting, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act is on its way to the presidents desk.
This point of bipartisan solidarity is a bright spot in an otherwise dismal record for this Congress, which recessed with most of its annual work undone. In fact, work on the addiction recovery act isnt finished. Although CARA authorizes $181 million in emergency spending to help U.S. communities curb the opioid abuse epidemic, the money still must be appropriated. Otherwise, the CARA is mostly empty or delayed promises.
On Wednesday, the same day the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of CARA, more than three dozen Democratic Senators, including Montanas Jon Tester, sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asking him to act on funding for prevention and treatment of opioid addiction. The Democrats also cautioned against cutting other public health programs to fund the opioid initiative.
We owe all Americans a strong response to the opioid crisis that shows we can work together and eschew extreme partisan goals or political games, the Democrats said. That means providing real dollars immediately, strengthening other public health priorities, and staying away from poison pill riders.
Fortunately, both Tester and Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., recognized that opioid painkiller misuse is a sourge in Montana.
This bill provides needed resources for our health care providers, emergency responders and treatment courts to help treat and stop this epidemic, Daines said in a news release after voting for CARA.
In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted this month, 43 percent of Americans said they know someone who has been addicted to prescription painkillers, including 19 percent who say they have a family member who has been addicted.
In Montana, health care and law enforcement leaders have united to reduce misuse. The Montana Medical Association promotes physician education on best prescribing practices and alternatives to opioids. The Montana Prescription Drug Registry was established to help pharmacists and prescribers avoid overprescribing narcotics.
Attorney General Tim Fox has several initiatives to raise public awareness about being cautious with opioids. Many Montana law enforcement agencies, including the Billings Police Department, provide prescription drug disposal receptacles that encourage people to get rid of old or unneeded medicines before they fall into the wrong hands.
Between 2011 and 2013 prescription drug overdoses caused at least 369 deaths and more than 7,200 hospital inpatient admissions and emergency department encounters in our state, according to the Montana Department of Health and Human Services.
Prescription drugs are commonly abused by men and women on parole and probation, and figure prominently among the substances abused by treatment court participants in Billings and Yellowstone County. Along with meth, opioids are abused by many Montana parents whose neglect of their children has increased the numbers in foster care.
The CARA is a good plan. But without money, the plan is like an inflatable raft without air. As Tester said, Congress should put their money where their mouth is so we can better combat addiction and keep our families and communities safe.
Iraq marshlands named UNESCO world heritage site
UNESCO has named Iraqi marshlands once ravaged by dictator Saddam Hussein as a World Heritage Site, a bright spot for a country where jihadists have repeatedly sought to wipe out history.
The area named "is made up of seven sites: three archaeological sites and four wetland marsh areas in southern Iraq," UNESCO said.
"The archaeological cities of Uruk and Ur and the Tell Eridu archaeological site form part of the remains of the Sumerian cities and settlements that developed in southern Mesopotamia between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE," it said.
An Iraqi man gets off a boat in the Iraqi Marshlands -- one of the world's largest inland delta systems Haidar Mohammed Ali (AFP/File)
"The Ahwar of Southern Iraq -- also known as the Iraqi Marshlands -- are unique, as one of the world's largest inland delta systems, in an extremely hot and arid environment," UNESCO said.
Iraq has been seeking World Heritage status for the marshes since 2003, and its government hailed the move.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated the Iraqi people on UNESCO's decision, and thanked "all those who contributed to this success".
Abadi also said that culture in the country will continue "despite the destruction and demolition of Iraqi heritage and antiquities by barbaric terrorist gangs".
He was referring to Islamic State group's destruction of artefacts at the Mosul museum and the ancient cities of Nimrud and Hatra, the latter of which is a World Heritage Site.
IS has sought to couch the destruction in religious terms, saying it was targeting idols, but that has not stopped it from selling artefacts to fund its operations.
The marshlands once stretched across some 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles), but they were devastated after Saddam ordered them drained in the 1990s to stop them being used as hideouts by Shiite guerrillas opposed to his regime.
Many dams and canals ordered built by the dictator have now been demolished, allowing waters from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to flood back, fish and fowl to return and humans to settle once again.
But dams farther upriver in Syria and Turkey still limit the flow of water into the marshes, and high levels of salinity in water in the south has also been a problem, making it undrinkable for humans and animals and killing fish.
In addition to the newly named site in the south and Hatra, an ancient fortress city in present-day Nineveh province in the north, Iraq is home to three other UNESCO World Heritage sites.
The Arbil Citadel, where 19th-century facades still stand at a much older site, is located in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, while Samarra Archaeological City -- the site of the 9th-century capital of the Abbasid Caliphate -- lies north of Baghdad.
And Ashur, a city that dates to the 3rd millennium BCE and which was the first capital of the Assyrian Empire, is in the Sharqat area to the north of Samarra, where Iraqi forces have battled IS militants.
The archaeological site of Uruk, east of Samawa in Iraq has been named by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site Essam Al-Sudani (AFP/File)
Kerry says EU-US trade deal could ease Brexit damage
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that a massive EU-US trade deal could soften any damage caused by Britain's exit from the European Union following last month's referendum.
The treaty, bogged down in negotiations, has "a very significant ability to act as a counter" to the negative effects of Britain's eventual divorce from the EU, Kerry told a press conference in Brussels.
"Its our job to make sure that we adequately inform people about the facts of how TTIP will actually work for the people of Europe," Kerry said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) meets with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini in Brussels on July 18, 2016 Stephanie Lecocq (Pool/AFP)
"It will protect jobs, it will protect their regulatory rights, protect their abilities with respect to labour and the environment," he said.
Negotiators from the US and the EU are currently in trade talks to finalise the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that would create the world's largest free trade area.
But the shock setback of Brexit and rising opposition to the deal in France and Germany have raised serious doubts that it will be achieved by the end of the year as hoped.
Kerry said that he would embark on a European tour in "the coming month ... to lay out the facts for people to understand exactly the positive side" of a potential deal.
Kerry's comments came just days after the top US trade official said that Britain's vote to break with the EU opens new questions over the deal.
Britain "is a very significant part of what makes TTIP attractive," said US Trade Representative Michael Froman on Thursday in Washington.
Those comments came amid strong opposition by activists who have opposed TTIP since negotiations began in 2013, believing it will only benefit multinationals and harm consumers.
Earlier this month, France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it would be "impossible" for the two sides to conclude negotiations on a trade deal by the end of 2016, which coincides with the end of the Obama administration.
Key base near Syria risks new Turkey-US tensions post-coup bid
The future use by the United States of a key Turkish air base near Syria risks causing new tensions between the key NATO allies after the botched coup attempt, but using it as a bargaining chip could prove risky for Ankara.
Washington has since 2015 used the Incirlik base in the southern province of Adana as a highly convenient launch pad for bombing raids against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.
Before being granted permission by Turkey to use Incirlik for the air strikes -- after tough negotiations -- US planes had to use bases far further away in Jordan and Kuwait.
People hold Turkish flags in Taksim square in Istanbul on July 16, 2016 during a demonstration in support to Turkish president Yasin Akgul (AFP/File)
However Friday's failed coup, which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames on US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, has raised anti-American rhetoric in Ankara.
Turkish officials are furious that the United States has so far turned a deaf ear to requests for his extradition, with the Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu even saying Washington was "behind the coup".
This has raised fears that Ankara could use Incirlik as a lever to pressure Washington for Gulen's extradition to face trial in Turkey.
Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund's office in Ankara, said Turkey-US tensions were already high because of Washington's support for Kurdish militias in Syria.
"The situation would only get worse if Washington does not answer Turkey's calls for Gulen's extradition," he told AFP.
- 'Risks backfiring' -
Gulen, a reclusive 75-year-old Islamic preacher, has been in exile in the United States since 1999, but wields enormous influence in Turkish society, with supporters in the media, police and judiciary.
The United States has so far shown little interest in Turkey's repeated demands for his extradition since a vast corruption scandal that shook Erdogan's government in 2013, which was also blamed by Ankara on Gulen and his loyalists in the police and judiciary.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Programme at The Washington Institute, said Turkey would be making a mistake to use Incirlik to speed up Gulen's extradition.
"In my view, if Ankara did that, it would backfire," he told AFP.
"While access to the base is important for US operations against the Islamic State, it is not indispensable.
"Washington gained access to the base only in 2015 and before then, it was handling anti-IS operations very well without access to Incirlik or other Turkish bases," he said.
"If Turkey forces the United States, Washington can go back to that option again."
Incirlik houses 1,500 US troops and is just 70 miles (110 kilometres) from the Syrian border.
It has notably been used to deploy drones, Prowler electronic warplanes and A-10 ground attack aircraft in the fight against IS.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that Washington would assist Turkey in the investigation of the failed coup, inviting Ankara to share any evidence it has against Gulen.
Unluhisarcikli said any use of Incirlik as a bargaining chip would dent Washington's reliance on Turkey as a partner in anti-IS operations and would push Americans to seek an alternative.
"And that would not be smart," he told AFP.
- 'Active anti-IS player' -
Already, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Sunday that the events in Turkey had raised questions about its "reliability" in the fight against IS.
And after Friday's turmoil, Turkey briefly shut down Incirlik, forcing its NATO ally to halt strikes in Syria.
Turkish authorities also detained at the base a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Sunday that operations against IS had resumed from the base after its air space reopened.
After long being accused of not doing enough in the fight against the jihadists, Turkey has played a fuller role in the US-led anti-IS coalition and carried out its own artillery strikes.
"Turkey is an active member of the international coalition," a Turkish official said.
But Turkey had also lamented the delay in the delivery of American light multiple rocket launchers -- High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) -- to be deployed along its border with Syria to combat IS.
US has deployed F-16 warplanes at the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey
Large wing piece in Australia to be tested for MH370 link
A large piece of aircraft debris, believed to be a wing flap, has arrived in Australia for testing as part of the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, officials said Monday.
The piece, found by locals on Pemba Island just off the coast of Tanzania on June 23, was now in Canberra, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said.
"Technical specialists from the ATSB are working with Malaysian investigators to determine if it is from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, MH370," the bureau said in a statement.
Women walk past a mural depicting the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane in Shah Alam, Malaysia Manan Vatsyayana (AFP/File)
The ATSB has so far examined four pieces of debris on behalf of Malaysia and determined they are almost certainly from MH370, a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing which disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board.
They are in addition to a piece of wing debris found on Reunion Island a year ago and positively identified by French officials as originating from flight MH370.
Australia is coordinating the search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean far off its west coast, but so far has not found its final resting place.
Minister for Transport Darren Chester confirmed on Monday that the ATSB had received "a wing part suspected to be from MH370".
Fear in Syria's rebel-held Aleppo as regime lays siege
Civilians in rebel-held parts of Syria's Aleppo expressed fears Monday of a lengthy government siege, as food supplies dwindled after regime troops seized the only road into the city's east.
The government advance, which has been backed by a Russian air offensive, is seen as a major setback for opposition forces in Syria's second city.
The United Nations says about 600,000 Syrians already live under siege countrywide, most encircled by government forces, though rebels and the Islamic State group have also used the tactic.
A wounded Syrian is evacuated following reported air strikes on a rebel-controlled neighbourhood in Aleppo on July 17, 2016 Thaer Mohammed (AFP)
A US-backed alliance of Kurds and Arabs has also surrounded the IS stronghold of Manbij about 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Aleppo city.
Air strikes by the US-led coalition killed at least 21 civilians in and around the jihadist bastion on Monday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In Aleppo city itself, air strikes struck rebel areas, killing four civilians in Qaterji, the monitor said.
In Bab al-Hadid, another district that was hit, an AFP correspondent saw a man searching for his family under the rubble.
He called out to his daughter, who replied: "I'm in the basement. There's no air," before she fell silent, and he burst into tears.
Bombs then dropped nearby causing more casualties, including a woman who lost a leg, said the correspondent, who noted attacks on eastern Aleppo had intensified in recent days.
Food and fuel shortages had already hit rebel-held districts that are home to at least 200,000 people, after government forces advanced to within firing range of the key Castello Road supply route on July 7.
- 'Nowhere to go' -
Regime forces seized the road itself at the weekend, completely severing the rebel-held portion of the city from the outside world and raising fears of a potentially devastating siege.
"I don't know what is going to happen to us," said 38-year-old Mohamed Rukby, an unemployed father-of-four in the Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood.
"We have nowhere to go. All the roads are closed and we've been suffering for days with shortages of bread, food and basically everything."
In the opposition-controlled Al-Mashhad district, mechanic Mohamed Zeitun said his work had dried up because fuel shortages meant residents were not driving anywhere.
"The idea of the siege keeps me up at night," the 44-year-old told AFP.
"I don't have supplies to last me more than a week, and if there is no food in the markets, there could be a famine," said the father-of-five.
Aleppo city was once Syria's economic powerhouse, but it has been ravaged by the war that began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.
The conflict has killed more than 280,000 people and left Aleppo divided roughly between government control in the west and rebel control in the east.
Analysts said the government advance was a significant blow to the rebels.
"It has now become mission impossible for Syria's rebels who are completely deprived of any breathing space," said Karim Bitar, an analyst at the Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
The advance also leaves Syria's President Bashar al-Assad feeling "considerably more secure than a few months ago," he said, meaning his forces could move "to further consolidate his positions".
- 'Devastating blow' -
The encircling of eastern Aleppo has raised international concern, with the UN's humanitarian coordination body OCHA warning that "the situation is particularly worrying due to the high concentration of people living in this area".
It said eastern Aleppo had not received humanitarian supplies since July 7, and that there was enough food there to last 145,000 people for one month.
OCHA said some essentials had been stockpiled and there were sufficient emergency medical supplies for four to five months.
But "further life-saving aid is needed urgently", it added.
In some places, civilians have reportedly starved to death or died for lack of medical supplies because of siege tactics.
Despite successive rounds of talks, international efforts to find a solution to the conflict have yet to bear fruit, and UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura has urged Russia and the United States to push for renewed peace talks in Geneva next month.
But the opposition High Negotiations Committee said the regime's advance around Aleppo could jeopardise new talks.
"This is pushing the negotiations in Geneva to a more remote date. Frankly the prospects are becoming less and less possible or more and more remote," HNC member Basma Kodmani said late Sunday.
Syria expert Aron Lund, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that if Assad manages to secure both Damascus and Aleppo it would be a "devastating blow for his opponents".
"It wouldn't mean the war is over. The government is still weak and exhausted... But it might have severe repercussions for rebel morale and perhaps also for foreign support to the opposition," he added.
Syria afp (AFP)
A man waits as Syrian civil defence workers look for survivors under the rubble of a collapsed building following reported air strikes in Aleppo on July 17, 2016 Thaer Mohammed (AFP)
US shooter victims included black police officer with young child
An ex-US Marine and Iraq war veteran, shot and killed three Baton Rouge police on Sunday -- including an African-American officer who had a baby son.
President Barack Obama condemned the "cowardly" shooting and demanded an end to attacks on law enforcement.
Here are profiles of the victims:
Police officers gather near the place where three police officers were killed on July 17, 2016 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Sean Gardner (Getty/AFP)
- Montrell Jackson, 32 -
Jackson was an African-American officer and 10-year veteran of the police department. He was married and had a four month-old son.
On July 8, the day after the Dallas police shootings in which a black gunman killed five police and wounded several others, Jackson wrote on Facebook that events had left him physically and emotionally tired.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," Jackson wrote.
"In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat ... Please don't let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better."
Jackson was injured and treated for smoke inhalation in 2007 after he rushed into a burning building in a failed attempt to rescue a toddler, local newspaper The Advocate reported.
- Brad Garafola, 45 -
Garafola was a member of the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office. He had worked a night shift and was preparing to go on vacation on Monday.
He had four children, two boys and two girls, aged between seven to 21.
"He was a great guy. Not just a great law enforcement, he was a great husband and a great father," his wife Tonja Garafola told The Advocate. "He didnt deserve this. He always helped everybody."
- Matthew Gerald, 41 -
Gerald was an Army veteran who was a helicopter crew chief and served several tours of duty in Iraq.
He had joined the city police department in October.
"He was a damn good man," neighbor Stephanie Morgan, who had known him since 2009, told The Advocate. "Youre not going to find any better."
Montrell Jackson, one of three police officers killed in the latest Baton Rouge shooting, was married and had a four month-old son
Taiwan to make lunar lander for NASA moon-mining mission
Taiwan is building a $47 million lunar lander as part of the first ever moon-mining project, officials said Monday.
The lander, to be made by the island's Chung-shan Institute of Science and Technology, will carry a rover and touch down on the moon's surface after a three-day journey from Earth.
US space agency NASA is leading the project, which is called Resource Prospector and aims to be the first mining expedition on another world.
US space agency NASA is leading the first ever moon-mining project, which is called Resource Prospector Stan Honda (AFP/File)
The rover is designed to excavate hydrogen, oxygen and water from the moon, NASA says on its website.
"To be honest, the schedule is pressing," Han Kuo-chang, the head of CSIST's international cooperation programme, told AFP, adding that the US would supply the rover and the lander's descent propulsion system.
"Should the Resource Prospector prove to be successful, the moon could be used as a base for space journeys into Mars," Han said.
It is the first time Taiwan has built a lunar lander. CSIST is required to deliver the 3.7-tonne vehicle to NASA before the end of 2018, according to the agreement signed between Taiwan and the US space agency.
Coalition raids kill 21 civilians in Syria: monitor
Air strikes by the US-led coalition killed at least 21 civilians in and around a stronghold of the Islamic State group in northern Syria on Monday, a monitor said.
At least 15 civilians were killed in raids in a northern district of Manbij while six others were killed in a village near the city, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The jihadist bastion lies on their main supply route between Syria and Turkey in the northern province of Aleppo.
The Islamic State group bastion of Manbij in Syria has faced a more than month-long US-backed offensive by Kurdish and Arab fighters Delil Souleiman (AFP/File)
It has faced a US-backed offensive by Kurdish and Arab fighters since May 31 that has caused thousands of civilians to flee.
But tens of thousands of civilians are still trapped in Manbij, most of which is controlled by the jihadists.
On June 23, the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters broke into western districts of Manbij, after blocking the road south of the city heading to IS's de facto capital of Raqa.
But their advance has been slowed in the past month because of landmines planted by the jihadists, which are also fighting back by launching suicide attacks against the SDF.
Founded in October, the Kurdish-dominated alliance has seized territory from IS across large parts of northern and northeastern Syria.
Capturing Manbij would be its most significant victory yet.
In Lebanon, Syria refugees fear rising discrimination
Syrian refugee Abu Adnan was rushing his newborn to the doctor one night in the Lebanese town of Rmeish when municipal police stopped him and began questioning him.
He was in violation of a municipal curfew that prevents Syrian refugees from leaving their homes between sunset and sunrise.
"They began questioning me -- 'Where are you going? Why?'" he told AFP, speaking on condition that a pseudonym be used.
Lebanese protesters hold a Lebanese national flag on which is written in Arabic, "We are all refugees" on July 18, 2016 in the capital Beirut Joseph Eid (AFP)
Eventually he was allowed to continue, but was followed to and from the doctor's office, ensuring that he returned straight home.
This is just one example of what Syrian refugees and local activists say is increasing pressure on, and even outright racism against, Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
Lebanon hosts more than one million Syrian refugees -- roughly a quarter of its population -- and has regularly been praised for opening its borders to those fleeing the brutal conflict in its neighbour.
But the refugee influx has strained resources and tempers, with some Lebanese viewing the years-long presence of Syrians as a burden, even an imposition.
Some municipalities have taken matters into their own hands, imposing curfews on refugees, ordering night raids on their homes, evicting them or even making them clean the streets.
"Lately, things have become very difficult," said Abu Adnan.
"Once, a group of drunken young men broke into the home of some Syrian refugees and started beating and cursing them," he said.
"The municipality did nothing for the Syrians; instead it evicted dozens from their homes."
- Obligation to protect refugees -
Such incidents spiked again recently after a string of suicide bombers attacked Al-Qaa village on Lebanon's border with Syria.
Reports initially suggested the attackers had come from nearby refugee settlements, though that was later denied by Interior Minister Nuhad Mashnuq.
Lebanese activists say the security fears of citizens are being manipulated by some to justify measures against the Syrians.
On Monday evening, a "march against racism" took place in Beirut.
Several dozen demonstrators carried placards declaring "No to the curfew", "Racism threatens civil peace" and "Security forces only attack the weak".
Rights groups have urged Lebanon to protect Syrians escaping the war that began in March 2011 and has killed more than 280,000 people.
"Amnesty International is concerned about recent reports of harassment and physical abuse of Syrian refugees including arbitrary arrests and forced evictions from informal settlements," said its refugee researcher Khairunissa Dhala.
She said Lebanon has "international obligations to protect Syrian refugees who are seeking safety in the country".
Matthew Saltmarsh, senior communications officer for the UN's refugee agency UNHCR, added: "It is important to remember that Syrian refugees in Lebanon are themselves seeking sanctuary from violence in their home country."
But in Rmeish, the municipality's Facebook page urges "all citizens to be guards".
"It is our duty to report any suspicious movement to the authorities," it says.
Municipality chief Marun Shibli says Rmeish is home to 6,000 Lebanese and that the arrival of more than 1,000 Syrians was "more than we could handle".
- 'Forced to clean streets' -
"A decision was taken to keep only those who could have a local sponsor. Now there are only about 500 refugees left," he said.
Other municipalities have also come under fire for their treatment of refugees.
In mid-July, municipal police in the coastal town of Amchit, north of Beirut, carried out night-time raids on several homes.
Pictures posted online showed refugees kneeling or lined up facing a wall, their hands crossed behind their backs, as municipal policemen checked their identity documents.
Under pressure from activists, the interior minister wrote to municipality heads warning that law enforcement officers would face "disciplinary measures" if they abused their power.
Amchit municipality dismissed any wrongdoing and said its policemen were acting in line with nationwide security measures aimed at "preventing any terrorism action".
Other violations of refugee rights have been reported.
In Tartej village north of Beirut, municipal officials forced refugees to "clean up the streets", As-Safir newspaper reported in mid-July.
And in the predominantly Christian coastal town of Jounieh, also north of the capital, one resident said she witnessed municipal policemen beating up and insulting a Syrian man.
"It was a painful sight," said Sarah Kamel, who tried in vain to defend the man, a resident of Lebanon for more than 20 years.
She said she shouted at the policemen, who said the man failed to heed a warning to stop.
"The policemen told me 'When he comes to your house to rob you, you can come to us and defend him,'" she said.
Lebanese protesters hold a banner reading in Arabic, "It is forbidden to impose curfew" on July 18, 2016 in the capital Beirut Joseph Eid (AFP)
Syrian children play in a makeshift refugee camp on the outskirts of the town of Zahle (background) in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on June 20, 2016 Patrick Baz (AFP)
A Lebanese protester holds a placard reading in Arabic, "No to racism" on July 18, 2016 in Beirut Joseph Eid (AFP)
E.Asian shipping emissions kill tens of thousands: study
A sharp rise in shipping emissions in east Asia is killing tens of thousands of people in the region every year and adding to global warming, a study said Monday.
The manufacturing and export hub has the world's fastest-growing rate of particle and carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution from shipping emissions, it said.
This is likely to grow as China pursues a policy of reviving the ancient Silk Road trade with Europe -- yet very little is known about the damage done by east Asia's shipping emissions.
East Asia which holds eight of the world's top ten container ports, now accounts for more than a sixth of global shipping activity and emissions, which are not controlled Philippe Lopez (AFP/File)
A team of Chinese and American scientists used records of more than 18,000 vessels observed in the region in 2013 to calculate emissions and their likely effect.
They found that ship traffic in east Asia more than doubled since 2005.
Resulting emissions accounted for 16 percent of global shipping CO2 in 2013 -- up from about 4-7 percent from 2002 to 2005.
The region, which holds eight of the world's top ten container ports, now accounts for more than a sixth of global shipping activity and emissions, which are not controlled, the team reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.
"Increased emissions lead to large adverse health impacts with 14,500-37,500 premature deaths per year," they wrote.
The estimation was based on the known, relative contribution of air pollution to total deaths in a given population.
The team calculated that particle pollution from shipping fumes was responsible for about 18,000 deaths in mainland China, 3,600 in Japan, 1,100 in Taiwan, Hongkong and Macau, 800 in South Korea and 600 in Vietnam.
This was "an important though small fraction of the more than one million total premature deaths attributable to ambient air pollution in the same region," said the study.
Previous research had shown that about 70 percent of emissions from international shipping occur within 400 kilometres (216 nautical miles) of the coast.
"As a large fraction of vessels are registered elsewhere, joint efforts are necessary to reduce emissions and mitigate the climate and health impacts of shipping in the region," the researchers pointed out.
KALISPELL The Montana Nurses Association has begun a statewide campaign to explain the need for legislation that would make it a felony to assault a health care worker or emergency responder while they're on duty.
MNA labor representative Sandi Luckey says they're making a statewide effort this year after a bill introduced during the 2015 legislative session failed in committee. She says lawmakers didn't believe such attacks were that common
The MNA is sending postcards to lawmakers with stories of nurses who have been verbally and physically assaulted by patients.
MNA Executive Director Vicky Bird says it's a felony to attack a police dog, law enforcement officers or officials at sporting events, but health care workers don't have the same protection.
The MNA held its most recent meeting in Kalispell and will be in Butte on Friday.
Indonesia's most wanted militant may be dead: police
Indonesia's most wanted Muslim militant may have been killed Monday in a firefight with security forces, police said, after a lengthy hunt for the Islamic State (IS) group supporter.
Santoso, the leader of extremist group the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, is suspected to have been shot dead along with another militant in a jungle-clad, mountainous district on central Sulawesi island.
National police chief Tito Karnavian said there were indications the man killed was Santoso.
Santoso, the leader of extremist group the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, is suspected to have been shot dead along with another militant by Indonesia's security forces in a jungle-clad, mountainous district on central Sulawesi island
"There are indeed signs, a mole on his forehead, which matches the features of Santoso," he said, adding the bodies of those killed were being removed from the site of the firefight for further identification.
As well as those killed, one other man and two women managed to escape during the firefight in Tambarana village, said Karnavian.
If confirmed, the death of Santoso would represent a major victory for the Indonesian authorities who had sent thousands of troops and soldiers to Sulawesi to hunt him down.
Santoso, known by several aliases including Abu Wardah, led a small group of ragtag fighters who had been hiding in the jungles for several years and were known for carrying out deadly attacks on domestic security forces.
He had pledged allegiance to the IS group and was put on a list of global terrorists by the United States earlier this year, and in recent times several members of China's ethnic Uighur minority had joined his group.
Zika virus passed from Utah patient to caregiver
An elderly man who died of the Zika virus in Utah appears to have spread the infection to a caregiver, US health officials said Monday.
The case raises the prospect of a previously unknown path of transmission for a virus that is capable of causing birth defects and has traveled quickly though Latin America.
The caregiver has since recovered from the infection, which is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes but can also be passed on through sexual contact.
A family contact was infected with the Zika virus from an elderly man who died of the virus in the US state of Utah, raising the prospect of Zika, which is spreading quickly through Latin America Fabrice Coffrini (AFP/File)
However, common modes of transmission have been ruled out in this case. The caregiver had not traveled to a Zika-affected area or had sex with an infected person, Staples said.
Mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus are not believed to present in Utah.
"We are learning something new about Zika virus every day," said Erin Staples, a medical epidemiologist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This situation appears to be unique," she told reporters.
A statement issued by the CDC said the elderly victim had "uniquely high amounts of virus -- more than 100,000 times higher than seen in other samples of infected people -- in his blood."
The man, who was in his 70s and had an underlying health condition, passed away in late June, after traveling to a country where the mosquito-transmitted virus is active, the Salt Lake County Health Department said.
- Transmission route unclear -
Health authorities said they are investigating how the caregiver, described only as a "family contact," may have been infected with Zika.
Previous research has shown Zika virus has been detected in blood, semen, saliva, urine, breastmilk and in swabs from the female genital tract.
"We are not at the point today to describe any specific action that might have led to transmission," said Michael Bell, medical epidemiologist at the CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
Asked by a reporter if airborne transmission was considered a possibility, Bell replied: "In our line of work, nothing is ever truly off the table. The table is vast and we never want to underestimate possibilities.
"However, it would be extremely, extremely unlikely for something like that to occur in the absence of something like a medical procedure."
As of mid-July, US health officials have reported 1,306 cases of Zika in the continental United States and Hawaii.
None of these cases have been the result of local spread by mosquitoes. Fourteen have involved sexual transmission and one was the result of a laboratory exposure.
Zika virus can cause a variety of symptoms, including rash and joint and muscle pain, but often carries no symptoms at all.
Nigeria's Buhari fears delays in corruption trials
Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday said he was concerned about delays in prosecuting former public officials for corruption, warning it could harm his high-profile stance on graft.
"I am worried that the expectation of the public is yet to be met by the judiciary with regard to the removal of delay and the toleration of delay tactics by lawyers," he said.
"When cases are not concluded the negative impression is given that crime pays," Buhari told a summit examining the role of the judiciary in the overall drive against corruption.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, pictured on May 12, 2016, said that he is "worried" about delays in prosecuting former public officials for corruption Dan Kitwood (Pool/AFP/File)
"This certainly needs to change if we are to make success in our collective effort in the fight against corruption."
Buhari, who was elected last year on a platform to tackle graft, has said "mind-boggling" sums of public funds were stolen over decades and has made recovering the money a central plank of his presidency.
Most of those currently on trial are linked to the former administration of his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, and centre around an alleged $2.1 billion (1.9 billion-euro) "arms scam".
Former national security advisor Sambo Dasuki is accused of overseeing a sprawling embezzlement scheme that saw money earmarked to fight Boko Haram diverted for political purposes.
But there have been repeated delays and adjournments in that case and others, leaving Buhari without a single high-profile conviction since starting the crackdown in May last year.
Buhari told the summit that government corruption cases "are not progressing as speedily as they should be... because the courts allow the lawyers to frustrate the reforms introduced by the law."
Jonathan's main opposition Peoples Democratic Party has accused Buhari of a political witch-hunt, as most of those on trial are PDP members, supporters or linked to the former government.
Buhari and his government have been criticised for disregarding the separation of powers of the executive and judiciary by keeping suspects in custody, despite courts having granted them bail.
Algeria, Indonesia group to invest $4.5 bn in mining
Algeria and an Indonesian group Monday signed three accords to invest $4.5 billion in phosphate mining, as the North African state aims to consolidate its position in the industry, officials said.
The industry and mining ministry said the deals were signed by Algerian public companies Asmidal and Manal and Indonesia's Indorama Corporation.
"The strategic aim of this partnership is to transform five million tonnes of phosphates into phosphate-based fertilisers and to produce one million tonnes of ammonium and 800,000 tonnes of calcium ammonium nitrate," Mining Minister Abdesselam Bouchouareb said in a statement.
Algeria's Minister of Industry and Mining, Abdeslam Bouchouareb looks on during the opening of the 3rd forum on partnerships between France and Algeria on April 10, 2016 in the capital Algiers Farouk Batiche (AFP/File)
He said Algeria aims to become the third largest phosphate producer in Africa, after Morocco and Tunisia.
US Republican convention to nominate Trump begins
The Republican Party opened its national convention Monday, kicking off a four-day political jamboree that will anoint billionaire Donald Trump as its presidential nominee.
Some 2,000 delegates descended on a tightly secured Cleveland arena where Trump's wife will take center stage later in the day to make a personal pitch to voters that her billionaire husband is the best candidate for the White House.
The tough-talking mogul -- whose rise to lead the Republican White House ticket has been one of the more improbable journeys in American politics -- seeks to unify a party deeply split by months of bitter campaigning and divisive rhetoric.
An overall view of the convention floor the before the opening of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio Angela Weiss (AFP)
"This convention will come to order," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told cheering delegates at 1:00 pm (1700 GMT).
Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, has top billing for the opening night of the four-day convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which takes place against a backdrop of fear over racial violence and unrest abroad.
The opening-day theme is "Make America Safe Again" -- a play on Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again."
Priebus swiftly addressed the unrest that has rattled American communities, calling for a moment of silence for officers killed in the line of duty, including those gunned down in two attacks in the past 10 days.
"Before we begin the official business of this convention, I would like to take a moment to recognize the fallen police officers in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and elsewhere," he said.
"We also want to recognize the families who lost loved ones during these troubling times. Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings."
Trump told Fox News early Monday that his wife would be "speaking about her love of the country," adding that he will attend the evening session and may even say a few words -- a sign that the convention will be anything but politics as usual.
"I will be there. I want to watch. It's going to be very exciting," Trump said.
A spate of race-tinged police-involved shootings -- and cop killings, including the fatal shooting of three officers in Louisiana on Sunday -- has put the country on edge.
Deadly attacks overseas, most recently in Nice, and an attempted coup in Turkey, have only stoked an overall sense of instability.
President Barack Obama has urged Americans to temper their words and show stronger common resolve, but Trump is instead highlighting divisions.
"Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching," Trump tweeted shortly after the Baton Rouge shooting.
Trump has portrayed himself as a sheriff who can fix things.
"We have to bring law and order back to this country, whether we like it or not," he told Fox, as he bemoaned the ragged state of race relations in America.
Trump believes that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should be jailed for using a private email server to handle sensitive government documents while serving as secretary of state, something the FBI said was careless but not criminal.
On Monday, Trump will call on retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn and tough-talking Senator Joni Ernst as convention speakers to back up his point.
- Internal affairs -
Of more immediate concern for Trump is a split among Republicans.
The reality TV star's unorthodox style and hard-right message have left the party more divided than it has been in a generation.
After his wife, the candidate's team will send his son and daughters to the convention stage in the coming days in an attempt to humanize The Donald.
Polls show that Trump struggles badly with moderate voters, and his campaign will want to project a more positive image to the general electorate.
But several party luminaries will be absent -- the entire Bush family, Mitt Romney and reportedly even John Kasich, host state Ohio's sitting governor.
Trump's choice of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate could help shore up his position among conservatives, although the real estate billionaire seemed tepid about his decision.
In a remarkable first joint appearance on Saturday, Trump eventually got around to talking about Pence and explained why he was picked, in less-than-enthusiastic terms.
"One of the reasons is party unity -- so many people have said, 'party unity.' Because I'm an outsider."
Pence will address the convention on Wednesday.
- Protests -
Inside the convention arena, it remains to be seen if the "Never Trump" camp will make themselves heard.
Outside, however, law enforcement is bracing for a wave of protests, including on Monday, when demonstrators began gathering downtown and chanting "dump Trump."
As the GOP convention kicked off, Clinton blasted Trump's candidacy as a "threat to our democracy," and accused him of stoking racial and ethnic tensions with his rhetoric.
Trump "plays coy with white supremacists, Donald Trump insults Mexican immigrants," she told the NAACP, America's largest black civil rights organization, at a meeting in Cincinnati.
"Donald Trump cannot become president of the United States," she said, to huge applause.
The Republican convention ends Thursday with a speech from the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul. The Democrats stage their own convention next week in Philadelphia.
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks in New York on July 16, 2016, during a press conference Kena Betancur (AFP/File)
US Presidential election: Trump Pence ticket Simon Malfatto, Marc Antoine Guilbault (AFP)
Delegates listen to the US national anthem at the opening of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio Robyn Beck (AFP)
Fox News still reviewing status of CEO Ailes
Fox News on Monday was still reviewing the status of its boss Roger Ailes, after a report that the powerful media executive was being forced out following sexual harassment allegations.
A statement by Fox to media organizations said that "this matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded."
Earlier this month, the cable news giant said it had launched an internal review on allegations in a lawsuit by Fox News host and former Miss America Gretchen Carlson, who claimed she was fired for rejecting Ailes's sexual advances.
Roger Ailes from "Fox News" speaks onstage during the 2006 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour for the FOX Broadcasting Company at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel on July 24, 2006 in Pasadena, California Frederick M. Brown (Getty/Getty Images/AFP/File)
Fox stated at the time it had "full confidence" in Ailes but added that it was reviewing the matter.
"We take these matters seriously," Fox said in the July 6 statement.
New York Magazine reported Monday that Rupert Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James had decided that Ailes, who is chairman and CEO at Fox News, would soon be out.
The report, citing sources close to the situation, said Ailes was given the option of resigning or being fired this week.
The two sons of Fox founder Rupert Murdoch have been taking a larger role in operations since the 85-year-old tycoon announced he was gradually easing control of his corporate empire, which includes Fox News parent 21st Century Fox and the global publishing group News Corp.
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch share the title of executive chairman at 21st Century Fox and James is chief executive.
Ailes, a former consultant to Republican presidents, is a key figure in the media empire and a longtime ally of Rupert Murdoch.
Carlson, a top Fox personality, said in her lawsuit that Ailes "unlawfully retaliated against Carlson and sabotaged her career because she refused his sexual advances and complained about severe and pervasive sexual harassment."
Ailes denied the allegations.
African leaders moot South Sudan protection force
African leaders on Monday approved a proposal to deploy a regional protection force to South Sudan with a more robust mandate than the UN peacekeeping mission currently there.
"The UN doesn't have the mandate to impose peace," African Union (AU) Peace and Security Commissioner Smail Chergui said at a summit in Kigali.
"They are there where there is peace to keep. African troops are ready to engage in very difficult situations. It is our responsibility," he added.
A picture taken on July 16, 2016 in Juba shows a row of numbered body bags with the remains of victims waiting to be collected by a South Sudanese team of the ICRC Charles Atiki Lomodong (AFP/File)
A shaky ceasefire has held in South Sudan for a week after four days of bloody clashes between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those supporting his rival Vice-President Riek Machar.
At least 300 people were killed, and tens of thousands fled their homes.
The violence raised fears of a breakdown in protracted efforts to end a civil war that began in December 2013 with battles in Juba between the same rival groups.
The 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, UNMISS, has faced criticism for failing to stem the latest bloodshed or fully protect civilians during the fighting.
Chergui said the mooted force for South Sudan would be modelled on the 3,000 strong Force Intervention Brigade deployed within the UN's mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which proved decisive in neutralising the M23 rebellion in 2013.
IGAD, a bloc of east African states and the key player behind the proposed force, on Sunday called on the UN Security Council to give it a mandate that would allow it to separate the parties to the conflict and "pacify Juba".
Chergui said the international community would have to persuade Kiir to drop his opposition to the deployment of the new force.
While IGAD had backed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's call for an arms embargo on South Sudan, this did not get past the AU summit because of opposition from Uganda, which has strong ties to Kiir.
The summit also endorsed a plan for the AU to start withdrawing its 20,000 troops deployed in Somalia in the UN-endorsed AMISOM mission starting from October 2018.
Before that date, there would be "very robust and collective attacks" on Shabab insurgents in the south of the country.
- Welcome back Morocco? -
The summit also saw the first steps of the possible return to the AU of Morocco, the only African state that is not part of the union.
Morocco quit the bloc 32 years ago in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member.
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," King Mohammed VI said in a message sent to the summit.
"We consider Morocco a brother country and would be very happy to welcome them back," said Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama.
"But I think a lot will also depend on the terms on which Morocco would like to come back," he cautioned.
The heads of state failed to name a successor to Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to become the AU's new commission chair.
None of the three candidates garnered the two-thirds majority necessary, and a new ballot will be held at the next AU summit, due in January 2017 in Addis Ababa.
The leaders did agree on financing the bloc through a 0.2 percent levy on imports, so as to reduce its dependence on donors, who currently contribute 73 percent of the $781 million (708 million euro) budget.
Rwanda's Finance Minister Claver Gatete said this 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.
African leaders approved a proposal to deploy a regional protection force to South Sudan Cyril Ndegeya (AFP/File)
North Korea test-fires three ballistic missiles
North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles on Tuesday, in further defiance of the international community and in apparent reaction to the planned deployment of a US defence system in the South.
The launches drew swift condemnation from the United States and Japan, who vowed a coordinated response to Pyongyang's repeated violations of UN sanctions that bar it from weapons tests.
They come as North Korea's isolation deepens after it said this month it was severing all diplomatic channels with the US.
Replicas of a North Korean Scud-B missile (L) and South Korean Nike missiles at Seoul's Korean War Memorial Jung Yeon-Je (AFP)
Two SCUD missiles flew between 500 and 600 kilometres (310-370 miles) into the Sea of Japan, while a third, believed to be Rodong intermediate range ballistic missile, was fired about an hour later.
The trajectory of the Rodong missile was still being analysed, spokesman Jeon Ha-Kyu of Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
The SCUD missiles' range is such that they could strike anywhere within South Korea, the military said, adding that the latest tests were presumed to be linked to the North's recent threats.
Pyongyang last week said it would take "physical action" after Washington and Seoul announced the deployment of a sophisticated US anti-missile defence system.
The announcement of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, was prompted by a series of missile launches this year that analysts say demonstrate that the North is making progress toward being able to strike the US mainland.
Another military source that the SCUD missiles would likely be Pyongyang's weapon of choice if it were to target places like Seongju, where the THAAD system will be deployed.
"We strongly condemn this and North Korea's other recent missile tests, which violate UN Security Council Resolutions explicitly prohibiting North Korea's launches using ballistic missile technology," Pentagon spokesman Gary Ross said.
"We intend to raise our concerns at the UN to bolster international resolve in holding the DPRK (North Korea) accountable for these provocative actions," Ross said.
Japanese Defence Minister Gen Nakatani said the latest launches "compromise peace and safety of the region, including Japan".
"The Japanese government will strengthen cooperation with related countries, namely the United States and South Korea, and strongly urges North Korea to exercise self-restraint, while preparing for any contingencies," he said.
- Repeated tests -
The North test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile on July 9, following back-to-back tests of a powerful new medium-range missile on June 22.
Those two missiles achieved a significant increase in flight distance over previous failed launches and were believed to be of a much-hyped, intermediate-range Musudan missile -- theoretically capable of reaching US bases as far away as Guam, the South's defence ministry said in June.
The North previously launched relatively short-ranged SCUDs in March, as it flexed its muscles in response to joint US-South Korea military drills just south of the border.
A US think-tank last week warned there was intense activity at a North Korean nuclear test site.
The US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University said images from July 7 of the Punggye-ri site show what appear to be supplies or equipment stacked near the spot where the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in January.
The institute cautioned that it was not possible to determine whether this was maintenance or possible preparations for a fifth nuclear test.
"Nevertheless, it is clear that North Korea is ensuring that the facility is in a state of readiness that would allow the conduct of future nuclear tests should the order come from Pyongyang," it added.
North Korea missile test
Undated image shows a test launch of the surface-to-surface medium long-range strategic ballistic missile Hwasong-10 at an undisclosed location in North Korea
DIVIDED AMERICA: To some, Trump is a desperate survival bid
LOGAN, W.Va. (AP) Mike Kirk leans across the counter of the pawnshop where he works for $11 an hour. It's less than half what he made in the mines, but the best he can do these days.
Many of the storefronts on the narrow downtown streets are empty. Some of the buildings burned. Their blackened shells, "condemned" signs taped to the doors, stand as a symbol of how far they've fallen.
In 10 years? A ghost town, one customer offers. Another wonders if it might simply cease to exist.
ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, JULY 18, 2016 AND THEREAFTER-Billy Prater, 27 adjusts a Donald Trump sign on his fence in Beech Creek, W.Va., in Mingo County on April 28, 2016. Laid off from the mines, he had been out of work for more than a year. Now he works for the railroad, but the major customer is the collapsing coal industry so his work is unsteady. He was a registered Democrat from a family of diehard Democrats. But when he hung the Trump sign, his neighbors started calling and sending him messages, asking where he got it and how to get their own. "Everybody on this creek wants one," he said. "He's honest. He says thing that he probably shouldn't say. We respect that, because it means he's not buttering us up." (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)
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EDITOR'S NOTE This story is part of Divided America, AP's ongoing exploration of the economic, social and political divisions in American society.
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There are places like this across America poor and getting poorer, feeling left behind while the rest got richer. But nowhere has the plummet of the white working class been as merciless as here in central Appalachia. And nowhere have the cross-currents of desperation and boiling resentment that have devoured a presidential race been on such glaring display.
It used to be that young people could finish high school and get a job in the mines that paid enough to feed their families. Now the mines are idle. Families are fleeing.
The population of Logan County is 35,000, half what it was 50 years ago. More than 96 percent of residents are white; one in five lives in poverty. Few have college degrees. Drug abuse is rampant. The life expectancy for men is 68 years, eight years shorter than the average American man.
"Look around, this town went to hell," said Kirk, who lost his $28-an-hour job on a strip mine and his three-bedroom house with a two-car garage.
The unemployment rate is 11 percent, compared to less than 5 percent nationwide. West Virginia is the only state where less than half of working-aged people work.
Anxiety turned to despair, said James Branscome, a retired managing director of Standard & Poor's. And desperate people, throughout history, have turned to tough-talking populists.
And that is how, in one of America's forgotten corners, the road was perfectly paved for the ascent of Donald Trump. He won by spectacular margins across the coalfields.
"He offers us hope," Kirk said, "and hope's the one thing we have left."
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Daniel Cox, the research director for the non-profit Public Religion Research Institute, said an uneven recovery from the recession lined up with societal shifts the election of the first non-white president and a rising minority population. It left many in struggling, blue-collar communities feeling deserted for the sake of progress someplace else.
"When confidence falls, it's all too complicated to understand an elaborate plan or an articulated policy," Atwater said. "We don't want to wait for the details; we don't want to read the footnotes. Just give me a powerful headline."
Trump promised to build the wall. Create jobs. Destroy ISIS. He blamed immigrants and China and Muslims for America's woes.
His critics warn that his red-blooded, racially tinged rants threaten to unravel the fabric of the nation. Here, the same words translate as truth-telling.
A think tank called the Economic Innovation Group created the Distressed Communities Index , which combines several factors for every county poverty rate, the percentage of people without a college degree, the number of abandoned homes.
The most distressed patches stretch through Appalachia and across the South. Trump won in rich places and poor places and places in between. But an analysis shows that Trump's strongest support increased along with the level of economic hardship.
In Buchanan County, Virginia, a quarter of people live in poverty and one in five live on disability. In March, 70 percent of primary voters supported Trump.
"Maybe part of it is his ego," said Gerald Arrington, Buchanan County's prosecutor, a 37-year-old Democrat. He voted for Trump. "His ego is going to make him want to be the greatest president ever."
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Albert Adams and a friend quit their jobs after decades in the mines and opened up Big Al's Auto and Small Engine Repair in Logan to try to build a life after coal.
They hung a Make America Great Again sign over the coffee maker.
Adams doesn't like everything Trump has to say. He imagines immigrants are a lot like West Virginians: doomed by the place of their birth to be down on their luck, looking for a better life.
His conundrum is echoed all over these mountains. People like Trump's rat-a-tat-tat of promises and insults so unscripted they figure he couldn't have given it enough forethought to be pandering. Yet they're occasionally disturbed by the contents.
Adams' business partner, Leslie Arthur, isn't sure Trump should be trusted with the nuclear codes. Mike Honaker, who runs the funeral home, doesn't appreciate how he talks about women.
But they're willing to forgive because they believe the political machine left them with no other option.
Coal is all but gone, Adams knows. There are no factories, no infrastructure to build any and no companies that want to relocate here.
They knew opening this shop was a gamble. Maybe they'll stay afloat, maybe they won't. Maybe Trump can fix it. Maybe it can't be fixed.
Sometimes Adams thinks of packing it all up and moving himself. He figures he'd head west, where the coal seams still run thick.
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Data journalist Angeliki Kastanis in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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Online:
EIG Distressed Communities Index: http://eig.org/dci
ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, JULY 18, 2016 AND THEREAFTER-This May 10, 2016 photo shows a boarded up building downtown Logan, W.Va. The unemployment rate is 11 percent, compared to 4.7 percent nationwide. Many have given up working altogether: West Virginia is the only state in America where less than half of working-aged people work. More than 12 percent of Logan County residents collect Social Security disability checks, three times the national average. (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)
ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, JULY 18, 2016 AND THEREAFTER-Pawn shop employee Mike Kirk talks with customers Ranny Grimmett and Joe Finfrock in Logan, W.Va., on May 11, 2016. Kirk works for $11 an hour. Its less than half what he made in the mines, but the best he can do these days. He and the two customers discussed what this city might look like in 10 years if nothing changes. Many of the storefronts on the narrow downtown streets are empty. Some of the buildings burned, condemned signs taped to the doors. In 10 years? A ghost town, one customer offers. The other wonders if it might simply cease to exist. (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)
ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, JULY 18, 2016 AND THEREAFTER-Brenda Horvath displays a large sign that reads, "Hillary for Prison 2016," on the front of her home in Logan, W.Va., on May 10, 2016. A registered Democrat who comes from long line of coalminers, she says she's supporting Donald Trump. "When I was growing up, it was a big to-do to change from Democrat to Republicans. Now I don't see any difference... They'll all out for themselves." The collapse of the coal industry has left her family with little hope, she says. Horvath laughed at politicians' promises to retrain miners for other work. "What are they retraining them for? McDonalds?" she asked. "There's no jobs here." (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)
ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, JULY 18, 2016 AND THEREAFTER-Albert Adams and Leslie Arthur, who own Big Al's Auto and Small Engine Repair, sit in their offices in Logan, W.Va,. on May 11, 2016. They quit their jobs in the mines when they figured the industry wouldn't bounce back and started this shop to try to build a life after coal. They said they are working on a disabled miner's car on credit because jobs are scarce and families are hurting to make ends meet. (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)
HELENA Montana Gov. Steve Bullock signed an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service on Monday for the state to play a bigger role in forest management on federal lands, which officials say will speed up backlogged logging projects.
Forest management and the declining timber industry have emerged as major issues in this year's governor's race, with Weyerhaeuser announcing last month that it would close a Columbia Falls lumber and plywood mill. The closure will put about 100 people out of work in addition to 100 administrative jobs that are being eliminated or moved with Weyerhaeuser's purchase of Plum Creek Timber.
With the Chessman Reservoir as a backdrop, Bullock, Forest Service Regional Forester Leanne Marten and Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation Director John Tubbs signed the Good Neighbor Authority agreement, which was authorized under the 2014 federal Farm Bill.
The agreement will allow the state to work on behalf of the Forest Service on federal land, such as conducting environmental analyses for logging projects. Forest management, including logging trees for fuel reduction, is important as fire seasons grow longer and more intense, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Robert Bonnie said.
But most of the Forest Service's budget is being spent fighting fires, and the number of non-fire Forest Service employees has dropped 39 percent since the 1990s, Bonnie said.
"This allows us to get more work done more quickly," Bonnie said of the agreement.
Two logging and restoration projects in the Flathead National Forest and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest will be the first conducted under the signed agreement, but Bullock said two other projects have been undertaken without a formal deal.
The Chessman Reservoir project, which logged more than 400 acres of trees killed by the recent mountain pine beetle outbreak from Helena's main water source, was the first example of a federal-state logging and restoration partnership, Tubbs said.
"We're already out there doing this," Tubbs said.
Greg Gianforte, Bullock's Republican opponent in the November election, criticized Bullock for waiting so long to sign the agreement after it was authorized in 2014. At least 18 other states have already entered into similar agreements, the Bozeman businessman said.
"We've already lost 600 timber jobs under his watch, including 100 job losses just announced last month in Columbia Falls," Gianforte said.
Bullock dismissed Gianforte's comments as part of the "silly season" of election politics, and said the state and federal forest collaboration was happening long before Monday's signing.
"We've been doing the work even without a piece of paper signed," Bullock said.
The Latest: Milwaukee police to be sent in 2-person teams
MILWAUKEE (AP) The Latest on a Milwaukee police officer who was shot and wounded by a domestic violence suspect who apparently killed himself shortly afterward (all times local):
4:30 p.m.
The Milwaukee Police Department is sending all officers out in two-person squad teams after a Milwaukee officer was shot and seriously wounded by a domestic violence suspect.
Broken auto glass is scattered in the street in the 3500 Blk. of S. 17th St. in Milwaukee, where a Milwaukee Police officer was shot while seated in the front seat of his squad car early Sunday, July 17, 2016. A domestic violence suspect opened fire on the officer, who was sitting in his squad car early Sunday, seriously wounding him before fleeing and apparently killing himself shortly afterward, authorities said. (Michael Sears/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via AP)
Assistant Milwaukee Police Chief William Jessup says all seven police districts were told to use two-person squads "effective immediately and until further notice."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (http://bit.ly/29MKRLi ) reports authorities identified the wounded officer as 31-year-old Brandon Baranowski, a 13-year police veteran.
Baranowski was sitting in his squad car conducting the investigation early Sunday when the suspect approached on foot and fired at the officer, striking him several times. The suspect, a 20-year-old man from the suburb of West Allis, was later found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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8:10 a.m.
Authorities say a suspect opened fire on a Milwaukee police officer sitting in his squad car and seriously wounded him before fleeing and apparently killing himself shortly thereafter.
Sgt. Tim Gauerke says officers responded to several calls in the 3500 block of South 17th street early Sunday, including two domestic violence-related calls in which the suspect was no longer there when the officers arrived.
Gauerke says at around 2 a.m., an officer was sitting in his squad car conducting the investigation when a suspect approached on foot and fired at the officer, striking him several times.
About 30 minutes later, officers heard a nearby gunshot and found a man who had apparently shot himself in the head, killing himself.
Gauerke says investigators believe the dead man was the suspect in the domestic violence incidents and the person who shot the 31-year-old officer, who was hospitalized with serious wounds that weren't considered life-threatening.
Family and friends remember slain Baton Rouge officers
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) Just days before he was shot and killed Sunday morning, a Baton Rouge police officer posted an emotional Facebook message saying he was "physically and emotionally" tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, a friend said Sunday.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," Montrell Jackson wrote.
Friends and family of Jackson, 32, were mourning the 10-year veteran of the police force that relatives described as a "gentle giant" and a "protector" after he and another two law enforcement officers were shot and killed Sunday morning by a gunman.
This undated photo taken from Baton Rouge Police Officer Montrell Jackson's Facebook page shows Jackson in a vehicle. Jackson and two other Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed Sunday, July 17, 2016, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. (Facebook via AP)
Sgt. Don Coppola Jr. of the Baton Rouge Police Department identified the other slain Baton Rouge police officer as 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been with the department less than a year.
The third officer killed was 45-year-old sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, a 24-year veteran, spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said.
In the Facebook posting Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I've experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core," the posting read.
The message was posted July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge. That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the country's fraught history of race relations. Another black man was shot and killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend livestreaming the aftermath on Facebook. Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, killing five police officers.
Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
Erika Green told The Associated Press Sunday that she is friends with the family of Jackson, one of three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers who were killed Sunday morning. She said she saw the message on his Facebook page.
In the message, Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired.
"These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," Jackson wrote.
A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet but is no longer on Jackson's Facebook page.
Jackson's family was mourning the officer Sunday afternoon.
Kedrick Pitts, the 24-year-old younger half brother of Montrell 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 that 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.
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, spoke to reporters on the front lawn of Jackson's house. Jordan 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, 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.
Garafola's house in the Baton Rouge suburb of Denham Springs lies at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac and there were several cars parked in front. East Baton Rouge sheriff's deputies said the family needed its privacy and was not speaking with any more media after having done an interview with a local newspaper.
A neighbor, Rhonda Smith, a 39-year-old marketing representative, said Garafola was a family man.
"You never saw him without at least one of his kids," she said Sunday evening.
She said he had four children -- a 7-year-old girl, a 12-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter and a 21-year-old son.
She said she and the Garafolas were the first to build homes in 2007 in the subdivision where they live.
"He was low-key, happy," she said. "He never raised his voice, never hollered at anyone. The epitome of a peace officer."
She said Garafola mowed people's lawns just to be a good neighbor and built a back yard fence for her. She said he also "kept an eye on the neighborhood."
"Very surreal. Still can't wrap my brain around it. My heart goes out to those kids and Tonja (his wife)," she said.
Officer Gerald and his wife, Dechia, celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary just two weeks ago, according to WWL-TV (http://bit.ly/2a9jnF9 ).
The couple had a 3-year-old daughter together and Gerald had adopted his wife's older daughter from a previous marriage.
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.
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Associated Press reporter Kevin McGill in Livingston Parish contributed to this report.
Kedrick Pitts, the half-brother of slain Baton Rouge Policeman, Cpl. Montrell Jackson, talks on the phone in front of Montrell's mother's house in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Jackson was one of the law enforcement officers who were shot and killed on Sunday morning. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Octavia Lacey, the aunt of fallen Baton Rouge policeman Montrell Jackson gives a kiss to Kedrick Pitts, Montrell Jackson's half-brother in front of Montrell's mother's house in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Jackson was one of the law enforcement officers who were shot and killed on Sunday morning. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Kedrick Pitts, the half-brother of slain Baton Rouge Policeman Montrell Jackson, stands in front of Montrell's mother's house while talking about his brother in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Jackson was one of the law enforcement officers who were shot and killed on Sunday morning. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Beverly Blakes, the aunt of fallen Baton Rouge policeman Montrell Jackson, hugs Kedrick Pitts, the half-brother of slain Baton Rouge Policeman, Cpl. Jackson, after visiting Montrell's mother's house in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Jackson was one of the law enforcement officers who were shot and killed on Sunday morning. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Baton Rouge police killer: An ex-Marine from Kansas City
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) The man who killed two police officers and a sheriff's deputy in Baton Rouge Sunday was a former Marine sergeant who served in Iraq and had no known ties to any extremist groups.
Gavin Eugene Long, whose last known address was in Kansas City, Missouri, carried out the attack on his 29th birthday. Police say he also wounded three officers before he was killed in the latest in a string of violent incidents involving police.
According to military records, Long was a Marine from 2005 to 2010 and rose to the rank of sergeant. He served in Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, and records show he received several medals during his military career, including one for good conduct. Long, who received an honorable discharge, was listed as a "data network specialist" in the Marines.
Baton Rouge police officer Randy Bonaventure takes a bouquet of flowers 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)
After the Marines, he attended the University of Alabama for one semester, in the spring of 2012, according to university spokesman Chris Bryant. University police had no interaction with Long during that time, Bryant said.
Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism for the Anti-Defamation League, said there was no information linking Long, who was black, to any known extremist group or movement, but the ADL and others were investigating Long's possible use of aliases.
Sunday's incident was the latest in a series of deadly encounters in the United States involving police and black men that have sparked a national debate over race and policing. It also came less than two weeks after 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man, was fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests and has reverberated nationwide. Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since Sterling's death.
In Kansas City, police converged on a small turquoise frame house listed under Long's name. 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 in the southern part of the city.
Missouri court records show that a Gavin Eugene Long filed a petition for divorce from his wife in February 2011. The online court records don't say why the couple divorced, but the petition indicates they had no children and that Long had represented himself. Three months after the divorce petition was filed, his ex-wife was granted restoration of her maiden name. Last month, on June 7, a case against Long by the city of Kansas City over unpaid city earnings taxes was dismissed.
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AP journalists Maria Sudekum, Gerald Herbert and Janet McConnaughey also contributed to this story. Suhr reported from Kansas City; Mohr from Jackson, Mississippi.
A Hawaiian Airlines jet carrying almost 300 passengers punctured its tires while making an emergency landing in Japan, forcing a runway at the airport to be closed.
Eight tires blew out when the Airbus A330 returned to Haneda Airport after a display indicated a problem in the hydraulic system, Japanese media reported.
None of the 293 passengers and crew on board were injured, the reports said.
A Hawaiian Airlines jet is seen on tarmac after making an emergency landing at Haneda airport in Tokyo, Monday, July 18, 2016
The plane was stuck on the tarmac for hours as workers replaced the tires.
Japan Airlines cancelled some domestic flights, and warned of the possibility of other flight disruptions.
Haneda Airport said in a statement on its website that international flights had not been affected.
An aviation expert told Japanese public broadcaster NHK that the brakes may not have functioned properly if there were a hydraulic system problem, causing the blowouts.
Hundreds attend vigil for 2 from Texas killed in France
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Hundreds of people have attended a candlelight vigil for a Texas father and son who were killed in the truck attack in Nice, France.
The Austin American-Statesman (http://atxne.ws/2a1fEH9 ) reports Lake Hills Church Pastor Mac Richard began the service Sunday night explaining it wasn't a memorial service, but rather, the beginning of the grieving process. He said the deaths of 51-year-old Sean Copeland and 11-year-old Brodie Copeland of Lakeway near Austin were an "indescribable, unspeakable loss."
The Copeland family was in France during a European vacation when Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel slammed a truck into a crowd Thursday during the Bastille Day celebration, killing at least 84 people.
According to a statement the pastor read, other Copeland family members still in Europe are working with the U.S. government to get back home.
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Coca's comeback forces Colombia to rethink drug war
ESPINAL, Colombia (AP) Explosives experts wearing heavy body armor light a fuse and take cover behind a concrete-reinforced trench. "Fire in the area!" a commando shouts before a deafening blast ricochets across the Andean foothills and sends a plume of brown smoke 30 meters (100 feet) high.
Such drills have intensified for Colombia's military, one of the most battle-tested in the world, as it tries to control skyrocketing cocaine production that has fueled a half-century of war with leftist guerrillas.
After six straight years of declining or steady production, the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia began rising in 2014 and jumped 42 percent last year to 159,000 hectares (393,000 acres), according to the U.S. government. That's an area twice the size of New York City, and after much production shifted to Peru over the past decade, the United Nations said recently that Colombia is once again the world's largest supplier of the drug.
In this May 10, 2016 photo, a police officer holds up a marker that identifies a variety of coca called "Boliviana Rosa" in an experimental coca field at Los Pijaos police training base in San Luis, Colombia, where procedures and equipment are tested against coca growers ever-changing techniques. Amid rising cocaine production, Colombia is being forced to rethink its anti-drug strategy again, taking into account the possibility of a more stable future now that the government has reached a cease-fire deal with rebels that will take effect once a final accord is signed, probably in the coming weeks. If and when that happens, the military is hopeful it will be able to shift its energy and resources from fighting rebels to pursuing top drug traffickers. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
The military training exercises simulate the charges that troops typically use to blow up land mines protecting coca crops in areas dominated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel group known as the FARC. Once the mines are destroyed, civilians move in to dig up the plants.
Troops have had to wipe out coca plants manually since last year when President Juan Manuel Santos ended a two-decade-old aerial eradication program over health concerns signaled in a World Health Organization-sponsored report reclassifying the chemical herbicide glyphosate as a carcinogen.
But amid rising cocaine production, Colombia is being forced to rethink its anti-drug strategy again, taking into account the possibility of a more stable future now that the government has reached a cease-fire deal with rebels that will take effect once a final accord is signed, probably in the coming weeks.
If and when that happens, the military is hopeful it will be able to shift its energy and resources from fighting rebels to pursuing top drug traffickers.
In the meantime, Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas insists that Colombia's military is not easing up on eradication, as was suggested in June in Senate testimony by the State Department's top anti-narcotics official.
"We haven't renounced the war on drugs," Villegas said in an interview. "Nobody in the world has produced more dead, more blood, or more resources than Colombia."
As proof, he points out the government's scaling up of manual eradication to replace the now-grounded crop duster plans that were piloted by Americans. In the coming months, Colombia will quadruple to around 200 the number of eradication crews, each comprised of about two dozen civilians escorted by a much-larger security detail of sharpshooters, paramedics and land mine removal teams.
It's dangerous work. In the last 15 years, 153 people on manual eradication teams have been killed, the majority from exploding land mines or booby traps, according to the anti-narcotics police. More than 500 have lost limbs or suffered serious injuries.
It's also costly and slow-going: On an average day, each crew can only clear about a hectare (about 2 acres). That's why the government has managed to eradicate only about 9,000 hectares (22,000 acres) of coca fields this year compared to the 172,000 hectares (425,000 acres annually at the height of the fumigation program a decade ago.
With some people warning that Colombia will soon be awash in coca because the manual eradication process moves so slowly, Santos earlier this year decided to bring back pesticides on a more limited and what he says is safer basis.
Starting later this year, crews will be equipped with hazardous materials suits and motor-powered sprayers worn on their backs, allowing them to spread a glyphosate substitute over longer distances.
But even those committed to the program's success recognize its limitations and yearn for a return to the days of fumigation.
"Without a doubt the results aren't going to be sufficient," Capt. Manuel Perez, a police special forces instructor, said between loud blasts at Los Pijaos training base, a drive of a few hours south of Bogota.
Elsewhere on the sprawling base, in an experimental field growing 23 varieties of coca, procedures and equipment are being tested against growers' ever-changing techniques. The biggest concern lately is a strain called "Boliviana negra" Black Bolivian, also known as "Supercoca," which is found in the southern jungles and being studied for its resistance to the herbicide.
However strong the government's eradication effort, the new strategy's linchpin is the FARC. The group has long funded its insurgency by levying a "war tax" on cocaine shipments moving through areas it controls. But as part of peace talks, it has already agreed to abandon the business and join the government in an alternative development program to wean an estimated 64,000 mostly-peasant families off the drug trade. Although details are scarce, the two sides in July made public a pilot project in western Antioquia state near where they're already removing land mines together.
Conservative critics of Santos see his plan as tailor-made to appease the rebels, who have long compared the fumigation with glyphosate to the U.S. military's use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam war.
Experts say FARC members are taking advantage of the relative safety provided by the end of fumigation, as well as the long build-up to a peace deal, to urge farmers to increase coca production so they will be well-positioned to receive government assistance when hostilities cease.
Meanwhile, the coca growers have little faith the government can deliver. A visit earlier this year by The Associated Press to a FARC-controlled area in Antioquia found some coca growers bracing for confrontation and showing no sign of slowing down.
"We'll fight whoever comes and touches our plants," said Fernando Zapata, head of a community council in the tiny hamlet of San Isidro, his hands swollen green from so many years stripping coca leaves from its knobby bush. "We're organized and will fight to the death if necessary. They want to stop us from feeding our families."
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Associated Press writer Cesar Garcia in Bogota contributed to this report. Jacobo G. Garcia also contributed.
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Joshua Goodman is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjoshgoodman. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/joshua-goodman.
In this May 10, 2016 photo, police give a tour of an experimental coca field, growing 23 varieties of coca, at Los Pijaos police training base in San Luis, Colombia, where procedures and equipment are tested against coca growers ever-changing techniques. The biggest concern lately is a strain called Boliviana negra, or Black Bolivian, also known as Supercoca, which is found in the southern jungles and being studied for its resistance to herbicide. After six straight years of declining or steady production, the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia began rising in 2014 and jumped 42 percent last year, according to the U.S. government. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
China digs in after tribunal rebuke; Philippines wants talks
A look at some recent key developments in the South China Sea, where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons in waters crucial for global commerce and rich in fish and potential gas and oil reserves:
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a weekly look at the latest key developments in the South China Sea, home to several territorial conflicts that have raised tensions in the region.
In this Thursday, July 14, 2016 photo, a woman walks past a billboard featuring an image of an island in South China Sea on display with Chinese words that read: "South China Sea, our beautiful motherland, we won't let go an inch" in Weifang in east China's Shandong province. China says if its interests in the South China Sea are threatened, it could declare an air defense identification zone in the area. Such a move would be seen as a threat to freedom of navigation, which the U.S. has promised to uphold. (Chinatopix via AP) CHINA OUT
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PHILIPPINES READY FOR TALKS AFTER WINNING ARBITRATION
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says he's ready for talks with China to try to solve their maritime dispute, after his government won an international arbitration case that challenged Beijing's vast claims.
It could be the first step toward a diplomatic solution to tensions that have been building up since China expelled Filipino fishermen from Scarborough Shoal in 2012, and constructed seven island outposts on disputed reefs.
China says the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration is "null and void" because the tribunal has no jurisdiction in this case.
The tribunal ruled that China's nine-dash line encompassing much of the sea violates international maritime law because it encroaches on the Philippines' own 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone.
Duterte asked former President Fidel Ramos to travel to China and start the discussions. However, the 88-year-old former leader cited his age and other commitments in suggesting he may not be up for the job.
Duterte's goal of repairing relations with China he already talked about his desire for Chinese-financed railways will be constricted by the tribunal's ruling, and he could face fierce opposition at home if he tries to give Beijing concessions. Philippine Solicitor General Jose Calida said the ruling will form the basis for any negotiations.
China, on the other hand, says the opposite: talks are OK, but the ruling is not.
"After the storm of this arbitration has passed, and the sky has cleared, we hope this day (of negotiations) will come quickly," said Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin, adding that China believed cooperation would also bring Filipinos "tangible benefits."
President Barack Obama's nominee for the next U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, Sung Kim, said the United States would support China-Philippines negotiations that were free from "coercion and undue pressure."
The U.S. Navy's top admiral, meanwhile, arrived in Beijing Sunday for talks with his Chinese counterpart about the South China Sea and other issues. The visit by Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, also will include a tour of the aircraft carrier Liaoning in its home port of Qingdao.
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FILIPINO FISHERMEN TURNED BACK FROM SCARBOROUGH SHOAL
Testing the waters in the wake of the ruling, Filipino fishermen tried to gain access to Scarborough Shoal, a tiny uninhabited outcrop, but were blocked by China's coast guard.
Footage showed the Filipino boat being tailed by a white Chinese coast guard ship and Chinese personnel using a bullhorn to order the Filipinos to leave "this area immediately."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that "if anyone challenges China's rights and interests by taking provocative actions" based on the ruling, "China will surely make a resolute response."
The Philippines and its ally the U.S. are watching carefully how Beijing reacts to the ruling. There are concerns that China may turn Scarborough Shoal into another military outpost, but so far, all signs are that Beijing wants to keep the status quo.
Both China and the U.S. have ramped up military presence in the region. At a U.S. congressional hearing, retired Pacific commander Adm. Dennis Blair said the U.S. should be willing to use force against China in case of "aggression" at Scarborough Shoal.
According to the Navy Times, U.S. destroyers have been quietly stalking Scarborough Shoal and Beijing's man-made islands farther south in the Spratlys, but did not cross the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit.
Meanwhile, the People's Liberation Army Air Force published photos of its newest H-6K bombers flying over Scarborough Shoal. Chinese media also reported the first civilian flights to Mischief Reef and Subi Reef, two of the three locations where Beijing constructed airfields.
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BEIJING SAYS IT MAY DECLARE AIR DEFENSE IDENTIFICATION ZONE
China says if its interests in the South China Sea are threatened, it could declare an air defense identification zone in the area. Such a move would be seen as a threat to freedom of navigation, which the U.S. has promised to uphold.
"If our security is being threatened, of course we have the right to demarcate a zone. This would depend on our overall assessment," China's Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said.
"We hope that other countries will not take this opportunity to threaten China and (instead) work with China to protect the peace and stability of the South China Sea, and not let it become the origin of a war," he said.
In 2013, China set up a similar air zone over disputed islands in the East China Sea, requiring all aircraft entering the area to notify Chinese authorities or be subjected to "emergency military measures" if they disobey orders from Beijing. The U.S. and others refuse to recognize the zone.
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CHINA GETS MILD REBUKE AT ASEM BUT ASEAN SILENT
China didn't want any mention of the South China Sea at a summit of Asian and European leaders in Ulaanbataar, the Mongolian capital.
In the end, a statement by the meeting's chair, Mongolia, noted that the leaders agreed "on the critical importance of confidence building measures, of refraining from the use or threat of force, and of disputes being resolved in accordance with principles of international law, the U.N. Charter and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea."
"Still, it is not easy to agree with our Chinese partners when it comes to this issue ... it was a difficult task but also promising," said European Council President Donald Tusk.
Beijing was more successful in preventing any such statement being issued by the Association of Southeast Nations. Half of the 10 ASEAN countries have some sort of South China Sea dispute with Beijing, but China's ally Cambodia said it does not want the bloc to mention the ruling.
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Associated Press writers Hrvoje Hranjski in Bangkok, Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, Gillian Wong in Beijing, Aritz Parra in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, and Tran V. Minh in Hanoi, Vietnam, contributed to this report.
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Follow Hranjski at www.twitter.com/hatbangkok
Gomez at www.twitter.com/JimSGomez
Wong at www.twitter.com/gillianwong
FILE - In this May 1, 2016, file photo, an illuminated globe shows the South China Sea at a museum in Pathumthani, Thailand. Philippine President Duterte says hes ready for talks with China to try to solve their maritime dispute, after his government won an international arbitration case that challenged Beijings vast claims. Chinas initial reaction to the tribunals ruling in favor of the Philippines was defiance and warnings to other nations not to resort to provocations. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
In this July 17, 2016 photo, waitresses wait for customers at a restaurant with a Diaoyu island theme in Beijing, China. China says if its interests in the South China Sea are threatened, it could declare an air defense identification zone in the area. Such a move would be seen as a threat to freedom of navigation, which the U.S. has promised to uphold.(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
FILE - In this July 1, 2016 file photo, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte addresses the troops during the Change-of-Command ceremony for incoming Armed Forces chief Gen. Ricardo Visaya, at Camp Aguinaldo in suburban Quezon city northeast of Manila, Philippines. President Duterte says hes ready for talks with China to try to solve their maritime dispute, after his government won an international arbitration case that challenged Beijings vast claims. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Four new hills built on New York City's Governors Island offer stunning views of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan.
They are unique places to hike and climb, and even have massive slides that dwarf those found on any playground.
Set to open Tuesday, the 10-acre park called The Hills at Governors Island is the newest piece of the redevelopment of the former Army and Coasts Guard base in the heart of New York Harbor.
Stunning: Four new hills built on New York City's Governors Island offer stunning views of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan
Aloof: Set to open Tuesday, the 10-acre park called The Hills at Governors Island is the newest piece of the redevelopment of the former Army and Coasts Guard base in the heart of New York Harbor
Peace: The hills are unique places to hike and climb, and even have massive slides that dwarf those found on any playground
The four hills, built in part with fill and debris from demolition of the island's old barracks, range from 26ft to 70ft high, and have been lushly planted with trees, shrubs and grasses.
One, aptly named Slide Hill, has four stainless-steel chutes that run as long as 57 feet.
'One of the signatures of Governors Island is this idea that play is for everyone,' said Leslie Koch, president of the trust overseeing redevelopment of 150 acres of the island.
'There's no age limit. Adults are invited to play, not just children.'
Gulls cawed overhead as Koch described how the hills were designed to take advantage of the island's 360-degree vantage point, offering views not only of New York's skyscrapers and Lady Liberty, but of burgeoning Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges.
'With each foot that you go up the hills, you get more and more,' Koch said.
Tranquil: The four hills, built in part with fill and debris from demolition of the island's old barracks, range from 26ft to 70ft high, and have been lushly planted with trees, shrubs and grasses
Fun: One mound, aptly named Slide Hill, has four stainless-steel chutes that run as long as 57 feet
'One of the signatures of Governors Island is this idea that play is for everyone,' said Leslie Koch, president of the trust overseeing redevelopment of 150 acres of the island
The Dutch landscape architecture firm West 8, based in Rotterdam, designed the park.
Designer Adriaan Geuze said the pathways that wind around the park's hills create 'conceal and reveal' vistas that create a sense of anticipation.
GETTING TO GOVERNORS ISLAND Located in New York Harbor, it is open to the public from May 28 to September 25. Ferries run daily from the Battery Maritime Building in lower Manhattan and on weekends from Pier 6 in Brooklyn. The round-trip cost is $2 for adult and $1 for senior citizens. There is no cost for children under 13. The ferry is free for everyone on Saturdays and Sundays until 11.30am. Cars on not allowed, but visitors can bring bicycles on the ferry or rent them on the island. Advertisement
Outlook Hill, at 70ft the highest point on the island, can be ascended by strolling up a sloping path or by climbing over granite blocks salvaged from the island's old seawall.
Other hills include the gently sloping Grassy Hill and Discovery Hill, home to a site-specific art installation called Cabin, by the British artist Rachel Whiteread.
The concrete shed is meant to evoke a Thoreau-like retreat overlooking the busy metropolis.
Governors Island was off limits to ordinary New Yorkers during most of the past 200 years, and Koch said the redevelopment over the past decade has been aimed at making it part of the 'living, breathing city.'
Other attractions include tours of Castle Williams, a 19th-century fort built to prepare for a British attack.
There are bike trails and Hammock Grove, which has playgrounds for children and 50 hammocks for their parents to relax.
The hills take advantage of the island's 360-degree vantage point, offering views of New York's skyscrapers and Lady Liberty and of burgeoning Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges.
Designer Adriaan Geuze said the pathways that wind around the park's hills create 'conceal and reveal' vistas that create a sense of anticipation
China to close part of South China Sea for military exercise
BEIJING (AP) China is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, the government said Monday, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. China's navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
A navy honor guard prepares for a welcome ceremony for U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson at the Chinese Navy Headquarters in Beijing, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool)
The announcement of the drills came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the U.S. Navy's top admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to boost interactions between the two militaries.
Although the tribunal's ruling was likely to be raised in Richardson's discussions, the head of the Chinese navy, Adm. Wu Shengli, did not mention it directly in opening remarks before reporters at a meeting Monday between the two men at navy headquarters in Beijing.
State broadcaster CCTV later reported that Wu reiterated China's determination to defend all of its territorial claims in the South China Sea and would not permit its interests to be infringed on, a standard position for Chinese officials.
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It asserts that islands in the South China Sea are "China's inherent territory," and says it could declare an air defense identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In the days following the ruling, Beijing landed two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block Philippine fishing boats from a contested shoal.
In a further development, Chinese air force spokesman Shen Jinke was quoted by state media as saying that air force fighters and bombers had recently conducted patrols over the South China Sea and would make that "a regular practice" in future.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
China's island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, U.S. warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the U.S. of threatening its national security.
Commander of the Chinese Navy Adm. Wu Shengli, right, points out the layout of the Chinese Navy Headquarters to visiting U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, left, in Beijing, Monday, July 18, 2016. Richardson met Wu during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao that began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour China's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool)
FILE - In this July 8, 2016, file photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese missile frigate Yuncheng launches an anti-ship missile during a military exercise in the waters near south China's Hainan Island and Paracel Islands. China said Monday, July 18, 2016, that it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway. Hainan's maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. (Zha Chunming/Xinhua via AP, File)
In this July, 13, 2016 photo released by Xinhua News Agency, pilots place Chinese national flags on the cockpit window of China Southern Airlines' passenger jet after it successfully test landed at an airport on the Meiji reef of the Nansha Islands in the South China Sea. China said Monday, July 18, 2016, that it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway. (Chen Yichen/Xinhua via AP)
In this undated photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese H-6K bomber patrols the islands and reefs in the South China Sea. China is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, the government said Monday, July 18, 2016, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway. (Liu Rui/Xinhua via AP) NO SALES
A Chinese navy officer pulls the hat over a member of an honor guard whose hat fell during a welcome ceremony for U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson at the Chinese Navy Headquarters in Beijing, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool)
U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, foreground right, escorted by Commander of the Chinese Navy, Adm. Wu Shengli, walks past a member of an honor guard whose hat fall off during a welcome ceremony at the Chinese Navy Headquarters in Beijing, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool)
Through an author's eyes: 50 years of Israeli occupation
HEBRON, West Bank (AP) Notebook in hand, acclaimed Irish author Colm Toibin walks into Hebron to observe Israeli military rule in its rawest form.
In the heart of the West Bank's largest Palestinian city, several hundred combat troops guard an equal number of ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers, enforcing a separation system that lets settlers move freely at the expense of Palestinians and has turned a once vibrant market into a ghost district.
Moments after Toibin reaches a small plaza in downtown Hebron, the quiet of largely deserted streets gives way to violence.
In this Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo, acclaimed Irish author Colm Toibin shows his ID to an Israel soldier in the West Bank city of Hebron. Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org via AP)
Two Israelis sitting at a cafe table spot Toibin's escort, Israeli peace activist Yehuda Shaul, and begin cursing him. Shaul turns and stares at the pair, but says nothing. The two jump up and walk toward him. Suddenly, one of them attacks a videographer in Toibin's group who was filming the scene, breaking the camera with a kick. Israeli troops who witness the assault refuse to detain the attackers, who eventually slip away.
Toibin, 61, stands back and takes notes on what Shaul later describes as routine settler lawlessness in Hebron.
The troubled city is the last stop on Toibin's weeklong visit to Israel and the West Bank. He's collecting material for an essay, his contribution to an anthology on Israeli occupation that will be published at the 50-year mark in June 2017. The book will include essays from 20 international writers, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, and six local authors.
Each tackles a different subject, from Israel's military court system to grieving Jewish and Arab families who lost loved ones to violence. The work is based on observations during tours similar to Toibin's.
Toibin, who last visited in 1992, said he was struck most by the elaborate system of Israeli control over Palestinians, including roadblocks and fences, and the energy spent on maintaining it.
"All of us have been surprised by the amount of architecture and engineering required to make sure one side is locked in and the other side is free to move," said Toibin, who has won several literary awards and whose novel "Brooklyn" about an Irish immigrant was adapted into a movie last year.
The anthology is meant to introduce a wider audience to this reality through the power of story-telling, said those involved in the project.
"I want to get to people who would normally avoid at all costs thinking about this issue because it makes them uncomfortable," said Israeli-American writer Ayelet Waldman, one of the book's editors.
Toibin's millions of readers, for example, might not be interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "but they might read an essay by a writer like Colm Toibin and then they might think of the place in a new way," the U.S.-based Waldman said in a phone interview.
The occupation began with Israel's swift capture of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war lands the U.N. General Assembly recognized in 2012 as making up a state of Palestine. The international community, including Israel's closest allies, has said a final border should be based on the pre-1967 frontier, with agreed land swaps, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected that as a baseline for negotiations.
Over the past five decades, Israel, citing security needs, established a military bureaucracy that enforces movement restrictions on Palestinians through a complex permit system. Close to 600,000 Israelis, or 10 percent of Israel's Jewish population, now live in settlements on war-won land, often lured by government subsidies. It's a multi-billion-dollar enterprise the international community overwhelmingly considers illegitimate.
Israel has also fragmented the territory of what is meant to be Palestine.
Israel annexed east Jerusalem in 1967, withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but then sealed the territory after the 2007 takeover of the territory by the Islamic militant group Hamas. Under interim peace deals reached in the 1990s, it directly controls 62 percent of the West Bank, known as Area C, home to settlers and largely off-limits to Palestinian development. Palestinians led by Hamas' rival, Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas, have some autonomy in the rest of the West Bank.
Israel says it has been willing to negotiate an end to occupation, but that Palestinians rejected or responded with violence to generous Israeli offers in 2000 and 2008. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he remains open to talks, but he has shown little faith in Abbas. Talks have been at a standstill since Netanyahu took office in 2009.
Palestinians say a systematic colonization of east Jerusalem and the West Bank belies Israel's claims that it is serious about ending occupation. Many members of Netanyahu's government oppose Palestinian statehood, and several advocate annexing large parts of the West Bank.
The anthology, to be published in English, Hebrew, Arabic and several other languages, was conceived by Shaul and Waldman, who say they are Israeli patriots and want to contribute to ending occupation by helping shift public opinion at home and abroad.
"It is on our shoulders to stop the occupation and save Israel," said Shaul, 32, who spent part of his military service in Hebron and a decade ago founded "Breaking The Silence," a veterans' group that collects soldiers' testimony about abusive practices in the West Bank.
Netanyahu's office did not respond to a request for comment on the book project.
Last week, Shaul accompanied Toibin to the Palestinian hamlet of Susiya, home to several dozen families. The village is flanked by a Jewish settlement and the ruins of a centuries-old Jewish town of the same name.
Palestinians lived in the area of the ruins until it was declared an archaeological site and they were forced to leave in the mid-1980s. Some moved to other Palestinian communities, while others settled a few hundred yards away, on land they say they own.
Israel refused to recognize the community or hook it up to electricity and water grids, while providing such services to the settlement of Susiya and unauthorized Jewish outposts in the area. Israel has also threatened to demolish the Palestinian village of tents and shacks.
In his essay, Toibin said he will tell the story of some of the displaced, including Nasser Nawaja, who now has to pay $7 to visit his birthplace at the archaeological site. Even then, Nawaja said, settlers only let him enter the site when he is accompanied by Israelis or foreigners.
On a hot summer day, Toibin toured the park with Nawaja, including a cave where the 34-year-old Palestinian said he was born and that is now used to screen a short film about ancient Susiya for visitors. The novelist, dressed in a crisp white shirt and gray linen pants, and the villager sat in the dark as they listened to a Jewish version of local history.
In writing about his experience, Toibin said he will avoid words like "occupation" and "''settlements" that he believes convey little meaning. "What I want to use are the smaller words to let people actually see what it is like on the (given) day for people who are humans under the same sky," he said.
In this Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo, Irish author Colm Toibin, visits the West Bank village of Susiya, where some Palestinians live near ruins that were declared an archaeological site in the mid-1980s forcing them to leave, south of Hebron. Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
In this Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo, a boy watches a short film about ancient Susiya, inside a cave where 34-year-old Palestinian Nasser Nawaja told Irish author Colm Toibin he was born, in the Susiya archaeological park, adjacent to the West Bank village of Susiya, south of Hebron. Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
In this July 12, 2016 photo, Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Breaking The Silence, right and Irish author Colm Toibin, inspect the location of what is believed to be a synagogue, during a tour of the Susiya archaeological park, adjacent to the West Bank village of Susiya, south of Hebron. Toibin toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
In this Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo, Yehuda Shaul, left, co-founder of Breaking The Silence, and Irish author Colm Toibin inspect a cave, where 34-year-old Palestinian Nasser Nawaja said he was born, during their tour of the Susiya archaeological park, adjacent to the West Bank village of Susiya, south of Hebron. Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
This Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo shows what is believed to be a synagogue, during a tour by Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Breaking The Silence, Irish author Colm Toibin, and others at the Susiya archaeological park, adjacent to the West Bank village of Susiya, south of Hebron. Irish author Colm Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
This Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo shows a mosaic with Hebrew writing at the location of what is believed to be a synagogue, during a tour by Irish author Colm Toibin, at the Susiya archaeological park, adjacent to the West Bank village of Susiya, south of Hebron. Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
In this Tuesday, July 12, 2016 photo, Irish author Colm Toibin visits a cave in the West Bank village of Susiya, south of Hebron. Toibin has toured the West Bank to observe Israeli military rule over the Palestinians, collecting material for an essay that will be part of an anthology on 50 years of occupation. The 2017 book includes contributions from two dozen well-known authors who have written about subjects ranging from Israels military courts to a weekend in Gaza. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
A 47-year-old Yellowstone County man drowned Sunday after the raft he was riding in flipped in the Yellowstone River west of Columbus.
Lorne Speakerworth, of the Worden and Lockwood areas, died Sunday in what was ruled an accidental drowning while floating the river with "a lifelong friend," said a news release from Stillwater County Sheriff Cliff Brophy.
Stillwater County Dispatch received a report of the incident at about 3:45 p.m. after the raft carrying the two men overturned in a section of whitewater. The friend made it to shore and called 911 to report seeing Speakerwoth floating down the river. At about 4:15 p.m. dispatch received another call from a person who found the man about a mile and a half downstream from where the raft overturned.
Columbus Police Department, Columbus Fire and Ambulance, Fish Wildlife and Parks, Stillwater Search and Rescue, and Stillwater County Sheriffs Office responded to the incident. Speakerworth was partially submerged for at least 30 minutes and was not wearing a life vest. He was pronounced dead on scene shortly after emergency medical personnel arrived. The other rafter was taken to the hospital and treated for minor injuries.
The release said the United States Coast Guard requires an investigation into every incident on water that results in a death, injury or loss of property. Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks will compile the report.
In the initial release Sheriff Brophy reminded boaters to wear a personal flotation device while spending time on the water.
Tensions with West rise as Turkey continues purge
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) The purging of thousands of alleged plotters of a failed coup raised tensions Monday between Turkey and the West, with U.S. and European officials urging restraint, while Ankara insisted that Washington extradite an exile accused of orchestrating the plot.
Authorities have fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others, while detaining thousands more alleged to have been involved in Friday night's attempted coup, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Former air force commander Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the uprising, was put under arrest following questioning by a magistrate along with 25 other suspects, the news agency said. Ozturk, who has denied involvement and insisted he had tried to suppress the rebellion, appeared in video from Turkish TV looking bruised with a bandage over his ear.
Government supporters light flares during a protest in Taksim Square, in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Turkey's Interior Ministry has fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others and detained thousands of suspected plotters following a foiled coup against the government, Turkey's state-run news agency reported Monday.AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to rule out bringing back the death penalty, telling the U.S. cable TV station CNN in an interview via a government translator, "There is a clear crime of treason." He added that it would be up to parliament to decide.
"if they accept to discuss it then I as president will approve any decision that comes out of the parliament," he said. He said Turks have been calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty because of the increased terror attacks and demand for swift justice.
Anadolu said 8,777 employees attached to the Interior Ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers. Other media reports said police, military police and members of the coast guard also were removed from duty.
During the uprising by a faction of the military, warplanes fired on government buildings and tanks rolled into the streets of major cities before the rebellion was put down by forces loyal to the government and pro-Erdogan civilians who took to the streets. The top brass did not support the coup.
Erdogan told CNN that he escaped death by only a few minutes before coup plotters stormed the resort in southwest Turkey where he was vacationing last weekend when the coup unfolded.
He said soldiers supporting the coup killed two of his bodyguards when they stormed the resort early Saturday.
"Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken," he told CNN.
Revealing new details of the night of the coup, Erdogan said the renegade soldiers were in control of the command and control towers at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport for hours before forces loyal to the president were able to regain control. He said that about 10,000 supporters were at the airport to greet him when his plane landed.
He also said that power was shut off at all military bases, including the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey used by the U.S.-led coalition jets fighting the Islamic State group, because the military didn't want to risk having the conspirators use them.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 232 people 208 government supporters he called "martyrs," as well as 24 coup plotters died in the unrest. His voice cracked and he wept as he spoke with reporters after a Cabinet meeting and repeated a question his grandson had put to him: "Why are they killing people?"
He said he had no answer, but that Turkey would make the coup plotters answer "in such a way that the whole world will see."
As Western officials expressed alarm at the rapid roundup of so many by their key NATO ally, Turkish government officials explained that the plotters in the military had been under investigation and launched their ill-planned operation out of panic.
The swift move against so many reflected the prior investigation, the government said. It alleged the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former Erdogan ally who lives in exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, and espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy.
Erdogan has often accused Gulen of trying to overthrow the government, and Turkey has demanded his extradition, labeling his movement a terrorist organization and putting him on trial in absentia. Gulen strongly denies the government's charges and has suggested that Friday's attempted coup could have been staged, as a pretext for the Erdogan government to seize even more power.
U.S. officials have said that the U.S. will consider extraditing Gulen, if the Turkish government offers evidence that he was involved in the plot or committed crimes. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the U.S. would follow procedures in a decades-old extradition treaty and called Turkish charges that the U.S. was harboring Gulen "factually incorrect."
Erdogan said an official formal request will be conveyed to the United States demanding the extradition of Gulen.
"Even if he is a citizen of the U.S., the U.S. should not keep such a terrorist," Erdogan told CNN. He said if Gulen is on Turkey's terrorist list that should be enough for the U.S. to extradite him.
Yildirim said the normal U.S. legal processes would not be good enough.
"We would be disillusioned and would question our friendship if our friends were to say to us 'Show us the evidence.' despite all the efforts ... to eradicate the elected government and the national will of a country," he said, while adding that the Justice Ministry was preparing documents to send to the United States.
Over the weekend, Turkey responded to the coup attempt by rounding up some 6,000 people, including hundreds of judges and prosecutors.
Reacting to the large number of arrests in the military and the judiciary, as well as Erdogan's suggestion that Turkey could bring back the death penalty, Western officials were urging Turkey to maintain the rule of law.
Earnest said President Barack Obama would call Erdogan soon to reiterate U.S. support for Turkey's democratically elected civilian government and make the case for restraint and respect for the freedoms enshrined in the Turkish constitution.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a news conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that the coup "is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that."
Kerry added that Turkey must "uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law."
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Kerry said: "We caution against a reach that goes beyond that."
Mogherini said the talks on Turkey's bid to join the European Union would end if Ankara restores the death penalty. That message was echoed by Germany, the EU's biggest state.
"The institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member," Steffen Seibert, spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel, said in Berlin.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who said he spoke to Erdogan, praised the Turkish people for showing "great courage," but he also said it was essential for the alliance member to "ensure full respect for democracy and its institutions, the constitutional order, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms."
For the fourth night in a row, hundreds took to public squares in major cities, including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, in a fresh show of support for the government. They waved Turkish flags, shouted pro-government slogans and sang praise of Erdogan.
Mostafa Minawi, director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative at Cornell University, called the failed coup "a gift for President Erdogan, given him all the justification he needs to implement further clamp down measures against any dissenters, in the process sinking Turkey deeper into authoritarianism."
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Soguel reported from Istanbul. Desmond Butler in Washington contributed to this report.
People light flares as they gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, protesting against the attempted coup, Monday, July 18, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim speaks in tears after a weekly cabinet meeting in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Following a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his government moved swiftly to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying it has detained 6,000 people. (Hakan Goktepe, Prime Ministry Press Service, Pool)
Turkish special forces policemen attend a mass funeral for their colleagues killed Friday during the failed military coup, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A Turkish woman, center, feeds pigeons at Kizilay main square, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A man works in a machine shop in front of a picture of Turkey's founder Kemal Ataturk in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. The European Union and the United States expressed alarm Monday with Turkey's response to a failed coup, telling the NATO member and EU aspirant that it must uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, right, chairs a cabinet meeting before he speaks about the failed military coup, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Following a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his government moved swiftly to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying it has detained 6,000 people. (Hakan Goktepe/Pool photo via AP)
A shopkeeper waits for customers at this shop in a bazar in central Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Sellers wait for customers as they look at their phones in central Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Sellers wait for customers inside their cabins to sell food for pigeons in central Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
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)
A Turkish woman cries as she attends a mass funeral of policemen who were killed Friday during the failed military coup, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
People gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, protesting against the attempted coup, Monday, July 18, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
Protesters hold a giant Turkish flag as they gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
Iraqi Shiite cleric calls additional US troops a "target"
BAGHDAD (AP) A powerful Iraqi Shiite cleric said the additional 560 U.S. troops heading to Iraq to upgrade an air base recently retaken from the Islamic State group would be a "target" for his supporters.
Muqtada al-Sadr's threat came in response to a question from a supporter about the deployment, announced in Baghdad last week by U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
"They are a target for us," Al-Sadr wrote on his official website late Sunday, without elaborating.
Al-Sadr's supporters fought major battles against American troops in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. His militia, known as the Peace Brigades, is among the largest of several government-sanctioned Shiite armed groups battling IS.
In recent months, al-Sadr has been campaigning for reform and an end to government corruption. Earlier this year, his followers twice stormed the heavily fortified Green Zone, a sprawling complex housing parliament, government ministries and diplomatic missions, including the U.S. Embassy.
On Friday tens of thousands of al-Sadr supporters rallied in central Baghdad.
It was not immediately clear whether al-Sadr's comment amounted to ordering his followers to attack the American troops headed to the Qayara base in northern Iraq. The latest deployment brings the total U.S. force authorization in the country to 4,647.
Other Shiite militia leaders have made similar threats against U.S. military personnel deployed in Iraq, but they appear to be mainly aimed at pandering to supporters, many of whom still view the U.S. as an occupying force.
New British foreign secretary arrives for first EU meeting
BRUSSELS (AP) New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who recently likened the European Union to Adolf Hitler's vision for Europe, came to Brussels Monday to meet for the first time with his EU colleagues, and said he hopes to cooperate closely.
Johnson led a winning campaign to persuade British voters to leave the European Union, but said the referendum's outcome last month "in no sense means we are leaving Europe."
"We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds," Johnson said before the start of an EU foreign ministers' meeting. He said last week's attack in Nice, France, showed the need for European countries to coordinate their response to terrorism, and that he would support an EU call for "restraint and moderation" in Turkey following the failed military putsch there.
Newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, right, speaks with Belgium's Foreign Minister Didier Reynders, center, and Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Margallo before the EU foreign ministers meeting at the EU Council building, in Brussels, Belgium, Monday, July 18, 2016. Johnson, who recently likened the European Union to Adolf Hitler's vision for Europe, is in Brussels to meet with his new EU colleagues, and says he hopes to cooperate closely. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Despite Johnson's anti-EU stance, Federica Mogherini, the bloc's foreign policy chief, told reporters that "our common work on foreign and security policy continues and today we will welcome him as a new member of the family."
Johnson and Mogherini met privately in Brussels on Sunday evening and "had a good exchange on the main issues on the agenda today," the EU official said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who has said Johnson "lied a lot" to turn British public opinion against the EU, vowed to speak to him "with the greatest sincerity and frankness." Ayrault also called for a quick start to formal talks on Britain's exit from the 28-nation bloc to end what he called the current situation of uncertainty as to the country's intentions and relationship with its European partners.
Johnson, 52, a former London mayor and Brussels-based journalist, was appointed foreign secretary by new Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday.
"It is very good to be here for my first overseas trip," he told reporters Monday morning as he arrived at EU headquarters, also referring to his colleagues from other member states as "our friends."
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in May, during the referendum campaign, Johnson said the EU was trying to build a super-state, recreating the Roman Empire.
"Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods," he was quoted as saying.
At Monday's foreign ministers' meeting, Johnson "did not present his excuses" to his colleagues for those remarks, Ayrault said, but he added that he didn't feel personally slighted. The Frenchman said he and his colleagues are conscious that the EU grew out of attempts to build a more peaceful and prosperous Europe on the ruins of World War II.
Ayrault told a post-meeting news conference that the frequently flamboyant Johnson behaved with "a certain modesty" at the session. Britain's new top diplomat didn't hold a news conference of his own, but emerged for about two minutes to speak with journalists. Johnson said he'd had a "long, productive day."
Asked what sort of reception he was given by the other EU ministers, he answered simply: "very good."
Newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson smiles before a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the EU Council building, in Brussels, Belgium, Monday, July 18, 2016. Johnson, who recently likened the European Union to Adolf Hitler's vision for Europe, is in Brussels to meet with his new EU colleagues, and says he hopes to cooperate closely. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Slain Baton Rouge officers all hailed from same community
DENHAM SPRINGS, La. (AP) Fresh out of the police academy, Matthew Gerald was so proud to bring his cruiser home that he stood in the driveway, wiping it down under the hot Louisiana sun. His neighbor Ashley Poe watched as he flicked the blue lights on and off, on and off.
Poe and her husband shared a laugh. The 41-year-old former soldier and Marine looked like an excited kid.
"It's like living out the dream," she said.
Dechia Gerald, wife of slain Baton Rouge police officer Matthew Gerald, cries while holding their children Fynleigh, left, and Dawclyn, right, during a candlelight vigil at the Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. At Left is Dechia's mother, Denna Badeaux. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Gerald got to live it only for a few months. He was one of three officers gunned down in an ambush Sunday in Baton Rouge, traumatizing a nation already on edge.
In the span of 10 turbulent days, 10 law enforcement officers have been killed by attackers at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
The officers who died Sunday all lived just outside Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks. Tensions rose sharply after the death of 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.
As the nation debates race and policing, this community is mourning three of its sons all husbands and fathers described by friends as being committed to protecting and serving the public.
"You hear about these things happening across the country to officers just trying to defend us, but this brings it right here, to our home," Livingston Parish President Layton Ricks said. "These are our families. These are good men. They're the only line of defense between good and evil. We say we don't want to let this evil affect how we live our daily lives. But it does."
Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers around 8:45 a.m. Sunday, police said.
The gunfire also killed 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy and a father of four, and 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department with a newborn baby at home.
Garafola and Gerald were white. Jackson was black, as was the gunman.
"The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos," Jackson's sister-in-law Lauren Rose said. "And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace."
Three other officers were wounded. One of them, Deputy Nicholas Tullier, remained in critical condition Monday. The gunman was killed at the scene.
Poe watched from the window Sunday morning as a line of police cars pulled up in front of Gerald's house. She woke up her husband, a former city police officer.
"He said, 'What's wrong?' and I said, 'There's units everywhere, and you've told me that's never a good sign,'" she said. They turned on the news.
The gunman shot Gerald and Jackson first.
Gerald was a Marine from 1994 to 1998. He later joined the Army and served as a decorated soldier from 2002 to 2009, including three tours in Iraq. Less than a year ago, he joined the Baton Rouge Police Department.
He had a wife and two daughters, Poe said, and was devoted to them.
Poe said her 14-year-old son was interested in the military, and Gerald was always ready to answer his questions.
"He'd tell him how he was proud to protect his country," she said. "It seemed like that was his passion to do that."
Denham Springs, population 10,000, is the sort of town where everyone is connected, said Mayor Gerard Landry. There's a palpable sense of anger and despair.
"There's no way to describe what it does to a small city like this," Marilyn Wallace said Monday, standing behind the counter of the store she and her husband, Randy, own on a two-block long stretch of antique shops in the historic district of Denham Springs.
The city is in Livingston Parish, about 13 miles from Baton Rouge, with a history of racial tension. But that history and the racial divide in nearby Baton Rouge seem remote here.
Jackson's father-in-law, Lonnie Jordan, called him a "gentle giant" tall and stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition.
Jordan said his son-in-law had been working long hours since Sterling was killed.
Jackson posted on Facebook that he was physically and emotionally tired. He wrote that while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I swear to God I love this city," he wrote, "but I wonder if this city loves me."
The police chief described at a news conference how he had gone to the district where Jackson worked just days earlier in an attempt to boost the spirits of the officers. Instead Jackson ended up giving him the pep talk.
He had been on the force 10 years and risen to the rank of corporal, said Kedrick Pitts, his half-brother. He worked hard, sometimes seven days a week.
He was funny and good natured, Pitts said. He collected shoes, 500 pairs, including special Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan lines.
But what he loved most was his wife and 4-month-old son.
"He's going to grow up without a father," sister-in-law Rose said. "But we'll be there to give him memories and let him know how his dad was a great man, and how he died with honor ... Hopefully one day, he'll be like his dad."
At the convenience store Sunday, Garafola tried to intervene and help the fallen officers.
Surveillance video showed Garafola firing at the gunman from behind a dumpster as bullets hit the concrete around him, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said.
"My deputy went down fighting. He returned fire to the very end," the sheriff said.
Garafola's friends described him as a man committed to public service and devoted to his family.
He had a wife and four children: a 21-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
Sgt. Gerald Parker, a close friend, described him as a "jack of all trades" who enjoyed helping people in his neighborhood, like mending their fences or mowing their lawns. He worked hard, often picking up extra hours.
"He was a man of strong character," Parker said. "All these officers are heroes. Some people would run. But these gentlemen leave their families knowing something can happen."
His colleague, Deputy Nicholas Tullier, a father of two teenage sons, is surrounded by family at the hospital.
Carol Sue McManus, a relative, said he's a workaholic who serves on two units, one patrol and the other motorcycle. She said he was injured at one point when he was run over while escorting a funeral procession.
"I'm mad," she said with tears in her eyes. "I wish all this madness would stop."
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Galofaro reported from Louisville, Kentucky.
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Associated Press Writer Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
Millville, N.J., Police Chaplain Bob Ossler prays and weeps with a local resident as she places flowers on a memorial at the B-Quik gas station on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday, a day after law enforcement officers were killed in the attack. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Millville, N.J. police chaplain Robert Ossler prays Monday, July 18, 2016, at a makeshift memorial at the fatal shooting scene in Baton Rouge, La., where several law enforcement officers were killed on Sunday. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
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)
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 East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office shows deputy Brad Garafola. Garafola and at least two other Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed Sunday, July 17, 2016, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. (East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office via AP)
Mother, Crystal Rende, center, and her family, including from left to right, Lara Rende, 15, Aydin Rende, 4, Noah Rende, 6, and Hannah Enamorado, 13, pray in front of a memorial of flowers and mementos in front of the B-Quick convenience store where Baton Rouge law enforcement officers where engaged by a gunman and three were killed on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Rende's daughters attend Denham Springs Jr. High School, a school in the community where two of the officers who were killed lived. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
A memorial at the location where Baton Rouge police officers were killed and wounded continues to grow, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
A memorial at the location where Baton Rouge police officers were killed and wounded continues to grow, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
This frame grab made from a video posted on YouTube on July 10, 2016, shows Gavin Eugene Long speaking as his online persona Cosmo Setepenra. Long killed law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, July 17, 2016. (YouTube via AP)
Local resident Rea Lolley and family friends Dominick Duplessis, 10, and Addison Cummings, 4, arrive with flowers and balloons to place on a memorial for shooting victims at the B-Quik gas station on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La., a day after a shooting that killed and wounded multiple police officers. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
The Latest: Erdogan ready to reinstate death penalty
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) The Latest on the attempted military coup in Turkey (all times local):
1:45 a.m.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he's ready to reinstate the death penalty if the Turkish people demand it and parliament approves the necessary legislation.
A woman waves Turkish flags during a rally against the attempted coup in Taksim Square in Istanbul, protesting against the attempted coup, Monday, July 18, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
Erdogan spoke early Tuesday to hundreds of supporters outside his Istanbul residence who were chanting for Turkey to restore capital punishment following the failed coup. Erdogan said Turkey is "a democratic state run by rule of law" and "you cannot put aside the people's demands." European Union officials say talks on Turkey's bid to join the EU would end if Ankara restores the death penalty.
"Today is there no capital punishment in America? In Russia? In China? In countries around the world? Only in European Union countries is there no capital punishment," Erdogan said.
He also said he planned to meet with his National Security Council on Wednesday.
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1 a.m.
The Federal Aviation Administration says it has lifted a ban on flights between the U.S. and Turkey.
No U.S. carriers fly directly to Turkey. The FAA's decision mainly affects Turkish Airlines, which announced that it would resume its Istanbul-to-New York service on Tuesday. The airline also flies to several other U.S. cities from Istanbul.
On Saturday, the FAA banned all flights that began in Turkey from entering the U.S. even if they stopped in another country along the way. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara had said security at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport was "significantly diminished" after the attempted coup, and they told U.S. government employees to avoid the airport.
The chairman of Turkish Airlines, Ilker Ayci, said Monday that there was no reason for the ban "as all precautions were in line with the norms." He said that following meetings, the FAA "removed the ban as expected."
The airline said its operations at Ataturk airport were back to normal
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12:30 a.m.
Turkey's United Nations ambassador says he is disappointed the Security Council could not agree on a statement regarding the attempted coup in his country.
Yasar Halit Cevik said Monday that a statement from the Security Council would have been helpful when the attempted coup was still in progress.
"We would have wished that the Security Council would have come to a position in a timely manner," Cevik told reporters gathered for a briefing at the Turkish Mission.
The Security Council failed to condemn the coup attempt after Egypt objected on Saturday to a statement calling on all parties to respect Turkey's democratically elected government. Statements by the 15-member Security Council must be agreed upon by consensus.
Cevik said what his country most needs is international support.
"Turkey wants to see support, not advice or criticism," Cevik said.
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12:15 a.m.
Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan has told the U.S. cable TV station CNN that he escaped death by only a few minutes before coup plotters stormed the resort in southwest Turkey where he was vacationing last weekend.
Erdogan's interview was broadcast late Monday. He told CNN that soldiers supporting the coup killed two of his bodyguards when they stormed the resort early Saturday.
"Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken," he told CNN through a translator provided by the presidency.
Revealing new details of the night of the coup, Erdogan said the renegade soldiers were in control of the command and control towers at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport for hours before forces loyal to the president were able to regain control. He said that about 10,000 supporters were at the airport to greet him when his plane landed.
He also said that power was shut off at all military bases, including the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey used by the U.S.-led coalition jets fighting the Islamic State group, because the military didn't want to risk having the conspirators use them.
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12 a.m.
Leading global human rights groups have condemned Turkey's crackdown in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt, which has led to sweeping purges, detentions and arrests.
Amnesty International warned Monday that human rights were in "grave danger."
"The sheer number of arrests and suspensions since Friday is alarming," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty's director for Europe and Central Asia. "Cracking down on dissent and threatening to bring back the death penalty are not justice."
Thousands of people have been dismissed or detained in the judiciary, interior ministry, military and police following Friday's failed coup. The large scale of the crackdown has also alarmed Turkey's key allies, the United States and the European Union.
Amnesty said it was investigating reports that detainees in Ankara and Istanbul had been subjected to a series of abuses, including ill-treatment in custody and being denied access to lawyers.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch Europe and Central Asia Director Hugh Williamson noted: "The speed and scale of the arrests, including of top judges, suggests a purge rather than a process based on any evidence. Turkey's citizens who took to the streets to defend democracy deserve a response that upholds the rule of law."
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11:30 p.m.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says that Turks want to reinstate the death penalty after so many terror attacks in the country.
Erdogan, whose government survived a failed military coup, made the comments in an interview with CNN.
Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 as it sought membership in the European Union. There have been renewed calls for capital punishment after the attempted coup.
Turkey has also seen a spate of bombings in recent months blamed on the Islamic State group and Kurdish rebels.
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11 p.m.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told CNN that the foiled coup is a "clear crime of treason," adding he will approve the reinstatement of the death penalty if the parliament decides it should be restored.
Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 as the country sought EU membership. After the failed coup attempt Friday, there were calls for reinstating the death penalty.
Erdogan told CNN in an interview broadcast Monday it is up the parliament to discuss the decision. He added he would ratify it if the parliament approves.
The EU called on Turkish authorities to exercise restraint after the failed coup, saying the reinstatement of the death penalty would threaten its membership bid.
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10:45 p.m.
For the fourth night in a row, hundreds of demonstrators have taken to Turkey's squares in a new show of support for the government after a failed coup attempt.
First called for by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the night of the coup, the "democracy meetings" have been held in all of Turkey's major cities every night for the past four nights.
The demonstrations feature flag waving, pro-government slogans, songs praising Erdogan and Islamic chants. There is a Quran reading at the meeting in front of Erdogan's Istanbul residence in the Kisikli district.
Other major demonstrations are taking place in Istanbul's central Taksim square, Ankara's central Kizilay square and Izmir's central Konak square.
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9:55 p.m.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says he has spoken to his Turkish counterpart to express happiness about the restoration of stability in Turkey.
The official IRNA news agency says Rouhani spoke with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and told him: "We are happy that we have witnessed the restoring of stability in the friendly country of Turkey."
Rouhani was also quoted as saying that "peace and stability in Turkey will lead to improving peace and security in entire of the region."
Rouhani says Iran has closely watched developments in Turkey from Friday night.
The Iranian leader described the coup attempt as a "test for detecting both domestic and foreign friends and enemies" of Turkey.
He adds that Iran has "stood by and will stand by government of people of Turkey."
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9:45 p.m.
Turkey's state-run news agency says a former Air Force commander accused of a role in a failed coup Friday night has been placed under arrest by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office along with 25 others.
The government has accused Gen. Akin Ozturk of being the ringleader of the coup, though he told prosecutors he did not plan or direct it. The Anadolu news agency, relying on prosecutors, initially said Ozturk had confessed to a role in the coup, but later retracted that report.
"I don't know who planned or directed it. According to my experiences, I think that the (Gulen movement) attempted this coup. But I cannot tell who within the Armed Forces organized and carried it out. I have no information. I have fought against this structure (meaning Gulen movement)," Ozturk was quoted as saying.
Before his detention, Ozturk had denied in a statement that he was involved in the uprising, insisting that he had worked to quash it.
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9:40 p.m.
Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in the failed coup attempt in Turkey were held in Istanbul on Monday.
Hundreds of people gathered at the Eyup Sultan mosque for the funeral of police officer Erol Ince.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion which was not supported by the military's top brass was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets.
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8:45 p.m.
A Turkish journalists' association has condemned raids and violence against media organizations and journalists both during and in the aftermath of Friday's failed coup.
The coup plotters took control of state broadcaster TRT during the uprising and forced a newscaster to read a statement declaring that they had seized control. The headquarters of private CNN-Turk channel and Hurriyet newspapers were also raided.
Photojournalist Mustafa Cambaz was killed while protesting the coup.
The Turkish Journalists Association, or TGC, said it condemned the attempts "to eliminate parliamentary democracy, the people's basic rights and freedoms and the freedom of press or expression."
The TGC also said the media had played a role in countering the coup "despite being subjected to attacks, repression and threats."
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8:35 p.m.
The White House is urging the Turkish government to exercise restraint and act within the rule of law as it investigates and prosecutes those responsible for last week's failed coup.
Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that President Barack Obama would call Turkey's president soon to reiterate U.S. support for the country's democratically elected civilian government and make the case for restraint and respect for the freedoms enshrined in the Turkish constitution.
Some senior Turkish officials have alleged that the coup was inspired by a Turkish cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and have demanded that the U.S. turn him over. Earnest said the United States had not received any extradition request for the cleric but that it would evaluate one if it arrived under a 30-year-old extradition treaty.
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6:30 p.m.
NATO's chief has joined with others who are calling for Turkey's leadership to respect the rule of law in its reaction to the failed attempt at a military coup.
"I have spoken to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the aftermath of the attempted coup in Turkey," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday in a statement. "I welcomed the strong support shown by the people and all political parties to democracy and to the democratically elected government. The Turkish people have shown great courage."
As he did early on Saturday, Stoltenberg condemned the attempted coup in Turkey and reiterated his full support for Turkey's democratic institutions.
"Being part of a unique community of values, it is essential for Turkey, like all other allies, to ensure full respect for democracy and its institutions, the constitutional order, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms," the NATO chief said. He called Turkey a "valued NATO ally," and offered his condolences to the families of the innocent people who lost their lives in the takeover attempt.
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5:45 p.m.
The European Union's 28 member states are calling on Turkish authorities, including police and security forces, to exercise restraint in the wake of the failed coup.
"All must be done to avoid further violence, to protect lives and to restore calm," the bloc's foreign ministers said in a statement following a meeting Monday in Brussels.
"The EU calls for the full observance of Turkey's constitutional order and stresses the importance of the rule of law prevailing," the ministers said. "It is crucial to ensure full respect for all democratic institutions of the country including the elected government and the Turkish Grand National Assembly."
They added that "the unequivocal rejection of the death penalty is an essential element" of the bloc's conditions for membership, the ministers added.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was abolished in 2004. Turkey, already a NATO member, also aspires to join the EU.
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5:40 p.m.
The Turkish prime minister's office is canceling all public servants' leave and is asking employees currently on vacation to return to their duties.
A statement from Prime Minister Binali Yildirim's office said the order, issued Monday, would be valid until further notice.
The decision comes in the wake of a failed coup attempt that has killed 232 people, according to the prime minister. The government has fired thousands of judiciary and other officials suspected of links to a movement led by a U.S.-based Muslim cleric. The government says the cleric, Fethullah Gulen, is behind the failed uprising.
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5:35 p.m.
Dogan news agency reports that an official working for Istanbul's Sisli district city hall is in critical condition after two gunmen walked into his office and shot him in the head.
Deputy Mayor in charge of Development Cemil Candas has been rushed to a nearby hospital.
Police detained the two gunmen, who were taken out by the rear entrance.
The Sisli municipality is run by the opposition Republican People's Party, or CHP.
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5:20 p.m.
Turkey's state-run news agency says seven prosecutors, charged with investigating a foiled coup, have entered a base in southern Turkey that is key to the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State group.
Anadolu Agency says the prosecutors, accompanied by police, entered Incirlik Air Base on Monday.
A Turkish brigadier general at the base has already been detained for his alleged role in Friday's uprising.
News reports say refueling aircraft that took off from the base helped keep F-16s used by the coup-plotters up in the air.
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4:45 p.m.
Turkey's state-run news agency says the Interior Ministry has sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country, following Friday's foiled coup.
Anadolu Agency says a total of 8,777 employees attached to the ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers. Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty.
The government has blamed the failed coup which led to at least 232 deaths and wounded 1,400 others on supporters of a U.S.-based Muslim cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's chief opponent.
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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.
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.
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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.
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2:55 p.m.
The Ankara governor's office says a military officer was detained after he shot and killed the driver of a vehicle that he hijacked.
In a brief statement Monday, the governor's office said the officer whom it described as being mentally disturbed was caught by the security forces following a brief shootout.
It was not immediately clear if the incident was related to Friday's failed coup attempt by a faction within Turkey's military.
Earlier, news reports said police detained a man in front of the courthouse in Ankara after a series of shots were fired.
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2:20 p.m.
Turkey's prime minister has rejected accusations that his government is concentrating all efforts on dealing with the aftermath of a failed coup, weakening its ability to counter foreign or terrorist threats.
Binali Yildirim told reporters at the end of a cabinet meeting that Turkey is "strong enough to eliminate multiple threats at the same time."
Yildirim said: "Turkey is a great country with 100 years of experience."
The Turkish premier also insisted that Friday's failed coup had no major economic impact.
"Our banks, our bourses are working. Our central bank is on top of its duties. Any changes in economic indices are normal and no different from fluctuations recorded on normal days."
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2:10 p.m.
Germany says the failed coup in Turkey has had no impact on the deal between the European Union and Turkey to cut the arrival of migrants by sea.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said Monday the EU will continue to fulfill its part of the deal including giving financial support to refugees living in Turkey.
Spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin that the migrants deal is in the interest of both the EU and Turkey, and that Germany expects Turkey to continue adhering to it.
More than 1 million migrants reached Europe last year from the shores of Turkey. A recent deal between the bloc and Turkey to return all migrants coming to Europe from Turkey has reduced the number of arriving migrants tremendously.
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1:30 p.m.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says a total of 232 individuals were killed during a failed coup attempt.
Speaking on Monday, he said the toll comprises "208 martyrs" in reference to government supporters and 24 coup plotters.
With a cracked voice and tears, he repeated a question his grandson had put to him: "Why are they killing people?"
Earlier, government and military officials had put the fatalities in the anti-government camp at 104. The prime minister did not explain the discrepancy.
He said the pro-government dead were 145 civilians, 60 police officers and three soldiers.
The prime minister also said 50 coup backers and 1,491 government supporters were wounded in the unrest.
He put the total numbers of detentions since Friday's tumultuous night at 7,543, including 6,030 military.
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1:05 p.m.
Germany says negotiations for Turkey to join the European Union would end if the Turkish government decides to revive the death penalty following a failed coup.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin Monday that the EU is a "community of values, therefore the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member."
For the moment, he says that Germany and other EU countries are watching the internal Turkish debate on whether to institute the death penalty, but that the EU's position is clear.
"We categorically reject the death penalty and an institution of the death penalty would mean an end to the negotiations to join the EU," he said.
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12:35 p.m.
The European Union and United States say Turkey must respect democracy and human rights in its response to a failed coup.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini says rule of law must prevail in Turkey at a time the government is rounding up suspects. She said Washington and Brussels agree on the need for Turkey to respect democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Mogherini spoke Monday at a joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, after Kerry met the bloc's 28 foreign ministers.
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12:25 p.m.
The European Union commissioner negotiating with Turkey on its accession bid believes the Turkish government is exploiting the failed coup to target internal opponents.
Johannes Hahn said Monday it appears Turkey's government "prepared" arrest lists before the weekend coup attempt and had been waiting for the right moment.
Hahn said of the government's post-coup response: "It is exactly what we feared." He spoke before a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
Turkey has detained some 6,000 people. They include hundreds of judges and prosecutors, and more than two dozen generals.
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12:20 p.m.
Turkey's state-run news agency says the Interior Ministry has sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country, following Friday's foiled coup attempt. Anadolu Agency says a total of 8,777 employees attached to the ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers.
Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty. The government has blamed the failed coup which led to at least 294 deaths and wounded 1,400 others on supporters of a U.S.-based Muslim cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's chief opponent.
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12:15 p.m.
Turkey's state-run news agency says prosecutors have begun questioning 27 generals and admirals over the failed coup attempt.
The Anadolu Agency says Monday the group questioned by prosecutors in Ankara includes 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.
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11:00 a.m.
Eight Turkish military personnel who landed in Greece in a helicopter during a military coup in Turkey are to appear in court in the northern Greek city of Alexandroupolis, charged with illegally entering the country.
They are likely to request a one- or two-day postponement during Monday's court appearance. Turkey is seeking their return, and all eight have requested asylum in Greece.
The eight landed in Alexandroupolis Saturday after issuing a distress call and requesting permission for an emergency landing. Their lawyer, Vassiliki Ilia Marinaki, has said her clients say they knew nothing about the coup and that the helicopter had been used to transport wounded. They say that shortly after finding out about the coup, they came under fire from the police and feared for their lives.
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10:20 a.m.
Saudi-owned broadcaster Al-Arabiya says Saudi authorities detained Turkey's military attache to Kuwait while he was at the airport in the eastern Saudi city of Dammam.
Quoting unnamed sources, the Dubai-based broadcaster said Monday that the attache, Mikail Ihsanoglu, was on his way to Dusseldorf, Germany via Amsterdam when he was detained.
The official Saudi Press Agency meanwhile reported that Saudi King Salman, who is vacationing in Morocco, called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to "congratulate him on Turkey's return to normality" after an attempted military coup.
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9:45 a.m.
The European Union's foreign policy chief says foreign ministers on Monday will send a "strong message" that the rule of law and the democratic system of checks and balances must be respected in Turkey following the failure of a military putsch.
Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs, spoke before a meeting of the bloc's foreign affairs ministers in Brussels. The ministers will also be meeting for breakfast with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders says Turkish authorities' reaction to the failed coup needs to be "proportionate." He says he was alarmed by the arrests of judges and calls for reinstatement of the death penalty against coup participants.
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9:30 a.m.
Warplanes have patrolled Turkey's skies following a failed coup, a sign that authorities fear the threat against the government is not yet over.
A senior official said Monday that F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight, after a faction within the military launched an attempted coup late Friday against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded.
The state-run news agency, Anadolu, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s.
A youth waving a Turkish flag salutes during a rally in Taksim Square in Istanbul, protesting against the attempted coup, early Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
The Camlca Mosque, still under construction, dominates the skyline in the Asian side of Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. The mosque is set to be completed as the largest mosque in Asia Minor by the end of 2016 and will be able to accommodate 37,500 people. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
Turkish special forces policemen attend a mass funeral for their colleagues killed Friday during the failed military coup, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Turkish police officers stand guard next to a wreath sent by Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the funeral of Erol Ince, a police officer killed Friday during the failed military coup, in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. The wreath reads in Turkish: 'President'. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after the failed coup. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Ahmet Ince, center, the son of Erol Ince, a police officer killed Friday during the failed military coup, looks at his Turish flag-draped coffin, in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after the failed coup. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Turkish special forces officers attend a funeral for their comrade who was killed Friday during the failed military coup, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, July 18, 2016. Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies overnight in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was not yet over, despite official assurances that life has returned to normal after a failed coup. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Melania Trump ignites GOP convention after gloom, turmoil
CLEVELAND (AP) After a harsh primary, Republicans kicked off Donald Trump's general election campaign with a warm and personal validation from his wife, Melania Trump, who emotionally assured GOP convention delegates and voters across the country that the brash candidate has the character and determination to unite a divided nation
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," Mrs. Trump told delegates in her highest profile appearance of the presidential campaign. But her well-received address was marred by two passages with similarities to a speech first lady Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic convention.
Trump's campaign responded in a statement that said her "immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech." The statement didn't mention Mrs. Obama. "In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," Trump spokesman Jason Miller said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump walks off the stage with his wife Melania during the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Even so, Mrs. Trump's remarks were a sharp contrast to the night's other speakers, who painted a bleak picture of a nation gripped by insecurity. The speeches were also filled with harsh criticism of Democrat Hillary Clinton, with delegates chanting "lock her up."
The evening's "Make America Safe Again" theme took on new resonance given the nation's unsettlingly violent summer. A parade of speakers told detailed stories about deadly combat missions and loved ones killed at the hands of people in the United States illegally. And they cast the turbulent times as a direct result of weak leadership by President Barack Obama and Clinton, who spent four years in the administration.
"Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them? I wouldn't," Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in one of the night's most fiery addresses.
Trump himself made a brief, but showy, entrance at the convention to introduce his wife. Emerging from shadows, he declared, "We're going to win, we're going to win so big." Trump returned to the stage after his wife's remarks, greeting her warmly with a kiss and cheering her on along with the crowd.
Many of the party's past and future stars were glaringly missing from the lineup, underscoring the concerns some GOP leaders have with closely aligning themselves with Trump. The businessman has cast aside decades of Republican orthodoxy in his unexpected political rise, creating a crisis within the GOP about its future.
Republican divisions erupted briefly on the convention floor Monday afternoon after party officials adopted rules by a shouted voice vote. Anti-Trump forces seeking to derail his nomination responded with loud and angry chants, though they were quickly quieted and there were no lingering signs of the protests as delegates returned to the cavernous convention hall for the evening program.
Trump hoped the chaos would be little more than a footnote. Despite persistent party divisions, his campaign is confident Republicans will come together behind their shared disdain for Clinton.
Convention speakers highlighted at length the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while Clinton was serving as secretary of state. The mother of one of the victims choked back tears as she personally blamed Clinton for her son's death and accused her of giving a false explanation for the attack.
"If Hillary Clinton can't give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency," Pat Smith said.
The convention comes amid a wrenching period of violence and unrest, both in the United States and around the world. In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and gruesome Bastille Day attack in Nice, France. Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the eve of the convention's opening day.
Convention speakers relentlessly cast the troubling times as a result of ineffective leadership by President Barack Obama and Clinton, who spent four years in his administration.
"Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world," said Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa. Ernst is one of the Republican Party's rising stars, but the speaking schedule had her appearing late in the night before a nearly empty hall.
Trump has been vague about how he would put the nation on a different course, offering virtually no details of his policy prescriptions despite repeated vows to be tough.
Campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Trump would "eventually" outline policy specifics but not at the convention. However, Trump said in a Monday night interview with Fox News that his convention speech Thursday would discuss a "major, major" tax cut, immigration, getting rid of burdensome regulations and taking care of veterans.
The line-up of speakers and no-shows for the four-night convention was a visual representation of Trump's struggles to unify Republicans. From the party's former presidents to the host state governor, many leaders were staying away from the convention stage, or Cleveland altogether, wary of being linked to a man whose proposals and temperament have sparked an identity crisis within the GOP.
Trump's team insists that by the end of the week, Republicans will plunge into the general election campaign united in their mission to defeat Clinton. But campaign officials undermined their own effort Monday by picking a fight with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is not attending the convention and has yet to endorse Trump."
Manafort, in remarks to reporters at a Bloomberg breakfast, called Kasich "petulant" and said the governor was "embarrassing" his party in his home state.
Even some of those participating in the convention seemed to be avoiding their party's nominee. When House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates Monday morning, he made no mention of Trump in his remarks.
Ryan, asked at a later event whether Trump was really a conservative, said: "Define conservative; he's not my kind of conservative."
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AP writers Kathleen Hennessey, Erica Werner and Josh Lederman in Cleveland and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Alan Fram at http://twitter.com/asfram
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, greets his wife Melania after introducing her during the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, greets his wife Melania after introducing her during the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Melania Trump smiles as husband Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump kisses her while exiting the stage after she addressed delegates during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he arrives to introduce his wife Melania during the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Pat Smith, mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith, salutes after speaking during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Karen Pence speaks to husband Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
John Tiegen, a U.S. Marine Corp veteran and Mark Geist, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who fought in Benghazi, L-R, speak during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Iran begins trial for 21 linked to storming of Saudi posts
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Iran began a closed trial on Monday for 21 suspects in the storming of Saudi diplomatic missions earlier this year, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported.
The trial is the first in the case of the January incident, when Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and a consulate in Mashhad after Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia executed Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shiite cleric and dissident. Iran views itself as the defender of the world's Shiites.
The attacks on the diplomatic missions led to the severing of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, regional rivals that back opposite sides in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
In Monday's proceedings, the court heard the defense statements for 14 of the suspects, who are charged with participating in the "intentional damage" of the Saudi's diplomatic posts as well as with "violation of law and order."
The report did not identify any of the suspects. It only mentioned they are aged from 21 to 36 years and hold various non-government jobs, including a garment businessman and a private teacher.
ISNA further said the defendants claimed they were not aware their gathering was illegal. One reportedly said he was repentant, after learning that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not happy about the incident.
ISNA did not say how it obtained details of the hearing, which is to continue on Tuesday.
Portman's Ohio campaign differs sharply from Trump's
CLEVELAND (AP) Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman and his re-election team have been beating the bushes and sifting through reams of data for more than a year.
Donald Trump has visited the state once since clinching the GOP presidential nomination.
Republicans say Trump needs to take a page from Portman's playbook, and they worry that Trump's flyby approach to one of the most important states on the electoral map won't give him the edge he needs over Democrat Hillary Clinton, who already has a strong Ohio operation.
FILE - In this June 23, 2016, file photo, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. Republicans say Trump needs to take a page from Portmans playbook, and they worry that Trumps flyby approach to one of the most important states on the electoral map wont give him the edge he needs over Democrat Hillary Clinton, who already has a strong Ohio operation. Portman narrowly leads his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Ted Strickland, while Trump and Clinton are deadlocked in Ohio. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Portman narrowly leads his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Ted Strickland, while Trump and Clinton are deadlocked in Ohio. Some Republicans complain that Trump could be ahead if he were to make a more specialized effort in the state.
"If you can't speak to everybody, you can't win statewide," said Ohio Republican consultant Jai Chabria, until recently a top aide to GOP Gov. John Kasich.
Certainly Trump has more states than just Ohio on his mind. He has said he can win states traditionally carried by Democrats, such as New York and California. But he must win some places where 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney lost, and he has pointed to the upper Midwest, where his tough talk on trade resonates with some blue-collar workers.
Ohio, worth 18 electoral votes, has been carried by every winning candidate for president since 1964, and by a margin of less than 3 percentage points in the past four White House elections.
Trump came in second in the state's GOP primary to Kasich, and Kasich has yet to back Trump, citing his former rival's divisive rhetoric and positions.
It's a message Trump will have to fundamentally change if he hopes to appeal to more of Ohio's diverse electorate, beyond the working-class white voters in the southeast part of the state with whom his populist economic theme resonates most clearly, Chabria said. Trump lacks a large staff in the state focused exclusively on promoting him, relying instead on the roughly 50 Republican National Committee workers promoting the entire GOP ticket.
Of Clinton, by contrast, Chabria said: "They may have an older machine, but at least they have a machine."
It's understandable that Portman's future depends on Ohio. For Trump, it's still critical. Beating Clinton there and neighboring Michigan or Pennsylvania could offset a potential Clinton victory in Florida, worth 29 votes of the 270 needed to clinch the presidency.
By the end of the month, Portman is expected to have contacted 3 million voters. He has had a team on the ground for a year and a half, and has 15 paid employees staffing 10 offices. Portman visits at least one office every weekend, his campaign manager, Corry Bliss, said.
"The target of our grassroots campaign is identifying swing voters, identifying the issues they care about and communicating with them," Bliss said.
Portman has committed $15 million from his campaign to television advertising, much of it addressing heroin addiction, a big concern for swing-voting suburban women, but also the ailing coal industry, a priority in the southeast part of the state.
Trump has spent no money in Ohio on advertising. The RNC staff is also promoting Portman and the rest of the GOP ticket. Just last month, he named an Ohio director, an experienced state operative, Bob Paduchik, who ran Portman's 2010 campaign.
State GOP Chairman Matt Borges touts the combined RNC and state party effort and contends Republicans who were in "mourning" over Kasich's drop from the race in May are beginning to coalesce around Trump.
"I just completely and utterly reject this notion that (Clinton is) ahead of us," Borges said.
Clinton has been to Ohio four times since effectively locking up the Democratic nomination. Her campaign also has spent an average of $1 million per week on television advertising in Ohio since mid-June and has about 100 paid organizers in the state.
Michigan's neighbor and a major auto and parts manufacturer itself, Ohio was hit hard by deep job cuts in the industry, giving Trump's stance on trade some traction. Reports show dozens in Ohio dying of heroin overdoses every week in the suburbs of its numerous metro areas, and workers in Ohio's southeast worry about the future of the coal industry, in light of higher environmental standards.
Yet, Trump also shows no sign of tailoring his message to Ohio.
During his one visit to Ohio since clinching the nomination, Trump pledged to defeat the Islamic State group responsible for deadly attacks in the United States and abroad. He also promised to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious trade pact with Asian nations, which he told the audience "will do to you worse than NAFTA's done," referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
At no time during the rally near Cincinnati did he mention heroin or the coal industry. Instead, he spent much of the time accusing Clinton of lying about sending and receiving classified information on a private email server in her home when she was secretary of state.
"These are all lies. We say, lie, lie, lie. Dirty rotten liar," Trump said at campaign rally near Cincinnati on July 6.
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa.
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What political news is the world searching for on Google and talking about on Twitter? Find out via AP's Election Buzz interactive. http://elections.ap.org/buzz
Myanmar rebels satisfied with preparatory peace talks
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) Representatives of ethnic minorities who have been battling Myanmar's government for decades said Monday their meeting with the country's de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was a good beginning but that the peace process remains an uphill task.
Neither side made any promises in the talks to prepare for substantive peace negotiations in August, said Khu Oo Reh of the United Nationalities Federal Council, a coalition of ethnic rebel groups. The ethnic groups are particularly interested in securing a political agreement the subject of the planned August talks that would meet their long standing demands for greater autonomy.
"It was just like a family meeting," he told reporters. "It was a meeting that led to constructive intentions for the future meeting."
Khu Oo Reh said the Sunday talks did not resolve whether ethnic armed groups who didn't sign a 2015 nationwide cease-fire agreement would participate in the August meeting, considered by both sides to be crucial to restoring peace after more than five decades of mutual mistrust and warfare. Fighting continues in some areas.
"We have said many times that the government needs to work on the negotiations to stop the offensive attacks by the military on the ground," Khu Oo Reh said. "We generally understand that the government and the military are aware of that and working on that process."
Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party in March succeeded a military-backed government, has dubbed the August meeting the 21st-Century Panglong Conference, a reference to the 1947 Panglong Agreement that was signed by her father, Gen. Aung San, and ethnic minority groups. Aung San was assassinated before the country became formally independent from Britain, and ethnic groups generally hold his successors responsible for not honoring the 1947 pact, which would have guaranteed them more autonomy.
"All stakeholders, which means all armed groups, must be included," in the August talks, said Khu Oo Reh. "If any group is excluded, the problem will come back again one day to the country, and the hope that we have on for secure lives, peace and rule of law will fade away."
He expressed some frustration that Suu Kyi, who holds the official post of State Counselor, had asked what the ethnic rebel groups could give to the government.
He said he replied with his own question noting the suffering that many minority groups had undergone in decades of fighting.
Suspected MH370 wing flap reaches Australian investigators
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) Investigators in Australia on Monday were examining a wing flap found last month on an East African island that is suspected to be from the missing Malaysian airliner, officials said.
The "large piece of aircraft debris" arrived at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau headquarters in the capital, Canberra, for examination as part of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, said a joint statement by Australian and Malaysian government authorities.
"The large piece of what is likely to be a wing flap" was found June 23 by locals on Pemba Island, off the coast of Tanzania, the statement said.
FILE - In this March 31, 2014 file photo, HMAS Success, as seen from a Royal New Zealand Air Force P3 Orion, patrols the Indian Ocean searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 off the coast of Western Australia. Investigators in Australia on Monday, July 18, 2016, were examining a wing flap found in June on an East African island that is suspected to be from the missing Malaysian airliner, officials said. The large piece of aircraft debris arrived at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau headquarters in the capital, Canberra, for examination as part of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, said a joint statement by Australian and Malaysian government authorities. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith, File)
Australian technical specialists were working with Malaysian investigators to determine whether the debris was from the Boeing 777 that vanished with 239 people on board after flying far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
The Transport Safety Bureau has so far examined four pieces of debris and found that they were almost certainly from Flight 370, which is thought to have crashed in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia.
Another piece of wing found a year ago on La Reunion Island, off the African coast, was positively identified by French officials.
The bureau is overseeing a sonar search of 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) of seabed in the hunt for Flight 370's crash site.
UK's new PM to make 1st overseas trips to Germany and France
LONDON (AP) Theresa May's office says Britain's new prime minister will meet the French and German leaders in her first overseas trips this week.
May replaced David Cameron last week in the wake of Britain's decision to leave the European Union.
The prime minister's office says she will fly to Berlin Wednesday to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel, a key player in the negotiations that will determine the terms of Britain's EU exit.
Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May attends a reception for the Police Bravery Awards in Downing Street, London, Thursday July 14, 2016. Theresa May is filling more Cabinet posts Thursday as she assembles a government that includes prominent anti-EU figures in key international roles. (Andrew Parsons/PA via AP)
Downing Street says the talks will focus on U.K.-German relations, global challenges and "how the U.K. and Germany can work together as the U.K. prepares to leave the EU."
Authorities identify man hit, killed by off-duty officer
NEW YORK (AP) Police have identified the man who was killed after an off-duty New York City police officer's vehicle struck four pedestrians in Brooklyn during the weekend.
Authorities said Sunday that 21-year-old Andrew Esquivel died early Saturday after an out-of-control SUV driven by 28-year-old Nicholas Batka mounted a sidewalk, hitting Esquivel and three others. The Manhattan man died at a hospital, and police say two women and another man, all in their 20s, were hospitalized with serious injuries.
Police say Batka has worked in the department's Manhattan transit bureau for 1 years and has been suspended. He's charged with manslaughter, driving while intoxicated and other offenses.
EU, US to Turkey: No excuse to break democratic traditions
BRUSSELS (AP) The European Union and the United States expressed alarm Monday with Turkey's response to a failed coup, telling the NATO member and EU aspirant that it must uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.
"This is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
The top American diplomat said Turkey must "uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law."
European Union High Representative Federica Mogherini, right, shakes hands with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the EU Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Kerry said: "We caution against a reach that goes beyond that."
Kerry and Mogherini spoke after a meeting in Brussels that also included the bloc's 28 foreign ministers, and after a weekend when Turkey's government responded to the coup attempt by rounding up some 6,000 people, including hundreds of judges and prosecutors.
Mogherini said the talks on Turkey's bid to join the European Union would end if Ankara restores the death penalty, as some are suggesting. That message was echoed by Germany, the union's biggest state.
"The institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member," Steffen Seibert, spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel, said in Berlin.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities on Friday night. But the rebellion wasn't supported by the military's top brass and was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. More than 200 people were killed and more than 1,500 wounded.
Both Mogherini and Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically elected government. But they also revealed their deepening frustration with his government's actions over the last three days. Beyond the detentions, one Turkish government minister even claimed U.S. complicity in the violence.
Going further than Mogherini or Kerry, the EU commissioner leading negotiations with Turkey on its accession bid suggested Erdogan was exploiting the crisis to eliminate opponents who may or may not have been involved in the coup.
"It is exactly what we feared," Johannes Hahn said. It appears, he added, as if Turkey had "prepared" arrest lists of political opponents and was waiting for the right time to act.
Both the EU and the U.S. need Turkey right now and are limited in how far they can push the criticism.
Washington is working with its NATO partner to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and Kerry credited Turkey for reopening a key air base in the south of the country; Brussels is counting on Turkey to stem refugees from reaching the continent. Merkel's spokesman said the quashed coup hasn't affected an EU-Turkish arrangement for stopping migrants arriving by sea.
Erdogan, for his part, is demanding that Washington hand over an exiled cleric he blames for orchestrating the violence. Kerry said no extradition request for the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, has arrived yet. He said at the U.S. would first need to see "evidence, not allegations" of Gulen's responsibility.
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Associated Press writer John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.
European Union High Representative Federica Mogherini, right, welcomes U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the EU Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks with journalists at the EU Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
The Latest: Candlelight vigil honors slain police officer
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (AP) The Latest on the fatal shooting of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (all times local):
8 p.m.
Hundreds have gathered on the sprawling campus of a Baton Rouge church for a candlelight vigil honoring a police officer shot to death Sunday.
Tre Patton, 10, looks at a makeshift memorial at the scene of the shooting of police officers, in Baton Rouge, Monday, July 18, 2016. Multiple police 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)
Monday night's ceremony for 41-year-old Matthew Gerald is taking place at Healing Place Church. Associate pastor Johnny Green said Gerald had been a member of the church. He said Gerald's family was present but had declined media interviews.
Gerald was a Baton Rouge rookie police officer who had just begun his new career after stints in the military. Another Baton Rouge officer and an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy also died. Another deputy was in critical condition.
Prayer services and vigils are being held around the Baton Rouge area this week.
The shooter, 29-year-old Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, died in Sunday's gunfight.
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6:15 p.m.
President Barack Obama has called authorities in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the families of three law enforcement officers killed this weekend to offer his condolences.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Obama on Monday called Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr. and East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, as well as the families of Officers Matthew Gerald and Montrell Jackson, and Deputy Brad Garafola. He also pledged federal support for the ongoing investigation into Sunday's attack, Earnest said.
The calls came as Obama also ordered flags at all government buildings to be flown at half-staff in honor of the victims.
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5:45 p.m.
President Barack Obama has ordered the U.S. flag to be flown at half-staff at the White House and other federal buildings until sunset on Friday to honor the police officers shot in Baton Rouge.
The proclamation says the flags will be flown at half-staff as a mark of respect for the victims of the attack, which killed three officers and injured three.
The order also applies to all military posts, naval stations and naval vessels, as well as to U.S. embassies and consular offices around the world.
In the past few weeks alone, the president also ordered the flag lowered after the nightclub shooting in Orlando, the killings of police officers in Dallas and the truck attack in Nice, France.
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3:25 p.m.
East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux says Deputy Nicholas Tullier is in "very, very critical condition."
The sheriff says, "It's in God's hands. We'll just have to see what happens, but he's not in good shape at all."
He says Deputy Bruce Simmons, meanwhile, just got a titanium rod to replace an arm bone shattered by the gunman's bullet.
The sheriff also said slain Deputy Brad Garafola "went down fighting" and "returned fire to the very end" as he tried to protect a wounded police officer.
He says surveillance video showed Garafola returning fire from a prone position as bullets hit the concrete around him. Only after the deputy died did the shooter return to the wounded officer and kill him with two more bullets, at close range.
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3:10 p.m.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie says "that shot that our SWAT team made was a helluva shot but it had to be made."
The chief was describing the long-distance shot that killed the gunman. He said he's got no doubt that the gunman would have gone next to police headquarters to take more lives.
Dabadie says police have been questioned about militarized tactics, but says these killings show that "we are up against a force that is not playing by the rules."
He says "they did not play by the rules in Dallas and they did not play by the rules here."
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2:45 p.m.
FBI Agent Jeff Sallet says federal investigators are actively trying to figure out if gunman Gavin Long had any associates or support for his plan to come to Baton Rouge and kill police.
Sallet says the agency is committing all resources necessary to identifying any co-conspirators or facilitators and bring them to justice."
He cited what he called seven key words from the Pledge of Allegiance: "One Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice For All."
Indivisible he said that means "Baton Rouge unified, Louisiana unified, America unified. This will only make us stronger; We will work tirelessly to ensure safety in this community and throughout the nation."
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2:40 p.m.
Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux has described how the gunman killed officers at close range and was moving in on two other officers after wounding him when he was finally taken down.
He praises the Baton Rouge City SWAT team officer for saving more lives by firing from a long distance, through structures, at the gunman who was closing in for more kills.
Gautreaux says he's convinced that if the officer hadn't killed the gunman at the scene, "we would have had two other slain deputies and that individual would have had the opportunity to get into his car and go after other targets."
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2:30 p.m.
Louisiana State Police Col. Mike Edmonson says the gunman who shot six police officers in Baton Rouge clearly targeted law enforcement, carrying two riles and a 9 mm handgun in Sunday's ambush.
Edmonson showed overhead maps of the area to explain how Gavin Long snuck up behind police officers and shot them at close range.
He says another deputy had spotted the gunman's car and was about to run his license plate when the gunman shot the deputy "that's the one critically injured, fighting for his life right now."
Edmonson says a responding SWAT team officer finally shot the gunman from about 100 yards away.
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2:15 p.m.
Kip Holden is the Mayor-President of East Baton Rouge Parish, where three officers were killed and three others wounded in an ambush by a gunman from Kansas City Sunday morning.
At a news conference, he thanked the mayor of Orlando, Florida for reaching out to him in support just weeks after that city's nightclub attack.
Holden also addressed the dead gunman, saying "you have slain some law enforcement officials, but this city, this state and this nation will rise again."
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The above has been edited to clarify the context of the mayor's quote.
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2:10 p.m.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards says the shooter who killed three police officers in Baton Rouge "came in here from somewhere else to do harm to our community."
He says "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 says killing police officers "doesn't accomplish anything, it's not constructive. It's just pure unadulterated evil."
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All three of the slain Baton Rouge officers lived in Denham Springs, just outside Louisiana's capital.
Antique store owner Marilyn Wallace says "everybody knows everybody" in the small city, so the killings have a huge impact."
Denham Springs is in Livingston Parish, which has a sharp racial divide, but that seems remote now in the racially mixed neighborhood where the Wallace's white son grew up with Montrell Jackson, a slain officer who was black.
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1:25 p.m.
One of the three officers wounded in the attack on police in Louisiana's capital has been released from a hospital.
A statement from Our Lady of the Lake hospital in Baton Rouge says the city police officer who was reported in fair condition has now been released.
That leaves two who are still being treated.
East Baton Rouge Sheriff's spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks says sheriff's deputy Nicholas Tullier remained in critical condition, at the same hospital.
Deputy Bruce Simmons is being treated at Baton Rouge General Hospital for wounds to his arm and shoulder that are not expected to be life-threatening.
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1:15 p.m.
Louisiana authorities say surveillance video of the scene where three officers were killed makes clear that it was an ambush.
State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson is telling The Associated Press that video shows specific movements by the shooter that shows he was specifically seeking out law enforcement officers.
The shooter was killed and three other officers were wounded in the shootout.
Authorities plan to release more information during a news conference at 2 p.m. local time.
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1 p.m.
Authorities in Baton Rouge plan to release more information at a news conference at 2 p.m. local time about the shooting of police officers by a Kansas City man.
Kip Holden is the Mayor-President of East Baton Rouge Parish, and he visited today with officers at police their headquarters. He says all are grieving the loss of their co-workers, but they are well aware of the dangers in their jobs.
He says the city's mission now is to make sure the families of the officers who were shot and wounded are taken care of.
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12:45 p.m.
Gov. John Bel Edwards has ordered the U.S. and Louisiana flags to be flown at half-staff over the State Capitol and all public buildings in Louisiana until sunset on Monday to honor the lives of the six law enforcement officers who were shot in Baton Rouge this past Sunday.
Three of those officers were killed: Baton Rouge Police Officers Matthew Gerald and Montrell Jackson, and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola.
The governor calls them "heroes in the truest sense of the word."
"Rather than running from danger, they ran toward it and three of them paid the ultimate sacrifice," the governor says. "In honor of their lives, let us all remember that what unites us is far greater than what divides us."
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12:30 p.m.
Hillary Clinton says the killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge threatens the nation's ability to make progress with criminal justice reform.
Speaking to the NAACP national convention in Cincinnati, the Democratic presidential candidate says much hard work remains to resolve the nation's problems with race and policing.
Clinton's proposals include developing national use-of-force guidelines, investing more in bias training and body cameras and passing laws against racial profiling.
She also would cut mandatory minimum sentences for minor offenses and help people find jobs after serving time behind bars.
She calls this work difficult and painful but essential for repairing the bonds between police and our communities.
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12:15 p.m.
Kansas City police have arrested a man on a city warrant at the last known address for the man who killed three law enforcement officers in Louisiana.
A police statement says 39-year-old Kamerran Fryer, of Kansas City, was arrested Sunday night for a seat belt violation and released after promising to appear.
The statement said police made the arrest while assisting the FBI, and referred questions to the federal agency.
FBI spokesman Bridget Patton said agents were in the area assisting with the Baton Rouge shooting investigation, but had no further comment.
Police said it wasn't immediately known if Fryer has an attorney. He does not have a listed phone number.
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12:05 a.m.
Federal agents in Kansas City and Baton Rouge are trying to determine where the gunman got the firearms he used to kill three officers and wound three more in the Louisiana capital.
Regional spokesman John Ham of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says "all parts of this investigation, at least from the ATF's standpoint, are very fluid."
The slain officers were responding to a report of a man with an assault rifle and were met with gunfire. For several long minutes, it wasn't clear where the shooting was coming from.
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11:40 a.m.
Businesses around a shooting that killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are reopening as police continue investigating the crime 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 were getting ready for the day at a car wash where the gunman was cornered.
Neighboring businesses were riddled with at least eight apparent gunshots. Investigators examined a hole in a window at a fitness supply business, and wood already covered another window that was shot out.
Authorities say two city police and a sheriff's deputy died in the shooting Sunday morning, and the gunman was killed by law enforcement.
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11:35 a.m.
Frank Cooper works at a garage right next to the spot where the gunman killed three law enforcement officers and wounded three more before authorities killed him.
Cooper says the convenience store was an ideal target for someone wanting to catch police off-guard. It's less than a mile from police headquarters, and uniformed officers often stop there for coffee before their shifts.
The gunman was identified as Gavin Long from Kansas City. Cooper is guessing that it's unlikely someone from out of town would known about the spot.
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11:20
The neighbor of one of the slain officers in Baton Rouge says that if 41-year-old Matthew Gerald had been hardened by his years in the military, you couldn't tell it when he became an officer and got his squad car.
Ashley Poe says Gerald seemed so tickled when he got his take-home car that he scrubbed it down and was playing with the lights, turning them on and off, just like a kid -- "living out the dream."
Poe said her 14-year-old son was interested in military service, and Gerald was always ready to answer his questions, telling him "how he was proud to protect his country."
Poe also says that Gerald was devoted to his wife and daughters.
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10:50 a.m.
The man who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge declared last year that he was changing his name from Gavin Eugene Long to Cosmo Setepenra.
Long described his new name in a document he filed in May 2015 with the Recorder of Deeds Office in Jackson County, Missouri. The filing also declared membership in a black separatist group that considers itself beyond the reach of state and federal laws.
County spokesoman Brenda Hill says he never followed through in court to make the name change official.
Long cited common law, saying that "an emancipated person has the right to change his or her name without legal formality."
He said he was a member of the Washitaw Nation. The Southern Poverty Law Center says this group uses pseudo-legal language and ideologies similar to that of hard-line American white supremacists.
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8:45 a.m.
In online posts, a man using an alias of the Baton Rouge shooter said protests alone don't work, and people must fight back after the deaths of black men at the hands of police.
Documents show that gunman Gavin Eugene Long sought to change his name last year to Cosmo Setepenra. A website using that name links to self-published online books on 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 man says he's speaking from Dallas after the fatal attack on police officers there during a march over the deaths of black men at the hands of law enforcement. The man also discusses the 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.
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8:45 a.m.
Clark Atlanta University officials say Baton Rouge gunman Gavin Eugene Long was briefly enrolled at the Atlanta university during the 2012-13 academic year.
Clark Atlanta said in a statement Monday morning that the university "categorically denounces this heinous act."
Long, a former Marine from Kansas City, Missouri, turned 29 on Sunday, the same day he opened fire, killing three law enforcement officers and wounding three others. Long was killed at the scene.
The shooting added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police.
University of Alabama spokesman Chris Bryant said Long also attended the University of Alabama for one semester, in the spring of 2012.
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8:35 a.m.
The man who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge sought to change his name last year and said he was part of a largely black group that claims to separate from state and federal governments.
Gavin Eugene Long, a black man whose last known address was in Kansas City, Missouri, carried out the attack Sunday on his 29th birthday. Police say he also wounded three officers before he was killed.
He sought to change his name to Cosmo Setepenra in a document filed in May 2015 with the Jackson County Recorder of Deeds. He also refers to himself as a member of the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah, also known as the Washitaw Nation.
The groups says it's a sovereign Native American nation within the boundaries of the U.S.
The name-change document ends: "Standing firm on the Ancient Principles of, LOVE, TRUTH, PEACE, FREEDOM AND JUSTICE."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Sheriff Sid Gautreaux explains the shooters actions during a news conference regarding the shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Multiple police 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, sparking nightly protests across the city. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
Mother, Crystal Rende, center, and her family, including from left to right, Lara Rende, 15, Aydin Rende, 4, Noah Rende, 6, and Hannah Enamorado, 13, pray in front of a memorial of flowers and mementos in front of the B-Quick convenience store where Baton Rouge law enforcement officers where engaged by a gunman and three were killed on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Rende's daughters attend Denham Springs Jr. High School, a school in the community where two of the officers who were killed lived. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Millville, N.J., Police Chaplain Bob Ossler prays and weeps with a local resident as she places flowers on a memorial at the B-Quik gas station on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday, a day after law enforcement officers were killed in the attack. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Balloons of support tied to mailboxes bounce in the wind across the street from the home of Baton Rouge Police officer Matthew Gerald in Denham Springs, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Gerald was one of three law enforcement officers who were shot and killed Sunday. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Local resident Rea Lolley and family friends Dominick Duplessis, 10, and Addison Cummings, 4, arrive with flowers and balloons to place on a memorial for shooting victims at the B-Quik gas station on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La., a day after a shooting that killed and wounded multiple police officers. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Shattered glass surrounds a bullet hole at Fitness Expo, Monday, July 18, 2016, at the fatal shooting scene in Baton Rouge, La., where several law enforcement officers were killed on Sunday. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Millville, N.J. police chaplain Robert Ossler prays Monday, July 18, 2016, at a makeshift memorial at the fatal shooting scene in Baton Rouge, La., where several law enforcement officers were killed on Sunday. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday. (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)
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)
This undated photo made available by the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office shows deputy Brad Garafola. Garafola and at least two other Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed Sunday, July 17, 2016, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. (East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office via AP)
Col. Mike Edmonson speaks during a news conference regarding the shooting of police officers, in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Multiple police 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, sparking nightly protests across the city. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
Baton Rouge Chief of Police Carl Dabadie, Jr. speaks during a news conference regarding the shooting of police officers, in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Multiple police 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, sparking nightly protests across the city. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
Pastor Robert Ossler, left, prays with people visiting a memorial Monday, July 18, 2016, in front of the B-Quick convenience store where law enforcement officers where engaged by a gunman and three were killed on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La. Ossler, a police chaplain from Millville New Jersey, was on his way home from comforting officers in Dallas when the shooting in Baton Rouge happened and he felt compelled to come to Baton Rouge. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Sheriff Sid Gautreaux describes a wounded officers account of events during a news conference regarding the shooting of police officers, in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Multiple police 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, sparking nightly protests across the city. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
A memorial sign is posted Monday, July 18, 2016, in front of the B-Quick convenience store where law enforcement officers where engaged by a gunman and three were killed on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La. Pictured in the poster is, from left to right, Montreal Jackson, Matthew Gerald, both with the Baton Rouge Police Department and Brad Garafola of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
The Latest: 2 Melania Trump passages mirror Michelle Obama
CLEVELAND (AP) The Latest on the Republican National Convention in Cleveland (all time local):
12:30 a.m.
Melania Trump's well-received speech Monday to the Republican National Convention contains two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
Melania Trump, wife of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump waves to the delegates after her speech during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
The passages in question focus on lessons that Donald Trump's wife says she learned from her parents and the relevance of their lessons in her experience as a mother. They came near the beginning of her roughly 10-minute speech. Mrs. Trump's address was otherwise distinct from the address that Mrs. Obama gave when then-Sen. Barack Obama was being nominated for president.
Trump's campaign had no immediate reaction when asked about the similarities in the two speeches. White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday evening.
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12:25 a.m.
The ghostwriter of Donald Trump's bestselling 1987 memoir "The Art of the Deal" says he regrets his role in creating the image of Trump as a successful deal maker the foundation of his presidential campaign.
Tony Schwartz tells The New Yorker magazine that he fears a Trump presidency and feels remorse for making Trump "more appealing than he is."
Schwartz says he feels he sold out on his former career as a journalist when he agreed to share Trump's half-million-dollar advance to write the book.
"The Art of the Deal" led to Trump's starring role in TV's "The Apprentice."
Schwartz says he "put lipstick on a pig" in his portrayal of Trump. He says he turned down an offer from Trump to write a sequel.
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12:10 a.m.
Hillary Clinton says the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server for official communications while secretary of state taught her a major lesson in gaining public trust.
Speaking to Charlie Rose in an interview aired late Monday on PBS, Clinton said she is "the last person you will have to worry about ever not being 100 percent as specific and precise." She says she hopes "nobody ever raises any questions like that ever again."
A yearlong FBI investigation revealed this month that her private email server did carry classified emails, contrary to her past statements. And it made clear that Clinton used many devices to send and receive email.
Clinton asserted that many government officials had done the same thing, but now that the rules have "been clarified, we will all be able to understand them better."
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11:30 p.m.
Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana is bringing the first night of the Republican National Convention to a close.
Zinke a former Navy SEAL was part of the Republican National Convention's tribute to the military. Also emphasized was Donald Trump's campaign pledge to "Make America Safe Again."
Zinke is blaming Democrat Hillary Clinton a former secretary of state for many of the country's security challenges. He says that in a Donald Trump administration, "If we go to war, we'll go to war to win."
The congressman spoke to a largely empty hall as the program ran late and most of the crowd left after Melania Trump's speech.
The evening ended with a benediction from a pastor in Florida.
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11:25 p.m.
As the political world focuses on the Republican National Convention, Democrat Hillary Clinton is criticizing Donald Trump for what she says is his "dangerous, reckless approach" to the presidency.
She says in a CBS interview that Trump has "no self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any president should impose upon himself."
Clinton is trying to make the case that Trump is offering "simplistic, easy answers" that appeal to people who are anxious and fearful.
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11:20 p.m.
Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst is a rising star in the Republican Party, and on Monday night, she delivered a tribute to veterans at the GOP national convention in Cleveland.
Ernst and Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana were joined on the stage by nearly a dozen former members of the military.
Ernst had Democrat Hillary Clinton in mind when she said the country can't afford four more years of what the senator calls a "lack of leadership."
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10:55 p.m.
Donald Trump's running mate Mike Pence is entertaining a steady stream of high-profile visitors in the VIP box during the first evening of the Republican convention.
The Indiana governor doesn't give his speech until Wednesday, but is in the audience for the opening night. Pence is joined by former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, who lost to President Bill Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort stopped by for a chat with Pence and Dole. Two of Trump's children, Tiffany and Donald Jr., also were on hand during the evening.
The VIP section is just next to where a Code Pink protester caused a brief commotion when she tried to roll out a banner.
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10:50 p.m.
Melania Trump isn't the last speaker of the night at the Republican National Convention, but she's certainly proving to be a tough act to follow.
Donald Trump's wife drew loud ovations for her speech Monday night at the convention in Cleveland and when she walked off the stage with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Many in the crowd also began to make their way to the exits, even though several speakers remained on the night's program.
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10:35 p.m.
It's a rare campaign appearance for Melania Trump and she's telling her life story to the crowd at the Republican National Committee.
She's a former model who moved to the United States from Slovenia. She's recounting how she became a U.S. citizen and she's citing "the love in the Trump family."
Melania Trump is the first of several of Donald Trump's family members who are on the list of speakers at the Cleveland convention this week. Their appearances are an attempt to humanize the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
She has thanked the crowd for "the warm welcome" and said her husband was "moved by this great honor."
Melania Trump says she and her husband "love America very much" and that she, more than anyone, knows what she's calling the "the simple goodness" of her husband's heart.
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10:25 p.m.
Donald Trump has arrived at the Republican National Convention that will nominate him for president of the United States.
Trump drew cheers as he took the stage to introduce his wife, Melania, before her remarks to the delegates.
The candidate made only brief comments, telling the crowd in Cleveland: "We're going to win, we're going to win so big."
Trump is expected to return to Manhattan late Monday and then travel back to Cleveland Wednesday afternoon. He's set to deliver his acceptance speech Thursday night to close out the convention.
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10:10 p.m.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has given a forceful defense of law enforcement at the Republican National Convention.
He's gotten the biggest cheers of the night from the crowd of more than 2,000 delegates.
Giuliani has been critical of those who protest against police, including those involved with the group Black Lives Matter.
He says when police officers "come to save your life, they don't ask if you are black and white, they just come to save you."
He also called Donald Trump "a man with a big heart" who's helped out their native New York City. He says Trump would anonymously help the families of police officers who were injured in the line of duty.
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10:05 p.m.
A lone protester from the liberal activist group Code Pink is attempting to disrupt the proceedings at the Republican National Convention.
A woman dressed in pink began shouting during a speech by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
She tried to unfurl a pink banner, which other spectators tried to rip from her hands.
The protester was quickly surrounded by photographers. It took security several minutes to remove her from the audience.
The woman was shouting "end Mike Pence's war on women" Pence is the Indiana governor who's Trump's running mate.
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10 p.m.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton has a message for the military: "Help is on the way" if Donald Trump is president.
Cotton tells GOP convention delegates the U.S. "could not afford" four years of a Hillary Clinton administration.
The senator who some believe will someday make his own White House run was the latest in a line of speakers Monday night who hammering the theme that Trump will be the "law and order candidate" who will "make America safe again."
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9:55 p.m.
Perhaps the fish weren't biting.
Steve Daines is the Republican senator from Montana who said last week that he'd be on a fly fishing trip with his wife and would skip his party's convention.
Now Daines has tweeted that he's "heading to Cleveland in the morning."
His office says Daines will join several other first-term Republican senators on stage Tuesday evening.
Just don't expect Ben Sasse (sas) to be there. The freshman senator from Nebraska one of Donald Trump's biggest critics tweeted from his child's Little League game during the first night's speeches.
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9:35 p.m.
The sheriff of Milwaukee County in Wisconsin has energized the crowd at the Republican National Convention by declaring, "Blue Lives Matter in this country."
Sheriff David Clarke a Donald Trump supporter has made the night's most explicit reference to the recent deaths of two black men at the hands of police officers and the slaying of officers in Texas and Louisiana.
Trump also addressed the Black Lives Matter movement in an interview that aired Monday night on Fox News Channel. He didn't make a specific reference to that movement. But he said some activists "are essentially calling death to the police that is not acceptable."
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9:30 p.m.
A cousin of the American ambassador killed in Benghazi, Libya, is accusing Republicans of politicizing the diplomat's death.
The envoy, Chris Stevens, was among four Americans who died in the attacks on the U.S. compound in 2012.
Stevens' cousin, David Perry, posted a tweet just as speakers took the stage Monday night at the GOP convention to blame former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for what they say was lax security at the compound.
Perry says in his tweet that Stevens "loved Arabic, diplomacy, internationalism. I reject politicization of his death."
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9 p.m.
Donald Trump is competing with his own convention as he previews his Thursday night speech accepting the Republican nomination for president.
Trump tells Fox News Channel that the speech it will be "relatively long" and will touch on national security and domestic policy.
The interview on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" began as the mother of a State Department employee killed in Benghazi, Libya, was speaking on the Republican National Convention stage.
Trump says his convention speech will discuss a "major, major" tax cut, immigration, ditching burdensome regulations and taking care of veterans.
Trump also criticized Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who's skipping the convention and hasn't endorsed Trump.
Trump says Kasich should have attended "from the standpoint of honor."
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8:50 p.m.
Delegates attending the first night of the Republican National Convention are eagerly anticipating a speech from Melania Trump the wife of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
She rarely campaigns on behalf of her husband. But she's the Monday night headliner at the convention in Cleveland.
Here's what Steve King, an Iowa congressman says: "The whole world is watching. This is their first big look at her."
He says it's important to see "the success of the family unit working together."
Saul Anuzis is a former chairman of Michigan's Republican Party.
He says: "This is the first chance a lot of us are going to get to see, let's call it the real Trump story."
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8:40 p.m.
The mother of one of the four Americans killed in the siege on an U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is taking on Hillary Clinton.
Pat Smith tells Republican delegates at their convention: "If Hillary Clinton can't give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?"
Smith's son, Sean, was a State Department foreign service officer Sean Smith who died in the 2012 attack.
Pat Smith says she blames Clinton who was secretary of state "personally" for her son's death.
The convention's program Monday night had a strong focus on Benghazi an issue that Republicans have pressed for years against Clinton, claiming her negligence contributed to the Americans' death.
Delegates also saw a video and presentation about Benghazi.
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8:25 p.m.
The retired Navy SEAL at the heart of the book and movie "Lone Survivor" has drawn cheers and shouts of "thank you" from the crowd at the Republican National Convention.
Marcus Luttrell was introduced by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Luttrell spoke about the need for the government to take better care of veterans when they return to the United States.
Luttrell praised Donald Trump's commitment to the military. Luttrell also somewhat touched on the recent violence against police officers telling delegates that the nation's "next war is here."
Luttrell co-wrote a book about a 2005 gun battle in Afghanistan an incident that later was made in to a movie.
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8:20 p.m.
Television actor Scott Baio tells the Republican National Convention that "our country is in a very bad spot" and that "we need Donald Trump to fix this."
Baio is the former star of "Charles in Charge" and "Happy Days. He said Monday at the convention in Cleveland that presumptive Republican nominee Trump isn't "a messiah." But Baio says Trump is someone he'd "trust with the lives of our family and the health of country."
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8:15 p.m.
The star of the TV show "Duck Dynasty" says the America needs "a president who would have our back," and Willie Robertson says that's Donald Trump.
Robertson was the first speaker Monday night at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He tells the crowd of more than 2,000 delegates that that Trump is the candidate running for president who will best support the military and the nation's police officers.
Robertson tossed in a little playful criticism of the news media on Monday night, hitting them "for missing the Trump train." He joked that he and Trump had three things in common: they were successful businessmen, had hit television shows and had wives "more attractive than we are."
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8:10 p.m.
The first night session of the Republican National Convention is underway in Cleveland.
The headliner is Melania Trump, the wife of presumptive nominee Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is expected to introduce his wife before she speaks.
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7 p.m.
A former top intelligence official says Donald Trump "recognizes the threats we face and is not afraid to call them what they are."
Michael Flynn once led the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama and was thought to be on the short list of potential running mates for Trump.
Flynn is one of the scheduled speakers at the Republican National Convention on Monday night, and he says in prepared remarks that Obama has led with "bumbling indecisiveness."
Flynn says Trump will help "restore America's role as the undeniable and unquestioned world leader."
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6:40 p.m.
The brother and sister of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry say Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate who'll secure the border.
Terry was shot and killed in a remote stretch of desert in Arizona in December 2010.
Guns found at the scene were later traced to a failed gun-trafficking investigation led by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Two men in the United States illegally have been convicted in Brian Terry's death.
Kelly Terry-Willis and Kent Terry are among the scheduled speakers at the Republican National Convention on Monday night. They say in prepared remarks that Trump is serious about border security and will give border agents "the resources and support needed to do their jobs."
The Terrys say: "President Trump will make America's borders secure again."
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5:40 p.m.
A car carrying some of Donald Trump's campaign staff was involved in a minor accident on the way from Trump Tower in New York to LaGuardia Airport.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks says the staff car was traveling separately from Trump's motorcade.
Trump wasn't in the car involved in the accident, and Hicks says everyone is OK.
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5:30 p.m.
GOP officials say delegates from Maine, Minnesota and the District of Columbia pulled their names from petitions calling for a state-by-state roll call vote on the rules that'll govern the Republican convention.
Anti-Donald Trump forces had collected enough signatures to force the roll call vote. But Trump supporters circulated a form enabling delegates to remove their names.
Delegates from Washington state also had submitted petitions calling for a full vote. Delegate Kevin Marks says the head of his state's delegation, Susan Hutchison, tried to persuade delegates on the convention floor to remove their names by warning them they'd embarrass their state.
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5:20 p.m.
Democrats say some "everyday Americans" will speak at the party's national convention next week.
The speakers include many people who Hillary Clinton met while campaigning. Others are involved in work that's similar to the kind of advocacy Clinton once did as a young lawyer and they will highlight her advocacy on behalf of children and families.
The group includes a survivor of the 9/11 attacks, a family impacted by opioid addiction, a home health aide involved in the fight for a $15 minimum wage and the daughter of the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut the scene of a mass shooting in 2012.
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5:10 p.m.
Who had the job of restoring order from the podium when the Republican National Convention was breaking into chaos?
It wasn't House Speaker Paul Ryan or the party chairman, Reince Priebus (ryns PREE'-bus).
That responsibility fell to the presiding officer an Arkansas congressman named Steve Womack. He may be little known outside his state or away from Capitol Hill.
Womack talked firmly over angry delegates on Monday, and he called for a voice vote on a rules package opposed by anti-Donald Trump forces. Womack then declared that the "aye" side had prevailed.
Womack is a leadership ally who's part of the vote-counting whip team in the House. He's a retired Army National Guard officer.
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5 p.m.
The Republican Party has adopted what Christian conservatives are cheering as the most conservative statement of party policy principles in recent memory.
The GOP national convention has approved language reaffirming the party's opposition to gay marriage and bathroom choice for transgender people.
And there's new language condemning same-sex parenting.
Here's what it says: "Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to sue drugs and alcohol, engage in crime or become pregnant outside of marriage."
The party's platform represents the GOP's formal policy positions for the next four years. The document serves as guidance for Republican leaders across the nation, but is not binding.
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4:45 p.m.
It took two votes, but delegates at the Republican National Convention were able to approve the rules that'll govern the convention.
It was some scene.
The rules won approval in an initial voice vote, and then anti-Donald Trump delegates became raucous and started chanting, "Call the roll!"
Others drowned them out with chants of "USA!"
There was a brief break before Steve Womack the Arkansas congressman who was chairing the proceedings returned to the podium and called for a second voice vote.
He said for a second time that the rules had passed.
The anti-Trump delegates wanted a state-by-state roll call vote on the rules. That would have been a drawn-out process and could have exposed party divisions.
These delegates collected enough signatures on petitions to force a roll-call vote, but Trump supporters persuaded some delegates to remove their names.
Ending the dust-up was important to show at least a veneer of party unity behind Trump.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves as he leaves the stage during the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the American Federation of Teachers convention at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., speaks to former Republican presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Melania Trump, wife of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump walks on stage during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani gives a thumbs up as he walks to the podium to address delegates during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Activists meet with Atlanta mayor, as others protest format
ATLANTA (AP) Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed described a closed-door meeting Monday with community activists as productive, but news media outlets reported that some organizers refused to attend and plan to resume protesting with a demonstration outside City Hall.
Reed said the main meeting was focused on ways to improve relationships between police and Atlanta residents. He said participants discussed requiring annual mental health screenings for officers and rotating duties to relieve those on tough beats.
"I want the public to know that there were real recommendations and things that should be considered that came out of this meeting today," Reed said at a news conference after the meeting, which wasn't open to media.
Reed, Atlanta Police Chief George Turner and several organizers of large protests spurred by recent police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota met last Monday night in an armored truck as protesters gathered for the fifth straight day. The crowd gathered outside the Georgia governors' mansion in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood finally broke up when organizers emerged from the truck and announced they had secured a meeting with the mayor.
But Monday, members of a group called Atlanta Is Ready said they wanted Reed to meet them outside City Hall rather than inside the building so anyone could participate. They held a demonstration and read a list of demanded changes at the Atlanta Police Department, including less funding for the department and more for housing, health and education. The group also wants changes to police training, staffing and a citizen board that reviews police misconduct complaints.
The group later announced plans to hold another demonstration Monday night outside City Hall.
Reed described the Atlanta Is Ready organizers' list of demands as thoughtful and said it will be reviewed by city staff. But Reed added Monday that he doesn't agree with everything on the list. For example, Reed said he wouldn't take funding away from the police department because officers need "every available resource."
Coast Guard searches for man who fell into Mississippi River
DONALDSONVILLE, La. (AP) The Coast Guard is searching for the captain of a freight vessel who fell into the Mississippi River in Louisiana.
Media outlets report that the Coast Guard began its search for Capt. Ambarish Parekh at 9:30 a.m. Sunday. The Coast Guard says Parekh was last seen wearing a blue shirt and long pants with a personal flotation device.
Parekh was attempting to board the freight vessel African Raptor from a crew boat and fell off a ramp that was connecting the two vessels near Donaldsonville.
Bangladesh tribunal sentences 3 to death for 1971 war crimes
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) A special tribunal in Bangladesh on Monday sentenced three militia members to death for carrying out killings and other serious crimes during the country's independence war against Pakistan 35 years ago.
Five other defendants were sentenced to life in prison.
Justice Anwarul Haque, head of a three-member panel of judges, announced the verdict in a packed courtroom with only two of the defendants in the docks. The others were tried in absentia.
Bangladeshi policemen escort S M Yousuf Ali, third left, after he was sentenced to life until death for his alleged involvement in war crimes in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monday, July 18, 2016. A special tribunal in Bangladesh has sentenced three members of a militia group to death and five others to life in prison for their alleged role in killings and other serious crimes committed during the country's independence war against Pakistan in 1971. (AP Photo)
The accused men were members of the Al Badr militia group that collaborated with the Pakistani army to commit genocide in Bangladesh's Jamalpur district in 1971.
Bangladesh says Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed 3 million people, raped 200,000 women and forced 10 million people to flee to refugee camps across the border in India.
Prosecution lawyer Tureen Afroz said they were satisfied with the verdict. Defense lawyer Gazi Tamim said they would appeal the verdict.
In 2010, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina formed a special tribunal to try the suspected war criminals and it has convicted dozens of people. At least five of the convicts have been hanged for war crimes committed during the country's war for independence from Pakistan.
The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party headed by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and its main ally Jamaat-e-Islami party criticized the government, saying the trial is aimed at weakening the opposition. But Hasina has rejected the allegations and said the families of the people killed in the 1971 war deserve justice.
Bangladeshi policemen escort S M Yousuf Ali, center, after he was sentenced to life until death for his alleged involvement in war crimes in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monday, July 18, 2016. A special tribunal in Bangladesh has sentenced three members of a militia group to death and five others to life in prison for their alleged role in killings and other serious crimes committed during the country's independence war against Pakistan in 1971. (AP Photo)
4 Kenyan police charged in killing of lawyer, 2 others
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) Four Kenyan police officers were charged Monday with murder in the killings of a human rights lawyer, his client and a taxi driver that caused an uproar across the country.
The four suspects were identified in court documents as Fredrick Leliman, Leonard Mwangi Maina, Stephen Cheburet Morogo and Silvia Wanjiku Wanjohi. They were charged in the high court in the capital, Nairobi.
The killings of lawyer Willie Kimani, his client Josephat Mwenda and their driver Joseph Muiruri have caused protests over alleged extrajudicial killings by the police. Their bodies were pulled out of a river after they were abducted on June 23.
The bodies showed signs of torture, according to an independent pathologist who conducted a post-mortem examination. Mwenda's testicles had been crushed and his skull was fractured, Dr. Andrew Gachii said in a report presented to the court. The other bodies had injuries from a blunt object.
Kimani worked as a lawyer for the International Justice Mission, a U.S.-based rights group. He was representing Mwenda, who despite threats had been pursuing charges against a police officer who shot him in an unprovoked incident in 2015.
Kenya's police force is the most corrupt institution in the country, according to the global anti-corruption coalition Transparency International. It often has been accused of running death squads, among other abuses.
US homebuilder sentiment slips in July
U.S. homebuilders are feeling slightly less optimistic about their sales prospects this month, though their outlook for the new-home market remains positive overall.
The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo builder sentiment index released Monday fell one point to 59.
Readings above 50 indicate more builders view sales conditions as good, rather than poor. The index had mostly held at 58 this year before rising to 60 last month.
FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016, file photo, a "Sold" sign sits in front of the foundation of a house under construction as workers discuss plans in Plano, Texas. On Monday, July 18, 2016, the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo releases its July index of builder sentiment. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)
Builders' view of current sales and traffic by prospective buyers slipped one point this month. Their outlook for sales over the next six months slid three points.
The latest survey of builders follows a recent pullback in sales of new U.S. homes.
Sales declined 6 percent in May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 551,000 homes. Overall, though, sales are running ahead of last year's pace through the first five months of this year, aided by job growth and ultra-low mortgage rates.
The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage ticked up 3.42 percent last week, staying close to its all-time low of 3.31 percent in November 2012. A year ago, the average rate was 4.09 percent.
While new-home sales have rebounded from the depths of the housing bust, the current rate of new home sales lags behind the historical annual average of roughly 650,000 homes. New home sales figures for June are due out next week.
Many builders also continue to grapple with a stubborn dearth of skilled workers and available land parcels cleared for new construction.
Still, the NAHB expects that new-home sales will continue to grow, albeit slowly.
"Job creation is solid, mortgage rates are at historic lows and household formations are rising," said Robert Dietz, the NAHB's chief economist. "These factors should help to bring more buyers into the market as the year progresses."
This month's builder index was based on 304 respondents.
A measure of current sales conditions for single-family homes slipped one point to 63, while a gauge of traffic by prospective buyers fell one point to 45. Builders' view of sales over the next six months slid three points to 66.
On a regional basis, the index found builder sentiment held steady in the Northeast, Midwest and South, but ticked up one point in the West.
Germany: 91 pieces in Gurlitt art trove likely looted art
BERLIN (AP) A foundation evaluating artworks found in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt says it's found 91 so far that were likely looted from Jewish owners during the Third Reich.
The government-backed German Lost Art Foundation said Monday that 502 works have been evaluated, including pieces by Paul Cezanne, Eugene Delacroix and Albrecht Duerer.
The foundation is tasked with researching the origin of art hoarded by Gurlitt, who died in 2014. He had kept more than 1,200 works in his Munich apartment and 250 more in Salzburg, Austria.
Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand, was an art dealer who traded in works confiscated by the Nazis.
Review: A touch of humor invades 'Star Trek Beyond'
In the previous "Star Trek" installment, Spock cried. In the latest, "Star Trek Beyond," he laughs. And not just a little snicker, either, but a belly-full one. What bold explorations into the farthest reaches of the galaxy hold for Spock no one knows. A sigh? A hiccup?
"Star Trek Beyond," like most of the rebooted properties flying around our movie theaters, delights in nostalgically resurrecting iconic characters and tweaking them anew. The balance is a delicate one, as seen in the pre-release debate around this film revealing Sulu (John Cho but formerly played by LGBT icon George Takei) as gay.
The scene in question turns out to be a mere moment, lightly handled, showing Sulu greeting his same-sex partner and their daughter after a long mission. It's all expressed with just a few arms tenderly draped across shoulders. And it's the kind of welcome touch that director Justin Lin, the "Fast & Furious" veteran who takes over for J.J. Abrams, has brought to this pleasingly episode-like installment.
In this image released by Paramount Pictures, Zachary Quinto, left, and Karl Urban appear in a scene from "Star Trek Beyond." (Kimberley French/Paramount Pictures via AP)
The opening scene, fittingly, plays with a smaller scale. Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), on a diplomatic mission, appeals to a snarling beast looming above him in a crowded amphitheater. Enraged at Kirk's offer, the alien beast hurtles down upon him, only to turn out to be no more monstrous than a feisty bulldog.
The film finds a bored Enterprise finishing up a five-year tour in deep space. The (albeit brief) change of pace is immediately appreciated. The last two beefed-up "Star Trek" movies, as if overcompensating for decades of Trekkie nerd-dome, threatened to make the once brainy "Star Trek" less distinct from other mega-sized sci-fi adventures just another clothesline of CGI set pieces strung together.
Like its recent predecessors, "Star Trek Beyond" is mostly an assortment of effects-heavy scenes with bits of talking in between. But unlike the previous film, 2013's bloated "Star Trek Into Darkness," not everything is quite so much of a life-and-death issue (the exhausting de facto pitch of today's summer blockbuster).
The Starship Enterprise, led by Captain Kirk (Chris Pine, looking more natural in the role), is lured through a nebula where a would-be rescue mission turns into a trap set by the villain Krall, whose spectacular army of mechanical drones ("bees" he calls them) attack in an overwhelming swarm. In a galactic blitz, the Enterprise is torn to shreds and crashes down on a rocky planet where the ship's scattered crew tries to gather, survive and understand Krall's motives. A local becomes an essential guide for them: Jaylah (a nimble Sofia Boutella), a pale loner with black streaks running down her face who helps the crew discover the Federation's history on the planet.
The backstory, though, never quite gets filled out, and the plot serves as little more than a mechanism to test the efficient camaraderie of the Enterprise crew. Among them: Zoe Saldana's Uhura, Simon Pegg's Scotty, Karl Urban's Bones and Chekov, played by the late Anton Yelchin, a fine actor who's disappointing underused here. They're an entertaining enough bunch meandering around, and screenwriters Doug Jung and Pegg (who, as the writer of "Spaced," knows plenty about the intersection of comedy and science fiction) have injected some humor to the proceedings.
The heart of the film, though, like the previous two, is the bromance between Kirk and Zachary Quinto's Spock. They're Felix and Oscar in outer space, and still the highlight of this batch of "Star Trek" films.
It's only late in the film that the alien mask is pulled away revealing the actor underneath Krall: Idris Elba. For those who didn't place his baritone earlier, the reveal comes as a disappointment. It should be a crime in deep space, as it is on Earth, to shroud such a tremendous force behind mountains of extraterrestrial makeup. But I suppose had Elba been an unadorned baddie all along, the Enterprise might really have finally met its match.
"Star Trek Beyond," a Paramount Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "sequences of sci-fi action and violence." Running time: 122 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
In this image released by Paramount Pictures, Zoe Saldana, left, as Uhura and John Cho as Sulu appear in a scene from, "Star Trek Beyond." (Kimberley French/Paramount Pictures via AP)
In this image released by Paramount Pictures, from left, Anton Yelchin, Chris Pine and John Cho appear in a scene from, "Star Trek Beyond." (Kimberley French/Paramount Pictures via AP)
Morocco asks to rejoin African Union after leaving in anger
KIGALI, Rwanda (AP) Morocco has formally written to the African Union requesting to rejoin the continent-wide organization more than three decades after it left in protest over Western Sahara.
The request was included in a written speech signed by King Mohammed VI of Morocco and addressed to AU members.
Morocco withdrew from the Organization of African Unity, the African Union's precursor, in 1984 in protest over the admission to the organization of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which claims sovereignty over Western Sahara territory that Morocco also claims.
An African Union summit is taking place in Rwanda's capital, Kigali.
Party Disunity: Trump team says Kasich 'embarrassing' GOP
CLEVELAND (AP) Donald Trump's supporters promised party unity this week at the Republican National Convention. Then his campaign manager called the Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich "embarrassing" and "petulant" for refusing to show.
The remarks escalated an intra-party feud that had many Republicans groaning and wondering whether the party could conclude this week's festivities with any semblance of civility.
"John Kasich is being petulant," said Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, to reporters Monday morning at a Bloomberg breakfast.
FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2016, file photo, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, left, and Donald Trump, right, speak to reporters after a Republican presidential primary debate hosted by ABC News at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. Donald Trumps top campaign adviser accused Ohio Gov. John Kasich of embarrassing his home state by avoiding the Republican convention, opening the gathering with a stark display of party disunity. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
Kasich the last member of the crowded GOP primary to end his campaign and whose exit from the race cleared the path for Trump's nomination doesn't appear to be taking the bait.
In remarks to an Illinois delegation Monday afternoon, Kasich did not utter the presumptive nominee's name once. But in an interview to be broadcast on NBC Nightly News, Kasich said Trump would "have to change everything that he says" before he would endorse the celebrity businessman.
"I don't hold any personal animus toward Donald Trump," Kasich said in the interview. "We are just two companies that have different values, different directions and different philosophies."
In a phone interview with Fox News Channel in the midst of the GOP convention Monday night, Trump said Kasich should have attended "from the standpoint of honor."
Other Ohio Republicans swung behind Kasich.
"Manafort still has a lot to learn about Ohio politics," Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges wrote on Twitter. "Doesn't know what he's talking about. Hope he can do better."
In his public dispute with Kasich, Manafort also had drawn in Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, saying Portman was "very upset" with Kasich and believes the governor's lack of support for Trump is hurting his own re-election campaign.
Portman is locked in one of the year's toughest Senate races. While he has endorsed Trump, he is hardly an enthusiastic backer. Portman has said he plans to be on the convention floor occasionally this week, but is not delivering a speech.
Portman's campaign quickly disputed the idea of a rift between the Ohio senator and governor, who are longtime friends and colleagues.
"That's totally false," said Corry Bliss, Portman's campaign manager. He added that Portman and Kasich are "working hand in hand" on the senator's campaign and "any suggestion otherwise is inaccurate."
While Kasich won't be stepping inside the convention center, he has an active schedule in Cleveland, planning to meet with delegates from several states and speak to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He also addressed the NAACP convention on Sunday, an invitation Trump declined.
Kasich's advisers say he doesn't plan to speak out aggressively against Trump during the convention week because he doesn't want to be "rude." John Weaver, Kasich's chief strategist, says the Ohio governor will turn his focus this fall to campaigning for down ballot races. Recent polling put Kasich's approval rating well over 50 percent in Ohio.
"It's going to be a pretty tremendous headwind in the effort to keep control of the Congress, so he's going to take a leading role in that," Weaver said.
Ohio is one of the biggest prizes in the presidential election and almost certainly a must-win for Trump. Ohio, worth 18 electoral votes, has been carried by every winning candidate for president since 1964, and by a margin of less than 3 percentage points in the past four White House elections.
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AP writers Daniel Sewell in Cincinnati, Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, and Kathleen Ronayne in Claremont, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.
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Poland debates adding 2010 crash victims to WWII observances
WARSAW, Poland (AP) Veterans of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and city authorities have taken steps to prevent the names of victims of the 2010 presidential plane crash from being read out during the upcoming anniversary observances of the revolt against German occupation.
The controversy around one of Poland's most painful anniversaries stems from a decision last fall by Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz to commemorate the late President Lech Kaczynski, twin brother of the leader of the right-wing Law and Justice party that took power in November. Macierewicz wants the names of Kaczynski, First Lady Maria Kaczynska and the 94 others who died in the 2010 crash read out by an army officer at every state ceremony. The victims include high state officials, lawmakers and Armed Forces' commanders.
Macierewicz's plan is part of the ruling party's efforts to perpetuate the memory of the late president and the others who were killed on Russian territory while traveling there to honor Polish officers, prisoners of war, killed by the Soviet Secret Security during World War II. Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski argues they gave their lives for a national cause. He holds observances for them every month.
Prime Minister Beata Szydlo has called Macierewicz's decisions "very beautiful."
However, in a letter to Macierewicz Monday, the veterans of Warsaw's ill-fated 1944 revolt sought to have only names of fallen fighters read at various observances of the Aug.1 anniversary. Some 200,000 Warsaw residents, mostly ordinary civilians, were killed during the 63 days of fighting in which the Germans razed most of the city and expelled the survivors.
Halina Jedrzejewska, deputy head of the veterans union, said the fallen fighters and the crash victims should not be mixed together.
"These two things are not equal," she said. "The insurgents fought and died in battle. We must take every effort to preserve their memory."
Former Yukos shareholders appeal $50 billion award reversal
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) The former majority shareholders of Yukos, once Russia's largest oil producer, have appealed a Dutch court's decision to quash an international arbitration panel's $50 billion compensation award.
In April, The Hague District Court overturned a July 2014 decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which awarded the shareholders $50 billion, saying that Moscow used tax claims to seize control of Yukos in 2003 and silence its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an opponent of President Vladimir Putin who had begun to use his vast wealth to fund opposition parties challenging Putin's power.
McDonald's, Starbucks agree to filter Wi-Fi porn
CHICAGO (AP) McDonald's and Starbucks are implementing filtering technology that blocks customers using Wi-Fi from accessing pornography sites.
The move follows a campaign from anti-pornography groups Enough is Enough and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation to demand the chains filter out pornography.
Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's says in a statement that Wi-Fi filtering has been activated in the majority of its nearly 14,000 restaurants nationwide. A spokesperson for Seattle-based Starbucks says it is implementing filtering once it can find a system that "also doesn't involuntarily block unintended content."
FILE - In this July 12, 2012, file photo, Starbucks patrons use laptop computers at a shop in Cambridge, Mass. Starbucks and McDonalds told The Associated Press on July 18, 2016, that they're in the process of implementing technology to filter pornography from Wi-Fi connections at their stores. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
Enough is Enough President Donna Rice Hughes applauds the moves and says the organization plans to push other businesses and venues to filter their Wi-Fi.
The National Center for Sexual Exploitation says chains such as Chick-fil-A and Panera Bread already block porn on Wi-Fi.
Duke Energy CEO: buyout foresees greater natural gas demand
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) Duke Energy Corp.'s purchase of Piedmont Natural Gas Co. will create a company with the financial resources to expand the distribution of natural gas across the country as utilities shift further away from coal to the cleaner-burning fuel, the chief executive of the country's largest electric company said Monday.
Duke Energy is spending $5 billion for Piedmont Natural Gas to secure natural gas and control costs for its own power plants and to position for a national expansion in future gas demand, Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good told utilities regulators in North Carolina.
"Natural gas will continue as an increasingly important part of the nation's energy mix as the shift away from coal continues," Good said. "The combined company will be well-positioned for a future that may require additional natural gas infrastructure and services."
Good and Piedmont Natural Gas CEO Thomas Skains testified before the North Carolina Utilities Commission, whose approval is one of the final hurdles to closing the purchase by the end of this year. The Federal Trade Commission and Tennessee regulators have signed off on the deal.
Charlotte-based Piedmont has about 1 million customers across most of North Carolina; around Nashville, Tennessee; and around Spartanburg, South Carolina. Duke Energy, also based in Charlotte, has more than 7 million electricity customers in the Carolinas, Florida, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. It operates five North Carolina power plants which Piedmont supplies with natural gas. Duke Energy is building a sixth Piedmont-supplied plant in South Carolina.
The two companies were already working together to build a 550-mile-long pipeline to deliver natural gas from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina when Duke announced its planned purchase last fall. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is expected to begin operating in late 2018.
Nearly a dozen environmentalists told the commission they opposed the buyout. Some said the merger would worsen climate change by expanding fossil fuel use. The pending pipeline would increase the demand for natural gas produced by fracking, a drilling technique that opponents blame for polluting groundwater and causing small earthquakes, others said.
Allowing the country's largest electric company to grow larger will create a behemoth whose political and economic influence swamps the interests of consumers and communities where it operates, said Ruth Zalph of Chapel Hill, addressing the hearing.
The buyout "makes Duke a mega-monopoly with tremendous power benefiting only Duke and its shareholders," she told commission members.
The companies sought to hasten the acquisition by striking deals in North Carolina with the agency responsible for representing consumers, commercial electricity users and one environmental group.
The North Carolina Public Staff said it backed the merger after promises that natural gas consumers would get $10 million in savings over two years, the combined company would make annual charitable contributions in North Carolina of at least $70 million over four years, and that it would spend $7.5 million on job training programs and energy assistance for the poor.
Business and industrial customers were promised a share of $35 million in the combined company's fuel savings. The Environmental Defense Fund got Duke Energy's promise to study expansion of a technology that allows utilities to adjust voltage during high-demand periods.
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Albanian fisherman returns, released from capture in Egypt
TIRANA, Albania (AP) Police say a fisherman has returned to Albania after being taken to Alexandria, Egypt, on a boat commandeered by an Egyptian man as it left Albania's Port of Durres June 18.
Luan Mema, 36, returned Sunday after the Albanian Embassy in Egypt provided him with a passport, police said Monday.
Adel Sallan, 30, the Egyptian man accused of taking the boat, was arrested in Alexandria. Sallan has claimed to friends and in Facebook posts that he took the boat because he was owed 70,000 euros ($77,000) in back pay, which the boat owner has denied. Three other Egyptians found on the boat in Alexandria claimed Sallan sold them the boat for 100,000 euros ($110,000).
Turkish editor among winners of press freedom award
NEW YORK (AP) An editor of a Turkish daily newspaper who was sentenced to nearly six years in prison after reporting allegations that Turkey sought to supply weapons to Syrian opposition groups is among the recipients of the 2016 International Press Freedom Awards.
Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, was sentenced in May on charges of revealing state secrets. He remains free pending his appeal. He is one of four journalists recognized in the annual awards from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists which were announced Monday and will be presented in November.
The other recipients are:
Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid, who was arrested while covering the dispersal by security forces of a protest in which hundreds were killed. He has been imprisoned since August 2013.
Oscar Martinez, an investigative reporter for a newsmagazine in El Salvador who covers gang violence and extrajudicial killings and has been threatened for his work.
Clinton condemns shooting of Baton Rouge officers
CINCINNATI (AP) Hillary Clinton on Monday called for an end to the "madness" after the death of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, condemning a series of recent shootings involving police and vowing to hold those who kill police officers legally accountable.
"They represent the rule of law itself. If you take aim at that and at them you take aim at all of us," Clinton told civil rights activists at the annual convention of the NAACP. "There can be no justification, no looking the other way."
The Democratic presidential candidate condemned the killing of three Louisiana law enforcement officers, the latest in a recent string of shootings involving black men in Louisiana and Minnesota and police officers in Dallas.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the 107th National Association for the Advancement of Colored People annual convention at the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinatti, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
"We have difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and our communities and between and among each other," she said.
A former Marine ambushed police in Baton Rouge on Sunday, killing three law enforcement officers in the attack. Three other officers were wounded, one critically. The shooting was the fourth high-profile deadly encounter involving police over the past two weeks.
Clinton also acknowledged that the violence has gone both ways. "Another hard truth at the heart of this complex matter is that many African-Americans fear the police," she said. "I can hear you."
Clinton has proposed a series of reforms to the criminal justice system, including developing national guidelines on the use of force by police, new investments in bias training, legislation to end racial profiling and funding for body cameras. She has also pushed for cutting mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for drug offenses, and providing better support to help the formerly incarcerated find jobs after prison.
Campaigning 250 miles south from where Republicans gathered for the first day of the party's national convention in Cleveland, Clinton poked at Republican candidate Donald Trump's decision not to speak at the NAACP convention.
"My opponent may have a different view but there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here with all of you," she said.
Later Thursday, Clinton faced a series of protests during an address to the annual convention of the American Federal of Teachers, a union that endorsed her over a year ago.
"I share in the urgency and the commitment to actually address these issues," she said, as protesters circled the convention hall shouting, "Hands up, don't shoot."
The black vote was a critical part of President Barack Obama's two national victories, and no state perhaps other than Florida demonstrates why better than Ohio, where black voters produce troves of Democratic votes in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, among a few other smaller cities.
Trump's strategy in Rust Belt states like Ohio is to maximize both white turnout and his share of that vote, while presuming that Clinton simply cannot match Obama's performance in the black community.
"Hillary Clinton's platitudes on gun control and public safety will not ensure an America in which both civilians and law enforcement can feel safe in their own neighborhoods," said Telly Lovelace, Republican National Committee national director of African-American Initiatives.
Clinton's campaign is launching a major voter mobilization drive during the Republican National Convention, with a goal of getting more than 3 million to register and commit to vote in the 2016 election. In a PBS interview with Charlie Rose that aired late Monday, Clinton argued that Trump was offering voters "simplistic, easy answers" that appeal to people who are anxious and fearful.
"That is, unfortunately, part of our political environment right now," she said. "I understand people who are asking these questions. And I hope by the time we have this election-- it will be clear to voters who they can count on."
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Associated Press writers Ken Thomas in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Catherine Lucey in Des Moines contributed to this report.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, right, accompanied by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, left, speaks at a rally the University of Cincinnati Dieterle Vocal Arts Center in Cincinnati, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the 107th National Association for the Advancement of Colored People annual convention at the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinnati, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the 107th National Association for the Advancement of Colored People annual convention at the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinatti, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Police reopen street outside Minnesota governor's mansion
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) Police in St. Paul on Monday reopened the avenue in front of the Minnesota governor's mansion that had been shut down by protesters since shortly after a suburban officer shot and killed a black man during a traffic stop nearly two weeks ago.
Officers informed protesters at 6 a.m. that they would no longer be allowed to occupy Summit Avenue "because they had created an ongoing public nuisance," police spokesman Steve Linders said. Protesters voluntarily packed up and removed their personal belongings, he said, adding that everything was peaceful and nobody was arrested or cited.
"The protesters were told they were welcome to continue their protest on the sidewalk as long as it did not impede vehicle and pedestrian passage or involve structures or other obstructions," Linders said.
St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell greets protesters outside the Governor's residence Monday, July 18, 2016. in St. Paul, Minn. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks amid protests over police violence, was reopened early Monday morning. (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP)
Black Lives Matter protesters had been assembled outside the mansion where Gov. Mark Dayton lives since a few hours after 32-year-old Philando Castile was fatally shot July 6 by a St. Anthony Police Department officer in Falcon Heights. Castile's girlfriend streamed the aftermath live on Facebook.
Dayton, who is white, has suggested that race played a role in Castile's death. The Democrat, who attended the school cafeteria worker's funeral Thursday, had said protesters were welcome to stay outside his residence as long as they wanted.
His office declined to comment on Monday's police action.
It was the second time that police had attempted to reopen the street. Officers cleared away tents, chairs and other property last Tuesday, but more protesters arrived within a few hours and closed the avenue again.
About 30 protesters stood on the sidewalk on Summit Avenue later Monday morning. Organizer Curtis Avent said they were hoping that more protesters would join them so police would have to shut down the avenue for public safety reasons.
He said police "attempted to violate our civil rights and remove us."
While not as high-profile, the protests outside the Governor's Residence since Castile's death have been reminiscent of those last November and December after the Minneapolis police shooting death of another black man, 24-year-old Jamar Clark. Black Lives Matter protesters blocked the street outside a Minneapolis police station for more than two weeks before police tore down the demonstrators' encampment, erecting high fences to dissuade others from trying to return.
Protesters chant at the cars driving by at the Governor's residence on Summit Avenue, in St. Paul, Minn. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks amid protests over police violence, was reopened early Monday morning, July 18, 2016. (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP)
Henry Habu of Minneapolis sweeps the sidewalk outside the Governor's Residence in St. Paul, Minn. Monday morning, July 18, 2016. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks amid protests over police violence, was reopened early Monday. (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP)
Under police orders, demonstrators clear the street in front of the Governor's Residence in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, July 18, 2016. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks near the Governors Residence amid protests over police violence, reopened Monday as demonstrators were cleared from the street for a second time. The protests started the night of July 6 after Philando Castile, a 32-year-old nutrition services supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori, was shot to death by St. Anthony police during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights. (Mary Divine/St. Paul Pioneer Press via AP)
Brian Allen shows the peace sign to a passing police car outside the Governor's residence on Summit Avenue, in St. Paul, Minn. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks amid protests over police violence, was reopened early Monday morning, July 18, 2016. (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP)
Protesters chant at the cars driving by at the Governor's residence on Summit Avenue, in St. Paul, Minn. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks amid protests over police violence, was reopened early Monday morning, July 18, 2016. (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP)
Protesters chant at the cars driving by at the Governor's residence on Summit Avenue, in St. Paul, Minn. Summit Avenue, closed to car traffic for nearly two weeks amid protests over police violence, was reopened early Monday morning, July 18, 2016. (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP)
Dog attacks loom over this year's count of queen's swans
STAINES-UPON-THAMES, England (AP) The annual count of Queen Elizabeth II's mute swans has begun amid worries that dog attacks may have taken their toll on the monarch's waterfowl in the River Thames.
The queen is the traditional owner of unmarked mute swans, and royal custom requires they be counted each year in a colorful affair.
The tally began Monday when royal scarlet-clad Swan Uppers rowed up the River Thames outside London in a flotilla of wooden skiffs to count and examine cygnets, or young swans, for disease and injuries.
Britain's Queen Elizabeth's Swan Uppers look for cygnets while sailing down the River Thames, in Staines on Thames, England, Monday July 18, 2016, during the annual count of the Queen's swans on the river Thames. The queen is the traditional owner of unmarked mute swans and royal tradition requires they be counted each year. (AP Photo/Leonora Beck)
The group fears that a recent spate of fatal dog attacks may affect the final tally. In 2015, they only marked 83 cygnets, down from 120 the previous year.
"Hopefully this year we can go back up to round about 100," said the Queen's Swan Marker, David Barker. "Lots of attacks have been going on, so until we get through the week, we won't know."
Last year, a rise in vandals shooting swans with air riffles caused the number of royal swans to dwindle, Barker said.
The first day of the seven-day-long journey attracted visitors and residents to the riverbanks as the Swan Uppers honored the tradition that dates back to the 12th century. Back then, the young feathered creatures were considered a delicacy and served at royal banquets and feasts.
Kate Turner, one of the bystanders, cherishes the tradition and admires her queen and the royal family.
"She should have been in one of the boats, directing operations with a tiara on," Turner said laughing.
The Swan Uppers get their name from rowing up the river and upping the swans from the water. "Aaaaall up," they shout when a family of swans is located. The boats, with the royal cypher fluttering behind, surround the swans and the Swan Uppers capture them for the annual procedure.
The Queens Swan Marker David Barker releases a cygnet back into the River Thames, in Staines on Thames, England, Monday July 18, 2016, during the annual count of the Queen's swans on the river Thames. The queen is the traditional owner of unmarked mute swans and royal tradition requires they be counted each year. (AP Photo/Leonora Beck)
Britain's Queen Elizabeths Swan Marker David Barker holds a cygnet during the annual count of the Queen's swans on the river Thames, in Staines on Thames, England, Monday July 18, 2016. The Queen is the traditional owner of unmarked mute swans and royal tradition requires they be counted each year. (AP Photo/Leonora Beck)
Lawyer: Clinton already answered every question on email use
WASHINGTON (AP) Hillary Clinton's lawyer told a federal judge Monday that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has already answered enough questions about her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
David Kendall appeared at a hearing on whether a conservative legal group should be granted its request to interview Clinton under oath. The group, Judicial Watch, has filed multiple lawsuits seeking records related to Clinton's tenure as the nation's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.
If allowed, a videotaped sworn deposition by Clinton would likely become fodder for attack ads in the presidential race. Republican officials have said repeatedly they plan to hammer the issue of her emails through the November election.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the 107th National Association for the Advancement of Colored People annual convention at the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinnati, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Kendall told U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan that Clinton has previously testified under oath before the congressional committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks and was interviewed for hours as part of the FBI's recently closed criminal investigation. Both times Clinton said her choice to use a private server located in the basement of her New York home was motivated by convenience, not any attempt to thwart potential public-records requests.
Kendall said further questioning would be "futile."
"The answer is not going to change: It was a matter of convenience," Clinton's lawyer told the judge.
Kendall also cited case law that says current and former cabinet secretaries and department heads should only be subjected to depositions under extraordinary circumstances, adding that the lawsuit at issue failed to meet that legal standard.
Sullivan previously authorized Judicial Watch to question seven current and former State Department officials, including Clinton's Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin. They have gained access to reams of emails and other documents.
Judicial Watch lawyer Michael Bekesha told Sullivan that those prior interviews, while useful, did not explain Clinton's choice to forgo a government email account in favor of her private one. Only Clinton could adequately answer why she made that choice, he said.
"We are not on a witch hunt here," Bekesha said. "The question is: 'What was she hiding on the personal system?'"
The group also wants to question two officials who were in charge of records retention processes at the State Department during Clinton's time. The government opposes that request, though it has taken no position on whether Clinton herself should be questioned.
Last year, Clinton handed over roughly 55,000 pages of her work-related emails to the State Department for potential release, but withheld and deleted a similar number she said dealt solely with such personal matters as family vacations and plans for her daughter's wedding.
However, as part of its investigation the FBI turned up "several thousand" additional work related emails that Clinton failed to provide. The FBI will be providing copies of those to the State Department in batches starting Friday, according to the government.
Lawyers for the State Department asked Sullivan to delay any decision on the deposition until after those new emails are reviewed for potential release, a process that could take weeks or months.
In a pointed question to Kendall, the judge asked how much time Clinton and her team might need to respond if he were to allow Judicial Watch to submit written questions, rather than approving an in-person deposition. Kendall initially said two weeks, before extending his estimate to the maximum 30 days allowed by statute.
Sullivan gave no indication Monday of when he might rule.
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Effects of Baton Rouge shooting rippled outward, returned
CHICAGO (AP) A racially charged narrative has re-emerged in the U.S. due to fatal shootings of black men by white officers as well as the shooting deaths of eight officers in Texas and Louisiana. This round of violence and protests against such violence began and continued this weekend in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Here's a look at what's happened in the span of less than two weeks in July:
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TUESDAY, JULY 5: ALTON STERLING, BATON ROUGE
Pallbearers raise their fists into the air as they carry the casket of Philando Castile back to the horse drawn carriage following Castile's funeral service at The Cathedral of Saint Paul, Thursday, July 14, 2016, in St. Paul, Minn. Castile was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in suburban St. Paul last week. (Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)
The 37-year-old black man had been a fixture for several years outside of a convenience store, where he sold CDs. That night, two white police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II pinned him to the pavement during an altercation and fatally shot him. Police have said Sterling, who as a convicted felon was barred from legally carrying a gun, was armed and an eyewitness said he had a gun in his pocket.
Sterling's death was captured on cellphone video by an anti-violence group and spread quickly online, sparking days of protests in the city where 54 percent of the population is black and more than 25 percent live in poverty.
The U.S. Justice Department has opened a federal civil rights investigation into Sterling's death and has made it clear it does not want a parallel local investigation. The officers are on administrative leave and had prior "use of force" complaints.
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WEDNESDAY, JULY 6: PHILANDO CASTILE, FALCON HEIGHTS, MINNESOTA
Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria supervisor, was driving in a St. Paul suburb with his girlfriend and her young daughter in the car when police pulled them over. Castile, who was black, was shot by Latino officer Jeronimo Yanez. Castile died at a hospital.
Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, began livestreaming on Facebook shortly after the shooting and said that Castile was shot while reaching for his ID after telling the officer he had a gun permit and was armed. The next day, Reynolds told reporters that Castile informed the officer about the gun as he reached for his wallet, she told him Castile was licensed and then the officer fired shots.
Yanez and his partner, Joseph Kauser, who was present for the shooting, were placed on administrative leave. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating, while the federal Justice Department is staying on the sideline despite pleas from the governor and other officials.
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THURSDAY, JULY 7: FIVE OFFICERS, DALLAS
Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Dallas to peacefully protest Sterling's and Castile's deaths. Then shots rang out, aimed at police officers. Five were killed and nine were injured, two civilians were hurt. Authorities negotiated with 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a black military veteran who police said told them he was targeting white officers because of the recent shootings, but eventually used a robot-delivered bomb to kill him.
Initially, Dallas authorities said Johnson had a stockpile of bomb-making materials, though two officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity contradicted such claims recently. Johnson's friends and family also disagreed with officials' characterization of him as a loner, saying that he was a gregarious, colorblind extrovert at least until he returned from Afghanistan after being accused of sexual harassment.
The Dallas mayor and police chief called for calm in the wake of the shooting. President Barack Obama and wife, Michelle, Vice President Joe Biden and wife, Jill, and former President George W. Bush and wife, Laura, attended a large memorial service for the officers.
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FRIDAY, JULY 8-MONDAY, JULY 11: PROTESTS IN BATON ROUGE
The day after the Dallas shooting, officers in Missouri, Tennessee and Georgia were all shot and wounded, with at least two of them being racially motivated.
Protesters were undaunted, rallying daily in Baton Rouge, outside of governor's residences in Minnesota and Georgia and blocking interstates in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Memphis, Tennessee. All were mostly calm affairs, with some arrests.
In Baton Rouge, however, where the city is segregated into the southern white section and mostly black northern part, tensions came to a head the weekend of July 9. Police arrested more than 200 demonstrators over a three-day period and wore riot gear, carried rifles and drove armored vehicles. Protesters claimed authorities became agitated, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana questioned police tactics during peaceful protests.
On July 12, police in Baton Rouge said they had arrested four people who were accused of stealing several handguns as part of a "substantial, credible threat" to harm police officers in the area.
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SUNDAY, JULY 17: THREE OFFICERS, BATON ROUGE
At 8:44 a.m. Sunday, reports began coming in that officers had been shot less than a mile from police headquarters. Three died and three were critically injured. One of the officers killed was Montrell Jackson, a black man who wrote on Facebook days before "I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me."
Louisiana authorities said the suspect, Gavin Long, a black 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, was definitely "seeking out" police. He was shot and killed Sunday.
Long, who had served in the Marines for five years and been deployed to Iraq, changed his name last year and declared membership in a black separatist group that considers itself beyond the reach of state and federal laws. Online posts by a man using an alias of Long's said people must fight back after the deaths of black men at the hands of police.
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Associated Press writer Nomaan Merchant in Dallas contributed to this report.
FILE- In this July 9, 2016 file photo, members of an FBI evidence response team work at the scene of the attack on police officers in Dallas. Authorities have described the Dallas sniper Micah Johnson as a loner. President Barack Obama called him demented. But in multiple interviews with The Associated Press, the Mississippi-born, Texas-bred 25-year-old was remembered by friends, comrades and acquaintances as a gregarious, even goofy extrovert. But after his Army career ended in disgrace, they say, the easygoing young black man was suddenly deeply shamed and ostracized. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
4 international journalists named for Press Freedom Awards
NEW YORK (AP) Four international journalists who faced imprisonment, arrest and threats for their reporting have been named winners of the International Press Freedom Awards.
The Committee to Protect Journalists announced the 2016 recipients on Monday.
The awards will be presented to Egypt's Mahmoud Abou Zeid, India's Malini Subramaniam, Turkey's Can Dundar and El Salvador's Oscar Martinez on Nov. 22 at a ceremony in New York.
The organization said CNN correspondent and anchor Christiane Amanpour will receive its Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in the cause of press freedom.
Zeid is a freelance photographer who has been imprisoned since 2013. He was arrested while covering clashes between Egyptian security forces and supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi during a Cairo protest in which hundreds of people were killed.
Subramaniam, a freelance journalist, was interrogated over her coverage of human rights abuses and the conflict between Maoist and state forces. She has been forced to leave her home state due to repeated threats and harassment.
Dundar, editor-in-chief of the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, was sentenced in May to nearly six years in prison on charges of revealing state secrets, espionage and aiding a terrorist group. The charges relate to a story that alleged Turkey sought to smuggle weapons to Syrian opposition groups.
Martinez, an investigative reporter for the online newsmagazine El Faro, has received death threats for his reporting of gang violence and extrajudicial killings by police in El Salvador.
"These four brave journalists have risked their freedom, and their lives, to report to their societies and the global community about critical news events," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said.
Poll: US-Mexico border residents feel ignored, oppose wall
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) Residents along the U.S.-Mexico border are feeling ignored in the midst of a U.S. presidential election in which immigration, border security and a proposed wall are being hotly debated, a poll released Monday suggests.
A Cronkite News-Univision News-Dallas Morning News border poll found a majority of urban residents surveyed on both sides of the border are against the building of a wall between the two countries and believe the campaign's tone is damaging relations.
Residents feel Democrats and Republicans are ignoring their concerns and aren't proposing solutions to help their economies or combat drug trafficking and human smuggling, journalists who gathered reaction to the poll found.
FILE - In this Jan. 4, 2016 file photo, a U.S. Border Patrol agent drives near the U.S.-Mexico border fence in Sunland Park, N.M. A new Cronkite News-Univision News-Dallas Morning News Border Poll released Monday, July 18, 2016, says a majority of residents surveyed on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border are against the building of a wall between the two countries. The poll also suggests residents feel Democrats and Republicans are ignoring their concerns and aren't proposing solutions to help their economy and combat drug trafficking and human smuggling. (AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File)
According to the poll, 86 percent of border residents in Mexico and 72 percent of those questioned in the U.S. were against building a wall.
The economy/jobs and crime/drugs tied at 37 percent each for the most important issue for border residents, the poll found.
The poll surveyed 1,427 residents in 14 border sister cities to assess attitudes and opinions on the local economy, immigration and border security. It was conducted in April and May.
The majority of interviews were done in Spanish on both sides of the border, and the margin of error was 2.6 percent.
Michael Baselice, president and CEO of Baselice & Associates Inc., the Texas-based public research opinion firm that conducted the survey, said he didn't believe the predominance of Spanish speakers who participated in the survey skewed the results. He said around the same percentage of Spanish speakers were surveyed in a similar border poll in 2001.
Baselice said residents on the U.S. sides were randomly chosen and surveyed by telephone. Residents in Mexico were randomly selected from targeted neighborhoods in certain cities and surveyed face-to-face, he said.
Among the questions asked: "Should the U.S. build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. in an effort to secure the border?" And "Please describe in your own words the three most important issues or problems facing you and your family."
The survey comes as Donald Trump prepares to accept the GOP presidential nomination. While earning praise from some conservatives, Trump has drawn scrutiny from immigration activists and others for promising to build a wall and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally.
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican and the nation's only Latina governor, has denounced Trump for some of his comments about Mexican immigrants and said she strongly opposes a wall.
The two-term governor has worked for years with her counterparts south of the border to build an international economic hub in the region. A border wall would hurt trade and not get to the root causes of illegal immigration and drug trafficking, she has said.
Many residents expressed concerns over security but want to be better connected to the other side of the border, said Alfredo Corchado, a former Dallas Morning News Mexico City bureau chief who now serves as an editor on the Borderlands desk at Cronkite News.
"And walls are not going to do that," Corchado said.
Angela Kocherga, director of the Borderlands Bureau of Cronkite News, said the residents surveyed already live in areas with border fences.
"(The wall) is too simplistic a solution," she said. "They aren't asking for open borders, but they are asking for real solutions, real thoughtful approaches to the issues along the border."
The survey included seven pairs of sister cities along the border, from California/Baja California to Arizona/Sonora and Texas/Tamaulipas.
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Follow Russell Contreras on Twitter at http://twitter.com/russcontreras. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/russell-contreras
Spokesman: Christie misspoke on Trump's Superstorm Sandy aid
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's spokesman said that the governor misspoke Monday when he cited a donation by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to Superstorm Sandy relief efforts as a sign of his generosity.
Christie told Michigan's Republican delegation in Ohio Monday that his wife, Mary Pat Christie, asked the billionaire businessman for a donation. "One of her first calls was to Donald Trump. And it wasn't a long phone call. He said, 'Mary Pat, I like Chris, but I'm scared of you.' He said, 'How much does the check need to be? Just tell me and I'll send it.'"
But Trump isn't listed in a final report thanking the more than 150 people and companies that donated at least $25,000 to the Hurricane Sandy New Jersey Relief Fund effort run by Christie's wife, Mary Pat, after the devastating 2012 storm.
FILE - In this May 2, 2106 file photo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie answers a question about a possible state takeover of Atlantic City finances, in Trenton, N.J. Christie, as a friend and adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, is gearing up to lead New Jerseys delegation to the Cleveland convention this week. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)
Trump has been called out previously for failing to donate to charities even after promising he would, including his own charitable foundation. However, in this case, there was no indication Trump ever promised to make such a donation in the aftermath of Sandy.
"The Governor misspoke this morning," said Christie spokesman Brian Murray. "Mr. Trump has given to other New Jersey charities, including the Drumthwacket Foundation."
Trump's foundation did donate $20,000 between 2012 and 2013 to the Drumthwacket Foundation, a separate entity run by Mary Pat Christie dedicated to New Jersey's governor's mansion. Christie and his wife do not live in the home in Princeton, but the governor and his wife have frequently used it to host events.
The day after Sandy, Trump extended the deadline for an offer to make $5 million in donations if President Barack Obama made all of his school and passport records public. Trump said that "could have provided substantial aid to a variety of great causes, including the victims of Hurricane Sandy."
A spokeswoman for Trump didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
A final report issued in 2015 includes 151 people and companies that donated at least $25,000 to the cause, including a $1 million donation from New Jersey rocker Jon Bon Jovi and his band. But Trump isn't listed. IRS documents for Trump's charitable foundation also show no donations to the charity between 2012 and 2014.
Christie was a runner-up to be selected as Trump's vice presidential running mate and has been a strong supporter of Trump since shortly after ending his own campaign.
Superstorm Sandy became a defining moment of Christie's time in office, for both his response to helping residents deal with the devastation and his embrace of President Barack Obama, who came to tour the damage about a week before he won re-election over Mitt Romney.
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Argentine Jews urge president to help solve terror bombing
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) Jewish leaders asked President Mauricio Macri to help solve Argentina's worst terrorist attack as the country observed the bombing's 22nd anniversary Monday.
The 1994 attack on the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association collapsed the organization's main building, killing 85 people and leaving hundreds injured in the rubble.
During the ceremony Monday, Macri presented a flower wreath as sirens blared and the families of the victims held photographs of their loved ones.
People hold up pictures of those who died in the AMIA Jewish center bombing that killed 85 people as they commemorate the attack's 22nd anniversary in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, July 18, 2016. The 1994 attack is still unsolved. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Survivors also criticized previous governments for not solving the crime.
"The justice they deserved is as dead as them," Sofia de Guterman said about her daughter, Andrea Guterman, and other victims during the ceremony held at the reconstructed building.
If those responsible don't face justice, "we'll soon have to issue a death certificate for the case itself," Guterman said.
Prosecutors have accused Iranian officials of being behind the bombing, but no one has been convicted in the attack, which many Argentines believe has come to symbolize an inept and corrupt justice system.
"It's been 22 years of not knowing what went on as a result of badly introduced evidence, other evidence that hasn't even been considered, and documents that the executive power hid from judges," Mario Cimadevilla, head of a special investigative unit focused on the attack, told local radio.
During the ceremony, some also called for answers in the mysterious death of the leading prosecutor investigating the case. Alberto Nisman's body was discovered in his apartment Jan. 18, 2015, with a gunshot wound to the head.
Nisman was scheduled to go before Congress the next day to present allegations that then-President Cristina Fernandez orchestrated a secret deal to cover up Iranian officials' alleged role in the attack. Fernandez denied it and judges later threw out the case.
A year and a half after Nisman's death, authorities have yet to determine whether he took his own life or was killed by someone else.
Conspiracy theories swirl around the case. Some people believe Nisman killed himself because he felt his claims against Fernandez lacked proof. Others say he was slain because he was a threat to the Argentine and Iranian governments.
Argentine President Mauricio Macri arrives for the 22nd anniversary event for the AMIA Jewish center bombing that killed 85 people in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, July 18, 2016. The 1994 attack is still unsolved. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
A man holds a picture of a person who died in the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center that killed 85 people as people commemorate the attack's 22nd anniversary in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, July 18, 2016. The 1994 attack is still unsolved. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
A man holds a sign that reads in Spanish: "Eighty-five plus Nisman equals zero" on the 22nd anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center that killed 85 people in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, July 18, 2016. The attack and death of Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor investigating the attack, are still unsolved. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Tesoro was one of two companies to sign a $425 million settlement with the federal Justice Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Monday to reduce air pollution at six petroleum refineries, including the Mandan refinery.
The settlement was over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act and requires Tesoro to install new emissions controls.
Tesoro also will spend about $12 million on three environmental improvement projects and pay a $10.5 million civil penalty.
Tesoro said in a statement to the Associated Press Monday that it agreed to settle the case but did not admit to any violations. The company said most of the emissions projects are complete or are in progress, with about $75 million of work left to do after the end of this year.
"We are dedicated to operating in a safe and responsible manner that reduces the impact on the environment," said Keith Casey, Tesoro's executive vice president of operations.
The agreement was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Federal officials say the settlement will reduce emissions at the six refineries by 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
The states housing the refineries will split $2.4 million of the $10.5 million penalty with the rest going to the federal government.
Ex-soldier who killed Guatemalan bishop dies in prison riot
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) A former army officer serving a prison sentence for the 1998 slaying of a Roman Catholic bishop died in a jail riot Monday that killed a dozen inmates and a female visitor, Guatemalan authorities said.
Byron Lima was convicted of the murder of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, who was an outspoken critic of military abuses during the country's 36-year civil war. Lima's death was confirmed by firefighter Julio Sanchez, but no other details were released.
Interior Minister Francisco Rivas said four of the dead had been decapitated.
CORRECTS YEAR OF CONVICTION - FILE - In this Feb. 15, 2012 file photo shot through a window, former Guatemalan Army Captain Byron Lima Oliva, accused and sentenced in 2001 to 20 years in prison for the 1998 slaying of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, stares into the camera as he waits in a courtroom in Guatemala City. Authorities said on Monday, July 18, 2016 that Lima has died in a prison riot. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File)
He said the riot involved a fight between Lima's inmate group and a rival gang headed by Marvin Montiel, who was sentenced to 820 years in prison for the murder of 15 Nicaraguans and a Dutch tourist in 2008.
Rivas said the riot began when someone threw a hand grenade at Lima and the inmates protecting him and then attacked them with guns.
An Argentine woman who regularly visited Lima in prison was among the dead, Rivas said
Lima was an army captain in 2001 when he was sentenced to 30 years for the killing. The term was later reduced to 20 years. Three other men were also convicted in the case, including Lima's father.
Gerardi was bludgeoned to death with a concrete block at his seminary on April 26, 1998, two days after he presented a report blaming the military for most of the 200,000 deaths in the 1960-1996 conflict.
Lima had been considered the most powerful inmate in Guatemala's prison system. He was facing additional charges for his activities behind bars.
Prosecutors alleged he built a multimillion-dollar illicit prison empire based on threats and corruption. They said Lima took money from other inmates in return for favors such as prohibited cellphones and appliances as well as special food and conjugal visits.
A prisoner evacuates a child, who was visiting a relative, to a safer place during a riot inside the Pavon prison on the outskirts of Guatemala City, Monday, July 18, 2016. Authorities said Byron Lima, the man serving a prison sentence for killing a Catholic bishop, died in the riot. (AP photo/Moises Castillo)
Seen through several chain link fences, people take cover after a riot broke out inside the Pavon prison in Guatemala City, Guatemala, Monday, July 18, 2016. Authorities in Guatemala say Byron Lima, an army captain serving a prison sentence for killing a Catholic bishop, has died during the riot. (AP Photo/Moses Castillo)
GOP speakers fault Clinton on Benghazi deaths
CLEVELAND (AP) The mother of a State Department employee killed in the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, angrily lashed out at Hillary Clinton on Monday at the Republican National Convention, accusing Clinton of lying to her about her son's death.
Two Marine Corps veterans who fought in Benghazi as part of a security team posted near the U.S. diplomatic compound also blamed Clinton for lax security before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2012, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.
The accusations came during the opening night of the convention, as Republicans cast Donald Trump as a strong leader who can keep Americans safe in a dangerous world.
John Tiegen, a U.S. Marine Corp veteran, left, and Mark Geist, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who fought in Benghazi, speak during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. . (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Security officers Mark "Oz" Geist and John Tiegen spoke harshly about Clinton, but did not repeat a widely debunked claim by some conservatives that high-level officials in Washington had issued a "stand down" order delaying a military rescue in Benghazi.
Pat Smith, the mother of State Department employee Sean Smith, accused Clinton of lying to her by blaming the assault on an anti-Muslim video, instead of labeling it a calculated terrorist attack. Clinton was secretary of state when the attacks occurred and now is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
"I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son," Smith said in an emotional speech applauded by delegates.
Smith noted that Clinton had told her daughter, Chelsea, in an email that the attacks were likely terrorism, but told Smith and other family members a different story.
Clinton told the House Benghazi committee last year that "some" people had wanted to use the offensive, anti-Muslim video to "justify" the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. She rejected that justification, Clinton said.
Clinton and other officials have acknowledged inadequate security in Benghazi a point also made by numerous congressional investigations and an independent panel.
Geist and Tiegen, the former Marines who fought in Benghazi, also focused on the lack of security and blamed Clinton. The two men and Smith all support Trump for president.
"Hillary failed to protect her people on the ground," said Geist, who has appeared in TV ads sponsored by the NRA in support of Trump.
In a 30-minute address, Geist and Tiegen said they defied a "stand down" order by a local CIA station chief to try to rescue Stevens and others at the diplomatic outpost.
"We took off and went to the consulate," Geist said in a claim also repeated in the book and movie "13 Hours." Geist and Tiegen were co-authors of the book, a detailed account of the attacks.
The Senate Intelligence Committee found "no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction" of movement by the team from the CIA annex, although some members of the security team expressed frustration that they were unable to respond more quickly.
U.S. military leaders told the House Benghazi committee they thought an evacuation was imminent, slowing any response. The Benghazi panel said in a report last month that Marines based more than 2,000 miles away in Rota, Spain, changed into and out of their uniforms four times as officials debated whether to launch a full military response. The attacks occurred in waves at two locations over 13 hours.
Democrats accuse Republicans of exploiting the tragedy for political reasons and note that the Benghazi panel has spent more than two years and $7 million investigating the attacks. Democrats eagerly point to comments last year by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., suggesting that the Benghazi panel could take credit for Clinton's slumping poll numbers.
The report last month by Republicans on the Benghazi panel accused the Obama administration of lethal mistakes, but produced no new evidence pointing to wrongdoing by Clinton.
Clinton has said the Benghazi report "found nothing to contradict" the findings of multiple earlier investigations into the attacks.
"I think it's pretty clear it's time to move on," she said last month.
David M. Perry, a cousin of Stevens, accused Republicans of politicizing his death. His cousin "loved Arabic, diplomacy, internationalism. I reject politicization of his death," Perry said on Twitter.
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Follow Matthew Daly: http://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC
Pat Smith, mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Mexico prepares athletes for health risks at Rio Olympics
MEXICO CITY (AP) Epidemiologists from Mexico's public health agency will accompany the country's athletes to the Olympic Games for the first time this summer.
Deputy Health Secretary Pablo Kuri Morales says the specialists will monitor athletes and try to keep them healthy in Rio de Janeiro next month.
Each athlete will receive a fanny pack containing insect repellent and condoms.
Brazil has seen an outbreak of the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, which has been linked to devastating birth defects and a rare paralysis. Water-borne illnesses in Rio's polluted waterways are a concern for athletes competing in those venues. Zika can also be transmitted sexually.
Communist rebels kill 10 Indian paramilitary soldiers
PATNA, India (AP) At least 10 Indian paramilitary soldiers were killed in an attack by Maoist rebels in a forest area in eastern India, police said Tuesday.
P.K. Thakur, the director-general of state police, said three insurgents were also killed in an exchange of gunfire on Monday in the Dumrinala area, nearly 105 miles (170 kilometers) south of Patna, the capital of Bihar state.
The rebels used improvised explosive devices and fired at paramilitary soldiers in the area that is known to be a rebel stronghold, P. K. Sahu, another police officer, said.
Thakur said eight paramilitary soldiers were killed immediately and two of the five wounded died later in a hospital.
The bodies of three dead insurgents were recovered, he said.
The Press Trust of India news agency said the soldiers of the Cobra battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force were conducting anti-rebel operations in the area over the last two days. The Cobra unit is especially trained for jungle warfare.
The rebels have been called India's biggest internal security threat. They operate in 20 of India's 28 states and have thousands of fighters, according to the Home Ministry.
The insurgents, who say they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting for more than three decades in central and eastern India, staging hit-and-run attacks against authorities as they demand a greater share of wealth from the area's natural resources and more jobs for farmers and the poor.
Gov't watchdog: HUD secretary violates Hatch Act
WASHINGTON (AP) Days before Hillary Clinton is scheduled to accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, a government watchdog says the nation's housing secretary violated a law prohibiting government officials from using their office for partisan politics when he promoted her candidacy during a media interview.
Julian Castro "impermissibly mixed his personal views with official government agency business" in violation of the Hatch Act during an interview with Yahoo Global News anchor Katie Couric at the Department of Housing and Urban Development's broadcast studio earlier this year, Carolyn Lerner, head of the Office of the Special Counsel, said in a report. The report was sent to President Barack Obama on Monday.
Castro has endorsed Clinton and is a surrogate speaker for her campaign, which is permitted as long as he presents his views as personal and doesn't use the trappings of his office. Castro, a former San Antonio mayor, is also among a group of Democrats being considered as Clinton's running mate. Clinton is expected to name her choice for vice president before the party's convention begins next week in Philadelphia.
In this July 13, 2016, photo, House and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Carolyn Lerner, head of the Office of the Special Counsel, said in a report sent July 18 to President Barack Obama that Castro impermissibly mixed his personal views with official government agency business when he promoted Hillary Clinton's presidential bid during a media interview, in violation of the Hatch Act. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
In the Yahoo interview, Castro discussed HUD programs for about 7 minutes before Couric asked him about his endorsement.
"Now taking off my HUD hat for a second and just speaking individually, it is very clear that Hillary Clinton is the most experienced, thoughtful and prepared candidate for president we have this year," Castro told Couric, according to the report. He went on to offer further praise of Clinton. Asked about Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Castro said Trump wasn't prepared for the office of president and didn't understand what leadership or being president is all about.
Lerner said Castro's attempt to separate his official position from his political views during the interview didn't go far enough. The HUD seal behind him, Castro was introduced as the HUD secretary by Couric, who repeatedly referred to him as secretary.
"That disclaimer could not negate the fact that he was appearing in his official capacity for the rest of the interview, as the official HUD seal remained behind him and his political comments were bracketed by statements concerning official HUD policies and programs," the report said.
The report also notes that following his appointment in July 2014, Castro received four briefings on the Hatch Act. Emails between Yahoo News and HUD's public affairs office on arrangements for the interview made it clear that Couric would ask about the presidential campaign.
Castro acknowledged the mistake in a letter to Lerner released Monday, saying that at the time he believed his disclaimer that he was speaking "individually" was "what was required by the Hatch Act."
"However, your analysis provides that it was not sufficient," Castro wrote. "When an error is made even an inadvertent one the error should be acknowledged. Although it was not my intent, I made one here."
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Associated Press writer Kenneth Thomas contributed to this report.
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A look at police ambush killings in US and its territories
Authorities said Monday that police officers were clearly targeted and ambushed in this weekend's shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which killed three officers and wounded three others. It's the latest such ambush in the United States, and happened just 10 days after five police officers in Dallas were gunned down.
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July 7: A gunman in Dallas opened fire on police officers working at a protest about recent killings by police of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. The attacker, Micah Johnson, killed five officers and wounded nine others and two civilians before police killed him with a robot-delivered bomb when negotiations failed. Authorities say Johnson, who was black, told negotiators he wanted to kill as many white police officers as he could. It was the deadliest day for American law enforcement since September 11, 2001.
FILE- In this Jan. 7, 1973, file photo, a plainclothes police officer runs for cover as he moves into the area of the burning Howard Johnson Hotel in New Orleans. Mark James Essex, a member of the Black Panthers who was discharged from the Navy for going AWOL, killed nine people in New Orleans, including five police officers, in two sniper attacks. Essex is shot more than 200 times by police sharpshooters on Jan. 7, 1973. (AP Photo/File)
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Dec 28, 2015: Officer Guarionex Candelario Rivera showed up unannounced at his police station in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and fatally shot three fellow officers. Candelario, a 19-year police veteran, killed Lt. Luz Soto Segarra, Cmdr. Frank Roman Rodriguez and policewoman Rosario Hernandez De Hoyos. Candelario was shot twice but survived.
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May 9, 2015: Two Hattiesburg, Mississippi, police officers, Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate, were shot to death during a traffic stop. Three suspects were later arrested.
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Dec 20, 2014: Two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were ambushed and shot to death in their vehicle without warning by a man who approached the passenger window of their marked police car. The suspect, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, then fatally shot himself. Brinsley was black; the officers were Asian and Hispanic, police said. The shooting came amid heightened tensions between law enforcement and minority communities.
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September 12, 2014: A survivalist ambushed two Pennsylvania state troopers outside of a police barracks late at night, killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and wounding Trooper Alex Douglass. Suspect Eric Frein led authorities on a 48-day manhunt through the heavily wooded Pocono Mountains before U.S. marshals captured him at an abandoned airplane hangar. He has pleaded not guilty.
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June 8, 2014: A man and a woman ambushed two police officers eating lunch at a Las Vegas pizza restaurant, fatally shooting them before fleeing to a nearby Wal-Mart where they killed a third person and then themselves in an apparent suicide pact. Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo died.
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Aug. 28, 2010: Two police officers were ambushed in a tiny Alaskan village of Hoonah before a SWAT team and dozens of other law officers surrounded a house where the gunman took refuge. Officers Tony Wallace and Matt Tokuoka died after the shooting. Hoonah resident John Marvin Jr. was captured and charged in the deaths.
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May 20, 2010: Two West Memphis, Arkansas, police officers doing anti-drug work were shot to death by two men wielding AK-47s along a busy Arkansas interstate. Sgt. Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans died at a nearby hospital. The suspects were later killed in a shootout that injured the local sheriff and a deputy at a crowded Wal-Mart parking lot.
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Nov. 29, 2009: Four police officers were shot and killed in an ambush in a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington, by ex-convict Maurice Clemmons. Killed were officers Mark Renninger, Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold and Greg Richards. Clemmons was shot and killed by police after a two-day manhunt.
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Jan. 13, 1998 University of Nevada, Reno Police Sgt. George Sullivan is ambushed and attacked with a hatchet while doing paperwork in his squad car. Siaosi Vanisi is later convicted and sentenced to death for Sullivan's slaying. Witnesses testified at Vanisi's trial that he stalked Sullivan after repeatedly telling friends and relatives that he wanted to kill a police officer.
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Dec. 31, 1972, and Jan. 7, 1973: Mark James Essex, a member of the Black Panthers who was discharged from the Navy for going AWOL, kills nine people in New Orleans, including five police officers, in two sniper attacks. Essex is shot more than 200 times by police sharpshooters on Jan. 7. Authorities find the walls of his apartment covered in anti-white graffiti.
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April 6, 1970: Career criminals Bobby Davis and Jack Twinning kill four California state troopers in a four-minute gunbattle in Los Angeles County. Twinning kills himself when authorities surround a house where he is holding a hostage; Davis is soon arrested and, almost three decades later, kills himself at Kern State Prison.
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Oct. 30, 1950: Members of a nationalist party seeking to overthrow the government of Puerto Rico shoot and kill eight police officers in San Juan, including Chief Aurelio Miranda-Rivera. The revolt is put down by the U.S. military, the FBI and the CIA.
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Jan. 2, 1932: Six officers from two Missouri agencies are killed as they surround a house where two suspects wanted in the murder of a Greene County marshal are holed up. The suspects flee to Texas and kill themselves when authorities track them down.
FILE- In this Dec. 20, 2014, file photo, investigators work at the scene where two NYPD officers were shot in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York. Two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were ambushed and shot to death in their vehicle without warning by a man who approached the passenger window of their marked police car. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
FILE- In this July 7, 2016, file photo, Dallas Police respond after shots were fired at a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Dallas. A gunman in Dallas opened fire on police officers working at a protest about recent killings by police of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. The attacker, Micah Johnson, killed five officers and wounded nine others and two civilians before police killed him with a robot-delivered bomb when negotiations failed. (Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News, File)
FILE- In this Dec. 8, 2009, file photo, police officers approach the caskets of four slain Lakewood police officers as they prepare to fold the flags draped on them during a memorial service at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Wash. Four police officers were shot and killed in an ambush in a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington, by ex-convict Maurice Clemmons. Killed were officers Mark Renninger, Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold and Greg Richards. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
FILE- In this May 20, 2010, file photo, emergency personal tend to Crittenden County Sheriff's Chief Deputy W.A. Wren in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in West Memphis, Ark., following a shootout. Two West Memphis, Ark., police officers doing anti-drug work were shot to death by two men wielding AK-47s along a busy Arkansas interstate. Sgt. Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans died at a nearby hospital. (Alan Spearman/The Commercial Appeal via AP, File)
Afghan teen killed after injuring passengers on German train
BERLIN (AP) A teenage Afghan migrant armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled, authorities said.
Wuerzburg police said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and one was slightly injured. Another 14 people were being treated for shock.
Bavaria's top security official, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, told Germany's ARD television that the attacker had been identified as a 17-year-old Afghan.
Police officers stand beside a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening, July 18, 2016, after a 17-year-old Afghan armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
German officials did not identify the victims, but Hong Kong's immigration department said in a statement Tuesday that among those injured in the attack were four members of a family of five from the southern Chinese city. The department said it is working to provide assistance to the family but did give not give details of their injuries.
Germany last year registered more than 1 million migrants entering the country, including more than 150,000 Afghans, but it was not immediately clear whether the suspect was among them or someone who had been in the country for a longer time.
Herrmann said initial information was that the suspect came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor and had lived in the Wuerzburg area for some time, initially at a refugee facility in the town of Ochsenfurt and more recently with a foster family.
He said authorities were still investigating the motive of the attack and were looking into reports that the suspect had yelled out "an exclamation" during the rampage. He was responding to reports that some witnesses had heard the suspect shout "Allahu Akbar" ("God Is Great") during the attack.
The train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Nuremberg.
Blood stains and a rescue blanket are seen through the windows of a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening, July 18, 2016, after a 17-year-old Afghan armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
Firetrucks and ambulances stand at a road block in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured more than a dozen. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
A firetruck blocks a road in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening, July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured more than a dozen. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
An ambulance stands at a road block in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured several of them. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
Bloodshed fills headlines, confronting public with anxiety
Orlando. Istanbul. Dallas. Nice. And now, again, Baton Rouge. Ever since a gunman opened fire on Florida nightclub goers five weeks ago, killing 49, we've been buffeted by images of bloodshed.
The scenes of the violence are often far away and disconnected from one another. But all too often, the victims whether they're patrolling the streets or out for an evening of fireworks remind us of ourselves, our families, our neighbors. To many people, the barrage has started to feel inescapable. As non-stop news coverage and social media confront people with video of conflict and death, the images have begun to exact a collective toll of exhaustion and anxiety.
"The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos," Lauren Rose, sister-in-law of Montrell Jackson, one of the three police officers slain in Louisiana, said Monday. "And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace."
FILE - In this June 19, 2016, file photo, Club goers embrace at the approximate time one week ago that the Pulse nightclub mass shooting began as the music is turned off on the dance floor to observe a moment of silence at Parliament House, an LGBT nightclub early in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
Such feelings reach far beyond Baton Rouge, which has been rocked since the July 5 killing of Alton Sterling, the first of two recent, highly publicized shootings of black men by police officers. It doesn't matter if there is no connection between those shootings and last week's fatal truck rampage in France. Together, they contribute to a sense of turmoil that seems beyond easy resolution.
"It's scary but yet I don't know how, like in Nice and stuff, how that can be prevented," Terri Smith, a legal secretary from Richfield, Minnesota, said Monday. "You get tired of it after a while, I mean, and you're kind of helpless."
Cheri Lovre, a Portland, Oregon crisis counselor who specializes in working with children, teachers and communities after school shootings, said conversations in recent days increasingly convince her that even people far removed from violence are experiencing a vague, but unsettling sense of angst.
"The effect is trickling down to all of us," said Lovre, who has counseled people after shootings at Colorado's Columbine High School, in Newtown, Connecticut, and in other communities. "When you have the TV on and it (the violence) is in your living room, Nice is suddenly right here."
In some ways, we've been here before.
Look back to recent history the upheaval that came around the Civil Rights movement, the threats of the Cold War and there are plenty of reminders of times when fear and uncertainly lingered over day-to-day life in the U.S.
Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, compared the current moment to 1968, when the already troubling story line of the Vietnam War was interrupted by the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, only to be followed by riots around the country and protests at the national political conventions. Such groupings of events can cause people to question their own safety and how others think, he said.
"When those seven stories on the front page or the 15 stories in the newscast or so much of your Twitter feed is filled with things that are as inexplicable as the terrorist truck attack in Nice or a veteran doing a deranged ambush of police in Baton Rouge, it's hard to get your mind around these things," he said.
But there were no social media networks in 1968, no 24-hour news channels. Today, those feed into an unending cycle of anxiety.
"This isn't just about television. It's about the constant ability to get alerts about things that are wrong in the world because we, again, don't have breaking news about what's going right," said Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University.
The heightened anxiety can serve a positive purpose, forcing people to identify problems and their sources and seek out solutions, Gadarian said.
"The only way this is going to get solved is if people with cooler heads, with credibility, get together and talk through these issues," said Jarrod Berguan, police chief in San Bernardino, California, where 14 people were killed in a terror shooting last year. "It is never going to happen because people are making short little soundbites on the news, or because people are going to the Internet to absorb whatever information they want to absorb from people who share their viewpoints."
But news of violence can overwhelm our ability to sort through the situation and reflect on the paths of action.
"People have lost the ability to step back even for a second and consider the possibility that as horrible as it is, that it might not be some sort of some grand world coming apart," said Steve Gorelick, a criminologist and lecturer in the department of film and media studies at Hunter College City University of New York. "How are we supposed to solve or even think about all these things at once? You can't."
If there's any consolation, though, it's that we are not alone in our anxieties.
In Minneapolis, airline pilot Keith Schmidt paused during a layover Monday to ponder the state of things. The way the world is going, he said, he might have to start carrying his concealed handgun more often.
"It's really kind of scary when the country is killing the police officers," said Schmidt, who lives in Arlington, Texas. "I would say chaos and or anarchy could be around the corner."
In New York, secretary Rita Donovan voiced similar uncertainty.
"There's no sense to this," said Donovan, 63, of Nutley, New Jersey, while on a lunch break. "This time has reminded me of the bad time of the 1960s."
And in Grandview, Missouri, Sean Hanan, a 48-year-old equipment operator, said the past few weeks' events worry him that people are being split into opposing camps. Hanan lives on the same block south of Kansas City that Gavin Eugene Long, who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, did when Long was in high school.
"Things are going a little bit crazy," said Hanan, who's between jobs. "Most people are just trying to feed their families and not get shot by someone with an ideological agenda."
He added, "It's all just starting to blur together."
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Associated Press reporters Sharon Cohen in Chicago, John Hanna in Grandview, Missouri, Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis, Matt Sedensky in New York, Amy Taxin in Tustin, California, and Joshua Replogle in Baton Rouge contributed to this story.
FILE - In this July 14, 2016, file photo, Law enforcement officers pray after the graveside service for Dallas police Sgt. Michael J. Smith at Restland Funeral Home and Cemetery in Dallas. Smith was one of five police officers killed during protest in Dallas. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)
FILE - In this July 15, 2016, file photo, Na'Quincy, son of Alton Sterling, looks back at his father's grave as he leaves Alton's burial, at the Mount Pilgrim Benevolent Society Cemetery in Baton Rouge, La. Sterling was shot July 5 outside a Baton Rouge convenience store in an encounter with police that was caught on video. Left is family attorney Justin Bamberg, and right is Na'Qunicy's grandmother, whose name was withheld. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, Pool, File)
FILE - In this Monday, July 18, 2016, file photo, people gather at the makeshift memorial after a minute of silence on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, to honor the victims of an attack near the area where a truck mowed through revelers. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)
Berkeley student killed in Nice honored at campus vigil
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) A University of California, Berkeley student who was killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack in France was remembered Monday as a charismatic and engaged member of the campus community who would not want his death to inspire revenge.
Several hundred people, including the university's chancellor and the French consul general, attended a university vigil in honor of 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie, the Berkeley junior who was one of the 84 people killed in the Nice terror attack.
"We feel, I think I can say for all of us, overwhelmed by the unspeakable horror and tragedy that took place in Nice," Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks told the crowd consisting primarily of students. "Yet this evening we are united as one, for we all have all come here together to mourn the loss and celebrate and honor the life of Nicolas Leslie."
Students leave condolences on a banner for Nicolas Leslie, who was killed in France last week, during a vigil at the University of California, Berkeley Monday, July 18, 2016 in Berkeley, Calif. Leslie, 20, a Berkeley student who was killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack in France was remembered Monday as an energetic and engaged member of the campus community. Leslie was an aspiring entrepreneur and environmentalist who participated in fraternity life and a student-run consulting group that provides marketing, research and social responsibility advice to businesses, student body President William Morrow said. (AP Photo/Lisa Leff)
Childhood friends, Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers and classmates described the environmental science major and avid surfer from the San Diego area as a happy and generous young man who lived life to the fullest and lit up rooms with a radiant smile.
"Nick was just an incredible human being. If you had a chance to even meet him for a second, know how lucky you are," said Natasha Nicholson, a family friend from Del Mar, California.
Leslie was one of 85 California college students attending a month-long entrepreneurship class and competition in Nice, hosted by the European Innovation Academy and organized by Berkeley's Study Abroad program, UC Berkeley officials said.
He had been missing since a Tunisian man rammed a truck through crowds watching a fireworks display on a seafront promenade. Friends, relatives and university officials had been searching hospitals in Nice and plastering the city with flyers before the FBI informed university officials Leslie was among the dead.
Three other Berkeley students were injured in the attack, while one other program participant still was unaccounted for as of Monday: 21-year-old Estonian Rickard Kruusberg.
The Ukrainian embassy in Ottawa confirmed the death of a citizen on Monday but declined to release his name. A spokesman said only one Ukrainian citizen, 22-year-old Canada-based Ukrainian national Misha Bazelevskyy, who also was studying with the European Innovation Academy, was reported missing in the Nice attack.
Another Berkeley student, 18-year-old sophomore Tarishi Jain, was among the 20 hostages killed by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earlier this month.
With the Berkeley campus quiet for the summer, school officials and friends gathered in front of a poster-sized photograph of Leslie, white flowers and a roll of paper on which mourners were asked to write remembrances. Behind them stood the American, French and Italian flags Leslie's mother is Italian and he was born in Milan.
Leslie's uncle, Alberto Leslie, told the San Diego Union Tribune (http://bit.ly/29QbSxn ) that his brother and sister-in-law were in France on Monday to claim their only child's body.
"I ask that people send light and love to them, because they're in a very dark place. I just want them to know that people are thinking of him," Alberto Leslie said.
At Berkeley, Leslie hoped to acquire the skills and contacts to parlay his love of oceans into a job protecting them. He had planned to study at the university's business school at the fall and was a member of a student-run consulting group that provides marketing, research and social responsibility advice.
Campus Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell said that Leslie's parents hoped other Berkeley students would follow his example by working for positive change in the world.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks speaks during a vigil for student Nicolas Leslie on Monday, July 18, 2016 in Berkeley, Calif. Leslie was killed in last week's truck attack in Nice, France. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group via AP)
Funeral for Michigan bailiff killed at court draws hundreds
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. (AP) A bailiff who was fatally shot at a Michigan courthouse was laid to rest with full military honors Monday in southwestern Michigan, a week after he and a colleague were gunned down by a jail inmate during an escape attempt.
Officials added an overflow room to accommodate hundreds of people at Ron Kienzle's funeral at the Mendel Center at Lake Michigan College. Bagpipers led the hearse during a final procession at Crystal Springs Cemetery.
Officers from across the county attended the funeral, and Berrien County judges wore their black robes. Sheriff Paul Bailey, who delivered the tragic news to the public a week ago, said he's still hurting from losing two friends, Kienzle and fellow bailiff Joe Zangaro.
Several law enforcement members from Michigan and Indiana gather at the Crystal Springs Cemetery in Benton Harbor, Mich. for the grave site service and final rendering of honors for slain court officer Ronald Kienzle, Monday, July 18, 2016. The funeral service for Kienzle, 63, was held at the Lake Michigan College Mendel Center. Kienzle, was killed when an inmate disarmed another officer inside the Berrien County Courthouse, Monday, July 11. (Mark Bugnaski/MLive.com via AP)
"Our hearts are still broken," Bailey said. "They won't heal for some time."
Kienzle, 63, and Zangaro, 61, who both worked at the Berrien courthouse after long careers as police officers in the region, were killed by inmate Larry Gordon. Kienzle served in the U.S. Army.
"We've got people in the courthouse who are sad and traumatized," Judge Gary Bruce said. "Nobody's ever going to be the same, but we have to figure out how to go forward. How do we go from here? I don't know the answer to it, but we're going to do it."
Zangaro's funeral was held Friday.
Gordon wrested a gun from a deputy while being transported between court and jail and fatally shot Kienzle and Zangaro before he was killed, Bailey said.
Several law enforcement members from Michigan and Indiana gather at the Crystal Springs Cemetery in Benton Harbor, Mich. for the grave site service and final rendering of honors for slain court officer Ronald Kienzle, Monday, July 18, 2016. The funeral service for Kienzle, 63, was held at the Lake Michigan College Mendel Center. Kienzle, was killed when an inmate disarmed another officer inside the Berrien County Courthouse, Monday, July 11. (Mark Bugnaski/MLive.com via AP)
People carry the casket at the Crystal Springs Cemetery in Benton Harbor, Mich. for the grave site service and final rendering of honors for slain court officer Ronald Kienzle, Monday, July 18, 2016. The funeral service for Kienzle, 63, was held at the Lake Michigan College Mendel Center. Kienzle was killed when an inmate disarmed another officer inside the Berrien County Courthouse, Monday, July 11. (Mark Bugnaski/MLive.com via AP)
North Dakota delegates said a protest broke out on the floor of the Republican National Convention Monday over a last ditch effort to change the convention rules binding delegates.
While North Dakota is one of about five states with unbound delegates, leaving them free to vote their conscience on all balloting, according to state party rules, it could affect how the states Republican party decides on its candidate in 2020.
A group of anti-Trump delegates, hoping to get the rules binding delegates to vote according to state primary results rejected, submitted signatures to try to force a roll call vote on the rules of the convention. When only a voice vote was taken, a shouting match ensued until leadership announced three of the nine states that had signed the petition had withdrawn, leaving not enough signatures for a roll call.
With the protest efforts failure, Rep. Rick Becker, R-N.D., said he sees no other way for a candidate other than Trump to come forward.
What effect that will have on the states approach to choosing a candidate in 2020 remains to be seen.
It depends on how things come about, said Sen. Dick Dever, R-Bismarck, adding that he had already expected the rules to pass.
The state party held a non-binding presidential straw poll in the previous three or four election cycles but decided not to have one this year because the Republican National Committee insisted the results would have bound the states delegates.
Dever said he expects the state party will likely decide to conduct a caucus or primary but nothing has been officially decided.
Roz Leighton, executive director of the North Dakota GOP, previously told the Fargo Forum the party saw a lot of pushback about not having a caucus. State party chairman Kelly Armstrong, a state senator from Dickinson, also told the Forum he plans to form a committee after the November election to develop binding caucus rules.
There was enough pushback on the caucus issue . I think we do need to do it in the future, Leighton said.
If that is what the party decides, its delegates will then be bound in 2020 as a result of Mondays convention vote.
Florida deputy charged in off-duty fatal shooting
PALM BAY, Fla. (AP) Prosecutors in Florida say an off-duty sheriff's deputy has been charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a man in Palm Bay.
Florida Today (http://goo.gl/LTKXMN ) reported Monday the state attorney's office has formally charged Brevard County deputy Yousef Hafza in last month's shooting of 22-year-old Clarence Mahogany X Howard. Hafza also faces a charge of attempted second-degree murder.
Hafza told authorities he was being followed by two men June 19 and that their vehicle nearly collided with his. Hafza stopped, exchanged words with the men and then fired on them, authorities say in reports. Records show Hafza never identified himself as a deputy.
Hafza has claimed he was acting in self-defense and pleaded not guilty to the initial charges.
A bond hearing is set for July 26.
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State: Man had nursing license revoked before Nevada bombing
LAS VEGAS (AP) A former nurse who authorities say killed himself shortly before exploding two powerful bombs targeting his former boss in a rural Nevada town had previously been investigated for unaccounted morphine at the hospital where he worked, state documents indicate.
The state said it investigated Glenn Franklin Jones for two incidents in 2015 involving morphine at Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente, where Jones had worked in recent years.
The investigation indicated that Jones in July and August 2015 had obtained morphine syringes for patients but failed to document whether the drug was administered, a violation of protocol.
Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, left, speaks to the media and community members with Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee on Friday, July 15, 2016, at a destroyed house in Panaca, Nev., about a Wednesday night bombing. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
Jones had his nursing license revoked for unprofessional conduct by the Nevada State Board of Nursing in April for a period of five years, the documents state.
Jones had been notified of the case against him and summoned in February but failed to appear at the March hearing before the revocation was ordered.
Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee said his office wasn't notified by the hospital about missing medication or asked to investigate, and it didn't have any reports of any past conflicts between Jones and Joshua Cluff, his supervisor.
Jason Bleak, Dils hospital administrator, declined to comment on the nursing board investigation but said broadly that the hospital reports all possible cases of nursing misconduct to the board.
Bleak said Jones voluntarily resigned from his position in August 2015 and had in the year before that voluntarily cut back his schedule, working just part-time.
Bleak also confirmed that Cluff was Jones' supervisor. The two men, along with Cluff's wife, Tiffany, all worked as nurses at the hospital and had a relationship outside of work. Bleak said there was no known animosity among them or against the hospital.
Authorities said Jones, 59, died of suicide on July 13 in Panaca after setting off bombs inside the Cluffs' house and in a rental car in front of the house in the Mormon enclave near the Utah border.
Authorities haven't indicated a motive. They said the bombs used in the attack were sophisticated enough to hurl car parts, building materials and bomb fragments across the town with some debris landing up to a mile away.
Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg said Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head and his body was blown up in the blasts.
Joshua Cluff and a daughter weren't home at the time, and his wife and their other two daughters fled from the house just before the explosions. Messages left for the Cluffs haven't been returned.
A search of Jones' motorhome in Kingman, Arizona, where he had been living for several months, led authorities to several pounds of explosives and improvised bombs, said Rusty Cooper, Kingman's deputy police chief. Explosives experts also detonated a box of black powder that was found inside.
"It appears this was a bomb-making lab," Cooper said of the motorhome towed Friday evening from a recreational vehicle park.
Cooper declined to detail what investigators had seized from the motorhome but said he didn't think any weapons were found. A search of a nearby storage unit didn't turn up anything dangerous.
FBI spokeswoman Bridget Pappas in Las Vegas called the investigation ongoing, and said no details could immediately be provided.
A man takes a photo of the damage from a Wednesday night bombing in Panaca, Nev., Friday, July 15, 2016. A man with two powerful bombs killed himself detonating a vehicle outside and an explosive inside a home after a woman and two girls fled for their lives, officials said Thursday. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
Republican platform tacks right on social issues
CLEVELAND (AP) The Republican Party adopted what Christian conservatives cheered as the most conservative party platform ever on Monday, pushing the GOP decidedly to the right on abortion and gay rights amid uncertainty about Donald Trump's policies.
The New York billionaire's campaign largely took a hands-off approach to the divisive social issues, fighting instead for an immigration policy that focuses on building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and a trade policy that includes "better deals" for America.
The new platform, as adopted by the Republican National Convention on Monday, represents the GOP's formal policy positions for the next four years. The document is not binding, but is intended to guide Republican policymaking at every level of government.
Delegates stand and turn toward the camera for the official photo during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/John Locher)
The 2016 platform is "the most pro-life platform ever," according to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. Christian conservatives also cheered the GOP's continued opposition to same-sex marriage and formal opposition to bathroom choice for transgender people. They also endorsed new language that condemned same-sex parenting: "Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime or become pregnant outside of marriage."
The new language on same-sex marriage, which the Supreme Court made legal nationwide in 2015, drew passionate opposition from younger Republicans and moderate-leaning party leaders across the Northeast in the days leading up to Monday's formal vote.
"The platform is a broad statement," said Steve Duprey, a RNC member from New Hampshire. "Not everybody agrees with everything in the platform, including our nominee."
Indeed, Trump has been reluctant to embrace social conservative positions in some cases, particularly as Republicans across the country push for new restrictions on bathroom access for transgender people.
Trump, who claims strong support from the gay community, has invited transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner to use whichever bathroom in Trump Tower she'd like. He also said North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, has caused unnecessary strife.
Yet Republicans on Monday let stand language that attacks the Obama administration for directing schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms and other facilities that match their gender identities. "Their edict to the states concerning restrooms, locker rooms and other facilities is at once illegal, dangerous and ignores privacy issues. We salute the several states which have filed suit against it," reads the platform.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the GOP "the party of the open door," despite the aggressive language.
"We're still a party that believes that marriage is between one man and one woman, but it doesn't mean that we're going to kick people out," he said. "I can't win this race if I tell people that they're not welcome in our party."
On trade, the new platform embraces Trump's hardline approach to immigration, led by his call for a massive wall along the U.S-Mexico border.
"The border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border," reads the updated platform, which adds that "the presence of millions of unidentified individuals in this country poses grave risks to the safety and sovereignty of the United States."
Trump's team also pushed for more liberal language on trade and banking, calling for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that would limit the size of banks and backing off the GOP's long embrace of free trade. Trump has railed against free trade deals throughout his candidacy.
"We need better negotiated trade agreements that put America first," reads the platform.
On social issues at least, Tony Perkins, the head of the socially conservative Family Research Council, called the new platform "without question" the most conservative he can remember.
He noted that the policies help guide policymaking at every level in American politics: from the White House all the way down to school boards and city councils.
AP EXPLAINS: Do US political conventions still matter?
American political conventions once had real drama as parties held rounds and rounds of voting before settling on a presidential nominee. Now, they are highly staged television pep rallies as party loyalists anoint a nominee determined in state primaries and caucuses.
So as Republicans convene in Cleveland this week to nominate Donald Trump, with Democrats waiting to follow with Hillary Clinton's nomination next week in Philadelphia, it's reasonable to wonder whether the soirees still matter especially in a year in which Trump has upended American politics.
The answer is not a simple yes or no. Here are some points to consider:
Utah delegate Phil Wright speaks as some delegates call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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THIS IS NOT A NORMAL ELECTION YEAR
Conventions normally offer nominees an opportunity to bask in the spotlight, basking in the praise of their adoring supporters. But Trump has had a rough run-up to the convention. Top Republicans, including the party's last four nominees, are boycotting the convention. Trump's rollout of running mate Mike Pence was shaky. And the first hours of the convention were marred by tumult on the convention floor in a fight over Republican rules.
So does a rocky start to the convention bode ill for Trump? Not necessarily. The first rule of the 2016 campaign is that usual rules may not apply. The political power brokers who have been abuzz about the turmoil in Trump's campaign are some of the same ones who couldn't imagine the outlandish billionaire developer winning the Republican nomination. Many were also shocked that Clinton faced a strong challenge from Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old senator who identifies as a democratic socialist.
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TOUGH REBRANDING EFFORTS
Conventions offer candidates opportunity to shape their images to voters who hadn't really tuned in before. That will be a tough task this year. A July Associated Press-GfK poll found more than 6 out of 10 voters held an unfavorable view of Trump; Clinton did poorly on that front as well, with a 57 percent unfavorable rating.
For Trump, Cleveland is about making himself more "likable," according to top Republican advisers. A prime target: women, who make up more than half the electorate. For Clinton, the hurdle is "trust." Democrats say the way to overcome persuadable voters' skepticism is to tell them about what she's accomplished in her public roles, convincing them she's best for the job, even if they may not completely trust her.
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PARTY UNITY?
Parties traditionally strive to project an image of unity at their conventions. The Democratic Party has rallied behind Clinton, with Sanders and President Barack Obama among those speaking at the convention. Clinton will use surrogates to tell her story until she appears on her convention's final night to accept the nomination.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is fractured, as was evident in the rules fight Monday. Yet Trump doesn't seem to care about party fissures. He's the outsider selling himself to voters. His party label is secondary. That would seem to give the united Democrats an advantage over the chaotic Republicans. But maybe not. Trump's primary product is his personal brand. Because of Trump, Republican primary debates set ratings records. Republican primary turnout set records. His name almost guarantees a large audience for his acceptance speech Thursday.
Trump enhanced his fame as a reality TV star, succeeding in a genre in which audiences tune in to see the unpredictable. Democrats could have a hard time attracting as many viewers and voters to their carefully scripted show.
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John Travolta fantasist to die in jail for rape and murder of teenager
A John Travolta fantasist will die behind bars for the "cruel and brutal" rape and murder of a teenage girl 34 years ago.
For half a lifetime, self-employed tiler James Warnock, 56, evaded justice for strangling 17-year-old Yiannoulla Yianni in her own home, just half a mile from where he lived in north London.
Police cracked the case by matching his DNA to the crime scene last year, after Warnock was caught by an undercover officer sharing indecent pictures of children on the internet.
Yiannoulla Yianni was raped and murdered in her Hampstead home in 1982 (Metropolitan Police/PA)
The divorced father-of-two, who was still living in the local community, claimed he had a secret affair with Yiannoulla, even though the teenager was brought up in a traditional Greek Cypriot family and never had a boyfriend.
A jury at the Old Bailey took just over two hours to convict Warnock, and Recorder of London Nicholas Hilliard QC jailed him for life with a minimum of 25 years for murder.
The judge said Yiannoulla had endured a "terrifying ordeal" at knifepoint and was killed in a way that was "cruel, brutal and without mercy".
He said: "It is impossible to understand how one human being could do such things to another and in the process you visited misery beyond measure on those whom Yiannoulla was and is so dear and which will never leave them."
Warnock was also sentenced to 20 years for rape and a range of terms of between four years and five months after admitting six counts of distributing indecent images in 2013, all to run concurrently.
Paying tribute to Yiannoulla, the judge told Warnock that the "brightness of her spirit" meant that she would forever be remembered as a "happy and hopeful" teenager and not defined by "the awful things you did to her".
The defendant would continue to pose a risk to young women but is likely to die in jail, he said.
Warnock made no reaction as he was sent down.
The murder had shocked the nation and led to high-profile police appeals, with detectives travelling as far afield as Australia in their search for the killer.
Her brothers and sister, who had sat through the distressing trial, broke down in tears as they finally saw Yiannoulla's killer brought to justice.
The court had heard how on August 13 1982, the victim, known as Lucy, had been with her parents at their shoe repair shop minutes away from their Hampstead home.
Yiannoulla's mother, Elli, had sent her home to start preparing a leg of lamb for supper, saying she would join her soon.
She was playing the latest Patrice Rushen hit Forget Me Nots on the record player when Warnock knocked on her door at about 2pm.
The court heard that Warnock had stalked her before, and followed her home after spotting her around her father's shop.
Her parents arrived home half an hour later to "a sight beyond their worst imagining" - Yiannoulla's partially naked body lying on their bed, prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC said.
Despite a high-profile public appeal, including a televised reconstruction featuring her sister Maria, no real suspects were identified.
More than 1,000 people came forward with information but police were no closer to finding the doorstep stalker and the case remained unsolved for decades.
In efforts to keep the investigation going, her heartbroken father, George Yianni, appealed to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the commissioner of Scotland Yard. He never recovered from the grief and died in 1988 after contracting a brain tumour.
At the time of the murder, 5ft 6in Warnock was aged 22 and gave the impression of being a "cocky ladies' man", with his hair carefully salon-styled and blow-dried like his Saturday NightFever idol.
But when officers tracked him down after matching his DNA to the crime scene, they found the heavily tattooed, balding and portly defendant awaiting their arrival, drinking beer in his underpants.
In a police interview he was asked what he looked like in the 1980s and he said: "How can I put it? Er, John Travolta?"
During the trial, Yiannoulla's brothers and sister relived the nightmare of her violent death while her now 86-year-old mother was among those to give evidence.
They were even forced to listen as Warnock, formerly of Harrington Street in Camden, north-west London, maintained his claim that he used to go to their home to have sex.
Following the verdict, they described how the loss of their beautiful sister had left the family "saturated by grief" although they never gave up hope of finding the man responsible.
Her brother Rick said: "Thankfully the long arm of the law has reached out from the past to bring this evil being to justice."
Detective Inspector Julie Willats told how she was at the theatre last December when she received a text informing her of her "lucky break" in the case.
She said: "He must have known we would be coming for him. It's the science that has solved this one for us."
At the time of the murder, techniques in DNA testing had yet to be invented.
Aisling Hosein, CPS London reviewing lawyer, said: "More than three decades since this terrible crime, James Warnock has finally been brought to justice.
"I would like to thank Yiannoulla's family for their support of the prosecution and for giving evidence in court, which must have been a harrowing experience after 34 years.
"Warnock's continuing lies have only served to cause more pain to the family but I hope that his conviction today can bring them some small comfort.
Leon Smith determined to keep Great Britain's Davis Cup journey going
Leon Smith has his sights set on another Davis Cup final after Great Britain continued their remarkable run in the competition with victory over Serbia.
With Andy Murray in an observer capacity in Belgrade, Kyle Edmund was Britain's hero as the 21-year-old won both his singles rubbers to earn the defending champions a 3-2 victory at the Tasmajdan Stadium.
Next up is a home tie against Argentina in September where, with Murray having already said he is planning to take part, Britain would be favourites to advance to the final for the second year in a row.
Leon Smith hopes to steer Great Britain into another Davis Cup final
November's victory over Belgium earned Britain a first Davis Cup title since 1936 and a repeat now looks a distinct possibility.
Captain Smith, whose impressive record improved to 14 wins from 16 matches, said: "We absolutely love Davis Cup, they're amazing weekends. We love our home ties, we have so much fun together as a team.
"It's great to showcase our sport again, especially later in the year after our grass season has finished and we've got this huge event now.
"The journey keeps going and we're enjoying it as much as the first tie we had as a team together, and we just want to keep going."
A venue for the semi-final will be announced in due course but it is very likely to be Glasgow.
Scotland has not staged a tie yet this season while Murray is hosting a charity event at the Hydro only three days after the tie on September 16-18.
Argentina defeated Italy to book their place in the last four, with a key factor being the return to their team of former US Open champion Juan Martin del Potro, who was sidelined for two years by wrist problems.
But their highest-ranked player is Federico Delbonis at 43 and, with Edmund having proved his ability to win key rubbers at World Group level and Britain boasting a superb record in doubles, there are few chinks in Smith's side's armour.
The captain said: "Argentina have got good depth, a lot of good players. Del Potro coming back obviously is big for them, so we'll see how the rest of the summer goes for him because he's obviously their most dangerous player.
"It's going to be difficult but we are also a very good team. We see what Kyle's done this weekend, Andy when he comes back in, Jamie (Murray) in the doubles, Dom (Inglot) in the doubles, we've got good back-up as well when needed."
At 21, Edmund is one of the leading young players in the world and showed great maturity in taking the number one role in Davis Cup for the first time in only his second tie and delivering for his country.
The Yorkshireman did not drop a set in two matches and, although he wobbled in sight of the finish line in what proved to be the decisive rubber against Dusan Lajovic on Sunday, he regained his composure and dominated with his heavy forehand.
There is no rest for Edmund, who heads to Toronto on Tuesday to play in qualifying for the Rogers Cup - which Murray looks set to miss - before making his Olympic debut in Rio.
It would be a surprise if his coming-of-age weekend did not have a positive impact, with Edmund saying: "These matches give you confidence.
"Different situations give you confidence. Knowing that you are able to keep your level in those situations.
"I've known that I've been improving, but on the match court is where you want it to count. There's no point playing well in practice and then when you come to matches you don't quite get it out there. It's nice to be able to execute that.
"At the same time, there will be stuff that I feel I could have done better here. You are always trying to find that extra one or two per cent to make you better. It never stops. People don't stop working. I certainly don't.
May lauds 'very constructive' talks with Welsh First Minister
Theresa May says she has had "very constructive" talks with Wales' First Minister during her first visit to the principality since becoming Prime Minister.
Mrs May, who succeeded David Cameron as PM last Wednesday, said it was vital to meet the Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones early into her premiership.
She was greeted by the First Minister on the Senedd steps on Monday morning before heading into his office to discuss post-Brexit Britain and the uncertainty surrounding Tata's steelworks in Port Talbot.
Prime Minister Theresa May with the First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, before their meeting at the Senedd in Cardiff
Mrs May said: "The Union is very important to me and I'm pleased to visit Wales so early in my premiership.
"I've had a very constructive meeting with the First Minister and we've been talking about a number of issues - including the United Kingdom leaving the EU.
"What I want to see is the best possible deal for the whole of the United Kingdom and I want the Welsh Government to be involved in the discussions - that's why I am here.
"We also discussed Tata and the UK and the Welsh Government have put a strong package together. We want to continue to see steel making here - it's in the Welsh interest and also the UK national interest."
Prior to Mrs May's visit, First Minister Mr Jones admitted he admitted he knew "very little" about the new Tory leader - but hoped she would be able to deliver an improved devolution settlement.
The former barrister has also called on her to deal with the aftermath of the EU Referendum as "a matter of urgency" - especially given the potential knock on effects to the economy and investment in Wales.
Welsh Secretary and Conservative MP Alun Cairns, who sat in on the bilateral talks, described the meeting as a positive one.
He said: "This is the first time for the Prime Minister and Carwyn Jones to properly meet.
"We share a lot of common ground - we are all comprehensive school children and we laughed and smiled about that.
"It was a way of getting to know each other, but also putting markers down what are the key priorities are - the steel industry and how we exit the European Union."
Plaid Cymru, the official opposition in the Welsh Assembly, said it was good for the new PM to visit Wales so early in her premiership.
However, party leader Leanne Wood said: "We have seen Scotland securing a much better deal than Wales from Westminster thanks to the strength of the Scottish Government. It's vital the the Welsh Government now commands the respect of the new Prime Minister in the same way - something it has failed to do in recent years, leaving us with a weak settlement.
Get on with the job, Theresa May tells Cabinet at first meeting as PM
Theresa May has told her new Cabinet they must "get to it and get on with the job" as the top team gathered for its first meeting in No 10.
In a 90-minute discussion, the Prime Minister announced she would take the helm of three new high-level committees to drive through plans for Brexit as well as social and economic reform.
Mrs May told senior ministers that "politics is not a game" as she insisted quitting the European Union presented a "huge opportunity" and pledged to make government work for everyone, not just the privileged few.
Prime Minister Theresa May holds the first Cabinet meeting of the new government
The Prime Minister's official spokeswoman said: "The Prime Minister concluded with the fact that Brexit presented a huge opportunity and it was now time to get to it and get on with the job."
Mrs May will chair three new Cabinet committees - on the economy and industrial strategy, exiting the European Union and international trade, and social reform.
But No 10 denied the move was prompted by a desire to keep tight control on the policy areas or counteract any potential turf wars between Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Brexit Secretary David Davis and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox.
"It's because the issues that they (the committees) will be discussing go to the heart of her agenda, the top priorities for this government and the challenges that we face as a country," the spokeswoman said.
"This idea that it is in some way to manage relations between other Cabinet ministers and things, that is not what it is about.
"At Cabinet this morning you saw the Prime Minister really encouraging a collective government approach."
Mrs May told the Cabinet that her visits to Berlin and Paris in the coming days would be an "opportunity" for discussions about Brexit but insisted the Government would not be defined by the UK's exit from the EU.
She told ministers: "When I launched my leadership campaign I said that politics is not a game. The decisions that we take around this table affect people's day-to-day lives and we must do the right thing and take the right decisions for the future of this country.
"We have the challenge of Brexit and Brexit does mean Brexit and we are going to make a success of it and we will do that by forging a new role for the United Kingdom in the world but we won't be a Government that's defined just by Brexit.
"We will also be a Government defined by the social reform that we take."
Judges have decided that a legal challenge over Brexit will be heard by the High Court in October.
Government lawyers told the court in London that Mrs May had made clear she did not intend to trigger Article 50 - the formal process that pulls Britain out of the bloc - before the end of 2016.
The PM's spokeswoman said "legally it is for the Government to make the decision".
Mrs May is yet to move into Downing Street, where she will live in the larger No 11 flat.
UK farmers union complains over supermarkets "fake" farm brands
LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - Britain's farmers union has formally complained to the country's National Trading Standards Institute over the use by supermarkets, including market leader Tesco, of "fake" farm branding on some food products, it said on Sunday.
The National Farmers Union (NFU) said its letter of complaint followed concerns expressed by its members that the use of fictional farm labels could be misleading for shoppers.
It said mixing imported product with British product under the same fake farm name could confuse customers, and called for clear guidelines for retailers on labelling the country of origin of goods.
The NFU highlighted Tesco's March launch of seven fresh fruit and vegetables, poultry and meat lines with fictional brand names such as 'Woodside Farms' and 'Boswell Farms'.
"The NFU's 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," said NFU President Meurig Raymond.
"I have spoken to senior management at Tesco to highlight our members' concerns about the use of these fake farm brands," he added.
Raymond welcomed a commitment from discounter Aldi to only source British product for its fictional farm brands by the end of March 2017.
Tesco has defended the brands, saying its customers were well aware that the supermarket was so big it could not possibly source all its products from individual farms.
Chief Executive Dave Lewis said in April the farm brands' launch was the most significant investment he had made since taking over as CEO in September 2014. [nL5N17G2EZ}
Recruitment firm Reed says job listings rise after Brexit vote
LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - British recruitment firm Reed Group said there had been an 8 percent increase in jobs added to its website in the three weeks since Britons voted to leave the European Union, the firm's chairman told the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Reed, which says more than 7 million people use the site to find jobs from over 25,000 recruiters every year, had 150,000 more jobs added since the June 23 referendum compared to the same period last year, the newspaper said. It did not give a comparative figure.
"The vote hasn't affected things. People are still hiring and there are lots of opportunities," Chairman James Reed told the newspaper.
"We've 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," he said.
There have been expectations that Brexit-induced uncertainty would hit business and consumer confidence.
A little piece of the Gulf of Mexico is heading to North Dakota and it could get uncomfortable.
National Weather Service meteorologist Patrick Ayd said air from the Gulf of Mexico will bring temperatures in the 90s and perhaps higher along with oppressive humidity that will make it feel even hotter. A heat advisory has been issued for 1 to 8 p.m. today.
It will make it feel like youre on the beach in the Gulf of Mexico, Ayd said.
Todays high in Bismarck is expected to be around 94 or 95 degrees.
And its going to be pretty darn humid out there, too, Ayd said. So its going to be pretty oppressive humidity-wise.
Wednesday will have similar humidity but will be even hotter. While Bismarcks forecast high is 97, communities near Bismarck are expected to reach 100, Ayd said.
Thursday also will be humid, but the temperature will cool off to 92, Ayd said. Temperatures into the weekend are expected to be in the mid to upper 80s.
The body is not as efficient at cooling itself in high humidity, and those with medical conditions that make them susceptible to heat, as well as the old and the young, are more likely to be overcome by heat if theyre not careful, according to Ayd, who advises people to limit their time in the heat, take frequent breaks, drink sufficient water, use sunscreen and check on those without air conditioning.
Its also important to look before you lock, especially in hot weather, Ayd said. Children and pets should never be left alone in a vehicle, but the danger is heightened in extreme heat. Keys should be kept out of reach of children so they dont accidentally trap themselves in a vehicle.
Because the air aloft also is warm, Ayd said no widespread storms are expected. However, any storms that do crop up could become severe because of the conditions, he said.
4-Ex-U.S. Marine kills 3 policemen in racially tense Baton Rouge
By Sam Karlin
BATON ROUGE, La., July 17 (Reuters) - A decorated ex-U.S. Marine sergeant opened fire on police in Baton Rouge on Sunday, killing three officers, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man there sparked nationwide protests, one of them shattered by the massacre of five Dallas policemen.
The Baton Rouge suspect, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was himself shot to death minutes later in a gunfight with police who converged on the scene of a confrontation that Mayor Kip Holden said began as an "ambush-style" attack on officers.
Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriff's deputy were killed, and one sheriff's deputy was critically wounded. 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, told a news conference the gunman was believed to have acted alone, contrary to early reports that police may have been looking for other shooters.
Sunday's bloodshed followed days of 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.
Police did not name the suspect. But a U.S. government official told Reuters the gunman was identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri. Long, who was black, was reported by other media to be 29 years old.
DECORATED MARINE
According to Long's military record, released by the Pentagon, he served in the Marines from August 2005 until August 2010, achieving the rank of sergeant. Listed as a data network specialist, he was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 until January 2009, earning several medals and commendations.
Authorities declined to offer a possible motive for Sunday's attack in Louisiana's capital, a city with a long history of distrust between African-Americans and law enforcement that was further inflamed by Sterling's slaying.
Social media postings linked to an individual named Gavin Long and a Kansas City address cordoned off by police on Sunday included a YouTube video posted July 10 saying he was fed up with mistreatment of blacks and suggesting that only violence and financial pressure would bring about change. He also said he was speaking from Dallas, where he had gone to join protests.
"It's only fighting back or money. That's all they care about," he said to the camera. "Revenue and blood, revenue and blood, revenue and blood."
In a separate video, he insists that should "anything happen" to him, he wanted his viewers to know he was "not affiliated" with any particular movement or group.
"I'm affiliated with the spirit of justice, nothing more nothing less," he said. "I thought my own thoughts, I made my own decisions."
A second government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators had reason to believe an emergency 911 call may have been used to lure Baton Rouge police into harm's way.
Edmonson said several officers came under fire as police were responding to a report of a man dressed in black standing behind a store holding a rifle shortly before 9 a.m.
CHAOTIC MOMENTS CAUGHT ON RADIO
In the ensuing pandemonium caught on a recording of emergency radio traffic, police are repeatedly heard reporting: "Officer down" and "deputy down" as officers swarmed the area searching for, and ultimately confronting, the gunman.
The episode was over in about eight minutes, according to Edmonson's account. At least one of the three officers killed was known to be black.
President Barack Obama condemned the attack, vowed that justice would be done and urged Americans to focus on rhetoric and actions that united the country, rather than divided it.
"We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us," 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 policemen killed by a black former U.S. soldier who opened fire July 7 at the end of an otherwise peaceful protest denouncing the Sterling and Castile slayings.
Those two killings and the reprisal attack on Dallas police by a suspect who embraced militant black nationalism renewed tension 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.
CONVENTION CONCERNS
The wave of violence has also 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 Nov. 8 election.
"We demand law and order," Trump said in a Facebook posting on 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 carrying of firearms for the duration of the Republican convention.
Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, told Reuters he was concerned about copycat shootings at the convention. A Kasich spokeswoman said the governor lacked authority to suspend the open-carry law.
Sunday's shootings took place about a mile from the city's police headquarters, where dozens of people were arrested this month while protesting Sterling's death. The father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by police.
A witness to the Baton Rouge shootings, Brady Vancel, told CNN he saw a man dressed in black clothing and a ski-type mask running through a parking lot amid a hail of gunfire.
Vancel said the gunman "looked up and saw me. We stopped. I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction."
U.S. seeks to reassure South Sudan on troops sent to Juba
WASHINGTON, July 17 (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.
Saudi always reacts to oil supply and demand, watching market - minister
RIYADH, July 17 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's energy minister said on Sunday the kingdom always reacts to oil market supply and demand and it would continue to monitor crude markets for any developments.
Khalid al-Falih also said that final agreements with foreign investors taking part in state oil giant Saudi Aramco's huge ship repair and shipbuilding complex that it is developing at Ras al-Khair would be signed "over the next few weeks and months".
The complex, on the kingdom's east coast, is due to be fully operational by 2021. Lamprell, Aramco, National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (Bahri) and Hyundai Heavy Industries signed a potential partnership agreement relating to the yard earlier this year.
Falih added that the world's largest oil exporter should own the largest oil shipping company, with a fleet that matches the kingdom's oil reserves and sales.
He was speaking on the sidelines of an event marking the signing of an agreement between Bahri and Arab Petroleum Investments Corp. (APICORP) to launch a $1.5 billion investment fund that could buy up to 15 very large crude carriers (VLCCs).
Cameroon hostages freed from captivity in Central African Republic
YAOUNDE, July 17 (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.
Sao Tome votes as President da Costa runs for second term
SAO TOME, July 17 (Reuters) - Sao Tome and Principe voted in a presidential election on Sunday in which incumbent Manuel Pinto da Costa is looking to win a second term against four opponents including a former speaker of parliament.
The small island nation located in the Gulf of Guinea is a former colony of Portugal and has a semi-presidential system in which the prime minister is the head of government.
The country has 19 oil blocks in its exclusive economic zone and an additional joint exploration zone with Nigeria, but it is yet to find any commercially viable oil.
"Everything is proceeding normally," said Ambrose Quaresma, spokesman for the National Electoral Commission. Soldiers and police ensured security on Sunday and international observers were also present at polling stations, witnesses said.
EU ministers meet on Turkey, facing perfect storm
By Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott
BRUSSELS, July 18 (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 neighbour.
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 finalise a deal struck in March to reward Ankara for preventing migrants from crossing to Greece by channelling 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:
Slain Louisiana police officers ranged from rookie to veterans
July 17 (Reuters) - The six Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers killed or wounded in an attack on Sunday morning ranged from a newcomer to the force to veteran officers, officials said, in the latest mass shooting to afflict a U.S. city.
Three officers died and a fourth was fighting for his life after the attack by a suspect who opened fire on them in Louisiana's capital city.
The suspect, identified by a U.S. official as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, was believed to have acted alone.
The dead included Montrell Jackson, a 32-year-old new father who had served for 10 years with the Baton Rouge Police Department, and Matthew Gerald, at 41 a newly minted law enforcement officer with a military background, the police department said on its Facebook page.
Also slain was Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four, local media reported, citing Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and Garafola's wife, Tonja.
"He loved us so much," Tonja Garafola told the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper. "He didn't deserve this."
Friends and relatives of Jackson took to Facebook to remember him.
"Rest in Peace to my former partner and one of the best cops I've ever known... His name was Montrell Jackson!" Facebook user Marcus Tillman said in a post, which received more than 8,000 likes and 6,000 shares by midday on Sunday. "He was a black life that apparently didn't matter to the one that took it!"
The Facebook page shows several pictures of a baby boy, and comments suggested that the child was Jackson's son.
"Cuz, this is you all over again," commenter Catina Williams Alexander wrote beneath the photo of the child. The Facebook page includes a picture of a police badge, posted in 2015.
'BIG TEDDY BEAR'
Jonathan Saunders, a friend of Jackson, said the officer was a big man - but gentle and kind.
"He was 220 pounds of Teddy Bear," said Saunders, who now lives in New Orleans and once worked at a Laser Tag business where Jackson was a part-time security guard. "If you needed a hug, you could walk up to him and hug him. He cared about everybody."
Saunders said in a phone interview that Jackson's child was just a few months old.
A Facebook page belonging to Matthew Gerald in Baton Rouge featured images of law enforcement badges, and friends and family posted condolences on a page that appeared to belong to his wife.
Earlier in the day, Dechia Badeaux Gerald posted a news video of the shooting aftermath with the comment: "Everyone please pray!!! My husband along with others is out there."
A 41-year-old sheriff's deputy was in critical condition, "fighting for his life as we speak," said Gautreaux.
In addition, one sheriff's deputy was in surgery for non-life-threatening injuries, Gautreaux said. A 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer, on the force for nine years, also received a non-life-threatening injury, Dabadie said.
UBS, DBS, Falcon face Singapore scrutiny over 1MDB transactions-sources
By A. Ananthalakshmi and Saeed Azhar
SINGAPORE, July 17 (Reuters) - Singapore's central bank is scrutinising 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 world's 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 hadn't 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 BSI's staff and poor management oversight of the bank's 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 BSI's 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 centre 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 couldn't 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.
China extradites first fugitive from Latin America
SHANGHAI, July 18 (Reuters) - China has extradited its first criminal suspect from Latin America following eight years of negotiations, repatriating an alleged crude soybean oil smuggler from Peru who has been on the run for 18 years, the country's customs bureau said on Sunday.
The General Administration of Customs said on its website that Huang Haiyong, evaded over 700 million yuan ($104.69 million) in taxes between 1996 to 1998 through selling 107,000 tonnes of smuggled crude soybean oil.
Huang and his two associates fled to the United Sates in 1998 and Interpol issued a global arrest warrant for Huang in 2001 at the request of Chinese authorities, the customs bureau said.
He was caught by Interpol in Peru in 2008 and the two countries began negotiating his repatriation, but Huang appealed against returning to China citing the death penalty and risk of torture, it said.
Photos published on the custom bureau website and state media show Huang being escorted by anti-smuggling police and being read his litigation rights. Reuters was unable to reach Huang for comment.
"This case again reflects the customs bureau's attitude to fugitives, to 'chase them until the end', to crackdown on any determination to smuggle. No matter where suspects flee to, they will be severely punished by law," it said.
China has brought home more than 600 officials in a campaign dubbed "Operation Fox Hunt", pursuing them abroad as part of a wider crackdown on deep-rooted graft.
Singapore launches talks for free trade deal with Sri Lanka
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Reuters) - Singapore and Sri Lanka have started talks for a free trade pact, including measures to free up trade in goods and services as well as investments, the city-state's trade minister said on Monday.
Sri Lanka's push to build infrastructure and develop its industries presented prospects for Singapore firms to partner with companies in the Indian Ocean nation and contribute to its growth, S. Iswaran said in a statement.
"Amidst an uncertain economic environment, Sri Lanka offers good potential for Singapore companies looking to tap opportunities in new markets," he said.
Turkish revival of death penalty would be unacceptable, Austria says
VIENNA, July 18 (Reuters) - It would be unacceptable for Turkey to reintroduce the death penalty in response to Friday's attempted coup, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said in an interview published on Monday ahead of a meeting of his European Union counterparts.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday after the failed coup attempt there could be no delay in using capital punishment, which Turkey abolished in 2004, and the government would discuss it with opposition parties.
Suspected Islamist militants kill five in Kazakhstan's biggest city
By Mariya Gordeyeva and Olzhas Auyezov
ALMATY, July 18 (Reuters) - Suspected Islamist militants killed at least four policemen and one civilian in Kazakhstan's financial capital Almaty on Monday, security and hospital sources said, the second attack on the security services in less than two months.
The attackers targeted a district police station and an office of the KNB state security service. Another shootout occurred on a busy central street where police wounded and detained one of the attackers.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev called the attacks a terrorist act and ordered tighter security in public areas.
The shootings will stoke fears of a growing Islamist threat to the oil-producing nation of 18 million people. Last month, men the authorities said were Islamic State sympathisers attacked gun stores and a military facility, killing seven.
Nazarbayev said the security services were working to identify Monday's attackers, but one security source told Reuters the authorities believed they were Islamist militants.
Thousands of nationals from Central Asian nations are known to be fighting alongside Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, and the authorities have long warned they could return and carry out attacks on home soil.
Kazakhstan is far more prosperous than its post-Soviet neighbours and has been ruled with a firm hand by Nazarbayev since 1989.
But the fall in global oil prices has hit its economy hard and there have been rare outbreaks of violence and public protests since April, initially caused by discontent over proposed land reforms but swiftly attracting others unhappy about wider issues.
Five witnesses told Reuters they heard gunshots in three parts of Almaty, the mainly Muslim nation's largest city.
"We saw a man with a rifle," one shop worker said by phone. Footage uploaded to the Internet showed a man pointing an assault rifle at a car he tried and failed to stop.
The Interior Ministry said one attacker shot a policeman guarding a police station and then took his automatic rifle. He then shot two more policemen who chased him.
The same man then tried to hijack a car, killing its civilian driver. He shot and wounded two more police officers before being wounded himself and detained on a busy street.
The ministry did not name the gunman but said the 27-year-old was also suspected of murdering a woman last weekend. It later said it had detained a second suspect.
It was unclear if any other suspects remained at large.
The ministry statement put the total death toll at four, including three policemen. However, a source at Almaty's emergency aid hospital told Reuters it had taken in six dead, including four policemen, one civilian and one suspected attacker.
There were also eight wounded at the hospital, the source said.
Many in Hong Kong look for the exit amid China tension
By Sharon Shi
HONG KONG, July 18 (Reuters) - When activists began setting fire to trash bins and hurling bricks at police during a February riot in Hong Kong, Chris Lee became more convinced his decision to leave his siblings and mother behind and move to Taiwan was the right one.
Hong Kong, long known as one of the safest and most law-abiding cities in Asia, has become increasingly polarised with occasional violent protests, fuelled in part by tensions with Communist Party leaders in Beijing over the Chinese-ruled city's democratic future.
"It's not just the politics that are messed up," said Lee, who moved to Taiwan in March and opened a restaurant. "It is also the people who have become irrational and fickle that drove me to leave."
Lee is not alone. Some 42 percent of Hong Kong residents want to leave, a survey by independent think tank Civic Exchange showed in June. This compares with 20 percent wanting to leave neighbouring Singapore.
Seventy percent of 1,500 people surveyed said Hong Kong had become "worse" or "much worse" to live in, with the biggest concerns housing, the "quality of government" and education.
The number of Hong Kong people emigrating to Canada almost doubled in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, and the number moving permanently to Taiwan rose 36 percent over a similar time frame, data shows.
The most recent data from the United States is from 2014 and flat. Emigration to the UK has declined, but the minimum amount for those seeking to qualify for residency as investors there has also doubled to 2 million pounds ($2.64 million).
Australia doesn't provide data for Hong Kong but aggregate figures for emigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Mongolia rose slightly last year.
"STARTED TO BE NERVOUS"
The diminishing confidence in Hong Kong's future follows the "Occupy Central" protests in late 2014 demanding Beijing grant Hong Kong full democracy.
"After Occupy, (Hong Kong people) started to be nervous about the future," said Andrew Lo, a director of Anlex Services Limited, which handles Taiwan immigration cases.
Mary Chan, of immigration experts Rothe International Canada, said the immigration process typically takes one to two years. "Which is why the numbers are only increasing now," she said.
The disappearances of five Hong Kong booksellers who specialized in gossipy political books about Chinese leaders, some of whom were believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents, has also eroded broader confidence in the "one country, two systems" formula under which the former British colony returned to China in 1997.
One of the booksellers who returned to Hong Kong told media he may emigrate to Taiwan because he no longer feels safe in the city.
"Young people were more upset about the government two years ago but the sense of dissatisfaction actually cuts across ages now," said Professor Michael DeGolyer, who co-led the study.
The Mainland Affairs Council in Taiwan, a self-ruled island China considers a breakaway province, said it expected the increase in Hong Kong immigrants to continue.
"Taiwan is an open, pluralistic and liberal democracy. The people are very friendly. Housing prices and consumer prices are relatively cheap, while entrepreneurial opportunities and the similar cultures of Hong Kong and Taiwan are all factors for Hong Kong residents to consider coming to Taiwan," it said.
Hong Kong's immigration department declined to comment on the survey. The Security Bureau declined to answer questions about whether the Hong Kong government was concerned about emigration or believed it was due to political concerns.
PRESS DIGEST - Bulgaria - July 18
SOFIA, July 18 (Reuters) - These are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Monday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
TELEGRAPH - The government will be ready with a proposal in a month how to deal with the compensation of over 550 million euros an arbitration court ruled it has to pay to Russia's Atomstroyexport after it canceled its Belene nuclear project, Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova said. (Telegraph, )
-- Privatisation of the Belene nuclear project is the better option for Bulgaria than selling the nuclear equipment Sofia has ordered, Delyan Dobrev, senior official of the ruling centre-right GERB. party said. (Trud, Monitor)
SBM shares leap as investors cheer Brazil corruption settlement
AMSTERDAM, July 18 (Reuters) - Shares in Dutch offshore engineer SBM Offshore opened up more than 10 percent on Monday on news that the company had reached a deal with Brazilian authorities in a long-running corruption probe.
Brazil's federal prosecutors and state-controlled oil company Petrobras said they signed a leniency deal on Friday with SBM Offshore in the country's widest-ever corruption probe.
In exchange for paying Petrobras $328.2 million, SBM will be immune from further lawsuits in the case.
Iran targets oil sales to China teapots via Trafigura -sources
By Florence Tan and Chen Aizhu
SINGAPORE/BEIJING, July 18 (Reuters) - An Iranian crude cargo loaded by trading house Trafigura is set to arrive in east China this week, heating up the race among oil suppliers to meet the rise in demand for imports from China's independent refineries, trade sources said.
Only last year, China's independent oil refiners, known as teapots, were granted licenses to import crude in line with Beijing's efforts to boost competition in a sector dominated by state-run groups. Frenzied buying by the teapots followed, drawing in rare supplies from both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Now, Iran is eyeing the new group of Chinese buyers, located mainly in eastern Shandong province, as it rebuilds its global market share after western sanctions were lifted in January.
The National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) sold a 2-million barrel Iranian Heavy crude cargo to Trafigura, which was loaded in late June onboard supertanker Olympic Target.
Trade sources with knowledge of the deal say this cargo is heading to Shandong, putting Trafigura ahead of other major trading firms in being the first to sell Iranian oil to teapots.
Trafigura, the world's second-biggest independent oil trader, declined to comment on this, while NIOC could not be immediately reached for comment.
But sources told Reuters the sale was agreed on condition Trafigura would market the crude to Chinese teapots, which are outside NIOC's usual Chinese clients - state refiners Sinopec and PetroChina, and that the oil would be offloaded at Shandong.
Iran, OPEC's No.3 producer, needed to sell through a trader given logistical constraints and credit risks involved when dealing with small non-state buyers, the sources said.
"No single teapot could absorb a VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) cargo. Without crude storage operation in China, it is hard for NIOC to sell into teapots," said a Beijing-based trading official with knowledge of Iran's Chinese oil sales.
Saudi Aramco for instance sold its first spot cargo to a teapot from its storage in Okinawa, while Kuwait supplied oil to privately-controlled Shandong Hongrun Petrochemicals, via state-run oil trader Sinochem Corp.
NIOC's sale via Trafigura will help Iran to also avoid demurrage costs at congested Shandong ports, the sources said.
Demand from the teapots have accounted for more than half of China's incremental crude purchases this year and have led to long lines of tankers waiting to unload at ports.
The Olympic Target, carrying Iranian crude, is expected to arrive later this week, shipping data on Thomson Reuters Eikon showed. Trafigura is expected to move the cargo into storage tanks and then sell it in smaller parcels to teapots, the sources said.
Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition would not support death penalty -spokesman
ISTANBUL, July 18 (Reuters) - Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) would not support any proposal put to parliament on the reintroduction of the death penalty following a failed coup attempt, party spokesman Ayhan Bilgen told Reuters.
"No, we will not support it," Bilgen said, adding that in any case new laws could not be applied retroactively and that it was the responsibility of politicians to communicate this to the people.
Responding to crowds of supporters calling for the death penalty for the plotters on Sunday, President Tayyip Erdogan said such demands could not be ignored.
FARGO An online survey found that nearly 30 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who sought help at a rape and domestic violence crisis center in North Dakota werent satisfied with the support they received.
The survey was done by an advisory committee made up of LGBT advocates from around the state, a group brought together by the North Dakota Womens Network and the state Department of Health.
Zach Packineau, chair of the advisory committee, said the plan is to use the survey results, which were released this month, to guide centers and other agencies in becoming more inclusive of the LGBT community.
Theres a need for more training and kind of education for service providers, for law enforcement, for people who work in the courts systems, he said.
Liz Anderson, director of the Abuse Resource Network in Lisbon, said advocates at her center could benefit from more training on how to assist LGBT victims. Everybody needs to know how to respond, and they cant have any preconceived notions, she said.
Packineau said the survey results show some LGBT people who needed services didnt feel welcome at centers in the state. He said such feelings may stem, in part, from the fact that North Dakota law doesnt offer protections against the discrimination of LGBT people.
We live in a state and in a culture that isnt necessarily friendly and supportive of LGBTQ folks, said Caitlin McDonald, a member of the advisory committee. Even asking people to take an online survey is a little more difficult, especially when were talking about such sensitive and intimate topics.
A number of people surveyed reported they did not seek help at a center because they feared being outed something Packineau said he didnt expect to see in the results.
Anderson acknowledged her center could do a better job publicizing that its services are available to anyone. We need to let people know we help any type of relationship whether youre straight or not, she said.
Packineau said centers can become more LGBT friendly by using gender-neutral photos and language on their websites and pamphlets.
In a similar vein, the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center in Fargo took the step of removing the gender labels from its restrooms, said executive director Christopher Johnson.
Johnson said his center also placed an LGBT decal at the entrance and has an LGBT magazine among the reading materials in the waiting room. Along with making the physical environment more inviting, he said, the center adjusted its policies and trained staff to better serve LGBT people.
McDonald, who works for the North Dakota Womens Network, said the survey did not collect as many stories directly from LGBT people as the committee had hoped. We got a lot of people talking about their friends or different experiences, she said, adding that the committee is considering other ways to gather input, such as focus groups.
The survey was done during the summer and fall of 2015, with more than 170 people voluntarily completing it. The state received a $10,000 grant from the Consensus Council, a nonprofit group in Bismarck, to coordinate the advisory committees work, including the survey.
The advisory committee plans to present the survey results at the state Department of Healths Injury Prevention and Control Conference set for Aug. 10-11 in Bismarck.
Iran receives the missile part of S-300 defence system from Russia - Tasnim
DUBAI, July 18 (Reuters) - Russia has delivered the missile part of S-300 surface-to-air defence system to Iran, Tasnim news agency reported on Monday, moving to finish the delivery of all divisions of the system to Tehran by the end of this year.
"The first shipment of missiles of S-300 missile system has recently entered Iran that shows Iran's determination to equip its air defence circle with this system," Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Revolutionary Guards, reported.
Russia's agreement to provide Iran with S-300 has sparked concern in Israel, whose government Iran has said it aims to destroy.
Russia says it cancelled a contract to deliver S-300s to Iran in 2010 under pressure from the West.
President Vladimir Putin lifted that self-imposed ban in April 2015, after an interim agreement that paved the way for July's full nuclear deal.
PRESS DIGEST - RUSSIA - JULY 18
MOSCOW, July 18 (Reuters) - The following are some stories in Russia's newspapers on Monday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
VEDOMOSTI
www.vedomosti.ru
- Russian state companies will have to explain publically their reasons for importing foreign software if they prefer them to those made in Russia.
- Shareholders of Russia's largets car maker Avtovaz expect the company to become profitable in three years under the leadership of Sergei Skvortsov, a former deputy head of the state holding Rostec.
- Sberbank and Megaphone are installing virtual modules near their offices to attract "Pokemons", the daily writes, referring to a forthcoming launch of the mobile game in Russia.
KOMMERSANT
www.kommersant.ru
- Deputy Prime Minister Olga Gorodets says that 65 percent of Russia's population does not need higher education because the domestic market could digest only 35 percent of university and college graduates.
ROSSIISKAYA GAZETA
www.rg.ru
- Russia's budget could receive up to 40 billion roubles ($634.12 million) if the share of the unofficial "grey" economy halves, according to the head of Russia's Accounts Chamber, Tatyana Golikova.
- The Dutch authorities are trying to hush up Ukraine's guilt for the crash of Malaysia's Boeing 777, the daily writes, adding that the extremely slow investigation was conducted behind closed doors.
- The Rossiiskaya gazeta is the most often quoted daily among social network users, according to Medialogia, a Russian company automatically monitoring media on-line.
RBC
www.rdc
- The failed coup in Turkey and the plotter's clumsy actions have paved the way for the virtually unlimited power of the Turkish leadership ijn the future.
- Prices for services provided by telecoms companies will at least double or triple as they boost spending on saving data of their users to meet the requirements of a new anti-terror law, the head of Tele2 company, Sergei Edmin, says in an interview.
IZVESTIA
www.izvestia.ru
- Russian senators could discuss ways of restricting the use of the "Pokemon Go" game service for mobile telephones in Russia, the daily writes.
Suspects in Saudi embassy attack appear in Tehran court
DUBAI, July 18 (Reuters) - Twenty-one men accused of storming Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran in January appeared in a Tehran court on Monday, Tasnim news agency reported, weeks after President Hassan Rouhani urged the judiciary to take action.
The suspects are accused of "disturbing the public order and damaging embassy buildings", according to Tasnim.
Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic relations with its Shi'ite rival Iran after protesters attacked the kingdom's embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad following Riyadh's execution of a prominent Saudi Shi'ite cleric.
The Iranian government promptly condemned the attack and Rouhani asked the judiciary to punish the protesters and to halt embassy attacks, which have recurred throughout the Islamic Republic 37-year history and often complicated its foreign policy.
Iranian demonstrators attacked the embassey of the United States in 1979, Kuwait in 1987, Saudi Arabia in 1988, Denmark in 2006 and Britain in 2011 - most of which have led to a breach in diplomatic relations.
None of the attackers in those incidents were convicted.
Iran's judiciary announced in April that more than 100 suspects had been arrested in relation to the attack on the Saudi missions and 48 had been charged. All were released on bail.
Speaking in the judiciary's annual gathering in June, Rouhani said the attackers had been identified and urged the courts to take action.
"People want to know how the judiciary will deal with those who attacked the embassy against the law and Iran's national security," Rouhani was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.
"They are waiting to hear the verdicts for these rogue elements."
After reaching a nuclear accord last year with world powers, Rouhani had sought to ease strained relations with neighbours and Western powers.
Suicide bombers attack Yemeni army checkpoints, killing 10
By Mohammed Mukhashaf
ADEN, July 18 (Reuters) - Two suicide bombers tried to ram vehicles laden with explosives through two Yemeni military checkpoints near the government-held port city of Mukalla on Monday, killing at least 10 people, the army and medics said.
Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch claimed responsibility for the attacks near the capital of Hadramout province on the Gulf of Aden, the latest in a series of bombings since forces loyal to Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, backed by troops from the United Arab Emirates, drove out the Islamist militants from the city in April.
The Yemeni army's Second Military Command, which is based in Mukalla, said militants had used a booby-trapped bus at a checkpoint in al-Burum, southwest of Mukalla, and a booby-trapped car in al-Ghaber, to the west.
"Forces at the checkpoints were able to confront the vehicles and prevented them crossing the security barriers," an army statement said. It said six soldiers had been killed and 18 wounded.
Medics said four civilians were also dead, and that 15 soldiers had been taken to hospital, five in serious condition.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said in a report on the messaging service Telegram that dozens of Hadi troops were killed and wounded in the attacks, according to U.S. monitoring group SITE.
It posted photos of two young men posing before its black and white banner, and identified the two bombers as Abu Tariq al-Sana'ani and Amir al-Sana'ani.
Islamist militants from al Qaeda and its rival Islamic State have been building up their presence in the impoverished country, taking advantage of the chaos created by Yemen's civil war, which began in 2014.
Freedom of navigation patrols may end "in disaster" -Chinese admiral
By Ben Blanchard
BEIJING, July 18 (Reuters) - Freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end "in disaster", a senior Chinese admiral has said, a warning to the United States after last week's ruling against Beijing's claims in the area.
China has refused to recognise the ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague that invalidated its vast territorial 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 adherence to the decision.
China has repeatedly blamed the United States for stirring up trouble in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually.
China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have rival claims, of which China's is the largest.
The United States has conducted freedom of navigation patrols close to Chinese-held islands, to Beijing's anger, while China has been bolstering its military presence there.
Speaking behind closed doors at a forum in Beijing on Saturday evening, Sun Jianguo, an admiral and deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the powerful Central Military Commission, said the freedom of navigation issue was bogus and one that certain countries repeatedly hyped up.
"When has freedom of navigation in the South China Sea ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there won't be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks," he said, according to a transcript of his comments seen by Reuters on Monday.
China is the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and won't let anybody damage it, Sun said.
"But China consistently opposes so-called military freedom of navigation, which brings with it a military threat and which challenges and disrespects the international law of the sea," Sun said.
"This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way," he added, without elaborating.
A U.S. Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States reserved the right to carry out freedom of navigation operations and the Chinese admiral's comments would not change that.
Sun also said the court case at The Hague must be used by China's armed forces to improve its capabilities "so that when push comes to shove, the military can play a decisive role in the last moment to defend our national sovereignty and interests".
Despite the warnings, China and the United States have been maintaining open lines of communication, with U.S. Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson meeting the head of the Chinese navy, Wu Shengli, in Beijing on Monday.
"I think that you can visit China this time at our invitation, that shows both sides attach great concern to maritime security," Wu told Richardson in brief comments in front of reporters.
In the meeting, Wu said China would not stop building reefs and islands in the sea, state-owned Xinhua news agency reported, with that construction also a part of China's efforts to bolster its claims.
Separately, China's Maritime Safety Administration said on Monday that an area just off the east of the island province of Hainan would be a no-sail zone from July 19-21 while military drills take place.
China generally describes its exercises in the South China Sea as routine.
China's air force also said on its microblog it had recently carried out "normal battle patrols" over the South China Sea involving bombers, spy planes and flying tankers, including over Scarborough Shoal, which is disputed with the Philippines.
Vietnam TV station drops Chinese drama over South China Sea dispute
HANOI, July 18 (Reuters) - A provincial Vietnamese TV channel has dropped a Chinese drama series after several Chinese actors condemned a court's decision that denied Beijing's vast claims to the South China Sea.
China claims most of the energy-rich waters through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, deciding a case lodged by the Philippines, ruled last week that China's "nine-dash line" encircling its territory, almost all the South China Sea, was illegal and breached Manila's sovereign rights.
"Due to some objective reasons related to several Chinese actors criticising the court's ruling on the nine-dash line and to show clear views of a mouthpiece under the Communist Party and the State, Binh Thuan TV announces the suspension of broadcasting of 'Shanghai Bund'," a station anchor said in a video posted by media.
"Shanghai Bund" is a Chinese television series remake of the 1980 Hong Kong television series "The Bund", starring Huang Xiaoming, who voiced support for Beijing's claims. Binh Thuan TV is a state-run station based in the southern province of the same name.
Beijing has called the court ruling a farce and several Chinese celebrities have spoken up against the court's decision.
Many Vietnamese people have shared the video clip and showed support for the channel.
About 20 Vietnamese were detained on Sunday while trying to hold a protest against China's rejection of the court decision.
Sri Lanka police arrest ex-leader's brother on suspicion over funds
COLOMBO, July 18 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan financial crime police arrested on Monday a brother of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa for a third time over suspicion of state fund misappropriation when he was economic development minister, a lawyer said.
Rajapaksa's younger brother, Basil, is on bail after being arrested twice for alleged misappropriation of state funds and a land deal allegedly involving money laundering. Court hearings into the two cases are going on.
Sri Lanka's new president, Maithripala Sirisena, faces pressure to act on allegations of corruption dating back to the Rajapaksa era, especially from civil society organisations who backed his successful bid to oust Rajapaksa last year.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president for a decade until January 2015 and is now an opposition legislator, is popular among many ethnic majority Sinhala Buddhists who credit him with ending a 26-year-war against ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009. He is trying to rally opposition to the current government with the help of Basil.
Basil Rajapaksa's lawyer, Jayantha Weerasinghe, told Reuters police had taken his client to court regarding the supply of building materials to district councils when he was a minister.
"There is nothing illegal and it is an utterly false allegation," Weerasinghe said.
Neither Basil Rajapaksa nor his family members were immediately available for comment.
Several members of the Rajapaksa family are facing police investigations for alleged financial crimes. They include Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brothers Basil and Gotabaya.
Mahinda Rajapaksa's eldest son, Namal Rajapaksa, who is also a member of parliament, was released by a court on bail on Monday, media reported.
He was arrested on July 11 for suspected misappropriation of funds in a high-end apartment project.
Uganda's president opposes arms embargo on South Sudan
KAMPALA, July 18 (Reuters) - Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said he was opposed to a U.N. plan to impose an arms embargo on his neighbour South Sudan, saying it would weaken its army just as the country was trying to contain a resurgence of violence.
The statement from one of the region's main powers, issued over the weekend, came after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Security Council to block arms sales to try and end more than two years of fighting in the world's newest nation.
At least 272 people have died in the latest clashes between forces loyal to South Sudan's President Salva Kiir and his rival, Vice President Riek Machar.
Museveni told Ban he was against the embargo at an African Union summit in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Saturday, officials said.
"When you impose an (arms) embargo on South Sudan you destroy the local force on which you need to build a strong integrated army," a statement from his office read.
He did not say if Uganda would take any more concrete action against the plan for South Sudan, which declared independence from Sudan five years ago.
1-Oil down 1 pct on worry of crude and fuel supply glut
By Barani Krishnan
NEW YORK, July 18 (Reuters) - Oil prices settled down more than 1 percent on Monday after rising stockpiles of crude and refined fuel intensified fears another major glut was building up.
Market intelligence firm Genscape reported that the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery hub for U.S. crude futures saw a supply build of 26,460 barrels in the week to July 15, traders who saw the data said.
Morgan Stanley said it still expected a supply-demand rebalancing in oil by mid-2017 but added that fundamental headwinds were growing in the market. "Tail risks are admittedly large in both directions, as geopolitics add to uncertainty."
An attempted coup in Turkey barely supported the market as Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait, which handles about 3 percent of global oil shipments mainly from Black Sea ports and the Caspian region, reopened from a brief closure.
Prices came off session lows after a labour union said a 24-hour strike on July 26 by Wood Group oil and gas maintenance workers employed at Royal Dutch Shell's platforms in the North Sea will severely disrupt operations.
Brent crude settled down 65 cents, or 1.4 percent, at $46.96 a barrel. It fell more than $1 earlier to an intraday low of $46.50.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude settled down 71 cents, or 1.6 percent, at $45.24 a barrel, after a session low at $44.86.
"We are maintaining a bearish trading stance as we still see an ultimate price downdraft in WTI and Brent to about $37 and $38 areas respectively," said Jim Ritterbusch of Chicago-based oil markets consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates.
A Reuters poll projecting a ninth straight weekly drop in U.S. crude stockpiles did not support prices. Nor did U.S. government data showing shale crude output likely fell for a 10th straight month in August.
The world's refineries have churned out more diesel, gasoline and jet fuel than eager drivers and holiday makers have been able to consume even over the summer travel season, cargo loadings and U.S. government data showed.
Oil prices are up nearly 75 percent since hitting 12-year lows of around $27 for Brent and about $26 for WTI in the first quarter. The rally has stalled since the two benchmarks breached the $50 a barrel mark in May as worries grew that higher prices will fuel more production.
Hedge funds last week cut their bullish bets on Brent to the lowest since February even they raised their positive wagers on U.S. crude, data showed.
Temasek set to unveil buyout deal for struggling Singapore rail operator-sources
By Anshuman Daga and Saeed Azhar
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Reuters) - Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings is set to announce a deal this week to buy out the remaining nearly 46 percent of SMRT Corp that it doesn't already own, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The deal caps a turbulent period for Singapore's main rail operator. SMRT has come under heavy criticism in recent years after a series of train breakdowns led to public outcry in a country long known for an efficient and reliable public infrastructure.
Temasek already owns 54.5 percent of SMRT, Thomson Reuters data shows.
Last week, Singapore's transport regulator said it will buy almost S$1 billion ($742 million) worth of metro train assets from SMRT, in a move aimed at easing SMRT's finances and allowing it to focus on providing reliable and well-maintained services.
"This potential transaction could be to address the underlying conflict - that a listed company is not the best entity to run a public service," said Robson Lee, a M&A partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP in Singapore.
The deal will be one of Temasek's rare buyouts at a time when it is seeking to boost its U.S. exposure in difficult markets.
SMRT has a market value of about $1.8 billion. But the deal valuation is unclear given the reduced future margins for SMRT once it starts operating as an asset-light company, said the sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The Land Transport Authority of Singapore had been in extensive talks with SMRT since 2011 to transfer its train assets to the regulator.
The LTA had been in separate discussions with the city-state's other metro rail operator SBS Transit Ltd on the company's assets.
Last week, SMRT said the rail financing framework had become unsustainable and its rail fare margins had been on the decline as operating expenses had risen significantly due to maintenance regime and replacement programmes for the ageing network.
"The constant breakdowns of the MRT trains - that has cost the jobs of two transport ministers - underscore the need for the government to reverse the policy of privatising public services," Gibson Dunn & Crutcher's Lee said.
Temasek and SMRT declined to comment.
SMRT shares in Singapore have been halted since Friday.
In a note, CIMB analysts wrote that other than reviving SMRT's balance sheet strength, the asset sale was nothing much to be cheered about especially when SMRT had no intention of paying a special dividend.
Chinese takeover of Norway's Opera fails, alternative proposed
By Stine Jacobsen and Paul Carsten
OSLO/BEIJING, July 18 (Reuters) - A $1.2 billion takeover of Opera Software by a group of Chinese internet firms fell through on Monday after failing to get regulatory approval in time, sending the Norwegian browser firm's shares to a seven-month low.
The deal needed a green light from the United States and China, and one firm in the Chinese consortium said U.S. privacy concerns would have led to an investigation into some of Opera's products that risked delaying the acquisition for up to a year.
Opera and the Chinese group have instead come up with an alternative deal worth $600 million which strips out some products and services in a bid to overcome regulatory hurdles.
The so-called Kunqi consortium, which includes online and mobile games distributor Beijing Kunlun Tech Co and search and security business Qihoo 360 Technology Co, will now buy certain parts of Opera's consumer business.
It will acquire Opera's mobile phone and desktop computer browser business, its performance and privacy apps division, its technology licensing business, as well as its stake in Chinese joint venture nHorizon.
However, the consortium will no longer buy Opera's advertising and marketing business, its TV operations, nor its game-related apps.
The hope is that the alternative deal will make it easier to win regulatory approval from U.S. authorities, one of the Chinese partners told Reuters on Monday.
"According to what we know, it was because of Opera's other services, and involves very many users' privacy. This would be extremely rigorously investigated during the U.S. government's audit and probably would have delayed the entire acquisition process by six months to a year," a Kunlun spokeswoman said.
"So we opted for a better method, and chose Opera's core assets, namely the consumer business, as the target of the acquisition. That greatly accelerates the acquisition process," she said in an emailed statement.
Opera declined to comment Kunlun's statement to Reuters.
The acquisition was part of a complex of deals being done by the Chinese buyers seeking to join forces in their home market, which is dominated by giant rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent. Buying Opera will also help the group expand into emerging markets in Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
EXTRAORDINARY DIVIDEND
Shares in Opera, which had flagged potential regulatory issues last week, slumped as much as 17 percent but recovered to trade at 54.25 crowns by 1210 GMT, 11 percent higher than before the original deal was announced in February.
Earlier on Monday, Opera said the original deal was lacking regulatory approval, without saying whether it was awaiting the green light from China, the United States, or both.
The final deadline for the offer, and the deadline for approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, were both on Friday.
"No regulators have said no. We have not received an answer within the agreed deadline," Opera Chairman Sverre Munck told Reuters, adding that the parties could have postponed the deal but decided to pursue the alternative instead.
"A vast part of the investors are disappointed. We understand that, and we are also disappointed that the original offer didn't go through," said Munck.
"People had expected a payout of 71 crowns, they won't get that. Instead, they will get an extraordinary dividend by autumn at some point," he said, without giving a figure for the payout.
The hope is that the new deal, which has been approved by Opera's board of directors, will close late in the third quarter. It is expected the proceeds will be used for a distribution to shareholders, share buyback and debt repayment.
"Since it will not repay all its net debt, but maybe reduce net debt by around half ... the expected distribution of one time dividends and share buy backs is likely to be between 25-30 crowns per share," Norne Securities analyst Karl-Johan Molnes said.
Qihoo and the Kunqi consortium, which also includes Golden Brick Silk Road (Shenzhen) Equity Investment Fund and its Yonglian Investment affiliate, declined to comment. Chinese regulators did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Kremlin says concerned by instability in Turkey, Armenia and Kazakhstan
MOSCOW, July 18 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Monday it was concerned by instability along Russia's borders following a failed coup attempt in Turkey, a hostage taking drama in Armenia and an attack by suspected Islamist gunmen on security forces in Kazakhstan.
"Certainly, this turbulence along our borders is a cause of concern," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters. "Taking into account the information which we get, appropriate (security) measures are being taken."
Kazakhstan calls security council meeting after suspected Islamist shootings
ALMATY, July 18 (Reuters) - Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, convened an emergency meeting of the Central Asian nation's Security Council on Monday, his office said, after gunmen attacked police and security forces in Almaty, killing four people.
Merkel tells Erdogan death penalty not compatible with EU membership
By Michael Nienaber and Andrea Shalal
BERLIN, July 18 (Reuters) - Turkey cannot join the European Union if it reinstates the death penalty, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in a telephone call on Monday, a German spokeswoman said.
Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing it to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then.
With pro-government protesters demanding that the coup leaders be executed, Erdogan said on Sunday there could be no delay in using capital punishment and the government would discuss it with opposition parties.
Merkel told Erdogan on the phone that the European Union and Germany vehemently oppose the reinstatement of the death penalty and that such a step is "in no way compatible" with Ankara's goal of EU membership, a Berlin government spokeswoman said.
"The chancellor also urged the president to abide by the principles of proportionality and rule of law in the Turkish state's response (to the coup attempt)," she added. "The recent wave of arrests and dismissals in Turkey are a matter for grave concern."
Merkel's comments were echoed by Foreign Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who told reporters in Brussels that Germany expected Turkey to deal with those responsible for the attempted coup in line with the rule of law.
"Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU," Steinmeier said.
Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference earlier on Monday that Germany and the EU categorically reject the death penalty.
"A country that has the death penalty can't be a member of the European Union and the introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would therefore mean the end of accession negotiations," Seibert said.
Even before the coup attempt, many EU states were not eager to see such a large, mostly Muslim country as a member, and were concerned that Ankara's record on basic freedoms had gone into reverse in recent years.
Turkey widened the crackdown on suspected supporters of the coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000.
German officials said they had seen no evidence of any conspiracy in the events beyond an effort by parts of the Turkish military to seize control of the government.
EU's Moscovici urges Greece to stick to bailout reforms
ATHENS, July 18 (Reuters) - Greece needs to stick to reforms to regain credibility and earn further debt relief, EU Economic Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said during a visit to Athens on Monday.
Moscovici said his visit was "a message of trust", noting that Athens had made significant progress in reforming its economy, and that the possibility of leaving the euro zone currency was no longer on the table.
"It is time for normality, it is time for stability, it is time for implementation and it is time for investment," Moscovici said after meeting Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
"That doesn't mean that everything is done. We still have a way to go and there are discussions taking place and the need to complete some milestones for the first review and also to discuss the so-called second review."
Greece's second bailout review, which includes unpopular labour reforms, is expected to begin in the autumn.
Moscovici said Greece should work closely with its international lenders -- the European Union and the International Monetary Fund -- and show ownership of the reforms prescribed in its third international bailout, for Europe to "be in a very good position to discuss, especially with the IMF, debt relief measures".
Brexit spurs 10 London start-ups to enquire about move to Berlin
By Caroline Copley
BERLIN, July 18 (Reuters) - Ten London start-ups have made enquires about moving to Berlin since Britain voted to leave the European Union, business development group Berlin Partner said on Monday.
The start-ups employ between 10-18 people each and are interested in issues such as the price per square metre of commercial property, the labour market situation and the availability of accommodation, Berlin Partner Director Stefan Franzke said.
"The most concrete enquiries are coming from London fintechs (financial technology firms). They are considering a move to Berlin so as not to lose access to the European single market," Franzke told a news conference.
Along with other European cities, Berlin is jostling for a piece of London's fintech industry and has stepped up efforts to promote the German capital as an affordable and creative alternative to other centres.
Berlin's Senator for Economics, Technology and Research Cornelia Yzer has sent hundreds of letters to British firms and has travelled to London Fintech Week to lobby start-up founders.
Berlin Partner has also launched a website in English containing information about how to set up a business here and will open a pop-up lab in London in October to try and woo more companies.
Berlin attracted almost 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) in venture capital investment in start-ups in 2014, outpacing London, Ernst and Young said in a report last year.
The German capital has around 100 fintech start-ups, including German mobile financial services firm Number26. Affordable living costs, access to talent and the widespread use of English are among its advantages, Franzke said.
He said he expected Berlin to get enquiries not just from UK-based firms but also from foreign start-ups that were originally interested in London but were now looking elsewhere.
Nonetheless, the competition with rival cities that are all hungry to host fintech firms will be tough. Franzke says he sees Amsterdam - which used to be home to a number of global banks and has fast data connections - as Berlin's biggest competitor.
Kazakhstan detains second suspect over Almaty shooting
ALMATY, July 18 (Reuters) - Kazakh police have detained a second person suspected of being linked to the deadly shooting in the Central Asian nation's biggest city on Monday, the Interior Ministry said.
Taiwan's Merry Electronic and China's Luxshare agree alternative tie-up
TAIPEI, July 18 (Reuters) - Taiwanese micro-audio specialist Merry Electronics and China's Luxshare Precision Industry Co have agreed a potential 600 million yuan ($90 million) tie-up less than a month after a separate deal between the pair had been blocked.
Shenzhen-listed Luxshare Precision plans to invest 400 million yuan to 600 million yuan for a 40 percent to 60 percent stake in Merry's manufacturing unit in Suzhou, China, the companies announced on Monday.
The move follows swiftly on the heels of a rejection by Taiwan regulators of a plan by Luxshare Precision's Hong Kong unit to take a 25.4 percent stake in Merry for T$3.78 billion ($118 million).
Taiwan regulates China-related investments in the island's technology industry very carefully, given that the sector is a mainstay of the economy, with Taiwan's new government more wary of its neighbour than the previous government.
"We have not given up on the previous investment plan," Merry Electronics spokesman Allen Huang told reporters, adding that the new plan agreed in a letter of intent is aimed at giving both companies a better chance at clinching future business.
The new investment plan will expand capacity at the Suzhou plant, which mainly produces audio speakers, Huang said.
Luxshare Precision said the investment will increase the competitiveness of both companies in the audio electronics market. It made no mention of the previous plan to take a stake in the parent company.
Huang also said that the new deal is unlikely to require approval from Taiwan regulators because no capital in entering or leaving Taiwan via the investment into the Suzhou plant, but that the company will communicate with regulators on the deal.
Merry Electronics makes headsets, speakers, amplifiers and other small acoustic devices. ($1 = 6.7017 Chinese yuan renminbi) ($1 = 31.9880 Taiwan dollars)
Sri Lanka detains ex-leader's brother on suspicion over funds
COLOMBO, July 18 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan financial crime police arrested on Monday a brother of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa for a third time over suspicion of state fund misappropriation when he was economic development minister, a lawyer said.
Rajapaksa's younger brother, Basil, is on bail after being arrested twice for alleged misappropriation of state funds and a land deal allegedly involving money laundering. Court hearings into the two cases are going on.
He has denied any wrongdoing.
Sri Lanka's new president, Maithripala Sirisena, faces pressure to act on allegations of corruption dating back to the Rajapaksa era, especially from civil society organisations who backed his successful bid to oust Rajapaksa last year.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president for a decade until January 2015 and is now an opposition legislator, is popular among many ethnic majority Sinhala Buddhists who credit him with ending a 26-year-war against ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009. He is trying to rally opposition to the current government with the help of Basil.
Basil Rajapaksa's lawyer, Jayantha Weerasinghe, told Reuters his client was remanded in custody until Aug. 1 after police took him to court over the supply of building materials to district councils when he was a minister.
"We pointed out that nothing is irregular about this transaction. But irrespective of what we said, he was remanded," Weerasinghe said.
Neither Basil Rajapaksa nor his family members were immediately available for comment.
Several members of the Rajapaksa family are facing police investigations for alleged financial crimes. They include Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brothers Basil and Gotabaya.
Mahinda Rajapaksa's eldest son, Namal Rajapaksa, who is also a member of parliament, was released by a court on bail on Monday, media reported.
He was arrested on July 11 for suspected misappropriation of funds in a high-end apartment project.
Bangladesh charges 38 with murder over 2013 garment factory collapse
DHAKA, July 18 (Reuters) - A court in Bangladesh on Monday formally charged 38 people with murder in connection with the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building which killed 1,135 people in the country's worst industrial disaster.
Forty-one defendants in total face charges over the collapse of the complex, which housed five garment factories supplying global brands. Plaza owner Sohel Rana is the principal accused.
Public Prosecutor Abdul Mannan said 38 had been charged with murder while three had been charged with helping Rana to flee.
Of the 41 charged, 35, including Rana, who is being held on remand, appeared before the court and pleaded not guilty, Mannan told reporters.
The other six will be tried as fugitives from justice.
The collapse of the complex, built on swampy ground outside the capital Dhaka, sparked demands for greater safety in the world's second-largest exporter of readymade garments and put pressure on companies buying clothing from Bangladesh to act.
The duty-free access offered by Western nations and low wages for its workers helped turn Bangladesh's garment exports into an industry with $28 billion in annual revenue.
Vietnam says Chinese reports of PM backing Beijing stance 'untruthful'
HANOI, July 18 (Reuters) - Vietnam dismissed as "untruthful" reports carried in Chinese state media that said its prime minister respected China's stance on an arbitration ruling over the South China Sea, the latest sign of regional discord over the landmark verdict.
China has refused to recognise last week's ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague, which invalidated its vast claims in the South China Sea. China has said its position has support from numerous countries and has responded with fury to western calls for it to abide by the decision.
Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc met Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on the sidelines of a summit of Asian and European leaders in Ulanbaatar last week.
The Vietnamese government's news website said on Monday articles by several Chinese outlets, which quoted Phuc as telling Li that Vietnam respected China's stance and was willing to promote bilateral talks, were incorrect.
The reports backed up a statement by China's Foreign Ministry on Thursday, which also quoted Phuc saying Vietnam "respect's China's position" on the arbitration.
The Vietnamese report reeled off a list of points it said Phuc did raise in the meeting. It did not clarify what Vietnam's position on the verdict was.
Kenyan court charges 4 police officers with murder of rights lawyer, client, driver
NAIROBI, July 18 (Reuters) - A Kenyan high court charged four police officers on Monday with murder over what human rights groups say were the extra-judicial killings of an activist lawyer, his client and their driver in late June.
Rights groups said they believed foul play was behind the deaths of the three and demanded an investigation into that and other allegations of police corruption and heavy-handed tactics.
The four defendants - Frederick Leliman, Leonard Maina, Stephen Morogo and Silvia Wanjohi - pleaded not guilty on Monday, court documents showed.
They are accused of killing rights lawyer Willie Kimani and his client Josephat Mwendwa, and their taxi driver Joseph Muiruri on June 23. The three disappeared after Kimani and Mwendwa made a court appearance.
Kimani and Mwendwa had filed a complaint alleging that Mwendwa had been shot and injured by police in April.
After lodging the complaint, Mwendwa was charged with a range of offences, including possessing drugs and resisting arrest, according to rights activists.
The four police officers were remanded in custody until Aug. 16 when they are to reappear in court and allowed to apply for bail.
The East African country's police force denies being involved in extra-judicial killings, saying it investigates and prosecutes any officers suspected of breaking the law.
Kimani worked for the U.S.-based International Justice Mission rights group and Muiruri was one of its trusted drivers.
Russia says catches OSCE employee spying for Ukraine
MOSCOW, July 18 (Reuters) - Russia's FSB security service said on Monday it had caught an employee of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe spying for Ukraine by passing on sensitive military information about pro-Kremlin separatists.
The OSCE is monitoring a fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces still regularly exchange fire.
Its opinion counts, not least because German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she wants Russia to do more to resolve the crisis before the European Union considers whether to lift sanctions imposed on Moscow over its actions in Ukraine.
The FSB said in a statement it had clear evidence that Ukraine's SBU intelligence service was illegally using the OSCE to gather military information.
It said an OSCE translator, Artyom Shestakov, a Ukrainian national, had been recruited by the SBU and had passed on information about the movements of military convoys, troop numbers, and the mobile phone numbers of military commanders.
In late 2015, it said he had obtained information about a local pro-Russian Cossack leader who was later killed by the Ukrainian intelligence services.
Shestakov had been detained on Russian soil, the FSB said, and had confessed to spying. He was allowed to return to Ukraine because the FSB said his actions had not harmed Russia's own national security, but was banned from entering Russia, it said.
The SBU declined to comment.
The OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine issued a statement via social media, saying it was able to confirm that one of its local employees in eastern Ukraine was temporarily on leave and unavailable for comment.
Morocco asks to rejoin African Union as seeks backing over Western Sahara
By Aziz El Yaakoubi
RABAT, July 18 (Reuters) - Morocco has asked the African Union to readmit it to an organisation it left 32 years ago, as it seeks support for its plan to offer autonomy to the disputed territory of Western Sahara while keeping it under Moroccan sovereignty.
Morocco abandoned its seat in 1984 when the AU recognised the breakaway Western Sahara republic.
"It has been a long time that our friends have been asking Morocco to take back its seat in its natural institutional place, and now the time has come," Morocco's King Mohammed said in a letter to the AU, according to state news agency MAP.
The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was declared by the Polisario Front independence movement in the 1970s in the sparsely populated stretch of desert that was formerly a Spanish protectorate.
Morocco says at least 36 of the 54 AU member countries do not acknowledge the territory as a separate state and it is time to withdraw its recongition. None of the Western powers, nor the United Nations recognise the Sahrawi republic.
But it is unclear if powerful AU members including Algeria and South Africa, which have expressed support to hold a referendum of the people of Western Sahara on their sovereignty, would accept Morocco's request.
The AU chairman, Chadian President Idriss Deby, said he would like to see Morocco return to the regional body.
"Morocco has the right and the obligation to return to its great family when and how it wants," Deby told reporters on the margins of an AU summit in Kigali.
"Now I do not know if it (Morocco) posed conditions or not, and that is not important," he added.
Morocco has controlled most of the territory since 1975. The area has offshore fishing, phosphate reserves and oilfield potential. Moroccan officials visited Algiers, Abuja and Nairobi last week as the country seeks support for its autonomy proposal.
Rabat is also in talks with the United Nations about letting civilian staff of the Western Sahara peacekeeping mission MINURSO back into the country, after expelling them earlier this year when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon used the word "occupation" to describe its 1975 annexation of the territory.
The U.N. mission was formed more than 20 years ago ahead of an expected referendum on the Western Sahara's political future that has never taken place.
EU grants additional 500 mln euros to farmers
BRUSSELS/PARIS, July 18 (Reuters) - The European Union will grant an additional 500 million euros ($553 million) to EU farmers struggling with a long-running crisis linked to low prices, notably in the dairy sector where it aims to reverse a boom in milk output after the scrapping of production quotas.
European milk farmers have been struggling with a slump in prices fuelled by the ending of EU quotas last year, a Russian import ban on Western food products and weak Chinese dairy import.
The Commission's package includes 150 million euros of subsidies to reduce milk output and 350 million that would come on top of aid granted by member states, thus potentially doubling the support being provided to farmers, it said.
EU weighted raw milk prices have continued to fall since the start of the year and are now down 14.2 percent on June last year, Commission data showed.
German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt welcomed the measure as he arrived at the EU Agriculture Council where the Commission officially presented its plan.
"Today is a good day for European and German agriculture," Schmidt told reporters when he arrived at the Council, noting that the package dealt with both the issue of volume discipline and the outlook for the milk market.
Germany will be the biggest beneficiary of the 350 million euros of conditional aid aimed at securing market stability by reducing output, with 58 million euros, the Commission said.
France will follow at 50 million euros while the UK would come third at 30 million euros (25 million pounds).
"Better late than never," French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll told reporters. "If we had done this before we would certainly have had less problems."
The crises in the livestock and milk sectors had prompted a wave of protests in France, both last year and again this year.
The EU executive had granted a package of 500 million euros in September, targeting mainly cash-flow difficulties and market stabilisation, as well as a plan in March allowing producers to freeze milk output, relaxing EU limits on subsidies and effectively suspending EU rules on fair competition.
But both plans failed to prevent one of the worst crises the sector has ever faced.
Other technical adjustments in the Commission's latest support package included an extension of public and private storage aid for skimmed milk powder.
Some measures also targeted livestock farmers, which have also suffered from low prices, notably pig farmers, and the fruit and vegetable sector.
Afghan forces see hopeful signs as air strikes hit Taliban
By Hamid Shalizi and James Mackenzie
KABUL, July 18 (Reuters) - A combination of airstrikes and a Taliban apparently still adapting to its new leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada has given a lift to Afghan forces that had braced for heavy fighting at the start of summer.
After 15 years of war, nobody believes a lull in fighting seen over the past few weeks is a decisive shift in the conflict. Officials even admit to some surprise at the problems facing the Taliban, which launched its annual spring offensive in April promising major attacks across the country.
The insurgents started their spring offensive in April with a major push to take Kunduz, the strategic northern city its fighters briefly seized last year. A bumper opium crop promised to swell the coffers of the insurgents who control much of the trade, allowing them to pay for more fighters and equipment.
But the assault on Kunduz city was beaten back and fighting has eased in other key regions including the southern province of Helmand, where government forces were holding on in a few district centres after heavy fighting in the winter.
A Taliban drive to cut off the main highway linking the southern provinces of Uruzgan and Kandahar, which led to fierce fighting in May, was also quelled and Afghan government forces backed by U.S. air power have gone on the attack in Kandahar.
Haibatullah, a hardline cleric who took over after his predecessor Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike in May, is respected in the movement for his religious credentials. But Afghan and Western officials say he does not appear to have Mansour's administrative ability.
At the same time, the movement's wider leadership has suffered, with 45 senior figures, including key commanders in Helmand, Ghazni, Kunduz and Kandahar killed over the past six months, according to information from the interior ministry.
"Last year, we were more in active defence mode and the enemies were attacking us, but this year we are after them," said Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi.
With U.S. commanders free to step up air strikes against the Taliban since President Barack Obama gave them broader powers in June, operations are being conducted "almost daily", the top NATO commander Gen. John Nicholson said last week.
Afghanistan's own special forces and its fledgling airforce, including eight A-29 jets, have also played a growing role in hitting the Taliban forces and chains of command.
The Taliban have been scornful of claims of coalition success, issuing a statement last week dismissing the "futile" change to U.S. rules of engagement.
But Mohammad Rasoul Zazai, spokesman for the 215th Maiwand army corps in Helmand, said insurgents were avoiding large formations and were patrolling only in small groups of 10 or 15.
"The Taliban are no longer in a position to attack in large numbers," he said.
TALIBAN ON THE DEFENCE
Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, spokesman for the NATO-led Resolute Support mission, said there was "cautious optimism" amid signs the Afghan army had improved over the winter as well as at the impact of the U.S. airstrikes in recent weeks.
"It could change tomorrow, but at this point we believe that the Afghans are successfully on the offence," he said.
Earlier this year, coalition officials estimated the Taliban controlled as much as six percent of Afghan territory but threatened up to a third of the country.
However while they still threaten many provincial areas, they do not appear to have made substantial gains.
"It was clear from the outset that they wanted to seize a provincial capital as well as multiple district capitals and they have not done that," Cleveland said.
Interior ministry figures support the impression of a less active Taliban in recent weeks, but officials stress the change is relative and heavy fighting continues in many regions.
Since the start of the Persian new year on March 21, the Taliban have conducted 1,024 attacks, compared with 1,309 in the same period last year, according to interior ministry figures. Bomb blasts were down at 599 compared to 948 last year and there were four complex attacks against 11 last year.
Afghan and Western security officials believe the Taliban may also be facing financial problems that have limited the effectiveness of their fighters.
In particular, the fact that Haibatullah is a member of the Noorzai tribe, rather than Mansour's Ishaqzai tribe believed to control much of the opium trade, has made it harder to control the flow of drug money from Helmand and other areas, they say.
According to an Afghan security report seen by Reuters, many mid-level Taliban commanders are no longer sending opium levies directly to the leadership council since the death of Mansour and infighting over drug revenue has become an almost daily occurrence in some areas
Taliban commanders reject such an assessment however and dismiss suggestions of leadership problems.
"Our struggle is mainly on religious values and whoever commands, we obey them and respect them," said Mullah Shaheen Sangarmal, a senior Taliban commander in eastern Afghanistan. "All leaders cannot be the same, some have military expertise, others are better in politics."
German formin: Death penalty would prevent Turkish EU membership
BRUSSELS, July 18 (Reuters) - Any move by Turkey to reinstate the death penalty after the failed military coup would derail its efforts to join the European Union, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Brussels on Monday.
"Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU," Steinmeier told reporters. He said Germany expected Turkey to deal with those responsible for the attempted coup in line with the rule of law.
Turkey decided to abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing Ankara to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then.
Bangladesh charges 38 with murder over 2013 garment factory collapse
By Ruma Paul
DHAKA, July 18 (Reuters) - A court in Bangladesh formally charged 38 people with murder on Monday in connection with the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building which killed 1,135 people in the country's worst industrial disaster.
A total of 41 defendants face charges over the collapse of the complex, which housed five garment factories supplying global brands. Plaza owner Sohel Rana is the principal accused.
Public Prosecutor Abdul Mannan said 38 people had been charged with murder while three were charged with helping Rana to flee after the incident. Rana was arrested after a four-day manhunt, apparently trying to flee across the border to India.
Of the 41 people charged, 35, including Rana, appeared before the court and pleaded not guilty, Mannan told reporters. The other six are fugitives and will be tried in absentia.
If convicted, defendants could face the death penalty.
The collapse of the complex, built on swampy ground outside the capital Dhaka, sparked demands for greater safety in the world's second-largest exporter of readymade garments and put pressure on companies buying clothing from Bangladesh to act.
Duty-free access to Western markets and low wages for its workers helped turn Bangladesh's garment exports into a $28 billion-a-year industry that is the economic lifeblood of the country of 160 million people.
The minimum monthly wage for garment workers in Bangladesh is $68, compared with about $280 in mainland China, which remains the world's biggest clothes exporter.
The Rana Plaza tragedy prompted safety checks that led to many factory closures and the loss of exports and jobs but the industry had begun to recover strongly despite sporadic attacks in Bangladesh claimed by Islamic State and al Qaeda. These have included murders of liberals, gay people, foreigners and members of religious minorities.
But a targeted attack on a restaurant in Dhaka on July 1 that claimed the lives of 20 people including 18 foreigners, many of whom worked in the garment business, could pose a fresh threat to the industry.
Islamic State said it was responsible for one of the most brazen attacks in the South Asian nation's history, although that claim has yet to be confirmed.
UN says Iraq's battle of Mosul may cost $2 bln in aid
By Tom Miles
GENEVA, July 18 (Reuters) - An expected Iraqi assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul is likely to cause mass civilian casualties and force hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, the United Nations said on Monday.
It appealed for funds to deal with the humanitarian crisis, saying it would cost $284 million to prepare the necessary aid and up to $1.8 billion to deal with the aftermath.
"The impact of the Mosul military campaign on civilians will be devastating," the U.N. said in the summary of its Iraq humanitarian response plan.
"Mass casualties among civilians are likely and families trying to flee areas controlled by ISIL (Islamic State) are expected to be at extreme risk," it said.
Large-scale displacement of people was expected when Mosul city itself came under attack, it said. Between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people are estimated to live in the city.
"In a worst case, all or the majority of these people will require life-saving assistance and protection," it said.
Difficulties will include operating close to the Syrian border and the need to support civilians who escape across the frontline, transport them hundreds of kilometres to safety, and house and protect them in hundreds of camps, transit centres and reception sites.
In the best case scenario, 300,000 people will be displaced for three months, requiring an aid budget of $143 million. The worst case would be 1 million displaced for a year, meaning a $1.8 billion cost.
In any case, aid agencies need two and a half months of lead time and $284 million before the assault on Mosul starts. If funding comes too late, they will be unable to respond appropriately, the U.N. document said.
Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told Reuters last month that at least 430,000 more people could be displaced this year in Anbar, Iraq's desert province stretching west from Falluja to the Syrian border.
The United Nations asked for $861 million in January this year for Iraq, the minimum needed to keep people alive, knowing that it was unlikely to get the $4.5 billion needed to offer 10 million Iraqis international standards of care, the document said.
However, less than 40 percent of that appeal has been received, stopping 99 frontline aid programmes and hindering assistance for 85,000 people who have fled from Falluja.
Indonesia's most wanted extremist has been killed in a gunbattle with security forces.
Santoso, who was at the 'symbolic heart' of the Indonesian jihadi movement, was shot dead alongside another militant, the government said.
The death of IS supporter Santoso, who was slapped by the United States with an official terrorist designation, is a victory for President Joko Widodo, who made capturing him a top security priority.
Presidential spokesman Johan Budi said on Monday that Santoso was believed to be one of two militants killed in an exchange of fire with police on Sulawesi island, where he was thought to be hiding.
One of the world's most wanted IS terrorists, Santoso, has been killed in a gun battle with security forces in Indonesia, police have said
'One of the people killed bore resemblance to Santoso, and the body is being transported for identification by the family,' Budi said via telephone. Santoso's age was not known.
He had been hunted by Indonesian security forces for several years and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
His armed faction has attracted militants from other parts of Indonesia and several from the Uighur minority group in China's restive Xinjiang province.
Indonesia deployed thousands of police and military officials to scour the jungles of Sulawesi where Santoso and dozens of associates were believed to be holed up.
Police carry a body bag at a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight between suspected Muslim extremists
Santoso was from the most populous Indonesian island, Java.
In March, the United States imposed a special terrorist designation on Santoso, blocking any U.S. assets he might have, banning dealings with him by Americans and opening the way for U.S. law-enforcement action against him.
The U.S. State Department said Santoso led the Mujahidin Indonesia Timur (MIT) that had carried out numerous killings and kidnappings in Indonesia over the past few years.
Police guard a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight with suspected Muslim extremists in the nearby village of Tambarana
Its a reasonable question to ask because according to his resume, Katanacho worked at Bethlehem Bible College between 2007 and 2015, serving as the schools academic dean and as professor of biblical studies at the school. These are not the type of jobs one can do via Skype or Facetime, indicating that Katanacho passed through Israeli checkpoints in and out of the West Bank on a regular basis. If he was violating the law by speaking at the Christ at the Checkpoint in 2010, then it was not a one-time event, but something that happened a lot, hundreds if not thousands of times.
Either Israeli security officials are fundamentally incompetent, or there was a conscious, if implicit decision to let him through. Knowledgeable observers would go with the latter assessment.
To understand how this could be its important to know some background about the regulations prohibiting Israeli citizens from entering areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Here is how the Times of Israel reported on the issue after two Israeli journalists were arrested from violating the law:
Israeli citizens are not permitted to enter Area A,? areas in the West Bank under Palestinian security control, without a permit from the army. The rules were instituted in the wake of the violence of the Second Intifada in 2000.
Snapshots has made some inquiries and has learned that Israeli officials, reasonably enough, are more concerned about violence against Israeli Jews in the West Bank than it is Israeli Arabs, because Israeli Jews are much more likely to be targets of violence than Arabs. (Remember, the prohibition against travel into the West Bank was imposed in 2000 in response to the violence against Israelis during the Second Intifada violence which was mostly directed at Israeli Jews, not Israeli Arabs like Katanacho.)
As a result, the IDF, which controls passage into and out of the West Bank, will either grant a permit to an Israeli Arab allowing passage or even turn a blind eye to Israeli Arabs traveling into the area. They bend the law on this issue,? one source reported, But the law is the same.?
It stands to reason that Katanacho either had official sanction to travel into the West Bank or some sort of informal customary arrangement had been established allowing him to pass back and forth between Israel and the West Bank so he could do his job.
Given his responsibilities at Bethlehem Bible College, that seems like a reasonable and humane decision on the part of the Israeli officials, one that leads in the direction of establishing a badly needed modus vivendi between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
How does Katanacho respond to this? By mischaracterizing the law against Israeli citizens traveling into the West Bank as part of a scheme to keep Palestinians separated from one another, when in fact it was imposed to save the lives of Israeli Jews.
The upshot is that Katanacho is not telling the whole story. One way or the other, Israeli officials allowed him to pass into and out of the West Bank on a regular basis over several years. But instead of acknowledging the apparent willingness of Israeli security officials to cut him (and his employer Bethlehem Bible College) some slack, he used his presence in the West Bank to portray Israel in an unduly harsh light.
Note: On Friday, July 16, CAMERA sent emails to Rev. Dr. Katanacho asking for clarification about his statement, but so far, has gotten no response.
Update (July 18, 2016, 4:18 p.m.)
One of our correspondents has alerted Snapshots to a number of articles that indicate that, Israel has, on occasions, allowed Israeli Arabs into the West Bank.
In 2008, Ynet reported the following:
Israel began on Monday to allow its Arab citizens into the West Bank city of Jenin to visit relatives and shop for the first time since the start of a Palestinian uprising in 2000, Palestinian officials said. The move follows the deployment of Palestinian security forces in the city in a campaign that Washington sees as a chance for Palestinian security forces to show they can rein in militants an Israeli demand for Palestinian statehood. The move could also provide a badly needed economic boost to Jenin.
Haaretz also covered this story.
This bit of information indicates two things. First, Yohanna Katanacho was clearly not telling the full story when he said it was against the law for Israeli Arabs to visit the West Bank. There are exceptions. Secondly, it reveals that the restrictions were imposed to protect the lives of Israeli Jews, not to separate Israeli Arabs in Israel from their friends and relatives in the West Bank.
Indonesia's Indorama signs $4.5 bln of Algerian phosphate deals
ALGIERS, July 18 (Reuters) - Algeria signed deals with Indonesia's Indorama Corporation on Monday to develop a phosphate mine and build two plants to process the crop nutrient in the North African country at a total expected cost of $4.5 billion.
The contracts are part of steps to develop Algeria's long-neglected mining sector and diversify the OPEC member country's economy away from oil and gas, after a sharp fall in energy earnings.
Indorama signed the deals with state-owned phosphate companies Asmidal and Manal. They include a joint venture between Indorama and Manal to develop a new phosphate mine in the eastern province of Tebessa.
Indorama, Asmidal and Manal will build a phosphate processing plant in Souk Ahras, near the Tunisian border, to produce phosphoric acid and di-ammonium phosphate (DAP).
The second plant will be set up near the coastal town of Skikda by Indorama and Asmidal to process natural gas and produce ammonia, technical ammonium nitrate (TAN) and calcium ammonium nitrate (CAN).
Indorama Corporation will hold a 49 percent stake in those projects, with the Algerian partners owning the rest, Industry and Mines Minister Abdesselam Bouchouareb said at the signing ceremony.
He did not give details on production but said completion of the projects was due in 2019, when Algerian phosphate output is expected to reach 10 million tonnes a year from 1 million tonnes now.
"This is the right way to diversify our economy. We need to find sources of financing," he said.
Oil and gas currently account for 95 percent of Algeria's export revenues and 60 percent of the state budget.
EU states want Brexit process soon, defend free movement
By Ines Kagubare
BRUSSELS, July 18 (Reuters) - European Union states are broadly united in calling for Britain to quickly launch formal negotiations on leaving, and in rejecting new limits on migration within the bloc, a survey by Reuters has found.
The Brussels missions of 18 of the 27 other EU member states responded to questions from Reuters that included when Britain should formally notify the Union of its exit plan and whether the Union should consider further limits on the free migration of workers, which was seen a key factor in the Brexit vote.
1. Would you welcome Britain deciding to stay in the EU?
Most found the question too speculative and dependent on UK internal politics for them to answer. Of the 18, five clearly said they would be pleased if Britain did a U-turn. No state said it would definitely now prefer Britain to leave the EU.
A Lithuanian spokeswoman noted President Dalia Grybauskaite was asked what she would say if the British government did not launch the exit procedure: "Welcome back," was her reply.
But an Austrian official summed up the general assumption: "There was a referendum and we assume there will be a Brexit."
2. When should Britain formally notify the EU that it is leaving, triggering the two-year exit process under Article 50?
"As soon as possible," was the reply of 13 out of 18, but few were willing to be more specific about how long that would be. Finland spoke of September. Others think by the end of the year.
A German spokesman was typical in this response, stressing a need to end uncertainty: "Insecurity is bad for the market."
Two countries declined to answer.
Three, Hungary, Poland and Greece, voiced the clearest preference for not rushing.
Hungary's mission said: "There is no rush in regard to the notification." Poland said: "We do not want to rush the UK to notify its intention to leave." A Greek spokesman said: "A good and beneficial Brexit agreement is more important than timing."
3. Should the EU consider more limits on free movement?
Of the 18, 15 said no and three -- Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland -- did not reply directly to the question.
Bulgaria's spokeswoman summed up the general view: "Free movement is a fundamental EU value that we must guard strongly."
Suspected Islamist militant kills five in Kazakhstan
By Mariya Gordeyeva and Olzhas Auyezov
ALMATY, July 18 (Reuters) - A lone gunman with Islamist links killed at least three policemen and two civilians in Kazakhstan's financial capital Almaty on Monday, senior security officials said, the second such attack in less than two months.
Police detained the attacker, identified as 26-year-old Ruslan Kulikbayev, in a shootout on a busy central street after he had gone on the rampage, attacking a police station and an office belonging to the KNB security service.
Kulikbayev had been imprisoned before for robbery and illegally possessing weapons and had "became close to Salafists" in prison, KNB security service head Vladimir Zhumakanov told a Security Council meeting.
Salafists adhere to an ultra-conservative form of Islam.
The shootings will stoke fears of a growing Islamist threat to the oil-producing nation of 18 million people. Last month, men the authorities said were Islamic State sympathisers attacked gun stores and a military facility, killing seven.
Thousands of nationals from Central Asian nations are known to be fighting alongside Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, and the authorities have long warned they could return and carry out attacks on home soil.
Kazakhstan is far more prosperous than its post-Soviet neighbours and has been ruled with a firm hand by President Nursultan Nazarbayev since 1989.
But the fall in global oil prices has hit its economy hard and there have been rare outbreaks of violence and public protests since April, initially caused by discontent over proposed land reforms but swiftly attracting others unhappy about wider issues.
Interior Minister Kalmukhanbet Kasymov told the same Security Council meeting that police had first believed that the attacker had accomplices, but had later learnt that another man they had detained was driving a car under duress at gunpoint.
Nazarbayev, who chaired the meeting, called the attacks a terrorist act and ordered tighter security in public areas.
Five witnesses told Reuters they had heard gunshots in three parts of Almaty, the mainly Muslim nation's largest city.
"We saw a man with a rifle," one shop worker said by phone. Footage uploaded to the Internet showed a man pointing an assault rifle at a car he tried and failed to stop.
Interior Minister Kasymov said the attacker had shot a policeman guarding a police station, taken his automatic rifle and then opened fire at others, killing one civilian and wounding several policemen.
Kulikbayev then hijacked a car and went to a KNB building where he shot two more policemen. He hijacked another car, according to Kasymov, before engaging police in the final shootout after which he was captured.
Kasymov said the gunman had also killed a woman the previous night.
A spokeswoman for the state anti-terrorist centre told reporters seven people had been wounded in the shooting spree.
Iran's president supports Turkish counterpart in phone call after failed coup
DUBAI, July 18 (Reuters) - Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday he had spoken with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan to express his happiness at the return of security to Turkey after a failed military coup.
"In a phone call with the Turkish president, (I said) we are happy that stability and security have returned to Turkey today," Rouhani said on his Twitter account.
Bahrain slams UK, U.S. "interference" over party dissolution
DUBAI, July 18 (Reuters) - U.S. ally Bahrain on Monday dismissed as "unacceptable interference" statements by Britain and the United States criticising its decision to dissolve the main Shi'ite Muslim opposition party on Sunday in a widening crackdown on dissent.
Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, said that a court's decision to dissolve the al-Wefaq opposition party, accused of helping foster violence and terrorism, was "just" and "transparent", state news agency BNA reported.
"Bahrain expresses its deep regret at the statements from the British foreign secretary and U.S. State Department and considers them as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs," said BNA.
Close ally Britain expressed deep concern at Sunday's ruling and a statement by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Bahrain to guarantee political freedoms for all its citizens.
The State Department said the government's recent steps to "suppress nonviolent opposition" undermined Bahrain's and the region's stability, and strained America's partnership with its Gulf ally.
Bahrain said it wanted to take into account the interests of its allies and partners to preserve "distinctive and historical relations" with them.
The Gulf country 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 and arresting prominent activist Nabeel Rajab.
The country has been gripped by political tension since 2011, with Shi'ites complaining of discrimination and demanding reforms that would give them a bigger say in government affairs.
Azeri state oil fund's assets up 4.6 pct in H1 to $35.1 bln by July 1
BAKU, July 18 (Reuters) - The assets of Azeri state oil fund SOFAZ grew by 4.6 percent to $35.1 billion in the first six months of this year, the fund said on Monday.
SOFAZ holds proceeds from oil contracts, oil and gas sales, transit fees and other revenue. It uses income from investments to pay for social spending and infrastructure projects.
SOFAZ revenues reached 3.99 billion manats ($2.6 billion) in the first half of 2016, while its expenditures totalled 2.26 billion manats, the fund said in a statement. SOFAZ assets dropped by 9.5 percent year-on-year in 2015 to $33.57 billion.
The fund's spending in 2016 is forecast at 10.7 billion manats, with revenues at 4.6 billion manats.
The Caucasus nation of 9 million people relies on oil and gas exports for about 75 percent of its revenues, but the oil price slump has triggered a plunge in the manat.
SOFAZ sells dollars on the foreign exchange market to help prop up the manat.
Utah reports Zika infection in person who cared for patient with virus
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO, July 18 (Reuters) - Utah health officials on Monday said a caregiver of an elderly patient from Utah who died while infected with Zika has tested positive for the virus, they said in a statement.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that a person who helped care for the individual who died last month while infected with Zika has now contracted the virus, Utah officials said.
They said the infected caregiver had not had any recent travel to an area where the Zika virus is being transmitted nor had the person had sex with an infected individual. Utah officials are still investigating how the person became infected.
Gary Edwards, director of the Salt Lake County Health Department, said the infected individual is a family contact of the individual who passed away.
Edwards would not say how old the family contact was or release the person's gender.
"We know that the patient had contact with the deceased patient while the deceased patient was very ill. The exact nature of that contact, we are still investigating," he said.
Edwards said the cause of the deceased person's death is still under investigation, but he said the individual was infected with Zika at the time of death and officials believe the virus was a contributing factor.
"What makes this case unique is the individual does not have any of the known risk factors we have seen with Zika virus," said Tom Hudachko, director of communications for the Utah Department of Health.
Hudachko said state officials are not aware of any mosquitoes known to carry the Zika virus within Utah. He said there were a few Aedes aegypti mosquitoes - the kind that carry Zika - discovered in traps in the Southwestern parts of the state several years ago, but there have not been any since.
He said the state does not have any Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, the other type that has been found capable of transmitting Zika.
"We're looking at all potential contacts between the deceased patient and the new case," he said.
Irish PM warns punitive Brexit terms could inflame anti-EU sentiment
DUBLIN, July 18 (Reuters) - Ireland's premier urged fellow European Union leaders on Monday not to impose harsh terms on Britain as punishment its vote to leave the bloc, warning such an approach could inflame anti-EU sentiment across the continent.
Britain's shock June 23 referendum "out" vote has sparked debate in Europe about how to prevent other members following suit, with some fearing a favourable deal for Britain could tempt others to leave.
But Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said a punitive settlement for Britain could be equally destabilising.
"Any perception that the UK is being punished for its democratic decision to exit the European Union will only further inflame the growing populist backlash against European integration," Kenny said in a speech to academics.
"It is in nobody's interests for the UK and the EU to have anything but the best possible future relations," he said, according to a transcript published by his office.
Ireland will cooperate closely with other member states anxious to see "a constructive and respectful outcome", he said.
The Irish Republic is keen to avoid restrictions on the free movement of goods or people arising from Brexit, fearing this would undermine Northern Ireland's peace process and damage trade across its border with the British province.
A majority of voters in Northern Ireland, as well as in Scotland, voted to remain in the EU, unlike much more populous England. As a whole, Britain voted by a 52 to 48 percent margin to leave the bloc.
Britain accounts for 16 percent of Ireland's exports, but this rockets up to 44 percent when foreign-owned firms operating out of Ireland are excluded.
Northern Ireland will represent the only land frontier between Britain and the EU once Britain leaves.
Theresa May, who replaced David Cameron as British prime minister last week, said on June 30 that details of future Irish border arrangements will hinge on the outcome of Brexit talks with Brussels. But she noted that there had been a common travel area with the Irish Republic since the 1920s.
Japan's Son chased $32 bln ARM deal by the sea in Turkey
By Paul Sandle and Makiko Yamazaki
LONDON/TOKYO, July 18 (Reuters) - As the world reeled from the shock Brexit vote, the founder of Japan's SoftBank was sitting in a Turkish restaurant by the sea trying to persuade the bosses of ARM to let him buy Britain's most successful technology company.
With Masayoshi Son keen to seal a deal, ARM Holdings' Chairman Stuart Chambers interrupted his sailing holiday to meet the founder of SoftBank in the Mediterranean port of Marmaris, along with ARM Chief Executive Simon Segars.
"I proposed to him for the first time in the restaurant," Son told reporters after announcing the $32 billion takeover.
With an offer on the table, ARM's board considered the bid in the low-key, analytical style that characterises a company that supplies technology to nearly every smartphone from Apple's iPhone to Samsung's Galaxy, and a host of other devices.
The disciplined approach has long impressed investors.
ARM's shares were trading at 1 pound 10 years ago and are worth 17 pounds under SoftBank's offer. A record 14.8 billion chips powered by ARM technology were shipped in 2015, accounting for 32 percent of the global market. Revenue grew 15 percent to $1.5 billion and pretax profit grew 24 percent to 512 million pounds.
Chief Technology Officer Mike Muller, one of the dozen founders of the company, said ARM valued technical brilliance above all.
"It's always been a heavily engineering-focused company, so it's fairly open, transparent and at times a little brutal because I guess we are a bunch of slightly autistic engineers who just want to do the right thing," he told Reuters.
"It's always been 'Let's agree what is the right thing to do driven by a certain amount of data', rather than it being about politics."
LOW PROFILE
Suiting its low profile, ARM is located in a business park in Cambridge, the university city an hour from London.
Its offices have none of the funky fittings found at Facebook or Google, and its executives favour business suits over hoodies.
ARM traces its history back to the mid-1980s, when a group of software engineers decided to design their own microprocessor for the Acorn BBC Micro, a device that introduced a generation of British school children to computing.
Muller said the rise of rival computers based on Intel chips dealt Acorn a fatal blow, but despite the failure Apple had seen something it liked in the technology, which it wanted to use in its Newton handheld device.
With Apple's backing, ARM was spun out of Acorn in 1990.
The Newton failed, but ARM persevered with its designs and was chosen by another company set to become a global leader - Nokia - for a new mobile phone in the mid-1990s.
"Because Nokia was then becoming the number one mobile phone company, other people knew they'd selected ARM to use in mobile phones, and that drove a lot of adoption from other players," Muller said.
Nokia chose ARM'S processor designs because they required less power than those from rivals, making them ideal for a mobile device powered by a battery.
COMMON ARCHITECTURE
An early decision to let its customers innovate using ARM's core technology was key to its success, Muller said, giving partners such as Apple, Samsung or Qualcomm the freedom to develop their own chips while using ARM's common architecture that had become the industry standard.
The company and analysts had said that partnership model had made ARM less vulnerable to a takeover because an acquisition by the likes of Apple or Intel could put off its other partners.
SoftBank, a telecommunications and internet company with no presence in semiconductors, largely sidesteps that problem.
ARM chief executive Segars, who trained as an engineer, said he didn't ask the company's customers before agreeing the deal, relying instead on the analysis of the board.
"We weren't out consulting with our customers, we believe this is going to be a great thing for ARM, our partners, our employees, our shareholders and that's the judgment we've taken," he told Reuters.
British politicians were also kept largely in the dark, although new prime minister Theresa May and her finance minister Philip Hammond were briefed on the deal over the weekend.
After the early meeting in Turkey, the two sides retreated to the offices of financial advisers Lazard and Goldman Sachs in London, as well as the Berkeley Hotel. Due diligence was done in "literally 24 hours", a source said.
Son, seen as a unconventional visionary in the closed world of corporate Japan, said that unlike many of his fellow international investors, he was not put off by the turmoil that ensued from Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
"Talking is easy," said the man ranked by Forbes as Japan's second richest. "People say the UK is still a great country. That's easy to say.
Bahrain slams UK, U.S. "interference", clerics say Shi'ites under threat
DUBAI, July 18 (Reuters) - Bahrain on Monday dismissed as "unacceptable interference" U.S. and British criticism of its decision to dissolve the main Shi'ite Muslim opposition party, as senior clerics warned the Shi'ite majority was under threat.
Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, said a court's decision on Sunday to dissolve the al-Wefaq opposition group, accused of helping foster violence and terrorism, was "just" and "transparent", state news agency BNA reported.
The move against al-Wefaq was one of several steps taken by the Sunni-led government against its opponents that have drawn international criticism, including revoking the citizenship of the country's Shi'ite spiritual leader Ayatollah Isa Qassim.
"Bahrain expresses its deep regret at the statements from the British foreign secretary and U.S. State Department and considers them as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs," said BNA.
Close ally Britain expressed deep concern at Sunday's ruling and a statement by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Bahrain to guarantee political freedoms for all its citizens.
The U.S. State Department said the government's recent steps to "suppress nonviolent opposition" undermined Bahrain's and the region's stability, and strained America's partnership with its Gulf ally.
Bahrain said it wanted to take into account the interests of its allies and partners to preserve "distinctive and historical relations" with them.
The Gulf country has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni Muslim-led government, mainly drawn from the ruling al-Khalifa family.
In a joint statement distributed on social media, Bahrain's four main Shi'ite Muslim clerics warned that the government crackdown was not limited to the political opposition.
"We, the Shi'ites, as a main component of this homeland have become greatly convinced that we are being targeted in our existence, identity, beliefs, rituals and practices," the statement, signed by Sheikh Abdullah al-Ghuraifi, Sheikh Abdul-Hussein al-Sitri, Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Rubaiyi as well as Qassim, said.
Bahrain's justice ministry rejected the charges and vowed to keep up measures against what it said those who would try to divide the country on sectarian basis and finances terrorism.
"Everybody must support the measures taken by the state against those who violate the law, incite violence and are linked with forces abroad," the ministry said in a statement.
Seen by other Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdoms like Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Iranian influence, it put down Arab Spring protests in 2011.
The country has been gripped by political tension since 2011, with Shi'ites complaining of discrimination and demanding reforms that would give them a bigger say in government affairs.
United States lifts ban on Turkish Airlines flights -CNN Turk
ISTANBUL, July 18 (Reuters) - The United States lifted its ban on Turkish Airlines flights to the United States on Monday, broadcaster CNN Turk reported.
The ban, which included both direct flights and those from a third country, went into effect after a failed coup over the weekend in which a faction of the military attempted to overthrow the Turkish government. The coup crumbled on Saturday as supporters of President Tayyip Erdogan answered his call and took to the streets in defiance of the coup plotters.
Trump foes win chance to voice opposition at convention
By Ginger Gibson
CLEVELAND, July 18 (Reuters) - Republican opponents of White House hopeful Donald Trump scored a symbolic victory on Monday, forcing a vote at the start of the party convention enabling them to register their opposition to him as the expected U.S. presidential nominee.
U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah said enough delegates signed on to force a vote on the party's nominating rules that would allow delegates to vote for alternatives to Trump.
The anti-Trump delegates are unlikely to succeed in changing the rules and preventing the New York businessman's nomination for the Nov. 8 election. But the effort could allow them to register opposition, embarrassing Trump as his campaign strives to play down divisions within the party.
In response to statements from the Trump opponents on their efforts to force a rules vote, Ed Brookover, Trump's delegate manager at the Cleveland gathering, said he was unsure where the effort stood.
Italian man confirmed killed in Nice attack
ROME, July 18 (Reuters) - Italy's foreign ministry said on Monday an Italian man has been confirmed among the victims of last week's truck attack in the French Riviera resort of Nice that killed 84 people.
A ministry statement said French police had named the man as Mario Casati. It said his family had been informed, but gave no further information about his identity.
Italian media said Casati was a 90 year-old Milan resident, who was in Nice with a female friend who is one of the remaining four missing Italians.
Venezuelan retirees abroad left high and dry as payments peter out
By Rosalba O'Brien
SANTIAGO, July 18 (Reuters) - Thousands of elderly people in Latin America, Spain, and elsewhere who are dependent on a Venezuelan state pension have been forced to find other ways to survive after payments stopped last year, some of those affected told Reuters.
An estimated 1,000 retirees in Chile are no longer receiving pension income from Venezuela. Many of them are returned exiles who fled the 1970s right-wing military dictatorship for what at the time was a booming, relative safe haven.
Depending on the type of pension, some have not received any money due in 2016, while others have been waiting for well over a year, said 73-year-old Sonia Laborde, who heads up an association of Venezuelan pensioners in Chile.
"Many (pensioners) don't have a profession or work, they are sick, they are dependent on that money to eat and pay for their daily needs," she told Reuters this week.
A plunge in oil prices and a collapsing socialist economy have left Venezuela suffering from chronic product shortages.
While at home Venezuelans spend hours in line to buy basic goods, the problems have rippled out to affect around 12,000 pensioners living abroad in countries that include Spain, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. Some are Venezuelans; others are foreigners who spent decades working in the country.
Government supporters say Venezuela improved pension benefits during the rule of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who channeled oil revenue into social programs.
Many emigrants received their pensions at a favorable exchange rate as a result of currency controls. But with the fall in oil prices, Venezuela has limited hard currency payments for everyone from multinational corporations to travelers and retirees.
Just under half of the affected pensioners are in Spain or the Canary Islands, said 80-year-old Miguel Megias, a Spanish citizen who worked for five decades as an engineering professor in Venezuela and now is teaching English in Granada to make ends meet. He also runs a blog to share information with those affected globally.
"The system worked very well until 2014. Then the situation changed radically," he said on Monday. "Many of us haven't been paid in a year."
"Every person has to find a way to survive - in some cases they have family, others turn to the Red Cross or other charities."
Megias and Laborde said they have received no response from Caracas despite repeated phone calls, letters and emails.
A foreign ministry committee is looking into their case, Laborde said, adding that one sympathetic opposition lawmaker told her that President Nicolas Maduro considers their claims "not a priority".
Venezuelan government officials contacted by Reuters declined to comment.
In Santiago, 74-year-old Margarita Valls said she had no choice but to pack up her belongings and leave her rented apartment, going to live with a friend in southern Chile.
"I don't even have one peso," she said, close to tears. "I worked a lot in Venezuela, I gave it a lot, I was there 37 years."
UK's Johnson says Russia must join push to oust Syria's Assad
LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called on Tuesday for Russia and other states to demand Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down as he prepared for his first meeting with Western counterparts on Syria's intractable civil war.
Johnson will meet peers from Germany, France, Italy and the European Union in London to discuss Syria's five-year conflict, which has spurred the rise of Islamic State, sucked in regional and major powers and created the world's worst refugee crisis.
"I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this," Johnson will say, according to remarks released by his office in advance of the meeting.
Johnson will also see U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in London on Tuesday, less than a week after the ex-London mayor known for his undiplomatic wit was surprisingly appointed as foreign secretary by incoming Prime Minister Theresa May.
Russia and the United States are co-sponsors of peace talks, and back opposing sides, in the Syria conflict. Those talks, currently on hold, have so far carefully skirted the question of whether a peace deal would require Assad's departure, so negotiations could theoretically limp along despite contradictions between the stances of Moscow and Washington.
Sources familiar with the Kremlin's thinking said in June that Russia will countenance Assad leaving office, but only when it is confident a change of leader will not trigger a collapse of the Syrian government.
The last round of talks between the Syrian government and opposition broke up at the end of April as Assad's forces, backed by Russian air strikes, escalated their assault on rebel-held areas in the northern city of Aleppo.
Speaking in December, before his appointment, Johnson had called for Britain to set aside a "Cold War mindset" when dealing with Russia over Syria.
In a newspaper column in March this year, Johnson said "bravo for Assad" for saving the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, from Islamic State militants.
A friend of mine recently shared a well-circulated online article on the need for a "United States of South India".
According to the article, south India, with only 20 per cent of the country's population, generates 30 per cent of India's tax revenues. This and other statistical facts convinced the writer that south Indians should unite and demand more.
As expected, the piece got many south Indian software engineers worked up and raise their voices during lunch hours and coffee breaks. The only problem was that their call to arms was neither in the same language nor united.
This was not the first time we have come across such an argument.
This sentiment initially gathered steam soon after independence under the Dravidian revivalism banner led by Tamil leader Periyar.
But then the campaign could not last long once internal bickering and declining public support saw most regional political parties searching for compromise with Delhi, once they realised that they were being kept away from the big game of national politics.
In a more contemporary scenario, we often hear people in Mumbai use the same dangerous argument.
But fortunately like everything else, people in the cities often forget issues as fast as it takes rainwater to recede from the pothole-ridden roads.
Though the cycle continues every year.
Chennai activists hold a protest against Rohith Vemula's suicide. (PTI)
The fundamental issue with this demand for a "Union-of-sorts" for the southern states is that it unintentionally reveals the privileged, urban, upper caste, middle class ideology that exists among us.
The middle class in this country, which feels liberalisation is the greatest event in the history of India since Manusmriti was written, has often used economic statistics and meritocracy as its refuge to camouflage its casteist and classist mentality.
The cocktail was made stiffer by adding rapid urbanisation over the last few decades and the greed that comes along with it.
This call for unity, if ever realised, will not just be opportunist in nature, but also very short-lived.
This rich boy's club will be based on the bedrock of capital gains and not that of inclusive, all-round growth. It will always be guided by the principle of rich man should get more.
This approach conceived in the urban centres will by default overlook the interests of the marginal communities.
Sooner than later, the policy will further divide the southern Union; economic hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Amravati (if and when it gets constructed by wasting extremely fertile land), Chennai, Coimbatore and Kochi will start complaining about their share of revenues.
People residing in these cities will base their argument that they deserve a larger share of the pie because they earn more.
These cities will overlook the fact that the food they eat, the labour they use - all come from areas outside their commercial hubs.
It is a tragedy of monstrous proportion that almost 70 years since independence, our villages, which were once our pride, have now been reduced to the status of areas housing second-rate and utterly neglected citizens.
This ideology will only give rise to regional economic bullies who will be self-serving in its purpose.
South Indian states may want to model themselves on the lines of European Union, but they forget that respect for human rights and basic civil liberties shines through the founding values of EU.
Despite it being first off the block largely due to historical advantages it got under the British Raj, south Indian states still regularly spew incidents of hatred and ignorance.
Very often you hear the agrarian distress in Karnataka and the State's role in trying to push the farmer community to the corner, while in neighbouring Telangana, you still hear tales of the State's atrocities while dealing with tribals who took up arms, when they realised that a unified Andhra could never look beyond the IT wizardry of Hyderabad.
In Tamil Nadu, Dalits can still be murdered in broad daylight for daring to wed outside their communities.
While in Kerala segregated churches for converted Dalits, a strict no entry in temples for non-Hindus and RSS turf battle with the Left and Muslim organisations have left the tiny state more fragmented than ever before.
They may say that it is still better than the north, but a society should always measure itself against a higher, more evolved society to really understand where it stands on the metrics of morality.
The argument in the article, stating that who earns more, deserves more may sound great if spoken in a corporate board meeting, but running a Union on this principle will be a disastrous wish.
A country as large as India will always have some region or community, which continues to work at a laggard pace.
There is also no denying that political and bureaucratic set-up of this country made sure that certain states saw worse times than those from sub-Saharan region.
But a nation is destined for doom if it forgets and leaves behind its weak, disfranchised, minority, fringe and suppressed communities because of their lack of means; an ailment which originates in centuries of discrimination by upper castes.
A society can never be called truly developed until its weakest don't get empowered enough to get their voice to reach the highest office.
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File photo/Gulflive.com
(Tyler Carter)
PASCAGOULA, Miss. - After the revival of the EMS Advisory Board, Board Chairman George Sholl presented the resolution decided upon by the Advisory Board to present to the Jackson County Board of Supervisors on Monday.
In a 7-3 vote, members of the EMS Advisory Board decided the contract the county has held with Acadian for 16 years should be renegotiated. The three who did not vote in favor for Acadian were District 3 Supervisor Ken Taylor, Kim Henderson, Registered Nurse for Singing River Health System Hospital, and Gautier Fire Chief, Robert Jones.
Conversation among the supervisors varied from support of Acadian and the county's need to see to go out for a Request for Proposals (RFP) to see who else would provide the best service possible to Jackson County.
District 1 Supervisor Barry Cumbest is one of two supervisors who sits on the EMS Advisory Board and has been vocal in his support of Acadian. Cumbest says the county has received great service from Acadian and it should continue.
"I sit on the board and much conversation was had in regards to the service provided to the county and through my time as a supervisor, I think we have had great service," Cumbest said. "I don't see why we should not take the advice of the EMS Advisory Board."
Cumbest then made a motion to accept the EMS Advisory Board's recommendation to enter into negotiations with Acadian, and Board President Melton Harris Jr. agreed citing the old-fashioned phrase, "if it's not broken, why fix it?"
During discussion, Taylor discussed his reasoning for concern with the county entering back into negotiations and with Acadian.
File photo/Gulflive.com
"I serve on the Advisory Board also and I am concerned for several reasons," Taylor said. Number one being that our county ambulance service has not been competed in 16 years - number two, I believe we have a conflict of interest on the EMS Advisory Board in both meetings we have had. My concern is that members on the board are in close association with the contract which gives them a really serious conflict of interest in recommending we stay with the current contractor.
"Number three, it just makes very good sense for the citizens of Jackson County to compete this service that way we will know we are getting the best service and we also know that we would save quite a bit of money by competing our services," Taylor said. "I think we should clearly reject the recommendation by the EMS Advisory Board and proceed with competing this important service."
Cumbest rebutted Taylor's statements saying, "the people you are referring to work with our provider every day and receive the kind of service they provide. We have had bad service and we have good service now and we need to make sure we hold on to that good service."
Taylor responded saying, "some of the current people within Jackson County fire system are actually employees of Acadian, and I'm sorry but for these people to be represented on the EMS Advisory Board presents a severe conflict of interest."
District 4 Supervisor Troy Ross offered sentiments expressing that an RFP does not represent the current provider is doing poorly, but that an RFP serves as competition.
"An RFP is purely a competition," Ross said. "If you are the best game in town and you provide the best service, let's bring the competition on and let's see what Jackson County can get. It's been 16 years and it is time to see who else is out there.
"If nothing else, we may learn from someone we didn't even know about could present a service we didn't even know was available that the current provider of Jackson County didn't have," Ross said. "That doesn't mean Acadian won't continue to do it, but if you are the best you will rise to the top and show why you should continue to serve the citizens of Jackson County."
Ross continued saying he felt everyone involved should have welcomed the RFP and should have expected at some point in time, the issue would arise to see who else is out there.
Harris concurred with Cumbest saying in over 16 years, he has yet to hear much complaint in regards to Acadian. Taylor responded saying, "let me mention that one of those three votes against representation came from the representative at Singing River Hospital and I think that is significant."
After much conversation, Cumbest's motion to enter negotiations with Acadian failed 3-2 with supervisors Ross, Taylor, and Bosarge citing the need for the county to go out for an RFP.
Taylor's decision centers around the county's opportunity to save money by not choosing to reenter contract negotiations with Acadian.
Recent contract comparisons by the Mississippi Press shows what Jackson County has paid to Acadian in contrast to what Harrison and Hancock County is paying their ambulance provider which is drastically lower than the amount Jackson County has paid out to Acadian.
GULFPORT, Mississippi -- A group of African-American funeral home owners have filed a federal civil lawsuit in which they claim Harrison County officials have for two decades discriminated against them by sending the bulk of mortuary business to white-owned funeral homes.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court Monday, names Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove, the Harrison County Board of Supervisors and Harrison County as defendants. The plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial.
The suit has been filed on behalf of Lockett-Williams Mortuary, Richmond-August Funeral Home, Hartwell Family Funeral Home, Marshall Funeral Home, Dickey Brothers Memorial Funeral Home and J.T. Hall Funeral Home.
The filing claims that the six African-American funeral homes are the "victims of intentional and pervasive race discrimination, which continues to have a destructive effect on their business and their livelihoods."
The lawsuit alleges that for "at least two decades" Hargrove and Harrison County supervisors have "intentionally discriminated against black-owned businesses in the procurement of mortuary services" for the county, with Hargrove directing "public business and public money to white-owned funeral homes."
Supervisors, the suit claims, has "ratified" Hargrove's discriminatory practices by appropriating public money "to fund his discrimination."
A message left for Hargrove Monday was not immediately returned.
Harrison County does not have a morgue, thus all mortuary services are contracted out to local funeral homes.
The suit notes that roughly 2,000 people die in Harrison County each year, with at least 60 percent of those deaths falling under Hargrove's jurisdiction.
When a death occurs under Hargrove's jurisdiction, he chooses a funeral home within Harrison County to come to the location of the death, remove the body and transport it to the funeral home -- a practice known as a "removal," according to the lawsuit.
Additionally, the suit notes that the county is responsible for "pauper's burials" or cremations -- meaning when someone dies whose remains go unclaimed, has no financial means to pay the cost of burial or is unidentified, the county is responsible for disposition of the body.
Again, in those cases Hargrove is responsible for choosing a funeral home to perform the service.
There are, according to court documents, two "white-owned" funeral homes operating in Harrison County -- Bradford-O'Keefe Funeral Home and Riemann Family Funeral Home.
The suit suggests Hargrove and the board of supervisors should be using a "rotation system" to choose funeral homes for removals and other services. The plaintiffs say Hargrove has claimed to be using such a rotation system, but that claims were false "and Hargrove knew them to be false."
The plaintiffs claim that, if a rotation system were being used, each funeral home would receive roughly 150 calls per year from the county, but the plaintiffs "have not received anything close to this number of calls for removals. Instead, each has received only a handful of calls from defendant Hargrove."
They also claim that in each of the "handful" of calls the plaintiffs did receive from Hargrove, the deceased person was, in every case, an African-American.
"Defendant Hargrove has never called any of the Plaintiffs to perform a removal of a white person at any point in time," the suit alleges, "despite white decedents accounting for approximately 1,000 deaths falling within Defendants' jurisdiction each year."
The suit also claims that Harrison County supervisors have been told of Hargrove's discriminatory practices in the past, yet failed to take action and continue to appropriate public funds for removals/burials at Hargrove's direction.
The funeral home owners say Hargrove has told individual supervisors and others he "does not think that it is 'proper' for a white decedent to be sent to a black-owned funeral home, including Plaintiffs. He has expressed the view that white families would not want their loved ones' remains handled by African-American funeral directors as a justification for his discrimination."
The lawsuit says the county's actions have cost the plaintiffs' businesses "hundreds or thousands of dollars," as well as "valuable business and business opportunities" which would have allowed them to build relationships for future business.
The lawsuit is seeking compensation for "loss of business, revenue, profits, wages, money, opportunities to work, opportunities to engage in contracts, future prospects for employment, business and business relationships, reputational harms, mental anguish, humiliation, degradation, emotional pain and suffering, as well as other damages known and unknown to Plaintiffs" as a result of a violation of their Constitutional rights.
The lawsuit does not list a specific dollar amount sought in damages.
(NAPSI)--Summer is here! To beat the heat, many folks reach for a cold treat to
Just in time for summer, try this delectable California Avocado Cardamom Ice Cream.
cool themselves down. Ice cream has always been synonymous with summer, but now the "coolest" of indulgences can be found in a wide array of fun and innovative flavors, thanks in part to the growing trend of artisanal ice cream.
From small batch ice creameries, to national dessert chains, to innovative home cooks, everyone has started to experiment with this traditional dessert. Now, many are working to create interesting flavor combinations and focus on using local and in-season ingredients. A flavor that is definitely on the rise is avocado ice cream.
California avocados are now in peak season and lend a creamy base and a mild, nutty flavor that serves as the perfect platform to inspire your ice cream creativity, while contributing good fats and nearly 20 vitamins, minerals and beneficial nutrients. Add a dash of vanilla extract for a classic, clean scoop. For the more adventurous, experiment with a variety of toppings and even spices.
Just in time for summer, Chef Jessica Koslow of SQIRL in Los Angelesdeveloped a delectable California Avocado Cardamom Ice Cream that you can make at home. "Incorporating California avocados into ice cream is a no-brainer--the creaminess of the fruit lends itself so well to this traditional dessert, yet the innovative flavor combination puts a whole new twist on this dessert," said Koslow.
California Avocado Cardamom Ice Cream
Recipe created by Jessica Koslow of SQIRL for the California
Avocado Commission
Serves: 4
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 40 minutes
Total Time: 50 minutes
Ingredients
11/2 tsp. cardamom seeds
3 ripe, fresh California avocados, seeded and peeled
1 cup organic sweetened condensed milk
11/2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup whole milk
Instructions
1. Heat oven to 350deg F.
2. Toast cardamom seeds for 5 minutes.
3. Grind cardamom in a spice grinder and set aside.
4. Place avocado, condensed milk, cream, milk, and ground cardamom seeds into a blender. Turn on to lowest setting and puree until smooth.
5. Transfer to an ice cream maker and freeze per machine's instructions.
Note: Large avocados are recommended for these recipes. A large avocado averages about 8 ounces. If using smaller or larger size avocados adjust the quantity accordingly.
For more unique ways to enjoy California avocados, visitCaliforniaAvocado.com.
It has been another roller-coaster week in a
life that even the most far-fetched fiction writer would not invent for the 33 year old Octomom Nadya Suleman.
First there was the incident with a traffic cop on the Interstate 405 when Octomom was stopped for speeding, but during the stop she grabbed the policeman and would not let go until he let her off the ticket. Witnesses said that the policeman was crying after being held by the Octomom for more than 45 minutes.
She had a vice like grip, like it was somekind of glue or something. Ive never seen an LAPD cop cry like that. He was pleading for his life. Octomom had grabbed him by the testicles and was squeezing so hard his eyes were literally bulging. He let her off the speeding ticket and drove off swerving all over the place, poor bastard, Jonah Hanson, 45, told the LA Times.
Then on Thursday, there was a further incident that was caught live on TV.
The Octomom squirted CBS Julie Chen in the face with black ink when she dared asked the Octomom some questions she did not like. The CBS interview for the Early Show was also filmed by a British production company who have been following the daily life of Octomom.
Julie Chen asked her if she was exploiting her eight children and pursuing lucrative television deals by using them to make money. Octomom looked at Jule Chen, then lifted her skirt and squirted the anchor with a dark black liquid, it was like a real octopus squirting black ink to escape predators. Filming was shut down immediately and the Octomom was led out of the studio by security guards, one of the production crew recalled.
According to marine biologists, the Octomom acted like a real octopus does in its own habitat when threatened by a predator.
An octopus sometimes squirts a unique substance called ink into the
water. It does this when it needs to defend itself from predators such
as seals, whales, and sharks. The Pacific giant octopus, like
many other kinds of octopus, may squirt ink to make the water dark.
That way, a predator cant see the octopus escape. At other times, the
inky cloud serves as a decoy. The cloud actually looks like the octopus
itself. As the predator attacks the decoy, the real octopus makes its
getaway! This is what the Octomom did in these circumstances and must have felt threatened by Julie Chens questions so she squirted the co-anchor in the face thus making a quick exit. Were still looking into which orifice the black ink like substance was squirted from. Julie Chen was covered from head to toe with the black liquid which also stank to high heaven, Professor Janice Lieber, head of Marine Biology at the California Institute of Marine Studies told the LA Times.
The documentary will be aired in October and is set to make the Octomom very rich.
The adventures of Octomom have held the American publics imagination and everyday there are updates on her whereabouts and escapades, but there is a warning to any folks who get on the wrong side of the Octomom, watch out, you can get squirted.
BATON ROUGE - USA - The second mass shooting of law enforcement officers by deranged racially motivated gunmen within a short time period suggests an escalation towards martial law in the United States.
To understand what would happen under a martial law situation, lets take a look at the Katrina disaster.
Although Katrina was a natural disaster, the response was treated like martial law. The law enforcement troops were going house to house and confiscating firearms from all households. Those who held out, or responded with violence were simply neutralised.
It is safe to say the same would occur if martial law were instated in the United States today. Although the constitution of the United States has a second amendment protecting the ownership of firearms, this ruling under martial law falls into a grey area of legality, and in a time of extreme stress, street violence and civil unrest, one of the first priorities would be to relinquish the armaments from the general populace so that peace could be restored.
It is to this end that we find ourselves in 2016, in a position of extreme gun violence being meted out onto law enforcement service personnel by rogue citizens.
If there is an escalation, for example all 50 states see cop shootings, and there is an increase in general violence, Obama could easily cite a state of emergency and instate martial law then go for the guns.
Martial Law in the United States would include:
The suspension of the Constitution, probably starting with the first and second amendment.
Confiscation of firearms; it has happened and it will happen again.
Suspension of Habeas corpus: Imprisonment without due process and without a trial.
Travel Restrictions, including road closures and possibly, even quarantine zones.
Mandatory Curfews and Mandatory Identification.
Automatic search and seizures without a warrant.
Once martial law is in place, Obama would also have to suspend the general election of 2016, and he would benefit from a third term in office.
This falls in line with a 1961 document calling for all worldwide arms to be handed in:
The revolutionary development of modern weapons within a world divided by serious ideological differences has produced a crisis in human history. In order to overcome the danger of nuclear war now confronting mankind, the United States has introduced at the Sixteenth General Assembly of the United Nations a Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World.
Americans must get ready for martial law to occur as the augurs do not bode well for the future.
master of social media as Trump: Trump knows how to manipulate the headlines as he breathes in, sucks up with scandals, constructs conspiracy, bombarding our mind. Just like Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends, keep changing, 141 Things Donald Trump Has Said and Done That Make Him Unfit to Be President - still standing up ! Big surprise ! Celebrity rocks. Drama queen rocks. that's the point ! Let the show go on !
Mind your own business - do you want another entertainer? You better vote for a real thing - not a sloganeer, no substance, no valid plan. You got what you ask -all about your own wishful thinking - be careful before you regret - Trump is NO Reagan.
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Did you put money on federal funding regulations becoming one of the most controversial elements of the Every Student Succeeds Act? If so, congrats: We hope you got a nice payout. But either way, heres an update for you on where things stand with these regulations, a draft of which will probably be released by the U.S. Department of Education pretty soon for public comment.
The funding rule in question deals with the ESSA requirement that federal funding supplement, and not supplant, state and local funding.
Earlier suggestions from the Education Department would have required, among other things, that state and local per-pupil spending in schools with high shares of low-income students (Title I schools) be at least equal to the average spending figure in schools with relatively wealthy students (non-Title I schools).
Civil rights groups, among others, like that idea. They say it ensures districts are following the law. And they argue it would ensure greater equity between schools in the same district, which they think is a major problem.
District advocates and Republican lawmakers, among others, dislike that idea. They say the department doesnt have the power to require this. And they argue this plan could lead to bad outcomes for low-income students and district management.
Perhaps in part because of that newfound attention, three rounds of negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough on this issue. The department was then left to come up with its own rule. And the department hasnt really shown signs that it will back away from the idea that state and local spending between the two types of schools should be equal on a per-pupil basis.
However, the departments ideas evolved over the course of those earlier negotiations, even though the talks eventually stalled out. Lets take a look at that evolution, as well as thoughts from observers and other lingering issues and questions.
How the Departments Positions Evolved
The department didnt back away from the core spending requirement I highlighted above. But it did alter its suggestions in some ways during negotiations. Here are a few of those changes:
One of the more notable changes was language the department added to the draft before the third and final negotiating session (see the second paragraph in red on page 6). Essentially, the language was designed to give districts incentives not to simply cluster a large share of disadvantaged students into a single school. Thats one concern critics of the draft spending rule have highlighted. The language on this point, drafted before the third session started, included students with disabilities and English-language learners, but at the start of the session, the department offered additional language referencing low-income students.
before the third and final negotiating session (see the second paragraph in red on page 6). Essentially, the language was designed to give districts incentives not to simply cluster a large share of disadvantaged students into a single school. Thats one concern critics of the draft spending rule have highlighted. The language on this point, drafted before the third session started, included students with disabilities and English-language learners, but at the start of the session, the department offered additional language referencing low-income students. The department also added language designed to give districts more flexibility in terms of timing. If a district could not meet that per-pupil spending requirement between low- and high-poverty schools, it would not be flagged as out of compliance by the feds, unless it had also previously failed to meet that requirement once in the preceding three years.
Initially, the department proposed a requirement that district spending would also have to be sufficient to provide the basic educational program as defined by the state. But the department subsequently removed this language.
But in discussing that core per-pupil spending approach advocated by his department, U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. has repeatedly emphasized that districts will not have to focus on forcibly transferring many experienced (and well-paid) teachers in order to comply with the proposed per-pupil spending rule.
Hes said that districts could add a variety of new programs to Title I schools in order to provide more resources to Title I schools, like early-education programs and new school counselors.
A Fair and Equitable Education
Supporters of the departments views expressed during the negotiations say the plan will be an important step forward in helping several groups of students, from children of color to those with disabilities and English-language learners. Opposition from various quarters essentially is a distraction from that crucial issue, said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the national Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. And she views arguments to the contrary are ultimately a distraction from that core issue.
I think its making it more difficult for the Department of Education to do its job, which is to make sure that all children are given the opportunity to receive a fair and equitable education, Clarke told me in an interview. (She spoke alongside King during a reporters roundtable earlier this year about equitable educational resources.)
Clarke and others have linked resource inequities between poor and rich schools within districts to a broader debate about the extent to which schools are increasingly polarized in terms of economics and race . And she said the new regulations could be useful leverage in reversing that trend.
Clarity is always a helpful tool when we are talking about the expenditure of significant federal dollars. The new regulations provide just that, she said, referring to the proposal from the department.
In an op-ed last week for The Hill newspaper, Marc Morial, the president and CEO of the National Urban League, made similar points . He highlighted a 2011 report from the department indicating that over 40 percent of Title I schools get less money than non-Title I schools located in the same district.
Its simple. Districts should fund their schools fairly, and in return the federal government will provide additional resources to the schools serving low-income and vulnerable students, Morial wrote.
Skepticism Remains
But as I noted above, theres plenty of opposition to this approach, despite the arguments from civil rights advocates and the adjustments made during negotiations. At the top of the list is Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate education committee.
As weve reported several times, in Alexanders view, the department is violating a separate part of ESSA in its attempt to equalize spending between schools, by effectively requiring actual teacher salaries be used in the regulations for requiring federal dollars to supplant state and local aid.
If the department enshrines the per-pupil spending proposal in its final ESSA regulations, Alexander has threatened to use his legislative powers to try to overturn it.
I mentioned previously that some policy analysts believe that the regulations, however well intentioned, could have bad consequences for poor students. Thats an argument Nora Gordon, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies education funding, has made repeatedly.
Shes said, for example, that although the department has said intradistrict spending between rich and poor schools could be brought into greater balance through a number of new programs at Title I schools, forced teacher transfers are the only way many districts could really realistically meet the departments proposed per-pupil spending rule. Thats because many of them wouldnt be able to obtain additional state and local money to spend. (In case you were wondering, teachers unions dislike the prospect of using actual teacher salaries in funding regulations and the forced transfers that could result, because of how that approach could interfere with local, collectively bargained teacher contracts.)
The quality of teachers at Title I schools might actually go down if the such a proposal goes into effect, according to Gordon.
And efforts to integrate schools racially and economically could also be hurt by the proposal, she said.
All of those things, like pre-K, after-school, summer school, cost money, Gordon said of the ways the department has said districts could provide more to Title I schools and therefore level up their spending. And for many districts, its going to be a zero-sum game. So they need to get that money out of their non-Title I schools. Most of their money is in teachers.
Do Experienced Teachers Cluster in Low-Poverty Schools?
Theres also skepticism about the extent to which more experienced teachers really do tend to cluster in low-poverty schools.
A study released last week by researchers Mark Dynarski and Kirsten Kainz for the Brookings Institution, using data from federal sources, found that when certain variables are accounted for, "[a]n increase in the poverty rate of 10 percentage points increased teacher spending per student by about $30. And heres what they found about teacher experience and its connection to low- and high-poverty schools in Wisconsin:
(The authors state that a value of 5.6 for highest degree earned means the average teacher has a masters degree and some teachers have higher degrees.)
From our empirical perspective, the debate is much ado about nothingthe typical district already spends about the same on teachers in schools that are and are not eligible for Title I, Dynarski and Kainz write.
Its worth noting that their study focuses on teacher-pay equity, known in Beltway lingo as comparability. However, as I noted above, at least in legal terms, the regulations under discussion technically deal with supplement-not-supplant, a separate part of ESSA.
Bonus: So just how much federal money for disadvantaged students is at stake for each state, per student? Check out the state-by-state allocation of Title I money per eligible student for fiscal 2016, via the National Center for Education Statistics, in the chart below:
Create bar charts
Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Eastlake, Ohio
We caught up here with U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, who is attending the Republican National Convention.
Alexanderwho supported Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida in the GOP primarychatted about presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump; Trumps rival, Hillary Clinton, and, of course, the Every Student Succeeds Act, of which he was a key architect.
Alexander thinks a President Trump would favor local control of schools and have a light regulatory touch. And, while its no secret that the education committee chairman thinks the Obama administration is going too far in regulating on ESSA, he is hopeful that a Clinton Education Department wouldnt follow suit, in part because some of her supporters (namely, teachers unions) dont want her too.
Heres a recap of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity:
Alexander and Politics K-12 have talked before about Donald Trump and education policy . And Alexanders said he wasnt really sure where Trumps heart was on the issue. Does Alexander have a better sense now?
In a word, yes, he said he does. Alexander told me he had spoken with Trump about the issue, including when he met with GOP senators a few weeks ago.
Alexander told the presumptive GOP nominee that, my hope is that if youre elected you will enforce the new education law the way we wrote it, which is to transfer responsibility for accountability out of Washington back to the states. And [Trump] agreed with that. He said he was very much for local control. So Im convinced he will.
Whats more, Alexander said Trump understands the explosion of regulations across the board in Washington, D.C., is a massive issue, bigger he said than taxes. And I agree with him on that. The jungle of red tape that smothers a lot of college administrators, that makes it harder to fill out a student aid form, that makes it difficult to repay your student loan, all of that is a deregulation, de-centralization of authority that I think he would instinctively favor, so Im encouraged by that.
What about Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee? Alexander has talked about how hes been concerned that the Obama administration has overreached on ESSA regulation. Does he have a similar worry about Clinton, should she become president?
I hope that Hillary Clinton, if she were to be president would remember her days in Arkansas and how they, and weI was governor at the same timewe didnt think people in Washington were any smarter than we were in trying to figure out how to care for and educate our children, so I would hope that she would also understand the need to transfer or restore back to parents and classroom teachers, to the states, responsibility for education. Some of her biggest supporters understand that. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association dont like all this Washington control any better than I do. So her background and some of her supporters would make me hope that she would implement the new law in the way we wrote it, which means to restore states classroom teachers responsibility for what to do about our children.
What does Alexander think of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as Trumps running mate? Pence has a background in school choice, and hes anti-common core.
I like Gov. Pence. I think its an excellent choice. Hes a known quantity. I worked with him in Congress. I found him a conservative Republican, but a very reasonable person, interested in policy. And Im glad that hes had a chance to be governor because governors have a very different job than members of Congress, they have to solve problems, they have to be practical. ... What he did on school choice, on universities ... I thought represented a very practical point of view for a conservative leader. So I like him, Im glad hes there. I think he adds a lot to the ticket.
Who would Alexander like to see as Trumps education secretary?
Someone who cares about children and will implement the new education law the way we wrote it, instead of trying to recreate the national school board that we tried to undo. You could pick any one of a number of people. There are a lot of good Republican governors out there who have a background in education who would be well-suited to take this new law over the next several years and lead the states, not mandate the states, to work on higher standards, better teaching and real accountability.
All of the good ideas are in the states and in the school districts, not in Washington, and we need a new education secretary who understands that. ... Unfortunately the current Education Department seems not to understand it.
Could he name a name? Give any suggestions?
He demurred, although he did mention he thinks there are also some good GOP state chiefs who could head up the Education Department. (No names on that either, sorry.)
Should Clinton get elected, shes talked a lot about free college"of making public universities, or making public college free to many low- and moderate-income families. The Higher Education Act is the next big federal education bill to come up. Does Alexander think he could work with Clinton on something like that?
If Im the chairman or the ranking member of the education committee, my job is to work with the president. But [free college is] thats the wrong approach. I think shes just trying to catch up with Bernie Sanders and get his voters in a general election.
A better way to go, according to Alexander, would be Tennessees plan, which offers two years of free community college to every high school graduate, combined with mentoring, counseling, and a requirement for community service.
I dont see any way the federal government can afford the Sanders-Clinton philosophy that everything is free from Washington, nor do I think its the best approach.
Why does he think education has gotten so little attention in this presidential campaign, compared to past years?
Elections are about peace and prosperity. ... The solution to the prosperity problem, every governor knows, has a lot to do with education. ... Everyone talks about one thing: How do I get more trained workers for the jobs that need to be filled.
Photo: U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. (Swikar Patel/Education Week)
Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is blaming a longtime political foe and cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania for being behind the recent failed military coup in Turkey.
Fethullah Gulen, the founder of what is often described as a moderate Islamic movement which remains strong in Turkey, has also been linked to science- and math-focused charter schools run by Turkish educators across this country.
Most recently, local media outlets in California, Ohio, and Texas have reported on charter schools with alleged ties to Gulen, though he does not directly run any charters.
Still, the Republic of Turkey has hired the Washington- and London-based law firm, Amsterdam & Partners, to investigate over 100 charter schools founded by followers of Gulens movement, according to the Associated Press. Erdogans government has raised objections to a variety of issues related to the schools, including the hiring of Turkish nationals to teach in the charters. But Gulens supporters say Erdogans interest in the U.S. charters is entirely political.
Its a fight the Turkish government has taken all the way down to the local district level of American politics.
According to the San Jose Mercury News , a representative from Amsterdam & Partners appeared at a Fremont, Calif., school board hearing in January to protest Magnolia Public Schools application to open a new charter school there.
Earlier this month, the Houston Chronicle reported that a Texas state lawmaker asked the state attorney generals office to investigate a large charter school network there which, the paper said, was part of a bigger effort organized by the Turkish government.
Amsterdam & Partners filed a complaint with the Texas Education Agency accusing Harmony Public Schools of taking advantage of the U.S. visa program and favoring vendors with ties to Gulens movement.
In 2014, the Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, reported that several schools in the state under the Concept Schools charter network had come under scrutiny for almost exclusively hiring teachers of Turkish heritage. An investigation by the paper found that the schools were affiliated with a foundation that paid for state lawmakers to travel to Turkey. Former employees of the schools also told the paper that they were compelled to donate large portions of their salaries to Gulens movement.
Related stories:
The alliance has predicted that with approximate sales of 5.5 million units, they will surely be able to break into the list of top three players in light vehicles by 2020.
Based on the KWID and the redi-GOs success, the Renault-Nissan alliance want a bigger slice of the hatchback pie. The duo want to claim the third spot in passenger car segment in India. Currently, that spot belongs to Mahindra & Mahindra. On 14 March 2016, Tata Motors had also pledged to regain the third spot in the industry. The Renault-Nissan alliance is also fighting to achieve the same target. Certainly, Mahindra & Mahindra is in a tight situation with these manufacturers trying to capture more market share.
Renault-Nissan venture is planning to ramp-up the production of its Oragadam facility by 70 per cent, amounting to 3.66 lakh units by 2017, people close to the matter said.
With an astonishing booking number of 1.5 lakh (for the KWID) and more than 10,000 for the redi-GO, the duo is looking to thrust Chennai facilitys production to almost triple (1.6 lakh units) -- from the amount its currently manufacturing. This will help them in shortening the waiting period and at the same time, place Renault-Nissan in a better position to export their cars.
The alliance has predicted that with approximate sales of 5.5 million units, they will surely be able to break into the list of top three players in light vehicles by 2020. If the demand sustains, it will be able to roll-out 4.8 lakh units by then, as per internal estimates.
Guillaume Sicard, president, Nissan Motor India and head of the Oragadam plant, said, The business model is perfect and profitable. We are here to perform on all aspects, be it producing for sister company, producing for exports and also to do well in the domestic market.
Gaurav Vangaal, senior analyst for forecasting at IHS Automotive, said, "Carlos Ghosn agrees that India is a complicated market and one has to learn from experience here and he also knows that once Renault-Nissan is able to crack the Indian market, it will ensure success in Africa, South America and the Middle East."
Also, theres an internal word that Carlos believes that India has the biggest potential for growth in future, an official close to the matter said.
With growing export demands, the Renault-Nissan alliance has started round -the -clock production at the very same facility. Finally, something to cheer for Renault and Nissan.
Source: CarDekho.com
Renault has organised an after sales service camp for all its customers from July 15-21. This camp has been organised to check and ensure that all their cars deliver peak performance. These camps will be held at all Renault dealerships across the country.
At the camp, the cars will be provided with the crucial expert attention. As per the guidelines stipulated by Renault India, the cars will receive a detailed examination of various parts of the vehicle that usually get damaged in monsoon. Additionally, various activities will be organised for the customers to keep them engaged.
In addition to check-up facility, Renault customers can also take advantage of attractive discount offers of 50 per cent on AC filter, 20 per cent on wiper blades and brake parts, and 15 per cent on other value added services. All discounts are exclusive only to KWID owners. Customers will receive additional discounts on accessories and labour charges. The company will offer 10 per cent discount on 'Renault Secure', a service that entails roadside assistance and extended warranty.
Along with after sales initiatives like this the company is also working towards the expansion of the number of touch points it has in India. From the current network strength of more than 210 sales and service outlets, Renault is aiming to increase its reach to 270 facilities by the end of this year.
Having a growth mindset may help buffer students from low-income families from the effects of poverty on academic achievement, researchers found in a large-scale, first-of-its kind study of 168,000 10th-grade students in Chile.
But poor students studied by researchers were also less likely to have a growth mindset than their higher income peers, researchers found.
Stanford Professor Carol Dweck who coauthored the study along with Stanford researcher Susana Claro and PERTS Lab founder David Pauneskupopularized the idea of growth mindset.
Students with a growth mindset believe that skill and academic strength can be developed through effort and practice. Thats contrasted with students with a fixed mindset, who believe their intelligence and skill sets are unchangeable, like eye color. Dwecks previous research has found that interventions that help students develop more of a growth mindset can have positive effects on their academic achievement.
This new study expands on those findings, showing them in nationwide data, and it explores how mindsets interact with family income to affect school achievement.
While students from low-income households typically score lower on standardized tests, researchers found that poorer Chilean students with higher levels of growth mindset had similar test scores to their fixed mindset peers from higher income families.
Strikingly, students from low-income families (the lowest 10%) who had a growth mindset showed comparable test scores with fixed mindset students whose families earned 13 times more (80th percentile), said the study, which was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers used test scores and student survey responses from an entire class of students enrolled in public schools in Chile during the 2012 academic year to reach their conclusions. They measured students mindsets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements like you can learn new things, but you cant change a persons intelligence.
Consistent with prior experimental studies, our results show that, for students with the same observable characteristics, those with a growth mindset achieved at higher levels than those with a fixed mindset, the study says. Furthermore, these results show for the first time, to our knowledge, that this relationship is comparably strong with that between family income and achievement and that it holds true systemicallyacross an entire nations socioeconomic spectrum and across virtually all of its schools.
Researchers also found that a growth mindset was a greater predictor of success for poor students than it was for their higher-income peers.
But what about reverse causation? Isnt it possible that doing well in schools leads to a growth mindset rather than the other way around? Dweck and her co-researchers asked. To try to answer this, they controlled their results using other survey questions.
They found that the relationship between a growth mindset and achievement remained significant even when controlling for factors like students perceptions of their own academic skills. Thus, they concluded, our effect is not because of the fact that students who see themselves as doing well simply observe their academic growth and come to the conclusion that intelligence can be developed.
Low-Income Students Are Less Likely to Have a Growth Mindset
As one might expect, students living in lower-income households were more likely to have a fixed mindsets than their wealthier peers. It makes sense that a child dealing with poverty and its associated factors may perceive that people have less control over their circumstancesand possibly even their ability to learn and develop skills.
At the extremes, students from the lowest-income families were twice as likely to endorse a fixed mindset as students from the top-income families and schools, the study says.
This touches on a common criticism of schools emphasizing concepts like growth mindset, grit, and persistence: Critics argue that such work can fail to take into account the systemic factors that contribute to poor achievement, putting the full responsibility for a students learning on the student. Some label this a bootstraps mentality.
Claro, Dweck, and Paunesku address these concerns head on:
To be clear, we are not suggesting that structural factors, like income inequality or disparities in school quality, are less important than psychological factors. Nor are we saying that teaching students a growth mindset is a substitute for systemic efforts to alleviate poverty and economic inequality. Such claims would stand at odds with decades of research and our own data. Rather, we are suggesting that structural inequalities can give rise to psychological inequalities and that those psychological inequalities can reinforce the impact of structural inequalities on achievement and future opportunity. As such, research on psychological factors can help illuminate one set of processes through which economic disadvantage leads to academic underachievement and reveal ways to more effectively support students who face additional challenges because of their socioeconomic circumstances."
Bonus reading: Dweck has worked recently to address these concerns and to clear up misconceptions about her research. That work includes this wildly popular Education Week commentary: Carol Dweck Revisits the Growth Mindset
What do you think? Do schools do enough to address the psychological effects of poverty? Do you agree with the researchers conclusions?
Further reading on growth mindset and student motivation:
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Despite the ongoing political and economic uncertainties in some of the emerging markets, Mr Raychaudhuri said the recent recovery in EM equity flows is likely to continue.
Mumbai: French multinational bank and financial services company BNP Paribas believes that the recent recovery in foreign fund flows into emerging market equities including India would continue for another couple of months as the global equity investors are currently underweight on global emerging markets (GEM) by 2.5 per cent relative to the benchmark.
Given improving fundamentals in GEM (improving earnings estimates and likely recovery in return on equity), we think the traditional underweight GEM, overweight developed markets (DM) trade deserves to be reversed. We are particularly surprised that GEM investors are underweight Asian equities while overweight Latin American equities. Over 2012-15, GEM investors bought Latin America, despite the commodity price collapse and the regions commodity sensitivity, said Manishi Raychaudhuri, Asia Pacific equity strategist, BNP Paribas.
Despite the ongoing political and economic uncertainties in some of the emerging markets, Mr Raychaudhuri said the recent recovery in EM equity flows is likely to continue.
The recent flow recovery was predicted by our proprietary lead indicator, which predicts this momentum will continue for the next 8-10 months. We believe funds deserve to be reallocated from bonds to equities, from developed markets to EM equities and from Latin American equities to Asian equities. The under-ownership of GEM and Asia make a compelling case for such reallocation, he added.
Foreign portfolio investors have invested Rs 5,873 crore in domestic equities in July till date after picking up stocks worth Rs 3,713 crore in May when the global markets remained highly volatile due to uncertainties surrounding the Brexit.
Through 2015, India saw the worst earnings progression in Asia, with all sectors estimates secularly declining. Some have clearly turned around now like consumer discretionaries, materials and utilities. We also see signs of earnings bottoming out in industrials. Recovery in discretionaries fits our hypothesis of rural demand recovery, pointed out Mr Raychaudhuri.
Apart from central banks liquidity injections, other factors that could drive inflows into emerging market equities is a shift in fund flows from bonds to equities.
London/Toyko: SoftBank Group Corp has agreed to buy UK chip designer ARM Holdings PLC in a 24.3 billion ($32.2 billion) cash deal, the two sides said on Monday, a bold bet on internet-connected machines that will transform the Japanese group.
ARM, the largest London-listed tech company by market value, is a major presence in mobile processing, with its processor and graphics technology used by Samsung, Huawei and Apple in their in-house microchips.
Components based on technology licensed by ARM are found in the vast majority of the worlds smartphones, and the Cambridge-based group has branched into other connected devices as smartphone growth slows. ARM stands to be central to the tech industrys shift to the internet of things - a network of devices, vehicles and building sensors that collect and exchange data - a stated focus for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.
The Mondays deal, Softbanks largest to date, marks a departure for the Japanese group, whose tech and telecom portfolio ranges from US carrier Sprint to a stake in e-commerce giant Alibaba and humanoid robot Pepper - but does not yet include a major presence in the semiconductor industry.
Under the offer backed by ARMs board, Softbank will pay 17 for every ARM share a premium of more than 40 per cent to Friday's close. ARM shares surged nearly 43 per cent to 16.99 pounds by 0820 GMT.
This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made, and I expect ARM to be a key pillar of SoftBanks growth strategy going forward, Mr Son said in the statement. The acquisition is the first for Son, 58, since he last month rescinded plans to retire - effectively pushing out his heir apparent, former Google executive Nikesh Arora.
The share of waterways transportation mode in the modal cargo mix is about 7 per cent now.
New Delhi: The government is planning to increase the share of coastal shipping to 10 per cent in the modal cargo mix by 2020, which will reduce burden on rails and roads. The share of waterways transportation mode in the modal cargo mix is about 7 per cent now.
"The government envisions increasing the share of coastal shipping in modal cargo mix to 10 per cent by 2020 from the current share so as to reduce the over-dependence on road and rail sectors for domestic cargo transportation," Minister of State for Shipping Pon Radhakrishnan told Rajya Sabha in a written reply on July 18.
Radhakrishnan said the government has also given in-principle approval to setting up of four new ports at Colachal in Tamil Nadu, Sagar in West Bengal, Durgarajapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Vadhawan in Maharashtra. India has 12 major ports under the control of the Centre besides 205 non-major ports under the purview of state governments/ union territories, he said.
The percentage share of cargo handled by major ports in 2015-16 stood at 56.5 per cent as against 43.5 per cent by non-major ports, the minister said. Government's recent estimate has said promotion of coastal shipping of just six commodities, including coal, cement and steel, could result in a huge Rs 40,000 crore annual saving.
The Sagarmala project recently announced by the Centre intends to double the share of coastal and inland waterways in transport, thus boosting domestic trade and exports. The government expects to do this by expanding current port capacities, building new ports and developing ports proximate to industrial and manufacturing clusters.
Amritsar: 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 on July 18 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 MAS is in talks with several banks and will make an announcement on any punitive action against them after the review is completed.
Singapore: Singapore's central bank is scrutinising 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 centre 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.
PM Narendra Modi has listed ease of doing business on the top of his agenda.
New Delhi: The government on Monday tom-tommed before the Ease of Doing Business team of the World Bank Group of various initiatives taken to make it easier to do business in the country.
The team is on two weeks mission in India from July 18-29, 2016 for interacting with various groups and industries and to validate data for the upcoming Doing Business Report (DBR), 2017.
PM Narendra Modi has listed ease of doing business on the top of his agenda. Mr Modi had said in the past that he will like India to be among top 50 countries on World Banks high profile and keenly watched ease of doing business list.
Last year India had jumped 12 places to rank 130 out of 189 countries in the World Banks ease of doing business report.
Any significant jump in Indias ranking in World Banks ease of doing business report will be a huge image booster for the Modi government. The World Bank team held a meeting on Monday with additional secretary (investment), Department of Economic Affairs. The meeting was also attended by the representative from Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP).
During the meeting the team was told that Indian government accords highest priority to the improvement in the ease of doing business in the country.
Kareena said, "We are in 2016, not in the 1800s. Probably, even at that time, people were way more civilized and normal than the way the media is behaving and speculating now."
Mumbai: As soon as Saif Ali Khan confirmed his wife Kareena Kapoor Khan's pregnancy, the news spread like wildfire with several speculations associated to it; but looks like the would be-mommy is disappointed with the news.
In an interview to Hindustan Times, the actress expressed her displeasure over the news and the speculations. She said, "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."
She went on to add, "We are in 2016, not in the 1800s. Probably, even at that time, people were way more civilized and normal than the way the media is behaving and speculating now. 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."
For the uninitiated, there were speculations that Kareena, who is due in December, will push forward the shoot of her next 'Veere Di Wedding'. However, the makers soon released a statement stating that they will begin filming from August. The actress will shoot for some magazine covers by October before she goes on maternity leave.
The actor, who is riding high with the success of his film Sultan, welcomed Kat on Facebook.
Mumbai: As promised, Katrina Kaif hopped on board with social media frenzy and made her debut on Facebook on her 33rd birthday (July, 16). By posting a dazzling display photo and cover image, the actress officially launched her own page which has already received 4.4 million thumbs up.
Apart from her fans, Katrina was also welcomed by her ex-beau Salman Khan. The actor, who is riding high with the success of his film Sultan, welcomed Kat on Facebook by writing, Katrina Kaif, welcome to Facebook and wish you a very happy birthday.
Wasting no time and responding to the warm gesture, Katrina quickly commented on the post by writing, Thank you Sultan.
Well, Salman wasnt the only one who welcomed the actress on-board. Bollywoods King Khan, Shah Rukh was also one of the first ones to wish Katrina.
On her birthday, the actress also had a live chat with her fans.
Mumbai: Seems like Salman Khan and controversies go hand in hand. After his rape comment controversy, the actor is yet again in the midst of another smoky dispute. On Monday (July 18), the actor got into a heated argument with the airport authorities after the actor missed his flight to Delhi.
Salman Khan was supposed to fly off to Delhi from Mumbai with Vistara Airlines but the actor reached airport 15 minutes late due to which he was not allowed to board the plane. This left the actor feeling irritated, who then tried to reason with the airport authorities and asked them to let him board the flight. But rules being rules, Salman was no exception and the actor was not allowed to take the flight.
However, in the middle of the argument, Salman burst into laughter as the entire incident felt too comical to him. Apparently, this isnt the first time that the Dabangg actor missed his flight while travelling with Vistara Airlines and such incident has happened before, too.
Moving on, the actor then boarded Jet Airways' next flight to Delhi, leaving the entire drama behind him.
Salman Khan snapped at Mumbai international airport. (Photo: Viral Bhayani)
The research was carried out at 75 clinical sites in 14 European countries from 2010 to 2014.
Miami: Antiretroviral therapy vastly lowers the risk of spreading HIV for couples in which one partner has the virus and the other does not, even when they have condomless sex, researchers said.
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is the largest of its kind to examine the question of how risky it is for so-called serodiscordant couples to have unprotected sex when the infected partner is suppressing his or her viral load with medication.
The research involved 900 couples, about two-thirds of whom were heterosexual and the rest men who have sex with men.
After a median of 1.3 years, the study found no cases in which the HIV-positive partner, who was taking medication to suppress the virus, infected the partner.
There were, however, 11 cases in which a partner who was HIV negative at the start of the study became infected with the virus that causes AIDS.
Ten of these cases involved gay men.
Researchers said eight of the newly HIV-positive partners admitted to having had unprotected sex outside the relationship.
In no cases could the person's HIV infection be molecularly matched to the partner's, giving researchers an in-couple transmission rate of zero.
However, they cautioned, more follow-up is needed.
"Although these results cannot directly provide an answer to the question of whether it is safe for serodifferent couples to practice condomless sex, this study provides informative data (especially for heterosexuals) for couples to base their personal acceptability of risk on," said the study, led by Alison Rodger of University College London.
An accompanying editorial in JAMA by Eric Daar and Katya Corado of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, warned that couples should not take the study to mean that their risk of transmission is zero.
"For individuals who want to routinely or intermittently not use condoms with an HIV-infected partner, clinicians can indicate that the risk of HIV transmission appears small in the setting of continued viral suppression," they wrote.
The HIV-positive partner should be using antiretrovirals for at least six months before the couple engages in condomless sex, they said.
"Moreover, clinicians need to be clear that even though the overall risk for HIV transmission may be small, the risk is not zero and the actual number is not known, especially for higher-risk groups such as MSM" (men who have sex with men).
They added that "more research is needed with larger numbers of couples and longer follow-up."
The condomless sex occurred during periods when the HIV-positive partner had HIV-1 RNA load less than 200 copies/milliliter, said the study.
The research was carried out at 75 clinical sites in 14 European countries from 2010 to 2014.
Pennsylvanias Republican-dominated legislature negotiated a budget deal for the 2016-17 fiscal year last week that was ultimately passed without Democratic Gov. Tom Wolfs signature, according to the Associated Press.
K-12 education funding has taken center stage in the Keystone State. Wolf, who was elected in 2015, has pledged to eradicate the gap between the amount of money the state gives to wealthy and poor districts. Republicans in the state have pledged not to raise taxes.
Last fiscal year, the state went an entire nine months without a budget, holding up millions of dollars in public education funding. At one point, after months of taking out emergency loans, several charter and public school leaders said theyd have to close their school doors, a threat that never came to be.
The budget passed last week makes some significant changes to the states funding formula. Under the new formula, the states poorest districts will receive an average of $208 more per student, and wealthy districts will get $50 more per student.
Despite the fact, many superintendents in the state told local media that they will still have to make cuts because the increases dont make up for the dramatic cuts the state made during the recession.
I wrote about district cuts amid state increases earlier this year in a profile about an Iowa districts superintendent who vowed to break state law this fall after years of complaining about that states funding formula.
Other changes made to the Pennsylvania budget include a $30 million increase for statewide pre-K and a $20 million increase in special education funding.
In order to increase K-12 funding, the state passed new taxes on digital downloads and tobacco products, a tax Wolf says falls disproportionately on the states poorest residents. Although he refused to sign the budget deal because of his opposition to the revenue model, the budget will still become law, according to the states constitution .
In all, the states public schools will get close to $6 billion, an increase of $200 million over last years budget.
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Washington: The War on Drugs, mass incarceration of drug users and the failure to provide proven harm reduction and treatment strategies have driven up global epidemics of HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis B and C, reveals a new study.
According to the major six-part Series on HIV and related infections in prisoners, levels of these three diseases among inmates are far higher than in the general population.
With an estimated 30 million people passing in and out of prisons every year, prisoners will be key to controlling HIV and tuberculosis epidemics worldwide, as per the study.
"Prisons can act as incubators of tuberculosis, hepatitis C, and HIV and the high level of mobility between prison and the community means that the health of prisoners should be a major public-health concern. Yet, screening and treatment for infectious diseases are rarely made available to inmates, and only around 10 percent of people who use drugs worldwide are being reached by treatment programmes, said lead author Chris Beyrer of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA.
He added, "The most effective way of controlling infection in prisoners and the wider community is to reduce mass imprisonment of injecting drug users."
Data presented in the Series show that with growing numbers of injecting drug users in prison, the prevalence of infectious diseases has also increased.
Levels of HIV infection are 20 times higher among prisoners in Western Europe than the civilian population and around three times higher among prisoners in eastern and southern Africa and North America.
While most prisoners are men, women and girls are the fastest growing imprisoned group worldwide, and in most regions of the world, levels of HV infection are higher in female inmates than male prisoners including Eastern Europe and central Asia.
High rates of hepatitis C are also seen among prisoners, with 1 in 6 inmates in parts of Europe and the USA carrying hepatitis C virus.
Prevalence of active tuberculosis is higher in prisons than the general population in all settings. One study demonstrated that prevalence was 40 times higher in one prison in Brazil than the general population.
Moreover, new estimates produced for the Series suggest that up to half of all new HIV infections over the next 15 years in eastern Europe will stem from increased HIV transmission risk among inmates who inject drugs; and imprisonment could be responsible for three-quarters of new tuberculosis infections among people who inject drugs, and around 6 percent of all yearly tuberculosis infections.
The Series brings together a wealth of evidence to show that countries can reduce and even reverse infectious disease transmission by scaling up proven harm reduction and treatment strategies in prisons like opioid agonist therapy (OAT), antiretroviral therapy (ART), hepatitis B vaccination, condom distribution, and sterile needle and syringe exchange.
Modelling conducted for the Series suggests that reducing mass incarceration of people who use drugs, in this case lowering the number of prisoners who inject drugs by 25 percent, could result in a 7-15 percent drop in new cases of HIV among injecting drug users in the community over 5 years. Similarly, scaling up OAT (eg, methadone and buprenorphine) to all those in need in prison, and after release, could prevent over a quarter of new HIV cases in people who inject drugs in just 5 years.
The study is published in The Lancet.
A few others are on the verge of forging partnerships with clusters in Cambridge, while few others are looking East as well.
They are increasing crop yield by 15 per cent, identifying chemo drugs which have the highest efficacy for a particular patient and are growing seaweed for the generation of bio-fuels. And very soon, there will be a handheld device to check the spread of bacterial infection in ICUs of hospitals
Dont look now, but rookie start-ups from across the country could soon be part of major global discoveries in life sciences, or in rolling out novel technologies and products. Some of them have teamed up with Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay area)s cluster of innovation facilities, popularly known as the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), which figures in the list of the best cutting-edge research facilities. A few others are on the verge of forging partnerships with clusters in Cambridge, while few others are looking East as well.
Such connections are falling into place because Indian start-ups have announced their arrival with some unusual products and technologies: from immunotherapy-based treatment of cancer (which helps patients build immune systems to combat cancer) to identifying chemo drugs which have the highest efficacy for a particular patient, from improving the yield of crops and vegetables by 15 per cent with an extract of seaweeds to growing seaweeds for generation of bio-fuels, devices to test blood samples for fertility, or an entirely new genre of cosmetics, and one hand-held device to check the spread of bacterial infection in ICUs (intensive care units) of hospitals. Some of these products are now on sale while the rest are likely to make it to the shelves in a couple of years.
And just what spawned such original innovations? Transfer of lateral knowledge between the academia and start ups, and networking among start-ups, explains Dr Taslimarif Saiyed, Director and COO, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), a technology hub which has worked extensively to establish a strong life sciences innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in and around Bengaluru with support from the department of biotechnology (DBT) and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC).
C-CAMP, which provides world-class equipment and infrastructure for researchers in life sciences in 60 start-ups across the country, invited researchers of over 100 start-ups to network and explore areas of collaboration, during a two-day conclave hosted in partnership with BIRAC in Bengaluru last month.
Besides, C-CAMP has provided access to its research facilities to more than 200 R&D organisations from within and outside the country as well as trained 800 to 1,000 scientists on how to use these advanced platforms, he added.
But one hotspot for researchers of start-ups either in Bengaluru or similar clusters in Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, New Delhi, Faridabad or Mohali is, well, hold your breath, the cafeteria.
Unlike the IT sector, where companies, big or small, could be competing for projects, with techies keeping their work under wraps here, much happens over a cuppa as these scientists have no hang-ups about sharing details of their work, and even offer solutions to problems encountered in a project. Reason?
The focus of each start-up varies from the other with none pursuing the same goal as the other. For instance, researchers at Sea6 Energy, set out to find a way to make fuel from seaweed at a scale and cost never attempted earlier, but ended up developing a crop-yield enhancing spray after one coffee session with professors from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bengaluru.
Our product, JINGO, is now in the market after we launched it in collaboration with Mahindra & Mahindra. Our long-term goal is bio-fuel from seaweeds, but we are also working on products like animal feed and for healthcare, says chairman Dr Shrikumar Suryanarayan, while recalling the benefits such accidental collisions of thought in the cafeteria.
As for Dr Vinod Kuberkar, who heads Western Range Biopharmaceuticals located in biotech Cluster Innovation Centre on the campus of Maharaja Sayaji University at Baroda, a start-up which has developed two therapies for treatment of cancer, the focus in future would be on auto-immune disorders and failure of the liver. We want to contribute to development of indigenously-developed technologies that are both highly efficacious and affordable, he said.
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. (Photo: knpsikkim.in)
UNESCO on Sunday listed Chandigarhs Capitol Complex and Sikkims national park home to the worlds third highest peak Mount Khangchendzonga among its World Heritage Sites, approving all three nominations linked to India this session.
Sundays 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. Capitol Complex of Chandigarh now a World Heritage site. Thanks @UNESCO @RuchiraKamboj, Indias Culture Ministry tweeted. Ruchira Kamboj is Indias Ambassador to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Khangchendzonga National Park of India is now a World Heritage 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 dhabitation 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, Sikkims Khangchendzonga National Park home to the worlds 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 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.
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.
The incident came to light when local people noticed the mauled body of newborn girl baby and informed the police.
Chennai: The Chennai police on Saturday arrested a couple from Nepal under female infanticide prevention act after they allegedly killed their newborn baby by throwing in a garbage bin in Chitlapakkam.
The arrested were identified as Ram Bahadur, 26 and his wife Santhi, 24, staying a servant quarters in apartment complex in Thirumangai nagar in Chitlapakkam. Ram Bahdur worked a guard in the complex.
The couple told the police that they already have a one-and-a-half-year old daughter and they thought they would not be able bring up another daughter.
The couple also has a 6-year-old son living in Nepal with his grandparents. So they decided to dump her alive, which is a routine in their native village in Nepal, they told the police.
Ram Bahadur had wrapped his newborn baby in his shirt on the night of July 11, a few hours after his wife delivered and dumped her in the garbage pile on Lenin Street.
The incident came to light when local people noticed the mauled body of newborn girl baby and informed the police. The dead body of the girl was mauled by a pack of stray dogs Tuesday morning.
The police who rushed to the spot found the dogs had mutilated the body and one of the legs missing from the babys body. The babys body was later sent to GH for post mortem. Police said that the mans shirt found near the baby helped them to track the parents.
Hyderabad: Fabricated certificate manufacturing gangs are thriving in the city. In the last 18 months, Hyderabad Task Force and Cyberabad SOT teams have nabbed about 33 gangs for fabricating fake educational, job experience certificates, bank statements for US visa, driving licenses, vehicle registration cards, Aadhaar and ration cards.
The gangs which employed crude methods for producing fabricated certificates earlier, are now using sophisticated technology to create fake documents. After 19-year-old student Vishesh Agarwal was caught in a bar and restaurant with a fake driving license, police teams are concentrating on fake certificate gangs.
Gangs, which produce fake educational certificates, are still using old screen printing techniques for creating watermarks on certificates and use computers, scanners and printers only for printing text on the watermarked paper. Similarly, fabricated land document producing gangs, fake experience certificate rackets and fake bank statement gangs exist in west and south zones.
Surprisingly, some gangs in the city are procuring empty smart cards from RTO offices to create fake vehicle registration certificates for bank loans. These gangs do not tamper with the details on the card but create new cards which state the vehicle is free of loans. Later, the gang approaches banks for taking loans. Such gangs were nabbed in the city in 2009, 2010 and 2013 by police.
West zone task force inspector L. Raja Venkat Reddy said that their teams have been focusing on such gangs. Whenever we get credible information on these gangs we nab them. We have nabbed 13 gangs in the last six months. We are focusing on the Jubilee Hills case now in which a minor boy procured a fake driving license with false dates, he said.
Hyderabad: A day after the death of six- year-old Md Ibrahim in a school fight in Tolichowki, police have started questioning the school staff and other students of the school.
Police said that CCTVs in the school could not record the incident as there was a power cut at that time. The police is yet to establish whether the incident happened inside a classroom or outside. Meanwhile, Ibrahims parents alleged that the schools careless attitude on childrens safety led to the incident.
Banjara Hills police on Sunday questioned the classmates of Ibrahim and the teachers at the school to find out how the incident happened, but they could not get any clues.
We found that there was a power cut on Tuesday from morning 11 am to 4 pm, due to which the incident could not be captured on CCTV. We are also inquiring where the fight between the kids occurred and if any of the staffers had saw them fighting, Banjara Hills Inspector K. Srinivas said.
The police has also launched a probe to check for any negligence on the part of the school.
If any evidence about their negligence is found, we will proceed accordingly, the inspector added.
Since the boy who kicked Ibrahim is also a minor, he will be referred to the Juvenile Justice Board.
As per the instructions from the board we will proceed on this issue, he said.
Ibrahims father Abdul Majeed alleged that the school was careless in taking care of kids on the campus. Had any teacher found them fighting or had provided immediate medical care to my son, he would have been alive today, Majeed said.
Ibrahim suffered a serious injury in his groin, after he was kicked by a Class II student several times on the school campus on Tuesday. Later he underwent two surgeries at Niloufer hospital, but did not recover. He succumbed to injuries on Saturday as the infection had spread to the intestines. Police are investigating.
Nagpur: In a suspected case of honour killing, a 45-year-old woman Muktabai allegedly murdered her 19-year-old unmarried daughter at their house here after she found that the girl was pregnant.
Muktabai came to know that her daughter, who had dropped out of high school, was having an affair with a boy from the same locality in Wadi area and was three-months pregnant, the Nagpur police said in a statement.
She had asked the girl to terminate the pregnancy, but she refused to do so. Fearing that her pregnancy would harm the reputation of the family, Muktabai decided to kill her daughter, the statement said.
Muktabai allegedly 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 officials said some unidentified persons from the locality, however, informed them that the girl had died under suspicious circumstances.
A team from the Wadi police station led by woman sub-inspector S. Kutemate visited the scene of the crime and suspected foul play. The body was sent for autopsy, which revealed that the girl was three-months pregnant and died of strangulation, the police said.
The police interrogated the family after which Muktabai broke down and confessed to having killed the girl, the release said.
Muktabai was arrested on Saturday and a case was registered under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code, it said, adding that further investigations were on.
Hyderabad: A 15-year-old girl was allegedly raped by her 25-year-old cousin several times last month in Nalgonda. The girl was staying with her grandfather when the incident happened. When she went to her mother and complained of pain, her mother asked her about the incident.
Police registered a case against G. Sai, a Hyderabad native, her grandfather Anjaiah and government school teacher Rajender Reddy for allegedly encouraging Sai to rape the girl.
The girl belongs to the Kindisheshai Kunta village and was working as a helper at a cotton mill in Dindi. When her mother tried to get her married seven months ago she escaped from the mill and approached the Child Welfare Department. Later, she was rescued and handed over her to her grandfather who was staying in Tavaklapur village.
Officials also deposited Rs 1.5 lakh in her name and the pass book was with Anjaiah. The girl went to a school in Tavaklapur village till April 2016.
As she was not going to school this academic year, her mother sent a legal notice to Anjaiah, asking him to explain why her daughter was not going to school. Not knowing what to reply he sent the child back to her mother. After going to her mother, she complained of pain and when taken to hospital doctors said that she was raped. When asked, the girl said that her cousin Sai raped her at her grandfathers home.
A month ago when she was watching TV and her grandfather was sleeping outside Sai raped her, inspector C. Venkateshwar Reddy said. The girls mother alleged that Anjaiah and Rajender Reddy encouraged Sai to rape the child so that they can marry her to him and then get the money deposited in his name.
The girl was sent for medical examination and teams were sent to Hyderabad to trace Sai. Police registered a rape case against Sai, Anjaiah and Rajender. Reddy under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
Members of the Dalit caste held small protests in Rohtak on Sunday to demand justice for the victim. (Representational Image)
New Delhi: A student was recovering in hospital after being gangraped by a group of men including some charged with sexually assaulting her three years earlier, an officer said on Monday.
Police in Haryana state were hunting for the five, accused of abducting the 21-year-old Dalit student from outside her college before drugging and raping her in a car.
The student was found unconscious in bushes on the side of a highway on last Wednesday night in Haryana which borders New Delhi, in the countrys latest shocking sexual attack.
Haryana deputy superintendent of police Pushpa Khatri said the student, who is still in hospital, has identified all five men two of whom are currently on bail awaiting trial for raping her in 2013.
She has identified the five accused and two of them were involved in the gang-rape of the student in Bhiwandi district in 2013, Khatri said.
We have formed several teams to arrest the accused. The womans family has accused the five of threatening them in the lead-up to Wednesdays attack, demanding that they withdraw the rape case lodged after the 2013 assault.
The accused were constantly threatening us to compromise outside the court. They even offered us a hefty amount for settlement. But we didnt agree, the victims brother was quoted by the media as saying. The family also alleged they were forced to move to Rohtak district in the state from a neighbouring district after the 2013 attack because of harassment by the accused.
Members of the Dalit caste held small protests in Rohtak on Sunday to demand justice for the victim. The fatal gangrape of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 shone a global spotlight on frightening levels of violence against women in the country.
Mumbai: The bravery and presence of mind of an 11-year-old boy resulted in the arrest of a mobile snatcher on Sunday.
According to the police, the boy Mathew Nadar was walking along with his sister Vincy (15) towards a church for Sunday prayers in Indira Nagar near Sion around 7.50 am.
The accused reportedly came riding on a bike from behind, snatched the mobile from Vincys hands and took off. Mathew immediately threw an umbrella at the snatcher, who having lost his balance from the impact fell off the bike.
Soon people gathered around the mobile snatcher, grabbed him and handed him over to police officials.
According to the statement given by Vincy to Antop Hill police officials, the siblings were at the Optic art shop when suddenly a man appeared on a bike and snatched the Sony Xperia mobile phone from Vincy.
When my brother saw the biker snatch my mobile, he threw the umbrella at him. The umbrella hit the snatcher, who lost his balance on the bike and fell down, stated Vincy.
Both Mathew and Vincy then loudly shouted chor chor hearing which passersby came together and helped the children.
The passers-by held the snatcher and called us. The mobile snatcher was identified as Kannan Devendra (39). He works with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporations garbage collector unit. He admitted that he had snatched mobile phones previously and sold it in the black market in Mumbai. We have registered a case against relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code against Devendra, said a police official, who did not wish to be named.
(This story originally appeared in the Asian Age)
The nationally renowned elementary teacher Rafe Esquith, who was fired by the Los Angeles Board of Education last year amid allegations of misconduct, is back in a classroom, according to a Washington Post column .
Esquith, who was celebrated for his passionate teaching style and who wrote popular books, like Teach Like Your Hairs on Fire, was suspended last spring after joking that his fifth graders might have to perform in their next Shakespeare play naked if they didnt raise enough money for the productiona reference to a passage in Huckleberry Finn, which the class was reading.
The Los Angeles school district then launched a misconduct investigation, which allegedly revealed allegations of inappropriate touching of minors, among other sexual improprieties and district policy violations. Esquith repeatedly denied the allegations against him, and filed a lawsuit against the district seeking damages for defamation, emotional distress, and age discrimination. The district asked a state court to dismiss the case, but on Wednesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Esquiths case could continue .
Esquith has been silent for months, but today, Jay Mathews, an education columnist for the Washington Post and one of Esquiths high-profile defenders, wrote that Esquith revealed in an email to supporters that he was now teaching in a private program after school and on weekends. Esquith did not reveal the location or sponsorship of the program.
Esquith said in the email that elementary students in the program were reading four Shakespeare plays in addition to Great Expectations, and that he would be reviving his annual series of Shakespearean plays. His Shakespearean plays for elementary students were well-known , with his mostly low-income and immigrant students opening for the Royal Shakespeare Company and appearing at the Globe Theater in London. They were also the subjects of a 2005 documentary, The Hobart Shakespeareans.
Esquith is the kind of person for whom teaching is as important and as natural as breathing, Mathews wrote. The school board that removed him and other educators should be forced to stop making judgments out of fear and remember their job is to give children the best education possible.
Esquiths attorneys also filed a class-action federal lawsuit on behalf of about 2,000 teachers, charging that the Los Angeles district has unfairly targeted veteran teachers on trumped-up claims of misconduct. The district had ramped up its investigations of misconduct in 2014 after an elementary school teacher, Mark Berndt, pled no contest on 23 charges of sexual misconduct toward students and was sentenced to 25 years in prisoncosting the district $139 million in settlements to the victims.
Esquiths class-action lawsuit, which is seeking $1 billion in damages, is still pending.
AAP leader Preeti Sharma Menon alleged that a BJP MLA was eyeing the property and wanted to develop it commercially. (Photo: PTI)
Mumbai: AAP on Monday dubbed the BJP-led Maharashtra government as "anti-Dalit" for giving go-ahead for demolition of a decades-old building and a printing press in Mumbai associated with Babasaheb Ambedkar.
The Ambedkar Bhavan in Dadar, which also housed the Buddha Bhushan printing press started by the Dalit icon, was demolished late last month by Peoples Improvement Trust (PIT).
The trust, founded by Ambedkar, owns and manages the affairs of Ambedkar Bhavan. PIT said the structure, which was associated with Ambedkar's movement for social reforms, was in a "dilapidated" state and it was razed after receiving a notice from the BMC, the local civic body.
The way the historically important Ambedkar Bhavan was demolished shows the current government led by BJP is "anti-Dalit", Preeti Sharma Menon, national spokesperson of the party, said at a press conference in Mumbai.
All norms were set aside and permission was given to demolish the building, which was part of Ambedkar's rich legacy, she said.
"Had this government had even a little respect for Babasaheb, this shameful act would not have taken place," she said.
The AAP leader alleged that a BJP MLA was eyeing the property and wanted to develop it commercially.
"Commercial development is not going to restore the dignity of Babasaheb, which has been torn apart by this government. Now this government should build memorials across the state to control the damage," she said.
Menon said properties associated with Ambedkar were part of his legacy and also national assets. Therefore, the state government and civic body should have taken opinion from the common people and other stakeholders of the building before permitting the demolition.
"Both Prakash Ambedkar (Ambedkar's grandson) and Anand Ambedkar (a leader of Republican Sena) are carrying forward the legacy of Babasaheb in rightful way. This is why we are going to extend our support to their rally (against the demolition) tomorrow," said Sharma.
Another AAP leader Satish Jain said it was really sad that at a time when "we have gone extra mile to preserve Ambedkar's property in London, his property in our own city has been razed."
Rampur: Two Uttar Pradesh BJP leaders on Monday lashed out at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for accusing the Narendra Modi dispensation of turning the Union government's relationship with the state government into an "India-Pakistan situation".
"Whatever Kejriwal has stated correctly placed him in the category of the head of the enemy country," said Surya Prakash Paul, general secretary of BJP's western Uttar Pradesh unit, and Avdhesh Sharma, general secretary of its youth wing.
Kejriwal, also the national convenor of AAP, had said in the first edition of his 'Talk to AK' show yesterday that his government would have achieved four times of what he managed in 17 months had the Centre not put "obstacles" and "if they would not have made this an India-Pakistan situation."
"(Kejriwal) keeps one eye closed towards laudable acts of the Union government whereas the open eye sorts out certain points to show the Union government as his foe," they said.
The duo said: "Pakistan conspires to destabilise India and Kejriwal attempts to weaken the BJP."
Kejriwal had alleged that the Centre was trying to "break" the AAP government in Delhi and that BJP president Amit Shah was micromanaging the CBI, adding, "but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end."
The BJP leaders said such utterances "emphatically" give an impression that the former tax-man was "losing his balance of mind and decency in behaviour".
They asked Kejriwal to clarify whether he spent "hundreds of crores of rupees on advertisements mostly for self-publicity from his own pocket or from party's fund?"
The duo termed Delhi government's measures like the "odd- even" scheme and its promise to provide free wi-fi a "ruse" to save face because of his government's failures.
"Kejriwal should remember that Delhi is an international city hence sensitive issues cannot be handed over to the state," they said, referring to his promise to conduct an "opinion poll" on full-statehood for Delhi and bringing subjects such as police and land under the jurisdiction of the state government.
MNREGA is a demand-driven wage employment programme. Not less than 100 days of employment are provided to registered workers upon receipt of their demand. (Photo: Representational Image)
New Delhi: The Centre has released more than Rs 28,000 crore so far this year to states under MGNREGA to clear the last year's liabilities and for running the programme in the ongoing year, Parliament was informed on Monday.
Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), funds are released to the states on the basis of agreed to labour budget and performance of the states.
"As on July 12, an amount of Rs 28,022.87 crore has been released to the states/UTs for liquidating the pending liabilities of 2015-16 (wages+material) and for running the prgramme during FY 2016-17," Minister of State for Rural Development Ram Kripal Yadav said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha.
For ensuring timely payment of wages, the central government has started National Electronic Fund Management System (NeFMS) in 11 states, Yadav said in a separate reply.
The state governments have been advised to notify the rules and implement the system of compensation for delay in wages payment and to review and discuss with the programme officers this, he added.
In another reply, the Minister also informed that special camps are being organised in campaign mode at block level or gram panchayat level for linking the Aadhaar numbers of MNREGA workers with their bank accounts.
MNREGA is a demand-driven wage employment programme. Not less than 100 days of employment are provided to registered workers upon receipt of their demand.
MNREGA provides a supplementary means of livelihood for the rural people, primarily during the lean periods and is not a substitute for all other employment opportunities.
The issue of 10-day-old unrest in Kashmir resonated in Rajya Sabha on the opening day of the Monsoon session. (Photo: DC/H U Naqash)
New Delhi: Rejecting 'plebiscite' demands as an "outdated" idea, the government on Monday asserted that Kashmiris are "our own people" who are being "misguided" as it blamed Pakistan for the unrest in the valley and said all parties will be taken along in dealing with the situation.
The issue of 10-day-old unrest in Kashmir resonated in Rajya Sabha on the opening day of the Monsoon session, with the House taking up urgent discussion during which the opposition slammed the government and pressed for holding an all-party meet while pitching for a political solution rather than using "barrel of the gun".
Read: Dont deceive nation by holding state govt responsible for J&K unrest: Jaitley
The opposition, while attacking Pakistan for fanning trouble in Kashmir, asked the government to initiate a political process and direct security forces to exercise restraint while dealing with protests.
Replying to the debate, Home Minister Rajnath Singh affirmed that while militancy will be dealt with sternly, there should be "no instant" use of bullets while dealing with mobs which should first be tackled by the use of teargas and water cannons.
The use of pellet guns, which have been blamed for most civilian injuries, would be looked into, regarding which he will talk to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, he said.
Read: Modi hopeful of good decisions during Monsoon session, GST bill the priority
Singh said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he himself had asked security forces to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with mob violence which started after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
The Home Minister said he had, on Saturday last, expressed desire to visit Kashmir and have a dialogue with the people directly. Mehbooba, while welcoming the offer, told him that after the situation normalises a bit, she will come to Delhi and have a meeting with him to discuss in what format talks can be held, he said.
"Whatever is happening in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored. The name is 'Pakistan', but its acts are 'na-pak' (not pious)," Singh said.
Referring to the demands for 'plebiscite', he ruled it out, saying it is "outdated" and people of Kashmir are being "misguided" on this issue.
"Kashmiris are our own people. We will bring them on the right path... We will make them aware of the reality," he said.
Invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee's famous remarks of 'Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat and Insaniyat' (kashmiriyat, democracy and humanity), he said "If there is any place for Kashmiriyat in 'Jamhooriyat' (democracy), it can be only on the basis of 'Insaniyat' (humanity) and not 'Haivaniyat' (devilish acts). Those believing in Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat, cannot give space to haivaniyat."
Puducherry: Chief Minister V Narayanasamy on Monday said he would take up with the Centre, the plan and non-plan needs of the Union Territory, during his visit to New Delhi.
He told reporters here he would persuade the Ministers concerned to ensure that the plan and non-plan requirements of Puducherry as had been projected through a draft document sent recently, were conceded fully.
After attending the eleventh Inter-State Council meeting in New Delhi, he said he had asked the Centre not to discriminate between big states and small union territories in allocation of funds.
"The Centre should shed its big brother attitude and ensure balanced allocation of funds for all states," he said.
The chief minister also stressed that Centre should take immediate steps to earmark funds for modernisation of police force in Puducherry, as there was every need to strengthen its coastal security.
Hyderabad: MIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said on Sunday that the court would provide legal aid to the ISIS terror suspects arrested by the NIA earlier this month if he does not help them. He was while speaking at an anti-ISIS gathering in Mahbubnagar.
Mr Owaisi addressing the gathering at the ZP High School ground on Friday midnight said that the ISIS was like a plague and would destroy the community.
He said the youth should not fall prey to their ideology and spoil their future. Instead of thinking of the such ideologies, youth should focus on their future and their families. Mr Owaisi said.
The ISIS with its heinous acts is bringing a bad name to Islam, Mr Owaisi said.
As citizens of India, we abide by the Constitution and the Constitution has given every citizen a right to seek justice. If I do not provide help to arrested youth, the court itself will provide help to them, said Mr Owaisi. The Hyderabad MP is facing a slew of cases for offering legal aid to the suspects.
Srinagar: A ruling PDP MLA was injured in an attack by a stone pelting mob in Pulwama district in Kashmir where curfew remained in force today in view of clashes at some places even as newspapers failed to hit the stands for the third day.
Curfew was imposed in all 10 districts of the Valley to curb the clashes in the aftermath of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. "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 in view of clashes at some places in north Kashmir's Bandipora district and couple of places in the city yesterday.
He said the situation across the Valley so far is peaceful. "However, a stone pelting mob targeted the vehicle of PDP MLA from Pulwama last night, resulting in injuries to the lawmaker (Mohammad Khalil Band)," he said.
Police and paramilitary personnel have been deployed in strength across the Valley for strict implementation of the prohibitory orders, the official said.
Although fewer incidents of clashes were reported yesterday, newspapers did not publish for the third straight day.
While mobile telephony, except BSNL mobiles, is suspended across Kashmir for the past eight days, the mobile Internet services have also been downed across the Valley.
Meanwhile, normal life remained paralysed due to separatist sponsored strike. The schools and colleges, which were scheduled to reopen today after 17-day summer vacations, remained closed as government extended the holidays for one more week in view of the prevailing law and order situation.
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 nearly 3200 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 this evening.
Bengaluru: Karnataka minister KJ George stepped down after a court ordered the registration of an FIR against him and two top police officials on Monday, in connection with the alleged suicide of Deputy Superintendent of Police MK Ganapathy, which has raised a huge storm in the state.
The order by Additional Judicial Magistrate First Class Annapurneshwari came on a private criminal complaint filed by the deceased police officer's son Nehal Ganapathy requesting the court to direct the Kodagu police to take up investigation against the minister and two officers for allegedly abetting his father's suicide.
"Allegations against me are far from truth. Will consult with my legal expert for further action," KJ George said.
"I am confident that I'll come out clean as my conscious is clear," KJ George added on his name appearing in the Dy SP's suicide case.
Ganapathys wife Pavana and Nehal had approached the court, stating the police had rejected a complaint lodged by them with the Kushalanagar police on July 10 against George and IPS officials A M Prasad and Pranab Mohanty.
Read: Mangaluru DySP suicide note names minister, senior cops
In his complaint, Nehal had said his father had made a "dying declaration" naming George and the two officers and their acts amounted to "abetting suicide".
Appealing to the court to take cognisance of the offence punishable under IPC section 306 read with Section 34, the complaint also claimed the accused were highly placed and influential people who had prevailed upon police from taking action against them.
Read: Karnataka DySp suicide: Opposition disrupts Assembly proceedings for 6th day
Nehal's counsel M T Nanaiah said the investigating officers would have to question George and the two police officers and take a call on whether to arrest them depending on the probe.
Reacting to the court's directive in Bengaluru, Opposition BJP leader Jagadish Shettar said the minister should resign immediately and the two IPS officers be suspended to pave the way for an impartial probe.
Ganapathy (51) was found hanging from the ceiling fan in a room at a lodge in Madikeri on July 7, prior to which he gave an interview to a local TV channel, stating the minister and A M Prasad (IG-Intelligence) and Pranab Mohanty (IGP- Lokayukta) would be responsible "if anything happens to me".
Read: Karnataka Govt faces heat over DySP suicide; Opposition demands CBI inquiry
The case is currently being investigated by the state CID. Coming under attack from the Opposition, which has been stalling Assembly proceedings since Monday last, the Karnataka government has constituted a judicial commission headed by K N Keshavanarayana to inquire into the alleged suicide.
The commission would probe the "circumstances and events" leading to the "unnatural death" of Ganapathy.
The Opposition BJP and JDS have rejected the judicial probe and are insisting on a CBI inquiry and the resignation of George.
Senior police officers in Lucknow said the main accused, Sripal Lodh, is among those arrested and 11 officials of the Excise Department and police have been suspended. (Photo: Representational Image)
Lucknow: The death toll in the hooch tragedy on Monday climbed to 33 and more than two dozen people were battling for life after consuming spurious liquor in Etah and Farrukhabad districts even as the authorities launched a crackdown on bootlegging arresting 1,621 people across Uttar Pradesh.
Twenty-nine people have died in Etah district and four in neighbouring Farrukhabad, officials said, adding 21 deaths had occurred till Sunday and eight more died overnight in Etah.
Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kayamganj in Farukhabad Ajit Kumar said four persons have died in the district after consuming hooch.
Senior police officers in Lucknow said the main accused, Sripal Lodh, is among those arrested and 11 officials of the Excise Department and police have been suspended in connection with the tragedy.
An ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh each will be given to the families of the deceased.
Meanwhile, the condition of over two dozen people admitted to various hospitals in Etah and Saifai was stated to be serious.
DGP Javeed Ahmed issued strict directives to officials to carry out a drive against manufacture and sale of illicit liquor. Under this drive, 1,621 people were arrested and 1,585 cases lodged all over the state.
As many as 36,121 liters of illicit liquor and seven vehicles were seized while 197 illegal liquor producing units were destroyed under the drive, police said.
Agra IGP Durgacharan Misra said Sripal has been slapped with charges under the stringent National Security Act and is being interrogated about location of the liquor producing units.
Raids are being conducted within Aliganj police circle on the basis of information about location of the factories.
Circle officer of Police (Aliganj) D S Garbyal said raids were conducted at 15 locations and four factories were unearthed.
Meanwhile, a team of BJP leaders, including five MPs, an MLA and general secretary, on Monday met the families of the deceased.
BJP MPs Ram Shankar Katheria, Rajvir Singh, Devendra Singh, Mukesh Rajput, Ashok Doharey, MLA Jagan Prasad Garg and party General Secretary Pankaj Singh met the families of the victims in Aliganj town even as locals protested and accused the police of being hand-in-glove with the accused.
BJP demanded that the compensation amount be enhanced to Rs 10 lakh and sought dismissal of the Samajwadi Party government.
"There is no law and order in the state and criminal elements are having a field day," BJP alleged.
Hyderabad: A day after the death of a class I student in a scuffle with his senior, the eight-year-old, accused of bullying the junior does not understand what the hue and cry around him is all about. What is death? he asks, perturbed.
Mohammed Ibrahim, 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 the boy, two years older than him, on the school campus on Tuesday.
The quarrel broke out between the children after the eight-year-old teased Ibrahim for a runny nose.
Infuriated, Ibrahim verbally abused his senior, triggering a scuffle, which ended with the eight-year-old kicking Ibrahim in his stomach and private parts multiple times.
Ibrahim collapsed immediately after receiving the brutal blows, and was rushed to the hospital by the school staff, where he was administered first aid and sent home.
But he was rushed to the hospital for a second time after complaining of severe pain in his private parts. The doctors at the Niloufer Hospital performed two surgeries on Ibrahim, but he succumbed to his injuries on Saturday.
Banjara Hills police on Sunday questioned the student accused of harassing Ibrahim, and his classmates and the teachers at the school to find out how the incident happened.
When police questioned the older boy about the murder, he asked, Mar gaya matlab kya hai? (What does it mean he has died?) He claimed that Ibrahim had beaten him and he retaliated.
Ibrahim was the son of Mohammed Abdul Majeed, a Meru Cab driver from Toli Chowki.
Majeed said Ibrahim had complained of pain in the groin and had said that a student from Class II had kicked him. 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, 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.
Police said that CCTVs in the school could not record the incident as there was a power cut at that time. The police is yet to establish whether the incident happened inside a classroom or outside.
Meanwhile, Ibrahims parents alleged the schools careless attitude on childrens safety led to the incident.
Can Police Force Catheterized Urine Collection in DUI Cases?
How determined should authorities be to collect evidence from a reluctant suspect? Should they be allowed to strap someone down on a hospital gurney and take urine using a catheter without the person's permission but with a warrant? What if the warrant doesn't specify catheterization but simply authorizes police to collect blood or urine generally?
These are the questions that one South Dakota defendant, Dirk Landon Sparks, is asking after undergoing a forced catheterization to collect his urine. He seeks to have the warrant quashed and the evidence against him suppressed, saying that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment reasonableness requirement makes no allowances for such an invasive procedure. Let's consider his claims.
The Fourth Amendment
Sparks' arguments drew the attention of the American Bar Association Journal, which cites local lawyers as saying this is not a rare situation in South Dakota. Forced catheterization happens when suspects refuse to give blood or urine in a DUI case. The constitutionality of the procedure is questionable, however.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right of the people to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and ensures that warrants are specific. Generally, if a judge signs a warrant authorizing a particular search or seizure, this authorizes police to obtain the evidence sought. But in a case like this one where the evidence sought is a bodily fluid and the manner of obtaining it is extremely invasive, the question of reasonableness naturally arises.
Forced Catheterization
According to South Dakota criminal defense lawyers, these forced catheterizations occur regularly when a suspect does not agree to provide the evidence voluntarily. Suspects are then strapped to a gurney without being anesthetized and a catheter is forced into the genitals to obtain urine.
That, some say, violates the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment, as the warrant authorizes obtaining the evidence but makes no mention of such an invasive procedure. The defendant's motion argues that authorities should have sought his blood as the next most reasonable attempt to collect evidence. If the court agrees with his claim, this could lead to changes state-wide in how DUI refusal cases are handled.
Accused?
If you have been charged with a DUI or any other crime, talk to a lawyer today. Many criminal defense attorneys consult for free or a minimal fee and will be happy to assess your case.
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Chennai: Tamil Nadu government on Monday launched the free bus pass scheme for school and college students for the year 2016-17, with Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa giving away smart cards to five beneficiaries.
The government scheme, aimed at benefiting students from poor backgrounds, covered 28.05 lakh students in 2015-16, an official release said.
This year, 31.11 lakh students will be provided free smart card bus passes at an estimated Rs 504.31 crore, it said.
To mark the launch, Jayalalithaa gave away smart cards to five students at the Secretariat here, it added.
Meanwhile, the CM launched a pension scheme for beneficiaries of her RK Nagar constituency and gave away pension orders to five persons.
A total of 1248 beneficiaries will receive a monthly pension of Rs 1000 starting this August, the release said.
Almost 2,115 persons injured during the prevailing law and order situation, 1,924 have been discharged from the hospitals while 191 are still undergoing treatment including 70 persons with eye injuries. (Photo: PTI)
Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, has called for an all-party meeting on Thursday to discuss the prevailing situation in Kashmir Valley.
An official spokesman said that invitation for the meet has been extended to the leaders of all mainstream parties including ruling PDP-BJP combine and opposition National Conference, Congress, CPI(M), CPI, National Panthers Party, Democratic Party Nationalist and Peoples Democratic Front besides some others to discuss the prevailing situation and the measures to be taken to restore peace and normalcy in the Valley
Meanwhile, the Chief Minister has asked for a collective effort to get the State back on course. She also asked the administration to reach out to the people to mitigate their sufferings.
The Government is taking various measures to restore calm and it needs support of every section of the society to normalise the situation to end the miseries of the people, Mufti said while speaking at a high-level meeting of the administrative secretaries held here on Monday to review the situation on the governance front.
At the meeting which was attended also by Chief Secretary, B. R. Sharma, and other senior functionaries of the government, the Chief Minister said that apart from loss of precious human lives and injuries to scores, the local economy, especially the tourism sector and education have taken a big hit because of the ongoing turbulence in the Valley.
She said it was the responsibility of every section of the society including the political leaders, media, the religious heads, the business community, the prominent citizens and especially the emancipated youth to rise to the occasion and help the government in restoring peace and normalcy in the Kashmir.
The Chief Minister said the ministers and other government functionaries have been asked to reach out to the people and work with the local civil society groups for speedy restoration of peace and normalcy in the affected areas so that the public do not face any hardships.
Asking officers to lead from the front in reaching out to the people and mitigating their problems, the Chief Minister stressed the need for infusing new life in the institutions at the cutting edge level to address the developmental concerns of the public.
Mufti said unemployment is a matter of grave concern and every section of the society including individuals, institutions and organisations have to be brought together in a spirit of creative enterprise to widen the economic and employment space for the States youth and channelise their energies productively.
She asserted that the government is responsive to the peoples needs and concerned about their problems and is working judiciously and in a transparent manner to fulfil their aspirations and expectations.
She sought to elucidate that her priority is strict implementation of the rule of law and called for keeping a strict vigil on the activities of the anti-social elements who in the garb of law and order situation indulge in encroachments and misuse of States resources.
The officials informed the meeting that the situation has stabilized in most of the districts and except for some sporadic incidents of protests and stone-pelting the overall law and order scenario has improved substantially.
While taking a review of the condition of injured and availability of medicines and other equipment in hospitals, the Chief Minister was informed by the Commissioner Secretary Health and Medical Education Department that out of the 2,115 persons injured during the prevailing law and order situation, 1,924 have been discharged from the hospitals while 191 are still undergoing treatment including 70 persons with eye injuries.
The meeting was informed that there are adequate quantities of blood, medicines and other requisite facilities available for the injured in all the hospitals and no patient needs to be shifted outside the state for treatment. The Chief Minister directed that besides providing free medicines
The suspected ISIS operatives were arrested for allegedly conspiring to carry out terrorist activities in Delhi and during the Ardh Kumbh in Haridwar. (Photo: Representational Image)
New Delhi: Six suspected ISIS operatives were allegedly conspiring to carry out terror activities in national capital and adjoining regions and during Ardh Kumbh in Haridwar to terrorise people, the NIA on Monday told a special court.
According to the sources, in its charge sheet filed before District Judge Amar Nath, National Investigation Agency (NIA) claimed that the accused were planning to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) from explosive materials extracted from "match sticks".
The court has put up the charge sheet for consideration on August 25. The chargesheet was filed against Akhlakur Rehman, Mohd Azeemushan, Mohd Meraj, Mohd Osama, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and Yosuf-Al-Hindi under Section 120 B (conspiracy) of IPC and several provisions of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in the case.
While the five accused are currently in judicial custody, Yosuf-Al-Hindi is wanted in the case.
"They were conspiring to carry out a terror activity in the area of Delhi/NCR and during Ardh Kumbh festival in Haridwar in order to create terror in the minds of people of India and send global message that they are representatives of ISIS in India," the charge sheet said.
It further added that the "accused owed their allegiance to Islamic State/Islamic State and Levant (ISIL)/ Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to further its activities in
India by way of motivating Muslim youths in this regard and ultimately train and prepare them to carry out terror activities in India and also to shift them to countries like Syria, Iraq etc."
"They were conspiring to carry out terror acts by planting IEDs during the Ardh Kumbh Mela, Haridwar, and for this, they were in the process of acquiring explosives and the necessary expertise in assembling the IEDs with the help of literature provided to one of them through internet," the chargesheet said.
The case was filed by the special cell of Delhi Police on January 18, 2016. On the directions of Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), the case was later transfered to NIA.
New Delhi: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday held Pakistan responsible for the current situation in Kashmir following the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani. Addressing the Rajya Sabha, Singh said Pakistan is sponsoring terrorism in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Responding to Congress' accusation that the state government was treating civilians in the state like militants, Singh clarified that the Kashmir administration was acting tough with terrorists but had its sympathies with the civilians.
Read: Dont deceive nation by holding state govt responsible for J&K unrest: Jaitley
"A terrorist is killed in our country and Pakistan is trying to interfere in our internal affairs. Their sympathies lies with a terrorist and not just that, they are even observing a 'Black Day' to mourn his death, such is the state of affairs in Pakistan," Singh said while lashing out at Pakistan.
"Pakistan has been playing an irresponsible role, it should not claim to be protector of Muslims. Kashmiris are our own people, they are being misguided," he added.
Earlier, Arun Jaitley led BJP's charge in the Rajya Sabha and said the Opposition was deceiving itself and the nation if it believed that the PDP-BJP govt in J&K was responsible for the current situation in the state.
"National parties need to work together in the state. The PDP-BJP alliance was chosen by the people. We all know that BJP has ideological differences with the PDP, but we made a compromise for the benefit of the state," said Jaitley. He also urged the youth in the state to stay away from the unrest.
Read: Modi hopeful of good decisions during Monsoon session, GST bill the priority
Jaitley then went on to slam Pakistan for trying to interfere in the internal affairs of India and accused it of being in denial over the fact that J&K belonged to India.
"Pakistan never reconciled to the fact that J&K is a part of India. Because of their failure to accept this, they continued with their twisted politics. This even led to a war between the two countries. Thrice we fought a 'conventional war' with them and each time they lost. After realising that they could not win a war against us, they resorted to using terrorism as a means to their end,' Jaitley said.
Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad had spoke before Jaitley and had hit out at the Centre, accusing it of failing to differentiate between civilians and militants in Kashmir.
"Should locals be treated same way we treat militants? Should same bullets that are used on militants be used on innocents?," asked Nabi.
Governments are run on trust & faith, but people of J&K have a sense of mistrust towards the current Government. I'm not saying that Kashmiri people had complete faith when Cong was in power, but there was a sense of trust in some corner, he added.
New Delhi: The BJP on Monday responded to Congress' charge that it failed to rein in the unrest in Kashmir after the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani. Arun Jaitley led BJP's charge in the Rajya Sabha and said the Opposition was deceiving itself and the nation if it believed that the PDP-BJP govt in J&K was responsible for the current situation in the state.
"National parties need to work together in the state. The PDP-BJP alliance was chosen by the people. We all know that BJP has ideological differences with the PDP, but we made a compromise for the benefit of the state," said Jaitley. He also urged the youth in the state to stay away from the unrest.
#LIVE: If you want to end militancy, we have to look at the reasons and in one voice, we appeal the youth not to take such steps: A Jaitely Deccan Chronicle (@DeccanChronicle) July 18, 2016
Jaitley then went on to slam Pakistan for trying to interfere in the internal affairs of India and accused it of being in denial over the fact that J&K belonged to India.
"Pakistan never reconciled to the fact that J&K is a part of India. Because of their failure to accept this, they continued with their twisted politics. This even led to a war between the two countries. Thrice we fought a 'conventional war' with them and each time they lost. After realising that they could not win a war against us, they resorted to using terrorism as a means to their end,' Jaitley said.
Earlier, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad had hit out at the Centre, accusing it of failing to differentiate between civilians and militants in Kashmir.
"Should locals be treated same way we treat militants? Should same bullets that are used on militants be used on innocents?," asked Nabi.
Governments are run on trust & faith, but people of J&K have a sense of mistrust towards the current Government. I'm not saying that Kashmiri people had complete faith when Cong was in power, but there was a sense of trust in some corner, he added.
Read: Modi hopeful of good decisions during Monsoon session, GST bill the priority
Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoped that all parties will work shoulder to shoulder in the Monsoon Session of Parliament to take important decisions that will give a new direction to the country.
Noting that the session is taking place just ahead of the 70th Independence Day, Modi said he was confident that discussions of the highest standard will be held.
Addressing the media outside Parliament at the start of the Monsoon session, the Prime Minister said that based on the talks with all parties over the last few days, the prevailing mood was to take "very good decisions so that the country can move ahead on the path of development with greater speed".
New Delhi: Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, who was involved in a spat over Twitter with Congress leader Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar hours before her death, has been questioned by Delhi Police in connection with the murder case.
Tarar's questioning took place in February at a place of her choice -- a prominent hotel in New Delhi. She was questioned by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case in the presence of women police personnel, sources said today.
Summons could not be issued to Trar as she is a Pakistani national but she had earlier stated that she was open to joining investigation into the matter and had also written to a senior official communicating the same.
51-year-old Sunanda was found dead at a suite in a five-star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, a day after her spat with Tarar on Twitter over her alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.
Tarar was questioned about her relation with the Congress leader and his wife, her fight with Sunanda over Twitter, and other issues revolving around Sunanda's mysterious death. So far she has refused any proximity on personal terms with both Tharoor and Sunanda, the sources said.
The questioning stretched beyond two hours and Tarar was also asked to fill a questionnaire prepared by the SIT, they said.
Tarar also figured prominently in a statement by journalist Nalini Singh, believed to be the last person to have spoke to Sunanda over phone hours before her death.
Singh had said that Sunanda had mentioned to her about Tharoor deleting Tarar's messages from his Blackberry phone and had asked her if she could help her in retrieving the same. Singh had further said that Sunanda also told her she was unhappy following a meeting between Tharoor and Tarar in Dubai.
In January 2015, Delhi Police had registered a case of murder in connection with the death of Sunanda. An AIIMS medical board had earlier found poisoning as reason for her death following which the police had sent her viscera samples to an FBI lab in US.
The FBI lab report, sent to Delhi Police In November 2015, endorsed the findings of the AIIMS Forensic report. As police could not firm up about cause of the death based on the FBI report, they requested a medical board of AIIMS to analyse the contents of the report.
Several persons including Shashi Tharoor have been questioned in connection with Sunanda's death. The police have also conducted polygraph test on six persons, all prime witnesses in the case, including Tharoor's domestic help Narayan Singh, driver Bajrangi and Sanjay Dewan, a close friend of the couple.
BENGALURU: Bringing the curtains down on an embarrassing episode which left Congress top guns red-faced, Bengaluru development minister and Chief Minister Siddaramaiahs trusted lieutenant, K.J. George resigned on Monday, hours after a local court in Madikeri ordered the police to register an FIR against him in the case pertaining to deputy superintendent of police M.K. Ganapatis suicide.
Mr George, amongst the senior most original Congress leaders in Mr Siddaramaiahs government, was accused of harassment by Mr Ganapati in an interview to a television channel hours before the officer ended his life in a hotel in Madikeri on July 7. His resignation was the culmination of series of protests by Opposition parties in the state legislature and outside, and caustic remarks within the cabinet by senior ministers who quizzed Mr Siddaramaiah as to why he was resorting to double standards by rising to the defence of Mr George while he did not think twice before axing some ministers during last months reshuffle. Evidently, central leaders of the party advised the Chief Minister to accept Mr Georges resignation immediately after the court order this afternoon to thwart any attempt by MPs of BJP and constituents of NDA to embarrass the Congress in parliament on Tuesday and blunt their victory in the North-East.
Soon after handing in his resignation letter to the Chief Minister, Mr George told the media: In 45 years of public life, I have never harassed anyone. I am here to serve the people. My conscience is clear. I will come out clean. Since court has issued an order, I decided to hand over the resignation to CM. But I am keeping all legal options open. You wait and watch for further legal action.
On his part, Mr Siddaramaiah who chaired an emergency meeting of the cabinet, told the media, Mr George has voluntarily submitted his resignation. Though he was not involved in any crime, he resigned on moral grounds. I have accepted his resignation.
Earlier, the Chief Minister discussed the repercussions of the court order with senior ministers. Barring higher education minister, Basavaraj Rayareddy all the ministers felt Mr George should step down pending completion of the investigation.
Mr Siddaramaiah did not disclose his decision but called a leader in New Delhi and briefed him about the developments of the day. He continued to defend Mr George in the Legislative Council, saying he would take a call only after reading a copy of the court order.
The word for Mr Georges exit, however, came from Delhi soon after senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad briefed party president Sonia Gandhi on the implications of the court order and likely protests by MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi on Tuesday. Mr Siddaramaiah had little choice but to accept Mr Georges resignation but joined his cabinet colleagues in assuring the outgoing minister: We are confident that you will return taintless. You have done no wrong. We are all with you. You will come back.
How the axe fell
3 PM: JMFC court in Madikeri directs jurisdictional police to register an FIR against Mr George and two police officers, A.M. Prasad and Pronab Mohanty
3.30 PM: Mr Siddaramaiah convenes a meeting of senior ministers in his chamber near the Legislative Assembly
5 PM: CM takes a break to participate in the legislature session, and makes a statement that he would take a call only after getting a copy of the court order
6 PM: The inclusive meeting of senior ministers resumes on the third floor. A message arrives from central leaders that Mr George should resign. The meeting, however, lasts more than an hour
8 PM: Mr George addresses the media to announce his resignation
Hyderabad: The High Court on Monday said that there is a dire need to restrict collection of exorbitant fee, like the reported collection of one-time fee of Rs 7lakh to Rs 10 lakh by some private schools in the city.
A division bench comprising acting Chief Justice Dilip B. Bhosale and Justice A.V. Sesha Sai was dealing with petitions by Hyderabad School Parents Association and others challenging the inaction of authorities in restricting private schools from charging exorbitant fee.
When counsels appearing for the petitioners brought the issue of onetime collection of fee to the notice of the court, the bench wondered what a one-time fee is and under what authority this was being collected.
Counsel for the government replied that the government had prescribed a limitation for collection of one-time fee. The bench asked how the schools were then collecting such huge amounts.
The bench asked the government to explore possibilities for bringing out a policy which can provide quality education to children with a rational fee structure and also provide land to private schools for a reasonable price if they come forward to offer education for nominal fee.
When the bench asked for the details of schools which have collected huge one-time fee, Mr A. Sanjeev Kumar, special counsel for Telangana state, submitted that they had details of 160 schools.
Mr L. Ravichander, senior counsel, told the bench that the government has closed more than 4,000 government schools in the state. Expressing surprise at the decision of the government, the bench suggested handing over management of schools to private parties in case the government is unable to run them provided the private parities offer education for a reasonable price.
The bench told Mr J. Ramachandra Rao, Additional Advocate General of Telangana state, to inform the government not to take the issue easily as there was a larger public interest involved. The bench asked counsels appearing for petitioners and schools to come up with suggestions in this regard by the next date of hearing.
Hyderabad: The Telangana state government on Monday informed the Hyderabad High Court that it was taking steps to decentralise Ganesh immersion in the city from this year.
The government, in an affidavit submitted before a division bench comprising acting Chief Justice Dilip B. Bhosale and Justice A.V. Sesha Sai, explained that it was contemplating to take up construction of ponds in lakes as per the Bengaluru model for immersion of idols up to eight feet height from this year. Though there was no mention about not allowing immersion in Hussainsagar in the affidavit, counsel appearing for the government made a categorical statement that the state was taking steps for not allowing immersions at the lake.
The government filed the affidavit in response to an order of the bench, which was dealing with a petition by city advocate M. Venu Madhav, complaining that the courts orders on immersion were not being complied with.
Hyderabad High Court not to rule on idol height
The affidavit indicated that the government had been taking steps for constructing ponds in the city. Awareness programmes would be conducted to motivate and encourage people by involving utsav committees and residents associations for carrying out immersion of idols in the lakes identified nearby their localities.
When the petitioner sought a direction for restriction on the height of idols, the bench made it clear that it would not intervene and it was for the organisers and devotees to embark upon self-regulation in view of development of flyovers and the Metro project.
The bench pointed out that even Lord Ganesh would not appreciate if people caused hurdles to the development activities for the sake of height, and adjourned the case for 12 weeks.
Ganesh samiti insists on immersion at Tank Bund
The Bhagyanagar Ganesh Utsav Samiti has said that immersion at Tank Bund will continue as in previous years and no committee will abide by the suggestion of restricting the heights of Ganesh idols.
The permanent enclosures at Tank Bund and the other 10 lakes will only accommodate idols below 10 feet. Thus the Khairatabad Ganesh, which is the biggest at 58 feet, and other idols higher than 10 feet will be immersed as usual.
The samiti is against bureaucrats citing rulebooks and the courts suggestion to curb the height of the idols. Sources said since the top officers have been unable to convince the organisers, Chief Minister K. Chandrasek-har Rao will intervene and hold a meeting with the Samiti members.
The two meetings between officials and Samiti members have ended in a stalemate. The samiti is of the opinion that the government and court cant interfere as it is the fundamental right of citizens to worship freely and nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision to restrict the height of idols.
Officers have been trying to convince them that reducing the height of idols will not reduce their faith. They have also cited pollution issues post immersion.
Dr Bhagavanth Rao, general secretary of the Bhagyanagar Ganesh Ut-sav Samiti, said, Ganesh immersion will continue in Hussainsagar. The High Court has stated that it will not be involved in height issues and is not ready to impose any restriction on immersion. It has directed the government to take all necessary steps for the immersion. No committee is willing to decrease the height, the festivities will be conducted as usual.
Hyderabad: Principal commissioner of income-tax, Mr Susheel Kumar, said on Monday said that the department would conduct unlimited raids on those who did not declare undisclosed incomes before September 30, 2016.
Speaking at a seminar on Income Declaration Scheme 2016 with the Tax Bar Association of TS and AP, Mr Kumar said that a similar offer (VDIS) had been made by the Union government in 1997.
The Union government has given a chance to declare undisclosed amounts under the Finance Act, 2016. The I-T department will give a chance to pay 45 per cent of tax in three installments 25 per cent by November 30, another 25 per cent by March 1, 2017 and the remaining 50 per cent by September 30, 2017, he said. He added that the 45 per cent of tax included 7.5 per cent surcharge and 7.5 per cent Krishi Kalyan Cess.
The government has already extended the cutoff date and last date. It will not extend the date any more. We have sophisticated technology to identify culprits who are holding undisclosed amounts. We shall hold n number of raids on the respondents after the last date, he said.
Principal commissioner - 2, Mr B. Murali Krishna, said that the details of those who declared their assets would be kept secret. Even the assesses in our office will not know the details except for the respective principal commissioner. We shall send the details of undisclosed amounts but not the names, he said.
He added that the I-T department was only accepting undisclosed amounts earned legally. We do not accept applications from smugglers, those who are booked under Prevention of Corruption Act, amounts against Security Act etc., he said.
Responding to a question asked by DC, Mr Krishna said persons, industries and firms had been approaching I-T offices to verify the scheme. As per the norms, we do not disclose the details of any person who has already declared undisclosed assets. The response is good, he said.
Principal commissioners of I-T Mr S. Venkateswarlu, Mr K. Sridhar, Mr P.V. Rao, additional commissioner of IT Ms Amisha Gupt and others took part in the seminar.
The decision to invite ethnic political parties and the womens groups was decided the Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN) and leaders from Coordination Team (CT) of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement signatories at a meeting on July 8 in Chaing Mai, Thailand.
Padoh Kwe Htoo Win, a convening committee member of the Mai Ja Yang summit spoke to Karen News about the invitation.
We invited them [ethnic political parties] because the political objective of the ethnic armed groups and ethnic political parties are similar. Padoh Kwe Htoo Win said, We think they should participate in this conference.
Padoh Kwe Htoo Win said the Mai Ja Yang conference for the ethnic nationals to try to have a common political objective how they can move forward together.
Besides the 21 ethnic armed groups, the Mai Ja Yang Summit will include the two main ethnic parities alliances which are the United Nationalities Alliance (UNA) and Nationalities Brotherhood Federation (NBF).
The Womens League of Burma (WLB) are also to be invited.
Sai Nyunt Lwin, secretary of the UNA told Karen News, I have heard that we will be invited. I think holding this meeting is good. As for us we will have to discuss among our allies whether we will attend.
Before convening the 21st Century Pinlon Conference, ethnic nationalities wanted to have a common political objectives was proposed and decided at the United Nationalities Federal Council meeting held on June 3, in Thailand.The summit dates and place then confirmed during the Ethnic Armed Organizations Peace Process Steering Team meeting held on June 25.
He has been charge sheeted for criminal conspiracy, unlawful activities and under the Explosive Substances Act. (Representational image)
Hyderabad: The National Investigation Agency has filed a charge sheet against ISIS India chief Shafi Armar alias Yousuf-Al-Hindi for conspiring to carry out attacks in Delhi and Uttarkhand.
The National Investigation Agency charge sheet has confirmed that Shafi Armar, who was suspected to be the handler of the recent busted ISIS Hyderabad module, is alive in Syria.
The National Investigation Agency which filed charge sheets against five other ISIS suspects apart from Shafi Armar said, "Shafi Armar was a resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka and is at present working for ISIS in Syria. He has been charge sheeted for criminal conspiracy, unlawful activities and under the Explosive Substances Act. The case was initially registered by the Special Cell of New Delhi on January 18, 2016 and was transferred to National Investigation Agency.
In the charge sheet NIA said, The investigation has established that the six accused set up a terrorist gang owing allegiance to the ISIS and as per the direction of their handler Shafi Armar conspired to carry out terrorist acts by assembling and planting IEDs to terrorise the people.
The charge sheet has been filed against Akhlakur Rehman, Mohammed Azeem-ushan, Md Osama and Md Meraj, all residents of Roorkee in the Haridwar district of Uttarkhand, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed, a resident of Malad West in Mumbai and Yusuf-Al-Hindi alias Shafi Armar.
A book was retrieved from the mobile phone of accused Akhalqu titled Bomb Banane Ke Asan Tariqa which instructs how to assembly IEDs using explosive material extracted from matchsticks.
This gang purchased matchboxes in bulk and extracted the matchstick heads. It was recovered from accused Azeemushan, NIA alleged. It also said the accused went to attend meetings in Lucknow and Deoband to execute their plans. The National Investigation Agency said that investigation will continue in the case.
Hyderabad: Following the scuffle between two student groups, the UoH issued a fresh notice barring students from holding any protest or public meeting on the campus.
Only in-house meetings in the lecture halls or auditoria of various departments will can be held after securing permission, the administration said in its circular.
The two groups which were involved in Sundays brawl lodged complaints with the Proctorial Board and the Gachibowli police. Amol Singh, who alleged he was attacked by a rival group, said a few ABVP students had attacked him thinking he was a Kashmiri student.
Police booked a case against ABVP activists on a petition of SFI-ASA students, and another on SFI-ASA men on a complaint by ABVP activists. Police said no names were mentioned.
The cleric in his letter alleged that his wife was forcing him to shave off his beard as she was fond of clean-shaven men 'like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan' (Photo: file)
Meerut: 36-year-old Arshad Badruddin, an imam from Meeurt, was recently faced with a bizarre threat from his wife: shave, or Ill kill myself.
According to reports, the imam, in his complaint to the district magistrate, has alleged that his 33-year-old wife Sahana insisted on him shaving off his beard as she was fond of clean-shaven men like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. When he tried to reason that clerics like himself sported a beard, she was adamant.
She insists on her demand. I have also told her many times to curtail the use of mobile phone as I fear that our children will also pick the bad habit and it would become difficult to discipline them. I am irritated by her behaviour. When I scolded her recently, she started crying and threatened to commit suicide after poisoning our children," the cleric wrote in his letter to the DM. He also alleged that Sahana was chatting to gair mard or unknown men using her mobile phone through the day.
The couple, who have four children, have been married since 2001.
Arshad also revealed that when he refused to join Sahana to buy western clothes for herself and the kids, she quarreled with him and attempted to kill herself.
She locked herself in a room. When I peeped inside, I found that she was trying to hang herself with a rope from the ceiling fan. I immediately called for help and broke open the door. Luckily, we managed to save her. When we asked her why she was taking the extreme step, she kept mum and stopped talking to us," Arshad lamented.
The hassled cleric has sought that Sahana be counselled as he fears he might be blamed if she does anything to herself.
Chennai: Complaining that the Sri Lankan Navy has escalated the frequency and magnitude of incidents of abduction of Indian fishermen, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa on Sunday sought Prime Minister Narendra Modis intervention in the release of 77 fishermen, who are lodged in various jails in the island nation.
The Sri Lankan Navy has escalated the frequency and magnitude of incidents of abduction of our fishermen and seizure of boats and fishing equipment undeterred in recent days, she said. In the latest incident, four fishermen were apprehended by the Sri Lankan Navy in the early hours of July 15 and taken to Thalaimannar in northern Sri Lanka.
The Chief Minister also told the Prime Minister that the Sri Lankan Government continues to infringe upon the historically enjoyed rights of our fishermen to fish in the traditional waters of the Palk Bay.
Noting that the Sri Lankan strategy of not releasing the boats of our fishermen is causing great frustration among the fishermen of Tamil Nadu, she said these fishermen are in a state of despondency and asked Mr Modi to take up this matter with the highest authorities of the Sri Lankan Government and ensure the immediate release of the precariously berthed boats which continue to suffer great damage.
Jayalalithaa seeks PMs intervention in release of TN fishermen
Sri Lankan Navy has been apprehending Indian fishermen hailing from Tamil Nadu for allegedly straying into its water. Here are some of the recent incidents of fishermen from Tamil Nadu being apprehended by the Sri Lankan Navy:
Chennai: While city police investigators are doing their best to get the charge sheet ready before this month end against the Infosys techie Swathi murder suspect P Ramkumar, the prisoner is undergoing counselling sessions at Puzhal jail after the stitches on his neck, sustained in a suicide attempt prior to his arrest were removed on Saturday evening, according to sources.
Our aim is to file the charge sheet as soon as possible. We are trying to do it by the month-end. We are working towards that, said a police official who is part of the probe team which arrested Ramkumar for the June 24 murder at the Nungambakkam railway station.
After the victims father and a shopkeeper from Nungambakkam railway station identified the suspect during an ID parade last Tuesday inside the jail, the police interrogated Ramkumar for three days from Wednesday in their custody, at the end of which the police claimed he had confessed the crime.
Ramkumar was sent back to jail on Friday evening. On Saturday, a medical team present in the jail campus removed the stitches on his neck. When he was arrested he had allegedly tried to slash his neck using a blade to kill himself after police surrounded his house in Tirunelveli on the night of July 1.
He was then taken to Tirunelveli government hospital and by June 3 night he was admitted to Royapettah GH, from where he was sent to Puzhal prison, where the identification parade was carried out on July 12.
A total of 37,194 candidates appeared for the Group I exams out of which 5,382 passed. For Group II examinations, of 36,906 candidates who appeared, 7,864 passed. (Photo" A total of 37,194 candidates appeared for the Group I exams out of which 5,382 passed. For Group II examinations, of 36,906 candidates who appeared, 7,864 passed. (Photo: Representational Image)
Chennai: S Sriram from Salem district in Tamil Nadu has bagged the top honours at the recently held Chartered Accountants Final examination.
In a release, The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), announced the names of successful candidates of the CA Final examinations that were held in May.
Sriram secured first rank with 76.63 per cent marks, followed by Kantheti Naga from Vijayawada (76.25 per cent), the release said. Yash Manoj Kumar Goyal hailing from Jamnagar, Gujarat came third with 74.88 per cent.
A total of 37,194 candidates appeared for the Group I exams out of which 5,382 passed. For Group II examinations, of 36,906 candidates who appeared, 7,864 passed.
"Chartered Accountancy is a highly sought after professional course. Making the CA professionals as future managers with core competencies is our primary aim at ICAI," ICAI President M Devaraja Reddy said.
In the Common Proficiency Test held last month, 41,727 candidates of the 1,07,058, who appeared, passed.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday hoped that all parties will work shoulder to shoulder in the Monsoon Session of Parliament to take important decisions that will give a new direction to the country.
Noting that the session is taking place just ahead of the 70th Independence Day, Modi said he was confident that discussions of the highest standard will be held.
Read: PM introduces new ministers in Lok Sabha, House adjourned
Addressing the media outside Parliament at the start of the Monsoon session, the Prime Minister said that based on the talks with all parties over the last few days, the prevailing mood was to take "very good decisions so that the country can move ahead on the path of development with greater speed".
Remembering those who sacrificed their life for the country's independence, Modi said, "Everyone should work together, shoulder to shoulder to take the journey of the last 70 years to greater heights, to give a new pace to the country, to have discussion of highest standard, to take important decisions and to ensure Indian moves ahead with great speed."
Read: Venkaiah Naidu, Chidambaram, Amar Singh, others take oath in Rajya Sabha
The government is hopeful of a breakthrough on the key GST bill, which it wants passed during the session, following a recent meeting between senior ministers and top Congress leaders. The two sides are likely to meet again during the session.
However, sparks are set to fly this monsoon session 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 is likely make the session a tempestuous affair.
UP Congress President Raj Babbar with party's CM candidate Sheila Dikshit, Senior party leaders Sanjay Singh and Rita Bahuguna Joshi at a road show in Lucknow on Sunday. (Photo: PTI)
Lucknow: Congress' newly-elected office-bearers of Uttar Pradesh unit on Sunday 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-appointed party functionaries.
Dikshit said ND 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.
Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Arun Jaitley with Chief Minister of Telangana, K Chandrasekhar Rao in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI)
Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao met Union finance minister Arun Jaitley and expressed concern over the delay in raising of the FRBM borrowing limit for TS from 3 to 3.5 per cent of the GSDP despite the Cabinet approving it in April.
Mr Rao also met Union water resources minister Uma Bharati and urged her to resolve irrigation disputes between TS and AP. Mr Rao told Mr Jaitley that TS was met the eligibility criteria for higher borrowing limit as per the recommendations of 14th Finance Commission as it is the only revenue-surplus state in the country after Gujarat.
He said the TS government has lined up several irrigation projects by spending over Rs 1-lakh crore in three years, besides investing Rs 40,000 crore on Mission Bhagiratha and that the state requires Central assistance for the speedy and successful completion of these projects. Mr Rao also sought Rs 450 crore for development of backward areas in the state.
The CM later met Ms Bharati and urged her to ensure that the Brijish Kumar Tribunal delivers its verdict on sharing of Krishna water within six months.
He complained against AP for not cooperating on sharing of Krishna, Godvavari waters though other neighbouring states like Maharashtra and Karnataka were cooperating on efforts to resolve the water disputes.
After the meeting, Ms Bharati showered praises on the TS government on the irrigation front, especially the implementation of Mission Kakatiya.
TS Mission Kakatiya is a model for all states. We have constituted a task force to look into its implementation in all other states, Ms Bharati said.
Hyderabad: Telugu Desam president N. Chandrababu Naidu on Monday said he hasnt ignored nor left TS. Mr Naidu also asked the party leaders to work hard and bring the TD to power in TS.
I havent left Telangana. TD should also come to power here in next election. We can do it, he said, during an interaction with TS TD leaders here on Monday.
Mr Naidu asked party leaders to strengthen the TD at all levels and take up public issues to win over the people.
I do keep track of what is happening here. I also track your performance. I will get regular reports on you work. But dont think I am dictating from AP. You have to strengthen party on your own and not compare it with AP, he said at the closed-door meeting at NTR Trust Bhavan.
Like screening of schemes in AP, I will also screen your performance. I can see how LED bulbs function in Vizag from here on laptop. Out of 90,000 bulbs, 40 bulbs are still on during day time. I can also see you.
TS TD leaders A. Revanth Reddy, Revuri Prakash Reddy, Ravula Chandrasekhar Rao, Uma Madhava Reddy and others were present. Mr Chandrasekhar Reddy later said that the meeting discussed several issues and decided to take up public issues.
Mr Naidu or Mr Lokesh will meet TS TD leaders every Saturday. We will focus on strengthening the party. Several suggestions came up during the discussion, he said.
The conference organizing committee chairman Se Wan Phu said: We hold this conference with the objectives of exploring what we can do for the Tai Lai in the region, what these Tai Lai youths can do and to uplift and give them empowerment.
The conference that runs from July 15 to 17 focuses on issues of national causes, education, health, culture, environmental, news and information and legal issues, he said.
Mandalay Region Legislative Assembly, Ethnics Affairs Committee Chairman Dr. Aung Kyaw Oo who attended the conference said: Id like to say to these Shan Ni youths to use our assembly and parliament, present their ethnic rights of the Tai Lai tribes, and then we will discuss in our assembly what we can do for them.
The conference is discussing the cultural and national identities of the Tai Lai youths as a national issue, promotion of the Tai Lai new year festival, religious festivals, social festivals and Tai Lai customary practices, observing and marking Tai Lai national days, and the honouring of Tai Lai heroes and eminent persons.
Moreover the conference also seeks to discuss the Tai Lai National Education system in all Tai Lai areas, as well as the promotion of Tai Lai literature and language, with the aim to develop a national curriculum from primary to university level.
This conference is being attended by over 100 Tai Lai people coming from the Kachin and Shan states and the Mandalay Region.
The conference will release a statement on Tai Lai ethnic tribe related issues and their future plans at the conclusion of the gathering.
Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Monday failed to get any categorical assurance from Prime Minister Narendra Modi over bifurcation of the High Court at the earliest.
The PM met Mr Rao alone in Parliament House; no one was allowed to accompany the CM to the 30-minute long meeting. After the meeting, Mr Rao is learnt to have briefed the party MPs about the issues that came up for discussion.
Sources said the CM requested Modi to ensure early bifurcation of High Court in the backdrop of recent agitation by T-advocates and judicial officers, which led to their suspension and paralysed judicial activity in state. Mr Rao sought the PM's personal intervention in the form of convening a meeting with CMs of AP and TS in the presence of the Union law minister as early as possible to resolve the issue.
However, sources said, except giving promise that he will look into the issues raised by the CM, no categorical assurance was given by the PM on bifurcation of the High Court or the timeframe required for the purpose.
They added Mr Rao was upset over not getting any clear assurance from the PM since he had stayed back in New Delhi for four days with the sole purpose of securing his assurance on the issue.
The sources said that when Mr Rao tried to insist on HC issue again, the PM avoided it and asked him to discuss other issues concerning TS.
Mr Rao invited the PM for the launch of Mission Bhagiratha in his home constituency in Medak district either in August or September. He also sought Central funds for implementation of Mission Bhagiratha, Mission Kakatiya and Haritha Haram programmes.
Sources said the PM was impressed with Mission Bhagiratha implementation designed to supply tap water to every household in state by 2018 and sought details regarding the project.
He also praised Mission Kakatiya and Haritha Haram programmes saying that these will provide a permanent solution to drought and drinking water woes in state besides protecting the environment.
Mr Rao pointed out that Niti-Aayog had also examined and praised these schemes and recommended the Centre to grant funds but no funds were released so far.
Mr Rao also sought special package for development of backward region in Telangana and sought fulfilment of various promises made in AP Reorganisation Act, 2014.
Members of the Opposition parties seek the resignation of Bengaluru Development Minister K.J George in connection with DySP M.K. Ganapatis suicide, in the Council on Monday. (Photo: DC)
Bengaluru: Strongly objecting to Chief Minister Siddaramaiahs warning that the ongoing session of the legislature would be adjourned if the opposition did not cooperate with the government, state Janata Dal (Secular) chief H D Kumaraswamy accused him on Monday of behaving like a chieftain.
Pointing out that the prerogative of adjourning the legislature lay with the Speaker of the Assembly and chairman of the Legislative Council, he said the Chief Minister was speaking as if he controlled both Houses.
Mr Kumaraswamy also objected to Mr Siddaramaiahs statement that he made hit and run' allegations. I have always produced documents to support my charges. This was proved beyond doubt during the Bharatiya Janata Party rule in the state. I don't need certificate from this government,'' he told reporters.
As for the Chief Minister denying his association with Mr Mari Gowda, accused of abusing Mysore Deputy Commissioner, Shikha, he claimed that in cases of vandalism filed by the Mysuru police, Mr Siddaramaiah was listed as accused No. 1, and Mr Mari Gowda as accused No 2. How could this happen if the Chief Minister was not closely associated with him? he demanded.
Dr G Parameshwar: TV talk cant be dying declaration
Home Minister Dr G. Parameshwar categorically rejected the Opposition parties demand to consider deceased DySP M.K. Ganapatis interview to a TV channel as a dying declaration.
Replying to a debate under rule 59 in the Legislative Council on Monday, Dr Parameshwar said that a dying declaration made by a person must have some proximate relation to the actual occurrence. But the interview of Ganapati, telecast in news channels, was not clear as he has not mentioned about the particular individuals responsible for his suicide, the minister stated. Before he committed suicide, Ganapati had mentioned in his interview that former Home Minister K.J. George and two police officers were harassing him. In Ganapatis case, no one has instigated or conspired to cause his death, so no one can be held responsible for abetment of suicide, Dr Parameshwar replied amidst a protest and dharna by the opposition BJP and JD(S). Due to the dharna, the Home Minister was unable to read out his five-page reply and later placed it in the House. The Opposition demand for the resignation of Bengaluru Development minister K.J. George is inappropriate. The minister is not involved in the case, how can the go vernment ask him to resign, Dr Parameshwar said.
Taking forward Prime Minister Narendra Modis Mann Ki Baat radio address concept to devise an interactive Talk to AK webcast, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has demonstrated his growing national political ambitions. While it may have drawn Opposition criticism as a self-glorification project, it does give the AAP chief a perfect opportunity to directly connect to young people across India. The two-hour webcast, which included questions from people across the country, gave Mr Kejriwal a chance to highlight his partys ambitions in the coming Assembly elections in Punjab, Goa and Mr Modis home turf of Gujarat.
Mr Kejriwal again targeted the Centre over the contentious issue of Delhis statehood and the division of powers between the Centre and the city. This time, he widened his attacks to also target BJP chief Amit Shah, the partys main Assembly poll strategist. The AAP leader may have faced mildly uncomfortable questions such as on the state of Delhis roads and the non-implementation of his free wi-fi poll promise, but politics was the focus of the webcast.
To a question on the perennial waterlogging of Delhis roads in the monsoon, Mr Kejriwal promised a thorough cleanup in a year and a half if Delhis voters gave the AAP a mandate to run the three civic bodies. Mr Kejriwal has tried his best, now its up to voters in Delhi and elsewhere to decide whether to give him a chance. Despite trolls and mixed reactions on the social media, Talk to AK will be back in a month or two.
The strategic centrepiece of the sophisticated but muscular address by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the American Congress during his visit to the United States last month was a strong reiteration for Indias admission into the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group. Mr Modis exposition of Indias position in his Mann ki Baat to an American audience was a masterful performance as shown by the standing ovation he got. The initial impact appeared to have had a good effect towards developing a consensus between those supportive of Indias claim for admission as a special case when the NSG met in Seoul on June 23. However, events dictated otherwise, and Indias NSG bid failed against the combined manoeuvres of China and its client state Pakistan, which is the depository of countless illegal transfers of nuclear technology from its patron. For now, India has stepped back to assess the results of what has been for all intents and purposes the diplomatic equivalent of a reconnaissance in force, feeling out and testing the terrain, assessing the opposition against it and preparing the country for the next move ahead.
It can be assumed, however, that barring the totally unforeseen, Indias basic parameters will be unchanged: the country will continue to be a non-signatory to both the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Also, India will be a state possessing nuclear weapons, while progressing its objectives of acquiring enrichment as well as reprocessing technologies. In the ongoing game of thrones between the US and China at the global level, India will remain vigorously opposed to any equation with Pakistan in quid quo pro proposals by interested third parties on a piggyback entry into the NSG by the latter.
While it is undoubtedly the role of a spoilsport, under the existing circumstances, India is left with no other choice. Earlier, India might have been amenable to such proposals, despite the reservations of a large chunk of domestic public opinion, but the machinations of the Sino-Pakistan nexus seen in Seoul will have changed all that. The confabulations in Seoul and earlier at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tashkent have sent out another sub-textual signal a reiteration of Indias resolve to contest with all comers, any issues seen to have a bearing on our security or national interests.
Prominent amongst them is the String of Pearls around India crafted by China in the Indian Ocean Region, aimed at containing Indias influence. Indias response could be in the form of a strategic counter-arrangement such as a Necklace of Diamonds established around Chinas maritime peripheries by a coalition of the willing. These will be the countries that are uncomfortable in the shadow of the Dragon, anchored by India at one end and possibly Australia at the other. It could be backstopped by the US a sort of Seato in reverse, but without the burden of the outmoded Reagan-Thatcher era radicalism based on Cold War political and nuclear theology.
Here, the delightfully onomatopoeic BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) grouping of Indian Ocean countries in the Bay of Bengal region may be of interest. It could be used for further exploration by Indian policymakers, with its mix of purely economic issues, along with a security-oriented sting in the tail of counter-terrorism and transnational crime-fighting. Meanwhile, in its single-minded preoccupation with the US, India must not make the mistake of ignoring Russia a country that, with all its faults, has been Indias all-weather friend. It is now asserting itself again in Crimea and Ukraine.
With its composite Eurasian identity, Russia occupies the core of the heartland postulated in 1904 by geostrategic thinker Sir Halford Mackinder. That country is rising to its feet again from the rubble of the Soviet empire, though bloodied by its own clash of civilisations with radicalised Islam in the bear trap of Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Emirates of North Caucasus. India will have to craft a more balanced foreign policy in tune with today; keeping on an even keel with no major tilts either way, a reversion to a quasi-Nehruvian neo-nonalignment, but more hard edged in practice.
It is worth remembering that there are no matters of the heart in international realpolitik, and our policymakers must be mindful of Lord Palmerstons classic dictum: There are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent national interests. The US has deftly brushed off Indias over-effusive quest for a special relationship. Indias political leadership should have learnt by now not to further weave any unrealistically romantic dreams. New Delhis options have fortunately not been affected by the drifting smoke of Brexit as in the age of Islamic State, its also relevant that in May 2016 both India and Pakistan will have completed 18 years as nuclear weapon states with actively adversarial relationships.
This relationship is aggravated by Pakistans exploitation of its perceived nuclear standoff with India to actively sponsor and support separatist terrorism by jihadi tanzeems in Kashmir and elsewhere and to bleed India by its old strategy of death by a thousand cuts. Within the country, warped political perceptions have allowed strange politico-religious hobgoblins like Zakir Naik, Asaduddin Owaisi and their Hindutva counterparts like Sadhvi Prachi and Yogi Adityanath to flourish and take root, like poisonous toadstools, propagating religious extremism and sectarian hatred unchallenged by authority. In these times of turmoil engulfing its own near abroad, India must praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, drawing inspiration from the heritage of Chanakya, Indias first national security adviser, and his enunciation of sam, daan, danda, bheda an ancient strategic culture now even more relevant in the context of Pakistans new jihad in Kashmir.
Osho loved telling stories and had the gift of simply expressing the inexpressible. In Guida Spirituale, he tells a Sufi story: A man went in search of a master. Outside his village, he met an old man sitting under a tree. He asked the old man, Have you ever heard in your long life you look like a wanderer He said, Yes, I am a wanderer. I wandered all over the earth. The man said, That is the right kind of person. Can you suggest to me where I should go? I want to be the disciple of a perfect master.
The old man suggested a few addresses to him and the young man thanked him and went on. After 30 years he couldnt find a master. The moment he returned to his village he saw the old man sitting under the tree. And he recognised that he was the master he was looking for! He fell at the old mans feet and said, Why didnt you tell me that you are the master?
The old man replied, But that was not the right time for you. You needed some experience. Wandering gave you a certain maturity. The last time you met me, you had not seen me. You were asking me about some master. That was proof that you could not feel my presence, nor smell the fragrance. You were utterly blind. But even to be with wrong people is good, because that is how one learns. For 30 years I have been waiting for you here, I have not left this tree.
The seeker was even more surprised when he looked at the tree. Because in his dreams, he has seen that tree and there was always a feeling that he would find the master sitting under it. Last time he didnt see the tree at all. The tree was there, the master was there, everything was ready, but he was not ready. In the The Grass Grows By Itself, Osho explains the art of being a disciple. The greatest art in the world is to be a disciple, he says. It is unique and incomparable. Nothing like it exists in any other relationship.
To be a disciple, to be with a master, is to move into the unknown. You cannot be very aggressive there. To be near a master is to be just a passivity, absorbing whatsoever the master gives or whatsoever the master is not asking. The moment you start asking you have become aggressive, the receptivity is lost, you have become active. The passive, the feminine, is no longer there. In fact, you wait and truth reaches you. The truth seeks you, like water seeks some hollow ground, moves downwards, finds a place and becomes a lake.
After over four decades of an active political career and lately having been a governor, Margaret Alva in her autobiography Courage & Commitment sheds light on key events of Indias post-Independence history, from the imposition of Emergency and rise of Sanjay Gandhi to lack of trust between former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Congress president Sonia Gandhi. In an interview to Manish Anand, Ms Alva recalls the working style of Sanjay Gandhi that harmed the Congress, and says that outside interference led to the undoing of the UPA-2 government led by Dr Manmohan Singh.
After a 44-year political career, youve penned an autobiography. What made you want to share your experiences?
During my days in Raj Bhavan, I began thinking that I should write my experiences during my 44-year-long political career. I do not wish to criticise anyone. I wanted to write about my life and of having worked with different Prime Ministers, including Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao. Besides, I also saw from close quarters the emergence of Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. Though I was not part of UPA-1 and UPA-2, I was a governor.
Throughout my career, I maintained my right to speak, which may have been my undoing. With Rajivji, there was no age difference between us and he appreciated my views. Rao was sedate, sensible and very mature. I grew up as a girl who walked to her school barefoot and hailed from a middle-class background. I entered politics in 1969. My story could be inspiration for women. And maybe because of that I wrote my autobiography.
You were quite close to the events that led to the imposition of Emergency. Was it possible for Indira Gandhi to have avoided the decision?
I was not even in India when the Emergency was imposed; I was in Mexico and got the news from local newspapers. But there was a group of politicians, including S.S. Ray and Rajni Patel, who were actively advising her to impose the Emergency. The JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) movement was at its peak. There were reports that calls were being given to Army personnel to revolt, which were being seen by the Congress as hints of an impending insurgency.
You faced tough situations when Sanjay Gandhi was calling the shots within the Congress in the 1970s. How did his rise affect the functioning of the Prime Ministers Office?
Yes, there were a few events during which I argued against what Sanjay Gandhi was advocating like the merger of the NSUI with the Youth Congress. After I was asked to speak, Indiraji went with my views, and that angered Sanjay. He misused his position, which can happen anywhere. He was getting very powerful. Indiraji was also getting uncomfortable with the caucus surrounding Sanjay. She began saying that things were slipping away. And thats why she afterwards announced elections.
She did not want to rule without the peoples mandate. Whether the PMO is strong or not depends on the person holding the office. And thats why I believe the UPA-2 failed as there was too much interference from outside, including the coalition compulsions... there were a lot of things.
What was wrong with Sanjay Gandhi that he sought to push his programmes, including the family planning and demolition of Turkman Gate, unilaterally?
He (Sanjay Gandhi) was a very politically aware person. He was a go-getter. He sometimes took on the government. He fought the battle for the party. He went to jail. He won Indiraji a re-election. After the Emergency, he had matured into a sensible person. His five-point programme, which included each one teach one, family planning welfare, plant a tree, Be Indian, buy Indian, and anti-dowry, were all demands of the time. But the way he went about pushing his plans, including the demolition of Turkman Gate slums in Delhi in the name of beautification of the city, cost the party very heavily later.
How much did the Congress contribute to the collapse of the Janata Party government?
The Janata Party government, which came to power in 1977, was highly unstable from within, with too many ambitious people. Morarji Desai was on the high chair, but Chaudhary Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram were playing clan and caste politics. The Congress surely helped Charan Singh to become Prime Minister. But the Janata experiment collapsed due to the weight of its inner contradictions. The far-right Jan Sangh was part of the government. Politics is a game of chairs.
You were a minister under the P.V. Narasimha Rao government and youve mentioned a deep lack of trust between Mrs Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister then.
I do not want to blame anyone. My book should not be seen in a way that Ive attacked Mrs Gandhi. I met her and handed her a copy of the book. I told her that Ive written whats of historical importance. Everything is already in the public domain. Rao is even said to have put his IB men to keep a watch on key Congress leaders of his time. But Rao laid the foundation of change in the economy and at that time many within the party felt that he was going against the ideology of the party.
You came under scrutiny after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
Yes, that was very frustrating. I shared all details with Mrs Sonia Gandhi. I went to her and shared the details. But there were a few people in the party who dragged my name in the controversy, saying that the assassination was part of a Catholic conspiracy to make Mrs Gandhi Prime Minister of India.
You were comfortable with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who gave you charge of two states besides Rajasthan, and you completed your term as governor, unlike others who had to quit.
Yes, he (Modi) told me that I was doing a good job and assigned me additional responsibilities. I met him and handed over a copy of my book. I keep writing to him. I told him that he should not allow the merger of the Mahila Bank with any big bank. I wrote to him on coastal security, too.
Chinese giant, Xiaomi seems to be gearing up to expand its gadget portfolio with launch of its long-rumored Mi Notebook. A new image surfaced on the web, went viral on Friday revealing the notebook in its full glory.
Technology news website Gizmo China revealed the first ever images of the Mi-series notebooks. The design of the device is uncannily similar to Apples Macbook Air. The company has long been accused of copying Apples design for its smartphones and tablets.
Picture: KKJ.CN
The leaks also provide some information about the specifications of the laptop. The Mi Notebook is expected to sport an 11 inch and a 13 inch full HD display with 1080p resolution.
The laptop was rumored to ship with an Atom processor, but new leaks suggest that the notebook will run on a Skylake processor. It will be coupled with an Intel Core i7-6500U (2 cores, 4 threads, base clock speed 2.50GHz, Turbo speed 3.10GHz) and 8 GB of RAM.
The Mi Notebook will run on Windows 10 and will not feature a touch screen. The device is allegedly set to launch some time before September. Xiaomi is also teasing a big event coming in July, where the company may showcase its new series of laptops.
We would take this leak with a pinch of salt, and wait for the company to make any official announcements.
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Moto Z the thinnest premium handset in the market was released by Motorola a month back and just when we thought that Motorola was done making an impression for the year, we hear rumours of the company releasing another device in the series and this time, it is expected to be called the Moto Z Play.
This device is said to support MotoMods thereby, receiving additional functionality from modular accessories. As per the image that surfaced on +hellomotoHK, Moto Z Play is equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB Type C port. Apart from that, the device is expected to come with Snapdragon 625 and a 5.5-inch full HD AMOLED display along with Adreno 506 graphics processing unit.
The phone is said to be coming in two different variants, wherein one will hold a 3GB RAM and 32GB storage, while the other will have 2GB RAM and 16GB of storage. Other expected features include a fingerprint sensor, 16MP rear camera, dual-tone LED flash, PDAF and OIS. Moreover, it will draw power from a 3,500mAh battery and run Android Marshmallow 6.0.
While, there is no word on when Motorola will finally unveil the phones it certainly has been spotted on numerous import export listing websites such as Zauba and AnTuTu.
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Baton Rouge, Louisiana: The gunman who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been identified as a former US Marine named Gavin Long, according to a government source with knowledge of the investigation.
Officials speaking publicly have not yet released the name of the suspected killer or any details, beyond saying they believed the single shooter was killed in the shootout.
Read: Wonder if this city loves me: Baton Rouge cops FB post days before death
Another source familiar with the investigation told Reuters Long, 29, was from Kansas City, Missouri. The source said there was reason to believe a 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 by investigators.
Long, who was black, was affiliated with the anti-government New Freedom Group, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation. A spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, said she had no information about that.
Read: 3 police officers killed in Baton Rouge shooting; suspect dead
Long served in the Marines for five years, from August 2005 to August 2010, according to a report in the New York Times, citing Yvonne Carlock, the deputy public affairs officer for the US Marines. Long was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, the Times reported.
CBS News reported that Long left the Marines with an honorable discharge in 2010 with the rank of sergeant.
Public records show Long had lived in Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri. He had also lived in San Diego and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Read: Obama denounces Baton Rouge police shooting as work of cowards
Long was on the University of Alabama dean's honor list in 2012, school records show.
Missouri court records show he divorced his wife in 2011, with no children at the time. There was no criminal record for him in Missouri.
Long was a defendant in a case involving delinquent city taxes. It was filed in March and was dismissed in June, according to court records.
Brady Vancel, a witness to the Baton Rouge shooting on Sunday, said on CNN that he ran into the suspect, who was dressed in black, a few minutes before the police officers were shot. The man was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle and wearing a ski mask, Vancel said.
The gunman "looked up and he saw me. We stopped, I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction," Vancel said.
Sydney: US Vice President Joe Biden on Monday condemned the slaying of three police officers in Louisiana, dubbing the shootings a "despicable act."
Biden, who made the comments during a speech at a Boeing factory he is visiting in Australia, said while the details and motive behind the killings remain unclear, the public owes police officers in general a debt of gratitude for putting their lives on the line.
"It's a despicable act and it's an attack on our very way of life at home," Biden told a crowd at the Boeing facility.
The slayings occurred in the city of Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police there in a confrontation that sparked protests across the country. The officers had been investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle when they were killed. Three other officers were wounded, one critically. Police said the gunman was killed at the scene.
"My enduring thanks for every police officer who gets up in the morning and goes out on that night shift. And they look for one thing - they kiss their wife good-bye or their husband and they want to go home and tuck in their kids," Biden said. "They have a right to do that. They have a right to be able to be protected and we owe them big."
Biden is in Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific. Prior to his speech, he met with Boeing workers and toured the multi-million dollar factory, which manufactures wing flaps for the Dreamliner 787 aircraft.
Later, Biden flew to Sydney where he met with business leaders for a round-table discussion at the Opera House. During the meeting, he discussed the importance of investing in modern infrastructure, protecting intellectual property rights and passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious trade pact with Asian nations.
"It's going to be hard to pass in both our countries maybe not as hard for you; we're going to try during the lame duck session of the United States congress," Biden said. "Some of the changes, the growth of xenophobia in my country, the nature of the debate of the campaign that is preying on fear and not on hopes, who knows what it's going to take?"
Biden also spoke of Australia's importance in the U.S. pivot to Asia, saying the country was at "the epicenter of where the world economy is moving."
"It seems to me you are the single more important cog in the wheel as to whether or not we can change the dynamic in the region," Biden said. "It's not only economic growth, but there's political stability."
While in Sydney, Biden will meet Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other officials, before heading to New Zealand on Wednesday.
Director of the Mon State Immigration and Population Department (Photo: MNA/Mon Htaw)
After we compiled the list of migrant families from the township [immigration] offices, we counted over 9,000 families. But out of those, the number of families that really want to remain is 240, said U Shein Win, Director the Mon State Immigration and Population Department.
As part of the Mon State governments 100-day plan, the Immigration and Population Department announced that it would gather and catalogue the states migrant population figures, checking families household registration backgrounds and issuing them suitable identification cards when approved.
Director U Shein Win said that migrant families coming from other parts of the country must meet two criteria to be issued household registration documents by his department: state residency for longer than six months and possession of the household list from their place of origin. Without proof of registration in the hometown, the department would only grant temporary household documents, he said.
According to the director, families must remove their names from the household registration lists in their former residences before being eligible for permanent resident status in Mon State.
Some native residents of Mon State, however, expressed concerns about the household registration checks.
It appears to be some type of monitoring situation regarding this household document list. We want ethnic people to inform the Hluttaw if [the department] is not conducting [the checks] systematically, said Dr. Aung Naing Oo, deputy speaker of the Mon State Hluttaw.
The deputy speaker said that residents complaints have revolved around concerns that migrant families could be granted household registration documents without reliable evidence of where they are from or how long they will stay. Issuing household documents to newcomers who want to live in the state long term would not be a problem, he said.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Just days before he was shot and killed Sunday morning, a Baton Rouge police officer posted an emotional Facebook message saying he was "physically and emotionally" tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, a friend said Sunday.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," Montrell Jackson wrote.
Friends and family of Jackson were mourning the 10-year-veteran of the police force that relatives described as a "gentle giant" and a "protector" after he and another two law enforcement officers were shot and killed Sunday morning by a gunman.
In the Facebook posting Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I've experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core," the posting read.
The message was posted July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge. That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the country's fraught history of race relations. Another black man was shot and killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend livestreaming the aftermath on Facebook. Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, killing five police officers.
The entire post read,
"I'm tired physically and emotionally. Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments but hey what's in your heart is in your heart. I still love you all because hate takes too much energy but I definitely won't 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 at threat. I've 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 don't 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 don't let hate infect your heart. 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."
The post, which has since been removed from Jackson's page, ended with two emojis: a police officer and peace sign.
Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
Erika Green told The Associated Press Sunday that she is friends with the family of Jackson, one of three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers who were killed Sunday morning. She said she saw the message on his Facebook page.
In the message, Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired.
"These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," Jackson wrote.
A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet but is no longer on Jackson's Facebook page.
Jackson's family was mourning the officer Sunday afternoon.
Kedrick Pitts, the 24-year-old younger half brother of Montrell 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 that 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.
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, spoke to reporters on the front lawn of Jackson's house. Jordan 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, 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.
Johnson's arrival was awaited with some trepidation given his role in the Brexit referendum and his reputation for quips and bon mots which have often landed him in hot water. (Photo: AP)
Brussels: New British foreign minister and top Brexit backer Boris Johnson pledged Monday Britain would continue to play a leading role in Europe as he met his European Union peers in Brussels for the first time.
The normally ebullient Johnson was on his best behaviour after infuriating his partners in the run-up to the referendum by comparing the EU's ambitions for closer European integration to Adolf Hitler's.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union but... we are not going in any way to abandon our leading role in European participation," Johnson told reporters.
He said he had had a "very good conversation" on the subject with EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogherini late Sunday -- although his dinner with her was called off after his plane had to make an emergency landing.
"I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues," he added.
Johnson was a key player in the June 23 Brexit referendum and his appointment last week stunned many in Europe, with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying he had lied to voters during the campaign.
France 'frank' with Britain
Mogherini, arriving just after Johnson, said the two had had "a good exchange on the main issues on the agenda today."
She refused to be drawn on Britain's negotiations for its departure from the bloc, which EU leaders insist can only start once London invokes Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to trigger the divorce.
Britain remains a member of the EU until those negotiations are completed, she added.
Ayrault, speaking separately, said he had had a "frank and useful" phone conversation with Johnson.
"There are lots of things to work on with Britain, I will always talk to Boris Johnson with the greatest sincerity, the greatest frankness, I think it's like that we have to move on," he told reporters.
At the same time, he repeated French calls for Britain to launch the Article 50 negotiations as soon as possible so as to end the uncertainty.
New British Prime Minister Theresa May says she will likely do that at the end of this year or early in 2017 but not before London has worked out what sort of future relationship it wants with the other 27 EU members.
The foreign ministers' meeting was overshadowed by the failed military coup in Turkey and last week's deadly attack in Nice, the third major terror incident in France since 2015.
US Secretary of State John Kerry went into the talks without comment but Turkey is a key NATO ally for the United States and a major player for both Washington and Brussels as they keep a wary eye on increasing turmoil in the Middle East.
Trepidation over Johnson
Johnson's arrival was awaited with some trepidation given his role in the Brexit referendum and his reputation for quips and bon mots which have often landed him in hot water.
The former mayor of London and one-time schoolmate of former premier David Cameron is well known in Brussels where he worked in the 1990s as the Daily Telegraph's EU correspondent.
His critics accuse him of beating up his stories to play to the eurosceptic gallery at home.
Officials in Brussels stressed they would welcome Johnson as they would any new foreign minister but there is little doubt his Brexit role ruffled feathers.
Johnson was supposed to have met all his EU colleagues on Sunday for an informal dinner but several member states objected, saying it would amount to "informal talks" with London before it had triggered Article 50, one European diplomat said.
Johnson's influence in the Brexit process may be limited however as May has named leading Conservative eurosceptic David Davis as special minister for Brexit.
Would-be EU member Turkey carried out fresh raids on Monday as the EU ministers were meeting, prompting growing international concern over the scale of the crackdown. (Photo: AP)
Brussels: Turkey must protect the rule of law as it cracks down after the failed coup, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said on Monday, as the bloc said it looked like the government had prepared a list of people to arrest beforehand.
"We are the ones saying today rule of law has to be protected in the country, there is no excuse for any steps that take the country away from that," Mogherini said as European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels.
"As we have been the first ones to say that in that tragic night (of Friday's coup attempt), the democratic and legitimate institutions needed to be protected," she told reporters.
"Today we will say together with ministers that obviously doesn't mean that rule of law and the system of checks and balances in the country does not count. On the contrary it needs to be protected for the sake of the country. So we will send a strong message on that, Mogherini said.
Would-be EU member Turkey carried out fresh raids on Monday as the EU ministers were meeting, prompting growing international concern over the scale of the crackdown.
Judges and military commanders are among 6,000 people who were arrested over the weekend as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vows to stamp out the "virus" of the coup plotters.
The EU commissioner dealing with Turkey's long-stalled bid for membership of the bloc meanwhile said it appeared that the government had already prepared a list before the coup of people to be rounded up.
"I mean, (that) the lists are available already after the event indicates that this was prepared and at a certain moment should be used," EU enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn told reporters.
Turkey's attempts to join the 28-nation European Union have been hobbled in recent years by concern over the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan's record on human rights and press freedom.
But the EU agreed to speed up its membership bid and give visa-free travel to Turks as part of a migrant crisis deal in which Ankara agreed to take back people landing in the Greek islands.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said that "the rule of law must prevail".
"France has condemned the coup, you can't accept the military taking power," he said. "At the same time we have to be vigilant that the Turkish authorities don't put in place a system which turns back democracy."
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders also urged restraint, saying: "It's normal to punish those involved in the coup, but it's normal to ask for respect for the rule of law."
Around 400,000 migrants and refugees passed through Hungary in 2015 before Orban's right-wing government sealed its southern borders with razor wire and fences in the autumn. (Photo: AP)
Budapest: Eight people were hospitalised after a mass brawl involving some 200 migrants broke out at a migrant camp in Hungary Sunday, a senior government official said.
A group of around 20 asylum-seekers, including Algerians, Syrians, Pakistanis, and Mongolians triggered the violence when they exchanged blows before attacking each other using furniture, said Gyorgy Bakondi, chief advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The incident happened at around 8 pm (1800 GMT) in Kiskunhalas, 150 kilometres (95 miles) south of the capital Budapest, close to the southern border with Serbia.
As many as 200 police were needed to restore order, Bakondi told state news agency MTI. Nine people sustained non-life threatening injuries. The Kiskunhalas facility is one of three closed camps in Hungary where claims by asylum-seekers are processed.
An estimated 740 migrants were kept in the camps in June, according to refugee rights group the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
Around 400,000 migrants and refugees passed through Hungary in 2015 before Orban's right-wing government sealed its southern borders with razor wire and fences in the autumn.
Numbers have been rising sharply again in recent months however, rising to a total of around 17,500 by the end of June.
Earlier this month, Budapest introduced new security measures including the forced return to no-man's land between Hungary and Serbia of any migrant found within eight kilometres (five miles) of the southern border .
In a report released in mid-July, Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced Hungary for "cruel and violent treatment" of migrants in April and May, accusing police and soldiers of beating people before forcibly expelling them back into Serbia.
The government rejected the claims, saying HRW was "misconstruing the rules relating to the asylum proceedings out of obvious ignorance of the situation".
Msaken, Tunisia: The uncle of the truck driver who killed 84 people on the French Riviera says his nephew was indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice.
French officials could not confirm Monday that attacker Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel had been approached by an Algerian recruiter, saying that the investigation is ongoing.
IS claimed responsibility for last week's attack, though Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday that investigators have found no sign yet that Bouhlel had links to a particular network.
The driver's uncle, Sadok Bouhlel, told The Associated Press that given Bouhlel's family problems - he was estranged from his wife and three children - the Algerian "found in Mohamed an easy prey for recruitment."
Bouhlel's rapid radicalization has puzzled investigators. Friends and family said he had not been an observant Muslim in the past. Cazeneuve said Monday on RTL radio that the driver may have been motivated by IS messages but not necessarily coordinating with a larger network.
"Mohamed didn't pray, didn't go to the mosque and ate pork," said Sadok Bouhlel, a 69-year-old retired teacher, in the driver's hometown of Msaken, Tunisia. The uncle said he learned about the Algerian recruiter from extended family members who live in Nice.
Sadok is devastated by his nephew's act, and doesn't want him buried in Msaken. "He made more than 80 families grieve, and stained the reputation of our town and our country."
Many of the dead and injured were children watching a fireworks display with their families. Cazeneuve said 59 people are still hospitalized after the attack Thursday, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
France held a moment of silence Monday to remember the victims. Thousands of people massed on the waterfront promenade where the Bastille Day celebrations became a killing field on Thursday night.
Among the mourners was Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who was loudly booed as he arrived at and left the ceremony in Nice.
President Francois Hollande's Socialist administration has come under blistering criticism from opposition conservatives after last week's deadly attack. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy accused the government of bad policies that he says failed to prevent three major attacks in the past 18 months.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve hit back Monday, listing a series of laws and extra police forces created under Hollande's presidency "to face a threat that France was not prepared for" when he took over from Sarkozy in 2012.
After a special security meeting, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French forces in the U.S-led coalition struck IS targets again overnight and on Sagturday. French warplanes have been involved in the operation in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Syria.
A Turkish special forces policeman stands guard outside Turkey's parliament near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara, Turkey. (Photo: AP)
Ankara, Turkey: Some 6,000 people have been detained in Turkey over 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.
A total of 265 people were killed, according to official figures -- 161 civilians and regular troops, and 104 coup plotters.
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".
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 Sunday some 6,000 people including top army commanders, judges and prosecutors had been detained as Erdogan vows to stamp out the "virus" of the putschists.
These include 29 generals and 2,389 soldiers, according to Turkish media reports. A military aide to Erdogan, Ali Yazici, was also detained.
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.
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.
France's foreign minister warned Erdogan that the dramatic events of the weekend did not mean he had "carte blanche" to silence his opponents.
Ankara: US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose followers Turkey blames for a failed coup, said on Sunday that he would obey any extradition ruling from the United States but said that President Tayyip Erdogan had staged the putsch.
"I am not really worried about the extradition request," Gulen told reporters, speaking through a translator in Pennsylvania where he lives.
Read: Turkey coup attempt: Rebel F-16 jets had Erdogans plane in sight
Turkey has said it is putting together an extradition request for the cleric. The US government has said it would consider any formal request.
Trained as an imam, or prayer leader, 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. Supporters started 1,000 schools in more than 100 countries, including about 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the US In Turkey, they have run universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire with newspapers and radio and TV stations.
Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan has long accused Gulen of plotting to overthrow the officially secular government from a gated 26-acre compound in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Gulen is rarely seen in public and has been put on trial in absentia at least three times.
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, Turkey: Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over.
A senior official said F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight, after a faction within the military launched an attempted coup late Friday against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.
The state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s "for the control of the airspace and security."
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion - which was not supported by the military's top brass -was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in the rebellion that took the government - and much of the world - by surprise.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life had returned to normal. But he and other officials also urged people to take to streets at night, saying risks remained in its aftermath.
At nightfall, thousands of flag-waving people rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere. Erdogan remained in Istanbul despite statements that he would return to the capital and address crowds in Kizilay Square. News reports said close to 2,000 special forces police officers were deployed in Istanbul to guard key installations.
The government moved swiftly in the wake of the coup to shore up its power and remove those perceived as enemies, detaining some 6,000 people including a number of generals.
As the cabinet prepared to meet for its first regular session since the attempt, security forces continued raiding military facilities in search of suspected plotters. They searched the Air Force Academy premises and residences in Istanbul early on Monday, Anadolu reported. It was not clear if any arrests were made.
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.
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.
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.
Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus defended the crackdown on judiciary officials in an interview with CNN-Turk, saying many of them would have played a role had the coup attempt succeeded.
"All of these (judiciary officials) did not necessarily have first-degree knowledge about this pro-junta initiative. Had they succeeded (with the coup) it is clear that these people would have been included into this business. Therefore, anyone connected to this group will be exposed."
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.
Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve." Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was 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.
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.
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.
People gather around a makeshift memorial to pay tribute to the victims of an attack in the French Riviera city of Nice. (Photo: AFP)
Nice: 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 prosecutors office.
The excruciating delay is adding to the suffering of survivors.
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 the centre helping victims and family members.
Its 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, its unbearable.
Prosecutors in Paris said the identification was being carried out under an accelerated procedure established after last Novembers 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 centre.
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.
The discussion was described afterward as a friendly family talk on the State Counselors Office Facebook page.
In a statement following the meeting, the UNFC, a coalition of ethnic armed groups, called for an immediate halt to Tatmadaw offensives in ethnic areas, particularly in the countrys northern regions. The UNFC also said that genuine nationwide ceasefire can be achieved only through inclusive participation of all ethnic groups in the peace process, regardless of their signatory status to last years nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA).
It remains unclear which of the countrys 21 ethnic armed organizations, particularly those that did not sign the NCA in October, will be invited to attend the 21st Century Panglong peace conference scheduled with the government next month.
Sundays meeting reportedly included eight senior UNFC leaders including NBan La, Nai Htaw Mon, and Khu Oo Reh. Representing the government were State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Dr. Tin Myo Win, U Kyaw Tin Swe and U Moe Zaw Oo.
The meeting was a trust-building exercise between the UNFC delegation and state counselor, said Nai Shwe Thein, head of the New Mon State Partys Foreign Affairs Department.
Brussels: EU candidate Turkey would be barred from joining the bloc if it reinstated the death penalty following last weeks failed military coup, EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogeherini said on Monday.
Let me be very clear... no country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty, Mogherini said when asked about the possible impact on long-stalled accession talks with Ankara. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had on Sunday said Turkey would consider a return of capital punishment.
Germany, too, warned Turkey on Monday against reinstating the death penalty, as it blasted revolting scenes of caprice and revenge in the wake of the failed coup attempt.
People boo French prime minister Manuel Valls, center, and Health Minister Marisol Touraine, left, after a minute of silence on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, to honor the victims of an attack near the area where a truck mowed through revelers, Monday. (Photo: AP)
Nice (France): French Prime Minister Manuel Valls was booed before and after the minute of silence for the victims of the deadly Bastille Day attack on Monday.
Shouts of Murderers! and Resign! rang out as Valls and two ministers left the seafront where a huge crowd had gathered to remember the 84 people mowed down on July 14 by truck driver Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Emotions in France have been running high since the 31-year-old Tunisian rammed a 19-tonne truck into a crowd leaving a fireworks display, leaving a trail of crumpled bodies in his wake.
Opposition parties have accused the Socialist government of not doing enough to prevent the third major attack in France in 18 months. The government has attempted to fend off the criticism, saying that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had no known links to jihadist networks and claiming he became radicalised only recently.
On Monday Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the attack was premeditated. Investigations said that Bouhlel staked out the Promenade des Anglais on several occasions, taking selfies there throughout the day of the attack and had reserved the truck on July 4.
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 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.
Bangladesh has so far executed four war crimes convicts since the process began to try the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities. (Photo: Representational Image/PTI)
Dhaka: Three Islamists were handed down death penalty while five others jailed until death by a special tribunal in Bangladesh for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 liberation war with Pakistan.
A three-member panel of judges of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD) led by Justice Anwarul Haque pronounced the judgement as two of the convicts appeared on the dock while six others were tried in absentia as they were on the run to evade justice.
The verdict came as the prosecution accused all the eight of five charges relating to crimes like mass murders, abductions, tortures and lootings.
Prosecution lawyers said six of the convicts were members of infamous Al-badr auxiliary force of the Pakistani troops during the war and carried out atrocities in northern Jamalpur district.
The two others belonged to Razakar, another Bengali-manned armed group raised by Pakistanis during the war.
Manned by activists of fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, which was opposed to Bangladesh's 1971 independence from Pakistan, the Al-Badr appeared as an extremely notorious force by carrying out ruthless atrocities siding with Pakistani troops.
The verdict came amid a nationwide tension following the recent two back-to-back Islamist terror attacks in the country following which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hinted that Jamaat could be behind the assaults.
Bangladesh has so far executed four war crimes convicts since the process began to try the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Hasina in 2008.
An area off the east coast of China's island province of Hainan will host military exercises from Tuesday to Thursday, China's maritime administration said on its website, adding that entrance was prohibited. (Photo: AFP/File)
Beijing: Beijing will close off access to part of the South China Sea for military drills, officials said Monday, after an international tribunal ruled against its sweeping claims in the waters.
An area off the east coast of China's island province of Hainan will host military exercises from Tuesday to Thursday, China's maritime administration said on its website, adding that entrance was "prohibited".
The area of sea identified is some distance from the Paracel islands and even further from the Spratlys, with both chains claimed by Beijing and several other neighbouring states.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague last week ruled that there was no legal basis for Beijing's claims to much of the sea, embodied in a "nine-dash line" that dates from 1940s maps and stretches close to other countries' coasts.
Manila, which lodged the suit against Beijing welcomed the decision, as China dismissed it as a "piece of waste paper".
Despite Chinese objections, the European Union weighed in on the subject at a regional summit this weekend, with President Donald Tusk telling reporters that the grouping "will continue to speak out in support of upholding international law", adding that it had "full confidence" in the PCA and its decisions.
China pressured countries in the ASEAN bloc of Southeast Asian nations not to issue a joint statement on the ruling, diplomats said.
Beijing held military drills in the South China Sea just days before the international arbitration court ruling, state media reported. China has rapidly built reefs in the waters into artificial islands capable of military use.
In a separate message on its website, the maritime administration said last week that four out of five lighthouses built atop islands and reefs in the sea have been activated, and a fifth would be put into use soon.
Bangladeshi policemen cordon off the area near Holey Artisan Bakery, that was the target of the weekend militant attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Photo: AP)
Dhaka: A college teacher, said to be close to one of the Islamist militants who carried out Bangladesh' worst terror attack at a cafe in Dhaka, has been arrested.
Milon Hossain, a teacher in Piyar Ali School and College who was close to Gulshan cafe attacker Shafiqul Islam Ujjal, was held on Saturday night at Ashulia here, police said.
Milon, who earlier worked at Madbar Memorial School in Ashulia, had helped Ujjal get a job as a teacher of the school, a police official was quoted as saying by the bdnews.
He was produced before a court that granted police five days to grill him in custody.
Ujjal, a madrassa student from Bogra, was among the five militants whose photographs were published by the Islamic State, which claimed the responsibility for July 1 attack that left at least 20 hostages, including an Indian, and two policemen dead.
He had left home six months before the attack, his family had said.
Ujjal had told them that he would go to Tabligh Jamaat's 'Chilla', a 40-day travel from one mosque to another to attend lectures and call people to prayers.
Mufti Abdul Qavi was widely ridiculed after Qandeel Baloch uploaded her picture with him.
A prominent Muslim cleric in Pakistan who was censured for appearing in "selfie" photographs with murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch is being investigated in connection with her killing, police said on Monday.
Baloch, 26, described as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, divided opinion in the deeply conservative Muslim society with her risque photos. Her murder on Friday has shocked the country and sparked fresh debate about so-called honour killings.
Baloch's brother, Muhammad Waseem, told media he drugged and strangled his sister as she had violated their family's honour with her social media posts, including a series of selfies with cleric Abdul Qavi last month.
One video appears to show her sitting on Qavi's lap.
Police said Qavi, who was suspended from a prominent Muslim council after the photographs were published, was also part of their investigation into her murder.
"We have decided to widen the scope of the investigation and include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the probe," Azhar Ikram, the police chief in the town of Multan, where Baloch was killed, told Reuters.
Qavi has denied any involvement in Baloch's murder but told Reuters on Monday he would present himself to police for questioning if summoned.
Qavi told media on Saturday Baloch's death should serve as an example for others who tried to malign the clergy, though he also stated that he had "forgiven her".
Baloch, who described herself as a modern day feminist, was unapologetic about her bid to push the boundaries of acceptability for women and change "the typical orthodox mindset" of Pakistanis.
Her pictures and videos outraged religious conservatives who viewed her as a disgrace to the cultural values of Islam and Pakistan. Others hailed her as a "feminist icon".
BREADWINNER
Police were also investigating Baloch's other brother, Muhammad Aslam, who is a junior army officer, Ikram said.
More than 500 people - almost all of them women - die in "honour killings" in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives acting over a perception "shame" has been brought on the family.
Governments have deplored the practice but done little to stop it. Many Pakistanis have called for the passage of an anti-honour killing law aimed at closing a loophole that allows family members to forgive those responsible for such killings.
After Baloch's death her father, Muhammad Azeem, filed a police report against both his sons, alleging Aslam had encouraged Waseem to carry out the killing.
Police have declined to comment on Aslam's role and he was not available for comment on Monday.
Baloch built a modelling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner.
"She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son," Baloch's father said, according to the English-language Dawn newspaper. "She supported all of us, including my son who killed her."
Azeem was also not available for comment.
After the outcry over the selfies with Qavi, Baloch held a news conference and appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security. No help was provided.
In separate interviews in Afghanistan over the weekend, other senior US officers highlighted an unexpected easing of Taliban military pressure in the days since Ramadan. (Representational Image)
Aboard US Military aircraft: After inflicting heavy losses on weakened Afghan security forces a year ago, the Taliban under new leadership have been surprisingly slow to ramp up attacks at the midpoint of the traditional fighting season, senior American military officers said Sunday.
In an Associated Press interview, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he is cautiously encouraged by a relative slackening of the Taliban's aggressive tactics.
Citing "a lower level of violence from the Taliban than we have seen in the past," Dunford was quick to say that while he believes Afghan forces have seized battlefield momentum, there are no assurances that the balance won't shift again.
"We've seen peaks and valleys with the Taliban before, but certainly on the ground right now the Afghan forces have the momentum," he said, speaking aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane en route from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Stuttgart, Germany. Dunford spent three days in Afghanistan speaking with US and Afghan commanders, troops and officials. On Sunday he met with President Ashraf Ghani and other senior members of Ghani's government in Kabul.
Dunford commanded all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from February 2013 to August 2014.
In separate interviews in Afghanistan over the weekend, other senior US officers highlighted an unexpected easing of Taliban military pressure in the days since Ramadan, the period of traditional Muslim fasting, ended in early July. One called it a "tactical pause," another said it points to a weakening of the Taliban, but none claimed it means an early end to the long war.
Private analysts interviewed Sunday expressed skepticism about the war's progress.
Anthony Cordesman, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there are many forces at work against the country in addition to a resilient Taliban, even if the militants may have become more fragmented.
"Poverty is rising, governance is extremely weak and virtually absent in many districts," Cordesman said in an email exchange. "Power brokers and ex-warlords are stronger. No progress has been made in fighting corruption in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Narcotics is becoming more important in the economy, and there is a major brain drain."
He said President Barack Obama's recent decision to commit US troops longer and more directly "really does matter" on the military front. "But, Afghanistan desperately needs unified and more effective leadership and governance, more economic aid and reform, and less corruption or all the weakening of the Taliban can do is to make this an endless war of attrition."
Dunford said he found Afghan commanders and officials heartened by Obama's decisions to keep 8,400 US troops in the country when he leaves office, more than previously planned, and to authorize more aggressive use of US forces in support of Afghan offensive actions.
"It's a psychological turning point" for the Afghan government and its security forces, he said, while adding: "I'm not sure it's a turning point on the ground" for actual war fortunes.
Col. Michael Marti, director of the US-led coalition's intelligence center in Kabul, said Sunday he attributes the absence of an expected summer surge in Taliban violence to after-effects of the US killing in May of the group's leader, Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour.
"Their overall operational tempo appears to be decreased a little bit," Marti said, adding that the Taliban's leadership transition means they are "building a new team" under their new leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, an extremist cleric.
Cordesman said the new Taliban leader lacks charisma and credibility, and he and other key Taliban figures "seem even less interested in real peace negotiations."
Marti said it is too early to declare the slackening of Taliban attacks a trend. However, Gen. John Nicholson, the top US commander in Afghanistan, said in an AP interview on Saturday that he views the Taliban as seriously off the rails.
"This is not the cohesive, homogenous movement that it's been known as in the past," Nicholson said. "They're not on a war-winning trajectory."
As events of the past 15 years have shown, the Taliban do not need overall military victory in order to remain a threat to the US-backed government in Kabul.
"All they have to do is wait out the eventual end of outside funding for Afghan security forces, at which point the government would collapse," said Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
"This may not yield a literal Taliban military triumph even then, but the resulting chaos would be almost as bad for us - and for Afghans," Biddle said in an email exchange Sunday.
"The only real alternative to this scenario is a negotiated settlement in the meantime, and a fractured Taliban leadership could actually make that harder rather than easier," Biddle said. "So I don't disagree with Gen. Nicholson's assessment of the state of the Taliban, but I'm not sure it implies grounds for great optimism on the war's prognosis."
A black US Marine veteran killed three police officers in Baton Rouge before being shot dead, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man in the city that sparked country-wide protests and led to the massacre of five law enforcement officers.
The African-American gunman, identified by the media as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, shot the police officers in an "ambush-style" attack yesterday.
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 amid the ambush on Dallas police officers where a sniper killed five officers.
Officials confirmed that three law enforcement officers died while three others were wounded during the shooting on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over a kilometre away from police headquarters.
The gunman, a decorated former Marine sergeant who served in Iraq, was shot dead minutes later in the gunfight with police.
The shooter appeared to have attacked police officers on his birthday, police said. Authorities initially believed that two other assailants might be at large, but hours later said that no other active shooters were in the city.
"The dead suspect in the Baton Rouge shooting was wearing all black and a mask," Baton Rouge Police Department Sgt Don Coppola said.
A witness told WBRZ-TV that a man, dressed in black with his face covered, was shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash.
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.
President Barack Obama condemned the shooting as "cowardly" assault and called for national unity, urging Americans and political leaders to avoid inflammatory words and focus on "uniting the country rather than dividing it".
"It is so important that everyone regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organisations you are a part of, everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further," Obama said in an address to the nation from White House after the shooting.
"Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible," he said.
"...I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None," Obama said.
According to reports, the gunman, served in the US Marines for five years starting in August 2005 as a data network specialist, and attained the rank of sergeant. His Iraq tour lasted from June 2008 to January 2009.
As China moved in with its military to assert its claims, the US which is backing the smaller states in the area to stand up to Beijing's bid to forcefully establish control asked China to implement the verdict and settle the row peacefully with its neighbours who have counter claims over the area.
The new military manoeuvres by Beijing came in the midst of the visit to China today by the US Navy's top admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, to discuss the South China Sea dispute in the aftermath of the verdict and ways to boost interactions between the two militaries.
Richardson met the head of the Chinese navy, Admiral Wu Shengli and held talks with him.
"It is very helpful for us to strengthen communication between us and build confidence. Of course it can help to improve our working and personal relationship," Wu said.
Earlier, Sun Jianguo Chief of the Joint Staff Department of the China's all powerful Central Military Commission, said the freedom of navigation issue "was bogus and one that certain countries repeatedly hyped up".
Without directly mentioning US, he warned that freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end "in disaster".
Reiterating China's stand that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea has never been affected, he said there won't be a problem in future "as long as nobody plays tricks".
Terming China as the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea he was quoted as saying at a meeting here that Beijing won't let anybody damage it.
But at the same he said China consistently opposed "so-called military freedom of navigation" referring a number of US military vessels passing through waters close to artificial islands built by China in the South China Sea.
"This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way," he said.
China today closed a part of the South China Sea for military manoeuvres as it moved quickly to assert control over the disputed waters after an international tribunal struck down its claims over the region.The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force has conducted a combat air patrol with long range bombers in the South China Sea recently, which will become "a regular practice" in the future, a military spokesperson said.The PLA sent H-6K long range strategic bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force as saying.During the mission, the aircraft carried out tasks including aerial scouting, air combat and island and reef patrol, fulfilling the patrol's objective, Shen said.The air force aims to promote real combat training over the sea, improve combat abilities against security threats and safeguard China's sovereignty and security, he said."To effectively fulfil its mission, the air force will continue to conduct combat patrols on a regular basis in the South China Sea," he said.Shen pointed out that the South China Sea islands have been China's territory since ancient times, and China's rights and interests in relevant maritime areas should not be infringed upon."The PLA Air Force will firmly defend national sovereignty, security and maritime interests, safeguard regional peace and stability, and cope with various threats and challenges," he said.Separately the maritime administration in Hainan province, which overseas China's expansive claims over the South China Sea said it is closing off a part of the sea for military exercises this week as China simultaneously moved on both air and the sea to establish firm control over the area which was awarded by the tribunal to the Philippines.The maritime administration said that an area southeast of the island would be closed until July 12 without providing details about the nature of the military exercises.Beijing's moves followed after the tribunal appointed by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration last week quashed China's claims of historic rights over the vast expanse of the South China Sea and upheld the Philippines' claims under the UN Convention on Law of Seas (UNCLOS).China which boycotted the tribunal angrily rejected its verdict and said the award would not impact its claims over 90 per cent of the resource-rich sea.Besides the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also firmly contest China's claims in the region.
Thousands of Pakistan refugee families in the city who got plots from the Central government as compensation are struggling to get their properties converted from leasehold to freehold a process which involves excessive documentation and alleged corruption.
No one in the city can get a leasehold plot converted to freehold without paying bribes or pulling down the entire building to remove the deviations from the approved building plan, said Surinder Bhandari, a resident of Malviya Nagar.
Ashok Kumar, a resident of Amar Colony, said: For a 84 square metre plot owner, the conversion involves payment of about Rs 2-3 lakh through a consultant or agent.
The official fee is about Rs 50,000, he said, adding the worst part is that you have to pay penalty for extra construction in the building, get many of these demolished and
still pay bribes because pulling down the entire building is impossible for the occupants.
Why cant the central governments Urban Development Ministry convert all leasehold properties into
freehold through an executive order and collect a fixed token conversion fee depending on the size of plots? he asked them.
Kumar, who runs a shop in Sarojini Nagar, said a bulk of refugee plots are up to 100 sq metre and these should be spared any conversion charge.
For plots between 100-150 sq metre the fee could be Rs 50,000. For plots between150-200 sq metre the conversion fee could be Rs 1 lakh, he said, adding that it would reduce corruption.
The 99-year lease is irrelevant now. Rather than individual plot owners going to the government for conversion from leasehold and freehold, the government should make all leasehold as freehold in a single order and collect a token fee from them, he said.
Way of accomodation
Former MP and BJP leader V K Malhotra, who had prepared a report for MCD earlier suggesting ways to accommodate the deviations or illegal constructions existing in such colonies, admits that the terms of conversion could be made more user-friendly.
May be the building-bylaws can be relaxed so that the existing buildings with additions to the approved plan can be converted from leasehold to freehold without demolitions, he told Deccan Herald.
Malhotras report in the early 2000s was aimed at collecting a nominal fee from residents of such colonies and allowing them to use the unapproved portions of the house for meeting the needs of the growing family.
He said to bring relief to residents he would discuss the matter with his partys central government ministers for converting all leasehold properties to freehold through an executive order.
The Pakistan refugees who initially spent a few years in camps like in the Old Fort were allotted plots on 99 year-lease and relocated from camps to 46 refugee colonies developed across the city. Lajpat Nagar, Tilak Nagar, Malviya Nagar, Mukherjee Nagar, Malkaganj, Dayanand Colony, Amar Colony, Ramesh Nagar, Patel Nagar, Subhash Nagar, Jungpura and Rajender Nagar are some of the prominent ones.
The 99-year lease of all houses in refugee colonies has been issued by the Land and
Development Office based in Nirman Bhawan office of the Ministry.
Preeti Dutta, a resident of Malkaganj in North Delhi, said due to impractical terms her mother-in-law has given up on conversion of their plot with two-storey structure from leasehold to freehold before distributing the propertys different floors among her children.
How can families living in a house demolish their entire building before applying for the conversion? she said.
No plot given out to refugee colonies in the mid-1950s is without some deviations in construction from the sanctioned building plans. Families have grown over the decades and extra rooms have been built by almost all plot owners. Now, when plot owners want to distribute individual floors to their children, the leasehold comes in way, she said.
Only wealthy builders are able to get leasehold plots converted to freehold and rebuild the entire property and, in the process, the poor plot owners end up losing money or one floor in the property, she alleged.
Appealing to the court to take cognisance of the offence punishable under IPC section 306 read with Section 34, the complaint had also claimed that the accused were highly placed and influential persons who had prevailed upon police from taking action against them.
George said he would take a "legal remedy" in the case. Stepping up pressure after the court directive, BJP went on a "Raj Bhavan chalo" march requesting Governor Vajubhai Vala to direct the government to order a CBI probe and to drop George "in the interest of fairness and natural justice."
As news of George's resignation came, state BJP President B S Yeddyurappa said it had come after the court direction to file an FIR and added, "resignation is not important. An impartial probe is important."
"Along with George's resignation, a CBI probe is required. Our fight will continue," Yeddyurappa said after leading the march which came soon after the sudden end to the monsoon session of the state legislature.
Nehal's counsel M T Nanaiah said Investigating Officers would have to question George and the two police officers and take a call on whether to arrest them or not depending on their probe.
"Hope we will get justice. Let us see further what happens," Gapanathy's wife told reporters at Madikeri." Ganapathy (51) was found hanging from the ceiling fan in a room at a lodge in Madikeri on July 7, prior to which he gave 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."
Facing a combative Opposition, which has been stalling Assembly proceedings since Monday last, the state government constituted a judicial commission headed by K N Keshavanarayana to inquire into the alleged suicide. The commission would inquire into the "circumstances and events" leading to the "unnatural death" of Ganapathy.
The case was being probed by the state CID. The Opposition BJP and JDS had rejected the judicial probe, with the former insisting on a CBI inquiry.
A series of incidents involving alleged suicides by two DySps and resignation by another DySP has put the Siddaramaiah government in the line of fire of Opposition parties, which alleged that honest officials were being tormented.
Chikkamagalur DySP Handibag, named as accused in a kidnapping case, was found hanging in his father-in-law's house in Belagavi district on July 5.
Prior to this, Anupama Shenoy had resigned as DySP of Kudlagi in Ballari district unhappy over alleged interference by the then district in charge minister Parameshwara Naik, who has since been dropped in the recent major ministry rejig.
The Siddaramaiah government faced the first major storm in March last year when senior IAS official D K Ravi allegedly committed suicide under mysterious circumstances, with the public and Opposition outrage forcing the government to hand over the case to the CBI.
Bowing to mounting pressure, Karnataka Minister K J George today resigned shortly after a court directed police to register an FIR against him and two top police officers in connection with alleged suicide of a DySP, which has kicked up a huge political storm in the state.George's exit came within hours after a local court at Madikeri in Kodagu district gave the direction on a private criminal complaint filed by the deceased police officer M K Ganapathy's son Nehal requesting it to direct the police to take up investigation against the minister and two officers for allegedly abetting his father's suicide."I have submitted my resignation...it is left to the Chief Minister (to accept or not)," George, Minister for Bengaluru development, said, adding, he had taken the step to pave the way for an impartial probe.Asserting that his conscience was "clear", George said "... I have not harassed anybody...I will come out clean." Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said George had quit "voluntarily" and he had accepted the resignation. "Though there was no need for it, George has resigned voluntarily. I have accepted it...he has resigned on moral grounds," he said, emerging out of a cabinet meeting which was convened after the court directive gave a sudden new twist to the controversy that had put Congress in a tight corner.The order by Additional Judicial Magistrate First Class Annapurneshwari came, as Chief Minister Siddaramaiah faced growing clamour to remove George, with the Opposition stalling proceedings of both the Houses of legislature, which were abruptly adjourned sine die today much before the July 30 schedule.Ganapathys wife Pavana and Nehal had approached the court, stating that the police had rejected the complaint lodged by them with the Kushalanagar police on July 10 against George and IPS officials A M Prasad and Pranab Mohanty.In his complaint, Nehal had said his father had made a "dying declaration" naming George and the two officers and their acts amounted to "abetting the commission of suicide."
Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad has not found any exchange of calls or a "terrorist link" between former state minister Eknath Khadse and fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim during its preliminary inquiry but has stumbled upon certain "serious things" that need to be probed further, the Bombay High Court was told today.
Sezing on the the ATS' statement to the court, Khadse, a BJP veteran from North Maharashtra who resigned early last month in the wake of a string of allegations, dubbed it as a "clean chit" to him and "vindication of his innocence".
"The ATS conducted preliminary inquiry. No terrorist angle has been found as alleged by the hacker. No calls were exchanged between Khadse and underworld don Dawood, as alleged by the hacker," ATS advocate Niteen Pradhan told a division bench of justices N H Patil and P D Naik.
The HC was hearing a petition filed by the Gujarat- based hacker Manish Bhangale who alleged a "partial probe" by the state machinery and sought CBI investigation into the matter.
The ATS also dismissed the need for any CBI probe. However, Pradhan mentioned that while no terrorist angle has surfaced in the inquiry, certain other revelations have come to the fore.
"Certain other serious things have come to the fore during the preliminary inquiry. But those will have to be probed by experts from the city police's cyber crime cell. The ATS will submit its preliminary inquiry report to the cyber crime cell of the police's crime branch which shall then investigate," Pradhan said.
Bhangale had claimed to have hacked the authentication process of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd in April this year from where he acquired the telephone records of Dawood.
According to his petition, the information also includes alleged phone calls between Dawood and Khadse who was Revenue Minister in Maharashtra cabinet.
"The claims made by the petitioner that the information provided by him to the state machinery has been taken lightly is not correct. We are doing the needful and CBI probe is not required," Pradhan said.
The HC, after recording Pradhan's statement, directed Bhangale to appear before the crime branch as and when required and provide the information he has.
The bench, while disposing of Bhangale's petition, said, "We cannot jump to CBI every time. We have to trust and have faith in the state machinery also. If at a later stage the petitioner feels probe is not being done properly, he can approach the high court again."
On Bhangale's fear that there is a threat to his life, the HC said he can file a representation before the police commissioner who shall decide it on merits.
Khadse, who was accused of facilitating a controversial land deal in favour of his kin while in office, said, "After ATS gave me clean chit, people have now realised what is truth and what was false".
"Nobody believed me when I kept on saying that I had no relation with Dawood. However, people from opposition parties kept on making allegations for their ulterior motives despite my saying that I would myself resign or give up politics altogether if they are able to give even a single proof of my involvement.
"However, the opposition was bent on spoiling the image of me and my party and thus kept levelling allegations against me without any concrete proof. As ATS has given me a clean chit, people have now realised what is truth and what is false", Khadse said in a message.
Earlier, Maharashtra Lokayukta Justice (Retd) M L Tahaliyani had given a clean chit to Khadse in an alleged bribery case involving his "personal assistant" Gajanan Patil and closed a complaint in the matter.
The Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) had arrested Patil from outside the 'Mantralaya' (state secretariat) gate in May this year for allegedly demanding a Rs 30-crore bribe from Mumbai-based entrepreneur Ramesh Jadhav in a land allotment matter.
Earlier, initiating the discussion, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said while his party stands with the government and the PDP-BJP coalition in the state in dealing firmly with militancy, the "excessive use" of force against the common citizens, including children and women, is not acceptable.
For the current unrest, the Congress leader blamed a number of reasons including BJP's participation in government with PDP in the state, provocative statements made by some leaders of BJP and RSS besides Pakistan, "whose existence is the root cause of all problems."
He underlined that Kashmir cannot be ruled "through the barrel of the gun or bullets" and demanded that responsibility be fixed for "excessive use" of force.
Azad said the "bullets that are meant for militants should not be used against our own people in Kashmir". He even questioned why such bullets and pellet guns were not used in Haryana which had witnessed large scale Jat violence over quota in February.
Azad also demanded all-party meeting on the issue, a sentiment echoed by almost all other parties. Some demanded sending of an all-party delegation to Kashmir.
Azad also blamed TV channels for whipping up passion through talk shows. This sentiment was echoed by members of various other political parties also.
Leader of House Arun Jaitley admitted that the situation in Kashmir was a "matter of concern" but rejected the contention that the violence in the valley was a result of the BJP getting into power at the state.
Asserting that efforts are underway to restore normalcy at the earliest, he said the entire country should speak in one voice at this time and common man should not be made to suffer there.
Asking the youth to stay away from the agitation which is being held against the killing of a militant, he said, "When thousands of people attack the police, then understandably, there will be action. The fight is between the country and the separatists and common people are standing with the country which is in national interest."
"We want everybody and every party's support on Kashmir. We will engage with all parties and take everyone along on bringing normalcy in Kashmir," the Home Minister said, while welcoming all statements by leaders to bring normalcy in the valley.
With regard to pellet injuries, particularly the eye injuries, he said he will look into the damage caused by it but could not say anything off-hand.
He, however, cited some study which had said that in the year 2010, six people had been killed, 198 were injured and 5 blinded because of the use of pellet guns.
He said a team of eye specialists has already been sent to Kashmir and the central government is ready to send even a special plane to airlift any number of people requiring specialised treatment for eyes as also other injuries.
Singh said the Centre is ready to extend all help to the state government in meeting the situation, including the provision of essential commodities in the curfew-bound valley.
With regard to prohibitions on newspapers and mobile internet in Kashmir, he said it should not happen and that he will discuss this issue too with the Chief Minister.
He asserted that militancy will be dealt with sternly and Pakistan should not interfere in India's internal affairs.
Jaitley, the Minister for Finance, said he agrees with Azad that Kashmir situation is "serious" and that things were fine till recently.
"But, thinking that everything is wrong only since the formation of the PDP-BJP government is incorrect," he said.
Referring to Azad's contention that PDP-BJP government was a "misfit", Jaitley, the Minister for Finance, said mathematics of the poll results were such that only two parties (BJP and PDP) could join to form a government.
"You (Congress) also joined hands with National Conference and PDP because you knew that national parties need to work with these regional parties. We have differences with the PDP just like you (Congress) did with PDP and NC... but for the idea of India, we joined hands," he said.
Attacking Pakistan, Jaitley said ever since Independence, it has "never reconciled to the fact that Kashmir is an integral part of India. And hence they go to every extent to disrupt India and Kashmir's progress. When they (Pakistan) saw that they couldn't win a conventional war, they resorted to terrorism and militancy."
Rajnath Singh, while slamming Pakistan for its "irresponsible" role, questioned its claim to be the "protector of Islam", asking "How can a country claim to be protector of Islam when it was born on the basis of religion, when it is witnessing bloodshed in the name of religion."
He questioned how Pakistan could claim to be concerned about Muslims in India when it itself could not remain united despite being a Muslim nation.
Asking Pakistan to lay off, Singh said, "It is for the government of India to look after minorities of India and we will do so, whether it is Muslims, Sikhs, Christians or anybody."
He asked the minorities to "keep faith" in the government, cautioning that there are a "lot of people out to misguide them."
Rejecting 'plebiscite' demands as an "outdated" idea, the government today asserted that Kashmiris are "our own people" who are being "misguided" as it blamed Pakistan for the unrest in the valley and said all parties will be taken along in dealing with the situation.The issue of 10-day-old unrest in Kashmir resonated in Rajya Sabha on the opening day of the Monsoon session, with the House taking up urgent discussion during which the opposition slammed the government and pressed for holding an all-party meet while pitching for a political solution rather than using "barrel of the gun".The opposition, while attacking Pakistan for fanning trouble in Kashmir, asked the government to initiate a political process and direct security forces to exercise restraint while dealing with protests.Replying to the debate, Home Minister Rajnath Singh affirmed that while militancy will be dealt with sternly, there should be "no instant" use of bullets while dealing with mobs which should first be tackled by the use of teargas and water cannons.The use of pellet guns, which have been blamed for most civilian injuries, would be looked into, regarding which he will talk to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, he said.Singh said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he himself had asked security forces to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with mob violence which started after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.The Home Minister said he had, on Saturday last, expressed desire to visit Kashmir and have a dialogue with the people directly. Mehbooba, while welcoming the offer, told him that after the situation normalises a bit, she will come to Delhi and have a meeting with him to discuss in what format talks can be held, he said."Whatever is happening in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored. The name is 'Pakistan', but its acts are 'na-pak' (not pious)," Singh said.Referring to the demands for 'plebiscite', he ruled it out, saying it is "outdated" and people of Kashmir are being "misguided" on this issue."Kashmiris are our own people. We will bring them on the right path... We will make them aware of the reality," he said.Invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee's famous remarks of 'Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat and Insaniyat' (kashmiriyat, democracy and humanity), he said "If there is any place for Kashmiriyat in 'Jamhooriyat' (democracy), it can be only on the basis of 'Insaniyat' (humanity) and not 'Haivaniyat' (devilish acts). Those believing in Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat, cannot give space to haivaniyat."
When Julien Andrianiana started selling charcoal 14 years ago, he was just one of a few dealers around. Most households in Toliara, a coastal city in southwestern Madagascar, still used firewood for cooking. As the citys population doubled, business became so brisk that he managed to send two of his children to college. It quickly became the product of choice in kitchens not only in Toliara, but also in other fast-growing cities across Africa. Charcoal cleaner and easier to use than firewood, cheaper and more readily available than gas or electricity has become one of the biggest engines of Africas informal economy. But it has also become one of the greatest threats to its environment.
In Madagascar, an island nation off the eastern African coast and one of the worlds richest nations in biodiversity, the booming charcoal business is contributing to deforestation. It is expected to exacerbate the effects of climate change, which has disrupted farming, fuelled a migration to cities, and pushed many rural residents into the one thriving business left: charcoal. Sellers now appear on street corners throughout Toliara, hawking charcoal made from trees from the surrounding forests, an ecologically rich and fragile area with plants and animals found nowhere else.
Procuring good charcoal
But acquiring high-quality charcoal made from hardwood trees has become increasingly difficult for dealers like Julien, 44, as a third straight year of drought has pushed ever more people into the charcoal trade. He now wakes up at 3 am and rides his bicycle an hour north to try to strike deals with charcoal producers before his competitors do. Most of the trees have been cut down, he said, hours after securing only 60 bags of charcoal.
Within five years, all the trees will be gone. Trees have been disappearing in a widening arc from Toliara in the past decade. As charcoal producers first culled trees in forests closest to Toliara, it left villages surrounded only by thickets. As a result, the business shifted to remote areas about 100 miles away, accessible by dirt roads and waterways.
About 100 miles southeast of Toliara, driving along National Road 10, I encountered Tsitomore, a 35-year-old cassava farmer, selling bags of charcoal by the roadside. Holding an axe, Tsitomore took me for a short walk into the forest to a spot where he had chopped off the branches of a large tamarind tree a hardwood that is considered sacred in many communities in Madagascar, and cannot be legally used for charcoal. Early this year, he became a full-time charbonnier, as charcoal burners are called in this former French colony, after a disastrous harvest caused by El Nino, which brought the worst drought in decades to parts of Africa.
Climate change is believed to have intensified the weather phenomenon. It rains less nowadays, he said as white smoke rose from the dirt kiln in which he was making charcoal by burning the tamarind wood without oxygen. Thats why I started making charcoal. No ones going to help me, and this is the quickest way to make money.Africas charcoal production has doubled in the past two decades and now accounts for more than 60% of the worlds total, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Rapid urbanisation across the continent has increased the demand for charcoal; it has become the preferred way to cook in cities.
Many people have left rural areas where firewood, typically dead wood collected from the forest floor, is a largely sustainable source of energy for cooking. In a poor neighbourhood in Toliara one evening, housewives sat on stools outside their homes, keeping watch over pots on charcoal stoves. Monira Ferdinand, a 32-year-old mother, said she had used firewood back in her village, but the smoke would sting her eyes and the fire required constant fanning. In the city, she and her neighbours use charcoal, though she is careful to buy the high-quality kind made from hardwood trees, not the cheaper charcoal made from mangrove trees or softer wood. The good quality charcoal lasts twice as long, Monira said.
As Africas population is expected to swell and urbanise at an even faster rate, the continents demand for charcoal is likely to double or triple by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme. The charcoal business, along with the expanding use of land for farming, is expected to increase deforestation and worsen the effects of climate change on a continent poorly equipped to adapt to it. Its all interconnected, this long-term trajectory and the long-term effects on climate change, said Henry Neufeldt, an expert on charcoal and climate change at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. In the next 30 years, a lot of forests and landscapes are going to be degraded because of charcoal demand, and because of the lack of policies to counter it.
A fading past
Though charcoal is one of the most widely used sources of energy in Africa, regulations regarding its production are rarely enforced, experts say. In the region surrounding Toliara, an estimated 75% of charcoal production is illegal, said officials at the World Wildlife Fund, which runs projects encouraging the sustainable production of charcoal. Randria Zigzag, the government official responsible for overseeing zones of intensive charcoal production near Toliara, said 45% was illegal.
A dry region used to periodic droughts, southern Madagascar has become even drier in the past two decades. The spiny forests in the region are blanketed with low-lying vegetation and dotted with several species of large trees. People have gravitated to cities where the population has risen 50% in the past two decades, said Col Jules Rabe, chief administrator of the Toliara region. In a self-reinforcing movement, the migration to cities has led to a greater demand for charcoal from rural areas. In Antevamena, a village of cassava and corn farmers, poor harvests have pushed more and more people into the charcoal economy as tree cutters, charcoal burners, transporters, middlemen, agents.
Things are far different in Befoly, a village not far from Toliara. Befoly supplied Toliara with charcoal until it ran out of trees. Everybody was involved in the charcoal business, said Reginike Faralahy, 26, a former charbonnier who, in the boom years, made so much money that he was able to invest in goats and chickens. More than 20 other former charbonniers had left the village, some to work as petty traders in Toliara, he said. The village chief, Evomasy, 48, said he believed that the trees disappearance had caused the recent severe droughts. We cut down everything, he said, looking at the shrub land now surrounding his village. We used to have trees all around us.
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 countrys polls, said on Twitter on Friday. And it will not stop until we close our borders for Islam and de-Islamise our societies. No more terror. No more Islam!
In France, next years presidential contest is already in full swing. The unpopular incumbent, Francois Hollande, a Socialist, is facing intensifying questions about his handling of the nations 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.
Germany and Austria both have elections coming that will test the strength of anti-immigrant parties. Right-leaning populism has also picked up strength across much of Central and Eastern Europe, especially since the migrant crisis last year that brought more than a million asylum seekers to the continent, most from Syria, Iraq and other poor and war-torn Muslim nations. In all of those places, the Nice attack quickly rippled through the political discourse.
This was in one of the most famous holiday destinations in Europe, and the images were so horrific that it does feed into this general sense of insecurity that populist parties trade off, said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research institute.
It adds to the idea that the established parties are not in control and that we are under threat. It adds, too, to this general sense that rather than transforming the world around us, Europe is being transformed by globalisation, and by people coming in and posing a threat, Leonard added.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Centre showed that the refugee crisis and the threat of terrorism were becoming intertwined in the minds of many Europeans. In eight of the 10 European nations covered, more than half of those surveyed said they believed that the presence of refugees increased the likelihood of terrorism in their country, with fears highest in Hungary and Poland.
In Poland, the right-wing government is already locked in bitter disputes with the European Union over freedom of speech and the rule of law. As the grisly details in Nice became clear, Polands interior minister swiftly blamed decades of multi-culti policy and those who lit up the Eiffel Tower after earlier attacks in Paris. We need to focus on guaranteeing peoples safety.
That is best done, he argued, by emulating Poland and Hungary, keeping migrants out and preventing crime. We, unlike Western Europe, dont experience such problems; we dont have districts ruled by a different law than Polish law; we dont have no-go zones that Polish police cannot enter, Blaszczak said, alluding to debu-nked reports of such areas in Western Europe.
Pawel Kukiz, leader of the self-described patriotic opposition party Kukiz15, which won seats in parliament last fall, used the Nice attack to call for a referendum asking Poles whether they agree to accept any refugees.
Hungary was already due to hold a similar plebiscite in the fall, and Prime Minister Victor Orban the first European leader to build fences last year to keep out waves of West Asian migrants is urging Hungarians to vote against European quotas for taking in newcomers.
That vote is scheduled for October 2, the same day that neighbouring Austria will hold a rerun of its presidential election. That contest pits a former Green party leader against a far-right politician, Norbert Hofer, who could become the first rightist elected head of state in Europe since 1945. Even if Hofer does not prevail, his Freedom party is still No. 1 in opinion polls, well ahead of the mainstream parties that have governed Austria since 1945 but were eliminated in the first round of presidential voting in April.
German politics
Even in prosperous and conservative Germany, Europes No. 1 power, politics has become more fractured. The far-right Alternative for Germany, mired in internal disputes, has slipped from 15% to between 9 and 12% in opinion polls. But that is still well above the 5% barrier for winning seats in next years national elections.
Support for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative bloc has strengthened slightly since the British referendum as the public saw the economic and political aftermath of that vote. But Merkel is still widely blamed for a policy that saw one million migrants arrive in Germany last year. Desperate to stanch the flow, she enlisted Turkey to help keep migrants from entering Europe. How that agreement will fare now that Turkeys military has tried to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was one of many open questions.
In Britain, one of the biggest challenges facing Prime Minister Theresa Mays new government is how to balance a desire for continued access to the European single market with the European Unions requirement that access to the market be coupled with open-border policies that allow European citizens to live and work anywhere they please within the bloc.
Shutting off immigration was one of the most powerful motives behind the vote to leave the European Union, and the attack in Nice seemed likely to harden the position of those advocating strict border control.
Well before the British referendum, the refugee crisis had put acute strain on European unity and in particular on Europes Schengen border-free travel zone. The attacker in Nice was living in France legally. But the assault followed other terror attacks in which some attackers had crossed the Belgian-French border, and two of the attackers in the assault on Paris last November had apparently entered Europe in last years migrant wave. As a result, criticism of Europes open-border policy has taken root not just on the far right but also among more mainstream parties.
All the Schengen countries have now free circulation of people, Pierre Lellouche, a former minister and member of Frances centre-right Republican party, told the BBC on Friday. But it is turning into free circulation of terrorists we dont know who enters. As for improving border control or sharing more information among European intelligence agencies, he added: Nothing is happening.
Finally, Bengaluru Development Minister K J George had to bow and step down as a Cabinet minister, after a local court ordered the police to register a First Information Report (FIR) against him and two IPS officers, named by DySP M K Ganapathi, before committing suicide.
Incidentally, both George and Ganapathi hail from Kodagu district and the very incident that occured in the backyard has, in a way, posed political hurdles to former.It has further aggravated the pain for Congress party leaders in the district, who are making efforts to regain the lost hold. BJP and Hindu organisations are basking in cantering home victory.
Earlier too, George had to face brickbats with a series of protests calling for Go Back George when he was made in-charge minister of the district. George, who had taken over the charge after PWD Minister Dr H C Mahadevappa, was finally relieved from the district (on November 10) on the eve of Tipu Jayanti that witnessed unprecedented violence.
While justice for grieving family of DySP Ganapathi was the reason, more than that, there was a growing clamour for Georges scalp and the right wing organisations played it to the hilt.
A native of Konanakatte near Gonikoppa in Virajpet taluk in the district, Georges father C Joesph had migrated from neighbouring Kerala to Konanakatte during 1960. The family was eking out a living by cultivating leased land. Joseph was also into business. George was third among seven children. He did his primary education at Mayamudi and high school at Ponnappasanthe.
It was during 1976, George was attracted towards politics and thus, began his career under then Youth Congress leader Gundurao. He later shifted to Bengaluru that catapulted his career in politics further.
While some of the family members continued to live in Virajpet and surrounding areas, George settled in Bengaluru. However, he still shares a bond with his native and owns a bungalow. He was concurrently running timber business, a source said.
He had also earned the ire of many local leaders for axing trees at coffee estates and supplying the same to saw mills. Though there were frequent appeals in the local body meetings to prohibit felling of trees for timber, it remained a demand to be heard.
Moreover, the locals were vexed at George for not contributing to development of the district even after becoming a minister. What had enraged them further was Ganapathis statement to media that George harassed him.
Recently, Kodagu bandh was observed and parties, barring Congress, and organisations had extended their support to the bandh.
Abof, the online fashion retail arm owned by the Aditya Birla Group, has stated that its strategy is to curate the trendiest fashion by working with about 100-120 brands, and give rich expereince with 3D and Virtual Reality technologies.
We focus on giving consumers a sharper collection which is in trend today, so they dont have to think about it, they will just browse and discover fashion on our platform. Our strategy is that we will only work with about 100-120 brands, Abof CEO and President Prashant Gupta told DH.
The online fashion retailers focus is on apparel, footwear and accessory brands for men and women. Besides having a minimum scale, certain size or certain positioning in the market, a brand should be different from label with certain consumer tracking and awareness.
We have already handpicked for each of the categories the brands that we believe are the most relevant. We work very closely with our brand partners as we do the joint plans with them, as also joint marketing decisions. If you have 1,000 brand partners, you can never work collaboratively, he said.
Gupta said that fashion is a business where innovation must happen frequently. So every day has new thinking, new ideas, new evaluation. Keep pushing the boundaries and come up with new ideas as to how to do things differently, Gupta said. The company, which began its operation in October last year, has witnessed a total visit of 2.20 million people, with an average individual purchase of Rs 1,500.
Abof has already witnessed one million downloads, and caters to 8,000 pincodes in the country. Abof introduced the 3D trial room experiment by asking three data points on height, waist and bust size, and looks at virtual reality as the next step. So if you give those three pointers, then the entire body shape is constructed. The next evolution in technology arguably is that we will use the face of the consumer. And in that context obviously, VR will make it even more real, he said.
On the technology front, he said that the company has a team of 30 members, which gives a Twitter meets Instagram experience. The company website can be called as Twitter meets Instagram, because the Instagram feed is visual. The Abof website is the fastest loading site with 1.7 seconds. The improved version of Abof has not only led to a great user experience, but has drastically improved the conversion rate of the website by over 60% and has witnessed an increase in page views by 21%. It also reduced bounce rate by 20%. Our tie-up with AWS and IBM has really given an edge in technology, he claimed.
The company also introduced the refund with 24 hours and spot alteration in Bengaluru and Hyderabad have increased the credibility. We will expand spot alteration in eight more top metros by the end of this year, he said.
To compete with horizontal players in the market, the company is providing a discerning shopping experience. One of the most differentiated things with us is the fact that we have Abof branded merchandise, which is only exclusive to us. And if you look at that merchandise, its actually very high on fashion quotient. When, globally, there was a trend of long line t-shirts for men, we were the first ones in the country to launch that on our platform under the Abof brand, and sold it within ten days, he said.
As civilian death toll in Kashmir is on the rise, the miserable plight of security forces has gone unheard, though they too have been suffering colossal causalities.
Official data reveals that two police personnel have been killed in protests and three are missing while around 800 of them are wounded, including 200 with grievous injuries. Similar is the plight of the CRPF personnel whose patrol parties and bunkers are being frequently targeted with stones, petrol bombs and firearms. Sources said around 80 security installations were attacked by the unruly mobs in the last ten days of violence in the Valley.
Official documents reveal, since July 8, the day Hizbul commander Burhan Wani and his two accomplices were killed in an encounter, the security forces are being constantly attacked. In a shocker, the mobs killed a policeman by throwing him into river Jhelum along with his armoured vehicle on July 10. On the same day, militants had a field day. It has been seen that in the garb of law & order, militants are firing and lobbing grenades on the police and the CRPF personnel. Militants lobbed two grenades on the CRPF sleuths deployed in Murran Chowk (Pulwama) resulting in injuries to some, police records reveal.
On July 12, a grenade was tossed on a CRPF patrol party at Nowhatta in Srinagar leaving 12 personnel injured.
On July 15, at Yaripora in Kulgam, militants lobbed grenades and fired indiscriminately on the police who were dealing with violent protesters. Seven police personnel and three civilians received gunshots and splinter injuries, police documents said.
A senior police officer told DH that the Jammu and Kashmir Police were facing a tough situation in tackling the unruly mobs.
A police official said that except for stray incidents of stone throwing, overall law and order situation remained calm across the Valley.
He said a decision to relax the curfew, which has been in force for the last 10 days, will be taken only after the assessment of overall situation.
In a near-total communication blockade and the curfew, the separatists extended their shutdown call till July 21. There is an apprehension of more violence as Pakistan has called for observation of black day on July 20 to condemn the killings of civilians and demand plebiscite under the UN resolution.
None of the local newspapers hit the stands for the third consecutive day on Monday after the Mehbooba Mufti government banned the publication of newspapers.
Newspapers recorded their protest in their web editions with black border and black pages, symbolising muzzling of the freedom of the press.
Internet still restricted
Mobile and Internet services continued to be affected. None of the officials in the administration is willing to answer queries related to restriction on telecom services. However, a source said these measures have been taken to contain the violence and spreading of rumours.
The protests and mob attacks are mobilised through phones and internet. We have taken the measures to prevent further loss of life and damage to property, he added. On Sunday, pro-freedom leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani set six conditions for restoration of peace in the Valley. He shot off letters to the UN and heads of several western and Muslim countries.
The conditions included accepting the disputed nature of J&K, announcement of peoples right for self-determination and rapid demilitarisation in Jammu and Kashmir.
Two protesters, including a woman, were killed in fresh protests that broke out on Monday evening after a relative calm during the day in the Kashmir Valley.Signs of improvement in the situation were shattered when a mob threw stones at an Army convoy near Qazigund in the Pulgam district in south Kashmir on Srinagar-Jammu national highway.To quell the trouble, the Army personnel opened fire, killing two people and injuring four. Condition of two of them is stated to be serious. The violence that started on July 8 has so far claimed 45 lives and left over 3,200 injured.
As the monsoon session of Parliament got underway, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached out to the opposition with a message lets work together.
Minutes before the Lok Sabha convened, Modi went around the House greeting members across party lines. Modi also greeted Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who was seen telling something to the prime minister. He had moved ahead but lingered on till the Gandhi had completed what she had to say.
Speaking to the media, Modi said he had got a sense that all political parties were in a mood to take best of the decisions that would put the country on forward on a fast track.
Modi recalled that on August 15, the country would celebrate its 70th Independence Day and made a strong pitch for high quality debates during the session.
Hence, all of us should join hands together in Parliament to give a new impetus and direction to the country, he said.
This was reflected in the Lok Sabha, where several new Union ministers, including Ananth Kumar and Ramdas Athawale, were seen greeting members on the opposition benches, particularly the Congress president.
Gandhi was also seen having a long chat with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, apparently inquiring about her well being. Swaraj was hospitalized recently for treatment of pneumonia.
Fourty-three new members, both newcomers and re-elected, took the oath in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, the first day of the Monsoon session.
The MPs who took the oath included Union ministers like M Venkaiah Naidu, Piyush Goyal and Nirmala Sitharaman. Those who returned to Parliament are P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Amar Singh.
The oath-taking, which lasted around 40 minutes once again magnified the diversity of the country with members taking the pledge in various languages from Kannada to Tamil, Sanskrit, Hindi, Odiya, Marathi and English. While most of them took oath in the name of God, others took the pledge in solemnly affirmed.
Union Minister Y S Chaudhary (TDP) was the first to be called, but he was absent. Union Environment Minister Anil Dave, who was recently inducted into the Council of Ministers, and RJD chief Lalu Prasads daughter Misa Bharti were not present in the House when their names were called initially, but took the oath later.
From Karnataka, Nirmala, who was previously a Rajya Sabha member from Andhra Pradesh, and K C Ramamoorthy (Congress) took oath as new members.
Opposition has stacked up in the Upper House experienced faces in Chidambaram, Sibal, Amar Singh, Beni Prasad Verma and Ram Jethmalani, who was a former BJP MP, is now supported by the RJD.
MPs cutting across party lines thumped their desks to cheer the members taking oath, while visitors gallery was packed with family and friends of the new lawmakers, who occasionally cheered their leaders by going against the norms of the House.
Business / Companies
by Oliver Kazunga
GLOW Petroleum has invested about $340,000 in its first service station in Bulawayo with plans to invest up to $5 million in the city by February next year.The outlet, which is located along Khami Road, is the company's 37th in the country. Speaking at the launch ceremony on Friday, Glow Petroleum managing director Mr Aaron Chinhara said they are happy to consolidate their presence in Matabeleland region."This service station here today is our 37th outlet in the country and we're coming to Bulawayo to consolidate our presence in Matabeleland region. We penetrated Matabeleland region through Gwanda, where we've built a state-of-the art shopping mall, which also includes a service station," he said.Mr Chinhara said the site where the new service station has been set up belongs to Gold Star Refinery and the premises have been secured through his business partner Mr Tawanda Ruzive under a five-year lease agreement.The new outlet employs about 15 people. "Our recruitment policy as an organisation is centred on recruiting locally. In all the areas that we have operations we recruit the locals," he said.In an interview later, he said: "We invested about $340,000 to set up the infrastructure at this service station and we didn't put much into this project because we're operating under a five year lease agreement."We believe we would have recouped the profits from the investment within the five year period."Earlier on in his address, Mr Chinhara said they have already bought the land for their next project, a state-of-the-art service station in Bulawayo's Central Business District."We've bought land in Bulawayo where we're also going to build a service station, which we believe would be the mother of all service stations. At that site we're also going to compete with other companies in the fuel industry," he said, adding that his organisation was seeing opportunities at a time when Bulawayo and the region at large is seen as dying in terms of investment.However, Mr Chinhara blasted the Bulawayo City Council for being slow when dealing with potential investors. "We could have opened this site about three weeks ago but this couldn't be so because of some delays by some BCC employees to sort out some documentation. We're saying by the moment BCC acts like that, investors get frustrated."As an organisation, even if we get frustrated by the city council, we're not going to give anyone anything to get favours from the local authority because we highly value Christian values," he said.Glow Petroleum is an indigenous company with branches in areas such as Harare, Kadoma, Hwange, Rusape, Chiredzi and Triangle.
The State BJP is not satisfied with Bengaluru Development Minister K J Georges resignation. The party wants the government to hand over the DySP M K Ganapathi suicide case to the CBI and arrest George.
Resignation of George is not sufficient. The case should be handed over to the CBI to ensure free and fair investigation. Besides George should be arrested immediately, BJP State President B S Yeddyurappa told reporters after submitting a memorandum to Governor Vajubhai Vala seeking his intervention in the Ganapathi suicide case. He said the partys agitation will continue till the case is handed over to the CBI.
The BJP MPs are planning to hold a protest in front of the Mahatma Gandhi statue on Parliament premises on Tuesday.
Madikeri MLA and former Speaker K G Bopaiah said the BJP is working out the modalities to get Ganapathis wife Pavana an appointment with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of the partys endeavour to ensure justice to the former police officers family.
The State BJP leaders will also be touring districts and holding conventions from July 22 in support of their demand.
Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council K S Eshwarappa said that between July 22 and August 2, district conventions will be held at Kodagu, Mysuru, Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Haveri, Davangere, Belagavi, Bagalkot, Gadag, Koppal, Chitradurga, Tumakuru and Bengaluru (Rural).
The failures of the state government will also be highlighted at the conventions. A mega rally will be held in Bengaluru on August 8, he added.
JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy has demanded that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah should clarify whether there are any first information reports against him.
Addressing reporters on Monday, Kumaraswamy charged that Siddaramaiahs name appeared in about 10 FIRs. Siddaramaiah has claimed that he has no close links with Marigowda. But there are joint FIRs against the two. While Siddaramaiah is accused no. 1, Marigowda is accused no. 2 in all these cases, he said.
The Opposition has been demanding action against Marigowda, a Congress worker and an associate of Siddaramaiah, ever since Mysuru Deputy Commissioner C Shikha lodged a complaint against him on July 4. Marigowda reportedly abused the officer.
Releasing copies of the FIRs dating back to 2007, Kumaraswamy said, It should be clarified whether it is Siddaramaiahs name in the FIRs.
Reiterating that the government was protecting Marigowda, Kumaraswamy said the FIRs pertained to cases including torching and pelting of buses and harassment of officials.
Levelling charges against IPS officer Pronab Mohanty, the former chief minister accused the officer of being corrupt. The government is projecting him as an upright and honest officer. But this is far from the truth, he added. Terming it another scam like the Hublot watch case, Kumaraswamy charged that Mohanty had played a role in destroying an FIR registered by NRI Dr Debdatta Das pertaining to a theft case, in 2014. Das, like Mohanty, hails from Odisha, he said. Mohanty was serving as an assistant commissioner of police then.
According to Das claims, the police had closed the case, owing to Mohantys interference. Mohanty had even requested Das not to mention his name anywhere, as he was following orders from his superiors.
Werent the then Home Minister K J George and DG&IGP aware of the happenings? I demand to know who stopped the investigation midway, he said.
Kumaraswamy said that Das had stayed briefly at his friend Gnanesh Mishras place in Viveknagar in Bengaluru after his return from New York on January 9, 2014. On realising that around $12,000 was missing, he registered a theft case against Mishra in Viveknagar police station. Das has said that he is unable to locate the FIR copy, said Kumaraswamy. Das has written to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in this regard, he added. Kumaraswamy did not release any documents to prove his charges against the police officer.
6 cases withdrawn, C report in others
Mysuru SP Abhinav Khare, on Monday, said, no cases were pending before the Mysuru district police against Siddaramaiah and Marigowda.
At a press meet at his office, Khare said the government had withdrawn six cases and the CID filed C reports in the other cases in 2009.
In 2007, when Siddaramaiah was an MLA from the Chamundeshwari constituency, the police had booked him and Marigowda, based on complaints over their involvement in violence and damaging government property in a protocol issue. Eleven cases - five in Mysuru South station and six in Jayapura station - were booked, with Siddaramaiah and Marigowda as prime accused.
The SP said that while the government has withdrawn six cases that were registered at the Jayapura police station on August 14, 2009, the CID has submitted C reports to the court in other cases.
When questioned as to why C reports were filed even after the suspects were known, the SP said, it was a CID probe and he is unaware of it. All 11 cases were filed on March 31 and August 1, 2007, when Kumaraswamy was the chief minister. Siddaramaiah, along with Marigowda and others, was alleged to have resorted to violence, damaged KSRTC buses and laid a siege to the SPs office.
The Credit Information Bureau of India (CIBIL) will provide individuals with one free credit report a year, Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said here on Monday.
At present, the credit report is used by the lending institutions to check the credit-worthiness of an individual before granting a loan. The CIBIL charges Rs 500 for a credit report.
By the end of the year, the CIBIL will start providing individuals with one free credit report a year so that they can check their credit rating and can petition if they find possible discrepancies... So, along with a greater use of credit information bureaus, we need checks and balances on them, which the RBI is mandating, he said, delivering the keynote address on Equity, Access and Inclusion Transforming Rural India through Financial Inclusion at the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (NIRD&PR) here.
When an individual knows that a default has spoiled their credit rating and cut off future access to credit, at least for a while there is a strong incentive to make timely payments, he said, stressing the need to increase the reach of these credit-rating institutions to rural areas, particularly the borrowings by self-help groups.
Citing the example of Rajasthan, Rajan pointed out that digitisation of land records, accompanied by a guarantee of a certificate of final ownership by the state governments, will ease the use of land as collateral against which funds can be borrowed. If only we can monetise land and make it more pledgeable as collateral, we can expand access to credit tremendously, he said.
Proposing the concept of forgiveness in case of default of huge educational loans by choosing a bad educational institution by mistake, Rajan said many countries have provisions for such forgiveness. We propose that if you have a period of unemployment, then you can choose two moratoria over the period of student loans based on your inability to repay the loan or some kind of flexibility that we allow in agricultural loans.
The monsoon session of the legislature was drastically cut short as the Oppositions demand for the dismissal of Bengaluru Development Minister K J George and handing over of the DySP M K Ganapathi suicide case to the CBI was not acceptable to the government.
On Monday too, there was no meeting point between the government and the Opposition, which has been fighting for Georges ouster over the Ganapathi suicide case.
According to the schedule, the session was to be held from July 4 to 29 with 19 working days. But the Assembly hardly met for 24 hours spread over eight days before it was adjourned indefinitely. The one and only topic debated at length from July 11 was the suicide of Ganapathi. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, while deciding to standby George, settled only for a judicial probe into the case. The next session would be held in Belagavi, probably in December.
As the demand for Georges ouster grew shriller in the legislature, the government got a dozen bills passed without debate. Amid intermittent adjournments, even the appropriation bills including making provision for additional grants for various departments, replies to questions tabled by the members, reports and replies to call attention notices have been passed without discussion.
While staging dharna to air their demands, the BJP MLAs raised slogans against the government, particularly George. In chorus they were heard saying, To save ATM mantri, why sacrifice the legislature session, implying that George is funding the Congress party, Dhamaki sarkarakke, dhikkara, and We want justice.
Speaker K B Koliwad told the Opposition that it has made its arugments over the Ganpathi case both in the House and outside. His request to allow the House to conduct business went in vain. Finally, the Speaker went through the agenda and concluded the session despite stiff oppositio.
A Legislative Assembly committee has recommended suspension of the tahsildar of Devanahalli taluk in Bengaluru Rural district for helping land sharks grab prime government lands.
Fictitious documents
In its report submitted to the Assembly on Monday, the 15-member Petition Committee headed by Animal Husbandry Minister A Manju has stated that the tahsildar had recently created fictitious documents in favour of Nagaratnamma with regard to 5.10 acres of government land at Palya village of Devanahalli taluk.
The complaint was filed against the officer in January this year.
The report has, however, not mentioned name of the officer.
In January this year, a section of residents of Palya village had complained against the officer. Of the seven complaints, the tahsildar was prima facia found guilty in two cases.
The panel has also recommended the government to order a departmental enquiry into the issue.
The Ministry of Water Resources has informed the Karnataka government that before taking up any projects in the Cauvery basin area, it has to get them examined by the Cauvery Supervisory Committee headed by Union Water Resources Secretary.
The Cauvery Supervisory Committee has been set up on the orders of the Supreme Court to implement the award of the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunal (CWDT) on the water shares allocated to Cauvery basin states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry.
Union Minister of State for Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation Sanjay Kumar Balyan in his written answer to the Rajya Sabha on Monday said that the Ministry has also asked Karnataka to share its plans for the proposed power project it intends to build on the Cauvery river with the co-basin states (Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry) and bring them on board before taking up a detailed project report (DPR) or construction.
The minister was replying to a question whether the government has received any representation from the Tamil Nadu government requesting the Centre to advise Karnataka not to proceed with the construction of a reservoir at Mekedatu and Shivanasamudram run of the river power project.
The Central Water Commission (CWC) has received a DPR for Shivanasamudram run of the river power project from Karnataka Power Corporation Ltd in 2014.
The same has been returned to Karnataka asking it to obtain views/comments of basin states in view of the final award of CWDT to facilitate its examination from inter-state angle, Balyan said.
No proposal received
However, the minister said that the CWC has not received any proposal from Karnataka on Mekedatu project.
But, the Karnataka Government had informed the CWC that Tamil Nadu has filed an interim application in the Supreme Court objecting this project.
The Karnataka government also clarified that it has no plans to proceed with the construction of the above projects without informing the Supreme Court as the interim application is pending before it, the minister added.
Countering the Goa governments arguments before the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal, Karnataka on Monday said farmers in Hubballi-Dharwad and Belagavi region were facing drought due to shortfall in rainfall over the years and not because of growing water-guzzling crops.
Making the submission before the Tribunal headed by Justice J M Panchal, Karnatakas senior counsel Fali S Nariman said only 5% of farmers in the region grow sugarcane (a water-guzzling crop) against Goas claim that it is grown on 26,000 hectares.
The Tribunal is hearing an interim petition by Karnataka, seeking permission for urgent diversion of 7.56 tmc feet from Mahadayi river for drinking water purposes.
Owing to low inflow of water to Malaprabha reservoir mainly due to shortfall in rainfall in the catchment areas in recent years Karnataka is unable to provide water for irrigation as well as drinking purposes.
With 35 km of Mahadayi river flowing in Karnataka, the state has a natural right on its waters.
Of the total flow of 108 tmc feet of water in the river annually, Karnataka is seeking just 7.56 tmc feet, that too for drinking purposes, he said.
Rejecting Goas argument that the diversion of river would lead to large-scale destruction of forests in Western Ghats, Nariman assured the Tribunal that before commencing the project, the state will take required steps to protect the forests and get necessary clearances from the Ministry of Forests and Environment.
The Goa government in its submission last week before the Tribunal said Karnataka created artificial drought in the Hubballi-Dharwad and Belagavi region by allowing farmers to grow water-guzzling crops like sugar cane, instead of encouraging them to grow less water-consuming crops.
Construction of lift irrigation projects and mini dams along the Malaprabha river was the primary reason for the poor inflow of water to the Malaprabha reservoir, theneighbouring state said.
The NDA government on Monday slammed Pakistan for triggering the latest bout of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. Leaders from almost all political parties suggested initiating a dialogue process with the separatist leaders to restore peace in the Valley.
It is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Burhan Wani, Hizbul Mujahideen commander in south Kashmir, was radicalising the youngsters using social media. They expressed joy at the death of a soldier. It is a perverted mentality, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said in the Rajya Sabha on the first day of the Monsoon Session.
The killing of Wani and two other terrorists earlier this month triggered a chain of violent reactions all over the Valley, killing 43 civilians and one security officer. Also, 1,948 civilians and 1,671 security personnel were wounded.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said Pakistan was instigating trouble as it never reconciled to the idea of Jammu and Kashmir being a part of India. The government's arguments were countered by veteran Congress leader Karan Singh, who said there was an unprecedented outburst of frustration and rage among the youth in the Valley.
This needs to be tackled in a compassionate manner. Simply blaming everything on foreign hands is not the right approach. Dialogue is the most difficult process, but dialogue cuts through all barriers, he said.
Political solution
Initiating the debate, Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said excessive use of force was not acceptable. Azads views were echoed by CPM's Sitaram Yechury, DMK leader Thiruchi Shiva and CPIs D Raja, who said the government must find a political solution to the issue.
A Legislative Assembly committee on Monday recommended one year imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10,000 fine on journalist Ravi Belagere for publishing defamatory article against Speaker K B Koliwad.
The article was published in the Kannada tabloid Hi Bengaluru edited by Belagere in September 2014.
Koliwad had lodged a complaint to the then Speaker Kagodu Thimmappa against the journalist. He had also moved a breach of privilege motion in this regard. The then Speaker had referred the issue to the Privilege Committee, which submitted its report in the Assembly.
News / National
by Pamela Shumba
AN elderly couple from Bulawayo has lodged a complaint with the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) over a "lenient verdict" against an unlicensed soldier who killed their nephew in a hit and run accident. Mr Peter Kanotsauka (59) and his wife Matilda (50) from Hillcrest lost their nephew Kenneth Mayenge (44) after the soldier, Mr Mqalisi Ncube (22) hit him and drove his car over him along Luveve Road on May 14, 2016.Western Commonage magistrate Miss Tancy Dube fined Mr Ncube, a soldier based in Masvingo, $300 after convicting him of culpable homicide. Mr Ncube fled from the scene, leaving Mayenge for dead before rushing to repair the car and replace a shattered windscreen, apparently to conceal the crime.The couple told The Chronicle last week the soldier was arrested days after the incident. They said their nephew's spirit haunted a witness who had taken down the vehicle's registration number, until she took it to the police. Mr Ncube was allegedly zigzagging across the road when he hit Mayenge at about 11PM."Kenneth flew into the air, crashed onto the windscreen and slid to the ground where Ncube drove his car over him," said Mrs Kanotsauka. Doctors certified Mayenge dead on arrival at Mpilo Central Hospital. He was hiking to the city centre after his car developed a mechanical fault at the Cowdray Park turn-off along Luveve Road.According to a copy of a police report, which The Chronicle is in possession of, Mr Ncube initially faced four charges; driving without a licence, failure to stop after an accident, failure to report an accident and culpable homicide.However, a transcript of court proceedings shows the prosecutor Mrs Sibekithemba Dube, only proffered two charges; culpable homicide and driving without a licence. Mr Kanotsauka said the family was crushed by the court's verdict."Kenneth was like our son because he grew up in our house. We're not happy that Mr Ncube was ordered to pay a paltry $300 for killing our son, who left behind a wife and four children. One of the children is still being breastfed."We've requested fresh investigations and retrial of this case as it's evident that it was not handled properly. "Ncube is a member of the uniformed forces, who is expected to protect the people and uphold the law. He didn't only break the law by driving without a licence but also took the life of a civilian and tried to conceal the offence," said Mr Kanotsauka.He said the police reports clearly show that there is a lot of information that was not considered in the determination of the matter. "We observed with great concern that the narrative of what really happened before and after Kenneth's death was not brought up in court and that negatively affected the outcome of the trial," said Mr Kanotsauka.He added that Mr Ncube did not show remorse after committing the crime."He ran away after committing the crime and later took the car for repairs to conceal evidence. He even lied to his mother that he had been involved in a fight after she asked him why the car was damaged and why his clothes were stained with blood. It was a devastating experience as we went out of our way to trace Mr Ncube's whereabouts at a time when we were grieving," said Mr Kanotsauka.Mrs Kanotsauka said their son was assisted by witnesses who saw the accident happening. "Three people saw Kenneth being hit by the car. They followed and caught up with him after driving for about a kilometre, where he had stopped to relieve himself. He ran away and a passenger took over the driver's seat and sped off."One of them recorded the vehicle's registration numbers resulting in Mr Ncube's arrest five days later," said Mrs Kanotsauka. She said the three called an ambulance and returned to the scene.A lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity said the magistrate was right to fine Ncube, based on the charges he faced in court. "That would be a standard sentence for those charges," said the lawyer. NPA spokesperson Mr Allen Chifokoyo confirmed that they received the complaint adding that the matter was being attended to."We received a complaint and one of our officers is attending to it. He has written a letter to the police inquiring on the circumstances of the matter. There are issues raised in the complaint which seem not to have been part of the docket," said Mr Chifokoyo.
Amid mounting pressure from the Opposition, Bengaluru Development Minister K J George on Monday resigned in connection with the suicide of Deputy Superintendent of Police M K Ganapathi.
This followed hours after a court in Kodagu district ordered the state police to file a first information report against George and two senior IPS officers, whom Ganapathi had accused of harassing him. The police will now have to register a criminal offence case against the minister. Ganapathis son Nehal had approached the court seeking a direction to the police to register an abetment to suicide case against George and the two IPS officers.
On a day of fast-paced developments in the Vidhana Soudha, George submitted his resignation to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah at an informal meeting of ministers he had convened to discuss the court order and its consequences. Governor Vajubhai Vala has accepted the ministers resignation.
Not harassed anyone
At a press conference held after putting in his papers, George said he had submitted his resignation voluntarily as he held the judiciary in high esteem and wanted to pave the way for an unbiased investigation. At the same time, George said he had not harassed anyone in his 45 years of public life and added that he would come out clean.
George, flanked by ministers Ramesh Kumar and U T Khader, said, Let the law take its course...I have never stuck to power... My conscience is clear and I will cooperate with the investigation.
George said he would keep all legal options open. If I have committed a mistake, I am ready to face any punishment, but let the Opposition or the media not conduct the trial and draw conclusions, he said.
Sources close to George said he is likely to challenge the Madikeri court decision in the Karnataka High Court. After his statement before the media, George left the Vidhana Soudha in a private car.
Siddaramaiah has retained the Bengaluru Development portfolio which was held by George.
The government, sources said, is contemplating shifting IPS officers Prasad and Mohanty from the present positions they are holding.
Earlier, the Principal Civil and Judicial Magistrate First Class Court in Madikeri, Kodagu district, directed the police to register an FIR against George and IPS officers A M Prasad and Pronab Mohanty under IPC Section 306 (Abetment of suicide). The three have been accused of harassing Ganapathi who committed suicide after naming them on July 7.
High Court Advocate M T Nanaiah prayed Judge Annapoorneshwari to direct the police to file a case under CrPC 156 (3). Accepting the appeal, the court directed the Madikeri town police to file an FIR against the minister and the two police officers and submit a report to the court on or before August 5.
When the hearing commenced at 11 am, Advocates Nanaiah and Amruth Somaiah argued in favour of Nehal.
Nanaiah said, The police have no option but to file an FIR. The government had ordered only a probe into the case. As senior police officers are involved in the case, an officer of the rank of a DySP should conduct the probe. However, there is no rule that one has to be arrested soon after an FIR is filed (against him or her). But, if the investigating officer feels that an arrest is necessary, then the suspect can be arrested.
Truth will win
After the court verdict, Ganapathis son Nehal said in Madikeri he believed in the judiciary. With the hope that truth will win, we will continue the fight, he said.
His mother Pavana said she was happy that the court directed the police to file an FIR against George. We want justice based on the statement of my husband M K Ganapathi before he committed suicide. Society should know what he said was true. We had not demanded the resignation of anyone. After discussing with the family members, we will decide on the future course of action, she added.
Upcoming schools want the state government to roll back a notification that mandates half-acre campuses for all primary and secondary educational institutions that are started after 2015. The notification was issued by the Department of Public Instruction last year.
The institutions have formed a body called Proposed Primary and Secondary First to Fifth Schools Association and held a meeting in Bengaluru on Sunday. They resolved to submit a memorandum to Primary and Secondary Education Minister Tanveer Sait, seeking rollback of the notification.
The associations president, A R Salik, argued that the rule would only burden the students. Students may end up paying higher school fees because land prices in a city like Bengaluru are too high, he told Deccan Herald. It would be just impossible for schools to purchase such huge plots of land.
Opening half-acre campuses will also be costlier in rural areas where land prices have gone up, he claimed. The association wants the government to modify the notification and allow upcoming schools to operate on 3,000-4,000-sq ft campuses.
Child rights activist Nagasimha G Rao, however, said the associations demand would hamper the overall growth of a student. We see most schools growing vertically. Children need to have enough play area. Nowadays, we hardly see any child excelling in sports. It is unethical of schools to say they will pass on the (monetary) burden to students, he said.
Ajay Seth, Principal Secretary (Primary and Secondary Education), said the government had not yet taken a decision on the associations request. We are in the process of collecting information on how other states are dealing with the matter. There is a need to strike a balance, he said. Fee will certainly be high in schools that are asked to have half-acre campuses. According to Seth, no new school had violated the notification since 2015.
The government had earlier mandated one-acre campuses for new schools, but brought down the condition to half-acre last year.
The High Court on Monday orally suggested to the Kannada and Culture Department to form a committee to pick Rajyostava awardees. Justice S Abdul Nazeer directed the state government to spell out the steps it had taken to formulate rules and names for the panel and submit the report to the court within 10 days. Writer B V Satyanarayana Rao had moved the court urging it to direct the government to consider his application for the award.
Govt opposes plea by Shashidhars wife The state government has urged the High Court to dismiss a petition that seeks a CBI inquiry into the arrest of V Shashidhar, president of Akhila Karnataka Police Maha Sangha, who is accused of instigating constables to go on mass leave last month. Filing a statement of objections on the petition filed by Shashidhars wife Poornima, the government said, The government has said that the extraordinary power must be exercised sparingly, cautiously in exceptional situations where it becomes necessary to provide credibility to instil confidence in investigation or where the incident may have national and international ramification. The government has stated that the petition has been filed prematurely and lacks bona fide. (sic) Justice S Abdul Nazeer adjourned the hearing.
The state government on Monday secured the approval of the legislature to incur an expenditure of Rs 25 lakh on the Yoga Day programme attended by bollywood actor Bipasha Basu in Bengaluru recently.
Shwasa, a yoga centre, had organised the event in association with the Karnataka Olympics Association. The event Bend it like Bipasha held at Kanteerava Stadium was attended by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Union Ministers Ananth Kumar and D V Sadananda Gowda and many elected representatives.
The department of Ayush, which had coordinated the event, was in for a surprise when the yoga centre subsequently presented a whopping Rs 45 lakh bill.
The department had earmarked a modest budget of Rs 21 lakh for organising the event. So, it had kept the bill on hold. With the legislature giving its nod to incur the additional expenditure in this regard, the department will now be able to clear the bill. The Yoga Day programme expenditure was a part of Rs 2,916 crore additional expenses the government has sought to incur during the fiscal 2016-17.
Besides, the government will buy 13 new cars, models and make of which are not disclosed, for the benefit of MLCs. Honorarium of Rs one lakh will be paid to deputy chairman of State Planning Board C M Ibrahim. The chairman of high power committee on implementation of the Dr D M Nanjundappa Committee Report will also get Rs one lakh honorarium, as per the supplementary estimates.
The legislature also gave its approval to the government to utilise Rs 612.04 crore deposited unauthorisedly in hundreds of bank accounts of the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj department. The government had recently closed the accounts and transferred the money to the state treasury. The money was meant for implementing the National Rural Drinking Water Project.
The Legislature gave its approval for an appropriation bill that seeks to incur Rs 1.72 lakh crore expenditure as mentioned in the 2016-17 state budget.
News / National
by Bongani Ndlovu
ORGANISERS of the Miss World Zimbabwe pageant have finally called for all scouted and aspiring models to attend a final selection in Harare tomorrow. After months of silence, speculation had grown that this year Zimbabwe will not send a contestant to the Miss World finals but Miss Zimbabwe Trust will hold the final selection at the trust's offices, 14 Boundary Lane, Highlands, Harare from 10AM.The competition is open to models who are 1.71 metres tall and aged between 18 and 25 years. Members of the public, according to Miss Zimbabwe Trust, stand a chance to win $2,000 in cash for bringing a lady of virtue who they think can win the Miss World Zimbabwe 2016 title.Miss Zimbabwe Trust spokesperson Tendai Chirau said the date of the pageant will be known after the final selection. "The final selection committee which is chaired by Marry Chiwenga is the one that has the final say on who will contest. If the girls meet the standard that's when we shall know when the pageant will happen," said Chirau."The boot camp will be there and it'll be for two weeks." Quizzed if the pageant is running against time as the deadline for submitting names of contestants was a few weeks away, Chirau said the Miss World deadline was flexible."The Miss World deadline isn't cast in stone. They normally have leeway for countries to submit the names of their representatives after the deadline and we shall do that for ours," said Chirau."I want to be honest with you, we haven't been receiving the best that we anticipated. I think that's one of the factors. If after the selection we're convinced that the girls are what we want, we shall hold the pageant."If we don't receive what we think is the best, we'd rather postpone it and do it next year. We can't just waste resources at boot camp for girls who will waste their time. In this economy it won't make sense."There was a low turnout at the auditions held as some quarters say this was because of the new requirement that Miss World Zimbabwe contestants should swear on the Bible that they do not have nudes. If nudes leak during or after the competition, the winner will have to pay back the Miss Zimbabwe Trust all the money used on her.
News / National
by Mafu Sithabile
Exiled Zimbabwean human rights defender and democracy activist Nkosilathi Emmanuel Moyo has said President Robert Mugabe should stop punishing the people of Matabeleland because of "his father's weakness".Moyo who once sent Mugabe a prison uniform as a birthday present said on Monday: "It's easy for most of my fellow Zimbabweans to accept the possibility of a black President ruling the United States of America, than for them to believe that one day Zimbabwe can have a Ndebele President.""But I don't blame them for that, the seeds of tribalism and looking down upon Ndebeles were sowed and indoctrinated in them by Robert Mugabe who for the last three decades did all he could to weaken Matebeleland and it's inhabitants," he told Bulawayo24 from his hideout.Moyo said the 92-year-old leader "must be reminded that we were not there when his father abandoned their family and re-married in Bulawayo and he must stop trying to punish us all for his father's weakness."The outspoken human rights defender once told Bulawayo24 that he fled the country after some men attempted to abduct him.
News / National
by Thobekile Zhou
China is cementing relations with Zimbabwe by donating a mere 500 blankets worth over $5 000 to the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services (ZPCS).Deputy Defence Attache Wang Gongg handed over the blankets with state run Herald saying it "was aimed at strengthening relations with the Zimbabwean Government".500 blankets "is a key work to the exchanges between the Chinese government and Zimbabwean Government. We want to improve the life of prisoners here," Gongg is quoted saying.He added, "Zimbabwe and China are currently enjoying good relations and the donation has come as a proposal from the Chinese embassy."The donation here was a proposal from the Chinese embassy and this is the first of many things to come" Zimbabwe regard China as its all weather friend.
Vinith Kumar N, Supriya P (PathPartner)
Abstract
In this paper, we propose and explain two efficient optimization approaches on H264 decoder.
1. First method exploits efficient utilization of SIMD for deblocking filter.
2. The second method uses algorithmic level optimization in the core decoding path upon thorough understanding of the H264 video standard.
The test were made on TIs AM437x board with single core running at 600 MHz and 1 GHz operating frequencies. Using these two techniques 1 and 2, average per frame decoding time (FPS) improved by 42.5% and 37.8% for 600MHz and 1 GHz operating frequencies
1. Introduction
H264 standard has dominated and is continuing to dominate the video codec market for more than a decade. H.264 was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC JTC1 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The project partnership effort is known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003, and various extensions of its capabilities have been added in subsequent editions.
This paper explains the two novel optimization techniques conducted on H.264 decoder (Baseline profile), Cortex A9 platform, to get the best performance. This paper gives a brief overview of H264 decoder and ARM Neon architecture before explaining the various optimization techniques we have executed on the decoder.
2. Overview of H264 decoder and ARM Neon:
2-1. H264 Decoder
Figure 1: H.264 Decoder Block diagram
Input to the decoder is encoded stream (264) and output is the raw data (YUV, RGB) depending on the test application. The decoder receives a compressed bitstream from the NAL and entropy decodes the data elements to produce a set of quantized coefficients X which is scaled and inverse transformed to give Dn. Using the header information from the bitstream, the decoder creates a prediction block PRED, identical to the original prediction (P). P is added to Dn to produce uFn which is filtered to create each decoded block Fn. The entire process happens macroblock (MB) by macroblock until all MBs of a frame are completed. More information related to H264 decoder can be found in [1] and [2].
2-2. ARM NEON
ARM's NEON technology is a 64/128-bit hybrid SIMD architecture designed to accelerate the performance of multimedia and signal processing applications, including video encoding and decoding, audio encoding and decoding, 3D graphics, speech and image processing [3]. NEON supports 8-, 16-, 32- and 64-bit integer and single-precision (32-bit) floating-point data and SIMD operations for handling audio and video processing as well as graphics and gaming processing. In NEON, the SIMD supports up to 16 operations at the same time.
3. Optimization techniques proposed:
Two major aspects were considered for achieving the best targeted performance of the decoder on Cortex A9. First one was efficiently using SIMD with maximum number of pixels to be processed parallelly for the deblocking filter module (Section 3.1). Second one was efficient handling of special cases in core decoding (Section 3.2).
3.1 Deblocking filter processing ensuring maximum SIMD exploitation:
The deblocking filter is applied to each macroblock within a decoded frame to reduce the blocking artifacts (i.e. smoothens the block edges) which is caused as a result of inverse quantisation and transform stage. Filter is applied to vertical and horizontal edges of a 4x4 blocks within a 16x16 macroblock (except for edges on slice boundaries). Filter operation mainly takes two phases; boundary strength calculation and filter decision.
3.1.1 Boundary Strength Calculation
The extent to which a particular block edge is required to be filtered is based on boundary strength calculation phase. The boundary strength parameter BS is decided according to the following rules listed in the table 1.
Boundary Modes And Conditions Boundary Strength(BS) One of the blocks is Intra and the edge is macroblock edge 4 One of the blocks is Intra 3 One of the blocks has coded residuals 2 Difference of block of motion > =1 luma samples distance 1 Motion compensation from different reference frames 1 Else 0
Table 1: Boundary Strength Calculation
3.1.2 Filter Decision
Normal implementation involves the filtering of single 4x4 block at a time. This implementation was changed in such a way that it performs unconditional filtering of two 4x4 blocks simultaneously [8].
Algorithmic Flow:
Flowchart shown below provides the algorithmic flow for filtering luma vertical edges. Loading of 8 pixel lines i.e. pqSample_0 to pqSample_7 (as shown in figure 2) each having eight pixels to corresponding registers (D0 to D7) is done using neon instruction VLD. Each of these registers contain 8 pixel values from index -4 to 3 i.e. pqSample[-4] to pqSample[3]. For ease of computation, transpose operation is applied (VTRN) so that each register will hold pixel values of a particular index only (say for example D0 holds pixel values at index -4 i.e. pqSample_0 [-4] to pqSample_7 [-4]). Alpha, beta, and boundary strength (BS) values are required for making filter decision.
Particular edge is filtered based on the 3 conditions as listed below.
If absolute difference of the pixel values at index 0 and -1(as shown in figure 3) is less than alpha
If absolute difference of the pixel values at index -2 and -1, and of the pixel values at index 1 and 0 (as shown in figure 2) is less than beta
Non-zero boundary strength
Figure 2: Assembly level flow chart
Figure 3: 16 x 16 Macroblock
These conditions are implemented using neon instructions [4] such as VABD (for absolute difference), VCLT (compare less than). If all four conditions are satisfied, then it goes to filtering stage which involves delta calculation and clipping. Neon instructions used at this stage includes VNEG (vector negate), VRSHR (shift right and round), VMAX and VMIN (for clipping). If the conditional check turns true, then the filtered pixel values are stored into the registers using neon instruction VST. Otherwise the unfiltered pixel values are stored. This selection of pixel values is made possible through the neon instruction VBSL (bitwise select). And the Lumasample pointer is incremented such that it points to the next two 4x4 blocks. Transpose needs to be applied only for horizontal filtering (i.e. filtering vertical edges). For vertical filtering, transpose is not required.
3.2 Algorithmic level optimization:
3.2.1 Skip Macroblocks Processing:
When the current Macroblock which is to be processed is a skip MB, the coefficients are not transmitted in the bit stream. Also, according to the standard, when the MB is skip MB, interpolated values are the reconstructed values. So, the interpolated values need not be added to the coefficients and stored again in the frame buffer. Also, deblocking filter need not be processed for the inner 4x4 blocks in the macroblock as shown in the figure below, which reduces 56% of total filter computation (for one MB) .
Figure 4: Blue 4x4 blocks no deblocking
3.2.2 Line Buffer storage on the fly for Intraprediction:
After decoding every Macroblock, it is important to preserve the corner pixels of the Macroblock (Bottom 16 and Right 16) as shown in the figure below. This is to get the spatial neighbor information when the next MB or bottom MBs which is to be decoded is intra.
Figure 5: MB pixels for Intrapred line buffer (Red blocks)
Figure 6: Line buffer computation on the fly
The line buffers are not updated for every MB instead they are derived from the frame buffer on the fly. Only when the current MB is intra MB, the line buffers are copied from the frame buffer to the line buffer for spatial prediction of the neighbors and that too only when the neighbors are available. This avoids 37 loads/stores for every MB which is a bit costly affair. This is illustrated in the figure 6 above.
3.2.3 Handling of MBs with CBP zero:
CBP (Coded block pattern) is the syntax element signaled for every non skip MBs in H264 encoded bit stream. This syntax indicates the presence of coded non zero coefficients in a MB. If this flag is zero, it means there are no coded coefficients in the MB. From the definition of CBP zero it means that the coefficients are not present in the MB and is not signaled in the bit stream. For the deblocking filter, standard specifies that when the MB is having CBP zero and it is coded with 8x16 or 16x8 partitions, deblocking filter need not be applied to all the vertical and horizontal edges instead only the alternate edges marked in red needs to be filtered. This is shown in figure 7 below.
Figure 7: Deblocking filter for CBP zero
4. Conclusion
Two efficient optimization schemes have been proposed and have been implemented in the decoder which is ported in A9 platform. Firstly, we have exploited SIMD for deblocking filter to use 8 pixels to be operated in parallel, unconditionally. Secondly, we proposed algorithmic optimizations by thoroughly exploring h.264 standard and incorporated it in the decoder. These schemes together gave very encouraging results. The performance of the decoder in frames per second has been improved by 42.5% and 37.8% for 600MHz and 1 GHz respectively on cortex-A9 platform.
5. References:
[1]. H264 overview and explanation of the concepts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC and http://lib.mdp.ac.id/ebook/Karya%20Umum/Video-Compression-Video-Coding-for-Next-generation-Multimedia.pdf).
[2]. H264 decoder syntax and standard (https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-201402-S/en)
[3]. ARM connected community blog (Coding for NEON) - https://community.arm.com/groups/processors/blog/2010/03/17/coding-for-neon--part-1-load-and-stores.
[4] NEON Development guide (http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.dht0002a/DHT0002A_introducing_neon.pdf).
[5] ARM Architecture Reference Manual ARMv7A (http://liris.cnrs.fr/~mmrissa/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=armv7-a-r-manual.pdf).
[6] H264 AVC reference software (http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/)
[7] TI reference manual for AM437x hardware (http://www.ti.com/product/AM4379)
[8] IEEE paper on H.264 Video Decoder Optimization on ARM Cortex-A8 with NEON , 2009 Annual IEEE India Conference
(http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5409460&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5409460 ).
6. PathPartners Expertise
PathPartner carries a grand legacy in the field of Video Codec Development. From video encoders to decoders, PathPartner has worked on optimizing such codecs on variety of platforms be it multicore DSPs, multicore ARM, GPGPUs, FPGA or ASICs. PathPartner has expertise in embracing every piece of code to fit into the required performance budget with no compromise on the quality of the codec. PathPartner, equipped with Video lab and a strong group of visual analytic experts, has done evaluation of video sequences for variety of encoders such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9VC-1, JPEG, H.264 etc.
In the space of IPs, PathPartner has also developed optimized HEVC decoder on multicore ARM, multicore DSPs, FPGA and GPGPUs. PathPartner also works with various semiconductor companies, OEMs and ODMs for porting and optimizing codecs on their platforms or ASICs.
About PathPartner
PathPartner based out of California, USA and Bangalore India is a leading provider of Consulting, Services and Solutions for digital media centric devices market. Our services range from Product Engineering/R&D and System Integration to Middleware, Applications and System solutions
With an expert management team which has rich experience in Technology, Engineering & Business practices, PathPartner has Sales & marketing presence in USA, Europe, Korea and Taiwan. The company specializes in addressing challenges faced by leading OEMs, Silicon and OS providers in their product development.
www.pathpartnertech.com
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News / National
by Staff reporter
The body of the late national hero, Dr Charles Utete has been taken to his rural home in Nharira, Chivhu in Mashonaland East province.The body of the late national hero Dr Utete accompanied by his wife and relatives left One Commando Barracks this Monday morning for his rural home in Nharira aboard a military helicopter.Home Affairs representative, Mr William Changwara says today is family programme whereby relatives in his rural home will be given the opportunity to bid farewell to the late national hero.The body will be back in Harare this afternoon where a service will be held at Trinity Methodist Church in the capital.It will then be taken to his residence in Highlands where it will lie in state awaiting burial at the National Heroes Acre on Tuesday.
More deals are up for grabs on Xiaomi's India website
Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone giant, will be celebrating its second anniversary in the country from July 20 to July 22. The anniversary celebrations will see flash sales on the companys Indian website every day at 2PM, on the above mentioned dates. These flash sales will see prices of popular Xiaomi smartphones and accessories dropping to as low as Re 1.
Ten units of the Xiaomi Mi5, along with 100 units of the 20,000 mAh Mi Power Bank will be up for grabs at a price of Re. 1 on July 20, the first day of the sale. Next up, 10 units of the Redmi Note 3, along with 100 units of the Mi Band will be put up for the Re. 1 sale on July 21. The recently launched Xiaomi Mi Max phablet and the Mi Bluetooth Speakers will also be a part of the jaw dropping flash sale on July 22.
Apart from the Re. 1 flash sales, all Xiaomi products and devices will be available on discounted rates. In addition, the company is also bundling some of its popular accessories with its smartphones for free during the celebration period. For instance, on purchasing the Mi5 Gold, customers will get the Mi In-Ear Headphones Pro Gold for free.
Xiaomi VP, Hugo Barra, is also expected to make a special announcement tonight at 8PM, via a Facebook Livestream. An event post on the Xiaomi forum reads, Join Hugo and the Mi India team as we share our upcoming plans for Mi India, announce new products and exclusive sales offers, answer your questions. Hugo will be genie for a day and grant selected Mi Fans their Mi Wishlists' during the Mi India 2nd Year Anniversary Livestream. So it's time to start adding those Mi Products to your Mi.com cart and telling us why we should select you as one of the lucky fans!
Earthport has partnered with Bank of The Bahamas to provide local payment capability into the Bahamas.
The AIM-listed payments service provider said it will support the efficient, secure and cost effective payment services into the country and strengthen payment capability into the Caribbean.
Currently, this market is only available for financial institution clients due to a condition of Earthport's regulatory approval in the Bahamas.
Earthports president of global strategy, Sajeev Viswanathan, said: The addition of this market into our global payment network enables us to service the growing demand for payment services to the Caribbean region. We look forward to working together to deliver payment services to our growing global client base."
The company did not disclose any financial details of the deal.
At 1020 BST, shares were up 9.8% to 14p.
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We're back! We've moved into our new house in Salinas, well, sort of...there's still a lot of unpacking and organizing to do but we're here and we are so happy to be all moved in and to be back on the Internet!! We have a lot to share with you guys, so stay tuned and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already.
We're an Expat Family of Five, Living Frugal, Healthy and Happy Abroad. We live in Cuenca, Ecuador and travel the Ecuador coast whenever we get a chance. Come along and enjoy some of our experiences with us!
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.
News / National
by Thobekile Zhou
The frontman of #ThisFlag Evan Mawarire has said President Robert Mugabe is directly responsible for rampant corruption in government.In an interview with a South African based media network CNBC Africa today, he said the #ThisFlag campaign is a legitimate one aimed at holding government which Mugabe leads to account.He said corruption is at an all time high."When we say we are challenging government it includes especially the head of state."He is the man that is responsible for government and he leads government. So defiantly our concerns with corruption include the head of state and his entire administration" he said.Mawarire was arrested last week Tuesday and released on Wednesday.The 39-year old Harare-based pastor started the social movement after spontaneously posting a video of himself expressing his frustration with the socio-economic situation in Zimbabwe, and the government's inability to remedy the situation.His act inspired other movements such as #tajamuka which means "we have rebelled" and #shutdownzimbabwe2016 , a protest against Mugabe's economic policies.During the interview seen by Bulawayo24.com Mawarire said he was surprised by his arrest.He described himself as a " law abiding citizen and have not broken the law in anyway."....the response of the state have been somewhat surprising" he said.He added "I am an everyday person trying to make ends meet. #ThisFlag campaign is the voice of citizens crying out for better Zimbabwe."It is a rallying point for all of us now to be able to say we can no longer be quite, can no longer entrust the future of our country to a small group of people that are out of touch with the reality that we see on the streets everyday".
News / National
by Thobekile Zhou
Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa has hinted that he is in the dark over civil servants' July pay dates.The military which is traditionally paid on the 14th of each month was not paid last week.The Government delayed paying civil servants their June salaries, citing cash flow constraints, resulting in some of the workers downing tools last week.According to media reports from Kigali, Rwanda where Chinamasa is currently at, he couldn't say whether the government has money to pay salaries due at the end of July."We have to work frantically to raise the money for salaries for July and for subsequent months," he is quoted saying.Civil servants representatives and the Government where expected to meet today in Harare to discuss pay dates and modalities for July salaries.
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CHICAGO (AP) The city of Chicago is planning a multi-billion-dollar effort to expand the city's O'Hare International Airport that includes more gates, larger terminals and upgraded amenities.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the project includes up to nine more gates in the international terminal, which hasn't been expanded since it opened 23 years ago. The mayor says taxpayers won't fund the projects. Planning is expected to be finished next year.
. . .
Malaysia Airlines settles families' MH17 damages claims
Malaysia Airlines had settled claims for most victims of flight MH17, Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported, after families gathered yesterday to mark two years since the flight was shot down over eastern Ukraine.
The broadcaster cited Veeru Mewa, a lawyer representing some of the 165 Dutch victims. The report said parties involved in the settlement had agreed to secrecy.
''Talks are still ongoing for the rest of the victims' relatives,'' The Guardian reported quoting Mewa, who is based in Amsterdam.
Under the Montreal Convention, airlines would need to pay 130,000 ($145,000) to victims' families, regardless of the circumstances of a crash. Under the convention, yesterday marked the deadline for legal action under the convention.
The aircraft, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was hit by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile, the Dutch Safety Board concluded in its final report in late 2015.
Villagers in eastern Ukraine, yesterday held a vigil at the site of the plane crash, as bereaved relatives marked the anniversary with emotional memorial services.
Around 60 people gathered at the site in the village of Petropavlivka, carrying flowers and lighting candles at the square where some of the victims' remains and belongings had fallen to the ground.
Meanwhile, Dutch prosecutors said they were still waiting for Russia to provide information on the downing of Flight MH17.
According to the west and Ukraine, Russian-backed rebels were responsible but Russia accused Ukrainian forces.
The plane crashed in July 2014, at the height of the conflict between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian separatists.
A number of victims' families are suing Russia and its president Vladimir Putin in the European Court of Human Rights.
In a separate legal action families of six Malaysia Airlines crew members who were killed filed a lawsuit on Thursday blaming the carrier for the tragedy.
The lawsuit accuses the carrier of negligence and breach of contract.
Visakhapatnam port is undertaking significant expansion in capacity, which include construction of new berths and terminals, modernising berths with state of the art loading/unloading equipment to improve operational efficiency and deepening of channels to accommodate larger vessels. India on 18-22 August 2009 and subsequent meeting of Inter-Governmental Committee in Kathmandu, The Port of Visakhapatnam has been notified as the second gateway port for additional transit facility to Nepal as per an August 2009 agreement. The agreement provides for transport of the cargo through the rail route connecting Visakhapatnam-Jogbani or/and Visakhapatnam-Birgunj. In addition, the development of Vizag General Cargo Berth (VGCB) with integrated mechanical coal handling will help the major ports to handle Super Cape Size vessels while the development of Vizag Coal Terminal (EQ-1) in inner harbour with integrated mechanised steam coal handling facility on DBFOT basis will increase its coal handling capacity. Vizag Port will develop the WQ-6 berth in inner harbour on DBFOT basis, adding 2.08 million tonnes of handling capacity and develop the EQ-10 berth in inner harbour on DBFOT basis to raise capacity by 1.84 million tones. It is also developing two berths in the inner harbour for handling coastal cargo as a Green Channel Berths. This will include development of EQ-1A berth in inner harbour on DBFOT basis with a capacity of 7.36 MTPA, up-gradation of existing facility and creation of new facility for iron ore through integrated mechanized handling system on DBFOT basis with a capacity addition of 7.50 MTPA. Existing container terminal at outer harbour is being extended on DBFOT basis with a capacity of 0.54 MTEUs. The expansion plans will also include: Development of West Quay North berth (WQ-7 & WQ-8) in inner harbour with a capacity of 6.39 MTPA;
Development of multi-purpose terminal by replacing EQ-2 to EQ-5 berths in inner harbour with a capacity of 6.0 MTPA; and
Installation of 2 mobile harbour cranes on license basis with a capacity of 3.0 MTPA. Besides, in order to reduce tariff to drive higher productivity, improve utilization of assets and increase competitiveness of major ports, the port has ubdertaken measures like: Productivity norms for different types of cargoes are being fixed on a scientific basis in a phased manner and being implemented;
40 per cent rebate in vessel and cargo related charges given for coastal vessels;
Cargo handling levy on general cargo, bagged cargo, steel and project cargo removed completely;
Cargo handling levy on unloading of thermal coal wagons reduced from 499 per cent to 150 per cent.
Concessions are being extended to the tune of 100 per cent, if 20 per cent growth is shown over previous year's cargo handling;
25 per cent discount on the sum of port dues and pilotage on scale of rates approved by TAMP for all container vessels, including mainline vessels, irrespective of the size of vessels (GRT) in terms of the provisions of clause 12 of TAMP Approved Scale of Rates, 2011;
50 per cent concession for mainline container vessels of 50,000 GRT and above; and
50 per cent concession for all container vessels when the service is giving direct connectivity to ports not covered by existing lines. The steps taken by the port has resulted in significant improvement in efficiency parameters of the port, including pre-berthing detention time, berthing time, average turnaround, average output per ship per berthday and cargo throughput. As per agreement finalized during official visit of Prime Minister of Nepal to India on 18-22 August 2009 and subsequent meeting of Inter-Governmental Committee in Kathmandu, the Port of Visakhapatnam has been notified as 2nd Gateway Port for additional transit facility to Nepal. The agreement provides for transport of the cargo through the rail route connecting Visakhapatnam-Jogbani or/and Visakhapatnam-Birgunj. In addition to the rail route, four road routes have also been identified which are as under: Vishakhapatnam-Cuttack-Kharagpur-North Kolkata-Biratnagar.
VishakhapatnamCuttack-Ranchi-Patna-Muzaffarpur-Raxaul- Birgunj.
Vishakhapatnam-Cuttack-Ranchi-Aurangabad-Varanasi-Gorakhpur-Bhairahwa.
Visakhapatnam-Cuttak-Ranchi-Aurangabad-Varanasi-Lucknow-Nepalgunj. The movement of traffic-in-transit between Port of Visakhapatnam and Nepal will be in sealed containers and in full rake only and the cost of transhipment will be borne by the consignor/consignee.
The MacGill Summer School in Glenties has used its opening weekend to pay homage to the late Brian Friel.
The playwright, who died in October last, was closely associated with the school and of course the town of Glenties, where his mother was from.
Friels fictional town of Ballybeg was based on Glenties and was the setting for his most acclaimed work, the Tony award winning Dancing at Lughnasa.
The week-long summer school has been extended by a day to pay tribute to Friel. Events got underway on Saturday when actor Stephen Rea, who was one Friels collaborators on the Derry-based theatre company Field Day, was among those who paid tribute to Friel.
Rea addressed the school about the work of Brian Friel and read Friels short story Among the Ruins.
Mr Rea told the audience that he had got to know Friel through Field Day and this had given him the chance to observe a great writer at work.
He said that Friels early works had been personal, but the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry, where Friel had lived, made him a more political writer, which was demonstrated with his 1973 play, Freedom of the City.
Great dramatist
Director of the summer school, Joe Mulholland, said Friel's short stories are often overlooked and are overshadowed by his drama works, but they had led to him becoming the great dramatist that he was.
Stephen Rea was followed by Anthony Roche, Prof Emeritus, English and Drama at UCD, and author and poet Peter Fallon who spoke on the memories of Brian Friel.
The success of the 1991 play Dancing At Lughnasa was recalled by three members of the original cast: Rosaleen Linehan, Brid Ni Neachtain, Brid Brennan.
There were readings of scenes from the play by Rosaleen Linehan, Brid Ni Neachtain and Brid Brennan.
Pictured: MEMORIES OF DANCING AT LUGHNASA... Shelia Pratschke chairperson of the Arts Council (left) speaking with some of the cast members of Dancing At Lughnasa, Rosaleen Linehan, Brid Brennan and Brid Neachtain, who performed the Brian Friel play in New York and Glenties in 1991, pictured at the MacGill Summer School on Saturday. PhotoThomas Gallagher INDD 180716l MacGill TG3
Marion ODwyer, Dorothy Duffy and Charlie Bonner.
There was also a staging of making History, Friels work about Hugh ONeill on Saturday night.
Sunday saw a visit by the summer school to The Laurels in Glenties, home of the McLoone sisters, the Mundy sisters of Dancing at Lughnasa.
The summer school was officially open on Sunday night and the annual John Hume lecture was given by Fianna Fail Tomorrow morning the summer school will start its socio-economic and political agenda with a full days sessions on the aftermath of the 2016 general election concentrating, in particular, on the implications for the future conduct of politics in the republic. Speakers will include Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny will visit the MacGill Summer School this afternoon.
The theme of Ireland in an unstable world will also feature strongly in this years MacGill School, with sessions on the crisis in the European Union including, of course, the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in the UK.
Today MacGill focuses on the socio-economic and political agenda with a full days session on the aftermath of the extraordinary 2016 general election concentrating, in particular, on the implications for the future conduct of politics in the republic.
Better governance and longer-term planning, making our institutions fit for the purpose of delivering sustainable economic and social progress, will be the dominant themes present throughout the week, as topics such as: the threat to democracy itself in parts of the Union will be high on our agenda.
The vast movement of peoples from countries destroyed by war, famine and poverty in search of a new life in Europe has added to the alienation of electorates in some countries and is increasingly expressed by support for extremist parties and groups. And on top of all of this instability and uncertainty is international terrorism, which is one of the gravest problems our age.
It is expected that the Taoiseach will arrive in Glenties at approximately 4pm.
News / Press Release
by Jacob Mafume
The People's Democratic Party (PDP) strongly condemns the continued use of brutality by the police to quash peaceful demonstrations, which has resulted in scores of innocent people receiving permanent and life threatening injuries.Since 6 July 2016, when the people of Zimbabwe decided to stage peaceful protests against the severe socioeconomic challenges and public sector corruption, the police have resorted to the use of brute force and teargas to break the demonstrations.The citizens are protected by the country's Constitution to hold peaceful demonstrations but the rogue Zanu PF controlled police officers have turned against the people they are supposed to protect.Chilling and uncomfortable details are coming out in most parts of Harare, Beitbridge, Bulawayo and Kwekwe on how the police have indiscriminately attacked innocent people resulting in some receiving serious injuries.A minor Tapuwanashe Mutasa and an unidentified adult passed away at Burombo Flats, Makokoba in Bulawayo on 6 July 2016 after police fired teargas in the corridors at the flats in a clampdown on protestors.Chamunorwa Ngamurani of Budiriro, Harare, now has his hand in a cast after the police attacked him and broke his arm. He is now failing to fend for his family as he was self-employed.Jessica Svunirai of Epworth is uncertain whether her 16 year-old son will ever lead a normal life after he was also severely attacked by the anti-riot police and spent some nights at Harare Central Police Station without receiving medical attention.Zvikomborero Mukarakate and Gabriel Vhuzhuri were also hospitalized for days after they were heavily assaulted and arrested by the police.Last Friday, vendors in central Harare were tear gassed while others were arrested after staging a peaceful demonstration against harassment by the city council.The PDP is also concerned the continued arrests and denial of bail to prominent protesters like Linda Masarira and Stendrick Zvorwadza.Journalists have also not been spared in the latest police dragnet with several media personnel being harassed, arrested or told to delete their footage of police brutality.On 6 July, the police also blocked internet services despite a recent United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on the protection of rights online and for countries to refrain from disrupting internet service.As PDP, we are seriously concerned by the continued to violation of human rights in the country without regard to protections enshrined in the country's constitution.The Constitution enshrines the respect for the rule of law, and tasks government with the responsibility to fully implement and ensure the realisation of the right to freedom of association, assembly, expression, and access to information.As the PDP, we call upon SADC and the international community to confront and demand that Robert Mugabe puts an end to Zimbabwe's poor human rights record as this could also weaken the region.The Zanu PF regime should be aware that blocking internet services or crashing peaceful demonstrations will not solve Zimbabwe's problems.In spite of the acts of brutality by the police and the Zanu PF regime, the PDP calls on the people of Zimbabwe not to give up. The people must continue to call for the stepping down of Mugabe and his incompetent, brutal and uncaring government.Another Zimbabwe is Possible!!!
Home Off beat Rajinikanth's Kabali Is One Movie That Is Transforming Even Supercars oi-Rajkamal
We all know it for a fact that when it comes to movies, there's nothing bigger than Rajinikanth. So when a new movie of his is due, it is common for fans from around the world to bezerk.
The latest is a fan from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who decided to wrap his Lamborghini Gallardo to celebrate the movie's release, and promote it.
The owner has taken movie promotion and his love for Rajinikanth to the next level. The movie, Kabali is set to release on July 22 worldwide. Scenes for Rajinikanth's upcoming movie was shot in Chennai, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Bangkok.
This is not the first time the movie Kabali has been promoted in such a way since earlier, AirAsia had a similar wrap on their jets. Incase there are a few wondering what the hype is all about, take a look at the trailer below.
Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics export figures show that Australias manufacturing industries continue to look overseas for export opportunities. According to ABS, 300 Australian manufacturers began exporting for the first time in 2015-2016. With international demand for Australian-made quality products, this is a trend that is likely to continue.
In line with this trend, according to Efics latest SME Exporter Index research, over one third of Australian small and medium sized enterprises are optimistic about growth in the year ahead. This optimism is positive for the manufacturing and construction sectors, with one in five small businesses intending to launch new exporting operations within the next six months.
However, businesses also continue to face a number of barriers to export, such as cash flow issues, limiting their access to export finance. Victorian-based construction company, AUS Group Alliance, has overcome such barriers to grow its business internationally.
Victorian success story
AUS Group Alliance (AGA) is a leading Australian specialist construction company that designs, supplies and installs a wide range of innovative products including freeway noise walls and barriers and commercial structures for civil projects.
Most of the products are manufactured in Victoria, with AGA servicing a range of industries including construction, manufacturing, architectural building, food and retail.
AGA has worked on a number of major infrastructure projects in Australia, including Peninsula Link in Victoria, Gateway in WA, the M5 in NSW, and the Southern Express Duplication in SA. In addition to the Australian market, the company has started to explore overseas growth opportunities.
European expansion
In the infrastructure space, AGA has identified Europe and Asia as key target markets for the sale of its products. AGA has engaged a Dutch plastics company in a trial capacity to distribute one of its patented products, a freeway noise wall panel. If successful, this trial could lead to a much larger contract or agent arrangement, allowing AGA to export its products at scale into Europe.
Accessing exporting finance
In order to fulfil the contract with the plastics company, AGA required finance to fund the supply and design costs. While AGAs bank was supportive of its expansion overseas, it was unable to provide financial support for the contract.
Efic provided a $150,000 Export Contract Loan to support the funding requirements relating to the contract. The finance will be used to fund payments to suppliers and design costs, so that AGA can fulfil its European export contract and grow its overseas operation.
Help for small exporters
While barriers to export finance remain a concern, there are options for small businesses if they know where to look. Overseas markets offer excellent opportunities for Australian companies which are looking to grow their business and take the next step.
For more information on how to overcome financial barriers to export, download our free eBook for SMEs, Export-related finance.
About the author:
This post was written by Andrew Watson, head of the SME team at Efic which provides financial solutions to help small and medium-sized Australian businesses grow their exports, offshore investments and onshore export-related business opportunities. Prior to joining Efic, Andrew was Head of Rural & Regional Banking at Bankwest and successfully transformed this business, implementing a new sales framework and improving credit quality. He was also head of Bankwests Property Finance Business where he successfully implemented a new business strategy for the division.
Taxes are high in Australia. But when it comes to taxation policies, our government is too lenient on some large businesses and too hard on small business.
Some large multi-national companies have been able to utilise tax structures that allow them to avoid paying their required tax in Australia, which has enabled them to lower their tax obligations.
The fact some big businesses are paying minimal amounts of tax in Australia, compared with small businesses that are trying to do the right thing and pay their fair share of tax in Australia, is a clear example of the disparity in the tax treatment between large and small businesses.
Small businesses matter
Small businesses are the countrys biggest employment base and the heartbeat of our economy. They account for 96 per cent all Australian businesses, 44% of Australias employment (4.72m people) and one fifth of Australias gross domestic product.
Not enough is done to help small businesses grow.
Australian small businesses would be in a better position if some of their tax money could instead be invested in their businesses, and I support the move to cut the tax rate for small businesses. But its not enough, especially when some larger companies are avoiding the need to pay tax in Australia.
The government is now taking steps to address the loophole with the proposed introduction of the Diverted profits tax, better known as the Google Tax.
I support any introduced change where those larger companies that are avoiding the need to pay tax in Australia, start paying tax in Australia, as it impacts everybody in the country. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being diverted away from Australia every year, which creates more pressure on everyone to come up with the funds to balance the budget.
There are many ways in which those funds could be used, and I think a fantastic initiative would be for a portion to be used as a substantial incubation fund for developing Australian small businesses. This would be a great way to use the Google Tax, as a way to fund investment in start-ups and their incubation. This funding initiative wouldnt be limited to particular sectors, but would be used to help fund new start-ups no matter the industry they are in.
Supporting innovation in any country is important. If you look at Israel, it is called the start-up nation because there has been a lot of government focus on developing small businesses. Israel has an innovation culture where the capabilities and entrepreneurship of the people is encouraged and nurtured. Looking at Australia, we definitely have the skills and the talent. Theres no reason why we cant achieve similar small business growth here. Weve got some fantastic technologies and some great success stories coming out of Australia but they need to be encouraged, because right now there simply isnt sufficient support for small businesses.
Taking a global mindset
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who think globally, not locally. Our small businesses shouldnt be looking at how they can be the best in Australia, but how they can be the best in the world. Developing this mindset, one where small business owners think outside of local boundaries and address the global market, should sit at the heart of our innovation agenda.
Sage recently ran a global research project to identify the key characteristics, attitudes and behaviours of todays young entrepreneurs, who are the cornerstone of our economic development. It uncovered the barriers they face, key amongst which are that over a quarter (27%) of Australian entrepreneurs struggle to get funding, a third (30%) become demotivated by bureaucracy, and even more (43%) get disheartened by late payments and cash flow difficulties.
With the support of a strong resource base, the development of a global mindset and positive encouragement from our support structures, Australia will create many more tremendous success stories, boost the economy and encourage others to take the leap of faith and apply their entrepreneurial spirit.
About the author
Alan Osrin is CEO of Sage Australia. He has extensive experience in the financial and payroll software industry, having co-founded Softline, an accounting and payroll software solution company, in 1988. Alan is widely regarded by many of his peers as a statesman of the accounting software industry in Australia with vast knowledge and long held experience.
News / Regional
by Whinsley Masara
THE Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has reportedly transferred a non-Ndebele speaking headmistress who stirred controversy in Lupane District recently.A close source said Mrs Millet Bonyongwe, was transferred with six teachers from the same school, with immediate effect. "Officials from the provincial education office visited the school last Wednesday to effect the transfer. Four teachers volunteered to move out as well."The officials selected two other teachers, who were asked to submit their transfer letters as well," said the source.The source said Mrs Bonyongwe has been transferred to Lukosi Secondary School in Hwange where she will be reporting for duty today. The six teachers have also been transferred within the province.Parents shut down Mlamuli Secondary School two weeks ago demanding the removal of Mrs Bonyongwe who was deployed to the institution at the beginning of the year, arguing that she cannot speak isiNdebele.Four parents were arrested following a demonstration at the school.Mrs Bonyongwe was transferred from George Silundika Secondary School in Nyamandlovu where she had been a teacher for three years.Matabeleland North provincial education director Mrs Boithatelo Mnguni declined to comment on the transfers saying she was not aware of them."As far as I'm concerned, things are back to normal at Mlamuli Secondary School. I know nothing about the transfers and can't comment on the transfers that you're talking about."Zanu-PF Lupane West MP, Martin Khumalo, told The Chronicle last week, the non-Ndebele speaking secondary school headmistress in his constituency whom parents wanted transferred should leave.Khumalo said if there is a language barrier, then the teacher should be transferred."I think if a teacher is unable to communicate well with the parents because of a language barrier, then certainly how will she relate to pupils? With such cases, the province will continue to record poor results like Mlamuli is doing right now," he said.The MP said he was not a tribalist but a neutral leader who believed Mrs Bonyongwe was supposed to try harder and should be speaking isiNdebele by now."We've a lot of Government employees in the district that we work with so well but if it has failed with Bonyongwe then the earlier she leaves the better. I feel the ministry is protecting her or else we will be made to think that she came into the district to cause commotion."At a meeting three weeks ago, the parents gave Mrs Bonyongwe an ultimatum to leave the Matabeleland North school within a few days, a similar deadline that she had been given in January.Parents who spoke to The Chronicle at that time said they would not allow her into the school as long as she "can't speak IsiNdebele.""She came last year and was on Thursday being introduced because that was the first parents' meeting since December last year."She greeted people in English and parents beseeched her to speak in IsiNdebele since it was a parents' general meeting where some wouldn't understand English," said a parent in January.The deployment of non-Ndebele speaking teachers in Matabeleland has in recent years raised the ire of people from the region who blame it for contributing to low pass rates in schools in the region.Last year, seven men were arrested for storming a school in Mangwe District demanding the removal of a headmistress over the same issue.
This is my first time to try fencing. Ive always wanted to do it because of Richard Gomez, Zorro and the Three Musketeers! Haha! Anyway ,Fencing is known as a very elite sports in the Philippines because of the expensive equipment, but now you can try it out without having to buy a thing! Just []
Opinion / Columnist
Vince Musewe is an independent economist and author. He is also Secretary for Finance and Economic Affairs for PDP. You may contact him on vtmusewe@gmail.com
No more comfort of opinion without active participation in creating the change we want to see.For a while now, I have been at pains to articulate to Zimbabweans that we are the ones responsible for creating the circumstances which we now face by doing nothing to change them. All of us have been complicit in propping up the dictator who has abused us in return and we have taken it as normal. Things have to change today and not tomorrow and he has to go.In his place we have to appoint a national transitional authority and on this NTA must be a broad spectrum of citizens' representatives from politicians to civic organisations to churches to individual experts who must present to the country a road map of political and economic reforms. In this process, let us not forget our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora whom I think can add tremendous value.We all have to agree on the date that Mugabe must step down as soon as possible. On that date we shall all be out in the streets to see that he goes. For me the demands by #ThisFlag are most welcome and appropriate but highly unlikely to happen given the depth of corruption and fear of change within this regime, especially as long as Mugabe is in charge.This means between now and then, a National Transformation Convention (NTC) must be held where the NTA is nominated and appointed by citizens. This team must then be given a deadline to propose a credible and inclusive transformation road map for the immediate future and the medium term. This NTA will then take over executive powers when Mugabe steps down on the agreed date.It is very critical that this NTA has powers over the police and the army and will dissolve at the handing over of power to a new President of a new Zimbabwe after free and fair election to be held as soon as practically possible.For me nothing short of this will suffice. We must refuse to negotiate with a dictator or to prolong the administration of the affairs of our country by the current crop of Ministers. Lessons from the GNU must surely be fresh in all our minds. Half measures will not work.The only thing exciting about the future is that we can create it. We can no longer expect others to sacrifice for us while we wait and hope for the best.It's time for action.
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Opinion / Columnist
"Of course this is all this Mthwakazi is about - political power and you desire to govern"
You are not different from Robert Mugabe for it was his lust for absolute power that driven him to commit all the corruption and murderers dragging the nation into this hell-on-earth. He did not give a dam about the suffering he cause or how many innocent lives were long as he enjoyed absolute power and remain president for life!"
Patrick you have no rights whatsoever to belittle the name of Mthwakazi for whatever political reasons. This name Mthwakazi means us as people and it is our identity as people of Mathebeleland and therefore you have no legitimacy whatsoever to belittle us and the name that identifies the peoples. Ungalibambi ngeze ighama lika Mthwakazi, Patrick. Don't you think we have heard enough of insults coming from your corner of the country, literally disregarding us as people, our nationhood, our heritage, our culture, disregarding the people of Mthwakazi? We have been insulted by the President, his wife, the VPs Mnangagwa and Mphoko, and most of the time unprovoked. We are taking none of your belittling anymore; we say enough is enough too.You say:said Patrick Guramatunhu.As a matter of fact: Patrick, we the people of Mthwakazi do need our political power, the desire to govern ourselves; we want that political power to determine our destiny Patrick. We do not want to be misgoverned by Zanu PF anymore; we do not want our destiny to be determined by the central government of Zimbabwe. Our experience as subjects of Zanu PF is painful and horrendous enough; I know you will never comprehend the suffering we went through during the Gugurahundi genocide atrocities, I do not expect you to do so, what for? Hence we need our devolution at all cost to take our destiny in our hands and determine our fate as Mthwakazi people, and nothing less than that Patrick. It is for this very reason that we shall ask the government of Zimbabwe to give us our autonomy through devolution of power.I have been passionately reading your articles, Patrick and I sincerely thought you were one of the progressive thinking Zimbabweans who were going to usher some semblance of stability in our country, post Mugabe era. Inherently your latest article sold you out, we know that you are anti- Mthwakazi, you could not hide enough your detest of our name Mthwakazi and its identity. Just yesterday we experienced a raw tribalism in MDC-T, a political party we thought it was going to exemplify multi-culturalism in Zimbabwe. VP Ms. Thozani Khupe was not even consulted when a decision was made to bring in two VPs unconstitutionally into the running of the MDC-T party operations. Yet MDC-T got a clear lead in general elections through Thokozani's political clout in Bulawayo and Mathebeleland. We see and view that as an act of tribalism per se. MDC-T got that victory edge, that strategic win through Mathebeleland vote. She is nowhere today after ten years hard work in the party, she has been used and discarded, and MDC can now move on without her, they don't need her anymore!. Are we supposed to watch as dormant and beaten-to-submission-tribe that was threshed during the Gugurahundi atrocities of the 1980s?Multi-culturalism does not mean one smaller tribe surrendering to another larger and dominant one. Multi-culturalism means absolute sensitivity of dominant and larger tribes in respect to other of other tribes irrespective of their smaller size and the other way round. Multi-culturalism means embracing that difference in each tribe as unique and special.What Israel Dube said in the article of 18th July 16 in Bulawayo24 was wholly correct; this information is all known to all of us, nothing was exaggerated in his analysis. Kuyini okukunyakazileyo lapho? The people of Mthwakazi must put up with all sorts of humiliations on daily basis. If teachers e. g. from Mashonalands, teachers who do not communicate isiNdebele with the primary pupils they are supposed to impart knowledge to, at primary school level, then the parents are rightfully concerned about the educational development of their offspring. Is it wrong again, to say that loudly and protest about it to the extent of being imprisoned? Such situations are not normal, but the people from Mathebeleland are forced to cope with that misshape as if we are occupied zones, subjects, that do not need to air their emotional grievances in terms of social and economic developments in their areas; we are less as people ever to challenge that status quo, do you say?It is fundamentally wrong to bundle us with the wickedness and the atrocities committed by Zanu PF in areas of Mashonalands. Quote you verbatim: "said Patrick Guramatunhu.Our situation is unique; atrocities relating genocide must be treated uniquely. Crimes committed in Mashonalands were crimes against humanity and not genocide. Legally these are two legal entities that should be treated differently. To say that Israel Dube is not different from Robert Mugabe is insult ipso-facto. Israel Dube is a complete victim of Gugurahundi atrocities; so to say he is now a Robert Mugabe? The good question is who voted for Robert Mugabe in the first place? Are they not the majority of the people of Mashonalands? Mr. Israel Dube is saying, (I do not support Israel on this issue, we should all gather together to remove Zanu PF) can you remove this monster Robert Mugabe you voted for in the first place, no peoples of Mathebeleland should take part in that? There are no peoples of Mathebeleland and some peoples of Midlands who voted for Robert Mugabe in 1980 except one Ndebele: Enos Nkala. Robert Mugabe is a creation of the peoples of Mashonalands including General Solomon Mujuru!Please, next time do not quote Comrade Joshua Nyongolo Mqabuko in vain. Ungamkoti ngeze ubaba uNkomo. This person Nkomo has been used and abused in all manner of evil to justify an opinion that suites you. The good question is, why did you not defend him when he was chased by Zanu PF like a snake, a cobra in the house of Zimbabwe in 1983? Did most of the peoples from Mashonalands who were aware of the genocide say it was right and good to remove the chaff, the dissidents from Zimbabwe? Sure we would like to ring-fence the atrocities committed during the Gugurahundi atrocities and some other atrocities so that we give our great nation a chance to heal.Well, we still need to build bridges, Patrick Guramatunhu. We need a multi-cultural society that respects other cultures and we co-exist and live in harmony with each other. For argument sake, if Mthwakazi liberation Front managed to get its autonomy from Zimbabwe we shall still need to peacefully co-exist as diverse peoples and cultures. I and many other citizens including Ms. Theresa Makoni of MDC-T want devolution as the immediate solution to our tribally-divided nation.I am still of the opinion that there should be some tribal manifesto in Zimbabwe that will be a guideline on how we shall deal with our volatile tribalism that is inherent and entrenched in our sub-consciousness. A manifesto will give voice to all in the country how to deal with post Mugabe tribalism. A successful country is a country that development towards building bridges and not shying away from tribalistic interplays that give discord to Ubuntu and respect for the one next door.Nomazulu.thata(at) hotmail.com
News reports over the weekend confirm what we Coloradans have been hearing for months, that our Governor, John Hickenlooper, is on the short list for vice president by presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Wikimedia Commons
Having suffered through six long years of Gov. Hickenlooper here in Colorado, I offer these top five reasons why Clinton should not pick him as her vice president:
1. Climate Change
When Hickenlooper got in office, one of his first quips was about how he wasnt sure climate change was real. Throughout his tenure hes maintained an arms length to the issue and when, in 2015, he finally released a Climate Action Plan, it ensured that emissions would continue rising and the issue would not be taken seriously during his tenure.
2. Coal
As Governor, Hickenlooper gets to appoint the Public Utilities Commission in Colorado which oversees the electricity industry. Hickenloopers appointments have been pro fossil fuel (the chair of the commission used to work for a fossil fuel company). In addition, hes repeatedly spoken in favor of the coal industry and even supports opening up roadless areas for more coal mining in Colorado.
3. Water and Rivers
To much ballyhoo, Hickenlooper launched the Colorado Water Plan which missed the mark and is an all of the above approach to water supply in Colorado. Further, no sooner did the ink dry, than he endorsed two controversial new dam and diversion projects that would further drain and destroy the already beleaguered Colorado River.
4. Fracking
If theres one thing Hickenlooper will be known for, its his support of fracking and the oil and gas industry. Hes drank Halliburtons fracking fluid, sued cities that voted to ban fracking and hes stood arm-and-arm with Tea Party Republicans in his support for the fracking industry. He didnt gethe earnedthe nickname Frackenlooper.
5. Population Growth
During Hickenloopers tenure, population growth has boomed in Colorado at a faster clip than at any time in history. He has lured, subsidized and promoted population and business growth which has had a devastating impact on our states air quality, water supplies and road congestion. From mountains to plains, our states landscape is being devoured by population growth.
Many folks in the environmental community in Colorado think we should all stay silentafter all, if Clinton picks Hickenlooper, he will be gone from here and well have a new dawn to try and get a new governor who respects and protects the environment. But I see it differently.
Under Hickenloopers regime, the environmental community and the progressive base of the Democratic Party in Colorado has been split, scorned, marginalized and eviscerated. I do not want to see that happen to the U.S. by a person who could be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The Chilean salmon industrys rampant use of antibiotics is once again under the microscope after a new report revealed that salmon producers are using record levels of the drugs to treat stocks suffering from salmonid rickettsial septicemia (SRS).
Antibiotic use among Chilean salmon producers has skyrocketed amid a bacterial outbreak caused by piscirickettsiosis (or SRS) bacteria.
Following a Chile Appeals Court order, the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service (Sernapesca) revealed that the countrys salmon producers used 557 tonnes of antibiotics in 2015, with consumption rate per tonne of salmon reaching its highest point in the last nine years at 660 grams per tonne. The previous high was 640 grams per tonne in 2007. Usage was as low as 310 grams per tonne in 2010, Undercurrent News noted. The newest figures were compiled from 46 companies that operate in both freshwater and sea water.
SRS, or piscirickettsiosis, causes lesions, hemorrhaging and swollen kidneys and spleens in the salmon, and can ultimately lead to death. Chilean farmers have used ever-increasing amounts of antibiotics to try and keep their stocks healthy.
However, concerns over drug-resistant superbugs are driving away American consumers and retailers who seek antibiotic-free products. Last year, Costco spurned the South American countrys farmed salmon, opting instead for farmed salmon from Norway, whose farmers use far less antibiotics.
Environmentalists have criticized salmon aquaculture, aka fish farming, as the carnivorous fish are fed animal-derived proteins called fish meal, or fish oil made from anchovies, which have been shown to carry Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other toxins that can make their way into the human food supply.
Environmentalists also warn that farmed salmon can escape from the oceanside pens they are raised in, potentially spreading disease or unwanted genes to enter wild populations already under stress from overfishing, pollution and shrinking habitats.
Its fair to say that salmon farming is better than it used to be, but it used to be horrendous, wrote Oceana contributor Justine Hausheer. Even the best farms still pollute their waters with parasiticides, chemicals and fish feces. The Chilean farmed salmon industry uses over 300,000 kilograms of antibiotics a year, causing bacterial resistances that affect fish, the environment and human beings.
Christine Bornes, adviser to the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, told Chilean publication La Tercera after the release of the latest antibiotics figures that it is important to reduce use of the substance due to drug resistance which can be transferred to humans, according to Fish Information Services.
Alicia Gallardo, deputy director of Aquaculture in Sernapesca, said, These vaccines have not been successful in preventing SRSthe main disease affecting salmonwhich accounts for more than 90 percent of all antibiotic treatments in salmon farming. The official added that Sernapesca will enact additional measures to regulate antibiotics use.
Over in the U.S., the overuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, fueling a devastating and expensive superbug crisis. About 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are deployed in livestock production, which can directly or indirectly result in antibiotic resistant infections in humans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states.
The superbug crisis has been linked to 23,000 human deaths and 2 million illnesses annually in the U.S. at a price of $20 billion in direct costs.
Studies have found that antibiotics have worked their way into our waterways and leached into soil, also causing the proliferation of resistant bacteria.
Antibiotics are having an effect even after they are outside of the animal, Gail Hansen, DVM, MPH, a veterinarian and former public health officer who now owns a consulting business, told WebMD.
Last month, scientists announced the alarming discovery of the first instance of a person living in the U.S. infected with a feared antibiotic-resistant microbe.
Unless we take dramatic measures now to transform animal agriculture, we risk a world where antibiotics dont work, more incurable bacterial infections in people and a rising death toll, Emily Cassidy of the Environmental Working Group wrote.
Chile is the second largest producer of salmon in the world. Not only has the countrys salmon farming industry been criticized for its staggering use of antibiotics, it is also reeling from a deadly and ongoing algal bloom in its coastal waters that has caused the death of more than 23 million fishor 15 percent of the countrys salmon production. The total economic blow from lost production is at least $800 million, Reuters reported.
23 Million Salmon Dead Due to Toxic Algal Bloom in Chile https://t.co/7boq3jaCwX @GreenpeaceAustP @Sierra_Magazine EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 11, 2016
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What is fracking?
Fracking is a process of blasting water, chemicals and frac sand deep into the earth to break up sedimentary rock and access natural gas and crude oil deposits. The fracking industry, which has sought to promote the practice as safe and controlled, has preferred the term hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking emerged as an unconventional, relatively new and extremely popular technique only about 20 years ago in the U.S., after advances in technology gave it an unprecedented ability to identify and extract massive amounts of resources efficiently.
Fracking is one of the most important environmental issues today, and its a prime example of how a new technology that offers immediate economic and political benefits can outpace (often less obvious) environmental and health concerns.
Why is fracking so controversial?
Modern fracking emerged so quickly, faster than its impacts were understood. Just as importantly, once scientists, health experts and the public started to object with evidence of harm it was causing, business and government succeeded in perpetuating a message of uncertainty, that more research was necessary, further enabling the full speed ahead fracking juggernaut.
How does fracking impact the environment?
Frackings supporters have pushed an environmental angle, insisting that natural gas can be a bridge fuel, a cheaper, cleaner option than coal before we have a large-scale transition to renewable energy. This claim has some merit, as natural gas does emit much less carbon dioxide than coal or oil. However, it is still a fossil fuel, adding harmful emissions while the climate crisis worsens. Moreover, fracking wells leak methane, a greenhouse gas more than 25 times more potent than CO2.
Water
In order to break up rock formations one to two miles deep, a fracking operation requires millions of gallons amount of water. After its used, the resulting wastewater, which contains chemicals is pumped back into injection wells, sent to treatment plants, or can be dangerously dumped or spilled.
In 2016 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a report skewed friendly to industry in its language: Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States. The EPA acknowledged that drinking water contamination was possible, but ultimately came to this conclusion: Data gaps and uncertainties limited EPAs ability to fully assess the potential impacts on drinking water resources locally and nationally.
Earthquakes
According to the U.S. Geologic Survey, disposal of wastewater has caused an increase in earthquakes in the central U.S. Seismologists have reported that frackings initial blasting process can trigger earthquakes.
Air Pollution
In addition to methane, fracking releases many toxic contaminants into the air. EPA has acknowledged the public health threat, but a lack of urgent political pressure has sidelined the agency into advising on ways to control and reduce, rather than eliminate, the danger.
Toxic Chemicals
Fracking fluids contain unknown chemicals and known carcinogens such as benzene. Fracking companies havent been required to disclose their proprietary formulas, however. This is yet another example of how uncertainty serves as an enabling force. The EPA has identified more than 1,000 different chemicals used in fracking fluid.
Wildlife
Fracking can destroy wildlife habitats, pollute rivers and fisheries, poison birds, and use up water supplies that animals need to survive.
How does fracking affect the economy?
The fracking boom made the U.S. the worlds largest producer of oil and gas, reducing its energy imports from 26% to less than 4%. It has lowered oil and gas prices and created thousands of industry jobs. While fracking companies profited greatly at first, as prices dropped their margins collapsed. Many are now going bankrupt.
How is fracking regulated?
Congress has enabled the oil and gas industry to be exempt from such regulations as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Fracking surged during the Obama administration, which moved to protect water from fracking on federal lands in 2015. Subsequently, the Trump administration sought to roll back protections and expand fracking on federal lands.
Key Examples of Fracking in the United States
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvanias Marcellus Shale is the source for about 40% of shale gas production in the U.S.
New York
While the Marcellus Shale also runs through New York, the state has banned fracking.
Texas
Texas produces more crude oil than any other state.
North Dakota
The Bakken Shale in North Dakota has been one of the main sites for the fracking boom and subsequent bust, leaving behind extensive environmental damage.
A recent report found that all 50 states could provide 100% (or even greater) in-state renewable energy.
Other Countries
Outside the U.S., only Canada, China and Argentina have commercial fracking operations. A UN report in 2018 said that other countries were highly unlikely to produce at such a large scale as the U.S., due to political and cultural factors, and existing infrastructure.
The Future of Fracking
While renewables were considered a solution for peak oil only a decade ago, fracking changed the terms of the debate, with a new focus from environmentalists to keep it in the ground starting in 2015.
The Biden administration now stands at a pivotal moment in the climate crisis. Bidens stance on fracking is not yet entirely clear, but he has rejoined the Paris agreement and appears to take climate seriously. At the same time, he is sympathetic to workers in fossil fuel industries, was vice president during the fracking boom years under Obama, and may be more inclined to seek a gradual transition than one fast enough to help solve the crisis.
Brushing aside warnings of dangerous geological risk, federal regulators say construction can start immediately on a methane gas storage project next to Seneca Lake that has galvanized opposition from wine and tourism businesses across the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.
Vineyards in the Seneca Lake. Photo credie: Wikipedia
The Sept. 30 decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) represents a major breakthrough for Houston-based Crestwood Midstream. The company has been waging a five-year campaign for permission to convert long-abandoned lakeside salt caverns into a regional storage hub for both methane gas and liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, from fracking operations in Pennsylvania.
FERC has jurisdiction over the methane gas storage portion of the project, while the state Department of Environmental Conservation has the final say over the storage of LPG, mostly propane and butane. The company has been trying to persuade both agencies that the old caverns are ideal storage sites for highly-pressurized, volatile hydrocarbons. Scientists who are not paid by the company disagree and have warned of the caverns unstable geology.
In May, after 14 months of review, FERC granted conditional approval of Crestwoods request to expand its existing methane storage into a cavern that has a history of instability. Meanwhile, the DEC has been evaluating the LPG portion of the project since 2009. It announced in August plans to hold an issues conference to further weigh the evidence before ruling.
Crestwoods storage hub would be located in a cluster of several dozen salt caverns on the west shore of Seneca Lake less than three miles north of the village of Watkins Glen, population 1,859. The company continues to mine salt at the site, and it already uses a former salt cavern to store methane gas. FERC has allowed it to expand its working gas capacity from 1.45 billion cubic feet to 2.0 bcf.
Typically, methane gas is transported to the caverns by pipeline, while LPG storage would require truck and rail transport. If Crestwood wins DEC approval, it would store LPG in two other caverns less than a quarter mile away from the compressed methane.
The company has asserted that the history of the storage caverns, including details of their flaws, is a trade secret. And state and federal regulators have complied with the companys requests to keep most cavern information out of the public eye. But reports dating back decades by engineers employed by the caverns ownerstracked down in Internet searchescandidly spell out their defects.
Opponents of Crestwoods proposed storage hub have expressed alarm over FERCs brisk dismissal of potential risks, but safety issues are not their only concern. They also fear increased air and noise pollution, a steep increase in LPG truck traffic through the village of Watkins Glen and new LPG rail traffic over a spindly 80-year-old trestle that spans the Watkins Glen gorge, one of the states Top 10 tourist destinations.
On Sept. 6, New Yorkers blockaded an entrance to the Seneca Lake Compressor Station protesting Inergys proposed LPG facility. Photo credit: William Huston / Shaleshock Media
In March, two internationally renowned vintners who recently purchased 65 acres directly across Seneca Lake from Crestwoods property wrote Gov. Andrew Cuomo to urge him to block the LPG portion of the plan.
The potential for accidents, the threat to fresh water quality and the visual impact of a 60-foot flare stack with massive compressors is not compatible with developing the tremendous potential of the region, wrote Paul Hobbs, owner of the Paul Hobbs Winery in Sonoma County, California, and Johannes Selbach of the Selbach-Oster estate in Germanys Mosel Valley.
Farmed salmon is an industry shrouded in secrecy, producing more questions than answers and threatening the native salmon population, according to Sea Shepherd Conservation Societys Operation Virus Hunter.
Sea Shepherd along with biologist Alexandra Morton and actor/activist Pamela AndersonSea Shepherds board chairmanare behind the new campaign to investigate the lawfulness of salmon farming. Morton, as part of the campaign, will travel around Vancouver on Sea Shepherds R/V Martin Sheen tracing the major salmon migration route, and stopping at various farms to conduct audits for disease and other factors.
The salmon farming industry thrives on secrecy, shrouding its activities from public view, Morton said. Operation Virus Hunter will shine a bright spotlight on this industry. Canada cannot claim it is protecting the oceans, including wild salmon, while at the same time, allowing the farmed salmon industry to release waste into the worlds largest salmon migration route.
Morton said the audits with be non-aggressive and non-harassing.
Ninety-four Nations of the Fraser River view wild salmon as being essential to who they are, and they have worked to conserve those stocks for thousands of years, First Nations Leader Chief Ernie Crey said. The recent salmon declines are a threat to our existence and we hold salmon farms as one of the culprits. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans chooses foreign salmon famers over our title and rights again and again. We ask wild salmon be allowed to come and go to this river free from infection with farm salmon disease.
Farmed salmon comes from a hatchery stock lacking genetic variation. Often, farmed salmon are released into the wild as part of restocking programs hoping to reduce the impacts of overfishing wild salmon. Salmon can also escape into the wild due to faulty containment cages at farms. The intentional and unintentional release of farmed salmon in the wild is one of the main reasons Atlantic salmon has been drive to effective extinction.
Genetic erosion, which occurs when there is no diversity, is another consequence of the release of farmed salmon. Without diversity, a species cannot adapt to new environments or conditions. If they cannot adapt, the species eventually goes extinct.
Not only do farmed salmon lack genetic diversity, they are full of harmful chemicals, as well. Chiles National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service reported the countrys salmon producers used 557 tonnes of antibiotics in 2015, with consumption rate per tonne of salmon reaching its highest point in nine year at 660 grams per tonne. Chile is the worlds second largest salmon industry.
Farmed salmon are also more susceptible to disease.
Salmon farms keep pens in the ocean, where the fish swim in their own feces, and breed disease and sea lice that kill wild salmon, threatening the orcas ability to feed, Anderson said.
Salmon farming can also contribute to algae blooms in both fresh and salt water. Salmon farms could exacerbate the blooms by dumping rotten or contaminated fish into the sea. Sea Shepherd hopes to expose malpractices such as these.
It is personally very satisfying to me to send one of our vessels to my home province of British Columbia, to address one of the most insidious threats to biodiversity on the West Coastsalmon farms, Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson said. Our mission is to investigate, document and expose an industry that is spreading disease, parasites and destroying the natural habitat of our wild salmon the coho, the sockeye and the chinook. These exotic Atlantic salmon simply do not belong in these waters.
Watch this PSA on the campaign:
By Brettny Hardy
In late 2015, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the greenlight to AquaBounty, Inc., a company poised to create, produce and market an entirely new type of salmon. By combining the genes from three different types of fish, AquaBounty has made a salmon that grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative.
Never before has a country allowed any type of genetically engineered animal to be sold as food. The U.S. is stepping into new terrain, opening Pandoras box. But are we ready for the consequences?
Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska. Photo credit: Ray Plourde, Ecology Action Centre
In order to answer that question, we must first look back on how we as a nation arrived at this point. Historically, the U.S. has enjoyed a rich bounty of seafood from the ocean. When I lived in Alaska, I always loved the late summer months when wild salmon would fill the rivers, making their way to spawning grounds. Fresh, wild salmon filets were delicious and abundant. And they still are.
Unfortunately, outside of Alaska, our poor management of an enormous fishing industry and important habitat has depleted fish stocks all along our coasts. Salmon species, in particular, are sensitive to environmental changes. The development and industrialization of our coast has polluted and dammed the rivers they depend on to breed. Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska.
Instead of fixing the environmental problems we have created or investing in the protection and recovery of our existing wild salmon resources, some have decided to create a new, genetically engineered fish that brings a host of its own problems and further undermines the sustainability of our food supply.
The genetically engineered salmon that the FDA approved will undertake a journey that stretches halfway around the globe in order to arrive at your dinner table. AquaBounty plans to produce the salmon eggs in a lab on Prince Edward Island in Canada, fly them to Panama to be raised, slaughtered and filleted and then bring them back to the U.S. so they can be sold to your family. How many tons of greenhouse gases are emitted during that 5,000-mile trip?
Thats a far cry from the farm-to-table experience of eating seafood caught and sold by your local fisherman. Even worse, the FDA has so far refused to require food labels, so you wont even know if the fish youre eating is genetically engineered.
The waste and secrecy inherent in this process is bad enough, but the environmental consequences of this decision are potentially enormous. The FDA has failed to fully examine the risks this new species of salmon may present to wild salmonand the environmentshould it escape into the wild, which even some supporters of the FDA decision acknowledge is inevitable.
Once free, these fish will enter a world where wild salmon are already in a precarious state. In this fragile environment, genetically engineered fish would compete with their wild counterparts for food and space and could even potentially interbreed with them. They will also bring new diseases and cause changes to basic food webs and ecosystem processes that are difficult to anticipate.
Even more concerning is that the FDA does not have the expertise to properly understand the environmental devastation a release of genetically engineered fish could cause. The FDA exists to ensure that the food and drugs we consume are safe for humans, but does not typically evaluate the environmental impacts of putting new types of engineered foods into the ecosystem. The two agencies with actual biological expertise in fisheries and ocean ecosystems, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, were not given the chance to formally review FDAs approval.
Congress has not created a comprehensive statutory scheme to address the management of genetically engineered products. As a result, agencies are left trying to regulate genetically engineered products under a patchwork of ill-fitting statutes that do not comprehensively address associated environmental and other risks of these new creatures.
This new breed of fish does not herald progress. Instead, it highlights the ways we have devastated many of our wild fish populations and our continuing failure to recover this once-abundant natural food source.
We are opening Pandoras box and we are completely unprepared for the consequences.
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HOLLYWOOD, Calif.Latina adult star Vicki Chase is ready to get wet and wild this weekend in Las Vegas. The fun began with a headlining show at Sapphire Las Vegas on Saturday, July 16. Sapphire is located at 3025 Sammy Davis Jr Drive., Las Vegas, NV 89109. For more information, visit SapphireLasVegas.com.
The fun continues on Sunday, July 17 as Chase hosts a Sapphire Pool and Day Cub special event. Considered by some to be the best pool party in Las Vegas, Sapphire Pool & Day Cub is now open.
Excited to be dancing at Sapphire Las Vegas! Chase said. Can't wait to party at the Day Club on Sunday with everyone there.
For the most up to date information, check out her site, VickiChase.com, and follow her on Twitter: @vickichase.
About Vicki Chase:
Born and Raised in Boyle Heights, Vicki Chase was always destined to be in the Spotlight. Discovered working as a bank teller in Los Angeles, the 5'4 Latina Model, armed with a 34C-26-36 to die for all natural physique, insatiable lust for passionate, hot sex and a strong work ethic have made Vicki one of the most sought after actresss working today. This Latin booty won multiple AVN, Xbiz and XRCO Award winners thru out her career, starred in over 150 Feature Videos, currently has 85.000 organic followers on Twitter,, 90,000 plus on instagram and a never ending fan base that expands with each new release, Not one to rest on her laurels Vicki continues to diversify her brand name, moving into mainstream, horror and music genres. #vickichase
Follow her on twitter:Twitter.com/VickiChase &www.instagram.com/VickiChase
To book for video work contract [email protected]
{@VickiChase}
Jamia Millia Islamia plans to organise an international conference on advances in nanomaterials and nanotechnology (ICANN 2016) on November 4 and 5, 2016. Registration and abstract submission started on July 1.
The keynote would be delivered by S Iijima, professor, Meijo University, Japan. With plenary talks, lectures, oral and poster presentations as well as exhibitions, the conference is expected to focus on applications of nanostructured materials in different fields. It is an opportunity for scientists, professors and technologists to discuss their research findings and achievements along with current challenges.
SS Islam, director, Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, said, The two-day congregation is intended to bring the global research and development community together on a common platform to disseminate the knowledge gained so far as well as to discuss the projections of the field. Both theoretical and experimental findings would be considered for presentation.
Indian students are required to pay Rs 3,000, Indian faculty and scientists Rs 5,000, industry participants Rs 10,000, international students/faculty $100/$200, and an accompanying person Rs 2,000/ $100 (Indian/foreign).
At a Glance
Last date for abstract submission: August 31
Centre to notify acceptance of submissions by: September 20
Deadline to pay participation fee: October 10
Human beings are good at adapting to change. We have survived the path from caves to condos when many other species have become extinct. Think dinosaurs. We are flexible, resourceful, and creative. However, only about 17% of us say we like change and many of the rest hate it.
The common perception is that the pace of change is accelerating with Brexit, a multiplicative outflow of refugees, and increasing incidents of global terrorism. And its not good change although adapting to good change can be stressful. Think about a good change such as a new baby and the stress that comes with sleepless nights.
Enter the millennial generation optimistic, driven to find meaning, well-educated and informed, digitally savvy, collaborative, and accustomed to communication 24/7 to every corner of the world. What lessons do we have for them not to just cope with change, but also thrive on it? Change can always be framed as opportunity, at least for someone.
What do models of change management tell us about engaging this emerging generation of workers so they can feel confident and competent to mould their world into a more tolerant place to live and work, one that respects those who are different on any of the dimensions of diversity?
The model of change created by practitioner and scholar William Bridges outlines three stages of effective change management. First, it is necessary to say goodbye to the old and allow time to mourn its passing and acknowledge its legacy. Then there will a period of in-between where neither the old way nor the new dominates. The lesson here is to pay attention to the essentials and get through this stage as fast as possible. Then the last stage of change, the new beginning, is possible, where a vision of the new way of doing things is important.
In teaching the next generation about managing change, it will be important to communicate the value in the old way of doing things, say having strong country barriers that inhibit immigration. But in setting a vision for the new way of acting, such as having more permeable borders, we must establish the meaning and value of this new beginning. Then, as a society, it will be necessary to acknowledge that the change wouldnt be 100% effective right away. However, there will be a period in which some still follow the old way of doing things whereas others are on the new pathway.
Heres an example of a massive change my college experienced in the last year with the digitisation of all records financial, human resources, and student interactions. Most of these processes had been managed by hand or with a potpourri of outdated systems. However, when a problem occurred, it was easy to call up the person on the other end and get it fixed. The vision was of an automated system that would solve all problems with no or limited human intervention. It has been a year of pain and lowered productivity. Where we were able to fall back on the old human interaction system, we knew it was temporary and mourned its passing. But our management pushed us to get through the messy adaptation stage fast, concentrating on only the essentials such as providing students their grades. Now, a year later, the college is ready to enjoy the benefits of the new system.
Patience, tolerance, and listening well will be critical.
European Investment Bank/ To be defined
The European Investment Bank has agreed to provide EUR 180 million to support the creation and first operations of the new Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (ELIDEK). This reflects the crucial need to harness Greek strengths in fundamental research and innovation and represents the first dedicated backing for fundamental research in Greece by Europes long-term lending institution.
Once operational the Foundation will manage the evaluation and financing of research projects, academic positons and investment in scientific equipment. This will strengthen financing of research in Greece and ensure that research jobs can be created for young scientists and doctorial students who might otherwise leave the country to seek opportunities elsewhere.
This key step in the creation of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation was formally announced at a signature ceremony in Athens attended by representatives from across the Greek research community. Contracts confirming the new European Investment Bank backing were signed by Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs Nikos Filis, Alternate Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, Costas Fotakis and European Investment Bank Vice President, Jonathan Taylor.
Euclid Tsakalotos, Minister of Finance stated: Greece is putting conditions in place to move on from the vicious circle of recession to the virtuous circle of inclusive development that focuses on the needs of society. Recapitalization of banks, completion of the first evaluation, followed by the disbursement of EUR 7.5 billion and the reintroduction of the waiver, as well as agreement on debt, are key pillars of the governments roadmap to restore confidence in the Greek economy and provide a path to attract long-term investment. We are confident that given countrys new direction the European Investment Bank will continue to play an important role by investing in priority sectors for the government, including energy, health and education, as well as research and innovation. The EIBs investment initiatives demonstrate a vote of confidence on the growth prospects of the Greek economy.
Nikos Filis, Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs said The agreement signed today between the European Investment Bank and the Greek State once again demonstrates the current governments recognition of the importance of research and innovation. This includes financing of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and the proposed legislation to create the new foundation which will shortly be put before Parliament. ELIDEK is a new, flexible and merit-based Foundation that will focus on supporting research and innovative entrepreneurship. The first phase of the operation will be financed by the European Investment Bank, which is providing EUR 180 million over 3 years and the Public Investment Programme, providing EUR 60 million over 3 years. The new foundation will focus on financing research projects following evaluation. The Foundation will cover the entire academic and research ecosystem, target support for young pre and post-doc researchers, address the exodus of young scientists going abroad and strengthen research infrastructure. Through the new Foundation we aim to achieve our ambition of providing a basis for effective development of research and education, and facilitate development of a knowledge economy that contributes to strengthened productivity and social reconstruction.
Costas Fotakis, Alternative Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs highlighted that Support of research and expanding research activity taking place in universities and research centres across the country, seeks to both strengthen valuable human resources and create opportunities for conducting high-quality research. In this context, creation of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation represents a key step, especially given the crisis being experienced by the country. The first objective of this initiative is to take immediate measures to address the current situation. The second objective is to create an efficient and merit-based mechanism for optimal financing of research in the long term. This projects success will contribute to strengthening the knowledge economy in the country, as a new development pillar for the benefit of society."
Investment in research is essential to nurture research talent and contribute towards a knowledge-intensive, innovative and entrepreneurial economy. The European Investment Bank is pleased to expand our firm engagement in Greece through EUR 180 million backing for the new Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. This is the first time that the EIB has backed research activity at a national level in Greece. Our significant support reflects the Foundations potential to strengthen Greek excellence in science and innovation and ensure a future in Greece for young Greek researchers. said Jonathan Taylor, European Investment Bank Vice President responsible for lending operations in Greece.
The new Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation is a public science council that will be established in accordance with best practice from across Europe and around the world. The Foundation will be supported by EUR 240 million provided by the Greek state and the European Investment Bank and will support the national strategy for research and innovation and contribute to Greeces National Growth Strategy. This backing is in addition to grant funding from the EU National Strategic Reference Framework and the EU Horizon 2020 research programme.
The Foundation will provide funding for fundamental research by universities, higher technology institutes and public science institutions to support the national strategy for research and innovation, itself aligned with the National Growth Strategy. This is expected to represent around 15% of public research investment in Greece.
The new Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation is expected to support development of new technologies and products across a range of sectors that can contribute to long-term economic growth.
Since 2010 the European Investment Bank has provided more than EUR 9 billion to ensure continued investment in crucial infrastructure including education, energy, waste and water and by companies across Greece.
Ely, Cambridgeshire is best known for its majestic cathedral dubbed the 'Ship of the Fens' because it dominates the flat landscape. The city, which is the second smallest in England, is about 14 miles north-northeast of Cambridge and about 80 miles by road from London.
13:33, 25 OCT 2022
In light of recent events in the United States, it does not seem to be a good time to be a cop. In a recent incident in Phenix City, Ala., a disgruntled Taco Bell employee has been fired by the food giant after rudely refusing to provide service to two deputies who simply wanted to order some food.
The incident was brought to light by Tammy Bush-Mayo, the wife of one of the officers involved, who described how one of the restaurant's staff reacted very negatively to her husband and his peer, both of whom were wearing their uniforms.
"My husband is a Deputy Sheriff in Lee County, Alabama and tonight a Deputy on his shift went into Taco Bell in Phenix City, AL and was told that they don't serve cops. A lady waiting for her food spoke up to say that she was about to ask for a refund because she didn't want to eat somewhere with a cop," Bush-Mayo said.
"This really disturbs me that people have started treating law enforcement professionals in this manner when these same law enforcement professionals put their lives on the line every day to protect all people, including this woman with a very bad attitude at Taco Bell. We're going to research this further but if this is what Taco Bell allows to happen, they have lost my business and I hope others of you will do the same."
According to Mayo, her husband and his colleague at first thought that the Taco Bell employee was simply joking. However, it soon became evident that she was not.
"No, I am not serving you," the employee allegedly said.
What was worse was that another customer lauded the cashier for her rude actions, stating that had the officers been served food, she would have asked for a refund because she did not want to eat at a place where there are cops around.
Taco Bell has reacted to the incident, assuring the public that the Mexican food franchise does in no way condone such behavior towards people of authority. Spokesperson Laura Nedbal also stated that the employee in question, whose identity remains unknown as of writing, has already been terminated.
"In the course of the investigation at the Taco Bell in Phenix City, Tacala, the franchise owner of that location, has terminated the employee who refused service to two Lee County Deputies on July 16th. Tacala has contacted the Lee County Sheriff's Department to apologize directly to the two Deputies and assure them of their ongoing support of law enforcement," Nedbal stated.
The Real is facing more drama roughly two months after letting Tamar Braxton go.
This time, actress Tatyana Ali has filed a lawsuit against the daytime talk show. She has accused it of stealing the show after she pitched the idea to the production company just six months before it began its test run, Deadline reported Friday.
Apparently Ali brought the concept to show executives in December of 2012 but they decided to decline.
Still, it later debuted as The Real in the summer of 2013.
Ali decided to take legal action and filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court Friday.
With a great deal of disappointment and completely disbelief, [Ali] witnessed [her] concept come to life on major network television at the hands of the Defendant Corporations.
Deadline obtained the documents that outline the lawsuit.
It said that Ali wanted to start a show which featured an eclectic group of engaging female celebrity hosts, each aged within their 20s and 30s, and added that, the executives engaged in multiple telephone discussion and one in-person, culminating pitch meeting.
She also teamed up with Judge Greg Mathiss production team. Still, Telepictures declined, which is said to have surprised Ali considering the number of times she met with them. She was reportedly even more disappointed after Telepictures launched The Real.
The documents also state that Mathis agrees The Real is a direct concept birthed from Alis ideas.
Warner Bros., which owns Telepictures, has yet to comment.
Check out the documents here.
Keep up with Enstars for more.
PHOENIX, Arizona, July 18, 2016 -- A non-surgical treatment that uses a patient's own bone marrow stem cells to treat chest pain or angina improved both symptoms and the length of time treated patients could be physically active, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association's Basic Cardiovascular Sciences 2016 Scientific Sessions.
Angina is chest pain or discomfort caused when the heart does not get enough oxygen-rich blood due to narrowing or blockages in the arteries leading to the heart.
Most studies that have explored stem-cell therapies for angina required surgery to directly inject stem cells into the heart muscle or the heart blood vessels.
"We injected a 'catalyst' molecule that caused bone marrow stem cells to enter the patient's blood, then harvested them to re-inject into the patient. This is not considered a surgical procedure, is easy to implement, and allows for repeated administrations," said Hadyanto Lim, Ph.D., study senior author and professor of pharmacology at The Methodist University of Indonesia in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia.
Fifteen patients were first injected with a molecule called granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) once a day for four days. G-CSF stimulates stem cells to migrate into the bloodstream from the bone marrow where they reside. Stem cells have the ability to transform into different types of cells.
On the fourth day, three hours after the last G-CSF injection, blood was drawn and stem cells were separated from the blood. Stem cells were identified by the presence of a protein called CD34 on the cell's surface. Thirty minutes after the cell separation procedure finished, the collected stem cells were injected back into the patient through an IV.
Four weeks after receiving the treatment, patients experienced significantly fewer angina-related symptoms, and they were able to exercise at a higher intensity and for a longer period of time. Most patients also reported mild muscle pains in their backs or legs, but the pain could be managed with acetaminophen.
When lifestyle changes and drug therapies do not control chest pains and discomfort, patients are often recommended for surgical procedures including coronary angioplasty in which a small mesh tube is inserted in the narrow heart artery to open it up and coronary artery bypass grafting in which healthy blood vessels are used to shunt blood around the narrowed heart arteries. However, 20 percent to 30 percent of patients with severe coronary atherosclerosis are not suitable for these interventions.
"Previous studies have shown that transplanting stem cells helps treat heart disease caused by narrowed or blocked arteries and heart failure. Using G-CSF to isolate CD34-harboring stem cells, called CD34+ stem cells, for transplantation back into the patient may be a practical alternative for hard to treat patients. The stem cells cause new blood vessels to grow which can improve blood circulation and may help repair the lining of the blood vessels," said Lim.
The study's limitations are the small number of patients and absence of a control group. Because no control group was used, the placebo effect cannot be ruled out, Lim noted.
Although this treatment is currently used to treat some cancers -- multiple myeloma and lymphoma -- it will need more investigation before it can be made available to the general public to treat angina, according to Lim.
###
Co-authors are Lindarto Dharma Ph.D.; Zein Umar, Ph.D. and Hariaji Ilham, M.Sc. Author disclosures are on the abstract.
The study was supported by the authors' clinic.
Additional Resources:
Heart image and BCVS logo are located in the right column of this release link http://newsroom.heart.org/news/hard-to-treat-chest-pain-may-be-improved-with-a-patients-own-stem-cells?preview=8246ad3c8678d91dea16a398457d5b72
Angina
Animation of angina
For updates and new science from the BCVS meeting, follow @JAHA_AHA
Follow AHA/ASA news on Twitter @HeartNews.
Note: Actual presentation time is Monday, July 18, 6:10 - 7:40 p.m. MT.
Statements and conclusions of study authors that are presented at American Heart Association scientific meetings are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect association policy or position. The association makes no representation or warranty as to their accuracy or reliability. The association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific association programs and events. The association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations are available at http://www.heart.org/corporatefunding.
(WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016) -- Five-year survival data published online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), suggest that the targeted therapy brentuximab vedotin may have cured some Hodgkin lymphoma patients whose disease has persisted despite receiving previous therapies.
This multinational Phase II study examines brentuximab vedotin (BV) in patients with Hodgkin lymphoma who relapsed after stem cell transplant. The study reports that 13 of 34 (38%) patients who achieved complete remission have remained disease-free for over five years and may be cured. Of those patients, nine received only single-agent BV.
BV is an immunotherapy that targets CD30, a protein on the surface of some Hodgkin lymphoma cells, and delivers a potent dose of chemotherapy to destroy the cell. The therapy is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for relapsed or treatment-resistant Hodgkin lymphoma, and it is commonly prescribed to patients whose disease has progressed after autologous stem cell transplant, a procedure that replenishes the bone marrow with the patient's own healthy stem cells after therapy. While BV is becoming standard care, this is the first study to observe long-term success in such patients who have exhausted all other treatment options.
"For a patient population that typically only sees an overall survival of one to two years after relapse from autologous stem cell transplantation, the fact that we can report such durable results after five is incredible," said lead author Robert Chen, MD, of City of Hope Cancer Research Center in Duarte, California. Referencing the 15 patients still in remission at the close of this longitudinal study, Dr. Chen said, "Each day that these individuals continue to spend with their loved ones is a testament to the strides our community is making in understanding and beating treatment-resistant lymphomas."
In this study, 102 patients with CD30-positive Hodgkin lymphoma were given one dose (1.8 mg/kg) of BV through outpatient intravenous infusion every three weeks for up to 16 cycles. Prior to beginning this trial, these patients had failed to achieve remission on a median of 3.5 therapies including stem cell transplant, which, prior to BV, was the only potentially curative treatment for those who failed standard chemotherapy. Researchers monitored patients from their initial response (either complete or partial reduction of the tumor) until disease progression or death and continued the study for approximately five years after final treatment.
At five years, 34 of the 102 patients had achieved a complete response (disappearance of their cancer for a period of time), with an estimated 64 percent of patients surviving with or without disease (median five-year overall survival was 40.5 months) and an estimated 52 percent surviving without disease progression. Of these 34 patients, 13 (38%) have remained in remission for five years, and an additional two patients whose disease did not progress after BV went on to achieve remission after receiving allogeneic stem cell transplant (in which healthy stem cells are taken from a donor and administered to the patient). These two patients also remain in remission five years later.
"It is critical to note that nine of the complete response patients have been in remission for over five years after receiving only brentuximab vedotin," said Dr. Chen, "The fact that these patients are doing so well, even five years out, provides a new perspective for prognosis."
Dr. Chen went on to point out that, though 56 of the patients treated in the study experienced mild peripheral neuropathy (an adverse event characterized by tingling in the extremities, commonly reported among those treated with BV), 88 percent reported that symptoms abated over time.
Currently, BV is the subject of several clinical trials. Notable among these are the use of BV prior to autologous stem cell transplant in Hodgkin lymphoma patients, to treat additional CD30-positive lymphomas, and in patients with relapsed or treatment-resistant non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
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This trial was supported by Seattle Genetics, Inc., and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
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Water supply contamination has become a global issue, affecting communities in both the United States and around the world. Exposure to environmental toxins - such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and other heavy metals - early in life via contaminated water or other sources can have long-term health consequences as children grow. Investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Sciences at Harvard Medical School have assessed environmental exposure to multiple toxins in children living in a region of Mexico with a high incidence of chronic kidney disease, especially among young adults. Not only did the team detect high levels of the arsenic and chromium in urine samples from the children, they also were able to detect elevated levels of KIM-1, a biomarker that is being studied as an early sign of kidney injury. The team's findings are published this week in Environmental Research.
"Until now, no one has studied these children - an especially vulnerable population - to determine their risk of exposure and possible measures of kidney dysfunction," said senior author Vishal Vaidya, PhD, a principal investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "KIM-1 may be an early warning sign of exposure, suggesting that something may be beginning to go wrong in the epithelial cells in the kidneys of these children. Many questions remain to be answered: we don't know if this effect might be reversible, we don't know if there are other kidney toxic contaminants such as uranium present as well. Because we don't have follow-up data from these children we also don't know the long-term consequences of this exposure. But this does give us our first insights into this population at a young age."
The team found exceedingly high levels of arsenic and chromium in urine samples collected from 107 children living in the north-central region of Mexico - levels that were even higher than exposure limits set for adults. When the team measured traditional biomarkers of kidney function - such as those measured at a routine physical exam - they did not find elevated levels of these markers. However, more sensitive and specific biomarkers of kidney injury recently qualified by the FDA for use in preclinical studies, including Kidney Injury Molecule-1 (KIM-1), were elevated in the children. (KIM-1 was first discovered by paper co-author Joseph Bonventre, MD, PhD, chief of the Renal Unit and director of the Bioengineering Division at BWH.)
"For the first time, we've been able to evaluate and assess an early warning sign of kidney injury - one that may give us the ability to act in advance before there is irreversible harm," said first author Mariana Cardenas-Gonzalez, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Vaidya lab. "This may be a problem that can be solved by reducing exposure, but first we need to understand how such high levels of these toxins are winding up in the urine of these children."
The research team also tested water samples from the children's tap water, identifying contaminated drinking supply as the likely source of arsenic. The source of chromium, however, remains unknown. Chromium exposure can come from contaminated air, soil, water, food or tobacco products and further studies will be needed to identify which source or sources may be responsible for the children's elevated levels.
In addition to the unknown route of exposure, other questions remain to be answered about the short-term and long-term consequences of elevated levels of these toxins in children and whether reducing exposure may reduce risk of injury. Cardenas-Gonzalez, who is currently in the process of accepting a role as a principal investigator at a university in Mexico that will begin this fall, plans to return to Villa de Reyes county in San Luis Potosi, Mexico to continue to follow the children over time.
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Funding for this project was provided by fellowships from National Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT, grant 234833) and Fundacion Mexico en Harvard; Outstanding New Environmental Sciences (ONES) award from NIH/NIEHS (ES017543); a pilot project grant from the Harvard-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health (P30ES000002); and a pilot facility access grant from HSPH-NIEHS (grant P30ES000002).
Paper cited: Cardenas-Gonzalez M et al. "Environmental Exposure to Arsenic and Chromium in Children is Associated with Kidney Injury Molecule-1." Environmental Research DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2016.06.032
An international team of researchers has identified a new rare genetic condition - a chromosome breakage syndrome associated with severe infections and lung disease in infants. The discovery provides an explanation for this deadly pulmonary disease, possibilities to diagnose it and opportunities for developing alternate ways to treat it. The results appear today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Independently from each other, a team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and a team at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands identified a local family with two young children with severe infections and lung disease. Dr. Saskia N. van der Crabben, co-first author and, at the time, a resident in clinical genetics at UMC Utrecht, was involved in patient care of both Dutch siblings. "I ordered diagnostics, counseled the family, coordinated interdisciplinary clinical collaboration and later on proposed this case as a research project," said van der Crabben.
Co-first author Dr. Marije Hennus, a pediatric intensive care doctor at UMC Utrecht, was the primary physician for both siblings. "Having had the eldest child under my direct care I was shocked to have her sibling admitted with an identical course of disease only two years later. This triggered my belief that an underlying genetic defect was likely at the heart of their problems," said Hennus.
"Dr. Hennus and I were dedicated to finding an answer for this family. I am very glad we finally found it," said van der Crabben.
"The project 'grabbed me' when I heard of a family that had lost two young children to a rare lung disease; both siblings were approximately the same age when they passed away. Because this happened twice in the same family, our odds of finding a genetic cause increased significantly," said co-senior author Dr. Gijs van Haaften, associate professor of genetics and leader of the group in Utrecht.
In the meantime, the group at Baylor found out about a similar family through the genetics consult service. The physicians at Texas Children's Hospital caring subsequently for two siblings, both having severe problems with lung disease and infection, had asked the genetics consult service to see them. The family was presented as an unknown disorder by then genetics fellow and co-author, Dr. Sandesh C.S. Nagamani, (now assistant professor and Director for Clinical Research in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor) at Genetics Clinical Rounds attended by co-senior author Dr. Sharon Plon professor of pediatrics - oncology and molecular and human genetics at Baylor and director of the Cancer Genetics Clinical and Research Programs at Texas Children's Hospital. "I mentioned to the genetics consult team that having problems with handling DNA damage could be the cause of the infants' clinical problems," said Plon.
"They sent off a clinical test that looked at the infant's ability to respond to DNA damage and found the result to be highly abnormal," said Plon. "At that point I talked to the family about their interest in entering our research study which is designed to use new genomic sequencing methods to try to understand these kind of disorders. The parents agreed for the children and themselves to enter the study."
The search for the gene
The Baylor and the Utrecht teams continued working independently trying to identify the gene that could explain the infants' condition. The process involved first sequencing the DNA of the children and then comparing their genes with those listed in databases. "A lot of our work is to try to figure out what rare genetic change in is in this family that isn't found in other individuals," said Plon.
The first attempts at finding the gene resulted in a fairly long list of gene candidates. The genetic databases at the time did not have enough information about the genes and their variants present in normal populations. But "about a year and a half ago a new member of the lab, Deb Ritter, went back and reanalyzed the data using some of the newer databases of normal individuals as a comparison and she got it down to two genes," said Plon. The new databases contained genetic information from tens of thousands of individuals.
"I did the bioinformatics analysis," said co-first author Dr. Deborah Ritter, research scientist of pediatrics at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor and Texas Children's Hospital. In collaboration with Dr. David Wheeler, professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor, Ritter compared the children's genes with those in "large databases of healthy individuals so we could look for truly rare mutations in the children's DNA."
The gene they identified, called NSMCE3, "is a very small gene; it was extremely unique that two rare mutations were present in it," said Ritter.
Ritter's work strongly suggested that the mutations of NSMCE3 gene present in the infants were responsible for the severe lung disease and infections that affected the children. "Combined with the fact that there were no other very compelling mutations, and the literature on this gene made sense for a role in DNA repair, then the case for this gene being causal was very strong," said Ritter. Nevertheless, "we really needed to find additional families; it's very hard to prove a case with a single family," said Plon.
The Utrecht team had identified the same gene in the family they were working with. "We found a candidate gene with mutations in it, and functional work in collaboration with experts in the University of Sussex in the UK confirmed the devastating effects of the mutations," said van Haaften. To find additional families "we entered the candidate gene in 'GeneMatcher,' a clever webtool developed by Johns Hopkins University for rare disease researchers, and found out the group of Dr. Plon also was interested in the gene."
Dr. Plon had also entered her team's gene in GeneMatcher. "Originally there were no matches. Nobody was interested in this gene, and then, six months later, we got an email saying 'you've got a match,'" said Plon. "I sent a simple email to van Haaften saying that we had a family with two children with severe infections, and two mutations in this gene. Dr. van Haaften immediately replied, 'it sounds very similar to our family.' So we decided to collaborate."
A long-term fruitful collaboration
"By combining our data we had very strong evidence that the mutations in the candidate gene were indeed responsible for the disease," said van Haaften. The Dutch family "has exactly the same mutation as one of the two mutations in our family," said Plon.
Sadly, all four children, two in the Dutch family and two in the American family, have died very young of this severe lung disease and infection. They also presented with chromosome breakage. According to these clinical and genetic features, the scientists named the condition 'severe lung disease and immunodeficiency chromosome breakage syndrome.'
The mutations in the NSMCE3 gene affect a protein that is essential for repairing damaged DNA and participates in the process that separates chromosomes when cells divide. Co-senior author Dr. Johanne Murray, reader at the Genome Damage & Stability Center at University of Sussex, and co-first author, graduate student Grant McGregor also at Genome Stability, studied in detail what these specific mutations do and how they impact the function of the protein. "We were able to coordinate with other scientists - co-authors Dr. Laurence Pearl and Dr. Antony Oliver at Sussex and Dr. Jan Palecek at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic - to build a picture of what is happening in the patients' cells," said Murray.
The mutated proteins were different from the normal protein by a single change in their amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The single change resulted in a destabilized protein that could not carry out its normal function during DNA repair. "We were able to show that the cells were most sensitive to problems that occur when the DNA is copied," said McGregor. In laboratory experiments in which cells were irradiated, for instance, Murray and McGregor observed that, after irradiation, cells with the mutations did not repair their DNA as well as cells without the mutations.
Because infections were common in the children with this syndrome, both teams looked into the children's immune response. At Baylor, co-authors Dr. Jordan Orange, professor of pediatrics - rheumatology, and Dr. Ivan Chinn, assistant professor of pediatrics - allergy & immunology, studied the numbers and function of T and B cells, two important cell types in the immune response. "The patients had low percentages of T cells and poor to absent T cell responses to infectious agents. Their B cell numbers did not appear to be universally low, but we saw evidence of B cell dysfunction in all of the patients who were tested," said Orange and Chinn. T and B cells also showed evidence of multiple chromosome breakages.
Thanks to this long-tern, international collaboration, the researchers have determined that a rare fatal syndrome characterized by chromosome breakage, infections and severe pulmonary disease is caused by inheriting a mutation in both copies of the gene NSMCE3. They identified two single mutations that can cause the syndrome. The mutated genes produce a protein that destabilizes the process of DNA repair, which leads to chromosome breakages. In addition, affected T and B cells do not perform their immunological functions properly.
Implications of this research and the future
For researchers, to describe a new genetic disorder is a significant contribution to the field. But the authors remark that what they are most excited about this work is that "now we can provide a scientific explanation to the families, hopefully improve diagnostic opportunities for future children with a similar disease and understand more of the function of the DNA repair complex in the human body in health and disease," said van Haaften.
"This is a particularly good example of different groups doing genomic sequencing and individually not having enough data, but by sharing data achieving important results," said Plon. "I work on the development of databases to facilitate sharing of data. It was personally rewarding to use one of those tools to enable us to define this rare disease."
"I hope that, after publication of the paper, more patients will be identified and we will be able to get a better idea of the characteristics of the syndrome. Maybe from this new chromosomal breakage syndrome we will learn more about other breakage syndromes," said van der Crabben.
"This was not a disease that could have been prevented, influenced by something the parents worried they did wrong or cured at this moment," said Hennus. "I'm by far most excited that we were finally able to give the grieving families the answers and counseling they were looking for."
For the parents of the American children who contributed samples to this study, getting the results of the research was significant. "It was a gift to us because most parents of children with unknown illnesses really never receive an answer to the question, why did my children get sick? Being able to get the answer was also a gift to the nurses, the physicians, the staff and the researchers at Texas Children's. Texas Children's is an incredible hospital where they see many kids from all over the world. To actually receive a specific answer to an unknown illness is very unique, very rare. For us, it was amazing," said the father of the American children who were part of this study.
The researchers are deeply thankful to the parents of the children affected by this syndrome for participating in the study. "I cannot say enough how highly I regard their decision to participate and what an impact it has had on understanding this syndrome better, or how often I thought of their families as this work developed," said Ritter. "Even though I only 'met' their DNA, the parents and the children they lost were present to me."
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Other authors who contributed to this work include Owen S. Wells, Magdalena Harakalova, Aaron Alt, Lucie Vondrova, Ron Hochstenbach, Joris M. van Montfrans, Suzanne W. Terheggen-Lagro, Stef van Lieshout, Markus J. van Roosmalen, Ivo Renkens, Karen Duran, Isaac J. Nijman, Wigard P. Kloosterman, Eric Hennekam, Peter M. van Hasselt, David A. Wheeler and Alan R. Lehmann from the University Medical Center Utrecht, the University of Sussex, Baylor College of Medicine and Masaryk University.
The research was supported by MRC grants G0901011, G1001668 and G1100074; CSF grant GA13-00774S and European Regional Development Fund CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0068; the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas grant RP10189, NIH R01-CA138836 and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and Institutional Research and Academic Career Development K12 GM084897-06. Also, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) Clinical Scientist Development Award, DDCF grant 2013095 and Baylor College of Medicine Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) grant 1 U54 HD083092 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- In at least 11 cases over the last 24 years, including the appeal of a Missouri case heard in June, U.S. courts have grappled with difficult arguments between men and women who fertilized and froze embryos together, but then disagreed about whether they should be gestated and born. The scattered case law has resolved little, creating a need for common ground rules that could prevent such disputes.
In a new paper, two experts review this history and propose five specific guidelines. The results could offer clarity for disputes over any of the estimated million or so frozen embryos in the U.S.
"All of these ad hoc, individually tackled cases aren't taking us anywhere or pointing us in a common direction," said Dr. Eli Adashi, professor and former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown and co-author of the new paper in the Hastings Center Report. "But a lot of theses issues are preventable."
The cases typically arise because it's unclear, once a couple has split up, whether one can oblige the other to become a parent. In four of the 11 cases Adashi reviewed with co-author I. Glenn Cohen, professor at Harvard Law School, there was no valid contract between the parties. Meanwhile, courts have applied various legal tests to considering the cases. Often -- but not always -- they have arrived at rulings that favored the party who did not want the outcome to be a child.
In a case resolved in Illinois last year, Szafranski v. Dunston, the parties had an oral contract only. The court considered the case as both a contract dispute and one in which the parties' interests should be balanced. Ultimately it allowed the woman to gestate an embryo, despite the father's objection, because cancer had left her unable to reproduce otherwise.
In the Missouri case heard on appeal in June, McQueen v. Gadberry, the original decision favored the man who did not want an embryo used by his ex-wife. The case gained particular notice when, in an unprecedented twist, the Thomas More Society interjected the argument that an embryo should be considered a child and that the court should therefore consider the child's best interests.
Five recommendations
In reviewing the 11 prior cases, Cohen and Adashi discerned five ways that couples and fertility clinics could use to prevent disputes from arising. The authors argue that these practices could become standard procedure at the time of embryo creation either because the parties simply agree, because they become adopted as clinic policy, or because they've become enshrined as federal law.
"There are a finite number of cases now," Adashi said. "We're trying here to learn from the mistakes. Really our proposal is all about avoiding mistakes that were already committed."
Here's what they recommend:
Don't blend contracts into other forms: When clinics have combined informed consent language together with the text meant to direct the disposition of embryos, they have created confusion. Clear, standardized contract language regarding what to do with the embryos should be presented separately.
Require a contract: Clinics shouldn't freeze any embryos for later possible use without the parties fully executing a binding legal agreement.
The original agreement stands: What the parties agree to at the time they sign the contract should serve as the rules from then on. If one party unilaterally changes his or her mind later, for instance because of divorce, that shouldn't matter.
'Legal parenting' not compulsory: As soon as the embryo exists, the man and woman are "genetic" parents, but if one party later uses an embryo against the other's desires, that non-consenting person should not have to be the resulting child's legal parent.
Anticipate tragedy: No one expects to suddenly lose fertility -- because of injury or disease, for instance -- but the parties should plan for the possibility. Contract language that anticipates circumstances in which one party may want to use an embryo can ensure both parties pre-agree on what to do.
"Individuals who cryopreserve embryos face an uncertain and shifting terrain of varying state laws, with varying degrees of respect for contract, and case law that might generate different outcomes depending on changes in the underlying fact pattern," Cohen and Adashi wrote in their conclusion. "A uniform approach throughout the country seems desirable."
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An international team of researchers has succeeded for the first time in sequencing the genome of Chalcolithic barley grains. This is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date. The 6,000-year-old seeds were retrieved from Yoram Cave in the southern cliff of Masada fortress in the Judean Desert in Israel, close to the Dead Sea. Genetically, the prehistoric barley is very similar to present-day barley grown in the Southern Levant, supporting the existing hypothesis of barley domestication having occurred in the Upper Jordan Valley.
Members of the research team are from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany; Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel; Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany; and the University of Haifa, Israel; The James Hutton Institute, UK; University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; University of Minnesota St. Paul, USA; University of Tubingen, Germany.
The analyzed grains, together with tens of thousands of other plant remains, were retrieved during a systematic archaeological excavation headed by Uri Davidovich, from the Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Nimrod Marom, from Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Israel. The archaeobotanical analysis was led by Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University. The cave is very difficult to access and was used only for a short time by humans, some 6,000 years ago, probably as ephemeral refuge.
Oldest plant genome reconstructed to date
Most examination of archaeobotanical findings has been limited to the comparison of ancient and present-day specimens based on their morphology. Up to now, only prehistoric corn has been genetically reconstructed. In this research, the team succeeded in sequencing the complete genome of the 6,000-year-old barley grains. The results are now published in the online version of the journal Nature Genetics.
"These archaeological remains provided a unique opportunity for us to finally sequence a Chalcolithic plant genome. The genetic material has been well-preserved for several millennia due to the extreme dryness of the region," explains Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University. In order to determine the age of the ancient seeds, the researchers split the grains and subjected half of them to radiocarbon dating while the other half was used to extract the ancient DNA. "For us, ancient DNA works like a time capsule that allows us to travel back in history and look into the domestication of crop plants at distinct time points in the past," explains Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. The genome of Chalcolithic barley grains is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date.
Domestication of barley completed very early
Wheat and barley were already grown 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a sickle-shaped region stretching from present-day Iraq and Iran through Turkey and Syria into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. Up to this day, the wild forms of these two crops persist in the region and are among the major model species studied at the Institute of Evolution in the University of Haifa. "It was from there that grain farming originated and later spread to Europe, Asia and North Africa," explains Tzion Fahima, of the University of Haifa.
"Our analyses show that the seeds cultivated 6,000 years ago greatly differ genetically from the wild forms we find today in the region. However, they show considerable genetic overlap with present-day domesticated lines from the region," explains Nils Stein, who directed the comparison of the ancient genome with modern genomes at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, with the support of Robbie Waugh and colleagues at the James Hutton Institute, Dundee, Scotland, and Gary Muehlbauer, University of Minnesota, USA. "This demonstrates that the domestication of barley in the Fertile Crescent was already well advanced very early."
The comparison of the ancient seeds with wild forms from the region and with so-called 'landraces' (i.e., local barley lines grown by farmers in the Near East) enabled to geographically suggest, according to Tzion Fahima and his colleagues at the University of Haifa and Israel's Tel-Hai College, "the origin of the domestication of barley within the Upper Jordan Valley - a hypothesis that is also supported by two archaeological sites in the surrounding area where the hitherto earliest remains of barley cultivation have been found.
Immigrants "trust" in extant landraces
Also the genetic overlap with present-day domesticated lines from the region is revealing to the researchers. "This similarity is an amazing finding considering to what extent the climate, but also the local flora and fauna, as well as the agricultural methods, have changed over this long period of time," says Martin Mascher, from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, the lead author of the study. The researchers therefore assume that conquerors and immigrants coming to the region did not bring their own crop seeds from their former homelands, but continued cultivating the locally adapted extant landraces.
New insights into the origins of our crop plants
Combining archaeology, archaeobotany, genetics and computational genomics in an interdisciplinary study has produced novel insights into the origins of our crop plants. "This is just the beginning of a new and exciting line of research," predicts Verena Schuenemann, from Tuebingen University, the second lead author of the study. "DNA-analysis of archaeological remains of prehistoric plants will provide us with novel insights into the origin, domestication and spread of crop plants."
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NEW YORK, NY, July 18, 2016--A toxic Alzheimer's protein can spread through the brain--jumping from one neuron to another--via the extracellular space that surrounds the brain's neurons, suggests new research from Columbia University Medical Center.
The study has been published online in Nature Neuroscience.
The spread of the protein, called tau, may explain why only one area of the brain is affected in the early stages of Alzheimer's but multiple areas are affected in later stages of the disease.
"By learning how tau spreads, we may be able to stop it from jumping from neuron to neuron," said Karen Duff, PhD, professor in the department of pathology and cell biology (in the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain) and professor of psychiatry (at New York State Psychiatric Institute.) "This would prevent the disease from spreading to other regions of the brain, which is associated with more severe dementia."
The idea the Alzheimer's can spread through the brain first gained support a few years ago when Duff and other Columbia researchers discovered that tau spread from neuron to neuron through the brains of mice.
In the new study, lead scientist Jessica Wu, PhD, a former post-doctoral researcher at the Taub Institute who is currently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered how tau travels by tracking the movement of tau from one neuron to another. Tau, she found, can be released by neurons into extracellular space, where it can be picked up by other neurons. Because tau can travel long distances within the neuron before its release, it can seed other regions of the brain.
"This finding has important clinical implications," explained Dr. Duff. "When tau is released into the extracellular space, it would be much easer to target the protein with therapeutic agents, such as antibodies, than if it had remained in the neuron."
A second interesting feature of the study is the observation that the spread of tau accelerates when the neurons are more active. Two team members, Abid Hussaini, PhD, and Gustavo Rodriguez, PhD, showed that stimulating the activity of neurons accelerated the spread of tau through the brain of mice and led to more neurodegeneration.
Although more work is needed to examine whether those findings are relevant for people, "they suggest that clinical trials testing treatments that increase brain activity, such as deep brain stimulation, should be monitored carefully in people with neurodegenerative diseases," said Dr. Duff.
The study is titled, "Neuronal activity enhances tau propagation and tau pathology in vivo."
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Authors included Jessica W. Wu, S. Abid Hussaini, Isle Bastille, Gustavo A. Rodriguez, Kelly Rilett, Hongjun Fu, Rick A. C. M. Boonen, Mathieu Hreman, Eden Nahmani, Sheina Emrani, Y Helen Figueroa, Catherine L. Clelland, and Karen E. Duff (Taub Institute, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY), Ana Mrejeru (Department of Neurology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY), David W. Sanders and Marc I. Diamond (Center for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX), Casey Cook (Department of Neuroscience, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL), and Selina Wray (Institute of Neurology, University College, London, UK).
This work was supported by a BrightFocus Foundation fellowship, NIH/NINDS grants NS081555 and NS074874, Cure Alzheimer's Fund, the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, NIH/NIA grants AG050425 and AA19801, and the NIHR Queen Square Dementia Biomedical Research Unit.
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Columbia University Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. For more information, visit cumc.columbia.edu or columbiadoctors.org.
Philadelphia, PA, July 18, 2016 - A new study in Biological Psychiatry reports that variations in 16p11.2, a region of the genome associated with risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have distinct effects on cognition. The findings highlight the diversity of people with ASD.
Extra or missing copies of genetic material in a small region of the genome in chromosome 16, designated 16p11.2, increases the risk of autism spectrum disorders. Known as duplications or deletions, these alterations in the 16p11.2 genomic region are also associated with intellectual disability.
In the first study to look at the effect of both duplications and deletions in 16p11.2 on specific cognitive domains, senior author Dr. Sebastien Jacquemont, from the University of Montreal in Canada, and a large research team assessed the effects of these variations in 62 deletion carriers, 44 duplication carriers, and 71 controls from within the same families. According to Jacquemont, determining the effect of these alterations can only be performed through family studies. The researchers used neuropsychological tests to assess overall cognitive functioning, fine motor skills, language, memory, and executive functions.
After accounting for the lower IQ associated with 16p11.2 variations, differences in specific cognitive domains emerged. Deletion carriers had difficulty with phonology, reading fluency, fine motor skills, and verbal and motor inhibition. Duplication carriers outperformed controls with the same IQ on tasks of verbal memory, executive functions, and phonological skills. The authors suggest this is reminiscent of the complex and conflicting association between language impairment and autism.
"These data suggest that copy number variants may generally increase risk for intellectual disability and autism, but that the particular nature of the genetic alteration may have specific functional consequences for brain and behavior," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.
"Genomic variants associated with ASD may be associated with very different cognitive alterations and profiles," said Jacquemont, "and we may learn something on the developmental mechanisms involved in ASD by focusing on the cognitive comorbidities." He added that generating similar data across other regions of the genome will be essential to understand the impact of different variants on development.
The findings of the study may help better inform the type of intervention that patients will benefit from most; the authors write that the use of visuospatial processes when learning may help patients who carry a deletion, whereas verbal methods may improve learning strategies in patients who carry a duplication.
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Notes for editors
The article is "The Number of Genomic Copies at the 16p11.2 Locus Modulates Language, Verbal Memory, and Inhibition," by Loyse Hippolyte, Anne M. Maillard, Borja Rodriguez-Herreros, Aurelie Pain, Sandra Martin-Brevet, Carina Ferrari, Philippe Conus, Aurelien Mace, Nouchine Hadjikhani, Andres Metspalu, Anu Reigo, Anneli Kolk, Katrin Mannik, Mandy Barker, Bertrand Isidor, Cedric Le Caignec, Cyril Mignot, Laurence Schneider, Laurent Mottron, Boris Keren, Albert David, Martine Doco-Fenzy, Marion Gerard, Raphael Bernier, Robin P. Goin-Kochel, Ellen Hanson, LeeAnne Green Snyder, 16p11.2 European Consortium, Simons Variation in Individuals Project Consortium, Franck Ramus, Jacques S. Beckmann, Bogdan Draganski, Alexandre Reymond, and Sebastien Jacquemont (doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.10.021). It appears in Biological Psychiatry, volume 80, issue 2 (2016), published by Elsevier.
Copies of this paper are available to credentialed journalists upon request; please contact Rhiannon Bugno at +1 214 648 0880 or biol.psych@utsouthwestern.edu. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Sebastien Jacquemont at sebastien.jacquemont@umontreal.ca.
The authors' affiliations, and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.
John H. Krystal, M.D., is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Chief of Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available here.
About Biological Psychiatry
Biological Psychiatry is the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, whose purpose is to promote excellence in scientific research and education in fields that investigate the nature, causes, mechanisms and treatments of disorders of thought, emotion, or behavior. In accord with this mission, this peer-reviewed, rapid-publication, international journal publishes both basic and clinical contributions from all disciplines and research areas relevant to the pathophysiology and treatment of major psychiatric disorders.
The journal publishes novel results of original research which represent an important new lead or significant impact on the field, particularly those addressing genetic and environmental risk factors, neural circuitry and neurochemistry, and important new therapeutic approaches. Reviews and commentaries that focus on topics of current research and interest are also encouraged.
Biological Psychiatry is one of the most selective and highly cited journals in the field of psychiatric neuroscience. It is ranked 5th out of 140 Psychiatry titles and 11th out of 256 Neurosciences titles in the Journal Citations Reports published by Thomson Reuters. The 2015 Impact Factor score for Biological Psychiatry is 11.212.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions -- among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey -- and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. http://www.elsevier.com
Media contact
Rhiannon Bugno
Editorial Office, Biological Psychiatry
+1 214 648 0880
biol.psych@utsouthwestern.edu
Today, Madagascar is home to a mosaic of different habitats--a lush rainforest in the east and a dry deciduous forest in the west, separated by largely open highlands. But the island off the southeast coast of Africa hasn't always been like that--a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences announces that these two ecologically different portions of the island were once linked by a patchwork of forested areas. And to figure it out, the scientists analyzed the DNA of some of the cutest animals on earth--mouse lemurs.
"For a long time, scientists weren't sure how or why Madagascar's biogeography changed in very recent geological time, specifically at the key period around when humans arrived on the island a few thousand years ago. It has been proposed they heavily impacted the Central Highland forests," says Steve Goodman, MacArthur Field Biologist at The Field Museum in Chicago, who co-authored the study and has been studying Malagasy animals for thirty years. "This study shows the landscape was changing thousands of years before humans arrived."
So scientists wanted to learn about the history of Madagascar's landscape--why study mouse lemurs? The tiny primates are the perfect combination of fast-breeding, hardy, and unique to the island. "They reach reproductive maturity within a year, and that means that a lot of generations are produced very quickly," explains Goodman. "That enables us to see evolution at work faster than we would in an animal that took, say, five years to first reproduce." The lemurs, which are found only on Madagascar, live across much of the island, even forested areas that have been damaged by humans. That means that for scientists studying how the island changed over time, mouse lemurs are a jackpot. "The mouse lemurs are forest dependent--as the forest changes, they change. By studying how mouse lemurs evolved in different areas of the island, we're able to glimpse how the island itself changed and learn whether those changes were caused by humans," says Goodman.
By analyzing DNA from five different mouse lemur species, the scientists were able to tell when the different kinds of lemurs branched out from each other. "We were able to characterize tens of thousands of changes in the genomes of mouse lemurs that are now isolated and form separate species. By analyzing these DNA changes, we were able to understand when the species diverged from each other, and by inference, identify the ecological forces that might have driven them apart," says Anne Yoder, Director of the Duke University Lemur Center and lead author on the paper.
"When we analyzed the mouse lemurs' DNA, we were able to see genetic similarities between lemur species that are closely related but today live far apart from each other. That suggests that their ancestors were able to disperse across forested habitat that no longer exists--portions of the Central Highlands that formed the bridge between the eastern and western parts of the island today," explains Goodman. Instead, the scientists believe, Madagascar was covered by a patchwork of forests, enabling the mouse lemurs to slowly disperse over tens of thousands of years between different areas. Then, once those bridges did not exist anymore, the populations became isolated.
The DNA analysis allowed the scientists to infer the timeline for the habitat changes of the Central Highlands--it happened thousands of years before humans arrived on the island. "At least at first, the changes to this region of the island were almost certainly the result of natural climate change over the past approximately 50,000 years," says Goodman.
The study also indicates that the former forested areas of the Central Highlands may have been an important zone of ecological transition between the extremes of eastern humid forests and western dry forests. This has important implications for understanding how the mid-section of the island served as a zone of dispersal for animals, such as mouse lemurs and many others. "We've learned that it's probably incorrect to talk about Madagascar's humid east and dry west like they're two completely separate habitats," says Goodman. "The eastern and western parts of the island are just different extremes on the continuum."
"Madagascar is one of the top conservation priorities in the world," says Goodman. "All of the native land mammals on Madagascar occur nowhere else in the world. This study is important because it sheds light upon the long-term life history of Madagascar, before human colonization. It helps us understand change."
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This study was led by Anne Yoder at Duke University and contributed to by scientists at Queen Mary University of London, Universtat Hamburg, The Field Museum, Association Vahatra, the German Primate Centre, Universite d'Antananarivo, and the University of Kentucky.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Scientists at Florida State University, Baylor College of Medicine and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have broken ground in a little-understood area of human genetics.
In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show that an unusual DNA repeat element on an inactive X chromosome is actually essential to the overall three-dimensional structure of this female-specific genetic phenomenon.
It's what FSU Associate Professor of Biological Science Brian Chadwick describes as the "black box of genome biology."
"These repeat elements are one of the unknowns in our genome," Chadwick said. "Nobody knows where they originated from or why we have retained them, but typically this points to them performing some as of yet unknown important function. The repeats on the X chromosome are particularly intriguing, because they don't behave the way other DNA sequences do."
In nearly all female mammals, there are two X chromosomes. However, one of the chromosomes is almost entirely inactivated, meaning that most genes on the chromosome aren't necessarily dictating a biological function. Since silencing this chromosome is essential for female development, scientists have long been trying to understand how this is achieved and maintained.
While most of the chromosome is packaged into a silent state, there are parts that don't play along. What is unique about most of these parts is that they feature unusual repeat sequences including at one location the extensive tandem repeat called DXZ4.
Similar large repeats exist elsewhere on other chromosomes, and at least one is directly involved in the onset of a common form of muscular dystrophy, while another has been linked to schizophrenia. But why the X chromosome contains these repeats and what they are doing has been a mystery.
Earlier independent work from both groups showed that these repeat elements make frequent contact with one another exclusively on the inactive chromosome, generating what Baylor Assistant Professor and Director of The Center for Genome Architecture Erez Lieberman Aiden coined "superloops."
When Chadwick saw how complementary Aiden's research was, he suggested they team up to tackle the question of function together. In their latest work, the researchers also report that DXZ4 is involved in forming superloops at the inactive X chromosome in rhesus macaque monkeys and mice.
"In principle, the presence of DXZ4 at one end of the human superloops could have been a coincidence," said Aiden, who is also a faculty member at Rice University in Computer Science and at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. "But the fact the DXZ4 lies at the site of superloops in all three species was a critical clue."
Chadwick and Aiden employed cutting-edge genome engineering techniques to remove DXZ4 from the inactive X, generating one of the largest engineered deletion in human cells to date, and then applied innovative approaches and microscopic techniques in order to see what exactly would happen if that didn't exist.
The deletion caused a major formation change in the chromosome -- it caused the three-dimensional structure of the inactive X DNA to collapse.
"In the absence of this repeat, it significantly alters the folding and organization of the X chromosome," Chadwick said. "It showed for the first time that it was essential for the correct three-dimensional structure of the human chromosome."
"We're entering an exciting new era of genomics," Chadwick said. "We know a lot about basic gene expression and gene structure. But what we don't know is how everything works three dimensionally in the nucleus. Armed with these new genome engineering resources and the state-of-the-art high-throughput genomic analysis tools pioneered by labs such as Dr. Aiden's, we're just starting to pick away at that."
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Other authors on the paper are Florida State graduate students Emily Darrow, Zhuo Sun and Andrew Seberg; Miriam Huntley, from Harvard University and The Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine; Olga Dudchenko, Elena Stamenova, Neva Durand, Su-Chen Huang, Adrian Sanborn, Ido Machol and Muhammad Shamim from The Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine; and Eric Lander from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
With support from the Pfizer Foundation, the GW Cancer Center will train patients and providers on how to improve communications for better health
WASHINGTON (July 18, 2016) -- The George Washington University (GW) Cancer Center received a one million dollar grant from the Pfizer Foundation to advance equitable, patient-centered cancer care by providing resources for patients and health care providers to have improved conversations, including a focus on patient health literacy, and cultural sensitivity.
"We know that health care professionals are pressed for time, always being asked to do one more thing with less time. We also know that patients are often overwhelmed by information and that very few people know how to use information to advocate for their health and health care," said Mandi Pratt-Chapman, principal investigator and associate center director for patient-centered initiatives and health equity at the GW Cancer Center. "We will develop tools to help patients identify their priorities for care and clarify when information is confusing. We will also train patient navigators and clinicians on communication techniques to support patient engagement and understanding of information across diverse and intersecting backgrounds."
Patients will be trained to better self-advocate and share in decision-making. Health care providers will be trained in culturally sensitive practices.
This project will examine ways in which gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and income impact the patient-provider relationship and whether providers who are trained will be more confident and committed to providing culturally sensitive care for those who have different experiences from themselves. Researching this connection will inform strategies to improve cancer health equity for minority populations.
"Productive patient-provider interactions are essential to ensuring that all individuals living with cancer are able to access quality care," said Caroline Roan, president of the Pfizer Foundation. "We are pleased to be working with the GW Cancer Center on this initiative to improve access to patient-centered, equitable oncology care for women."
This grant will build on existing efforts to help patients make informed choices about their health and health care through the GW Cancer Center's Prepared Patient Program. To learn more, visit preparedpatient.org.
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Media: For more information or to interview Ms. Pratt-Chapman, please contact Lisa Anderson at lisama2@gwu.edu or 202-994-3121.
About the GW Cancer Center
The George Washington (GW) Cancer Center is a collaboration between GW Hospital, The GW Medical Faculty Associates, and the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences to expand GW's efforts in the fight against cancer. The GW Cancer Center also partners with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at GW, and incorporates all existing cancer-related activities at GW, serving as a platform for future cancer services and research development. Learn more about the GW Cancer Center at http://www.smhs.gwu.edu/cancercenter.
About Pfizer Foundation
The Pfizer Foundation is a charitable organization established by Pfizer Inc. The Foundation is a separate and independent tax-exempt organization. The Foundation's mission is to promote access to quality health care, to nurture innovation, and to support the community involvement of Pfizer people.
KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) Professor of Electrical Engineering Jeff S. Shamma has been elected as a fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).
The IFAC Fellow Award is given to eminent engineers, scientists, technical leaders or educators who have "made outstanding and extraordinary contributions," according to the federation's website. Specifically, Shamma was elected for his "contributions to linear parameter varying systems, multiagent systems, game theory, and robust control."
Shamma and 33 co-selectees will be honored at the federation's 20th triennial World Congress held in Toulouse, France, in July 2017. He joins a prestigious list of global academics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) members and National Science Foundation (NSF) grant holders from top research institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, ETH Zurich, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and others.
"This is peer recognition of a body of work--both my early work on robust control systems as well as my more recent work on multiagent systems," said Shamma.
Shamma earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1983 and a Ph.D. in systems science and engineering from MIT in 1988. He is the recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award, the American Automatic Control Council Donald P. Eckman Award and the Mohammed Dahleh Award, and he has been an IEEE Fellow since 2006. He is currently the deputy editor-in-chief for IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and associate editor for the journal Games.
"My work over the last 10 years has been focused on distributed decision making, and KAUST gives me the chance to not just work on algorithms, but also to explore various applications and experimental testbeds," said Shamma.
Shamma is currently the program chair of Electrical Engineering in the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division at KAUST and the director of the Robotics, Intelligent Systems & Control lab (RISC). He is the former Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems & Control in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota, The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Los Angeles.
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MANHATTAN, KANSAS -- If you have visited Alaska's Katmai National Park in the month of July, you probably enjoyed watching brown bears fish for salmon at the iconic Brooks Falls.
But what if you saw the same scene on a live webcam? Would you have the same emotional response as viewing the bears in their natural surroundings?
That's what two Kansas State University researchers want to find out through a live-stream video study of brown bears. Jeffrey Skibins and Ryan Sharp, both assistant professors of park management and conservation, want to answer an important question: Do people have the same emotional connections with animals when watching them through live webcams and in real life?
"Live-streaming cameras are a new and novel technology in the wildlife viewing experience," Skibins said. "Ultimately we want to know how viewers are affected by seeing something online -- not having an actual experience, but having the virtual experience of viewing animals in nature. Does it create a conservation behavior action within the viewer? Does it cause people to want to get involved in saving these animals?"
Skibins and Sharp are focusing the study on a "bearcam" that provides live footage of brown bears at locations throughout Katmai National Park, including the iconic Brooks Falls, where salmon jump up waterfalls and bears wait nearby to catch them. Expect more bears in the coming weeks: July is peak salmon season, when more than a hundred bears gather on a mile-long stretch of the Brooks River. It's the best chance to watch bears on camera, the researchers said.
"Live-stream videos can become alternate ways to experience a national park," Sharp said. "We want to engage people, perhaps in urban environments who may not have access to Alaska, and we want to know what that means for the park resources, for the animals, for the ecological conditions and for the visitor experience."
The project could revolutionize conservation efforts and could help national parks create visitor opportunities that reach global audiences who may not be able to travel to national parks. The project also can help park managers develop new ways to prevent visitor overcrowding at national parks.
The project involves the multimedia organization explore, which has set up cameras at parks throughout the world, including the "bearcam" at Katmai National Park. Other cameras offer live footage of tigers, eagles, pandas and fish. The cameras are extremely popular and garner millions of hits from viewers across the world, Sharp said.
Skibins and Sharp joined forces to study if virtual viewers and real-life viewers have the same emotional responses to the brown bears at Katmai National Park. Skibins' research focuses on conservation psychology while Sharp studies ways to help parks manager run national parks.
The researchers are collecting data in two ways:
1. Video experience: The researchers are asking online viewers to fill out an online survey after watching the bears on the live stream cameras.
2. Live experience: Sharp is spending several days at Katmai National Park and surveying real-life visitors after they have viewed the bears at one of the park's viewing platforms.
The survey contains the same questions for both real-life and virtual visitors. Skibins and Sharp will compare the two sets of survey data to understand the differences in people's emotional responses. The questions cover topics such as conservation caring -- a scale that shows a person's connection with nature -- and environmental psychology theories that determine if a person holds core values around preserving wildlife.
The survey also looks for new ways -- beyond giving money or volunteering -- for parks to use web-based technology to engage global audiences. For example, the research could help park managers develop ways for virtual viewers in Brazil to engage in conservation efforts that help the brown bears at Katmai National Park, Skibins said.
"This reach and technology can really personalize the experience and allow a visitor -- whether virtual or real -- to be engaged in something that may be five continents away," Skibins said. "It is an exciting new way to explore how people can access their national parks and wildlife around their country and around their world."
Skibins and Sharp launched the project in the spring and will be collecting data for several years. While the researchers are focusing this first study on bears, they want to expand future studies to include live stream videos of other animals, such as giraffes, elephants or birds.
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The project has received financial support from the university's horticulture and natural resources department and K-State Research and Extension.
New book by Lehigh University researcher explores the changing fortunes of lobbying efforts by state governments and governors, revealing much about the role and relative power of states within the US federal system
All 50 states depend on federal funding to support significant parts of the state budget. Using 2012 Census data, State Budget Solutions, a nonpartisan nonprofit public policy organization, found that, combined, state governments received 31.6 percent of their general revenue from the federal government in 2012--with Mississippi at the top with 45 percent and Alaska receiving the least at 20 percent.
It makes sense then that states utilize lobbyists to advocate for their interests at the federal level, usually related to funding and regulatory flexibility. Today, approximately half of all American states have lobbying offices in D.C. In addition, governors are represented by their own national, partisan, and regional associations.
But just what role do these lobbyists play?
Jennifer M. Jensen explores this question and more in her new book out later this month, The Governors' Lobbyists (University of Michigan Press).
An associate professor of political science at Lehigh University, Jensen's research and teaching focuses on state politics and intergovernmental relations, interest groups, and political careers. She has also worked in Washington, D.C., in the House of Representatives and as an energy lobbyist.
Drawing on quantitative data, archival research, and more than 100 in-depth interviews, Jensen details the political development of state advocacy organizations. Among these are the seven associations representing state governors: one nonpartisan group, the National Governors Association; two partisan groups, the Democratic Governors Association and the Republican Governors Association; and four regional ones, the Western Governors Association, the Southern Governors' Association, the Coalition of Northeastern Governors and the Midwestern Governors Association.
One of the topics that fascinate Jensen most is the growth of these groups, particularly as the political landscape has become increasingly partisan.
During the last eight years, for example, the Obama administration has had a hard time getting things done in Congressthis is one reason why interest groups that lobby officials and make campaign contributions are turning to governors and state policymaking, says Jensen. This in turn has helped fuel fundraising by the Republican Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Associations. Both the RGA and the DGA used to be much smaller, and they didnt focus on fundraising Now they are the largest state-focused 527 organizations [political advocacy groups with 527 tax-exempt status] in the country.
Adds Jensen: Governors have also become more ideologically divided in recent years, making it more difficult to get things done as a group. For example, in recent years, some Republican governors in particular have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the National Governors Association. There has been some exiting with feet. Proliferation and division
As Jensen investigated the growth of individual state offices and governors associations focused on federal advocacy, a story of proliferation and, at times, division emerged.
According to Jensen, the first state to have a lobbying presence in D.C. was New York. Opened in 1941, the office's primary goal was advocating for private contracts for World War II. Connecticut followed soon thereafter, but state offices in Washington during this time were uncommon.
In fact, she says the explosion of governors lobbying groups really began in the 1960s. The urban renewal trend of the 1960s shifted federal funding away from states toward large cities. This was viewed by governors with some alarm, and the National Governors Association established a Washington lobbying office in response. The growth of governors associations and individual state offices in Washington continued into the 1970s and 80s.
Among the reasons that governors open D.C. lobbying offices is to place state issues on the congressional agenda that might not otherwise be included, such as earmarks--congressional spending directives to fund special projects. The lobbying offices might be needed due to opposing agendas by the governor's office and that state's congressional delegation. State senators and representatives may be less focused on supporting operations of the state than the governor would hope.
Jensen's book addresses the question of interest group variation: why, given the fairly clear material benefit a state draws from having a lobbying office in Washington, doesn't every state have one?
According to Jensen, offices are shrinking and being staffed by younger, less costly employees or contractors. Governors' lobbying offices enjoyed more robust staffing in the 1980s and 90s.
We tend to think first of the financial costs and benefits of lobbying offices, but there are also political costs and benefits to consider, says Jensen. Governors are vulnerable to the political fallout from the existence of these officesespecially during election season. Opponents often frame a D.C. lobbying office quite negatively, using it to instill doubts about a sitting governors trust in the states congressional delegation, as proof of a governors national ambitions or as an example of excessive spending.
In fact, Jensen says there have been instances when a governor has closed his or her D.C. lobbying office to fulfill a campaign pledge, only to re-open it later, after missing the benefits it brought.
A state might also choose to forgo a lobbying presence in D.C. for ideological reasons or because of broader issues pertaining to a state's political culture.
"Idaho and Wyoming are examples of states with constituents who are more sensitive to the idea of federal government interference in state affairs," says Jensen. "Or a particular governor might be ideologically against having a representative in Washington. It's a bit ironic that having a state office -- which is there to protect a state's interests in Washington -- can make a governor seem as if he or she is cuddling up to the feds.
Political differences with Washington leadership may also factor into the decision. For example, in a state like Alabama, where the governor famously eschewed federal funding in protest of the Affordable Care Act, a D.C. lobbying office may not play very well back home.
Jensen acknowledges that measuring impact is one of the greatest challenges in the field of interest group research, but says: If D.C. lobbying offices are doing what they should be doing, they are worth havingsomewhat for their ability to lobby on federal regulations, and mostly for earmarks and other funding. Just because there are fewer earmarks today than there used to be doesnt mean that these offices arent helping the states with their bottom lines.
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A team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Engineering in Medicine (MGH-CEM) have created a "liver on a chip," a model of liver tissue that replicates the metabolic variations found throughout the organ and more accurately reflects the distinctive patterns of liver damage caused by exposure to environmental toxins, including pharmaceutical overdose. Their report has been published online in the journal Scientific Reports.
"Our goal with this project was to create a liver tissue construct that responds to toxins the same way the liver in your body does," says William McCarty, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at MGH-CEM and the paper's lead author. "The liver is a chemical processing plant, but it's not a single vat; different locations within the liver react differently to drugs and toxins. Here, we exploited microfluidics to control the metabolism of liver cells down to a resolution of a few cells, allowing us to create liver tissue that shows the same patterns of toxicity caused by differences in drug metabolism as the liver in your body."
When blood passes through the liver, it travels from arteries to veins through channels called sinusoids, lined with the liver cells called hepatocytes. From one end of the sinusoid to another, the hepatocytes have different metabolic functions, often controlled by external factors and gene expression. For example, the cells closest to the arterial end of the sinusoid are most efficient at releasing glucose that has been stored in the form of glycogen, while cells at the venous end are most efficient at taking up and storing glucose. Similar differences for other liver functions are well known, with metabolic changes occurring across the 25-cell length of the sinusoid.
In order to develop a system that more closely replicates the metabolic differences among hepatocytes, the research team developed a microfluidic device that distributes hormones or other chemical agents across a 20- to 40-cell-wide sample of hepatocytes in such a way that the effects on the liver cells vary from one side to the other. For example, if blood-sugar-lowering insulin is fed into one of the device's two inlets while glucagon, which raises blood sugar, is added through the other, the metabolism of the hepatocytes is changed so that those on one side release glucose while those on the other take it up. The use of other agents produced similar results across the field of hepatocytes regarding nitrogen metabolism or alcohol degradation, and use of a molecule that induces the expression of drug metabolism enzymes resulted in varied zones of susceptibility to the toxic effects of acetaminophen.
"Investigators have been developing in-vitro liver models for 40 years, but all of those systems ignore the distinct patterns of metabolically active hepatocytes that exist within the liver sinusoid" says Martin Yarmush, MD, PhD, director of the MGH-CEM and the paper's senior author. "We hope this tool, which displays zonation of carbohydrate and nitrogen metabolism, in addition to drug detoxification and alcohol degradation, will improve our ability to understand and predict the effects of toxins and new drugs on the liver."
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Co-author Berk Usta, PhD, of MGH-CEM, adds, "While further replication and validation using more compounds are needed, this study demonstrates the importance of fine control of liver metabolism. Since many liver pathologies also show regional variation, this tool may also serve as a basis for models of liver disease." Berk and Yarmush are both members of the Harvard Medical School faculty. The work in this study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants UH2TR000503, F32DK098905 and 1R21EB020192-01.
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with an annual research budget of more than $800 million and major research centers in HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, photomedicine and transplantation biology. The MGH topped the 2015 Nature Index list of health care organizations publishing in leading scientific journals, earned the prestigious 2015 Foster G. McGaw Prize for Excellence in Community Service and returned to the number one spot on the 2015-16 U.S. News & World Report list of "America's Best Hospitals."
HOPE to enroll former ASPIRE participants, will learn more about adherence and safety of monthly dapivirine ring, and better understand why the ring may work well for some women but not for others
DURBAN, July 18, 2016 - Women who took part in ASPIRE, a trial that found a vaginal ring containing an antiretroviral (ARV) drug called dapivirine was safe and helped protect against HIV, will soon be offered the opportunity to use the ring as part of a new study called HOPE. The first of HOPE's sites opened just today, at the Medical Research Council of South Africa's Verulam clinical research site in KwaZulu-Natal. Other South African sites, and sites in Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe, will open in the coming weeks or months as in-country approvals are received and other requirements are met.
HOPE (HIV Open-label Prevention Extension, or MTN-025) will build on the results of ASPIRE by gathering additional information on the ring's safety, how women use the ring knowing that it can help reduce their risk of HIV and the relationship between adherence and HIV protection.
The study also seeks to understand why the ring may work well as an HIV prevention strategy for some women but not for others. The dapivirine ring is meant to be used for a month at a time, and women can insert and remove it themselves. But this may not be for everyone, acknowledge the researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Microbicide Trials Network (MTN) who conducted ASPIRE and will run the HOPE study. For this reason, former ASPIRE participants may enroll in HOPE even if they do not wish to use the ring.
ASPIRE (A Study to Prevent Infection with a Ring for Extended Use, or MTN-020) involved 2,629 women ages 18-45 from Malawi, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe and was conducted between August 2012 and June 2015 in parallel with a second Phase III trial, The Ring Study, led by the International Partnership for Microbicides (IPM). IPM developed the dapivirine ring and is the ring's regulatory sponsor.
Primary results of both studies were reported earlier this year. Across both studies, HIV risk was reduced by about one-third, meaning that one in three women who might have acquired HIV did not. In ASPIRE, there were 27 percent fewer women who acquired HIV in the group assigned to use the dapivirine ring than in the group who used a placebo ring with no active drug. HIV risk was reduced by more than half among participants older than 21, who also appeared to use the ring most consistently.
New results from exploratory analyses of data from ASPIRE reported today at The International Conference on AIDS (AIDS 2016) in Durban suggest even higher levels of protection can be achieved with regular and consistent use. Among women who appeared to use the ring most regularly, HIV risk was cut by more than half across all analyses, and in some, by 75 percent or more.
"The timing of these results could not be more perfect. The goal of HOPE is to offer women a product shown to be safe and able to provide some protection against HIV. When we were conducting ASPIRE, we did not know whether the ring would be effective for HIV prevention. Knowing the results of ASPIRE, it will be a totally new conversation with women in HOPE," said Jared Baeten, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Washington, who led the ASPIRE study with Thesla Palanee-Phillips, Ph.D., M.Sc., of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, Johannesburg, South Africa. "That we, as a field, are in a place to be able to offer women a product specifically designed for them is truly a significant milestone in HIV prevention."
Drs. Baeten and Palanee-Phillips will also be leading the HOPE study, together with Nyaradzo Mgodi, MBChB, MMed, from the University of Zimbabwe-University of California San Francisco in Harare.
In other open-label extension studies that followed Phase III trials of oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), adherence to product use increased, and as a result, those studies were able to demonstrate the approach was more effective than in the original Phase III trials. Whether this will hold true for the dapivirine ring in HOPE remains to be seen.
Unlike a Phase III clinical trial, there is no placebo group in an open-label study. In HOPE, all women, if they choose, receive the monthly dapivirine ring. Other aspects of the study are designed to help move toward a more "real world" delivery model. For instance, visits will be monthly for the first three months, and then quarterly thereafter. And while staff will counsel participants on the importance of adherence, they will also want women to feel empowered to make their own choices and to be open about the reasons they may or may not want to or be able to use the ring.
"It requires a whole new shift in mindset," explained Dr. Palanee-Phillips. "In ASPIRE, we counseled participants on the importance of adherence so we could establish whether the ring was safe and effective. If women didn't use their assigned rings in ASPIRE, we would not have been able to answer these critical questions. In HOPE, with the information we now have, we want women to understand that the importance of adherence is not about the trial, but about their own, individual protection."
"We want nothing more than for women in sub-Saharan Africa, and of course the world over, to have a means to be protected. While we are excited about the ring, it may not be the right approach for some women. Maybe they would prefer oral PrEP, or perhaps other approaches we are investigating, like long-acting injectables. It's really about giving women choices," added Dr. Mgodi.
Women will be able to stay in HOPE for about a year after they enroll. The study is expected to be completed by early 2018. A similar open-label extension trial for former participants of The Ring Study, called DREAM, is expected to begin soon at sites in South Africa and Uganda.
Both the HOPE and the DREAM open-label studies will be taking place at the same time that IPM is compiling comprehensive data on dapivirine and the ring, including findings from ASPIRE and The Ring Study, and from several smaller supporting studies, into an extensive dossier it expects to submit to regulators in 2017. If granted, the first regulatory approvals could be received as soon as 2018, within the same timeframe that results of both HOPE and DREAM may be available.
Vaginal rings are flexible products that fit high up inside the vagina where they release a medication slowly over time. The monthly ring tested in ASPIRE and The Ring Study, and offered to women in the HOPE and DREAM studies, contains an ARV drug, dapivirine, as a way to provide women potentially longer-acting protection against HIV.
Women account for nearly 60 percent of adults with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, where unprotected heterosexual sex is the primary driver of the epidemic. Despite advances in preventing HIV, women - young women, especially - still face disproportionate risk, and a number of current prevention options, including oral PrEP, may not be accessible to or practical for many women. Ideally, women should be able to have choices when it comes to protecting themselves against HIV because no one approach will be right for all women, nor be right at all times in their lives.
Toward this end, MTN is planning a study (MTN-034/IPM 045) that will evaluate how adolescent girls and young women use the monthly dapivirine vaginal ring and Truvada as daily PrEP, and their preferences for either or both approaches. The study will also examine whether certain biological or physiological factors affect how the active drugs are taken up in the body. MTN-034/IPM 045 will help to better understand the factors that may have contributed to the ring not being effective among those ages 18-21 in ASPIRE. The study, which is expected to launch early 2017, will enroll approximately 300 girls and young women ages 16-21 at five trial sites in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Dapivirine, also known as TMC-120, belongs to a class of ARVs called non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) that bind to and disable HIV's reverse transcriptase enzyme, a key protein needed for HIV replication. The dapivirine ring's development was made possible by a public-private partnership between IPM and Janssen Sciences Ireland UC, a Janssen pharmaceutical company of Johnson & Johnson, which granted IPM a royalty-free license in 2004 to develop dapivirine as a microbicide for women in developing countries. That license has since expanded to a worldwide rights agreement.
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About the Microbicide Trials Network
The Microbicide Trials Network (MTN) is an HIV/AIDS clinical trials network established in 2006 by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with co-funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Mental Health, all components of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Based at Magee-Womens Research Institute and the University of Pittsburgh, the MTN brings together international investigators and community and industry partners whose work is focused on the rigorous evaluation of promising microbicides - products applied inside the vagina or rectum that are intended to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV - from the earliest phases of clinical study to large-scale trials that support potential licensure of these products for widespread use. More information about the MTN is available at http://www.mtnstopshiv.org.
HOUSTON - (July 18, 2016) - Rice University researchers have developed gas biosensors to "see" into soil and allow them to follow the behavior of the microbial communities within.
In a study in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science and Technology, the Rice team described using genetically engineered bacteria that release methyl halide gases to monitor microbial gene expression in soil samples in the lab.
The bacteria are programmed using synthetic biology to release gas to report when they exchange DNA through horizontal gene transfer, the process by which organisms share genetic traits without a parent-to-child relationship. The biosensors allow researchers to monitor such processes in real time without having to actually see into or disturb a lab soil sample.
The Rice researchers expect their technique will serve the same purpose for environmental scientists that fluorescent reporter proteins serve for biochemists who track protein expression and other processes in biological systems.
The work by the Rice labs of biogeochemist Caroline Masiello, biochemist Jonathan Silberg, microbiologist George Bennett and lead author Hsiao-Ying (Shelly) Cheng, a Rice graduate student, is the first product of a $1 million grant by the W.M. Keck Foundation to develop gas-releasing microbial sensors.
"This paper describes a new tool to study how microbes trade genetic material in the environment," said Masiello, a professor of Earth science.
"We care about this because the process of horizontal gene transfer controls a lot of things that are important to humans either because they're good -- it's how rhizobia trade the genes they need to fix nitrogen and support plant growth -- or they're bad -- it's how bacteria trade antibiotic resistance in soils," she said. "It's been much more challenging in the past to construct models of this dynamic process in real soils and to study how horizontal gene exchange varies across soil types. We've created a new set of tools that makes that possible."
The researchers expect scientists will use gas biosensors in the lab to study nitrogen fixing in agriculture, antibiotic exchange in wastewater treatment, gene transfer in conditions where nutrients are scarce and the relationship between gene expression in soil and the release of greenhouse gases.
"There are other technologies that will build on this," said Silberg, an associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology. "The idea of using gases opens up most anything that's genetically encoded. However, we do need to improve technologies for some of the subtler kinds of questions."
He said releasing and sensing methyl halide gas represented an easy proof of concept. "Now we want higher-resolution information about other types of biological events by creating more sophisticated genetic programs using synthetic biology," Silberg said.
They expect they will soon be able to test agricultural soil samples to help fine-tune crop growth through more efficient watering and fertilizer use. "How can agriculture get this extra level of efficiency without the waste? Lots of people are coming to that, and there are lots of ways to do it," he said. "We're trying to build high-tech tools that allow us to understand mechanisms to make reliable predictions. That's the long game with these tools."
The researchers emphasized that these are tools for soil studies within lab environments. The synthetic microbes are destroyed once the results are obtained.
The Rice lab tested soil samples from the National Science Foundation's Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research Site in Michigan after adding Escherichia coli bacteria programmed to release gas upon transfer of their DNA to another microbe. Signals from the gas were up to 10,000 times the lab's detection limit.
The gas sensors were effective in anoxic -- or oxygen-depleted -- conditions, unlike green fluorescent protein, which requires oxygen to work. It is anticipated the reporter proteins can be used in many kinds of soil microbes, and some are currently being tested, Bennett said.
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Along with the Keck Foundation, the Rice Faculty Initiative Fund and the Taiwan Ministry of Education Scholarship supported the research. Bennett is the E. Dell Butcher Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.
Read the abstract at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b01415
This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2016/07/18/gas-sensors-see-through-soil-to-analyze-microbial-interactions/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Related materials:
Gas sensors promise advances in Earth science: http://news.rice.edu/2015/07/06/gas-sensors-promise-advances-in-earth-science-2/
Rice University Biochar Group (Masiello lab): http://biochar.rice.edu/Rice_Biochar_Group_/members.html
The Silberg Research Group: http://www.bioc.rice.edu/~joff/
Microbial Biotechnology Laboratory (George Bennett): http://www.bioc.rice.edu/~gbennett/
Wiess School of Natural Sciences: http://naturalsciences.rice.edu
Images for download:
http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/07/0718_GAS-1-WEB-187ga43.jpg
Rice University graduate student Shelly Cheng prepares soil samples for testing. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/07/0718_GAS-2-WEB-1nbq7zx.jpg
Prepared soil samples used to test bioengineered tools that will allow researchers to study Earth's microbes from micro- to macroscales. Rice University researchers have developed microbial sensors that release gas to report on specific biochemical reactions. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/07/0718_GAS-3-WEB-1hhneun.jpg
Rice University scientists have created programmed bacteria that serve as gas sensors to help them "see" into soil and learn about the behavior of the microbial communities within. When the engineered bacterium receives genetic information from another bacterium, it releases a gas to "report" the transaction. (Credit: Jonathan Silberg and Shelly Cheng/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,910 undergraduates and 2,809 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for best quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.
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david@rice.edu
Mike Williams
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease recently awarded the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Pediatrics contracts totaling $11.5 million under its Broad Agency Announcement mechanism to support two studies to be conducted at UAB and its partner academic sites.
The studies will assess treatment of babies born with congenital cytomegalovirus without symptoms, and frequency of neonatal herpes infections in the United States and Peru.
Almost 1 percent of babies born in the United States will have CMV, the largest nongenetic cause of sensory loss and mental disabilities. Ninety percent of these babies will be asymptomatic, or show no visible or laboratory evidence of the disease, at the time of birth. Early detection and close follow-up can lessen the effects of congenital CMV in infants. The new study, supported by a $10 million contract, will explore whether treating babies with four months of an oral drug -- valganciclovir -- that targets the virus can improve outcomes.
"UAB has been the world leader in studying congenital viral infections for the past 50 years," said David Kimberlin, M.D., who holds the Sergio Stagno, M.D., Endowed Chair in Pediatric Infectious Disease at UAB. "Our team of researchers and physicians has been instrumental in learning more about CMV and treating the disease. The next step is being able to identify and treat CMV in babies who are asymptomatic at birth."
Studies conducted by UAB researchers Suresh Boppana, M.D., and Karen Fowler, Dr.P.H., under a $15 million contract with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders found diagnostic tools to screen for congenital CMV. In 2011, Boppana and Fowler developed a saliva test that can identify the silent virus in newborns with 97 percent accuracy. This has directly led to increasing testing of babies for CMV.
"Now that there is a targeted screening program for identifying CMV, we will see more babies with CMV who are asymptomatic," said Kimberlin, principal investigator of the study and co-director of the UAB Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. "Under this new contract, we will be able to build upon the previous studies to observe and identify proper treatment plans for the asymptomatic population of infants."
The five-year study across nine sites will look at male and female infants under 1 month of age with asymptomatic congenital CMV infection. Four months of oral valganciclovir, an antiviral treatment for infections caused by viruses, will be administered to babies without baseline sensorineural hearing loss. Those with baseline SNHL also will be enrolled if they are receiving oral valganciclovir prescribed by their physician.
A $1.5 million contract will support a study to assess the incidence of neonatal herpes infections in the United States and Peru using large databases in both countries to see how common the infection is. Knowledge gained from these investigations will inform future therapeutic studies aimed to decrease mother-to-infant transmission of herpes simplex virus. A prospective trial also will be conducted in Peru under this contract.
UAB researchers involved in both studies that improve the lives of children across the globe include Mary Wyatt Bowers, Penny Jester, Susan Branscum, Sara Davis, Juliette Southworth and Richard Whitley, M.D.
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About UAB
Known for its innovative and interdisciplinary approach to education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, the University of Alabama at Birmingham is the state of Alabama's largest employer and an internationally renowned research university and academic medical center; its professional schools and specialty patient-care programs are consistently ranked among the nation's top 50. UAB's Center for Clinical and Translational Science is advancing innovative discoveries for better health as a two-time recipient of the prestigious Center for Translational Science Award. Find more information at http://www.uab.edu and http://www.uabmedicine.org.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The University of Alabama at Birmingham is a separate, independent institution from the University of Alabama, which is located in Tuscaloosa. Please use University of Alabama at Birmingham on first reference and UAB on all subsequent references.
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(Princeton, Honolulu) A biopharmaceutical company collaborating with Hawai'i scientists on an Ebola vaccine announced encouraging news about its vaccine today.
Tests on the vaccine, still in development, have shown it is able to retain its effectiveness without refrigeration. That is a real plus when you are talking about many rural areas in Africa that are most at-risk for another Ebola outbreak.
"What we've just recently shown with the work performed with Soligenix, Inc. at the University of Colorado is that we can dry stabilize the key antigen for the Ebola vaccine so that it basically can be stored at room temperature or elevated temperature--you can almost leave it out in the sun --and it can be stable for up to three months," said Axel Lehrer, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Tropical Medicine, Medical Microbiology and Pharmacology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM).
The announcement was made by Soligenix, Inc. (OTCQB: SNGX) (Soligenix or the Company), which is a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing products to treat rare diseases where there is an unmet medical need. The company is collaborating with the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Hawai'i Biotech, Inc. (HBI) to develop a heat stable subunit Ebola vaccine.
Soligenix said thermostabilization (heat stabilization) formulation studies, conducted with Dr. Theodore Randolph at the University of Colorado, have also shown that the use of thermostable formulations may allow full immunization to potentially be achieved with fewer vaccinations.
"None of the other Ebola vaccines under development have the ability to withstand high temperatures, which is an ongoing concern in areas of the world where Filoviruses are endemic," said Dr. Lehrer. "The ability to stabilize our vaccine candidate to retain immunogenicity may not only have an impact on logistics, but has also the potential to reach more persons at need. A vaccine that needs to be given fewer times increases the likelihood that more people receive sufficient doses of the vaccine to protect them from disease."
"We are very encouraged by these preliminary results and look forward to our continuing collaboration with Soligenix and HBI to further develop our Ebola and multivalent filovirus vaccines," said Dr. Lehrer. About Ebola
Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is caused by one of five species of Ebolavirus, four of which cause disease in humans, including its best-known member, Zaire Ebolavirus (Ebola virus). All species of Ebolavirus belong to the Filoviridae family, a family that further contains the equally human pathogenic Marburgvirus. The Ebola virus is believed to be harbored in various animal species in Africa, although the specific reservoir host is still unknown. There have been several known EVD outbreaks in Africa since 1976, with the most recent and largest outbreak starting in 2014 in Western Africa.
Transmission of Ebola requires direct contact of bodily fluids from an infected person or contact with infected animals. The mortality rate from Ebola infection is extremely high, and can sometimes be affected by the quality of supportive care available with a focus on early initiation of treatment. Symptoms of Ebola virus infection include high fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain and unexplained hemorrhage. Resolution of the disease largely depends on the patient's own immune system. There is no approved treatment and no approved vaccine for Ebola, although research into both has accelerated since the onset of the 2014 outbreak.
The Ebola outbreak of 2014 primarily spanned three West African countries, and involved over 28,000 confirmed/probable/suspected cases with an estimated death toll of more than 11,000 persons according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including some cases in Europe and the United States. The widespread nature of the infection and its devastating impact has further illustrated the need to develop an Ebola vaccine to prevent future and possibly more significant outbreaks.
About ThermoVax
ThermoVax is a technology that is designed to eliminate the standard cold chain production, distribution and storage logistics required for most vaccines. Cold chain requirements add considerable cost to the production and storage of current conventional vaccines. According to the Biopharma Cold Chain Sourcebook of 2010, more than 90% of all vaccines (with a total value of $20.6 billion) require shipment through cold chain. Elimination of the cold chain would also enhance the utility of these vaccines for emerging markets and for other applications requiring but lacking reliable cold chain capabilities. Further, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that as much as 50% of all global vaccine doses are wasted due, in part, to excursions outside required temperature ranges NIAID has also highlighted the priority of technologies for biodefense vaccines that focus on broad spectrum approaches including vaccine adjuvants and temperature stabilization for long shelf life, rapid onset of immunity, and surge capacity for production. For vaccines that are intended for long-term stockpiling, such as for use in biodefense or in pandemic situations, the utilization of ThermoVax has the potential to facilitate easier storage and distribution of strategic national stockpile vaccines in emergency situations.
The technology utilizes precise lyophilization of protein immunogens with conventional aluminum adjuvants in combination with secondary adjuvants for rapid onset of protective immunity with the fewest number of vaccinations. RiVax is extremely labile in liquid form requiring careful management under refrigerated conditions at 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit). By employing ThermoVax during the final formulation, it is possible to produce stable and potent vaccines that are capable of withstanding temperatures at least as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for up to one year.
The underlying technology has been developed by Drs. John Carpenter and Theodore Randolph at the University of Colorado. The vaccine technology has been developed to date in collaboration with SRI International, the University of Kansas, the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health, and the Tulane National Primate Research Center under the sponsorship of the cooperative grant from NIAID.
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About the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
The John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) at the University of Hawai'i Manoa honors its unique research environment to excel in science-based efforts to eliminate diseases that disproportionately affect people in Hawai'i and the Pacific region. The school obtains some $50 million annually in external research funding and offers degrees in Medicine, in Biomedical Sciences, Communication Sciences & Disorders, and Medical Technology, and trains physicians in MD Residency programs in partnership with Hawai'i's top community-based medical centers.
About Hawai'i Biotech, Inc.
Hawai'i Biotech (HBI) is a privately held biotechnology company focused on the development of prophylactic vaccines for established and emerging infectious diseases and anti-toxin drugs for biological threats. HBI has developed proprietary expertise in the production of recombinant proteins that have application to the manufacture of safe and effective vaccines, diagnostic kits, and as research tools. HBI completed successful first-in-human Phase 1 clinical studies with both West Nile virus and dengue vaccines in healthy human subjects. HBI has developed a product pipeline of recombinant subunit vaccines, including vaccine candidates for Zika virus, West Nile virus, tick-borne flavivirus, malaria, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and Ebola. The company is also continuing the development of small molecule anti-toxin drugs for anthrax and botulism. HBI, founded in Hawai'i in 1982, is headquartered in suburban Honolulu. For more information, please visit: http://www.hibiotech.com
About Soligenix, Inc.
Soligenix is a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing products to treat rare diseases where there is an unmet medical need. Our BioTherapeutics business segment is developing SGX301 as a first-in-class photodynamic therapy utilizing safe visible light for the treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, proprietary formulations of oral beclomethasone 17,21-dipropionate (BDP) for the prevention/treatment of gastrointestinal (GI) disorders characterized by severe inflammation including pediatric Crohn's disease (SGX203) and acute radiation enteritis (SGX201), and our novel innate defense regulator technology dusquetide (SGX942) for the treatment of oral mucositis.
Our Vaccines/BioDefense business segment includes active development programs for RiVax, our ricin toxin vaccine candidate, OrbeShield, our GI acute radiation syndrome therapeutic candidate and SGX943, our melioidosis therapeutic candidate. The development of our vaccine programs incorporates the use of our proprietary heat stabilization platform technology, known as ThermoVax. Currently, this business segment is supported with up to $57 million in government grant and contract funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
For further information regarding Soligenix, Inc., please visit the Company's website at http://www.soligenix.com.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements that reflect Soligenix, Inc.'s current expectations about its future results, performance, prospects and opportunities, including but not limited to, potential market sizes, patient populations and clinical trial enrollment. Statements that are not historical facts, such as "anticipates," "estimates," "believes," "intends," "potential," or similar expressions, are forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results in future periods to differ materially from what is expressed in, or implied by, these statements. Soligenix cannot assure you that it will be able to successfully develop, achieve regulatory approval for or commercialize products based on its technologies, including dusquetide (SGX942), particularly in light of the significant uncertainty inherent in developing vaccines against bioterror threats conducting preclinical and clinical trials of vaccines, obtaining regulatory approvals and manufacturing vaccines, that product development and commercialization efforts will not be reduced or discontinued due to difficulties or delays in clinical trials or due to lack of progress or positive results from research and development efforts, that it will be able to successfully obtain any further funding to support product development and commercialization efforts, including grants and awards, maintain its existing grants which are subject to performance requirements, enter into any biodefense procurement contracts with the US Government or other countries, that it will be able to compete with larger and better financed competitors in the biotechnology industry, that changes in health care practice, third party reimbursement limitations and Federal and/or state health care reform initiatives will not negatively affect its business, or that the US Congress may not pass any legislation that would provide additional funding for the Project BioShield program. Positive results from the Phase 2 study evaluating SGX942 does not ensure that the follow-on Phase 2/3 clinical study will be successful. These and other risk factors are described from time to time in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, Soligenix's reports on Forms 10-Q and 10-K. Unless required by law, Soligenix assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events.
A new study from Belgium indicates that the majority of community-dwelling elderly adults are taking prescription medications inappropriately. The study, which is published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, also found a link between underuse--not taking essential medications--and an increased risk of dying or needing to be hospitalized.
Appropriate prescribing of medications is a major challenge in the care of elderly adults because older patients tend to be more sensitive to the effects of medications than younger patients, and they often have multiple conditions requiring numerous prescriptions that could negatively interact with each other. To examine patterns of prescription drug use in elderly adults, Maarten Wauters of Ghent University and his colleagues studied 503 community-dwelling adults aged 80 years and older for a period of 18 months.
The researchers found that more than half (58 percent) of patients were taking five or more chronic medications daily. Few patients were taking medications appropriately, with underuse occurring in 67 percent of patients and misuse occurring in 56 percent of patients (with some overlap between these groups). Just 17 percent of the population were not affected by any kind of underuse or misuse.
Over the 18-month study period, underuse was associated with 39 percent and 26 percent increased risks of mortality and hospitalization, respectively, per underused medication. Associations with misuse were unclear.
"Taking too many medications or unsafe medications are known to cause adverse health outcomes; however, we have shown that not taking essential, beneficial medications is more frequent and can be more strongly associated with negative outcomes," said Wauters. "Prescribing medications to older persons should be done after careful thought, balancing the benefits and risk of every medications at regular intervals."
Wauters noted that clinical pharmacologists can play an important role in identifying and addressing inappropriate prescribing. "Clinical pharmacologists can help prescribers to clearly assess misuse and underuse of medications in full knowledge of the patient, their comorbidities, and their medications. They can help to build electronic systems for constant monitoring of the quality of prescribing, using evidence-based criteria of potentially inappropriate prescribing."
"Prescriptions are the most common interaction many of us have with healthcare professionals, yet this research shows the underuse of prescription medicines can be harmful. Clinical pharmacology is the only medical specialty in the UK's health service focusing on the safe, effective, and economic use of medicines," said Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, Vice President - Clinical at the British Pharmacology Society. "Despite there being only 72 clinical pharmacology consultants in the UK, the British Pharmacological Society is leading the way in improved prescribing around the world through the delivery of the Prescribing Safety Assessment - a national prescribing assessment - and dedicated learning resources."
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For more information or to obtain a PDF of any study, please contact sciencenewsroom@wiley.com.
Full citation: "Too many, too few, or too unsafe? Impact of inappropriate prescribing on mortality, and hospitalisation in a cohort of community-dwelling oldest old." Maarten Wauters, Monique Elseviers, Bert Vaes, Jan Degryse, Olivia Dalleur, Robert Vander Stichele, Thierry Christiaens, and Majda Azermai British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. Published Online: July 18, 2016, DOI: 10.1111/bcp.13055.
URL Upon Publication: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/bcp.13055
Author Contact: To arrange an interview with the author, please contact Isaac Demey of Ghent University's department of communications at Isaac.Demey@UGent.be or +0032 9 264 82 25.
About the Journal: The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology has the primary goal of publishing high quality research papers on all aspects of drug action in humans. The journal has a wide readership, bridging the medical profession, clinical research and the pharmaceutical industry, and is published monthly. It is owned by the British Pharmacological Society and published by Wiley. The journal's current Impact Factor is 3.83 (Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index).
About The British Pharmacological Society: The British Pharmacological Society is a charity with a mission to promote and advance the whole spectrum of pharmacology. Founded in 1931, it is now a global community at the heart of pharmacology, with over 3,500 members from more than 60 countries worldwide. The Society leads the way in the research and application of pharmacology around the world through its scientific meetings, educational resources and peer-reviewed journals: the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Pharmacology Research & Perspectives and the British Journal of Pharmacology, which includes the Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY, featuring open access overviews of the key properties of over 1,700 human therapeutic targets and their drugs, and links to http://www.guidetopharmacology.org.
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With a goal of treating worn, arthritic hips without extensive surgery to replace them, scientists have programmed stem cells to grow new cartilage on a 3-D template shaped like the ball of a hip joint. What's more, using gene therapy, they have activated the new cartilage to release anti-inflammatory molecules to fend off a return of arthritis.
The technique, demonstrated in a collaborative effort between Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cytex Therapeutics Inc. in Durham, N.C., is described July 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The discovery one day may provide an alternative to hip-replacement surgery, particularly in younger patients. Doctors are reluctant to perform such operations in patients under age 50 because prosthetic joints typically last for less than 20 years. A second joint-replacement surgery to remove a worn prosthetic can destroy bone and put patients at risk for infection.
"Replacing a failed prosthetic joint is a difficult surgery," said Farshid Guilak, PhD, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Washington University. "We've developed a way to resurface an arthritic joint using a patient's own stem cells to grow new cartilage, combined with gene therapy to release anti-inflammatory molecules to keep arthritis at bay. Our hope is to prevent, or at least delay, a standard metal and plastic prosthetic joint replacement."
The technique uses a 3-D, biodegradable synthetic scaffold that Guilak and his team developed. The scaffold, molded into the precise shape of a patient's joint, is covered with cartilage made from the patient's own stem cells taken from fat beneath the skin. The scaffold then can be implanted onto the surface of an arthritic hip, for example. Resurfacing the hip joint with "living" tissue is designed to ease arthritis pain, and delay or even eliminate the need for joint-replacement surgery in some patients.
Additionally, by inserting a gene into the newly grown cartilage and activating it with a drug, the gene can orchestrate the release of anti-inflammatory molecules to fight a return of arthritis, which usually is what triggers such joint problems in the first place.
"When there is inflammation, we can give a patient a simple drug, which activates the gene we've implanted, to lower inflammation in the joint," said Guilak, also a professor of developmental biology and of biomedical engineering. "We can stop giving the drug at any time, which turns off the gene."
That gene therapy is important, he explained, because when levels of inflammatory molecules rise in a joint, the cartilage is destroyed and pain increases. By adding gene therapy to the stem cell and scaffold technique, Guilak and his colleagues believe it will be possible to coax patients' joints to fend off arthritis and function better for a longer time.
The 3-D scaffold is built using a weaving pattern that gives the device the structure and properties of normal cartilage. Franklin Moutos, PhD, vice president of technology development at Cytex, explained that the unique structure is the result of approximately 600 biodegradable fiber bundles woven together to create a high-performance fabric that can function like normal cartilage.
"As evidence of this, the woven implants are strong enough to withstand loads up to 10 times a patient's body weight, which is typically what our joints must bear when we exercise," Moutos said.
Currently, there are about 30 million Americans who have diagnoses of osteoarthritis, and data suggest that the incidence of osteoarthritis is on the rise. That number includes many younger patients -- ages 40 to 65 -- who have limited treatment options because conservative approaches haven't worked and they are not yet candidates for total joint replacement because of their ages.
Bradley Estes, PhD, vice president of research and development at Cytex, noted, "We envision in the future that this population of younger patients may be ideal candidates for this type of biological joint replacement."
Guilak, who also is the director of research at Shriners Hospitals for Children -- St. Louis, and co-director of the Washington University Center of Regenerative Medicine, has been collaborating with Cytex on this research. The scientists have tested various aspects of the tissue engineering in cell culture, and some customized implants already are being tested in laboratory animals. He said if all goes well, such devices could be ready for safety testing in humans in three to five years.
###
Moutos FT, Glass KA, Compton SA, Ross AK, Gersbach CA, Guilak F, Estes BT. Anatomically shaped tissue-engineered cartilage with tunable and inducible anti-cytokine delivery for biological joint resurfacing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. July 18, 2016.
This work was supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers AR55042, AR50245, AR48852, AG15768, AR48182, AG46927 and AR067467. Additional funding provided by the Collaborative Research Center; the AO Foundation, Davos, Switzerland; the Arthritis Foundation; the Nancy Taylor Foundation for Chronic Diseases; and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Authors Farshid Guilak, Bradley T. Estes, Franklin Moutos and Sarah Compton have a financial interest in Cytex Therapeutics of Durham, N.C., which holds patents for the development of these devices. They could realize financial gain if the devices eventually are approved for clinical use.
Washington University School of Medicine's 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient-care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
Today Parliament will debate and vote on the principle of replacement of the UKs Trident nuclear weapons system. This is a major decision for the future security and defence of the United Kingdom. The government wants to commit the country to this particular weapons system until the 2070s, and it comes with a massive price tag of up to 41 billion.
The vote comes only two weeks after the release of the Chilcot Inquiry report about the UKs role in the Iraq War. Chilcots findings have rightly unnerved parliamentarians and raised serious questions about decision making at the highest level.
Surely, scrutinising the government is one of the key functions of parliament? Parliamentarians should be asking themselves why parliament offered such little challenge to the assertions made by the government thirteen years ago, even when the decision was as serious as taking the country to war.
Today, despite the importance of the decision about the future of the UKs nuclear deterrence, we will inevitably see yet another example of parliament voting in favor of the government without serious debate or accountability. The government is already making major investments that takes the country down the path of replacement of the current Trident system. Yet there remain a number of key issues that have not been at the forefront of the current debate but will have significant influence on the outcome. If parliament was doing its job properly, this vote would have been delayed until the government had paid due diligence to the following issues:
1. Do the four existing Vanguard submarines that make up part of the Trident system need to be replaced now? If so, what is the date beyond which they would become unsafe and unreliable if not replaced?
(Over the past decade the end-of-service dates provided by successive governments for both the submarines and warheads have changed with little or no explanation or accountability from the government to parliament or the public).
2. Do we need a new nuclear warhead? If so, when will warhead replacement be necessary?
3. What are the total costs for replacing the Trident system? The government has so far refused to provide any transparency into costs for Trident even though Crispin Blunt in an interview with Reuters claimed that the cost was an estimated total of 167 billion over the duration of the systems life.
4. Whats the plan for an alternative site, if there is a second referendum in Scotland and this time Scotland votes for independence? The Scottish National Party has stated that an independent Scotland would not accept nuclear weapons on its soil and according to experts there are very few, if any, alternative sites that would be appropriate.
5. What are the technological developments which will impact both the threats we face and the vulnerability of our nuclear systems? Are we assured that we can continue to protect our systems against evolving cyberthreats?
6. What are the long term threats we face and how are these threats being countered; what is the role of our nuclear posture in deterring these threats over the next several decades; and what will the strategic environment look like during the lifespan of the renewed submarines (up to the 2070s)?
7. What is the rationale behind our continuous at sea deterrence (CASD) and can it assuredly protect against current and future security threats? Would an enemy really be more likely to attack the UK, if it knew we no longer had a policy of CASD?
Is the lesson of Chilcot not that parliament should approach a major decision such as the renewal of our nuclear deterrent with caution, demanding accountability from the government and reaching out for independent technical expertise as needed? If not, we are at risk of finding ourselves in the future undergoing another Chilcot-like report asking why we spent billions of pounds and severely limited our defence options on a nuclear system that has since been made defunct.
The opinions articulated above represent the views of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Leadership Network or any of its members. The ELNs aim is to encourage debates that will help develop Europes capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security challenges of our time.
(NewsUSA) - Sponsored News - At bedtime, it's common for parents to sweetly send their children off to sleep by saying, "Sleep tight -- don't let the bed bugs bite!" But could you imagine the reaction if that was said to vacationers by hotel staff? People wouldn't be able to check out fast enough. Unfortunately, travelers will never be given such a clear warning about bed bugs in real life, but there are steps they can take to prevent an encounter while enjoying a trip away from home.
Bed bugs, which feed on human blood and often leave behind red, itchy welts, continue to be a major concern, especially as travel season heats up and incidents rise. In fact, a recent study conducted by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) and the University of Kentucky found that 99.6 percent of pest control companies treated for bed bugs in the year prior. Pest control companies also reported treating for infestations in a variety of locations, including five-star hotels, retail stores, single-family homes, apartments, movie theaters, hospitals, schools and even on public transportation.
These biting pests are seemingly found everywhere, and no one wants to cuddle up with them in a hotel room, or worse, bring them back home. So, what can you do to avoid bed bugs while traveling? Use this helpful advice from NPMA:
* Upon check-in, inspect the entire room before unpacking. Use a flashlight to search behind the headboard and in the crevices of furniture, looking for the bugs themselves or shed skins. Pull back bed sheets and check mattress seams and box springs for pepper-like stains that may be evidence of bed bug activity.
* If you suspect an infestation, notify management and change rooms immediately. Be sure the new room is not adjacent to or directly below or above the possibly infested room.
* Keep suitcases off the beds and in plastic bags or protective covers to prevent the bugs from latching onto luggage.
* Once back home, inspect all belongings before bringing them into the house.
* Wash all clothes in hot water and dry on an extra-hot dryer setting.
* If you are concerned that you brought bed bugs home, contact a professional pest control company to thoroughly inspect the property and if needed, offer guidance on treatment options.
Bed bugs are hardy and stealthy hitchhikers, so it is essential that travelers practice caution during and after trips. For more bed bug advice, please visit: http://www.pestworld.org/all-things-bed-bugs/.
Monday, July 18, 2016
Killing and grief are all over the news and social media this summer. From the shootings in Orlando to Dallas police officers gunned down while protecting protesters, and all the other killings weve seen, our grief reactions have a pattern.
Immediate reactions are shock, numbness, horror, sadness, anger and tears. Then come the candlelight vigils, the public memorials with flowers, flags, candles, teddy bears and hand-drawn cards expressing love and remembrance.
Grief reactions can vary based on different elements manner of death, age of the person who died, relationship with the person, and the grieving style of each individual mourner. Thanatology the study of death, dying and bereavement can help us learn about the different ways people express their grief.
Many may think of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross concept of Five Stages: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, theres another effective framework for understanding grief reactions, from noted thanatologist Kenneth Doka, Ph.D.: intuitive and instrumental grieving.
The instrumental grieving style focuses on practical matters and problem solving.
This reaction is not determined by gender. You might think men are more inclined toward the practical approach. However, in research by Doka and Terry Martin reported in 2010, its a pretty even split for men and women to experience an instrumental grief reaction.
An intuitive grieving style emphasizes experiencing and expressing emotion overt sadness, tears and withdrawal. Rather than getting busy with activities that may distract or channel emotional pain and sadness, the intuitive griever is immersed in mourning, physically slowed down by grief. While we may think of women as emotional, men are just as likely to embrace this style of grieving, although they may retreat to the privacy of a man cave to mourn.
Because the Orlando shooting took place in a gay night club, theres another potential layer of grief: disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. (Kenneth Doka, 1989)
Examples of disenfranchised grief include not recognizing the death of a same-sex partner; a mistress unable to publicly mourn the death of or breakup with an illicit lover; mourning of other losses, such as jobs, health or friends; or pet owners who are devastated by the loss of a beloved companion animal.
The love of a pet is intense, and with the loss, there is intense grief. Yet, grief over the loss of a pet often does not get the same level of public recognition given the loss of a person. Mourners may turn to social media sites like Facebook to receive supportive comments from friends.
In 2016, people may be more a bit more understanding about mourning the death of a same sex partner. Paradoxically, a number of the victims at that evenings Latin music event in Orlando were not homosexual.
Whether a mourner is experiencing intuitive, instrumental or disenfranchised grief, the best way to help is by acknowledging the loss, being present, expressing concern, carefully listening, and offering your support. Avoid judging, rationalizing, minimizing or trying to fix the loss. The mourners in your life will appreciate it.
Gail Rubin is a Certified Thanatologist (a death educator) who uses humor and funny films to reduce resistance to discussing death. Her Continuing Education presentation, The Many Faces of Grief: Mourning in the Movies, uses film clips to illustrate and explain grief reactions.
Shes the author of the award-winning books, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Dont Plan to Die, Hail and Farewell: Cremation Ceremonies, Templates and Tips, and the forthcoming title, Kicking the Bucket List: 100 Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die (Rio Grande Books, October 2016). A preview of the new book is available at: http://agoodgoodbye.com/celebrant-services/downsizing-information/
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Hours after a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that claimed the lives of three police officers and wounded three others, hundreds from the San Antonio community convened Sunday inside New Creation Fellowship Church to discuss the state of law enforcement and gun violence.
With the church as the backdrop, panelists participated in a public forum that aimed to improve the relationship with the community and the San Antonio police force. Chief William McManus and Sheriff Susan Pamerleau assembled a panel of seven people.
The forum was well into its second hour when Becky Brenner delivered a question that elicited applause from the audience.
Brenners question boiled down to law enforcement not addressing the real issue: poverty, and masking it as a gun problem.
Im totally at my wits end with all the murders, Brenner said. Now this is real.
Brenner, a civil rights activist who was arrested in Alabama for calling the police chief the best liar shes ever met, said her passion derived from struggling for 50 years.
Brenner, now an art teacher, remembers meticulously carving a bar of soap while she sat in an Alabama jail. It was in that short time that Brenners passion for art was born and her fight for civil rights was far from over.
Brenner attended the forum for answers to her questions and to relieve her concerns. Instead, she left disappointed.
The forum seemed to be more an opportunity for the powers to be to blame the community for their problems, Brenner said. They dont talk about the real problems. Its more to calm the community than resolve anything. Everything they suggest is about the community changing. What about the police changing?
Panelists fielded questions after the second of two deadly ambushes on police officers within 10 days.
Sunday mornings shooting occurred less than a mile from the Baton Rouge police headquarters, according to the Associated Press. After several minutes of gunfire, the suspected gunman was shot and killed.
Last week, authorities arrested one man and another suspect still was at large after shots were fired at the San Antonio Police Department headquarters. McManus said there were no new developments in the investigation.
This is a bad time in law enforcement with all this going on, McManus said.
When a citizen posed a question about socioeconomic status, McManus said the conditions that lead to violence: lack of work opportunities, deficient education, are difficult for police to solve by themselves.
We cant arrest those problems away, McManus said. We can arrest a million people and it wont change those conditions. I would change the conditions. Changing those conditions are up to somebody else, not the police.
Engaging the community, McManus said, is essential because officers rely on the publics providing information to assist them.
Pamerleau added that the community has an obligation to be part of the dialogue to resolve tension between law enforcement and citizens.
The outpouring from the community has been outstanding, McManus said. Ive never seen it stronger.
Paula Applin sat toward the back left corner of the church, listening during the forum. Occasionally she nodded or clapped. Other times, she looked intently at the speaker, absorbing everything.
After almost three hours of discussion, Applin left encouraged and with a new perspective.
It was peaceful, Applin said. I think we need to do this more often. Its crucial for progress. And sometimes crisis can cause great change.
qramirez@express-news.net
WILMOT, Ohio He doesnt have much in the way of farm buildings and farm equipment, and most of his livestock live outside on pastures and in the woodlands that he owns.
But Virginia-based farmer and author Joel Salatin certainly doesnt consider himself poor.
He told a crowd of 3,000-plus at the annual Family Farm Field Day, July 16, that the average farmer in America spends $4 in depreciable infrastructure to turn $1 in annual sales. On his farm, it costs just 50 cents to produce $1.
Our equity is not in machinery and buildings; our equity is in skill, information and customers, he said.
Skills and information are still costly, he said, and valuable but not something that a bank cannot take away.
About his farm
Salatin lives and farms on his familys Shenandoah Valley farm, where he raises pork, beef, poultry and eggs using a pasture-based system that he feels allows the animals to express their natural behaviors.
His farm is called Polyface, which means the farm of many faces. The farm is rooted in polyculture, or the growth of many things, and is known internationally.
Family Farm Field Day is an annual gathering of farmers and the public usually held in Holmes County and attended by Amish, but open to others.
Salatin spoke multiple times throughout the day, calling for a return to biological farming, and warning of the cost and perils of mechanical farming.
In a morning talk on salad bar beef, or the concept of rotational grazing he pointed out the potential to raise healthy cattle on the God-given vegetation already available.
More growth
He said before Europeans arrived, the country was covered with growth, including wild animals like wolves, beavers and bison, that maintained a natural cycle and order.
There was a tremendous amount of productivity here before we ever arrived, he said. In fact, more than there is today.
His goal, when he took over the family farm, was to identify the patterns and choreography of life, and mimic that as closely as he could.
He keeps about 1,000 head of cattle on a rotational grazing system, and strives to move them to new pasture on a daily basis. He said cattle are the pruners at his operation, and just like pruning a vineyard or orchard its important to only prune the right amount, at the right time.
By moving the cattle daily, he feels they do less damage to the grass, and are more likely to stimulate new growth in new places. He challenged farmers to be deliberate in their grazing efforts focussing on each day, and making sure each pasture or paddock is sized to the number of cattle that it keeps.
He demonstrated how he measures off each pasture with fence, and said he doesnt worry about straight fences because he wants to follow the contour of the land.
Factory farming
In a keynote address over lunch, Salatin said he cant imagine a more troublesome environment for livestock than factory farms, which raise livestock in controlled, enclosed environments, usually of single-specie.
You could not conceive nor contrive, or come up with a more pathogen-friendly system than we have, he said.
While Salatin spoke critically of industrialized farming, he said its also not as easy as telling farmers what to do, or how to farm. Hes also not in favor of the government telling people how to farm.
Farmers do what consumers buy, and when consumers buy Hot Pockets and frozen pizza, thats what the food system gives them cheap, he said.
Salatins farm provides food to more than 6,000 families in a three-hour radius, and supplies restaurants and select stores.
Although local foods can sometimes be more costly than other options Salatin said theres still room for people to eat healthier, if they choose to.
For example, he said for what one person spends on one value meal at a fast-food restaurant, the same person could buy two pounds of grass-fed beef.
Learning to cook
But buying the raw ingredients takes time, and you have to know how to cook.
In the afternoon, a panel of three growers discussed how they provide fresh food to urban customers and how they help educate the public about healthier eating and cooking at home.
The loss of cooking knowledge has led people to move toward convenience foods, but thanks to Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, more people are returning to cooking. A CSA is a farmer-consumer contract in which the grower provides the customer a weekly allowance of fresh foods.
The foods are boxed or packaged for each customer, and because the customer pays for them up front like groceries the customer usually feels a sense of urgency to make sure everything gets eaten.
They dont want to waste it, so theyre going to try to eat it, said David Yoder, a CSA grower from Fredonia, Pa. Its almost like youve forced them to eat healthy and eat the stuff they normally wouldnt.
Customers perspective
Scott King, a CSA customer from Columbus, said he buys for his family of five, which includes three young children. Hes found himself cooking and trying new things, because he wants to use up everything he buys.
But at the same time, he said some things do go to waste just as with grocery store food. This is especially true during family vacations, or times when hes not home to cook.
The customers of CSA can be urban, suburban or basically anyone who likes having a fresh supply of food, and knowing from which farm it came.
Theres about as much variety in the customers as there is on the farm, Yoder said. We have people with pony tails and sandals, and we have people who wear businesses suits.
The day featured various other talks and presentations on topics that included beekeeping, deer and wildlife management, and farm and road safety. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources helped lead the outdoors sessions, including a presentation on pond fish.
The Holmes Burn Care Foundation led a talk on what the foundation does to help burn victims in the Amish community, and what families should do to treat and care for various types of burns and when to seek professional help.
About the event
This years event was held at Wholesome Valley Farm, which serves as a hub for organic and pasture-based livestock within the Amish community.
Lloyd Miller, one of the coordinators, said the biggest thing he hoped people got out of the day was relationships.
My whole goal is that we can restore relationships people among people and relationships with our own land and our own animals, he said.
Miller said organizers are considering holding future Family Farm Field Days at this same location, because it is better suited for inclement weather and large crowds. The event has drawn as many as 5,000 people, and is free to attend, although donations are requested.
High tunnel crops to be featured during educational short course
Growers, educators and industry personnel can learn more about the aspects of high tunnel crop production during a short course Nov. 9 offered by ISU.
Shropshire
A Full-Time position is available for an assistant herdsperson on a family dairy farm in mid Shropshire. We have a 250 dairy herd rearing own replacements together with a b...
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has announced that bluetongue (BTV-8) vaccine is now available from two pharmaceutical retailers to manage the risk of a BTV incursion.
There is a high risk of an outbreak of Bluetongue (BTV-8) towards the end of the summer as a result of infected midges being blown across the English Channel from France, where the disease is present.
The disease affects all ruminants, but particularly cattle and sheep. It poses no threat to human health and does not affect meat, milk or other animal products.
Report Bluetongue immediately to the Animal and Plant Health Agency on 03000 200 301
Government Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer Simon Hall, said: "Its fantastic news that the vaccine is now available.
"This is the perfect time to talk to your vet as the vaccine is the only effective tool to prevent illness.
"I am urging our livestock farmers to keep an eye out for any signs of the disease and report any suspicions to their vet and the Animal and Plant Health Agency immediately, so we can work together to reduce the possible spread of Bluetongue this summer.
At the start of June, the British Veterinary Association (BVA) and other veterinary bodies welcomed the announcement that bluetongue (BTV-8) vaccine would be available by mid-July.
Since the Defra risk assessment indicates a high risk by late summer of a BTV incursion from France, veterinary associations have been involved in discussions with government, farmers representatives and manufacturers to ensure vaccine is available to meet potential demand particularly in the south of England where risk is highest.
The situation remains under constant review by Defra as the disease develops and the weather warms up, promoting midge activity.
Pharmaceutical companies MSD and Zoetis announced that batches of vaccine would be available from mid-July, which Defra has just confirmed.
Joint campaign Against Bluetongue
Vets across the UK are also contributing to the Joint campaign Against Bluetongue (JAB), helping to make farmers aware of the risk, clinical signs and what action to take, through speaking at local JAB information events and displaying posters and leaflets in practices.
While welcoming the announcement of vaccine availability in June, veterinary organisations also sought clarification about the cost and the amount of vaccine likely to be available in July and thereafter
BVA President Sean Wensley said: "We welcome the announcement that vaccine will be available in time to meet potential demand.
"This disease seriously affects animal health and welfare as well as the productivity of livestock, and vaccination is the key control.
"We recommend farmers speak to their local vet about the benefits of vaccination, taking into account their locality and individual circumstances.
"Farmers should not hesitate to seek advice if they have any concerns about their livestock."
Brexit gives the chance for Welsh farmers to adopt a "made-in-Wales" approach for the future of the industry, Rural Affairs Secretary Lesley Griffiths has said.
She will be meeting senior figures from the agricultural and food industries at the Royal Welsh Show near Builth Wells.
Ms Griffiths said she had seen a "real readiness to work together".
Environment and Rural Affairs Secretary, Lesley griffiths AM
With farming fully devolved, Ms Griffiths said it was a chance to create policies and regulations "tailor made for Wales' unique needs".
Ms Griffiths will hold a roundtable meeting with representatives of Wales' rural affairs and environment sector to discuss the implications of Britain's impending withdrawal from the EU.
"I can't see how there wouldn't be a subsidy scheme, so while it's very uncertain, there are things that will have to happen."
Leanne Wood, leader of Plaid Cymru
Continue to receive CAP
The leader of Plaid Cymru, Leanne Wood, has called on the farming community in Wales to maximise the benefits of EU membership whilst Wales remains a part of the organisation.
She said that Welsh farmers will continue to receive CAP support through the Basic Payment Scheme and enjoy tariff-free trade with the EU as long as Wales is a member of it and urgers farmers to make the most of it.
Leanne Wood said we must also work towards the best deal for Welsh farmers and that means making the case to maintain the level of financial support they currently receive.
Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood said: "Plaid Cymru was not in favour of leaving the European Union, but now that the people of Wales have taken that decision we need to ensure that we maximise the opportunities we have.
"Welsh farmers continue to have access to European funding until we leave the EU, and the Welsh Government should be working to maximise the potential of this money.
"But when that funding ends, we need to ensure that the level of support afforded to Welsh farmers in direct payments is at least as much after we leave the EU as it is now.
"During the EU referendum campaign, Welsh farmers were promised that the direct payment support they receive will be at least equal to that received through the Common Agricultural Policy.
"They were also told that they could continue to trade with the EU according to terms favourable to Welsh businesses.
Under the current EU Common Agricultural Policy, Wales receives approximately 250m per year in direct payments to farmers in addition to more that 500m between 2014-2020 to run a rural development programme.
'Resist temptation' to trigger Article 50
The Farmers Union of Wales President, Glyn Roberts, asked those in power to resist the temptation to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty prematurely.
Speaking at the Royal Welsh Show, he said vast amounts of work needs to be undertaken to repeal, or redraft the 5,500 acts relating to agriculture and the rural economy; the likely timescales over which trade agreements can be negotiated; the risk that elections in France and Germany would impact on negotiation time and the huge job of unravelling the current CAP and our commitments made under the Multi-Annual FInancial Framework.
"We know what weve potentially got until 2020, so lets stick with it. Lets maximise the return on what is planned.
"Moving at speed towards Brexit brings with it huge risks, so we certainly dont want speed, but there is certainly a need for haste in terms of what can be done to prepare for a post-Brexit world, and provide as much clarity as possible in terms of removing confusion, uncertainty and rumour," he said.
UK farm and fisheries minister George Eustice has kept his job at Defra following Prime Minister Theresa Mays government reshuffle.
Mr Eustice was promoted to minister of state at the department yesterday and will work alongside newly appointed Defra secretary Andrea Leadsom, both of whom campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union.
"In 2011, with my MP colleagues Chris Heaton Harris and George Eustice, I founded the Fresh Start group of Conservative MPs," Leadsom wrote on Conservative Home.
Newly appointed Defra secretary Andrea Leadsom
"Our plan was to look in detail at every aspect of the EU, getting right under the bonnet of the huge engine of the European Commission.
"We want to look at how it currently affects our lives in the UK and specifically how, with fundamental reform, it could be so much better not just for the UK but for all of its members."
'Opportunity to give more to UK farmers'
During referendum campaigning, Mr Eustice said Brexit offered Britain an opportunity to give more to farmers than they do as members of the EU.
He drew attention to non-EU nations like Switzerland and Norway and how their governments gave more to farmers than the UK does.
"Where power has been ceded to the EU, we see inertia, inconsistency and indecision," he said.
"The achievements we cherish most of all are those where we have secured opt-outs from EU initiatives."
Eustice said the UK gives money to the EU, which they convert into foreign currency creating unnecessary exchange rate risks.
"The system has been through various changes over the years but remains a centralised and bureaucratic policy.
"In its current form, it attempts to codify and regulate almost every conceivable feature of our landscape and almost every conceivable thing a farmer might want to do with their land."
He said some 80% of legislation affecting DEFRA comes directly from the EU.
"It is all pervasive: how many farm inspections there must be in a given year; what proportion of those inspections must be random; how much a farmer must be fined if they make a mistake; how much they should be fined if they make the same mistake twice; the precise dimensions of EU billboards and plaques that farmers are forced to put up by law; the maximum width of a gateway; how we define a hedge; whether a cabbage and a cauliflower are different crops or should be deemed the same crop. The list goes on forever and it's stifling."
The current status of bovine TB in Wales could put future trade deals at risk, the Farmers Union of Wales has warned.
Addressing their conference at the Royal Welsh Show, FUW President Glyn Roberts said: "We know that the current rates of bovine TB may represent a significant threat in terms of meat and dairy exports once we are outside the EU.
"There is a real risk that our current TB status could be used against us during trade negotiations.
"This means that we have to proactively address the problem, otherwise we might jeopardise all UK trade negotiations with Europe.
"The FUWs policy on proactively managing the wildlife disease reservoir has been well publicised, what has now changed is that failing to implement that policy may lead to the loss of our export markets post-Brexit," the Union President added.
The Union calls on the Welsh Government to initiate a 'proactive badger management policy' at to ensure Wales 'does not risk losing access to foreign markets'.
'UK's trade policies at risk'
Glyn Roberts warned: "If we do not sort out the long running problems with Bovine TB we will be putting the UKs Trade policies at complete risk.
"We will not be able to trade with the European Union without fixing or having a clear programme to fix the issue of Bovine TB.
"This is not just about dairy it will impact all sectors. The Welsh Government has it in its powers now to take proactive action and on behalf of all of us who wish to export in the future.
"This is not an issue for individual farmers to apply for licenses. It needs a centrally planned and managed solution.
"It is now time for the Welsh Government to accept that they already have powers and responsibilities and they cannot now hide behind EU regulations."
"As the FUW predicted, throwing millions of pounds at badger vaccination in and around north Pembrokeshire has yielded no results whatsoever.
"The clock is now ticking how fast, we dont know, but it is ticking, and we need to see our Welsh Government taking the sort of aggressive proactive approach to the disease in wildlife they have taken towards cattle.
"If they dont, then there is a significant risk that our export negotiations will be at an end before they start," stressed the FUW President.
The European Commission has outlined a new support package worth 500 million for European farmers.
The package, from EU funds, has been unveiled to support farmers in the face of ongoing market difficulties, particularly on the dairy market.
The measures were presented by the EU Agriculture Minister Phil Hogan. He said: "Coming at a time of significant budgetary pressures, this package provides a further robust response, and means that the Commission has mobilised more than 1 billion in new money to support hard-pressed farmers.
"Our ultimate goal is to see the much needed recovery of prices paid to farmers, so that they may make a living from their work and continue to provide safe, high quality food for citizens, as well as their contribution to rural areas and rural jobs and the provision of public goods."
Today's package contains three main elements:
An EU-wide scheme to incentivise a reduction in milk production (150 million)
Conditional adjustment aid to be defined and implemented at Member State level out of a menu proposed by the Commission (350 million that Member States will be allowed to match with national funds, thus potentially doubling the level of support being provided to farmers)
A range of technical measures to provide flexibility (e.g. on voluntary coupled support), cash-flow relief (e.g. through an increase in the amount of the advances for both direct and area-based rural development payments) and reinforce the safety net instruments (by prolonging intervention and private storage aid for Skimmed Milk Powder).
The precise details of all the different measures will be finalised in the coming weeks, in consultation with Member State experts.
Incentives to reduce production (150m): With the most recent meeting of the Milk Market Observatory Economic Board concluding that a correction on the support side of the dairy market is still necessary, the Commission will put forward an EU-wide measure aimed at incentivising a voluntary reduction in production.
Conditional adjustment aid (350m, plus possible national co-funding up to an equal amount. Such top-ups are not considered a state aid): With the prolonged crisis showing that some farmers maintain or even increase production in order to maintain cash flow, the Commission intends to provide new funds which can be linked to specific commitments while contributing to secure market stability.
The financial grant available to each Member State takes into account the main features of its sector including production, market prices and the weight of small farmers.
Member States will have flexibility to define the measure or mix of measures they will make available to farmers such as extensive production methods, support for small farms, cooperation projects, further production reduction support measures, etc. There will also be scope to cover other livestock sectors.
Other technical adjustments: With many Member States providing voluntary coupled support to the dairy sector (often per cow), they will be granted the possibility to derogate from the obligation to maintain the size of the herd in 2017.
Moreover, in a repetition of last year's move, Member States will again be allowed to advance up to 70% of Direct Payments from October 16 and 85% of area-based Rural Development payments without the necessity of completing the on-the-spot checks.
On the other hand, the Commission intends to extend the period for public intervention and for private storage for Skimmed Milk Powder beyond the end of September.
The Commission will also update the support for withdrawals for fruit & vegetables made by producer organisations.
James Evans from Builth Wells has been announced as the fourth Llyndy Isaf Scholar.
The Rhosgoch YFC member will join the current scholar Owain Jones at Llyndy Isaf in September before fully taking over the 614 acre upland farm in the Nant Gwynant Valley in October.
Launched at the 2012 Royal Welsh Winter Fair, the partnership between Wales YFC and the National Trust Eryri gives one Wales YFC member aged between 18 and 26 the exciting opportunity to be the Llyndy Isaf farm manager for one year to gain invaluable experience of living and working on an upland farm.
James is a past member and officer of Radnor YFC who has worked on his familys beef and sheep farm since he was a young child where his passion for agriculture was cultivated.
In his spare time he enjoys playing rugby for Gwernyfed Rugby Club and public speaking.
After receiving the good news James said: "I am very grateful to the National Trust and Wales Young Farmers Clubs for this unique opportunity to manage Llyndy Isaf farm.
"The terrain is very different to that of my native Radnorshire but I and my faithful dog Scott are looking forward to the challenge of farming stock in Nant Gwynant".
'Wonderful opportunity'
Trystan Edwards, National Trust Snowdonia Operations Manager said: "Were really proud of what the scholarship program has achieved over the past three years.
"When the time comes well be very sorry to see Owain go, but were confident she he the foundations and ability to develop a career in the agricultural industry."
Wales YFC Rural Affairs Chairman, Carys Vaughan, added: "Wales YFC in conjunction with the National Trust are excited to open the gate of Llyndy Isaf to the first south Wales scholar.
"Its great to see that members across Wales recognise the wonderful opportunity that Llyndy Isaf presents and Im very confident that James will follow in the footsteps of our current scholar Owain whilst also ploughing his own furrow.
"We look forward to seeing YFC members from across Wales visit Llyndy Isaf and chart the progress of our fourth scholar over the next twelve months."
The European Commission has launched a new Meat Market Observatory aimed at improving market transparency for the beef & veal and the pigmeat sectors.
It is designed to help operators read market signals and to cope better with market volatility.
First announced by Commissioner Hogan at the March 2016 Agriculture Council meeting, the Meat Market Observatory follows the model of the Milk Market Observatory that was established in April 2014.
The Observatory takes the form of a website with different sections, which will provide regular, and timely, reporting of prices, production and trade, with some short-term analysis, complemented by an Economic Board comprising representatives from different parts of the chain that will meet a few times a year.
In a speech to the first meeting of the MeatMO Economic Board, Commissioner Hogan welcomed this new Observatory, stating: "It's no secret that I am a believer in markets, and their central role in creating exports, jobs and profits for our European farmers and agri-businesses.
"But markets only function if all the players have access to the right information at the right time."
Anticipating potential crises
EU agri-cooperative Copa & Cogeca has welcomed the launch of the Market Observatory, saying it will give farmers up-to-date market information and enable them to anticipate potential crises.
Copa & Cogeca Secretary-General Pekka Pesonen said: "The new Observatory was included in the EU aid package in March and it is something we have been calling for.
"It provides a forum where information on the meat market and trends can be exchanged between market players.
"To ensure its success, its vital to have up to date, transparent market information across the wholesupply chain, both at EU and global level.
"This will provide an early mechanism to participate potential crises and take quick action.
"Data from the observatory can be used by our working parties and the civil dialogue groups to reflect on the market situation and policy measures."
Speaking at the launch meeting today, Chairman of Copa & Cogeca Beef Working Party M. Fleury said: "There are very close links between the EU beef and dairy sectors and we need to ensure that this tool helps anticipate the potential impact that extreme volatility in the dairy sector could have on the beef sector, and in particular on specialized beef production.
"We would equally need to address factors affecting consumer demand as today we are lacking more detailed data at consumer level."
'Lack of information' at retailer and consumer level
Chairman of Copa & Cogeca Pigmeat Working Party M. Tavares stressed: "With a market and consumer oriented sector and as first world pigmeat exporter, EU-wide quality and statistical information is vital in order to analyse potential market trends, to support producers and to allow a good functioning market.
"Today there is a lack of information at retailer and consumer level and this forum should also tackle this dimension."
Copa and Cogeca said it would also encourage the Commission to reflect on the possibility of enlarging this Observatory to include EU sheep, goat meat, poultry and eggs to "increase market transparency and price reporting through the food chain."
Farmers and crofters have been urged to complete the information needed for the Beef Efficiency Scheme ahead of the extended 31 July deadline.
Scottish farming union NFU Scotland has welcomed an extension to the deadline, but it encourages farmers and crofters not to delay.
The administrative deadline, which was due to on the 15 July, has now been extended to 31 July 2016 to allow more time for farmers and crofters to complete their calving data on the ScotEID website.
The objective of the five-year Beef Efficiency Scheme is to assist in the development of suckler herds in Scotland to become more efficient.
The information required by farmers to ensure their application is accurate includes:
Calf: calf ID, date of birth, sex and the dam ID; sire ID of calf; calving ease; size of calf; calf vigour; creep feeding (if applicable); and calf mortality (if applicable).
Dam (mother of the calf): Dam docility and culling/death reasons of the dam (if applicable).
Problems with the system
NFU Scotland understands that there are a small number of applicants who have had problems with the system, and has fed this back to Scottish Government.
This has included some who were previously unable to record calving data for all calves born from 1 January to 1 June 2016, due to issues with holding numbers. ScotEID has confirmed this has now been resolved.
Charlie Adam, NFU Scotlands Livestock Committee Chairman commented: "We welcome this extension to the data submission deadline, however we encourage farmers to not to delay in uploading the information.
"It is important that this extension does not lead to a delay in notification for which calves are to be tissue tested.
"We know of a small number of applicants who have had problems uploading information, and we have relayed this back, but the majority, including myself, have had no problems in doing so.
"NFU Scotland recognises that some of these problems have been resolved by Scottish Government but we understand that there are others that are still being looked at.
"We have put a number of suggestions to Scottish Government as to how the scheme can be improved: Adjustment to allow for a payment on animals in expanding herds and new herds; extending the payment from three years to five years; tissue testing tags to be on farm by the end of August; and clear and proportionate penalties, and will continue to communicate with officials on the scheme.
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.
The Soil Association has today wrote to all major UK bread companies and supermarkets asking them to avoid glyphosate, the widely used herbicide.
With wheat harvest to start in the next few weeks the Soil Association have been asking bread companies to put a stop to glyphosate use as a pre-harvest desiccant in their supply chains.
The EU has just advised glyphosate use as a pre-harvest spray on food crops should be restricted - but its up to individual member states to decide if they want to implement this or not.
Peter Melchett, Policy Director at the Soil Association, wrote the letter - expressing disappointment over the glyphosate extension and calls for UK bread manufacturers to avoid using it.
Soil Association's letter to bread companies and retailers
Glyphosate was first registered for use in the U.S. in 1974. It is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, but faces vocal criticism
"The Soil Association is disappointed that glyphosates license has been extended until December 2017, although the fact that the 18 month extension is far shorter than the 15 years originally proposed has come as a huge blow to the pesticide industry.
"As you may know, it is for Member States to apply further restrictions on the use of glyphosate, but the Commission made clear (that it supports three important curbs on glyphosate use that were recommended by the European Parliament.
"In light of mounting evidence that has found glyphosate is not the benign chemical that you were led to believe, the Soil Association believes all these conditions must be implemented as soon as possible.
"For users of UK flour, the key step must be to ban the use of glyphosate as a pre-harvest desiccant on crops due to enter the human food chain, to prevent the powerful weed-killer being sprayed on food crops just before they are harvested.
"As you know, a ban on pre-harvest use of glyphosate on wheat destined for bread has been the focus of our Not in Our Bread Campaign.
"In view of the controversy surrounding the safety of glyphosate, the Soil Association is calling again for bread manufacturers and flour millers to insist on a glyphosate-free supply of UK cereals destined for human consumption, as there is still time to achieve this before this year's harvest begins.
"The response from UK bread manufacturers to our previous requests that you ensure that glyphosate is not used on the wheat that will supply the flour for your bread, has been to say that UK industry is waiting to see what was decided in Europe.
"The European decision has been taken. The short term and conditional approval for the continued use of glyphosate has clearly confirmed that there are, at the very least, doubts about the safety of glyphosate, and Member States have just agreed that there should be restrictions on pre-harvest use of glyphosate.
"The European Commission has also made clear that implementation of conditions on use is a matter for individual Member States.
"You will be aware that politicians in the UK are currently preoccupied with other matters, and it seems to us that as a responsible company producing bread in the UK, you must now take responsibility for the quality of your own supply chain.
"Will you ensure that all of the flour you source from this years wheat harvest in the UK comes from wheat crops which have not been sprayed with glyphosate immediately before harvest?"
The United Nations has today emphasised an urgent need to promote 'more positive' interactions between agriculture and forestry to build 'sustainable agricultural systems' and 'improve food security.'
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) explains forests play a major role in sustainable agricultural development through a host of channels, including the water cycle, soil conservation, carbon sequestration, natural pest control, influencing local climates and providing habitat protection for pollinators and other species.
"The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as the Paris Agreement on climate change, recognizes that we can no longer look at food security and the management of natural resources separately," said FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva in his opening remarks to the Committee on Forestry.
"Both agreements call for a coherent and integrated approach to sustainability across all agricultural sectors and food systems. Forests and forestry have key roles to play in this regard.
"The key message from is clear: it is not necessary to cut down forests to produce more food," he added.
Global agriculture accounts for the lion's share of the conversion of forests, but on the flip side of the coin, the UN stresses that forests serve many vital ecological functions that benefit agriculture and boost food production.
'Cross-sectoral' coordination of policies
"Food security can be achieved through agricultural intensification and other measures such as social protection, rather than through expansion of agricultural areas at the expense of forests," said Eva Muller, Director of FAO's Forestry Policy and Resources Division.
"What we need is better cross-sectoral coordination of policies on agriculture, forestry, food and land use, better land use planning, effective legal frameworks, and stronger involvement of local communities and smallholders."
She added: "Governments should provide local communities not only with secure land tenure but also with secure forest tenure rights.
"A farmer knows best how to manage his or her own resources but often lacks legal instruments to do so."
Farm leaders warn of 'devastating' new veterinary rule for exports
Fort Bragg to be known as Fort Liberty. Here's what to know.
military
The World Banks Office of Suspension and Debarment (OSD) released its latest Report on Functions, Data and Lessons Learned this spring. The Report (pdf) provides important insights into the World Banks sanctions process.
That process starts with the World Banks integrity vice presidency (INT), which investigates any allegations of sanctionable practices in the performance of a World Bank project. The OSD then evaluates the information gathered by the INT and, if it deems the evidence sufficient, will issue a notice of sanctions proceedings and recommend an appropriate sanction.
According to the OSD Report, the sanction most often recommended is debarment with conditional release.
If the respondent chooses not to contest the allegations or the recommended sanction, then the proposed sanction is imposed. According to the Report, respondents contested only about one third of cases.
The OSD goes forward with the vast majority of cases submitted by the INT. According to the Report, the OSD has rejected only 4 percent of the cases brought by the INT in their entirety, and has referred 36 percent of cases back to the INT for revision.
The respondent may appeal the case to the World Banks Sanctions Board. The Sanctions Board reviews cases de novo and may hold hearings. According to the Report, appeals were taken to the Sanctions Board in only 33 percent of cases.
The World Banks sanctions procedures also provide that a party can seek settlement at any time in the sanctions process. According to the Report, a total of 52 cases brought during the last eight years resulted in settlement agreements. The majority of these settlements occurred during the most recent part of the time period covered by the Report, suggesting that settlement activity may also be increasing.
In total, the Report states that 368 firms and individuals were sanctioned in the 2008-2015 period. The majority were sanctioned during the most recent part of this time period.
If the sanction imposed is debarment with conditional release or conditional non-debarment, the World Bank normally requires the implementation of an integrity compliance program. The Report notes that the World Bank has developed detailed guidance on the conditions for release from debarment, and that these conditions focus on the debarred party demonstrating the adequacy of its integrity compliance program.
The Report also reveals that the vast majority of sanctions cases 83 percent involved allegations of fraud. Only 18 percent involved corruption, 8 percent collusion, 4 percent obstruction and 1 percent coercion.
Of the cases involving fraud, about half involved forged third party documents, while most of the remainder involved misrepresentations by the respondent.
One important lesson from the Report is that the World Bank has ramped up its enforcement activities in recent years. Therefore, companies that wish to continue working on World Bank projects would do well to adopt rigorous compliance regimes.
The Report also suggests that the Bank may be increasingly interested in settling sanctions cases. The Report specifically highlights the timeliness of cooperation, the fast payment of restitution reflecting genuine remorse, and the prompt acceptance of responsibility as mitigating factors in determining sanctions. However, even in settlements, the World Bank has often insisted on the imposition of onerous conditions.
Therefore, although a settlement may result in a shorter period of debarment, the onerous requirements that the World Bank often insists upon as part of a negotiated settlement may outweigh the advantages of taking this path.
____
Dave Nadler is a partner in Blank Romes Washington, D.C., office and chairman of the firms government contracts practice group. He represents companies in anti-corruption matters, including sanctions proceedings before the World Bank and other multilateral development banks.
Adam Proujansky is a partner in the firms Washington office.
I love the sea.
I'm drawn to the ocean, maybe because I was born in Hastings, East Sussex and lived by the sea. I spent my childhood in the rock pools, and on the pebble beaches. In the US, I live in California and am drawn to Big Sur. My new novel Ghost Maven , about a teenage girl who falls in love with a ghost, is set in Monterey Bay.
Tony Lee Moral
Blue is my favourite colour
Blues and greens inspire me. In fact, there is scientific evidence that colours can facilitate creative insight. Not surprisingly I was at my most creative when I lived in Monterey Bay and had the immense stretch of the Pacific in front of me, and the cool cypress forests to hike in.
Abstract Expressionism is my favourite art
My favourite artists are the American Abstract Expressionists, like Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Richard Diebenkorn. They, in turn, were inspired by Henri Matisse. "Harmony in Red" is a painting I can study for hours. For me, art is more relaxing than music, and a great source of pleasure.
The South of France is my Guilty Pleasure
I visit the South of France every summer, because I love the Cote d'Azur. I think I'm attracted by the light quality like so many artists and writers before me. The sun sparkling on the sea and the soft sand is so inviting. It's like stepping into a warm bath.
My first boss was David Attenborough
I have a zoology degree, and my first job after University was researching for David Attenborough on his television series The Private Life of Plants. He was very encouraging and supportive to me. Over twenty years later, when I won the Special Jury award at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in Wyoming, I had the opportunity to thank him.
I like Cats
I'm currently filming a documentary called The Cat that Changed America about P22, the mountain lion who lives in Griffith Park in the middle of LA. It's a very inspiring and heart tugging story about local residents who are campaigning to build a wildlife crossing so that P22 may eventually find a mate.
My favourite film is Marnie
Winston Graham wrote the novel, and he is now very famous again because of his Poldark series set in Cornwall. One critic said Marnie was the best book about a woman written by a man, and the thought processes of Marnie help me when I write female characters. Alfred Hitchcock directed the adaptation, and I wrote an entire book on the making of the film.
My favourite city is New York
I've written two books about the city which never sleeps. The first is a murder mystery set in the 1950s, about a woman who pretends to be a rich man's wife. The second is a middle grade adventure book following an alien boy who is stranded in the city and has to solve a series of brain teasing riddles to travel home.
I'm a member of the Savile Club
The Savile Club is a traditional London Gentleman's club with a long history of literary associations. My favourite authors Charles Darwin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and J.M. Barrie were members. Ghost Maven is partly inspired by the Barrie play Mary Rose, about a girl who disappears on an island and mysteriously re-appears in ghostly form many years later. It's an honour to be a member of the club and carry on their literary traditions.
I have dual residency
I divide my time between London and LA, as I have dual residency. I wrote Ghost Maven when I was living in California for two years, in Monterey Bay. It's an incredibly beautiful place, and a haven for writers. I'll be signing copies of the book at the Old Capitol Books store in Monterey on Labor Day weekend, Saturday September 3rd at 2pm.
www.ghostmaven.com
www.tonyleemoral.com
www.thecatthatchangedamerica.com
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver still haven't divorced - despite splitting up five years ago.
Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger
The couple broke up in July 2011 after it emerged the 'Terminator' actor had fathered a son with their housekeeper and although they have both moved on with their lives, neither are keen to make the split official.
According to gossip website TMZ, the pair didn't have a pre-nuptial agreement and had already worked out how to split their $400 million fortune.
And as their children - Katherine, 26, Christina, 24, Patrick, 22, and Christopher, 19 - are all adults, there are no custody issues.
Sources claim that one of the reasons could be that neither wants to walk away from $200 million and other insiders have speculated that super religious Maria, 60, doesn't believe in divorce.
Arnold - who is in a long-term relationship with Heather Milligan, while Maria is dating Matthew Dowd - previously admitted the breakdown of his marriage was his "biggest personal failure" but he is pleased with how things have turned out.
The 68-year-old star said: "It was my biggest personal failure. We all fall at one time or another and this was a major fall. But I had to get up again because only losers stay down, winners get up.
"I had to move forward and say, 'OK, now how do I heal and how can I bring everyone together again? Now I am absolutely delighted with my life."
And the former Governor of California is thankful his estranged wife has worked with him to ensure he still has a good relationship with their kids.
He said: "It has worked out really so well with the help of Maria.
"My kids are a straight 10. I am so proud of them. I'm so in love with them."
The untitled Blade Runner sequel is already one of the most talked about movies this year... and a fantastic new piece of concept art has been released.
Untitled Blade Runner Sequel
Principle photography is set to start this month and will see Denis Villeneuve back in the director's chair.
Villeneuve has brought us movies such as Sicario and Prisoners in recent years and I cannot wait to see him put his own stamp on this new film.
Speaking about the movie the director said: "I've always been attracted to science-fiction films with strong visual signatures that lead us into unique parallel worlds and the original 'Blade Runner' is by far the best of all time.
"Ridley Scott had the genius to blend science fiction and film noir to create this unique exploration of human condition. The new 'Blade Runner' is an extension of the first movie a few decades later."
The sequel is set several decades after the 1982 original, with Harrison Ford reprising his iconic role as Rick Deckard.
The film is written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, and succeeds the initial story by Fancher and David Peoples based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Story details are not being revealed.
Harrison Ford will reprise the role of Deckard and will be joined on the cast list by Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri, Mackenzie Davis, Barkhad Abdi and Dave Bautista, David Dastmalchian and Hiam Abbass.
It was back in 1982 when Blade Runner hit the big screen and saw Ridley Scott in the director's chair. It has gone to become a huge cult hit and is now one of the most acclaimed sci-fi films of all time.
The new film will be released on 6th October 2017 in the U.S. - no UK release date has yet been announced.
by Helen Earnshaw for www.femalefirst.co.uk
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Duchess Catherine is "very hands on" as a mother.
Duchess Catherine
The 34-year-old royal was joined by her husband Prince William and her son Prince George at the Special Air Service 75th Anniversary event in Credenhill, Herefordshire, England, where the two-year-old royal played with some of the other children.
A woman who attended the event wrote on Facebook: "My children played with George. He's so handsome and Kate is stunning - something to tell the children.
"She's a fantastic down to earth mummy, she plays with him she's very hands on."
Whilst an SAS source added: "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."
During the event, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge greeted members of the regiment, both those who are currently serving and retired servicemen, as well as watching the legendary Red Arrows perform and the Spitfires fly past.
Later in the day, a lucky Prince George got a chance to sit in the cockpit of a plane, where he asked his mother if he could "fly the Red Arrow now", to which Prince William replied, "Not right now."
Meanwhile, Duchess Catherine - who also has 14-month-old daughter Princess Charlotte with Prince William - is reportedly keen to go on a "hot summer holiday".
An insider shared: "Kate is uber-keen to get a hot summer holiday."
It's an open secret that LGBT community members face workplace harassment in some form or the other. Sometimes things can go to such an extent that a person might have to quit a job. That's what precisely happened with Rohini (name changed), who worked with a leading ad firm in Kolkata. She is a lesbian, who was madly, deeply in love with another woman. A talented worker, the 30-something woman couldn't cope with the sneers and jeers from her colleagues. Here's what she has to say about her experience at her former workplace:
I had to quit the firm a few days ago. That is because my colleagues came to know of my sexual preference. They (colleagues) used to talk behind my backthey passed comments such as, 'Doesn't she know that a woman's body is meant only for men?' I couldn't cope with such snide remarks all the time. It was a mental torture."
She left the job. But gossip and rumours spread by colleagues dogged her for a long, long time. She fell in love with a woman. But they broke up too. Her father too, is in no mood to accept her preference. But Rohini is upbeat. "Some parts of the world are slowly accepting same sex marriages. Can any law or rules really stop true love? I wonder," she says.
In fitting compliance with the Prime Minister's Skill India campaign, Apparel Training and Design Centre (ATDC), has trained more than 1,86,000 youth in various aspects of garment production under the Textile Ministry's Integrated Skill Development Scheme (ISDS) and is all set to cross the 2 lakh mark by October this year.Not only did it manage to impart skills to hundreds of thousands of youth, ATDC, the country 's biggest vocational trainer in garment sector, also successfully helped more than 70 % of them get jobs with apparel exporters, said Mr Ashok G Rajani, chairman of ATDC on the occasion of the first anniversary of Skill India campaign.
In fitting compliance with the Prime Minister's Skill India campaign, Apparel Training and Design Centre (ATDC), has trained more than 1,86,000 youth in various aspects of garment production under the Textile Ministry's Integrated Skill Development Scheme (ISDS) and is all set to cross the 2 lakh mark by October this year. Not only did it manage...#
'Skill India Campaign', as the name suggests, was launched in July 2015 with a vision to achieve the objective of skilling India with 'speed, scale and standards'. ATDC has been comprehensively contributing towards it by skilling hundreds of students every year especially in the 'sunrise' apparel or fashion industry in the country, an ATDC release quoting him said.The 2,00,000 mark is not far away and I congratulate the entire team, Mr Rajani said at one of the functions organized by ATDC across the country to mark the Skill India campaign anniversary, which is also observed as the UN world Youth Skill Day.ATDC had organized a series of competitions and workshops in all its major centres Gurgaon, Indore, Faridabad, Chennai Guindy, Patna, Okhla, Kanpur and Ranchi on the occasion. A mystery box contest marked the start of celebrations at the centers. Other competitions such as 'saree draping', 'jewellery making', 'fabric painting' and 'paper bag making', were also held to evaluate the trainees, the ATDC press release said.Alumni meets were also arranged wherein the ex-trainees counseled the students, enabling them to choose a career path in apparel sector wisely. A large number of students and former students participated in the events and shared their experiences, thus adding to the spirit of the occasion.ATDC keeps organising different competitions from time to time to analyze each student's progress. This not only improves their skills but also instills in them a sense of doing better than before. I owe whatever I have achieved today to them, said Manoj Kumar, an ATDC alumnus working as an Industrial Engineer with Modelama Exports in Gurgaon.According to Dr Darlie Koshy, DG & CEO, ATDC, apparel sector has the unique potential to employ youth and women (18-50). The ATDC has such varied courses that in about 45 days the students are able to gain lifelong skills to earn and enjoy their work.With skills put to use they become productive and engage; arresting their attention from other nonproductive activities, he said adding that the World Youth Skill Day emphasizes the need for equipping youth with employable skills so that they can contribute to the well-being of their family and of the country.ATDC, which operates under the aegis of Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) has since its inception in 1996 trained more than 2.5 lakh in line with its vision of "imparting skills and improving lives". It has 200 centres including 65 ATDC vocational institutes and over 135 ATDC-SMART centers and skill camps, the release said. (SH)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
Global retailer of clothing accessories and personal care products retailer GAP Inc said it would invest $3.1 million in its Gallatin campus over the next five years and would create more than 100 new jobs at the company's Sumner County distribution centre in Tennessee state.Most of the new capital will go into technology upgrades as the company expands online fulfillment capabilities in Middle Tennessee, company officials announced in the presence of state Gov. Bill Haslam and Economic and Community Development Commissioner Randy Boyd on Thursday.
Global retailer of clothing accessories and personal care products retailer GAP Inc said it would invest $3.1 million in its Gallatin campus over the next five years and would create more than 100 new jobs at the company's Sumner County distribution centre in Tennessee state. Most of the new capital will go into technology upgrades as the company expands...#
Three years ago, Gap Inc. invested $35 million to bring 90 jobs to Gallatin. This reflects the company's continued commitment to create more jobs for Sumner County, Haslam said adding that the retailer has been a cornerstone of Tennessee's robust logistics and distribution industry that employs 2,63,000 people collectively.The growth in Gallatin by Gap Inc., one of the largest employers in Sumner County, brings us another step closer to make Tennessee the No. 1 location in the Southeast for high quality jobs, he said.According to Boyd, Gap Inc. was now putting more resources into e-commerce. Increased online sales demand was driving its latest expansion in Gallatin. The new hires are needed to expand online fulfillment capabilities for e-commerce sales on Gap Inc.'s brand websites.Gap Inc. VP of Logistics Kevin Kuntz said that as a premier logistics provider, they continued to find innovative ways to dynamically, quickly and reliably deliver product to both retail stores and online customers. With the expansion of our presence in Gallatin, we look forward to providing opportunities for members of our valued community, he added.Headquartered in San Francisco, Gap Inc.'s clothing and accessory brands include Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta, and Intermix. It operates about 3,300 company-operated stores across the globe. (SH)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
African entrepreneur Ms Catherine Nana Esi Anowah Coffie has appealed to the government of Ghana to support the apparel manufacturing industry as it can immensely contribute to economic growth of the West African nation.Ms Coffie, who has been inducted into the West Africa Nobles Forum for her contribution towards the development of women, children and the vulnerable in society said there were many companies in Ghana that had the expertise to produce apparel for both domestic and international markets but they needed was support from the government.
African entrepreneur Ms Catherine Nana Esi Anowah Coffie has appealed to the government of Ghana to support the apparel manufacturing industry as it can immensely contribute to economic growth of the West African nation. Ms Coffie, who has been inducted into the West Africa Nobles Forum for her contribution towards the development of women, children...#
One of the foremost challenges these units faced was acquisition of local contracts mainly because people preferred giving orders to foreign companies as they did not believe in the capacity of domestic manufacturers to produce the desired qualities and quantity, she observed.We, therefore, want the government to help us get more contracts from the local markets because we have the capacity to produce 3000-10000 pieces a day depending on the garment, said Coffie, who started her own garment unit Anowah Afrique Limited (AAL) some years ago.We really feel the government can help us through the trade ministry and other affiliated agencies, she stated adding that the sector did not have enough trained professionals and that her enterprise had to train people before employing them.She recalled how Anowah Afrique Limited which had started working from home had grown into a medium sized factory with the capability to temploy over 2,000 people. However, at present it employed 200 workers producing 500 pieces of garments on a daily basis for the export market.The company exports to China and Dubai but its main focus is the local market. As part of being situated in a trade free zone, her company had to export 75 per cent of its products and it was working hard towards achieving that goal. (SH)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
Dealing a major blow to the man-made fabric (MMF) industry, Textile commissioner Dr Kavita Gupta has rejected their claims that the powerloom sector in Surat was losing business badly due to under-voiced import of synthetic fibres from China.Chinese fabric is not a problem, there must be other factors as well, Dr Gupta told reporters in Surat on the sidelines of the inauguration of the Textile week organized by the Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SGCCI).
Dealing a major blow to the man-made fabric (MMF) industry, Textile commissioner Dr Kavita Gupta has rejected their claims that the powerloom sector in Surat was losing business badly due to under-voiced import of synthetic fibres from China. Chinese fabric is not a problem, there must be other factors as well, Dr Gupta told reporters in Surat...#
In response to what action government had taken on the application of domestic MMF manufacturers seeking anti-dumping duty on Chinese synthetic fabrics, she said the textile ministry had gathered all the import data from the customs and other agencies in June and found that the extent of impact due to import of Chinese fabric in the country is just 3 per cent and for Surat it is a meager 5 per cent."I request the industry stakeholders and associations to submit substantial data regarding the reason for the closure of so many powerloom units in the state, said Dr Gupta expressing concern over the developments in Surat, which has the country's largest man-made fabric industry has upgraded machines in most powerlooms.Earlier, while inaugurating the week-long business show, she said Surat has been identified for development as a mega cluster and most likely IL&FS which has been project consultant for major textile sector projects such as Tripura and in Tirupur, would be chosen for Surat too."We are in the process of finalizing an agency for developing a mega cluster project. Surat is among the MMF mega cluster that we are thinking about. In all probabilities, we are going to finalize IL&FS for the cluster development project," Dr Gupta said.Meanwhile, the SGCCI has demanded that the embroidery and zari sectors in Surat be included in the recently announced Amended Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme (A-TUFS) of the Textiles Ministry.In a memorandum to Textile Commissioner, the industry body said at present only the embroidery machines that are used in the readymade garment units qualify for subsidy in A-TUF, and there is no mention of the Zari units the A-TUF scheme at all.A cluster like Surat has around 1.50 lakh embroidery units in the decentralized and unorganized sector. However, each process in garments manufacturing is carried out by distinctly by different units. Despite of this the embroidery sector has been excluded from getting the benefits of subsidy under A-TUF, the industry organization said.On the other hand, cops winder, considered as an import machinery in weaving preparatory is excluded from the machinery list under A-TUFs, it added. (SH)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
National Award-winning editor KL Praveen says working on superstar Rajinikanth-starrer Kabali earned him a lot of respect. He also said that the Tamil gangster drama is the most relaxed project he has worked on in recent times.
"Working on 'Kabali' earned me a lot of respect. When I worked on Ajith Kumar's 'Mankatha', people referred to me as 'Mankatha' editor. And now I'm being called as 'Kabali' editor. It's very special because I never thought I'll get to work on his (Rajinikanth's) film," Praveen told IANS.
Click on the slider below to view movie stills
Working on the project also earned Praveen nationwide recognition. The film's first teaser, which he had cut, has so far clocked over 25 million views on YouTube.
"After the teaser went viral, I received a lot of calls from Bollywood. I was even offered a big Hindi project, but I couldn't accept it because I was busy with 'Kabali'. Appreciation poured in from all quarters and it still keeps coming in," he said.
Admitting to have been nervous at the beginning of the project, he said the superstar himself made everybody comfortable.
"'Kabali' is easily the most relaxed project I worked on in the last few months. When Rajini sir watched the first cut and appreciated each and every one of us, it boosted our morale. He made us feel confident. Since he liked the film so much, we didn't care much about what others might say," he said.
Directed by Pa Ranjith, Kabali is the story of a gangster's shot at redemption and how he fights for equal pay rights for Tamilians in Malaysia.
"As much as it's a gangster film, it's equally emotional," said Praveen, adding audiences shouldn't expect another Baasha.
"Unlike 'Baasha' and 'Thalapathy', this is a straightforward film about a man who has lost 25 years in prison. If you walk in not expecting another 'Baasha', you'll love the film. It's a Rajinikanth film sans any cliches one usually associates with his films," he said.
According to Praveen, Ranjith's realistic treatment of the script is what makes Kabali stand out from other gangster films.
"He is known for his realistic approach to his stories. Even Rajini sir admitted that 'Kabali' is a Ranjith's film all the way. It means a lot when such a comment comes from the superstar himself. It was after watching Ranjith's 'Madras' that Rajini sir expressed his interest to work with him," he added.
The film also stars Radhika Apte, and Praveen is all praise for her.
"It's very unfortunate that Radhika's Tamil films so far have been bad. However, Ranjith spotted her acting talent from her Hindi films and wanted her on board. She was extraordinary in the film. It takes a lot of effort for a co-actor to score over Rajinikanth in his film. Radhika was fabulous in some of her scenes," he said.
Also Read: Rajinikanth's 'Kabali' To Storm Into 4000 Screens In India Alone?
Divyanka Tripathi and Vivek Dahiya, who got married on July 8th in Bhopal, had arranged for a reception party in Mumbai for their industry friends. The who's who of the Television industry attended the event. The guests enjoyed the party and the couple danced as though nobody was watching them!
Many of you wouldn't know that the couple also partied in their room! It looked like a kind of send off for their close friends who came from abroad, just to share their happy moments. Dhaval Pujara, Rahil, Pankaj Bhatia and Snehal Sahay were a few of Vivek and Divyanka's friends who were in the after party celebrations.
Vivek's friend Rahil posted a group picture (above) snapped with the newly-weds Divyanka and Vivek and wrote, "#final #seeoff #allfriendnsunderaroof."
Another buddy of Vivek, Dhaval Pujara, posted a video of the couple dancing for the song 'Biwi no. 1', which caught our attention. He wrote, "Cutest dance ever #Biwino1 #somuchlove #divek #vivekdivyanka #vivekdahiya #divyankatripathi #happilymarried @vivekdahiya08 @divyankatripathi #friends #mumbai #crazynight." In the video, Divyanka tries to impress her hubby Vivek with her adorable dance moves!
It has to be recalled that DiVek's pre-wedding, wedding and reception (one in Chandigarh and another in Mumbai) - were all grand events. The couple had taken only a few days' leave. Divyanka is back to her work on the sets of Yeh Hai Mohabbatein.
The Mumbai reception was in news for another reason - there were reports that YHM actor, Karan Patel (who was also present in the reception party) refused to speak to the media. But the actor later clarified that he felt 'unnerved' after watching media persons standing just 'an arms length' away from him. He thought that he should walk away before anybody could get hurt.
In Kumkum Bhagya, Pragya (Sriti Jha) is kidnapped by Nikhil's men. We saw how he blackmails Sarla to get Abhi's signatures, to free Pragya. Sarla is helpless and tells the same to Pragya's Dadi, who decides to get Abhi's signatures.
As we had reported earlier, Pragya's Dadi shocks Abhi with the divorce papers. Initially, he doesn't believe that Pragya has sent the divorce papers, but Tanu constantly blames Pragya and emotionally traps Abhi. Finally, she gets Abhi's signatures on the divorce papers. Well, you must be wondering, how Tanu suffers miscarriage! Read on to know the complete story...
Click On The Sliders To Check Out The Spoilers With Pictures
In the upcoming episode, Pragya, along with Pari, escapes from the kidnappers' den. According to the latest spoiler, Pragya manages to send Pari in an auto, but she gets stuck! She tries to stop the vehicles to reach home, but no one would stop for her!
Tanu and Nikhil get to know about Pragya's escape and they go in search of her. Nikhil finds her in the middle of the road and tries to kill her. He drives the car towards Pragya, who somehow manages to escape.
Pragya gets hurt, but Tanu will suffer severe injuries. Seeing Tanu injured, Pragya takes her to the hospital, but the former suffers miscarriage.
Pragya meets Abhi at the hospital and tells him how she was kidnapped by Nikhil and Tanu. But Tanu's emotional atyachaar will change the fate of Pragya!
Tanu's drama will make Abhi feel that she is innocent. On the other hand, Nikhil, Alia and Tanu will take advantage of this situation, and the whole blame of the accident will come on Pragya!
How will Pragya manage to prove herself innocent now? Stay locked to this space for the latest update...
In Zee TV's primetime popular soap, Tashan-E-Ishq, there were a lot of speculations regarding Twinkle's (Jasmin Bhasin) sudden disappearance!
Well, we are now glad that all these speculations have been finally put to rest as Twinkle returned home in the last episode!
Yuvi (Zain Imam) firmly believes that Rocky has kidnapped Twinkle and plans to expose him. He follows Rocky, which brings him to an old warehouse!
Click on the slides to see the latest updates with pictures.
Rocky finally admits that he has kidnapped Twinkle! On hearing this, Yuvi is enraged. Rocky, then challenges Yuvi to find his beloved wife if he can, and throws a key at him!
Yuvi bends to pick up the key and as soon as he lifts his head, he is puzzled to see Rocky pointing a gun at him!
Just then, someone fires a bullet at Rocky, and his knee is injured. Yuvi hears the police siren; fearing that he might get caught, he escapes!
On the other hand, Rocky brings Twinkle home. Twinkle is lying unconscious. Yuvi arrives at the Sarna House and blames Rocky for kidnapping Twinkle. To his surprise, the Sarnas defend Rocky and blame him!
Just then, Twinkle wakes up, confused. She is puzzled to see her family blaming Yuvi for kidnapping her!
In the upcoming episodes, she will put all the blames on Yuvi, for kidnapping her! Relax guys, as per the latest spoiler, this will be her plan to bring out the truth.
While Rocky believes that he is successful in creating a rift between the couple, Twinkle on the other hand, trusts Yuvi completely and will plan to find out the truth!
If approved, SB5, a biosimilar candidate referencing Humira (adalimumab), will be Samsung Bioepis' third anti-TNF-a biosimilar in Europe
The Marketing Authorization Application for SB5 was based on a 52-week Phase III study which showed SB5's comparable efficacy and safety to Humira among different treatment groups, including those who switched from Humira to SB5
Samsung Bioepis Co., Ltd. today announced that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has accepted for review the company's Marketing Authorization Application (MAA) for SB5, a biosimilar candidate referencing Humira (adalimumab).
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160717005055/en/
Samsung Bioepis headquarters in Incheon, Korea. (Photo: Business Wire)
SB5 is Samsung Bioepis' third anti-TNF-a biosimilar candidate submitted for review to the EMA, following Benepali (etanercept) and Flixabi (infliximab), both of which have since received European Commission approval in January 2016 and May 2016, respectively. If approved, the marketing and distribution of SB5 in Europe will be handled by Biogen.
"If approved, SB5 will join Benepali and Flixabi in Europe, which have already started to increase patient access to high-quality treatment options while driving down healthcare spending," said Christopher Hansung Ko, President CEO of Samsung Bioepis. "We will continue to work hard to advance one of the industry's largest biosimilar pipelines, so that more patients can access affordable medicines without any compromise in the quality of treatment."
The MAA for SB5 was based on data derived from a 52-week Phase III study which randomized 544 patients with moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis despite methotrexate therapy. 24-week results showed ACR20 response rate of 72.5% in the SB5 arm versus 72.0% in the adalimumab arm, while the safety profile of SB5 was comparable to adalimumab. At Week 24, 508 patients with rheumatoid arthritis were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to receive either SB5 or adalimumab 40 mg every other week via subcutaneous injection. 254 patients from SB5 continued to receive SB5 (SB5/SB5), 125 patients from adalimumab were transitioned to SB5 (adalimumab/SB5) and 129 patients from adalimumab continued to receive adalimumab (adalimumab/adalimumab). At Week 52, the efficacy, safety and immunogenicity profiles remained comparable between SB5/SB5, adalimumab/SB5 and adalimumab/adalimumab with ACR20 response rates of 76.9%, 81.1% and 71.2%, respectively. There were no treatment emergent issues or clinically relevant immunogenicity precipitated by switching. After transition up to Week 52, the incidence of anti-drug antibody was 15.7% in SB5/SB5, 16.8% in adalimumab/SB5 and 18.3% in adalimumab/adalimumab.
Samsung Bioepis Biosimilar Pipeline
Samsung Bioepis continues to advance a broad pipeline of 13 biosimilar candidates, which includes the following six first-wave candidates that cover the therapeutic areas of immunology, oncology and diabetes:
SB4 biosimilar candidate referencing Enbrel (etanercept) i
(etanercept) SB2 biosimilar candidate referencing Remicade (infliximab) ii
(infliximab) SB5 biosimilar candidate referencing Humira (adalimumab)
(adalimumab) SB9 (MK-1293) biosimilar candidate referencing Lantus (insulin glargine)
(insulin glargine) SB3 biosimilar candidate referencing Herceptin (trastuzumab)
(trastuzumab) SB8 biosimilar candidate referencing Avastin (bevacizumab)
i SB4 has received regulatory approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS), and is being marketed in Europe by Biogen as Benepali and in Korea by MSD/Merck as BRENZYS
ii SB2 has received regulatory approval from the EMA and MFDS, and is being marketed in Europe by Biogen as Flixabiand in Korea by MSD/Merck as RENFLEXIS
Commercialization of Samsung Bioepis Biosimilars
Samsung Bioepis is responsible for the development and manufacture of all immunology and oncology biosimilar candidates in its pipeline, as well as global clinical trials and regulatory registration in all markets worldwide for these biosimilar candidates. Following approval, Samsung Bioepis biosimilar products are marketed and distributed by its commercialization partners, Merck and Biogen.
Manufacturing of Samsung Bioepis Biosimilars
Samsung Bioepis and Biogen have a manufacturing partnership for anti-TNF-a biosimilars, which brings together Samsung Bioepis' technical leadership in manufacturing process development and Biogen's rich heritage and expertise in manufacturing biologics. Samsung Bioepis' biosimilars are manufactured in the same state-of-the-art drug substance facilities that have manufactured Biogen's biologic medicines.
About Samsung Bioepis Co., Ltd.
Established in 2012, Samsung Bioepis is a biopharmaceutical company committed to realizing healthcare that is accessible to everyone. Through innovations in product development and a firm commitment to quality, Samsung Bioepis aims to become the world's leading biopharmaceutical company. Samsung Bioepis continues to advance a broad pipeline of 13 biosimilar candidates that include six first-wave candidates that cover the therapeutic areas of immunology, oncology and diabetes. Samsung Bioepis is a joint venture between Samsung BioLogics and Biogen. For more information, please visit: www.samsungbioepis.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160717005055/en/
Contacts:
MEDIA CONTACT:
Samsung Bioepis Co., Ltd.
Mingi Hyun, +82-32-455-6128
mingi.hyun@samsung.com
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO--(Marketwired - July 17, 2016) - International trade and foreign investment expert Pablo Soria de Lachica applauded Mexico's recent $4.4 billion loan to state-owned oil company Pemex. "Infusing Pemex with capital is a strong strategy in both the short- and medium-terms," he stated. "As a result of this cash influx, the company now has the capability to adapt to the evolving challenges in the global oil market." Soria de Lachica noted that, given Pemex's prominent role in the Mexican economy, the company's capacity to respond to fluctuating prices is critical. "Since the loan, the price of oil has recovered, doubling from $26 per barrel to $52 earlier this month." According to World Bank forecasts, the cost of petroleum will continue its upward trajectory through 2025. Soria de Lachica views the international financial institution's confidence in oil futures as further evidence that Mexico's Pemex investment will have significant rewards.
The government's energy investment will also have a positive impact on production, enabling Pemex to make up for lost ground in its deep water drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. "As energy demands continue to increase, the company's ability to increase petroleum output will be critical," Soria de Lachica indicated. Currently, oil accounts for about five percent of Mexico's exports, significantly lower than the 33 percent benchmark in 1990. Soria de Lachica sees this as an indicator of the country's export growth potential in the energy sector. "Because private investment in drilling and exports is relatively insignificant, it positions the state-owned company to dominate market opportunities," he reasoned.
Acclaimed broker Pablo Soria de Lachica pointed out that Mexico's decision to lend $1.5 billion in capital and $2.7 billion to cover other company obligations will improve Pemex's liquidity while ensuring it's long-term liquidity and feasibility. "Pemex has made enormous strides in aligning its budget with today's market realities and increasing efficiencies," he offered. "The Finance Ministry has done its part to ensure the company's health by authorizing changes to reduce its tax liability by approximately $2.8 billion per year."
Pablo Soria de Lachica observes that Mexico is on pace to economically outperform most of its Latin American neighbors. "By the end of 2016, I expect growth in the Mexican economy to fall between 2.0 and 2.6 percent." He says that this economic upswing, along with the stabilization in the country's exchange rate, proves that Mexico's Pemex loan was well timed and is already paying off.
After receiving his Master of Business Administration degree from Universidad Tecnologico de Mexico, Pablo Soria de Lachica became an expert in foreign exchange markets. His knowledge and experience enabled him to deliver guidance to clients on international exchange and market analysis, as well as to develop trading tools for investors. Today, he collaborates with Kartoshka in creating sales, telemarketing, and customer support technologies. Also an avid philanthropist, Soria de Lachica supports environmental causes and youth programs.
Pablo Soria de Lachica -- Foreign Exchange Specialist: http://pablosoriadelachicanews.com
Pablo Soria de Lachica -- Predicts Impact of China Crisis on World Economy: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/pablo-soria-de-lachica---predicts-impact-of-china-crisis-on-world-economy-2015-10-15
Pablo Soria de Lachica -- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablo-soria-de-lachica-82460411b
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Mobidiag Oy, a Finnish molecular diagnostics company, today announced that it has signed a 15 million euro loan with the European Investment Bank Group. As part of the InnovFin initiative, the loan will allow Mobidiag to finalize and scale up Novodiag products manufacturing, assay validation and commercialization over the next 3 years. The operation is supported by 'InnovFin EU Finance for Innovators', with the financial backing of the European Union under Horizon 2020 Financial Instruments.
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160717005013/en/
The 5 innovative Finnish Midcap companies supported by the InnovFin initiative, represented by Jan Vapaavuori from the EIB. Photo: EIB (european investment bank)
"We are extremely pleased with the outcome of this loan and we are very proud to be the 3rd recipient of a loan granted by InnovFin Infectious Diseases since its creation. Since our Finnish and French teams joined forces in 2013, we have thrived to become a key player in the field of IVD for infectious diseases. Thanks to the EIB, we have now the resources to reach our goals and build significant value over the next years based on our state-of-the-art assays and platforms", said Tuomas Tenkanen, Mobidiag's CEO.
The EIB loan will strongly contribute to the development and validation of Novodiag, a proprietary 'sample-in, result-out' diagnostic solution. Novodiag platform will offer an on demand automated solution for small labs or decentralized units bringing key benefits such as low hands-on time, ease of use and reliable results. Thanks to its extensive solution offer and strategic presence in Finland and France, Mobidiag is able to answer current health care challenges throughout Europe.
About Mobidiag
Established in 2000, Mobidiag develops innovative solutions to advance the diagnosis of infectious diseases and serves the European clinical diagnostics market since 2008. Mobidiag is headquartered in Espoo, Finland, with a subsidiary in Paris, France.
Mobidiag is able to address both high volume and on demand testing with:
The Amplidiag product line, innovative multiplex tests for gastrointestinal infections. Based on well-established real-time PCR technology, they ensure optimal performance, suitability for high-volume screening use and cost-effectiveness in mid-sized to large laboratory settings.
The new Amplidiag Easy platform brings the Amplidiag suite further by automating the workflow from sample to results.
Easy platform brings the Amplidiag suite further by automating the workflow from sample to results. Novodiag platform and associated panels (upcoming) is a fully automated solution and suitable for smaller volumes and labs. Visit www.mobidiag.com for more information.
About EIB and InnovFin
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the only bank owned by and representing the interests of the European Union Member States and strives to make a significant contribution to growth and employment in Europe. The "InnovFin EU Finance for Innovators" programme consists of a series of integrated and complementary financing tools and advisory services offered by the EIB Group, covering the entire value chain of research and innovation in order to support investments from the smallest to the largest enterprise.
Infectious Diseases Finance Facilityprovides a broad range of financial products ranging from standard debt to risk sharing instruments for amounts between 7.5 and 75million euros, to innovative players active in developing new innovative vaccines, drugs, medical and diagnostic devices or novel research infrastructures for combatting infectious diseases. Final recipients will be project developers that have successfully completed the pre-clinical stage, and preferably early stage clinical development, and would now require clinical validation or be ready for later stage clinical trials.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160717005013/en/
Contacts:
Mobidiag Oy/Ltd.
Tuomas Tenkanen, +350 50 553 4980
CEO
tuomas.tenkanen@mobidiag.com
Regulatory News:
Inwido (STO:INWI):
This information is such that Inwido AB (publ) is obliged to publish in accordance with the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted by the contact persons below for publication on Monday, 18 July 2016 at 7:46 a.m.
Inwido's President and CEO Hakan Jeppsson comments on the second quarter of 2016:
Innovations (216(:
"At SEK 208 million (180), we are reporting an operating profit of more than SEK 200 million for an individual quarter for the first time. This was Inwido's best quarter ever."
"In line with the strong growth in earnings, the operating margin rose to 14.2 percent and sales increased by nearly 7 percent to SEK 1,470 million."
"Order bookings increased by 12 percent, mainly within our most important segments and channels. Growth strengthened, primarily in Finland and Norway."
"Acquisitions are fundamental to our growth strategy. So far in 2016, we have acquired companies that contribute annual sales of approx. SEK 800 million, two of them in Finland, one in Denmark. After the quarter, we also entered an acquisition agreement with CWG Choices in the UK."
"We are continuing to work according to our plan with a predominance of sales in consumer-driven channels, to continuously review our structure to find potential additional efficiency enhancements and to work with both organic and acquisition-based growth."
Read the entire press release in the pdf attached
About Inwido
Inwido is Europe's largest supplier of windows and doors. The company has operations in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland and the UK, as well as exports to a large number of other countries. The Group markets some 20 strong local brands including Elitfonster, SnickarPer, Hajom, Hemmafonster, Outline, Tiivi, Pihla, Diplomat and Sokolka. Inwido has approximately 3,400 employees and generated sales of slightly more than SEK 5.2 billion in 2015. The Group's headquarters are located in Malmo, Sweden. For further information, please visit www.inwido.com
This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160717005086/en/
Contacts:
Inwido AB
Hakan Jeppsson, 46 (0)10-451 45 51 or 46 (0)70-550 15 17
President and CEO
or
Peter Welin, 46 (0)10-451 45 52 or 46 (0)703 24 31 90
CFO
peter.welin@inwido.com
VIENNA (dpa-AFX) - SGS Group (SGSOY.PK) reported that its first-half profit attributable to equity holders reached 258 million Swiss francs, an increase of 24.6% over the prior year (constant currency basis) and an increase of 20.6% compared with the 214 million francs reported in June 2015 mainly due to the restructuring expenses accounted for in the first-half of 2015. Earnings per share was 33.99 francs compared to 27.98 francs. Adjusted EBITDA reached 550 million Swiss francs, an increase of 2.6% (constant currency basis) versus prior year. Adjusted operating income increased by 2.3% to 411 million francs versus 401 million francs (constant currency basis) in prior year. The Group reported revenue growth of 7.0% on a constant currency basis to 2.9 billion Swiss francs, nearly equally split between organic revenue growth of 3.4% and 3.6% contributed by recently acquired companies. On a historical reported basis, Group revenues increased by 5.4%. The Group said its trading conditions remained challenging due principally to reductions and delays in expenditures by clients in the Energy and Mining industries which impacted our Oil, Gas & Chemicals, Industrial and Minerals businesses. For 2016, the Group expects to deliver organic revenue growth in the range of 2.5% and 3.5% with an increase in adjusted operating income on a constant currency basis and solid cash flow generation. SGS Group said it remains committed to deliver its 2016-2020 plan: Mid single-digit organic growth on average with an improvement over the period; and an adjusted operating income margin of at least 18% by the end of the period. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Regulatory News:
Alfa Laval (STO:ALFA)
"Order intake was marginally better than in the first quarter and in line with our expectations. The large projects in the market were still very few at the same time as demand was slow within the oil gas and marine sectors. During the quarter external prognoses for the 2016 ship contracting were reduced to the range 650-850 from about 900. This is a low figure and in line with how we perceive the market.
The order intake in the quarter was supported by a number of sectors, such as food. Geographically, the growth continued in Eastern Europe, including Russia. Excluding the Marine business, Asia also continued to grow with China as the main engine. Sequentially, the U.S. showed good growth, but compared to the same quarter last year the order intake is negatively impacted by the downturn within the oil gas sector.
The outcome per division was mixed. The operating margin in Process Technology continued to be burdened by a negative mix, which is expected to remain during the rest of the year. The Marine Diesel division showed a flat order intake in the quarter, with a downturn in two segments at the same time as the demand within Pumping Systems grew. The profitability continued to be good. The Equipment division had a good quarter with good growth, especially in the food sector and in addition a stable operating margin.
The strategic review that was announced in the previous quarter is continuing according to plan. The result of this review will be presented before the end of the year."
Tom Erixon, President and CEO
Summary: second quarter
Order intake decreased by 9 percent* to SEK 8,101 (9,146) million.
Net sales decreased by 9 percent* to SEK 8,950 (10,177) million.
Adjusted EBITA**: SEK 1,393 (1,816) million.
Adjusted EBITA margin**: 15.6 (17.8) percent.
Result after financial items: SEK 1,265 (1,455) million.
Net income: SEK 931 (1,075) million.
Earnings per share: SEK 2.21 (2.54).
Cash flow from operating activities: SEK 1,233 (1,505) million.
Impact on adjusted EBITA of foreign exchange effects: SEK 137 (182) million.
Summary: first six months
Order intake decreased by 14 percent* to SEK 15,811 (18,990) million.
Net sales decreased by 8 percent* to SEK 17,149 (19,248) million.
Adjusted EBITA**: SEK 2,726 (3,385) million.
Adjusted EBITA margin**: 15.9 (17.6) percent.
Result after financial items: SEK 2,355 (2,718) million.
Net income: SEK 1,802 (1,938) million.
Earnings per share: SEK 4.27 (4.59).
Cash flow from operating activities: SEK 2,143 (2,606) million.
Impact on adjusted EBITA of foreign exchange effects: SEK 230 (330) million.
Excluding currency effects. ** Alternative performance measures, defined on page 22.
Outlook for the third quarter:
"We expect that demand during the third quarter 2016 will be in line with or somewhat lower than in the second quarter." Earlier published outlook (April 25, 2016): "We expect that demand during the second quarter 2016 will be on about the same level as in the first quarter."
The interim report has not been subject to review by the company's auditors.
Alfa Laval AB (publ)
PO Box 73
SE-221 00 Lund
Sweden
Corporate registration number: 556587-8054
This information is information that Alfa Laval AB (publ) is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out below, at CET 11.45 on July 18, 2016.
This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160718005458/en/
Contacts:
Alfa Laval AB (publ)
Peter Torstensson
Senior Vice President, Communications
Phone: +46 46 36 72 31
Mobile: +46 709 33 72 31
peter.torstensson@alfalaval.com
or
Gabriella Grotte
Investor Relations Manager
Phone: +46 46 36 74 82
Mobile: +46 709 78 74 82
gabriella.grotte@alfalaval.com
SAN FRANCISCO, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
The globaloptical imaging system marketis expected to reach USD 3.0 billion by 2024, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Technological advancements and rising preference for noninvasive technology are anticipated to be the preliminary market catalyst.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150105/723757 )
Rising R&D efforts by pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies requiring the use of optical imaging systems are encouraging the market growth. Additionally, veterinary hospitals and educational institutions are utilizing this technology in research and diagnostics, due to its noninvasive nature.
North America and Europe together accounted for the largest market share that was over 60.0% in 2015. Well-developed research infrastructure, availability of skilled professionals, and faster adoption rates of technically advanced devices within the region are certain factors promoting growth. Furthermore, supportive government initiatives in this region are propelling the growth in this sector. The government of Canada invested around USD 750,000 in the Canadian Imaging Research Center to promote research and commercialization opportunities in the imaging sector.
Asia Pacific is expected to witness the fastest growth rate during the forecast period owing to the easy availability of resources. Favorable environment is encouraging research activities as government funding for R&D is increasing in emerging nations, such as India and China. For instance, Impacting Research Innovation and Technology (IMPRINT), an initiative by the Indian government, promotes R&D in imaging and other technology sectors. This is expected to attract market players to this region, thereby facilitating higher penetration and expansion.
Browse full research report with TOC on "Optical Imaging System Market Analysis By Technology (Photoacoustic Tomography, Optical Coherence Tomography, Hyperspectral Imaging, Near-infrared Spectroscopy), By Product (Imaging Systems, Optical Imaging Software, Cameras, Illumination Systems, Lenses), By Application (Pathological Imaging, Intraoperative Imaging), By End Use , By Therapeutic Area (Ophthalmology, Cardiology, Oncology, Dermatology, Neurology) And Segment Forecasts To 2024" at: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/optical-imaging-system-market-analysis
Further Key Findings From the Study Suggest:
The optical coherence tomography segment is the largest segment over the forecast period. The largest share was attributed to the extensive application in small animal imaging and research projects.
North America captured the largest market share of around 35.0% in 2015. The market is expected to maintain its dominance during the forecast period. Technologically advanced research infrastructure and increasing use in medical testing for chronic conditions are some of the factors supporting the growth in this region.
captured the largest market share of around 35.0% in 2015. The market is expected to maintain its dominance during the forecast period. Technologically advanced research infrastructure and increasing use in medical testing for chronic conditions are some of the factors supporting the growth in this region. Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness a significant growth rate from 2016 to 2024 owing to the government initiatives in this region. For instance, the Asia-Pacific Optical Sensors Conference held every year by the Optical Society helps showcase new products to consumer, thereby increasing awareness regarding the market and its developments.
is anticipated to witness a significant growth rate from 2016 to 2024 owing to the government initiatives in this region. For instance, the Asia-Pacific Optical Sensors Conference held every year by the Optical Society helps showcase new products to consumer, thereby increasing awareness regarding the market and its developments. Some key players are PerkinElmer, Inc., St. Jude Medical, Inc., Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Topcon Corporation, and Koninklijke Philips N.V.
In order to curb the competition, key industry players are meticulously involved in the development of new systems that facilitate easy diagnosis. For instance, the Dragonfly Catheter series by St. Jude Medical, Inc. provides data sampling of around 100 MB per second.
Request for sample of this research report: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/optical-imaging-system-market-analysis/request
Grand View Research has segmented optical imaging system market on the basis of technology, product, application, end-use therapeutic area, and region.
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Technology (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Photoacoustic Tomography Optical Coherence Tomography Hyperspectral Imaging Near-infrared Spectroscopy
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Product (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Imaging Systems Optical Imaging Software Optical Imaging Systems Spectral Imaging Systems Cameras Illumination Systems Lenses Other Optical Imaging Products
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Application (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Pathological Imaging Intraoperative Imaging
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by End-Use (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Research Laboratories Hospitals & Clinics Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Therapeutic Areas (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Ophthalmology Cardiology Oncology Dermatology Neurology
Optical Imaging Systems Market by Region (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 North America U.S. Canada Europe UK Germany Asia Pacific Japan China Latin America Brazil Mexico MEA South Africa Saudi Arabia
Browse related reports by Grand View Research:
Rat Model Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/rat-model-market
Direct Energy Medical Devices Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/direct-energy-medical-devices-market
Fluid Management Systems Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/fluid-management-systems-market
Kidney Fibrosis Treatment Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/kidney-fibrosis-treatment-market
About Grand View Research
Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. Thecompany provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.
Read Our Blogs - ni2014.org , grandviewresearch.com/blogs/healthcare
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Grand View Research, Inc
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In light of the forecasted higher temperatures this week, the Hamilton County Sheriffs Office Safe Journey Program is cancelling its regularly scheduled car seat check tomorrow at the AAA Motor Club on Gunbarrel Road.
With temperatures forecasted to reach 100 degrees, Safe Journey personnel do not wish to keep children outside or in a hot car any longer than necessary due to the heat.
Often times, car seat checks require children and parents to exit the vehicle and can take several minutes to perform. During this time children can become very hot, especially newborns and infants.
The car seat checks should resume next week on Tuesday, weather permitting.
MIAMI, 2016-07-18 14:30 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KISSES FROM ITALY Inc., a U.S. based fast-casual restaurant chain, in less than one short year, has experienced a rapid rise by expanding its corporate owned stores from one location to four, recently opening its fourth restaurant in the Wyndham Royal Vista - Pompano Beach. It is interesting to note that all three new locations are situated within Wyndham Hotel properties. For those following this startup chain's moves, the rapid rate of expansion and the development of a strategic partnership with Wyndham are indicative of a strong positive trend.The Company is committed in continuing the brand expansion with additional corporate owned stores in the state of Florida and in other areas of the U.S. In addition, the company has begun to parlay its success and is taking the initial steps into franchising opportunities regionally and eventually nationwide. "We place great value in our relationship with the Wyndham Group for our corporate owned stores and we have definitely received some serious inquiries concerning franchising and are driving the business into this next phase," said Michael Di Turi, the Company's co-founder, President and Co-CEO. "We have recently retained the legal services of renowned franchise lawyer Harold L. Kestenbaum along with iFranchise Group, a premier consulting expert in the franchising industry."Claudio Ferri, also a co-founder of the Company, CIO and Co-CEO, said, "We are cautiously optimistic about what the future holds for KISSES FROM ITALY. So far our results have exceeded our expectations. We are exploring the possibility of going public and have had positive responses from the experts that we have spoken with on that idea." Speaking on the brand and products, Claudio adds, "Focusing on high quality ingredients at very reasonable prices is our primary driver. We want to make sure our guests are made to feel at home and then walk away more than satisfied. Undoubtedly, we feel that at this moment we are carving out our own space in the South Florida fast-casual restaurant sector."About KISSES FROM ITALY Inc.KISSES FROM ITALY is a U.S. based restaurant chain focused on fast-casual dining with traditional Italian Panini, homemade lasagna, panzerotti Di Bari, coffee and dessert offerings. The business entity successfully began operations in May of 2015 with the opening of its flagship location in Ft. Lauderdale at 3146 NE 9th St. This storefront is situated mere steps from the beach near the corner of East Sunrise Blvd and A1A. It has proven the ideal launch pad for the company to rapidly open three additional sites across the greater Ft. Lauderdale/Pompano Beach area.Safe Harbor Forward-Looking StatementsTo the extent that statements in this press release are not strictly historical, including statements as to revenue projections, business strategy, outlook, objectives, future milestones, plans, intentions, goals, future financial conditions, future collaboration agreements, the success of the Company's development, events conditioned on stockholder or other approval, or otherwise as to future events, such statements are forward-looking, and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made.For Additional Information Contact:Malcolm McClintock, MBA Alabaska Marketing LLC 1500 S. Ocean Blvd, Suite 1505 Pompano Beach, FL 33062, United States Tel: 407-408-0912Company Contact Information:KISSES FROM ITALY Inc. Miami Brickell Bayview Center 80 SW 8th St, Suite 2000 Miami, FL 33130, United States Tel: 305-423-7129 Direct: 305-747-9354
Effects on C-reactive protein and cholesterol efflux support dalcetrapib benefits on cardiovascular outcomes in patients with AA genotype of ADCY9 gene
Data support the rationale for studying dalcetrapib's effects on cardiovascular outcomes in DalCor's ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial in patients with the AA genotype
MONTREAL and LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DalCor Pharmaceuticals and The Montreal Heart Institute today announced the publication in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics of data demonstrating dalcetrapib's genotype-dependent effects on high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) from the prospective analysis of a randomized, placebo controlled clinical trial that included 5243 genotyped patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). In addition, cholesterol efflux results support dalcetrapib's benefits on atherosclerotic cardiovascular outcomes in patients with the AA genotype at polymorphism rs1967309 of the ADCY9 gene from the dal-Plaque-2 clinical study. Cholesterol efflux is a key beneficial component of HDL biology while hs-CRP is associated with deleterious inflammation in the cardiovascular system.
hs-CRP was measured at baseline and end of a 5243 patient study from the dal-OUTCOMES study. The dal-OUTCOMES study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled Phase 3 clinical trial designed to test the safety and cardiovascular efficacy of dalcetrapib in patients with ACS. Cholesterol efflux capacity of HDL from J774 macrophages was determined at baseline and 12 months in 171 genotyped patients from dal-PLAQUE-2, a randomized, multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel group Phase 3 clinical trial designed to assess the effect of dalcetrapib on atherosclerotic disease progression in patients with evidence of coronary artery disease. Efflux of HDL from the macrophage using the patient's blood is a relevant marker of lipid metabolism and is a sign of the healthy positive effect of dalcetrapib in patients with the right genotype.
In the article, titled "Genotype-Dependent Effects of Dalcetrapib on Cholesterol Efflux and Inflammation: Concordance with Clinical Outcomes" by Jean-Claude Tardif, Marie-Pierre Dube et al., the authors found that:
There was a significant increase in cholesterol efflux in dalcetrapib-treated AA population, but not the GG genotype group;
The GG population showed significant increase of hs-CRP whereas the patients with AA genetic profile had no significant increase (and even a trend for a decrease) in hs-CRP when treated with dalcetrapib compared to placebo.
Quotes
Robert McNeil, Ph.D., chief executive officer of DalCor, said, "Following positive results of the retrospective GWAS study we believe that targeting a genetically specific patient population with dalcetrapib has the potential to reduce risk of cardiovascular events in this select patient population. In this study, four cases of prospective analysis of samples of two different clinical trials delivered expected results: dalcetrapib is beneficial for a select genetic patient group and biology of the response is as we predicted. Consistency of the findings reinforces our expectation that dalcetrapib will show a reduction in clinical cardiovascular outcomes in our ongoing randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled Phase 3 clinical trial evaluating dalcetrapib in patients with the AA genotype. We expect to complete the clinical trial in the first half of 2020."
Jean-Claude Tardif, C.M., MD, FRCPC, FACC, FAHA, FESC, director of the Research Center at the Montreal Heart Institute and professor of medicine at the UniversiteI de MontreIal, said, "These data support the hypothesis that patients with a specific genetic profile will respond favorably to dalcetrapib and they provide us with key insight into the biology of this response. Matching dalcetrapib with the right patients based on genotype holds great potential to enhance effectiveness of therapy for better cardiovascular outcomes. This is a major milestone in the battle against atherosclerosis, the leading cause of mortality in the world and we hope to use these findings to further dissect the mode of action of dalcetrapib and potentially improve standard of care for patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease."
About Dalcetrapib
Dalcetrapib is one of four CETP inhibitors to have reached full-scale development. Over 17,000 patients have participated in dalcetrapib clinical trials. A large, double blind cardiovascular (CV) study, dal- Outcomes, randomized over 15,000 patients already taking statins. The drug was well tolerated but the study results were globally neutral - there was no significant reduction in CV events in the dalcetrapib group.
In 2012, investigators at the Montreal Heart Institute led by Professors Jean-Claude Tardif and Marie- Pierre DubeI found a significant association between the effects of dalcetrapib in altering CV events and the polymorphism at the rs1967309 location in the adenylate cyclase type 9 (ADCY9) gene. Patients with the AA genotype had a 39% reduction in CV events when treated with dalcetrapib compared to placebo, while GG patients had a 27% increase and AG patients had a neutral effect. This analysis was conducted in 5749 patients. Additional analyses of other studies also demonstrated reduced atherosclerosis in the AA population when treated with dalcetrapib.
DalCor secured a worldwide exclusive license for dalcetrapib together with rights to the genetic marker for use with dalcetrapib and is sponsoring the dal-GenE study, which is planned to include 5,000 patients to prospectively confirm the results of the pharmacogenomic analysis in the dal-Outcomes study in a patient population with the AA genotype at the rs1967309 location in the ADCY9 gene.
About DalCor Pharmaceuticals
DalCor is developing precision treatments by genetically targeting patients that will derive clinical benefits. By integrating clinical and genetic insights, DalCor intends to deliver superior clinical cardiovascular outcomes. The company's first development program, dalcetrapib, is intended to reduce cardiovascular events in a specific genetic subset of patients. DalCor Pharmaceuticals has offices in Montreal, San Mateo, Calif., Zug, Switzerland and Stockport, U.K. For more information, visit www.dalcorpharma.com.
About the Montreal Heart Institute
Founded in 1954 by Dr. Paul David, the Montreal Heart Institute constantly aims for the highest standards of excellence in the cardiovascular field through its leadership in clinical and basic research, ultra-specialized care, professional training and prevention. It is part of the broad network of health excellence made up of UniversiteI de MontreIal and its affiliated institutions. The Montreal Heart Institute ranks as the No. 1 research hospital in Canada for research intensity and research funds per researcher, according to Research Infosource. For more information, please visit www.icm-mhi.org.
DalCor Contacts:
Corporate
DalCor Pharmaceuticals Donald Black, M.D.
(609) 613-6637 dblack@dalcorpharma.com
Media
Russo Partners
Matt Middleman, M.D.
(212) 845-4272 matt.middleman@russopartnersllc.com
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - July 18, 2016) - Charlesbank Capital Partners, LLC, a middle-market private equity firm, today announced that its affiliate has entered into a definitive agreement with Investcorp to acquire Polyconcept. Equity for the transaction will be provided by Charlesbank, management and certain other investors. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Polyconcept is the leading value-added supplier in the $30 billion promotional products industry. Sourcing products from hundreds of manufacturers, the company then customizes them on behalf of its 35,000 reseller customers and ships the products to end-consumers (typically businesses) located in the United States, Europe and across the world. Polyconcept offers one of the industry's broadest assortments, with over 25,000 SKUs across hard goods and premium apparel, providing customers with an integrated set of services including product design, global sourcing, digital services, sales tools, order management, customization and next-day shipping.
Josh Klevens, Managing Director at Charlesbank, said that his firm was attracted to the company's strategic position and its diversification across customers, suppliers, price points and geographies. "Polyconcept is a market leader in both the United States and Europe, with superior customer service and global capabilities," he said. "We are very pleased to have the opportunity to partner with the management team to expand the business globally, building on their track record of success and tapping into new opportunities for growth."
"We have had a successful chapter with Investcorp and are thankful for its partnership over the years," said Gene Colleran, Chief Executive Officer for Polyconcept. "We are excited to forge a new partnership with Charlesbank, which has a long history of joining forces with management teams to grow their businesses. With Charlesbank's financial support, strategic guidance and significant network of contacts, we look forward to working together to create substantial value for the future."
Maud Brown, Managing Director of Corporate Investment North America at Investcorp, said, "When we acquired Polyconcept, we recognized the company's potential to become a leading international brand with a global presence. We worked closely with senior management to transform the business into the global leader that it is today, supporting a series of strategic acquisitions and realizing success through expanding into new markets, launching new product categories, building out a key digital presence and implementing significant operational enhancements. We believe that Polyconcept is very well-placed for the future and wish management and Charlesbank the best of luck in this new phase of growth."
Subject to the satisfaction of regulatory requirements and other customary closing conditions, the transaction is anticipated to close later in the third quarter of 2016.
William Blair & Company, LLC and Barclays served as financial advisors to Investcorp and fellow investor 3i, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP served as legal advisor to the company.
For Charlesbank, Jefferies Group LLC served as financial advisor, with Goodwin Procter LLP acting as legal advisor and PricewaterhouseCoopers advising on accounting and tax issues.
Goldman Sachs Bank USA, RBC Capital Markets and Natixis, New York Branch, have committed to provide the first lien debt financing for the transaction, and GSO Capital Partners LP has committed to provide the second lien debt financing.
About Polyconcept
Polyconcept is the world's largest supplier of corporate and promotional merchandise, operating on five continents and selling to over 100 countries around the globe. With main offices in the US, Europe, Hong Kong, Canada and China, the company supplies a wide range of promotional, lifestyle and gift products to several hundred thousand companies ranging from small enterprises to global corporations, through a network of advertising specialty distributors.
Further information is available at www.polyconcept.com.
About Charlesbank Capital Partners
Based in Boston and New York, Charlesbank Capital Partners is a middle-market private equity investment firm managing more than $3.5 billion of capital. Charlesbank focuses on management-led buyouts and growth capital financings. The firm seeks to partner with strong management teams to build companies with sustainable competitive advantage and excellent prospects for growth. For more information, visit www.charlesbank.com.
About Investcorp
Investcorp is a leading provider and manager of alternative investment products and is publicly traded on the Bahrain Bourse (INVCORP). The Investcorp Group has offices in New York, Bahrain, London, Saudi Arabia, Doha and Abu Dhabi. Investcorp has three business areas: corporate investment in the US, Europe and the Gulf, real estate investment in the US and global hedge funds. As at December 31, 2015, the Investcorp Group had $10.7 billion under management. Further information is available at www.investcorp.com.
Media Inquiries:
For Polyconcept:
Benjamin M. Antin, Esq.
Email contact
(724) 334-9000 x3108
For Charlesbank Capital Partners:
Maura Turner
Email contact
617-619-5457
For Investcorp:
Raina Gajjar
Email contact
212 850 5724
BURLINGTON, MA--(Marketwired - July 18, 2016) - Haley & Aldrich, an engineering and environmental consulting firm, today announced the significant expansion of its airport consulting expertise with the appointment of key staff, including industry veteran Darcy Zarubiak as Senior Associate; industry experts Alice Richard and Neal Wolfe, as Associates; David Fusco, as a Senior Technical Specialist; and Jeffrey Covert, as a Staff Scientist. With the appointment of these strategic hires Haley & Aldrich now offers the largest and most experienced airport-dedicated air quality practice in the U.S. and one of the largest providing sustainability services.
The newly expanded practice will offer consulting services to Haley & Aldrich's growing roster of airport and aviation clients, addressing their sustainability challenges; Clean Air Act issues; National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews; implementation of alternative energy, solar site selection and glare analyses; and grant writing needs. The team, which brings extensive experience from engagements with more than 17 large-hub, 10 medium-hub and numerous smaller airports, will work collaboratively with the firm's Lean, asset management and aerospace operations, and regulatory and compliance service areas to provide greater value to Haley & Aldrich clients. The new team brings a management perspective to its client projects and develops custom, creative solutions to address challenging environmental and regulatory issues.
"We are thrilled that Darcy, Alice, Neal, David and Jeffrey have joined our team, bringing years of invaluable experience in airport air quality and sustainability as well as strong relationships with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]," said Alec Smith, Senior Vice President and Infrastructure Market Segment Leader, Haley & Aldrich. "They all are industry innovators, continually developing new tools and approaches to solve problems in an evolving and complex environment. Equally important, they take a critical management approach to help airports make sustainability and air quality decisions within the context of larger business issues."
"We are excited to be part of the collaborative Haley & Aldrich team," said Zarubiak. "The strong synergy between the airport practice and the firm's other areas of expertise in Lean, asset management, sustainability, aerospace operations and regulatory and compliance enable us to bring all of our resources, insights and best practices to bear to effectively and creatively solve our clients' challenges and help move their businesses and the industry forward. This is particularly important now as airports -- and the aviation industry in general -- work to comply with the new EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] air quality standard."
Following is background on the new hires:
Darcy Zarubiak has led one of the nation's most prominent airport environmental consulting practices. He brings over 20 years of experience in airport planning, air quality, airport environmental management and operational oversight of environmental sustainability at airports. Previously Zarubiak led an environmental practice at a global consulting firm, where he worked with the team to develop new solutions and approaches, such as applying FAA's new Aviation Environmental Design Tool for environmental analysis. He also worked at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, managing some of the most challenging environmental issues. Zarubiak serves the FAA as a member of the Energy and Environment Research, Engineering and Development Advisory Committee (REDAC) and previously served as a technical resource for the Voluntary Airport Low Emission (VALE) program. He has supervised more than 70 percent of applications prepared since 2008. Zarubiak has a B. Eng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan and an M.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University.
Alice Richard has nine years of experience in airport environmental and sustainability planning. Her areas of specialty include the formulation, funding, and implementation of sustainable and low emissions projects; dispersion modeling of airport emissions sources; design and evaluation of airport environmental and sustainability management strategies; assessment of alternative fuel technologies and emission mitigation strategies; collection, management, and analysis of air monitoring data; planning, design, and analysis of landside ground transportation policies and operations; and environmental financial analyses. She has an M.S. in Transportation Planning and Analysis from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Keene State College.
Neal Wolfe specializes in airfield planning and environmental projects, including working with clients to secure grant funding from the FAA and EPA to implement low-emission projects, performing solar photovoltaic (PV) site selection and glare analyses, and performing NEPA reviews. In conjunction with his solar PV work, he also developed a novel modeling tool to estimate emissions associated with power grids. Wolfe has a law degree from the Salmon P. Chase College of Law, an M.S. in Microbiology and an M.S. in Organic Chemistry from University of Cincinnati, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Miami University.
David Fusco specializes in the management and analysis of environmental, financial, operational and security projects at airports across the country, with extensive experience using FAA's air quality modeling tools. Before joining the aviation industry, he worked with AIG, where he focused on financial analyses and managing various projects for AIG's international operations. Fusco has an M.S. in International Management from the University of California San Diego, and a B.S. from Lehigh University.
Jeffrey Covert specializes in environmental planning, including assisting airport sponsors in the development and implementation of low-emission projects at airports nationwide. Prior to working in the aviation industry, Covert worked as an intern for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He holds an M.S. in Environmental Science and a Master of Public Affairs from the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington, Indiana.
About Haley & Aldrich
Haley & Aldrich, Inc. is committed to delivering the value our clients need from their capital, operations, and environmental projects. Our one-team approach allows us to draw from our 600 engineers, scientists, and constructors in nearly 30 offices for creative collaboration and expert perspectives. Since our founding in 1957, we have one goal in all we do: deliver long-term value efficiently, no matter how straightforward or complex the challenge.
Twitter: www.twitter.com/haleyaldrich
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/haley-&-aldrich
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Media Contacts:
Diane Pardes
Pardes Communications, LLC
dpardes[at]pardescommunications.com
781-652-8059
Linda Pendergast-Savage
Pardes Communications, LLC
pendergast[at]pardescommunications.com
508-224-7905
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Donald Trump's choice of Mike Pence as his running mate is expected to appeal to social conservatives, although the results of a new Gallup poll show the Indiana Governor is not a well-known figure nationally. Forty-four percent of registered voters said that have never heard of Pence, while 18 percent said they have no opinion of him. Just 39 percent of voters have an opinion of Pence, with 21 percent viewing him favorably and 18 percent viewing him unfavorably. Since Pence is largely unknown, Gallup Senior Editor Lydia Saad noted there is a great deal of opportunity for his favorability rating to change as he becomes a household name. The poll also showed that Trump's selection of Pence has drawn a muted reaction, with voters split on whether the real estate tycoon has made a good choice. While 37 percent of voters rate the choice of Pence as 'excellent' or 'pretty good,' 45 percent rate the choice as 'only fair' or 'poor.' The numbers are similar to the reaction to Mitt Romney's choice of current House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as his running mate four years ago. Gallup noted that Pence and Ryan are the only vice presidential picks that have elicited more negative than positive reactions since it began measuring voters' immediate reactions in 2000. The choice of Pence is more popular among Republican voters, as 67 percent say the Indiana Governor is an 'excellent' or 'pretty good' choice. The Gallup survey of 901 registered voters was conducted July 15th and 16th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. (Photo: Gage Skidmore) Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
License This, the annual competition designed to introduce new properties to licensing, is now open for entries at http://www.brandlicensing.eu.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130723/629764-a )
The competition forms part of Brand Licensing Europe (BLE), the largest and most prestigious licensing event in Europe, which is organised by UBM and sponsored by the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association (LIMA).
Now in its seventh year, the competition is open to anyone with a concept that has yet to be published or broadcast, or a brand that has not yet extended to non-core consumer products. It applies to any new property with its roots in publishing, art and design, television or digital media. Entries are reviewed by a panel of experts and a shortlist of four properties are then pitched to the panel in front of a live audience at BLE on 13th October 2016.
This year's winner will receive a prize worth over 6,000 which includes a fully furnished nine square metre stand at BLE 2017 to bring the property to market. They will also receive LIMA membership for one year and a ticket to the LIMA Licensing Essentials Course & Spring Fling Networking Party in May 2017.
"License This is now an integral part of BLE, and provides a fantastic opportunity for property owners to present their creations at Europe's biggest showcase for brand extension," said Anna Knight, BLE Brand Director. "For those who are shortlisted, it's also a valuable learning experience - our judges are always forthcoming with advice and feedback; something which past winners and runners up have found extremely useful in shaping their strategies. We would urge anyone with a new creative concept to enter today."
Past winners have included Pink Chillies, RaNT! and Mr Trafalgar, who have all gone on to sign successful licensing agreements. 2015 prize winner was OiDroids, a range of collectable pop out and build robot characters aimed at the pocket money sector.
OiDroids creator, Jonathan Klemenz, added: "Following our win, we enjoyed great sales over the Christmas period and released our new set of characters, the Nuts 'n' Bolts Crew, which are currently on sale online and we're hoping to release into retail shortly. After appearing at the show, we've had strong interest from a couple of publishers and are continuing discussions with a number of exciting potential partner brands. We are also looking forward to having our own stand at BLE 2016."
Entry forms and competition rules can be found at http://www.brandlicensing.eu . Deadline for entries is 9th September 2016. Brand Licensing Europe 2016 takes place from 11-13th October 2016 at London's Olympia.
About Brand Licensing Europe, part of UBM's Licensing group
Brand Licensing Europe 2016 (http://www.brandlicensing.eu) takes place from 11 - 13th October 2016 at Olympia, London. It is the only pan-European event dedicated to licensing and brand extension. Now in its 18th successful year, Brand Licensing Europe 2015 was the biggest event to date; hosting 300 exhibitors and 7,203 visitors from 63 countries.
Brand Licensing Europe is owned by UBM which also organises Licensing Expo in Las Vegas, USA. Both shows are produced in partnership with the international Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association (LIMA). License! Global is the official publication for both shows.
About UBM EMEA
UBM EMEA (http://ubmemea.com/) connects people and creates opportunities for companies across five continents to develop new business, meet customers, launch new products, promote brands and expand markets. Operating in more than 23 countries, UBM EMEA organises many of the world's largest, most important live events, awards and community sites in a wide variety of industries. Its events include Brand Licensing Europe, Technology for Marketing, eCommerce Expo, Customer Contact Expo and Decorex.
PARIS (dpa-AFX) - A US student was among 84 people killed in Thursday's terrorist attack in the French port city of Nice, the student's University authorities confirmed.
The University of California, Berkeley, said Sunday that Nicolas Leslie, who had been studying in Nice, France, as part of the campus's Study Abroad program, has been identified as dead. He was among those missing following the deadly truck attack in Nice.
Leslie, 20, was one of 85 participants in a local summer entrepreneurship program in Nice. Unaccounted for since the truck attack, in which another 200 were injured - including three Berkeley students - he had been the subject of an extensive search by university staff, local officials and family.
His death was reported to campus officials by the FBI, which was notified by its French counterparts earlier Sunday.
'This is tragic, devastating news,' UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said.
Following the latest attack, two of the injured Berkeley students were released after medical treatment and have returned to their summer dormitories in Nice. They are Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, a senior computer science major in the College of Letters and Science, who sustained a broken leg; and Diane Huang, 20, a senior majoring in environmental economics and policy in the College of Natural Resources, who suffered a broken foot.
Daryus Medora, 21, whose leg was broken, remains in the hospital. He is an undeclared sophomore in the College of Letters and Science.
Leslie, an environmental sciences major, had been planning to begin studies at the Haas School of Business in the fall. Counselors are on the ground in Nice, where some 60 Berkeley students remain, and are available to speak with students on campus, the University said.
A vigil is planned for 4:30 p.m. Monday on Sproul Plaza.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - In an interview Monday morning, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump seemed to imply that President Barack Obama had sided with those who attacked police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, despite Obama's words to the contrary. In his statement after the Baton Rouge shooting, Obama had made it clear that there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. But in an interview on Fox News' 'Fox and Friends,' Trump said he watched the president addressing the nation Sunday in the wake of the fatal shooting of three police officers. 'But you just look at the body language. There's something going on. Look, there's something going on and the words are not often okay, by the way,' the septuagenarian told host Steve Doocy. 'What does that mean, there's something going on?' Doocy asked. 'There's just a bad feeling, a lot of bad feeling about him,' according to Trump. 'We have a country that has not been like this since I can remember it,' he added. Earlier, strongly condemning the attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, the second such assault in two weeks, Obama vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
On Tuesday last week, pv magazine wrote about the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) injecting more funding into Turkey's renewable energy development, including solar PV. On Thursday, the EBRD announced it had acquired a 16.67% stake in local company Akfen Renewable Energy, injecting further capital into Turkey's renewable energy sector. And by Friday night, as the news of an attempted coup in Turkey spread, the previous announcements seemed as if they may have some new facets to them. The attempted coup may have failed, but more than 190 civilian lives were lost and the country has been thrown into political turmoil. Invest in Turkey, Turkey's governmental agency on the promotion of foreign investments, sent an email out this morning entitled "An Informative Note on the Failed Coup Attempt" stating that "the terrorists will be punished in accordance with the law." Western analysts fear that the forthcoming punishments will also weigh heavily on Turkey's shaky democracy and increase the Turkish President's strong authoritarianism. The cost of financing Politics matters in business too. Investors always weigh up the political stability of a country when targeting a foreign market, while political turmoil always ...
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Husch Blackwell and Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek S.C. have joined forces, completing the largest law firm combination announced this year. The firm retains the Husch Blackwell name and will continue to operate in all markets where the individual firms previously had offices. The combination became effective July 15.Husch Blackwell now has more than 700 attorneys and offices in 19 cities. The combination, announced April 29, strengthens the firms commitment to providing industry-focused services to clients, officials said.We are pleased at how quickly our two firms have come together, and we are excited by the additional talent and experience that we have already gained, said CEO and managing partner Greg Smith.This combination will undoubtedly help us better serve clients across all industries and in all of our markets.Since the April announcement, management teams from both firms have worked to integrate attorneys and groups, and administrative teams have worked to integrate policies, systems and personnel to ensure critical functions and services were ready for the July 15 combination.Im really encouraged by how teams from both firms have worked so well on integration efforts, said Deputy CEO Paul Eberle, formerly chief executive of WHD. To me, that speaks volumes to how were going to work together going forward.Early on, it became clear that this combination was going to work. Strategically and culturally, this was a great fit, and our common commitment to providing superior client service and value through industry expertise was key, said Chairman Maurice Watson. Were excited about the opportunities this combination represents for our clients and for our firm.
Technavio analysts forecast the textile manufacturing market in Serbiato grow at a CAGR of 3% during the forecast period, according to their latest report.
The research study covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the textile manufacturingmarket in Serbiafor 2016-2020. The report also outlines the challenges faced by the manufacturers and the market at large, as well as the key trends emerging in the market.
Textile manufacturing market in Serbia: At a glance
The textile manufacturing market in Serbia is expected to grow at a modest rate, posting a CAGR of 3% during 2015-2020. Textile manufacturing is an integral part of the Serbian economy. It is export oriented and labor intensive, providing the country with huge employment opportunities and, therefore, is an industry that is highly favored by the government. The GDP is expected to accelerate in 2016 following a number of government policies such as relaxation in monetary policies and structural reforms, which are expected to improve the business environment and lead to the inflow of foreign investments. Manufacturers in the market are expected to capitalize the market and boost production. They are also expected to focus on exports, particularly to the EU, the country's most important trading partner.
Technavio consumer and retail analysts highlight the following three factors that are contributing to the growth of the textile manufacturingmarket in Serbia:
Strategic location
Favorable trade agreements with EU
Low subcontracting costs
Strategic location
"Serbia is located in the Balkan Peninsula, bordered by Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the west, Hungary to the north, Bulgaria to the east, Montenegro to the southwest, and Albania and Macedonia to the south, which puts the country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. This strategic location provides the country with a significant advantage from the perspective of trade. This has been a key factor in influencing the inflow of FDI into the country's manufacturing sectors, including the textile manufacturing industry. Moreover, this puts the country in close proximity to leading fashion capitals, such as Italy and France, and enables the manufacturers to keep abreast of changing market trends and respond speedily," says Brijesh Kumar Choubey, a lead apparel and textile expert at Technavio.
Favorable trade agreements with EU
In 2005, Serbia signed the free trade agreement with the EU. Since the implementation of this agreement, exports of textiles to countries in the EU have more than doubled. Currently, the EU is the country's most important trading partner, and exports account for nearly 70% of the revenue generated by the textile industry in the country. In 2008, Serbia entered into the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU, which led to the elimination of import customs on industrial and other products entering the country. Serbia has also entered into trade agreements with Belarus, Turkey, the US, and members of Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), which also provides manufacturers with potential growth opportunities in foreign markets.
Low subcontracting costs
The textile market in Serbia has a long history of collaboration with foreign partners, and a prime contributing factor for this is the availability of a relatively cheap labor force. Currently, the textile market in Serbia is very competitive in terms of pricing, along with Bulgaria and Belarus. "On a global scale, wages in Serbia are slightly higher than that in China. Moreover, the textile industry also has access to a highly qualified labor force due to the presence of several schools and universities across the country. These factors have contributed to the availability of subcontracting services at a low cost, and this has been a major driver for the inflow FDI in this sector, which in turn has led to a rise in the number of SMEs in the country over the past several years," adds Brijesh.
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Do you need a report on a market in a specific geographical cluster or country but can't find what you're looking for? Don't worry, Technavio also takes client requests. Please contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and our analysts will be happy to create a customized report just for you.
About Technavio
Technaviois a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.
Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.
If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160718005376/en/
Contacts:
Technavio Research
Jesse Maida
Media Marketing Executive
US: +1 630 333 9501
UK: +44 208 123 1770
www.technavio.com
NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- World Health Energy Holdings (OTC PINK: WHEN), a diversified energy, health and financial software company www.worldhealthenergy.com.
Announces Refocus on new management Appointment of Mr. Gennady Teplitsky previously from LabMorgan /JP Morgan Chase as Manager for Financial Market Development www.jpmorgan.com
Mr Gennady Teplitsky, has more than 20 years of experience working in Manufacturing, CPG and Financial Services industries. Gennady's unique skills included:
Gennady Teplitsky was a Vice President of LabMorgan, a unit of JPMorgan Chase, where he lead the Strategic Technology consulting organization. In this capacity he managed a group of senior business and technology consultants
Prior to this role, Gennady was a CRM and Data Warehousing practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
Gennady holds a Master degree in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Louisville, Kentucky.
WHEN is focused on bringing in top management for each position for current management see http://worldhealthenergy.com/management/ Only those listed are part of management
World Health Energy Holdings is a Financial Software, Banking, and Holding Company. Its companies include FSC Solutions, Inc. (www.fsc.trade),and Online trade company www.onlinetrade.trade
FSC Solutions, Inc. is an online software solutions trading company providing cutting edge software solutions for financial institutions, banks and traders. The financial broker service www.onlinetrade.trade, will be competing with E- Trade www.etrade.com (Market Cap -- $7.01 Billion) and Ameritrade www.tdameritrade.com (Market Cap $19.6 Billion). The online software trading Company www.fsc.trade is looking to compete in a $2 billion per annum financial software market.
Investor Database for Future Press Releases and Industry Updates
Interested investors and shareholders are invited to be added to the corporate e-mail database for corporate press releases and periodic industry updates by sending an e-mail to info@worldhealthenergy.com
About World Health Energy Holdings (www.worldhealthenergy.com)
World Health Energy Holdings, Inc. (WHEN) is a diversified energy, health and financial software company. WHEN is comprised of:
FSC Solutions Inc. (www.fsc.trade), a suite of next-generation, direct-access online trading platform solutions for stocks, equity, options, bonds, futures and Forex trading on the global markets, as well as risk management software.
Online Trade www.onlinetrade.trade is a online FX and Stocks service company offering an online trading platform for Stocks,mutual,fx futures, and fixed income with low transaction costs.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Although forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of management, forward-looking statements are inherently subjected to known, unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those discussed in these forward-looking statements, including but not limited to our ability to maintain our website and associated computer systems, our ability to generate sufficient market acceptance for our products and services, our ability to generate sufficient operating cash flow, and general economic conditions. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time which attempt to advise interested parties of the risks and factors that may affect our business, financial condition, results of operation and cash flows. If one of more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those expected or projected. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this release.
Contacts:
World Health Energy Holdings, Inc
511 Avenue of the Americas #710
New York, NY 10011
1-212-884-8395
For Tel quotes
OTC Live Quote
1-855-732-0051
www.OTCLiveQuote.com
http://www.otclivequote.com/
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- Southern Silver Exploration Corp. (the "Company" or "SSV") (TSX VENTURE: SSV)(FRANKFURT: SEG1)(SSE: SSVCL) has announced that further to its recent news releases, the Company's shares have been approved for listing on the OTCQB Marketplace as of July 18, 2016 and will commenced trading on that exchange. Real-Time Quote Display Service for the company's US symbol (OTCQB: SSVFF) will be available at: http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/SSVFF/quote. The Company also maintains listings on the TSX Venture Exchange in Canada, (SSV), the Frankfurt Exchange in Europe (SEG1) and the Santiago Exchange in Chile (SSVCL).
About Southern Silver Exploration Corp.
Southern Silver Exploration Corp. is a precious metal exploration and development company with a focus on the discovery of world class mineral deposits in north-central Mexico and the southern USA. Our specific emphasis is the Cerro Las Minitas silver-lead-zinc project located in the heart of Mexico's Faja de Plata which hosts multiple world class mineral deposits such as Penasquito, San Martin, Naica and Pitarilla. We have assembled a team of highly experienced technical, operational and transactional professionals to support our exploration efforts in developing the Cerro Las Minitas project into a premier, high-grade, silver-lead-zinc mine. The Company engages in the acquisition, exploration and development either directly or through joint venture relationships in mineral properties in major jurisdictions. Our property portfolio also includes the Oro porphyry copper-gold project located in southern New Mexico, USA.
On behalf of the Board of Directors
Lawrence Page, Q.C., President & Director, Southern Silver Exploration Corp.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
This news release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward looking statements include the timing and receipt of government and regulatory approvals, and continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. Southern Silver Exploration Corp. does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law.
Contacts:
Southern Silver Exploration Corp.
604.641.2759
ir@mnxltd.com
www.southernsilverexploration.com
LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
IFSEC International 2016, organised by UBM EMEA, is pleased to announce another hugely successful year for Europe's largest security event, hosted from the 21 - 23 June at ExCeL London.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130723/629764-a )
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150714/236178LOGO )
IFSEC once again delivered an exceptional industry experience, attracting 27,052 attendees, in line with the 2015 attendance. The event saw a huge day one and two at IFSEC, with exhibitors overwhelmed with the sheer volume of quality visitors. Battling nature and politics on the third day, with the UK's EU Referendum and severe flooding in London, the South West and Essex severing transport links to the venue, IFSEC still managed to deliver over 7,000 visitors to exhibitor stands on day three alone.
Key audiences on the IFSEC show floor saw growth this year, with an increase of the installer and integrator professions by 7% and significant international visitor participation at 34%, cementing IFSEC as the industry's chosen global security exhibition. IFSEC also grew this year through crossovers from the co-located events, FIREX, Facilities Show, Safety & Health Expo, Service Management Expo and Professional Clothing Show, with a higher interest in security this year leading to an increase of show-floor visits.
Gerry Dunphy, Event Director for IFSEC & FIREX International, said: "IFSEC 2016 was another seismic experience for all concerned, a fantastic display of the very best in world class security products and solutions. The new areas this year such as Home Automation successfully showcased a whole new range of technologies available to security professionals and the Drone Zone was an absolute floor filler proving that IFSEC can always provide exciting spectacles for the visiting audience. We have already planned the main themes for 2017, so the security world should look out for further developments in home automation, smart commercial buildings, Borders & Infrastructure for senior specifiers of strategic security management and Installer World - a definitive destination for engineers and installers."
IFSEC International was very pleased to again welcome BSIA (British Security Industry Association) as a supporter of the event. James Kelly (Chief Executive), speaking on the event, stated "BSIA is proud to promote the importance of quality as a key consideration within the security industry. IFSEC provides both security buyers and industry colleagues with access to education and thought leadership."
With security technology at the heart of the IFSEC community, this year saw the audience of 27,000+ security buyers with over 20,000 different security solutions on offer at this year's event. Key to the product offering were new launches across video surveillance, cyber, access control and integrated solutions, with new products revealed from Suprema, Canon, Avigilon and IDIS to name a few.
For the first time a complete home environment was created within IFSEC in the form of a purpose-built, smart house, sponsored by Yale. This setting, delivered by the Control4 platform, demonstrated the very latest tech for fully automating the home for safety and security measures. There were examples on show from Merit Lilin, Nest, Invixium, 2N Communications and many others, all of which integrated with Control4's network to demonstrate the fully automated functionality of Home Automation.
With an enhanced focus on this year's Physical & Perimeter Protection area, IFSEC saw a growth to 22% of the audience attending to view products across perimeter protection, locking systems, safes and more. With increased security threats from terrorism, the need to protect your business from external threats has never been greater, therefore this year's success will develop into a fuller offering on the show floor as the event moves into 2017, with a new launch, IFSEC Borders & Infrastructure.
A further launch for 2016, the ARC Village, comprised of 13 exhibiting ARCs to meet the visiting installer needs. Within this first year, the attendance surpassed expectations, with over 2000 installers and integrators attending this area, designed to showcase the best in Alarm Receiving Centres, hosted in partnership with connectivity partner, CSL Dualcom.
The new Drone Zone created a buzz throughout the ExCeL as people visited to see how the security world can benefit from this innovative new offering, with demonstrations expertly piloted to showcase the opportunities of this new technology to the crowds. With new legislation still being drafted and research indicating the drone market will be worth $80 billion by 2025, this new tech area showcased a unique and exciting alternative to the security industry in the future.
The Inspirational Speaker Series continued to attract large crowds this year from across the security, safety, fire, facilities management and service management industries to the 400 capacity theatre each day. Speakers were again of a very high calibre with Colonel Tim Collins OBE, Kate Adie OBE and James Cracknell OBE, sharing key insights on how they have overcome adversity and challenges in their extraordinary careers in order to achieve their goals, from everyday tasks of getting children to school before work, to overcoming traumatic events to ensure a continual strive for progress. A further hugely successful security-centric seminar programme saw over 11,000 security professionals attend sessions from tactical training through to security leadership techniques, including the popular Tavcom Training Theatre.
IFSEC also continued to benefit from the co-located fire, facilities, security, service management and workwear and uniform events, which as a total saw over 45,000 visitors at the ExCeL over the three days, a 4% increase on 2015. Across the series, visitors were able to benefit from meeting their needs for fleet management, fire integration, health & safety legislation, uniforms and more.
IFSEC International 2017 takes place from 20th - 22nd June at ExCeL London. For more information about IFSEC International 2017, visit http://www.ifsec.co.uk .
About UBM EMEA:
UBM EMEAconnects people and creates opportunities for companies across five continents to develop new business, meet customers, launch new products, promote their brands and expand their markets. Through premier brands such as Routes, CPhI, IFSEC, Ecobuild, Seatrade, and many others, UBM EMEA exhibitions, conferences, awards programs, publications, websites and training and certification programs are an integral part of the marketing plans of companies across seven industry sectors.
About Protection & Management Series:
UBM Live's Protection & Management Series unites business professionals across the fields of security, fire, safety, facilities and service management at IFSEC International, Safety & Health Expo, Facilities Show, FIREX International, Professional Clothing Show and Service Management Expo. In 2017 the events will take place at the ExCeL London from 20 - 22nd June.
New Zealand, the leading softwood log exporter in the world, increased log shipments to India and South Korea during the first five months of 2016, while exports to China were down, reports the Wood Resource Quarterly. With total shipments trending higher, log export prices have gone up by 36% from September of 2015 to May 2016.
New Zealand continues to be the world's leading exporter of softwood logs followed by Russia and the US. These three countries accounted for almost 50% of globally traded logs in 2015, with a majority being destined for the Chinese market, according to the Wood Resource Quarterly (WRQ).
New Zealand is exporting over 50% of the country's total harvest in log form. In 2015, New Zealand exported 14.7 million m3 of radiata pine logs, of which almost ten million m3 was shipped to China. This was down from a record high of almost 12 million m3 in 2013. In late 2015 and early 2016, Chinese log buyers became more active in the New Zealand log market with shipments increasing from 1.8 million m3 in the 3Q/15 to 2.5 million m3 in the 1Q/16.
However, during the first five months of 2016, total NZ shipments to Asia have increased slightly with 2016 year-to-date volumes being two percent higher than the same period in 2015. The biggest rises so far this year have been in shipments to India and South Korea, while exports to China were down 10%.
The good news for log exporters in New Zealand over the past 12 month has been the steady increase in log export prices. The average log export price in May of this year was 36% higher than its six year low in September last year. The FOB prices for the major destinations in May 2016 had converged to a range of US$100-106/m3, reports the WRQ (www.woodprices.com).
Over the past four years, prices for logs exported to Asia have been on a roller-cost ride, averaging just over US$90/m3 in 2012, reaching an all-time high of US$130/m3 in the 1Q/14, falling to US$82/m3 in the 3Q/15 (the lowest level since 2010), then rising significantly in early 2016. These export log price fluctuations have strongly impacted the price trends for both sawlogs and pulplogs consumed by the domestic forest industry in New Zealand over the past ten years.
Global lumber, sawlog and pulpwood market reporting is included in the 52-page quarterly publication Wood Resource Quarterly (WRQ). The report, which was established in 1988 and has subscribers in over 30 countries, tracks sawlog, pulpwood, lumber and pellet prices, trade and market developments in most key regions around the world. To subscribe to the WRQ, please go to www.woodprices.com
Wood Resources International LLC (WRI), an internationally recognized forest industry-consulting firm established in 1987, publishes two quarterly timber price reports and have subscribers in over 30 countries. The Wood Resource Quarterly, established in 1988, is a 52-page market report and includes sawlog prices, pulpwood and wood chip price and market commentary to developments in global timber, biomass and forest industry. The other report, the North Americam Wood Fiber Review, tracks prices of sawlogs, pulpwood, wood chips and biomass in most regions of Canada and the US.
This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160718006106/en/
Contacts:
Wood Resources International LLC
Hakan Ekstrom
info@woodprices.com (info@wri-ltd.com)
www.woodprices.com
SAN DIEGO CA--(Marketwired - July 18, 2016) - LightPointe Communications, Inc. announced that its outdoor 60 GHz point to point wireless bridges were successfully deployed by St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake of Lake County, California, as an alternative to using fiber to connect buildings in a medical campus setting. LightPointe's AireLink 60SX was installed to provide full duplex Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, while avoiding the cost and challenges associated with trenching for fiber or other wired solutions. The AireLink 60SX is an affordable wireless bridge which does not require licensing under FCC rules, making it extremely cost effective and capable of being installed very quickly as either a primary data transmission link, or as an emergency backup to service provider leased-line networks.
"St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake needed a HIPPA compliant, easy to install, Gigabit capacity connection between their medical buildings," said John Taylor, vice president of sales for LightPointe. "As a previous customer of LightPointe, St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake was already familiar with the quality and performance of our wireless bridges and, after assessing their link requirement within their medical campus, we recommended our 60 GHz radio due to its all-weather reliability and advanced features."
LightPointe's 60 GHz, 70 GHz, and 80 GHz backhaul radios comply with HIPPA regulations. HIPPA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. It sets national standards for technology involved in healthcare transactions in order to protect the health information of individuals. Adherence to HIPPA regulations also makes LightPointe's radios ideal for other sensitive applications, such as transmitting financial, personal identity, and monetary transactions which require optimum security and avoidance of eavesdropping and cybersecurity issues.
"As a repeat customer of LightPointe, we were already confident in their products and support," said Jon McAllister, IT network engineer for St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake. "My objective was to quickly deploy a point to point link flexible enough to handle VoIP, large medical imaging files with jumbo frames, numerous hospital software applications, and also securely transmit patient records while adhering to HIPPA regulations. After reviewing various wired, fiber, and wireless alternatives, it became clear that LightPointe's AireLink 60 provided the best features and security for our application, including nine levels of modulation which ensures up to 99.999% network availability. And by deploying a license-free 60 GHz wireless bridge, we avoided the costs and infrastructure damage and repairs associated with trenching for fiber, and were able to connect our buildings within thirty days with a product that works great 24-7 without any human intervention. And the hospital saves money, since there aren't recurring monthly leased-line fees or regulatory licenses. The system pays for itself over time, which is great for both our bottom line and our patients."
About LightPointe Communications, Inc.
LightPointe (www.LightPointe.com) is a San Diego-based manufacturer of wireless Gigabit capacity bridges for enterprise and 4G/LTE carrier markets, including small cell backhaul. The company also manufactures a line of Ultra Low Latency (ULL) wireless bridges utilized for High Frequency Trading (HFT) networks, Data Centers, Data Warehousing, and Cloud Networks. The company is owned by a billion-dollar Silicon Valley firm and employees. LightPointe has representatives worldwide, including Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Canada, China, Singapore, India, and Japan. LightPointe products lead the unwired solutions sector, and compete with Siklu, Bridgewave, Ubiquiti, and other wireless bridge brands.
Todd Easterling
Email contact
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- Shareholders ("The Investor Group") holding approximately 8.38 million Class B shares of Sirius XM Canada Holdings Inc. ("Sirius XM Canada"), representing 21% of those held by minority shareholders (excluding the CBC), filed a complaint with the Ontario Securities Commission ("OSC") on July 15, 2016, raising a number of concerns relating to Sirius XM Canada and Sirius XM Holdings Inc. ("Sirius XM Holdings"). The concerns relate to material related-party transactions, potential conflicts of interest, and the proposed acquisition of the assets of Sirius XM Canada and related financing.
As interested shareholders, we view the current offer to take Sirius XM Canada private as inadequate and not in the best interest of independent minority shareholders.
It Appears the CBC is an Interested Party for Purposes of the Majority of the Minority Vote
The Investor Group believes that CBC should be excluded from the vote of the minority shareholders. CBC, as one of three major Canadian shareholders in the Company has publically announced that it intends to vote in favour of the Transaction. Sirius XM Canada also announced that Sirius XM Holdings, Slaight Communications Inc. and Obelysk Media Inc. are all (rightfully) being excluded for purposes of the majority of the minority vote. There was no indication that CBC is also being excluded, despite the fact that in our view the CBC is an interested party under MI 61-101 and substantial commercial benefits will accrue to CBC as a result of the transaction. Specifically, CBC is receiving the continued benefit of a business relationship with Sirius XM Canada after the Transaction closes; this benefit is not being equally shared by the other shareholders who are participating in the majority of the minority vote.
An Economically Coercive Climate
The Investor Group has serious concerns with what they view as threatening and economically coercive tactics taken by the Company in connection with the announcement of the Transaction. The OSC has cautioned that conduct which can be construed as "threatening in nature" or which constitute "warnings" to shareholders may be viewed as being intended to exert pressure on minority shareholders to vote in favour of a transaction or tender to a bid. The OSC believes that such conduct undermines the integrity of the public markets and runs contrary to the public interest.
Evidence of this coercive climate include:
i. Dividend Suspension.
The Investor Group believes that the Company should not try to exert undue pressure on its minority shareholders to vote in favour of the Transaction by declaring a cut to its dividend as part of the Transaction. To announce a sudden and immediate cut to a long-standing dividend in connection with the Transaction is arguably oppressive and coercive, particularly where the Company is aware that minority shareholders are unwilling to tender at the deal price. In light of the strong quarterly financial results reported on July 14, 2016, the suspension of the dividend does not appear to be related to deteriorating financial conditions. In the past, the OSC has found that a dividend cut announcement made at the same time as a transaction announcement was not co-incidental, unduly exerted pressure on the minority shareholders, and therefore was contrary to the public interest. In addition, the impact of the dividend suspension arguably alters the calculated premium of the offer to the unaffected share price of Sirius XM Canada.
ii. Comments made regarding Licensing Renewals.
Comments made over the past year by executives at Sirius XM Holdings regarding license negotiations that coincided with sharp drops in the share price of Sirius XM Canada. The Investor Group believes that such conduct is an attempt to exert undue pressure on the minority shareholder at large to vote in favour of the Transaction, failing which they will face the dire picture being painted by the Company and Sirius XM Holdings.
iii.Demand for Activation Fees.
On April 26, 2016, Sirius XM Canada announced that it received a demand for payment from Sirius XM Holdings for an additional US$33.9 million as "activation fees" under the XM Licence Agreement owed from 2005 to the end of January 2016. Sirius XM Canada announced that it was confident in its interpretation of the XM Licence Agreement and the calculation of the "activation fees" thereunder, and that it intended to seek resolution of the matter through binding arbitration under the terms of the XM Licence Agreement. The day prior to this announcement, the share was trading at C$4.60, relative to which the C$4.29 adjusted offer price represents a 6.8% discount. Following the announcement of the activation fee demand, the share price dropped C$0.40 and closed on April 26, 2016 at C$4.20 per share.
Keith Graham, President of Rondeau Capital Inc. noted "We believe the current proposal is not in the best interests of all shareholders and does not provide fair value for the minority shareholders. In addition, we believe that serious process, governance and conflict issues are present that should be reviewed by the OSC."
About the Shareholders
The shareholders who filed the request with the OSC relating to Sirius XM Canada and Sirius XM Holdings comprise portfolio management firms that have long-established track records of patient and successful value investing, and are committed to promoting good corporate governance and protecting their rights as shareholders and those of their clients, and include:
Van Berkom and Associates Inc., one of Canada's leading independent small-cap investment management firms, has been a leader in advancing good governance, seeking to improve corporate governance for the benefit of all stakeholders. Mr. J. Sebastian van Berkom, the firm's founder and current president and chief executive officer was a founding director of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP). In addition, a number of the firm's institutional clients are strong supporters of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance (CCGG).
Rondeau Capital Inc. Agilith Capital Inc. Lester Asset Management Avenue Investment Management JC Clark Ltd.
Contacts:
Media Contacts:
Andrea Horan
Portfolio Manager
Agilith Capital Inc.
416-637-4635
Gabriel Bouchard Phillips
Partner
Van Berkom and Associates
514-985-5149
Keith Graham
President
Rondeau Capital Inc.
416-487-4444
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Rambus Inc. (RMBS) announced, for the third quarter of 2016, it expects revenue to be between $75 million and $80 million. The company noted that achieving revenue in this range will require that it signs new customer agreements for mobile payments software and solutions licensing among other matters. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report revenue of $84 million for the third-quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Shares of Rambus Inc. were down 4.45% after hours.
Non-GAAP net income in the second quarter of 2016 was $16.7 million, 4% higher than the second quarter of 2015. Non-GAAP net income per share was $0.15 compared to $0.13. On average, four analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $0.13 for the quarter.
Net income for the second quarter of 2016 was $3.9 million compared to $6.9 million in the second quarter of 2015. Net income per share was $0.03 compared to $0.06.
Revenue for the second quarter of 2016 was $76.5 million, up 5% year-over-year primarily due to higher revenue from security technology development projects, including revenue from the acquisition of SCS, offset by lower royalty revenue from various customers. Analysts expected revenue of $74.44 million for the quarter.
Separately, Rambus announced that Dish TV India has selected the CryptoMedia Security Platform for use in its pay TV satellite system. The platform, which includes a hardware root-of-trust embedded in the set-top box chipset, ensures secure distribution of premium content for cable and satellite operators while eliminating the need for a smart card and enhancing usability of the set-top box.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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TORONTO, ON -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- The Board of Trustees of Brookfield Canada Office Properties (TSX: BOX.UN) (NYSE: BOXC) announced a distribution of $0.1092 per trust unit payable on August 15, 2016 to holders of Trust units of record at the close of business on July 29, 2016.
The distributions are declared in Canadian dollars. Registered unitholders resident in Canada will receive payment in Canadian dollars and registered unitholders resident in the United States will receive the U.S. dollar equivalent unless they request otherwise. The U.S. dollar equivalent of the distribution will be based on the Bank of Canada closing exchange rate on the record date or, if the record date falls on a weekend or holiday, on the Bank of Canada closing exchange rate of the preceding business day. Beneficial unitholders will receive payment in Canadian dollars unless they request to receive the U.S. dollar equivalent.
About Brookfield Canada Office Properties
Brookfield Canada Office Properties is Canada's preeminent Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Our portfolio is comprised of 26 premier office properties totaling 20 million square feet in the downtown cores of Toronto, Calgary, and Ottawa, in addition to a development site in Calgary. Our landmark assets include Brookfield Place and First Canadian Place in Toronto, and Bankers Hall in Calgary. Further information is available at www.brookfieldcanadareit.com. Important information may be disseminated exclusively via the website; investors should consult the site to access this information.
Brookfield Canada Office Properties is the flagship Canadian REIT of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global alternative asset manager with approximately $240 billion in assets under management. For more information, go to www.brookfield.com.
Contact:
Sherif El-Azzazi
Manager, Investor Relations & Communications
Tel: (416) 359-8593
Email: Email Contact
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- DXI Energy Inc. (NYSE MKT: DXI)(TSX: DXI) ("DXI" or the "Company"), an upstream oil and gas exploration and production company operating in Colorado's Piceance Basin and the Peace River Arch region in British Columbia, today announced it has retained industry veteran A. Paul Kroshko as a senior consultant to its E&P team.
Paul has a dynamic background with more than 40 years of oil and gas exploration experience. He held highly technical (geoscience) positions with Shell Canada, Unocal and Canadian Superior and key management positions in Sceptre Resources Indonesia, Petrominerales Colombia Ltd (V.P. Exploration) and Petroamerica Oil Corp.(CEO), which was recently acquired by Gran Tierra Energy Inc..
Mr. Kroshko purchased 545,000 common shares of DXI in the recently completed private placement. The Company has initially reserved 400,000 options to purchase DXI common shares @C$0.165 per share for Mr. Kroshko for a five-year period.
With a BSc in Geological Geophysics, Paul was instrumental in aggregating high potential land blocks with a record of significant success. At Petroamerica Oil Corp., production reached over 4,500 BOPD on acquired blocks and the Guatiquia block of Petrominerales Colombia Ltd. produced more than 15,000 BOPD from the very prolific Candelilla wells.
Mr. Kroshko has also held a foreign advisory position with the Canadian government where he provided international guidance in Africa and Colombia and served as President of TechEx Corp, which has been very successful in participating with private oil and gas clients in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.
"We are all pleased to welcome Paul to the DXI team, based in Calgary. DXI expects to leverage his experience and extensive record of success to strategically accelerate its growth initiatives. His discerning ability to evaluate expansion and integration opportunities of new global discoveries mirrors our mandate to significantly expand DXI's oil production profile," stated Robert Hodgkinson, Chairman and CEO.
DXI also announces its intention to file a Form 25 (Notification of Removal from Listing and/or Registration under Section 12(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") to voluntarily withdraw its common shares from listing on the NYSE MKT LLC ("NYSE MKT"). The Form 25 will be filed on Thursday, July 28, 2016. The voluntary delisting is intended to reduce the duplicity of significant listing fees and burdensome administrative costs associated with reporting on two separate stock exchanges. DXI carefully considered the NYSE MKT listing rules with respect to the maintenance of a minimum share price which could require the Company to undertake certain corporate or other actions primarily to meet such requirements that may not be in the best interests of DXI shareholders. DXI's Board of Directors has determined that the compliance obligations and costs of maintaining a listing of the common shares on the NYSE MKT currently outweigh the benefits to DXI. DXI will maintain listing of its common shares on the TSX Exchange, its primary trading jurisdiction since 1969.
The Company has designated the Toronto Stock Exchange as its primary stock exchange, however with due consideration to the DXI U.S. shareholder base, the Company has made an application to have its common shares qualified for quotation in the United States on the OTCQB ("OTCQB").
The Company's goal is to have its common shares approved for quotation as seamlessly as possible; however, there can be no assurance that the Company's common shares will be approved for quotation or that trading on the OTCQB will occur.
About DXI ENERGY INC.
DXI Energy Inc. is an upstream oil and natural gas exploration and production company operating projects in Colorado's Piceance Basin (39,312 net acres) and the Peace River Arch region in British Columbia (14,444 net acres). DXI Energy Inc. maintains offices in Calgary and Vancouver, Canada. The company is currently publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE MKT: DXI) and Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: DXI).
Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information: This news release contains statements about oil and gas production and operating activities that may constitute "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation as they involve the implied assessment that the resources described can be profitably produced in the future, based on certain estimates and assumptions. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the timing of delisting from the NYSE MKT, the approval of this listing on the OTCQB and all necessary final approvals being obtained, Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by DXI Energy and described in the forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to, adverse general economic conditions, operating hazards, drilling risks, inherent uncertainties in interpreting engineering and geologic data, competition, reduced availability of drilling and other well services, fluctuations in oil and gas prices and prices for drilling and other well services, government regulation and foreign political risks, fluctuations in the exchange rate between Canadian and US dollars and other currencies, as well as other risks commonly associated with the exploration and development of oil and gas properties. Additional information on these and other factors, which could affect DXI Energy Inc.'s operations or financial results, are included in DXI Energy Inc.'s reports on file with Canadian and United States securities regulatory authorities. Other risks include the Company's ongoing review by NYSE MKT ("the Exchange") to ensure the Company continues to regain compliance with Section 1003(a)(iv) of the Company Guide which addresses a Company's ability to operate as a going concern. We assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements should circumstances or management's estimates or opinions change unless otherwise required under securities law.
The TSX does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.
Follow DXI Energy's latest developments on: Facebook http://facebook.com/dxienergy and Twitter @dxienergy.
Contacts:
DXI Energy Inc.
Robert L. Hodgkinson
Chairman & CEO
604-638-5055
investor@dxienergy.com
DXI Energy Inc.
Craig Allison
Investor Relations- New York
914-882-0960
callison@dxienergy.com
Chattanoogas Kids on the Block received a grant from Westfield Insurance Foundation thanks to the help of First Volunteer Insurance Agency. The grant is part of the new Westfield Legacy of Caring program in which Westfield agencies across the country were invited to nominate a local nonprofit in the areas of disaster relief, insurance pathways, family stability, or safety.
Thanks to the generous donation from Westfield Insurance Foundation, we will be able to increase our efforts toward providing prevention and awareness educational programs for children and families in our community.
Our programs focus on child abuse, bullying, accepting difference, healthy eating and exercise, gangs and violence, respect and effective communication, among other topics to help keep children safe and healthy, said Kelly Williams, executive director of CKOB.We value our partnerships with our independent insurance agencies. Giving back to our agents communities in support of these key areas is an extension of the fundamental role that insurance plays every day in stabilizing families, businesses and communities, said Ed Largent, Westfield president, CEO, board chair and Westfield Insurance Foundation chairman.First Volunteer Insurance Agency and its employees are proud members of the Chattanooga area community. Our collaboration with Westfield allows us to further our citizenship efforts and have impact in critically important initiatives, said Mike Owen, agent with First Volunteer Insurance."CKOB is one of 45 nonprofit agencies nationwide to receive over $400,000 in donations from the Westfield Legacy of Caring program. Westfield is proud to work with their independent agents in distributing nearly $750,000 since the onset of the Legacy of Caring program last year," officials said.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- Homestake Resource Corporation (TSX VENTURE: HSR)(FRANKFURT: B6IH) ("Homestake" or the "Company") entered into a Loan Agreement with Auryn Resources Ltd. ("Auryn") dated May 10, 2016 which provided for the loan of $150,000 to fund the purchase of a NSR from Teck Resources Ltd., on its Homestake Ridge Property (see news release dated May 13, 2016) as to $100,000 and as to $50,000 to fund expenses towards negotiating and executing an Arrangement agreement with Auryn (see news release dated June 14, 2016).
The Loan Agreement contained a conversion feature allowing conversion of the indebtedness into Homestake common shares at a conversion price of $.10 per Homestake common share. Auryn has delivered a Conversion Notice and, accordingly and subject to the consent of the TSX-V Exchange, Homestake shall deliver to Auryn 1.5 million Homestake Common Shares in satisfaction of the indebtedness.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF HOMESTAKE RESOURCE CORPORATION
"Joseph A. Kizis, Jr.", President & Director
The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this release. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, constitute "forward-looking statements" and includes statement regarding the timing for completion of the grinding and flotation circuits, its effect on gold recovery, grade and average payable gold, as well as any other information that addresses activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future including the Company's strategy, plans or future financial or operating performance and other statements that express management's expectations or estimates of future performance.
Forward-looking statements are generally identifiable by the use of the words "may", "will", "should", "continue", "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "believe", "intend", "plan" or "project" or the negative of these words or other variations on these words or comparable terminology. These statements, however, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed, implied by or projected in the forward-looking information or statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements include but are not limited to: risks related to the exploration and potential development of the Company's project, the actual results of current exploration activities, conclusions of economic evaluations, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, future prices of gold, and other statements that express management's expectations or estimates of future performance.
There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. Except as required by law, the Company does not intend to revise or update these forward-looking statements after the date of this document or to revise them to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events.
Contacts:
Homestake Resource Corporation
+1 (604) 684-9384
+1 (604) 688-4670 (FAX)
info@mnxltd.com
www.homestakeresource.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- Alexco Resource Corp. (TSX: AXR)(NYSE MKT: AXU) ("Alexco" or the "Company") announced today that it has filed a preliminary short form base shelf prospectus with the securities commissions in each of the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario and a corresponding registration statement on Form F-10 (Registration Statement) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the U.S./Canada Multijurisdictional Disclosure System.
The shelf prospectus filings, when final, will allow Alexco to make offerings of common shares, warrants, subscription receipts and/or units up to an aggregate total of Cdn$50 million during the 25-month period that the final short form base shelf prospectus remains effective. Such securities may be offered in amounts, at prices and on terms to be determined based on market conditions at the time of sale and set forth in one or more shelf prospectus supplement(s) and, subject to applicable regulations, may include at-the-market transactions, private placements, public offerings or strategic investments. Information regarding the use of proceeds from a sale of such securities will be included in the applicable prospectus supplement.
The Registration Statement has been filed with the SEC, but has not yet become effective. Securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the Registration Statement becomes effective. After the Registration Statement becomes effective, a copy of the Registration Statement and a copy of the preliminary short form base shelf prospectus, and copies of the final short form base shelf prospectus and any shelf prospectus supplements that may be filed in the future, can be found on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov or may be obtained by request to the Corporate Secretary of Alexco at Suite 1225, Two Bentall Centre, 555 Burrard Street, Box 216, Vancouver, British Columbia, V7X 1M9, Telephone (604) 633-4888.
If any securities are offered under the Prospectus or Registration Statement, the terms of any such securities and the intended use of the net proceeds resulting from such offering would be established at the time of any offering and would be described in a prospectus supplement filed with the applicable Canadian securities regulatory authorities and the SEC at the time of such an offering and would be made available by Alexco at the above address.
About Alexco
Alexco Resource Corp. owns the Bellekeno silver mine, one of several mineral properties held by Alexco which encompass substantially all of the historical Keno Hill Silver District located in Canada's Yukon Territory. Employing a unique business model, Alexco also provides mine-related environmental services, remediation technologies and reclamation and mine closure services to both government and industry clients through the Alexco Environmental Group, its wholly-owned environmental services division.
This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of any of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful, including in the United States.
Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Certain statements ("forward-looking statements") in this news release contain forward-looking information concerning the shelf prospectus filings including the final short form base shelf prospectus and any shelf prospectus supplements that may be filed, planned exploration and development of its properties, plans related to its business and other matters that may occur in the future, made as of the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the preliminary short form base shelf prospectus, the final short form base shelf prospectus, any shelf prospectus supplements and any related shelf prospectus filings. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, risks related to regulatory approval of the shelf prospectus filings; risks related to Alexco's ability to raise additional capital; actual results and timing of exploration and development activities; actual results and timing of mining activities; actual results and timing of environmental services activities; actual results and timing of remediation and reclamation activities; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; future prices of silver, gold, lead, zinc and other commodities; possible variations in mineable resources, grade or recovery rates; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; First Nation rights and title; continued capitalization and commercial viability; global economic conditions; competition; and delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing or in the completion of development activities.
Forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that management believes are reasonable at the time they are made. In making the forward-looking statements included in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including, but not limited to, the assumption that regulatory approval of the any shelf prospectus filings and related offerings will be obtained in a timely fashion, that the Company will be able to raise additional capital that the proposed exploration and development will proceed as planned, and that market fundamentals will result in sustained silver, gold, lead and zinc demand and prices. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.
Contacts:
Alexco Resource Corp.
Clynton R. Nauman
President and Chief Executive Officer
(604) 633-4888
(604) 633-4887 (FAX)
Alexco Resource Corp.
Mike Clark
Chief Financial Officer
(604) 633-4888
(604) 633-4887 (FAX)
info@alexcoresource.com
(ASX:MJP) Martin Aircraft Company Limitedhas announced it has signed a formal Alliance Agreement with US based Avwatch Incorporated.
Avwatch trains Federal, state and local government agencies in homeland security and disaster recovery.
The partnership will involve training in and development of the First Responder Martin Jetpack, to meet the requirements of US Homeland Security.
Martin Aircraft also plans to establish a sales and marketing presence at Avwatch headquarters in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Martin Aircraft Company Limited reported a net profit of $4.62 million at 31 December 2015.
BetaZi, an early-stage data science company, raised funding from Mark Cuban, through his VC firm Radical Investments*.
The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
The company intends to use the funds to speed product development and market penetration.
Led by CEO Janette Conradson, BetaZi provides production oil and gas forecasting solutions to give industry stakeholders access to actionable intelligence with testable results.
*Radical Investments LP is a Mark Cuban VC investment entity that does seed and early stage venture funding. Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters, Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of AXS TV.
FinSMEs
18/07/2016
Lifesum, a Stockholm, Sweden-based digital health company, raised $10m in funding.
The round was led by global venture capital firm Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), with participation from Draper Esprit, Bauer Media Group and SparkLabs Global Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, Walter Masalin, NGP, will join Lifesums board.
The company will use the funds to hire across multiple sections of its team, including engineering, product, design and marketing and grow in Europe and the US.
Co-founded by Henrik Torstensson, CEO, and Marcus Gners, COO, Lifesum provides an app that features tech and psychology to show users how changing small, everyday habits can transform their life.
The app which has 15 million users worldwide is available on iOS, Android and Apple Watch.
In 2016, the company has launched digital-to-real world partnerships with food and juice bar Crussh in the UK, and farm-to-table delivery service PALETA in the U.S. Both projects saw Lifesum provide user data which revealed the nutritional deficiencies in London (for Crussh), and New York and Los Angeles (for PALETA). This data was then used to create tailor-made juices to provide the nutrients that locals were lacking.
Lifesum is also seeking partnerships with organizations in other sectors, including food, fitness, healthcare, DNA and pharmaceuticals.
FinSMEs
18/07/2016
Quilt, a Boston, MA-based insurtech startup focused on renters, raised $3.25m in seed funding.
Backers included NextView Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Founder Collective, Basset Investment Group, Titan Partners, and some angel investors.
The company will use the funds to launch the platform and expand nationally.
Led by Blair Baldwin, co-founder & CEO, Quilt is building an online platform that allows renters to insure their things online and in less than 5 minutes with no phone calls, faxes, or paperwork. The solution is now live in Florida.
In a recent post, Baldwin explained his own vision. Read it here.
FinSMEs
18/07/2016
Mobidiag Oy, an Espoo, Finland-based molecular diagnostics company, signed a 15m loan with the European Investment Bank Group.
As part of the InnovFin initiative, the loan will allow Mobidiag to finalize and scale up Novodiag products manufacturing, assay validation and commercialization over the next 3 years. The operation is supported by InnovFin EU Finance for Innovators, with the financial backing of the European Union under Horizon 2020 Financial Instruments.
Led by Tuomas Tenkanen, CEO, Mobidiag develops innovative solutions to advance the diagnosis of infectious diseases serving the European clinical diagnostics market including:
The Amplidiag product line, innovative multiplex tests for gastrointestinal infections;
The new Amplidiag Easy platform that automates the workflow from sample to results; and
The Novodiag platform and associated panels (upcoming), an automated solution suitable for smaller volumes and labs.
The company has a subsidiary in Paris, France.
FinSMEs
18/07/2016
MarketInvoice, a London and Manchester, UK-based peer-to-peer online invoice finance platform, raised 7.2m in funding.
The round was led by MCI.TechVentures Fund of MCI Capital, a listed Polish private equity group, with participation from existing investor Northzone. In conjunction with the funding, Sylwester Janik, Senior Partner at MCI Capital, joined MarketInvoices board.
The company intends to use the funds to consolidate its position in the UK, accelerate marketing, and continue developing its products.
Launched in 2011 by Anil Stocker, CEO, and newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer Lisa Gervis (formerly of Sequoia-backed Elevate Credit and American Express) and Director of Sales Rupert Thorp (formerly of Experian and Sky IQ), MarketInvoice is a peer-to-peer invoice finance platform that allows SMEs to get paid in 24 hours by financing their invoices at competitive rates. To date, more than 850m has been raised through the platform, with businesses using the funds to hire more staff, launch new products and pay their suppliers. In August 2013, the UK Government via the British Business Bank began lending to UK small businesses through MarketInvoice with more than 50m funded via the platform.
Now, as the peer-to-peer sector consolidates, the company will try to broaden its reach by targeting a wider range of businesses, from startups to mid-sized corporates.
FinSMEs
18/07/2016
Two hours.
Thats all it took for tickets of Rajinikanths upcoming starrer Kabali to be sold out, at 400 theatres across the US.
And were not even putting a figure on the frenzy for tickets to the first few shows of the film in the superstars core constituency Tamil Nadu.
As the release date of Rajinikanths 159th film draws nearer (Kabali will be in theatres on 22 July) the demand for tickets has been unprecedented. Nearly all the theatres in Chennai will be playing the film across all their screens and yet, theres quite the fight raging between moviegoers for access to coveted tickets, especially over the films first three days.
Memes and jokes about the excuses professionals will have to come up with for their bosses, just so they can skip work and take in an early Kabali show, have already been doing the rounds. Meanwhile, social media was abuzz with rumours that there would be special 1 am shows of Kabali on 22 July although producer Kalaipuli S Thanu has said that the first shows will begin only on the morning of 22 July.
Thanu, who sold the rights to Kabali for record prices, adds that it was unprecedented that every theatre in Chennai was screening the film across all its screens. One of the most popular theatre chains, SPI Cinemas, is playing the film across its 27 screens in the city which amounts to 96 shows per day. Pre-booking at SPI Cinemas opened on 15 July and within a few hours all the tickets for the 96 shows had been sold out for the first three days. Bookings opened on Monday morning across other theatres like Abirami (16 shows) in the city and by 10 am, tickets for the first three days have been sold out. Social media is filled with requests from fans to theatres like AGS Cinemas to check when they are opening bookings.
Rakesh Gowthaman owner of Vettri Theatres tells us that though he has not yet opened bookings, tickets for 22 July have been sold out for Kabali. We have two theatres Vetrri and Rakesh and all the tickets for the first day have been reserved by friends, family, VIPs and people on social media. This has never happened before in our theatre! In the city, there are no tickets available across screens for the first three days and people are now calling me for tickets. In fact, Lions Club wanted tickets for an entire show and I had to decline. Now they are going to Coimbatore to watch the film, says Rakesh. Ask him why there is a big demand for tickets and he says, Director Pa Ranjith has shown Rajinikanth portraying his actual age in Kabali and people want to see that. Secondly, the teaser and the song Neruppu Da is mind-blowing and people love it.
The Kabali craze has caught on in other states like Karnataka and Kerala as well. While in Tamil Nadu, ticket prices are regulated by the government and cannot exceed Rs 120, in these states the ticket price ranges anywhere from Rs 150 to Rs 600! And whether July 22 is a working day or not people are definitely planning to catch the film. Says Abhilash Jacob, a sales professional in Bengaluru, The bookings have opened only in four theatres and they are sold out for the first day. I am hoping to get tickets for the first day when bookings open across other screens. I cant miss the first day first show of Kabali at any cost.
Rajinikanth fans and even those who arent, but are just caught up in the craze are calling in their connections to score Kabali tickets. An actor, on condition of anonymity, says, I got a call from an uncle who I havent heard from in ages! He generally enquired about my well-being and then asked me to get him a few Kabali tickets because my aunt wanted to see the film. I dont even think Ill be able to get tickets! VIPs are now looking at theatres outside Chennai to catch the film in case they dont get tickets.
Such is the power of Rajinikanth.
Japan's SoftBank Group Corp is set to agree a deal to buy British chip designer ARM Holdings PLC for around $32 billion, a source familiar with the deal said, adding an announcement could come later in the day.
ARM, the most valuable tech company listed in London, is a major presence in mobile processing, with its processor and graphics technology used by Samsung, Huawei and Apple in their in-house designed microchips.
SoftBank could not immediately be reached for comment. ARM officials were not reachable outside market hours.
If confirmed, the deal would be one of the largest in European technology to date and SoftBank's largest ever - outranking the $22 billion acquisition of a controlling stake in wireless operator Sprint in 2013, a deal that left the group with hefty debts as the carrier's losses mounted.
Softbank has announced plans over the past few weeks to raise $14 billion with the sale of assets including shares in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba - unusual for a group that has rarely exited investments. But analysts had expected it to use the cash to reduce debt or give shareholders a windfall by buying back its own shares.
An announcement on Monday would come less than a month after the Japanese group's founder, Masayoshi Son, scrapped his plans to retire, effectively pushing out his heir apparent, former Google executive Nikesh Arora.
Son, known as "Masa", said then that he wanted to stay on to develop Sprint but also to complete the transformation of SoftBank into a tech investment powerhouse. Among the triggers for what Son has called the next 'paradigm shift' in technology are artificial intelligence and the internet of things - a new focus for ARM as it weathers a smartphone slowdown.
It bought UK imaging specialist Apical earlier this year, a company that specializes in technology to allow computers to analyze images - replicating human vision using software.
A deal would also come just weeks after Britain voted to leave the European Union, a decision that has battered sterling and bolstered the yen.
Though it has warned on the staffing impact of Brexit, ARM Holdings' revenues are largely in dollars and it has a diverse portfolio of technologies it licenses. Its shares have actually climbed almost 17 percent since the vote.
According to a Financial Times report earlier on Monday, SoftBank will pay 17 pounds in cash for each ARM share, a premium of more than 40 percent to Friday's close at 11.89 pounds.
SoftBank shares were not traded on Monday, a market holiday in Tokyo.
The Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014, intends to amend the Indian Constitution to confer concurrent tax powers on the Union as well as the States and Union territories to make laws for levying Goods and Services Tax (GST).
The objective of this amendment is to replace a plethora of indirect taxes being levied by the Central Government and various State Governments with a single GST and create a common national market for goods and services.
Under the proposed amendment, alcohol for human consumption has been exempted and with regard to five petroleum products (petroleum crude, high speed diesel, petrol, natural gas, aviation turbine fuel), GST will apply on a later date.
The amendment also envisages the setting up of a GST Council that will recommend rates of tax, period of levy of additional tax, special provisions to certain states, apportionment of Integrated GST, the threshold limit of turnover below which goods and services may be exempted from GST, etc. Furthermore, under this the central government is empowered to impose an additional tax of up to 1 percent on inter-state supply of goods for two years or more. This tax will be given to states from where the supply originates.
Even though the constitutional amendment has been passed by the Lok Sabha in May 2015, it is still pending in Rajya Sabha where the ruling dispensation does not have the requisite majority. Besides, differences between the ruling and opposition parties have resulted in a deadlock.
The lack of consensus between the ruling coalition and the principal opposition party is around the following three points:
Scrapping of 1 percent additional tax on inter-state sales: The additional 1 percent tax in my opinion goes against the very basic idea of GST which is aimed at a common unified market. The panel headed by Chief Economic Advisor set up by the Central Government has also recommended removing this additional one per cent tax on inter-state sales over and above the GST rate.
Providing for an independent Dispute Resolution Mechanism: As per the proposed amendment, the GST Council which is a formal grouping of the Centre, and States will take decisions on all operational aspects of GST by way of voting. While the Centre has been given 1/3rdvote, all the states together will have 2/3rd vote and all resolutions have to be passed by a 3/4th majority of this council. When the previous government introduced the constitutional amendment for GST (115th Amendment), it provided for a three member Dispute Settlement Authority (DSA) headed by a judicial member to settle disputes between states or between states and the Central Government on GST with an appeal provision to the Supreme Court. The present constitutional amendment does not provide for a separate dispute settlement body on the basis of the recommendation of the parliamentary standing committee on finance.
In my opinion, it is always a good idea to have an independent three member DSA which consists of at least one judicial member who may be a retired Supreme Court judge. The mandate of the DSA is to adjudicate any dispute referred to it by a State Government or Central Government arising out of a deviation from any of the recommendations of the GST Council that results in a loss of revenue for the governments or anything that affects the harmonised structure of GST. This means that there is virtually no scope for any unnecessary intervention by DSA and whatever be the decision of DSA, the ultimate control over finances will always be with Parliament and state legislatures.
Constitutional Cap on the rate of GST: The demand of the principal opposition party to provide for 18 percent constitutional cap on GST rates is opposed by the government on the ground that putting a constitutional cap on rates would make the system very rigid as it is extremely difficult to amend the constitution in case of an emergency. I feel that there should be some cap with respect to the GST rates, but it should not be made part of the constitution. The constitutional rate cap can be inserted by aligning it to the provisions dealing with financial emergency under Article 360 or it can be framed as a cap on indirect tax based as a percentage of GDP. Instead, the maximum rate can be put into the GST Act itself and if this is done then changing the rate to tackle any emergency is easier as it would only require approval from both houses of parliament with a simple majority.
However, governments should also understand that GST rates must not be increased frequently unless there are some very important reasons for doing so.
Even if our proposed GST model is not perfect because of its exclusion of certain items, the urgent need of the hour is to get the GST Amendment passed by Parliament.
(The author is professor, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Views are personal)
BEIJING Freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end "in disaster", a senior Chinese admiral has said, a warning to the United States after last week's ruling against Beijing's claims in the area.
China has refused to recognise the ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague that invalidated its vast territorial 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 adherence to the decision.
China has repeatedly blamed the United States for stirring up trouble in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually.
China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have rival claims, of which China's is the largest.
The United States has conducted freedom of navigation patrols close to Chinese-held islands, to Beijing's anger, while China has been bolstering its military presence there.
Speaking behind closed doors at a forum in Beijing on Saturday evening, Sun Jianguo, an admiral and deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the powerful Central Military Commission, said the freedom of navigation issue was bogus and one that certain countries repeatedly hyped up.
"When has freedom of navigation in the South China Sea ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there won't be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks," he said, according to a transcript of his comments seen by Reuters on Monday.
China is the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and won't let anybody damage it, Sun said.
"But China consistently opposes so-called military freedom of navigation, which brings with it a military threat and which challenges and disrespects the international law of the sea," Sun said.
"This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way," he added, without elaborating.
A U.S. Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States reserved the right to carry out freedom of navigation operations and the Chinese admiral's comments would not change that.
Sun also said the court case at The Hague must be used by China's armed forces to improve its capabilities "so that when push comes to shove, the military can play a decisive role in the last moment to defend our national sovereignty and interests".
Despite the warnings, China and the United States have been maintaining open lines of communication, with U.S. Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson meeting the head of the Chinese navy, Wu Shengli, in Beijing on Monday.
"I think that you can visit China this time at our invitation, that shows both sides attach great concern to maritime security," Wu told Richardson in brief comments in front of reporters.
In the meeting, Wu said China would not stop building reefs and islands in the sea, state-owned Xinhua news agency reported, with that construction also a part of China's efforts to bolster its claims.
Separately, China's Maritime Safety Administration said on Monday that an area just off the east of the island province of Hainan would be a no-sail zone from July 19-21 while military drills take place.
China generally describes its exercises in the South China Sea as routine.
China's air force also said on its microblog it had recently carried out "normal battle patrols" over the South China Sea involving bombers, spy planes and flying tankers, including over Scarborough Shoal, which is disputed with the Philippines.
Such air patrols would become "a regular practice" in the future, Xinhua reported an air force spokesman as saying.
(Additional reporting by Beijing monitoring team and Idrees Ali in Washington.; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Nick Macfie and Paul Simao)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
BATON ROUGE, La. The black U.S. Marine Corps veteran who shot dead three police officers in Louisiana's capital planned his attack for days and then assassinated the men, police said on Monday, as the United States reeled from the latest deadly shooting involving police and African-Americans.
One of three officers wounded in Sunday's shootings was hit in the head and stomach and was fighting for his life, police said at a news conference in Baton Rouge, which has been the scene of repeated protests against police violence after the July 5 fatal shooting by officers of Alton Sterling, a black man, outside a convenience store.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson said at the news conference. "It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day."
Edmonson said "the most compelling piece of evidence is the video" of the shooting. Three guns were recovered from the scene and much was left to be learned about the attack, including the gunman's social media footprint, Edmonson told reporters. He said the gunman "had been in our community for several days."
The gunman has been identified as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who served in the Marines for five years, including a 2008 deployment in the Iraq war. Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was shot dead on Sunday morning in a gunfight with police.
Racial tension in the United States has been especially high since a black former U.S. Army Reserve soldier fatally shot five Dallas police officers who were patrolling a protest over the police shootings of Sterling and another black man in Minnesota.
The suspect said he wanted to change his name from Gavin Eugene Long to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra in May 2015, according to Jackson County, Missouri, public records. But court officials said he never completed the process of legally changing his name.
A website, social media accounts and YouTube videos that appeared tied to Long included complaints about police treatment of black people and praise for killings of the Dallas policemen.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told Monday's news conference that Long "came to do harm," and he called the shooting "pure, unadulterated evil."
Police said a member of the SWAT team that responded to the scene killed Long with a shot from 100 yards away. East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said he had "no doubt" that Long would have killed additional officers if not for that shot.
Long also affiliated himself with the Washitaw Nation, an African-American offshoot of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, a group whose members view the federal government as illegitimate.
The dead officers in Baton Rouge were identified as Montrell Jackson, 32; Matthew Gerald, 41; and Brad Garafola, 45.
Two other officers were treated for their wounds in hospital and released.
MEMORIAL AT SHOOTING SCENE
At the B Quick gas station where the shootings occurred, people left flowers and balloons in memory of the slain officers.
"I just want us to have peace and drive down the road and not feel like we have to duck our heads and look around and see if someone's going to be on top of a roof," said Pam Collins, a resident of the Baton Rouge suburb of Prairieville who brought three shiny balloons to honour the officers.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in a speech to the NAACP civil rights group in Cincinnati, said she would bring the "full weight of the law to bear" against cop killers but added that here is "another hard truth at the heart of this complex matter: Many African-Americans fear the police."
But she added that the police shootings of Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota "drove home how urgently we need to make reforms to policing and criminal justice (and) how we cannot rest until we root out implicit bias and stop the killings of African-Americans."
Her Republican rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, tweeted that "our country is a divided crime scene" and called for stronger leadership on law and order issues.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service were in Baton Rouge.
"At the Department of Justice, we are determined to do everything we can to bridge divides, to heal rifts, to restore trust, and to ensure that every American feels respected, supported, and safe," Lynch said in remarks prepared for a conference of black law enforcement officers in Washington.
Louisiana's capital has a long history of distrust between black residents and law enforcement and it has been inflamed by Sterling's death. For many in Baton Rouge, the police have been viewed as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of a city where more than half the 230,000 residents are black.
A local state legislator, Republican Barry Ivey, said in aftermath of Sunday's shootings political leaders should "lay the rhetoric aside" and focus on peaceful solutions.
The recent U.S. violence has heightened security concerns, notably for the Republican convention beginning in Cleveland where Donald Trump is positioned to get his party's nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election, and the upcoming Democratic convention in Philadelphia where Clinton is due to get her party's nomination.
(Additional reporting by Sam Karlin in Baton Rouge, David Alexander and Eric Walsh in Washington, Laila Kearney in New York; Writing by Will Dunham and Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Trott)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday declined the request by two amicus curiae senior counsel Raju Ramachandran and Sanjay R Hegde to withdraw from assisting the court in the hearing of the appeals by the convicts in the 16 December Delhi gangrape case.
Asking both to continue assisting the court in the hearing of the appeals by the four accused convicted and sentenced to death, the bench of Justice Dipak Misra, Justice R. Banumathi and Justice Ashok Bhushan said: "We can appreciate the anguish expressed by the learned amici curiae.
"We repeat at the cost of repetition that this court has complete faith in the intellectual integrity in the objective assistance of the learned amici curiae who have been appointed by this court and, therefore, they should not feel any agony on any score."
Reminding two senior counsel of their duty to assist the court, the bench said: "Their duty is to assist the Court and we are sure they will do the same."
"We may hasten to clarify, the learned friends of the court shall assist the court with regard to the case and not with regard to any particular petitioner."
Ramachandran and Hegde, in their communication to the court, sought to withdraw as amicus curiae following a letter by two accused objecting to their being nominated to assist the court in respect of their appeals.
The bench had asked Ramachandran to assist it in the hearing of the appeals by Mukesh and Pawan, and Hegde asked to assist the court in the hearing of appeals by Vinay Sharma and Akshay Thakur.
The court on Monday commenced hearing on the appeals by the four whose conviction and death sentence in 16 December Delhi gangrape case was upheld by the Delhi High Court on 13 March, 2014.
Appearing for one of the accused, counsel ML Sharma took the court through the evidence that was tendered at the stage of trial. Since his submission was inconclusive, the next hearing will take place on 22 July.
Mukesh, Pawan, Sharma, Thakur and Ram Singh along with a juvenile were accused of gangraping and assaulting a 23-year-old paramedical student inside a private bus. The victim and her friend were thrown out of the bus after the crime.
Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide while in incarceration.
The victim died of grave intestinal injuries on 29 December, 2012, at Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital.
Ahmedabad: Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel on Monday ordered a CID probe into the alleged assault on Dalit community members for allegedly killing a cow at Una last week, and also announced to set up a special court for "speedy" trial of the case.
"The probe into the Una Dalits thrashing case has been handed over to CID (Crime). Also a special designated court will be set up for speedy trial of the case," an official statement listing the orders given by the Chief Minister said.
Terming the incident as "unfortunate", Patel also ordered appointment of a special public prosecutor, who will be required to submit the charge-sheet within sixty days, it said.
In addition, Patel announced that the state government will bear all the medical expenses of the seven Dalit youths, who were injured in this incident and are undergoing treatment at various government hospitals in Una, Junagadh and Rajkot.
"Rs one lakh each has been given to the victims as compensation," it said.
The order from the Chief Minister's office came even as the Rajya Sabha on Monday witnessed a brief adjournment on the opening day of Monsoon session as BSP members trooped into the Well of the House alleging atrocities on Dalits in BJP-ruled Gujarat.
According to the official release, nine persons have been arrested in this case so far, while three policemen have been suspended for dereliction of duty.
The incident at Una town in Gir-Somnath district, where Dalit youths were paraded and flogged for allegedly killing a cow, caused nation-wide outrage after its video went viral. The victims' contention was that they were skinning a dead cow and had not killed it.
Justifying their act, the accused alleged that these youths were involved in cow slaughter.
Several elected leaders of Gir-Somnath met the Gujarat CM at Gandhinagar and demanded action against the culprits.
She assured that officials have been given instructions to take all necessary action in this regard, the release added.
Chicago Police Continue To Patrol In Pairs After Baton Rouge Attack
By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 18, 2016 2:59PM
By Aaron Cynic/Chicagoist
Chicago police officers will continue to work in pairs after three officers were fatally shot and three others were wounded on Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, LA, according to a police statement.
The directive was previously instated on July 8 in the wake of the Dallas sniper attack that killed five officers.
A statement sent to Chicagoist said there is currently no threat to Chicago, but officers continue to patrol in pairs and in uniform and remain vigilant.
"Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the Baton Rouge Police Department and the families of the slain officers. CPD has reached out to offer any support and police resources that could possibly assist., the release also read. We ask that everyone take a moment to pray for the Baton Rouge community during this difficult time.
Police said in a statement earlier this month that the pairs measure intends to increase visibility and strengthen officer safety.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel released a statement on Sunday calling for unity.
Statement from Mayor Emanuel on Baton Rouge pic.twitter.com/Fz4izG4PQJ ChicagosMayor (@ChicagosMayor) July 17, 2016
The attack in Baton Rouge is the latest violent act in a summer that has seen tensions rise between police, the black community and activists. Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile, in St. Paul, MN, were both fatally shot by police, sparking protests nationwide (including in Chicago).
Jaipur: Hundreds of people have been evacuated to safer places in eastern Rajasthan after heavy rainfall over the past two days led to a flood-like situation in the region and severed road connectivity to many areas.
Incessant rainfall lashed Bharatpur, Dholpur and Karauli districts inundating several areas. Bharatpur district collector Laxminarayan Soni said, "Flood like situation affected normal life in the district and nearly 400 people have been shifted to shelters. The army was called in for rescue work on Friday, but was sent back on Sunday night as the situation improved."
He said many areas and villages were water-logged but the water level has been gradually reducing.
Dholpur collector Suchi Tyagi said two officers of the army today reviewed the situation. "Several villages have been cut off by roads and remain inundated. Policemen have been deployed to prevent people from crossing roads or bridges where water-level is high," she said.
The areas received light rain since last night, but the Met department issued a warning for heavy rains today. Tyagi said all arrangements for relief and rescue were in place. Schools in Karauli district have been shut on Monday.
"More than 300 people are staying at five-six temporary shelters. Arrangements for food and medicines have been made," an official overseeing the relief work said, asserting all people in the district were safe. A 35-member National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) team was camping in Karauli for relief and rescue.
Rajasthan has received excess rainfall so far this season. Against a normal rainfall of 149.85 mm from 1 June to 17 July, the state recorded 222.99 mm rainfall, a jump of 48.81 per cent.
Twelve districts Alwar, Baran, Bharatpur, Chittorgarh, Churu, Dausa, Jhalawar, Jhunjhunu, Karauli, Rajsamand,
Sawaimadhopur and Sikar have received abnormal rainfall (60 per cent or more). Eleven, including Ajmer, Jaipur, Kota and Udaipur, received excess rains (20 per cent to 59 per cent).
Despite this, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Sirohi have had deficit rains while Barmer, Jalore and Sri Ganganagar have had
scanty rainfall so far. The other four districts Banswara, Nagaur, Pali and Pratapgarh have recorded normal rainfall.
Of the 822 dams in Rajasthan, 36 were fully filled and 391 were partially filled, while 395 are empty, according to water resources department.
In a shocking incident, a six-year-old boy died after he was allegedly beaten up by his senior in a school in Hyderabad.
According to Deccan Chronicle, Mohammed Ibrahim, a Class 1 student at the Promising Scholars High School in Toli Chowki, Hyderabad, was kicked in the groin four times by a Class 2 student in the school campus.
The boy was taken to Niloufer Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries on Saturday. "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," the report quoted Ibrahim's father Mohammed Abdul Majeed as saying.
Another NDTV report said that Majeed also lodged a complaint with the police, alleging negligence by the school authorities.
In fact, the caretaker at the school, Maheshwari, admitted that she knew about the incident but was on the ground floor when the fight between the boys happened on the first or second floor.
"I have filed an FIR. This shouldn't happen with any other child again...Concerned authorities should take action against this irresponsible school. What was the management doing?" ANI quoted Majeed as saying.
New York: Separatist Kashmiri groups have held demonstrations outside the premises of India's Permanent Mission to the UN protesting against the Indian forces in the Valley and demanding UN intervention in the Kashmir issue.
The Kashmir American Council led the three-hour protests on Sunday attended by women and children as well. Holding banners and placards that read 'Indian Forces Out of Kashmir', 'No Democracy Without Self-Determination' and 'Time to Resolve Kashmir Dispute Now', the protesters shouted slogans demanding "freedom" for Kashmir and its people.
The demonstrators also shouted slogans in support of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, who was killed this month by Indian forces in Kashmir.
"The US and other western countries must intervene to stop the human rights violations in Kashmir," Shaheen Khalid Butt, Chairman of the Kashmir Mission USA, said.
Ghulam Nabi Fai of World Kashmir Awareness said India and Pakistan must sit at the negotiating table "without any condition from any party" and keep "their horizon open" to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute.
Fai has served two years' imprisonment in the US on the charges of working on behalf of Pakistan's ISI. The protesters, demonstrating a few yards away from the UN headquarters, also demanded intervention by the world body to settle the Kashmir issue.
CTA Blue Line Derailment Causes Afternoon Delays
By Rachel Cromidas in News on Jul 18, 2016 5:27PM
CTA Blue Line Illinois Medical District station, via Chicagoist Flickr User M.R.
A CTA train derailment is causing delays on the Blue Line and the Eisenhower Expressway where the train line meets the highway near the Illinois Medical District stop, according to reports. No injuries have been reported, according to CBS News.
The CTA has temporarily suspended service between the UIC Halsted station in Greektown and the Pulaski station at the end of the Southwestern Blue Line branch, and is providing shuttle bus service instead.
Outbound Eisenhower lanes are being blocked near Ashland Avenue while emergency workers address the CTA derailment, according to A CBS Chicago reporter.
Jaish-e-Mohammad operative Mohammad Abid was sentenced to life imprisonment by a special court on 14 July for "plotting to kill innocent people in the country in order to create an atmosphere of terror".
According to police, Abid, Mirza Rashid Beg alias Raza Kazzafi and Shaifurrahman alias Yusuf were Pakistani nationals and were kept in Lucknow jail after their arrest in November 2007, following an encounter when they were on their way to Lucknow.
Soon after Abid's conviction, Mahesh Devi, a woman from Meerut claimed that the JeM operative resembled her son Praveen Kumar, who went missing in 2006, reported The Indian Express.
"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," she said.
Mahesh Devi said that she came across Abid's photo in a local newspaper and expressed interest in meeting Abid and was quoted in the report as saying, "Abids face resembles my sons. Praveen had left home for Delhi with a passenger on 5 May, 2006, but he never returned. She also submitted a memorandum requesting the Lucknow District Magistrate and UP jail superintendent to facilitate a meeting with Abid.
"When the photographs of the three JeM men held guilty by the court on 30 June, 2016 appeared in newspapers on 1 July in Meerut, we realised that there is uncanny resemblance between Pravin and Abid. Thereafter, we came to Lucknow to meet Abid," her younger son Pawan told PTI.
On 16 July, the local administration granted her permission to meet Abid in Lucknow jail. The family finally met Abid for 50 minutes on Sunday in the presence of senior officials of the special task force, anti-terror squad and local intelligence unit.
After the meeting, which the family stuck to its claim and demanded a DNA test, Abid denied any links to the family, reported The Times of India. "His voice, the body structure and all about him speak the same thing, except he himself. He said he was not Pravin, and also denied being married, but won't a mother recognise her child," she told TOI.
Not giving up their search, Rihai Manch, the NGO, which is helping out Mahesh Devi, said that they will ask the state government's intervention in the matter.
After their arrest in 2007, the police claimed that they had sneaked into India from Pakistan to free 42 JeM operatives lodged in Indian jails. Three pistols, two AK-47 rifles, 60 live cartridges, 16 hand grenades, 4kg RDX and fake I-cards were recovered from them.
The Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh police had said that they had planned to kidnap a top politician from the state, according to The Hindu.
Director General of Police Vikram Singh had described them as fidayeen or suicide bombers and said that Abid had undergone training in Afghanistan and in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
With inputs from agencies
Sydney: Riches from the Palace of Versailles including a harp belonging to Marie Antoinette will travel to Australia, the country's national gallery said Monday, as part of a display never seen outside France.
More than 130 paintings, tapestries, pieces of furniture, statues and other objects from Versailles, one of France's grand museums, will be on display in the Australian capital Canberra from December.
"The Palace of Versailles has never before lent a collection like this, drawn from all over the palace, to an exhibition outside France," National Gallery of Australia director Gerard Vaughan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Items making the long journey include a marble bust of Louis XIV, a formal portrait of Marie Antoinette, and the 1.5 tonne-statue of Latona and Her Children from one of the main fountains of Versailles outside Paris.
"Versailles: Treasures from the Palace" will also showcase personal items, including Marie Antoinette's hand-crafted chair and harp.
President of the Palace of Versailles, Catherine Pegard said it was the first time the items from the museum had travelled so far from France.
Speaking from Canberra, she told AFP it was important to show that the landmark museum was not closed in on itself but "open to the world".
The exhibition, which will run from 9 December, 2016 to 17 April, 2017, had been under discussion for several years, she said.
"We thought that Canberra was a wonderful place because it is so different from Versailles but, at the same time, the power is located in Canberra as it was in Versailles," she added.
By claiming that relations between his Delhi government and Modi government at the Centre was like "India-Pakistan situation" in his hugely advertised #TalktoAK, Arvind Kejriwal gave an easy headline to the media.
But he didn't specify what position he had in this confrontational relationship India or Pakistan. In India-Pakistan situation, India and Indians have since the time of Independence believed that Pakistan is aggressor, overt or covert and constantly on the roll for creating tensions in one form or the other. Lately Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticised for un-necessarily extending an olive branch on far too many occasions than required. Each time Modi did so, the both the state and non-state actors in Pakistan went on a step further in unleashing fresh bout of hostilities.
For Delhi Chief Minister, the Prime Minister is a "psychopath" and "coward" who has committed a fraud on the nation by acquiring fake and forged graduation and post-graduation degrees and who is mentally so obsessed with him (Kejriwal) that he (Modi) 24x7 keeps on conspiring with his party leaders, Lt Governor, heads of CBI, IB, Delhi Police and so on to confront Modi. In sum and substance, these are the kind of accusations even Pakistan does not make against Modi. Kejriwal would like to believe that in this India-Pakistan situation between Centre and NCT of Delhi, he is India and Modi is Pakistan. It would be for people to judge where does he stand.
He wants to run city government by his whims, constantly challenging, naming Modi and the union government without pausing for a minute to consider that the government runs by set Constitutional and legal norms and more so, the powers of the government in a Union Territory are quite restricted. If he had gotten a prior nod from the Centre to the Bills he intended to pass, as is required under the existing law for NCT of Delhi, 14 bills passed by Delhi assembly wouldn't have hit a roadblock.
He knew this before he assumed power in Delhi but his idea is to create news play both hero and the victim. Kejriwal has made claims that he is the sole challenger of Narendra Modi who has the guts to fight the might of Centre and everyone else, Congress and regional satraps, have capitulated.
Kejriwal has had the location (Delhi) advantage and knows how media would play his actions to the hilt. His prime concern seems to be his politics of expanding beyond Delhi and in the years to come be able to travel the distance between Civil Lines in Delhi (Delhi Chief Minister's residence) to Race Course Road (Prime Minister's residence) in New Delhi. No harm in having such ambition but if one gets obsessed with that then there is a problem for the city state which he leads.
Lately, he has chosen be an absentee chief minister of Delhi. Though Manish Sisodia is an able Deputy, Delhi surely needs a full time chief minister who is focused more on governance than on playing his brand of politics. He returned to Delhi only few days ago after doing rounds in Punjab, Goa and Gujarat. But after doing a two hour long #TalktoAK (crores of rupees was presumably spent on advertising this session in radio, TV and print) and later in the night he was off to Amritsar to Golden temple to perform 'Sewa' to 'atone' the Aam Aadmi Party's 'unintentional mistake' of using an image of the temple along with a broom, the party's symbol, on their Punjab youth manifesto.
Television clips showed that Kejriwal was cleaning already clean plates a person, his party leader or sympathsier standing next to him handing over clean plates and spoons even wiping them afresh, then Kejriwal dipping them in water and putting that on tray. The visuals make it clear that Kejriwal and everyone present there in early hours of Monday at Golden Temple kitchen could see or knew of the dramatic farce that was played out in full glare of cameras.
Kejriwal would like to believe that by cleaning clean plates, he has atoned for the sin committed and people of Punjab would hail him for 'Sewa' performed at most revered Sikh temple and overwhelmingly vote for his Aam Aadmi Party in coming state assembly elections. After he had finished with his dramatic sewa, he said: "I had come here to offer voluntary service to apologise for the unintentional mistake committed in our youth manifesto, I have peace of mind now."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi hopes to have a smooth Monsoon Session of Parliament that begins Monday (18 July). But, most likely, he wont. Thats the sense one gets after Sundays all-party meet called by parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar and a dinner meet convened by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan.
The Opposition is armed with a handful of fresh issues, including Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, the Kashmir unrest, Kairana communal violence and the Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) policy. Then there are usual topics of price rise and farm stress. All of them critical issues which warrant debates in Parliament.
But, what about the business of lawmaking? There are 16 Bills lined up for clearance this time, including the crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill that has been pending in Parliament for eight years. The Bill has been a casualty of the Bhartiya Janata Partys (BJP) weak numbers though passed in the Lok Sabha last year.
At this stage, the GST is a must-do for the BJP government to save its pro-reforms face but a hot potato for the Congress to handle. The deadline for GST implementation has already been delayed by a year and further delay will act as a turn-off for international raters and investors looking at India.
In the all-party meet on Sunday, Modi rightly pinpointed the basic problem on the GST political deadlock the question of who is getting the credit for getting the prize home. GST is the biggest indirect tax reform India has ever seen so far.
It promises to subsume several state, Central-level levies that make life difficult for the taxpayers at all levels and turns off the foreign money managers from the convoluted tax regime. In the long-run, history will remember only the government who converted the GST dream to a reality, not the party who was forced to give in.
The Congress realises it too and so they wouldnt let it happen until they run out of the last possible excuse. The BJP too knew this when it was in the opposition. In fact, Modi, as the Gujarat chief minister, himself was at the forefront of those who opposed GST at that point. It is mere politics.
Therefore Modis comment that, The issue is not which government gets credit, will be received with a wink and grin by the old warhorses in the Congress. For this reason, it wont lay off easily. The grand old party didnt have to struggle in the previous three sessions to put up a fight against the BJP on the GST because there were enough on the plate the JNUs and Rohit Vemulas, intolerance, Vyapam, Agusta and Vijay Mallyas.
But this time, its arsenal is weak, hence it was forced to dig out a weak unconvincing case, not really a Congress method to make some noise the Rs 45,000 crore telecom scam citing a CAG report. But, the ripples of the scam didnt reach far since there was no scam to begin with.
As for the remaining issues on the plate, including Arunachal and Uttarkhand, none is strong enough to blackball the GST. For the first time, the Congress is pushed back to the corner to discuss the core issues in GST. But, it doesnt have a strong ground there.
Of its three major demands, the only major issue capping the GST rate in the constitution doesnt have any major supporters possibly even within the Congress party, both among intellectuals and infantry. The demand is the last, weak point of defence.
Thats the reason why senior leaders like Anand Sharma and Jairam Ramesh have signalled a dilution in the stand from inclusion of the GST rate in the constitution to working out an alternative modal like weaving into the GST Bill. Also, the GST council, which comprises of Union Finance minister, revenue minister and state finance ministers can be given the power to alter the GST rate time to time when situation demands.
As far as the Revenue Neutral Rate (RNR) rate is concerned, there seems to be a broad understanding about 18 percent. A panel headed by Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian had suggested a three-tier rate structure and a standard GST rate of 18 percent. Both the BJP and the Congress are scheduled to discuss GST on Tuesday.
This time Modi has made it extremely difficult for the Congress to blackball the GST Bill by bringing up the issue of larger national interest. At a time when the Congress party has hopes of a revival (especially after winning back Arunachal and Uttarkhand, thanks to judiciary) and UP polls are at the door step, the Congress party wouldnt want to test the patience of middle class voters by creating further impediments to reforms progress. Modi knows this and hence rightly used the phrase suicide by opposing GST.
The public in states like UP, Bihar and West Bengal will be the biggest beneficiaries. Therefore, I do not think any political party will try to commit suicide by opposing GST, said Modi.
Thats a veiled threat to the Congress party that it shouldnt risk battling GST any longer and consensus will be a better option. Also, there is a general agreement among experts that time is running out for the country to initiate the GST reform. In series of columns run by Firstpost recently, industrialists, economists and academics pointed out the pressing need to pass the GST as early as possible considering the time required for the final roll out (states have to separately pass the GST and systems need to be put in place) and the larger benefits of the reform.
GST, in due course, will help broaden the tax base, bring in transparency and create a unified tax regime big enough to add 1.5 percent- 2percent to the GDP.
For the first time, the Congress is cornered on the GST issue and probably for the first time there arent any major weapons in the Congress arsenal to take on the ruling party strong enough to cause a wash-out.
With most regional parties, except for the Left parties and AIADMK, favuoring the GST and the BJP improving the numbers in Rajya Sabha post the recent polls, the Congress fight against the Bill wouldnt have any major support from political allies or voters.
The big reason it highlights to stall the Bill capping the rate in the Constitution was a mistake from the day one. In this context, it makes more political sense for the party to settle for a truce and score a point by emerging as the saviour of larger national interest.
The Congress, eventually, did what it should have done in the first place to stem the disaffection within its Arunachal Pradesh unit, i.e. remove Nabam Tuki from chief ministership. But the Congress is not known to heed voices of discontent within its ranks. Rather, what the party is known for is its top-down hierarchical organisational structure, strictly controlled from Delhi. It is known to practice a durbari culture that has time and again propelled the party to slight regional leaders and pay a high electoral price for such neglect.
Despite these steep and repeatedly felt political costs, the Congress however continues to solely depend on the Gandhi family and its loyalists to bail the party out from crises. And crisis is what now largely defines the Congress party whether in the form of periodic revelations of scams suggesting the direct or indirect involvement of top party leaders, or rebellions frequently breaking out in the partys regional units.
Following Arunachal Pradeshs change of leadership, The Indian Express report on Sunday said: The Congress on Saturday pulled off a coup in Arunachal Pradesh bringing the rebels back into its fold, six months after they deserted the party under the leadership of Kalikho Pul the Nabam Tuki government fell as a consequence.
The eleventh hour leadership change indeed carried the imprint of a desperate face-saver, though the Congress maintained that it had been engaged in a dialogue with the rebel leaders for over a month. However, why the party bosses, particularly the high command at 10 Janpath, did not open a line of communication even earlier is a question that is still unanswered. A timely intervention by the Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Vice-President Rahul Gandhi perhaps could have made stymied the BJPs plans of engineering defections and using them to serve its political ambitions in the North East.
It is true that this time around the last-minute negotiations with Tuki and the rebels have extricated the Congress from the potential embarrassment it could have faced on the floor of the House in case of a floor test. But serious questions about the Congress arrogant organisational culture will continue to haunt it in the weeks and months to come. Has the party learnt any valuable lessons from the recent crises in Arunachal Pradesh, and before that, in Uttarakhand? So far, the answer seems to be in the negative.
In fact, it seems to have become a practice in the Congress to careen from one crisis to another especially in the states. The high commands lack of interest in nurturing home-grown regional leaders has already cost the party dearly. Recall in this context the partys failure, in Assam, to retain within its fold the effective former minister and state Congress leader Himanta Biswa Sarma (who joined the BJP.) His departure was significant to the partys subsequent electoral loss in the recently concluded elections in May. However notwithstanding the accumulated costs of ignoring grievances of state leaders, the Congress continues on a path of self-destruction.
Following its disastrous performance in the last Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 2012, the Congress should have used the next five-years to build up local leadership in the state. Instead the party is now projecting the thrice-elected former Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, as its Chief Ministerial face in next years Assembly elections. This tendency to ignore party sentiments on the ground holds true in most states for the Congress. Contrast this with the BJPs strategy and its electoral success a large part of which can be attributed to the emergence of powerful state leaders who are nurtured by the partys central leadership. While inner-party dissension and the rise of factions are inevitable corollaries of any organisation, ignoring them for a prolonged period of time, can only damage a political party: a fact that the fate of the Congress is making apparent to us today.
Even in the other states of the North East, the Congress is in trouble. A section of Congress legislators and leaders in Meghalaya believe that the present three-term Chief Minister Mukul Sangma should be replaced with a new face before the state heads into Assembly polls in 2018. The Congress high command also had to stave off a crisis in Manipur recently when a section of disgruntled legislators revolted against Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh.
The common complaint cutting across various disaffected factions relates to the party leaderships indifference. Usually if we follow the general pattern the Congress lets intra-party disquiet simmer and escalate into a full-blown rebellion before getting into crisis management mode. Unfortunately, in our current political context, this approach is simply not enough to revive a party on the brink of irrelevance.
Nagpur: NCP leader and former Union minister Praful Patel has claimed that the Devendra Fadnavis government is shielding former Maharashtra minister Eknath Khadse who had resigned in the wake of a series of charges against him.
"We were always sceptical about the ACB probe. The manner in which the government was shielding Khadse, it was crystal clear that he would be protected," Patel said referring to media reports on the investigating agency giving a 'clean chit' to Khadse in a bribery case involving his personal assistant Gajanan Patil.
According to reports, the ACB chargesheet in the case does not name the controversial BJP leader, thus giving him a clean chit. However, Patil, is indicted for allegedly demanding a bribe on Khadse's behalf.
Among other charges, Khadse was accused of alleged irregularity in buying a Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) plot at Bhosari in Pune.
The former Union minister also criticised the proposed inquiry to be conducted by a retired High Court Judge and demanded that the probe should be under Commission of Inquiry Act.
"This probe is another attempt to save Khadse who is under scanner for questionable land deals by his family members and brazen misuse of office by him," Patel told reporters here yesterday on the sidelines of a Eid function.
The NCP leader also launched a frontal attack on the state government over alleged deterioration in law and order and took potshots at Fadnavis for inducting alleged tainted individuals in the state cabinet.
The allegations against ministers in Fadnavis' government are on the rise and with this addition of tainted people, all are perturbed, Patel claimed.
Reacting on the trouble in violence-hit Kashmir valley, Patel claimed that the Centre "over-relied" on personal warmth between leaders overlooking the harsh realities of international politics and criticised the PDP-BJP government in Jammu and Kashmir as well the NDA for "inept handling" of the situation.
He also criticised Narendra Modi government for its decision to impose President's rule in Uttarakhand first and recently in Arunachal Pradesh.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has been asked a lot of questions in his political life.
Those defending monogrammed suits have wondered why he wears a muffler; those who get infuriated with queries into personal lives and family details of other politicians have questioned the cause nautanki or real of his persistent cough; devotees of monologues have probed the logic behind his dialogue with people; fans of scripted interviews have doubted the credibility of his live interactions; and those who admire burning ambition in their idols have lamented why Kejriwal can't be content with the chief minister's job.
Among the litany of hypocritical questions the Delhi CM has been asked, this one is the most amusing: Why is he washing utensils at the Golden Temple? Why is he up to nautanki again? Doesn't he have other things to do?
The answer is simple: Kejriwal and his party made a mistake by hurting the sentiments of Sikhs. And, by performing sewa at the Akal Takht, he is performing penitence and seeking forgiveness in the hope that the mistake doesn't cost AAP the election in Punjab.
A few weeks ago, while releasing its election manifesto, the AAP incensed a section of the Sikh community by placing the party's symbol, a broom, next to a picture of the religious shrine. Around the same time, party leader Ashish Khetan compared the AAP 'youth manifesto' with the holy book of the Sikhs. This lead to a series of protests and complaints against the party.
To understand the significance of religious symbols in Punjab, bear in mind that the panthic agenda has always dominated electoral politics in the state. The Akalis, who control most of the religious bodies in the state, including the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, survive in the state in spite of charges of corruption and dynastic hegemony primarily because they have positioned themselves as custodians of the panth in Punjab.
In December, when Captain Amarinder Singh was named the chief of Punjab Congress, he began his campaign by swearing over a gutka (holy book) that his party would rid Punjab of the drug menace within months of coming to power.
Short point: In Punjab, politics and religion are interlinked.
Just a few weeks ago, Kejriwal's party was considered the front runner in Punjab. A C-voter survey indicated that the broom will sweep Punjab, relegating rival parties to single digits. Among bookies, Kejriwal was the clear leader with his party expected to win thrice the number of seats the Akalis and Congress may win. Obviously, Kejriwal can't let all these gains slip away by letting his voters simmer over a mistake his party made.
Those who resent Kejriwal's tactics somehow fail to understand a simple fact: Elections, like wars, are fought to win. Like every politician in this country, Kejriwal too has the right to dream big, and aspire to the highest electoral office in the country. Nobody except the Indian voter has the right and power to thwart a politician's ambition.
In his pursuit of power, Kejriwal often borrows from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ideas, fine tunes them and sells them as his own (Talk to Arvind Kejriwal is Chai pe charcha meets Mann ki Baat). He understands the importance of relentlessly selling the Delhi model of governance, attacking the PM to position himself as his major rival, staying in the media limelight and rolling out catchy slogans and strategies. Like Modi, he has eyes fixed on his ultimate goal 2019 General elections.
As veteran journalist S Nihal Singh argues in The Tribune, Kejriwal has been copying the Modi formula. After cynically ousting men of stature such as Yogendra Yadav who could pose a challenge to him from his party, he set about a publicity blitz in newspapers and on television glorifying his leadership. In the manner of Modi making his name synonymous with the BJP, the subtext of the ads is to transform AAP into a Kejriwal party. The parallel has been so striking that in the capitals political circles he has been nicknamed chhota Modi (little Modi).
It is primarily for this reason, that Kejriwal gets under the skin of the BJP and its bhakts. They see in Kejriwal a glimpse of their own idol's past.
Video: Stephen Colbert Crashes RNC To Declare 'Hungry For Power Games'
By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 18, 2016 3:33PM
The Illinois delegation at this week's Republican National Convention is as noteworthy for whos missing as whos actually there. (Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and Sen. Mark Kirk are both likely hoping to avoid the Trump Anti-Bump in upcoming elections.) But one attendee with Illinois roots is unafraid to grab the spotlight in their absence. We refer, of course, to the leader our times need: Stephen Colbert.
In the brief but hilarious clip, the Late Show host helps himself to the podium, dressed in Caesar Flickerman regalia, to announce the Hungry for Power Games have commenced. He also gets in a beautiful zinger just as the muscle arrives to escort him from the stage: I know Im not supposed to be up here, but lets be honest, neither is Donald Trump.
The dude has been in fine form lately, drawing on is Chicago roots recently by chomping down expensive-AF Lincoln Park popcorn and rubbing down his lucky Cubs. But nothing brings out the best in Colbert like electoral politics. What will surely be an absurd week in Cleveland should continue to be his boon.
One of Navjot Singh Sidhu's famous one liners is, "Pitches are like wives. You never know which way they will turn." Well, what Sidhu the commentator said can now easily be said about Sidhu the politician: Nobody knows which way he will turn.
Just a few months after being nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP, Sidhu delivered a googly and resigned from Parliament on Monday. Nobody knows which way his politics may turn now, but there is growing speculation that he would now be the AAP candidate for Punjab's chief minister.
Only the other day, under fire for being a party of outsiders that can't relate to the sensitivities and sensibilities of the Sikhs, Arvind Kejriwal had indicated that his party would put somebody from the community on the forefront of the campaign.
Sidhu could be his man of the match.
Though Sidhu had mysteriously agreed to the BJP's Rajya Sabha offer, it was widely speculated that he was in talks with AAP as its presumptive CM candidate. But the deal could not be worked out because of internal differences in the AAP, where several ambitious leaders and factions were vying for the top job.
But, the AAP's hand seems to have been forced by recent events aimed to portray the party as inimical to the Sikhs and insensitive to the Panth.
Early on Monday morning, Kejriwal had made a surprise appearance at the Golden Temple in Amritsar to wash utensils and perform seva. While his critics labeled it nautanki, Kejriwal was performing penance for hurting the religious sentiments of Sikhs over the past few weeks. By washing utensils, at the Akal Takht, he was seeking forgiveness with the hope that the mistake doesn't cost AAP the election in Punjab.
A few weeks ago, while releasing its election manifesto, the AAP incensed a section of Sikhs by placing the party's symbol, broom, next to a picture of the religious shrine. Around the same time, party leader Ashish Khetan compared the AAP "youth manifesto" with the holy book of Sikhs. This lead to a series of protests and complaints against the party. Obviously, Kejriwal can't let all these gains slip away by letting his voters simmer over a mistake his party made.
But, Kejriwal needs to address another problem that is facing his party: Lack of a credible Sikh face to impress rural voters and snare them away from the Akalis who dominate the panthic discourse in the state.
Kejriwal is wary also of Captain Singh's presence. The Congress leader is currently on a massive outreach programme in the state in a last-gasp effort to pitch himself as the face of the anti-incumbency vote against the SAD-BJP combine in the state. The AAP desperately needs a credible, local heavyweight to counter the Patiala royal.
For the past few months, Sidhu had been sulking because of the BJP's reluctance to consider his demand for snapping the alliance with Akalis. Interestingly, though he had become a BJP parliamentarian, Sidhu had refused to campaign for the party in Punjab till it divorces the Badals. He also indicated that his wife, Navjot Kaur Sidhu, a BJP MLA in Punjab, would not contest the next Assembly elections. That led to a lot of embarrassment within the BJP.
Unless he has a doosra up his sleeve, Sidhu is now likely to turn up in the AAP team. And sweep his former friends out of Punjab with a broom.
A verbal spat between Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati and Union Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu was witnessed on Monday in the Rajya Sabha as she blamed the Centre for what she dubbed were "rising incidents of atrocities against the Dalits".
Mayawati raised the issue of beating up of four Dalit youth in public and parading them in Una town in Gujarat by cow protection vigilantes.
The Bahujan Samaj Party leader said, "Since the BJP-led government has come to power (at the Centre), the Dalits are being exploited at different levels. There are several incidents, and this reflects the narrow and casteist mindset of this party towards these groups."
Naidu immediately objected and said: "You cannot take the party's name. You can raise the issuethat is the practice." Mayawati however did not shy away from naming the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which irked Naidu. The minister retorted while Mayawati was speaking, but his comments were not clearly audible.
Mayawati said some "anti-social elements" caught the Dalit youth when they were removing the hide off a dead animal, they were stripped half-naked and beaten up with rods and sticks.
"The administration did not take action against the culprits and the police was a mute spectator," the BSP leader said.
The former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh asked the central government to instruct the Gujarat government to take action against the guilty.
Soon after, as Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Hamid Ansari wanted to take up the Question Hour, BSP members trooped near his podium and started raising slogans against the government.
In the din, the house was adjourned for 10 minutes. Later, the House took up the Question Hour.
According to reports, the youth beaten up in Una had been called by farmers to skin dead cattle. The incident came to light after a video of the atrocity went viral on the social media.
'Policing Crisis' Event On Tuesday Is Incredibly Timely
By Gwendolyn Purdom in News on Jul 18, 2016 8:10PM
Brandon
An event exploring the current "policing crisis" on Tuesday night in University Village comes at a fitting time: three police officers were killed Sunday in Baton Rouge, and on Monday morning, news came of another not-guilty verdict in the police-involved death of Freddie Gray, a black man. It also comes at a fitting time for Chicago. Protesters have recently filled the Loop to protest the fatal police shootings of Philando Castile in the Minneapolis area and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.
At Tuesday's event, held from 5:30-7:00 p.m. at Jane Addams Hull House (800 S. Halsted Street), co-editors of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives MatterJordan T. Camp and Christina Heathertonwill discuss their book. Released in May, it devles into the spread of "broken-windows policing" with accounts and reflections from artists, scholars and activists including #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors and Ferguson activist and law professor Justin Hansford. Camp, Heatherton and Social Justice Initiative representatives will examine the book, the Black Lives Matter movement and the state of police brutality in America.
The event is free, and hosted by University of Illinois at Chicago's Social Justice Initiative. See the event details here.
Dhaka: Three Islamists were handed down the death penalty while five others were given life imprisonment by a special tribunal in Bangladesh for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 liberation war with Pakistan.
A three-member panel of judges of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD), led by Justice Anwarul Haque, pronounced the judgment as two of the convicts appeared on the dock while six others were tried in absentia, as they were on the run to evade justice.
The verdict came as the prosecution accused all eight of five charges regarding crimes like mass murders, abductions, tortures and lootings.
Prosecution lawyers said six of the convicts were members of the infamous Al-badr auxiliary force of the Pakistani troops during the war and carried out atrocities in northern Jamalpur district.
The two others belonged to Razakar, another Bengali-manned armed group raised by Pakistan during the war. Manned by activists of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami group, which was opposed to Bangladesh's 1971 independence from Pakistan, the Al-Badr appeared as an extremely notorious force by carrying out ruthless atrocities siding with Pakistani troops.
The verdict came amid nationwide tensions following the recent two back-to-back Islamist terror attacks in the country, following which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hinted that Jamaat could be behind the assaults.
Bangladesh has executed four war crimes convicts since the process began to try the top Bengali perpetrators of the 1971 atrocities in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Hasina in 2008.
Dhaka: Bangladesh police arrested a college teacher close to Shafiqul Islam Ujjal, one of those who attacked a Dhaka cafe on 1 July leaving over 20 dead, officials confirmed on Monday.
Milon Hossain, a teacher of Piyar Ali School and College, was whisked away on Saturday night, bdnews24 reported.
Milon was produced before a court that granted police five days to investigate him in custody, a police officer said.
Milon, who hails from Lalmonirhat, worked at Madbar Memorial School in Ashulia area near Dhaka.
Milon had helped Ujjal get a job as a teacher at the school, the officer said.
Ujjal was among six attackers killed by security forces to free the cafe siege hostages.
The Islamic State terrorist group published photos of five gunmen and claimed they killed over 20 persons in the cafe, bdnews24 reported.
Ujjal, a madrasa student from Bogra, was among the five "IS fighters".
He had left home six months before the attack, his family said.
At least 22 persons, including an Indian women were brutally killed during the siege on July 1 in the popular hangout, Holey Artisan Bakery and O'Kitchen Restaurant, in Dhaka's Gulshan area.
Brussels: EU foreign ministers warned Turkey on Monday to show restraint in its response to a failed military coup, expressing concern over retaliation against judicial officials and calls for a reintroduction of the death penalty.
"Today we will say together with the ministers that this [coup] obviously doesn't mean that the rule of law and the system of checks and balances in the country does not count," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said before their meeting in Brussels.
Punishment against the coup plotters must not include "measures that could lead to an authoritarian state," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault noted.
"It's very important ... that we see restraint and moderation on all sides," added Britain's new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.
The EU ministers were meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday morning to coordinate their responses.
Thousands of people have been arrested since the coup attempt on Friday night by a group within the armed forces. Arrest warrants were also issued for 250 judges and prosecutors, and 2,745 judges were dismissed from their posts over the weekend.
"This is a reaction that is not in line with rule of law," Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also said that he will consider the possibility of capital punishment for those who carried out the failed coup attempt.
"This poses a problem in the relations with the European Union," Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said.
The death penalty has not been used in Turkey since 1984 and was abolished in 2004. The EU is a lead campaigner for its abolition around the world.
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Rock paintings at the Zuojiang Huashan site in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
A group of rock paintings dating back over 2,000 years in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was included into UNESCO's world heritage list on Friday.
The Zuojiang Huashan site, covering over 6,621 hectares, is home to more than 1,900 well-preserved drawings on the face of the Huashan mountains along the Zuojiang River, Chongzuo.
The brownish red paintings depict the sacrifices of the Luoyue people, ancestors of today's Zhuang ethnic minority, during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) and East Han Dynasty (25-220).
Liang Tingwang of Beijing's Minzu University of China said the major images of the paintings are frog-shaped people -- a totem of the Zhuang ethnic group -- and the Zhuang people's invention of artificial cultivation of rice.
Lan Riyong of Guangxi world heritage application office said the paintings are the sole record of the vanished Luoyue people.
It remains a mystery how the Luoyue managed to paint on the rocks at a height ranging from 10 to 130 meters above the surface of the river, he said.
Chongzuo residents gathered to celebrate the inclusion with dancing and music. Lyu Xiaofang said, "We are so proud as ethnic Zhuang people. The inclusion of the heritage list is the world's recognition of China's ethnic minority culture."
Lyu is also looking forward to economic benefits brought about by more tourists in the future.
Chongzuo officials said they will strengthen protection of the site and work to build a high level tourist destination.
The listing of the paintings was announced during the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee in Istanbul.
A total of 27 applicants for listing are being reviewed by the committee, including another Chinese site -- Shennongjia Forestry District in central China's Hubei Province.
Istanbul: The future use by the United States of a key Turkish air base near Syria risks causing new tensions between the key NATO allies after the botched coup attempt, but using it as a bargaining chip could prove risky for Ankara.
Washington has since 2015 used the Incirlik base in the southern province of Adana as a highly convenient launch pad for bombing raids against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.
Before being granted permission by Turkey to use Incirlik for the air strikes after tough negotiations US planes had to use bases far further away in Jordan and Kuwait.
However Friday's failed coup, which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames on US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, has raised anti-American rhetoric in Ankara.
Turkish officials are furious that the United States has so far turned a deaf ear to requests for his extradition, with the Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu even saying Washington was "behind the coup".
This has raised fears that Ankara could use Incirlik as a lever to pressure Washington for Gulen's extradition to face trial in Turkey.
Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund's office in Ankara, said Turkey-US tensions were already high because of Washington's support for Kurdish militias in Syria.
"The situation would only get worse if Washington does not answer Turkey's calls for Gulen's extradition," he told AFP.
'Risks backfiring'
Gulen, a reclusive 75-year-old Islamic preacher, has been in exile in the United States since 1999, but wields enormous influence in Turkish society, with supporters in the media, police and judiciary.
The United States has so far shown little interest in Turkey's repeated demands for his extradition since a vast corruption scandal that shook Erdogan's government in 2013, which was also blamed by Ankara on Gulen and his loyalists in the police and judiciary.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Programme at The Washington Institute, said Turkey would be making a mistake to use Incirlik to speed up Gulen's extradition.
"In my view, if Ankara did that, it would backfire," he told AFP.
"While access to the base is important for US operations against the Islamic State, it is not indispensable.
"Washington gained access to the base only in 2015 and before then, it was handling anti-IS operations very well without access to Incirlik or other Turkish bases," he said.
"If Turkey forces the United States, Washington can go back to that option again."
Incirlik houses 1,500 US troops and is just 70 miles (110 kilometres) from the Syrian border.
It has notably been used to deploy drones, Prowler electronic warplanes and A-10 ground attack aircraft in the fight against IS.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that Washington would assist Turkey in the investigation of the failed coup, inviting Ankara to share any evidence it has against Gulen.
Unluhisarcikli said any use of Incirlik as a bargaining chip would dent Washington's reliance on Turkey as a partner in anti-IS operations and would push Americans to seek an alternative.
"And that would not be smart," he told AFP.
'Active anti-IS player'
Already, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Sunday that the events in Turkey had raised questions about its "reliability" in the fight against IS.
And after Friday's turmoil, Turkey briefly shut down Incirlik, forcing its Nato ally to halt strikes in Syria.
Turkish authorities also detained at the base a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Sunday that operations against IS had resumed from the base after its air space reopened.
After long being accused of not doing enough in the fight against the jihadists, Turkey has played a fuller role in the US-led anti-IS coalition and carried out its own artillery strikes.
"Turkey is an active member of the international coalition," a Turkish official said.
But Turkey had also lamented the delay in the delivery of American light multiple rocket launchers High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) to be deployed along its border with Syria to combat IS.
Turkish authorities pressed 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 also said Turkey could consider reinstating the death penalty following the putsch bid, despite concerns in the international community.
The number of people killed in Friday's failed coup attempt in Turkey has climbed to more than 290, the foreign ministry said.
"More than 100 putschists" were killed and at least "190 of our citizens", the ministry said in a statement today. The government had earlier put the death toll from Friday night's coup attempt at 265.
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.
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.
Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are deported annually through the Tijuana border post, but many havent set foot in Mexico for decades, while others leave their children behind. Donald Trump vowed to send millions back across the border if he becomes the president of the United States in November. Some 30,000 of the 207,000 Mexicans deported from the United States last year were sent back through the San Ysidro gate -- which separates Tijuana and San Diego, California -- according to Mexican government figures.
WASHINGTON The United States on Monday urged NATO ally Turkey to exercise restraint and respect the rule of law in the aftermath of a failed military coup.
Turkey purged its police after rounding up thousands of soldiers in the wake of the weekend coup attempt and there have been calls to reinstate the death penalty for plotters.
The broad crackdown drew concern from Western allies who said Ankara must uphold the rule of law in the country, a NATO member that is Washington's most powerful Muslim ally.
"What U.S. officials will make clear to their Turkish counterparts is that it's critical for them to exercise restraint, to respect and observe due process and to protect the freedoms that are enshrined in the Turkish constitution," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a news briefing.
Earnest said he was not prepared to "pass judgment" on specific actions of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan since the coup attempt.
"The United States strongly supports Turkey's democratically elected civilian government and that country's democratic institutions," Earnest said.
Washington has offered to help Turkey in any investigation into the failed coup, Earnest said.
Turkey is calling on the United States to hand over a cleric Ankara blames for the putsch, Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for years.
The United States has not received an extradition request from Turkey and would evaluate any such request according to its 30-year-old extradition treaty with Turkey.
"The suggestion that somehow the United States is harboring Mr. Gulen is factually incorrect. The truth is there's been no extradition request put forward," Earnest said.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by James Dalgleish)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
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Kenyan authorities have beefed up security in Nairobi and its environs as the UN Conference and Development (UNCTAD) began in the city on Sunday.
The thousands of delegates drawn from 194 member countries of UNCTAD are attending the week-long conference on key economic issues including the fall in commodity prices, globalization, economic partnerships and sustainable development.
Leaders including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and over 80 ministers are expected to attend the conference aimed at shaping policy debates to ensure that domestic policies and international actions in trade contribute to sustainable development.
Roads leading to the conference venue have been sealed off as both local and international security officers stationed at strategic locations to vet delegates at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) where the events are taking place.
"We are under firm instructions not to allow any security lapses during the conference. We are here to ensure all bad characters do noT gain access to the meeting venue and ensure all delegates are safe," a police officer told Xinhua in Nairobi.
The police officer said they will be restricting access to vehicles, adding that anyone accredited to attend the conference as a delegate, service provider among others will have to display official badges.
Nairobi traffic police commander Leonard Katana has called on motorists to cooperate with the security officers to ensure free flow of traffic.
"Motorists are urged to comply and obey orders issued to them by traffic police officers at the junctions. Those areas (meeting venues) are out of bounds for vehicles with no official badges for the conference, Katana said.
He said the restrictions on some roads will help to secure the conference that brings together more than 7000 delegates including Heads of State, ministers and business executives meeting to discuss global trade and economic development.
Katana said drivers of heavy commercial vehicles using Nairobi-Mombasa highway will also be diverted to avoid causing snarl-up in the city.
"Heavy commercial vehicle, trailers and articulated vehicles bound for Rift Valley region are advised that they will be diverted at Mombasa Road Southern Bypass to use Southern Bypass to Kikuyu for Nakuru. Similar to those heading towards Mombasa in order to reduce congestion along Uhuru Highway," Katana said.
The quadrennial conference will bring together heads of state and governments, ministers and other high level players from the business world and civil society to discuss global trade and economic development matters.
Scope: This project includes the installation of approx 646 LF of 18" RCP drainage pipe, 22 LF of 18" HDPE drainage pipe, eight (8) FDOT Type C Inlets, 81 LF 10" HDPE Reuse line with transitions, 1 20 LF 6" HDPE Water line and four (4) 6" insert a valves. Asphalt will be removed and replaced during construction. Clearing and grubbing will be required for the installation of the drainage piping and structures.
Scope: Work consist of construction of approx 1,350 LF of 8" PVC water main by open cut method, including valves, fittings, fire hydrants, new water services to existing meters, trench asphalt pavement removal and replacement, abandonment of existing water mains, disinfection, testing, and other appurtenances and materials required for a complete and operable system as accepted by the Owner. Up to one Bid Additive Alternates may be executed for a total of approx 1,840 LF of 8" PVC water main by open cut method, including valves, fittings, fire hydrants, new water services to existing meters, trench asphalt pavement removal and replacement, abandonment of existing water mains, disinfection, testing, and other appurtenances.
Flash
Up to 16 Taliban militants were killed and six others injured in separate air strikes in Sangin and Marja districts of the southern Helmand province on Sunday, spokesman for provincial government Omar Zawak said Monday.
According to Zawak, 10 Taliban insurgents had been killed in Sangin district and six others injured as the aircraft pounded Taliban hideouts.
Six more Taliban fighters were killed after the aircraft targeted their positions in Marja district on Sunday morning.
Taliban militants who have been fighting the government forces over the past couple of years are yet to make comment on the situation in the districts.
SoftBank has agreed to buy chip giant ARM Holdings for a whopping 23.4 billion pounds ($32 billion), according to a latest report from the Financial Times. The deal is touted to be the largest ever acquisition of a European tech company.
As per the report, SoftBank will pay 17 pounds in cash for each ARM share. UK based ARM is known for its processor that offer low power consumption and are present on Apples iPhones and Apple Watches. The deal comes just weeks after the UK elected to exit the EU. ARM which faces tough competition from Intel is adding new customers in the automotive industry and is also exploring chip designs to boost the graphics capabilities of phones.
SoftBank has stakes in US wireless carrier Sprint Corp. and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Just last month, SoftBanks president Nikesh Arora stepped down while founder Masayoshi Son announced that he would stay on as CEO for at least another five years.
Opera Software has decided to sell its businesses including browsers for mobile devices and desktops, technology licensing to Chinese Group for $600 million. The latest deal comes after Operas sell to the Chinese group did not received regulatory approvals.
Earlier in February this year, Opera had received $1.2 billion buyout offerfrom Chinese consortium. Qihoo 360 (mobile security maker) and Beijing Kunlun Tech (mobile game developer) are the companies included in the consortium along with investment funds Golden Brick and Yonglian.
The Chinese Group will gain control of Operas 29.09 percent stake in the Chinese company nHorizon, in which Opera Software has invested, and they will also take over the reins of Operas technology licensing business outside of Opera TV. It will not acquire Operas advertising and marketing business, its TV operations, nor the apps that are game-related. Opera Mediaworks, Opera Apps & Games (including Bemobi), and Opera TV will continue to remain under Opera Softwares control.
The deal is expected to be closed in the second half of Q3 2016, pending further regulatory approval.
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The shrinking value of the currencies of most developing economies is driving up food and fuel prices in ways that could deepen the food crises that many already face,... Read More
Finding dividend stocks that yield more than 6% typically means that you are trolling the trading floor for less than stellar companies or those that are under a lot of financial stress that puts its payout in serious jeopardy. That isn't exactly a formula for anyone that wants to grow their wealth over time or get a decent nights sleep. Fortunately, there are companies with yields north of 6% that are actually worth buying and holding. Three in particular that seem to stand out are Terra Nitrogen Partners (NYSE: TNH), Holly Energy Partners (HEP 0.91%) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) (RDS.B).
Here's a quick look at why Terra Nitrogen, Holly Energy Partners, and Shell -- with dividend yields of and 8.7%, 6.6% 6.7%, respectively -- are worth considering today.
A little variability never hurt this stock
Terra Nitrogen Partners isn't for every dividend investor because it is a variable rate dividend rather than the fixed rate that we are so used to in the US. Terra Nitrogen has a variable rate payout because it has only one cash generating asset, a nitrogen fertilizer plant in Verdigris, Oklahoma that generates commodity products such as ammonia as well as higher margin products such as urea ammonium nitrate. By keeping a variable rate payout to shareholders, it prevents the company from having to payout more cash than what is coming in the door.
That is possibly the biggest negative when it comes to the company, but the positives help to make up for that shortcoming. As a nitrogen fertilizer producer that uses natural gas as its base feedstock instead of coal or petroleum coke (an oil refinery byproduct) like so many other companies producing nitrogen, it has an immense feedstock cost advantage that puts it near the bottom of the cost curve. So even though the price for fertilizers have gone down quite a bit in recent years, the company has remained solidly profitable.
It also helps that Terra Nitrogen is completely debt free, an absolute rarity among master limited partnerships. Having a lower debt burden has helped the company produce spectacular returns on equity over the past 10 years. Even after its recent slide in profitability, Terra Nitrogen is still producing returns on equity of greater than 75%. So maybe the dividend payment isn't consistent, but it has remained well above 6% for most of the past decade and has generated incredible total returns over that time.
Slow & steady has won the race so far
Holly Energy Partners is another one of those companies that tends to fly under many investors' radars. It doesn't do a lot of flashy acquisitions or promise these massive growth forecasts that so many other partnerships have over the past few years. Instead, the company has kept its head down and done the things that really matter when it comes to creating value: grow modestly but consistently, keep a strong balance sheet and investment grade credit rating, and don't stretch cash flow statements with an overly generous payout to shareholders. Those three things have allowed Holly Energy Partners to raise its payout every quarter for 46 quarters (11 and a half years!) straight. That kind of consistency is what has allowed the company to steadily outpace the S&P 500 on a total return basis
If you are looking for a company that will rebound strong as oil and gas prices increase again, this isn't the company you're looking for. Holly Energy Partner's revenue is 100% fee based and more than 80% of its contracts with its customers for pipeline or tank storage carry a minimum volume. So there isn't a whole lot of upside for rising oil prices. Instead, Holly Energy Partners will keep doing those three things above. As long as it stays on that track, it's not too much of a stretch to see the company keeping its payout streak alive for a long time.
A healthy portion of yield with a side of risk
Of the three companies here, Royal Dutch Shell may be one company here with the most questions to answer. Even though Shell is more than 100 years old and is one of the stalwarts in the industry, it surprisingly doesn't have the best reputation as a company that generates long term value for investors. The company's penchant to invest in higher risk, higher reward development projects like its recently abandoned Arctic oil project have not always led to high returns on capital invested. As a result, the company's stock hasn't even kept pace with the S&P 500 on a total return basis over the past 10 years.
Despite this less than stellar record, Royal Dutch Shell's management has realized the faults of its past and is looking to reconfigure itself as a more profitable company for the future. CEO Ben van Beurden has said on multiple occasions that is is focusing more on profitability rather than production growth. Also, the company is making a major transformation after making a $50 billion plus acquisition of BG Group and now shedding a bunch of assets that are less profitable or don't benefit from the two companies joining forces. The idea is to preserve the company's current dividend and buy back gobs of stock once the company's cash flow situation is figured out.
It's one thing to say these things, but now Shell needs to execute on them. If it can do that, then today's 6.7% dividend yield and its price to tangible book value of 1.1 times looks pretty appealing, just know that there are still some aspects of Shell's investment thesis that are still up the air that could make even today's cheap stock price seem unappealing.
After battling global economic headwinds last year, safety products maker MSA Safety (MSA 12.23%) started 2016 off surprisingly strong, thanks in part to some large orders. Whether or not that momentum continued will be answered Wednesday evening when the company reports its second-quarter results.
First, let's review
Before looking ahead, here's a quick look back at last quarter's numbers:
Metric
Q1 2016
Q1 2015
Growth (YOY) Revenue $280.2 million $257.3 million 8.9% Adjusted earnings $18.0 million $15.7 million 14.3% Adjusted EPS $0.48 $0.42 14.3%
As the chart shows, MSA Safety delivered solid growth on both the top and bottom lines. Partially driving this was the addition of Latchways, a U.K.-based maker of fall protection systems and solutions that it acquired last October, which boosted revenue by 6% and earnings by $0.03 per share. In addition, strong sales of the company's new self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) to fire departments drove revenue growth, as did large orders for fixed gas and flame detection systems to customers in the Middle East and Mexico. Meanwhile, the company's cost-cutting moves boosted earnings: It cut selling, general, and administrative expenses by 5% year over year.
Next, here's what to focus on in this week's report.
1. Foreign currency headwinds
While sales growth was strong in Q1, foreign-exchange headwinds remained fierce: Sales were up 13% on a constant-currency basis, but up just 8.9% after translating those revenues into dollars. That said, the currency impact was even steeper in the prior quarter, when revenue was only up 1% on a reported basis, but rose by 8% on a constant currency basis.
While these headwinds appears to be abating somewhat, investors should look to see which direction the trend moved quarter.
2. SCBA sales
MSA Safety overcame the exchange headwinds in Q1, as well as the impact of weak sales to energy and emerging market customers, thanks to rapidly rising sales of its revolutionary G1 SCBA product. Last quarter, sales from its SCBA segment jumped 40%, with "robust shipping activity" to fire departments worldwide.
That sales momentum appears to have continued during the second quarter. In early June, the company put out a press release detailing a new SCBA contract in Australia, which also noted that it had secured large orders in China and Chile. Furthermore, it wrote that it was "seeing solid demand... across a number of our key geographic markets." Investors should check the second-quarter release for additional contract announcements, as well as any other comments about the SCBA sales pipeline.
3. The outlook
While SCBA sales have been robust, CEO William Lambert noted last quarter that the company continues to see "challenging conditions in certain end markets and geographies." In particular, sales to energy customers were hurt by the oil market downturn. That market, however, has started to show some signs of life again after oil prices rose sharply during the second quarter. The recovery in crude prices led some oil companies to put idled rigs back to work. According to the most recent data oil-field service company Baker Hughes (BHI), the rig count has risen for six straight weeks. This improvement in oil and gas activities has the potential to fuel incremental sales of safety equipment to energy market customers like Baker Hughes.
Given that the oil market seems to be on the upswing, investors should be on the lookout for optimism about the back half of the year from Lambert in his upcoming report.
Investor takeaway
MSA Safety has done an admirable job battling some pretty tough headwinds over the past year. The hope now is that those headwinds have abated, allowing the company to take full advantage of its momentum in SCBA sales. If that situation applies, the company could deliver a pleasant surprise on Wednesday.
Just weeks after delivering feasibility studies in May on its massive Simandou iron ore project in the west African republic of Guinea, Rio Tinto (RIO -3.79%) seemingly reversed course and said it wouldn't be developing the site and was instead putting the project into mothballs. Thought surprising at first glance, Rio has long expressed doubt about being able to bring it to fruition because of the monumental costs involved, and earlier this year it effectively wrote off its entire $2 billion investment in the project, leaving a carrying value on its books of just $10 million.
That's a dramatic reversal of fortune. Simandou is estimated to contain 50 billion tons of iron ore, and when fully developed, it will likely transform Guinea's economy, which is currently dependent upon its large bauxite deposits. But there were a lot of good reasons Rio Tinto finally drove the last nail into Simandou, hurdles that even in the best of times would be difficult to surmount.
Iron ore supply glut
The most obvious reason, of course, is the massive oversupply of iron ore in the market that drove prices to their lowest levels. The benchmark import price of 62% iron ore fines at China's Tianjin port that once traded as high as $160 per ton had fallen all the way to $38 a ton last December. It has since rallied back to near $60 per ton, but analysts don't see any way that can hold.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley forecast a supply glut of 33.4 million tons this year before rising to almost 100 million tons by 2018. The Roy Hill project in the Pilbara region of Western Australia is on track to ramp up to 55 million tons annually by the end of the year, and Vale (VALE -2.69%) expects its expects its S11D expansion project at Carajas in the Brazilian Amazon to begin producing in December and reach full capacity by 2018.
Lack of infrastructure
Even without the market in oversupply, there are logistical roadblocks. Simandou is located in a remote region of Guinea that requires construction of an entire infrastructure network before the mining project could begin.
That infrastructure alone is estimated to cost some $20 billion, because in addition to 80 miles of roads needing to be built, 400 miles of railway needs constructing to transport the ore from the mine to the coast, plus bridges, tunnels, and ancillary infrastructure such as housing, power-generation facilities, and water systems. Then there's a deepwater port that needs building so Simandou can feed into the seaborne trade. Guinea demands any ore be shipped from its coast, rather than taking the shorter route through Liberia.
Threat of pandemics
The outbreak of the Ebola virus in Guinea and the surrounding area two years ago crippled the mining industry, even if it was temporary. But there was a renewed, if muted, outbreak of the virus again this year, making finding investors willing to come in a foot the tab more difficult.
Rio Tinto owns 46.6% of Simandou, with a consortium of Chinese government-owned enterprises and the World Bank owning the rest. Despite Chinese demand for iron ore that's seemingly insatiable, not even it is willing to step forward.
Ignore the rallies
Iron ore continues to rally. Its price was once again north of $60 per ton again as the Chinese began buying to fill inventories, but there's no indication its sustainable and analysts are expecting another collapse.
As a result, there's simply no need for new iron ore projects to come on the market, and probably not for at least another decade or more. Rio Tinto knows that, which means Simandou's enormous resource riches won't see the light of day anytime soon.
A tragic shooting took the lives of three police officers in Baton Rouge over the weekend, heightened already elevated concerns over racial divides in America.
During an interview on the FOX Business Networks Mornings with Maria, former Republican Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said it wont be easy to bring the nation together, but support for law enforcement across the country is vital.
Crime has become a huge issue in this country for the first time in a long time, and these murders of police officers have made that explosive, he said. Totally indefensible blue lives matter. Thats something thats been said. Of course all lives matter, but the people that protect us, provide our securitywe owe them better.
Barbour, who also served as chairman of the Republican National Committee, added these clashes area low, low point in Americas history and called on President Barack Obama to speak out to strongly condemn the acts.
The former governor said along with crime, economic conditions in the U.S. have contributed to heightened tension saying out on Main Street, its sometimes impossible to tell recession from recovery.
Median household income is down, more small businesses are closing than are openingmost of the unemployment drop has been because people are dropping out of the workforce, not because people are finding jobs. So that and the increase in crime, the worry about national securityparticularly terrorism [are contributing to the tension], Barbour said.
Another ambush shooting claimed the lives of three Baton Rouge, Louisiana law enforcement officers and injured three others on Sunday morning. The president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, Stephen Loomis, told Fox News the violence against police officers has escalated since President Obama validated the afalse narrativea of anti-cop sentiments expressed throughout the country.
aThose police-involved shootings are what absolutely has triggered a rash of senseless murders of law enforcement officers across the country. It is reprehensible. The president has blood on his hands and it will not be able to come washed off,a Loomis said.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke agrees, telling the FOX Business Network he believes Obamaas rhetoric is directly related to the attacks on law enforcement officers.
aPresident Obama has been the maestro. He has led course and fanned the flames of anti-police sentiment that is sweeping this country,a Clarke said on Varney & Co.
In a statement after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Obama said, "And when incidents like this occur, thereas a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same. And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us."
Clarke thinks President Obama should have disavowed the anti-law enforcement sentiments expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement and suggests a good start to ease tensions is for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to publically dissociate herself with such groups at the annual NAACP conference across the state in Cincinnati on Monday.
aThey must denounce and I am talking about specifically, none of this code language, none of this ambiguous language. They must denounce the anti-cop sentiments spewed by this hateful ideology Black Lives Matter,a Clarke said.
Clarke would like the Attorney General of the United States and the Department of Justice to perceive local law enforcement officers as an ally in the pursuit of justice.
In the spirit of patriotism, convention-goers can buy wooden flags handcrafted by combat veterans at the 2016 Republican National Convention underway in Cleveland, Ohio.
Flags of Valora veteran owned and operated companyis one of 22 vendors showcasing their product at this weeks event.
Air Force veteran and President of Flags of Valor Brian Steorts said he got the idea for the company after being injured while deployed. He joined the FOX Business Networks Maria Bartiromo to share his story.
I went to a rehabilitation program and I didnt wear my uniform anymore, Im used to having my flag on my shoulder and so it kind of upset me, Steorts said. There was a flag that I found that was actually a beautiful flag, but it wasnt made in the United States, and so for therapeutic reasons I started making my own and I wanted to make it all with materials made in America.
Steorts said hed never done woodwork before, but picked up the trade by watching do it yourself videos of painting and distressing.
After it became a passion for Steorts, he says he launched the Virginia-based company to offer jobs to veterans.
Flags of Valor now employs five other combat veterans and sells handcrafted U.S. flags named after specific groups of people or military events.
Were very old school Steorts said. We make everything by hand. We believe Made in America still matters, we believe that our veterans are an untapped resource, and believe in giving back.
When it comes to hiring, Steorts said he advocates for veterans because they thrive in the workplace.
Its a great therapeutic transition for them to go from military lives to civilian and to really search for that camaraderie and brotherhood that we have at our company, he said. Im a veteran myself and I know what drives me and what drives these men and women. Theyve been through some very intense conflicts and theyre very well at handling stress and being in those kinds of environments.
Steorts said he hopes to spread that message and share his love for America at this weeks convention.
Weve gotten to connect with almost every one of our customers in one way or another, and its very rewarding to know that something that I started in my garage. and have gotten to train ally my guys, my team back in Virginia, veteran craftsman, he said. Its self-rewarding and its philanthropic when we give back. We love being able to promote patriotism like this.
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The black U.S. Marine Corps veteran who shot dead three police officers in Louisiana's capital targeted them and assassinated them, authorities said on Monday, as the United States reeled from the latest deadly violence involving police and African-Americans.
One of three officers wounded in Sunday's shootings was hospitalized and fighting for his life, police said at a news conference. They said three guns were recovered from the shooting in Baton Rouge, which has been the scene of repeated protests against police violence following the July 5 fatal shooting by officers of Alton Sterling, a black man, outside a convenience store.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson said of the Sunday incident at the news conference. "It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day."
Edmonson said "the most compelling piece of evidence is the video."
The gunman has been identified as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who served in the Marines for five years, including a 2008 deployment in the Iraq war. Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was shot dead on Sunday morning in a gunfight with police.
Racial tension in the United States has been especially high since a black former U.S. Army Reserve soldier fatally shot five Dallas police officers who were patrolling a protest over the police shootings of Sterling and another black man in Minnesota.
The suspect said he wanted to change his name from Gavin Eugene Long to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra in May 2015, according to Jackson County, Missouri, public records. But court officials said he never completed the process of legally changing his name.
A website, social media accounts and YouTube videos that appeared tied to Long include complaints about police treatment of black people and praise for killings of the Dallas policemen.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told Monday's news conference that Long "came to do harm" and Edwards called the shooting "a diabolical attack" on society.
"It's just pure, unadulterated evil," Edwards said.
(Additional reporting by Sam Karlin in Baton Rouge, David Alexander and Eric Walsh in Washington, Laila Kearney in New York; Writing by Will Dunham and Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Trott)
There are certain facts that remain, incontestable. We are in the embryonic stage of a holy war with Islamic radicalism and we are not yet prepared to manage this risk on our own soil.
As uncomfortable as that is to say as well as to digest, we wake today with the fact that we have, as a country, embraced our need for unfettered freedom. This so-called constitutional right to privacy that we have failed in holding ourselves accountable against has underscored a sentiment of entitlement that permeates throughout the countrys current culture.
From Nice and Paris, France to San Bernardino and Brussels to Orlando, a very clear business model of terror is playing out before our eyes and it is one that will require a public-private partnership to remedy. Post 9/11, I have vivid memories of working to secure iconic sites and business centers in New York City all because they were foreseeable risks. CEOs recognized it was both their fiduciary, as well as social responsibility, to fortify their respective buildings from never before contemplated threats like vehicles being used as weapons of mass destruction and biological weapons such as Anthrax compromising their air filtration system.
Unfortunately, as the clock turned, we did what we excel at perhaps better than anything else: We hit the snooze button. What we face now is far more dangerous than what we had to contend with in 2001 as our enemy is smarter, more technologically advanced in its recruitment training and operational deployment and, continues to recruit from our own citizen base.
By working together, chief executives and our elected officials well at least those more concerned with doing their jobs than keeping them can forge a partnership which will more closely examine employees and contractors backgrounds, replacing the cheap check the box policy in place. We can incorporate anti-crime cyber security protocols in lieu of standard IT platforms and go back to the table to reassess the physical security blueprint of their properties.
Remember, target selection is all about negative migration (negative behavior migrates to the path of least resistance). The threat is more than foreseeable but it is entirely up to us, including corporate America, if we are to avoid it.
Paul Viollis is Chief Executive of Viollis Group International, a global security consultancy firm. He has held multiple leadership roles including Managing Director for Citigate Global Intelligence & Security; and Vice President at Kroll, where he served on their post September 11th Threat Assessment Team.
Paul is the author and lead editor for Jane's Publishing's book "Workplace Security and Contributing Editor for Jane's. He is co-author of "Silent Safety Best Practices for Protecting the Affluent. He appears regularly on the FOX Business Network as well as other national television and radio outlets.
Paul holds the distinction of Honorary Assistant Attorney General for the State of Louisiana. He holds a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice, a Master of Public Administration, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy.
A poll by the Barna Group, commissioned by the filmmakers of Gods Not Dead 2, found 32 percent of Republicans feel Hollywood is biased against Christianity. Meanwhile, only 5 percent of Democrats feel the same way. The poll results were revealed at a Sunday screening of Gods Not Dead 2 in Cleveland ahead of the RNC.
The poll asked the question, What is your opinion of Hollywoods treatment of Christianity?
David A. R. White, founder of Pure Flix and a star of Gods Not Dead 2, told FOX411 the poll illustrate why he created the Christian film production company.
Thats one of the reasons why we started Pure Flix over 10 years ago because we wanted to make positive uplifting life affirming content that ultimately catered to the morals and values of what our society and culture was built on, he said. I think obviously a third of the Republicans said Christianity was not fairly portrayed in films, and I think we have seen that.
Pat Boone, who appears in the film, told The Hollywood Reporter the results didnt surprise him.
Christianity imposes restriction on behavior, even in movies, he said. Hollywood doesnt like it when people tell them to stick to moral rules because it makes a lot of money breaking those rules. Orgies, vampires, zombies, debauchery of all forms. Anything goes, and it is liberal Democrats who are making these films. Depravity is profitable.
Boone said once during his career where he was asked to play a heathen, money-grubbing hypocrite Christian book publisher. This happens all the time, he said. They try to utilize my good image to skewer people of faith. They portray us as dunces.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, before the screening Sunday night, there was a worship service. Former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reportedly urged the crowd to see the film.
If youve never had a reason to watch this film, youve got one now, he said. Its harder today than ever to truly live as a person of faith because youre subjected to ridicule and scorn and contempt.
This comes just a week after a Gods Not Dead 2 billboard was banned at the RNC after it was deemed to be incendiary and too political. On Friday, Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher announced an inquiry as to why the billboard was rejected.
White said the billboard controversy is part of a bigger issue.
I think it more and more represents where our culture is. We even have some theaters now that are questioning booking our films. Then, you have the whole billboard issue going on, so it just seems that ultimately as believers as Christians, our goal is not to be in spite about all of this stuff, it is not to say we are being discriminated against. But the other question is who is going to stand up and start speaking out against some of this stuff happening?
A mother in Kansas has her hands full after giving birth to her third set of twins in just over two years.
"Three babies walking within a couple of months," 20-year-old Danesha Couch of Kansas City, Kansas, told Fox4KC.com.
Couch told the news station that she has not undergone any fertility treatment and realizes that some people might consider her "a freak of nature."
Couch delivered two boys, Danarius and Desmond, 26 months ago. Desmond died shortly after birth from complications of prematurity, the news station reported.
"That was a pretty bad time," Couch told Fox4KC.com.
Shorlty after she gave birth to twin 1-year-olds, Delilah and Davina.
And last month, Dalanie and Darla were born. They just arrived home after three weeks in neonatal intensive care.
"My regrets would be timing, but I'm really happy that I can even create babies or have life because some women can't do that," Couch told Fox4KC.com.
Dr. Elizabeth Wickstorm of Shawnee Mission Medical Center told Fox4KC.com that if you've had twins before, it makes you more likely to do it again.
Couch and her fiance plan to marry in September, but she says they don't plan to have any more children for at least 10 years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
What are the three most horrifying words in the English language? Wrong. The correct answer is "amateur testicle surgery." The BBC reports 56-year-old Allan Matthews pleaded guilty Wednesday to removing another man's left testicle at an Australian motel despite not being qualified to practice medicine.
The unsanctioned surgery took place in May after a 52-year-old man posted an ad online seeking help for a medical issue, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
The man was apparently still suffering after being kicked in the groin by a horse years earlier but couldn't afford an actual doctor. A week after Matthews allegedly removed the man's testicle, infection set in.
The man went to the hospital, and the police launched an investigation. Authorities say a raid of Matthews' home last month turned up medical equipment, seven guns, and four bottles of what may be amyl nitrate.
In addition to performing surgery without being a doctor, Matthews also pleaded guilty to gun and drug charges. He did not plead guilty to inflicting "reckless grievous bodily harm." AAP reports Matthews is out on bail until another hearing next month.
(An Oregon man claimed surgery left him with an 80-pound scrotum.)
This article originally appeared on Newser: Man Pleads Guilty to Rogue Testicle Surgery
More From Newser
An employee at a suburban Detroit childrens day camp who was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis has died.
The Macomb Daily of Mount Clemens reports that the Macomb County Health Department confirmed 21-year-old Kristy Malters death Saturday in a news release.
Malter, of Shelby Township, was admitted to a hospital earlier this week. She worked at the Lifetime Fitness camp in Rochester Hills, north of Detroit.
Oakland County health officials said roughly 200 children ages 5-12 who attended the camp between July 1 and Monday may have been exposed to bacterial meningitis.
Parents were being notified.
Meningitis is an infection of the fluid surrounding the spinal cord and brain. Bacterial meningitis is transmitted through close contact, primarily exchanging saliva. Most people who get the infection recover.
In West Michigan, a student at Portage Northern was diagnosed with a form of bacterial meningitis in May. In 2013, Kalamazoo College student Emily Stillman,19, passed away from complications due to bacterial meningitis. Ethan Giang, an 8-year-old third-grade student in Byron Center, also died that same year from bacterial meningitis.
There's no accounting for tastebut if you want to blame anything on how you were raised, your taste in music could rank up there, a new study suggests.
In music, chords can be broken down into many categories, two of which are called "consonant" and "dissonant." A consonant chord consists of two or more notes spaced certain degrees apartthe first and fifth notes of a scale, for instance, are so pleasing to many Westerners that the interval is called "perfect." A dissonant chord, on the other handdrop that fifth note down a half step, sayproduces what some describe as nails on a chalkboard, or dark, or even the "devil's music," explain scientists at Brandeis University.
But now those researchers report in the journal Nature that these preferences do not appear to be hardwired from birth, and that people develop preferences for whatever music they are most exposed to growing up.
To test this, they traveled to the Tsimane tribe in remote Bolivia. To establish a base point, they also surveyed US undergrads, Bolivians in the capital city of La Paz, and Bolivians in the rural town San Borja, all of whom had exposure to Western music.
Turns out the Tsimane were the only ones to express no preference for consonant or dissonant musiclikely because their music consists only of one person singing at a time.
So any harmony, consonant or dissonant, was new to them. "Your brain basically gets tuned to the environment around it," one researcher tells Nature News.
Another researcher writes in an opinion piece in Nature that the hypothesis "provides food for thought," but that it doesn't necessarily rule out innate preferences.
So if you like, say, Bjork, whose songs can be quite textured in dissonance, it's possible you were born that way, but it could come down to whatever music your parents played.
(Check out which US cities will get you the most music exposure.)
This article originally appeared on Newser: Our Taste in Music Is More Nurture Than Nature
More From Newser
Two-year-old twins Jenna and Jillian first made headlines after they were pictured holding hands during their birth. Now the Orrville, Ohio, toddlers are in the news again as their mother shares details of their remarkable bond.
If one twin is crying, the other will try to find a way to comfort her, like going to find a pacifier or rubbing the others back or offering a hug, mom Sarah Thistlethwaite told PEOPLE. They always take care of each other.
The twins were born via Cesarean section at 37 weeks after Thistlethewaite had been placed on bedrest for 57 days. Doctors were initially concerned because the twins were found to be monoamniotic, which means they shared the same amniotic sac, PEOPLE reported.
Its the rarest form of twinning and it carries the most risk, Dr. Melissa Mancuso, director of the fetal treatment center at Akron Childrens Hospital, told PEOPLE. Because theyre sharing the same amniotic sac, their umbilical cords can become tangled as theyre growing and moving which can cut off blood supply to one or both twins.
The twins were born perfectly healthy and soon began showing signs that their close bond would continue outside the womb.
Sometimes if my husband goes to the store, hell take one twin and Ill keep the other, Thistlethwaite told PEOPLE. When that happens, they both get really upset and ask for each other. Theyre definitely really close. Theyre like two peas in a pod.
Thistlethwaite said the family tries to buy two of everything to minimize competition over a favorite toy.
Twins have this special bond and I cant wait to watch them grow up and be best friends, Thistlethwaite told PEOPLE.
Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in the New York Post. It is reprinted with permission.
The failed coup detat by elements of Turkeys military signals more repression and chaos in the Middle East.
We still lack important information on what motivated the attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, its timing and how and why it collapsed so quickly. Nonetheless, we confidently predict Turkey will suffer several major domestic consequences, in turn causing significant international ripples.
Most importantly, Erdogans relentless pursuit of an increasingly radical Islamicization of Turkey will proceed largely unfettered. And no significant institutional or political opposition inside Turkey now stands athwart his penchant for authoritarianism.
The triumph of Erdogans government means he has swept the board clear of any real impediments to implementing his radical policies. Both as prime minister and now as president, Erdogan has focused single-mindedly on an Islamicist attack on Turkeys secular constitution, and the very foundations of a modern Turkey, rising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, envisioned by Mustafa Kemal.
Turkeys military, following the pattern laid down by Kemal (known widely as Ataturk, meaning father of the Turks), was intended to be the guardian of the new, Europe-oriented nation-state he strove to create.
Although it may sound odd to Western ears that the military was to safeguard civil rights, especially freedom of religion, in this new Turkey, Kemal well understood that modern thinking needed time to take root and replace the Byzantine medievalism that had characterized Ottoman rule for centuries.
Sadly, Erdogans religious zeal has proven Kemal right. For years, Erdogan has replaced high-ranking, secular military officers with loyal Islamicists in a blatant effort to bend the military away from its secular vocation, toward endorsing or at least accepting a re-established state Islam, harking back to the deceased Ottoman caliphate.
Erdogans success at stuffing the militarys top officer corps with Islamicists and political loyalists likely explains why Turkeys military wasnt fully behind the coup attempt. Indeed, as seemed clear even in the revolts early hours, it appeared more an act of desperation, a last gasp by the militarys pro-secular elements, rather than a concerted effort by a united military establishment.
Erdogans increasingly dictatorial approach to governance has in recent years become ever clearer internationally, epitomized by his arrests and harassment of both foreign and domestic journalists he deemed critical of his regime. In earlier days, serving as mayor of Istanbul, he said publicly: Democracy is like a street car. You ride it to the stop you want, and then you get off. Fridays coup attempt may well be precisely the stop Erdogan was waiting for.
When he says the coup plotters will pay a heavy price, he isnt kidding. And he will not stop with the coups central figures.
Obviously, any military coup in a theoretically democratic state is illegal (at least until it succeeds), but we can expect Erdogans crackdown to be relentless and thorough.
Conveniently, Erdogan has been hard at work for years packing the Turkish judiciary with Islamicists and political supporters. As with his cleansing of the militarys officer corps, Erdogans placement and promotion of loyalists within the judiciary will now pay important benefits as hundreds, maybe even thousands of coup plotters, accomplices and mere political opponents of Erdogan face the consequences of failure.
Erdogan will also have a free hand in dealing with Kurdish political and military opposition efforts, particularly those pursuing an independent Kurdistan.
Internationally, Erdogan will obviously be strengthened significantly, at least once Turkey settles back down. It comes as no surprise that Iran was among the first governments to congratulate Erdogan on retaining power. His victory is a significant blow to the West and to the NATO alliance, with every indication that Turkey will turn increasingly rapidly away from Western values and America in particular, Obamas personal friendship with Erdogan notwithstanding. And despite Erdogans recent reconciliation with Israel, there should be no celebrations in Jerusalem.
The lamps have been going out all over the Middle East for years. Many more went out this weekend in Turkey. Whether we will see them relit in our lifetime remains unknown.
Five police officers died in Dallas on one terrible day a week ago. Now three more police officers are dead in Baton Rouge and another one is fighting for his life.
Dont Blue Lives Matter? How many more cops have to die before politicians and the people unite and announce their full support for the police?
Were not talking about half-measures, or weak support. Were not talking about meaningless words, but rather strong, meaningful actions.
Back in the 1980s the Newt Gingrich-led GOP created a "Contract with America." It swept the GOP into power.
Dont Blue Lives Matter? How many more cops have to die before politicians and the people unite and announce their full support for the police?
Contracts are effective forms of communication. So we believe this is the perfect time for a new kind of contract with America- one that puts the full force of government behind the thin blue line.
This is a contract every politician in America should be willing to sign And if they wont sign, they have lost their wayand lost their mandate to lead.
Which national candidate will endorse this contract? Where does your candidate stand? Where do you stand? Here is the contract. Read it and decide.
THE LAW ENFORCEMENT CONTRACT WITH AMERICA
1. We stand in strong and unwavering support of law enforcement. PERIOD. Not lukewarm support, not support when things are going great. We stand in support of police when the going gets rough, when the chips are down.
2. We pledge to fight for legislation to protect families of fallen officers and those catastrophically disabled in the line of duty. Currently this support varies based on the jurisdiction and often is sorely insufficient. It is a sad reality that many families would be better off financially if their officer died in the line of duty, rather than becoming catastrophically disabled. In addition, there is no federal protection for the surviving spouse and children of a law enforcement officer who is killed in the line of duty, or disabled in the line of duty, as it concerns their medical coverage. This is a national disgrace and must be changed immediately. Legislation is needed to protect these men and women who have sacrificed so much for their communities.
3. We pledge to support The Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights (LEOBR). This bill is intended to protect American law enforcement personnel from investigation and prosecution, arising from conduct during official performance of their duties, and provides them with privileges based on due process additional to those normally provided to other citizens. The need for a nationally recognized Police Officers Bill of Rights would serve as a protection for our nation's law enforcement officers.
4. We pledge to fight for more federal funding grants for police training. This is not the politically-correct "diversity and sensitivity training" being forced upon police departments across the USA by politicians like President Obama or New York City Mayor Bill DiBlasio. A special emphasis should be placed on Officer Survival Training. This should encompass not just physical survival, but emotional and psychological survival as well. PTSD takes a tremendous toll on American Law Enforcement, just as it does on the military.
5. We pledge to de-politicize and de-weaponize the United States Department of Justice against American Law Enforcement. The DOJ is an immense powerhouse that dramatically effects all aspects of Law Enforcement. The choice of an attorney general is a critical appointment that touches the lives of not only everyday Americans, but every single law enforcement officer in the nation. Unfortunately that position has been poisoned by politics under the administration of President Obama. Police officers across the country live in constant fear of becoming the next Darren Wilson -- the Ferguson, Missouri police officer whose only crime was to do his duty and defend his own life. Our politicians should pledge not to use the DOJ as a weapon to bludgeon police and achieve "social justice."
6. We pledge to pass legislation making The Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (aka LEOSA) enacted under the Bush administration, uniform across the USA. In essence, LEOSA is a federal law that allows retired Law Enforcement Officers the right to carry firearms concealed in any state without having to obtain a CCW Permit. Retired armed police and other law enforcement personnel are a huge backup force patrolling our streets- always armed and ready to defend the citizens...if they are allowed to do their job. This law is vital for not only the protection of those who have retired, but for the safety of Americans who face increasing risk of terror attacks and violent crime.
7. We pledge to declare war on cop killers. Targeting and hurting or killing police is a heinous crime. It tears at the fiber of society. It rises to a one-of-a-kind level of moral crisis. We believe these crimes should trigger unique penalties -- including the death penalty and recognition as a hate crime. If killing someone because they are black or gay merits special recognition and additional penalties added to the sentence, why shouldnt killing someone because they are a police officer? If Blue Lives Matter, then targeting or killing police should reach the status of a hate crime.
8. We pledge to create a uniform minimum pay scale for law enforcement personnel across the USA. An officer was killed in the line of duty recently. At his time of death, he was making $12 per hour. These are trained professionals, whose job is to risk their lives for us. Shouldn't cops be paid appropriately for the risk, courage and heroism required for the job?
We are intensely interested to see where our political leaders and candidates stand on the simple, commonsense planks of this "Law Enforcement Contract with America." Because
BLUE LIVES MATTER.
Political parties havent always chosen their presidential candidates through national conventions. Before 1832, caucuses of each partys members of Congress selected them.
But on September 26, 1831, Americas original third party was forced by circumstances to find a different way. Since the Anti-Masonic Party had no members of Congress, local party leaders from twelve states gathered in Baltimores Athenaeum and selected William Wirt for president.
The party had emerged following the disappearance and supposed murder in September 1826 of William Morgan, a disaffected western New York Mason, on the eve of the publication of his book revealing Free Masonrys secrets.
His body was never found, but Morgans disappearance sparked allegations that Masons were a powerful secret conspiracy bent on subverting the countrys republican government. Springing into existence rapidly, the Anti-Masonic Party sought to remove all Masons from public office.
On September 26, 1831, Americas original third party was forced by circumstances to find a different way. Since the Anti-Masonic Party had no members of Congress, local party leaders from twelve states gathered in Baltimores Athenaeum and selected William Wirt for president.
This populist, anti-establishment movement was limited in influence to the Northeast but won the Vermont governors office and legislature. It also had a supporter in the Pennsylvania governor, and emerged in New York as the principal opposition to the Democratic Party of President Andrew Jackson, a prominent long-time Mason.
The Anti-Masonic candidate for president was a respected lawyer whom Jefferson had picked as Aaron Burrs prosecutor in 1804. Wirt was also the longest-serving Attorney General in history, having labored for twelve years under Presidents James Monroe and John Q. Adams. Upon leaving office, he represented the Cherokees in court battles opposing Jacksons forced relocation of the tribe to what is now Oklahoma. Ironically, Wirt had been active in Masonry for a few years. He received nearly 8 percent of the vote in 1832 and carried Vermont.
Within a few years, the party was co-opted by Henry Clays Whigs. Anti-Masons and Whigs shared many common views, including support for protective tariffs and federal support of internal improvements and, most important of all, opposition to Jackson whom the Anti-Masons saw as a leader of a dangerous scheme to destroy the freedoms of ordinary Americans.
Some Anti-Masons went on to become active in the Whigs and then Republicans, including William Seward, Thurlow Weed and Millard Fillmore of New York and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.
In the past, the opening days of contested conventions typically featured test votes so factions could see how strong each contender was. These test votes frequently centered on the selection of the temporary chairman, elected immediately after the party chairman called the convention to order.
The temporary chairman had real power appointing leaders of the committees that considered credentials challenges, set the rules, recommended the meetings permanent officers, and wrote the platform. But his time at the podium was limited, being replaced by a permanent chairman, elected generally on the second day.
The June 1884 GOP convention in Chicago opened with Republicans badly split. On one side were those who supported the nomination of President Chester A. Arthur, who had succeeded to the office upon President James Garfields assassination. But most delegates were leery of the New York machine politician, believing his reputation for patronage and boodle was too unsavory.
Arthurs leading challenger was James G. Blaine, Garfields secretary of state, but he was one of nearly half-a-dozen possible alternatives to the incumbent, none of whom had enough votes to win on the first ballot.
The convention was held at Chicagos Exposition Center on Lake Michigan, a 1,000-feet long and 200-feet wide structure, topped by a dome. It was painted a dull Indian red that vividly contrasted with the sky and white clouds visible through 200-foot tall arched glass windows on its long east and west sides. The podium was in the halls east, decorated in Union battle flags. Portraits of Washington, Lincoln and Garfield hung over the stage.
After the convention was gaveled to order at 12:28 P.M. on Tuesday, June 3, the Republican National Committee offered Powell Clayton for temporary chairman. The tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, one-armed Union veteran from Kansas had settled in Arkansas after the Civil War and was elected governor in 1868 and U.S. Senator in 1871. By 1884, he was out of office but as leader of the Minstrels faction, still boss of the Arkansas GOP.
Some anti-Arthur men wanted Clayton as temporary chairman to embarrass the president. Clayton had supported until Arthur rejected his demand to be appointed Postmaster General with control of the Post Offices vast patronage.
But the idea of rebuking one machine politician Arthur by electing another machine man Clayton was too much for two young Eastern reform Republicans. One was the 34-year old Massachusetts GOP state chairman, the other a 25-year old New York Assemblyman from a silk stock Manhattan district. They had met briefly a year or two before in Boston and exchanged stilted formal letters shortly before the convention. They were drawn together by their mutual support for Vermont Sen. George Edmunds, a favorite of Easterners bent on fundamental reform of their party, so it didnt help their opinion of Powell that he backed Blaine.
When Powell was nominated, the Bay Stater immediately rose, gained the chairs recognition and moved to substitute John R. Lynch of Mississippi in place of Powell. The Blaine men were caught by surprise, having expected a united anti-Arthur front on the question of the temporary chairman.
Lynchs nomination presented a special problem for them. The Blaine men were counting on southern Black Republicans to help secure their mans nomination. But Lynch was a former slave, freed at the age of 16 in 1863 by the Union Army. Lynch entered politics after the Civil War, serving in the State House of Representatives from Natchez and being elected Speaker in his last term, the first Black to hold the position. Lynch then served two terms in the U.S. Congress from 1873 to 1877, and then was reelected in 1880 for a single term. If Black delegates voted for Lynch, they might get into the habit of making surprises.
In response to Lynchs nomination, several party bigwigs condemned the substitute nomination as an attack on tradition, some making the argument that defeating a decorated veteran would be an insult. In response, the young New York Assemblyman reminded delegates that 24 years before, Republicans had chosen Abraham Lincoln who broke the fetters of the slave and rent them asunder forever and called it fittingto choose to preside over this Convention one of that race whose right to sit within this walls was due to the victory made possible by Lincolns leadership.
After more wrangling, the previous question was called and the roll began. When it was over, Lynch beat Clayton, 431 to 387, becoming the first Black man to chair a national convention of any major political party.
His victory also cemented the friendship of the two young troublemakers Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Theodore Roosevelt of New York.
In welcoming Donald Trump to Cleveland, the media are serving up a smorgasbord of unflattering stories.
There is, of course, some meat-and-potatoes stuff about what to expect at the Republican convention and all that. But there are also appetizers and entrees spiced with that pungent anti-Trump flavor.
The theme is that this is a presidential nominee unlike any other--which is true--and therefore worthy of special treatment.
And special doubts.
The Washington Post has a long piece on how the billionaire has little time for books:
Trump, poised to become the first major-party presidential nominee since Dwight Eisenhower who had not previously held elected office, appears to have an unusually light appetite for reading.
Not even presidential biographies.
The New Yorkers Jane Mayer has a lengthy interview with Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, who says he wrote the whole thing and that Trump has an amazingly short attention span.
Having sold out (by his own admission) and done it for money (half the $500,000 advance for the 1987 book, followed by half the millions in royalties), Schwartz now wants to clear his conscience:
I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. He went on, I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.
See? This is a high-stakes election. The end of civilization and all that.
If he were writing The Art of the Deal today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, The Sociopath.
Not that hes biased against Trump or anything.
New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg says its time for the press to get more aggressive in facing a convention where some of it promises to border on spectacle, to put it mildly. (Let me repeat: Among the potential themes is Mr. Clintons sex life.)
It could be one of those events that we look back on as a defining moment in American media, especially for the television networks: Did they once again this year hand themselves over to a Trumpian infomercial - the ultimate Trump infomercial and bask in the ratinginfs?
Or did they rediscover their vital role of providing context, perspective and truth in a contest that is not a countdown-clock-worthy sporting event or reality show, but a competition for the presidency of the United States in fraught and dangerous times?
Sorry, but yielding to a Trump infomercial doesnt account for all the critical reporting, harsh commentary and (some) tough interviews. Or Trumps willingness to submit to endless interviews even in the midst of damaging controversies, whether self-inflicted or not, while other candidates turned down endless invitations.
Politico writes the following story for at least the third time, saying GOP insiders are dreading the Trump convention.
And Trump doesnt get much solace from the conservative media. The Weekly Standard, led by #NeverTrump guy Bill Kristol, sees his campaign crashing and burning:
These leaders are political pros who understand how bad Trump's fundraising is, who have access to the best polling data, and whose careers depend on reading the pulse of the people. Better than anybody else, they know that a Trump nomination likely means a Clinton victory in November.
With that in mind, it's time for conservatives to ask themselves some difficult questions, above all: What is the point of the Republican party anymore?
Trump is transforming the Republican Party, which was ripe for a transformation after years of losing presidential electionsbut that doesnt please defenders of the old order.
So lots of negativity for The Donald. We'll see whether Hillary Clinton gets remotely comparable treatment on the eve of her Philadelphia convention.
Republican officials hastily adopted a set of much-contested convention rules Monday, setting off an unruly protest from anti-Donald Trump delegates on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Those anti-Trump forces had hoped to challenge the rules that bind delegates to vote for the presumptive GOP nominee, as part of a last-ditch bid to at least disrupt his march to the nomination. But the convention's presiding officer, Arkansas GOP Rep. Steve Womack, abruptly put the rules to a vote -- twice -- and declared them approved by voice.
This prompted loud objections from Trump opponents, who shouted roll call vote" in a dramatic showdown that effectively ended the Never Trump movement, but also underscored the deep divisions that remain in the party even as the Trump campaign claims the GOP has united.
Those delegates were hoping for a state-by-state vote on the rules that bind delegates to back Trump.
I have no idea whats going on right now, Utah Sen. Mike Lee said Monday, who helped lead the failed uprising. This is surreal.
Following the votes, almost all of the Colorado and half of Iowa delegations walked out. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and members of his state's delegation were screaming "shame" amid the vote; he later told CNN the RNC "violated its rules."
The Trump camp was said to be "livid" at the revived push.
"This is a big headache," one official told Fox News.
Anti-Trump delegates tried to force a vote after collecting signatures calling for one. They claimed to have more than enough support, including a majority of the delegates in nine states, to technically allow them to file a report challenging the convention rules.
But Womack said from the podium that delegates from three states withdrew their signatures. He then declared that the effort had fallen short.
The three delegations that dropped out of the effort to challenge the rules package were the District of Columbia, Minnesota and Maine. Alaska did not file the paperwork properly, while Iowa dropped out after the fact.
Womack took the unusual step of calling for two separate voice votes. He declared the pro-Trump delegates victorious both times despite the loud chorus of boos from the crowd.
Rory Cooper, senior adviser with the Never Trump group, blasted party officials, saying in a statement: Delegates presented party officials with more than enough states to force a roll call vote on the floor. There is no excuse for strong arming delegates and skirting the rules to silence these members of the party.
North Dakota delegate Gary Emineth, who had a role on the Trump Victory fundraising committee, resigned in protest following the floor fight over the way the anti-Trump forces were treated.
They want a kumbaya moment. Why cant we have a little drama? he said. He also had strong words for RNC Chairman Reince Priebus; asked if Priebus should resign, he said yes.
The anti-Trump forces wanted to change a rule that requires delegates to vote for the candidate they were committed to by the primaries and caucuses. Under current party rules, Trumps nomination is essentially secured since hes accumulated more than the 1,237 delegates required to win.
While Trump wasn't in danger of losing the delegates he needs to get nominated, the stamina of the anti-Trump movement is an embarrassing setback for the presumptive nominee.
Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign manager, downplayed the events Monday morning during a press briefing with reporters.
We dont expect anything to come out of the rules committee, Manafort said.
At a separate event he said, Its not a movement. Its some rogue, recalcitrant delegates.
Other delegates had threatened to walk out if the rules weren't changed.
"We won't sit around and coronate a king," said Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, who like many insurgents backed vanquished presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
The convention's rules committee earlier had defeated the dissidents seeking to make the changes late last week, thanks to an alliance between the Trump campaign and RNC leaders on that panel. For a short time, it seemed to sideline the movement.
Manafort has said there is no longer a viable "stop Trump" movement, only some "malcontents" who don't represent the broader Republican Party.
Despite the tension, Manafort insists that the GOP is not showing signs of strain but instead is coming together in a show of party unity.
Ninety-four to 95 percent have come together, Manafort said.
Still, high profile Republicans have decided to skip the convention as well as withhold their endorsement of the New York real estate mogul.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush said they would not attend the Cleveland convention which seemed fine with Manafort.
They are part of the past, Manafort said. We think that the unification is happening and we hope that when the Bush family decides to participate again in the political process, that they will join us. We would welcome them handily. Weve reached out to them but healing takes time.
Manafort called Ohio Gov. John Kasichs decision not to speak at the event a difficult situation.
Its a difficult situation when the home state governor doesnt participate in the convention process We invited him. We wanted him to participate, he chose not to. We think that's the wrong decision. There were no conditions put on him.
Aside from dealing with the rules package, delegates also approved the party platform during Mondays afternoon session including language that Christian conservatives cheered as the most conservative statement of party principles in recent memory.
The GOP convention approved language reaffirming the party's opposition to gay marriage and bathroom choice for transgender people.
And new language condemning same-sex parenting says: "Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to sue drugs and alcohol, engage in crime or become pregnant outside of marriage."
FoxNews.com's Barnini Chakraborty and Fox News' Bret Baier and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Republican convention appears to be facing a rocky opening both inside and outside the arena inside, from forces loyal to Ted Cruz mulling a procedural fight and outside, from anti-Trump protesters testing the demonstration rules set by the city.
Party Chairman Reince Priebus formally kicked off the convention Monday afternoon, setting in motion a packed day of speeches and official party business including the platform itself.
But on the sidelines, multiple high-level GOP sources in Cleveland told Fox News that officials loyal to Cruz led by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah have been bargaining with the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump campaign over procedural changes they failed to secure in last weeks Rules Committee sessions.
Coming as some anti-Trump delegates still are trying to mount a rebellion on the floor, the Cruz camp is seeking its own changes.
Those forces want to revise the rules that will reward states with closed primaries -- and for the RNC and Trump camp to allow Cruzs name to be placed in nomination from the convention floor.
For the latter to occur requires certain numbers of delegates from eight states, written signatures and more and the Trump campaign can move to frustrate that effort if they wish.
From their end, the Cruz forces have the power to somewhat disrupt the convention over the first two days albeit with little power to affect the ultimate outcome of Trump receiving the nomination. One threat the Cruz forces are said to be holding over the heads of the RNC and the Trump campaign is the specter of a large group of delegates in the hundreds simply leaving town after Cruz speaks on Wednesday night, exposing the nominee to the prospect of televised images of empty seats in the Quicken Loans Arena. Its an open question whether there are enough alternate delegates who can be rallied to fill such a number of seats.
On the Trump side, Republican consultant and Trump adviser Roger Stone is said to have mobilized a group of 1,000 people to push back wherever his candidates interests are being threatened.
RNC Chairman Priebus was huddling with key advisers on these issues Sunday night, to a degree unusual for a sitting chairman on the eve of the gaveling of his partys convention; on such evenings, the chairman is usually performing more ceremonial duties.
These sources tell Fox News that the bargaining is reaching its end. The deal most likely to materialize would see Cruz rewarded with his name being placed in nomination, and revisions to the rules that reward closed-primary states with more delegates, in exchange for Cruz instructing his delegates to allow the convention to proceed smoothly and perhaps signing some kind of unity pledge.
A Republican source tells Fox News that the key sticking point is Cruz's speaking slot and specifically the content of his speech. The original agreement between team Trump and team Cruz allowed Cruz to speak without offering a formal endorsement of Trump. So far, Trump's folks have not asked to look at the speech.
Meanwhile, protests are getting underway. While demonstrations have been held for days in Cleveland, Mondays have the potential to get rowdy.
One group, the Coalition to Stop Trump, is planning to march toward the convention site and has already gone on the move -- going outside the guidelines set up by the city. With at least 200 people starting to gather, the protest has brought together a mix of groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to several pro-socialism organizations.
The city has only allowed permitted protests a considerable distance away from the arena.
Other protests are also on tap for Monday.
Fox News James Rosen and FoxNews.com's Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
The Republican National Convention kicked off with fireworks Monday morning between the Donald Trump campaign and the governor of the host state, with campaign manager Paul Manafort calling former Trump rival Gov. John Kasichs absence from the event embarrassing.
The Ohio governor has been an outspoken Trump critic, and has not buried the hatchet with the presumptive Republican nominee since suspending his own presidential campaign earlier this year. Manafort, who also is the convention manager for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told NBCs Today that Kasich missing the convention makes no sense.
He is embarrassing his state, frankly, Manafort said.
Chief Kasich strategist John Weaver hit back at Manafort late Monday morning.
Manaforts problem, after all those years on the lam with thugs and autocrats, is that he cant recognize principle and integrity, Weaver told The New York Times. I do congratulate him though on a great pivot at the start of the convention after such a successful vice-presidential launch. He has brought great professionalism, direct from Kiev, to Trump world.
The barbs underscored the lingering tensions between Trump and certain wings of the party, as the campaign tries to use to weeklong convention to forge unity going into the general election campaign against Hillary Clinton.
Manafort said on MSNBC it was a big mistake for Kasich to stay home.
"Most of the Republicans who aren't coming are people who have been part of the past," Manafort said.
Kasich, a rival of Trumps for the Republican nomination, has not endorsed his partys likely standard bearer and has been critical of Trump.
"Why would I feel compelled to support someone whose positions I kind of fundamentally disagree with?" he told Fox News in June.
Kasichs lone win during the Republican primary was his home state of Ohio.
Despite the absence of Kasich and a number of other prominent Republicans, including Jeb Bush and several former presidents and presidential nominees, the Trump campaign is eager to use the convention to bring disparate wings of the party together.
While Kasich is sitting out the convention, several former GOP rivals are set to speak.
They include former Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Monday, to be followed later in the week by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
Perhaps the biggest headliner Monday, though, is Trumps wife Melania.
Trump told Fox News that he plans to attend on Monday; sources confirmed to Fox News he plans to introduce his wife.
Fox News John Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are considering an ambitious plan to protect endangered ferrets by using drones to drop peanut-butter flavor vaccine pellets in a Montana wildlife refuge.
The UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge is an important site for the recovery of black-footed ferrets, which are considered one of North Americas rarest mammals. Captive-reared ferrets have been reintroduced at the refuge, which covers about 56,000 acres, since 1994.
However, Sylvatic plague poses a major threat to the species. While the ferrets are vaccinated against the plague when they are introduced to the refuge, the disease is lethal to prairie dogs, on which they depend for food and habitat.
Officials currently spray an insecticide to kill the plague-carrying fleas, a manual process that can be labor-intensive across an expanse of prairie. A spokesman for the USFWS told FoxNews.com that the Service is keen to find a more efficient method to protect prairie dogs and ferrets. Were always thinking how to do things better, he said.
One potential solution could involve drones dispersing vaccine in peanut-flavored oral bait that are roughly the size and weight of M&Ms. Apparently, just like you and your Golden Retriever, Prairie Dogs really enjoy the flavor of peanut butter, said the spokesman.
The baits would be distributed very sparsely in targeted areas, at around 50 small pellets per acre.
Another method being considered is dispersing the oral vaccines manually.
The spokesman told FoxNews.com that the drone plan is still in its conceptual stage. The proposals are currently being routed to our leadership for review, he said.
The black-footed ferret is the only ferret species native to North America. Approximately 300 black-footed ferrets were known to exist in the wild at the end of 2015, spread across 27 reintroduction sites in North America.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
A volcano outside Rome, long thought extinct, is rumbling to life. But don't panic: The volcano isn't likely to blow its top for at least another 1,000 years.
Colli Albani is a volcanic complex of hills located 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the center of Rome. There are no historical records of eruptions from Colli Albani, so it was long thought to be extinct, according to the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Now, researchers have reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that Colli Albani just doesn't erupt that often. In fact, it enters an eruptive phase every 31,000 years or so.
A team of researchers, led by volcanologist Fabrizio Marra of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, used ground-based observations of rising land, earthquake swarms and steam vents alongside satellite data to track Colli Albani's recent activity. An analysis of rocks from the volcano revealed a history of past eruptions, the most recent of which occurred 36,000 years ago. [The 11 Biggest Volcanic Eruptions in History]
Now, the ground underneath the volcano is inflating, rising at a maximum of about 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) per year in areas where steam vents are emerging, Marra and his colleagues reported. During the past 200,000 years, the area has risen by about 164 feet (50 meters) in elevation, they found. This suggests that magma is entering fractures beneath the volcano, they said.
The reason for the change has to do with the subsurface geology of Colli Albani, Marra told the AGU. Until about 2,000 years ago, the surrounding land held together a fracture under the volcano, preventing magma from bubbling to the surface. More recently, however, the subsurface stresses have changed so that the rock on one side of the fracture is moving and sliding against the rock on the other side, according to the AGU.
So far, these changes have manifested in a swarm of earthquakes around Rome that lasted from 1991 to 1995. Another sign was a small fumarole, or steam vent, that appeared in a road near Rome's Fiumicino airport in 2013.
Given its 31,000-year cycle, Colli Albani is arguably overdue for an eruption, but the volcano won't unexpectedly blow its top, Marra told the AGU. It likely won't build up enough pressure for an explosive eruption for at least 1,000 years. Even then, Romans can expect plenty of warning, Marra said, as an explosive eruption would be preceded by initial stages of moderate volcanic activity.
Original article on Live Science.
Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A 3,000-year-old graveyard with the bones of about 200 individuals discovered in Ashkelon, Israel, is being hailed as the first (and only) Philistine cemetery ever found.
If valid, the finding would reveal more about a mysterious people known as the Philistines. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Philistines came from the Aegean Sea region, along with other groups of people, during the 12th century B.C, at a time when cities and civilizations in Greece and the Middle East were collapsing.
According to the Hebrew Bible the Philistines fought a series of battles against the Israelis. The conflict between the Philistine giant Goliath and Israel's King David (who was armed only with a slingshot) is the most famous encounter. Little is known about the burial practices of this culture, archaeologists said.
However, experts not affiliated with the excavations are not yet convinced of the claim, saying that the identity of the people buried at the Ashkelon cemetery is not clear-cut and the finding itself has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Further muddying the waters, other burials found in known Philistine cities, though never confirmed, also have dibs on the title of "first-discovered Philistine cemetery." [See Photos of the Possible Philistine Cemetery and Artifacts]
Archaeologists are waiting to see what the scientific publication of the Ashkelon cemetery will show. "Though the Ashkelon Philistine cemetery received much media attention, the full professional archaeological picture still awaits further clarification," said Shlomo Bunimovitz, an archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
The excavators acknowledge that other burials identified as Philistine have been found before, but say that their finds will show that most of the past discoveries were incorrectly identified as "Philistine."
"Ninety-nine percent of the chapters and articles written about Philistine burial customs should be revised or ignored now that we have the first and only Philistine cemetery, found just outside the city walls of Tel Ashkelon, one of the five primary cities of the Philistines," expedition co-director Lawrence Stager, a professor at Harvard University in Massachusetts, said in the press release announcing the find.
Are these Philistine people?
Radiocarbon dating and analysis of the cemetery's pots indicate that the cemetery was in use between the late 11th century B.C. and the early eighth century B.C., said Daniel Master, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois and a co-director of the excavations at Ashkelon.
During this time period, Ashkelon was a Philistine city, as were Ashdod, Ekron, Gath and Gaza, according to ancient texts, Master said. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]
"We have a high degree of confidence that Ashkelon was a major Philistine city in this period because of a convergence of earlier and later texts from Egypt, the Hebrew Bible, Assyria and Babylon," Master said. He also noted that the burial styles seen at the cemetery appear different than those of other groups who lived in the region, such as the Canaanites.
Amihai Mazar, an archaeology professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said he believes the answer is more complicated. Previous archaeological studies indicate that the Philistines arrived in Israel from the Aegean Sea region during the 12th century B.C., he told Live Science in an interview.
By the 10th century B.C., the Philistines were intermixing with the local Canaanite population and adopting local traditions as well as Canaanite artifacts and practices, Mazar said.
He said that while you "can call [the cemetery] Philistine," there may be differences between how people were buried in this 3,000-year-old cemetery and how they would have been buried 3,200 years ago, when the Philistines were newcomers to the region.
Images of the cemetery published in media outlets show numerous Phoenician pots and a structure with Phoenician architectural elements, Mazar said, adding that these features suggest that some of the people buried in the cemetery could be Phoenician merchants rather than Philistines.
Master agreed that not all the people buried in the cemetery were Philistine. "No one can be sure of the affiliation of every person in any ancient cemetery," he said.
Additionally, the people buried in the cemetery may not have thought of themselves as being Philistine and may have identified themselves more on the city they lived in or on their religious practices, said Raz Kletter, a professor of theology at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
Kletter doesn't dispute that the people buried at Ashkelon used a series of artifacts that modern-day archaeologists identify as belonging to the Philistines. However, that doesn't mean the people buried there thought of themselves as Philistine, he said.
"We do not know how they [the Philistines] viewed themselves, having few written sources that are mostly from outside Philistia," Kletter said. "People living in Iron Age Philistia could identify themselves by city or religion, and not necessarily by an ethnic group."
Is it the first Philistine cemetery ever discovered?
Neither Mazar nor Kletter agree with the assertion that the cemetery found at Ashkelon is the only known Philistine cemetery.
Kletter has been excavating an ancient city in Israel called Yavneh, which he says also contains artifacts that can be identified as "Philistine." Additionally, he and his colleagues found a cemetery there, which they described in the journal Atiqot in 2015. That cemetery also dates to a time when ancient texts say that Yavneh was a Philistine city. "I believe the people buried there [in Yavneh's cemetery] were Philistines," Kletter said.
Other sites with burials that could be considered "Philistine" have also been previously discovered both Kletter and Mazar said.
For instance, a Philistine cemetery at Azor, a site located near modern-day Tel Aviv, was excavated in the 1950s by the late archaeologist Moshe Dothan said Mazar. Additionally, some archaeologists consider burials dug up in southern Israel by British archaaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie a century ago to be Philistine, Mazar added.
"Ashkelon is not a 'first,' but it is certainly an important find," Kletter said.
Identifying a burial as that of a Philistine is difficult because archaeologists have to use ancient records of the areas that the Philistines ruled and try to confirm, using the artifacts they find, that the people in a cemetery are Philistine and not from other groups. These findings are published in scientific journals and can be the subject of debates that can go on for many years.
Original article on Live Science.
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Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Facebook has lately taken a beating from critics that claim the company has not done enough to address its lack of diversity in employee ranks. Its recent diversity report seemed to support that assertion. The report and its results were enough to generate headlines and fierce debate. Commentary on the report from Maxine Williams, Facebook's Global Director of Diversity, has drawn even more controversy to the company.
Williams blamed a lack in the "pipeline" of qualified minority applicants for Facebook's failure to achieve its diversity initiatives, according to USA Today. Williams essentially blamed the nation's education system for supplying fewer graduates with degrees than tech companies need to hire. To Williams, the reason that Facebook is not hiring more black and Hispanic workers is one of supply and demand, and not derivative of Facebook's hiring practices.
Related: Facebook still shows little signs of progress when it comes to diversity
Diversity advocates were outraged at William's comments, as they placed blame for Facebook's diversity problems on external market problems that the giant social network cannot account for. The implication from her comments was that a steady flow of qualified diverse applicants does not exist, and therefore Facebook hires from the one that does.
Data contradicts Williams' statements, however. There are actually more black and Hispanic students who major in computer science and engineering than work in jobs in the tech industry, according to USA Today. A study by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed that among top engineering programs, nine percent of graduates are black and Hispanic. The study further shows that total black and Hispanic workforce at major technology companies sits at around 5 percent.
It appears from the EEOC data that a "pipeline" does exist, and critics claim that Facebook is making excuses that are not valid. To protest Williams' comments and the results of Facebook's diversity report, a Twitter hashtag #FBNoExcuses was created.
A company that sells software that analyzes the human voice and touts the virtues of empathy, rapport and emotional intelligence is joining forces with West Point United States Military Academy in an effort to help cadets become better negotiators.
Cogito Corp. is a Boston-based company that makes software that can analyze a persons voice in real-time. That information, the company says, can help customer service representatives show more empathy; the result is phone conversations that are more efficient and personalized, according to Cogito.
Col. James Ness of West Point said that this kind of tech will help their students become better negotiators, a key skill for people in the military.
Cogitos behavioral analytics technology will systematically analyze communication patterns within negotiating sessions and provide insight into the cadets psychological state, Ness, who directs the engineering psychology program at West Point, said in a statement. This technology will provide an unbiased assessment of how each cadet is being perceived by the other party. It will deliver insights into how they can modify their behavior to improve negotiation outcomes.
A company that makes software designed for people who work in call centers might seem like a strange fit for West Point, but Cogito has also partnered with the likes of the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The company has also worked with Massachusetts General Hospital on an app-based project tailored to analyze the moods of people with depression and bipolar disorder.
Behavior analytics is the art and the science of measuring behavioral information, and then making inferences about our psychologic state, the companys CEO and co-founder, Josh Feast, said during a television appearance to speak about the Mass. General study. He also mentioned the call center software the company makes, called Dialog, which he said actually helps people be more charming on the phone.
Helping cadets advance their negotiation skills is a wonderful use of Cogitos technology, Feast said in a statement about the West Point deal. The novel insights the software delivers will provide real-time intelligence into how they are being perceived and how they can modify their behavior to reach more successful agreements.
Follow Rob Verger on Twitter: @robverger
A Walt Disney World intern received her job back after she was briefly fired for tweeting a photo of a sign guiding employees on how to respond to questions about alligators in the theme parks waters.
The Orlando Sentinel reported Friday that Shannon Sullivan was fired last week after posting the photo on Twitter. It told employees that if guests ask whether alligators live in the parks waters, they should reply: Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call pest management to have it removed.
The sign said that workers shouldnt tell guests that they have seen alligators before. We do not want our guests to be afraid while walking around Frontierland, the note added.
Sullivan told her bosses that the sign was misleading. She told the Sentinel that she was offended by the photo and was pretty vocal about it. She acknowledged that tweeting the photo couldve gotten her in trouble.
"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, it's worth it to me, she explained.
Sullivan, who served as an intern in Disney Worlds College Program, posted the photo on Twitter and was subsequently fire.
However, in a reversal, Disney said the sign wasnt authorized and was removed. Sullivan got her job back.
A 2-year-old Nebraska boy was killed by an alligator at the park last month.
Disney told the paper that they didnt know who posted the sign and that no one else had been punished over the incident.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Click for more from the Orlando Sentinel.
On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted a ban on flights from Turkey to the United States, allowing Turkish Airlines and other carriers to resume flights to nine U.S. cities.
The FAA first issued a "notice to airmen" prohibiting flights to and from Turkey on Friday, following reports of increased violence throughout several Turkish cities.
On Saturday, U.S. airline regulators banned all flights between the U.S. and airports in Ankara and Istanbul. The ban included flights to the U.S. by non-U.S. carriers via third countries.
In the wake of the flight ban, United Airlines announced a fee waiver program for people traveling to or from affected locations from July 15 through July 22 and encouraged passengers to contact customer service.
The U.S. embassy in Ankara issued a statement Saturday warning that U.S. government officials have been told not to use the airport in Istanbul but Turkish Airlines resumed usual operations through Ataturk Airport that afternoon.
Other U.S. carriers like Delta, already ceased operations to Turkey as early as last fall following prolonged periods of civil unrest and several terror-related attacks.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Thailands tourism minister and police are working to eradicate the countrys well-known sex industry, Reuters reported.
Police officers have raided some of Bangkoks largest brothels over the past few weeks, Reuters said.
Tourism Minister Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul told Reuters that people do not travel to Thailand for the sex industry.
"They come here for our beautiful culture," she told Reuters. "We want Thailand to be about quality tourism. We want the sex industry gone."
Although Thailand is mostly a conservative, Buddhist nation, its sex industry is widespread, serving mostly Thai men, the news service said. Prostitution is illegal in the country, but the law is mostly ignored.
According to Reuters, the country expects a record number of tourists in 2016. The beaches, temples, go-go bars and massage parlours of Thailand are all popular among tourists.
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Proponents of the sex industry in Thailand told Reuters that it is unrealistic to think the country will ever be rid of prostitution.
Her push comes amid an attempt by the country's tourism authorities to transform Thailand into a luxury destination to attract moneyed tourists.
As the Thailand director of the Christian nonprofit organization NightLight, which works to get women out of prostitution, Panomporn Utaisri told Reuters that the government doesnt want to admit that prostitution contributes to the economy and tourism.
"There's no denying this industry generates a lot of income," Panomporn told the news agency.
Everything on earth seemed to stand still for a few brief hours last Thursday as reports of the terror attack in Nice during Bastille Day began to surface. Of the 84 people murdered that night, 10 were children -- 10 innocent little victims whose lives were only just beginning.
ISIS has now claimed responsibility.
The collective American spirit reels at the idea of children dying violently and it remains hard to process. The grief over children ripped away from their loved ones erases color, nationality, political party. We understand this as true evil.
"Sorrow makes us all children again -- destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote.
"These terrorists are barbaric, and they don't care about anybody," Fr. Stephen Rock, pastor of St. Agnes Catholic Church in Reading, Massachusetts, told LifeZette. "The more death they can cause the better -- if they hurt kids, they don't care."
There is a caveat, however -- as this religious leader and others of faith made clear.
"People of faith have got to trust in God," he said. "That doesn't mean we don't defend ourselves, but individually we need to have faith in just how much God loves us -- especially children. One of the sad things about any attack of this nature is that young children are always the most vulnerable. They can't hide or fight back -- they don't have those skills."
"People in your own networks who have lost children can be very triggered by attacks like this involving children," said one pastor. "It's time to reach out -- it is something we can do in our helplessness."
Rock served in the Navy Chaplain Corps for 20 years and has seen large swaths of the world in his travels. "I've been to Beirut, Lebanon, and I've been instructed to stay away from other people in crowds because of body bombs, which were prevalent in the 1980s," he said. "I understand fear when war or terrorism seems to be overtaking every corner of the world. But we can give in to this and cower -- or we can step outside our doors in faith and embrace the world."
"It's easy to have faith when times are good," said Rabbi Ahron Benmergui of the New Ashkenazi Minyan, an Orthodox congregation in Brighton, Massachusetts. "The challenge is to have faith when events like these unfold. We have to remember the times that G-d pulled us through difficult situations -- a child who was ill, trouble at work. If G-d helped us then, He will help us now."
Even as we grieve the innocent murdered children, there is still important work to be done in our communities, noted Robert Zucker, a Wellesley, Massachusetts, grief counselor and author of "The Journey through Grief and Loss."
"It might be very helpful to be tuned into how people in your own networks who have lost children can be very triggered by attacks like this involving children," he told LifeZette. "Their grief may re-emerge, or may intensify. It's time to reach out -- it is something we can do in our helplessness."
Zucker also said children must be guarded from exposure to graphic or disturbing images, especially in this age of cellphone photos and videos.
"Kids can now witness terrible things," said Zucker. "Our children need to be sheltered from over-exposure to violence [and terror]. We know we can pray for the families that lost their lives, and we can also reach out to the vulnerable, including those in our own homes who are living in a heightened state of fear. Their world can feel very unsafe."
Rock recalled the spirits of the martyrs of the Christian faith in examining layers of grief.
"There is a church in Rome called St. Stephano Rotundo -- not too far from the Roman Coliseum," he said. "On the walls are al fresco paintings of the Roman martyrs, portraying people who were butchered for their faith. What struck me about the way the Renaissance artists portrayed those who suffered greatly was the serenity in their faces. They weren't cowering -- because they were walking with God. When we think about the essential nature of God, we know again where we're going."
"Terror is reality, but I don't let it freeze me or frighten me."
Zucker shared specific advice for parents about good over evil.
"There's a lot of goodness and kindness in the world, even though there is there is this horrible stuff, too. Remind your children of this, and remind yourself, too. We don't have to stick our heads in the sand, but we do need balance. We must consider the goodness still alive in the world."
Fr. Rock recalled a recent example of faith amid violent death. "Most of the saints who were killed had a sense of peace, and if you remember the 21 Coptic Christians murdered by the sea in Libya, they didn't cry out. They were very peaceful at the moment of their death," he said. "What their last words were, as someone who read their lips was able to share, was, 'Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.' That depth of faith -- I think sometimes the West doesn't have as we should. Terror is reality, but I don't let it freeze me or frighten me."
A stronger sense of purpose should now envelop our leaders and accompany our own personal gratitude. "We must always take sides," said Elie Wiesel, the recently deceased Holocaust survivor and distinguished author who won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
The University of California at Berkeley confirmed Sunday that one of its students was among the 84 people killed after a terrorist rammed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd in the French city of Nice.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was one of 85 students in a local summer entrepreneurship program in Nice. Three other Cal-Berkeley students were injured in last weeks terror attack.
This is tragic, devastating news, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a press release. All of us in the UC Berkeley family - both here on campus, and around the world - are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence.
Leslie, from the San Diego area, was the son of an Italian mother and American father. He was a junior at the University of California in Berkeley, the school said.
His fellow students had plastered the city with flyers searching for him in the three days he was officially missing.
Cal-Berkeley said two of the three injured students had been released from local hospitals. The university said 23-year-old Vladyslav Kostiuk had suffered a broken leg, while Diane Huang, 20, suffered a broken foot. The third injured student, 21-year-old Daryus Medora remained hospitalized with a broken leg.
Thursday's attack was not the first time Cal-Berkeley has been affected by terrorism. Earlier this month, Indian-born student Tarishi Jain, 19, was killed by Islamic extremists in an attack on an upscale restaurant in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka.
The university planned to hold a vigil Monday for him and the three Berkeley students who were injured in the attack.
If youre a startup or a small business looking for press, the world of PR can seem like a dark and lonely place. Its especially difficult if you believe that sending a press release is your only option. (Its not.)
No company is newsworthy by virtue of existence. Thats why boring content and conventional PR tactics often lead to disappointment.
The secret to landing media coverage comes down to your approach. If youre willing to get creative and apply that entrepreneurial hustle, youll get results.
When youre a scrappy startup fighting for every win, creativity is your best weapon. Go outside the traditional PR playbook to find the press youre looking for. Here are 12 ways to approach PR to get the coverage you deserve.
1. Pitch in 140 characters or fewer.
Once youve identified your target journalists (tip: use MuckRack) that youd like to pitch to, add them to a private Twitter list and follow them. You can share their content, like their posts, and chat about shared interests. After several months (and asking permission) you can send a snappy 140-character pitch.
2. Become a trusted source on Haro.
The mass pitch has died -- and thats largely because news travels a lot faster than it used to. To get up to speed, subscribe to HARO (Help a Reporter Out).
HARO is one of the best free ways to land valuable media coverage. When you subscribe, youll get a newsletter with source requests three times a day, five days a week. These newsletters contain hundreds of requests from journalists and provide the perfect opportunity for you to contribute to topics that are relevant to your industry. Monitor your inbox at 5:25 a.m., 12:25 p.m., and 5:35 p.m. ET for source requests.
Related: PR Expert: Social Media Has Obliterated Traditional Public Relations
3. Find relevant stories on #journorequest.
Bloggers and journalists use the Twitter hashtag #journorequest to find useful sources and interviewees for stories. Its worth checking in once a day for relevant requests or subscribing to the hashtag. There are a lot of opportunities for small businesses.
4. Chat with people in real life.
The internet is an amazing way to connect with people, but its hard to beat the energy of an in-person connection. Whether its a conference, local event or coffee date -- sometimes you just need to get outside to give your company a boost.
5. Tell a weird story.
Nothing puts a journalist off like a predictable, repetitive pitch, so avoid the self-serving product launch narrative. Youre better off to pitch a story with a totally unique and unexpected angle. What can you glean from the weird world of starting a business? Promise actionable tips that will provide real value for readers.
6. Craft a click-worthy headline.
Many journalists use email as their main mode of business communication, so if youre sending an email pitch, you need a hook in the subject line. Think of your subject line as your mini pitch. It needs to grab the attention of the journalist and make them intrigued enough to take action. As Copyblogger says, a magnetic headline should make a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader.
7. Offer to write a guest post.
Reach out to a small news agency or online publication that covers your industry. You have a much better chance of getting coverage when you share the same niche industry and location.
Related: How Social Media Can Help With PR
8. Use data to inform new story angles.
If you know what topics are getting traction, youre that much closer to being newsworthy. Tools like Buzzsumo, Google Analytics and SEMrush can give data on keywords and topics in your industry that are performing well. Take note of high volume, low competition search terms and use tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest to play around with different content ideas.
9. Build authority through content.
Its much easier to get press when youve put in the work. Why? Because relevant, educational content gives you authority and thats exactly what journalists are looking for. They want experts on niche topics. Blogs and ebooks are a great place to start.
10. Speak for free.
Like good content, speaking gigs are an excellent way to share your expertise and build authority. Volunteer to speak at local conferences, schools or business seminars. Always network after events -- you never know who you might meet.
11. Give back by hosting an event.
If youve got free space for an event, do it. You can give back to your community with things like local fundraising drives, learning sessions for students or lunch and learns for new business owners. Its an easy way to do good and get some local press.
Related: 4 PR Strategies You Should Be Using Right Now
12. Run a contest on social media.
With so many ways to engage your audience (and a great way to get a little buzz for your brand), social media is the best place to run a contest. On Facebook, for example, you can run a contest or sweepstakes campaign directly through your Facebook company page.
When youre running a small business, you cant afford expensive media placements. Your only option is to get creative in your approach. By testing out different PR strategies, youll discover what makes your company newsworthy. Its a lot of hustle and youll work hard for everything you get -- but thats half the fun.
The former Marine who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge Sunday may have spent days "hunting" cops and staking out the gas station where the shocking attack occurred, police sources said.
A portrait of Gavin Long, who was killed by return fire from police, is beginning to emerge, including his ascent to the rank of sergeant and his one-year deployment to Iraq in 2008. Investigators going through his computer and cellphone are eyeing two unidentified people he had contact with, including one they have talked to and another they are searching for, sources told Fox News.
Police believe Long, who was wearing body armor during his attack, had been in Baton Rouge for six days and knew that cops often frequented the gas station and car wash where the shooting unfolded, sources said. One of the officers shot was vacuuming his car at the time.
The FBI was running down Long's social media activity and phone records to flag people he may have contacted and why he targeted Baton Rouge.
Long was associated with the Nation of Islam, the militant Muslim group led by Louis Farrakhan, according to a report by The Daily Caller. That report cited YouTube videos in which a person believed to be Long called for violence against white America, and revenge for the death of Alton Sterling, a black man killed July 5 while being arrested by Baton Rouge police.
If I would have been there with Alton clap, Long says in a video posted on July 14.
The three murdered cops have been identified as Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola. Another police officer was in critical condition and two suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
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 Long attended classes for one semester in the spring of 2012. A school spokesman said university police had no interactions with him.
Law enforcement sources told the Baton Rouge newspaper The Advocate, that Longs military records matches that of a so-called spiritual adviser, life coach and author who went by the name "Cosmo Setepenra." The persona claimed to have been in Dallas during the protests over the police shooting deaths of Sterling as well as the racially charged police shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota.
The paper reported that Long posted a video in a YouTube series called Convos with Cosmos titled Protesting, Oppression and how to deal with Bullies, where he talked about Sterlings death and the protests that came after it.
Jackson, who was black, posted a message on Facebook on July 8, just three days after the death of Sterling, a 37-year-old black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store.
In the message, the 32-year-old 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.
Gerald, 41, has served on the force for less than a year.
Garafola has been with the sheriffs office for 24 years, Casey Rayborn Hicks told the Associated Press.
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 said that Tullier is in critical condition while Simmons has non-life-threatening injuries.
The shooting began at the 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 didnt know where the shooting 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 6 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," Louisiana 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."
The FBI and the ATF were on scene, helping state and local police investigate what is being described as a "very large crime scene."
President Obama said in an address Sunday that the shooting deaths underscore the danger police face every day.
"Our hearts go out to the families who are grieving, go out to the officer fighting for his life," Obama said.
Major Doug Cain said that the individuals from Addis were questioned and released, but that the investigation was still ongoing. He said no charges were filed against them.
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."
Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Lucas Tomlinson, Bree Tracey, Leland Vittert and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Over the span of 20 years, Ive probably written more than 100 op-ed articles that have been published. If theres a magazine or newspaper or website that takes guest commentary and opinion pieces, my words have more than likely been in it.
Related: For a Company to Rise Above the Rest, the CEO Must Engage on Social Media
An op-ed is a great way to establish or build credibility as a leader and influencer in your field or community. Its also a virtually unrivaled way to move conversations or debates in ways that favor your views or interests.
But partly because op-ed space is so valuable, its not easy to get. Doing an op-ed right requires offering an argument editors want and writing it with solid preparation and discipline. In my time working with business, political and social leaders to get attention for their issues and ideas, Ive developed three rules to assess whether what someone has have is op-ed worthy.
So, before you spend the time to write and, heaven forbid, pitch, something that wont work, check these three rules to see if your op-ed that will work or, alternatively, be more appropriate for a Facebook post.
1. Are you an unquestioned expert or have a unique voice?
Do others recognize your contribution or standing? Would everyone recognize your expertise based on your experience in this area? Have you been there and done that?
This doesnt mean that youre an expert in everything -- it means you're an expert in what youre writing about. If youre a retired four-star general writing about military preparedness, yes. If youre the same four-star general arguing that pepper does not belong on gourmet salads, no.
To weigh in about pepper and salads, youd better be a chef who owns a few restaurants or have written the definitive book on pepper.
Unique voices also work. You can be a refugee and comment on immigration policy or a local police officer writing about keeping the peace in Iraq. You dont need to be an expert on either Iraq or immigration policy to have something interesting to say on these subjects -- your personal experiences can substitute for academic credentials or career standing.
Related: The Venerable Press Release Remains the Cornerstone of Public Relations
2. Is yours an original idea?
This one is the toughest because truly unique ideas are rare. But ask yourself, has anyone said this before or shared this thought? Check. Do some research.
This works especially well for proposing solutions to problems. Have a better way to get people to recycle? A cure for a disease? If you have a really good, novel or ground-breaking idea, your background or expertise wont matter and if you can explain your idea well, an outlet that covers that subject is likely to publish it.
A note of caution, though. If your solution to the problem you identify is your business model, that will likely be seen as (and likely is) self-promotion. Editors are exceptionally unlikely to publish op-eds around self-interested answers even if they are unique. If youll profit based on the solution youre suggesting, think twice.
3. Are you making a minority point or picking a fight?
You dont have to be unquestioned expert or have an original idea if youre on the minority or seldom voiced side of an issue and can make a good argument. If youre not a climate scientist or other expert scientist offering a solution, your op-ed on why global climate change is bad isnt going anywhere.
If, however, you can credibly argue that climate change is a blessing in disguise, youre on to something, op-ed-wise.
Picking a fight also works. Want to share evidence that your police chief is wrong about an issue or your congressional representative's view is backwards? Cite studies and examples and youll also be on to something. But if youre going there, be direct. Point the finger.
Hitting just one of these op-ed rules is good, but getting two or even three into your op-ed is even better. If, for example, youre a retired general writing to oppose the U.S. presidents plan for policing in Iraq, and you want to offer a brand new approach, you've got the trifecta of op-eds.
Related: 5 Big Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Their PR Efforts
The Marine who "targeted and assassinated" law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana brought three guns and scoped out areas where he could specifically attack police, investigators revealed Monday as they showed surveillance photos from the crime scene.
The images showed 29-year-old Gavin Long outside the gas station and car wash where he shot three officers and wounded three others on Sunday. A Baton Rouge SWAT team responding to the gunfire shot and killed Long from 100 yards away, State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson told reporters in a news conference.
The shooter used a rifle to kill the three officers, Edmonson said, adding that investigators also recovered a handgun and a second rifle. He said they were working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to determine how he obtained the weapons, and also were looking into his social media activity.
Long was from Kansas City and had been in Baton Rouge for six days, Edmonson added. Investigators said there were no other shooters at the scene, but they were still unsure whether Long had any kind of help.
"This investigation will leave no stone unturned," Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said. "This was a diabolical attack on the very fabric of society."
Using an aerial photo of the crime scene, Edmonson walked reporters through a timeline of the shootings. He said one of the officers Long shot was sitting in his car.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie, Jr. also defended law enforcement amid criticism of so-called "militarized tactics" by police in response to violent protests in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri. Describing the Baton Rouge gunman and the man who shot officers in Dallas last week, the police chief said, "we are up against a force that hasn't played by the rules."
Of the officers who survived the shooting, one was released from the hospital Monday. Two others remained hospitalized, one still in critical condition.
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 apparently posted to an online account belonging to Long on 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 shot and killed Alton Sterling in a confrontation that reverberated nationwide.
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."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Authorities in Northern California were searching for a man Sunday who allegedly stabbed two dogs during a trip to a local park.
According to CBS San Francisco, Robert Selhorst took his three dogs to a dog park in Oakland last week. One of his dogs noticed another dog on the other side of a fence and began to sniff it.
One of my dogs went under the fence to sniff his dogs, Selhorst told the station. My dogs tail was wagging. He was just sniffing his dog and the guy, like night and day, flipped out.
Selhorst said the man on the other side of the fence stabbed the first dog and when his other dog came over, the man slashed it too. The third dog stayed back.
I look at my other dog and it was cut up real bad, he said. From one shoulder down to the other side of his body.
The two dogs were slashed to death and Selhorst was slightly wounded in the incident too. He said the guy then picked up his puppy and ran away.
The stabbing suspect was described as a dark man, about 6-feet tall. He was wearing shorts and a Panama hat.
Police were still searching for the suspect.
Click for more from CBS San Francisco.
The Coast Guard is searching for the captain of a freight vessel who fell into the Mississippi River in Louisiana.
Media outlets report that the Coast Guard began its search for Capt. Ambarish Parekh at 9:30 a.m. Sunday. The Coast Guard says Parekh was last seen wearing a blue shirt and long pants with a personal flotation device.
Parekh was attempting to board the freight vessel African Raptor from a crew boat and fell off a ramp that was connecting the two vessels near Donaldsonville.
The Coast Guard asks anyone with information to contact the Sector New Orleans Command Center at (504) 365-2209.
The deadly shooting of a home intruder in Colorado Springs, Colorado could put the state's controversial "make my day" law to the test in an upcoming trial, as a grand jury found that a homeowner did not give the intruder enough time to react before he fired shots, according to newly revealed court documents.
Michael Joseph Galvin, 35, pleaded not guilty Friday to negligent homicide Friday in connection with the November 2015 death of Robert Carrigan, The Gazette reported. He has been released on $2,000 bond and is scheduled to face trial Jan. 9.
Galvin's attorney, Julia Stancil, confirmed that she planned to argue the case using Colorado's "make my day" law, which offers protections to people who defend themselves from intruders inside their homes.
Investigators said Galvin shot the 54-year-old intruder in his detached garage only 10 days after buying the home. Galvin claimed Carrigan could have lunged at him, but evidence suggested the intruder was shot in the back.
"The evidence indicates there was not significant time lapse between the verbal warnings and shots fired resulting in Mr. Carrigan's death," the grand jury in El Paso County reportedly announced in the April indictment.
At least two bullets pierced the garage door.
Relatives said Carrigan had relapsed into drugs, The Gazette reported. Galvin reportedly shot him in the same neighborhood where the intruder grew up.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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.
Police in Roswell, Georgia fired one of their officers after somebody complained that a Confederate flag was flying outside the officer's home, a pastor told local media on Saturday.
Roswell Police Chief Rusty Grant confirmed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that an officer was fired Thursday after the department received a complaint, but he did not elaborate. The former officer is a woman, WTVM reported.
Pastor Lee Jenkins said he'd reached out to Grant after the police chief accepted an invitation to worship at Eagles Nest Church last week in the spirit of healing after police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota.
The next day, the pastor said he'd heard from a parishioner that a Confederate flag was flying outside a house with a Roswell Police vehicle sitting in the driveway. Jenkins said he reported it to the police chief.
The flag has emerged as a polarizing symbol in recent years. Opponents have described it as a symbol of hate, while supporters say it's an unmistakeable part of Southern history.
People have a First Amendment right to fly a flag on their own property, but when you have a government-issued vehicle out front, thats highly offensive and inappropriate, Jenkins told the Journal-Constitution.
The pastor said he learned from police that the officer in question was terminated after an investigation.
Grant said the worship service was an eye-opening experience. For me the takeaway from Ferguson was that a lot of African Americans dont trust police officers and dont see them as I did when I was growing up, he told the newspaper. I honestly didnt know that before.
Roswell is a half-hour's drive north of Atlanta.
Click for more from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Police say a Georgia man has been charged after he urged people to kill white police officers.
An arrest warrant states that 19-year-old Derrick "De De" Hudson of Macon, Georgia, wrote "Just kill all white cracker cops" in his online response to a Facebook post by Macon station WGXA-TV last Wednesday. The warrant says Hudson was charged with criminal solicitation.
The Telegraph reports that the comments were linked to the TV station's post showing a video of Alton Sterling's 15-year-old son speaking out about his father's death. Sterling is the 37-year-old black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store on July 5.
WGXA's news director declined to comment Monday. Bibb County Jail records do not list an attorney for Hudson.
A sharp eye and a sense that something was very, very wrong led a Good Samaritan in South Carolina to save another woman from a potentially more terrible fate than she had already been enduring.
This witness to a crime in progress in Rock Hill, South Carolina, used her car keys, of all things, to interrupt an armed robbery, a potential kidnapping and perhaps more. In so doing, she ended up saving another woman's life.
Judging by her smart, swift actions, she would do it all over again if she had to.
The woman -- the victim -- was standing in an alley off Main Street at around 8:30 a.m., putting her key into her office door and about to enter it to start her workday, when a man with a knife approached her.
The man, identified as Danny Brown, 58 -- who had previously been arrested for armed robbery -- grabbed her purse and held her at knifepoint. He then began to force her down the street with him toward her bank's ATM -- so that she would withdraw more money and hand it over to him.
The woman was petrified.
As they headed for the Wells Fargo bank that morning, they could have been mistaken for any ordinary couple walking down the street. But the woman was in great duress and in shock. With the knife at her side and the man's tight grip on her, she had little choice but to go along.
That's when a Good Samaritan showed up.
A woman nearby saw the two people heading for the ATM. She heard a scream and immediately realized something was amiss.
Earlier this week, Brown was brought into court for his bond hearing -- with the victim present.
She asked the woman directly, "Are you OK?"
The woman replied, "No."
But Brown, the man with the knife, interjected, "Yes, she's OK," according to AJC.com, which reported the story.
But for the Good Samaritan, this was not good enough. She flung the car keys she was holding directly at Brown -- who became flustered. In that split second, the victim was able to break free and run off. The Good Samaritan then called 911, alerted authorities to what had happened, and described the attacker.
"She did a very brave thing," said a local shopkeeper who heard the whole story.
"I'm not sure I would have the guts to do what this woman did," said a New York woman and mother of two.
The attacker began running down the street -- toward City Hall, as it turned out -- which is just a block from the local police station. Officers on foot then chased Brown into City Hall, caught him and arrested him, according to local reports.
Earlier this week, Brown was brought into court for his bond hearing -- with the victim present. She did not want to be identified and said she'd prefer there was "no bond set, because I've been terrified and [he] threatened that he would return and come looking for me," she said.
The judge denied bond.
Brown's criminal recorded included past arrests for armed robbery. He told the court he was homeless, has no bank account, car or income, other than a monthly disability check.
But it was the Good Samaritan who stepped in and saved the day, and who, judging by her smart actions, would do it all over again if she had to -- demonstrating a lesson for all of us everywhere.
A judge in Baltimore Monday acquitted the highest-ranking officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray, marking the fourth trial that prosecutors failed to win.
Lt. Brian Rice faced charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. He opted for a bench trial by Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams.
The judge previously dismissed a second-degree assault charge, and prosecutors dropped a second misconduct charge against the 42-year-old officer, who is white.
After the verdict announcement, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake tweeted that Rice would face an administrative review by the police department. She asked for the community's continued respect for the judicial process.
Gray died a week after suffering a spinal injury in a police van last year, touching off protests and rioting.
Rice's failure to seatbelt Gray, Williams said, may have been an error in judgment and a violation of updated policy -- but the judge found prosecutors failed to prove it rose to a criminal level.
"The state failed to show that the defendant, even if he was aware of the risk, consciously disregarded that risk," the judge said.
Three earlier trials resulted in two acquittals and a mistrial.
Officers Caesar Goodson and Edward Nero -- both of whom were found not guilty in bench trials -- were also present at the courthouse.
Gray was arrested after he ran from police officers in a high-crime area of the city. He was handcuffed and later shackled in the back of the police van, but officers never buckled him in.
Prosecutors had said Rice was most responsible of the six officers charged for following police procedures to fasten a prisoner in a seat belt, citing his 18 years of experience on the force.
The officer's attorney said police could use discretion, if they believe their safety is at risk. Rice attorney Michael Belsky said officers had concerns because Gray was not cooperative and they weren't sure what onlookers would do if extra time was taken to fasten Gray in the van.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys gave different characterizations of the onlookers. Prosecutors described them as concerned observers, while Belsky said officers heard threatening comments during the arrest.
Three of the charged officers are black, and three are white. Race has not been cited as a direct factor in Gray's death, but his arrest and deadly injury added momentum to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Gray's family received a $6.4 million settlement from the city.
Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby vowed to bring justice to an aggrieved citizenry when she announced the charges last year. But she has yet to find success in court, and is being sued for defamation by five of the officers.
Fox News' Varuna Bhatia and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein could face new criminal charges if lawyers for his alleged former teen sex slaves succeed in an unusual effort to overturn a 2008 plea deal that gave him house arrest, despite accusations he pimped the girls out to his rich and powerful friends.
Attorneys for two of the 30 girls Epstein, 63, allegedly prostituted on his private jet, in his Florida mansion and at his private island hideaway are attempting to open up - and potentially overturn - the governments secretive agreement with Epstein that critics say left him with just a slap on the wrist for pleading guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution.
If they succeed, many of Epsteins powerful friends could find themselves in the public spotlight.
This is absolutely a groundbreaking case, said Meg Garvin, executive director at the Oregon-based National Crime Victim Law Institute. The victims are fighting to truly make victims rights meaningful to ensure that victims are informed and have a voice at every critical decision point.
Florida attorney Brad Edwards and retired federal judge Paul Cassel filed the civil case against the federal government in U.S. District Court in Southern Florida in 2008, claiming federal prosecutors conspired with Epstein to keep the details of the plea deal under wraps in violation of the federal Crime Victims Rights Act.
Epstein reached financial settlements with both women, who are now 28. Their current suit is against the Department of Justice, and a federal judge has only recently ordered the two sides to intensify settlement negotiations.
By law, the women cannot receive financial damages from the government, but they are seeking "fundamental changes" to the justice system, Edwards said.
Edwards said the women still hope that federal prosecutors, or a judge, will consider invalidating Epstein's non-prosecution agreement and consider filing criminal charges against him. They could also seek an apology from prosecutors or fines against the U.S. Justice Department which could benefit a crime victims' group, Edwards said.
This legal challenge is incredibly unusual -- I have never heard of this happening before, said John Malcolm, a former prosecutor in the Department of Justices Criminal Division, now director of the Heritage Foundations Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
The investigation of Epstein and the plea deal that followed was a complicated matter involving multiple jurisdictions.
The Palm Beach Police Department opened an investigation into Epstein in 2005 after parents of a 14-year-old girl claimed the girl gave Epstein a massage at his Palm Beach estate for money. A subsequent investigation by the FBI allegedly found Epstein had paid at least 30 underage girls for sex.
The girls told police they were molested at Epsteins $6.8 million Palm Beach mansion beginning in 1998 regularly on a daily basis, and in most instances, several times a day, according to court records. Girls claimed they were paid between $200 and $300 for each visit with Epstein.
A subsequent investigation by the FBI allegedly found Epstein had paid at least 30 girls ages 14 to 17 to engage in illegal sexual activities. That probe resulted in an 82-page prosecution memorandum and a 53-page indictment against Epstein and his female staff members. Although he was the target of state and federal investigations, it was state prosecutors who ultimately hatched the plea deal.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to one count of prostitution with a minor, registered as a sex offender, and spent 13 months in prison and home detention.
Under state and federal law, victims have a right to be present and reasonably heard at any public proceeding in the district court involving release, plea, sentencing, or any parole proceeding. Not only did the alleged victims not attend hearings regarding Epsteins plea deal, key evidence assembled by authorities has remained sealed, Edwards said.
None of the parties would comment on the ongoing mediation.
The government deliberately kept crime victims in the dark so that it could enter into a plea arrangement designed to prevent the victims from raising any objection, Edwards argued in court documents.
Those familiar with the criminal case against Epstein say the plea deal was extraordinarily lenient, and some suspect his friendship with powerful allies played a role.
One powerful friend of Epstein is former President Bill Clinton, who FoxNews.com first reported took 26 trips around the world aboard Epsteins Boeing 727, dismissing his Secret Service detail for five of the trips.
Virginia Roberts, who claims that at age 15 she was a sex slave for Epstein and his friends, and is one of the plaintiffs in the ongoing civil case against the federal government, claims the plane was outfitted with a bedroom for orgies, earning it the name Lolita Express.
Epstein required me to describe the sexual events that I had with these men, presumably so that he could potentially blackmail them, Roberts said in an affidavit filed with the court. Based on my knowledge of Epstein and his organization, as well as discussions with the FBI, it is my belief that federal prosecutors likely possess videotapes and photographic images of me as an underage girl having sex with Epstein and some of his powerful friends.
One key piece of evidence from Epsteins case was released last week by the Forida State Attorney Generals Office: a one-hour video showing the Oct. 20, 2005, search of his mansion. The video captured numerous salacious photos of young girls, some totally nude, as well as a photo of a child around 5 years old bending over in a short dress, adorning his walls.
Other Epstein items documented in the police video include a small stuffed teddy bear by his bedside, a professional dental chair and drill set in his bathroom, and Epstein in a photo standing next to a Catholic pope, but not shown are the hidden cameras found on his property.
Whether more evidence comes out now depends on the current lawsuit.
Kenneth Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project and faculty member at University of Hawaii Law School, believes the lawsuit has merit.
The victims attorneys are alleging the government conspired with the defendants attorneys to circumvent their rights, Lawson said. This flies in the face of the Crime Victims Rights Act, and it shows bad faith on both parties -- the defendants attorneys and the government attorneys.
Friends and relatives on Monday were remembering the heroic actions of a young man who drowned in a North Carolina river after saving two boys who had fallen into the water.
Preston Johnston, of Spindale died while attempting to rescue 2 kids near Lake Lure #RIP pic.twitter.com/1X2weo5x51 DILLON HUFFMAN (@DillonHuffmanTV) July 16, 2016
Preston Johnston, 19, was swimming in the Rocky Broad River in Rutherford County Friday with family friends who ranged in age from 10 to 12, WSPA reported.
Johnston and the kids reportedly chose to swim out to a rock in the middle of the river, but two 12-year-old twin brothers soon had trouble staying afloat in the strong current.
Rescuers said Johnston jumped in the water to pull them to safety. Both of the younger boys made it out alive -- but Johnston never resurfaced. The fight to save the kids may have worn him out, WLOS reported.
"Right now that's the only thing helping me hold on... is knowing that he saved their lives," Johnstons father, Richard, reacted.
"Preston loved these kids," his mother, Tammy Wellman, told WLOS.
Richard Johnston said rescue crews finally found his son's body around 8 p.m., nearly two hours after the search began. The young man's body was wedged underneath the rock.
His father said the fast current and muddy water hindered their efforts.
The two younger boys had grown up with Preston Johnston in the same neighborhood in Spindale, his father added.
The Rutherford County Sheriffs Office said none of the other children swimming with Johnston was injured.
A burial service was scheduled for Thursday morning.
Spindale is about 60 miles northwest of Charlotte.
Click for more from WSPA-TV.
Activists and educators say a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for use across Texas is biased and poorly researched.
They argued Monday that its contents are especially offensive in a state where 52 percent of public school students are Hispanic.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on Texas' Board of Education, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program.
Instead, publishers were asked only to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
Texas got one submission: A publisher offered a textbook titled "Mexican American Heritage."
But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
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A special tribunal in Bangladesh has sentenced three members of a militia group to death for their role in killings and other serious crimes committed during the country's independence war against Pakistan 35 years ago.
Five other defendants were sentenced to life in prison in the same case.
A three-member panel of judges announced the verdict Monday with only two of the defendants in the docks. The others were tried in absentia. All of them were members of Al Badr, which collaborated with the Pakistani army to commit genocide in Bangladesh's Jamalpur district in 1971.
Bangladesh says Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed 3 million people, raped 200,000 women and forced 10 million people to flee to refugee camps in India.
EXCLUSIVE: He had a ringside seat for the entire, bloody rise of ISIS, and by his own count killed dozens of innocent men, women and children. Now facing likely execution, Thahir Sahab Jamel disavows the black-clad Islamist army, but his Kurdish jailers say theyve heard it all before.
In a jailhouse interview with FoxNews.com in the Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk, Jamel, 27, detailed how he joined Islamic State in 2013, served as a foot soldier in the takeover of Mosul a year later and, he claims, eventually became disillusioned with the dark vision of his fellow fighters.
At the beginning, ISIS told us we would all go to heaven, Jamel said, speaking under the watchful eyes of Kirkuk police guards. But now that I am in prison it means I am going to the fire. I am going to hell.
Handcuffed and partially masked, Jamel, who has been in solitary confinement since his arrest two and a half months ago, said he joined the terror group like many other young Sunni Muslim men opposed to the Shia-led government in Baghdad.
A man named Salam talked to me and got me connected to ISIS. He told me I needed to be a jihadist and fight the Shia government. He convinced me to fight the government, Jamel said. I started getting involved as they were planning operations to begin in Iraq and Syria.
Jamel lived with his mother and three brothers in Hawija, a smaller town just south of the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk. He had a decent, agriculture-related job, and his family did not understand why he wanted to throw in with the insurgents who would soon become the worlds most-feared terrorist army.
In the early days, Jamel said, most of the recruits were young men in their early 20s. But soon their ranks were swollen by experienced soldiers as old as 50 from Saddam Husseins old army. The battle-hardened men, also Sunni Muslims alienated by the Shia government, were experienced with small arms and heavy equipment.
The mission was to take over the nation, and kill infidels and fellow Muslims who stood in their way, he said.
Everything was about setting the role of Shariah [Islamic law], he said. We have to have a world based on Shariah.
We were told that yes, people here are Muslims, but they are not the right Muslims, he said. And to build the Caliphate we must control the economy, take over every oil field.
Jamel was initially permitted to carry a gun, but as ISIS grew, orders came down that only senior leadership and mid-level commanders, known as Amirs, could carry arms when not in battle. But Jamel would not be without his weapon long: He was made an Amir in early 2015 and put in charge of a group of 70 fighters in the heavily-contested area of Baiji.
ISIS moved on the oil-rich city of Baiji, situated on the primary road to Mosul some 130 miles north of Baghdad, a week after overrunning Iraqs second-largest city of Mosul in June 2014. With momentum from victory, and their ranks increased by a steady stream of foreign fighters, ISIS battled Kurdish and Iraqi government forces for the city, which is home to the nations largest oil refinery, the Baiji oil refinery and other crucial energy and money-producing facilities.
Over the next 18 months, the city would change hands repeatedly, its residents caught in a perpetual, bloody crossfire. The prized refinery that made Baiji so critical was so heavily damaged that it may not be operational again for years.
Jamel did not offer an estimate as to how many civilians and soldiers he and his men killed, but he admitted he willfully took part in the slaughter and also handed over prisoners to his ISIS superiors for torture and execution.
Now that he is facing trial at the hands of his enemies, Jamel carefully treads the line between repentance and resignation. He told FoxNews.com he never cared for the public beheadings and civilian murders his team carried out to instill fear in conquered villages. He simply obeyed orders, he claimed, even ones handed down from the shadowy, self-professed Islamic State Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
I got many orders from him, Jamel said. But he is a liar, he lied to us. His plan is all wrong.
Jamel was arrested in May in a village near Kirkuk. Police in the government-controlled city had intelligence reports on him and arrested him and several associates. It was after the arrest, and as he faced justice in the Kurdish-run courts that Jamels conscience seems to have awakened.
It haunts me that I am responsible for killing many people, we killed them for nothing, he said.
Kirkuk Police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qader Mohammad told FoxNews.com Jamel told authorities after his arrest that he had been planning to escape ISIS, a claim Mohammad said police hear nearly every time they capture a jihadist.
When they are arrested they try to say they are no longer with ISIS, but most of the time it is not true, Mohammad said. And we know they are terrorists, but we have to complete a special investigation.
This process typically takes a couple of months, during which the prisoner is held in isolation as police investigators and Kurdish security agents known as the Asayish interrogate them. Mohammed insisted that all captives are treated as human beings and are not subject to torture and other violations of international law.
Once this is complete, the prisoner is relocated and able to mix with other criminals and ISIS fighters. He or she also then faces court trial and sentencing typically life behind bars, but sometimes a death sentence by hanging for acts of terror.
The Kirkuk Police Department currently has some 70 ISIS members awaiting trial. Since the militant groups onslaught began just more than two years ago, some 60 fighters have been sentenced to death. Most are local men, but some are foreign fighters, Mohammed said.
We have many operations and ways to arrest them, he added. We arrest them sometimes when they are sleeping, and sometimes we arrest terrorist men trying to hide by dressing as women.
Gospel for Asia-Supported Workers Holding 7,500 Vacation Bible Schools Across Asia Children Taught Bible Stories, Respect, Love, Personal Discipline
Contact: Gospel for Asia, 972-300-3379, pressrelations@gfa.org
WILLS POINT, Texas, July 18, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Workers supported by Gospel for Asia (GFA) are holding 7,500 Vacation Bible Schools (VBS) across Asia this summer, teaching children important values, including respect and love for parents and friends as well as personal discipline through a variety of activities such as songs, skits and crafts.
Photo: Children show off their Vacation Bible School books brought to them by Gospel for Asia-supported workers.
"Vacation Bible School is an inviting place for children to come during the summer," said K.P. Yohannan, founder and international director of GFA. "There, they learn solid values through fun, educational activities, all while being taught that they are precious and loved by the God of the universe."
VBS typically begins with the support of church pastors. Each program has a theme this year's is "New Beginnings" and classes are formed according to age group. VBS classes are well-organized and are conducted by people who have been given special training to teach, in collaboration with local Sunday School teachers. Typically, VBS fills entire days and are generally a week long.
On the first day of the program, each child is given an age-appropriate VBS book filled with stories, games and songs. GFA-supported workers guide each program so each child's unique gifts are highlighted through enjoyable classes, skits, puppet shows and competitions. Teachers encourage the students to continue to develop their gifts as they grow.
The schools also supply snacks and juice each day provided by the church. On the last day, each child receives a VBS certificate and is given the opportunity to participate in a presentation for their parents by demonstrating the songs and dances they learned and showcasing the crafts they made.
To date, more than 6,000 VBS programs have been conducted. VBS is held over several months and is on schedule to exceed program attendance of 231,713 children in 2015.
About Gospel for Asia
GOSPEL FOR ASIA has for more than 30 years provided humanitarian assistance and spiritual hope to millions across Asia, especially among those who have yet to hear the Good News. Last year, this included more than 75,000 sponsored children, free medical services for more than 180,000 people, 6,000 wells drilled, 11,000 water filters installed, Christmas presents for more than 400,000 needy families, and spiritual teaching available in 110 languages in 14 nations through radio ministry.
To schedule an interview with a Gospel for Asia representative, call 972-300-3379 or email pressrelations@gfa.org.
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Shouts of Allahu Akbar and sermons blaring from speakers continue to echo throughout the cosmopolitan districts of Istanbul in the wake of Fridays failed military coup, creating a surreal scene and stoking fears a nation that remained proudly secular for the last century could be hurtling down the path to full-blown Islamic rule.
As the coup attempt unfolded, President Recep Tayip Erdogan rallied his supporters to the streets and squares of major cities. Long Erdogans base, the nations most fervent Muslims had steadily been moving from smaller cities and rural villages into the secular intellectual bastions of Istanbul and Ankara. His urgent call amid the coup attempt brought into sharp relief the cultural clash that defines Turkeys past, and likely, some fear, its future.
There was a truck with enormous speakers parked next to the main Ataturk statue, blaring first a sermon by an imam, during which everyone stood quietly with their hands held out, said Paul Loomis, an American expatriate who was in Istanbuls Taksim Square Saturday night. Then the soundtrack switched to a `Recep Tayyip Erdogan chant set to a beat, and the crowd went wild.
Religious fervor and support of Erdogan seemed to have fused into one, he mused, calling the scene surreal.
The rhetoric of Erdogan, who has been prime minister or president of Turkey since 2003, has been increasingly religious in recent years and accompanied by crackdowns on the judiciary, the press and critics. In the wake of the failed coup, in which more than 250 people were killed, his government has detained nearly 6,000 military and judicial officials.
Critics who support the secular tradition begun in 1923 when Mustafa Kemal, the leader better known as Ataturk, founded Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, fear the failed coup will give Erdogan all the justification he needs to transform the nation into an Islamist state.
Indeed, the presence of Koran-quoting, pro-Erdogan crowds in Taksim Square was seen by some as a symbolic step back from the freedoms and traditions that have long made Turkey an anomaly among Muslim nations. The Square includes Gezi Park, which in 2013 became a symbol of resistance to Erdogans growing authoritarianism as thousands took to the streets in protest of the government.
Other signs that Erdogans opposition had been turned included a mosque in Istanbuls opposition stronghold Besiktas district, which was one of several relaying the presidents call on the faithful to take to the streets to protect our country from the threat it is facing.
For some, the impact of the sudden religious fervor was immediate. Selin Nurlu, who has lived in Istanbul, working for an executive search firm since completing her studies in London three years ago, said she made a conscious decision to dress more modestly in the hours following the coup attempt.
I was going to wear what I would normally wear on Saturday when I was going to leave the house, which is a relatively short black dress, said the 26-year-old. But I decided not to at the end because I have no idea how people are going to react now. So, instead, I decided to put on my jeans despite the boiling weather.
On social media, reports emerged of people attacking those drinking out in the streets in Istanbuls traditionally secular district of Kadikoy. And even before the weekends events, there were signs that brazen mobs were already enforcing strict Islamist rule. A record shop launching a Radiohead album release in one of Istanbuls hip neighborhoods, Cihangir, was attacked last month during Ramadan over rumors wine was being served during the holy month.
With city squares now filled with Islamist supporters of Erdogan, many who witnessed the 2013 uprising in which those same spaces were occupied by people calling for freedom are fearful.
I dont understand, Duygu Cagdas, 32, said. We have over 250 people killed, soldiers beaten in the streets, a parliament targeted by our own countrys jets, and yet we are taking to the streets to celebrate.
Turkeys Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said yesterday that complete control around the country has been achieved by the government, and cast the call to occupy city squares as the peoples watch for democracy.
We will go on with our business and daily lives, Yildirim said, but we will not leave the squares at night. We will continue this watch for democracy.
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The Latest on that truck attack in Nice, France (all times local):
11:30 a.m.
The French government is defending its efforts to fight Islamic State extremists abroad and at home, announcing new airstrikes against their strongholds in the past two days.
President Francois Hollande's Socialist administration has come under blistering criticism from opposition conservatives after last week's deadly attack in Nice. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy accused the government of bad policies that he says failed to prevent three major attacks in the past 18 months.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve hit back Monday, listing a series of laws and extra police forces created under Hollande's presidency "to face a threat that France was not prepared for" when he took over from Sarkozy in 2012.
After a special security meeting, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French forces in the U.S-led coalition struck IS targets again overnight and on Saturday. French warplanes have been involved in the operation in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Syria.
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9:15 a.m.
France's interior minister says investigators have no evidence so far that the truck driver who killed 84 people in Nice had links to "terrorist networks."
Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday on RTL radio that while the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the Bastille Day attack, the driver may have been motivated by IS messages but not necessarily coordinating with a larger network.
Cazeneuve says: "These links for now have not been established by the investigation."
Authorities say Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in Nice, had become recently and rapidly radicalized.
Cazeneuve said 59 people are still hospitalized after the attack Thursday, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall. Many of the dead and injured were children watching a fireworks display with their families.
Christians in central Egypt gathered for protests and prayers Monday after officials said a Muslim mob attacked priests with knives and batons over a personal feud, leaving one person dead in the chaos.
The fighting may have stemmed from an argument over whether Christian or Muslim children had priority to pass through a street, the English-language site Ahram Online reported. The attack came months after an armed Muslim mob stripped an elderly Christian woman and paraded her naked on the streets while looting and torching seven Christian homes in the same area, security officials said.
Sunday's attack killed 27-year-old Fam Khalaf in the village of Tahna al-Gabal. Investigators did not disclose that victim's possible relationship to either of the Coptic Christian priests, who were with their families at the time.
Three people, including the father of one of the priests, were wounded, investigators said. Police arrested four people after the attack.
Christians make up 10 percent of Egypt's mostly Muslim population. Sectarian violence occasionally erupts, mainly in rural communities in the south. Islamic extremists have also targeted Christians.
According to the local Orthodox Coptic church and security officials, the May assault in the Minya province village of Karma began after rumors spread that the elderly woman's son had an affair with a Muslim woman a taboo in conservative Egypt.
Police arrested at least six men suspected of taking part in the violence, security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called for the culprits to be held accountable and gave the military a month to restore property damaged during the violence, at no cost to the owners.
The president said Egypt appreciated the role of "glorious Egyptian women" and that "the rights and the protection of their dignity are a humanitarian and patriotic commitment before being a legal and constitutional one."
Anba Makarios, Minya's top Christian cleric, told a talk show host on the private Dream TV network that the 70-year-old woman was dragged out of her home by the mob who beat her and insulted her before they stripped her off her clothes and forced her to walk through the streets as they chanted Allahu Akbar, or "God is great."
The woman reported the incident to the police five days later, said Makarios, adding that she had initially found it too difficult to "swallow the humiliation" she suffered and go to the police.
Attiyah Ayad, a 58-year-old farmer from a nearby village who witnessed the attack, described how the mob chanted "we must drive the infidels out" as they looted and burned the Christian homes, one of which belonged to his relatives. He said they were armed with firearms, knifes and sticks.
"They emptied magazine after magazine, firing in the air to terrorize us," said Ayad, who suffered a head injury from being hit by a rifle butt and his son Ayad, 30, sustained a deep knife wound in his left shoulder.
The incident unleashed a flurry of condemnations on social media networks where users blamed the influence of ultraconservative Salafi Muslims for the attacks and derided authorities for not reacting quickly.
The hashtag "Egypt stripped naked" on Twitter gained traction shortly after it was introduced.
Extramarital affairs or sex between unmarried couples are taboo among Muslims and Christians in Egypt. They often attract violent reactions in rural areas, where questions of honor can lead to deadly family feuds that endure for years or result in ostracizing the perpetrators.
Christian men cannot marry Muslim women in Egypt unless they convert to Islam first, but Muslim men can marry Christian women. An affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman takes such sectarian sensitivities to a much higher and dangerous level and often lead to violence if found out.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Turkey detained a total of 103 generals and admirals for questioning and canceled all vacations for public workers, part of the government's latest crackdown over the failed coup that left hundreds of people dead, Turkish media reported Monday.
Separately, Turkey's Interior Ministry reportedly sacked 8,777 personnel across the country, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers. Also, seven prosecutors investigating the foiled coup entered Incirlik Air Base, which is used by the U.S.-led campaign battling the Islamic State terror group.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim's office on Monday canceled all public servants' leave and asked employees currently on vacation to return to their duties. A statement from the office said the order would remain valid until further notice.
As many as 41 of those military officials were ordered jailed pending trial, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency. A Turkish brigadier general at Incirlik was detained earlier for his alleged role in Friday's uprising. The specific reason for the prosecutors' appearances at the base Monday was unclear.
The government has blamed the failed coup -- which led to at least 294 deaths and wounded 1,400 others -- on supporters of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's chief opponent.
Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. 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.
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.
Earlier, Anadolu reported that prosecutors in Ankara were questioning 27 generals and admirals, including former Air Force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, who had 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.
Warplanes patrolled Turkey's skies Monday in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over.
Anadolu reported that Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s "for the control of the airspace and security."
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion -- which was not supported by the military's top brass --was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and other officials urged people to take to streets at night, saying risks remained in its aftermath.
At nightfall, thousands of flag-waving people rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere. Erdogan remained in Istanbul despite statements that he would return to the capital and address crowds in Kizilay Square. News reports said close to 2,000 special forces police officers were deployed in Istanbul to guard key installations.
As the cabinet prepared to meet for its first regular session since the attempt, security forces continued raiding military facilities in search of suspected plotters. They searched the Air Force Academy premises and residences in Istanbul early on Monday, Anadolu reported.
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.
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.
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.
Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve." Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was 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.
Also Monday, the Ankara governor's office announced that a military officer was detained after he shot and killed the driver of a vehicle that he hijacked.
In a brief statement, the governor's office said the officer -- whom it described as being mentally disturbed -- was caught by the security forces following a brief shootout. It was not immediately clear if the incident was related to Friday's failed coup attempt.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Theresa May's office says Britain's new prime minister will meet the French and German leaders in her first overseas trips this week.
May replaced David Cameron last week in the wake of Britain's decision to leave the European Union.
The prime minister's office says she will fly to Berlin Wednesday to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel, a key player in the negotiations that will determine the terms of Britain's EU exit.
Downing Street says the talks will focus on U.K.-German relations, global challenges and "how the U.K. and Germany can work together as the U.K. prepares to leave the EU."
On Thursday May will meet French President Francois Hollande in Paris. They will discuss counterterrorism cooperation in the wake of last week's deadly truck attack in Nice.
Turkish reports suggesting the United States may have supported the failed coup in Turkey were "categorically untrue," U.S. Ambassador to Turkey John Bass said Monday, adding that "such speculation is harmful to the decades-long friendship between two great nations."
Bass also addressed accusations that a Muslim cleric in Pennsylvania sparked the unrest that led to the attempted coup Friday. "If Turkey decides to submit an extradition request for anyone legally resident in the United States, it will be considered under the terms of the U.S.-Turkey extradition agreement."
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan often has accused the cleric, Fethullah Gulen, of trying to overthrow the government.
Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburg, 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.
So far, officials have not offered evidence he was involved in the failed coup. The violence killed 208 government supporters and 24 plotters, Turkish media reported.
"I reject the narrative that suggests the United States is trying to undermine Turkish security and prevent Turkey from being a strong, successful country. Our alliance shows that we have continually invested in Turkey, in its security and its prosperity, and that we remain committed to helping everyone in this country realize a future in which Turkey and the Turkish people are strong and prosperous," Bass added.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup would "receive every punishment they deserve."
Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was abolished in 2004 as part of the country's bid to join the European Union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said Monday that Turkey reinstating the death penalty would mean the end of negotiations for the country to join the EU.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Coyote Ugly Signs Franchise Agreement for First Bar in Kyrgyzstan
July 18, 2016 // Franchising.com // NEW YORK Coyote Ugly the rowdy, western-themed bar widely known for its beautiful female bartenders and dancers who have made pouring drinks an art form has signed a franchise agreement for the development of its first bar in Kyrgyzstan. The new bar is expected to open in the capital city of Bishkek in September.
"Since launching our international franchise program last year, Coyote Ugly has made great strides in expanding to new markets across the world and this is another incredible milestone for the brand," said Justin Livingston, Coyote Uglys Vice President of Global Development. "Were incredibly excited about introducing our version of honky-tonk to Kyrgyzstan and look forward to working with our new franchise partners to grow their business."
The new bar will be owned and operated by a group of bar and restaurant industry veterans led by Daniyar Monolbaev. Together, the group already owns four bars, one restaurant and a cafe in Bishkek, and will also be developing several Papa Johns franchises in the area over the next few years.
Bishkek is a cosmopolitan capital city with a wide range of cafes, bars and nightclubs. Whatever type of bar or club you are looking for, you will find it in Kyrgyzstan, said Monolbaev. Were long-time fans of Coyote Ugly and think the brand is a perfect fit for not only our bar portfolio, but also for those looking for a night out full of fun and unexpected antics.
Widely recognized as the most famous bar on the planet, Coyote Ugly thrives on booze, bar dancing and girl power. Each night sexy, sassy, tough-talking Coyotes go well beyond serving drinks; they ascend the bar to entertain the crowd with choreographed dance routines, songs games, body shots and much more that celebrate the wild side of American culture. As for the drinks, the rule is hard-nosed: no frou frou shaken or stirred concoctions, and nothing that requires a blender or more than two ingredients to make.
Coyote Uglys expansion into the Kyrgyzstan comes on the heels of the companys recent announcement to further expand its international footprint. With 21 locations already open and operating in four countries United States, Russia, Ukraine and Germany Coyote Ugly is focusing on aggressive franchise expansion in non-U.S. territories, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Africa and the United Kingdom, among others.
The companys first international franchise agreement was signed earlier this year in Wales.
For more information about the Coyote Ugly franchise opportunity, visit www.coyoteuglysaloon.com/franchising or call (720) 442-7777.
About Coyote Ugly Saloon
Founded in 1993 in New York Citys East Village, Coyote Ugly has become widely recognized as the most famous bar on the planet. The music is loud, the liquor is hard, and the female bartenders, known for their dance routines on top of the bar, serve a little bit of attitude with the drinks. The company currently has 21 locations operating in four countries the United States, Russia, Ukraine and Germany and is looking to strengthen its growing presence by attracting qualified single and multi-unit franchise owners. For more information on the Coyote Ugly franchise opportunity, visit http://www.coyoteuglysaloon.com/franchising/.
SOURCE Coyote Ugly Saloon
Contact:
Mike Misetic
Franchise Elevator PR
(847) 239-8171
mmisetic@franchiseelevator.com
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CPR Cell Phone Repair Continues Expansion with the Opening of a New Store in Hudson, WI
CPR Cell Phone Repair, the largest and fastest growing retail mobile device repair franchise network in North America, congratulates Gary Gamayunov on the opening of his third CPR franchise store.
Independence, OH, July 17, 2016 - (PR.com) - CPR Cell Phone Repair, the largest and fastest growing retail mobile device repair franchise network in North America, is pleased to announce the opening of a new franchise store in Hudson, WI. CPR Cell Phone Repair congratulates Gary Gamayunov on the opening of his third CPR franchise store.
Josh Sevick, CPRs President stated, Everyone at CPR joins me in enthusiastically congratulating Gary Gamayunov on the opening of his third franchise location. As an experienced CPR franchise owner, Gary brings both technical repair skills and store management expertise to his latest venture. We wish Gary continued success with his new store in Hudson.
Hudson is just 15 minutes east of St. Paul and 30 minutes east of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although located in Wisconsin, Hudson is part of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Hudson is one of the fastest growing cities in Wisconsin, having grown by more than 50% since 2000. The town has many of the same chain stores and restaurants as most other suburbs in the region, but is also home to a historic downtown area filled with locally owned restaurants, shops and small businesses. CPR Cell Phone repair looks forward to meeting the repair needs for this diverse community.
As an owner of two other CPR franchise locations, I am delighted to be expanding by opening this new store in Hudson. Having worked in the mobile device business for the past 8 years, I know that high quality repairs that are also affordably priced are in demand everywhere. Im delighted to be bringing CPRs services to the Hudson community, added Gary Gamayunov.
CPR Cell Phone Repair Hudson, WI is located at 2270 Budger Drive, Hudson, WI 54016.
Learn more about the stores full range of electronic device repair services, call 715-808-8568 or 715-808-0750. Please contact the store via email at gary@cpr-hudson.com.
Please visit the website: www.cellphonerepair.com/hudson-wi/.
About CPR Cell Phone Repair
Founded in Orlando, Fla. in 1996, CPR Cell Phone Repair is the fastest growing wireless technology franchise in North America and operates over 250 locations internationally. As a pioneer and leader in the electronics repair industry, CPR offers same-day repair and refurbishing services for cell phones, laptops, gaming systems, digital music players, tablets and other personal electronic devices. CPR was named an Entrepreneur Magazine Franchise 500 (2016) ranking and earned top brand on the Inc. 500. For more information about CPR Cell Phone Repair and franchise opportunities, visit http://www.cellphonerepair.com/ or call 877-856-5101.
SOURCE CPR Cell Phone Repair
Contact:
Shari Kosec
Director, Onboarding and Franchisee Relations
CPR Cell Phone Repair
skosec@cellphonerepair.com
216-674-0645 x616
Lauren Davies
CPR Cell Phone Repair, Social Media
ldavies@merrymtg.com
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CPR Cell Phone Repair Expands Services in South Puget Sound Area with New Franchise Store in Tacoma, WA
CPR Cell Phone Repair congratulates Ed Piecek and Shannon Scannon on the opening of their new franchise store that will serve customers in the South Puget Sound area.
Independence, OH, July 17, 2016 - (PR.com) - CPR Cell Phone Repair, the largest and fastest growing retail mobile device repair franchise network in North America, is pleased to announce the opening of a new store located in Tacoma, WA. CPR Cell Phone Repair congratulates Ed Piecek and Shannon Scannon on the opening of their new franchise store that will serve customers in the South Puget Sound area.
Josh Sevick, CPRs President stated, We are delighted that business partners Ed Piecek and Shannon Scannon have opened a new CPR franchise in Tacoma. Both Shannon and Ed are former United States Air Force veterans and we are proud that they have joined forces with the CPR team. We know with their combination of professional skills and experience, their new store in Tacoma will be well managed to meet the demands of the South Puget Sound marketplace. We welcome Shannon and Ed to the CPR franchise network and wish them every success with their new venture.
Tacoma is the second-largest city in the Puget Sound area and the third largest city in the state of Washington. Located 32 miles southwest of Seattle and 31 miles northeast of Olympia, the state capital, Tacoma is a perfectly situated mid-sized urban port city. In the mid-1990s Tacoma embarked on a major downtown revival that added a new cultural dimension to the city with the addition of The Museum of Glass, the restoration of Union Station and the historic Pantages Theater, plus the opening of a new branch campus for the University of Washington and the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center. The citys largest employers include Boeing, the United States military installation Joint Base Lewis-McChord, U.S. Oil and Refining plus a variety of international paper companies and number of hospitals and healthcare systems. Tacoma has been ranked amongst the 30 Most Livable Communities in an annual survey conducted by the Partners for Livable Communities. Tacoma is an ideal location for the expansion of CPRs services and the needs of the South Puget Sound community.
Shannon and I feel that our new CPR store location is ideally located to meet the needs of the South Puget Sound consumers. We are committed to always putting the customer first and aim to be their number one choice in electronic repairs. Plus, we are really proud to say that our franchise is not only a locally operated family business, but is also a veteran owned and operated business, added franchise co-owner Ed Piecek.
CPR Cell Phone Repair Phoenix - South Tacoma is located at 3702 South Fife Street, Suite L, Tacoma, WA 98409. To learn more about the stores full range of electronic device repair services, call 253-719-5536 or 253-719-5543 or contact the store via email at repairs@cpr-southtacoma.com.
Please visit the website: http://www.cellphonerepair.com/tacoma-south-wa/.
About CPR Cell Phone Repair
Founded in Orlando, Fla. in 1996, CPR Cell Phone Repair is the fastest growing wireless technology franchise in North America and operates over 250 locations internationally. As a pioneer and leader in the electronics repair industry, CPR offers same-day repair and refurbishing services for cell phones, laptops, gaming systems, digital music players, tablets and other personal electronic devices. CPR was named an Entrepreneur Magazine Franchise 500 (2016) ranking and earned top brand on the Inc. 500. For more information about CPR Cell Phone Repair and franchise opportunities, visit http://www.cellphonerepair.com/ or call 877-856-5101.
SOURCE CPR Cell Phone Repair
Contact:
Shari Kosec
Director, Onboarding and Franchisee Relations
CPR Cell Phone Repair
skosec@cellphonerepair.com
216-674-0645 x616
Lauren Davies
CPR Cell Phone Repair, Social Media
ldavies@merrymtg.com
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Jersey Mike's Subs Opens Second Corpus Christi Location
July 18, 2016 // Franchising.com // Corpus Christi, TX - Jersey Mikes Subs, known for its fresh sliced/fresh grilled subs, opened in Corpus Christi on July 13. Franchise owners Bob and Gail Smith, along with general managers Clayton Smith and Tim Wear held a grand opening and free sub fundraiser from Wednesday, July 13 to Sunday, July 17 to support The Boy Scouts of America South Texas Council.
The new restaurant, located at 1813 Ennis Joslin, circulated 7,500 coupons throughout the community offering a free regular sub for a minimum $2 donation to The Boy Scouts of America South Texas Council.
We are really excited about the opening of this new second location in beautiful Corpus Christi said Bob Smith. To be part of this growing and diverse city has been very rewarding for us and Jersey Mikes. We are looking forward to expanding our business commitment and ongoing support for the community in the years to come.
The Smiths are exemplary Jersey Mikes franchise owners who share the companys commitment to quality products and exceptional customer service, and who are dedicated to giving back to the local community.
Since 2010, Jersey Mikes locations throughout the country have raised nearly $18 million for worthy local charities and have distributed more than 1.5 million free sub sandwiches to help numerous causes. This year, the companys 6th Annual Jersey Mikes Month of Giving in March raised more than $4 million for 180 charities throughout the country.
About Jersey Mikes
Started in 1956, Jersey Mikes now has 1,500 restaurants open and under development nationwide. In 2016, for the third year in a row, the company was named the #1 fastest growing chain in the Nations Restaurant News Top 100, and continues to win best sub awards in virtually every market it enters.
The growth is fueled by passionate Jersey Mikes fans who crave their subs made Mikes Way with the freshest vegetables onions, lettuce and tomatoes topped off with an exquisite zing of the juice red wine vinegar and olive oil blended to perfection. Jersey Mikes premium meats and cheeses are sliced on the spot, piled high on in-store baked bread and served up with a helping of neighborly banter from a dedicated and high-energy team.
The restaurants hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week. You can contact this location directly at (361)906-0028.
SOURCE Jersey Mikes
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TCT National Broadcast of 23rd Annual Eagles' Wings Conference Proclaims Message of Reconciliation and Healing Contact: Stephen Jenks, Eagles' Wings, 716-759-1058
ORCHARD PARK, N.Y., July 18, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Tens of thousands across America heard a message of the power of the cross to overcome prejudice as the twenty-third annual Eagles' Wings East Coast Leadership Conference was broadcast live on TCT this past Saturday night.
Tom Nolan, President of TCT television network, along with Bishop Tommy Reid and Bishop Robert Stearns of the Tabernacle in Orchard Park, NY, opened the evening in prayer.
Following over an hour of exuberant worship, Stearns welcomed up international evangelist and speaker Sean Smith of Point Blank International to tell his personal story of how prejudice and hate took the life of his father.
Sean shared how at nine years old, his father, a chemical engineer with IBM, was murdered in a racially motivated hate crime. His father, a black man, was driving home from work when he was pulled over by police for "speeding." Sean continued, "Witnesses at the scene described how my dad was pulled out of the car, had mace sprayed in his eyes and was shot by the officer. When he arrived to the hospital my father had died from his wounds." Sean stressed to the audience, "I have great respect for the men and women who wear the badge. There are many officers who are my friends and I am grateful to all who protect us. Unfortunately it came out in court that this particular officer was involved with the KKK and the incident was entirely racially motivated."
Speaking directly to the nation, Sean shared, "Years later when I was in college, I was still grappling with this loss, and I cried out to the Lord. At three o'clock in the morning Jesus appeared to me and I heard the audible voice of God: 'I am a father to the fatherless.' That night I gave my life to Christ and forgave that officer who murdered my dad. God's love is greater!"
Smith and Stearns then led all those tuning in around the nation who had been affected by trauma such as abuse, racism, neglect, and violence in a prayer of reconciliation and forgiveness for those who had caused the pain, releasing the power and love of God to heal.
That night several received supernatural physical healing in their body as the power of God was released not only to touch the heart but also to restore the body, mind and soul.
The Eagles' Wings East Coast Leadership Conference gathers passionate believers from across the nations each year for times of worship, prayer, and equipping. For more information visit www.eagleswings.to.
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Study Overshadows AMA Recommitment Opposing Physician-Assisted Suicide
Contact: Margie Shealy, Christian Medical & Dental Association, 888-230-2637, 423-341-4254, margie.shealy@cmda.org
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- At the recent American Medical Association (AMA) Convention, the organization reaffirmed their stance opposing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia which appears in their Code of Medical Ethics. The Code of Medical Ethics offers guidance to help physicians meet the ethical challenges of medical practice. According to their website, this new edition, adopted last month, is the culmination of an eight-year project to comprehensively review, update and re-organize guidance to ensure that the Code remains a timely, easy to use resource.
A Compassion & Choices news release started a frenzy of media reports that the AMA will consider changing their position, when in fact they reaffirmed their position to oppose physician assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Christian Medical & Dental Associations CEO David Stevens, MD, MA (ethics) commends their decision, "I am pleased that the AMA has reaffirmed their strong opposition to physician assisted suicide and euthanasia. They continue to state, that 'PAS is fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's professional role' and that 'Requests to physicians for PAS should signal the M.D. that the patient's needs are unmet and further help is needed.'"
CMDA member Dr. Tom Eppes, a Virginia delegate to the convention and Chair of the Integrated Physician Practice Section of the AMA who was in attendance at the Code of Ethics Decision Reference Committee and speaking for himself says, "You are violating the AMA Code of Ethics when you are in the business of prescribing a deadly drug to your patients. Physicians are healers, not killers.
"At the same time the AMA reaffirmed their decision to oppose physician assisted suicide and euthanasia, a committee agreed to set up a panel that will investigate what is happening throughout the U.S. in regards to end of life care, get input from the AMA members and report back. I expect a small but extremely vocal group of physicians will to try to convince delegates to approve a neutral stance on legalizing PAS. Wherever a state medical organization has done that, legalization has soon followed."
In our study we actually started very early on testing adherence, because we knew adherence had been an issue in earlier HIV prevention studies, said Dr. Elizabeth Brown, a statistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Microbicide Trials Network, or MTN, an international HIV/AIDS clinical trials network funded by the National Institutes of Health. Brown led the new analyses of the ASPIRE data and will present her findings Tuesday at The International AIDS Conference, or AIDS 2016, in Durban, South Africa.
So we had some objective measure of adherence in every participant in the study, she said.
Adherence is key
In the ASPIRE study, led by University of Washington vice chair of global health Dr. Jared Baeten, women visited clinic sites monthly to receive a new ring and turn in their previous months ring. ASPIRE researchers then tested both the levels of drug present in the womens blood and the amount left in the used (or not-so-used) ring. More than 12,000 returned rings were tested.
The dapivirine rings were developed by the nonprofit International Partnership for Microbicides, or IPM, and contain 25 mg of the HIV-fighting drug. If used consistently during the entire 28-day period, about 4 mg of that drug should have been released through the vaginal tissues into the womans bloodstream. In two different analyses, Brown and her team looked at women whose ring-drug-levels indicated that at least 3 mg or at least 1.5 mg of the dapivirine had made it into their systems. In those datasets, women had a 65 or 56 percent reduction in HIV infection risk, respectively, compared to women whod received the placebo ring.
Brown then developed a statistical model to take into account times when women were not able to come to follow-up visits exactly on time, as the study allowed off-schedule visits if needed. The researchers were thus able to stratify levels of adherence from those who didnt use the ring at all to those who used it nearly perfectly. In these analyses, women who used the ring most consistently reduced their risk of HIV infection by either 75 or 92 percent, depending on the analysis.
It wasnt that many women in the study just didnt use the ring at all, Brown said. Its more that they had stages of consistent and inconsistent use. The researchers dont fully understand all the reasons behind the inconsistent use, but scientists from MTN and IPM will be conducting behavioral studies to further understand the barriers to consistent use and how they might be overcome.
Dr. Zeda Rosenberg, founder and chief executive officer of IPM, noted in an interview that adherence is often lower in a clinical trial than it would be for an already-approved product precisely because researchers tell trial participants that the method being tested may not be entirely safe or effective.
In a trial, every month a woman is told, We dont know if its safe and we dont know if it works, she said. In some cases, women may join a trial for other benefits, such as the health care and social support that comes with it, with little incentive to actually use the product.
The new analyses add to the body of evidence that the dapivirine ring may be highly protective against HIV when used consistently. They provide a better understanding of what perfect use looks like so that clinicians will be able to tell women, If you use the ring all the time, you can get this much protection, Rosenberg said.
MTN researchers also announced the launch of an extension study to ASPIRE, known as HOPE, at the AIDS 2016 conference Monday. Since the rings safety and efficacy are now well understood, HOPE is whats known as open-label study all women will have access to the dapivirine ring, if they want to use it, and no placebo will be used. The first HOPE study site opened Monday in Durban; the study will be open to all women who participated in ASPIRE and is expected to conclude by early 2018.
The results are extremely encouraging as we move forward with new studies, said Baeten, who will also lead the HOPE study, at a press briefing Monday in Durban. Adherence is key to HIV prevention.
Long Waited Launch of New SEO Services, Gives Local Businesses the Edge Multi Marketing USA is celebrating the launch of their new Search Engine Optimization service in the Westchester, New York area by giving 50% off on Initial Services. View as PDF Print View July 16, 2016 (FPRC) -- In a slightly different approach to launching its new Search Engine Optimization service, Multi Marketing USA, a Digital Marketing Agency in Westchester, New York has decided it will be giving 50% off on Initial Services, and this is expected to take place starting July 19th, 2016.
Where most businesses tend to just Advertise on the local radio. Multi Marketing USA has decided to be a little more Exciting and Innovating with the start of its new Search Engine Optimization service.
Marvin Vasquez, says local businesses are missing out in potential sales by not having a search engine optimization strategy for their local business. Digital Marketing Director at Multi Marketing USA, says: "We wanted to be Exciting and Innovating with the launch of our new Search Engine Optimization service because we wanted to give something back to the local businesses community.
It should be really worthwhile and we're hoping it raises our brand awareness locally. It should go great unless we anger the Gods in some way!"
Multi Marketing USA has always made a point of standing out when compared to other Digital Marketing Agencies in the Westchester, New York area. This launch celebration is just one of the many ways it does so.
This is a great chance for Westchester, New York residents to meet new business owners. and support our P.A.C.T. Team which stands for passion, action, teamwork and commitment.
Multi Marketing USA has been serving the Westchester, New York area since 2011. To date it has served over one hundred customers and has become recognized as one of the most committed in the area. It can be found nearby downtown Yonkers.
Marvin Vasquez, says local businesses are missing out in potential sales by not having a search engine optimization strategy for their local business. Also said: "While Multi Marketing USA may not be the only business with this kind of offering, local business owners are choosing Multi Marketing USA because we are experts in our field of digital marketing and advertising."
When asked about the new Search Engine Optimization service, Marvin Vasquez, says local businesses are missing out in potential sales by not having a search engine optimization strategy for their local business. Said: "We think it's going to be a hit because because we will generate business owners more sales, more clients and more consumer awareness for their products or service online.".
Further information about Multi Marketing USA and the new Search Engine Optimization service can be discovered at http://www.multimarketingusa.com.
Send an email to Marvin Vasquez of r
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Maple Holistics Announces New Lavender Bubble Bath Formula For Healthier Bathing
Maple Holistics has announced the release of a brand new Lavender Hybrid Bubble Bath formula for use with women, men, and teens. Maple Holistics bubble bath is intended to provide the ideal combination of relaxation and healthy skin promotion.
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Maple Holistics has announced that they have developed and released a new all-natural Lavender Hybrid Bubble Bath formula for use with women, men and teens. Following the release of their original Lavender Hybrid Bubble Bath, Maple Holistics' new formula is made with stronger ingredients which are better suited to promote healthy skin and protect sensitive skin. The bubble bath is available for purchase on the Maple Holistics website or at Amazon.com.
The latest in a long line of personal care products which are designed to promote a healthy lifestyle, Maple Holistics bubble bath is intended to provide the ideal combination of relaxation and healthy skin promotion. The natural Lavender hybrid formula includes Bulgarian Lavender, Clary Sage and Palma Rosa to soften and strengthen skin at the same time. The high-yielding bubble bath produces a large amount of strong bubbles which last throughout the whole bath. The formula makes for a gentle and pleasant additive to any bath, no matter the gender or age, as the included vitamin-E and aloe vera are naturally good for the skin and make this bubble bath hypoallergenic without the need to add any artificial fragrances. Those with highly sensitive skin can enjoy a non-irritating experience due to the gentle ingredients.
Packaged in an environmental-friendly facility, the bubble bath is distributed in BPA-free plastic bottles which allow for easy storage. The packaging methods for the product are held to the highest standards to ensure that the bubble bath retains full freshness and effectiveness.
Primarily known for their hygienic, hair, and skin products, Maple Holistics has begun to introduce all-natural bath products in their continued attempts to provide customers with the best in products that promote a healthy lifestyle. Like their hygienic products, the bubble bath is made naturally and with an eye towards improving the health and lifestyle of Maple Holistics consumers.
About the Company
Maple Holistics provides industry leading all-natural hair, body, skin, and food products. The company offers a natural, holistic range of premium products which can enhance hygiene, health and daily living. Company products are made in the USA.
For more information, please visit https://www.mapleholistics.com/
For more information, please visit https://www.mapleholistics.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Nate M
Organization: Maple Holistics
Release ID: 123825
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Los Angeles Limousine Airport Night Out Rental Packages Service Expanded
Los Angeles limousine company American Limos has announced a service expansion, with a full range of vehicle rental packages available online. As part of the expanded service, a deal is available for customers to get their eight hour of rental free.
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American Limousine, the Los Angeles limousine rental company, has announced a service expansion in time for summer. The company is now offering a full range of Chrysler limousines, SUV limousines, speciality vehicles and party buses, which are ideal for nights out or for group celebrations. As part of the service expansion, the company is also offering the eighth hour of vehicle rental free across the entire fleet.
More information can be found on the American Limousine site at: https://americanlimos.org.
The site explains that Los Angeles limousine rentals are available with a versatile range of lending options, with different charges for interested parties to choose from. These can include hourly, daily and weekly charges for varying needs, because the company understands that every client has different purposes for renting a limousine.
A wide range of limousine packages is available as part of the service provided by American Limos. These include Celebrity Limo packages, Airport Limo packages, Bachelor Party Limo Packages and a range of on the town services, from private tours to fun trips.
American Limousine Service has been in business since 1975, and has experience providing professional celebrity concierge services for popular personalities, artists, musicians and athletes. It can also offer LAX stretch limousine pickup and drop of at the Los Angeles airport, whether for an individual or for a group.
The site explains that customers wanting a night out on the town in style can rent a private tour limousine, which can help to make the event more memorable. The American Limos site goes on to say that customers wanting to order this service can get in touch with their plans, and the company will help to arrange their access, with customisable trips to night clubs, top 10 restaurants, clubs and bars.
A full range of vehicles is available on the American Limos site, with details provided for each car. Anyone with further questions can get in touch using the contact form provided, and those looking to take up the eighth hour free offer can contact Tina on 310-438-4473
For more information, please visit https://www.americanlimos.org/
Contact Info:
Name: Robert
Email: reservations@americanlimos.org
Organization: American Limousine
Address: 5230 W. Century Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90045
Phone: +1 310 438 4473
Release ID: 123950
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Old Mutual Wealth has said its Financial Adviser School could grow to focus on all aspects of the industry, including administration.
Richard Freeman, chief distribution officer of Old Mutual Wealth, said he would look at how the school could expand in a years time.
He said: I have been in distribution for 20-odd years. At all the firms I have ever been in we have wanted some sort of academy to bring in new blood. This (buying the Financial Advice School off Sesame) was a great opportunity.
We have taken longer than perhaps we should have done to get it set up because we are in a big PLC and things do not move as quickly as they might but we want to scale it up.
What I want is different streams stopping short of Level 4, maybe on the administration side but that is phase two or three.
What we need to do first is to get it up and running and that will probably take us 12 months.
Old Mutual Wealth bought the Financial Adviser School from Sesame Bankhall Group in February 2016 and operates it on a not-for-profit basis.
Last month it appointed Darren Smith, who worked at Old Mutual Wealth-owned network Intrinsic, as the schools head.
Mr Freeman said the focus of the school will not just be on getting young people into the industry - it will also be aimed at those who might want a second career.
He also said Old Mutual Wealth has agreed with the Financial Conduct Authority that newly trained advisers will be able to choose their own path at the end of the course.
He said: We cannot force someone at the end of the course to join us but most of the initial advisers will come from our adviser firms.
We have got a year to build a relationship so it would be unusual if they didnt want to join us but we will not try and force people to do so if they dont want to.
Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) has reduced a negative fair value adjustment on its UK Property fund by 5 percentage points.
The firm initially placed a 5 per cent adjustment in the aftermath of the referendum on June 23 but then upped this to 15 per cent on July 7.
However, LGIM said the turmoil that has besieged the open-ended UK property fund sector had begun to stabilise, allowing it to reduce the fair value adjustment on its 2.3bn fund to 10 per cent.
An L&G spokesperson said: While it remains difficult to predict the exact impact of the vote to leave on commercial property values, conditions in the market and within our peer group have begun to stabilise.
We will continue to monitor market events closely, using all available sources and our experience of the property market.
L&Gs UK property fund remains open to trading, unlike many of its peers. Since the decision to leave the EU, six open-ended funds have ceased trading, while Aberdeen has cut its property portfolios price for redeeming investors by 17 per cent.
Britains historic decision to leave the EU has left many wondering what happens next. This question was asked of the Leave campaign in the run-up to the referendum in the event they won a majority but, in the aftermath of the vote, the order of events appears just as uncertain.
This is in part because there is no precedent no member state has ever left the EU.
The only certainties are that the UK does remain a member of the EU for now and will do for two years after Article 50 is triggered. Prime minister David Cameron also confirmed the day after the referendum he will stand down and will not start the Article 50 process the task will be left to his successor.
In its post-referendum investment update, Rathbones says the vote to leave the EU should now trigger a formal exit process, but admits that, given the constitutional challenges and relatively close result, this will not be straightforward.
The government [has chosen] to delay formal notification until the Conservative Party leadership situation is resolved and until its policy ducks are in a row. There is even a chance that the UK could remain in the EU the referendum is not legally binding and parliament must vote to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act. Also, despite their rhetoric in the run-up to the vote, European leaders may well explore new ways to keep the UK in the EU, the wealth manager suggests.
EXIT MODELS Trinity, an independent specialist hedge fund company, sets out the three principle exit models: The EEA model Remaining as an EEA country, rules such as the AIFMD and Mifid II would continue to apply but UK policymakers would have less say in their formulation. The Swiss model This means joining the European Free Trade Association and negotiating access to the single market. The World Trade model A complete withdrawal would designate the UK as a third country. This would have a more noticeable impact as Britain may have to rely on its World Trade Organisation membership to negotiate trade deals.
Chris Urwin, head of global research at Aviva Investors, explains: Negotiations for exit do not start immediately. For that to happen, the UK needs to inform the European Council of its intention to invoke Article 50.
However, the government may choose to start negotiations before triggering Article 50: once invoked, negotiations are limited to two years unless there is unanimous agreement of the European Council to extend them.
So there is going to be a prolonged period of time during which the terms of our withdrawal from the bloc are unknown. It could take even longer for clarity on the UKs terms of trade with partners around the world.
40% Of the EUs financial services exports are from the UK One of the questions frequently asked during the run-up to the referendum was whether there are any models the UK could follow outside the EU.
As Amundis Philippe Ithurbide, global head of research, strategy and analysis, and Didier Borowski, head of macroeconomics, note: The UK has several options: join the European Economic Area [EEA]; draw on the existing model for certain countries [Switzerland, Norway or Turkey]; or conform to the rules of the World Trade Organisation the most costly solution for the UK as it is the furthest from the current situation. None of these solutions will please both parties at this stage.
TSB has completed the legal transfer of 27,000 former Northern Rock mortgages and loans from UK Asset Resolution.
TSB has created a new brand called Whistletree, which has been purpose-built to manage the mortgage accounts.
Padraig Carton, customer service operations director at TSB, said, We are delighted to welcome these customers to Whistletree from today (18 July).
Whistletree will provide a secure, long-term home for these mortgages and loans based in the UK.
Supporting hardworking people and helping local communities right across Britain to thrive is absolutely at the heart of what TSB was set up to do. Whistletree is a natural extension of this.
Some 27,000 mortgages and loans will transfer to Whistletree, a reduction from the anticipated 34,000 mortgages which is due to homeowners naturally redeeming their mortgage or switching lender.
The mortgages, which were originally owned by Northern Rock and acquired by the government during the financial crisis, were sold to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management by the state-owned limited company UK Asset Resolution.
The sale, authorised by then-chancellor George Osborne in November, was the largest ever financial asset sale by a government in Europe, with UKAR selling the portfolio for 280m more than their book value.
TSB has not disclosed the monetary value of the mortgages, or how much it has paid for them, but speaking in Parliament last year then-economic secretary to the Treasury Harriett Baldwin said the company had agreed to buy 3.3bn of the loans, which numbered 125,000 in total.
The terms and conditions of the existing loan agreements will remain unchanged.
Customers transferring to Whistletree are being informed by letter this week with full details of what action, if any, they need to take.
Adviser View
Kevin Dunn, senior partner at Leicester-based Furnley House, said: I wouldnt say borrowers should be concerned if their mortgage has been sold, particularly if it is to a reputable provider like TSB.
They will probably have more choice now because they can choose from TSB products without further underwriting.
In addition, eight of the 17 fund categories have entirely new members, with the Asia Pacific, European, Global Emerging Markets, Japanese and Global Equity categories having a complete refresh, alongside the Property, Specialist Sectors and Assets and Sterling Corporate Bond groups.
Market volatility in the past 12 months, combined with macroeconomic and geopolitical concerns, may have helped drive the change in membership, as, for example, the UK Equity category was last year filled with mid-cap funds.
But with uncertainty in the first half of this year regarding the EU referendum vote, it is perhaps unsurprising that only one member has returned from 2015, the JPMorgan Mid Cap Investment Trust.
That said, there are a number of new entrants from fund houses such as Crux, with its European Special Situations fund, Matthews Asia, with the Pacific Tiger fund, and Pioneer Investments, with its US Fundamental Growth and Emerging Markets Bond funds.
KEY NUMBERS 8 out of 20 Categories with entirely new members compared with 2015 10 out of 20 Fund groups returning to this years 100 Club 11 out of 85 Funds that made the Club again from 2015 12 out of 85 Number of investment trusts in the 100 Club in 2016 2 out of 3 Fidelity and BlackRock are members in two of the three group categories
The number of returning funds from earlier years has also increased. The current vintage includes seven vehicles that were last members of the 100 Club in the inaugural membership in 2012.
Perhaps the most interesting development this year is the fall in the number of investment trust members down from 19 in 2015 to just 12 this year, spread across eight categories with most located in the Specialist category.
There are some long-standing members of the 100 Club, with the Henderson UK Absolute Return fund and Finsbury Income & Growth Trust returning as members for the fourth time in five years, while five vehicles have made the list in three of the past five years.
But it is the group categories that show the most consistency. This year five groups top the list with the most nominations overall Fidelity, Jupiter, JPMorgan Asset Management, Old Mutual Global Investors and Schroders, while BlackRock and Fidelity appear in two group categories for Passive Investment Groups and Large Investment Group.
All the group members have appeared in the list at least once before, but it is Vanguard and iShares that have secured the most success, with both companies appearing in every 100 Club passives list since 2012.
With this years membership more diverse than ever, as new entrants challenge the old guard, the big question is who can convert their memberships into category wins at the Investment Adviser 100 Club Awards in October.
Nyree Stewart is features editor at Investment Adviser
Ex-pension minister Ros Altmann has taken aim at the government over the decision to scrap her former role in favour of the new title under secretary for pensions, raising the prospect the pensions brief has been downgraded.
The Department of Work & Pensions has named MP for Watford Richard Harrington as under secretary for pensions, but stopped short of making him pension minister.
He replaces Baroness Ros Altmann, who resigned from her post as minister of state for pensions on Friday (15 July) as part of prime minister Theresa Mays dramatic government reshuffle.
In a note following Mr Harringtons appointment, Ms Altmann said if the downgrading of ministerial responsibility in DWP reflects a move to joined-up policy within the Treasury, then that would make some sense.
But she warned, if it poses threats to major planks of pensions policy, then we should be very worried. If it poses threats to major planks of pensions policy, then we should be very worried. Ros Altmann
Mr Harrington entered parliament in 2010. On his website he states that he has done parliamentary work on issues relating to health, education and international affairs, but nothing on pensions.
His lack of pensions experience is in stark contrast to his two predecessors. Before joining government in 2015, Baroness Altmann had spent her life working in pensions in various capacities, while her predecessor Steve Webb was Liberal Democrats spokesman for work and pensions for six years from 1999.
A spokesperson for DWP urged the industry not to read too much into the name change from minister of state for pensions to the apparently less prestigious under secretary for pensions, saying Mr Harrington was still a minister, and the role was essentially the same.
Pensions remain a key priority for the government and the important work to bring in the new state pension, roll-out automatic enrolment and safeguard the pension freedoms will continue under our new minister for pensions, the spokesperson said, adding that the focus will now be on implementing policy rather than introducing new reforms.
But Baroness Altmann responded to DWPs assurances with scepticism.
She said: I do hope that the new government is not going to downgrade pensions - they are so important for millions of people.
We need to be vigilant that sensible changes are made, hopefully by people who understand how pensions work and care about the long-term implications of policy change.
Earlier on Monday (18 July) Baroness Altmann revealed she had recommended putting HM Treasury in charge of private pensions.
I suggested to government last year and last week to move private pensions to Treasury in a new pensions plus long-term savings brief. Is that happening? she tweeted.
FTAdviser put that question to both DWP and Treasury. At the time of this articles publication, neither had responded.
Mr Harringtons only ministerial experience to date has been as minister for Syrian refugees, a multi-departmental portfolio that involved working across government to resettle 20,000 vulnerable Syrian refugees in the UK who are fleeing persecution in the Middle East.
'Hawaii Five-0' Season 7 Air Date, Spoilers, News & Update: Will Next Installment Be The Last?
After reports confirmed that the cast and crew of "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7 have started filming new episodes for the much awaited seventh installment, a new report claims that this could possibly be the last for "Hawaii Five-0."
READ: 'Hawaii Five-0' Season 7 Air Date, Spoilers, News & Update: Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams Faces 'Love and Torture'?
The "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7 cast gathered together in Waikiki for a traditional blessing ceremony before they started filming for "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7.
"Hawaii Five-0" Season 7, Chi McBride (Lou Grover), Alex OLoughlin (Steve McGarrett), Daniel Dae Kim (Chin Ho Kelly), Grace Park (Kono Kalakaua), Jorge Garcia, Teilor Grubbs (Grace williams), Dennis Chun (Sgt. Luke Lukela) and Shawn Garnett, joined forces for the significant event.
READ: 'Hawaii Five-0' Season 7 Air Date, Spoilers, News & Update: 'Grey's Anatomy' Star Joins Cast? Find Out Who!
This "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7 good news didn't last long as Carter Matt suggests that "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7 could be the last installment for the beloved show as the ratings kept spiraling down.
Ever since "Hawaii Five-0" changed its time slot to Friday, the ratings have been nothing but disappointing. Will "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7 be the show's saving grace? Or will this be their final farewell?
READ: 'Hawaii Five-0' Season 7 Spoilers, News & Update: Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams' Friendship On The Rocks?
It's no secret that "Hawaii Five-0" has always been a sure hit for CBS. But with all the new interesting shows out there, and the declining ratings of "Hawaii Five-0," it's not hard to see how this cancellation rumors after "Hawaii Five-0" Season 7 started.
Has "Hawaii Five-0" already reached the end of the road? Or do you think the show can still do more seasons? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
READ: 'Hawaii Five-0' Season 7 Spoilers, News & Update: Chin Ho Is Going To Be A Dad?
Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson Dating: Twilight Actress Lost Loved Ones Because of FKA Twigs Fiance? Rupert Sanders Ex Still Loves Cosmopolis Actor?
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have been hitting the romance headlines again these past few weeks. Now, new reports are claiming that the "Twilight" actress has lost her loved ones because of Robert Pattinson.
Kristen Stewart lost loved ones because of Robert Pattinson
The Inquisitr reported that Kristen Stewart has also lost her loved ones since she started dating Robert Pattinson. The "Twilight" actress has revealed that she felt left out at one point of her life after she rose to fame.
Robert Pattinson's ex has said that she actually had a hard time catching up with her friends as her time does not permit her to do it at all. Kristen Stewart said she realized back then that she had more time than the "Cosmopolis" actor than with her loved ones.
"But then I made a really conscious effort of gathering them and being like, 'I need you,'" Robert Pattinson's former ladylove Kristen Stewart has divulged to Elle UK. "Now they are really awesome, they're all really protective."
Kristen Stewart has admitted that she almost lost the friends who know her so much better than her fans and detractors because of Robert Pattinson. However, the "Equals" actress has already made it clear that she is now in good terms with her close friends.
Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson are getting back together
Meanwhile, GamenGuide has previously reported that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have been reportedly rekindling their old romance. Sources have claimed that the former "Twilight" co-stars have been planning to get back together.
Rumors are rife that Robert Pattinson has started wooing Kristen Stewart again after learning that she already broke up with SoKo. According to reports, the two still have feelings for each other and getting back together is highly possible.
As a matter of fact, both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have been sighted having lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant few weeks ago, wherein the "Cafe Society" actress was seen wearing an old swear shirt given by her ex-boyfriend. Though these reports could possibly be true, fans should take these with a grain of salt until proven true.
'One-Punch Man' Season 2 Air Date, Spoilers, News & Update: Yusuke Murata Almost Done With Anime Following Toonami Premiere?
Saitama fans are already hoping that the "One-Punch Man" Season 2 release date will be much sooner this year. The first season has already enjoyed a successful debut on Toonami, so does this mean that the next season will premiere earlier than October?
"One-Punch Man" English Dub Premieres On Toonami! Is It Time For "One-Punch Man" Season 2?
"One-Punch Man" English Dub finally aired on Adult Swim on Saturday, July 16. New viewers as well as die-hard fans expectantly tuned in to Toonami to see how the anime's humor and storyline would translate in English.
Luckily, it looks like the "One-Punch Man" English dub was well-received. So is it finally time for "One-Punch Man" Season 2?
"One-Punch Man" Season 2 Officially In Development Because Of "One-Punch Man" English Dub Success?
Although "One-Punch Man" Season 2 was confirmed by Yusuke Murata, the anime creator has not revealed whether the new season is already in development. However, it is possible that things may change because of the "One-Punch Man" English Dub success.
Fans are already expecting "One-Punch Man" Season 2 to air by October, at roughly the same time that the first season was released. Hopefully, Yusuke Murata is hard at work on the new season now that more people are watching the anime.
When Is The "One-Punch Man" Season 2 Release Date?
There is a possibility that "One-Punch Man" Season 2 will not be released while the English-dubbed version is still on Toonami. This way, new fans can catch up on all of Saitama's battle while those who have already seen it can get a refresher. Besides, the best way to prepare for the new season is to remember every single "WAAAN PAAAANCCHHH" in the anime.
There are speculations that "One-Punch Man" Season 2 will be unveiled by September or October this year.
"One-Punch Man" English Dub airs on Adult Swim's Toonami block every Saturday night.
CSULB alum wins gold at the 38th Long Beach Marathon which was his first
People on the Move
Tonya Smiley recently joined the office of Drs. Dan and Nancy Lach in Corvallis.
Smiley assists patients for both Timberhill Spine Care and the Nutritional Healing Center. She brings with her several years of experience, including 10 years in the health field. She can be reached at 541-207-3330.
Jim and Brandy Stoffel recently joined Windermere Willamette Valley in Corvallis as licensed brokers.
The Stoffels bring more than 20 years of combined real estate experience in buying and selling homes, investment properties, and new construction and renovation projects. Jim Stoffel is a retired military officer who understands veteran and relocation issues. Brandy Stoffel is a former nurse who has communication and detail skills.
The Stoffels can be reached at 503-310-3689 or thestoffelteam@windermere.com.
Willamette Community Bank in Albany recently announced the promotion of Shelly Ortiz to vice president.
Ortiz joined the company in 2014 as customer service manager of the Albany and Lebanon branches. She will continue with her primary responsibilities of managing both branches for the bank.
10D Telecom, Inc., doing business as 10D Tech, recently announced that Colleen Phillips has joined the company as business development manager.
With a broad knowledge of technology, telecom and network services, Phillips brings more than 17 years of telecom industry experience to her new position. She has been active in sales and sales management, production and, most recently, account management.
As business development manager, Phillips is working with both new and existing customers, as well as assisting current management in the areas of customer service, sales, installation and growth. She is operating out of Salem.
As technology experts with a focus on telecommunications and business networking, 10D Tech has design, technical and implementation depth in all aspects of business telephone systems, infrastructure technology, wi-fi implementation, telecom consulting, unified communications and network security solutions.
10D maintains strategic partnerships, licenses and certifications with more than 15 key manufacturers, including Avaya, Allworx, NEC, Plantronics, Sophos, Hewlett-Packard Co. and the Oregon Construction Contractors Board.
NuScale Power recently announced that Robert Gamble has joined the company as vice president of engineering.
Gamble comes to NuScale from AREVA Solar, where he just completed design, construction, commissioning and startup of a 125MWe thermal solar plant as the VP of engineering and general manager of North America operations.
Prior to his work at AREVA, Gamble worked for General Electric (nuclear) for 21 years in several roles, including vice president, mechanical design and analysis group; program manager, economic simplified boiling water reactor; engineering manager, ESBWR; and various engineering roles.
Gamble received a doctorate, a Master of Science degree and a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School AREVA Executive Management Training Program.
NuScale Power, LLC, is developing a new kind of nuclear plant: a safer, smaller, scalable version of pressurized water reactor technology, designed with natural safety features a technology initially developed and tested at Oregon State University. NuScale is headquartered in Portland and has offices in Corvallis.
Take a Bow
Soft Star Shoes, a seller and manufacturer of handmade shoes in Corvallis, has received a national 2016 When Work Works Award.
This accolade, sponsored by the Families and Work Institute and the Society for Human Resource Management, recognizes companies that have created workplaces based on research-supported criteria linked to positive employee and employer outcomes: autonomy; work/life balance; supervisor support for work success; satisfaction with earnings, benefits and opportunities for advancement; opportunities for learning; and a culture of trust.
Soft Star received one of 351 awards given to workplaces hailing from 43 states and the District of Columbia.
Soft Star has been a proponent of employee balance and well-being since 1985. The company welcomes families into the workshop, offers flexible scheduling and time off, brings in ergonomics consultants to make daily tasks less stressful, and offers bonuses for the use of alternative transit during commutes. Soft Star plans to expand these initiatives once it transitions into its new home this fall, a former roller rink in Philomath that will triple its working space.
A year or so ago, I sat across a dinner table from an optimistic young woman (in her 30s, a millennial) and sternly explained to her why Hillary Clinton, were she to become the Democratic presidential nominee, would never pick Elizabeth Warren for a running mate. I deployed several reasons from my arsenal, the most pressing being that picking Warren would be an inherently risky move and Clinton had never been a risk taker. It would be out of character and therefore jarring to the public.
I told my friend that I would be delighted to see a Clinton-Warren ticket, but it was simply never going to happen.
"You may have grown up in the era of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, well, Hillary Clinton," I said, "but there are still a lot of Neanderthals out there who think a woman can't be trusted with the security of the free world because she's too hormonal (regardless of her age) and erratic. Put two women in that position and the resulting misogyny would be so inflamed that it could impede the important work of government."
Despite the "you go, girl" veneer of a two-woman ticket, I added, it would simply be too much, too soon.
My friend told me I was wrong. She said I needed to have a little more faith in the American voter and in Clinton. She told me I was operating with an outdated mindset.
As the Democratic National Convention approaches and Clinton's decision grows imminent, I still suspect I'm right that Clinton will never choose Warren. And more than ever, I would love to be wrong.
The reasons that diehard progressives want to see Warren as the vice presidential nominee are obvious. She would bring some much-needed electricity to Clinton's campaign. Her reputation as a populist crusader might offset Clinton's as a member of the establishment elite. She might even get some of the more intransigent Bernie Sanders voters to quit stomping their feet and start working for the Democratic candidate already.
Best of all, choosing Warren would be pardon the metaphor downright ballsy.
There's no question in anyone's mind even, and maybe especially, in the minds of her enemies that Clinton is tough. She is weathering the harsh assessment that FBI Director James Comey delivered about her self-proclaimed email "mistake." She has both won and lost grueling political campaigns. She has shown almost superhuman resilience in the face of decades of scrutiny and attacks. She has navigated a complicated marriage. As secretary of state, she demonstrated a willingness to deploy military force that, fairly or not, got her labeled a hawk.
Toughness is not necessarily the same thing as gutsiness, though, and Clinton's reputation for being calculated and strategic can too often feed the impression that her political passions take a backseat to her personal ambitions. That's why the smart money for her VP pick remains on the safe choice, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, whose white male centrism promises to make Clinton seem less scary for those inclined to be scared.
But for those inclined to be bored by Clinton, a little scariness could translate into excitement. The thrill would come not just because of Warren's undeniable appeal for a certain segment of voters but, crucially, because choosing her would offer us a glimpse of a wilder, more fervent Clinton than the one usually on view.
It's no accident that the story of Clinton delivering a blazing 1969 Wellesley commencement address about, among other things, "the art of making what appears to be impossible possible," retains an almost mythic quality among her devotees. She ditched her notes briefly to challenge the previous speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke, whom she perceived was defending President Nixon. In that younger Clinton, we can see a fearlessness that's gone by the wayside. That Clinton didn't hold her finger up and test the wind. Listen to the audio and hear her taking charge, consequences be damned.
If Clinton chooses Warren as her running mate, it would be the ultimate throw down. It would be unabashedly bold, which is why I still think it's unlikely. If it happens, I'll apologize to my millennial friend. And coming from a Gen Xer, that's its own kind of throw down.
Philomath Fire & Rescue had a few obstacles to overcome while trying to extinguish a fire at the Georgia-Pacific sawmill and planing mill near Philomath late Thursday night and early Friday morning.
There were no injuries but firefighters had to figure out how to battle the blaze, which was located in one of G-Ps hoppers.
Probably the biggest issue we had was we couldnt get the hopper doors open because they did an emergency shutdown on it, Fire & Rescue chief Tom Miller said. So we couldnt dump the wood chips down on the ground, at least initially.
Seventeen Philomath firefighters along with three from the Corvallis Fire Department responded to the blaze. Dispatch to the fire occurred at about 11:30 p.m. The plant is located near the Highway 34 and Highway 20 intersection.
When we got there, hopper No. 4 was blowing and going, if you will, with a lot of smoke and fire, Miller said. It was starting to get into hopper No. 3, so we used our ladder truck, pulled it around and started spraying water on it.
However, Miller said that tactic had limited impact on beating down the blaze and a call went out to Corvallis for ladder truck.
We realized a lot of the doors on top were not open, so we had to send some firefighters up to the top of the catwalk and have them open up the doors, Miller said.
Miller estimated the catwalk at about four stories high. Firefighters had to watch their step with darkness and a slippery surface from the water factored in.
In addition to the wood chips, Miller said there was what he described as a filter box on top of the hopper that had ignited.
Basically, after two hours we got the G-P folks to open up those doors and we got the fire out and down on the ground and spread it out, Miller said. We finally got it cooled down enough where G-P reps could get up there and do a manual override.
Hoppers are situated above ground so trucks can drive up underneath and receive a load of wood chips.
The operation had wrapped up by 3:30 a.m. Friday.
Miller said he had no information on the cause of the fire and also couldnt estimate damage, saying it was mainly wood chips. A phone message left with Georgia-Pacifics media relations office was not returned.
Do you remember the fight we had in Oregon over a ballot measure that would require that genetically modified foods carry a label to that effect? How about the fight in Benton County over an ordinance to ban genetically modified organisms?
Both measures were defeated by voters but not without a considerable battle.
The fight over GMOs isn't going away, though. As evidence, look to Vermont, which this month became the first state to require labels on genetically modified foods.
According to a recent story in The New York Times, Vermont's law requires the labeling of most packaged grocery products as well as any fruits or vegetables produced with genetic engineering. As the Times notes, this means that virtually all products containing derivatives of crops like corn, soy, canola and sugar from sugar beets will require labeling, since most of those crops in the United States are grown from genetically modified seeds. (The law excludes cheese, a big business in Vermont, because most hard cheeses require the use of chymosin, an enzyme naturally found in the stomachs of ruminant animals; most cheese producers use a type of chymosin generated through synthetic biology, a form of genetic engineering. The law also exempts meat from animals that have eaten feed made from genetically engineered grains.)
Vermont's law imposes a civil penalty of $1,000 per day per genetically modified product that is not labeled as required.
In the meantime, a somewhat less stringent GMO labeling bill passed Congress last week and is headed to President Barack Obama, who is expected to sign it. The bill would allow an electronic code on a package to stand in for a label, requiring a smartphone and internet connection for a consumer to know whether the product contained genetically modified ingredients.
There is something to be said for federal guidelines instead of forcing food producers from dealing with a patchwork of state regulations.
But neither Vermont's law nor the legislation that passed Congress is necessary. First, remember that study after study has concluded that GMO foods are safe. And the benefits from GMOs in terms of increasing agricultural output to feed the world's increasing population outweigh any negatives. American consumers are used to seeing labels on products that are harmful the labeling on tobacco products, which pose health risks even when used as directed, is the pre-eminent example. The overwhelming bulk of scientific evidence is that GMO foods are safe. Why require labels for a product that's safe?
Besides, these GMO laws are attempts to legislatively push through something that the market already is taking care of on its own. The market for GMO-free food products is growing fast, just like the market for organic foods. Savvy producers who want to tap into that market already are doing so by voluntarily labeling their products as free of GMOs. As consumers gravitate to products with that GMO-free label, other producers will follow suit. The GMO law in Vermont and the federal legislation are textbook examples of government trying to come up with feel-good solutions for something that's not a problem. Worse, these government-mandated "solutions" could end up needlessly complicating a market that seems to be taking care of itself just fine.
Finance : Deutsche Bank to close 188 branches in NRW
Frankfurt/Bonn Fewer people are banking in person; Deutsche Bank will close walk-in branches and invest more heavily in digital services.
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The most highly populated state in Germany, North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) will be the most impacted by the shutting down of Deutsch Bank affiliates in the coming year. A total of 51 branches are to be closed in NRW, one of them in Bonn, one in Bad Neuenahr and four in Cologne. Nationwide, 188 affiliates are to be shut down. Customers will be transferred to the next nearest branch.
An increasing number of customers are doing their banking online. Deutsche Bank is reacting by closing a quarter of their branches. The bank had indicated in June that they would be carrying out this action as part of a cost reduction scheme. Currently there are 723 affiliates throughout Germany and after the closings are in effect, a total of 535 Deutsche Bank branches will remain.
Fewer and fewer people do their banking in person, according to Christian Sewing, the head of private banking for Deutsche Bank. From the 188 to be closed in NRW, 30 of those which are in more rural areas will be converted into Finance agencies. They will offer consulting services and also have ATMs.
Sewing says that Deutsche Bank wants to invest 750 million euros in building up its digital services by 2020. They also plan to have seven customer service centers where 360 trained bank employees are available per video, chat or telephone to help customers, also outside of normal banking hours.
A list of affected affiliates can be found at: www.ga.de/deutschebank
Kolner Lichter and Dusseldorf fair : Police characterize events as peaceful
Cologne/Dusseldorf Both in Cologne and in Dusseldorf, events went off without a hitch. Police say celebrations remained undisturbed.
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After recent events in Cologne and worldwide, security was ramped up for the Kolner Lichter 2016 (Cologne Lights) event on Saturday. Following the huge affair, Federal Police declared in a press release that their operations had been effective. Thanks to a high visible presence of police and intensive security measures, fewer crimes were committed in the critical areas around the Cologne Hauptbahnhof (Central train station) and the Messe/Deutz (exhibition hall area in Cologne-Deutz).
Before the fireworks, one person had been arrested at the central train station, accused of committing grievous bodily harm. Pickpockets were underway but few dared to risk being caught. Some who were recognized by police were banned from the area.
On the steps of the Cologne cathedral, two plain-clothes federal police officers were offered marijuana for sale. Instead of being given money, the sellers were charged with drug violations.
After the devastating attack in Nice, France on Thursday, when a truck plowed through a crowd and killed scores of holiday revelers, security arrangements had been further stepped up for the Kolner Lichter event. Overall, more than 1,600 state and federal police were deployed. The Kolner Lichter was was very peaceful, reported a police spokesperson in Cologne.
Traffic measures were also effective, according to Federal Police. Many people used public transportation and 500 law enforcement workers were on hand to help keep things under control. On the return, some individual platforms had to be temporarily closed due to the huge volume of passengers.
People who had attended the event in previous years reported seeing fewer people this year on the promenade between the Zoobrucke (Zoo Bridge) and the Hohenzollernbrucke (Hohenzollern Bridge). Police confirmed there was less activity this year than in the past. At the Black Fooss concert at Tanzbrunnen, a moment of silence was observed for those killed in Nice.
Here's How You Can Get a Reliance Jio SIM and Free 4G Data for 3 Months Features oi -Abhinaya Prabhu
Reliance Jio is the recent buzz when it comes to 4G services in India. However, the services are yet to be officially launched to the end users. Right now, the service is available but only to select people such as the Reliance employees.
You might be interested in knowing what is Jio or the LYF smartphones, what services do they offer, the cost and the quality of the 4G service from Jio, etc. In that case, you can take a look at this content below to know in detail about the Reliance Jio 4G services and how you can get a SIM card.
Jio Network
Jio is Reliance Industries Limited's (RIL) wireless broadband service. So far, Airtel is the company that is dominant in providing the 4G services and as India needs growth with a better 4G LTE penetration, Jio and other service providers have started offering the same.
Also Read: A mystery LeEco smartphone with dual-camera set up spotted in leaked photos
In order to make the Jio broadband services more reliable, relatively cheaper and faster, the company owns a huge network of fibre network. This sounds promising, but we have already seen the launch of the 4G services being delayed many times.
How can you get Jio service?
As of now, Jio is in the beta phase of some sort. The only way to get the service is through the employee referral programme that was started last year. Jio employees are eligible for free unlimited data as well as voice calling offers for three months with the network.
Well, you read it right! The employees get free 4G internal and voice calling for three months. Also, there is a range of Jio proprietary applications as well. Users can extend the services more than three months by visiting the official Jio website.
August 15 Launch of Jio Service
Last week, Reliance confirmed that the Jio service will be launched on August 15. The company has teamed up with Apple and Samsung to provide a Jio SIM card for users of select phones such as iPhones and high-end phones in the Galaxy lineup.
Also Read: Lenovo Vibe K5 Note to Launch in India on July 20
The highlight is that the SIM card that you get along with these phones can be used on any 4G compatible smartphone and it will work fine helping the users enjoy the freebies.
LYF smartphones are bundled with freebies
With the employee referral program of Jio, employees are given the referral code with which they can get the 4G service from Reliance. If the employee receives more than one code, he or she can distribute the same to a friend or relative. With the referral code, it is easy to buy a LYF smartphone.
Also Read: ZTE Small Fresh 4 Announced
Remember that a LYF smartphone is important to use the Jio 4G service. The users can use the 4G LTE service on any compatible smartphone after the service is official in the country. These smartphones are priced from Rs 3,999 to Rs 21,499. But, these have failed to compete with thelikes of the offerings from Xiaomi and Lenovo in the market.
Why prefer LYF smartphones?
Though these smartphones are not too appealing in comparison to the other devices in the market, the highlight is that these phones will come with unlimited and free 4G service bundled with them for 3 months. This is possible even with a smartphone priced at Rs 3,000 from the LYF lineup.
Also Read: Top 10 Best Smartphones with 20 MP Camera to Buy in India
Bundled Jio applications
Reliance Jio SIM cards come bundled with a slew of exclusive applications such as Jio Chat, Jio Drive, Switch-and-Walk, Jio Play, Jio Beats, Jio Maps, Jio Money, and Jio News.
How fast is Jio 4G?
As of now, there are no official data related to the speed of the Jio 4G service, but the details that have been revealed on Twitter show that the speed will be up to 50 Mbps. The test results are average showing download speeds of up to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2.5 Mpbs.
Best Mobiles in India
Djibouti: Ambouli Airport supports flight operations amid Juba crisis
Navy News Service
Story Number: NNS160716-04
Release Date: 7/16/2016 6:26:00 PM
By Lt. Desiree V. Woodman, Camp Lemonnier Public Affairs
DJIBOUTI, Africa (NNS) -- Although last week's escalation of attacks in South Sudan caused immediate cancellations of all flights in Juba, Ambouli International Airport stepped up to the challenge, providing superior support for both commercial and military operational flights to their airfield.
Fighting broke out in South Sudan on July 7 between government and opposition forces. The increased concern over the security situation led to Juba International Airport closing its airfield July 9 to incoming and outgoing flights. Coordination between both U.S. military and Djiboutian airport leadership in the Horn of Africa assisted in the joint effort of ensuring safe transport during the influx of activity to Ambouli.
Air Operations Officer, U.S. Navy Lt. Matthew Daniels, said Ambouli's director of the airport assured priority handling and support of increased mission events.
"Coordination on several short-fused request has proven to be positive to flight operations with the Djiboutian leadership in regards to the current needs of the airfield," Daniels said. "Both Djiboutian and U.S. [Navy] air-traffic controllers have truly shown professionalism and readiness to combat any situation."
In a previous interview, Daniels said the three tenants of air traffic control are to execute the mission by providing 'safe, orderly, and expeditious' flow of traffic. U.S. and Djiboutian Air-Traffic Controllers (ATC) have shown an immeasurable response and control of flight operations without missing a beat.
Djiboutian ATC Field Officer Mohammad Mousse has been one of the driving forces to ensure military operations can take place on the airfield. The impact has led to several successful missions in the past week. During the increased operations tempo, massive coordination between Djiboutian and Navy ATCs and KBR employees has been crucial.
Camp Lemonnier Airfield Manager, Christopher Williams, said the mutual relationship and understanding of military operations was key in the recent and continued success of airfield readiness.
"We've established a great working relationship with the Djiboutian airport leadership," Williams said. "That rapport is apparent in the smooth coordination, timely reaction and operational response to real world events."
Air Traffic Control Chief Francis Beaudoin said there is a mutual respect that has grown between the team that has been helpful.
"The relationship we have allows us to get the mission done. When events pop up, we can mutually help one another bridge the gap," Beaudoin said.
The recent high visible activities at Ambouli represents the superior capability the air traffic controllers have in supporting missions day or night. The airport is a full functioning military airfield that has caught the attention of higher echelon leadership throughout the region.
Flight operations onto the airfield are coordinated through the Djiboutian Air Tower. Safety of military personnel, aircraft and cargo is the priority for all operations from Ambouli.
The airfield has undergone massive improvements in the past year. These improvements include the runway and navigation systems. The joint training has proven to be beneficial during crucial events.
"We've seen unwavering flexibility and a driven initiative by all to safely execute this mission," Williams said. "It's apparent that there is a mutual understanding of the importance and complexity of the Juba operation."
Camp Lemonnier provides, operates, and sustains superior service in support of combat readiness along with security of ships and aircraft detachments and personnel for regional and combat command requirements, enabling operations for the Horn of Africa while fostering positive U.S.-African nation relations. Camp Lemonnier enables the forward operations and responsiveness of U.S. and allied forces in support of Navy Region, Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia's mission to provide services to the fleet, fighter, and family.
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USS America Hosts CNO During RIMPAC 2016
Navy News Service
Story Number: NNS160716-01
Release Date: 7/16/2016 5:37:00 PM
By MC1(SW/AW) John Scorza, USS America (LHA 6) Public Affairs
PACIFIC OCEAN (NNS) -- Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson visited the amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6) to meet with shipboard and embarked leadership, speak with Sailors and Marines, and tour the ship's spaces, July 15. Richardson's visit coincided with this year's Rim of the Pacific Exercise.
Once aboard, the Navy's top officer addressed the crew on the ship's 1MC announcement system.
"To everyone on board, congratulations. Welcome to the 2016 RIMPAC exercise," said Richardson. "This is the largest maritime exercise of its kind in the world; the biggest, the most complex. Sounds like [USS America is] off to an absolutely sprinting start... This is an extremely important part of the world right now and you are right in the center of gravity."
During his visit, Richardson took the time to reenlist and promote Sailors previously selected through the Navy's meritorious advancement program.
"There is nothing that gives me more chills or makes me more proud than to see our Sailors renew their commitment to our Navy and our nation either through a reenlistment or through an advancement," said Richardson. "It's just one small symbol of what makes our Navy the greatest Navy in the world and that power extends by us working with our multi-national partners and allies."
The Sailors that were able to reaffirm their oath to serve and defend the country said they were excited and thankful for the unique opportunity.
"I felt honored that he reenlisted me," said Personnel Specialist 2nd Class Clayton Davis. "I wasn't going to reenlist this early, but when I was presented with the option to have the CNO reenlist me, I decided right away that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I was not going to let slip away."
"Who wouldn't jump at the chance to be reenlisted by the CNO?" said Senior Chief Hospital Corpsman (SW/AW/IW/FMF) Gerald Lee. "This was a highlight. I've reenlisted four times, and if this is my last reenlistment, I will go out on a high note by being reenlisted by the CNO."
Richardson left the crew with encouraging words just before he departed on an MV-22 Osprey.
"To the crew, to the embarked Marines and to all our multi-national partners; I just want to say that it has been a terrific visit here to this ship," said Richardson. "After walking around the spaces, I can't tell you how proud I feel to get a chance to shake your hand and to learn a little bit about you. I'm super proud of all of you. I'm going to take all of these stories back to Washington and tell our leadership, up to the highest levels, what they've got here is just an amazing capability and something they can be proud of too."
Twenty-six nations, more than 40 ships and submarines, more than 200
aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC from June 30 to Aug. 4, in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world's largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity that helps participants foster and sustain the 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.
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Yemen: UN envoy urges 'definitive decisions' as peace talks continue in Kuwait
16 July 2016 The United Nations-supported Yemeni peace talks continued in Kuwait today after several weeks of daily sessions and two weeks of intensive consultations with regional and political leaders, the UN envoy for the country has said.
"The time has come for you to take definitive decisions that demonstrate to the Yemeni people the sincerity of your intentions and your national obligations," said Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Yemen, in a statement, noting that the decisions will primarily revolve around Security Council resolution 2216 (2015) and other relevant resolutions, the Gulf Initiative and its implementation mechanism, and the outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference.
The cessation of hostilities declared on 10 April to end nearly 16 months of conflict in Yemen has continued to provide relief from violence in many parts of the country, but serious violations have occurred, such as the shelling of a popular market in Taiz on 4 June, which resulted in 18 civilian deaths and tens of injuries. In addition, there have been violations of the truce in Marib, al Jawf, Taiz and in the border areas with Saudi Arabia.
The Special Envoy indicated that meetings will continue to be held in Kuwait for an additional two weeks, during which the focus will be on the "complete and comprehensive consolidation" of the cessation of hostilities, the activation of the de-escalation and coordination committee and the local committees, in addition to the formation of the military committees that will supervise the withdrawal and the handing over of weapons from area A and on the opening of safe corridors for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
At the same time, the prisoners and detainee committee will continue its work, the Special Envoy said, reiterating the necessity of the release of all prisoners and detainees as soon as possible.
"The priorities for this stage are the consolidation of the cessation of hostilities, the improvement of the humanitarian situation and an agreement on the security arrangements so that we can manage to address all of the other issues," he said.
Mr. Ould Cheikh Ahmed said that during the past two weeks, he convened intensive meetings in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Oman to discuss the security, political, economic and humanitarian issues.
He said he held more than one meeting with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, members of the Yemeni political leadership, and the delegations participating in the peace talks, in addition to the representatives of other parties and political actors.
In addition, the Special Envoy said he met the Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, and was in "constant contact" with other political figures and diplomats, who reiterated their support for UN efforts and the importance of reaching a final solution for the crisis in Yemen.
"This stage is delicate and definitive; you are going to be closely scrutinized by the Yemeni and international public," the Special Envoy emphasized.
Noting that the UN has "put at your disposal all of its political and administrative expertise, while the State of Kuwait kindly devoted a full team for logistical, security and political support," the envoy stressed that such efforts would not be sufficient if all efforts necessary to ensure security and stability in Yemen were made.
"People do not require political statements detailing your concessions, patriotism or your concern for them. Yemeni men and women will understand your concern when you are concerned with their security and will appreciate your labours when their security, humanitarian, and economical situation improves," the Special Envoy said.
"Political statements and speeches lose their credibility with every security breach and with each loss of civilian life," he added.
Emphasizing that there was "much to achieve" in the two weeks ahead, Mr. Ould Cheikh Ahmed expressed hope that those participating in the peace talks would take advantage of the opportunity.
"Two weeks to demonstrate good will and credibility and concern for the national interest. Two weeks to build upon the solid common ground achieved and on the decisions of the previous period," he said, adding that "the attainment of peace might be hard but derailing is easy."
"You must listen to the voices of women and men who call for peace. Work towards bettering the situation of the citizens, human rights, and on achieving the aspirations of the Yemeni youth. Leadership is actions, not words," the Special Envoy concluded.
After intense talks with both parties, last month the envoy reported that he had presented a roadmap outlining a practical plan to end the conflict in Yemen. It provides for implementation of the security arrangements specified in Security Council resolution 2216 (2015) and the establishment of a national unity government that would ensure the delivery of basic services and address the recovery of the Yemeni economy.
According to the proposed roadmap, the national unity government would also be responsible for preparing a political dialogue to define the remaining steps for a comprehensive political solution, including the electoral law, the mandate of the institutions, which would oversee the transition period and the completion of the draft constitution. The delegations have responded positively to the proposals, but have not yet reached agreement on the sequencing of the different steps provided for in the roadmap.
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In Rwanda, Ban calls for concerted regional and international action in South Sudan
16 July 2016 On the margins of the 27th African Union (AU) Summit taking place in Kigali, Rwanda, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today addressed a regional body and met with several African leaders, stressing the need for concerted action to revive the implementation of the peace agreement in South Sudan.
"Now is the time for decisive and collective action. The people of South Sudan need to hear the region and the world speak with one voice to end this mindless violence," Mr. Ban said at the Extraordinary Summit of the International Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-country trade bloc in Africa whose members include the Governments of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.
"I know many of you have worked hard to secure peace for the world's youngest country and I know all of us agree that we cannot afford South Sudan slipping back into a civil war," he added.
Noting that everyone is "appalled" by the magnitude of the violence, the indiscriminate attacks on civilians and peacekeepers, and the immense loss of lives and suffering that the crisis has inflicted on the people of South Sudan, the UN chief emphasized that the renewed fighting is "horrendous and totally unacceptable."
"UN compounds have been caught in the crossfire, our warehouses and food stocks for hundreds of thousands of people have been brazenly stolen, and our premises have sustained significant mortar and small arms fire," Mr. Ban said.
The Secretary-General condemned in the strongest terms the targeting of UN personnel and international personnel from non-governmental organizations; premises and assets in Juba allegedly by soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA); and reports of sexual violence, assaults and killings of those personnel and South Sudanese civilians.
Welcoming the strong condemnation of the fighting and ceasefire violations by the AU Peace and Security Council and the IGAD Council of Ministers, the Secretary-General thanked the participants at the Extraordinary Summit for calling on the South Sudanese leaders to assume their responsibility and subject individuals who undermine the peace process to "stern measures," including targeted sanctions.
Mr. Ban highlighted that he had spoken with the Special Envoy of the President of South Sudan, Nhial Deng Nhial, with First Vice-President Riek Machar, as well as with some leaders of the region, and had urged them to do "everything in their power" to bring about an immediate cessation of hostilities and recommit to the implementation of the peace agreement.
"I have sent a clear message that leaders must be accountable for their actions. This includes the military chain of command the chiefs of general staff and other officials who are complicit in perpetrating the violence," the Secretary-General said.
Meetings with regional leaders
Among his other meetings today, Mr. Ban talked with Hailemariam Dessalegn, Prime Minister of Ethiopia and IGAD Chairman. The leaders discussed regional peace and security challenges, as well as climate change, with the Secretary-General commending the leadership role of Ethiopia in the promotion of regional peace and security, and its contribution to peacekeeping.
Mr. Ban met with Hailemariam Dessalegn, Prime Minister of Ethiopia and Chairman of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The leaders discussed regional peace and security challenges, as well as climate change, with the Secretary-General commending the leadership role of Ethiopia in the promotion of regional peace and security, and its contribution to peacekeeping.
"The Secretary-General and the Prime Minister expressed alarm at the situation in South Sudan and the risk of further escalation, with far-reaching consequences for the country and its people, as well as for the region," said a statement issued by Mr. Ban's office.
"They agreed on the need for an urgent and enhanced international action to avert full blown violence and further atrocities, and put back on track the implementation process of the agreement on the resolution of the conflict in South Sudan," the statement also said.
The UN chief informed the Prime Minister about his recommendations to the Security Council in favour of an arms embargo, the imposition of targeted sanctions against individuals involved in violence and blocking the implementation of the peace agreement, and the reinforcement of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).
The Secretary-General indicated that he was looking forward to the outcome of the deliberations of the IGAD and AU Heads of State and Government, emphasizing the "important role" of the African leaders.
The Secretary-General also thanked the Ethiopian Prime Minister for his country's key role and sacrifices towards stabilization efforts in Somalia, emphasizing the need to "spare no efforts" in creating the required security conditions for the successful holding of the forthcoming elections.
In addition, Mr. Ban underlined the debilitating effects of the El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena globally and in the Horn of Africa region in particular. The Prime Minister informed him of the steps taken by Ethiopia to mitigate the impact of La Nina and its commitment to the global efforts to address climate change, including through the early ratification of the Paris Agreement.
The Secretary-General also met today with Idriss Deby Itno, President of Chad and Chairperson of the AU. Commending Mr. Deby for his country's critical role in the regional efforts to combat the Boko Haram terrorist group, Mr. Ban reiterated the UN's support in that regard.
Mr. Ban also met with the High Representative of the AU for South Sudan and former President of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare, and the Chairperson of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission and former President of Botswana, Festus Mogae.
During that discussion, former Presidents Konare and Mogae updated the Secretary-General on their efforts for peace in South Sudan, including recent consultations in Juba with South Sudanese leaders, with the UN chief commending them for their efforts and encouraging them to remain steadfast.
Acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and the risk of relapse into conflict and that of further and widespread atrocities against the civilian population, the Secretary-General and the two former Presidents agreed on the "urgency of concerted regional and international action to address the current challenges and bring about lasting peace and security in South Sudan." In that respect, they emphasized the role of IGAD and of African leaders.
In addition, Mr. Ban met with the President of Uganda, Yoweri Kabuta Museveni, on the situation in South Sudan.
In another meeting today, the Secretary-General discussed the situation in South Sudan with Gayle Smith, Administrator of the United States Agency for International, together with the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Linda Thomas Greenfield, and the United States Special Envoy for South Sudan, Donald Booth. The leaders expressed grave concern about the risk of further violence in the country, as well as the "appalling" humanitarian situation compounded by the recent fighting in Juba.
"They look forward to the outcomes of the deliberations of the IGAD and African Union leaders on the matter, hoping that these will provide additional momentum to the international efforts to address the security situation, in particular in Juba, and ensure the effective implementation of the peace agreement," said a statement issued by Mr. Ban's office.
On Friday, Mr. Ban met with a number of African leaders on the sidelines of the AU Summit, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Algeria, Ramtane Lamamra.
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Haiti: UN and partners express regret over failed deliberations on provisional governance
16 July 2016 The United Nations and its partners in Haiti have expressed "deep regret" that for the fourth time in as many weeks, the country's National Assembly was unable to deliberate on the provisional governance arrangements.
In a joint press statement, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Haiti and Head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), Sandra Honore, and the other members of the international community in Haiti represented in the "Core Group" (the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the United States and the European Union, and the Special Representative of the Organization of American States) cited the "absence of a number of parliamentarians leading to a lack of a quorum" as the reason for the failed deliberations.
"Haiti continues to face serious long-term socio-economic and humanitarian challenges. These challenges cannot be fully addressed in an environment of institutional instability," the Core Group said in a joint press statement, reiterating 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," the statement also said.
On 14 February, the Haitian National Assembly elected Jocelerme Privert as the island nation's interim President, one week after former President Michel Martelly departed without a successor. Mr. Privert served as interim President for 120 days, and an election had been scheduled for 24 April, following an agreement known as the 5 February Agreement between Haitian stakeholders to preserve institutional continuity and further the electoral process.
Subsequently, on 25 April, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson issued a statement underlining the UN chief's deep concern that that the agreed-upon date for holding elections in Haiti was not met and that no alternate electoral calendar was announced.
In June, when Mr. Privert's 120-day interim period had come to an end, the Core Group called on the National Assembly to take action and reach a solution that avoids an "institutional vacuum," and to facilitate the return to constitutional order through the holding of elections.
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China Gives Cambodia $600M in Exchange for International Support
by Sok Khemara July 16, 2016
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 country's 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 Cambodia's tacit approval of China's 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. "That's 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.
This report was produced in collaboration with VOA's Khmer service.
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AU Advisory Body Slams International Criminal Court
by Nick Long July 16, 2016
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 ICC's 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 journalist's 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. Kenya's 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.
VOA's Lou Lorscheider in Washington contributed to this report.
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Somalia Condemns Coup Attempt in Turkey, Closes Projects Linked to Gulen
by Harun Maruf July 16, 2016
Somalia has ordered organizations linked to a U.S.-based Turkish cleric shut down after Turkey's president said Fethullah Gulen was involved Friday's coup attempt.
The decision came in an extraordinary session of the Somali cabinet on Saturday. The government ordered Turkish citizens working for Gulen-linked organizations to leave the country within seven days. The government said the services the organizations provided, such as education and health care, will continue under new administration.
The cabinet said the decision was in response to a request from the Turkish government.
The two countries have close ties. President Hassan Mohamud was one of the first world leaders to oppose the coup attempt as it developed.
"It is unacceptable to reverse the democratic path that the people of Turkey enjoyed in the recent times of their history. This was unfortunate and we are very glad to hear that the evil forces who tried to turn Turkey into a violence ground have been defeated," he said.
On Saturday, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Mogadishu in a government-organized rally against the military coup attempt.
Fethullah Gulen denied involvement in the coup attempt and has condemned it. He was a former ally of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but had a falling out years ago. Gulen now lives in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. His movement advocates service and interfaith dialogue and has millions of adherents in Turkey and abroad.
"Our position on what happened in Turkey is never to support the forceful change of a democratically elected government," Somalia Foreign Minister Abdusalam Hadliye Omer told VOA's Somali service.
Somalia will likely have suffered had the coup succeeded, as Turkey provided about $25 million a year in aid.
Omer said the Turkish people and their government have provided Somali close to one billion dollars' worth of aid, investment and infrastructure rebuilding since 2011.
"It's very important for us to stand with Turkey, it's a big country, and they are our friends."
He said President Erdogan's visit to Mogadishu on August 2011 has "opened the eyes of the world toward Somalia" following the deadly famine.
Since 2011 Erdogan visited Somalia three times, including a trip last month to Mogadishu where he inaugurated what was said to be the largest Turkish Embassy in the world.
Turkey has also refurbished Mogadishu's sea and airport and has built schools and hospitals as well as roads in Mogadishu. Several thousand Somalis are studying in Turkish schools under sponsorships by charities.
Omer dismissed criticism on social media by some Somalis who suggested that the Somali government should "mind its own business."
"They want us to wait and see who wins and then speak out?" he replied when asked if the government was quick to take sides.
"We were making our position clear. When Erdogan was coming to Mogadishu he didn't ask any one permission, we owe to them," he said.
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Inherent Resolve Strikes Target ISIL in Syria, Iraq
From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release
SOUTHWEST ASIA, July 17, 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 nine strikes in Syria:
-- Near Abu Kamal, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit.
-- Near Raqqah, a strike struck two ISIL oil pump jacks.
-- Near Manbij, seven strikes struck five separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed nine ISIL fighting positions, an ISIL tactical vehicle and a house ISIL had rigged with explosives.
Strikes in Iraq
Bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted eight strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:
-- Near Habbaniyah, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit.
-- Near Mosul, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL mortar system, an ISIL supply cache, two ISIL assembly areas, an ISIL bunker and an ISIL vehicle-borne-bomb facility and suppressed an ISIL mortar position.
-- Near Qayyarah, a strike destroyed two ISIL mortar systems, 11 ISIL oil tankers, an ISIL supply cache and an ISIL assembly area.
-- Near Ramadi, three strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL mortar system and an ISIL bulldozer.
-- Near Tal Afar, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle-borne bomb.
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 targets in Syria and Iraq further limits ISIL'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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Filling bigger boots at Rim of the Pacific 2016
US Marine Corps News
By Staff Sgt. Jesse Stence | July 17, 2016
In 1971, the first Rim of the Pacific exercise took place in Hawaii. This biennial exercise has flourished, drawing more nations and service members each year. RIMPAC 16, the largest exercise in the series, hosts 26 nations, 49 ships, six submarines, nearly 200 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel.
Fortunately, Marines like Sgt. Max. T. Humphreys are there to provide supervision that helps arrange an array of gear and equipment into a sophisticated combat machine.
Max T. Humphreys, native of Pueblo, Colorado, a town nicknamed Home of Heroes because of its long standing military ties, provides the Marines in his charge with the tools they need in order to make large moves like this come together.
"I facilitate the movement of personnel and packs from any location to another," said Humphreys, a landing support specialist with Transportation Support Company, Combat Logistics Battalion 3, which supports III Marine Expeditionary Force. "If something is going from one place to another, I usually have something to do with it."
Particularly during large-scale exercises like RIMPAC 16, when so much gear needs to be moved and accounted for, commanders typically place this responsibility on the shoulders of a staff noncommissioned officer or officer.
"Here we have a lot of gear and packs coming through, and two of our priorities are accountability and safety," said Lt. Col. Patrick Pluas, a New York native and the commanding officer of CLB-3. "This is the job for a staff NCO typically, but Humphreys is in charge of making sure everything happens in an organized manner, especially with the Australian military here. It's a lot of responsibility for a sergeant, but he's doing it and he's doing a good job."
According to Humphreys, a job this large would usually require about 15 to 20 Marines. But with only six Marines in his charge, he is still required to perform to the same standard -- not only when it comes to offloading ships, but also aircraft that come to the island.
"Without having these hard-working Marines that I can rely on, my job would be a lot harder," said Humphreys. "Without them busting their humps for me, I probably wouldn't be as successful as I am here."
According to Lance Cpl. Francisco Sanchez, a landing support specialist with CLB-3, Humphreys' close knit-relationship with his Marines makes working short-staffed easier and even enjoyable.
"Working with so few people is a little harder," said Sanchez, a native of Centerville, Tennessee, "but [Humphreys] makes it easier. I believe all the junior Marines, including myself, look up to him."
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India closes Kashmir newspapers amid unrest
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 1:33PM
Authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir have shut down newspaper offices and printing presses as part of an information blackout following a week of unrest in the disputed region.
According to Naeem Akhtar, the state government spokesman and education minister, who was speaking on Sunday, the measures were taken in a bid to save more lives and strengthen peace efforts.
The move came a day after police raided the offices and seized tens of thousands of local newspapers in an attempt to curb news distribution of deadly clashes in the region.
At least 40 people are now confirmed dead and over 2,000 others injured following days of violent clashes between protesters and Indian forces, but the government has put the number of fatalities at 36.
With a curfew entering its ninth straight day, medical sources have expressed serious concern that a severe lack of blood donations and life-saving medicines could cause more deaths.
Internet and mobile networks have already been suspended in the region, and authorities have halted cable television broadcasting.
The state government has ordered restrictions on the movement of people and traffic in several parts of the valley. It said in a statement that only people involved in medical emergencies would be allowed to travel across the troubled region.
Clashes erupted after Burhan Wani, a top figure in the pro-independence Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) group, was killed along with two others in a shootout with Indian troops on July 8.
Anti-riot troops have used live ammunition, pellet guns and tear gas to disperse the crowds and calm down the outrage over the past few days.
Kashmir has been at the heart of a bitter territorial dispute since India and Pakistan became independent in 1947.
New Delhi and Islamabad both claim the Himalayan region in full, but rule parts of it. The two countries have fought two wars over the disputed territory.
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Bahrain court dissolves main opposition group al-Wefaq
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 7:31AM
A court in Bahrain has dissolved the country's main Shia opposition group, the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, almost a month after the regime suspended its activities.
The so-called administrative court in the capital, Manama, on Sunday ordered the dissolution of al-Wefaq and the seizure of its funds.
The Bahraini justice ministry had suspended the opposition group's activities on June 14.
The latest move, part of a wide crackdown on political dissent in Bahrain, is certain to prompt more protests in the country, whose embattled regime has faced an uprising since 2011.
Various human rights organizations had condemned the suspension, labeling it is part of a new crackdown on dissent.
Al-Wefaq's secretary general, Sheikh Ali Salman, has been in prison since December 2014 on charges of attempting to overthrow the regime and collaborating with foreign powers, charges he has denied. A court sentenced him to four years in prison in June 2015.
The spiritual leader of the group, Sheikh Issa Qassim, has also been stripped of his Bahraini citizenship over similar accusations. On Saturday, the public prosecutor in Bahrain said the cleric will go on trial early next month on charges of "illegal fund collections and money laundering," without providing an exact date.
Since February 2011, thousands of anti-regime protesters have held numerous demonstrations on an almost daily basis, calling for the Al Khalifah regime to relinquish power.
In March that year, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates themselves repressive Arab regimes were deployed to the country to help in the crackdown on peaceful protests.
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Yemen rival parties reconvene peace talks in Kuwait
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 6:17AM
The UN-mediated negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict in Yemen have resumed in Kuwait City after a 15-day suspension.
Delegates form Yemen's Houthi movement and Saudi-backed loyalists to the former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, attended a ceremonial meeting on Saturday night in the presence of UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed.
The two sides are expected to get down to bargaining on Sunday despite Hadi's threat to boycott the peace talks if the UN keeps insisting on a roadmap for the formation of a unity government.
The talks were suspended on June 29 after weeks of deadlock.
The UN envoy told Saturday's meeting that the discussions would last for two weeks, warning that they may be Yemen's last chance for peace.
"It's time for decisive decisions that will prove your true intentions and national responsibilities to Yemenis," he said in an address to the delegates.
The peace talks, which started in Kuwait City on April 21, were held against the backdrop of a shaky ceasefire that began in the conflict-ridden state at midnight on April 10.
Elsewhere in his comments, Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the negotiations would focus on strengthening the truce and "forming the military committees that will supervise the withdrawal and handover of weapons... and opening safe passages for humanitarian aid."
The UN official further noted that he had held intensive talks in Sana'a, Riyadh and Muscat and met with many dignitaries over the settlement of the Yemen crisis over the past two weeks.
Yemen has seen almost daily military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March 2015, with internal sources putting the toll from the bloody aggression at about 10,000. The Saudi military aggression was launched to crush the Houthis and allies and restore power to Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.
The Houthi Ansarullah fighters took state matters into their own hands after the resignation and escape of Hadi, which threw Yemen into a state of uncertainty and threatened a total security breakdown in the country, where an al-Qaeda affiliate is present.
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One Dead As Armed Men Storm Yerevan Police Station, Take Hostages
July 17, 2016
by RFE/RL's Armenian Service
YEREVAN -- A group of armed men from an opposition group stormed a district police headquarters and exchanged gunfire with police in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, early in the morning on July 17, the National Security Service said in a statement.
The NSS said that a police officer was killed and two others were wounded in the shootout in the Erebuni police station.
Earlier, the security service had said the attackers were holding several hostages in the police headquarters, adding that "negotiations are under way to release them peacefully."
Security officials say two of the hostages have been released.
The opposition group Founding Parliament issued a statement demanding the release of the group's leader, Zhirayr Sefilian, a fierce government critic who was arrested last month.
A top security police official, General Hunan Poghosian, confirmed that security forces were in negotiations with the gunmen. But he excluded Sefilian's release.
Poghosian urged the armed men to surrender.
"If they don't listen to our appeal, we will neutralize them, because killers cannot be dealt with in any other way," he said. "But for now, we are continuing the negotiations."
Varuzhan Avetisian, a spokesman for the group, has also announced that "they are starting a rebellion" and an attempt to "overthrow the government" and "release political prisoners."
The group has released a video on Facebook, calling on Armenian citizens to take to the streets against their government.
The 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."
Police have cordoned off the area, with armored vehicles blocking off the road to the police station. The NSS statement said that law-enforcement agencies were functioning as normal to uphold public safety.
"The law-enforcement agencies fully control the situation and are taking all necessary measures to resolve it," it said.
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. "There were also many gunshots afterwards," a local resident said.
Meanwhile, opposition lawmaker and outspoken government critic Nikol Pashinian visited the police station and spoke with the attackers.
Pashinian, the leader of the newly established Civic Agreement opposition party, said one of the attackers inside the police station was critically wounded in the head.
He also said a policeman, who was feeling unwell, has been released by the hostage-takers.
The Founding Parliament group frequently stages street protests in Yerevan, demanding the resignation of President Serzh Sarkisian.
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 afterward.
With reporting by AFP and AP
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/armenia- opposition-group-attack-police- station-hostages/27863123.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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Army, Peacekeepers Liberate South Somalia Port From Al-Shabaab Militants
Sputnik News
20:47 17.07.2016(updated 20:49 17.07.2016)
The Somali army supported by the African Union peacekeepers have pushed the Al-Shabaab militants away from the key port town in southern Somalia, local media reported on Sunday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to the Mareeg news portal citing residents of the port town of Merka, the army and peacekeepers entered the coastal town with tanks after dislodging the militants of the radical Islamist group from the strategic port.
Port of Merka is located 110 kilometers (68 miles) south-west from the Somali capital of Mogadishu. It has been liberated from al-Shabaab in 2012, but fell into the hands of the militant group again in February 2016.
Somalia has been experiencing violence since the country devolved into civil war in the early 1990s. The state's collapse provided a breeding ground for warlords, pirates and the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Shabaab.
Sputnik
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Tokyo Provokes Beijing, Demands Adherence to the South China Sea Ruling
Sputnik News
03:17 17.07.2016(updated 08:17 17.07.2016)
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wasted no time following The Hague's ruling that China has no legal basis to territory that has long been in its control, a ruling that may also impact Tokyo and Beijing's longstanding dispute over the Senkaku Islands.
Tokyo increased pressure on Beijing during the Asia-Europe summit on Saturday calling on China to respect an international tribunal's ruling that dismissed its claims to much of the South China Sea including the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the assembled leaders that the rule of law was "a universal principle that he international community must firmly maintain," according to Japan's Jiji Press.
"I strongly hope the parties to the dispute comply with the award and move towards a peaceful solution of the dispute in the South China Sea," he said.
Japan is not one of the six nations that have a claim to the South China Sea territory, but Tokyo does hold a separate dispute with China regarding the Senkaku Islands, known by the Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands.
Tokyo has gone to great lengths under the Abe administration to squelch China's 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 China's 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 country's 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.
China has sought to counter Western meddling in their claim to the South China Sea by building a network of artificial islands capable of supporting military operations, and this week reiterated its right to declare an Air Defense Identification Zone in the area, which would demand civilian flights submit to the authority of its military.
With the ruling from the PCA going against China, the South China Sea region is now a powder keg just waiting to explode as the United States continues to attempt flyovers in the region and Beijing may soon decide that the provocations are too great to ignore.
Sputnik
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U.S., Coalition Continue Strikes Against ISIL in Syria, Iraq
From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release
SOUTHWEST ASIA, July 18, 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, ground-attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 12 strikes in Syria:
-- Near Abu Kamal, a strike destroyed two ISIL oil wellheads.
-- Near Manbij, 11 strikes struck eight separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed 22 ISIL fighting positions.
Strikes in Iraq
Rocket artillery and attack and fighter aircraft conducted 11 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:
-- Near Baghdadi, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL beddown location and destroyed two ISIL fighting positions.
-- Near Beiji, a strike destroyed three ISIL tunnel entrances and an ISIL tunnel vent.
-- Near Mosul, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL security headquarters and destroyed two ISIL vehicles.
-- Near Qayyarah, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed two ISIL mortar systems, 14 ISIL rocket rails and an ISIL vehicle and denied ISIL access to terrain.
-- Near Ramadi, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed two ISIL fighting positions.
-- Near Sinjar, two strikes destroyed an ISIL mortar system and suppressed an ISIL mortar position.
-- Near Sultan Abdallah, a strike struck a large ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL headquarters.
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 targets in Syria and Iraq further limits ISIL'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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Ansarullah stresses political solution to Yemen conflict
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 7:10AM
Delegates from the Houthi Ansarullah movement at the fresh round of Yemeni peace talks in Kuwait have described political dialog as the only way out of the conflict in the violence-wracked Arab state.
During a meeting with Kuwaiti Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid Hamad al-Sabah in Kuwait City on Sunday, the envoys underlined the need for the continuation of the UN-backed peace negotiations until they lead to a comprehensive political solution, al-Masirah reported.
They said Ansarullah has been maintaining a clear and transparent position concerning the formation of a new Yemeni legislature and administration ever since the intra-Yemeni negotiations started on April 21.
They also said the movement calls for the resolution of obstacles in the path of the talks, as well as the immediate cessation of Saudi Arabia's military aggression against Yemen.
The Ansarullah representatives further stressed that they have never hesitated to engage in the talks, flatly rejecting excuses and threats being made by Saudi-backed negotiators against them.
The delegates also emphasized the need for an immediate end to the Saudi naval and air embargo imposed on Yemen.
The deputy Kuwaiti prime minister, for his part, expressed hope that the two sides to Yemen's peace talks could reach a final agreement to restore peace in the crisis-hit Arab country and alleviate the sufferings of the Yemeni nation.
The UN-mediated negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict in Yemen have resumed in Kuwait City after a 15-day hiatus.
The peace talks, which started on April 21, were held against the backdrop of a shaky ceasefire that had taken effect on April 10.
Car bomb attack
Separately, at least nine militiamen loyal to Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi who has resigned as Yemen's president have been killed and tens of others wounded in car bomb attacks at a security checkpoint on the outskirts of the southern port city of Mukalla, situated some 900 kilometers (559 miles) southeast of the Yemeni capital.
Yemen has been under military strikes by Saudi Arabia since March 26, 2015. The Saudi war has been meant to restore power to Hadi, who has resigned as Yemen's president but seeks to forcefully return.
The Houthi Ansarullah fighters took over state matters after the resignation and escape of Hadi from the capital, Sana'a.
The Saudi attacks, meanwhile, continue against Yemen despite the ceasefire.
At least two civilians lost their lives and 14 others sustained injuries on Monday when Saudi fighter jets carried out airstrikes against a residential area in al-Mukha district of the southwestern Yemeni province of Ta'izz.
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Some Hostages Freed As Standoff Continues In Armenia
July 18, 2016
by RFE/RL's Armenian Service
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 city's 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."
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
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/ armenia-opposition-group-attack-police- station-hostages/27863123.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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Taliban Stages Fresh Attacks in Northern Afghanistan
by Ayaz Gul July 18, 2016
Afghanistan's Taliban launched new assaults in at least two northern provinces near the border with central Asian countries, but government officials have denied insurgent claims of battlefield advances.
The deputy governor of northeastern Badakhsan province, Gul Mohammad Baidar, said Monday insurgents mounted a three-pronged attack overnight on the remote Khash district but security forces repulsed it.
He told VOA timely deployment of reinforcements from the provincial capital of Faizabad and Kabul enabled security forces to defend the area, killing dozens of assailants in fighting that last several hours.
He declined to comment on losses to government forces, saying there were no confirmed figures available immediately.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed its fighters have besieged the district center after overrunning villages and security outposts around it, inflicting heavy casualties on government forces.
It is not possible to independently verify claims made by either side because of the remoteness of the war zone.
Fighting in Badakhshan erupted after a lull of several months. Officials also confirmed Taliban insurgents assaulted security outposts around the Qala-e-Zal district in northern Kunduz province early Monday.
The rebels reportedly captured several villages there and fighting has caused casualties on both sides, but no confirmed details were immediately available.
Meanwhile, witnesses in neighboring Baghlan province said anti-government fighters have asked residents in several villages of a central district to relocate to safer areas before a possible Taliban attack.
The renewed hostilities came a day after U.S. Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford concluded a three-day visit to Kabul as part of the overall assessment of NATO's Resolute Support Afghan mission.
Dunford said Sunday Afghan forces have significantly increased their capabilities, notably air power, as possible reasons why the level of violence has been lower than anticipated in the middle of the Afghan fighting season.
"I think there's a degree of optimism that the Afghan forces have the momentum this summer, but I think the Taliban have proven to be resilient in the past, and I think there's still a fair amount of fighting ahead," he cautioned.
Fighting in the northern and northeastern border regions has raised alarm in neighboring central Asian countries, some of which are also under threat from indigenous Islamist militants.
In a bid to allay those fears, the Taliban said it is struggling to end the foreign occupation of Afghanistan and establish an "Islamic system" in the country.
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Cameroonian Hostages Freed from CAR Captivity
by Moki Edwin Kindzeka July 18, 2016
Eleven Cameroonians, including the mayor of the northern town of Ladgo, have been freed from captivity after they were seized by a rebel group from the Central African Republic more than a year ago.
Government ministers, family members and a crowd of onlookers turned out in Cameroon's capital Monday to receive Mama Abakai and 10 others, who were seized by armed men from the east Cameroonian villages of Gbbabio and Yokossire, and taken across the border to the bushes of the CAR.
Upon capture, Abakai said, the group was divided into pairs and chained at the leg and abdomen and, at times, the hands. Two people were given a liter of water to share for 24 hours, and they ate the same meal, once a day, for 16 months. One captive reportedly was held for 18 months.The captives were allowed to go to the toilet twice a day, at 10 a.m. and at 5 p.m.
The captives lost hope, Abakai said, when rebels told them that if the government of Cameroon did not pay for their liberation by July 31, 2016, they would be killed.
Abakai said two of the hostages died in those deplorable conditions, and he expressed gratitude to God and the government of Cameroon for helping to save his life. He did not know if ransoms were paid.
Captive Daouda Abdoulaye, 48, said the armed men told them they were members of a movement fighting for liberation of the Central African Republic; they vowed to kill the hostages if the government of Cameroon refused to pay undisclosed sums of money to secure their release.
A group of soldiers armed with rifles, claiming to belong to the Democratic Front for Central African People, led by Aboubakar Sidiki, took the captives to the bush, where they were tortured every morning, Abdoulaye said. They were kept in villages, away from other human settlements.
Cameroon Minister of Defense Joseph Beti Assomo, who received the freed hostages, refused to comment on how much Cameroon paid for their release, but said negotiations were carried out following instructions from President Paul Biya.
Biya discretely and efficiently coordinated all the processes that led to the people's release, Assomo said. The government's main preoccupation now, he said, is to attend to their health and psychological care.
Armed groups from the CAR periodically cross into Cameroon to kidnap cattle ranchers and businessmen for ransom, or to steal their properties.
Cameroon shares a 900-kilometer long boundary with the troubled CAR, and presently hosts 300,000 refugees from the neighboring state.
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Fethullah Gulen / "Gulenist Terrorist Group"
The "Hizmet Movement" (Hizmet means "Service" in English) - or as it is often called, the Gulen movement, is made up of followers of Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen. His brand of Islamism is attractive to many who want to live their Islamic faith in the modern world. Once a collaborator of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after 2013 he was considered to be his archenemy. The Turkish government calls the Gulen movement a terrorist organization. In July 2016 They made a massive attempt to remove all Gulen supporters from the justice system, the police force, the military and media outlets.
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 core of the movement is education, and it also links religious values with a sensibility for economic activity. Meanwhile, the movement is active in more than 140 countries, mostly building schools and other educational institutions. Nothing is known about the source of its financing, nor about the exact number of its followers, which is normal for a Sufi formation. Analysts estimate he has between 3 million and 6 million followers. Members are said to contribute between 10 and 20 percent of their monthly income. The movement is estimated to hold up to $50 billion in assets virtually none of them in Gulens name.
Fethullah Gulen remains a political phenomenon in Turkey. Although "exiled" [self-imposed] in Pennsylvania since 1999, Gulen's impact continued to expand, aided by legions of loyalist supporters and a network of elite schools. Gulen continued to maintain a following within Turkey and his supporters are believed to have raised some 50 million liras ($17 million) between 2004 and 2015. He preaches Sunni Islam together with a message of interfaith dialogue and his movement, known as "Hizmit" (Service), operates in Europe, the United States, Asia and Africa.
Faced with anti-government protests and corruption investigations, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed his problems in part on Gulens followers and foreign powers. The Turkish president has frequently accused his former ally, who lives in exile in the US state of Pennsylvania, of trying to overthrow the government. But in his own messages, Gulen said Erdogan suffered from decayed thinking and denied Erdogans accusations Washington never found any compelling evidence in Erdogans previous claims.
Gulens messages of peace and tolerance have won him praise from luminaries in the United States. Former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and James Baker and former President Bill Clinton have all spoken at Gulen foundation events.
The Gulen Movement's purported goals focus on interfaith dialogue and tolerance, but in the current AKP-secularists schism, many Turks believed Gulen had a deeper and possibly insidious political agenda, and even some Islamist groups criticize Gulen's lack of transparency, which they say created doubts about his motives.
Gulen was born between 1938-1942 (varying dates have been given), and initially served as an imam and as an employee of Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). He established his own movement in the 1970s based on the teachings of Said Nursi, an Islamic thinker of Kurdish origin, whose followers are called Nurcus. Gulen then broke away from the Nursi framework. Gulen's own philosophy emphasizes the role of science in Islam. He supports interfaith dialogue and condemns terrorism. In the past two decades, Gulen has focused primarily on education, not only in Turkey but around the world. His schools have earned a reputation particularly in Central and South Asia for academic excellence and the advocacy of moderate Islamic views.
Gulen has been living in the US since 1999 when he went there ostensibly for health treatments (a heart condition and diabetes). At the same time, however, he faced charges in Turkey of plotting to overthrow the state. The charges were based on a 1986 sermon where Gulen is heard declaring that "our friends, who have positions in legislative and administrative bodies, should learn its details and be vigilant all the time so they can transform it and be more fruitful on behalf of Islam in order to carry out a nationwide restoration." This indictment gave his travel to the US the appearance of his being a fugitive from the Turkish judicial system. A Turkish Court acquitted him of all charges in 2006. That acquittal was appealed but the acquittal was upheld in 2008.
In the meantime, Gulen had applied for Permanent Residence status in the US. Immigration officials initially rejected Gulen's application to be classified as "an alien of extraordinary ability," but a Federal Court ruled in late 2008 that this rejection had been improper. Gulen now holds a Green Card, and lives in a secluded compound in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains.
The core of the Fethullah Gulen Movement is his network of schools, which extend from South Africa to the United States. The schools emphasize high academic achievement, and they openly recruit and provide scholarships to the brightest students from poor and working class families. Gulenist schools in Turkey routinely produce graduates who score in the upper one percent of the annual university entrance exam. These top graduates often become teachers themselves. The Gulenist doctrine, with its conservative and religiously observant undercurrent, has met fierce hostility in regimes such as Russia, which expelled the Gulenists en masse in the 1990s.
Central Asia was one of the first regions where the movement set up schools in the 1990s as part of a then Turkish-government supported push to spread Turkish culture and influence abroad. The drive, which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw schools established in all the newly independent Central Asian states with the support of local governments.
However, several of the region's authoritarian leaders later turned against the schools. Uzbekistan closed the schools in the early 2000s, Turkmenistan in the early 2010s, and Tajikistan last year. Russia, which originally welcomed the schools in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, annexed the schools in the early 2000s by putting them directly under the state educational system. None of these countries provided a reason for shutting the Gulen schools. But some observers say that authoritarian governments are usually the first to feel threatened by the existence of any well-organized network in their countries that is not under their direct control.
But it is within Turkey that the movement has its roots, its largest following, and its greatest controversies. The Gulen Movement includes not only educational institutions, including the famous Samanyolu ("Milky Way") school in Ankara and Fatih University, but also the Journalists and Writers Foundation, various businesses, and media outlets such as "Zaman," "Today's Zaman" (English language), "Samanyolu TV," and "Aksiyon Weekly."
In his early years in power, Erdogan drew on Gulen's influence in the judiciary to help tame the Turkish army, which had toppled four governments since 1960, including the country's first Islamist-led cabinet, through a series of coup plot trials. Gulenists reportedly dominate the Turkish National Police [TNP], where they serve as the vangard for the Ergenekon investigation -- an extensive probe into an alleged vast underground network that is accused of attempting to encourage a military coup in 2004. The investigation swept up many secular opponents of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), including Turkish military figures, which prompted accusations that the Gulenists had as their ultimate goal the undermining of all institutions which disapprove of Turkey becoming more visibly Islamist.
The assertion that the Turkish National Police is controlled by Gulenists is impossible to confirm but no one disputes it, and TNP applicants who stay at Gulenist pensions are provided the answers in advance to the TNP entrance exam.
Gulenist newspapers such as "Zaman" relentlessly questioned the validity of the Ataturk legacy and argue that as an EU aspirant country, Turkey must ensure the diminished voice of the Turkish military in political issues. These papers champion the Ergenekon investigation and continually stress that the traditional dominance of the Turkish military has been a negative factor in Turkey's history. Not surprisingly, the the Turkish General Staff openly loathe Gulen, and contend that he and his legions of supporters are embarked on a ruthless quest not only to undermine the Turkish military but to transform Turkey into an Islamic republic similar to Iran.
Even among some Islamist organizations, the Fethullah Gulen Movement had a murky reputation. The City Women's Platform regarded Gulen positively, because he disapproves of the use of violence, but that Gulen's lack of transparency creates doubt about his motives and leads to suspicions about what lies ahead -- even within the communities where Gulen is most active. Gulen's purported main goal is to bolster interfaith dialogue and tolerance, but the notion is widespread among many circles in Turkey that his agenda is deeper and more insidious.
The Gulen movement has been described as a modernized version of Sunni Hanafi Islam. It shares this orientation with "Milli Gorus," the grouping associated with former PM Necmettin Erbakan, but the two movements are otherwise distinct: "Milli Gorus" is Turkey-centric; the Gulen Movement has a broader scope and is more comfortable with the concept of justifying the means for the end, such as discarding the headscarf when necessary. Still, there is some convergence: many of the founders of AKP came from "Milli Gorus," but many officials within AKP are known to be close to the Gulen movement.
Most discussions in Turkey which touch on Gulen tend to be somewhat delicate and deliberately artful. In addition, the political context for conversations about Gulen is complicated because President Gul is himself seen by almost all as a Gulenist, while Prime Minister Erdogan is not. Indeed, some have argued that Erdogan is so firmly outside the Gulen camp that Gulen loyalists view him as a liability. At the same time, the Republican People's Party and other AKP opponents of the ruling Justice and Development Party were quick to accuse the US of working covertly to prop up Gulen, allegedly to weaken Turkey's secular foundation to produce a "model" moderate Islamic nation. This accusation relies on the premise that Gulen was given refuge in the US, and ultimately permanent resident status, despite facing indictment in Turkey for illegal anti-secularist activities.
Gulen had his share of non-Islamic supporters, which includes the Eucumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. Given the current AKP-secularist schism in Turkey today, it should not be surprising that any Islamist movement in Turkey would choose to be circumspect about its intentions. Unfortunately, this simply feeds the reflexive tendency in Turkish society for conspiracy theories, and magnifies suspicions about the Gulen movement itself. While the purported Gulen goals of interfaith dialogue and tolerance are beyond reproach, there are aspects of concern in the allegations that the US is somehow behind the Gulen movement.
The US is not "sheltering" Gulen and his presence in the US is not based on any political decision. Gulen applied for, and received, permanent residence in the US after a lengthy process which ended in 2008 when a Federal Court ruled that he deserved to be viewed as an "alien of extraordinary ability" based on his extensive writings and his leadership of a worldwide religious organization. As a Green Card holder, Gulen is entitled to all the privileges which that status entails. His presence in the US should not be viewed as a reflection of US policy toward Turkey.
Turkey's government has taken over companies that are believed to have ties to Gulen, detained hundreds of followers, and removed thousands of Gulen's supporters from government jobs. Turkey's government accuses the Gulen movement of infiltrating the police, judiciary and political system and creating a state within a state.
The Human Rights Watch's 2016 world report stated that there was no evidence to prove the charges of terrorism held against the Gulent movement, which was inspired by the teachings of prominent Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen. Prosecutions of journalists, judges, prosecutors and police for membership of an alleged Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization' were ongoing at time of writing, although there is no evidence to date that the Gulen movement has engaged in violence or other activities that could reasonably be described as terrorism, the HRW report reads. The report titled "World Report 2016: Politics of Fear' Threatens Rights was released on 27 January 2016 in Istanbul.
Pointing to legal proceedings launched against the police and judicial members deemed as being close to the Gulen movement following a major corruption scandal in December 2013, the HRW went on to state: The AK Party government in 2015 continued efforts to purge the police and judiciary of alleged supporters of the Gulen movement. During 2015, prosecutors, judges, and police officers with perceived links to the Gulen movement were jailed and charged with plotting against the government and membership of a terrorist organization. The main evidence being cited against judges and prosecutors at the time of writing was decisions taken in the course of their professional duties rather than any evidence of criminal activity.
In May 2016, the president designated the religious movement of Gulen a terrorist group and said he would pursue its members, whom he accused of trying to overthrow the government. The move put the organization built by his former ally legally on par with Kurdish militants currently fighting the army in Turkey's southeast. Erdogan might use the designation in pressing Washington to extradite Gulen.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who conducted an interview through FaceTime with CNN Turk 15 July 2016, said Turkey "cannot be run from Pennsylvania," a reference to Gulen who lives in the US mid-Atlantic state.
Fethullah Gulen denied involvement in the coup attempt and condemned it. In response to the upheaval in Turkey, a nonprofit group serving as a voice for the Gulen movement rebuked the violence. We have consistently denounced military interventions in domestic politics, the Alliance for Shared Values said in a statement. We condemn any military intervention in domestic politics of Turkey.
On July 16, 2016 Somalia ordered organizations linked to a US-based Turkish cleric shut down after Turkeys president said Fethullah Gulen was involved the 15 July 2016 coup attempt. The decision came in an extraordinary session of the Somali cabinet on Saturday. The government ordered Turkish citizens working for Gulen-linked organizations to leave the country within seven days. The government said the services the organizations provided, such as education and health care, will continue under new administration. The cabinet said the decision was in response to a request from the Turkish government.
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Saudi Arabia uncooperative in Bin Laden probe: 9/11 report
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 5:59PM
Saudi Arabia has refused to cooperate with US-led investigations about former al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and other terror suspects before and after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, according to newly declassified documents.
On Friday, the US Congress released 28 pages of a congressional report about the attacks that revealed the extent of Saudi Arabia's involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The documents, kept secret until now, indicate that the Riyadh regime provided investigators with false details but escaped punishment because of its status as a staunch ally of Washington.
"Prior to September 11th, the FBI apparently did not focus investigative resources on [redacted] Saudi nationals in the United States due to Saudi Arabia's status as an American 'ally,' " reads the report.
"There is a May 1996 memo from the [CIA's] Counterterrorist Center [redacted] stating that the Saudis had stopped providing background information or other assistance on bin Laden because bin Laden had too much information about official Saudi dealings with Islamic extremists in the 1980s for Riyadh to deliver him into US hands," the papers added.
The report also revealed that the al-Qaeda chief's half brother Abdullah bin Laden worked as "an administrative officer" for the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, DC.
However, Riyadh's failure to provide Washington with the necessary details further reduced chances to prevent the attacks, according to the documents.
"When a high-level [redacted] officer was asked how the September 11 attacks might have been prevented, he cited greater Saudi cooperation, pointing to an example from the summer of 2001, when the US requested Saudi assistance, with no success," the report states.
Supporting the hijackers and selectively helping Washington's investigations were some of the other charges that the report brought against the kingdom.
"While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government," the report said.
Of the 19 hijackers that reportedly carried out the attacks, at least 15 were from Saudi Arabia. Today it is also proven that some of the hijackers had received financial support from Saudi officials.
"FBI documents... indicate that several Saudi naval officers were in contact with the September 11 hijackers," the report notes.
Despite the report's revelations, the White House claimed the 28 pages clear Saudi Arabia's ties to the attacks as they offer no conclusive evidence.
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French Police Release Estranged Wife of Nice Attacker
by VOA News July 17, 2016
French police Sunday released the estranged wife of the truck driver who ran down nearly 300 Bastille Day revelers in the French resort of Nice, but are still questioning six others to see if the attacker was acting alone.
The woman, the mother of attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's three children, was arrested Friday. She was detained hours after Bouhlel drove a 19-ton refrigerator truck at 90 kilometers an hour along Nice's Mediterranean shoreline Promenade des Anglais, mowing down people over a 2-kilometer path, killing 84 of them.
Her lawyer told French television she is no longer in touch with him, after kicking him out of their house when he physically abused her.
Authorities believe that Bouhlel sent a text message to someone just 18 minutes before launching the truck attack, saying, "Bring more weapons, bring five of them to C," although it was unclear what the letter C referred to.
Among the six still in custody were a man and a woman arrested Sunday, but police gave no indication why they were being held.
A grieving France was observing the second of its three days of national mourning for the 84 people, including 10 children, killed in the attack and the more than 200 injured. Authorities said 85 people were still hospitalized, with 18 of them in critical condition.
The Islamic State terror group has claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack in a statement published in an IS media outlet, calling the attacker a "soldier."
It remains unclear whether there was any direct connection between the French-Tunisian attacker and the terrorist group. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities "now know that the killer radicalized very quickly."
But authorities said said he was "totally unknown" to French intelligence services. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said American authorities also had no prior knowledge of the attacker, adding that when someone has been radicalized recently, finding them is "worse than a needle in the haystack."
As of Sunday, no evidence had emerged of Bouhlel's sudden transformation from someone with no apparent interest in Islam. Relatives and friends said they knew the 31-year-old Bouhlel as someone who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and ate pork, traits unlikely for a devout Muslim.
"The claim on Saturday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalization of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack," Valls said, adding that the Islamic State "gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts...this is probably what happened in Nice's case."
The promenade along the Mediterranean is now lined with flowers and candles, transformed into a makeshift memorial to the victims. The area has largely returned to normal with tourists and locals frequenting the many cafes and night spots in Nice.
Bouhlel, who lived in Nice, was suspected by local police to have committed criminal offenses. In March, he was given a suspended, six-month sentence for armed violence that took place in January. Relatives living in Tunisia told news agencies that he had psychological problems before leaving for France in 2005. His father said Bouhlel had problems from 2002 to 2004 "that caused a nervous breakdown."
'Facing a struggle'
In an address to the nation, French President Francois Hollande said the attack was done "to satisfy the cruelty of an individual and maybe a group." Speaking after visiting the hospital where victims were treated, he also said France was "facing a struggle which will be long.''
Hollande said France's state of emergency, set to end later this month, will be extended another three months. He has also enacted Operation Sentinel, introduced after terror attacks in January 2015 that allow 10,000 extra military personnel to boost the ranks of security forces across the country. He said France will strengthen its roles in Syria and Iraq. "We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil," Hollande said.
Thursday's slaughter was the third major terrorist attack in France since last year. A coordinated attack in Paris on November 13 killed at least 130 people in a strike claimed by Islamic State, and a series of attacks in January 2015 that began with an assault on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo killed 17 people.
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Chinese premier wins backing over South China Sea at ASEM Summit
People's Daily Online
(Xinhua) 08:28, July 17, 2016
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."
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China's air force conducts combat air patrol in South China Sea
People's Daily Online
(Xinhua) 20:09, July 18, 2016
BEIJING, July 18 -- The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force has conducted a combat air patrol in the South China Sea recently, which will become "a regular practice" in the future, said a military spokesperson on Monday.
The PLA sent H-6K bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, said Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force.
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Salehi terms Iran nuclear case closure a miracle
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
Tehran, July 17, IRNA -- Head of Iran Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi said on Sunday the adversaries had brought unfounded accusations about Iranian nuclear program, so that closure of the nuclear case was a miracle.
He made the remarks in the introduction ceremony of his new deputies.
Salehi referred to the anniversary of nuclear deal known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), saying that few persons believed that the stand-off will be the matter of the past.
Of course, friends and dears took concerted efforts in this respect and God gives nothing to anybody for free, he said.
Referring to Iraq-imposed war 1980-1988 and the sanctions imposed on Iran over the the past decades, Salehi said, 'We have many problems, but, we enjoy other divine blessings such as security, we should be thankful'.
Salehi said that the UN has announced several days ago that Iran has also taken major steps in the field of health services.
He further noted that Iran has achieved eight indices out of 15 set to be materialized until 2020 and this was achieved despite obstacles and political immoralities.
Referring to warm welcome accorded to the Iranian delegation by the officials in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) France, Salehi opined that ITER and Fusion are the most Important projects of the organization.
'True that they will bear fruit after 40 years, but if this generation does not undertake them, we will never be forgiven,' he said.
During the ceremony, Mohammad Qannadi-Maragheh was appointed as deputy head of the organization and Behrouz Kamalvandi as deputy for international, legal and parliamentary affairs.
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Velayati criticizes US for breaching JCPOA
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
Tehran, July 17, IRNA -- Head of the Center for Strategic Research of Expediency Council Ali-Akbar Velayati said on Sunday that the Americans have not honored their commitment to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Velayati, also a top foreign policy advisor to Supreme Leader, made the remarks in a ceremony to mark the 1st anniversary of the landmark nuclear deal with six world powers.
The Americans have not honored their commitments to the nuclear deal, the sanctions are not fully removed and some of the conditions set by the Supreme Leader have been ignored, Velayati said.
President Obama has to give assurances that the sanctions will be removed, Velayati said, adding, 'We have kept all our promises even ahead of the time they had specified, but unfortunately, the Western parties to JCPOA have not removed the sanctions yet.'
Velayati said that as repeatedly warned by the Supreme Leader, the Americans may lift nuclear-related sanctions, but, driven by the blind animosity toward Iran, they will impose new sanctions under other pretexts.
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Araqchi downplays Congress measures, holds US gov't responsible for JCPOA implementation
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
Tehran, June 17, IRNA -- Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Sunday that the US government has to refrain from any measure that would violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Araqchi made the remarks in a press conference.
Asked to comment about anti-Iran measures made by the US Congress, he said that the Congress has taken a hostile approach towards Iran from the very beginning and some others in the region and beyond have helped them.
However, he noted that Iran regards the US government responsible for the commitments to the JCPOA.
The US government has to refrain from any measure that would violate the nuclear deal, Araqchi said.
'We do not care about what the US Congress does but it is the US government that should honor its commitments to JCPOA,' he said, adding that the US President Barack Obama has said he will veto the Congress bid to block the nuclear deal.
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Iran discuss selling heavy water with 4 countries
ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency
Sun / 17 July 2016 / 09:47
TEHRAN (ISNA)- Spokesman of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behrouz Kamalvandi said that Iran has held talks with 3-4 countries on selling heavy water.
"The heavy water sold is now on the way and would reach the US next month," he said.
"We delivered a 32 tone consignment of heavy water to the US a few days ago. We attached an
amendment to our agreement. We delivered the consignment after we received the cash because of
their unreliability and concerns we had."
He said that the heavy water can be used for different purposes, including power plants and
research projects, and Iran has held talks with 3-4 countries.
Kamalvandi said that Iran included other countries in the negotiations because it could find alternative
countries in case US failed to buy heavy water since the US Congress has banned purchase from Iran.
End Item
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Iran Navy to send 42nd flotilla to high seas
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 3:56PM
The 42nd flotilla of the Iranian Navy plans to set off for high seas to safeguard maritime routes used by Iranian vessels operating in international waters.
The flotilla will be dispatched to high seas on Monday simultaneous with the return of the 41st fleet of the Iranian Navy to the country.
The 41st flotilla, consisting of Lavan logistic warship and Alborz destroyer, will arrive in the country's southern coasts on Monday after sailing over 5,130 miles in 48 days.
During its presence in high seas, the fleet managed to escort 46 Iranian merchant ships and oil tankers.
Iran's Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari will attend a ceremony to welcome the return of the flotilla.
In recent years, Iran's Navy has increased its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for merchant vessels and tankers.
In line with international efforts against piracy, the Iranian Navy has been also conducting patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 in order to safeguard merchant ships and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran or other countries.
Iran's Navy has managed to foil several attacks on both Iranian and foreign vessels during its missions in international waters.
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Iran decries US failure to fulfill JCPOA obligations
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 12:44PM
A senior advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has slammed the United States for its failure to remain committed to last year's nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.
Ali Akbar Velayati, the Leader's advisor on international affairs, made the remarks on Sunday on the occasion of the first anniversary of the nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia plus Germany on July 14, 2015.
"The Americans did not abide by their obligations under the JCPOA. Sanctions [imposed on Iran] have not been lifted completely and certain conditions set by the Leader in the JCPOA have not been observed," he added.
The senior Iranian official emphasized that US President Barack Obama should pledge in writing that his administration would remove sanctions imposed on Iran by Washington, but he has not met this condition yet.
He reiterated Iran's commitment to its JCPOA obligations, saying, "But, Western sides have not lifted the sanctions yet."
Iran and the six world powers started implementing the JCPOA on January 16.
Under the deal, all nuclear-related sanctions imposed on Iran by the European Union, the Security Council and the US should be lifted. Iran has, in return, put some limitations on its nuclear activities.
After the JCPOA went into effect, congressional Republicans have introduced many sanctions bills and other legislation to undermine the agreement that is viewed as a foreign policy legacy of President Obama's administration.
The American banks are still banned from dealing with Iran as part of an old US trade embargo that still remains in place. Accordingly, this is believed to have already effectively blocked any transactions with Iran which is based on US dollar, because they would ultimately have to be cleared in the US.
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Iraqi Military Liberate District in Anbar Province From Daesh Militants
Sputnik News
16:52 18.07.2016
Iraqi forces have liberated from the Daesh militants the ad-Dulab district in the western province of Anbar, Commander of the Iraqi Army Maj. Gen. Numan Zubai said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to the commander, Iraqi forces have killed 73 Daesh militants, destroyed three mined cars and neutralized 500 improvised explosive devices.
"Squadrons of the seventh army brigade, supported by tribal fighters, international coalition aircraft, [Iraq's] Air Force and artillery, have managed to liberate the ad-Dulab to the West of the Hit city," Zubai told the Al Sumaria television broadcaster.
Iraqi troops launched a large-scale offensive against Daesh militants last summer. In December 2015, they drove Islamists out of the Anbar provincial capital Ramadi, in preparation for the operation to recapture the Daesh stronghold in Fallujah.
Daesh is a designated terrorist group that is outlawed in the United States, Russia and numerous other countries worldwide.
Sputnik
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Dunford Says ISIL in Libya is Weakened
By Lisa Ferdinando DoD News, Defense Media Activity
STUTTGART, Germany, July 18, 2016 The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said here today he is encouraged by developments against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Libya, a branch of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
"The trend line for [ISIL] Libya is positive from my perspective," Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford said during a joint press conference with Marine Corps Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, after Waldhauser assumed command of U.S. Africa Command.
Dunford said terrorists suffered "significant casualties" in and around Benghazi, with assessments indicating their numbers have been reduced to just a few hundred inside the northern city of Sirte.
"I don't think that there's any doubt that the Islamic State in Libya is weaker than it was some months ago; there's no question about it," he said.
Dunford said whatever actions the United States conducts in Libya, "less those specifically against the threat against the homeland or our interests," are done in conjunction with the interim government there, known as the Government of National Accord.
Fighting in Sirte
Over the last six to eight weeks, the General National Congress, which is aligned with the GNA, has been fighting against Islamic State terrorists in Sirte, Dunford told reporters.
"There has been a significant amount of attrition against [ISIL] Libya in Sirte as a result of those operations," he said.
The general added he is "very encouraged" by the U.N. effort to bring together two security forces, the GNC and the House of Representatives.
"I think probably the most important thing that can happen inside of Libya over the next week or two are the negotiations ongoing to bring those security forces both aligned underneath the GNA," he said.
Dunford said U.S. diplomats speak with Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj on a routine basis.
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Armata Tanks to Get Russian-Made Sights as MoD Phases Out Imports
Sputnik News
16:54 17.07.2016(updated 16:56 17.07.2016)
The next generation of armored vehicles based on the Armata and Kurganets tracked platforms will feature Russian-made sight matrices instead of French ones now, Gazeta.ru wrote citing Defense Ministry sources in Moscow.
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 Russia's top-of-the-line tanks and armored vehicles based on the Armata and Kurganets platforms during last year's 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.
"We are already working on hardware components needed for mass production of [the next generation of tanks and armored vehicles]," he said early last year.
Gazeta.ru learned that by "hardware components" Bochkarev meant, among other things, thermal sights and motion control gear for Armata and Kurganets tanks and APCs.
Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry is closely monitoring the process of replacing US, European and Ukrainian-made parts in Russian defense production.
The Russian Defense Ministry unveiled its new Armata tank at the May 9 Victory Day military parade in Moscow in 2015.
The tank is operated by a crew of three, housed in an armored capsule at the front. Its main armament includes a 125-mm smoothbore cannon and a 7.62-mm remote-control machine gun.
Sputnik
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Russia Tests Hydrogen-Powered Drones in Syria - Senior Military Source
Sputnik News
16:53 18.07.2016(updated 17:06 18.07.2016)
The Russian Aerospace Forces tested new hydrogen-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in Syria that allowed for longer flight times, a high-ranking Russian military official told RIA Novosti on Monday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The source said all the tested drones have safely returned to Russia for studies on their use in hot climates and sandstorms.
"The drones that have been used in Syria, not all, but there were quite a lot, flew on hydrogen fuel. In other words, they can stay in the air for a long time, allowing the propulsion to replenish energy," the source said.
According to the source, all UAVs have returned to Russia for analysis of combat data, including performance in sandstorms.
Sputnik
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Total of 188 Settlements Have Joined Syria Ceasefire - Russian Military
Sputnik News
23:33 17.07.2016
The number of settlements which agreed to join the Syrian ceasefire has increased to 188, Russian Center for reconciliation of opposing sides in Syria said on Sunday.
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.
The Russia-US brokered ceasefire regime in Syria came into force on February 27.
Sputnik
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Syrian Army, Militia Groups Liberate Town of Kinsabba From al-Nusra Front
Sputnik News
11:30 17.07.2016(updated 11:34 17.07.2016)
The Syrian Army and militia groups have liberated the town of Kinsabba in the northwest of the country near the border with Turkey, a source told RIA Novosti on Sunday.
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.
Syria has been mired in civil war since March 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups.
A US-Russia-brokered ceasefire came into force across Syria on February 27. It does not apply to terrorist groups such as Daesh and the al-Nusra Front, both outlawed in Russia.
Sputnik
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Naval frigate on way back after patrol mission near Spratlys
ROC Central News Agency
2016/07/18 16:39:57
Taipei, July 18 (CNA) The Lafayette-class Di Hua frigate is on its way back to Taiwan after completing a routine patrol mission in waters near the Spratly Islands, sources said Monday.
The warship, which was originally scheduled to set off for the mission on July 14, set sail a day earlier after a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on July 12 concerning a dispute between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea.
The court found that none of the Spratly Islands, including the Taiwan-held Taiping Island, could be considered "islands" under international law and are therefore not entitled to 200-nautical-mile economic zones, indirectly undermining Taiwan's claims in the region.
Before its departure, President Tsai Ing-wen () gave a pep talk to the crew on board, saying that the government was committed to maintaining Taiwan's sovereignty over Taiping and other islands in the South China Sea.
Also Monday, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said the Wei Hsing patrol vessel, which left for Taiping Island on July 10, will head back to Taiwan on Tuesday.
Another patrol vessel named the Taitung set sail for the region on July 16 to take over the mission of protecting the security of waters surrounding Taiping Island, the CGA said.
(By Lu Hsin-hui, Chu Che-wei and Y.F. Low)
ENDITEM/ls
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Turkish acting army chief says 104 coup plotters killed, 1,563 soldiers detained
People's Daily Online
(Xinhua) 08:59, July 17, 2016
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."
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Turkish president urges Obama to extradite leader of opposition movement
People's Daily Online
(Xinhua) 08:33, July 17, 2016
ISTANBUL, July 16 -- 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.
"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.
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Turkey reopens air base used by US apparently to target Daesh
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 7:53PM
The Turkish government has reopened an air base in the south of the country used by American forces to allegedly target Daesh terrorists, the Pentagons says.
"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 read on Sunday.
Access to the Incirlik air base was denied by Turkish authorities and power was cut after an overnight coup again the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday.
US Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN that he had spoken with his Turkish counterpart three times on Saturday.
"They assure me that there will be no interruption of our counter-ISIL efforts," Kerry said, referring to the Daesh Takfiri terrorists, whom the US alleges is fighting.
He further suggested that the coup supporters may have used the base, located in the southern city of Adana, to refuel.
The secretary of state has also asserted that Ankara should respect what he call the democratic process in the country.
"We have urged them not to reach out so far that they are creating doubts about their commitment to the democratic process," he told NBC.
Following the overnight coup that left nearly 300 people dead, the Turkish president pointed the finger at Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is based in the US state of Pennsylvania.
Gulen, however, has categorically denied the accusations, saying he is totally against a coup.
The US, along with its regional allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have been known to openly support the Daesh terror group operating in Syria and Iraq.
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Turkey detains coup plotters at base used by US: Media
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 7:9AM
Turkey has detained a senior air force general and other officers accused of involvement in a failed military coup at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria, Turkish media reports say.
Local news papers, including Hurriyet Daily, said brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was taken into custody Saturday along with over a dozen lower ranking at Incirlik Air Base in the southern province of Adana.
AFP quoted an unnamed Turkish official as saying that Ankara suspected Incirlik was used to refuel military aircraft hijacked by the putschists overnight Friday.
Last year, Turkey agreed to allow the United States to use Incirlik to carry out raids against purported Daesh targets in neighboring Iraq and Syria.
Incirlik is of strategic importance to Washington's aerial military operations as it is home to A-10s, the most reliable manned aircraft the US uses in its military campaign in the two Arab states.
It is also one of six NATO sites in the region, which house tactical nuclear weapons.
On Saturday, Turkey said it managed to largely crush an attempted military coup launched by an army faction after a night of explosions, gunfire and tanks rolling along the streets of the capital, Ankara, and the main city of Istanbul.
Fierce clashes erupted between army forces and the soldiers involved in the foiled coup.
In the wake of the botched coup, Ankara has launched an intensive crackdown against the judiciary and the military.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Sunday Turkey has detained over 6,000 people over the coup plot and the number will rise.
"Now the clean-up operations are continuing. We have around 6,000 people detained. The number will increase above 6,000," he was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency.
A total of 265 people were killed in the attempted coup d'etat in Turkey.
According to the US consulate in Adana, Turkish officials had imposed a security lockdown on the air base in the wake of the coup, preventing all movements in or out of the site. The airspace around Incirlik airbase remained closed for a few hours.
The report on arrests inside Incirlik come as a number of Turkish state officials, including Labor and Social Security Minister Suleyman Soylu, have suggested that the US had played a part in the failed coup.
The accusations prompted US Secretary of State John Kerry to call Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and reject the claims as "utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations."
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Turkey turmoil: Foreign plot or staged coup
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 6:34AM
Some of the soldiers detained in Turkey have reportedly told interrogators they were not aware they were part of a coup attempt.
They had been told by commanders they were taking part in military maneuvers, the Turkish Hurriyet newspaper has reported.
Some soldiers said they understood they were part of a coup when they saw civilians climb on tanks.
Turkish televisions have shown footage of soldiers surrendering to people and special forces police without resistance, their hands behind their heads.
According to Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, all soldiers involved in the attempted coup have been taken into custody.
A Turkish official told reporters that six senior army commanders were arrested in connection with the failed coup, including General Akin Ozturk, who in the 1990s was the Turkish military attache to Israel.
The 64-year-old Ozturk, who later served as the commander of Turkey's air force, served in his country's Tel Aviv embassy from 1998 to 2000.
He stepped down as air force commander last year, but continued to serve on Turkey's Supreme Military Council. Prior to Friday's coup attempt he was a celebrated military leader, boasting medals from his own air force as well as from NATO.
According to a Turkish official, those behind the attempted coup had been preparing for some time to overthrow the Turkish government.
Accusations of US role
The most dramatic fallout from the event, however, was suggestions by Turkish state officials that the US was involved in the failed coup.
The accusations by Labor and Social Security Minister Suleyman Soylu, in an interview on Turkish TV, forced US Secretary of State John Kerry Turkish to call Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and warn that those claims could harm ties.
Kerry "made clear 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 in a statement.
The first aftershock came as the Incirlik airbase used by the United States forces lost its electric power and local military authorities closed movement in and out of it.
Ankara and Washington have already clashed over US support for Kurdish militants in Syria, which Turkey regards as terrorists trying to carve out an independent state in the region.
Staged coup for crackdown?
Ankara is also angry with Washington for giving refuge to Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose followers Turkey blames for the failed coup.
On Saturday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the US to extradite Gulen but Kerry suggested that his country would do so if Turkish leaders "present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny."
Gulen said the attempted overthrow may have been staged. "There is a slight chance, there is a possibility that it could be a staged coup," Gulen told reporters in Pennsylvania. "It could be meant for court accusations and associations."
Turkish authorities rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters on Saturday and ordered thousands of judges detained.
Erodogan said that the coup leaders would "pay a heavy price" as his ally and deputy prime minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu announced that the government is considering bringing back the death penalty for the plotters.
"This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army," he said in Istanbul.
French President Francois Hollande said he expected there would be a period of repression in Turkey in the aftermath of the failed coup.
A successful overthrow of Erdogan would have marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, which is grappling with a Takfiri menace and foreign-backed militants fighting to topple Iraqi and Syrian governments.
There are already suspicions that the US and its allies are creating "managed chaos" in the Middle East with the aim of weakening regional countries and propping up Israel.
Warning of further instability
Russia's Foreign Ministry warned that the coup attempt in Turkey increases the threat to stability in the region.
"Moscow is most concerned at the latest events in Turkey," the ministry said in a statement.
"The flare-up of the domestic political situation against the backdrop of the existing terrorist threats in this country and the armed conflict in the region brings a heightened risk to international and regional stability."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged Turkey to avoid "bloodshed," saying its problems needed to be resolved "in accordance with the constitution."
In Iran, Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani hailed "the victory of democracy and national will over a desperate bid" to topple the government.
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U.S.-Based Turkish Cleric Rejects Coup Plot Charges
July 17, 2016
Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen has rejected any involvement in the failed coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Gulen, who lives in exile in the eastern U.S. state of Pennsylvania, said on July 16 that he had "no knowledge" of the military coup attempt that began late on July 15 and that he condemned any violent attempt to oust the Turkish government.
The reclusive Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, spoke to reporters at an Islamic compound amid accusations by Turkish officials of involvement by Gulen supporters in the coup attempt.
"You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup," Gulen said. "They could be sympathizers of the opposition party; they could be sympathizers of the nationalist party."
Erdogan called for U.S. officials to send Gulen -- who has lived in the United States since 1999 -- back to Turkey during a rally in Istanbul on July 16.
"Mr. [U.S.] President [Barack Obama], I told you myself, either deport or hand over to us this person," said Erdogan. "I told you that he was engaged in coup plots, but I was not listened to.... Deliver this man who lives in Pennsylvania to Turkey."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on July 16 that the Obama administration would consider an extradition request for Gulen but would only comply if Washington was shown proof of the cleric's guilt.
Gulen is a former ally of Erdogan who became a sharp critic of the Turkish president's authoritarian ways.
Based on reporting by AP and Reuters
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/us- based-turkish-cleric-rejects-coup- plot-charges/27863015.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 Signals Turkey Could Restore Death Penalty Following Failed Coup
July 17, 2016
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erodgan says his country would consider reinstating capital punishment in the wake of the July 15 failed military coup attempt.
Speaking on July 17, Erdogan said his government will discuss the use of the death penalty with opposition parties in parliament.
"In a democracy, you cannot ignore the demands of the people," Erdogan said to a crowd of supporters who were calling for the death penalty outside his residence in Istanbul.
"We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay," Erdogan said.
Capital punishment has not been used in Turkey since 1984 and was abolished in 2004 to meet European Union accession criteria.
Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have detained more than 6,000 people over the failed coup attempt, as Erdogan pledged that the "cleansing" of state institutions will continue.
Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on July 17, Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of supporters of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames of being behind the plot.
Erdogan said Turkey would request the extradition of the cleric, who denies any involvement in the failed coup attempt.
Gulen lives in exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on July 16 that the Obama administration would consider an extradition request for Gulen but would only comply if Washington was shown clear evidence of the cleric's involvement in the coup.
Erdogan also his supporters to continue to occupy public places and take to the streets in the days ahead.
The arrests included high-ranking military officers and 2,700 judges. More than 50 senior soldiers were detained on July 17.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag described the arrests as a "clean-up operation," saying the number is expected to rise.
Turkey's state-run news agency reported that authorities have issued a warrant for the arrest of Erdogan's top military aide.
The Anadolu Agency said on July 17 the warrant was issued against Colonel Ali Yazici. It wasn't immediately clear what role, if any, Yazici played in the attempted coup.
Officials say at least 265 people were killed in clashes as the coup failed.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on July 17 that life has returned to normal following the turmoil in Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.
He said the central bank, capital markets board, banking system, and stock exchange were all operating with their normal schedules.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the failed military coup attempt did not interrupt the fight against the extremist group Islamic State (IS).
Turkey, a major U.S. ally in the region, has allowed the United States to use an air base in Incirlik to launch attacks against the militant group.
Those air operations were blocked, at least temporarily, by the Turkish government following the coup.
The Pentagon said on July 17 that Turkish authorities have reopened the air base in Incirlik and U.S. led operations against IS have resumed from Turkey.
"After close coordination with our Turkish allies, counter-ISIL coalition air operations in Turkey have resumed," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said on Twitter.
Based on reporting by AP, dpa, and Reuters
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey- arrests-failed-coup/27863439.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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Meet Exiled Muslim Cleric Wanted in Turkey for Allegedly Instigating Coup
Sputnik News
20:21 17.07.2016
Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the attempted coup in Turkey was organized by people living in the United States. In particular, he accused the social activist and cleric Fethullah Gulen and urged Obama to extradite him to Ankara.
Fethullah Gulen is a cleric who leads the global Hizmet movement from exile in Pennsylvania, United States. He is a critic of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and remains influential in Turkish affairs.
Gulen was born on April 27, 1941 in the Turkish village of Korucuk. When he was 10 years old he became a professional reciter of the Qur'an and in 1959 he was appointed the second imam of the mosque Jami Uchsherefli in Edirne.
At 20 years, Gulen started his military service in Ankara, but just three years later he returned to Edirne, where he took office as a Koran teacher and became an imam at a mosque called Darulhadis.
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, Gulen's 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 Gulen's 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.
Erdogan described it as an attempt to shift power under the pretext of a fight against corruption and accused the Hizmet movement.
The conflict between the parties kept amplifying. In 2014, Turkish police arrested employees of one of Turkey's largest newspapers Zaman and broadcaster Samanyolu TV, allegedly for having close ties with the Hizmet movement.
They were accused of trying to create an illegal organization and attempting to seize power in the country. In 2016, police detained more than a hundred supporters of Gulen, whereas, Zaman was given control of the external administration.
In May of this year, Erdogan actually said that Hizmet will be likened to a terrorist organization.
Gulen himself has firmly condemned the coup attempt, which occurred on the night of July 16. He did not rule out that it is possible that the coup attempt was staged by the Turkish leader himself.
"I do not think that the world believes in the charges made by President Erdogan. There is a chance that it was a staged coup, which could be used for further accusations against Gulenists," the politician said.
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 the 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 of the coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life.
Over 260 people were killed and hundreds were injured during the events, while some 6,000 people have already been detained.
Sputnik
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'Heavy Purges' Will Weaken Turkish Military and Ankara
Sputnik News
17:45 17.07.2016
Even before the unsuccessful coup attempt was over, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to "cleanse" the army, promising that the mid-rank military officers who tried to depose him on July 15 "will pay a heavy price." But looming purges will not only weaken the military, but also Turkey.
Erdogan compared the uprising to "a gift from God" because it will allow the authorities to weed out those who, in their opinion, pose a threat to the state and the government. This is particularly true of supporters of reclusive Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in the US since 1999.
The Muslim cleric was once a key Erdogan ally, but the Turkish strongman now views him as his archenemy. So much so that Erdogan accused Gulen of being the mastermind behind the military coup that rocked the country on Friday night. The cleric denied these allegations.
The Turkish president "will now implement a swift and forceful crackdown, which could easily escalate into an outright purge. Any member of the Turkish armed forces with even a tangential link to the Gulenist movement may face arrest," US-based think tank Stratfor noted.
The purge, like others before it, will adversely affect the Turkish Armed Forces, a once powerful institution that Erdogan has tried to weaken ever since he came to power.
"It will erode morale and lessen fighting cohesion. The arrest and imprisonment of combat leaders as well as quartermaster and military logistics administrators will increase disorganization and cause confusion among the ranks," the analysts detailed.
They further added that training schedules will likely be messed up "as routine exercises are postponed or canceled. Mistrust will spread. Planning for military operations will become more difficult as the government reforms its command and control structures."
The cleansing will come at a time when Turkey needs a strong military.
Turkish authorities have cracked down on the Kurds in southeastern regions of the country since the months-long peace process collapsed last year. They are struggling to contain massive waves of refugees fleeing sectarian violence in Syria. Ankara has also been involved in the Syrian conflict and counterterrorism efforts in Iraq.
"This will make it difficult for Ankara to use the military as an instrument of policy and national strategy," Stratfor noted, adding that recovery from upcoming purges will take years that Turkey does not have.
Sputnik
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42 Helicopters Missing in Turkey Sparking Concerns of a Second Coup Attempt
Sputnik News
17:26 17.07.2016(updated 01:28 18.07.2016)
At least 42 helicopters have gone missing from Turkey's military inventory in the wake of the failed coup attempt on Friday evening causing concern that there may be another act to the attempted overthrow of Erdogan.
CNN Turk anchor Serdar Tuncer reports that at least 42 helicopters have gone missing from the Turkish military inventory and says concern is brewing that another coup effort may soon be underway.
"It is as though this rogue will try more things. Can they succeed? No! But will they try?" said the reporter.
Unrest continues in Turkey in the wake of Friday's failed coup attempt that left at least 265 dead and over 2000 people wounded, most of whom were civilians answering the call of President Erdogan to put down the coup attempt.
The Turkish government asserts that it has retained full-control of the government and has begun a "systematic purge of the military." On Saturday, the government rounded up over 6,000 individuals who will face prosecution under the country's treason laws with President Erdogan refusing to rule out applying a death sentence to the traitors. The arrested include 2,745 judges and over 2,800 soldiers in the Turkish military including Erdogan's top military adviser.
The US State Department cautions that the situation in Turkey remains unstable in the wake of the failed coup plot and warns foreign travelers against visiting the country citing an increased terror threat as chaos ensues across the country.
NATO also maintains roughly 90 tactical nuclear weapons at the Incirlik Air Base, from where the 42 helicopters have gone missing, causing concern about the security of US weapons in Turkey and raising the specter that terrorists may ultimately be able to get their hands on advanced weaponry or potentially a nuclear bomb.
Sputnik
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Erdogan Not Ruling Out Death Penalty For Coup Supporters
Sputnik News
15:09 17.07.2016(updated 15:51 17.07.2016)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not ruling out instituting of death penalty for participants of the thwarted military coup in the country, media reported on Sunday.
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 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.
At least 265 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.
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Turkey's Failed Military Coup: 'Spur-of-the-Moment Event' Vs Planned Action
Sputnik News
13:55 17.07.2016
An unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has caught the country and the world by surprise. Questions remain as to who was truly behind the coup carried out by a group of middle-rank military and law enforcement officers and whether it was a well-planned operation, considering how quickly it failed.
Semyon Bagdasarov, Director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, told RT that there was a lot of bad blood between Erdogan and the armed forces. The Turkish strongman has been trying to weaken the army's influence in the country from the moment he came to power. And he largely succeeded.
"Erdogan has long hated the military. When he served as the mayor of Istanbul, the military put him in jail for incitement of ethnic hatred. When Erdogan [became the prime minister], the first thing he did was to hold a referendum in order to amend the Turkish constitution," he said.
Bagdasarov was referring to the 2010 national plebiscite that abolished Provisional Article 15 of the Constitution that provided protection to coup plotters. Hundreds of military personnel, including generals, have been tried under Erdogan, the analyst added.
For their part, the Turkish Armed Forces have been increasingly discontent with the Islamist-leaning trend in the country. At the same time, Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, once a key Erdogan ally, and his movement, known as Hizmet, "has never wielded influence on the military," Bagdasarov noted.
Erdogan has promptly pinned the blame for the Friday coup on Gulen, but the reclusive former imam has been influential with the law enforcement, the judiciary and partly intellectuals, not the army. As a result, coup plotters were able to receive support from a few military officers. In other words, not nearly as much as they needed to succeed. To a certain extent, this is why they failed.
Those who wanted to remove Erdogan from power on Friday "went all in without proper preparations," the analyst said. "But they did not have enough power. This is what happened."
Defense analyst Viktor Murakhovsky, the editor of the Arsenal Otechestva (the Armory of the Fatherland) military magazine, shared these sentiments. In his view, the army, at least its leaders, were not behind the coup.
"I would not say that the military made a stand against Erdogan," he told RT. "Unlike four successful post-WWII coups, this insurrection was not based on a military structure, but instead on a political platform that was backed by three-four dozen officers."
These people, the expert added, did not control the military and did not understand what needed to be done to take over the country.
"This was not a planned action, but rather a spur-of-the-moment event," Murakhovsky observed.
Sputnik
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Erdogan Vows to Rid Turkey of 'Virus' Behind Failed Coup
by Dorian Jones July 17, 2016
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.
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.
Authorities in Turkey said 2,745 judges had been suspended in the wake of the coup attempt most if not all of them because of alleged links to Gulen. Turkish media also reported that 140 arrest warrants had been issued for members of Turkey's Supreme Court.
The U.S. Defense Department said Turkey closed its airspace to military aircraft following the coup attempt and cut off electrical power to NATO's Incirlik Air Base, home to many U.S. warplanes involved in combat operations against Islamic State militants in Syria. A former senior U.S. diplomat who now lives in Turkey, Matthew Bryza, said this appeared to be a pressure tactic aimed at forcing the United States to hand over Gulen.
"President Erdogan issued a statement saying any country that doesn't help in bringing Mr. Gulen to justice is an enemy of Turkey. Well, he has only one country in mind the United States," Bryza told VOA.
Kerry said earlier Saturday that any extradition request from Turkey for Gulen's extradition would be judged on the basis of whatever solid evidence of Gulen's wrongdoing Turkey might provide.
Gulen went to the U.S. in 1999 to flee harassment by a former secular government in Turkey that was dominated by the military. He and Erdogan were close allies then, and they remained close for years after Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, but they fell out a few years ago after the Turkish leader assumed the presidency and came under increasing criticism for his autocratic policies.
A former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, told VOA's Georgian service 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," Volker said.
VOA's National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, White House Correspondent Mary Alice Salinas, VOA's Turkish service, VOA's Georgian service, and reporters Ken Schwartz and Isabela Cocoli were among those who contributed to this story.
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Situation "under control" in Turkey after coup attempt
People's Daily Online
(Xinhua) 07:54, July 18, 2016
ANKARA/ISTANBUL, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Turkish authorities said they regained control of the country on Saturday after thwarting an attempt by a military faction to seize power from the Turkish president.
The putsch attempt appeared not to have been backed by most senior military ranks, and Turkey's main opposition groups quickly condemned the attempted overthrow of the government.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that eight rebel soldiers escaped to Greeceby a helicopter, CNN Turk reported.
Ankara demanded Athens to immediately extradite the rebels who sought political asylum, Cavusoglu was quoted as saying.
He added that Greek authorities promised that they would fully cooperate with Ankara.
At least 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the coup attempt, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said earlier on Saturday.
"The situation is completely under control," Yildirim told reporters outside his Ankara office, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been held by the plotters.
He described the coup attempt as a "black stain" on Turkish democracy.
"Those who form the backbone of the coup have been taken into custody and arrests are still being made," he said.
Yildirim vowed to consider enacting a death penalty, which is not included in Turkey's constitution, "to make sure this will not happen again."
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.
Turkey's acting army chief Gen. Umit Dundar said 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.
"A military unrest has begun outside the chain of command around several cities of Turkey, mainly in Istanbul and Ankara," Dundar said.
"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.
"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, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to finish the operation against the military plotters, saying "our army is clean and no one can harm it."
Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when the coup attempt unfolded on Friday night, with tanks rolling into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul.
Appearing on television over a mobile phone overnight, Erdogan had urged people to take to streets to defend the government, and large crowds responded to his call.
He denounced the coup attempt as "treachery," saying he was carrying out his functions and would keep on working "to the end."
"What is being perpetrated is a treason and a rebellion. They will pay a heavy price for this act of treason," Erdogan said. "We will not leave our country to occupiers."
He pointed finger at cleric Fethullah Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him.
However, Gulen "categorically" denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation "insulting." Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in the United Statesfor years.
Turkish Airlines announced that flights are due to resume as normal at 1100 GMT on Saturday, its chairman told CNN Turk.
The airline had diverted 35 airplanes and canceled 32 flights on Saturday at Istanbul's main airport, Ilker Ayci told the broadcaster.
Turkish maritime authorities have reopened Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait to transiting tankers after shutting it earlier on Saturday for several hours following the attempted coup.
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 Russiaand the Caspian Sea - passing through the 17-mile waterway that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, countries have condemned the attempted coup and stressed support for Ankara.
Morocco said it was deeply concerned over the ongoing political turmoil in Turkey, where a rebel group in the military attempted to launch a coup against the legitimate government.
In an official statement by the Foreign Ministry, Morocco pledged support for Turkey's stability, saying it refuses any recourse to force to change regimes.
Sudan voiced its strong solidarity with the legitimate government in Turkey on Saturday, declaring support for the country to bolster stability, security and development, as well as enhance its international position.
"The Sudanese government and people have followed, with deep concern, the foiled coup attempt on Friday night, July 15, 2016, against the legitimate Turkish government," Sudanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The statement congratulated the Turkish government on its victory over the foiled military coup attempt.
Iran hailed "the resistance of Turkish people against the coup attempt as a victory of democracy."
"The brave support of the Turkish people of democracy and their elected government proved that the coup has no room in the region and is doomed to failure," Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said.
Saudi Arabia welcomed Erdogan's success in standing against the coup attempt, state news agency SPA quoted a foreign ministry official as saying on Saturday.
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Why did Turkey coup d'etat fail? President's popularity vs plotters' ineptitude
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 9:33AM
Protest in any society arises from discontent with the status quo, unlike a coup, in which there is an armed push to overthrow the state with the help of the military. The recent botched putsch in Turkey simultaneously falls into both categories and neither something inbetween but with a catch: The true winner of the overnight coup, President Erdogan, is using this "God-given gift" to reinvigorate his version of democracy and further the exact actions that caused the protests in the Turkish society in the first place.
Underneath the facts we know about the messy and short-lived coup-that-wasn't, there is a more dramatic series of events yet kept in the dark. Many believe that it was not an actual coup d'etat as it lacked the real defining characters of one; and even if we can call it a coup, it was doomed to fail since the very beginning as it was nothing comparable to Turkey's previous military interventions in politics in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997.
Every novice in politics knows that all politics is about contrast. And to turn a contrasting voice to durable political power in a democracy, you need popular support, which would be garnered if your promised changes to the status quo that capture the essence of what people truly want.
This was not the case in Turkey as the plotters seemed to be following a checklist from a very outdated version of Coup d'etat for Dummies and very incompetently too. Waiting for the president to leave the town for a holiday. Check. Seizing the main airport, sealing off internationally-significant routes here Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge and Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Check. Sending tanks to the parliament. Check. And taking over the offices of Turkish Radio and Television (TRT), the country's national public broadcaster and broadcasting a statement declaring a curfew. Check.
But the putschists had no planning to capture important figures in the authority or major government buildings, no one to lead the endeavor, no strategy for communication and social media, no popular fan base in society or even in the military itself, and no coordination among their ranks. Even the creation of their executive body, the Turkish Peace Council, was announced by a news anchor at the TRT news channel during the coup, allegedly at gunpoint.
Istanbul-based military affairs researcher Gareth Jenkins says, "This coup was obviously planned quite well but using a playbook from the 1970s," and Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish foreign policy scholar with the Carnegie Europe think tank, believes that the plotters' biggest flaw was their undefined line of authority and lack of control over the key levers of power. He says, "Their blueprint was also ineffective since they failed from the outset to capture any military installations in Turkey or any of the (political) leadership" as they were acting outside the military chain of command.
Erdogan, who is frequently accused of muzzling media and journalists, turned out to be more tech-savvy than the plotters as he managed using the media to change the narrative and outflank his enemy forces on the streets thanks to an app on his smartphone.
Rebel without a cause?
According to claims by some of the soldiers who were detained following the turmoil, they were told by commanders they were part of a military drill, and they only understood that it was an attempted coup when they faced popular resistance. Moreover, as much as he insists on the role of erstwhile ally Fethullah Gulen living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania Erdogan has not provided any solid evidence proving his involvement.
Nobody still knows for sure who the brain behind the bungled attempt was, or even whether it was staged by Erdogan or by a cleric from the United States. It is not yet clear how much control the plotters managed to gain over government's institutions, or how the coup would affect Turkey's relations with the European countries and the United States given the fact that a reliable army is of utmost importance for the NATO ally.
With their support, the US and EU and almost everybody who supported Erdogan against the plotters -- sent a signal to the potentate that they prefer a flawed democracy to military rule; that they care more for stability than freedom; that any successful coup would be more disastrous for the region than Erdogan's existing state of affairs.
Reborn from the ashes of his long campaign to kill and jail Kurds, critics, adversaries, and journos, Erdogan is now hoping that the failed plot would give him the clean slate he desperately needs for a new era in modern Turkey. The plot still seems like an Erdogan-versus-Erdogan tale as he is the sole beneficiary but it may have set in motion another narrative: Can Erdogan keep on selling his democracy to the world?
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Turkey Continues 'Cleansing' After Coup Attempt
July 18, 2016
Turkish officials continue to detain people they say played a part in or supported the July 15 failed military coup attempt, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged that the "cleansing" will continue.
Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on July 17, Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of supporters of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for being behind the plot to overthrow the government.
Erdogan attended a late-night rally in the capital, Ankara, where thousands of flag-waving people came out to listen to him and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim speak.
Turkey said on July 17 that it would request the extradition of Gulen, who has condemned the failed coup attempt and denied any involvement in it.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he had spoken to Turkish Foreign Minister three times in recent days and told him that Washington would consider a formal extradition request for Gulen but would only comply if Turkey showed compelling evidence of Gulen's involvement in the coup attempt.
Erdogan urged his supporters to continue to occupy public places and take to the streets in the days ahead to show support for his government.
A large late-night rally was also held in Istanbul's central Taksim Square and in the coastal cities of Izmir and Antalya.
The more than 6,000 detentions and dismissals that have been made so far include high-ranking military officers and some 2,700 judges. More than 50 senior officers were detained on July 17.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag described the arrests as a "clean-up operation," saying the number is expected to rise.
Officials also raised the death toll from the coup attempt to 294 people as dozens of funerals were held on July 17.
Erdogan attended the funeral of his campaign manager, Erol Olcak, and his 16-year old son, who were killed by renegade soldiers at the Bosphorus Bridge on July 15.
The president vowed to move the country forward in "unity and solidarity."
Erdogan also said that Turkey could reinstate the death penalty, which it abolished in 2004.
He promised a crowd on July 17 that there would be talks in parliament about bringing back capital punishment because "those who attempt a coup in this country must pay."
Meanwhile, U.S. defense officials announced that Turkey had reopened its airspace to military aircraft at the Incirlik Air Base, used by the U.S.-led coalition for air operations against Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq.
Prime Minister Yildirim said on July 17 that life has returned back to normal following the turmoil in Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.
He said the central bank, capital markets board, banking system, and stock exchange were all operating on their normal schedules.
In Athens, eight Turkish soldiers who flew a helicopter to Greece during the coup attempt and asked for political asylum are due to appear in court on July 18.
Turkish officials have demanded that they be sent back to Turkey.
And in Saudi Arabia, officials arrested the Turkish military attache to Kuwait at the Riyadh airport on instructions from Ankara for his alleged involvement in the coup attempt.
Based on reporting by AP, dpa, and Reuters
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey-arrests-failed-coup/27863439.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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Turkey Suspends Thousands Of Officials Amid Calls For Proportionate Response
July 18, 2016
by RFE/RL
Turkish authorities have suspended nearly 8,000 police officers in the wake of the failed military coup attempt, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported on July 18, citing the Interior Ministry.
More than 7,500 people, including members of judiciary and military, have 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 also said that his country would consider reinstating capital punishment against coup participants.
The government said on July 18 that 208 people, including 145 civilians were killed, and more than 1,490 wounded in the violence.
The arrests and dismissals come amid calls on Turkish authorities to respect democracy, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.
"We firmly urge the government of Turkey to maintain calm and stability throughout the country," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on July 18.
"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.
Germany warned that negotiations for Turkey to join the European Union would end if the Turkish government decides to revive the death penalty.
Capital punishment has not been used in Turkey since 1984 and was abolished in 2004 to meet European Union accession criteria.
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Ankara's reaction to the failed coup needs to be "proportionate."
Turkey's opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) said on July 18 that authorities' response to the coup attempt must be conducted within the rule of law. It said the suspects behind the coup attempt must be tried in the courts.
In a statement, the CHP also said the military must not be portrayed as the enemy.
Erdogan has vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of supporters of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for being behind the plot to overthrow the government.
Turkey said on July 17 that it would request the extradition of Gulen, who has condemned the failed coup attempt and denied any involvement in it.
Kerry said on July 18 that the United States has not received a formal request from Turkey for Gulen's extradition.
Kerry said he had told Turkey's foreign minister "to make certain that in whatever portfolio and request they send us they send us evidence, not allegations."
"We need to see genuine evidence that withstands the standard of scrutiny that exists in many countries' system of law with respect to the issue of extradition and if it meets that standard, there is nothing, there is no interest we have in standing in the way of appropriately honoring the treaty that we have with Turkey with respect to extradition," Kerry said.
With reporting by AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters, the BBC
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey- suspends-thosands-of-officials/27865039.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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Commander of Air Base Holding US Nukes Arrested After Turkey Coup Attempt
Sputnik News
00:55 18.07.2016(updated 01:34 18.07.2016)
On Sunday, Turkish authorities arrested the commander of Incirlik airbase General Bekir Ercan Van, putting in question US-led anti-Daesh operations that are launched from the Turkish base, as well as relevancy of storing American nukes there.
Bekir Ercan Van was detained at the base along with a number of lower-ranking officers on suspicion of the complicity in the military coup attempt in the country. The news came amid a large-scale "cleansing" operation aimed at capturing all the coup plotters. By that moment, around 6,000 people have been arrested.
Incirlik is separated in Turkish and NATO parts. The latter is used for launching anti-Daesh air-raids in Syria and Iraq on regular basis. It hosts some 2,500 US military staff and stores 90 American nuclear weapons.
Following the failure of the takeover, Turkish authorities claimed the putschists got crucial support from Incirlik. The news emerged that the mutineers had refueled "seized" F-16s from two airborne tankers located in the Turkish sector of Incirlik base.
On Saturday, the movement in and out of the base was blocked until the end of anti-coup raids. The power supply of the base has been also cut off. The US officials said that the measures were taken to prevent those engaged in the revolt from fleeing Turkey.
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 won't 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 don't 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 Ankara's fall out from the anti-Daesh struggle or NATO.
Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy also said in an interview with Wall Street Journal that the "resignation of dozens if not hundreds of generals will have a debilitating effect on the military's effectiveness."
However, Western officials remain optimistic. According to a US official talking to WSJ, the military top-level leadership "understands the importance of the alliance" and will likely stay in power so cooperation will return to normal soon.
Sputnik
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At Crossroads, Erdogan Urged to Show Magnanimity
by Jamie Dettmer July 18, 2016
As Turkish authorities cast the net far and wide to scoop up those they suspect of participating or colluding in Friday's failed coup, opposition politicians, as well as foreign leaders, are urging President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show magnanimity and set aside his autocratic instincts in his response to the unsuccessful putsch.
Failure to rethink his divide-and-rule governing style, they warn, risks greater political and social strife, and erosion of the rule of law.
European leaders are warning that repression will further roil relations with the West and could doom a deal they struck with Erdogan earlier this year that has helped to limit the migration crisis impacting the European continent.
They warn that moves to restore the death penalty to allow for the executions of the coup organizers or moves to imprison ethnic Kurdish lawmakers recently stripped of immunity will prompt the European Parliament to decide to halt the deal that rewards Turkey financially for stemming the refugee and migrant flow.
The pleas to Erdogan have been met by harsh rhetoric, mass detentions and arrests.
Prime Minister Binali Yilidirim said Monday 7,543 people have been detained and 2,745 members of the judiciary suspended. He also said 1,500 officials in the Finance Ministry and 8,777 Interior Ministry officials have been suspended.
Purge vowed
On Sunday, Erdogan vowed to purge state bodies of the "virus" that caused the coup, and signs are his crackdown includes not only coup participants, but perceived enemies as well, warn diplomats and analysts.
The country's main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), Monday warned Erdogan not to launch a witch hunt, arguing it was the erosion of democracy under his presidency that gave rise to the coup attempt.
"Plotters and all their affiliates should give account before the courts within the legal order," the CHP said, "Investigations should not be seen as an opportunity for revenge and purging."
Observers question how and when the lists of those to be detained or suspended were drawn up, especially when it comes to the civilians who were not directly participating in the armed rebellion on Friday.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini is among those suspicious of the arrests and purges already carried out, arguing it looks like the lists were drawn up before the coup was launched.
Speaking Monday in Brussels, she warned the Turkish government that it must protect the rule of law as it responds to the failed coup. "We are the ones saying today rule of law has to be protected in the country; there is no excuse for any steps that take the country away from that."
The magnitude and speed of the unfolding purge is lending credence to the fear some of the plotters reportedly had that the Erdogan government was planning in the coming days and weeks to carry out a large cleansing of perceived foes in the bureaucracy and judiciary, as well as a major reorganization of military commanders.
'Sloppy and uncoordinated'
Those fears are what triggered the launch of the coup Friday, suspects Metin Gurcan, an independent security analyst and former adviser to the Turkish military. "Had there not been a coup attempt July 15, there would have been massive detentions on July 16-17," argues Gurcan.
"The plotters learned of this plan and launched their sloppy and uncoordinated attempt hastily. In other words, the coup attempt that was planned for a future date was moved up," he writes on the Al Monitor news-site.
Gurcan maintains the military clique behind the coup consisted of officers with ties to the movement of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, now in self-imposed exile in the United States, other officers motivated either by a determination to save or boost their military careers, and commanders dedicated to the secular values of the army and angry with the direction Erdogan has been taking the country.
"The involvement of a large number of the judiciary and even Erdogan's own military aide suggests that opposition to him is deep and widespread within the country's institutions," says Afzal Ashraf, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.
"How President Erdogan responds to his victory over the coup conspirators and what he does to address the widespread grievances they attempted to harness will determine how Turkey moves forward," he says. "Erdogan can gain much political advantage by introducing more openness in public debate and adopting a less regal style in his trappings of power," he told VOA.
But Ashraf warns, "His ego may take him in an opposite direction."
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US Urges Turkey to Act Within Rule of Law as it Probes Coup Attempt
by VOA News July 18, 2016
The United States is urging Turkey to exercise restraint and act within the rule of law as it investigates last week's failed coup, amid conflicting reports about whether a former Air Force commander confessed to being a ringleader of the attempted takeover.
The state-run Anadolu news agency reported that 8,777 officers have been suspended and 6,000 members of the judiciary and military have been detained following the attempted coup Friday, sparking concern from world leaders who warn against actions that would damage constitutional order.
On Monday, Anadolu quoted General Akin Ozturk, who earlier had denied involvement in the uprising against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as saying that he "acted with the intention of carrying out a coup."
But the news agency has since taken the report down and his alleged involvement has been denied in reports by private news media outlets in Turkey.
In Brussels Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he supported bringing perpetrators of the attempted coup in Turkey to justice, but warned the government against going "too far" while restoring order in the country.
At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest stressed U.S. support 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."
Turkish President Erdogan ordered F-16 fighters to patrol Turkey's skies overnight, although there was no new sign of resistance against the government. Meanwhile, Ankara suspended annual leave for more than three million civil servants.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels that the rule of law "needs to be protected for the sake of the country."
Erdogan said Sunday he is receptive to reinstating the country's death penalty in the aftermath of the coup attempt. But Mogherini warned that such a step may end Turkey's EU membership hopes.
In Germany, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed that the EU is a "community of laws and values" with which the death penalty was not compatible.
Crackdown continues
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."
State-run media report 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
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 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 Monday.
Kerry denies US Involvement
Secretary 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 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.
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.
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 Sunday at the funeral for his top campaign manager and the manager's teenage son who were killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul on Friday night.
He used a handkerchief to wipe away the tears and turned around as he continued to weep.
The government Monday said 208 were killed in the uprising, including 145 civilians, 60 police and three soldiers, in addition to more than 100 coup plotters. 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.
VOA's National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, White House Correspondent Mary Alice Salinas and VOA's Turkish service are among those who contributed to this story.
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May urged to delay vote on 'immoral' Trident
Iran Press TV
Sun Jul 17, 2016 3:34PM
The Scottish National Party (SNP) has called on new British Prime Minister Theresa May to delay a parliamentary vote on the renewal of Trident, saying it is wrong to spend billions of pounds to expand the country's "immoral" nuclear weapons program.
Speaking amid nationwide anti-Trident protests in Scotland on Sunday, SNP's Westminster leader Angus Robertson said Trident was "immoral" and plans to renew it needed "scrutiny."
Thousands of Scots in more than 30 towns and cities across Scotland took to the streets over the weekend to protest against the UK's use of a military base in Faslane, Argyll and Bute, to store nuclear weapons.
This is while the UK Parliament is set to vote on the program's renewal on Monday, which if finalized, will allow the Defense Ministry to build more nuclear submarines.
"Trident is an immoral, obscene and redundant weapons system - and the decision on whether to renew it is one of the most important votes this parliament will ever take," Robertson said, "It would be both morally and economically indefensible for the UK government to commit to spending hundreds of billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction even more so at a time when they are cutting funding for public services," he continued.
"Having spent the best part of a month engaged in backstabbing, score-settling and navel-gazing, neither the Tories nor Labour are in any fit state to be giving proper scrutiny to decisions as important as this," the SNP official added, referring to the ongoing political turmoil in the UK after its exit from the European Union (EU).
During the build-up to the June 23 EU referendum, the ruling Conservative Party became increasingly divided over the vote while the Labour Party was engulfed in a leadership challenge. Prime Minister David Cameron's step-down worsened the political turmoil.
So far the Ministry of Defense has refused to disclose the Trident program's overall cost on the grounds that it is classified. While some analysts say the figure lays somewhere around 167 billion, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament estimates Trident to cost at least 205 billion, a figure Robertson said was closer to reality.
"It would be both morally and economically indefensible for the UK government to commit to spending hundreds of billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction even more so at a time when they are cutting funding for public services," he said.
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Alan Burkitt-Gray speaks to Don MacNeil, chief operating officer of GTT, about its company restructuring after coming out of Chapter 11 and its strategic roadmap for the next 12 months.
Danvilles new mayor spoke out Friday morning on several issues the city faces, including high utility rates, the Confederate flag, violent crime and the Long Mill Dam.
John Gilstrap said he will propose asking the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors to accept the addition of a supervisor to the Danville Utility Commission.
The idea will be discussed during a Danville City Council work session next month, Gilstrap said during an interview in his office at City Hall on Friday morning.
County residents spoke out at a recent board of supervisors meeting, taking issue with the electric rate increase and that despite the large percentage of county customers, only one of the seven members of the citys utility commission is a resident of Pittsylvania County.
County residents have expressed concerns over Danville Power & Lights rate increase, which began July 1 and will first be seen on bills starting Aug. 1.
The county is home to 40.5 percent of Danville Power & Lights customers.
The other major concern was the impact on the countys economy. With Danville Utilities rates higher than other local power companies such as Dominion and Appalachian Energy Power residents and business professionals expressed concerns about what the rising cost would do to their budgets.
The utility commission should be able to find ways to reduce costs to Danville Utilities customers, Gilstrap said, adding that internal operations and purchasing should be examined.
If we wont do it and a private company can do it better, we should let a private company do it [provide power], he said.
***
As for violent crime in the city, Gilstrap said he would propose that city officials including the police chief research other cities success in reducing their crime rates.
We should be able to learn from them, Gilstrap said.
A lot of Danvilles violent crimes occur in poorer areas, and the city must address how to bring those residents above the poverty level, Gilstrap said.
Having jobs available and training and qualifying residents for them is one way, he said.
We should begin at an early age and motivate them to want to do better, Gilstrap said, adding that some people just dont want to work.
While those on certain forms of public assistance should be taken care of, it shouldnt be a gift, Gilstrap said. The state should require them to volunteer in the community to receive benefits, he added.
***
As for whether to remove the Long Mill Dam, City Council tabled the matter last month with an 8-1 vote to see if we had more options, Gilstrap said.
If the dam is not being used, Gilstrap said, he has no problem removing it unless removal is found to be expensive. City staff has estimated that removal would cost about $57,000.
Im a parks-and-rec guy, said Gilstrap, former director of Danville Parks and Recreation. I like natural rivers.
The entire dam not just the visible part of it must be removed if the city chooses that course, he said. Otherwise, the area would be just as dangerous, and getting rid of the whole structure could be more costly, he added.
If City Council were to vote on the matter now, a majority of members would choose for the dam to remain, Gilstrap said.
City Council will take up the matter again in a September work session when city staff completes their research on other alternatives for the dam, Gilstrap said.
***
Regarding the Confederate flag, the issue "is behind us, Gilstrap said.
Council took action as to what flags they would like to fly on city-owned poles, and its behind us, he said.
The Heritage Preservation Association filed a petition for a rehearing in the Virginia Supreme Court last month, asking the court again to hear their appeal of the citys decision to remove the Third National Confederate flag from the grounds of the Sutherlin Mansion.
A three-judge panel of the court on June 20 declined to hear the HPAs initial appeal of a local judges decision that upheld Danvilles removal of the flag from a monument at the Sutherlin Mansion.
The petition for a rehearing was to be circulated among the courts remaining four members who did not hear the initial argument.
In rejecting the appeal, the three-judge panel said it found no reversible error in the judgment of Danville Circuit Court Judge James J. Reynolds, who in October dismissed a lawsuit against the city filed by the HPA and others.
The HPA and others filed the lawsuit after City Council adopted an ordinance Aug. 6 permitting only the U.S., state, city and POW/MIA flags to be flown on flagpoles owned by the city. Danville police removed the flag from the grounds of the city-owned Sutherlin Mansion just a few minutes after the citys adoption of the ordinance.
Gen. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis wanted the Confederate flag folded up and put away following the end of the Civil War, Gilstrap said. As for HPAs pursuit of an appeal, thats their right, he added.
Thats the way our government and judicial system is set up, Gilstrap said. Everybody has a right to that fair process.
Residents can fly whatever flag they want on private property, he said, referring to Confederate flags that have gone up since the removal of the flag at the Sutherlin Mansion.
Staff writer Ceillie Simkiss contributed to this story.
After news of a $266 million Virginia budget shortfall surfaced recently, pay raises for school staff in both Danville and Pittsylvania County will still happen this fall as planned, school district superintendents said this week.
We made the decision to roll it out with our July 1 contracts, said Danville Superintendent Stanley Jones. It will not impact us at all.
On July 8, Gov. Terry McAuliffes administration announced the state was anticipating a budget shortfall of $266.3 million, or 1.8 percent of major revenues. The $18.3 billion in revenue collections still set a new record for annual gross receipts.
Although these results indicate that our economy continues to grow in the wake of the recession and sequestration, they also underscore the necessity of continuing our work to diversify the Virginia economy and create more and better paying jobs in the state, McAuliffe said in a news release. We are having significant success bringing more than 135,000 net new jobs to the commonwealth that are helping to buoy our revenue collections, but we have more work to do to build the new Virginia economy that will result in greater opportunity and budgetary certainty in the future.
The shortfall suspends the planned 2 percent state employee raises slated to begin in December. The General Assembly will take a look at amending in the raises for employees during next years session.
However, Danville Public Schools will still move forward with a 2.5 percent raise for all employees, and Pittsylvania County will follow suit with a 2 percent raise.
Jones said the school board made the decision to begin the raise in the fall, finalizing it by asking for the immediate funding from Danville back during budget preparations. Additionally, he said other funding sources should be able to make up for the state funds, pending school board approval later this month.
We think we can offset that with existing funds, Jones said. We will be presenting that to our board at our next work session.
Earlier this week, Pittsylvania County superintendent Mark Jones told the school board 2 percent raises for all staff would proceed as planned. He said funding from other sources also would be used to supplant the state funds.
We can do what it takes to keep the contracts that weve issued to our employees intact, Jones said.
McAuliffes administration now will develop and present a revised revenue forecast Sept. 1.
To the editor:
Do you know that Danville is ranked 132nd out of 134 Virginia communities for having the worst child poverty percentage in Virginia? Do you know that 21.6 percent of Danvilles population is food insecure and that 12.9 percent of Pittsylvania Countys population worries about putting food on the table?
Do you know that in the world, 1 in 8 people do not get enough to eat?
These statistics are sobering, but we can come together as a community to fight hunger in both our hometown and in our world by participating in the 2016 Danville Area CROP Hunger Walk.
Since its inception, the Danville Area CROP Hunger Walk has raised more than $100,000 to assist with the hunger relief programs of Church World Services and Gods Storehouse. If you are interested in joining our community- wide effort to eradicate hunger and poverty, we invite you to attend our spaghetti supper at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 3 at Ascension Lutheran Church.
Enjoy a delightful dinner with people who want to make a difference in our world while learning about our CROP Walk and its work. Please RSVP to recruitment@ danvillecropwalk.org to let the team know that you are attending.
I hope you will join our efforts to make a difference in the lives of people in Danville, Pittsylvania County and the world. In the words of Jesus Christ, For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed
me Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. (Matthew 25:35)
SHERRI TUCK
Danville
Editors note: Tuck is a member of the 2016 Danville Area CROP Hunger Walk planning committee.
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.
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Jul 18, 2016) - Arena Minerals Inc., (TSX VENTURE:AN) ("Arena" or the "Company") provides updates on activities and developments from its ongoing joint venture exploration programs. Drill campaigns on the Paciencia North and Solitario prospects have concluded and the joint venture is currently in the process of reviewing incoming results in light of the mandatory property reduction on July 26th, 2016. The Company, through work completed through its joint venture agreements and on land not under joint venture agreements, has met its minimum work commitments for the underlying option agreement with Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (please refer to press release dated August 1, 2013). In addition, Arena is in a good position to make the upcoming payments for the underlying option agreement with significant cash on hand and approximately $2.3 million in funds to be received by July 26, 2016 (please refer to press release dated July 12, 2016). The Company will provide news on joint venture activity and option agreement land reductions as information is received.
Drilling permits for the Pampa Union drill program that forms part of the US$17.5 million Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation ("JOGMEC") joint venture have been evaluated by the relevant authorities. The exploration program has been designed to complete a 1.5 kilometer grid spacing drill pattern over Pampa Union as well as follow up on previous successes. Drill hole PU-RC-39, drilled in the north western portion of the Pampa Union block, intersected a lithocap, alteration and pyrite shell characteristic of a porphyry system down to a total depth of 441 metres below surface. The follow-up 241 platform drill program was deemed to meet all necessary environmental, health and safety, fresh water resource management, archeological, communal, fauna and flora standards and was officially recommended for approval as described in the resultant Informe Consolidado de Evaluacion ("ICE") issued by the Regional Environmental Assessment Service. On the July 15th, 2016 the Environmental Assessment Commission for the Antofagasta Region voted against the project deciding that the drillings could cause impact to historical heritage located at significant distance from any of the proposed drill platforms. As the permit was denied at the regional level the Company will file a claim ("Recurso de Reclamacion") before the National Environmental Assessment Service in Santiago for final approval.
"We are pleased the Solitario and Paciencia drill programs have been completed on time. We now wait on these results to determine the development of these properties," commented William Randall, President and CEO of Arena. "Given the favourable recommendations in the ICE, we are confident the permitting process will have a favourable result for our JOGMEC joint venture. We expect the permits to be received within a two to six month timeframe. These results will allow the joint venture to complete the remaining 1.5 kilometre grid drilling as well as follow up on the two porphyry systems discovered in previous drill campaigns."
Pursuant to the Environmental Law the project owner is entitled to file a Recurso de Reclamacion, if the final decision of the Environmental Assessment Commission rejects the Declaracion de Impacto Ambiental ("DIA") or imposes conditions or additional requirements that may be consider arbitrary or illegal. The above mentioned administrative complaint has to be filed within a term of 30 business days, counted from the public announcement of the issuance of the RCA which occurred on July 15, 2016.
For the Pampa Union project, the complaint must be filed before the National Environmental Assessment Service in Santiago. Based on precedents, we forecast that the final decision may be issued between two to six months.
Once the resolution of the National Environmental Assessment Service is issued, such resolution can be challenged before the Second Environmental Court, located in Santiago.
About Arena Minerals
Arena Minerals is a prospect generator that has two properties under option covering approximately 95,400 hectares within the Antofagasta region of Chile. The properties are at low altitudes, within producing mining camps in infrastructure rich areas. The Company's flagship asset is the Atacama Copper Property, consisting of 92,000 hectares, following a contractual land reduction on July 27, 2015, of essentially undrilled ground in the heart of Chile's premier copper mining district. Currently, approximately 85% of the Atacama Copper Property is under option to third parties. Pursuant to option agreements entered into between Arena, Japan Oil, Gas and Minerals National Corporation and Teck Resources Chile Limitada, each have the right to earn into 60% of the respective land holdings within the property, by collectively spending over $40 million in exploration expenditures, amongst certain other commitments. In addition the Company has the Pampas El Penon project, comprising a total of 3,400 hectares which is less than 1 km from Yamana's Agusta Victoria project which forms part of the El Penon mine complex. The Pampas El Penon and Atacama Copper properties comprise Arena Minerals highly prospective copper and gold properties within an active mining region.
The technical and scientific aspects of this news release have been reviewed and approved by Mr. Vernon Arseneau, P.Geo, who is a qualified person pursuant to NI 43-101. As the Vice President of Exploration of the Company, Mr. Arseneau is not considered independent.
To view the website, please visit www.arenaminerals.com.
In addition to featuring information regarding the Company, its managements and projects, the website also contains the latest corporate news and an email registration allowing subscribers to receive news and updates directly.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of
Arena Minerals Inc.
William Randall, President, and CEO
Cautionary Note Regarding Accuracy and Forward-Looking Information:
This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements, projections and estimates relating to the future development of any of the Company's properties, the progress of drill programs, the prospectivity of, and planned work programs on, such properties, the ability to enter into any additional joint venture partnership agreements as proposed, or at all, the ability of any potential partner to accelerate drill programs, increase the development of any of the projects or prospects of the Company, the results of the exploration program, future financial or operating performance of the Company, its subsidiaries and its projects, the development of and the anticipated timing with respect to the Atacama project and the El Penon project. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". The statements made herein are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of the Company's interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulations. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, geopolitical and social uncertainties; the actual results of current exploration activities; other risks of the mining industry and the risks described in the annual information form of the Company. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking information. Arena Minerals does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Jul 18, 2016) - Vendome Resources Corp. (the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:VDR)(FRANKFURT:9VR), announces an increase of $126,000 in its previously announced proposed non-brokered private placement financing for aggregate gross proceeds to the Company of up to $516,000 (the "Offering") by issuing a maximum of 55,466,667 units at a price of $0.0075 per unit for maximum proceeds of $416,000, and 13,333,333 "flow-through" shares at a price of $0.0075 per share for maximum proceeds of $100,000. Each of the units will consist of one common share in the capital of the Company and one common share purchase warrant. Each warrant will entitle its holder to purchase one additional common share at an exercise price of $0.01 for a period of 3 years from the closing date of the private placement. There can be no assurance that the Offering will be completed, whether in whole or in part.
Due to the fact that the Offering is being completed by issuing securities at a price lower than $0.05 per security, the Company is required to obtain a waiver from the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") to proceed with the Offering. In order to obtain the waiver from the Exchange, the Company has agreed to seek the approval of its shareholders for a consolidation of the Common Shares on a ten to one basis (the "Consolidation") at the upcoming annual general meeting, which is scheduled for September 6, 2016. The Company is confident that it will receive shareholder approval for the Consolidation, and as a condition of the closing of the Offering, all subscribers of the Offering will be required to execute undertakings and proxies in favour of the Consolidation and the Company will provide the Exchange with proof that the Company has received approval from holders of more than 50% of the outstanding common shares in support of the Consolidation. If the Company is successful in obtaining shareholder approval for the Consolidation, it will immediately proceed with the Consolidation.
The Company anticipates that the proceeds of the Offering will be used to finance the Company's working capital requirements.
Completion of the Offering is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals, including the approval of the Exchange and the securities regulatory authorities. All securities issued by the Company in connection with the Offering will be subject to a statutory four month hold period.
About Vendome:
Vendome is a mineral exploration company located in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Our primary focus is to acquire "near-term production" exploration mining projects and existing producers. Vendome Resources Corp. is managed by an experienced team of mining professionals with extensive operating and financial experience.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF VENDOME RESOURCES CORP.
W. John Priestner, President and Chief Executive Officer
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
This news release contains "forward-looking information" including statements with respect to the future exploration performance of the Company. This forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements of the Company, expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks, as well as others, are disclosed within the Company's filing on SEDAR, which investors are encouraged to review prior to any transaction involving the securities of the Company. Forward-looking information contained herein is provided as of the date of this news release and the Company disclaims any obligation, other than as required by law, to update any forward-looking information for any reason. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate and the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking information.
Greek chef Yiannis Baxevanis is opening a restaurant at the Hellenic Club. Photo: Supplied
Canberra's about to get a taste of Greek food with a bit of Michelin mystique.
Greek celebrity chef Yiannis Baxevanis, who has previously held a Michelin star in Athens, will open a new restaurant in conjunction with the Hellenic Club of Canberra in Woden.
The restaurant will be called Orexi by Baxevanis and is the chef's first restaurant in Australia. It's slated to open in September.
Baxevanis is a well known chef in his native Greece, and is a consultant to high end restaurants in Dubai, South Africa and Switzerland.
It's part of a $2 million refurbishment of the Hellenic Club in Woden and club president Andrew Satsias said it was a first for the industry. "We are very excited to be opening the first Baxevanis restaurant in Australia, and deliver something very special to our members and to Canberra," he said.
"We are the first in the local club industry to bring such a high profile, talented and globally focused chef to a community club in the ACT. We know that along with upgrading our facilities, we also need to be continually innovating our food and beverage offering to remain competitive and relevant in Canberra's restaurant scene, which has matured significantly over the past 3 years."
Baxevanis will "control the menu at Orexi and visit regularly on his global culinary travels". Meanwhile his business partner Joanna Stavara will move to Canberra to run the Woden restaurant day to day.
Spanner crab, sake vinegar jelly, brown butter emulsion, pea flower and horseradish from Sepia, Sydney. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
Grilled oyster from Igni, Geelong. Photo: Josh Robenstone
Uni, koshihikari rice, salted yolk, fish maw, sweet prawns, umami broth from Quay, Sydney. Photo: Brett Stevens
Schnitty sanga from Fleet, Brunswick Heads. Photo: Kate Nutt
Marron, Geraldton wax and watercress from Orana, Adelaide. Photo: Aaron Fenwick
Slow-roasted parsnip and apple mousse, Brae, Birregurra.
Scallop dish from Wildflower, Perth. Photo: Supplied
Yabby jaffle from Monster Kitchen & Bar, Canberra. Photo: Lee Grant
Apple truffle strudel from Esquire, Brisbane. Photo: Michelle Smith
Salted red kangaroo and bunya bunya from Attica, Melbourne. Photo: Jane Holroyd
Roasted Murray cod grenobloise from Restaurant Hubert, Sydney. Photo: Supplied
Pad Thai from Long Chim, Perth.
Poulet vin jaune d'Australie from Bar Brose, Sydney. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
Paperbark-grilled fish from Paper Daisy, Cabarita Beach. Photo: Supplied
Whole slow-roasted lamb shoulder, Cumulus Inc, Melbourne. Photo: Earl Carter of
Of course you're not planning to die any time soon, but we thought you should know how good the Australian dining scene is right now, just in case.
So here's a handy glovebox guide to 17 of the most exciting dishes that are happening across the country. Diversity being our middle name, they jump from Japanese-inflected seafood, slow-roasted meats and Australian natives to retro snacks that make drinking even more fun. Together, they represent a new era in Australian gastronomy. Pace yourself. There's a lot to get through.
Roasted Murray cod grenobloise
Where: Restaurant Hubert, Sydney
Why: An impeccably farmed Australian freshwater fish famed for its subtle, snow-white, flaking flesh is wood-roasted and served whole by classics-with-a-twist chef Dan Pepperell. Bathed in a classic French sauce of brown butter, capers and onions and served by candle-light. It's a real "event" dish, a magnificent thing in keeping with the nostalgia of this sprawling basement bistro and bar.
restauranthubert.com
Salted red kangaroo and bunya bunya
Where: Attica, Melbourne
Why: It's never a dull moment dining at the highly awarded Attica, as Ben Shewry builds the experience into a unique and almost interactive experience. This is the standout dish, a mind-bending drama queen of salted Uluru kangaroo fillet teamed with purple carrot, native currants, fermented cabbage and a lush bunya bunya puree that is both astringent and lush, primeval and elegant.
attica.com.au
Poulet vin jaune d'Australie
Where: Bar Brose, Sydney
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Why: Because Analiese Gregory is a rising star who brings originality, freshness and great wine-friendly flavours to this long, narrow Darlinghurst bar. And because the busty Holmbrae chicken is bathed in a ladleful of glossy, winey sauce (not the celebrated yellow wine of the Jura but Gregory's own blend of Pennyweight Oloroso, Tom Shobbrook's Il Chicco, and shao hsing), enriched with foie gras butter and crisp chicken-in-a-biskit shards.
barbrose.com.au
Slow-roasted parsnip and apple mousse
Where: Brae, Birregurra
Why: Former Mugaritz head chef Dan Hunter created his ground-breaking regional restaurant as "a place to interact with nature and eat from the land". In his hands, the humble parsnip takes on a new life as a naturally sweet dessert slow-roasted until it is a crisp, hollowed-out shroud, filled with parsnip and apple mousse under a fizz-wizz of tart, dehydrated apple.
braerestaurant.com
Spanner crab, sake vinegar jelly, brown butter emulsion, pea flower and horseradish
Where: Sepia, Sydney
Why: Because the Queensland spanner crab meat is cooked in butter at 70C to keep its moisture, then dressed in walnut oil and rolled in a very fine sheet of sake vinegar and sake jelly, served on a brown butter creme fraiche and finished with pea flower petals and dehydrated pea dust. Complexity reduced to simplicity: pure Martin Benn.
sepiarestaurant.com.au
Apple truffle strudel
Where: Esquire, Brisbane
Why: It makes you rethink the apple. Stanthorpe pink ladies are rotor-sliced, gently cooked, dried, fried and formed into a crisp apple rose, served with a truffle jam made from Malmsey wine, beef stock and fresh Manjimup truffles and a rich mascarpone Chantilly cream. And no, it's not a dessert.
esquire.net.au
Uni, koshihikari rice, salted yolk, fish maw, sweet prawns, umami broth
Where: Quay, Sydney
Why: Peter Gilmore says this is a great representation of his cooking right now, being full of texture and powerfully harmonious flavours. The nutty koshihikari rice is enriched with Port Phillip Bay sea urchin butter, topped with crisp fish maw made from the swim bladder (fish maw) of northern barramundi, served with an intense umami broth made from 30 different ingredients.
quay.com.au
Raw Shark Bay saucer scallops with sesame cream
Where: Wildflower, Perth
Why: In this glass-and-steel cube atop boutique hotel COMO The Treasury, chef Jed Gerrard serves raw scallops from Shark Bay, 800 kilometres north of Perth, on a white sesame cream with a gel of apple juice and native basil. An additional apple, wild fennel and chardonnay "snow" falls at the table.
Where: Paper Daisy, Cabarita Beach, NSW
Why: Forget your fish of the day; this is the fish of the year. At this charming beachside boutique hotel Ben Devlin layers blue-eye trevalla in both soft and crisply cooked caramelised onions, seaweed and lemon myrtle, encases it in a sheath of paperbark and grills it over hot coals. It is, quite simply, a great Australian dish.
halcyonhouse.com.au/restaurant
Grilled oyster
Where: Igni, Geelong
Why: Chef Aaron Turner (formerly of Loam) is back with a bang at this tucked-away 50-seat treasure down a Geelong laneway. With luck, the opening volley of snacks will include this take-your-breath-away oyster with seaweed and oyster plant, served warm in a porcelain oyster shell.
restaurantigni.com
Seasonal agnolotti
Where: LuMi, Sydney
Why: It could be small coins of spelt ravioli holding hot buttery pumpkin puree, or soft capsules of paper-thin agnolotti encasing nonna's tomato sugo, but it will be extraordinary, as Federico Zanellato packs elegance, power, structure, acidity, balance and finesse into the very idea of pasta.
lumidining.com
Schnitty sanga
Where: Fleet, Brunswick Heads
Why: In this tiny restaurant, Astrid McCormack and Josh Lewis redefine how we dine with personal warmth and quietly captivating small courses. The downy-soft, white-bread "schnitty sanga" pairs crumbed sweetbreads and anchovy and mustard mayo in a shock of crisp/soft, hot/cold.
instagram.com/fleetrestaurant
Marron, Geraldton wax and watercress
Where: Orana, Adelaide
Why: In Australia, it makes perfect sense for a Scottish/Italian chef with French training to champion indigenous Australia and its powerful, resonant ingredients. That's how we roll. Hence the relentlessly restless Jock Zonfrillo marries delicate Kangaroo island marron or Coorong mullet with the lime/lemongrass shock of Geraldton wax in this luxurious, evocative dish.
restaurantorana.com
Wood-roasted pigeon
Where: Franklin, Hobart
Why: It's all about the 10-tonne wood-fired Scotch oven in this minimalist concrete-clad, wine-oriented, Tasmania-first restaurant. Uncompromising chef/owner David Moyle roasts whole local pigeons to a bronzed caramel, pressing the bones to extract goodness for the accompanying (very pinot-friendly) sauce.
franklinhobart.com.au
Yabby jaffle
Where: Monster Kitchen & Bar, Canberra
Why: Yabbies + horseradish + creme fraiche + chives + lemon juice + gruyere + buttered bread = one hot, crisp, toasty yabby jaffle. Chef Sean McConnell takes comfort food to new heights at Hotel Hotel's free-wheeling, all-day restaurant.
monsterkitchen.com.au
Pad Thai
Where: Long Chim, Perth
Why: When David Thompson does pad Thai, it's done properly. So the usual mindless office lunch order is, instead, beautifully eggy, with springy rice noodles, crunchy bean shoots and sweet prawns, with three types of chilli and the traditional white sugar on the side.
longchimperth.com
Whole slow-roasted lamb shoulder
Where: Cumulus Inc, Melbourne
Why: Sharing the eight-hour slow-roasted lamb shoulder at Melbourne's best workaday bistro is a rite of passage. Inspired by a humble worker's meal in La Rioja in Spain, Andrew McConnell cooks the shoulder sous-vide for eight to 12 hours, then roasts it until the crust caramelises and the meat falls from the bone at the very sight of a fork. Festive, celebratory and delicious.
cumulusinc.com.au
Pew Charitable Trusts/TNS Stewart Nelson-Reid and Malcolm Reid at their home in Alpharetta, Ga. Like many Americans, the couple hasn't saved enough to adequately support their retirement.
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By Jenni Bergal, Stateline.org (TNS)
ALPHARETTA, Ga. Malcolm Reid and Stewart Nelson-Reid, both 58, have been together for 18 years. They've had a blast traveling, sky diving and riding roller coasters around the country.
What they haven't done is save much money for retirement. For years Malcolm Reid, a manager at AT&T, contributed only a small amount to his 401(k). His spouse, a freelance makeup artist, has no retirement fund.
"I don't know what we were thinking," Reid said. "We were spending money like crazy. We traveled. We bought clothes. We ran up credit card debt. Now, we're watching every penny."
They aren't alone: A recent federal report found about 55 percent of households with workers between 55 and 64 have less than $25,000 in retirement savings. Malcolm Reid has saved a bit more than that $38,000 but far less than what he'd need to support himself during a retirement that might last decades.
For many Americans, a major barrier to saving more is that their employers don't offer a retirement plan. Between 2010 and 2014, 42 percent of full-time, private sector workers between 18 and 64 about 30 million people did not have access to an employer-sponsored plan, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew also funds Stateline).
To fill the gap, since 2012 at least 31 states have considered setting up state-sponsored retirement savings plans for private sector workers, according to Pew. This year, legislators in more than a dozen states introduced bills.
Seven states have approved state-sponsored retirement programs for private sector workers. In Massachusetts, the treasurer would handle contributions and investments for the voluntary program, which would be only for small nonprofits.
Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and Oregon have approved mandatory programs in which a small percentage would be automatically deducted from an employee's paycheck and put in an IRA in a financial institution, although the person could opt out. Employers would play a minimal role, providing information about the program to workers and sending payroll deductions to the state, but not offering financial advice or assistance. None of the programs requires employers to match employee contributions.
Under Maryland's program, employers that don't enroll their employees must pay a standard $300 filing fee. But there is no penalty for failing to participate in the program.
New Jersey and Washington state have adopted a "marketplace" model, in which the states would create an online exchange and set basic standards for eligible retirement plans.
The states would rely on the existing private market to provide the plans, as well as help educate small businesses about their options and encourage them to offer one to employees. Participation would be voluntary for small businesses and employees.
AARP, one of the biggest boosters of state-sponsored retirement funds, says auto-enroll programs like the one in Illinois will best help retirees become more financially secure.
"Social Security is not enough. People need that private savings," said Gerri Madrid-Davis, AARP's state advocacy director. The average monthly Social Security retirement benefit as of January was $1,341.
Associated Press PHHOTOS Turkish honor guards carry the coffin of a policeman killed in Friday's failed military coup during a mass funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by making approximately 6,000 arrests.
SHARE Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, prays during the funeral of his campaign manager Erol Olcak, killed Friday along with his 16-year old son Abdullah 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) Members of Turkey armed forces are detained by police for their suspected involvement in Friday's attempted coup in Mugla, a Mediterranean city, Sunday.
By Steph Solis, USA TODAY NETWORK
Turkey has detained about 6,000 people in a government crackdown on alleged coup plotters and government opponents, the Justice Ministry announced Sunday.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said the number could grow. In a television interview reported by The Associated Press, Bozdag also said he was confident that the United States would extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes Gulen, 75, was behind the coup attempt and he called for his extradition Saturday in a televised speech. Gulen promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education and science.
"I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey," Bozdag said.
Gulen has denied any involvement or knowledge about the attempted coup. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. would consider extradition if Turkey's government could prove Gulen's role in the failed uprising.
Kerry told CNN on Sunday that the U.S. is waiting for a formal extradition request to the State and Justice departments. He said U.S. courts need a solid legal foundation to approve such a request.
"The United States is not harboring anybody, we are not preventing anything from happening," Kerry said. "We think it's irresponsible to have accusations of American involvement when we're simply waiting for their request, which we're absolutely prepared to act on if it meets the legal standard."
The crackdown comes less than a day after Erdogan said government forces have quelled a coup attempt and that the orchestrators will "pay a heavy price for their treason to Turkey."
The coup attempt began late Friday as military members issued a statement saying it had seized control "to reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms" to the country.
At least 265 people were killed and more than 1,400 were wounded during the failed coup, the AP reported.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters Saturday that 2,839 officers, including 29 colonels and over 40 generals, have already been taken into military custody. More than 100 judges and military officers were detained Sunday over alleged ties to the attempted military coup, the Turkish-run Anadolu news agency and CNN Turk reported.
The coup attempt 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.
SHARE Dillion Gage Compton Mari Johnson
By Staff Report
Inmate Dillion Gage Compton, 21, has been identified as the alleged assailant who killed a female corrections officer at a prison in West Central Texas Saturday.
Mari Johnson, 55, a correctional officer with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, was found unresponsive about 3 a.m. near the kitchen area of the French Robertson Unit, a prison in Abilene, according to a TDCJ spokesman.
Compton, who was assigned to the kitchen area, allegedly attacked Johnson when she entered a storage area near the kitchen, according to a release from TDCJ in Huntsville.
Lifesaving measures were initiated and Johnson was then taken to Hendrick Medical Center in Abilene where she was pronounced dead, according to TDCJ.
Compton was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14 in Dallas County, according to the release, and entered the TDCJ system on Dec. 13, 2011.
He has been transferred from the French Robertson Unit to an undisclosed maximum security TDCJ unit, the release stated.
Investigators with the Office of the Inspector General-TDCJ continue their investigation and the findings will be presented to the Taylor County District Attorney's Office.
"Correctional officers have one of the most difficult jobs in all of state government protecting the public from dangerous individuals," Brad Livingston, the department's executive director, said. "This is a tragic reminder that carrying out that mission can lead to the ultimate sacrifice."
Johnson had been with the prison system since August 2009.
Dale Wainwright, chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, said the loss of a corrections officer's life was "difficult to put into words."
"I ask the public to remember their acts of unselfishness, remember their many acts of courage, and remember the dedication and commitment demonstrated every day by correctional officers," he said.
The Robertson Unit, about 140 miles west of Fort Worth, has a capacity of nearly 3,000 inmates.
Gov. Greg Abbott called the slaying senseless and an "unfathomably tragic event."
Johnson's death comes a year after the last on-duty slaying of a Texas corrections officer. Timothy Davison, 38, was attacked by an inmate in July 2015 at the Telford Unit near Texarkana in far northeast Texas. The inmate, Billy Joel Tracy, 38, already was serving a life prison term and now is awaiting trial for capital murder.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Associated Press People gather at a makeshift memorial Sunday to honor the victims of a truck attack on revelers on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation.
SHARE Associated Press People comfort each other at a makeshift memorial Sunday to honor the victims of a truck attack on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France. 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.
By Steph Solis, USA TODAY NETWORK
The truck driver who plowed into a French holiday crowd Thursday, killing 84 and injuring 200, asked for "more weapons" in a text message before the attack in Nice, and the attack came after police removed vans that had been blocking the road, according to news reports.
The updates came as French authorities announced Sunday they detained two more people, an unnamed man and woman, in connection with the attack, according to multiple news reports. The latest arrests make a total of seven suspects in police custody since the deadly Bastille Day attack.
The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years, drove through the crowd for more than a mile before police shot him dead. His mobile phone sent a text that said "bring more weapons, bring him in at 5 C," on Thursday at 10:27 p.m., according to the French television station BFMTV.
The attack came hours after police removed four vans that had blocked Promenade des Anglais for a military parade earlier in the day, according to The Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom. Just 60 officers were on duty, despite warnings that Nice was a target of jihadists, according to the paper.
"Terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time," said France's prime minister, Manual Valls.
In an interview with the Journal du dimanche newspaper, Valls said the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the attack, is encouraging more people to stage attacks. He said of the driver that "the killer was radicalized very quickly."
Investigators are trying to determine whether Bouhlel acted alone.
A man and woman were detained Sunday in Nice, the AP, Reuters and Agence France Presse reported, all citing an unnamed official from the Paris prosecutor's office. Neither suspect was identified.
Authorities are trying to determine whether Bouhlel, a Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years, acted alone.
The Associated Press reported Sunday that 85 remain hospitalized, 18 of whom are in life-threatening condition.
Despite the Islamic State group's claim of responsibility, people who knew Bouhlel said they saw no signs of radicalism, only flashes of anger.
SHARE Monique Ching/Standard-Times Paul Lewis and Milton Lewis, Fort Concho Buffalo Soldiers, are ready for the parade to begin. The two rode just behind the Fort Concho Color Guard, at the front of the procession.
By Staff Report
On July 28, 1866, Congress authorized the creation of Buffalo Soldier units, made up of black enlisted soldiers in the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry regiments and the 24th and 25th U.S. Infantry regiments. To mark the 150th Anniversary of the act, Fort Concho will host a special ceremony and talk at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, July 28, on the fort's Parade Ground.
Nicknamed "buffalo soldiers" by their Indian foes who equated their hair style and courage to that of their sacred buffalo, these troops served with distinction across the American west in the late 1800s. Companies of all four regiments served at Fort Concho from 1869-85 and represented half of the soldiers stationed at the post.
Members of the fort's Buffalo Soldier living history unit, assisted by other living history members, will take down the flag and fire the evening gun, much as was done in the fort's historic days.
A talk on the history and achievements of the Buffalo Soldiers by Dr. John Langellier, a noted historian from Tucson, Arizona, and author of a new book, "Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Soldiers in the Frontier Army" will follow the ceremony. The presentation will be in the Commissary Building, at the intersection of Burgess Street and East Avenue C. Copies of the book, featuring dozens of rarely seen photos, will be on sale and refreshments will be served at the free event.
The Fort Concho National Historic Landmark has been owned and operated by the city of San Angelo since 1935.
The fort is located at 630 S. Oakes St.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at San Angelo Regional Airport.
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By Staff Report
Semper Fresh Kettle Corn, with the help of Lonestar 92.9 radio station, will have the Restore the Memorial fundraiser from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the corner of Sunset Drive and Sherwood Way for the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 457 to restore the Tom Green County Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Local Vietnam veterans will be present to eat lunch and visit with members of the community, according to a news release. Food for purchase will be barbecue plates, fresh-popped kettle corn and shaved ice snow cones. There will be shaded seating available.
For more information, call Stephen Bright at 325-212-9460 or email stephenbright42023@yahoo.com.
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The winning Kids Inc. participants will set up shop at Sunset Mall from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday for the Kids Inc. Business Showcase. This year's event is sponsored by 1st Community Federal Credit Union, a news release from the Sunset Mall said. The event allows the kids to learn about business, make money and have fun.
The winners submitted their business ideas through Sunset Mall's Facebook page. Fans then voted on their favorites, and the winners will sell their products at Sunset Mall for the Kids, Inc. Business Showcase. The 15 winning businesses include the following:
Laura's Jewelry Store by Laura Gonzalez.
Mia's Neat Knits by Mia Flores.
Good Old Fashioned Suds by Keegan Hallie and Rylan Wadsworth.
September's Sassy Crafts by September Bogs.
Unique Arts Booth by Hadley Mann and Ryan Romo.
Juliana's Fine Art by Juliana Castanon.
Beth-Tastic Art by Beth McCann.
Mustang Arts by Jade and Emery Harper.
Stuck on You by Ben McCann.
Bippity Boppety Bam by Dylan Fisher and Gabriel Gutierrez.
Personally Yours by Abigayle and Katelynn Garcia.
Patterns by Design by Faith Miller.
Gifts for Everyone by Sterling Cook.
Jewel 4 Life by Desiray Thorp.
Tristian & Mila's Bowtique by Tristin McGuire.
"We are excited to put kids in business and offer this opportunity to budding retail entrepreneurs," said Sabrina Tatsch, Sunset Mall marketing and specialty leasing manager. "Allowing kids to sell their products or services in a retail environment will give them a real taste of what it takes to run a business. We're looking forward to hosting these merchants of the future."
This year's event will be held near the east fountain by Master Cuts and Dillard's Women.
State business starts grow by 10 percent
Growth in the number of businesses registered in Texas was just over 10 percent for the first half of 2016 compared to the same period last year, according to data compiled by the Texas secretary of state. The agency records the formation of new businesses in the state.
From Jan. 1 through June 30, a total of 91,578 new business entities were created with the Texas secretary of state's office to form new for-profit corporations, professional corporations, professional associations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships. This represents a 10 percent increase from 2015 which saw the formation of 83,235 entities in the same time period, the secretary of state said in a news release.
In June alone, more than 15,000 new registrations were logged. Of those, 30 were based in San Angelo.
The agency did not indicate how many businesses closed during the period for which the data were compiled.
Staff reports
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The following editorial appeared in Wednesday's Orange County Register:
In a show of shocking imprecision, the White House recently released statistics on the number of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa during President Obama's seven years 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-ever report of this kind, as few as 64 and as many as 116 non-combatants 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 is 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 to bombs from manned aircraft, they're more accurate at hitting small targets. Collateral damage is supposed to be minimized. Civilian deaths should be few the strikes 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 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, this editorial board called on Congress to give the president authority to use military force against ISIS. At the same time, the board 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 mission by asking hard questions about the vague, barely believable data released on July 1 and the drone strategy itself.
To OUR Gourmet Retailer Readers
While Gourmet Retailer no longer exists as a separate print publication and website, Progressive Grocer will continue to feature new content about boutique retailing in our ongoing coverage of Independent Grocers.
Please update your Gourmet Retailer bookmark and check our Independent Grocers topic page regularly for updates and fresh content.
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Three recent studies examining the role of public pension debt on the overall fiscal health of states should be a warning shot for Americans entering retirement age. If you will be living on reduced income when you retire, as most Americans will, you'll likely want to avoid the states most likely to raise your taxes and cut your essential government services. As reports by J.P. Morgan, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Mercatus Center show, that dubious distinction goes to Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky and New Jersey.Due largely to massive unfunded liabilities for public-employee pensions, the fiscal health of these four states doesn't look promising. If you live there now, you may want to plan on moving to better enjoy your golden years.In its report, "The ARC and the Covenants," J.P. Morgan calculated what all 50 U.S states currently spend on bonds, pensions and obligations related to underfunded pensions and retiree health benefits, along with what they would be spending to cover those obligations over 30 years assuming a 6 percent rate of return on investments. Here's what the report's authors found: To fully cover its retirement and other debt obligations, Connecticut would have to either increase taxes by 14 percent, cut spending on government services (such as senior health insurance assistance, roads and community centers) by 14 percent, or raise workers' pension contributions by an astonishing 699 percent. In Illinois, policymakers would need to either hike taxes 17 percent, cut spending by 16 percent or increase worker contributions by 400 percent. Kentucky fares even worse. To pay its retirement obligations, the Bluegrass State would have to raise taxes by 20 percent, cut spending by 13 percent or raise worker contributions by 435 percent. But when it comes to taxpayers bearing the brunt of unfunded pension liabilities, those in New Jersey would get hammered the worst. To pay for its massive debt, the state would need to raise taxes 26 percent, cut spending by 24 percent or increase workers' contributions by 471 percent.PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) approaches the problem from a different perspective. In its State Financial Position Index , PwC considers unfunded retirement obligations and aggregated financial assets less liabilities relative to the number of taxpayers and median household income for each state. The four worst states: again, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky and New Jersey.Interestingly, the PwC report notes that the states with the greatest need to improve their relative financial position are experiencing negative net migration. In other words, people are voting with their feet, which of course will make the tax burden even greater on those who stay behind.And a new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, "Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition," examines states' financial health based on short- and long-term debt and other obligations, such as unfunded pensions and retiree healthcare benefits.According to the study's authors, "Growing long-term obligations for pensions and healthcare benefits continue to strain the finances of state governments, highlighting the fact that state policymakers must be vigilant to consider both the short-term and the long-term consequences of their decisions." Those states most affected, largely due to the low amounts of cash they have on hand and their large debt obligations, are Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky and New Jersey, plus Massachusetts. It plays like a broken a record.In all, U.S. public retirement programs are more than $1 trillion in debt, resulting in tremendous budget challenges for states and local governments. While it's easy to kick the can down the road for another day, if policymakers don't get control of the pension crisis now, taxpayers and public workers will be paying for it dearly instead of enjoying what should be the best years of their lives.
Governor Raimondo has vetoed a bill that would have given grandparents, with temporary custody of their grandchildren, adoption -- and parental-termination rights -- they do not currently have.The grandparents adoption bill sponsored by Rep. Anastasia Williams, D-Providence, cleared the General Assembly in the final hours of this year's legislative session. It would have allowed grandparents to petition the Family Court to terminate the parents' rights, so they could adopt children in their care.In her veto message, Raimondo said the legislation "could undermine the rights of natural parents and may inadvertently hinder the Department of Children, Youth, and Families' ability ... to place children, even on a temporary basis, in the care of their grandparents."Among the concerns she listed: "If grandparents have the right to petition for the termination of parental rights once children are placed with them, then parents are less likely to agree to such kinship placements or guardianships, even though they might be in the best interest of the child."Beyond that, "attorneys may choose to advise their clients not to agree to such guardianships or placements if this bill were to become law. In 2015 alone, there were 128 guardianship petitions filed in the Family Court. If parents do not agree to such kinship care arrangements ... children could end up in unnecessarily intensive settings of care such as group homes."Under current law, she also noted, "natural parents have a right to counsel in any termination proceeding brought by the state, and the state is generally required to demonstrate that it has made all reasonable efforts to encourage and strengthen the parental relationship ... It is unclear whether natural parents would still have a right to counsel in the event of a private right of action authorized by this bill."According to the governor's office, requests for a veto came from the Rhode Island Family Court, the Office of the Public Defender, DCYF and the Rhode Island Coalition for Children and Families.The governor noted the Senate has created a special legislative commission to review and make recommendations relative to grandparents rights.
icksPoisonings from fake marijuana have jumped alarmingly and usage has become so prevalent that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced new efforts Thursday to prevent the sale of products often sold in head shops, vaporiums and online.So-called synthetic marijuana goes by a litany of names on the street -- K2, Spice, Green Giant, Smacked, Wicked X, AK-47, Geeked Up, Ninja, Caution, Red Giant, and Keisha Kole, state health officials said Thursday.Earlier this week 33 people were rushed to Brooklyn hospitals when a bad batch of K2 sickened dozens in Bedford-Stuyvesant."It was like 'The Walking Dead.' A zombie scene," said Brian Arthur, 38, about the street scene on Tuesday.Users not only were seen wandering the streets, some were lying on sidewalks and leaning against fire hydrants and trees, witnesses said.Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared an epidemic.Cuomo announced a series of aggressive actions to fight the sale of K2 and other illegal synthetics. He said the state health department's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, in partnership with the New York State Police, would clamp down on sales statewide."The evolution of synthetic drugs is an alarming public health risk," Cuomo said in a statement Thursday.The synthetics, which can be smoked like conventional marijuana or inhaled from incense, are made in clandestine labs abroad. And while the drugs tend to have a chemical resemblance to THC -- the key psychoactive compound in marijuana -- illegal drugmakers frequently change the chemical structure to conceal the products' identity to keep from having them seized as they cross U.S. borders, experts say.Writing in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Thursday, a national team of researchers said usage had exploded -- and so had hospitalizations.The weekly report, a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted 42,138 poisonings caused by the drugs nationwide from Jan. 1, 2010, to Nov. 30, 2015. The poisonings were reported by only 101 hospitals.In a subset of 456 cases, researchers found 70 percent of users were 19 to 65 years old and 27.4 percent were ages 13 to 18. More than 80 percent of users were male, researchers found.The drugs can cause hallucinations, heart rhythm disturbances, delirium, coma and death. The synthetics are said to be two times to 100 times more potent than actual marijuana.Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds, chief executive of the Family & Children's Association in Mineola, said the synthetics are called cannabinoids but often have very little, if any, genuine marijuana."To call this stuff marijuana is a misnomer because it is not marijuana in any way shape or form," Reynolds said.He said the products largely hail from labs in China and are sold surreptitiously in head shops, vaporiums and "no-name gas stations" on Long Island.Worse, the products are sold online as incense and potpourri, by vendors whose whereabouts are difficult to track, Reynolds said.Online products often use fanciful names to attract young buyers, he said. "If you look at the packaging you can see it's not designed to attract the attention of a 50-year-old man because it's sold under names like Scooby Snacks and Bizarro with a Superman logo on it," Reynolds said.In Manhattan, emergency medicine physician Dr. Robert Glatter said he had treated toxic exposures to fake marijuana and sedated some of these patients to prevent them from harming themselves or the emergency staff."We've seen sporadic cases, but not like the plethora coming from the Bronx and Brooklyn," said Glatter of Northwell Health system's Lenox Hill Hospital. "People use it because they believe it's natural, and therefore, safe."The synthetic drugs are sometimes coated in insecticides, even rat poison, Glatter said.Patients given drug tests routinely pass them, however, because the drugs lack THC, he said.
On Saturday, in the morning, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC, Administrator of the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, with Mrs Kaye de Jersey, attended and officially opened the 100th Gatton Show and addressed guests.
In the evening, His Excellency ceased duty as Administrator of the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia and resumed duty as Governor of Queensland, and the Honourable Chief Justice Catherine Holmes ceased duty as Acting Governor.
On Sunday, in the evening, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC Mrs Kaye de Jersey departed Queensland for an official visit to France, and the Honourable Chief Justice Catherine Holmes assumed duty as Acting Governor of Queensland.
Description
GIS 18 July 2016: Government has given its approval for the implementation of an e-health project, on a pilot basis, at the Accident & Emergency, and Unsorted Outpatient Departments of Dr A. G. Jeetoo Hospital in Port Louis.
The main objective of the project is to have a single integrated source of information and a focal point of reference on all matters related to health with improved resource planning, allocation, monitoring and evaluation through the use of appropriate information technology.
In the first instance, four modules, namely the Medical Records, Nursing Management, Patient Management and the Pharmacy Services, will be computerised. On successful implementation of the project, it will be extended to other regional hospitals and health institutions.
Description
GIS - 18 July, 2016: Enterprise Mauritius is leading a delegation of eleven manufacturers for first time to participate in the forthcoming edition of Premiere Vision New York which will be held on 19 and 20 July 2016 at Pier 94 New York, USA.
The delegation comprises six large and five medium textile and apparel companies. The products that will be showcased are t-shirts, polo shirts, jeans and children wear.
The main objectives behind this participation are to consolidate and expand market share in USA and maintain visibility as a Reliable Sourcing Destination for textile and apparel products.
Premiere Vision is an international fair which is held twice a year both in Paris and New York at different intervals. It is considered as an ideal platform for Mauritian enterprises to showcase their products and establish contacts with new buyers as well as consolidate linkages with existing buyers.
The fair is visited mainly by sourcing professionals and decision makers from the apparel industry. New York is considered as the fashion district of the United States; with over 900 fashion companies having their headquarters there. The prime location of the show, in the very centre of New York, ensures that important buyers, sourcing professionals, brands and private labels will attend the show.
The July 2015 edition which recorded 306 exhibitors attracted some 4,500 international professional purchasers over a two-day period. Representatives from renowned brands such as Calvin Klein, J.Crew, Michael Kors, Banana Republic, amongst others, attended the show.
USA is the second most important export market for Mauritius with total exports amounting to Rs 8.23 billion in 2015. The main products being exported comprise mainly of textile and apparel (83%), agro products and jewellery.
The preferential market access granted to Mauritius and other African countries through the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has played a critical role in spurring Mauritius exports to the U.S. The recent renewal of AGOA for a further period of 10 years, coupled with the extension of Third Country Fabric Derogation until 2025, offers a tremendous opportunity for Mauritian manufacturers to further boost up exports.
(TNS) -- If the wildfires that recently devastated parts of Kern County, Calif., had a positive side, it was that they brought together local communities for good, often through the use of mobile technology.That may have been just the beginning.Kern Innovation & Technology Community, an organization formed to promote the local tech industry, is putting together a competition next month pitting local software developers against each other to see who can invent the best computer app for assisting wildfire victims and emergency responders.The idea for the Aug. 5 event, titled Technology Fighting the Wildfires, was born in the aftermath of the Erskine Fire that last month destroyed more than 200 homes in the Lake Isabella area. A group of volunteers calling itself the All for One Movement formed to help in the recovery and rebuilding process. It soon reached out to KIT looking for help for fire victims in the Kern River Valley.KIT knew just what to do: Host a hackathon.A hackathon is where teams compete, in this case for an entire weekend, to come up with the best computer program fitting the contests parameters. At KITs last hackathon in April, close to two dozen local software developers divided into three teams to create an alcohol-themed smartphone app.Clearly, next months event will be more weighty than the last one.With what is surely only the beginning of a particularly devastating wildfire season in California, and Kern County in particular, the timing is right to come up with ideas and solutions to help responders and communities deal with the threat and aftermath of wildfires, Justin Powers, a representative of All for One, wrote by email.He noted the group is already using computer technology to connect emergency responders with people affected by the Erskine Fire.Local tech entrepreneurs say Kerns computer programming circles are up to the challenge. Besides that, the hackathon is a chance to show the wider community that technology isnt just about video games or dating apps, as Bakersfield programmer Scott Burton put it.More than that, Kevin Mershon, president of Bakersfield software developer Mershon Enterprises LLC, said the event is an opportunity for the public to get a taste for a career in technology and for business leaders to get a look at top local talent.KIT founder Alyssa Haerle sees the event as part of the organizations mission to improve and build up its community, responding to needs that arise. When All for Ones Powers contacted her about supporting his efforts in the Kern River Valley, she convened a brainstorming session with Burton, Mershon and others. Up came the hackathon idea.She hopes to see the event succeed on many levels, including creating partnerships and collaborations in the larger community, and broadening perceptions about the utility of computer technology.Most importantly, though, I want us as a community to work together to create tools that help the parts of the community that are currently hurting, she said.
A major player in Californias electricity system has opened its arms to the concept of using batteries whether mounted on a garage wall or inside an electric vehicle and other small-scale technology to help the grid.California Independent System Operator (ISO) received approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in June to launch a program that allows people with small-scale electricity technology to aggregate together and sell energy and services on the states wholesale market. Under the rules, people with technology such as batteries, rooftop solar panels and smart thermostats can enter into agreements with aggregators to form units representing at least half a megawatts worth of assets.But early looks at the idea suggest that it wont be much of an option for most rooftop solar customers rather, California ISOs aggregation concept appears more likely to act as a means of giving people with other emerging technologies a way to make money off their assets. That could be important from a system standpoint because those things offer flexibility to the grid and could, in fact, offer an answer to the lingering question of how to address the variability of renewables.The idea of aggregation is not technically new several organizations have put together demand response programs that involve placing controls on power-sucking systems like hot water heaters and air conditioners. By enrolling, or aggregating, those resources, power managers can curb demand during peak hours. That can mean protecting the grid from strain, or it might mean using less power from expensive, polluting peak-demand plants.Whats different about the CAISO program is its scale and flexibility. The aggregation of distributed energy resources, or DERs, provides a potential path for people with certain technology to enter into the wholesale market. Under certain circumstances, aggregations could even be mixed and matched rooftop solar systems, electric vehicle batteries, demand response and more. Aggregating entities who managed those arrangements might be utilities, solar power companies or companies that provide services to the grid.Its anything that could give energy back to the grid, so storage could definitely be part of that, said Steven Greenlee, a senior public information officer for CAISO. And that could be a home battery-type of setup and it could even be something such as the aggregation of electric vehicles.Though CAISO has set up the aggregation program to allow for rooftop solar, Severin Borenstein, a research professor in the Haas School of Business Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said that it likely wont be attractive for customers with panels on their roofs. Thats because net metering, a program where customers sell electricity from rooftop systems to a utility at the same rate as they would buy it for on the retail market, simply pays more. Whereas a net metering customer might get 20 cents for selling one kilowatt-hour of electricity back to the grid, the average price for that same KwH on the wholesale market would be more like 5 cents, Borenstein said.Its not obvious to me, if somebody is eligible for net metering, why they would choose to do this instead, he said.CAISOs program explicitly disallows net metering customers from aggregating and selling to the wholesale market because double participation would mean double payment, Greenlee explained.Still, Greenlee said, the program is relatively unique in the U.S. And the fact that its received regulatory approval from a federal agency means it could become a model for other states.And net metering is not intact in all states. Its been weakened in Nevada and Arizona , both of which are prime targets for the solar market because of the comparatively high levels of sunshine they receive.Sonia Aggarwal, director of the electricity research project Americas Power Plan, said that aggregation could serve as a possible alternative to net metering in states that either dont have it or have already rejected the concept.I definitely think it could [become a net metering alternative], she said.In California, she said, there are other uses. Aggregation could open up a new market for people who are currently just using assets for their own benefits people with electric vehicles and home batteries, for example.I think at this point its pretty much about saving money, from an individual perspective, she said.Aggregation could allow them to move from saving money to selling services. Exactly where the details of such setups will fall remains to be seen according to Greenlee, CAISO hasnt processed any applications yet.But there are many possible uses for aggregation. A smart thermostat company might enroll customers who would agree to let the company turn the temperature in their houses down one degree in the winter or up one degree in the summer not a big deal to any individual house, but it would add up if the company was able to do it in hundreds of buildings in a given area.Or, Greenlee posited, businesses that have nothing to do with electric power might find ways to sell services to the grid.For instance, you take a company such as United Parcel Service [that] has a big fleet, Greenlee said. If all that fleet was electric, they may be able to bid into our market with what energy they have.Batteries, whether they are in a car or on a wall, also present the opportunity to sell more than just electricity to the grid. The Rocky Mountain Institute explored some of those uses in a report last year among them, voltage and frequency regulation, helping meet peak demand and bringing power generators back online after a blackout.In addition to helping stabilize the grid and creating new pathways to help adopt cleaner energy, the move also positions CAISO to glean further insights into what the grid actually looks like. The aggregation rules subject participants to most of the same data reporting rules that large-scale power generators already have to follow real-time, or near-real-time submission of data.Today, most DERs and pretty much everything behind the meter is invisible to the ISO," said Sean Gallagher, vice president of state affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association, "and they have to sort of react to it.
(TNS) The Wisconsin Department of Corrections is seeking authority to destroy recordings of staff training just one day after their creation.The agency, which is cooperating with federal investigators over allegations of staff abuse of inmates, destroying public records, and other incidents at its Irma youth prison, is asking the states Public Records Board to approve an update to the departments records policy.The proposal would for the first time, officials say explicitly state how long the agency must keep recordings of employees participating in training designed to improve performance.DOC spokesman Tristan Cook said the proposed rule would cover audio and video recordings and screen-shot exercises meant for skill practice, technique training and quality assurance of service within training courses, on-the-job training or while performing job duties. The rule applies to recordings of employees receiving training only, he said.DOC is proposing (this retention rule) as we continue to refine and enhance training provided to DOC employees by enabling DOC managers and fellow employees to provide immediate feedback to employees in training, Cook said. The (retention rule) is being proposed to ensure DOCs compliance with Wisconsins public records law.He said the purpose of the videos is to provide real-time feedback for employees participating in training.DOC does not foresee a use for the recordings beyond providing feedback. I would also note that one day is the minimum retention period. If DOC determines they have additional value beyond one day, DOC has the ability under state law to retain the videos for a longer period, Cook said.The records board will consider the proposal next week.The wide ranging criminal investigation into the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls north of Wausau has raised questions about how well DOC trains prison guards, counselors and other employees.The proposal is contrary to the spirit of the states open records law, said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.Cook said examples of records falling under this rule would be recordings of probation and parole agents participating in motivational interviewing training, and employees answering the phone in DOCs electronic monitoring center and at its information technology help desk.He said the proposed rule would not govern pre-existing recordings used to train employees as part of a training course.Cook acknowledged that the two most substantial training programs within DOC are an academy for new correctional officers and basic training for new probation and parole agents.Beyond that, he said, DOC provides a host of other training options.When asked if the recordings subject to the proposal would apply to all training, including that of prison guards and probation and parole agents, Cook said he could not say definitively.In October, a state appeals court ruled Attorney General Brad Schimel must release two video recordings made in 2009 and 2013 depicting training sessions led by Schimel when he was the Waukesha County District Attorney.The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the state Democratic Party after it requested access to videos made of five sessions featuring Schimel, but the Justice Department said it could find only two.The state Supreme Court plans to rule on the matter this summer.Lueders said there is nothing in the open records law that says government officials have to promptly destroy certain records.He said the proposal is concerning because of the agencys track record on openness.The DOC has not been a good actor when it comes to openness and accountability, said Lueders. Just a horrible disregard for the spirit and the letter of our open records law.Lueders said hes troubled by the agencys desire to summarily destroy video recordings.What problem exactly is this intended to fix? said Lueders. Is the DOC getting or does it expect to get lots of requests for records of training videos? Cant it simply refuse to release them under the balancing test, by claiming they would compromise security, like the DOC does with so much else? How do we know that a video that is destroyed falls into this category, since it would, in fact, no longer exist?Cook said the recordings will help the agency in its effort to identify and improve the skills of our employees.Whether or not DOC expects to receive public record requests for these records is not relevant to the creation of (a new rule), as the (rule) simply establishes DOCs specific obligations regarding retention of the record, said Cook.Lueders said a preferable proposal would be for the agency to keep the recordings and provide reasons to withhold them.If the DOC does not promptly destroy these records, it would be forbidden from doing so after a request is made, per the open records law. That doesnt mean it has to release them, but it would need to have some sort of reason for not releasing them if asked to do so, said Lueders. I submit that this would be a better starting point, especially given how capable the DOC has proven itself to be at coming up with reasons for not releasing things.The Public Records Board will review the proposal at its Tuesday meeting and make a final decision at a later meeting, said board member Paul Ferguson, who leads the Department of Justices Office of Open Government.
(TNS) -- The man sitting alone at the picnic table was muttering to himself as the young police officer approached. Spotting the officer, the man became visibly agitated, swearing profusely and threatening to hit him with a metal tray.Theres only one of you and three of us, he taunted.As the man closed on the officer, the image froze.Capt. James Mulla stepped to the officers side. What did you have and what did you do? he asked.Mulla is an instructor at the New Hampshire Police Academy, and this is the academys state-of-the-art training simulator.Last week was week 11 of the 16-week academy for full-time officers. Sixty-four recruits from about 35 police agencies took turns in the simulator, which uses 300-degree video images to create real-world scenarios.Amid an ongoing national conversation about police use of force, New Hampshires police academy uses technology and live-actor scenarios to give officers a taste of what theyll face on the streets.The point is to bring classroom learning into practical application, explained Capt. Mark Bodanza, commander of the academy. We want to expose them to as much as possible here in the training environment so when theyre out there under stress, theyre handling it appropriately, he said.In the simulator, officers use handguns, Tasers and pepper spray canisters that are designed to feel like the real thing but use lasers instead.Scott Ferguson, the academys media specialist, programs the scenarios and can change what happens in response to the decisions a recruit makes.If the officer successfully de-escalates a situation, Ferguson can adjust the simulation in response. But if the officer starts yelling and screaming, instead of de-escalating it, it will escalate, Bodanza said.After a scenario runs, instructors debrief recruits about what they did and whether their actions were legally justified. If not, were correcting their behavior before they go out into the field, Bodanza said.We dont want officers to treat every situation as a deadly force situation, he said. Its just not appropriate for what we do in law enforcement.The state Police Standards and Training Council has a partnership with the New Hampshire chapter of National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) to provide mental health training for police officers. That contract was renewed last month.Last week, academy recruits spent two full days learning about mental illness from Ann Duckless, a community educator at NAMI. Then they had the chance to try out what they had learned, both in the simulator and in live-action scenarios.In the simulated confrontation with the agitated man, Michael Roscoe Jr., a recruit from the Manchester Police Department, pulled his Taser as the man approached, brandishing the metal tray.Later he told Mulla he should have created more distance between himself and the man. But he didnt want to escalate the situation by yelling at him to drop the tray, he said.Mulla pointed out that the man had threatened to hit him with the dangerous object. When he replayed that moment in the simulation, Roscoe was surprised; he hadnt heard the direct threat.Thats not uncommon in stressful situations, Bodanza said. Sometimes you will lose auditory function, fine motor skills, dexterity. Your heart rate goes up, your respiration is up.Thats why this kind of training is critical, he said. You still have to function rationally. You still have to function appropriately, he said. So you put them under stress so theyre accustomed to it.Duckless said this kind of training cant prevent every tragedy, such as the recent fatal shooting of a mentally ill Michigan teen by police in Peterborough.But it certainly does insure greater awareness and sensitivity, she said.She said she knows that the training they do here saves lives. And the collaboration between NAMI and police gives her hope.We dont see all of the success stories where that sensitivity and that awareness paid off, she said.Duckless teaches officers to recognize signs of mood and anxiety disorders that can affect how someone responds to a police officer. She talks to them about how to defuse a tense situation with someone in crisis, and tells them its important to forge relationships with residents in their communities who have mental illnesses.This is community policing at its best, she said.The capstone of NAMIs training, Duckless said, is something called In Our Own Voice, bringing in individuals who have mental illnesses to tell their stories.Last week, the academy class heard from a woman with schizophrenia and a man with post-traumatic stress disorder.Their stories are so powerful, Duckless said. Both of them suffered and struggled for a long time before they got help.In the end, it feels like it isnt enough; how can 16 weeks prepare someone for all the challenges they may face on the streets?Bodanza admits it cant.Upon graduation, these recruits will return to their agencies for additional training, he said. And theyll learn on the job, hopefully with guidance from more experienced officers.At the academy, Bodanza said, You try to expose them to as much as possible. You lay the foundation properly, then you hope that they take advantage of the additional training options that are out there.Any police agency can use the academys simulator to train their officers, Bodanza said. Ferguson will even go out and take photos of local communities so that departments can train using local landmarks.Michael Barber, a campus police officer at New Hampshire Hospital, is part of the new academy class. He called the mental health training very beneficial.Just the fact that were dealing with real people with real lives, he said. Just because someone has a mental health issue doesnt mean theyre necessarily a criminal. So its our job to help any way we can. ...Outside the academy last week, the American and New Hampshire flags were at half-staff to honor the five police officers slain in Dallas. Hanging still in the summer heat, they were a reminder to these new recruits of just how high the stakes can be.
COLUMBUS -- Several thousands of dollars of damage was done to the Loup River Bridge and farm equipment after a tractor and planter got stuck on bridge on Highway 81.
According to a press release from the Platte County Sheriffs Department, the incident happened at about 5:30 p.m. Friday when a tractor driven by Daniel Krafka, 55, of Bellwood, was traveling south on the bridge just south of Columbus.
The planter that was being pulled behind the tractor caught a section of the overhead structure of the bridge, causing the driver to lose control. The planter was partially torn away from the tractor and became lodged in the bridge structure.
The sheriffs department responded to the accident. The southbound traffic on the bridge was closed for several hours.
Due to the condition of the equipment and damage to the bridge, the Nebraska Department of Roads was contacted to assist in the removal of the equipment.
The sheriffs office has not yet been informed by the department of roads of the approximate dollar amount of damage to the bridge. The estimated damage was $70,000 to the tractor and $100,000 to the planter.
In the next 20 years (2016-2035), according to Airbus Global Market Forecast, passenger traffic will grow at an average 4.5% a year, driving a need for more than 33,000 new aircraft above 100 seats (32,425 passenger & 645 freighters greater than 10 tonnes) worth US$5.2 trillion. By 2035, the worlds aircraft fleet will have doubled from todays 19,500 aircraft to almost 40,000. Some 13,000 passenger and freighter aircraft will be replaced with more fuel efficient types.
Urbanization and increased wealth in emerging economies particularly in Asia is powering air traffic growth. With a combined population of more than six billion people, these economies will grow at 5.6% per year and the propensity to travel will triple to 75% of its population. Within 10 years Chinas domestic air traffic will become the worlds largest. In economies such as Western Europe or North America, air traffic growth will be 3.7% percent.
While GDP remains a key driver in traffic growth, Airbus sees private consumption (a component of GDP) becoming a more significant economic variable on some important flows including domestic China and domestic India. Middle classes in emerging markets will double to 3.5 billion people by 2035.
Globally, by 2035, 62% of world population will be city dwellers and the number of aviation mega cities will rise from 55 to 93 by 2035. These centres of wealth creation many 47 of which are already schedule constrained airports will account for 35% of world GDP.
In 20 years the number of daily long haul passengers travelling to, from, or via aviation mega cities, will more than double to 2.5 million.
The next 20 years sees a requirement for some one million pilots and engineers (560,000 new pilots, 540,000 new engineers) to fly the and maintain the new aircraft.
In the widebody market, Airbus forecasts a trend towards higher capacity aircraft and forecasts a requirement for more than 9,500 widebody passenger and freighter aircraft over the next 20 years, valued at some US$2.8 trillion.
This represents 29% of all new aircraft deliveries and 54% by value. Most widebody deliveries (46%) will be in the Asia Pacific region.
A focus on sustainable growth has enabled fuel burn and noise reductions to fall by at least 70% over the the last 40 years.
Cadenza Innovation is bringing to market a low-cost and high-performance technology platformcell design and housingfor licensing to lithium-ion battery manufacturers worldwide.
Cadenza Innovation , a Li-ion battery startup founded in 2012 by Dr. Christina Lampe-Onnerud, former CEO and founder of Boston Power ( earlier post ), has raised more than $5 million in growth capital. The company says it will use the new funds to expand product development, secure additional certifications, extend initial deployments, make key new hires and fuel revenue growth.
Cadenza Innovation is capitalizing on its intellectual property, combined with the massive industry learning curve, advancements in manufacturing and increasingly mature supply chains, to create a very low cost approach for the packaging of lithium-ion chemistries. Were excited to partner with global players for rapid implementation into this unprecedented market opportunitypaying particular attention to battery capacity inside a given footprint, total system cost and an unwavering commitment to safety. Doing this also enables our team to remain a meaningful part of the solution to climate changea mission weve held as individuals for decades. Dr. Lampe-Onnerud
Cadenza says that its cell designs combines the best properties from wound jelly rolls and large prismatic cells.
Its cylindrical jelly rolls are longer and wider compared to those in 18650 cells. These larger jelly rolls lead to significant packaging advantages (higher Wh/L), as well as lower cost and higher yield. The cells can use all state-of-the-art chemistries to optimize power or energy.
Left. Cylindrical jelly rolls. Right. Housing. Click to enlarge.
Thermally isolating housing featuring non-combustible ceramic fiber material formulations with high levels of fire retardant enables a closely packed jelly roll configuration without cascading failure. The thermal isolation is sufficient to allow large jelly rolls with no roll-to-roll runaway.
The companys large prismatic cell configuration allows and open jelly roll structure with shared atmosphere. Non-expanding cells and no cascading result in space effective and low cost module designs.
The cell uses the entire jelly roll capacity distribution with no need for sorting, while the large format size allows easily incorporated low pressure vent and pressure disconnect designs in a space effective way.
Cadenza Innovation thus offers:
Energy Density: tighter packaging of electrochemical units delivers longer range in existing vehicle designs as well as viable peak-shaving for grid and community energy storage in urban areas.
Low Cost: highly simplified design using readily available components in global mass production to approach a price-neutral paradigm when compared to fossil fuels.
Safety: integrated fire protection, enabling fail-safe battery packs for use in residential, grid and transportation applications.
With more than a dozen patent applications filed and four published, Cadenza Innovation says that its novel pack architecture for the EV market enables longer range in a smaller pack footprint; price parity with internal combustion engine vehicles; and eliminates battery pack fires caused by thermal runaway.
For the grid market, the companys solution enables a smaller footprint to open up more placement options; generates higher return on investment via a wider range of use cases; and is critical for entry into dense urban markets characterized by strict safety codes.
Led by Golden Seeds, investors in the oversubscribed Series A round include Connecticut Innovations; Scale Investors; Summit Power Group Co-chairman Eric Redman; and entrepreneur, philanthropist and investor Mark Torrance, along with angel investors from Asia, Europe and North America.
Working closely with Dr. Lampe-Onnerud, Cadenza Innovations corporate and technical leadership team previously established Boston-Power, which today is based in China. The team includes Cadenza Innovation Chief Technology Officer Dr. Per Onnerud, Chief Operating Officer Declan Shalvey and Vice President of Research and Development Dr. Jay Shi.
The company is collaborating with an extensive network that includes FCA (Fiat Chrysler), ABB, Alcoa, Morgan Advanced Materials, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and multiple supply chain sources throughout Asia and the US.
Development of the Cadenza platform has been funded, in part, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the US Department of Energy (Award Number DE-AR0000392) and from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) (Agreement Number 70422).
Additional financial assistance has been provided by the State of Connecticut, through both Connecticut Innovations and the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), and by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, through its MassCEC Catalyst Program Awards.
Two weeks separate us from the announcement and, apparently, market launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note7, and the myriad of leaks has so far left little for Samsung to surprise us with. Casemakers don't help either - some listed their products a while ago, others only just.
VRS Design falls in the latter category, and it has launched a wide range of cases to accompany the upcoming Samsung phablet.
VRS Design cases for the Samsung Galaxy Note7
Now, we'll refrain from debating the pros and cons of the various models in terms of looks vs features, but rather stick to the Note7 itself. Sure we already know it'll sport a dual-curved display, and this manufacturer's renders show exactly that.
However, the S Pen has so far been little more than a hole in a drawing, and somehow none of the lucky folks to have handled a Note7 seems to have taken any interest in it. The VRS renders, on the other hand, show the stylus' top end (at the bottom of the device, obviously), which seems to be a similar design to the one on the current Note5. That would mean click to eject, and hopefully Samsung has learned its lesson and foolproofed it better this time to avoid unpleasant Pengates.
One more bit that gets another confirmation is the USB Type-C port. The Note7 thus looks set to become the first Samsung smartphone to sport the next standard port design, after the Korean company took the conservative approach and stuck with microUSB 2.0 for the Galaxy S7 in the spring.
Source
The Fair Trade Commission in South Korea is investigating Qualcomm for unfair market competition practices and may fine the chip maker up to 1 trillion Korean Won or $880 million.
The FTC put Qualcomm under investigation 17 months ago for anti-competitive licensing and its final verdict will come out on July 20.
Apparently, Qualcomm misused its patents licensing and charged Korean manufacturers Samsung and LG unfair prices. Here is a quote from an FTC rep:
Qualcomm has been collecting royalty fees from mobile phone manufacturers based on certain fixed rates from the suggested price of a mobile device Qualcomm should have sought royalty fees based on each chipset.
Qualcomm are suspected of charging patent fees based on the product's price instead of a fixed price for a specific patent. If proven true, Qualcomm may have unfairly overcharged Korean manufacturers by KRW 1 trillion, which is about $879 million.
And while we are waiting for the verdict, there is a good chance Qualcomm be fined by July 20. Last year the chip maker settled for a fine of $1 billion by the Chinese authorities for the very same thing and is currently under investigation by the EU Commission.
Source 1 Source 2 Source 3
Haiti - Agriculture : New partnership in the sector of Vetiver
International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF) and Unilever announced a new partnership with leading non-governmental organizations to enhance the livelihoods of smallholder vetiver farmers in Haiti. The partnership, Vetiver Together, aims to sustainably improve food security, increase yields, and diversify income, while working to support womens empowerment and environmental conservation.
Let's reclall that Vetiver oil is a common ingredient in many fragrances and an important crop for Unilever, found in brands such as Axe and Impulse. Haiti produces some of the best vetiver in the world, and many farmers rely on cultivation of the root for their entire source of income. But, due to economic pressures, farmers often harvest the roots before they are fully mature, leading to low prices, poor oil yields, deforestation and soil erosion. The partnership will help farmers address these challenges as well as provide training to community members - including in crop and livestock production, soil conservation and nutrition - to help improve social conditions and diversity of farm production and food security.
The project is a strategic social investment that recognizes that improving smallholder and community livelihoods and strengthening the Haitian vetiver supply chain are mutually beneficial. It is supported by the Enhancing Livelihoods Fund a partnership between Unilever, Oxfam Great Britain, and the Ford Foundation which backs innovative models to improve agricultural practices and have a positive social impact, particularly for women.
"IFF relies on small farming communities for many natural products. These farmers, their families, and communities are an important part of our supply chain," said Andreas Fibig, Chairman and CEO of IFF. "Sustainability is a key enabler of our Vision2020 business strategy, and this partnership is the embodiment of one of our key sustainability strategies, Sensational People, in which we engage our employees and stakeholders to make a positive difference in the world."
"Sustainability is integral to how we do business at Unilever we aim to enhance the social and economic livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers in our supply chain," said Dhaval Buch, Chief Procurement Officer of Unilever. "Creating a more resilient supply chain is essential to make real impact on the ground. Partnerships, like Vetiver Together, are instrumental if we are to achieve the level of systematic change that is necessary across industries and supply chains."
SL/ HaitiLibre
Haiti - Tourism : Inauguration of the Promotion Centre of Saut d'Eau
On Friday, the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Industries, proceeded to the inauguration of the Community Centre of Cultural Promotion and Tourism of Saut d'Eau realized within the framework of a partnership project between the townhall of Saut d'Eau, the Ministry of Culture, Concern Worldwide, W.K Kellogg Foundation and the European Union.
This partnership project for Community Tourism Promotion is part of the Ministry's strategy towards a development of the tourism sector through a participatory approach promoting community as the primary beneficiary of the benefits of sustainable tourism.
Took part in the ceremony among others Raphael Jean Baptiste, of theCabinet of the Minister of Tourism (Guy Didier Hypollite), Leila Bourahla the National Director of Concern Worldwide and the mayor of Saut d'Eau, Thelus Marie Andree Ruth.
Recall that Saut d'Eau is a commune in the Central Department (Borough of Mirebalais) which owes its name to a waterfall called "Le Saut" whose waters come from the Mountain "Terrible." This place is a sacred place for Catholics and voodoo believers and a tourist attraction by excellence which plans to host once again this year, thousands of pilgrims and local and international tourists.
S/ HaitiLibre
Haiti - Education : Partial resumption of corrections for Bac 2016
Friday, Louis Mary Cador, Director General of the Ministry of Education hasprovided an update on the process of correction of exams of Bac 2016, disrupted by a strike since Monday, July 11.
Recall that the teachers involved in the correction of exams of baccalaureate assigned to the Lycee Toussaint Louverture, headquarters of the process had started a work stoppage for better wage conditions. Recall that they demanded to the Ministry 45,000 gourdes for the correction work instead of 21,000 they receive. In response the Ministry had rather than an increase, announced a decrease in pay to 19,000 gourdes what is at the origin of this strike.
Louis Mary Cador that informs that due to financial problems at the ministry, it is not possible to meet the requirements of teachers, however, despite the financial constraints he said that the Ministry had taken steps to maintain the premium of 21,000 gourdes to correctors. Stressing that the ministry can not promise what it can not pay it ensures that a set of measures were adopted to allow teachers to continue their correction work.
He announced that the corrections had be resumed in several centres of of various departments (without quantifying the magnitude of this resumption). In the West where blocking is more important, Louis Mary Cador said to have instructed the Departmental Director in order to take the necessary and allow candidates and population to avoid being penalized (without specifying what ae the measures). Finally he seek the understanding and cooperation of all correctors to resume work, appealing to their conscience...
Concluding "We have a duty to do the exercise that should facilitate the correction of copies. However, we remind all those who associate with this movement that the Ministry is not insensitive to their demands. However, the Ministry regrets not being able to meet these requirements at this time, without trivializing them."
See also :
https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18014-haiti-education-corrections-of-bac-paralyzed-by-strike.html
PI/ HaitiLibre
Haiti - Technology : The mayor of Les Cayes discusses solar energy with South Koreans
Friday, as part of the battle that the Municipal Council of Les Cayes leads to permanently solve the electricity crisis in the South Department (especially due to the service interruptions at the Central Haytrac of Bourdet), former SenatorJean Gabriel Fortune, new elected Mayor of the commune of Les Cayes met a delegation of South Korean entrepreneurs led by Gabriel Lee, Chief Executive of the company "Atlantic Bridge Developments" established in Toronto (Canada).
According to Mayor Fortune, the meeting aimed to explore solutions to the crisis of "blakawout" in the department including the option of solar energy. Representatives of the "Atlantic Bridge Developments" Group suggest the installation of a 15MW solar power plant that would allow make available to the city, power 24/24.
Jean Gabriel Fortune is convinced that this solar project is the solution and declared "We will continue to fight in the interests of the population, because no development is possible without electricity."
SL/ HaitiLibre
Published on 2016/07/17 | Source
Actor Lee Jin-uk who has been sued for rape underwent an 11-hour investigation. He told the police there was no force involved.
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Lee Jin-uk arrived at the Seoul Suseo Police Station around 6:55PM on July 17th and came out at 6AM in the morning on the 18th.
He argued that there was no force like the accuser said and submitted their chatting log as evidence. Lee Jin-uk also gave his DNA which will be compared to the DNA found on the accuser's underwear.
Lee was sued to rape on July 14th. The accuser had tests done.
Lee Jin-uk's agency said, "They met through a friend and she was someone that Jin-wook was going to be interested in. They are not in a relationship". Then the accuser was countersued for false accusations.
Lee Jin-uk appeared at the Police Station on the 17th and said, "Falsely accusing someone is a big deal and I think the accuser made the mistake of charging me with rape just because I'm famous".
Sri Lanka has made an entry in the 2016 edition of JLLs Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI), which tracks which countries provide the most favourable operating environments for investors, developers and corporate occupiers. Compared to similar market sized countries like Myanmar (ranked at 95) and Vietnam (ranked at 68), Sri Lanka (ranked at 69) is a stronger debutant, and better-placed to move up in GRETIs next (2018) assessment given the reforms being rolled out by the government and increasing interest of international investors in this market.
Sri Lanka and Vietnam are likely to compete for moving into the semi-transparent category ahead of others in the pack from their low-transparency status today. Both countries are reforming several sectors and attracting international investors. Myanmar too is off the block, and one of the fastest improvers, but has a long journey ahead through the cluster of countries with opaque real estate sectors.
Sri Lanka is currently in the midst of a promising period of rapid economic growth and social development, driven largely by investments into infrastructure across the country as well as continued growth in the services sector, which now contributes 58% of the countrys GDP. Revival signs in the economy can be seen from the promising GDP growth expected in the next few years.
According to the Asian Development Bank, the GDP growth rate is forecast to reach 5.3% in 2016 from 4.8% in 2015.Moreover, World Bank recently listed Sri Lanka at 107 (out of 189 countries) in terms of ease of doing business, as opposed to its 2015 listing at 113. Policy changes proposed in the Budget 2015-16 are expected to positively influence private and foreign investments.
Political stability coupled with a business-friendly environment facilitated by the current government has helped restore investors confidence. The country is now focused on long-term strategic and policy development changes to ensure long-term economic growth.
The governments infrastructure push has led to an expansion of the construction industry over the past few years. Expansion and modernisation of Colombos port as also the development of other ports along with an improvement in the countrys road network has helped the logistics industry.
Moreover, domestic companies have showed stable growth and the number of foreign companies entering the island has seen a surge compared to 2009-10. Among the multinationals entering Sri Lanka, players in the food processing (see graph) and IT sectors too have shown interest in opening up offices, which bodes well for the economy.
The governments plans of turning Sri Lanka into the most competitive economy in South Asia is expected to result in an incremental demand for office space from BPOs, financial, accounting and outsourcing companies
rsquo;s a good time for women in leadership roles right now: In the UK, Theresa May has been appointed Prime Minister, with MP Angela Eagle angling for the role of leader of the opposition Labour party, and across the pond in the US, Hillary Clinton has become the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party in this years presidential race.
Scratch at the surface however, and research suggests that what these women are facing in their leadership roles is in fact a glass cliff.
Alongside the concept of the glass ceiling that women face an invisible barrier when it comes to advancement in the workplace compared to men the glass cliff theory is based on research which suggests that women are more likely to be appointed to high-profile leadership positions at a time when the organisation has been facing a tough or tumultuous period.
Academic research conducted by Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam in 2005 looked at the performance of FTSE 100 companies after they had appointed new CEOs, and found that female CEOs were more likely to be appointed to organisations whose share prices were already falling meaning their leadership and performance would be under even greater scrutiny.
What does this tell us about gender bias when appointing women to leadership roles?
"When you look at opportunities for leadership that one might describe as high-risk, women are more likely to be selected into that kind of role," according to Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.
"There's this expression -- think crisis, think female," Cooper told the Washington Post.
This concept is particularly apt in the current political situation in the UK May is taking the helm from David Cameron, who resigned after his vote remain campaign lost in a national referendum to an unexpected Brexit vote, leaving the undesirable task of leading Brexit negotiations to his successor.
Its a complicated story with a number of different strands, but the key explanation put forward by the authors lies in the notion that in times of crisis we are more likely to take risks, Julia Yates, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of East London wrote in The Conversation.
She added: If all the usual plans and ideas have failed, the organisation is likely to look around, desperate to try anything which might work. Even a woman.
alists in the prestigious Australian HR Awards have been announced today.The awards, sponsored by AustralianSuper , define excellence in the HR profession, recognising the achievements of HR practitioners, teams and companies across a range of categories.HRD magazine editor Iain Hopkins spoke to HC about the finalist selection process.With a record number of nominations received this year, competition was fierce across the board. In total there are 150 finalists this year from 105 companies that represent a true cross-section of the HR industrys elite, he said.Due to a large number of quality entries, the Australian HR Team of the Year category has been divided into two awards for companies with less than 1000 employees and more than 1000 employees, giving more teams the opportunity to be recognised for their achievements.The finalists for the Australian HR Team of the Year are:Challenger LimitedData#3DLA PiperMinor DKL Food GroupNovita Childrens ServicesSanofi Stryker South PacificThe Hollard Insurance Company Pty LtdCBRECrown MelbourneDeloitteNews Corp Australia Operations HR TeamSouthern Cross Care (NSW & ACT)The Star Westpac GroupFollowing the next stage of the judging process, this years winners will be announced at a gala dinner on Friday 9 September at The Star Sydney. View the full list of finalists and find out more about the event at www.hrawards.com.au . Full coverage of the 2016 Australian HR Awards finalists will also be available in the upcoming issue of HRD magazine, arriving on desks soon.
me Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced his new cabinet with incumbent Minister for Employment Michaelia Cash retaining the role for another three years.Sworn into the position in September 2015, Cash has spear-headed a number of policy aims during that time, including tough new public interest tests to evaluate major union mergers, abolishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, and cleaning up after the collapse of Clive Palmers Queensland Nickel.Shes also been a strong advocate for gender equality in the workplace including the need to normalise flexible work arrangements for men and women.As for what HR can expect of the future cabinet, this depends on what government policy will be around industrial relations, Robert Holden, professor of economics at the UNSW Business School, told HC.Issues such as penalty rates, the Australian Building and Construction Commission and related issues to do with workplace flexibility are something that the Coalition has talked about. Whether they feel that theyve got the political capital to be able to pursue those further remains to be seen.
The Art Cellar Gallery in Banner Elk is honored to present a Retrospective of artist Bryan Keith Smith running through July 23 . The Retrospective exhibition will feature watercolors from the acclaimed artists thirty year career. Smiths artwork won more than sixty awards, many accolades and can be found in collections nationally and internationally.
He began his artistic career in 1976 as a self taught nineteen year-old native of Virginia Beach, VA. His first works were in oils but he later become captivated with the process and results of working in watercolors. His talent was quickly recognized by enthusiastic collectors and received numerous awards from festivals and exhibitions. In 1984 Bryan settled in St. Augustine, Florida and opened his own gallery continuing to build his reputation and demand for his richly detailed watercolors. He was a vital and engaged member of the active St. Augustine arts community.
In 1990 the Bryan moved his studio to Franklin, in Western North Carolina and focused on the natural landscapes and waterscapes the region. His artwork stands apart for his detail and rich layering of watercolor and ability to capture emotion. His passion for his art and subjects are clear in the scenes of Carolina riverbeds, farms, coasts, and rock crevasses. Realism is his style, but his distinct and articulate interpretation of his subjects continually draws collectors to his watercolors.
Smiths work has been included in exhibitions from Virginia to Florida and continued to receive accolades and awards throughout his career. In 2014 Bryan Keith Smith died after a year long battle with cancer. His artwork stands as a testament to his talent, dedication and life long passion for art.
Bryan Keith Smiths final exhibition at The Art Cellar Gallery in 2012 featured a return to oils on canvas along with his watercolors. It had been his dream to present a body of large scale oils on canvas and the works were received with high praise for their remarkable style, rich color and artistic mastery, all highlighting his lifetime of commitment and passion for his art.
With this months show the gallery will be honoring Bryans life and work by featuring a collection of over 50 works in oil and watercolor that span his entire artistic career, from Florida to North Carolina and Europe. Gallery Collections Curator, Sarah Myers says, Its such a unique experience to see his earlier work and the progression of his talent over time.
Saturday morning June August from 10am to Noon . Featuring different artists every week, coffee, tea and light refreshments. For more information about any gallery events and artists the gallery may be contacted at This weeks coffee talk with feature clay artist, Teresa Pietsch who will be speaking about her process and unique designs and inspirations. Coffee Talks are held everymorning June August from. Featuring different artists every week, coffee, tea and light refreshments. For more information about any gallery events and artists the gallery may be contacted at 828-898-5175 or online at artcellaronline.com
The Art Cellar Gallery is located on Hwy. 184 (920 Shawneehaw Ave), Banner Elk, NC. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturdays from 10am to 5pm each day.
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Ready for a new adventure this summer? Lace up your running shoes and get ready for the Multisport Majic Xterra trail run at Beech Mountain. Its back again after a brief hiatus and its bigger and better than ever before.
The trail race will take place on Sunday, July 24 and will offer a 5K and a 15K option to accommodate runners of all skill levels.
The Xterra, which was hosted annually at Beech until a few years ago, is part of a larger trail run series that features four North Carolina races as part of a national qualifying series.
Beech Mountain resident Tim Holland, who wears many hats in the community, has partnered with the town to bring the Xterra back to the High Country.
Some will do all three and travel across the state to do the whole series, but there will be a lot of people running this race just for fun, said Tim. It is open to the public and it will be a good combination of both local runners and those running the whole series, as well as a mixture of experience levels with beginners and seasoned veterans.
With the help of his son Michael, recent winner of the grueling footrace known as The Bear at this years Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, Tim is working hard to make sure the Xterra is a great experience for all involved.
Michael has designed this years route, which will begin by town hall in Beech Mountain, cross the ski slopes and cover many of the towns Emerald Outback trails.
Runners will begin by crossing the ski slopes before heading up a mountain meadow lined with tall grass. From there, the trail dives into the dense Emerald forest where runners will experience a variety of terrain and sights, Michael said. The entire race is above 5,000 ft in altitude, providing cool mountain air throughout the race. From grassy fire roads to technical rocky trail, trickling stream crossings to large rock overlooks, and maybe even the occasional wildlife viewing, the Xterra Trail Race is sure to provide a great racing atmosphere that will show why Beech Mountain is truly above the rest.
So, what makes the Xterra stand out from other foot races in the area? The challenging nature of trail running, Tim explains.
Its not like regular road racing, so its a bigger challenge from that standpoint, Tim said. Most of it is out on the Emerald Outback trails, so its not your average 5K or street race.
Youre out in nature a lot more with this type of running that we do. There are a lot of hills involved that will challenge you. Its different from what most people are used to and its a good break from your common road races.
Tim said he hopes the race will give exposure to the Emerald Outback trails, which are maintained by the Town of Beech Mountains Parks and Recreation department.
Anyone thats interested in running the Xterra is invited to participate, no matter their experience or skill level. All you have to do is sign up!
Registration will continue online until the day before, and race day registration and packet pick-up begins at 6:30 a.m. at Freds General Store, which will also serve as the finish line.
Plan to run? Pick up your maps at the trailhead off of North Pinnacle Ridge Road and park by town hall.
The race will begin promptly at 8 a.m. on Sunday.
The overall top three male and female finishers will receive medals and prizes, as well as the top three male and female finishers in each of 13 age groups.
Register online and get entry fee information here.
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The Town of Boone was recently named one of the best southern college towns by Southern Living magazine. Boone joins other small towns in the South, which is defined by the publication as a population of less than 350,000 and a place where the university is a driving force in the character of the town.
According to Southern Living magazine, Boone was chosen among other southern small towns with schools which are beloved by their fan bases and alumni, as well as schools that explore exciting academics and research that promises to reach the wider world. While all of these are true for Boone, our town stands out as being a creative small town filled with folk art and bluegrass, as well as an outdoor paradise.
Those of us who are lucky enough to call Boone home know these facts and more to be true.
The Town of Boone is proud of this distinction, and we invite you to view the entire list at http://www.southernliving.com/travel/2016-best-college-towns.
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(New York Times) After years of rapid internal growth, the worlds biggest hedge fund appears to be slowing down.
The $154 billion hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, run by the billionaire Ray Dalio, is known for hiring hundreds of people every year. Yet it is now telling recruitment firms to cancel interviews with prospective employees, according to three people briefed on the matter.
to read this article:
People waved flags around a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016, during a demonstration organised in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Ministry for Foreign Affairs has updated its travel bulletin on Turkey in the aftermath of a failed military putsch that claimed the lives of over 250 people on Friday, advising everyone in the country to use caution.
The security situation is unpredictable. You should use extreme caution in the entire country and avoid large crowds and demonstrations, it states.
People gathered around a makeshift memorial for the victims of a deadly terror attack in Nice, France, on 17 July, 2016. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack that killed 84 people, according to a news service affiliated with the terrorist group.
No Finnish citizens are believed to be among the casualties of the deadly terror attack that took place in Nice, France, on Thursday, reports the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Ministry officials have according to a press release successfully reached all people whose whereabouts have raised concerns among their family members. The Embassy of Finland in Paris will nevertheless continue posting information about the attack via Facebook, the press release indicates.
The situation is very alarming. It is high time for the foreign policy-leaders of Finland, the European Union and the entire international community to re-consider their uncritical position on the current regime of Turkey, she writes on Facebook.
Li Andersson, the chairperson of the Left Alliance, has urged foreign policy-makers to re-consider their position on the current political regime of Turkey in the wake of a failed military coup on Friday.
Andersson points out that the migrant-exchange agreement between the European Union and Turkey was passed in Finland after only minor debate and that the Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland primarily called attention to the good relations between Finland and Turkey during the visit of ex-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Finland in April.
There is a genuine risk that the situation in Turkey will exacerbate further after the government suppressed the coup attempt. [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan will tighten his grip on the army, while also the judicial system will be cleansed by laying off numerous judges, says Andersson.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced [on Sunday] that the country is considering restoring the death penalty to ensure no additional military coups take place. Some believe a civil war is a possibility.
Aleksi Teivainen HT
Photo: Roni Rekomaa Lehtikuva
Source: Uusi Suomi
The National Coalition proposed at Suomi Areena, a debate event held in Pori, on Thursday that the statutory obligation be abolished to allow labour market organisations to re-determine the bonuses in union-specific collective bargaining negotiations.
Timo Soini, the chairperson of the Finns Party, has categorically rejected a proposal to abolish the obligation to provide employees with extra compensation for work done on Sundays.
Hands off Sunday bonuses, Soini declares in his blog. The National Coalition's employment and entrepreneurship package includes, for example, a proposal to remove Sunday bonuses from the legislation. We'll refuse to tamper with [the bonuses]. The Finns Party won't approve of it.
Discussion on such issues is nevertheless both allowed and beneficial, acknowledges Soini.
The proposal has come under heavy criticism also from the Finnish Union of Practical Nurses (Super). Silja Paavola, the chairperson of Super, points out in a press release that for many low-income employees bonuses are precisely what ensure their earnings suffice for more than mere survival. There would be no guarantee that employers paid the bonuses without the statutory obligation to do so, she estimates.
Aino-Kaisa Pekonen, the chairperson of the Left Alliance Parliamentary Group, has similarly expressed her appalment with the proposal.
It would be an unbelievably insolent wage cut in a situation where the livelihood of many low-income earners is already under threat. It would be unreasonable if low-income earners were made to pay the bill for the austerity policy of the Government, she says in a press release. It would be a direct wage cut, not an expansion of local bargaining.
Pekonen is a trained practical nurse.
Sture Fjader, the president of the Confederation of Unions for Professional and Managerial Staff in Finland, is also opposed to the proposal. The National Coalition's proposal won't do, he tweeted on Friday.
Aleksi Teivainen HT
Photo: Roni Rekomaa Lehtikuva
Source: Uusi Suomi
LIBATION NATION: Tour blends education and fun
Beer expert Gary Glancy operates The Brewery Experience, which offers a four-hour driving tour of Bold Rock Hard Cider and the Sierra Nevada and Blue Ghost breweries.
Gary Glancy, a certified beer expert in a locale teeming with amateurs, took the plunge with a new business that he hopes will catch craft beers wave of popularity.
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With the craft renaissance that is unfolding as we speak I just thought it was about time, he says when asked why he started the Brewery Experience, his guided tour of two breweries and a cidery in Henderson County. We not only have possibly the most beautiful brewery in the world in the county but now we have, with Sanctuary just having opened up, Basic Brewery, Stags Heads coming soon, Blue Ghost just opened. It was really time.
Add Southern Appalachian Brewery, the first craft brewery in Hendersonville, and Henderson County has five craft breweries. A sixth is set to open within a year.
The Brewery Experience provides tours of the breweries in Greenville, S.C., and in Henderson County.
Glancy, a former newspaper reporter and avid runner, made a Forrest Gump parody in which he visit breweries across the country while reenacting movie scenes. A certified Cicerone, the beer equivalent of a wine sommelier, hes a serious student of the art of malt and hops.
Theres only about a dozen of us in Western North Carolina and theres only one other tour operator right now whos got it, he says.
'Knowledge-based, fun tour'
After beer tourists book their seats, they meet Glancy at the Visitors Center parking lot in Hendersonville.
Ill tell them how to enjoy different kinds of beer, different styles, glassware, beer and food pairings, he says. Its really an all-encompassing experience.
He also touts his private party tours.
Hes led trips for wedding parties, corporate retreats, clubs and conventions. His door-to-door tours pick up and drop off tour guests at their hotel or home.
The tour, with tastings at Bold Rock Hard Cider, Sierra Nevada and Blue Ghost, a new brewery in Fletcher, takes about four hours. The tour costs $54 to $59 depending on the day.
We have music along the way, Glancy says. Its really a combination of fun and educational. Its a knowledge-based tour where people have fun along the way.
He loads a cooler on board in case people want to buy a six-pack or growler when they get home, although drinking on board is not permitted.
He praises the Henderson County Tourism Development Authority, which has promoted his brewery tour and one by Eva Ritcheys Trolley Co.
I cant speak highly enough of how supportive theyve been of my venture, he says. Theyve been willing to bend over backwards to do whatever it is to see me be successful.
He is also developing a walking tour of the brewery taprooms in Hendersonville.
Glancy, who works at Catawba Brewing Co. in Asheville between tour guiding trips, has a serious but friendly way of imparting his knowledge of the libation he loves.
Beer education and just showing my passion about craft beer is definitely where Ive found my niche, he says. Ive had good relationships with the breweries. Im friends with the guys at Blue Ghost. I know many of the folks at Sierra Nevada.
His niche has also found the right home.
Hendersonville is well positioned to feed off the brew boom that has helped Asheville to claim the title of Beer City USA.
Asheville is a world-renowned beer destination, Glancy says. I see it all the time at Catawba where I work. You have people coming in from all over the place every day visiting from Indiana, Chicago, Boston, and theyre coming just for beer beercations they call it.
To book a tour on the Brewery Experience visit thebreweryexperience.com or call 828.216.1343.
Extension service hosts pesticide collection day
The Henderson County Extension Office, in cooperation with the N.C. Department of Agricultures pesticide disposal program, is hosting a Pesticide Collection Day on Wednesday, July 20, for residents in Henderson County and surrounding counties.
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The collection will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Jackson Park (near ballfields 8 & 9).
Nearly all pesticide products will be accepted at this amnesty collection event, including banned and outdated pesticides. For pesticides with unreadable or missing labels, please contact the Extension Office for instructions. Please save any portion of the label to help identify the material so you can be assisted with disposal. Unknown materials cannot be accepted.
For pressurized pesticide gas cylinders or containers greater than 5 gal in size, please contact the Extension Office BEFORE the Collection Day for special instructions and information. For tips on transporting the pesticides safely to the Collection event, contact the Extension Office.
For more information contact the Extension Office at (828) 697-4891.
The holiday plans of more than 15,000 Irish people have been thrown into chaos after online travel site Lowcostholidays went bust.
Thousands of holidaymakers have been left in a state of shock since 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 already having 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, and will have to pay out again.
Valid
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 Aviation Commission.
The body will today release details as to how people can start making a claim to recoup their money.
However, sun worshippers 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.
Verona Caldwell, from Westmeath, told the Herald last night that she paid Lowcostholidays more than 1,500 for her dream holiday to Morocco with her mother, Christina.
Ms Caldwell said she is devastated that their holiday plans have hit a major setback.
"We don't know what is going to happen, I have been trying to contact the airlines and hotels to see what our situation is. Our booking is complex - there are no direct flights to Morocco, so we have to stay over in London.
"The company didn't even tell us it went bust, I only found out when I saw the news on Friday night."
Despite going bust on Friday afternoon, Verona received an email from the company on Saturday requesting that she must pay over the remaining amount owed on the holiday.
"I was stunned when I got the email saying the balance was due. The devastating part is that it's our hard-earned money that we are losing.
"The company could have been a lot more professional in how they handled the situation.
"It's an awful lot of money to be put into the dark about.
"A holiday is meant to be a relaxing time with no stress or worries.this is just not fair," Verona added.
Shauna Lee, from Blanchardstown, Dublin, paid Lowcostholidays more than 2,200 for her holiday - just two hours before they went bust.
"I booked at 3.27pm on Friday and received a confirmation email," she said.
"The next morning my mam phoned to say they had gone bust. I know there are worse things happening in the world, but we're all devastatedit's just two weeks away to our holidays."
She added the family will not be able to travel unless her bank refunds the money within the next two weeks.
Unacceptable
The Irish Travel Agents Association (ITTA) has branded Ireland's travel laws as "historic and pre-internet age".
"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 Herald last night.
"They have no interest in bringing forward legislation. Our travel legislation is outdated, it's 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 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, describing it as "unacceptable".
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Bono was in a restaurant in Nice when the attack began
U2 star Bono was caught up in the Bastille Day massacre and had to be evacuated from a Nice restaurant by French police.
The Dubliner (56) was eating next to the seafront in the French city when killer Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck through a crowd on the seaside promenade, murdering 84 people including 10 children.
Following the attack, Bono and others dining in La Petite Maison were evacuated by police amid the fear and confusion in the area.
Attack
Speaking to French publication La Parisienne, Anne-Laure Rubi, the owner of the upmarket restaurant, said it was just an ordinary Bastille Day with customers sitting and looking at the Promenade des Anglais.
Ms Rubi explained: "Suddenly I see people running, without shouting. It is a silent panic. It was extraordinary."
Ms Rubi told La Parisienne magazine that "by reflex" she grabbed the arm of Christian Estrosi, the former Nice mayor, who was sitting close to Bono.
"He was on the phone. He didn't want to say much. I think he was just learning about the attack," she said.
Ms Rubi's staff pulled down the shutters, and instructed everybody to hide and remain calm, until the all clear was given.
One customer, who asked not to be named, said: "The situation was very confusing. We did not know what was happening.
"They heard rumours that snipers would be shooting out of a van.
"After half-an-hour, the police evacuated us," said the customer.
"Everyone came out onto Place Massena, under police protection."
Bono and his friends, like other customers, left the restaurant with their hands on their heads.
"When we go out, we still believe that there was a hostage, including one at the Meridien hotel, that people were still circulating [who] the police were looking for," said the customer.
Bono owns a home in the nearby town of Eze, and had been relaxing with friends when the atrocity started at around 10.30pm last Thursday.
Homage
This is not the first time that U2 have found themselves at the centre of a terror attack.
Last November, Bono and his band were rehearsing for a concert in Paris, when Islamic State operatives attacked the nearby Bataclan theatre, killing 89 people.
Rather than leave the French capital, the four U2 members made their way to the Bataclan the next morning, and paid their respects to the deceased.
A plumber has admitted deceiving a householder into paying for bathroom work at his home that was never carried out.
Gary Kett (34) took 310 from the victim for the job, then failed to do the work, a court heard.
A judge has ordered him to do 150 hours of community service to avoid a three-month jail sentence.
Kett, a father of three, pleaded guilty to dishonestly inducing the victim to make the payment by deception.
Victim
The incident happened at North Road, Finglas, on February 6, 2015.
Blanchardstown District Court heard Kett had called to the house to meet the victim to agree a price on a plumbing job in a bathroom.
They agreed on a price of 310, but on the day he was meant to carry out the work, Kett failed to show up.
The victim tried to contact him to say it had not been done and the work was not done to this date, the court was told.
The job had been paid for in advance.
An "unfortunate situation arose" and the accused was not in a position to repay the victim, his solicitor John O'Doherty said.
He had been doing "a day's work here and there" and was desperately trying to obtain the funds.
Kett, from Slievemore Road, Drimnagh, gets 188 in social welfare payment per week and is supporting his wife and three children, Mr O'Doherty said.
Kett had previous convictions for motoring offences but had not been in trouble since 2003.
Judge McHugh asked if he was to "infer" that the defendant had in fact planned to do the work but did not.
Kett had been paid to buy equipment and "between the jigs and the reels" the customer changed his mind about what was bought.
"There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and Mr Kett lost patience with the job," Mr Doherty said.
He was unable to bring the items he had bought back.
The court heard Kett had worked as a plumber in the past and never had any difficulties.
Debt
Judge McHugh said the evidence he had heard was "more in the nature of a civil debt rather than a criminal matter".
Mr O'Doherty replied that the full facts had been put to Kett and he had been happy to deal with the case on that basis.
"He told the injured party he had underpriced the job and was not going to do it," Garda Sergeant Mary Doherty said.
Star Wars: Episode VIII will be a classic war film in the style of The Bridge on the River Kwai, its director has revealed.
Rian Johnson, who has just finished shooting the first direct sequel to 2015's The Force Awakens, told convention-goers at the ExCeL London conference centre that he set up a "film camp" for the Story Group at Lucasfilm to show them where he wanted to take the Star Wars franchise.
Johnson said that a large section of the film has been shot on the southwest coast of Ireland, and showed a cryptic photograph of one of the locations: a wild stretch of shoreline covered in thick green undergrowth and swimming in mist.
"It was amazing getting out there some way into the shoot and suddenly having this whole other texture to the film," he said. "The natural beauty of the coastline just opened up to us, and it was a thrill to put those actors out there and film them there for real."
The iconic Arnotts department store is set to go back to basics in a dramatic makeover that would reduce it to its original size.
The Henry Street store is expected to undergo a facelift as early as 2018 in a deal struck by developer Noel Smyth with the store's owners.
Planning application documents lodged to Dublin City Council reveal a major shake-up is planned for the layout of the store.
The developer has applied for permission to separate numbers 7, 8 and 9 on Henry Street - which currently forms part of Arnotts - into a separate 40,000 sq ft building.
Although the separation will reduce Arnotts' physical footprint, the store will remain Ireland's largest department store.
If the application to remove the three units - currently the home of Arnotts' ladies' shoes department - gets the green light it would transform Arnotts back to its original size.
The units earmarked for redevelopment were only added in the 1960s.
However, Dubliners and shoppers do not face any major revamp anytime soon.
A spokesperson for developers Fitzwilliam Finance Partners said that if planning permission is granted, it would not be until spring 2018 before any works take place.
The staff working in the department store are said to be surprised by the proposed separation of the building.
However, the move is in line with the developers' and Arnotts bosses' vision for the store.
Property
It is understood the developer plans to create a unit which would be suitable for a major international retailer - such as Apple or Next.
It is widely known that such retailers are searching for a suitable Dublin city centre property.
However, business sources believe that no talks with a possible tenant will take place until permission is granted by Dublin City Council, dashing shoppers' hopes of a new store opening soon.
Arnotts say the proposed changes will boost buyers' experiences.
"Arnotts is committed to enhancing the shopping experience for its customers while cherishing the store's unique heritage," said a spokesman.
"Our vision is to return Arnotts' retail footprint to the original iconic building.
"Following the proposed changes, Arnotts will remain the largest and only full-line department store in Ireland, and one of the biggest in Europe."
Meanwhile, Fitzwilliam Partners stated the plans will have no impact on the number of people working at the department store.
A spokesman added: "The separation of the buildings will see Arnotts return to its original retail footprint, something that was envisaged for the business at the time of its acquisition last year. The change will have no impact on staff numbers in Arnotts.
"The separation is part of wider plans that Arnotts are progressing to improve the shopping environment for their customers."
Flowers left at the scene of the killing
Gardai are investigating whether the fatal stabbing of a man in the city centre over the weekend was linked a "low-level" drugs dispute.
Gardai have arrested a man and a woman, both aged 18, in connection with the attack in Seagull House, on Rutland Avenue at around 4pm on Saturday.
They are being held at Crumlin and Sundrive Road Garda Stations under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act.
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".
Brutal
Local sources said he owed money to somebody and this will form part of the garda investigation.
Paul Curran was a brother of double-killer David Curran, who is serving life for the brutal murder of two Polish men in a case that shocked the nation in 2008.
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 in 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.
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.
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.
Her husband John and two children, aged three and six, were held by the gang, while Ms Hall was forced to go to the Bank of Ireland in Inchicore where she worked.
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.
Gardai are appealing for witnesses or to anyone who can assist with the investigation into the stabbing to contact them at Sundrive Road Garda Station on 01-666 6600,
A man looks at flowers left on the promenade in Nice
The Tunisian man who killed at least 84 people in France by mowing down Bastille Day revellers with a lorry had phoned his brother hours earlier and sent a picture of himself laughing as he mingled with the crowd, the brother said.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old delivery driver, was shot dead by police on Thursday night after careering along a packed sea-front promenade in Nice for about 2km, zigzagging in order to run over as many victims as possible.
The Bastille Day carnage wrought by 0Bouhlel on the seafront claimed the lives of at least 84 people and wounded 202, including many tourists from other countries.
About 85 people remain hospitalised, and of those, 18 including a child were still in life-threatening condition, French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said.
The Paris prosecutor's office said only 35 bodies have been 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 hospitalised wounded still has not been identified.
A man and a woman were detained yesterday in Nice, according to an official.
One of the men arrested is suspeted to have supplied arms to the killer, who sent a chilling text message demanding weapons minutes before the seafront massacre.
The 37-year-old is thought to have been sent a message from the mobile phone of Mohamed Lahaouaiej Bouhlel 18 minutes before the attack.
It read: "Bring more weapons, bring five of them to C."
The attacker's brother Jabeur told Reuters in Tunisia that Mohamed had called him for a final time on Thursday afternoon and sent a picture of himself among the crowds in the southern French city.
Unclear
"That last day he said he was in Nice with his European friends to celebrate the national holiday," Jabeur said, adding that in the photo "he seemed very happy and pleased, he was laughing a lot".
He declined to share the photograph. Mohamed Bouhlel's motive remains unclear.
France's prime minister said that the attack, which was claimed by Islamic State, was Islamist in nature and that Bouhlel had radicalised "very quickly".
Relatives and former neighbours in Msaken, about 120km south of Tunis, said Bouhlel had moved to France in 2005 and had last visited four years ago. They described him as sporty, uninterested in religion and from a normal family.
Family members said Bouhlel had begun calling them frequently in recent weeks.
"He asked for news about our parents ... he always spoke to me, we were very close," he added. "He sent us small sums of money recently, sometimes 300 or 400, and mobile telephones."
Bouhlel's sister has said he was treated for psychological issues for years.
A psychiatrist who treated him more than a decade ago said that he had been aggressive towards his parents and had body image problems. The psychiatrist, Chemceddine Hamouda, said Bouhlel's parents brought him to his clinic in Msaken in August 2004.
After excelling academically, Bouhlel had drifted away from school, Hamouda said.
"He had problems with his body," said Hamouda. "He said: 'Why am I thin?'
Meanwhile, French authorities detained two more people last night 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.
Bouhlel's estranged wife 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.
IS said he was following their call to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists.
Radicalised
Neighbours described the attacker as volatile, prone to drinking and womanising. 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 radicalised 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.
Armed officers close off the highway where the attack took place yesterday
Three police officers have been killed and three others wounded in a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Police responded to reports of a masked man armed with an assault rifle yesterday morning. When police arrived, the gunman opened fire.
One of the officers is listed as critical and another in fair condition. The status of the third wounded officer is unknown.
The shooting took place at 9am local time, just one mile away from police headquarters in the area of Airline and Old Hammond highways. Roads were closed off in both directions.
A suspect was shot and killed, with a suspicion that two others may have been at large, but hours later police said that no other active shooters were in the city.
Armour
Police used a robot to check for explosives at the scene but it's unclear if a specific threat was made.
The suspect was dressed in black fatigues and a mask, and there were reports that he was wearing body armour.
President Barack Obama condemned the shootings 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.
He added that he had 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.
One witness told WBRZ-TV that a man was dressed in black with his face covered and began randomly shooting as he walked by a convenience store and car wash.
Mark Clements, who lives near the scene, said he heard the shootout in his backyard, explaining: "I heard probably 10 to 12 gunshots go off.
"We heard a bunch of sirens and choppers and everything since then."
Airline Highway has been the site of angry 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. The US Justice Department's civil rights division is currently investigating the incident.
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.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown offered words of encouragement to the Baton Rouge Police Department yesterday.
Last week, police arrested four suspects deemed as 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.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump blamed a "lack of leadership" for yesterday's shooting.
Trump said in a statement posted on his Twitter and Facebook pages: "We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today."
He added: "How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order."
An unidentified man uses his belt to hit Turkish soldiers involved in the coup attempt
A woman lays her head on the coffin of a victim of the failed July 15 coup
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indicated that Turkey could reinstate capital punishment in the wake of Friday's failed coup attempt in which at least 265 people died.
Mr Erdogan spoke to his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence yesterday 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 on 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.
Crackdown
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.
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 war planes 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.
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."
Democracy
The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country", while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."
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.
A group of 40 producers and their families recently participated in the Upper East Tennessee Cattlemans Tour to Montana during the week of July 4-9. The tour was organized by Rick Thomason, UT/TSU-Johnson County Extension director. Also assisting with the tour was Chris Ramsey who serves as the extension director in Sullivan County, Tennessee. The group flew into Billings, Montana, on July 4 and spent the rest of the week touring many sites of interest.
Genex Hawkeye West was a great stop where the group learned about collecting bulls, evaluating, processing and storing semen to be used in artificial insemination. The group toured Vermilion Ranch, Gateway Simmental Ranch, Hinman Angus, Bruce Hould Ranch and Sitz Angus. Discussions with these ranches were about improvements in beef cattle genetics, marketing, pasture irrigation, pasture management, fly control, parasite control and herd management. The group enjoyed learning about a top producing bull in the Angus breed named Cowboy Up, that recently sold for $350,000.
Bear Paw Livestock and Meats in Chinook, Montana, was a great tour stop. They learned about the auction market operated by Travis Buck and the custom processing facility. They capped the day with a steak dinner at the Beef-N-Bones Steakhouse where the group dined on a MT Fillet that was finished and processed by Bear Paw Meats. Cascade County Extension Agent Rose Malisani joined the group for dinner and shared information about the beef cattle business in her area of the state.
The Grant Kohrs Ranch in Deer Park, Montana, provided a great historical look at the cattle industry in the west. This historic ranch is a part of the National Park System and demonstrates ranching life as it was in the mid 1800s. The ranch was having its annual branding demonstration on the day of the visit and proved to be another interesting stop. The group learned about the importance of branding cattle in the west and watched a demonstration.
A tour of Yellowstone National Park and the Museum of the Rockies provided a glimpse into the great outdoors of Montana and its history.
By participating in the this beef cattle tour, the participants made new contacts with beef cattle producers, evaluated top-producing breeding stock and learned management practices to implement on their home farm. Each ranch featured a discussion of the marketing, genetics, beef cattle management and problems facing producers today.
Chris Ramsey is an agriculture extension agent in Sullivan County, Tennessee. His office is at 3258 Highway 126 in Blountville. You can reach him at 423-279-2723 or cwramsey@utk.edu.
County cross country: Hubs sweep titles, boys score a perfect 15
North Hagerstown claimed both team championships and had both individual champions, with the boys achieving the first perfect score in meet history.
Adam Lowe reflects on the epic run that put him in the hospital
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In our much-storied history, which our hyper-nationalists will possibly claim is the most ancient, there has been just one recorded instance where a commander-in-chief of the army overthrew the government of the day and seized power. This issue finds some resonance today in the context of the attempted coup in Turkey. Many ask, could this happen here, although the answer is pretty unambiguous that it cannot and will not. The recorded instance referred to happened around 187 BC, when Pushyamitra Shunga, the senapati of the Maurayan empire, killed the king during a guard of honour, and founded a dynasty that lasted till around 70 BC.
No king, sultan, emperor, viceroy or prime minister Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian or Sikh has since then has been overthrown by a military coup. Yes, empires have declined, rulers have been defeated, lost their kingdoms to rebels and relatives, but it is difficult to find another instance of the event that defines a coup the takeover of a government by its military. In addition, of course, the modern Indian military identifies its DNA with that of Britain, another country which has never had the history of a coup.
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Yet, even today, in the 21st century, dread of the man on a horseback runs like a thread through Indias governmental attitudes towards the armed forces. It is not open, but exists in the shadow world of intelligence agencies and civilian bureaucrats, who stoke the insecurities of politicians on the need to keep the military in check, and have succeeded in keeping uniformed personnel out of policy-making.
It was this perception that led Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to eliminate the powerful post of commander-in-chief and make all three service chiefs equals in 1955. There were several instances in the 1950s and 1960s when politicians revealed their insecurities in relation to the armed forces. The first set of rumours came when General KS Thimayya retired as army chief in 1961. The train of events beginning with Thimayyas resignation in August 1959, its withdrawal under Nehrus pressure, the appointment of General PN Thapar as his successor, led to rumours of a coup with a specific date January 30, 1961 being designated as D-Day.
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This is detailed in a book Indias Defence Problem by SS Khera, who was Indias defence secretary between 1963 and 1967. In chapter titled Coups, Khera noted that in January 1961, Nehru and home minister G B Pant had come to know of some military movements and had countermanded them. Apurba Kundu, who has examined the events, noted in his book Militarism in India that the stories [of the alleged coups] may be dismissed as unfounded. Khera did conclude that the chances of an outright coup were difficult, if not impossible, in India.
Again, after the debacle of the 1962 border war with China, according to Neville Maxwell, Nehru expressed his concerns about the military in a letter to philosopher Bertrand Russell.
There is another incident widely known in the army. This is when the IB reported to the authorities about the movement of military personnel in the wake of Nehrus death in May 1964. Actually, the then Army chief, General JN Chaudhuri, ordered the movement because he thought that it would be needed to help handle the crowds that would gather, just as he had experienced as a young officer in Mahatma Gandhis funeral. As a result, even today the IB maintains a discrete watch on the movements of military units in the vicinity of New Delhi.
Read: Prejudice against the military
All this could have been understood in the context of the 1950s and 1960s, when many newly independent countries especially Burma and Pakistan came under the heel of military dictators. But it sounds ridiculous in the 21st century, when the probity of the Indian armed forces has been thoroughly tested by time and circumstances.
Yet, more than half a century after the Thimayya coup, New Delhi was rocked by a newspaper story hinting at a coup attempt and coincidentally, again in January, in 2012. A front-paged report splashed across a New Delhi newspaper claimed that central intelligence agencies had detected an unexpected (and non-notified) movement by a key military unit in the direction of the capital, subsequently, another similar movement was detected involving a parachute unit. This was in relation to a suit filed in the Supreme Court by the then army chief General V.K. Singh. The same newspaper later reported that the MODs considered view now seems to be that it was a false alarm. The ministrys official spokesman too denied the report as being baseless.
Actually, these sensitivities continue in the highest levels of the Indian political system today. Many observers believe that the refusal of the political system to appoint a chief of defence staff stems from their worries over the man on the horseback. Indeed, this writer was told by a former national security adviser that the principal opposition to the CDS in the UPA regime came from Sonia Gandhi, who raised worries about the possibility of a coup if a CDS took charge.
All this has had a deleterious effect on our national security planning. The dysfunctional system we have arises from the decision to keep the uniformed personnel out of planning and administering the military. This has prevented effective reforms to make our military a modern, war-winning force which requires the organisation and functioning of the military under the joint command of a chief of defence staff and the restructuring of the military under theatre commands.
But the answer to the question as to why a coup in India has not taken place, and will not do so, provided the country is not brought to the verge of collapse by its civilian leadership, lies in the quality of the military. Despite the fact that the politicians and the bureaucrats have gone out of their way to belittle and even insult them, the Indian military has remained steadfast in its commitment to democracy. This has as much to do with its history and DNA, as the outlook of the personnel who constitute it.
The writer is Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation
The views expressed are personal
South Middleton Township supervisors unanimously approved a number of items at last weeks board of supervisors meeting, including a final subdivision plan for a housing development, a package of ordinances and a conditional use request for parking from a local church.
Among those seeking approval last Thursday was the developer of Stonehill Farm, a housing development located off of Rockledge Drive.
Initially, the plan had called for 15 homes with two cul-de-sacs and was located almost in the back yards of some of the residences in the Summerfield Development. South Middleton Township Supervisor Tom Faley said the close proximity to the homes in Summerfield caused some of those residents to raise their concerns about the new development.
The township asked that Stonehill Farm be moved farther south to provide a green barrier between the two developments, and the developer agreed. Though usually a plan submitted through the Allowable Growth Boundary Development program is limited in the number of homes the development is allowed to have, Faley said Stonehill was granted an allowance to have 19 detached single-family homes in the final plan given that it agreed to move the development and also got rid of one of the cul-de-sacs.
Through the conservation program, the development had a required maximum of 13.47 acres for housing and 53.87 acres to put into perpetuity. The final plan uses only 8.53 acres for housing and has 58.81 acres in perpetuity.
Supervisors voted unanimously to approve the plan.
Parking
Also up for a vote Thursday was a conditional use application from Carlisle Evangelical Free Church on Petersburg Road to build more parking spaces.
The church purchased about 10 acres of land from the nearby Morgans Crossing development, which has not yet been built. Supervisors had approved a preliminary plan for Morgans Crossing back in November, and that parcel of land had contained a plan for housing, but Faley said the church negotiated the purchase.
Along with another 2.5 acres, the church asked to build 148 parking spaces on 12.5 acres of land at its site, which would increase parking to 491 spots. Given that the churchs congregation was estimated at 1,500 members on the 25,000-square-foot property, supervisors approved the request.
Currently the only access road to the church is Petersburg Road, but Faley said there may be another road built in the Morgans Crossing development that could provide access. That road may not be built for eight or more years, Faley said.
Last week, supervisors also unanimously approved a number of township ordinances. One dealt with changing the schedule for developers to request paving of roadsin accordance to a new timeline from PennDOTand another followed rules from the American Association of People with Disabilities to extend new sidewalks in the township from a 4-foot requirement to 5 feet. Any sidewalk currently built in the township would be grandfathered.
Supervisors also approved an ordinance regarding its wellhead protection and zones that would allow for certain types of development. Stemming from concerns over possible gasoline leakage at gas stations, supervisors approved an ordinance that would limit certain types of businesses and sales in certain zones.
Those in zones 1, 2 or 3 surrounding a wellhead would not be allowed to have underground storage tanks. Above ground storage tanks would not be allowed in zones 2 or 3 if they are within 200 feet of a zone 1 boundary. There are also guidelines as to how much of a hazardous chemical may be housed on site, with limitations for such substances as gasoline, diesel fuel and lubricating oils.
The ruling party in Madhya Pradesh suffered a major jolt in civic bodies elections held for two Nagar Palika Parishad and one Nagar Parishad. The Congress won all the elections despite chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan campaigning for the party candidates in the elections.
The Opposition candidates not only snatched the presidents posts but also had majority of coroprators seats in the elections. The counting of votes was held and results declared on Monday.
Maihar Nagar Palika Parishads president post goes to Cong
Congress candidate Dharmesh Ghai defeated the BJPs Dheeraj Prasad Pandey with a margin of 4035 votes to win Satna districts Maihar Nagar Palika Parishads president post. He polled 14185 votes against his rivals 10150 votes.
In another prestigious election, Badri Singh of the Congress defeated Rajendra Kumar Agrawal of the BJP in Mandideep Nagar Palika Parishad election in neighbouring Raisen district with a margin of 5311 votes. He got 18731 votes while Agrawal could secure 13420 votes.
Cong bags presidents post in Isagarh Parishad in Ashok Nagar dist
Bhupendra Narain of Congress defeated the BJP candidate Hariballabh with a margin of 1268 votes to win the presidents post in Isagarh Parishad in Ashok Nagar district.
Though Ishagarh is not the BJPs bastion, the partys defeat in Maihar Nagar Palika Parishad where it registered an emphatic win in the state assembly seat by-poll about five months back only and Mandideep where former chief minister Sunderlal Patwa and his nephew culture and tourism minister Surendra Patwa wields much political influence has caused flutter in the party circles.
Congress wins 12 corporators seats in Maihar
The Congress won 12 corporators seats in Maihar against the BJPs 11 and BSPs 1 in Maihar, while the Opposition now has 13 corporators in Mandideep against the BJPs 12 and one Independent. In Ishagarh the Congress won 11 seats of corporators against the BJPs merely 4.
Infighting in the BJP for dominance over the local politics, wrong selection of candidates and the partys over dependence on chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhans campaign are said to be some of the reasons behind the partys poor show. It was only in December last year when in the elections held for 8 civic bodies the Congress registered its win in five.
The BJP has put up a brave face saying the local equations could be compared with the state assembly and Lok Sabha elections.
The party has gracefully accepted the defeat. Certainly, there has to be some reasons behind the defeat and the party will look into it, said the BJYM leader Rajneesh Agrawal talking to the Hindustan Times.
The state Congress president Arun Yadav termed the victory as the party workers victory saying people defeated the BJP despite the latters misusing the government machinery and resorting to muscle and money power.
Aamir Khans upcoming film will star two newcomers Fatima Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra. They will play his daughters on the big screen. Now, we have come to know that the actor will shoot for a promotional video to introduce the two youngsters. The last time Aamir shot for a similar video was for Delhi Belly (2011), which starred his nephew, Imran Khan.
Read: Aamir Khan didnt make six-pack abs for Dangal because of Salman Khan
Aamir, who will play the role of wrestler Mahavir Singh Phogat in the film, will play himself in the video, and not his character from the movie. Its not just another, run-of-the-mill promotional video. It will introduce two new girls. Since Aamirs promotional video in Delhi Belly was a massive hit, the makers of this film thought of coming up with a special number for this movie too. Aamir is excited about working on the video, says a source close to the Bollywood actor.
Read: Aamir Khan is all bulked up to play a young Mahavir for Dangal
When contacted, Aamir confirmed the news, with a text message that read, Yes. The films spokesperson adds, It will be a special number.
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Slamming actor Manoj Bajpayee, filmmakers Anurag Kashyap, Hansal Mehta and Tigmanshu Dhulia, chief of Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) Pahlaj Niahalani questions their credibility and asks, Manoj has not featured in any hits... and asks, Are you aware of how much money Anurag Kashyap lost to his producers close to Rs 300 crore have been lost through his flop pictures?
Read: Pahlaj reacts to Aligarh, asks if homosexuality is a subject for kids and teens
Almost a week after Bajpayee zeroed in on the censor terming him spent force, the latter has now hit back at the actor. According to a DNA report, the CBFC chief said that he is still waiting for Bajpayees career to start. Bajpayee saab feels so strongly about me? He is such a busy actor. And he still has time to study my career graph. I am deeply moved. But if I am a spent force and I need to retire, then it means Ive been working all these years- nearly 45 years as a producer and filmmaker. I am still waiting for Manoj Bajpayees career to start, he stated.
Manoj Bajpayee in a still from Aligarh. (Twitter)
Read: You are not going to change rules by questioning my sexuality, says Pahlaj
Apart from Satya, which was a very good film, Manoj has not featured in any hits in the 10-12 years of his career. Who is he to talk about my career? He should worry about his own. Manoj is talking about the CBFC to promote his new film. This is his desperate method of getting media space, Nihalani further said.
Attacking filmmakers like Hansal Mehta, Tigmanshu Dhulia and Anurag Kashyap, he said, Theres a group of filmmakers in Mumbai comprising self-styled geniuses like Hansal Mehta, Tigmanshu Dhulia and above all, Anurag Kashyap, who make films that are praised to the skies by their colleagues and a handful of learned critics.
Read: Pahlaj functions like mafia, says Anurag
However, the theatres showing their films open empty and close empty. Are you aware of how much money Anurag Kashyap lost to his producers close to Rs 300 crore have been lost through his flop pictures like Ugly, Bombay Velvet and Raghav Raman 2.0. He still continues to make films! he added.
Read: Kashyap is a like a child being denied a toy, says Pahlaj
This came after the film industry raised its voice against censorship, especially Udta Punjab, and now the piracy rumours.
Bajpayee, during a recent promotion of Budhia Singh: Born to Run, said Nihalanis time is over and its time for him to retire. His earlier movie Aligarh too faced trouble from CBFC.
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Richa Chadha worked extensively in theatre before she entered Bollywood. The actor will share her stage experience with aspiring artists at Thespo, an upcoming youth theatre festival.
She has been invited by the organisers to speak at the event. The organisers hope that her words of wisdom will encourage young students from college to pursue theatre as a career option. Richa, who has featured in acclaimed films like Gangs Of Wasseypur (2012) and Masaan (2015), has also participated in the festival in the past.
Pre-shoot workout selfie HK :) A photo posted by Richa Chadha (@richachadha9) on Jun 3, 2016 at 4:08am PDT
Read:It is a great time to be an actress: Richa Chadha
Since I have been part of Thespo, when I was asked to speak at the festival, I was excited to share my experiences with aspiring actors. Theatre is a great place to learn the arts and transform yourself and society. I am happy to do anything I can to support it, Richa said.
"Elegance is the only beauty that never fades." - Audrey Hepburn A photo posted by Richa Chadha (@richachadha9) on Jul 12, 2016 at 1:50am PDT
Read: Richas having a great time in Los Angeles
Actors under 25 get an opportunity to put together professional shows at the festival which encourages new young talent. Richa added, Theatre opened the doors to acting and even to films for me. I got picked up for an audition for my first film while I was rehearsing for a play. I was playing the lead in Baghdad Ka Ghulam by Barry John. I consider Barry my guru. Theatre is a satisfying medium, which is why I performed in a play two years ago with Atul Kumars company.
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Actor Tanishaa Mukherji, who recently finished filming for Anna, a biopic on social activist Anna Hazare, plays a journalist in the film. Talking about the challenges she faced while playing the role, Tanishaa says that she had to work on how not to appear emotionally involved when reporting.
Actor Tanishaa Mukherji says that she wants to a film where she gets to do adventure sports.
Read: Kajol remembers late pal, shares throwback pic
The challenge I faced was keeping myself unemotional while playing a journalist. It took me time to understand how hard it is to not get emotionally involved in what youre reporting. It is difficult to stay unbiased, says Tanishaa, who shot in shot in Annas hometown in Ahmednagar, Maharashta, where she interacted with the locals.
According to sources close to the actor, she also observed senior journalists on television to get her body language right.
Meanwhile, the actor says that she is on the lookout for something very different for her next film. In fact, she is keen on trying out something adventurous. I had recently gone for a holiday where I tried some water sports. I think I would like to do the role of a scuba diving instructor or anything related to a sport as that will challenge me, says Tanishaa, who also took part in stunt-based reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi last year.
Hindustan Unilever (HUL), the largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) maker in the country, said its first quarter net profit grew 9.8% against the same period previous year due to a moderate business rise in all segments, while warning that the near-term outlook for its products did not look good.
The Mumbai-based maker of soaps and shampoos, which is a bellwether of consumption trends in the country, said its profit in the April-June period rose to Rs 1,174 crore against Rs 1,069 crore during the same period last year, also aided by a one-time write back of provision for pension benefits. Net sales during the quarter under review grew by 3.6% to Rs 7,988 crore against Rs 7,713 crore last year. Rural sales account for around 40% of the companys total revenue.
HUL operates in four segments - home care, personal care, foods and refreshment, along with a residual category for others.
While the near-term market growth is likely to remain muted, we are optimistic for the medium-term and remain focussed on driving competitive and profitable growth, chairman Harish Manwani said on the performance.
The quarterly result was announced minutes before the stock market closed, sending the stock to fall sharply before ending 2.04% down to its previous close.
The company also announced its proposal to invest about Rs 1,000 crore towards building a new manufacturing unit near its existing factory in Doom Dooma, Assam. The new unit, likely to be ready by early 2017, will increase production of its personal care products.
HUL cited operational efficiencies for its quarterly growth.
During the quarter, against the backdrop of a challenging environment where market growth further slowed down in both volume and value terms, the business continued to track ahead of market with sustained margin improvement. Domestic consumer business growth was at 4%, with 4% underlying volume growth, and operating margin expanded by 70 basis points, said the company. The margin stood at 20.1% in the April-June period.
The company also announced a key change in the management committee, appointing Srinandan Sundaram in place of Punit Misra as executive director and vice-president, sales and customer development.
A person named Damyanti Gada places an order for Folvite tablets and Evion capsules with online medicine seller, PharmEasy. The company checks the accompanying prescription: Nothing is in order. Patient details are incomplete, and the doctor who has prescribed the medicines is a homeopath.
The prescription is considered fake and the order immediately cancelled.
This is not an isolated case. HT has seen several medical prescriptions signed by veterinary surgeons, aurvedic doctors and homeopaths. In each case, the online pharmacy screened the prescriptions and rejected them at the cost of their sales.
Its very disturbing to let your revenues go. The same prescription would probably go to an offline chemist and would fetch medicines easily, complained Dharmil Sheth, co-founder of PharmEasy, an online medicines selling platform, which rejects about 45-50% of orders daily due to flawed prescriptions.
For online pharmacy start-ups that are chasing an almost $1 billion market, the struggle is to convert orders into sales. E-pharmacies, which cannot sell medicines without verifying the prescriptions, are rejecting almost 5 out of 10 prescriptions daily. According to industry body, Indian Internet Pharmacy Association (IIPA), online pharmacies lose over 40% of business every day due to prescription defects.
In several cases, customers even send pictures of the medicines they need. Customers send us images of their tablet strips or syrup bottles or at times writing down their requirements on a piece of paper and upload it. Such orders are also rejected, Sheth said.
It is an unequal market, he says, as they are competing with pharmacy stores. Prashant Tandon, co-founder of 1Mg, an e-pharmacy, said, The offline pharmacy sector has completely failed to check self-medication and flow of fake prescriptions.
To sustain the business, e-pharmacies have now started assisting customers fix appointments with doctors.
Every state Food and Drug Administration has a set of guidelines for prescriptions. For Instance: The Maharashtra FDA requires prescriptions to mention the date, doctors name, address, registration number, dosage and duration of medication, among other things.
The government is expected to introduce guidelines for e-pharmacies soon. The drug controller general of India, GN Singh, has told HT that the committee working on the draft for e-pharmacies ecosystem to submit the papers in the next one month.
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Tracking gain in the broader markets, shares of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) rose close to 2% in Monday morning trade on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) after the oil-to-retail major reported better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter on Friday.
Mukesh Ambani-led RIL was trading 1.7% up at Rs 1,029.90 in the morning trade. The wider BSE Sensex was up 139 points, or 0.5%, at 27,975.55.
After market hours on Friday, RIL had reported a better-than-expected 18% year-on-year rise in its first quarter net profit to Rs 7,113 crore due to higher gross refining margins (GRM). According to Reuters estimates, the analysts on an average had expected the company to report a profit of Rs 6,515 crore.
The beat was driven by better-than-expected GRM of $11.5 per barrel (estimated $10/barrel) led by higher gasoil cracks, nil exposure to negatively-yielding fuel-oil, and higher domestic sales, while hedging and inventory gains contributed $2 per barrel, said Jal Irani, analyst at Edelweiss Securities.
Maintaining a buy rating on the stock, Edelweiss believes structural revival in downstream margins and conclusion of mega capital expenditure programme will double earnings over the next five years, and raise return on equity by 400 basis points.
Arya Sen of Jefferies pointed that the full impact of the downstream projects could start showing only from the second-half of fiscal 2018. The hedging plus inventory gains, and higher sales than throughput, which contributed to the GRMs, are one-offs and may not be replicable going forward, Sen added.
We remain positive on Reliance given our optimistic view on its core refining and petrochemical business. Compared to a compounded annual growth rate of 1% over 2011-2015, RILs EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) grew by 18% in 2015-16. Over the next three years, we estimate an ex-telecom EBITDA compounded annual growth of 11%, said Anil Sharma of Nomura.
Most investors are looking ahead to the companys commercial launch of Reliance Jio telecom network.
RIL has still not disclosed the exact timeline for the launch. It said on Friday that it currently has 1.5 million test users and the trial programme would be upgraded into commercial launch in the coming months.
Analysts say a launch is imminent and will likely ramp-up on an all-India basis in a very short time. The network, which is in the last stage of completion, would be able to support 200 million users, the company has said.
The network seems to be ready to start. 2,300/1,800MHz network is radiating across 18,000 cities. Also, 800MHz deployment is completed in most circles, except four, where it has received frequency allocation this month. Even in these circles, the deployment and optimisation of the 800MHz network is likely to be completed in the next 6-8 weeks, said Nomuras Sharma.
Nomura and Jefferies too have a buy rating on RIL.
SoftBank Group Corp has agreed to buy UK chip designer ARM Holdings PLC in a 24.3 billion pound ($32.2 billion) cash deal, the two sides said on Monday, a bold bet on internet-connected machines that will transform the Japanese group.
ARM, the largest London-listed tech company by market value, is a major presence in mobile processing, with its processor and graphics technology used by Samsung, Huawei and Apple in their in-house microchips.
Components based on technology licensed by ARM are found in the vast majority of the worlds smartphones, and the Cambridge-based group has branched into other connected devices as smartphone growth slows.
ARM stands to be central to the tech industrys shift to the internet of things - a network of devices, vehicles and building sensors that collect and exchange data - a stated focus for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.
Mondays deal, Softbanks largest to date, marks a departure for the Japanese group, whose tech and telecom portfolio ranges from US carrier Sprint to a stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and humanoid robot Pepper - but does not yet include a major presence in the semiconductor industry.
Under the offer backed by ARMs board, Softbank will pay 17 pounds for every ARM share - a premium of more than 40% to Fridays close.
ARM shares surged nearly 43% to 16.99 pounds by 0820 GMT.
This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made, and I expect ARM to be a key pillar of SoftBanks growth strategy going forward, Son said in the statement.
The acquisition is the first for Son, 58, since he last month rescinded plans to retire - effectively pushing out his heir apparent, former Google executive Nikesh Arora.
Son, whose lucrative early investments include Alibaba, said then that he wanted to cement SoftBank 2.0, turn around loss-making US carrier Sprint and work on a few more crazy ideas.
Though he has a low profile outside Asia, Son has long been an unconventional, charismatic visionary in the often closed and clubby world of corporate Japan, turning profits from Japanese telecoms into bets on up-and-coming start-ups.
Not all have been a success: SoftBanks $22 billion acquisition of a controlling stake in loss-making Sprint in 2013 has left the group with hefty debts.
SoftBank had interest-bearing debt of 11.9 trillion yen at end-March, including 4 trillion yen at Sprint, and its net debt currently stands at 3.8 times core earnings.
SoftBanks position as an entity outside the semiconductor industry allows ARM to retain its independence and protect existing customer relationships, while commitment to UK investment ensures management buy-in, Jefferies analysts said in a note. Its difficult to see other suitors at this stage.
LOOKING ABROAD
The ARM deal is one of Japans biggest deals overseas, outranking even Sprint, as SoftBank joins a parade of Japanese companies seeking growth abroad as the domestic economy stagnates.
Softbank has raised nearly 2 trillion yen ($19 billion) in cash over the last few months through asset disposals, according to Son - including the sale of shares in Chinas Alibaba, unusual for a group that has rarely exited investments.
But analysts had expected it to use the cash to reduce debt or give shareholders a windfall by buying back its own shares.
Instead, Son appears to have leapt on the opportunity presented by a battered sterling following Britains vote to leave the European Union last month, and a strengthening yen.
Though ARM has warned on the staffing impact of Brexit, its revenues are largely in dollars, and its shares have climbed almost 17% since the vote.
Under the offer on Monday, greeted by the UK government as proof that the economy is open for business, SoftBank said it was committed to keeping top managers, ARMs headquarters and to at least double the employee headcount in Britain.
Announcing plans to stay on last month, Son said he wanted to complete the transformation of SoftBank into a tech investment powerhouse. He has focused on what he calls the next paradigm shift in technology, which includes artificial intelligence and the internet of things - both increasingly important for ARM as it weathers a smartphone slowdown.
This year ARM bought UK imaging specialist Apical, which specialises in technology to allow computers to analyse images - replicating human vision using software.
Analysts said on Monday that a counterbid was not impossible but also unlikely, as any rival bidder among ARMs customers or Chinese rivals could face regulatory challenges.
SoftBank shares were not traded on Monday, a market holiday in Tokyo.
NEW DELHI: Aditya Puri, managing director (MD), HDFC Bank, continues to be the highest paid executive among his peers in private sector banks in India. In 2015-16, Puri took home 9.73 crore, up 24% from the previous fiscal. During the period, HDFC Banks net profit rose by 20%.
The remuneration of ICICI Bank chief Chanda Kochhar, who was the second highest paid banking executive in 2014-15, dipped 22% from 5.85 crore to 4.79 crore, as the largest private lenders net profit dipped 13% due to the stringent provisioning norms for non-performing assetsloans that do not fetch returns imposed during the year. Its total revenue, however, rose by 12%.
Indusind Bank managing director Romesh Sobti, in the mean time, got a 31% pay hike to 5.71 crore, putting him at number 2. The banks net profit rose by 28% in 2015-16 year-on-year.
At number four is Rana Kapoor, chief of Yes Bank, who took home 5.67 crore while Shikha Sharma, who heads Axis Bank earned 5.41 crore, comes in at number five.
Salaries paid to the Indian private sector bank CEOs are low compared to their global peers... a bank CEO in south east Asia would earn 4-5 times more while it would be 10 times more in a bank in the West, Ronesh Puri, MD at search firm Executive Access (India) told HT.
These packages do not reflect earnings on t he basis of employee stock options (ESOPs), which would raise the remuneration manifold.
Puri is not only the highest paid executive but a comparison of his pay package with the median salary paid to other employees of HDFC Bank employees, reveals that he earned 179 times more than the median pay in 2015-16.
Similarly, Axix Banks Sharma earned 163 times more than the median pay of her employees. The difference narrows down to 131 times for Sobti, 100 times for Kochhar and 91 times for Kapoor in the latest fiscal according to the latest annual reports of these banks.
Indian CEOs are reasonably well rewarded on purchasing power parity, felt Rana Kapoor.
Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse raised eyebrows after making a controversial statement at a violence forum Thursday night.
Weve got a river that segregates us by race, he said, with far too many poor black people on one side, too many prosperous white people on the other.
Reaction was strong on social media. One tweet reads, I remember when I moved here 4 years ago. Everyone told me with tongue in cheek, The West Shore is The White Shore.
City leaders and community activists on the East Shore say its not controversial, just fact, and once we realize it, we can address it.,
Its not that clear cut for some. David La Torre, who runs a public relations firm in the city, tweeted at the mayor, So its the fault of those of us who live on the West Shore? Id rather you just thank me for buying property, locating my business, and investing in another in Harrisburg.
Its certainly not everybody on the West Shore is afraid to come to the East Shore, said Darrel Reinford, executive director of Christian Churches United of the Tri-County Area in Harrisburg. The group provides social services to Dauphin, Cumberland, and Perry counties.
Reinford recently moved from the city to the West Shore himself and says the divide is very real.
Recent census data show Harrisburg is more than 50 percent African-American and the median household income is around $32,000.
Camp Hill, for comparison, is 1.8 percent black, with a median income of $65,000.
Particularly for white folks, Reinford said, we need to listen to people of color and hear about their experience.
These are very, very difficult issues for our community, city spokeswoman Joyce Davis said, adding the mayor wants to find solutions.
She cites meetings with state lawmakers and his Interfaith Advisory Council, so that people on the West Shore get to know and interact with people in Harrisburg neighborhoods and communities.
One initiative, My Brothers Keeper, aims to bring more regional voices to the table.
Richard Hampton, a pastor in Steelton, is one of them.
I dont think he said anything controversial, Hampton said of the mayors comments. I think he spoke the truth, and sometimes the truth does make us uncomfortable. But until we face that truth, were never going to be able to change our reality.Davis also made clear the mayor did not intend to insult or offend anyone living on the West Shore, that he was just addressing the problems he hears from his city.
Like Delhi, Beijing also suffers from both urban flooding and water scarcity. In 2012, when flooding killed 79 people in the Chinese capital, the authorities blamed the volume of rain and not their citys mindless concretisation and inadequate drainage for the tragedy.
Sounds familiar? But the Chinese people mounted pressure on their government. Even the state-controlled press joined in. It was beyond understanding that city planners gave priority to high-profile vanity projects while ignoring the need for storm drains and the like, The Economist quoted The China Youth Daily in 2015.
Chinese president Xi Jinping stepped in and his government announced the development of 16 sponge cities. The project, launched in 2015, is about developing storage ponds, filtration pools and wetlands in residential areas, and roads and squares built with permeable materials that allow storm water to soak into the ground more effectively.
The pilot projects in Beijing, Shanghai and Xinjiang have shown that 85% of the storm water run-off can be reduced yearly, China Water Risk, a non-profit organisation, reported. The harvested water is meant to be used in toilets, for washing the streets and firefighting, the Economist wrote.
Flooding is yet to claim lives in Delhi. But every time it pours, the city comes to a halt. Reports of clogged roads, sewage backflow and traffic jams kill the joys of the first rain, almost instantly. All through the year, Delhi sets the stage for this monsoon mess by stuffing tonnes of garbage, construction waste, road dust and domestic sewage into its gutters and storm water channels.
Before the monsoon, the road-owning agencies start cleaning these choked drains. A huge amount of muck and silt is dug out. While some of it is carried to the dumpsites, the rest sits in piles at the edge of the drains before the first shower drives the load back to where it came from.
The storm water should be soaked up by green patches along the roads and pavements, recharging local aquifers. (S. Burmaula/HT Photo)
The other triggers for the civic collapse during the rains are Delhis mindless appetite for growth and greed for land. At 98%, Delhi has the highest level of urbanisation anywhere in India. The result is heavy concretisation and little open space.
Storm water drains and natural channels that used to carry rainwater to the Yamuna have either been converted to mega structures such as Barapullah elevated road and Dilli Haat-INA, or taken over by slums and unauthorised colonies. Ponds and water bodies are long lost to real estate development. Elsewhere, residents have covered the storm water drains to park their cars or extend their lawns.
The Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning and Engineering) Centre, in its 2012 report on storm water management, had suggested to the government to treat run-offs from roads locally. Right now, all storm water that falls on Delhi roads goes into the drains and then the nallahs and the river. There is no groundwater recharge. These nallahs also carry sewage. So, the storm water that finally reaches the Yamuna is nothing but a toxic mix.
Instead, the storm water should be soaked up by green patches along the roads and pavements, recharging local aquifers. With 25% of Delhis surface being roads, the rainwater harvesting potential is huge, the report concludes.
But any such initiative requires administrative unity and a political will. With more than 100 agencies running the national capital including as many as 17 in-charge of roads, drains, traffic and civic management, it has never been easy to fix accountability for any civic mess.
Accepting that cleaning up Delhi is no rocket science, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday said that the problem was political and the solution lied in getting Delhi full statehood and same-party rule at all levels. But as Delhi waits for the big electoral and legislative outcomes, there is no reason why different agencies cannot form small working groups for better coordination on key civic and infrastructure issues.
Beijing realised that retrofitting its existing drainage systems with larger pipes was a long haul and harvesting rain was a far cheaper, faster way to prevent flooding. Delhis big challenge is that at least 45% of the city still awaits sewer lines. As they work on it, whats stopping the authorities from tapping a little rain where it falls?
And whats stopping us, citizens who crib every time the city goes under water, from taking community initiatives to protect the storm water drains in every neighbourhood??
shivani.singh@hindustantimes.com
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BATON ROUGE (LOUISIANA): Three police officers were shot to death and several others wounded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday, the citys 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 said.
One suspect is dead and police are checking the shooting scene with a robot to make sure there are no explosives, Baton Rouge police spokesman L Jean Mckneely said.
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.
Earlier, a spokesman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff s Office said police were involved in the shooting incident, which occurred around 9am local time (2pm GMT).
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.
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.
A wave of protests against police violence in Baton Rouge and other cities erupted after Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old African-American father of five, was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers on July 5.
At a rally in Dallas to protest Sterlings killing and a similar incident in Minnesota, a gunman opened fire on white officers, killing five of them.
The Black Lives Matter civil rights movement has called for police to end racial profiling, bringing the issue to national attention ahead of the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.
The Justice Department, which has opened a federal probe into Sterlings death, declined to comment on Sundays shootings.
A White House official said President Barack Obama has been briefed on the shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge and will be updated throughout the day. T he official added that the White House has also been in contact with local officials and has offered assistance.
NEW DELHI: The Centre has created an India-Pakistan-like situation with the Delhi government, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said Sunday as his interactive show Talk to AK debuted on social media. He also announced the Aam Aadmi Partys intention to contest elections in Gujarat if the people want.
Talk to AK was the top Twitter trend in India between 11am and 3 pm as the CM lauded his government s 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 women s 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants Indian cities to have more empowered administrative agencies, as is the case with international metros such as London and New York. If the Centre has its way, countrys urban hubs will get directly elected mayors with a fixed term of five years, and greater financial and functional powers.
At present, six states Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu provide for mayors that are elected directly by voters for a five-year term. However, they remain mere figureheads with limited financial and functional independence. The actual power continues to lie with the state government, which runs the city through the municipal commissioner.
Government sources said Modi is keen on making cities across the country adopt the directly elected mayoral system, according greater accountability to local leadership.
Taking this forward, the PM O in a series of meetings directed UD ministry officials to explore various options aimed at strengthening municipalities .A blue print is being readied on how to implement it. We are looking at various options, including amending the Constitution, to make it mandatory for states to get the mayor elected directly, said an official.
The ministry has setup a committee headed by UD secretary Rajiv Gauba to look into the matter. The first meeting of the body will take place on July 20. It is also planning to hold a national conclave of state UD ministers, mayor sand commissioners of 500 cities to discuss ways to empower urban local bodies.
At present, mayors are elected by municipal councillors in a majority of the states. Though the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act provides for the transfer of 18 powers including electing the mayor and tax levy to urban local bodies, state governments have implemented it patchily because they don t want their own authority over the cities to diminish. According to urban experts, a majority of the municipalities in India continue to be cash-strapped. The total revenue collected from all the municipalities is estimated at Rs 1.2 lakh crore, which is about 1% of the gross domestic product (GDP). This is paltry when compared to countries like Brazil and China, where municipal revenues account for 5-6% of the GDP.
A directly elected mayoral system with a five-year term is a huge positive. However, for it to yield results, the government will have to ensure mandatory devolution of functions to municipalities, a more robust fiscal decentralisation and empowering of the mayor to hire staffers. In the present system, a mayor is not able to function because the power remains with the state government , said Srikanth Viswanathan, coordinator of the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a Bangalore-based advocacy group.
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NEW DELHI: Making a hard push for the GST bill on the eve of Parliaments monsoon session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked an all-party meeting 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.
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.
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.
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 Telang ana 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 later 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 had said it was ready to talk on any issue that is raised.
NEW DELHI: 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.
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 had broken 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.
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.
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.
NEW DELHI: A wrestler-turned-property dealer, wanted for two murders and in an attempt to murder case in the NCR was arrested. He was carrying a reward of Rs 5,000.
Aakash, alias Subhash Pehalwan, of Loni in Ghaziabad was previously involved in six crimes in Uttar Pradesh. Pehalwan is said to be a close associate of Sanjay Gurjar, a criminal from UP.
Ajit Kumar Singla, deputy commissioner of police (northeast), said Pehalwan was arrested by a team of anti-auto theft squad (AATS), led by inspector Rajender Dubey. They had received a tip-off that Pehalwan would meet his associates near the DTC bus depot in Old Seemapuri area.
Accordingly, a trap was laid and Pehalwan was caught with a pistol and two cartridges. He was booked under the arms Act, said Singla.
Pehalwan revealed he was born in Shamli, Uttar Pradesh. After completing Class 11, Pehalwan quit studies and started wrestling. Later, he became a property dealer and began working for the Gurjar gang.
HYDERABAD: 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.
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 and sent home.
But later in the evening, he complained of severe pain in his private parts and was taken to hospital, where he underwent two surgeries to stop internal bleeding. But he 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 do you mean he 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 CCTV cameras installed in the school.
Police registered a case against the eight-year-old under section 304 of the IPC (culpable homicide not a mounting to murder ), but did not arrest him as he is a minor. He is likely to be produced before a juvenile court on Monday.
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To decode the architectural complexity of Khirki village, a unique walk is being organised on July 20 that will take participants through the streets of the crammed urban village. The aim is to understand how slums, modern apartments coexist here.
Decoding Khirki will be conducted by Polish artists Simone De Iacobis and Malgorzata Kuciewicz. The artists will walk around the densely populated area replete with grocery, barber, electronic and other shops, pass through residential areas, Khirki mosque and Sai Baba temple. Participants will also get an opportunity to visit Khoj Studios to study a map made out of sketches and drawings of Khirki area vis-a-vis its architectural relevance in Delhi.
Khirki is a sample of reality. It offers room for a thorough observation of pure architectural elements. Jaali panels, space frame structures and chhaajjas are just some of the features we are going to explore in an hour-long tour, said Simone.
Both the artists work and live in Warsaw, Poland. What attracted them about Khirki was its complex architectural nature. Khirki gets its name from the intricate windows on the mosque there, one of the finest examples of Sultanate-era architecture. From the mosques roof, the residential buildings are so close, one can speak across terraces.
Khirki villages architecture will help us in understanding its history, climate responsive designs and even anthropological behaviour, said Simone.
The event being organised by Khoj Studios will take place between 5 pm and 6 pm. The walk will be a dynamic, fluid process where anyone from the area and outside is free to come, said Sitara Chowfla, curator at Khoj Studios.
Residents are looking forward to the walk. Rajesh Kumar, who is from Uttar Pradesh, has been living in Khirki village for more than a decade now and has witnessed the changes the area has gone through over the years. Kumar worries that the locality is expanding in an unplanned manner at an alarming rate.
People from various regions and countries have made Khirki village their home. Apart from African nationals, many from UP and Bihar have come here. Khirki village has become a multicultural place and small units are being constructed in every corner. It is said that the cultural identity of a place is reflected through its architecture. And this is something that the walk will be about, said Kumar.
Apart from the walk, two more events are lined up on the same day. There will be an exhibition by Iranian artist Hoora Soleimani and Hyderabad-based Indian-Iranian Soghra Khurasani. The artworks will highlight issue of individual freedom. There will also be a poetry session by Akhil Katyal between 7pm and 7.30pm. He is a bilingual writer and translator from Delhi.
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Just two government hospitals have reported dengue cases equal to the total number of such cases confirmed in the city by the municipal corporation that keeps count of cases and deaths in the city.
The Safdarjung Hospital alone treated 77 cases of dengue from Delhi and the NCR till July 9, whereas the MCD data from Delhi and the NCR confirmed 50 cases till July 16. The MCD says 18 of these are from Delhi.
A dozen of the 77 dengue cases are from within Delhi and the rest from NCR, a Safdarjung official said. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital near Connaught Place has confirmed another 6 cases from Delhi, taking the number of confirmed dengue cases between the two hospitals to 18.
Safdarjung has confirmed all 77 cases using the accurate ELISA test and not the rapid diagnostic test, which the MCD rejects on the grounds it throws up almost 50% false positive cases.
Along with the awareness campaigns, Delhi government has asked hospitals to assign beds for dengue patients, keep testing kits and platelets in stock so there are no shortages.
Read more: To combat dengue, Gurgaon breeds larvae eating fish
Delhi health minister Satyendra Jain also said around 250-300 fever clinic corners would be set up in the hospitals, dispensaries and mohalla clinics by September.
Right now, we need to prevent mosquitoes from breeding. Since very few cases are from within Delhi, treatment facilities dont need to be scaled up right now, he had said.
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UNESCO lists Khangchendzonga National Park and Chandigarh Capitol Complex in World Heritage Sites
Published: July 18, 2016
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has added Sikkims Khangchendzonga National Park (KNP) and Chandigarh Capitol Complex in its list of World Heritage Sites.
Decision in this regard was taken by the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) of UNESCO held in Istanbul in Turkey.
Khangchendzonga National Park (KNP)
KNP was added in the mixed heritage site category of the list i.e. it exhibits qualities of both natural and cultural significance.
of the list i.e. it exhibits qualities of both natural and cultural significance. With this, it becomes the first mixed heritage site from India to make it to the list.
to make it to the list. KNP covers 25% of Sikkim and is home to a significant number of endemic, rare and threatened plant and animal species including large number of bird and mammal species.
Geographically the park includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests.
The park combines the religious and cultural practices of Buddhism as well as the ecological significance of the region.
It signifies an outstanding example of traditional knowledge and environmental preservation.
Chandigarhs Capitol Complex
Chandigarhs famed Capitol Complex designed by Swiss-French architecture Le Corbusier was added in the list in the Transnational category .
. The site was added in the list as part of the UNESCOs recognition of Le Corbusiers architectural works in different parts of the world.
The Capitol Complex includes the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Punjab and Haryana Secretariat and Punjab and Haryana Assembly.
The complex was designed by Le Corbusier in the 1950s when the city was constructed as a symbol of independent, modern India.
Indias three sites inscribed in Word Heritage List
The 40th session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) of UNESCO, three sites from India were inducted in Word Heritage List. Earlier Bihars Nalanda University was added in the list.
With this, India becomes first country to get three sites inscribed in the Word Heritage List at a single session of the committee meeting.
With these additions, India now has 35 world heritage sites, including 27 cultural heritage sites, 7 natural sites and 1 mixed site.
Month: Current Affairs - July, 2016
Category: Art & Culture Current Affairs
Topics: Envrionment Khangchendzonga National Park National Places in News
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Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Monday launched a 24x7 helpline 1077 to lodge complaints of water-logging in the national capital.
The government called a high level meeting to review water-logging problems after two days of continuous rainfall in Delhi. I have directed all agencies to conduct joint inspections at severely affected areas and submit reports by tomorrow (Tuesday), Sisodia said in a tweet.
In another tweet, he said, Dial 1077, 24x7 Helpline for registering complaints regarding water logging is functional now. Kindly register your complaint.
Dial 1077, 24x7 Helpline to report water logging anywhere in Delhi. It's a 247 Helpline. Manish Sisodia (@msisodia) July 18, 2016
He also asked Delhi police to send a separate report on spot for water-logging in Delhi and the cause of it.
Vehicular movement was affected in Delhi due to continuous rainfall for the past two days. The city has been witnessing traffic jams at various intersections due to heavy rains and water-logging.
Read | Morning rain sends Delhi under water, mile-long traffic jams reported
Read | Heavy rain brings down Delhis monsoon deficit
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) asked Delhi transport authorities on Monday to immediately revoke the registration of diesel vehicles more than 10 years old following complaints that a lack of enforcement of judicial orders was hurting the Capitals fight against pollution.
Last April, the NGT banned all diesel vehicles older than 10 years. In 2014, the green court said all diesel and petrol -- vehicles more than 15 years old wont be permitted to run on city roads.
But despite the orders, older cars continued to ply on Delhis roads with the city government saying only the regional transport office (RTO) had the authority to ban old vehicles.
That implementation glitch was resolved on Monday with the NGT asking the RTO to issue a public notice after cancelling the registration of older vehicles and supply a list of such vehicles to the traffic police.
We hereby direct RTO, Delhi to deregister all diesel vehicles which are more than 10 years old, a bench headed by NGT chairperson justice Swatanter Kumar said.
This is the latest step in a raft of judicial measures to improve the citys air that is among the worst in the world. Earlier in the year, the Supreme Court banned the registration of large diesel vehicles and ordered all diesel taxis to convert to CNG. The SC has indicated it is open to revisiting its order on the ban.
Older cars are more harmful for the environment as they have primitive pollution control systems installed and emit more harmful gases than their newer variants. Vehicular exhaust comprises a big chunk of the air pollution that chokes Delhi.
The tribunals order came after the Delhi Police said it made repeated attempts to stop older vehicles from plying on city roads. But they have hardly met any success, the bench noted.
The traffic police said repeated challans and fine on offending older vehicles hadnt fetched any result.
It is also stated that vehicles are released by the magistrates after imposing fine under the Motor Vehicles Act and the vehicles surface again on the roads, the bench noted.
The NGT also directed the ministry of heavy industries to file an affidavit, giving the status of electric and hybrid vehicles in India and also mention the benefits the government was considering for those who wish to dispose of old vehicles.
The green court also ordered the ministry to write a letter to the chief secretaries of all the states within one week in this regard.
Last week, the NGT asked the Delhi government to submit an action-taken report on the ban orders and give data on the number of cars impounded. In reply, the Delhi transport department said it had impounded around 3,000 cars in the past year but had released them later.
In reply, the Delhi transport department said it had impounded around 3,000 cars in the past year but had released them later.
It said that according to the Motor Vehicles Act, only the RTO had the authority to deregister old vehicles.
The Delhi government had also implemented an ambitious road rationing scheme earlier this year, allowing vehicles to ply on alternate days based on their registration numbers ending with odd or even digits barring Sundays.
According to a study by IIT Kanpur, diesel vehicles contribute 78% of particulate matter tiny particles that can penetrate the lungs comes from four-wheelers.
Besides short-time problems such as eye irritation and headache, the pollutants can even lead to heart attacks and cancers, according to health experts.
Read| Centre backs car-makers before key green tribunal hearing
Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main arterial roads leading to Govindpuri Extension main market has become nightmare for the residents. Due to the bottlenecks they have to wait for long to enter the colonies. Residents blamed encroachment by vendors for the situation. And, illegally parked cars make matters worse.
A large number of visitors come to the market and most of them leave their vehicles on the main road. People from other localities also park their cars. This leads to traffic jams, said Jaspreet Sidhu, a resident. There is complete disorder and confusion in the evenings, which has become a routine exercise for locals, he added.
Residents said the issue has been discussed on several occasions in meetings with authorities but no change has taken place. They claim that it has been a decade that things have been so chaotic but the situation has worsened in the past four years with encroachments increasing manifold in the market area. Residents also claim that the road, which was 25ft wide, has been reduced to 15ft.
The footpath has been taken over by food outlets, pan shops and other small kiosks extending till the main road, leaving no space for pedestrians.
The situation is so bad that there is no way an ambulance can reach the place in cases of an emergency, said KK Makkar, chairman of the Resident Welfare Association. He added that the RWA has been pursuing the matter with South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) and the traffic department for a decade no but no action has been taken so far by either of the departments. And, with time, the encroachment has only increased.
Residents said that some of the shopkeepers charge money from vendors to set up their stalls in front of their shops. Around six months ago, the footpath was renovated here but is used by vendors instead of pedestrians.
Shopkeepers have rented the footpath to food vendors and other hawkers. This makes even the footpath an accident-prone zone, said Sachin Agarwal, another resident. He added: This road has been shrunk to almost a single-lane passage. And all the traffic and pedestrians have to pass through it.
After repeated complaints of the RWA members, in 2011, the municipal corporation and police had carried a drive under which they removed all encroachments from the road. However, residents claim that within six months they were back.
What is more worrying is that when a commuter confronts an encroacher, it always ends into commotion.There are scuffles between motorists and vendors almost every day, said Agarwal.
Meanwhile, a senior SDMC official said the civic body conducts anti-encroachment drive from time to time. We request the residents to contact us and we will look into the matter, he said.
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Several things about Said-ul-Ajaib village make it stand out in South Delhi. The most striking is that a majority of the Hindu Jat inhabitants of this village worship a Pir (Sufi saint) and believe him to be their saviour. Next to the main temple complex in the village stands the shrine of the pir after whom the village has been named. Every evening the devotees, comprising mostly women, line up here to light a lamp and reclaim the long line of faith established by their ancestors.
Considered the smallest village of South Delhi, Said-ul-Ajaib is located on the outskirts of the Capital on the Mehrauli-Badarpur Road, opposite Sakets D block. The urban village also houses some ancient havelis and is home to students and young professionals who live here in rented accommodations as most of the owners have moved out for lack of amenities. Over the years, lower rents have attracted entrepreneurs and the village has become a preferred place among designers and artists who prefer to set up their workshops here instead of the more commercialised art hubs in the vicinity such as Hauz Khas or Lado Sarai. However, Said-ul-Ajaibs rich past and thick greens are fast diminishing due to rampant encroachment and illegal construction, which are eating away its old trees, water bodies and open spaces.
Next to the main temple complex in the village stands the shrine of the pir after whom the village has been named. (Sanchit Khanna/HT Photo)
The past
People new to the area find it difficult to pronounce or spell the name of the village but only till they discover the legend behind it. It is believed that the village draws its name from Sufi saint Saiyyd who was said to have the power to perform miracles (Ajaib means mysterious powers).
The old residents of the village believe that all prayers and wishes come true when a devotee visit the saints shrine, said Surender Yadav, a resident. Outsiders may find it difficult to locate the shrine but Yadav says it has a strong following and even people who have moved out to other localities come here to pray. Every Thursday, the village priest offers gur-chana at the shrine, which is distributed as prasad among the devotees.
There are several havelis here that date back to the 1900s besides around six wells that villagers claim are older than the havelis. The narrow lanes of the village lead to the most prominent house, a haveli, which belonged to Mahipat Rai Kaptan (chief), a senior police officer during the British rule. The beautiful heavy wooden door to the haveli has been preserved well. It is maintained by Kaptans family.
A few houses away, a group of elderly men can be seen enjoying a game of cards at the village chaupal. A few metres away is another haveli with Jeevan (engraved on its entrance). Old residents claim this also belonged to a police officer who held an important position in the British empire. The haveli has an ancient staircase along with ramps on either side leading up the entrance. This structure has been rented out. The ramps were built for the horses belonging to special guests, said Yadav.
Manjeet Singh Bal, a resident, said the ruins of an old stone wall and a number of small houses inside this complex were built much before that time. Bals great grandfather Dharam Singh was the SP of Central Province (present day Madhya Pradesh). He also built a haveli in the 1920s adjoining the haveli Jeevan.
Bal, a lawyer, remembers growing up in the village and sneaking around the large courtyards and attics of the haveli. He and Yadav attended school together and recall spending their afternoons with other village kids at a large pond near their house. The pond was deep enough for cattle. We used to jump from a high boundary straight into the pond. The race was to catch the turtles. The one who fished out most was declared the winner, he said.
Bal pointed to a huge peepal tree, which used to be at the edge of the pond and which has now been cut to half its size. His mother, Bimla Devi, 71, still disapproves of his diving in the pond all those years ago. Devi, who was married off at 17, remembers that the village then had no power. She says there was always the threat of dacoits attacking the village as it was on the outskirts of the city and many rich families lived here.
The pond that dried up some years ago has now been encroached upon . (Sanchit Khanna/HT Photo)
The present
The modern-day Said-ul-Ajaib is a lot different. Saddened that the pond is now dry, Devi says, The water level of the pond was such that it would almost reach our house. Many cattle drowned there. There is nothing of it now, only concrete land. Bal has been fighting a case against the misuse of the village land by builders who have constructed tall structures across the dried-up pond.
About eight to 10 years ago, the water level receded and people started dumping construction waste and garbage into it, which is when it dried up completely. I have filed a plea and also requested the civic agency to revive the pond as a rainwater harvesting unit. It has been a long battle, Bal said.
He has also been crusading against the unmindful and unauthorised felling of trees for builder flats. Two buildings have home up in the past few years over a village land, which used to be a thick mango grove. The tree cover was so dense that the sunlight could not percolate in. Strangely it has all been cleared away to make way for four-storey buildings. It saddens me to see my village being rapidly reduced to concrete. But I will continue to fight to save and restore it to its past glory, he said.
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Citys municipal schools are often criticized for the poor quality of education mainly due to the inadequate number of teachers. However, things are about to change as the Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board (DSSSB) has cleared the appointment of new teachers by the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC). The education department of the civic body has started the exercise of deputing the teachers at primary schools that have about 2.86 lakhs students.
The sanctioned strength of municipal teachers in south is 9,400. About 2,400 posts had been lying vacant for a long time and the civic body was struggling to fill the gap. Now, recruitment of more 1,000 teachers has been cleared by the DSSSB and 221 teachers have been hired on contractual basis under Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, a part of the central government scheme.
The list of newly recruited teachers includes 850 primary teachers for classes one to five and 150 nursery teachers. Additionally, about 931 teachers have been allowed to continue, they were hired on contractual basis in 2010. The move is to ensure smooth functioning of the schools.
Out of the four zones under SDMC south, west, central and Najafgarh the central zone will benefit the most with this development as 40% of the total recruitment will be provided to the zone. Out of 579 schools in south Delhi, there are 132 schools in central zone. There were 7,000 teachers in the 579 schools; however, that was not enough keeping in mind the prescribed student-teacher ratio. As per rules, there should be one teacher for a group of 40 students.
A senior official of SDMCs education department said, The reason for deputing maximum teachers in schools in central zone is the long pending demand from here. Comparing it with the rest of the three zones, most of the schools in central zone were being run with minimum staff. We dont want to compromise with the quality of education, thats why we took the decision.
According to him, ideally there should be one teacher over 40 students but in the central zone the teacher and student ratio was 1:50. The deployment of sufficient staff will help in improving quality of education, monitoring and security in schools, the official said.
According to Yashpal Arya, chairman of SDMC education committee, the process for deputing nursery, regular and contract based teachers has started while the teachers under SSA category will be deputed from next week onwards.
We have started sending the appointment letters to the teachers and within 8-10 days everything will be finalised, he said.
As far as the contract teachers are concerned, only those who have been working on and before 2010 with SDMC schools will be given the opportunity to continue further, said Arya. The development has come as a big relief for us as the matter for appointing new teachers was pending with DSSSB, Delhi Government for the last seven years. We were constantly asking them to approve the selection process, said an SDMC official.
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Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar was questioned by the Delhi Police four months ago in connection with the mysterious death of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, few details of which came to light on Monday.
Speaking to Hindustan Times but refusing to divulge any specifics, Tarar said she met Delhi Police officers in March. She, however, clarified that she was not interrogated.
People are writing and saying anything they want. They do not understand the difference between interrogation, summoning or request, she said.
Read | Who is Mehr Tarar
Claiming that her name was dragged into the matter for no reason, she said, People connected me to her (Pushkars) death. I was dragged into it only because I had chatted with her on Twitter. I learnt of her tragic death on Twitter. I was in Lahore and not even in India. I dont want to talk about it. I hope it comes to an end.
Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a luxury Delhi hotel on January 17, 2014. A day before, a Twitter spat occurred between the two women, with Pushkar accusing Tarar of having affair with Tharoor. Pushkars suspicions also led to a row between husband and wife.
Confirming that Tarar was questioned, joint commissioner of police (south-east range), RP Upadhyay told HT, In February, she joined the investigation. However, I am not in a position to comment anything as Ive not gone through the details of the questioning.
A police official said Tarar, when asked about her association with Tharoor, denied having a romantic liaison with him.
Sources said the journalist was also asked to explain phone conversations and BBM messages she had exchanged with Tharoor, apart from meeting with him in Dubai, days before Pushkars death. Police also tried to ascertain if Tarar was aware of any trouble in the Pushkars marriage.
Despite a murder case being registered last year, no development has taken place thus far. As it stands, the commissioner of police, special CP (law and order), two joint CPs (southeastern range), two DCPs, two additional DCPs, the ACP of the Special Task Forces and the first investigating officer, who primarily dealt with the case, moved out in routine transfers.
Read | FBI endorses AIIMS report of poisoning as cause of Sunandas death
When asked if the transfers had any impact on the investigation, the joint commissioner of police said, Its the officers who have been transferred, not the posts they were holding. The officers who have joined these posts are carrying forward the probe. Whatever needs to be done will be done in the case, Upadhyay said.
Sources in Delhi Police said there has been no significant development in the case since the last changes took place in the police hierarchy that included the retirement of former police chief, Bhim Sain Bassi.
Tarar had earlier written an email to Bassi, saying she was willing to join the probe. When she came to Delhi in February, she was questioned by a team headed by DCP Premnath in a five star hotel.
Earlier in May, BJP MP Subramanian Swamy had sought home minister Rajnath Singhs intervention in setting up a court-monitored Special Invetsigation Team to take forward the probe. In a letter to Singh, Swamy was critical of Delhi Police alleging that it was dragging its feet even on elementary steps necessary in criminal investigation when it has been established that poison was found in her body and she died an unnatural death.
Political legitimacy is of utmost importance when it comes to dealing with a crisis. But in curfew-bound Kashmir, the Mehbooba Mufti government is making itself visible largely through men in uniform. Apart from a brief video message, Mehbooba has not uttered a single word, nor have her legislators reached out to people in their constituencies. Most of her MLAs, in fact, belong to South Kashmir, the epicentre of the current spiral of violence, but none have had the courage to speak to their constituents to find out why they are so angry, to understand why the explosive street is refusing to quieten down. The attack today on a PDP MLA by angry stone-throwers though some seem to suggest he was injured in a car accident is an ugly manifestation of the fact that mainstream politicians from the ruling PDP, or even the National Conference, are being rejected by the same people who voted for them only eighteen months ago.
Read: Curfew continues for 9th day, train services suspended in Kashmir
The ground from under Kashmirs feet has slipped dangerously since December 2014, when the state registered its highest voter turn-out in assembly elections in the last 25 years, with an estimated 65% of voters casting their votes. There was a reason for the unprecedented turnout: People defied the boycott call given by the separatists because they wanted to keep the BJP out of the Valley. The party, which wants the abrogation of Article 370, was and continues to be viewed with suspicion by the Kashmiris. What the common man did not anticipate was the PDP tying up with the very party it said it would never have a truck with. The hard line pursued by the Narendra Modi-led NDA government it first called off talks with Pakistan after its envoy spoke with separatists and is now responding to the unrest in Kashmir by pumping in additional troops has further aggravated the ground situation in the Valley.
Read: First person: When a vacation in Kashmir turned into confinement
Through the 10 days that the Valley has been burning since the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani, the Mehbooba government stands further alienated. Neither the chief minister nor the health minister, nor any of her legislators have even visited the hospitals teeming with civilians wounded by bullets and pellet guns. Nor for that matter have any leaders of the National Conference (NC), led by Omar Abdullah. In the enraged Valley, even the opposition leaders are not welcome, either in hospitals or in homes that have seen deaths. According to a senior NC leader, their workers are lying low for fear of being assaulted by the angry youth who have taken over the street. It is time New Delhi woke up to the fact that Kashmirs mainstream parties are losing their legitimacy. All through 26 years of insurgency, the NC and the PDP have been the bridge between Srinagar and New Delhi. That very crucial link is now under grave threat. And it will threaten not just the state but the country as a whole.
Read: After Oppns attack in RS, govt says Pak sponsoring Kashmir violence
The Institute of Chartered Accounts of India (ICAI) is expected to declare the Chartered Accountants (CA) final examination and Common Proficiency Test (CPT) exam results 2016 on Monday at 2pm.
Yes, Im worried about the result but more than that Im proud of myself. I decided to become CA and shall become one day, said Shruti Jain a CA final student from Sonepat.
Many students recounted long hours of preparation ahead of the exams and how they were preparing themselves mentally before the results.
I used to cry while studying. The only human interaction was with my mother when she used to offer me food. I cut myself off from people. I stopped liking food, said Jain.
Read more: CA final, CPT exam results 2016 declared, check it here
But this result reminds me of the sacrifices I made, sacrifices my parents made, my brother made, my m-baba made.
Ashutosh Saraf from Delhi said he didnt give himself a single day of enjoyment since his Class 12 exams.
For the exams, I have prepared like there is no tomorrow, the most memorable days of my life are my exams days. I am feeling excited as well as tense for results, he said.
Ashita Chauhan from Delhi said the preparation period had taught her a lot. The result day is like Judgement Day for us. It has a lot at stake, she said.
The expectations of your family, relatives, friends, office colleagues and most importantly your own expectations are either going to come alive or they will be put to the test again.
The CA final exam was held in May, while the CPT exam was held in June. Candidates will be able to check their results on the ICAI website.
The all-India merit list of candidates securing a minimum of 55% and up to the Rank 50 will also be available on the ICAI website.
Read more: IBPS PO 2016 recruitment notification (CWE PO/MT-VI) issued
Steps to check the results:
1) Go to the ICAI website
2) Click on the link for the result of the exam in which you have appeared
3) Log in with your registration number or PIN number along with your roll number
4) The result will be displayed on the screen
You can receive your results via SMS. The service will be available through India Times.
Read more: SBI PO prelims exam 2016 results to be declared on July 18
For results through SMS:
a) For final examination result: CAFNL(space)XXXXXX (Where XXXXXX is your six digit final examination roll number. For example: CAFNL 000136)
b) For CPT result: CACPT(space)XXXXXX (Where XXXXXX is your six digit Common Proficiency Test roll number. For example: CACPT 000121)
and send the message to 58888.
Read more | RRB NTPC 2016: Declaration of results to take time, says official source
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The Rajasthan government has decided not to charge orphans for education in its universities and colleges, higher education minister Kali Charan Saraf announced on Sunday.
The free education policy will be implemented from this year in 24 state-run universities and their 207 constituent or affiliated colleges, Saraf said in Kota.
The minister, however, clarified that the decision was not binding on private colleges.
Governor Kalyan Singh was instrumental in bringing about the policy, taken at the vice-chancellors coordination committee meeting held in January this year, he said.
The aim is to provide educational opportunities to orphans who face financial issues and are vulnerable as they do not have parents, he said.
Commissioner of the directorate of state higher education, Anoop Khinchi said orders have been issued to universities to not charge fees from orphan students from this academic session (2016-17), which began earlier this month.
However, he said the policy would be applicable only to those orphan students who clear the admission process.
Vice-chancellor of Vardhman Mahaveer Open University (VMOU), professor Ashok Sharma said while other varsities would provide only free education to orphans, VMOU would also provide free study material to them.
However, he said no orphans have approached the university yet, he said. Vice-chancellor of University of Kota, Professor PK Dashora said orders have been issued for implementing the policy, but they were yet to receive applications from orphans. Education is free for orphans in government schools of the state.
Deputy secretary of secondary education, BK Gupta said while the school education is free for orphans up to Class 8, the Rajasthan government has extended the policy till Class 12. Besides Rajasthan, Odisha government provides free education to orphans in universities of the state.
City police on Sunday booked the president of a society under the Cooperative Group Housing Societies (CGHS) for allegedly duping members to the tune of Rs. 7 crore.
The police identified the accused as Ishpal Bharadwaj, a Gurgaon resident. Between February 2015 and March this year, he allegedly collected the money for plots from prospective buyers, most of them Delhi residents, for a residential society and then duped them.
The residential society, Shiv Shankar (GHS), is located in Sector 51 of Sadar area, Gurgaon.
The police further said though Bharadwaj collected the money from prospective buyers, he did not deposit the amount with the Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda).
The police said a complaint accusing Bharadwaj of fraud was registered by New Delhi resident Dinesh Kumar Malik, one of the victims. Malik lost Rs. 5 lakh and is one of the 200 complainants, the police said.
He told the police that the accused had collected money from all the members of the society but didnt deposit it with the Huda.
After several complaints accusing Bharadwaj of cheating investors surfaced, the case was transferred to the Economic Offences Wing (EOW), which investigated the matter and found that the allegations were true.
Based on the EOW findings, the police have now lodged a case against Bharadwaj under sections 420 (cheating), 406 (breach of trust) and 403 (dishonest misappropriation of property) at Sadar police station.
We have lodged the case. The accused will be held for questioning. It seems to be a case of cheating. We have received many complaints against the chairman of this society, a police spokesperson said.
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UNESCO lists Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier's works among World Heritage Sites
Published: July 18, 2016
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has listed Swiss-French architect Le Corbusiers works among its World Heritage Sites list.
In this regard, announcement was at the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) of UNESCO held in Istanbul in Turkey.
Le Corbusier works were added in the list in recognition of his contribution in spearheading the modern architectural movement after World War I, with an emphasis on functionality, bold lines and materials such as concrete, iron and glass.
His 17 sites across spread across seven countries France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India have been added in the World Heritage Sites list.
About Le Corbusier
Born on October 6, 1887. Died on August 27, 1965.
He was Swiss-French architect, urban planner, designer, painter, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture.
His architectural career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout Europe, India, and the Americas.
Famous Works: Some of his architectural masterpieces included in the World Heritage Sites list are La Cite Radieuse housing project in Marseille, Dominican monastery of La Tourette near Lyon and La Villa Savoye near Paris.
Some of his architectural masterpieces included in the World Heritage Sites list are La Cite Radieuse housing project in Marseille, Dominican monastery of La Tourette near Lyon and La Villa Savoye near Paris. Corbusier also had prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India and contributed specific designs for several buildings including Chandigarhs Capitol Complex.
Month: Current Affairs - July, 2016
Topics: Honours Le Corbusier Persons in News UNESCO World Heritage Sites
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At least 10 commandos of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and four Maoists were killed in an encounter in Bihars jungles, sources said late on Monday.
The offensive took place in Dumari Nala forest area on the border of Gaya and Aurangabad districts, 172 km south of Patna, where the CRPF had launched a combing operation, the sources said. The men were trapped after the Maoists triggered around 21 improvised explosive devices (IED). Ten of the jawans were reported to be killed, making this one of the heaviest casualty in recent times in an anti-Maoist operation in Gaya.
The district magistrate of Gaya, Kumar Ravi, however, confirmed only two deaths. Bodies of two jawans and five injured are on way. Three Maoists have also been killed in the gun battle, he said over the phone.
Ravi, who was supervising relief and rescue operations at the airport at 0030 hrs on Tuesday, said the operation had started at 11am and went on till about 6pm, lasting about seven hours. The administration sent reinforcements after the heavy casualty from the IED blasts.
We sent a helicopter, but it was unable to evacuate our people as the Maoists engaged our forces in heavy firing. The Gaya international airport will be opened throughout the night and BSF choppers are on standby. We will resume our operations in the morning, he said.
The injured will be air-lifted either to Patna or Ranchi for medical treatment after being assessed at the Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College Hospital, he added.
The search operation has been going on since the last two days after we had a tip off that a group of Maoists led by Sandeep Ji of Bihar Jharkhand Special Area Committee (BJSAC) was moving there. On Monday the ultras started blasting IEDs and the security forces who went inside the jungle got trapped. They started firing indiscriminately after the blast of the IEDs, said a senior officer.
Some arms and ammunition were also allegedly recovered from the site. However, given the bad connectivity to the location of the encounter, information has been difficult to access.
The jawans are believed to be from the elite Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) and were deployed in the state for conducting anti-Maoist operations.
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Three days have passed since the police registered a case against five accused of gangraping a Dalit girl in Rohtak, but no arrests have been made.
The five accused, who had allegedly gangraped the Dalit girl in Bhiwani three years ago, allegedly raped her again in Rohtak on Wednesday.
The victim complained that she was kidnapped by the same accused in broad daylight when she was returning home from college. She said the accused took her in their car and raped her.
She was found lying unconscious near Sukhpura Chowk with her clothes torn on Wednesday night, by locals, who rushed her to Rohtak Civil Hospital. On Thursday, she was referred to the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) by doctors, where she gave her statement to the police.
A case against five accused Amit, Mausam, Raju, Akash and Sandeep was registered after her complaint. Police said all the accused were from Bhiwani and were absconding.
Deputy superintendent of police Pushpa Khatri, who is heading the case, said two of the five accused were arrested in 2013, but the names of the other three were not mentioned in the FIR. The two arrested were also released later on bail.
However, the victims brother said they had filed the case in the court for the arrest of remaining three and re-arrest of two accused. The accused were constantly threatening us to compromise outside the court. They even offered us a hefty amount for settlement. But we didnt agree. They are men from upper caste and we are Dalits. It seems they can do whatever they want without fearing the law, the victims brother said.
We have also requested for police protection, but to no avail. Despite repeated demands, the police didnt include SC/ST Act in the FIR, he added.
Meanwhile, the police have formed three teams to nab the accused, but have not succeeded till now.
DSP Khatri said the investigations were on in full swing. Our teams have been going to Bhiwani from the past two days to conduct raids and interrogations. We have raided their houses, but they are on the run. I cant reveal more content of the investigation right now, she added.
India over the weekend added a building complex designed by Swiss-French architecture pioneer Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and a national park in Sikkim to its list of world heritage sites.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, or Unesco, on Sunday approved both the sites, two days after giving nod to the archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara (Nalanda University) in Bihar, approving all the three nominations sent by India -- a rare honour.
This is the first time that any country has got three sites included in a single session of the Unescos world heritage committee. The committee met in Istanbul.
A world heritage site is a place (such as a building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, or mountain) which Unesco sees as being of special cultural or physical significance.
India now has 35 (27 cultural and seven natural sites and one mixed) heritage sites recognised by Unesco, opening up the chance of more funding for conservation.
Chandigarhs Capitol Complex was among the 17 Le Corbusier works listed by the Paris-based body on Sunday, which said the sites spread over seven countries were 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 dhabitation 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 a statement.
The Capitol Complex
Spread over more than 100 acres in Sector 1, the Capitol Complex was in news when it hosted the International Yoga Day event on June 21 that was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The complex houses the Punjab and Haryana high court, the secretariats and assembly buildings of both the states.
The famous Open Hand Monument that has come to symbolise Chandigarh and the hand to give and the hand to take; peace and prosperity, and the unity of mankind is also part of the complex. Martyrs Memorial, Geometric Hill and Tower of Shadow are the other buildings.
Khangchendzonga park
Sikkims Khangchendzonga National Park is home to the worlds third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga. The park includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular, snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests.
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.
Nalanda
Nalanda stands out as one of the most ancient universities in South Asia, Unesco said in a release.
Archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara comprises the archaeological remains of a monastic and scholastic institution dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE, it said.
The site includes stupas, shrines, viharas (residential and educational buildings) and important art works in stucco, stone and metal.
The university engaged in the organised transmission of knowledge over an uninterrupted period of 800 years. The historical development of the site testifies to the development of Buddhism into a religion and the flourishing of monastic and educational traditions, the release said.
With agency inputs
The government refuted the Congress charge that Jammu and Kashmir was disturbed because of the PDP-BJP coalition government failed to handle the situation, and blamed Pakistan as the sole reason and sponsor for the violence.
To think that because BJP-PDP coalition is ruling there and thats why there is this problem, is not correct, finance minister Arun Jaitley said during a debate in the Rajya Sabha. Pakistan never reconciled the fact that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, he said, adding that it was the sole reason for unrest in the hilly state.
Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces. In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 people including a cop have been killed, while nearly 3,200 people including 1,500 security force personnel have been injured.
Read: As it happened: Debate in Rajya Sabha over Kashmir unrest
On Monday, home minister Rajnath told the Rajya Sabha: Whatever is happening in Pakistan is totally Pakistan-sponsored. The name of the nation is Pakistan but their actions are na-Pak (impure).
Singh said the central government ordered the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir to exercise maximum restraint while tackling the angry mobs that took to streets following Wanis killing. Forces were directed to use non-lethal weapons in case of violence, he added.
Responding to Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad on the issue earlier, Jaitley defended security forces for their action against separatists and terrorists, saying no sovereign country can allow attacks on its forces and interests, but however, accepted that excessive use of force should be avoided.
The ministers remarks came after Opposition parties, cutting across political lines, slammed the Centre over excessive use of force in Jammu and Kashmir, saying bullets cant bring a solution to the current unrest in Kashmir.
During the discussion on the latest Kashmir crisis in the Rajya Sabha, the Opposition also urged the government to immediately start a dialogue process with the Kashmiri people.
Read: Have faith in all parties: Modi sets the tone as monsoon session begins
Congress leader Karan Singh said: I have spent 70 years watching developments in J&K. This time, there has been unprecedented outburst of anger and frustration. If young people are blinded, our people are blinded. If we say they are part of India, then India must share their pain.
Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agarwal asked the government to understand the sentiments of the Kashmiri people. You cant stop a revolt with the guns. Our leader Mulayam Singh Yadav has said if you go on a war against Pakistan, we will stand by you. But if there is a need to change policy, you have to do it with a brave heart, Agarwal said.
One by one, the Opposition leaders slammed the government over its handling of the Kashmir situation and questioned why it was not following the political process the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government started.
JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav said: In Ataljis government there was a political effort. Why is there so much difference between Vajpayees government and this government?
Read: Uproar in Rajya Sabha over price rise, Dalit rights
CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury also reminded the government about the Vajpayee governments approach. Narasimha Rao had said that sky is the limit for autonomy. Vajpayee spoke about humanity. Where is that humanity?
The Left leader also took potshots at the government over its flip-flop on the Pakistan policy. Sometimes we speak about 56-inch chest, and sometimes, we fly down to Pakistan to taste biriyani, Yechury said, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modis unscheduled visit to Lahore to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
While all parties assured the government of their support and stressed on the need for security forces, they also expressed concern over the use of excessive force in the Valley during the last two weeks.
Kashmir is not about its soil, it is all about the soul of Kashmir. I urge the government to please protect the soul of Kashmir even when there is a need for hard policing, Trinamool Congresss Derek oBrien said.
BJD, CPI(M) and other parties also asked the government to probe into allegations of excessive use of force.
Leader of Opposition, Ghulam Nabi Azad talked of use of disproportionate force. The government must look into it. The youth and intelligentsia are alienated. It is unrealistic to simply blame everything on foreign hand. We are facing a serious problem of trust deficit. There is a need to introspect, Karan Singh urged.
Yechury recalled how the government called all-party meetings on earlier occasions during crisis in Kashmir. Sharad Yadav told the government not to wait for an all-party meet, but take a decision to defuse the Kashmir issue immediately. SP, BSP and AIADMK asked the government to start the dialogue process.
AIADMKs Vijita and CPI(M)s Yechury also accused the government of failing to fulfill promises made to Kashmiri people.
Give them more education and employment opportunities. Common people are affected because of militant activities. The government must take constructive measure to restore peace, the AIADMK leader said.
Only one in five doctors in rural India are qualified to practice medicine, says a WHO report on Indias healthcare workforce, pointing to the widespread problem of quackery.
The report, the health workforce in India, based on 2001 Census data and published in June, also says nearly one-third of those calling themselves allopathic doctors were educated only up to Class 12. Also, 57% of the practitioners did not have any medical qualification.
Quackery is mostly dealt at the state level as state medical councils have been given the authority to act against quacks. According to the Supreme Court rulings, practitioners of alternate medicine cannot prescribe allopathic medicine, said a senior official at the Medical Council of India (MCI).
The MCI cannot confirm the authenticity of the figures of 57% since the council only maintains the data regarding registered medical practitioners of Modern Medicine or Allopathic System of Medicine.
Over nine lakh names are entered in the Indian Medical Register under the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956. These are all registered medical practitioners in modern medicine or allopathic system of medicine.
Dr Girish Tyagi from the Delhi medical council (DMC) said they tracked quacks regularly and had acted against 200 unqualified persons in the past year. We file complaints and then it is up to the cops to register an FIR, he said.
At the national level, the density of doctors -- allopathic, ayurvedic, unani and homeopathic -- was 80 per 100,000 of the population and the number of nurses 61. The numbers compare poorly with China -- 148 for doctors and 103 for nurses.
The report is based on old data, things have quite improved since then, the MCI official said.
The lack of trained health professionals has been a major constraint on Indias ability to achieve health delivery. At the time of compiling the report, the country needed an 700,000 more doctors but medical universities could produce only 30,000 doctors a year.
Eliminate the unqualified and the number drops sharply to 36 doctors per 100,000 people. It is worse for nurses. If only those trained properly are counted, it leaves only six nurses for 100,000 people.
There is a significant variation in the density of health professionals across states.
Kerala had 38.4% qualified nurses but they are only 3.1% of the total population. Similarly, West Bengal had 30.6% of all homoeopathic doctors in the country but only 7.8% of the population.
Across the districts, inequalities were massive. The density of allopathic doctors in the 30 most impoverished districts half of which were in Northeast and the other in central states was a little more than
9.4 per lakh of the population whereas, in the most affluent 30 districts, it was 159 per lakh.
The report also busts another myth. The country had 2.4 dentists for every 100,000 people, with 58 (of the total 593) districts having no dentists in 2001. As many as 175 districts had no dentists with a medical qualification.
It is largely held that India is better off as far as dentistry goes.
Opposition parties, cutting across political lines, slammed the Centre over excessive use of force in Jammu and Kashmir, and cautioned the government that bullets cant bring a solution to the current unrest in the Valley.
During the discussion on the latest Kashmir crisis arising out of the clashes between the protesters and security forces in Rajya Sabha, Opposition parties also urged the government to immediately start a dialogue process with the Kashmiri people.
Congress leader Karan Singh said, I have spent 70 years watching developments in J&K. This time, there has been unprecedented outburst of anger and frustration. If young people are blinded, our people are blinded. If we say they are part of India, then India must share their pain.
Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agarwal asked the government to understand the sentiments of the Kashmiri people. You cant stop a revolt with the guns. Our leader Mulayam Singh Yadav has said if you go on a war against Pakistan, we will stand by you. But if there is a need to change policy, you have to do it with a brave heart, Agarwal said.
One by one, the Opposition leaders slammed the government over its handling of the Kashmir situation and questioned why this government is not following the political process the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government started.
JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav said, In Ataljis government there was a political effort. Why is there so much difference between Vajpayees government and this government?
CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury also reminded the government about the Vajpayee governments approach. Narasimha Rao had said that sky is the limit for autonomy. Vajpayee spoke about humanity. Where is that humanity?
The Left leader also took potshots at the government over its flip-flop on the Pakistan policy. Sometimes we speak about 56-inch chest, and sometimes, we fly down to Pakistan to taste biriyani, Yechury quipped referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modis unscheduled visit to Lahore to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
While all parties assured the government of their support and stressed on the need for security forces, they also expressed concern over the use of excessive force in the Valley during the last two weeks.
Kashmir is not about its soil, it is all about the soul of Kashmir. I urge the government to please protect the soul of Kashmir even when there is a need for hard policing, Trinamool Congresss Derek oBrien said.
BJD, CPI(M) and other parties also asked the government to probe into allegations of excessive use of force.
Leader of Opposition, Ghulam Nabi Azad talked of use of disproportionate force. The government must look into it. The youth and intelligentsia are alienated. It is unrealistic to simply blame everything on foreign hand. We are facing a serious problem of trust deficit. There is a need to introspect, Karan Singh urged.
Yechury recalled how the government called all-party meetings on earlier occasions during crisis in Kashmir. Sharad Yadav told the government not to wait for an all-party meet, but take a decision to defuse the Kashmir issue immediately. SP, BSP and AIADMK asked the government to start the dialogue process.
AIADMKs Vijita and CPI(M)s Yechury also accused the government of failing to fulfill promises made to Kashmiri people.
Give them more education and employment opportunities. Common people are affected because of militant activities. The government must take constructive measure to restore peace, the AIADMK leader said.
With opposition to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill waning and Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying minutes before the monsoon session on Monday that every party is in the mood to take the best decisions, the Congress said it is willing to let the bill move forward, provided the government comes up with concrete solutions to its objections.
Anand Sharma, deputy leader of Congress in the Rajya Sabha where the Constitution amendment bill is stuck for want of numbers said, The last meeting was a preliminary one, but it was positive. The ministers of finance and parliamentary affairs met me and the Leader of the Opposition. We briefed the Congress leadership about the meeting and asked them to come back with concrete proposals to address our partys concerns.
Asked if the Congress was softening its position, Sharma said the party was willing to move ahead if the government could address its concerns. It is not a question of softening our position. The Congress has inherent wisdom and pragmatism, he said.
Sharma reiterated the partys concerns about having an 18% cap on the tax included in the bill, having an independent dispute redressal mechanism, and deleting the clause that allows for imposition on a 1% additional levy.
Read | Debate GST bill to clear confusion: Naqvi says govt confident of its passage
PM Narendra Modi with key Union minister and leaders of the Opposition during an all-party meeting ahead of the monsoon session at Parliament House in New Delhi on Sunday. (Arvind Yadav/ HT Photo)
He said the Congress will use the session to raise issues of national importance. The Congress has given a number of notices for discussions on subjects ranging from the violence in Kashmir to the rise in prices, especially of food items, and what it termed attacks on federalism by the government in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh. The Congress is looking at collaborating with other Opposition parties to corner the government.
Sources involved in negotiations on GST said the government could get back to the Congress as early as Tuesday, but the deliberations between the two sides could take longer. If the Congress is satisfied with the governments response, it will consult other Opposition parties on supporting the bill, they added.
The business advisory committee that met in the afternoon allotted five hours for a discussion on the GST bill.
The Modi government, which is hoping to give a decisive push to its reforms agenda, wants the GST bill that will radically alter the indirect tax regime across the country passed in this session.
The government, Modi said, has spoken with all parties separately and collectively. The sense we are getting is everyones mood is to take the best decisions (in the session). The remarks came a day after he told an all-party meeting that national interest, rather than who gets credit, should drive the functioning of Parliament.
Read | Have faith in all parties: Modi sets the tone as monsoon session begins
Though the BJP closed in on the Congress in the Upper House, narrowing the gap in numbers between the two parties with elections to 58 seats in June, it still remains short of the majority mark even with the help of allies and other parties willing to support it.
The Congress now has only six more lawmakers than the BJP in the Rajya Sabha.
Read | Monsoon session an acid test for NDA govts political risk management
Sunanda Pushkar, the wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, was found dead in her suite at a five-star hotel in Delhi in January 2014, a day after she was involved in a spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar on Twitter over the latters alleged affair with her husband.
A three-member AIIMS autopsy panel found anti-anxiety drug Alprazolam popularly known as Alprax in Pushkars body, a fact corroborated by the FBI, which analysed the viscera samples.
A number of conspiracy theories have cropped up over the circumstances leading to her death. Former Rajya Sabha MP Amar Singh had alleged that Pushkars death was a result of her husbands wrongdoings in the Indian Premier League. Others blame it on a troubled marriage, which was confirmed by Tharoors help, Narayan Singh.
However, most believe the other woman theory, involving Mehr Tarar.
Read | Sunanda case: A mysterious death and endless theories
Heres a timeline of the case so far:
2014
January 16: Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, and Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar are locked in a Twitter spat over the latters alleged affair with the politician.
January 17: Pushkar is found dead in room number 345 of Hotel Leela Palace, Delhi.
January 19: Post-mortem at AIIMS reveals a case of sudden and unnatural death. Doctors say certain injury marks are found on the body.
January 21: The sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) says in his report that Tharoors wife died due to poisoning.
January 23: The probe into Pushkars death is transferred to the Delhi Police Crime Branch.
January 25: The case is transferred back to the South District Police.
July 2: An AIIMS doctor heading the panel to conduct Pushkars post-mortem claims he is being pressurised to manipulate the autopsy report.
September 30: AIIMS doctors submit viscera report to Delhi Police.
October 19: Media says poison was found in Pushkars final viscera report.
November 9: The hotel room in which Pushkar was found dead is again examined by police and forensic experts. Fluid marks found on the bed and broken glass are sent for examination.
2015
January 6: Delhi Police commissioner BS Bassi says Pushkar did not commit suicide but was murdered. He also says a murder case was registered and a probe will be conducted. Tharoor says that he is stunned by the developments and that he will cooperate with police.
February: Pushkars viscera samples are sent to the FBI lab in Washington for examination and identification of poison that killed her.
March 12: Bassi says Tarar is an important link in the case and will be asked to join the investigation. Tarar says she is ready to help investigators whenever summoned.
November 10: Delhi Police receive Pushkars viscera report from the FBI. The report says radiation in Pushkars viscera samples was within permissible levels and did not cause her death.
November: Delhi police ask journalist Nalini Singh, who was one of the last persons to speak to Pushkar, to help with investigation. Pushkar had reportedly asked Singh to help her retrieve BBM messages between her husband and the Tarar.
2016
March: Tarar comes to Delhi, meets a senior officer and denies any knowledge about Pushkars murder.
Read | Sunanda Pushkar case: Swamy writes to Rajanth for setting up SIT
Read | Sunanda Pushkar case: Mehr Tarar quizzed by Delhi Police in Feb
The government has decided to introduce a rating system for artists and writers on the basis of which they will get to represent India, the Indian Express has reported.
The culture ministry, under a pilot project, has already graded 185 artists into three categories O (outstanding), P (promising), W (waiting), a report said Monday.
The ministry says the grading, done by a high-powered committee of ministry officials and selected artists, will prevent a clique from dominating the cultural space.
The idea was to create a comprehensive profile of all cultural personalities and rank them according to their popularity, age and experience, the report quoted minister of state for culture Mahesh Sharma as saying.
His ministry had in November and December called for applications and graded the respondents, including many big names. Kathak exponent Shovana Narayan, Padma Bhushan awardee and Carnatic musician TV Gopalakrishnan and Delhi-based Akshara Theatre group have been rated as outstanding.
Forty-six of the 185 graded are outstanding, 112 promising and 27 have been put in the waiting category and cant represent India.
Only applicants placed in the outstanding and promising categories will be selected for participation in festivals abroad, a June 2 note of the ministry says. It also talks about a cooling-off period of two years between two official events.
Calling the pilot project a success, officials said the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT), an autonomous institution under the ministry and the nodal agency for the project, had profiled around seven million artists and writers.
The artist would be sent to various events as per their grading, Sharma said, adding the aim was to create a definitive cultural directory.
The ranking would ensure fairness in participation of artists at various events and help in fixing their honorarium, officials said.
While some artists have welcomed the move others were ignorant of the ministrys criteria.
Artists have to be graded, otherwise how would you profile them? You cannot send a junior artist to a major festival, Padma Shri and Bharatanatyam exponent Devayani Kumari said. She has been graded outstanding.
Another Bharatanatyam exponent Dimple Kaur, ranked waiting, said she didnt know how the rating system worked. They should be more transparent, structured and organised, she said.
Artists and writers can get on the CCRT website and fill an application which has various columns for fields like architecture, sculpture, painting, handicraft, music, dance, theatre and written literature. There are sub-categories as well.
When the cultural-mapping project was launched in August, few expected artistes and writers would rush in to submit details, said officials who expect the figure to reach 10 million.
It was easy to rate 185 applicants but it remained to be seen how the ministry would scrutinise and rank around 10 million people, an official said.
The ministry has a plan. Applicants will have to compete at every level -- villages, towns, districts and states. The ministry will step in at the final stage. Prizes worth Rs 40 crore are being planned for the winners, who will get the best grades.
Five people who attempted suicide in Rajkot districts Gondal town demanding action against Shiv Sena members who allegedly thrashed four Dalit youths for skinning dead cattle were arrested by Gujarat police on Monday.
The five protesters, all residents of Gondal, tried to consume phenyl near an Ambedkar statue in the city, where the police anticipating their move following their threat, arrested and admitted them to a government hospital.
One of the five, Anil Madhad, is the Congress councillor in Gondal municipality, ruled by the BJP.
Fortunately, all five are out of danger. We appeal to the SC community to not take extreme steps like this. The government is with the SC community and we are taking appropriate steps regarding any atrocities in the state, said Ramanlal Vora, the states social justice and empowerment minister.
The police have so far arrested eight people, including two who were arrested on Sunday, and suspended four police officers for dereliction of duty in the Gir-Somnath case. The incident had sparked a huge outcry among Gujarats scheduled caste community.
The four Dalit youths were thrashed by a group claiming to be from the Shiv Sena in four Dalit youths in Gir-Somnath districts Samadhiyala village on July 11 for allegedly slaughtering a cow. The youth explained they were skinning dead animals, as was their traditional vocation, but they were beaten with iron rods and dragged for half a kilometre behind an SUV by the assailants.
A video clip of the incident was shared widely on social media, sparking outrage across the country.
Read | Four Dalit men stripped, beaten by cow protection vigilantes in Gujarat
: ; - CM ?; -
An unidentified staffer of Fortis Memorial Research Institute in Gurgaon was booked for allegedly sexually harassing an Iraqi woman during her treatment, police said on Monday.
The victim was admitted to the hospital on July 5 for treatment. She was allegedly sexually harassed during her treatment, Hawa Singh, assistant commissioner of police, told IANS.
The woman was discharged from the hospital on July 15, after which she contacted the Iraqi embassy.
Officials of the Iraqi embassy informed Indian officials and a case was registered. The case has been registered on the complaint of director of bureau of security ministry of external affairs, Singh said.
A case under section 354A (sexual harassment) of the Indian Penal Code was registered at the Sushant Lok police station.
We are checking out the CCTV footage of the hospital when the victim was hospitalized, he added.
Fortis hospitals spokesperson was not available for comment despite repeated attempts.
IIT-Indore has banned all social media on its campus in a bid to stop PhD scholars from taking their protest against the recent fee hike online.
All the systems linked to the institutes server have been blocked for all social media platforms.
The clampdown has affected scholars as the campus is situated in Simrol in the outskirts of the city, where there is poor phone and internet connectivity.
The step came after around 400 research scholars protested the 150% hike in fees, with some tweeting to the HRD ministry and ministers under the hashtag #iitindorestand.
The students had tweeted pictures of the campus, showing the deplorable condition of various facilities, while others questioned the rationale behind the fee hike for the scholars.
Reportedly, the fee for pursuing PhD in the institute was hiked from 8,350 to 19,990, effective even for those currently pursuing their doctorate.
The protest soon gained momentum and it was reported that the HRD ministry asked the administration to have a word with the students, even as online protests continued on Monday.
We had taken to Twitter and had started tweeting about the problems we face. This made the administration furious and led to its crackdown on us in which we were asked to delete our tweets. Then, they blocked Twitter on the campus, said a scholar on condition of anonymity.
We have been protesting against the fee hike as they are forcing us to shift to a campus which is still under construction and are denying HRA. The administration has been keeping us in a very bad state, said another scholar.
The institutes director Pradeep Mathur and PRO Vani Venkat were not available for comment despite several attempts to reach them.
However sources inside the campus said the director was not in the city.
A meeting with the dean of students welfare was held wherein no conclusion came about, but the DSW has assured the students that action will be taken.
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Illegal trade of rare animals and their body parts is flourishing on popular websites, including Quikr, Olx, eBay, Amazon and YouTube, the government said on Monday.
Environment minister Anil Madhav Dave said online smuggling of rare animals and their parts was being monitored by the state and central governments as part of their efforts to combat cyber crime.
Several websites are seen advertising sale of rare animals and their parts, Dave said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.
He furnished a list of 106 such websites collated by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB). The websites include prominent names such as quikr.com, olx.in, alibaba.com, ebay.com, youtube.com, amazon.com, shopping.rediff.com, petsmart.com and snapdeal.com.
Dave said several steps have been taken to prevent such illegal activities, including employing the services of cyber crime specialists on a contractual basis to carry out regular cyber patrolling to detect posts and offers on the portals.
He said if any such offer is detected, details are retrieved of the suspect and information is passed on to the relevant enforcement agencies for legal action.
A meeting of representatives from online trade portals was convened in May this year to issues pertaining to wildlife trade, sensitise them about it and discuss modalities to assist the WCCB in case of such detections.
Dave said during the training and sensitisation programmes, the issue of illegal online wildlife trade was highlighted so that officials involved in its enforcement are abreast of such trends.
A wildlife body recently alleged that a prominent website was selling wildlife specimens, including sea horses and alligator heads, protected under the countrys laws.
Wildlife SOS claimed the website was offering an array of wildlife trophies, including preserved snakes, butterflies, starfish and rare beetles, besides hunting manuals and devices.
Ever since the BSP was founded in 1984, founder-president Kanshi Ram had been working on various caste formulas that would pave the way for a series of victories in Uttar Pradesh. Over two decades later, his successor Mayawati meticulously put one involving a rainbow coalition of Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits in place to score a particularly overwhelming triumph in 2007.
Brahmins formed an integral part of Mayawatis strategy, and she gave the community its due soon after coming to power cabinet positions in proportion to its population.
However, the Brahminical hunger to reclaim their erstwhile political primacy remained. Often, its leaders discussed the Congress days when people from their community used to become chief ministers.
In 2017, they may have the opportunity to see one of their own in the chief ministers chair. Eyeing the crucial elections are three players the BJP, the BSP and the Congress and they all know the Brahmin community holds the key to winning it.
Political expert Gyanendra Sharma believes there is a rush for Brahmin votes because they are not aligned with any political party. The Congress decision to project a Brahmin face has again made the community politically relevant. It will compel the BJP to hunt for a matching candidate, he says, adding that the ongoing struggle will help the Samajwadi Party (SP) because there will be a division in anti-votes.
As of now, most vote banks seem to be allied to one party or another. While the OBC block is divided between the SP and the BJP, the BSP has claimed a large chunk of the Dalit pie. Among upper castes, the Rajput and Vaishya communities stand with the BJP.
In such a scenario, only 12% of the Brahmin votes and 18% of the Muslim votes are up for grabs. And these communities have been known to be politically fickle tactically shifting their political allegiances in every election.
However, the question that remains is what would Brahmins have to do to remain politically relevant?
Prof Vishwanath Pandey of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) believes that the community is upset because they have been marginalised over the years. To make a mark in the upcoming election, they will have to vote en block, like Muslims and Dalits, he says.
His colleague, Prof Shailendra Tripathi, does not believe thats possible. Brahmins are not united like the Dalits and the Backwards, he claims.
However, Anupam Sharma a voter from Kaasanj believes Prime Minister Narendra Modi may succeed in bringing Brahmins together. The personality of Modi dwarfs all. A majority of the Brahmins prefer the BJP, which will probably declare a Brahmin as its chief ministerial face.
The All India Brahmin Sabha, an otherwise non-political group, reportedly plans to appeal to community members that they prioritise Brahmin candidates over political parties.
Karnataka minister KJ George resigned on Monday after a court ordered that he be booked for allegedly abetting the suicide of a policeman, ANI reported.
Deputy superintendent MK Ganapathy was found hanging from the ceiling fan in the room of a lodge on July 7, hours after he accused George and two IPS officers of harassing him, an incident that triggered a controversy in the state ruled by the Congress.
A judicial magistrate of a first class court (JMFC) ordered police action against George and two senior police officers on Monday for abetting the suicide.
The issue triggered uproar in the Karnataka assembly as the opposition insisted on Georges resignation and a CBI probe into the case.
In a press conference, opposition leader Jagadish Shettar said an impartial investigation could not be conducted as long as George was still a minister. He also said the two police officers named in the complaint should be suspended to ensure a fair investigation.
George said he was 100% sure that he will come clean. The opposition is not asking for my resignation today, they have been asking for it from the day I became a minister.
An uneasy calm in the Valley on Monday, after more than a week of violent protests, was short-lived as protestors clashed with security forces over the killings of two civilians.
The two people were killed and seven were injured in retaliatory firing after protestors pelted stones at a 9RR army patrol in Churat Qazigund in South Kashmir, police said.
The deceased were identified as 25-year-old Showkat Ahmad and 45-year-old Saida.
The fresh killings took the death toll in ongoing protests to 43, excluding two people who drowned and one person who died when his car overturned while fleeing from a spot where police and protestors had clashed.
While most of the areas remained peaceful, sporadic incidents were reported from several places in north Kashmir, including Trehgam in Kupwara district, and Sopore and Rafiabad in Baramulla district, a police official said.
The official said at least five people were injured in action by the security forces when a protesting mob pelted stones at them in Trehgam.
All 10 districts of Kashmir Valley continue to remain under curfew today as a precautionary measure for maintaining law and order, the official added.
Normal life remained paralysed due to the curfew and the strike call by separatists, which has been extended till July 22.
Schools and colleges, which were scheduled to reopen on Monday after a 17-day summer vacation, remained closed as the government extended the holidays by a week in view of the prevailing situation.
Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8. In the ensuing clashes, more than 3,400 people, including 1,600 security force personnel, have been injured.
With inputs from PTI
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Separatist Kashmiri groups held demonstrations outside the premises of Indias Permanent Mission to the UN here, protesting against the Indian forces in the Valley and demanding UN intervention in the Kashmir issue.
The Kashmir American Council led the three-hour protests on Sunday, attended by women and children as well.
Holding banners and placards that read Indian Forces Out of Kashmir, No Democracy Without Self-Determination and Time to Resolve Kashmir Dispute Now, the protesters shouted slogans demanding freedom for Kashmir.
Demonstrators also shouted slogans in support of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, who was killed this month by Indian forces in Kashmir.
The US and other western countries must intervene to stop the human rights violations in Kashmir, Shaheen Khalid Butt, chairman of the Kashmir Mission USA, said.
Ghulam Nabi Fai of World Kashmir Awareness said India and Pakistan must sit at the negotiating table without any condition from any party and keep their horizon open to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute.
Fai has served two years imprisonment in the US on the charges of working on behalf of Pakistans ISI.
The protesters, demonstrating a few yards away from the UN headquarters, also demanded intervention by the world body to settle the Kashmir issue.
Tribals of Athirappilly vividly remember director Mani Ratnams adventurous setting for Raavan and Aiswarya Rais fall into the roaring waters. The thunderous waterfall that has formed the backdrop of several Bollywood hits could eventually fall off the map thanks to an ambitious power project.
A favourite picnic spot and weekend getaway, the Athirappilly waterfall is in the news again as the demand for a hydel power project in its upstream has been revived after a long gap, triggering loud protests from nature-lovers and local tribals. The ruling CPI(M), a strong votary of the dam, has dubbed these protests as green fundamentalism.
The ruling LDF government feels the dam can be built without disturbing the course of the waterfall and the surrounding green cover. But its opponents say the dam will deal a death blow to the picturesque landscape and displace many tribal families. Earlier this month, the Kadar tribals living in the area took a vow saying the hydel project can only be built over their bodies.
They have to kill us before building the dam. We never expected such a proposal from the new government that we just voted to power. It is a ploy to plunder green cover and destroy the serene waterfall. We will oppose it tooth and nail, said tribal leader KP Indira.
Several tribals like Indira work with the Vana Samrakshana Samiti, a group that protects the waterfall and surrounding areas. For them, it is the sole source of their livelihood. Only fools will argue that the dam can be built without harming the pristine forest, said Gopalan Kaliappan, another tribal.
The hydel project with an installed capacity of 163 MW is being planned on the Chalakudy river in Thrissur district. It will be spread along 6.7 km upstream from Athirappilly waterfall to the Vazhachal fall, both famous tourist destinations. Six dams for hydel projects and one for irrigation have already been constructed along the 145-km-long river that flows through Palakkad, Thrissur and Ernakulam districts before entering the Arabian Sea.
Environmentalists say the proposed dam will submerge 200 hectares of forest land that is home to tigers, elephants, the endangered Malabar giant squirrel, lion-tailed macaque and great Indian hornbill. Besides affecting the rich flora and fauna it will also displace 500-odd tribal families living here for many generations.
The tribals say they have been displaced and driven downstream earlier for hydro power projects and there is hardly any forested area left downstream for them to shift. The dam would also affect at least four lakh people living downstream, they argue.
It is sad that for 163 MW power we are planning to destroy a lush green cover. The Madhav Gadgil expert panel on Western Ghats has put Athirappilly and surrounding areas in ecologically-sensitive list and opposed any move to grant permission to the dam, says Dr Latha Anantha, founder of River Research Centre, who has been spearheading a campaign to protect Chalakudy river.
The dam was first mooted in 1978 and the state electricity board (SEB) moved a proposal in 1982. But it was forced to back down following a loud outcry. In 1998, when Pinarayi Vijayan (the current CM) was the Power Minister in the EK Nayanar government, the project was revived again. Later it was given ecological clearance but got into a series of legal wrangles.
However, the Kasturirangan committee on Western Ghats ecology gave a conditional permission to SEB to pursue the project. Subsequently Union Environmental Ministry allowed the SEB to go ahead with the project with some riders, including the flow of water level at the fall should be maintained and power generation should be done only during night and it should be limited to four hours during summer.
SOME BOLLYWOOD HITS FILMED AT THE FALLS Mani Ratnams Dil Se starring Shah Rukh Khan, Manisha Koirala and Preity Zinta (the song Jjya Jale)
Ratnams Guru (the song Barso Re Megha)
Ratnams Raavan (the song Behene De)
Rajkumar Santoshis Pukar starring Anil Kapoor (the song Sunta Hai Tera Khuda)
Shankars Nayak (the song Chalo Chale Mitwa)
Rohan Sippys Kuch Naa Kaho (the song Achchi Lagti Ho)
Several scenes inblockbuster Hornbills: All four species of hornbills Bahubali
But green activists were not convinced. This will end up like mining permission. Initially there will be checks and balances but later it will be a plunder, said VC Anil Kumar, president of the forest protection council.
With the protests against the project snowballing, the CPI(M) has done a climb down. We are not in a tearing hurry. All stakeholders will be taken into confidence, said state electricity minister Kadakampally Surendran. But local tribals, activists and nature-lovers are not convinced
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The gangrape and killing of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district, rocked the Maharashtra Assembly on Monday as the monsoon session of state legislature got underway.
Making a statement after ruckus by the Opposition in the Lower House, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said the accused in the gangrape and killing of the girl in Kopardi village of Ahmednagar district, have been arrested and the matter will be heard in a fast-track court.
Ujjawal Nikam will be the public prosecutor, he said.
The state government has given Rs 5 lakh financial help to the victims family, Fadnavis said.
DNA samples of the victim and the accused have been sent for forensic tests, he said.
Raising the issue in the Lower House, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) legislator Ajit Pawar said the Kopardi case was heinous than the December 16 gangrape in Delhi.
I request CM Fadnavis to take action against the guilty, considering the victim as your and our daughter, Pawar, a former deputy chief minister, said.
Former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan insisted that the House discuss the issue on Monday.
Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, who raised the issue through an adjournment notice, said the matter was serious and the House should discuss it.
Fadnavis said the matter could be discussed in a meeting of party group leaders in the House, before it is discussed in the assembly.
The House was later adjourned after transacting other items on the agenda, which included paying condolences to former members of the House and introduction of new ministers.
A 15-year-old girl was brutally raped last week, allegedly by three men who inflicted injuries all over her body and broke her limbs before throttling her in the village in Ahmednagar district, sparking outrage as well as political slugfest, with the Congress demanding Fadnavis resignation on moral grounds.
The spiralling of violence in Kashmir reverberated in parliament on Monday, with the government blaming Pakistan for the unrest while opposition parties insisted the authorities had mishandled the street protests which killed at least 43 people.
The opposition parties rounded on the Centre for excessive use of force, and cautioned the government that bullets would not douse the violence, triggered by the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani by security forces on July 8.
Later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told NDA leaders the government had nothing to hide and that it would take everybody along on how to move forward. Modis remarks came after Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut suggested the PM who had had a meeting over tea with his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif also hold a chai pe charcha with the people of Kashmir.
Read: As it happened: Debate in Rajya Sabha over Kashmir unrest
The violence in Kashmir is among a host of prickly issues facing the government in this session of parliament, where the latter hopes to win legislative approval for several key reform measures, including a long-pending Goods and Services Tax.
Faced with the criticism in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, the government blamed Pakistan for the violence. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said Pakistan was the sole reason for the unrest.
It is not television debates on the issue of J&K or anything else the unrest is because Pakistan is creating the problem, he said during a debate on the situation in Kashmir on the opening day of the parliaments monsoon session.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh promised to review the use of pellet guns, blamed for most civilian injuries in Kashmir. He also offered to visit Kashmir for a dialogue with the people but state chief minister Mehbooba Mufti suggested they discuss the format for talks once normality returned.
Whatever is happening in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored. The name is Pakistan but every act is na-pak (impure), Singh said, adding that the country felt the pain of innocent Kashmiris suffering because of the violence.
Read: After Oppns attack in RS, govt says Pak sponsoring Kashmir violence
Earlier, Ghulam Nabi Azad, the leader of the opposition in the upper house, said the government had not learned from its past mistakes. Militants were always killed in the state. But this present environment did not exist even during the 1990s, he said, referring to the early days of the Kashmiri insurgency.
Youngsters have been killed in all the 10 districts of the Kashmir valley this time.
Opposition leaders Sitaram Yechury (CPIM) and Sharad Yadav (JDU) demanded answers as to why the NDA government was not following the Atal Behari Vajpayee governments policy which spoke of insaniyat in the handling Kashmir issue. Trinamools Derek o Brien urged the government to protect the soul of Kashmir even when there is a need for hard policing.
Congress leader Karan Singh termed the current situation as an unprecedented outburst of anger and frustration. If young people are blinded, our people are blinded, he said.
Many Opposition leaders asked for an all-party meeting and maintained that government must make a distinction between a civilian and a militant.
The same bullet used to kill militants should not be used to kill children, women and youngsters. Should we treat them as militants? the Congress partys Azad said.
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Three Cadet residents and a woman from Imperial were injured Thursday morning in an accident in Washington County.
The two-vehicle crash occurred at 8:55 a.m. on Missouri Highway 21 south of the north Highway 47 junction.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reports the accident occurred when Wanda L. Willard, 83, of Imperial, driving a 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix, attempted to make a left turn into a commuter parking lot and traveled into the path of a 2016 Dodge 4500 driven by Zachary D. Lessley, 22, of Bixby.
Although Lessley was not injured, Willard and the three occupants in the Grand Prix were all injured. Bryan Stidem, 40, of Cadet, received serious injuries and was taken by Air Evac to Mercy Hospital in St. Louis for treatment.
Alex Stidem, 20, of Cadet; Kyle Stidem, 15, of Cadet; and Willard all reportedly received minor injuries and were taken by Washington County Ambulance to Washington County Memorial Hospital for treatment.
According to the patrol report, both drivers and all passengers were wearing seat belts at the time of the accident.
The Parliaments monsoon session will test the NDA governments political risk management ability to push through crucial policy moves amid heightened hopes that it will be able hammer out a consensus on key initiatives, including the contentious goods and services tax (GST).
In the last two years, it has been able to implement some politically contentious policies and legislations including aligning diesel prices with international crude oil costs.
It also managed to work out a consensus across Parliaments political aisle on raising the foreign direct investment (FDI) ceiling in insurance to 49% from 26%, but not before an unrelenting Opposition forced it to refer the bill to a select committee.
Experts also count the passage on the bankruptcy code and the real estate regulation laws as among the NDA governments reforms triumphs.
Attempts to ease land buying rules and bring about a vastly modified central land acquisition law has, however, proved to be a difficult political barrier to surmount for the Narendra Modi-led government. Its efforts to change social security rules have also met with limited success.
In March, it rolled back the controversial budget proposal to tax employees provident fund (EPF) withdrawals, caving in to mounting opposition by labour unions, the salaried class and rival political parties.
Read | Why this monsoon session gives Modi govt its best shot at reforms push
In the budget presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley on February 29, the government had announced that 40% of an individuals accumulated corpus in EPF and National Pension System (NPS) schemes would not be taxed at the time of withdrawal.
This was taken to mean that the remaining 60% of the EPF corpus was taxable.
The budget had also proposed a monetary ceiling of Rs 1.5 lakh on employers contribution to PF accounts. This was also withdrawn.
Almost all governments since 1991, the year when India rolled out its economic reforms programme, have had run into Oppositions insistent demand for roll-backs or changes in policies.
Former finance minister Manmohan Singh was forced to moderate a steep hike in fertiliser prices proposed in 1991. Likewise, Yashwant Sinha as finance minister had to rollback a decision to raise manure prices in 2000.
In 2006, the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government acceded to ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagams (DMK) demand, putting on hold the disinvestment programme for public sector enterprises.
The DMK had threatened to walk out of the government but not out of the UPA if its opposition to the Neyveli Lignite Corporation was not heeded.
Then again in 2012, the UPA government, battling surging criticism of policy paralysis, quickly bottled up a proposal to open foreign investment for the pension sector fearing reprisal from key ally Trinamool Congress.
The same year, the UPA government had raised diesel prices by Rs 5 a litrethe steepest ever hike -- and capped sale of cheaper cooking gas to six cylinders a year for each family. The cap on cooking gas was later raised to nine cylinders a year and later to 12 cylinders, as the government had to expend a lot of political capital in managing a restive alliance in its final year.
Read | GST deadlock: Congress goes into huddle over Parliament strategy
Three days after a clampdown on news organisations in the Valley, newspapers are expected to hit stands on Tuesday, even as the chief ministers office said it had not approved of the ban.
Political advisor to chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, Amitabh Mattoo told NDTV that the CM did not approve of the restriction, and claimed it was imposed without her knowledge.
The statement, however, contradicted the government spokespersons confirmation of the ban on Saturday.
Read | Kashmir newspapers raided, printing banned for 3 days to ensure peace
Senior minister Nayeem Akhtar had then told Hindustan Times that the undesirable step was taken to ensure peace.
This is an extraordinary situation, very strict curfew will be imposed in the city and newspaper distribution will not be possible. So, we have asked the newspapers not to publish, he said, claiming the step was taken to save lives and strengthen the peace efforts.
Pakistan has given 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.
According his statement, the ban was to last till Monday.
The gag on news media followed a week of violent unrest in the Valley, following the killing of the young Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani. Considered a local hero amongst many of the locals, Wanis death sparked protests through Kashmir, the worst affected being the southern districts of Pulwama, Anantnag and Kulgam.
As trouble boiled over, leading to more than 40 deaths, newspaper offices were raided and printing presses were stopped.
Speaking to HT, a senior journalist for Greater Kashmir, the Valleys largest circulating daily, confirmed that the newspaper will hit stands on Tuesday.
The news blackout isnt the only incident the chief ministers office claimed being unaware of. Earlier, it also stated that Mehbooba was not informed of the encounter in which Wani was killed in Kokernag village. However, former CM Omar Abdullah quickly dismissed the claim, saying the chief minister is informed of every encounter involving a high profile killing.
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The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad on Monday told the Bombay high court that it found no exchange of calls between former state minister Eknath Khadse and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in a preliminary inquiry.
No terrorist angle has been found as alleged by the hacker. No calls were exchanged between Khadse and underworld don Dawood, ATS advocate Niteen Pradhan told a division bench of justices NH Patil and PD Naik.
Khadse, a BJP veteran from North Maharashtra who resigned last month in the wake of a string of allegations, dubbed it as a clean chit to him and vindication of his innocence.
The HC was hearing a petition filed by Gujarat-based hacker Manish Bhangale, alleging partial probe by the state machinery and seeking CBI investigation in the matter.
Bhangale claimed to have hacked the authentication process of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd in April and acquired the telephone records of fugitive Dawood Ibrahim.
According to Bhangales petition, the records allegedly included phone calls between Dawood and Maharashtras former revenue minister Eknath Khadse.
The claims made by the petitioner that the information provided by him to the state machinery has been taken lightly is not correct. We are doing the needful and a CBI probe is not required, Pradhan said.
Nobody believed me when I kept on saying that I had no relation with Dawood. However, people from opposition parties kept on making allegations for their ulterior motives despite my saying that I would myself resign or give up politics altogether if they are able to give even a single proof of my involvement.
As ATS has given me a clean chit, people have now realised what is truth and what is false, Khadse said in a message.
However, Pradhan said while no terrorist angle was found, other revelations have come to the fore.
Certain other serious things have come to the fore during the preliminary inquiry. But those will have to be probed by experts from the city polices cyber crime cell, Pradhan said. The ATS will submit its preliminary inquiry report to the cyber crime cell of the polices crime branch, which shall then investigate.
The high court, after recording Pradhans statement, directed Bhangale to appear before the crime branch as and when required and share the information he has.
We cannot jump to the CBI every time. We have to trust and have faith in the state machinery also. If at a later stage the petitioner feels probe is not being done properly, he can approach the high court again, the bench said, disposing of Bhangales petition.
On Bhangales fear of threat to his life, the court said he could file a representation before the police commissioner, who shall decide its merit.
A legislator of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party was injured late Sunday night in Kashmir after his car was allegedly attacked by a stone-pelting mob as curfew continued in the Valley for the tenth straight day.
But the state government said Mohammad Khalil Band was hurt after his car met with an accident while traveling from Pulwama to Srinagar.
His car skid and turned turtle. He has a hip injury and is admitted in hospital. There was no mob attack, insisted government spokesman Nayeem Akhtar.
At least 41 people have been killed and more than 1,800 injured in week-long clashes between civilians and security forces following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani. No fresh casualties were reported on Sunday.
The violence has also seen mounting anger against the PDP, which is in alliance with the BJP, a party that is deeply unpopular in the Valley due to its perceived hardline Hindu policies.
A masked Kashmiri protester throws stones at policemen as they clash in Srinagar. (AP)
Mobile networks, apart from that of the government-owned BSNL, are suspended, while mobile internet services are jammed across Kashmir for all networks. BSNL broadband is the only functional internet service as of now.
In Srinagar, the streets remained deserted and all shops and other business establishments shuttered down.
On Sunday, hardliner separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani wrote to the United Nations and heads of many Western and Muslim countries to intervene in wake of a new wave of state terror unleashed by the Indian armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Congress has sent a two-member team to get a ground report in Kashmir. According to a press statement, J-K Pradesh Congress Committee held an urgent meeting on Sunday in which AICC general secretary and J-K in-charge Ambika Soni, former Union minister Salman Khurshid and state chief GA Mir were present.
The weekend saw the death of 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.
According to the state administration, a total of 1,882 people have been injured in the current unrest. They include 600 who have suffered pellet wounds while 125 were hit by bullets.
The Supreme Court on Monday sought responses from six states on a petition seeking release of nearly 300 people who are languishing in mental hospitals despite being cured of their ailments.
A bench comprising Chief Justice TS Thakur and Justice AM Khanwilkar issued notices to Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir and Meghalaya on a public interest litigation seeking the release of people who are now fit for discharge from mental hospitals and steps to ensure their social security post-discharge.
Advocate Gaurav Kumar Bansal, who filed the PIL in his personal capacity, said underprivileged persons are still languishing in mental hospitals despite being cured of their ailments, and there was no policy in place to ensure their well-being after release.
The plea also referred to responses under RTI with regard to release of persons at Bareilly, Varanasi and Agra in Uttar Pradesh even after being cured from their ailments.
The queries, which were posed under the transparency law to Mental Health Hospital, Bareilly, Institute of Mental Health and Hospital, Agra and Mental Hospital, Varanasi, pertained to names, residential address and age of the patients who are now normal and waiting for their discharge from hospitals.
Bansal had also sought information about the year in which the patients were declared fit for discharge.
The plea has sought issuance of directions to the states to forthwith make arrangements to shift the patients who are absolutely normal and are fit for discharge from the mental hospitals to any other secure place like old age home, etc.
Issue appropriate Writ/Orders/Directions to the respondents to formulate effective and proper guidelines for the relief and rehabilitation of such normal female and male patients, the plea said.
Earlier, the apex court had refused to accord an urgent hearing to the plea during the summer vacation.
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) members allegedly thrashed a 25-year-old research student in Hyderabad late on Saturday after mistaking him to be a Kashmiri.
A group of 20-25 ABVP members allegedly attacked Amol Singh when he was on his way back to his hostel in the University of Hyderabad after a protest against alleged police atrocities in Kashmir, sources said.
They knocked me down and started punching on my face and stomach and hitting on my knees. My friends and I tried to run away into the hostel and they chased us, Singh said.
He said the ABVP activists apparently mistook him for his Bilal, a Kashmiri and a former student of the university, because of his beard and skin.
Bilal finished his PhD and left for Kashmir a couple of months ago. He used to be active in campus politics and was vocal about the plight of Kashmiri Muslims.
That is why ABVP was angry and in the darkness, they mistook me as Bilal, said Singh, a Sikh who comes from a family of farmers in Patiala.
Students at the hostel alleged that security guards didnt intervene to protect Singh. The ABVP students barged into the hostel saying: Where is Bilal? We will teach a lesson to that anti-national, said Munna, who stays in the same hostel and uses a single name.
Singh alleged that when he reached the hospital, another group of ABVP members started beating him up. They left only after the other students cordoned me and took me into the hospital, he recalled.
But ABVP leader N Sushil Kumar rejected the allegations and said Singh and his friends attacked the ABVP students who were taking out a bike rally in protest against violence in Kashmir.
Those Left-wing students confronted us when we were raising Bharat Mata Ki Jai slogans. They raised counter slogans like Kashmir Maange Azaadi and even heckled us, Sushil said.
One of our friends suffered a fracture on his leg in their attack.
He said Bilal had been in the campus for two years and could be easily identified. There was no chance of mistaking someone else as him, he added.
The incident follows week-long violence in Kashmir following the death of top insurgent Burhan Wani. Tens of thousands of people have clashed with security forces with 41 people dead and more than 1,400 injured.
The government has clamped prohibitory orders in the Valley, imposed a gag on newspapers and local media and snapped internet services.
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A Kashmiri student was thrashed in Bhopal on Monday and assailants beat up a Hyderabad research scholar after allegedly mistaking him to be from the Valley, the latest in a string of recent attacks on students from the region.
In Hyderabad, a group of 20-25 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) members attacked 25-year-old Amol Singh who was on his way back after a protest against alleged police atrocities in Kashmir late on Saturday, sources said. He is pursuing an MPhil degree at the University of Hyderabad.
They knocked me down and started punching on my face and stomach and hitting on my knees. My friends and I tried to run away into the hostel and they chased us, Singh said.
He said the ABVP activists apparently mistook him for his senior Bilal, who was from Kashmir, because of a beard and similar complexion.
In Bhopal, doctoral student Umar Rashid was allegedly attacked by two people inside the campus of the Barakatullah University after he told them he hailed from Kashmirs Pampore.
When they started beating me, I held my ears seeking forgiveness just to save myself but they thrashed me brutally in front of security guards, said Rashid.
One of them said we were responsible for the poor condition of Kashmir.
The incidents follow week-long violence in Kashmir following the death of top insurgent Burhan Wani. Tens of thousands of people have clashed with security forces with 41 people dead.
The government has clamped prohibitory orders in the Valley, imposed a gag on newspapers and local media and snapped internet services.
The violence has triggered sharp reaction from elsewhere in India with several protests against the allegations of human rights violations by state forces held in Kolkata, Delhi, Bengaluru and elsewhere.
In April, Kashmiri students in Jodhpur were beaten up after a flare-up over nationalism in NIT-Srinagar. The nationwide controversy over demands of a beef ban also triggered attacks on Kashmiris. HT wrote in April that 30 attacks on Kashmiri students have been reported since 2013.
In Hyderabad, other students from Singhs hostel alleged that the guards witnessed the alleged attack but didnt intervene. The ABVP students barged into the hostel saying: Where is Bilal? We will teach a lesson to that anti-national, said Munna, who stays in the same hostel.
Bilal finished his PhD and left for Kashmir a couple of months ago. He used to be active in campus politics and was vocal about the plight of Kashmiri Muslims.
That is why ABVP was angry and in the darkness, they mistook me as Bilal, said Singh, a Sikh man from a farming family in Patiala.
But ABVP leader N Sushil Kumar rejected the allegations and said Singh and his friends attacked the ABVP students who were taking out a bike rally in protest against violence in Kashmir.
In Bhopal, Kashmiri students demanded safety and alleged the university administration didnt help Rashid.
We want security. We came to Bhopal as we feel safe here but this incident has worried us, said another student Irfan Rashid.
Arvind Kejriwal on Monday morning washed utensils at the Golden Temple community kitchen for 45 minutes offering sewa (voluntary service) -- his apology for hurting Sikh sentiments.
His Aam Aadmi Party had equated its youth manifesto with the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. On the cover of the manifesto booklet, a picture of the party symbol, a broom, was printed along with that of the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, causing offence.
AAPs prospects look good as Punjab gears up for elections in 2017. The Delhi chief minister clearly realised that the partys actions would give ammunition to rivals to paint him as an outsider, insensitive to religious sentiments of the Sikh. A non-Sikh himself, Kejriwal cannot afford to take that risk in the only Sikh majority state in the country. He took the initiative and reached out, all humble, to those hurt.
The apology may have been genuine. But, it also made political and tactical sense. Indian politics has seen both its share of apologies, albeit rare, and a firm refusal to apologise -- especially in cases of mass killings.
Read: Kejriwal says sorry for manifesto goof-up, performs sewa at Golden Temple
Apology accepted
Kejriwal may have been motivated to apologise because of his past success with the tactic.
Remember he quit as the Delhi chief minister within 49 days in early 2014, and ambitiously expanded to fight the Lok Sabha elections. The party faced a rout. He lost the Varanasi seat to Narendra Modi.
As Delhi geared up for snap polls, Kejriwal realised the folly of his over-reach. The IIT-trained mechanical engineer told voters he made a mistake by resigning, and if voted back with a majority, he would complete his term. Apology accepted. Delhi voters returned him with an unprecedented 67 seats in a 70-member house.
The Bihar half-apology
Take the case of another political leader. Nitish Kumar apologised for one decision and stuck to another in the run-up to the 2015 Bihar elections.
Kumar broke off the alliance with the BJP when the senior partner declared Modi its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 national elections. His government survived, but in the Lok Sabha elections, Kumars Janata Dal (United) was humiliated.
Till a few days before the results came in, the Bihar leader had maintained the Modi factor was a media hype. The results came as a shock to him. He decided to take personal responsibility for, he had decided to snap the ties though most of his colleagues were happy to go with the BJP.
Kumar then nominated a Dalit minister, Jitan Ram Manjhi, as the chief minister. But within eight months, he decided to throw Manjhi out and take back control, causing instability in the politically vital eastern state.
After a solid, stable performance for almost a decade, Kumar was being seen as temperamental. Why did he leave BJP? Why did he appoint Manjhi? And if he did, why did he remove a Dalit CM?
Kumar did a Kejriwal he admitted he had made a mistake by resigning and appointing Manjhi as the chief minister. In interviews to the media and rallies across the state, he pre-empted the criticism by saying he should have stayed on after the 2014 loss.
This was smart politics -- it kept his partys Dalit base intact. But, he refused to apologise for breaking up with the BJP. The decision, he said, stemmed from his conviction in secularism. The move made political sense. Muslims continued to see in him a leader who would take on Modi.
Read: In pics: Kejriwal prays at Golden Temple, apologises for mistakes
The 1984 apology
The political class has reacted differently to riots -- an apology in the case of one and a firm refusal to admitting any wrong-doing in the other.
It was on the Congresss watch in 1984 that Sikhs were massacred on Delhis streets in the aftermath of prime minister Indira Gandhis assassination. There was a degree of political complicity, as documented by multiple fact-finding reports. Rajiv Gandhis instinctive reaction was: When a big tree falls, the earth shakes.
It took the Congress over two decades to admit sins of omission and commission. In 2004, when Sonia Gandhi nominated a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, as the prime minister, it was an acknowledgment of the wrong done to the community. But Singhs most categorical statement in Parliament was the first clear instance of a top Indian political leader -- in this case a symbol of both the Indian state and the Congress party -- owning up to mistakes that had led to a mass killing.
He said, I have no hesitation in apologising to the Sikh community. I apologise not only to the Sikh community, but to the whole Indian nation because what took place in 1984 was a negation of the concept of nationhood enshrined in our Constitution.
The power of Singhs apology, however, was somewhat diluted by Rahul Gandhis refusal, in an interview to Times Now before the 2014 elections, to personally offer regret for the riots.
He took refuge in his age. The Congress leaders said he was a child and while what had happened was wrong and some Congressmen may have been involved, the government had done everything to stop the killings.
When asked if he would apologise, Gandhi said he was not involved in the riots; it was not that he was a part of it; and he was not in operation in the Congress then.
The 2002 refusal
In the saga of non-apologies, 2002 would mark a milestone.
After the Gujarat riots, chief minister Narendra Modis reaction eerily echoed that of Rajiv Gandhi, when he said any action elicits a reaction. Ever since, the opposition and activists have consistently asked of him to apologise for what they allege was state complicity in the anti-Muslim violence.
Modi has been steadfast in his refusal. If he was wrong, he should be punished and not forgiven was his response. In an interview to the Wall Street Journal in 2012, he explained, One only has to ask for forgiveness if one is guilty of a crime. If you think it is such a big crime, why should the culprit be forgiven...I think Modi should get the biggest punishment possible if he is guilty.
Indian politicians, like politicians elsewhere, deploy a range of tools to win over voters -- emotion, anger, fear and reason. An apology is yet another tool in the arsenal. Who deploys it, and when, depends as much on the nature of the politician as the circumstances and calculations over potential benefits.
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From alleged atrocities on Dalits to price rise, the NDA faced attack from the Opposition on several issues, resulting into a temporary adjournment barely an hour after the monsoon session started in Rajya Sabha.
Soon after the new members took oath in the House on Monday, BSP chief Mayawati launched a scathing attack on the BJP-led NDA over alleged atrocities against Dalits in Gujarat.
This shows BJPs casteist outlook towards the Dailts of this country, Mayawati said amid protests from the ruling benches. Other members of the BSP rushed to the Well of the House to shout slogans.
CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury and Trinamools Derek o Brien could be seen demanding an adjournment motion on the price rise. We want a debate on price rise immediately, Yechury was heard saying amid chaos in the Upper House.
With assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh approaching, the BSP chief didnt want to lose any chance to attack the NDA government on the key issue of Dalit safety, and referred to a recent incident in Gujarats Una where seven Dalit youth were stripped and beaten publicly.
Ever since the BJP has formed the government at the Centre, in the country Dailts are being victimized, she said.
Anti-social elements assaulted them. But sadly the police and administration didnt take any step. Gujarat government should have taken steps but it shows the mentality of the BJP. I want to tell the Centre to ask the state to act.
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced his new ministers to the House. The Rajya Sabha also condemned the recent terror attacks in Istanbul, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and France.
Intense drama was witnessed at the Lucknow district jail here on Sunday morning when the Meerut family came face to face with convicted Jaishe-Mohammad terrorist Mohammad Abid alias Fathe amidst elaborate security. While Mahesh Devi and her elder son Pawan Jatav looked for a tattoo on his hand and a scar on his face, the convict brazenly denied any connection with them. The family later demanded DNA test of the convict to clear all doubts.
Mahesh Devi and her elder son had gone to meet Fathe after permission from the district administration on Saturday. The woman suspected that the convict was her missing son Pravin, who disappeared under mysterious circumstance on May 5, 2006. The meeting took place in the presence of special task force (STF), anti-terror squad (ATS) officials, local intelligence unit (LIU)and jail authorities.
The convict himself denied having connection with the Meerut family and said it was sheer coincidence that his face resembled the missing Pravin. A major identity sign, Pravins name tattooed on his right hand, was also not found. The family looked for the scar on his face but it was also not found, said Shashi Kant Mishra, jail superintendent, who was present during the interaction for around 50 minutes.
Pawan Jatav, however, demanded DNA test of the convict to clear identity doubts.
Rihai Manch, a civil society organisation, had presented the Meerut family before the media on Friday. The family claimed that they came to know about Fathe when his photograph was published in a newspaper in Meerut on July 1, after the special jail court in Lucknow convicted him along with two others Mirza Rashid Beg Raja Kazaffi and ShafiUr-Rahman Yusuf. On July 14, the court awarded life imprisonment to the trio and imposed a fine of Rs 1.30 lakh, holding them guilty of waging war against India.
Spokesman of Rihai Manch, Shahnawaz Alam said the family had demanded DNA test, as it still had doubts that the convict was not accepting his real identity under police pressure. According to Pravins mother, the convict was very emotional while talking to her and his accent was of Meerut people, he emphasised, adding, Other than the tattoo and scar on the face, two more injury marks on the leg, which Pravin got in childhood, were present. The injury marks were smaller than those described by the family but it is quite possible they became smaller with time. Besides, the scar could not be checked properly as the convict was sporting a beard, he said.
Alam said another thing that raised doubts was that Fathe said during the interaction that he was arrested from Ghaziabad, merely 55 kilometres from Pravins native place in Meerut.
But the STF had shown his arrest from Gudamba here on November 15, 2007. The ultimate solution to solving the mystery is to conduct the DNA test of the convict, which will clear all doubts related to his identity, he said.
Janata Dal (United) president Nitish Kumar on Sunday challenged UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav to impose ban on liquor in the state.
Addressing a rally and political convention at Bhulai-ka-Pura in Phulpur, Kumar promised a blanket ban on liquor in UP if his party was voted to power in the state.
Expressing sorrow over hooch tragedy in Etah in which 21 people lost their lives, he said liquor was responsible for many social evils and great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Ram Manohar Lohia, Dr BR Ambedkar and Karpoori Thakur campaigned against liquor.
It is through their inspiration that the Bihar government implemented a complete ban on liquor. The initiative is showing a positive impact on the society. Due to its success, people are inviting us from all parts of the country, he said.
Kumar said that liquor ban actually helped a state develop and added that simple steps could prevent financial losses to sugarcane farmers as well.
Ethanol is being imported for ethanol-blended petrol in the country. The government can easily protect farmers from suffering financial loss incurred through liquor ban by simply producing ethanol in the state itself through molasses, he said.
He said that when Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat, he imposed a ban on liquor in the state.
His responsibility has increased and he should implement liquor ban at least in BJP-ruled states. The BJP has made only tall promises and has failed to keep them, he added.
He said that effective steps should be taken to protect crops from blue bull menace.
Kumar blamed the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party for using the principles and ideologies of Ram Manohar Lohia and Dr Ambedkar for garnering votes.
SP and BSP are indirectly helping BJP which is simply pitting one against the other for political gains, he said.
Kumar also promised reservation for women in government jobs.
Senior JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav dubbed Phulpur as the land of revolutionaries.
Frequent fliers pointed out gaps in the revised rules on passengers compensation on Monday. While the new rules make provisions for a five-fold increase in compensation to stranded passengers, fliers have said loopholes ensure airlines wont have to pay passengers anything at all.
The policy categorises Air Traffic Congestion (ATC) with other extraordinary circumstances beyond airlines control, such as political instability, natural disaster, civil war and riots. Airlines can thus avoid paying compensation for flight disruptions.
We have strong objections to the inclusion of ATC delays in this section, said Sudhakar Reddy, national president of Air Passengers Association of India. He said such congestion is common at most metro airports.
It is difficult to prove whether the congestion was caused by poor air navigation or if it was the airlines fault. This could lead to never-ending disputes, he said.
The revised rules also permit airlines to refuse to pay damages if they inform fliers about flight cancellations or changes in schedule two weeks before the journey.
This has happened to me more than once. The airlines claimed they had sent text messages and emails, which did not reach me. They turned down my request for compensation, said Brijesh Gandhi, a Malad-based frequent flier.
Fliers said airlines could cite a lack of adequate personal information about their passengers as a reason for not informing them about cancellations or delays ahead of time.
This is a sham. Airlines shouldnt sell tickets without basic passenger information, such as their names, mobile phone numbers and e-mail IDs, said Sooraj Thadani, a city-based entrepreneur who travels frequently.
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A preliminary report on the activities of Islamic preacher Zakir Naik has been readied by the special branch of the Mumbai police, which apparently mentions that some terms and lines in his sermons and speeches may be objectionable but not provocative or anti-national.
Sources in the police said they had not been able to find anything concrete that could be used to file a hate speech case against Naik. The special branch report will be submitted to Mumbai police commissioner Dattatray Padsalgikar within 24 hours. Padsalgikar had tasked the special branch after Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis sought an investigation into Naiks activities in the wake of reports that his sermons had influenced a couple of the terrorists who killed 20 people in an upmarket Dhaka cafe on July 1.
Read: Ive never advocated suicide bombing, claims Zakir Naik
Cops will struggle to build a case against Zakir Naik, say experts
A team of more than 20 police officers went through a huge collection of Naiks sermons and speeches, which are in the public domain. In the last eight days, the team focused on sermons and speeches Naik made in the last four years, the sources said.
Police had collected them from various places, including the office of Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, which houses the editing studio of Naiks Peace TV. The officials also spoke to some of the employees during the enquiry.
The police team heard the sermons and speeches and all the objectionable content was penned down after listening to the transcripts. Those documents have also been attached in the preliminary report on Naik, said a police officer.
Officials said that the report would be studied by senior police officers to decide if a further enquiry needed to be initiated against Naik.
Apart from the speeches and sermons, activities of Harmony Media and Naiks think-tank, the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) were also being studied. This would take some more time and resources. Documents and past records could not be gathered at such a short notice for verification, hence these things are left open-ended in the report, which may or may not require further enquiry by the Mumbai police, added the officer.
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SRINAGAR: Separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani has sought the intervention of the United Nations and 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 deaths of dozens of protesters in retaliatory firing by government forces.
Four youths from Bandipora were injured in firing by the Army on Sunday. Sources say the protesters were trying to storm an army camp.
Mobile networks, apart from BSNL, remained suspended even as cable network, gagged earlier on Saturday, was restored in the day. Kashmir also got no newspapers on the second consecutive day. Essential commodities were not available as the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway remained closed.
Geelani alleged that India continues to institutionally perpetrate violence in J&K, 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.
Meanwhile, in order to get a ground report of the situation, Congress has sent a two-member team to the Valley. J&K Pradesh Congress Committee held an urgent meeting here on Sunday in which AICC general secretary Ambika Soni, former Union Minister and senior Congress Leader Salman Khursheed and state Chief GA Mir were present.
GUWAHATI: Newly- crowned Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Pema Khandu said on Sunday that he would try to complete the unfinished work of his father, former chief minister Dorjee Khandu who died in a helicopter crash in April 2011.
The unfinished work includes 153 big and small hydropower projects, many controversial. Dorjee Khandu ushered in the hydropower era after becoming CM in 2007, attracting developers who paid money upfront to his government. My father tried his best to develop Arunachal. Many projects initiated during his tenure and later are pending. As a son of a CM, people expect a lot from me and so my priority will be to implement these projects, Khandu said after his swearing-in ceremony at Raj Bhavan.
Tripura governor Tathagata Roy, standing in for the indisposed JP Rajkhowa, administered the oath of office and secrecy to Khandu at noon. Before the ceremony, old foes Nabam Tuki and Kalikho Pul hugged and exchanged pleasantries. Chowna Mein, who was a key player in the rebellion, was also sworn in as deputy CM. He held the same post in Puls rebel Congress government.
BJP SAYS PARTY, GUV STAND VINDICATED
NEW DELHI: Facing Congress attacks for dislodging the government, the BJP on Sunday asserted that Tukis exit had vindicated the BJP as well as governor Rajkhowa. We always said Tuki did not have a majority. The governor took decisions following the rebellion against him by Congress MLAs and Presidents Rule was imposed. His resignation proves the BJP right as well as the actions of the governor, BJP national secretary Shrikant Sharma said.
Sharma said the Supreme Court had come up with two solutions for a similar problem. In Uttarakhand, it had asked CM Harish Raw at to take a floor test as well but restored the previous government in Arunachal. In a sign that the courts prescription in Arunachal had taken the party by surprise, Sharma said if the SC had asked Tuki to take a floor test, then the result would have been different .
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MALDA: A group of villagers in West Bengals Malda district allegedly stripped a 33-year-old woman, thrashed her and chopped two fingers of her left hand after her cow ate grain from a neighbours field.
The incident happened at Munnitola village in Malda on Saturday evening. The woman was 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 HT.
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 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 with the police against seven persons, the womans husband said. I work as a labourer. When the incident happened, I wasnt in the village.
Sources said one of the cows entered Haruns field and ate some grain. After this, Harun caught the cow and beat the animal mercilessly, fracturing two of its legs. Police said when the woman found her cow was 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, stripped her and started beating her. They also tried to hack Ayesha with a sickle. When she tried to resist the attack with her left hand, her little finger and ring finger were chopped off. As word of the thrashing spread, her son Iqbal rushed to the field, only to be attacked by the same men who hit him on the head with a sickle.
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Monday issued directions to Delhis regional transport office (RTO) to deregister diesel vehicles more than 10 years old. However, Noida and Ghaziabad residents said the order would adversely affect diesel vehicles plying from their cities to Delhi.
Some residents were of the opinion that the tribunal should also issue a similar order for other areas of the National Capital Region (NCR) in order to bring more clarity on plying of diesel vehicles more than 10 years old from NCR cities to Delhi.
There are a number of such vehicles that ply to Delhi and may be stopped there as per the NGT order. Commuters in such vehicles will face issues. We feel that the NGT should be rolling out a similar order for other NCR cities such as Ghaziabad that also face severe problems of air pollution. In fact, the NGT must take a step ahead and issue such orders for all polluted cities across the country, said Colonel TP Tyagi (retired), chairman of Ghaziabad RWA Federation.
Residents are also concerned that the ban would affect the many people who use such vehicles to earn their livelihood.
I have learnt that the ban also applies to cars. This would affect people who use diesel cabs and cars for commuting, said Harish Joneja, a member of the Noida Entrepreneurs Association (NEA).
In April last year, the tribunal had ordered ouster of diesel vehicles over 10-years-old from Delhi and NCR. It had also ordered that petrol vehicles more than 15 years old not be registered in the region.
We are complying with the April 2015 orders of NGT. We are not re-registering diesel vehicles more than 10-years-old and petrol vehicles more than 15-years-old. In fact, we have allowed issuance of no-objection certificate (NOC) for such vehicles (to be moved out) from our region. We are not endorsing or allowing any such vehicles to come to our region, said Mayank Jyoti, regional transport officer, Ghaziabad region.
Fresh registrations of diesel vehicles of 2000cc and above are already banned and are not being conducted, Jyoti added.
As per the records of the regional transport department, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Hapur and Bulandshahr districts under the Ghaziabad transport region have more than 42,300 diesel vehicles, registered before July 18, 2006.
These include nearly 7,600 in Gautam Budh Nagar, 14,188 in Ghaziabad, 19,926 in Bulandshahr and 634 in Hapur district.
We are waiting for the fresh order (Mondays) of the NGT and would be able to comment only when we receive it, said Rachna Yaduvanshi, assistant regional transport officer (ARTO), Noida.
Officials from Ghaziabad are also complying with earlier directions of the Environmental (Prevention & Control) Authority (EPCA) to divert trucks travelling through Delhi on alternate routes.
The Supreme Court had earlier directed that trucks can enter Delhi by paying an environmental compensation charge, but those registered in 2005 or earlier do not qualify for entry.
Laying the foundation stone for the a Rs 8-crore solar plant at the Amritsar railway station, Union railway minister Suresh Prabhu promised a high-speed train (180kmph) between Amritsar and New Delhi.
The minister also gave the green signal to the long-pending Ferozepur-Patti rail link and said the work will start once the state government acquires the land.
Also read | Ferozepur-Patti rail link: Punjab directs DCs to start work on land acquisition
To chief ministers demand that Punjab should be exempted from its contribution to the project, Prabhu said, Badal saheb, you give the money when you can. He also pointed out that the work on the project got delayed due to paucity of funds at the states (Punjab) end.
The railways is focussing on solar energy and plans to reduce power expenses by Rs 3,500 crore in the first year. We plan to produce 1,000 MW through solar energy by December this year, he said.
On the Amritsar-Delhi high-speed train, Prabhu said several trials had been done, adding, I promise that very soon we will have a train running at 180-kmph from Amrtisar to Delhi.
He also promised model stations at Amritsar and Ludhiana.
Rajya Sabha MP Shwet Malik, Punjab minister Anil Joshi, Amritsar mayor Bakshi ram Arora and other officials of the railways were also present.
The ninth deadline to get mandatory licence and registration under the Food Safety and Standards Regulations, 2011, is going to end on August 4, but not a single liquor vend in the district has come forward for registration and get a licence so far.
The state food safety commissioner had written to the excise department to inform all liquor vend owners for compulsory enrolment, but the order failed to evoke any response.
The district has around 683 liquor vends, including 311 in the city.
Till June 30, the health department issued 601 licences and registered 2,430 food business establishments in the district.
An official said if the Union government does not extend the deadline after August 4, the department would start issuing challans to those who fail to enroll themselves under the Act.
He said the deadline for registration and getting licences was extended for eh ninth time on May 4 (the first ended on August 5, 2012) as the department did not receive the expected number of applications from this category keeping in view the number of vends in the district.
The official said most liquor vends have an annual turnover of above Rs 12 lakh and require a licence, while those having sale below Rs 12 lakh need registration.
District health officer (DHO) Balwinder Singh asked liquor vend owners to do the needful before the deadline expired.
The DHO said that it was the last chance for them to enroll themselves failing which a fine of up to `5 lakh as per the business may be imposed on them.
When I was in Kapurthala, no liquor vend contractors had come forward for registration and the situation is the same here as well, the DHO said.
The registration was mandatory for all food businesses involved in food processing, manufacturing, catering or transportation, the DHO said.
Food safety commissioner Hussan Lal said that he would again write to the excise department to inform the vends of the mandatory provision.
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After much speculations, Manjeet Singh Dasuya, former president of the Shiromani Akali Dals North America wing, has joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Dasuya called a press conference at his residence here and announced his enrolment in the AAP. He was called to the party office in New Delhi and offered the membership, he said.
About two months ago, he was almost set to join the AAP at a press conference in Jalandhar, but the announcement to this effect was deferred at the eleventh hour, reportedly due to opposition from within the AAP.
Dasuya had fallen out with the Akali leadership after he was removed from the post shortly after the parliamentary elections. He had started cosying up to AAP, but officially he had not severed his relation with his parent party. Recently, he attended all the four sangat darshan functions of deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal in Urmur constituency and even hosted one at his marriage palace.
Although he claims otherwise, he is keen to contest elections from Urmur from where a transporter Jasbir Singh Raja has also staked claim. A Lubana by caste, Dasuya eyes the 35,000 odd votes of the community in the constituency.
District SAD president Surinder Singh Bhulewal Rathan refused to comment on the issue, saying Dasuya was not an office-bearer of the party.
AAPs national executive member Naveen Jairth was oblivious of the development. We were hearing about his joining for long. He might have done so, he said.
Bringing relief to the patients, the senior resident and junior doctors of Guru Nanak Dev Hospital called off their strike on the fourth day after the intervention of deputy commissioner Varun Roojam on Sunday.
The doctors had resorted to strike and protest on Thursday after one of their colleagues was beaten up by relatives of a deceased patient, Bhan Singh (75), alleging negligence on the hospitals part.
The decision to call off the strike came after principal of medical college Dr BS Bal; medical superintendent Dr Ram Sarup Sharma; deputy commissioner Varun Roojam; sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) Rajesh Sharma and members of the residents doctors discussed the demands of the agitating doctors.
Deputy commissioner Varun Roojam said, We had a meeting with the doctors and felt that their demands were genuine. Most of the demands have been accepted and will come to reality soon.
The main demand of the doctors was to provide security to them as in past too, doctors were beaten up by patients relatives.
Assuring the doctors, deputy commissioner (DC) Varun Roojam said, I will ensure that Punjab police officials provide safety to the hospital.
The DC gave a nod to the implementation of pass system in the hospital. Moreover, adequate repair and clean drinking water will be provided to hostels of Government Medical College and no weapon will be allowed inside the hospital premises.
The DC further assured action against the mob who assaulted the doctors.
Dr Gagan Deep Shergill from resident doctors association said, The strike has been called off. We will submit everything in written as told to us.
Meanwhile, about the development projects in medical college, medical superintendent Dr Ram Sarup Sharma said, I and Dr Bal had a meeting with chief minister Parkash Singh Badal on Saturday. The CM has directed the authorities to complete the development work in government medical college by October.
To avoid embarrassment, chief minster (CM) Parkash Singh Badal chose not to take railway minister Suresh Prabhu and former Union minister Sharad Parwar to Bhagat Namdev College for its inauguration on Sunday, as the building is still under construction.
Dont miss: Sidelined in presence of Badal and Suresh Prabhu, Sampla scowls
Notably, the CM arrived in town an hour before schedule, visited the college premises and interacted with the students. He then left for the inauguration ceremony which was orgainsed at Bhagat Namdev Government Senior Secondary School, Ghuman, three kilometres away from the actual college.
Railway minister Suresh Prabhu, came from Delhi to inaugurate the college (being built in the memory of Saint Namdev) but was not even made to visit its campus. He was directly taken to the school from his helipad, from where he returned to Delhi.
Bhagat Naamdev College which is still under construction. (HT Photo)
The inauguration was done electronically by the CM in the presence of Prabhu and Sharad Pawar.
After the inauguration, Badal said that setting up of Baba Namdev University College by the state government was a step towards communal harmony.
Hailing the railway minister for giving green signal to a number of projects in the state, Badal said that every Punjabi was indebted to him for this magnanimity.
Meanwhile, the pending work of the college includes construction of ramp, flooring on the ground floor corridor, drinking water facility and other painting and railing works. Nearly 30% of the building is said to be incomplete.
Read more: 180 kmph train between Delhi, Amritsar soon, promises Union railway minister
Five days after youth Congress leader Sahil Kapoor Pappal and his accomplices were booked for attempt to murder, the party suspended him on Sunday.
Pappal, vice-president of Atam Nagar constituency, was suspended from the party following a disciplinary action against him, said Amarpreet Lally, Punjab youth Congress chief. Party investigation revealed that Pappal and his 40 accomplices fired bullets at the house of Gurjeet Singh Seenh, who is president of Atam Nagar, on July 13.
The infighting among party leaders will not be tolerated and severe action will be taken against those who indulge in such things, said Lally.
He said, Action might be taken against district youth Congress president Rajeev Raja, who was booked for fraud, in the coming days. Raja had procured a fake Scheduled Caste (SC) certificate to contest the elections. Action will be taken after verifying the facts in the case.
On July 7, when Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) chief Captain Amarinder Singh had come to Ludhiana to take part in Halke vich captain event, Pappal and his supporters raised slogans against Amarinder.
While Amarinder was having lunch at a local eatery, Pappal and his accomplices clashed with Seenh. On July 11, Pappal fired bullets at Seenhs residence at Vishivkarma Colony. Later on July 12, city police booked Pappal under Section 307 (attempt to murder) of the IPC.
Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh has questioned the moral authority of deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal in accusing the Union government of undermining the Constitutions federal structure when his Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) was part of the ruling combine.
At an inter-state council meeting in Delhi on Saturday, Sukhbir had demanded a genuine federal structure and reportedly said the Centre had reduced the states to beggars. Amarinder issued a statement here on Sunday that Sukhbir was trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, while his father, chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, had double standards.
If they (the Badals) are aggrieved seriously, why dont they ask Harsimrat Kaur Badal (Sukhbirs wife) to withdraw from the Union cabinet? Captain said. Fearing a Supreme Court ruling against Punjab on the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal issue after the Centre favours Haryana in the river-water-sharing dispute, the Badals are trying to prepare the ground for exit.
He asked the Badals if they had done anything to get their ruling partner at the Centre, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to support Punjabs case or at least be neutral.
Show me a single word you wrote to the Prime Minister on the (SYL) issue, Amarinder said. While we will support you along the legal and constitutional parameters on the SYL, we will in no way be part of your dangerous game plan of pushing Punjab into anarchy for your vested interests, he told the Badals.
Finally, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has conferred the heritage status on the Capitol Complex in the city.
Also read: Unesco lists Le Corbusiers works among World Heritage Sites
The decision was taken at the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO at Istanbul on Sunday.
The Capital Complex was listed in trans-continental serial nomination.Various sites from seven countries France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India were included in the list to show the global reach of the works of French designer Le Corbusier.
The Capitol Complex, also designed by Le Corbusier, represented India for the heritage status.
The Capitol Complex, spread over more than 100 acres in Sector 1, is the prime manifestation of Chandigarhs architecture designed by Le Corbusier, with the Shivalik hills in the backdrop making the sight more serene and grand.
The buildings at the Capitol Complex include the Open Hand monument, Punjab and Haryana high court, Tower of Shadows, Geometric Hill, the legislative assembly and the secretariat.
How will city gain out of it?
Though UNESCO will not provide any funds to the union territory, it will provide technical assistance for conservation and preservation of the buildings at the complex. The heritage status will also boost tourism in Chandigarh as it will bring the city on the international map.
Anurag Aggarwal, home secretary, UT administration, said, It will boost tourism in Chandigarh. I have called a meeting for working out a strategy to encash on this development to attract international tourists to the city.
The UNESCO team will frequently review the site and if we fail maintain it upkeep, they can delete it from the heritage status list. For the upkeep, we will not get any funds, he added.
Admn vying for status since 2007
The UT administration has been vying for the UNESCO heritage status since 2007. Earlier, the administration had attempted to make it to the heritage list in 2008.
How to visit
Those who want to see the Capitol Complex can visit the tourist information centre in Sector 1 to register for a tour. For this, one needs to have an identity proof such as a licence or a pan card.
Dr AK Gupta, medical superintendent of the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), has written to the institute director, seeking withdrawal of chargesheet against him for not obeying orders of the health ministry.
He has alleged that the Union health minister had never issued the orders for action against him, but these were modified at the under-secretary level.
In April this year, Dr AK Gupta was chargesheeted by the director for disobeying the then Union health ministers order by continuing his three-month assignment with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Nepal in 2014, for which had not taken permission from the ministry.
The MS had also applied for the post of PGI director, but he was not given the vigilance clearance, making him ineligible for the post.
The health ministrys letter, dated October 10, 2015, reads, We may, therefore, seek his [Dr Gupta] explanation as to why he should not be proceeded against departmentally.
However, the second letter forwarded by the under-secretary to the PGI director on November 16, 2015, reads, The matter has been examined by the ministry and it has been decided that regular departmental proceedings may be initiated against Dr AK Gupta.
The director is requested to take further necessary action, it adds.
Highlighting the difference between the two orders, Dr Gupta has asked the director to withdraw the chargesheet.
The chargesheet has not been approved by the competent authority which is the governing body of PGI. The president of the PGI (health minister) had only approved seeking my (Dr Guptas) explanation as to why I should not be proceeded against, departmentally, Gupta argues in the letter.
But instead of seeking my explanation, the under-secretary modified the presidents order, directing PGI to start departmental proceedings, he adds.
When contacted, Gupta said, I have already submitted the facts to the director and nothing else to say.
The PGI director was not available for comments.
The issue
In 2014, Dr Gupta had taken an extraordinary leave of three months from September 15 to December 15 without the consent of the governing body. At a meeting of the body in October 2014, the then Union health minister Harsh Vardhan had reportedly expressed surprise as to how Dr Gupta had gone to Nepal on a WHO assignment as a hospital management specialist, without taking consent from the ministry.
Vardhan had cancelled Dr Guptas leave and the message was conveyed to the doctor on September 29, 2014. However, instead of following orders and coming back, he chose to stay back and filed an appeal with the ministry seeking permission, but he got no reply.
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The district courts issued non-bailable warrants against Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Kanwar Sandhu on Saturday in a 2013 defamation case.
Justice Rajinder Singh Nagpal issued the warrants when neither Sandhu nor his lawyer appeared for the hearing. Complainant Fastway Transmission had accused Sandhu of calling the company cable mafia. Fastway Cables is owned by Gurdeep Jujhar, a close associate of Punjabs ruling family of the Badals.
The judge had asked Sandhu to appear before the court on July 12 but when he did not show up, called him on July 13, warning him that skipping this time would invite non-bailable warrants.
Kanwar Sandhus lawyer Harpreet Sandhu said there had been a confusion about communicating the hearing date. Our being absent wasnt intentional or to disrespect the court orders. We will present our case soon, he said.
In May, the AAP had accused the cable television company of tax evasion and asked for the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to look into it. Kanwar Sandhu, apart from calling the company cable mafia, had also accused it of tax fraud in collusion with deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal for the past more than eight years.
Leaders of ruling SAD-BJP alliance have accused Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal of using religion to meet his political ends and even termed his sewa at Golden Temple a blasphemous act.
Kejriwal has disrespected the Sikh ethos by indulging in a sham sewa and it appeared that he was self obsessed and the Darbar Sahab visit to him was merely a PR exercise, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) secretary general Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa and the partys spokesperson Daljit Singh Cheema said here in a joint statement.
Kejriwal conducted a sham sewa by washing utensils which were already clean. He came to the Darbar Sahab as a chief minister and not as a devotee, the SAD leaders said.
Read: Arvind Kejriwal indulging in politics of fraud, says Harsimrat Kaur Badal
They said if Kejriwal had any remorse, he should have sought forgiveness at Darbar Sahab immediately after the AAP faced the heat for printing the picture of Golden Temple on its youth manifesto and comparing the document with the Guru Granth Sahib.
You (Kejriwal) made what was supposed to be a solemn occasion into a tamasha, proving that your visit was politically motivated, the SAD leaders said.
Punjab BJP president and union minister Vijay Kumar Sampla also condemned Kejriwal, terming his visit to Golden Temple as a publicity stunt.
Today, Kejriwal went a step ahead and insulted the concept of sewa for political gains, Sampla said. Announcing a date for sewa and turning up with camera crews is an insult to the devotees who do sewa.
Congress vs Congress
The Congress is so used to fighting the Congress that it almost cannot help it. Now that the detractors of Captain Amarinder Singh have been either expelled or are quiet, his loyalists are busy targeting strategist Prashant Kishor and his team, IPAC, for their transgressions. Some fiercely guard Captains turf and get Amarinder to tick off Kishor now and then to remind him of the boundaries. Kishor seems to love to ruffle feathers by showing off his clout and meddling into matters organisational. But a senior leader says the tug-of-war is forgotten after both drink to each others health, as Amarinder never forgets to play the perfect host to Kishor, who stays at his residence when in Chandigarh.
Bitter on Twitter
Harcharan Bains, media adviser to Punjab chief minister, was engaged in a bare-knuckle spat with former Congress leader Jagmeet Brar on Twitter for two days running. The exchange started warmly enough at least from Bains side, but soon the two were trading barely concealed insults. While Brar attacked Bains for his blind toeing of the party line, Bains took digs at Brars craven desire to join the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Both, known otherwise for their suave public image, descended quickly to making scathing personal jibes at one another. Brar said Bains lived in the high castle of the Badals, while Bains responded by saying that Brars Awaaz-e-Punjab was actually Awaaz-e-Kejriwal. Brar went on to insinuate that Bains was using fake Twitter handles to get support. Bains said the AAPs troll army had joined hands with Brar to abuse him on Twitter. Finally, both gave up and issued press notes to say they had won the Twitter war.
Miffed Maluka
Punjab rural development and panchayats minister Sikandar Singh Maluka appears to be angry. Whenever a reporter asks him any tough question, the Akali minister loses his cool. Last week, a scribe asked the minister how many panchayats had passed resolutions against the SYL (Sutlej Yamuna Link) canal, but he dismissed the question. Write whatever you want to. My department has nothing to do with these resolutions. It is their (panchayats) own initiative, he retorted. The minister was surrounded by officials, supporters, and security guards. And they didnt seem impressed with his response.
Akalis seal lips
When passing through tough times, stay united is the mantra of Akali leaders these days. Faced with high stakes in the 2017 assembly elections, the Akali ministers have closed ranks. They are tight-lipped about all that goes on behind the closed doors. I would never reveal what is discussed in the Cabinet meeting, agriculture minister Tota Singh told a reporter of this newspaper, when asked about discussions on the proposed PCOCA (Punjab Control of Organised Crime Act) Bill. The minister said that there might be serious differences, but he would not bring those in the open.
Short memory
Politicians have a short memory. Haryana education minister Ram Bilas Sharma, while speaking on the new teachers transfer policy last week, said that male teachers over 50 would not be posted in the senior secondary schools for girls. The opposition Congress hit out at the BJP government instantly, objecting to the move. Haryana Congress president Ashok Tanwar questioned the rationale behind the decision. Adampur legislator Kuldeep Bishnoi blamed it on frustration and sick mentality. The partys student wing, NSUI, also condemned the regressive mentality, terming the move as shameful. The Congress leaders were quick to slam the minister, getting the media excited. But they forgot that their own governments transfer policy had this clause. Only female teachers or male teacher above the age of 50 will be posted in the girls schools. This provision will be applicable to the ministerial staff, read the transfer-policy notice of the-then Bhupinder Singh Hooda government in April 2008. The clause, which has been there for a long time, is mentioned specifically in transfer orders. But, as they say, the opposition is there to oppose.
Leak not liked
Haryana IAS officer Ashok Khemka knows how to use the media. So it was not unexpected when he demanded that the call details of chief secretary DS Dhesi and a reporter of this newspaper be scrutinised to get into the leaking of his minor penalty charge sheet. His letter seeking scrutiny appeared in language newspapers even before it reached the state government, an apparent leak by Khemka himself. For someone who has been widely perceived to have thrived on selective leaks to the media during his career, Khemka now appears to take every piece of news not to his liking as a leak.
Groupism gone?
The bickering in Haryana Congress got louder just days after the All-India Congress Committee general secretary and in-charge of the party affairs in Haryana, Kamal Nath, claimed there was no groupism within. A statement by state Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Kiran Choudhry that chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar was honest but surrounded by indecent people gave ammunition to the leaders loyal to former CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Though Choudhry said her remark was twisted out of context, Hooda loyalists, including Kuldeep Sharma, Karan Dalal, Geeta Bhukkal and Shakuntala Khatak, criticised her. They said the CLP leaders praise for Khattar was shocking, since it was he who was targeting top Congress leaders with vengeance and slapping false cases on them. Later, party leaders Phool Chand Mullana and Nirmal Singh joined them, calling Choudhrys statement a great disappointment.
Misleading website
His office issues transfer and posting orders of the IAS officers, but does not find time to update the names of its officers on its own website. The chief secretarys office has three IAS officers, in-charge of training, vigilance and parliamentary affairs, general administration and secretariat establishment. But the names and telephone numbers of the IAS officers on these posts are not updated. Going by the CS office website, Apoorva Kumar Singh, principal secretary (PS), technical education, is still PS, training, vigilance and parliamentary affairs, and Rajeev Ranjan, secretary, general administration. Both officers were shifted from the chief secretarys office three months ago.
Modi worshipper
Ever since he dropped a letter bomb on his party, Himachal Pradesh BJP veteran leader Shanta Kumar has been trying to make amends. Almost every week, the Kangra MP writes to one or the other party leader, mostly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His letters are full of praises for the PM for his extraordinary work. Shanta, in a letter to Modi on the need for implementing a national policy on population control, wrote the other day: Only you have the capabilities to do chamatkar to overcome this problem (growing population).
Facebook fan
Himachal Pradesh transport minister GS Bali has become active on social-networking media these days. The minister posts on Facebook the details of every decision in the three offices he holds. When Bali, in a post, asked people to submit videos of drunken drivers of state roadways buses and get `1,000 cash award, the idea was appreciated. And there was response, too. We have a prize winner under the scheme, he posted the other day.
(Contributed by Sukhdeep Kaur, Chitleen K Sethi, Gurpreet Singh Nibber, Navneet Sharma, Hitender Rao, Rajesh Moudgil and Naresh K Thakur)
The Punjab Congress has accused Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal of launching a monologue through his Talk to AK programme.
Kejriwal, given his self righteous arrogance, cannot listen to others or take questions from them, Punjab Congress vice-president and Kapurthala legislator Rana Gurjeet Singh said here on Sunday.
Also read | Odd-even, Centre vs AAP, Gujarat polls: Highlights of Kejriwals Talk to AK
At best, he said, it was a monologue and at worst, his characteristic character assassination of others. It ended up more as a personal monologue than a public dialogue.
In comparison, said the MLA, Amarinder Singh allows public to speak and ask questions, and he answers those instead of making self-promotional statements.
He says having seen the public response to Amarinders question-answer sessions, whether with party workers or at Coffee with Captain and Halqe Vich Captain public-interaction programmes, the AAP national convener apparently tried to copy it but failed miserably.
The state Congress vice-president accused the Delhi CM of spending crores of rupees on advertisement ahead of his Talk to AK programme that virtually ended up in Listen to Kejriwal.
Moreover, the advertisements were circulated more in Punjab newspapers than in Delhi, where he is CM and should be answerable to the public about his achievements in the past 18 months, Rana said.
AAP leaders Bhagwant Mann and Prof Sadhu Singh visited Mansa and held a public meeting at the old grain market on Sunday evening.
Mann criticised the state government for not performing their duties towards the people of Punjab and for using vans in publicity drives to highlight their developmental works.
The meeting lasted for three and a half hour, and saw Sangrur MP Mann throwing repeated barbs at the state government.
The crowd grew impatient when Sadhu Singh rose to speak before Mann and virtually heckled him.
Another leader, who rose to read Kejriwals letter to Punjabs chief minister (CM) Prakash Singh Badal, went unheard when Mann arrived on the stage.
On being asked whether they will go for a ban on liquor, as they have raised the issue of drugs, Mann said that the ban will only be reinforced if villagers oppose the presence of liquor vends in their vicinity.
It was his maiden appearance in Mansa as Mann has been skipping the previous meetings of AAP in the city. Protests by the youth, farmer suicides, agriculture crisis, and looming business remained the focus of the meeting.
When we ask for jobs, they give us atta-dal. Some youth here in this rally are way more qualified than Dhindsa and Sukhbir Badal, said Mann.
When asked as to why the party is playing religion-based politics by registering case against the CM over Mai Bhago scheme, Mann and Sadhu blamed SAD for such issues.
Recalling the Holi celebration pictures, Mann said that Sukhbir Badal resembled a rag-picker near a bus stand. He asked the voters to accept the bribe if it is offered by SAD leaders in exchange for vote, ahead of assembly elections.
For decades, thousands of Rajinikanth fans celebrated a release of their favourite stars film by giving a milk bath to giant hoarding cut-outs of their thalaiva. He also played a milkman in one of his biggest hits, Annamalai, in 1992.
But now, milkmens association of Tamil Nadu wants fans to scrap the tradition, saying they should think about poor and hungry people before wasting thousands of litres on posters of Rajinis latest film, Kabali. The association says approximately 50,000 litres of milk worth Rs 20 lakh will go down the drain just on the first day of Kabalis release on July 22.
When 15% of Tamil Nadus population does not have money to buy milk every day, does this kind of wastage look good? asked SA Ponnusamy, president of the Tamil Nadu Milk Dealers Employees Welfare Association.
Read: Why Rajinikanth will sound different in Kabali
The milk dealers want the superstar to ask his fans to organise blood donation and eye and organ donation camps at all theatres screening Kabali.
Spokespersons for the Rajinikanth Fans Association indicated the actor too is not in favour of such wastage of a precious commodity. In all likelihood, Rajinikanth who is in the United States now, will urge his fans over Twitter not to give his cut-outs a milk bath.
Rajinikanth cut-outs being bathed with milk before the release of his film, Lingaa (2014). (IANS)
One of Indias most-loved filmstars, Rajinikanth commands legions of fans through numerous film clubs and fan associations across the state and the release of one of his films is often a state-wide carnival. Fans burst firecrackers, distribute sweets and pour milk on Rajinikanths cut-outs ranging between 50 and 100 feet in height before the release.
Read: In Kabalis song teaser, Rajinikanth tells the world hes back
Tamil Nadu also has a history of idolizing film actors who have shrines dedicated to them in public as well as homes. One of the states most-prominent chief ministers, MG Ramachandran who ruled through the late 70s and 80s, was also the states biggest cinestar at the time.
Earlier this year in March, a suit was filed in a Bengaluru court against Rajinikanth and his fans for wasting milk during the release of his films. The petitioner, activist IMS Manivannan, urged the actor to stop the wastage.
So many children can benefit from the milk which is wasted. There is so much poverty in our country. Rajinikanth should ask his fans not to waste the milk, says Manivannan.
Read: Will Kabali be actor Rajinikanths new touchstone?
Taking a cue from Rajini fans, admirers of other actors too have started creating a Milky Way at cinema halls. Milk dealers claim during the release of popular actor Vijays film Theri in April, many fans stole milk from shops to indulge in bathing his cut-outs.
Many say that during the last two Rajinikanth releases -- Kochadaiiyaan and Lingaa in 2014 no tea was available at any shop near theatres screening the movie as all the milk supply had been diverted to the cinema.
The release of Kabali has seen a frenzy of sorts, with just about every corporate out to milk Brand Rajinikanth. However, if the actor tells his fans to spare him the milk bath, they may just enjoy the movie without making others cry over spilt milk.
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Actor Ashish Sharma, who essays Ram in popular mythological show Siya Ke Ram, took out time to meet a wheelchair-bound fan, who flew down to Hyderabad from Dubai.
The actor was stunned to see 32-year-old special fan Amishi on the sets of the show here last week accompanied by her father. The family flew down especially from Dubai to meet Ashish, read a statement from Star Plus channel.
Read: Siya Ke Ram or Ramanand Sagars Ramayan? Heres a test by fire
The actor took time out of his shooting schedule and spent some time with Amishi and her family.
She is a special child and her very first interaction with me stole my heart. Her father told me that she religiously watches Siya Ke Ram and claps every time I am on screen, Ashish said.
Read: Siya Ke Ram makers get 8 replicas of all costumes to stay ahead of monsoon
The actor shared that the fact that she flew down all the way from Dubai despite her condition was very endearing.
He said: Even though she cant talk, her actions touched my heart. Such gestures melt your heart and make you all the more confident of what you are doing as an actor. I really wish the best for her.
Follow @htshowbiz for more
As many as 88% of the Republican voters support the party nominee Donald Trump against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in US presidential elections in November, a latest survey has found.
This is quite a significant jump in support for Trump in the past one year.
Pew Research Centre said when it had asked Republican voters their preference for the Republican presidential candidates in March 2015, just 1% of them supported Trump.
Thirteen months later, Trump was the first choice of 44% of Republican and Republican-leaning Republican voters, more than any of his rivals. Today, as the Republican convention begins in Cleveland, 88% of these voters back him in the general election against Hillary Clinton, Pew said.
At an overall level, Trumps rise may appear linear - his support increased in the aggregate with each survey over the course of the primary - but in actuality, voters preferences over this period were remarkably fluid, it said.
According to Pew, even most Republican voters 79% - who did not support Trump through the primaries are backing him in the general election against Clinton.
US Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump supporter Mark Hoffman sits in his truck before driving to a Bikers for Trump rally in Cleveland, Ohio, US on Monday. (Reuters )
However, only 53% of these Trump skeptics say they are certain they will support Trump over Clinton; that compares with 91% of those who consistently supported Trump between December and April.
These Trump skeptics were more likely to be better educated and more religiously observant than GOP (Republican) voters who backed him consistently throughout this period, it said.
Pew said that by April, even as Trump moved toward an insurmountable delegate lead, he was not the first choice of more than half of Republican voters, and 44% did not support him in any of the three surveys between December and March.
As Republican National Convention began in Cleveland on Monday amid tight security and tensions following a series of shootings in the US, Muslim doctors in this city have said they will provide medical help to Donald Trumps fans if needed despite his anti-Muslim rhetorics.
Trump, 70, who has encouraged a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US from a complete ban of Muslims to extreme vetting - would be formally nominated as the partys presidential candidate at the convention.
Thousands of Trumps supporters from across the US have started arriving in the city along with the party delegates. Several thousand protesters along with the anti-Trump movement have also come to the city to hold protest rallies every day.
Clevelands hospitals are already prepping for violence.
But even as his most ardent supporters arrive for the convention to cheer on his nomination, the citys Muslim doctors stand ready to provide them with medical help, The Daily Beast reported.
While Land is known for its high-quality hospitals, whats less well-known is that Muslims make up a substantial proportion of the citys medical professionals, it said.
In response to anti-Muslim rhetoric, Dr Bryan Hambley helped found a Cleveland protest organisation of doctors, nurses, and medical professionals called Stand Together Against Trump, or STAT which is a medical term from the Latin word statim, meaning immediately or right away, it said.
Muslim doctors save lives in Cleveland is one of the groups mottos. There are about a dozen Muslim medical professionals affiliated with the group, Hambley said, and he estimated that the medical residency programs he has been part of have included between 10 to 20% Muslim students.
Theres this running stereotype amongst Muslims that your parents expect you to either become a doctor or engineer. Thats the way we see it, said Dr Fatima Fadlalla, a resident physician in internal medicine who grew up in Cleveland and then returned for her residency.
She estimates that there are thousands of Muslim doctors in Cleveland, and that among her Muslim friends, around 90% are physicians or in the medical field.
We have a lot of Muslim doctors in this city. If they stopped working for a day, the whole medical system might come to a halt in the Cleveland area. We save lives every day, said Isam Zaiem, a retired medical technologist who has lived in Cleveland since 1974 but hails from Syria.
I would just treat them like anybody else, if (a Trump supporter) needs my help. I would help without hesitation. Its no problem to have disagreement on issues, she was quoted as saying by the Daily Beast.
The protests, marches, and demonstrations planned for this week in Cleveland have the potential for a toxic mix: extremists from white supremacists to the New Black Panther Party have indicated that they will be attending.
Three Islamists from the infamous Al-badr militia were sentenced to death on Monday while five others jailed until death by a special tribunal in Bangladesh for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
A three-member panel of judges of Bangladeshs International Crimes Tribunal (ICT-BD) led by Justice Anwarul Haque pronounced the judgement as two of the convicts appeared on the dock while six others were tried in absentia as they were on the run to evade justice.
The verdict came as the prosecution accused all the eight of five charges relating to crimes like mass murders, abductions, tortures and lootings.
Prosecution lawyers said six of the convicts were members of Al-badr auxiliary force of the Pakistani troops during the war and carried out atrocities in northern Jamalpur district.
The two others belonged to Razakar, another Bengali-manned armed group raised by Pakistanis during the war.
Manned by activists of fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, which was opposed to Bangladeshs 1971 independence from Pakistan, the Al-Badr appeared as an extremely notorious force by carrying out ruthless atrocities siding with Pakistani troops.
The verdict came amid a nationwide tension following the recent two back-to-back Islamist terror attacks in the country following which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hinted that Jamaat could be behind the assaults.
Bangladesh has so far executed four war crimes convicts since the process began to try the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Hasina in 2008.
Authorities in Armenia called on gunmen holed up in a police station in the capital Yerevan to lay down their arms on Monday and release five police officers they were holding hostage.
The gunmen seized the police station and hostages on Sunday, killing one police officer and wounding two others in the process before demanding Armenians take to the streets to secure the release of jailed opposition politicians.
They released two hostages on Sunday and released two more on Monday, the security service said.
Negotiations to end the situation peacefully are underway.
The hostage-takers main demand is 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.
The security service said talks were deadlocked so far. The armed group is refusing to release other hostages, including high ranking officials, to lay down their weapons, or to surrender, the National Security Service said in a statement, saying the group posed a direct threat to society.
Yerevans deputy police chief, Valery Osipyan, was reported to be among the hostages as was Vardan Yeghiazaryan, the countrys deputy police chief.
The security service said the outcome remained uncertain.
Law enforcement agencies are doing everything they can to end this peacefully, but in the circumstances it might not be enough, it said.
Thats why we again appeal to the members of the armed group...to end their armed resistance. For now, there is still time and the opportunity to do that.
The Bangladesh government on Monday approved a proposal to amend its extradition treaty with India to simplify the process for handing over suspects wanted by both countries.
Following the approval, Bangladesh and India can now extradite suspects once police warrants are issued for them. In the past, the countries were required to furnish evidence against suspects even if arrest warrants had been issued for them.
The change was approved at a meeting of the federal cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka.
The provision for extradition solely on the basis of arrest warrants was brought in by amending a section of the existing extradition treaty for convicted or under-trial suspects, said cabinet secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam.
The two neighbours had signed the landmark extradition treaty in January 2013 and it came into effect nearly nine months later.
Alam said the Bangladesh cabinet made the decision in response to a request from India to simplify a complex section of the treaty. As per the amendment, there will be no need to show evidence against the accused, he said.
If a judge, magistrate or a tribunal in our country, or any other authority of this category, issues a warrant against a person who is Indian, we can seek extradition, Alam said.
A person from Bangladesh, who has a warrant against him here, may be living in India. India in that case will hand him over to Bangladesh for trial, he added.
Home minister Asaduzzman Khan Kamal lauded the cabinets approval, saying it has made things easier when it comes to extradition.
The move for the simplification followed certain procedural complexities that surfaced at the time of handing over to India of United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) leader Anup Chetia.
Last November, Bangladesh handed over Chetia after he had spent 18 years in jail. Chetias jail term ended eight years before his handover to India, but Bangladesh could not send him back because of the absence of a deal on returning convicts to their countries.
Chetia could not be sent back under the 2013 treaty because it required the submission of evidence against him. Similar complications emerged in the case of extradition of Bangladeshi fugitive Nur Hossain, who was in jail in West Bengal and was wanted by Dhaka for seven murders.
The head of an elite Bangladeshi anti-crime agency on Monday asked militants from radical groups to return to normal life, promising they would be awarded 10 lakh Takas and an opportunity for rehabilitation.
Benazir Ahmed, director general of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), made the announcement after a 12-hour search for militant hideouts across vast riverine chars (shoals) in Sariakandi and Dhunat sub-districts of northern Bogra district.
Ahmed also announced that any person who provides information to security agencies about suspected hideouts or militants will be awarded 5 lakh Takas.
Members of several radicals groups, including the banned Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), will be rehabilitated if they want to return to normal life, he said.
The offer came a little more than a fortnight after armed militants stormed a cafe in the Gulshan diplomatic zone of Dhaka and butchered 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, before being gunned down by security forces.
Officials said they conducted a massive search with about 550 personnel of different security agencies since early on Monday, covering vast and remote areas along the Jamuna river where some militants were reportedly trained.
During the search, Ahmed said, security forces only seized some books on jihad and some sharp weapons but did not give details of the recoveries and the places where they were made. The search covered the remote Char Kajla and Nimgachhi area of Bogra.
The drive was conducted after Shafiul, a suspected militant captured during an attack on Eid-ul-Fitr on July 7 at Sholakia in Kishorganj district, told officials he was trained up in the riverine area. Ahmed said some recoveries showed that militants had hideouts in the area but had left. He promised the drive in remote areas will continue.
Mondays move was apparently aimed at spreading the message that no place would be spared from surveillance as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas government is facing the serious political challenge of rooting out militants reportedly belonging to domestic radical groups tied to international organisations.
Dozens of people, including secular and atheist bloggers, members of minority groups and foreigners, have been attacked and killed allegedly by Islamist radicals since last year. This has given rise to concern at home and abroad that Islamist militancy is on the rise in the Muslim-majority nation, a parliamentary democracy with a fragile opposition.
Bangladesh was rattled after the attack on Holey Artisan Bakery in Gulshan on July 1. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack but authorities said the young attackers belonged to the JMB.
A decorated former US Marine sergeant opened fire on police in Baton Rouge on Sunday, killing three officers, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man there sparked nationwide protests, including one shattered by the massacre of five Dallas policemen.
The suspect, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was himself shot to death minutes later in a gunfight with police who converged on the scene of a confrontation that Mayor Kip Holden said began as an ambush-style attack on officers.
Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriffs deputy were killed, and one sheriffs deputy was critically wounded. 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, told a news conference the gunman was believed to have acted alone, contrary to early reports that police may have been looking for other shooters.
It was not immediately clear whether there was a link between Sundays 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.
Police did not name the suspect. But a US government official told Reuters the gunman had been identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, and was black. He was reported by other media to be 29 years old.
According to Longs military record, released by the Pentagon, he served in the Marines from August 2005 until August 2010, achieving the rank of sergeant. Listed as a data network specialist for the Marines, he was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 until January 2009, earning several medals and commendations.
Authorities declined to offer a possible motive for Sundays attack in Louisianas capital.
Pandemonium caught on radio
A second government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators had reason to believe an emergency 911 call may have been used to lure police into harms way.
Edmonson said several officers came under fire as police were responding to a report of a man dressed in black standing behind a store holding a rifle shortly before 9am.
In the ensuing pandemonium caught on a recording of emergency radio traffic, police are repeatedly heard reporting: Officer down and deputy down as officers swarmed the area searching for and ultimately confronting the gunman.
The episode was over in about eight minutes, according to Edmonsons account.
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.
Read | Obama denounces Baton Rouge police shooting as work of cowards
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 doesnt help anyone, it doesnt further the conversation, it doesnt 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.
Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, one of the three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers who were killed on Sunday. (AP Photo)
He attended a memorial service last week for the five Dallas police officers killed by a black former US 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 Americas 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 has also heightened security concerns across the country, notably in Cleveland and Philadelphia, hosts to this weeks Republican National Convention and next weeks Democratic National Convention, respectively, which are expected to formally nominate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the November 8 election.
Worries around convention
We demand law and order, Trump said in a Facebook posting on 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 dont 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 Patrolmens Association, told Reuters in an interview.
Loomis said he was concerned about copycat shootings at the Republican convention.
A spokesperson for Kasich said the governor did not have the power to suspend the open-carry law.
An East Baton Rouge Sheriff vehicle is seen with bullet holes in its windows near the scene where police officers were shot, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Reuters Photo)
Sundays shootings occurred about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of people were arrested this month while protesting Sterlings death. The father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers.
A witness to the Baton Rouge shootings, Brady Vancel, told CNN he saw a man dressed in black clothing and a ski-type mask running through a parking lot amid a hail of gunfire.
Vancel said the gunman looked up and saw me. We stopped. I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction.
Shocked community members lined the highway about a mile from the shootings, at the site of the protests against Sterlings killing.
It never hits home until its in your own living room, said Redell Norman, an activist who attended the recent protests at police headquarters.
Read | US woman live streams boyfriends dying moments after police shooting
Britains Prime Minister Theresa May said she would be willing to authorise a nuclear strike causing mass loss of life, ahead of a House of Commons vote on replacing Britains Trident submarines on Monday.
May answered with a decisive yes when questioned by opposition Scottish National Partys (SNP) George Kerevan about whether she would personally approve a nuclear hit. Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children? Kerevan asked May.
May responded: I have to say to the honourable gentleman the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike some suggestions that we could have a deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seem to come from the Labour party frontbench.
The statement was met by gasps from some MPs on the opposition benches, as the chamber debated whether to agree the replacement of Trident.
In her first address to the House of Commons since taking office last week following the EU referendum, May said it would be an act of gross irresponsibility to abandon the nuclear deterrent, pitching for the construction of four new submarines to carry the Trident missile system and their nuclear warheads. The project is estimated to cost 41 billion pounds (Rs 3.65 lakh crore).
MPs were to vote on Monday evening on whether to approve the construction.
The motion is almost certain to pass, as many Labour lawmakers are expected to back the Conservative government despite the opposition of their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and members of the SNP.
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.
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.
Days after an international tribunal ruled China had no historic rights to islands in the South China Sea, Beijing announced that access to parts of the disputed region will be blocked for a few days for a naval drill beginning on Tuesday.
On July 12, a tribunal formed by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration rejected Chinas claims to exclusive economic rights across large swathes of the South China Sea in response to a petition filed by the Philippines.
China dismissed the ruling, saying the court was illegal and it had no jurisdiction to rule on the region Beijing called the verdict a piece of waste paper.
Following the ruling, Beijing has been on the offensive, claiming the support scores of countries and saying it will not follow the verdict. Mondays announcement on the naval drill came against the backdrop of Chinas aggressive military posturing.
Chinas Maritime Safety Administration made an announcement on Monday that ships were prohibited from entering a certain area off the coast of Hainan between July 19 and July 21 as the navy will conduct a drill.
The area off the east coast of Chinas island province of Hainan will host military exercises, the administration said on its website, adding that entrance was prohibited.
The area of sea identified is some distance from the Paracel islands and even further from the Spratlys, with both chains claimed by Beijing and several other neighbouring states, AFP reported.
Reuters quoted a senior Chinese admiral as saying freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end in disaster.
When has freedom of navigation in the SCS ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there wont be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks, Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the powerful Central Military Commission, was quoted as saying.
But China consistently opposes so-called military freedom of navigation which brings with it a military threat, and which challenges and disrespects the international law of the sea, Sun said.
This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way, he added.
The PLA Navy drill follows an exercise conducted by the PLA Air Force over the South China Sea, which, the government announced, will become a regular practice in future.
The PLA sent H-6K bombers and other aircraft, including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, PLA Air Force spokesperson Shen Jinke said on Monday.
Last week, Beijing said it will hold a military drill of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) that involves all five newly designated commands. It is the most elaborate drill in recent times that will go on till September.
China said Monday that it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijings claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainans maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and defence ministry had no immediate comment.
The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navys top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson is meeting with Chinas navy commander, Adm. Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao that began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navys submarine academy, tour Chinas first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
China rejected last Tuesdays ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are Chinas inherent territory, and says it could declare an air defence identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippine fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Read: India for peaceful means to resolve South China Sea row, Pak backs Beijing
Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy. (Reuters)
Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the United States should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunals decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the countrys economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared to his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
Read: Facing the nine dashed line in the South China Sea
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. Chinas navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
Chinas island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, US warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the U.S. of threatening its national security.
The mother of slain Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch on Monday alleged that prominent cleric Mufti Abdul Qawi, who also appeared in the controversial selfies with the social media star, provoked her son into murdering her daughter.
The 26-year-old models mothers statement came on the same day when police announced that Mufti Qawi would be part of the murder investigation of the slain social media sensation.
Police had arrested Qandeels brother Muhammad Waseem on Saturday. He has admitted to strangling his sister to death for the honour of the family. Waseem said he gave her a tablet to subdue his sister and then strangled her in their family home over the weekend.
Waseem said he killed his sister due to her social media activities, which included a series of risque video posts with the prominent cleric, Mufti Qawi.
Qawi was suspended from the Ruet-e-Hilal committee in the controversy following the video posts.
Speaking to Geo News on Monday, Qandeels mother accused Mufti Qawi, her daughters former husband Ashiq Hussain, and a man name Shahid of being involved in the murder.
Read | Qandeel Baloch murder: Most controversial things she said and did
Qandeel Baloch had posted three selfies of herself with cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi on her Facebook page. (Facebook)
She claimed her son Waseem carried out the murder on the advice of Mufti Qawi, and that the cleric provoked him into killing Qandeel. She claimed Waseem was also in contact with Qandeels former husband Ashiq Hussain.
Earlier on Monday, police announced that Mufti Qawi would be included in the murder investigation of Qandeel.
We have decided to include Mufti Abdul Qawi in the murder investigation, said Azhar Ikram, the police chief in Multan where Baloch was killed.
Read | Those who humiliate clerics must learn from Qandeel Balochs fate: Cleric Mufti Qawi
The scope of the investigation has been widened. The victims brother, Aslam, will also be investigated. We are waiting for the forensic reports, Ikram said.
Reacting to the move of the police, Mufti Qawi said that he was willing to cooperate if approached by the police.
However, he said that it was ridiculous that he had been included in the murder investigation when the murderer had already confessed to the crime.
Prior to her death, Qandeel Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, spoke of worries about her safety and had appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security.
No help was provided and the interior ministry has not commented on her death.
In Facebook posts, she, spoke of trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people in Pakistan. She faced frequent abuse and death threats but continued to post provocative pictures and videos.
The so-called honour-killing has sent shockwaves across the country and triggered an outpouring of grief on social media for Baloch.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reiterated that the death penalty is not off the table for those suspected of plotting a coup against his government, in an interview with CNN broadcast Monday.
Erdogan, giving his first media interview since Fridays dramatic coup attempt, also said his government would submit a written request for the extradition of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he blames for the unrest, in the coming days.
There is a clear crime of treason, Erdogan, speaking through a translator, told CNN when asked about calls for the alleged plotters to face capital punishment.
But of course, it will take a parliamentary decision for that to take action in the form of a constitutional measure, he said, given that Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 as part of its long-standing efforts to join the European Union.
So the leaders will have to come together and discuss it. If they accept to discuss it, as the president, I will approve any decision to come out of the parliament.
Turkey launched fresh raids and sacked almost 9,000 officials Monday in a relentless crackdown against suspected coup plotters, with Erdogan vowing to wipe out the virus of the putschists after Fridays coup attempt, which left more than 300 dead.
But the United States and European Union have sternly warned him against excessive retribution and to respect the rule of law.
Erdogan has blamed the coup attempt on Gulen, his arch-enemy, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Gulen has denied any involvement.
The Turkish leader said his countrys formal request for extradition would soon be submitted.
We have a mutual agreement of extradition of criminals, he told the network.
There should be reciprocity in these types of things.
Read | 6,000 detained in Turkey purge, Erdogan hints at bringing back death penalty
Conservative MP Alok Sharma has been appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Prime Minister Theresa May, adding a new face of Indian-origin to frontline British politics.
Sharma was first elected to parliament in the May 2010 elections and re-elected in May 2015 from Reading West.
He will work with foreign secretary Boris Johnson and is likely to have a role related to India.
Sharma had the role of Prime Ministers infrastructure envoy for India in the previous government headed by David Cameron , working on the implementation of massive projects announced during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to London in November 2015.
However, Sandip Verma, the Amritsar-born member of the House of Lords, was dropped from Mays council of ministers. Baroness Verma was the parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department for International Development.
The new secretary in the Department for International Development is Priti Patel, who was appointed to the cabinet-level post soon after May took over as prime minister last week.
Three police officers and a civilian were killed in a morning attack on a police station in Kazakhstans largest city, the interior ministry said on Monday.
Two gunmen attacked a police station in central Almaty late Monday morning, killing three police officers in a gun battle. While fleeing from the police station, one of the gunmen shot and killed a local resident before hijacking his car, the police said.
The police said it has detained one suspect, identified as a 27-year-old former convict who was wanted for the murder of a woman. The other man remained at large.
The attack comes a month after 20 people were killed in the Kazakh city of Aktobe when groups of gunmen attacked a military base and a gun shop. Authorities in this Central Asian nation then described the violence as a terrorist attack and blamed it on radical Islamists.
Energy-rich Kazakhstan, arguably one of the most prosperous former Soviet republics, is a predominantly Muslim but largely secular nation.
Officials on Monday raised the terror threat level to red after the attack but would not immediately identify the affiliation of the attackers.
Leading news website Tengrinews.kz, reporting from a local hospital, said seven police officers were in critical condition.
Local media also reported that gun shops across Almaty, Kazakhstans commercial capital, have been closed.
Indonesias most wanted Muslim militant may have been killed on Monday in a firefight with security forces, police said, after a lengthy hunt for the Islamic State (IS) group supporter.
Santoso, the leader of extremist group the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, is suspected to have been shot dead along with another militant in a jungle-clad, mountainous district on central Sulawesi island.
National police chief Tito Karnavian said there were indications the man killed was Santoso.
There are indeed signs, a mole on his forehead, which matches the features of Santoso, he said, adding the bodies of those killed were being removed from the site of the firefight for further identification.
As well as those killed, one other man and two women managed to escape during the firefight in Tambarana village, said Karnavian.
If confirmed, the death of Santoso would represent a major victory for the Indonesian authorities who had sent thousands of troops and soldiers to Sulawesi to hunt him down.
Santoso, known by several aliases including Abu Wardah, led a small group of ragtag fighters who had been hiding in the jungles for several years and were known for carrying out deadly attacks on domestic security forces.
He had pledged allegiance to the IS group and was put on a list of global terrorists by the United States earlier this year, and in recent times several members of Chinas ethnic Uighur minority had joined his group.
However analysts think that other cells in Indonesia may now pose an even greater threat, and Santoso was not believed to have played a role in a deadly attack on Jakarta in January claimed by IS.(AFP) APK
Boris Johnsons bumpy start as Britains new foreign secretary continued Sunday when the plane on which he was travelling to meet European leaders in Brussels made an emergency landing near London.
There was a technical issue on the RAF (Royal Air Force) flight on Sunday afternoon carrying the foreign secretary and his officials from London to Brussels that required the aircraft to land at Luton airport, said a foreign office spokesperson.
After a short delay, the foreign secretary continued on his way to Brussels by alternative means, he added.
The BAE 146 jet suffered a problem with its hydraulic system and fire engines were deployed as the plane landed at the airport north of London, according to the Guardian.
New Prime Minister Theresa Mays appointment of Johnson, the figurehead of the victorious campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, triggered near uproar in European capitals.
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.
Johnson was booed at the French ambassadors Bastille Day party in London on Thursday, his first engagement as Britains surprise new foreign secretary.
He then had to respond to the Nice terror attack and the failed coup attempt in Turkey in an eventful first week in the role.
Islamic State loyalists fighting in Afghanistan are mostly residents of the Orakzai tribal region of northwest Pakistan, a top Afghan official said on Monday.
Documents recovered from the IS loyalists revealed they had come from Pakistan to fight under the name of Islamic State terrorist group, officials in Nangarhar province were quoted as saying by Khaama Press news agency.
Some officials in Nangarhar even believe the IS loyalists are directly operating under the command of Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
Ataullah Khogyani, the spokesman for the provincial governor, said documents obtained from the bodies of fighters and those arrested during operations in Achin, Kot, Haska Mina and other parts of Nangarhar revealed they were residents of Orakzai Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
Khogyani said intelligence gathered by the government had also revealed that the IS loyalists mostly comprised Pakistani nationals.
Residents of Tajikistan are also fighting alongside Pakistani nationals for the IS, whose members are mainly deployed after completing training in Pakistan, he said.
The comments by the Afghan officials came against the backdrop of reports that at least 30% of Kot district in Nangarhar is under the control of IS loyalists.
Afghan and US forces have increased raids against IS loyalists in Nangarhar in recent months. The troops have conducted airstrikes to eliminate the supporters of the terror group amid fears they are attempting to expand their footprint in Afghanistan, the report said.
Confirming the Bastille Day attack in Nice was premeditated and prepared, the Paris prosecutor on Monday said the truck driver showed a clear, recent interest in radical Islam.
The investigation showed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had trawled the internet for information on a terror attack in the US city of Orlando and on the killing of a police couple in a Paris suburb last month, Francois Molins said.
A search of his computer also found violent images linked to radical Islam, he told a press conference in Paris.
However he said no clear link had been established between the father of three and the Islamic State group which claimed the Bastille Day carnage, in which 84 were killed.
The revelations came on the third day of mourning over the grisly attack, which saw Bouhlel use a 19-tonne truck to mow down crowds leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display in the French Riviera city.
A sea of people thronged the seafront promenade in Nice where the attack took place for an emotional minutes silence. Similar ceremonies were held across the country, accompanied by the ringing of church bells.
But in a sign of the anger and bitterness gripping France after its third major terror attack in 18 months, Prime Minister Manual Valls was booed as he arrived and left Nice for the tribute.
Valls dismissed the jeers and calls for him to resign as disgraceful, saying they reflected the attitude of a minority in the city run by the opposition Republicans party.
Molins said the investigation confirmed the attack was premeditated, and said 13 victims had yet to be identified.
Read | Waiting for identities, Nice victims families caught in painful limbo
Jabeur Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the brother of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who drove a heavy truck into crowds in the French city of Nice killing at least 84 people on Friday, holds his phone near his house in Msaken, Tunisia, July 15, 2016. REUTERS/Zoubeir Souissi
Photographs found on the attackers mobile phone showed he staked out the promenade in the days before he struck, he added.
Molins painted a picture of a non-practising Muslim who ate pork, drank, took drugs and had an unbridled sexual activity.
French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve defended the government efforts to halt terror attacks, calling for dignity and truth from critical opposition politicians as the national mood sours further nine months ahead of the next presidential election.
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.
Former president and main opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy said Sunday that everything that should have been done the past 18 months was not done.
We are at war, outright war. So I will use strong words: it will be us or them, he said.
Read | A petty criminal radicalised quickly? The portrait of Nice attacker Bouhlel
Shameful politicians
While previous attacks saw grand displays of national unity, there was no semblance of cohesion after the Nice massacre, with Sarkozy joining a long line of opposition politicians who have accused the government of not doing enough to protect the French.
Cazeneuve described the bitter debate as shameful.
Certain members of the political class have not respected the mourning period, he said.
The frustration of the French was writ large in some of the messages left among flowers and tributes on Nices seafront.
Enough with the speeches and Sick of carnage in our streets, the messages read.
French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (C) and French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve (2nd R) meet with soldiers of the operation Sentinelle on Monday in Avignon. (AFP)
Cazeneuve sought to highlight the measures taken by government to fight terrorism, such as boosting the armed forces and adopting new anti-terror laws.
There is no zero risk. By saying this we are telling the truth to the French and tackling the threat with lucidity, he said.
After the latest attack, the government called for volunteers to become reservists who can be called on to supplement the security forces -- already on high alert under an eight-month-old state of emergency.
Who were the victims of the French Riviera horror?
Text messages and selfies
The deadly use of an easily obtainable vehicle as a weapon by a man who had no long history of radicalisation has highlighted the challenge for intelligence and security officials in stopping such attacks.
We cannot exclude that an unbalanced and very violent individual had been through a rapid radicalisation, Cazeneuve said.
As investigators piece together details about his motives and planning, it emerged that Bouhlel had used the rented truck to stake out the Nice seafront for two consecutive days before striking.
Thousands of people observe a minute of silence on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Monday, in tribute to the victims of the deadly Nice attack on Bastille day. (AFP)
A source close to the investigation told AFP that he had also sent a text message just before the attack in which he expresses satisfaction at having obtained a 7.65-millimetre pistol and discusses the supply of other weapons.
He also took a selfie at the wheel of the truck in the days before the attack.
Six people were in custody on Monday including a 38-year-old Albanian suspected of providing Bouhlel with a pistol he used to fire at police during the attack.
In Nice, many people were still desperately waiting for news of their loved ones.
Molins said 71 victims had been officially identified so far, with the authorities taking painstaking measures to avoid errors of identification seen during the Paris attacks last November.
At least 10 children were among the dead, as well as tourists from Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany, and a local Russian association said there were about 10 victims from Russia.
Eighty-five people were still being treated in hospital on Sunday, 18 of them in critical condition.
A prominent Muslim cleric in Pakistan, who faced flak for featuring in selfies taken with murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, is being investigated in connection with her killing, police said on Monday.
Baloch, 26, described as Pakistans Kim Kardashian, divided opinion in the deeply conservative Muslim society with her risque photos. Her murder on Friday shocked the country and sparked fresh debate about so-called honour killings.
Read | Qandeel Balochs brother proudly accepts drugging, killing her, has no regrets
Balochs brother, Muhammad Waseem, told media he drugged and strangled his sister as she had violated their familys honour with her social media posts, including a series of selfies with cleric Abdul Qavi last month.
One video appears to show her sitting on Qavis lap.
Police said Qavi, who was suspended from a prominent Muslim council after the photographs were published, was also part of their investigation into her murder.
We have decided to widen the scope of the investigation and include Mufti Abdul Qavi in the probe, Azhar Ikram, the police chief in the town of Multan, where Baloch was killed, said.
Qavi has denied any involvement in Balochs murder but told Reuters on Monday he would present himself to police for questioning if summoned.
Qavi told media on Saturday that Balochs death should serve as an example for others who tried to malign the clergy, though he also stated that he had forgiven her.
Baloch, who described herself as a modern day feminist, was unapologetic about her bid to push the boundaries of acceptability for women and change the typical orthodox mindset of Pakistanis.
Her pictures and videos outraged religious conservatives who viewed her as a disgrace to the cultural values of Islam and Pakistan. Others hailed her as a feminist icon.
Read | Qandeel Baloch murder: Most controversial things she said and did
Police were also investigating Balochs other brother, Muhammad Aslam, who is a junior army officer, Ikram said.
More than 500 people almost all of them women die in honour killings in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives acting over a perception of shame being brought on the family.
Though governments have deplored the practice, they have done little to stop it. Many Pakistanis have called for the passage of an anti-honour killing law aimed at closing a loophole that allows family members to forgive those responsible for such killings.
After Balochs death, her father, Muhammad Azeem, filed a police report against both his sons, alleging Aslam had encouraged Waseem to carry out the killing.
Police have declined to comment on Aslams role and he was not available for comment on Monday.
Baloch built a modelling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner.
She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son, Balochs father said, according to the English-language Dawn newspaper. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her.
Azeem was also not available for comment.
After the outcry over the selfies with Qavi, Baloch held a news conference and appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security. But no help was provided.
In a summer of unsettling violence, Republicans rallied behind Donald Trump as the right man for turbulent times as they opened their presidential convention on Monday. They lambasted Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as entrenched in a system that fails to keep Americans safe.
For Trump, the convention is also a moment to unite a party still skeptical of him, in part by assuring GOP leaders and voters alike that theres a kinder, gentler side to what many see as merely a brash businessman. Trumps family will play a starring role, beginning Monday with a prime-time speech by his wife, Melania Trump, who has kept a low profile throughout the campaign.
In a surprise, Trump announced he would come to Cleveland and go onstage on opening night to introduce her.
This June 7, 2016 file photo shows Trump gestures with his wife Melania. (AP file photo)
The convention comes amid a wrenching period of violence and unrest, both in the United States and around the world. On the eve of the opening, three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the city where a black man was killed by police two weeks ago.
Republican National Committee chairperson Reince Priebus welcomed delegates with a brief acknowledgement of the troubling times swirling outside. The chairperson called for a moment of silence out of respect for genuine heroes in law enforcement.
Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings, he said.
In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and gruesome Bastille Day attack in Nice, France.
Trump has seized on the instability, casting recent events as a direct result of failed leadership by President Barack Obama and by Clinton, who spent four years in the administration as secretary of state. But Trump has been vague about how he would put the nation on a different course, offering virtually no details of his policy prescriptions despite repeated vows to be tough.
A Trump/Pence poster appears over the convention floor on the opening day of the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday. (AFP)
Campaign chairperson Paul Manafort said Trump would eventually outline policy specifics but not at the convention.
Clinton, during remarks Monday at the NAACPs annual convention, said there was no justification for directing violence at law enforcement.
As president, I will bring the full weight of the law to bear in making sure those who kill police officers are brought to justice, she said.
Clinton was expected to be a frequent target of the eclectic group of lawmakers, military service members and entertainers headlining opening night of the convention. They include Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty, as well as immigration advocates and a Marine who fought in the Benghazi attack that occurred during Clintons tenure at the State Department.
The speakers line-up of speakers and no-shows for the four-night convention was a visual representation of Trumps struggles to unify Republicans. From the partys former presidents to the host state governor, many leaders were staying away from the convention stage, or Cleveland altogether, wary of being linked to a man whose proposals and temperament have sparked an identity crisis within the GOP.
Trumps team insists that by the end of the week, Republicans will plunge into the general election campaign united in their mission to defeat Clinton. But campaign officials undermined their own effort Monday by picking a fight with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is not attending the convention and has yet to endorse Trump.
Manafort called Kasich petulant and said the governor was embarrassing his party in his home state.
Even some of those participating in the convention seemed to be avoiding their partys nominee. When House speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates Monday morning, he made no mention of Trump in his remarks.
A Donald Trump supporter poses with a gun while attending a rally for Donald Trump on the first day of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in downtown Cleveland, Ohio on Monday. (AFP)
Disaffected delegates were still pressing for a way to derail Trump. As Mondays working sessions opened, anti-Trump delegates claimed theyd collected enough signatures to force a state-by-state roll call vote on changing party rules, a battle that party leaders hoped to avoid.
Republican Party leadership and officials from Donald Trumps campaign said Monday theyd held 11th-hour talks with anti-Trump delegates to see if they could avert a messy floor fight, live on television, over the rules. But one official said the negotiations had failed, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
The roll call vote on the nomination is expected Tuesday, with Trump scheduled to close the convention with an acceptance speech Thursday night. Vice presidential pick Mike Pence, who left Indianapolis for Cleveland on Monday, is to speak Wednesday.
The summer disturbances had tensions running high outside the heavily secured convention site in Cleveland.
Hundreds of Trump supporters and opponents held rallies a half-mile apart, with a few of the Trump supporters openly carrying guns as allowed under Ohio law. The president of the police union had asked Kasich to suspend the law allowing gun owners to carry firearms in plain sight. But Kasich said he didnt have that authority.
One of the most senior military figures detained on charges of involvement in Turkeys failed coup bid appeared in court Monday, denying he was the mastermind of the plot.
Looking tired and haggard with his ear bandaged in images published by state media, former air force chief General Akin Ozturk appeared before the criminal court in Ankara.
The court was to decide if he and 26 other generals and admirals should be remanded in custody ahead of trial, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
They are accused of trying to overthrow the existing order and also of plotting to assassinate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In his statement to prosecutors, Akin denied that he had been the ringleader of the coup, whose identity remains unclear.
I am not the person who planned or led the coup. Who planned it and directed it I do not know, Anadolu quoted him as saying.
Some Turkish media had earlier quoted him as confessing to have played a prime role in the coup but later replaced this information with his denial.
Turkeys treatment of the coup suspects had alarmed its allies, with EU and US leaders urging Ankara to respect the rule of law.
Anadolu published images of Ozturk and other suspects on the stairs inside of the Ankara court house, staring blankly into the camera with their hands tied behind their backs.
Turkey has blamed the coup on supporters of Erdogans arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, within the military.
At the height of the attempt to overthrow Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had Erdogans 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 Istanbuls main airport and sending tanks to parliament in Ankara.
At least two F-16s harassed Erdogans 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 didnt 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 spiralling into conflict and marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprisings erupted and plunged its southern neighbour Syria into civil war.
A senior Turkish official confirmed to Reuters that Erdogans 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.
Pro-Erdogan supporters wait for Turkish President at Kizilay square in Ankara during a demonstration in support to the Turkish government following a failed coup attempt. (AFP Photo)
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 quarters 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.
Read | Erdogan breaks down in tears at funeral for friend killed in Turkey coup attempt
Gunfire and explosions rocked both Istanbul and Ankara through Friday night, as the armed faction that 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.
Pro-Erdogan supporters gather on Taksim square in Istanbul, during a demonstration in support for the Turkish government. (AFP Photo)
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 centred on the Akinci air base around 50km (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 refuelling 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 US-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.
Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim (left) and Chief of Staff General Hulusi Akar stand as a funeral car carries the coffin of a police officer killed during a failed military coup, in Ankara. (AP Photo)
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 militarys 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 US-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 Gulens 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 fuelled 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 that was the biggest handicap for the coup plotters, said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and a former Turkish diplomat.
Read | Death toll in failed Turkey coup crosses 290: Foreign ministry
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 realised they were under surveillance, something corroborated by other officials in Ankara.
They werent 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 Erdogans 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.
A police officer stands next to an armoured vehicle that was used by soldiers during the coup attempt at Taksim square in Istanbul. (AFP Photo)
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 organised 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 Turkeys worst nights of bloodshed.
China will not stop construction on the islands in strategic South China Sea, a top Chinese admiral on Monday said, dismissing the pressure from Washington following an international ruling quashed Chinas claim of historic rights over the water body.
We will never stop our construction on the Nansha (Sparatly) Islands halfway. The Nansha Islands are Chinas inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful, commander of the Peoples Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli told his US counterpart admiral John Richardson during their meeting here.
A tribunal appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration acting on a petition from the Philippines quashed Chinas claim of historic rights on the South Chinas Sea last week and upheld Manilas claims over the islands.
China, which boycotted the tribunals proceedings, rejected the verdict questioning its legality.
Describing the security situation in waters around China as complicated and sensitive, Wu said Richardsons visit will be beneficial for the two countries to strengthen communication, promote trust, resolve doubts and avoid misjudgments.
We will never sacrifice our sovereignty and interests in the South China Sea, Wu was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
He stressed that it is Chinas core interest and concerns the foundation of the ruling Communist Partys governance, the countrys security and stability and the Chinese nations basic interests.
Wu said that China will not recede over territorial sovereignty or fear any military provocation, which the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with.
He stressed that no matter what country or person applies pressure, China will push forward and complete island construction as planned.
Wu said China will never be caught off guard, and the number of its defence facilities is completely determined by the number of threats it faces.
He vowed that China will never give up its efforts to solve the South China Sea issue peacefully, despite many negative factors at present, but warned that any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect.
The Chinese admiral hoped that the two countries air and maritime forces will fully follow the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and the Rules of Behaviour for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters to avoid strategic misjudgment or exchange of fire, and jointly ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.
Wu called on the two sides to promote strategic mutual trust, seek common ground, expand the scope of cooperation and create new momentum for China and the US to develop a new type of major-power relations between the two countries.
DHAKA: Acting deputy vice chancellor of a private university was arrested along with two others for sheltering militants who carried out the Holey Artisan restaurant terror attack.
Fearing fresh Islamist attacks, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina sought a nationwide social alert advising neighbourhoods and institutions to develop their own security systems. Once they (Islamists) started, they are unlikely to keep silent, she told media.
North South Universitys (NSU) acting pro-VC Gias Uddin Ahsan was arrested for renting out a flat to the attackers of Holey Artisan Bakery, said Masudur Rahman, deputy commissioner of Dhaka Police. Ahsan is the dean of NSUs School of Health and Life Sciences, according to the private universitys website.
His nephew Alam Chowdhury and Mahbubur Rahman Tuhin, the manager of a house in Bashundhara Residential Area, were also arrested.
Five militants who carried out the July 1 assault had taken shelter in the flat owned by Ahsan, Rahman said. The associates of the assailants fled the flat after the attack.
Meanwhile, machete-wielding men attacked three elderly Sufi Muslims, including two women, on Sunday in western Bangladesh.
YEREVAN/MOSCOW: Armed men seized a police station and hostages in Armenias 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. One of their main demands was to free Jirair Sefilian, an opposition politician whom the authorities have accused of plotting civil unrest. Sefilian was jailed in June over allegations of illegally possessing weapons. Armenias security service said one policeman had been killed and two wounded in the violence, but that negotiations were now underway to resolve the standoff peacefully.
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ISTANBUL/ANKARA: Widening the crackdown on those behind a failed military coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, authorities rounded up around 6,000 people from the armed forces and judiciary on Sunday.
Overnight, supporters of 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.
The US urged Turkey to exercise restraint and warned that public suggestions of a US role in the plot were utterly false and harmful to relations. President Barack Obama urged parties on all sides to avoid destabilising Turkey. 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, Secretary of State John Kerry said, according to the state department.
The coup attempt complicated US-led efforts to combat Islamic State as Turkey closed its airspace to military aircraft in Incirlik air base, which American forces use to launch air attacks against the terror group. US officials were working with Turkish officials to resume air operations quickly, the Pentagon said.
Erdogans government has accused US-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 made clear US would only act if there was evidence against Gulen.
With expectations growing of heavy measures against dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan that the coup attempt did not give him a blank cheque to disregard the rule of law. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag was cited as saying that more arrests were expected on top of the 6,000 people already detained.
Among those arrested is General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base, an official said. A military aide of Erdogan was also taken into custody, reports said.
Control across Turkey has been restored and there are no clashes at the moment, a senior official said, adding although a few groups of coup plotters were holding out in Istanbul, they no longer posed a risk.
The crackdown appears to intensify a longstanding push by Erdogan to root out the influence of followers of Gulen.
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.
Lets hang them! chanted the crowd in Ankaras central Kizilay square.
Erdogan told them parliament may consider a proposal to bring back the death penalty, which has been abolished.
Meanwhile, the US urged Turkey on Saturday to exercise restraint.
ISTANBUL/ANKARA: Widening the crackdown on those behind a failed military coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, authorities rounded up around 6,000 people from the armed forces and judiciary on Sunday.
Overnight, supporters of 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.
The US urged Turkey to exercise restraint and warned that public suggestions of a US role in the plot were utterly false and harmful to relations. President Barack Obama urged parties on all sides to avoid destabilising Turkey. 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, Secretary of State John Kerry said, according to the state department.
The coup attempt complicated US-led efforts to combat Islamic State as Turkey closed its airspace to military aircraft in Incirlik air base, which American forces use to launch air attacks against the terror group. US officials were working with Turkish officials to resume air operations quickly, the Pentagon said.
Erdogans government has accused US-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 made clear US would only act if there was evidence against Gulen.
With expectations growing of heavy measures against dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan that the coup attempt did not give him a blank cheque to disregard the rule of law. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag was cited as saying that more arrests were expected on top of the 6,000 people already detained.
Among those arrested is General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base, an official said. A military aide of Erdogan was also taken into custody, reports said.
Control across Turkey has been restored and there are no clashes at the moment, a senior official said, adding although a few groups of coup plotters were holding out in Istanbul, they no longer posed a risk.
The crackdown appears to intensify a longstanding push by Erdogan to root out the influence of followers of Gulen.
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.
Lets hang them! chanted the crowd in Ankaras central Kizilay square.
Erdogan told them parliament may consider a proposal to bring back the death penalty, which has been abolished.
LONDON: 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 Britains vote to leave the EU, Mays office said on Sunday. While acknowledging that legal obligations prevent UK from signing deals while still an EU member, May had would be very keen to complete an agreement as soon as possible.
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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 Qaed a 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 they re 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.
There is also the sense that Nusra offers the purest form of jihad as against Islamic State, 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.
Read: Dont be in denial, north Kerala is in the grip of radicalisation
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.
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 Islamic State, 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. It s like a dampener , Bhaskar said.
Amarasingams work offers a crucial insight into the mind sand motives of the jihadis in Iraq and Syria at a time when a growing number of Indian families are grappling with the radical is at ion 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 Syria Some of them were early enough that they did kind of spend sometime 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.
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LONDON: Two candidates seeking to take on Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn in a leadership contestAngela Eagle and Owen Smith battled each other on Sunday, each claiming higher support than the other.
Eagle and Smith appeared on Sunday television to set out their vision for the party and the country, including on Brexit. The official Labour position was for Britain should remain in the EU, but Corbyn was flayed for allegedly not campaigning strongly enough for it.
Wednesday is the deadline for the nominations for the contest, with Corbyn already on the ballot paper as one of the candidates. His rivals, however, insist that he, like other candidates, should be supported by at least 51 party MPs, which he cannot be sure of, given last weeks no-confidence motion against him.
The three could go ahead for a vote of Labour members, registered supporters and union affiliates. Eagle and Smith are keen to whittle the choice down to Corbyn and one opponent.
I think one of us standing would be better, is the honest answer, Smith told the BBCs Andrew Marr Show .But I think the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) has got to be a grown-up organisation and come to a decision in the next couple of days as to who it is. Asked if the party should pick its leader based on who had more nominations, Smith said: Thats one way in which we could do it.
NICE: 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 United States presidential candidate Donald Trumps 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... how will she overcome the outrage?
Investigators continued to comb through the attackers mobile phone and other details, while officials in Paris invited people to join the countrys reserve forces to deal with the threat of terrorism.
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COVER-HOGGING OVERINDULGENCE
When I was 10 years old, I was at a friends house and happened upon his fathers January 1978 issue of CWTI. I have collected and read cover to cover every issue since February 1978, when William C. Davis was editor.
I have never written before this time and have now done so because of the Behind the Lines editorial by editor Kushlan. My personal opinion was that the last logo of CWTI was the best. In 1978, the first logo was still in use, until June of 1981, when the Illustrated was parked next to CWT instead of under it. No big deal. Then in April 1982, CWTI decided to bold everything and change the font, which made for a really cramped cover. In December 1995, you presented your best logo ever, and I cannot believe you changed it to make it easier to see on newsstands and on endorsements.
I wont stop my subscription, because as Mr. Kushlan said, Whats behind the logohas not changed, but I do voice my thoughts against the new logo as an overindulged, modern-appearing cover-hogger (a la 1982-1995) that makes the magazine seem unprofessional.
Scott Fishencord
Wylie, Texas
Editors note: William C. Davis, by the way, will soon join the faculty of Virginia Tech. Beginning this fall, Davis will be the director of programs for the colleges Virginia Center for Civil War Studies.
THE BLOOD IS ON LEES HANDS
When I saw Jeffry D. Werts article about Robert E. Lee in your May issue, I became very excited. It promised to explain why Lee fought on when he knew further resistance was futile.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed in Mr. Werts answer. It was the same as has been stated many times before, i.e., Lee felt it was his duty. Even more unfortunately, I believe Mr. Wert is correct. I am in awe of Lees courage, resourcefulness, and determination. But that does not blind me to his faults. As an intelligent and experienced soldier, Lee must have known sometime after the Petersburg siege began that his army could not win. At that point, Lees duty was to God and humanity, not to Virginia and the Confederacy. Because he did not then surrender his army, he is responsible for every death in the Army of Northern Virginia from that time until the surrender at Appomattox.
Norm Danis
West Hills, California
SOME SORROW, SOME REJOICE
I loved your May special issue. Fairness, however, requires an expansion of Gary Gallaghers quotation from Joshua Chamberlains famous book The Passing of the Armies. To illustrate the animosity that remained after the surrender of Lees army, Gallagher quotes an unnamed Confederate officer: We hate you, sir. Taken just a smidgen out of context, that quotation supports Gallaghers contention that there was great bitterness, not brotherhood, following Lees surrender.
What precedes that quotation and what follows it deserves mention. Chamberlain quotes other Confederate officers at the time, for example, who said such things as, General, this is deeply humiliating; but I console myself with the thought that the whole country will rejoice at this days business. I do not mean to suggest that there was not bitterness or animosity on both sides in April 1865. My letter is intended only to point out that sometimes comments, taken out of context, are like using only one color to paint a picture that actually contains a wide variety of hues.
Paul W. Barada
Rushville, Indiana
HARD FEELINGS DIE HARD
Your special issue The End of the War (May) is a keeper. The article by Gary Gallagher reminded me of my introduction to Southern feelings about the end of the Civil War, on October 2, 1947. At 18 years old, I had enlisted in the Air Force and been sent to Lackland Field in San Antonio, Texas. Upon arrival, this naive Michigander was processed through induction, clipped hair, new fatigues, etc., and marched along with 59 strangers to the front of a tarpaper-covered orderly room. We halted and faced left. A corporal walked out of the O.R. and said in a loud Southern accent, Are there any Rebels in the crowd? Immediately, about half the boys whooped and hollered. What is going on? I asked myself. Then the corporal said, All you Rebs fall out and rest here in the shade. All you Yankees, parade rest. Over the next week, there were many one-sided discussions that included remarks like, The South should have won, and My granddaddy fought in the Civil War. Their feelings were still strong. These impressions have stayed with me for over 50 years, and I still chuckle over the experience today.
Jack Cochrane
Edmond, Oklahoma
LOST CAUSE? WHAT CAUSE?
With reference to the excellent May issue, I would respectfully disagree with Albert Castels (and James McPhersons) fanciful conjectures that the South had victory in its grasp on three occasions during the conflict. The outcome of the war was predetermined by the simple fact that for every American wishing to continue slavery, there were at least five who felt otherwise. After one absorbs the 650,000 deaths and uncounted legions of maimed and wounded, the greatest remaining tragedy of the war is that such a tiny percentage of the Southern population, composed mainly of its educated class, was able to convince a large majority of 11 states that they had a cause. The naked truth is that there never was a creditable, cohesive cause.
F.T. Ernst
Tryon, North Carolina
2000, Cowles History Group, Inc. d/b/a PRIMEDIA History Group, a division of PRIMEDIA Special Interest Publications.
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Death comes too soon for Lincoln to summon his better angels.
By the spring of 1865, as Abraham Lincoln looked forward to his second term as president, exhaustion got the better of him. Just weeks past his 56th birthday, he carried himself like a man who was old and decrepit and had lost so much weight that his dry, sallow skin hung on his cheekbones and dark circles shadowed his eyes. Poor Mr. Lincoln is looking so brokenhearted, so completely worn out, I fear he will not get through the next four years, his wife, Mary, told an aide. Lincoln himself acknowledged he wasnt well. I am a tired man, he told one visitor. Sometimes I think I am the tiredest man on earth.
The war had battered Lincoln, and he had battered himself. Since gaining national prominence in the late 1850s, he had stumbled several times and had to pick himself up, typically wiser for the experience but bruised nonetheless. His House Divided speech of 1858 taught him the perils of saying too much, after Southerners interpreted his words as those of a closet abolitionist and responded accordingly. His studied silence between his 1860 election and his 1861 inauguration showed the dangers of saying too little, by leaving Southern moderates nothing with which to answer the radical secessionists. His repeated failure to find a fighting general, until he hit upon Ulysses Grant in 1864, prolonged the war excessively. Even his successes exacted a moral and psychic toll. The Emancipation Proclamation required him to throw out most of what he had said and thought about the power of the federal government to restrain slavery in the states. The appalling costs of the Unions battlefield victories drove him to blame Providence, which mysteriously let the carnage continue. But what kind of peace? A victors peace, with the South punished for its sins? Or a peace of reconciliation, which summoned the better angels he had cited in his first inaugural address? This was not only a question of policy, but also a question of character. Who, finally, was Abraham Lincoln? He had proven himself to be a man of war. Was he also a man of peace? He had wielded the sword of righteousness; could he extend the hand of mercy? The nation, and the world, wanted to knowbut no more than Lincoln himself did.
Lincoln Pushes for National Anti-Slavery Laws
Lincoln had been preparing for the wars end for months. In his annual message of December 1864, he described the progress already made in reconstructing the Union. Louisiana and Arkansas had reestablished loyal state governments in recent months, he told the Congress, with antislavery constitutions. Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee were moving in the same favorable direction. Maryland, while an adherent to the Union and therefore not requiring reconstruction per se, nonetheless earned the presidents praise for adopting a new constitution abolishing slavery. Maryland is secure to Liberty and Union for the future, he said.
Lincoln urged Congress to follow suit and put an end to slavery once and for all. The Emancipation Proclamation, which he had issued as commander in chief, applied to the Rebel states alone, and its authority might expire with the war. The Senate the previous spring had mustered the two thirds vote necessary for ratification of a constitutional amendmentthe 13th which would outlaw slavery nationwide. But the House had subsequently balked. Without questioning the wisdom or patriotism of those who stood in opposition, Lincoln said, I venture to recommend the reconsideration and passage of the measure at the present session.
The wars end was coming, Lincoln observed, but it hadnt arrived yet. And weary though Americans were of the fighting, he cautioned against any compromise of that for which the Union had sacrificed so much. Overtures from Confederate President Jefferson Davis should be shunned. No attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Unionprecisely what we will not and cannot give.Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. Yet what was true of Davis wasnt necessarily true of all the Rebels, Lincoln added. Some of them, we know, already desire peace and reunion. The number of such may increase. They can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution.
Three weeks later, Lincoln received a message suggesting he was approaching a moment of truth in his effort to balance the reality of war against the promise of peace. General William Tecumseh Sherman had left Atlanta in November and plunged toward the sea, cutting a swath of destruction across eastern Georgia. He outpaced the news of his progress, so that for weeks Lincoln didnt know where he was. On Dec. 22, he finally sent a dispatch, which Lincoln received on the 25th. I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and also about 25,000 bales of cotton, Sherman wrote.
Lincoln was delighted by the news. Many, many thanks, he responded. He shared with Sherman some earlier misgivings: When you were about to leave Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful. But believing that the general knew his job, he had kept quiet. Now he was glad he had. The honor is all yours, he congratulated Sherman. Yet he had a hard time restraining his impatience. What next? he asked, before catching himself: I suppose it will be safer if I leave Gen. Grant and yourself to decide.
But he couldnt help wishing for more. A week later Sherman wrote to Henry W. Halleck, the chief of staff, explaining his intentions. I do not think I can employ better strategy than I have hitherto done, namely make a good ready and then move rapidly to my objective, Sherman said. Lincoln read this message and responded to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton: While Gen. Shermans get a good ready is appreciated, and is not to be overlooked, time, now that the enemy is wavering, is more important than ever before. Being on the down-hill, and somewhat confused, keep him going. Please say so much to Genl. Sherman.
Stanton conveyed Lincolns impatience to Sherman, who marched northward through the Carolinas. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives took up the 13th Amendment again. General Shermans progress and apparent relentlessness won the amendment some new votes, as did lobbying by Lincoln. The passage of this amendment will clinch the whole subject; it will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close, the president promised Rep. James Rollins of Missouri. Indeed, Lincoln was so pleased that he signed the approved measure, despite knowing that neither his signature nor his approval was constitutionally required. The Senate slapped the presidents wrist a week later, passing a resolution asserting that such approval was unnecessary.
Lincoln ignored the sanction. He happily told a crowd gathered beneath his White House window that the 13th Amendment was a very fitting if not an indispensable adjunct to the winding up of the great difficulty of the war. Once ratified by the states, he said, it would obviate concerns about the enduring validity of the Emancipation Proclamation, and would remove all causes of disturbance between the sections. He congratulated the Congress, the country and himself for this great moral victory.
Morality could imply either righteousness or mercythe sword or the olive branchand Lincoln still hadnt chosen between the competing principles when he delivered his second inaugural address in early March 1865. As if reflecting the profound weariness he felt, and perhaps reflecting too Mary Lincolns fears that his days were dwindling, he confined himself to fewer words than any president since George Washington in 1793, when the Father of His Country had simply said thanks for reelection and lets get on with the job. Lincoln explained his terseness on the grounds that the war remained the overriding issue of public affairs, and that he had already explained his war policies at length.
Yet he felt obliged to summarize what the momentous struggle meant. In language of superficial neutrality All dreaded it; all sought to avert it, he said of the warhe nonetheless levied judgment against the rebellious South. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. In other words, the South attempted to murder the republic, the North simply to defend it.
Lincoln declined to dignify Southern arguments about states rights with any mention. Slaverythe Southern property interest in human fleshwas the essence of the conflict. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war.
Lincoln again employed disingenuous neutrality in declaring that each side had claimedand still claimed the sanction of heaven for its actions. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. Yet Lincoln knew that God understood the difference. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens faces, he said. But he immediately reverted to the language of moral relativism: Let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The War Comes to a Close
Lincoln had long since convinced himself that the war was Gods will, and he now sought to convince his listeners, in language of fierce righteousness that might have made an Old Testament prophet blanch. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-mans two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said, The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
Yet Lincoln ended on a note of mercy: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nations wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The presidents words sent shivers through many who heard and read them, although no one could say for certain what they meant. Was Lincoln endorsing more war, or peace? Northern Unionists nonetheless applauded. An editorialist said Lincolns inaugural message should be printed in gold; Frederick Douglass, the African American leader, called it a sacred effort.
Lincoln valued the praise. Everyone likes a compliment, he admitted in a letter to the New York political boss Thurlow Weed. He told Weed he expected his inaugural message to wear as well asperhaps better thananything I have produced. As for those who didnt like what he had said, he could only reflect that a prophet was rarely honored in his own time or his own country. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world.
God continued to govern, in the Unions favor, during the following month. With Sherman sweeping up through the Carolinas and Phil Sheridan closing in from western Virginia, Grant drove Robert E. Lee from Richmond on April 2 and captured the abandoned Con federate capital. Lincoln couldnt resist visiting the city, which starkly evinced the cost of the conflict. The entire business portion of the city is a heap of smoldering ruins, a newsman accompanying the president recorded. And nothing but the absence of wind saved the entire city from destruction. Richmonds African-American population rejoiced at the coming of their liberator. Bless the Lord, there is the great Messiah! one elderly black man proclaimed. Others echoed the sentiment: Bless the Lord! Father Abrahams come!
With victory apparently within reach, Lincoln urged his commanders to finish the job. Secretary of War Stanton passed along a telegram from Sheridan, which Lincoln quoted to Grant: Gen. Sheridan says, If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender. Let the thing be pressed. Grant did so, and on April 9 forced Lees surrender in Virginia at Appomattox Court House.
When the news reached Washington, the city erupted in celebration. Thousands tramped through a spring rain up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, where they surrounded the building and beat the lawn to a muddy mess. They shouted for Lincoln, who, uncomfortable as ever speaking off the cuff, told the throng he would have something more formal to say later.
We cant wait! they shouted. We want it now!
I shall have nothing to say if you dribble it all out of me before, he replied, to much laughter.
A quartermasters band had accompanied the rowdy group of marchers, and Lincoln made a special request. I have always thought Dixie one of the best tunes I have ever heard, he said. Nodding toward the Potomac River, he continued, Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. More laughter. I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. Still more laughter, and the band struck up the Southern favorite.
The end of the war might have meant that mercy would win out over righteousness in Lincolns policy, and perhaps in Lincolns soul. God apparently had exacted all the blood recompense for slavery required; now Lincoln and America could turn to binding up the nations wounds. On the other hand, the end of the war complicated matters in all sorts of ways. Lincoln lost his ability to set aside the Constitution where it conflicted with what he thought the country needed; his pleasure at the progress of the 13th Amendment demonstrated his understanding of this loss. More tellingly, the end of the war might deprive him of the confidence he had acquired that heaven guided his hand. He had needed to believe he was Gods instrument when tens of thousands of lives hung on his decisions; his need, and likely his ability, to believe this would lessen as the stakes diminished. And mercy, while easy to recognize when contrasted to the savagery of war, became much more elusive during peace. Where did mercy or for that matter righteousnesslie between the wish of white Southerners for an end to strife and the demands of black Southerners for a social and political revolution?
The Legacy of Lincolns Death
How Lincoln planned to confront those contradictions became stunningly moot when John Wilkes Booth mortally shot the president in the back of his head at Fords Theatre on April 14. The murder froze Lincoln in the American mind. Northerners saw him as a prophet and a martyr. The shooting took place on Good Friday evening; 36 hours later, from Easter pulpits all across the North, ministers made the connection plain. Our Moses has been taken, A.G. Thomas declared in Philadelphia. John Blake told his Episcopal flock in Bridgeport, Conn.: As God sent Moses to deliver the children of Israel from slavery, so, I believe, he sent Abraham Lincoln to deliver us. A.D. Mayo of Cincinnati likened Lincoln to Jesus, quoting St. Paul: Without the shedding of blood is no remission. Unitarian Richard Eddy of Philadelphia contented himself calling Lincoln the martyr to liberty. George Boardman of Philadelphia denominated him thou illustrious martyr for us all.
Perhaps surprisingly, the South embraced Lincoln in death almost as quickly, if not as devoutly, as the North did. To be sure, some Southerners took pleasure in the demise of the one Northerner they saw as their principal tormentor. In Columbia, S.C., which had burned after being captured by Shermans army, young Emma LeConte rejoiced in her diary: Hurrah! Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated! And a Richmond woman who had lost her home, two sons and a daughter, pronounced: Thank god! It was the vengeance of the Lord.
But others feared for the future of the South and of themselves. African Americans were especially worried. The colored people express their sorrow and sense of loss in many cases with sobs and loud lamentations! a schoolteacher in South Carolina wrote. Another teacher, in Union controlled Charleston, heard African Americans saying, Secesh come back. Were going to be slaves again.
Many Southern whites evinced dismay too. John Jones of Virginia, a civilian staffer in the Confederate government wrote: The occurrence might be a calamity for the South. Possibly the Federal soldiers, supposing the deed to have been done by a Southern man, might become uncontrollable and perpetrate deeds of horror on the unarmed people. A Tennessee businessman worried similarly: Instead of peace I now fear anarchy without law. Eliza Andrews of Georgia called Lincolns assassination a terrible blow to the South, for it places that vulgar renegade, Andy Johnson, in power. The Richmond Whig agreed, accounting the presidents death the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South. Jefferson Davis described it as a great misfortune to the South. John C. Breckinridge, one of Lincolns opponents in the 1860 presidential election, and the last Confederate secretary of war, said simply, The South has lost its best friend.
As Reconstruction unfolded, first under Andrew Johnson and then under the Radical Republicans in Congress, even those Southerners initially pleased at Lincolns death increasingly adopted Breckinridges view. The result was an unexpected convergence between Northerners and Southerners on the historical and political significance of Lincoln. Yet the two sides differed on the nature of his significance. The North looked to Lincoln as the man of war he had been, the South to Lincoln as the man of peace he might have become.
H.W. Brands is a history professor at the University of Texas and the author of 22 books. His most recent is Traitor to His Class, a biography of Franklin Roosevelt.
Ron Maxwell is the director of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. The latter, which appeared in theaters eight years ago, was a four-hour experience (3 hours, 45 minutes plus a 15-minute intermission), unusually long for a movie. Yet, over an hour of film had to be left on the cutting-room floor to trim it to that length. With the release of the extended directors cut of Gods and Generals now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, viewers can see what had to be left out, including the scenes involving a John Wilkes Booth character. Jay Wertz, a frequent contributor to HistoryNet, recently interviewed Maxwell about the new version and his next project, Copperhead.
Q: The extended directors cut of Gods and Generals, now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, is premiering eight years after the original release of the film. Whats new in this version, and why should those who saw the film in theaters see it now?
A: We originally filmed a screenplay that was over 200 pages. So we knew when we were filming that we had at least four hours of material. When we got into the post-production, there was a debate that went on many months. Should we release two movies over two yearsor should we release just one? Ted Turner [and] the executives at Warner Brothers left it up to me, as the filmmaker. And I struggled with it. Finally, I thought it would not be a good idea to break what I call the Homeric arc of the films main character, who was Stonewall Jackson. So in order to retain that dramatic structure of the rise of a relatively obscure professor to become one of the greatest military leaders in history and then to see his death (ironically as the result of friendly fire) metaphorically as the coup de gracethe death of the ConfederacyI thought you needed to see that all in one experience. So once that decision was made we had the task of cutting this five hours of material down to the maximum releasable length for one movie.
We had tests at various theaters across America in the summer and early fall of 2002 and finally locked it down at the length it was released at, approximately 3 hours, 45 minutes plus a 15-minute intermission. So it was still a four-hour experience for the moviegoer. As a result, we left at least an hour to an hour-and-a-halfs worth of material on the cutting-room floor. This had two negative consequences for our theatrical release: No. 1, because we had to take so much out, I must confess the story-telling became disjointed in a way that we just couldnt completely fix. The second thing that it didit was still a four-hour experience for the moviegoerso it still depressed the turnout and we ended up falling between two stools. We had a film that was not as good as the film we had filmed dramatically in a storytelling fashion, and we depressed the turnout because of its length. In retrospect, I would have gone with the suggestion made by Warner Brothers studio executives who were 100% correct to release the full film, the full five hours as two movies over two years.
The good news is that eight years after the theatrical release we have now restored the complete film, so the dramatic problems and continuity which were inherit in the theatrical version are addressed. The film is more coherent, and a lot of what we added back not only makes more sense in terms of the storytelling but a lot of the character and character development. You get to know Tom and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Colonel Ames better. You get to know all of Jacksons aides de camp better. You have more time with Jim Lewis and another Afro-Virginian who was completely cut out of the theatrical version, which gives more insight into the conditions and the aspects of Afro-Virginians who were drawn into the Confederate war willy-nilly by the circumstances of their lives, not because they necessarily wanted to be in it. All of this enriches the story in a very personal way, which makes you care more about all the characters. Also, theres more of the civilians in it; theres more of Fanny Chamberlain; theres more of Jane Beal and Anna Jackson.
That hour that went back in which also includes the brief foray into the Battle of Antietam. None of these battles do we pretend this is the Battle of Fredericksburg or this is the Battle of Antietam because you would need entire movies to do that. We only see them through the eyes of our leading characters as it affects them, and to that extent we try to be as historically accurate as possible. Finally, the last piece that was completely removed from the theatrical version is the fascinating subplot with John Wilkes Booth, where we have re-created all of his authentic theatrical performances. We put him on the stage, in the play, in the role he was playing, on the date he was playing it, and that serves as a powerful commentary by the greatest poet of the English language, William Shakespeare, who seems to comment [on the films storyline] through the parts that John Wilkes Booth is playing. It serves as a kind of Elizabethan Greek Chorus on the events of the Civil War.
So its not simply that the directors cut is an hour longer than the theatrical film. Its an entirely different animal. The entire film has been restored to its original concept and also technically [improved]. We re-mixed it. We added a lot of score that no one heard before. We re-colorized it. Its in every way a different, and I think a far superior product, than the theatrical feature film which was released in 2003.
Q: A major aspect of the story of Gods and Generals is the belief systems of the four main characters, Robert E. Lee, Joshua Chamberlain, Winfield Scott Hancock and, of course most importantly, Thomas J. Jackson. How does their portrayal in the film reveal these belief systems and their impact?
A: I could have made Gods and Generals with much less reference to the belief systems of the protagonists, and that would have been a valid choice and I would not criticize a filmmaker who took that choice. I chose to do otherwise because in doing my own research I found that especially in the case of Jackson his faith permeated his daily existence and it influenced his character to such an extent that to not bring it into the story would have indeed created an incomplete if not an altogether erroneous picture of who Jackson was.
One can safely assume based on the historical record that most Americans at the time of the Civil War were believing, practicing Christians. Of course there were other faiths in America at the time but the overwhelming religious ethos in America in the middle of the 19th century was Christian and people variously had different commitments to it and expressed it differently. Its not my job as the filmmaker to sit in judgment [of their commitment to their faith], anymore than its my job to sit in judgment of the motivations of the soldiers who wore blue or the soldiers who wore gray. I am trying to present all the characters in their full view to give them their full-throated reasons for being in the war. After this study and after this considerable consideration, I decided that Jacksons Christian faith needed to be articulated at appropriate times. Some critics found this off-putting. They found the film too preachy. The film doesnt preach. It would be unfair and judgmental to either put Jackson on a pedestal or to try to make him look silly. I tried to present it as he really was to the best of my ability. This is my personal interpretation, articulated by the wonderful actor Steven Lang, of an idea, a presentation that we hope is valid of who Jackson is. His faith, I think, is accurately portrayed, as is Lees faith, as is Joshua Chamberlains. All of those characters make references to their faith through the film, but the one who was most upfront about it was Thomas Jonathan Jackson.
Jackson personally abhorred slavery. As we know by the historical record he set up a school to teach Afro-Virginian slaves to read and write, which technically in Virginia at the time was illegal. He didnt consider himself superior to black people or that white people were superior to black people. In that sense he was liberated. He had also accepted that things would be changed in Gods time. Now when we look back in the view of hindsight of 150 years later that might seem cold and callous to us. How could any humane person not want slaves to be liberated instantly and to do everything in their power to change that condition instantly today, not to leave it to some abstract future date? But as a filmmaker I have to put myself in the context of the time and the place and thats how Jackson and Lee and many other God-fearing highly ethical, highly moral people thoughtthat through the institutions of law and the legislative process this egregious institution of slavery would be cured in time.
On the other side, you have Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who is also a believing Christian but who sees his Christian role in a different light. He, like Wilburforce in England, understood Christianity to be a liberating force. If you believe in a just God, you have to become a tool of his justice to correct wrongs and grievous sins and to change things in this world. Therefore part of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlains motivationalthough he was an abolitionist and even though he started the war like most soldiers in blue as a crusade to save the Unionafter the Emancipation Proclamation he, like many soldiers in blue, added a second reason to fight the war against the Confederacy. So his Christianity affected him and many other Northerners and it became a crusade to liberate the black man. So in this sense both these different views of Christianity are woven through the characters and the motivations of the film.
Q: How in the film and through the eyes of the characters does each side justify the cause for which they are fighting?
A: [For] anyone who has seen Gettysburg or Gods and Generals or hopefully this longer versionthe directors cut of Gods and Generalsit should be obvious that a deep concern of mine is to try to understand why people were fighting. The first thing you see when you read your first book about the Civil War or see your first film, whether youre 8 years old or 50, is youre struck by the horrific destruction and slaughter. It is so immensely sad. It is such a huge tragedy that the first question in your mind is what were they thinking? So it was a big challenge for me to address that question. I am not interested as a filmmaker to explore the motivations of the opportunists, the war profiteers and the sadists. I was interested in why did the good people get involved. Why did the people of honor, of high ethical standard, of selflessness, of courage, the people who had a sense of duty, the people who had a great sense of humanity, why did they so readily take part in the killing and the destruction and the warfare that went on for more than four years? Why did no one say, Stop? It was a fight to the death, and it only ended when to continue it for another day it would have changed from warfare to just murder.
It was a high priority for me to give every character in the film a chance to explore why they were in the war. I was rewarded for asking that question by a torrent of insults and personal attacks by the mainstream motion picture critics who dont think there is any honorable, honest reason why any Confederate fought in the war. I found it to be revealing of the pervasive ignorance as well as the high-minded self-righteousness of so many people in powerful media positions who think they understand the Civil War but really dont have a clue. So, yes, it was very important for me to give all the main characters whether they were blue or whether they were gray to try to wrestle onscreen in different scenes with why they were fighting the war, to challenge themselves and to challenge the people who they were with in those scenes, why they were fighting. Now its up to the viewer to watch the films and say, I disagree with that reason. I think they were wrong. Fine. But I think, whats the point of making a film on the Civil War unless we try to go there to where those people lived and try to understand what made those people tick; try to illuminate their condition because they can no longer hear us? But if we listen very, very carefully and make a real big effort to open our hearts and our minds, we can hear them. And that is the rationale for both of my Civil War films.
Q: How can films such as Gods and Generals and Gettysburg and related commemorative events help modern understanding of what happened 150 years ago?
A: The Civil War belongs to our American heritage, but it also belongs to world heritage, because while its very particular and specific to our culture and our history its also an example of the human condition. Its important as members of the American family but also as members of the human race to try to understand how we get into wars, why we get into wars, and what happens to us when the wars are unleashed. Making films about the war, writing books about the war, having commemorative events of the war, all these are expressions of trying to get to this understanding. As we go into these questions, these almost imponderable questions, along the way we discover these extraordinary characters, some of them are heroic, some of them are despicable, but they are all human and we are met by these extraordinary characters. We are fascinated by them. We want to know more about them, and we want to know about their stories. In terms of our national story, the Civil War is a very, very rich place to explore these stories, and I hasten to add that these films also play to wide audiences around the world; so, even people who may not know the particulars about American history find these stories engaging because they understand the core element in the American Civil War, which is the story of fratricide. Thats the story they recognize, they understand and sympathize with. I think we will always visit the Civil War. It raises so many questions, that the answers to these questions are limitless.
Q: In an industry dominated by fantasy and comic book characters, the challenges of bringing a historical drama to the screen and bringing an audience to the product are very great. What are you and Warner Brothers Home Video doing to handle these challenges and to promote the new version of Gods and Generals?
A: The premiere [was] on July 22, [2011], which was the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Manassas. We had that premiere not far from the battlefield itself, at the beautiful new theater on the George Mason campus. Its rare that directors cuts get premieres like that, so Warner Brothers did a uniquely fabulous opening for the film. They flew in a dozen cast-members from around the country. The initial feedback that I get is that the [home video] sales have been very strong and Ive noticed a very, very positive response from viewers who post, who write the reviews at IMDB and other places, so its been deeply satisfying for me to see how this version has been almost universally embraced by the public.
The plan is to do a special screening to coincide with the 150th anniversaries of [each of] the four battles of the directors cut. So we did First Manassas. The next one coming up will be the fall of [2012], the Battle of Antietam, then December of the same year will be the Battle of Fredericksburg and then in May of the following year the Battle of Chancellorsville. Im sure well try to find suitable theaters in towns close to those battlefields. They will be publicized well so that fans of the film and the general public will know about them well in advance.
Q: Youre starting a new historical film, Copperhead. Our readers will be very excited to know anything we can about this upcoming project.
A: Were going to be filming Copperhead this spring. The original screenplay is by Bill Kauffman, based on the 19th-century novel by Harold Frederic, and I am the producer/director. (Copperhead was originally serialized in Scribners Magazine, JulyNovember 1893, before being published in book form; it is sometimes called a novella.Editor) Its a very dramatically intense story set in New York State in 1862 and 1863 and its about the price of dissent, the cost of dissent. As the title indicates, Copperhead was the extremely derisive term used to insult those Northerners who were opposed to the war. It was a big movement in the North. They wanted to end the war, and this film explores the anti-war movement in the North through the conflict of one family in one town. Its a work of fiction, but its based on real events. I think it will explore ground that has not been explored at all in cinema (even though there have been movies about pacifists in the Civil War) these people were politically opposed to war, so I think we are moving into new ground here. Thats interesting for me because I wanted to be challenged in an area in which I had not worked before. I think it will be new ground for the audience. Were very excited about this. We expect to have it in theaters either late 2012 or early 2013.
By Lee Enderlin
A furious Stonewall Jackson watched impotently as his proud Confederates stumbled down the hillside at Kernstown, Va. Give them the bayonet, Jackson imploredbut no one obeyed.
The Confederate general didnt want to fighthe wanted to pray. It was, after all, the Sabbath, and if the Good Lord found it necessary to rest a day after Creation, then the least mankind could do was refrain from killing each other on the Lords Day. If, however, an uncooperative Union commander got in the way on Sunday, then that must be Gods will, after all.
Those were the thoughts of Maj. Gen. Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson on the afternoon of March 23, 1862, as he surveyed the ground around Kernstown, Va. The religious yet pragmatic Jackson knew a battle was upcoming, and despite his preferences, he deployed his troops accordingly outside the tiny Shenandoah Valley town.
About to get under way was a strange little fight, one that very well may have lengthened the war to its ultimate four-year life span, adding hundreds of thousands of names to the melancholy roll of the dead.
The preliminaries for the Battle of Kernstown began the previous day. Jacksons cavalry commander, the brilliant if undisciplined Colonel Turner Ashby, had been leading his small group on a reconnaissance foray in the strategic Winchester area, some three and a half miles north of Kernstown. Winchester, Va., was important because of its location at the head of the Shenandoah Valley.
Besides being a valuable Southern breadbasket, the Shenandoah was also a key overland route for Rebel armies to outflank Washington to the north, or for Union forces to drive deep into the Confederacy to the south. Both sides quickly recognized its significance. Indeed, Winchester, as the northern gate to the valley and the hub of nine major wagon roads and the Winchester and Potomac Railroad, was so important that it changed hands 72 times during the war.
To keep the valley out of Union hands, Jackson was ordered there in November 1861. Under his command at his first Valley headquarters in Winchester were 2,000 mostly inexperienced troops. His gunners were so green they did not even know how to load their only two cannon. By the end of the year, however, he had 10,000 men of varying degrees of quality, including his old command at Bull Run, the 1st Virginia (Stonewall) Brigade.
By March 1862, his army had dwindled again to less than 5,000 men due to a bitterly cold winter campaign waged in northern Virginia along the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley. Although Jackson had suffered few battle losses during the campaign, most of his men had been left behind to garrison several towns recaptured from the Federals.
Union commanders were not idle during this time, either, but their attention was focused farther to the east, on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. From there, Union forces could either defend Washington, or if the Confederates remained quiet, launch an invasion of their own into the Valley. Over the winter, three divisions were quietly assembled along the Potomac. With their support personnel, they numbered 38,000. By the end of February 1862, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks had crossed some of them into Virginia at Harpers Ferry.
Jackson had been back at Winchester for about a month now; after hearing of Banks move, he realized his force of 4,200 men was no match for the Federals. They pulled out of Winchester on March 11. It was none too soon. Banks, although slowed by the problem of getting his heavy equipment across the Potomac, arrived in Winchester on March 12.
With the Confederates in retreat, Banks felt comfortable in sending some of his command to aid Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan in his upcoming Peninsular Campaign. On March 14, Brig. Gen. John Sedgwicks division started marching east. Then, on March 17, Banks sent Brig. Gen. James Shields division after Jackson, who had retreated 18 miles to Strasburg.
Shields, like his commanding officer, was a political appointee to military office. Unlike Banks, however, Shields was also an aggressive soldier. In 1842, he had challenged an out-of-office politician to a duel over an alleged libel. Fortunately, the duel never took placethe politicians name was Abraham Lincoln. By the time war broke out, the men had settled their differences and become friends. In addition, Shields had some practical military experience, having served as a brigade commander during the Mexican War.
Shields wasted no time marching his men to Strasburg, then another five miles southwest to Woodstock the next day. Jackson though, was not in the neighborhood.
Stonewall had brought his command to Mount Jackson, some 37 miles southwest of Woodstock. Between Jackson and Shields were Ashbys cavalrymen, acting as a very effective screen for the tiny main force. A few of Shields own cavalrymen actually reached the Mount Jackson area, but were prevented by Ashbys men from learning anything about Jacksons deployment.
Over March 19 and 20, Shields brought his entire division back to Winchester. There, the first of a number of faulty intelligence reports that led eventually to the Battle of Kernstown was delivered. In it, Shields affirmed to Banks that only a small Confederate cavalry contingent remained in the Shenandoah Valley.
Banks couldnt have been happier. His assignment had proven far easier than expected. He ordered a second division, under Brig. Gen. Alpheus Williams, to leave for McClellans command the next day. Banks himself returned to Washington on the 22nd. This left only Shields 7,000-man division in the Valley. In addition, he had 750 cavalry and 900 artillerymen with 24 guns. Offhand, that appeared to be plenty.
With the Union confidently pulling out of the Valley, having barely raised a sweat, the stage now belonged to Ashby. He and his troopers had done a magnificent job screening Jackson from Union horsemen and had followed Shields back down the Valley to Winchester. On the evening of the 21st, Ashby sent word to Stonewall that large numbers of enemy soldiers were leaving for the east. Jackson, as incensed as Banks was elated, had his much-vaunted foot cavalry marching back northeast by dawn. Besides defending the Valley, his orders had been to tie down excess Union troops that could be used to threaten Richmond. So far, it appeared he had failed. That galled him.
Except for Jacksons movement, most of the 22nd was quiet. Late in the day, however, Ashby became antsy. Around 4 p.m., he moved up his artillery (Chews Battery, Virginia Horse) and began shelling Union skirmishers posted on the southern outskirts of Winchester.
At first, Ashby was successful, forcing the Union troops back toward the town. However, Shields reacted immediately and brought up reinforcements, leading them himself. Skirmishing was heavy, but eventually Ashby was forced back. The shooting died out around sunset, with the Union troops halting about halfway between Winchester and Kernstown.
Shields, however, was out of the fight. He had suffered a broken arm from a shell fragment. As he was leaving the battle, Shields ordered Colonel Nathan Kimball, commander of the First Brigade, to take command of the division. Kimball, also a veteran of the Mexican War, thus became the third commanding officer to lead the division in just three weeks. (The original commander, Brig. Gen. Frederick Lander, had died of illness on March 2.) Shields himself had taken command only two weeks earlier.
Overnight, Shields sent Kimball orders to clear Ashbys observation force from the area. The wounded commander also sent a brigade north to confuse the enemy, but kept it within marching distance of Winchester.
In the meantime, Ashby delivered another report to Jackson. Based on his observations and some intelligence from misinformed Confederate sympathizers, the cavalry officer told Stonewall that the Union forces before them numbered only 3,000 men in four regiments, a small cavalry contingent and one battery of artillery. And even these were scheduled to return to Harpers Ferry on the 23rd. Shields ruse had worked all too well.
On the 23rd, the fighting resumed early. Kimballs First Brigade continued to push back Ashbys cavalry, although it had been reinforced with four companies of early arriving infantry. At this point, the key event of the day occurred. The pressure on Ashby was enormous, and he continued to retreatall the way to the other side of Kernstown. In so doing, he abandoned the single most important piece of terrain in the area, a small knoll called Pritchards Hill just north of the village, which happened to be the only high ground in the area and was also centrally located.
Realizing the hills importance, Kimball stationed his entire brigade plus two batteries of artillery in a strong defensive position. From here, he had full command of the battlefield below.
Kimball, probably in an effort to paint himself as an energetic, bold leader, later put the completion time of these movements as early as 8 a.m. Other sources set the action between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. In any event, what cannot be disputed is that Kimball spent several hours awaiting developments and ignoring orders streaming from Shields back in Winchester. In this, he was correctShields information about ongoing events was inevitably out of date by the time Shields orders in turn reached Kimball.
In the meantime, Kimball completed his preparations, moving one brigade and some artillery to his left flank, even with the southern edge of Pritchards Hill, and holding one brigade as a reserve out of sight behind the hill. His right flank was left open. Kimball then determined to remain on the defensive.
About midafternoon, Jackson arrived at Kernstown. After conferring with Ashby, he was content that the majority of the small Union force was entrenched on Pritchards Hill, directly in front of him. Unfortunately, he broke one of his own rules and failed to reconnoiter the situation for himself, opting to accept Ashbys report at face value. (Ironically, it was one of these personal reconnaissance missions that was later to cost Jackson his life at the hands of his own troops at Chancellorsville, Va.)
To his right, Jackson knew, was another contingent of enemy troops. Although it appeared obvious to him that this force couldnt be very large, the terrain was forbidding. The Union soldiers were deployed along Hogg Run, which ran east to west. In addition, Confederate troops would have to cross large areas of open territory before reaching the run, exposing them to fire from Pritchards Hill.
An assault up the hill directly in front of him was enticing because the important Valley Turnpike ran along the eastern foot. But Jackson quickly realized that such an attack by his dog-tired men would be futile.
Still, the left flank held much promise. It was free of enemy troops and its commanding feature, Sandy Ridge, was covered by dense forest that would provide cover from the guns on the hill, although the Confederates would have to cross through some wheatfields to reach the woods. In addition, Hogg Run broke into two forks between Kernstown and Pritchards Hill, neither of which was much more than a stream. The northern fork snaked back toward the hill where Jackson didnt want to go anyway, while the southern fork was both short and shallow. The troops who couldnt march around it could easily ford it. The woods to the west, then, would be where Jackson would try to outflank the Yankees.
He gave the orders to deploy. A few of Ashbys men were sent to skirmish along Hogg Run and hold that flank while the rest of the cavalry and his three brigades wheeled left and marched for the woods. Almost from the first, however, things began to unravel.
Jacksons lead brigade, under Brig. Gen. Samuel Fulkerson, marched off smartly under the covering fire of Rebel cannon in the vicinity of Kernstown. The return fire, however, was deadlyand far more hearty than anticipated. The Southerners ran for the safety of the ridge.
Jackson, chastened, reacted with something close to panic. He ordered one regiment of the Stonewall Brigade to move forward to support Fulkerson. The brigades commander, Brig. Gen. Richard B. Garnett, later to become a key figure in the battle, hurried off to get the 33rd Virginia under way. While he was away, a second command arrived from Jackson ordering him to move up the entire brigade. Unfortunately, Garnett wasnt around to receive it.
Jackson saw only a quarter of Garnetts men moving and grew furious. He personally took command of the stationary units and ordered them forward. Garnett now got news of Jacksons second set of orders and, totally confused, halted the 33rd Virginia in place while he went off to get clarification. Meanwhile, two of the three regiments Jackson was commanding wandered off, their officers unsure if they should be following Garnetts or Jacksons orders.
Kimball, in the meantime, was enjoying an eagles eye view of the Confederate confusion. Although he certainly must have enjoyed the spectacle, especially since some of it was occurring within range of his guns, he was also shrewd enough to realize that his right flank was being threatened. He ordered his hidden reserve brigade to counter the enemy movements.
Eventually, Jackson got his command somewhat straightened out. Fulkersons two tiny regiments (only 400 men) had plodded on and found themselves emerging from the woods. Halfway across a clearing ran a stone wall half a mile long. At the same time, Kimballs reserve brigade emerged from the other side of the clearing. The Confederates won the race for the wall.
The situation stabilized. The Union attempted two assaults on the wall, but both were repulsed. Garnett brought up most of the Stonewall Brigade, taking up position along the wall to Fulkersons right. Kimball moved his own infantry off Pritchards Hill and attacked Garnett. The fighting now became furious as the stone wall changed hands twice over the next two hours. Meanwhile, Jackson had become painfully aware of the trap. A subordinate had found a high clearing from which he could see Kimballs men coming off Pritchards Hill. His report was far more accurate than Ashbyshe saw 9,000 to 10,000 Federals in the area. Say no more of it, Jackson replied. We are in for it.
The impasse at the stone wall continued until around 6 p.m. Union troops came on in wave after wave while the Confederates resolutely counterattacked and then defended their ground, until finally the Stonewall Brigade ran out of ammunition. In addition, Union cavalry were beginning to demonstrate around the Southern left flank. The crisis was reached.
Garnett later said that if he had only been able to confer with Jackson, Stonewall would have concurred with his subsequent decision to withdraw. Jackson, however, was in the rear, bringing up a reserve regiment in an attempt to break the stalemate. Garnett held off as long as he thought possible, but felt compelled to eventually sound the retreat. Unfortunately, the retreat soon became a rout.
Suddenly, Jackson found himself swimming in a ragged sea of frightened soldiers now headed in the opposite direction. Moving on, he found Garnett, but between the two of them, they were unable to rally the troops. Jacksons antiquated admonition to give them the bayonet! held no sway with soldiers who were out of bullets. In short order, Fulkersons men, too, were forced to retire; their right flank was exposed. They, too, ran off in panic.
Fortunately, the two brigades that had borne the brunt of the Union fighting were too disorganized for effective pursuit. Jackson, ever an optimist, hoped that the 5th Virginia Regiment might still win the day, but Garnett made the decision that later led to his court-martial. Instead of ordering the 5th Virginia forward to attack as Jackson wished, Garnett had it deploy in a defensive position to cover the retreat. It was gratifyingly effective in this role, garnering enough time to allow Jackson to move his last brigade into the area in support. That night, Jackson pitched his camp four and a half miles back down the Valley Turnpike at Newtown.
Beginning that night and continuing to the end of his life, Shields bragged that he was the only Union general to defeat Jackson in an open battle. While technically correct, the honor, if not the rank, more accurately belonged to Kimball. On the day Shields resumed command after recovering from his injuries, April 30, Kimball was promoted to brigadier general for his victory over Jackson.
The hapless Garnett, however, had incurred Jacksons wrath. Although widely regarded as Jacksons best general, Garnett was arrested immediately after the battle for his unauthorized retreat. The affair actually got as far as a court-martial in August, but after only two officers testified (one of them Jackson), the war intervened and nothing more came of it. Garnett remained an admirer of Jackson and was even an honorary pallbearer at Stonewalls funeral, despite his well-publicized difficulties with him. Kernstown was not the first run-in between the two, only the most serious. It is fair to say that, at the least, Garnetts admiration of Jackson was not mutual. Garnett returned to command, but was killed at Gettysburg a year later while he was leading a brigade in the famed Picketts Charge.
The Battle of Kernstown was, all things considered, a minor one. According to Jackson, he had 3,087 infantry and 27 cannon under him. Ashbys cavalry numbered only 290, which Jackson generously attributed to heavy cavalry duty and the extent of the country to be protected in his official report. However, a month later, Jackson relieved Ashby of command for his lack of discipline.
Among the charges was that Ashby allowed the other half of his troops to wander about the Kernstown area on their own because Ashby did not believe they would be needed until the next day. Ashby got his command back three days later after a vigorous protest. The total Confederate losses over the two days numbered just 80 dead, 375 wounded, and 263 captured or missing.
On the other side, Shields reported his losses at 118 killed, 450 wounded, 22 captured or missing.
Yet, despite these small numbers, Kernstown was one of the most decisive engagements of the war. The Confederates, though soundly defeated, ultimately gained the most. As historian Bruce Catton observed: The victory meant nothing at all, whereas the mere fact that the battle had been fought meant a great deal. Indeed, the ramifications of this odd little affair reached all the way to President Lincoln.
None of the Union generals with an interest in the Shenandoah ValleyShields, Banks or McClellancould believe that Jackson would attack while being so outnumbered. They never realized that Jackson thought he outnumbered them. In their eyes, Jackson must be a far greater threat than in fact he actually was.
Banks was ordered to return immediately to the Shenandoah with Williams 9,000-man division.
But that wasnt enough. Lincoln, who suffered from an almost pathological fear of a Confederate attack upon the capital, withdrew a 40,000-man corps from McClellans command. These troops would protect Washington from the Fredericksburg area.
Meanwhile, McClellans Peninsular Campaign would just have to do without them. In addition, Lincoln took a further 10,000-man division and sent it to join 5,000 other Union troops guarding against Jackson in west Virginia (not yet a Federal state at this time).
At the very least, Jacksons 3,600 men had tied up almost 65,000 Union troops at a time when a decisive campaign to end the war quickly was being undertaken. Later, 10,000 men from Fredericksburg reinforced McClellan, but so great was Lincolns fear that he never allowed the remaining 30,000 men to march south and support McClellan with an attack on Richmonds north side.
Despite this heavy-handed interference, McClellan came within six miles of the Confederate capital and came very close to defeating the main Confederate army that June. With those extra troops, the war might very well have ended in 1862. Indeed, the ultimate reason McClellan was repulsed was that Robert E. Lee felt confident in leaving his northern flank exposed, allowing him to march his entire army east to meet the threat. Thus, Stonewall Jacksons Valley Campaign, of which Kernstown was the first major fight, had gained for the Confederacy three more years of precarious existence and bloodletting.
All of which leads back to Kernstown and one of the great causes for speculation in the Civil War. Early on the morning of the 23rd, Kimball moved a brigade under Colonel Jeremiah Sullivan to hold the flank along Hogg Run. There they sat all day while the battle raged far to the west. Their only contribution was to prevent Confederate movement toward Pritchards Hill after Kimball moved his own brigade off the hill in support of the reserve brigade that was fighting along the stone wall. Other than that, Sullivans 2,000 men did little more than skirmish with about 150 of Ashbys men.
Had Kimball been truly aggressive, it would have been an easy matter to send these men across the run toward the Valley Turnpike south of Kernstown, thus cutting off Jacksons retreat. Earlier in the battle, Jackson had left behind 1,100 men to guard against exactly this situation. But by late in the afternoon, these men had moved to their left to cover their retreating comrades. The path to the Turnpike remained virtually unguarded.
It seems that, at the very least, a more accurate appraisal of Jacksons strength might have been obtained. At best, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to destroy Jacksons army was lostperhaps, indeed, an opportunity to take Jackson himself out of the war. And who can say how much more successful McClellan might have been in the Peninsula with all those extra troops that Stonewall kept tied up? For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.
Marketing Communications Coordinator for Western New England College, Lee Enderlin of Springfield, Mass., is also a long-time freelance writer with a strong interest in military history. As further reading: Terrible Swift Sword, by Bruce Catton and Decoying the Yanks: Jacksons Valley Campaign, by Champ Clark and the Editors of Time-Life Books.
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A dwarf planet with no name is a new friend of astronomers. It was found beyond Neptune, revolving around the sun in a wide orbit.
The new dwarf planet was spotted through a telescope at the top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Even though it was imaged in 2015, it was really noticed only in February this year.
The surface of the planet is not still understood, and a better view of that would help scientists to assess its size more accurately. Its body runs 435 miles across.
A number of dwarf planets were once found in the solar system, even though many were ejected or destroyed, as bigger planets shifted into their respective places. The RR245 is among other planets discovered in the distant edges of our solar system, such as Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Pluto and Ceres, writes Science Alert.
It stands out for its orbit and size, compared to other dwarf planets the scientists chanced upon in the Kuiper belt. The Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) discovery is the biggest so far, following the discovery of more than 500 trans-Neptunian objects.
The planet is called 2015 RR245 by the International Astronomical Union. Its elliptical orbit is so wide that it takes 700 earth years to finish one orbit. The planet moves away 120 times further away from the sun.
"The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the Sun. They let us piece together the history of our Solar System. But almost all of these icy worlds are painfully small and faint: it's really exciting to find one that's large and bright enough that we can study it in detail," researcher with OSSOS, Michele Bannister, said in a statement.
"They are the closest thing to a time capsule that transports us to the birth of the Solar System," astrophysicist Pedro Lacerda from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, who wasn't involved with the discovery, told Ian Sample at The Guardian. "You can make an analogy with fossils, which tell us about creatures long gone."
@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The American space agency NASA recently announced that it is "sailing full-steam ahead in solar system investigation." The team is hopeful that the findings of the mission will help answer fundamental questions about the universe, how the solar system came into existence and where it is going and whether or not it is one of its own kinds in the universe.
NASA made the announcement ahead of the day when its Juno spacecraft is scheduled to take close-up images of the giant gaseous planet, Jupiter. The spacecraft is expected to make a close pass of the planet on August 27.
According to NASA researchers, Juno is one of the extraordinary objects present in the solar system that the space agency looks forward to. The team believes that Juno holds a number of clues to how the solar system came into existence. There are a number of similar objects present in the solar system that NASA is eager to explore in their current and future space missions.
The space agency is set to launch James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. It is a powerful telescope that the astrophysicists could potentially use to observe not only the faintest objects in the sky but also the planets along with their moons. The telescope has a great spectral and angular resolution that will allow the researchers, astronomers, and astrophysicists to observe distant targets and even observe the geological activity.
Juno, the Mars 2020 rover, and the Dawn are some of the current missions that the space agency is working on. The team at NASA will launch OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) in September 2016. For the first time in the history of astronomy, the space agency will send a spacecraft to an asteroid near Earth called Bennu. It will return in 2023 to Earth along with a few samples.
@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Pregnant women who smoke tend to have sons with low sperm production, says an Australian study.
About 404 men in their 20s were contacted for a study. Their mothers were part of infant and maternal health studies when they had been pregnant a couple of decades earlier.
By conducting testicular ultrasounds on the adults, and gathering samples of their sperms from 365 men, the study looked at the median sperm production, which is the amount of sperm produced by at least half the male participants.
Lead study author, Dr. Roger Hart of the University of Western Australia, confirmed that smoking during pregnancy can lead to a number of problems for the foetuses, including low brain development in the utero, complicated deliveries, premature birth, breathing problems as well as hyperactive childhood.
"It is a general healthy lifestyle message that women should not smoke in pregnancy, they should only start to try to conceive when they are in their optimal health, and when any co-existing medical conditions have been optimized, as this is associated with good foetal growth through pregnancy and a reduced risk of premature delivery," Hart said.
Scientists noted that the production of the sperm in the men whose mothers had smoked during pregnancy was about 19 percent lower. On the other hand, men who had been born prematurely (which is also a risk for men with mothers hooked on the fag during pregnancy) reported that they had lower testosterone as adults.
With reduced testosterone levels, men might report a low sex drive, plummeting sperm count and erectile dysfunction. Smoking might even affect the growth of the foetus.
The results were arrived at even earlier, when tests were performed on only mice. "It is harder for men with low sperm counts to conceive children, or it may take a longer time to make the partner pregnant ... If women want to have grandchildren, they shouldn't smoke," researcher at the University of Copenhagen who wasn't involved in the study, Dr. Christine Wohlfahrt-Veje, told Reuters. "Unfortunately about 25 per cent of young women today continue to smoke when they are pregnant and/or breast feeding - thereby potentially damaging their sons fertility."
The recent study on humans was published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani model and social media figure has been killed by her brother in an apparent honor killing for bringing "shame" to her family.
"I was determined either to kill myself or kill her," Muhammad Waseem, the brother, told local reports Monday. "Money matters, but family honor is more important."
He went on to tell media he drugged and strangled his sister as she had violated their family's honor with her social media posts, including a series of selfies with cleric Abdul Qavi last month.
"I planned this after her scandal with the mufti and was waiting for the right time," he says.
Waseem goes on to remark that he thinks he will be remembered with pride and honor, and by bringing honor to his family he has earned his place "in heaven."
"Girls are born to stay home and follow traditions. My sister never did that," he says.
Baloch, who's real name was Fauzia Azeem, first caught the public's eye after entering "Pakistan Idol", a local shoot-off America's "American Idol" talent show. Though she did not win, she did post a rant about the results that gave her more visibility on Facebook, which subsequently drove people to her Instagram and her other social media accounts.
Those accounts consisted of photos of herself in various states of undress, bearing cleavage or wearing bold lipstick. Described as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, Quandeel divided opinion in the deeply conservative Muslim society.
More than 500 people die in "honor killings" in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives acting over a perception "shame" has been brought on the family.
Governments have deplored the practice but done little to stop it. Many Pakistanis have called for the passage of an anti-honor killing law aimed at closing a loophole that allows family members to forgive those responsible for such killings.
Pakistan, which is 97 percent Muslim, places second to last out of 145 countries with regards to gender disparity, according to the World Economic Forum's 2015 Gender Gap Report.
@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
It is tiresome, all the expert advice on the how-to of winning more direct hotel bookings.
The simpler path is to embrace the OTAs and let them guide us to victory.
Confused?
Read on because what you will discover here is why it's a fool's errand to obsessively seek to stop OTA bookings because there is an easy way to win that OTA customer as your own. For life.
Of course we all understand the grumbles about OTAs. The commissions are steep, as much as 30% at some independents, more typically 15 to 20% for high visibility properties. That's still at least $15 out of every $100, a $400 room actually brings in only $340 at many properties.
$280 at some unfortunate independents.
That's a painful slice of revenues and thus the "get them to book direct" anxiety.
Just one problem: most of us are unlikely to win this battle. The OTAs - led by Expedia and the Priceline companies - are massive ad spenders. Priceline spent $2.8 billion on advertising in 2015. Expedia spent $3.3 billion.
Both also are huge spenders on Google and Facebook, usually ranked among the biggest.
Maybe the biggest hotel brands - such as Marriott and Hilton - can fight it out with the OTAs in the advertising arena, but not so small groups and independents.
The other line of attack for some hotel operators is to aim to net direct bookings by winning the SEO war.
Does that ever work? Expedia and Priceline can and will outbid most hotels for any important keywords. That's the painful reality of jousting with giants.
Meantime, some hotels continue to drown their website with keyword-soaked copy in the belief - however erroneous - that this will up search engine visibility and therefore bookings.
Word of advice: stop that. Now. Bad writing repels readers.
Nobody is saying don't seek to win direct traffic. By all means, too, make rational bids for select keywords but don't go obsessive in a misguided effort to win more direct traffic.
My advice is this: let the OTAs do the heavy lifting. They are good at putting themselves top of mind with consumers. Let them get the initial bookings.
I have known DoSMs who have declared war on the OTAs and, honestly, I have never understood their logic. It's rather like Luxembourg declaring war on Germany. There are no odds in favor of a victory.
But out of this defeat there is a way to grab success, just by doing two critical things when the guest arrives on property.
Seek to upsell them - gently - with a range of unique experiences, upgraded rooms, spa, and restaurant. Add a single spa treatment and a meal for two and that will bring in enough profit to let you forget the OTA's commission.
Take every opportunity to upsell because this is where your real profits on OTA-generated guests will come.
Step two: enroll the guest in a loyalty club. That means even at an independent.
Assure the guest that the best rates for future stays will be gotten by calling a private number or responding to an email that goes out only to club members.
Use this loyalty club email list for select marketing but always offer only genuinely tasty deals.
I ask you this: if you are offering better rates to loyalty club members than they can find on OTAs, why wouldn't they book direct with you? Of course they will. That means you will get them to book direct with you in the future and tell them that if they have friends and relatives who want the same treatment, it's available to them if they come to you directly.
Does this mean you'll cut the OTAs out of your bookings?
Let's hope not. Personally I want to see the OTAs do the heavy lifting in selling many of our first- time guests.
But I want to win those guests' future bookings directly and, really, it is easy if you wow them with service (thus making them want to return) then promise them a deal that will be the best they can hope to find.
That's how simple it is to tame the OTAs and transform them into your best supporters.
Babs Harrison
Babs Harrison + Partners
Babs Harrison + Partners
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Kirk Jones joined Benchmark Hospitality International in the spring of 2015. He brought with him an extensive professional background in international hospitality financial management. He has previously held positions such as executive vice president of finance for Capella Hotel Group.
Alex Cabanas, chief executive officer of Benchmark Hospitality International, has announced that Kirk Jones has been promoted to chief financial officer. The company's Benchmark Resorts & Hotels-brand portfolio merged with Gemstone Hotels & Resorts this past Monday, bringing the total number of properties managed to 58. Mr. Jones was previously senior vice president of finance for Benchmark Hospitality.
"On behalf of our newly joined management team, I congratulate Kirk on this well-deserved promotion to lead the finance and accounting functions of our growing company," said Mr. Cabanas. "Kirk was instrumental in the merger of Gemstone and Benchmark, and will lead the integration of our finance teams with a keen focus on business intelligence and improving the financial skills of all managers and department heads."
"The merger of Benchmark's and Gemstone's portfolios represents an enormous professional opportunity for our combined management team," stated Mr. Jones. "My promotion is a harbinger of wonderful opportunities to come for many of our employees. At 8000 rooms and 10,000 employees, we are in an important space for internal professional development and advancement as we integrate the two leadership and employee teams together, and move toward future growth."
Kirk Jones joined Benchmark Hospitality International in the spring of 2015. He brought with him an extensive professional background in international hospitality financial management. He has previously held positions such as executive vice president of finance for Capella Hotel Group, a company with a portfolio of independent and branded properties across the globe. He has also held property and regional financial leadership positions within several branded hotel companies, including Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, Doubletree and Embassy Suites.
This past May, Kirk Jones was honored with the 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award, presented by the Cal Poly Pomona Alumni Association. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Hotel Administration from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He earned his Master of Business Administration degree in Finance from Cleveland State University. Mr. Jones resides in The Woodlands, Texas, near Houston.
Azevedo joined Loews Hotels from Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, where as Vice President of Development, he was responsible for leading brand expansion in Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America.
Loews Hotels has announced the appointment of Alinio Azevedo as Vice President, Acquisitions and Development. A seasoned veteran with 20 years of industry experience, Azevedo oversees expansion of Loews Hotels & Resorts, Loews Regency, and the OE Collection brands via acquisition of existing assets and development of new projects in the U.S. and select international markets.
Azevedo joined Loews Hotels from Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, where as Vice President of Development, he was responsible for leading brand expansion in Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America. Along the way, he opened and staffed the company's Miami development office, creating a pipeline for 12 projects and bringing the brand into key emerging markets in the region.
Previously, Azevedo served as Global Transaction Real Estate Manager with Ernst & Young; as Development Manager of Driftwood Hospitality Management; and as Hotel Director of Novotel Ladeira do Sol Natal, a hotel owned by his family in Natal, Brazil.
"Alinio brings impressive experience and a proven track record in all aspects of hotel development to his new role," said Kirk Kinsell, President & CEO of Loews Hotels. "As we continue to seek out new opportunities, Alinio will be a key player in leading further development throughout our brands."
Azevedo earned a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering from the Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande Do Norte in Natal, Brazil, as well as an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He also attended the Ecole Superieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (ESSEC) in Paris. Azevedo resides in Miami with his wife Mariana and two daughters.
Many thought that Calvin Harris (whose real name is Adam Wiles) took a loss after his highly publicized breakup with Taylor Swift, who has already moved on to British actor Tom Hiddleston. Well, the Scotsman is back up now. Not only is his ex involved in one of the more viral social media controversies in recent memory, but its also been revealed that Harris has picked up a new squeezeone of the freshest in the world. According to Page Six, Harris, 32, is now dating the 23-year-old R&B goddess known as Tinashe. To our male readers, we apologize for this cruel blow. I feel your pain. Though if Harris cant hold on to a goody-goody like Swift, his days with the Party Favors seductress are likely numbered.
The two were spotted on a date at the Malibu hotspot Nobu, a favorite haunt of Drake and Futures. They have been seeing each other on the DL, a source told Page Six. Its only been weeks, so its still pretty casual right now.
Harris first met Tinashe when he enlisted her to guest on the track Dollar Signs, which appeared on his 2014 album Motion, and they got back in touch after his breakup with Taylor. At this point, its unclear if theyll be putting in any work in the studio in addition to the bedroom. Last week, Tinashe released her new single, Superlove, which only confirms that Harris is one lucky guy.
Calvin Harris
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When Clams Casino civilian name Mike Volpe released his groundbreaking debut mixtape Instrumentals in 2011, he was months away from graduating from Essex County College with a degree to become a physical therapists assistant. He was 23 years old at the time, an intern at the hospital in which he was born. He was about to move out of his moms house in Nutley, New Jersey, located one hour west of Manhattan, and find a regular job.
Making beats had always been just a hobby for Clams. When he completed his degree, he started making music full-time and never looked back. At that point he already had under his belt collaborations with Lil B, Soulja Boy, and other artists he met on MySpace. In the coming years he would develop close creative partnerships with stars like A$AP Rocky and Vince Staples. But the fact that he is still best-known for his trilogy of instrumental mixtapes Instrumentals, Instrumentals 2, & Instrumentals 3 testifies to the originality and complexity of his production style. It takes a rapper of unusual confidence, skill, and imagination to reckon with Clams Casinos koan-like beats and emerge unscathed.
A Clams beat
A Clams beat is unpretentious. It is epic, but usually devoid of sonorous bells, hallowed organs, weepy orchestral strings, and other cinematic signifiers. It might contain a fuzzy ambient synth or any number of disembodied voices, pummeled, distorted, reversed, and stretched with all manner of digital tools so that the original sample is hardly recognizable.
A Clams beat is a universe unto itself. It often gives off a bittersweet taste because it contains several emotions nostalgia, melancholy, hope and the listener is left to draw his own conclusions.
A Clams beat is a soundtrack to the animal kingdom, to Mother Natures dispassion. A Clams beat lets us know that we are only dust in the wind.
A Clams beat is a psychedelic tale of life and death that evokes a timeless feel and unlocks an ancient power beyond comprehension. On Instrumentals, Motivation is sunny dawn after the monsoon blesses the crops of a South Asian village. Im Official is Odysseuss boat catching a gust as it skirts across the wine-dark Aegean. Brainwash by London is the tragic, unglamorous final breath of the last giant sloth.
A chat with Clams
Clams came by the HNHH studio in June to discuss his debut album 32 Levels. He wears a white short-sleeve polo and a bushy, kempt beard. A pair of sunglasses rests atop his bald head. He looks like a physical therapist. He looks a young Lex Luthor, before the disillusionment and minus the thirst for power.
He is 29 now. He wears a band on his left ring finger he is either married or about to be married. He is conversational but quiet. He doesnt emote much, save for the occasional shy chuckle. He does not frequently grant interviews, but he needs to promote his album. He appears on the 32 Levels cover as a charcoal silhouette wearing a hoodie turned away from the camera with his hands pensively clasped behind his back.
Clams is no hermit but he is clearly introverted. He tells me he does not enjoy performing and tours only to make his fans happy and because he likes to travel. He seems to have his life pretty much figured out. He keeps his circle tight, makes music, and plays retro Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games he downloaded to his Wii U. Im trying to finish up Zelda: Twilight Princess, he says.
Photo by Elijah Dominique
Shoot your shot
The importance of MySpace in connecting musicians in the mid- to late-aughts is truly astounding, and there are few greater MySpace success stories than Clams Casino.
In those days, MySpace was a volume shooters game. One was wise to search for new and more prominent musical collaborators like J.R. Smith hoisting fadeaway threes, to not dwell on the misses and proceed with impunity, confident that the next shot would find pure nylon.
With the help of a friend, Clams Casino reached out to as many as 50 artists on MySpace per day. He estimates that he successfully elicited a response ten percent of the time. Often times, he would send out the same beat to a dozen or so different artists, and more often than not these beats would be snatched up by industrious so-called internet rappers Soulja Boy and Lil B. On one occasion, Soulja Boy released a song featuring a beat that Clams had pledged to A$AP Rocky. Such is life.
Can I get a witness
Clams has still never met Soulja Boy in person. He had never spent a significant amount of time with Lil B until last year, when he invited B down to L.A. for a three-day studio session. There they cut the ominous yet braggadocious 32 Levels single Witness.
Lil B has directed countless of his own music videos (just him and himself, as Clams says). Witness was the first video he directed with a full crew. He developed the concept himself; the original plan to travel to Europe and shoot the video there had to be scaled back for budgetary reasons, but the video turned out well. It begins in an angular, well-lit modernist mansion. Lil B casts Clams as a shadowy Bond villain who wanders through the forest and drives through San Francisco and the winding hills of Marin County in a Maserati convertible. Lil B rides shotgun.
Clams identity
The title 32 Levels refers to a Lil B line on Clams Casino-produced Im God: The mind is so complex when youre based 32 levels. Welcome to my world.
Clams came up with the title for his album in early 2015. It was the only title he ever considered. It has a private meaning to him, and while it may seem obscure, that is partly the point. It represents the moment when he found his musical identity, when his style matured and took flight of its own accord.
I always worried when I was coming up that I would never have my own distinctive sound, he explains. Im God was a major turning point for me for where I was heading musically. I listened through that song and tried to pull something from there because thats when I really started figuring my own lane out.
Im God features a stunning flip of Imogen Heaps Just For Now. The beat is windswept, wistful, the sound of a horse freed from her enclosure running wild in the meadow. It is perhaps Clams most celebrated piece of production. Lil B originally released the track in 2009; the beat would later appear on Instrumentals 2. Lil Bs contributions work surprisingly well because his agenda, on a surface level, does not overlap with that of Clams: Bruh think Im gay cause Im riding in my tiny pants / Bet Im the only goon, nigga, in these tiny pants, he raps.
When Clams speaks of the songs personal importance, he is presumably referring to the instrumental and not the iteration that stars Lil B. They are two different songs.
Photo by Elijah Dominique
Happy accidents
Clams didnt have any sort of vision when he made 32 Levels. I didnt know what was going to happen, he says. The one trait that distinguishes 32 Levels is the absence of traditional sampling, which has been Clams bread & butter for his entire career.
To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word like blue or cold into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results, Clams told Pitchfork in a 2011 interview. While he eventually abandoned this tactic, he nearly abandoned sampling altogether on the album to avoid paying unnecessary royalties. He cleared only one sample for 32 Levels, and it came from a Polynesian meditation CD that Clams purchased at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. The rest he created himself from scratch or recorded with his musician buddies.
Clams spent a full year collecting sounds that he would transform using a battery of guitar pedals and effects compression, distortion, overdrive, delay (I make a chain of like three to five of them and keep pressing buttons) and later use to construct beats at his modest home studio. He has used the DAW Acid Pro since 2002.
He would record around his house or on the street on a mic that plugged into his phone and iPad. Hed pick up an acoustic guitar and strum a dozen-odd chords. It didnt matter what the chords were. I dont actually know how to play properly but I can do enough, because Im gonna chop it up anyways, he explains.
He would record at various studios in New York, Los Angeles, and London. His engineers would know to start recording as soon as he stepped in the room, even when he was setting up. The method is tinkering just pressing record and leaving it running for a half hour, plugging different things in.
He cites a particular sound that occurs on Be Somebody, a song on the album that features Lil B and A$AP Rocky. Its a unsettling, hollow explosion that detonates at the beginning of Rockys verse. Clams accidentally removed the patch cord from his guitar while the amp was still on. The guitar was hooked up to multiple effects, thus giving the explosion sound its rich texture.
Thats the stuff thats unique that I always end up using because it doesnt sounds like anything else, he says. So once I caught on to that, I was like, This is it. Its the right direction to be going in.
Whats in a name?
Clams casino is a dish native to Rhode Island that consists of clams slathered in breadcrumbs, bacon, garlic, and other aromatics. Clams Casino has never tasted clams casino, he just likes the way it sounds, which is a bit odd but reflects his sensory, subjective and vaguely nihilistic approach to art in which beauty exists in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.
Its just a joke that started with my friends, and I stuck with it because it was catchy, Clams says of his nom de guerre. People hear it and they remember it. And thats whats important. Theres no deep meaning or story behind it.
Beginning at the end of August, ScHoolboy Q will tour the world in support of his new album, Blank Face LP, which dropped earlier this month. He just let loose all the dates on his social media accounts, and what a jam-packed latter half of the year it shall be for the Hoover Street rapper. There are a total of 63 dates on the tour, which kicks off in Indianapolis on August 30. He then goes throughout most of the U.S., barely taking a day off, and on November 3, hell fly across the world to New Zealand for the first of six shows in Oceania. Europe gets the final leg of the tour, beginning on November 21 in Helsinki and finishing on December 15 in Birmingham.
The Blank Face LP, which made its debut at No. 2 behind Drakes 10-week old album, VIEWS, wasnt as commercially successful as Qs last album, 2014s Oxymoron. However, most every outlet has given his newest LP a rave review. Head here to read why HNHH awarded it with a cumulative rating of 91%.
Check out all of the Blank Face tour dates below.
ScHoolboy Q
Ian Connor has had a continued fall from grace ever since multiple women came forward accusing the stylist and friend to many a rapper a rapist. The first accusation surfaced in April, following which, its been reported that as many as ten women have came forward Amber Rose recently quoted the number 21 for the amount of women who came to her personally with claims against Connor. Not only that, but it appears as though tensions are mounting within the circle of rappers Ian runs with. Recently Theophilus London, friend to Kanye West (as is Connor), called out the model on twitter which led to some IRL fighting.
Connor is being exposed once again, as two women have taken to twitter to share DMs the stylist sent them respectively. The Daily Beast reports that in both cases, the threatening messages came after either women sent out tweets labeling Connor as a rapist.
You can take a look at their tweets with screenshots from the back-and-forth with Connor below. Following these allegations, Connor sent out a tweet that alleging that he and Kanye are still on good terms after a user tweeted the opposite Connor basically stated that its Yeezy who is currently paying for Connor live in Japan (where hes apparently been hiding out since these rape allegations surfaced).
Ian Connor
Release date remains unannounced
Danny Brown has previously called Closer one of his favorite albums; now, he's doubling down on his Joy Division fandom.
The rapper revealed through Twitter today that his next album will be called Atrocity Exhibition, named for the opening track of Closer.
He played up the album's connection to the song of the same name, posting lyrics to the Joy Division track on Instagram.
No word as of yet when the followup to 2013's Old will drop, but Brown revealed in June that he was "putting the final touches on my next masterpiece" via Instagram. He has also said the upcoming album is inspired by Talking Heads.
The name of my next album is Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) July 18, 2016
Atrocity Exhibition Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) July 18, 2016
This is the way!!!! ..... Step inside!!!! #AtrocityEXhibition Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) July 18, 2016
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Ummmmm I know that lol!!! https://t.co/7pYzgH4wf2 Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) July 18, 2016
Rapper believes the U.S. government continues to monitor him
Last year, a photo of Obama's daughter Malia wearing a Pro Era t-shirt made the rounds on the internet. The Joey Bada$$-led hip-hop collective reposted the image on Instagram, capitalizing on the publicity. Subsequently, Joey told reporters that he believed the U.S. Secret Service was monitoring him as a result of the incident. Now, he has said that he believes the monitoring has not ceased.
Joey has previously noted hearing clicking noises during his phone calls, believing that these noises indicated he was being tapped. He also revealed that a tree in front of his house mysteriously went missing after the Malia incident. "I guess they [had] to get clearer pictures", the rapper said.
Despite his suspicions, Joey hopes to meet Malia one day and express his gratitude to her. Still, he believes the interaction would be "weird...because the Secret Service guys are gonna be there".
Revisit the image and the Obama-referencing 'Survival Tactics' below.
Malia Obama rocking that classic Pro Era tee! | Make sure you get your official Pro Era gear from theproera.com! A photo posted by Pro Era (@proera47) on Jan 5, 2015 at 6:12am PST
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In an April interview, MIA made a few statements regarding the Black Lives Matter movement that many viewed as "critical," and now her remarks have resulted in her removal from her headliner slot in the Afropunk Fest in London.
After receiving their fair share of backlash from MIA's comments on the Black Lives Matter movement, the London Afropunk Fest released this announcement:
A message about AFROPUNK LONDON: pic.twitter.com/Zd5z2ToWuF AFROPUNK (@afropunk) July 15, 2016
In their statement, they wrote "after discussing the situation with the artist [MIA] and the community, a decision was agreed upon by all involved that MIA will no longer headline.
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In her interview back in April, MIA said:
"Is Beyonce or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? Thats a more interesting question.
It was this comment that led many attendees of London's Afropunk Fest to request her removal from the show, which has now been granted.
Dolores & Co. are one of the acts who played the city's legendary Theatre Royal
The citys legendary Theatre Royal is celebrated in Limericks Temple Of Sound, a Newstalk documentary airing at 7am on July 23 with a following day repeat at 10pm. After this itll be available as a newstalk.com podcast.
Pulled together by Out On A Limbs Ciaran Ryan, its contributors include Noel Hogan from the Cranberries, Theatre Royal promoter Joe Clarke, historian Dr. Matthew Potter and our man Stuart Clark who recalls seeing the aforementioned Cranberries, House Of Pain and Billy Connolly there. He was also on hand when part of the Father Ted Eurovision episode was shot in the Royal, which was renowned for its eclectic booking policy.
When the venue was badly damaged by a fire, the show went on with Cork metallers Judgement playing in the charred, roofless auditorium. Were not sure Health & Safety would stand for that sort of carry-on now!
It also became Limericks answer to Sir Henrys with top local and international DJs like Billy Nasty and Judge Jules playing to 1,000-plus crowds.
Going back somewhat further, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Pearse, Roger Casement, Catherine Hayes and John McCormack all trod the Theatre Royal boards.
The Colorado folk collective are Dublin-bound again in October
Just days after pulling out the stops on the main stage of Longitude, Denver folksters The Lumineers are already plotting an Irish return later this year.
A visit to 3Arena will be part of the UK and Ireland leg of their Cleopatra World Tour, their global jaunt in support of their already massively successful second LP.
They also turned more than a fair share of heads at Glastonbury, so they certainly seem on a roll - so why not strike while the iron's hot?!
Tickets for the October 26 show are on sale from Thursday, priced at 38.50.
For the past couple of sessions the stock of Hemp Inc (OTCMKTS:HEMP, HEMP message board) has been mostly retracing its steps up the chart. The daily gains, however, have not been that impressive - on Friday the stock added a little over 2.5% to its value, sitting at $0.031 at the time of the closing bell.
The company has been trying to get investors excited using every chance it has to mention that its decortication facility in North Carolina is nearing completion. While many of the supporters of HEMP will undoubtedly be glad to learn that the plant might finally become operational after the numerous missed deadlines and serious delays even they might be reluctant to jump back into the stock.
After all, less than a month ago the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against HEMP and its CEO Mr. Bruce Perlowin. Among the defendants are also Mr. Perlowin's brother, Jed Perlowin, as well as one of his friends, Barry Epling. According to the complaint hundreds of millions of unregistered and purportedly unrestricted shares have been sold to public investors.
Despite HEMP's propensity for issuing PRs even if they contain little more than fluff so far not only has the company failed to address the SEC charges against it but it hasn't even mentioned them in an official press release.
Even if you disregard this completely the red flags around the company will remain significant. HEMP may have been able to report nearly $750 thousand in sales for the first quarter of the year but they still finished the period with a net loss of more than $3 million. Not to mention that the lack of any cost of sales may indicate that the revenues came from the various consulting deals of the company. A couple of years ago HEMP reported millions of revenues from consulting services but instead of money the company was paid in billions upon billions of shares.
The dilution of the common stock mustn't be overlooked, either. Following the reverse split from July 31, 2015, HEMP have issued over 200 million shares and as of March 31, this year, they had 556 million outstanding shares. With 5.5 BILLION authorized shares and a vast amount of preferred, preferred K, and preferred K (P) shares the O/S could continue to grow. Especially if the company needs to raise additional funds in order to pay for its legal expenses.
HEMP is more than likely going to remain a volatile stock in the coming sessions which could allow some traders to walk away with quick gains. Underestimating the risks is not advisable, though, and putting any money on the line should be preceded by extensive research.
In early trading today HEMP is jumping up and down, currently sitting 1.6% in the green at $0.0315 per share.
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SAN ANTONIO - Damian Nowak, a business owner and father of three living in Floresville, pays $673.92 each month for a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas health insurance policy that covers him, his wife and their children.
Now the insurer is proposing to raise rates for health plans like Nowak's by nearly 60 percent effective Jan. 1, a change that could increase his monthly health insurance costs to $1,069 and affect more than 602,000 customers statewide, according to filings it has submitted to federal regulators.
Those requested hikes - the steepest of any in Texas, according to HealthCare.gov's Rate Review page - would apply only to Blue Cross individual plans that consumers purchase themselves and not to group plans obtained by companies for their workers.
Nowak doesn't blame Blue Cross. He blames the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care law, which took full effect in 2014 and required all Americans to get coverage.
"Before Obamacare was imposed, everyone was free to choose whatever worked for them or not choose anything at all. And providers were free to choose whatever they think is best for their customer," said Nowak, 28, CEO and co-owner of Virtkick, a company that builds software for cloud-hosting providers.
Insurers are also taking on significantly riskier customers since the Affordable Care Act opened the door for all Americans to buy health coverage. Under the health care law, insurers can no longer deny coverage to consumers who have pre-existing health conditions.
That's allowed the people who need and use the coverage the most to get insurance, while the younger, healthier people who were supposed to balance that out are opting to self-insure or go without coverage. It's leading to higher health insurance premiums and fewer plan choices for consumers throughout Texas.
"In general, what we've seen is that the oldest, sickest people who could not get insurance otherwise are signing up like crazy," said Dana Forgione, an accounting professor who chairs the University of Texas at San Antonio's business of health program. "But the young healthies, it's still a hard sell."
Blue Cross officials caution that the actual prices levied in 2017 may end up being quite different because no final decisions have been made. Federal and state regulators are still reviewing health insurers' proposed rates for Texas consumers next year.
Regardless of what happens, Nowak said he will do what he always does - shop around for the most affordable option.
"I might change from Blue Cross to something else," he said. "However, it's all based on the fact that Obamacare is broken."
Individual plan losses
Blue Cross lost $770 million on individual plans sold in Texas last year, the company told federal regulators in filings justifying its requested rate increases in May. It attributed the loss mostly to actual claims for medical care being "significantly higher than expected" on its Affordable Care Act policies purchased by individuals and families.
The company is seeking rate hikes ranging from 57.3 percent to 59.4 percent for its Blue Advantage individual plans to be sold next year. All of those plans were offered in Bexar County during this year's open enrollment period, which ended Jan. 31.
And Blue Cross is not alone. Plenty of other insurance carriers in the Texas market - including Humana, Aetna, Oscar Insurance Company of Texas and Allegian Insurance Co. - have notified regulators of potential rate increases for certain products in 2017.
Not everyone covered by these plans will feel the sting if the requested rate hikes take effect, Forgione said.
"For the consumer who is getting subsidies, they're going to feel relatively little impact from this," Forgione said. "Plus, these rates all have to go through the regulatory review process. And the final result may be nowhere near what (insurers are) asking for upfront. So some of this is negotiating posturing - you know, asking for a lot more and settling for less."
Consumers like Nowak who aren't receiving tax credits or other subsidies to ease their payments will feel it the most.
"And they're going to start looking for alternatives," Forgione said.
The actual rates consumers end up paying next year also will vary widely depending on their ages, the geographic regions where they live, whether they use tobacco and the levels of benefits they choose.
Proposed changes gleaned from preliminary rate filings don't capture what HealthCare.gov customers will actually pay, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a recent statement.
Average falls to $87
Last year, the average monthly premium paid by Texans who received tax credits for coverage purchased through HealthCare.gov dropped $2 - from $89 to $87 per month, department spokesman Jonathan Gold said.
Roughly 84 percent of Texans shopping through HealthCare.gov receive subsidies that reduce their out-of-pocket costs, Gold said. The average tax credit granted to a Texas consumer buying coverage through the federal website this year was $257 per month.
Texans "know that they can shop around and find coverage that fits their needs and budget. In fact, last year more than 48 percent of them did exactly that by switching plans to save money," he said in a statement.
In some rural Texas counties, Blue Cross has been the only option for consumers looking to buy their own coverage. The company is the only health insurer to offer individual policies in all of the state's 254 counties.
880,000 in Texas
Blue Cross covered more than 880,000 Texas customers with its individual policies last year. That doesn't include consumers covered by employer-sponsored group plans or Medicare-related plans.
The rate hikes sought by Blue Cross Texas' operations aren't intended to recover last year's $770 million loss but to offset another loss it expects to incur in 2017 from customers' anticipated medical costs, said Dr. Esteban Lopez, the company's chief medical officer. The company wouldn't say how much it expects to lose on its individual plans next year.
Blue Cross is not publicly traded and doesn't operate as a for-profit. It saves up reserves to pay for customers' future medical needs.
"Our individual market business has to stand on its own," Lopez said in an interview. "We can't fund this product with other product lines. Every line has to be independent."
Last year, actual health care costs on policies purchased by individuals exceeded the premiums that Blue Cross' Texas operations collected from customers. For every dollar the Texas company collected from those customers, it paid out $1.26 in costs, Lopez said.
The average monthly premium paid by a customer for a "silver" health plan - one that typically covers 70 percent of health care costs - was $303.45, while the average monthly cost paid out by the company was $382.34, he said.
Adding to Blue Cross' challenges - its parent company, Health Care Service Corp., recently saw its credit rating cut by S&P Global Ratings analysts, which projected a third year of marginal to weak profitability.
Humana seeks increase
Humana, meanwhile, is seeking a 45 percent rate hike for its HumanaOne HMO Premier individual plan, federal filings show.
Similar to Blue Cross, Humana's proposed rate hike is being driven largely by expected claims costs, the rising costs of medical care, customers' increasing use of such services and changes in contracts with hospitals, physicians and other providers, Humana said in a statement.
Because many Humana customers who shop through the HealthCare.gov website receive federal subsidies to help pay their premiums, the actual increases they face come Jan. 1 will vary widely, the company's statement said.
Humana covered 1.7 million customers in Texas as of March 31 but declined to specify how many of those had purchased their own individual health policies without the help of employers.
The company would not discuss the health plans it intends to offer in Texas next year since regulatory agencies are still reviewing them, spokesman Ross McLerran said.
Leaving exchanges
Rate increases across the country are being driven partly by some carriers' decisions to withdraw from the government-run exchanges in certain markets, Forgione said. That reduces competition and drives up prices until the remaining players find a way to make the market profitable, he said.
UnitedHealthcare, which sold products on public exchanges in 34 states this year, will no longer sell individual policies on or outside of HealthCare.gov in Texas in 2017.
"The individual market is a market of last resort ... And that's not how it used to be," said Janna Hamstra, a benefits consultant in San Antonio whose firm, Hamstra Benefit Solutions, advises employers across Texas.
"In our industry, they call it the death spiral ... As those premiums keep escalating, healthier individuals decide to self insure," she said. "They drop out of that pool because it's too expensive. And as that keeps happening, then the insurance companies have to increase the rates further."
Guaranteeing insurance for everyone sounds like a great idea in theory, Hamstra said. "But the flip side of that is to make that available and it be profitable," she said. "I'm not sure that those two things can co-exist."
As voters go to the polls this November, at least four states will consider ballot questions on marijuana legalization. Pending proposals in Nevada, Maine and California would authorize recreational marijuana use, while Floridians will vote on whether to allow medical marijuana use.
Legalization of marijuana in the United States has spread rapidly over the last few years. Half of the states have already legalized marijuana in some form. Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia have legalized it for recreational use. And the Democratic Party platform committee recently voted 81 to 80 to amend the federal Controlled Substances Act to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule 1 drugs. The stated purpose of this proposed amendment is to provid[e] a reasoned pathway for future legalization.
States with some form of legalized marijuana have implemented stringent regulatory and licensing schemes with regard to the who, what, where and how of marijuana possession, cultivation, and distribution. But policymakers have failed to address an important area: the marijuana industrys energy and climate impacts. Although marijuana is a plant, it is not a green product when grown indoors. As more states and, potentially, Congress consider legalizing the marijuana industry, they should also adopt rules to make it more environmentally sustainable.
Indoor marijuana farms are energy hogs
Indoor marijuana cultivation is one of the most energy-intensive industries in the United States, generating nearly $6 billion in energy costs annually. According to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which carries out energy planning for the Columbia River Basin states (Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon), growing marijuana indoors consumes up to 5,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of output. For comparison, aluminum production requires about 16 kilowatt-hours per kilogram.
Colorados experience demonstrates marijuanas large energy footprint. Since the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2014, the industry has expanded rapidly there. In 2015 legal marijuana businesses in Colorado made nearly $1 billion in sales, up 42 percent from the previous year. And as marijuana businesses become more competitive and specialized, growers are moving their farms indoors to get a more controlled product.
Indoor cultivation requires electricity to power high-intensity lights, frequent air exchanges and ventilation, and to maintain consistent temperatures and humidity levels day and night. As a result, the state now has numerous indoor warehouses that consume huge quantities of electricity.
Experts estimate that a 5,000-square-foot indoor marijuana facility in Colorado consumes six times more electricity per square foot than an average commercial business, and 49 times more than an average residence. Last year Denver officials sought guidance from the Department of Energy on ways to curb the industrys power requirements. Electricity use in Denver is rising by 1.2 percent yearly, and marijuana farms account for nearly half of the increase.
Sam Wolson/Special to the Chronicle
Colorado has set a goal of generating 30 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Currently, however, only 18 percent of its electricity comes from renewable sources. The rest is generated from coal and natural gas.
On-site generation systems, such as rooftop solar arrays, and community-scale energy projects cannot produce enough electricity to meet marijuana growers' energy needs. As a result, the marijuana industry is indirectly increasing Colorados reliance on fossil fuel.
Legalization provides some energy benefits. For example, it allows indoor cultivators to connect to existing electricity grids instead of relying on carbon-intensive gasoline and diesel generators. However, these benefits are swamped by the industrys fast-growing electricity requirements.
Experts estimate that nationwide, indoor marijuana cultivation accounts for nearly 15 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually more than the annual energy-related emissions of South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island and Vermont, or the District of Columbia. Public utility commissioners across the nation are discussing strategies for managing power demand from indoor pot growers.
Legalize and regulate
When states legalize marijuana cultivation, they establish detailed regulatory and licensing schemes governing who may sell, possess and cultivate the plant, where they may do so, and how much they must pay for licenses. Policymakers should also seize this opportunity to enact rules governing the industrys climate and energy impacts.
Since indoor growers consume such enormous amounts of electricity, policymakers should start by requiring indoor cultivators to consume only carbon-free energy sources or to pay a carbon fee until such measures can be implemented.
Boulder, Colorado is addressing this issue by implementing city and county licensing schemes that require indoor marijuana cultivators to use energy monitoring technology and routinely report their energy use. Growers must offset their energy use by utilizing 100 percent renewable energy, purchasing renewable energy credits, or paying a carbon fee. However, few other states or localities have followed Boulders lead.
Oregon has established a task force to study energy and water use for marijuana production. The group is scheduled to report its findings to the state legislature later this summer. Preliminary indications are that the task force will call on growers to follow energy best practices, but it is unclear whether it will recommend making this policy mandatory or merely a suggestion.
States that do not have enough renewable energy generation to meet the industrys electricity demands, such as in Colorado, should take a two-pronged approach. First, they should require indoor growers to pay escalating carbon fees based on their electricity consumption. These funds should be used to support development of more efficient technology and climate-friendly electricity facilities.
Second, legislators should also require an exponential increase in the percentage of energy consumed by indoor growers from renewable energy sources via on site generation such as rooftop solar or community renewable energy facilities. This two-pronged approach would ensure growers do not become complacent just paying the fee.
The best time to address impacts of this magnitude is before they occur, not after a major industry is already established. Marijuana production is rapidly developing into an extremely lucrative industry that can afford to manage its impacts on the environment.
Gina Warren is an associate professor of law at the University of Houston.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Bookmark Gray Matters. We've moved indoors to get a more controlled product.
The day after Texas law enforcement buried the last of five officers killed by a gunman in Dallas, the slaying of three officers in southeastern Louisiana by a 29-year-old Kansas City man ratcheted up tensions and left officers in Houston - and across the country - shaken and on edge.
"It's scary," said one Houston police officer, speaking anonymously because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press. "Any officer that tells you they're not scared is lying."
Authorities say Gavin Eugene Long shot and killed three law enforcement officers and wounded three others in a mid-morning attack behind a beauty supply store in Baton Rouge, just east of the Mississippi River.
The slayings came less than two weeks after African-American men were shot by police in Baton Rouge and Minnesota, setting off Black Lives Matter protests across the country and escalating tensions between civil rights activists and pro-law enforcement groups.
"Folks are shocked," said Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, who could not recall a similar back-to-back attack in at least four decades. "They're incredibly concerned about the interactions their officers have on the street."
DeRay McKesson, a national Black Lives Matter leader who was arrested amid protests in Baton Rouge after the shooting of Alton Sterling, 37, by police, told the Chronicle by telephone Sunday that the mission hasn't changed.
"The movement began as a call to end violence," he said. "That call remains."
63 officers killed this year
Houston-area departments and unions, meanwhile, urged officers to ride two-man patrols, back each other up, and remain watchful.
"We've been on a heightened status of alertness in the days following the shooting in Dallas, always fearing the worst and hoping for the best," said Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman. "You wonder where that madness is going to end."
David Cuevas, of the Harris County Deputies' Organization, said officers are in shock.
"We're being ambushed while we're doing our job," Cuevas said. "As soon as you start preparing to remove your mourning cover on your badge, you leave it on because of events like what happened today."
Officers from around the region will be Houston on Monday to bury another local officer - Bellaire motorcycle Officer Anthony Zarate, 52, who died July 13 in a crash during a high-speed chase.
Overall, 63 police officers have died in the line of duty so far this year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which tracks such statistics. Last year, 62 officers had been killed by this time.
Gunfire-related deaths, however, have increased by 72 percent, according to the organization, which has tallied 31 firearm-related deaths since January, compared to just 18 during the same period last year.
"Over half of the 60 officers have been killed in gunfire incidents," said Steve Groeninger, a NLEOMF spokesman. "That's troubling for us, for the law enforcement community."
Experts cautioned against alarmism, and noted that policing is safer than in years past. Data from the FBI shows that the rate of assaults on officers has dropped by almost 50 percent since the 1980s.
"In the grand scheme of things, those numbers have gone down, but some of that gets lost," said Larry Karson, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Houston-Downtown and former law enforcement officer. "Yes, it is a dangerous job. But in context, it's not even close to some of the other jobs out there."
Houston Police Officers' Union President Ray Hunt refused to speak to the Chronicle for the story.
'Increasingly difficult'
As events unfolded Sunday in Baton Rouge, Texans roundly condemned the attacks and called for unity and support of law enforcement.
"I ask for Texans to pray for officers killed and injured in Baton Rouge," Gov. Greg Abbott said on social media. "It's time for us to unite as Americans to say 'no more.'"
Dallas Police Chief David Brown tweeted his support for his fellow law enforcement officers.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police," Brown posted.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a statement Sunday that he was directing city officials to light up City Hall in blue as a show of support of law enforcement.
"It is increasingly difficult to find the words to express what I am feeling these days," Turner wrote. "Last night I attended a vigil in remembrance of those killed in the attack on Nice. A week ago we mourned the shooting of police in Dallas. Before that we had Orlando and the violence in other cities at home and abroad. Today, I pray for Baton Rouge and the families of the officers shot there.
"There have been too many senseless acts over the past couple of months," he said. "This cannot become our new normal. I know tensions remain high but I ask that everyone lower their temperature as we search for a way forward. We have to come together because no one wins when there is violence."
'It's got to end'
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, likewise called for expanded support of law enforcement.
"This is a trying time for our country, and understandably, frustration is mounting," Cruz said in 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."
Local residents echoed those concerns.
At Hermann Park Sunday afternoon, local resident Robert Luna reflected on the violence.
"It's got to end, one way or another," said Luna, 43. "People have got to come together; it's nonsense to be killing each other. I think that everybody's got to dig deep in their heart and there'll be change."
Samantha Ketterer contributed to this report.
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A retired Texas police chief has added his voice to the chorus calling for greater transparency about police-chase policies.
"The bottom line is we need to remember that we work for the public," said John Urby, who retired in 2007 after nine years as Midland's police chief and 30 years in law enforcement. "If the public wants that document, give them that document."
Urby said chiefs should welcome public interest and media inquiries about pursuit policies. In response to a Houston Chronicle article citing small Houston-area departments that refuse to detail or release their policies because criminals could know when they can flee without fear of pursuit, Urby said, "That's bogus. That's just not right."
The Chronicle has filed public-records requests with several small departments in the Houston area. Most agencies refused to comment on their policies and did not respond to requests for details, including the 20-person Patton Village department whose sergeant died June 19 in a chase crash that also killed an 11-year-old boy.
Urby said the Midland department's policy required a written supervisor's review after each chase, which would be read by a lieutenant, deputy chief and the chief. The reviews led to feedback for officers such as a lieutenant saying a chase was continued for too long which in turn triggered training. Each year, Urby said, the agency would make a report on how many chases were initiated, how many were justified, and what training issues were identified.
Both those annual reports and the pursuit policy were available to the public upon request under the Texas Public Information Act, Urby said.
Trauma nurse Esther Seoanes lost her husband in 2012 when police in Austin pursued a suspect for stolen property. The suspect had been stopped at a red light before the chase, she said, but "the moment that police began to give chase, he became a wild animal" and ran red lights in mid-afternoon Austin traffic.
She marked the fourth anniversary of his death on June 15 by visiting his grave and listening to recordings of him playing the bass guitar.
"It's been four years now, and it really doesn't get easy, especially when you see it happening again and again," she said. "I don't want anybody to feel what I felt."
Seoanes is now executive director of the nonprofit PursuitSafety, where she advocates for police policies that only allow chases for violent felonies.
She agreed that departments should release their policies.
"Transparency is the best way," she said. "Every police department should show their individual policy."
She said local residents could provide more input and hold their police accountable. "This could give the citizens the opportunity to voice their concerns (or) to agree with the policy," she said.
Tom Gleason, a retired Florida police captain who trains officers for pursuits and sits on the board of PursuitSafety, also said pursuit policies should be made public.
"I'm not asking for the ongoing criminal investigation," Gleason said of the Patton Village chief's refusal to discuss his department's guidelines. "All I'm asking for is, 'What does your policy say?'"
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JOHANNESBURG - 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.
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 the 6.8 million infected people is on treatment.
Gates noted that Mandela fought stigma by announcing publicly the death of his son from AIDS.
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."
The following are excerpts from reports generated by the Houston Police Department:
Jason Thompson, 39, of 612 Maple St. in Houston, was arrested July 17 for having an active Texas County felony warrant for non-support. A pair of officers who were aware of the warrant made the arrest at Thompsons residence.
He was taken to the Texas County Jail, where he was unable to post $50,000 bond.
Travis L. Bailey, 32, of 108 E. Ninth St. in Willow Springs, was issued tickets for following too closely, failure to register a motor vehicle and no insurance after a two-vehicle accident at about 5:50 p.m. July 14 at U.S. 63 and Chestnut Street.
Douglas P. Horton, 58, of 9148 Strawberry Road at Licking, was cited for failure to stop at a stop sign on July 14.
Samantha J. Simmons, 28, of 16684 Brushy Creek Road in Houston, was cited on July 11 for displaying the plates of another.
Corey R. Crumm, 32, of 9215 Highway 17 at Bucyrus, was issued a citation for stealing under $500 on July 9 after allegedly swiping a 45-year-old Houston mans cell phone after it had been left at a check stand at Walmart.
Marissa A. Gilbert, 26, of 426 King St. in Houston, was cited for stealing under $500 after allegedly shoplifting at Walmart on July 13.
James P. Mitchell, 66, of 10885 Higgins Drive at Licking, was arrested July 8 for having an active Texas County warrant for driving while intoxicated.
An officer made the arrest after responding at about 11:10 p.m. to a report of a suspicious person at Hardees, who had reportedly been parked in the same location for more than four hours. Upon arrival, the officer observed a man asleep in his Pontiac Trans Am.
A routine computer check revealed the warrant. Mitchell was taken to the Texas County Jail where he was unable to post $250,000 bond.
Ardis F. Morton Jr., 34, of 777 W. Highway 17, Apt. 9, in Houston, was arrested at his residence on July 12 for having an active Texas County warrant for theft of a credit card, second-degree burglary and two counts of fraudulent use of a credit device. He was taken to jail and held without bond.
Houston resident Rudolph Rudy Blahnik was one of two men honored at a ceremony Sunday by Missouri Lt. Gov Peter Kinder.
Blahnik and Lewis McReynolds, of Willow Springs, were two of 34 Missouri veterans from around the state to receive the 2016 Veterans Service Award, which is given to veterans who provide exemplary volunteer service. The ceremony was at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 473 in Cabool.
Blahnik, who was nominated by the Texas County Republican Committee, served as commander of Post 473 from June 2013 to June 2015. He assisted veterans with processing claims for medical assistance. He also has been active with Texas County youth, participating in the Constitution Project and presenting awards to the winning students at the state capitol in Jefferson City.
He also has been active in the VFWs Voice of Democracy and Patriots Pen programs with students from Willow Springs and Cabool. Blahnik has been the presenter of the VFW Scholarship Awards to students at Texas County high schools.
Blahnik presents the colors at many community events, conducts flag education classes to middle schools students in Cabool and to the Boys Scouts of America at Kansas City and conducts flag-retirement ceremonies.
And thats not all, Kinder said. Rudy also has been an active member and served on the board of directors at the Hamrick Terrace apartments for seniors in Houston and collected and donated food, clothing and furniture to the Texas County Food Pantry.
Kinder pointed out that it likely is the first time since he instituted the Veterans Service Award that two winners have hailed from the same VFW Post.
Congratulations to you here at Post 473 for having two winners in your ranks, he said.
Kinder presented both men with Veterans Service Award lapel pins and an official declaration from the lieutenant governors office highlighting their volunteer service. Also attending the ceremony were Missouri Reps. Shawn Rhoads of West Plains and Robert Ross of Yukon, who both presented the winners with House Resolutions recognizing their service.
Kinder instituted the Veterans Service Award in 2012 as a way to recognize Missouris hometown heroes and shine the spotlight on their selfless service.
This award is just one small way our state can say, Thank you to our veterans and honor the sacrifices they continue to make for their communities and the state, he said.
The following are excerpts from just some of the reports recently generated by the Texas County Sheriffs Department:
A 38-year-old Mountain Grove man reported on Oct. 31 that four game cameras with a total value of $380 had been stolen from his Highway AD property.
The man told an investigating deputy he suspected a 17-year-old Cabool man was to blame.
A deputy was dispatched at about 7:55 a.m. Nov. 3 regarding a report of a domestic dispute at a McColgin Road residence at Raymondville.
Deputies from the Texas County Sheriffs Department were called to several investigations in the last week.
Upon arrival, the officer observed that a Missouri State Highway Patrol officer had also responded and had the issue under control. The 43-year-old man and 42-year-old woman involved were advised of the 12-hour rule, and the woman left for her daughters house.
On Oct. 4, a deputy traveled to a Highway M residence at Cabool to look for a woman with an active felony warrant out of Wright County.
The officer made contact with a man there who said the woman wasnt in the house but the deputy was welcome to come in and look for her. The woman Danielle A. Bishop, 32, of 6475 Highway M at Cabool was found inside, arrested and taken to jail.
A 61-year-old Raymondville man reported on Oct. 10 that a shed had been broken into at his Amburn Road residence and several tools with a total value of $900 had been swiped. The man told an investigating deputy that his tenants daughter was likely to blame.
A 72-year-old Licking man reported on Oct. 12 that a rental home of his on Highway AF had been broken into and numerous items with a total value of $2,991 had been stolen. Investigation is ongoing.
A St. Louis man who owns hunting cabins on Turley Road at Plato reported on Oct. 3 that cabins had been broken into and pillows and blankets had been stolen. Investigation is ongoing.
Texas County Jail admissions
Nov. 4
Sterling L. Moore possession of controlled substance, endangering the welfare of a child
Danny A. Nungesser assault
Stacey N. Sartor assault
Ryan Pettit writ (to appear before judge)
Timothy Parker writ
Joshua E. Purcell possession of controlled substance
Nov. 5
Jordan S. Clinton stealing
Michael L. Karnes tampering with motor vehicle, stealing
Justin D. Strunk writ
Thomas S. Wofford possession of controlled substance
Brandon M. Murphy writ
Cynthia M. Farris possession of controlled substance
Justin D. Dake trespassing
Nov. 6
Micheal H. Morgan non-valid license, non-support
Jennifer A. Scott assault
Chastity Likes assault
Robert A. Brandon non-support
Frankie L. Thomas stealing rental property
Christopher Giller possession of controlled substance
Nov. 7
Graham M. Glenn possession of controlled substance
Aaron Whitman DWI
Heather E. Fitzgerald possession of controlled substance
Daniel G. Stephens failure to appear
Tommy D. Perkins possession of controlled substance
Samantha D. Brooks possession of controlled substance
Nov. 8
James T. Martin 24-hour commitment
David C. Jones possession of controlled substance
Nov. 9
Chad L. Cooper 48-hour commitment
Belinda J. Bryant possession of controlled substance
Nov. 10
Roy G. Toomey DWI
Shane L. Briggs failure to appear
Randy L. Hale assault, property damage
Edna Mae (Ogden) Jackson, 88, daughter of Virgil and Saloma Margaret (Brunstutter) Ogden, was born May 11, 1928, in St. Louis, Mo. She left this earth to join her Savior in Heaven on July 14, 2016, at Texas County Memorial Hospital, Houston, Mo.
Mae was preceded in death by her parents, sister and husband, Gene Jackson.
She is survived by two daughters, Jackie Pinkston of Success, Mo., and Mareta Ramsey (and husband Bill) of Houston, Mo.; one son, James Jackson of Bucyrus, Mo.; 10 grandchildren; 14 greatgrandchildren; two great-great grandchildren; as well as several nieces and nephews.
Mae married Claude Macomber in 1946, and to this union one daughter was born, Jackie Ruth. Even though they divorced, they remained great friends. Mae married Gene Jackson in 1956, and to this union two children were born, Mareta Gail and James David.
Mae was a member of the Success Baptist Church, Success, Mo. She received Jesus as her Savior when she was 32 years old in Parsons, Kan. One of her final prayer requests was that all her kids and grandkids be saved.
Mae loved cooking, sewing and quilting. She was very generous with her quilts, giving them to family and friends, as well as donating them to be auctioned at fundraisers in the community.
Everyone could learn from the way she loved her family. She would defend them in every instance. However, she loved them enough to tell them when they were wrong. It didnt mean she loved them any less, it simply meant she loved them unconditionally.
Mae was a Godly woman and a wonderful wife, mother, grandmother and friend. She will be greatly missed by all who knew and loved her.
The family is hosting a visitation from 10-11 a.m. Saturday, July 23, 2016, at Success Baptist Church with a memorial service beginning at 11 a.m. at the church with Pastor Ted Moore officiating. Mrs. Jackson was cremated under the direction of Evans Funeral Home.
Memorials may be made to Success Baptist Church, in lieu of flowers. Online condolences may be made at www.evansfh.com.
Kathy Lynne York-Durham, 55, passed away June 20, 2016, in a car accident near Houston.
She was born March 26, 1961, in Kansas City, daughter of Fred S. and Alice E. York.
She grew up in Grandview and attended the Grandview School District.
She loved the ocean, fishing, traveling, cooking, her pets and the color purple. She loved spending time with her children, grandchildren, sister and other close family members and friends.
She was preceded in death by her parents.
Survivors include a son, Randall Dunkin Jr.; two daughters, Amy Dunkin and Jessica Mitzel; three grandchildren; and a sister, Debra York-Perkins
Private family memorial will be held at a later date in Sheldon Cemetery. Cremation was under the direction of Evans Funeral Home.
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There is a gradual change happening in the employment sector. People are given more importance than anything else. So retaining the right talent, encouraging them, acknowledging their work regularly, and offering the right benefits to them are becoming top priorities in organizations. Recently, many companies decided not to define performance by a single number and has set their focus on emphasizing ongoing, quality conversations between managers and their teams.So definitely, the attention is now on people! Humans have a lust for control and have developed quite a few mental concepts to control performance management; processes, ratings, manuals, competency frameworks, forms, collective labor agreements, etc. While all these things once had a purpose, the sum of it is not fit for duty 16 years into the 20th century. What really matters is people connecting and leaving each other valuable feedback to improve the way you work. Check out our cover article by Patrick Willer, From Performance Management To Feedback Culture where he explains what we need to stop doing and what we need to start doing. Has digitization changed the overall experience of performance appraisal systems? With so much of digital progress that has hastened our ability to serve better, how do we use that same technology to monitor our own performance on an on-going basis? To know more that, read Procyon Mukherjees article Performance Appraisal Systems. D...
m Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley, weve seen a number of major corporations scrapping performance reviews in recent month so why is the practice falling out of favour with HR? Here, the CEO of a leading service provider shares his thoughts.There are a few different issues with rating systems, says Rajeev Behera, CEO of Reflektive. The first and foremost is that theyre very demotivating for employees.According to Behera, when employees hear that theyre anything other than the highest potential rating, it demotivates them immediately.That is a huge problem because the whole point of performance management is to help improve the performance of your employees, he told HRM.Only a very small subset of your employees is going to be top rated so that means youre demotivating and causing disengagement for a huge amount of your workers when you rate them, he continued.San Francisco-based Behera says the second major issue is around bias and accuracy.There are two big biases that come into play that cause the inaccuracy, he told HRM. One is recency bias where people just remember the last few months of that employees actions.The second, and according to Behera more important issue, is rater bias where the managers approach has a far greater impact on the outcome than the employees actual performance.There have been studies that say who the rater is matters far more than who the employee is, he told HRM. So who the manager is and how they grade is more important than the employees own performance.Both these biases, he stresses, are working to undermine the huge amount of time and effort employers put into performance reviews.If youre spending so much time on performance reviews and Accenture said they spend two million hours on performance reviews and the result ends up being an inaccurate rating that demotivates people, then that becomes a pretty big issue, he warned.Its for these reasons that Behera says employers are finally waking up to the inefficacy of performance reviews.Theres a lot of momentum around companies removing ratings completely, he told HRM. This is a huge trend and we saw it with start-ups two or three years ago but now were seeing large companies too.For all the latest HR news and info straight to your inbox, subscribe here
Government Of Canada/Twitter
Canada's Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs visited southern Alberta this weekend to commemorate the settlement of a First Nation claim that dates back to the Second World War.
The Department of National Defense confiscated 55,000 acres of land in the Blood Reserve, near Lethbridge, more than 75 years ago, for use as a bombing and gunnery range.
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Now, the government has settled with the Blood Reserve for $6.3 million in financial compensation which Indigenous and Northern Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett says is an important step on the federal government's part towards reconcilation.
After over 75 years of this much-awaited claim resolution, todays announcement marks an important step in renewing our relationship and advancing reconciliation with the Blood Tribe.
"Im glad that this negotiated settlement will open the door to new opportunities for the Blood Tribe to invest in a more prosperous future that will benefit its members and all Canadians," Bennett said in a statement about the historic event.
@Carolyn_Bennett and Chief Charles Weaselhead resolving a long standing claim at Blood Reserve pic.twitter.com/ZN6egKzHVR Bonnie Leask (@bonsjl) July 16, 2016
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I want to acknowledge the respect and cooperation weve had up to this point, Blood Tribe Chief Charles Weasel Head said in an interview with Global News.
I think it says a lot about this government wanting to settle past grievances and past wrongs.
Chief Weasel Head said the land, which was once a spiritual area, was unusable by his tribe for years.
We werent quite sure about whether there were still shells out there or whether it was a high hazard area, he told the Lethbridge Herald.
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Some of Britain's Commonwealth partners are riding to the country's economic rescue following the Brexit vote, and Canada is among them, although perhaps half-heartedly.
A British cabinet minister told media this past weekend that Canada and the U.K. have opened talks on a free trade deal.
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Britains international trade secretary, Liam Fox, described the talks to the Sunday Times as very fruitful, and noted Britain is scoping about a dozen free trade deals around the world as it prepares for a new existence outside the European Union, following the Brexit vote.
But the office of Chrystia Freeland, Canadas international trade minister, played down the talks with Britain and said the countrys pending trade deal with the EU continues to be the focus.
We had a very positive conversation with [Fox], a spokesperson for Freeland said, as quoted at Bloomberg.
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Freeland shared details about the trade negotiating team in her department, and the two committed to work together to ratify CETA [the Canada-EU trade deal] as quickly as possible.
Freelands department may be trying to avoid the appearance of taking a side in the political fight between Britain and the EU.
Negotiating free trade deals outside Europe was something that the Leave campaign was pushing for, economist Howard Archer noted on the BBC.
But while Canada continues to focus on ratifying the EU trade deal with 28 member countries, in Britain the political focus is shifting towards the country's potential trade deals post-Brexit.
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"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,'" Fox said.
Among them is Australia, which is not negotiating a trade deal with the EU, and whose prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is calling for urgent free trade talks with Britain.
We need to get moving on that quickly ... Australia has been a great beneficiary of free trade and open markets and so has the United Kingdom, he said, as quoted at The Guardian.
Britains new prime minister Theresa May said the interest in free trade talks with Britain shows that we can make Brexit work for Britain.
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Baz Ratner / Reuters An elderly man mourns during a funeral ceremony for a killed Turkish police officer in Ankara, Turkey, July 18, 2016. REUTERS/Baz Ratner
The Edmonton Turkish Festival has been indefinitely postponed in the wake of an attempted military coup in Turkey.
The decision was announced on the festival's website on Saturday just hours before the event which features Turkish food, crafts, music and dance was set to begin.
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We dont think it is right to celebrate at any level while our country is having an horrific incident," organizer Ibrahim Cin told Global News.
Edmonton Turkish Festival postponed after "political unrest" in country #TurkeyCoupAttemptpic.twitter.com/UN0RL5e0QV Zoe Todd (@ZoeHTodd) July 16, 2016
On Friday the country was in chaos as the Turkish military reportedly tried to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Jusitce and Development Party.
Cin's family lives far from the violence, but his wife's family is in Istanbul, one of the centres of the attempted coup.
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"This morning I cried too much with my wife. You feel so powerless and you cannot do anything. It's like you don't have legs and feet and you're just by yourself here," he said in an interview with CBC News.
Cin told the Edmonton Journal he hopes the festival can be held once the political situation calms down. In the meantime, the festival's food is being donated to members of the local Turkish community.
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Now if only the original owner of this brain could know where it ended up.
A Pennsylvania man was charged Thursday after police say he used a brain believed to be a teaching specimen to smoke marijuana.
State police in Carlisle charged 26-year-old Joshua Lee Long with abuse of a corpse and conspiracy.
They say he used the formaldehyde preserving the brain, which he nicknamed "Freddy," to soak his joints, a method that gives users a more intense, but far riskier high, according to PennLive.com.
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This undated photo provided by the Cumberland County Prison in Carlisle, Pa., shows Joshua Lee Long.
Carlisle police told the outlet while they've heard of people using the chemical as a drug, the brain is a first.
"Every day there's something new and bizarre," Cpl. Bryan Henneman said.
Fox43 reports that Long's aunt found the organ in a Walmart bag under the front porch of her sister's trailer on June 21.
Both her sister, Angela Micklo, and another man, Robby Zoller, have been on the run for over a month, wanted for their roles in several burglaries, according to the outlet.
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"Every day there's something new and bizarre."
Long himself is already in prison on multiple burglary charges, and admitted in a phone call with his aunt that he had the brain and was using the formaldehyde to get high, according to court documents obtained by WGAL.
Henneman told PennLive.com that cops are searching for the organ's owner, saying it was a specimen that was "obviously stolen."
Not a new phenomenon
Smoking joints or cigarettes soaked in embalming fluid is becoming more popular with teenagers and young adults, according to ABC.
The fluid is a mix of formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol and other substances, one Pennsylvania probation officer told ABC. It is often combined with the drug phenylcyclidine (PCP), which itself has been nicknamed embalming fluid.
"What they're getting is often PCP, but the idea of embalming fluid appeals to people's morbid curiosity about death," New York University School of Medicine's Julie Holland told the outlet.
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"There's a certain gothic appeal to it."
With a file from The Associated Press
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On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took his daughter, Ella-Grace, to the Calgary Stampede and the photos speak for themselves. The daddy-daughter duo is just too cute.
Trudeau And Ella-Grace At Calgary Stampede 2016 See Gallery
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Both wore a traditional cowboy hat (Trudeau's was white, while his seven-year-old opted for pink), which protected them from the rain. But the grey weather didn't dampen their spirits. They were all smiles as they flipped pancakes together and took in some midway rides. Clearly, they enjoyed their special time together.
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This isn't Ella-Grace's first time at Calgary's annual event. In 2012, she and her older brother, Xavier, attended the 100th Stampede with both their parents. At the time, Trudeau was still considering whether or not to run for Liberal leadership.
They came back with their dad in 2014.
Ella-Grace also accompanied her dad on a visit to the Sweetgrass Lodge at Stampede Park. There, they joined Indigenous elders in a traditional prayer.
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"But I write this open letter to encourage the fashion industry to not just continue the dialogue of race in America, but to do something about it. Fashion exists in a world of make believe. Our job is to offer an escape from everyday life and a fantasy of glamour and beautiful clothes. Its easy to forget the real world with its very real problems. But it doesnt have to be that way. Fashion is always at its best when it looks outside of itself for inspiration and holds up a mirror to society. Sometimes we do that on the runway and sometimes when we come together as an industry and take up important causes, like so many of our peers have and continue to do with breast cancer and HIV/AIDS.
"Stand with Black Lives Matter. Go out and educate yourself and learn how you can help and join the conversation as an active participant and not just as a passive, if well-meaning, observer. Encourage diversity on your runways and campaigns. Empower your social media fans to raise their voices. Use your designs for the public good. Attend a protest and see change in action. Raise awareness its not as empty a gesture as it may seem and others will follow your lead."
Brendan McDermid / Reuters Republican U.S.presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a news conference after he announced Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate in New York City, U.S., July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
In the current campaign for the American Presidency,the GOP candidate Donald Trump's proposed temporary ban on Muslims seeking entry into the United States is a big vote-getter amongst Republicans. Trump is calling "... for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
Some six months after the December 2015 statement proposing the ban, Trump generously offered to limit the ban to specific terrorist countries, adding that there is existing knowledge as to which countries these are.
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A poll taken two weeks after the minute revision to the ban revealed that 35 per cent of Americans support the idea. The CBS News/New York Times poll conducted from July 8 to 12, 2016 had 56 per cent of Republicans in agreement with "... temporarily banning Muslims from other countries from entering the United States" (note that the question doesn't refer to any limit to "terrorist countries").
The proposed Trump Muslim ban was widely denounced as unconstitutional. Indeed, perhaps the best source for this rather obvious observation is none other than Trump's running mate, Mike Pence. Back in December 2015, Pence referred to the proposed ban as "offensive" and "unconstitutional." Now, however, he believes that the revised version of the ban is just fine.
A ban that Pence and nearly all Republicans would consider unconstitutional is one that would infringe on the right of Americans to bear arms. A McClatchy-Marist poll carried out from July 5 to 9, 2016 reveals that 66 per cent of Republicans versus 23 per cent of Democrats oppose a ban on the sale of assault weapons and semi-automatic rifles.
Pence strongly supports a right to carry a firearm in public. While holding a similar view on the Constitution's right to bear arms, Trump has nonetheless expressed openness to banning people on terrorist watch lists from purchasing firearms.
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The striking paradox in the Muslim ban is Trump's inference that it would be in effect until such time as "... we figure out what is going on." He declared that "... it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life."
Don't Trump and the Republicans insist that they know what is going on? Trump repeatedly berates Barack Obama for not using the term radical Islam, which is to state the obvious when it comes to the source of terrorism. I highly doubt that making the ban temporary is Trump's way of looking into the root causes of the hatred that underlies terrorism.
Many American voters seemingly appreciate the fact that Trump would propose such a ban regardless of whether it can be implemented. A Gallup poll conducted from June 14 to 15, 2016 found that only 17 per cent of Americans thought that such a ban would be effective.
Many Americans likely realize that actually putting this thing into effect risks compromising a Constitution that Americans greatly value.
The idea of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, while attractive to many Republicans, is surely seen as unrealistic by members of the GOP. Getting the Mexicans to pay for it is ludicrous. Whether it's a ban on Muslims or a wall with Mexico, it's just the thought of such things rather than any action that matters for many Republicans. It's the thought that counts.
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Trumps Around The World See Gallery
Gleb Garanich / Reuters Canadian military instructors and Ukrainian servicemen take part in a military exercise at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center in Yavoriv, Ukraine, July 12, 2016. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
Last February, I wrote that Chief of the Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance said Canada "will certainly be involved somehow" in Libya.
"I don't know whether we will be involved militarily, but we will certainly be involved somehow, because Libya sits at a crossroads of some very important and dangerous things that are happening in the world," Vance said.
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Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan also said Canada could join a coalition in Libya to fight ISIS. However, in a conference call last Wednesday, Sajjan confirmed his government was considering a number of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions but no further details were given.
Considering the fact that UN peacekeeping missions are not aimed at taking part in offensive operations, Canada will most likely not join a coalition to "fight" ISIS.
However, last Thursday, Lieutenant General Paul Wynnyk became the commander of the Canadian Army and quickly stated the Canadian Army could possibly deploy troops in Africa. As a matter of fact, according to Wynnyk, a deployment to Africa was imminent.
Although many regions in Africa would benefit from having Canadian soldiers on the ground, Mali has been mentioned on many occasions. When the French government deployed troops to drive out Islamic extremists in early 2014, Canada contributed by sending CC-177 Globemaster III strategic lifters.
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France has been requesting Canada's aid to take a major role in the UN peacekeeping mission after its intervention in Mali, according to documents obtained by CBC.
Based on the fact that the French government has a high number of troops deployed domestically to counter recent terror attacks, President Francois Hollande most likely turned to Canada due to its past logistical participation, and the fact that many Canadian soldiers can speak French -- one of the main spoken languages in Mali.
According to Walter Dorn, a professor at the Canadian Force Staff College in Kingston, Canada could supply up to 1,000 soldiers to a UN mission. Dorn believes Canada could sustain a deployed contingent of more than 1,000 troops for many years.
The Canadian Forces will be stretched out and with more than $3.7 billion in slashed military spending until 2020, deployed troops will most likely have logistical issues and equipment problems. With different missions in different parts of the world, the logistical branch of the Canadian Forces will have to pull miracles to keep soldiers well-supplied and in fighting shape.
That said, with a deployed contingent in Ukraine, Poland and soon Latvia, Canada will most likely draft an option to involve in Special Operations Forces elements.
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Could CANSOFCOM deploy in Mali?
Due to a significant number of French troops deployed in Mali, the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM) could very well deploy to the African country with a training mission in mind.
CANSOFCOM could assist in the rebuilding of the security sector, one of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) main focus.
The Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR) has been actively taking part in Exercise Flintlock, an annual exercise in Africa. Malian soldiers have taken part in Exercise Flintlock in the past, according to the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM).
This exercise gave CSOR good interoperability experience with African soldiers, as well as with NATO allies currently participating in a number of operations on the continent.
"Exercise Flintlock is designed to foster regional cooperation to enable our African partners to stabilize regions of North and West Africa, reducing sanctuary and support for violent extremist organizations. Exercise Flintlock provides increased interoperability, counterterrorism, and combat skills training while creating a venue for regional engagement among all TSCTP nations."
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Yet, if Canada agrees on sending UN peacekeeping troops in Mali to relieve French troops, CANSOFCOM will not play a major role in the West African country.
The Canadian Forces presently have troops deployed with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of South Sudan.
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Romeo Ranoco / Reuters A man displays a rainbow flag during a LGBT Pride parade in metro Manila, Philippines June 25, 2016. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
"They say we are the people of Lot. But in fact we are the angels of Lot. We were sent so that the mercy of others may be tested." - Leyla Jagiella
Professor Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle is an American Muslim academic noted for his seminal work on homosexuality in Islam. Thirteen years after his essay in Progressive Muslims and six years after his book Homosexuality in Islam, conservative Muslim leaders have promoted a rebuttal.
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The timing of the rebuttal is interesting. Post-Orlando, mainstream Muslim groups have begun to express open solidarity with the LGBT community. Muslims and LGBT communities have even broken bread together in Toronto and Dublin. This societal shift bolsters Kugle's affirmation of LGBT Muslims, which the guardians of "Abrahamic morality" perceive as threatening.
Indeed, openly gay Imam Daayiee Abdullah observes:
"They are running scared. We have broken the dam of lies, and their fears are rushing out to clog the water outlets ... but no avail, for as the waters of truth rise, the tsunami of change is coming."
Academic arguments, satire and humour that challenge established positions are essential for growth. However, the rebuttal challenges a minority opinion to destroy any threat to the mainstream dogmatic position. The conduct of an overwhelming Muslim majority has been aggressive in online discussion threads.
Omar Sarwar, a gay Muslim graduate student, mentioned, "I had to delete my comment because the thread was becoming abusive." Hasan Nuri, a Jewish convert to Islam, similarly stated:
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"[Conservative Muslim leaders] let their cult like followers participate in the verbal stoning of LGBT Muslims to leave the religion, burn in hell, etc. ... Actually I spent most of Ramadan wanting to leave, because there is nothing but brick walls no matter where I turn. ... I'm exhausted and I'll be surprised if I stay Muslim."
There is a Hadith attributed to the Prophet that states, "among you are those that drive people from the sanctuary." Indeed, by endorsing the rebuttal, the author's mentor quoted, "If they disagree with the Qur'an so much, why don't they just leave the faith and do as they please?" Paradoxically, even in his defensive clarification, he re-asserted, "Why believe in a book whose main premises you disagree with?"
The objective of the rebuttal was neither to reach out to LGBT Muslims, viewed as resorting to "cheap emotional refutations" nor to invite a dialogue with Kugle. One Muslim activist, who works with LGBT Muslims, asserted:
"This is not about queer people and their sufferings - it is about creating solidarity among Muslims who are very anxious about their present and their future, who are anxious about sexuality in general, ... the interests of making a larger majority comfortable that they will be OK, that fetishized tradition and particular leaders will save them."
Kugle is no stranger to ostracism. He mentions about heresy charges and facing online boycott of his books. Yet, Garrett Fugate-Kiriakos, a gay Greek Orthodox convert to Islam and a PhD student in Islamic Studies, defends him passionately.
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"Kugle, as a leader and scholar, has done a lot more work in nourishing the spirituality of Muslims who happen to be queer than [conservative Muslim] leadership and usage of knowledge. He is one of the few Muslims out there repairing a lot of the spiritual damage and trauma queers have suffered in mainstream mosques and [through] rhetoric."
Garrett's observation is buttressed by the testimony of scores of LGBT Muslims who resolved their inner conflict through Kugle's work. One medical student wrote:
"I'm a 24-year-old medical student and I'm a practicing Muslim, having learned Islamic studies ever since I was little ... [His book] has helped me to reconcile with my religion and sexuality. Scott Kugle has probably saved my life from one of constant internal conflict and depression with his writing."
It is this life-saving work that the rebuttal seeks to destroy. Conservative Muslim leaders seem more interested in defending ink on paper than living, breathing human beings. The proposed alternative is perpetual conflict between faith and sexuality. This toxic struggle is sold as a "test from Allah." Commenting on this obsession of conservative Muslim leaders to inflict tests on gay Muslims, Garrett writes:
"I don't understand where people get this idea that if a queer person 'acts' on 'it' that they are not being tested. For example, relationships of any sort can be very challenging. ... Similarly, dealing with a family who disowns you because you won't marry is quite a test."
However, those who are mentally paralyzed and controlled through the fear of eternal hellfire buy the test. They grow bitter and find LGBT Muslims as threatening to their faith. Their faith seems so weak that in order to fast, they demand people around them to also fast.
The rebuttal can be deconstructed argument by argument. However, if Behnam Sadeghi is correct then legal inertia in Islamic law is not necessarily broken by legal counter arguments in vacuum. It is societal shifts that compel jurists to evaluate if the law is tolerable. This is perhaps why conservative Muslim leaders are scared of recent attitudinal shifts in the Muslim community.
While Kugle needs no defence, Leyla Jagiella, a PhD student in religious studies, passionately wrote:
"Scott Kugle is a 'scholar' in the best sense of the word. We are talking about a man who can fluently converse in Classical Arabic and a couple of other literary languages of the Islamic world. ... He is educated not only with regards to the disciplines, principles and tools of classical Islamic theology but also anthropology and modern secular religious studies. It is exactly the lack of such a broad base of Islamic knowledge that is a big problem in the world of our Muslim scholarly establishment these days. And the victims are too often the marginalized, who are judged by "specialists" who simply do not have knowledge of half of what they are talking about."
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Carlo Allegri / Reuters Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to introduce Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate in New York City, U.S., July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Monday was the first day of the Republican Convention where Donald Trump will be confirmed as the party's nominee for November's presidential election. On Thursday, when he delivers his keynote speech, he will likely repeat his tirade against free trade agreements, which has become his trademark.
On purely economic grounds, though, he is simply wrong. Among economists, there is a broad consensus that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been beneficial. Overall, NAFTA has substantially increased trade volumes and made Canadians more productive, which means that they enjoy higher living standards thanks to free trade.
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There is another, unsung benefit of free trade that would also disappear if Donald Trump gets elected and decides to roll back NAFTA and other trade agreements. Simply put, free trade helps the environment.
First, free trade changes where goods are produced. Producers move to where production is the most efficient, and in many instances, there is an environmental benefit to this.
Consider the case of agriculture. Free trade ensures that food is produced as efficiently as possible in the most appropriate places. One recent study concluded that around one fifth of productivity improvements in agriculture came from moving to more appropriate locations. Since free trade liberates land that is being unproductively exploited, there is a strong environmental benefit in terms of reforestation. Moreover, shipping enormous quantities of food by boat requires far less energy per ton than shipping food by train or truck, which can actually mean fewer emissions per ton of food.
To be sure, the manner in which trade liberalization takes place is crucial in determining the extent of the positive effects.
Additionally, free trade increases the availability of environmentally-friendly goods by lowering their prices. Individuals can then increase their consumption of such goods, and firms can adopt production techniques that make use of these goods.
One telling example is the market for used cars. Since a large portion of the pollution associated with automobiles is emitted during their manufacture, increasing the lifespan of a car limits total emissions. Trade in used cars across borders tends to be highly restricted, so that even a small amount of liberalisation leads to significant increases in trade volume, with substantial environmental benefits.
In 2005, trade restrictions on used vehicles between Mexico and the United States were eliminated and 2.5 million used vehicles were subsequently imported into Mexico. Since the imported cars were cleaner than existing vehicles in Mexico, free trade in used cars reduced pollution in that country. Moreover, the cars sold to Mexico were dirtier than the existing stock of vehicles in the United States. This means that Americans were selling their used cars to Mexicans and buying cars that were more fuel-efficient, thereby reducing greenhouse gases. Basically, free trade in used cars reduced emissions per mile in both countries.
To be sure, the manner in which trade liberalization takes place is crucial in determining the extent of the positive effects. However, many studies find strong environmental benefits from free trade, with very few signs of detrimental effects. In short, free trade is good for the environment as well as for people's living standards. American voters should bear this in mind when they hear Donald Trump slamming free trade.
David Cooper via Getty Images Aerials of the Pickering Nuclear Plants. It will cost Ontarians $46 billion to whip the province's troubled electricity system into shape to keep lights, air conditioners and factories running for the next 20 years. The plan unveiled by Energy Minister Dwight Duncan today includes refurbishing existing nuclear plants, building new reactors on those sites and doubling the amount of renewable power. (Photo by David Cooper/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Ontario could save money, increase public safety and create jobs if it closes the Pickering Nuclear Station when its operating licence expires on Aug. 31, 2018. Yet, the Liberal government has approved plans to extend Pickering's operating life to 2024.
Pickering is already 15 years past its best before date. It's the fourth oldest nuclear station in North America and the seventh oldest nuclear station in the world. Given its age, it is not surprising that Pickering is one of the most unreliable and poorest performing nuclear plants in North America. Or that is has the highest operating costs of any nuclear station in North America.
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Best before dates are important -- not only for the milk you drink but also for the nuclear plant you live by. Pickering is surrounded by over 2.2 million people who live within the 30-kilometre high-risk zone. The Liberals are rolling the dice on a nuclear station that is surrounded by more people than any nuclear plant in North America.
While it is possible to eat food past its best before date -- my kids complain about my inability to waste dated food -- it might not be such a great idea to gamble with the best before date of one of the largest nuclear stations in the world. This doesn't pass the sniff test.
While Kathleen Wynne chooses to gamble on Pickering, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is calling for the closure of Indian Point nuclear station north of New York City. It's Number 2 on the nuclear population list. Governor Cuomo is putting safety first.
The Liberals argue that extending Pickering beyond its best before date is necessary to keep the lights on. Although I support utilizing nuclear facilities until their end of life date, the Liberal argument for Pickering simply doesn't add up.
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The Liberals seem more interested in making the nuclear lobby happy than in making smart energy choices for the people of Ontario.
Ontario is currently selling excess electricity at a loss. Ontario's total electricity exports (22.6 billion kWh) exceeded the total output of the Pickering Nuclear Station (22.6 billion kWh) in 2015. Ontario's peak hour demand for electricity has declined by 17 per cent in the past decade.
Even if electricity demand goes up because of the Ontario's efforts to electrify the transportation system, Ontario can purchase electricity from other sources at a lower cost.
We live next door to the world's fourth largest producer of water power -- Quebec. Quebec has a large and growing supply of water power available for export. On average, Quebec water power sells at one third the price of power from Pickering. Why not use this low cost source of clean power to meet possible increases in demand and to cover gaps from the anticipated temporary shut down of the Darlington Nuclear Station?
Ontario can also do more to stretch our energy dollars by investing in energy efficiency measures. The cheapest source of energy is the energy we save. According to the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), large industrial energy efficiency programs save electricity at an average cost of 1.5 cents per kWh. Residential, commercial and small industrial energy efficiency programs save electricity at an average cost of 3.5 cents per kWh -- far below OPG's estimate cost of power from Pickering of around nine cents per kWh.
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The Liberals seem more interested in making the nuclear lobby happy than in making smart energy choices for the people of Ontario. And while I understand why the nuclear lobby would fight to protect jobs at Pickering, I believe the Liberal government has a responsibility to make energy decisions that benefit all the people of Ontario even if it means cancelling their $100,000 dinners with the premier.
Moreover, what if we could convert operating jobs at Pickering into jobs decommissioning Pickering--making the area safer for residents while establishing Ontario's expertise in the decommissioning of nuclear plants. Doing this would create 16,000 person years of employment according to a study by Torrie Smith Associates. This could establish Ontario's global expertise in decommissioning nuclear plants. With a number of nuclear plants around the world reaching their best before dates, Ontario nuclear workers could benefit from becoming the global experts in shutting down nuclear plants.
The Liberals have a choice to make -- give the nuclear lobby what it wants or provide the people of Ontario with an affordable, clean electricity supply; a supply that doesn't include an old and aging Pickering Nuclear Station that is well past its best before date.
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April 23, 2016: About 300 Ontario doctors, their families and supporters gathered at Queen's Park Saturday for a rally and a march to protest cuts and a "crisis in health care." (Photo: Jim Rankin/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Last week, the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) announced that it had reached a tentative agreement on a Physicians Services Agreement (PSA) with the Ontario Ministry of Health (MOH). Physicians were shocked as the OMA hadn't even informed them that they had resumed negotiations with the MOH.
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There is rather a lot of very animated discussion about the agreement amongst physicians. Certainly the Concerned Ontario Doctors (COD) group has spoken out publicly against the agreement. There's been quite a bit of discourse amongst various OMA sections about how this came about as well.
Normally, of course, medical politics should be of little interest to the general public outside of the same kind of morbid curiosity that occurs when one is watching "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. However, I actually think the general public should pay more interest to this particular contract, because if it's approved it's going to significantly damage health care in the province for the next four years. It will hurt your ability to get a family physician if you don't have one. It will increase wait times for diagnostic tests and specialists. It will decrease Ontario's already low physician to patient ratio (currently seventh out of the 10 provinces).
While the agreement itself is supposed to be confidential until it's ratified, it's already been leaked to so many media sources that it's essentially a public document. So let's review it.
First, the agreement proposes a fixed Physicians Service Budget (PSB) in each of the four years of the contract. Currently the manner in which the system works is that physicians get paid for each service they provide a patient. So a fixed budget essentially means that there is going to be a limit on how many services patients get.
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This is clearly a win for the bean counters and bureaucrats at the MOH who want a predictable budget. However, no one knows for sure what will happen if patients want more services than is budgeted for. It's to be referred to a joint MOH/OMA committee of some sort. But then what?
Additionally, the OMA has agreed to what are referred to as "progressive discounts" on billings over $1 million. Obviously, this was done because of optics. It could be sold to the general public as cutting back on "fat cat" doctors. The fact that the reason the billings are so high is that patients needed the services (doctors can only bill if patients need to see them) is ignored.
The OMA also gave up the demand to have independent binding arbitration in the negotiation, violating a promise made by OMA President Virginia Walley on the day of her inauguration.
Most alarmingly, it appears that the OMA, while publicly agreeing to a Physicians Human Resource Committee, MAY have had some back door discussions about the possibility of DECREASING the number of medical students that graduate every year. This at a time when there are still about one million people without a family doctor!
So why would the OMA give up all of this? Isn't the goal of a bargaining agent to get MORE for the people you represent? The answer is that the OMA obtained some guarantees to "co-manage" the health care system in return. The OMA hierarchy seemingly grasped at the opportunity to give itself more power.
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But why is this bad for patients? Turns out, in the mid 1990s, the OMA struck a similar deal with then-Premier Bob Rae's government. It allowed for a fixed Physicians Service Budget, progressive discounts (in that agreement it was 33 per cent) on physicians who billed above a certain level, enshrined the OMA as a "partner" in jointly finding savings in the health care budget and turned a blind eye to the medical school cutbacks of the early 1990s. Sounds familiar, no? So what happened?
Predictably, the government abandoned its responsibilities to find savings at the first sign of public outcry. (What's that you say? Politicians actually flip-flop on promises they made in the interests of political expediency? Who knew?) Because the government never kept its end of the bargain, the PSB was always over the fixed budget. However, the government insisted physicians stick to their end, and slapped progressive claw backs on their billings to keep the fixed budget at the agreed-upon rate.
Angered by the betrayal, physicians left the province in droves, leading to, at one point, three million people without a family physician.
The so-called high billers did what any other human being would do. Say you normally get $30 for performing a service, up to the first 1,000 pateints. After 1,000 you only get $20 for the same job. You're going to do the first 1,000, but are less likely to do more. The specialists who were over the limit wound up just taking more time off. Problem was, patients still kept getting sick -and now had to wait longer to be seen.
I can completely understand why the Ministry of Health would propose an agreement like this. The Liberals don't care, they just want peace with the doctors before the 2018 election. The way the agreement is set up, the crisis from its bad decisions will likely hit in 2019 and 2020, by which time it'll be the responsibility of the next government to fix.
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However, I think it's absolutely shameful that the Ontario Medical Association has ignored the evidence of what happens with this type of agreement. We've been there and done that, and these clauses never work. They sold out the patients of Ontario in the naive hope that they will be given more power in the health care system. For the sake of my patients, I hope this agreement is not ratified by the membership of the OMA.
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The five things you need to know on Monday July 18, 2016
1) EAGLE, ALBATROSS, BOGEY
Todays the day Labour MPs try to work out just who they want as their anyone but Corbyn candidate. And the good news for us hacks is that there is an early tee-off time. Up in Committee Room 14, General secretary Iain McNicol has a briefing at 12.30pm and the hustings between Angela Eagle and Owen Smith start at 1pm. No opening statement, but questions from floor, then closing statement of 2 mins. An hour is set aside but it could last a fair bit longer.
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The pair of them invading each others personal space on the Marr sofa was pretty awks yesterday. But will either invade Jeremy Corbyns personal space among the party membership?
Although Eagle got the 51 MPs/MEPs nominations required to trigger a contest, its not clear such names will be made public. And if not, that will further give cover to those MPs tempted to peel off now to back Smith. Theres no such thing as gratitude in politics, so Eagles bravery in jumping first may not be rewarded if colleagues now see Smith as the better option.
Eagle has a clear pitch: her personal story as a working class gay woman (that Daughter of a Seamstress line could become the new My dad was a bus driver), her trade union official background and her long experience as a minister and shadow minister. One of Eagles best lines privately has been I knew what aspiration was before I knew what the word was.
Smith has an equally clear pitch: as a clean skin, new generation candidate who has loyally said he will back Corbyn if he loses. His launch in Pontypridd had him open-shirted, looking fresh and relaxed. He has new policy ideas, a new Clause 4 on inequality and is said to have double the number of backers Eagle does. For several Labour MPs, backing Smith may end up being the safer, default option to reduce the backlash among their local parties. But they may not relish having two blokes fighting it out to oppose a female PM.
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In some ways Eagles candidacy is a curious mix of Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom. The May in her is the get on with it, no nonsense, oven-ready leader, with bags of experience. The Leadsom in her may be the candidate who cant attract the backing of more than a small minority of her fellow MPs. That may be an albatross too heavy to bear in a long race. If the numbers look difficult, it may be Eagle who ends up pulling out to give the party a binary choice. 'JC or not JC', that could be the question. It would be a very tough call, but could also be her final act of self sacrifice in the leadership race.
2) TRIDENT TESTED
Theresa May has not been slow in unwrapping the parting gift left to her by David Cameron, in the shape of a Commons vote on Trident. The PM has issued some strong overnight words, warning we cannot abandon our ultimate safeguard out of misplaced idealism, and that the nuclear threat has not gone away, if anything, it has increased.
The vote itself will be at 10pm, but the debate will probably be cut short because it will start not at 3.30pm as planned, but 4.30pm or even later, as there will surely be at least one and possibly two Oral Statements on Turkey and Nice (will the PM do them both, with Boris away?).
The whole vote is of course symbolic rather than binding on any procurement decision. Which is why Shadow Foreign and Defence Secretaries Emily Thornberry and Clive Lewis are abstaining. More than 100 Labour MPs may back the Government. Thornberry told Today money is important at a time of financial stress. It is reckless for us to plough ahead with the most expensive options. Fallon was at his smoothest on Today: "We use our nuclear weapons every day..[by just having them, not using them]".
Tom Watsons clear lead will give them some cover against the inevitable backlash from Momentum and other local activists who see Trident as a wedge issue in the leadership contest. Corbyn will vote against. A poll of members this year found only 18% backed renewal.
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Meanwhile, theres so much change around, its hard to keep up. Note that No.10 announced the rest of its new Government at junior minister ranks at around 7am yesterday morning, with typically little fuss. Lots of comebacks, plenty of rewards for May and Boris supporters, the promotion of George Bridges (one to watch) to the Brexit Dept. And todays Order Paper already looks out of date. Pubs code regs are in the name of Sajid Javid, Andrew Percys adjournment debate may have to be abandoned (now hes a minister).
3) PARK LIFE
The ICM/SunonSunday poll yesterday included party leader names in a routine question on who the public would back in a general election. The result was this: Theresa May and the Tories 43%, Jeremy Corbyn and Labour 28%. As pollster Matt Singh has pointed out, that is exactly the result of the 1983 general election. Spooky huh? Though of course no one trusts polls these days...
But as Jeremy Corbyns Finsbury Park interview with Sunday Politics showed, the man is as chilled as ever. (I was going to headline this section SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH CORBS but the interview was actually done on a Saturday, and you know what a stickler I am for accuracy).
As well as tackling Pokemon Go (with the legendary line Seumas, youre blocking the Pokemon), he was greeted with a warmth among local constituents that underlines the personal appeal that Smith and Eagle may struggle against.
Yet the interview also had two strong news line. First Corbyn said the 25 registered supporter fee was not reasonable and I expect and I hope our party officials and national executive will see sense on this in coming days. Second, he that the NEC had been wrong to ban all local party meetings. To cancel meetings because theres a perception that intimidation might take place, I think is a big mistake. There was even a hint he was defying the NEC locally: I havent stopped party meetings taking place.
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Meanwhile, John McDonnell says he will announce a new Bank of the North, a regional development bank to unlock 500bn investment and lending for SMEs. Its part of Labours postBrexit offer. Lab sources have also hit back at Nick Cohens excoriating piece yesterday on the state of the partys policy, including criticism from ex economic adviser David Blanchflower. One says of the ex-MPC member: Its a shame his loyalties arent as predictable as his calls for looser monetary policy.
BECAUSE YOUVE READ THIS FAR
Watch Nigel Farage slowly but surely get caught out by an LBC caller
4) THERESA JOLLY GOOD FELLOW
Boriss plane had to make an emergency landing at Luton Airport yesterday, so he made his way to Brussels by alternative means. Nothing about Boris ever seems straightforward, but maybe his diplomacy will be straighter than many expect today as he attends his first ever EU foreign ministers meeting.
Carrying the full authority of Theresa May, and our referendum result, the new Foreign Secretary will probably resist the temptation to thumb his nose at long-standing EU foes and instead carry out the patient groundwork his boss wants for Brexit. His remarks about Hitler were shrugged aside by EU foreign chief Mogherini this morning.
And the botched Turkey coups impact on the EU migrant crisis looms large. Its a serious business today, not one for Boris quips or gaffes. In fact, theresa feeling at Westminster that Mrs May handed him the post in a challenge to prove he could effectively grow up overnight. Having been given this golden opportunity, any serious errors and he will be out, pronto. Yes, there may be a bit of hail fellow, well met, but the job in hand is the main focus.
Both Corbyn and Boris will probably be pleased by the overnight news that the EU-US TTIP deal now looks dead in the water, after the German SPD said theyd veto it. Good news for Liam Fox, whos soon off to the US to explore fresh trade links. Hammond welcomed the 24bn Japanese takeover of ARM as proof the UK still had an allure to overseas investors, post-Brexit vote. Not quite what he was saying before the vote, but shows hes fully onboard now.
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Still, The Three Brexiteers this weekend proved they are a handful. The Mail on Sunday reported how Fox celebrated his return to Cabinet with bottles of Commons champagne at an event attended by Adam Werrity. Fox said: My friends are my friends and I'm very loyal to them. DD also signalled to the MoS (and Sky) that he wanted a phased process on EU migrants rights in the UK to avoid a surge in arrivals.
5) RECLAIM THE INTERNET
The Reclaim the Internet conference will be attended by leading figures from Facebook, the Crown Prosecution Service, and a cross-party group of MPs today. Yvette Cooper, blogging for HuffPostUK, writes that he disturbing escalation of vitriol in public life in recent months means we cant keep politics separate, because it sets a climate for wider abuse too
The former Shadow Home Secretary (an uncommonly common phrase for most journos but at least we no longer have to write it to describe David Davis) says its time for UKIP, the Tories and Vote Leave campaigners to tell their supporters to stamp out online xenophobia. She says the SNP have to do more to curb cybernat abuse.
But it is Labour of course where Cooper has more topical relevance, urging party general secretary Iain McNicol to draft a new code of conduct and to urgently wake up, given the level of online abuse within our party right now. As leader, Jeremy Corbyn should have done this himself instead of just warm words, she says.
What were the chances of meeting both a live Dodo AND a live Richard John Bingham (the notorious 7th Lord Lucanl) in 1975?
The way Michael Horsnell tells it, it could just have happened. And if you read his hilarious black comedy of a novel, you might just be in two minds.
It concerns the extraordinary adventures of Brooke Beever, one of Fleet Street's finest (if that's not an oxymoron) - a senior reporter on a red-top newspaper called the Daily Packet. The Guardian it's not. But he's decent enough chap, and very sadly, his attractive ex-stripper girlfriend, Fanny Lock is the first victim of the so-called Strawberry Tart Murders "that gripped Fleet Street" in the mid-70s. (As one who was working in Fleet Street then, I was un-gripped at the time - perhaps because our crime reporter failed to mention them to me.)
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Even in his moment of extreme anguish at the discovery of his girlfriend's body, Beever - unable to resist a good headline - almost involuntarily comes up with "Barmaid Killer Leaves Strawberry Tart Calling Card on Body".
Fanny had been head barmaid at The Boot, a dingy pub where Beever sometimes drank. And we learn: "She had single-handedly raised a family of young offenders, fathered by as many different felons in the eastern suburbs of the capital".
Beever is initially one of the principle suspects. Indeed, the objectionable, irascible cockney policeman leading the investigation into Fanny's death, Det. Chief Insp. Arthur Tickett, is convinced he did it. As indeed is Fanny's psychopathic son, Binyamin
Tickett has a particularly annoying habit of peppering his conversation with back-slang, accusing Beever of punching Fanny "on the Irish Rose" and strangling her. "Broken Gregory Peck" he adds later. But eventually he relents a little, saying Beever might have been telling the "Babe Ruth".
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Surreal scenes erupt when "all hell broke out" among the various characters at Fanny Lock's funeral
Indeed, Horsnell - a former veteran Times reporter - tells us the Guinness Book of Records might well have been prepared to create a record for the most living people to occupy a grave in an English churchyard.
"The psychopath, his knife aimed at the back of (Beever's) neck, took the full force of a shoulder barge from the Irishman (Beever's colleague Doc Doherty) of which the great Nat Lofthouse would have been proud. Binyamin flew over the prostrate Beever. He crashed onto the lid of his mother's coffin, losing his grip on the flick-knife..."
"Doherty lost his balance during the heroic rescue of his friend, the momentum taking him over the edge of the grave. He landed on top of Binyamin, temporarily winding himself. The assassin, pinned by the sixteen-stone bulk of his attacker, tried to teach for the knife.
"A policeman guarding James Lock (a major suspect) abandoned his task and leaped into the grave in order to prevent Binyamin from retrieving the weapon. James consequently spotted an opportunity to elbow the other officer guarding him hard in the solar plexus. The man toppled forward and fell in, inadvertently catching the Rev Beever (the senior reporter's father) at the back of his knees. The clergyman flailed at thin air and fell on top of both officers, losing his grip on his umbrella in the process."
At this stage Binyamin's two equally unpleasant brothers Wayne and Eddie wade into the action, attacking all four police officers involved in the graveyard free-for-all. But the most joyful ending to the melee was about to come into play.
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None of the deeply dislikeable brothers had taken the elderly church organist Liam Lacy into account. "He was apparently frail and inconsequential" says Horsnell. "What no-one knew, however, was that he was a fencing gold-medallist for Ireland at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Old Liam hadn't picked up an epee in anger since the war. He didn't have one with him, of course, but there, waiting for him, like Excalibur, was the rev Beever's foiled umbrella."
You can guess the rest. "Errol Flynn would have been impressed as Liam swashed his buckle."
What you can't guess without reading the book is what happens when Beever ends up in Mauritius in the most delightful and intriguing of circumstances - even though two of his major foes somehow end up there with him. But not for long. As for the Dodos - there's a strong clue about them on the back cover of the book, which tells the reader: "Beever's journey to salvation takes him, via Paris and Mauritius to a rocky outcrop in the Indian Ocean where he eventually find true love, possibly encounters fellow fugitive Lord Lucan - and discovers a thriving community of extinct birds." Like you do.
Women in politics is becoming a more familiar sight; Angela Merkel has now been the Chancellor of Germany for 11 years, the United Kingdom has just appointed their second ever female Prime Minister in the form of Theresa May and it looks incredibly likely that in November, it will be announced that Hillary Clinton is going to be the 45th President of the United States. All in all, women are dominating recent leadership races and roles of political power. There are currently 16 women across the globe in Prime Minister and President roles, whilst still an incredibly low percentage of worldwide leaders, this marks a stark improvement in the correct direction. Why then, in our current global situation, are women in politics still not taken seriously by the public and the press?
I was recently shocked and angered by a headline, published the day Theresa May became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, comparing May to Hillary Clinton. This headline wasn't comparing their policies, or their outstanding political achievements, it was comparing and judging the two on the clothes that they had chosen to wear that day. Seemingly, two outstanding and powerful women choosing to wear the same colour combinations on the same day was worthy of headline news. Can you imagine David Cameron and Barack Obama making headlines by both choosing to wear navy suits on the same day? In today's modern society, why should there be such distinct differences in the way that male and female politicians are reported upon? Since Theresa May's appointment, the same news publication has released several similar stories and videos including one entitled 'The Prime Minister wears Prada!', concentrating on the shoe preference of our new nation's leader.
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As a young woman hoping to enter the political realm I am appalled at the way in which female politicians are judged and reported on first by their fashion sense and second by their policies. Why should what a women chooses to wear articulate their leadership powers? To me, this should play no part in assessing how competent potential leaders are and should not be something concerning the British public and major news publications.
The recent appointments of women within the political realm would suggest to many that politics is no longer a patriarchal field, take for example Theresa May's newly appointed cabinet. Sadly though, this is not the case, politics is still very much a man's world regardless of the fact that the majority of the major UK political parties are currently led by women.
Sexism within politics is something I now have a much greater understanding of following my time working on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign earlier this year in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I came into contact with a worrying number of American citizens who informed me that they would not be voting for Hillary Clinton simply for the reason that she was a woman. For these seemingly narrow-minded people, what was important in a future leader was not policies, political experience or values, simply the gender of the candidate. This was a frequent response from American citizens, what was most worrying for me is that this response also came from women. Under our current global environment, why are women all over the world still believing the patriarchal view that women are inferior to men, especially within the political field. We as a society should be far more concerned about women undertaking this inferior self-image.
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Following the appointment of our nation's second ever female Prime Minster, regardless of political orientations, I believe it is fundamentally important to acknowledge the under-appreciated role of women within politics. Female leaders across the globe are undertaking the somewhat impossible task of convincing the narrow-minded few that they are more than capable of fulfilling a leadership role. I only hope that in twenty years time the thought of a female Prime Minister or President is no longer thought of as a novelty or as a contentious issue, that female politicians will be judged in the same way as their male counterparts, with candidates being judged upon as a result of their policies, not gender.
There is a new occupant in Number 10 Downing Street. Theresa May is now the Prime Minister, and has inherited a fairly daunting to-do list.
Brexit has inevitably taken many of the headlines, but it is heartening to see that Mrs May has already zeroed in on another issue that will impact our lives for generations to come: the UK housing crisis.
In Mrs May's speech setting out her vision for what her Government's priorities will be, the new Prime Minister argued that "housing matters so much" and pledged to do more to ramp up the production of new housing.
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She added: "Unless we deal with the housing deficit, we will see house prices keep on rising. Young people will find it even harder to afford their own home. The divide between those who inherit wealth and those who don't will become more pronounced."
The Prime Minister is absolutely right. The UK has stumbled along for decades, allowing the structural undersupply of housing to get worse - as a result, house prices have grown at extraordinary rates, locking many young people out of the housing market.
But home ownership can not be allowed to become a pipedream for millennials. Tackling that undersupply has to be one of most important items on Mrs May's agenda. This isn't an issue that can be kicked into the long grass, to be dealt with another day.
For a long time one of the issues holding back development has been access to land. To its credit, the Government under David Cameron took welcome steps to try to address that, opening up public land for housing development. Last winter the Department for Communities & Local Government (DCLG) pledged to release enough land to build 160,000 homes by 2020.
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But a new report from the National Audit Office (NAO) this week says that it has only managed to sell land with the capacity for 8,580 homes so far. Radical improvement is needed here in order to get over this slow start, and the impetus for that must come from the top. We are falling dramatically short of what is required to address the housing crisis.
It is also important that the Prime Minister does not concentrate all of her efforts simply on homes for sale. The property market is changing in the UK, with many actively choosing to rent rather than buy. Producing more homes with the private rented sector specifically in mind, and introducing measures to support the build to rent market, would be an important step.
While Mrs May has been clear about her intentions to ramp up housing production, the nation's largest housebuilders may not be quite so keen to do more. Barratt Developments has said that it will "reassess" its land acquisition strategy following the Brexit vote, and others are said to be taking a similarly cautious approach, which may result in their output actually falling.
This need not be the setback it appears - it presents the Government with a terrific opportunity to rebalance the emphasis we put on the largest housebuilders being the ones to get us out of this crisis. We have long been over-reliant on the biggest housebuilders, but there are thousands of small- and medium-sized developers up and down the county who, with the right backing, are nimble and enthusiastic about getting the homes built that we so desperately need.
That means helping them access the land that normally goes to the big housebuilders and making it easier for them to finance those smaller developments that the high street banks cannot or will not fund.
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Thankfully, there is momentum already building on this front. The Government through the DCLG Select Committee last week launched an Inquiry into the capacity of the homebuilding industry to meet the demand for new homes, and will specifically look at the role of small- and medium-sized developers in tackling the housing crisis. It's precisely the sort of forum needed to address the barriers which currently impede us from delivering the homes we need up and down the country.
The brief trending of #ThankYourMP on social media in mid-June highlighted how often we fail to appreciate and thank those around us. Thankfulness is a subtle but powerful antidote to our fast paced and 'consumptive' lives. So when I learnt of the imminent retirement of one of my primary school teachers, I wanted to join with many other pupils across the country and say thank you to my teacher too.
I live in east London in a commuter suburb that has seen a lot of change over the last 100 years. Goodmayes Primary School was built in 1909, as the railway line from Liverpool Street opened up what had formerly been farm land. Much of the housing here was privately built before the First World War, to serve city workers. But with the call for 'Homes fit for Heroes', the next batch of house building was the publicly built Becontree Estate, which makes up much of what we now know as Dagenham. Goodmayes sits on the edge of Redbridge next to Dagenham. Just as the housing dramatically changed from privately built Edwardian to interwar public builds, so the people in this area have been changing. Already a fairly diverse area in the 1980s when I grew up, it is now one where white British children are in the minority.
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In the uncertain sea of 'progress' we need anchors
How does this relate to a retiring teacher? Flux of population has been one of the things in the background of the EU referendum debate, particularly in the post mortem discussion around the seeming disunity of the United Kingdom. Why do people feel disconnected from government? From political parties? I think the answer is that people feel disconnected generally. We used to live in the same area for 20 year plus on average; now this is reduced to six years. A recent report from an east London borough talked about the need for 'anchor' organisations. I would go further: we need anchor people, anchor families and anchor groups. As my mum said of Miss Proctor, "In a fast changing school, it was nice for me as a mother and now as a grandmother to know there was someone who had shown care to my family, a familiar face - someone who knows our family." Longevity is an important quality that we can easily overlook.
What I learnt from the best teachers
In 2003 my wife and I bought our current house which is on the same street that I lived on when I went to primary school. When my eldest was in year 2 his teacher was Miss Proctor, almost 30 years to the day from when I was in her class. She was well able to deal with his dreaming and tangential wonderings: after all, she had dealt with an earlier Singleton day-dreamer. The calmness with which she was able to dispatch parental concerns and appreciate the individual behind the difficulties was part of her gift to us as a family.
With a sometimes overbearing focus on professionalism, the passion and love of the amateur can sometimes be squeezed out. The root meaning of the word amateur is 'love'. When a teacher likes a pupil it can make a huge difference. I believe the best and most inspiring teachers are not those who are technically the most competent, qualified, or professionally distant, but those who have a passion they are generous enough to share. I taught alongside one such character, Severin Herbert, who had an uncanny ability to win over any student and engage them. His approach wasn't clean cut, but it was passionate, inspiring and sometimes confrontational.
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Peter Bennett and David Torn, two excellent practitioners themselves, go even further in their book for secondary teachers: they talk of the need to love your students. It is clear that relationship plays a great part in the success of a teacher. This, combined with the longevity and commitment mentioned earlier, inspired my brother Nathan (who was also taught by Miss Proctor) to develop the VIP Programme for mentors, youth workers and teachers. A cornerstone of the programme are mentors who build long-term relationships with young people in order to spark vision, identity and purpose in their lives.
What I wish I'd learnt at school...
As I embarked on my teacher training, I was talking to one of my former teachers, who said 'I don't care what people say, I still believe it's a noble profession'. But as I look back it would be wrong to leave you with the impression that I think all is perfect in education's past. The reading methods I was taught as a child in the 80s were limiting. I still work out unfamiliar things by looking at what else is going on (mind you, this is as much a lesson for dinner parties as it is for reading the classics). The fact we were not taught anything about grammar outside of what we picked up in French is something that you as the reader are now probably all too aware of!
How quickly things can change. That sense of possibility we had just a few days ago is already in danger of dissipating. The political class is closing ranks. The Tories' anointing of Theresa May as their (and our) unelected leader, and an attempted slow motion coup in the Labour Party, have the same object in mind. Saving themselves and putting a lid on the popular sentiment that was, to their mutual horror, released by the Brexit vote.
Having said that, when the man who once sang about 'ch-ch-ch-ch-changes' unexpectedly died at the beginning of the year, that sense of possibility resided very much in the past. We were nostalgic for celebrity representatives of a generation that young Remainers have more recently been hurling abuse at as selfish EU-wreckers. As Mick Hume, journalist and editor-at-large of spiked-online, described this icon in his early 70s heyday: 'Bowie emerged as the spirit of that rebellious age in a dayglow jumpsuit'. Jennie Bristow, author of the excellent Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict, thinks our response to the 'Boomer deaths' that seemed to dominate the first half of 2016 was not just a response to the tragic passing of individuals held in popular affection but also to an overwhelming sense that 'the spirit of the Sixties seems to be retiring as well.'
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So is today's generation, more likely to blame the Boomers for their problems than be inspired by them, really up to the task of taking on the political class? The fact that the Pretty Things rather than 'driving their mammas and papas insane' joined the March for Europe demanding that the EU Referendum result be overturned doesn't bode well. The setting up of a 'Brexit Department', albeit headed up by the estimable David Davies, may be designed to put like-minds at rest, but is turning a popular decision into a drawn-out technocratic process requiring its own department and minister really what we want? As campaigner Tom Slater put it there is a real danger that without sustained pressure from without the unwanted result will be happily 'kicked into the long grass'. An outcome that would be in keeping with our newly crowned prime minister's promise to insulate the political class from the electorate until 2020. Will all be Hunky Dory in the end as May puts into action her words that 'Brexit is Brexit'? Or are the signs ominous and the triggering of Article 50 that will put the nation's decision in irreversible motion a distant or even endangered prospect? Either way they won't pursue the matter in the same democratic spirit that forced it so reluctantly upon them.
One thing is for sure though, British politics has changed for good and will never be quite the same again. The political elite have been exposed as just that - with no real connection to the people on whose behalf they have disingenuously claimed to speak. The result of the Referendum vs their desire to remain in the EU Club has made that clearer than ever. We're not so apathetic. When finally presented with a genuine political choice of real consequence, we made our view known. But faced with the biggest popular mandate in the UK's political history, we were dismissed as too old, bigoted, or emotional to know what we were doing. We just don't understand the repercussions said Labour peer Oona King in a debate she had triggered on holding a second referendum. Speaking in the House of Lords it would be 'only fair and democratic' she said. The irony.
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What looked like being a year in which we rather morbidly obsessed over what and who has passed could be the start of a new era - a taster of what's to come. Instead of looking back at a roll call of dead celebrities, as grim onlookers; we have found ourselves playing a part in the throwing out of the old and moribund party politics, and with the prospect of ushering in something new to take its place. Who'd have thought that even a few weeks ago? And the barbaric attack in Nice on people celebrating Bastille Day is a reminder that there is nothing intrinsically inward-looking about fighting for freedom and democracy. It is a universal aspiration that needs to be shouted ever more loudly across the continent.
These words may be the chorus to a Beyonce anthem but 2016 may just be the year that this statement actually becomes a reality.
Picture this: Theresa May in Downing Street, Angela Merkel in the first female chancellor in Germany, Christine Lagarde in charge of the International Monetary Fund, Hilary Clinton the first woman in the Oval Office, and a possible first ever female secretary-general of the UN. Suddenly, politics has a lot less testosterone at the top.
Yesterday, I watched yet another documentary on what it means to have a second female Prime Minister. Despite this, a friend called me and said 'why doesn't anyone seem excited?'
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As much as I'm an avid supporter of women and our empowerment, I'm definitely not one for tokenism. Ultimately I believe roles should always be allocated depending on a person's ability regardless of race, religion or gender. So for me the question should perhaps be 'should we be excited?'
Some might say that we should judge a man (or woman in this case) by actions. So, it could be said that with the country feeling jaded, disappointed and disillusioned with politics, we are simply just waiting for Theresa May to do something that deserves our excitement.
We could easily argue that Theresa May was only elevated to the top of government after her male colleagues fell apart in front of the nation. Similarly, in America, it could be argued that if Hilary Clinton is elected president in November, it will be due to Donald Trump's antics finally proving too much for the general American population.
I should also add, we have been here before. When I was a child and Margaret Thatcher became our first female PM, there was a huge victory moment amongst women.
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It proved to be a waste of time, especially as she quickly proved she wasn't a feminist, famously saying 'I don't like strident women'.
Later on, Beatrix Campbell described the Iron Lady as: "Femininity is what she wears, masculinity is what she admires."
Call me crazy but I happen to believe we could be a little more excited! For a start, those of you who read my articles regularly know that I am a Domestic Abuse Interventionist. Theresa May has made violence against women a key area during her time as home secretary. Under her leadership, the law of coercive control to tackle domestic violence was introduced. Mrs May is co-founder of Women2Win, a campaign to elect more Conservative women. Despite the huge job that has been dumped on her desk as the U.K is arguably more divided than ever before, she immediately started that she will prioritise appointing women to senior positions.
That's not to say I'm jumping up and down with glee. Like everyone, I feel 'BREXIT'ed out' and fed up of watching British politics turn into a theatre show. Still I wonder if maybe we're just fed up of symbolism. President Barack Obama broke the mould as Americas first black president. It was a moment the entire diaspora and beyond felt proud to witness.
Eight years on, it is hard to ignore the fact that America is in turmoil, police brutality through the roof and unemployment amongst African-Americans is at an all-time low.
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I still believe that Barack Obama symbolises progress in our society. He, and his wife (who is extraordinary in her own right) are a black family living in the White House in a country built on slavery.
This significance has impacted and inspired me and millions of others.
Simone Roche (Founder of Northern Power Women and Director of Women 1st) agrees that a careful response to the appointment of a female PM is warranted. Still, Roche is also watching closely in anticipation of just how monumental it would be for Britain to finally have the full package: a Prime Minister who is effective, successful and female. 'It is vital to have more visible female role models however we still have the challenge that women in politics and business are still under represented. It's not About gender it's about the ability to do the big job and anything is possible. Still, Theresa May is demonstrating leadership and her bold and swift decisions so far are in response to the countries need for stability.'
I believe that as women we should give Theresa May an opportunity to prove she is what this country needs. Still, a second female Prime Minister should excite us. We may not be exactly where we want to be but we're on our way there. Surely each small step we take towards progress is a step worth celebrating.
Europe is in a flux. We are living through the most politically and economically uncertain period since the end of World War II. The famous Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" could not be more apt. Whilst a new Prime Minister starts work in the UK, whilst the UK grapples with its exit from the EU and whilst the EU comes to terms with how to protect the Union, it is important that we do not lose sight of what is at stake for the security of our continent.
Moments of global tension are often followed by increased discrimination and intolerance, but instead of allowing this trend to continue we must use the UK vote to leave the European Union as an opportunity to usher in a new era of solidarity throughout Europe.
The aftermath of the UK's decision to leave the European Union has been marked by a rising tide of hate crimes according to the UK's National Police Chief's Council. Since the referendum result, London alone has seen a 50 per cent rise in the number of hate crimes reported with a total increase of 42 per cent across England and Wales compared to last year. To some, the promise to 'take back control' has been interpreted as an opportunity to repatriate foreign nationals, causing the general public to undermine the UK's commitment to diversity and tolerance.
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But the trend is not unique to the UK. Across Europe, the ongoing migrant crisis has stirred up unrest and heightened tensions between migrant groups and local communities. Germany, long a bastion of tolerance and social-cohesion, has seen a pronounced increase in hate crimes. In 2015 the number of violent racist attacks nearly doubled when compared to figures for 2013. France has also experienced a rise in hatred and violence against immigrants and this has been replicated across the continent.
And then of course there is the continued worrying increase of anti-Semitic violent and non-violent attacks against Jews, which is evident in every country with a significant Jewish population, especially the UK and France. The Moshe Kantor Centre at Tel Aviv University has shown attacks on Jews to be worryingly high. The French Ministry of the Interior found that in 2015, despite making up just one per cent of the French population, the Jewish community was subject to 40 per cent of all racist attacks.
For too long, anti-Semitism, hatred and intolerance have been Europe's companion, tearing at the fabric of our social cohesion. These vile expressions of bigotry strike at the core of our European values. Values, such as the respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the right to belong to minority groups.
The UK now has a new Prime Minister and soon we will also see a new US President. These global leaders, and many others from Austria to Australia, are entering a period where strong and effective leadership is being undermined by populist far-right movements, where a mass of people are turning in-wards and where the politics of fear and division is reigning supreme. It is perhaps no coincidence that the UK-EU referendum lead to a spike in hate crimes as much of the rhetoric was incendiary and divisive. It is now time for leaders to exercise restraint and demonstrate responsibility, to rebuild our social fabric and not demolish it further. Not only a strong, but also a more responsible leadership is what Britain and Europe need today.
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In order to protect our societies against the haters and turn back the tide of intolerance we need concerted political, enforcement and economic action. We must insist our leaders are steadfast in their rejection of those in our societies looking to promote hatred and fear. This involves tough uncompromising rhetoric, but also support for law enforcement and the judiciary to arrest and prosecute those in our midst that seem to harm others based on their race, religion or political views.
We need tougher legislation to bring extremists and their sympathisers to justice, and we need better intelligence cooperation between countries so that terrorists and those who aid them do not slip through the net. The data from the Moshe Kantor Centre and other organisaions must not be ignored. In addition, we also need to demand that our leaders address the economic problems that are allowing bigotry and extremism to thrive. Clearly economic factors alone are a very poor excuse for hatred, however, it is also clear that rising inequality and extreme poverty provide fertile ground for extremist leaders - from the far-right, far-left and also from Islamists groups - to brainwash and recruit young men and women to commit atrocities at home and abroad.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
It's 8.25am and the inner circle is gathering inside the Prime Minister's study at No10.
The PM's Chief of Staff hands out the printed agenda prepared so recently that it is still warm to the touch from the laser printer. On a single side there are a half a dozen pressing issues requiring discussion.
Yet first amongst them is always the same opening item. It simply reads: The Media.
These get-togethers, duplicated again at 4pm, provided the daily sat-nav for the Cameron/Osborne Downing Street operation. The eight-thirty and four helped navigate the administration through six years of both good and bad times.
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Whist I was Chairman, unless travelling, my diary was shaped around attending both these daily sessions. But I would sometimes wonder whether a more distanced approach to the daily media noise wouldn't be more conducive to constructive government. Could, for example, a modern PM learn from the approach of our Sovereign? Try to be more above the media fray by regally allowing the daily discourse to simply pass by; uncommented and unreacted to? After more than two and a half years of participating in these No10 meetings, it is with regret that I am sorry to report that the answer in reality is quite simply no.
In fact, I don't believe any modern government can afford to ignore the relentless, virile, often ferocious and sometimes destructive news cycle. And here's why...
The next time the PM steps outside her front door, she will doubtless be asked about the day's main news item most likely by a hack shouting across Downing Street. She will sensibly ignore the voice as she steps into her waiting Jag. But then it is on to the school or factory where the PM is launching the government's latest shiny new education or industrial policy. The TV cameras have of course turned up to record the moment, but the only clip they will actually feature on the news bulletin will be when the journalist asks about the day's other news agenda which, much to the Prime Minister's quiet frustration, isn't what she actually came to talk about.
Regardless at what happens at that launch, the story will move on to the House of Commons chamber because come midday on Wednesday Prime Minister's Questions is in full swing. Now there is simply no escaping that news item and failing to give a clear response will be far worse than having taken the time to think through a planned line to take well in advance.
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So there is simply no avoiding it. No chance of becoming royalty-light with space to refrain from comment. No way to avoid the daily buffeting of whatever the country, or at least the media, is actually discussing at that given moment in time.
Back inside the surprisingly small Prime Ministerial study in No10, David Cameron's astute Director of Communications Craig Oliver would list the main news stories. Each headline would be noted, some would attract passing comment, whilst other headlines were so significant that they attracted their own item on the main agenda.
And there would be an unpredictable flow to events. Sometimes a merely mentioned item at the four-pm, might have become a full-blown mini-crisis to be gripped by the eight-thirty the following morning. Decisions would be made about who to despatch on the media. A senior Cabinet Minister like William Hague? One for the Chairman? Or should the Home Secretary be encouraged to record a clip to be shared between all the outlets? And if so, who will actually ask her?
Every administration comes to power with shiny new ideas and plenty of healthy idealism. The abiding challenge for the new Prime Minister's team, led by the very capable Chiefs of Staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, will be to find the right balance between focussing on the big stuff, without allowing the new PM and government to appear too diffident about the daily media hubbub.
It's a difficult balance. Tempting to ignore. But in the end it is what happens when the best laid Downing Street plans meet the daily media reality.
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President Erdogan has defeated the military coup in Turkey with the help of a popular mobilisation and loyal military chiefs. He now needs to explain why the coup occurred. It is no surprise that he has chosen the Gulen movement as chief conspirator and scapegoat He has been fingering them as a "state within a state" since the movement was implicated in fingering him for family corruption in 2013.
Hizmet (service to the common good), as the movement calls itself, is a good pick as a scapegoat. It evokes in many Turks a similar mix of derision and suspicion as the Freemasons in UK. Yet that is a poor parallel. Hizmet does not have secret rituals and funny handshakes. It does not sit outside mainstream religion. Though it does have powerful networks of members and organisations.
The movement follows the teachings of Fetullah Gulen. It is sui generi. It has a vision of religious modernism comparable to the Non-Conformists of the 18th century, at ease with economic liberalism and piety, and follows a strong commitment to an elite education. Rooted in the teaching of the Kurdish Quranic scholar, Said Nursi, it champions multi-party democracy and the teaching of the sciences in Muslim schools. But it has an extraordinary plethora of sophisticated communications channels, TV stations, newspapers, a Journalists and Writers Guild, and associations for inter-religious dialogue, and so on. It has been astonishingly successful amongst an aspiring Muslim middle-class in Turkey.
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Not surprisingly with its own universities, and - formerly before Erdogan began closing them down - crammer schools, it has produced socially mobile, meritocratic members of the civil service, different armed forces and police. I doubt if many have read Gramsci on the importance of ideological struggle within civil society but Hizmet has followed did not need his theoretical help. They have developed a user-friendly version of Islam for a Muslim society in transition, a third way between Islamism and pugnacious Kemalist secularism.
About five years ago, before Recep Erdogan began his descent into authoritarianism, I accompanied a group of academics to Istanbul to learn more about the movement. How had they managed, using - what to a westerner was - Fetullah Gulen's bland version of Islam, to attract so many followers and to expand as a major branch of progressive Islam in other countries? Well partly, it was by enjoining and keeping to strict moral codes. Our group suppressed a giggle when a Hizmet TV station boss told us that that he had to make compromises so they did feature female presenters showing their arms.
At Zaman, a widely read quality national newspaper, the policy was to eschew "malicious gossip and rumours" and there were no cartoons. One corrupted westerner muttered that they wouldn't read it. Yet there was something admirable about a touch of Calvin's Geneva surviving commercially in the brutal media world.
A Puritan streak was, of course, entirely acceptable to mainstream Islam. But another feature of the Hizmet, a strong and active commitment to interfaith dialogue and outreach, was not. Dialogue was seen as an integral part of modern Islam rather than an external demand. But at the end of the visit, and after reading some Gulen essays, I still failed to see how they had achieved such spectacular expansion, effective networking and genuine piety.
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So this, according to the Turkish government, is the "FETO, Fetullah Terrorist Organisation", that lies behind some 200 deaths and a failed military coup on 15-16 July. Forget the fact that the coup was instantly denounced by Gulen himself and constituent bodies within the Hizmet movement. Well, there might have been some active Hizmet members involved. The movement in the last few years had taken a terrible beating from Erdogan who tried to dismantle their structures, educational and communication, and who simply could not stand any source of authority in civil society apart from himself and the AKP. More likely as coup leaders, are old guard secularists and Kemalists in the armed forces whose hatred of anything smacking of more religion is passionate and frightening. And then there would be junior officers who didn't like their superiors. It is a measure of the discontent surrounding Erdogan that a - probably - disparate group of people who wanted for different reasons to get rid of him, managed to keep their planning secret and away from military intelligence.
It's shocking really. Shocking in the sense that actually it isn't that shocking at all. 31% of Labour voters believe that Theresa May will make a better Prime-Minister than Jeremy Corbyn could, that is the finding of a recent YouGov poll (46% believed the opposite with the remainder not knowing).
This comes just days after one of many long-running disputes within the party finally came to an end. Jeremy Corbyn will be automatically on the ballot paper when members vote in the leadership election, that is the decision of the party's National Executive Committee which voted 18-14 in favour of the motion last week. Yet even this failed to proceed without some form of controversy or malaise.
There was initial disagreement over whether Corbyn should be allowed to vote in the vote to determine if people could vote for him and even after that was decided there was more disparity to come. When the leader came out to triumphantly announce his victory to the nation's press, a second decision was made to disenfranchise party members who joined after 12 January unless they were willing to pay a fee of 25. This, claimed Corbynistas, would seriously hamper the incumbent's chances of being re-elected; a slap in the face for democracy, a desertion of Labour's values they cried.
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This is not to say those suggestions are unfounded, simply that the very fact so much hysteria and animosity can be generated over a simple legal vote speaks volumes about the current state of the party. Labour has been forced unceremoniously into a period of self-reflection and as it turns out, it's not been doing brilliantly.
In fact, this neuroticism runs to its very core. An article in the New Statesman this week rumoured that a member of the Shadow Cabinet suspects another of being an MI5 informant. Remarkable really that in 2016 the official Opposition are apparently playing Cloak and Dagger with one another. To be honest though, such is the frenzy of British politics at the moment it would be rather fitting if awkward-looking Tom Watson, the man who seemingly doesn't know if he's coming nor going, a right-winger in a socialist world announced via Twitter that he was really a Russian double agent before flying to Moscow and living out the rest of his days in the Kremlin's shadow.
On a more serious note, the rancour that has come to define the Labour Party manifested itself last week in the shape of a brick - a brick hurled through the window of leadership candidate Angela Eagle's constituency office. A shaken Eagle appealed to her leader to denounce the display of intimidation from his supporters to which he duly obliged. Yet this is just about the highest level of communication the pair are likely to have at the moment. A former high-level Shadow Cabinet Minister, Eagle sat in for her leader at Prime-Minister's Questions on many occasions, yet during the period of mass resignations from the frontbench it was she who denounced some of the major flaws of the regime. Organisational and Communicational issues had come to define the leadership she claimed. From that moment it was obvious who the first challenger for Labour's top job would be.
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This initial disagreement has now festered into a cavernous schism between Corbyn supporters and those they denounce as 'Blairites' of which Eagle is apparently the leader. The level of animosity this has given rise to is actually extraordinary really. On Thursday, John McDonnell labelled Corbyn's enemies within as "f****ing useless", a slur not even reserved for the blue lot on the other side of the dispatch box. To make it all the more remarkable such a claim is actually relatively unfounded. It is hard to see what more the Shadow Chancellor could expect from the so-called 'plotters'; they have organised a mass exodus from the font-bench, destroyed Corbyn in a vote of no confidence and forced a leadership battle.
This isn't the first time in recent days that McDonnell has produced a rather incendiary statement though. During what can only be presumed as a rather tense PLP meeting last week, he is accused by Owen Smith, when questioning weather he was prepared to split the party, of shrugging his shoulders and affirming "if that's what it takes". Of course he denied the claim, but was rebuffed by Kate Green, another Labour MP who confirmed Smith's accusation.
Yet is easy to see where McDonnell gets such brazen confidence from. A staunch loyalist of Corbyn, he can now sit tight in the knowledge that the incumbent leader will probably remain in his post for a while yet. Corbyn's proponents are so fervent and so large in number that the decision made by the NEC last week to allow his name on the ballot paper could effectively be classed as the victory itself.
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I've been watching Theresa May form her government over the past for days, interested in who's going where in which department. I'll admit to having to Google a couple of the names. There was the shocker of the first few "you broke it, you sodding fix it" appointments of Johnson, Fox and Leadsom, followed by Priti "replace DfID" Patel, causing an intake in breath by the poorest people in the world. Then came a steady stream of less controversial appointments and, in my opinion, some potential improvement.
When Karen Bradley was elevated to Cabinet a space was left for a new Minister for Preventing Abuse, Exploitation and Crime. This job matters to me. This job is the one place where violence against women and girls, modern slavery, and sexual exploitation sits in Government. This is the job I want when I play fantasy reshuffle. The likelihood of me ever having a government job is currently akin to the fantasy Oscar I'm also going to win for best original screenplay. I waited eagerly to see who would fill this role - alas I am still waiting. There are two Home Office ministers or Parliamentary under Secretaries of State (whatever that means) who seem to have no brief, so perhaps one of them will get it.
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I'm reserving my full on screaming rage at the idea that the position is gone. I'll give them 24 hours to sort their act out. For now I shall express concerned disappointment that this was less of a priority for allocation than the big hitters of immigration, and counter-terrorism. If Andrea Leadsom, Gove or Johnson had won the race I would expect this oversight. Not May. I expect a lot more from May.
I made no secret of the fact that May was my preferred candidate for Prime Minister. Before all the people who cannot see nuance rush to berate me, let me be clear: I don't want a Tory prime minister at all - I also wish I was a size ten, reality sucks at times. I preferred May because I think that while she has been a bit rubbish on refugee women and has left many victims of domestic violence who have no recourse to public funds in the lurch, she has been an alright Home Secretary on violence against women and girls. She was solid on modern slavery and good on stalking. She has changed laws for the better even though delivery on the ground remains stubbornly slow to improve.
The Home Office efforts of the past five years have been woefully let down by other departments. Education have time and time again stubbornly voted down compulsory relationship education that would help keep children safe. The Department for Communities and Local Government have removed every safeguard May tried to put in place by decimating local budgets for refuges, community domestic violence services and local rape crisis. The Department for Health continues to gleefully fail to recognise the problem of domestic violence up and down the country's A&E and primary care services and frankly does naff all in the fight for keeping millions of people's safe. The DWP have repeatedly failed to recognise that Universal Credit, localised welfare rules and now the potential reduction in housing benefit for supported accommodation doesn't just ignore victims of domestic violence it actually puts them in harms way.
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However the greatest offender of crapping on scared families is the Ministry of Justice. The removal of legal aid has meant that thousands of victims of violence are now left with no representation and are being cross examined by their perpetrators in the country's civil and family courts. Yes that's right, we live in a country where you have to represent yourself and your rapist is allowed to question you in court. Slow hand clap.
By comparison to this shower, May's department at the Home Office looked like a beacon of good practice. I was told by many Tory MPs during the briefest leadership battle in history that she had spoken of her commitment to ending this violence. They assured me that if she was the Prime Minister violence against women and children would be prioritised.
I really hope that I will be eating my words this week. I really hope that not only will there be an announcement about someone having the role of Minister for Preventing Abuse, Exploitation and Crime, but that in every department of government she will give one of her shiny new ministers the job of managing sexual and domestic violence in that department. I want to see a council of ministers with this brief who actually wake up to the fact that this is costing us billions of pounds, killing more people each year than UK terrorism does in decades, and leaving our children learning unacceptable standards.
I'm willing to help her get it right. I don't like Tories, I don't want to help them, but I like victims of domestic violence getting a bad deal far less. I realise some think this means I'm a red Tory, I call it giving a toss about someone other than myself. I could write her a policy document right now that would change things, just say the word Theresa.
Theresa May, I'm counting on you to give a damn. I want deeds not words. Prime minister, I beg you to make me look a fool for doubting you because if you don't, I will be standing up and shaming you every day and neither of us want that.
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When I was seven years old I accidentally cracked my Mum's vase. I knew that I should tell her immediately but, fearing the repercussions and not wanting to upset her, I instead clumsily glued the cracks and turned them to face the wall. Out of sight, out of mind: or so I thought. It turns out that when you destroy an integral part of a delicate structure, the whole thing will crumble once put under a slight amount of pressure. And, you still get yelled at.
The Conservative Party could learn something from my younger self's mischief. The Brexit vote both highlighted and widened some deep-running cracks through UK society: our differing opinions on nationalism and sovereignty, immigration and democracy, business and economics, boiling over into racism and xenophobia from some, anger, lies and frustration from others.
Of course political turmoil ensued from our unexpected EU decision; of course the Conservative Party wanted to patch it up as quickly as possible to navigate through the tough weeks and years ahead. But after the whirlwind switchover from Cameron to the sensible and straight-talking Theresa May, we only have the semblance of calm.
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Remain voters are disappointed with the result of the referendum and the narrow margin by which it was lost; we're also dissatisfied that the Leave camp plucked statistics from thin air to aid their victory then withered away when the country looked to them for an exit strategy. Leave voters, meanwhile, had barely pulled off their party hats when they were suddenly faced with a Remain-voting Prime Minister, reservations over triggering Article 50 and the spectacular domino effect which claimed Boris Johnson, Michael Gove then Andrea Leadsom.
One of the key areas of the EU debate -- perhaps the key area -- was democracy. Northern or southern, Leave or Remain, Conservative or Labour, the one thing we can all pretty much agree on is that the wishes of the people should determine our nation's future. Hence the SNP calling for another Scottish referendum on independence. Hence the Leave camp banging on about unelected bureaucrats. Hence Remainers pointing to the Lords, monarchy and First Past the Post system as failures in our democracy.
But the one, and only, clear message from the government in the wake of Brexit is that they don't really care what the people think if there's no electoral price to pay. The appointment of May, who herself questioned the validity of Gordon Brown's takeover of Prime Minister in 2007, demonstrates this: but it isn't just the Tories who are at fault. Labour is letting us down as well.
Now, more than ever, we need stable opposition to a brand-new and controversial cabinet. The current squabbles within the Labour Party are again more reminiscent of myself at seven years old than a group of adults representing millions more around the UK. Jeremy Corbyn has a clear mandate from British Labour supporters to lead the party, but this is clearly less important to the MPs who turned against him than their own preferences: Angela Eagle even brushed off the backlash against her leadership challenge from her own constituency.
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When asked why she was best placed to take over from Corbyn as Labour leader on BBC Newsnight, her rather pathetic answer was that "it's time Labour had a woman leader". I'd almost feel sorry for Eagle, being unable to come up with better credentials than the sex she was born with, but the fact that she appropriated the serious issue of gender representation for her own electoral traction exempts me from any such pity.
Although Corbyn will automatically be included on the leadership ballot, many members of the Labour Party feel cheated of their right to vote, and their money, as new rules mean that only party members who joined over six months ago are eligible -- unless they pay 25. Conservative Party members shouldn't feel too smug about our problems, though: they were also cheated of the opportunity to vote for a new leader after Cameron's resignation.
Given the turmoil within both the Labour and Conservative parties, voters could be forgiven for looking elsewhere to seek post-Brexit guidance. Some might turn to Ukip who were, after all, partially responsible for the EU referendum being called in the first place but, alas, Nigel is nowhere to be seen. Nor is Tim Farron, for that matter, even amidst rumours of a splinter group of MPs forming a new centre-left party. And as for the million of us who voted Green at the last general election, we might have known our voices would be ignored when denied proportional representation, and we're seeing that already through May's decision to abolish the Climate Change and Energy Department.
There have been a lot of jitters lately about Scotland being on the verge of jumping out of the UK since the Brexit vote.
You hear it with Nicola Sturgeon, the steely Scottish First Minister, announced almost immediately that a second referendum 'must be, and is, on the table.' You see it from the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, dashing to Scotland with a commitment to the union. The surge of SNP memberships helps to stoke the flames.
In many ways, the Scots case of leaving the UK is rather compelling. During the last Scottish Referendum, despite a 10% margin defeat for the separatists, the central argument for staying included not losing out on the membership of the EU.
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For many, having the UK being carved up to pieces (let's not even talk about Northern Ireland here) after being on the fast track of jumping out of the EU, is a pretty tough pill to swallow. So jitters from unionist can be expected.
So, for those who love the union, are we screwed?
Nope, and here is why.
The central Westminster Government won't grant approval, and there has been zero indication from PM May that suggests anything different. The Westminster Government has primacy over the Scottish Government and the UK as a whole voted to leave. Which is why Scotland cannot get any special measures with the EU that differ from the rest of the UK. Until May says yes - it's constitutionally impossible, and barring a Turkey-style coup, it will stay that way.
No cautious PM will risk additional uncertainty and everybody on the Remain side of Government officially hates referendums now. The Westminster administration will use every argument; delay and detail to avoid a referendum, an easy way is to simply repeat the words 'oh but the SNP did not win a majority at Holyrood in the last Scottish Election', that alone will work for at least another four years.
Sure, the Scottish Government can hold their own vote as an act of defiance, in a similar way to Catalonia in Spain. That comes with huge risks and minimal upside - if they lose, the journey ends and if they win, critics will denounce the lack of neutrality. Others would argue that Sturgeon should focus on economic stability instead of spending millions on a symbolic vote.
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Second, the SNP core arguments are not yet developed or markedly changed from 2014, when we had the last Scottish Referendum. No solutions are currently feasible for replacing the Scottish currency, and joining the Euro, which is mandatory for new EU joiners, to bail out Greek and Italian banks is not exactly a snappy campaign slogan.
Oil price has dropped to the floor - widening a 8 billion funding gap per year, and that's assuming the rest of the UK will let Scotland have all the revenue (they won't). Combine that with the immediate loss of EU funding, no monetary policy control (as the Bank of England will control the pound) and the uncertainty in dividing the country: you have yourself a perfect cocktail for a financial crisis...
The immediate mess from the Brexit win has been a cautious reminder of what could happen in the immediate aftermath of an independent Scotland.
You might think Scotland will sort out the EU funding crisis by joining the EU quickly, but that won't work either. Scotland will get no special concessions aside for some warm words. They will have to go through the extremely long winded process and will be (depending who is in charge) be behind Scotland in the queue. Very stringent economic tests will need to be passed, not guaranteed without the financial muscle of oil or the tax revenues from London.
If all those fail to discourage Scotland - we have a surprising ally our side: Spain. Spain will simply shrug and veto the whole dream anyway. There is no way the Spanish will let Scotland in, as it encourages the Catalonians to break away. It's a matter of self-preservation - they care little for Scottish politics.
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Finally - it's actually the First Minister. She's a smart, hardworking and very cautious politician and lacks the bluster of her predecessor. She knows she needs to win if she goes for a second referendum. She had to declare dramatically that Scotland might want another say in leaving the UK, she had no choice, her members are chopping to the bits to try again, but her story is not yet solid. Sturgeon would have preferred to dictate the process under her own terms, not external events.
Millennials know him as Santa Claus in Elf (2003) or Carl the main character in the animated Oscar-winning feature Up (2009), but seven-time Emmy Award winning actor Ed Asner will always be best known for his role 'Lou Grant', first on the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then the spinoff hour-long newspaper drama Lou Grant, whose first season was finally released last month in the U.S. on DVD.
Still active as a working actor who turns 87 in November, IMDB lists Asner as being involved in 18 projects in the first half of 2016. Some are full-length films, while others are TV pilots or documentaries. He's non-plussed by all the offers, noting some never get completed or are in various stages of financing or production.
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"I give them my name to help sell the picture," says Asner, who is getting honored with a lifetime achievement award July 23 at the International Film Expo in Bellmore, NY, where My Friend Ed, the hour-long 2014 documentary about him being an activist who refuses to budge on his ideals no matter what anyone thinks will be screened, followed by a Q&A.
His outspokenness in the early 1980s about American military intervention in Central America is thought to have resulted in the cancellation in Lou Grant by CBS after five seasons in the Top 10.
Ed Asner in 'Lou Grant'
"I carry great guilt about the loss of jobs by my fellow actors, writers, producers, crew - all the people I loved and appreciated: my words supposedly being the target of the cancellation [of Lou Grant]," says Asner, who I first interviewed in November 1982 for Rolling Stone. At the time, he believed he was blacklisted for his anti-Reagan political views, but would stand by his principles, even knowing what he knows today.
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"All I know is I was chosen as the patsy to be the target by Charlton Heston and his stuntmen and day players who followed him sheep-like, attacking me for what I believed in," he says, somewhat bitterly. "I said to that [Lou Grant] producer of mine, 'What do you want me to do when they attack me as an enemy of the state. You want me to shut up?' It was impossible for me to shut up. Interestingly enough, my agent at the time, Jack Fields, thought my career was finished. The fact that I responded verbally to the verbal attacks, he thought kept me alive. So here I am today."
Asner believes the full truth is not known about 9/11, and less controversially he is active in Autism Speaks, a nonprofit that sponsors autism research and conducts awareness and outreach activities aimed at families, governments, and the public. Asner has a son and a grandson who are autistic.
Asner is still a loud voice in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), for which he served two terms as president 1981-1985, and vehemently opposed its merger in 2012 with American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), unsuccessfully suing to stop the merger. In another pending case against Actors' Equity, he served as lead plaintiff, objecting to producers' right to pay performers as little as $7 per performance.
Regarding his octogenarian lifestyle, he watches what he eats and explains his "eight hip surgeries" prevent much mobility. "My left leg is shorter and I can't do a lot of walking." Still he manages a half hour every day for exercise on an elliptical bicycle.
Asked why it took Lou Grant so long to come out on DVD, Asner believes, "It was regarded as an ideas show. It was canceled under a cloud of controversy. People who finance these things were afraid to touch it. Also, it's not the Mary Tyler Moore Show; it's not going to be a big smash, flood of sales."
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Asner is depressed by the current state of American politics. He supported for president "the Jewish Socialist" (i.e., Bernie Sanders), a label that could he easily apply to him. "At least the Jewish Socialist made a splash among the electorate and the young. Of the young, it'd be nice if we could all learn from them. I find society itself quite depressing. Our rotting infrastructure, our military industrial complex is always with us. The leading democratic candidate is happy to dance jigs for the banks. Mr. Bill [Clinton] is probably in the background pulling the strings. Our selection of candidates drops even lower than ever. It's a joke."
On what he's most proud of in his career, Asner responds: "The fact I could get by in comedy is a great achievement."
'Never argue with a fool, people might not notice the difference' so the saying goes. Perhaps the same logic could be applied to War on Terror. The Remain campaigners in the recent Brexit referendum argued that the creation of an integrated Europe was a truce to ensure that European nations never went to war again, but yet there seems to be a persistent refusal to use the same logic with other nations.
From the day George W Bush declared the war on terror, terror unleashed its ugly face and we are all terrified. He declared that the Iraq War was going to be 'Shock and Awe' and indeed it was, with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives lost, homes and livelihoods destroyed, making life for most impossible. The saddest thing I saw was an Iraqi homeless child who sleeps between the graves of his parents. How then, would this child grow up to believe in humanity?
In Europe the far right is on the rise and racists openly parading themselves no longer caring to hide it, validated by leaders like David Cameron who referred to men, women and children escaping from the repercussions of that 'Shock and Awe' paradigm George Bush and Tony Blair gifted the world as 'swamps'. Katie Hopkins even makes a career out of racism and vilainising refugees in her usual crass, vile outbursts. Never underestimate the human resolve, when leaders of developed nations use their position to quash anyone with a different opinion or point of view yet by the same token claiming to be open minded, turning a blind eye excruciating suffering, how then can they not see that such hatred and demonization breeds hatred.
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It is a sad state of affairs watching more lives lost in France but this is a reality for many round the world using weaponry that is sold by European countries. France refuses to acknowledge pleas from impoverished African nations who still have to pay tax for being colonised with their national reserves directly controlled by France. The refusal to allow integration of Algerians in France instead confining them to the squalid ghettos rife with Islamic fundamentalist is folly, instead blaming external terrorists. The truth of the matter is, its virtually impossible to radicalise anyone who feels like a valued member of the society. Those living on the margins feel like there is nothing to live for and will undertake what revenge is accessible to them.
Instead of confronting the root causes of home grown terrorism, France has declared more bombs and attacks on Syria and Iraq, yet the culprit of the atrocity in Nice was half French and half Algerian which is completely illogical with promise for more blood shed. Europe's love affair with war games and global domination is being challenged, yet refusal to accept that goals posts keeps shifting means we will be in this is a quandary for the next century.
What if instead of demonising the Muslim, you reached out to them by giving them a hug, they might hug you back because they too value safety for their families. What if next time you see a woman in a hijab, instead of abusing her you show her love by wishing her a good day. What if instead of letting the refugees drown, you offered a safe haven with the agreement that when their countries are safe they will go back? What if Blair and Bush had offered Sadam Hussain the same favourable friendship they offer to the Saudi regime, maybe the world would have been a slightly safer place.
Here's a brutal truth that no hipster will ever admit: festival dressing is tricky.
You see, the aim is to appear all nonchalant and cool whilst secretly planning and packing for days in advance, streamlining your essential kit into one 'oh, dunno', type bag. And it can total really quite a hefty stash even without all this batsh*t "British Summer" weather we've got going on right now.
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Take this weekend - I was at Love Box with team Hoxton Radio. Now. Love Box is a three day festival but you don't actually stay over-night. This has pros and cons. Pro: no tent admin. Con: no base to leave extra layers / spare shoes etc. For me - given my extreme hatred of tents (vile sweatboxes of doom) - the pros far outweigh the cons, but it's personal preference. And I must admit that the experience of leaving Bethnal Green circa 11.30pm on Saturday night amidst a tidal wave of festival-types was slightly stressful.
Anyway. As an unseasoned festival-er, packing was slightly difficult. I just didn't know what to take and asking cooler friends for advice just seemed so deeply unacceptable. Here's what I found you need:
SUNSCREEN
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I learnt my lesson filming in Kent last Thursday when I managed to tattoo a t-shirt tan onto my arm: it is really possible to tan / burn / frazzle in the UK. Sunscreen is key, particularly the non-sticky type. Murad do a great Invisiblur one for face, and on body I love Kiehl's.
HANDSFREE BAG
When I did Park Life with Tigi in Manchester, I took my Longchamp along for the ride. Now. I love Longy. But what I'd brutally failed to recognise was just how unpractical partying with a handbag would be. I've never felt so uncool. Backpacks (I love mine by Vans) / cross-body bags (like my Davina Mulford) are ideal. Or a bumbag if you're feeling really cool.
SNEAKERS
Hunters are the ONE for mud, but sans bad weather nothing screams festival virgin louder than a clean pair of wellies. And you'll be really sweaty (ew). Sneakers are big this year - and actually, even in the extreme mud of Glastonbury, people like Millie Mac and Leomie Anderson were in Converse, so... I love Victoria Plimsoles - they're Spanish and have a mega array of different colour schemes.
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PHONE CASE
If ever you're going to drop / step on / abuse your phone, it'll be on the last day of a festival, having hitherto managed to nail the whole keeping the screen un-smashed thing. It can't just be me who has a knack for this. Especially if it's an iPhone - they're just so damn breakable. So now I have a Gear4 case - it has crazy awesome shock protection without being bulky. Apparently I can now drop Iggy (the iPhone) from a great height. I haven't quite built up to testing this yet.
WATERPROOFS
I know it's unsexy, but if it rains you'll literally be so happy. Parajumpers have a super bright range for Summer so they double as a statement piece.
LAYERS
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At Sandhurst, we were always told to keep an emergency layer of warm kit, just in case. Then there's always something else to fall back on. I didn't quite go this far at Love Box, but I did have a thick Noisy May t-shirt in reserve for when the sun went down.
EASY ACCESSORIES
Because who has time for careful layering? A token long pendant is fun and everso sling-on-able. My pendant au choixe for Love Box was by Engelsrufer, which has a little sound ball that apparently calls my guardian angel when I move it. I got home in one piece so guess it worked?
What're your festival essentials? Let me know in the comments below so I can nail my next festival venture.
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In the wake of the EU referendum it has become clear that radical and unpredictable political movements are gaining momentum and gradually eclipsing their moderate, centrist rivals.
If we flashback to 20 years ago when New Labour was becoming increasingly popular due to Blair's centrist revisionism, the political scene would be barely recognisable. After nearly two decades of arguably radical neo-liberal governments, the nation's overwhelming desire for a moderate alternative triumphed. Blair's Third Way policies of progressive taxation, affordable tuition fees and improved education struck a chord with many disenchanted British voters and shifted the political balance from the right to left-of-centre. When we compare the Britain of 1996 to the Britain of 2016 the differences are stark. Gone are the days of pragmatism and triangulation; now replaced by radical far right and far left ideals and dogmatic politicians such as Nigel Farage.
However, this new wave of political radicalism has a dark side which many of its ambassadors - Paul Nuttall and Douglas Carswell for instance - seek to disguise in populist rhetoric.
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Vote Leave promised that Britain would be able to "take back control" and limit immigration whilst continuing to reap the economic benefits of free trade we receive whilst in the EU. But these promises were only the tip of the iceberg. More radical characters such as Nigel Farage used the referendum campaign to exacerbate tensions within the main political parties and cause division in areas with high rates of immigration. By dividing the Westminster parties, the radical thinkers hope that an opening will emerge for their anti-establishment policies and a new kind of politics will prevail.
Centrist politics is deemed by many on the far right and far left to be a breeding ground for career politicians and excessive pragmatism. However, when one takes a closer look at the centre ground of British politics it becomes clear that this is not the case.
David Cameron's resignation speech exemplified everything that has gone wrong in British politics in the last few years. Many believed Cameron to be a career politician whose privileged background and ruthless ambition catapulted him to the top. But the break in his voice when he delivered his speech and the lines "I held nothing back... I love this country and I feel honoured to have served it," prove that the far-right have quashed the genuine efforts of centrists to make Britain a better place. Cameron's emphasis on "enabling those who love each other to get married whatever their sexuality" and "increasing people's life chances" highlighted how centrism is not just the politics of elections, but the politics of egalitarianism and social prosperity.
When Cameron's speech is compared to some of Farage's comments on immigration it is painstakingly clear that centrism is the best option to heal our divided nation. In 2014, in response to the question "what sort of people should be allowed to migrate to Britain", he replied "People who do not have HIV." This comment adds to the notion that radical politics is divisive as Farage almost explicitly suggested that people suffering from HIV are unwelcome in the UK. Although an entirely unfounded comment, to an already Eurosceptic person this remark would only serve to further entrench anti-immigration sentiment and lead to a more fractious nation.
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Radical far-left politics is also a recipe for polarity. Labour should have reaped the electoral benefits of a divided Conservative Party in the wake of the EU referendum; however Corbyn's divisive politics and inability to control discontented MPs shifted the media focus away from the fractious Tories and on to his own party. As with the far-right, the far-left is a place of rooted ideology and, put frankly, stubbornness. Corbyn, despite failing to attract the confidence of his MPs, refuses to step down as leader and thus continues to cause rifts in his party. His obstinate determination to pursue contentious policies such as a Maximum Wage are leaving Labour riddled with schisms and on the path towards election annihilation.
One-Nation Conservatism, Blairism and Liberalism are not perfect but they are the only ideologies which can unite the country following this referendum rather than worsen pre-existing divisions. Those who campaigned to remain are not without their flaws and the scaremongering conducted during the last four months was unnecessary and unhelpful.
However, now that the referendum has been decided, we must work to make the best of it; we need politicians who will reunite the country and promote stability and equality. To ensure this happens the centre ground of British politics must harness the support of the 75% of 18-24 year olds who voted remain and use their accepting and internationalist views to suppress the rise of radicalism.
The Japanese firm Softbank is to take over British chip designer ARM with no objection from the government, despite Theresa May's recent questioning of the wisdom of takeovers of British companies by overseas entities.
Before she became prime minister, May suggested that a government under her premiership would be readier to intervene in foreign takeovers that were not in the national interest. However, the ARM takeover tests not only the detail of her campaign promises, but also the spirit in which she entered Downing Street. In the speech following her appointment, May swore that her government would govern in the interests not of the wealthy, but of the poor and insecure, saying, "When we take the big calls, we'll think not of the powerful, but you."
May has argued that this deal does satisfy the national interest test because Softbank intends to double the size of the workforce, currently 3000-strong, at the Cambridge site of ARM over the next five years. The government has also claimed that the takeover bid proves the strength of the British economy after Brexit.
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However, Robert Peston has derided this as "spin", pointing out that takeovers of this kind are detrimental to the current account deficit, which has already reached historic proportions and is, in his words, "one very important reason why the UK is economically fragile post Brexit". Peston accused May and Chancellor Philip Hammond of having been "captured by Treasury orthodoxy", in apparent contravention of their promise to listen to the people over the elite. He added that if foreign investors were keen to invest in the British economy, it was not because of its strength but a result of the devaluation of the pound.
At the age of two, the Queen's great-granddaughter Mia Tindall has started a constitutional row - to go or not to go to boarding school. Mia's dad (and former day boy) Mike Tindall says he's "certainly not keen" of having her live away from home. However, going away to school is as royal as cucumber sandwiches, as Mia's mum, and ex-boarder, Zara will agree. Princes William and Harry famously studied at Eton while Prince Charles was packed off to the north of Scotland to Gordonstoun, a school he referred to as "a prison sentence" and "Colditz in kilts".
But is boarding school really that bad? Yes, there will be homesickness, especially for younger children, but in today's world of email, Skype and social media, you can be in regular contact with family, wherever they are in the world. As many parents work full time, kids who do live at home probably spend more time in school clubs or with nannies and babysitters than with their own flesh and blood. I know many parents - dads mainly - who see their children for just 10 minutes a day at breakfast.
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Gone are the days of Victorian-style schooling with the distant masters, caning and fags. Nowadays, staff are on hand to involve themselves with the children's lives and offer comfort where necessary. As Jenny Dwyer, the head of Sherborne School for Girls says to new parents: "If an answer from a housemistress doesn't come immediately, it's because I don't want them always to be stuck behind their computers, but to be spending the time looking after your daughters."
Boarding school offers so much more than teaching. It has to entertain its charges during evenings and weekends and does so with extra-curricular activities such as sport, music, drama and trips out. The schools are often set in grounds with fields and woods to explore. Many children find that once they've settled in, they're too busy to get homesick. Then of course, there are the lifelong friends you meet. Every night's a sleepover when you're rooming with your best mate.
My company tutors children from eight to 18 and as many are international students, they attend British boarding schools. They are well-rounded, confident individuals with an air of independence and a can-do attitude. They're comfortable socially and with new situations and when they do enter the job world, they've got an established network of contacts. Plus, when they see their family, it's real quality time: leisurely catch-up dinners and holidays rather than sitting slumped together on the sofa, staring at a screen. There are no arguments over homework or being late for class as all that is dealt with by the teachers.
Culturally, we would be in a poorer place if it weren't for boarding schools. They've been immortalised in books and films from Mallory Towers and Goodbye, Mr Chips to St Trinian's and Dead Poet's Society. I never boarded, but many friends did and they loved it. Mike, if you're reading this, I'm sure it's like Hogwarts and full of magic. Please don't rule it out.
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The only thing standing between me and loose women is Tony Blair. A promising career in Broadcast media, brought to an abrupt end when I accused Tony of Hijacking publicity on Channel 4 news.
At the same time as I was congratulated by the editor for doing "an outstanding job", my name was being erased from the "expert contributor list". Number 10 (which I took to be Alistair Campbell), I was later told, called while I was mid interview demanding that I be ejected from the studio. My criticism of
Tony Blair's handling of the Darfur genocide was, apparently, beyond the pale.
One of the greatest unspoken tragedies of the Iraq war is that Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Hilary Benn turned their backs on the first genocide this century. Resources and troops that should have been deployed as peacekeepers to prevent another Rwanda, had been expended fighting an illegal war in Iraq.
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A few months ago, a young Sudanese man, fleeing the genocide in Darfur, was crushed to death by a truck in Calais. Thousands more languish in refugee camps throughout Europe. This is a direct result of Tony Blair's failed foreign policy.
In between episodes of Benefits Britain and Can't pay? We'll take it away!, I read the entire Chilcot report into the calamitous Iraq war. There are two recurring presages that emerge in almost all post crises critiques. Group-think and psychopathy. In each case, the signs that could have averted catastrophe were missed. Lessons, though documented in postmortems, are rarely learned.
And so, as with most post disaster autopsies, such as Enron, Challenger, and the global financial crash, there it was in Chilcot's report. Group-think. A phenomena wherein "like minded" clones make the big decisions, excluding dissenting views and questioning voices. Every business school and leadership manual in the world warns that decisions made in this way are perilous. Chilcot exposed Blair's cosy "sofa style" private meetings involving just a handful of unquestioning yes men, from which even members of his own cabinet were excluded.
Instead of toeing the party line, the excluded MPs should have spoken out and demanded more and better evidence. They chose not to. They failed to raise the alarm, putting self-interest ahead of the national interest. Sitting Labour MPs who backed Blair's reckless war should now do the decent thing and resign.
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There is a direct causal link between Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State. Many of the terrorist attacks in Europe and the US in recent years were carried out by young disenfranchised Muslims radicalised by the Iraq war and its aftermath. In her testimony to Chilcot, former head of M15, Eliza Manningham-Buller, said "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people".
The invasion, and the lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) used to validate it, have also undermined confidence in political leadership in the West. The Chilcot report documents in shocking detail that the political and governmental structures which planned the invasion were unworthy of public confidence.
The second theme that, although seldom articulated, is invariably evident in post disaster inquiries, is the prevalence of psychopathic leadership behaviours. Dr Robert Hare is an expert in psychopathy. He maintains that people in power tend to score higher in psychopathic dimensions than the rest of us. In his book Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work, he says psychopaths are motivated by "their own selfish desires, regardless of consequences to others". He describes them as "superficially charming, manipulative, lying, guilt free, lacking in empathy, ruthless and unwilling to accept responsibility".
All of these adjectives have been used to describe leadership traits of the key political players that took us into Iraq and out of Europe (one of whom is now foreign secretary, which is as mad as making Tony Blair peace envoy to the Middle East, oh yes, that really did happen). Having unleashed a tsunami of hate and havoc on our nation, they abandoned the sinking ship without a care in the world for the traumatised souls left drowning in a sea of excrement. Not a single life boat to cling to.
Still living with the devastating consequences of the doomed Iraq invasion, this country has been thrust into yet another cataclysmic, life altering upheaval. With the same hallmarks of group-think and remorseless psychopathy, I wonder how much more chaos and reckless abandon, this weary world can take.
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The Tate's continuing commitment to platforming female artists continues apace with this Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition, the Tate Modern's big summer show, and the biggest retrospective of her work to be held outside of America.
And certainly the scope of the show is impressive, with works from across the full-length of Georgia's career, including her early work in 1920s New York, through her exploration of the New Mexico landscapes, and on to her large-scale paintings of horizons in the 1960s.
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And, of course, the flowers.
Georgia O'Keeffe will forever be associated with her close-cropped studies of flowers. And rightly so as these are not just iconic pieces, but they are wonderful too. In some, the detail is exquisite - the folds in the petals, the developing hues - and in others, the magnification is so close that the piece becomes almost abstract.
And this use of nature as a source of abstraction continues in Georgia's other still life works from the time, such as leaves and shells, and in her sudden love affair with the ocean (Georgia only left the USA for the first time in 1932) which led to some glorious works, such as Nature Forms - Gaspe, 1932, where Georgia's experience of a storm at sea is reflected in a beautiful swirl of the most delicate hues of blues and greens.
The big draw is, understandably, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932 - the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction (snapped up a couple of years ago for an impressive $44 million) and it is probably the sharpest piece in Georgia's catalogue of works, with its clear, clean lines and simple striking palette of greens and whites, as opposed to the softer, less defined lines and warmer hues in works such as Dark Iris No. 1, 1927, and Oriental Poppies, 1927.
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However, their perennial interpretation as an exploration of female sex and sexuality infuriated Georgia. So much so that the constant framing of these beautiful studies of flowers as vaginas eventually led to Georgia turning her back on them completely, replacing them as the objects of her attention with the desert landscape of New Mexico, and all its colours and features.
It's a real shame as, for all the sumptuous colours in some of these later landscapes, and the inventiveness she brought such as using the holes in the scattered pelvic bones from dead cattle as the lens to see the world, the flowers remain her best work.
Georgia made her first extended visit to New Mexico in 1929 and the place made an instant and lasting impression. "As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before." And that love of the distinctive geography and landscape, with its mountains and valleys, and add to that the extra factors of the Native American and Spanish influences, and the dramatic effects of the scorching sun, and you can see why Georgia came back again and again to paint.
Much like the flowers, here she was again using nature as inspiration. There are some wonderful landscapes here, such as Black Mesa Landscape, 1930, with its earthy reds and browns, and My Front Yard, Summer, 1941, with the scorching sun bleaching the landscape. But the quality isn't sustained and you do find yourself wondering past some rather forgettable paintings of animal skulls, ram's horns, and large Catholic crosses.
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There are moments of real beauty and brilliance in this show but, sadly, I'm not sure this retrospective does Georgia many favours as the consistency in her work isn't there. It does dip a bit. And add to that the slightly eye-watering 19 admission charge and it's a tricky one to blanket recommend to everyone.
Nevertheless, I am a fan of Georgia's work and there are enough moments here for me to say that I enjoyed this show.
For a glimpse inside the show, have a look at the photos on my Facebook page.
Tate Modern, London, to October 30, 2016.
Admission 19.
Image Credits:
1. Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932Oil paint on canvas48 x 40 inchesCrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas, USA. Photography by Edward C. Robison III 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London
2. Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986 Oriental Poppies 1927 Oil paint on canvas 762 x 1016 mm The collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/ DACS, London.
Dan Kitwood via Getty Images
Death threats, rape threats, refugees demonised, EU citizens told to go home, a Muslim Mayor targeted with islamophobia, a Jewish MP bombarded with anti-Semitic threats, young women campaigners called traitors or scum. Political debate online is being poisoned and it has to stop.
When I first called for a campaign to reclaim the internet from online abuse seven months ago, I said loudly that I thought this shouldn't be about politicians or political debates. We had cross-party support, and I wanted people to focus on the teenagers targeted with online homophobic bullying or revenge porn, the women working in science or the tech industry being bombarded with misogynist abuse or threats, the staff in public services facing racist harassment on Facebook or Twitter, or the young campaigners silenced by abuse when they tried to speak out.
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Over months we have built a coalition of organisations - from the police to GirlGuidesUK, from the teaching union NASUWT to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and campaign organisations like Hope not Hate - all contributing to today's Reclaim the Internet Conference, and calling for more action against online abuse.
But the disturbing escalation of vitriol in public life in recent months means we cant keep politics separate, because it sets a climate for wider abuse too. Since the referendum, there has been a fivefold increase in hate crime. Much of it is online. Demos identified 5,000 xenophobic tweets in just a few days. For some time Tell Mama have been reporting rising online islamophobia, CST reports rising online anti-semitism - and both warn of the links with far right websites and groups.
MPs have had death threats for speaking out in support of different campaigns. Women campaigners have faced vile misogynist abuse. Journalists like Owen Jones are targeted with appalling homophobic threats and harassment.
Passionate disagreement and strong debate are essential in a democracy. The internet and social media are amazing ways to give voice to the voiceless and hold the powerful to account. DEMOS also found a big increase in online activity opposing xenophobia, and there have been brilliant empowering campaigns like #EverydaySexism or #YouAintNoMuslimBruv. But that's why it is so important to prevent a minority of screaming, threatening people from silencing others.
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Much of the really nasty abuse is from the far right. But not all of it. Mainstream parties and politicians need to reflect on their responsibility for how we got here and how we pull it back.
Ukip supported a vile poster campaign demonising Syrian refugees. What are they doing now to stop their members posting divisive attacks on refugees online?
Tory MPs ran an appalling campaign against Sadiq Khan in London. And Leave campaigners used false claims about Turkey to increase hostility to foreign citizens. What are they now doing to take a stand against online xenophobia?
In the Scottish referendum online abuse by "cybernats" was a serious problem. Are the SNP sufficiently challenging the abuse by their members online?
And we in the Labour Party must urgently wake up, given the level of online abuse within our party right now. Of course people have strong views about the leadership and they need to be able to express them. But we cannot tolerate threats, bullying, intimidation or vitriolic abuse by party members - either of other members or anyone else - it goes against the deeply held views of our Labour Party, and is morally wrong.
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I'm glad that leadership candidates have signed up to a clean campaign. But it's not enough. Labour has a responsibility to party members, staff, elected representatives and supporters to ensure they are not subject to a baying mob online or offline.I've proposed a new online code of conduct so where there is serious abuse, intimidation or harassment online, members face expulsion from the Party. As leader, Jeremy Corbyn should have done this himself instead of just warm words.
Most organisations - including political parties, employers and trade unions - have standards of behaviour or decency they expect people to follow offline. It's time they all showed some leadership and set some standards online too.
And then lets build a new consensus on the wider action we need and will be debating today at the Reclaim the Internet conference.
We need much more action in schools and among young people to tackle bullying online, and prevent abuse in the next generation - including compulsory online safety and sex and relationship education in all our schools.
We need stronger action from the police and prosecutors when laws are broken. Too often officers investigating abuse don't even know how the social media platforms work - new training, new guidance and a full review of the law are all needed.
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And we need action from social media platforms and publishers that goes beyond the code they have recently signed with the EU Commission - including more investment in safety, more transparency about the scale of the problem, and more protection particularly against organised and repeated abuse.
And every one of us needs to stop being a bystander. Time to start reporting, speaking out, standing up for others who are being targeted. They say evil triumphs when good people do nothing. Time for all of us to do something to stand up for decency, civility and respect for other human beings. Tim Berners-Lee said when he invented the world wide web, "this is for everyone." Lets make sure it stays so.
The Palestinians feel frustrated and hopeless. Everything is static and nothing is moving to solve the Palestinian question, and ending the ongoing occupation in the Middle East. In 1970s, Robert Ames, the CIA Officer who was in contact with PLO knew that the more the Palestinians are hopless; and with Israel and the International Community keep the status quo as it is, the more likely the Palestinians would go back to violence to get the world's attention and incite the world community to act.
Mr. Ames hoped that the United States would put more pressure on Israel to be more flexible. Ames was trying to keep the group, "Black September" calm, but other extremisms (as he call them at the time) such as PFLP and DFLP are ready to move. He argues that he had spoken to few leaders of PFLP and their reasons to act violently were convincing. Ames was the first and considered to be one of peace process early engineers in the Middle East. He was killed in Beirut's U.S. embassy attack in 1983.
More than three decades passed and the Palestinians still fight for justice, freedom and the right of self-determination. They are disappointed by the international community that failed them. After more than twenty years of Oslo Accord, and more than thirty-five years since the US president, Reagan, the Palestinian question has to be solved, and Israeli settlements' expansion in the occupied territories since 1967 has to be terminated. The scene seems to be the ugliest scenario that have been drawn thirty years ago.
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In early July, Israel announced their bids for new 1300 house in settlements in the occupied Palestine. These actions not only frustrate the Palestinian leadership, but also give a room for whoever says that Israel is going to swallow our lands anyway, and therefore, we will fight by all means. A report shows that Israel spends considerably more on a West Bank settler than it does on a resident of the outlying Negev or Galilee regions, and twice as much as it does on a resident of the center. In 1993, there were only around 100,000 settlers in the West Bank, while in 2015, there are more than half Million Israeli settlers, accompanied with a war machine that violates human rights on daily bases, making the life of the Palestinian unbearable. This shows clearly that Netanyahu and Israel are not interested in the peace process, abandoning their policy of annexing the Palestinian lands. If they were really interested in peace, why would they continue settlements expansion at the account of the Palestinians? Isn't that an enough reason to transfer the feeling of frustration and hopelessness into a violent act and defending the Palestinians and the Palestinian lands?
The recent report by the Quartet committee is betraying the Palestinians and their right to self-determination. It refers to "Palestinian violence and incitement" as a more important catalyst to the perpetuation of the conflict than Israel's settlement activities. This report can be named as the " Report of Peace's Death" in the Middle East, as it shows obviously that the world is not interested in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine based on the UN security council and UNGA, 242. The report which shows the bias of the UN, USA, EU and Russia is nothing but a slaughtering tool to what they call it peace process and peace, transferring it, virtually, to a meaningless and biased committee. The report failed to show the real reason of the negotiation failure and the current tension between Israel and the Palestinians. This report raised many serious questions concerning the policy within the Quartet itself; that dominates the decisions and writes the reports and why it has no serious and sharp positions against the overgrown settlements in the West Bank, and the daily executions of children and teenagers in the west bank. Why it has no statement concerning the speech of hatred and incitement against the Palestinians in Israeli media, schools and social media webpages?
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The ongoing tension and violence is surely a result of Israeli practices. Over the last weeks, Israel executed more than a dozen Palestinians, most of whom were women and children. The practice of execution presses the Palestinians and form in itself as a tool of incitement. Israeli army, which is equipped with the capacities to arrest and control any human being whoever has a knife and can easily manage to arrest dozens of the Palestinians who were accused of attempting to attack the Israeli soldiers, but the orders are to murder. This is the real incitement by acting. What does the world expect from unarmed people to do when they see their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers and elders being killed in front of them and their photos being showed on all social media platforms, and Israeli settlers and radicals films them, saying inappropriate words, and swearing them? This is the real incitement.
The Quartet's report writers are biased and shows how the Quartet is a biased committee dominated by the US. The Palestinians do not have alot of options in their life and in their political doctrine. The armed struggle of the Palestinians from 1960s-1990s has not failed. It has taken the Palestinian from being a non-exist political entity, which was denied by the US and Israel, to a Political entity and people who have the right to self-determination. However, what failed is the peace process, as Israel did not commit to Oslo accord, which aims at establishing a Palestinian state by 1999. This did not happen. The second Intifada was unavoidable as Peace process failed to reach its goals as a result of Israel arrogance and greediness to swallow more lands, and keeping East Jerusalem under its control, which no one will ever accept that from the Palestinian side nor the Arab side . Jerusalem is the red line for the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that can not be compromised. Currently, what is left for Palestine is nothing except more frustration, hopelessness and a bomb of pressure that will explode anytime soon. We have been seeing it since October 2015. It is individual, unorganized, fearless, and miscalculated attacks against the Israeli settles in the occupied Palestine and the Israeli occupation forces.
Seventy years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust, the Jewish people took a vow: Never Again!
After the Nazis murdered six million Jews, we came to recognize that we only have ourselves to rely upon for our defense. In today's tumultuous world, the sole guarantor of Jewish safety is a strong Israeli military. Jews around the world facing mortal danger can count on the State of Israel to protect them.
This year commemorates the 40th anniversary of the July 1976 Raid on Entebbe, when Israel demonstrated what Never Again really means. After an Air France plane with about 300 passengers traveling from Israel to France was hijacked by terrorists and brought to Uganda, the Israeli and Jewish passengers went through a Nazi-like selection process and were kept as hostages while the non-Jews were set free to return to Paris.
The terrorists declared that they would kill all the hostages if their demand for the release of 53 international terrorists, held in Israel and other countries, was not met. Yet it was only the State of Israel that chose to take action and save the Jewish captives. Israel refused to accept the execution of Jews by the terrorists, and in a daring and carefully planned mission, Israeli forces used four American Hercules C-130 cargo planes, travelled 2,400 miles and rescued the hostages. One IDF officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and three hostages were killed. More than 100 were saved.
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But this is not the only time in recent history that only the people of Israel were willing to put their own lives in harm's way to protect their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. After a lethal pogrom in Yemen in 1947 after the U.N. vote to partition the British Mandate of Palestine, Israel secretly airlifted 45,000 Yemenite Jews to safety in Israel with Operation Magic Carpet. And again with Operation Solomon in 1991, the IDF airlifted 14,500 Ethiopian Jews out of harm's way in Africa to Israel. With these incredible rescue missions, Israel has made it clear that it will do whatever it takes to protect global Jewry.
Again and again, the Jewish people have been targeted. Yet now, the State of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people, is here to step in and stand by those in danger. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel resettled more than 1 million Soviet Jews in Israel. Jews around the world, wherever they are, can rest assured that their brothers and sisters in Israel are there to protect them. The IDF is there to ensure that the Right of Return of the Jewish people in any corner of the world is protected, from Ethiopia, to Russia, to Yemen. In addition to serving as the homeland for the Jewish people, Israel is here to extend its arms and ensure that Never Again remains a reality.
Before Israel's founding in 1948, Jews were easy prey to the world's terrorists. They could run but they were never completely safe. Not anymore, Never Again! Thanks to its strength, the Israel Defense Force is fulfilling its true purpose--to serve as the ultimate insurance policy for the Jewish people against our enemies.
We saw this powerfully displayed again in 2003, when three Israel Air Force (IAF) F-15 Eagle fighter jets, piloted by descendants of Holocaust survivors, took to the skies, soaring over the 40 square kilometers of Auschwitz where Nazis slaughtered more than one million Jewish men, and women, and children only 70 years ago. Below the IAF jets--on the very ground where so many Jews lost their lives--stood hundreds of IAF commanders singing the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikva." (You can watch the powerful video of the Israel Air Force flyover at Auschwitz here.)
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If history has taught us anything, it is that others will try to annihilate the Jews again in the future. But whenever the next time comes, we will not be helpless. Israel, with all its might and determination, is not going anywhere. It will do whatever is necessary to eliminate threats posed by those who seek the Jewish people's destruction.
In the early 1930s, people across the world--including many of the most successful and assimilated Jews in Europe--wrote off Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism, believing that he would never actually act on his words. Little could they imagine the disaster that would be brought upon the entire world by Hitler's madness just a few years later, leading to the death of tens of millions and the destruction of half the world.
If Hitler's intentions had been taken more seriously early on, he could have been stopped. The Holocaust is further evidence that Jews are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When Jews are persecuted, slandered or unfairly singled out, it does not bode well for others. While Jews are often the first to be targeted by tyrants and bigots, it almost never ends with the Jews.
Remember that the next time you hear the news about an IDF military operation. When Israel goes to war, it is not doing so just for its citizens or Jews around world. When Israel fights, it does so on behalf of Western civilization as a whole. Israel is the floodgate--it sits on a strategic fault line between enlightenment and tyranny.
We will soon be without any Holocaust survivors who can provide us with direct personal accounts of the horrors they suffered. But the lessons of the Holocaust are more relevant than ever and they must be passed on to future generations.
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This month, we lost one of the great bearers of those lessons, Elie Wiesel, who said of this cause, "without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future."
"Really? You and the Florida legislature worked like mad dogs to reject, refuse and to deny the ability of the U.S. EPA to regulate fertilizers including nitrogen and phosphorous, the cause of the algae blooms. And you want the federal taxpayer to rescue you because of your own stupidities? When the federal government offered to assist in regulating fertilizers, you said 'no thanks'. Then you set the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida loose on Congress. When we have tried to move Everglades restoration forward, your administration has pushed back against any efforts to put tighter restrictions on phosphorous and nitrogen flowing from sugar fields owned by your buddies, the Big Sugar cartel. So who are you kidding with your complaints about the federal government not stepping in and being active? We tried. You denied. We promoted the U.S. economy and environmental stewardship and you demagogued against pollution control laws because they "kill jobs". You kicked us out and then you cut your own agencies' science staff to the bone. Next time you call, give me some good news; like you support buying enough land in the Everglades Agricultural Area to stop the use of Florida waterways as sacrifice zones for Big Sugar."
It was only as I was standing in the kitchen of my Irish home, washing up the breakfast dishes, that the importance of what I'll be doing this week stunned me so much I had to sit down for a minute.
I'd been listening to writer, John Banville discuss his 16th novel, The Blue Guitar on the radio, to get a gist of what he sounds like, as he and a host of other writers as well as myself, will be participating in the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, Co. Cork, Ireland.
After Banville gracefully finished expounding about his love of music and not his novel, a promo came on naming famous writers who will be reading from their books at the Festival: "John Banville, Gloria Steinem, Zadie Smith, Louis de Bernieres and Fintan O'Toole, among others." Those two words--"among others"--simple words that they are, drew me in and commanded my attention by christening me an Irish writer.
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Having two books published in America, I am already considered a professional writer. But all I've ever really wanted was to be to be published in my native land. Yet no matter how hard I tried I had no success. Then, after four years of knocking on every door, working ever angle and even exploring self-publication, through serendipitous seating at a New Year's Eve dinner, I sat beside a literary agent who boldly took me on, and after a year or so of tweaking and cutting, sold my book to an Irish publisher. Now, after six complete re-writes for The Collins Press, my memoir is published and I have been asked to participate at the renowned West Cork Literary Festival.
When I was a child, the word 'festival' loomed as something extremely special. Weddings are weddings. Christmas is Christmas. But Festival!--as it appears in my mind complete with exclamation point--is far beyond a regular event. It's mythic. Yet strangely enough, now that I'm a part of a Festival! I find myself taking it all in stride.
I'm not turning cartwheels in the fields, or documenting my feelings on Facebook. Rather, I am surprisingly calm and happy - actually happy, an uncommon feeling for me - that all my efforts have paid off. Manhattan to West Cork: Alice's Adventure's in Ireland is a beautifully published book lying on tables in bookstores all over Ireland and England, waiting for the passing glance, a look through, and a possible sale.
Songwriters, Kander and Ebb wrote a rarely performed lovely little song for Liza Minnelli called "A Quiet Thing":
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"When it all comes true just the way you planned,
it's funny but the bells don't ring.
It's a quiet thing.
Happiness comes in on tip-toe,
Well what'd ya know, it's a quiet thing,
A very quiet thing."
(GERMANY OUT) A young mother holds the hand of her newborn son (Photo by JOKER / Gudrun Petersen/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
When people ask me what changes when they have kids, I laugh and tell them that everything changes, and there's really nothing you can do to prepare for it. However, the miracle of parenting is that just when you think you can't love any more, your ability to love expands again, day after day, year after year.
To be a parent is to know a love deeper than any love imaginable.
I had a rough pregnancy with a lot of the complications you read about in the books and hope you don't have. When the big day arrived, the thoughtful birthing plan I'd carefully written that requested candlelight and a string quartet playing by my side as I gently pushed out a child was abruptly tossed in the trash. Instead of going into natural labor while rocking casually on a yoga ball, I got Pitocin. Instead of my water breaking during a romantic Italian dinner while my husband and I giggled and calmly headed for the hospital, a nurse with a giant knitting hook did the deed. The finale was an emergency C-section that my husband nearly missed because he ran home to bake banana bread for the labor and delivery nurses (true fact). I was in such bad shape during the C-secton that I didn't even see my daughter goopy and newly-born, as they whisked her away for blood work while they sewed me back together.
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How does life change when you have kids? You become thankful for the truly important things, like having a healthy baby girl. You reset your expectations.
After recovery, I remember being groggy and looking over into a glass incubator in the middle of the night, and a panic set in.
"Do I have to take that baby home with me?" I thought to myself, terrified.
We took her home. I did my best. Despite my ample breasts that I knew my entire life were surely meant for nourishing a baby, breastfeeding wasn't in the cards for us. The glowing halo I expected to appear over my head as I breastfeed never came, and in its place, a dark cloud appeared. Postpartum depression wasn't in my birthing plan, either. I began to consider that I might be a complete failure at the mommy job.
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How does life change when you have kids? You learn to forgive yourself for not being perfect.
Thanks to the unwavering support of family and friends and an excellent doctor, I received the treatment I so desperately needed to ward off the dark cloud. I began to embrace the little things. The love that is deeper than any love imaginable kept me going. I took the baby to a baby massage class, and soothed her crying by pulling gently on her little toes. She began to smile at me, and I began to smile back.
How does life change when you have kids? You'll never sleep the same way again, because a part of you is always alert in a desire to protect your young. You'll develop weird obsessions in an effort to ensure your child's safety. If you're a mom, there's a pretty good chance you'll never sneeze again without peeing.
It's all worth it.
The Orlando shooter was the son of Afghan immigrants who had fled their war-torn country; he was resentful of what the U.S. had done to his homeland. The gunman from Dallas was a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan; he was killed by a remote control bomb developed for and battle-tested in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The link between the two is the continuing U.S. war in Afghanistan. But you would be hard pressed to find any mention of that from LGBTQ NGO "activists" talking about Orlando, or from anyone talking about Dallas.
Yet many self-professed "progressive" LGBTQs are loud in their support of "intersectionality," a term which means the finding of common cause within and among groups of the oppressed. Yet aside from pointing out the obvious, that most of the Orlando victims were LGBTQ and Latino, and to lesser extent, that people shouldn't scapegoat Muslims in the U.S., their response to the Orlando massacre abjectly failed the test of genuine intersectionality.
Instead, it was the same old tunnel vision, the familiar nationalist myopia of LGBTQs in the U.S. thinking only about "our issues," with the rest of the world, gay and non-gay, as a distant after-thought at best.
The result is that tragedies like the Pulse nightclub attack are hijacked by the professional political class for crass political gain. Consider the Democrats' phony Congressional sit-in to force Republicans to take up the issue of gun control: Rather than address the conditions that give rise to violence, the Democrats promoted the most reactionary, anti-civil libertarian, pro-national security state "reforms" under the rubric of gun control. Anyone on the executive branch's national security "watch list" - with no oversight of the selection criteria used and no due process procedure for getting off the list - is denied the right to own a gun.
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To say that this reinforces a horrible precedent is an understatement. It unconstitutionally augments the government's unilateral power to penalize those, particularly people of color, who it designates as "security risks," with implications far beyond gun control and freedom of movement.
In diverting an anti-LGBTQ tragedy into reactionary legislation, the Congressional sit-iners were in familiar territory. After the 1998 murder of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, Congressional Democrats ignored the hate-inducing, anti-LGBTQ legislation that they had played the primary role in promoting - Bill Clinton's 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and his 1993 Don't Ask, Don't Tell law. Instead, they promoted "hate crimes" legislation that only served to promote Clinton's mass incarceration binge which was already devastating communities of color.
A true, intersectional approach to the Orlando tragedy would have helped expose and deflect this crass opportunism.
For while gun violence here currently dominates U.S. domestic politics, the longest war in U.S. history - where gun violence is on steroids - drags on in Afghanistan. But of course neither liberals nor conservatives, Democrats nor Republicans, like to talk about that. After all, they're the ones approving the appropriations that continue the drone bombings, that maintain hundreds of U.S. bases worldwide while building new ones, and that fund the U.S. role as the world's biggest arms exporter, many of them to the most venal, brutal regimes. But gun control Democrats are almost entirely silent about that.
Almost two generations ago the U.S. attempted to dominate Southeast Asian countries by propping up a hopelessly corrupt client state in South Vietnam. The U.S. knew that that state would collapse like a house of cards if it exited the country. Today, presidents both Democratic and Republican follow much the same script in Afghanistan, with traumatic results there, but also "collateral damage" back home in Orlando and Dallas. The U.S. client regime is so illegitimate in the eyes of Afghans that despite many billions of dollars of latest high-tech war making gadgetry and a decade and a half of U.S. and other foreign troops, "The Taliban controls more territory than it has since the U.S.-led invasion there began in 2001, according to U.N. estimates."
Today's LGBT NGO's are rightly derided as "Gay, Inc." [2] Genuflecting to their Democratic Party allies, their intersectionality pales in comparison to the young LGBTQ movement that emerged out of the Stonewall Rebellion, which put real intersectionality into practice well before the term was even coined.
So unlike the National LGBTQ Task Force's opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion, which was grudging and tepid, with "activism" largely confined to issuing press releases, the earlier movement, with far more to lose, was in the streets making common cause against the war. At a time of rampant, violent government repression, they showed active solidarity with the Black Panthers and others fighting for justice on "non-LGBTQ" issues. While Stonewall era organizations regularly organized numerous protests, The Task Force probably hasn't initiated a single street protest in decades, at best passively lending its name to activities organized by others.
When Chelsea Manning was brutalized in military prisons for exposing U.S. forces' slaughter of journalists and civilians in Iraq, the U.S. slaughter of Afghan civilians, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's support of Honduran military coup, the Task Force and the rest of the LGBT NGOs sat on their hands, and some actively encouraged her prosecution. And recently, despite escalating racist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the Task Force allowed pro-Israel forces [2] to hold a reception at their annual conference in Chicago.
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Which leads to the fundamental question: Who really leads the LGBT movement? Gay, Inc. - or the Democratic Party and its corporate backers to whom it owes fealty? As Burkely Hermann suggests, "follow the money.... The banksters who helped plunge the [2008] world economy into economic crisis sponsored a number of organizations including the HRC, NGLTF, GLAD, PFLAG, NGLCC, Out and Equal, GLSEN, and GLAAD."
And who are these sponsors? Too big to fail Wells Fargo, Citibank and GoldmanSachs. But also defense giant Northrup Grumann and giant oil polluters BP and Shell. And of course Nike, with its atrocious human rights record in places like Malaysia, Pakistan and Vietnam.
Today these giant corporations find it convenient to their bottom line to appear gay-friendly. But all that can turn on a dime. In the U.S., support for LGBTQ rights is fairly broad though far from universal. History has shown that such support can rapidly wither in severe economic downturns. We must be vigilant and principled. In the wake of Orlando, when Gay, Inc. and its political allies confine the messaging to banalities like "hate is bad," or worse, divert people towards reactionary legislation, we must oppose them.
When Democrats or Republicans express remorse over the Orlando massacre, we must implement true intersectionality by exposing their hypocrisy. We must point out that their support of U.S. domination of large areas of the world fuels the very violence they say they oppose.
No matter how unpalatable and unpopular it may be to others in denial, we must stand with the savage truth: Bipartisan drone bombings, invasions, massive arms exports, support for dictators and ethnic cleansing regimes like apartheid Israel have fueled violence in the Middle East and South Asia to a scale never before seen in history.
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"Community cannot feed for long on itself; it can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them -- unknown and undiscovered brothers." - Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry into the Basis of Man's Experience of Community
America must understand that Black Lives Matter is a movement born from the human spirit seeking community, harmony, and flourishing.
It is biblical in its cause, revolutionary in its spirit, and democratic in its goals.
It is a loud, physical and passionate invitation to 'America' to acknowledge unbalance and disharmony in its own house.
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It is a spotlight on the real injustices arising from the value status assigned black and brown Americans by many of our cherished institutions.
It is a demand letter to dominant white-oriented society from unknown and undiscovered sisters and brothers.
It is a call for justice, not vengeance.
Howard Thurman--the theologian, philosopher, civil rights leader and mentor to Dr. King--wrote that Rodin's wondrous Hand of God sculpture is a "memory of a lost harmony," a reference to Jung's thought on collective unconscious. There in the The Search for Common Ground... he also discussed the concept of "racial memory" placing it in a theological and civil rights context.
The idea of "racial memory" is the memory born from experiences shaped by race that yearns for a once-extant and creational harmony of the human race. The racial memory is born from the experience of cognitive dissonance.
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Black Lives Matter is an invitation to America to acknowledge the real contradictions existing in the assumed experiences and real experiences of brown and black lives in America. It is an invitation to close this gap in public and private institutions, businesses, organizations and communities.
It is an invitation to a certain kind of dissonance, for white America to own up to a racial memory that lives in the same universe as that of black America.
My experience with racial/cognitive dissonance
I believe in policing and I cherish the peace protected by good policing. I also respect police officers because I recognize the commitment required in good policing. But I also have a sober perspective on the cultural and structural elements that shape good policing. I also understand that my race and gender shape my views.
Sometime in 1993 or 1994 after college, I worked on and off at my father's business. One night I left the office close to midnight. As I turned onto my street I was pulled over by police. I knew my record was clean. I trusted the police then as I generally do now. I have friends and family who are officers. I am a white male.
Two black officers checked my license while I waited outside my car. Soon they handcuffed me and informed me they found a murder warrant for my arrest. I quickly became angry and frightened and was handcuffed to the bolts in the back of the cruiser with metal cutting into my wrists. I was 25 years old and shocked.
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After a couple of hours in the cruiser and two phone calls to answering machines, I was placed in a holding cell with at least twenty other men. I believed I had nowhere to turn.
After an hour, one of the officers retrieved me from the holding cell and told me they had picked up the wrong man. Apparently, I had an outstanding traffic ticket from East Texas on my record. He then made a comment that I will forever remember.
He said, "Now you know how it feels." That's all. No explanation.
Across town, I spent another hour in a holding room with a man working off a chemical high. I was able to reach a work colleague who paid my bail. The next day a clerk in East Texas acknowledged a mistake and that I indeed had paid the traffic fine on time.
In the following year I had ugly thoughts about that night and those cops. On my worst days they were racist, especially around some groups of friends, for which I felt shame. Most everyone offered the same advice: sue the police department. Those officers were negligent, many said. Criminal, racist, and derelict others said.
Confused and troubled, I suspended judgments about this experience until I moved from Texas to Virginia to study theology some months later.
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After seminary, my wife and I relocated to North Carolina for her associate pastorate position and more theological education for me. In the small town where we lived, I was mentored by an African American chaplain as we ministered to a marginalized community. He was a blessing to me.
As I learned more about the reality of structural racism and injustice, my mentor helped me reflect on my arrest. Whether the officer planned the lesson ahead of time or not, I'll never know. I realized, though, that I got a small sense of what it means to be wrongly or perhaps unjustly arrested by a system I was supposed to respect.
If I put all the pieces together, however, my false arrest was a lesson racial profiling. I have no proof this was the officer's intent, and most likely his comment was part of a communications blunder. Still, perhaps they targeted me because I was white, if not through the arrested or jailing, but by way of the officer's final comment. Even then, I would resist calling their actions reverse discrimination.
I believe the black officer--hopefully knowingly--offered me a sacred invitation to cognitive dissonance; an invitation to receive a racial memory in the same universe as black and brown people, even if an incomplete and skewed one. It was an action to include me in the lives of unknown and undiscovered sisters and brothers. It was an act of hospitality and generosity, an act square in line with the sit-ins and freedom rides.
Solidarity with the Other
Where, I ask, is the public advocacy and action for a common good and a common racial memory?
It is where dissonance is generated and critically examined for the purpose of reflection and change. I believe one instance is Black Lives Matter. Another is the degree-bearing education of incarcerated persons in light of their release into community. Another is the reform of the criminal justice system. And I believe another is the community-based reshaping of policing in our communities.
Yet, we must continuously vigilant to unhealthy dissonance and its consequences: murder, racist inflammatory speech, violent militancy, and the selfish use of power.
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In 1967, King lamented, "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the institutions of the society, a little change her, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you have to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."
Nearly 50 years later, it appears a reconstruction is taking place yet again, one that seeks to restore a lost harmony even as citizens perpetrate evil on the attempts.
Governments around the world are looking for economic growth and job creation. African economies are no exception, with increasing recognition that growth has to be built on a more diversified economic structure in order to make a lasting contribution to development. For even though Africa has weathered the fall in commodity prices better than the pessimists predicted, the instability of commodity dependence remains a reality.
In their pursuit of growth and diversification, African economies should consider transforming the discourse from a focus on industrialisation to a broader one centred on value addition in agriculture, manufacturing and services. There is no one size fits all approach to value addition. It is worth analysing whether the well-established post-1950s path to development - moving people and resources out of low-productivity subsistence work, especially farming, and into more productive activities in modern manufacturing and ultimately services - is still the optimum approach to job and wealth creation.
This doesn't mean that African governments should give up on manufacturing and trade. In fact, as China moves up the value chain, there is much potential to attract labour-intensive light manufacturing, as is already happening in countries as varied as Ethiopia and Madagascar. What it does mean is that African governments, partner countries and multinational companies should do more to encourage investment not just in export-oriented manufacturing, but also in services, innovation and agri-processing. This involves investing in the 'framework of trade': from improving policies and physical infrastructure to lowering production and trade costs, fostering better business links to regional and international buyers and ensuring ready availability of financing for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Agriculture deserves particular attention, because it accounts for around 60% of the labour force in Africa - more than 70% in countries like Liberia and Guinea. And it employs the vast majority of women, especially in sectors such as coffee and tea. Many African smallholder farmers did not share in the 'green revolution' productivity gains driven by modern seeds and techniques, irrigation, and greater fertilizer use in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s. In sub-Saharan Africa, irrigation still reaches only a small share of arable land, and the wide variety of staple crops - from teff in Ethiopia to cassava, yams, millet, and maize elsewhere - means that crop strain innovation is a taller task than in Asia where wheat and rice dominate.
Efforts are ongoing to close the yield gaps in African farming by overcoming limited irrigation and other inputs, low-yield seeds, inadequate storage, weak climate resilience, and uncompetitive access to local - let alone international - markets. Initial results are promising. Success could be transformative: with half the world's uncultivated arable land, and relatively underused renewable water resources, Africa should be at the heart of feeding the 2.5 billion new mouths - many of them African - the global population is projected to add by 2050.
Yet substantially higher productivity will mean that far fewer women and men will be needed to till the soil itself. And people likely won't be able to walk off the farm and into low-skilled urban manufacturing jobs as they might have done half a century ago in Spain and Korea. The risk is that many people will end up languishing in low-productivity informal service sector work.
The goal, then, must be to transform today's subsistence agriculture into tomorrow's agro-processing. Agricultural production, transformation, and related activities like branding, marketing and logistics could become alternative drivers of value addition and the creation of decent jobs.
By Rasha Jarhum
Three rounds of peace talks have so far failed to bring an end to the devastating conflict in Yemen. While the violence continues, consuming the lives of innocent people with catastrophic humanitarian consequences, the UN Envoy is struggling to revive the talks after a two-week pause. Throughout all of this, there is a missing force that could save thousands in my country: women.
Insisting upon womens' presence at the talks ensures the issues unique to them remain on the table. In fact, studies show that a peace agreement is more likely to last for at least 15 years if women are included in the process. But more than that, women have a right to be part of the decisions that will shape the future of their societies.
The formal peace agenda focuses on five main areas, including: 1) the withdrawal of militias and armed groups, 2) the handover of heavy weapons to the state, 3) interim security arrangements, 4) the restoration of state institutions and the resumption of inclusive political dialogue, and 5) the creation of a special committee for prisoners and detainees. These are important, but the agenda is missing a focus on gender and women priority issues, such as the protection of women and children and the demobilization and reintegration of child combatants.
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Today, there are only three women out of a total of 26 peace negotiators, ignoring a quota of 30% that was agreed as part of the national dialogue conference outcomes, which was tasked with charting a new social contract for Yemen after the uprising in 2011 and inaugurated the transitional period. The national dialogue conference was relatively inclusive as women represented almost 30% (youth represented 20%). Women did not only participate as members but as moderators and leaders to main conference working groups. The result was a comprehensive package of rights and freedoms that formed the basis of a new democratic state.
Excluding women at the current peace talks will only lead to male power brokers carving up the spoils of a fragile peace between them. Issues of war and peace in Yemen have traditionally been limited to men: a two-party negotiation representing political and military forces, discussing the dynamics of power sharing. The result has been shaky peace agreements, political instability, sporadic armed conflict, power struggles, exclusion, and marginalization. We have not witnessed a single initiative where, for example, reparation for affected communities and social justice was achieved, one of the priorities women groups are calling for.
Yemeni women are working hard to make their voices heard. Last September, I was part of a group of women leaders who, with the help of UN Women, formed the Yemeni Women Pact for Peace and Security, aimed at increasing female participation in peace building. Through this effort, a group of us were invited by the UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed to the most recent round of peace talks in Kuwait. Our mission was modest. We were present on the sidelines, holding meetings with national, regional, and international stakeholders, and delivering messages with the aim of reflecting the voices of 25 million Yemenis torn apart by war--especially the voices of women and children.
However, soon after our arrival was announced, debates erupted in both traditional and social media about our selection, role, agenda, legitimacy, and affiliations. Some saw us as new mediators and others concluded we were there to tip the balance in favor of one of the parties. This sort of media campaign against women peace-builders is not new; Syrian women were subjected to the same treatment when the UN announced the establishment of the Syrian Women Advisory Board.
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There are many ways women could be involved today: as a separate delegation to ensure their rights are properly respected; as advisors to the mediators (as was the case in Syria); or as observers, witnesses, and signatories to the peace agreement.
Often at times of conflict, such as now, women are only seen as victims or perpetrators of violence, not as potential peacemakers and negotiators. The exclusion of women, however, risks taking Yemen down the same disastrous path as before. The negotiating parties must understand that any peace agreement must not benefit only those represented at the table, but rather should benefit the whole of society in Yemen. Having women present and addressing issues of social justice and responsibility sharing does not undermine their influence but rather it increases their legitimacy.
Yemen needs a stronger commitment to an inclusive process. The contribution of Yemeni women should be embraced, not spurned. This is Yemen's only chance for a lasting peace.
Rasha Jarhum is a member of the Yemeni Women Pact for Peace and Security, an initiative bringing Yemeni women leaders together to advocate for peace. She is a Senior Development Policy Advisor and Social Researcher and an Aspen New Voices Fellow for 2016.
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)
ISTANBUL -- In the seven decades since Turkey's 1946 transition to a multi-party democracy, the country's politics have been constantly haunted by the specter of military coups. There have been four full-fledged coups during this period, three unsuccessful coup attempts and innumerable smaller plots. On Friday evening, a faction within the Turkish army tried to carry out the first major coup in 21st-century Turkey.
A night of utter turmoil ensued. Conspirators occupied Istanbul's airport and bridges as well as the offices of CNN Turk and Turkey's national broadcaster, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (known as TRT). They took the chief of general staff hostage and even went as far as bombing the Parliament in Ankara with fighter jets and helicopters. The coup was finally suppressed, but not before at least 290 people, both civilians and security forces, had lost their lives. The dust had hardly settled when more than 6,000 soldiers were taken into custody. Of a total of 358 generals in the army, 70 -- or one in five -- have either been taken into custody or arrested, and several thousand of the country's judges have been relieved of their duty.
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Acting outside the chain of command, the conspirators behaved much like the factions in the Turkish army who tried to take power during the 1960s. If Turkey's modern history is any guide, then this abortive coup will lead to a major shakeup in the military hierarchy. It may also lead to a further erosion of the rule of law in Turkey, which is already in a parlous state. Both the ruling Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP) and Turkey's opposition parties are surely aware of this: long estranged from one another, they have published a joint declaration championing democracy and condemning the coup.
In Ankara, Turkey on July 18, friends and relatives carry the body of Murat Inci, who was killed in the recent failed coup attempt. (Chris McGrath/Getty)
The conspirators' reckless, go-for-broke tactics -- aptly called "deranged" by General Umit Dundar -- bespoke a lack of planning and a level of desperation that requires an explanation. Most likely, they had discovered that a coterie of officers and generals within the army affiliated with the Gulen movement, a prominent Sunni Muslim group, was to be arrested that weekend. Realizing that their time was running out, the conspirators evidently decided to carry out a kamikaze-style coup, remarkable for its lack of planning, poor timing and strategic errors. Erdogan has often described the December 2013 corruption investigations against himself and his associates as an attempted "coup" by Gulenists within the police and judiciary; since that time, hundreds of police, prosecutors and judges have been arrested and dismissed from their posts. For months now, the Turkish media has been hinting that the Gulenists within the army were next on the list.
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In the 1980s, the Gulen Movement started to become especially visible in the education, banking, media and other sectors; in the following decade, it acquired a strong organizational foothold in the police, judiciary, military and intelligence forces. Ostensibly a civil society organization, it harbors a wing within the security and intelligence forces whose prime loyalty is not to the state but to its leader, the cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in the U.S. since 1999. Leftists and secularists have been arguing for decades that the Gulen movement, with its goal of overthrowing Turkey's secular order, represents a national security threat. Many believe that Gulen has been reluctant to return to Turkey due to fear of facing trial.
The tactics that have allowed Erdogan to hold onto power until now cannot solve problems of this magnitude.
Erdogan has now implicated the Gulenists in the attempted coup, which he has described as "encouraged and masterminded by the parallel structure." A Gulen-linked group called the Alliance for Shared Values has denied involvement in the coup attempt. Military experts have stated that although the Gulenists make up a significant part of the high-ranking officers who have been taken into custody and arrested, the coup also had minor participation of other non-Gulenist factions, as well as individuals who acted opportunistically. Erdogan is proclaiming that the Gulenists will be "cleansed" from the army and other state institutions where they have become entrenched.
Anyone ignorant of Turkish politics could be forgiven for being unaware that until 2013 (i.e. for most of the AKP's 14 years in power), these same Gulenists were Erdogan's closest allies. Starting in 2008, the Gulenists, with Erdogan's blessing, arrest of hundreds of officers and generals known for their anti-government, secularist loyalties. In the resulting investigations and trials, titled "Ergenekon" and "Balyoz," the accused were charged with planning to bomb mosques in Istanbul and spread general havoc. Erdogan has since claimed that he was "misled, tricked" by his former associates; a simpler and more likely explanation is that by 2013, the Gulenists had grown too powerful and outlived their former usefulness.
Gulen in Pennsylvania on Sept. 24, 2013. (AP/Selahattin Sevi)
If the 2013 corruption investigations damaged the Gulenists' relationship with Erdogan beyond repair, Friday's attempted coup has turned Gulen into "Public Enemy Number One." Ankara is currently believed to be preparing a formal extradition request for the cleric. Suleyman Soylu, Turkey's minister of labor and social security, has even stated that the U.S. is behind the coup and must hand over Fethullah Gulen. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry replied that the U.S. would do whatever was called for provided that Turkey presented it with "evidence" of wrongdoing; if Turkey neglects to do so and the U.S. refuses to extradite Gulen, the two powers may experience a serious falling out in the months to come. But the biggest problem in this regard is that it is impossible to know who is a Gulenist and who is not, since this is not an official organization with a list of members. To accuse any given person of being a Gulenist is one thing; to prove it is another.
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Meanwhile, Turkey is in the midst of an unprecedented national security crisis. Friday's coup attempt against Erdogan is but the latest chapter in a long saga of political and social unrest. Turkey's war against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (known as the PKK) continues in the southeast while the so-called Islamic State carries out bomb attacks in cities all over the nation. The tactics that have allowed Erdogan to hold onto power until now -- forming temporary, strategic alliances -- cannot solve problems of this magnitude. Nor can Erdogan's plan to arrogate more powers to himself by changing the constitution and establishing a presidential system in Turkey. The only way to rouse Turkey's democracy from its slumber is to fight to re-enshrine the universal principles of the rule of law, freedom of the press and individual freedom -- however distant that goal may look now.
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In May, the Portland, Oregon school board passed the country's first comprehensive "climate justice" resolution. The school board voted unanimously to "abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities," and called for all schools to teach a "climate justice" curriculum. The Portland resolution said that students in city schools "should develop confidence and passion when it comes to making a positive difference in society, and come to see themselves as activists and leaders for social and environmental justice--especially through seeing the diversity of people around the world who are fighting the root causes of climate change..."
That effort received a big boost last week in Washington, DC, when the country's largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), voted at its national convention to support the Portland resolution and to encourage state and local affiliates to create and promote climate literacy resolutions in their own communities, using the Portland resolution as a model. The NEA has close to 3 million members, and its convention is dubbed "the world's largest deliberative assembly," with 7,000 delegates.
The effort to pass the resolution was led by teacher delegates from Oregon, Washington, California, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, and included members of the national Badass Teachers (BATs) caucus.
Oregon teacher Kathleen Jeskey was one of the delegates supporting the NEA resolution: "Clearly teachers from all over the country see that it is past time to teach our students the real science of climate change and properly prepare them for the future. BATs is a caucus dedicated to social justice and we realized that no other social justice issue can be dealt with properly if we ignore the issues around climate."
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In addressing the convention, Jeskey paraphrased the Portland climate justice resolution: "We must commit ourselves to providing teachers, administrators, and other school personnel with professional development, curricular materials, and outdoor and field studies that explore the breadth of causes and consequences of the climate crisis as well as potential solutions that address the root causes of the crisis, and do so in ways that are participatory, imaginative, and respectful of students' and teachers' creativity and eagerness to be part of addressing global problems and that build a sense of personal efficacy and empowerment. Our schools must play a leadership role in modeling for students climate and environmentally friendly practices."
NEA delegates passed a second resolution, sponsored by Noam Gundle of the Seattle Education Association, calling for the teachers union to "publicize the work of NEA members educating students and their communities on issues of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change using innovative project-based learning and cross-curricular methods."
There remains an enormous gulf between the severity of the climate crisis and the attention given the crisis in U.S. schools and in widely used text material. In testimony before the Portland school board in May, members of the community group Educating for Climate Justice, shared examples of textbooks currently in use in Portland schools. One passage in Physical Science: Concepts in Action tells students: "Carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, and other sources may contribute to global warming." The small section on climate change is filled with this conditional language of "may" and "might."
A social studies textbook used in Portland and around the country, Holt McDougal's Modern World History, begins its second of three paragraphs on climate change: "Not all scientists agree with the theory of the greenhouse effect."
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Portland's resolution was passed with the support of more than 30 community groups including 350PDX, the Sierra Club, the Portland Association of Teachers, Columbia Riverkeeper, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Climate Action Coalition, and the Raging Grannies.
The Milwaukee-based social justice education publisher Rethinking Schools has been distributing "seed packets" to parents, educators, and community activists around the country, which include a copy of the Portland resolution, supporting articles, an "Organizing Lessons from the Portland Climate Justice Resolution," and excerpts from the Rethinking Schools book, A People's Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis.
Rethinking Schools' interim executive director, Bob Peterson, former president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, an NEA local, suggested the NEA's "new business item" in support of Portland's climate justice resolution. "Today's teacher unions should recognize that educators need to address social and environmental justice issues," Peterson said. "The NEA's support of the Portland climate justice resolution offers teacher unions around the country a concrete way to connect teachers, parents, and the broader community on an issue that concerns us all."
Month after month, terrorism continues; it takes new shape, growing in ways we cannot predict, feeling like an uncontainable epidemic. There's a palpable shift toward a spiritual revolution of a new kind. And although there is great power in prayer, we can't pray this away. We are our own answers to prayers of compassion, understanding, safety, decency and peace. We each have a responsibility to be the change that's being called forth. We can't become paralyzed.
We gotta be about it.
The solution we're looking for will require us to look deeply inside ourselves. It will require us to execute the spiritual concepts we believe in - not just proclaim them. We have to examine the deep root of why extremism persists, and take accountability for our individual influence collectively before we can arrive at peace. Until then, in a sense, it is not just the terrorists who are at fault. If we are all one, we are also a part of the problem.
Every conflict exists because of the perception of separation. Spiritually, these attacks are showing us the ramifications of the "us and them" narrative. Pointing the finger, coupled with continual protection of a fearful-self will only prove futile. Instead, the sustainable and collective resolution lies within an honest look at where we may hold fear or judgment in our own lives.
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Dissipating separation: The importance of inner work.
When we blame, we immediately forfeit our power to create change and healing. Our own sense of lack creates separation and fear consciousness. We do this because we have habituated lifestyles with tendencies toward making our joy extrinsic and conditional. We all have emotional wounds we try to fix by modifying conditions, but these patterns will leave us endlessly chasing our tails, fighting for power and identity outside ourselves without yield. Not only is this perceptual pandemic dangerous personally, but globally. We cannot collectively arrive at peace if we have not arrived within.
Our Spiritual Responsibility Through Love.
To be a light worker means to be of the light and it often requires us to light the path for others. It asks us to see past the blame to activate our own healing and we have to be spiritually accountable in order to activate change.
Change comes through expanding our ability to love. Not only within our hearts energetically, but by activating love in our lives. We have to take it to the streets. I don't mean just praying for France, Orlando or Istanbul. I mean activating love in our immediate lives. This means forgiving our perceived transgressors and releasing blame. Holding blame only keeps us immobile and feeble. It doesn't work to think 'we' are spiritual and 'they' are not. We are not separate.
How We Can Use The Atrocities To Activate Change:
1. We have to level up our love. We must pray for the suffering of the attackers as well as the victims.
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If it's not possible to see the attackers' divine nature hidden behind their deep fear, can you re-direct this intention to release any judgment in your own life? Is there one person in your life you can forgive today? Are you holding anyone hostage in order to falsely claim your worth? Can you forgive a sibling, a friend or a co-worker?
2. As you recognize the world around you it also looks back at you as part of it. If the root of our issues is separation, how can you realize your connection to all things? What makes you feel purposeful? What is important to you? What is your life mission statement? It's special, and it's needed. Big time. Your creative expression is a piece of our collective balance.
3. Try seeing the events through the eyes of the soul. How would your soul see it? What would your inner being want to learn through witnessing such contrast?
4. We live in a democratic society and there is nothing unspiritual about politics. We can write congressmen and elect officials that offer peaceful solutions. We can educate ourselves about legislation, our international role as a country and our domestic morals and where we need transformation. We can speak candidly about our beliefs from love, we can evaluate why we hold the beliefs we do. There is plenty we can do.
Blame is spiritually lethargic. It is vital for all of us to activate love and accountability, how else will we find peace? The truth is we have the answer to peace but it doesn't come through pointing fingers, it comes by feeling your own intrinsic call. Remember, there are no small acts of love.
Several leading figures in Bahrain's civil society who have briefed the State Department on the country's repression are among those now prevented from leaving the kingdom.
The United States really should react to these reprisals forcefully, publicly and quickly. Around 20 people have been hit with travel bans in recent weeks as Bahrain's government chokes off voices of peaceful dissent.
Those targeted include Rula Al Saffar, president of Bahrain's Nursing Society and one of the medics arrested, detained, and tortured in 2011 after treating injured protestors and telling the media the truth about the regime's violence. She spent 18 years training and working in the United States and has a PhD from Widener University in Pennsylvania. Although subjected to a sham trial in military court and sentenced to 15 years in jail, she was finally acquitted on appeal in June 2012.
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She tells me she hasn't been given any explanation for her ban. "I was going to Saudi Arabia last week and was stopped at the border--they told me 'You are banned from traveling.' I asked by whom, and they said it was the public prosecutor."
She has traveled to the United States several times since 2011 to brief members of Congress and administration officials in an effort to free her colleague Dr. Ali Alekri, who is still in jail, and about other concerns of Bahrain's civil society. The ban appears to be an attempt to stop her from traveling to Geneva and sharing information with an international audience, although she had not been planning to go to Geneva because of work commitments.
Jalila al Salman is vice president of Bahrain's Teachers' Association and also a prominent figure in Bahrain's civil society. She too was detained and tortured in 2011, and the American embassy sent an observer to her trial. She spent several months in prison. Since her release she has also visited Washington, D.C. to brief lawmakers about the attacks on labor and other activists.
"I found out about the travel ban on June 13th," Jalila told me. "I was traveling to Oslo for a human rights award ceremony and where I had several meetings with labor officials. They stopped me at immigration without giving any reason--they called higher officers and kept me there for about an hour. I asked them to give me any reason for the ban--I said there are no legal charges against me and my work is well known to everyone, but they gave me no answer. Finally they told me to follow up with the general prosecution since it was that office which imposed the ban but they gave me no more information except to say the ban was issued on June 9th."
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Others first learned of their bans--including nurse Ebrahim Demastani who had been in the same trial with Rula Al Saffar in the group of 20 medics in 2011--when they tried to leave Bahrain on June 12 to attend the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Sheikh Maytham Al Salman had his passport withheld and so was unable to travel to take part in a fellowship program due to start this month at Stanford University, awarded in recognition of "the significant contributions that he has made to build more tolerant societies to counter violence and extremism in the Middle East."
Mohammed Al Tajer is a veteran human rights lawyer in Bahrain, respected for decades of legal representation of civil society figures. He too was detained and tortured in 2011, and has also visited the United States to brief lawmakers about attacks on civil society in Bahrain. Last year he spoke at an event in Congress with Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA), Professor Amy Strobl, and myself about human rights abuses in Bahrain.
He was also stopped last week trying to leave Bahrain for Saudi Arabia. "Normally travel bans should be issued through civil courts," he told me. "People are supposed to be informed if there is a ban on them and in theory they have a right to two appeals. In practice that's not happening and there are three or four different authorities issuing bans without justification, including police stations and the National Security Agency. We understand that the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID) is the main source of the travel bans, although under Bahraini law these issues are supposed to go through the judiciary, and these bans clearly contravene Article 19 of Bahrain's constitution."
Article 19 (b) says, "... nor shall the residence of any person or his liberty to choose his place of residence or his liberty of movement be restricted, except in accordance with the law and under the supervision of the judicial authorities."
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Continued from>>> Entry 19
Rick and I keep a journal and include daily observations about our travels. This proved to be more Rick than me on this trip. I was so highly sensitized by the daily events, it was hard for me to write more than a few words every day while we were in Phuket, particularly after Christian arrived. Here is Rick's entry on the morning after Christian came to stay the night with us:
"My day began much like the others with a walk on the beach. One big exception, as I left the room, Leigh wasn't alone. There with her, just waking up, grandson Christian welcomed the day with us. While walking I was taken back a year ago to the horrible tragedy. There didn't seem any hope, only the germ of a plan that would bring us where we are today. The question always became "How can we make this happen?" A didn't seem cooperative at all back then, unless we came up with a ton of money to appease her. In the passing months we didn't even know where Christian was, or with whom. To me Tarn was the biggest player in these events. Eventually, she was able to take him in and provide for him in the way the others could or would not. As she cared for him for the past 4 months, the plan to bring him to the US didn't seem so farfetched. Wheels were turning slowly for sure but in a positive direction. The legal hoops through the US Embassy were many but not completely hopeless.
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Even with Mia being pregnant she stayed determined to wade through the muck, knowing that if it happened she would have her hands full with a newborn and Christian as well as Luca and Micaela. Nat was a very big part of this equation. She and Leigh were at odds often but somehow they became a team and forged ahead with unyielding determination. The odds of this happening were formidable but neither gave up. It is hard to capsulize the tortuous pace of dealing with not only the US Embassy, but the Thai Government and laws governing children in a country known for child trafficking. Even though it seemed easy to declare A an unfit mother, the Thai government would still see her as Christians mother. If we got to court, a strong possibility was she could still win."
We spend the next 2 days with Tarn, Ant, A and Annie. And Christian of course. I am happy to share him with whomever. We are all seven of us getting along well; Christian being the anchor. A and Annie come by the hotel with Christian, and then Ant and Tarn come to gather us all in the van Tarn has hired to take us to restaurants and places that Tarn is familiar with from her time with Joshua. I silently thank Josh for making this possible....as if he were here with us, but of course he is!
My "elephantitus" has subsided and so has the massive bite to my right cheek, but now Rick has a terrible earache. Rick is completely deaf in one ear, so any problem with the other ear is cause for alarm. He and Ant go off in search of a pharmacy. He returns incredulous that the total cost for the pills and ointments comes to 5.00. He is almost completely better the next day.
I love being in Phuket. I feel so close to my son. The beach is warm and soothing. We have expert guides in Tarn and Ant and A. I get to see and play with Christian every day. I tell Rick I could live here. He doesn't feel the same. The heat and humidity is oppressive and his daily walk on the beach is becoming boring to him. He would like to see some other scenery and hike some other places, but we are here in this place for a reason and venturing off the immediate terrain is not on our list of things to do.
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It was a dark and stormy night two hundred years ago this June when Frankenstein was first animated in a Swiss chateau by the 18 year old Mary Shelly. She created the legendary monster after a challenge by Lord Byron who had invited a group of young British literary types to spend the summer on the shores of Lake Geneva. Climate change caused by a volcano in Indonesia created endless rainy weather that meant they spent a lot of time indoors pursuing their respective writing efforts.
After some evenings recounting German ghost stories while drinking local wine and consuming opium Byron challenged the assembled writers to each create their own similar tale.
Shelly was feeling pressured, being asked every morning if she had succeeded. Finally several days later during a night where she couldn't sleep she wrote her 'waking dream' around 2am about a doctor in nearby Geneva who animated a creature made of scavenged body parts.
(The mood must have been conducive to scary stories as another member of the group, John Polidori, wrote a short story that eventually became The Vampyre; the first vampire story in English with the theme later being amplified in Bram Stoker's Dracula.)
At that time, Galvanism was the newest scientific research being conducted in Europe where electricity was used to animate dead tissue, giving thought to the possibility of reanimating dead bodies. Shelly had seen demonstrations of scientific experiments at the Royal Institute in London, and knew how electricity could be used to recreate movement in dead muscles. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Shelly noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". This is probably why she used electricity as the source of life for the creature built out of body parts from dead people.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein Shelley said, 'I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.'
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Exactly two hundred years later a New York Times headline announced in June: 'Project aims to synthesize entirety of Human DNA. Ethical issues include the possibility of babies with no biological parents'.
So if Boris Karloff scared you in the original 1931 Frankenstein movie (or soon Javier Bardem who is being tipped to be the new monster in an upcoming remake) you should be really afraid now. One of the points in Shelly's book was that the good doctor was trying to play god and it had disastrous results after a potentially promising start. Are we now also at the same crossroads?
In April 2015, researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in China used gene-editing techniques to alter human embryos for the first time in history. And a U.S. federal biosafety and ethics panel recently gave a university the go-ahead to conduct research on genetically modifying humans. While it could mean future generation have inherited diseases like cancers removed from their genes there are more questions than answers
If scientists can create life to their own specifications is it not pure ego to think humans are better able to do this than letting nature find it's own way? And what kind of manipulations and interests will guide such efforts leading to potential misuse of the knowledge. We live in a world that today sadly has very low moral standards and people of immense wealth and power who do as they please. Will countries create super beings to go to war on their behalf or else try to create perfect societies with individuals having Einstein IQ's and movie star looks?
In Europe, the organizations questioning the safety of genetically modified foods call these staples 'Frankenfoods' as a nod to scientists trying to be superior to nature. I don't know enough details about the young science and the jury is still out on the subject regarding potential long-term health issues and benefits but when it comes to custom made humans perhaps a little more research should be done. And also ethical considerations need to get taken into account before a new monster is unleashed.
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Last Thursday I was privileged to attend an event that had been scheduled as part of an ongoing advocacy effort on behalf of open trans military service. The symposium, entitled "Inclusive Military Policy: Transgender Service, Like Repealing DADT, Strengthens the Force," was planned when it seemed that the original deadline, already six months past, would be kicked further downfield, potentially into a new administration. The lineup was chosen very strategically to make the case that the time for dallying had long passed, and the noises coming from the Congressional Armed Services committees needed to be ignored.
The lineup included Democratic Leader, Nancy Pelosi, and Democratic Whip, Steny Hoyer, Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), and Under Secretary of Defense Peter Levine. Hosting the event was the Palm Center's Aaron Belkin, with participation of:
Major General Gale Pollock, USA (Ret.) and Rear Admiral Alan Steinman, USCG (Ret.) representing the community of retired General and Flag Officers; Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Victor Valenzuela, Army Captain Sage Fox, and Army Staff Sergeant A. Nazzal, representing 12,800 - 15,500 transgender troops serving currently; Major Kimberly Moore, USMC (Ret.) representing 134,000 transgender veterans; British Army Captain Hannah Winterbourne, representing 19 militaries that allow transgender service; and Dr. Nathaniel Frank, the gay scholar who has performed and encouraged much of the LGBT research leading to the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the removal of the administrative ban on trans service.
This was a powerful cast of characters, invited to lay down a marker to the Pentagon that further delay was unacceptable.
The effort turned out to be unnecessary; the symposium was a time of celebration.
Celebrating with Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, of whom Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley said, "Probably no single person deserves more credit for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell," were other leaders of the LGBT community and the effort to end the trans ban. These included Matt Thorn, representing Outserve-SLDN, David Stacy of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Fiona Dawson, producer of the award-winning documentary, TransMilitary, Harper Jean Tobin of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders (who served with Admiral Steinman and Aaron Belkin on the Transgender Military Service Commission which studied the ban back in 2014 along with Professors George Brown and Eli Coleman), and members of SPARTA, the mostly-trans LGBT organization which was at the forefront of this repeal effort and recently released its 147 page guide to implementation, represented this day by president Sue Fulton.
I was especially impressed with the words of Rear Admiral Alan Steinman, who, as a physician and former member of the US Public Health Service, explained the ban to the audience and distinguished it from Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Dr. Steinman explained how the ban on trans service was administrative, based on outmoded psychiatric beliefs, and the removal of the ban required a process different from convincing Congress to repeal the DADT law. He explained how their efforts were absolutely contingent upon the revision of the DSM in 2011, when being trans was de-psychopathologized with removal of the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder. Its replacement, Gender Dysphoria, built on the definition of being trans as gender incongruence, a state with no moral or religious values applied to it.
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I'm very proud to have been part of the team which re-wrote the Gender Dysphoria text, and I'm amazed that even though we knew, a decade ago, that repeal of the ban would require the revision of the DSM, that we were able to accomplish both in less than ten years. Not only was this repeal absolutely contingent on revision of the DSM, as the ban was directly derived from the earlier psychiatric consensus, but, more importantly, I believe that removal of being trans as a type of mental illness empowered innumerable trans persons to take control of their lives with confidence and pride. The efforts of trans advocates like Brynn Tannehill, lead author of the SPARTA report, Allyson Robinson, former Executive Director of SLDN, and Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), who has shared his legal expertise throughout this process, were amplified by the knowledge that there was nothing but fear preventing repeal. This is the incrementalism of the civil rights movement at work.
Just as repeal of DADT had been resisted by the fake issue of a threat to unit cohesion, so, too, were efforts to thwart the repeal of the trans ban. Director Belkin has said,
It's increasingly obvious that ostensible concerns are, in fact, a delay tactic masquerading as complexity. ... [A]ll genuine questions--as opposed to stalling tactics--about implementing inclusive policy have now been addressed by a wide variety of expert sources.
Those fears were voiced just recently by none other than Senator John McCain, who learned nothing from his previously doomed efforts, or his being insulted by Donald Trump.
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I look back at decades of research and advocacy, and wonder why it took so long. How could physicians grounded in scientific truths have allowed themselves to demonize an entire community based on religious beliefs rooted in homophobia and misogyny? Why would a military that has had to loosen its standards to fill the ranks prefer to reject service members it knows have been serving honorably for decades, though in secret?
And, yet, I come back to the fact that given the complexity and diversity of this country, made so obvious in the rise of fascism and hatred in this election year, and the deadly persistence of institutionalized racism. It's remarkable that the LGBT community has been able to achieve so much in, basically, the past decade. Americans took real notice of the trans community only back in 2007 with the issue of trans inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and here we are today, with a community no longer considered mentally ill, with federal protections under the 1964 Civil Rights Act Titles VII and IX endorsed forcefully by the President, marriage equality for the entire LGBT community, and open military service for all as well.
How to gauge the ever-increasing reach of the art market? There is, of course, the growing number of art fairs around the world, and the series of record-setting multimillion-dollar prices paid at auction for works by Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and so many others. There is the growing scale of art thefts and the frequency with which stories about art purchases and frauds make the front page of The New York Times. But there is also a quieter indicator: the increasing number of students looking to learn about the business of art at the schools set up by the two major auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's.
"We'll be awarding 300 master of arts degrees this year," said David Levy, president of Sotheby's Institute, which has campuses in London, New York City and Los Angeles. "Ten years ago, there were maybe 75 or 80." The reason for the almost four-fold increase is "the explosion in the art market. People see the art market correctly as one of the most dynamic areas of the global economy, and they want to be a part of it."
In Sotheby's program, students learn the business of art, which entails art evaluation, including both connoisseurship and appraising in some specialized field. They are instructed in the differences between the market for one type of art and that of another, the legal and tax issues involved in the domestic and international art trade, how to market and sell artworks in galleries, at art fairs, online "and in the future," Mr. Levy said. "How and where will art be sold in the next 10 years?"
Students also learn some art history in the area of fine and decorative art in which they look to specialize, but their aim is not to become scholars and art historians. "When they graduate college," Mr. Levy said, "many art history majors see their only option as getting a master's and then a Ph.D. in art history, which is fine for people who want to teach art history, but not everyone does. A lot of college graduates get jobs in art galleries, but their skills don't prepare them for the asset-driven art market, and that's where we come in."
While Christie's runs its own education program, Sotheby's licenses its name to the Bethesda, Md.-based Cambridge Education Group, which operates Sotheby's Institute. "We are very closely associated with the auction house," Mr. Levy said. "Their specialists teach in our program, and our students are in and out of Sotheby's all the time." One of the central differences between a traditional art history master's degree program and those offered by both Christie's and Sotheby's, he added, is that students aren't just looking at pictures of artworks but go behind the scenes at the auction houses, handling the objects, talking to collectors, appraisers, museum curators, dealers, conservators, auctioneers and other people involved in the art trade.
Students at both Sotheby's Institute and Christie's Education generally represent a mix of recent college graduates, those who have been out of college for a number of years but who haven't fixed on a career and others who have worked in one field for a while but want to make a change. "We have quite a few lawyers and accountants who want to try something else, refocus their skills," said Veronique Chagnon-Burke, academic director of Christie's Education. "The reports of record sales and huge prices for works of art have driven many of those career-changers our way."
As one might expect, many of these students see the schools associated with the two largest art auction houses in the world as opportunities to find employment there, and "We do watch out for top talent," Ms. Chagnon-Burke said. The students have mandatory internships at Christie's, and, she said, every year the house recruits some for full-time employment. "Some of our graduates get jobs at Sotheby's, too," she said.
However, most internships don't turn into jobs, and Mr. Levy noted that, while "a lot of people come into this program thinking they'll get a job at Sotheby's, they need to be disabused of that idea."
Neither Christie's nor Sotheby's closely tracks what becomes of their graduates, but many of them do work in some facet of the art trade--in galleries, as art consultants, in an auction house, as art appraisers and even some artists. Mr. Levy said that between 10 and 15 percent of the Sotheby's Institute students have undergraduate studio art degrees. "I learned about the business side of the art world, such as how to approach a gallery from the perspective of a gallery owner, as well as the significance of art fairs and the legal side of selling your work," said New York City painter and printmaker Madeline Aguillard, who received her master's from Christie's in 2011. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, she had double-majored in studio art and art history but wasn't so set on a direction that she wanted to enter either a master of art history or a master of fine arts studio. However, "after the Christie's program, I left with a desire to work more on my own art and apply to MFA programs."
Another painter who took the Christie's program, Cynthia Grow, who lives in both Manhattan and Barcelona, Spain, cautioned that "it would be incredibly naive" to enroll at either Christie's or Sotheby's with "the hopes of furthering a career as an artist--that it would somehow help in hopes of furthering one's career as a fine artist, that there would suddenly be connections with dealers, gallerists, potential clients that magically open the door to a successful career as an artist probably won't happen. My advice? Save your money." However, she is currently attempting to open an art gallery in Barcelona, and "my education at Christie's will certainly help" with that.
Perhaps more typical an experience was that of Margherita Desy, who majored in art history at the College of the Holy Cross but "didn't know what I wanted to do for a graduate degree. I knew I wanted to increase my knowledge of the decorative arts," which led her to enroll in Sotheby's Institute's works of art certificate program in 1984 (it wasn't until 2010 that the Institute was accredited to award graduate degrees by the State of New York). Within six months of completing the program, Ms. Desy was hired as a curator at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, Conn. ("going to Sotheby's was definitely a plus"), and she later took on her current role as historian at the USS Constitution Museum in Charlestown, Mass.
Another success story is Erin-Marie Wallace, who had earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in drawing from the University of Central Florida in 2000 but "always knew I was going to have my own auction company." She took the Sotheby's Institute master's program in 2004, returning to start E.M. Wallace Auctions & Appraisals in Tarpon Springs, Fla., in 2006. "I'm the only Sotheby's-trained auctioneer in Florida," she said, adding that "my ultimate goal is to host Antiques Roadshow."
Such auction-related cable television programs have been cited as spurring the growth in the number of people enrolling in auction schools around the country. There is a lot of excitement about finding valuable objects among things that were just piled up in the attic, but differentiating what is valuable and what is just old and dusty requires new and specialized skills. Just learning what is called the "auction chant" is no longer enough. "For decades, the auction industry focused on real estate, livestock and heavy equipment sales, but since the recession, people have begun to focus on art and other personal property, and there has been much more interest in that side of auctions," said Aaron Ensminger, director of education at the National Association of Auctioneers in Overland Park, Kan.
There are auction schools in every state, many run by local auction houses, and graduates of these one- or two-week-long programs receive certificates that enable them to obtain a state license to auction property. Tuition to these programs generally ranges from $800 to $1,300. The master's and nondegree programs at Christie's and Sotheby's are longer and considerably more expensive. Christie's three semester art, law and business program in London costs $52,000 (32,000 pounds), while a nine-month-long certificate program on Modern and Contemporary art ("the course will allow you to analyze the interests and practices of a fast-changing art world and fast-track your career change") costs $19,000 (12,000 pounds). Sotheby's Institute's art business master's program also is three semesters long, costing $21,981 per semester--the certificate version of this program lasts two semesters, at the same per-semester rate--in addition to travel fees of $2,750 and estimated living expenses of more than $26,000.
The cost was worth it to Caitlin Kelly, a 2011 recipient of a master's degree for Sotheby's Institute's art business program, who now works as a client adviser and fine art expert in the private client group for the Manhattan-based fine arts insurance brokerage Frenkel & Company. The high prices that most intrigued her were that of art and antiques on sale at the major auction houses. "The question I was drawn to is: Why is this worth $20 million?" she said. The instructors in her program, many of whom worked at the auction house, made clear to her "all the mechanisms at play that drive up prices."
She didn't get hired by Frenkel & Company right after completing her master's degree. In fact, immediately after Sotheby's Institute, she enrolled in a nondegree program in appraising at New York University in order to learn specific skills needed for this type of work. Referrals from people she met while at Sotheby's Institute did lead to the job. Sotheby's Institute "didn't help me get this job, but the contacts I made while in the program has helped me be very successful."
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young homeless boy sleeping on the bridge, poverty, city, street
House Speaker Paul Ryan in an NPR interview Monday acknowledged that the poor are victims of our economic system. The interview sounds reasonable, almost soothing, until you examine what Ryan is really saying.
After acknowledging that poverty is systemic, he turns around and blames the poor themselves as being personally -- even morally -- responsible for being poor. He implies the poor are just lazy. He cited addiction, lack of skills, and, of course, government handouts as the real causes of poverty. He said raising the minimum wage would not help. His soothing-sounding words are actually quite radical and extreme.
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The Interview
Ryan was interviewed on Monday's NPR's Morning Edition by Steve Inskeep about his ideas on helping people get out of poverty.
When asked about people born into poverty who can't get out of poverty, Ryan responds, "That's right ... You go look at the country and the conditions, you're just as likely to stay poor today as you were if you were born into poverty 50 years ago. ... There are people out there fighting poverty, that do well, succeed but for government I think in many cases they could do more."
Q: You've argued that welfare "is keeping people away from work, it disincentives work." Ryan: Right. Yeah. Q: Do you want to cut welfare? Ryan: The smarter thing to do is to customize a benefit to a person's particular needs. ... Maybe this person needs addiction counseling, or maybe she needs a GED or transportation or something. You customize the benefits for her particular needs with the proper accountability.
Asked about low minimum wages keeping people in poverty, Ryan rejected raising the minimum wage as a "one-size-fits-all solution." Inskeep asked, "Why not do something that raises wages?"
Ryan: "Well, skills. I think when you raise the minimum wage, you'll lose over a million jobs ... So you don't want to take away those entry-level jobs that give people hard and soft skills they need just to learn how to do work. Every person has a different problem, sometimes a person has an even deeper problem like addiction or something like that."
What Ryan Is Saying
Ryan began by acknowledging that the "country and the conditions" are what is keeping people poor. He said if you "look at the country and the conditions, you're just as likely to stay poor today as you were if you were born into poverty 50 years ago." But then he said there are people who are fighting poverty whose efforts would succeed "but for the government"
Ryan then contradicted what he said about "the country and the conditions," and blamed the poor themselves for being poor. They don't have skills, they don't have an education, they are addicted, and they are so lazy that a little bit of "welfare" keeps them from looking for work. He said they need to "learn how to do work."
Several states have bought in to this "blame-the-poor" mentality to the point where they require drug testing before a person can get assistance. Earlier this year Think Progress surveyed these programs and found that despite the cost of this drug testing, several states did not find even one person testing positive. The national total was 321 positive tests, out of the millions in circumstances where they need help.
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So why does Ryan bring up "addiction" when talking about poverty? For the same reason he talks about government and "welfare" causing people to not bother to look for work or even "learn how to do work." These kinds of words point the finger at people for personal, moral failings, and contribute to a story that the poor are really just bad people who do not deserve our assistance.
Minimum Wage
Ryan also implied that people in poverty are lazy, saying "welfare" is "keeping people away from work." But because of the decrease in the purchasing power of the minimum wage, many working people, even those working in full-time jobs, make so little that they qualify for "food stamps" and other government aid.
This chart, "Share of workers receiving public assistance for the poor, by industry" from the Washington Post Wonkblog report, which says, "When work isn't enough to keep you off welfare and food stamps," tells the story:
"Share of workers in each field who rely on at least one program among Medicaid/CHIP, TANF, the EITC or food stamps. UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education"
According to the Wonkblog report, "The problem, according to this picture, isn't that poor people won't work -- it's that the work they do can't sustain them."
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Ryan also said, "when you raise the minimum wage, you'll lose over a million jobs." But a National Employment Law Project (NELP) report from May, titled "Raise Wages, Kill Jobs? Seven Decades of Historical Data Find No Correlation Between Minimum Wage Increases and Employment Levels," found that:
The results were clear: these basic economic indicators show no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and lower employment levels, even in the industries that are most impacted by higher minimum wages. To the contrary, in the substantial majority of instances (68 percent) overall employment increased after a federal minimum-wage increase.
So raising the minimum wage, giving working people more money to spend in local stores, not only doesn't kill jobs but increases demand in the economy enough that it might actually cause those stores to hire people. Who could have predicted?
Never mind that increasing the minimum wage to a "living wage" level would end the need for public assistance for millions of people.
Note that "welfare" as Ryan and Republicans describe it -- giving cash to people who don't work -- ended with the 1996 "welfare reform". Today people -- overwhelmingly single mothers with children -- can get minimal temporary cash assistance, minimal food assistance and health care. Some can get housing subsidies and a few other forms of aid.
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Personal Responsibility
Ryan is repeating the old "personal responsibility" language conservatives have developed to shift people's thinking about government and democracy away from the idea that We the People are in this together, toward a selfish idea that we should all be on our own. Of course, this leaves individuals defenseless against the powerful forces of aggregated wealth and power.
Paul Ryan, like many Republicans, is an admirer of Ayn Rand, who taught that society consists of a few "producers" and lots of "looters" and "parasites." Rand taught that democracy is a "statist" "collectivism" of those parasitic looters, that it is wrong for people to help other people, altruism is evil and government is "monstrously evil," "the political expression of altruism."
Ryan's words on "welfare" fit right into this radical, extreme framework, but in a more soothing-sounding way.
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This post co-authored with Alex Hillbrand
Talks in Vienna to limit the super-warming chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol kicked into high gear on Friday and Saturday. The first phase of the nine-day negotiating session ended favorably in the wee hours of Sunday morning with agreement on key challenges and solutions.
That agreement paves the way for countries to spend the week ahead coming to terms on the central issues: ambitious schedules for freezing and phasing down HFC production and use in both developed and developing countries, and financial assistance to help developing countries achieve their phase-down commitments.
The upbeat mood of the first two days, evident in the words and actions of nearly all parties, further raises expectations that this is the year for agreeing on an HFC amendment.
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The goal for the Vienna meeting is to get close enough to a complete agreement on phase-down schedules and financing provisions that countries can seal the deal on a final HFC amendment to the Montreal Protocol when they meet in Kigali, Rwanda, in October.
The stakes are high. Left unchecked, HFC production, use, and emissions are rising fast. An treaty amendment this year could prevent, between now and 2050, HFC emissions with a warming power equal to nearly three times the worlds current annual output of carbon dioxide. This would be the biggest climate protection achievement of 2016 and help power the Paris Climate Agreement forward.
The Sunday-morning agreement addresses the main principles to govern financial assistance to help developing countries meet HFC phase-down commitments. The parties agreed to continue using the Montreal Protocols Multilateral Fund (MLF) the mechanism through which donor countries helped developing countries phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and many other ozone-destroying and climate-damaging chemicals and to provide sufficient additional financial resources to help those countries meet new HFC commitments. They agreed on a list of activities eligible for funding, and on a process for the MLF to adopt detailed guidelines.
The Sunday-morning agreement reassures countries that the MLF will cover the costs of licensing patents where needed. Patent issues have been a point of contention in past negotiations, although recent research presented at the meeting has helped cut this problem down to a resolvable size. The agreement also asks the MLF to look at ways to support enhancing the energy efficiency of air conditioners and other equipment in tandem with adopting new refrigerants.
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The agreement also opens the door for making certain exemptions available as the phase-down proceeds. This is a tried-and-true mechanism for addressing the fear that alternatives wont be ready for some uses when phase-down limits kick in. The possibility of hard-case exemptions makes it acceptable for countries to agree up front to ambitious reduction schedules.
Negotiators enthusiasm palpably increased with every challenge met and solution found.
India and China are joining the U.S., Canada, Mexico, European Union and others in down-to-earth problem solving. Even Saudi Arabia, in the past an obstacle, is contributing to progress.
Whats next? Negotiators will work all next week to develop the specific language of the HFC amendment, building from four existing proposals and the solutions adopted this weekend. On Friday and Saturday, ministers from around the world will convene for a high-level Meeting of the Parties. The U.S. will be represented by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy as well as high-level White House and State Department officials.
The goal is to get as close as possible to a final deal, so that the ministers can close the remaining gaps this week and in the months ahead, and sign the long-awaited HFC phase-down amendment to the Montreal Protocol in Kigali this October.
Steve Gunderson, the former congressman (R-WI), who heads the discredited, depleted for-profit college trade group CECU (formerly APSCU), is working hard to defeat a new Obama Administration rule that would (1) provide debt relief for students who were defrauded by their schools and (2) take steps to hold fraudulent schools accountable. In addition to efforts to buy spokespersons and scare non-profit and public colleges into opposing the rule, CECU now aims to get for-profit colleges to enlist their students as lobbyists in the effort -- a tack the industry has taken before. Here's Gunderson's email today:
Unfortunately, the new CECU "toolkit" is, like the pitches often used to recruit students to for-profit colleges in the first place, full of distortions. Among the messages that Gunderson urges schools to tell their students are:
Regarding forced arbitration clauses:
"Currently, many schools have enrollment agreements requiring that students resolve disputes through arbitration; and do so individually rather than as a class action suit against the school."
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Fact: Only for-profit colleges, and a handful of for-profit colleges that have converted to non-profit status, force students into arbitration and ban class actions; other non-profit and state schools don't do that.
"Now, [under the new regulation] students would be required to go through complicated legal proceedings or a bureaucratic process through the Department of Education."
Fact: The "complicated legal process" is called having the right to bring a claim to court, a fundamental right in our system. Arbitrations are often no less complicated, but they do tend to keep disputes secret and thus wrongdoing concealed, and they do tend to favor companies over individuals, make it difficult to get a lawyer, and keep many claims from getting filed at all.
"The regulation eliminates mandatory arbitration clauses in enrollment agreements. Most times, these provisions were inserted into such agreements to provide opportunities for both students and schools to resolve disputes in the easiest way possible. On the one hand, such a process establishes a formal method to address any disputes. On the other hand, such a process eliminates the ability of the student and the school to work out any disputes in ways they think are easiest for both parties. One of the side effects of the proposed rule is that if you are enrolled at a small school, and arbitration is no longer an option, the likelihood that you will be able to achieve a remedy diminish if the only remedy is through filing complaints with the Department or in the courts. If this seems unusually complicated for you, then it is important to share your thoughts as to why all options for remediation should be available to students - especially those in small schools.
The rules limit your ability to choose how you would want to settle a dispute, if you had one.
You would be forced into a complicated legal claims process that may not suit your individual needs.
You may be lumped into a larger group, where the government could use your information without your knowledge or approval."
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Fact: Nothing in the rule prohibits a student and a college from mutually agreeing to address a dispute in arbitration. The rule would only prohibit colleges, in some circumstances, from forcing students to accept arbitration of any dispute as a condition of enrolling.
The "toolkit" also gives colleges advice about giving their students advice about what to say about the rule's provisions allowing the Department to require schools that have engaged in troubling behavior to post letters of credit so money will be available to pay victims and creditors:
"While it is not our place to tell you what to say, if you want to weigh in on this issue you should state that "No letters of credit should be required until such time as a case is decided against the school. Anything else has the potential to reward frivolous law suits and damage students who simply want to finish their education and pursue their careers.
Schools would be required to secure credit which would divert valuable resources away from your education.
Such letters of credit are difficult to obtain, and may cause schools to close.
If a school closes, students may need to start their education elsewhere, adding to the time it takes for students to finish their programs."
Gunderson's toolkit concludes with some typically Gundersonian exclaimation marks: "We encourage you to share with the Department any thoughts you might have as to how such regulations could impact you, or students like you in the future, seeking a career education. Anything you say is appropriate! Any position you take is welcome!"
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Michael Heizer's Double Negative, shot from the western edge. Brent Holmes, 2015.
Stop sneering at Nevada: we've got Michael Heizer. For almost five decades, the internationally renowned Land Artist has etched, dug, plowed and excavated the state.
Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) sculptures scooped from dry lakebed inaugurated Nevada as Heizer's go-to medium. Double Negative followed the next year, spanning a canyon, gouging 1500 feet of mesa, and displacing 244,000 tons of Nevada sandstone and rhyolite. (It's longer than the Empire State Building is tall.) In 1997, Germano Celant's 550+ page opus, Michael Heizer, credits Nevada with provisioning landscape for more than a third of the book's photos. And just last year, Heizer's colossal City a sculpture complex worthy of pharaohs landed safely inside the 704,000-acre Basin and Range National Monument signed into law by President Obama to protect Nevada wilderness.
Art using Nevada as material is tricky to commodify. Acreage and vista the format of the Land Art movement can't be hung in a museum, or shown in a gallery, or crated for a trip to Sotheby's. At the outset of his Land Art career, Heizer still exhibited paintings and sculptures, but the frequency of his shows diminished then halted. While health problems were a factor, City gobbled up most of his time, attention, and funds. The enormous site 1.25 miles long and about a quarter mile wide is the largest sculptural undertaking in U.S. history. It outsizes James Turrell's Roden Crater installation (Arizona), Walter de Maria's Lightning Field (New Mexico), and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (Utah). The jewel in the crown of the Land Art movement, Heizer's City as yet unfinished is said to be the largest sculpture project by a single artist of all time.
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But it was more than maniacal dedication to a gargantuan artwork that led to the artist's quasi-withdrawal from the art world. Heizer is constitutionally reclusive. For the past few decades, he's lived in a cinderblock house adjacent to City, an hour from the nearest small town and three hours from Las Vegas. A man who willfully makes his mark on the rangeland of central Nevada with coyotes, cattle and the occasional cowboy for company isn't hankering after the limelight. Heizer's recent exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Altars (May 2015), was his first solo show in New York in 21 years.
"Post Historic Screenprint No. 1" (2014). Courtesy of Durham Press and the artist.
All this makes the current exhibition of Heizer prints at MCQ Fine Art in Las Vegas rare and appropriately local. On display through August 13, the show is everything that Heizer is usually not. Not large. Not overwhelming. Not made for an incremental, step-by-step viewing. No special footwear required. No chest thumping. Seen in the cozy, mid-mod confines of the gallery, the prints reveal the artist's softer side. Accompanying the shift to personal scale is a shift in style Heizer's uncompromising exactitude is everywhere present, yet tamed by a gestural lyricism that only the artist's hand, not a bulldozer, can supply.
"Post Historic Screenprint No 1" and "No 2," are standouts. Completed in 2014, the 46-by-46 inch works feature a tribal palette, nervy graffiti, and images of stones seemingly vibrating right out of the picture plane. The uncanny perspective derives, in part, from the twenty-some screens (22 for No 1 and 33 for No 2) and up to 23 colors in the printing process, coupled with a 14-year compositional gestation. While the stones appear to be scaled down from sculptural studies, Heizer actually did the opposite: scaled-up small prehistoric tools, monumentalizing their mass and dramatizing their presence.
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The artist's affection for stone is frequently linked to the Indiana Jones-years of his youth when Heizer accompanied his anthropologist father, a recognized expert in building methods of pre-Columbian peoples, to archeological sites throughout the Americas, and to Egypt. Decades later, major installations like Levitated Mass (2012), the whopping 340-ton boulder permanently installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the impressive "Asteroid" (2000), the relatively demure 12-ton ore rock recently exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, are often described in a nature-vs.-culture frame. The religious implications of Heizer's work he's arguably a stone worshipper if ever there was one are downplayed or deliberately overlooked. But at MCQ, they're hard to miss.
"Post Historic Screenprint No. 2" (2014). Courtesy of Durham Press and the artist.
In "Post Historic Screenprint No 2," Heizer depicts six stone artifacts in levitating perspective, as if animistic powers were fueling lift-off. Arrayed in two rows one black, the other burnt sienna the palette is the same one used in ritualistic rock art and ceramics by ancient peoples. Loose, multiple contour lines surround the stones like discharging auras, transforming fragments of geology into fetishes worthy of a shaman. Another striking print, the 35-by-94 inch lithograph "Levitated Mass" (2015), portrays a triangular LACMA boulder bobbing in graffiti currents. Quick gestural lines, loose crosses, splotches and circles ping both Heizer's early geometric paintings as well as the motorcycle-track drawings he made on a dry lake bed near Las Vegas almost fifty years ago. But Heizer's marks dive further back in time to petroglyphs (drawings incised on rocks by pre-literate peoples) and even further, all the way to the Paleolithic, when ancient artists superimposed images on cave walls. Suspended in the compendium of mark marking, the boulder seems to commandeer the energy fields generated by its mass.
For millennia, peoples have revered stones as sacred objects and identified stone sites as places of worship, largely because of the woo-woo purported to emanate from the minerals. While Heizer is far from being a high priest of a theo-lithic cult, he is definitely a metaphysician who seeks to provoke awe in the viewer. His efforts culminate in City, with its riffs on meso-American and Egyptian sacred architecture. The prints with their animistic stones provide a window on the monumental works, portable Heizers with accessible views. Luckily for Nevada, we've got these works-on-paper for a while. The stones are keepers.
Rich Countries Work to Undermine Mandate UN's Premier "Trade for Development" Agency at 14th Conference of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
What if there were a United Nations agency that could assist developing countries in using trade for their own development purposes, while helping them advocate for a more fair and sustainable trading system? That could advocate for more fair and just international tax and debt systems? That had specialist divisions working to support Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the developmental challenges of Africa, among other regions? That could use integrated approach to the evolution and management of globalization, regarding the interdependence of trade, finance, investment and technology as they affect the growth and development prospects of developing countries, rather than assuming that trade occurs in a global policy vacuum?
Such an agency exists: the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Every four years, it holds a conference to debate these issues and to set the mandate of the work of the agency for the next quadrennial. Unfortunately, every four years, some rich countries push to turn it into an agency for implementing corporate trade agreements negotiated elsewhere, and to keep the agency on the sidelines of global debates and rule-setting (dominated by developed countries) on tax, debt, fiscal and macroeconomic policies, technology, and other key issues. (You can see here my commentary on the last struggle.)
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On July 17-22 in Nairobi, Kenya, governments from around the world will meet to hash out UNCTAD's mandate for the next four years. The results of these negotiations will have meta-implications for development policy in developing countries around the world.
More than 331 civil society organizations (CSOs) including trade unions, farmers, development advocates, and public interest groups from over 150 countries sent a letter on July 14th to member governments of UNCTAD, demanding that they agree that UNCTAD continue its positive mandate for development. (The letter is available in English, Spanish and French.)
The CSOs highlighted that:
UNCTAD can play a unique role in the panorama of international economic institutions thanks to its focus on the interdependence of trade, finance, investment, macroeconomics, and technology as they affect the growth and development prospects of developing countries. However, to live up to its name and promises, its role must be development-centered, and not tied to the liberalization goals of other institutions.
This issue is critical, because in the constellation of global economic agencies and rule-making bodies, UNCTAD is one of the only institutions that includes promoting development at its core. It has a long and proud history of advancing systems of international trade that recognize the various levels of development of different countries, such as the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) that countries still use; the concept of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) that is under attack at the World Trade Organization (WTO); and the international commodity agreements, the abolition of which has had a tremendously negative impact on developing countries' trade balances.
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The WTO hijacked the global rule setting space when it was founded 21 years ago. It has an entrenched seat at the big boys' global economic deciders' table, along with institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the G20, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, the rich countries' private club) from which UNCTAD is often excluded.
But over the years, while public efforts to reform the balance of power among countries in the IMF have yielded small results, UNCTAD has seen its efficacy eroded by the attempts to shrink its mandate, limit its international participation, and stack it with pro-neoliberal developed-country leadership.
Nevertheless, the institution makes invaluable contributions beyond just trade capacity building, on issues of regional integration, structural transformation, policy space, global tax policy, international debt sustainability, and other issues. And it should play a much larger role in determining the future of trade negotiations, be they at the WTO or in regional or bilateral agreements.
The letter from CSOs makes specific policy recommendations on the mandate draft document, noting that:
[t]rade and investment agreements do not support development without the right policy environment, which necessitates policy space, an effective and developmental state able to sustain its own resource base responsible for safeguarding people's human rights, and a more coherent, inclusive and representative global architecture for sustainable development. (Paragraph numbers referring to the draft mandate have been removed for ease of reading.)
The letter addresses the full range of developmental issues which have been affirmed by member states as crucial to UNCTAD's mandate, but which developed countries are attempting through the drafting process, to diminish, including on key issues of tax and debt. It highlights that the outcome of the conference "must continue and strengthen UNCTAD's mandate on curbing tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance including in commodities markets and through investment policies." It further notes that "UNCTAD's work on debt workout mechanisms and responsible lending and borrowing has been uniquely useful and should be strengthened, including by supporting further work on these issues at the UN General Assembly level."
The issues highlighted in the CSO letter all refer to provisions from a leaked version of the draft text, which exposed the positions of various governments. From this leaked version, it was clear that developed countries in two blocks -- the EU and the so-called "JUSCANZ (JZ)" representing Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand -- had moved to strike any reference to UNCTAD working in any arena in which it has actually made positive contributions to the global debates and rule-setting in favor of developing countries' interests.
Instead, the EU and JZ supported replacing development mandates with mandates for UNCTAD to simply encourage developing countries to implement free trade agreements (FTAs) and investment deals, whether or not those agreements were in the interests of the developing countries. For example, regarding UNCTAD's role on investment, the letter noted:
Given UNCTAD's long history encouraging developing countries to sign International Investment Agreements (IIAs) and the negative impacts developing countries have experienced, particularly due to the Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, UNCTAD's mandate should be intensely invested in helping developing countries craft investment policies that will contribute to development, rather than just "balance the interests" of investors and development; as well as to unwind and reform these agreements.
The CSO letter also made recommendations regarding UNCTAD's mandate on the "integrated approach of UNCTAD to the evolution and management of globalization and on the interdependence of trade, finance, investment and technology as they affect the growth and development prospects of developing countries", as many developed countries have objected to the superlative work of the Globalization and Development Strategies division in particular, for its integrated critiques of finance-led globalization, IIAs, and its encouragement of developing country participation rule-setting on the global level.
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The letter also addresses issues of LDCs; promoting regional integration; monitoring the role of the private sector rather than promoting Public Private Partnerships (PPPs); advocating technology transfer; and on the importance of UNCTAD's leadership in the Financing for Development (FfD) process that supports the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed to by governments through the UN last year.
The letter concludes:
We believe that the further UNCTAD moves toward seeing developing countries mainly as engines to increase trade -- and thus deviating from its mission to support the use of trade for development -- the more it risks redundancy and irrelevancy. As civil society organizations deeply committed to human rights and social justice, the achievement of the SDGs and sustainable development for all, we urge you to adopt the above positions and ensure that UNCTAD continues and strengthens its role in trade, finance, investment, macroeconomics, and technology as they affect the growth and development prospects of all developing countries.
By Friday, July 22nd, it will be clear if developing countries were successful in securing a mandate that promotes development, or if developed countries won out in their efforts to convert UNCTAD into yet another institution promoting pro-corporate policies that further entrench the chasm of inequality between and among developed and developing countries.
And if the correct mandate is affirmed, the letter makes a final plea: "there is a need to scale up the international financial and human resource support of member governments towards UNCTAD and its overall mandate."
The letter was coordinated by the International Steering Group of CSOs towards the UNCTAD 14, which includes: ActionAid International, Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), Center of Concern, European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD), FEMNET, Financial Transparency Coalition, Global Alliance for Tax Justice, Jubilee USA, Latin American Network on Debt, Development and Rights (LATINDADD), Our World Is Not For Sale network (OWINFS), Public Services International (PSI), Regions Refocus, Society for International Development, Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Initiative-Uganda, Tax Justice Network Africa (TJN-A), and the Third World Network - Africa.
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Just a few years ago, Charlotte was a student at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. She was studying biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and considering a career in research. Charlotte graduated in 2013, and today she is employed by a top cancer center and involved in cancer research--specifically clinical research--within a particular area of oncology known as Bone Marrow Transplant.
Her employer, the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, is designated by the National Cancer Institute as one of only 46 comprehensive cancer centers in the United States. The Karmanos Cancer Institute is headquartered in Detroit, with cancer treatment locations throughout the state of Michigan. Karmanos' robust clinical trials program offers new cancer therapies to patients that are often not available at other hospitals.
Before a new cancer treatment is made available, it must go through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA's) lengthy and rigorous development and approval process. (This process applies to all drugs, regardless of their intended therapeutic use.)
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The initial phase of drug development includes many years of testing. Drugs are first tested in the laboratory setting. If these efforts show promising results, the potential drug is made available to eligible cancer patients in a clinical trial, approved by the FDA. The purpose of clinical trials is to establish drug efficacy and safety. This is where Charlotte's role as a clinical research coordinator (CRC) comes into play.
Prior to discovering a career in human health, Charlotte was employed within the animal health division of a pharmaceutical firm. She worked in research and development, supporting scientists in developing new therapeutics for animals. While she had childhood dreams of being a physician, she decided upon a career in research. But she quickly realized that while she enjoyed the work, company, and co-workers, she desired greater interpersonal interaction.
A friend from college involved in clinical research suggested that Charlotte look into clinical research coordinator positions. Charlotte took her friend's advice and started applying--ultimately netting her position at Karmanos.
Now she's happily engaged in a role that combines research with patient care. And what perks! In her position, Charlotte has the opportunity to regularly interact with amazing individuals and learn on a daily basis, all while making an impact by aiding in the development of new cancer treatments.
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I asked Charlotte what it takes to excel as a CRC and she replied:
"A successful Clinical Research Coordinator, or CRC, is very organized. We are often working on multiple, complex clinical trials at the same time. We are the "protocol experts," which means we have to know what sort of patients are eligible, (and able,) to participate in a trial, and when all of the information needs to be gathered. This can include blood tests and pathological tests (tests that can confirm a cancer diagnosis or remission) when study participants can get the new drug; and what to look for so that the pharmaceutical company can report its results to the FDA, who will decide if a drug can be approved or not for use by everyone! There are a lot of rules to follow to protect patients' health and safety in the medical field, and then there are even more in the field of clinical research. We have to know all of them and make sure they are being followed."
I also asked Charlotte if she had any advice for girls and young women thinking about STEM career possibilities, and this was her reply:
"Follow your passion. You will be working for most of your adult life, so love what you do! I love what I do because it is always changing! We are learning and changing the face of cancer treatments. And when some of these new chemotherapy drugs come out, I know I helped with that approval.
I also strongly urge young women to consider an all-women's college. I didn't realize how much I would learn about myself and the great pride I would have in having graduated from Saint Mary's. Plus the place where I spent so much time as a student, Science Hall, is unveiling new modern space this fall. Thanks to alumna Jen Mathile Prikkel '95 and her family, $10 million has been invested. I can't wait to see it.
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Take every opportunity you can to learn more about science, and make sure to build each other up. I have found that it is not in competition with my peers and coworkers that I have learned the most or that the best work has been done, but when we all work together; it's a cliche for a reason. So empower each other! And that goes for girls, boys, women, and men. We can do the most good working together! So, go, change the world!"
Insightful advice from a young woman on-track for a rewarding and dynamic career in clinical research.
When contemplating the college-choice decision, keep in mind that women's colleges are one of the best-kept secrets in higher education today. For so many college-bound high-school girls, the final decision of which college to attend is not made exclusively on the basis of academics. While an institution's academics are extremely important, finding a college that can empower while it educates is of equal value.
The good news is that women's colleges provide both. Women's colleges effectively educate as well as empower. As Charlotte discovered: women's colleges are a welcome alternative for girls wanting to change the world.
Follow Diane on Twitter @HerSTEMCareer, where she celebrates and champions STEM women from around the world. To learn more about women's colleges, visit Diane's blog, Advantages of a Women's College, where a complete listing of all women's colleges in the United States is provided.
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A thought about Trump.
Many sane and smart people have been confused as to how this brazen ass-monkey won the Republican nomination and is now running even with Hilary Clinton, despite the fact that she is smart and qualified and he is not. We keep being shocked that he says dumb things and has no actual policies that make sense. We are exasperated and confounded that his campaign hasn't gone up in smoke despite the fact that his head is up his ass. We are missing the point.
Donald Trump is a new kind of figure in American politics and represents a new kind of approach. Usually a politician will say things like, "I'm gonna create jobs and lower taxes and here's how." Trump isn't doing that in any logical way.
What he is doing is presenting himself as a brand. His success so far has been based on the promise of this brand. The promise is not about policies or jobs. Instead his appeal is all about how he makes his followers feel. It's irrational and it's emotional and it's powerful.
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And so the Democratic counter argument can't just be a bunch of true policy ideas or wonkish facts because that would be missing the key to his appeal. He is appealing to the weak by making them feel like power is within reach, and so they suspend all logic.
Therefore we cannot defeat him with the usual campaign logic. We need to counter him by undercutting his brand. He has no real platform or policy, so that's not worth dissecting. The Trump brand is a self-inflated and ultimately hollow, acrid theatre of self-aggrandizement that's more like the ranting of a school yard bully than a statesman. And how do you destroy a bully? You beat the living shit out of him in public.
Elizabeth Warren seems to understand this better than anyone else at the moment and I think we need to follow her lead. Forget the fact that his policies make no sense. We need to stand up and tell the world that Donald trump is a fat bloated weakling. And say it often and loud.
He is a short fingered vulgarian, a failed businessman, a spoiled brat, an incredibly flaccid example of a man, and about as tuff as a pop-tart.
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The world awoke several weeks ago to a shocking turn of events. With a decisive margin, the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union and in the wake of that decision UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his intention to resign and leave office within the next few months. The past few weeks in the UK prior the vote have been marked by increasingly hostile campaigns as the polls showed an almost even split between the leave and remain camps, with each side resulting to ideological arguments and accusations of scare mongering to swing the vote their way. In the end, with record high voter turnout throughout the UK, the leave side won the day with a margin of 52% to the remain side's 48%.
A statement that the EU issued reads: "We stand ready to launch negotiations swiftly with the United Kingdom regarding the terms and conditions of its withdrawal from the European Union". Although the EU has signaled their intention to move quickly to try and quell uncertainty in the markets, the process will not happen overnight. The UK represents a significant portion of trade within the single market and the EU economy as a whole, and the exit process will need a considerable amount of thought and foresight at a time when emotions are high. Current estimates are that it will take two years or more for negotiations to complete. There is no historical precedent for a political move of this nature, and it is not unreasonable to state that with the exit of one of its largest economies the future of the EU itself can be called into question.
There is rampant speculation of what the Brexit means in the short, medium and long-term. The exit of the United Kingdom could bring momentum to anti-EU sentiment in other countries, giving rise to a Frexit, Italexit, Swexit? As of now that is not likely, but it is a possibility that cannot be excluded. Once the door for an exit is open, with a high-profile Brexit leading the way, then others might follow or at the very least attempt to negotiate a different kind of membership that backs away from the increased centralization that arose in the efforts to fortify the Euro.
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The immediate aftermath of the leave decision in Britain is how to unite a divided country; with the resignation of the Prime Minister and a sharply divided country, the UK will need to work to if not bridge the divide at least instill confidence in the wake of great uncertainty. David Cameron's statement that he intends to hold off on invoking Article 50 and begin the exit nominations in October is not going to sit well with those who voted to leave, who will want more immediate action.
Negative short-term economic implications seem to be a given for the UK, but should not affect our state. Over the years Louisiana companies have build a strong business reputation and bond to the UK, and its companies who are one of our largest foreign direct investors. Said this, EU exit negotiations will determine how strategically important certain investments might be for UK companies in the US and vice versa.
As has been widely reported, global markets suffered in immediate downturn in the wake of the Brexit news. The European Central Bank has said they are ready to intervene to steady the markets. Similar statements have been issued by US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and the central banks of Japan and Switzerland.
The EU on the other side wants to negotiate a quick exit with Britain as well as realizes that they have to focus more on its current members with goal to hold the European Union together. Therefore we believe that we will see more co-operations on the EU side, as for example a closer defense integration, a proposal that is already on the table done by Ms. Mogherini, EU Representative for Foreign Affairs. This is very important as other EU Countries could follow Britain's example and elections are on its way. The Dutch vote in March next year, France in April and Germany in August. Only time will tell.
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There were so many moments of inspiration from Thursday night's Los Angeles Premier of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's movie, Norman Lear -- Just Another Version of You that I woke up thinking about it the next morning. I wondered how it could be possible to reach the age of 93 and still find the anticipation, not to mention the stamina, of going to bed every night and looking forward to that next morning's delicious cup of coffee. That's just what Norman Lear told a packed audience during a Q&A immediately following the movie at the WGA Theater last night.
When you listen to Norman Lear speak, it's like a masterclass in humanity. He is confident, compassionate and remarkably sensitive to those voices that have the most difficulty being heard. There is no confusion, nor is there any need to decipher, or unscramble sentences in order to make sense of them, and that's because Norman Lear truly is just another version of us, although a far more experienced version of most of US, and an US without the Emmy's, Academy Award Nomination, star on the Walk of Fame and a National Medal of Arts Award. To be fair though, when you finish watching this incredibly entertaining movie, it becomes clear that awards are a bi-product of an industry that Norman Lear chose early on in life. The intention of Norman Lear has always been to push the envelope of consciousness and to reach further than his grasp, somehow pulling us all along with him... even still.
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Arguably the greatest influential American television writer and producer of all time, Norman Lear is responsible for such legendary 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Maude.
Through his unstoppable vision, Norman Lear single-handedly pioneered the inclusion of controversial topics in Primetime Television by virtue of delivering those "wake-up calls" through the miracle of laughter. Abortion, homosexuality, women's rights and a host of other previously uncharted television sitcom topics were battlefields that plagued a mission to educate (without spelling it out) but never conquered it.
Thursday night, Norman Lear showed no signs of slowing down on his journey to encourage thought provoking conversations with each other. Respectfully, and often with a playful repartee, Norman responded to various questions from an esteemed audience that included Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, among numerous others.
Not so surprisingly, one of the questions asked was, "What are your views on Donald Trump's presidential candidacy?" Hearkening a classic Norman Lear response and with absolute conviction he replied, "I think of Donald Trump as the middle finger of the American right hand, and it's saying, 'This is the kind of leadership you give us? Fuck you!' And Trump just happens to be the one who represents that middle finger."
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Certainly no stranger to political opinion or for the love of his country, Norman Lear (along with his wife Lyn) purchased one of the first published copies of the Declaration of Independence in 2001, but not as collectors of American Historical memorabilia, rather with "the intent to tour the document around the United States so that the country could experience its 'birth certificate' personally."
While it seemed that every question asked had an answer that either made me laugh, say "wow," or wipe away a falling tear, there was one moment that really stood out for me during the Q&A and that was when one of the filmmakers was explaining what she got out of working with Norman Lear. She said, "to simply give a shit."
So there I was yesterday morning, sipping my own delicious cup of coffee, wondering what it all means to be 93 years of age. That's when I decided to do what everyone in the modern world does -- I Googled the number 93! What I found pretty much summed up the Norman Lear Legend:
93 is the numerical equivalent for the Greek word Agape, which means love.
Let the games begin.
As we prepare for the negotiated spectacle that will play out at both political conventions, these staged reality television moments will also be set against a backdrop of heightened social, cultural, racial, and economic tensions. America has not seemed as divided nor as tribal since the 1960s.
What will this whirlwind of emotion, rhetoric, and anti-intellectualism mean for American higher education?
To begin, it might be best to take a step back to recognize that the federal government has done and can do enormous good.
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It was the government that brought us the GI Bill. It was the government that brought us advances like Title IV and Title IX, protecting basic rights to encourage access and equality. These improvements shaped and refined our approach to American higher education. Collectively, they are a powerful statement of what responsible government can accomplish for its citizens.
There is always an open question on what national political platforms mean to governance. They may not reflect the views of the candidate nor the political realities faced by a new administration. But in a strange election cycle where the rule of reason and the basic social courtesies no longer seem to apply, we might be wise to establish a few general parameters by which to read the tea leaves a little early.
First, the operating principle guiding political positioning on American higher education must be to do no harm.
It's always presumed that national political candidates have benefited from a blizzard of white papers and informed conversations on various education issues. It is further assumed that a coherent governing philosophy emerges from these think tank moments upon which national political leaders can graft sound education program and practice.
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There's a lot to worry about here. The Democrats have a clearer program and their platform is likely to move the presumed nominee further to the left. The Republicans seem to have little definition to their higher education goals. It's a "who's on first" moment for both sides with some uncertainty about viewpoints and what will prevail.
Second, let's understand what we propose.
This is where the philosophical meets the practical. It's one thing to offer free ice cream for everyone, since almost everyone likes ice cream. But at some point - free public tuition is an outstanding example - both the cost and the impact must be thoroughly vetted.
Who will pay for this "free" tuition? With student/counselor ratios of 1000/1 at some community colleges already, how can a massive influx of new public college students receive the counseling necessary to match the financial resources to the needed graduation outcomes? Do we really want to choke the system further?
Who will build the facilities and hire the faculty and staff beyond what new tuition dollars can reasonably provide?
Do we really want to transfer students in big private college states to public higher education if it is cheaper for the government to educate students at private colleges, supported by grant and loan programs? What would be the impact on local and regional economies?
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What's best for public and private higher education in the long run, already underfunded and weighed down by a massive collection of contradictory and expensive state and federal rules and regulations?
It's not enough to propose new government programs developed from polling and anecdote. If America wants to improve higher education access and outcomes, its leadership should understand the situation far better than the language used to argue for the programs proposed in the recent primary battles.
Third, rather than approach how to make improvements to American higher education through sweeping programs that a deficit-ridden government cannot afford, it might be better to think about what can be done.
This approach presumes three conditions.
The first is that national political candidates ask higher education's leadership what it needs. One answer will likely be regulatory relief that costs far less than free ice cream.
The second is that the new political leadership must be willing to examine which programs work best when measured against their stated policy goals.
And the third will be to figure out how the government can offer new programs within available discretion that better serve current students seeking to gain access, debt relief, and employment.
Of course, if the current political dysfunction continues, much of the conversation will go nowhere. Americans must ultimately prevail over their elected officials to demand that things get done. If this requires incremental steps, it may be that less is more. But less is better than nothing.
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WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 07: U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), speaks during a visit with residents at the Graceview Apartments, June 7, 2016 in Washington, DC. Speaker Ryan spoke about his A Better Way agenda, as well as addressing his stance on presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Calling the 2016 GOP convention the whitest of the whitest GOP conventions is not redundancy or a play on words. It underscores the fact that this convention, in comparison to the 2012 GOP convention and indeed a string of other GOP conventions going back in recent time, have been virtually lily white affairs. Start with the 2012 convention. Much was made before the start of that convention that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Democratic Congressman Arthur Davis and Saratoga Springs, Utah Mayor Mia Love would be among the bevy of speakers at the convention. Much was also made that New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley would also be prominent on the speaker's dais. This supposedly was the GOP's public rebuke to the loud charge that it was yet another good ole' white guys confab. The charge was more than a charge it was a brutal fact. Blacks and Hispanics were the proverbial invisible persons at the convention. African-Americans made up a paltry two percent of the delegates, and Hispanics only a slightly higher number.
It wasn't much better four years earlier in 2008. Only 36 of the more than 2,300 delegates to that convention were black. The GOP by its lowest of low minority delegate bar looked positively like a minority's champion in 2004 when the number of black delegates soared to a towering 167 number at that convention.
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The 2016 convention may well plumb even deeper the depths in the number of minorities there. The tip-off is who is on the list of the dozens of speakers announced. More than 80 percent of those who will take the podium are white, mostly white males.
The chronic invisibility of minority, especially African-American speakers and delegates, at this year's GOP convention is chalked up to Trump. That is his racially incendiary, immigrant, Hispanic and especially Muslim bashing campaign and rhetoric that got him to the top of the GOP presidential heap. This was on glaring and embarrassing display when one poll found that Trump got all of one percent of black voter support. Embarrassing because even Reagan and George W. Bush got about six percent of the black vote, and other GOP presidential candidate like Reagan and Bush no matter how conservative their credentials get around that percentage of the black vote.
The paltry number of blacks and Hispanics that turn up at the GOP conventions is much more than just a reflection of a GOP presidential candidate, Trump, who has run a virtual one-man hit campaign against minorities. And who has not so subtly aimed his hard pitch at frustrated, fearful, and angry whites, and worse unreconstructed bigots. It's a continued hard indictment of the party that shoved him to the top. That's on naked display in the Trump influenced 2016 GOP platform that calls for a tough crackdown on illegal immigrants, and comes dangerously close to endorsing Trump's call for a border wall.
Trump, however, merely swims in the party's longstanding, rancid, racially charged history and philosophy. The GOP is a party that promotes unabashed racially sneaky code words, a Southern Strategy and state's rights. It would not be the political force it is in state and especially national politics, and would not maintain its firm support base in the Deep South and the Heartland states among white rural, suburban, conservative blue collar and male voters, if it wavered in defending its core racial turf. Even the few high profile black Republicans, such as Clarence Thomas, adhere to and fervently espouse the party's hardline conservative attack points.
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There is absolutely no room for them to deviate from them. Former GOP Republican National Chairman Michael Steele had a momentary inkling that simply having black faces spout the stock conservative line would never attract more than a bare handful of blacks to the GOP. On occasion he quipped that the GOP had to give blacks some reason to embrace the GOP. But Steele even as he said that Steele was already well on his way to becoming a casualty of the GOP's steady march backward to its extreme right-wing stance on the issues. He was soon ousted.
With the spectacular surge of Trump there was little doubt that the GOP's 2016 convention would play hard to white conservatives, and that the delegates to the convention would reflect their views. Trump's virtually lily white key staffers, his selection of ultra-conservative Mike Pence as his VP running mate, and his raucous rallies before mostly white audiences were further glaring signs that the GOP convention would be a convention where minorities would be largely missing from sight.
The 2016 GOP platform reflects much of the Tea Party agenda. The staples again are: repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash government spending, downsize the federal employment, gut federal regulations on environment protection and laxly check on financial and corporate abuse. The convention platform is designed to rouse the GOP's conservative legions and will wreak even more misery on minorities. The 2016 GOP convention again delivers on what the GOP has worked overtime for years to be and that's the whitest of whitest conventions.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - JULY 13: Protesters attend the rally to denounce deploying the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in front of the Defense Ministry on July 13, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. South Korea's defense ministry announced on July 13, 2016 to deploy a U.S. military's THAAD anti-missile defense unit in Seongju county amid the escalating tension with the neighboring China and North Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
When I read that South Korea has agreed to deploy the THAAD missile defense system, I was swept over with a profound sense of sadness. For all the misunderstandings that have emerged, many in the United States and Korean military have worked together over the years for a common purpose of establishing stability in the face of a perceived North Korean threat. But this time all logic and science has fallen out of the debate. In fact, it seems as if the decision to deploy was made at the highest level with minimal consultation with the wide range of experts on security who have harbored doubts about the effectiveness of missile defense. The project seems to be driven more by the potential for profit, and recalls the tragic consequences of the political machinations of multinational arms dealers one hundred years ago that drew the world into World War One.
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To start with, THAAD is an outdated technology whose ability to stop missiles is doubtful. To the degree that THAAD might work, it does so for missiles flying at high altitudes. North Korea does not need to send missiles at high altitudes to attack South Korea, if such an unlikely scenario unfolded.
After all, if North Korea wanted to kill tens of thousands or more South Korean civilians, it does not need to use any missiles at all, but rather can use its substantial artillery units for which Seoul is fully within range. THAAD is entirely useless against artillery.
Moreover, there are any number of strategies that render the missile defense system ineffective. As THAAD is aimed at missiles flying at a high altitude, most likely is will simply encourage the Chinese, who perceive the system as intended primarily to deter them, to build many more missiles. That will only bring on an arms race and greater insecurity.
There is only one way to respond to the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles such as the SALT (strategic arms limitation treaties) that brought stability to Europe. During the early 1970s, the two sides of the Cold War divide made a commitment to addressing their various disagreements in three ways: through bilateral nuclear agreements between Moscow and Washington, through political and economic discussions in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and through the reduction of military forces in Europe in the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) negotiations. But today the United States is not even considering such an approach.
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But there is even more to this tragic decision. The immediate threat to security in Northeast Asia is not missiles or nuclear weapons. Creating a peaceful political environment and embracing disarmament regime, starting with the United States, will greatly reduce the chance that such weapons would ever be employed.
But drones are developing at a rapid rate and pose a poorly-understood security threat around the world. The players behind future drone warfare may not even be nation states at all. We have not even started to draft protocols to address the proliferation of drones in the region and their employment. Drones are potentially the most destabilizing aspect of an arms race in East Asia.
Finally, the entire region faces the existential threat of climate change, rising oceans, spreading deserts and the potential of massive dislocation over the next twenty years of hundreds of millions of people. The cost of mitigating climate change, by shifting away from fossil fuels and creating a low-consumption economy, and the cost of adapting to its impact on society through new infrastructure, policy and institutions will cost trillions of dollars and eventually dominate our economy. The United States, China, Japan, Russia and other nations must cooperate closely in the long-term response and establish a common security agenda based on the response to climate change.
It is no longer an option for Koreans to meekly follow misinformed policies like the deployment of THAAD that are issued from Washington D.C. think tanks wallowing in corruption. We cannot waste our precious resources and Korea will be the greatest victim if it permits a greater arms race. If Korea has the bravery and the vision to propose a new security agenda for East Asia with a focus on climate change and emerging threats, and if Korea includes the other nations of East Asia as partners in this enterprise, Korea will find unexpected supporters in the United States or elsewhere.
A nuclear strike on South Korea from North Korea is a highly unlikely scenario. The threat of drone warfare is certain. The existential danger of climate change is guaranteed.
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If Korea goes along with a misguided program because of the profits to be made, or because of the political benefits to be gained, the costs for the world will be tremendous and future generations will be unforgiving in their judgment.
The last pediatrician in Aleppo, Syria was killed and the emergency room and pediatric unit destroyed when a government air strike hit Al-Quds Hospital on April 28, 2016. Since then, shelling and airstrikes targeting civilian areas in Aleppo have continued. Where have people injured during the attacks, particularly children, gone for life-saving treatment? And what steps have been taken to protect Al-Quds and other hospitals from attack?
One step was already taken five years ago, on July 12, 2011, when the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1998. Specifically focused on children and armed conflict, Resolution 1998 made state and armed non-state actors that carry out attacks against schools and hospitals eligible for inclusion in the Secretary General's list of shame published in the annual report on children and armed conflict. Since then, 12 parties from 7 countries have been listed for attacks on schools and hospitals and there has been a widespread increase in awareness amongst practitioners and the public of the prevalence and scale of targeted attacks. However, attention has predominately focused on attacks on education and actions that can be taken to protect education from attack. Comparatively much less is known about attacks on hospitals and health care and the impact of these attacks on children.
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Similar efforts should be undertaken to research incidences and the impact on children of attacks on hospitals and health care and to advocate for the implementation of protective measures and accountability for parties that have perpetrated attacks. Reports published in recent years by a number of organizations have documented that hospitals and health care have been systematically attacked as objects of war. A report released in May of this year by Safeguarding Health in Conflict documented that targeted attacks against hospitals and health care had been carried out in at least 19 countries throughout the world between January 2015 and March 2016. The Secretary General's annual report on children and armed conflict released in June reported significant increases in attacks on hospitals and health care in 2015 in a wide range of countries, including Afghanistan, Yemen, and the State of Palestine. According to Leonard Rubenstein, founder and director of Safeguarding Health in Conflict, "while we are getting a better picture of the frequency and types of incidents, we need much more of an understanding of the impact."
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Some of the impacts are already known. These include loss of access to health facilities and emergent and preventive care, flight of health workers, and increased mortality. For example, Physicians for Human Rights estimates that more than half of Syria's doctors have fled the country since the conflict began, resulting in entire communities' complete lack of access to medical care.
However, attacks on hospitals and health care have a differential impact on children, including lack of access to vaccinations that have resulted in the recurrence of preventable childhood diseases in countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, and lifelong disabilities resultant from lack of access to health care that might limit or prevent altogether access to education or future employment opportunities. These are but two examples of the devastating consequences to children of attacks on hospitals and health care that are just beginning to be traced by organizations such as Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.
In 1973, the rock group Bachman-Turner Overdrive had a big hit with their song Takin' Care of Business which celebrated the joys of being a rock musician as opposed to being trapped in a "slaving job to get your pay."
The chorus of that song goes as follows:
Taking care of business (every day)
Taking care of business (every way)
I've been taking care of business (it's all mine)
Taking care of business and working overtime
More than four decades later, while most corporate CEO's in America aren't saying "it's all mine", they are certainly acting as if it is in terms of compensation and the distribution and sharing of rewards with line level employees.
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The relative wages that an employee gets paid for working in his or her "slaving job" today compared to what they were paid forty years ago are much lower than they were back then. And, the gap between what those in the C-suite make versus the employee group writ large has become a chasm.
Over the past several years, much of what has gone on in terms of taking care of business has come down to taking care of the business's executives - and in some instances its shareholders - in "every day" and "every way." (See our earlier blog for a discussion on the steps that have been taken to increase the size of the executives' and shareholders' wallets and pocketbooks.)
As we move into the second half of 2016, there are nascent signs that the times they may be changing - at least a little - and that business may be starting to place a somewhat renewed focus on taking care of employees again.
Drawing upon recently released analysis of tax data done by Emmanual Saez, economics professor at the University of California, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post Writers Group reports, "... the bottom 99 percent of earners saw their incomes grow by 3.9 percent. That is the strongest annual growth rate since 1990."
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In June, the research firm of Penn Schoen Berland sampled 800 employers in a Workforce of the Future Survey sponsored by Time, the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative, Burston Marsteller and the Markle Foundation. The survey disclosed that:
More than one-half of the employers use independent contractors and expect to use even more in the future.
In spite of this, 58 percent of the employers say full time employers are better for their company because they are more invested in the business, loyal, available when needed, and easier to retain
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Nearly 80 percent said they provided benefits such as health care and paid vacation to full time employees while less than 20% provide these benefits to independent contractors.
Almost 70 percent of employers indicated that they felt the "social contract" which tied "health, retirement and other benefits" to "traditional full time W-2 employment" should be reformed to provide the opportunity for independent contractors to get some of these benefits but felt that it should be up to the business to determine the level and nature of those benefits and who and how they should be paid for.
The results of the Workforce of the Future survey are a mixed bag indicating that the traditional employment model is eroding but that it is still a preferred mode and there may be some wiggle room for improved treatment of both the members of the full time and contingent workforces in the years to come.
In contrast to this equivocal stance, on July 11, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, announced that in October it will be raising the base pay of all employees and store managers at its U.S. company-run stores (approximately 7600) by 5 percent or more. In that same announcement, Schultz committed to meeting employees' scheduling needs - especially to ensure benefits eligibility - and doubled its stock award program for hourly workers with more than two years of continuous employment.
On July 12, Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan Chase weighed in on the "business taking care" side of the ledger with an op-ed in the New York Times titled "Higher Wage Wisdom." In his piece, Mr. Dimon asserts, "A pay increase is the right thing to do. Wages for too many Americans have gone nowhere for far too long."
He goes on to state, that his company:
Will raise the "minimum pay for 18,000 workers to$12.00 to 16.50 an hour depending, depending on geographic and market factors " (the current minimum is $10.50 per hour) over the next three years
Invest more than 200 million in 2016 in training entry level employees and 325 million in "career-oriented education aligned to growing sectors"
Dimon and Schultz are not alone in increasing the minimum wage at their businesses. Over the past two years other businesses such as Walmart, Ikea, Aetna and the Gap have raised their minimums as well. In addition, various surveys of small business owners show that on average at least 50 percent of the respondents favor an increase in the minimum wage.
Over a century ago in January of 1914, Henry Ford raised the pay of his employees to the unheard of wage of $5 per day. That was more than double the daily pay of the average factory worker at that time.
Ford took that action not out of the goodness of his heart but because it made business sense. It increased productivity in the plant and gave his employees more dollars for consumption. Ford saw the logic of his business taking care as a means for taking care of his business.
Admittedly, in a global economy with huge wage differentials, intensified competition, increased automation and technological innovation and numerous other complicating factors, taking care of business and business taking care is not as simple and straightforward in 2016 as it was in 1914. Still, there is emerging evidence that an increasing number of today's business executives are seeing that logic as well.
That is a good thing for the future of the American economy because the future of that economy is the future of the American worker and workforce. The business leaders who recognize this and who are stepping forward to take care of their employees are taking care of America's business.
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Turkey knows this enterprise very well. It recognises these scenes. The country remembers well the consequences and pains of each past coup; in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. The wounds are still fresh in people's minds.
One thing they all know is that no one, except for a small group of putchistas and their collaborators, emerged victorious from those coups. Even those segments of society that had supported military take-overs of power prior to them ended up bearing the brunt of each one. They caused pain, squandered lives and blackened the future.
That was why when a faction of the military, believed to be affiliated with the Gulen movement, led by the US-based scholar Fethullah Gulen, which is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, attempted to stage a coup against a democratically-elected government, all parties in the parliament and people from all walks of life and persuasions came forward to reject it.
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From a dark night, a bright morning
It was a dark night but it brought a bright new morning for democracy in Turkey.
It was dark because even in today's highly-connected and transparent world, a small group of putchistas driven by a narrow agenda were able to plant bombs in the national parliament, briefly take over TV channels and news agencies and kill civilians as well as officials.The bombing of the national parliament and presidential palace has no precedence in Turkish history.
Though we use the word coup to describe what took place yesterday, this is for the sake of convenience. It was, in fact, more than a coup. Most of what happened yesterday has no parallel in Turkey's previous ignominous coup d'etats.
It was more like a terrorist campaign conducted by a small group of people aiming to maximise the levels of horror by hitting their targets indiscriminately. So many people have lost beloved ones as a result.
But this night has led Turkey into a bright day. The people of Turkey proved courageous. They came out on to the streets and demanded that political disputes be settled through political means and democratic procedures. The vast majority of people of all political persuasions rejected this violent campaign, and all of the political parties represented in parliament opposed it.
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President Erdogan has called upon people to remain defiant and steadfast in the face of these 'invaders'. People positively responded. As a result, the coup attempt hasn't survived even for a day.
Rejecting the coup has now become Turkey's new common denominator. Given the political polarisation of recent years, yesterday became a rare symbol of national unity for Turkey.
The threat of the Gulen Movement
In addition, yesterday's failed coup has revealed the danger posed by the Gulenists. Now the world knows what Turkey means when it describes this group as a state within a state that poses a threat to Turkey's democracy, its politics and its people.
Those involved didn't only defy the demands and aspirations of the people, but the decisions of their superiors. The vast majority of the military was not with them.
One of the factors that probably motivated those involved to undertake this act now is the upcoming Supreme Military Council (YAS) meeting on August 1, 2016, which was expected to lead to a major reshuffling in the military's higher echelons. A long-awaited purge of the Gulenists was anticipated.
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In addition to this, there were reports that the judiciary would launch an investigation into the military wing of the Gulenists. This may have unnerved them, leading them to make hasty decisions about the timing and nature of this ill-prepared and ill-conceived coup attempt.It now seems highly likely that the government will engage in a full purge of their network. In fact, a wide segment of society and the political class is demanding it.
An opportunity for national reconciliation
Now Turkey has an opportunity to use this plot as a means for national reconciliation. There has been a societal and political consensus in rejecting the attempted coup and the government should take comfort from this. While remaining committed to deconstructing the Gulenist network, it should also take steps to initiate a nationwide process of reconciliation. What started as a menace can turn into an opportunity.
This act will also consolidate the rank and file of the AK Party's base as all of the current and previous elites of the party have shelved their differences and adopted a united stance against it. The AK Party is likely to emerge stronger and more unified.
More than two and half years ago, I argued in one of my pieces for Al Jazeera that "democracy cannot flourish in Turkey if the Gulen Movement's parallel structure is not dismantled". Yesterday's events have confirmed this.
Now that the people have defeated this coup attempt, the politicians should remain vigilant and hold these perpetrators and their wider networks to account. Anyone supporting democracy in Turkey should support them as they ensure that such coups have no place in the country's future.
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Caption: Yelling man (image credit)
Written by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, Intentional Insights Co-Founder and President
This article first appeared on the blog of Intentional Insights, a nonprofit organization that empowers people to refine and reach their goals by providing research-based content to help improve thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns.
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The June 12 mass killings in Orlando was the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. A shooter's rampage through a packed gay nightclub left dozens of people dead and many more wounded. The gunman swore allegiance to ISIS, and shortly after the shootings, ISIS claimed responsibility for the terror.
How can we achieve our goals of making us safer from such mass acts of terror and get revenge on ISIS by preventing it from getting what it wants?
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Donald Trump repeated his call for banning all Muslims from entering the country, although this would not have done anything to address the shooter, who was a US-born American citizen. Trump also called for Barack Obama to resign the presidency because Obama refused to blame "radical Islam" for the terror.
By contrast, Obama stated ""In the face of hate and violence, we will love one another," adding "We will not give in to fear or turn against each other. Instead, we will stand united as Americans to protect our people and defend our nation, and to take action against those who threaten us." Hillary Clinton reacted in a similar fashion.
These two perspectives represent radically different responses to addressing this situation. Which of these is preferable for ISIS and which is most likely to make us safer from terrorism?
We know that ISIS wants to achieve the radicalization of American Muslims. Radicalizing Muslims in the US and other nations has become a central aspect of the Islamic State's terroristic operations abroad over the last years: encouraging people to pledge allegiance to ISIS and then kill in its name.
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Of course, killing is only the extreme edge of radicalization. Somewhat less radicalized people will simply support ISIS - sending it money, hiding potential terrorists, or simply looking the other way when they notice suspicious activities. The more radicalized Muslims there are, the better the situation for ISIS, and the more dangerous for us.
Whose statements and policies would make Muslims grow more radicalized, those of Obama or Trump?
The answer is easy. Trump's suggestion that the President should resign, and that Hillary should drop out of the race, for failing to use the term "radical Islam" are perfect fodder for the kind of propaganda that ISIS uses to create more terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the US is another great tool in the ISIS campaign to radicalize the millions of Muslims in the US. If enacted, such a policy would be much more likely to create more radical Muslims in the US than it prevents from entering the US.
By contrast, Obama's statement appeals to mutual love and unity. By speaking of all Americans loving each other, he makes Muslims feel included. Doing so decreases the sense of marginalization, alienation, and isolation, which are the key forces leading to radicalization.
Now, does this mean we should do nothing? No! Instead, we should not act immediately! We need to go against our intuitive emotional self's desire for immediate action, we need to step back and assess the situation intentionally.
Recent research shows that after any emotionally powerful event, our brains tend to assign too much weight to that event compared to what is really important to us, a thinking error called attentional bias. To fight this thinking error, we should consider what are our actual long-term goals and how to get to them in the best possible manner.
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To make ourselves more safe, and take revenge for the shooting spree, we should prevent ISIS from getting what it wants - increased radicalization of American Muslims. To target the already-radicalized Muslims, we should take quiet and covert actions that would avoid radicalizing others. This means doubling down on the efforts of law enforcement agencies while also reaching out to the Muslim leaders in our communities to work together against the radicals.
At the same time, we need to employ probabilistic thinking to recognize that sometimes terrorist acts will happen. It's important to accept that our security will never be perfect. The only question that we can honestly ask is whether one set of policies will increase our security over another set of policies.
Radicalizing Muslims is a sure-fire way to have less security and give a wonderful gift to ISIS. Instead, let's take the best form of revenge on ISIS by ensuring we prevent it from getting what it wants and make ourselves safer!
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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky runs a nonprofit that helps you reach your goals using science to build an altruistic and flourishing world, Intentional Insights, authored Find Your Purpose Using Science among other books, and regular contributes to prominent venues; and is a tenure-track professor at Ohio State. Consider signing up to the Intentional Insights newsletter; volunteering; donating; buying merchandise; and/or support him personally on Patreon. Get in touch with him at gleb@intentionalinsights.org.
Woman uses digital tablet on board speeding train
"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." Martin Buber
I started my book No! Maybe? Yes! with the following paragraph..
I'm looking out my window, and snowflakes are falling. They slowly drift out of the sky and give me an impression they have no direction, destination, or urgency to get anywhere.
I was sitting quietly at my computer; for that moment, not moving, not thinking, although my mind was perhaps drifting in a way quite similar to the snowflakes that grabbed my attention -- no direction, destination, or urgency to get anywhere.
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In a few weeks, I will be celebrating my birthday. This one, for many reasons seems to be having some extra baggage with it. I will soon have completed my sixty-ninth trip around the sun. I am not certain of all the reasons that I am feeling heaviness about this. After all, I have lived so many of my dreams, and am living as my true self with joy and gratitude each day. Perhaps the various external transformations belie the fact that so many of my internal parts are starting to see the wear of time. Over the past few years I have found my strength reduced as I hike and bike. Sometimes I think it the impact of estrogen running through me. Of course my endo tells me that my estrogen count exceeds that of most women my age. I do hear him, but this is the point where I practice some cognitive dissonance. I mentioned that I seem to be losing strength to my primary care doc at my last physical, and he matter-of-factly replied -- "You're getting old!" I must admit that this triggered the heck out of me.
I remember something a younger cousin said almost 50 years ago as he was turning fourteen. "I am too old to do the things I used to do and too young to do the things I want to do," he complained. Now I am beginning to lament that I may be too old to do the things I used to do -- at least at the same level, but too young to just do sit around and do nothing. I no longer have any responsibilities and have a great deal of time on my hands. I wonder what shall I do? I wonder...
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I have always had a difficult relationship with traveling and exploring. I would read and watch adventures whether real or fantasy and let my mind wander through these worlds without limitation. However, I barely would take a step out on my own to explore our real world. Perhaps it was my parts that told me to keep in hiding -- don't let anyone ever know the truth inside of you; perhaps it was all the responsibility I had to provide for my family. For me "getting out" into the world was internally limited and constrained.
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It is interesting that each of my three children never felt that way, and was always ready and willing to go out and explore the world. As parents, my ex and I were fortunate to be able to allow and encourage the kids as teens go out on various trips with their peers during the summers. This included multi-week camping and rafting trips in the Sierra's and even when our youngest was only 13, sent him and a bicycle on a plane to Seattle where he met a group that biked from there to San Francisco. When they were in college, they took semesters abroad in Australia, Strasbourg and Costa Rica. I used to "joke" that sometimes I wished that I were my own father, in that I wanted someone to be able to send me on a trip, where all I had to do is just go.
...and now, it is going to happen....
I was sitting at the town pool, this past Monday when my phone rang.
"Can I speak to Grace Stevens," the pleasant voice asked. When I responded, she went on, "You have been selected....... (Instantaneously my brain thought this was some timesharing offer).... as one of this year's Amtrak Residency writers. Congratulations."
I was stunned! I forgot that I applied for this almost nine months earlier. It totally came out of the blue. What an honor to be chosen. Another example that nothing is impossible!
I am going on a trip I could only imagine. Across the USA on a train. I will have a sleeping compartment, and dining room, and observation room. I am still stunned. All they ask is that I blog about it while on board. I am pretty sure I can do that.
I never really have admitted that I have wanderlust. Perhaps I have learned it from my kids, or it could have been buried deep inside for reasons I have not yet accessed.
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When I get to be on these trains I will wander the country and see the wonders though the windows. Although I may be sitting in a chair, I will be on a train and I will be moving as the landscape stands still. I am pretty sure this is different than just watching the snow drift by through my window at home. The train will have a direction, and a destination. However I am certain that once I am on board I will be enjoying the sense of freedom of wandering and looking forward to whatever wonders I may see and take part in.
This will be my trip of wanderlust and wonderlust. I hope that I will be like those snowflakes I used to watch and have no urgency to get anywhere.
"You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it." Freya Stark
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The old saying goes that you have to fight fire with fire.
Using that logic, health officials have increased the availability of an opioid to combat the rising tide of opiate addiction.
On any given day, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 650,000 opioid prescriptions are dispensed.
Of these, 3,900 people begin using the drugs for nonmedical reasons, and 78 people die from an opioid-related overdose. That's every day.
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In western Pennsylvania, for instance, deaths caused by opioids, including heroin and prescription drugs, increased by more than a third last year, according to a new report from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
In an effort to address the opioid epidemic, the White House has requested $1.1 billion to help people get treatment near where they live.
This includes expanding the number of physicians who can prescribe an opioid that's used to treat opioid addiction when administered in large doses.
Expanding access to buprenorphine
Major studies have found people who use drug-assisted therapy, such as buprenorphine or methadone, have a much higher success rate of finally ridding themselves of their addiction.
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Coupled with group behavioral therapy, that rate increases.
"The studies that have come out have shown this is most effective for opioid addiction," Dr. Doug Nemecek, chief medical officer of Cigna Behavioral Health, told Healthline.
Research has shown that without medical intervention, addicts have a 90 percent relapse rate.
"It's a really terrible addiction," Stephen A. Wyatt, D.O., medical director of addiction medicine and behavioral health at Carolinas HealthCare System in North Carolina, told Healthline.
Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) changed its rules to allow individual physicians to personally oversee the use of buprenorphine for 275 patients at a time.
The doctors must be federally certified to prescribe the drug.
The move reflects a better understanding of addiction and the underpinnings behind it. It's not, as once widely believed, a matter of weak character, but a mental and physical condition that can be all-consuming and, all too often, fatal.
Previously, a doctor was only allowed to prescribe buprenorphine to 100 patients. Before the last rule change in 2006, a physician could prescribe the drug to only 30 patients.
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Buprenorphine is on the market under different names and formulations, the most common is Suboxone, which is administered in a dissolving strip. It's formulated as a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone, a drug used to prevent fatal opioid overdoses.
Buprenorphine is used as a long-term treatment for opioid addiction. Its euphoric effects are milder than opioid medications and heroin, although the same parts of the brain are activated. And naloxone is far less likely to be fatal if injected.
While overdoses are less likely, they do occur, namely when taken with other drugs or alcohol.
And like other drug subcultures, Suboxone has turned into a cash-only drug market, smuggled into prisons, and distributed by doctors with questionable, and sometimes criminal, prescribing practices, according to a New York Times investigation.
Allowing doctors to legally prescribe buprenorphine to more patients has some people hopeful it will cut down on these shady, back alley practices. Still, others say the 275-patient limit isn't enough.
"There's certainly a number of people who believe having a set number restricts practice," Wyatt said.
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This was the case when the new rule was proposed and open to comments. Many addiction specialists noted that while there are restrictions on how many patients a doctor can prescribe buprenorphine, there isn't a restriction on how many prescription opioids they can dole out.
To use the fire analogy again, that's like restricting water supply to firefighters during a wildfire.
A treatment with fewer stigmas
While there are concerns, the increased access to buprenorphine does have its advantages, namely the ability to bring drug treatment inside a doctor's office.
Getting medication from a doctor, instead of visiting a methadone clinic, may help addicts overcome the stigma associated with opioid addiction.
"Because of the stigma of methadone clinics, they thought they were different than heroin addicts living on the streets," Nemecek said, "but as an illness, there's no difference between someone who is addicted to Percocet or oxycodone than individuals addicted to heroin."
Besides stigma, relapses on methadone clinic-based treatments are about as common as nonmedical interventions.
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The issue of opioid addiction gained increased attention, not just as rates skyrocketed, but also as heroin became more common in affluent communities, specifically predominantly white, higher-income suburbs.
"It's now becoming evenly spread across races," Wyatt said.
While buprenorphine alone is far from a cure-all, it is a tool doctors have to combat opioid addiction epidemic in the United States.
Still, access and increasing Medicare and Medicaid spending to fund the programs to ensure addicts are getting sufficient care continue to be an issue, Wyatt said.
"Are we really moving them forward in terms of their addiction?" he said. "We need to show the public this good treatment."
By Brian Krans
As the presidential campaigns focus on making the most out of the upcoming conventions to catapult them into the general election and toward victory in November, the Latino population, often referred to as the sleeping giant, is stirring. Intent on making its voice heard, reacting to divisive and hateful rhetoric, and growing in numbers, Latinos are a powerful, emerging, political force. Of the nation's 58 million Latinos, 28 million are eligible to vote, comprising 12 percent of the country's eligible voting population. Latino turnout in the last several elections has grown steadily. Figures from the Pew Research Center indicate that 13 million Latinos will cast ballots in 2016, a 17 percent increase from the 2012 election. But the numbers may turn out to be even higher. With over 66,000 Latinos turning 18 each month, many advocacy groups and community organizations have begun on-the-ground efforts to register, educate, and mobilize voters. And would-be voters seem more motivated than ever. The number of Latinos registering to vote this year is significantly higher than during the last presidential election year. In California, for example, the number of new registrants has doubled compared with 2012. Similar activity in Latino-heavy states such as Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado may end up deciding November's election. Beyond voting numbers, there is also an equally potent economic story to be told. Latinos' purchasing power has grown 70 percent faster than Americans as a whole since the 1980s, and our community is well known for its entrepreneurship. The economic role Latinos play in the nation is another example of why the presidential campaigns should view Latinos as critical constituents whose issues are vital to the nation. We are an integral part of American society and are important economic contributors with a stake in the direction of the country. Over the course of this election cycle, Latinos have become increasingly active on critical policy issues of concern for all Americans, including economic growth, health, the environment, criminal justice reform, education and other issues central in the national debate. Our community is rapidly emerging as change agents on these issues, in addition to the policy areas where Latinos are best known for making their mark -- in immigration, labor and civil rights. Earlier this year, the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of 40 prominent Latino advocacy organizations, released its 2016 Hispanic Public Policy Agenda and simultaneously called on the presidential candidates to respond to a questionnaire focused on key issues of concern. The responses of the different campaigns are quite telling. While the two Democratic Party candidates took up the challenge and told us where they stand on important issues, the Republican candidates did not. The lack of engagement is disconcerting not only because Latinos have the ability to determine the next president, but also because it signals a jarring disregard for a key constituency that contributes to the economic, social and cultural vitality of this nation. Latinos are looking for leaders who will understand and respond to our needs. We will not tolerate any hateful rhetoric and will strongly oppose any policies that will adversely affect our community. Both the Republican and Democratic conventions provide an important opportunity for developing a dialogue about the most pressing issues facing Latinos in this country. The leaders of the Latino community will be at both conventions, ready to initiate a dialogue, and we hope that both of the parties will take our concerns seriously. It is time for us to move forward toward a brighter future for Latinos and all Americans.
For now, let's focus on what we already know -- deep in our hearts. We know there is something wrong with our country. There is too much violence, too much hate, too much senseless killing, too many people dead who shouldn't be. And we know there is clear evidence that African Americans are much more likely to be killed in police incidents than any other group of Americans.
And we know there is too little trust in too many places between police and the communities they are sworn to protect. With so little common ground, it can feel impossible to have the conversations we need to have, to begin fixing what's broken. We owe our children better than this. We owe ourselves better than this.
The families of the lost are trying to tell us. We need to listen. People are crying out for criminal justice reform. Families are being torn apart by excessive incarceration. Young people are being threatened and humiliated by racial profiling. Children are growing up in homes shattered by prison and poverty.
They're trying to tell us. We need to listen.
Brave police officers are working hard every day to inspire trust and confidence. As we mourn the Dallas police officers who died and pray for those wounded, let's not forget how the Dallas Police Department in particular has earned a reputation for excellence. They've worked hard for years to improve policing and strengthen their bonds with the community. And they've gotten results.
Police officers across the country are pouring their hearts into this work, because they know how vital it is to the peace, tranquility, justice, and equality of America. They're trying to tell us. And we need to listen.
People are crying out for relief from gun violence. We remember Reverend Clementa Pinckney, eight congregants at Mother Emanuel in Charleston -- and thousands more killed every year by guns across our nation. Things have become so broken in Washington that to just try to get a vote on compromise gun safety reforms, John Lewis himself had to stage a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Gun violence is ripping apart people's lives. They're trying to tell us. And we need to listen.
I know that, just by saying all these things together, I may upset some people. I'm talking about criminal justice reform the day after a horrific attack on police officers. I'm talking about courageous, honorable police officers just a few days after officer-involved killings in Louisiana and Minnesota. I'm bringing up guns in a country where merely talking about comprehensive background checks and getting assault weapons off our streets gets you demonized.
But all these things can be true at once. We do need police and criminal justice reforms, to save lives and make sure all Americans are treated equally in rights and dignity. We do need to support police departments and stand up for the men and women who put their lives on the line every day to protect us. And we do need to reduce gun violence. We may disagree about how to do all these things, but surely we can all agree with those basic premises. Surely this week showed us how true they are.
It's not even close to Mother's Day, yet since my last column appeared on "The Thin Line Between Marriage and Divorce" I have received several angst-ridden queries on the thin line between loving and loathing aging moms. Most of the laments are about widows, who daughters are finding increasingly needy and cranky.
I miss my mother every day. She died at the age of 86, in 2006. She was understandably not easy, this Polish-born Holocaust survivor whose immediate family was burned in Hitler's camps. We snarled and had stubborn stand-offs, some for weeks. But we always made up. Because this is what I always knew to be true:
You can't say "I'm sorry" at a funeral.
In fact, I came to believe that it's better to suck it up and say "I'm sorry" to an aging parent, even if you aren't sorry one bit. Because that could be a last conversation.
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As the author of I Am My Mother's Daughter, a compilation of 200 interviews with older daughters reflecting on their older moms, I have learned successful strategies on how to navigate the sometimes stormy relationship between grown daughters and their mothers who are living longer than ever. As moms enter their 80s and 90s, and become more childlike and forgetful, it is more important than ever to embrace these women who clamor for care and attention.
This, of course, unless you grew up with a cold matriarch who was relentlessly abusive and cruel, and still is. There are clearly horrific incidents when a parent's behavior merits a total "divorce". Yet the stories I hear are rarely about real abuse. They refer to old grudges and constant grating and "selfish" behaviors -- the latter word is often used when discussing widowed moms.
The dozens of adult daughters who talked to me for my book, and who write about prolonged rifts with mothers, come from varied backgrounds and experiences. Some are six-figure attorneys and financiers; others are teachers and waitresses and stay-at-home moms. However different are their voices and paths, they nearly all relay how their relationships with their mothers, good and bad, dramatically affects how they work, play, love and mother their own broods.
As a central and essential force, this is one relationship you want to push through and get right, Here are some lessons I learned along the way, from my own irrepressible mother and from the wise daughters who have generously shared their roads from war to peace::
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1. In your interactions with a mom think about how you want your kids to treat you when you have buried a spouse, your friends are dying and your mind is blurring. Your patience is an example to your own children on how to behave with you as you enter your own final lap, a passage that sabotages the body and emotions. This is the sunset of life when doting children and grand-children are all that you have.
2. One of the most wrenching tales I heard was of from 54-year-old daughter who was so mad at her dying mom she refused to rush to her bedside. The day her mom heaved her last breath the daughter rushed to the hospital, heaved her body on her mother's lifeless body and clung to her like a baby. You may not be able to forgive for nasty stuff that has happened. But work on letting go of antique blame and simmering rage and appreciate that aging mother, while you still have her within reach. Festering anger is a wedge that blocks your ability to love this woman who is flawed and imperfect just like you are. Then, when your mother does pass away and moves on to a heavenly place you will not be left behind, writhing in agony and remorse, like the woman above I described.
3 Understand her history and it may melt your heart. Mothers who are icy and unable to freely say I love you" often duplicate how they were mothered themselves, or not mothered. Do you know your mom's history? Don't wait to find out who this woman truly is and how she became that person. Dig deeply while she is healthy and coherent to discover her own residual pain from her youth. Being vulnerable and honest with each other, unearthing hidden parts of yourselves, allows adult daughters to fully know and comprehend their own stories - and re-write those stories as their raise their own families.
4. "I Am My Mother's Daughter" becomes more blindingly true as we age, as we find traits in ourselves that are hauntingly familiar and that the mirrors are everywhere. Yet, this discovery can actually be healing and fortifying. You will find that the mother you loathed at the age of 15 is a mother you can transform into a best friend when you turn 45, 50 and beyond. Learn from your mother now. Love her fully now as you grow gray together -- . although my own octogenarian mother never allowed herself to go gray! You only get one chance to get it right.
Write to Iris with your stories and questions at iriskrasnow.com. You will remain anonymous.
June 2016 was a highly emotional time for LGBT Americans. This year's annual New York City Pride Parade, held on June 26th, drew record numbers of participants and supporters. However, the event was sadly marred by the still-open wound of the Orlando nightclub shooting two weeks prior. It was widely speculated that the massacre in Florida would cause tensions between American Muslims and the LGBT community, two groups that were already used quite frequently as political pawns through the years. In reaction to Orlando and other recent tragic events, a vigil was held in New York City's Times Square on the evening of the Pride parade. The event, which featured speakers from both the Muslim and LGBT communities, was actually more than just a vigil; it was a rally to speak out against further violence, fear-mongering, and post-tragedy political opportunism. One of the speakers was 56-year old Thomas Simmons of Shelbourne Falls in western Massachusetts. A professor of business and economics at Greenfield Community College, the 56-year old, openly gay adoptive father of six children is running for Congress in Massachusetts' First District, on the Libertarian ticket. He will go up against the incumbent Richard Neal, a Democrat. Simmons grew up in Baldwin Harbor, Long Island, which just under 30 miles from New York City. He is quick to point out to me, however, that his ancestors actually came to New York City in 1642. They were Dutch sea captains. Simmons moved to Massachusetts in 1991.
It's easy to forget that there are more than just two political parties in the United States. The Libertarian Party, officially formed in 1971, is the third largest nationally organized political party. The main platforms of the Party are the promotion of civil liberties, non-interventionism, laissez-faire ("hands off") economics, and the abolition of the welfare state. Thomas Simmons is always happy to educate the masses on the benefits of less government in our private lives. He is against government-mandated gun control, an issue that has occasionally put him at odds with some of his fellow liberal-minded peers, both gay and straight. However, he believes that the LGBT community has much more to gain in terms of civil rights with the Libertarian model:
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So often we run to the government as our savior. Pull back a little bit. With DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), who was the adversary to us exercising our right to marry? It was Congress. It was the government. Right now, there's the whole transgender bathroom issue. McSorley's Old Ale House in New York City has figured out how to have people in a bathroom without a problem for decades. Target has figured it out. Individual businesses have figured it out. Who is the problem? It's the State of North Carolina, saying, "You can't do this! You have to do this instead." Look back to when blacks and whites couldn't marry. Who was the problem? The government. We run to the government for the answer, when many times they are the problem. They are always, sadly, behind the times. At the rally, I wore my Stonewall Inn T-shirt. Think back to those incidents that sparked the Stonewall riots in . It was a reaction against the agents of the State who were sent there to harass gay people. The State is almost always the problem because they have power and authority. They can jail, fine, confront, or arrest you. They have been the problem, not the savior.
Articulate and knowledgeable, yet always jovial in personality, Thomas Simmons spoke with me about the Libertarian Party and his political vision for both Massachusetts and the entire nation:
Hello, Thomas! Thank you for speaking with me. So, for starts: What was the goal behind the recent rally in Times Square?
The goal behind the event was to bring a groups of people from different perspectives within the Libertarian party, to talk mostly about civil rights from our perspective. We billed it as a vigil for dealing with people as individuals and not as members of groups. What we've seen, especially in the wake of the Orlando shootings, is that politicians were really quick as to who the "bad guys" are: "Muslims are the bad guys". "Gay people are the bad guys." "Legal firearm owners are the bad guys." It was very quick. In this country, every time there's a crisis, there's a call for immediate, instant action... and every time that happens, there's an erosion of civil rights. The examples we brought up were: World War II, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Crisis! So lets take Japanese-Americans out of their houses, out of their jobs, and put them in--let's call them what they were-- concentration camps.
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Yes. There was a recent musical on Broadway about that, "Allegiance".
Yes! Another example: September 11th happens, and the immediate reaction is The Patriot Act. Now the government wants your library records, and they want limitless search and seizure, and they want a Secret FISA Court to get a warrant. In 2016, after the Orlando shootings, it's like, "We gotta do something! We gotta do it now!" Whenever we act out of fear and crisis, we tend to do it in the name of national security, and we tend to be willing to give up civil rights. The groups that were present at the Rally included Muslims for Liberty-- a group of Muslims mostly in the New York area, who actually believe in freedom and constitutional rights. They are not terrorists, and they don't want their name on a "No Fly List" simply because it sounds Arabic. Another group was Outright Libertarians, who I represented, which is the gay/lesbian/transgender caucus within the Party. Pink Pistols did not show up because there was a scheduling conflict. So, it was a number of groups who all believe in holding up the Constitution and not giving in to crisis mentality, hate, or the "Who are the bad guys?" kind of thinking.
Congratulations on that event! Now, it's safe to say that a lot of Americans see only two political parties in this country. They only see Democrats and Republicans. What would be the most important thing that you'd want the masses to know about the Libertarian party?
We start from the perspective that the majority of Americans-- or at least the plurality if not the majority-- actually see themselves as Independents: Not as Democrats and not as Republicans, even though they may naturally gravitate towards those parties. They are registered as, or consider themselves to be, Independents. They have really rejected the Establishment politics of both, and the nonsense that both parties play. A great example of that nonsense is the recent four votes on gun control in the House. The difference in those four proposals was minute. It was a hair. Yet, the Democrats only voted for their proposals, and the Republicans only voted for theirs-- because to them, voting for their proposals was more important overall than actually doing anything. So, if you start from the perspective that the majority of Americans are really Independent and are sick of both parties-- as evidenced by both the Sanders phenomenon and the Trump phenomenon-- then the Libertarians actually represent what most Americans are. That means: Get the government out of my life. If I'm not hurting anybody, let me live my life. We represent Americans who are fiscally responsible and socially tolerant. It's just hard for us, as Libertarians, to get on the national stage. We've done better this year than any year previously, because Gary Johnson and Bill Weld leading the ticket are credible candidates. This year, there is a credible third choice. I think that we are very used to "Democrat versus Republican", but Americans are very willing to go "Third Party". Ross Perot got 18 percent of the vote. John Anderson did much better against Reagan and Carter than anyone thought. We simply need to get on the main stage... but there's such a fixation that it's only Democrat and Republican that it's hard to do that. In my case, I am running for Congress and there's no Republican in the race. It's still a two Party race. It's me against the incumbent Democrat.
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I understand! So, for people who have never been in your district in Massachusetts, what is unique and/or distinctive about where live and where you hope to represent?
Western Massachusetts is very different from the rest of the State. With the exception of the city Springfield-- which is kind of an anchor in the Southwest corner of my district-- my district is very rural. It is very liberal. These are "farmers with PhD's", as I like to describe them! They are organic farmers. They are people who believe in local economies, local networking, small business... They are this interesting dichotomy of both sportsmen and hunters, and Bernie Sanders supporters. Our district voted for Bernie Sanders three to one in the Democratic primary. So, it's highly educated. We call it the "Pioneer Valley" along the Connecticut Valley-- that's where U Mass Amherst is. We also have four community colleges, and the Five Sisters consortium of colleges-- all private. The people in my district are very highly educated, very open, and very tolerant. We have a town meeting form of government, and everyone participates. It's very realistic. People are very bent on having conversation and on coming to a consensus to govern. It's just very different from living in a big city like Boston or Bedford.
On a larger level, what characteristics are in your district which also would apply to the proverbial "Anytown, USA"?
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What applies to "Anytown, USA" would be the emphasis on small business. In this economy, small businesses have been creamed. A lot of Congressional legislation is all geared towards helping large corporations. Bailouts, for example, were geared towards keeping large corporations afloat. The Import/Export Bank was geared towards helping military contractors in Washington stay afloat. The "small guy" is actually getting wiped out. the Berkshires, which are in my district, is a big vacation spot. You can see motel after motel after motel boarded up. Restaurants come and go. They turn over after three or four months because they can't make it. Being a small business person in this climate is really tough. I think that is the case in "Smalltown, America" all across the country. There's the whole idea that if you're big and wealthy and have connections in Washington, you can get bigger and wealthier and have more connections and more government support. But if you're the little guy, that doesn't happen.
Living in New York City, I have seen much of that through the years in many neighborhoods. It can be depressing and discouraging to see so many small businesses close down. So, as a political candidate, what issue or issues do you feel most strongly about?
There are a couple of issues which really prompted my run against the incumbent. The first is Common Core. It might not be a glitzy issue, but for teachers-- and I have been a teacher for 18 years-- it's a big issue, especially in Massachusetts. The students and the teachers themselves have their hands tied. It interferes with teaching students to think critically, to explore things, and to pull information from different disciplines together to come up with new ideas. Instead, what they are told is, "Here is the curriculum package we bought from this big curriculum company. Here are the A, B, C, and D multiple choice tests. This is how you answer the test." That's what they spend their time doing. As long as they get the right percentage of students to do well on the tests, then the federal government releases funding to the schools. So, everything is incentivized to get good grades on a test, and not to teach students how to think critically. They come to the college level after high school, and the ability to think critically and to integrate different disciplines is a lost art. When we are dealing with complicated economic questions and having a discussion, a student will ask, "So what's the answer?" In other words, "Don't make me think through it and say, 'Well, it's complicated.' Is the answer A, B, C, or D?" That's what they are being trained to do. I watched this happen for 18 years. That's coming out of the Federal Department of Education--which is, quite frankly, in league with curriculum textbook-publishing companies. There are only four or five of them. The gentleman I am running against has been one of the biggest promoters of this. This actually launched my campaign.
There are other issues as well. We are a very pro-choice district. The man I am running against has voted to restrict women's medical choices on a number of occasions. I am 100 percent pro-choice. I don't believe the government should stand between person and their doctor. That could be on the question of abortion, or the prescription of medical marijuana to veterans. It crosses a whole bunch of different issues when you get the government involved; I want them out of medical decisions. Here's my real radical stance: I am running as openly gay and openly HIV-positive, which puts me in a fairly unique and very narrow category of people running for Congress this year. Just like the federal government ties transportation funding to having a 21-year drinking age, I actually would tie health care and Medicare funding to eliminating HIV transmission as a crime. There are just too many places in America where that could send you to jail for 10 to 20 years. State legislatures are free to tackle the issue because it's just not "politically safe" to do so. So, I would definitely be on the side of that issue, as well as ending employment discrimination for other gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Those are the three issues I am going to be hitting home in the campaign.
On a national level, what do you believe is our most important issue?
I'm going to make it a double issue: The national debt, and the erosion of civil liberties. Those are the two things that I've been concerned about as an economics teacher for the last 18 years. The national debt is now 20 trillion dollars. So what? So we owe 20 trillion bucks. How does that affect me? Obviously, in your personal life, it may not. So what if the government owes it? But when the government spends more than it takes in, it really borrows the money. It just doesn't print more on a printing press. It borrows the money from large institutions that have enormous sums of cash. We borrow from Goldman Sachs, from Chase Manhattan, from Citibank, from the House of Saud, from the Chinese government -- and then we pay it back with interest. That interest comes from the United States taxpayer through their federal income tax. We now spend five times more in interest payments alone than we do on infrastructure-- roads, bridges, et cetera. That's a lot of money coming from Joe and Jane Taxpayer. And the money gets paid to these enormous financial institutions. It's an institutional situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Bringing revenues and expenses in line-- both the tax system and spending--must be a top priority. Most people in Congress say that, yet they don't want to do it. They'd rather come home to their district and say, "I brought you this and I brought you that!" Never mind the fact that we had to borrow to pay for it. It gets them re-elected in two years. I've already told my district that I'm not going to come back and say that I'm bringing you all sorts of goodies if there's not a way to pay for them.
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The second issue is the erosion of civil liberties. I've always been a big supporter of the ACLU. I get emotional talking about constitutional rights and civil liberties. I fear the State. It doesn't matter whether it's the Russian pogroms of Jews, the "internment" of Japanese-Americans, the jailing of draft resisters, the attack on the Waco compound... The Bill of Rights to me is very special. It says, "Government, stop! You can't get involved in my life." When you start saying, "Yes, they can read my e-mails, and they can tap my phone, and they can put me on a 'No Fly' list and not even tell me that they're doing it." then we have reached an Orwellian, authoritarian State. We have, in essence, pretty much become-- and I hate to be so bold about this, but I will-- the Soviet Union that I learned about as a kid in elementary school, and that's scary. I don't believe in government surveillance.
A very hot issue right now is the concern for our country's safety with the influx of refugees from the Middle East coming into the United States. We had spoken about that a while back. You told me that some of our fears may be hyperbolized, because most of the refugees will likely assimilate into our culture over time. However, some people dispute that-- and they use recent tragic events in France and other European countries as an example. What would you say to them?
It's a different scenario in Europe. What makes France, for example, unique is that they are French. They have their French language and their French culture. What makes Germany unique is their "Germanity". What makes the Danes unique is that they speak Danish and have Danish culture. America does not have that, to that extent. We are this enormous "salad bowl" of so many cultures. People still harken back to their ethnic backgrounds. You can still see ethnic Germans doing schuhplattler dances. You can see Hispanic-Americans celebrating Quinceanera. People bring with them the best of their culture. But all you have to do is walk down the street here in New York City, and you'll see an Arab, a Jew, a German, an Albanian, a Latino, and a Brazilian all working at the same construction site together. People remember who they are and they bring with them the good-- but they tend to begin much better here in the States rather than in Europe, which is so identified by their own language and their one culture. This has been the history of America.
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How true! Well, thank you for speaking with me. Where can people learn more about the Libertarian Party?
They can go to www.LP.org, which is the national Party's website. Again, I will say that like any political party, there is a national platform and there are individual candidates. That website gives a very general, "Here's our philosophy" approach. My candidacy in general is www.Simmons4Congress.com.
When he introduced Christian conservative Mike Pence as his running-mate on Saturday, Donald Trump made a point of acknowledging that "party unity" was a reason for his choice. Pence, who'd endorsed Trump's main rival, "Lyin' Ted Cruz," is beloved by the Republican Party's loyal base of religious and free-market fundamentalists - which includes many Republican voters and activists still wary of Trump.
Trump's choice may make the GOP convention less contentious. And it's a smart electoral strategy to galvanize the activist base of the party; Trump wants these people to not only vote for him in November, but to actively work for the Trump-Pence ticket over the next several months.
Now let's turn to Hillary Clinton's VP strategy.
According to press accounts, Clinton is leaning toward the opposite strategy - ignoring her party's progressive base. If she does so, she may open the door to a Trump presidency.
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Bernie Sanders received 13 million votes (far more than Cruz received on the other side). Millions of those progressive voters - which include thousands of talented and Internet-savvy activists - are wary of Clinton and prepared to stay home or cast a Green Party vote, even in the dozen swing states that will determine who inhabits the White House in January.
The best way for Hillary Clinton to give momentum to "Bernie or Bust" activists would be to choose from her reportedly short list of corporate Democratic politicians.
On the other hand, one way Clinton could build an energized center-left alliance able to overwhelm Trump in November would be to choose a running-mate from the Democrat's progressive wing - someone like Elizabeth Warren or Keith Ellison or perhaps Sherrod Brown. Such a choice would also assure a less unruly Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
Unfortunately, it looks like Clinton - a Democratic centrist with close ties to corporate America - is ready to disregard the party's activist base.
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You don't need to survey Bernie supporters to know that they will be appalled by two corporate-centrists on the Democratic ticket. Or that Bernie delegates will publicly denounce or protest such a choice at the upcoming convention.
But in case you do need a survey, here are the results of a brand new one. The independent Bernie Delegates Network (launched by RootsAction.org in partnership with Progressive Democrats of America) received responses in recent days from more than 270 Sanders delegates who took the time to complete a lengthy survey about Clinton's selection of a running-mate.
Asked how important Clinton's VP choice would be to these delegates, 71 percent said "very important" or "important." An additional 14 percent responded "somewhat important."
Delegates were then asked to respond with "Acceptable" or "Not Acceptable" or "Unsure" about several individuals mentioned in recent news reports as possible Clinton running-mates. (The survey offered brief summaries of some of their positions on issues important to progressives, such as TPP, Keystone XL and Wall Street.)
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Only 2.9 percent of responding Bernie delegates considered Kaine "Acceptable" -- while 88.5 percent responded "Not Acceptable."
Only 7.8 percent of respondents deemed Castro "Acceptable," while 80.1 percent responded "Not Acceptable."
Only 2.1 percent deemed Warner "Acceptable," while 91.8 percent said "Not Acceptable."
SEN. CORY BOOKER: A longtime corporate ally, the New Jersey senator received more funding from financial firms than any other US senator. He famously denounced the Obama campaign in 2012 - while he was an Obama surrogate - for its "nauseating" criticism of private equity firms and Mitt Romney's work at Bain Capital. Booker has supported school privatization and vouchers.
Only 11.1 percent considered Booker "Acceptable," while 73.1 percent responded "Not Acceptable."
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Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the survey was the question asking delegates if they would speak out or protest at the convention if Clinton chose one of the named centrists "or someone politically similar" as her VP pick. The vast majority of surveyed delegates said that they would "seriously consider participating" in one or both of these actions:
--- "Denouncing the VP pick as a clear indication that Hillary Clinton does not intend to seek common ground with the progressive ideals and positions of the Bernie Sanders campaign."
--- "Nonviolently and emphatically protesting in the convention hall during Clinton's acceptance speech."
Since I've always taken the menace of a Trump presidency seriously (his movement and ideology have fascist tendencies, in my view) and since I believe it's silly to say that Hillary Clinton is as dangerous as Trump, I've never been part of the "Bernie or Bust" forces.
But I'm not blind to those forces, as Team Clinton seems to be.
Nor am I blind to history, especially the 2000 election.
Sixteen years later, you can still hear Democratic leaders blaming their failure to keep the White House in 2000 on "defections" to Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign. These Democrats want us to forget that in the face of serious, publicly-expressed progressive dissatisfaction with Al Gore's candidacy, Gore told left-leaning voters to take a hike by choosing Joe Lieberman as his running-mate, one of the few inside-the-Beltway Democrats even more corporate and hawkish than himself.
(You remember Lieberman? He exited the party several years later over his Iraq War fanaticism and campaigned for McCain in 2008 against Obama.)
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Today, progressive dissatisfaction with Hillary Clinton is even stronger, more organized and better-networked than was dissatisfaction with Gore in 2000.
I sure hope Clinton does not ignore this reality - or this history.
If she loses a close election after choosing a corporate-centrist running-mate seen by progressive voters as a slap in the face, she'll be the one to blame for a Trump White House.
No issue is too big to be above the news cycle. In a world where we are overloaded with information, anyone fighting for a particular cause must seize those moments where they become top-of-mind for mainstream media.
The timing of the ColorComm conference this year (an essential organization for women of color in all areas of communications) could not be better, as the possibility of a woman holding the highest office in the country has put the issue of equal opportunities in careers firmly on the main stage.
However, the fact the United States has the option to elect a woman as President is clearly not enough to propel all of us forward by itself. Breaking through the Presidency of the U.S. may be one of the highest glass ceilings, but it's not the only barrier that women and minorities must face. Politics is an industry just like any other, and sector specific insight into how gender still affects career chances is still needed.
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This will be the focus of the panel I will lead at the ColorComm Conference later this week - #C2Miami, but in the spirit of seizing the moment, some of the most important arguments are laid out here.
Public Relations, and the communications industry in general, is highly inclusive for women at entry level but leadership roles still frequently go to men, and representation is even more skewed when it comes to women of color.
We still hear that the reasons for this are 'complex' and 'multiple' - which, taken together, they are. However, many challenges that women face are as obvious as they are overlooked. We are judged too much by how we look relative to the work we do; if we are as assertive as men we are 'bossy'; and too many professional compromises need to be made for family planning fall to us.
There are many practical steps women can take to overcome this on an individual level, but I have always felt we have responsibility to leave any team, company and industry in a better place than when we entered it. So in the communications industry, as well as PR, we must continuously make a wide-reaching case for why diversity is a business imperative, and not just political correctness.
Across multiple sectors, companies with the highest representation of women in senior management teams have higher return on equities and returns to shareholders. But in marketing services and communications, we have even more of an obligation to hear from a greater range of voices.
This is because creativity requires a more diverse section of people to keep producing new ideas. Diversity is therefore essential to the business of PR and the underrepresentation of women and women-of-color in leadership roles means we are drawing from a smaller pool of talent and ways of problem-solving. Good ideas can come from anywhere, male or female black or white.
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However, this is not happening fast enough, especially in creative roles themselves which are especially important in our increasingly integrated communications agencies. In 2008, only 3.6% of the world's creative directors were female. Now it has only grown to 11%.
The lack of diversity in our workplace is unreflective of the increasingly diverse marketplace we exist to serve, and is having a profound impact on the work we make. According to research by CreativeEquals, 91% of female consumers feel advertisers 'don't understand them' and seven in 10 women go further to say they feel "alienated" by advertising.
Overcoming the culturally ingrained biases that hinder diversity will take a concerted effort from every walk of life, but we cannot wait for legal and corporate policies to catch up to us. So what can we do?
Firstly, we can take advantage of the changes in technology the communications industry. Today, everyone can be a maker and build their own brand through social media, their own website, YouTube channel, or podcast. This allows more ideas to be heard and shared that otherwise may not have been.
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But it is not just about who is behind the work we make, but also about how we represent people in the work we make. This is somewhere the PR industry is making progress. Work that promotes female empowerment is well rewarded - inside the corridors of creative agencies and outside on main street.
If this creative expression of diversity continues, it could turn PR and Advertising from a partial source of the problem, having shown such a narrow array of female stereotypes for so long, into part of the solution to racial and gender equality.
Quite simply, moving towards an industry that more accurately mirrors the world we are supposed to be communicating with, will help create a more equal and effective industry. If we do so we will all benefit and can make sure there is no limit to people's potential.
The face of the Mad Men (and women) in 2016 should look very different.
The weekend began with a harmless piece of news: Out of respect for the victims of the tragedy in Nice, France, Donald Trump was to postpone the announcement of his running mate.
But then, the circus began. Trump, the next morning, announced that he was choosing Indiana Governor Mike Pence, just around the time he would have been holding the event if it had not been for the fact the he postponed it. It was the first act of maturity we've seen from Trump this entire campaign - - selecting an establishment Republican likely to draw in some of his skeptics -- but in the process we learned that Trump did it in the most immature way possible. Reports indicated that Trump had spent the night on the phone with his aides looking for a way to back out of the decision to tap Pence, a revelation that is a few logical steps from concluding that Trump used a terrorist attack to buy himself time.
Then on Friday night, as if the heavens were sending a signal, we were left with a contrast: If Trump cannot make a swift decision to stand alongside a quiet, boring governor from Indiana, what would President Trump's phone call with President Erdogan be like on the night of a spontaneous Turkish coup? Yikes.
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And then, our cardinal rule: If ever the world is in need of sobriety and seriousness, we can count on Trump to knock us out of it. As if bourgeoning masculinity was not already central to Trump's appeal, the world was stunned when his new campaign logo resembled -- you guessed it! -- sex. Of course, the only remaining question was whether or not Trump intended to project this message, or if it was just another example of the sloppiness that categorizes just about everything he does.
We then learned it was the latter, after the man who lacks the shame to hold back a penis joke at a national debate, or to do something about his silly hair, nonetheless succumbed to Twitter pressure and removed the infamous logo. Evidently, promiscuity -- rather than race-baiting, lying, or misogyny -- is his limit. Who knew? Maybe, more likely, he just realized it was an ugly logo.
Finally, in a moment that was sure to find its way into this piece, Trump and his new side-kick conducted their first joint interview, on 60 Minutes. You would suspect that Trump's overtly political pick would at least pay some dividends, but immediately it began to backfire because, well, the two don't really agree on anything. So when pushed on Pence's vote to authorize the Iraq war -- the same vote Trump has spent months attacking Hillary Clinton for -- Trump responded, "He's entitled to make a mistake every once in a while." But Clinton? "No. She's not."
One is left wondering, of course, what in the world the distinction could be. Could it be that Trump holds Clinton to a higher standard because of her intelligence, strength, or experience? Probably not, because he mocks it all consistently. More likely, Trump -- like many in this country -- arbitrarily place a very tight leash around Clinton's neck. Or maybe it's not arbitrary; maybe deep down Trump believes that if a woman is going to make a serious decision, it better be clean and it better be right. After all, what else could his twisted logic indicate?
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Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks before introducing Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential runningmate in New York City, U.S., July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Tonight's theme for the opening night of the Republican National Convention is "Make America Safe Again."
If they were serious about that, the next part of that theme would be, "Do Not Let Donald Trump Near the Nuclear Codes or the Military."
Paul Manafort, the campaign's chief, said something telling and extremely disturbing at the end of last week. Of Trump's decision to postpone the campaign's announcement of Mike Pence as the Vice Presidential selection for a day, Manafort said Trump "reacted emotionally" to the attack in Nice.
Manafort then caught himself and quickly added that Trump didn't feel it was appropriate to engage in politics in the aftermath of Nice, even though that's exactly what Trump did, in appearing on FOX News multiple times the evening of the Nice attack.
As a former commander in the Iraq War, and a Captain and then a Major during that war, we cannot tell you the shiver it sent up our spine to hear a potential Commander in Chief "reacted emotionally" in making decisions after a terror attack on one of our allies.
This isn't to say that a Commander in Chief cannot have emotions. Everyone is human, even our presidents. But when we talk about the temperament to be Commander in Chief, like in this ad, we're talking about having a President who makes their decisions based on clear-eyed thinking, facts, and a good sense of secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary effects of that decision.
Donald Trump does not have that temperament. Paul Manafort confirmed it.
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Even the man who actually wrote The Art of the Deal confirmed it. In a piece released today, Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote the book, said, "I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."
It is telling that those speaking tonight -- despite their military service -- back an irresponsible path forward in the Middle East, and even on how we take care of those who fought there.
It includes Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose most recent book hyperbolically declares that ISIS could conquer the US, put us under Sharia Law, and drink our blood. Flynn also has had a fairly uncomfortable warmness to the leadership style of Vladimir Putin and Russia, much like the candidate Flynn backs.
It also includes Congressman Ryan Zinke, who has taken a lead role in Congress to block refugees from Syria, and has asked his home-state governor in Montana to turn them away.
Demonizing Syrian refugees, and turning them away, is possibly the ultimate feelings-based decision. Despite Donald Trump's declaration to the contrary, we do have a vetting process for refugees. More importantly, turning away refugees only feeds the propaganda of ISIS -- that we do not care about Muslims, that we do not like Muslims, and that we would rather see Muslims sent back somewhere to die, than help them. Refusing refugees is exactly the fear-based type of decision ISIS is banking on us making, to help with their recruiting, globally.
It also includes Jason Beardsley, an Iraq veteran who seems to agree with many Republicans that the cause of ISIS was ending the war in Iraq. Beardsley comes from a group called "Concerned Veterans For America," which was essentially a continuation of a group called "Vets for Freedom," which backed the surge of troops in Iraq, about a decade ago. Now, rather than do the hard work of improving the Department of Veterans Affairs, in the wake of recent scandals, Concerned Veterans is pushing a plan to lead veterans health care into the private, for-profit system. It is an ill-conceived, reactionary plan that would leave veterans to fend for themselves, as health care profiteers look to make a buck off them. Not surprisingly, it is something a strong majority of veterans oppose, according to recent polling.
These all were members of the military who served honorably and ably. Their service should always be honored, deeply. But, it doesn't mean they are wrong, now.
In Trump, they see someone who is weak and easily manipulated by emotions into reactionary decision-making. In Trump, they see someone who won't push back with the clear-eyed thinking we expect from a Commander in Chief.
And why wouldn't they? Paul Manafort admitted that emotional reactions guide even the most basic elements of his decision-making.
Having Trump in command of these world-altering, life and death decisions may do a lot of things.
But his lack of temperament and emotion-based judgement will not "Make America Safe Again."
The world's view of China is changing dramatically. Replacing a Western adoration of China over the decades, there comes gloom and doom about the future of the Chinese economy. Is it warranted?
Many fail to remember all the positives still pushing the Chinese economy forward or the role that recessions and even depressions have played in our own Western economies. The United States for example, went through a series of steep declines and even depressions in its 200+ years' existence yet became a global economic superpower. No economy forever goes straight up but rather there are cycles of boom and bust in economic development.
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The same is true for the Chinese economy, even if it is at best (but never declared) semi-capitalist with "Chinese characteristics." Furthermore, China is trying the heretofore impossible: to develop the world's biggest economy in record time.
China has done a huge number of positive things that set them apart from other economies. When I first started going to China in 1988, the leading universities, still suffering from the ills of the Cultural Revolution that had shut their doors for an entire decade, were doing poorly. Gender preference was openly given to men over women. In the late 1980s only several hundred thousand students graduated from college while today the number is close to eight million students. And, in many schools, women are now the majority. Back then, only a small number of Chinese were studying in the West; Now over 300,000 Chinese students are studying in American universities.
Exports were less than $10 billion at the onset of the Four Modernizations and today, as the world's leading exporter, exceed $2.3 trillion. Its $10 trillion economy is expected to overtake the United States as the world's leading economy in the next two decades.
In the late 1980s a majority of all Chinese were peasants in the countryside while today, after 250 million peasants have moved to the cities, the majority of all Chinese (52 percent) are now urban. The regime intends to move another 200 million more peasants into cities in the next ten years.
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Twenty-five years ago almost no one, not even high officials, had their own cars while today China is the world's leading auto market. Similarly, in the 1980s almost no one owned their own condos while today hundreds of millions of urbanites own their own homes.
Such economics are important but so too are politics. China has brought pride to the Chinese people not only through its economic growth but also its emerging role as the dominant power in Asia. Of the rising revisionist powers in the world -- China, Russia and Iran -- there is little doubt that in the long run China will become a major power, if not a superpower, in the next two decades as well. Its growing military capability (fueled by an $150 billion budget) and the "Chinese Dream" of Xi Jinping erase the disgrace of the humiliating century of shame and humiliation from the First Opium War in 1839 to the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945). For the first time in perhaps two centuries Chinese are now proud of China and its place in the world.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, introduces Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., during a campaign event to announce Pence as the vice presidential running mate on, Saturday, July 16, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
In the freewheeling ideological odyssey that is Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, every major policy position -- from abortion to Afghanistan to assault rifles -- has been subject to negotiation and revision.
Still, Trump has tried to contend that there's at least one unshakable principle for which he's fighting: since the early 1990s, he's opposed free trade agreements on the grounds that they ship jobs overseas, violate U.S. sovereignty and betray our national interests. He's been consistent in his criticism of NAFTA and recently described the TPP as "insanity". This constancy in combatting trade deals is perhaps the candidate's strongest selling point. In the all-important Industrial Midwest and across the country, Republican and Democratic voters are in agreement that the TPP is a bad deal.
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So why did Donald Trump just choose one of the country's foremost free trade cheerleaders as his running mate?
Over the course of his career as a congressman, radio talk show host and governor, Mike Pence has been a genuine evangelist for NAFTA-style free trade agreements and the ideology that underlies them. In Congress, he voted for every single trade agreement that came before him. Whereas Hillary Clinton has at times garnered criticism for her evolutions on trade policy, she crucially showed backbone by voting against the most consequential deal during her Senate tenure: the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Pence proudly whipped House votes for it -- just as he did for the pacts with Colombia, South Korea, Panama, Peru, Oman, Chile and Singapore. Adding to the awkwardness, Pence directly contradicted Trump's proposed tough-on-China policies, voting for a variety of trade preferences for the rising superpower.
While this may be par for the course for most Congressional Republicans, what's notable about Pence is that his free trade zealotry has extended beyond his time on Capitol Hill. As governor of Indiana, Pence proactively lobbied members of the state's Congressional Delegation, urging them to support the TPP as well as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe. This is in spite of the fact that most independent research shows the agreements costing Indiana and the nation more manufacturing jobs.
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Trump's Pence pick reveals more than an inconvenient and unsightly policy disagreement. It reveals a fundamental fissure that the candidate is unwilling or unable to address.
For the first time in memory, both major parties declined to promote the free trade agenda in their official platforms. This is a reflection of deep public distrust in a policy framework that prioritizes the interests of Wall Street investors and big multinational corporations above everyone else: incentivizing the offshoring of jobs, allowing the importation of unsafe products and food, and even enabling foreign companies to sue U.S. taxpayers in unaccountable tribunals outside the regular legal system. The country is as divided as ever, but people across the ideological spectrum oppose the backroom deals, corporate power-grabs, and threats to jobs and wages inherent in the trade deals. It's only the Mike Pence political class -- beholden to big money and discredited economic theory -- that's keeping the corporate trade agenda alive.
Black woman in handcuffs
In 2009, Maisha Yearwood an African American writer and gender non-conforming lesbian was imprisoned abroad. Arrested on trumped up drug charges, her experience in Turkey's Bakrkoy prison is now the subject of a transmedia project, which includes a book, the forthcoming documentary, 9 GRAMS, and a one-woman play premiering in New York City on July 16th directed by S. Epatha Merkerson. Yearwood's tale spotlights the ways that intersectional race, gender, and sexual biases occur globally in criminal justice at the same time that it helps to highlight inequitable treatment of gender non-conforming prisoners at home.
While much exists about the overrepresentation of African American women in the US prison system, largely stemming from misguided, draconian drug laws, less is readily available about their experiences abroad. Maisha Yearwood had been returning to New York City from a trip to Israel. She had a layover in Istanbul. She had 9 grams of hash on her person when she was detained by authorities at one of the checkpoints. Typically an American caught with this amount of illegal narcotics would be deported. However, in Yearwood's case, the arresting officers alleged that she had 15 grams of hash, which meant she was considered a drug-trafficker - a far more serious offense.
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Once in prison, Yearwood noticed a disproportionate number of black women locked up in Bakrkoy - the majority appeared to be South African immigrants who like Yearwood were facing drug-trafficking charges. However, Maisha Yearwood differed from her black counterparts in that she was an "out lesbian" and because she was gender non-conforming the authorities treated her as even more of a threat. She was placed in solitary confinement for the safety of the other female prisoners and Yearwood was subjected to a series of invasive tests to determine whether she did in fact "have a uterus."
Transported by armed guards and handcuffed during these visits, doctors at the hospital examined her outer genitals and gave her a sonogram. Despite having what they regarded as proof of her "true sex," she remained in solitary for three months. During that time, her family and friends worked on her release. Though she was finally cleared of the more serious charge of drug trafficking and deported back to the United States, Yearwood struggled to overcome the trauma of her incarceration.
Her writing helped her survive Bakrkoy, but after her release she remained haunted by not only having been denied the basics such as seeing the sun or bathing daily, but also by the screenings and interrogations about her sexuality. Yearwood's treatment and experience of solitary confinement bears similarities to how transgender prison activist, CeCe McDonald was treated during her incarceration for defending herself against a racist, transphobic attack. Released in 2014, McDonald had served 19 months in solitary in Minnesota. As the National Center for Transgender Equality explains: "Being transgender or gender non-conforming in an American jail or prison often means daily humiliation, physical and sexual abuse, and fear of reprisals for using the legal remedies to address underlying problems."
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In her upcoming performance, Yearwood aims to call attention to the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality with respect to confinement globally; but also her work seeks to reframe how mainstream audiences consider and understand the incarcerated. She explained, despite being a college graduate and a successful writer, "Solitary confinement made me invisible. Simply removed from Life. Whatever Life I had simply PAUSED or disappeared."
"Our war for their sake will be relentless and will hit them in their own ground"Abdullah II of JordanKing of Jordan His Majesty King Abdullah II, the Supreme Commander of the armed forces, presides over a meeting of the General Command of the Armed Forces, which was attended by a number of senior military and government officials, after a terrorist attack on Kingdom's northeast border (Photo: Yousef Allan)
Whether Jordan will play a critical role in the fight against ISIS is no question in the minds of Jordanians. Jordan has been in the forefront of resistance against any form of Islamic extremism in the region. With the help of American military aid, the country has succeeded in almost all its counter-terrorism efforts. Indeed, according to the Jordanian government, the current fight against ISIS is part of a larger regional strategy to do away with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq while preventing their spread to other areas, such as Jordan itself. As part of this strategy, Jordan has used its military bases to house foreign forces and has shared intelligence amongst members of a US-led anti-ISIS international coalition. It now hosts one of the largest and strongest foreign forces fighting ISIS, including about 2,200 U.S. military personnel.
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Jordan's fight against ISIS and the challenges aheadSince the rise of ISIS in 2014, Jordan has played a central role in the fight against violent Islamists not only within its borders, but also beyond them. Jordanian citizens have hailed the country's ongoing crackdown on terrorist cells linked to Daesh, an Arabic name for ISIS. Dozens of suspected ISIS-affiliated terrorists have been arrested in Jordan this year. These security operations are part of a larger scheme by King Abdullah II to enlarge his underground war against ISIS, whose activities would undermine his Hashemite Kingdom and harm the Jordanian people.
Jordan has always been a loyal alliance member in the fight against ISIS. Coalition-led and Jordanian security forces have been consolidated to fight their common enemy. This consolidation has allowed the country to effectively fend off terror while at the same time maintaining security for its citizens.
Despite this, recent events have exposed the inevitable threat ISIS poses. In the northern part of the country, ISIS has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack launched from across the Syrian border, which killed seven Jordanian border guards.
King Abdullah said Jordan would respond to the attack "with an iron fist." This was the first direct attack launched by ISIS against Jordan from Syria since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011 - but it is not Jordanians' first brush with the terrorist group. In early June, there was another attack on the Baqaa camp, a Palestinian refugee camp outside the Jordanian capital of Amman, in which three Jordanian intelligence officers were killed, among others. These two incidents have shaken the kingdom, which, despite regional instability in the wake of the Arab Spring and the subsequent rise and expansion of ISIS, had previously gotten by relatively unscathed.
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His Majesty King Abdullah II receives US presidential envoy Brett McGurk Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS (Photo/Yousef Allan)
Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood - a political organization espousing Islamic extremist beliefs, which the king has recently begun to clamp down on- enjoys between approximately 25 to 30% of popular support. Over the past year, the Jordanian government has applied a variety of tactics to weaken or do away with the party, such as preventing them from holding rallies and raiding their offices. However, these policies are likely to simply force Muslim Brotherhood members underground, which increases the chances that these individuals will join other dangerous terrorist organizations, such as ISIS.
Jordan also feels it has been betrayed economically, especially in the area of investment funding. Official sources confirmed that the Jordanian government aims to adopt the Jordan Investment Fund Act to strengthen its relationship with Saudi Arabia and attract Saudi foreign investment, but this project is slowly disintegrating. Jordan has grown increasingly frustrated with the international community, and incoming refugees and the threat of terrorism have put pressure on its borders. But the Jordanian government has not ruled out other options, including working with the Syrian regime and its allies to at least secure the Syrian-Jordanian border.
The reboot of Ghostbusters opens this week with a stellar all-female comedic cast including Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon. Directed by Paul Feig, this film has a theme all of its own and, in our estimation truly deserves a look. KIDS FIRST! Film Critic Ryan R. comments, "I like because it has a strong comedic female cast, good humor and great realistic CGI animation." See his full review below.
Ghostbusters
By Ryan R., KIDS FIRST! Film Critic, age 12
Ghostbusters is the new female reboot of the original Ghostbusters which I like because it has a strong comedic female cast, good humor and great realistic CGI animation. In this reboot, we meet Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a professor who is up for tenure at her college. One day a man approaches Erin about a book she wrote with her friend Abigail (Melissa McCarthy) regarding the paranormal that he bought on Amazon. Erin asks Abigail to take the book down because Erin doesn't want it to jeopardize her tenure. That same day, Erin goes with Abigail and another friend, Jillian (Kate Mckinnon) to speak with the man who bought the book and that's where the fun begins as they encounter a ghost. After that, they start a business as Ghostbusters and along the way they hire an incompetent receptionist name Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) and are joined by Patty (Leslie Jones) who quits her job at the MTA when she sees a ghost on the tracks and decides to join them. Their mission is to find and capture ghosts. Will they find the ghosts and save New York City? Or will they be labeled as frauds?
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The performances by Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate Mckinnon, Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth are superb. All four of these women are funny but Leslie Jones and Kate Mckinnon really stand out as exceptionally hilarious. All of their jokes, timing and facial expressions are extremely funny and just cracked me up. Most of the jokes are funny, but this film has some jokes that not everyone would get, especially if they never saw the original movie. Chris Hemsworth really commits and delivers in his role as the clueless incompetent receptionist so you can't help but laugh at him as well. I also love how the CGI animation makes the ghosts look scary and very realistic. I appreciate how the animation makes Slimmer and Marshmallow man look different compared to the original movie. This film also features some actors in surprise cameos which is a bonus for fans of the film.
What I didn't like is the pace of this movie. Some parts feel rushed and some parts feel like they are dragging. Additionally, some scenes are predictable. Other than that, this film is really enjoyable.
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I give this film 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it for kids ages 10 to 18. I think adults might like this as well especially those who like action, adventure and sci-fi films. This film has many intense scenes that are unsuitable for younger viewers because they may find it to be too scary. Make sure to see this film which opens July 15, 2016.
A close friend of mine said to me recently that when it comes to sustainability, we're a whole lot of good people having a bad conversation. We're still focused on the wrong issues, he said. More often than not, discussion centers on conserving resources, when really we should be figuring out how to rethink our methodologies.
We've been through an industrial revolution and a chemicals revolution. Now we are in the throes of a technological revolution with potential to create intelligent new systems that can provide better, safer and truly sustainable ways to live on this planet. We have the manpower. We have the need. We have the desire. It's time to start talking about the right things.
So how to change the subject?
It starts with getting the right people together in the right room. This spring, I attended a number of gatherings where major industry players joined forces to network, brainstorm and better understand the transitions we all need to make to achieve sustainable development in product and manufacturing. It was truly inspiring to see longstanding companies developing smart, nimble, forward-thinking ways to collaborate, figuring out how to drive change with a sense of urgency, and affirming immediate commitments to rethink design from the bottom up.
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On Earth Day, for example, Macy's Green Living Campaign brought together experts from the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute alongside leaders from Levi's, Cotton Inc., Under the Canopy and others, in a far-reaching discussion of how retailers - yes, even very large retailers - can work toward corporate sustainability. A few days later, at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation CE100 Summit in France, I joined a group of global multinationals in a series of high-level workshops to foster cross-sector, cross-industry collaboration. Together we worked to develop circular economy pilot incentives, figure out better ways to build capacity, improve our network and become more adept at sharing the latest thinking. (If big groups working across industries and national borders can come up with ways to drive change at speed and scale, no one else has got a good excuse.)
Next, it's about serving as an interpreter, translating from old methodologies to new. I believe this is one of our most important roles at C2C: to help articulate and communicate what a circular economy can and will make possible. At C2C's own Community of Practice meeting in May, attendees joined up at Park 20/20 in the Netherlands - a living, breathing testament to the fact that a group of motivated, like-minded people can achieve very real, very tangible and very promising results. Park 20/20, a full service Cradle to Cradle working environment combining sustainable design, an optimal ecological approach and a groundbreaking way of doing business, is perhaps our strongest statement of C2C's key principles: design for disassembly, products of service, materials banking and productivity and health. As the first environment of its kind in the world, it's a bridge to the future - built not only of words but also of action.
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Last, but certainly not least, it's about knowing when to offer guidance and when to yield the floor. It's about opening up the conversation to the young, innovative and dynamic thinkers who have a real stake in this game, for whom conversations about long-term materials sustainability and safety are not merely academic.
Nowhere in recent memory have I felt this more viscerally than at the fourth Copenhagen Fashion Summit in May, where the breakaway Youth Summit in particular felt like a call to action from one generation to the next. There - watching young innovators mingle with senior leaders from companies including H&M, Nike and Patagonia as well as figures from fashion's most important organizations - I felt an almost palpable sense of accountability, one group of leaders saying to another: You are in power now, but tomorrow it will be us.
The Youth Summit mandate for commitments and change reminded me - and should remind us all - of the critical role today's leaders must play in starting a new conversation now, so we can begin to build momentum toward a truly circular economy. As its participants made very clear, we don't have time - nor is it ethical - to sit around and wait for the next generation to clean things up, cooling our heels while the planet gets hotter, our impact grows increasingly toxic, and critical resources run dry.
CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, is a momentous milestone.
The war on drugs has long been proven ineffective and inhumane, and now with the passage of CARA, Congress has clearly signaled that people with addictions must be treated instead of jailed.
It is progress that we've finally decided to treat addiction as a disease instead of a crime, but our slow progress toward this end comes at the expense of too many people.
Decades of neglect mean we are in the middle of a massive public-health crisis.
There isn't anywhere near enough help for the nine out of 10 Americans who need treatment for a substance-use disorder but don't get it.
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As many as 25 million Americans are facing an addiction, 2 million alone to opiates. That costs the country $700 billion a year, says the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in health costs, crime and lost productivity.
More important is the toll in agony and death. Overdoses on heroin and prescription opiates now kill more Americans than car accidents.
It is a national disgrace -- and a holdover from the old days of people with addictions being labeled as weak or immoral -- that there aren't enough counselors and doctors and nurses and other resources to lift people with these life-threatening health conditions out of misery and give them the tools and support they need to lead a productive life.
CARA gives us a start. This new law includes prescriber education; allows nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe buprenorphine; incentivizes Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs; and authorizes an array of grant programs.
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Unfortunately, CARA calls for expanding resources in the fight against addiction to opiates but doesn't provide a single dime in funding.
The House says it will appropriate $581 million when it returns to Washington in September. While we're waiting, more than 6,000 Americans will die from opioid overdoses, and thousands more from alcohol-related deaths. We must finish the process, and give CARA teeth.
But no matter what amount Congress decides on for CARA, the money will come in the form of grants. That means some treatment facilities will get money and some people with addictions will get help, but others will not. And when the grant ends, the care ends.
We'd be appalled if a hospital couldn't treat us for a broken arm because it needed a grant to do so. Yet that's too often the case for people with an addiction.
There's a way, however, to start fixing this problem. That is for the states to step up to the responsibilities on which many of them, too, have underperformed.
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Addiction treatment has not been a priority, despite the broad changes in attitudes about addiction over the last few decades.
So it's not fair that the federal government get all the blame for short-changing addiction treatment for so long.
That's why it's heartening that 46 members of the National Governors Association -- who gathered for their annual meeting last weekend -- recently signed the Compact to Fight Opioid Addiction.
The compact binds the governors to "redouble their efforts to fight the opioid epidemic with new steps to reduce inappropriate prescribing, change the nation's understanding of opioids and addiction and ensure a pathway to recovery for individuals suffering from addiction."
It was the first time in a decade that the governors had signed such a compact on an urgent national issue.
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They're in a position to make a huge difference. Is it just rhetoric? Or will they put money behind their compact?
How can they do it? They can take advantage of an existing federal state partnership, the Medicaid program. Expanding capacity through state Medicaid programs provides a continuous, reliable source of funding for treatment that doesn't depend upon winning a grant.
Medicaid, the government health insurer for those unable to afford private insurance, is a federal state partnership with the federal government that picks up from 50 percent to 82 percent of the costs of care.
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is already encouraging expansion of addiction services at the state level. And some states, like California, are using this flexibility to design and fund the full continuum of inpatient and community treatments and supports necessary when someone is dealing with a deadly disease.
This is the direction the future of addiction treatment must take. Our thinking must change because we can no longer tolerate turning away people in desperate need simply because we don't have a bed, a medication or a counselor. Grants are not enough. Not in this day and age.
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My professional relationship with Juhani Pallasmaa from Finland dates back to mid-June 2009 when I received a letter notifying me that because of his frequent travels around South America (Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil), he have stopped responding to my requests in order to have an exchange of ideas on what I wanted to research about the philosophy of the language of architecture and phenomenology of spatial perception.
At that time I receive of him a brochure from his recently published book "The Thinking Hand" which had not been published yet in Spanish at that time, and it was "The Eyes of the Skin" book that kept first to understand and express my sensitivity ideas on the epistemology of Space Perception contents of a plastic base with existential experience with the environment, materiality, in order to achieve dominance in the aesthetic essence in the experience, the plasticity of the architectural phenomenon through the time.
After many years when I was a lecturer at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico, I receive an invitation, and it what was my surprise that the meeting of Design and Architecture, in celebration of 50th anniversary of the Latin American University of Mexico, based in Celaya, Mexico, was going to give the "Don Francisco Tresguerras" award for the excellency in the architectural field to renowned architect Juhani Pallasmaa.
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Since that moment, I had the honor of maintaining a good professional friendship with him and after his return to his town at Hameenlinna, Finland, we have maintained a communication where I could deploy some ideas of a smart thinking to understand his epistemological and architecture language theory, which is then expressed in an open dialogue that ends with the interview below for my Huff Post blog.
1. Mario A. Rodriguez Zamora: How we should re-think in the "ocular centrism" conception of the haptic city and the city of senses today?
Juhani Pallasmaa: The ocular-centric view of the world, human existence as well as of arts and architecture has been historically strengthened especially by the invention of writing and printing, and then further accelerated by countless more recent inventions that further support the unchallenged hegemony of the eye. The dominance of vision has also become evident in urbanism, architecture and object design. Today we live in the era of vision and the visual image.
We need to acknowledge the roles and meanings of all the senses (and definitely not only of the five Aristotelian senses) and their essential interactions. In addition to taking a critical position to the exaggerated and often forced visually, we also need to recognize our simultaneous bias for "rational" thinking and cognition as well as the priority of language over our embodied existence and the tacit wisdom of the body. We tend to believe that we sense only through our five senses and think only by our brain, but our entire bodily being and sense of self sense and "think", as they process and regulate our relationship and interactions with the world. For instance, the significance of the unbelievably voluminous bacterial systems in our intestines, as well as the communicative role of our endocrinal glands, have only fairly recently been identified.
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2. MARZ: How you interact the "architecture epistemology" in the diverse international environment that you have teach or how this have been trans-discipline the teaching of the profession?
JP: Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, confesses:" I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties". I wish to say similarly that I am not a philosopher, i.e. I have not formally studied philosophy in any academic institution. My architectural thinking and writings on architecture and art arise from my personal observations, fifty years of work in architecture, urban design, a well as exhibition, graphic, and product design, and rather intense reading since my school years. For the last 35 years i have been interested in philosophical writings and I associate my personal views especially with the phenomenological movement, as expressed in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gaston Bachelard, and a number of contemporary philosophers, such as Edward S Casey, David Michael Lewin, Richard Kearney, and Mark Johnson, just to mention a few. I am not a purist at all in my thinking, and I use any evidence from literature, poetry, painting, cinema, and other arts as well as the sciences, to support my views and arguments.
I have traveled the world for sixty years now and become friends with notable thinkers, artists, architects, craftsmen, designers, scientists, therapists, etc., and my interests and views certainly reflect the multitude of my engagements and personal relationships. The best way to break disciplinary and professionalism boundaries is to have friends across these boundaries. That is the reason why I often advice my students to seek friendships beyond the architectural profession, particularly among makers, such as artists and craftsmen.
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3. MARZ: From your book The Thinking Hand you have mentioned that the brain configuration, the language and the human culture, on the phenomenological task of the architectural existence, from which way you conceptualize this process?
JP: I believe in the fundamental integrity, interaction and integration of things. Our experiential, cognitive and mental worlds are split into too many compartments that tend to maintain defensively their artificial autonomies. I also think that the biological, evolutionary, historical, and ecological perspectives are or will become crucial in all fields. We are participants in constant unconscious processes and we need to acknowledge these processes and their interactions. The separation of the outer physical realm and the inner mental realm from each other is, perhaps, the most crucial of our mistaken attitudes. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests," The world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside of myself".
4. MARZ: Which way you can envisage the connection of the visual perception with the corporal changes towards the environment (habitat)?
JP: Lecturing and teaching around the world, I see an increasing interest in our multi-sensory relationships with the world, the interaction and integration of the senses, and a strengthening realization of the fundamental significance of embodiment and an embodied tacit "thinking". Our existence in the world itself structures and articulates basic existential understanding. Embodiment is equally important to perception, memorizing and imagination. We are simply embodied beings.
5. MARZ: Today, we live a material change in the biological life, of which way we can combine the mental atmosphere (noosphere) with our existential terrestrial experience?
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JP: I already commented on the negative consequences of categorizations. Thinking needs to be rigorous, perceptive and based on subtle intuition, and it needs to identify both similarities and differences, but these distinctions should not prevent the essential interplay between things that may seem to be categorically different.
6. MARZ: To settle the fundamentals of the architectonical corporeity, of which way we discover what means the building and how the transformation occurs to improve the human habitat?
JP: Architecture addresses our physical and practical, individual and collective, as well as the mental and mythical dimensions of as Merleau-Ponty suggests," The world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside of myself"ourt being. Architecture is fundamentally an "impure" and "diffuse" field, which cannot be dealt entirely with reason and logic; architecture can only be grasped fully as a poetic enterprise, that fuses all these irreconcilable dimensions. In architectural experience and creative endeavor emotion, existential intuition and embodied and unconscious fusion are more important than reason.
7. MARZ: Why have been difficult the corporeal experience in the architecture?
JP: The visual dominance in thinking as well as architecture derives all the way from Greek thought. Clear vision has been a metaphor for clarity of thought and even truth. As I said earlier, this bias has been reinforced by technological developments to the degree that today we live in an era of the visual image, more than ever in history. On the other hand, the body has been regarded as something that is solely of flesh and it has been assumed to project ethically questionable desires. Religious beliefs, also, tend to suppress our essentially embodied way of existing in the world. Here we still need emancipation in our historically derived thinking.
8. MARZ: Which are the challenges that face the architects today, under the concept The Eyes of the Skin, to see the city in our sustainability context?
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JP: Ecological issues are the most important challenges that humanity faces, but these issues are not primarily of technological nature. These burning questions are philosophical and ethical; they call for new attitudes towards biological life, nature and ecological systems, the human historicity as well as our understanding of the meaning of life. Biophilia, "the science and love of life", propagated by the biologist (myrmecologist, to be precise) Edward O. Wilson, is one of the new ways of thinking about human existence on this earth.
9. MARZ: Which are the key characteristics of the visual embodied image of the architectonical aesthetics in the contemporary world?
JP: Modernism has been obsessed with form and especially with strong form, and this orientation aspires to create cohesive and overpowering formal entities. It is evident to me that we also need to think of "fragile form", formal structures that instead of aspiring for totalization and finiteness, think in terms of processes, change, growth and becoming. Landscape architecture has already developed ideas of thinking about physical surroundings in these terms instead of closed and finite forms. The idea of "weak thought" was introduced by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo.
10. MARZ: As defined the awareness of the sustainability to the incorporeal world with sensitivity and aesthetics in the architecture of the 21 Century?
JP: Thinking in the 21st Century needs to become more "biological" in terms of acknowledging human biological historicity, and the meaning of our genetic constitution as well as our acquired cultural and mental structures, that still continue to guide our reactions and emotions regardless of our new digital realities. The modern man has been blinded by his excessive fascination with the future, but we need to know our deep past in order to understand who we really are. Our recent inventions from the search media to virtual realities as well as algorithmic design, gene manipulation and stem cell operations, have to be valued against the biological background, which finally is the only valid criteria. Our ultimate choices have to be ethical rather than intellectual, scientific, or technological. In this new way of thinking about human cultural evolution in its true ecological context. Also beauty will have a new meaning. "The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty", the Nobel laureate poet Joseph Brodsky declares with the assurance of a great poet.
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By Mark Green
Lowry & Lemarche debate Clinton's standing after Comey's rebuke and the Sanders embrace. In our super--polarized era, will Hillary's 50% negative be the new 40% and will unindicted beat unqualified? Then they a) agree that Pence will be a footnote in '16 but b) disagree whether Obama's remarks at the Dallas service were courageous and candid or tone-deal and inappropriate.
After the Truck Attack. Though analogies to the tumultuous '60s arre surely overwrought, does the combination of lone wolves causing mass deaths and shootings by and of police change the trajectory of 2016?
Rich Lowry of the National Review is sympathetic to "extreme vetting", in Trump's words, based not on religion but anti-American "ideology" as happened during the Cold War or "if, say, people believed in killing homosexuals." But he parts company with Newt Gingrich by calling "outrageous and unconstitutional" efforts to deport American Muslims if they believe in Sharia Law. Gare Lamarche thinks any such tests of new arrivals or current Americans repugnant and likely intended to politically instill and exploit fear.
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Ok, but what if there's an Orlando a month -- would that create a terrible "new normal" that Americans would treat calmly as Israelis do... or stampede voters into a a national security state or officials into over-reacting as Bush 43 did? Lowry notes that "France is right now facing such constant low-level terror threats because of a greater Muslim population not well integrated into its society" and that America certainly would respond with alarm if there more Orlandos. He worries that ISIS has found a new tactic that works for them.
Gara, for years with the ACLU, agrees that were there more such events in the US -- "a country awash in guns" -- there would then be "a continuing balancing of civil liberties versus crackdowns."
Host: certainly Trump and Gingrich's rhetoric is inflammatory and politically inspired. But imagine if there were a Trump Administration -- how would it react to continuing low-level attacks? For now: internationally, the Obama Administration has been modestly successful at its combination of drone/missile/air attacks plus special forces in helping allies take back territory from the self-declared "Caliphate"; domestically, law enforcement agencies have capably stopped large scales attacks since 9/11; but extremists driving a truck through crowds or shooting up a nightclub pose a new and different kind of problem.
Pence, Sanders, Comey. There's a consensus that VP pick Michael Pence of Indiana may slightly assauge the party's fundamentalist base but will be soon forgotten, especially given the dismissive to nearly humiliating way he was rolled out. "It gives Hillary alot of room on her own VP choice," adds Gara, "which everyone seems to think keeps moving to Senator Tim Kaine -- former governor, former DNC chair, now Senator -- who easily meets her 'ability to be president' test."
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More significant is how Clinton comes out after the extraordinary Comey rebuke and Sanders endorsement. Lowry thinks that "the media missed the importance of an FBI director attacking a party's nominee" because they thought that a stupid tweet with a star of david was as important. Indeed, national polls did show her slipping some 4-5 points after Comey's denunciation-- which Gara thought was an outrageous violation of prosecutorial discretion since his job is to indict or not...but not editorialize.
Host: but won't Sander's endorsement move as many points in her direction by coaxing the 90%+ unity a nominee needs to win? Lowry agrees that with the Reagans, Bushes, Romneys, Scowcroft, Armitage, Kirk/Graham/Sasse, Will/Erickson/Gerson/Lowry etc opposing the GOP nominee, it will be hard for Trump break 90% of his smaller party. Lamarche agrees but still worries about Trump's threat since "he really can't get below 45% [in a 2 way race]."
The Host pounces: "given his qualities and numbers, he hasn't ever gotten over 42 percent -- and won't." There ensures an interesting debate as Lowry notes that 42 might be enough to win a multi-candidate contest (see Lincoln, Wilson, Clinton) , as the Host adds that Gary Johnson is not TR, Perot or Nader, to which Lowry niftily replies that he needn't be, only a safe place for the millions of voters dissatisfied with the two major nominees. To which the Host only later realizes he should have concluded that the Libertarian and Green party nominees will likely fall to perhaps 5-7 percent since people don''t like to waste their vote when so much is at stake.
Obama After Dallas. Speaking of the Rashoman Effect -- when differently situated people see the same events very differently -- Lamarche lauds Obama's eloquent, sensitive, gutsy remarks at the service for the five police officers slain by a black sniper targeting whites. Many Obama admirers think only someone of his oratorical skills and unique bi-racial background could attempt such a challenging assignment. Rich, however, is unmoved, thinking it very inappropriate to discuss Black Lives Matter and shootings by police at a solemn service about shootings of police.
Lamarche then condemns Rudy Giuliani's remarks calling BLM protestors "inherently racist" for focusing on only "black lives." Gara recalls a friend saying that while all houses matter, if yours is burning down that should probably be the one fire fighters immediately focus on. Rich then questions statistics about whether there's a serious problem at all of racial bias in law endorsement, which Gara dismisses by citing the overwhelming weight of policing studies as well as Tim Scott's own problems "driving while black" though a U. S. Senator.
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I have been pushing myself to figure out what to do. I haven't landed on the full answer yet, but I am certain that all of us must take consequential actions that speak to the seriousness of our current crisis. We cannot allow the burden of explaining, protesting and mourning to rest only on the shoulders of African-Americans and other people of color. I expect a lot of white people are afraid of saying the wrong thing. I have often said the wrong thing and it is embarrassing and awkward to make a mistake that offends a co-worker or friend. But we need to compare the fear of making a mistake to the fear of your son being violently taken from you in a second because he was a black kid in the "wrong" place at the "wrong" time. Or, the fear that the deafening silence of white people means that we do not care, that we do not understand this as a crisis for all of us to address. A good place for us to start is by building empathy. Imagine your own son being pulled over for a traffic violation and getting shot, bleeding to death in his car. Or, envision your own teenager hunted down for walking the street while wearing a hoodie. Imagine your grief and outrage as the authorities call you. Really try it -- I am not being rhetorical.
Empathy requires stretching outside of our own personal experience. I grew up like many white people do in majority white schools, neighborhoods -- I am so familiar with how separate we can be from the reality of others. And yet, I live now in this world as the mother of an African-American son, which makes these countless murders of young black men all too real. I shudder as I see the news and imagine him being next. This is one reason I join in saying "black lives matter" -- because our sons and brothers and friends are truly precious to us, but their lives are simply not valued enough by some fellow human beings who fail to see this as a crisis: to admit they live in real danger. I want my beautiful son to grow up safe and be able to be his own full self. My son cannot risk doing some of the foolish things I did when I was fifteen; the world is seriously, genuinely different for him because he is black.
At the same time, I also wept for the Dallas police and their families, even though I don't have any police officers in my family. I ache for their co-workers who are mourning them while also going back to work a dangerous job knowing what a messed up system we have. I have no personal experience of their lives but I certainly can empathize.
Many faith and social justice traditions provide powerful tools for utilizing empathy. In the labor movement it's called solidarity: "an injury to one is an injury to all." My mom -- a Catholic school teacher -- reminded me of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which also calls us to reach across difference to affirm our common humanity.
We saw empathy in action just a month ago in Orlando. It made such a difference to me and other LGBTQ people that straight and cis allies showed up and bore witness to the homophobia and racism that led to Orlando. That law enforcement rushed in under fire to rescue these LGBTQ lives. And, that when some politicians tried to erase the fact that this targeted LGBTQ and Latinx people, we refused to be invisible and set the record, well, straight so to speak.
So, if you have not checked in on your co-workers, fellow congregants, neighbors and friends who are people of color, don't be immobilized by guilt or fear, do it now. And, if you don't have co-workers, congregants and friends who are people of color, now's the time to notice that and to do something. Our shared loss creates new avenues and opportunities for empathy, solidarity and action.
As a nation, we have failed to confront systemic racism. This won't change without white people really engaging. Developing this ability requires regular workouts as well as a heavy dose of humility. All of us, including those of us who identify as activists and allies have to self-reflect on how much more we need to do. This is not about lecturing the "other" white people on what "they" should do. This is about embracing our own responsibility and inviting others to do the same. Each of us has an obligation to take concerted action right now. It may mean action in the streets or it could mean action with our interpersonal and professional relationships. It should also mean voting and much more. It may mean making a financial contribution this week to an organization led by people of color. Another simple action would be reading and learning. Ta-Nehisi Coates or Bryan Stevenson have written powerful books that can aid in broadening our understanding and dismantling our cloaks of silence, ignorance and inaction. I also urge us to watch one of the many awful videos of murders by the police in order to confront the reality that African Americans know keenly -- the disturbing violence from which white people are shielded. We must confront this reality.
After a summer of mass shootings in Orlando, racial tensions in Dallas, and terror attacks in France, it is tempting to look the other way when it comes to a middle-of-the-night coup in the far-flung land of Turkey. But make no mistake -- what happened in Turkey on Friday night, what continues to unfold in Turkey, matters. Not just to the people of Turkey, but to the rest of the world as well.
Here are five things to know about the coup in Turkey:
1) This is not Turkey's first coup. Turkey has had a long history of military uprisings. It's the fifth time the military has attempted to take over the presiding government in a half century. Of note: the 1960 coup organized by young military members, which resulted in the then-prime minister's ouster and eventual execution. Coups in Turkey have traditionally been viewed as the military's attempt to protect the democratic principles established by Ataturk during the founding of the modern Turkish republic. That appears to have been the case for this most recent coup attempt, which was reportedly launched by Turkish military officials intent on keeping the growing power of Turkey's president Erdogan in check. That said, there's some murkiness surrounding who actually masterminded the coup in Turkey, which brings me to my next point.
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2) It's unclear who masterminded the coup -- and why. While fingers have been pointed at a group within the military calling itself the "Peace at Home Council", which is derived from Ataturk's famous saying "Peace At Home, Peace In the World", it's not clear precisely who masterminded the military uprising. President Erdogran claims that the coup was actually organized by a cleric now based in the United States, Fethullah Gulen, and has demanded his extradition. Gulen left Turkey, at his choosing, nearly 20 years ago to hole up at a compound in Pennsylvania. He embraces what the New York Times describes as "a moderate, pro-Western brand of Sunni Islam that appeals to many well-educated and professional Turks." Gulen has denied any participation in the coup. Other rumors floating about are that President Erdogan himself was behind the failed coup attempt in a bid to provide his regime with ever-greater power and to give him ever-more reasons to further crack down upon the nation's journalists and others he deems a threat.
3) Regardless of who was the ultimate mastermind of the coup, the coup has managed to further strain U.S.-Turkish relations. The United States has long considered Turkey an ally and friend. But relations have been strained between the two nations in recent years, particularly in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which created a myriad of problems for Turkey, not the least of which was an influx of refugees. The two countries have also not seen eye to eye about how to handle Syria and what to do about Turkey's Kurdish population. Still, owing to its strategic position, literally bridging Europe and Asia, and owing, too, to its democratic government, which has served as a model to the rest of the Moslem world, Turkey has been embraced as a longtime ally and friend. The coup threatens to further undermine that friendship. The Friday night uprising blocked access to Incirlik, the U.S. airbase which houses, among other things, U.S. nuclear weapons. Airspace was closed around the base in the hours following the uprising. Erdogan has long been growing more vocal about his anti-U.S. views, which he has imparted to the young Turkish population. Now that he has implicated the U.S.-based Gulen in masterminding the coup, many believe Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to further distance Turkey from the U.S. and from the West in general.
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4) If Erdogan is not a name you know, that needs to change. Now.Turkey's president is no flash in the pan. He has been in power since 2003 -- serving first as Turkey's prime minister. That's more than a decade. That's longer than Obama's been in the White House. That's longer than David Cameron's term. Erdogan is a leader that's steadily seized more and more power in Turkey, decreasing the impact and reach of the military, stripping journalists of their liberties. Many have called him a dictator. He famously jailed a 16 year old for speaking out against him, a Turkish beauty queen for reciting a poem he believed undermined him. After decades of acting as a secular nation, Turkey, under Erdogan, has embraced an increasingly non-secular way of life. Females again wear -- and are encouraged to wear -- headscarves, after being told for years they were forbidden to do so. He's additionally pushed for alcohol-free zones in the nation. He's a leader that has voiced a desire to lean East, rather than West. That is not expected to change in the wake of the coup. If anything, Erdogan is expected to use the coup as an excuse to crack down harder on those he deems critics and threats.
5) What happens in Turkey does not stay in Turkey. Especially now. Turkey has always held a pivotal position in the world, owing to its unique geographic location, sandwiched neatly between Europe and Asia. It's long been a buffer for the West -- the country that absorbs the problems of the Middle East before they spread their tentacles. The shockwaves felt in Turkey have always threatened to spread elsewhere. But now that the shockwaves are coming *from* Turkey -- are not just spreading *through* Turkey -- the West needs to pay attention. Turkey has long been the leader of the Moslem world -- the gold standard -- the shining example of what a Moslem country could achieve as a secular nation. Its instability now threatens to impact the global economy and upend the delicate balance of the Middle East. Make no mistake. What happens in Turkey will not stay in Turkey. It will spread, first to Europe, then way (way) beyond.
I have been watching in utter amazement as I see CEOs and senior level executives posting political comments on Facebook and tweeting out their support for particular candidates in this year's election. But what has truly amazed me is the level of partisanship that is being posted in the public domain.
I never thought I would see a CEO of a company call people "morons" or "idiots" for supporting either Trump or Clinton. Do they not realize that half of the people they are addressing are their own clients and prospects? Sure, let's call half of our prospects and clients "morons." They'll really love that.
The posts I really enjoy reading, are the ones that start out by saying: "Regardless of who you support, you should read this..." I guess this is some way to rationalize that your post really isn't partisan, but actually balanced and impartial. Trust me, it's not working. Everyone knows what you are doing. No one is falling for it.
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Polls show that, as of today, the election is a dead heat, meaning that half of your existing clients, and half of your prospects, are likely to be opposed to your particular meme or posting. So you are likely to piss off half of your clients and prospect. All I can ask is "Why?" What is it that compels you to risk alienating a client or prospect? When you post these items, do you actually believe that you are going to change someone's mind? Hopefully, you're smarter than that. Although my information is more anecdotal than empirical, I can honestly say that I have never met a person who told me they changed their mind and supported the "other" candidate because of a Facebook post they read.
To prove my point, ask yourself this question: Have you ever had someone say to you: "Gee whiz, (insert your name here), I read your post about (Trump/Clinton), and you completely convinced me I was wrong in supporting him/her. You really opened my eyes. And when you called me a moron for supporting him/her, that really put me over the top. I certainly don't want to be a moron. Thanks so much for enlightening me."
If this has never been said to you, there's a reason. It's because you aren't changing anyone's mind. So why do you feel the need to make these posts?
My sense is that it makes you feel good, and that's all there is to it. It's a great way of venting at the people who don't support your view. The problem is, according to recent polls, that about half the people reading your posts and tweets, don't support your position or candidate. So why would you want to call them names and alienate them? You can't be that clueless.
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I submit that those of you doing this are probably violating your own corporate social media policy (if you even have one). You would never allow your employees to post things that would reflect back on your company. You, as the CEO or senior executive, can't separate your personal life from your business life in social media. Clients and prospects know who you are and immediately associate your comments with your company...because, to them, you ARE the company. Everything you say or post is a reflection on you, and hence, the company you run. You can't offend or call people names and expect them to not have some negative feelings about you and your company.
According to a recent survey by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research, 45% of people said they would be less willing to buy from your company if they disagree with you. Why risk this to make a political expression?
Furthermore, Leslie Gaines-Ross of Weber Shandwick stated that "political endorsements are likely to remain something of a taboo. CEOs have long given money to political candidates, and plenty of business leaders do speak out. But it remains relatively rare to see sitting CEOs of Fortune 500 companies vocally endorse a particular presidential candidate."
A technician works with Baxter, an adaptive manufacturing robot created by Rethink Robotics at The Rodon Group manufacturing facility, Tuesday, March 12, 2013, in Hatfield, Pa. There are three jobs open at Rodon Group, a plastic parts manufacturer near Philadelphia. But despite the reports of a shortage of skilled workers nationwide, CEO Michael Araten isn't sweating it. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Let's start with a small test.
When was the following text published -- in 1961, 1987 or last week?
The number of jobs lost to more efficient machines is only part of the problem. What worries many job experts more is that automation may prevent the economy from creating enough new jobs ... In the past, new industries hired far more people than those they put out of business. But this is not true of many of today's new industries ... In the past, new industries such as autos and household appliances used relatively unskilled workers. Today's new industries have comparatively few jobs for the unskilled or semiskilled, just the class of workers whose jobs are being eliminated by automation.
The correct answer? 1961.
The quote is from a Time article published in February of that year but it could have been written last week. It could have also been written in 1970, 1987, 1993 or any other time in the past half century. Worries over new technologies destroying jobs have become chronic -- and up to this point, unfounded.
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It's not difficult to imagine a demagogue like Trump promising that he will ban the use of robots and other 'job-killing' technologies.
Thanks to new technologies, new industries emerged that created more jobs than were destroyed and increased not only productivity, but also workers' incomes, something the economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted in 1942. He called this phenomenon "creative destruction" -- a "process of industrial mutation ... that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."
His theory has held true. Until now.
There are those who believe this time is different and that the job destruction created by technological advancements is of unprecedented speed and magnitude. As economist Eduardo Porter recently wrote, "new technology does seem more fundamentally disruptive than technologies of the past."
A robot waiter in a restaurant in Shanghai on July 3. It can deliver food to customers and play welcoming words and music. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
The worry is that new industries and occupations that will potentially be created won't come in time and won't be enough to provide jobs and incomes for the millions of workers displaced by new technologies. In the past few weeks, I had the opportunity to visit a handful of centers of innovation and speak with some of the world's leading experts in technology information and robotics. As is usual in this environment, there was an air of contagious optimism. But there was also a lot of worry about the impact new technologies would have and many doubts about the societal, economic and political capability to adapt to it.
The CEO of a well-known technology company told me, under the condition of anonymity:
We will soon launch a robot that can perform tasks currently done by people with a high school education or less. The robot will only cost $20,000. We're not the only ones; our competitors across the world are working on similar projects. When these cheap, efficient and reliable robots become commonplace, I have no idea what jobs could be given to people who don't have skills above a high school level. I also think this technological revolution is inevitable; I'm not sure what the solution is.
Meanwhile, Uber recently announced it has begun tests with driverless cars. And they're not the only ones -- Google, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Toyota and Tesla are just a few of the dozens of companies investing in this technology. Driverless cars are as inevitable as the $20,000 robot. Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union, said that the popularization of driverless vehicles will eliminate millions of jobs. Stern noted that "employing 3.5 million people, truck-driving is the largest profession in 29 states in the U.S. So introducing self-driving trucks means replacing 3.5 million jobs."
But Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley's most respected investors and a cofounder of Netscape (among other companies), has a much more positive and drastically different opinion. As he wrote in the Financial Times, "Robots will not eat the jobs but will unleash our creativity ... To argue that huge numbers of people will be put out of work but we will find nothing for them -- for us -- to do is to short human creativity dramatically. And I am long on human creativity."
Worries over new technologies destroying jobs have become chronic -- and up to this point, unfounded.
Andreessen is right. But we desperately need to encourage the maximum amount of human creativity to make this transition less traumatic. How to guarantee a certain level of income for those who suffer the negative consequences of this revolution has to be part of any conversation about the incredible potential of new technologies.
Is giving away money the solution we've been looking for?
Recently, Switzerland held a referendum vote to decide whether the government would give citizens about $2,500 a month for doing absolutely nothing. Although the vote didn't pass and was never expected to, it may be a significant precursor to an emerging global trend.
In fact, many countries are already testing the idea of giving their citizens a minimum, no-strings-attached income. In Finland, the government will choose as many as 10,000 adults at random and will give them between 500 and 700 euros a month with the purpose of measuring the effects the money has on their propensity to work and on their life decisions. If the trial is successful, the Finnish government could implement the policy at a national level. Similar experiments are taking place in Canada, the Netherlands, Kenya and other countries.
Nissan's Atsushi Iwaki takes his hands off the steering wheel of a self-driving new Serena minivan near Tokyo on July 12. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)
The problems and defects with this idea are obvious. Having a guaranteed income could discourage work. Giving someone a material compensation without something of value produced in exchange is questionable from economic, social and ethical standpoints. The risks of corruption and political favoritism in the selection of beneficiaries are high. And, of course, this isn't a cheap initiative. These types of subsidies could turn into a huge burdens for the state and create enormous chronic deficits in public budgets.
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And yet, despite all its defects, a minimum income guarantee may well become an inevitable policy. There is no doubt that globalization and new technologies have created infinite new opportunities for humanity. From reducing global poverty to medical advances and empowering historically marginalized social groups, progress is obvious.
But the negative effects are also obvious. Increasing inequality, the destruction of jobs and shrinking salaries -- especially in the U.S. and Europe -- all have some link to globalization and new technologies. And all these negative effects feed into the populism and toxic political extremism that we see taking hold of many countries today.
Despite all its defects, a minimum income guarantee may well become an inevitable policy.
As jobs continue to be lost due to accelerating technological progress, concern that not enough new ones will be created fast enough is valid. Faced with this situation, the world has responded in three main ways.
1. More education and training for workers displaced by technology. This should be a priority. But the reality is that, while there have been occasional successes in this field, the overall results of these efforts have been disappointing. In the U.S. for example, the government spends a meager 0.1 percent of gross domestic product on job retraining and similar efforts. In the majority of countries -- even the most advanced ones, programs designed to help technologically displaced workers have been poorly funded, used ineffective teaching techniques and have been run by inefficient bureaucracies. Improvements need to be made urgently.
2. Isolationism. Donald Trump is just one example of the many politicians proliferating in the world who promise to protect jobs by reducing the number of immigrants competing for them, as well as the volume of low-cost imports that displace local production. It's not difficult to imagine a demagogue like Trump promising that he will ban the use of robots and other "job-killing" technologies.
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The fact that these policies are not a solution and in many cases would not even be implementable doesn't seem to be an obstacle for millions of people who believe in the populists' promises. It seems inevitable that some countries will end up adopting these bad ideas.
3. More guaranteed minimum incomes. That's right. Giving away money may seem like an outrageous idea. But a world in which nine low-cost robots can do the job of 140 workers (in a Chinese factory) is a world that is open to evaluating all the options. Even the ones that may seem -- or even be -- outrageous.
High and permanent levels of unemployment are unacceptable and unsustainable, which is why we must be willing to try everything -- and, at the same time, understanding that governing rarely means choosing between a great policy and a terrible one. More often than not, those who govern are forced to choose between a catastrophic policy and a defective but workable one. Guaranteeing a minimum income may be one of the latter.
I didn't sleep well Wednesday night. Perhaps because we didn't turn the air conditioner on until 4 am. The air was sticky until then. So when I woke up at 2:30 I found it difficult to resume sleep. Which resulted in the second, more dominant, factor that denied me a contented slumber.
I read from several news sites. My eyes kept getting wider and wider with consternation. Could Mr.- and Mrs.- and Miss- and Ms. America really be so angry, scared, bigoted and, most importantly, ignorant that they would vote for Donald Trump to be the beacon of leadership of the free world for the next four years? Could they really want to roll back progress in equality, in environmental protection, in equal opportunity, in race relations (no matter how frayed they may appear these days), in a host of other areas where we are so much better today than we were decades ago?
Yes, Hillary Clinton is a flawed candidate. But do they really think she favors her cronies more than Trump favors his fellow billionaires (assuming, of course, he really is a billionaire)? She professes a desire to put checks on the investment community. But don't Wall Streeters and bankers realize they made gazillions during the last two Democratic presidents and almost lost it all during the last two Republican presidencies.
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Republicans like to point out President Obama didn't keep his word when Syria's Assad crossed a red line and dropped chemical weapons on his people. No one would believe in our word anymore, they say. Yet they would support a man who openly acknowledged he would rip up treaties and agreements he didn't like. Nothing the United States has signed would be meaningful any longer. And Trump has advocated for torture more extreme than waterboarding.
As he has for virtually all other issues, Donald Trump's response to the killings of blacks by police and the assassination of five Dallas policemen is that we have to get "better, sharper and smarter." No details, just get better, smarter and sharper.
As he has no political record to check, it might be instructive to look at how he has handled his business relations and how outside experts evaluate his plans.
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Trump's modus operandi in business appears to be to often unilaterally renegotiate agreed upon terms of service. Contractors who helped him build his casino empire say he reneged on full payments.
Such a tactic might fatten his pockets while undercutting the profits of, and even bankrupting, his providers, but it is hardly a way to manage the U.S. economy.
Trump's allies in securing the nomination of his party are the crazed Islamic terrorists who sow fear throughout the world. Isolated terrorists, even bands of two or three, are almost impossible to stop. Police states like Russia and Saudi Arabia can't thwart dedicated, demented terrorists, much less so countries that cherish freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and even freedom to bear arms.
The absence of a wall across the Mexican border hasn't left America vulnerable to Islamic terrorists. As the only publicized "invasion" came from Canada in 1999, would a president Trump demand Canada pay for a wall across our more than 5,500-mile shared border?
As the coronation of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate nears, Republican thinkers not enamored with Trump are trying to forge a post-election comeback strategy for a party that has veered so far to the right even iconic presidents like Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt would not pass muster with the rabidly doctrinaire primary-voting fringe of discontents and non-compromisers.
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David Brooks, the conservative Op-Ed columnist of The New York Times, advises Republicans can be saved by harking back to progressive programs like those of Teddy Roosevelt.
Think, how many present-day conservatives would endorse any, much less all, of those programs?
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"For the first time in my life, I'm actually afraid that we Americans can forget who we are as a people and succumb to historical amnesia," says Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and author of Alexander Hamilton. When that happens, when the historical record is scrubbed clean, Trump or any demagogue can come along and write upon it whatever he wants, says Chernow.
Trump's implausible coalition includes the Religious Right. We need look no further than the evangelical community to see how expediency trumps (pun intended) values. "Nearly four-fifths of white evangelical voters plan to cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump despite his multiple marriages, lack of piety and inconsistency on the issues they care about most," according to a Pew Research survey reported by The Times.
I'm not angry at Trump. I'm angry at the electorate, at the stupid, self-centered, uninformed, xenophobic, even racist, ignorant, personality-driven voters willing to turn this country over to a man who, as McCullough points out, lacks any of the four key qualities President Dwight D. Eisenhower said a leader must possess: character, ability, responsibility and experience.
The Jadeed Voices Initiative is a special project by the Muslim Writers Collective which offers a platform to reflect on our faith and the diversity among us by highlighting the exigency of promoting nuanced, multifaceted perspectives. We will be sharing one narrative a day from July 8-19. For more information about this initiative, please visit our author page, and follow the Muslim Writers Collective on Facebook and Twitter.
There we were, sitting in my old high school auditorium, literally at the edge of our seats as the lights went down.
"Lights up on Washington Heights, up at the break of day..."
The opening number of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights rang across that quiet, dark auditorium. The entire audience was silent as they absorbed every aspect of the stage. The entire audience save for two. My older brother sat next to me, our bodies moving effortlessly to the blended sounds of In the Heights -- Latin music, hip-hop, and rap. We recited along to every line nearly as perfectly as our youngest brother, Muhammad, who was on stage as the leading role of Usnavi.
"I am Usnavi and you prob'ly never heard my name/
Reports of my fame are greatly exaggerated/
Exacerbated by the fact that my syntax/
Is highly complicated cuz I emigrated/
From the single greatest little place in the Caribbean/
Dominican Republic/"
This play was made for someone like Muhammad. He grew up on the southwest side of Houston where he spent his afternoons rap battling people at parking lots. His rapid command of rhythm and rhyme fit flawlessly to the character of Usnavi. But as I sat with my older brother, Abdullah, in the audience, I knew this play went beyond that stage...In the Heights touched our hearts in a way that only storytelling could. Throughout the play, Usnavi struggles with his identity as he tries to wrap around the paradox of being an immigrant living in America. By all accounts, he is a foreigner...yet by those same accounts, he is American. For Usnavi, the question of where is "home" transcends the limitations of physical tangibility. No, the question of "home" is a question that yearns for culture, for roots, for family.
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As I sat in the audience that night, I knew that my brothers and I were the only people in the room who understood how amazing it was that someone had grabbed our emotions, our thoughts, our lives and put them into song after song after song. Just like Usnavi, we struggled with our identities. We struggled with what it means to be an immigrant. We struggled with what it means to be a minority. We struggled with what it means to be a minority within minorities. We were Muslim-Indonesian-Americans living in a city whose Muslim populations were predominantly Arabs or Desis. We didn't belong to any specific community: not among our schoolmates, not among our faith group, not among our city. For us, "home" transcended the limitations of physical tangibility. Seeing my baby brother as Usnavi was witnessing a manifestation of our internal battles. Muhammad would later win a Tommy Tune Best Actor award, Houston's highest distinction for high school actors. His Tommy Tune would then take him to the National High School Musical Theatre Awards (The Jimmy Awards). At the Jimmy Awards, Muhammad would then win the Spirit of the Jimmy Award by unanimous decision. For now, however, it became time for Abdullah and me to ball our fists while pushing back tears as Nina Rosario's song played.
"When I was a child I stayed wide awake/
Climbed to the highest place/
On every fire escape/
Restless to climb/
I got every scholarship/
Saved every dollar/
The first to go to college/
How do I tell them why/
I'm coming back home?/
With my eyes on the horizon./"
Failure. Poverty. Shame. This play was showing us the hardships of our lives. I am the first in my family to attend an American university. I lost my scholarship within a semester of college. I, too, made it out of a life of continued struggle and failed. I cried. My older brother next to me grabbed my head. Not long after this, he too experienced the reality seeping through the stage lights when Kevin Rosario (Nina's father) held his emotional solo.
"Today my daughter's home and I am useless.../
I will not be the reason/
That my family can't succeed/
I will do what it takes/
They'll have everything they need/
Or all my work, all my life/
Everything I've sacrificed will have been useless/"
Helplessness. Circumstances. Inadequacies. This was our family. We were watching the downfall that came with daring to dream. How many families had watched these scenes through tear-soaked faces? What uncertainties had those families seen within these scenes? How many parents saw themselves in Kevin Rosario, or how many Nina's were there in the audience? The only thing that was certain that night was the impact Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights had on my brothers and me. We listened to our own cries within those melodies - children of immigrants who wanted nothing more but to live up to the legacy that our parents had so graciously laid out for us. We saw our own memories of years of struggle embedded in the choreography of that stage. We were failures. We were helpless. But that was no longer who we wanted to be. That night my brothers and I understood what it meant to work towards a legacy.
Lin-Manuel Miranda went from producer to producer trying to make his In the Heights story come to life. Rejection after rejection, Miranda kept true to the story he wanted to tell. He recalls the encounter he had with a "really big deal producer" who felt it necessary to add more "high stakes" to Nina's story. "Perhaps she could come back home pregnant," the producer had said. It seemed losing a scholarship wasn't "high stakes" enough. However, Miranda rejected this producer's offer to bring his musical to fruition. Miranda knew what type of story he wanted to tell; he felt no need to compromise his show for the sake of getting ahead, or in actuality, for the sake of securing more money. Barely out of college, Miranda could have easily allowed his story to be altered, so he could begin reaping the benefits of a "high stakes" production. But that was not how Lin-Manuel Miranda wanted his legacy to be. That was not the story he wanted to tell.
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Proper, quality storytelling allowed for my brothers and I, men of Asian descent, to feel as if a story like In the Heights, a story heavily rooted in Latino culture, belonged to us. Similarly, there are stories within the Muslim communities that also leave a tremendous level of impact within the hearts of those who experience them. Lin-Manuel Miranda held on to an incredible amount of urgency when telling the stories he told. Imagine how we, as a Muslim community, can change the course of a nation if we mixed Miranda's sense of urgency with our own unaltered stories and personal conviction.
sen. hillary clinton speaks at ...
The theoretical notion of "intersectionality," as originally articulated by Kimberle Crenshaw in her 1991 groundbreaking Stanford Law Review essay, was recently revisited in her 2015 Washington Post essay "Why Intersectionality Can't Wait." In this essay, Crenshaw makes a case for using intersectionality, as a framework, for analyzing racial, sexual and economic justice--the very issues that are at the forefront of this year's Presidential Election. Crenshaw states: "intersectionality was a lived reality before it became a term."
At the end of the day, when individuals are supporting, or not supporting a political candidate, our voting choices are informed by just that: our lived realities. As a critical scholar, my work is informed by theories of intersectional feminism(s)--understanding how categories of race, class, gender and sexuality, within institutional structures, affect bodies. What is clear in adopting an intersectional feminist approach to discussing societies most pressing issues, is that one must attempt to understand how some categories are more salient, and interact with other identity categories. However, when one analyses the media framing of the current Presidential election, this nuanced analysis is lacking. Perhaps most clearly is this "lack" seen in the dominant discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton's bid to shatter the glass ceiling, and become the first female President of the United States.
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Let's look at, for example, some of the recent quotes pertaining to female voters' decisions as to whether or not they should support Hillary's candidacy. Madeline Albright, when asked about Hillary as our first female President, remarked: there is a "special place in hell" for women who do not support Hillary for President. Gloria Steinem, appearing on the "Real Time with Bill Maher" show, when attempting to explain why young women are not supporting Hillary for President explained that women "are going where the boys are, and the boys are with Sanders." Bernie Sanders supporters also invoked gender as a monolithic category by accusing female Clinton supporters of being "vagina voters," swayed by "shared anatomy, rather than their candidate's qualifications and positions." These discourses, which are repeated widely, among all mainstream media outlets, reflect a narrow and inadequate understanding of gender, in relation to other identity categories (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality) and institutional structures of power in contemporary society. The centering of gender, simultaneously de-centers other critical categories of analysis that are critical to the populous voting bloc, in decision-making processes, and renders other, more critical explanations for Hillary's "women problem," invisible.
First, we must interrogate the premise that Hillary does, in fact, have a "women problem," when it comes to female voters. When analyzing the most recent credible presidential polls, to find evidence as to how Hillary is polling with the female voting block, when placed head-to-head with the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, Hillary holds strong favorable margins across conservative, liberal and independent polls. Even the conservative Fox News poll has her at a crushing +22, amongst all female voters, and ahead with women in key battleground states.
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However, when you break the polling down to young female voters, differences across those aforementioned intersectional categories, begin to emerge. For example, according to recent polls, in relation to Hillary's candidacy, a generational gap amongst female voters does indeed exist. Many more middle-aged, or older women (30-49) support Hillary, versus the millennial generation (18-29) of young female voters, who, up until Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, were zealot Bernie-or-bust supporters. In fact, in recent polls before Bernie backed Hillary had Sanders leading Clinton among young voters, overall, by as much as 60 points, while Clinton loses young women by about 30 points. The task now then, for the Hillary camp, is to attempt to understand, between now and November, these reported ideological voting disconnects, in order to become the first Female President. While Hillary's exigence is in securing the White House, my interest lies in applying intersectional understandings of feminisms in order to offer insight into how categories of race, class, gender and sexuality are embodied within the mainstream political system.
Some pundits have claimed that the female generational gap amongst potential Hillary supporters is due to young women not viewing themselves, or identifying as feminists. However, these claims are disputed by a national survey conducted in January of this year, by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey found that 6 in 10 women and one-third of men call themselves a "feminist," or "strong feminist," with roughly 7 in 10 of each reporting feminist movement as "empowering." Moreover, when we look at young female voters, feminism, as a category, is strong. For instance, 63% of women who fall between the ages of 18-34 identified as "strongly feminists" or "feminist."
But this still begs the question, why the gender divide? First, we must remember that there are many different types of feminisms. This poll does not ask respondents to list what type of feminism they ascribe to. In addition, feminism is not just a label. It is an identity and an analytic category used to make sense of lived experiences. As such, young women, as they are just beginning their lives, do not have as much life experience in relation to things such as discrimination on the job market, or childcare--issues that have been staples for a Hillary candidacy, for decades. Therefore, in addition to a disconnect between Hillary's articulated gender challenges for women, issues of economic justice, which poll as extremely important to young female voters, was completely dominated by Sanders. Indeed, Bernie's strongly articulated tropes such as "the 1%," "Wall Street greed," and "corporate corruption" all went in the Bernie column. Now that Bernie has dropped out of the race, Hillary's platform must embrace the economic concerns of young women/women of color.
The evidence for the necessity of embracing intersectional feminism to understand voting patterns is further evidenced by "GenForward"--a survey project enacted by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago, with the Associated Press, Center for Public Affairs Research. The first-of-its-kind polling pays particular attention to the voices of young adults of color, "highlighting how race and ethnicity shape the opinions of the country's most diverse generation."
Hillary's campaign is beginning to see the necessity of this more nuanced analysis. Recently, in fact, her team has hired three former Sanders aides to spearhead an effort to bridge this gap: "Clinton has made moves in recent days to attract some of Sander's loyal young supporters, including unveiling a college affordability plan that would make in-state tuition free for families making $125,000 or less per year. Sanders proposed free tuition at public higher education institutions for all, a plan supported by three-quarters of young adults, according to the survey."
Here, we see a move beyond gender, to attempt to address economic justice. We see a (perhaps) not so subtle shift of Hillary's departure of her comfort zone discourses of "battles of the sexes," which have its roots in second wave feminism, from Hillary's generation, in an attempt to catch up to critical discussions which have emerged, of late, within popular culture--discourses on racial and economic justice, in relation to privilege.
So, yes, Hillary would be our first female president. But theories of intersectionality and feminism seek to understand what type of female president? When that question is answered, we are left with the stark image of a privileged, White, rich straight Woman. Viewed through this lens, not only is Clinton's gender not enough to secure the young women's vote it, in fact, may be a negative. One need only examine the multitude of tweets regarding Hilary's bid to make herstory. Hashtags such as #I'mnotwithher #Notmyfeminist, etc., function to conjure these critical limitations, of her identity, into reality. The limits of gender, as a driving category, are brought to bear when they intersect with her record on issues that permeate the categories of race, class and sexuality. Issues such as transphobia, the prison pipeline, imperial wars, to name a few, are not only categories of non-support, but also categories that function as warrants for claims, and campaigns against.
Young voters are also disenfranchised with the system, itself, that propels Hillary as a candidate. As reported by GenForward: "Indeed, 7 out of 10 young voters, including Blacks, Whites, Asian and Hispanics [sic] state that they are unsatisfied with the race between Clinton and Trump and want the option of a third party candidate."
In sum, I contend, not only does intersectional feminism offer an understanding of young female voters' rejections of Hillary as a candidate, it also offers insight into the rejection of the political system itself. As Crenshaw, herself, reminds us: "intersectionality is not just about identities but about the institutions [emphasis added] that use identity to exclude and privilege."
After EU-member states agreed on a Commission proposal, the EU will invest 263 million in key gas and electricity projects across the Union with primary focus on the Baltic Sea region.
The European Commission announced on Friday (15 July) in a press release that the 28 member states agreed to invest 263 million in trans-European energy infrastructure projects. The biggest share of the support will be destined to the Baltic Sea region to help the expansion of the gas infrastructure, meanwhile the other part of the investment will support the electricity sector across the European Union.
Under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) funding support programme, the EU was allocated a total of 5.35 billion to trans-European energy infrastructure projects for the period of 2014-2020. The programme selects projects that aim to increase energy security, connect isolated EU countries to the Union's energy network, as well as ensure affordable, secure and sustainable energy for the member states. The proposals must be 'projects in common interest' in order to be eligible for a grant, which means that once completed, the projects ensure significant benefits for at least two EU member states and improve supply security and reduction of CO2 emissions.
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"Well-connected energy infrastructure is essential to achieving the Energy Union. This EU support will help fill existing gaps in energy infrastructure, putting us on the path to a truly connected European energy market. This is necessary to strengthen the security of energy supply and a more efficient use of the energy resources and integration of renewables into the grid", Miguel Arias Canete, European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy said.
In the gas sector, CEF grants will cover the building of the Balticconnector, which will be the first gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland. The interconnector aims to end Finland's heavy energy dependence from Russia, which has been the country's single natural gas exporter since 1974.
Moreover, a 18.6 million EU support will be destined to increase the works around the Estonian-Latvian interconnection. "The enhancement of Estonia-Latvia interconnection will enable better access to storage in Latvia, ensure a more diverse natural gas transmission network in the Baltic Sea region and further enable the Balticconnector project", the statement says.
Apart from investing in gas projects, the funding programme will also focus on the electricity sector. The list of electricity related projects, among others, will include the construction of a new 100 km electricity line between Dobrudja and Burgas in Bulgaria with an EU support of 29.9 million.
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In addition, a 125,010 EU support will be given to develop a preparatory study for a secure and reliable operation of the Baltic states' power system and a 243,250 grant for another study on the gas interconnection at Nea Messimvria in Greece.
Under Connecting Europe Facility - Energy in 2016 a total of 800 million available for grants. The second call for proposals for this year with an indicative budget of 600 million is currently ongoing and will close on 8 November.
All in all, the CEF funding support programme is a very interesting and promising initiative and in the long-term could be a real game-changer in the EU's energy sector. However, even though there are plenty of grants available for all member states, it's no surprise that the current programme is primarily focusing on the Baltics, aiming to reduce the region's heavy energy dependence from the Kremlin.
This is a Black Lives Matter Banner in Charlotte, NC, November 2015. Camera - Canon 7D Mark II, Lens - Canon EF 200mm f/2L IS USM
I must have watched the video of Alton Sterling's son cry on the internet five times when it first appeared on my Twitter feed. I could not help but watch it over again, and try to understand what just happened and why.
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To see Cameron Sterling become the man of the house so suddenly, and in such a terrible way, was heartbreaking. I wanted to be one of those men patting him on the back, embracing him and offering some kind of comfort.
This young man would remember Tuesday, July 5, 2016 not only as the day that he lost his father, but the day when he would never trust a police officer again.
Still, after watching the video a few more times I found myself trying to understand the "fear." That fear of a darker or lighter skin, that seems so ingrained.
Is it ancestral? Is it taught? Or is it something more?
I waited and watched the barrage of news coverage, the media becoming concerned with Black lives once more and the condolences that followed. All of the dedicated Facebook and Twitter statuses that tried to rally people together, offer some bit of wisdom and calm.
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I struggled to find the right words to articulate what I was feeling that day. To say nothing more than that there is a pit in my stomach would not be enough. I am hurt, I am sad and I am fearful. Fearful, not just of looking at someone who looks like me the wrong way but fearful that one day I could find myself in similar situations that echo across the country now. I feel, at times, like an endangered species.
There are good police officers out there, I know some of them. I will continue to respect them and honor their profession. It just gets harder, at times like these, to believe that those who are sworn to protect are actually good.
As I watched the events unfold of Philando Castile, watching him slowly die as an officer pointed a gun at him. I found myself again trying to make some sense of what was going on. There has to be an underlying reason, an explanation as to why African-Americans are always the victims.
I feel so lost at times and find myself yearning for so much more than a simple answer.
I love my people, I care for them and it's so hard to continue watching them being taken away from me and others. I feel myself becoming numb as shootings and the death of unarmed African-American men become a daily way of life.
I have also become numb to the vigils, the ceremonies, and the press conferences of those who promise repeatedly that "no stone will be left unturned." I'm tired of the celebrities who come out and say a quote or two about what should be done or what we have to do. Yet, months pass by and nothing truly happens. And after a while, the numbness I feel just becomes pain.
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And that pain did not subside when learning about the Dallas police officers who were killed and wounded. That type of action does nothing for African Americans, it does nothing for the cause and there is no justice behind it. Chanting "F--- the police" does not show who we are, and we are something much more.
I understand the anger and frustration, but some of it is misguided. Some of it is lost in translation. And it will continue to be until there is an understanding of "the struggle" that African-Americans, all different shades, face daily.
While it seems like we are at our darkest hour, I like to believe that there is still hope. A way to unify amongst the struggle and ignite ideas instead of ways to inflict more pain.
We have just a couple of weeks before we leave for our trip to Iceland. This is a trip that I have been dreaming about and planning for the last few months. I haven't even finished up some of my travelogues from last summer but I'm excited to write this planning post for Iceland. Like most other trips we have a tightly packed itinerary of chasing waterfalls, snowmobile rides and road trips planned. The family leaves me to the planning and boy are they in for a treat this trip - Iceland is like being inside a book of adventures! Where else can you see geysers and hot spring areas, majestic glaciers, dormant volcanoes, a zillion powerful waterfalls in one trip.. not to mention all the awesome food.
Here's how we'll be spending our week in Iceland, whilst getting in touch with our adventurous side!
REYKJAVIK
Pick up our rental car from Hertz and hit the road running at 6am after some coffee!
We will be spending three nights at the Holt Hotel, a charming and intimate 4 star hotel in central Reykjavik. They have the country's largest private art collection and I'm looking forward to seeing some of it
Visit the Hallgrimskirkja church with stunning views of the city from the top
Shop on Laugavegur Street
Exploring the Reykjavik City - See some of the museums, galleries, the Harpa concert hall, the Sun Voyager sculpture and some vibrant street art
Hotdogs and chocolate milk at Bjarins Beztu
Reykjavik has an awesome coffee culture, so looking forward to some good cuppa
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NORTHERN REGION
We will be taking the domestic airline to the North to Akureyri for a day trip, we will see the incredible Dettifoss and Godafoss waterfalls. The tour itself is organized by SBA
Visit Akureyri and the see the whale watching hub of Husavik
We might not have time to relax and enjoy the Myvatn Nature Baths but atleast we get to see them
WESTERN REGION
We will be doing a day trip to the West Iceland to Snfellsnes peninsula from Reykjavik
Lunch at Borgarnes
Drive to Grundarfjordur and admire the mountain, Kirkjufell
We hope that we will have time to get to Stykkisholmur, made famous by Walter Mitty (from the movie Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which sparked our wanderlust for Iceland)
GOLDEN CIRCLE
Drive the famous Golden Circle route, visiting Thingvellir National Park, Geysir, and Gullfoss
Stay overnight at here, Too bad there won't be any Northern lights this time of the year. This would have been the perfect hotel to see it from.
Ride the adorably shaggy Icelandic horse at the one of the smaller farms at Solhestar
Stop for Icecream at the Efsti farm
SOUTHERN REGION
Visit Seljalandsfoss waterfall and Skogafoss waterfall
Ride the Snowmobile on the Myrdalsjokull, an icecap covering one of Iceland's largest volcano, Katla. We will be able to explore and experience the wilderness and the breathtaking views over South Iceland on this ride promises Arcanum
Check out the cliffs of Dyrholaey, black sand beaches of Reynisfjara near Vik
Stay 2 nights at Icelandair Hotel Vik
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On Day 2 of the Southern adventure
Visit the Svartifoss waterfall at Vatnajokull National Park
Glacier hike near Skaftafell Vatnajokull National Park with Icelandic Mountain Guides This walk will takes us on to the Svinafellsjokull glacier tongue
Get upclose and personal with the icebergs in Jokulsarlon in the glacier lagoon
BACK TO KEFLAVIK
Explore the region around Reykjanes
Visit the sulfates area at Krisuvik, Lake Kleifarvatn, Continental bridge
Visit the Blue Lagoon and have dinner at Lava
Stay in Keflavik overnight
The next morning, we head to Denmark for a few days before going home.
These travel plans aren't set in stone. We are always flexible and might change things up along the way. So if you have any tips or suggestions for us, do let us know. We won't get to the Eastfjords and Westfjords this trip but it will be an excuse to return to Iceland.
WHAT TO PACK
As such, our packing list will be a bit different than for a visit across Continental Europe. Contrary to preconceptions you might have, you will not need a heavy winter coat and snowshoes when visiting Iceland in the summer. We will need some rainproof gear and some warm layers since the weather changes considerably based on the activity. Here is what would be in our bag
Waterproof or quick-drying pants, ski pants
Hiking shoes
Thermal underwear, light jackets and some light sweaters
Gloves, scarfs and hats
GPS device for the road trip
Camera gear and backpack to carry it all
Swimsuit, we won't be swimming at the beach, but in Iceland's geothermal pools
Sunglasses and sunscreen are essential in the summer with the constant low-hanging sun and reflective terrain
Iceland is on 220-volt system, so we will bring a converter to plug in any devices, such as a cellphone charger, hair styling tools ( We have a teenage girl travelling with us )
Some non-perishable snacks since their prices are heavily taxed and inflated in Iceland
A sleeping mask to help sleep, since the sun only sets for a few hours in Summer
A FEW PHRASES IN ICELANDIC
Icelandic looks very formidable with its strange characters "" and "" and many accented vowels and multisyllabic words, not sure if we would need these but always good to have it handy.
Hello. Hallo. (Ha-low)
Hello (informal, to a man). Sll. (Sight-l.)Hello (informal, to a woman). Sl. (Sigh-l.)Hi. H. (High.)
How are you? Hva segiru gott? (Kvadth sey-ir-thu goht?)
Fine, thank you. Eg segi allt gott, akka er fyrir. (Yeh sey-i atlt goht, thah-ka thyer fi-rir.)
What is your name? Hva heitiru? (Kvath hey-tir-thu?)
My name is ______ . Eg heiti ______ . (Yeh hey-ti _____ .)
Nice to meet you. Komdu sll, (to a man). (Komdu sight-l.)Komdu sl, (to a woman). (Komdu sighl.) Please. Gjoru svo vel, (to one person). (Gyur-thuh svo vel.)or Geri i svo vel, (to many people). (Gyer-ith thith svo vel.)
Thank you. akka er fyrir. (Thah-ka thyer fi-rir.)
Thanks (informal) Takk. (Tahk.)
I can't speak Icelandic [well]. Eg tala ekki islensku [svo vel]. (Yeh ta-la eh-ki ees-len-skuh [svo vel].)
Do you speak English? Talaru ensku? (Ta-lar-thu en-sku?)
Help! Hjalp! (Hya-oolp!)
Goodbye, (informal). Bless. (Bless; often said twice, "Bless bless".)
Brazilian acting President Michel Temer gives the thumbs up during a meeting with mayors at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, on July 13, 2016. / AFP / EVARISTO SA (Photo credit should read EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images)
If suspended president Dilma Rousseff's administration was a disaster in managing the economy, through its baleful practices and its slipshod treatment of minorities, Michel Temer's administration, supported by a coalition, has found a way to be even worse, despite only being in office two months.
The actions that the Temer administration have taken couldn't be more contradictory. In the face of pressure from protesters, those who rallied against Dilma, the Worker's Party (PT) and corruption, Temer declared that he would put together a ministry of "notables," but he did the exact opposite: He invited various figures who have been investigated in their own scandals.
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Additionally, Temer has named allies of suspended Deputy Eduardo Cunha, possibly the most corrupt politician in the history of Brazil, to key government positions, including the appointment of Andre Moura, himself accused of attempted murder -- among other things -- to the position of Government Leader in the Chamber of Deputies.
In the economic arena, Temer has decided to increase the salaries of judicial civil servants. In some cases these increases have been as high as 40 percent, an unfit measure in the face of the dire economic crisis facing the country.
Speaking on social security reform, Temer, who himself retired at the age of 55, stipulated a new minimum age for retirement: 70. This, in a country where the life expectancy in some states doesn't even reach 70.
On Friday July 8th, two new storm clouds hit the front pages of newsstands. First, a declaration by Robson Andrade, president of the National Confederation of Industry (CNI), at an event which included the attendance of interim President Temer. Andrade stated that "France, which currently allows 36 [hours in a work week], has now passed legislation to enable the work week to reach up to 80 hours and a work day up to 12 (...) We need to be open to make these changes."
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Note: In France, the referenced legislation now makes it possible for a work week to reach at maximum 60 hours; the president of the CNI added 20 hours to this figure independently. The change in worker's rights laws in Baudelaire's homeland has stirred up large and constant protests, generating serious social instability and lowering the already uncomely popularity numbers of French president Francois Hollande.
The other storm cloud surfaced during the same event when Michel Temer declared before an audience of businessmen: "In your businesses and in other business which may someday be connected with yours, it would be good to give preference to those people who have been educated abroad, because, whether we want it so or not, it may be that these workers come equipped with technological knowledge which they learned abroad."
In a moment in which stories chronicling the rise of unemployment continue to fly off the presses, recommending business leaders to give preference to people who have been educated abroad is irresponsible. Principally because those who have been educated abroad, in the majority of cases, are people who are already in better financial conditions than those educated at home.
The Temer administration has been marked more and more by one word: retrogression. Its allies are the most backward in Brazilian politics. With Michel Temer, the Bullet, Bible and Beef brigade (BBB) has continued to gain voice and sway in the Chamber of Deputies. The current situation is so bizarre that a general who lauds the coup of 1964 only narrowly lost out on the nomination for president of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).
But apparently the interim president doesn't much care about this torrent of bad news. After everything, as if the rest wasn't enough, he has been an active participant in attempting to avoid the suspension and expulsion of suspended Deputy Eduardo Cunha, with whom he has been friends for decades, from office. And the most incredible part of it is that, even with all these headlines piling up, those who headed out to the street, those who beat pots and pans to protest corruption, have simply disappeared.
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It's true that Dilma Rousseff and the Worker's Party have committed unforgivable errors and have contributed to the deepening political crisis in which the country now finds itself. However, Rousseff didn't commit a crime which deserved to be punished with her suspension and the possible termination of her presidency. At the current moment, the best way forward for Brazil is the return of President Dilma, even if she returns only to negotiate with Temer the resignation of both politicians and call for new elections.
Terminating the Dilma presidency and maintaining Temer as president would engender the worst types of retrogressive politics imaginable for the future of this country. In this moment, certain sectors of this society look back with nostalgia at the authoritarian regime of the past. These sectors see in the Temer administration a chance to return to a certain time and place, which, through long decades of progressive social struggles and conquests, they lost.
That's why it's understandable that many critics of the Dilma administration cry, "Down with Temer."
And it looks like very soon they will be crying, "Come back to us Dilma."
Egypt, finding itself beleaguered by tragedy, debt, unrest, and political isolation, and a demographic emergency with a population of 90 million people, has decided that its interest requires restoring its regional role through the Palestinian-Israeli gateway, especially after the Turkish-Israeli reconciliation that gave Ankara a stronger say in Gaza via Hamas, directly on the border with Egypt. Thus the Egyptian FM Sameh Shukri flew to Jerusalem this week, meeting with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu who invited him to dinner in his home. The sudden but significant visit drew a lot of criticism. Since President Sisi took power in Egypt, the bilateral relationship between Egypt and Israel has been excellent. Informed US sources even say they are at an unprecedented level of coordination, surpassing even what existed under former President Mubarak. According to reports following Shukri's visit, preparations are underway for a visit by Netanyahu to Cairo, for the first time. The reasons behind Egyptian-Israeli rapprochement are many, and include partnership in fighting terrorism in Sinai. However, the prospects for an agreement on the Palestinian question are very slim, bearing in mind that President Sisi wants to revive the Arab Peace Initiative adopted by the Beirut Arab League Summit more than a decade ago; and that Netanyahu wants to amend this initiative to remove the clauses related to withdrawal to the borders of 1967 and the fate of Jerusalem. This raises questions about what Netanyahu intends to bring with him to Cairo, if the visit takes place. Opponents of the Egyptian demarche, which they say is cosmetic, question the timing of the visit and the rapprochement, at a time when the campaign to boycott Israel is growing and putting pressure on Netanyahu to accept the two-state solution, end the occupation, and stop settlement building. Supporters of the Egyptian efforts, which have been coordinated with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, cite the benefits of saving and supporting the Palestinian Authority at a time when it has been practically excluded at the decision of Turkey-Israel-Hamas, three parties that converge when it comes to weakening and paralyzing the Palestinian Authority. They also argue that with the systematic retreat of major powers and the UN represented by the Quartet, and with the French initiative emptied of its substance at the Security Council, it was necessary for an Arab player with Egypt's weight to make a move to ensure Arabs retain their role in the Palestinian issue and stop the nearly irreversible loss of further Palestinian land.The Arab summit convening in Mauritania next week will not issue a resolution at the level of the peace initiative on the Palestinian issue like the Beirut summit. Yet the summit must not be an occasion to paper over challenges, conflicts, and crises. The Arab region is in crisis, and the regional unrest is serious and dangerous. Europe is busy with Brexit and who might be next in leaving the European Union and its very fate. The US is preoccupied with its elections, fear of terrorism, and racial tensions. Russia is feigning greatness while suffering severe economic problems, and is drowning in a war with radical Islamism even as it is surrounded by five Muslim-majority republics. Turkey is stumbling. Iran is correcting course albeit slowly, as it sets eyes on the regional and international maps, reading adverse developments despite its gains in Iraq and Syria.Egypt looked at its surroundings and international equations, and judged that rapprochement with Israel at this juncture serves its interests, at least in the point of view of President Sisi's administration. The official stated reasons are that Egypt is concerned by the failure of the Quartet, and decided to act by proposing an initiative to circumvent failure. Moreover, Cairo judged that the French initiative for an international peace conference on Palestine will not lead to any results as long as the US is merely present rather than leading or sponsoring such a conference.Egyptian diplomacy has considered the French initiative to be a ploy, especially as it hijacked all efforts at the Security Council, including a draft resolution that was meant to reaffirm the two-state solution and the implementation of resolution 242, bearing in mind that it was the implementation of that resolution that had led to serious negotiations between Egypt and Jordan, and Israel and the eventual peace treaties.Sisi's proposals were not successful because they appeared incoherent, aimed at obstruction or one-upmanship. He spoke of a "warm peace" with Israel without offering anything specific about the requirements and foundations for it. He sent his FM to Jerusalem, which Egypt refuses to recognize as the capital of Israel, drawing ire as Shukri's actions in Jerusalem was seen as undermining "national red lines". He objected to the failure of the international community to act in the UN Security Council, but he deliberately ignored the fact that Egypt's membership of the council allows him to take serious action if he truly wished so, proposing coherent and important initiatives. He bypassed the issue of settlement at a time when the momentum for boycott in Europe and elsewhere against Israeli settlement policy was beginning to reach critical mass. Sisi moved to normalize relations with Israel on the basis of reviving Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, but his actions have not followed a roadmap or a mechanism.Therefore, the Egyptian president's calculation must be domestic in the most part, as well as related to ties with neighboring countries and the United States. The coordination of the visit with the Palestinian Authority is significant. But it is also true that the motive of Egypt's concerted efforts was Turkey's rapprochement with Israel and the mandate Hamas gave to Ankara to sponsor its interests on the border with Egypt. This touched on an issue that is at the heart of Egyptian national interest and thus had to be confronted or challenged, with an eye trained on the relationship between Turkey and Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the implications for the Sisi administration.The Egyptian factors related to national security that led to partnership with Israel include a security one related to the growth of terrorism in Sinai. There, according to observers familiar with the issue, there is growing Egyptian-Israeli coordination, including in surveillance and intelligence, to hunt down terrorists. This is of paramount importance to the Egyptian government, which finds itself threatened in its soft underbelly in Sinai as well as Gaza. In this context, Cairo has felt it necessary to try to coax Israel away from Turkey and Hamas.The other consideration behind Egyptian-Israeli rapprochement is that Cairo believes the road to Washington's heart goes through Israel and the latter's influence on Congress and the media in the US, both of which are primed to criticize Sisi's administration's violations of human rights, freedom of expression, and the freedom of the press. There is growing resentment against Egypt's deportation and prosecution of journalists, and repression and detention of dissidents and critics. According to one expert on Egyptian Sisi-era politics, Cairo sees Israel as a potential defender of Egypt in the US arena.All this does not invalidate the fact that Egypt has an honest desire to see a breakthrough in the Palestinian-Israeli track, that would not be at the expense of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people. Egypt can be a sponsor of inter-Palestinian relations if Israel allows it to do so, which requires for Netanyahu to forgo the de-facto partnership with Turkey and Hamas behind it, and the ball is in his court now.Egypt is able to be the main engine in the revival of Arab-Israeli negotiations leading up to a comprehensive peace that would save Israel itself from its current siege mentality. And again, the ball is in Netanyahu's court. If Netanyahu believes his country is an oasis of stability in a desert of turbulence in the Middle East, perhaps the Israeli people should alert him to the fact that this is a just a mirage. Indeed, Israel in the long run can never be a normal country in the Middle East if its survival depends on occupation, unrest, and instability.President Sisi will not be able to meet the demands of the Israeli prime minister, if the latter exaggerates the amendments he demands to the Arab Peace Initiative, by asking for removing the clause of an Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 1967, with a willingness to adapt to the requirements of the Palestinian - Israeli negotiations such as land swaps. Sisi will not be able to fulfill Netanyahu's dream of removing Jerusalem from the initiative, no matter how many visits Egyptian officials make to Jerusalem. Sisi will not give Netanyahu a chance to amend the initiative, which offers Arab recognition of Israel if Netanyahu proves his desire for peace and the two-state solution. But if Netanyahu is just playing games, then both leaders are in a quandary.Egypt is right in trying to stop the farce of the Quartet. This farce, represented by none other than Tony Blair until recently, continues to stoop lower and lower. Its latest report was a scandalous testimony of its bankruptcy, as it described settlements as an obstacle to negotiations, while international resolutions say settlements are illegal and illegitimate, and while settlement policy imposes a fair accompli after the other severely undermining the two-state solution. Civil society's campaign to boycott Israel as long as it continues its settlements is the cry of a strong conscience in the face of the moral failure of the Quartet and its members, the US, Russia, EU, and UN.But where is the Arab strategy to address this? What Arab strategy is there to deal with Israel's fait accompli under Netanyahu, as he proceeds to efface any remaining Palestinian rights? Yes, inter-Palestinian divisions are responsible for a large part of the current situation, but that does not negate Arab and international responsibility.Israel may appear today reassured while the region gets torn apart. However, this anomalous situation will not bring long-term reassurance for Israel, despite what Netanyahu might think. Here, there is a responsibility that must be shouldered by the Israeli people, who boast of their democratic rights and the ability to correct course.For its part, Iran too is exposing itself and its claims that Palestine is a priority for it. Like Turkey, Iran uses the Palestinian issue to further its own agenda, and exploits Arab absence from the Palestinian issue.This leaves ISIS, al-Qaeda, and similar groups that have destabilized the Arab region and contributed to its wholesale destruction and fragmentation. These groups are doing a great service to Turkey, Iran, and Israel at the expense of the Arab countries and peoples.If the Arab summit in Mauritania finds itself ready to think seriously about the state of the Arab region and its surroundings, then it must lead the Arabs to stop burying their heads in the sand. The Arabs, led by Egypt, must stop papering over reality and the fateful actions it requires them to do. Translated from Arabic by Karim Traboulsi http://www.alhayat.com/Opinion/Raghida-Dergham/16606456/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D9%85%D9%8A----%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%84%D8%A8-%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%B4%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%8A-%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A%D9%84
Qandeel Baloch, was a 26-year-old social media celebrity who had boldly decided to live "outside the box." The box in this case being the parameters laid out by the majority of men in Pakistan dictating how much freedom a woman can have in their staunchly patriarchal society. She courageously pushed those parameters by publicly commenting on and challenging the restrictions placed upon women. Qandeel's behavior was tame by our standards, but in the prohibitive society in which she lived, she was a true lightning rod. She dared to rebuke women's subjugated position in Pakistani society and she was murdered by her own brother for doing so. He said that he "killed for honor" and has "no regrets," because "girls are meant to stay at home."
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recently released a report noting that honor killings were on the rise. 1,096 Pakistani women were killed in honor-related attacks in 2015, which amounts to three killings per day. Globally, it is estimated that 20,000 women are killed in the name of honor each year. And these are just the reported cases.
Honor killing is a tribal custom wherein the honor of a village, a tribe, or a family lies in the body of a woman. As long as she follows the dictates of her family and abides by societal rules, she is considered noble. As soon as a woman decides to exercise freedom of thought or action, she is considered to have crossed the line - a line dictated by male members of her family. Once this happens, she is a marked woman, forever tainted and blood must be drawn in order to restore the family's honor.
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In 2016, the Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won the Academy Award for her film, "Girl in the River," a documentary about honor killings. Obaid-Chinoy has called for an Anti-Honor Killing bill. However, this legislation will be difficult to pass in a country where according to a law based on Sharia, the family of a victim is allowed to forgive the killer. And, since most often the killers are part of the family as in Baloch's case, relatives rarely even register a complaint. It's a sickeningly vicious cycle. Other members of the family forgive the killer and he goes free, thus signaling to other men that they too can take lives without risk of prosecution.
In the Baloch case, almost as horrific as the actual murder was the social media reaction in which scores of Pakistanis applauded her killing and wrote that Baloch indeed needed to die as she was a 'dishonorable' woman. These killers go unpunished and they don't even experience stigma in a society that considers their actions not only justified, but righteous.
Baloch had done the unthinkable. She had exposed the hypocrisy of Pakistani society, spoken out against abuse at the hands of her former husband and had the audacity to declare that she was master of her own body.
She also exposed the double standards of the Mullahs but perhaps her biggest mistake in the eyes of those who decided to snuff out her life, was the fact that she stood against patriarchy and misogyny in Pakistan. For this she gave her life.
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We in the West are not immune to honor-based violence. In Canada, there have been 13 cases of honor killings since 2002. However a project was undertaken by grass roots activists to educate Members of Parliament by sending them a copy of the award winning documentary Honor Diaries. This allowed Parliament to host many round table discussions as well as invite testimony by women regarding the issue of honor-based violence. The result was Bill S-7, the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act which was passed in June 2015.
The bill raised the legal marital age to 16 and added forced marriage to the Criminal Code. It also strengthened the laws around polygamy, with an eye to preventing immigration by those who engage in the practice and making it easier to deport people who do. And, it toughened the rules around honor killings, so that the defense of provocation could no longer be used in court.
Mt. Everest is not just a pride for Nepalese people, but also the tallest peak in the world. Is there any lack than the heaven itself when we are talking about Mt. Everest? Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgey were the first climbers of Mt. Everest in the entire world. If it was an easy task to climb over Mt. Everest, everyone would have done so. You need to be courageous to complete this daunting mission. Nepalese talk proudly of the Mt. Everest while thousands from across the world come here to see it with their own eyes. It is a pride in itself to get an opportunity to visit such place. It is natural for anyone to imagine climbing the tallest peak in the world, Sherpas are known to be the people who climb Mt. Everest. Sherpas are heroes of Mt. Everest.
Many folks might be thinking "what is the cost of climbing the peak? How to climb? Ang Gyaljen Sherpa is among those who have successfully scaled the peak for 3 times and has personally gained tremendous experience about it. He says he has been playing with the snow since his childhood. He has an experience of saving many lives while taking people to the peak. He is a leader when it comes to climbing Mt. Everest. Anybody who is climbing with him feels very safe. He reiterates that his experiences have increased confidence in him. How much does it cost to reach the peak? Where to begin the journey? It is natural for people to come up with these questions.
It costs $25000 to $40000 for Nepalese people while $25000 to $80000 for tourists interested in climbing the peak. All the facilities are included in this amount. Expensive cost means an opportunity to visit other tourist destinations too.
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Expenses include domestic airlines, lodging and food facilities. However, the climber himself must make arrangements for the jacket and other equipment. It is far easier these days to climb the Everest because rescue teams are available. Besides, two helicopters and doctors are always available at the base camp. In case something happens, everyone has a walkie-talkie in their hands to communicate. Moreover, every climber has a Sherpa Guide with him.
Nepalese can even have life insurance services. If some foreign tourist dies, all the services are provided by the respective embassy. This is the very reason why appropriate season is chosen for Mt. Everest expedition. During Spring, season is opened twice. Parties are separated into groups for the expedition. Small group consists of 10-15 people, whereas bigger groups consist of 60-65 people. During the climbing season, pollution of Everest increases. Even the government is very much concerned about this problem. The Government has set down the rules that people can't do whatever they want to over there.
Big accidents are frequent occurrences in Sagarmatha. Several dead bodies are found when the snow melts during April and May season. Permission of Nepal Tourism Board is necessary in order to climb the Everest. Sagarmatha is at 8848 km above the sea level. There are three camps, 1, 2 and 3. Base camp is at the height of 5400 km. The most dangerous spot is the Khumbila Falls, located at the Camp 1. After the camp comes, the South Pole and then, the Mt. Everest. Huge wide spots are available at the South Pole.
If something happens to some person, the helicopter goes up to the second base camp. Helicopter doesn't go beyond that point. Group a person belongs to while on the Sagarmatha expedition is always ready to do whatever possible. Nobody lets another die. Before climbing over Sagarmatha, it takes few moments to adjust with its atmosphere. After that one can begin his expedition. Most of the expedition begins at 6 am in the morning and reach the base camp within 3 hours. They move for another base camp as soon as they feel adjusted with the weather there. Many begin expedition for another base camp after sleeping over there that night or next week only. One must be mentally prepared and should have knowledge of the basic climbing skills.
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Ang Gyaljen Sherpa answers the question, "What do people do when they reach the Mt.Everest peak?"
Most of the people cry. For most of the people, it is the happiest moment of their lives. They begin taking pictures. From the peak, Nepal's mountains can be seen. Sagarmatha can be climbed both from Tibet and Nepal. Tibet's city area's lights can also be seen from the peak. Some talk to their families via Walkie-talkie. Everyone carries 2 headlights and 2 gloves. Temperature there is so cold that skin falls down when it comes in contact with the air there.
It takes 2 months to get to Mt. Everest from Kathmandu for the expedition. Change in atmosphere is also very dangerous. There's a huge chance of accident if the decision of the guide goes wrong. Special attention must be given for hypothermia. Papers are signed for who'd receive one's wealth in case of death before one begins the expedition. After successful scaling of the summit, one must return before 12 pm.
(South Pole)
After 12 pm, strong avalanches begin to blow. It is harder to return than to climb. At the south pole if something happens to somebody, it is very hard to do something about it because helicopter doesn't go that far. It is a matter of pride to climb the Everest. It's like conquering the world. After successful scaling of the Everest, people celebrate with their family members.
Visitors walk past retail stores along a half empty Taksim street in Istanbul, Turkey, on Monday, July 18, 2016. Tourism is an essential source of foreign currency to finance Turkey's current-account deficit and employs 8 percent of the nation's workforce. Photographer: Ismail Ferdous/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The courage displayed by the Turkish people and its government, both supporters and opponents of Erdogan, is a valuable lesson for politicians around the world.
There's a valuable lesson in the reactions of the opposition to the attempted coup. They supported the regime's legitimacy, and refused the military's attempt at power. It was clear that the opposition set its disagreements with Erdogan aside in favor of democracy.
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Turkey has had to endure the horrors of military rule for years. As the military's most recent victim, Turkey's Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan was forced to step down in 1997.
This month, a few misguided Turkish generals attempted to exploit the support of some countries in the region, as well as the rising attacks on the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) foreign policy. This attempted coup posed a true test to the Turkish economy.
Those who have been following the ongoing conflict in the Middle East are familiar with Turkey's strategic role in the region. The tension in Syria has further bolstered Turkey's role -- particularly since the country is considered to be the most important passageway for people going in and out of Syria.
As a result, a coup would have had massive repercussions in the region as the security of neighboring countries is closely tied to Turkey's.
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The attempted coup in Turkey this July brought back memories of the coup that took place in Egypt in June 2013.
It's natural to wonder why the coup succeeded in Cairo, yet failed in Istanbul, given the resemblance of the democratic transition taking place in both countries.
In Turkey, the opposition chose to democratically stand against the coup, putting the interests of the country before the party's.
Some people believe the reason lies in the foreign policy decisions made by former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi versus those made by Erdogan this month. Some would say that the former wasn't well-prepared to lead the country, and that he was not well-protected against traitors and those with dual interests.
Meanwhile, Erdogan was skillful and dexterous, and made the necessary maneuvers before taking power in a country that had suffered from military rule at various junctures throughout its history.
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Also notably different was the behavior of the opposition and the media in Egypt. In Turkey, the opposition chose to democratically stand against the coup, putting the interests of the country before the party's.
This is definitely a reflection on the AKP's political experience and expertise. Meanwhile, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had spent so much time in prison that they lacked the political experience they needed to cope with the political and media craftiness exercised by the military at the time.
After the failed coup against Erdogan, his opponents, before his supporters, will acknowledge that his regime is the most powerful in the history of modern Turkey. This incident will show Arab politicians that there's a reason they have not been able to gain the trust of their peoples and protect their countries against such bloody coups as the ones that have unfolded in Egypt, Mauritania and other countries.
Cameron Sterling, son of Alton Sterling, who was killed by Baton Rouge police last Tuesday, holds his grandmother's hand as he speaks to the media outside the the Triple S Food Mart, where his father was killed, in Baton Rouge, La., Wednesday, July 13, 2016. Cameron called his father a good man and urged protesters not to resort to violence. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
As I stood in a church pulpit on Sunday with 12 mothers of police brutality victims behind me, I raised the issue of three officers that were just brutally killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. On the second anniversary of the death of Eric Garner, his mother, Gwen Carr, had the courage to lead these brave women as we denounced both police brutality and violence against the police. As I addressed the congregation, I emphasized the fact that the murders of law enforcement are not only morally reprehensible and ethically intolerable, but they hurt the cause of these mothers (and other loved ones) pursuing justice. These family members will face a hardened criminal justice system that looks like it doesn't want to appease people. Even though these parents (who have suffered such immeasurable grief) and civil rights groups have consistently pushed for nonviolence, we are now watching lone actors intensify their pain with these cowardly murders. Instead of carelessly pointing fingers at this crucial moment, we need a national look in the mirror.
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On Friday, I spoke at the funeral for 37-year-old Alton Sterling whose gruesome death at the hands of officers was caught on film. The agony and suffering that I witnessed in Baton Rouge, for it to come back now from roads that I had just traveled, brings the point home even more. There cannot be a violent or revenge-type movement and achieve justice. Do people have the right to be angry? Absolutely. In fact, anger and rage are a normal human response to decades of grievances that have long been ignored. But anger cannot make us go and become that which we have been fighting. While people are full of frustration at a system that does not hold law enforcement to the same standards as the rest of us, we cannot and must not forget that there are real victims like these mothers whose very real cases can be upended by horrendous shootings that harden society rather than make society understand our plight.
These mothers and other family members now have empty seats at their dinner tables. Children have lost a parent for good, and entire lives have been cut short -- that is what we must not lose sight of. We are not fighting police; we are fighting wrong. We are fighting people that would end someone's life for no justifiable reason. But we cannot fight that doing the same and failing to denounce those that commit murder. This is why I, my organization, National Action Network, these mothers, other civil rights groups and all those pushing for peace have condemned the killings in Baton Rouge and Dallas as we continue to march for justice for police victims. There are some that seek to divide us for their own benefit, but we must not fall into that trap. It is possible to grieve for police brutality victims and grieve for officers. And yes, it is possible to hold law enforcement accountable, while praising the good work that many of them do day in and day out.
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As we went to place flowers on Alton Sterling's grave this weekend, I recalled the great musical genius, the late Michael Jackson, who made a poignant song called "Man in the Mirror". The following lyrics resonate profoundly at this moment:
"And no message could have been any clearer; If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change."
At a time when there are real issues we must tackle, are we going to remain united for the betterment of the nation, or are we going to retrieve to our convenient corners and take sides? Are we going to dig up "gotcha" statements and increase polarization, or are we going to look in the mirror and be part of the solution?
Date: July 14, 2016
No: 560-LR-5012
The Right Honorable Theresa May
Prime Minister of United Kingdom
London, UK
Dear Prime Minister:
We extend to you our warmest congratulations and best wishes on your appointment as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
In these trying times the international community, and the free world in particular, require sound and strong leadership from the oldest parliamentary democracy. It is therefore important that the tyrannical theocratic regime oppressing the Iranian people have a firm and unequivocal understanding of the United Kingdom's support and commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its respect for the civil and democratic rights of the Iranian people.
We appeal to your high office and the international community to support our campaign for the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience. It is with an emphasis on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a non-violent solution for the future of Iran that we formed the Iran National Council for Free Elections in 2013 with the participation of Iranians from many political, social and religious spectrums, both in Iran and abroad.
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Our ultimate vision is to hold free, fair and transparent elections in our beloved homeland.
Madam Prime Minister, we ask that you urge and convince the governments of the nations which comprise the free world to increase their pressures on the Islamic Republic with respect to its continuous violations of human rights, and to simultaneously support the aspirations and struggles of the Iranian people to achieve freedom, democracy and secularism.
Sincerely,
I was talking with a friend the other day, and she was telling me about the trip that she and her husband were planning. It was to be in two weeks... in France.
Needless to say, the couple is now uncertain of their plans. And though she said they'll likely still go, it's something they'll be sitting down to discuss.
I can completely understand their concern. It's such a horrible situation what happened in Nice. As well as earlier in the year in Paris. And I told her that I don't know what I would do in their situation. While I suspect the same as them, probably go, it's impossible to know until I faced it. It's a very real question.
I did offer one piece of information, though. Not offered remotely as "advice" but as perspective to throw in the mix when they talk things over.
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Terrorism is often viewed from the deaths it causes, and that view understandably overwhelms most other thoughts about it -- but the reality is that the main intent of terrorism is generally to cause paralyzing fear. Which it does overwhelmingly more than cause deaths. The tragedy in Nice killed 84 people, which is gut-wrenching. And understandably it got world news, headlines around the clock, the near-entirety of the news cycle, and kept France as a nation under Emergency Law.
For perspective's sake, last year in the U.S., 38,000 people were killed by cars. That works out to averaging 105 people killed a day. Every single day. Day after day after unrelenting day. 105 people killed in a car accident today and tomorrow and the next day and day after and after. Non-stop. Month after month after year after year after year. 105 people killed by a car every single day. Yet no one even blinks at that. We accept it, almost without thought. We accept it as the price of the convenience, to the extent that most people don't even see it as a price. The sun comes up and 105 people will be killed by a car that day. And the next. And yesterday. And the day before. And before. Pass the coffee. I of course understand the situations are different. But they're not as totally different as one might try to make them. The intent is different, but the end result the same. And for all the differences, context still helps.
Or another perspective: Last year, throughout all of Western Europe, under 200 people were killed in terrorist attacks for the entire year. More people than that we killed by car crashes in the U.S. over just two days.
Or from 2001-2014 (that's as far as the stats went), more American were killed by falling furniture (293) than by terrorist attacks in Western Europe and the U.S. combined.
Really.
I know that it's one thing to read cold, dispassionate "stats" and another thing to personally face a reality. And I don't know what the proper answer is to my friends' travel plans -- or anyone's travel plans. Or concerns over the horrors of terrorism. It's deeply serious, tragic and worrisome. And significantly more so in other areas of the world that western society is separated from. But I still just passed along the information to my friends as one thing to include in their discussion.
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Because in the end, the point of terrorism is... to terrorize. And one death can do that. And "intent" is a problem of its own. But the expanded reality is that long before the concerns of terrorism, as well as during the concerns, we have had mass killing by crazed people who also intended to do harm. Whether in all the mass shootings that we know of all too well, or domestic violence, or bombings like in Oklahoma City or at abortion clinic, or anyone there were sick people out to cause harm. And not only do they rarely bring society to a screeching halt, but we're often told, "Now is not the time" to concern ourselves with fixing them.
The deaths in Nice were galling. 84 people dead. And more attacks throughout the world.
But last year, in just the United States alone, 38,000 people were killed by cars. Around the world, the number becomes astronomical -- 1.24 million people are killed by cars a year, every year. There are 32,000 people killed with a gun each year, in only the U.S. 370,000 people around the world drown each year. 1.2 million people in the U.S. alone die every year of heart disease or cancer. And almost none of this phases people. Death is a sad part of our lives we mourn and accept.
Terrorism is a worldwide problem that not only must be addressed, but is. The point of terrorism is to paralyze people with fear.
In Nice, 84 people were tragically killed, and the world came to a halt. It was a horrific, sickening act. And the very same day, 3,400 other people around the world were killed by a car. And no one gave it a thought. And 3,400 more people died in a car death the next day. And the next. And will again today. And will tomorrow.
Yes, in terrorism, someone is making an intentional attempt to cause many deaths. But so too was someone attempting to do the same at people going to see a movie in Aurora. Or those going to see Trainwreck at a movie theater in Lafayette. Or students just going to school at Columbine -- or going to school at Virginia Tech or at New Town. Or those working in Oklahoma City. Or at any of the other far-too many just as intentional mass killings that are caused by someone who wasn't a terrorist. Yet which have caused far more deaths. On and on and on, just as regularly. All of which were intentional, to just masses of people. Yet none of this has stopped people from going to movies or going to school or going to work. Or brought about national emergency laws. Or even simply changed national laws for the use of a gun. (We can't even pass a law to prohibit a suspected terrorist on the No-Fly List from owning a gun.) We mourned, offered prayers, and went on with our lives. The world did not come to a half .Which the world shouldn't. Yet when 84 people are killed by what is presumed to be a terrorist -- though not yet even established -- we (for absolutely human reasons) consider not even traveling to a country. And half the country nominates a man for president who wants to ban all people because of their faith from simply entering the border.
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Perspective matters.
Society must and does work to contribute massive resources to combat terrorism. It is a much-too real and devastating threat. And if we kept doing that and also put one-tenth the effort, money, time and attention to combat cancer, heart disease, guns, cars safety, all the seemingly insignificant oversights that kill so many in the U.S. and around the world, even things that appear so small and almost stupid as the ability to swim and poorly-made furniture -- we might be able to save the lives of several million people a year around the world. Each and every single year. After year. After year. Millions. Including you. And me.
This is not said at all to diminish concerns or raise awareness of anything. It is to put a perspective on what the world is focused on, in order to better address all what needs to be addressed.
The point of terrorism is to paralyze people with fear. And it is always easier to work to solve a problem -- any problem, all problems, always, since the beginning of time -- when you are not paralyzed with fear.
We work to solve problems. We mourn loss. And the only thing we have to fear, it turns out, is indeed fear itself.
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Seek without seeking, for
what you hope to attain is
already within you. -- Sydney Banks
It was such a relief when I realized I did not have to keep working on myself and striving for self-improvement. I had been successful in many ways with an amazing husband, wonderful children, a successful psychotherapy practice, and a lovely home, but I struggled to relax and really appreciate my life. I was plagued with feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. I did not feel good enough. I felt unworthy. No amount of success on the outside made a difference. I had pursued many avenues of personal growth and this still persisted. I was always on the look out for the next thing that would help me feel whole.
I intellectually understood why I struggled with insecurity. I had a very tumultuous childhood. I was not a planned pregnancy. My father and mother were never married. Their separation was so acrimonious I had no contact with my father between the ages of two and twenty-two. Shortly after I was born, my father had an arranged marriage without my mother knowing before hand. We all lived together in the same home for a period of time with the neighbors thinking my father's wife was a relative visiting from Sri Lanka, but the situation became more and more untenable as tempers flared.
My first memory is, me sitting in the back of a police car. I remember the flashing lights reflecting from outside, and the policeman smiling at me and putting his hat on my head. It took me twenty years to ask my mother about that memory. It turns out my father was with his wife who had moved out of our house at this point. My mother had gone round there to kill her with a carving knife. Being the fiercely loving, doting mother that she was, and is, she couldn't leave me at home alone, so she took me with her. I have another memory of standing outside the front door of a home at night. I remember the door opening and the light streaming out into the dark. My mother tells me to go inside. The adult in the doorway says if I go inside, I won't come back out. I never did ask about this memory.
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My mother did eventually move on with her life. She married a Canadian, and we moved, when I was seven, from my home in London, England to the suburbs of Quebec. My stepfather was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin's disease soon after we arrived. He was given five years to live without treatment. He chose to do all of the treatment and lived six years, but with all of the debilitating effects of the medical interventions. His mood and temper were impacted by all of this. We did not have a good relationship. He only hit me once, but his mocking and irritation with me were more painful.
Add school bullying, financial hardship, and racism to the mix, as well as another move across Canada at the age thirteen. It is no wonder I perceived the world as unsafe and unstable. I believed it was because there was something wrong with me. However, during my teen years, I got very good at internalizing all of this and presenting well. I perfected the art of cool even though I was naturally quite a nerd. Things fell apart in my second year of college, but that is an anecdote for another time.
I created a story for myself that convinced me I was damaged because I was so fearful. I escaped my painful feelings of shame by earning external approval and validation. I thought, if I could just please everyone all of the time, then I would be okay. This actually worked quite well in terms of propelling me forward in school and helping me get scholarships to college, but, as you can imagine, it set up a cycle of stress, burnout, and depression. I could never live up to the internal expectations I set for myself. Any kind of perceived failure on my part was the end of the world. At the hint of a misstep, I would drop into an abyss of shame and become consumed by self-loathing.
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That is why I turned to yoga, meditation, and therapy in my early twenties. I could not keep going as I was. This was all tremendously helpful for lifting my spirits and giving me hope. It led to me studying spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica. Here, I experienced the loving essence of my true nature in a profound and unequivocal way, but I was still confused. Now, instead of seeking respite through external validation and approval, I had found a better high, and I wanted to feel it all the time.
My perfectionism co-opted my spiritual practice. I thought I could practice the tools and techniques I was learning to rid myself of my human frailties. I still felt less than, but I was convinced I now had the way to improve myself and eradicate negative feelings from my life. I saw peace of mind and wellbeing as something I could achieve, if I was courageous and tried hard enough.
It was not until I participated in an intensive with Linda Pransky that my whole perspective shifted in one conversation. I met with her as part of my quest for self-improvement. She asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I told her I wanted to feel less insecure. She had a conversation with me about how human psychological functioning works and where my experience comes from, based on the teachings of Sydney Banks. While listening to her, my personal thinking settled, and I had fresh thought.
I saw how I can get caught up in my insecure thoughts and feel unworthy. I recognized that I have the capacity to use my free will to create from my own thoughts the illusion of my unworthiness, and that the illusion can look very real to me at times. I also realized, it didn't matter one bit that I did this.
No matter how vividly I create the illusion of my brokenness and inadequacy, regardless of how real the emotions feel as a result of believing these thoughts, it doesn't matter because they are never true. And, if they are not true, I don't need to put any energy into trying to improve myself and make myself feel better. I can relax and wait for the illusion to pass.
I do not need to get freaked out by my feelings of shame and try to fix myself. I can just know when I am experiencing shame that I am gripped by my irrational thoughts. There is nothing I need to do. There is nothing I need to fix. My wellbeing, peace of mind, and loving nature are always there. They are constant.
I saw I do not have to stop myself from feeling insecure to be good enough. I recognized I am good enough even though sometimes I feel insecure. I knew I did not have to change one thing about myself in order to be worthy, none of my frailties or bad behavior mattered.
When I saw this I felt free -- freer than I had ever felt in my life. I understood experientially what I had been learning at the University of Santa Monica. I experienced a tremendous release as I let go of self-judgments. I let them go because I could see they were not true. I wanted to cry. I was too embarrassed to cry in front of Linda, and that didn't matter. I could feel every crummy feeling I had ever felt in my life, and it didn't matter. I did not have to fix or change anything. I knew categorically my innate value. I knew I did not always have to feel good to be worthy. Just like my love is real for my children. Sometimes I don't feel it when I am angry and upset, but it does not mean my love is not there. My loving essence is there no matter what. The beautiful feelings I attributed to getting from outside of me were inside of me all along. They would just get obscured when I believed my negative thoughts.
This meeting changed my life. I was high for days afterwards, but more importantly, it woke me up to my capacity to unconditionally love and accept myself exactly as I am with all of the range of my human experience. This has impacted every area of my life. My relationships are better. My health is better. My sleep is better. Sex is better. I am working less and earning more. I am more relaxed. I am kinder to myself and to others. I am appreciating all of the diverse opportunities I get to serve others. I am enjoying my life more and having more fun.
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Yes, I still get caught up in the illusion of my negative thinking, but the profound difference is, I know it doesn't matter, and there is nothing I need to do. I still feel anxious, insecure, angry, sad, and unworthy at times, but I know these feelings will pass no matter how intense they feel in the moment. I recognize, when they are present, that my thinking is distorted and the thoughts will settle. I am only ever one thought away from experiencing my true nature, and that is reassuring.
From that meeting forward, I knew I wanted to help others experience the depth of wellbeing I did. The teachings of Sydney Banks are echoed in all spiritual teachings, but, for me, the simplicity of how he shared them makes them so accessible and impactful.
We feel our thoughts. Our feelings let us know if our thoughts are on track or not. When they are not on track, don't worry. The wisdom within will always move us to a peaceful settled state. We don't need to do anything to make that happen. We are inherently divine beings connected with the formless essence of our loving nature. We cannot get in the way of that. It can never be taken away. When we slow down, our personal thinking settles, and the illusion dissolves. We then get to experience who we truly are. Wellbeing, peace of mind, clarity, joy, compassion and love are our natural state. They are not experiences that come from outside of us. They are who we are.
By Saeed Ghasseminejad and Emanuele Ottolenghi
A year ago, the Obama administration made a gamble, striking a nuclear accord with Tehran that it hoped would transform its behavior, leading to a thaw in bilateral relations and a more stable Middle East. In the administration's telling, the agreement would help loosen hardliners' grip on power in favor of more moderate forces. Now, one year after the nuclear deal, the sad truth is unavoidable: the very opposite has occurred, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei continues to consolidate his hold over Iranian politics.
Those in Washington charmed by the hope of a new Iran believed that its parliamentary elections this year, the first after the nuclear deal, would turn the tables on Khamenei and strengthen the hand of the relatively more pragmatic president Hassan Rouhani. However, when Ali Larijani and Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati were selected speaker of parliament and chairman of the Assembly of Experts respectively, this optimism quickly morphed into disappointment.
These same optimists should have known that in the Islamic Republic, the ballot box cannot deliver substantive change. In the past, the regime reacted to popular discontent with violence, undermining any chance for reform. But since 2009, when the regime nearly lost control of popular protests against fraudulent presidential elections, it has conducted its political maneuverings with heightened sophistication.
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This year's ballots for parliament and the Assembly of Experts are a prime example. The regime confronted an inconvenient choice: either let reformists sweep back into power or face a repetition of the 2009 unrest. It cleverly chose a third course, disqualifying the most inconvenient candidates for both bodies in advance of voting.
Western commentators cheered the relative electoral success of groups loosely linked to Rouhani without realizing that the only way they could even field candidates was by coopting hardliners to their own ticket. When viewed in that light, the results become a clear disappointment for those who believed change was possible in Tehran through the ballot box.
Instead, the government took further measures to ensure that future elections are effectively meaningless. First, it strengthened the Guardian Council - which vets all political candidates and laws for ideological purity - by granting it the ability to disqualify sitting parliamentarians. Half of the Council's members are chosen by the supreme leader, and the other half chosen by the leader's appointed judiciary chief, so bolstering its power effectively ensured that parliament will fall into line with the leader's diktats. Soon after the elections, the Council used this new power to disqualify a newly elected member of the pro-Rouhani coalition because her hijab was deemed insufficiently modest.
Both Rouhani and parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani challenged her disqualification, but to no avail. Instead, Khamenei seized the opportunity to test a newly created body, the Supreme Council for Dispute Resolution, bypassing the Expediency Council - the institution that for decades has resolved conflicts between the Guardian Council and parliament. The Expediency Council is headed by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the relatively pragmatic politician and ex-president who is a Khamenei rival. Predictably, the new council affirmed the decision to disqualify the MP. In one fell swoop, Khamenei weakened his adversaries and neutralized parliament - one of the two elected branches of government that, as a semi-democratic state organ, could theoretically act as a vehicle for peaceful reform.
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Time and again, Khamenei has modified Iran's political system to strengthen his own power. In theory, he welcomes the public's participation in elections. In practice, he manipulates the system to forestall any effort at substantive change. His latest maneuvers illustrate an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: after the nuclear deal, even more than before, the Islamic Republic remains firmly in the hands of the hardliners.
Mother With Baby Working In Office At Home Looking At Laptop
Reader Sole Breadwinner Mom writes, I'm the sole breadwinner and my husband is the stay at home parent to our three kiddos. Work has been more stressful than usual -- a lot of turnover, onboarding challenges with new employees, new boss. What has me so upset is that we had a very sensitive, high-priority medical appointment for my son and work scheduled a sensitive, high-priority in-person meeting with a client. I approached my boss about potentially missing the work meeting so I could attend my son's medical appointment, but I could tell from her body language that she wanted me at the work meeting. When I explained the situation to my husband, he became very frustrated with me. I got a babysitter so my husband can do the appointment with my son, but it's still a huge source of stress. How do I establish better boundaries at work? How can I communicate to work that I'm stressed out and frustrated and the bang just isn't worth the buck? Finally, are there any sole breadwinner moms out there with full-time stay at home husbands who'd like to create a support group?
Dear SBM,
I understand why you're so frustrated, but, unfortunately, there aren't that many ways to satisfy two masters (the kids/husband and your boss) at the same time during the work day. I think the babysitter solution was a good one, and babysitters are a good idea in general as this working mom and I agree. Since your husband is a SAHD, generally, doctors' appointments would be expected to fall on his shoulders when they are during the 9-5 workday (or whatever your workday is). Is there a reason he didn't want to take your child himself? This, as well as the resultant need for childcare for the other two kids (or taking them along) would be generally expected for the parent whose job is to provide childcare.
If the appointment was something you couldn't live with yourself for missing, though, you would have had to tell that to your boss and try and head off her disappointment by compensating in some other way. In general, you can compensate for absences during the workday by working late, working early, trying harder in some way (e.g., to get clients, to come up with awesome ideas for the company), or whatever else you can think of. If you want to work from home, come up with some awesome reasons that you should, and bust your ass working on those days, and set your alarm for 4am so you can send your boss a pre-written email so that she thinks you're working at 4am. Well, maybe not, but that's a pretty good idea if we were in a sitcom.
In terms of boundaries, it would be nice to say that you should be able to have less on your plate at work, and I could guide you to how to ask your boss for some more slack, but the reality of your job may be that this honest expression of emotions may get you fired. Instead, my advice is to stop taking on more than your job description, and stop overpreparing or saying yes to new obligations, unless such things ARE your job description. When I became pregnant, I stopped doing about 50% of my work just because I felt sick, and nobody noticed. This indicates that for the prior 28 years, I had been overworking, overpreparing, overediting, overeverything. If you try to do the bare minimum at work, it is possible that nobody will notice and you'll realize you were trying to hard. Try this for a couple days and see what feedback you get.
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If you truly feel that the bang isn't worth the buck at your job, though, and you try to scale back (while appearing accessible and a team player, which is some good trick in a corporate environment) and things don't feel better to you, then you may not be in the right career. You and your husband may need to talk about ways for you to stay home or work part-time while you scale back or switch careers. If you were able to spend less money, would you be able to change careers? Life is too short to hate your job.
Did you want to be the sole breadwinner? Are you happy with the current dynamic? I ask because you seem to feel stressed and unsupported. I encourage other women to leave comments if they would like to contact you, and if they are in the same boat. But I also encourage you to speak openly to your husband if you're not happy or feel overwhelmed in the current setup. My dream is to be the sole breadwinner so someone else, specifically, my husband, can deal with more childcare than I do. But then again, I work for myself, which I cannot recommend highly enough, so more work hours for me just means more stuff I like doing, whereas for you it means more time with your passive aggressive boss. On that note, have you considered starting your own business?
Thanks for writing in, and till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Some People Just Aren't Cut Out To Have Bosses. Because We Are Difficult, I Mean, Free Spirits.
This Post originally appeared on the blog ScreenCraft. ScreenCraft is dedicated to helping screenwriters and filmmakers succeed through educational events, screenwriting competitions and the annual ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship program, connecting screenwriters with agents, managers and Hollywood producers. Follow ScreenCraft on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
We always like to explore those many different avenues that cinematic storytellers have taken in order to offer our readers any and all nuggets of wisdom that they can use in their own journey.
Here we sit down with indie writer/director Kenneth Andrew Williams (KAW) to discuss his career leading up to his indie horror film Expulsion, which is currently in production.
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ScreenCraft: How, when, and where did your storytelling roots begin?
KAW: I was lucky to have parents that let us watch all kinds of films as a kid. So, I was drawn to storytelling early on. But I can say I became pretty enamored with storytelling -- particularly dialogue and character development -- by age 10. We moved to Los Angeles around then so I guess it was just in the air. And from that age on I've been refining my screenwriting craft and thankfully it still continues to improve.
ScreenCraft: Where did you learn the ins and outs of the actual filmmaking process, as far as camera work, production, editing, etc.?
KAW: Where I really learned the true ins and outs of the filmmaking process was writing and directing my first feature, Wrong Place Wrong Crime. We shot that on 16mm, so there was very little room for error. However, s***loads of mistakes were made and that film took a long time to make. But I learned real world techniques from pre-to-post production that I still use today. That project was the beginning of me finding my voice as a director -- how I wanted to use the camera to help tell the story or add subtext, usage of different color schemes to help indicate mood and tone. All of these I still use today and started with WPWC. And that film taught me first hand about the importance of having a great team of talented people around you. I'm over the moon to say that I have great people involved with my upcoming horror film, Expulsion.
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ScreenCraft: You have a background in shooting music videos and commercials and it seems that many Hollywood directors came from that medium as well. How has that experience helped your feature directing?
KAW: Yes, I do indeed have an extensive background in both. The impact those have had on my writing and directing is unparalleled because you have to make your points within 30 seconds for commercials or 3 minutes for music videos. Prior to this, my writing went on and f***ing on. Now, as a feature film screenwriter and director, I can work with precision and not subject anyone to a 180 page script that is 77 pages of meandering filler. Plus, with commercials and music videos you work fast as hell so speed and precision is expected. Although the two don't usually go together, you have to make it work in those worlds.
ScreenCraft: You also write your own films as well. What are the pros and cons of developing, writing, producing, and finding distribution for your own scripts?
KAW: It's all cons every step of the way! Just kidding. Developing and writing your own work is total creative freedom. And, in some ways, can be the best part of it. There are no limits on your ideas and that is thrilling.
Now I don't care how old you are -- once you step into producing a feature, your hair will immediately f***ing turn gray. It's inevitable. Producing usually deals with money first. And one of your options can be self-financing, which will age you 20 years overnight just by entertaining the idea. The pros to this is retaining all of your creative freedom as a director. The cons are obvious.
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Another option is crowdfunding, which I'm personally not a big fan of. I did this only once as we needed a couple of grand for post on my film Cupid's Requiem. It was like a full time f***ing job doing the crowdfunding campaign. And you really have to bother the s*** out of people for 30 days straight to be successful at it. It stressed the f*** out of us and I loathed the experience. But obviously it does work for a great many people. The pros are that you get help from "the people" to finance your film and you build an audience as you go. The cons are that this is harder than it looks!
Lastly, there are investors. The big questions with this avenue is "Where are the investors?" and "How do you find those motherf***ers?" Fortunately, there's a few dozen ways to find investors. And when it's the right fit for your project -- and they're legit -- they can literally be saviors to you and the picture. The flip side of the coin is that some "investors" are not legit at all. These types fall into the category of lying, creepy motherf***ers who have interest in the project but never come through. Oh, and hot tip -- if you meet an investor who has to go out of the country right when negotiations start to solidify, be aware. You might not hear from them again.
After you've written your kick ass, flawlessly executed screenplay, gathered great talent and a crew that is second to none, acquired sets and locations that add aesthetic and production value, and navigated the financing route, you make an awesome film. Sounds easy, right? That's actually the easy part when compared to finding distribution of merit. It's not impossible at all! But it is easier when you have at least one person around who is knowledgeable of pitfalls that need to be avoided. Keep this person close. You won't regret it.
ScreenCraft: What is the most difficult aspect of indie filmmaking and how have you overcome it?
KAW: I think the most difficult aspect is being heard. At the end of the day this is a look at me and listen to me business. And there are a lot more voices now. And it can be a bit daunting. The best way to overcome this is to believe what you do is great. Have a healthy dose of self-confidence. It'll come in handy.
ScreenCraft: What is the best advice you can share for those screenwriters out there wanting to shoot their own script?
KAW: The best advice I can give is to stop reading this and get a white-collar job. You'll encounter so much less disappointment. However, you'll also wind up [figuratively] developing a drinking problem and jumping to your death from a building. So, let's discuss 8 healthy alternatives.
Just go for it.
Your first script or film might be a masterpiece or a piece of dog s***. If it turns out to be the latter, don't fret. Learn from your mistakes and make the next one better. If you know what NOT to do, then by process of elimination you'll know what to do.
Don't compare.
Some people find success very early in. Others have to grind it out for decades. Neither person is better. And comparing your journey to others is a road to ruin.
F*** fear.
It can be terrifying to go into an endeavor such as writing and directing. Very easy to let the fear tell you to push something to tomorrow or next year. Something I learned is to intentionally let the fear overtake you for 2-3 days until you're face down in the dirt. When it passes you'll see that there's nothing to fear. Failure? It's part of life. But you learn more from failing than from success. Two of the biggest things you'll learn is finding out who you are as an artist. The other is finding out who your friends are. Trust me on that one.
Don't let social media dictate your worth.
If you post an excerpt from your script or a scene from your film on social media and don't get 8,000 likes, it's okay. People are busy.
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Don't be afraid to switch things up.
Try not to fall into the habit of writing the same kind of material. Switch things up and challenge yourself. You never know when venturing into a new genre will spark the overwhelming urge to direct. And you'll feel like a f***ing rock star when you pull off new material that seemed impossible before. That's definitely what happened when I wrote Expulsion. I'd been wanting to write horror for some time but was hesitant because it was an unfamiliar genre. Once I committed, I was more than pleasantly surprised with the outcome.
Do extensive pre-production.
This can sometimes be the most overlooked part of filmmaking. And it can have a direct negative impact on principal photography and the overall project if overlooked. If you wrote the screenplay then you know how it needs to look. Storyboard and shot list that s***. Let the actors know in clear terms what you're looking for. They're your allies!
F***ing. Chances.
Not many people get anywhere playing it safe. If you have an idea that just seems too weird, that's the one that might get you noticed. Great example is Swiss Army Man. A bit weird? Yes. Does it work? Yes. A film about a farting corpse with boners works on so many levels. Enough said.
Know where you want your career to go.
Put a s***load of thought into where you want your career to go. Then work your ass off to get there. You'll encounter a lot of no's on the way. It happens to everyone. Just don't quit. And remember this -- If you do something long enough, you'll become good at it. If you're good at something long enough, you'll become great at it. If you're great at something long enough, you'll get paid for it. That's my theory, anyway.
Kenneth Andrew Williams is a well rounded writer/director known for his ability to tackle dark and intense subject matter. With an extensive commercial and music video background and four features to his credit, Andrew is quickly becoming an emerging voice in the independent film world. For more info on Andrew, he can be found on IMDb, Facebook, and you can find more info on his upcoming horror film, Expulsion.
Sequence of businesswoman working in office
Silicon Valley Tech Executive Sherry Lowe Turns a Negative Term on Its Head and Explores How Women Can Embrace the Inner Strength to Succeed
On today's political campaign trail, we see a lack of civility playing out among candidates from both parties. Watching the recent debates, town halls and interviews shows a stage full of heated banter and a seeming lack of manners on all sides.
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While the political stage presents the extreme, this type of climate seems to be increasingly spilling over into the workplace, where a certain level of brazenness has become more acceptable and, in many ways, required to be heard. So how do women fare in this increasingly "say-anything-you-please" environment, where politeness frequently takes a back seat to a more "in-your-face" communications style?
As a woman in business, often times voicing your opinion leads others to accuse you of being aggressive. But if you can't step up without being inaccurately judged, how do you inspire and lead? Ultimately, is being "half a bitch" not half bad to succeed in an increasingly competitive world and workplace?
The Challenge
Taking it back to the political stage, Hillary Clinton seems to often be graded on a different scale than her male counterparts. We've heard she doesn't connect or her working style is too aggressive, and she struggles with support from both men and women alike as a result. Or look at Carly Fiorina, who you rarely hear about without mention of her business missteps, while Donald Trump seems to get more of a pass for many of his business failures.
The criticisms of Hillary in particular are what many women who have navigated the workforce have heard time and again -- we're too pushy, too aggressive or made to feel guilty for requesting a better salary or promotion. Some might even be reminded just how lucky they are to have made it this far.
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Whatever your political stance may be, witnessing the conundrum of women running for office got me thinking about the unique challenges women face in male-dominated work environments as well. While we've started to see progress -- Facebook and Microsoft, for example, recently disclosed they pay male and female employees equally while Salesforce is spending $3 million to fix the gap -- we still have a ways to go on how women's actions are judged and defined.
Defining and Striking the "Half a Bitch" Balance
While the term "bitch" is generally defined as a malicious or difficult woman, too often it's tossed around to describe any woman who is stepping up or showing leadership qualities that aren't necessarily negative. It's time for this to change. Similar to how the LGBTQ community has embraced "queer," we need to own and re-define the label in a positive way as an empowered, uncompromising woman leader.
Women today need to be "half a bitch" to succeed. This doesn't give you a free pass to be rude or disrespectful, but it is about a mindset of empowerment, confidence and honing a certain inner strength that keeps you from sitting on your hands with your mouth shut. Often, remaining silent proliferates problems -- it does not solve them.
In challenging environments, it's not always effective to stand down or take the high road, regardless of how you're perceived. For women leaders, questioning a colleague might be viewed as uncooperative, while men are seen as simply asking great questions. Or saying no to a project that's wrong for the business can earn you a reputation as a "no" person, while men may be viewed as making strategic decisions about prioritization.
When you find yourself in these situations, my best empowerment tip is to not fear criticism or opposition. Instead, focus on owning your unique qualities and skills, and use that strength to guide you. If the opposition isn't hearing you, the trick is to embrace your inner "half a bitch" and focus on clear, direct and concise communications without apology.
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Above all, it is about achieving balance -- choosing your battles wisely, weighing kindness with assertiveness and knowing when to speak your mind, and when to let things go. A motto I've lived by for 15 years in Silicon Valley is that if 99 percent of the time you're doing what's right for the company, you'll make the right decision. If that requires having the confidence to take a stance and take charge, then own being half a bitch and use it to everyone's advantage.
While others go so far as to claim being actually aggressive or unfriendly is a good idea, this behavior does not nurture a healthy workplace. By striking the balance, we can maintain our manners, spread both fearlessness and positivity and, best of all, accomplish great work together.
The Opportunity
In an increasingly ambitious environment, it can be particularly challenging for women, however it also provides an opportunity to be more honest, upfront and assertive. Women today more than ever have a chance to rise up and stand out alongside their peers. For these strong women, being called a "bitch" should not be a bad thing if you're merely being decisive and doing what's right for the company and everyone in it.
Men, too, have an opportunity to stand alongside women and be part of the solution. We are seeing many examples of this emerge -- in Hollywood, men have started speaking up about the pay gap, and in the technology world a number of men are making waves to help level the playing field. Diversity improves every workplace, and men taking steps to be conscious of the odds and back female colleagues goes a long way.
I walked into the village feeling a bit uneasy about photographing its inhabitants. The camera can make those on the other end of my lens uncomfortable, self-conscious. That day I also felt uncomfortable, even apologetic. The camera can be a barrier to people connecting, its physical presence is an obstacle that can only be overcome by pulling the camera down from my face and getting to know the people I am photographing.
The people whose images I was taking that bright day in June have no electricity or cars. They sleep on dirt floors in circular huts that have walls made of dirt and manure. They continue to live as their ancestors have for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is the Himba tribe that live in villages along the Kunene River on the border between Namibia and Angola. The village I visited was in northern Namibia.
The Himba were expecting us. Our guide had informed them the previous day that we were coming. Our guide, Ben McRae, an Australian, spent years cultivating a special relationship with the Himba.
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That afternoon I spent time watching the Himba children play and talking to some of the Himba men who spoke English. That evening I watched the Himba women dance and the men cook a goat. I was offered the opportunity to spend the night in the Himba village. Once I heard the night would be spent cuddling with other men to stay warm in the men's hut I graciously declined.
The next morning I spent a half hour talking with three Himba women through a translator. We sat in their cramped hut as they prepared themselves for the day. The sun was rising outside. A fire, just inside the door, filled the air with a layer of smoke and seemed to do little to warm the chill. I sat on the dirt floor with the ladies. My pant legs were inches from the flames and my eyes were watering a bit from the smoke.
In return for taking their pictures as we spoke they only asked that I show them the pictures I was taking of them. I took a picture and then turned the back of my camera to them so they could see their image in the LCD. On each occasion they said "ah, ah," as they looked. This meant, "yes, yes" in Himba.
Soipi and her grandson
The women told me they do all the village's work except herding the goats and cattle. That duty is left to the men and boys. The women haul the water over long distances, as well as build the huts, milk the goats, gather firewood, and care for the children. Each woman is allowed one husband but are permitted to have boyfriends with the blessing of their husband. They smiled when I asked about their boyfriends but would not say more. The men, on the other hand, are allowed multiple wives as long they have enough cows to pay the dowry to the bride's family.
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The women told me how they make their skin a powdery bronze color twice a day. They grind a brown iron containing rock to make an ochre power. They then apply butterfat to their skin and rub the powder into the butterfat. The butterfat makes the powder cling to the skin. They apply the powder to all visible spots on the body. They also told me how they mold clay around their braided hair and make headdresses out of goat's skin. I asked them if there was anything in the world they wanted. They could not think of anything.
Kaepewa in front and Twakara in back
The Himba women asked me how many cattle I own.
Cattle to the Himba are like a bank account. The number of cattle you own is equivalent to your financial worth. I told them I had only a dog. They asked me how many wives I had. I told them just one. They smiled again and giggled then said, "You mean you work for only one wife and a dog?" I had to admit I did.
Centuries of progress have passed them by and they could not care less. I wondered if what we define as "progress" is merely dissatisfaction with the way things are and whether truly contented people are those that are not constantly asking for something more or something different. The Himba seem to be content with very little. They are lucky people.
After two days with the Himba I no longer felt like an interloper. I felt I had made a bit of a connection with the Himba as we got to know each other. I felt like we were friends.
Tjatungwa
Special thanks to Ben McRae and Morne. For those interested in reading about Ben McRae's experience with the Himba I recommend his book "Chasing Tjanongombe."
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Ribs--crusty with spices, fragrant with wood smoke, sizzling with fat and caramelized sauce--invoke the spirit of barbecue like no other meat. Plus, they are unabashedly fun to eat, channeling through our DNA the same hand-to-mouth pleasure our cave-dwelling ancestors experienced after they embraced the power of live-fire cooking.
Bet you could go for a slab right now. But wait--it's a weeknight. And ribs take hours and hours to cook, right?
Yes and no. If you're a devotee of the enormously popular 3-2-1 method of cooking ribs, then yes, they will take 6 hours to cook: 3 hours exposed to smoke and 225 to 250 degree temperatures; 2 hours enclosed in a sealed foil package, usually with liquid (a braising technique derisively known as the "Texas Crutch"); and 1 hour unwrapped over higher heat with a basting of sauce.
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What results is preternaturally tender meat--some people (especially if they're trained Kansas City Barbecue Society judges) might even call it mushy--that releases its hold on bone with the slightest tug of the teeth.
But it's possible to put perfectly cooked bones on the table in 2 hours or less. You no longer have to eat at midnight or wait for weekends or vacation days to enjoy these meaty staves.
For my money, baby back ribs cooked faster over higher heat are superior to long-cooked ribs using the 3-2-1 or similar methods (don't get me started on preboiling ribs), or low and slow from start to finish. They're simply more interesting, with better bark, juicier meat, deeper and more complex flavors, and contrasting textures. Of course, you can still employ all the same taste-enhancing techniques, including wood smoke, dry rubs, marinades, slathers (wet rubs), mops, and sauces. Note: spareribs require low and slow smoking to tenderize the tough connective tissue.
The direct grilling method: Cooking ribs directly over glowing embers or on a gas-fired grill may not be the first technique that comes to mind for most American pit masters. But in Mexico, Italy, Japan, Korea, and Argentina, ribs are routinely grilled right over the fire.
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Of course, you cannot just throw any slab of ribs over a raging fire and expect the best. You must pick a rib properly suited to direct grilling, such as a tender rack like baby back pork ribs; country-style pork ribs; cross-cut beef short ribs (also known as flanken, Argentinean- or Korean-style short ribs); veal ribs; and lamb ribs.
For most ribs that are direct grilled, you'll need to work over a medium fire and have a fire-free safety zone where you can move the ribs in case of flare-ups.
SIGN UP for Steven Raichlen's UP IN SMOKE newsletter to learn more about barbecue!
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Twenty years ago when someone acquired HIV, they would, on average, not live more than 12 years. Today, a young person who becomes infected in the developed world can expect to have a near-normal lifespan with access to lifelong, uninterrupted HIV treatment. Globally, the HIV/AIDS community has worked hard to realise the Sustainable Development Goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. One crucial part of this plan is bringing HIV treatment to all who need it. The 90-90-90 concept is one part of this plan. Ahead of the 21st International AIDS Conference, ProfessorGlenda Gray, President of the South African Medical Research Council, explains the importance of 90-90-90 and why there is so much talk around it.
What is 90-90-90?
A concept introduced by the United Nation's programme on HIV/AIDS in 2013, 90-90-90 is a set of goals. The idea is that by 2020, 90% of people who are HIV infected will be diagnosed, 90% of people who are diagnosed will be on antiretroviral treatment and 90% of those who receive antiretrovirals will be virally suppressed. Viral suppression is when a person's viral load - or the amount of virus in an HIV-positive person's blood - is reduced to an undetectable level.
The strategy is an attempt to get the HIV epidemic under control and is based on the principal of universal testing and treating. What is central to "test and treat" approaches is that if one can identify people early on in their infection, and start treatment so they become virally suppressed, the onward transmission of HIV will be prevented and this will impact on HIV incidence at a population level.
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There are an estimated 36.7 million HIV-positive people across the globe. In line with this, the goals would mean that 33.2 million of these people would be diagnosed, 29.5 million would be on antiretrovirals and 26.9 million would have viral suppression.
According to some of the latest figures, there are only 19.8 million people - or 53% - who have been tested. About 13.4 million people remain undiagnosed. There are 17 million people on antiretrovirals while a substantial 12.9 million have not been initiated on antiretrovirals and remain untreated. Of those on antiretroviral treatment, only 11.6 million have viral suppression, which means that almost a third of HIV-infected individuals on treatment are not virally suppressed. This not only impacts on the development of antiretroviral drug resistance and future treatment options; it also has implications for the onward transmission of HIV.
How realistic is this plan?
This is a strategy to try and control the HIV epidemic and get towards an HIV-free world. The concept of universal test and treat is an aspirational concept, but it is an incredibly difficult plan to implement at scale, particularly in resource-poor settings that are heavily burdened with HIV.
This plan entails that the health service identify HIV in people who are not symptomatic, and who are not seeking care. It entails taking HIV testing out of the clinics and into the community, and requires new and innovative ways to get people tested for HIV infection. In order to make this plan realisable the health system has to endeavour to make HIV testing easily available even in the most remote areas of the world.
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The second component of this plan entails ensuring that HIV-infected individuals are triaged into care, and they need to start antiretroviral treatment as close to diagnosis as possible. People who are asymptomatic and well may not feel ready to start taking treatment for life, which means that there needs to be adequate counselling and support, and the health benefits of early initiation of care need to be adequately explained.
Antiretroviral drugs need to be available in all places at all times. Once treatment is initiated, the aim is to keep people on treatment and adherent so that they can be virally suppressed and incapable of transmitting the virus to sexual partners, and to have maximal health benefits from early initiation of treatment. It also requires countries to have at least three lines of drug therapy. Currently only five countries in sub-Saharan Africa have three lines of treatment for people to transition onto once they have drug resistance or experience toxicities.
Most countries are unable to realise these ambitious programmes. There are several reasons for this:
First, they require resources for extraordinary access to HIV testing. Second, they need resources to procure drugs and prevent stock-outs. And, lastly, they need resources to keep people on treatment for life. No country either rich or poor can boast this kind of access or resources.
Although resource-rich countries that have less of a burden of disease are more likely to get and retain people on treatment, in heavily burdened countries there are difficult choices to make as a government, as programmes such as this require extraordinary resources.
It entails a robust health system, innovation to improve HIV testing access, and antiretroviral supplies that will be uninterrupted and support all three lines in case of drug resistance. It will entail not only a robust health system but a cadre of health-care workers who are trained and able to deliver a good service.
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It also requires financial investment and a country that sees the investment case and is willing to put its own money and not that of donors into the programme.
Which countries have made remarkable progress towards 90:90:90?
In Africa, Botswana is close to reaching the 90-90-90 target for testing, treatment and viral suppression. Botswana was the first country on the African continent to provide free antiretroviral treatment to people with HIV, starting in 2002. Furthermore it has achieved its level of coverage when providing treatment to people with CD4 cell counts below 350 cells/mm, even before moving to providing treatment for everyone diagnosed with HIV infection.
Previous international reviews of treatment cascade performance have shown that northern European countries and Australia have made the greatest progress towards reaching the 90-90-90 target.
At the last International AIDS Conference, it was reported that Switzerland, Australia, the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands were well on their way to achieving this target. In each case, easily attainable improvements in the rate of diagnosis or treatment initiation should allow these countries to reach the goal.
Which countries are struggling to reach the 90:90:90 goals?
Many countries are struggling to reach these targets because of hard-to-reach populations. Testing and treatment has enormous challenges irrespective of the country you live in.
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Many of those who receive HIV treatment are those who are the easiest to reach. This means that the road to universal access for all populations still poses major challenges.
There are substantial coverage gaps in many regions. To use Africa as an example: in 2013, treatment coverage on the continent ranged from 41% in eastern and southern Africa to 11% in the Middle East and North Africa.
At least 30 countries in the world account for 89% of all new HIV infections. At least 18 of these countries are in Africa, including Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria and South Africa. But the list also includes other low- and middle-income countries like Brazil, China and India, and high-income countries like the US.
Glenda Gray, President of the SAMRC and Research Professor, Perinatal HIV Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
MANILA, PHILIPPINES - JULY 18: People light candles during the observance of a minute of silence during a vigil for the victims of the attack in the French city of Nice at the Alliance Francaise Manille, on July 18, in Manila, Philippines. A French-Tunisian attacker killed 84 people as he drove a lorry through crowds, gathered to watch a firework display during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France. The attacker then opened fire on people in the crowd before being shot dead by police. (Photo by Dondi Tawatao/Getty Images)
The Bastille Day terror attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice has been claimed by the Islamic State group -- sort of.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a delivery driver known to police for petty crimes, drove a 19-ton white Renault truck into crowds gathered for a fireworks display. At least 84 are dead.
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As they did when Orlando shooter Omar Mateen killed 49 people, IS news agency 'Amaq released a statement calling Bouhlel a "soldier of the Caliphate." IS reiterated the claim in its Bayan Radio news bulletin, adding a warning that "Crusader states" are not safe from its fighters.
However, unlike the attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh or even attacks at Bataclan and Brussels airport, as yet no pre-attack photos or "last will and testament" videos have been released to cement the connection beyond a loose and general claim of affiliation, which may or may not be legitimate.
IS fan boys celebrated with glee on IS-linked social media accounts in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but this does not mean that Raqqa, the self-declared capital of the caliphate headquarters in Syria, ordered or organized the attack.
Reasons to doubt an IS link
President Hollande has already determined this to be a terrorist act -- even before any real evidence has been found on Bouhlel's cellphone or in his laptop browser history on his laptop beyond a phone number alleged to be connected to Al Nusra Front's Omar Diaby. This is problematic.
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According to reports, Bouhlel suffered from depression after his wife divorced him. Stories are circulating that he acted in ways consistent of someone with suffering from mental illness. His own father admitted he had bouts of depression and breakdowns.
With no clear connection to Jihadi groups (and merely a record as a petty criminal), French officials are trying to ascertain whether Bouhlel was a lone actor terrorist or a mentally ill person with whom IS is opportunistically associating.
The idea that a mass casualty perpetrator is likely to be suffering from mental illness is consistent with the research on lone actors conducted by Paul Gill, John Horgan, Emily Corner and others.
The worst-case scenario is that Bouhlel is so-called "clean skin." That's what security officials call a terrorist with no real criminal record who is not under surveillance, and who might be part of a larger plot.
The response by counterterror officials would be very different depending on which of these theories proves to be true.
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My research on suicide terrorism has demonstrated that affiliation with a group is quite different from the research of criminal justice professor Adam Lankford of the University of Alabama, who insists that many terrorists are suicidal and not sacrificing themselves for a greater cause or for some underlying altruistic motivation of self-sacrifice.
The implications for policy and the potential for backlash from terrorists and counterterrorists vary greatly depending on which scenario ends up being accurate for Bouhlel. Whether he was in fact radicalized or possible mentally ill matters.
At this time, any of these explanations is plausible. It is important to explore what is known, admit what we don't know and base any analysis on fact and not speculation.
Why France? Again?
REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
France has suffered three attacks in the past 19 months. There is a robust literature exploring why Europe and especially France has borne the brunt of Jihadi terrorism.
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Explanations include the fact that Muslims (mostly of north African origin) in France have not assimilated into the mainstream of French society. Muslims constitute a disproportionate percentage of the unemployed poor living in the banlieus, or suburbs, of urban sprawl. They are incarcerated at percentages that far exceed their percent of the population, and have fewer opportunities for upward mobility than even their non-Muslim African counterparts have enjoyed in the U.K. and France.
The French government has aggressively banned the veil. The extreme right wing party, the National Front, has soared in the polls and increased its percentage of the seats in the Parliament.
However, one point the news media has largely neglected to mention is that France has been spearheading the bombing campaigns against IS (compared to the Russian bombardment of free Syrian Army positions). It has led attacks against Jihadi groups in Mali and other parts of Africa.
President Francois Hollande's declaration that "We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil" is a not-so-veiled reference to France's involvement in air strikes in Syria. Hollande's statement reflects what the French security services already believe to be a persuasive hypothesis: even if this attack was not IS-directed, it might have been IS-inspired.
Beyond Syria, France has expanded its counterterrorism operations throughout North Africa as Jihadi groups have proliferated in the aftermath of the downfall of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Groups in Morocco, Algeria and Mali affiliated with al-Qaida or IS have flourished. The French counterterror operations launched in 2013 to roll back the Islamist militant uprising in the north of Mali has metamorphosed into a semi-colonial arrangement.
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All of this goes a long way to explain why France.
But it is crucial to point out that just acts inspired by IS are most certainly not the same as those planned by or at the behest of IS. The connection to IS is not crystal clear even when groups (let alone individuals) claim affiliation by making a pledge, or bayat, to the Islamic State.
According to the Minerva research team at Georgia State University, the 2014 expansion of IS' so-called Caliphate was foretold by "Wiki Baghdady" -- a Jihadi insider, but more than likely an al-Qaida agent -- who predicted IS would amass multiple group allegiances and then announce them simultaneously in order to project power and influence.
"It would be as if the pledges came from everywhere, answering al-Baghdadi's call," Wiki Baghdady wrote. Unsurprisingly, within 10 months WikiBaghdady's predictions proved correct. Formal pledges from jihadists in Sinai, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and Algeria were released through IS media in November and were formally accepted by the "emir" three days later.
In essence, the IS expansion strategy follows a preset "script." Obvious patterns have emerged in terms of the types of attacks a group perpetrates -- and even IS' use of a standardized logo, font, colors and branding.
For individuals, the branding is more complex. Unless video emerges of Bouhlel being trained in Mosul or Raqqa or some incriminating materials are found on his cellphone or personal computers, we must treat the situation as unconfirmed until we have more information.
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Challenge coins are a symbol of hard work and a job well done. They are physical proof of achievements in a soldier's life. Each one has a story behind it. What they did and had gone through to earn it.
A higher commander in US military has a supply of them at all times, whether at headquarters or in the field.
Whenever a soldier gives out an outstanding service or performance of duty, he is rewarded by the commander on the spot.
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The event of handling a challenge coin is brief and subtle like an ordinary handshake which often goes unnoticed by others. It is their way to build a personal bond, spur pride and create a feeling of loyalty in the company.
Commanders at platoon level are known to purchase these coins from their own pockets so it does not necessarily represent an official medal.
Soldiers who go beyond the call of normal duty to perform at headquarters or in the field are considered for an official award or medal. But they are also often handed out with a challenge coin by the commander as a personal token of appreciation for their hard work.
Different military units have their own unique customs for challenge coins. They can be handed as a nod of gratitude and appreciation or a deep personal connection or even to build a common bond among soldiers on a deployment.
US AirForce holds a Coin distribution ceremony for its cadets upon graduation. For most of the Airmen this is the first time they receive a Challenge Coin. And it is like a tradition of excellence.
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For war heroes, US military organizes a salutation event wherein all soldiers are presented with challenge coins and other certifications. One of the recent such events was a presentation of challenge coins by high ranking Military Officers to war heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan.
At deployments, the commander of a company or platoon often gives one Challenge coin to each soldier. It is like building a bond among all those who served together in a brotherhood. No one outside of this company gets that unique coin.
It ties them to the experience for the rest of their lives.
As soldiers advance in their careers, they keep getting these little awards for their outstanding job performances. They value these coins throughout their lives and make sure to showcase the ones that mean the most to them.
All retired officers or senior noncommissioned officers have their huge collection of Challenge coins which they proudly showcase in their offices or at home. They often build custom furniture to display the coins they have acquired over the years of their service to Military. For example, in a presidential portrait of former president Mr. Bill Clinton's, he is posing in front of his collection of challenge coins.
The tradition has now spread across many different institutes and departments apart from Military, including fire, law, police, spots and even NASA. A challenge coin is now recognized as a physical proof of achievements and hard fought relationships. It is believed to build unity among a team that also promotes morale along the way.
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Why is it called a Challenge Coin
Military has a tradition of carrying their unit's challenge coin at all times specially for those who have been given a coin formally by their unit. This rule is not always official depending on the different departments.
The word challenge is associated with the act of challenging called "Coin Check". This is usually loudly announced in a casual gathering where the challenger accidentally drops a challenge coin to challenge everyone to produce their unit's coin. Anyone who fails to do so must buy a round of drinks for the challenger and everyone else who participated in the challenge coin. But if everyone is carrying their coin, the challenger has to buy a round of drinks for the group.
Who designs the Challenge Coins
Unlike old times, when each Military unit designed unique coin reflecting their forte, now anyone can design a coin and sell it online. Even military officials now get these coins designed by different services providers online and get them manufactured with private imprints.
The design process is usually informal since officers have their own personal budget for these and there is nothing official about getting a challenge coin designed in US military. They are also not very expensive to design and produce.
For example, when the US Air Force celebrated its 60th anniversary in the year 2007, they decided to add to the celebration by minting a special challenge coin. They assigned the task to a Minted Service retailer to design a perfect theme of Heritage to Horizon, a representation of the official 60th anniversary symbol on the obverse and a World War II-era flying ace on the reverse.
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Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they've been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways. In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front. As vets have returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment -- including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) -- have poured off America's distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide. And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public.
The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those five white officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases, taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters were wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as "collateral damage.") In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot, built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive, and typical of robots that police departments now possess.
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In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by a drone in the United States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the ante. Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade robots -- a burgeoning field for the Pentagon -- are imagining other ways to employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a future in which they will be "useful, cheap, and ubiquitous," and capable of Tasing as well as killing.
Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the country's wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over "the homeland" on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies. So the future stage is set. Once you've used any kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, it's only logical -- given some future extreme situation -- to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed (no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), it's not hard to imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or later. After all, Johnson was already talking about planting "IEDs" (the term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a relatively modest step from there.
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As an American citizen, according to our democratic system, all law-abiding citizens have a right to bear arms. The decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Heller vs. DC (2008) affirms the right of a citizen to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes. I have a Constitutional right to be able to defend my family, myself, and my property; whether this defense becomes necessary because of criminals, tyrants, or an over-zealous government. And it seems to me, now more than ever, I need this right to protect my family from criminals and terrorists.
Yet if I am on a terror watch list or a no-fly list, I will fail a background check and not be allowed to legally purchase a firearm. And there are nearly a dozen such lists being maintained by different agencies in the US government. While I agree that people who are terrorists or criminals should not be allowed to legally possess a firearm, being suspected of a terrorist act does not satisfy the requirements of due process explicitly stated in the 5th and 14th Amendments. And just being suspected of an activity, should not give state or federal government the power to take away my legally purchased firearms, or prevent me from legally purchasing a firearm for lawful purposes.
But what happens when an individual is mistakenly added to these lists? What is the due process that the government uses to justify removal of my right to bear arms? Where is my 6th Amendment right to confront the witnesses against me? Representative John Lewis (D-GA) and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) were on a no-fly list, and did not know about this until they tried to board a plane. While I may disagree with their individual views and policies from time to time, I can hardly find a valid reason to keep them off of commercial airplanes "in the interest of public safety."
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And once placed on the list, where is the transparent appeals process to prove to the government that you are not the threat that these agencies think you are? Why does it happen that young children sometimes have problems flying with their families just because they have the same name as someone who is on the list? A mistake by the government should not allow agencies the ability to infringe upon the rights of citizens to this degree. Given the lack of a speedy and fair trial, or an equitable system of appeals; how is this setup Constitutional to the American people?
And consider the possibility of an 18-year-old making a wrong choice in a situation, which leads to felony charges. After prosecution and conviction, a judge will determine what sentence the individual must complete in order to repay their debt to society. Upon completion of the terms of the sentence, this individual will no longer have the right to possess a firearm for the rest of their life. This assumes that the individual will remain, at least to some degree, a threat to society forever. This excludes the possibility of an individual recognizing the malice of their crime and rehabilitating into a law abiding citizen. Where is the course of action which proves to the justice system beyond a shadow of a doubt that essentially you have "learned your lesson"?
The battle to achieve women's equality in life and in the work space - to secure the sort of change that profoundly transforms society for the better - is far from won. This pushing and shoving process is as challenging for men as it is for women. Both sexes are still susceptible to the emotional and intellectual conditioning of the "old normal", which at best can be an apathetic deference to men, based on force of habit. In developing countries, inequality can be a "fait accompli" that decides a woman's fate with the same physiological certainty as her DNA. Walking into the public places of a developed country, such as a bar or office, and glimpsing a sea of dark business suits, not one of them on a female shape, might look weird, but it happens.
Women often fear sounding naive or un-succinct in public, so osmotic are their inbred notions as usurpers when it comes to offering leadership. It was not that long ago when a woman's desire to succeed was considered a "neurosis" or the result of a "castration complex" that was best treated through passiveness, according to that great proponent of women's psychology, Sigmund Freud. While women worry about public reaction, men naturally brace themselves for it. Freeing inherent gender bias can still feel like loosening a mollusc off a shipwrecked galleon.
Hangovers from another era, when French women were encouraged to mime the heart-shaped pout with the words, "pomme, prune, pouce", resonate in today's social media accounts of young teenage girls. Displays of sexuality are part of getting to know how and when to use or not use one's physical attributes in a work or social environment. But at least Aristotle and Plato can be relegated to their creaky beds in the firm knowledge that women are no longer an "error of nature" nor a "failed man".
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Some women may prefer the status quo of inequality; in anachronistic societies docility can allow them to live through anything without too much personal injury; and, in modern ones, it is sometimes easier to wrap the security blanket of collective victimisation around a shrugging shoulder of acceptance. Not all women are born warriors or barricade removers, some channel their energy into a bigger, selfless love towards family, marriage and community. Yet, without true choice, the joys of ironing and washing-up are what Marcel Proust called, "the arts of nothingness", when every-day sharing of drudgery constitutes a husband asking, "Do you mind making dinner again tonight, dear? I feel like writing a fleeting poem."
A fifty-fifty world is not just about the empowerment of women, but of men, unburdening them from societal expectations and role-playing as traditional breadwinners, and doubling up on the potential to share the good stuff about being alive, or at its most basic, a combined salary to live on.
A recent international conference in London demonstrated the reality of what a healthy gender power ratio should look and sound like. Long gone were the days of the 1980's when a male participant forewarned a couple of women speakers on a literary panel about feminisation: "It's going to be hard for me not to make fun of you two". This time, panellists, participants and organisers were firmly a fifty-fifty women to men ratio, covering topics of governance, economics, cyber-security, religion, inter-connectivity and globalisation.
The result was a dialogue characterised by measured passion; intense, civilised, human, complex, with an impetus towards the discussion of solutions over their recognised causes, and generated by a thought process of unity, not rank. An Imam, pressed on the dearth of women in leadership positions in Islam, rhetorically asked muslim women in the audience if they were ready to lead, to which there was a respectful but resounding "yes!".
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The conference was insightful, hopeful and up-lifting.
A Vice Presidential pick is a defining moment in a campaign, motivating nominees to utilize unique strategies. Some try to accentuate their heavyweight status by partnering up with less vibrant versions of themselves in what might be called the "Bad Xerox Without Any Toner" maneuver. Think... Dan Quayle.
Some pick opponents who put up distinguished fights on the primary trail even though the two get along like hot fudge sundaes and gravel rakes in the "One Plus One Equals Three" scenario. Lyndon Johnson and Al Gore fit this template.
Others look for anything semi- vertical and warm blooded, in the "Please, Somebody, Anybody, Say Yes" approach which led George McGovern to pick Sargent Shriver after his first choice was revealed to suffer from depression. Before being picked, as opposed to Shriver who was afflicted afterwards.
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You have the "Game Changer" blueprint that gave us Sarah Palin and Admiral Stockdale. Who? Exactly. Then there's the ever popular "Toughen the Kid Up by Giving Him a Taste of Satan" move, leading to Dick Cheney.
Looking Presidential is not a problem for Hillary Clinton, as she has been involved in enough high profile intrigue, chicanery and deceit to give three or four late 19th Century administrations a run for their money. After eight years as First Lady and four as Secretary of State, she could plot her way to the Oval Office from the Lincoln Bedroom blindfolded. Of course, so could some of Bill's dates.
Hillary's requirements are more esoteric, so let's check out the short list of possible candidates designed to provide the former New York Senator with an edge this November.
Bernie Sanders because otherwise his legion of supporters will evaporate like pixie dust in a hard rain.
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Elizabeth Warren, although having two people of the same sex on a single ticket would be unprecedented. Oh wait, no, it wouldn't.
Cory Booker, because the best way to mooch some of that Obama mojo is picking someone who many Americans think is the same dude.
Tom Brady would complete The Team of Schemers.
Tim Kaine, a man so safe and boring he could accept a charisma implant from Richard Gephardt.
Ted Cruz could reveal inside info on which buttons to push to drive the GOP even crazier, not to mention really sticking it in Donald Trump's craw.
Joaquin Castro to cement the Hispanic vote, or his twin brother Julian. Or one of their uncles, Fidel or Raul.
Joaquin Phoenix who can match Donald Trump crazy for crazy.
Joaquin Guzman, also known as El Chapo, to prove that in America, we believe in second chances; also he's a friend of Sean Penn and dresses nice.
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Pete Rose, so both spots on the ticket will have the same haircut.
Stephen Curry, because who doesn't love Stephen Curry?
Bill Cosby who in comparison will make her the paragon of virtue and if they lose, he'd be a perfect fall guy. Also provides assassination insurance.
Al Franken, because if the campaign does go down the tubes, at least he can keep the bus laughing.
Joe Biden who would provide continuity, having proved he can do the job. Of course, so would Cheney.
John Hickenlooper because "Vice President Hickenlooper "is just fun to say.
And finally, FBI director James Comey because, come on, the guy deserves something, right?
Donald Trump has to be feeling the heat now. With polls a week ago showing essentially a dead heat for president between him and Hillary Clinton (new network polls show her moving back into a slender lead after receiving her Bernie Sanders endorsement), the billionaire bully boy waffled badly at the end over his pick of far right Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate http://time.com/4409330/donald-trump-mike-pence-vice-president-2/ before finally announcing in an awkward Friday tweet what his advisors had already leaked.
What else happened in the last few days? A horrific terrorist attack on the French Riviera followed by a mysterious and ultimately failed military coup in Turkey, the only Islamic nation in NATO and an important yet very problematic US ally.
After boasting again via twitter that he had foreseen another jihadist terrorist attack -- Does the man's genius know no bounds? Heh -- Trump has had remarkably little to say. Which is just as well, as these are complex matters and Trump has no knowledge about or facility for them.
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Too bad for him that a real-life rather than "reality" show president has to make real-time calls that involve things far more important than the use or non-use of social media.
With a decidedly odd-looking Republican national convention getting underway now in Cleveland, all this reminds of the very high stakes involved. And why Duce Donald is very much not the person for the job.
Trump reportedly tried to change his mind at the last minute on his selection of far right Indiana Governor Mike Pence as would-be vice president. While it's understandable that Trump might not want to be so easily pinned down as being supportive of laws harassing gay folks and attempts to control women's bodies, he has already taken it upon himself to lead the nation's reactionary forces. So he needs to own it.
Just imagine that unsteadiness on his biggest hard-and-fast decision as a candidate at work on the far murkier matters of the horrific Thursday night truck attack on tourists and Bastille Day celebrants in Nice, France.
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What is Trump's 140-character solution to the emerging reality of that attack; namely, that the attacker had few if any discernible ties to jihadists and was not much of Muslim, much less a fundamentalist Islamic radical? What he was was a seemingly irrational, frequently violent guy.
There's no typically glib and shallow Trumpist answer for that. Well, except for that which really underlies so much of Trump's message. Sheer racism.
The Turkish crisis too defies the instantly reflexive social media/"reality" TV/appeal to the constantly honed resentments of Fox News media chops that have elevated the opportunistic neo-fascist well within hailing distance of the Presidency of the United States.
I followed the attempted coup as it unfolded on the two compact Androids I carry at all times. (See, Hillary, it's easy to carry two devices. Try it some time.)
Lately I've been using the smartphones in tandem. On the one hand, to watch and listen to the stunningly good Dead & Co. tour as it moves around the US. On the other, for the usual news/research/communication purposes. And for just this sort of thing.
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As the Turkish coup unfolded, I kept one device on the BBC World Service and other on the Russia Today television feed. (American cable news? You're kidding, right?)
Two things were clear pretty early on. First, that the rebels, drawn entirely from the traditionally more modernist and secular military, were putting out America-friendly messages in contrast to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's much more ambivalent moves of recent years. Second, that the rebels' success in seizing state media, airports, and certain other key elements of infrastructure was not matched in securing Erdogan.
In uncertain situations, it's often what has not happened that is most important.
Fanciful rumors about Erdogan's whereabouts -- he'd been vacationing at a Mediterranean resort -- were flying but Erdogan's prime minister was still at large and issuing defiant statements.
Finally the man himself dramatically emerged, phoning a private and, oops, unsecured TV station to address some of the nation in the middle of the night using Apple FaceTime. Erdogan even more dramatically rallied his supporters to take to the streets and oppose the rebels.
Now, Trump is certainly not only not an expert on Turkish politics (nor am I), he has no real knowledge of the dynamics of Turkish history. He does know, because his fave rave Vladimir Putin complains about it, that Erdogan has been something of a double dealer on the matter of going after Isis. Since Erdogan backs various flavors of Islamists trying to bring down the Assad regime in Syria.
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Might Trump, who has never studied the dynamics of conflict and was a persistent draft dodger when he was eligible for military service, have leaped at the lure of the pro-Western statements from the rebels and not noticed that Erdogan was still at large? And still alive. (I don't advocate assassination, but clearly, within the logic of their situation, the rebels should have killed Erdogan with a military strike immediately after they failed to take him at his resort.)
Given Trump's belief that going off half-cocked is the virtue that has gotten him this far, he certainly could have put the US on the wrong side of the outcome. And that's even without suspecting that Erdogan manipulated the coup into being in order to greatly accelerate a crackdown on internal opposition.
Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama wisely supported the democratic process, i.e., the maintenance of Erdogan. Even though he is not so slowly rolling back many democratic safeguards and not the partner Obama hoped for at the beginning of his administration. Why is that smart? Because we have a big airbase in Turkey with substantial nuclear weapons. And because Erdogan is backing our use of the base in the struggle against Isis.
The only saving grace for "President" Trump might have been his penchant for following along after Russian President Putin, who would undoubtedly have told him that with Erdogan on the loose and able to instigate a popular mobilization, as well as call on much of the state security apparatus, it made no sense to jump precipitously.
But, even though he is a very capable guy and not the Hitler some make him out to be, we really don't want Vladimir Putin as our de facto national security advisor, do we?
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Don't laugh. That could easily happen.
The technology now exists to deliver, at the push of a touch screen, a taxi to your door. A doctor can assess a person's health remotely. Computers can process and organize data from millions of inputs.
So governments, long accused of taking on tasks too large to complete, now have access to technology to make extremely complex tasks easy. Digital technologies open opportunities to governments that are limited, it seems, only by our imagination. And in countries all over the world, digital innovators are testing ways to modernize long standing bureaucratic processes. Here are eight innovations worthy of replication.
Join up government: The New Zealand government has set an ambitious goal to reduce the cost of dealing with government by 25 percent by 2017. Surveys found that a big pain point for businesses was the frustration of starting from scratch each time they worked with a new government organization. So the Kiwis have launched a major effort to share information and processes across departments. A business incorporating with Inland Revenue can simultaneously register as an employer with the accident compensation service, for example. "The goal is to not have to ask businesses for the same information time and time again," explains Andrew Bardsley, who runs the Better for Business program. "We've started to pull together pictures of a more complete way of understanding the customer."
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Once only: In Estonia, every citizen has a unique online identity, meaning he or she never has to fill out the same information twice when transacting with government, and citizens control their own data. Estonia's system isn't simply a tool for single sign-on--it makes everything from visiting the hospital to boarding a train infinitely easier.
Reimagine the current model: By 2025, the city of Helsinki plans to eliminate the need for any city resident to own a private car. The idea is to combine public and private transport providers so citizens can select the fastest or cheapest mode of travel. Helsinki is taking a quintessentially physical transportation system designed around vehicles, roads, bridges, subways, and buses, and reverses it to revolve around digitally-enabled individual mobility--moving each traveler from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible. Instead of expecting commuters to adapt their habits to the buses, the city uses rider data to adapt infrastructure to commuter habits.
Tap into the broader tech ecosystem: San Francisco wants to become the world's hub for the Internet of Things (IoT). One way it's doing this is by using the city as a sandbox for testing and validating use models for IoT applications. Companies that successfully apply to the city's entrepreneurs in residence program spend eight weeks collaborating with a city department to pilot their application. It's a terrific win-win. The startup gets a real-life use case while the city gets cutting edge technology with little financial risk.
Reinvent procurement: Traditional procurement models are mostly incompatible with a digital product's rapid, agile model of development. To rectify this, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) developed a "bake-off-style" approach to contractor engagement. Instead of awarding one big award, they make awards to four different contractors for agile development teams. Every six months, teams are reevaluated. Companies that perform well receive contracts for more teams on the project--poor performing teams go home, well before they have a chance to underdeliver or request a pricey change order.
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Plug and Play: Whenever multiple agencies carry out common processes--payments, payroll, authentication, reservations--they can save considerable amounts of money by sharing systems. Britain's former digital chief Mike Bracken once lamented: "There isn't one IT system in government, not a single one that has managed to service the needs of all the other government departments." He defines a platform as a system that is additive--any department can use it, and every new user adds value. The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) has responded by building a handful of platforms, ranging from publishing (Gov.uk) to identity management (Verify).
Continuous learning: Digital is never really "finished." You're always gathering more data, seeking user feedback, A/B testing, learning, and iterating. Recognizing this, VicRoads, the transport agency in New South Wales, Australia has adopted the practice of phased releases, performing rigorous A/B testing when releasing new features to the public. For example, 95 percent of site visitors might see the old change-of-address form, with only 5 percent able to access the new and improved version. Only after addressing any remaining issues would the application be opened up to 100 percent of users.
Citizens as sensors. Deep wells of user feedback can turn beta tests into extraordinarily thorough quality-control trials. The SmartSantander project in the Spanish city of Santander has expanded this principle to the entire civic infrastructure. The city-run project involves 20,000 sensors that measure traffic flow, parking spaces, noise, pollution, temperature, moisture levels, and other metrics.
The city has saved money by directing services where sensors say they are needed--say, dimming streetlights on empty streets. Parking sensors have helped inform drivers where spots are available, and the SmartSantanderRA app even lets citizens point their smartphone at a civic monument to learn about it--like which performance will play tonight in the concert hall, or what that guy did to deserve a statue.
Santander residents can add to the information flow by downloading an app that turns their smartphones into sensors. In this way, citizens play a dual role in the SmartSantander project: as testers and as extensions of its capacity.
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These digital innovations will enjoy a first mover advantage when attracting businesses and satisfying citizens. Other governments will adopt the innovations pioneered by these digital leaders. In the spirit of thorough beta testing, they will have the experience of their predecessors to build on, and, one assumes, improve.
By American Society of Nephrology President Raymond C. Harris, MD, FASN and XPRIZE CEO, Marcus Shingles
Kidney transplantation is the optimal form of therapy for the nearly half million Americans and millions of people around the world suffering from kidney failure. However, the kidney transplant waitlist--approximately 100,000 Americans--is growing, and the average wait time for a transplant is five years. Most will die before their name is ever called.
About 450,000 Americans have failed kidneys and - in the absence of transplant options -- depend on dialysis to live. Dialysis keeps them alive but their quality of life is often dismal, and their life expectancy is often short. At a cost of nearly $35 billion annually--more than the entire budget for the National Institutes of Health--Medicare pays for dialysis for every citizen with kidney failure regardless of age. Despite this remarkable commitment, investment in innovations for kidney treatments has been inadequate for decades.
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Unlike kidney transplants, dialysis is not a cure and does not return patients to full health or a normal lifestyle. Patients receiving dialysis endure three to four hour treatment three or more times a week. Their blood is removed, filtered through a machine that clears toxins and waste the kidneys would normally remove, and returned. The process is emotionally exhausting and physically debilitating. Only 1 in 5 patients of working age who are on dialysis have jobs. Approximately half of the dialysis population dies within three years.
Kidney diseases disproportionately affect minority populations. African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are up to four times more likely to develop kidney failure than Caucasians. African Americans in low income neighborhoods are also 57 percent less likely to make the transplant list than others.
Recognizing that this kidney transplant crisis is largely due to organ shortages, the Obama Administration recently convened the White House Organ Summit. At the Summit, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) announced its pledge of the first $7 million dollars toward a global prize competition to develop a novel wearable or implantable device that replaces kidney function and improves patient quality of life, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation.
ASN and XPRIZE believe we must do better for the millions of people with kidney failure. XPRIZE designs and implements innovative competition models that utilize the unique combination of gamification, crowd-sourcing, incentive prize theory, and exponential technologies to solve the world's grandest challenges. We believe that a global competition will help create a fundamental shift in the way we treat kidney failure by incentivizing the development of a better alternative to dialysis, improving patients' health and the quality of their lives. Research in bioengineering, matrix technology, and cell biology is poised to ignite revolutionary changes in the options clinicians can offer people with kidney diseases. A global prize competition would bring together scientists and innovators to catalyze transformative innovation.
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We commend the White House for putting a spotlight on this critical issue, and we call on others to join us in this serious and time-sensitive initiative to help finalize, fund, and execute this competition that can ultimately improve treatment options for kidney failure patients and the clinicians who treat them. Learn more at http://www.xprize.org/prizes/future-prizes/kidney-disease and http://www.asn-online.org/news/2016/0613-organ-summit.aspx.
By Kevin Xu
In a globally competitive world, startups now have to balance working in multiple countries simultaneously to stay ahead of the competition. Doing business in different locations with different cultures can be a challenge, but smart entrepreneurs can stay afloat with the right approach.
As a Chinese-born American and CEO of two companies -- one in each country -- I have learned a few strategies that can help other entrepreneurs achieve international success.
Challenges of Global Business
Doing business in multiple countries presents three primary challenges: culture, time, and distance.
The cultural differences between China and the U.S. are vast. In China, people are more likely to discuss business during leisure time while sharing a meal or out on the town. But in America, people prefer to make decisions in conference rooms. These challenges extend to language as well. Even with a translator, one side will often fail to grasp the subtleties of what the other is trying to communicate.
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Time management gets trickier when international travel becomes a regular occurrence. I once flew between Beijing and Los Angeles to attend multiple conferences on the same day, which could have been a scheduling nightmare if I hadn't been keenly aware of the flight and conference schedules beforehand. If you travel internationally with any frequency, learning the specifics of travel options ahead of time can pay massive dividends when you have to make quick decisions.
Finally, while people you work with mean well, you cannot overly rely on their support when separated by a significant distance. When we are ready to start the day in the U.S., our Chinese counterparts are just falling asleep. Geographical distance can make you feel less in control of your company, and video conferences can only do so much to alleviate this when small details slip through the cracks. Meetings feel less private because there is always a third party involved in facilitating communication across an ocean.
How to Stay Afloat in Multiple Countries
Despite the significant challenges, the rewards of doing business in multiple countries are immense. These four strategies have helped me maintain balance in two places while helping both companies grow:
1. Use Strong Videoconferencing Software
Find a good third-party software that brings instant visualization to the team. We initially used Skype, which required logging in and often an actual PC, but it was slow and unintuitive for our purposes -- largely thanks to its heavy digital regulation in China. For our purposes, WeChat has been much more effective.
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2. Stick With a Time
If you schedule a conference meeting for both sides, make sure people in both countries can participate on equal ground, and stick with that time once you establish it. We hold our meetings at 7 p.m. PST, which means the team members in China are ready to go at 10 a.m.
3. Solve Local Problems Locally
Don't replace one country's experience with the other. Western logic will struggle to solve Eastern problems and vice versa. When I first met a government official in China who was guiding me through a certain process, I went alone and found myself speaking with 10 other people. At the time, I didn't realize I was expected to bring different specialists from my team. Why? Because I was approaching the meeting as if it were in the U.S.
4. Clarify Quantitative Descriptions
A little in one country might be a lot in another. When I went to China to meet some business partners, they told me they would only be drinking a little. Their definition of "a little" turned out to be vastly different from my own. The same is true in more formal business settings. A short time or a low stock in one place might be interpreted differently in another.
Don't hesitate to expand internationally just because there are obstacles in your path. Embrace the culture, create consistent communication, and treat both sides equally. You will soon enjoy the immense benefits that multinational markets provide.
Atheist US Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan delivering a secular-inspired Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol -- Photo by Roen Horn
All around the world, religious terror is striking and threatening us. Whether in France, Turkey, London, or the USA, the threat is now constant. We can fight it all we want. We can send out our troops; we can chip refugees; we can try to monitor terrorist's every move. We can even improve trauma medicine to deal with extreme violence they bring us. But none of this solves the underlying issue: Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam are fundamentally violent philosophies with violent Gods. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others have all reiterated essentially the same thing.
Consider these verses from the Koran:
Koran (3:56): As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.
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Koran (8:12): I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
And then consider these verses from the Bible:
Deuteronomy 17:12: Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the holy man who represents God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged.
Numbers: 31:17: Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
Of course, both the Koran and Bible have passages that highlight kindness too--but you don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card in the 21st Century by being both violent and peaceful. If you beat your spouse, you're an abuser and can face jail time (even if you're a loving spouse other times). It's one or the other in the 21st Century: If you're a warmonger, murderer, or a terrorist--you're a bona fide warmonger, murder, or terrorist. And nothing is going to change that.
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The fundamental problem with religion is that believers--about 5 billion people right now on Planet Earth--are so sure they're "correct" on anything and everything they believe. This is, of course, a sure sign of insanity--especially since most of what people believe was taught to them when they were children (and they had no way to filter it out or reason about it).
The only real truth out there, at least while our brains are just three pound bags of meat (and our senses--like our eyes--see just 1 percent of the visible universe), is to know "absolute truth" is something way too complex to understand. The only real thing to understand right now is the Scientific Method--the holy grail of wisdom that reason advocates follow. It states that if you test a hypothesis enough times, and the outcome seems to always be similar, then you can utilize that as a semi-truth and apply it functionally in one's life (but beware: It could change anytime and it might). That's the language of reason--the language of science.
It's the same method of thinking that explains why jet airplanes don't fall out of the sky. Or why skyscrapers keep standing through hurricanes. Or why we could put a man on the moon and bring him back.
However, it's not the thinking method that President Obama used to swear on a Bible to get his job on inauguration day. Or George W. Bush when he stopped life saving stem cell funding for seven years during his presidency. Or the Pope when he insists condom usage is a sin, despite it having the possibility of saving millions of lives from AIDS in Africa.
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The Scientific Method is also not the thinking method of the pilots who flew into the World Trade Center. Or of the murderer who gunned down people in Orlando. And it's certainly not the method of thinking that the truck driver used to run down innocent people in Nice, France.
Like the hundreds of millions of other nonreligious people out there, it's hard for me to fathom how religious people got brainwashed into being this way--this ignorant. But bear in mind, it's not just religious terrorism that is literally killing us--it's much more.
Consider how many nonreligious secular people there are leading our nation right now. The answer is astonishing: It's zero (at least publicly). All 535 members of Congress, all eight Supreme Court justices, and our President believe in God and an afterlife.
No wonder life extension and anti-aging science is basically unfunded by the US Government. Why should the US care about whether you live longer or can overcome disease when you're all going to wake up in Jesus' arms after you die? Or in some heavenly Islamic paradise with a bunch of virgins?
I'm a presidential candidate that wants you to live--not in some unknown paradise once you die that no one has ever seen before or can prove exists. I want you to live now, regardless what craziness or tragedy the world can throw at you. I want your loved ones to live too--and not die because of aging, disease, or terrorism. I want you all to survive as long as you want--and to try to find a perfect world here on Earth. Transhumanist science can give that to us, and it will soon. And maybe in a hundred years, we can all even venture somewhere else in the universe when space travel can get us there safely.
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If you want to live--and not be killed or die--make a point to criticize and disavow religion and religious people for being deathist: the idea that death is either welcome or acceptable (whether it comes via terrorism, disease, or aging).
Advocates say healing takes time after former police officer arrested
After a former Hutchinson police officer was arrested in a series of rapes and sexual assaults, victim advocates worry some victims might stay silent.
Cruz is trying to stop the move before it goes into effect, but its hard to see how he succeeds since the administration has already signed off on it. He spoke at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation and TechFreedom.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) on Thursday called the U.S. governments plan to transition its control over the body governing the internet domain name system an extraordinary threat to our freedom.
The U.S. government holds a contract with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the body that governs the internet domain names that essentially power the world wide web. The contract runs out on September 30.
American officials and private sector experts spent two years working with stakeholders worldwide to develop a plan to transition U.S. control over IANA to a privatized group of global stakeholders. That transition is now on track to take place by the end of September.
Cruz hit the Obama administration on what he called a radical proposal that he argued will empower countries like Russia, like China, like Iran to censor speech on the internet.
The former Republican presidential candidate said the transition should give Americans greater and greater concern over the security of top-level internet domains like .mil or .gov. There could be censorship on the internet because, he argued, the proposal would give adversarial governments direct influence over the internet.
A group of Republicans led by Cruz introduced a bill in June that would halt the IANA transition until Congress gives its approval. Congress doesnt have to sit by and allow censorship to happen, Cruz told the audience Thursday as he stumped for his legislation.
Proponents of the transition have argued that postponing the plan would imply that the U.S. wants to keep its stronger control over the internet, which doesnt sit well with the international community. Experts also say they have responded with due diligence regarding Cruzs concerns.
Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, was involved in the IANA transition negotiations. He says that the worries of foreign government censorship are unrelated to the transition proposal.
Ive responded to concerns raised by Senator Cruz and others, by showing how the community proposal restricts government power relative to the private sector, and by showing that human rights wont be enforceable by [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], DelBianco said in an email to Morning Consult. I share the senators concerns about foreign government censorship, but that is already happening and has nothing to do with ICANN or IANA oversight.
Other GOP senators, including Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.), though not in favor of blocking the transition, have expressed concerns about rushing the move and have requested delaying it to ensure the transition occurs smoothly. They want to make sure it proceeds without any problems in U.S. domain security and has adequate protection from any foreign government power grabs.
The Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in internet rights around the world. It originally appears each week on Global Voices Advocacy. Ellery Roberts Biddle, Weiping Li, Hae-in Lim, Laura Vidal, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.
Notorious internet enemies like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia approved a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council that condemns internet shutdowns and human rights violations committed against persons for exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms on the internet. The resolution is nonbinding, meaning it cannot be enforced as law.
The resolution was hotly debated by the 47-member council, with the aforementioned statesalong with South Africa, India, Indonesia, and otherspushing back against language surrounding internet shutdowns. Ultimately, with key support from certain member states and civil society groups, it is now approved. The resolution will provide a concrete benchmark and accountability mechanism that advocates can use in efforts to promote online rights in the policy arena.
But what does it mean for internet users and digital activists in countries where shutdowns and threats for online speech are the norm? For those working in the area of online access and rights, the list of current U.N. HRC members inspires concern.
The council includes several countries that are known for mandating platform and internet service shutdowns in the face of political strainaside from Russia and China, theres Bangladesh, where Facebook and WhatsApp were blocked for three weeks in 2015 in an effort to quell public instability. Theres Ethiopia, where state persecution of journalists and online human rights advocates are commonplace and where multiple social media platforms in the Oromo region have been blocked this year in response to student protests. Theres Venezuela, which has experienced a smattering of platform shutdowns and wholesale internet blackouts since opposition protests peaked in 2014. Beyond these, member states like Cuba, Ecuador, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Vietnam have abysmal records when it comes to human rights violations against online activists and media workers.
While the resolution provides a strong policy standard for what constitutes good behavior by national governments around the world, the distance between policy and practice may remain great.
Satirical Street Children stuck behind bars in Egypt
Four members of a satirical web video group in Alexandria, Egypt, have been behind bars since May 10 on accusations of undermining national stability. The Ministry of Interior described them as instigators against the ruling regime after the group, called Street Children, posted a video that mocked President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and called for him to resign. Their lawyer, who works with Cairos Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, said they had also been accused of spreading false news, despite the fact that the videos are clearly in jest. The video received more than 1 million views on Facebook before their page was deactivated.
Founder of protest reporting outlet detained in China
Lu Yuyu, founder of citizen media outlet Not in the News, went missing June 15 along with his girlfriend. Chinese human rights advocates reported June 26 that Lu and his girlfriend Li Tingyu are being detained on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
The citizen news outlet reports and distributes news of mass demonstrations in China via Blogspot,YouTube, and the Twitter account @wickedonnaa since 2013. Not in the News also keeps track of the scale and number of incidents, the number of arrested demonstrators, and the reasons behind the demonstrations through its monthly statistics report. It recorded 28,950 incidents in mainland China in 2015 and 9,869 incidents in the first quarter of 2016.
China bulks up on internet governance
A draft security law presented before the standing committee of Chinas National Peoples Congress increases unspecified social responsibilities for network operators by requiring them to comply with social and business ethics and maintain supervision by both government and public. It is unclear when it may be passed.
Meanwhile, Lu Wei, the official in charge of overseeing cybersecurity and online censorship, unexpectedly stepped down from his post as director of the Cyberspace Administration of China. His deputy, Xu Lin, who is known as a loyal supporter of President Xi Jinping, will take over.
Peru slaps Google for denying citizen right to Be forgotten
The Peruvian Data Protection Authority sanctioned Google for ignoring a Peruvian citizens right to be forgotten, setting a new precedent in the country. In the case, a Peruvian citizen petitioned the Data Protection Authority to request the removal of links relating to accusations against him for child pornography, after his case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. The Data Protection Authority deemed Google responsible for treating the personal data of Peruvians and issued a $75,000 fine. The company can still appeal the decision in court.
Facebook will keep tracking non-users, at least for now
People who do not have Facebook accounts are nevertheless tracked when they visit the site, unless they use an anonymous browser such as Tor. The Belgian Privacy Commission recently sought to change this by taking the U.S.-based company to court, but it has now officially lost its case against the company. The Brussels Appeals Court dismissed the case, claiming the regulator does not have jurisdiction over the company, which has its European headquarters in Ireland. The Privacy Commission plans to launch a final appeal with the Court of Cassation, which can throw out previous judgments but not deliver new ones; the commission notes that in the past the court has overruled the Court of Appeal on cases involving jurisdiction over foreign companies.
New Research
Source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/07/05/netizen_report_the_u_n_condemned_internet_shutdowns_but_does_it_matter.html
Internet freedom has been part of U.S. foreign policy since 2010, when the Internet had just emerged as a powerful political tool, fueling activism in Iran, connecting dissident communications in the Arab Spring, and challenging rulers in Russia, China, Cuba, and other authoritarian regimes.
Helle C. Dale is the Heritage Foundation's senior fellow in public diplomacy. Her work focuses on the U.S. governments institutions and programs for strategic outreach to the public of foreign countries, as well as more traditional diplomacy. Read her research.
Challenges to Internet Freedom
The principle of extending freedom of expression through the Internet remains strong, but since the rise of terrorist propaganda and recruitment on the Web, Internet freedom has become an issue of greater complexity.
Change in Command
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) anti-censorship office has inherited the issue of Internet freedom, following the State Departments series of missteps in its grant-making process to private companies working on censorship circumvention software.
The BBG has a greater degree of technical expertise and has experience in anti-censorship policy and in fighting the jamming of its programs into hostile foreign territory.
New Office, New Director
This week, the BBG announced the appointment of Dr. Nnake Nweke as the new director of the Office of Internet Freedom to head the interagency effort to overcome attempts to interfere with, monitor, censor and prevent people overseas from using the Internet. Nweke, founder of the Science and Technology Policy Center and a former official at the Federal Communications Commissions Office of Engineering and Technology, has more than 15 years of experience in information and communications technology, cybersecurity, and Internet policy.
For the Internet, Freedom Is Paramount
As director, Nweke will face a set of complex challenges, including how to deal with terrorist communications using encrypted technology. However, Internet freedom is paramount and should continue to be a pillar of U.S. foreign policy.
Source: http://dailysignal.com/2016/07/13/protecting-internet-freedom/
Donald Trump will receive his formal nomination as the Republican candidate for president in Cleveland this week, with Indiana Governor Mike Pence at his side. Trump unveiled Pence as his running mate Saturday, and political commentators were quick to label the new vice presidential candidate a potential liability for the GOP ticket.While boosting the conservative credentials of the unconventional Trump, Pences track record as a congressman and governor is considered by some to be farther right than moderate voters may wish. Similarly, Senator Elizabeth Warrens presence on the vice presidential shortlist for Hillary Clinton has led analysts to raise concern over Warrens progressive views, as well as the pairing of two women on the Democratic Partys ticket a first for both the White House and the governorship of any state.Yet while these choices may represent political risk, the addition of a vice presidential candidate to a presidential campaign does little to affect the underwriting of its insurance policies, one industry professional says.As senior underwriter for K&K Insurance, Warren Mead oversaw insurance coverage for eight of the 17 Republican presidential candidates this election cycle, while others in the company led efforts in insuring a candidate running for the Democratic nomination. He says the addition of a vice presidential nominee should not have much bearing on underwriting for the account most of the time.Since the VP pick is anticipated as part of the overall process for a (successful) presidential campaign, the selection of a running mate does not have much if any impact on our approach to the account, Mead told Insurance Business America. Of course, if the person selected is a fire brand or otherwise deemed to be inflammatory or controversial, we may have a bit more concern.Strong personalities have been a major factor in this election cycle, Mead said in a separate interview with IBA, and K&K underwriters have had to take note of the shift in political winds in their approach to campaign accounts.We got to a point this year where many college campuses were very liberal in their mindset. If you have a conservative politician going onto a liberal campus like that, there is the possibility for rabble rousing, demonstrations and other protests, he said. Theres a lot of little intricacies like that that have to be considered.While Mead said he encountered some of that with a couple of campaigns during the primary season, it did not create significant problems and he doesnt anticipate significant problems as running mates are added to party tickets, either.History has shown that the VP selections never outshine the presidential candidate, so this track record factors in to our approach to this particular circumstance, Mead said.Trump will accept the GOP party nomination July 21, while Clinton will receive her nomination a week later during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.Related Stories:
Cleveland ups coverage limits to $50M as GOP convention risks rise
Trump picks VP who cut insurer tax breaks
There has been much speculation about the impact of the expected growth of driverless cars on the insurance industry with many expecting vehicle manufacturers to take on the liability and the premiums for insuring their products.However, there could actually be a boost for the insurance sector if a model proposed in the UK is adopted.The British governments Centre for Connected & Autonomous Vehicles has released a new whitepaper as part of a consultation process which includes a specific proposal for insuring the vehicles which would extend compulsory auto insurance to cover product liability when drivers have handed full control to the vehicle.Therefore, rather than insurers losing out to self-insurance schemes by driverless car manufacturers such as Google, existing auto policies would require additional coverage. The UK government proposal says that drivers (or their insurers) would rely on courts to apply the existing rules of product liability and negligence to determine who should be responsible.The health insurance exchange in Connecticut says it will meet with the last two insurers available to consumers in the state amid viability concerns.Anthem and ConnectiCare are continuing to offer coverage through Access Health CT following the decision of UnitedHealth to stop offering policies citing financial viability; and a supervision order ending new plans from co-op insurer HealthyCT.Jim Wadleigh, the CEO of the exchange told the Associated Press that we need to collaborate with the carriers to help them to be financially sustainable in the future. Although the two remaining insurers have assured Wadleigh of their intention to provide coverage for at least a year, the longer term situation of yet to be secured.A greater proportion of Americans trust Hillary Clinton on health care issues than Donald Trump, a new poll has found.The research by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows 46 per cent of respondents say Clinton better represents their health care views with 32 per cent saying the same of Trump and 15 per cent saying neither.The majority (56 per cent) also believe that too much is being said about health care by Trump compared to 35 per cent who say that of Clinton.On the Affordable Care Act, more respondents trust the Democrats (49 per cent) than the Republicans (38 per cent) but 47 per cent have an unfavorable view of Obamacare compared to 40 per cent who view it favorably.
Housing and Economic Development Secretary Jay Ash recalled the hard times of his hometown of Chelsea and how local investment helped turn it around. Thomas Krens presents his idea for a destination hotel on Main Street. 1Berkshire President Jonathan Butler leads one of two sessions held after the presentations. North Berkshire has slightly higher median income. The region's poverty rates are lower than the county's overall. PreviousNext
North County Economic Forum Looks at Opportunities
State Rep. Gailanne Cariddi hosted the forum to bring business and community leaders together.
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. There was a strong sense of optimism on Saturday as dozens of business and community leaders gathered to address North County's economic development.
From hundreds of millions of dollars in current public and private investment to local entrepreneurs to a dropping jobless rate to ambitious plans for downtown development, the future seemed brighter than in years past.
"I'm really excited about the possibilities here," Housing and Economic Development Secretary Jay Ash said. Ash said he and the Baker administration were there to support local efforts. "We're going to be willing followers."
The North Berkshire Economic Summit called by state Rep. Gailanne Cariddi brought stakeholders in the region together at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts to consider opportunities and hear from Ash.
Cariddi said she's been privy to some of the conversations about development and wanted to bring those leaders together.
"I really thought people would be impressed with the work each other is doing and I wanted to bring people together to see what similarities we have ... see what the challenges are to what is going on here and some next steps," the North Adams Democrat said. "I think what's good that comes out of this is the additional little conversations they have to dive greater into the details and to make those really crucial friendships and partnerships that propel these ideas forward."
Speakers included MCLA President Jaimie Birge, Mayor Richard Alcombright, Mark Maloy of the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission; John Hockridge of the Berkshire Education Task Force; Dr. Gray Ellrodt, chief of medicine at Berkshire Health Systems; Massachusetts Broadband Institute Chairman Peter Larkin; William Kolis of the Adams-Anthony Center; Jeffrey Thomas of Lever; and Thomas Krens, a co-founder of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art who is proposing two more museums for the city.
"The city and region has enormous potential through growth of what we have," said Alcombright, noting the reuse and renovation of venues from the Clark Biscuit mill to Colegrove Park Elementary School to the solar array at the landfill. "As the city has become more financially stable and the region grow in popularity, we've seen more private sector investment the last few years than we've seen in decades."
Among those investments are the redevelopments of the Redwood Motel and Greylock Mill along what community leaders are beginning to call the Cultural Corridor along Route 2 between the Clark Art Institute and Mass MoCA.
"We can't wait for growth to find us here, we have to court growth we have to go out and find it," he said.
Thomas Krens is hoping to tap into the 36 million people within a half-day's drive of North Adams with the development of the Extreme Model Railroad and Architecture Museum at Western Gateway Heritage State Park. One of the first models, a 31-foot tall Empire State Building will be unveiled in a few weeks; he expects to begin preliminary work by the end of the year with an opening date of summer 2018.
He's also proposing a privately funded Global Contemporary Art Museum at Harriman and West Airport. His interest in the city has spread to concepts for restoring the Mohawk Theater, building a boutique hotel inspired by the former Wilson Hotel, and adding a Museum of Time, distillery and chocolate factory at Heritage Park.
"I could be wrong, but I figure if I'm right 60 percent of the time, it's a landslide," he said, later adding, "we believe this will have a transformative effect on the Northern Berkshires."
Where Krens was thinking big, Jeffrey Thomas is thinking small.
Sally and Fred Harris were chosen as 'Citizens of the Yeaar' for their significant contribution to Great Barrington in saving St. James Episcopal Church
Biz Briefs: Rotary 'Citizen of the Year,' Bank Grants
Good citizens: The Rotary Club of Great Barrington presented its annual Citizen of the Year award to Sally and Fred Harris of Saint James Place. A luncheon presentation took place on June 29 at Crissey Farm, with selection committee chair, MaryAnn Norris, presiding.
Each year Great Barrington Rotarians honor a member or members of the community exemplifying the Rotary motto service above self. Sally and Fred Harris were chosen for their significant contribution to Great Barrington in saving St. James Episcopal Church and embarking on a six-year long historic restoration to transform the church buildings into a cultural center destined to enhance the cultural life of Great Barrington as well as the regional economy.
Several speakers gave heartfelt testimony to the Harrises unwavering commitment, their skills in advancing a well-conceived project, and their enormous investment in the community they treasure. Rotarian Bobbie Hallig said, Lucky us in Berkshire County to attract folks the likes of Sally and Fred Harris, who are bringing an amazing place to life for us in downtown Great Barrington, henceforth known as Saint James Place. Six years of hard work are culminating in a performance space, rehearsal venue, wedding and celebration location, permanent home for Breaking Bread food suppliers, office space, and possibly many uses not yet even anticipated.
Sally Harris said she comes from Texas where we dont have buildings like this. I couldnt bear to see this architectural gem torn down. Harris was a parishioner for 34 years before disaster struck in 2008 when a wall collapsed resulting in the building being condemned and slated for demolition.
Through the Harrises vision and determination, the complex restoration is almost complete with the official opening slated for later in 2016. Saint James Place will serve as creative hub, permanent home, and year-round quality performance venue for small and mid-sized cultural organizations. For more information visit saintjamesplace.us.
Trained to care: Greylock Federal Credit Union is the first business in the Berkshires to complete the Home Instead Alzheimers Friendly Business training for 100 percent of their employees, and they plan to integrate the training into the hiring process.
In a memo to all employees, Greylock President and CEO John Bissell thanked all employees for helping to create a more welcoming and supportive environment for customers suffering from Alzheimers Disease and other dementias. He also acknowledged that, this designation supports Greylocks dedication to identify and help prevent elder financial abuse concerning our aging members.
Congressman Neal Hosts Heroin Documentary, Panel Discussion
PITTSFIELD, Mass. U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal is hosting a screening of the HBO documentary "Heroin: Cape Cod USA" at Berkshire Community College on Tuesday.
Neal is joined in the event by Pittsfield Mayor Linda Tyer; North Adams Mayor Richard Alcombright; Berkshire County Sheriff Thomas Bowler and Berkshire County District Attorney David Capeless.
The showing in the Koussevitzky Arts Center is free and open to the public. The event begins at 5 p.m. with brief remarks; a panel discussion about current efforts to reduce the drug problem in Berkshire County will follow the 77-minute film. It is expected to conclude by 7:45 p.m.
Panelists include Alcombright; Bowler; Pittsfield Police Chief Michael Wynn; Dr. Alex Sabo of Berkshire Medical Center; Ananda Timpane, executive director of the Railroad Street Youth Project, and Chris MacBeth, CEO of The Brien Center. John Rogers, vice president and general counsel of Berkshire Health Systems, will moderate.
As far as juicing gurus go, it's hard to outdo the likes of Jay Kordich. After beating bladder cancer, he went the infomercial route with his juicers in 1990. At one point, he went two years without solid food. His liquid bible, The Juiceman's Power of Juicing, became a New York Times' best-seller in 1992. By the way, he's 92 now.
We may not live so long. But given a track record like the one Kordich has, snagging a juicer certainly can't hurt. So if there's a price to pay for superior health by way of juicing, check out our guide to see four spotlight juicers across the price spectrum.
Under $30: Black and Decker CJ630-2 Citrus Juicer
If your juicing needs are simple and you don't mind a one-trick pony, the Black and Decker earns high marks for its light weight (2 pounds); safe pressure mechanism (which disengages the motor unless half a fruit gets pushed onto the reamer); and pulp adjuster. Admit it: There's nothing worse than a household full of fussy juice hounds who fight over the virtues or evils of pulp. At this price point, 32 ounces is a generous capacity higher than the NutriBullet, for example. And at $18.47 on Amazon, you're paying the equivalent of just five fresh-squeezed OJs at the local diner.
SEE ALSO: Hip, Hip, Puree: The 4 Best Blenders for Every Budget
Pros: Two-year limited warranty; high customer satisfaction ratings; drip-free pour spout.
Cons: Just 20 watts of power. And don't try juicing celery or kale on this thing; it's simply not possible.
Midrange: Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Juice Extractor
This juicer, which runs up to $70 (and maybe more), can be often be found on sale below $50. There's a lot to like here, as Cheapism names the Hamilton Beach a best pick. Food & Wine also dubbed it the winning juicer it reviewed, by virtue of is easy assembly and cleanup. An 800-watt motor and rear pulp catcher make juicing with the Big Mouth as joyful as stomping barefoot on cool grapes on a hot day (if you're into that sort of juicing).
Pros: Dishwasher-safe; powerful; 3-inch feed chute.
Cons: Some pre-chopping necessary; no drinking cup attachment available.
High-End: Magic Bullet NutriBullet
For many consumers, the Magic Bullet (or "Bullet," as it's affectionately known) is synonymous with juicing. And if you've got a Benjamin to drop, the NutriBullet, which runs $89.99 at Target, is a proven winner that will leave you with enough pocket change to load up on oranges and peaches. After more than 7,000 reviews, it's rated a solid 4.4 out of 5 stars by Target shoppers. Features include a 600-watt motor and high-torque power base; two blending chambers that double as drinking cups (18 and 24 ounces); and a stainless steel extractor blade that never needs sharpening.
SEE ALSO: 10 As Seen On TV Products That Are Actually Worth Buying
Pros: Comes with a recipe book; blends in under a minute; one-year limited warranty.
Cons: Capacity not large enough to make family-size servings.
Pricey but Nice: Kuvings Whole Slow Juicer B6000S
Yes, this is Jay Kordich's baby. And let's face it, he's pretty much the Steve Jobs of juicing. And much like a MacBook Pro, the Kuvings Whole Slow Juicer (available for $399.95 at Williams-Sonoma) is one impressive piece of electronic wizardry. Kordich claims it reduces prep and processing time by up to 40%, thanks to a 3-inch feeding tube that easily accommodates whole produce items (except for watermelons). Amazon users give it a solid four stars, and Consumer Reports rated it the top cold-press juicer it tested. Until a fridge-sized, melon-family juicer is invented (or perhaps not), this is as good as it gets.
Pros: A 10-year manufacturer's warranty and $200 worth of free juicing guides.
Cons: Sorry, folks: Kordich can't guarantee you'll live into your 90s. But maybe this juggernaut juicer will last that long.
Speaking of juice gurus, no less a spiritual figure than the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh recommends chewing your food 50 times, and liquifying it in your mouth, before you swallow to ensure digestive health. Many people follow this advice; others might be grossed out by the thought, or swear by inhaling a lunchtime burger at the cubicle. But at least if you're rushed, a juicer can do the chew-chew-chew for you. Health enlightenment? A life span to rival a redwood? Who knows what kind of power supply you'll tap until you turn on the juice.
Readers, do you own a juicer, and do you think it was worth the money you paid for it? What juicer brands are you loyal to? Let us know in the comments below!
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Edward Price Non-Resident Senior Fellow NYU Center for Global Affairs Contact email
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Edward Price, a former British economic official, teaches international political economy, financial systems and international relations at NYUas Center for Global Affairs. He is also an economic advisor for BritishAmerican Business (BAB). Educated at the London School of Economics (LSE), Edward holds an MSc in Finance and Economic Policy and an MA in German History. He has worked in both the British and European parliaments, was Americas editor at IFLR and has worked in the City of London. He speaks German, gets by in Italian and is a member of the Economic Club of New York (ECNY).
Nissan Philippines Inc. (NPI) once again brings Innovation that Excites to the Philippine motorsports scene as formally launches the second season of the Nissan GT Academy Philippines. The launch was held last June 30, 2016 at the SM Mall of Asia Atrium.
The Nissan GT Academy is NPIs way of encouraging Filipino gamers to believe in their dreams. Through this virtual-to-reality racing competition, we look forward to giving more opportunities for Filipino gamers to realize their dream of becoming professional racecar drivers, said NPI President and Managing Director Ramesh Narasimhan.
Adding excitement and edge to an already excellent tournament, NPI revealed that the new Sony PlayStation-4-exclusive Gran Turismo Sport would be playable for the first time ever during live recruitment events of the 2016 Nissan GT Academy. Nissan, in partnership with Polyphony Digital, introduced the upgraded racing video game to the Philippines, and other participating countries, ahead of its official release to the rest of the world in November.
For the opening, NPI brought Lucas Ordonez, the inaugural winner of the 2008 Nissan Playstation GT Academy in Europe. Since winning in 2008, Ordonez has emerged as one of the leading contenders in racing competitions around the globe. Now, he is an inspiration for all gamers and aspiring racers looking to get their big break in the new season of Nissan GT Academy.
Last year, the Philippine team competed against other racers in other countries and came out on top. Continuing the competitions success, we open season 2 with Lucas Ordonez in hopes of motivating the best Filipino talents to enter the competition and make the country the breeding ground for outstanding racing drivers, added Narasimhan.
During the event, Ordonez encouraged the participants to grab the Nissan GT Academy Season 2 as an opportunity to make their racecar dreams a reality.
Back then, I was just studying for my MBA. When I saw an ad for a new competition called GT Academy, I knew I had to join and take this shot to be the racing driver I dreamed to be. Now, here I am racing on every possible tournament. It felt great to have taken that move. I hope Filipinos will grab this opportunity, too, said Ordonez.
Last season, over 13,000 hopefuls showcased their talents at the live events carried out nationwide. Out of all the contenders, six Filipino representatives were chosen to represent the Philippines at Race Camp Week in the Silverstone Circuit, UK. One of them won the title, besting other competitors from India, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand.
Joward Policarpio was crowned the grand winner and became the first Filipino Nissan GT Academy Asia champion.
This season, NPI will be holding nationwide series of Live Events for its recruitment drive starting July until August, with the National Finals slated for September. The Top 6 contenders will then fly to the Silverstone Circuit in the United Kingdom for the Race Camp to compete against representatives from Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, North Africa, and Thailand to determine the Nissan GT Academy 2016 champion.
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Early support and mentorship programs build long-term research careers
Washington, DC - A public - private mentored research program based at the National Institutes of Health called the NIH Clinical Research Training Program (CRTP) has helped foster the careers of research-oriented medical and dental students, and similar programs may help bolster the dwindling pipeline of biomedical researchers and clinician - scientists, according to a study now available electronically in Academic Medicine.
The NIH CRTP, which ran from 1997 to 2012, was a yearlong research enrichment program conducted at the NIH intramural research program in Bethesda, Maryland. In the study, NIH experts assessed career and research outcome data from CRTP alumni. At a time when the number of clinician-scientists is declining, the study indicates that the CRTP helped shape the careers of many research-oriented medical and dental students as measured by time conducting research, successful competition for federal funding, and the publication of their research.
In surveying CRTP alumni, the authors determined that nearly two-thirds of scholars who had fully completed formal training, including professional school, a primary residency and fellowships, were now conducting research for some percentage of their time, many at academic medical centers, as opposed to entering entirely into full-time practice of medicine.
While additional follow-up is warranted to assess the longer-term impact of these mentored research experiences, the authors conclude that investments in mentored research programs for health professional students may be invaluable to reverse the trend of fewer medically trained doctors and dentists from entering careers in biomedical and clinical research.
These preliminary data are very encouraging, but our goal is to continue to track research outcome measures for this initial cohort as well as for the larger denominator of all CRTP trainees who have more recently completed their post-graduate clinical training, according to Frederick P. Ognibene, M.D., lead author and former CRTP director, who is currently the NIH Clinical Centers Deputy Director for Educational Affairs and Strategic Partnerships.
The CRTP was an NIH intramural initiative to enhance interest in clinical research careers for medical and dental students. During its 16-year run, CRTP provided yearlong mentored clinical or translational research opportunities for 340 medical and dental students, chosen from 1,300 applicants.
Because the majority of CRTP participants were still in residency and fellowship training at the time of data collection in 2012, the study focused on career progression of CRTP participants who had completed residency and fellowship training by January 1, 2014. The participants had transitioned to academic medical centers with junior faculty positions, clinical practice or industry (pharmaceutical, biotechnology, or device companies).
Out of the 340 total CRTP participants, 135 had completed their primary and subspecialty training by 2014. The data of those 135 scholars were then analyzed, excluding five subjects who did not provide follow-up.
Of the 130 survey respondents, 64.6 percent indicated that they were conducting research including 74 in faculty positions at academic medical centers. Forty-six study participants, or 35.3 percent, reported spending more than a quarter of their time conducting research. Over 25 percent of the individuals conducting research received some form of grant support from NIH.
In 2012, the CRTP and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-NIH Research Scholars Program were combined into a new program called the Medical Research Scholars Program, which similarly provides yearlong mentored research experiences ranging from basic science to translational and more clinically oriented research for outstanding medical, dental, and veterinary students.
Physicianscientists have made critical contributions to basic studies that have led to numerous Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine and chemistry, said senior author Michael M. Gottesman, M.D., NIH deputy director for intramural research. They represent a very special population of researchers with unique insights into biomedical and disease processes. Yet, the NIH MRSP and only a handful of other privately and publically funded yearlong research programs still exist to maintain the clinicianscientist pipeline for young investigators. Hopefully our data will encourage NIH and others to initiate or enhance such programs.
Could You Be Going Through a Midlife Crisis?
Rochester, Minnesota - Is a midlife crisis real, or is it a common myth that you may feel significant uncertainty or discontent at a certain point in your adult life?
People often wonder if someone can have a midlife crisis, says Jennifer Wickham, a licensed professional counselor for Mayo Clinic Health System. Its a good question to ask, as all of us go through personal issues and transitions in our lives. The term midlife crisis was coined in 1965 by Elliot Jacques, M.D., Ph.D., a Canadian psychoanalyst, to describe challenges during the normal period of transition and self-reflection many adults experience from age 40 to 60. During these years, adults may commonly question who they are in this world and in their life, what their purpose is, and how have they used their time thus far. These questions can be triggered by the realization of the passage of time or changes that may occur with the physical body, such as a health scare or a diminished ability to perform physical tasks.
Your midlife crisis, or transition, may occur around significant life events, such your youngest child moving away or finishing college, says Wickham. You may feel it when youre entering a new decade or after the death of a parent.
Wickham explains the emotions these questions and changes prompt may cause you discomfort, stress and confusion, and may lead you to feel that you are in a crisis. Despite this stress, you might experience this time as the beginning of a new and exciting stage of life.
Occasionally, midlife transitions might invoke depression, and Wickham says its important you recognize these symptoms if youre not feeling quite like yourself:
Have your eating or sleeping habits changed, or are you feeling tired and run-down?
Do you have feelings of pessimism or hopelessness?
Do you have feelings of restlessness, anxiety or irritability?
Are you feeling a loss of interest in activities that you once enjoyed, including sex and hobbies?
Are you having thoughts of suicide or attempts at suicide?
Do you have physical symptoms, such as headaches or other physical aches or pains, that don't respond to treatment?
Wickham offers tips to help:
Stay active.
Go for daily walks and get some fresh air.
Go for daily walks and get some fresh air. Stay social.
Stay engaged with friends and family.
Stay engaged with friends and family. Meditate.
Take a yoga course, or learn how to meditate to clear your mind.
Though this is a normal transition of adult development, if you or a loved one believes that you are engaging in out-of-character behavior or making sudden changes to major life areas, such as work or relationships, it can be helpful to seek the support of a professional, adds Wickham.
New Control Strategies Needed for Zika and Other Unexpected Mosquito-Borne Outbreaks
Baltimore, Maryland - A recent spate of unexpected mosquito-borne disease outbreaks - most recently the Zika virus, which has swept through parts of the Americas - have highlighted the need to better understand the development and spread of little-known diseases and for new strategies to control them, a new review by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers suggests.
Publishing online July 14 in the journal Science, the researchers say that despite the discovery of Zika in Uganda in 1947 and the identification of the first confirmed human infection in Nigeria six years later, few cases were reported in humans until 2007. Even then, no one understood the grave risk the disease posed to pregnancies until the recent outbreak in Brazil, which began less than two years ago.
The rise of Zika after its long persistence as a disease of apparently little importance highlights how little we truly understand about the global spread of mosquito-borne viruses and other lesser known diseases, says Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School who led the study along with Lelia Chaisson, a student in the department. Over the past decades, dengue, chikungunya, West Nile virus and now Zika have emerged or re-emerged across the globe. Yet why these viruses have expanded their range and others have failed to invade areas potentially ripe for their spread remains a mystery.
In their review article, Lessler and his colleagues looked at previously published research on Zika in an attempt to assess the global threat the virus poses. Many of the questions raised thus far by the recent outbreak, which has hit hard in Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico and other parts of the Americas, still need to be answered.
There are two main theories as to why Zika is currently posing such a threat: that the virus has mutated to become more infectious or pathogenic, or that it previously struck such small populations that it was hard to discern its health effects. When an outbreak in French Polynesia from October 2013 to April 2014 infected an estimated 66 percent of the population, the number of cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome jumped dramatically (from three to 42), but the small number of people made it difficult to be sure of the cause and effect. Only later did it become apparent that there may also have been an increase in cases of microcephaly a condition where a babys head and brain can be dangerously small over the same period. Most people who are infected either show no symptoms or minor ones like rashes.
But these links became clear once Zika moved to Brazil, with its population of 200 million. It spread rapidly because this was a population that had never before been exposed to this virus, and there was no immunity.
Despite knowing about this disease for nearly 70 years, we were completely surprised and rushing to discover the very basic things about it when it invaded the Americas, Lessler says. We have been completely unable to stop its spread. That is a problem for how we approach public health. We will always be in this situation when something new comes about or something little-known reemerges unless we do a better job planning for threats more generally instead of always fighting the last battle.
There is no vaccine for Zika and there is no cure, which means that prevention methods such as mosquito spraying are the only options to control the spread of the disease, the researchers say.
Lessler says that research going forward needs to go into vaccine development and into better understanding how well certain mosquito control methods actually work. In the past, intense control strategies, including mass DDT spraying, successfully eliminated Aedes aegypti, the type of mosquito that carries Zika and other viruses, from 18 countries in the Americas, substantially reducing new dengue cases. But these efforts ultimately proved unsustainable and Aedes aegypti and dengue re-emerged.
Also, he notes, there is little evidence for the effectiveness of measures to reduce exposure to the diseases carried by these mosquitoes. The research shows that for dengue control, the use of window and door screens reduced the odds of developing the disease by 78 percent, but there is no conclusive support for mosquito repellents, bed nets and traps. However, Lessler stresses that such personal protective measures have been shown to reduce biting rates and should be used by those travelling to areas where Zika is present.
Lessler says that a good portion of the millions of dollars expected to be earmarked for Zika by the U.S. Congress should focus on developing long-term strategies for sustainable mosquito control and vaccines.
In a companion paper also published online in Science, Lessler and colleagues from Imperial College London note that the ongoing Zika epidemic in Latin America may have already peaked, limiting the scope for testing interventions that could play a role in future outbreaks. They say that the number of new cases is falling in many places because so many people have already been exposed and that there appears to be herd immunity developing. The outbreaks will likely last another year or two and then disappear, they say, but the relief may only be temporary. When enough people are born who havent been exposed, the conditions will be in place for a new outbreak to develop.
Well have a lull in transmission, and it will seem like our job is done, Lessler says. But we need to keep our eye on the ball for what we need to do five years out, 10 years out when the virus may come back.
Assessing the Global Threat from Zika Virus was written by Justin Lessler; Lelia H. Chaisson; Lauren M. Kucirka; Qifang Bi; Kyra Grantz; Henrik Salje; Andrea C. Carcelen; Cassandra T. Ott; Jeanne S. Sheffield; Neil M, Ferguson; Derek A. T. Cummings; C. Jessica E. Metcalf; and Isabel Rodriguez-Barraquer.
Genetics of type 2 diabetes revealed in unprecedented detail
Washington, DC - A comprehensive investigation of the underlying genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes has unveiled the most detailed look at the genetic differences that heighten a persons risk for disease development.
The findings, published today in the journal Nature by an international team of more than 300 scientists led by the University of Oxford, the Broad Institute, and the University of Michigan, reveal the complexity of the disease in more detail than previously appreciated, but also identify several promising targets for new treatments.
Type 2 diabetes is a global health concern, with approximately ten percent of the worlds population diagnosed with the disease or likely to develop it in their lifetime. Previous studies into the genetics of diabetes risk have identified over 80 areas in the human genome associated with type 2 diabetes; however, it remains unknown exactly how these genetic changes, known as variants, are distributed among populations and how they lead to increased risk. Functional explanations for these risk variants have been particularly elusive because most of them fall outside the coding region of genes, and are presumably involved in gene regulation.
Using DNA sequencing in more than 120,000 people with ancestral origins in Europe, South and East Asia, the Americas and Africa, the authors, including Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health and head of the Molecular Genetics Section at the National Human Genome Research Institute, evaluated the genome at a greater level of detail than had been previously attempted for type 2 diabetes. Some individuals had their entire genome sequenced while for others the researchers focused on the part of the genome that codes directly for proteins, known as the exome. The researchers then compared the genetic changes between affected and healthy participants.
The findings suggest that most of the genetic risk of type 2 diabetes can be attributed to common, shared genetic variants each contributing a small amount to an individuals risk of the disease rather than many rare variants unique to individuals. This resolves a question about the genetics of type 2 diabetes that has puzzled researchers for decades.
The researchers also identified over a dozen genes in affected participants where changes in the DNA sequence altered the structure or composition of the proteins they encode, suggesting that those genes and proteins are directly involved in the development of the disease and providing important clues to the mechanism by which they confer risk. That, in turn, provides possible clues to new drug targets.
Results from this study suggest that any personalized approach to treatment and prevention of type 2 diabetes will need to be tailored on the basis of an individuals broader genetic profile, as well as environmental factors.
This work was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the National Institute on Aging, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, all part of the National Institutes of Health.
Twisted Sister said: That is an old saying that I heard from Christians a long time ago. Muhammad did ascend to Heaven from the Temple Mount and that is in the Quran but don't know the book or verse. Click to expand...
on that Day
the Day of Resurrection
which is why i say anyone talking about the quran must have the sura and verse otherwise you are probably wrong. i am sorry to say that you are wrong about this. muhammad did NOT ascent to heaven. he was buried in the mosque of the prophet in medina. his successors, the first caliphs, are buried along side him. islam teaches that everyone lies in their graves until 'the last day' sometimes called the 'day of ressurection'. on that day, allah will not give the sun permission to rise, instead allah will visit earth, everyone will be raised from the dead and judged by allah. muhammad will be the first one to be raised and will help allah in his judgement.Quran 18:100. AndWe shall present Hell to the disbelievers, plain to view,101. (To) Those whose eyes had been under a covering from My Reminder (this Qur'an), and who could not bear to hear (it).102. Do then those who disbelieve think that they can take My slaves [i.e., the angels, Allah's Messengers, 'Iesa (Jesus), son of Maryam (Mary), etc.] as Auliya' (lords, gods, protectors, etc.) besides Me? Verily, We have prepared Hell as an entertainment for the disbelievers (in the Oneness of Allah Islamic Monotheism).103. Say (O Muhammad): "Shall We tell you the greatest losers in respect of (their) deeds?104. "Those whose efforts have been wasted in this life while they thought that they were acquiring good by their deeds!105. "They are those who deny the Ayat (proofs, evidences, verses, lessons, signs, revelations, etc.) of their Lord and the Meeting with Him (in the Hereafter). So their works are in vain, and on, We shall not give them any weight.106. "That shall be their recompense, Hell; because they disbelieved and took My Ayat (proofs, evidences, verses, lessons, signs, revelations, etc.) and My Messengers by way of jest and mockery.107. "Verily! Those who believe (in the Oneness of Allah Islamic Monotheism) and do righteous deeds, shall have the Gardens of Al-Firdaus (the Paradise) for their entertainment.108. "Wherein they shall dwell (forever). No desire will they have to be removed therefrom."
Zimbabwe Man Who Started 'Pak Bean' Rivalry Had This to Say After Pakistan's Defeat
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Childrens books often fly beneath the cultural radar, belying their ability to work powerfully on the social imagination. In the McCarthy-era US, for instance, they provided both a safe haven and a platform for writers and illustrators whose work was out of favour with the establishment. Subsequent studies suggest that the progressive views many American children absorbed through their books shaped the generation that protested against the war in Vietnam, supported the Civil Rights movement and campaigned for equal rights for women.
The fact that childrens books can have a strongly formative influence upon the young has often attracted the attention of new leaders and regimes. In the early days of the Soviet Union, Lenin and his followers harnessed the power of childrens books to shape culture. Some of the artistically vibrant work that resulted from co-opting leading writers and artists is currently on exhibit at Londons House of Illustration with the title, A New Childhood: Picture Books from Soviet Russia. In interwar Britain too, a group of socially and aesthetically radical childrens books underpinned the work of making Britain a progressive, egalitarian, and modern society. But unlike their Soviet counterparts, these books have since remained a largely hidden secret, with most scholars of the period overlooking them altogether.
In fact, there were many childrens books published during that time that sought to use writing for children and young people to create activists, visionaries and leaders among the rising generation. These radical childrens books were created by writers and illustrators drawn from many quarters, including working class socialists, the liberal intelligentsia and prominent cultural figures, from Hugh Gaitskell through JBS Haldane and WH Auden. Drawing on the latest ideas from the spheres of science, politics, economics, pedagogy, social policy and literature, as well as the fine and applied arts, they encouraged young readers to look with fresh eyes at how people were living, interacting, and organising themselves. They were not only concerned with engineering social change but also sought to transform how the world was perceived. Aesthetically radical works continued the general project of widening youthful horizons by celebrating children as artists and introducing aspects of the new arts associated with modernism.
Kimberley Reynolds explores the history of 20th century radical childrens literature in this new book
These radical works included books opposing war, and books about modern architecture and design, class and unemployment, childrens health, sex education, the countryside, and all the sciences. EF Stucleys Pollycon (1933) is one of a number of books that sought to teach children and young people the principles of economics because, as Stephen King-Hall, a popular radio presenter of the day, declares in the books preface: I cannot tell you too often that you will be a stupid ass if you do not make up your mind to learn about Economics.
As here, radical childrens books assumed an audience of intelligent, capable, socially aware young readers and set about providing them with the skills, information, and inspiring social visions they would need to find solutions to the many problems confronting the world; problems that eventually resulted in a second world war, a global financial crisis, and mass social unrest and protest. They set about breaking down stereotypical attitudes to gender, race, class, poverty, ethnicity, nationality, and childhood.
One example is Martins Annual (1936), named for its leftist publisher, Martin Lawrence. This volume included stories about young freedom fighters and others who oppose fascism; lessons from nature in how the small and weak outwit the large and strong; a warning against the seductions of military recruiting regiments; accounts of Soviet heroes; cartoons deriding the Blackshirts, and a detailed critique of Britains national anthem. There were also comic poems, a revolutionary alphabet, recipes for healthy eating and a competition to find juvenile proletarian writers.
Then theres Eddie and the Gipsy, by Alex Wedding a 1935 book translated from the German in which, as the title suggests, a boy called Eddie becomes friends with a Romany girl. Illustrated with photographs of real children by John Heartfield (better-known for his anti-fascist montages and bitterly satirical images of Hitler), it captures the tensions in Germany during the Nazis rise to power and promotes trade union activism forbidden under Hitler as well as friendship across racial divides.
But Geoffrey Trease is the quintessential example of a radical childrens writer of the time. A founder member of the Promethean Society, a group for pacifists, humanists, and devotees of Freud, Marx, Wells, Shaw, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Havelock Ellis and DH Lawrence, in later life he recalled, We believed that the worlds poverty could be cured by a simple change in the financial system. War could be abolished by disarmament and by non-violent demonstrations such as lying down in front of troop trains. The rueful tone gives voice to the sense of disillusion felt by those who, like Trease, having hoped for so much from the Soviet experiment, saw it descend into show trials, the Great Terror and the Cold War.
SR Badmin dreamed of a better future for Britain in the 1942 Puffin Village and Town (from 'Left Out', courtesy of OUP)
Before that realisation, however, radical writers inspired British youth with a panoply of ideas and images of what the future could be like. Treases Bows Against the Barons (1934), a retelling of the Robin Hood story which uses the Middle Ages to talk about the Depression, includes a vision of a future in which the common people will have twice as much as they have now, and there will be no more hunger or poverty in the land. And many of the popular Puffin picture books encouraged children to think about how they could do things better when they had grown up and were running the country. SR Badmin, for example, ends his Village and Town (1942) with the questions: Do you know we could have much better houses if they were well designed. we could have towns which were clean and smokeless which had plenty of playing grounds and no slums? . Look at your own home town. Surely something better must be built next time?
Peggy Harts The Magic of Coal (1945) shows a future in which the mining industry has become fully technologized, collectivised and sanitised. The cover image features a broad-chested miner with a tattoo of St George fighting a dragon on his chest, making miners modern day heroes and emblems of Britain. Miners are shown enjoying the facilities in the pit baths before setting off to nice homes on fine housing estates or to participate in activities including higher education classes and watching plays.
In the 1940s, interest in producing radical childrens literature receded as the kinds of futures they imagined move from the page into real life in the form of the emerging Welfare State. The 1942 Beveridge Report set out a series of milestones which became the 1944 Education Act (free secondary education for all), the National Insurance Act (protection against illness and unemployment), the building of the first council houses and the National Assistance Act (which provided for anyone in extreme poverty), culminating in the official launch of the National Health Service in 1948.
EF Stucleys Pollycon (1933) sought to teach children of the complexity of economics (from 'Left Out', courtesy of OUP)
These texts may seem quaint now but we should not forget their legacies; indeed, there are lessons to be learned from them still. Compared with todays output of gorgeously produced and varied childrens books they might look rather humble and earnest but there is something deeply attractive about their aspirations for children and the future. Childhood reading develops intellects, imaginations and tastes. The generation for whom these radical texts were written was responsible for seeing that the young Welfare State flourished, for making Britain part of Europe at least for a time and for placing it at the centre of youth culture and fashion. Geoffrey Trease could only imagine a distant future when life would be better for ordinary people, but by 1949 Britain was a genuinely fairer place with cradle-to-grave care and world-leading, child-centred primary education.
While the hopes and ambitions for lasting peace and global government featured in these books may not have materialised, the vision of a more socially just and progressive society that lies at the heart of radical childrens writing continues to shape Britain today. The part played by radical childrens literature in this social transformation deserves to be remembered and perpetuated. Rarely has it been more important for the rising generation to be well-informed, to master new technologies and to be prepared to help with the work of making the world safer, fairer and more sustainable. Today we are blessed with a wealth of writing for the young, but much of the most socially engaged, forward-looking writing takes a dystopian stance. Young readers today could surely benefit from the same determination to inspire progressive thinking and a belief that the future can be better than the present if they will help make it so that characterised this forgotten chapter in the history of childrens publishing.
In next weeks article: Reading and rebellion
Kimberley Reynolds is the author of Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain, 1910-1949 (Oxford University Press, 35), to be published on 28 July
A New Childhood: Picture Books from Soviet Russia is at The House of Illustration, 2 Granary Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4BH until 11 September
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Spanish actor Antonio Banderas is to bring his enthusiasm for fashion to his craft in a new biopic that will see him play designer Gianni Versace.
The biopic is to be directed by Billie August whose past film credits include Pelle the Conqueror and the 1998 version of Les Miserables.
Controversially, the film has not been agreed to by Versace's family with a representative stating to WWD that the company has not "...authorised nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming movie; [it] should only be seen as a work of fiction.
Filming on the biopic is said to be starting this December in Milan before heading to the fashion designer's birth city of Reggio Calabria as well as the city of his death, Miami, where he was shot dead by serial killer Andrew Cunanan in 1997.
Banderas is a keen follower of fashion having recently launched his first collection in collaboration with high-street label Selected. He also enrolled in London university Central Saint Martins' MA Fashion course last year.
GMO labeling bill headed to the White House for approval
The House of Representatives, on a strong bipartisan vote (306-117), passed the historic genetically modified organism labeling bill which has been sent to the White House for President Obamas signature.
The White House indicated prior to the vote that the president would sign the bill....
The legislation immediately preempts Vermonts labeling law on enactment and does not allow any other state to impose different requirements than the national standard. The legislation requires mandatory disclosure but gives companies various options on informing the public including text on packages, a symbol or an electronic link to a website. Meat and dairy products (steaks, loins, pork chops, etc.) from animals fed GMO feed are exempt.
USDA will have two years to develop regulations to implement the national GMO labeling standard. This includes determining the threshold of GMO content that would trigger labeling, establishing a process for determining whether a product is bioengineered, and developing labeling standards. The American Feed Industry Association says, AFIA is pleased the confusion surrounding animal food products will be minimized by requiring disclosure for human food only. Products derived from animals fed GE ingredients are also not required to display a label....
However, the U.S. Right to Know organization who strongly opposed the bill says, This bill is a sweetheart deal for the food and agrichemical industries, who want to keep consumers guessing about the contents of their food. There are legitimate questions about the health and environmental risks genetically engineered crops, including the glyphosate herbicide that many are doused with. Over 1,100 companies and organizations urged the House to pass the Senate GMO bill to avoid the economic costs of a patchwork of state laws that will directly impact consumers, farmers, and the entire food value chain.
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In 2017, a sequel to Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic Blade Runner will arrive in cinemas, 35 years after the original was released.
While recent concept art provided a look at the state of the film's dystopian Los Angeles-setting, a first look image from the follow-up has been released - and it looks like it could have been stripped direct from the 1982 original.
It's a safe bet to assume that the person seen in the image is the film's lead character played by Ryan Gosling. Or could director Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) be teasing the return of Harrison Ford's character Rick Deckard who is set to return in an unknown capacity?
The Canadian filmmaker has described the film as "...an extension of the first movie a few decades later.
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Show all 23 1 /23 Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Citizen Kane (1941) Long revered as one of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles' debut a film following newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane was just another nominee back in the day, losing out to How Green Was My Valley. RKO Radio Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Searchers (1956) The Searchers may be considered John Ford's greatest film, but it was not treated as such back in the 1950s. In fact, the western starring John Wayne failed to earn a single nomination. Around the World in 80 Days turned out to be more the Academy's cup of tea. RKO Radio Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Vertigo (1958) Not only did Alfred Hitchcock never win an Oscar (save for his memorial award in 1968), but neither did any of his films one of which is Vertigo, a classic that won Sight & Sound's once-a-decade greatest films of all time poll in 2012. If it had been nominated, it would have faced stiff competition in the form of eventual winner All About Eve. Paramount Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Graduate (1967) One of the films that kickstarted the New Hollywood Cinema era, The Graduate may have won director Mike Nichols an Oscar, but it ultimately lost out to Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night. United Artists Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic remains one of the most influential pieces of cinema there is. The Academy didn't agree. The Academy nominated Kubrick for Best Director and awarded the visual effects in favour of considering 2001 for Best Picture (it didn't even get nominated). That year's winner was Oliver!, the musical by Carol Reed. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Taxi Driver (1976) Despite Taxi Driver's failure to win the main award, its nomination in four categories showed the Academy had good intentions. That All the President's Men and Network also lost out to eventual winner Rocky shows that, ultimately, it never really stood a chance. Columbia Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Apocalypse Now (1979) Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now received a grand total of eight nominations, but only went home with two prizes (for cinematography and sound) losing out to drama Kramer vs. Kramer. United Artists Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Raging Bull (1980) Of all the Oscar blows dealt to Martin Scorsese over the decades, none landed harder than Raging Bull losing out to Robert Redford's weepie Ordinary People, an oversight many consider one of the Academy's most egregious. United Artists Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Blade Runner (1982) Another sci-fi classic overlooked by the Oscars was Blade Runner, which didn't even get nominated in the Best Picture category (Gandhi ended up winning). Ridley Scott's The Martian went on to receive seven nominations in 2017 evidence, perhaps, of the Academy taking responsibility for its past errors. United Artists Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Do the Right Thing (1989) Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing failing to win Best Picture at the 1990 Oscars is one thing losing out to Driving Miss Daisy is another thing altogether. Universal Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Goodfellas (1990) Having awarded both The Godfather Part I and The Godfather Part II Best Picture in 1972 and 1974 respectively, the Academy seemed destined to appreciate Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. But no Kevin Costner's directorial debut Dances with Wolves was the most appealing choice for voters. 2012 Getty Images Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Pulp Fiction (1994) New talent on the block Quentin Tarantino's second feature Pulp Fiction won him the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1994 a success he failed to match back on home turf. While he won an Original Screenplay Oscar, his film was beaten by Forrest Gump... Miramax Films Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Shawshank Redemption (1994) ...and it wasn't the only one. Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's prison-set novella The Shawshank Redemption also fell victim to Robert Zemeckis' Oscar-friendly Forrest Gump. We don't see that film sitting atop the IMDb top 250 though, do we? Getty Images Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Heat (1995) If Heat was released today, there's no way it wouldn't be a Best Picture frontrunner. That it was completely ignored in favour of Braveheart is a huge travesty. Warner Bros Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Fargo (1996) You may think it was remiss of the Academy to shun Fargo, but it did come pretty close to winning, its chances bolstered somewhat by seven nominations and two wins (Actress for Frances McDormand and Original Screenplay for the Coen Brothers). It lost out to The English Patient. Gramercy Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Saving Private Ryan (1998) Having won Best Director five years previous for Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg was strongly expected to take home the top prizes for his Second World War epic. Cue Shakespeare In Love upsetting everybody. Paramount Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Social Network (2010) David Fincher's Facebook drama got shunned in favour of British patriotism in an Oscar two-horse race for the ages that ultimately saw The King's Speech crowned winner. Columbia Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Lynne Ramsay has directed two films that would have been deserving of Best Picture: You Were Never Really Here and this, We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's easy to see why Hollywood was temporarily more charmed by The Artist, but it's clear which film will stand the test of time. Oscilloscope Laboratories Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) It's almost unthinkable to recall that the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis only scored two Oscar nominations in the cinematography and sound mixing categories, respectively. In the ensuing years, the film has been hailed as one of the greatest of the 2010s, meaning that its no-show at the Oscars will go down as one of the Academy's biggest omissions. Still, it would have had a hard time winning over 12 Years a Slave. CBS Films Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Boyhood (2014) For the 2015 Oscars race, you were either team Birdman or team Boyhood. Richard Linklater's labour of love, shot intermittently over 12 years, ultimately failed to win. Universal Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture American Honey (2016) If there's any justice, Andrea Arnold will one day become an Oscar winner, but in a perfect world, she would have already won for American Honey, a drama deserving of Best Picture if there ever was one. Universal Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Get Out (2017) Horror rarely gets recognised at the Oscars, but Get Out is the closest the genre had come in years. Jordan Peele may have taken home the Best Original Screenplay award, but the stars aligned for Guillermo del Toro's fantasy The Shape of Water instead. Universal Pictures Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Roma (2018) Roma was strongly expected to become the first ever foreign language film to win Best Picture. It had everything going for it, including a standout festival run and universal acclaim. But then Green Book snatched its trophy away in a late stage awards season twist that still seems too ridiculous to be true. Netflix
Joining Gosling and Ford will be Robin Wright (House of Cards), Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Barkhad Abdi who impressed critics with his performance in 2013 Paul Greengrass thriller Captain Phillips.
Originally slated for a January 2018 release, the sequel was recently moved up to 6 October 2017.
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Star Wars 8 will be based on classic war films, according to new director Rian Johnson.
Johnson told fans at the Star Wars Celebration in London last weekend that he had set up a film camp for his cast and crew to watch old movies before shooting began.
Bridge on the River Kwai, about prisoners of war in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid their Japanese captors, and Twelve OClock High, about a brigadier who rallies his demoralised troop of pilots films, became a really personal part of the new Star Wars epic. Johnson also screened black and white 1959 Soviet drama Letter Never Sent and 1964 Japanese film Three Outlaw Samurai.
Recommended Read more The 5 best things we learned at Star Wars Celebration
Star Wars 8 will pick up where last movie The Force Awakens left off, with Daisy Ridleys Rey meeting Mark Hamills Luke Skywalker on a desolate island. It is yet to receive a full title but is due to arrive in UK cinemas in December 2017.
Johnson also revealed at the Londons ExCeL fan convention that Star Wars 8 has been shooting in Ireland to add a whole other texture, before welcoming Alden Ehrenreich on stage to confirm him as the new Han Solo ahead of the characters as-yet-untitled standalone prequel.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Show all 45 1 /45 Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art
The Star Wars 8 gang recently celebrated at a wrap party in absolute style, taking to the Natural History Museum in London for a night of dancing and some extra special guests, an elite squad of dancing stormtroopers. Britains Got Talent finalists Boogie Storm took to the stage dressed in the costumes to perform a whole host of iconic dance routines, from the Nae Nae to Beyonces Single Ladies.
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It's been nothing short of a whirlwind weekend for Star Wars fans.
For those attending London's Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016, certainly; gathered in their thousands to share the joy, spend their life savings on merchandise, and take some pictures with sexy Ewoks (no, really). Yet, there were plenty of thrills in store even for those not in attendance at the three-day event.
Though Disney held back on anything as major as a new film announcement, or even the much-anticipated title of Episode VIII; the weekend was still packed to the brim with some fascinating reveals and morsels of information that would send any dedicated Star Wars fan wild with anticipation. Here's the very best of what we learnt.
1. Alden Ehrenreich was FINALLY confirmed as Han Solo by Disney
It's slightly unfortunate that Star Wars Celebration's major reveal had been spoiled by the Hollywood rumour mill months previously; yet, still, it was thrilling merely to get confirmation that Hail, Caesar!'s Alden Ehrenreich will indeed be taking on the role of a young Han Solo in Phil Lord and Chris Miller's yet-to-be-titled spin-off movie.
Ehrenreich himself came out to greet the crowds, and it seemed immediately apparent why the actor was chosen for the role. A man with easy charm, and enough of a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford to make the character work; Ehrenreich was actually the first actor Lord and Miller ever auditioned for the role, though they eventually saw over 3,000.
A fact both comforting and, clearly, comically exasperating for the directors; yet, Lord and Miller made it clear they weren't prepared to take any risks when it came to recasting such an iconic role. Though Ehrenreich's obviously got his work cut out here; he's an actor preparing for what he confessed was the wildest of childhood fantasies come true, sharing a photo of his old Han Solo toy that his mother sent to him as soon as he told her the news.
2. We had our first look at Darth Vader in Rogue One - but for the audience only
We've known for a while that the classic Star Wars villain would be making a return in Gareth Edwards' spin-off Rogue One, resulting in major speculation as to whether he'd be revealed in any of the upcoming trailers.
The answer, in short, is yes; though the new trailer shown at the Rogue One panel was strictly for Celebration audience eyes only. Amongst plenty of new footage establishing the new film's gritty, more sombre, war-like tone; nestled a final shot that sent the crowd absolutely wild.
Darth Vader; or more accurately, a reflection of Darth Vader haloed in a reddish glow, taking in a single breath. Sure, this reveals essentially nothing about Vader's role in the film's narrative; yet, it's merely exciting to see the character once more in concrete form.
3. We had our first look at Rogue One characters, Galen Erso and droid K-2SO
With Episode VIII only just wrapped filming, and the Han Solo film without even a complete script; it was only natural the spotlight would fall on this year's Rogue One, with the film's panel by far being the most revealing in its content.
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Though we've already glimpsed the majority of the film's central characters in the initial trailer; two individuals seemingly kept hidden were Mads Mikkelsen's Galen Erso and new droid K-2SO, with both now getting full reveals at the film's panel.
Though we'd already learnt Mikkelsen would be playing Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones)'s father, the panel gave final confirmation of the fact; whilst revealing a first image of the actor in costume, alongside a very tantalising quote as to why the character has so far been kept such a mystery. Mikkelsen teased that Galen, once invented something so beautiful, so fantastic that it could change the universe.
Those in attendance also saw a brief clip of droid K-2SO, played by Alan Tudyk in a motion capture performance, with the revelation that he was an Imperial droid reprogrammed by the rebellion.
"Cassian reprogrammed him, and did like a data wipe," Tudyk explained. "When he reprogrammed him, hes not quite all there. He speaks his mind and says things, I dont know, that can be unsettling. Hes very honest. If you know any old people, hes like that; he just says whatever he thinks. It was great. It was really great to play him."
4. There was plenty of new Rogue One footage thanks to a Celebration Reel for the film
Though the new trailer revealed to the Celebration audience won't be dropping online anytime soon, director Gareth Edwards still had a bounty of new footage to show elsewhere thanks to a special behind-the-scenes reel for the film.
What's immediately obvious is what a visual shift Rogue One will be making within the Star Wars universe; the film boasting a muted, sombre colour palette that's fitting to its identity as more of an offshoot war film than a piece of the main storyline. Not that Rogue One is about to lose its central cinematic DNA, with the reel all leading up to Jyn uttering that magic phrase, "May the force be with us".
5. A HUGE Rogue One spoiler may have accidentally be revealed
There was always going to be a danger that someone would let something slip, even if every cast member lived constantly under the watchful eye of Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. So, the fact we may have accidentally been told a fairly major Rogue One spoiler shouldn't be much of a surprise - *DON'T read ahead if you want to avoid any potential spoilers for the movie - you've been warned!*
While Jiang Wen - who plays Baze Malbus in the film - discussed his character in the upcoming film, he let slip; "I pretend [to all the characters to do a very, very big mission. I cannot say [anything more about] that. And [he gestures to Donnie Yen], when this guy dead I do something better. Maybe I believe by my action - he's thinker, I'm doer so-"
A statement which seems to quite clearly reveal that Donnie Yen's Chirrut Imwe dies over the course of the film; especially considering host Gwendoline Christie interrupted saying, "I think we need to leave it here. I think you've got to leave it there."
Wen had previously apologised for his limited English, so it's possible the statement was just a miscommunication; presumably something we'll only find out when the film itself is released in cinemas.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits UK cinemas 16 December 2016; with Star Wars: Episode VIII expected 15 December 2017, and the Han Solo film on 25 May 2018.
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London property prices are falling following UKs vote to leave the EU.
The vote triggered a wave of discounts as nervous owners slashed their asking prices following the surprise victory of the Leave campaign.
The number of cuts to asking prices surged by 163 per cent in the 12 days following the referendum, compared to the 12 days ahead of the vote, according to figures from LondRes, a property research firm.
But the post-Brexit discounts have failed to encourage people to buy.
Recommended Read more London property snapped up by overseas investors
Completions, measured as the day money has been transferred and the purchaser can move in, fell by 18 per cent before the vote on the EU membership. The numbers were down by 43 per cent compared to a year earlier in Londons 30 most central postal districts.
The figures suggest that vendors have come to terms with the fact that they must drop asking prices to offload homes. Buyers, on the other hand, are becoming more demanding as they want to secure deals that will protect them from potential price falls.
This is a very, very different market to a week ago. Im now trying to do deals 10 per cent below where they were a week ago and central London is already down 10 to 15 per cent from its peak, Henry Prior, a buying agent said the week after the referendum.
A downward trend in house sales is expected to continue through the summer as buyers put off their plans amid uncertainty, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
Surveyors said house sales were down in June and are expected to drop another 26 per cent over the next three months in the most negative reading since 1998.
The Brexit vote has however triggered an interest from overseas property buyers.
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
Estate agents in the UK have been swamped with calls from Chinese, Middle Eastern, Italian and Spanish buyers looking for a bargain after the pound tumbled to 30-year lows in the week after the EU referendum, making the exchange rate very favourable for foreign buyers.
Buyers from the eurozone gained a 50,900 (42,000) discount on the average London house price in the wake of the result, according to Stirling Ackroyd, a London estate agent.
European buyers can now snap up real bargains across London. Overnight London has become a more affordable global property hotspot particularly for those paying in euros, said managing director Andrew Bridges.
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Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister, has seemingly performed an about turn on her plans for a policy of opposing foreign takeovers of British businesses less than a week after it was announced in Birmingham.
May said on Monday that she personally called chief executive of Japanese company SoftBank about the 24 billion takeover of the UK's biggest global technology company, ARM Holdings, to congratulate him on the deal.
"This is clearly a vote of confidence in Britain. It will be the biggest ever Asian investment in the UK," the prime minister's offical spokeswoman said.
The Prime Minister spoke to the chief executive of SoftBank yesterday and welcomed the investment and their commitment to keeping the company in Cambridge and doubling the number of jobs over five years.
This is good news for British workers, good news for the British economy. It shows - as the Prime Minister has been saying - that we can make a success of leaving the EU," she added.
Theresa May's most controversial moments
Philip Hammond, Ms May's new Chancellor, said that the deal will turn a "great British company into a global phenomenon".
The comments come days after May launched her national campaign in Birmingham, stating that the Government should be capable of stepping in when a foreign firm swoops for British businesses that are important to workers and communities.
"Because as we saw when Cadburys that great Birmingham company was bought by Kraft, or when AstraZeneca was almost sold to Pfizer, transient shareholders who are mostly companies investing other peoples money are not the only people with an interest when firms are sold or close," May said at the launch.
May's strategy was not to automatically stop the sale of British firms to foreign ones, but to be capable of stepping in and defending it if the business was as important as AstraZeneca to the pharmaceuticals industry.
David Reader, a senior research associate at the Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) and UEA Law School who specialises in researching the role played by public interest considerations in merger control regimes around the world highlighted contradictions in the deal.
Barely a week after setting out her plans for an industrial policy that would allow the UK to oppose foreign takeovers in strategically important sectors, Theresa May's new-look government has given its backing to a 24bn bid by Japanese firm SoftBank for UK chip-maker ARM," he said.
"This has led to a few raised eyebrows, including from the former business secretary Vince Cable, who in a BBC Radio 4 interview was critical of the Government's apparent lack of opposition to the bid."
ARM is the UK's biggest global technology company. It manufactures iPhones, chips and other technology that is licensed to other firms. It has the potential to be a leader in the "internet of things", when devices are given web connectivity.
Simon Segars, ARM chief executive, has had to defend the ARM deal against accusations that the UK is selling off its only top-tier tech company.
Our culture, our management, the way we operate, our ethos, none of that is going to change," Segars told the Independent.
"We are not expecting SoftBank to come in here and say this is the way we do business, and here are a lot of processes you have to follow. They look at us and they see we are running a successful, profitable business. The thesis behind this is the two of us working together to drive the technology forward," he said.
Biggest business scandals in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Biggest business scandals in pictures Biggest business scandals in pictures Volkswagen emissions scandal VW admitted to rigging its US emission tests so that diesel-powered cars would looks like they were emitting less nitrous oxide, which can damage the ozone layer and contribute to respiratory diseases. Around 11 million cars worldwide were affected. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Martin Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals Martin Shkreli became known as the most hated man in the world after his drug company, Turing, increased the price of a 62-year-old drug that treated HIV patients by 5,000% to $750 a pill. He was charged with illegally taking stock from Retrophin, a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it pay off debts from unrelated business dealings. Shkreli, who maintains he is innocent, and says there is little evidence of fraud because his investors didn't lose money. Biggest business scandals in pictures Panama Papers: Millions of leaked documents expose how worlds rich and powerful hid money - April 2016 Millions of confidential documents have been leaked from one of the worlds most secretive law firms, exposing how the rich and powerful have hidden their money. Dictators and other heads of state have been accused of laundering money, avoiding sanctions and evading tax, according to the unprecedented cache of papers that show the inner workings of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is based in Panama. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Google's tax avoidance Google reached a deal with the HM Revenue and Customs to pay back 130 million in so-called back-taxes that have been due since 2005. George Osborne championed the deal as a major success. But European MEPs have since called for the Chancellor to appear in front of the committee on tax rulings to explain the tax deal. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Rogue trader A French court cut the damages owed by rogue trader Jerome Kerviel from 4.9bn (4.2bn) to just 1m (860,000). The court ruled on that Kerviel was partly responsible for massive losses suffered in 2008 by his former employer Societe Generale through his reckless trades. Kerviel has consistently maintained that bosses at the French bank knew what he was doing all along. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Barclays CEO under investigation for trying to identify whistleblower - Monday Paril 10 Authorities have launched an investigation into Barclays chief executive officer Jes Staley for trying to identify a whistleblower, the bank said on Monday. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are both investigating Mr Staley after the bank notified them that Mr Staley had tried to identify the author of two anonymous letters, which were sent to the board and a senior executive in June 2016. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures UK to crack down on bank money laundering after reports of 65bn Russian scam, City minister says - March 2017 The Economic Secretary to the Treasury has vowed that the Government will crack down on money laundering practices, after several of the UK's biggest banks were accused of processing money from a Russian scam, believed to involve up to $80bn (65bn). Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Former HBOS bankers convicted of bribery and fraud over 245m loan scam - February 2017 Two former HBOS bankers were among six people found guilty of bribery and fraud that cost customers and shareholders hundreds of millions of pounds, the BBC reports. Lynden Scourfield, 54, a manager at HBOS, forced struggling clients to use the services of his friends David Mills, 60, and Michael Bancroft, 73. In return, the two businessmen arranged sex parties, cash and lavish gifts. On Monday, the three were convicted at Southwark Crown Court on accounts including bribery, fraud and money laundering. Mark Dobson, another manager at HBOS, Alison Mills, and John Cartwright were also convicted. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Lloyds chief apologises for damage caused by affair allegations - August 2016 Antonio Horta-Osorio, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank, has broken his silence over allegations about his private life admitting he regrets any "damage done to the group's reputation". In a message sent to the bank's 75,000 employees, the banker said that anyone can make mistakes while insisting that staff had to maintain the highest professional standards. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Christine Lagarde faces court over 340m Bernard Tapie payment - July 2016 The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, must stand trial in France over a payment of 403 million (now 340m, then 290m) to tycoon Bernard Tapie, a France's highest appeals court has ruled. The court rejected Ms Lagarde's appeal against a judge's order in December for her to stand trial over allegations of negligence in her handling of the affair. Ms Lagarde could risk a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of 15,000 euros if convicted. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures HSBC senior manager arrested in FX rigging investigation at JFK airport in New York - July 2016 A senior executive at HSBC has been arrested at New York's JFK airport for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy to rig currency benchmarks, according to reports. Mark Johnson, global head of foreign exchange cash trading in London, was reportedly arrested on Tuesday. He will appear before a federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Bloomberg said. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Former PwC employees found guilty in 'Luxleaks' tax scandal - June 2016 Two ex- PricewaterhouseCoopers staffers were found guilty in Luxembourg of stealing confidential tax files that helped unleash a global scandal over generous fiscal deals for hundreds of international companies. Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet face suspended sentences of 12 months and 9 months and were ordered to pay fines of 1,500 (1,230) and 1,000 (822) for their role in the so-called LuxLeaks scandal. Despite the minimal sentences, the ruling was described by Deltours lawyer as shocking and a terrible anomaly. The ruling puts on guard future whistle-blowers, Deltour told reporters.The LuxLeaks revelations sped beyond Luxembourg, causing European Union regulators to expand a tax-subsidy probe and propose new laws to fight corporate tax dodging, while EU lawmakers created a special committee to probe fiscal deals across the 28-nation bloc. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Goldman Sachs dealmakers lavished Libyan officials with prostitutes to win contract - June 2016 A former Goldman Sachs dealmaker trying to persuade Gadaffi-era Libya to invest $1 billion with the investment bank procured prostitutes and invited Libyan officials to lavish parties in the hope of winning the business, the High Court heard on Monday June 13.The Libyan Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund is suing Goldman Sachs for inappropriately coercing its naive staff into giving its sovereign wealth fund cash to the bank to invest in products they did not understand. The products were designed to generate big profits for Goldman, the LIA claims.Goldman denies wrongdoing and says the LIA was treated as an arms-length customer Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Former boss of BHS said his life was threatened - June 2016 Darren Topp, the former boss of BHS, has said former owner Dominic Chappell threatened to kill him when he challenged him over a 1.5 million transfer out of the business. MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee asked Mr Topp about a 1.5 million transfer Mr Chappell made from BHS to a company called BHS Sweden. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley admits paying workers below the minimum wage - June 2016 Mike Ashley admitted paying Sports Direct employees below the minimum wage at a hearing in front of MPs. The company founder said that workers were paid less than the statutory minimum because of bottlenecks at security in an admission that could result in sanctions from HMRC. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Mitsubishi admits improper fuel tests - April 2016 Mitsubishi has admitted to using false fuel methods dating back to 1991. The scale of the scandal is only just coming to light after it was revealed in April that data was falsified in the testing of four types of cars, including two Nissan cars. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Quindell, the scandal-ridden insurance firm Quindell was once a darling of AIM but its share price fell in April 2014 when its accounting practices were attacked in a stinging research note by US short seller Gotham City. In August the group was forced to disclose that the 107 million pre-tax profit it had reported for 2013 was incorrect, and it had in fact suffered a 64million loss. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Toshiba Accounting Scandal The boss of Toshiba, the Japanese technology giant, resigned in disgrace in the wake of one of the countrys biggest ever accounting scandals. His exit came two months after the company revealed that it was investigating accounting irregularities. An independent investigatory panel said that Toshibas management had inflated its reported profits by up to 152 billion yen (780m) between 2008 and 2014. Biggest business scandals in pictures FIFA Corruption Scandal Fifa, football's world governing body, has been engulfed by claims of widespread corruption since the summer of 2015, when the US Department of Justice indicted several top executives. It has now claimed the careers of two of the most powerful men in football, Fifa President Sepp Blatter and Uefa President Michel Platini, after they were banned for eight years from all football-related activities by Fifa's ethics committee. A Swiss criminal investigation into the pair is ongoing. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Libor fraudster City trader Tom Hayes, 35, has become the first person to be convicted of rigging Libor rates following a trial at London's Southwark Crown Court. Hayes worked as a trader in yen derivatives at UBS before joining the American bank Citigroup in Tokyo. He was fired from Citigroup following an investigation into his trading methods. He returned to the UK in December 2012 and was arrested following a two-and-a-half year criminal investigation by the SFO. Getty
But Hermann Hauser, the co-founder of ARM, said it was a sad day for technology in Britain.
ARM is the last British [technology] company that has a global reach, he said.
It gave Britain real strength. It was a British company that determined the next generation microprocessor architecture.
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Anton Yelchins parents penned a letter the late actors fans for their support and well-wishes following his unexpected and tragic death.
Viktor and Irina Yelchin took out a full page ad in The Hollywood Reporter to offer their thanks.
Thank you to all of you who have sent flowers and gifts, for your condolences and kind words, and to all who came to celebrate the life of our son, Anton, the letter reads.
We are deeply grateful for your unconditional love for [him]. He would be surprised at how many hearts and souls he touched
Thank you very much.
Yelchin, 27, died after his car rolled down his driveway and pinned him between the vehicle and a mailbox pillar attached to a security gate.
He is best known for his role as Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek reboot, first filmed by JJ Abrams in 2009.
Yelchin was born in St Petersburg, Russia, where his parents were professional figure skaters. They immigrated to the US before his first birthday.
The actors final film, Star Trek Beyond, is set for wide release in the US on 22 July.
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This Snapchat didnt disappear after 10 seconds.
Dani Mathers, Playboys 2015 Playmate of the Year, was at L.A. Fitness on Wednesday when the body of a fellow gym-goer offended her. The 29-year-old took to Snapchat to post the womans body naked, on her story.
The caption: If I cant see unsee this then you cant either. It pictured Mathers, sporting weight-lifting gloves and a Nike tank top, covering her mouth in false-shock. What resulted was likely thousands looking at this womans nude body, fat-shamed by a blond Playmate, on Matherss public Snapchat.
The backlash was strong Mathers has been banned from L.A. Fitness, indefinitely suspended from her radio gig on a popular Los Angeles station and predictably lambasted on the Internet.
She apologized, then deleted her Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, according to the New York Daily News.
But apologies dont work in court. And thats where Mathers might be headed next.
Thats because LA Fitness banned Mathers from all 800-plus of its gyms, then notified the Los Angeles Police Department that Mathers photographed a member in its locker room. Thats strictly prohibited, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Her behavior is appalling and puts every member at risk of losing their privacy, said Jill Greuling, the companys executive vice president of operations.
Los Angeles Police Capt. Andrew Neiman said they received a report of illegal distribution of the image from the international gym chain. Detectives from the LAPDs west division sexual assault section are investigating, Neiman told the L.A. Times.
Our written rules are very clear: Cellphone usage and photography are prohibited in the locker rooms, Greuling said. This is not only our rule, but common decency.
Playboy mansion for sale
Matherss act was illegal under California law. A section of its Penal Code revised in 2014 said its a misdemeanor to look with the intent to invade the privacy of a person into places like a changing room, where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, with a camera. Under this law, its illegal generally to distribute an image of the intimate body part or parts of another person without the consent of or knowledge of that other person.
Inspiring body positivity quotes Show all 12 1 /12 Inspiring body positivity quotes Inspiring body positivity quotes Ashley Graham "And cellulite, I have not forgotten about you. I'm going to choose to love you even though you want to take over my whole bottom half. You're a part of me and I love you." Inspiring body positivity quotes Danielle Brooks "Sometimes I don't like what I see, but I have the power to change the way in which I relate to my body both physically and mentally." Inspiring body positivity quotes Iskra Lawrence "Stop comparing yourself to anybody else. The [pictures of] movie stars, even the Disney characters, thats not real. Thats not attainable. You cant be anybody else. You are you. You cant be them. So you really just have to start embracing yourself and accepting so-called flaws that society has given the name flaws. Its just our body, our patchwork quilt. Inspiring body positivity quotes Beyonce "The most alluring thing a woman can have is confidence." Getty Images Inspiring body positivity quotes Kate Winslet "Nobody is perfect. I just don't believe in perfection. But I do believe in saying, 'This is who I am and look at me not being perfect.' I'm proud of that." Getty Images Inspiring body positivity quotes Rihanna "You just want something that someone else has, but that doesn't mean what you have isn't beautiful, because people always want what you have and you always want what they have - no one is ever 100 per cent like, 'Yes, I'm the bomb-dot-com - from head-to-toe!" REUTERS Inspiring body positivity quotes Tess Holliday "Never compare yourself with others and celebrate what makes you, you." Inspiring body positivity quotes Demi Lovato "Instead of looking in the mirror and focusing on your flaws, look in the mirror and appreciate your best features... everyone has them." Inspiring body positivity quotes Kim Kardashian-West "See this little dimple of cellulite here? It was so worth it for that cookies 'n' cream ice cream!" Inspiring body positivity quotes Jennifer Lawrence "It should be illegal to call someone fat." Inspiring body positivity quotes Mindy Kaling "Insults about the way I look cant be the thing that harms me and my heart the most. It has to harm me the least. If I have a daughter, Im going to tell her that. Far too many women are much more hurt by being called fat or ugly than they are by being called not smart, or not a leader." Rex Features Inspiring body positivity quotes Selena Gomez "Im learning that you can be comfortable and still look beautiful. AFP/Getty Images
Under that law, Mathers could be charged in the state of California with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor that can include a fine of up to $1,000 or six months in jail.
This incident, which resulted in Mathers deleting all social media accounts, has ironically become her 15 minutes of fame. Google search trends suggest its her most popular moment yet:
Meanwhile, Playboys popularity as a whole has been sinking. The magazines circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to 800,000 in October 2015, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.
The magazine stopped featuring full front nudity starting with its March 2016 issue. Its part of rebranding the magazine that aims to promote an image thats Less sweatsuit, more Tom Ford. It markets its brand as more aspirational and luxury-focused, rather than hawking crass nudes. Its ideal reader is an urban male millennial. Editor Cory Jones told the New York Times last year, The difference between us and Vice is that were going after the guy with a job.
The last time a Playmate of the Year made headlines for losing a job, it was model Hope Dworaczyk. After being named in 2010, she competed in Celebrity Apprentice and was fired in week nine. Her appearance on the show, she said, was for only one purpose: Not to leave until I won money for Best Buddies. I chose to play for them because its a great cause.
Mathers posting snaps of herself snickering at a naked, overweight woman is a bit different from that.
Washington Post
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Rupert Murdoch and his sons have reportedly unanimously decided to oust Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, who is at the centre of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
A report in the US media said Mr Murdoch and his sons, Lachlan and James, had settled on removing the 76-year-old after reviewing the initial findings of a probe into the allegation of sexual harassment, filed by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson.
New York magazine said that after looking at the findings of the investigation being conducted by New York law firm Paul, Weiss, James Murdoch said Mr Ailes, the CEO and chairman of Fox News, should be presented with a choice this week to resign or face being fired.
(Getty Images) (Getty)
It said that Lachlan Murdoch and his father said no action should be taken until the Republican National Convention, which is taking place this week, was completed. But it said that all three were in agreement that the controversial Mr Ailes should go.
On Monday, a spokesman for 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, said in a statement: This matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded.
Earlier this month, former Fox & Friends co-host Ms Carlson alleged in a lawsuit that Mr Ailes, did not renew her contract as she rebuffed his sexual advances and she challenged a sexist newsroom culture.
James Murdoch speaks to students in Florence on Monday (Bloomberg Finance)
Ms Carlson said she was ostracised by the news network because she had refused to accept condescending treatment from the married CEO.
Ruper Murdoch's wedding
Mr Ailes has rejected Ms Carlsons allegations. This is a retaliatory suit for the networks decision not to renew her contract, which was due to the fact that her disappointingly low ratings were dragging down the afternoon lineup, he said in a statement.
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Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has criticised The Sun and its former editor Kelvin Mackenzie for a column questioning why a journalist wearing a hijab reported on the Nice attacks on Channel 4 News.
The former Sun editor, who writes a weekly column for the newspaper, aired his thoughts under the headline: Why did Channel 4 have a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of the Muslim terror in Nice?
In the article, MacKenzie says he couldnt believe his eyes that the journalist Fatima Manji was reporting on last weeks terror attack in Nice where 84 people died after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a lorry through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day. Isis have since claimed responsibility for the attack.
The presenter was not one of the regulars Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Matt Frei or Cathy Newman but a young lady wearing a hijab, Mackenzie wrote.
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.
Was it appropriate for her to be on camera when there had been yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim? Was it done to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer who looks at the hijab as a sign of the slavery of Muslim women by a male-dominated and clearly violent religion? Would the C4 editor have used a Hindu to report on the carnage at the golden Temple of Amritsar? Of course not."
In response to the article, former Tory Cabinet member Sayeeda Warsi shared a letter she has written to The Suns editor Tony Gallagher on Twitter critcising the "divisive column.
In the letter, Warsi writes: Just as politicians should carry the responsibility for xenophobic and toxic campaigning that divides communities so journalists should be held accountable for shock jock writing that simply perpetuates stereotypes, demonises and attempts to hold a whole community accountable for the action of an individual.
Labour MP Dianne Abbott also branded the article a shocking attack.
Further criticism came from other social media users who labelled the column absurd and offensive.
Earlier this afternoon, the press standards body Ipso said they had received over 100 complaints in relation to the column.
The Sun did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Theresa May will warn it would be a gross irresponsibility for the UK to surrender its independent nuclear deterrent, when she opens the debate on Trident renewal in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon.
In her first statement to the House as Prime Minister, Ms May will say: We cannot compromise on our national security. We cannot outsource the grave responsibility we shoulder for keeping our people safe.
"The nuclear threat has not gone away, if anything, it has increased".
She will also issue a stark warning to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has campaigned against nuclear weapons for decades, and has given his MPs a free vote on the issue,
We cannot abandon our ultimate safeguard out of misplaced idealism, she will say. 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.
Labour's shadow foreign and defence secretaries have allowed MPs to abstain in the vote, which is expected to take place at 10pm on Monday night, after a six-and-a-half hour debate. Renewing Trident is expected to cost more than 40bn.
Emily Thornberry and Clive Lewis say the vote is only occurring to capitalise on current divisions in the Labour Party. Renewal on Trident was already agreed in principle in 2007.
Which countries have nuclear weapons? Show all 14 1 /14 Which countries have nuclear weapons? Which countries have nuclear weapons? USA Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Russia Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? UK Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? France Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? China Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? India Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Pakistan Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? North Korea Say they have nuclear weapons EPA/Rodong Sinmun Which countries have nuclear weapons? Israel Believed to have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Belgium Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Germany Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Italy Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Netherlands Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Turkey Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty
Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson has said the vote is partisan political game-playing but nevertheless said to abstain would be abdication of responsibility.
Emily Thornberry led a review into Labour's policy on Trident renewal, concluding that underwater drones would render Trident as obsolete as the spitfire in the decades to come, remarks for which she was ridiculed by her party's MPs. But independent security experts have warned that advances in technology will make the location of permanently at sea submarines detectable far beyond the end of the planned lifespan of Trident.
The Scottish National Party, who are longstanding critics of Trident, will vote against renewal.
The party's leader at Westminster, Angus Robertson said the decision needed proper scrutiny.
Trident is an immoral, obscene and redundant weapons system and the decision on whether to renew it is one of the most important votes this Parliament will ever take, Mr Robertson said.
Having spent the best part of a month engaged in backstabbing, score-settling and navel-gazing, neither the Tories nor Labour are in any fit state to be giving proper scrutiny to decisions as important as this.
The SNP has constantly criticised successive governments for operating Trident submarines from a base on the River Clyde in Scotland.
May 'shocked' by Nice attack
If the decision is taken to renew Trident, the replacement programme would be operational until the 2060s.
Jerusalem is seeking US approval for the support package to maintain eight SH-60F Sea-Hawk Helicopters to Israel be delivered from US Navy surplus to support the Israeli Navy security operations in the Mediterranean Sea. The Israel Navy currently operates French produced HH-65 Dolphin helicopters built by Airbus Helicopters, procured via the USA in 1983. The new helicopters will initially work with the four new Magen Class, Meko-100 corvettes, Israel will receive from Germany by 2020. The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) confirmed the State Departments approval for the planned transfer in its notification to Congress earlier this month.
The original request for eight airframes was submitted and approved in February 2015. The recent announcement relates to the related equipment and support package. According to the package list, Israel requested 12 T-700 GE401C engines, a universal (navalized) version of the T700 powerplant. Each SH-60F uses two such engines. Of the 12 engines ordered, ten will be installed in five of the eight airframes, and two maintained as spare engines. The remaining three airframes could be maintained for future service or are likely to be cannibalized for spare parts.
The helicopters will operate on these Corvettes will be committed to secure the Leviathan Natural Gas Field located within Israels Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ), about 60 nautical miles off the East Mediterranean coast. The SH-60F helicopters will be used onboard these new frigates to patrol and protect these gas fields as well as other areas under threat. The US agency assesses the support package for the eight airframes at $300 million.
The SH-60F entered operational service with the US Navy in 1986. The helicopter primarily serves as primary antisubmarine warfare (ASW) and Search and Rescue (SAR) aircraft. The SH-60F can carry offensive weapons, primarily on ASW missions. These include Mk 46, Mk 50, or Mk 54 torpedoes. It cal also carry various fuselage-mounted machine guns, for self-defense. Some of the weapons deployed by the Israel Air Force have already been tested on board the SH-60 helicopters, these include the Delilah loitering weapon and hellfire guided missile.
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Video footage has captured violent clashes breaking out between anarchists and businessmen during a protest outside Boris Johnson's home.
The footage shows clashes breaking out near the 2.3 million north London home between protesters and men in suits who appear to be supporters of Mr Johnson.
The violence arose during a demonstration organised by Class War, a direct action group, in which around 100 masked protesters descended on the Foreign Secretary's home to "fight back" against the man they claim "stole [their] future".
The suited men are seen chanting Mr Johnson's name as they walk into the protest, which may have provoked anger among the demonstrators.
A female protester was also reportedly knocked over, provoking further anger from the group.
The footage shows an anarchist and a man in a suit break into a fight, with the protester throwing the other man to the ground before he gets up and tries to attack him.
Police immediately intervened and the two men are soon pulled apart.
The footage later shows police trying to restrain protesters in a brawl outside Mr Johnson's home. One officer's hat gets knocked off by a protester.
In another instance a man repeatedly says, "I'm not part of this" while being pushed away by police.
Before the violent outbreak the protesters marched holding banners and chanting slogans including, "The rich, the rich, we've got to get rid of the rich", and various other insults directed at Mr Johnson.
Outside the Foreign Secretary's home, smoke bombs were let off and several demonstrators made speeches. "The far-right is in government, We're living in a police state," said one.
"The blood of the working class is on this Tory government."
At least nine police officers could be seen cordoning the front door of Mr Johnson's home.
The Foreign Secretary was not at home during the protest but one protester reportedly remarked that if he were to return, he would "probably be killed".
Three people were arrested for violent offences during the demonstration.
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A man who agreed to go to Turkey with a woman he matched with on Tinder just 12 hours beforehand has said he was more scared of his date than the attempted coup they became caught up in.
Phil Stephenson, 22, from Darlington, agreed to go to on holiday to Turkey with Nicole Graham, 22, from South Shields, South Tyneside, after a family member had to drop out from the holiday due to passport issues.
The pair had matched on the dating app the day before but had not met before they both arrived at the airport, but it didnt go well from the start.
"As soon as we got on the plane she was wanting to hold hands, he said once he was home.
"She was a nice girl, don't get me wrong.
"For me it was just a bit of banter, like two mates going away together.
"Unfortunately it was a Tinder date that went wrong, he said, adding that he had been spontaneous.
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 pair flew to Marmaris, where there had been shootings heard by people staying at the hotel and claims that a helicopter had been brought down at nearby Icemeler during the attempted military coup in the country.
Speaking the Northern Echo at the time, Mr Stephenson said: My mates are telling me to stick it out because its so funny but its not Isis or terrorists Im scared of, its her.
But Ms Graham, a nurse, later told the paper it wasnt just Mr Stephenson who had had a terrible time.
It was the worst time of my life and he nicked my toothpaste, she said, claiming that Mr Stephenson was 100 per cent boring and had left her with an 80 bar bill to cover.
Shallow Tinder: 'You're the prettiest girl but I get turned on by someone slimmer'
Mr Stephenson has since decided to move on from the experience by booking a holiday with his friends.
"I've booked a flight to Ibiza with the boys and we're going on Tuesday.
"I'm going to enjoy a lads' holiday, he said.
Additional reporting by Press Association
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Until Wednesday when a 15 year-old girl sadly sustained spinal injuries in St Ives, after she was startled by a gull snatching her ice cream and fell from a harbour wall it had all the makings of what has become an annual "silly season" story. The warm-up started a few days ago with Ultra seagulls are mugging people and trying to break into cars (The South Wales Evening Post) and was followed by Seagull scourge ... as they attack postmen (The Daily Telegraph) and Maritime mayhem (the Telegraph again). Meanwhile, gulls seized a teenagers Greggs sandwich in Dundee, according to the local Courier; the Seventies pop star David Essex was gulled of his cone in Anglesey (the Daily Star); and all media outlets feasted on the story of the RSPB expert who was dive-pecked by gulls when he was trying to return some eggs to their nest.
But why do seagulls attack people? Are they fundamentally mean, or do they have a deeper motivation? Although a common bird, we know little about deep seagull psychology (although this will hopefully change, as psychologists in Bristol have started to study what makes them tick). However, most animals fight when they want something either food, or to protect their offspring and gulls are no different. In fact, their numbers are gradually declining. So why are we noticing them so much more these days?
Well, there are a many reasons why they have become a problem. Seagulls are omnivorous, so will eat anything, even human rubbish. (Humans are also omnivorous, which probably lead to our intelligence and success as a species.) As gulls supply of fish runs out, they have to find food elsewhere. We discard tons of high-quality food every day; thrown out because its gone past its best-before date, but a banquet for a hungry gull. Its no coincidence that most gulls attack to steal our treats. Seagulls are also highly neophillic, so unafraid of new things. A crow will be very cautious when approaching something new, whereas a gull will approach anything to see if its edible. And since they are extremely aggressive to each other, its no surprise when gulls challenge us over our lunch.
Then theres the matter of timing. The "silly season roughly coincides with the gull breeding season. Desperate parents are struggling to find enough food to placate their voracious chicks, or protecting them from predators. Anything close to the nest is a threat and will be attacked. This week, when nesting gulls launched at a primary school-gate father in Hartlepool, he withdrew his children from school because he was scared of a repetition. And its understandable to be scared if an animal attacks your child. Many parents first instinct is to demand the offending animal be destroyed. However, we sometimes have to step back from our feelings and think about why the animal attacked and how we might prevent it happening in the future.
Gulls move inland when their food runs out, and we provide a plentiful supply of high-calorie foods
Recently in the US, a young boy climbed into the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla enclosure. Harambe, a large male gorilla, approached the boy and was considered an immediate danger, so was shot and killed. Many gorilla experts have now questioned whether the gorilla was attacking or protecting the child. Although a lower risk, a gull could seriously injure a young child, so was this parent wrong to want to remove his kids from danger? The father probably didnt realise the gull was protecting its own chicks, and that simply avoiding the area around the nest could have reduced the threat. We have to take responsibility for our actions. We decimate the gulls food; we should expect them to try and take ours. We approach their nests; we should expect to get mobbed. Perhaps our general inability to care about or understand the natural world is the cause of our misadventures with it when it turns up on our doorstep.
UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures 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 UK news in pictures 6 September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA
To quote my own book Bird Brain: As birds encroach into human environments because of the threat of climate change and habitat destruction, with the subsequent effects of reducing their food supplies and potential nesting sites, we have to adapt to their presence, but they also have to adapt to these strange new worlds. Those birds that are smart enough to adapt their behaviour to a changing world will be more successful than those species that cannot. As birds start to share our world, they will lose their fear of us and increase their tenacity. Some species, such as gulls, are behaviourally flexible, exploiting a wide variety of resources that puts them potentially into conflict with humans. However, mutual assistance and respect can stave off a real-life version of Hitchcocks The Birds!
So how do we live in harmony with birds such as gulls? Many think we shouldnt try; we should just kill them. Thankfully, nesting seagulls are protected (though this is no comfort to those whose lives are put in danger, distress or inconvenience by these angry birds). But even if it were legal, destroying gulls or their nests is not a practical, ethical or rational solution to the problem we ourselves have caused. We need to address the root of the problem, not its symptoms. Gulls move inland when their food runs out, and we provide a plentiful supply of high-calorie foods. Gull nesting sites have been destroyed, so they nest further inland where its warmer. I wish I had an answer. Until fish stocks return and shorelines are given back to our wildlife, its not clear what can be done to stem this onslaught of avian invaders. But for now, we need to find a way to live happily together. Having empathy and knowledge for what motivates our feathered friends may be the best start.
Dr Nathan Emery is senior lecturer in cognitive biology at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of Bird Brain: an Exploration of Avian Intelligence (Ivy Press, 20)
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Theresa May has a record of surviving political controversy.
In her six years as head of the Home Office, she became known for being tough especially when it comes to immigration.
In her first speech as Prime Minister, Ms May's rhetoric was more consolatory. She sought the centre-ground, vowing to fight against "burning injustice".
As she prepared to face her first parliamentary test, when MPs will vote on whether to renew Trident, it is an opportunity to reflect on the career-defining moments of the UK's new PM.
Earning threshold of 35,000 for non-EU migrants
Teachers are feared to be deported from the country as many don't earn 35,000 (Getty Images)
The 35,000 earning threshold for immigrants outside the EU, which was introduced in April, has been branded discriminatory with campaigners against the law raising a petition of more than 100,000 signatures.
According to the new rule, immigrants from outside the UK who cant prove they earn enough will be deported, even if they have been living here for more than five years. The average salary in the UK is about 26,000.
The policy prompted fears Britain could be hit by serious shortages of workers in the teaching, charity and entrepreneur sectors. After Ms May realised the threshold would likely lead to vital NHS staff being deported, the Home Office granted a temporary exemption for nurses. But there is no guarantee that NHS staff will remain immune to the new law.
Vans carrying billboards telling illegal immigrants to 'go home'
The Home Office advert scheme urged illegal immigrants to 'go home' (Home Office/ PA) (PA)
Two vans carrying the slogan: "Go home or face arrest" aimed at undocumented immigrants were driven around the country in 2013. The then shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, accused Ms May's government of using the "language of the National Front". The campaign was also criticised by UKIP, whose former leader Nigel Farage later endorsed another divisive immigration poster.
The Conservative immigration minister, Mark Harper, defended the poster saying: "I don't see any problem with saying to people who have no right to be in the UK they can't be here any more."
The pilot scheme, which was going to be rolled out on a larger scale, was later banned by the Advertising Standards Authority.
May's promise to break police's power
Relations between the police and Home Secretary have been strained, but one of Ms May's first appointments as Prime Minister was to host the reception for the Police Bravery Awards (Getty)
Ms May has accused the police of racist behaviour. In a speech to the Police Federation in 2014, she said they were over-using stop-and-search powers against black communities and that the discrimination was down to more than "a few bad apples".
However some officers believe her remarks were not an expression of genuine concern for minorities, but simply an opportunity to criticise the police while furthering her own career.
Ms May vowed to break the power of the Police Federation by ending its automatic right to enrol police officers as members.
She said: "The federation was created by an act of parliament and it can be reformed by an act of parliament. If you do not change of your own accord, we will impose change on you."
Following the speech, Ms May was called a "bully" by one police officer. Her reforms are comparable to the changes the Thatcher government forced onto trade unions.
Scrapping the Human Rights Act
During her speech at the 2011 Conservative Party conference, Theresa May announced plans to clamp down on illegal immigrants hiding behind the human rights act (Getty)
Ms May has affirmed and then re-affirmed her distaste for the European Human Rights Act. In 2011, she said: "We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act. The violent drug dealer who cannot be sent home because his daughter for whom he pays no maintenance lives here.
"The robber who cannot be removed because he has a girlfriend. The illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because and I am not making this up he had a pet cat.
"This is why I remain of the view that the Human Rights Act needs to go."
Human Rights campaigners told Ms May she should "get her facts straight", because it was not the cat that prevented the immigrant from being deported.
Labours Lord Charles Falconer accused Ms May of sacrificing Britains 68-year-old commitment to human rights for her own miserable Tory leadership ambitions.
But, when announcing her bid to become Prime Minister, Ms May U-turned, saying pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights was "something Im not going to pursue". She acknowledged she didn't have parliamentary support.
Theresa May on scrapping Human Rights Act in 2013
Opting into the European Arrest Warrant
The European Arrest Warrant is controversial because it requires little proof before it can be used (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
But Ms May is pro-Europe when it comes to the controversial European Arrest Warrant.
Under this scheme, suspected criminals can be extradited without any evidence to any EU country.
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Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to be falling behind in their language skills by the time they start school, putting their chances of being successful in life at risk, according to a report.
In the past decade, almost a million boys were not achieving the level expected of them at the age of five, often struggling to follow simple instructions or speak a full sentence.
The study, by Save The Children, warns that unless action is taken to ensure all youngsters have access to good quality early education, almost a million more young boys could be left behind in the next 10 years.
In the last academic year alone, about 80,000 boys in England were behind in language and communication when they started school equivalent to four boys in every reception class.
The gender gap is well-documented, the study says, It has hardly changed for five-year-olds over the past decade, despite a dramatic improvement in overall results.
The difference in outcomes for boys and girls is having a devastating impact; nearly a million boys have fallen behind with their early language skills since 2006.
That is nearly a million five-year-olds who may struggle with skills like explaining what they think and how they feel, and engaging with the adults and children around them.
Lagging behind at the start of their school career is often an indicator that these youngsters will continue to be behind later on, the childrens charity said.
Overall, one in four boys were behind in language at the age of five in 2014/15, compared to 14% of their female classmates. Poor white boys performed the worst, with about 38% falling below the expected standard.
The study, which draws on official data and analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study, calculates that those who are not reaching the expected level at the age of five are four times more likely to be lagging behind in reading by the end of primary school.
Poor language skills also prevent young children from being able to express themselves and engage in the world around them, while in the long term it can affect their earnings, literacy skills and mental health as adults, it argues.
The report goes on to say that girls are out-performing boys in every area of the country, with the biggest gender gap in St Helens, Merseyside, where boys start primary school 17.3 percentage points behind their female classmates in language and communication.
At the other end of the scale, in Richmond, south west London, the gap is 5.4 percentage points.
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 report calls for the Government to help develop a well-qualified workforce, with an early years teacher in every nursery.
We cannot wait for disadvantaged children and boys to get to school before they receive the support they need, it says.
By this time many will have already fallen behind, with negative consequences for their childhoods, school attainment and life chances. We must invest in the best early years provision, led by early years teachers and supported by skilled staff at all levels, particularly in the most deprived areas.
Gareth Jenkins, of Save The Children, said: Every child deserves the best start in life. But in England, too many children, especially boys, are slipping under the radar without the support they need to reach their potential.
Theyre falling behind before they even get to school and that puts their life chances at risk. In 2016, this is unacceptable. A whole generation of boys is being failed.
Andy Bowden, St Helens Councils cabinet member for education, said: Were very aware of the gender issue, but its important to point out that the data used in this report is up to two years old (from 2014/15).
Since then, great efforts have been made to encourage nurseries to narrow the very evident gaps in childrens development when they start nursery or school.
Were also doing all we can to encourage parents and carers to help prepare their children for school with initiatives like Read and Rhyme Time in our network of local libraries.
A Department for Education spokeswoman said: We are making a significant investment in the early years sector and the number of qualified staff is rising with more trained graduates in the workforce and a record number of providers rated good or outstanding.
This investment is paying off, latest figures show more than 80 per cent of children are reaching the expected communication and language skills by age five, but we will continue working with the sector until every child gets the high-quality education they deserve.
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Naz Shah has said the comments which resulted in her suspension from the Labour party were anti-Semitic but, at the time, she didnt get anti-Semitism as racism.
Ms Shah, the Bradford West MP, was suspended from the party in April amid controversy over a social media post appearing to endorse the relocation of Israelis to the US. Labours governing body, the National Executive Committee, has since reinstated Ms Shah.
In a Facebook post in 2014, before she became MP for Bradford West, Ms Shah shared a graphic which showed an image of Israel's outline superimposed onto a map of the US under the headline "Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict Relocate Israel into United States", with the comment problem solved.
Asked by BBC Radio 4s World at One what she thought when she now looked back at the posts, Ms Shah replied: How stupid I was and how ignorant I was. At the time, I didnt understand it.
The language that I used was anti-semitic, it was offensive. What I did was I hurt people andthe clear anti-semitic language, which I didnt know at the time, was when I said the Jews are rallying. Now that is anti-semitic.
I wasnt anti-semitic, what I put out was anti-semitic, she added.
"I didn't get anti-Semitism as racism," said Ms Shah. "I had never come across it. I think what I had was an ignorance."
Naz Shah apology
Asked whether she thought silly for not knowing that it was anti-semitic, she added: Of course. I will always own my ignorance and it was ignorant. Lets be clear about it. It has been a journey that Ive been on Ive had amazing compassion from the Jewish community. And I have to earn that trust. I have to be able to say this is what I did.
Ms Shah also explained her initial reaction to the furore: "One of the tough conversations I had to have with myself was about, God, am I anti-Semitic?
"And I had to really question my heart of hearts. Yes, I have ignorance, yes everybody has prejudice, sub conscious biases, but does that make me anti-Semitic? And the answer was no, I do not have a hatred of Jewish people."
The Guido Fawkes website - which published the post - also pointed to another made before Ms Shah was an MP, which used the hashtag #IsraelApartheid above a quote saying: Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
When the comments first emerged Ms Shah, in a statement to the House of Commons, apologised saying she accepted and understood that the words I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community and I deeply regret that.
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Boris Johnsons new foreign office deputy mocked him as Silvio Borisconi just a few weeks before his appointment.
The new Minister of State for the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan, compared his new boss to the theatrical and comical antics of the eccentric former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, in a speech to the House of Commons.
He was urging his Conservative colleagues not to elect Mr Johnson as leader during the first Prime Minister's Questions after the EU referendum.
The MP, who backed the Remain side during the referendum, asked David Cameron: From his experience as Prime Minister on how, in terms of their countries reputation and success, he would compare the undemonstrative, competence and dignity of Angela Merkel with the theatrical and comical antics of Silvio Borisconi?
Mr Johnson did not enter the race to become Conservative party leader after his former ally Michael Gove launched a surprise bid for the job on the day the ex-London mayor was due to announce his candidacy.
Sir Alan is seen as a key ally of Prime Minister Theresa May, prompting speculation he was appointed to keep an eye on Mr Johnson.
Sir Alan Duncan compared Boris Johnson to Silvio Berlusconi (Getty Images) (Getty)
Mr Johnson has had an eventful first few days as Britains top diplomat with the terror attack in Nice and the attempted coup in Turkey.
Eyebrows were raised across the world on his appointment as the former journalist had a reputation for undiplomatic comments including writing a poem accusing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having sex with goats which won 1,000 in a Spectator competition.
In a column for the Sunday Telegraph, he insisted Brexit did not mean the UKs withdrawal from the world but instead the country would be more outward-looking, more engaged and more active on the world stage than ever before.
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
He reiterated earlier comments that Britain was leaving the EU, not Europe, and said We will remain key players in all kinds of intergovernmental cooperation with our European friends and partners.
It gives us a chance not just to do new trade deals, but to think of ourselves once again as a truly global Britain using our unique voice humane, compassionate, principled to do good around the world, and to exploit growth markets to the full.
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A plane carrying Boris Johnson was forced to make an emergency landing at Luton airport on Sunday evening.
The Foreign Secretary was travelling on board an RAF passenger jet to Brussels, for the first foreign trip he has been on since his appointment.
The aircraft began experiencing mechanical difficulties, possibly with the hydraulics.
All other flights were temporarily grounded while the issue was investigated. Eyewitnesses at the airport reported seeing numerous emergency services vehicles in the area around the time of the incident.
Some other passengers at the airport claimed their flights were delayed by the incident.
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.
Recommended Read more Boris Johnson booed at French embassy after Brexit speech
After a short delay the Foreign Secretary continued on his way to Brussels by alternative means.
Boris Johnson has had a baptism of fire in his new post, which he was only assigned to on 13 July. Since then, his office had to respond to the Nice atrocity in France, an apparent terrorist attack which killed at least 84 people and injured many more.
The following day, factions of the Turkish military attempted a coup against the government of President Erdogan. More than 200 people were killed in a night of violence which despite its failure will likely have long lasting ramifications for politics in Turkey, a country of huge strategic importance.
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Britain is in no sense leaving Europe as it pulls out of the European Union, the new Foreign Secretary has said.
Boris Johnson said ahead of his first meeting of the EUs Foreign Affairs Council that the UK would not abandon its leading role on the continent after Brexit.
The Brexit campaigner told reporters in Brussels that he had had a productive 45-minute meeting with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini on Sunday.
Recommended Read more Boris Johnson booed at French embassy after Brexit speech
It's very, very good to be here for my first overseas trip, he said.
The message I'll be taking to our friends in the Council is that we have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union.
But that in no sense means we are leaving Europe. We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European participation and co-operation of all kinds.
I had a very good conversation to that effect with High Representative Mogherini and she very much agreed that is a role Britain should continue to play.
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
When you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice, and Turkey where we have to work very closely together, you see the importance of that.
On Nice, we will be ensuring that we co-ordinate our response to terror.
On Turkey, it is very important in light of the failed coup that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and that is what I will be calling for.
In the meantime, I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues from other European countries.
Mr Johnson made similar comments last week, arguing that he would be reshaping Britain's global profile and identity as a great global player in his new role.
The Foreign Secretary is expected to get a rough ride from his European Union counterparts at todays meeting, who are well aware of his role in steering Britain towards the exit door.
He met US Secretary of State John Kerry for breakfast talks on Monday alongside other EU foreign ministers. They are said to have discussed the situation in Turkey and the aftermath of the Nice atrocity
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A former Conservative peer has been acquitted of submitting false expenses claims after Parliament decided the main issue of the case does not fall under the jurisdiction of the criminal courts.
Lord Hanningfield was accused of claiming around 3,300 for attendance at the House of Lords in 2013.
In 2014, the 75-year-old was barred from the House of Lords after a standards watchdog found he had claimed a 300 attendance allowance for 11 days when he had not undertaken any parliamentary work.
Lord Hanningfield, of West Hanningfield, near Chelmsford in Essex, was due to stand trial at London's Southwark Crown Court on Monday but the prosecution offered no evidence against him after Parliament intervened.
The faces at the House of Lords Show all 4 1 /4 The faces at the House of Lords The faces at the House of Lords 383126.bin PA The faces at the House of Lords 383130.bin Getty Images The faces at the House of Lords 383127.bin PA The faces at the House of Lords 383128.bin PA
He was formally found not guilty of false accounting.
Judge Alistair McCreath said Parliament had exercised its right to decide that the main issue in the case, whether Hanningfield was carrying out Parliamentary work or not, does not fall under the jurisdiction of the criminal courts.
He said: At the heart of the prosecution case is an allegation that on the material days Lord Hanningfield did not carry out Parliamentary work.
It is manifestly impossible for the Crown to present their case without requiring the jury to receive evidence on the topic of, and make a determination of, what is and is not Parliamentary work.
Towards the end of last week and indeed relatively late on Friday, it became evident that Parliament was exercising exclusive cognisance in relation to the matter of Parliamentary work.
In other words Parliament was saying 'It is a matter for us as Parliament to make that determination, not for the criminal court'.
Parliament having made that decision means that the prosecution are not in a position to invite the jury to consider the question of what is Parliamentary work, let alone make a determination of it.
Prosecutor Patrick Gibbs QC said: The authorities are asserting exclusive cognisance over the meaning of Parliamentary work.
The courts and Parliament strive to respect each other's role and courts are careful not to interfere with the workings of Parliament.
In 2011, the non-affiliated peer was sentenced to nine months in prison after being found guilty of nearly 14,000 worth of expenses fraud. He served a quarter of the sentence in jail.
Lord Hanningfield said in a statement: I am relieved the matter has come to an end. I always maintained that I carried out parliamentary work on the dates in question away from the House and that my short time in the House on those dated was explained by my ill health.
Additional reporting by Press Association
New Jefferson
Co. Courthouse
opens Monday
BEND Jefferson County opens its new courthouse in Madras on Monday.
The Bulletin newspaper reports the county in Central Oregon took advantage of a state program offering financial assistance to counties needing to update or replace substandard court facilities.
The old courthouse was built in 1961, has just two courtrooms and is at risk of collapse in an earthquake.
The new building has three courtrooms and improved security. It sits just west of the Madras City Hall and Madras Police Department headquarters.
County Administrator Jeff Rasmussen said the project is on target to come in at around $13.9 million, below the budgeted $15 million. Construction began 16 months ago.
Orchard donates
tons of cherries
to the needy
SALEM The group Farmers Ending Hunger has lined up a large donation of cherries from a prominent orchardist in The Dalles.
The Capital Press reports that roughly 80,000 pounds of fresh cherries will be distributed to Oregon food banks this summer.
Ken Bailey of Orchard View Farms is donating 14 totes per week, each of them 1,000 pounds.
The donated dark cherries are ones the commercial market doesn't want because they are perhaps under-sized or off color.
Orchard View has an optical scan sorting system that routes market-quality cherries to the appropriate totes. The system practically eliminates hand-sorting labor costs and results in a product of uniform quality, size and color.
2 killed in head-on
crash east of Portland
PORTLAND Two people died and four were injured in a head-on crash east of Portland.
The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office says Estacada firefighters responded to Saturday night's crash on Highway 224, finding a 7-year-old child unresponsive in one of the vehicles. CPR was performed but the child died at the scene.
The other patients were taken by either air or ground to Portland-area hospitals. One of them died on the way.
The highway was closed for hours after the crash.
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Owen Smith, a challenger for Jeremys Corbyns job as leader of the Labour Party, landed himself in a Twitter storm by talking about his family life on live television.
Responding to a journalist who described him as normal, Mr Smith took the phrase a compliment, and replied: I am normal. I grew up in a normal household. Ive got a wife and three children. My wife is a primary school teacher.
Angela Eagle, who is locked in contest with Mr Smith over which of them should take on Mr Corbyn in the forthcoming leadership election, was the first MP ever to come out as a lesbian.
During the Conservative leadership contest, Andrea Leadsom was heavily criticised for comparing herself favourably with Theresa May because she has children and the Prime Minister is childless.
When Mr Smith described his family life, he did not say anything hat implied that he was comparing himself with Ms Eagle, but later in the day, his supporters were having to fend off accusations on the social media that Mr Smith was being homophobic.
It was a slip up on a day when Mr Smiths backers had hoped he would be able to induce Ms Eagle to withdraw from the contest giving him a clear run against the incumbent Labour leader.
Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Show all 12 1 /12 Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Corbyn's reshuffle Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Corbyn and the Syria bombing vote Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Corbyn asks questions from the public at PMQs, meanwhile backbenchers plot to oust him Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Corbyn is unavailable to attend the Privy Council Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Conference rejects Corbyns call to debate Trident Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn At Labour conference Corbyn and McDonnell press for a Robin Hood tax Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Corbyns hopes for a new politics look optimistic in the face of a media barrage Dave Brown on Jeremy Corbyn Corbyn enters Labour leadership race
The two would-be contenders were said by observers to have achieved a score draw at their first hustings in packed lunchtime meeting of MPs and MEPs, which was an unhappy experience for Mr Corbyn. While Mr Smith and Ms Eagle were applauded every time they spoke, Mr Corbyn was heard in stoney silence a sharp contrast to the rousing cheers he invariably gets when addressing left wing crowds outside Parliament.
I am normal. I grew up in a normal household. Ive got a wife and three children Labour leadership candidate Owen Smith
It is thought that Owen Smith, who has put himself forward as the unity candidate, has the support of about 90 MPs, well above the 50 he needs to get himself on the ballot, and reputedly more than have signed up for the more experienced Angela Eagle.
He offered to withdraw if Ms Eagle managed to get the greater number of nominations. She brushed off the question of whether she would make an equivalent commitment by joking: I think the person with the fewest nominations is Jeremy.
Mr Corbyn and his supporters won a hard fought battle at last weeks meeting of Labours national executive to spare him having to ask for support from fellow MPs, three quarters of whom backed a vote of no confidence in him.
Owen Smith and Angela Eagle disagree over one person standing
Mr Smith believes he has the better chance to beat Mr Corbyn because he is relatively new to Parliament and did not vote in favour of the Iraq war in 2003. Ms Eagle supported that and military intervention in Libya. But she believes that she is better qualified because of her experience as a government minister, and that it is time for Labour to elect a woman leader.
One seasoned observer who was at the hustings said that Smith came over as stronger on policy while Eagle seemed the more human. He said: If Owen on policy lines was nine to her eight, on lightness she was nine to his eight. Hearing them, I was glad to be a member of this party. They were both so much better than the present leader that it was embarrassing.
Since she announced her intention to run against Mr Corbyn, Ms Eagle has drawn vitriolic responses from some Corbyn supporters. A brick was thrown through the window of her constituency office in Wallasey, in what may have been a political gesture.
She told MPs: When it comes to bricks and windows, the Labour Party I know uses bricks to build homes and opens windows on a more tolerant society.
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Theresa May has declared without hesitation that she would order a nuclear strike to kill hundreds of thousands of people if she thought it was necessary.
The Prime Minister gave the blunt reply during a parliamentary debate on the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme, which many suspect was staged by the government for the sole purpose of drawing attention to the rift between Jeremy Corbyn and a majority of Labour MPs.
Ms May was challenged by the SNPs George Kerevan, who asked: "Are you prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?
Ms May replied with one word: Yes.
She also told MPs that it would be "an act of gross irresponsibility" for the UK to scrap its nuclear weapons and accused opponents of the UKs Trident missile system of being "the first to defend the country's enemies".
Previous prime ministers have avoided answering the hypothetical question of whether they would ever press the nuclear button. Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was Foreign Secretary in the closing years of the cold war, said it was a question no prime minister should ever answer directly.
But Ms May knew that the Labour leader was prepared to state his position, which is the opposite of hers. Without being asked, Jeremy Corbyn volunteered the statement that Im not making the decision that kills millions of innocent people.
He added: I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations.
The decision to stage Monday's vote was made by David Cameron, who sat three rows back saying nothing while his successor addressed the Commons.
Officially, Parliament was being asked to agree to spend up to around 30 billion renewing the four Trident submarines that are equipped with nuclear missiles and warheads. Every hour of the day or night, there is always one submarine patrolling the sea.
Trident was originally bought from the USA by Margaret Thatcher as a last ditch defence in case the armies of the former Warsaw Pact, which was disbanded in 1989, overran Europe.
Which countries have nuclear weapons? Show all 14 1 /14 Which countries have nuclear weapons? Which countries have nuclear weapons? USA Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Russia Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? UK Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? France Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? China Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? India Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Pakistan Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? North Korea Say they have nuclear weapons EPA/Rodong Sinmun Which countries have nuclear weapons? Israel Believed to have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Belgium Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Germany Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Italy Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Netherlands Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Turkey Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty
Since 1989, it has been the official policy of the Labour Party to support the retention of Trident, to which Jeremy Corbyn, as a back bench MP, was consistently opposed.
He announced that he would vote against Trident again, but as he spoke, he was constantly interrupted by Labour MPs who demanded that he should defend the partys policy instead of giving his own opinion. His response was that there is a review of Labour defence policy being carried out by the newly appointed Shadow Defence Secretary, Clive Lewis.
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MPs are set to vote on whether to renew Britains nuclear weapons programme after a House of Commons debate.
In her first statement to the House since becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May said it would be a gross irresponsibility for the UK not to renew Trident.
She said: "We cannot abandon our ultimate safeguard out of misplaced idealism. That would be a reckless gamble."
What is Trident?
The Trident programme covers the UK's development, procurement and operations of its current generation of nuclear weapons.
The programme has four Vanguard-class submarines in operation which are currently based in Scotland.
The system, which was commissioned in 1980 and went into service in 1994, replaced Polaris which was in operation between 1968 and 1996.
Unlike previous systems, the Trident programme is not targeted because it went into service after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Previous Cold War systems were targeted with the aim of protecting Britain and its Nato allies from Warsaw Pact members.
Why do we need a new one?
The submarines were designed to last between 30 and 40 years - after which time they would need to be replaced, repaired or decommissioned.
The Ministry of Defence has said that it could extend the life of the submarines by five to 30 years but this would be risky and expensive as it would involve repairing or upgrading the parts onboard.
Certain parts, such as the generators which make steam from nuclear energy to power the turbines, would require expensive refits and it will only increase its lifespan for a short time.
Protestors gathered at an anti-Trident rally in Glasgow ahead of the House of Commons vote on renewing the nuclear deterrent. (PA)
In addition, refurbishments increase the likelihood of there being times when no submarine is out on patrol.
Under the current system, one submarine is always armed and out at sea at all times.
How much will it cost to replace?
Figures released by the MoD have suggested the maintenance of the system over its lifetime would not rise beyond six per cent of the annual defence budget - with the cost of four new submarines being put at 25bn.
But growth forecasts for the UK released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that means the total bill for Tridents replacement could be 167bn.
The new figures estimate that the programme would run between 2028 and 2060.
But the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) claim the true figure could be around 205bn once the cost of decommissioning has been taken into account.
The Royal United Services Institute estimated in 2013 that a new system would cost between 70bn and 80bn over its lifetime but the independent Trident Commission put that figure at 100bn.
Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a CND rally earlier this year. Unlike many in his party, Mr Corbyn is against renewal (Getty)
Is it worth it?
Opinion is divided on whether Trident should be renewed. Ms May claims the nuclear threat has increased and it would be reckless to abandon Britains nuclear programme.
It has been argued it would be foolish for Britain carry out nuclear disarmament on its own rather than waiting for an agreement with multiple foreign powers.
Nato has warned against any member countries disarming, saying it is a core component of its overall defence and deterrence capabilities.
In addition to security concerns, commentators say Britain needs nuclear weapons to maintain its position as a world power in light of it being overtaken economically by countries like China.
US defence secretary Ash Carter said the UK needed the deterrent to maintain its outsized place on the world stage.
According to a graph made by Statista, the UK has far fewer submarines than its closest allies - or its biggest rivals.
But opponents of nuclear weapons, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, say it is immoral keep weapons capable of that much destruction regardless of whether you ever use them.
They point to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fact that nuclear weapons have been deployed accidentally 13 times as a reason that having nuclear weapons can never be safe.
Others, such as Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, argue that the supposed security benefits do not justify the cost.
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A substantial minority of Welsh people would consider supporting independence if leaving the UK kept Wales inside the European Union, a poll suggests.
A survey conducted by YouGov for the Welsh Political Barometer found 28 per cent of Welsh voters would support independence if it allowed Wales to remain a member of the European Union upon becoming an independent country.
The result was against 53 per cent who would not support independence and 20 per cent who did not know which way they would vote.
Though the figure is still relatively low, it is significant because previous polls have shown support for Welsh independence well under 10 per cent.
An ICM poll conducted in September 2014 during the Scottish independence referendum campaign found support for Welsh independence at a record low of just three per cent, though other polls have suggested slightly higher results.
The latest poll appears to be roughly a doubling of support for the cause of independence when the issue is couched in the context of remaining in the EU, however.
A more direct question, which did not mention the EU, saw support for independence rather lower, at 17 per cent.
Roger Scully, a professor of political science at the Welsh Governance Centre and Principal Investigator for the 2016 Welsh Election Study, warned that the poll should be treated with caution.
The National Assembly of Wales building in Cardiff Bay
The poll showed considerable support in Wales for continued EU membership, he wrote in an analysis.
And for some respondents, at the time the poll was conducted, that support for EU membership appears to have been sufficiently strong that it would pull them towards supporting Welsh independence if it were the only way of remaining inside the EU.
Whether such strength of sentiment on the EU will fade over time is something that we cant currently know.
Our results perhaps suggest some potential for supporters of Welsh independence to build upon. But the results also show, even in this most favourable context, that support for independence remains very much a minority position in Wales.
In the wake of the EU referendum, Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood said Welsh independence should in fact be considered as an option.
The Welsh nationalists had previously supported independence as a long-term aspiration only, and on constitution issues campaigned primarily for more powers and devolution.
A rise in support for independence was recorded in polls in Scotland in the wake of the EU referendum result.
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Two men have been injured after a runaway bus crashed into other vehicles in Glasgow city centre.
A service bus with an empty drivers seat was seen by eyewitnesses rolling down Renfield Street just before 4pm on Monday.
Police Scotland said two men had been taken to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for injuries following the incident.
A police statement said officers were called to reports of a bus travelling south in Renfield Street having collided with a stationary car at traffic lights at West George Street. The car moved forward and struck a pedestrian on Renfield Street.
It said the bus then continued to travel on Renfield Street before it collided with a stationary bus near to St Vincent Street, which then nudged into another stationary bus on Renfield Street.
According to one witness the driver was seen exiting the vehicle to visit a newsagent and chased after the bus when it began to move.
Arran Watkins, managing director of AW Painters and Decorators, told Press Association: When a bus stops it normally makes a hissing noise and then it lowers itself, but in this case, the bus didn't do that.
"The driver ran into a newsagents and the bus started rolling down the hill.
"He chased after it, but the bus hit a blue Renault Twingo which was then smashed forward and hit a pedestrian.
He added: "It also hit a bus waiting at the traffic lights and that one went into other buses. They are fairly squished and compacted together.
"There were passengers on the other buses.
"I saw the passengers coming out holding their necks, so there will probably be some other minor injuries."
First Glasgow has confirmed that one of their vehicles was involved in the incident.
A First Glasgow spokesman said: "We've launched an immediate investigation and will work closely with the emergency authorities to determine exactly what happened.
"Our thoughts at this time are with the two men who were injured as a result of the incident."
Police Scotland said: Police are appealing for information following an incident involving a bus in Glasgow city centre on Monday 18 July 2016.
"Inquiries are ongoing to establish the exact circumstances of the incident, including reviewing CCTV footage, and anyone with information is asked to contact Police Scotland on 101."
Additional reporting by Press Association
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Hillary Clinton has said the madness of police officers being shot and African Americans being disproportionately killed by the police has to stop.
The day after three police officers were shot dead in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Ms Clinton said her number one priority as president would be to bring such killers to justice, to fight implicit racial bias within police departments and prevent mass incarceration of black people.
This madness has to stop, she said. Watching the news from Baton Rouge yesterday, my heart broke. Not just for those officers and their grieving families, but for all of us."
Her comments came 24 hours after officers Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola, were shot dead by 29-year-old Gavin Long when they responded to a call about a man with a gun.
There can be no justification, no looking the other way," she said.
In her speech at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she said there is clear evidence that African Americans are disproportionately killed by the police compared to any other group.
Obama Calls for Unity After 3 Police Officers Shot Dead in Baton Rouge
They are also sentenced to longer prison terms than white people convicted of the same offenses, she said, more likely to be stopped and searched, less likely to secure jobs at interview, and more likely to go straight from school to prison.
These facts tell us that something is profoundly wrong. We cant wish it away, she said.
She called for in custody data to shed light on deaths like that of Sandra Bland, who died in July 2015 after being arrested for a minor traffic violation. Police said they found she had hanged herself in her cell, and the claim has been disputed.
The presumptive democratic nominee also called for more police training on how to avoid using lethal force, like that used against black men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in Minnesota and Baton Rouge.
Ive said from the beginning of my campaign, that will be my priority as president, she said, adding that America should follow the example of many police departments that are "trying to do better.
The deaths of Alton and Philando drove home how urgently we need to make reforms to policing and criminal justice; how we cannot rest until we root out implicit bias and stop the killings of African Americans, she said.
Many African Americans fear the police, she added. I can hear you.
She asked for white Americans not to assume that their experiences are everyones experiences and to practise humility.
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
Ending systemic racism requires contributions from all of us, she said. Especially from those who havent experienced it themselves."
In Cleveland, the Republican convention is underway. Ms Clinton promised that as the "24-hour news cycle" moves on, she would not.
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President Barack Obama responded to a petition demanding that the White House officially designate Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organisation.
[T]errorism is defined as the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims, the 6 July We the People petition reads. This definition is the same definition used to declare Isis and other groups, as terrorist organisations.
The petition cited demonstrations in Ferguson, Baltimore, and even at a Bernie Sanders rally as reasons for the designation.
Recommended Read more Civil rights activists say FBI told them not to protest GOP convention
It is time for the pentagon (sic) to be consistent in its actions, the petition continued, and just as they rightfully declared Isis a terror group, they must declare Black Lives Matter a terror group on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality, and safety.
The petition garnered more than 140,000 signatures in less than two weeks.
The White House plays no role in designating domestic terror organisations, the We the People wrote in response. The US government does not generate a list of domestic terror organisations, and therefore we are not able to address the formal request of your petition.
Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Show all 10 1 /10 Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Gerald Herbert/AP Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Bryn Stole/Twitter Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Bryn Stole/Twitter Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Bryn Stole/Twitter Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Brittany Weiss/Twitter Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Brittany Weiss/Twitter Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Bryn Stole/Twitter Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Alton Sterling/Facebook Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Google Maps Protests after Baton Rouge police fatally shoot Alton Sterling Family Handout
Mr Obama elaborated further.
I know that there are some who have criticized even the phrase black lives matter, as if the notion is that other lives don't matter, the President said. I think it's important for us to also understand that the phrase 'black lives matter' simply refers to the notion that there's a specific vulnerability for African-Americans that needs to be addressed.
It's not meant to suggest that other lives don't matter. It's to suggest that other folks aren't experiencing this particular vulnerability.
George W. Bush Dances to Battle Hymn at Dallas Memorial
He added that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals, and acknowledge the potential for peaceful protest to be hijacked by an irresponsible few.
But even those who dislike the phrase Black Lives Matter, surely we should be able to hear the pain of Alton Sterling's family, he said, and know that his life mattered to a whole lot of people of all races, of all ages, and that we have to do what we can, without putting officers lives at risk, but do better to prevent another life like his from being lost.
Mr Obamas response came after the shooting during a Dallas protest against police violence, where five officers were killed. The shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, is believed to have targeted officers in the attack.
Similarly, the response came the same day as former US Marine Gavin Long killed three Baton Rouge police officers. He was eventually shot and killed by police.
In the aftermath of the Dallas shooting, Long referred to the incident as justice in a video diary posted to YouTube.
The shooters both of whom were black men were not linked to groups that organised protests against police violence in either Baton Rouge or Dallas. Nonetheless, critics continue to insist there is a link between the violence and Black Lives Matter the organisation, the social media movement, and the demonstrations.
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Stark political differences between US presidential candidate Donald Trump and running mate Mike Pence became clear on Sunday, as their first joint interview revealed contrasting views on key issues, including immigration, trade and the Iraq war.
Mr Trump announced his choice of running mate on Friday via Twitter the first time a potential vice president has been announced via social media and confirmed his decision at a press conference.
Though the Indiana governor stated he couldnt be more honoured to have been given the opportunity to run for vice president, an interview broadcast on CBS highlighted personal and political variances between himself and Trump, who have only known each other few months.
Mr Pence, who endorsed Ted Cruz during Indiana primaries, voted for the Iraq war that Mr Trump has denounced, has slammed border controls endorsed by Mr Trumps unconstitutional and has voted for every trade deal put in front of him, including NAFTA, which Mr Trump has called a disaster.
Dominating the interview, Mr Trump insisted that he and Mr Pence got along, and that he was impressed by Mr Pences work in Indiana.
Despite often citing Hillary Clinton's endorsement of the Iraq War as a mark of her bad judgement, Mr Trump said he didnt care that his potential vice president voted the same way.
Hes entitled to make a mistake every once in a while Shes not, he said.
Throughout the interview, Mr Pence claimed to endorse several of Mr Trumps views that he has previously disagreed with, and insisted that he had confidence in the presumed Republican presidential candidate.
The governor claimed to agree with Mr Trumps plan to suspend Muslims from coming into the US, alluding to the suspension of the Syrian refugee program in Indiana.
However, in December, Mr Pence said on Twitter: Calls to ban Muslims from entering the US are offensive and unconstitutional.
Despite prompting from the interviewer, Mr Pence would not say anything about the tweet, and continued to insist that he and Mr Trump were on the same page.
You just asked me if Im comfortable with [restricting borders], and I am, he said.
Perhaps one of the most extreme contrasts between Mr Trump and his running mate is their position on free trade.
When in congress, Mr Pence voted in favour of every trade agreement, including NAFTA (the North American Free Trade agreement), and supports the trans-pacific partnership that Mr Trump has said would rape the country.
Im all for free trade, Im not an isolationist, Mr Trump insisted, but went on to say that NAFTA, which Mr Pence has supported, was one of the worst things that ever happened to this country in terms of trade and economics.
What I hear Donald Trump saying, Mr Pence said Is lets look at these trade agreements and reconsider them and renegotiate them.
Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Show all 14 1 /14 Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Isis: "Some of the candidates, they went in and didnt know the air conditioner didnt work and sweated like dogs, and they didnt know the room was too big because they didnt have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?" Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On immigration: "I will build a great wall and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me and Ill 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." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Free Trade: "Free trade is terrible. Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people." PAUL J. RICHARDS | AFP | Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Mexicans: "When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists." Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On China: "I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them?... I love China. The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On work: "If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable." AP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On success: "What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate." Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On life: "Everything in life is luck." AFP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On ambition: "You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On his opponents: "Bush is totally in favour of Common Core. I don't see how he can possibly get the nomination. He's weak on immigration. He's in favour of Common Core. How the hell can you vote for this guy? You just can't do it." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Obamacare: "You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high. It's virtually useless. And remember the $5 billion web site?... I have so many web sites, I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a web site. It costs me $3." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Barack Obama: "Obama is going to be out playing golf. He might be on one of my courses. I would invite him. I have the best courses in the world. I have one right next to the White House." PA Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On himself: "Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On America: "The American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." GETTY
When asked if he is comfortable with bringing back waterboarding, which Mr Trump has said that he wishes to reintroduce, Mr Pence pointedly avoided the question.
I dont think we should ever tell our enemy what our tactics are, is his response.
I think enhanced interrogation saved lives.
When asked if he was okay with the use of these tactics, Mr Pence said: What Im okay with is protecting the American people.
Both Donald Trump and Mike Pence will be appearing at the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland this week.
Mr Trump has said that he trusts the police to prevent violence taking place: The police like Donald Trump, he said.
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Campaigners have condemned a proposal from politicians in El Salvador that would send women to jail for up to 50 years for having an abortion.
The Latin American country already has perhaps the toughest rules in the world surrounding reproductive rights. Abortion is illegal there under any circumstances - there are no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother, and women are aggressively pursued by prosecutors.
Around 25 women are currently in jail for terms of up to 30 years after being accused of trying to terminate their pregnancies. Many of them said they simply suffered a miscarriage.
Maria Teresa had no idea she was to be set free (Center for Reproductive Rights ) (Center for Reproductive Rights)
Now, politicians from a conservative opposition party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) have submitted a motion to reform article 133 of the penal code, which stipulates the penalty for women who cause or consent to an abortion.
At the moment sentences range to eight years, but the proposal calls to increase it to minimum of 30 years and a maximum of 50 years. This is equivalent to the sentence in the country for aggravated murder with extreme cruelty.
The Penal Code does not harmonise with the protection of life from the moment of conception, violating the constitution and the principles of equality and proportionality of the protected penalty, Arena said in its proposal, according to the EFE news agency.
Salvadorean activist gives her thoughts on Donald Trump
The countrys top law official, Attorney General Douglas Melendez, told reporters while visiting Washington that he had asked for a review of the laws surrounding abortion but did not specify whether he supported increasing the penalties.
Campaigners have hit out at the proposal, saying it would make worse a situation that was already very difficult for women.
Parliamentarians in El Salvador are playing a very dangerous game with the lives of millions of women, said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.
Morena Herrera has faced death threats and slander (Amnesty International)
Banning life-saving abortions in all circumstances is atrocious but seeking to raise jail terms for women who seek an abortion or those who provide support is simply despicable.
The state of reproductive rights in El Salvador, a staunchly Catholic Central American country of around six million people, was not always so dire. Prior to 1998, abortion was permitted in cases of rape, incest, where a foetus was injured or if the life of the woman was in danger.
Yet that year, amid pressure from religious conservatives and the powerful church, the law was changed to remove any exceptions whatsoever. It is estimated that between 1998 and 2013, more than 600 women have been jailed for up to 40 years after being accused of having had an abortion.
Morena Herrera, a former left-wing guerrilla who fought against government forces in a civil war that left up to 70,000 people dead, currently leads the fight for reproductive rights as head of the Citizens Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion.
The problem is the lack of awareness about what reproductive rights are, and because of this the [impression] for the majority of women is that they are here just to be mothers, she recently told The Independent. For example, right now, the huge number of teenage pregnancies is brutal. A third of all births come from teenage mothers.
In May, in a rare victory for campaigners, a court released one prisoner, Maria Teresa, who had been jailed for 40 years after suffering a miscarriage, but who was convicted of murdering her foetus.
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The highest ranking Baltimore police officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray was found not guilty of manslaughter.
Lieutenant Brian Rice, 42, was charged after giving two bicycle patrol officers the go ahead to arrest 25-year-old Gray on 12 April 2015. Baltimore City Circuit Judge Barry Williams acquitted Rice, who opted for a bench trial instead of facing a jury.
Mr Gray subsequently suffered catastrophic spinal damage after police handcuffed him and shackled him at the feet and placed him inside of a police transport unrestrained going against official police protocol. Prosecutors accuse Rice of negligence in how Mr Gray was handled by police, according to Reuters.
Rice is the fourth of six officers involved in Mr Grays death to face trial in a case that has yet to deliver a conviction to prosecutors.
After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Show all 22 1 /22 After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Police and firefighters respond in front of a building that caught fire as protests of the death of Freddie Gray continue in Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots A Baltimore firefighter cuts his way into a burning convenience store with a saw to attack a fire set by rioters at East Biddle Street and Montford Avenue in Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots A Baltimore firefighter climbs onto a rooftop to attack a fire set by rioters in a convenience store and residence at East Biddle Street and Montford Avenue After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Baltimore firefighters attack a fire in a convenience store and residence during clashes after the funeral of Freddie Gray in Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Gloria Darden, mother of Freddie Gray, covers her face during a news conference after a day of unrest following the funeral of Gray After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots The family of Freddie Gray gather with clergy and pray during a news conference in Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Rioters burned police vehicles and pelted officers with stones AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots A man has pepper spray cleaned from his eyes Getty Images After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Baltimore police officers form a line in front of protesters Getty Images After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Looters ransacked shops and torched police cars amid the unrest AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots A CVS chemist outlet burns in Baltimore after it was set alight by rioters AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots The Shaheed family assess the damage to their store in downtown Baltimore David Usborne After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots The riots broke out just a few streets from the church where the funeral was held AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots A protester is detained in Baltimore following the funeral of Freddie Gray earlier in the day AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Police in front of a building that caught fire after being looted EPA After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots A youth washes out pepper spray from his eyes near a building that caught fire after being looted EPA After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots People pose for photographs on the hood of a Baltimore Police car destroyed by demonstrators GETTY After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots The riots broke out just a few streets from the church where the funeral was held for Freddie Gray GETTY After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Demonstrators threw rocks and other objects at police following the funeral of Freddie Gray AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Arrests have been made, with many of those involved appearing to be school children and students AP After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots Protests over Freddie Gray's death turned violent Reuters After Freddie Gray: Baltimore unrest in pictures Baltimore riots The circumstances surrounding Freddie Gray's death in custody still remain unclear AP
Defence says that the decision whether or not to buckle Mr Grays safety belt was based on the discretion of Rice. They say Mr Gray was being combative and Rice did not have to enter the back of the vehicle to secure him to his seat.
Judge Williams previously acquitted officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson Jr the latter faced the most serious charge of depraved heart murder.
William Porter, the first officer tried in the case, is scheduled for a retrial in September after a jury deadlocked while deliberating.
Mr Gray died a week after police arrested him. His death sparked massive protests in Baltimore and further galvanised the national debate about police violence in black communities.
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The knives are coming out between Donald Trump and the assorted prominent Republicans who have opted to skip the partys national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, because they disapprove of his becoming their nominee.
While the Trump campaign accused the Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, of embarrassing his own state by refusing to show up for the gathering in Cleveland, which opened on Monday afternoon and runs for four days, one of his staunchest supporters, Newt Gingrich, accused the Bush family, once the most powerful brand in the party, of acting childishly by staying away.
While there remained almost no chance of a successful mutiny being launched by dissident delegates at the convention to deny Mr Trump the nomination, the holes in the speaking schedule left by such party grandees as former President George W. Bush as well as his father, former President George H.W. Bush, were hard to ignore.
Mr Gingrich, the former House speaker who was passed over by Mr Trump last week as his choice for running mate in favour of Indiana Governor Mike Pence, insinuated in an interview with ABC News that the Bush clan wasn't coming because the presidential aspirations of one of their own had been torpedoed by the billionaire during the primary process.
That would be Jeb Bush, of course, the former Florida Governor who everyone saw as the prohibitive front-runner when the Republican field of hopefuls first came into view about a year ago. Instead, Mr Bush found himself branded as low energy by a belligerent Mr Trump and his campaign never took off.
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Jeb Bush announces that he is suspending his presidential campaign at his South Carolina primary night party in Columbia, South Carolina, (Reuters)
Most of Mr Trumps jibes at Mr Bush were delivered in televised candidates debates, the first of which was held in the same arena in Cleveland where the convention is now under way nearly a year ago. Mr Trump in time would be similarly ruthless in assailing all the other candidates who came close to threatening him, including Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
The Republican party has been awfully good to the Bushes and they're showing remarkably little gratitude, Mr Gingrich averred, before going on: The reason people nominated Donald Trump is because they werent happy, and frankly, I think the Bushes are behaving childishly. Jeb lost. Get over it.
But it isnt just the Bushes who are conspicuous by their absence. The nominee from four years ago, Mitt Romney, is not in Cleveland either. Mr Romney led efforts earlier this year to discredit Mr Trump, notably in one speech in Utah where he reeled off what he said had been all of his business failures.
Senator John McCain, the partys standard-bearer in 2008, said he had pressing plans to trek in the Grand Canyon, presumably after calculating that his campaign for re-election to the Senate from Arizona would not benefit from any association with Mr Trump. The other Arizona Senator, Jeff Flake, told reporters he could not go because he had to mow his lawn.
Appearing on Fox News, Peter Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman and manager of the convention for him, was pressed on the awkwardness of Governor Kasich boycotting the national gathering of his own party in his own state. Like Mr Bush, the Governor was also a victim of the Trump bulldozer and was forced to abandon his bid for the party nomination in May.
He is embarrassing his state, frankly, Mr Manafort argued, a statement that promoted a sharp and sarcastic rebuttal from John Weaver, who was Mr Kasichs chief strategist for the primaries.
Manaforts problem, after all those years on the lam with thugs and autocrats, is that he cant recognize principle and integrity, Mr Weaver told The New York Times. I do congratulate him though on a great pivot at the start of the convention after such a successful vice-presidential launch. He has brought great professionalism, direct from Kiev, to Trump world.
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Suspected Islamist militants have killed four police officers and a civilian in an attack on a police station in Kazakhstan's largest city.
The attackers targeted a district police station and an office of the KNB state security service. Another shootout occurred on a busy central street where police wounded and detained one of the attackers.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev called the attacks a terrorist act and ordered tighter security in public areas.
The attack began when one gunman shot at a duty officer and took his machine gun, Kazakh police said.
One of the gunmen shot and killed a local resident and then hijacked his car as he fled from the police station.
World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. 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Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. 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The Interfax news agency, quoting a police source, said "a religious radical and probably a follower of non-traditional Islam", was on the rampage.
The man then fled in the car, shooting at a traffic police crew and injuring two before he was detained a mile away.
Police identified him as a 27-year-old former convict who was wanted for the murder of a woman last weekend.
A second person suspected of being linked to the deadly shooting has been detained by police, the Interior Ministry said. It said in a statement that the detained person "had been beside the criminal" who tried to get into the district police station.
The ministry statement put the total death toll at four, including three policemen. However, a source at Almaty's emergency aid hospital told Reuters it had taken in six dead, including four policemen, one civilian and one suspected attacker.
There were also eight wounded at the hospital, the source said.
The attack comes a month after 20 people were killed in the Kazakh city of Aktobe when groups of gunmen attacked a military base and a gun shop. Authorities in this Central Asian nation then described the violence as a terrorist attack and blamed it on radical Islamists.
Energy-rich Kazakhstan, arguably one of the most prosperous former Soviet republics, is a predominantly Muslim but largely secular nation.
Additional reporting by agencies
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North Korea has fired three ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast that had a range of between 300 and 360 miles, South Korea's military said.
The missiles were launched into the Sea of Japan from an area in the North's Hwangju region at about 6am local time on Tuesday (10pm UK time), the South's military said.
"The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 kilometres to 600 kilometres, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea including Busan," the South's military said in a statement.
Busan is a port city at the southern end of South Korea.
North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months including an intermediate-range missile in June and a submarine-launched missile this month.
Tuesday's launch came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision this month to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North.
North Korea launch short range projectiles Show all 6 1 /6 North Korea launch short range projectiles North Korea launch short range projectiles A man watches a TV news program showing a file footage of the missile launch conducted by North Korea, at Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, AP North Korea launch short range projectiles North Korean leader Kim Jong-un speaking during a ceremony for the scientists, technicians, workers and officials who worked on the recent successful launch of a satellite EPA North Korea launch short range projectiles People watch a TV news program showing a file footage of the missile launch conducted by North Korea, at Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, AP North Korea launch short range projectiles North Korean soldiers guard the truce village of Panmunjom at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates the two Koreas, in Panmunjom, North Korea AP North Korea launch short range projectiles People watch a TV news program showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, at Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea AP North Korea launch short range projectiles An undated file picture released by the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North Korean ruling Workers Party EPA
North Korea's military has threatened to retaliate against the deployment of the system with a "physical response" once its location and time of installation were decided.
China has also sharply criticized the decision as a move that will destabilize the security balance in the region.
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A number of people on a train in Germany have been injured after they were attacked by a man with an axe, who was later shot dead by police.
The Bavarian interior minister said the attacker was believed to be a 17-year-old youth originally from Afghanistan who had arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied refugee, according to a ZDF TV journalist.
The Bavarian interior ministry said the attacker shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) during the incident, which took place on Monday evening when the train was near the city of Wurzburg.
The Main Post newspaper reported that three people were seriously hurt, one slightly injured and 14 others left suffering from shock.
Eyewitness Thomas Velten, who went to see what had happened after the train stopped, told the Post the carriage was "like a battlefield" with a large amount of blood.
Police said the attacker had used "blunt" and "slashing" weapons. These were said to have been an axe and a knife, according to local media.
Officers who went to the scene shot dead a man believed to be the attacker, the Bavarian Interior Minister confirmed.
Local media reported that the suspect had been trying to flee the train when he was killed.
Trains running between Wurzburg and Ochsenfurt were cancelled.
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Hisham Kahlfallah had once again made the round of hospitals and he was exhausted when he turned up outside the victims centre in Nice. His sister Olfa was dead and her four-year-old son Kylan had been listed as missing. He could get no further details from the authorities about the little boy. Four days after the massacre on the promenade in Nice, just 35 out of 84 bodies of the victims had been identified.
Bereaved families are increasingly venting their frustrations at the authorities. When Christian Estrosi, the head of the regional council, turned up for an official visit at the centre on Sunday, Mr Kahlfallah could no longer contain himself.
Christian, come to us, why are you not coming this way? We have questions for you, you call the media but you dont call the families of the victims. What about our dead? he said.
Mr Estrosi strode away, but an aide spoke to Mr Kahlfallah, explaining that the office of the public prosecutor was refusing to release the list until all checks had been concluded.
Kylans father, Tahar Majri, was outside the Pasteur Hospital where he thought he might find his son. I have done everything, I have been to police stations, hospitals, tried Facebook. My wife is dead, where is my son? Bye, bye Kylan if I dont see you again," he said, weeping.
Yannick Favre was also at the hospital, in search of his friend Jeanne, who has not been seen since the night of the attack.
What happened was so bad; but this is a form of torture, not knowing, hoping she was at worst injured but not dead, but also fearing to hope, he said, shaking his head. It is really unacceptable that we are not getting this information, really unacceptable.
The mood of anger and frustration, with the government seemingly impotent to prevent repeated terrorist attacks in the country, was shown today when the prime minister, Manuel Valls and other ministers arrived at the citys Monument du Centenaire for a minute's silence in remembrance of the victims. Resounding jeers and boos were directed at them by the crowd. Many accuse the government of not having enough police on duty during the Bastille Day celebrations despite an ongoing threat.
The French authorities say they are doing what they can about the identification of the bodies. An accelerated procedure established after the Isis murders in Paris last November, using DNA and family medical records, is in place but they stress that it is impossible to give a definite timeframe.
France attack: Mourners pay respects in Nice
This process is step by step, so that everything is guaranteed the moment that the identities are established and released," said health minister Marisol Touraine. She added that up to a dozen more of the dead would be identified soon.
According to hospital staff one of the problems with identification is the horrific injuries inflicted by 31-year-old Lahouaiej Bouhlals 19-tonne refrigerated truck, especially on the young boys and girls he mowed down. Ten of those killed were children, as were 54 of the injured, the youngest a six-month-old baby.
But many feel that the authorities are not doing enough. An American student from Berkeley, Abhinav Kukreja, was distributing flyers outside the citys central police station seeking the whereabouts of three friends who had been studying with him at the European Innovation Academy in Nice.
The police werent helping us at all. We had made multiple calls, so we decided to bring out these flyers, said Mr Kukreja. The American embassy told us it was OK to go ahead, but the police are apparently unhappy that we are doing this.
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
One of the friends Mr Kukreja was searching for, 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie, a fellow Berkeley student from San Diego, has in fact been declared dead by the French authorities to the FBI. But Misha Bazelevsky, a 22-year-old Canadian, and 21-year-old Rickard Krussberg, from Estonia, remain missing.
Relations of 12 of those killed were allowed to see the bodies of the victims for the first time on Sunday, when the authorities issued the first death certificates and also the first permission for funerals. Some of the families waiting anxiously had been Muslims whose religion requires burials to take place within 24 hours whenever possible.
The Sahroui family, originally from Algeria, were among those who went to see their dead on Sunday. They had lost a three-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, their mother and an uncle. Among those who went to the morgue to carry out a final identification was the childrens sister, a young teenager.
A woman reacts to the news of the death of her grandson in Nice (Getty Images)
A volunteer counsellor at the victims centre, Yasmin Toauabia, said: "As you can imagine, they are in a state of shock.
"The grandmother kept repeating that her pain was not being able to bury them, the wait. They could at least have been buried right away if they had died at home.
Brigitte Erbibou, a psychologist who has been working with survivors of the attack, described the reaction of two children whose father had been killed and whose mother is missing.
The more the days go by, the more they suspect that the death announcement will come, said Ms Erbibou. However, until it is announced, the wait is so difficult because there is no way to come to terms and begin the grieving process. That is what the children are telling me, they say 'with our Dad we know, but with our mum, its unbearable'.
Some of these children have witnessed a scene of horror, they have witnessed their loved ones die. Ive seen traumatic experience among the young before, but not on a massive a scale like this. Now, on top of all this, they have to go through this agonising period of waiting.
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French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has been booed at memorial service to remember the victims of the Nice terror attack.
Mr Valls was booed as he went to sign the book of condolence at the memorial service on the Promenade des Anglais.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel killed at least 84 people and injured hundreds of others as he rammed a 19-tonne lorry into the crowd at the Bastille Day celebrations on Thursday night.
The 31-year-old zigzagged through the crowd in a bid to cause maximum casualties and was shot dead by police after he pulled out a gun and opened fire.
Families of the dead and some of those injured gathered at the site of the massacre to remember the victims at the Moment du Centenaire in a park on the street.
Mr Valls attended the service alongside the Mayor of Nice, Philippe Pradal, the regional president Christian Estrosi and the reigning prince of nearby Monaco, Prince Albert.
The crowd cheered to celebrate the work of the emergency services. They broke in applause and raised their fists in the air when they heard the French national anthem
A man holds a French flag at a memorial service for the victims of the Nice terror attack. The crowds cheered and raised their fists in the air as they heard their national anthem but booed their prime minister (AFP/Getty Images)
Tensions are running high over the French government's handling of security in the country when it was revealed Mr Estrosi's request for more security at the event was denied despite France being in a state of emergency stemming from the Paris attacks in November.
Many blame President Francois Hollande's Socialist administration for falling to prevent the three major Isis-inspired terror attacks on French soil in the past 18 months which have now killed more than 200 people.
Mr Hollande and Mr Valls were also booed and jeered at by onlookers on Friday when they visited the site of the attack on the promenade with Mr Estrosi.
Local resident Isabel, who declined to give her surname, said she did not boo but understood why tensions are running high.
She said: "They want him (Mr Valls) to resign because he didn't put enough police on on the day. 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.
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
"I am very sad. It has broken families apart for nothing."
Local residents are also frustrated at the slow speed that victims are being identified.
Currently only 35 out of the 84 victims have been identified so far and there are a number of children in hospital whose identities cannot be verified as it is feared their parents died in the attack.
A tribute is laid on the ground where a person was killed on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice (Getty)
Bouhlel was not known to security services but was a known criminal with a history of violent offences and mental health problems.
It is believed he was radicalised "very recently" by an Algerian member of Isis and was not known as a devout Muslim.
Thousands gathered at the spot where the attack happened with bunches of flowers and candles left on the seaside promenade.
Additional reporting by agencies
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The six wealthiest nations host less than nine per cent of the world's refugees, Oxfam has said.
According to Oxfam's report, the UK, United States, France, Germany, China and Japan, which make up 56.6 per cent of global GDP between them, host 2.1 million refugees and asylum seekers, or 8.89 per cent of the world's total.
Germany hosts around a third of those (736,740) while the UK hosts 169,000 refugees, less than one per cent of the world's total.
Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.
The report found poorer countries shouldered the most responsibility, with half the world's refugees and asylum seekers - almost 12 million people - hosted by Jordan, Turkey, Palestine, Pakistan, Lebanon and South Africa, despite them making up less than 2 per cent of the world's economy.
More than 65 million people have fled their homes because of conflict and violence, 40.8 million within their own countries, 21.3 million as refugees and 3.2 million are awaiting asylum decisions.
The figures are the highest since records began, mostly fuelled by the conflict in Syria, though people are also fleeing violence in South Sudan, Burundi, Iraq, Yemen and other countries.
An average of 24 people per minute are were displaced last year, the UN said, amounting to 34,000 people per day.
Syrian refugees in Turkey lose hope of return
Many governments are turning their backs on the suffering of millions of vulnerable people who have fled their homes and shirking their duty to protect them," said Mark Goldring, chief executive of Oxfam GB.
"Thousands are risking their lives to reach a safe haven. Those lucky enough to survive often end up living in squalid conditions without enough clean water or food and face hostility, discrimination and abuse with too many governments doing little to help or protect them."
The refugee crisis is "one of the greatest challenges of our time," he added, saying poorer countries and poorer people are left to shoulder the responsibility.
"It is a complex crisis that requires a co-ordinated, global response with the richest countries doing their fair share by welcoming more refugees and doing more to help and protect them wherever they are," he said.
Now more than ever, the UK needs to show that it is an open, tolerant society that is prepared to play its part in solving this crisis.
"It is shameful that as one of the richest economies the UK has provided shelter for less than one percent of refugees.
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Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has said he will support an EU call for "restraint and moderation" in Turkey following the failed military coup.
Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs, said foreign ministers will send a "strong message" that the rule of law and the democratic system of checks and balances must be respected in Turkey in the wake of the putsch failure.
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Turkish authorities' reaction to the failed coup needed to be "proportionate." He said he was alarmed by the arrests of judges and calls for reinstatement of the death penalty against coup participants.
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
Some 8,000 police officers across Turkey have been removed following the attempted military coup.
The move comes as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues his "cleansing operation" after the attempt to oust him on Friday night by members of the country's military.
Over 6,000 people in the army, judiciary and other state bodies have been arrested following violent clashes in Ankara and Istanbul, where at least 290 people were killed.
Turkey rounds up thousands after failed coup
Soldiers closed the bridge over the Bosphorus river in Istanbul around 10pm local time on Friday, in the first part of their plot to overthrow the country's leadership.
Tanks were then stationed outside the main Ataturk airport in the city and soldiers took over the state broadcaster - forcing the newsreader to read out a prepared statement live on air saying a "peace council" was in control.
But President Erdogan - who was on holiday at the time of the coup - gave a defiant interview over FaceTime to urge his supporters to go out onto the streets and defy the coup.
Later on Mr Erdogan was able to fly into to Istanbul and reestablish control.
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The swift rounding up of judges and others accused of taking part in a failed coup in Turkey indicates the government had prepared a list beforehand, the EU commissioner dealing with Turkey's membership bid has said.
Following a failed coup attempt on Saturday, Turkish authorities on Sunday rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, ranging from top commanders to foot soldiers, and the same number of judges and prosecutors.
"It looks at least as if something has been prepared," Johannes Hahn said. "The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage.
"I'm very concerned. It is exactly what we feared."
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
It appears, Mr Hahn added, as if Turkey had "prepared" arrest lists of political opponents and was waiting for the right time to act.
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.
Conspiracy theorists are saying the attempted military coup was faked, comparing it to the Reichstag fire - the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building used by Hitler as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and order mass arrests of his opponents.
Some of the soldiers detained following the coup reportedly told interrogators they were not aware they were part of a coup attempt and had been told by commanders they were taking part in military manoeuvres.
Turkey rounds up thousands after failed coup
Reports have emerged that rebel jets had President Erdogan's plane in their sights during the coup but did not fire.
"Why they didn't fire is a mystery," a former military officer told Reuters.
The European Union and the United States expressed alarm at Turkey's response to the coup, telling the NATO member and EU aspirant it must uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.
"This is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a joint news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry.
The top American diplomat said Turkey must "uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law."
While he recognised the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Mr Kerry said: "We caution against a reach that goes beyond that."
Additional reporting by agencies
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An unknown assailant has shot the deputy mayor of Istanbul's Sisli district in the head.
According to Turkish broadcaster NTV, the victim was in a critical condition.
It was not immediately clear whether the incident was linked to Friday's abortive military coup in which more than 200 people were killed.
Turkey remains in a state of high tension, though the government says it has the situation fully under control.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erodgan has said he will rid the country's institutions of the "virus" of those who oppose him.
More than 7,000 people - including over 100 generals - have been arrested following the coup.
It comes as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has suspended the annual leave of more than three million civil servants nationwide until further notice, according to a government order published on Monday.
John Kerry: Turkey coup could threaten country's Nato membership
The order, published in Turkey's Official Gazette, comes amid a wide-ranging government purge of the civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces following an abortive coup attempt by a faction of the army on Friday evening.
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
Civil servants already on leave will return to their posts as soon as possible, the order said.
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Turkish fighter jets had President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plane in their sights at the height of the attempt to overthrow him, but they did not fire.
The Turkish president was returning to Istanbul from a holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris after a faction in the military launched a coup attempt on Friday night.
"At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan's plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul," a former military officer told Reuters. "They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him."
"Why they didn't fire is a mystery," he added.
A senior Turkish official confirmed to Reuters that President Erdogan's Gulfstream IV jet was harassed while flying to Istanbul by two F-16s commandeered by the coup plotters.
Another senior official also told the agency the presidential business jet had been "in trouble in the air" but gave no further details.
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
Flight tracking websites showed the jet taking off from Dalaman airport, about an hour and a quarter's drive from Marmaris, around 10.40pm (GMT) on Friday.
It later circled in what appeared to be a holding pattern just south of Istanbul - around the time a Reuters witness at the airport reported still hearing bursts of gunfire - before coming in to land.
Following the failed coup, the government moved swiftly to shore up President Erdogan's power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying on Sunday it had 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.
Turkey's government vows to 'cleanse' military after failed coup
Conspiracy theorists are saying the attempted military coup was faked, comparing it to the Reichstag fire - the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building used by Hitler as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and order mass arrests of his opponents.
Some of the soldiers detained following the coup reportedly told interrogators they were not aware they were part of a coup attempt and had been told by commanders they were taking part in military manoeuvres.
The swift rounding up of judges and others allegedly involved in the coup indicated the government had prepared a list beforehand, the EU commissioner dealing with Turkey's membership bid said.
"It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage," Johannes Hahn said.
"I'm very concerned. It is exactly what we feared."
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.
Additional reporting by agencies
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Turkey could fall foul of Nato's "requirement with respect to democracy" if it fails to uphold the rule of law in the wake of an attempted coup, the US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned.
The Turkish government's response to the failed coup has alarmed both the US and the EU, after it described the plotters as a "cancer" which had to be "cleansed" from public institutions.
A State Department spokesman has suggested it is "too soon to say" if a clampdown by the Erdogan government could jeopardise Turkey's membership of Nato.
But Nato's leadership has made it clear that a commitment to "uphold democracy, including tolerating diversity" is one of the five core requirements for members of the alliance.
Around 8,000 police officers have been suspended across Turkey following the failed coup, with more than 6,000 people in the army, the judiciary and other state bodies arrested as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's response to Friday's events.
Erdogan has said the people who attempted the coup "must pay," and that the government will consider introducing the death penalty for people believed to have committed traitorous acts against the state.
At a joint news conference with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that America stands "squarely on the side of the elected leadership in Turkey," but that "we urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions and the rule of law".
While Ms Mogherini warned that countries that allow the death penalty cannot join the European Union, Mr Kerry added that "Nato also has a requirement with respect to democracy," The Washington Post reported.
The US "will certainly support bringing the perpetrators of the coup to justice," he said, "but we also caution against a reach that goes beyond that and stress the importance of the democratic rule being upheld".
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 Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has insisted that President Erdogan's government will respect democracy, while Mr Kerry responded that Nato would "measure" its actions. "Obviously a lot of people have been arrested and arrested very quickly," Mr Kerry added, "The level of vigilance and scrutiny is obviously going to be significant in the days ahead. Hopefully we can work in a constructive way that prevents backsliding."
Ms Mogherini said the incident "is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that."
The pair spoke after a meeting in Brussels that also included the bloc's 28 foreign ministers.
US officials have since denied Mr Kerry's comments on Nato were a warning to Turkey. State Department spokesman John Kirby told the Washington Post that Nato will be watching Turkey carefully, but added it was "too soon to say" its membership was at risk.
A senior official from the US embassy in Ankara told the Daily Sabbah, "Secretary Kerry didn't say anything at all about Nato membership being in jeopardy. There is nothing in his actual statement that indicates the US believes Turkey is in a danger in this sense."
In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said talks on Turkey's bid to the join EU would end if Ankara restores the death penalty.
Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said "the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member" of the bloc.
Both Ms Mogherini and Mr Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically-elected government.
But they illustrated deepening frustration with the Erdogan government's response to the failed coup, which has even included allegations by ministers of US complicity in the violence.
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Why was the coup attempt mounted?
This requires assumptions about who carried out the coup attempt. One theory is that the followers of self-exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen knew that they were going to be purged and decided to strike first.
Was the coup attempt concocted by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give himself the excuse to crack down?
It is more likely that Mr Erdogan is taking advantage of a real coup attempt to rid the armed forces and key state institutions of all who do not give him full obedience.
He called it a gift from God in that it would allow him to do so. An argument against the theory that the coup attempt was a put-up job is that it involved too many people, including high-ranking military officers, and might even have succeeded if the plotters had been able to eliminate Mr Erdogan.
Why did the coup fail?
The plotters did not eliminate Mr Erdogan and did not include the majority of the military high command. They did not enjoy any popular support and did not gain control of communications and the media. They did not have enough soldiers to suppress popular protests in favour of the President. The timing of the coup attempt is also peculiar since it took place late Friday night when people were still up and going outside and not in the early hours of the morning as is traditional.
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
Is the civilian reaction being orchestrated?
Mr Erdogan successfully orchestrated public protests in order to thwart the coup by calling for them on an iPhone held in front of a television camera. So far as can be judged these were carried out his committed supporters and right-wing nationalists, the numbers on the streets being boosted by free public transport until Monday night. A feature of the coup attempt was that there were no demonstrations in favour of it because the coup plotters announced a curfew and, in any case, Mr Erdogans many opponents do not necessarily want him replaced by a military government.
The mosques also played a significant role in mobilising his constituency by calling people onto the streets and delivering sermons all night long as jets flew overhead. Secular Turks are worried that religiously inspired mobs will become a permanent factor in Turkish politics, but there is no doubt that Mr Erdogan is massively popular among a large part of the Turkish public. An online poll by software company Streetbees shows that in answer to the question of whether or not they wanted the army to seize power 82 per cent said no and 18 per cent said yes. The president may be using the coup for his own ends but there is no doubt that he has a democratic mandate.
Is Turkey still a democracy?
In one sense yes: Mr Erdogans AKP party was democratically elected in a general election on 1 November, last year. But he runs an increasingly authoritarian government and has taken over or suppressed most critical television stations and newspapers. Mr Erdogan is getting close to his dream of an all-powerful presidency which controls all the levers of power including the judiciary, armed forces and bureaucracy.
Where does this leave the EU deal and the refugee crisis?
Mr Erdogan is a tough negotiator but has proven himself to be an unreliable partner when it comes to long-term commitments.
How will this affect relations with Russia (after the plane that was shot down, and ahead of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin)?
Before the coup Turkey had effectively apologised for shooting down the plane. Mr Erdogan is trying to reduce Turkeys international isolation by improving relations with Russia and Israel.
But relations with Russia are unlikely to be transformed so long as Turkey is backing groups seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russia is committed to preventing regime change in Syria.
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The Turkish Prime Minister has suspended the annual leave of more than three million civil servants nationwide, according to a government order.
The order, published in Turkey's Official Gazette, said annual leave had been suspended until further notice and civil servants already on leave will return to their posts as soon as possible.
Public sector employees have also been banned from travelling abroad, Turkish broadcaster NTV reports.
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
It comes amid a wide-ranging purge of the civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces followed a failed coup attempt.
Turkey's state-run news agency says the Interior Ministry has sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country.
Anadolu Agency says a total of 8,777 employees attached to the ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers.
Turkey rounds up thousands after failed coup
Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty.
The government has blamed the failed coup - which led to at least 232 deaths and wounded 1,400 others - on supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Muslim cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's chief opponent.
The European Union and the United States expressed alarm with Turkey's response to the failed coup, telling the NATO member and EU aspirant it must uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.
"This is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a joint news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Additional reporting by agencies
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As crowds chant calls for the execution of those involved in the failed coup in Turkey, there are fears that this once-secular country is decisively turning the corner towards full scale Islamisation. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the attempted military takeover to justify a purge of state officials and army officers who do not give him total obedience, opening the door for him to establish an all-powerful presidency while seemingly Islamising Turkish society to a degree not seen since the fall of the Ottomans.
The purge continued at full throttle on Monday with the sacking of 8,000 police and 30 governors as well as 52 high ranking civil servants. This is in addition to 70 admirals and generals along with 3,000 soldiers and 2,700 members of the judiciary fired or detained since the coup failed on Saturday.
As pro-coup forces were rounded up over the weekend, there were parades of religious zealots in the streets chanting Allahu Akbar as giant speakers in Taksim Square in central Istanbul blasted out verses from the Koran. Appeals from Turkeys 85,000 mosques played a significant role in mobilising popular protests in the hours after the coup began. In Gezi Park in Istanbul, the centre of secularist and liberal protests against Mr Erdogans authoritarian rule three years ago, was now filled with crowds loyal to the President.
The increasingly Islamist mood is already influencing social mores in Istanbul. Selin Derya, 26, who works for a business head hunting company, says that since pro-Erdogan crowds flooded into city centre in the aftermath of the coup I am frightened of going out wearing a dress that some bigot might think is too close fitting or does not like the fact that my skirt ends above the knee. Another secular woman in Istanbul explained that she does not want to enter the city centre at the moment because she fears harassment by religious extremists.
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
There have been escalating signs of intolerance of secular lifestyles in recent years, including an attack in June by two dozen men on a music store in Istanbul where they beat up Radiohead fans whom they accused of drinking alcohol during the holy month of Ramadan. When protesters gathered to demonstrate against the attack, they were dispersed by police using tear gas and water cannon.
The programme of Mr Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) since they won their first general election in 2002 has been to reverse the secularisation introduced by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the republic in 1923. As the AKP has tightened its grip on power, it has chipped away at the secular institutions of the state and encouraged the Islamisation of education and social behaviour as well as seeking to cull non-Islamist officials and officers.
Mr Erdogan has said that he wants to see the growth of a religious generation, which would replace long-standing secular domination in Turkey. His foreign policy since the Arab Spring in 2011 has been to support the largely Sunni Arab uprising in Syria in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, though his efforts to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad have so far failed. This strategy included tolerance for extreme Islamist jihadi movements such as Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, enabling them to establish networks of support inside Turkey. However, in the summer of 2015 the Turkish government agreed to let the US and four other states, including the UK, use Incirlik air base in south east Turkey for air strikes against Isis. Gunmen and bombers from the Islamist group attacked Ataturk Istanbul airport in June killing 42 people.
John Kerry: Turkey coup could threaten country's Nato membership
The failed coup will enable the implementation of Mr Erdogans long-desired presidential system based on Islamic values. It is unlikely to face much resistance now from people who do not want to be labelled as coup sympathisers. Not only are large numbers of soldiers and officials being arrested, but they are being publicly humiliated by being beaten, forced to strip to their underwear and lie crammed together on the floor of wherever they are being held. The commander of Incirlik air base, Gen Bekir Ercan Van, was shown on film handcuffed and being bundled into the back of a van.
Mr Erdogan is likely to find it easier to create an executive presidency, with all power concentrated in his hands, given that his victorious aura, following the failure of the coup, has enhanced his popular support. Though Turks are deeply divided between his supporters and opponents, few want to see him replaced by a military junta. He expanded his political base by increased nationalist support after he abandoned peace process with the Kurds after the 7 June general election last year, said a political observer. he has even more support now.
US and EU officials have called on Turkey's government to respect the rule of law amid the purge of state institutions in the wake of the attempted coup.
As regards the coup plotters, it looks likely that only the movement led by the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen would have had the connections within the Turkish armed forces to organise such a widespread conspiracy although Mr Gulen and his supporters have denied any involvement. This coup may not have been as big as the Government now says it was in order to justify its crack down on all its opponents, but it was still impressively large and was not far from succeeding from seizing power for a few hours on 15 July.
An explanation may be that the Gulenists, when closely allied to Mr Erdogan and the AKP between 2006 and 2012, played a leading role in helping him defang the armed forces. They ruthlessly led a witch hunt inside the army with hundreds of officers removed or arrested accused of plotting a coup which probably never existed. The Gulenists appear to have used the opportunity to replace the ousted officers with their own sympathisers who were activated last Friday night to launch a coup of their own.
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MPs have been told to evacuate the Turkish parliament building in Ankara over an unspecified security threat, according to an opposition politician.
The Cumhurriyet newspaper quoted the Peoples' Democracy Party member Ziya Pir as saying: "We have been informed of an attack. The Meclis is being evacuated."
The parliament building was among the public assets bombed by plotters during the coup attempt on the night of July 16.
A dramatic video captured by one MP showed the moment the first bomb hit while politicians were still in session, crashing through the roof into a courtyard.
Meanwhile, an unknown assailant has shot the deputy mayor of Istanbul's Sisli district in the head, Turkish broadcaster NTV reported.
It was not immediately clear whether the incident was linked to Friday's abortive military coup in which more than 200 people were killed. Turkey remains in a state of high tension, though the government says it has the situation fully under control.
NTV reported that the assailant had entered the office of deputy mayor Cemil Candas and then gun shots were heard. Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) runs the prosperous Sisli district. Along with other opposition parties the CHP has condemned the attempted 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
More than 300 people died and some 1,500 people were injured in the clashes, which ended when soldiers involved in the coup gave up their weapons and handed themselves in.
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.
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Turkey cannot join the European Union if it reinstates the death penalty, a spokesman for the German government said on Monday, sending a clear message to President Tayyip Erdogan who has raised the possibility after a failed military coup.
The government also urged Turkey to maintain the rule of law in investigating and bringing those behind the weekend coup attempt to justice, and raised questions about Turkey's decision to round up thousands of judges.
"Germany and the member states of the EU have a clear position on that: we categorically reject the death penalty," government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference.
"A country that has the death penalty can't be a member of the European Union and the introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would therefore mean the end of accession negotiations."
Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing it to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then.
With pro-government protestors demanding that the coup leaders be executed, Erdogan said on Sunday that the government would discuss the measure with opposition parties.
Even before the coup attempt, many EU states were not eager to see such a large, mostly Muslim country as a member, and were concerned that Ankara's record on basic freedoms had gone into reverse in recent years.
Turkey widened the crackdown on suspected supporters of the coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000.
German officials said they had seen no evidence of any conspiracy in the events beyond an effort by parts of the Turkish military to seize control of the government.
Erdogan and the Turkish government have accused the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, of orchestrating the coup.
Seibert said German and EU officials would emphasise the need to maintain the rule of law in all their conversations with Turkey. He said he expected EU foreign ministers to address their concerns about the revival of the death penalty and disproportionate punishment in a joint statement about the situation after a meeting in Brussels later on Monday.
"Everyone understands that the Turkish government and the Turkish justice system must bring those responsible for the coup to justice, but they must maintain the rule of law, and that always means maintaining proportionality ... and transparency."
German Foreign Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke to his counterpart early on Sunday, but Chancellor Angela Merkel has not spoken to Erdogan since the attempted coup, government spokesmen said.
Reuters
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Thousands of people have circulated a short animation video designed to show the restrictions that Saudi Arabia's male guardianship system places on women.
The video, published on Facebook by Human Rights Watch, depicts a Saudi woman being forced to reconcile with her abusive husband.
The footage, captioned "Even when they abuse their wives, Saudi men still act as guardians over them #TogetherTo EndMaleGuardianship", has been shared more than 2,300 times and gained more 8,400 'likes' in 12 hours.
It shows the woman being beaten by her husband before he orders her to leave the home. She then goes to a shelter and is told the best thing she can do is reconcile with her husband.
It proceeds to show her husband signing a sheet of paper before pulling the crying woman out of the shelter and beating her in the home again.
10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty
The film follows a recent report by Human Rights Watch that finds Saudi Arabias male guardianship system remains the most significant impediment to womens rights in the country, despite limited reforms over the last decade.
The report, Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabias Male Guardianship System, examines the many barriers women in the country face when attempting to make decisions or take action without the presence or consent of a male relative.
To produce the report Human Rights Watch conducted interviews with 61 Saudi women and men as well as analysing Saudi laws, policies and official documents.
As the law stands every Saudi woman must have a male guardian, normally a father or husband, but in some cases a brother or even a son, who has the power to make a range of critical decisions on her behalf.
Another video produced by Human Rights Watch following the report shows a female surgeon in Saudi Arabia receiving an invitation to speak at a cardiac surgery conference in London, but having to get the permission of her son to do so.
Her son declines to give her permission because he doesn't "feel like it".
A third shows a young woman being released from a female juvenile detention centre and hugging her mother, but having to return after her father refuses to grant permission for her release, saying: "She brought shame upon us. There's no way I can ler her come home."
In light of the report, Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, said: The fact that Saudi women are still forced to get a male guardians permission to travel, work, or do anything else is a long-standing rights violation and a barrier to the governments plans to improve the economy.
The government should do itself a favor and finally listen to the demands of half its population to be freed from the shackles of the guardianship system.
One Saudi woman, 25, told Human Rights Watch: We all have to live in the borders of the boxes our dads or husbands draw for us.
Womens rights activists in Saudi Arabia have repeatedly called on the government to abolish the male guardianship system.
In 2009 and again in 2013, Saudi Arabia agreed to take some steps to decrease guardians control over women, including no longer requiring permission for women to work and passing a law criminalising domestic abuse.
But Human Rights Watch found that despite these limited reforms, the male guardianship system remains largely in place, hindering and in some cases nullifying the reforms.
Women may not apply for a passport without male guardian approval and require permission to travel outside the country and they regularly face difficulty conducting a range of transactions, such as renting an apartment to filing legal claims, without a male relative.
They cannot study abroad on a government scholarship without male guardian approval, and a male relative must accompany them abroad while they studies, though this requirement is not always enforced.
Women are also barred from driving, and the report found that they face tremendous obstacles when trying to seek help or flee abuse by violent guardians.
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Of all Americas skyjackings, only one remains unsolved. The case has confounded FBI investigators for decades, and its astonishing details, clues and alleged participants have become the stuff of American criminal lore. The story has inspired songs, T-shirts and books; and the main character has, at times, bordered on American folk-hero status.
Now, after one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in FBI history, the agency is finally moving on from the search for the infamous skyjacker known as DB Cooper, according to a statement released by the FBI. The riveting search which Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney described as Jesse James meets the Loch Ness monster is more or less over.
During the course of the 45-year Norjak investigation, the FBI exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, co-ordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses, the statement says. Over the years, the FBI has applied numerous new and innovative investigative techniques, as well as examined countless items at the FBI Laboratory. Evidence obtained during the course of the investigation will now be preserved for historical purposes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC.
The case began on the afternoon of 24 November 1971, when a man who went by the name DB Cooper used cash to buy a one-way ticket on Flight 305, bound for Seattle, according to an FBI statement. By the end of night, Cooper would vanish into thin air 10,000 feet above dense Washington State forestland with $200,000 in cash, appearing to pull off a heist so daring that he would eventually be considered the most infamous hijacker in American history.
The FBI describes Cooper as a quiet man in his mid-forties, who wore a business suit with a black tie and white shirt. After ordering a bourbon and soda, he passed a note to a stewardess that explained he had a bomb in his briefcase. The stunned stewardess did as she was told, the FBI statement notes. Opening a cheap attache case, Cooper showed her a glimpse of a mass of wires and red-coloured sticks and demanded that she write down what he told her. Soon, she was walking a new note to the captain of the plane that demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills.
Almost a decade later, FBI agents were still scouring for clues beside the Columbia River (AP) (AP Photo/Reid Blackburn)
After landing in Seattle, Cooper allowed 36 passengers to leave the plane in exchange for cash and several parachutes. He instructed the plane to take off again and head for Mexico City. A little after 8pm, between Seattle and Reno, according to the FBI, Cooper launched himself from the back of the plane with his money in hand. He was never seen again.
Originally, FBI investigators believed Cooper must have been an experienced skydiver, possibly with military experience. But we concluded after a few years this was simply not true, Special Agent Larry Carr said in 2007. (The FBI didnt provide his first name.) No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut something a skilled skydiver would have checked.
In a 1980 profile of Ralph Himmelsbach the FBIs lead investigator on the case at the time the ageing lawman disputed the romantic idea that Cooper was a Robin Hood figure who gamed the system by pulling off an exquisite victimless crime. Sleazy is the word the he uses, actually. A sleazy, rotten criminal. (Himmelsbach turns downright eloquent when he gets going on this subject.) Nothing heroic about him, nothing glamorous, nothing admirable at all. He jeopardised the lives of 40 people and I have no admiration at all. He was a stupid, selfish man...
At the time, the writer noted, Himmelsbach was fielding calls from all over the country, responding to mail from as far away as Germany and investigating just about everything in between, including trousers found slung on Washington treetops (hoax) and men too short and men too young and men whose alibis place them firmly far away from the North-west skies that night. Well over 1,000, he has since said, tallying up his Cooper suspects to date. Real, real good ones; real, real poor ones. A lot of both. And many in between.
Nearly four decades and countless suspects later, not much has changed. Despite some tantalising clues discovered over the years such as a rotting package containing $5,800 in $20 bills with serial numbers that matched the ransom money many investigators believe Cooper never survived his plummet to the earth. His parachute wasnt steerable and he wouldve landed in the wilderness wearing a suit and leather shoes in the winter time, at night. The area where the jump is thought to have occurred has been described as a God-forsaken swathe of rugged Washington forest country. If theres any place around you wouldnt want to jump into, thatd be it, an FBI investigator once said.
Years later, Carr agreed: Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open. At the time, The Seattle Times reported, Carr was renewing his plea for new information in the case, possibly with the help of technology. While publicly brainstorming, he said he was hoping a clever hydrologist using satellite technology might find a way to trace the Cooper cash found on the Columbia River in 1980 back to the creek in which it originated. At the end, he noted, a body might be waiting. Perhaps, he said, somebody might remember something about an odd uncle. Almost a decade later, the thief remains at large.
Although the FBI appreciated the immense number of tips provided by members of the public, none to date have resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker, the FBIs latest statement says. The tips have conveyed plausible theories, descriptive information about individuals potentially matching the hijacker, and anecdotes to include accounts of sudden, unexplained wealth. [But] every time the FBI assesses additional tips for the Norjak case, investigative resources and manpower are diverted from programs that more urgently need attention.
Washington Post
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Young peoples level of engagement with education varies significantly by region, according to a new report, which has revealed the north of England to have the most disengaged students.
The research from The Careers and Enterprise Company has found students from Humber, Liverpool and, Tees Valley are most at risk of detaching themselves from learning.
Recommended Read more Disadvantaged youth at risk of being put off university if fees rise
Basing findings on six key indicators - including persistent absence and under-performance against GCSE expectations - the report also discovered Buckinghamshire Thames Valley, Enterprise M3 - formed of Hampshire and Surrey - and Thames Valley Berkshire have the lowest risk.
The report has come on the same day another from Save the Children, The Lost Boys, reveals boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to have fallen behind by the time they start school. The leading childrens charity has projected that, if the results of the past ten years are repeated, almost one million boys will be at risk over the next decade unless quality early years education is in place across England.
To tackle the issue and improve young peoples ability to transition into work, The Careers and Enterprise Company is calling for more mentoring and is making available a country-wide fund of 12 million over the next four years. The fund is designed to support a network of mentors and targets young people who are most at risk of not achieving their potential.
Save the Children, meanwhile, is calling on the Government to support the development of a well-qualified nursery workforce, with a qualified early years teacher in every nursery, starting in areas with large numbers of poor children first. Early years teachers help to identify the children who are falling behind and support them to catch up, adds the charity.
Claudia Harris, CEO of The Careers and Enterprise Company said too many young people across England are at risk of breaking away from education with lasting impact on their futures. She added: Research shows mentoring can have a transformative effect on future achievement by helping young people recognise what they are good at and what is valued in the world of work, providing inspiration about the future. Unlocking this inspiration is critical, and our model will direct resources to proven mentoring programmes so they can reach more young people at risk of disengaging from education.
Speaking about Save the Childrens findings, Gareth Jenkins, director of UK poverty at the charity, described how every child deserves the best start in life. He said: In England, though, too many children, especially boys, are slipping under the radar without the support they need to reach their potential. Theyre falling behind before they even get to school and that puts their life chances at risk. In 2016, this is unacceptable. A whole generation of boys is being failed.
Both reports have come on the day a third, commissioned by Kings College London, highlighted further problems within education by revealing white working-class boys feel forced to hide their identities in order to get through university. This report has been reflective of new Prime Minister Theresa Mays first speech before entering number 10 in which she said: If youre a white working-class boy, youre less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university.
The reports lead author, Dr Sam Baars, acknowledged how low attainment at school accounts for much of the problem of low participation in higher education by white working class boys. However, it does not explain it away, he added.
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Q How significant are airport sales to retailers and the airports themselves?
A Crucial for both. The airport takes a large slice of everything spent on its premises, whether you park in the short-stay car park, change money or make a last-minute purchase. Even with the airport helping itself to upwards of one quarter of sales revenue, shops in the terminal can be enormously profitable locations, thanks to the abundance of dwell time that most passengers have.
Nobody is entirely sure how long the journey to airport will take, nor how long it will take to get through security. So travellers rationally allow plenty of time just in case. When the process proves relatively smooth, as mostly happens, they have plenty of time to spare before their flight. Many passengers fill it by going shopping.
Q What does the law say on tax-free shopping?
For any journey within the European Union (between the UK and Spain, France, Italy, etc) tax- and duty-free shopping ended in 1999. But passengers travelling outside the EU, to destinations such as Switzerland, Turkey, America or Dubai, are liable for neither duty nor VAT on airport purchases that they take abroad.
For sales of spirits and tobacco, specialist duty free shops usually have a two-tiered pricing system, so low prices apply only for passengers flying to non-EU destinations. In these kinds of stores the retailer is obliged by HMRC to report every customers destination, by scanning the passenger's boarding pass.
But most goods are not liable to large amounts of duty just normal VAT at 20 per cent. A 6 bottle of sunscreen includes 1 of tax.
Until now, airport stores have typically had a single, VAT-inclusive price on anything from batteries to cosmetics.
In 2015, The Independent revealed that many retailers ask to see customers boarding passes. In the case of that 6 bottle of sunscreen: if the passenger was heading for Greece the 1 in VAT had to be passed on to the Chancellor, while if the retailer discovered the destination was Turkey, it could keep the tax element.
Q What did George Osborne have to say about that?
A At the end of 2015, the then-Chancellor ordered a review of airport sales to make sure VAT savings were passed on to shoppers. The UK Travel Retail Forum, which covers everyone from distillers and tobacco firms to the airports themselves, said: We welcome the opportunity to show HMRC the value that we offer to consumers and to demonstrate how airport retail generates vital revenue to underpin and sustain the success of British airports.
Q What will happen when the UK leaves the EU?
A It is expected that the customs rules that currently apply for destinations beyond Europe will be imposed on travel to remaining EU countries. Therefore all sales at British airports will qualify for relief, except for domestic passengers. It could be that the present situation is reversed that prices are shown without VAT, for example, but the tax is added for travellers flying within the UK.
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Following revelations in The Independent of airport retailers pocketing the VAT paid by passengers heading outside the EU, one of the UKs biggest chains will today start returning some of the tax to eligible travellers.
At airport branches of WHSmith, passengers flying beyond Europe will get a discount but only for items costing 6 or more.
Airport shops are obliged to collect 20 per cent VAT on all purchases made by travellers within the European Union and pass it on to HMRC. But for anyone flying beyond the EU for example to Switzerland, Norway or any country outside the union no tax is payable. On a 6 bottle of sunscreen, that should mean a saving of 1.
But last summer The Independent showed that a number of high street retailers were charging VAT-inclusive prices to non-EU passengers and keeping the tax element as profit. Some passengers who queried the request to show a boarding pass were told it was a security requirement. In fact, its purpose was to allow the retailer to calculate how much they could legally withhold.
In response, the then-Chancellor, George Osborne, demanded action on the practice. A Treasury review was expected to report by this summer, but, like so much Government business, it has been delayed because of the EU referendum and is now unlikely to publish its conclusions until the autumn.
Recommended Read more The rules explained for luggage policies on a package holiday
Now The Independent has learned that WHSmith is set to give the appropriate discount for taxable items priced at 6 or more for passengers flying outside the EU. The company is still taking part in the Treasury review, but chose to launch its own refund scheme before the main summer holidays.
A spokesperson for the firm told The Independent: Following customer research, focus groups and an in-store trial, WHSmith has introduced a new approach to the VAT relief concession at UK airports in time for the peak summer season.
The rollout at UK airports begins today and will be completed by Wednesday.
The 6 figure was chosen because it represents a minimum saving of 1. The WHSmith spokesperson said: Below 6, the net VAT benefit will continue to be used to lower prices for all customers.
In order to qualify for the concession, eligible travellers must agree to have their boarding-pass scanned. Anyone who declines will be treated as an EU passenger, with their purchase subject to VAT.
While the benefit will be significant for eligible travellers, most WHSmith customers will see no difference. Almost three-quarters of British airline passengers flying abroad are staying within the EU. Even for those going beyond Europe, many of the goods on sale, such as books, water and sandwiches, are zero-rated.
If, as expected, Brexit leads to the re-imposition of customs limits to EU countries, the perk will become significantly more valuable.
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It was sad but inevitable.
Democrats and Republicans alike exhort the need for national unity. But the two race-driven shootings in the past 11 days in which eight police officers haven died have become weapons in the battle for the presidency. And caught in the middle is the man who does currently occupy the White House in large part because he has the perspective, and the courage, to speak the truth.
The depressing fact is that under Barack Obama, Americas first black President, racial tensions in the US have, if anything, worsened. Long gone is that gauzy moment just after he was elected, which some saw as proof conclusive that the country had finally broken loose of its original sin. America, these optimists claimed, was evolving into a post-racial society.
The deterioration arguably started back in February 2012 when a black teenager named Trayvon Martin was shot by a watchman at a gated community in Florida. It was the first in a string of highly publicised incidents in which unarmed black suspects died at the hands of white police officers, spurring the emergence of the protest movement Black Lives Matter.
The crisis came to a head this month, with the deaths on successive nights of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, both harrowingly captured on mobile phone videos, where in both cases police appeared to use unneccessry force. That triggered the revenge killings of the police officers, first in Dallas, then in Baton Rouge.
Obama went to Dallas, and delivered one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency on race. He spoke movingly of the fallen police officers, but he explicitly connected their deaths with the incidents that had gone before in a way no white president could have done, or would have dared to do.
Obama Calls for Unity After 3 Police Officers Shot Dead in Baton Rouge
Now that speech has been thrust into the meatgrinder of the 2016 election. For Republicans, it is proof that deep down, Obama sides not with the police, a last rampart protecting us from anarchy, but with black and minority protesters complaining about police excesses.
No matter that Tim Scott, the black Republican senator from South Carolina, made the same point, taking to the Senate floor to remind his colleagues of how he had suffered from racial discrimination by law enforcement, how he had been pulled over while driving half a dozen times in a year, and of the anger and humilation felt by lawabiding African-Americans singled out for nothing except the colour of their skin. This was a cudgel to use against Democrats.
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
Leading the charge was of course Donald Trump, for whom Obamas body language during his public response to the police deaths was the give-away.
The words might be okay, but "theres something going on, Trump told Fox News.
Asked to elaborate, he declined, There's just a bad feeling, a lot of bad feeling about him [Obama].
But he didnt need to elaborate. Everyone knew what Trump was insinuating that Obamas real sympathies lay not with the police, but with the young black men who were their victims. Its the classic Trump modus operandi: plant a suspicion and hint at a conspiracy.
He is digging in fertile soil. Many of his supporters are poorer and southern whites who have never come to terms with the fact that a black man is their president, who still believe Trumps previous birther fantasies, that Obama was born outside the US and is not an American citizen at all.
So much for the gauzy illusions of November 2008.
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By any standard, Theresa May has had a pretty tumultuous few weeks. Her first days in office have been dominated by Brexit and European relations, and central to todays vote on Tridents renewal is the question of what kind of role the UK should play in the world.
May's view on the nuclear question is very clear. She has argued that the nuclear threat has increased and 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.
The first part of her argument ignores the governments own National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review. The review listed international terrorism, cyber-attacks, public health scares and natural hazards among the many greater threats than nuclear war. The report went on to say there is no direct threat to the UK or its vital interests from states developing weapons of mass destruction.
Fallon on Trident vote
Beyond that, her argument that we dont know what might happen in 40 years time is one that absolutely every single state in the world could use to justify the development of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Its a self-perpetuating argument that makes the world more dangerous by giving a blank cheque to those who seek nuclear proliferation, and can be used to delay disarmament indefinitely.
One of the real reasons consecutive governments have chosen to renew Trident is status. Tony Blair acknowledged this in his autobiography, when he wrote of his hesitation before deciding that in the final analysis I thought giving it up too big a downgrading of our status as a nation.
Its a strange interpretation of status. There are a number of powerful and influential nations, like Germany and Japan, that have never had nuclear weapons. Are we really to believe that the maintenance of arms that could wipe out millions of lives is a pre-requisite for global influence?
Many of the press reports on Trident understandably focus on its outrageous cost (up to 200 billion over the course of 30 years). Especially in tough economic times, this money could be reinvested in far better ways, rather than being poured into a new generation of nuclear weapons.
But even if we put the financial implications to one side, the potential impact of the weapons is far too deadly to contemplate. One Trident submarine has the power to kill 5.4 million people, and it would do so indiscriminately. The impact could be on an even greater scale than Hiroshima.
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
Politicians of all stripes say they want to see a nuclear free world. But if countries like the UK dont take the first step by disarming then why will anybody else? If we keep following the logic of Trident then the current situation will only continue, and well find ourselves having the same debate in 20 or 30 years time.
Many political observers believe that the reason this vote was called for today was to reunite the Tory Party and exploit long-standing divisions on the Labour benches.
Whatever peoples views on Trident, surely one thing we can all agree on is that the issue is far too big, and the consequences potentially far too grave, for it to be used as just another pawn in a contemptible parliamentary parlour-game.
For far too long, UK foreign policy has been guided by a commitment to militarism and interventionism. But, with the Chilcot report having forensically dismantled the case for the Iraq war, it is time to question the Whitehall consensus and ask what UK foreign policy should seek to achieve.
Ultimately there needs to be a far broader discussion that goes beyond the petty point-scoring and narrow confines of party politics. Only in this way can we work towards a new approach to national security; one that isnt constantly focused on projecting strength and taking part in catastrophic wars that leave a trail of destruction and do nothing to keep us safe.
Andrew Smith is a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT)
Bank of Ireland group chief executive Richie Boucher, right, and Andrew Keating, group chief financial officer, who presented the preliminary results for 2015 yesterday. Photo: Mark Condren
Bank of Ireland's profitability is expected to take a hit from a weaker sterling and lower bond sales in the opening half of the year, Davy stockbrokers has said.
Davy analyst Emer Lang warned of a 36pc decline in earnings in the first six months of 2016 with currencies wreaking havoc with the bank's profitability.
The bank's asset quality is tipped to continue its improvement with the trend in bad debts set to continue. In the first quarter bad debts fell by around 800m and Ms Lang expects further reductions in the second quarter.
Bank of Ireland's half year results are due out on July 29 with the post-Brexit outlook being pegged as the most important element.
Deutsche Bank has cast doubts on the ability of Ireland to win increased foreign direct investment in the wake of Brexit.
The global finance house also warned of a marked slowdown in Irish economic growth.
Deutsche said Dublins capacity to take advantage of the dislocation from London of financial services firms has limits.
In a note to investors, Deutsches chief economist Mark Wall said that if the common travel area between Ireland and the UK can be retained, then Ireland will be an appealing destination for firms relocating elements of their business from London.
But infrastructural gaps could hinder Dublins ability to benefit, Deutsche suggests.
Dublins capacity to take significant advantage of the dislocation of financial services from London has limits, in our view, the bank said.
A decision to relocate will depend on a range of factors. Commercially, the fit requires a range of other business services being available, from sufficiently well developed global accounting, tax, legal and business services industries.
Non-commercially, it depends on factors such as availability of housing, school places, etc. Dublins non-commercial capacity and infrastructure is suffering from under-investment after the financial crisis.
Deutsche said the Irish economy is exposed to a Brexit through various channels.
About 40pc of exports from indigenous Irish firms go to the UK, the bank said.
These firms are responsible for over 85pc of employment.
There could also be an impact on the housing market, Deutsche said, with higher uncertainty and tighter conditions likely to weaken housing demand.
There are analysts predicting outright recession in the UK. Ireland is exposed to these risks, Deutsche said.
We expect Irish GDP growth to slow from 5pc this year to 2.9pc in 2017. This is a marked slowdown.
This week the European Central Bank will hold its first scheduled monetary policy meeting since the UK voted to leave the European Union.
ECB President Mario Draghi is likely to plead for governments to do more to boost the eurozone's economy in the coming week as the fallout of Britain's vote and weaker global growth threaten the bloc's fragile recovery.
A reiteration of Draghi's long-standing call on governments to spend more where possible and speed up growth-boosting reforms may well fall on deaf ears. The only country with significant fiscal firepower, Germany, is reluctant to give up its budget surplus and has resisted any attempt to pool more money at the European level in the absence of greater power-sharing.
The ECB is not expected to change its monetary stance on Thursday, its last meeting before an eight-week summer break.
On Tuesday the International Monetary Fund will release its latest global macroeconomic forecasts. In the US, markets will get a double dose of housing news with figures on previously owned home sales and new construction starts in June. While low borrowing costs are sustaining demand, higher prices are limiting the speed at which residential real estate can progress.
US Republicans also meet to nominate their choice for president at the convention in Cleveland. Donald Trump is the party's presumptive nominee.
Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley announce earnings this week, along with General Motors, Daimler, Microsoft, Novartis and Netflix.
Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has said the DUP's backing is not essential for the establishment of a 'post-Brexit' national dialogue.
Mr Martin has said in light of the decision by Britain to leave the EU, the Oireachtas should convene a "national dialogue" or "civil dialogue" involving workers, business organisations, non-governmental organisations and community groupings.
He said the body would be different from the so-called 'all-island' forum, which was shot down by the North's First Minister Arlene Foster.
"That was a mistake, that was wrong," he said.
Significantly, Mr Martin said the body could go ahead without the support of the DUP and should go right around the island of Ireland. He made the claims to reporters as he arrived at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.
Delivering the John Hume lecture, Mr Martin described the allocation of speaking rights in the Dail as "absurd", arguing that it unduly favoured "ad hoc groupings of a few deputies".
Read More: Fianna Fail happy to let Kenny hobble on, but all that changes if box office Leo takes over
He said: "The situation at the moment is still unsettled," while insisting that the minority Government could still work.
Mr Martin was also critical of the slow pace at which legislation is being passed.
During the week, Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin said that no legislation had been passed in six months.
Mr Martin expressed concern that the largest parties in the Dail did not have proportionate speaking time.
He explained: "As part of this, there is no doubt that the amount of time for government legislation needs to be increased if we are to properly review the more important measures that will start to appear on the order paper from October onwards.
"In addition, the principle that all deputies should have an opportunity to contribute to the work of the Dail has not yet been achieved.
"In large part, this is because we have the absurd situation where the greater the mandate your party holds, the less opportunity you have to speak."
The Fianna Fail leader also used his speech to address the concerns stemming from the attack in Nice and Brexit.
The French ambassador, Jean-Pierre Thebault, had pulled out of the event following the Nice massacre.
Mr Martin told the audience: "We are in what can best be termed a new age of uncertainty. There is no question where the people of our country stand - we stand in solidarity with France and we stand in solidarity with the great principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which July 14 celebrates.
"This is a tense time...There is a natural urge to find refuge in broad definitions of the enemy. We must take robust action - we cannot fail to adopt reasonable measures to fight new threats. But equally, we must never forget what we are defending."
On Brexit, Mr Martin said barriers on the Border could set the country back decades.
"The Brexit vote has added a new risk. It threatens to set back a model of shared development, which, in spite of many problems, has achieved a lot and could achieve much more. The introduction of new barriers between both parts of this island would potentially set us back decades," he said.
Mr Martin hit out at the media for predicting Fianna Fail's demise. "This year's general election demonstrated a profound detachment between elite and public discourse in this country. The most dramatic proof of this was the shock of so many at the massive losses by the government parties and the fact that Fianna Fail gained..."
SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has claimed she has a veto over when Britain leaves the European Union, in comments that will infuriate Tory ministers in charge of Brexit.
Scotland's First Minister suggested she could dictate the timing of a British exit from the EU, in an interview on BBC One's 'Andrew Marr Show'.
Ms May indicated on Friday that Brexit could be delayed as she said she would not start the formal process for leaving until there is a "UK approach" backed by Scotland.
In a sign that the new Prime Minister was committed to keeping the union with Scotland intact, she said she would not trigger Article 50 - the formal process for withdrawing from the EU - until all the devolved nations agreed.
Asked whether she had a "veto in her back pocket" about the timing of Brexit, Ms Sturgeon said: "I think we are in a very strong position. That is a position that I am going to use as well as I can."
Later, she told BBC Scotland that she believed Ms May wanted to "find options" which acknowledge that Scotland voted to remain in the EU.
"If you are asking me right now, do I think Theresa May will never ever trigger Article 50 unless I am saying to her I am absolutely happy with the direction that the UK is taking, I don't know that that is the case," she said.
"But what she did seem to indicate is that she wants, as I want, to see if we can find options that respect how Scotland voted."
Ms Sturgeon has already set up a group to look at the options for protecting Scotland's place in Europe.
Read more: Setback for Scotland as Sturgeon is snubbed by Tusk in drive for EU deal
Watch: VIDEO - Nicola Sturgeon: Immigration has made Scotland stronger
She also said it could be possible to find a solution in which Scotland remains in the EU and the UK, while the rest of Britain leaves the EU - a move that Scottish Secretary David Mundell has described as fanciful.
Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Brexit Secretary David Davis said they wanted Britain to start formal exit talks this year.
Mr Davis insisted on Sky News that Scotland could not have a veto over leaving the EU. 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."
He said that 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 for ever".
As a result, those arriving after a set date could be denied an indefinite right to stay in Britain, he said. ( Daily Telegraph, London)
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
New Ireland Assurance has been fined 650,000 by the Central Bank for breaches of the Consumer Protection Code.
The Central Bank said this morning that the breaches relate to the provision of incomplete information to consumers regarding New Irelands investment products, including the performance of those products.
The Central Bank also said that there were systems and controls failures associated with the provision of information to consumers.
The breaches occurred between July 1, 2012 and November 30, 2014. The Central Bank said the firm had accepted the breaches.
The Central Banks director of enforcement, Derville Rowland, said regulated entities must have adequate systems and controls in place to ensure the provision of information.
The Consumer Protection Code 2012 sets out the minimum standards the Central Bank expects regulated entities to comply with in their dealings with consumers. Chapter 6 Provision 6.16 of the 2012 Code requires regulated entities to provide certain information to consumers on at least an annual basis to enable them to assess the performance of their investment products over the previous year, Ms Rowland said.
It is of paramount importance that consumers receive such information in a complete and transparent manner, particularly in respect of longer term investment products, to enable them to analyse the performance and value of their investments and to assess whether those investments are on track to meet their personal financial goals and objectives.
As the Firm was not providing all such information to consumers the Central Bank brought this enforcement action to protect consumers interests.
In order to ensure that consumers receive complete information in respect of their investment products in a timely fashion, regulated entities must have adequate systems and controls in place regarding the provision of such information.
Workers without pensions will be automatically enrolled in a new scheme although they will have the ability to opt out under new government proposals.
Minister for Social Protection, Leo Varadkar, said it was an essential objective" of his to bring in a new, universal, workplace retirement saving system for employees without supplementary pensions.
However, he admitted that the proposal will be a ten-year project.
Mr Varadkar said the current system whereby most people rely solely on the state pension in retirement is unsustainable.
He said the government has a duty to ensure a better system is put in place.
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The minister said in order to deliver this new system, which would mirror similar pension schemes in the UK and Australia, there is a need to reform and simplify the pension landscape.
He said the confidence and trust of pension savers has been serious damaged and this had to be repaired if any reforms are to be successful.
Mr Varadkar said it would be a possibility that workers could agree to sacrifice part of a pay rise to put into their pension pot.
He also said that as the USC is phased out, employees could contribute part of that cash to their pensions.
The minister said it would make sense that employers would match employees contributions under the scheme although these details have to be worked out and he did not want to prescribe what it would look like.
The minister was speaking this morning as the Pensions Authority unveiled a consultation document setting out a package of proposals to reform and simplify the private pension scheme arena.
Among its proposals are higher standards for trustees of workplace pension schemes, better information for members, a reduction in the number of pension savings vehicles and an authorisation process for schemes.
Submissions are invited from all interested parties on the authority's proposals by October 3 this year.
First-time buyers will get financial help from the Government in a new scheme to be announced in the Budget.
Homebuyers of new houses will benefit from a tax refund based scheme.
The measure is aimed at helping buyers currently struggling to get on the ladder due to Central Bank lending restrictions.
The new first-time buyers grant will be "very generous", according to Government figures involved in the preparation of the Budget.
Read More: Middle class 'Generation Y' feels pinch
However, it will not be similar to the British scheme which sees the State take an equity share of the house.
The Help-To-Buy scheme will involve upfront tax repayments to buyers. The precise details and the cost are still being worked out ahead of October's budget.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan is also wary about ensuring the scheme will not interfere with either the supply or demand for housing.
Mr Coveney has pointed out this means 40pc of people are locked out of the mortgage market.
The new scheme will form part of the Government's new housing action plan.
Housing Minister Simon Coveney will publish the plan later this week.
The plan is in response to the housing crisis and was promised within the first 100 days of the new Government.
Homeless targets
One of the opening chapters of the plan is understood to be dedicated entirely to the homeless crisis, with specific details on how it is intended to tackle the crisis in the short and long term.
Among the measures contained in the plan is a new law to protect tenants when their accommodation is sold.
The move follows the case of tenants in Tyrrelstown being evicted when their complex was being sold to a vulture fund.
The high-profile case of more than 100 families in Cruise Park Drive who faced losing their homes sparked demands for greater protections for tenants.
The new so-called 'Tyrrelstown Amendment' will mean anyone selling more than 20 housing units in a complex will have to provide security of tenure to tenants and also won't be able to dramatically jack up rents.
The view within Government is most normal institutional investors are buying housing developments for a long-term return. Only investors who want to sell on and get a quick return, known as flipping, are interested in replacing the existing tenants.
The housing strategy will include a special emphasis on increasing the supply of "starter homes" for first-time buyers in Dublin.
Read More: Census shows 'we're not building anywhere near enough houses'
Current prices mean no house in the Dublin area could be bought for less than 300,000.
The report will cover every aspect of the housing market, including building, buying, renting and financing, and will particularly focus on homelessness.
The Government has signalled it will make no attempt to interfere in a Central Bank review of its tough rules on deposits for homebuyers, which have been controversial.
Mr Coveney has said he has no power to tell the Central Bank what to do. Instead, the plan aims to increase supply and assist first-time buyers.
The plan will also contain a new move to speed up house-building nationwide and tackle the country's housing crisis.
Read More: Housing supply at worst level for 50 years as prices exceed boomtime levels
A new Special Delivery Unit will be set up in the Department of Housing, with project managers appointed to drive specific house building projects from start to finish. The minister is also considering further bypassing councils by fast-tracking big building projects to An Bord Pleanala, to speed up decisions and minimise delays through procedures and objections.
Infrastructure
This process is similar to the strategic infrastructure projects, like roads and bridges, which go straight to the planning board for a slimmed-down assessment process.
Mr Coveney has vowed to deliver 25,000 houses per year - well ahead of the target set out in the Programme for Government.
A mix of initiatives would be deployed to boost building of starter homes. 27,000 planning permissions are currently granted in Dublin but only 4,400 of those are being used.
A special infrastructure fund will be set up to speed up projects like roads, bridges or power supplies, which may be delaying building.
Venture capital firm Draper Esprit, which is backed by the Government through the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, has announced its first investment since floating on the stock exchange last month.
The company has pumped 3.1m (3.7m) into Stockholm-based digital health business Lifesum with Draper Esprit venture partner Vishal Gulati joining the Lifesum board.
The tech firm has become one of Europe's fastest growing health apps with over 15 million users. Lifesum looks to engage users to help them maintain a health lifestyle and work towards fitness goals.
The investment comes after Lifesum closed a $10m Series B funding round with the money earmarked to fund international growth.
Draper Esprit chief executive Simon Cook said: "As we outlined during our IPO, we are looking to invest in high quality management teams with innovative digital technology from across all of Europe. Scandanavia has produced many great digital success stories such as Spotify and the team at Lifesum has created a very powerful platform."
Henrik Torstensson, CEO of Lifesum, commented: "Their investment will help accelerate the company's next phase in becoming a truly global product and brand. The support from our new partners, as leading tech investors, and experienced digital healthcare and wellbeing investors, will help us to meet our product development targets, while facilitating the continued growth of our European and US user bases."
18/07/2016Marta Herda (29), with an address at Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, arrives at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin this morning where he has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Csaba Orsos at the South Quay, Arklow in March, 2013. Pic Collins Courts
A woman accused of murdering her colleague by driving him into a harbour, where he drowned, told gardai that she was hoping to save him if she had seen him in the water.
A video of the waitresss garda interviews was played to the Central Criminal Court on Monday, the ninth day of her trial.
Marta Herda of Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, Co Wicklow is charged with the murder of 31-year-old Csaba Orsos on March 26, 2013.
The 29-year-old Polish woman has pleaded not guilty to murdering the Hungarian at South Quay, Arklow.
Expand Close Marta Herda (29) (left ) with an address at Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, arrives at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin this morning where he has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Csaba Orsos at the South Quay, Arklow in March, 2013. Pic Collins Courts / Facebook
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Whatsapp Marta Herda (29) (left ) with an address at Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, arrives at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin this morning where he has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Csaba Orsos at the South Quay, Arklow in March, 2013. Pic Collins Courts
They both worked at Brook Lodge Hotel in Aughrim and the trial heard that he was in love with her, but that she didnt feel the same way.
Both had been in Ms Herdas car when it went into the water that morning. Ms Herda escaped at the harbour but Mr Orsos body was found on a nearby beach later that day.
Detective Sergeant Fergus OBrien was being cross examined by the defence yesterday about the interviews that he had conducted with Ms Herda following her arrest in August 2013.
He agreed that not all of what she had said, which could be seen on the videos, had made it into the gardais handwritten memos. Segments of the videos were then played at the request of the defence.
If I would see him in the water, I was hoping I would try to save him, she said. But, my friend said: Dont even think of this. It is good that it didnt happen because then you would die together.
She explained that her friend thought that he would have pulled her down.
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She said that she was constantly thinking of what she should have done.
If I had driven a different way, she suggested.
She was asked what sort of person the deceased was.
I dont know if he was a good person or a bad person, she replied. For me, he was like a good-hearted person.
However, she said she was afraid of him too.
He had a few personalities, she said.
She said that she had seen his suffering due to him having fallen in love with me badly.
She was asked if he was a nuisance.
Yes, she replied.
She was asked if he was a pest.
Yes, she replied. He said he will prove to the whole world how much he loves me.
She said she had never had a sexual relationship with him.
I said: I could never be with someone like you because you would lock me somewhere, she said.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy had earlier told the jury of eight men and four women that he had been asked to bring a number of matters to their attention.
He said it was essential that they consider the case only on the evidence before them.
Media reports cannot and do not provide a full account of the relevant evidence, he said. Indeed, media reports may refer to some aspects of evidence and not others, thereby giving an incorrect impression.
He said it was better that they didnt discuss the case with anyone else, who might be affected by such media reports.
The trial continues.
A foreign national who blackmailed a 13-year-old girl from his community into having sex with him using a compromising photograph has been jailed for six years.
The Central Criminal Court heard the photograph did not involve nudity and was not especially compromising but due to cultural differences it would have caused problems for the girl if her family became aware of it.
The girl had sent the picture to a different man but the accused had come into possession of it.
The 29-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect his victims identity, pleaded guilty to three counts of defilement of the child on dates between September and November 2012.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the offences had a squalidity about them and noted they had caused considerably difficulty for the young woman. He said he was taking into account that the victim had failed to receive family support to the extent that one might have hoped.
He noted the accused man's guilty plea and that he was not likely to re-offend.
Mr Justice McCarthy imposed a two year sentence on each of the three counts. He made the sentences consecutive to each other, noting if they were not consecutive the accused would have been punished for only one offence despite repeating the wrongdoing.
A local garda told Kerida Naidoo SC, prosecuting, that the accused man had been a family friend and had become jealous when the girl got a boyfriend. He came into possession of a compromising photograph of the girl that she had sent to someone else.
The garda said the accused man used the photograph to blackmail her into having sex, by telling her he would show it to her parents.
On three occasions he arranged to pick her up from school and brought her up to the Dublin mountains where he had sex with her. The girl did not want to have sex and told him so.
During one of the incidents he made a video. It was not explicit and the girl could be heard telling him to stop. On the final occasion he told her he would delete the image if she agreed to have sex.
The matter was reported to gardai in December and the man arrested and interviewed.
Sean Gillane SC, defending, said the accused man had a difficult enough background and a lot of responsibly had fallen on his shoulders as he grew up. He had a good work record and contributed to his family.
He handed in a number of reports and testimonials. He said his client was someone who was in general of a good nature, worked hard, was relatively quiet and responsible. He said he was not taking the impact on the victim lightly and had written a letter of apology.
Mr Gillane said the issue of jealousy should never have arisen and it seemed to trigger a response that was criminal and wrong. He submitted his client was otherwise of good character.
A teenager has appeared in court charged with the murder of a man who was fatally stabbed at a flats complex in Crumlin.
Graham McEvoy (18) was arrested and brought before Dublin District Court today following the stabbing of Paul Curran at the weekend.
As he was remanded in custody for a week, Mr McEvoy called out to a family member in the courtroom: I love yous...Tell my mam I love her.
Mr McEvoy, with an address at Captains Road, Crumlin, is charged with murdering Paul Curran Seagull House, Rutland Street on July 16.
Mr Curran died after he was stabbed in the stairwell of the flats complex on Saturday afternoon.
Detective Sergeant Danny Kelly said he arrested the defendant for the purpose of charging him at Sundrive Road Garda Station in the early hours of this morning.
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He was charged at 12.57am and made "no comment" to the charge after caution, Det Sgt Kelly said.
He told Judge Michael Walsh he was applying for the accused to be remanded in custody for a week.
Obviously there is no application for bail, considering the charge, Defence Solicitor Michael Kelleher said.
A bail application on a murder charge can only be made in the High Court.
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Judge Walsh remanded Mr McEvoy in custody, to appear in court again on July 25.
The defendant, wearing a white polo shirt, black tracksuit bottoms and white runners gave a thumbs up to a family member who was sitting in the courtrooms public gallery.
I love yous tell my Mam I love her, he said.
Judge Walsh granted free legal aid in the case after Mr Kelleher made an application and there was no garda objection.
Gardai were called to the scene at around 4pm on Saturday and Mr Curran was brought to St Jamess Hospital where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
A young woman (18) was also arrested and was released without charge in the early hours of this morning, with a file being prepared for the DPP.
Primary school pupils will soon be getting lessons in the basics of how to write computer programs.
Education Minister Richard Bruton has asked the Government's curriculum advisers, the NCCA, to consider ways of integrating coding into the primary curriculum.
Coding is regarded as an essential skill for the modern world, with digital literacy now as important as proficiency in reading, writing and maths.
Computer programming has not featured at either primary or post-primary level in Ireland - which is regarded as a factor in the high drop-out rates from college computing courses.
Outside school, Irish children have shown an enthusiasm for coding, including at the CoderDojo network of clubs.
From September, coding is being introduced for students in some secondary schools as part of wider Junior Cycle reform and its uptake will spread rapidly as more teachers are trained.
The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has also recently been given the go-ahead to start work on Computer Science as a Leaving Certificate subject.
Now Mr Bruton has written to NCCA chief executive Dr Anne Looney asking that they examine approaches to bringing coding into primary schools.
He wants it considered as part of a review of the primary curriculum, and the development of a new maths curriculum for junior infants to second classes, currently under way.
The draft new maths curriculum is expected to be ready next spring, but it would be September 2018 at the earliest before the first coding lessons take place in primary schools.
One of the issues that have arisen is where to find time in an overcrowded curriculum.
In his letter to Dr Looney, the minister said he wanted to ensure that every child had an opportunity to develop computational, flexible and creative thinking skills.
"I am acutely conscious that we need to give all children the best start in a world where such skills will be key to participation and success" he stated.
Dublin City University president Professor Brian MacCraith welcomed the focus on "the intersection of digital technology with critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving".
Prof MacCraith said projects such as CoderDojo had shown the "amazing potential of young children in this convergent space".
Main: Philip Cairns; Insets: Alice Cairns, mother of Philip; Students arrive back to Colaiste Eanna on the Ballyroan Road, Rathfarnham, after the mid-term break of October 1986; The lane where Philips bag was found
THE mum of missing schoolboy Philip Cairns has urged broadcaster Gareth OCallaghan to go to gardai with information he says he has received about the disappearance of her son.
Gareth OCallaghan, who hosts a show on 4FM and previously worked for 2fm, told the Herald that he has been piecing together a new theory on the disappearance of schoolboy Philip Cairns (13) in 1986.
He claims this new theory is based on information people have been passing onto him via social media.
He has not gone to gardai with this information, and he says he will only do so if he gets agreement from those who have been in touch.
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However, he has publicly made a number of allegations in relation to the disappearance.
Speaking from her home in Ballyroan, Rathfarnham, Philips mother Alice Cairns urged anybody with information regarding her son to go to that gardai.
Expand Close A Garda on duty at the laneway on Ballyroan Road, Rathfarnham from where 13 year old schoolboy Philip Cairns went missing on the afternoon of 23 October 1986. NPA/Independent collection / Facebook
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I would say that if anyone had any information in relation to Philip they should go to the Gardai, and if Gareth OCallaghan has information he should bring it to gardai too, she said.
The mystery of what happened to the young school boy who disappeared during his lunch hour has been the subject of a three decade long garda investigation.
Expand Close Philip Cairns went missing on October 23, 1986, after leaving his home after lunch to return to school for the afternoon. He had just begun secondary school the previous month / Facebook
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Whatsapp Philip Cairns went missing on October 23, 1986, after leaving his home after lunch to return to school for the afternoon. He had just begun secondary school the previous month
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Mr OCallaghan said he has been contacted by a number of people who have given him information about the disappearance of Philip but did not say how many people contacted him about the case.
I dont want to divulge much about the information that is coming forward because its private some of it is very detailed. These are people who clearly have held back for a very long time, he said.
Where do I take it? I dont know because it has been given to me on strict guarantee that its confidential.
I think eventually, obviously there is nowhere else to bring it but I think its got to be information that will convince the gardai to open a new line of investigation.
Mr OCallaghan said he and Philip are distantly related by having the same great grandfather, but Mrs Cairns said she has never met him.
Philip vanished after leaving his home to return to school during his lunch hour on October 23. He had only started secondary school the previous month. Despite extensive searches of the area and other areas in Dublin no trace of the youngster was ever found.
A new lead linking his disappearance to the paedophile radio DJ Eamonn Cooke has given the ongoing investigation into his death a new direction in recent weeks, but it has not been established if Cooke was behind his disappearance.
Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacts after attending the funeral of a victim of the coup attempt in Istanbul. Photo: Getty
Irish holidaymakers travelling to France and Turkey are being urged to take extreme caution following violent incidents in both countries.
The warning from the Department of Foreign Affairs comes after a fatal terrorist attack in Nice, which killed 84 people, and a failed coup by a section of the Turkish military.
A spokesperson for the department last night said the Irish Embassy in Ankara was "monitoring developments" in Turkey following the thwarted coup on Friday evening.
However, it also urged holidaymakers visiting the troubled country to exercise a "high degree of caution".
"The situation in Ankara and Istanbul, in particular, remains tense, and there is a heightened security presence on the streets in both cities," said the spokesperson.
"There have been incidents of violence and Irish citizens should be extremely vigilant and stay informed of local developments and security advice.
"Terrorist attacks are, by their nature, random and indiscriminate and cannot be predicted in advance.
"You are advised to remain vigilant, particularly in public places that are frequented by foreigners.
"There has been serious disruption to public transport, including international and domestic air travel," it added.
Meanwhile, Irish people are being urged to exercise a "high degree" of caution when travelling to France, which is on a state of high alert following last week's massacre in Nice.
The department said that airlines had shown "flexibility in changing tickets" if customers decided to change their plans.
"Due to ongoing threats to France, the French government has reinforced its security measures and advised the public to exercise a higher level of vigilance," said a spokeswoman.
"We advise all citizens to maintain an awareness of their surroundings, remain vigilant and to follow the security advice issued by the French authorities."
Burning candles, messages and a drawing pay tribute to victims of the truck attack along the Promenade des Anglais on Bastille Day that killed scores and injured as many in Nice. Photo: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters
A minutes silence for the victims of the Nice terrorist attack will take place across France today.
At 11am Irish time the minutes silence will be marked in Dublin with the tri-colour flying at half-mast over Government and public buildings across Ireland.
President Michael D Higgins and his wife, Sabina, will sign a Book of Condolence for victims of the attack at the Mansion House in Dublin at 9.30am.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack that killed 84 and injured 200 people who were celebrating Bastille Day celebrations in Nice.
Expand Close A child mourns as people gather next to flowers and candles placed on the road for victims of the deadly Bastille Day attack in Nice. Photo: Getty / Facebook
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Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck into a crowd in the French city with many children among the 84 dead.
Hours before the attack its reported that Bouhlel sent a picture of himself to his brother where he was laughing, standing in a crowd of people in Nice.
Yesterday, those who died were remembered at prayer services and the tributes will continue today across France.
A Fianna Fail councillor has denied involvement in claims at the centre of an alleged cover-up in the disappearance of Mary Boyle.
In a statement issued on behalf of Councillor Sean McEniff on Monday, the Donegal politician emphatically and unconditionally denied the rumour and innuendo related to a video recently posted to YouTube named Mary Boyle, The Untold Story.
McEniff, who has been a Donegal County Councillor for more than 40 years, said he supports the call for a Commission of Investigation into the case of missing person Mary Boyle.
The statement says: Mr McEniff emphatically and unconditionally denies that he was the politician who allegedly contacted the Gardai in Ballyshannon at the time of the disappearance of Mary Boyle.
He has no knowledge of such a call other than what he has heard recently on what was contained in the video Mary Boyle, The Untold Story.
The documentary Mary Boyle, The Untold Story, which was created by journalist Gemmy ODoherty, was recently posted to video sharing website YouTube.
In the video it is suggested there was pressure put on local authorities by a politician to not properly investigate certain suspects in relation to the disappearance of six-year-old Mary Boyle in 1977.
In Mondays statement, Mr McEniff said he is satisfied the two former gardai interviewed in the documentary have clarified their position following the video being posted.
Mr Mc Eniff is satisfied that the two former Gardai interviewed as part of the video have recently clarified that at the time of the disappearance or in the investigation that followed neither were aware of any such alleged phonecall and that there was no impediment from their superiors in the investigation as a result.
Mr McEniff also asserted his right to a good name and said he has taken legal advice in relation to what he says are defamatory comments made both directly and by innuendo.
The statement says he will also take such steps as are necessary to protect his reputation.
He alleges that comments and statements made in relation to the issue are false, malicious and damaging to him.
The statement also says Mr McEniff will make no further public statements in relation to the issue and all further related issues will be dealt with through his solicitors.
A Dublin cafes window was destroyed on Monday morning after a car crashed into it.
There were no injuries reported following the crash, which took place at Rogers Cafe in Ballymounts M50 Business Park.
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Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB) reported that its Tallaght service responded to the crash which involved a silver Mercedes.
The service had posted the images of the crash to its Twitter account.
In the post, the service confirmed: Luckily no one was injured in the incident.
Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald: the only woman being mentioned as a potential successor to Taoiseach Enda Kenny. Photo: Caroline Quinn
When asked about her political influences, the country's second most senior office-holder recites a who's who of powerful female leaders.
Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and Mary Robinson are the first names that trip off the tongue of Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald when the question is posed to her at her office in Government Buildings.
Other less obvious influences get a mention too.
Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for the vice-presidency of the US, and Petra Kelly, the trailblazing and ultimately ill-fated German Green Party activist who was murdered by her partner, are also name-checked.
The latter two were both invited to speak in Ireland when Ms Fitzgerald was chair of the Women's Political Association in the 1980s.
"I admire anybody who survives in politics. This is a rough business. These were women in a man's world," she said.
Ms Fitzgerald is, of course, the only woman currently being mentioned as a potential successor to Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
She said it was an honour to be appointed Tanaiste and that she hopes other women will be inspired into politics.
Read More: 'Charities should look to share admin staff' - Tanaiste
Her ultimate wish is for a 50/50 split between men and women in the Oireachtas. More women "changes the tone of the debate", she said.
"Role-modelling is very important for women. When you see women breaking barriers, it encourages other women to think big."
But if the Dublin Mid-West TD, who turns 66 next month, has any leadership ambitions herself, she certainly isn't saying so now.
"I don't speculate about the future," she said. "All you have to do is look at the leadership contest in the UK and what a cast of characters we have seen.
"People who expect leadership often don't get it. People that are seen as certainties sometimes aren't so certain. So I never really speculate about it."
It is a cautious answer and Ms Fitzgerald clearly does not want to say anything which will fuel further speculation about Mr Kenny's future.
It also has the hallmarks of a politician who is seeking to stabilise affairs after inheriting a ministry where landmines have been going off all too frequently in recent years.
Feuding
Ms Fitzgerald acknowledges that her appointment as Justice Minister in 2014 came about in "unusual circumstances" following the resignation of Alan Shatter after a series of controversies.
She herself has not had an easy ride. Her election campaign, for example, was overshadowed by the outbreak of deadly gangland feuding and accusations that not enough was being done to get on top of it.
Ms Fitzgerald has had to deal with an explosion in burglaries and ongoing campaigns for the reopening of rural garda stations.
The former social worker has also had the tricky task of mending bridges with the legal professions, who were none too enamoured with her predecessor's plans for regulation of the sector.
While the gangland issue remains very live, Ms Fitzgerald can point to some success on the other fronts.
The latest CSO crime statistics show significant drops in burglaries, robberies and theft in almost every garda district, while the new legal regulator is set to arrive in three months' time.
She attributes the success on the burglary front to Operation Thor, a garda crackdown which began last November.
"The approach was multi-faceted. It was patrols, making sure the gardai had the right vehicles. It was the money to have gardai in place doing this work," she said.
Next comes the implementation of the Legal Services Regulation Act and the setting-up of an independent regulator for the legal professions.
It will begin operating on a phased basis on October 1 and will be fully operational by early to mid-2017, she said.
Ms Fitzgerald pledged that the new regulator will be "consumer-focussed" and help drive down the cost of accessing justice.
"We will have a new legal costs adjudicator structure. That is very important. You have greater opportunities for competition. You can have solicitors and barristers working together in partnerships," she said.
Some observers felt the Tanaiste "caved in" to pressure and gave considerable concessions to the legal professions to get the Act over the line.
For example, the Bar Council will retain its power to refuse membership of the Law Library to barristers in employment, partnerships or new business models, and the Law Society will retain financial and accounting oversight of solicitors.
Ms Fitzgerald acknowledged that amendments were made, but insisted these were to make the legislation better.
"I don't regard it as a cave-in. I don't accept some of the characterisation that has been made by various people," she said.
"I believe this is a historic, ground-breaking act. It delivers independent oversight and independent regulation. We have never had this before.
"So many of the changes were to improve the bill. They weren't a row-back. That characterisation was wrong as well."
Ms Fitzgerald is also hopeful that a Mediation Bill, which will be published before the end of the summer, will help provide an alternative to costly litigation in family disputes.
The bill will oblige solicitors and barristers to advise parties to consider using mediation as a means of resolving their differences.
It will also allow for court proceedings to be suspended so mediation can be entered into even after a case has begun.
Two other pieces of legislation are also high in her list of priorities this summer.
A Victims of Crime Bill, expected in the next few weeks, will make it mandatory for the gardai, the Parole Board and Prison Service to share information with victims.
This will include providing updates on the progress of investigations and informing victims when the perpetrator of a crime is being released from prison.
"Victims have been overlooked. We saw it in the O'Higgins Report. The guards have a lot more work to do in terms of giving a proper service," said Ms Fitzgerald.
"I think they are improving their service to victims.
"They are much more conscious of it. But the biggest complaint you will get from people who report an incident is: 'I didn't hear anything back. I wasn't kept up to date'."
A new Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill will also see the introduction of tough anti-child grooming laws, with sentences of up to 10 years for a range of offences. It will also criminalise the purchase of sex, with fines of up to 1,000.
Critics have argued that such legislation could make things even more difficult for people in the sex trade, driving them further underground.
But this is rejected by Ms Fitzgerald.
Evidence
"I think it is absolutely the right thing to do. I am very struck by the evidence from other countries who are doing it now," she said.
Her hope is that the bill will have a significant knock-on effect on people trafficking, which, she said, was closely linked to prostitution in Ireland.
"Women are being trafficked into towns and villages around Ireland and being sexually exploited. Sometimes they don't even know what country they are in or what town they are in," she said.
"The bill contains a stronger offence if you buy sex from someone who has been trafficked.
"That is another degree. We need to give out a message about not supporting trafficking," she said.
People lay floral tributes and messages to the victims of the attack in Nice. Photo: Kyran OBrien
Suspected jihadists face being expelled from Ireland - even if the evidence against them would be deemed insufficient to support a criminal prosecution.
Suspected jihadists face being expelled from Ireland - even if the evidence against them would be deemed insufficient to support a criminal prosecution.
Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald said the State had a right to protect its citizens and that she would "make no apology" for deporting individuals in cases where intelligence suggested they were supporting Islamic extremism.
Ms Fitzgerald also said that while Ireland was "not likely" to face attack, the authorities are keeping tabs on "a limited number" of suspected extremist sympathisers here and need to be vigilant.
She said a "lone wolf" attack, such as last week's terror atrocity in Nice, was "always a possibility".
Her comments, in an interview with the Irish Independent, come less than a fortnight after a 52-year-old man, alleged to be the foremost Irish-based facilitator of Isil fighters, was deported to Jordan, despite claims that he had previously been tortured by security services there.
The decision drew criticism from Amnesty International, which has questioned why the man was deported rather than being charged and given a fair trial in Ireland.
Ms Fitzgerald would not comment on the case specifically.
Read More: In their own chilling words - eyewitnesses recount the horror of Bastille Day massacre
However, she said such deportations were justified to protect Irish citizens.
The Tanaiste said it was "the reality of life" that intelligence was different to evidence.
"Obviously in appropriate cases you will have prosecutions and you will go the criminal route. Other times you have to take actions to protect the State," she said.
"If that means following a certain line that ends up with somebody not being in the country, and I am not referencing that case, then that is the appropriate way to go.
"A State has its right to protect its citizens and defend itself and if there are appropriate actions that we can take that result in people being safe we have to do it."
The deported Jordanian had been living in Ireland for 16 years and never faced prosecution here for terrorist offences despite claims by authorities that he was "a senior Isil operative" who had made arrangements for others outside the country to travel to fight in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
VIDEO: 'I remember seeing bodies flying everywhere' - Galway barman describes Nice massacre
The allegations against the man, who cannot be named due to a court order, came into the public domain after he mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge to his deportation.
The High Court ruled the man had failed to demonstrate he was at risk of torture in Jordan or that the minister's decision-making had been unreasonable.
Ms Fitzgerald declined to give specific figures on the number of suspected Islamic extremists living in Ireland.
"We are talking about a limited number of people. I am briefed about the situation all the time," she said.
"We know we are not on the front line. The threat is not as acute as other countries that we have seen.
"We are not under a severe threat here. It is possible, but not likely. But you can't be complacent. You have the lone wolf. This is always a possibility as well.
"I would be confident about the gardai's work on the intelligence side in relation to the small numbers."
Ms Fitzgerald said it was important to avoid the isolation of Muslim communities that had occurred in France and Belgium and she pledged to put funding into programmes to combat any potential for radicalisation.
"I think as a State we need to be doing that.
"We need to be building the links whether it is with the mosques or with the families," she said.
"The only way you will deal with that is by prevention at this stage, by the right kind of youth facilities, programmes, information and education.
"It is an area I am going to put more funding into to make sure we are doing the preventative work."
A senior Sinn Fein TD has suggested the party will have a new leader within five years.
Dublin Mid West TD Eoin O Broin rejected suggestions Gerry Adams in a hindrance to the partys development.
Will Sinn Fein change the leader of our party? Yes we will, Mr O Broin said.
"Is it going to happening the next year or two? I don't think so. Is it likely to happen in the next five years? I think that's quite possible.
Mr O Broin made the remarks at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal.
The remarks came in response to calls for Mr Adams to step down as Sinn Fein leader.
Thomas Anthony McNulty, who heads up the Virginia Mullagh branch in Cavan, claimed at the weekend that Mr Adams's is hindering the party's expansion in the republic.
The fresh questions over Mr Adams's leadership came following a meeting of senior party figures in Ballyfermot on Saturday.
The party has said it will now embark on a new strategy for the next 10 years, the same process that was announced in 2006.
Sinn Fein has rounded on a branch chairperson who broke ranks and called for the party's president Gerry Adams to step down as leader.
Thomas Anthony McNulty, who heads up the Virginia Mullagh branch in Cavan, claimed at the weekend that Mr Adams was hindering the party's expansion in the Republic.
The call for the Louth TD to step down took senior party figures by surprise and last night they insisted that Mr McNulty was in a minority.
Two opinion polls yesterday showed a drop in support for Sinn Fein.
But the party also moved to fend off any criticism of Mr Adams, who has said that all issues, including his leadership, will be discussed internally.
One senior strategist labelled Mr McNulty, who served a prison term for IRA membership, a "lone wolf".
"(We are) not sure what he's at," the source added.
But pointedly, the party's TD for Cavan/Monaghan, Caoimhghin O Caolain, said he did not what to comment on Mr McNulty's criticism when contacted by the Irish Independent.
"I haven't spoken to him. I don't know if he was speaking on behalf of himself or others. It wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment at this particular point in time," Mr O Caolain added.
Others within the party fold launched a strong defence of Mr Adams, who said on Saturday that he would not be repeating what Enda Kenny did and suggesting when he would be stepping down as leader.
The party's director of elections, Matt Carthy, said Mr McNulty's view was not shared among the wider Sinn Fein membership.
"There is no call among the wider membership for Gerry to go quickly," the Midlands-North-West MEP said.
Murat Karavult and Gokhan Bilgi, both from Istanbul, after they flew into Dublin Airport from Turkey. Photo: Frank McGrath
Above: Tipparut and Conor Brennan with their children Ollie (10) and Gemma (8) Photo: Frank McGrath
A Dublin family has spoken of their fear after being caught up in the coup attempt in Turkey.
Tipparut Brennan (39), from Castleknock, and her children, Ollie (10) and Gemma (8), were staying in a hotel near Istanbul's Ataturk Airport on Friday night when the attempted coup unfolded.
She described scenes of chaos as thousands of panicked people swarmed the airport.
At around 1am on Saturday, she heard a loud explosion. "It wasn't far off. The building was shaking," she said.
"I heard people crying in the hallways. I was afraid to go out. I didn't know what was going on," she said.
She feared that a bomb had been detonated.
However, it later emerged that a mild earthquake struck the region as the coup was unfolding, causing buildings to shake. Two explosions were also reported around the same time at Taksim Square in Istanbul.
Read More: Fears Erdogan using coup to consolidate his power amid ruthless crackdown
The family was returning home to Ireland after a visit to Ms Brennan's native Thailand and were staying in the hotel as they awaited a flight due to depart at 7am on Saturday.
While she could see the images of the coup on television, she wasn't able to make out what was going on because it was broadcast in Turkish.
Later, after the military uprising was quashed, she witnessed Turkish citizens protesting en masse at the airport in support of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, as she arrived in Dublin Airport yesterday, Ms Brennan said the ordeal was one she will never forget, adding: "I'm thrilled to be home."
But her husband Conor Brennan said he was disappointed with the Department of Foreign Affair's helpline while the crisis was unfolding. He said the information he was given "was useless".
"All they could tell me was the same information that was on Sky News," he said.
A spokeswoman from the department was unable to comment on his complaint yesterday, although she said the department did upgrade its travel advice on its website as the situation was developing.
Meanwhile, Turkish nationals Murat Karabult and Gojhan Bilgi, from Istanbul, said the coup was terrifying. "At first, we didn't know what was happening," said Mr Karabult, who flew into Dublin yesterday for a training session. "It felt like we were under attack," said Mr Bilgi.
Counselling services are being used by Irish people who were caught up in the horrific massacre in Nice.
A number of them attended the offices of the International Red Cross in the French city.
Among those to avail of counselling services was young barman Eoin Staunton (22), who witnessed the carnage along with his French girlfriend.
He said: "I tried to go back to work in the bar the morning after it happened but I found it very difficult.
"The counsellor I met in the Red Cross told me she had been to Afghanistan.
"What she told me about the effects of what happened really hit the nail on the head for me. It all felt like a dream."
Read More: In their own chilling words - eyewitnesses recount the horror of Bastille Day massacre
Eoin, from Tourmakeady, Co Mayo, and his girlfriend Lydia were among a group of friends on the Promenade des Anglais when a terrorist driving a truck began mowing down people.
"First, we could hear screaming and shouting. When we looked around, the truck was behind us," said Eoin.
"The truck came so quick. It was only 10 metres away and I saw it hitting a man.
"We ran to the right. We were so panicked we did not know where to go. We ended up down on the beach. People were freaking out. They were hysterical. I tried to calm people."
The first victim Eoin saw was the man that he had seen being struck by the truck.
"I'm still trying to absorb what happened. I go between feeling bad for what happened so many people and feeling good that I am lucky to be alive," he said.
VIDEO: 'I remember seeing bodies flying everywhere' - Galway barman describes Nice massacre
Meanwhile, Ireland's Ambassador to France, Geraldine Byrne Nason, told the Irish Independent that the embassy was still encouraging all Irish citizens to keep in touch with it if they are worried about anybody.
She added: "Sometimes in these events, people only realise 48 hours in that they haven't heard from someone, so we still want people to watch our website and contact us if there is someone that they are concerned about."
The two-vehicle crash occurred on the N4 at Cloonart, Bornacoola, Co Longford at approximately 11.50pm on Sunday night
An 18-year-old man has been killed and another young man is seriously injured after the car in which was travelling collided with a tractor.
The young man was a passenger in the car.
The two-vehicle crash occurred on the N4 at Cloonart, Bornacoola, Co Longford at approximately 11.50pm on Sunday night.
The victim was brought to Mullingar Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The driver of the car and the other two occupants were also brought to Mullingar Hospital.
One of the passengers and the driver suffered 'minor' injuries, while the third passenger is in a serious condition.
The driver of the tractor was uninjured in the collision.
This stretch of road is currently closed to facilitate an examination by Garda Forensic Collision Investigators and Diversions are in place via Roosky for traffic coming from Sligo, and Newtownforbes for traffic travelling from Dublin.
Gardai wish to appeal for witnesses to contact Longford Garda Station on 043-3350570, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
Elizabeth Lynch knows from personal experience what it means to get a second chance at life. She has also discovered that no matter how ill you become, there is always the possibility you will find your way back to good health.
Elizabeth grew up on Achill island, surrounded by natural beauty, and that no doubt influenced her decision to become an architect. Following her studies, she practised in London, New York, Tanzania and Kenya. She says that working on social housing in Africa was her most meaningful professional experience.
In 1996, Elizabeth returned to Ireland, and, four years later, she opened a practice in Castlebar, Co Mayo. She says homes are her main architectural interest, and she stresses the importance of building houses that can evolve with the ever-changing needs of the family. These days, Elizabeth's main occupation is caring for buildings owned by the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT). She is married with two children, who are now 11 and 12 years old.
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About a year ago, Elizabeth faced one of the most frightening experiences of her life. It began innocently enough, with her feeling tired. But that wasn't unexpected, her mother had been in hospital, suffering from heart failure, for some time. Then Elizabeth noticed she was occasionally short of breath. So she went to her local medical practice, where asthma was suspected. When she didn't get any better, she returned, and was seen by a different doctor, who immediately diagnosed a problem with her heart. That night, Elizabeth got worse, so she called an ambulance, and was rushed to the local hospital. "They didn't have a cardiologist and couldn't stabilise me," she explains. By now, it had become clear that Elizabeth's life was in danger and that she needed to be rushed to Galway. But medical staff weren't convinced she would survive the journey. An anaesthetist helped assess the situation. "He was quite a funny man," she remembers. "He looked at the X-rays and said, 'If I were you, I'd jump in that ambulance.'" Given that Elizabeth is a 'glass half-full' kind of person, she took his advice and was soon on her way. She says the paramedics monitored her carefully, and were very reassuring. Nonetheless, she was stunned by the reception she got at the hospital in Galway.
"Even though it was the middle of the night, there was a whole cardiac team waiting for me," Elizabeth remembers. She was diagnosed with myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the myocardium, the middle layer of the heart. This is usually caused by a virus. Doctors had to break the devastating news that she was in a "very bad way". There was fluid around her heart, in her lungs and in the lining of other organs. Unbeknown to her, Elizabeth's immediate family was alerted, and began flying back to Ireland to say their "last goodbyes".
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She was immediately medicated and learned that if the drugs failed, she could end up on life support, needing transplants. It was a terrifying situation. But when she woke next morning, a medical miracle had occurred. "Unbelievably, the drugs they had given me managed to cause six litres of fluid to leave my body. I said it must be due to the fact that I was so young. But they said, 'No, the last person with this condition ended up on life support, while another one had died'. And both were even younger than me."
Later, when doctors asked her why she hadn't been alerted that something was amiss when she had put on weight (because of the build-up of fluid) she explained she had been so busy attending to her mother, while looking after her children and working, that she hadn't been eating properly. So a little extra weight was to be expected. No doubt Elizabeth's previous healthy lifestyle did stand her in good stead when it came to the crunch. She had always been active, especially during visits to Achill. And if further proof was needed, she was a member of the lifeboat crew on the island. "They check you out medically," Elizabeth explains. "The last thing they want is another distressed person on their hands during an emergency."
The upshot of all this was that, over time, and with excellent medical interventions, permanent damage to her heart was limited to just 10pc of the organ. "I seem to have made a good recovery," she says, smiling broadly. Elizabeth remained in the hospital's cardiac unit for three weeks. During that time, she watched people who were generally a good deal older than her, coming and going. Four days after her own discharge, her much-loved mother passed away. It was an exceedingly emotional time for everyone concerned. "A lot of it has to do with your attitude," says Elizabeth stoically. "I am a practical person. I had a funeral to organise. I did mum's make-up before we laid her out at home in Achill; of course, we had the family helping out too." In spite of all that was going on, Elizabeth's recovery continued to hold firm.
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Soon after her ordeal, her cardiologist recommended that Elizabeth should start exercising. And even though she had been used to long, strenuous, beach walks, she was advised to get a treadmill and to start at the beginning again.
"He wanted me to exercise gently at first, and to do so regularly, with no excuses, like the rain," Elizabeth explains. "So I went on DoneDeal and bought myself a treadmill, and like any good woman, I bought the gym gear too." She was also introduced to the Heart Failure Clinic in Galway, and is delighted to have the support and back-up it provides. "As the amount of drugs I am taking are reduced, they are guiding me through the process, explaining how it all works, step by step," says Elizabeth. They're constantly checking what is going on, and monitoring me."
She has the number of the clinic's chief heart-failure nurse in her mobile phone, and is comforted just knowing she can access help at any time. She is also full of praise for her GP, Edward King. "He is brilliant and continues to look after my father and me," she says.
Elizabeth urges everyone to take full responsibility for their health. "It doesn't matter how fit you feel," she says. "There's always the possibility something will get you. So be vigilant. I was lucky, because I had such an astute GP."
For more information about heart failure, see Croi.ie or heartbeat-trust.ie. This is an initiative of the Heart Failure Patient Alliance, a partnership between Croi, the West of Ireland Cardiac Foundation; and the Heartbeat Trust, a national heart-failure charity
Our giddy guru knows how to lay it on thick when it comes to all things beauty. From foundation to French kissing, our beauty buff has the usual mix of facts and fun . . .
Triona's trends
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Thick isn't a bad thing, you know! My friend Melanie always says I have great, big, country hair! She reckons girls from the country always have much thicker hair, but I actually have lots of fine hair, which is a very Irish thing, apparently.
So I like to wash my hair with a shampoo that will encourage fullness, such as Pantene Volume and Body, above, 4.19. Then I blast my hair until it's damp with my Dyson Supersonic hairdryer, below, 399 from Arnotts. I just can't get enough of this hairdryer. Honestly, it has encouraged me to blow-dry my own hair at home much more.
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Anyhoo, next I apply a little Pantene Repair and Protect Dry Oil, 10.19, through my hair to smooth the cuticles and maximise shine. I use a large round brush to blow-dry my hair - making sure to pull each section of hair upwards as I am drying it, to create volume. I also point the hairdryer's nozzle downwards, to smooth the hair shaft.
When the volume has been created and the hair is dry, I take random sections, and I use a large tongs to wave the hair away from my face. I leave the ends out to create a more relaxed movement in the hair.
Then I leave my hair to cool for at least 20 minutes before gently running my fingers through it to loosen up the wave. I finish off with Pantene Perfect Volume Hairspray, below 5.39.
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Triona's trick
Recently, I was lucky enough to have lunch with Michael Bronner, grandson of the Dr Bronner, and the president of the cult beauty brand, Dr Bronner's. I told him of how my kiddies have very sensitive skin and how I use Dr Bronner's Castile Liquid Soap, from 8.70, to wash their clothes, and now they don't have bumps, redness or a rash.
Forever young
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Will likes to tell people he's a single dad with, em, three kids. The pup! Truth is, Will is six years younger than me, but nobody ever guesses, as he's quite mature and I'm so flipping immature.
But while I might act younger than my years, my looks might betray my real age, and one of the things I always tell peeps to do, in an effort to hold back the years, is use SPF.
In fact, a recent study for Olay revealed that protected skin looked 20 years younger than skin that had been damaged by UV rays.
So I'm always on the lookout for a day cream with enough sun protection for the summer months, and this new one from Olay, Regenerist 3 Point Day Cream SPF 30 Moisturiser, above, 39.99, is a winner. I'm also holding it in my photograph, above. Not only does this moisturiser have sun protection, it also has all the anti-ageing qualities of the original Regenerist, and it's also a great base under my foundation. #win
Beauty duty
Calling all Galway gals! I recently popped into the Beauty Quarters in Oranmore, where the proprietor, Melissa Naughton - who is a dead ringer for actress Hilary Duff, right - showed me round her chic salon.
They have the best of the best. They offer Waxperts waxing, Bellamianta spray tanning - the tan I'm always harping on about, as it really suits Irish skintones; and they use Jan Marini skincare, which gives great results.
The staff also told me how they're now doing semi-permanent make-up; the eyebrows are proving to be the most popular area to have done.
The Beauty Quarters, Unit 8 Howley Sq, Main St, Oranmore, Co Galway, tel: (091) 788-222, or see beauty-quarters.com
Triona's most wanted
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I'm sitting here typing this, with Will roaring laughing at me. He says it looks like I'm trying to French kiss myself! Eh, nothing new there, either!
What happened is, I put my fave new lippie on - more of that later - and decided to brush my hair as well and drink my coffee, and in the middle of all that, I somehow got a hair in my mouth. So I've been swirling my tongue around my mouth, as you do, trying to locate the flipping hair, looking like a loony!
Right, I had to just grab it off my tongue with my hands, which has resulted in even more hysterical laughter from himself, but now, at least, I'm ready to tell you about the new lippie!
If you only buy one new lipstick this summer, make it one of the new Urban Decay Vice Lipsticks, 19.50. I'm totally addicted.
There are 100 shades and six different finishes from matte to shimmer to choose from - I know it's a cliche, but there's something for everyone.
My go-to daytime shade is Backtalk, above. It's the perfect pink for just a hint of colour, in a Comfort Matte formula that's loaded with nourishing ingredients, which leave my lips soft and conditioned.
Just perfect for a spot of French kissing on yourself! I know, I know! #mwah
Cult product
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Max Factor Miracle Touch Foundation, above, 17.99, is the biz! It instantly smooths the look and texture of my skin without settling into my, eh, frinkles - that's fun-induced wrinkles - or fine lines, as they're better known.
It transforms from solid to liquid on contact with the skin, and I use a large brush and my fingertips to blend it. It offers incredible coverage - it even hides tattoos, as MUA Lyndsey Cavanagh recently told me.
Customers who have already booked their holidays for the coming weeks and months will also be told their accommodation has been cancelled (Stock picture)
The country's 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 Aviation Commission 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 Ireland's 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, it's 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. It's 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: "We're devastated and we don't know if we will be able to go on holidays anymore."
Holidaymakers who booked their holidays with the bust UK travel agency Lowcostholidays said they have lost thousands of euro following the companys closure on Friday evening.
Tom Murphy who is already on his holidays told Newstalk Breakfast that he is out 1600 after booking his holiday with the travel agency.
Yesterday evening we were going into town for lunch and our daughter rang to tell us that the company had gone bust," Mr Murphy said.
"Our flights were booked and paid for but wed have to arrive at the hotel and wed have to pay for the hotel again so were down about 1600. Somebody out there has our money; somebody out there knows where it is. How do we get it back?
Mary Geary from Cork told RTEs Morning Ireland that she lost 1100 on a holiday to Majorca that she booked in September for her and her boyfriend.
I woke up on Saturday morning and a friend of mine had sent me a link that she saw on Facebook and it said that Lowcostholidays had gone bust. I was dumbfounded. I was in shock because have used them numerous times over the last three or four years and I never had any problems and I didnt expect this to happen, she said.
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I tried to get information and thought maybe emails had come through but we heard nothing whatsoever from the company.
"We spent 1100 and Im very doubtful Ill get any of it back because on the fine print at the bottom of the email from Lowcostholidays it says that unless its stated in your travel insurance that if a company goes bust I mightnt get anything from them.
"I rang my bank this morning even the rigmarole that we have to go through there to even try make a claim.
Im disappointed its my birthday in September and it was the first proper holiday for my boyfriend and me and to be honest the thought of losing 1100 is very frustrating, she said.
Meave from Galway also called into Morning Ireland to say she doubts shell get refunded the 820 she spent on a Lowcostholiday to Salou in October.
It would have been my first holiday in seven years and our first family holiday. The whole holiday including the insurance they gave me was 820. I dont think Ill get to see any of that money back and Im on disability allowance as well. Id like to be compensated because thats an awful lot of money, she said.
Pat Dawson the CEO of the Irish Travel Agency Association said that people who booked full holidays with Lowcostholidays will be able to reclaim their money.
Dawson told RTEs Morning Ireland that if you booked a full holiday with flights and a hotel room through travel agents that customers are covered.
Anybody booked with Lowcostholidays can go to aviationreg.ie and they will have a form to claim money back so theyre covered, he said.
He said people may have to rebook their accommodation as its likely that their bookings under Lowcostholidays will be cancelled but that people can claim the payment through the The Commission for Aviation Regulation.
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He explained that people who used Lowcostbeds which are part of the group but sold beds only are not covered under the aviation bond but that people should check with their credit card companies or travel agencies to see if theyre covered.
They could (end up paying twice) because theres no legislation to cover bed banks and accommodation only providers. Theyre not covered but Id advise them to talk to their credit card companies and they certainly should have some cover. They should be able to stop the payment going through.
Id urge people to contact the commission of aviation. They will be trained to sort many of these problems out but more importantly the people who are members of travel agents those members have contacted the vast majority of their customers and theyre sorted out because the travel agents are looking after them.
He said that Lowcostholidays carry 90,000 people in 12 months out of Ireland and that up to 15,000 people are likely to be impacted by the travel agents closure in the next three weeks.
The very glamorous Sadie Parker, 83, has six children and 13 grandchildren ranging in age from adult down to one-year-old Dessie. The eldest grandchild, event manager Sarah May Clarke, is thrilled to have a special relationship with someone so wise and caring.
"All of my other grandparents passed away when I was young, and my nana is like my friend," says Sarah May, 26. "We hang out all the time and have a really good time together. Nana tells me all of her stories about old boyfriends and everything - she had them all running after her. For her 80th birthday we went to see Soul Sisters at Bord Gais Energy Theatre, which was about Tina Turner, and the two of us were up dancing."
Sarah May is the daughter of chef Derry Clarke and his wife Sallyanne, the proprietors of Michelin-starred restaurant l'Ecrivain. They opened the restaurant nine months before Sarah May was born, and Sadie helped out hugely with minding her and her younger brother Andrew, particularly at weekends.
"Nana was amazing and always gave us her full attention, and looking back now, I don't know how she had the patience," laughs the pretty Sarah May. "She let us turn her sitting-room into a fort, and we would forget she was an adult because she was always playing games with us. She was so cool, and Andrew and I really enjoyed going to her house."
Interestingly, Sadie and Sallyanne were also officially christened Sarah. Sadie wanted to call her eldest daughter Sallyanne, which was vetoed by the officiating priest, who insisted on Sarah Anne. Sarah May was named after both of her grandmothers, and Sadie affectionately describes her as "a holy terror, who is just herself". She ticks her off for smoking, which is the one piece of advice Sarah May doesn't heed - yet!
"Nana is loving, caring, kind and generous, and if there is something wrong, she will know straight away and is really good at cheering you up," says Sarah May. "She's really funny and very inquisitive and direct, and she makes me laugh because she cuts out the small talk and gets straight to the point. I'm very lucky to have her, as she's amazing and gives me great advice."
Sadie lived on New Street in the Liberties area of Dublin until she was five, and was the youngest of the late Sarah and James Malone's nine children - they had 13 but not all survived. The family then moved to Crumlin and Sadie attended the Presentation schools in Warrenmount School. Unusually for that time, she stayed on until she was 18.
After school, she worked as a bookkeeper and was office supervisor at Prescott's dry-cleaners for 13 years. She married Desmond Parker at 29, and they had their first two children, Sallyanne and Tom, before emigrating to Chicago for over four years, where Desmond's two brothers were living. They had two children there, Joycelyn and James, and Margaret and Bernard were born when they returned to live in Crumlin.
At that point, they bought a combined drapery shop and house on Crumlin Road, and many people will remember that Sadie opened it as a boutique called Sallyanne's, which she ran successfully for years. They moved then to Kimmage, but sadly Desmond passed away 20 years ago.
Sadie is an avid bridge player, and all her beloved children and grandchildren are hugely important to her.
Sadie was devastated when Sarah May's brother Andrew passed away through suicide aged 16 in December 2012. "Andrew was wonderful and he gave us so much pleasure," says Sadie. "I used to mind him even more than Sarah May, because I'd drop him to school and pick him up."
Sarah May says that Sadie's support was amazing, and her strength held everyone together at such a truly heartbreaking time. "It was really hard for Nana as it was hurting her just as much as us, but she wanted to look after her baby, my mum, and keep strong for everyone in the family," she says. "We were all in our own heads dealing with grief, and I don't know if we were as good at giving support back to her. My grandmother has been through so much, but I think losing her grandson was one thing she never thought she would see in her life."
Sarah May completed a degree in event management and marketing after school, and then combined working at the restaurant with production and operation roles on major events like Taste of Dublin and Taste of Diffusion. She recently went travelling for five months through Asia, New Zealand and Australia, which she says was the most amazing experience ever, and is going to the UK for the rest of the summer to work on Carfest. After that, she's off to Australia in October, where she hopes to get work at events and festivals.
When she is away, Sarah May misses her family very much, but keeps in touch by phone and Skype. Sadie chats to her weekly and also follows her adventures on Facebook, and is a great believer that young people should travel and see the world. "I think it's very good for her, and I just hope that she will go to Australia, sow her wild oats and then come home," says Sadie. "When I'm sick or need anything, Sarah May is always there for me. A few years ago, I tripped and broke my arm and she was so good to me. She is unbelievably talented and has an awful lot going for her, and of course I'm very proud of her."
www.lecrivain.com
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John Downing Opinion New British prime minister Rishi Sunaks succession proves an important milestone in British political inclusivity
There is an old saying in British politics that goes: The right looks for converts while the left seeks out traitors. It comes to mind when one reflects upon the election of Rishi Sunak as the UKs first non-white prime minister in a party traditionally seen as most opposed to mass immigration and the dilution of national identity via multiculturalism.
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Mary Kenny Opinion If men want to yammer on about sport, then let them it helps them connect emotionally
I was travelling on a train from Dublin to Cork, and near me sat two Dublin men. Throughout the entire journey they managed to keep up a fluent dialogue about English football teams. From Aston Villa to Sheffield Wednesday, from Crystal Palace to Manchester City the conversation flowed eloquently. I was in awe at the minutiae of their knowledge and expertise. And if the topic of their discourse lacked a certain variety, it was nonetheless better than sitting in sullen silence, or glued to their phones.
In Turkey, shortly after midnight local time on Saturday, tanks moved onto the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. The sound of gunfire was heard across both cities and military jets streaked across the night sky over both cities. An old-style military coup attempt was under way.
By morning, the coup was effectively over, the ringleaders were rounded up and more than 6,000 people are now detained.
Large sections of the judiciary seem to have been removed as the finger is pointed at Fethullah Gulen and his movement.
At this stage, it's unclear whether Turkey might reintroduce the death penalty as it faces threats on all sides and from within.
What is most significant from a Western perspective was that all sides in Turkey, be they pro- or anti-President Erdogan, seemed totally opposed to the coup.
It simply didn't have support from the start.
Turkey remains on a high state of alert as the implications of this coup attempt for the wider security of the region come into sharp focus.
By Saturday morning, when it was clear that the coup had failed, Europe and the West looked on with utter relief. Had this gone the wrong way, the outcome for Turkey and indeed for the delicate balance of power in the war-torn Middle East could have been devastating.
What's obvious is that the Turkish people want to change their government exclusively by means of the ballot box. It was a test of Turkish democracy and the fact the opposition sided with the government is a healthy sign for the long-term.
That's not to say that Turkey is a liberal democracy. Nobody can argue that it is. But one unintended consequence of the coup's failure may well be that it helped to bind the country together in a lasting way.
Yes, of course Turkey must have a strong relationship with Europe, but it must also show that it understands our values of democracy and human rights. Its embryonic commitment to democracy took a big step forward this weekend.
Turkey is too big and too important to the EU for these events not to be significant to all our lives. It's a regional power player situated between the Middle East and Europe. A type of enormous economic and military buffer. A crucial player in the longer term sustainability of Europe, from the migration issues across the Mediterranean to our collective economy.
The instigators of the coup made a fatal error. They failed to neutralise senior politicians. The president called on citizens to take to the streets to save his government. The streets of Istanbul and Ankara, which had been almost empty, suddenly became crowded with cars and protesters. Crucially for the government, the police appear to have stayed loyal.
Turkey has had a long history of military coups and political interventions by the military. The military sees itself as the guardian of Turkey's constitution and the secular legacy of Turkey's national hero, Kemal Ataturk. President Erdogan and his Islamist-leaning AK Party have been setting a different political direction for Turkey.
He is very much in the nationalist authoritarian mould of political leaders.
In many respects, he resembles President Putin of Russia. He has clamped down hard on political dissent and gradually introduced extremely oppressive media controls. These are big issues for the EU.
In recent years, Erdogan has been projecting himself as a regional strongman. Turkey, of course, has serious internal political tensions associated with its Kurdish minority population. The government also took a strong anti-Assad stand, allowing arms supplies and other supports to flow to dissident groups inside Syria. Turkey also allowed its country to be used as a transition route for jihadi fighters from all over Europe. In recent months, Turkey itself has become a target for Isil terror attacks.
As a member of Nato, Turkey has the largest standing army of any Nato country. Of necessity, Turkey is also a partner of the EU in controlling the flow of refugees and economic migrants coming into Europe. Its government has driven a hard bargain with the EU in recent months.
If anything, the failed coup is likely to increase the authority of the president.
The Turkish economy, which is heavily dependent on the tourist sector, will be badly hit by recent events - putting jobs and livelihoods at risk.
The greater risk is that Turkey may be sucked into the wider instability that is now such a feature of the Middle East.
A stable Turkey is of critical concern to the EU. Turkey has a population of 80 million people. If Turkey became destabilised, it would pose a massive danger to the EU and the entire region. Dialogue and deal-making must continue with Turkey.
During the British EU referendum, one of the scares raised was the possible accession of Turkey to the EU. And while Europe will continue to engage on the question of Turkey joining the EU, the weekend's events have made that even more remote then it was before.
Turkey will not be joining the EU anytime soon.
Brian Hayes is a Fine Gael MEP
Nadia Forde says her grandmother Bernadette is a huge influence on her, and is 'the glue that holds the family together'. Photo: David Conachy
Nadia Forde's parents sadly broke up when she was eight years of age. She was initially shuttled between her two aunties - Cindy in Clontarf and Beverly in Leopardstown. Nadia and her brother Stephen eventually made a permanent home with their granny, Bernadette Paulozzi in Clontarf.
Nadia describes Bernadette as "the glue that holds the family together. I think every family member is always afraid of what 'Nana' might say ... We all hold her opinion in high regard. She's just been that one constant in my life since I've been born, so I guess that's why she's the pillar of my family and I think my brother and other family members would agree."
I had the pleasure of meeting Bernadette with Nadia during one fun evening in Dublin. Bernadette was quite the character, full of life, full of joie de vivre. "My nana leaves a huge impression on everyone," Nadia told me proudly.
"My dad re-married. And my mum was not in a position to look after us. My nana is a saint," Nadia also told me during an interview in the Bluebird Cafe on the King's Road in Chelsea in the summer of 2014.
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I ring Nadia in Japan and ask her what impression her nana has made on her, and more importantly, on her life.
"Just to fight," she says. "To keep going."
Does she owe her life to her nana?
"Yes. To the way my life is now - yes."
Earlier this year, Nadia relocated to Tokyo with her boyfriend, rugby player Dominic Day. "I'm just spending time in Japan with my boyfriend, that's all really," she says.
She says of Bernadette, "Maybe the best way to say it is my nan took over the responsibilities of raising me and my brother when I was eight years old."
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The model, who was born on May 3, 1989, in Dublin's Rotunda Hospital, laughs loudly down the phone from her new home in East Asia when I ask her if she would like to be a grandmother herself one day in the future. "Definitely, but I really like living day to day; I don't want to wish life away, but hopefully I will be a gran myself," she says.
The 27-year-old says that her nana has experienced a lot in the past 70 years. "Marriages, divorce - when it was really frowned upon in Ireland - she's also experienced losing her daughter," Nadia says, referring to her own mum Berenice (who passed away in June, 2015, after battling lymphoma cancer for several years). Bernadette's daughter dying before her, Nadia says, "goes against natural order of life. So that, in particular, has been a difficult thing to come to terms with." (Obviously this was tremendously difficult for Nadia to come to terms with as well.)
I ask Nadia to tell me about the day-to-day routine with her nana growing up. Did Bernadette make her breakfast, bring her to school, pick her up, make her tea, put her to bed etc?
"Oh yeah," exclaims Nadia," she used to burst into my room first thing in the morning singing at the top of her lungs! That was my alarm clock for school. She would leave for work, and I'd normally see her late afternoon when she'd come home. My aunty was heavily involved too, so she made a lot of our dinners."
So what kind of woman is Bernadette Paulozzi?
"She's loving, glamorous, fiercely protective, and stubborn," Nadia says. And she believes she has "definitely" inherited that quality from her.
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"She's sensitive yet she's pretty much the head of our family. She's also hilarious, even when she's not trying to be funny," Nadia says.
"She's honestly hilarious. She doesn't even try to be. Its just how she lives her life. My nana literally has no filter. She'll call me up to tell me if she didn't like my outfit that she might have seen a picture of me in, and when I'm home visiting her she sneaks into my suitcases and 'reorganises' it while throwing out the pieces that she hates!" Nadia laughs.
"By the way, she has no idea I'm onto her. I always quietly go to the garage; and low and behold there's the dress or top I was missing. She is fiercely protective of all her family and even of my friends, if she sees anything or reads anything I'm the one who needs to tell her it's all ok. I think she's starting to realise now how it works though."
Nadia's illustrious modelling career is all down to one woman. No prizes for guessing which.
"It's actually all because of my nana!" Nadia roars with delight down the blower from Japan. "We were shopping for my communion dress, so I was about seven years old. The lady who owned the shop asked my nan if I could be part of her photoshoot in her shop ads (store windows and a spread in Social and Personal magazine). My nana agreed and from that job I got an agency and that was it. I used to model a couple of times a year... all throughout school and then I signed with Assets at 16. It was a great way to pay for my singing and dance classes so I enjoyed modelling at that age. It was like playing dress-up," says Nadia, who went on to become one of Ireland's top models as well as appearing on ITV's I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in November 2014, to say nothing of Nadia Goes To Hollywood on TV3 also that year.
Her modelling career aside, how large was her nana's influence on Nadia's life.
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"A huge influence. She pretty much raised me," Nadia continues, "so even now I find myself stopping mid sentence and just thinking, 'Jesus I've turned into my nana'. I wouldn't have it any other way, though.
"I've a few funny stories about nana," Nadia says. "Like the time I sang the national anthem at the Ireland game against Sweden. . ." Nadia recalls of September 2013, when she sang Amhran na bhFiann before the Ireland v Sweden game. "She turned up in a bright yellow jacket [Sweden colours] and she was sat next to the president [Michael D Higgins].. Not her finest fashion choice!
"But on a more serious note," Nadia adds, "my nana had raised her three kids and suddenly found herself raising me and my brother and we have pretty much taken up the last 25 years of her life. We have been her priority when she could've easily walked away from the responsibility. I don't think it ever even crossed her mind; she was just there, constantly." "Which," Nadia says, "is more than any child could ask for."
What has Nadia learned about life from her gran?
"One thing I've learnt from her is never give up, professionally or personally. My nana has experienced a lot of highs and lows in her life but she's never let it stop her. She just keeps going, keeps herself busy, learns the lesson and moves on. Sometimes when I reach moments in my life where I could choose to quit, she's the first one to tell me otherwise. Even if I haven't discussed anything with her, she'll call me and already know what's going on."
An Australian TV presenter called for an end to Muslim immigration saying the more Muslims we import, the more danger we are in.
Sonia Kruger, the host of Channel Nines The Voice and Today Extra was discussing the massacre in Nice when she said she agreed with Donald Trumps stance on immigration.
There is a correlation between the number of people in a country who are Muslim and the number of terrorist attacks, she said live on air.
I have a lot of very good friends who are Muslim, who are peace-loving, who are beautiful people, but there are fanatics.
Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia. I want to feel safe and I want to see freedom of speech.
Kruger was backed by Channel Nine which released a statement citing freedom of speech.
Nines view is that we believe in freedom of speech and the Mixed Grill segment on the Today show is a place where that happens. Sonia, [and the other presenters] David and Lisa each expressed a variety of opinions on the show this morning.
I want to feel safe, as all of our citizens do when they go out to celebrate Australia Day, and Id like to see freedom of speech, Kruger said.
I support you Sonia Kruger. Finally someone has had the courage to voice the fears of many. Fiona Brown (@fionaewestone) July 18, 2016
Her remarks were challenged by her co-host, David Campbell, who said: Id like to see freedom of religion as well, as well as freedom of speech. They both go hand in hand.
Kruger said the victims of Nice would agree with her and as a mother she felt it was vital to be able to discuss the issue.
@SoniaKruger by making generalisations, you're being racist. By preaching hate, you're causing division. Spread love and acceptance. Caitlin Tait (@caitlin_tait) July 18, 2016
I would venture that if you spoke to the parents of those children killed in Nice, they would be of the same opinion.
The reaction to her comments on Twitter were mixed with some users calling her "brave" and others slamming her for being "intolerant".
China has said it is closing off part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week.
The move comes days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainan's maritime administration said an area south-east of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defence Ministry had no immediate comment.
The announcement came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the US Navy's top admiral to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to increase interactions between the two militaries.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson is meeting China's navy commander, Admiral Wu Shengli, during his trip to Beijing and the port city of Qingdao which began on Sunday. He is also scheduled to visit the navy's submarine academy, tour China's first aircraft carrier and discuss ongoing Rim of the Pacific military drills.
China rejected last Tuesday's ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are "China's inherent territory", and said it could declare an air defence identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on the disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippines fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that America should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Mr Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunal's decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect the country's economy as well as ties with treaty ally the United States.
Mr Duterte has been more reconciliatory with China compared with his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. China's navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
China's island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, US warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the US of threatening its national security.
AP
A man walks past Taksim Monument in Istanbul, Turkey, as warplanes continue to patrol the skies following Friday's failed coup (AP)
The purging of thousands of alleged plotters of a failed coup in Turkey has raised tensions between the country's leaders and the west.
US and European officials are urging restraint, while Ankara insists Washington should extradite an exile accused of orchestrating the plot.
Turkish authorities have dismissed nearly 9,000 police officers, public officials and others, while detaining thousands more alleged to have been involved in Friday night's attempted coup.
Former air force commander Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the uprising, was placed under arrest following questioning by a magistrate along with 25 other suspects, reports said.
Mr Ozturk, who has denied involvement and insisted he had tried to suppress the rebellion, appeared in a video looking bruised, with a bandage over his ear.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to rule out bringing back the death penalty, telling broadcaster CNN: "There is a clear crime of treason."
He added that it would be up to parliament to make the decision.
Reports claimed 8,777 employees attached to the interior ministry were sacked, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers.
Other media reports said police, military police and members of the coast guard were also removed from duty.
During the uprising by a faction of the military, warplanes fired on government buildings and tanks rolled into the streets of major cities before the rebellion was put down by forces loyal to the government and civilians who took to the streets.
The military top brass did not support the coup.
Prime minister Binali Yildirim said 232 people - 208 government supporters he called "martyrs", as well as 24 coup plotters - died in the unrest.
His voice cracked and he wept as he spoke with reporters after a Cabinet meeting and repeated a question his grandson had put to him: "Why are they killing people?"
Mr Yildirim said he had no answer, but that Turkey would make the coup plotters answer "in such a way that the whole world will see".
As western officials expressed alarm at the rapid round-up of so many by their key Nato ally, Turkish government officials explained that the plotters in the military had been under investigation and launched their poorly-planned operation out of panic.
The swift move against so many reflected the prior investigation, the government said.
It alleged the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former Erdogan ally who lives in exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, and espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy.
Mr Erdogan has often accused Mr Gulen of trying to overthrow the government, and Turkey has demanded his extradition, labelling his movement a terrorist organisation and putting him on trial in absentia.
Mr Gulen strongly denies the government's charges and has suggested that Friday's attempted coup could have been staged, as a pretext for the government to seize even more power.
US officials have said that the US will consider extraditing Mr Gulen, if the Turkish government offers evidence that he was involved in the plot or committed crimes.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the US would follow procedures in a decades-old extradition treaty and called Turkish charges that the US was harbouring Gulen "factually incorrect".
Mr Yildirim said the normal US legal processes would not be good enough.
He said: "We would be disillusioned and would question our friendship if our friends were to say to us, 'Show us the evidence,' despite all the efforts ... to eradicate the elected government and the national will of a country."
He also added that the justice ministry is preparing documents to send to the United States.
Over the weekend, Turkey responded to the coup attempt by rounding up some 6,000 people, including hundreds of judges and prosecutors.
Reacting to the large number of arrests in the military and the judiciary, as well as Mr Erdogan's suggestion that Turkey could bring back the death penalty, western officials are urging Turkey to maintain the rule of law.
AP
Disgruntled delegates are trying to force a state-by-state vote at the Republican National Convention to deny Donald Trump the presidential nomination
Republicans have opened their convention to nominate Donald Trump for US president as dissident delegates pursued one last chance to deny the front-runner.
A day after a deadly ambush of police in Louisiana, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus welcomed delegates to the convention hall with a brief acknowledgement of the "troubling times" swirling outside. The chairman called for a moment of silence out of respect for "genuine heroes" in law enforcement.
"Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings," he said.
Weeks of racial tensions and violence are shadowing the Republicans' long-awaited showcase of their presidential pick and putting both participants and the convention city on alert.
True to form, Mr Trump himself provided the first curveball of the week, announcing he will make an unexpected swing to the convention hall on Monday night to introduce his wife, Melania, on the first night of speeches.
"I want to watch," Mr Trump said on Fox News. "It is going to be very exciting."
This week will belong to Mr Trump - his chance to stand at the pinnacle of American politics in a triumph that few could have imagined when the New York billionaire entered the race a year ago. He will take on Democrat Hillary Clinton in November.
The line-up of speakers is aimed at showing off the man behind the mogul, his advisers say. Several family members and friends are slated to speak to his character and reveal a side of Mr Trump that Americans may not know.
Along with Melania Trump, Monday's opening night speeches include a mix of figures linked broadly under the theme of "Make America Safe Again." They include Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, as well as immigration advocates, a Marine who fought in the Benghazi attack and entertainers, including actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty.
However, the speakers highlight the wedge Mr Trump's candidacy has driven through the Republican party.
Many Republican leaders, party elders and rising stars have steered clear of Cleveland. Others have come to meet with donors and rank-and-file but have kept heir distance from the main event.
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez came to Cleveland but had no role on the programme.
When House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates on Monday morning, he made no mention of Mr Trump in his remarks.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, a vanquished Trump rival, planned several public appearances but was not going to step inside the Quicken Loans Arena.
Top Trump adviser Paul Manafort called Mr Kasich's behaviour "petulant" and he brushed off the absence of former presidents George HW Bush and George W Bush.
"Certainly the Bush family, we would have liked to have had them. They're part of the past. We're dealing with the future."
"When we leave here, by and large, it's going to be a united Republican Party," he said.
That remained to be seen. Disaffected delegates continued to try to derail Mr Trump.
All delegates are due to vote on Monday afternoon on the rules that will govern the convention week, and insurgent delegates are circulating a petition to force a state-by-state vote - a threat to disrupt floor proceedings even if it fails.
Some rebellious delegates are threatening to walk out.
"We won't sit around and coronate a king," said Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, who like many insurgents has backed vanquished contender Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Mr Trump's campaign dismissed the effort.
"It's not a movement," Mr Manafort said. "It's some rogue, recalcitrant delegates."
The roll call vote on the nomination is expected on Tuesday, with Mr Trump scheduled to close the convention with an acceptance speech late on Thursday.
Mr Trump is gaining the nomination during a summer of unsettling violence at home and abroad. In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France. The killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, early on Sunday added to the sense of a nation on edge.
Mr Trump has sought to capitalise on the mood by casting himself as the "law and order candidate" and blasting Democrats for weak leadership in a crisis.
On Monday, he quickly linked the shooter to "radical Islam," despite early indications the man had no known ties to any extremist group.
Former Marine Gavin Eugene Long "seems to be a member of that group also. It seems to be something going on there," Mr Trump said on Fox News.
Campaigning in Cincinnati on Monday afternoon, Democrat Mrs Clinton called for an end to the "madness," saying that if elected she would use all her powers to hold those who kill police officers legally accountable.
"They represent the rule of law itself. If you take aim at that and at them, you take aim at all of us," Mrs Clinton told civil rights activists at the annual convention of the NAACP. "There can be no justification, no looking the other way."
Mrs Clinton's campaign is spending about one million US dollars (754,000) on TV ads in Ohio this week, according to Kantar Media's campaign advertising tracker.
Several hundred Donald Trump supporters gathered on Monday for the first major pro-Trump rally in the convention city.
A few openly carried guns as allowed under Ohio law. The president of the police union had asked Mr Kasich to suspend the law allowing gun owners to carry firearms in plain sight. But Mr Kasich said he does not have that authority.
AP
Up to 15 people have been injured after a man with an axe went on the rampage on a German train.
The incident happened on the railway line between Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt, central Germany.
A police spokesman said between 10 and 15 people have been injured, some critically.
Officers said some of the victims' injuries were life threatening.
ATTAQUE ALLEMAGNE : Suivi - L'homme qui a attaque a la hache les passagers d'un train a Wurzburg a ete abattu. pic.twitter.com/0CsPkfL5ib Infos Francaises (@InfosFrancaises) July 18, 2016
Local media is reporting that the perpetrator was shot dead by police as he attempted to flee the scene.
A special police task force was sent to the area to catch the kliller.
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The Bavarian Interior Minister has confirmed that the attacker a 17-year-old Afghan refugee who was living in the town of Ochsenfurt, Bavaria's interior minister said.
Joachim Herrmann told public broadcaster ARD that the young man, who was later shot dead by police, appeared to have made his way to Germany as an unaccompanied minor. Herrmann declined to speculate about the motive for the attack.
Polizei will sich jeden Moment bei meinem Kollegen melden. Noch ist kein Amoklauf bestatigt. #wurzburg pic.twitter.com/CLZtTgPpXB Christian Huther (@huethi89) July 18, 2016
A police spokesman confirmed that there are currently three people critically injured, one has suffered non-life threatening injuries and there were 14 other passengers on the train. They are being treated for shock and therefore count as injured.
Authorities have organised an alternative bus route for passengers as the train line between Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt has temporarily been shut down.
A seven-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 lorry attack has finally been identified.
A seven-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 lorry attack has finally been identified.
The spokeswoman of Lenval children's hospital in Nice, Stephanie Simpson, said yesterday the boy was Romanian and had been visiting Nice with his parents, who remain missing.
Read More: Lives and families destroyed by hate
The boy's grandmother travelled from Germany to make the identification, after a relative in Nice reported the family missing.
The boy was among six children still in hospital after the attack, Ms Simpson said. She said the boy was on artificial respiration and had not undergone any surgery. Ms Simpson said "there is still hope he is going to wake up".
Sixteen people killed remain unidentified, according to French authorities. The French government said 84 people were killed and 202 injured in the attack on Thursday night, including many tourists from multiple countries.
An official working at a special victims' centre in Nice told reporters that 16 bodies remain unidentified, and forensic experts are working with DNA samples to determine their identities. Three students on a European study programme - an American, Ukrainian and Estonian - are still missing.
A communications officer at the Nice branch of the European Innovation Academy, Annie Seneard, said 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 programme, and fellow students have posted fliers in Nice trying to find him.
The other programme 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.
One person being treated in hospital remains unidentified.
A total of 85 people were last night still in hospital after the attack, with 18 in a critical condition.
The scene of the crash in Glasgow city centre. Picture: @sophia3993x
A "runaway" bus has caused chaos in Glasgow city centre, ploughing into other vehicles and leaving a pedestrian injured.
Renfield Street in the Scottish city was closed after the crash as officers investigated the incident.
4 buses have crashed on Renfield St in town for anyone travelling in Glasgow. No traffic appears to be moving as yet pic.twitter.com/MakTB0XGPu Sophia McLaren (@sophia3993x) July 18, 2016
Witness Arran Watkins said he saw the driver get out the vehicle, which is understood to have been empty, to visit a newsagents and chase after it when it started to roll.
The incident happened in the city's Renfield Street, between West George Street and St Vincent Street, just before 4pm on Monday.
Mr Watkins, managing director of AW Painters and Decorators, said: "When a bus stops it normally makes a hissing noise and then it lowers itself, but in this case, the bus didn't do that.
"The driver ran into a newsagents and the bus started rolling down the hill.
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"He chased after it, but the bus hit a blue Renault Twingo which was then smashed forward and hit a pedestrian.
"He was about 18 years old.
"Another pedestrian gave him first aid and then the emergency services turned up.
"The boy was lying on the ground and he was still conscious from what I could see."
Mr Watkins said that he initially feared it was a terror attack.
He added: "It looked like the lorry incident in Nice. The emergency services were quite quick in responding to the incident.
"It also hit a bus waiting at the traffic lights and that one went into other buses. They are fairly squished and compacted together.
"There were passengers on the other buses.
"I saw the passengers coming out holding their necks, so there will probably be some other minor injuries."
Police confirmed one pedestrian had been injured.
A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: "Around 3.45pm, police received a report of a bus having struck a male pedestrian on Renfield Street near to West George Street, Glasgow.
"Emergency services are at the scene and inquiries are ongoing to establish the full circumstances of the incident."
Renfield Street was initially closed, leading to major city centre congestion, but later reopened.
Police Scotland confirmed the bus collided with a stationary car at traffic lights at West George Street.
An additional police statement said: "The car moved forward and struck a pedestrian on Renfield Street.
"The bus continued to travel on Renfield Street before it collided with a stationary bus near to St Vincent Street, which then nudged into another stationary bus on Renfield Street.
"Two men have been taken to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary for treatment to injuries."
A First Glasgow spokesman said: "We can confirm that a First Glasgow vehicle was involved in an incident on Renfield Street this afternoon.
"Its too early to speculate on the cause of the incident. However, we've launched an immediate investigation and will work closely with the emergency authorities to determine exactly what happened.
"Our thoughts at this time are with the two men who were injured as a result of the incident."
A man has admitted murdering a single mother he met on a dating website in a "drunken rage".
Miles Donnelly, 35, strangled 44-year-old Usha Patel at the home she shared with her five-year-old son in Cricklewood, north-west London, on October 8 last year.
During the killing, he stabbed Ms Patel 16 times in the stomach, punched her around the head and injured her mouth as he attempted to stop her from screaming, the court heard.
Ms Patel had been particularly vulnerable as she was undressed at home expecting to have sex with Donnelly when he attacked her, the court heard.
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She was discovered the next day when the boy's grandfather arrived to pick him up and was told the mother was still sleeping.
Ms Patel's battered body was found amid drink bottles and glasses.
Meanwhile, Donnelly went on to assault a second woman, Rosie Ferrigno, causing her actual bodily harm.
Donnelly, who had a lifestyle of drink and drugs and a long criminal history, had denied the charges against him but changed his plea on the first day of the trial at the Old Bailey.
Donnelly, of Hall Place, Paddington, west London, pleaded guilty to both charges, of murder and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Turkey's Chief of Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar, left, stands next to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey (AP Photo)
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said 232 individuals were killed during the failed coup attempt.
He said the toll comprises "208 martyrs" - in reference to government supporters - and 24 coup plotters.
With a cracked voice and tears, he repeated a question his grandson had put to him: "Why are they killing people?"
He said the pro-government victims were 145 civilians, 60 police officers and three soldiers.x
The PM also said 50 coup backers and 1,491 government supporters were injured in the unrest.
He put the total numbers of detentions since Friday's tumultuous night at 7,543, including 6,030 military.
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According to Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, among those being questioned by prosecutors are 27 generals and admirals.
They include former air force commander General Akin Ozturk, who has been described as the ringleader of the foiled uprising.
Ozturk, who remained on active duty, has denied he was involved and insisted he worked to quell the uprising in statements he made to Turkish media.
Meanwhile, warplanes are continuing to patrol Turkey's skies, in a sign that authorities fear the threat against the government is not yet over.
A senior official said F-16 jets guarded Turkish airspace overnight, action ordered by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "for the control of the airspace and security".
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion - which was not supported by the military's top brass - was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets.
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The interior ministry has sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country following the coup attempt. Anadolu said 8,777 employees attached to the ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers.
Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty.
The government alleges the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Mr Erdogan has often accused of trying to overthrow the government.
Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, espouses a philosophy which blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy. He is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter enemy who has been put on trial in his absence in Turkey, where the government has labelled his movement a terrorist organisation. He strongly denies the government's charges.
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". So far, officials have not offered evidence he was involved.
Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacts after attending the funeral of a victim of the coup attempt in Istanbul. Photo: Getty
Turkey intensified its ruthless crackdown yesterday in the wake of Friday night's failed coup, detaining 6,000 people as world leaders and opposition politicians raised concerns that Recep Tayyip Erdogan would use the coup as a pretext to consolidate his power.
The Turkish president's military aide, Colonel Ali Yazici, was among those who were arrested on suspicion of plotting against the government on behalf of Mr Erdogan's arch-rival, the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.
Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul, Mr Erdogan vowed to "cleanse" Turkey's state institutions of their "virus" - meaning Mr Gulen's supporters - raising the spectre of a wide-ranging clampdown in the days to come.
"Since yesterday, the judiciary has been cleansed of these elements, they were put in custody, dismissed and imprisoned. This was necessary, but that is not enough," Mr Erdogan said.
On Saturday, the government launched a sweeping purge targeting Turkey's judiciary, suspending more than 2,500 judges and arresting two Supreme Court judges.
Read More: A rushed coup put down - and Erdogan's near miss in the skies
"I wish we'd learn our lesson from this and strengthen our democracy. Unfortunately, judging from what happened these past two days, the opposite appears to be the case," said Aylan Bilgen, an MP for HDP, the pro-Kurdish opposition party.
After a strong show of unity in support of the government, world leaders began to express fears of the strengthening of Mr Erdogan's hand.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, warned Mr Erdogan not to use the failed coup as a "blank cheque" to crush dissent, a remark echoed by the Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz, who said the Turkish president should not "misuse" the events as "a carte blanche to do whatever he wants".
Barack Obama, the US President, urged the government to respect the rule of law, as John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, rebuffed Ankara's request for Mr Gulen's immediate extradition, saying Turkey would need to provide proof of the cleric's involvement in the coup.
Mr Ayrault added that the attempted coup had raised doubts about the "reliability" of Turkey in the fight against Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (Isil), though the Pentagon announced that Turkey would reopen its Incirlik air base, used by the US-led coalition for raids on Isil, after closing its airspace to military planes on Saturday.
The base's commander, General Bekir Ercan Van, was detained on suspicion of taking part in the coup.
Mr Erdogan also gave signals that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment in the wake of the failed coup attempt.
Mr Erdogan spoke to his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence yesterday and his speech was punctuated by frequent calls of "we want the death penalty" from the large crowd, to which he 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.
Clashes broke out yesterday between security forces and putschists at a Turkish air base in the central city of Konya, a Turkish official said. He also confirmed an incident at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen airport, where police fired warning shots at rebels who were resisting arrest. They eventually surrendered.
In Ankara, Turkey's parliament stands empty. Security forces have locked down the building after it was bombed several times in the early hours of Saturday as rogue F-16s roared over the capital.
In a rare show of unity, Turkey's four parties in parliament released a joint statement condemning the plotters. But opposition parties feel uneasy with Mr Erdogan's response to the attempted coup and his continued calls for his supporters to take to the streets. ( Daily Telegraph, London)
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Shoppers were trapped in a car park for more than three hours as they attempted to leave a newly opened Ikea store.
Frustrated customers were left beeping their horns as they struggled to get out of the multi-storey car park of the superstore in Reading.
One man joked it was "easier to leave Europe than the Ikea Reading car park".
Rory Firth, 40, told the Press Association: "It was just bedlam. We were stuck for about an hour but a lot of people were stuck for upwards of three hours."
The father-of-two, from Maidenhead, Berkshire, said it was "a real nightmare".
He added: "We were on level one so we were quite lucky. I had my four-year-old and 10-month-old in the back seat so we were fortunate to get out when we did."
Stacey Barber, 22, from Farnborough, Hampshire, said the three-hour delay had ruined her day's shopping.
She said: "We were stuck for three hours and we only went to return something. We didn't get home till 6 so all the shops were shut and missed out on a whole afternoon."
Ms Barber added that staff handed out bottles of water but had "no idea what they were doing".
She said; "After an hour everyone had enough. It was so hot and a bottle of water goes so far. People started arguing with staff saying 'what is going on?' and they had no answer."
"There were people with two or three kids in the car so they were getting more annoyed. People just kept beeping their cars to get attention but all we got was 'sorry for the delay'."
The store in Reading is the first Ikea to open in the UK in seven years.
Manager Johanna Heuren said a "traffic management plan" would remain in place while they investigated the cause of Sunday's delays.
Ms Heuren added: "We can confirm that there was a delay with regards to customers exiting the Ikea Reading car park on Sunday afternoon.
"The number of visitors to the store was in line with the previous busy days during the opening weekend where our traffic management plan worked efficiently as planned.
"Our traffic management team responded to keep cars moving as quickly as possible and we'd like to thank customers for being patient and understanding of the situation."
In 2005, several people were injured and others suffered heat exhaustion following the opening of an Ikea in Edmonton, north London.
Around 6,000 people - triple the number expected by the company - descended on the store, forcing it to close its doors temporarily.
A man walks past Taksim Monument in Istanbul, Turkey, as warplanes continue to patrol the skies following Friday's failed coup (AP)
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was warned by world leaders not to use the attempted coup as carte blanche to do whatever he wants," amid concerns the putsch has become a pretext for him to consolidate power.
Mr Erdogan moved rapidly over the weekend to round up his adversaries, arresting more than 6,000 soldiers, including senior military leaders, and judges, suspected of involvement.
So many soldiers have been detained that the lower ranked conscripts have been locked in schools and gymnasiums in the capital, Ankara.
With expectations growing of heavy measures against dissent, European politicians warned Mr Erdogan that the coup attempt did not give him a blank cheque to disregard the rule of law.
Mr Erdogan has hinted he may reintroduce the death penalty, which the country abolished in 2004 in line with its bid to join the European Union.
Guenther Oettinger, the European Commissioner, said Mr Erdogan would move Turkey away from the core values represented by the EU and the Nato defence alliance, of which Turkey has been a crucial member in the fight against Isil, 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, he warned.
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President Barack Obama said he was concerned by pictures showing the rough treatment of some of the arrested coup plotters, some of whom appeared stripped to their underwear and handcuffed behind their backs.
But a resurgent Mr Erodgan responded defiantly on Sunday, telling a crowd of supporters attending a funeral of a loyalist killed on Friday night, that he would clean the virus from all the state bodies.
He said Turkey would request an extradition order for Fethullah Gulen, an Islamist cleric and longtime foe of the president who lives in self-imposed exile in the US, so that he could stand trial in Ankara.
Mr Gulen said on Sunday he would obey any extradition ruling from the United States. He has insisted that he had nothing to do with the uprising and suggested that Mr Erdogan could have staged the attack himself in order to legitimise a fresh crackdown on the judiciary and military.
The thousands gathered at the funeral bayed for revenge, calling for the return of the death penalty to punish the Gulenist plotters.
Let them hang, they are worse than Isis and worse than the Kurds," they said, referring to the minority group which has militias waging attacks on the Turkish state.
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While the government has been keen to suggest a small band of low-ranking dissenters were behind the coup, a new report and the released names of military figures linked to the plot suggest it ran much deeper.
Akn Ozturk, the man thought to have been the mastermind, is former air forces commander and Turkish Supreme Military Council (YAS) member.
He led a group which included the presidents own top military adviser, the commander of the main air base used by US troops to launch air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria, and the commander of the powerful Second Army.
According to the report, which appeared in the local Cumhuriyet newspaper, the 300 putschists had heard that the Turkish government was about to issue arrest warrants for soldiers accused of supporting Mr Gulen. So, they advanced their plans to Friday night when Mr Erdogan was away on holiday in what would turn out to be a doomed attempt to catch the government before it caught them.
The report would explain why the events unravelled so quickly. The beginning of the coup felt very rushed, but the planning of it was not. That's important, Oktay Vural, MP from the nationalist opposition party MHP, told The Telegraph.
It emerged on Sunday that at the height of the attempt to topple the president, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had Mr Erdogan's plane in their sights.
The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from the coastal resort of Marmaris when at least two F-16s harassed Mr Erdogan's plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul.
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"Why they didn't fire is a mystery," one former military officer with knowledge of the event said.
Mr Erdogan said as the coup unfolded that the plotters had tried to attack him and had bombed places he had been at shortly after he left. He "evaded death by minutes".
Around 25 soldiers in helicopters descended on his hotel in Marmaris on ropes, shooting, just after Mr Erdogan had left in an apparent attempt to seize him.
Around a dozen individuals have been named as among the coup plotters, but in Mr Erdogan's Turkey it is difficult to distinguish between real foe and political challenger. Among the names was Ali Yazici, Erdogans military aide, who, if confirmed to be true, would be the closest to Erdogan's inner circle to have been involved in the plot.
Eight soldiers who fled to Greece in a helicopter to seek asylum on Friday night claimed on Sunday that they had no role in the plot at all. Their lawyer said the officers were ordered to carry injured people, and that shortly after hearing about the coup they were fired at by police and crossed the border, emitting a distress signal.
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Law enforcement officers block the entrance to the Louisiana State Police headquarters after 3 police officers were killed early this morning. (Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
A Baton Rouge Police officer pours water on his head on Airline Hwy after 3 police officers were killed early this morning. (Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
Law enforcement officers do a security check on a man in a vehicle near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge. REUTERS/Joe Penney
A police helicopter flies near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge. REUTERS/Joe Penney
Baton Rouge Police run from the emergency room ramp as a man is taken into custody after a gun was found in his vehicle near the entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center. Multiple law enforcement officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge. (Hilary Scheinuk/The Advocate via AP)
Law enforcement officers gather in front of the B-Quick convenience store where police were shot in Baton Rouge. REUTERS/Joe Penney
Law enforcement vehicles block access to Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman
Police officers block off Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge. REUTERS/Joe Penney
Police officers block off a road after the killings of their colleagues in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Photo: Joe Penney
Three policemen were shot dead and at least three others wounded when they were ambushed by a "masked gunman" in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Police said the suspect, Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, was shot and killed at the scene. Authorities initially believed that two other assailants might be at large, but hours later said there were no other shooters in the city.
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Authorities said the dead gunman was the only person who fired at the officers, but they were unsure whether he had some kind of help from others.
The brazen attack took place less than 1km from the town's police headquarters.
A witness told television station WAFB that he saw a masked man in black shorts and shirt running from the scene where the three officers were killed.
Brady Vancel said the man looked like a pedestrian running with a rifle in his hand, rather than someone trained to move with a rifle.
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The attack comes just 10 days after five policemen were killed in Dallas and amid spiralling tensions between police officers and members of the black community, in Baton Rouge and nationwide. It was the fourth high-profile deadly encounter in the US involving police over the past two weeks.
In the latest attack, two city police officers, a 32-year-old with 10 years of service and a 41-year-old with just under a year on the force, died, said Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr.
Also among the dead was an East Baron Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy, who was 45, said Sheriff Sid Gautreaux.
Authorities did not immediately release the names of the dead and wounded, but relatives and a man who said he was a former partner of one of the slain officers posted on Facebook and Twitter that he was Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson.
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Read more: Three dead as seven police officers shot at shopping centre in Louisiana
Read more: Obama: USA must reject despair and find common ground
Baton Rouge has been gripped by arrests, stand-offs and mass protests after Alton Sterling (37), a black man, was shot by a white police officer in a killing captured on camera.
Governor John Bel Edwards called yesterday's attack "an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing". Mr Sterling's nephew condemned the killing of the three officers. Terrance Carter said the family just wants peace.
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"My uncle wouldn't want this," Mr Carter said. "He wasn't this type of man."
President Barack Obama condemned the shooting as "cowardly". "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 in a statement.
"These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law and on civilised society, and they have to stop."
Mr Obama spent most of last week focused on trying to build trust between police and communities.
But Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, said the attack was a sign America needed greater leadership and more "law and order".
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"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?" Mr Trump wrote on Facebook. "We demand law and order."
In Baton Rouge, police officers responded to reports there was a man walking down a highway carrying an assault rifle when they were attacked, police said.
Michelle Rogers, a resident of Baton Rouge, said she was at a church service praying for Mr Sterling's family when the priest interrupted to say that "something was happening".
"But he didn't say what. Then we started getting texts about officers down," she said.
Don Coppola, a police sergeant, said officers were taken to a local hospital which was then placed on lockdown. Multiple police units were stationed at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where the wounded officers were undergoing treatment.
A hospital spokesman said they had received five wounded "law enforcement professionals". Of the two who survived, one was in critical condition.
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The attack happened in the Old Hammond area, on a multi-lane road lined with fast food restaurants and motels.
Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokesman for the sheriff's department in Baton Rouge, confirmed shooter Gavin Long was killed in the aftermath of the attack. He was described as "wearing a mask" during the shootings. ( Daily Telegraph, London)
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Mr Trump reinforced his message that he was running for president as a 'law and order' candidate. REUTERS
The state of race relations in America looks set to dominate this week's Republican National Convention as a host of campaign groups descended on Cleveland last night to make a stand against one of the most divisive politicians in modern American history.
Groups campaigning against racism, Islamophobia, attacks on immigrants and the LGBTQ community were all gearing up to protest against billionaire Donald Trump, pictured, who will be officially crowned the party's presidential nominee tomorrow.
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But in the wake of deadly attacks against police officers, and the high-profile killings of black men at the hands of police, race relations is expected be the flashpoint around Mr Trump, who has frequently stoked racial tensions.
In the wake of yesterday's shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana - already reeling in the aftermath of the killing of Alton Sterling - Mr Trump reinforced his message that he was running for president as a "law and order" candidate.
The head of the Cleveland police union yesterday urged Ohio's governor to declare a state of emergency and to suspend laws allowing the open carrying of firearms during the convention, after the shooting of six police officers in Louisiana.
The New Black Panthers, considered an extremist black rights group, are just one of the organisations who have arrived in Cleveland to protest his appointment. White supremacist groups have also been organising themselves, via Facebook and social media, to stage marches in support of Mr Trump at the convention, sparking fears of violent clashes between the two sides in a state where it is legal to carry firearms. (Daily Telegraph, London)
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Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Dana Dougherty from Deltona, Fla., cheers as she holds a Donal Trump figure during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Photo: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Republicans have opened their convention to nominate Donald Trump for US president as dissident delegates pursued one last chance to deny the front-runner.
A day after a deadly ambush of police in Louisiana, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus welcomed delegates to the convention hall with a brief acknowledgement of the "troubling times" swirling outside. The chairman called for a moment of silence out of respect for "genuine heroes" in law enforcement.
"Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings," he said.
Weeks of racial tensions and violence are shadowing the Republicans' long-awaited showcase of their presidential pick and putting both participants and the convention city on alert.
True to form, Mr Trump himself provided the first curveball of the week, announcing he will make an unexpected swing to the convention hall on Monday night to introduce his wife, Melania, on the first night of speeches.
"I want to watch," Mr Trump said on Fox News. "It is going to be very exciting."
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Whatsapp A Texas delegate yells after the temporary chairman of the Republican National Convention announced that the convention would not hold a roll-call vote on the Rules Committee's report and rules changes and rejected the efforts of anti-Trump forces to hold such a vote at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Young
This week will belong to Mr Trump - his chance to stand at the pinnacle of American politics in a triumph that few could have imagined when the New York billionaire entered the race a year ago. He will take on Democrat Hillary Clinton in November.
The line-up of speakers is aimed at showing off the man behind the mogul, his advisers say. Several family members and friends are slated to speak to his character and reveal a side of Mr Trump that Americans may not know.
Along with Melania Trump, Monday's opening night speeches include a mix of figures linked broadly under the theme of "Make America Safe Again." They include Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, as well as immigration advocates, a Marine who fought in the Benghazi attack and entertainers, including actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty.
However, the speakers highlight the wedge Mr Trump's candidacy has driven through the Republican party.
Many Republican leaders, party elders and rising stars have steered clear of Cleveland. Others have come to meet with donors and rank-and-file but have kept heir distance from the main event.
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez came to Cleveland but had no role on the programme.
Expand Close Delegates react as some delegates call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) / Facebook
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Whatsapp Delegates react as some delegates call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
When House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates on Monday morning, he made no mention of Mr Trump in his remarks.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, a vanquished Trump rival, planned several public appearances but was not going to step inside the Quicken Loans Arena.
Top Trump adviser Paul Manafort called Mr Kasich's behaviour "petulant" and he brushed off the absence of former presidents George HW Bush and George W Bush.
"Certainly the Bush family, we would have liked to have had them. They're part of the past. We're dealing with the future."
"When we leave here, by and large, it's going to be a united Republican Party," he said.
That remained to be seen. Disaffected delegates continued to try to derail Mr Trump.
All delegates are due to vote on Monday afternoon on the rules that will govern the convention week, and insurgent delegates are circulating a petition to force a state-by-state vote - a threat to disrupt floor proceedings even if it fails.
Some rebellious delegates are threatening to walk out.
"We won't sit around and coronate a king," said Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, who like many insurgents has backed vanquished contender Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Mr Trump's campaign dismissed the effort.
"It's not a movement," Mr Manafort said. "It's some rogue, recalcitrant delegates."
The roll call vote on the nomination is expected on Tuesday, with Mr Trump scheduled to close the convention with an acceptance speech late on Thursday.
Mr Trump is gaining the nomination during a summer of unsettling violence at home and abroad. In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France. The killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, early on Sunday added to the sense of a nation on edge.
Mr Trump has sought to capitalise on the mood by casting himself as the "law and order candidate" and blasting Democrats for weak leadership in a crisis.
On Monday, he quickly linked the shooter to "radical Islam," despite early indications the man had no known ties to any extremist group.
Former Marine Gavin Eugene Long "seems to be a member of that group also. It seems to be something going on there," Mr Trump said on Fox News.
Campaigning in Cincinnati on Monday afternoon, Democrat Mrs Clinton called for an end to the "madness," saying that if elected she would use all her powers to hold those who kill police officers legally accountable.
"They represent the rule of law itself. If you take aim at that and at them, you take aim at all of us," Mrs Clinton told civil rights activists at the annual convention of the NAACP. "There can be no justification, no looking the other way."
Mrs Clinton's campaign is spending about one million US dollars (754,000) on TV ads in Ohio this week, according to Kantar Media's campaign advertising tracker.
Several hundred Donald Trump supporters gathered on Monday for the first major pro-Trump rally in the convention city.
A few openly carried guns as allowed under Ohio law. The president of the police union had asked Mr Kasich to suspend the law allowing gun owners to carry firearms in plain sight. But Mr Kasich said he does not have that authority.
Montrell Jackson with his son Mason at a Father's Day event for police officers in Baton Rouge earlier this year (Trenisha Jackson/AP)
Montrell Jackson posted an emotional Facebook message saying he was "physically and emotionally" tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, days before he was gunned down in the Baton Rouge attack.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," the 32-year-old policeman, who leaves his wife Trenisha and four-month-old son Mason, wrote.
He said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I've experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core," the posting read.
The message was posted on July 8, just three days after Alton Sterling was shot dead by police in Baton Rouge.
That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the country's fraught history of race relations. Another black man was killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend live-streaming the aftermath on Facebook.
Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, Texas, killing five police officers.
Mr Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
Erika Green said she was friends with the family of Mr Jackson, one of three Baton Rouge officers who were killed on Sunday morning. She said she saw the message on his Facebook page.
In the message, Mr Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired.
"These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," he wrote.
A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet but is no longer on Mr Jackson's Facebook page.
Mr Jackson's father-in-law Lonnie Jordan described him as a "gentle giant".
Speaking on the front lawn of Mr Jackson's house in the rural Livingston Parish area of Baton Rouge, Mr Jordan said he heard about his death while at church on Sunday morning.
He said Mr Jackson was tall, stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition, "always about peace".
He said his son-in-law had been working long hours since the death of Mr Sterling and the resulting protests, but if the work was a strain, Mr Jackson did not let it show.
Kedrick Pitts, 24, a lorry driver who is Mr Jackson's younger half-brother, said the officer was dedicated to "God, family and the police force" and often worked seven days a week.
Mr Pitts said his brother "went above and beyond" and that he was "a protector". He said he had been on the force for 10 years and had risen to the rank of corporal.
Suspected jihadists face being expelled from Ireland - even if the evidence against them would be deemed insufficient to support a criminal prosecution.
Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald said the State had a right to protect its citizens and that she would "make no apology" for deporting individuals in cases where intelligence suggested they were supporting Islamic extremism.
Ms Fitzgerald also said that while Ireland was "not likely" to face attack, the authorities are keeping tabs on "a limited number" of suspected extremist sympathisers here and need to be vigilant.
The minister said a 'lone-wolf' attack, such as last week's terror atrocity in Nice, was "always a possibility".
Her comments, in an interview with the Irish Independent, come less than a fortnight after a 52-year-old man - alleged to be the foremost Irish-based facilitator of Isil fighters - was deported to Jordan, despite claims that he had previously been tortured by security services there. Ms Fitzgerald would not comment on the case specifically.
Read More: 'I admire anyone who survives in politics, its rough'
However, she said such deportations were justified in order to protect Irish citizens.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the man who mowed through a crowd with a truck and killed 84 Bastille Day revellers in Nice had phoned home just hours earlier and sent a picture of himself laughing from the French city.
The revelation was made by his brother, as 18 more victims continued to fight for their lives.
The attack by delivery man Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plunged France into new grief and fear, just eight months after jihadists killed 130 in Paris.
And Turkey intensified its crackdown yesterday in the wake of Friday's failed coup, detaining 6,000 people - as world leaders and opposition politicians raised concerns that Recep Tayyip Erdogan would use the coup attempt as a pretext to consolidate his power.
Students from North and South Carolina work to create fleece blankets for Project Linus.
SHARE Lynda Hempll of Quilts of Valor wraps a patriotic quilt around Jebidiah Ballard of Augusta. Ballard served tours in Iraq and Japan.
In May, the Hugh O'Brien Leadership Conference was held at Furman University. Over the course of four days, 160 teens from North and South Carolina came together to learn leadership techniques, practice fellowship and donate time to community service projects. Each teen represented his or her high school and had been selected for this prestigious honor.
One of the chosen service project involved Project Linus. Cecilia Lewis, the Linus coordinator, was asked to speak to students about volunteering in the community and then teach students how to make fleece blankets. In addition, Lynda Hempel, representing Quilts of Valor, and Stamie Cline, the philanthropy coordinator for Anderson's two quilting guilds, Electric City and Prickly Fingers, attended to share their stories about philanthropy with the teens.
An amazing program evolved with the teens making over 75 fleece blankets which were then donated to Project Linus for children in the Upstate who are sick or in need. Cline said of the students, "I was so impressed with these young people their eagerness to help with the Linus Project and their manners! They were so polite and many came by to thank Lynda (Hempel) and me for coming and helping. WOW, what a surprise."
An adult facilitator accompanied each group of 16 students and after hearing the first program about Quilts of Valor and quilts made for veterans, one of the facilitators, Jebidiah Ballard of Augusta, Georgia, shook Hempel's hand declaring it such a worthy cause and how much he knew the older veterans appreciated the gesture. Then Ballard admitted he too, was a veteran of Iraq and Japan. Ballard was completely surprised when during the second assembly he was honored as a veteran in an impromptu ceremony and wrapped in the patriotic quilt which had been brought to display.
Beverly Waters, the HOBY (Hugh O'Brien) leadership coordinator, was presented with a plaque as a thank you from Project Linus. HOBY has asked Project Linus to return next May to Furman University and again organize a blanket-making day while sharing personal stories about why giving back is so important for everyone.
Dia de los Muertos: What to know about the celebration of life
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Contributed photo Amara, a dog that was shot, blinded and left for dead in Townville, is recovering at a North Carolina rescue run by Heidi Wagner (left).
By Nikie Mayo of the Independent Mail
The woman who rescued blind dog Amara said Monday that Anderson County's proposed animal-welfare regulations still contain loopholes that make it too easy for people to shoot their pets without cause and without fear.
Heidi Wagner, the founder of Boxer Butts & Other Mutts in western North Carolina, has cared for Amara in the months since the dog was shot and left for dead in South Carolina in January. Wagner said she plans to be at the Anderson County Council meeting Tuesday, when leaders will consider making more tweaks to an animal-control ordinance.
Up for council discussion Tuesday: adding language that allows owners to shoot healthy animals that threaten people.
"I understand that change takes time, and I am glad they are attempting change in Anderson County," Wagner said. "But this ordinance already has loopholes that allow people to say: 'Oh, this dog was destroying my livestock or my property' without really having to prove it. Now, if they add something else, a person will just be able to say: 'Oh well, the animal tried to attack me, so I shot it.'
"I feel like they are leaving too many loopholes, and those loopholes are wide open for anybody who wants to shoot their dog. It's easy enough to make up a story and get away with doing whatever you want to do."
Under Anderson County's proposed regulations, a domesticated dog generally can only be euthanized by a veterinarian or a licensed euthanasia technician.
"If the animal is unwanted, it must be taken to a certified shelter or recognized rescue shelter," according to the proposal. "Shooting of a canine with a firearm for the purpose of euthanasia is prohibited unless the animal has been severely injured and it is the only way to prevent undue suffering."
The ordinance does include exceptions, indicating the regulations do not apply "in situations where an individual is threatened by a rabid animal or where the animal is destroying livestock, poultry or other personal property."
The council is expected on Tuesday to consider broadening the exceptions to say that euthanasia regulations do not apply in situations in which an individual is threatened by a rabid animal "or any other animal." The language that allows shooting when an animal is destroying livestock, poultry or other personal property would remain in place.
Anyone found not in compliance with the ordinance would be guilty of a misdemeanor.
The County Council must approve three readings of the animal-control regulations before they become final. The first reading was in late June, and the second is scheduled for Tuesday.
County Administrator Rusty Burns said Monday that the ordinance remains a work in progress.
"We are trying to be conscious of the things we can do as a county while also understanding that there are limits to what we are able to do at the county level," Burns said. "Unfortunately, there will always be areas that may seem imperfect. But the spirit and intent here is for Anderson County to provide as much protection to animals as possible."
Councilman Tom Allen, who has taken the lead in shepherding and crafting the ordinance, was traveling Monday. He did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Wagner said Amara continues to improve at her rescue organization, which is just outside Asheville. Amara was shot last winter by her Upstate owner, who told investigators at the Anderson County Sheriff's Office that Amara had tried to bite his pregnant wife. The owner told investigators that he took Amara to a wooded area away from his home and shot her, then left, believing her dead.
Amara survived and wandered in the woods nearly three weeks before being picked up by an animal-control officer.
Vicki Strickland, an animal-rights activist from Townville, said incidents like what happened to Amara are too common where she lives.
"These county rules are long overdue, but they won't change things overnight," Strickland said. "There is a convenience store that I go to in Townville and there is a woman I see there sometimes talking about her colony of cats. I have been trying for months to get her to let me help her get the cats spayed and neutered to stop the reproducing, but she won't let me help.
"About two weeks ago, she told me she 'had to drown' a kitten that had been injured. That's the problem: There is still a mindset out in the country areas that killing is a suitable means to deal with any problem involving an animal."
Follow Nikie Mayo on Twitter @NikieMayo
SHARE Rep. Jonathon Hill posted this image on his Facebook page Monday morning. He deleted it a short time later after facing a backlash of criticism. Rep. Jonathon Hill
By Kirk Brown of the Independent Mail
State Rep. Jonathon Hill faced a backlash of criticism Monday morning after posting an image on Facebook that one commentator said portrayed supporters of Donald Trump as "Nazi-like."
The image of a man in a military uniform and woman standing behind children while wearing insignias with the initials of Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, sparked a flurry of negative comments.
"Tasteless and despicable," commented one poster.
"Ignorance on steroids," stated another.
Hill, a 31-year-old Republican from Townville, deleted the image later Monday morning and posted an apology.
"For all who were offended by my last post, I am sorry that I caused you offense, and have taken it down," Hill wrote. "I want to make people think, not insult them."
Matt Moore, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, said Hill made the right decision to remove the "offensive and disrespectful" image.
"There are better ways to make political points," Moore wrote in an email.
The image that Hill posted and then deleted originally appeared Saturday night on a satirical Facebook page based in Columbia.
In a telephone interview, Hill said he viewed the image as a warning that history could repeat itself.
"Back in the day, I don't think all Germans were evil people," he said. "Many of them were deceived or coerced into supporting Hitler."
Hill's Facebook page has several others posts that are critical of Trump, who is expected to formally receive the GOP's presidential nomination at the party's convention this week in Cleveland.
"You can't trust Trump," Hill said Monday. He also said that the Manhattan real estate tycoon is "diametrically opposed to a lot of what conservative Republicans believe."
Hill, the founder of the Anderson tea party, is seeking a second term in the South Carolina General Assembly. He defeated two challengers in the June Republican primary and will face Townville Democrat Barbara Jo Mullis in the November general election.
Mullis and Hill have a shared dislike of Trump.
"I think Mr. Trump is a con man," Mullis said Monday.
Hill said he has not decided whom he will vote for in the presidential race, but he added that he definitely will not support Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Follow Kirk Brown on Twitter @KirkBrown_AIM
Anderson resident Susan Aiken posted this photo from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on her Twitter account Monday. She is standing with fellow delegates state Rep. Mark N. Willis of Fountain Inn (left) and Pickens County resident Elliott Kelley.
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By Kirk Brown of the Independent Mail
The heightened security is hard to miss at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, said Anderson resident and South Carolina delegate Susan Aiken.
Aiken said Monday that she has seen law enforcement officers "on every corner" in downtown Cleveland. She also said that she has watched helicopters buzzing around from her 14th-floor hotel room near the Quicken Loans Arena, which is where the convention is happening this week.
On Sunday night, Aiken said, a demonstration forced her and the rest of the South Carolina delegation to sit on a bus for about an hour before they could proceed to a reception.
Police are expecting protests to intensify before the convention wraps up Thursday. About 5,500 law enforcement personnel from across the nation have been deployed to keep the peace.
While saying she has concerns about security, Aiken added, "I was not going to let that stop me from coming."
She and state Sen. Tom Davis of Beaufort are serving as secretaries of the state's delegation. Aiken, who works as a regional director for U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, said she is using vacation time to attend the convention and paying for all of her own expenses.
South Carolina Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster, who is chairman of the state's delegation, will give a nominating speech for Donald Trump at the convention on Tuesday night. Easley pastor Mark Burns also was scheduled to speak on Monday.
Gov. Nikki Haley, who spoke at the GOP's 2012 convention in Tampa, Florida, plans to attend this year's event but is expected to keep a low profile. Haley supported U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who finished a distant second to Trump in February's Republican presidential primary in South Carolina before later dropping out of the race.
Reince Preibus, the Republican Party's national chairman, asked Haley to speak at the convention a couple of weeks ago, according to Rob Godfrey, Haley's deputy chief of staff.
Haley "was grateful for the invitation and looks forward to attending the convention, but, as we have said before, she has no plans to speak, so she declined the opportunity," Godfrey said.
Aiken said she senses that support for Trump is building.
"I think we need a strong leader," she said.
She also downplayed polls showing that Trump is trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton. Aiken said the presumptive Republican nominee is well-positioned in the presidential race, and that she would hate to see him "peak too soon."
Aiken is attending her third GOP national convention. She went to the 2004 convention in New York City and the 2012 gathering in Tampa.
This is Aiken's first trip to Cleveland. She said she has been impressed with the city's friendly residents.
Besides taking part in the convention, Aiken is looking forward to visiting the city's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she said.
Follow Kirk Brown on Twitter @KirkBrown_AIM
FILE - Gov. Nikki Haley, center, is applauded June 22 during a news conference calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol.
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By Jamie Self, jself@thestate.com
Four years ago, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley took the national stage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa as speculation swirled about the rising political star's future.
This week, the lame-duck governor, who missed the mark this presidential primary season by backing two of Donald Trump's opponents, will keep a lower profile as Republicans gather in Cleveland for their 2016 convention.
For instance, Haley's name was not on a list released Thursday of dozens of speakers slated for the convention stage.
But that's not because she was not asked to speak, Haley's office says.
Republican National Committee Chairman "Reince Preibus asked if Gov. Haley would speak at the convention a couple weeks ago," said Rob Godfrey, Haley's deputy chief of staff.
"Gov. Haley was grateful for the invitation and looks forward to attending the convention. But, as we have said before, she has no plans to speak, so she declined the opportunity."
Instead, the daughter of Indian immigrants, who made history with her 2010 election as South Carolina's first minority and female governor and enjoyed a meteoric rise in the party, will spend time with the state's convention delegation, network and attend Republican Governors Association events, her spokesman said.
RISE OF A GOP STAR
Haley's schedule is a change of pace from four years ago.
Convention speaking roles are a chance to showcase the parties' up-and-coming stars and test whether they are ready for prime time. Because of the potential to shine, the spots are coveted.
For example, Barack Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech was the start of his ascent to the White House.
Haley already was garnering national attention by the time she was highlighted as a GOP rising star on the 2012 convention stage.
A little-known state representative, Haley rode a tea party wave into the governor's office in 2010, winning high-profile endorsements from 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP's presidential nominee two years later.
The youngest state governor, Haley has shown she has appeal that branches beyond political audiences. A 2012 Vogue feature and New York meeting with rocker Joan Jett helped feed that image.
Since then, Haley has maintained a national profile in part due to her participation in Republican Governors Association events and her campaigning for GOP candidates in other states, including Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, whom Trump has tapped as his vice-presidential running mate.
Last summer, Haley and the state were thrust into the national spotlight again, after nine African-Americans were shot and killed during a Bible study in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. Within a week of the shooting, and with the nation watching and weighing in on social media, Haley pushed to remove the Confederate flag, pictured in photographs online with the alleged shooter, from the Statehouse grounds.
CLASHING WITH TRUMP
In January, Haley delivered the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address and used the nationally televised speech, in part, to rebuke Trump, criticizing his immigration proposals and warning the nation to ignore the "siren call of the angriest voices."
Haley since has said she would back the GOP's presidential nominee. But Trump was not her first or second choice.
Haley endorsed U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida before South Carolina's February GOP primary. When Rubio dropped out, Haley threw her support to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
In May, Haley was rumored to be on Trump's short list for vice president. But after Cruz ended his presidential run, clearing the path to the nomination for the blustery New York billionaire, Haley ruled out being Trump's running mate, saying her plate was full.
Trump and Haley also have clashed on Twitter, where Trump said South Carolinians were embarrassed by the governor. Haley responded dismissively, "Bless your heart."
As a respected party leader, Haley is someone whose absence on the convention stage will not go unnoticed, said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina GOP chairman and a 2016 convention delegate.
But Haley likely won't lose sleep over not sharing the stage with Trump, said Lexington political consultant Walter Whetsell.
Haley already has had the national spotlight this year, responding to Obama's speech, and "she did it magnificently, and she's gotten fairly universal praise for it."
Though Haley's gubernatorial career is coming to an end, her political career could go on, said Karen Kedrowski, a Winthrop political scientist.
Haley could land a job in a Trump administration if the Republican is elected or go to work in the nonprofit or political sector, re-emerging as a national figure in 2020, Kedrowski said.
"She's young, smart, beautiful, experienced and someone that the Republican Party really does want to showcase," Kedrowski said. "I don't think we've heard the last of her at all."
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By Charlie Bauder, WNEG FM 93.1/AM Special to Independent Mail
TOCCOA The final three candidates for a vacant Stephens County Board of Education seat have stated their cases to the school board.
The board on Thursday interviewed three of the six candidates for the District 2 school board seat left vacant by Jeff Webb's resignation in April.
Board members expect to make a decision at its meeting Tuesday regarding who will fill the empty post. Whoever is chosen will serve through the remainder of Webb's term, which runs through the end of 2018.
Dave Stancil with Northeast Georgia Bank was one of the people the board interviewed Thursday and said business knowledge such as his is an important trait for a school board member.
The county school system has an opportunity to be a part of growth in the community, Stancil said.
"I also feel that Toccoa-Stephens County, we are in a window of opportunity the next five years or so, with industry coming into this community, with a four-lane highway and an industrial park, I believe I want to become part of this board to become active in the community, in order to help facilitate," Stancil said. "If I am an industry coming into this community, I would want to look at the school system as a whole and certainly have a positive outlook."
He also said the board's biggest challenge is regaining the taxpayers' confidence.
Choyce Watson, who works at a local doctor's office, is another candidate for the board. She also said in her interview Thursday that regaining people's confidence is board's biggest challenge.
Watson said she would like to be able to give back to the community by serving on the board.
"I want the people to know we are for them, and I want to see kids grow and continue to succeed," she said.
Isaac White, the pastor at Hurricane Grove Baptist Church, was another of the candidates interviewed Thursday. He said the biggest challenge the board faces is limited resources.
He would bring a different perspective to the school board, he said
"I would like to be able to help our school system to adapt, to evolve, to bring some diversity to the school board," White said. "I do not believe it should be only educators on our school board, nor do I think it should be only businessmen or retired men or young family members. I think the school board should be a diverse group, because our youth are a diverse group."
Stephens County Board of Education Chairman Tony Crunkleton said the board appreciates all six candidates.
"You all have made our decision really difficult because you all are outstanding people and outstanding candidates. ... I feel like no matter what decision we make, it will be a good choice, because you are all good choices," Crunkleton said.
Bollywood's Khiladi star 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.
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The world should brace for potentially devastating impacts on human health due to climate change.
Some of these consequences may be avoided if humanity radically curbs its use of fossil fuels in coming decades, but many are already being felt, they said at the opening of a two-day conference run by the World Health Organization (WHO) and hosted by France.
"Health and climate are inextricably linked because human health depends directly on the health of the planet," French environment and energy minister Segolene Royal told participants.
Royal, also the rotating president of U.N.-led talks on how best to cope with global warming, said health impacts must play a more central role in future negotiations.
"From now on, I will do my best to ensure that health is integrated into all future climate conferences," starting with a special forum at the next high-level gathering of the 196-nation U.N. climate meeting in Marrakesh in November, she told AFP.
The Paris Agreement, inked in December last year, calls for holding global warming to well under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit), and helping poor nations cope with its impacts.
A crescendo of scientific studies paints an alarming picture of the human suffering in store due to disrupted weather patterns, rising seas, droughts and climate-enhanced superstorms.
Tropical disease vectors -- for malaria, dengue and zika, to name a few -- are expanding as the insects that carry them spread following warming climes.
"Health sector under-represented"
Extreme heat waves set to occur every decade rather than once a century will claims more lives, especially the ill and the elderly.
The WHO estimated in 2005 that killer hot spells claim 150,000 lives annually. More than 45,000 died in Europe alone due to a heatwave in the summer of 2003.
Most worrying of all, perhaps, is the threat to global food supplies.
"Can we feed so many people", nine billion by mid-century, according to U.N. projections, "when the climate that supports us is changing so adversely?", Letizia Ortiz, the Queen of Spain and a special ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization, asked the plenary.
Many staple foods, especially in the developing world, cannot adapt quickly enough to changing weather, resulting in lower yields.
Fish, a key source of protein for billions, have not only been depleted by industrial harvesting but are migrating as oceans warm and coral reefs die.
Sometimes it is the sources, rather than the impacts, of manmade climate change that damage health.
The WHO estimates that seven million people die each year from air pollution, which also contributes to global warming as a greenhouse gas.
"The health sector has been under-represented in this discussion when you think about the millions of lives that will be affected, and even ended," said Richard Kinley, the interim head of the UN climate forum.
"The world is already committed to important levels of climate disruption," he added.
"The health sector will have to deal with the consequences."
The Second Global Conference on Health and Climate will end Friday with a proposed "action agenda" for national governments
Related news:
> Singapore to build airport terminal higher in climate change fight
> Climate change implicated in France floods
> Trump taps climate change skeptic as energy adviser, pushes back on taxes
Would you like to keep your family strong and enjoy affordable summer fun?
If that sounds like a good combination to you, then get ready for African- American Day at the Indianapolis Zoo.
Coming Thursday, July 21st, African-American Family Day is an opportunity to celebrate the importance of the family unit while also enjoying exciting activities at the zoo.
This will be a day for families of all generations to have a special day together at the zoo, said Dominique Lee, a media and music producer who created African-American Family Day with his wife Wilhelmina.
They have also developed the emerging African-American Food Network.
Lee noted that high divorce rates and other national issues are impacting American families of all cultures. However, he added, African-American families face a unique set of economic, health and social challenges and need a positive day that celebrates the family unit.
After initial hesitation officials with the Indianapolis Zoo agreed to firmly embrace African-American Family Day to support diversity.
With discounted admission that day, guests will be able to see more than just regular zoo exhibits.
They will have access to exciting seasonal activities such as the Animals & All That Jazz Concert from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., a special menu will be prepared for the event and a water splash area is available for kids.
Wilhelmina Lee likes the fact that African-American Family Day will make going to the zoo more affordable for families. They can get $4 off the price of admission by going to the African-American Family Day page on Facebook and printing off the coupons.
Some kids dont even get to go to the zoo, Wilhelmina Lee said. This event offers families another opportunity to do that.
What is meant for fun and unity, however, has attracted the wrong attention.
Dominique Lee said hecklers have been leaving racist messages on the African-American Family Day Facebook page. He has also received racist phone calls, including four in a single day.
One message shown to the Recorder stated, maybe its time for white people to march on the zoo, while another said if there was a White Family Day people would call it a Klan rally.
Lee said these people do not understand the need for African-Americans to celebrate something positive such as their family heritage.
He added that just because the event celebrates African-American families doesnt mean that anyone is excluded.
It is not right for racists to stereotype Blacks with certain negative behaviours then criticize them when they have positive events.
Its not fair because there are events celebrating other cultures in this city, Lee said. No one said anything when they had Latino Day.
Lee said the harassment was only an effort to discourage him and he is not concerned about any problems occurring at the zoo. The Indianapolis Zoo also has security on its staff and is frequently patrolled by police.
Despite the toxic doses of hate, the Lees pledge to move forward with an event they know will be beneficial to the community.
They will not stop this event. I can promise you that, Dominique Lee said. We are going to bring families together and everyone will have a good time.
For more information, to download coupons and to hear the uptempo event theme song, visit the African-American Family Day on Facebook. You may also call (317) 709-3599. The first two families who arrive with at least four people will get free shirts.
1. Kareena Kapoor Khan, who has been bombarded with 'maternity leave' questions lashed out at media making some valid points.
Twitter
In a media statement, she said, 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!"
2. Teaser of Deepika Padukone and Vin Diesel's xXx was out and both shared it on social media sites.
Twitter
Deepika, who plays Serena Unger in her big Hollywood debut has her guns, knives and one-liners in place and yes the wait has become unbearable NOW!
Twitter
According to Salman, his controversial life is the biggest reason and the autobiography might just open up some old graves.
4. Priyanka Chopra, who turned 34 today celebrated her birthday in New York.
Instagram
PC and her Quantico friends had a ball last night as they ringed in PC's birthday. The pictures on social media prove that it was one lavish party.
5. Salman Khan expresses his unique wish of getting married on November 18th!
According to Khan, he said, "Yes. 18th November. Yeh 18th November, yeh kuch bees pachees November se chal raha hai. Lekin pata nahi kaunse saal main hoga. Lekin hoga."
Qandeel Balochs death has become a topic of discussion on social media sites and people have a lot of mixed reactions. While according to some, it was not just one man who killed Qandeel but the whole mindset and regressive patriarchal thoughts, some people went overboard in criticising her for her bold choices and raunchy videos and they went on to justifying why she deserved to die.
Twitter
Making some valid points on Qandeel Baloch, actor-comedian Gaurav Gera made a video which summed up everything that most of us have been thinking in the most brilliant way possible. Gaurav began the video explaining what made him a Qandeel Baloch fan at the first place:
"I was shocked because she was bold, she was fearless. When I first watched her videos, I found them weird. Then I went on to watching her videos on Youtube, morning Pakistan shows and others and I was thinking how does she do that?"
She knew what she was doing. She grabbed the attention of lakhs of people."
After Gaurav got to know about Qandeel's death, he shared his first reaction,
"The news has actually shaken me up, because, like I said, I was her fan and I don't think she deserved this."
Saluting Qandeel's courage and the spirit of doing whatever she wanted to despite hate comments on her videos and posts, Gaurav made the most valid comment on the whole concept of honour killing, he said:
"Where's the honour? There's no honour in killing. Honour killing is stupid."
Watch the entire video here and yes, it'll make you silently nod at Gaurav's sensible statements!
Tamil actor Siddharth went on Twitter to talk about how 'stalking' has been made romantic by the way it is portrayed in Indian movies.
He was speaking in reference to the murder of 24-year-old Infosys employee S. Swathi who was murdered in broad daylight in Chennai by a man who was allegedly obsessed with her and had been stalking her.
Twitter
He felt that the way stalking has been shown in cinema could be a factor in this case.
Here is what he had to say:
@dhanyarajendran when a woman says no,it means no. Not yes.Not maybe. No. No matter what a man says or does. Period. Sadly we see otherwise. Siddharth (@Actor_Siddharth) July 17, 2016
@dhanyarajendran we are all responsible for this. Nobody can shift blame including me. We have to ensure stalking is not encouraged anymore. Siddharth (@Actor_Siddharth) July 17, 2016
We've been selling a terrible dream in our films for long. That any man can get the woman he wants just by wanting her enough. Must change! Siddharth (@Actor_Siddharth) July 17, 2016
Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal had volunteered to do sewa (voluntary service) at the Golden Temple seek forgiveness for his party's apparent 'disrespect' to Sikhs - his party manifesto equated AAP manifesto to the Guru Granth Sahib, and used a picture of a broom next to that of the Sikh shrine.
twitter.com
He did clean utensil at the gurudwaras community kitchen along with other party leaders - kind of.
They were reportedly already clean
The move by Kejriwal to come here was to seek forgiveness; But the Chief Minister sparked a row after he was seen cleaning already clean utensils, inside the Golden Temple complex here early on Monday.
Accompanied by senior party leaders, including Ashish Khetan, H.S. Phoolka and Bhagwant Mann, Kejriwal arrived at the Golden Temple complex, where the holiest of Sikh shrines Harmandar Sahib, popularly known as The Golden Temple, is situated, before dawn on Monday.
BCCL
With his head covered with handkerchief and folded hands, Kejriwal went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the Langar hall, the community kitchen which serves food to over one lakh people in a single day.
During the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign, state minister and Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia was accused of twisting a religious hymn for which he performed sewa at the Golden Temple.
They choose to clean shoes and Kejriwal chooses to clean clean vessels pic.twitter.com/1W2wfYrfhw (@nanditathhakur) July 18, 2016
During the release of AAP's 51-point youth manifesto in Amritsar on July 3, AAP's Ashish Khetan stated that it was like the Guru Granth Sahib to them leading to court cases and police complaints against AAP leaders.
Also Read: After Controversy Over Hurting Religious Sentiments Kejriwal, AAP Leaders To Do Sewa At Golden Temple
If you've ever fought a legal case, or even stepped in a courtroom, you'd know that the business of law takes a lot of paper. Considering how easy it is to phase out paper, it is surprising that India has not had a single paper-free judicial institution - until now.
India's first e-court was on Sunday opened at High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad, the common high court for both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
reuters
The states will benefit from the"system which is going to integrate police stations with the courts, with jails, with the prosecution and with the forensic science laboratories", Supreme Court judge Justice Madan B Lokur noted.
Justice Lokur said he was impressed with the Hyderabad High Court's e-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. It's extremely user friendly. "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.
Judges would receive a an electronic case list (e-case list), and make digital notings, which would be synced on an online database. Records can be instantly filed by advocates, judges and all litigant parties, and advocates would receive SMS alerts.
The couple have been together for eight years but are separated for long periods due to the nature of Toans job. Toan said he wanted the trucks he has worked on for years to "attend" the wedding to show his wife he is a dedicated worker.
Kidney racket kingpin Brijendra Bisen (43) has confessed to have been involved in 30-35 kidney transplants in the last four years. The police will soon call for records of all kidney transplants carried out at the LH Hiranandani Hospital, Powai, in the last three or four years, a senior officer said.
The Hindu
The police are investigating if the latest racket is limited to Mumbai or has links with the Apollo Hospital kidney racket busted in Delhi early last month. A source said the case, at present with the Powai police, may be transferred to the crime branch.
Bisen's confession came during his interrogation. The police said he has not clarified whether the 30-35 transplants were carried out in Mumbai or elsewhere. The police are probing if he has links with the Delhi accused.
"It is possible that some of those involved in the Delhi racket, after it was busted, came to Mumbai for 'safety'. We have called for CDRs (call detail reports) of all the accused," said a senior police officer.
BCCL/Represenatational image
The police have learned why Bisen returned to his old ways despite being jailed earlier. In October 2007, the Mumbai crime branch had arrested Bisen and four others (including a Chennai doctor). At the time he had confessed that the racket was spread across Chennai, Mumbai and Gujarat, and included recipients from the Gulf, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. He confessed to running the racket since 2002, carrying out around 200 illegal transplants, with 100 kidneys being sourced from Mumbai alone.
After his release in 2009, he went to Jamnagar in Gujarat and took up odd jobs in a ceramic company. Dissatisfied with the money he got, he went to his hometown in Madhya Pradesh and started a sand business, in which he remained for one and a half years. He was forced to shut down the business after suffering losses of Rs 6 lakh. "Creditors started harassing him. Unable to play his loans, he decided to return to his old businesskidney racketeering," said deputy commissioner of police Ashok Dudhe. The police said that in Surat, Bisen used to work as a taxi driver as a cover and was in touch with a gang looking for kidneys for transplant.
BCCL/Represenatational image
About the latest case, Bisen said he arrived in Mumbai only three days prior to the transplant, which was scheduled for July 15. The police said they have recorded "donor" Shobha Thakur's statement. The 42-year-old housewife from Gujarat is likely to be a witness in the case. Thakur was to get Rs 10 lakh for "donating" her kidney.
TOI is in possession of a Rs 100 stamp paper which was notarized on July 4 and shows Thakur as the wife of the intended recipient Brij Kishor Jaiswal (48). The complainant in the Powai case, senior BSP leader Mahesh G Tanna, said that as part of the same racket, three more donors were supposed to arrive in Mumbai from Nagpur on Friday, but then the racket was busted.
India's monsoon session is hotly anticipated as a total of 25 bills, including the crucial GST Bill, are expected to come up for consideration and passage during this time. Today, however was focused on an issue of immediate concern - India's relationship with J&K, and therefore with Pakistan.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh spoke at length on the situation in Kashmir. He reminded the august gathering of the 15 FIRs against Burhan Wani. He said that militants will be dealt with strictly, but civilians must be treated with empathy. The state has been asked to exercise restraint in its dealing with civilians, in the wake of 1948 civilians injured and hospitalised.
We have sent retina-surgeons to Kashmir. 1740 jawans were injured, one succumbed. 39 civilians were killed.
The Congress was outspoken about how Pakistan was trying to worsen situation in Kashmir and India.
We say Kashmir is ours, but nobody says that the people of Kashmir are ours too
Leader of Oppn Ghulam Nabi Azad demanded that use of pellet guns, water cannons in J&K must come to an end. In this context, UP MLA, INC leader Pramod Tiwari raised the demand for a political bill to fight terrorism. This echoed Arun Jaitley's sentiment of a united voice to maintain peace in the Valley, even though he remembered how Pakistan has never reconciled to the idea of J&K being a part of India, and is in fact responsible for triggering this unrest.
Will Pakistan become the saviour of Islam? Pakistan which broke into two parts does not need to worry about Indian Muslims. Indians will worry for them": Rajnath Singh
Representing the Shiv Sena, Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut spoke: Pakistan is observing 'Black Day' for the death of Wani. Then, they should observe 'Black Day' everyday because our forces will kill such terrorists every day.
Pakistan is root cause of trouble in Kashmir. I want to tell Pakistan to leave us alone...We need to act fast so that Kashmir does not burn the way it is burning...: Azad
Azad pledged support to the government's measures to bring peace to the valley.
We stand with government in ending militancy
"Governments run on trust & faith. People of J&K have a sense of mistrust towards the current government"
PM Narendra Modi spoke to the media before Monsoon session began
PM Shri @narendramodi ji interacting with media on arrival at Parliament House on the 1st day of the Monsoon Session pic.twitter.com/hDuGiQHt3u Dr Jitendra Singh (@DrJitendraSingh) July 18, 2016
Goods and Services Tax Bill
The Congress, which has been combative on the Goods and Services Tax Bill (GST Bill) agreed to a 5 hour debate on the matter - a date is yet to to set on the bill, which can simplify tariffs across states Minister Arun Jaitley called it India's most important tax reform in decades. The bill has received support from Trinamool Congress and Samajwadi Party, but needs support from the Rajya Sabha, where the BJP stands in a minority. Anand Sharma and Ghulab Nabi Azad (Congress) are scheduled to meet Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to negotiate on the GST, with a raft of demands that the BJP is likely to mostly agree upon.
Soon after a Mar Thoma College of Science and Technology student couple was arrested from their live-in home in Thiruvananthapuram, they were produced before a magistrate.
Meanwhile, the college rusticated the couple, following which the girl filed a petition challenging the decision.
The Kerala High Court dismissed the petition on the 15th of July - college authorities reportedly accused her of eloping with a classmate
The girl was finishing up her 4th semester of a BA in English Language and Literature. and her petition said that her only crime was falling in love with a classmate. Considering her excellent academic record, she mentioned that grounds for her dismissal were weak.
However, Justice K. Vinod Chandran stated that the college was right to address this indisciplined act.
The judges statement did not mention law, as much as it spoke about setting a precedent in the college - even if it didn't have jurisdiction about college kids could do.
This is not a mere case of falling in love; but two students taking the drastic step of eloping and living together without even contracting a marriage. As consenting adults they could definitely act according to their volition. But, here they could not have even legally entered into a marriage. When taking such drastic step for the sake of love, as adults, they should also be ready to face the consequences. The Managements concern of setting an example to the other students and ensuring maintenance of discipline in the educational institution cannot be easily brushed aside.
The impulsive act of the petitioner has resulted in the drastic consequences. Having gone through the report of the five member Committee as also the order of the Principal and also noticing the fact that the petitioner along with a classmate had eloped and had been residing elsewhere from where they were apprehended by the Police, this Court is not inclined to exercise discretion in favour of the petitioner to interfere with the orders passed by the Management.
On Friday when French people were celebrating Bastille Day, a Tunisian-born terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a lorry through crowd killing 84 people and injured many.
Reuters
The gruesomeness of the terror strike took not only France but the entire world by surprise. France which was recovering from terror strikes on Charlie Hedbo office and the city of Paris bombings last year, once again descended into the state of emergency.
Who is Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel
According to sources, Bouhlel was a 'weird loner' who further became depressed when his wife left him in 2012. Bouhlel, a French passport holder who lived in the Riviera city and was regularly in trouble with the law.
Bouhlel was reportedly not on a terrorist watch list and investigators are seeking to establish his motives - and are also looking for possible accomplices. Though his behavior was suspicious and his father sniffed it way back in 2004 and he was assessed by a psychiatrist, but till then he didn't give hint towards being a terrorists.
The psychiatrist, Chamseddine Hamouda, told the BBC: "At the time he exhibited violent behaviour towards his family, but one cannot imagine that a person like that could carry out such a horrific and bloody crime on this scale. I'm sure that in the past 12 years something else happened that perhaps influenced how he thought."
Another psychiatrist who saw him in 2004, however, hinted towards a possible influence of indoctrination back then as he told L'Express that Bouhlel had come to him because of behavioural problems and that he diagnosed him as suffering from"the beginnings of psychosis."
When did he get indoctrinated?
Although Bouhlel's father found his behavior suspicious way back in 2004 and hence took him to psychiatrist. However, if french intelligence sources to be believed Bouhlel got radicalised quite quickly as reportedly he started going to mosque in April.
The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said the attacker "appears to have become radicalised very quickly" as one neighbour of his estranged wife added: "Mohamed only started visiting a mosque in April."
Two Albanians provided him gun
Reuters
Though Bouhlel mowed down 84 people and injured hundred with a lorry, but during the face off with police, he shot at police with 7.65mm automatic handgun at before they shot him dead.
Seven suspects including two Albanians who alledely supplied him with pistol were arrested. Bouhlel is reportedly had sent flurry of texts shortly before the attack. Another one, saying Ive got the material, was sent to one of the men in custody, whose identities have not been made public.
Bouhlel did recce of Promenade des Anglais
Reuters
CCTV cameras on the Promenade des Anglais, the scene of the massacre, captured Bouhlel twice in the two days before the attack driving the lorry as he did recce of surrounding to execute the attack.
IS's 'Soldier of Islam' sent money to his family
According to reports, Bouhlel had sent 84,000 to his family days before attack and if sources are to be belived, he got the money from IS. IS later took the responsibility of the attack and called him 'Soldier of Islam'.
Bouhlel used to do drugs and was bi-sexual
AFP
Bouhlel phone records suggest that he used dating websites and dabbled with drugs and drink, and was bi-sexual.
According to French media, he picked up both male and female lovers. Bouhlel's phone is said to be full of messages, videos and photographs, including ones of men and women he had recently slept with.
"The testimony which investigators are relying on most is that of the mobile phone," reported the BFM TV news channel, basing their report on evidence leaked to them.
After being brutally murdered by her own brother, Qandeel Balochs funeral was held close to her family home in Dera Ghazi Khan (130 km away from Multan). Apart from her father and mother, who were inconsolable were also trying to protect her dead body because they feared that her brother would harm the body too.
Twitter
Media reports confirmed that many attended her funeral and she was buried at her ancestral graveyard. However, many failed to notice one important thing.
In march, Qandeel Baloch had tweeted about Indian citizenship. Tagging Narendra Modi in her tweet, Baloch tweeted that she was damn disappointed with Pakistan.
She had expressed her displeasure on the same a few days ago in a video where she explained how people in Pakistan are still not ready to accept her. She had been receiving death threats since a long time for her controversial and bold social media videos and posts.
A few weeks ago, she had also written to the interior minister, the director general of the Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) and the senior superintendent of Islamabad, urging them to provide her stringent security.
Instagram
The major reason that Baloch had stated while explaining her plans to get an Indian citizenship were her security, that had always been an issue of major concern for her. Even though she had bigger and better plans for herself, looks like destiny had something else planned for her. Sad.
Journalist and TV host Apsara Reddy was not allowed to enter a warship anchored at the Chennai port on Sunday, after a security officer plainly told her: "No transgenders" could board the ship.
YouthKiAwaz
"Our car entered gate number 7 and we were treated very well by the CISF officers. In front of the ship, an officer named Shubh stopped me and said I can't enter. When I asked why, he rudely said transgenders are not allowed into the ship...I didn't say anything. I just said thank you and left," Apsara Reddy told the New Indian Express.
She was not on a media assignment, but had received a formal invitation to the ship, for a onboard dinner.
bccl
"They noticed me at entrance of the port itself. I think they decided to embarrass me and did this to me as I was about the enter the ship," she said. Apsara Reddy has said she will report the matter to the National Human Rights Commission and the Government about the officers, who she identified as Shubh and Ajay.
There's no understanding the drug addled brain of a junkie - even if the junkie literally uses a brain to get drug addled.
wikimedia
American criminal Joshua Long had a pretty ordinary rap sheet of a string of burglaries but his finest (or worst) moment came when he decided to get high like he'd never been before - by using a human brain.
Attempting to make a potent form of weed, Long and his friend would soak seed in the formaldehyde used to preserve the brain.
Not that they were attempting to preserve the brain - it was kept in a WalMart shopping bag under a trailer, where Long's friend stays.
ap
Long and his friend Robbie Lee Zoller reportedly used it to make 'wet' marijuana - which creates a powerful hallucinogenic high. The duo had even named the brain "Freddy".
"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...I didn't think they were that kind of people, but nowadays, you never know."
He adds: "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," wrote Trooper John Boardman, the investigator.
Hicks believes it was an educational specimen, used in classrooms
youtube
"We're hoping that if anyone feels like they're missing a human specimen brain, bring it to our attention and maybe we could return it to its rightful owner." Long's aunt found the brain while he was still doing time for another crime in prison, and contacted him in prison. Then, she called the cops.
"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," Trooper John Boardman, an investigator involved in the case, wrote in court documents cited by the AP.
The 26-year-old Long now faces new charges of misdemeanor abuse of a corpse and conspiracy to commit abuse of a corpse.
First Pakistan's decision to observe 'Black Day' on July 19th in the wake of Burhan Wani's encounter and now Hurriyat Chief Syed Ali Shah Geelani's letter to United Nations (UN) and other global players requesting intervention in matter of Kashmir is a deliberate ploy to give India's domestic matter an international reckoning.
BCCL
Separatist leader through his letter has requested UN, European Union, South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc), the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), urging them to stop this reign of terror from India.
However, none of the global leaders including, Ban Ki Moon, the UN Chief haven't responded to the letter. While speaking on the ongoing violence in South Sudan on July 12, Moon had said the parties and people in Kashmir should exercise ' maximum restraint' to avoid further violence.
BCCL
More than 40 people have died since the violence broke out after terrorist Burhan Wani's encounter by security forces on July 8th. In his letter, Geelani wrote: 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 forHuman 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.
BCCL
Geelani while alleging India of unleashing new wave of terror, requested the world powers to intervene and save people of valley. "Army unleashing a new wave of terror, killing dozens and maiming hundreds of unarmed protesters, utilising bullets and lethal pellet-guns aimed to kill and maim," accused Geelani in letter.
Geelani's six 'Confidence Building Measures'
In his letter, senior separatist leaders has give six confidence building measures that should be exercised by Indian Establishment to bring violence in valley to halt.
Six of these measures are:
1. Accept the disputed nature of Jammu and Kashmir and announce the acceptance of the peoples Right to Self Determination.
2. Announce rapid demilitarisation process of population centers.
3. Repeal draconian laws like AFSPA and Public Safety Act that facilitate the arbitrary and irresponsible behavior 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 defenseless local population.
4. Release all the political prisoners from prisons, detention centers and house arrest and restore their right to free political activity.
5. 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.
6. 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.
Pakistan Asks Veto Powers, especially China to take notice
BCCL
Pakistan on July 12 approached the five veto powers of the UN Security Council to take stoke of the situation in Kashmir and also called on New Delhi to respect human rights in the valley. Pakistan Foreign Secretary, Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry, also briefed ambassadors of the permanent members of the UNSC over the tense situation in Valley.
Hurriyat seeks Pakistan's support
BCCL
Hurriyat seeks Pakistan' support on the situation in Kashmir valley. Hurriyat leaders like Shabir Ahmad Dar, Muhammad Iqbal Mir, Muhammad Ahsan Untoo, Imtiyaz Ahmed Reshi and Ghulan Nabi war on Saturday thanked Pakistan to its support and also asked their Pakistani patrons to send delegations to various countries to generate awareness about the situation in Kashmir.
Pakistan must send parliamentarian delegations to different countries to create awareness about prevailing situation in Kashmir. The protests which are being organised in many countries should be highlighted by Pakistan. The protest in India from Kolkata to Delhi by Indian civil society and students against the atrocities committed on innocent Kashmiris show that now the Indians also realise that atrocities are being committed on Kashmiris, reported TheGreaterKashmir.
Super 7
He-Man and The Masters of the Universe is returning with a feature-length episode - 3 decades after releasing its first episode in 1985.
Team Super 7 is the mastermind behind the revival, however short, and they are going to debut it at San Diego Comic Con on July 20. Read more details here.
Here are 5 more stories that may interest you:
1. 2,000 Calls, Notes Written In Blood And More Is How Bengaluru Stalker Showed His Creepy Love
bangaloremirror.com
About 2,000 calls a day.
Several thousand messages.
Photos of notes written in blood.
Obscene personal pictures.
Constant stalking.
Threats.
This is how Arun Shashidhar, a former sales executive at a four-star hotel in Hebbal, thought he would woo the woman he 'loved'. Even a 14-day stint in jail didn't stop him.
Arun Shashidhar, a native of Kerala, was recently arrested a second time by the Hebbal police for this constant harassment and stalking, in a manner so obsessive that even the cops admitted they'd never seen anything so extreme. Read more here.
2. 26-Year-Old Thief Busted With A Human Brain He Used To Get High On!
There's no understanding the drug addled brain of a junkie - even if the junkie literally uses a brain to get drug addled.
wikimedia
American criminal Joshua Long had a pretty ordinary rap sheet of a string of burglaries but his finest (or worst) moment came when he decided to get high like he'd never been before - by using a human brain. Attempting to make a potent form of weed, Long and his friend would soak seed in the formaldehyde used to preserve the brain.
Not that they were attempting to preserve the brain - it was kept in a WalMart shopping bag under a trailer, where Long's friend stays. Read more about his weird misadventures.
3 India's First 'Electronic High Court' Has Just Gone Live, India Might Finally Resolve Cases Sup
If you've ever fought a legal case, or even stepped in a courtroom, you'd know that the business of law takes a lot of paper. Considering how easy it is to phase out paper, it is surprising that India has not had a single paper-free judicial institution - until now.
India's first e-court was on Sunday opened at High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad, the common high court for both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Read more.
4 In A Historic Decision, Four Female Athletes Will Represent Saudi Arabia At Rio 2016
Reuters
In a surprising turn of events, Saudi Arabia will be sending four female athletes to Rio. The news was confirmed by the Saudi Olympic Committee.
Sara Al-Attar, Lubna Al-Omair, Cariman Abu Al-Jadail and Wujud Fahmi will become only the second group of women Olympians to represent Saudi Arabia, where women are barred from driving and are subject to a restrictive male guardianship system. Read details here.
5 Angry Mob Lynches An Engineering Student For Murder Of A Girl, Turns Out She Committed Suicide
indiatvnews.com/Represenatational image
An angry mob lynched an engineering student suspecting that he had killed a girl at Adavuladeevi village of Nizampatnam mandal in Guntur district on Sunday.
However, it later turned out that the girl had committed suicide as her parents had arranged her marriage against her wishes.
Shaik Jasmine, 19, had hanged herself from the ceiling at her residence when her parents were away shopping for her marriage. However, her relatives and neighbours attacked two youths -Vemulapalli Sai and Pawan Kumar -who raised alarm after seeing her body. Read more here
A British military dog has been honoured with a memorial for saving thousands of lives by sniffing out hidden explosives in warzones.
Facebook/Military Working Dogs
Buster, an arms and explosive search dog with the Royal Air Force, completed five tours of duty in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Iraq and saved many lives by finding improvised explosive devices. He detected bombs and explosives in war-torn areas around the world.
The springer spaniel retired in 2012 and died at his handlers home in Lincolnshire when he was 13 in 2015.
His handler, Flight Sergeant Will Barrow, said, He undoubtedly saved lots of lives and the upshot of that is that there are also a lot of people that have still got their loved one around.
The memorial has been built at RAF Waddington.
A view of the hotel where American Willard Raymond Wirtse was found dead on Sunday. Photo courtesy of Giao Thong (Transport) newspaper
He has a history of acute diabetes.
Police in the central city of Da Nang are scrambling to ascertain the cause of death of an American man who had stayed in a local hotel.
Willard Raymong Wirtse, 78, had been sharing a room with another American man named Alan Wayne Short, 54, in Khanh Nhi 1 Hotel in Da Nang's Thanh Khe District since Saturday. Short woke up at around 6 a.m. Sunday to the death of his roommate, prompting him to report it to the police.
According to the police, Wirtse came to Da Nang 15 months ago, when he bought a house in Thanh Khe District. He had planned to come back to the U.S. just before his death.
An autopsy would be underway to determine the cause of death, the police said.
Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper quoted an unidentified investigator as saying that Wirtse had a history of acute diabetes and that might have caused his death.
Da Nang is a popular destination for both local and foreign tourists.
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State-run rail operator Trainose continues to incur damages from ongoing employee strikes and work stoppages, with Chinese multinational- a major customer - reportedly in talks with the rail company in the former Yugoslav Republic of Yugoslavia (fYRoM) for an agreement that bypasses the former
The alley where Lee Alex, who was found dead at his house on Saturday morning, lived. Photo by VnExpress/Hai Hieu
There is sign of foul play.
Ho Chi Minh City police are investigating after an Australian man was found dead last weekend at his house in District 10.
Lee Alex, 51, was the director of an education and tourism company. His staff made relentless attempts to contact him on Saturday morning but to no avail, prompting them to call the police.
Police rushed to his house and broke into it only to find his body lying naked in bed on the first floor with bloodstains on his nose and his mouth.
According to the police, Alex's motorbike was gone and there were signs that somebody might have rummaged through the house.
According to his neighbors, Alex had been renting the house for over a year and lived there alone. He was friendly and still seen the day before, they said.
Further investigations would be underway, the police said.
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> Ukranian couple found dead in Khanh Hoa, foul play suspected
Just so you stay ahead of people who dont visit INFORMATION NIGERIA, we have put together 7 things that went down in the President Muhammadu Buhari government in the past week.
MON 11 FRI 15 JULY: INVESTMENTS: A number of Nigerian Cabinet Ministers visited London to take part in a weeklong Nigeria Investment Roadshow organized by UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) in partnership with the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC). The Ministers delivered speeches, took part in press conferences, and met with groups of existing and intending investors in Nigeria. Investment opportunities highlighted by the Minister of State for Aviation, Hadi Sirika, included the impending concession of the Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Kano Airports (the four busiest in Nigeria), and the planned private-sector-led national carrier.
WED 13 JULY: LIGHTING UP NIGERIA: The National Council on Power met in Kaduna between the 11th and 14th of July. The Council, established in 2014, comprises is comprised of stakeholders in the electricity supply sector: Minister(s) of Power, Works and Housing, Permanent Secretary, State Commissioners of Power/Energy, CEOs of Power Companies (DISCOs, GENCOs, etc), Donor Agencies, Professional Bodies, Academics, Consumer Groups, and so on). On July 13 Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, accompanied by the Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, inspected the 215MW dual-fired (LPFO + Gas) power plant under construction in Kaduna. Originally due for completion in 2012, it will now be completed by June 2017.
TUE 12 JULY: AGRICULTURE: Hon. Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh received a courtesy visit from the Governor of Taraba State Governor, Darius Ishaku. During the visit the governor pledged his support for the Federal Governments planned cattle ranches, aimed at developing the livestock industry and addressing the lingering herdsmen/farmers clashes across the country.
WED 13 FRI 15 JULY: FOLLOWING THE MONEY: The Ministry of Finance organized a National Retreat on Revenue Generation, with the theme Enhancing Revenue Generation for Sustainable National Development in Kano, to generate new ideas for boosting revenue generation to finance the federal budget and to upgrade national infrastructure. State Governors, Ministers, Chief Executives of government revenue-generating agencies, Directors of Accounts and Audits in MDAs, as well as Revenue Officers were in attendance at the Retreat.
THUR 14 JULY: SECURITY: President Muhammadu Buhari paid a one-day visit to Zamfara State to commemorate the 2016 Army Day Celebration. He spent the day in Dansadau, with officers and troops of the Headquarters of the 1 Brigade. He also took advantage of his time in Zamfara to commission a number of infrastructure projects, as well as launch a special army intervention to tackle the menace of cattle rustlers and armed bandits. Zamfara is the state worst hit by the activities of these bandits in Northern Nigeria.
TUE 12 JULY: DATA: The National Bureau of Statistics signed an MOU with the Nigeria Mortgate Refinacing Company aimed at providing NMRC data for evidence-based policy and decision making to support the governments housing sector development strategy. The data will include numbers of mortgages, expenditure on mortgages, demand for mortgages, housing demand, percentage of home ownership, expenditure on rent, and so on.
THUR 14 JULY: HEALTHCARE: The Federal Ministry of Health presented cheques of $1.5m (~N420m) to each of the 36 States as part of the Saving One Million Lives Programme For Results Initiative. The Saving One Million Lives (SOML) Initiative aims to dramatically improve the health of mothers & children by focusing on the demonstrable improvement of health outcomes, and not on inputs. The Programme for Results component (PforR) supports SOML by providing financial incentives to Fed & State Govts based on results achieved. The States are expected to use the $1.5m primarily to achieve reduced maternal & child mortality, and increased quality of care at Primary Health Care facilities.
Culled from the 10th edition of AsoRock Newsletter
President Muhammadu Buhari during his address at the international workshop of the role of the judiciary in the fight against anti corruption made the following points.
Its no longer news that Pres. Buhari has made the fight against corruption one of the top priorities of his administration according to him, it is with the hope that the fight will help restore the economy and build a new Nigeria. INFORMATION NIGERIA brings you 9 interesting points he wants the judiciary to take note of.
1.The importance of the judiciary
The responsibility of the judiciary in a democratic society such as ours is a critical one. It is one of the three pillars of the modern democratic nation state and is essential to the process of checks and balances, which is so fundamental to the way societies such as ours are meant to operate and function. This apparent function that the Judiciary plays is undeniably one of the cornerstones of any effective strategy against corruption.
2.The judiciarys work
While it is true that corruption is a global phenomenon occurring in almost all countries in the world, the problem is much more pronounced in some countries than others but more complicated in developing countries. It has now become clear that corruption is one of the main obstacles to peace, stability, sustainable development, democracy, and human rights around the globe.
The judiciary is a public institution whose job is to provide fundamental checks on other public institutions. Therefore, a fair and efficient judiciary is the key to all anti-corruption initiatives.
3. What the UN says about the judiciary
Article 11 of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, provides that the independence of the judiciary and its crucial role in combating corruption, shall, in accordance with the fundamental principles of a State Partys legal system and without prejudice to judicial independence, take measures to strengthen integrity and to prevent opportunities of corruption among members of the judiciary. What Article 11 simply means is that a corrupt judicial system not only violates the basic right to equality before the law but also deny procedural rights guaranteed by the Nigerian Constitution.
4.Why the judiciary must remain pure
In carrying out its role in the fight against corruption, the judiciary must remain impartial and most importantly, be seen to be impartial. It is incumbent on the judiciary to analyze facts based on the applicable law without prejudice and penchant regarding the case they are dealing with, and without acting in any way that would favor the interests of any of the parties.
5. When the judiciary is corrupt
Where judicial corruption occurs, the damage can be pervasive and extremely difficult to reverse. It undermines citizens morale, violates their human rights, harms national development and depletes the quality of governance.
6.What the judiciary must do
The Judiciary must take steps to ensure that it is not seen as being partisan. As such, it must be aware of the sensitivities of the public and take steps towards avoiding even the shred of a doubt as regards its independence. In justice, integrity is a necessity. Hence, Judicial Officers and all other members of this sector must always demonstrate manifest integrity.
7.What a slow judiciary means
Critically important also, is the sacred duty of the judiciary to ensure that criminal justice administration is not delayed. I am worried that the expectation of the public is yet to be met by the judiciary with regard to the removal of delay and the toleration of delay tactics by lawyers.
8.How Nigerians should see the judiciary
To this end, the Judiciary is under a duty to keep its house in order and to ensure that the public, which it serves, sees this. Thus, we cannot expect to make any gains in the war against corruption in our society when the judiciary is seen as being distant from the crusade. This will not augur well and its negative effect will impact all sectors of society.
9.The success of the corruption lies only with the judiciary
The Rivers State Government yesterday accused the immediate past Governor and current Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, of frittering N3 trillion belonging to the State in eight years.
The Nyesom Wike-led Rivers Government said Amaechi left the most abandoned projects in the history of the State.
The Commissioner for Information, Dr. Austin Tam-George, who levelled the allegation against the former governor, noted that while Amaechis administration borrowed N4 billion agricultural loan from the Central Bank of Nigeria with no record of farmer-beneficiaries, Governor Wikes N2 billion loan from the same source, had recorded 35,000 beneficiaries that were small and medium scale entrepreneurs.
In a reaction, however, the opposition party in the state, the All Progressives Congress (APC), said the allegation was unfounded, as Amaechi could not have wasted such sum under any guise.
The Rivers APC publicity secretary, Mr. Chris Finebone, who dismissed the claim, accused the State Government of reeling out imaginary figures.
Finebone said, For once, you guys should ask the Commissioner what was used for those uncompleted projects he claimed was abandoned. It is important he cross-check his records so that he can overcome his little dream world of make-belief.
President Muhammadu Buhari has tasked the nations judiciary on the need to be impartial in handling all the corruption cases currently before it.
He gave the charge at the National Judicial Institute, Abuja on Monday at the commencement of a workshop, with the theme: The Role of Judiciary in the Fight against Corruption.
President Buhari noted that a corrupt judicial system denies the citizens rights guaranteed by constitution.
He, therefore, said the judiciary must be impartial and be seen to be so even as he warned it against acting in any way that would favour the interest of those concerned in the ongoing anti-corruption war.
Buhari also urged the nations judiciary to maintain its absolute independence and take steps to ensure it is not seen as being impartial.
The president, who expressed worry over the delay tactics by defence and prosecution lawyers in the ongoing trials of alleged corrupt Nigerians, maintained that the fight against corruption remained his governments priority in the face of the current economic downturn.
He, however, stated that progress could not be said to be made when the judiciary is seen to be distanced.
While describing the anti-corruption war as a task for all stakeholders, the president maintained that the judiciary is duty-bound to keep its house in order.
President Buhari, who said his administration was counting on the judiciary and was committed to promoting and supporting it, also urged the judiciary to count on him for support so that we can together rid our country of the cancer of corruption.
According to the president, a corruption-free Nigeria is possible.
Every arm of government should be the change we want to see in our country, he advocated.
He said the workshop was timely as it offered Nigeria a unique opportunity to agree on basic tenets that would make her efforts acceptable to all right-thinking people.
He said the responsibility of the judiciary in a democratic society like Nigeria is a critical one.
Buhari described corruption as a global phenomenon which knows no boundaries as it exists in all countries, in public and private sectors as well as in all facets of society.
However, he pointed out that the problem of corruption is much more pronounced in some countries than others, adding that it is more complicated in developing countries.
President Buhari also stressed that corruption is a challenge to peace, stability, justice and democracy.
Earlier in his welcome address, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Muhammad, had said that the responsibility of fighting corruption lies with all Nigerians.
We cannot continue to do things the same way and expect different results, the CJN said.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has praised the Borno State Governor, Alhaji Kashim Shettima, for giving priority to the welfare of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).
National Secretary of the APC, Alhaji Mai Mala Buni, gave the commendation on Sunday in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.
Buni said that the governor did not abandon his people, even when about 22 of its councils were under the Boko Haram siege.
He noted that despite the economic challenges making some states unable to pay workers, Shettima continued to pay workers entitlements when due.
The APC scribe also called on Nigerians to shun corruption and stand with President Muhammadu Buhari as he strives to pull the country out of its present woes.
The immediate past Inspector General of Police, Mr. Solomon Arase, has condemned his successor, Ibrahim Idris decision to address the media, rather than personally reach out to him over alleged missing police vehicles.
Acting IG of Police, Idris, had while addressing a press conference yesterday in Abuja, accused his predecessor of taking with him, following his retirement last month, 24 police vehicles, including two BMW 7 series; one armoured and leaving him with an old and rickety vehicle.
The police chief, who claimed Arase refused to return the vehicles despite writing him to that effect, disclosed that he had set up a Special Investigation Panel to investigate all the vehicle purchases, contributions to the police and the distribution of those vehicles in the last three years.
Arase who is in London for his sons graduation, said in a statement on Monday that every information needed by his successor on vehicles bought by the police were in his handover notes.
The retired IG maintained that all vehicles bought by the police under him were distributed to the state commands and other appropriate units of the force.
He also denied getting any letter from Idris since he has been in the UK.
I suspect there must be a disconnect somewhere because every information needed by my successor are provided in my handover notes, Mr. Arase said.
Im also not aware that any letter was written to me because if there was any dropped in my house, someone would have alerted me.
Its unfortunate that this matter is being made a media issue because my successor has my telephone number and could have called me for any clarification or even sent me a text message rather than addressing the media on an issue well documented in my handover notes, he lamented.
About a month after he retired from service, immediate past Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, has been drawn into a battle of attrition with his successor, Ibrahim Idris, over claims that he (Arase) went away with 24 police vehicles.
Mr. Idris, at a press conference in Abuja on Sunday, claimed that his predecessor went away with the vehicles, which included two BMW 7 series one armoured; and has refused to return them despite requests to do so.
The Punch newspaper quoted the Acting IG of Police as also alleging that the deputy Inspector Generals, who retired alongside Mr. Arase, also left with between seven and eight cars each.
He added that a special investigation team was already probing the number of vehicles purchased by the police in the last three years and how they were distributed.
Mr. Arase, however, denied the allegation, describing it as a malicious propaganda.
Idris insisted on recovering the vehicles, saying he had written to his predecessor and other recently retired senior police officers to return the vehicles in their possession.
So, what I am telling you is that I have signed a directive to my SIP (I have a special investigation panel, I set it up). It is going to investigate all the vehicle purchases, contributions to the police and the distribution of those vehicles in the last three years; we are going to look into that.
When I took over, there was no vehicle, even the vehicle I would use. I discovered the last IG went away with 24 vehicles; the DIGs, some of them eight, some of them seven. The IGs vehicles included two BMW 7 series, one armoured; and he left me with an old car.
The last time I followed the President with it, he was asking me, what are you doing with this old car because if you see the headlight, the thing has changed colour, which means they parked it and rains and everything had fallen on it, but the new ones that were bought, he (Arase) went with all of them; they are part of the 24.
I wrote back to him and said, we have a policy that says when a policeman retires, if you are an IG, AIG, a CP, you are entitled to some vehicles; please, the extra, return it. Four vehicles are enough for an average human being, but what will you even do with four vehicles; but he took 24 vehicles, including two BMW cars.
I wrote to him (Arase), I wrote to the DIGs.
Mr. Idris said he was shocked to discover that cars that were parked at the force headquarters transport department disappeared just a week before he assumed duties as Acting Inspector General.
If you look through the windows of my former office and from the report from my (Force) transport officer, you would see cars but a week to the day I would resume, all these cars disappeared.
In his reaction, Mr. Arase advised his successor to focus on confronting the security challenges in the country instead of wasting time on media propaganda.
What am I going to do with 24 cars? Do I want to open a car shop? This is a malicious accusation. There are ways of verifying issues rather than engaging in media propaganda, the newspaper quoted the retired police boss as saying, when he was contacted.
President Muhammadu Buhari, yesterday, directed the Acting Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to reopen investigation into the unresolved murder of former Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, and ex-Deputy National Chairman, South-South, of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Aminosari Dokubo, and fish out the perpetrators.
The killing of the two personalities caused national outrage, with Nigerians calling on the government of former President Olusegun Obasanjo to fish out the killers who have still not been found.
Late Bola Ige
Recall that Chief Bola Ige was shot dead in his bedroom in Bodija, Ibadan, home at about 9pm on December 23, 2001, after he arrived Ibadan from Lagos at about 8.30pm.
His security details were said to have sought permission from the former Attorney General to go and eat before the incident occurred.
The gunmen, who were said to have been waiting in the vicinity, then stormed the house and tied up family members.
One of the gunmen reportedly pointed a gun at a family member and asked him to lead them upstairs to Chief Bola Iges room. They allegedly moved the wife and his son to an adjourning room, locked them up before shooting their target in the chest.
Vanguard gathered from sources that towards unearthing the perpetrators of these unresolved murders, the Acting Inspector General of Police has instituted a high powered investigation team, headed by an Assistant Inspector General of Police, to crack the case.
Following the death of the late Bola Ige, several unsubstantiated allegations were made against several politicians and interest groups, with some even saying the Cicero, as he was fondly called, was killed to halt the rise in his political profile, while others said it had to do with his impending probe of the corruption in the power sector of the nations economy.
Dokubos assassination
On the part of Chief Aminosari Dokubo, the late PDP Deputy National Chairman was said to be returning to his base from Abuja after a meeting when he was waylaid by suspected assassins on entering Delta State. He was killed near Asaba on October 22, 2004.
Dokubos assassination at the time was alleged to have been caused by certain disagreements with the powers that be in his political party, prior to the general elections.
A source told Vanguard that the fact that the killers and their sponsors were still prowling the streets without arrest and prosecution for crimes against humanity, was a dangerous trend which, if not addressed, might lead to killing of more political leaders either now or in the future.
Its a new day Bola Iges son
Reacting to the development, Architect Muyiwa Ige, son of late Chief Bola Ige, said last night that it would be glorious, if the family could get justice 16 years after.
Muyiwa, who could not hide his happiness, said President Buhari did not disappoint him, saying the matter was now in the right direction.
He said: I knew right from the advent of the administration of President Buhari that the matter would be resurrected. The President is in the right direction. To God be the glory. Its a new day; we are happy, we will get justice after 16 years.
We are happy that all those who murdered our father, including the star witness, will be brought to justice. Its good news.
Source: Vanguard
Nguyen Hai Duong, the mastermind of the murder, accepted the death sentence and requested expedited execution. Photo by VnExpress/Phuoc Tuan
The story of a man who brutally murdered his ex-girlfriend's family last year is reaching its final chapter.
An appellate court in Ho Chi Minh City on Monday rejected all appeals by two men found guilty in the grisly murder of six members of a wealthy family in the southern province of Binh Phuoc in July 2015.
The case has since grabbed headlines and rocked the country.
In a trial held last December, the court convicted Nguyen Hai Duong, 24, the ex-boyfriend of one of the victims, of orchestrating the murders, and Vu Van Tien, Duongs 24-year-old friend, of acting as his accomplice. Both men were sentenced to death for the murders.
Tran Dinh Thoai, Duongs 27-year-old friend, was sentenced to 16 years for buying a knife for Duong and harboring the murder.
While Duong has accepted his sentence, Tien and Thoai requested appeals. The HCMC appeals court, in a one-day hearing, denied all of their requests and upheld their sentences.
The courts verdict stated that Tien was persuaded by Duong to help him murder the family.
Without Tien, Duong wouldnt have been able to commit the crime so he must take responsibility," the verdict said. "Although Tiens case has extenuating circumstances such as his guilty plea and his familys contribution to the state the nature of the murder dictates he must be removed from society, it said.
Vu Van Tien after the hearing. Photo by VnExpress/Quoc Thang
Thoai, while not directly involved in the crime, helped Duong to buy a knife. The court decided to not reduce his sentence.
On July 7 of 2015, Le Van My, who ran a big wood processing plant in Binh Phuoc Province (around 100 kilometers to the northeast of Ho Chi Minh City) and his wife, son, daughter and two other relatives, were found dead at their villa in Chon Thanh District.
Duong said he and My's daughter Le Thi Anh Linh, who was among the six deceased, loved each other but Linhs family objected to the relationship, leading Linh to end their romance. In April 2015, Duong began to plan his revenge by killing Linh and her family and stealing their assets.
Duong asked Thoai to help him; but rather than take part in the murders, he bought Duong a knife instead. Duong then convinced Tien to help him by lying that Linhs family owed him VND900 million (US$40,356). Duong promised Tien a certain cut of the money if he agreed to help.
Tien (left) and Thoai. Photo by VnExpress/Quoc Thang.
On the morning of July 7, 2015, the two broke into Linhs house, located off National Highway 13. The two men killed Vy, the homeowners 14-year-old nephew, after bribing the boy to open the gate, according to a police report. They then murdered Linh, her father, her 42-year-old mother, her 15-year-old brother and her 18-year-old cousin.
Police said the victims sustained fatal stab wounds to their necks and chests. Vy, the first victim, was found in the front yard, while the other five were found tied up in their rooms. However, the youngest daughter, an 18-month-old baby, was spared.
Duong told the court he had grown fond of the baby during his time with Linh. Duong and Tien then left the house at around 4:30 a.m. on July 7 with about VND4 million (US$180) in cash, five smartphones, a tablet and a laptop.
Vietnam switched to lethal injection from firing squad in 2011.
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The House of Representatives has never contemplated moving an impeachment against President Muhammadu Buhari, Chief Whip Alhassan Ado-Doguwa, said yesterday in Bauchi.
The Chief Whip spoke against the backdrop of alleged moves by some senators to impeach the president even though the Senate denied the existence of an impeachment plot against Mr. Buhari.
Ado-Doguwa, however, urged Nigerians and friends of the country not to take the allegation seriously.
He said: As a principal officer of the House of Representatives, we never had any such consideration before us.
So the speculation is unfolded, it has not come to my notice officially or otherwise from any principal officer or any member, so it is a mere speculation and should be left at that level
This matter has never been contemplated on the floor of the House. The House has never at any point in thought of it or deliberated on it.
As far as the House and the leadership of the House are concerned, we have no cause whatsoever to contemplate the impeachment of the president, after all, we dont have any impeachable offence at hand to which to even take any action against him.
The Chief Whip explained that the Reps have no cause whatsoever, genuinely or otherwise to contemplate the impeachment of Mr. President.
A pilot with Gyro Air Limited, the airline involved in the airlift of N1.299billion for the Ekiti governorship election in 2014, has told the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFFC) how he flew a former Minister of State for Defence, Senator Musiliu Obanikoro, with the cash to Akure, Ondo State.
The pilot, Captain Ahmed Bashir Borodo, said the cash was wrapped with green military tarpaulin bags before it was loaded onto the chartered aircraft with tail number HS125-800 5N-BMT and operated by Gyro Air.
He said the bags were so heavy that it took three people to lift one at a time.
It was learnt that the pilot made these disclosures at the weekend when he was quizzed by EFCC detectives.
The session was part of the ongoing probe of Governor Ayodele Fayose, who allegedly received the N1.299billion slush funds from Obanikoro through his associate, Abiodun Agbele.
About N4.745billion was paid into Obanikoros company, Sylva Mcnamara, by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) for the 2014 Ekiti governorship poll.
The slush funds had been traced by the anti-graft agency to the former junior minister, Fayose, three firms and a former Deputy Governor of Osun State, Senator Iyiola Omisore.
In his statement on what he knew about the transfer of the cash, Borodo told the EFCC detectives that he only flew the plane in line with the directive of his airlines management.
He said: On the 17th June 2014, I was advised around 0700 hours by my Flight Operations Department that we would be operating a chartered flight to Akure from Lagos with estimated departure time of 0830 hours.
The client was Musiliu Obanikoro, Minister of State for Defence at that time.
I arrived at the airport at about 0730 hours to prepare for the flight along with my colleague, Captain Olubiyi Famuyiwa and cabin attendant Uyi Okoro. Minutes later, the ministers aides came to the aircraft with some bullion vans. They started offloading the contents, which were big green tarpaulin bags. Military bags precisely.
The ADC to the minister was dressed in Navy uniform. This is all I can state now.
He added: When we noticed that only about three people could carry the bags because of the weight, we told them that because of the weight, we could only take about eight to nine bags.
The minister who had disembarked at that time from his vehicle pleaded with us but we said our aircraft was too small to carry all the bags. We loaded the bags. The minister, his ADC and a friend boarded the aircraft and we departed to Akure, Ondo State.
When we arrived at Akure Airport, some soldiers came and there was a bullion van as well to carry the baggage. We departed empty to Lagos on the 17/06/14. On the 18th of June 2014, we were sent from Abuja to Akure to pick Mr. Musiliu Obanikoro and take him to Abuja. He boarded without any luggage with his ADC and we proceeded to Abuja to drop him.
Also, the General Manager of the Airline, Mr. Jide West, has disclosed that about $25, 200 was paid for the two chartered flights from Lagos to Akure and Akure to Abuja.
Mr. West gave an insight into how the chartered flight service was procured at $25,200.
He said: On the 15/16 of June 2014, Lt. Adewale O Eruka called me for a flight to Akure scheduled for 17th and 18th of June 2014 on the instruction of Musiliu Obanikoro. I contacted operation and the flight was carried out as detailed below: 17/6/14 Lagos Akure Lagos
I was informed that they carried the bags to Akure with some passengers as indicated in the manifest.
On 18/6/14, the flight was Abuja Akure Abuja to pick up the passengers from Akure back to Abuja. The aircraft was empty from Abuja but brought the passengers as indicated in the manifest, back to Abuja.
The flights were paid for; $25,200 was paid for both flights and this was arranged by Lt. Adewale. The crew on the flight on both occasions were: Capt. Biyi Famuyiwa whose service has been terminated by Gyro Air Ltd; Ahmed Borodo the second pilot who accompanied me to EFCC today; and Uyi Okoro the cabin crew, who resigned her appointment from Gyro for further studies abroad. Resignation and termination letters attached.
I also have a text on my phone dated 19/6/14 from Lt. Adewale detailing how payment will be made for the chartered service.
As the EFCC intensifies its investigation of the Ekiti governor, indications emerged that some officials of Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and Nigeria Air Management Agency (NAMA) may appear before the commission to explain what they know about the airlift of the cash.
The brother of Qandeel Baloch, whose risque social media posts angered conservative Pakistan, on Sunday, July 17, admitted to killing her for the familys honour
Muhammad Waseem, who was arrested late on Saturday , said he gave a tablet to Baloch to subdue her and then strangled her in their family home over the weekend.
I have no regrets, he told journalists in a press conference arranged by the police early on Sunday .
The police arrested Muhammad Waseem, brother of Qandeel Baloch, for killing his sister late on Saturday , Multan City police chief Azhar Akram told AFP. Waseem confessed to his crime, saying he killed his sister for honour after her recent objectionable videos, mostly posted on Facebook.
The killing sent shock waves across Muslim Pakistan and triggered an outpouring of grief on social media for Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem.
In Facebook posts, Baloch, 26, spoke of trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people in Pakistan. She faced frequent misogynist abuse and death threats but continued to post provocative pictures and videos.
Source: AFP
A two-day visit by Sunday Vanguard to the community was an eye opener. The journey began from Coconut Bus Stop to the quayside during a downpour. It was followed by a N100 boat ride with 14 other passengers. But in the middle of the restless ocean, the engine coughed and went off, setting off panic among the passengers. The boat was in danger of tipping over as the passengers shifted about, several of them thinking the end had come, but the driver and a few level-headed passengers appealed for calm.
During several attempts to restart the engine, a boat loaded with sachet water passed by, also on its way to Igbologun while a canoe, with a lone female occupant, equally sailed by.
Finally, the driver brought the engine back to life and the journey continued. As passengers disembarked at the destination, the reporter was accosted by two young boys of about 12 and 16. They were there to help offload passengers luggage from the boat for a fee. Commercial motorcycle riders (Okada) also swarmed around the passengers.
Welcome to Igbologun, a community made up of different tribes, cultures and religions. It was gathered that Snake Island, on which the community sits, derived its name from the (snaky) way it appears on the map, contrary to the belief that it is so called because of the large population of snakes there.
Snake Island has so much beach sand such that, as you walk, your legs sink in and it is as if youre being pulled back. Interestingly, the hugely populated island, situated in the heart of Apapa, is under Amuwo-Odofin Local Government Area.
Despite being so close to the hub of trade and commerce, and all its modernity, what would seem like another shocking discovery, for a first-time visitor, is how typically rural the island remains.
Igbologun, despite a history of existence that precedes even the Nigerian nation, is dying for government attention for the provision of basic social amenities like schools, standard hospitals, tarred roads, potable water, stable power, standard market place and means of waste disposal, among others.
The first impressionable building to behold is Igbologun Senior Secondary School. Close to it is a police post that offers the community the only source of drinking water and it is about 30 minutes-walk into the heart of the community.
Trooping out were young and old women carrying trays of all sorts laden with wares of smoked fish
(Egun Fish). Young children were also hawking.
A striking feature that immediately becomes apparent across the community is the high number of pregnant teenage girls. This reporter soon gathered that even though pregnant, majority of the girls are not registered for ante natal care, mainly as a result of financial constraint and cultural beliefs.
Findings showed that there is a sense of laxity that enables these young girls engage in sexual activities. The development is essentially fuelled by the high level of poverty in the community. Many of the girls are lured with money by the young men who are boat drivers or Okada operators.
Most of these guys you see riding Okada or driving boat have more than three girlfriends each because they make quick money from their businesses and live like kings in the community, said Mr. Jude.
Further investigation revealed that whenever a pregnant woman in the community goes into labour, particularly at mid-night, they are usually in a dilemma. This is due to the inability to afford to register in a standard hospital, and for those who could afford it, reaching the centre at mid-night is a tug of war while obstetric complication that may require surgery is out of the question. The result is that many pregnant women and newborns often lose their lives. The only Primary Healthcare Centre in Igbologun is defunct.
Sunday Vanguard encountered some men who had sad tales to tell.
David lost his wife during childbirth.
Emeka, who lives in Mama P compound in the community, also lost his wife along with a set of twins while Daramola lost his wife and is left to bring up their baby alone. What the three men have in common is that their wives fell into labour at night.
Bolanle, Davids wife, 27, may have been alive today to experience the joy of motherhood, but her dream was cut short because she found herself at Igbologun.
Bolanles desire to give life led her to the great beyond. She fell into labour in the middle of the night.
When she went into labour in the middle of the night, we already knew there was a problem. Her mother called for help, but there was little anyone could do because there was no means of conveying her to the other side of the lagoon for medical attention, said Mr. Gbenga Sosanya, a neighbour.
Prior to her delivery time, Bolanle registered for antenatal at Tolu Hospital in Ajegunle, but no boat could convey her there in the night. She and her baby died after several hours of labour in the hands of traditional birth attendants.
Pointing to the spot where Bolanle was buried, Sosanya said that the trauma forced her parents to leave the community. He hinted that several of such cases were recorded in the community until few years ago, when someone set up a small private hospital.
The only Primary Healthcare Centre in the community can simply be described as an empty building because there are no doctors or nurses and, most of the time, it is locked.
Agony of motherhood
Sunday Vanguard visited the private hospital. It has seven rooms for the over 20,000 residents. The doctor in charge was battling to save the life of Pasca Kapo, a year and six months old child who was brought in a breathe away from death.
Pasca was brought in gasping for breath, his legs and arms cold. After administering first aid, the doctor said he had severe malaria and anaemia with PCV of 10 percent. To worsen matters, Pasca is O-negative, a rare blood group. The doctor required a transfusion urgently but the childs parents were broke. They were running from pillar to pole to raise money.
After a lengthy persuasion, John Kapo, the boys step father, spoke with our reporter.
I am not the biological father of Pasca. I married his mother when she was rejected while pregnant with him. It is the present pregnancy she is carrying that belongs to me, but I just have to help save him even though he is someone elses child, he narrated
We tried our best at home in the first three days when he was showing the signs, but when it went beyond us, we took him to the traditional birth attendant where he was for two days. When he was at the point of death, they said we should take him away.
In the nursing ward was Charity Felix. The 30-year-old woman recounted how the doctor saved her life. I went into labour around 2am. I had registered at Sonnex Hospital in Ajegunle where I had my second child who is presently six years old. My first child, who is 10, was delivered by the Ijaw women here in Igbologun. I could not cross to the other side of the ocean for delivery. When the Ijaw women tried all their best to take the delivery, with no success, they sent me to this private hospital.
In tears, Charity said her first two children were delivered normally but the third was through C-section and she had been in the hospital for two weeks and two days because they could not settle their bills.
Recently, my husband lost his job, and to eat became a problem. We have property to sell, but nobody is ready to buy. Even to pay the house rent is very difficult. Charity, who hails from Igueben local government area of Edo State, has lost contact with her parents since she lost her handset.
Next to her was Elizabeth Luke, 20, who was rushed from a nearby Island, Sabokogi. She went into labour around 7 pm and, after failure by traditional birth attendants to deliver her of the body, around 4am, she was transported with a chartered speedboat to Igbologun Medical Centre where she went through a C-section. Elizabeth said there is a Primary Health Care, PHC in their community but no doctor and no drugs.
Several hours later, our reporter engaged Dr. Sodipo Gbolahan, who opened up on the pathetic status of healthcare services in the community.
Only doctor in the community
The only doctor serving the over 20,000 residents of Igbologan graduated from University of Ibadan in 2005. He served at Bishop Shanahan Hospital, Nsukka and later joined Ibadan Central Hospital for a year and a half before moving to Tolu Medical Centre in Olodi-Apapa.
While at Olodi-Apapa, a patient attending ante natal facilitated his relocation to Igbologun.
When one of the pregnant women who came for ante natal told me they lost a pregnant woman with twins overnight because there was no means to transport her to the hospital, I was surprised and asked why they did not call for an ambulance. She said no ambulance could get there,the doctor said.
Gbolahan discussed his intention to relocate with his wife who kicked against it. But as God will have it, she was having problem with her own pregnancy; so I quickly took her to the United States of America and, before she returned, I had moved to the community.
Over the past five years, he has been practising in Igbologun. Most of his patients have been vulnerable groups, children, pregnant women and the elderly. He explained that most of his patients come to his clinic after trying so many options and only come at the point of death.
Few (pregnant women) register across the ocean in Ajegunle but usually have no means to cross the ocean and end up dead in the hands of traditional birth attendants or are brought to me very late. There was a case I just discharged, she presented very late, but eventually we saved her life but lost the baby. She went to be delivered in a church in the community, where there was no nurse. After several hours of prayer and miracles did not happen, they sent for me, the doctor said.
When I got there, there was no nurse to take the delivery. The woman was already weak, the baby distressed. She couldnt push, so we had a C-section to bring the baby out dead, but the mother was alive. She spent three weeks here and they were able to raise the N70,000 bill. Sometimes when patients present, I dont expect them to survive but miraculously they do.
Generally here, people dont go to hospital for delivery. They believe that strong women should deliver at home. There was a lady who, during her first pregnancy, tried to deliver at home but lost the baby. When she got pregnant a second time, she ran to me and said doctor, nothing must happen to this baby.
When I came here five years ago, they told me there was no light two years before my arrival and in my five years of staying, there was no light. The situation persisted until January this year when we had light because Governor Akinwunmi Ambode came to our aid. But for three months now, its been blackout.
Running the hospital
Gbolahan began running his hospital inside a room, self-contained, but later expanded. I purchased used beds from doctors in Ajegunle. I keep one room as private ward in which those admitted are able to pay their bills. It is from there I settle my own bills, pay my staff and buy drugs. I am here until the day I will not be able to cope again. Probably before that time, government may have come to their rescue.
Way forward
He urged the state government to partner with private facilities because Igbologun is just one of several islands.
If you go to Igboejo, Tomaro, Itu Agan or Sabokoji, government can put three secondary healthcare centres which will feed Island Maternity or the Lagos General Hospital, the doctor said.
Also in this community, there is nothing to motivate the younger ones. After their primary school, the next thing is to be a boat driver or a fisherman. They seduce females and impregnate them and later go for abortions that result in complications.
I was trying to talk to the school principal to start a scholarship. There could be potential doctors here. If a doctor is from among them, they would be committed. Half of the girls drop out in SS2 due to pregnancy. Most of time when I talk to the ladies, they say after secondary schools they will get married.
Religious leader
The Chief Imam of Igbologun, Osani Saka Olaribigbe, who complained bitterly over the state of healthcare in the community, said the only PHC in Igbologun can best be described as an empty building.
In that health centre, they dont have any equipment, no drugs, no doctor; so we cannot call it hospital, it is just an ordinary building. The two nurses there only refer people to urban areas to seek healthcare and once it is 2pm they close the centre, Olaribigbe said.
The last delivery I could remember they took in that PHC was in 2004. Even when they refer us to across the ocean, there is no means of transporting our pregnant women to the General Hospital or Cardoso Hospital in Ajegunle.
Traditional ruler
The Baale of the Igbologun, Chief Amisu Alao Gegeiyawo, also complained that they have tabled their challenges on several occasion to the government without favourable outcome.
He said that among the challenges confronting the community was lack of waste disposal facilities and source of potable water.
Gegeiyawo said that its been long since they enjoyed government services in the area of quality healthcare service.
The only intervention we enjoy once a while is from non -governmental organisations, which come to distribute drugs and mosquito net to our people, the traditional head explained.
The PHC is under Amuwo Odofin Local Government and I have complained on several occasions about the unavailability of medical personnel at the centre and no drugs, but the situation remains the same.
At the PHC, the Health Assistant, Mrs. Aminat Ogungbemi, declined to make comments.
The compound was overgrown with bush while the doctors lodge was under lock and key.
Source: Vanguard
The Kebbi Government has paid N600 million backlog of tuition and registration fees for indigents of the state studying in various tertiary institutions of learning within and outside the country.
The Commissioner for Higher Education, Alhaji Maigari Dakingari, revealed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Birnin Kebbi on Monday.
He reiterated that the payment would be sustained as part of efforts to improve the standard of education, adding that government would continue to support indigent students to acquire education.
Alh Dakingari said no fewer than 5,000 students benefited from the grant and he however, appealed to the beneficiaries to endeavour to study hard.
The commissioner said the payment was made to tertiary institutions including Ahmadu Bello University, Usmanu Danfodio University Sokoto and Shehu Shagari College of Education Sokoto.
Others include Alkalam University Katsina, Kebbi State University of Science and Technology Aliero, and Waziri Umaru Federal Polytechnic Birnin Kebbi.
He said students on scholarship studying in Indian and Sudan also benefitted from the payment.
The long running acrimony between Kanye West and Taylor Swift has entered a new gear.
Kim Kardashian called out the country star for lying about the lyrics of Famous where Kanye Made reference to her.
Kanye claims that he was on the phone for an hour and told Swift about the line I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex
Why? I made that bitch famous (God damn)
Taylor Swift called out Kanye on stage just after the song was released and stated that she had not given Kanye approval to use the line in his song.
Kim Kardashian has now released a video recording of the phone call where Kanye asked for Taylors permission.
Kim also went ahead to label her a snake and dissed her for always playing the victim.
The Lagos State Police Command has launched a manhunt for a man suspected to have killed his lover at a hotel on Prince Adeyemi Street, Ikotun, area of the state.
The unidentified man, had lodged in a room in Taola Hotel with the victim around 9.30pm on Friday.
According to the Punch, the man paid for one hour which was supposed to last till 10.30pm.
The hotel staff, however, became worried when it was 12am and the guests did not check out of the hotel.
The manager, name given only as Ahmadu, was said to have gone to check the room only to discover that the woman was dead, while the suspect had fled.
Ahmadu reported the case at the Ikotun Police Division, while the remains of the victim were deposited in a morgue.
A resident of the area, Jibola Adesina, said no one could explain how the suspect escaped from the hotel.
I learnt from one of the workers in the hotel that the man came out of the room around 10pm. He said he wanted to buy something outside. He left, but did not return. It was when they waited in vain for his lover to step out that they decided to go into the room. She was found dead, he said.
A worker of the hotel, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the incident shook everyone.
He said the lovers had come to spend few hours and that their details were not collected because they did not have the intention of spending the night.
He said, It was unfortunate. They just came to spend a short time together. That was why their details were not taken. The case was reported to the police.
The Police Public Relations Officer, PPRO, SP Dolapo Badmos, while confirming the incident, said the police were investigating the incident.
Source: Dailypost
President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday held closed door meetings with some former leaders of the National Assembly.
It was learnt that two separate meetings were held at the presidents office at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Among former National Assembly leaders that attended Mondays meeting with the president are former Senate Presidents, David Mark and Ken Nnamani, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Bello Masari and the Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Ita Enang.
While Nnamani and Masari arrived the State House, Abuja at the same time, Mark, who is still a serving senator arrived the presidents office alongside Enang an hour after.
The agenda of the meetings was unknown as at the time of publishing this report but it may not be unconnected with the frosty relationship between the Presidency and the current leadership of the Senate.
Mark, who came out after about thirty minutes in the presidents office, did not speak to journalists as he walked through the corridor with a protocol officer.
His visit to the Villa is the first since he stepped down as President of the Senate in the last dispensation.
The Nigerian Army has freed 249 captured suspected Boko Haram terrorists and accomplices after being cleared by the Chief of Army Staff in Maiduguri on Sunday.
Those cleared and released include 169 males, 46 women and 34 children. Further breakdown shows that 203 of them were from 18 Local Government Areas of Borno State, while 44 were from other States as follows; Adamawa 2, Jigawa 2, Lagos 1, Oyo 1 and Yobe 38. However, 2 of them were from the Republic of Cameroon.
The released suspects were handed N3,000 each
The Acting General Officer Commanding 7 Division, Brigadier General Victor Ezugwu made the handing over to the State government through the Commissioner for Local Government while the two Cameroonians were handed over to the Borno State Command of the Nigerian Immigration Service.
The Commissioner in his remarks praised the military efforts in the fight against insurgency and respect for human rights as manifested in the painstaking efforts that led to their clearance and subsequent release. He therefore urged the released detainees to remain law abiding and go about their lawful businesses. He also commended the
The National Assembly's election council was caught off guard by the fact a legislator has dual citizenship.
A representative of the electoral commission has confirmed that newly-elected legislator Nguyen Thi Nguyet Huong who holds dual citizenship has violated the countrys Nationality Law.
Nguyen Hanh Phuc, chief of staff of the National Electoral Council, spoke to the press on Monday following the dismissal of two members of parliament in just three days.
Question (Q): All delegates are nominated after a strict vetting process. Why did these two cases slip through the net?
Answer (A): Because they werent honest on their profiles. Maybe they lied or withheld information. Let me give an example. Nobody is supposed to know when a person applies for foreign citizenship. The whole legal process, from paying the fee to completing the paperwork, its not public. It's impossible to know if a person has foreign citizenship. This is a total surprise.
Q: In the case of Nguyen Thi Nguyet Huong, is it true that she provided false information in her documents?
A: On the [nomination] application form, there isn't a space for nationality. [Even if there was] it would be wrong to write Vietnamese in the space if you have dual nationality. Here is the problem. The National Electoral Council found out that Nguyen Thi Nguyet Huong has violated Article 4 of Vietnamese Law on Nationality.
Q: How did the National Electoral Council find out about her dual citizenship?
A: We did not. A government body did. Nguyet Huong was one among 31 [centrally-nominated] candidates that the Fatherland Front (Vietnams mass political organization) recommended to the National Electoral Council. According to the allotted target, the Fatherland Front nominated two business people, including Nguyet Huong.
Q: When did the National Electoral Council find out?
A: The authorities informed us after a meeting last Saturday. The council then held a meeting on Sunday afternoon to discuss her resignation letter.
Q: Did she commit any other violations?
A: For now that is the only reason she has been dismissed from the National Assembly. We cant tell whether or not there are other reasons. We have to wait for relevant authorities to conduct further investigations.
Q: Huong was elected as a legislator to the National Assembly for the two previous terms, so she must understand the law. Why do you think she still violated the law?
A: I am not certain Nguyet Huong knew that her dual citizenship was a violation of the law. I dont rule out the possibility that some people think it is legal for a Vietnamese citizen to have a second nationality. However, Vietnams Law on Nationality states two clear different cases. The first case is that a Vietnamese [natural-born] citizen must renounce his/her citizenship before he/she can apply for a second one. The second case is for Vietnamese citizens who migrate overseas, and the country where they have migrated to allows multiple citizenship. Then of course they can hold more than two citizenships [including Vietnamese].
We will continue to look into similar violations from now until the end of this term.
Q: Trinh Xuan Thanh (former vice chairman of the Peoples Committee of Hau Giang Province) was also ousted from the National Assembly. How will the provincial institution that nomionated him be held accountable?
A: Trinh Xuan Thanh was nominated by the Fatherland Front of Hau Giang Province. He was selected through several meetings organized by the local Fatherland Front and meetings to seek support from co-workers and neighbors before he reached the final list of candidates. The problem here was dishonesty and ambiguity. The people lacked information. Because he had held top positions in the past, they thought he must be extremely capable.
Q: What do relevant bodies do to verify information on the candidates profiles?
A: We cannot verify the profiles of all the candidates at once. Thats why we have procedures to address complaints [against National Assembly candidates]. Even after the announcement of the list of successful candidates, we still have to wait 35 more days to detect cases like Trinh Xuan Thanh.
Officials of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), on Friday, July 15, rescued a two-month old baby who was abandoned by her mother by a roadside in Rivers State. The baby girl, was discovered by the officials who were patrolling along the New Elelenwo Manifold in Akpajo, Eleme LGA Rivers State during a heavy rain.
She was kept inside a carton of noodles by the side of the road. The baby who was in a critical condition at the time due to the exposure to the rain was rushed to the welfare department of the NSCDC where prompt medical attention was given to her and she was stabilized.
Helen Amakiri, the State Commandant of the NSCDC said her men saw the carton and out of curiosity decided to check it and saw the baby. She also stated that the baby will be sent to the Social Welfare Department of the Ministry of Women Affairs.
Source: LIB
Condemnations have continued to trail the alleged verbal assault of Senator Oluremi Tinubu by Senator Dino Melaye with the All Progressives Congress (APC) women and other groups in Ondo State, are currently staging a protest against the Kogi West senator.
Their coordinator and former member of the state House of Assembly, Mrs. Fola Olasehinde-Vincente, described the attack on Tinubu as too harsh on the Nigerian women.
In a statement yesterday in Akure, the State capital, the former lawmaker representing Ose Constituency, said Melaye had records of assaults and physical attacks on women, especially with his first wife, Tokunbo.
The statement noted that the action of the Senate Committee Chairman on the FCT was indecent and shameful.
Melaye could flex his muscles if he so will, but not by being a bully in the Senate as evident in the way he sprang up from his seat and charged towards Senator Tinubu and threatened to physically assault her, Olasehinde-Vincente said.
She pointed out that the attack was the height of legislative rascality ever perpetrated by any lawmaker in the country even as she stressed that Melaye has misrepresented the people of Kogi West, who elected him.
The statement, therefore, called on every woman across the globe to rise up against any assault on fellow women, saying an attack on one woman is an attack on all women.
Olasehinde-Vincente called on women to join the procession slated for today in Akure.
The President Muhammadu Buhari administration will fulfill its promise of providing open and transparent leadership for the country, the Presidency assured on Monday.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, gave the assurance while speaking on the decision of the Buhari administration to submit the budget proposals for Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs) to the National Assembly for consideration.
The president, in a letter dated June 30, 2016 and read by Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, during plenary last Tuesday, intimated the lawmakers on the transmission of the budgets of 38 agencies and corporations under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007, saying it was in line with extant laws.
Shehu pointed out that the decision to send the budgets of the agencies and corporations to the National Assembly was in line with the presidents desire to offer a more accountable and transparent leadership for the country.
He said: The laying of budgets for the MDAs, particularly those regarding the Central Bank and the NNPC behemoth is clearly unprecedented. The President is determined to make the budgeting more transparent and more participative.
It is all part of the re-engineering of the entire processes of government for the benefit of the ordinary citizens.
He quoted President Buhari as saying that good governance is key to the nations progress and transparency is the cornerstone of any government that has the welfare of ordinary citizens as its mantra.
By responding positively to the demand of the National Assembly that MDA budgets be laid before it for scrutiny, a demand mostly ignored by past administrations, President Buhari has given a clear indication of his commitment to an open, transparent and people-oriented government for Nigerians.
He has shown that he is not hiding any secrets. It is equally a mark of respect for the institution of parliament. Our hope and expectation is that the National Assembly, acting in the best interest of the nation will allow the immediate operationalization of the budgets, so that the momentum of growth of the economy which has begun to build up will be sustained, Shehu added.
He further assured that President Buhari will not let Nigerians down on key promises made by the government.
A member of a four-man robbery gang, Nnamdi Onu, passed out when he was hit with the charm he prepared for victims.
His gang specialised in attacking commuters at Anthony Bus Stop in Lagos State, disposing them of cash and valuables. He was arrested, Friday, following a foiled operation.
Onu and members of his gang stormed the bus stop at about 5.45a.m., where they robbed passengers waiting to board buses to their respective destinations.
Eyewitnesses said at about 7a.m., they snatched a bag from a lady and were fleeing the scene, when Onu was apprehended by a mob.
He was said to have brought out a red amulet from his pocket and threatened to hit whoever got close to him with it.
The mob retreated out of fear, thereby making way for two other members of the gang to escape.
Unfortunately for Onu, he was apprehended by a team of policemen on patrol. He was said to have slumped when one of the policemen hit him with the charm.
Speaking with Vanguard while being paraded alongside other suspects at the command, the Junior Secondary School 2 drop-out said: I was lured into morning raid by my friend, Wasiu.
I used to be a private guard at a site in Ogun State. The charm was meant for protection, in case of any attack by intruders. If used on anyone, the person will faint but wont die.
There are some that can cause an opponent to run mad, but I decided to use this because I did not want anybodys blood to be on my head.
Wasiu only invited me to come to Anthony Bus Stop, but he did not tell me he was going for an operation. When I saw them snatching bags from female victims in particular, I could not turn back because I was afraid he could harm me.
I have brought shame to my father, who has already made arrangement for me to start apprenticeship in fashion designing by Monday (today), since I could not conclude my secondary education due to the demise of my mother, who was solely responsible for my education.
The suspect, according to the Commissioner of Police, would be charged to court soon, adding that he was among 43 suspects arrested in the state in one month.
Source: Vanguard
The Rapid Response Squad (RRS) of Lagos State Police Command said its operatives arrested one Abdullahi Olanrewaju, 30, a suspected armed robber over the weekend in Agege.
Olarewaju who is a suspected member of an Eight-man robbery gang, was apprehended during their operations at Abeje and Onibeju Streets, off Capitol Road in Agege Local Government area of the state.
The operatives noted that one of the resident, who was lucky to escape through the window, alerted the RRS team in the area that armed men were operating in their building.
The Police met a stiff resistance as they approach the building. But the swift response from the RRS operatives, who were on patrol routine in the area, led to the arrest one of them while others made away with two pump action guns, a sum of N549,500 and other valuables.
The suspect, who hails from Ita-Amoju in Kwara State, confessed that they went to the operation with four pump action guns and Jack knives in case of any security operatives intercept them.
We went for that operation with bullet loaded four pump action guns. We had planned our movements for that night. We had intention to rob all the houses on the two streets, but luck ran out on us as we were able to visit only five buildings before the arrival of RRS operatives. We collected a lot of money, mobile phones and jewellery to mention a few.
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, he revealed.
If I had known I would not have followed them that night. It was my first time of going out with them. I didnt know they were into robbery but when I discovered the kind of business they wanted to introduce to me, it was too late for me to reject, they also threatened to kill me if I expose them, the suspect regretted.
However, one of the residents alleged that the arrested suspect led the other members of his gang to their house. According to him, That was the man who pointed gun at everyone of us threatening to shoot us if we fail to cooperate with them. 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. In fact, he hit one of our neighbors with the pump action. The man in question has been hospitalized receiving treatment, he added.
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.
When I did the calculation, the fleeing robbers had escaped with amount of N549,500 collected from all of us with other valuables, one of the victims said.
The items recovered from the arrested suspect were one cut-to-size pump action, Jack Knife, two laptops, 14 handsets, wrist watch and Two Thousand and Six Hundred Naira (2,600).
The Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Superintendent of Police, SP Dolapo Badmus, noted that the suspect is helping the Police with investigation in order to arrest the fleeing robbers
Source: Trezzy blog
Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to stop acting like the grandfather of corruption in Nigeria by shielding his men from probe.
The governor also asked Nigerians to demand the release of the authentic report of the Presidential Committee on the Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement in the Armed Forces.
Fayose described the claim by the federal government that the probe panel only looked into procurement and contracts awarded by the military from 2011 to 2015 because documents regarding procurement from 2007 to 2010 were not available, as a clear indication of his support for corruption.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, on Friday, dismissed insinuations in some quarters that the report of the committee was doctored.
Following the submission of the AVM JON Ode (retd) led committees report last week, President Buhari gave approval for the probe of two former Chiefs of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika and Lt. -Gen. Kenneth Minimah, and 52 others, over arms procurement scandal.
However, the report generated some controversy over alleged shielding of former Chief of Army Staff and Minister of Interior, Lt.-Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau (retd.) and current Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Yusuf Buratai.
Reacting to the development, Mr. Fayose, in a statement issued Sunday in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, 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.
Lt.-Gen. Buratai was in charge of procurement at the time the said frauds were committed. He has also been recently enmeshed in a Dubai-properties ownership controversy with civil society groups and rights activists among others, questioning how he got over a million dollars to pay for the choice properties.
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?
Fighting corruption and targeting only opponents of the president is in itself corruption, Fayose fumed.
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.
On this day in 2015, Ekiti State Governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose condemned the invasion and sealing-off of the Abuja and Sokoto residences of the immediate past National Security Adviser (NSA), Col Sambo Dasuki (rtd) by men of the Department of State Services (DSS).
Fayose said the persecution of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stalwarts and others perceived as opposed to the All Progressives Congress (APC) Federal Government is an ominous sign of imminent return of dictatorship and draconian rule in Nigeria.
In a statement issued in Ado-Ekiti on that day by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Governor Fayose said he was sad that democracy is already being put on trial, less than two months that President Mohammadu Buhari assumed office, adding that; Rather than invading homes of Nigerians and putting people under house arrest, the government should invade Boko Haram territories and arrest the insurgents.
Nigerian troops conducting clearance operations of fleeing Boko Haram insurgents, have killed two armed insurgents and injured many others amidst harsh weather conditions around Sambisa forest.
The troops, ably supported by the Civilian JTF, were able to subdue a roving gang of Boko Haram fighters in an ambush attack at Marguba village, Kaga local government area of Borno State, which shares common borders with Sambisa forest.
Two of the Boko Haram gunmen died while others escaped with gunshot wounds.
The Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Colonel Sani Usman, said the weather conditions within Sambisa was making movement difficult for advancing troops, whose vehicles and war machines, he noted, continued to get stuck in the marshy terrain.
His statement reads;
In their bid to clear the remnants of Boko Haram terrorists hiding in some parts of the North Eastern of the country, troops have intensified efforts on clearance operations.
It is in this regard that the 29 Brigade Quick Reaction Force (QRF), in conjunction with Civilian JTF carried out an ambush against Boko Haram terrorists east of Marguba village in Kaga Local Government Area, Borno State yesterday Friday.
The troops killed 2 of the Boko Haram terrorists, while some of them sustained gunshot wounds as could be seen from traces of blood during mopping up. They also recovered 1 AK-47 rifle with 29 rounds of 7.62mm (Special) ammunition, a bow and arrows, a Tecno mobile telephone handset, 1 wallet and an Identity Card of Animal Dealers Association, amongst other items.
In a related development, troops along with Civilian JTF have continued clearance operations within Sambisa forest despite harsh climatic conditions and bad terrain occasioned by heavy rainfalls especially within Gombale area. Despite bugging down of vehicles and equipment because of the bad terrain, the troops have continued with their clearance operations.
The National Judicial Council (NJC) 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, over alleged misconduct
The NJC in a meeting on Saturday, recommended the compulsory retirement of the two judges to President Muhammadu Buhari.
A statement by the NJC explains that its hammer came on Mr. Yunusa for allegedly issuing illegal court orders blocking investigation by government agencies into alleged financial misappropriation by some public officers.
The decision followed a petition by a non-governmental organisation, civil society network against corruption.
In the case of Mrs Oloyede, the NJC stated that she was retired based on its findings that she failed to uphold the dignity of her office by maintaining impartiality and independence of the judiciary.
She was said to have written a petition laced with unsubstantiated allegations against the Osun State governor and his deputy, and circulated same to the members of the State House of Assembly, other individuals and organizations.
President Muhammadu Buhari has boasted that he is still as popular as he was during the 2015 presidential election.
Buhari said this in an interview with the magazine, African Leadership.
His words: 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.
Nigeria will soon be back on track. 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 on more investors to catalyze a sense of competition to grow our economy. Let there be law and order in our ways.
He urged Nigerians to continue to exercise patience and let them know that we will not rest on our oars until we bring succour back to them and to the country. From our efforts so far.
Source: Daily Post
She has become the second MP to be dismissed in just 3 days.
A Vietnamese businesswoman has been ousted from the National Assembly just days before the newly-installed national legislature convenes its first plenary session, after she was accused of concurrently holding the Malta citizenship.
Nguyen Thi Nguyet Huong has been found in breach of Vietnam's Law on Nationality, which prohibits Vietnamese citizens from having dual citizenship, Nguyen Hanh Phuc, chief of staff of the National Election Council, told VnExpress late Sunday. Only overseas Vietnamese who register with Vietnamese diplomatic missions to keep their Vietnamese nationality are eligible for dual citizenship.
It was not until Friday that the National Election Council detected Huong's undeclared dual citizenship. Phuc said, prompting the council to call a snap meeting Sunday in which its members unanimously voted to strip Huong of her lawmaker-elect status.
Huong herself had sent a request to the panel asking to step down. But Phuc stopped short of explaining how the council was able to detect her wrongdoing.
Huong was not immediately available for comments Sunday. It is not clear why she has adopted the citizenship of the Republic of Malta, one of the world's smallest and most densely populated countries and located in the Central Mediterranean Sea.
Huong, 46, is a businesswoman and a deputy of the outgoing National Assembly.
She is the chair of VID group, which invests in 10 industrial parks in Hung Yen, Ha Nam and Hai Duong provinces. She also chairs TNG Holdings Vietnam, the investor of several urban area and apartment projects in Hanoi. She too held leadership positions at several banks.
Last May, around 69 million Vietnamese cast their votes to choose representatives for an intended 500-seat National Assembly. Huong was elected along with 495 other candidates.
On Friday, Trinh Xuan Thanh, former vice chairman of Hau Giang's provincial government, was also dismissed before the new National Assembly convenes its first plenary session on July 20.
Thanh was stripped of his status after the Communist Party held him accountable for massive losses at a major state-owned oil corporation and rebuked him for illegally using a government license plate on his private luxury car.
After the latest dismissals, the new National Assembly will have 494 deputies.
Related news:
> Vietnams lawmaker-elect dismissed for economic mismanagement, lavish lifestyle
Japans SoftBank will acquire UK chip design company, ARM Holdings, to cash in on growing demand for processors and other technologies for the internet of things and mobile markets.
SoftBank is paying 24.3 billion ($32 billion) in cash for the chip company that licenses its designs to a large number of chip suppliers to smartphone makers and to the emerging IoT market.
The Japanese company will retain ARM's headquarters in Cambridge and plans to double the number of employees in the U.K. over the next five years, when it will also increase the company's headcount outside the U.K.
ARM, with 4,064 employees, will be an independent business within SoftBank, which will pay for the acquisition from existing cash resources and a loan facility. SoftBank said it intends to retain the current ARM organization including the existing senior management team, brand, and partnership-based business model and culture.
SoftBank has invested in a number of media and technology companies, including Internet retailer Snapdeal in India and ride-hailing app company Didi Chuxing in China. It also acquired Sprint Nextel in 2013.
The acquisition of ARM would place the company in a market where it would be an upstream supplier to some of the biggest names in the tech industry as licensees of ARMs designs like Qualcomm gear up to supply chips to the connected devices market.
"ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the 'Internet of Things,'" said SoftBank Chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son, in a statement Monday.
ARM and partners have been looking at new opportunities in markets such as robotics, connected vehicles and smart cities. It acquired recently Apical, a provider of imaging and embedded computer vision technology for next generation devices to understand and act intelligently on information from their environment. Apical's technology will complement the ARM Mali graphics, display and video processor roadmap, ARM said in May.
ARM has been successful in the small devices market, which requires low-power processors that consume far less battery than traditional microprocessors used in bigger gear like PCs, a market in which Intel has been dominant.
"ARM has long-term contracts with its customers so I wouldn't expect anything to change quickly, but all bets are off for the next generation architecture," said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies. In the long-term SoftBank could restructure anything they wish and could invest more than ARM did to drive the enterprise products forward, he said.
"This could ultimately impact mobile tech giants Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung. I'm surprised ARM wasn't purchased sooner," Moorhead added.
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The other day, we ran a story about the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which was formed after federal budget cutsenacted through the mindless meat cleaver of sequestrationleft researchers in the lurch as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation pulled back funding.
In May, we wrote about a group of funders stepping in with $125 million to address the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Two years ago, we wrote about philanthropy's role in the historic bailout of Detroit. Around the same time, we covered a big give by the Arnold Foundation to address big shortfalls in Head Start funding, created by federal budget cuts.
On the higher ed front, we've written about a number of major gifts in which donors came forward to help universities cope with state funding cuts.
In regard to K-12, we've covered several instancesmost notably in Boston and Philadelphiaof strapped education officials begging private funders to meet urgent funding shortfalls.
In New York and Los Angeles, we've reported on efforts by mayors to rattle the philanthropic cup for priorities that those great cities just can't afford.
And now, today, comes a small story about how the the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving will provide $1 million to nonprofits in Connecticut to help offset budget cuts in that state.
If we put our mind to it, we could probably find a story every week of how philanthropy is increasingly being asked to step up as the fiscal screws tighten on government, both nationally and locally.
Of course, at some level, this is all very familiar. Foundations and major donors have repeatedly come under pressure in past decades to give when the ax falls on public spending, typically during recessions.
What's different now is that we're heading into an era when this dynamic is likely to be permanent and ongoing.
Consider the present moment: The U.S. is not actually in a recession; it hasn't been in years. The economy has been growing, with unemployment under 5 percent. Yet budget cuts are nevertheless pinching in various places like Connecticut, which was struggling with a $900 million deficit earlier this year.
And they'll keep pinching. The biggest driver of fiscal pain is the retirement of the baby boomers, which is just kicking in, with associated costsespecially for healthcareincreasingly squeezing all other forms of government spending. Federal outlays for entitlements for seniors are projected to double in the next decade alone. Pension costs are also soaring at the state and local level. New York is a good example: city outlays for pensions rose to around $8 billion in 2015, or 11 percent of the budget, up from 2 percent is 2000. In Illinois, rising pension costs have already led to budgetary mayhem across education and human services.
This isn't the time to assign blame for how we got into this hole or discuss what might be done to avoid a future of ever-growing fiscal austerity. I can think of any number of villains in this story, along with posable steps to free up more cash for discretionary government spending. Realistically, though, my guess is that we'll see unending budgetary crunches in the future that inflict growing harm on vulnerable communities and the nonprofits that serve them.
On top of that slow-motion agony, we're likely to see periodic crises that demand urgent action from philanthropylike the Detroit bankruptcy, the Flint water crisis, and Hurricane Katrina. The combination of decades of deferred infrastructure investments, teetering local governments (most recently Puerto Rico), and a rising tempo of extreme weather events, terrorist attacks and financial crises will likely generate some very expensive emergencies down the line. Ditto at the global level, where the financial demands of helping a record number of refugees fleeing failed states have lately overwhelmed international agencies. That flood may be paltry compared to how many people will likely be displaced by climate change down the line.
This future raises tough questions for philanthropy. What's been happening in Flint is a great example, as we've discussed. Many funders, like Mott, strongly believe that water systems are a quintessential responsibility of government. But how can funders just sit back and do nothing when such basics in American life fall apart, hitting our poorest citizens the hardest? You see a nearly identical set of questions around refugees. On the one hand, helping those people should be the job of UNHCR and other agencies. On the other, enough help hasn't been forthcoming.
The age-old dilemma for philanthropists has been striking the right balance between meeting urgent human needs and trying to solve problems at a systemic level. Lately, we've seen a great burst of systemic philanthropy, made possible in part by an influx of new resourcesbut also by a sector that's raised the bar for itself, with more funders scrambling after the Holy Grail of long-term change.
But you've got to wonder: How long can this period last? In a future of declining government, recurrent crises, and growing suffering, how will funders be able to resist being pulled ever more deeply into meeting short-term needs?
I don't have the answer to that question. I'm not sure anyone does. And who knows? Maybe the future will be more prosperous and less chaotic than I'm suggesting, and maybe our political systems will become more effective at governing than has been the case lately. Let's hope so.
Related:What Should Philanthropy's Role Be When Public Systems Fail? Flint As Case Study
With the benefit of hindsight, many of the challenges that confronted investors and strategists at the start of 2016 were straightforward relative to those they face today. This is not to belittle the dangers that lay ahead for the global economy at the start of 2016, which were formidable. But the challenges were largely identifiable and measurable, and their likely impact was long-term and gradual.
Foremost among those was the structural adjustment to the Chinese economy, which was and still is the worlds worst-kept investment secret. It is very clear that there is excess capacity in China, which is still the main source of risk for the global economy, says Richard Kelly, Head of Global Strategy at TD Securities. To date, however, he adds that the authorities have managed the adjustment of the Chinese economy in an orderly and gradual way, which is minimizing its impact on the global economy.
This is very different to the most recent jolt to global economic stability, which was the surprise result of the UKs referendum on EU membership in June. In isolation, says Kelly, Brexits long term impact on the global economy need not be as destabilizing as some strategists have feared. But he adds that the shock of the UK referendum is redefining investment strategies in two key ways.
The first arises from the rapid emergence of politics as a driver of global rates and currency markets, the influence of which is likely to become increasingly decisive over the coming 12-18 months on either side of the Atlantic. We see the Brexit shock as the first of a number of event risks generated by political hurdles that investors will have to address over the next year or two, says Kelly. As well as the US Presidential election this year, France and Germany both go to the polls in 2017. This means that more so than at any time in recent decades, developed markets will be driven by political decisions. As Kelly adds, if those political choices lead to seismic developments such as a French exit from the EU, their impact will be immeasurably more unsettling than Brexit.
The second way in which the Brexit shock has redefined the global landscape, says Kelly, is that it has forced the market to shorten its investment horizons. In this environment, it is impossible to make a reasonable risk-reward assessment over a time horizon of more than one to three months, he says. That, he adds, will inevitably redefine or restrict opportunities available to investors. It is always easy to make money in a trending market, he says. But in this environment there are very few long-term trends, which makes alpha generation much more challenging for investors.
A by-product of the increasingly pervasive influence of politics and the enforced shortening of investment horizons, says Kelly, is that developed markets now share many of the characteristics of emerging economies. We are now facing uncertainty not just about policy decisions but also about how markets and economies function, he says. This was traditionally a feature of emerging markets, but is now becoming increasingly prevalent across the developed world.
The good news, Kelly adds, is that even within these shortened windows, it is possible to draw reasonably sound investment conclusions. In the case of Brexit, for example, he says that the collapse in sterling that was prompted by the referendum result was entirely consistent with the expected response of the Bank of England to a Leave vote. Although nobody could have forecast with any certainty whether Britain would vote to leave the EU, it was clear that it would force structural adjustment on the economy for many years to come, he says. That strengthened our conviction that sterling would fall in the aftermath of the referendum towards the 1.20 to 1.25 range, and that with the Bank of England needing to ease rates, there would have to be renewed QE which would flatten the yield curve.
The less positive news, says Kelly, is that investors generally put less capital to work in markets driven by shorter-term influences. This in turn reduces liquidity, which can create a negative feedback loop for investors.
None of this means that it is no longer possible to invest profitably in todays highly uncertain markets. Nor does it mean that markets should play less of a role in determining the rates at which currencies need to trade in order to underpin long-term economic adjustment. It does, however, mean that as well as assessing market opportunities through a shorter term prism, successful investment strategies will be predicated on agility and flexibility in identifying FX-driven opportunities. This is no longer an environment that is conducive to rates trading, says Kelly. To generate a reasonable yield in this market investors will need to be prepared to take on country or currency risk instead.
The firm is among the years biggest gainers on the latest iteration of the II300.
TIAA rises one rung to No. 14 on the II300, Institutional Investorsannual ranking of the U.S.s top money managers. It also lands in ninth place on this years list of biggest gainers, having picked up $16.9 billion in 2015, bringing its assets under management total to $854.3 billion.
Thats a feat that Robert Leary, CEO of TIAA Global Asset Management since 2013, pins largely on the appeal of its actively managed mutual funds and alternative investments such as timber and agriculture. The New Yorkbased firm provides a broad range of investments, including active and passive target-date retirement funds, equity, fixed income, private debt, real estate and other alternative assets.
TIAA Global Asset Management is the best-kept secret, he says. That will change and deserves to change given our performance.
Last year Chicago-based Nuveen Investments, which TIAA acquired in 2014, started distributing TIAAs mutual funds. Although nearly 70 percent of TIAAs $87.7 billion in mutual funds have four- and five-star ratings from Morningstar, on an asset-weighted basis, the firm had only a small team to market them outside its own retirement system. It has since introduced a new fund share class for advisers, and the firm has gained significant assets, including in its international equity fund, from wirehouses, broker-dealers and registered investment advisers. TIAA realized $8.3 billion in mutual fund net flows in 2015, a 6 percent organic growth rate, Leary reports.
Nuveen is also helping TIAA reach high-net-worth investors and distribute institutional products. Through Nuveens European fund platform, TIAA is marketing its $17 billion Social Choice securities, one of the largest socially responsible lineups, outside the U.S. for the first time.
The growth of alternative investments also helps push TIAA up the roster, he notes. The popularity of alternatives in the industry overall is not showing up in AUM growth so much, but it is reshaping the revenue and margin picture for asset managers, Leary explains. TIAA had $4.2 billion of net flows into real-asset strategies in 2015, including $3 billion in global agriculture and $667 million in global timber.
The firm was founded in 1918 as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to provide retirement services to educators.
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The year is shaping up to be one of the best ever for the master of macro mayhem.
July 18, 2016 | 12:21 am PT
Hospital staff are making money on people's misery and pain.
Years ago, the hospital I worked for had a regulation that an autopsy had to be performed on every patient that died before they were handed over to the families.
The autopsies had great benefits. It helped to examine doctors' diagnosis and treatment. I used to wait for the autopsy results to check my diagnosis, the treatment and more importantly, to find out the cause of death.
However, many cases needed to be observed by the police. Usually, the police would arrive after lunch time, but to my amazement, whenever I stepped out for 10 minutes, the autopsy was already complete and the police had left. I never had a chance to find out why my patients had passed away.
One day, the family of a patient invited me to a luxury restaurant near the hospital for lunch. At that time, hardly any doctors could afford a meal at a high-end eatery. Again, to my amazement, I saw many colleagues from the pathology deparment having lunch there. Doctors, technicians and even drivers who transported the dead bodies were all having lunch in the restaurant. I had always assumed their salaries were low because they only met families of dead patients so they would not receive any gratuity from them.
So how could they afford to eat at the restaurant? The question haunted me for a long time, but finally, I got the answer from a senior doctor.
They were "vultures" who gorged themselves on the money earned by not performing autopsies. The truth was the police never observed any autopsies at the hospital. That was why they never let me see the autopsy reports. It was the families who were paying for their deceased loved ones not to go through any more.
Rumor also had it that there was an unwritten rule that families of the dead had to pay a ridiculously large sum of money to buy a coffin from the hospital. Staff would take advantage of the hospital's hygiene regulations to explain the exorbitant fee.
Doctors, in response to the rule, would advise families of terminally ill patients to take them home before they passed away. I had done that too, believing it would stop the patients' families from falling prey to the "vultures". When these problems were finally solved thanks to the efforts of many generations of the hospital's directors, it was a strained revolution.
At the hospital's battlefield, where patients and their families fight against death, making money from human pain had been developed in various forms.
Recently, the public was shocked by the tragedy of a nine-month child who did not had the chance to go home for the last time before leaving this world because of hospital guards.
It happened in front of the Hanoi-based National Hospital of Pediatrics. An ambulance (hired by the family from the child's town) had been driven to Hanoi to take the dying child home to the central province of Nghe An. The guards refused to let the ambulance leave, and the child died there two hours later while his family shouted and cried and the guards verbally abused them.
The reality is this is not uncommon in hospitals. The family of a seriously sick patient of mine wanted to hire a car to take the patient home. They were very worried and asked me for help. I did not know why I needed to intervene, as I thought it would be a simple task. But long after, I found out that in some hospitals, the terminally ill and deceased can only be transported home by cars managed by the hospitals. The families must sign a contract with the hospitals for the service.
A hospital is a place where families naturally feel weak and are more likely to be "willing" to be taken advantage of. This "bonus" has also blinded many hospital staff. Competition between different hospital forces to earn money from the pain of patients and their families has become fierce and the business will mushroom without strict management.
I believe that strict, clear and detailed regulations, including punishments, can stop the disgraceful business.
Back to the case of the nine-month child. The hospital director made a public apology to the family, which is to be applauded, but after that, how will they avoid another tragedy in the future?
Brokers have only until midnight to put themselves forward
Warrnambools The Lighthouse on 26 July;
Warraguls West Gippsland Arts Centre on 28 July; and
Parramattas Riverside Theatre on 19 August.
QBE Insurance Australia has announced its sponsorship of Opera Australias regional tour of The Marriage of Figaro.Bettina Pidcock, QBE Australia EGM Marketing, said QBE was pleased to support the arts and join-hands with the iconic organisation that does so much in nurturing Aussie talent and bringing the performing arts to regional Australia.We are especially proud to help take this wonderful production of The Marriage of Figaro to so many fans, old and new, across Australia, Pidcock said in a statement.As an insurer of customers and communities as diverse as the country we live in, QBE is driven by a desire to connect with people across Australia, whether they call the city or the country home.We are honoured to bring some of Australias most talented cast, crew, and musicians on this much anticipated tour of Australia through this partnership with Opera Australia, said Pidcock.Lyndon Terracini, Opera Australias artistic director, said: Mozarts masterpiece has been likened to the Downtown Abbey of opera, but a whole lot more fun. We are thrilled to be visiting so much of regional Australia on this tour.As a show of support to Opera Australia, QBE is giving away five double passes to each of the following performances:Winners will be chosen from participants who visit their website and explain in 25 words or less why they would like to see The Marriage of Figaro.The competition closes for Warrnambool and Warragul at 4pm on 22 July 2016, and for Parramatta at 4pm on 12 August 2016.RELATED ARTICLES:
A man is recovering from minor injuries he suffered when he crashed his brothers car into a tree in central New York while playing Pokemon Go on his smartphone.
Police in Auburn in the Finger Lakes region tell The Citizen that 28-year-old Steven Cary of Portland, Oregon, crashed late on the night of July 12 while playing the wildly popular digital-monster cellphone game.
Authorities say Cary suffered a broken ankle and cuts to both legs. Police Chief Shawn Butler says his injuries couldve been worse because the impact of the crash nearly sent the engine into the passenger compartment.
Cary was ticketed for using a mobile device while driving and failing to remain in his lane.
Butler says the car, which was totaled, belonged to Carys brother. The police chief says Cary was visiting his mother at the time of the crash.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Auto New York Personal Auto
Neon, the specialist Lloyds insurer, has appointed Andrew Dougall to the newly created role of executive underwriter, head of Casualty.
Dougall joins Neon today, reporting to chief underwriting officer, Darren Lednor. Dougall will focus on enhancing Neons broker distribution and generating new business opportunities, classes and niche portfolios, the company said in a statement.
He joins Neon (formerly known as Marketform) after nearly a decade at Lloyds insurer Mitsui Sumitomo where he was most recently head of Underwriting Property & Casualty. Prior to Mitsui, Dougall spent seven years at CNA Insurance Co., where latterly he was responsible for European casualty operations across the London market, UK regions, France, Germany and Denmark.
Martin Reith, chief executive officer, Neon, commented: I am delighted to announce yet another outstanding hire and welcome Andrew to Neon. Having strong relationships aligned to knowledge and experience is essential in todays market, and Im confident that Andrews well-established reputation and industry expertise will drive growth in our casualty business and more broadly.
Source: Neon
Topics Casualty
Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK) has launched One TMK, a digital exchange for brokers to quote and bind policies on-line in real time.
The web-based platform has been developed to help brokers lower their transactional costs and significantly speed up the service to their clients, the company said.
The digital exchange provides brokers direct access from their desktop to a range of specialist business lines that have traditionally been difficult and often uneconomic to reach through traditional channels.
The first product on the exchange is Cargo 10, which delivers to the broker a cargo insurance quote after answering just 10 questions, TMK said, noting that the process is fully automated and delivers full post-bind documentation at the point of sale.
A construction and an unmanned aerial systems insurance offering will be added on to the exchange by the end of 2016 with a further six to 10 products expected to be online during 2017.
High expenses and inefficiencies have been an ongoing problem for the insurance market. The purpose of One TMK is to help brokers reduce the time, and therefore lower the cost of getting a quote and a policy to their clients, said Charles Franks, TMK chief executive officer.
This is only the start of TMKs push towards digital answers to specialist insurance questions. We will continue to work with brokers, regulators and clients to utilize technological changes in our underwriting.
Q&As about the One TMK platform can be viewed on TMKs website.
Topics Agencies New Markets
Swiss Re Corporate Solutions has added Christine Harman as senior vice president, head of Casualty, and named Gabriel Poppie as senior vice president, head of Sales, for its U.S. Central Region. Both are based in Chicago.
Harman will be responsible for leading the companys Central Region Casualty team and growing its capabilities and revenue in the umbrella and excess liability lines of business.
Harman brings almost 20 years of industry experience including claims, underwriting and team leadership roles at a variety of commercial carriers.
Poppie has been a key account manager at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions since 2013. In his new role, he is tasked with generating new business, managing relationships with key regional brokers and driving growth.
With over 16 years of industry experience, he is an expert in a wide range of industries and segments and new business origination. Poppie began his career in 2000 with Marsh in St. Louis.
Source: Swiss Re Corporate Solutions
Topics USA Leadership Swiss Re
Sompo Canopius AG announces has hired Laurie Banez as head of U.S. financial and professional lines. Banez is based in the New York office and reports to Stephen Hartwig, group head of casualty.
She joins from Argo Pro with nearly 30 years of underwriting experience in directors & officers, errors & omissions and related lines.
Banez began her career with National Union Fire Insurance Co. (AIG) where she spent 13 years in various underwriting roles. She then moved to Kemper where she assisted in the start up of its professional lines platform, moving with it to AXIS in 2000. In 2006 she joined Praetorian Financial Group where she was responsible for the launch and development of management and professional lines underwriting business. Between 2007 and 2009 she then set up the financial lines group for C.V. Starr, before moving to Argo Group US where for six years she was senior vice president, head of US Professional Lines and chief underwriting officer.
The company said her appointment signals Sompo Canopiuss growing commitment to U.S. casualty, as it looks to diversify its portfolio into more non-catastrophe related business.
Mike Duffy, chief underwriting officer, commented: When considering expanding in U.S. casualty, we wanted to be sure that we did so in the right way and with the right people. With Laurie, we have found someone who has an impressive track record of starting up and growing profitable books of business. She has a great reputation in the market, and were pleased that she sees the growing potential of Sompo Canopius in the U.S.
Source: Sompo Canopius
Topics USA
The Obama administrations top health official highlighted the importance of competition to insurance markets, as the Justice Department is poised to decide on two massive deals among four of the health-plan industrys biggest players.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said competition among insurers can reduce costs that consumers face and improve the quality of their health coverage. She declined to comment on her departments view of Aetna Inc.s proposed purchase of Humana Inc. or Anthem Inc.s deal for Cigna Corp. If both mergers are completed, the industrys five largest companies would be reduced to three.
When there is competition, that creates downward price pressure, and it also creates upward quality pressure, Burwell said in a brief interview in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Weve always thought and talked about why competition is an important part of the overall picture, and thats not just in the marketplace but overall for the nation in terms of our health care.
Pushing Obamacare
Burwell traveled to Iowa to highlight how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has improved care for Medicare patients. The act, one of President Barack Obamas signature domestic policy accomplishments, has extended health insurance coverage to about 20 million people, primarily by expanding eligibility for Medicaid and creating new markets where individuals can buy health plans, often with subsidies. The merger review gives the administration another chance to help guide the future of U.S. health care.
Those new markets, known as exchanges, rely on private insurers to offer health plans. The Obama administration has had to contend with companies including UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest in the industry, exiting many markets after suffering losses. The president wrote an article published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that a so-called public option or government-run health plan could help increase competition in some markets.
More can and should be done to enhance competition in the marketplaces, the president wrote. Congress should revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited.
Burwell said Friday [July 15] in an interview in Des Moines that there are some markets where competition is challenging, without naming them. She said competition can foster innovation and create a healthy balance in negotiations among doctors, hospitals and insurers.
Competition needs to be at a provider level and needs to be at an insurer level, Burwell said. When theres competition in both settings, that creates an even playing field for both sets of players.
Antitrust Scrutiny
While the Obama administration hasnt publicly signaled how it views the mergers, the Justice Departments No. 3 official has said hes taking a close look at the health insurer deals, which he has called a game changer. The official, Bill Baer, has stopped a string of mergers during his tenure, including Halliburton Co.s proposed takeover of Baker Hughes Inc., which would have combined the second- and third-largest oil-services firms in the industry.
In June, Baer told a group of antitrust lawyers that combining the countrys largest health insurers would lead to substantial consolidation in the industry, and antitrust enforcers cannot afford to let up.
Burwells department can weigh in on the deals with the Justice Department, which has the final say on whether to attempt to block the deals because of their impact on competition. Burwell declined to comment on those discussions. We support as asked, she said.
Employer Market
Federal antitrust officials at the Justice Department are reviewing Aetnas proposed $37 billion takeover of Humana and Anthems $48 billion bid for Cigna. The combination of Anthem and Cigna would create the biggest U.S. health insurer by membership, topping UnitedHealth. Together, the firms would have a large position in the market for coverage sold to big companies and other employers.
Aetnas bid for Humana would allow the buyer to expand in the market for private health plans for the elderly, called Medicare Advantage. Humana is already a leader in Medicare Advantage and the combined firm would be by far the biggest in those policies.
The Justice Department has told Anthem that the Cigna deal threatens competition and that selling parts of the business probably wouldnt sufficiently address that issue, people familiar with the matter said last month. That raises the possibility that the U.S. will sue to block the merger, which may lead the companies to a court fight or push them instead to seek deals with other, smaller insurers
With assistance from John Lauerman and David McLaughlin.
Related:
Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Topics Carriers USA
Middle market businesses in all parts of the world view their exposures to natural catastrophes as increasing but some fall short when managing these risks effectively, according to a new survey of senior executives at more than 80 independent insurance brokers. The survey found that these mid-sized firms may lack adequate insurance, continuity planning, risk management and civil infrastructure support to prepare for and recover from large-scale natural disasters.
In the survey, conducted by Assurex Global of its partner firms around the world, inland flooding was considered the most significant natural catastrophe risk for middle market businesses, cited by 70 percent of the brokers; followed by hurricanes, cyclones and windstorm (50 percent), and earthquakes and tsunami (38 percent). Understandably, responses varied somewhat by region, with hurricanes rated the top risk in the U.S. and Canada, earthquakes/tsunami in Latin America and the Caribbean, and inland flooding in the Asia/Pacific and across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Although the types of natural catastrophe risks facing businesses vary somewhat in different areas of the world, theres a common thread in terms of what must be in place for middle market businesses to manage them effectively, said Jim Hackbarth, CEO, Assurex Global. Certainly, having sufficient catastrophe insurance, effective business continuity management and a civil infrastructure that supports preparedness, response and recovery are all keys to managing these significant exposures. Further, senior leaderships support of the companys risk management measures is universally paramount to their implementation as well as to the companys ultimate success and survival.
Natural disaster risks on the rise. Worldwide, more than half the brokers indicated their clients believe their exposure to natural catastrophe risks has increased in the past five years, including 78 percent of those in Latin America and the Caribbean and 67 percent of those located in the Asia/Pacific.
Many businesses unprepared.In the face of increased risks, nearly one-fourth of the brokers surveyed worldwide estimated that fewer than 20 percent of middle market businesses in their regions now feel they are adequately prepared and insured for natural catastrophes. These estimates varied sharply by region, with 44 percent of brokers in Latin America/Caribbean citing the same low level of preparedness; 33 percent in the Asia/Pacific; 28 percent in EMEA, and 11 percent of U.S. and Canadian brokers.
Insurance, business continuity planning key elements of catastrophe risk management. When asked to list steps taken by clients that feel adequately prepared for natural disasters, 90 percent of the brokers worldwide cited client purchases of catastrophic property insurance; 68 percent pointed to the establishment of business continuity plans, and 40 percent indicated their clients retrofitted their facilities to withstand a disaster. In addition, 30 percent indicated these clients had worked to strengthen supply chains and 27 percent noted client efforts to increase worker response training.
On the other hand, when brokers were asked to list reasons clients might offer for not being adequately prepared for natural disasters, lack of effective business continuity planning was the biggest factor, cited by 60 percent of the brokers. Meanwhile, 39 percent mentioned lack of affordable insurance coverage for catastrophe risks, and 36 percent, lack of support from leadership for measures to manage catastrophe risks.
Lack of civil infrastructure and leadership issues undermine readiness. Although one-third of the brokers worldwide indicated their clients would tie inadequate readiness to the lack of available government/civil infrastructure to facilitate preparedness, response, recovery and protection of affected plant and equipment, the issue is especially pronounced for businesses in the Asia/Pacific, where it was cited by 67 percent of brokers. By contrast only 13 percent of brokers in the U.S. and Canada expressed the same concerns. In addition, issues related to lack of leadership support also appear acute in the Asia/Pacific region, cited by 60 percent of the brokers.
Among the most significant factors flagged by brokers around the world in determining whether a client is adequately prepared for a natural catastrophe, 71 percent cited internal support from senior leadership; an equal percentage identified company size and resources, believing clients view these factors as correlated with better protection and preparedness. In addition, 45 percent of brokers cited the presence of a corporate risk manager or risk management function, and 42 percent, the availability of a civil infrastructure (including emergency responders, evacuation routes, shelters, and related resources) to help facilitate preparedness and recovery.
According to the brokers surveyed, middle market clients would cite several elements of disaster risk management as needing improvement, with the responses varying markedly by region. For instance, although 25 percent of brokers worldwide cited the availability of adequate and affordable property catastrophe insurance, 56 percent of those in Latin America/Caribbean identified that issue, ranking it the regions top factor for improvement. And while 25 percent of brokers around the world cited improvements in government infrastructure to facilitate preparedness and recovery, these needs were cited by nearly half those in the Asia/Pacific and 38 percent in EMEA, making it the biggest element to target for improvement in those two regions.
The survey was conducted in June and July 2016.
Founded in 1954, Assurex Global is an exclusive partnership of large, privately held independent agents and brokers around the world, with more than 600 partner offices writing some $28 billion in annual premium.
Source: Assurex Global
Topics Catastrophe USA Agencies Commercial Lines Business Insurance Canada Risk Management
Telling Tesla drivers its Autopilot feature doesnt mean their cars can drive themselves may not be enough to keep Elon Musk off the hot seat if the technology comes up short.
This month, two Teslas equipped with Autopilot veered into barriers following disclosure of the first fatal wreck, a Model S slamming into a 18-wheeler crossing a Florida highway after the semi-autonomous car failed to distinguish the trucks white trailer from sky.
Tesla Motors Inc. warns drivers they must still pay attention and be ready to grab back control of the car, but theres a lot in a name.
The moment I saw Tesla calling it Autopilot, I thought it was a bad move, said Lynn Shumway, a lawyer who specializes product liability cases against carmakers. Just by the name, arent you telling people not to pay attention?
Joshua Browns death in Florida was the first involving Teslas semi-autonomous technology, triggering chatter in legal circles about who was liable for the crash and prompting a probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as well as the National Transportation Safety Board, which typically devotes its attention to mishaps involving planes and trains. Some details remain in dispute, including whether Brown, a former Navy SEAL, might have been watching a Harry Potter movie in a DVD player found in the car.
Musk had anticipated the moment for at least two years, telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel because they will be accountable if the cars on Autopilot crash. Tesla buyers must activate the Autopilot software, which requires them to acknowledge the technology is a beta platform and isnt meant to be used as a substitute for the driver.
Drivers Responsibility
When U.S. investigators began evaluating Browns crash, Tesla doubled down in a statement: Autopilot is an assist feature. You need to maintain control and responsibility of your vehicle.
But people will be people and they often dont do what theyre supposed to do.
Lawyers compare giving Tesla drivers Autopilot to building a swimming pool without a fence; the property owner should know that neighborhood kids will find it hard to resist and may get hurt.
Theres a concept in the legal profession called an attractive nuisance, said Tab Turner, another lawyer specializing in auto-defect cases. These devices are much that way right now. Theyre all trying to sell them as a wave of the future, but putting in fine print, Dont do anything but monitor it. Its a dangerous concept.
As with so-called smart features before it such as anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control, telling drivers Autopilot might not prevent an accident wont help Tesla in court if the technology is found to be defective, Turner said.
Warnings alone are never the answer to a design problem, he said.
Possible Arguments
In a court case, lawyers for accident victims or their families would have other lines of attack if Tesla blames accidents on drivers failing to heed warnings. They could assert that Teslas software is defective because it doesnt do enough to make sure drivers are paying attention.
Attorneys could also argue that, in Browns case for example, the car should have recognized the tractor-trailer as an obstacle, or that Tesla could have easily updated its system to address such a foreseeable problem.
Any argument will try to establish that Tesla acted in an unreasonable way that was a cause of the crash, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who researches automation and connectivity. It doesnt even need to be the biggest cause, but just a cause.
If Browns May 7 crash doesnt end up in court, others might.
A 77-year-old driver from Michigan, which passed laws allowing semi-autonomous and fully autonomous vehicles, struck a concrete median in Pennsylvania and his 2016 Model X SUV rolled over. Also this month, a driver in Montana said his Tesla veered off the highway and into a guardrail. Both drivers said their cars were operating on Autopilot at the time and both were cited for careless driving.
Pennsylvania and Montana are among the 42 states without legislation regulating autonomous and semi-autonomous cars.
Musk Response
Musk fired back in a tweet, saying the onboard vehicle logs show the Autopilot was turned off in the Pennsylvania crash and that the accident wouldnt have happened if it had been on. The company said the Montana driver hadnt placed his hands on the wheel for more than two minutes while the car was on Autopilot.
Musk and Tesla are certain to argue that while their technology has yet to meet the threshold for autonomous vehicle, its Model S has achieved the best safety rating of any car ever tested.
Even with that record, Consumer Reports last Thursday called on Tesla to disable Autopilot on more than 70,000 vehicles. 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.
Tesla is consistently introducing enhancements proven over millions of miles of internal testing to ensure that drivers supported by Autopilot remain safer than those operating without assistance, the carmaker said Thursday in a statement. 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.
Khobi Brooklyn, a spokeswoman for the Palo Alto, California-based carmaker, cited the companys earlier comments on the three accidents and declined to comment further on possible litigation involving Autopilot.
National Rules
The U.S. government will soon offer the auto industry guiding principles for safe operation of fully autonomous vehicles, part of a plan that includes $4 billion for safety research by 2026.
For now, the double line between Autopilot and full autonomy is a blurry one.
In 2013, NHTSA released a five-rung autonomous vehicle rating system based on cars computerized capabilities, ranging from level 0 for no-automation to level 4 for full self-driving automation.
Teslas likely to argue its technology has yet to surpass level 2: automation designed to relieve driver control of at least two functions. Plaintiffs will counter the cars been marketed more like a level 3, when the driver can fully cede control of all safety-critical functions while remaining available for occasional intervention.
Its great technology, I hope they get this right and put people like us out of business, says Steve Van Gaasbeck, an auto products lawyer in San Antonio, Texas. Theres really no excuse for missing an 18-wheeler.
Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Topics Auto InsurTech Tech Tesla Pennsylvania
The following is an adapted excerpt from the authors new monograph Uber-Positive: Why Americans Love the Sharing Economy.
Despite the results of a new Pew Research Center poll showing that Americans overwhelmingly reject the application of outdated regulations to the growing sharing economy, government regulators have missed the message. Places as diverse as Austin, Texas, and Montreal, Quebec, have recently taken steps to suppress the sharing economyspecifically ridesharingby treating the Uber as a taxi company. Regulators attitudes towards innovative new services can be summed up in one phrase: Regulators gonna regulate.
But when crafting regulation, policymakers need to keep in mind that the relationship between consumers and service providers has been transformed for the better in the sharing economy. Rather than keeping consumers safe, regulators are now threatening the growth of the new economygrowth that has proven to be a promising way to increase consumer choice, work opportunities, and economic growth.
For example, at every stage in ridesharings growth, established interests in the taxi industry have used claims about its dangers to scare politicians into acting. Each time, the claims have been shown to be overstated or blatantly false. Undeterred, the industry continues to use any political means available to maintain its monopoly. Rather than focusing on competing on Main Street, Big Taxi turns its attention to city halls and state capitols.
It is difficult for regulators to embrace the changing economy. Politicians on the campaign trail often talk about the need for regulatory reform, but their rhetoric alone will not be enough to change policy. However, despite the continued attacks on innovation, one major shift has happened in recent yearsthe rise of the sharing economy. Workers finally have a way to satisfy their desires to work on their own terms. It is now up to policymakers to facilitate workers calls for freedom, flexibility, and mobility, rather than standing in the way.
We Like Creative Business Models
Not only do many workers prefer to take part in the sharing economy, but in the current period of low economic growth it is an essential way to increase Americans earnings. More than half of those people who provide services through the sharing economy say they became better off financially over the past year. This is above the 32 percent level of other workers who make the same statement.
Partially because of the sharing economys success, and the subsequent hostile response of some politicians, only 18 percent of millennials believe regulators have the publics interest primarily in mind. Young people realize that many regulations do little to keep the public safe. They want companies to be held liable for harming consumers, but they do not support regulations that keep out new competition or dictate how entrepreneurs must meet their customers needs. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a millennial who wants an outright ban on Uber and Airbnb.
Ubers business model is to start operating first and work with regulators later. This embrace of permissionless innovation flies in the face of the antiquated command-and-control model of regulation. But it should not be the norm for American businesses to have to ask for government permission to innovate. While innovators tirelessly work to drive the economy forward, regulators now function as annoying backseat drivers or roadblocks.
Rather than applying outdated regulations on the sharing economy in the form of limits on its growth or business models, policymakers need to allow legacy companies to update their business models to better compete. In other words, taxi companies need to be allowed to become more like Ubernot the other way around.
Resistance Is Futile
By the time policymakers catch up to a new service such as ridesharing, a new innovation will already be gaining popularity. A regulatory framework for the future must embrace flexibility if it is to allow for the next transformational product or service to reach the market. One way to do this is to regulate by specifying explicit ends (in terms of consumer safety) but leaving the means to reach those benchmarks open to innovation.
Regulations specifying rigid means that only work for current business models will be outdated in a few years, when the next new technology arises. In short, regulators, who are still attempting to respond to the creation of the Internet, will never catch up to Americas entrepreneurs.
Ubers strategy of innovating around regulations might be compared with the effect e-mail has had on the U.S. Postal Service. USPS still has a monopoly on delivering lettersjust as yellow taxis still have a monopoly on Manhattan street hails. But the technological advancement of e-mail and forward thinking by FedEx and UPS have rendered the postal service obsolete for companies and nothing more than the butt of jokes about government inefficiency.
New technology cannot simply be wished away. Rather, established firms face a choice: they can either embrace innovation or they can follow the taxi companies lead and dig in their heels as they are pulled toward irrelevance or bankruptcy.
Innovation arises through individuals taking riskstrial and error, success and failure. People must be free to experiment and put their unique knowledge to use. Every time politicians and regulators call an Uber or plan a vacation with Airbnb, it should remind them how the economy actually grows.
Jared Meyer is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Follow him on Twitter here.
This article originally appeared in The Federalist.
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BP Plc has raised the total liability from the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, which triggered the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, by $5.2 billion to $61.6 billion before tax.
The London-based company expects to take a $2.5 billion after-tax charge in its second-quarter earnings following significant progress in resolving outstanding claims, it said in a statement Thursday. Any further payments related to the 2010 incident that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico wont have a material impact on financial performance, it said.
Over the past few months weve made significant progress resolving outstanding Deepwater Horizon claims, Chief Financial Officer Brian Gilvary said in the statement. Importantly, we have a clear plan for managing these costs and it provides our investors with certainty going forward.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill transformed BP, prompting the resignation of former Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward and forcing the company to sell assets and downsize its operations to cover the billions of dollars of fines, penalties and compensation. The company pumped 3.14 million barrels equivalent a day of oil and gas last year, compared with almost 4 million in 2009. Its current market capitalization of $114 billion is more than a third lower than prior to the disaster.
Record Settlement
The estimate means BP will have booked a total of $44 billion in after-tax charges related to the disaster. The company will continue to use proceeds of asset sales to meet these costs, Gilvary said. It has said it plans to raise $3 billion to $5 billion from sales this year and $2 billion to $3 billion a year from 2017. BP is scheduled to release second-quarter financial results on July 26.
The new $5.2 billion charge is related to possible payments to businesses and individuals who have claimed they were affected by the 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP estimates some claims to individuals will be paid by the end of this year while it expects to resolve other claims of business and economic loss by 2019, according to the statement.
This now looks like a line under all potential liabilities related to the spill, said Brendan Warn, a managing director at BMO Capital Markets in London. This doesnt change BPs organic cash flow estimates and now helps them move on and continue on their path of delivering projects and keeping the company on track.
Spending Cuts
In addition to selling assets to pay for the spill, the slump in oil prices over the past two years has forced BP Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley to cut spending in order to protect the balance sheet and maintain dividend payouts to shareholders. The company has said it has reduced costs enough for its cash flow to cover spending and dividends at an oil price of $50 to $55 a barrel next year. Brent, the international benchmark, has averaged $41.70 a barrel this year.
At the end of last year, BP had set aside $14.3 billion for spill response charges, $22.6 billion for litigation costs and claims and $8.6 billion for environment damage costs.
The $20.8 billion settlement it agreed last year with the U.S. government and five Gulf states over the spill was the largest in the Department of Justices history. That resolved civil claims under the Clean Water Act and Oil Pollution Act, as well as economic damage claims from regional authorities. The company agreed to pay the natural resource claims over 18 years and the economic damage claims over 15 years.
BP reached separate agreements to resolve criminal charges, settle claims it hid the size of the spill, and cover private property and economic damages.
In December, federal prosecutors dropped manslaughter charges against BPs two top employees on the Deepwater Horizon, which was operated by Transocean Inc. The men had been accused of ignoring multiple signals that the well was dangerously unstable before the explosion.
Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Topics Claims Energy Oil Gas Mexico Funding
Officials say the cost of damage from a fire at the Grand River Dam Authoritys main generating facility in Chouteau, Okla., could reach $200 million.
The Tulsa World reports that GRDA spokesman Justin Alberty says the July 1 fires total cost is expected to be $85 million to $200 million, depending mostly on the cost to rebuild the larger of the two coal-fired units that were affected.
According to Alberty, it appears that insurance will cover most of the damage.
Officials at the state-owned utility believe the fire started after a lightning strike knocked out cooling pumps for one of the units, causing it to overheat and create a friction fire. The fire spread to the roof of the building and caused the other generator to automatically shut down.
No one was injured.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Oklahoma
The Insurance Council of Texas (ICT) posthumously honored Ron Lawson, former vice president at the Republic Group in Dallas, with the Raymond Mauk Leadership Award during the groups 24th Annual ICT Mid-Year Property and Casualty Symposium in Austin.
Lawson passed last October after a brief illness and his wife, Cheryl, accepted the award on his behalf. Lawson becomes the nineteenth recipient of the prestigious award.
ICT presents the Raymond Mauk Leadership Award each year at its Symposium.The award is ICTs highest honor and is intended to bestow recognition on an individual whose leadership has made a significant difference in the business of insurance in Texas.
Fellow ICT board member and regional president with the Travelers Companies, David Lavergne, presented the award.
Lawson began his insurance career in 1986 with Safeco Insurance in its Stone Mountain, Ga., office. He joined the Republic Group in Texas in 2004. Lawson worked at Republic for 11 years, beginning as the companys vice president of Personal Lines and later vice president of Industry Relations, before being named vice president of Marketing in 2012.
Lawston was also very active in the insurance industry and served on numerous board and governing bodies. At the time of his death, Lawson served on the board of the Insurance Council of Texas (ICT), the Board of Trustees for the ICT Education Foundation, the Association of Fire and Casualty Companies in Texas (AFACT), the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, the Texas FAIR Plan Association, the Texas Medical Liability Underwriting Association (Texas JUA), and was a member of the Agency Company relations committee of the Independent Insurance Agents of Dallas.
The Raymond Mauk Award honors former Texas Fire Commissioner Raymond Mauk and annually recognizes someone who has made a notable contribution to the Texas property and casualty insurance industry.
Source: Insurance Council of Texas
Topics Texas
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has suspended from office the mayor of the central Florida city of Tavares after he was charged with insurance fraud.
Scott issued the executive order on July 14, one day after Mayor Robert Wolfe was arrested on the third-degree felony charge. Prosecutors say Wolfe filed false insurance claims for $9,300 regarding damage to his home, including a phony claim that he had to vacate the home during repairs.
Wolfe turned himself in to the Lake County Jail Wednesday night and was later released on bail. Court records dont indicate whether he has hired an attorney and Wolfe did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Wolfe has been mayor of Tavares since 2009.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Florida Fraud
A Louisiana truck driver charged in a fiery interstate crash that killed five nursing students in southeast Georgia was sentenced to prison Thursday one year for each life lost after he pleaded guilty to first-degree vehicular homicide and other crimes.
A judge gave John Wayne Johnson five years in prison plus an additional five years on probation. The plea deal with prosecutors spared Johnson, 56, of Shreveport, Louisiana, from a possible punishment of 93 years in prison if he had been convicted at a trial.
Johnson was driving on Interstate 16 west of Savannah before dawn on April 22, 2015, when his tractor-trailer smashed into traffic snarled by an unrelated wreck. The impact crushed two vehicles directly in front of Johnsons truck, killing five student nurses. The women were commuting from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro to their shifts at a Savannah hospital, a distance of about 55 miles.
Johnson, an ex-Marine, struggled to speak when asked by the judge if he wanted to make a statement. The truck driver handed his prepared notes to his defense attorney, Edward Tolley, to read.
I am so sorry for what happened, Tolley read from Johnsons notes. I would give anything to go back and change that day. I did not intend for any of this to happen, but I accept full responsibility for it.
Relatives of the victims hoping to learn why the crash happened got few answers from Johnson.
He had been driving all night from Mississippi to deliver a shipment of notebooks to a retailers warehouse in Savannah and was about 20 minutes from his destination when the crash occurred. Blood tests found no traces of drugs or alcohol, Tolley said, and cellphone records showed Johnson hadnt made a call or sent any text messages for at least two hours.
Johnson told the judge he was cruising at 70 mph the morning of the crash, with traffic passing him, when he noticed tail lights ahead of him stopping.
I am getting closer and closer and I am running through my head, `Why am I not stopping? Johnson said.
Superior Court Judge Robert Russell III asked Johnson why he failed to stop.
Sir, thats something Ive been wrestling with since that morning, Johnson said, telling the judge he couldnt explain it.
Relatives of some of the victims shook their heads in the Bryan County courtroom about 30 miles west of Savannah.
Sherrin Pittmans daughter, McKay Pittman of Alpharetta, was one of the women killed. She sobbed on the witness stand Thursday, harshly criticizing the truck driver for his lack of an explanation.
I have lost my daughter, never to hear her say `I love you, Mommy, again, Sherrin Pittman said, glaring at Johnson. You did it and you cant remember how you did it? Shame on you.
When Johnson was questioned under oath last December by attorneys handling civil lawsuits in the crash, he acknowledged a prior employer had fired him for crashing his truck after he fell asleep at the wheel. But Johnson insisted he was awake when he crashed in Georgia last year.
Executives of Total Transportation of Mississippi, Johnsons employer when the Georgia collision occurred, also acknowledged in civil depositions that they knew about Johnsons prior crash when they hired him. The company ultimately agreed to pay $78 million to settle civil suits by the victims families.
Johnson was indicted last month. And prosecutors made the unusual move of also bringing criminal charges against Total Transportation as a corporation. District Attorney Tom Durden dropped his case against the company last week in exchange for Total Transportation spending an additional $200,000 to establish an education fund for student nurses.
In addition to Pittman, the young women who died in the crash were Amber DeLoach of Savannah, Emily Clark of Powder Springs, Caitlyn Baggett of Millen and Morgan Bass of Leesburg.
As she left the courthouse, Pittmans mother said she respected the judges decision to give Johnson only five years in prison, but she didnt agree with it.
Theres probably nothing that would have made it right, Sherrin Pittman said.
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Topics Auto Personal Auto Georgia
The federal government is suing a California homeowner for nearly $25 million, contending his negligence sparked a 2013 fire in the mountains east of Los Angeles that forced 5,000 people from their homes.
The lawsuit says that a short in a poorly maintained electrical junction box sparked a blaze in the San Jacinto Mountains above Palm Springs that charred more than 27,500 acres of brush and timber, roughly 43 square miles, and at one point threatened the town of Idyllwild.
Investigators determined that the lid of the plastic box containing wires was warped and ajar, the lawsuit said.
As a result, an electrical discharge inside the box shot sparks and hot material out of the box and onto dry ground vegetation below, according to the lawsuit.
Property owners and their agents have a responsibility to ensure that property under their control is maintained in a safe fashion, U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker said in a statement.
The fire endangered countless lives, including those of firefighters who battle these large-scale blazes, she said.
The fire burned for more than two weeks in and around San Bernardino National Forest. More than 3,000 firefighters, 250 fire engines and 30 aircraft fought the blaze.
The U.S. Forest Service spent more than $15 million on firefighting, and the blaze caused in excess of $9 million in damage to resources, ranging from wildlife and timber to eroded soil, according to the lawsuit. More than $300,000 was spent on emergency rehabilitation of the area.
The lawsuit, which alleges negligence and violations of California law, was filed in Los Angeles one day before the third anniversary of the fires eruption. It names Tarek M. Al-Shawaf and two caretakers he employed at his home, known as Gibraltar West, in the community of Mountain Center.
The lawsuit was filed after Al-Shawaf and the caretakers failed to pay the costs of firefighting and fire damage demanded by the government, according to the lawsuit.
Messages for Al-Shawafs attorney, James Lance of San Diego, werent immediately returned.
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Topics Lawsuits California Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire Homeowners
More than 380,000 students in Washington state live in earthquake-prone areas and attend schools built before seismic construction standards were adopted statewide, according to a Seattle Times report.
The newspaper, analyzing state data, also reported that more than 31,000 students attend schools that are in or near tsunami danger zones.
However Washington doesnt mandate seismic evaluations or upgrades of school buildings and doesnt keep an inventory of unsafe schools. California, Oregon and British Columbia have all mandated seismic examinations of schools in earthquake-prone areas. And each has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to strengthen vulnerable buildings.
In Washington local school districts must raise their own funds before the state contributes money, creating disparities in school safety between wealthy and poor districts.
By law, we make kids go into buildings that may not be as safe as they should be, said Jim Mullen, Washingtons top emergency-management official from 2004 to 2013. Safe schools are a moral and legal obligation of the state Legislature, the governor and every other public official.
A magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami could kill up to 7,600 students and staff and cause $4 billion in damage and losses to schools, according to a 2014 study commissioned by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates almost 75 percent of coastal schools and one in five schools along the I-5 corridor could suffer extensive damage, including collapse.
A seismic evaluation for every school in the state would cost between $10 million and $13 million, a federally funded study found in 2011.
In a statement, Tara Lee, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jay Inslee said: Safety in our schools and communities is always a high priority but that more work needs to be done.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Washington
The city of Seattle, Wash. has paid $3.5 million to the family of a bicyclist who died two years ago in a collision with a truck in downtown Seattle.
The Seattle Times reported the payment resolves a claim that the citys failure to prepare an adequate traffic-control plan created dangerous conditions for bicyclists.
Sher Kung, a 31-year-old attorney, was biking on Second Ave when she was struck by a truck making a left turn. It happened less than two weeks before the city planned to make major bicycle-safety improvements to the Second Avenue bike lane.
City staff and David Whedbee, a lawyer for Kungs fiancee, said a confidentiality agreement prevented them from discussing settlement details.
A city official says a check sent June 21 represents only its share of the settlement, which includes other parties. The city would not identify the other parties.
The truck driver was not charged.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Washington
In the colonies it used to be said of England that Britannia did not so much rule the waves as it waived the rules. One hopes that the same might soon be said of European policymakers. If they fail to waive a number of basic European rules, they should brace themselves for further political backlashes that could in the end result in an unraveling of the whole European project.
In an effort to secure greater economic and policy integration, European policymakers have formulated a number of fundamental rules for EU membership. As an example, access to Europes single market requires that members subscribe to the free movement of goods, capital, services, and most importantly the unfettered movement of people between the 28 European Union member states.
Similarly, as a precondition for a move towards a European fiscal union, Eurozone membership requires that countries abide by strict fiscal rules aimed at keeping budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, as a precondition to an eventual European banking union, Eurozone membership now requires that countries do not engage in bank bailouts without first requiring that bank bondholders also take a loss on their holdings (known as a bail-in) with a view to saving the taxpayer money.
The trouble with each of the abovementioned rules is that, well intentioned as they might be, they are producing a political backlash across Europe that is raising the serious risk of an eventual disintegration of the Union. This backlash was all too evident in the recent Brexit referendum where 52 percent of the UK electorate voted in favor of the country withdrawing from Europe. It did so primarily in the hope that the country would gain greater control over its border. In deciding how to vote, the UK electorate allowed immigration to trump fears over any likely economic cost to the country of a Brexit.
The UKs political backlash against immigration is being replicated in other important European countries such as France and the Netherlands. To defuse this backlash, European policymakers would do well to revisit the rule that access to the single market requires the acceptance of unfettered movement of people within the European Union. Flexibility on the immigration issue would also be helpful in allowing a compromise to be struck in forthcoming Brexit negotiations with the UK that might allow a post-Brexit solution that was in the mutual interest of the UK and the European Union.
Flexibility would also be politically desirable in applying the Eurozones fiscal rules that currently require member countries to seek budget balance relatively soon. Over the past few years, the blind commitment to budget austerity in a Eurozone straitjacket has contributed importantly to Europes dismal economic performance and its continued high rate of unemployment. That poor performance has in turn given fuel to anti-European sentiment, particularly in southern European countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, where there has been a disturbing degree of political fragmentation. The need for greater fiscal flexibility would seem to be all the more pressing today at a time when the European economy could be hit hard by the economic fallout from the Brexit vote.
Perhaps the most immediate need for flexibility in the application of Europes rules is in relation to bank bailouts. Insistence that such bailouts be accompanied by bail-ins of bank bondholders could very much cloud the Italian economic and political outlook ahead of an all-important Italian constitutional referendum scheduled for this October.
Italy is at present in the grip of a banking crisis that needs early resolution. Italian bank shares have now declined by around 70 percent over the past year while non-performing bank loans have risen to 360 billion Euros, or around 18 percent of the Italian banks balance sheets. Should the European Commission now insist on a bondholder bail-in as part of any Italian bank bailout package, this could be politically very costly for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi since many Italian households own those bonds. It could thereby pave the way to power of the populist and anti-Euro Five Star Party which could in turn pose an existential threat to the Euro itself.
European policymakers would now seem to have a clear choice to make. They can continue to rigidly insist on the EUs rules but thereby risk a further political backlash against the European project itself. Alternatively, they can be more flexible in applying those rules. That would give the Union a better chance of surviving albeit in not quite as pure a form as European policymakers might have wished. Let us hope that European policymakers make the right choice.
Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly a Deputy Director in the International Monetary Funds Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.
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San Simone, apostolo e martire, nasce a Cana in Palestina, e muore a Pella (Armenia) o Suanir (Persia) nel 107. Vita Sono poche e controverse le...
SoftBankhas been sweeping tech and startup headlines in recent years. The company seems to have an investment in just about every major startup, with interests in everything from robotics to satellites, artificial intelligence to computerized enhancements for human bodies. The company has taken on an aggressive investment campaign which not only ensures its activity with and support of many hot startups, but which also consistently brings SoftBank itself to the top of many news feeds. What exactly is this company, and who is behind it?
Tokyo-Based Telecom Company
SoftBank got its start in 1981 in Tokyo. Founded as a telecommunications company, SoftBank now has a hand in a number of different areas, including e-commerce, finance, broadband, marketing, and more. The company has a portfolio including SoftBank BB, GungHo Online Entertainment, IDC Frontier, and more. In recent years, it has gone on a spending spree, buying up numerous smaller companies and initiating investments in many others. In July of 2016, for instance, SoftBank purchased UK-based chip manufacturer ARM for 24 billion, with an eye toward continuing to develop the Internet of Things. In 2017, SoftBank announced that it would buy two additional robotics companies from Alphabet. First, it bought up Boston Dynamics, the developer of the iconic Big Dog robot, and then it bought Schaft, a less well-known robotics outfit.
Masayoshi Son
SoftBank is headed by chair and CEO Masayoshi Son. Son has established himself as an assertive and confident player in the international tech scene. With about $100 billion to invest on companies developing the technology of the future, Son has ample room to explore a variety of new areas. According to The Economic Times, Son has strong opinions about the future of SoftBank and has put forth a conception of a 300-year plan for the company, with the end goal being to build the most valuable firm in the world. The key to Son's future investments is SoftBank's Vision Fund, dedicated to M&A deals like those listed above.
The list of acquisitions continues to grow. Back in April of 2017, Son was behind the $5.5-billion venture into Didi Chuxing, the massive ride-sharing company out of China. Describing the acquisition as a "big bang," Son went on to say that he believes "the next big bang is going to be even bigger. To be ready for that, we need to set the foundation, and that foundation is SoftBank Vision Fund."
Given the vast amounts of capital that Son already has at his disposal, some outsiders are wondering what he aims to do. Some analysts have concerns that Son's investments may flood capital into the tech sector, prompting inflated valuations, excessive lists of competitors,a nd ultimately hindering the process of technological development.
What Is a Substantially Identical Security?
The term "substantially identical security" comes from the language and explanation published by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regarding the rules of a wash sale. Securities that meet this definition are not recognized as different enough to be considered separate investments. Substantially identical securities can include both new and old securities issued by a corporation that has undergone reorganization, or convertible securities and common stock of the same corporation. Securities usually fall into this category if the market and conversion prices are the same and are therefore not allowed to be counted in tax swap or other tax-loss harvesting strategies.
Key Takeaways Substantially identical security is a phrase that comes from the tax explanation of the wash-sale rule.
Traders cannot expect to use tax-loss harvesting strategies if they have sold and then reacquired substantially identical securities within 30 days.
Generally, this can be avoided by purchasing similar stock or securities issued by a different corporation.
Understanding a Substantially Identical Security
Tax swaps, or tax-loss harvesting strategies, allow an investor to sell a stock or exchange-traded fund (ETF) that has gone down in price and thus incur a capital loss. This helps investors reduce taxes from capital gains earned elsewhere. However, to preserve their overall portfolio strategy, some investors will immediately purchase a very similar security to the one that was sold for a tax loss, hoping that it will return to, and perhaps exceed, its former value.
For example, if an investor sells the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) at a loss, they can immediately turn around and purchase the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. Tax-loss harvesting has become increasingly popular as algorithmic trading and investment management services such as robo-advisors are able to tax loss harvest on your behalf automatically.
The rationale is that the two S&P 500 ETFs have different fund managers, different expense ratios, may replicate the underlying index using a different methodology, and may have different levels of liquidity in the market. Presently, the IRS does not deem this type of transaction as involving substantially identical securities and so it is allowed, although this may be subject to change in the future as the practice becomes more widespread.
In another example, if a trader sells Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares at a loss in order to buy Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares, that may be considered a wash sale involving substantially identical securities because the two securities market the same portfolio at different price points. However, if they sold the Berkshire Class A shares in order to buy shares of a closely related stock issued by another company, the wash sale rules would not apply.
Wash Sales
If the IRS deems Berkshire Class A and Berkshire Class B shares to be substantially identical securities, the tax benefits gained from the strategy would not be allowed by the IRS , and would instead be considered a wash sale. In the United States, wash sale laws are codified in the Internal Revenue code and Treasury regulations. Capital gains and losses, including those related to wash sales, are reported using IRS Schedule D (Form 1040).
Under Section 1091 of the treasury regulations, a wash sale occurs when an investor sells a stock (or other securities) at a loss, and within 30 days before or after the sale:
This month marks the first anniversary of the launch of an alarming, systematic crackdown against lawyers and human rights defenders in China.
In July 2015, authorities began a nationwide campaign against the legal community. As State Department Spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement marking the anniversary, More than 300 people have been interrogated, detained, arrested, placed under residential surveillance or forbidden from leaving the country.
Mr. Kirby said the United States remains deeply concerned about the continued detention of at least 23 defense lawyers and rights defenders and denial of access to independent legal counsel.
In its most recent human rights report on China, the State Department noted that the lawyers arrested during the past year by authorities were detained on charges ranging from picking quarrels and provoking trouble to inciting subversion of state power.
Among those still in detention are Wang Yu and Li Heping. They have defended the legal rights of religious believers, journalists, victims of forced evictions, and women protesting sexual assault. Also among the so-called disappeared are Xie Yanyi, who defended Falun Gong practitioners.
Zhang Kai, who authorities detained in August 2015 immediately prior to a meeting with U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein, represented churches facing demolition and forced cross removal in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province. In February, Zhang made what many believe to be a forced confession on Chinese public television, and authorities released him in March after six months in detention. Reports indicate that Zhang remains on house arrest awaiting trial, as the charges against him have not been dropped. At least 20 other lawyers and rights defenders remain in custody.
State Department Spokesperson Kirby said the detention of lawyers and rights defenders by the Chinese government violates Chinas international commitments, and the campaign against the legal community in China undermines Chinas development of a judicial system that respects the rule of law.
Jailing those who seek to defend the legal rights of others harms Chinas international image and its ability to build a rule of law society, which is a critical component to fostering innovation and creating sustainable prosperity in the 21st century, Mr. Kirby said.
To this end, we urge Chinese authorities to immediately release the lawyers and rights defenders still in detention, drop the charges against them, and allow them to move freely and reunite with their families whom they have not seen in a year.
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REE Stock News - Defense Metals (TSX-V: DEFN.V) (OTCQB: DFMTF) Drills 113 metres of 2.50% Total Rare Earth Oxide at Wicheeda
Vancouver, British Columbia - October 26, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Mining / Metals / Green Energy Stock News - Defense Metals Corp. (TSX-V: DEFN / OTCQB: DFMTF/ FSE:35D) is pleased to announce high-grade Rare Earth Element ("REE") assay results from one additional core hole, totalling 383 metres (m), collared within the northern area of Defense Metals' 100% owned Wicheeda REE Deposit.
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Health and Wellness Stock News - Endexx (OTCBB: EDXC) Secures Third Order for Non-Nicotine Vape Product HYLA Worth Approximately $1.5M in Revenue for First two Fiscal Quarters of 2023
CAVE CREEK, Ariz. - October 27, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Endexx Corporation (OTCBB:EDXC), a provider of innovative, plant-derived, and sustainable health and skincare products, today announces it has secured three key significant orders for its newly acquired, non-nicotine plant-based vape product, HYLA.
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Breaking EV Stock News: Mullen (NASDAQ: MULN) FIVE 'Strikingly Different' EV Crossover Tour Starts Tomorrow, Oct. 27, in Pasadena, California; New Los Angeles Area Stop Added
BREA, Calif. - October 26, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Mullen Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: MULN) ("Mullen" or the "Company"), an emerging electric vehicle ("EV") manufacturer, announces today the beginning of the Mullen FIVE Strikingly Different EV Crossover Tour, which will commence on Oct. 27 in Pasadena, California. Due to overwhelming interest, new dates have been added for Nov. 1 and 2 at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California.
Top AI Stock News - Investor Idea
Breaking AI Stock News: FatBrain (OTCQB: LZGI) Acquires Confidential Computing Platform ZeroTrust to Protect Data Privacy and Accelerate Innovation for Millions of Growth Businesses
NEW YORK, NY - October 19, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) FatBrain AI (LZG International, Inc.) (OTCQB: LZGI), the leader in powerful and easy-to-use artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for star enterprises of tomorrow, has acquired the confidential computing and privacy intellectual property (IP) plus software assets of Zero2A PTE LTD ("ZeroTrust Platform"), a software company based in Singapore.
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Some residents and business owners in Nice are furious that Irish rock star Bono and other celebrities were rescued first during the Bastille Day massacre last week even though the restaurant they were in was a half mile away.
ISIS thug Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ran over and killed 84 civilians driving a large white truck. Eighty more are still in hospital with 18 badly injured.
Thirty anti-terrorist police rushed to get Bono, celebrity chef Alain Ducasse and several local notables, including the former Mayor of Nice, from the La Petite Maison restaurant near the waterfront and they were rushed to safety by the police.
The restaurant is hugely exclusive and charges $450 for 25 grams of caviar.
A nearby shopkeeper said the restaurant was a popular celebrity haunt and Bono was regularly seen there.
Read more: Irishman recalls the horror of Nice as killer mowed down everyone
However, local residents have expressed anger that celebrities seemed to take precedence over ordinary people who were injured, saying it was a ridiculous use of resources. Paulo Mendes, 46, the manager of a souvenir shop next door to the restaurant, said: "It is ridiculous that Bono was rescued by police."
He told the UK's Daily Telegraph that police were badly needed a half mile away at the scene of the carnage where thousands of distraught people were fleeing for safety.
"There was panic everywhere in the town," he said. "I don't care if it's Michael Jackson, Bono or Barack Obama. The police should not help one person just because he is a celebrity. Everyone is equal."
When the owner of the restaurant Bono was in saw the people fleeing she locked the restaurant and pulled down the shutters and told everyone to hide.
"Suddenly I saw people running, without shouting," said Anne-Laure Rubi, the owner.
"It took around half an hour for the police to get us out," said a diner. "Like everybody else, Bono had to put his hands on his head, and was told to remain calm.
"It was a silent panic it was extraordinary."
"The police were clearly very worried that terrorists might still be at large, and everybody was under suspicion."
It was a second close shave for the Irish rock legend. Bono and U2 were due to play in Paris the night of the Bataclan massacre last year.
Read more: Latest French massacre reveals no target too soft for ISIS madmen
A little bit of Irish American history passed forever last week. Mike Butler, the man who in 1962 started the annual St. Patrick's Day tradition of dyeing the Chicago River green, has died at the age of 81 of pneumonia. Butler was a proud first-generation Irish American, with his mother from Co. Tipperary, and his father from Co. Kerry.
Just as dyeing the river was a Chicago St.Patrick's Day tradition so was the annual speculation about how it was done and who was responsible for it. One extraordinary aspect of the dyeing, one that few knew, was that it took orange dye to make it all work.
An obituary by Maureen O'Donnell of the Chicago Sun Times lovingly chronicles Butler's life and how he and his family, along with another family of volunteers, the Rowans, have turned the Chicago River green every St Patricks Day for more than half a century.
Its special, O'Donnell quotes Butler as having once said of the tradition. Were the only city in the United States that does it. Nobody has been able to quite duplicate it. Other cities have tried. Maybe they get a little color in, but they never succeed the way we get the Chicago River.
Chicago River dye-er Michael L. Butler is dead at 81: A Green Giant is gone. Mike Butler, https://t.co/jRpIuW4Dn3 pic.twitter.com/zXUZoV9Gtn South Side Chicago (@SouthSideBuzz) July 15, 2016
He added: We never let anybody else know exactly what we do beforehand and during the process to get a completely green, Irish river.
O'Donnell spoke with his family about the method:
'He was very, very secretive about the dye,' said his daughter, Kathleen Unes.
After hed pick up the powder each year, 'It was hidden in the garage,' she said.
'Hed say, Ill take it to my grave,' Unes said of her fathers secret process."
The Rowans know the source of the nontoxic powder, Tom Rowan told her.
Read more: Mesmerizing sequence of photos of the dyeing of the Chicago River for Paddys Day
We always refer to it as leprechaun dust, Rowan said. We have never told anybody what it is.
O'Donnell continues on to explain that:
"Chicagos river-dyeing tradition began in 1962, though its genesis is a bit murky. Most versions lead back to the sponsor of the St. Patricks Day parade the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers union.
'Daley wanted something spectacular' for the holiday, [Mike's wife] Marlene Butler said of Mayor Richard J. Daley.
A light-bulb moment happened when somebody spotted a plumber splashed with green stains from a substance used to check for leaks, she said.
The Rowans and Butlers figured out the best way to distribute the dyeing powder which is orange was by shaking it through old-fashioned flour-sifters. Then came the next step, a second boat the Mixmaster, according to Marlene Butler. When churned with water, the orange dye turns the water a phosphorescent green."
Mike Butler is survived by his wife, daughters and 14 grandchildren. Click through to the Sun Times obituary to read more about his life and legacy, including a trip to Dublin to dye the Liffey green in 1998, when the orange powder sparked consternation among spectators who thought it was a Protestant St. Patrick's Day protest.
H/T: Chicago Sun-Times.
The United States Department of Defense, the National Security Service of Armenia (NSS), and the Armenian Border Guards held a ceremony on June 22, 2016, in Yerevan to mark the completion of a two-year, $9.35 million effort aimed at reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, by safeguarding Armenia's northern border with Georgia against trafficking in WMD-related materials.
The two-year effort focused on enhancing the Armenian Border Guards capabilities to deter, detect, and interdict trafficking of WMD and related materials.
Today we celebrate the completion of two years of extensive cooperation in countering the threat of illicit trafficking of weapons of mass destruction through the border between Armenia and Georgia, said U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Richard Mills, Jr. during the completion ceremony.
Dawn Brown, chief of the Building Partnerships Division at the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency or DTRA, also expressed satisfaction with the successful bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
The project was implemented by DTRAs Cooperative Threat Reduction, Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation Prevention Program. Through this effort, the United States provided Armenian border guards with equipment to detect WMD-related materials, as well as tools to support communications, surveillance, mobility, tactical infrastructure, and post and patrol operations. The border guards also received training on the use and maintenance of the equipment.
The United States installed a secure wireless broadband network along the border to improve the communications capabilities of the Armenian Border Guards, allowing improved communication between its patrol units, outposts, regional command facilities, and national headquarters in Yerevan.
The United States also provided fixed and mobile surveillance camera equipment to enhance the Armenian border guards capacity to operate around the clock and new patrol and all-weather vehicles to expand their ability to patrol remote areas of the border and respond to trafficking events.
The U.S. and the Armenian Border Guards have been working together under the Defense Departments Cooperative Threat Reduction Program since 2011, with the United States providing $21.3 million in aid.
The United States and Armenia are working together toward common goals of democracy and prosperity, security and peace both in Armenia and in the region, said Ambassador Mills. Our security cooperation is robust, and we remain committed to an open and enduring partnership with Armenia.
The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe has defended the use of Shannon Airport by US troops in the wake of the Nice attack writes Irish Examiner political reporter Elaine Loughlin.
Mr Donohoe said that a careful response is needed to terrorism such as Thursdays attack which killed 84 people in Nice.
Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a lorry through crowds who had gathered Promenade des Anglais to celebrate Bastille before he was shot dead by police.
Mr Donohoe said The Tanaiste, Frances Fitzgerald met the Garda Commissioner on Friday and added that the Gardai are well prepared to tackle and prevent such attacks here.
Its so important now that the response back from all of us isnt a cycle that can harden the worst impulses and lock us into a cycle where this happens again and again, he told RTEs The Week in Politics programme.
The kind of terror that we are now facing is the everyday, the truck, the car, something that is part of our everyday life.
However, AAA-PBP TD Clare Daly said the continued use of Shannon Airport by US troops means we are also a terrorism target.
I do think our culpability by allowing US military on an almost twice daily basis to transit military hardware, its soldiers across the Middle East to wreck destruction in those areas, does make us complicit in those actions, does make us complicit in the destabilisation of the Middle East.
And in that sense we would be a target as well, she said.
But Mr Donohoe: We have always been very clear and successful governments have been very clear on the importance of our neutrality and that that Shannon Airport and its use is not in any way incompatible with that.
Enda Kenny has opened up the possibility of a border poll in the context of Brexit negotiations, writes Elaine Loughlin, Political Reporter in Glenties.
The Taoiseach has also promised to further strengthen Irelands lucrative corporate tax rate and hinted at reducing personal taxes.
The upcoming budget will be shaped by the challenges posed by Brexit the Taoiseach said adding that a second secretary general will be appointed to his department to deal with Britains exit from Europe.
Foreign embassies will also be bolstered with more staff employed abroad.
Speaking at the MacGill Summer School last night Mr Kenny said that a vote on whether Northern Ireland should join the Republic must be considered during Brexit negotiations.
Mr Kenny said: If there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic that that should be catered for in the discussions that take place.
The discussions and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered."
Comparing the situation to Berlin Wall he suggested that Northern Ireland would be able to stay in the EU if it voted to unite with Ireland.
In the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, and was able to be absorbed into West Germany, and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union.
"People said it would be impossible that Britain would leave the European Union, and that has taken place now by virtue of the Brexit referendum.
So in the context of discussions that will take place about the future, about the connections between the republic and Northern Ireland, between Northern Ireland and the UK and the EU and our relationship with both, these are things that should be looked at in the context of that they might happen in some time in the future.
Mr Kenny was last night adamant that the current government would go the full distance.
The thing is the Programme for Government is based on a five-year term and we have a supply and confidence arrangement with the Fianna Fail party, guaranteeing three budgets and the review of the programme at the end of 2018.
He added that the agreement with Fianna Fail is based on good faith and no surprises and said: You cant act as if you have a majority because you dont have a majority therefore its very important to share necessary information.
An 18-year-old man will appear in court today in connection with a fatal stabbing in Dublin on Saturday.
A man in his 20s was stabbed to death in Seagull House, Ruthland Avenue at around 4pm on Saturday afternoon.
Enda Kenny promised to protect and "further strengthen" Irelands lucrative corporate tax rate and has hinted at reducing personal taxes, writes Elaine Loughlin, Political Reporter in Glenties.
The Taoiseach has said that a second secretary general will be appointed to his department to deal with Britains exit from Europe.
Foreign embassies will also be bolstered with more staff employed abroad.
Speaking at the MacGill Summer School this evening, the Taoiseach said upcoming Budget will be shaped by the challenges posed by Brexit.
Mr Kenny has asked both Michael Noonan and Paschal Donohoe to ensure that the upcoming Budget in October is shaped by, and addresses, the challenges resulting from Brexit, and to set out a national economic response.
Speaking in the context of Britains decision to leave the EU said there is now a need to further strengthen the competitiveness of our personal and corporate tax regimes for mobile investment and skills.
Supporting the strong recovery in tourism, agri-business and other regional, employment-intensive sectors in recent years will also be a priority of Budget 2017.
The Taoiseach added that there is now a need to further diversify our export markets.
A "wide conversation" will take place on how Brexit will impact communities, business and organisations across the country and the government is to organise a public consultation process to listen to the views and concerns of the people.
He said: The Government believes that there is a need in these circumstances for the widest possible conversation on the implications of the referendum result for Ireland, North and South and for North/South relations and we will continue to explore options to achieve this in a way that is non-divisive.
Adding that he respects the fact that all political views must be listened to Mr Kenny said: We need to ensure that all voices can be heard on this issue - all political parties throughout the island, inside and outside government, as well as civil society, NGO's and business.
Its really important that we have everybodys view and that they be able to express that view.
There will be a broader public consultation - including on an inclusive all-island basis - and an ongoing engagement with other parties in the Oireachtas, as well as with the Brexit Stakeholder Group which has already been meeting for some time now, Mr Kenny said.
France has marked a national moment of silence in memory of the 84 people killed in the Nice truck attack, as thousands of people massed on the city's waterfront promenade.
With flowers in their hands and tears in their eyes, crowds stood on the rocky beach for several minutes looking towards the Promenade des Anglais, the road where the attack targeting Bastille Day celebrations occurred.
Ahead of the minute's silence, being held at the seafront where the attack happened, crowds jeered French Prime Minister Manuel Vall who had joined thousands in mourning.
Boos rang out as it emerged that confidence in the capacity of the government to combat terrorism had plummeted to an all time low.
There were several placards also spotted in the crowd calling for French President Francois Hollande to resign.
As PM Valls moves towards books of condolence shouts and boos #nice pic.twitter.com/PstrrrLySw Emma Murphy (@emmamurphyitv) July 18, 2016
Driver Mohamed Lahouiaej Bouhlel sped his truck through the crowd, killing 84 people including several children and leaving more than 300 others injured.
Among those at the ceremony in Nice was French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and people fell silent across the nation to remember the victims.
It came after Bouhlel's uncle claimed his nephew was indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice.
Sadok Bouhlel said that given his nephew's family problems - he was estranged from his wife and three children - the Algerian "found in Mohamed an easy prey".
Bouhlel's rapid radicalisation has puzzled investigators. Friends and family said he had not been an observant Muslim in the past.
Crowds in Nice jeer French politicians calling for "demission" or resignation pic.twitter.com/grMlftM9Tw Jonathan Wald (@jonathanwalditn) July 18, 2016
Meanwhile, the French government has defended its efforts to fight IS abroad and at home, announcing new air strikes against their strongholds in the past two days.
President Francois Hollande's Socialist administration has come under blistering criticism from opposition conservatives after the attack in Nice, with former president Nicolas Sarkozy accusing the government of bad policies that he says have failed to prevent three major attacks in the past 18 months.
But Mr Cazeneuve hit back on Monday, listing a series of laws and extra police forces created under Mr Hollande's presidency ''to face a threat that France was not prepared for'' when he took over from Mr Sarkozy in 2012.
After a special security meeting, defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French forces in the US-led coalition struck IS targets again overnight and on Saturday. French war planes have been involved in the operation in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Syria.
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.
That is the view of EU agriculture commissioner Phil Hogan, who was responding to a commission review of how the measures have been implemented in their first year.
The analysis shows that greening has the potential to deliver environmental and climate benefits on a large share of EU farmland, including areas not covered by rural development measures.
However, it says the true impact of greening, in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in achieving environmental and climate outputs, is difficult to assess after only one year.
Mr Hogan said the report confirmed his expectation that there is a need for simplification of the rules.
In this respect, I have asked my services to come forward with a range of simplification proposals for steps that can be taken quickly and potentially be in place for payment claims next year.
This will not pre-empt a broader evaluation of the environmental impact of the scheme scheduled for the end of 2017.
Mr Hogan, speaking later at Kent County Show in England, said he believed there were a number of areas where progress could be made in the short-term to make the lives of farmers easier, without compromising the environmental performance of greening.
He said he expected to be in a position very shortly to propose several concrete simplification proposals.
Mr Hogan has also said the European Commission will hold a conference on rural development in Cork on September 5 and 6. It will bring together 250 interested parties to discuss current and future challenges of farming and rural areas, as well as policy responses.
Exactly 20 years ago, a groundbreaking European conference on rural development in the city concluded with the landmark signing of the Cork Declaration on Rural Development.
The State-owned company, which oversees port operations in Cork, saw revenue from charges to port users and property rental increase by 12.9% to 29.8m.
Irelands second busiest port also reported growth in the volume of goods passing through Cork in 2015 up 8.6% to 11.02 million tonnes although there was a slight decrease in the actual number of vessels down 10 to 1,174.
In its annual report the company welcomed the decision by An Bord Pleanala, last May, to grant planning permission for a 100m redevelopment at Ringaskiddy which it described as a critical infrastructure project.
The first phase of the project is expected to be completed by 2018. Port of Cork chairman, John Mullins, said the overall project would facilitate, on a planned basis, the transfer of cargo handling facilities from Tivoli and the City Quays to Ringaskiddy.
Staff numbers at the company rose by five to 121 last year. Total remuneration for Port of Corks chief executive, Brendan Keating, remained effectively static at 239,709.
In response to a request from the companys shareholder the Minister for Transport a dividend of 650,460 was paid last year, Last year also saw strong growth in business from cruise ships to Cork with the number of passengers up 22% to over 102,000. That was the first time the 100,000 mark has been passed at Cork, with the port overtaking Dublin in terms of cruise business.
A total of 57 cruise liners docked at the cruise ship terminal in Cobh and deepwater berth at Ringaskiddy during 2015 with the Port of Cork predicting the number will increase to 75 over the next three years.
It is estimated that tourists from visiting cruise ships contribute around 4m to the local economy each year.
It is welcome in that finally there is a clear and unambiguous analysis of the financial mess in which the sector finds itself.
It is depressing in that it took nanoseconds for the old habits of Irish policymaking, ideological biases and selective analyses, to emerge. It is also somewhat depressing that the underlying economic analysis of the sector is incomplete.
Despite what a casual glance at the newspapers might suggest, the report did not come down in favour of a loans scheme. It is a masterpiece of objectivity in that regard, laying out the pros and cons of the various schemes fully funded free at use, a loans scheme or a continued mix as we have now but with increased state contribution.
The report is very clear that increased spending is required if the Irish third-level system is to have any hope of regaining lost ground, never mind improving. All that is for debate if that is accepted, and let us not kid ourselves that that proposition is universally accepted, is who will pay.
There remains in public discourse an anti-intellectual chorus that deems state investment in third level a prima facia waste of money.
Leaving aside the shrill voices of those already up the ladder who seek to not so much pull it up behind them as to burn it to the ground, we can critique the report in one fundamental way.
It commences from an unconscious assumption that third- level education is a homogenous good. It is nothing of the sort. The third-level system is one which produces a number of different goods at the same time and from the same base set of inputs.
Modern macroeconomics has been harshly criticised for its reliance on overly homogenous agglomerations of sectors.
It is perhaps ironic that Stephen Kinsella, the chairman of the Higher Education Authority, is one of the people who is making the greatest strides in building up macroeconomic models from sensible microeconomic foundations where individual agents act in a recognisably real world fashion.
A deeper look at the foundations of third level might allow us to create sensible macro financing decisions.
Economists are good at goods. Typically, they classify goods on two continua the extent to which they are rivalrous and the extent to which they are excludable. Rivalry means whether my consumption of the good prevents you from consuming it, and excludable means the extent to which possession or enjoyment of the good is tied to having paid for it.
Thus, most private goods are RE rivalrous and excludable. If I buy an apple you cannot , and if I eat it you cannot. At the other end of the scale are pure public goods, such as radio broadcasts or human knowledge.
My knowing the works of Kant does not prevent you from so knowing. Finally, we have club goods.
These might include satellite TV my viewing of a Netflix programme is not at your expense but does depend on my having a subscription.
There are well-accepted pricing implications for these goods. Private goods are usually best delivered by a private market, public goods by the State as there are enormous incentives to free ride and over-consume. Club goods can be provided by monopoly suppliers to the point where rivalry impinges, and common goods require potentially complex regulatory intervention.
Third level produces at least the following goods. It produces education, increases in the stock of human intellectual prowess and ability, a better-educated populace.
This is a pure public good. It produces certification, a statement that X knows Y or has the ability to do Z. This is perhaps a club good, as it is non-rivalrous but is excludable if you didnt go to college and pass exams you cannot avail of the certification. It produces integration or networking, whereby individuals can form long lasting bonds for future professional advancement.
It produces initiation, whereby a person is confirmed and initiated as being in a group from which will be drawn those that will earn more.
All of these require different approaches to pricing and to funding, therefore. However, with the exception of the initiation element, there is no underlying economic reason to have this done by private individual pricing, in fact the opposite.
In the case of the private good element private payment is already done, graduates earning significantly more across the spectrum than non-graduates and thus paying more tax. The underlying economic logic of what third-level produces is, in fact, more towards increased public provision via the free-to-use or upping existing state provision approaches.
There is no logic, other than ideological, to a student loans system.
On July 9th, the fifth anniversary of South Sudans independence passed without celebration. Instead, the capital city, Juba, was consumed with renewed fighting between rival factions, which escalated into violence reminiscent of the countrys civil war and raised fears for the countrys increasingly fragile peace.
In December 2013, a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar escalated into a civil war. Fighting reopened ethnic fault lines between Kiir's Dinka and Machar's Nuer ethnic groups. Some reports indicate up to 50,000 people have been killed and more than 2.2 million driven from their homes, with many fleeing to neighboring states.
Finally, last August, both Salva Kiir and Riek Machar signed a peace agreement to end the devastating conflict. The agreement confirmed Salva Kiir as President and Riek Machar returned to government as the First Vice President. The agreement provided for a transitional government of national unity.
In late April, Riek Machar arrived in Juba and was sworn in as First Vice President. It seemed South Sudan was finally turning a corner. The sudden eruption of violence in recent days, in addition to the tragedy of more lives lost and more people displaced, has cast a deep shadow over the prospects for lasting peace under the agreement. The United States and the rest of the world have called for all sides to abide by the ceasefire declared on July 11 and allow the security situation to stabilize.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, "Yet again, the leaders of South Sudan have failed their people. Rarely has a country's conduct squandered so much promise so quickly."
The United Nations Security Council, the African Union, and regional partners have been actively engaged in calling on the leaders in South Sudan to commit to the full and immediate implementation of the peace agreement, including the permanent ceasefire, said State Department Spokesperson John Kirby.
[The United States] strongly urge[s] that the two leaders do everything in their power to ensure these decrees will be fully respected and unfettered humanitarian assistance will be provided to those affected by the violence.
In the light of recent events, the demotion of the highly paid boss of a British luxury goods company hardly ranks that high on the Richter scale. However, the Christopher Bailey story is worth telling.
Mr Bailey is standing down as chief executive next year, following a reversal of fortunes at this high-flying company that led to a sharp drop in its share price. The reins are being handed over to an older man, Italian Marco Gobbetti, with extensive industry experience. A new chief finance officer, with extensive restructuring experience, is also being brought on board.
As chief creative officer and CEO of Burberry, the maker of upmarket trench coats, Mr Bailey has been a leading icon in what has been a golden age in the world of high fashion. Last year, he took home a staggering 7.5m as head of a company whose shares jumped fivefold in value from the time he joined as designer back in 2001.
Annual profits since then have risen by 350m. At one time, Burberry had a dowdy reputation, its outerwear worn mainly by country gents walking fat labradors.
But Mr Bailey along with the companys longtime CEO, Angela Ahrends has transformed the group. In 2014, the year Ms Ahrends departed to work for Apple, revenues broke through the 2.5bn mark. Burberry has built much of this success on the back of Chinese spending on luxury items.
Mr Baileypresided over a team of designers who introduced dresses, suits, scarves, as well as coats, for a new generation of shoppers. And just as important, he was a pioneer in the use of digital-based selling direct from the catwalk.
Globalisation has created hundreds of millions of acquisitive middle-class people. At the same time, the ranks of the uber-rich have swelled exponentially. Between 1994 and 2014, the luxury goods market tripled in size to around 225bn.
The growth in online spending has challenged many ideas. Whereas physical shoppers prefer a mono-brand environment, people buying online prefer to choose between many brands. The whole process of selling is being transformed.
Between 2003 and 2014, sales online rocketed. Department stores and e-tailers have led the way, but some individual brands have struggled, with 35% not selling online at all. A lot is at stake. In the UK alone, over 8bn worth of luxury goods are sold.
Much of this activity has been driven by a surge in asset prices which threatens to go into reverse. Already, the prices of high-end residences are tumbling in cities such as London and New York. Growth in many of the emerging economies is tapering off.
The public mood, too, has shifted against those fond of flaunting their wealth. Higher taxes could soon be slapped on empty luxury properties. Rising rents and tuition fees fan the flames of discontent.
Mr Baileys elevation to the role of CEO, two years ago, could be viewed as a high watermark for creative stars in a fashion sector that was riding high on what in retrospect may come to be viewed as a luxury consumables bubble. In taking on the job, he became the first openly gay CEO of a FTSE 100 company. He was innovative in the use of models and actors. But even as he ascended to the top position, the ground was beginning to shift under his feet. China was coming off the boil and the commodities boom was coming to an end, hitting spending on top line goods.
The terrorist outrages in France and Belgium have also hit high-end tourism with Paris particularly badly affected. A decline in travel means less traffic at the tills.
If the catwalk can be catty, then the cutting industry is cut-throat. In the past year, Burberry shares have tumbled by 22%. Once Mr Bailey stopped delivering stellar performances on the bottom line, the shareholders grew restless. There were plenty of grumblings at the companys recent AGM aimed at Mr Bailey over his hefty pay package and dual role. In June, his package was cut 75% to 1.9m, but the wolves continued to circle. Following the announcement of his departure as CEO, the share price jumped by 75p to 12.50.
Mr Bailey has now stepped back from his dual role, but he may be relieved to shed responsibilities. The experiment of one person combining many roles looks unlikely to be repeated often, if at all.
This has been called for by the ICMSA since late spring when we became convinced that the Government and European Commissions policy of wait and see was failing.
Todays decision and it is no more than a possibility, though a strong one will mean the current drastic oversupply of milk can finally be addressed in a way that allows individual milk suppliers to make the decision on a completely voluntary basis and in a way that suits their own circumstances.
It will also retain the degree of flexibility that will allow production to be stepped-up as the supply- demand imbalance is worked through and farmer milk price returns to above-production levels.
It represents a very significant recognition of ICMSAs analysis and while it will not have an overnight effect, it will send an unmistakeable signal to the market that supply will tighten and prices will follow that recognition.
At the very least, it marks the end of the pointless policy that had us doing the same wrong things over and over and expecting different, better, results each time.
To those who say that such a policy signifies a lack of confidence in the post-quota EU dairy sector, I would make one simple point: Its high time that people stopped conflating the interests of the dairy sector and the dairy farmers.
The sector is doing very well, thank you. We can all read the analysts reports and the company accounts. Its a radically different story for the people actually providing the milk that is the basis for all that profit and optimistic forecasting; those people have gone over a year earning nothing from their work and investment and in many cases losing money.
So as far as ICMSA is concerned, its time we concentrated a little more on the dairy farmers the foundations of the sector and perhaps started worrying a little less about the processing, corporate, and retail elements. Goodness knows they dont seem that worried about us.
The pace of changes and the speed with which new challenges emerge will be further illustrated this week when a major announcement on climate change and Irish farming and agri-food is expected.
While in no way diminishing the reality of climate change and the revolution in our understanding of sustainability already underway, we would urge the Government to be vigilant in terms of defending the national economic imperative that is our farming and food sector. We absolutely cannot allow ourselves to be bounced into some cack-handed one-size-fits-all environmentally driven reduction in food production or farming that ignores the fact that our system is demonstrably less stressful on the environment than that of other states.
ICMSA makes no apology for insisting that our family dairy farm is insulated so far as possible from regulations or directives that take no account of its critical environmental, social, and economic role in rural Ireland.
If we are to make sacrifices and ICMSA rejects that premise to begin with then our family dairy farm system must be recognised as the equivalent of the family silver and should not even be considered in that context.
A rare opportunity in an otherwise challenging year has presented itself with the news that Turkey is seeking tenders to supply 50,000 head of cattle. The announcement follows hard on the heels that that states market is open for Irish live exports.
I repeat here what ICMSA said on the day of that announcement: Merely stating that a market is open is not sufficient.
We will need a concerted and co-ordinated promotional campaign aimed at securing as much of that 50,000 as we can possibly win.
The problem around a surge in cattle numbers at the back-end has long been known and it is absolutely crucial that we convert the Turkish opportunity into a real viable live export that will ensure the competition that ensures farmers get a decent price and are not left to the tender mercies of the factories and the beef processors who never miss an opportunity, whether real or imagined, to cut the price they pay to farmers.
Rumours were rife among Cork county councillors at a recent meeting in County Hall that the business bodies supported having an alternative to the now-mothballed M20 project run through the north Cork town.
The supposed logic of this was that a motorway link already existed from Cork to Mitchelstown and, therefore it would be far less expensive to build a link from there to Limerick instead of a complete new 800m link from Cork to Limerick.
Currently, the main road between the cities is through Mallow and Charleville. County councillors baulked at that idea, suggesting any such decision would economically isolate a large swathe of north-west Cork.
Cork Chamber chief executive Conor Healy said there was absolutely no truth that his organisation supported a Mitchelstown link. In fact, he said, the claim could not be further from the truth.
Both chambers have been working jointly to get a direct motorway connection between Cork and Limerick, he said.
The Cork organisation had recently met Cork ministers Simon Coveney and Michael Creed to emphasis the importance of restarting the plans for the M20.
The chamber has also been in touch with the Minister for Transport Shane Ross and is seeking a meeting with him to discuss the issue.
Meanwhile, Limerick Chamber chief executive James Ring said his organisation recently discussed the issue with Minister for Finance Michael Noonan.
In the opinion of Limerick Chamber this is the most important project for the entire region, he said.
Mitchelstown is not an option because Mallow, Charleville and Buttevant need to be serviced with better road links. A motorway directly from Cork to Limerick would also open up better services to West Limerick and places such as Newcastlewest. He said a motorway link from Mitchelstown to Limerick would be just crossing villages.
He said his chamber would be calling for the M20 project to immediately go through the planning process so when money starts to become available in two years time some work could be progressed.
Mr Ring said it might not be realistic to expect the motorway to be built in one fell swoop. However, he said bypasses should be built around Mallow, Buttevant and Charleville which could all be joined up to the motorway at a later date.
Cork county councillors are also hoping to put pressure on the Government to get the project back on track.
Senior executives from Transport Infrastructure Ireland recently met council officials and advised them that any political pressures councillors could exert to accelerate the increase in their spending budgets would be appreciated.
It also expressed its disappointment that the M20 is not on the current Capital Investment Programme (2016- 2021). It also said the need for the motorway was highlighted by the number of recent fatal crashes on the N20, especially in the Mallow area.
Councillors are also trying to lobby for the creation of a northern relief road around Mallow, as the town has extensive gridlock at peak times. A consultant has been appointed to carry out a feasibility study.
However, the national roads authority agreed there was a good business case for the project. The county council and Mallow businesses paid for another consultant to compile a report which was handed to the Government showing the economic benefits of building the road.
However, the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government has contradicted the councils claims it had no choice but to sell the houses due to government orders.
The council has been called on to explain its decision to sell the homes at a time when over 7,000 are on a waiting list for a council house in Cork County.
The Irish Examiner has learned that since 2013 when Cork County Council claimed local authorities were forced to sell repossessed properties councils in Carlow, Dublin City, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, and Fingal all transferred such houses to the social housing stock.
Last April, Sinn Fein councillor Melissa Mullane submitted a motion calling on the council to seek funding to purchase any properties subject to a council mortgage which are repossessed so that these repossessed properties can form part of the councils social housing stock.
The minutes of the meeting show the councils housing section told members up to mid-2013, the department allowed local authorities to purchase repossessed properties, which had been subject to local authority mortgages, and transfer the properties to social housing stock if the local authority had a housing need for the property at the location and if the property was deemed structurally suitable.
The Department of Environment, Community and Local Government then advised local authorities that they could no longer purchase these properties, irrespective of whether they had a housing need for them or not, the minutes read.
The claim drew the ire of councillors, who said the apparent directive was scandalous.
The council subsequently told the Irish Examiner that Cork County Council, along with other local authorities, had no choice but to sell the repossessed properties on the open market.
However, it has since transpired that a number of councils across the country have used such repossessed properties to tackle their housing waiting lists.
A spokesperson for the department has told the Irish Examiner it has not told councils that they must sell houses that have been repossessed.
It is possible some councils will sell such houses where, for example, they may not be suitable for social housing and where there is significant outstanding loans against the property, so a sale of a house can be used to offset the loan, said the spokesperson.
Other councils may take such houses where suitable into their housing stock or may continue to manage the loan and may tenant the house.
There are no separate criteria that apply to Cork in this respect and it will always be a matter for the council in the first place to make decisions on the management of their housing stock.
Last April, the council told members it had repossessed 13 houses since 2013, nine of which it has sold.
Asked to respond to the departments statement, Cork County Council said in April it wrote to the department asking for permission to buy any properties subject to a council mortgage which are repossessed so these can form part of its social housing stock, and to provide funding for same.
It said it has yet to receive a response.
Noirin OSullivan told the Irish Examiner she would continue to work with government departments and the Policing Authority to ensure that adequate and appropriate leadership capacity was in place.
The Government last week announced the appointment of 28 garda managers: 10 chief superintendents, and 18 superintendents.
Ms OSullivan had requested the immediate appointment of 46 garda managers: two assistant commissioners, 18 chief superintendents, and 26 superintendents.
The promotions leave her short 18 appointments: two assistant commissioners, eight chief superintendents and eight superintendents.
These appointments of superintendents and chief superintendents by the Government are welcome, the commissioner said.
I recently highlighted to the Government and the Policing Authority that these were critical vacancies that needed to be filled as quickly as possible to ensure the appropriate leadership capacity of the organisation.
These appointments will help to address the mission-critical vacancies that exist in An Garda Siochana.
The commissioner said she would continue to work with government departments and the authority to ensure adequate and appropriate leadership capacity was in place.
A Garda spokesperson later added that appointment of the two assistant commissioners was a matter for the Government.
The commissioner has publically commented on the critical need for these positions to be filled as quickly as possible, the spokesperson said.
One of the 10 new chief superintendents is a woman, while two of the 18 new superintendents are women.
IN BUSINESS since 2003, high-end tour operator Adams & Butler is a well-established stable business.
The companys early days were a little choppier, however, especially when it came to accessing credit.
In fact, founder and chief executive Siobhan Byrne Learat found the whole experience particularly unsavoury.
It was an horrendous experience whereby as a single mother with four children I had to put my family home as a guarantee whereas my fellow married director didnt, as he only co-owned the house. That was immoral, says Ms Byrne Learat.
Finding available talent is another issue that the niche tour operator, which creates tailor-made travel itineraries, has to contend with.
One avenue the business has used to find staff has been the controversial JobBridge scheme introduced by the Government to help people back into the workforce after the financial crash, but which has also drawn the ire of critics who suggest some companies exploit workers by not subsequently offering them a full-time role.
With Adams & Butler, the story appears quite different, however.
To date, four staff have been hired on JobBridge three of whom are still with the business.
Another state-funded support the company has used to its benefit over the past 13 years is Enterprise Ireland (EI).
Enterprise Ireland is very supportive with courses, and especially their mentor programme. I love EI, Ms Byrne Learat says unequivocally.
Its a similarly positive story when it comes to the countrys overall business environment which she describes as very supportive.
A lot, then appears, to be in Adams & Butlers favour.
As if to illustrate the varied array of issues SMEs in Ireland have to deal with, however, Ms Byrne turns to taxis or more accurately, taxi exams.
It is impossible for us to get driver guides.
Even though they are basically just chauffeurs, they have to do a local taxi-drivers test which means they must know the price for luggage, know intimately local housing estates that they will never use in their career.
There needs to be a separate test and course to be a driver guide. All these guys have already done a professional guiding course, but it breaks their hearts to study for a taxi exam when they will never need to know what they are learning.
Its an issue thats unlikely to have come across Mary Mitchell OConnors desk before, but for Adams & Butler its their most pressing concern.
STARTING a business is a balancing act at the best of times with a lot of plates to keep spinning .
One of the biggest challenges for any young business is ensuring its growth is strong enough to take advantage of available opportunities while all the time ensuring its not overstretching itself.
Its an issue thats been at the forefront of Theya Healthcare founder and chief executive Ciara Donlons mind.
She feels the Government could help ease the financial burden of taking on additional workers.
A concern is managing staff costs as the business grows. The cost of increasing headcount in a small business is significant and these costs need to be carefully balanced with anticipated revenues.
[The Government] could look at making it easier for startup companies to employ people, either through tax breaks or subsidies.
Like every other startup, cashflow and funding are among the biggest concerns the healthcare company, which specialises in underwear designed for women who have undergone breast cancer surgery, radiotherapy treatment or cosmetic surgery.
The UKs decision to leave the EU has only added to the list of concerns Ms Donlon and Theyas six staff members now have to contend with.
Since we are now moving into international markets, we need to manage our currency exposure to currency fluctuations. The UK is one of our key markets and as yet we dont know what the full impact of Brexit will be, she says.
Asked to evaluate the state of the business environment as a whole, however, and Ms Donlon has a largely positive story to tell.
University College Dublin (UCD) and its startup incubator NovaUCD and Enterprise Ireland come in for particular praise for its role in helping the company to date.
As an Irish startup we had significant support from both UCD and NovaUCD. UCD helped us get our clinical study off the ground and Nova was very enthusiastic to include Theya Healthcare in their business support programme.
Enterprise Ireland have been fundamental in the growth of the business. In 2012, at the idea stage, we won one of the first Female Feasibility Study grants which enabled us to do our market research. Then in spring 2014, we pitched for a competitive start fund and were awarded funds of 50,000 in order to grow the business. In October of the same year, Theya Healthcare became a high potential start up (HPSU) client of Enterprise Ireland which enabled us to access further funding support.
As a HPSU client we have access to support from 33 offices globally and have been allocated a development advisor to guide us as we expand into international market.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Nisha Biswal met with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and other high-ranking officials to reaffirm U.S. support for Bangladeshs stand against violent extremism.
She also held meetings with the diplomatic community and business leaders, who are concerned but committed to stand with Bangladesh.
She visited Gulshan Holey Artisan Bakery to pay respects to the victims of July 1 terror attack, where more than 20 people, were murdered.
Violent extremism is a global threat, the Assistant Secretary said. As we have seen too frequently, international terrorist groups can recruit and operate anywhere.
I am here, she said, to offer U.S. assistance and support for Bangladeshs own efforts against terrorism and extremism. This is an extension of our long and deep partnership based on shared values of democracy, tolerance, and inclusion, and the United States remains committed to this broad-based relationship with Bangladesh of which counter terrorism is but one part.
Sharing the concerns of Bangladeshis, said Assistant Secretary Biswal, we have taken steps to bolster the security of our staff. Our support for, cooperation with, and commitment to this country remains as robust as ever. We remain steadfast in our friendship with the Bangladeshi people.
The Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission said gardai had responded to almost 94% of requests made for documentation within the statutory time limit of 30 days in 2015, which GSOC said represented a significant improvement in compliance compared to the previous two years.
Despite such progress, GSOC also said it remained a concern that most responses came back quite close to the 30-day limit.
The average time taken to receive a response for mostly routine and mandatory documentation last year was 22 days.
It is quite a long time, considering that the majority of information requested through this system is of a standard nature, said GSOC in its latest annual report.
GSOC also expressed concern that staffing levels still needed to be improved, especially as amendments to the Garda Siochana Act 2005, which extended the time limit for making complaints as well as extending GSOCs powers of investigation, are likely to lead to an increased workload.
The commission welcomed what it described as the increasingly positive reception by gardai to observations it had made on the conduct of the force during last year.
However, it also expressed concern that in a survey of public opinion, only half of respondents expressed confidence in GSOCs ability to resolve problems.
It also revealed that it had received complaints from four Garda whistleblowers last year under protected disclosure legislation. Three of the cases were deemed to warrant further investigation.
Overall, the number of formal complaints made against gardai last year decreased by 11%, according to the annual report.
A total of 1,996 complaints against members of the force were reported to GSOC in 2015 246 fewer than the previous year which contained 4,269 allegations.
GSOC said the types of allegations were similar to other years with about one third relating to abuse of authority and one third to neglect of duty.
Some 1,102 cases contained at least one admissible allegation with 385 relating to possible criminal offences, such as assault, by gardai.
The highest number of allegations were made about gardai in the Dublin Metropolitan Region and the Garda divisions of Kilkenny-Carlow, Galway, Donegal, and Limerick. The smallest number were in Cork West and Cork North.
GSOC stressed that it was important to note that there is likely to be a higher number of complaints from larger and busier divisions.
There was also a reduction in the number of cases referred to GSOC by An Garda Siochana arising out of situations where it appeared that the conduct of a garda may have resulted in the death or serious injury to a person.
A total of 52 such incidents were reported last year down eight on 2014 figures. The cases included 15 incidents linked to fatalities.
The Garda watchdog body also launched 12 investigations in the public interest during 2015 up from four in the previous year.
Two of the latest cases were initiated by GSOC while the remainder were at the request of the minister for justice.
The budget tour operator has warned customers currently abroad on their holiday that they may be required to pay their hotel costs, even if accommodation fees were included in the price paid to the Lowcostholidays.
UK administrators Smith & Williamson has said that 27,000 customers currently in resorts and 110,000 who booked holidays through Lowcostholidays are affected.
The failure will affect many customers who have purchased flights or holidays, some of whom are on holiday in resorts and some of whom have not travelled as yet, the administrators said in a statement on Friday. Unfortunately, as regards customers who have not travelled as yet, a small number will have problems as regards their flights not having been paid for and many will have problems as regards their hotel rooms not having been paid for.
The public body responsible for licensing the travel trade in Ireland also administers a bonding scheme to cover consumers in the event of a travel agent going bust.
The Commission for Aviation Regulation has advised any Irish customer who booked their holiday through Lowcostholidays Spanish subsidiary will be able to claim their costs back.
Irish customers who booked with Lowcostholidays Spain should note that the company is licenced by and bonded with the commission and that details of how to claim, and who should claim, against the bond will be posted early next week, it advised.
Andrew Byrne, from Carlow, is one such Lowcostholiday customer who has been hit by the company going bust.
Mr Byrne and two friends are to fly to Tenerife this week, but have discovered that the hotel they had paid Lowcostholidays for has not been paid in turn by the operator.
Mr Byrne said they decided to go ahead with the holiday, and will have to pay 420 to the hotel and then try to look to claim money back at a later date.
We were in panic mode yesterday morning when we came to realise we would have to pay the hotel again.
We didnt have much of an idea if we could get the money back, he said.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sciences Po, Paris School of International Affairs, said that many recruits were born again when they enter Islamic State (IS).
He told the Irish Examiner this was not a slow process of radicalisation, but a brutal shock.
This comes as French prime minister Manuel Valls said that Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhel was radicalised very quickly.
Friends and relatives said the 31-year old was not religious and, at least until recently, drank alcohol, smoke marijuana, and ate pork.
IS claimed the attack on Saturday and asserted that Bouhel, a father of three, was one of the soldiers of Islamic State.
The Nice killer is only one among many with a record of petty crime and a negligible level of [religious] observance, said Prof Filiu, author of From Deep State to Islamic State.
While entering ISIS, the recruits are literally born again, with the symbolic change of their names.
Notes saying A good journey to all the angels and All our condolences left on the Promenade des Anglais. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
This is a brutal shock and not a slow process of radicalisation, a word that I find misleading since it nurtures the illusion that such process could be detected, stopped and eventually reversed.
He said France is host to the largest Muslim community in Europe.
This is a reality that ISIS cannot accept and will fight to the end, as the targeting of its terror attacks in France has proven, he said.
But the jihadi plan to stir sectarian violence in France has so far failed, even though tensions run high and a populist discourse is more and more vocal.
He said the immense majority of terrorist tip-offs come from the Muslim community and that, in Nice, imams preaching against ISIS have been threatened by jihadi sympathisers.
Meanwhile, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe defended the use of Shannon Airport by US troops after TD Clare Daly said it made Ireland a terrorism target.
Local councillors and businesses want the court complex to remain in the heart of the town. The early 19th-century building high over Ashe St has an imposing facade, but few facilities.
The listed building has just two court rooms for a busy civil, criminal, and family law schedule of district and circuit sittings and coroners inquests.
In a reply to a Dail question by Michael Healy-Rae, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said the Courts Service had stated improved facilities were needed, but would not be possible to provide within the current site.
Instead, the Courts Service proposes to construct a new courthouse on an alternative site, and a State- owned property was being looked at, Ms Fitzgerald said.
Instead of a new build at the Ballymullen army barracks, once the headquarters of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, lawyers are putting forward plans for an expanded complex in Ashe St to incorporate a yard belonging to An Post as well as the use of a listed building opposite.
The President of the Kerry Law society, Tralee solicitor Pat Mann, has said they had voiced in the strongest way their concerns about the move to Ballymullen.
Mr Mann and John Galvin, chairman of the Kerry Law Society, last week met with the president of the Circuit Court, Mr Justice Raymond Groarke.
Mr Justice Groarke was told an underused An Post yard at the rear, between Ashe St and Edward St, could be used to expand the current court building. The vacant Kerry Protestant Hall, a listed building directly opposite the court house, might be considered for facilities. The proposal was feasible and would preserve the heart of Tralee, the solicitors said.
Kerry is one of just five courthouses which remain to be upgraded, according to the Courts Service.
Currently it has no wheelchair access, unless by prior appointment, and no press or office facilities.
At the first sitting this year, Judge James OConnor hit out at the noise and filth of Tralee courthouse on district court days.
Paul Curran McGuirk, aged 23, was knifed at Seagull House flats in lower Crumlin at 4pm on Saturday.
It is thought the stabbing took place in the stairwell of the flats and that the victim sought assistance in a nearby flat, before collapsing.
Detectives at Sundrive Road Garda Station arrested two 18-year-olds, a male and a female, on Saturday night.
They were detained under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984 and were due to be either released or charged last night.
Seagull house, on Rutland Avenue and beside Crumlin Road, is located at a busy intersection and adjacent to Dolphins Barn Bridge and right beside a Dublin Fire Brigade station.
Mr Curran was taken to St Jamess Hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
The crime scene was sealed off pending a technical examination and gardai began conducting door-to-door inquiries.
Mr Curran, from Captains Road in Crumlin, was a brother of David Curran, who is serving a life sentence for the double murder of two Polish men.
In a case that shocked the country, David Curran used a screwdriver to fatally stab Pawel Kalite, 28, and Marius Szwaijokos, 27, in the head outside their home on Benbulbin Road in neighbouring Drimnagh.
Curran, who lived on Lissadel Green in Drimnagh, was aged just 17 at the time.
There was an arson attack on the family home on Captains Road in September 2014, in which the mother, Paul Curran, and three other teenage siblings, managed to escape.
The father, Michael McGuirk, is serving a 10-year sentence for a tiger kidnapping in October 2009.
Gardai appealed to people who could assist them to contact Sundrive Road Garda Station on 01-666 6600, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
Opening at Cork Opera House this week, a ground-breaking new show that, it is claimed, will redefine Irish dance for the next generation.
An original production by the theatre, choreographed and created by Alan Kenefick and directed and co-created by director Wayne Jordan, ProdiJIG: The Revolution breaks all of the rules of what youre supposed to see, hear and feel.
Forget the innumerable spin-offs of Riverdance, this feels, sounds and looks very different. Modern, streetwise, sexy, the revolution has a harder edge and allows for much more expression among the individual dancers.
What they wear is breaking with tradition too, says costume designer Katie Crowley.
Like the show, theres a modern, individualist approach that takes elements from street culture and a society thats standing up for itself. Expressive, free and edgy with something to fight for.
Led by Cork born world champion Irish dancer Alan Kenefick, ProdiJIG rose to international fame when it won Skys Got To Dance in 2012.
Now ProdiJIG: The Revolution sees Alan combine his incredible individual talent with a team of the best modern Irish dancers in the world, and music to match. This will genuinely be nothing like youve ever seen before.
The big step of producing summer shows in what had always been a closedown season is also a break with tradition, but one that has worked out very well for Cork Opera House, with sell-out seasons since they first began.
We have a mandate for summer opening. It was an in-house decision and one that is revisited by the board and executive team on an annual basis, says Opera House executive director, Eibhlin Gleeson.
Producing these shows allows us to programme for up to 4 weeks at a time that is traditionally quiet for theatre in Cork. We are a cultural institution in our own right, we build our own work and we take that very seriously.
In previous years weve gone with already-known shows (Sound of Music, Grease, Singin in the Rain), but when we find a good artist like Alan Kenefick, and the opportunity to build from the very beginning, then we seize the opportunity. This is good for all of Cork, she points out, not just the theatre.
People come to the city, they may stay overnight, they dine in restaurants, they go shopping, they use the car parking the spin off is excellent and everybody benefits.
Alan Kenefick, twitching with nervous energy, takes a reluctant break from driving his team hard. Even when hes sitting down, he cant relax and words flow as swiftly as his steps do onstage.
Its not another Irish dance show. I felt that that type of show is lacking. The absolutely original brief Riverdance sequence in Eurovision was incredible it had that totally new feel about it that swept everyone away. And then came the full length show and all the spin-offs and somehow that original brilliant inspiration became lost in the huge juggernaut and all the polish and exactitude and set formats performed over and over again.
World champion Irish dancer, Alan Kenefick, at rehearsals of Prodijig. Picture: Richard Mills
"Now were breaking away, this is a revolution, the idea that this is what Irish dance can be, can become. Get rid of all the preconceptions, the troupe following exactly the same rules, arms held stiffly by the sides, that sort of thing. You dont see that in a playground, do you? Or not on the singing stage Madonna can do what she likes, develops different approach, and everyone loves it. Irish dance should do the same thing and thats where ProdiJIG: The Revolution is going.
"Were artists and we show emotion, love, try to create an environment where everybody is completely honest. There are moments of pure joy, of absolute agony and grief, and hilarious moments too, when we take the mick out of traditional forms, but always in a positive way, showing what they can become.
So to whom does he think the show will mainly appeal?
"Look, I have a granny here in Cork, a mother, dozens of friends who all know their Irish dancing. I keep every one of them in mind when creating the movements and I know they will all love it.
Kenefick knows exactly what hes talking about, having taken the lead in Riverdance for several years.
Its time to move forward and take the audience with us, just as the original Eurovision sequence did all those years ago.
Eibhlin Gleeson is very excited about the way the show is developing and most of all because it is being created right there on Leeside.
We now have a reputation for building our own big productions and I have a feeling that Prodijig will go on from here, take the Opera House and Cork and Ireland out into the wider world. Its quite something to be part of that and wonder where it will go. Our two biggest events in the year now are the Christmas pantomime and the summer show, both with the same budget, and both doing very well for us on that.
Filling the seats is of course, as always, a priority. In fact the Opera House, through good planning of its programme throughout the calendar, with a mix of concerts, comedy, theatre, opera, and pop, has managed to turn things around over the past few years and actually come into the black.
You wont see that too often in todays theatrical world.
Social media has played a big part too in the pre-planning of ProdiJIG right from the start last autumn, with cleverly-made videos going viral worldwide on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Yes, that was a conscious decision, confirms Gleeson. These are unbeatable for spreading the message out there and we took care to use the very best, award-winning videographers. They were expensive but gosh they were worth it. Have a look at the video trailers here, in case you havent seen them already.
Between the fiery creative feet of choreographer/dancer Kenefick and the cool planning head of Eibhlin Gleeson comes the experienced directorial hand of Wayne Jordan. Are there many rehearsal explosions? No, our ideas dont clash he explains what he wants to do in a particular sequence, and I can see that it would be really effective if staged in this way that sort of thing.
What Jordan really enjoys is the breaking with old tradition. Normally there is an absolute gender divide where they only come together for specific routines. Rather like those old-fashioned Irish dance halls in fact, where girls stood at one side and boys the other. You wont find that in ProdiJIG. Nor is the music quite as traditional not with a band like Moxie, composer Peter Power, and musical director John OBrien, all known for their wildly creative ideas. Its going to be a very different feast for the senses. Not so much of the formal dinnertable, more of a happy al fresco musical picnic!
When presented with the choice between Oasis or Blur, in the mid-90s, I chose the more colourful path paved by Girl Power, the good time had by all whether you wanted it or not.
On your TV, radio, on your deodorant can, you couldnt fart in the 90s without covering the stench up with your Spice Girl air-freshener, and I was front and centre with my snout out for a sniff.
This day 20 years ago, the Spice Girls charted the first of nine number one singles. But, despite becoming a global phenomena, with record sales in excess of 100m and in spite of being cited as an influence by artists both sides of the Atlantic my admission of fandom is still greeted by a guffaw measuring 7.5 on the rectum scale, as the musically snide inject their heads up their own asses.
Some treat my insatiable taste for the group as if its dirt Ive trampled onto the good carpet of their sensibilities, due to their manufactured roots, their good (but not great) vocals or their supposedly questionable feminism.
But hankering on about all this rather misses the point. They were great fun, made great pop and were a breath of fresh air that flipped the blinds up on the basement-flat squalor that Britpop had become.
After all, Liam Gallagher aint no Luciano Pavarotti
The Spice Girls were manufactured only in so much as they met through the classifieds. A year after playing monster to their original managements Dr Frankenstein, it became apparent they werent willing to fit the mould before them.
So they did a bunk, stealing the master recordings of their work and hightailing it to Sheffield for a recording session with Take That hit-maker Elliot Kennedy.
They sweet-talked their way into getting him to stay the pace with them until they could pay him, living out of their car and snagging a management deal with Simon Fuller, by bursting into his offices and performing Wannabe on a boom box in his board room.
As beginnings go, they grafted as hard as anyone of the guitar bands who mock their so-called mass production, while their antics ambushing presenters who refused to play their debut single Wannabe (cause girlbands arent in) or lobbing the gob on Prince Charles, were far more original and anarchic than the coke-snorting and fist-flinging machismo of the Gallaghers or the mockney antics of Damon and co.
They crossed class divides and tooted their noses to convention in scenarios where women, particularly working-class women, were supposed to show deference.
So their message of female empowerment may not have been Germaine Greer approved. Whose is? It was a feminism that spoke directly to teenagers in a way The Female Eunuch never could.
The albums content emerged from the girls own banter, a feminist outlook gleamed from life experience, not academic decree. When Mel C sings If you want my future, forget my past, she spoke of how men are trained to see a woman as damaged goods based on past experience. (They less than politely suggested that boys cop on or get left behind).
Say Youll Be There espoused the importance of friendship over love in a sexual companion, a nerts to that approach to the type of Hallmark halitosis men sprouted to get women into bed, while 2 Become 1 siphoned a safe sex message into a ballad in a world where Aids had just stopped being a death sentence.
All over Spice are songs that drip with sexual autonomy. Songs like Naked where past encounters help the protagonist see through the snake-oil slither of a possible paramour; Last Time Lover where they delight in nicking some lads cherry, and If U Cant Dance about kicking him to the curb when his moves fail to match his mode, all changed the hymn sheet young women were supposed to sing off.
Even the Pepsi single Step to Me, couldnt be more relevant in an age where women are still treated like chattel on the internet.
Spice was a Petri dish from which many of todays most vocal feminists bloomed.
Not that I cared a fig about feminism at the time. For me, these songs were a triumph of self- expression. They didnt dress or speak in one way or behave in the manner expected of them.
For a gay starting life in an all boys school trapped in a closet with rusting hinges, this was the 10ccs of punk I needed to let the haters be damned.
They didnt care when some greasy haired Muppet witlessly mocked them and neither would I.
True, they released more advertisements than they did singles. Yes, their mantra Girl Power became a marketing ploy. But they were a true pop democracy, with no womans vocals being elevated above the rest a la Beyonce, JT or god forbid, Ronan Keating. They co-wrote every song, on every album, (a fact that sends eyes rolling to the back of more cynical heads quicker than contaminated yolks). But unlike their cooler girl band rivals, All Saints, they were never sued for credit by their collaborators, nor did they release any dodgy covers while claiming to be a real band.
Giving good copy in a world where wishing your rival had Aids was condoned, they didnt give a toss what people thought, a spirit sadly lost in a pop culture whose spark has been micromanaged out of it.
The domestic appliance market is always evolving and awash with choice, but how much of it adds up to good looks, saved time and financial efficiency?
Here is whats out there in new rangy cordless vacuums, low water intake machines and white goods so beautiful and clever, you will want to steer visitors straight to the kitchen.
Cordless- filling a vacuum
Addressing the noise level of vacuum cleaners, as well as the standard tripping point of the great domestic disrupter, cordless vacuums lighten up the profile, weight and hazards of conventional cleaning.
Flying free, while supported by lithium batteries, theres a trade off between power and running time, a nuisance that relegated cordless brands to wall hung crumb-collectors through the noughties.
Today manufacturers have not only breezed past one hour at a single charge, but theres good news too for a multi-level house of 1200sq ft or more.
The Athlet cordless from Bosch, new for 2016, offers the performance of a 2400w lead-locked machine and 75 minutes or cleaning per charge.
This is something of a blow-hard claim as they admit the real figure is closer to 60 minutes on Power 1 top- sucking mode.
An in-house customer rating gave the machine 4.7 out of five stars, highlighting its power, cleaning talents and agility.
However, as with all machines not featuring cyclonic technology, the drop-off in real pull is inevitable without keeping the collection bin clean.
The 79db sound performance is a purr (smaller motor, smaller voltage and most cordless are whisper quiet) and you can charge in any socket wherever you drop the machine, upstairs or down.
199 on sale at Harvey Norman (229, off sale).
James Dyson always returns to his primary feature consistent suction power through radial cyclones, but the engineering of his machines and the detail committed to dirt collection is equally impressive.
Two of the latest cordless Dysons, the DC59 and DC44 Slim are super light from 2.3kg (Mieles latest Dynamic U1 Cat&Dog Powerline described as an upright tank weighs 10kg).
With the balance of the machine suspended in your fist, the aluminium pipes and head can be lifted overhead in one hand.
We love the hygienic, drop down empty function, the quick hand-held conversion, and the re-designed brush head, but the docking station may annoy those dealing with one-room living and precious wall space. From 289.98.
The running time, however, seems mean at 20 minutes even with six of those devoted to a boost function.
There are 8 Dyson cord free machines, priced to a breathtaking 669.98. www.dyson.ie
Whats up in laundry?
The present shelving of water charges does not mean low water consumption in dishwashers and washing machines can be smugly dismissed.
Less water means less water to heat, and therefore will save you money.
However, I was alarmed to hear from my appliance repair genius that low water and low temperatures can leave machines smelly and clothes covered in cheery bacteria without the occasional 60 blast.
Read real, long term performance reviews for your potential machine, as streaks of skin prickling powder and perceptible stickiness are reported for even high-end brands.
Not good for those with skin allergies.
Base your choice on half load performance, not the stats on a full machine the latest Which report on low water washers has a Dont Buy list full of machine using less than 9.8l per kilo of laundry.
The latest must have in high end machines is an add as you wash facility big enough to take a forgotten jumper or pair of jeans something previously only enjoyed in top-loaders.
The EcoBubble range from Samsung features AddWash, a hatch in the porthole, starting at 770 for a white A+++ 8kg machine and rising to 1,800 for a 12kg model.
These machines should include child locks to prevent naughty experiments.
That extra pair of jeans, that sports kit? Stuff them in even after the cycle has started with a Samsung AddWash A+++ washing machine. 770-1,800, suppliers nationwide.
The energy efficiency of small loads is always an issue add a fast wash and you can double your run cost per kilo.
Miele have just introduced PowerWash 2.0 with spin/spray and steam technology to cut down heating energy by 40% for that one hour partial load.
These machines also include Mieles new CapDosing capsule facility to treat certain materials with extra care.
These machines will appear in the coming month in the 1,200 plus division.
Do looks matter?
Shaking off the all white tombstone face, large appliances have never looked so good.
If your machines (washer/dryer/dishwasher) are staged in your kitchen, then find something you can stand to live with.
If you dont want to build the cabinet around the piece and integrate, then take a look at the blue/black glass, super-sized portholes of some washing machines.
These cabochons not only look rather fascinating, they are easier to load and unload and hide the twisted dirty contents too great if you dont have a place off the kitchen to put your laundry machines away.
White, brushed stainless steel or black the colour of your kitchen or utility room will dictate how present your choice of appliances will be, but graphite for example could add 2-300 to the base price, with no change of features.
Gorenje do an orange 8kg washer for 580 for the colour determined find them on appliancesdelivered.ie, and the Electrolux EN3487A0H, is one of the few scarlet reds available in a fridge freezer, 979. Harvey Norman.
Stay with one brand for uniformity in dials and door fronts.
Slant fronts are very now in dryers and washing machines, but aesthetics must tally with ease of use, running costs and value for your budget.
Over-sized fridge-freezers fabulous, but its the layout of those interior cubic litres that should count first and foremost.
Some advances fall into extra bells and whistles not belt and braces upgrades.
Neffs Sparkle model dishwasher costs from 649 at various outlets.
Getting the buttons off the front face of a dishwasher, less fussy, but not everyone wants to plumb their instruction into the often grubby edge of a door.
Tired of cranking open the door to release steam before it condenses on the dishes?
Look for bump-open automation or try Whirlpools 6th Sense, 3D-AirFlow system.
This machine drains the steam and the latest models virtually scrape the dishes with PowerWash, delivering a clean and completely dry load (even plastic) in as little was one hour.
ADP900/IX, 699. Harvey Norman.
NOISE KNOW-HOW
The decibel (dB) reading for appliances is posted on their details and on the energy label, but expectations vary.
Understand whats really quiet in performance before you buy and consider where the machine is placed in terms of potential nuisance noise.
Surrounding materials in the floor and furnishings will soak up resonating and airborne noise.
* A fridge runs at a perceptible hum in the low 40dBs relative peace (conversation is about 60dB) but this does not take into account the occasional cracking noise of the linear compressors frost-free action.
Even softly, the compressor and motor are running 60% to 80% of the time. Keep cooling pieces away from relaxation areas.
* Vacuum noise is influenced by the size of the motor and the assemblage of the machine. In general, cylinders are quieter as the motor is on the floor which soaks noise and vibration.
A bagged, cylinder with a rating of 70dB or less is quiet enough to listen to the radio while you work, or go for remote quiet with a battery charged robotic cleaner from iRobot, Roomba, Dyson or Neato.
* A washing machine under 50dB is at a hush while running with the exception of raised dB and inevitable thrumming frequency heard at the height of the spin cycle.
For example a machine like the Hotpoint BHWM1292 (499) shows a db of 42db, which rises to still respectable 65dB during spin.
A heavier quality cabinet weighted to the floor, level and not touching wall surfaces with good drum balance is more likely to offer a low db number.
* The pulse of a modern dishwasher is almost inaudible between 40dB 50dB, but again, the better the build quality and insulation to the carcass, the better the number.
AEG Proclean machines offer an Extra Silent program of a whispering 37dB, ideal if your machine is near your dining table or you have to run it at night.
A red beam of light under the machine signals when its on. Easier to get and cheaper, try Beko for 48-49dB choices.
350 plus machines are more likely to settle below 50dB.
BLEEPING NUISANCE
Domestic machines, including dishwashers, dryers and most especially clothes washers, come wrapped up with factory settings.
Plumbed in and brought to life, they default to economy washes, 40 temperatures and the tinny, nerve poking assurance of a task completed with an audible alarm.
My Bosch Exxcel 8 never gave up, and we organised evening loads around some rumpled, cursing family member stumping out of bed to still that staccato cry for validation in a three beat MEEP-MEEP-MEEP.
Now, Im sorry for the more sentient readers out there with a modicum of practical good sense, but having recently cranked my brain to new life, I have to share this pearl.
That blasted sound is just a setting and it can be turned off.
I hear cries of joy ringing down from the Four Faced Liar, bouncing off the Opera House and skipping out across the rolling rock-prickled tapestry of our ancient land.
What? It goes OFF? The MEEP can be stilled?
The vigil is at an end?
Why yes, and all you have to do is tap the make of your machine in letters and numbers into the fabulous box of light using, say, a search engine like Google.
Ask that pressing question- how do I turn off the audible alarm in my washer/dishwasher/dryer/microwave...... FFS.
Generally the instruction will be something ludicrous on reading like turning the wash dial to the right three times while holding down the emergency door release and singing New York, New York.
Dont question the nerd in Berlin who figured it out, (or damn the one who created it in the first place), or the branded PDF explaining the many mysteries of the dratted object just do it.
Youll be feted as the hero of the household for months to come.
Sleep tight.
The new Death Star expansion for Star Wars Battlefront will be released in September, and will include everyones favourite Wookie, Chewbacca, as a new playable hero. Joining Chewbacca is Bossk, a bounty hunter who appears in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
EA released a trailer for the upcoming expansion at the Star Wars Celebration, which took place in London over the weekend.
It's a smaller and neater console that packs in the same great power and actually a little more, bringing 4K visuals into the mix. This will be the first home console to offer 4K blu-ray playback right out of the box, and that's quite an impressive thing.
Here's the latest snazzy trailer.
We've just heard that the console will be out on the 2nd of August in 'selected markets.' At the moment we're assuming Ireland is included in that opening window, and pricing is expected to be around 400 for the initial 2 terabyte option.
It's a good deal if you haven't jumped on board the Xbox One wagon yet, and you'll get to see some games in high dyanamic range- provided you have the TV for it. August 2nd, 2016.
Pemex workers at Monterrey, in northern Mexico. AFP
More information Pemex recurre a la deuda para evitar su asfixia
Amid falling output, continuing losses and mounting debt, Pemex, Mexicos state-owned oil company, has once again had to borrow money to remain operating. On Friday, it announced it had raised 80 billion yen ($771 million) on a 10-year loan from the Japanese capital market, pushing the companys long-term debt to $65 billion, equivalent to almost half its total liabilities.
Since Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto took office in December 2012, promising to break the state monopoly in oil and gas exploration and production in a bid to accelerate Mexicos economic growth, Pemexs problems have worsened, exacerbated by falling oil prices, swelling its losses in 2015 to $40 billion.
Pemex is the seventh-largest petroleum company in the world, but since 2004 its profits have dropped by 30%. But there has been no room for modernization in the state-owned oil firm, mainly because almost two-thirds of its revenue goes directly into the national treasury.
Pemex is fast running out of places to borrow money, while reducing its outgoings through mass redundancies would be political suicide for the government
Because of the current state of affairs in Pemex, the countrys major political parties agree that intervention in Pemex is not only necessary but urgently needed. The problem centers on how to go about it.
Tenders to open the energy sector that had been expected to draw billions of dollars in investment coincided with the global oil price crash. The drop in oil revenue has hit state coffers hard, falling from around 50% of state income to 20% in recent months.
In response, the government has sacked the companys director general, replacing him with a financier experienced in reviving ailing businesses. At the same time, some $5.5 billion worth of cuts have been imposed on Pemex.
Pemexs new strategy has focused on attracting private investment, which have bid for concessions at hundreds of oil fields across the nation.
Mexicos strong dependence on crude has also made officials careless in they way they invested money for new energy exploration projects. More than 90% of Pemexs investment is spent on maintaining current oil fields, with little money spent on exploring new wells.
Pemexs woes are matched by the Mexican economy, which this year is once again likely to fall, registering growth for 2016 of around 2%.
Pemexs debt has doubled under Pena Nieto. Production is falling, revenue is falling, and there are no solutions in sight. The time for accounting games is over and what is needed now is real progress, says David Shields, a US academic and expert on Mexicos oil industry.
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Unable to generate revenue, Pemex has decided to deepen its debt, a decision that has troubled the international markets and rating agencies. Borrowing provides short-term relief, they warn, but it also increases fiscal pressure. Falling output and lower oil prices reduce expectations of generating cash, which in turn reduces the companys ability to invest in exploration and production: a vicious circle that is hard to break.
Pemex has few options. It is fast running out of places to borrow money, while reducing its outgoings through mass redundancies would be political suicide for the government: the company employs some 150,000 people, with a further 100,000 former employees on its payroll.
Pemex faces one of the most difficult situations in its history, but there is no question of it being allowed to go bankrupt, despite the increasing burden it represents to the state. That said, if the government cannot turn its fortunes round, Pemex could end up dragging the Mexican economy down with it.
English version by Nick Lyne.
CORRUPT, egomaniacal, and repressive, there is not much to recommend Turkish President Tayyip Erdogans rule save the inescapable fact that he is the democratically-elected head of state. And that he is a politician who shines brightest in a fight.
Erdogan is not going to give up. He has millions of supporters who will give their lives for him. He has the support of all the opposition parties. And, because hes won three elections, he is in the right.
On Friday night, the streets of Istanbul were filled with people. Mosques in Turkey had been calling the people into the street. Erdogan was giving the same message on national television through a FaceTime linkup. One man later shouts back at the television screen, I am a Kurd from Bingol and I will die [for you]. Early on Saturday morning, Erdogan again appears on television, now surrounded by supporters at Istanbul airport. There are continued reports of jets buzzing over Ankara and Istanbul.
Turkeys military has long felt a sense of ownership of the country. Its first leaders, Kemal Ataturk and ?Ismet ?Inonu, were former generals. After democratic elections in 1950, Turkey experienced three military coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980. Each was bloodier and more repressive than the last.
In 1997, the military staged what has been called a post-modern coup, and sent the then prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, packing with a memo. There was nothing post-modern about the coup attempt that shook Turkey on Friday night. Military units were in the streets, main arteries were shut down.
The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, a centre-right party with roots in political Islam, has dominated Turkish politics since 2002. It only came to power by facing off with the military.
In 2007, generals attempted to repeat their 1997 success with a midnight memorandum, which condemned the candidacy of AKP politician Abdullah Gul, a close ally of Erdogan, as the next president of the republic.
Erdogan, however, faced the generals down, and Gul took up his position in the presidential palace until Erdogan was elected to the post seven years later.
Erdogan quickly reconfigured the largely ceremonial post into a powerful job. At one point, the AKP leadership played an important role and could challenge Erdogan on policy issues. No longer. Ministers serve at the presidents pleasure. Policy is determined in a new and grandiose presidential palace. Erdogan has made clear that his ambition is to change the constitution to create a presidential system that would render into law what is already political reality.
For years, Erdogan has waged war against the military: Hundreds of officers were targeted under trumped-up charges, others were forced into retirement. Meanwhile, the police and intelligence services were strengthened to act as a counterweight to the military.
In the past two years, however, it seemed that Erdogan and the military had come to terms. Certainly, they united in waging their no-holds-barred war on the resurgent Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds. It has leveled whole neighbourhoods, with no end in sight.
It was clear, however, that many officers were unhappy with Erdogan. They were resentful of the abuse their comrades had faced in the show trials. Many believed that the violence of the conflict with the PKK was a result, in part, of the AKPs earlier negotiations with the group.
At some military funerals, officers often specifically blamed Erdogan for the soldiers deaths. They reasonably viewed the rise of jihadi violence in Turkey as the cost of the AKPs tolerance of jihadi groups in the Syrian civil war. Like many secularists, they feared a creeping dismantling of Turkeys secularism.
The press has largely been cowed; judicial independence mostly broken. Perhaps some in the military believed this was their last chance to halt Erdogans consolidation of power.
A successful coup would likely be a disaster. The result could be a civil war.
The coup apparently isnt entirely over yet. But it seems already broken. Major generals have condemned it and many soldiers have returned to their barracks. If a successful coup would have led to chaos, a failed coup would likely result in even greater repression and centralisation of power.
Friday nights events will likely solidify Erdogans worst tendencies. Moreover, by apparently facing down the coup, Erdogan has effectively burnished his own brand as a man of the people.
On social media, conspiracy theories suggest that the coup was staged theatre, orchestrated so that Erdogan could gain more support and take greater control. This seems nonsense. But the essential point is correct: If Erdogan has prevailed, he has been made far stronger.
The horrifying truck attack in Nice that killed at least 84 people is the 10th strike in the country since the beginning of 2015. The French government is now considering a complete overhaul of its intelligence agencies to address this persistent threat.
A French parliamentary commission released a report last week that recommended the government fuse all its security services into one large national anti-terrorism agency.
Such an approach would mirror Americas National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a bureaucracy created in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The objective was to break down barriers within the US government, and pull together all agencies and departments related to terrorism issues.
But Paris should try to improve on the USs experiences? It certainly needs to avoid making the same mistakes.
Frances law enforcement and intelligence communities are similar to Washingtons in that they have their own cultural differences, opaque turf wars, resource constraints and labour problems. None of these issues, as Americans realised, would likely be resolved overnight by legislation.
A boy lights a candle placed where bodies fell on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
More important, standing up and successfully deploying an organisation like the National Counterterrorism Center requires each other law enforcement and intelligence division to cede power, share intelligence and provide personnel.
Are the French going to decide that the attacks in 2015 and this year are such a grave threat to national security that leaders and employees will accept a total change in the way they have been doing business for decades?
Because severe structural agony will most certainly occur. NCTC, under the overarching control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was viewed with great suspicion and scepticism when it was created in 2004. Numerous problems have been resolved since then, but many critics still view the agency as a shrunken head atop a lumbering body.
Why? Because even now, real decision-making power still remains within the individual intelligence and law-enforcement organisations, whether that means the US Department of Defense, the CIA, the FBI, or some other agency or department.
People are consoled by medic outside Hopital Pasteur in Nice, as nearly 20 people injured during the Bastille Day lorry attack remain in hospital in a life-threatening condition. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
The counterterrorism centre cant compete because it doesnt really control any of the relevant pieces. Many of its personnel are actually employees loaned from various other agencies. It cant even bring a knife to a bureaucratic gunfight because it doesnt own most of its own cutlery.
Of course, the counterterrorism centre does possess some strengths because it can serve as the hub for sharing counterterrorism intelligence across the entire government. It also helps break down walls among the intelligence services.
But it remains essentially a co-ordinating body. As Jean-Charles Brisard, director of the French Centre for the Analysis of Terrorism recently told The Washington Post: We have reached in France a point where we have more coordinating bodies than we have intelligence services.
In any case, its unclear if a French iteration of the counterterrorism centre could have done much to stop the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015, or the attack on the Bataclan concert hall and various cafes in Paris on November 13, 2015. Some of the killers were known to authorities, others not.
Notes saying A good journey to all the angels and All our condolences left on the Promenade des Anglais. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
French intelligence had been monitoring one of the Charlie Hebdo killers, Said Kouachi, for example, but had stopped because he did not seem to be a threat at the time and there were other, more urgent suspects.
Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman and four civilians in a kosher supermarket that same day, had been in and out of prison. But, again, the police didnt consider him a top priority.
In addition, many gunmen in the November strike were Belgian citizens. So French intelligence would have had to rely on Brussels for information and assistance. The ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was later killed during a police shootout in a Parisian suburb. How would a central French agency have stopped them?
Instead of creating a new bureaucracy, Paris might be better to examine other approaches when reforming its intelligence communities so they can better grapple with terrorism at home and abroad.
One relatively easy step, for example, would be to pass legislation that broadens punishments for those involved, even tangentially, with terrorist cells operating in France. A terrorism charge in the US that could mean a 25-year prison sentence currently results in only three years behind bars in France.
Another example would be to commit more resources to monitoring radicals in Frances prisons. France is also experimenting with efforts to weaken ties between the jihadists and the persuadables within the penal system.
Yet its unclear if that would have the desired permanent effects. An estimated 1,200 French citizens have travelled to Syria, presumably to fight for Islamic State. Hundreds have now returned. Others within France could have self-radicalised. As is evident, it does not take many people to create havoc that can unsettle an entire nation. Additional legislation wont be enough to prevent the next domestic attack.
Rather, hiring and retaining competent and effective personnel, building institutional capacity, opening up resources and providing real leadership can all help keep France safe. More funding is needed to achieve all this.
In addition, law enforcement and intelligence personnel, from senior to junior ranks, should rotate through other divisions so that all would be better informed about the overall counterterrorism effort.
One long-term effect of 9/11 is that the US intelligence community has indeed grown culturally closer. Individual agencies now better understand each others needs.
Rotating individuals throughout the French system might go a long way to foster trust within the system. It would help minimise intelligence silos and cultural roadblocks that might hamper Frances ability to stop the next attack.
France should also take the lead in developing a continent-wide database of all European citizens who have gone to Syria to fight for Islamic State or al-Qaeda. The US maintains one at NCTC, but France should orchestrate one for Europe as well. This could help build co-operation across Europe, as other countries feed into the database.
Paris should make this a high diplomatic priority in the EU. It should also strive to work with nations such as Turkey and Russia, largely because its in Frances self-interest to do so.
Thwarting Islamic States efforts across the continent is a European problem, not just a French one. Many nations have returning fighters at this point, so they would be willing to work together. And with the European-wide database, Paris wouldnt have to rely on Washington for basic information.
People reflect upon the horrific attack in Nice as they sit in front of tributes placed where bodies fell on the Promenade des Anglais. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
Soon after 9/11, America had the resolve and wealth to strengthen its intelligence services and also create a vast new bureaucracy. The result has produced great successes, but also some wasteful, costly mistakes.
France doesnt have billions of euro to fritter away trying to figure this out over the next decade. Rather, Paris should learn from Washingtons victories and failures as it tries to fight its shadowy war against terrorism within its borders.
Aki Peritz is a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and the co-author of Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counter- terrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda.
THE al-Wahda prayer room and the al-Baraka mosque on the Rue de Suisse in Nices city centre were filling up for their early afternoon services on Saturday.
Muslim worshippers arrived, locked up their bikes, and took off their sandals and socks on green mats laid outside the entrance to Al-Baraka to protect their feet. The sound of prayer spilled out from both.
Both al-Wahda, which only has a limited space of 160sq m for its worshippers, and the next door al-Baraka Mosque, are refusing entry to non-Muslims for the prayer services.
But once prayers were over, the imam of al-Wahda, Sheikh Abdulmonam, initially hesitant to speak, gave me permission to enter the house of worship so that we could talk about the actions of Mohamed Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian that the Islamic State militant group (IS) on Saturday claimed as one their own.
After Bouhlel mowed down hundreds of locals and foreigners celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday night, killing at least 84 people, Muslim communities across France are once again coming to terms with a mass killing carried out in their religions name.
What happened on Thursday has nothing at all to do with Islam because the person who did it, even according to his outward acts, wasnt a Muslim, the 46-year-old Abdulmonam says in Arabic, speaking through a translator.
He declined to give his last name. He smoked, he didnt pray, he didnt fast, he didnt do all these things that Muslims should do. It was a horrible crime.
Nices Muslims, like Abdulmonam, are adamant that Bouhlel does not represent the community in any way; he was a deviant who should never be termed a Muslim, they say.
Guillaume Gourves, 35, a robed French Muslim convert and worshipper at the al-Baraka mosque, says that Bouhlel is going straight to hell for carrying out such a heinous act, rejecting the notion that IS represents Islam and Muslims.
They just represent themselves. Islam is salam, its peace, he says. This man apparently wasnt even doing Ramadan or the prayer. He just thinks, Oh lets kill people. Is that what is Islam? No, it is not.
Lhouasaine Khalfaoui, a 41-year-old French-Moroccan butcher at the Boucherie Atlas, a minutes walk from al-Wahda, was a neighbour of the first person killed in the attack, a 60-year-old Muslim mother of six, Fatima Charrihi. Khalfaoui points to a fly on the counter in the shop and says a true Muslim wouldnt hurt it.
One person dead is [the same as] all of the community dead in the Quran. This was not a Muslim, he says. He did not practice religion. No Ramadan, no prayer. This was an animal. This is a contradiction with Islam.
France has now suffered through three major attacks committed by radical Islamists since January 2015; the countrys Muslim community is steeling itself for a backlash.
When these things happen in France, we always become the victims because we are one of the weakest sections of society here, says Abdulmonam.
When we saw the prime minister [Manuel Valls] come out and say it was a terrorist attack, we think he did that to placate the far right so they wouldnt rise up against him, but in reality this attack has nothing to do with Islam.
The prospect of a Donald Trump-like surge for the right-wing Front National leader Marine Le Pen ahead of the French presidential elections next April is worrisome for Muslims, and such attacks are likely to further the partys cause.
I think Marine Le Pen is extreme, just like Hitler, with Muslims or with French people. It is not good, not for us, says 46-year-old Moroccan national Salmi Saed, who sells frozen chickens at the bustling Islam Viandes supermarket on the Rue dItalie, which sits in the shadow of the citys main train station, Gare de Nice-Ville.
Every Muslim will go away from France.
Saed, who witnessed the carnage on the citys corniche after Bouhlel struck and gave a German mother and her daughter a room to stay in for the night when they could not find a hotel, says that despite what the media says, the city is united, with people of different faiths continuing to live side by side in peace.
In our shop, you can look, we have Muslims, French; different people who come here, Jews, he says.
Everybody comes here. You have people with kippahs who come here and buy their things. We stay together.
Bouhlels family say the delivery driver suffered from depression, saw a psychiatrist for years and often had violent episodes. But the French government has publicly linked Bouhlel with radical Islamism. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Saturday that the Tunisian national had been radicalised very quickly. Authorities gleaned this information from the interrogation of five suspects held on Saturday in connection with the attack.
Approximately 55 residents of Nice have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight for radical Islamist groups since 2013, according to authorities, suggesting a genuine problem of radicalisation within the community. But some of Nices Muslims are frustrated that some of their fellow citizens expect the Muslim community to apologise for the actions of others.
What can we do? Every time we say this is nothing to do with us, are we going to all the time say sorry, sorry? asks Gourves. We cant say sorry about that its nothing to do with us. This is us being attacked in France. Its our country.
ITS FAIR to guess that UK prime minister Theresa Mays new environment secretary, Andrea Leadsom, is unlikely to make speeches that include the phrase as a mum, because, courtesy of the London Times, that phrase has bitten the new member of the cabinet and left teeth marks that wont fade any time soon.
Leadsom is the most prominent of a cohort which holds that motherhood (sorry, mumhood) has developed in them a range of stunning insights which allow them to return to work or seek a prime ministership, confident that nobody can touch them. Bit like those people who come back from the Camino. You wouldnt mind if they just claimed to have better calf muscles, but no. The walk has changed their lives, raised them up in spiritual terms, and endowed them with new antennae positively shivering with sensitivity.
Its not the done thing to say to a Camino convert: Look, no offence, but youre exactly the same as you were before you headed off. Meaning you were always a bore and now you just have new pictures to support that status. Or meaning you were smart and insightful before you bought the walking shoes, so whyre you now attributing your smart insights to having an overseas stroll?
Theresa May
In similar vein, its not considered acceptable to query someone who proudly claims mumship before they describe any other aspect of their function or competence. When I do career development interviews with clients and ask them to describe themselves, no man ever starts with his dadship. They may, and frequently do, reveal themselves as fathers, but it usually takes the form of a comment like: We have three children. Ten, eight, and four. Two boys and a girl the last ones the girl. Its not that they dont adore their kids. Nudge them and theyll happily talk about their offspring. Its that they dont see themselves as having been put through a crucible out of which they have come, in career terms, bigger and stronger and better.
Before we were even sure how to pronounce her surname, thats what Andrea Leadsom did. Lost in the controversial wash was the reason she was, as she claimed, repeatedly asked by the London Times journalist about being a mum. She was asked because, in the lead-up to the Brexit self-harming episode, Leadsom had constantly referred to herself as a mum. The journalist logically assumed that someone who was so self-defined would impute some value to being a mum. So she asked. She got a great and lengthy answer which took on the general shape and flight plan of a boomerang.
The advantages bestowed on Leadsom by mumhood were not immediately clear. Capacity to anticipate disaster? Not in evidence, as she and her mumhood marched fearlessly into dissing the woman who is now prime minister. Understanding of how media works? Not in evidence, as she pontificated to the journalist, Rachel Sylvester, about how she, Leadsom, didnt want this to be presented as her and her mumhood agin the childless Theresa May. Judgement? Least in evidence as she rushed to attack the journalist How could you? she tweeted for printing what she herself had said. The journalist promptly produced the transcript and the recording of the interview, which suggests Ms Leadsoms attention to detail had also been in deficit all along.
Bottom line is that she provided a neat case study in mumhood self-delusion, claiming an accretion of extra wisdom as a result of giving birth, which was provably absent.
This particular form of delusion may derive from the experience of childbirth and maternity leave. Both can be tough. Both can be fun. Either way, the parents are never the same afterwards, and in the nature of things, the life of the mother tends to be more transformed than the life of the father. My life was transformed in many ways by mumhood. One of the ways was learning that trying to sneak mushrooms into a year-old baby who doesnt like them is bad for the wallpaper.
Mumhood delivers a myriad of such little lessons, none of which have the smallest application in any workplace. Face it, no matter how we might like to force-feed mushrooms to particular colleagues, employment law prevents it.
The other end of this crazy notion that mumhood confers a new value on anyone is the widely held conviction that full humanity is achieved by women only when they get to the mumhood part of their lives. This permits the most outrageous constant harassment of the childless (or child-free). In theory, this should have died out 50 years ago, with the move away from the pattern of men as the wage-earner and women as the homemakers. It didnt. It just took different forms.
Couples who live together dont get that much of it, but once a couple marries, the same tedious old invasive cliched questions start, right down to and including the patter of tiny feet query. Its a multi-generational invasion of privacy.
Parents of married couples are asked how soon they will be grandparents, the question carrying the same implication: The prospective mother of those grandchildren will have fulfilled her function in life and the grandparents will be on their ear with delight. The first is an insult and the second is part of a coercive assumption. Some grandparents love being grandparents. Some dont. One way or the other, they shouldnt be asked about their childrens procreation. Some people want to be parents. Some dont. They shouldnt be asked about it and judgments should not be made based on their not having children.
It may seem like harmless small talk, expressive of interest, but it isnt. It skews the perception of a woman into her being less complete if she hasnt reproduced. It feeds into the tabloid coverage recently condemned by Jennifer Aniston as dehumanising females because it is focused solely on ones physical appearance, which tabloids turn into a sporting event of speculation. Is she pregnant? Is she eating too much? Has she let herself go?
Jennifer Aniston
Thats how it affects a film star. What Im concerned about is the woman who is not famous. She has a career and a partner. She is childless. Not child-free. Childless. This woman wants to have a baby. Desperately. Her husband or partner, likewise. Theyve been trying for years. Theyve gone through the misery of testing and of IVF. In the middle of their working day, they may have had to find time and privacy to inject themselves with fertility-related drugs. They have gone through the monthly disappointments.
They need the questions that imply they should be getting on with it before their biological clock dies on them, like a hole in the head. Nor do they need the watercooler judgments that shes so career-driven, shes never going to tie herself down with a child.
Its time we banished the phrase mum from public discourse. A woman is a mother or shes not. And if shes not, leave her the hell alone about it.
Yet, as an analysis by Oxfam shows, it is the poor countries that are shouldering the greatest burden in caring for refugees while the richest nations all but ignore their plight.
Oxfams analysis shows that collectively the United Kingdom, United States, China, Japan, Germany, and France hosted 2.1m refugees and asylum seekers last year just 8.88% of the world total.
Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa as well as the Palestinian territories host more than 50% of the worlds refugees and asylum seekers but account for less than 2% of the worlds economy.
As Jim Clarken, Oxfam Ireland chief executive, put it: The generosity of poor countries welcoming people fleeing for their lives stands in stark contrast to wealthy countries turning their backs on the desperation and suffering of vulnerable people.
Yet the reality must surely be more complex than that.
It is not necessarily generosity that compels the citizens of poor countries to take in more than their fare share of refugees. Immediate proximity and the absence of border controls also has a lot to do with it.
Take Greece, for instance. It has a population of 11m and since 2015 it has seen more than a total of 1m refugees arrive on its shores. The controversial EU-Turkey agreement was meant to stop people crossing the Aegean Sea and has alleviated the burden on Greece. However, 57,000 people remain stranded there while Italy has now become the new frontline of the refugee crisis in Europe, with thousands crossing the Mediterranean from Libya every day.
Neither is it lack of compassion that results in richer nations doing less than they should.
Witness the efforts of the Irish naval service which to-date has rescued almost 10,000 refugees during operations in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with that, under the Irish Refugee Protection Programme, the Government has committed to taking 4,000 refugees.
Yet Oxfam is correct to point out that, despite this commitement, the process has been agonisingly slow, with less than 10% of that figure actually arriving here.
Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald last week blamed Greek and Italian lethargy and poor administration for the slow progress in relocating refugees in those countries to Ireland. She also promised that a mission would be sent to Lebanon in the autumn to select an additional 260 refugees to be admitted in Spring 2017.
Considering the scale of the problem, that response is utterly inadequate and reflects poorly on us all.
There is little doubt that rich countries Ireland included could be more proactive in alleviating such a monumental humanitarian crisis.
Charity begins at home but it doesnt have to end there.
The US music star posted a picture on Twitter with the controversial message after performing her tribute to the victims and survivors of the mass shooting in Florida which claimed 49 lives.
Lopez, 46, deleted the tweet following a backlash from social media users, who argued the hashtag has been used as a counter-argument to BlackLivesMatter, the phrase inspired by the fatal shootings of black people by police in the US.
Authorities have yet to produce evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, shot dead by police, had links to Islamic State, (IS) which claimed the attack, but Mr 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, he said in an interview with 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 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, Bouhlels sister said 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 yesterday, bringing the number of people in detention to seven.
The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said Bouhlel was one of the soldiers of Islamic State.
People are consoled by medic outside Hopital Pasteur in Nice, as nearly 20 people injured during the Bastille Day lorry attack remain in hospital in a life-threatening condition. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
Mr Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that Thursday demonstrated 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, Mr Valls said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.
The group, under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target, given its operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the US, which is leading a coalition against it.
Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and far-right over how president Francois Hollandes Socialist government is handling security, Mr Valls said there was no risk zero and new attacks would occur.
Ive always said the truth regarding terrorism: There is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks, he said. Its 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 ram 2km through large crowds before it was finally halted. After Thursdays 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.
Notes saying A good journey to all the angels and All our condolences left on the Promenade des Anglais. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
A former neighbour of Bouhlel said the 31-year-old had never spoken about extremism.
Speaking outside the high-rise block of flats on Boulevard Henri Sappia, where the suspect had previously lived with his family, Samiq, 19, who did not want to give his surname, said: I never heard him speak about extremism, I cannot believe that he was a member of Islamic State.
He said people thought Bouhlel had psychological problems. He was a little bit crazy, Samiq said, but he added that he was shocked by what had happened.
People reflect upon the horrific attack in Nice as they sit in front of tributes placed where bodies fell on the Promenade des Anglais. Pic: Ben Birchall/PA
The apartment on Route de Turin where Bouhlel was believed to be living before the attack was raided by police, and a view through the keyhole showed items including what appeared to be boxes of medication and a strip of tablets. The drivers father has said that Bouhlel had received psychiatric treatment in the past.
He told French television that the family had sought medical treatment after his son had a breakdown.
He had psychological problems that caused a nervous breakdown; he would become angry, shout, break everything around him.
Ms Baloch, who had become a social media celebrity in recent months, stirred controversy by posting pictures taken with a prominent Muslim cleric.
She was found dead at her family home in the central city of Multan on Saturday.
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.
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 Ms 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 honour is more important, Azeem said.
Nearly 1,000 women are murdered in Pakistan each year for violating conservative norms on love and marriage. The so-called honour killings are often carried out by family members.
Such killings are considered murder, but Islamic law in Pakistan allows a murder victims family to pardon the killer, which often allows those convicted of honour killings to escape punishment.
Regional police chief Sultan Taimuri said authorities will seek the maximum punishment for Azeem, without providing further details.
Ms Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, was buried yesterday.
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.
A 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 clerics trademark fur-lined hat.
Mr Qavi maintained that he only met with her to discuss the teachings of Islam.
However, the government suspended him and removed him from the official moon-sighting committee that determines when Ramadan starts and ends in accordance with the Islamic lunar calendar.
Alida Taylor, 28, was accepted to join the Sisters of Life in New York City in September.
The Clifton, New Jersey, woman started a GoFundMe page late last month, hoping to get $12,000 (10,870) to pay down her student loans. She surpassed her goal, raising more than $22,000.
In an update on the crowdfunding page, Taylor said the extra money will be used for a vocation fund for Casa Guadalupe, a house of prayer and discernment for Catholic women, where Taylor is currently staying.
Taylor told WCBS in New York that the Lord when its his will, he always provides, and I just trust him.
Officials say most Catholic religious orders ask people to delay applications until they have repaid debt.
Religious life is a full-time job, so to speak, so she wouldnt be able to work and enter into religious life, said Sr Mariae Agnus Dei, noting that nuns with the Sisters of Life have no salary or stipend.
When Twitter goes bad
Britain:
A mean comment on Twitter reduced The Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain to tears. The 31-year-old received a barrage of anti-Islamic abuse on Twitter and had to have a police presence at her home after winning the BBC programme last year.
In an interview with the Daily Express S Magazine, Hussain said the last time she cried was when she read a mean tweet.
She added that if she could pass a law she would give all Twitter trolls Asbos.
Hussain, who baked Queen Elizabeths 90th birthday cake, said the most poignant moment of her life was winning The Great Bake Off last year.
Hotting up
US:
Some holders of electronic benefits transfer cards find that dialing the phone number on the back of the cards gets them a sex line, not their balances.
A Maine Department of Health and Human Services spokesman told the Sun Journal that officials have been aware for months that the phone number on some cards is off by one digit.
Lj Langelier, of Lewiston, discovered the error this week when he went to check his EBT balance before going to the grocery store. What he got instead was a message welcoming him to Americas hottest talk line.
Langelier says he thought hed misdialed, but kept getting the same message when he called back. The department plans to replace the misprinted cards and strengthen its review process to prevent future errors.
Never too old?
Britain:
A 91-year-old pilot had to be rescued after crashing a microlight into an oak tree. The plane became stuck in the tree about 15ft above the ground in a field near Lingfield Road, Edenbridge, Kent, just after 3pm on Saturday.
Fire crews used lines, ladders and a winch to secure the microlight before attempting to extract the elderly pilot from the aircraft. The pilot was eventually released and assessed by paramedics by 5.20pm, a spokesman for Kent Fire and Rescue Service said.
Freud no fake
Britain:
The BBC says it has identified an early Lucian Freud painting worth at least 300,000 (360,000), despite the artists own denials that it was his work.
Fake Or Fortune, presented by Fiona Bruce and art historian Philip Mould on BBC One, has attributed the painting to the acclaimed portrait artist who died in 2011.
Bruce said: Freud is a colossus of 20th-century modern art, and challenging his word was something we undertook with some trepidation.
London-based designer Jon Turner inherited the work from two artist friends, who told him it was an early portrait painted by Freud when he was at art school in 1939. The subject is a man in a black cravat.
Experts at auction house Christies identified it as a painting by Freud in 1985, but the artist denied it was his work.
However, Bruce and Mould had a breakthrough when they spoke to the artists former solicitor, who found a note in her files of a phone conversation with Freud about the painting.
During that phonecall in 2006, Freud apparently said he had started the painting, but it had been completed by someone else. For this reason, he would not acknowledge it as his own work.
But when experts analysed techniques and materials used in the painting, they declared that it was the work of a single artist.
A panel of three Freud experts said they believed the painting was by the artist himself, likely from 1939.
Mould, who valued the painting at 300,000 or more, said: It was a novel and gargantuan task to overturn the reported views of the artist.
It was different from anything wed taken on until now we had never had to arm-wrestle with the words of an artist beyond the grave.
It was all the more frustrating as the more I worked on the picture and Fiona was able to add the background with her enquiries, the more I felt confident about it being entirely by Freud.
Under the system, women are barred from travelling abroad, obtaining a passport, marrying or exiting prison without the consent of a male relative.
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) study comes as the kingdom works to implement its Vision 2030 and National Transformation Plan to wean it off its dependence on oil, including government targets to boost womens participation in the workforce.
The report was published just seven months after Saudi women were allowed the right to run and vote for the first time in the countrys only local elections, for municipal council seats.
It found that even with these greater opportunities, a womans life in Saudi Arabia rests largely on the good will of her male guardian often a father, husband, brother, or in some cases her son.
A 25-year-old referred to as Zahra in the report said her father used to beat her so severely that at one point she temporarily lost her vision and had to be hospitalised.
Although her parents divorced and she lived with her mother, her father remained her legal guardian. He refused to allow her to study abroad on scholarship and she cannot travel abroad for work without his permission.
HRW, which interviewed 61 Saudis inside and outside the kingdom over the past nine months, said it used pseudonyms for its interviewees for security reasons.
Guardianship really creates a system that is ripe for abuse, said the reports author Kristine Beckerle, a fellow in HRWs Mideast division.
Saudi Arabias legal system and social norms are underpinned by an ultraconservative Islamic ideology widely known as Wahhabism.
Powerful Wahhabi clerics support the imposition of male guardianship based on a verse in the Koran that states men are the protectors and maintainers of women.
Other Islamic scholars argue this misinterprets fundamental Koranic concepts like equality and respect between the sexes. Other Muslim-majority countries, even those with Sharia courts, do not have similarly restrictive male guardianship laws.
HRW says the Saudi system effectively renders adult women as legal minors.
Under the kingdoms ambitious economic reform plans, women are encouraged to enter the workforce and companies are given incentives to boost female employment.
However, penalties are not imposed on employers who refuse to hire women without the permission of male relatives. Some universities also require guardianship permission to enrol.
People cool off in a fountain in Madrid Rio. Kiko Huesca (EFE)
The first heatwave of the summer, which started on Sunday and is affecting almost all of Spain, has put 37 provinces on intense alert due to the high temperatures. Of those, 13 are on orange alert (the second-highest level, indicating significant risk for unusual meteorological phenomenon and a certain level of danger for normal activity), especially in parts of the south, center and west, where the Spanish Meteorological Agency Aemet predicts temperatures of up to 41C. The rest of the country is on yellow alert, meaning the risk is limited to outdoor activity.
This Mondays forecast predicts clear or mostly clear skies throughout much of Spain, except for early in the day in the Gibraltar Straits, Melilla and the area north of the Canary Islands, occasional cloud cover along the northern coast of Galicia, and high- and mid-level clouds above the northwest part of the peninsula. Temperatures will continue to climb in all areas besides the extreme southwest, where they are expected to drop, and in the southern and eastern coast, Balearic Islands, and Canary Islands, where they are expected to remain constant. This rise in temperature will be notable near the Cantabrian Sea, and abnormally high in the north-western half of the country. Temperatures are likely to exceed 36C in large zones of the inland peninsula, even exceeding 40C in the valleys of Tajo, Guadiana and Guadalquivir.
Here are todays regional advisories:
Extremadura is on active orange alert (significant risk) for temperatures over 41C in the plains of Guadiana, Tajo and Alagon. Aemet predicts tropical nights in this region, meaning temperatures will remain above 20C.
Andalusia is on orange alert in Cordoba, Jaen and Seville for temperatures over 40C, and in the valley of Guadalquivir. Additionally, Granada is on yellow alert for temperatures of up to 38C or 39C in Genil, Guadix-Baza and Cadiz, expecting gusts of wind up to 80km/h.
Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real and Toledo remain on orange alert for temperatures reaching 40C in La Mancha, the Guadiana valley and the Tajo valley. Albacete, Cuenca and Guadalajara are on yellow alert for temperatures of up to 37C in the Albacete region of La Mancha, the Cuenca region of Alcarria, and the high moorlands of Molina.
Madrid is on active orange alert for highs of 39C or 40C in various parts of the south, the western region, the Metropolitan zone, and the Henares Corridor. In the mountains, the alert is yellow for temperatures expected to reach 36C.
Galicia remains on orange alert in A Coruna, Lugo and Ourense for temperatures between 37C and 29C. In Pontevedra, a yellow alert is still in effect for temperatures up to 34C or 36C in the Rias Baixas, interior zone, and the area around the Mino river.
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Basque Country is on orange alert in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa for temperatures of 37C in the interior and along the coastline, with a yellow alert active in Alava.
The regions of Aragon, Cantabria, Castilla y Leon, Navarra, La Rioja, Asturias and the Catalonian provinces of Girona and Lleida remain on yellow alert for temperatures between 34C and 36C.
The ultraviolet radiation index is predicted to reach level 10 in Andalusia, the central plateau, the coast of Levante and the Balearic Islands, while Jaen and Granada could see level 11 and the entirety of the northern Peninsula could see level nine. Aemet considers UV radiation above level 11 extremely high. In these cases, the agency recommends applying extra sunscreen, avoiding unnecessary time spent outside during the middle of the day and seeking out shade. It also recommends wearing hats, protective clothing and sunglasses, advising that special attention should be paid to children and fair-skinned people.
English version by Allison Light.
Burma Drugs Worth US$2.5 Million Seized in Northern Shan State
Authorities seize a large stash of amphetamines in a village in Kyaukme Township, the largest haul the conflict-wracked township has seen so far.
Police are hunting for culprits in connection with the seizure of amphetamines valued at 3 billion kyats (US$2.5 million) in a village in Kyaukme Township of northern Shan State.
Acting on a report from local villagers, soldiers from the local military outpost in cooperation with police and village administrators found the drugstotaling 682.5 kilograms of amphetamine powder and tabletspacked in sacks by a monastery compound in Chaung Kyauk Village, Kyaukme Township, on Wednesday.
This is the largest drug haul ever recorded in Kyaukme Township, which has been wracked by conflict over the last year, and whose mountainous terrain shelters several non-state armed groups, as well as units of the Burma Army, who have variously been blamed for drug trafficking.
According to local eyewitnesses, two men had unloaded the sacks from a car before leaving the scene, a township police officer told The Irrawaddy.
Eyewitness said the two were wearing military uniforms. But we have yet to find out more. I think they were preparing to carry drugs into [neighboring] Hsipaw Township. Maybe they abandoned those drugs near the monastery because of security checks [along the route], said the police officer.
Ye Htun, a former Lower House lawmaker representing Hsipaw Township, said that drug trafficking is rampant across Hsipaw and Kyaukme townships. He said it was difficult to solve the drug problem in the area because government authoritiesand not just ethnic armed groupsare involved in drug production and trafficking.
Some armed groups are anti-drugs while some produce and supply drugs, said Ye Htun. He stressed that local authorities and police alone would not be able to eliminate the drug problem. The situation calls for systematic action from the government, he said.
Burma Premier Coffee Compensates Workers but Case Continues
Local coffee-mix giant Premier voluntarily compensates factory workers, but the Burmese company remains charged with violating labor laws.
RANGOON Premier Coffee has chosen to compensate 321 workers from its factory in Rangoons Hlaing Tharyar Industrial Zone after being sued by the Ministry of Labor, Immigration and Population for breaking labor laws.
However, the case is subject to future court hearings and the charges remain in placecontrary to prior practice in Burma, where voluntary compensation payouts by companies signal the de facto conclusion of legal cases launched against them.
Nyunt Win, a ministry spokesperson and the deputy director of the Factories and General Labor Laws Inspection Department, told The Irrawaddy on Monday that, a day before the first court session on July 12, the company decided to pay 57.9 million kyats (US$48,740) to 321 workers (170 male and 151 female) to compensate them for unpaid overtime from the end of last year. The money was disbursed over the following days.
The ministry had received complaints from about 300 workers from the Premier Coffee factory, claiming that they had not received full overtime payment or sufficient days off.
After verifying these complaints, the Factories and General Labor Laws Inspection Department under the ministry filed a lawsuit against the company owner and the human resources manager of the factory at the Hlaing Tharyar Township Court on June 28 for breaking labor laws.
Under Burmas 1951 Leave and Holiday Act, employers must allow for at least one day off each week without cutting salaries. But the company failed to provide time off or full payment for overtime, which the 1951 Factory Act states should be paid at twice the standard rate.
The workers were pleased that the company had compensated them, but the trial will continue, Nyunt Win said. We dont know what the verdict will be.
He mentioned that, in similar cases previously, if a company voluntarily compensated aggrieved workers, the court would either drop the case or order them to pay a fine. If the company chose not to do so, the ministry would give them three warnings before proceeding with legal action.
The next court hearing will be held on July 26.
Premier is popular local coffee-mix brand belonging to the Capital Diamond Star Group, a conglomerate owned by Burmese businessman Ko Ko Gyi. Among the firms numerous enterprises are the Grab and Go chain of convenience shops, Capital Hypermarket, and several import and export businesses.
If the companys owner and human resource manager were to be found guilty, the minimum punishment prescribed under the 1951 Factories Act is three months imprisonment and a 2 million kyat fine ($1,680).
Burma Shan, Palaung & Kachin Youth March Against Conflict in Lashio
Over 500 people demonstrate against ongoing conflict in northern Shan State, after the Shan State parliament resolves to stop the fighting.
RANGOON A day after the Shan State parliament passed a resolution to bring an end to conflict in northern Shan State, over 500 peoplelargely ethnic Shan, Palaung (Taang) and Kachin youthstaged a demonstration on Saturday in Lashio, northern Shan State.
The protestors called on the Burma Army to halt their fighting with ethnic armed groups in northern Shan State, and to end rights abuses against local civilians.
Youth dressed in their traditional ethnic attire walked the streets of the northern Shan Shan administrative capital holding signboards, which also bore demands for a federal system of governance in Burmareflecting a long-standing demand for a devolution of power and resource-sharing with Burmas ethnic minority regions.
Sai Aung Myint Oo, a self-described Shan youth leader, said, Our people feel they have no security in their lives. He mentioned the disappearance of seven ethnic Shan young men traveling from northern Shan States Namkham Township to Lashio in early June, which reportedly remains unsolved.
He accused the Burma Army of murdering our people.
I condemn this on behalf of our youth, he said. We ask the authorities to take action against those who have violated the law.
Nang San San Aye, a female lawmaker from the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD) representing Hsipaw Township (1), told The Irrawaddy that the Shan State parliament on Friday agreed to her proposal to bring an end to fighting in northern Shan State.
However, she cautioned that they would need to wait and see whether this resolution would translate into action.
The proposal, accepted during a four-day session of the state parliament from 12-15 July, was not the first initiative undertaken in the state parliament to halt Shan States longstanding, and seemingly intractable, armed conflicts.
A fellow SNLD lawmaker had made a similar proposal during the first session of the state parliament under the new governmentwith no discernible result.
Nang San San Aye cited the human rights abuses and general suffering wrought on ethnic Shan and Palaung (Taang) communities across several townships of northern Shan State, including her own.
Earlier this month, seven people were killed in mysterious circumstances in and around Mong Yaw Village of Lashio Township, with local villagers accusing the Burma Armyalthough local police have refused to pursue allegations against the military.
Northern Shan State contains Burmas largest concentration of non-state ethnic armed groupssome in alliance, but several in active conflict, with the Burma Army. Those in active conflict include the Shan State Army-North, the Kachin Independence Army, the Taang National Liberation Army and the Myanmar Nationalities Democratic Alliance Army.
Since November last year, two ethnic armed groupsthe Shan State Army-South and the Taang National Liberation Armyhave been fighting over territory across numerous townships of northern Shan State, displacing thousands of mostly ethnic Palaung (Taang) and Shan civilians from rural areas.
Burma State Govt Blocks KNU Land Policy Workshop
The Karen State government denies the Karen National Union permission to hold a workshop outlining their land policy to residents of the state capital of Hpa-an.
RANGOON The Karen State Government has denied the Karen National Union (KNU) permission to hold a workshop outlining their land policy to residents of the state capital of Hpa-an, according to local sources.
Zaw Lwin Oo, director within the office of the Karen State government, told The Irrawaddy that his administration has their own land policy, so they did not grant the ethnic Karen political entity license to hold a workshop on the same topic. Declining to comment further, he referred The Irrawaddy to a statement issued by the state government on July 15.
The statement affirmed that, only the government can have a land policy and proceduretherefore our state government can not give permission to hold workshop [on the issue] when asked by the KNU.
The KNU had planned to hold a workshop on July 17 in Hpa-an at a Buddhist monastery for the purpose of raising awareness on their approach to land rights. Links to descriptions of the KNUs land policy can be found on the news section of The Border Consortiums website.
On behalf of the KNU, the Karen Unity and Peace Committee (KUPC) sent a letter to the Karen State Government on July 8 requresting permission to hold the workshop. KUPC reportedly pointed out that a variety of ethnic Karen civil society groups were to be in attendance.
Saw Kyaw Zwa, a KUPC senior member, speculated whether the rejection was based on the way in which the government was approached for permission. The KNU did not ask [the state government] themselves, but instead, let the KUPC do it. I think this was a mistake, he explained.
If KNU had said in the letter that the workshop will give awareness to the people about the land policy of [both] the KNU and the government, this might have helped to get permission, Saw Kyaw Zwa added.
Land tenure rights have been described as a top priority of the civilian-led National League for Democracy government, which took office earlier this year. Seizures of landby the former military regime, as well as private and military-backed business enterpriseshas long been a pressing concern throughout Burma.
The KNU was one of eight non-state armed organizations to sign a nationwide ceasefire agreement with representatives from the Burmese government in 2015; civil war between the Burma Army and ethnic Karen armed groups began in the region shortly after Burmas 1948 independence from Britain. In the decades of conflict that followed, tens of thousands of Karen were displaced and forced to abandon their ancestral lands, making the return of their farms a major concern in the countrys ongoing peace process.
Burma Suu Kyi Begins Talks with NCA Non-Signatories
State Counselor Suu Kyi and ethnic alliance leaders meet for the first time to discuss building a federal union and national reconciliation.
RANGOON Building a federal union with national reconciliation in mind was the primary issue discussed during the first meeting between State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and ethnic alliance leaders from the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) on Sunday.
The preliminary meeting at Rangoons National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC)ahead of the planned Union Peace Conference in late Augusthad the air of a family gathering as opposed to a formal meeting, participants said.
The focus was on building mutual relationships between UNFC senior leaders and the state counselor, said Khu Oo Reh, a UNFC spokesperson who added that there would be additional talks throughout the next month.
It is a step forward, as this is the first meeting under the new government, he said.
Attendees included UNFC chair Gen NBan La of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Naing Htaw Mon on the New Mon State Party (NMSP), Maj-Gen Say Htin of the Shan State Progress Party (SSPP), Khun Abel Tweet of the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), and Khu Oo Reh, the leader of Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN) along with other DPN members.
From the government side, lead peace negotiator Dr. Tin Myo Win and Kyaw Tint Sweboth vice chairmen of the NRPCattended along with Suu Kyi.
We share a common goal of achieving peace and building a federal union, so we will continue negotiations, said Naing Htaw Mon, NMSP chairman.
The government officially invited the UNFCan ethnic alliance of which all are non-signatories to last years nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) with the former governmenton Saturday to participate in the political framework review meetings, said Hla Maung Shwe, a member of the governments peace conference preparatory sub-committee.
Khu Oo Reh said ethnic leaders would decide later on whether they would join as a group or individually.
The leaders discussed how UNFC member groups could participate in the Union Peace Conference.
They also raised issues surrounding the Burma Armys current offensive against ethnic armed groups in the northern part of the country and its expectation that all armed groups declare a ceasefire.
The participation of their alliesthe armed and actively fighting Arakan Army, Taang Nationalities Liberation Army and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army; and the Arakan National Council, Wa National Organization and Lahu Democratic Unionin the peace process was also raised.
The previous government did not allow groups engaged in fighting to participate in the peace process, but did allow the latter three groups to join the Union Peace Conference as observers.
The ethnic armed group leaders will meet in Kachin States Mai Ja Yang in late July to find a common stance on building a future federal union.
Ceremony at Secretariat Commemorates Martyrs Day
A ceremony honors the late Gen Aung San and his colleagues at the Secretariat, where they were gunned down in 1947, as Burma marks the anniversary of the assassination.
RANGOON A commemorative ceremony to honor the late Gen Aung San and his cabinet members willfor the first time in several yearsbe held at the Secretariat, where they were gunned down in 1947, as Burma marks the anniversary of the assassination.
Organized by the Rangoon divisional government, Tuesdays ceremony will be attended by Rangoon Mayor Maung Maung Soe as well as Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC) members, according to U Than, YCDC joint secretary.
The ceremony will start five minutes after the event at the mausoleum, which will start at 8 a.m., he said, referring to a state-level commemorative ceremony held annually at the burial site of the leaders near Shwedagon pagoda.
Burmas State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi will attend the event at the mausoleum. The day is held in recognition and honor of her fatherindependence leader Gen Aung Sanand his former colleagues.
Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing will attend the ceremony at the mausoleum, becoming the first ever Burma Army chief to join the event since after 1988.
The ceremony at the Secretariat will be held in the courtyard where a pillar commemorating the assassination is erected.
After the ceremony, which includes hoisting the flag to half-staff, the Secretariat will be open to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., said U Than.
But access to the room where the leaders were assassinated will be off limits because the staircase leading up to it is not strong enough to be heavily trafficked.
But the first Parliament building will be open to all, he added.
Currently, the Secretariat is leased to a private company and is undergoing massive renovations in order to reopen as an art museum.
From the Archive: Aung San MuseumDiscover Burmas Hero
An article from The Irrawaddys archives describes the re-opening in 2012 of the long-shuttered museum in Rangoon dedicated to independence hero Aung San.
RANGOON Burmas annual Martyrs Day arrives on Tuesday, July 19. Ceremonies will be held at the Martyrs Monument and the Secretariat building in Rangoon, to commemorate the assassination of independence hero Aung San and eight of his comrades in 1947.
Rangoons Bogyoke Aung San Museum, housed in the last residence of Aung San, will be open with free admission to the public for three days, and is expected to draw large crowds wishing to pay respect to the national icon.
Below, in a May 12, 2012 article from The Irrawaddys archives, the reopening of the museum to the public that year is described, alongside its checkered history:
After parking his car outside the hilltop villa in a leafy neighborhood just a few hundred meters from the Shwedagon Pagoda, Zaw Htet Aung tells his son, this is where General Aung San used to live. His wife nods in agreement.
The couple chaperoned their boy to this two-storied colonial-style wooden house, namely the Bogyoke (General) Aung San Museum, for their only childs benefit.
He has seen Bogyoke in pictures, said eight-year-old Tet Htut Aungs father. Thats why weve brought him here to have some more ideas about Aung San.
After being closed for five years for large-scale maintenance, the former home of Burmas national hero and his family has now reopened to the publicproviding a unique glimpse into his private life.
Thaung Win, the director of the Rangoon National Museum and administrator of the Bogyoke Aung San Museum, told The Irrawaddy that the 91-year-old building reopened to the public on March 24 after renovations to strengthen the retaining walls as well as repairs to the roof, walkways and stairs.
We want it to be one of the main information centers on Bogyoke Aung San as well as providing a window for young people to understand who he was and how he lived, he said.
Aung San, the father of Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, is still highly respected as the hero of Burmese independence for his efforts in bringing about the end of British colonial rule.
Bogyoke and his family lived in the villa on lease from a Chinese couple from 1945 until he was gunned down in a 1947 conspiracy masterminded by his political rival U Saw. Aung San was just 32 years old.
After her husbands assassination, Khin Kyi kept raising their three childrenAung San Oo, Aung San Lin and Aung San Suu Kyiin the house until 1953 when Aung San Lin drowned in the compounds pool.
Following the death of her second oldest son, Khin Kyi moved her family to the same colonial-era mansion by the shores of Inya Lake on University Avenue where Suu Kyi lives to this day.
The Burmese government bought the former residence for 30,000 kyats (US $37.5 at the time) in 1948 and it was converted into the Bogyoke Aung San Museum in 1962, according to an article published in The Monitor weekly journal.
But the museum was temporarily closed between 1999 and 2007 for refurbishment and only reopened each year on July 19, the commemorative day of Aung Sans assassination, during this period.
Until last week, according to official records, the museum has seen 1,419 visitors including 140 foreigners. A museum is not a profit-making service, said Thaung Win. So we have fixed the entrance fee at a reasonable price [300 kyat] hoping to encourage everyone to visit.
The museum boasts a host of Aung Sans personal belongings ranging from a British-built black Wolseley motor vehicle to an overcoat given to him by the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during a trip to England in the early 1940s.
A collection of 240 books on a variety of subjectsfrom applied mechanics and air defense to political economy and selected short stories by D.H. Lawrencemay be a source of interest for literature fans.
Downstairs features pictures and paintings of Aung San and his family, while the special meeting room upstairs is decorated with extracts from some of his speechesincluding the explanatory guideline relating to the 1947 constitutional law which states no constitution in the world is perfect.
This heros residence has an aura of simplicity and is devoid of any trace of ostentationthe only embellishments are basic requirements for anyone to enjoy a happy family life.
Being curious about the independence icons private quarters, Wai Zin, 23, visited the museum for the first time last week. Now I believe the Bogyoke had a very simple lifestyle, said the business management graduate after touring the museum.
The lack of luxuries demonstrates that, despite his power, Aung San never sought to use his position to feather his own nestadding to the sense of reverence which accompanies his name all throughout Burma. Some members of the government today should take him as a role-model, said May Moe, 24, an English major graduate from Rangoon.
Even though Aung San remains highly regarded as the national hero who founded the modern Burmese Army, there was a time when his reputation was stifled by attempts to wipe him from peoples memories.
After the rise of his daughters influence in the Burmese pro-democracy movement following the 1988 students uprising, everything related to Aung San was pushed into the background by the then-military dictatorship. His portrait at government schools and offices were replaced with former junta supremo Snr-Gen Than Shwe.
The Lion, the insignia of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Association, took the place of Aung Sans image on Burmese banknotes from the 1990s. July 19, known as Martyrs Day in the Burmese calendar, was a muted celebration until last year. Elementary school text books only provided a brief description of Aung San and a 10-stanza poem as his biography.
Thanks to the former military governments ban, Burmas younger generation today has little or no idea who Aung San is, said Zaw Htet Aung. Thank God there are people who are selling Bogyokes pictures. Were it not for them, we wouldnt have anything to show our children what Aung San looks like.
Zaw Htet Aung is hopeful that the museum will help promote awareness amongst the next generation regarding Aung San and his message. We need young people with Aung Sans spirit who are honest, unselfish and work hard for the national interestespecially these days when our country is in a transitional period, he said.
I dont want to be a soldier like Bogyoke. Im afraid of guns, said Tet Htut Aung after visiting the museum. But I want to be a doctor, and I want to be an honest person like Bogyoke too.
The Bogyoke Aung San Museum is situated on a 2.5-acre plot in Bahan Township, near Kandawgyi Lake in Rangoon. Starting on Martyrs Day on Tuesday, July 19, the museum will be open with free admission to the public for three days. It is otherwise open throughout the year, TuesdaySunday, 10 am to 4 pm.
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans wait to cross into Colombia on Sunday. GEORGE CASTELLANO (AFP)
The estimated 90,000 Venezuelans pouring across the Simon Bolivar bridge into Colombia on Sunday greeted border guards with heartfelt thanks, many in tears as they took advantage of Venezuelas decision to reopen the frontier for a second weekend in a row with its neighbor from 6am to 11pm to allow people to buy food, medicines and other basic goods in short supply in their country. Over the course of the weekend some 140,000 Venezuelans crossed the bridge from San Antonio del Tachira into the Colombian town of Cucuta.
Last week, after the border was opened briefly, there were similar scenes as thousands of desperate people stormed into Colombian supermarkets, highlighting the ever-worsening situation in Venezuela, where the economy has been in a freefall since the 2014 crash in oil prices.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro blames the shortages of food, medicine and basic staples in in his country on opponents trying to create economic chaos to oust him from office. His critics accuse his socialist government of economic mismanagement.
Venezuelas economy has been in a freefall since the 2014 crash in oil prices
Colombian immigration officials say most Venezuelans making the crossing return home, but are taking measures to prevent illegal migration.
A police unit has been deployed to control those people who have tried to travel to the interior, says Humberto Velazquez, a Colombian immigration official. And we work with the authorities through a data system to study each case.
In August of last year, President Maduro ordered the 2,219 kilometer border shut to crack down on criminal gangs smuggling goods and gasoline over the border to be sold.
Before it was closed, more than 100,000 people daily used the two main crossings, according to the Venezuelan government. That has shrunk to just 3,000 a day, many of them students and sick people given special day passes, nonprofit groups working in the region say.
We have to look closely at how those who return behave and how we handle them, says Victor Bautista, border security affairs chief at the Colombian Foreign Ministry. Colombia says it has received many petitions from Venezuelans who want to remain in the country for more than one day to visit family. This is an area many Colombians and Venezuelans crossed every day to go to work, school or visit family members, Bautista added.
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By 6pm, about 70% of the Venezuelans who crossed the frontier on Sunday had returned. Colombian authorities relaxed border security regulations until 11 pm. After that time, Venezuelan travelers must show a passport and proof of economic means to support themselves while traveling in Colombia.
Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin is expected to travel to Cucuta on Monday where she will meet with local officials to evaluate their working plan for opening the border during extraordinary periods and, if necessary, adjust the date of her meeting with her Venezuelan counterpart, Delcy Rodriguez. The meeting is set to take place on August 4.
Despite the pressure on Cucuta, Colombia has not declared a humanitarian crisis at its border with Venezuela. With the record number of arrivals, we are creating surveys to assess the reasons why Venezuelans come to our country, Bautista said.
English version by Dyane Jean-Francois.
Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 (12:01 am) - Score 730
Independent ISP Hyperoptic, which is currently rolling out their own 1Gbps (Gigabit per second) Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP/B) broadband network to around 500,000 homes in 20 cities across the United Kingdom, has secured a huge 21m loan from the European Investment Bank.
Apparently the new 8-year EIB investment represents the largest ever dedicated backing for an Internet network investment in the United Kingdom and indeed its a shade higher than the loan that Gigaclear similarly secured from the same source earlier this year (here).
The new funding adds to existing investment from Quantum Strategic Partners Ltd. (Quantum), which is a private investment fund managed by Soros Fund Management LLC that put 50 million into the ISP back in 2013 (here). As a result Hyperoptic has so far secured a total investment of more than 75 million.
The ISP has used this investment to expand their network, where they generally focus upon covering big apartment (Multi-Dwelling-Units) or office blocks in urban areas. At present we believe that Hyperoptics network covers around 200,000 UK premises (were still waiting for a concrete figure) and recently we were told that their long-held aspiration of reaching 500,000 by 2018 was still intact (here).
In keeping with the above, todays news states that the EIB backed network expansion seeks to reach more than 300,000 homes in the next 3 years, with the goal still being to cover half-a-million homes in cities across the UK. The official announcement adds that the ISP has been growing its network reach by over 100% per year in the past few years and will continue its current pace of growth within existing cities and expanding by opening new ones.
Dana Tobak, CEO of Hyperoptic, said: Hyperoptic is excited by the European Investment Banks investment, which will further fuel our roll out and addressable market expansion. The confidence of both EIB and Soros Fund Management LLC supports the importance of FTTP in providing a boost to the UKs digital infrastructure and economy.
Jonathan Taylor, EIB Vice President, said: The European Investment Bank is pleased to support Hyperoptics roll-out of super-fast broadband in cities across the UK. This exciting new initiative will transform economic activity, healthcare, education and access to key services and represents the EIBs first targeted support to address slow communications in UK.
Apparently the EIB loan to Hyperoptic is supported by InnovFin EU Finance for Innovators, MidCap Growth Finance with the financial backing of the European Union under Horizon 2020 Financial Instruments.
Over the last 5 years the EIB has provided nearly 13 billion to improve broadband and telecommunications across Europe. The EIB itself is directly owned by the 28 European Union member states, including a 16% share held by the UK government.
Meanwhile Hyperoptic is continuing to roll-out their ultrafast service to homes and businesses in parts of London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff, Bristol, Reading, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Newcastle and Brighton. On top of that theyre also beginning work to roll-out in Portsmouth, Watford, Leicester, Southampton, Slough, Edinburgh and Woking.
The news rounds up an otherwise excellent month for Hyperoptic, which recently picked up the Best Superfast Broadband achievement at the annual 2016 ISPA Awards (here). The ISP has done well by focusing most of its efforts upon catering for the buildings and urban areas that BT has often left neglected.
However it should be said that Openreach (BT) are now responding with their own commercial plan to roll-out an FTTP service to 2 million premises by 2020 (here). Mind you BTs 330Mbps FTTP often works out as being more expensive for consumers, although packages / ISP choices do vary and weve yet to see how their prices may change with the forthcoming 500Mbps and 1Gbps tiers. Not forgetting that Virgin Media are also doing 1 million or so FTTP lines (here) and they like urban areas too.
Monday, July 18th, 2016 (2:07 pm) - Score 414
A new partnership between Openreach (BT) and Beddingtons Business Improvement District (BID) team will result in around 190 businesses within the industrial area of Croydon (London) gaining access to an up to 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband service.
At present most premises in the area are hobbled by slow ADSL2+ based copper line broadband connectivity, with many struggling to get much above 2-10Mbps of download speed. The only other option would be an expensive leased line connection, but that often isnt viable for smaller businesses.
The new development, which involves an upgrade of three local Street Cabinets, appears to be another one of BTs co-funded Community Fibre Partnerships. Under this model local residents and businesses are asked cover any costs that rise above those of Openreachs own commercial model for upgrading the area; 50% of the gap funding must be paid prior to work starting, with the final 50% on completion.
The community approach is usually used in areas that wont benefit from another upgrade programme and this seems to fit well with Business Improvement Districts (there are a total of 42 in London), where local businesses similarly club together in order to pool their resources and cover the cost of local improvements.
Peter Whitehead, Chairman of the Beddington BID, said: The BID Board have been in successful talks with Openreach, resulting in this exciting solution. The Beddington BID team recognised the demand for faster broadband speeds by many local firms in the area and the long term business benefits. Superfast broadband is becoming a must have item in developments across London, so this partnership will make the Beddington Industrial Area a hugely appealing place for companies to conduct their business.
Andrew Campling, BTs General Manager for London, added: This community partnership is great news for the area. It is the latest development in our continuing drive to make faster internet access as widely available as possible. The faster broadband speeds will make the local businesses even more competitive, helping to secure and grow local employment opportunities.
Openreach are currently in the process of making their fibre available (FTTC/P) services available to a further 360,000 homes and businesses in London over the next couple of years, which should push coverage to around 95%. Sadly the Beddington industrial area doesnt appear to have been on the list for that, hence the community approach.
Sadly we arent told how much the work will cost, although something in the low tens of thousands might not be unrealistic; depending upon how much fibre optic cable needs to be laid, the availability of an adequate power supply and the size of cabinet used etc. The first businesses should be able to use the service from sometime in 2017, although we arent given a solid date (it usually takes around +/- 12 months).
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Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan
I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General
I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox
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10 Myths About Virtual Mobile Infrastructure
When the United States began to normalize relations with Cuba in late 2014, it seemed to be only a matter of time before big telecommunications companies from the north set up shop in the island country. That was, and remains, a very appealing pot of gold in the form of untapped demand and infrastructure needs from the massive country less than 100 miles to the north.
That still may be the case, but it is apparent that the timeframe is a bit longer than optimists had hoped. The reason is that telecommunications in general and the Internet specifically are particularly sensitive areas. On one hand, according to Bloomberg BNA, reliable access to the Internet is vital for a company to accept credit and debit cards and in other ways be fully enfranchised in the modern financial structure. On the other hand, the regime sees telecom as a step down what the story describes as the slippery slope to U.S. dominance.
The bottom line is that things are better between the two nations, but nowhere near perfect:
That reticence stems from the historic mistrust between the two nations dating back to the Cold War and the thawed, but ongoing, U.S. trade embargo, as well as the Cuban governments view of communications networks as a national security concern rather than a tool for economic development.
Letting in telecom companies is a big step. At the same time, truly doing so is necessary toward giving Cuba financial and social equality and a step that its government is loath to take.
The flow may go the other way as well. Last month, Computerworld suggested that technology companies in the United States may see more than a promising new market in Cuba. They also perceive Cuba as a new source of IT personnel who, undoubtedly, will be eager and well positioned to serve Cuba and perhaps other central and South American nations. The story points out that 11 CEOs accompanied President Obama when he visited Cuba in March.
A story by the Cuban news agency posted at Escambray is very interesting. It reports on various improvements and expansions being undertaken by Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (ETESCA), which is the government-controlled carrier. It could be read as an effort to keep people happy and therefore less apt to demand that the Verizons and Sprints be welcomed in. Keep in mind that Cubans hear about the goods and services telecommunications included used by friends, relatives and business associates in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
It is inevitable that American carriers and other technology companies will have a big impact on Cuba. What will be interesting to watch going forward is the nature of that involvement and how quickly and deeply these companies embed themselves in Cuban telecommunications and IT.
Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at [email protected] and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.
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The upcoming "Star Wars" spinoff, set to be released in May next year, is going to star Alden Ehrenreich as the young Hans Solo. Disney and Lucasfilm made the during the Star Wars Celebration Europe over the weekend.
Here are the top 5 reasons ">Alden Ehrenrich is perfect for the role.
1. He looked best with Chewbacca.
The audition process took six months to do. The actors were screen-tested with the Millenium Falcon while Ehnrenrich tested with Chewbacca.
"I've never screen tested with an announcement">Wookiee," said Ehrenreich. "It was amazing."
2. He gave the most impressive performance.
According to sources from the casting crew, Ehrenrich gave the best performance. The star of Disney's "Hail Ceasar" landed the role among other actors like Jack Reynor from "Transformers: Age of Extinction Fury" star, Logan Lerman, "Brooklyn" actor, Emory Cohen, and "Everybody Wants Some" actor, Blake Jenner.
3. His performance in "Hail, Caesar" was outstanding.
Ehrenrich is best known for his work in movies. In fact, he is set to star in Cinelou's "The Yellow Birds." His performances are well-played and his projects are billed one after the other. He is even set to star in Warren Beaty's "Howard Hughes Project", which is due to be released by Fox in the fall.
4. Steven Spielberg discovered him in a batz mitvah.
The new Hans Solo did not escape the sharp eye of famous Director Steven Spielperg. In a reception that Spielberg attended, he immediately spotted the then young Ehrenrich and a comedy video that was made for the event.
Ehrenrich's discovery then led to stints in TV series such as "CSI" and "Supernatural".
5. He is very professional.
His professionalism is his best asset and part of what he learned from working with the Coen brothers. The new Hans Solo claimed that in the production of "Hail, Caesar", his colleagues were respectful and everything was organized.
The new Star Wars spinoff will be released next year with production scheduled to begin in January.
Tesla Motors is looking for ways to improve in its Autopilot partial self-driving system that might have been a cause in a series of recent crashes, including a fatal accident.
According to USA Today, CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter Sunday that that the German auto supplier Bosch, the maker of the radar for the Autopilot system, can make "significant improvements" to Tesla's electric cars' safety software via wireless updates. Musk also said that another supplier, sensor maker Mobileye can also help Tesla Motors to make the system better.
Tesla's Autopilot semi-autonomous driving system allows drivers of its electric vehicles to automatically keep the car in its highway lane and to maintain their speed relative to other highway traffic. However, the company has warned drivers that they must keep their hands on the wheel, stay alert and in control.
Since an Ohio owner, Joshua Brown, died while his Model S has being driven under Autopilot, Tesla has come under pressure. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board opened investigations to look into the safety of the system.
U.S. Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, asked Musk in a letter on Thursday, July 14, for detailed information regarding the safety of the Autopilot system. Critics have even called on Tesla Motors to disconnect its Autopilot system.
In response to all these critics, Musk declared in his tweets that he stands behind Autopilot. He also asked the critics to direct all their criticism at Tesla Motors, instead of blaming the suppliers.
According to Fortune, Tesla is looking to add to its radar system some more robust computer modeling such as "point cloud" technology that allows detecting motion from a series of images or 3D models. Associated Press reports that changes to the radar system could help Tesla's Autopilot partial self-driving system to "see" more effectively in bright sunlight, snow and rain.
The iOS 9.3.3 Beta Jailbreak and iOS 9.3.2 Jailbreak is now available but not to the public. The Chinese hackers have recently announced at their website that jailbreaks tools for the two versions have successfully been tested.
The Pangu site claimed that an Italian named Luca Todesco was able to crack the beta version of the iOS 9.3.3 as well as the iOS 9.3.2 version. He even has the video to prove it. However, Luca has yet to make the jailbreak tools available to the public.
His reputation for jailbreaking the iOS is legendary. Pangu is assuring jailbreak users that Todesco is going to release the tools for the two versions very soon. As of now, only iOS jailbreak developers close to him have access to them.
Meanwhile, The Chinese hacker group announced that Pangu 2.3 - the unofficial version is still not available. They also cautioned the public from downloading the upcoming tool from third party sites. They promised users can download the Pangu 2.3 directly from their site once Apple released the full version for the iOS 9.3.2.
The Chinese site also mentioned that the 9.3.3 jailbreak version will most likely be downward compatible with iOS 9.3.2 since there were only minor revisions made by Apple. It seems the American software company did not patch the areas which made it possible for the hackers to jailbreak the iOS.
In anticipation for the upcoming release of the 9.3.3 and 9.3.2 jailbreak tools, Pangu issued some instructions on how to jailbreak the iOS device.
Users should first backup their files on iTunes or iCloud in case something goes wrong. The Find My iPhone option, Touch ID and passcode should also be switched off. The upcoming jailbreak tool is only available for Windows. It is also important for users to keep their cable plug while jailbreaking their iOS device.
Indian IT spending is set to grow by 13.8% year-on-year in 2022, the technology analyst firm IDC says, adding that this was down from 25.3%
Adelaide-based SouthStart Accelerate is looking for its first intake.
SouthStart Accelerate plans to accept five start-ups into its first programme, which will run from September to December. Candidates have until 5 August to apply.
Start-ups accepted for the programme will receive a $25,000 investment in return for 6% of the company, mentoring from a team of 30 tech entrepreneurs, and free use of the Majoran co-working space in Adelaide.
Support includes activities such as Monday morning stand-ups sessions to discuss progress and plans; Wednesday night group dinners to mingle with the mentors and listen to guest speakers; a few workshops on product, marketing, sales and operations issues; and investor demo days in Australia and overseas (with flights at the startups' expense).
"We're investing our own time and money to help start-ups build enduring companies that delight customers, engage employees and generate wealth for founders and their communities," said SouthStart Accelerate co-founder and Acumen Ventures partner Shane Cheek.
"All of our mentors have a strong connection to South Australia and a fantastic track record as founders and leaders of technology companies across the globe.
"Whether start-ups need practical help in engineering, SEO, recruitment, product pricing, customer acquisition, building teams or executing their plans, we have a deep bench of mentor talent that have faced and solved the same problems."
Those mentors include Geoff Rohrsheim (Strategic Data Management and Kloud Solutions), Justin Dry and Andre Eikmeier (VinoMofo), and Alan Noble (serial entrepreneur and currently engineering director for Google Australia and New Zealand), Kym Welsby (regional director at Clearswift) and Elain Stead (investment director at BlueSky Funds).
"We're looking for founding teams of at least two people, with the technical skills to build a software or Internet product, who are passionate about starting their own companies or taking their existing start-up to the next level," said Cheek.
On completion of the programme, SouthStart has the option to invest another $100,000 into the start-up on the same terms as other investors, or on the basis of a $2 million valuation if there are no external investors.
There was a time when Its a Sony really meant something the most powerful name in electronics. Leading edge technology, great build quality, distinctive design, and a brand cred that said you had made it. Sonys fortunes have been flagging. Can the X series help to regain its mojo?
The short answer is that its X series are all good, well-made smartphones which anyone will be proud to own but fail to add that je ne sais quoi or Watashi wanai nani o shitte imasu in a very crowded smartphone market that is polarised at one end by Apple and the other by the rising Chinese companies that are offering so much more for so much less.
Background Z is dead
Sonys now superseded, 5.2, Z5 received a ho-hum review from iTWire shortly after its launch in October 2015. To be very fair the review stated, It is a flagship model with a few flaws certainly any identified are software/firmware based and should be fixable. The hardware is almost perfect.
In fact, when the, 5.7, 4K, Z5 Premium, was offered to iTWire for review it declined as it had already been superseded by the announcement of the X series at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona in February 2016. We declined because Sonys Mobile Communications president and chief executive said the Z was dead, and you should all wait for the X.
"The Xperia Z line has reached its culmination [after four months] Xperia X series represents a new chapter and evolution of our product strategy. While the Xperia Z series was all about bringing the best of Sony's advanced technologies to smartphones, Xperia X series is based on bringing smart, adaptive Sony user experiences across camera, battery performance and hardware/software design," the company said in an official statement.
The Z series were quite good but in iTWires opinion, they were not good enough to say Its a Sony, and all that should mean.
The X series
Sony has released three models a good, better, best, scenario. In fact, it has released more overseas including a 6 XA Ultra.
The XA is a budget model at $549 with 5, 720p display; MediaTek Helio P10 processor; 2GB RAM, 16GB storage and microSD to 200GB; Android 6.x; 13MP rear and 8MP front cameras; 2300mAH battery 40hr endurance; Wi-Fi N; NFC; LTE Cat 4; no fingerprint reader. International reviews say its a competent phone, good camera, Sony quality, but overpriced in an overcrowded segment.
The X is the mid-range model at $799 with a 5 1080p Triluminous display, Qualcomm 650 processor; 3GB RAM, 32GB storage and microSD to 200GB; Android 6.x; 23MP rear and 13MP front cameras; 2620mAh battery 67hr endurance; Wi-Fi AC dual band; NFC; LTE Cat 6; fingerprint reader. International reviews say its a good phone, Sony quality, excellent camera, and a tad underpowered with a Qualcomm 650. But a little overpriced in a crowded mid-range market.
The X Performance the subject of this review is a high-range flagship model at $999, It is essentially the same as the X but has a beefed-up Qualcomm 820, LTE Cat 9; and slightly larger 2700mAh battery with 61hr endurance; and IP65/68 water resistance. International reviews say its the best Sony has to offer but in that price category others have higher resolution and AMOLED screens; more RAM and storage; 4K recording; and again it commands a perhaps unjustifiable Sony price premium. But Apple gets away with it so why not Sony?
So on with iTWires objective review Sony Xperia X performance
I am going to give you a brief summary before the review that way you dont necessarily have to read the detail.
High-quality build it is a Sony.
The display is as good as I have seen in that class of IPS screen.
Heaps of power from the Qualcomm 820 processor.
One of the fastest autofocus rear cameras I have seen but not always the best image quality.
Great selfies in good light, but not so in low light.
Average battery life.
Sony User Interface (UI is clean and minimal changes to Android).
A little bland in design but Its a Sony.
Anyone who buys it will not be disappointed.
Out of the box
My review unit was missing everything from the box except the phone, so I cant be sure of the charger (I think it is a micro-USB 5V/1.5A), or the ear bud quality.
The demo unit was graphite black, has a brushed metal, non-removable back, and a fairly average screen to body ratio of 68.1% that makes this feel like a big phone. It is 143.7 x 70.4 x 8.7 mm and weighs 164.4g.
The fingerprint reader is on the side power key. Once set up it is accurate but I recommend using your right thumb when you hold it in your right hand, thats the only digit you can use naturally. Make sure you train it to accept your thumb tip! Other phones use fingerprint readers either on the home key (front, bottom, centre), or the back, offering a little more flexibility. No big issue.
There is a volume rocker and a dedicated camera shutter key (great) on the right edge and a covered slot for the dual SIM (one doubles as microSD expansion) on the left side.
My take It is a typical glass slab well-built but not as stylish as some.
Screen
The 5, 1080p, 441ppi, IPS, LCD screen is bright, colourful and easy to read in all conditions. The brightness of 600 nits and contrast of 1500:1 makes this one of the best I have seen for a 5 non-OLED screen. It has a nice colour too natural rather than oversaturated. Side by side, the screen is noticeably ahead of the Apple iPhone 6S.
Sony are wont to use marketing terms like Triluminous, X-Reality, and Dynamic Contrast Enhancer - I have had a polite dig at it before but hey its the Japanese way. Whatever it is called it works.
Camera
Sony has a reputation for its lenses and sensors they supply camera components to many smartphone makers.
The camera is often the reason to select one flagship over another. In my summary, I said that it is One of the fastest autofocus rear cameras I have seen but not always the best image quality. In general, I got good to great shots, but I felt sharpness was a little soft and in closer analysis there was more low light noise that I have come to expect.
Lack of sharpness turned out to be due to me needing to adjust my style to allow for the hybrid autofocus. But Sony has a dirty secret. The rear camera defaults to 8MP, 16:9 probably to save storage space. You can change it to superior auto 20MP in 16:9 and 23MP in 4:3 and the shots take on a whole different perspective.
The good news is that the hardware is top drawer. As the review unit had Demo only not for sale on it, I am going to blame any foibles on early software and firmware (there has been no update since release).
The rear camera is a 23MP (one of the highest of any flagship), 24mm wide angle (one of the widest of any), f/2.0 (lens aperture is outclassed by other flagships), with a large 1/2.3 sensor. It has hybrid autofocus that tracks movement (tap on the subject like an energetic dog and the camera follows), Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS no OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) but that seems not to matter). In all, it is very fast to lock and load. Sony claim .6 seconds to the first shot, and I believe them.
I use a series of reference shots tested with flagship cameras including the Lumia 950 XL, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, iPhone 6S Plus, LG G5 and an ever-growing range of review camera shots on file.
I test using default settings auto but in this case, HDR was only available in manual mode. I cannot understand this and am sure it is fixable. Some reviews suggest that HDR may be used in the superior auto mode when it needs to, but I did not find that to be the case. Most will use auto mode and not realise that HDR makes such a difference.
- Daylight, no flash, with HDR Manual mode
If you shoot in the default 8MP mode, you will be disappointed.
Engage 20/23MP mode it takes in so much detail. Bright, accurate colours, crisp detail, and no noise. Autofocus was blazingly quick. As good as any current flagship. But it is odd that HDR can only be used in manual mode it needs to be part of the auto mode.
- Daylight, no flash, without HDR Auto
The best way to describe this is what you lose without HDR highlights, shadows and details are slightly less. The trade-off of convenience between auto and manual means most will use auto mode, and that is a shame!
- Indoors, no flash, with HDR (manual)
The f/2.0 lens did a good job. Lots of detail and bright colours. Autofocus is slightly slower due to HDR as it "soaks" up the scene and adjusts accordingly. Shots tend to blur so hold the phone very still. Samsungs Galaxy S7 has larger 1.4 m pixels that give it the edge here.
- Indoors, no flash, without HDR
Dont do it pure whites become off-white, colours become muddier, detail is lost. Samsungs larger 1.4 m pixels severely show it up here.
- Indoors, low light, flash, with and without HDR
You cannot have HDR and flash on at the same time. HDR does compensate for details, but it takes longer to autofocus and produces better results than flash alone. I think it would have benefitted from at least a dual flash here. Again the 23MP captures so much more. Hate to be repetitive but Samsungs larger 1.4 m pixels give it the edge here.
- Speciality shots like panorama, time-shifts, video, etc.
Panorama was barely adequate, 1080 pixels tall and a very awkward interface. Not good at stitching and loss of detail around stitches. LGs G5 is the standout here followed closely by the Samsung S7.
I was disappointed that it did not do 4K, 2160p x 30fps video. It does good quality 1080p at 30 or 60fps, but I have seen better from the Samsung, Lumia and LG. It uses digital image stabilisation.
- Selfie
Again superior specifications 13MP, 1/3 Exmor RS sensor, and f/2.0 lens. In daylight and indoors with normal fluorescent light there was a lot of detail. It lacks fill light for low light close up shots. There are a few lighting modes, and it allows you to select light conditions. There is a smile shutter which is nice. HDR can be switched on an off use it.
- Camera summary
My take on the cameras: Samsungs 1.4 m pixels gives it the edge and in low light or flash. HDR in auto mode should be standard.
The Sony has 23MP (if you remember to use it) to Samsungs 12MP so the Sony captures more detail and probably a better image to edit. It was way, way, way, ahead of the iPhone 6S Plus and just ahead of the previous class-leading 21MP Lumia 950XL.
I am going to rate it 8 out of 10 while there are slightly better cameras in some circumstances, you will not be disappointed with the camera.
Battery
It uses a 2700mAh Qnovo battery-charging technology. It is fast, helps prolong battery life (normal fast charging can shorten it) and uses analytics to monitor charging. Regrettably, I could not test these claims.
In real life use, I could not get two days as I did from the Z series. It is an overnight charge phone. It does not come with USB-C c'est la vie.
It seemed to be very battery hungry during the main photoshoot where I took a couple of hundred photos, and it drained from full to 52% over a few hours.
Performance
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 is a blazingly fast system on a chip. It is on par in most ways with Samsungs Exynos. No issues here.
Phone/Sound
As a Cat 9 LTE, it is capable of 300/50Mbps. Around Sydney, it equalled other Cat 9 devices. Phone signal strength was as good as any other flagship. Call quality was good. The dual microphones were excellent.
Stereo front-facing speakers are effective and can be quite loud. They account in part for the low screen to body ratio by adding to the size of the top and bottom bezel. There is an equaliser that allows for ClearAudio+ and other effects.
Sony UI
Sonys dedicated apps are not removable. In every case they are adequate, but my take is that Android users will want to download the Android Gmail, messaging, contacts, etc.
The UI is light and colourful, and you can download a range of themes from Sonys app store.
While you can escape Google, it often had annoying popups asking me to reconsider.
Specifications
Qualcomm 820, four core, 2 x 2.15GHz and 2 x 1.6GHz
3GB, 32GB storage (20GB usable), microSD 200GB (occupies one of the two SIM slots)
5 1080p Triluminos IPS LCD, 441ppi, Scratch resistant, 68.1% screen to body and home, back, recent keys are soft taking up, even more, screen space
23MP camera 1/2.3 Exmor RS and predictive Hybrid Autofocus, 24mm, F/2.0, 1080p @ 30 and 60fps, manual HDR, 8X digital zoom
13MP front 1/3 RES, 22mm, F2.0, manual HDR, 1080p @ 30fps
2700 mAh, non-removable, Qnovo, micro USB, Fast, quick charge 2.0, endurance 61h. No wireless charge. Stamina mode to increase life.
IP65/68 dust tight and water immersion over 1 metre
LTE Cat 9. It uses the Qualcomm Gobi world modem that usually means 20 bands - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 26, 28, 29, 38, 39, 40, 41. These were not listed on Sonys website
Wi-Fi AC dual band, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, GPS, Fingerprint sensor (power button)
Android 6.x
143.7 x 70.4 x 8.7 mm 164.4g
Conclusion
It is a good flagship that could be even better given the basic hardware ingredients are there. Software and firmware updates will make a difference as it did with the Z series.
IP65/68 waterproofing is nice, but some other phones also have accidental dunk protection.
Battery life is shorter than expected, and there is no wireless charging that I have come to rely on. Having said that the Qnovo could be a game changer if I could have tested it.
The camera when you get the hang of it and use 20 or 23MP instead of the 8MP default is among the best. But it does not record 4K video (no biggie), and it is not the best low-light camera. On the whole, it is pretty good but not the class leader.
I give it an 8 out of 10 fit for purpose, and if you want a Sony, then this is it.
Postscript
After completing the review, I read a few international and local reviews to see if my experiences mirrored those. I was a little shocked to see the average reviews until I realised that without exception these reviewers wanted to be amazed by 4K screens, 4K video, the UI, and otherwise stoked. The Xperia X performance is so similar to the Z it replaced.
As I often say there is only so much you can do with a glass slab but in 2016 that has not been the case. Times have changed especially in the Android world and Sony, unfortunately, has delivered more of the same.
In my opinion, the Samsung S7 Edge is a better phone all round but it costs more so you have to expect that. Its curved edge design is unmistakable, its premium AMOLED screen, wireless and fast charge, performance, water resistance, great all-round camera, and a flawless user interface make it the leader.
I also really like the LG G5 with its removable battery and a dual-lens rear camera that have turned out to be killer features one 16MP and one 8MP wide angle for tourist shots. It is a great travelling companion.
I have yet to complete the Huawei P9 dual lens camera review it promises to be a spectacular performer too for $799. I even think the OPPO R9 Plus at $699 beats the Xperia in many ways. The Chinese makers like OPPO, Xiaomi, Vivo and OnePlus are delivering some amazing kit at amazing prices.
The message is clear it is time for innovation especially in the flagship segment wow the socks off us.
An increasing number of Australias pure play online-only retailers are now planning to open physical stores to drive sales as a way of further extending their market reach.
According to the latest Commonwealth Bank Retail Insights Report, 18% of the countrys online-only retailers are planning to establish a physical outlet in the year ahead, up from 13% in the previous half yearly report, and over three quarters of retail businesses will have a physical presence.
The Commonwealth Banks national manager retail, Jerry Macey, says the drive towards omni-channel retailing is picking up pace with many online and physical businesses seeking to extend their reach.
Bricks and mortar and multi-channel retailers are doing more online as customer preferences evolve. At the same time, emboldened digital retailers are opening physical stores to complement and drive further online sales. We have seen large online retailers such as Amazon unveil physical stores in the US, and this trend is expected to strengthen over the year ahead with almost one in five pure play online retailers planning a bricks and mortar outlet by early 2017, Macey said.
He says that retailers are also forecasting robust overall online sales, with an average 24% growth rate expected in the year ahead, up from 20% in the previous half, while overall they expect 35% of online sales to come via mobile devices over the next 12 months.
According to the research, conducted for the Commonwealth Bank by ACA Research, in an effort to capture expected online sales growth, technology budgets are again set to increase over the next 12 months with 45% of retailers expecting to lift investment and overall, the top priorities for investment are e-commerce, loyalty programs and social media.
And, on the market outlook, the report shows pure play online retailers are significantly more optimistic than their multi-channel peers, with 46% expecting an improvement in conditions, compared to just 28% among multi-channel businesses.
Macey says that, when looking at the drivers behind the outlook for retailers, for those expecting a decline, 95% attribute it to economic factors, and conversely, for retailers indicating an improvement in business conditions, 71% attribute it to internal factors such as business growth and the introduction of new products.
Our research shows the most optimistic retailers are those who have taken control of their own destiny, rather than looking to external economic conditions to drive sales growth.
The detailed findings of the research:
1. Retailers are forecasting continued online sales growth in the next 12 months with many increasing technology budgets to capture growth.
Retailers remain positive about sales generated from online orders in the year ahead.
Overall 38% of sales currently generated online - up from 35% (multichannel 18% to 22%).
Expected growth in online sales over the next 12 months at 24%, up from 20%.
Usage of online purchases made through a mobile devise continue to increase.
Percentage of mobile sales has increased 23% compared with last wave at 18%.
Overall online sales via mobile expected to increase to 35% in the year ahead.
When compared to the overall sector, pure play online retailers anticipate a decline in the growth rate of sales via mobile devices (27 per cent down from 44 per cent in prior period).
A total of 45% of retailers expect an increase in technology spend, up from 43% in the previous wave.
The top three investments in technology planned for the next 12 months are ecommerce, social media and loyalty programs.
For the single biggest priority investment, the top was ecommerce (17%, with 41% of all retailers investing here in some way) followed by retail network expansion (13%; with 27% investing here in some way) and personalised customer experience (11%; with 30% investing here in some way).
2. Pure play online retailers have a more positive view on business conditions in the year ahead than their multi-channel counterparts.
Net improvement of +10, remains positive although it has reduced from the optimism seen in last report (+20).
This was more pronounced across multi-channel (+21 to +5) whereas pure play online were substantially more optimistic this wave (+14 to +31).
NSW/ACT were the most positive on outlook for business conditions (34%) while WA was the least optimistic (sharp drop from 29% to 17%).
Confidence appears to be driven by engagement 71% of the reasons given for being confident are internal (such as a new product being launched) compared with just 13% for those seeing conditions declining.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The federal government and industry have been urged to work together to share information on cyber security threats and attacks to counter the increasing sophistication of cyber adversaries.
According to security vendor Palo Alto Networks APAC chief security officer, Sean Duca, the threat landscape in Australia, and around the world, is not abating and those looking to penetrate security are becoming more sophisticated, sharing tools, exploits and attack methods, and automating their processes. In doing so, they have achieved a clear competitive advantage in cyberspace and are eroding trust in todays digital age.
Duca urged the federal government, with industry, to quickly put into action the recommendations for greater cyberthreat information sharing laid out in the governments new Cyber Security Strategy announced in April.
Cybersecurity threat information sharing within and across industries and with the public sector must be embraced by everyone. The faster organisations can share information, the better we can serve to protect each other and push the cost back to the adversary.
Until the public and private sectors truly collaborate to build systemic information sharing partnerships, its like were combatting our adversaries with technological weapons that have no ammunition.
According to Duca, cybersecurity provides longevity to a business and can help differentiate the business from its competitors for both good and not so good reasons.
Organisations, both in the public and private sector, need to have strong cybersecurity fundamentals to provide trust and confidence to citizens, businesses and customers alike.
Duca says Australian industry can play a valuable role in combatting cybersecurity threats by participating in voluntary cyberthreat information sharing.
He says operationalising threat information sharing, both within and across industries, and between the private and public sectors, will dramatically shift the balance of power, close the competitive gap, and realise exponential leverage against cyber adversaries by driving up the cost of successful attacks.
Heres what information Duca says should be shared between the private and public sectors:
Threat Indicators: forensic artefacts that describe the attackers methodology;
Adversarys campaign plan: a collection of threat indicators for each link in the cyberattack lifecycle attributed to a specific adversary group;
Context: additional non-campaign plan intelligence about an adversary group that is helpful for organisations to understand the adversary. This includes things like motivation, country of origin, and typical targets;
Adversary dossier: campaign plans + context a collection of threat indicators attributed to a specific adversary campaign or playbook (campaign plans), plus any additional context about the adversary group.
Our mission should be to share all of the above but, most importantly, an adversary group dossier. Doing so will enhance the assessment of the adversary groups potential, material impact to the targeted organisation, giving a better opportunity for that organisation to detect and prevent the attack, as well as deter an adversary, Duca observes.
He cautions that the information (to be shared) itself is important but it must be actionable, and must arrive in as close to real time as possible.
As we have observed in some of the largest breaches, the best resourced security teams cannot scale manual responses to automated threats only through automating prevention and detection can organisations be fast enough to adequately secure networks.
According to Duca, government and industry must collaboratively build a robust, automated information sharing architecture, capable of turning threat indicators into widely distributed security protections in near-real time.
He acknowledges that there is apprehension amongst some Australian organisations that information sharing could negatively impact them and that many feel that that by sharing information that could be classified as sensitive and privileged, they would be giving the upper hand to their competitors.
This sentiment from the business community is valid and should be acknowledged. But, as noted above, we should focus on sharing attack information not information on who has been breached.
Some of the other challenges and perceived barriers to greater cyberthreat information sharing that Duca maintains should be addressed:
Privacy: Laws should not unduly prohibit the sharing of personal information that is necessary to identify and prevent attacks. At the same time, the Australian government should ensure that there are responsible privacy protections in place related to cyberthreat information sharing.
Trust among private sector competitors: Some organisations consider cyberthreat information to be their own proprietary intellectual property (IP) and do not want to share it. We need to reverse this notion. The more one continues to treat this information as IP, and the more it is kept in silos within our own organisations, the greater opportunity the adversary has to strike again. Adversaries share tools, exploits and attack methods so should we. Everyone should have access to the same body of threat information and collaborate to quickly translate it into security controls to use within their own organisations and their collective customer base.
Antitrust concerns: There is a fear among some companies that sharing threat information between organisations makes them vulnerable to antitrust violations. The Australian government should clarify that cybersecurity threat information voluntarily shared, or received, by a private entity with another private entity is exempt from antitrust laws.
Over-classification: The government, in some instances, may over-classify cyberthreat information it receives from both internal and external sources. It takes a significant effort and valuable time to declassify that same information to share with private companies and the public at large.
ESET, a security software company, has found the first fake lockscreen app and it is targeting Pokemon Go players. It found Pokemon GO Ultimate, Guide & Cheats for Pokemon GO and Install Pokemongo (now taken down from Google Play) were hastily rushed to the store and could have done some serious damage if more time had been taken in their development.
Pokemon GO Ultimate app is both a screen locker and porn clicker. Guide & Cheats for Pokemon GO and Install Pokemongo on Google Play, belong to the scareware family. They trick their victims into paying for unnecessary services, promising to generate Pokecoins, Pokeballs or Lucky Eggs up to 999.999 each day and lure victims into subscribing to expensive bogus services. (Such functionality has recently been described in an article published on ESETs blog, WeLiveSecurity.com).
Pokemon GO is such an appealing game that despite of all the warnings by security experts, users tend to accept the risks and download anything to catch all the Pokemon. Those who really cant resist the temptation should at least follow the most basic security rules, says ESETs Lukas Stefanko.
Fortunately the malware was immature but it wont be next time. Pokemon Go Ultimate resembles a version of the much hyped game but its true functionality is malicious: it deliberately locks the screen immediately after start-up. In many cases, reboot the intuitive solution for a frozen screen is not available because the app overlays all the other apps as well as the system windows. Users must resort to restart their devices device either by pulling out the battery or using Android Device Manager. After reboot, it runs in the background, invisible to the victim, silently clicking on porn advertisements. To get rid of it, the user needs to go to Settings -> Application manager -> PI Network and uninstall it manually.
Canberra and Wellington have formed a new sister cities agreement aimed at strengthening economic ties, including in the ICT industry, and to increase the impact of both cities on the global stage.
ACT Chief Minister, Andrew Barr, visited New Zealand as the guest of NEC NZ which is undertaking "smart city" projects for the Wellington City Council, such as sensors that can "smell" solvents to detect graffiti in action and reduce street light energy use, lowering city energy costs.
Barr and Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown signed the sister city agreement on Monday and also visited NECs Wellington Technology Innovation Centre.
It was fantastic to see first-hand how Wellington City Council and NEC New Zealand are working together to achieve real solutions to city problems by implementing innovative technology, Barr said.
It is clear why this is such a successful partnership and a model that Canberra can draw inspiration from as we work towards becoming a leading international smart city.
The tour of NECs centre featured technologies implemented in Wellington, such as CCTV camera software to support the monitoring of traffic for asset management, NECs Cloud City Operations Centre (CCOC) for real-time visualisation of city operations and NECs Kite Flexible Sensing Platform that enables a city-wide sensor network.
We look forward to collaboration opportunities with city councils to explore how NECs Smart City solutions can enable high-quality urban living for the community while contributing to a safer, eco-friendly environment, said Tim Packer, head of smart city solutions, NEC New Zealand.
The visit to NEC New Zealand was part of a tour organised by Wellington City Council to showcase Wellingtons key economic and innovation opportunities.
I'm a digital nomad.
In fact, I've been living (and loving) the digital nomad lifestyle on and off for 10 years now. Specifically, my wife and I got rid of our house and put all our stuff into storage. Now we choose various places around the world, rent a house or apartment for between one and four months, and live there as "temporary locals." (I maintain a blog about the digital nomad lifestyle called "Becoming Nomad.")
As a writer who typically interviews sources via Skype or email and files his stories via the internet, it doesn't matter where I live as long as I have a good internet connection.
I've lived for months in Kenya, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Cuba, Mexico, Greece, Guatemala, Jordan and elsewhere. Right now, I'm living in Aix-en-Provence, France.
But being a digital nomad doesn't necessarily mean you live abroad, just that you find yourself working in nontraditional work locations, ranging from a coffee shop to your couch at home, for extended periods of time. If you make your living without having to be full time in a particular office location, then you're a digital nomad, too.
When I started, services that catered to digital nomads were practically nonexistent. Over the years, several new categories of apps, internet-based services and other products have emerged to make my life easier.
One of the best of these services is Google's Project Fi, which I consider a must-use service for any digital nomad -- and it just got better. A lot better.
Google last week announced faster international service and 15 new supported countries (Google made a deal with a European carrier called Three, which brings the total number of countries where Fi works to 135).
Google Fi is what they call in the industry a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO. That means Google itself does not provide the wireless phone and data services, but uses existing services.
There are lots of MVNOs. But Google's is vastly superior thanks to technology and pricing. Let's first talk about the tech.
The technology that makes Google Fi great
Most MVNOs are built on the infrastructure of a single mobile carrier. Google Fi is built on three U.S. carriers. Fi connects you to the mobile phone services of Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular.
That's where the technology part comes in: Fi will pick which carrier on the fly based on which has the strongest coverage in your location.
However, Google Fi is only available on the Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X and Nexus 6 smartphones. Google says these phones uniquely support the special Project Fi SIM card and have special cellular radios that can work on different network types.
Google Fi screen grab Google Fi's mobile app lets you configure, manage and control Fi and even suspend service with no penalty.
If you're on a call as you move into an area where a different carrier is stronger, you'll be switched automatically. When you're within range of a free, open Wi-Fi network that's faster than the available mobile broadband, Fi will route your call through Wi-Fi.
If you have a Google Voice number, as I do, you can use that number as your main number for the Fi phone.
Fi was great even when Google throttled data connection speeds while abroad to 256Mbps. But that cap has been removed, so now you can get the full speed of the local carrier. This is huge news because it's an unprecedented service.
Google claims that it now is "able to deliver speeds 10-20X faster than before." This is a sudden, unexpected and dizzying upgrade from 2G to LTE, where available -- and all for a simple, low price.
The pricing model that makes Google Fi great
Local wireless data rates vary wildly from country to country. With Fi, you pay the same no matter where you go and no matter how much the local carrier charges local customers. (Sorry, world: Fi is limited to U.S. customers only.)
Fi costs $20 per month for unlimited domestic talk and text as well as unlimited international texts. Data costs $10 per month for each gigabyte you use over mobile wireless (Wi-Fi is free). The Google Fi app and website enable you to formally estimate your future monthly data usage -- something Google calls a "data budget."
Ordinary voice calls made while abroad using a local carrier (while you're not connected to Wi-Fi) cost an amount that varies based on the country. Here in France, it costs 20 cents a minute to make international phone calls over Fi.
And this is the best feature: You can also use your Fi-powered Nexus to create a Wi-Fi hotspot with the phone, so all your devices can connect without additional charge. That means I can connect five or six devices at the same time without paying more (unless I use more data).
Google Fi changed everything for me. I bought a Nexus 5X just to use the phone as a Google Fi Wi-Fi hotspot for my iPhone and MacBook Pro.
I always rent AirBnB accommodations that have Wi-Fi. When I'm at home, Fi routes through the home Wi-Fi network and data is free. When I leave the house, both my wife and I keep our iPhones, iPads and MacBook Pros connected at all times through the Fi hotspot. It's functionally close to life in the U.S., and all without "gotcha" pricing, buying and swapping SIM cards or any of the other hassles that used to attend connectivity abroad.
In addition to offering a clear pricing model, Fi is conspicuously fair as well. If you use less data than your data budget, Google will credit you about a penny per megabyte for whatever you didn't use, which will be applied to the next month's bill. If you're getting close to your budget, Fi alerts you. If you do choose to go over, you'll still be charged $10 per gigabyte -- but the amount you're charged for the overage doesn't go up in $10 increments. If you go over by just part of a gigabyte, then you'll pay only for that part. For example, if you go over by 137 megabytes, you'll pay $1.37 more.
Of course, if you're in range of an accessible Wi-Fi hotspot, Fi will automatically switch your phone over to Wi-Fi and you'll pay nothing for calls and data while connected to Wi-Fi.
As an incentive, Google offers a $150 discount on the Nexus 5X if you activate Fi on it within 30 days of shipment (the offer is valid until Aug. 11). Google offers the same discount for a Nexus 6P, but that expires July 19.
You can cancel anytime, and there is no termination fee.
Better still, you can suspend and reactivate your account at any time in seconds via the app or website. I'm grandfathered in on AT&T, so I suspend my AT&T account and activate my Google Fi account when I leave the country. When I'm back in the states, I reactivate AT&T and suspend Google Fi.
In short, Google Fi has become a very compelling service for digital nomads of all kinds and a must-use service for anyone who travels abroad -- even if you're like me and don't want to use one of the Nexus phones as your main phone.
Why Fi? Because it's always been cheap and easy. And now it's fast, too.
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Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders
PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces
There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan
Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia
Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair
Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan
I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General
I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox
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There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur
EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol Armenia and Azerbaijan to do so without delay
An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".
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The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022
Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully
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The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces
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STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN
This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan
Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments
Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan
Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement
With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building
OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border
Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh
USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens
ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression
Jirayr Sefilyan is ready to meet Serzh Sargsyan
Jirayr Sefilyan, the jailed member of the Founding Parliament opposition movement, is even ready to meet Serzh Sargsyan to discuss the continuing hostage crisis. Sefilyan has made an appeal. The appeal is not only addressed to his associates that continue to control a police building in Yerevan. He says it is necessary to do everything to prevent further bloodshed and is ready to meet the leadership of the country, Alek Yenigomshyan, a member of the Founding Parliament, told A1+. Yesterday, he had a meeting with Jirayr Sefilyan and the armed group members who attacked and seized Erebuni police department yesterday morning. As soon as they seized the building, they demanded a meeting with Sefilyan, urging law enforcement agencies to bring him to the building. But they demand was immediately rejected. If law enforcement agencies try to ease the situation, Sefilyan is ready to go to a meeting, he said. Alek Yenigomshyan says the gunmen do not have an Internet access and are denied food. T the same time, he stressed that the death of Colonel Artur Vanoyan during yesterdays events complicated the situation. There are injured people among the attackers, too. One of them is in a serious condition, his name is Tatul. There is also a second injured but I do not remember his name, he said. As reported earlier, one of the hostages held in the building was released at night. The attackers said they released him without consulting with Sefilyan as a sign of goodwill. Moreover, they said Sefilyan was completely unaware of what happened at the Erebuni police building until they informed him about the attack on the phone.
We did not discuss the possibility of taking Sefilyan to meeting with gunmen - Hunan Poghosyan (video)
The first deputy chief of the Armenian police, Hunan Poghosyan says the situation remains the same at the Erebuni police department which was seized on Sunday morning by a group of gunmen. Taking to reporters near the police building, Poghosyan said security forces continue to negotiate members of JIrayr Sefilyans Founding Parliament movement holding several police officers hostage. He added that s a result of the negotiations the gunmen had released one policeman and a citizen held as hostage in the building since yesterday. We shall provide you detailed information in due time and in due order. I cannot say anything more at this moment, General Hunan Poghosyan told reporters grouped outside the police building seized by anti-government gunmen for a second day now. The police official added that the demands of both sides remain the same. We urge them to stop the escalation of the situation and surrendered to the law enforcement agencies, he said. Asked whether Sefilyan would be taken to a meeting with the hostage takers, Hunan Poghosyan repeated several times, No, he will not. Both sides should make compromises. Negotiations are under way, I have nothing to add, he stressed. Speaking about the people who were detained in the aftermath of yesterdays attack on the police compound, Hunan Poghosyan said, We had all legal grounds for their detention, and all of them were given a proper response. Some have been subjected to administrative responsibility, others were invited to questioning. At the same time, the first deputy chief of the Armenian police said they had not discussed the possibility of taking Jirayr Sefilyan to a meeting with the attackers. In reply to a journalists question whether Chief of the Armenian Police Vladimir Gasparyan did not participate in the negotiations, Mr Poghosyan said, the Chief of the Armenian Police is not participating in the talks, he has been at the scene of the incident since the day of the attack.
People should become more active and guide this process - Armen Martirosyan (video)
This is not an acceptable option for many of us, and I have repeatedly said that I am against military solutions. I repeat that people should become more active and guide the process because both sides may take wrong decisions, Armen Martirosyan, Vice-Chairman of the Heritage Party, told reporters near a police building in Yerevan seized by anti-government gunmen for a second day. In reply to A1+s question what can be done to activates people, Mr. Martirosyan said, If I knew where the key to the lock was, I would use it long ago. Our citizens may be still wondering what is going on here. For me the best way out of the given situation would be to see our country coming out of this situation much stronger than ever and, secondly, I would pay attention to the principle of the supremacy of the national interests. These two principles can be realized if we hold early presidential and parliamentary elections, Martirosyan stressed. Should 30-40 000 people gather here, it would be difficult to put into question the gunmens demand concerning Serzh Sargsyans resignation, he said in conclusion.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and his wife, Janna, work with a technician as they stand on stage at the Quicken Loans Arena, the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
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Cleveland After being twisted and torn over Donald Trumps candidacy, Wisconsin Republicans have come to Cleveland searching for unity, something that hasnt been this elusive in quite some time.
We need to unify, said party activist Mary Buestrin, a longtime member of the Republican National Committee. Its a bit disconcerting to me that I have to actually work on people (to back Trump) that should be automatically just doing this.
There may be no better window into the turmoil Trump has caused in his party than the Wisconsin GOP, which was split every which way over the man who will become the Republican standard-bearer at this weeks four-day convention.
The divisions are all the more striking when you consider that this state was a model of Republican solidarity during the pitched warfare over Gov. Scott Walkers tenure, with conservative leaders, conservative media, tea party activists, business groups, social conservatives, party regulars and elected officials achieving a remarkable degree of cohesion while taking and holding power in Wisconsin.
Theres been a little splintering of the Walker coalition, but well get it back together, state GOP chairman Brad Courtney said.
The last five or six years have strengthened the team (and) put us in a situation where we can handle something like this and get through it in a good way and not be fractured and all over the place, Stephan Thompson, a former state party director and political aide to Walker, said of his fellow Republicans.
Its really just mind-boggling, said Mike Tate, who did battle with a GOP juggernaut in Wisconsin when he served as state chairman of the Democratic Party.
We have two of the stronger state parties in the country, said Tate. To watch (Republicans) sort of reel and careen back and forth is in many ways a microcosm what has been happening nationally in the Republican Party which is how do we handle the Donald Trump candidacy?
The party regulars who make up a large part of the Wisconsin delegation have mostly come around for Trump, out of partisan loyalty and a desire to beat Hillary Clinton. In interviews, many praised Trumps choice of running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as politically and philosophically reassuring.
Assembly Majority Speaker Leader Robin Vos, who has withheld his endorsement, said after arriving here that he hopes to get behind Trump in the coming days.
Our base just wants somebody who can win. Donald Trump has to show this week that he can win and I think people will unify, Vos said.
Despite his clashes with Trump during the primaries, Walker will speak Wednesday night at the convention, where he plans to argue that Democrat Hillary Clinton is wholly unfit to be president, he said in an email to supporters.
But prominent Republicans still couch their support for Trump more in terms of partisan obligation and political necessity than affection or enthusiasm for the candidate.
One of the primary political duties with this job is not to dis-unify our party, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan told National Public Radio last week when asked about his support for Trump.
There are lot of things that I dont like that Trump has said, and there are a lot of things he could have said in a better way than he did. However ...he won the nomination fair and square, said GOP congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, whose district gave Trump his biggest losing margin of any in the country in the presidential primaries.
Citing his partys past success in Wisconsin, Sensenbrenner said, We run the risk (in this election) of losing everything that we have stood for as a result of disunity over Trump.
Wisconsins role at this convention features several twists. The state swung hard against Trump in its April primary. Yet it will leave its stamp all over the Trump convention, with Ryan and national GOP chairman Reince Priebus presiding and six home-state Republicans speaking: Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy on Monday; Ryan and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson on Tuesday; Walker on Wednesday; and Priebus on Thursday.
Wisconsin is the only state Trump lost that was given front-row delegate seating in the convention arena, thanks to its clout in RNC.
And it has played a prominent but conflicting role in the intraparty battles over Trump.
In the run-up to the convention, Wisconsin Republicans Priebus, Buestrin and fellow RNC member Steve King helped squelch efforts by anti-Trump forces to release delegates from their pledges.
But Wisconsin is also home to notable Trump opponents in the party: conservative activist Eric OKeefe, an organizer of the effort to unbind delegates; Never Trump congressman Reid Ribble; and former state party chairman Michael Grebe, who gave up his slot at this convention because I do not want to be part of a process which results in the nomination of Donald Trump.
That one-sentence declaration by Grebe earlier this month stung some Republicans because of his long history in the party as a former counsel to the RNC; the man who ran the 1996 national convention in San Diego; and as a political godfather to Walker and Ryan.
Without naming anyone, Buestrin said she has been shocked that some good, strong party people have continued to withhold their support for Trump.
I cant understand it, because Im a party person. Admittedly, he wasnt my first choice but he is now, she said. And I will work hard to elect him, and thats what they should be doing, too, instead of badmouthing him. I mean, Just keep your mouth shut. Thats the way I feel.
Thiensville village president Van Mobley was one of the few elected officials in the state who backed Trump before the primary.
I think in this case I had better judgment than other people about the strength of his candidacy, said Mobley, who was added to the Wisconsin delegation in Cleveland when someone else dropped out.
He called Trumps double-digit defeat in Wisconsin one of the great mysteries of my life, but said, I see the party coming back together.
GOP voters in the state have begun to coalesce behind Trump, polls suggest.
Back in March, only 36% of Republican voters in Wisconsin viewed Trump favorably, according to a poll by the Marquette Law School. In June, 58% did. And in July, 67% do.
But the partys voters are still less unified behind Trump than Democrats are behind Clinton in Wisconsin and less unified than Republicans were behind nominee Mitt Romney at this stage in 2012.
A quarter of GOP voters in the state still have a negative view of Trump, and 35% remain uncomfortable with him as president.
Ive always believed in politics you cant make the perfect the enemy of the good, said Sensenbrenner.
Asked if that is a persuasive argument to his GOP constituents that voted by large margins against Trump in the primary, Sensenbrenner said: Well see.
Follow Craig Gilbert on Twitter @WisVoter
Graphic: A Trump divide
Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele will endorse Democrat Hillary Clinton for president on Monday.
The former secretary of state shares common ideological ground with Abele, a moderate Democrat on fiscal issues who fought off a challenge in April from liberal state Senator Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee).
In a statement, Abele said that Clinton is ready to be president on her first day in office.
"Secretary Clinton is the best candidate to unite our country and continue moving us forward so that every American has a shot at building their American dream, Abele said. "I am proud of the way in which Hillary has taken a stand on progressive issues, such as a ban on military style assault weapons and defending a woman's right to obtain a safe, legal abortion, while still offering serious, pragmatic solutions to challenges like college affordability and access to quality childcare."
Abele said that Clinton's GOP opponent, real-estate mogul Donald Trump, mixes opportunism with "divisive, racist, and offensive rhetoric."
"Government isnt a game. Citizenship isnt just a word to use in campaign speeches. This country needs a president that understands that, Abele said.
Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, bangs the gavel to officially open the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. Credit: Getty Images
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Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus kicked off the Republican convention in Cleveland with a moment of silence, a nod to what he called "troubling times."
Priebus, who previously served as chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, gaveled in the Republican National Convention shortly after 1 p.m. with a moment of silence in honor of fallen police officers.
"Before we begin the official business of this convention, I would like to take a moment to recognize the fallen police officers in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and elsewhere," Priebus said. "The men and women who protect our safety and well-being, who put their lives on the line every day. Theyre our genuine heroes."
The convention opened just one day after three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the same city where a black man was killed by police two weeks ago.
That shooting followed an ambush attack targeting police in Texas.
Priebus added, We also want to recognize the families who lost loved ones during these troubling times. Our nation grieves when we see these awful killings."
By of the
Two companies totaling 350 jobs are considering moves to downtown Milwaukee's Schlitz Park.
And the business park's operator is seeking a $1.25 million loan from a nonprofit lender to help finance that potential future office space.
The companies are not identified in the information posted Monday by Milwaukee Economic Development Corp., which would provide the financing. MEDC is affiliated with the city, but does not use city funds for its revolving loan fund.
Department of City Development spokesman Jeff Fleming said no additional information is available about the potential tenants.
Both companies are located in the suburban area, said Milwaukee Schlitz Park operator Gary Grunau. He declined to provide additional information, other than to say he hopes to provide details on one of the companies within the next few weeks.
Schlitz RiverCenter LLC, which Grunau owns, would use the MEDC loan to help finance converting warehouse space in the business park's RiverCenter Building, 1555 N. RiverCenter Drive, into offices totaling 80,000 square feet.
That space was formerly used by Assurant Corp.
MEDC's Loan and Finance Committee is to consider the loan at its Tuesday meeting. U.S. Bank would be the primary lender on the $6.73 million project.
Grunau in August 2015 announced plans to convert the former warehouse space into offices and to build an addition at another Schlitz Park building, to accommodate future tenants.
The 1.2 million-square-foot business park is full, thanks in part to the continuing trend of millennial generation members who want to work, live and play in urban areas.
Grunau's plans announced a year ago follow earlier building renovations at Schlitz Park, as well as the demolition of the former Schlitz brew house.
Other changes included a public square to replace the brew house, new fitness centers for office workers, a bike-sharing station, renovations at the Brown Bottle restaurant and the city-financed reopening of W. Galena and N. 2nd streets within Schlitz Park.
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To track this project and others, check out the Land & Space Development Database, at jsonline.com/development
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More than 150 buildings, many of them historic and iconic, will open their doors for visitors as part of Historic Milwaukee's annual Doors Open Milwaukee on Sept. 17-18.
This year's event will include several new buildings, including the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Adventure Rock MKE and Journey House Packers Field.
Special events this year include a behind-the-scenes look at the newly redesigned Karl Ratsch's restaurant with chef and owner Thomas Hauck and an exploration of Milwaukee's harbors and rivers with the Milwaukee Kayak Company and Milwaukee River Keepers.
Other highlights include new passport sites, special spotlights on specific neighborhoods and a Doors Open Slam in collaboration with the storytelling group Ex Fabula.
A revamped web site lets visitors search for buildings by region, area of interest and more.
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A former Dane County sheriff's deputy faces possible felony charges after officials there said she delivered contraband to an inmate in the Dane County Jail, the Dane County Sheriff's Office said Monday.
Former Deputy Victoria Long, who had been on the job for less than a year and was still on probation, was terminated July 11 after an internal investigation found she was involved in an inappropriate relationship with a 27-year-old male inmate.
The Sheriff's Office declined to specify the type of contraband but said it was not drugs or weapons. It has turned the case over to the Dane County district attorney's office for possible charging on five felony counts of delivering contraband to an inmate.
"The Dane County Sheriff's Office has a code of conduct by which our staff is guided as they perform their duties and responsibilities," Sheriff David Mahoney said in a statement. "Former Deputy Long not only betrayed these values by her conduct, she betrayed the public's trust."
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Milwaukee police arrested two suspects in a strong-arm robbery Sunday after they led officers on a pursuit from the city's northwest side into Waukesha County, the Milwaukee Police Department said Monday.
According to police, officers were on patrol near N. 60th St. and W. Capitol Drive shortly before midnight Sunday when they saw a black Nissan Sentra that was reported to have been used in a strong-arm robbery earlier Sunday in the 700 block of E. Ogden Ave.
The officers tried to stop the vehicle, but the driver fled, and they followed, according to police. The pursuit ended in Menomonee Falls where two Milwaukee residents a man and a woman, both 20 were taken into custody.
The department said it would turn the case over to the Milwaukee County district attorney's office for charging later this week.
City Development Commissioner Rocky Marcoux (left) and Ald. Tony Zielinski Credit: Journal Sentinel files
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Critics of City Development Commissioner Rocky Marcoux including Ald. Tony Zielinski are using a 7-year-old battle over a battery factory to argue for his ouster, but officials in the Department of City Development say Zielinski was at fault for the proposal falling apart.
"His actions single-handedly cratered that deal," Jim Paetsch said of Zielinski.
Paetsch is vice president of corporate expansion and attraction at Milwaukee 7 and was involved in discussions with Boston Power, a Massachusetts-based company that wanted to bring a lithium battery factory and 600 jobs to Milwaukee in the middle of the nation's recession. But negotiations stalled in March 2009.
The failure to lure Boston Power to Milwaukee has resurfaced amid discussions of whether Marcoux should keep his job. Marcoux, credited with shepherding successful projects including the Menomonee Valley redevelopment, Century City Business Park, the Pabst Brewery complex, the Water Council area and others, has faced criticism that he is too focused on downtown at the expense of Milwaukee neighborhoods.
Mayor Tom Barrett has recommended Marcoux for a fourth four-year term, and the Zoning, Neighborhood, and Development Committee recommended him to the Common Council. But his confirmation was held up after aldermen voted to send it back to committee this month. Another committee vote is set for Tuesday, and a council vote is scheduled for July 26.
Email correspondence obtained by the Journal Sentinel shows that after Zielinski introduced a Common Council funding measure for the battery factory in March 2009, the Massachusetts congressional delegation previously unaware that the company was looking to build a plant in Wisconsin began lobbying Boston Power to set up its factory in its home state.
Milwaukee development officials were unaware that Zielinski planned to introduce the measure in the Common Council and found out about it from a reporter at a trade publication, according to Paetsch and email correspondence among Paetsch, Marcoux and then-Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud.
"I received a call just now from a reporter at the Daily Reporter asking what I knew about a Common Council resolution authorizing $20m for Boston Power," reads a March 5, 2009, email sent by Paetsch to Marcoux and to Jim Scherer, then vice president of the Milwaukee Economic Development Corp. "Something perhaps Tony is doing?"
Scherer responded: "Tony has introduced a resolution granting (Boston Power) from $1 to $20 M. Just heard about it this afternoon."
The measure was proposed in the Community and Economic Development Committee but never brought to a vote.
Zielinski told the Journal Sentinel last week that he informed Marcoux about his plans to introduce the measure before he did it.
Jeff Fleming, spokesperson for the Department of City Development, said that wasn't true.
"We learned a hard lesson about how important it is to keep your mouth shut before these deals are ready to go public," Fleming said.
Zielinski said he had been in communication with a "very high-level person at Boston Power" throughout the eight-month negotiation process. He said that person knew he was going to propose a funding measure in the Common Council.
Zielinski added that his introduction of a council measure was a "gamble" meant to push Marcoux and Barrett to seal the deal.
"I didn't want to have to introduce the resolution," Zielinski said. "But I couldn't wait any longer because Boston Power is telling me that they're going to go overseas because we're not consummating the agreement."
Zielinski said Boston Power was prepared to close the deal from "day one" of the process, but Marcoux was "hemming and hawing."
Zielinski on Sunday cited an Aug. 8, 2009, email he received from a Boston Power representative thanking him for his support for the plant proposal.
But Paetsch said that before signing on to an agreement, Boston Power would have had to make sure it had secured federal stimulus funding.
"The idea that they were ready to sign on to anything from day one is fiction," he said.
Agreements like the one between Boston Power and the city usually take about 12 to 18 months to complete, Paetsch said.
A meeting between Boston Power and the Department of City Development had been scheduled to take place in April 2009 the month after Zielinski introduced his resolution. A memo drafted for use at that meeting shows the city planned to provide the company with funds through a tax incremental financing district, as well as federal New Markets Tax Credits and Renewal Community Benefits.
The meeting was canceled shortly after Zielinski introduced his resolution.
After the Milwaukee deal fell through, Boston Power settled on Auburn, Mass., as a proposed factory location.
That plan never came to fruition because the company didn't receive the federal stimulus grant.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) checks out the stage during preparation for the Republican National Convention inside Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Sunday. Credit: Associated Press
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House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) should be ousted from his speakership.
He has abdicated his constitutional obligation to enable members of Congress to debate and vote on whether their constituents in the armed forces should be sent abroad to risk that last full measure of devotion in fighting multibillion-dollar gratuitous wars lacking any definition of victory.
The Constitution is clear. Only Congress can authorize the offensive use of the military. President George Washington, who presided over the constitutional convention, sermonized: "The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress. Therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure." Every delegate present at the creation of the Constitution agreed.
The Constitution's architects knew that chronic wars characteristically initiated by the executive to aggrandize power had been the death knell of previous republics. They knew, as Alexis de Tocqueville would later write in "Democracy in America," "that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish" the destruction of "the liberties of a democratic nation."
James Madison, father of the Constitution, explained that the president would be an untrustworthy steward of the war power because of an inherent conflict of interest. The White House would concoct justifications for war to gain fame, secrecy and power at the expense of coequal branches of government and checks and balances. Madison elaborated: "The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legisl."
Notwithstanding the Constitution, President Barack Obama is fighting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) everywhere on the planet without congressional authorization. The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against people complicit in the murderous Sept. 11 abominations has been exhausted. All the culprits have been either captured or killed. A 2002 AUMF authorized military force to defend the United States against the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein. That objective was achieved years ago with Hussein's overthrow, capture, trial and execution.
Ryan has ignored four respectful overtures by up to 35 members of Congress, led by U.S. Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) for a debate and vote on a new AUMF to discharge their constitutional duty. That congressional process is especially urgent because our multiple post-9/11 presidential wars have proved stupendous failures.
We have spent several trillion dollars a substantial fraction of our $19 trillion national debt in post-9/11 conflicts that have created more enemies or dangers than have been killed or extinguished. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified that the international terrorist threat against the United States remains on an upward trajectory as of 2016. Former President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, recently advised, "I don't think military means will bring us peace...We did it for the last 14 years and it didn't bring us that, so how do we know military action will bring us that now?" Obama's military advisers project that the war against ISIL will persist for many decades longer than World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.
Ryan is flouting George Washington, James Madison and the lessons of experience by refusing to instruct the House Foreign Affairs Committee to draft and report a new AUMF for debate and floor vote by members of Congress. If he doesn't want that grave responsibility, he should resign the speakership or be ousted. President Harry Truman put it this way: "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen."
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan, and is author of "American Empire Before The Fall." He is a principal at Fein & DelValle PLLC, specializing in constitutional and international law in Washington, D.C.
People gather Sunday at Quicken Loans Arena as preparations take place for the Republican National Convention. Credit: Associated Press
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I'm proud to call myself a Republican. As our country observes the proceedings of one of America's great political parties this week, I thought it's important to remind my fellow Wisconsinites why so many of us are proud to be Republicans.
It's been 160 years since the first Republican National Convention was held in Philadelphia, a mere two years after the first meeting of anti-slavery activists in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon. The Republican Party was founded on the principles of freedom and equal opportunity. That solid foundation proved to be the building blocks of American exceptionalism. Our inspirational leaders were actually reformers and visionaries; they ended slavery, gave women the right to vote and granted citizenship to Native Americans. Republicans always have led the way in protecting our precious natural resources and created the first national park. While times have changed, our philosophy hasn't. We're the party of free speech, small government, big ideas and individual prosperity. I'm proud of my party.
We all know that the first Republican President was Abraham Lincoln, who ran to stop the spread of slavery. One of the party platform planks adopted at that 1860 convention said, "That the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government; that a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans; while the recent startling developments of frauds and corruptions at the Federal metropolis, show that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded."
While we might not use the same phrases as they did in 1860, it seems the issues we have with the Democratic Party have remained the same.
As we all think about the election in November, Republicans look back to our roots. We always have been the party of reform. We are the party that encourages the entrepreneur, rewards those who work hard to get ahead, respects those who protect us and encourages citizens to help each other and not become dependent on the government.
Many in the media are doing their very best this cycle to make this election about personalities. While that is one aspect of every election, I believe elections really are a clash of ideas. Each party prepares its platform at its convention and presents it to the American people for their review and judgment.
As an American citizen, you get to participate in that battle for the heart and soul of the nation.
There's been a great deal of attention given to a number of delegates and high-profile Republicans who are choosing not to attend the Republican National Convention this week in Cleveland. However, I'm not one of them; I'm excited to play a role at the convention as a delegate for Wisconsin. To me, this convention is really about reaffirming who we are as a party. We are the Grand Old Party. We are a party of ideas, freedom and opportunity.
This positive, forward-looking outlook is what attracts so many to my party. You see, I've been a Republican since before I had my first job as a teenage grocery store bagger. I credit my sixth-grade teacher for explaining the political process and encouraging my conservative political instincts. Since middle school, I've worked countless days at Republican activities. In a few weeks, I'll volunteer again at the GOP tent at the Racine County Fair. I enjoy engaging liberals and conservatives alike about the issues of the day and helping many people to realize they agree with our vision for America. Short and sweet, I'm simply passionate about ideas and about our political system.
One of my favorite presidents, Ronald Reagan said, "The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally not a 20% traitor." I hope my fellow Republicans remember his wisdom this week. Instead of focusing on our differences, we need to rally around our shared vision for a prosperous future, one that shouldn't include a Hillary Clinton presidency or Democratic victories in Congress or the Legislature.
It's time for all of us to engage in that battle of ideas. Every single citizen must participate in that national conversation. My hope is that we return to the basic principles that founded our country, created my party and brought greatness to America.
Whatever your political persuasion, I hope you remember how lucky we are to live in the greatest nation on the planet, where each eligible citizen has the same chance to influence the process with our constitutional right to vote.
Robin Vos is speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly.
State Sen. Lena Taylor (left) faces an election challenge from state Rep. Mandela Barnes in the Aug. 9 Democratic primary Credit: Journal Sentinel files
By of the
A fired aide who has filed a job discrimination complaint against Sen. Lena Taylor is releasing copies of private documents showing an insurance company initially denied her a policy last year, citing her use of marijuana.
But this effort to smear Taylor could fizzle. Not only were the records pilfered from her Senate files, but Taylor and her opponent, Rep. Mandela Barnes, both support full legalization and regulation of marijuana in the state.
The two lawmakers also say they have used the substance in the past but not recently.
"I don't care about anybody's marijuana use," Barnes said last week.
Brandon Jackson, whom Taylor fired this year, provided the Journal Sentinel with copies of two personal letters from Northwestern Long Term Care Insurance Co. addressed to the third-term senator. Jackson has filed an employment complaint against her.
In the first letter, an underwriter for the insurance company said it would not be providing Taylor with a policy for a variety of reasons, including "the resumption of the smoking of marijuana as documented in the medical records of October 6, 2014."
A month later, a second underwriter said the company had decided to issue the policy because the company concluded that her marijuana use "was infrequent enough to fit within our acceptable use guidelines despite not being clarified."
In an interview, Taylor disputed that she had used marijuana in recent years, providing medical records to back up her assertion.
"I'm not using," Taylor said this week at her Milwaukee house. "It's been a long time."
But Taylor said she was particularly upset that the letters had been taken from her Senate files, copied and released.
"Why would he be taking my personal health documents and sharing them with reporters?" she asked. "I don't know. That's inappropriate. As a matter of fact, I think that's illegal in some kind of way."
In her toughest race in years, Taylor is being challenged in the Aug. 9 primary by Barnes, a Milwaukee Democrat who has contended the district needs a more progressive senator.
One area of disagreement: Taylor voted for bills allowing people to carry concealed weapons and establishing the castle doctrine, which provides legal protections to people who shoot home intruders, while Barnes opposed the measures.
Also, Taylor has claimed credit for helping "to save" Milwaukee's voucher program for private schools in 2009 by pushing accountability plan. Barnes, who has the backing of the teachers unions, does not support the school voucher program.
The winner is all but assured of claiming victory in November because no Republican is running in the heavily Democratic district, which includes the city's north side, Glendale, Shorewood and a small portion of Wauwatosa.
Jackson, the former Taylor aide, attempted to run for Barnes' Assembly seat, but election officials kicked him off the ballot because of problems with his nomination papers.
In an interview, Jackson said he has been volunteering for Barnes and Verona Swanigan, a lawyer challenging Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm in his Democratic primary. Fred Ludwig, a spokesman for Barnes, said Jackson is not affiliated with the campaign.
Jackson told the Journal Sentinel that he discovered the insurance letters in a file cabinet in Taylor's Milwaukee Senate office while he was looking for postage in October.
He said he was making the documents public because he was frustrated by how Taylor has responded to his employment complaint. In his complaint, he asserted that Taylor's chief of staff told him he would be terminated or have his pay cut because of challenges he faced with work when his Crohn's disease flared up.
Jackson said he was not worried about any blowback or potential legal issues he could face for releasing private medical information.
"I'm not sure how I can get in trouble for it," he said. "I'm not really worried about the repercussions of it."
Taylor said she couldn't prove it but believes her opponent is behind the release of her insurance documents.
Barnes, 29, said that is not true.
"I hate that this is even a thing right now," Barnes said. "It creates a situation where she thinks I'm behind this. I'm absolutely not."
Asked about his own personal use, Barnes said he smoked marijuana in college but doesn't now. He said he can't recall the last time he used, but he added, "Marijuana is not a taboo thing."
Taylor let a Journal Sentinel reporter review her recent medical records, which did not appear to make any reference to her marijuana use. It was a topic, however, on her Northwestern insurance application.
The form says the senator initially "refused to answer" questions about smoking marijuana, saying the subject was "irrelevant." But then it adds, "Has not used."
Taylor said she was perhaps a little flippant with the Northwestern official.
In addition, the 49-year-old lawmaker said she might have told her family nurse that the last few years in the Legislature have been particularly rough and that she sometimes feels like she should "self-medicate." She also noted that she has some ongoing health issues.
But Taylor was emphatic that she is not using.
Asked if she would use marijuana if it were legal, Taylor said, "If I could medically do that instead of the pain pills and all that stuff they're giving, I surely would."
Both Taylor and Barnes said they favor full legalization such as in Colorado, noting that blacks are five or six times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. The two lawmakers have also backed bills to decriminalize marijuana and to make it legal for medicinal purposes.
A poll by the Marquette University Law School last week found that 59% of registered voters in Wisconsin favored legalizing marijuana like alcohol.
Gov. Scott Walker (left) says he has had three phone conversations with Donald Trump this month. Credit: Journal Sentinel files / Associated Press
By of the
Cleveland Gov. Scott Walker, who was assailed during the GOP primaries by Donald Trump, said he has advised Trump to stop criticizing other Republicans and focus his fire on Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"I said (to Trump) it's unsolicited advice, which I'm sure you get all the time, but it's my suggestion he really limit his comments about other people to Hillary Clinton and to a lesser extent Bill Clinton and Barack Obama," Walker said in an interview Tuesday with the Journal Sentinel.
"Don't talk about other Republicans, don't talk about other people, talk about the contrast between him and Hillary. Most importantly, talk about what you're going to do to make everyday Americans have a better life ... that's the best way to unite the party," Walker said.
The governor said Trump made it clear he found it frustrating that some Republicans have not gotten behind his nomination.
"I said, 'Don't worry about them. You won the primary. The best way to unite us as Republicans is to show your real opponent is Hillary Clinton,'" he said, referring to a conversation that took place in early July.
Walker, who is scheduled to speak Wednesday night at the convention, said he has had three phone conversations with Trump this month, beginning with that discussion at the beginning of July of Walker's speaking role at this week's convention.
The Wisconsin governor had an adversarial relationship with Trump during the primaries, and at the time he withdrew last fall, Walker urged other GOP candidates to coalesce against Trump.
Asked if he has a more positive view of Trump today than he did then, Walker said, "Absolutely, in particular this last week. I'm a huge fan of Mike Pence."
Pence, the Republican governor of Indiana, was named Trump's running mate Friday.
"The Mike Pence decision this week to me is a sign that this is somebody who is actually thinking about how to govern," Walker said of Trump.
Walker said he was not bothered by the broadsides Trump aimed at him when they were rival presidential candidates.
Trump resumed his attacks on Walker during April's Wisconsin primary, where Walker and other GOP leaders rallied behind Republican candidate Ted Cruz in what turned out to be a resounding defeat for Trump.
"He was critical of everybody and anybody he was running against. I don't take that personally. I've had far worse said about me, so that doesn't bother me. From my standpoint, that's just part of who he is. Whether you agree or disagree, it's hard to ignore the fact that for a lot of Americans his candor ... is appealing," said Walker. "I said last August any of the people on stage with me at that first debate were better than Hillary Clinton ... I think it's clearly true."
Walker said he was asked to appear at the convention by fellow Wisconsinite Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, who suggested that Walker and Trump speak to each other about it. The governor said Trump has called him twice since that first conversation to talk about the convention and the election.
Walker said of his upcoming speech:
"It's important at the convention, where you've got a nationwide audience, to talk about what Republicans are for and how we can do better ... than we would if Hillary Clinton were president."
Walker said he will pit the record of GOP governors against that of President Obama.
"That makes for a good argument that you put (in office) not just a Republican but in this case a Republican who's willing to shake up Washington," he said of Trump.
'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.
A Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department boat heads out to join other authorities continuing their search. Credit: Mark Hoffman
By of the
The Coast Guard is searching for two people who were swept into Lake Michigan from a Sheboygan pier Sunday afternoon.
High waves that broke over the pier swept three men into the lake around 3:45 p.m. and one of the men was recovered safely. The Coast Guard was still searching for two other people seen in the water, said Chief Jason Dwyer at Coast Guard Station Milwaukee.
The three were standing on a pier at the south break wall in Sheboygan when the incident happened as high winds created large waves on Lake Michigan.
"The water was coming over the break wall and it's been coming over the wall ever since," said Dwyer.
The man pulled from the lake was taken to Sheboygan Aurora Medical Center. His condition was not known.
The Sheboygan County Dive Team was unable to continue a dive operation because of the treacherous water conditions and will assess the lake conditions and make a decision of when they will resume operations on Monday morning. Boat and helicopter searches continue.
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By Rebecca Gordon | ( Tomdispatch.com ) |
Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. Its a shiny video game for grown ups a Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion weve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). Its a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
The Rise of the Drones
The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001 in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under Obama, with an actual White House kill list, the use of drones has again expanded, this time nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones.
Theres an obvious appeal to a technology that allows pilots for the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, or the Air Force to sit safely in front of video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in the U.S., while killing people half a world away. This is especially true for a president running a global war with a public that does not easily accept American casualties and a Congress that prefers not to be responsible for war and peace decision-making. Drone assassinations have allowed President Obama to spread the war on terror to ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S. casualties or congressional oversight and approval.
One problem has, however, dogged the drone program from the beginning: just like conventional air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to kill the wrong people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians killed by drones has been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by, although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists have done a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and offering reasonable estimates.
Analysis from all these sources suggests that there are at least three reasons why civilians die in such attacks.
1. The intelligence information on the individual targeted is often wrong. He isnt where they think he is, or he isnt even who they think he is. For example, in 2014 a British human rights organization, Reprieve, compiled data on drone strikes that targeted specific individuals in Yemen and Pakistan. According to the Guardian, Reprieves work
indicates that even when operators target specific individuals the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls targeted killing they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November [2014].
Some of these men were reported in the media as killed multiple times. Even if they didnt die in the first, second, and in some cases third attempts, other people certainly did. Reprieve also reports one particularly egregious case of mistaken identity:
Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administrations kill list was killed on the third attempt by U.S. drones. His brother was captured, interrogated, and encouraged to tell the Americans what they want to hear: that they had in fact killed the right person.
2. There isnt even a named target. The CIA has long based drone assassination targeting for many missions not on direct intelligence about a particular individual, but on what it calls the signature of possible terrorist activity (that is, the behavior or look of people below). Such signature strikes target unidentified individuals based on some suspicious activity, usually picked up through drone surveillance. Such a signature can be as ill defined as a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged, traveling in convoys or carrying weapons in countries where many men may be armed. Unfortunately, while such a gathering may indeed indicate some kind of military activity, it may also describe a rural wedding in, say, Yemen, involving driving in convoy from the grooms town to the brides, accompanied sometimes by celebratory gunfire.
Not everyone in the government is convinced that signature strikes are a good idea. In 2012, the New York Times reported this joke at the State Department: When the C.I.A. sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.
The fact that signature strikes continue to this day suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry was not entirely truthful when, in 2013, he said at a BBC forum: The only people that we fire a drone at are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level after a great deal of vetting that takes a long period of time. We dont just fire a drone at somebody and think theyre a terrorist.
3. They were in the way, and so became collateral damage. This is the term military theorists regularly use to describe human beings or civilian infrastructure unavoidably destroyed in an attack on a legitimate military target. Of course, a drone operators understanding of the term unavoidable may be different from that of a woman who has just lost three of her four sons as they were returning home from shopping for supplies to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
In addition, drone strikes dont just kill people, including women and children; they also destroy buildings and other property. For example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that, in Pakistan, more than 60% of all strikes target domestic buildings peoples houses. In other words, collateral damage often refers to the destruction of the homes of any survivors of a drone attack.
Not surprisingly, people dont like living in terror of deadly missiles screaming out of a clear blue sky. Many observers have argued that terrorist organizations have used widespread fear and anger over drone attacks as a recruiting tool. Al-Qaeda and ISIS appear to offer Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others an alternative to simply waiting for an attack they cant prevent. The CIA itself recognized the counterproductive potential of drone killings, which they call HVT [High Value Target] operations. A leaked July 2009 CIA report on Best Practices in Counter-Insurgency outlines the issues:
Potential negative effects of HVT operations include increasing the level of insurgent support, causing a government to neglect other aspects of its counterinsurgency strategy, altering insurgent strategy or organization in ways that favor the insurgents, strengthening an armed groups bond with the population, radicalizing an insurgent groups remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or deescalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.
So there are long-term strategic problems with targeted killings by drone. In addition, drones may help spread and intensify terror movements and insurgencies, rather than destroying them or their leaderships. Often, as Andrew Cockburn has made clear in his book Kill Chain, the successors to leaders assassinated by drone turn out to be younger, more effective, and more brutal.
There is, however, another problem with this sort of warfare. Such killings at least when they take place outside a declared war zone are almost certainly illegal; that is, they are murders, plain and simple.
Targeted Killing Is Murder
In my household we have a rule: were not allowed to kill something just because were afraid of it. This has saved the lives of countless spiders and other creatures sporting (in my view at least) too many legs.
Whatever your view on arachnids, should it really be permissible to kill people simply because we are afraid of them? After all, thats what these drone assassinations are extrajudicial executions of people someone believes we should be afraid of. It is easier to see an illegal execution for what it is when the killer is not separated from the target by thousands of miles and a video screen. Drone technology is really a Trojan Horse, a distracting, glitzy means of smuggling an illegal and immoral tactic into the heart of U.S. foreign relations.
Not all killing is illegal, of course. There are situations in which both international and U.S. laws permit killing. One of these is self-defense; another is war. However, a war waged against a tactic (terrorism), or even more vaguely, against an emotion (terror) is only metaphorically a war. Under international law, real wars, in which it is legal to kill the enemy, involve sustained combat between organized military forces.
Outside of the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now possibly Syria (where Congress has arguably never even declared war), the war on terror is not a war at all. It is instead a conflict with an ever-expanding list of targets, no defined geographical boundaries, and no foreseeable endpoint. It is a campaign against any conceivable potential U.S. enemy, fought in fits and starts in many countries on several continents. It involves ongoing covert operations largely hidden from everyone except its targets. As an undertaking, it lacks the regular, sustained conflict between armies that characterizes war in the legal sense. Such operations fit another category far better: assassination, illegal at least since President Jimmy Carters Executive Order 12036, which stated, No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Nor is the Middle East the only region where the United States is using targeted killing outside a shooting war. The U.S. military also deploys drones in parts of Africa. In fact, President Obamas nominee to head U.S. Africa Command, Marine Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, recently told Senator Lindsay Graham that he thinks he should be free to order drone killings on his own authority.
So much for war and war. What about self-defense? At every stage of the war on terror, Washington has claimed self-defense. That was the explanation for rounding up hundreds of Muslims living in the U.S. immediately after the attacks of 9/11, torturing some of them, and holding them incommunicado for months in a Brooklyn, New York, jail. It was the excuse offered for beginning torture programs in CIA black sites and at Guantanamo. It was the reason the U.S. gave for invading Afghanistan, and later for invading Iraq before, as Bush administration representatives and the president himself kept saying, the smoking gun of Saddam Husseins supposed weapons of mass destruction turned into a mushroom cloud over, presumably, some American city.
And self-defense has been the Justice Departments rationale for targeted killing as well. In a November 2011 paper prepared by that department for the White House, its author (identity unknown) outlined the necessary conditions to make a targeted killing legal:
(1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
(2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and
(3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.
That would seem to rule out most U.S. targeted killings. Few of their targets were people on the verge of a violent attack on the United States or U.S. soldiers in the field. Ah, but in the through-the-looking-glass logic of the Obama Justice Department, imminent turns out not to mean imminent in the sense that something is about to happen. As that document explains: The condition that an operational leader present an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.
It turns out that the threat from any operational leader is always imminent, because with respect to al-Qaeda leaders who are continually planning attacks, the United States is likely to have only a limited window of opportunity within which to defend Americans. In other words, once a person has been identified as an al-Qaeda or allied group leader, he is by definition continually planning attacks, always represents an imminent danger, and so is a legitimate target. Q.E.D.
In fact, few enough of these targeted killings, including the signature ones can be defended as instances of self-defense. We should call them what they really are: extrajudicial executions.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions has agreed with this view. In his 2013 report to the General Assembly, Christof Heyns noted that international human rights law guarantees a right to life. This right is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and given legal force in, among other treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party. There certainly are legal limits to the right to life, including in countries that have the death penalty the states right to execute a person after a legitimate trial. To execute someone without a trial, however, is an extrajudicial killing and a human rights crime.
Obama Comes Clean
By the middle of President Obamas second term in office, criticism of this extrajudicial killing program, and especially of the civilian deaths involved, had mushroomed. So, in May 2013, at least 11 years after the program was launched, the president announced a shift in drone strategy, telling an audience at the National Defense University that the U.S. would engage in targeted killings of al-Qaeda militants only when there was a near-certainty that no civilians would be injured. He added that he was planning to make the drone program more transparent than it had been and to transfer most of its operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.
In the two years since, little of this has happened. Although Obama has continued the job of personally approving drone targets, the CIA still runs much of the program.
On July 1st, he did finally take a step towards providing greater transparency. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report stating that, outside of more conventional war zones like those in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have killed 64 to 116 civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups. These estimates are, in fact, quite a bit lower than those supplied by the various groups that track such killings. Note as well that, legally speaking, not only the collateral damage victims, but all those that Americans identified as members of terrorist groups died via illegal, extrajudicial executions.
The document fulfills one of the requirements of a newly issued executive order, which, among other things, requires the government to release a report by May 1st of each year containing information about the number of strikes undertaken by the U.S. Government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities [i.e., outside genuine war zones] for the previous calendar year.
Attached to the executive order was a fact sheet, which noted that one goal of the new executive order is to set standards for other nations to follow. How happy would the United States really be if other nations decided that they had the right to kill anyone who scares them? How would the United States react if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decided to take out a U.S. general or two, on the grounds that, since the U.S. is supporting forces that seek to depose him, those generals are (as the Fact Sheet puts it) targetable in the exercise of national self-defense?
Some critics of the Obama drone program have welcomed the executive order, which does include a new emphasis on protecting civilians. But the larger effect of the order is to make the practice of illegal assassination a permanent feature of U.S. policy. It assumes that we can expect an annual murder toll announcement for years to come. No future is contemplated in which the United States will not be raining death from the sky on people who cannot defend themselves. The drones will continue to fly, but the Trojan Drones work is complete.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture and most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. She can be contacted at www.mainstreamingtorture.org.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardts latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon
Via Tomdispatch.com
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London (Informed Comment) As Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian forces squeeze its territory in the Arab world and Turkey hunts down the groups support networks and sympathisers inside its territory, it can seem like the days of Islamic State (IS) are finally numbered after a two year reign of terror in the region.
However it is worth remembering then that the West and local actors have been here before, when the predecessor group to IS was standing on the brink of defeat in the late 2000s. Following the US withdrawal however, the chance to prevent its re-emergence by inviting the Iraqi Sunni community into the Iraqi political mainstream was missed and the Sunni jihadi group was allowed the opportunity to rebuild and remerge.
The past history of IS is a salutary reminder that after the groups defeat this time around the devastated areas it has occupied in Syria and particularly Iraq will need to be rebuilt and re-engaged in the political process, if the violence is ever to end and these fragmented states to be rebuilt.
Ten years ago this summer the Jordanian national known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by two US laser guided bombs when the safehouse he was attending a meeting at was targeted by the US occupation forces.
Between 2003-2006 the network of Sunni Islamic extremists Zarqawi had originally founded in Afghanistan became notorious across Iraq for its cruelty and extreme sectarianism towards non-Sunni Muslims. But the death of its leader did not stop the anti-occupation insurgency in Iraq nor put an end to the group he had founded, then called Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
AQI went on to merge with other Sunni militant groups in the country and subsequently renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), continuing a campaign of terror against Iraqs Shia civilian population that helped to spark a sectarian war in Iraq.
However ISI went into a pronounced decline shortly after Zarqawis death under the impact of the much mythologized American Surge which bribed former Sunni tribal allies to turn against the network and killed scores of top leaders and hundreds of its militants.
The events of 2006-8 showed how vulnerable the AQI/ISI organisation could be when concerted pressure was applied against it simultaneously from without and within the Iraqi Sunni community. However it was not the end of the road for Zarqawis old group quite yet; retreating to lick its wounds around Mosul, the group was gradually able to reconstitute itself as the speartip of Sunni opposition to the bigoted and dictatorial rule of former Iraqi strongman Nouri al-Maliki following the American withdrawal in 2011.
Here is the heart of the problem for Western leaders as IS falters today; though al-Maliki was deposed at the insistence of President Obama as the price of renewed American aid after the forces of IS swept up to the gates of Baghdad in 2014, both his governing chauvinistic Dawa Party and the corrupt patronage system bequeathed to Iraq by its American and British occupiers remain intact.
This augurs badly for efforts at reconciliation after IS loses its twin capitals in Mosul and Raqqa because the bedrock of support for IS has always been within the Iraqi Sunni community.
While IS took advantage of the partial collapse of the Assad regime to expand into Syria, many Syrian jihadists subsequently defected to al-Qaedas local franchise Jabhat al-Nusra. Sunnis form the confessional majority inside Syria and while many feel marginalised by the present Alawite-dominated Assad regime, their numerical strength means the community is likely to gain political strength from any settlement at the end of Syrias civil war.
The same cannot be said of Iraqs once-dominant Sunnis, whose home areas have been devastated by repeated bouts of fighting and who have never regained the position they lost after the US/UK invasion in 2003. Too many Iraqi Shia do not trust the Sunni community and are determined to make sure it remains marginalised inside Iraqi politics.
This is a self-defeating proposition if western Iraq is neither to break away nor be the subject to massive sectarian cleansing as Baghdad was before the US Surge. It is noticeable armed opposition to Iraqs new order escalated sharply after the failure of Sunnis to break back into the political life of Iraq in the 2010 elections and the brutal official response to subsequent protests.
In 2010 the Sunni community felt cheated when it backed the mixed community Iraqi National Movement bloc under Ayad Allawi which won a narrow plurality of seats in the Iraqi parliament, only to see the Iraqi courts promptly declare that incumbent al-Maliki had the first right to form a new government.
To form this new government Al-Maliki joined forces with hardline Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadrs Sadrist movement, whose militias had been behind much of the sectarian killings of Sunnis in Baghdad. Al-Maliki then began declaring the Iraqi National Movement supported the banned Baath party and arresting prominent Sunni politicians he accused of involvement in terrorism. Sunnis started to protest on the streets of major Iraqi cities, and when these were attacked by the security forces the protests became an armed revolt against Baghdad.
If history is not to repeat itself after the fall of IS then the door to real talks must be open to the Iraqi Sunni community. Many Sunnis would be interested in entering into a genuine political dialogue with the Iraqi central government around regional autonomy for the six Sunni Iraqi provinces, and perhaps funding for jobs, in exchange for the expulsion of any remnants of Sunni extremist groups. After all the confrontational strategy employed by these militant groups has cost Iraqs Sunnis thousands of lives and practically destroyed important Sunni centres like Ramadi.
Following the dissolution of Islamic States so-called Caliphate, the movement will probably attempt to repeat the trick it pulled after the Surge and fade into the fabric of Iraqs Sunni areas, only to return later to launch a terrorist campaign aimed at Shia civilian areas. The IS movement has proved adept at moving between conventional and guerrilla warfare whilst maintaining terrorist cells to strike abroad or at home if it needs to distract attention from a particular setback.
The international community should push the authorities in Baghdad hard at this point not to treat the Sunni provinces of Iraq as occupied territory and thus repeat the mistakes of the past ten years. That would just retroactively legitimise the harsh rule of IS in the areas it conquered when the objective should be to provide a better standard of government entirely after the groups awful reign. Only reconciliation, autonomy and economic aid can now break the appeal of the political programme of extremist jihadi networks once and for all among Iraqs Sunni youth.
Outsiders have long found it difficult to control events in Iraqs fractious politics, and even the dominant Iraqi Shia community has split between nationalist and pro-Iranian groups with conflicting agendas. However the collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014 has demonstrated to Baghdads Shia leaders that they cannot control Sunni areas by force, and has reopened the door to American military influence. Furthermore whilst Shia popular militias have proven good at taking back lost territory with heavy US and Iranian support they have been unable to prevent mass-casualty terrorist attacks while groups like IS operate from Sunni areas. Keeping soft targets in Shia areas safe will require Sunnis to cooperate in dismantling the terrorist cells that perpetuate the violence.
The point that Iraqs civil war resumed with unprecedented ferocity after former Prime Minister Al-Maliki threw away the cobbled together settlement bequeathed to him by the US is one President Obama should remind his successors about now. Moreover whilst the US will work with the Iraqi army, Washington and the Shia militias try to avoid cooperating together publically. This is actually an advantage for American influence because while the Dawa Party, the main player in the ruling Shia coalition, controls the purse strings it lacks its own militia and must rely on the Iraqi army a point in Washingtons favour.
The formation of the Iraqi National Movement proves that Iraqi Sunni and Shia political factions can work together inside Iraqs political system, if only for reasons of self-interest. While the fight against IS is still ongoing is the time to seek out Iraqi Sunni leaders who might be willing to cooperate against the militants if it means keeping dubious Shia militias out of their areas. Washington should use the leverage its backing of the Iraqi army gives it with the ruling circles in Baghdad to push for Sunni forces to secure some Sunni areas as a small start to mutual reconciliation between the two communities in Iraq.
Neil Thompson is a freelance writer who has lived and travelled extensively through East Asia and the Middle East. He holds an MA in the International Relations of East Asia from Durham University, and is now based in London.
Related video added by Juan Cole:
Wochit News: ISIS On The Decline
It is natural that the NSS calls us terrorists - Varujan Avetisyan
Interview with Varujan Avetisyan, one of the militants that attacked and seized a police compound in Yerevan on Sunday morning. Why do you hold Armenia's deputy police chief, General Major Vardan Yegiazaryan and Yerevan deputy police chief, Colonel Valeri Osipyan as hostages? And what's the difference between them and other police officers. It is better that they are high ranking officials. They are greater guarantee for us under these conditions. There is an opinion that by storming the building and killing one police officer you confirmed the accusations against Jirayr Sefilyan. Of course, I shall disagree with the opinion. Jirayr Sefilyan has nothing to do with the attack. The problem must be considered in a wider context. If the power of people is usurped inside a country and they have no other way to re-establish their power, an armed rebellion remains the only option. People have the right to rebel against an unjust regime which is enshrined in the international law and even in the constitution of a number of countries. In general, the constitution of all democratic countries says power belongs to the people of that country. people have the right to re-establish their power in any way, including an armed rebellion. We served an example for our people by organizing an armed uprising and we hope that sooner or later our example will be contagious and the power of people will be eventually established in our country. As for people who express such an opinion deluding our people I can only say that they either cooperate with the people who usurped power in Armenia or are their associates. I cannot call these people by other names because if someone does not want people to restore their power in their own country, it is clear who that person is and what interests he/she serves. Mr Avetisyan, who did you choose Erebuni Police station? That is a tactical and technical issue, considering the accessibility and convenience of the building. I cannot reveal more details. Some reports suggest that you have two injured persons in the group. Is it right? No, we do not have any injured members. Some have light injuries but they cannot be considered serious. Alek Yenigomshyan, a member of the secretariat of the Founding Parliament opposition group, said today that two of the hostage takers are injured and one of them is in a critical condition. We have people with slight injuries but none of them is in a critical condition. One has a bullet graze but his life is not in danger, the other, who hit the windscreen of the vehicle with his head, has a fracture on his head. He feels well, too. Mr Avetisyan, you were armed when you stormed the police compound, werent you? Naturally, we were. We could not otherwise. Do you know that the National Security Service called you terrorists and said you pose a danger to Armenia? The NSS is one of the main structures that serves the interests of the criminal regime. It is natural that NSS calls us terrorists. In general, any person who wants to overthrow dictators and takes steps to end their dictatorship is a terrorist or criminal for them who should be made liable for his actions. And when people win, we have Ceausescu, Yanukovych and Gaddafi. This should not be viewed in the range of interests of 26 Baghramyan, NSS and police. It is a superficial and wrong approach. Dont you think that you were called terrorists to ease your destruction by the law enforcement bodies, I am sorry for saying this. Surely, you are right, there can be no second opinion. You also demand Serzh Sargsyan's resignation. Would like to negotiate with Serzh Sargsyan tete-a-tete? That is one of our main demands. That is our approach and we present it. It can become realistic when people take to the street. I have already said that we were serving an example to the people and we hoped that popular outbreak will occur. Dont you consider Sargsyans resignation realistic at this point? Surely, not, if we have so many people beside us t this moment. It would be naive to express the opposite opinion. The ratio of forces is very important in politics. We cannot make such conclusions at this moment. Our demands remain in force but we cannot expect such a turn of events, that is not correct What is the difference between your actions and terrorism? I have already answered the question. Terrorism is a completely different thing that has terrorist and criminal purposes and employs terrorist methods. We did not perform a terrorist act, we planned an uprising. Are you ready to stand before justice? But we do not have fair courts in Armenia. We also revolted against injustice in the country. Thank you
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |
Newt Gingrich suggested late last week on cable tv that Muslim Americans should be asked if they believe in sharia and if they answer yes, they should be deported. You cant deport US citizens, so the whole remark was ridiculous.
Sharia for Muslims is the equivalent of Canon Law for Catholics, Halakhah for Jews, and I guess the entire Bible for some fundamentalists (though there are laws in Deuteronomy that it is hard to imagine anyone actually practicing). All religions have laws. Sharia is the Muslim one. But it is fluid and an arena of contention within Islam. It forbids murder, theft, adultery, and drinking. Youd think people would be happy about all that. In any case, observant Muslims would all say they believe in sharia, just as observant Jews would say that the believe in Halakhah or observant Catholics would say they believe in canon law.
Although most interpretations of sharia frown on same-sex marriage, American Muslims are more likely to support it than are US evangelicals. That datum is an example of what I mean when I say it is fluid and an arena of contention. And by the way, whatever the Vatican says, http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/catholic/2001/01/the-catholic-abortion-paradox.aspxAmerican Catholics have a higher abortion rate than Protestants. You cant read off things from abstract data about peoples religion.
The American right wing (or far right; how could you tell anymore?) has tried to substitute sharia for the Communist Manifesto, attempting to configure it as radical or inherently un-American. The American Right never got over losing Communism as a boogey man with which to threaten people into accepting lower wages and being obedient to . . . the American Right. So it wants to shoehorn everyday Muslims into that role, on the grounds that sharia involves jihad or holy war. But in Shiite Islam, for instance, offensive holy war is forbidden under todays circumstances. And in mainstream Sunni Islam, state authority would have to declare it, and I dont know of any that have any time recently (you cant imagine secular leaders like Egypts Abdel Fattah al-Sisi or Caid Beiji al-Sebsi talking that way). It is only for fringe extremists that vigilanteism is allowed, and that is true in all religions.
One of the alleged grounds on which people like Gingrich attack Muslim religious law is that they say they fear the 1% of Americans who are Muslims will try to impose it on everyone else. That allegation is also ridiculous.
But there is a religious law that poses such a danger to secular and liberal traditions in the United States and that is the evangelical sharia, to which Trump running mate Mike Pence is devoted.
Pence is welcome to his own private beliefs. But he wants to impose Evangelical beliefs on all Americans.
1. Pence wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion made illegal. He holds this position because of an unprovable, unscientific belief that the human person begins at conception (not something held by traditional Christianity). Pence wants to take control of 150 million womens bodies in the United States and to inscribe his Christian sharia on them, getting in between them and their physicians. He wants to make thousands of pregnant rape victims every year bear their rapists baby. He wants his theology to be a ghostly presence in every OB-GYN consultation. And he wants to do this in the teeth of settled secular law. He actually signed a law requiring burial or cremation for aborted fetuses.
2. Pences personal and narrow theology has to be imposed on the rest of us even at the level of foreign policy. He said at an AIPAC conference, Let me say emphatically, like the overwhelming majority of my constituents, my Christian faith compels me to cherish the state of Israel. If he had said that his Christian faith requires him to cherish the state of Argentina or Thailand or North Korea, wed want to know why his weird doctrines should shape US foreign policy. There is in contrast no unanimity among American Muslims that the US must cherish any foreign state.
3. Pence pushed for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. There are no secular grounds for opposing this simple human right. He is against gay marriage because of some strange interpretation he has of some Bible verse (there isnt anything about what we call gays in the Bible). Some conservative Muslims are against same-sex marriage on religious grounds, as well. So why is it bad if they deploy their theology for social legislation but good if Pence does it? Shouldnt these decisions in a country with a separation of religion and state be made on rational grounds? Pence in essence wants to Establish a religion as the source of American law, which the First Amendment expressly forbids. And no, the Bible doesnt say that marriage is between one man and one woman.
4. He signed a bill allowing people to discriminate against gays (and I guess against African-Americans or anyone else) if their religious beliefs tell them to. In other words, he is putting Evangelical sharia above the secular law, exactly what Gingrich accuses Muslims of wanting to do (but which few American Muslims would even want to). White Christian anti-civil rights groups in 1964 also argued that their religion required racial segregation, and by Pences logic they should be allowed to discriminate against Black people if their reading of the Bible makes that obligatory.
5. Pence opposed stem cell research done with stem cells taken from aborted fetuses, even though aborting fetuses is legal and even though stem cell therapies are extremely promising. As it happens, science has advanced to the point where stem cells can be acquired in other ways. But the point is that Pence would rather have doomed quadriplegics to permanent paralysis rather than back down from his weird theological position that blastocytes are people (which requires us to believe that miscarriages of 3-day-olds in the toilet are a form of human death; wed all have a lot of dead siblings to mourn in such a bizarro world).
Pence and other people of faith are welcome to believe and practice as they will in the United States thats one of the purposes of the United States. I personally admire people of strong faith and conviction. But they are not welcome to Establish an official religion here and impose that religions laws on everybody; preventing that kind of thing is also one of the purposes of the United States. Muslim Americans are a tiny group and are in no position to impose anything on anyone. But Pence represents a quarter of Americans and nearly half of Republicans, and his wacky ideas could easily become law.
Related video added by Juan Cole:
Wochit News: Trumps New VP Is Seriously Anti-LGBT And Anti-Abortion
Vancouver, BC, Canada / TheNewswire / July 18, 2016 - Rock Tech Lithium Inc. (the "Company") (TSX-V: RCK; Frankfurt: RJIB), is pleased to announce that it has entered into a consulting agreement with Arriva Management Inc. ("Arriva") to provide technical geologic and strategic consulting to the Company. The Company is preparing to launch an exploration program at its 100%-owned Georgia Lake lithium property. Arriva's technical team will work alongside Rock Tech's well experienced field explorers who have years of experience at Georgia Lake. The Company is poised to act immediately upon the recently announced closing of its private placement financing of more than C$1,000,000 earlier this month (see news release July 5, 2016).
The Georgia Lake exploration program will have a robust and diverse field component and Arriva will assist with guidance on this program and other strategic and technical advice on the Company's further property development. This will include broader support with scientific, exploration and strategic relationships, and the identification, evaluation and potential acquisition of additional battery metal projects.
Martin Stephan, CEO of Rock Tech Lithium, comments: "We are currently expanding the knowledge and skills of our company, on our way to becoming a key player in the field of lithium and battery metals. We are very happy to announce the agreement with Arriva, an expert firm with high project and implementation skills in the exploration and mining sector. We have known their team for years and Arriva is closing a gap in our knowledge base and will support us in accelerating the further development of our Georgia Lake lithium project as well as entering into complementing projects."
As partial compensation for the services to be provided, Arriva will receive USD$22,500 worth of common shares of the Company. The common shares will be paid in tranches after services have been rendered, per the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange.
The agreement and all securities proposed to be issued thereunder are subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.
About Arriva Management Inc.
Arriva is a private, Canada-based consulting firm serving the mineral resources sector. Working with a number of experienced mining and mineral exploration experts providing a wide range of mineral exploration expertise, Arriva is an excellent fit for Rock Tech's growth plans. Arriva strives to provide information and services that deliver quality and speed to exploration programs. With experience in working in various parts of the world, Arriva offers a global perspective and is on top of current trends.
About Rock Tech Lithium Inc.
Rock Tech Lithium is an exploration company focused on acquiring and exploring properties in the field of lithium and other selected battery metals.
The Company's 100%-owned Georgia Lake lithium property, located northeast of Thunder Bay, Ontario, has an NI 43-101 compliant indicated resource estimate of 3.19 million tonnes grading 1.10% lithium oxide in addition to an inferred resource estimate 6.31 million tonnes grading 1.00% lithium oxide. To download the NI 43-101 resource estimate and learn more about Rock Tech, please visit our website at www.rocktechlithium.com.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Company,
"MARTIN STEPHAN"
Martin Stephan
Director, Chief Executive Officer
For further information, please contact:
Brad Barnett
Chief Financial Officer
Rock Tech Lithium Inc.
1021 West Hastings Street, Suite 900
Vancouver, B.C., V6E 0C3
Telephone: (604) 558-5123
Facsimile: (604) 670-0033
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Statements included in this announcement, including statements concerning our plans, intentions and expectations, which are not historical in nature are intended to be, and are hereby identified as, "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements may be identified by words including "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "expects" and similar expressions. The Company cautions readers that forward-looking statements, including without limitation those relating to the Company's future operations and business prospects, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.
Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, July 18, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aben Resources Ltd. (TSX-V:ABN) (OTCBB:ABNAF) (Frankfurt:E2L2) (the Company) is pleased to announce, further to its news release on July 06th, the TSX Venture Exchange has accepted for filing three agreements with third-parties whereby the Company will acquire a 100% interest in the 23,000 hectare Forrest Kerr Gold Project within B.C.s Golden Triangle region north of Stewart, B.C. The Golden Triangle is host to significant mineral deposits including Galore Creek, Copper Canyon, Schaft Creek, Valley of the Kings, Snowfield, KSM, Snip, Granduc, Red-Chris and numerous others.
See Forrest Kerr project, Golden Triangle area map:
Abens Forrest Kerr land package is located along the Forrest Kerr Fault, immediately north of the Iskut River and southward of More Creek, with recent road access afforded to the northern and southern limits of the property. The claims consist of a 40km-long north-south belt overlying rocks of the Hazelton and Stuhini Groups, a complex assemblage of volcanic accumulations with intervening sedimentary sequences which are host to significant gold deposits in the Golden Triangle area.
Historical drilling and field work done through the project area in the past hosts numerous high-grade gold, silver, and base metal mineral showings as well as past drill results.
High-lights include:
RDN drill-hole RG91-16, at the Boundary Zone, returned 10.2 g/t gold over 17m (including 359.7 g/t gold over 0.45m) and RG91-21 which returned 101.0 g/t Au over 1.95m and 137.8 g/t Au over 0.85m (true width unknown). Many of these intercepts, interpreted to be possible feeder zones to a precious metal VMS system, are yet to be followed up.
1990 drilling at the Triple Creek Zone to the south returned up to 39.7m grading 1.78 g/t Au (including 2.0m grading 5.9 g/t Au, 190.0 g/t Ag and 12.4% Cu).
Notable sample occurrences include: Jungle (25.5 g/t float); For (15.85% Cu in narrow veins; Forgold (30.5 g/tAu and 15.85% Cu in narrow veins); Falls (22.11 g/t Au, .32% Cu-grab); Marmot Heights (45.57 g/t Au-grab).
Aben has not been able to independently verify the methodology and results from historical work programs within the property boundaries. However, management believes that the historical work programs have been conducted in a professional manner and the quality of data and information produced from them are relevant.
2016 Forrest Kerr Exploration Activity
Aben intends to immediately initiate a comprehensive data compilation, bringing all historical work into a single GIS database. This work will be followed by fieldwork aimed at determining drill targets for a possible fall 2016 drilling campaign. Permitting for the drilling activity is currently underway.
Forrest Kerr Area History
Interest in the Golden Triangle region of British Columbia dates back to 1861 when placer gold was discovered at the confluence of the Stikine and Anuk rivers sparking the Stikine Gold Rush. Large-scale lode mining first took place at the Premier Mine located north of Stewart in 1918. In 1964, Cominco discovered the Snip deposit, which commenced operation in 1991, ultimately producing over 1.1 million ounces at an average grade of 27.5 g/t. Eskay Creek was discovered in 1988 and ultimately produced in excess of 3 million ounces of gold and 160 million ounces of silver, in addition to appreciable lead and zinc. Pretivm Resources in June 2014 announced updated Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves at Valley of the Kings containing 6.9 million ounces of gold from 13.5 Mt ore grading 15.7 g/t gold, with commercial production scheduled for 2017. Management cautions that past results or discoveries on proximate land are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be achieved on the subject properties.
Systematic exploration within regions of the Forrest Kerr project area commenced in the mid-1980s and saw continuous exploration programs from 1988 to 2005. Little work has been completed from 2005-2016. Early work in the project area was focussed on exploration for Eskay-type (VMS) deposits, though the more recent discovery of structurally-related high-grade gold mineralization at Valley of the Kings underscores the variety of exploration targets available to Aben.
Since the completion of significant exploration activity in the early 2000s, the area has seen major infrastructure improvements including roads associated with the construction of the Forrest Kerr and McLymont Creek hydro-electric facilities near the southern boundary of the property and the construction of the 287KV Northwest Transmission Line. Development of the Galore Creek Project has also provided road access to the northern reaches of the Forrest Kerr Project, which provide greatly improved access in addition to new exposures made by road-cuts.
Tim J. Termuende, Director of Aben Resources, has reviewed and approved the technical aspects of this news release and is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.
About Aben Resources:
Aben Resources is a Canadian gold exploration company developing projects in British Columbia, the Yukon and North West Territories.
For further information on Aben Resources Ltd. (TSX-V:ABN), visit our Companys web site at www.abenresources.com.
ABEN RESOURCES LTD.
Jim Pettit
____________________________
JAMES G. PETTIT
President
For further information contact myself or:
Don Myers
Aben Resources Ltd.
Corporate Communications
Telephone: 604-687-3376
Toll Free: 800-567-8181
Facsimile: 604-687-3119
Email: " href="https://www.globenewswire.com/Tracker?data=CqjHeLx1FNIO4_d3HM_oRpyssTPw6rHoPAQgZMzawwTDTlPEgq1wTFq5ugcSTnKL--VPW3yXqgu23QXouBT4NpVvUtbudch4Xt7uqj6HRuo=" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
This release includes certain statements that may be deemed to be "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that management of the Company expects, are forward-looking statements. Although management believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements if management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements, include market prices, exploration and development successes, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Please see the public filings of the Company at www.sedar.com for further information.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - July 18, 2016) - Columbus Gold Corp. (TSX:CGT)(OTCQX:CBGDF) ("Columbus") is pleased to report results of an additional eleven (11) drill holes completed at its 100% owned Eastside gold project in Nevada. Eastside is a district scale project consisting of 725 claims covering 57.7 sq. km (22.55 sq. miles), in an area of outstanding infrastructure. Significant gold values of up to 27.9 g/t have been obtained in surface sampling at Eastside and so far seven (7) large geochem anomalies have been identified, however drilling to date has been confined almost exclusively to one target (referred to as the Original Target), in an area of only approximately 1,250 X 800 meters, or about 1 sq. km., of the large 57.7 sq. km land package.
Thorough oxidation is remarkably deep at Eastside in certain areas, exceeding 300 meters in places. Preliminary metallurgy (see July 10, 2014 press release) indicates that gold at Eastside is amenable to cyanide leaching, whether oxide or sulfide.
Highlights of the drilling include:
ES-113 with 13 m of 1.12 g/t gold, including 2.4 m of 4.38 g/t gold and also 25 m of 1.26 g/t gold, including 7 m of 3.47 g/t gold. Hole lost prior to targeted depth.
ES-114 with 13.7 m of 0.69 g/t gold, including 2.3 m of 3.29 g/t gold, and also 141.7 m of 0.53 g/t gold, including 4.7 m of 6.45 g/t gold, and also 7.6 m of 35.1 g/t silver.
ES-115 with 16.5 m of 0.91 g/t gold and 6.1 m of 14.52 g/t gold, including 1.5 m of 56.89 g/t gold. Hole lost prior to targeted depth.
ES-116 with 7.6 m of 0.71 g/t gold and also 71.6 m of 0.50 g/t gold.
ES-117 with 97.5 m of 0.68 g/t gold, including 4.6 m of 3.17 g/t gold and also 21.3 m of 26.6 g/t silver, including 7.6 m of 62.5 g/t silver.
ES-118 with 10.7 m of 0.55 g/t gold and also 59.4 m of 0.74 g/t gold, including 7.6 m of 3.07 g/t gold and also 22.9 m of 38.8 g/t silver.
ES-119 with 4.6 m of 0.58 g/t gold and also 77.7 m of 0.83 g/t gold, including 1.5 m of 5.64 g/t gold and 3.1 m of 3.45 g/t gold and 4.6 m of 3.90 g/t gold and also 16.8 m of 14.8 g/t silver and 7.6 m of 21.1 g/t silver.
ES-121 with 79.3 m of 0.67 g/t gold, including 6.1 m of 4.32 g/t gold and also 18.3 m of 28.8 g/t silver.
ES-122 with 59.4 m of 0.85 g/t gold.
A table with averages of gold and silver intercepts* from holes ES-112 through ES-122, is available at the following link:
The 2016 drilling employs one reverse circulation rotary rig and one core drill. Columbus has completed 14,370 meters of drilling in 2016 including 10,149 meters of rotary drilling and 4,221 meters of core drilling, with assays pending on a number of samples. The current drilling phase will be completed in August 2016, and additional results will be reported periodically after they are received and analyzed. A map indicating the position of all drill holes, with their downhole traces as surveyed by IDS, is available at the following link:
www.columbusgold.com/i/nr/2016-07-18-map.pdf
Gold and silver mineralization at Eastside occurs in two broad, northerly-trending zones, called the East and West Zones, which coincide with two separate, northerly-trending, rhyolite dome complexes. Both East and West Dome complexes are made up of multiple rhyolite domes. Drilling has established the strike of significant mineralization extends at least 450 meters on the East Zone and 850 meters on the West Zone. Both zones remain open to depth, to the south, and possibly to the north. Both zones contain numerous parallel northerly structures with minor offsets. These minor structures likely formed upon reactivation of the major northerly fault zones that originally controlled the emplacement of the rhyolite domes. Gold and silver in both zones are associated with silicification and adularia replacement cut by multiphase quartz and adularia veining and stockworks. The rhyolite domes host the bulk of the mineralization but andesite near the dome margins acts as an important host rock as well.
Current drilling is focused on the north and south extensions of both the East and West Zones, as well as closely spaced drilling near ES-96 (35.1 m of 4.1 g/t gold including 19.8 m of 6.91 g/t gold and 97.3 g/t silver) along the west side of the West Zone. The closely-spaced drilling will help determine the true width, depth, shape, and the influence of northeast cross structures in localizing better grade areas in the West Zone.
On a regional basis, Eastside gold mineralization occurs in a discrete package of overlapping, rhyolite flow dome complexes which were emplaced and/or erupted 7.2 million years ago. These flow dome complexes are confined to an outcrop belt about 3.2 km (2 miles) wide and 11.2 km (7 miles) long which is completely enclosed in Columbus Gold's claim block. Detailed mapping and sampling of the entire claim block by Columbus geologists has yielded numerous additional targets outside of the area of the current drilling.
The Eastside project has outstanding infrastructure for mining and processing, is 32 km (20 miles) west of Tonopah, Nevada, and lies 9.7 km (6 miles) north of paved highway US 95, the main road route from Las Vegas to Reno. A good County-maintained, gravel road from the highway, along with a major power transmission line both pass through the claim block. The current drilling area is on the east flank of the Monte Cristo Range and a portion of the claim block extends well into the adjacent flats, which would provide excellent operating sites. The valley is known to have shallow water available in the same aquifer, which provided water for milling the Tonopah ores in the early 1900's. The area is high desert with sparse vegetation, and year-round drilling is possible.
QA/QC and Qualified Person
Gold and silver assays for 2016 drilling were performed by American Assay Labs in Sparks, Nevada. American inserts blinds and standards in the drill-hole assay string-generally 7% of all assays performed are of standards or blinds. For 2016 drilling, gold analyses are by fire assay with atomic absorption finish. Silver assays are by fire assay with gravimetric finish. In addition, Columbus Gold also inserts blank samples and also standard samples of known gold and silver assay values in the drill assay string for quality control. Additional check sampling is ongoing and, if material differences occur, will be reported. The position of all 2015 and 2016 drill holes were surveyed with a submeter GPS system and also surveyed downhole by IDS.
Andy Wallace is a Certified Professional Geologist (CPG) with the American Institute of Professional Geologists and is the Qualified Person under NI 43-101 who has reviewed and approved the technical content of this press release. Mr. Wallace is the principal of Cordilleran Exploration Company (Cordex), which is conducting exploration and project generation activities for Columbus Gold on an exclusive basis.
* Potential grades are conceptual in nature. There has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD,
Robert F. Giustra, Chairman & CEO
This release contains forward-looking information and statements, as defined by law including without limitation Canadian securities laws and the "safe harbor" provisions of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ("forward-looking statements"), respecting Columbus' intended plans for its drilling program, including the extent, expected results and time frame to complete the program. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to materially differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including: the ability to acquire necessary permits and other authorizations; environmental compliance; cost increases; availability of qualified workers and drill equipment; competition for mining properties; risks associated with exploration projects including, without limitation, the accuracy of interpretations; mineral reserve and resource estimates (including the risk of assumption and methodology errors and ability to complete the intended drilling program); dependence on third parties for services; non-performance by contractual counterparties; title risks; and general economic conditions. Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions that may prove to be incorrect, including without limitation assumptions about: market prices, exploitation and exploration success; that the design of the drill plan is appropriate for the site; general business and economic conditions; the timing and receipt of required approvals; continued availability of capital and financing; power prices; ability to procure equipment and supplies including, without limitation, drill rigs; and ongoing relations with employees, partners, optionees and joint venturers. The foregoing list is not exhaustive and Columbus undertakes no obligation to update any of the foregoing except as required by law.
VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - July 18, 2016) - Forum Uranium Corp. (TSX VENTURE: FDC) ("Forum") is pleased to announce that it has commenced a shallow, four-hole drill program for approximately 600 metres on its 100% owned Karpinka project, located approximately 30 km southwest of Cameco's Key Lake uranium mine and mill site (Figure 1).
The Karpinka claims lie just outside the southern edge of the Athabasca Basin where high grade, basement hosted deposits such as Fission Uranium Corp.'s Triple R deposit can be found at shallow depths. Infrastructure in the Karpinka area is excellent with targets located adjacent to the all-weather road and powerline to the Key Lake uranium process facility.
The drill targets are based on data from existing ground gravity, ground electromagnetic (EM), magnetic and soil gas hydrocarbon surveys conducted by Forum over the last five years. An airborne EM survey (TEMPEST) flown in 2007 identified a sequence of strongly conductive horizons over a 10 kilometre trend associated with the Key Lake Road Shear Zone, a major structure that marks the boundary of the fertile and productive Wollaston domain and the Mudjatik domain to the west.
Positive gravity survey results from these earlier programs identified a number of gravity lows, which may be indicative of zones of alteration, clay development and uranium mineralization along very strong EM conductors on the property. The combination of gravity low anomalies in conjunction with EM anomalies has proven to be a very successful exploration technique on Forum's Northwest Athabasca Joint Venture and in the discovery of the Arrow deposit by NexGen Energy Ltd.
Ken Wheatley, P.Geo. , Forum's Vice-President is the Qualified Person that has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release.
About Forum Uranium
Forum Uranium Corp. is a Canadian-based energy company with a focus on the acquisition, exploration and development of Canadian uranium projects. Forum has assembled a highly experienced team of exploration professionals with a track record of mine discoveries for unconformity-style uranium deposits in Canada. The Company has a strategy to discover near surface uranium deposits in the Athabasca Basin, Saskatchewan by exploring on its 100% owned properties and through strategic partnerships and joint ventures with Cameco, AREVA, Rio Tinto, NexGen and Uracan.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Richard J. Mazur, P.Geo.
President & CEO
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
[JURIST] Baltimore City Police Lieutenant Brian Rice on Monday was found not guilty [docket] of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office in connection with Freddie Grays arrest and death on April 12, 2015. Rice was the highest-ranking of six Baltimore police officers charged in the incident, and was the fourth to go on trial. Circuit Judge Barry Williams [Baltimore Sun profile], the judge who presided over Rices bench trial, previously acquitted officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson, Jr. of charges relating to Grays death. Officer William Porter [Baltimore Sun reports] had a mistrial in January, after a 12-member jury was unable to come to an agreement regarding his guilt on involuntary manslaughter charges. Prosecutors alleged that Rice had caused Grays death by failing to secure him in the transport van, despite knowing of the need to do so. The defense claimed that, given the volatility of the situation and Grays combativeness, failing to secure him was reasonable. Officer Garrett Miller is the next officer to go on trial in the Freddie Gray case, scheduled for July 27.
The States Attorney for Baltimore City in May, 2015 announced [JURIST report] the indictment of the police officers on charges including murder and manslaughter over the death Gray. Grays arrest and death in April of last year led to widespread protests and civil disorder in the city of Baltimore. In September Baltimore reached a tentative agreement with Grays family to pay $6.4 million in settlement [JURIST report]. In April of last year Amnesty International urged Baltimore police to exercise restraint [JURIST report] during protests, prioritize non-violent means and limit the use of force.
[JURIST] A group of international human rights experts, including UN Special Rapporteur on torture Juan E. Mendez, on Monday called on [press release] states worldwide to adopt the Revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners [text, PDF]. Also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, the standards represent a universally accepted minimum standard for the treatment of prisoners, conditions of detention and prison management, and offer essential practical guidance to prison administrations. The rules were adopted in 1957 and revised [UN News Centre report] in 2015, when they were renamed in honor of the former President of South Africa, who spent 27 years in prison in the course of his struggle for global human rights, equality, democracy and the promotion of a culture of peace.
The rights of incarcerated individuals are an important and contentious topic worldwide. In the United States, the issue is most acutely expressed in the Guantanamo Bay controversy. In February, President Obama delivered [JURIST report] his closure plans to Congress, stating that closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is a national security imperative. Its continued operation weakens our national security by furthering the recruiting propaganda of violent extremists, hindering relations with key allies and partners, and draining Department of Defense resources. Hindering Obamas plans, in November the US Senate passed [JURIST report] the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, which prohibits Guantanamo detainees from being transferred into the US. Obama has subsequently permitted [JURIST report] international prisoner transfers, a move that furthers the goal of closing Guantanamo, but may subject prisoners to rights deprivations elsewhere. In June, a report indicated that China harvests [JURIST report] thousands of organs from non-consenting prisoners yearly. In May, over 2000 prisoners were released [JURIST report] from Zimbabwes prison system due to overcrowding and food shortages. Earlier in May, Amnesty International reported [JURIST report] that dozens of detainees in South Sudan were being held in inhumane conditions.
In the final part of just-autos in-depth look at Ford Motor Companys future models and architectures, the spotlight is on the firms high margin vehicles; namely large SUVs and pick-ups, along with whats in the pipeline for Lincoln.
Free Report What's next for the Automotive industry? The theory of the peak car particularly in the triad markets of the US, West Europe and Japan and the need for sustainable transportation have driven the pivot to mobility in the automotive industry. Both of these drivers are motivating OEMs to change, while society at large is interested in sustainable transport. GlobalDatas forward-looking report provides you with insights into the direction that the automotive industry is heading in the next few years. It covers: The forces transitioning automotive to mobility services
CASE megatrends, and their relationship with COVID-19
The way forward for autonomous vehicles
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Having looked at cars, crossovers, pick-ups and SUVs as small as the Ka+ or as big as the Edge, Taurus and Mustang in the previous instalment, this feature starts with a look at Ford Motor Companys current and future large SUVs.
SUVs from L to XXL
The Explorer is one of Fords best sellers in North America and is now only two years away from replacement. U502 will be succeeded by a similarly sized SUV which uses an update of the same CD4 architecture from the Fusion/Mondeo. The D-segment/Mid Size sedan was the first model to use this platform. An additional model for Lincoln might well be launched some months ahead of the next Explorer (see AVIATOR below).
The next Explorer will logically be sold in the Australian market (as an import), rebadged as the replacement for the locally made Territory production of that Falcon-based SUV is due to end this October so there would be a hiatus of 1-2 years. Production is likely to be in Chicago as well as in Russia at the Ford-Sollers Elabuga plant.
In the class above this model sits the body-on-frame Expedition (codename: U324) plus the Expedition EL (U354). These models will be replaced for North Americas 2018 model year, and both standard- and extended-wheelbase derivatives should be available.
The new SUVs should switch to the lightweight T3 platform that was introduced by the 2015 Ford F-150 pick-up. Both Expedition (U553) and EL should have aluminium panels. A ten-speed automatic gearbox is also expected to feature. Production of around 85,000 units a year is said to be the target, with all build taking place at Kentucky Truck.
No future Pacifica, Sienna or Odyssey rival
Ford has really struggled in the full sized minivans segment for many, many years and is expected to exit this vehicle class in a few months time. The Flex has been built in Ontario since April 2008 and production will likely cease at the of the end of the 2016 model year, though there is a chance it might continue into CY2017.
During the first half of 2016, just 13,780 units of this model rolled off the line at the Oakville. The Canadian plants main product is the Edge (103,402 built during the same six-month period).
Supercar = super profits?
The GT is of course a tiny volume model but nonetheless it should serve as a useful image booster for the blue oval badge. This mid-engined supercar was revealed in prototype form at the Detroit auto show in January 2015. It was styled to resemble the 1960s Ford GT Le Mans racer and is being built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the GT placing first, second and third at the 1966 24 Heures du Mans.
To be manufactured on a bespoke platform by a contract assembler commencing this October, the GT should have a production run of five years. Build is being outsourced to Multimatic, a company based in Markham, Ontario. The same firm built the Aston Martin One-77, a limited edition car launched in 2009. Multimatic already supplies suspension parts for the Ford F-150.
F Series FoMoCos golden goose
The company might group the F-150 and larger Super Duty trucks as one model range but in reality they are two, especially as they presently use different platforms.
P552, the current F-150, is not yet two years old and should be built at Dearborn Truck as well as at Kansas City Assembly until 2022. An evolution of P552s T3 aluminium architecture will be the basis of the successor model. Aluminium is used for the body-in-white, pickup bed and most exterior panels of P552, but the frame is steel.
In January 2015, Ford announced that stop-start would become standard on all F-150 EcoBoost engines for the 2017 model year. That means it is new for variants with the 3.5-litre V6. A ten-speed automatic gearbox is the other main news.
There might have been a future hybrid variant, following the August 2011 announcement that Toyota and Ford would collaborate on such powertrains for some of their future light truck models. This alliance was then dissolved in July 2013, the companies noted at that time. However, Ford is said to still be working on a hybrid powertrain for the F-150.
In another way of improving the models overall fuel economy rating, a four-cylinder EcoBoost F-150 might be added for the 2018 model year.
F Series Super Duty trucks: new for the 2017 model year
Big change is coming for the P356 series F-250 pick-up and its heavier payload brothers. Production of the existing F-250-550 trucks should end in September, but series build of the replacements will not start straight away. This is because Ford is being wisely cautious in its approach to ramping up build of a vehicle which will be on a new, lightweight platform.
The 2017 F-Series Super Duty trucks (project code: P558) will switch to a derivative of the F-150s T3 architecture. The main difference for the new F-250-550 is to be a steel not aluminium bed.
In January 2016, Ford told the media that it would be building these models at a second plant. It was already known that production would be at Kentucky Truck but there will be additional production at Avon Lake. This facility, officially known as Ohio Assembly, will produce F-350, F-450 and F-550 Super Duty chassis cab configurations.
A note here on the larger F-650 and F-750. These are commercial trucks and a new generation of these models was announced by Ford in August 2015. Production shifted out of Mexico and into Avon Park, a Cleveland area plant in Ohio. Previous generations had been built by Blue Diamond, a 15 year old Ford and Navistar International joint venture based in Escobedo. The F-650 and F-750 are usually sold as cab-and-chassis skeletons and customised for specialist use as ambulances, beverage delivery trucks and oilfield vehicles. Both gasoline and diesel derivatives are available.
North Americas outgoing Super Duty trucks wont disappear completely, as Ford do Brasil only began building the latest versions of its F-350 and F-4000 variants at the Sao Bernardo do Campo plant in August 2014. Expect them to remain in production there into the early 2020s. As for the more modern T3 platform range, Avon Lake and Kentucky Truck should keep building these until 2024, with a mid-life facelift due in 2020.
Ford built a combined 541,330 units of its F Series trucks in the first half of 2016, which compares to just 423,289 in the equivalent period of CY2015. Of that near-half million total, 395,244 were the F-150. Ford has lately been pushing the trucks out of US dealerships with the offer of 0% finance over 60 months. This is unusually aggressive for a model which is selling so strongly, though some rivals have been offering 72 or even 84 month vehicle loans for a while now.
The promotion is as follows: 0% APR / 60mos +$1000 Ford Smart Bonus. Not all buyers qualify for Ford Credit financing. 60 months at $16.67 per month per $1,000 financed regardless of down payment.
Ford has been responding to an especially aggressive campaign from GM. The F-Series had a blockbuster of a month in June, selling 70,937 units (+29% YoY) versus 49,662 (-4%) for the Chevrolet Silverado, which remains in its usual position as the USAs second best selling vehicle for the year to date. It would seem that GMs recent sales tactics havent worked too well.
GM and Ford would each do well to try to wind back their overly generous promotions. We have been here before if the top of the latest economic cycle has been reached, pushing these high margin models out with long finance deals risks put many buyers leases way under water in years to come.
Lincoln Motor Company
After many years of underinvestment in its home grown luxury brand, Ford finally decided on a new direction for Lincoln, creating a separate division at the same time. Its still relatively early days and thus far, the results in North America are mixed.
Things look better from the perspective of the Chinese market, where Lincoln, a relatively new entry, managed to increase deliveries threefold during the first half of 2016. While 11,630 vehicles were sold during the whole of 2015, so far this year, the total is running at 12,450 cars and SUVs. Much of that is thanks to an 12 additional dealerships, the brand now having 45 outlets and aiming for 60 by year-end.
The 1990s were a long time ago but back then, Lincoln was a big selling brand in the US and Canada. Its export markets were fairly limited, though, with South Korea one of the main ones. The division is now hoping to keep its focus on North America and China, adding sales operations in other countries little by little. Europe has been ruled out for now at least, and there is no RHD production of any Lincoln model so India is a no go as well. The brand has recently been pulled from Indonesia and Japan too.
Crossovers and SUVs
The MKC (codename: C489) is one of the brands best sellers and this is no surprise given its size, pricing, segment and freshness (it was new for the 2015 model year). Compact SUVs remain hot sellers in the US, China, Canada and Mexico and Fords Louisville Assembly built 23,641 units of the Audi Q5 rival in the first half of 2016.
CX483, the MKC successor, will use the architecture to be introduced in a few months time by the fourth generation Ford Focus. It should again be manufactured in Kentucky and this time, also in China. The new model might also change names as the current five MK-something models can confuse many prospects, especially now that the Continental name has returned to join them, alongside the Navigator and Navigator L.
One size class up from the MKC is the MKX, another SUV. This rival for the Lexus RX is built in Canada alongside its twin, the second generation Ford Edge. It has a standard 300hp 3.7-litre V6 with a 330hp 2.7-litre biturbo V6 optional.
The latest MKX went on sale first in the United States in that countrys autumn of 2015, new for North Americas 2016 model year. It is also available in China, the Middle East and South Korea. The first facelift should come for the 2020 model year, with the third generation model due in calendar 2022. Expect that vehicle to be on an updated CD4 front- and all-wheel drive architecture.
With the exception of the low volume MKT, the only other Lincoln crossover or SUV is the big Navigator, a body-on-frame old school four by four. Available in standard (U326) or long-wheelbase (U356) L forms, the Navigator has been manufactured at Kentucky Truck since 2006 so is obviously overdue for replacement. U554 will therefore be out next year.
The replacement for the Navigator is expected to switch to an aluminium architecture based on the same one used by the Ford F-150. The Navigator and Navigator L should share much with the next Ford Expedition and Expedition EL.
Lincolns big trucks should also have GM and Fords ten-speed automatic gearbox. The new model was previewed by a design study which was first displayed at the New York auto show in March this year. As the pic above shows, the Navigator concept was memorable for having gullwing doors and three concertina steps on each side. There are even some suggestions that these could make production.
The obvious size gap between the MKX and next Navigator will likely be filled by an additional model in 2018. Lets call it Navigator Sport or Aviator and assume it will use CD4 as its basis, which means it would be the twin of the next Ford Explorer and built in Chicago. This proposed model would be a rival for the Volvo XC90 and others in its class.
Ford is said to be talking to Changan and the relevant authorities about the possibility of producing Lincoln vehicles in the city of Chongqing. The proposed Aviator would be a logical model to begin building in China, with the MKC the other obvious one.
The only other Lincoln crossover is the often overlooked MKT. This large model has never really worked and it was more or less a place holder in the limo and livery sectors until the Continental appeared, the Town Car having pretty much controlled those markets until it was discontinued in 2011.
Just 1,988 examples of the Em Kay Tee were made at Oakville Assembly between 1 January and 30 June, and as noted above, fewer than 14,000 were Ford Flexes built on same line during that period bodies and interiors apart, theyre the same vehicle. The Continental is considered to be the effective replacement for the MKT. The latter should linger on until 2018, or it might instead be axed later this year.
Sedans, present and future
Before we have a deeper look at Lincolns largest sedan, there is one model sized below it, the MKZ and its hybrid derivative. The MKS hasnt been forgotten in this overview: the last units of this big four-door were built in May, so a limited number of cars will be available until the end of the 2016 model year. Ford killed off the MKS for a couple of reasons: it was eight years old, the Continental serves as its replacement and capacity for more production of the hot selling Explorer was needed at the Chicago plant.
The CD533 series MK Zee has been around since 2012 and all production is in Mexico. Hermosillo will continue building it until 2019, a mid-life facelift having taken place for the 2017 model year. New for the North Americas 2013 model year, the MKZ is closely related to the equivalent Ford Fusion. It premiered in production form at the New York auto show in April 2012 and began to reach US market dealers in January 2013.
The 2017 MKZ, which is coming into US dealerships right now, offers the choice of 2.0-litre turbo, hybrid or 3.0-litre turbo engines. The last of these three is a new engine that is for the moment exclusive to Lincoln. It produces 400hp and 400 lb-ft of torque. Lincoln now calls its turbo engines GTDI.
There is a plug-in version of the Ford Fusion, the Energi, but there is no EV version of the MKZ. Instead, there is a petrol-electric variant, powered by the combination of a naturally aspirated 2.0-litre engine and one electric motor. Sales have not been strong, so it is by no means certain that the MKZ Hybrid will be replaced.
The replacement for the MKZ is expected to be the first vehicle for Lincolns D6 architecture. This platform can reportedly be for front-, rear- and all-wheel drive applications. The new model, which should changes names, is likely to be manufactured in North America and China.
Finally, the Continental. Fords own production data reveal that 339 units of this large sedan have been built thus far in 2016, with series production set to follow from September at Flat Rock, 25 miles southwest of Detroit. Production volume is hard to project but probably it will be similar to the Jaguar XJ and Cadillac CT6, two of the cars it is aimed at. Somewhere in the 10,000-25,000 units per annum range, in other words.
The only engine announced for the car thus far is a biturbo 3.0-litre petrol V6, with drive to all wheels. Lincoln says projected power and torque are 400hp and 400 lb-ft. Front-wheel drive versions and smaller capacity engines should follow, as should a plug-in hybrid variant.
Global sales expectations for Lincoln
In October 2014, Fords CEO Mark Fields told the media he saw 300,000 global sales for Lincoln by 2020, split evenly between North America and China. Worldwide numbers are not available but US deliveries for the first half of 2016 reached 53,297 vehicles. This was a 13 percent increase versus a year ago. That is nowhere near good enough to give the brand credibility to be in the same conversations as Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Lexus, but its a useful improvement nonetheless and starts to put Lincoln a bit closer to smaller volume premium priced names such as Volvo, Acura, Infiniti, Porsche, Tesla, Range Rover, Jaguar, Genesis, Maserati and should its promised future models be launched, Alfa Romeo. Vehicle pricing or size/segments are why MINI, DS and Jeep are not in that list.
Looking at the breadth of Audis model line-up, there are certainly lots of opportunities for any luxury brand with an aspirational image but what will be the best fit, and what will offer the best value in terms of required investment? A BMW 4 Series rival or something striking to attempt to go up against the Acura NSX and Audi R8? Or how about a dedicated EV in the style of the Tesla Model X? The big spending on additional Lincoln models hasnt yet happened, and the next few years will determine whether or not it happens at all.
Making Lincoln self funding is the first step; after that its going to take Ford probably between five and ten years to get to where Volvo or Infiniti is today. And to eventually be an American Audi if that is the ultimate goal? Fifteen years, probably more. Keep an eye on the first reviews of the Continental later in 2016 if they show its better than the Audi A8 and close to the refinement and handling levels of the Mercedes S-Class, Porsche Panamera and BMW 7 Series then well know that Ford is serious about Lincoln. If its not, then it might be time to give Mr Shifu a call and see how much hed be willing to accept for a certain Swedish global luxury car brand which, after six years of proper investment, is showing signs of becoming a future big earner for its far sighted owner.
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Authorities would rather drop an atomic bomb than leave power - citizen (video)
Yerevans Liberty Square has been deserted since early morning, with over ten more police cars patrolling the area. A1+ Company has asked the opinion of Yerevan citizens about anti-government gunmen occupying a police station in Yerevan on the second day of their standoff with Armenian security forces. Albert Arakelyan, who left Armenia 26 years ago and lives in Israel now, says he often hears complaints from people about the government but the most important thing in the fight against the government is the unity. If people are fighting for their rights, everyone must join the fight, he said. Pedagogue Julietta Petrosyan says the developments of the last two days may be dictated by the outer spaces. I am saddened to see Armenians taken hostage by other Armenians. We had better think about the soldiers who are defending our borders. There are many ways out of the situation. The sides can sit at a negotiating table. Painter Artur Hakobjyanyan who was selling his paintings in a Yerevan named after Martiros Saryan, says he does not believe in local media. I only believe the content of my pocket. If my pockets become empty, I might also take up arms and open fire at everyone, he said. Painter Ruben Nanasyan thinks the situation is chaotic. The police have cordoned off the Opera House and its neighbourhood, people are afraid to come to the park. I think the parties must reach an agreement, the Government is stronger, anyway, he said. None of our respondents believes that the events might result in serious changes, however, they all agree that the crisis can be overcome only through compromises.
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Defeatism is caused by contempt for Constitution - opinion (video)
Intelligentsia and people of Karabakh will never reconcile themselves to the idea of territorial concession. History shows that by ceding lands we only endanger our country and reach a state of war, says Vahan Badasyan. It is wrong to deceive people that we shall be much safer afterwards, Vachagan Zakaryan said, adding, If we cede five regions, another region becomes frontline. People in Karabakh do not believe Azerbaijans assurances of peace; it is impossible to satisfy their appetite. They are trying to change the quality of a fighting Armenian with the help of Serzh Sargsyan, they are trying to threaten us by war, said freedom fighter Mher Petrosyan. Avetik Ishkhanyan, a human rights activist from Armenia,says the roots of the problem started 22 years ago when talks began about concessions immediately after the ceasefire. If one of the sides speaks about concessions, while the other excludes concessions, you begin to feel defeated psychologically, he says. Nerses Ohanjanyan from Martakert says he is against the current language of negotiations; it is the language of defeat. These territories are important for three reasons. First, those are our historical territories, where we have historical and cultural heritage. Second, our sons shed their blood on them, and finally, they are the guarantee of our security, he said. Artur Khachatryan says the problem lies elsewhere; the authorities are trying to puddle compromise and concession, whereas there is no talk about compromise. Speaking about a possible solution, Vachagan Sargsyn said a new government should be formed in Armenia and in Karabakh. Margarita Karamyan, a participant of the Artsakh war, says defeatism is caused by contempt for the Constitution. Why did Armenia transfer part of its sovereignty to Russia? The reason is that the authorities did not comply with the Constitution, she said. Those participating in a special meeting in Shushi are going to adopt a declaration which considers surrender of territories treason and calls for fresh talks.
Varuzhan Avetisyan, Karo Yeghnukian talked on the phone /updated/ (video)
23.15 People are still undecided whether to stay at Liberty Square or go to Erebuni where the police building seized by an armed group is located. Karo Yeghnukian told the demonstrators that Varuzhan Avetisyan had called him again from the police building to say that the police did not move military equipment to the building. Demonstrator learned 'disturbing' news 22.50 Some time ago, one of the demonstrators, who wished to remain anonymous, contacted the editorial office of A1+ Company to say that he had received a telephone call from Erebuni police building which remains under the control of an armed group calling itself Sasna Dzrer (Daredevils of Sasoun). The called informed the demonstrators that the police had amassed military equipment near the patrol police building, breaking yesterday's agreement with the National Security Service. The latter promised earlier not to attack the building unless they got a response from the group. The anti-government attackers agreed to give a response on Wednesday, July 19. A1+ Company has been unable to verify the information because Khorenatsi street is closed by the police. Demonstrators sit down on ground, demanding to release all detainees 22.20 Demonstrators finally managed to contact individuals who had been detained during the day. They were told that all of them had been released, with two being transported to hospital. 22.02 Reaching Mashtots Avenue, the participants of the march sat down on the ground, demanding the release of those detained on Monday. The police officers escorting the group assured them that all detainees had been set free. The demonstrators tried to contact them to find out their whereabouts, but they were unable to. Hundreds of people had gathered at Liberty Square on Monday evening for a public discussion regarding yesterdays armed seizure of a police building. After the meeting, they started a march through Yerevan streets. Demonstrators start march in Yerevan 20.55 Activists have started a march from Liberty Square through the central streets of the Armenian capital. No decision will be taken in connection with armed group unless they take unwise steps 20.54 In reply to demands posed by human rights ctivist Avetik Ishkhanyan, General Hunan Poghosyan said the police will conduct an investigation against all policemen who broke the law after studying the video material. the Deputy Chief of the Armenian police added that people gathered at Liberty Square should not forget that a few hours ago policemen had lost one of their friends during an armed attack on the Erebuni police building. Speaking about the gunmen, Mr Poghosyan said, We continue to negotiations with the hostage takers. The negotiations are conducted in a civilized manner. At first they had nine hostages, now they have four. They were released as a result of ongoing negotiations and, why not, as a sign of goodwill by the attackers. The police also demonstrate goodwill. No decision will be taken in connection with the group as long as they take an unwise step. Policemen leave Liberty Square at the request of activists 20.44 Addressing people at Liberty Square, human rights activist Avetik Ishkhanyan offered to present three demands to the Deputy Chief of the Armenian police [Hunan Poghosyan]. First, they should give a clear guarantee that the law enforcement bodies will not use force against the armed gunmen [who seized the Erebuni police building on Sunday]. Second, they must arrest all those arrested today and finally, all policemen responsible for those illegitimate actions should be published, he said.
20.30 Deputy Chief of the Armenian police, General Hunan Poghosyan has left the area of the Opera House. Policemen gathered at the square followed suit at the request of the activists.
Activists injured at Liberty Square
While human rights activist Avetik Ishkhanyan was trying to explain to deputy chief of the Armenian police Hunan Poghosyan in the central part of Liberty Square that the police had interfered with the peaceful gathering, numerous red hats showed off at the square and chained the citizens.Activists Levon Zakaryan and Artush Chibukhchyan were rushed to hospital after clashes between demonstrators and police at Liberty Square. I tell deputy chief of the Armenian police Hunan Poghosyan that the police used violence against people inflicting injuries on them, he says there is no such thing, activist Rima Sargsyan told A1+. She says after violating peoples right to freedom of speech, police officers began punching and hitting those gathered at the square.
Demonstrators return to Liberty Square
20.00 As a result of talks between citizens and General Hunan Poghosyan, the first deputy chief of the Armenian police, Northern Avenue was re-opened for the demonstrators who returned to Liberty Square.
Police unable to stop the flow of people
The situation is very tense at Liberty Square the flow of people continues. Some time ago, police officers detained activist Davit Sanasaryan who called the participants of public hearings to head for the Erebuni police department which has been seized by and armed group affiliated with the radical opposition movement [Founding Parliament ] for the second day. Chief of Yerevan Police Ashot Karapetyan urged Sanasaryan to avoid illegal calls. Police officers cordoned off the area disallowing people from entering the square. Citizens were able to break through the police cordon and drive them away from the square. At present, people gathered at the square are moving along the nearby streets and opposite pavements calling everyone to join them. First Deputy Chief of Police Hunan Poghosyan sys some people are unnecessarily exciting passions instead of preventing further bloodshed. He labeled it a reckless step. Human rights activist Avetik Ishkhanyan told Poghosyan that people were holding a peaceful rally when police officers attacked them.
Before the start of the discussion, those gathered at the square honoured the memory of the police officers who was killed yesterday.
GERING A 16-year-old boy charged as an accessory in the attack of a corrections officer allegedly helped to plan the fatal attack. According to reports, the boy had been at the Youth Treatment and Rehabilitation Center in Kearney three times and was set for his fourth trip to YRTC following the attack.
Wednesday, Scotts Bluff County Attorney Doug Warner charged the boy, Guy Eagle Elk of Lisco, with aiding and abetting Dylan Cardeilhac.
Cardeilhac has been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree assault in the Feb. 14 attack on guard Amanda Baker, causing the 24-year-old womans death. Eagle Elk faces a charge of aiding and abetting first-degree assault, a Class II felony.
According to an arrest affidavit filed in Scotts Bluff County Court, Eagle Elk had been among teens questioned by Nebraska State Patrol investigators after the attack. NSP investigators learned through those interviews that Cardeilhac had expressed a desire to escape from the Scotts Bluff County Detention Center, where he was housed in the juvenile portion of the facility.
During the interviews, NSP investigators learned that Eagle Elk had allegedly had conversations with Cardeilhac on striking or choking out a corrections officer in order to get the keys to escape from the facility, the affidavit states. In the hours prior to the attack, Eagle Elk allegedly told the teen to target the female corrections officer because she would be an easier target, advised him on how long to squeeze the victim until she would pass out and told him not to attempt to choke the victim face to face. The investigation revealed Eagle Elk had been motioning to Cardeilhac through the windows of door cells on the method of administering a choke hold.
Court records indicate that Eagle Elk had recently been adjudicated in juvenile court on a charge of theft by shoplifting. On Feb. 14, a Scotts Bluff County Court judge had ordered the teen to be transferred to the Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center in Kearney as part of a two-year, 57-day intensive supervision probation sentence. Court documents indicate the teen had already been to the YRTC three prior times.
Amanda Baker, the corrections officer, died Sunday after two days on life support following the Feb. 14 attack at the Scotts Bluff County Detention Center. Funeral services for the woman are planned for 3 p.m. Saturday at Monument Bible Church in Scottsbluff.
Bakers family has set up a fund, called The Amanda Baker Memorial Fund, at Platte Valley Bank. Donations can be made at any Platte Valley Bank location.
Donations to help Bakers 6-year-old son, David, are also being accepted at all First National Bank of Nebraska locations. Checks should be made out to the Amanda Baker Memorial.
In news from our Sister City, Tamaulipas State Police arrest a man wanted in Freer for sexual assault of a minor.
Alfredo Javier was caught by authorities over the weekend.
According to reports, he has 13 arrest warrants pending - along with the sexual assault charge on a 13-year-old girl.
Officials from the state signed off on his extradition, and he was brought back by authorities through the International Bridge in Roma, Texas.
A charity that does trojan work around the city and county is looking for people to Strictly Come Dance.
The Order of Malta branch attends concerts, matches, charity events and other social gatherings and provides a vital medical service.
A major fundraising drive is underway by the charity who hope to raise 200,000 withing 12 months which will be used to find them a more uitable home.
At the moment we are calling out for people to participate in our Strictly Come Dancing event which takes place in October. We are especially appealing to men to come forward to keep the numbers balanced.
We will also be having a superdraw and both door to door and church gate collections. We are hoping to have a fundraising event every month, said the charity's fundraising officer, Rebecca Murphy.
The Kilkenny unit has been established since 1939. All members are volunteers ranging in age, background and qualifications. They donate their time to teaching, training and providing their skills and qualifications for ambulance and medic cover for events and community projects.
As well as providing ambulance cover they also provide medic cover for suitable events. They also have a fully equipped bike unit for local walks and fun runs.
The charity receives no government funding and their work is completely volunteer-based. They are currently based in the old Auxilliary Hospital on Wolfe Tone Street, which is kindly loaned to us by the HSE but due to many reasons the charity urgently needs to find our own home.
To secure a new home which will be suitable for the charity's needs involves raising a significant amount of money in a relatively short space of time.
To help us in our fundraising efforts, we are holding a Strictly Come Dancing event in Cillin Hill on October 15. We urgently need sponsors, judges and participants for this event.
I'm sure that at some point you will have attended an event in which the medics were provided by the Order of Malta Kilkenny Unit. If you appreciate the work that they do in the Kilkenny community please support us in any way that you possibly can, added Ms Murphy.
For more information contact Rebecca on 0862888559 or email omacckkstrictly@gmail.com.
If you're seeking out the best mutual funds, keep your wits about you. Mutual funds have a mind-numbing selection of ways to claim bragging rights. "Best five-year record." "Best three-year record for value funds." "Best 10-year record for growth funds with at least $1 billion in assets."
Morningstar counts 110 mutual fund categories. Even if you spread the awards among the 8,000 or so garden-variety open-ended mutual funds, there would be plenty of opportunities for bragging rights. And, thanks to the longest-running bull market in history, everyone's 10-year record looks great.
But it's another thing to outperform the competition over the entirety of a fund's life.
Here are the 25 best mutual funds of all time. We looked at the records of all U.S.-listed stock funds holding U.S. and/or international stocks alike with at least a 20-year record, and ranked them based on returns since inception. Going for a minimum of two decades eliminates some of the bias from a decade-long bull market, and adds in at least two major bear markets.
You'll note there are no index funds, nor any international funds. We didn't exclude them they just weren't in the top 25 top equity funds. Index funds don't aim to be top performers, and international funds are in a long-term performance drought. We did exclude bond and money market funds, however, because that's not where you go for high performance.
When it's time to tap your retirement savings, conventional wisdom dictates that you should first withdraw money from your taxable accounts. That allows your IRAs and other tax-deferred accounts to compound for as long as possible. "You never want to pay a tax bill today that you can postpone until tomorrow," says Rande Spiegelman, vice-president of financial planning for Charles Schwab.
But even Spiegelman concedes that every rule has its exceptions. And sometimes it pays to split your retirement withdrawals between your taxable and tax-deferred accounts now to prevent a huge tax bill later.
Retirement is also a good time to review how your investments are allocated among your taxable and tax-deferred accounts. You may be surprised to find that the investment strategies that worked well while you were saving for retirement could work against you when you start withdrawing your money.
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Investment swaps. There's a big difference between the way investments are taxed inside a retirement account and outside of one. When you hold an asset for more than a year, then sell it at a profit, you pay long-term capital-gains taxes at a maximum rate of 15% -- if the asset is held in a taxable account.
If that same asset is held in a tax-deferred retirement account, there is no tax consequence when you sell it. But when you withdraw the money from the account, all of it is taxed -- not just your profit -- at your ordinary income-tax rate, which could be as high as 35%. The 20-point spread between the maximum long-term-gains rate and the top ordinary income-tax rate can make a significant difference in your after-tax income during retirement.
But most people have their investments in the wrong accounts when they retire, says Mark Cortazzo, head of the Macro Consultants financial-planning firm, in Parsippany, N.J. "People tend to hold most of their long-term-growth investments inside their 401(k)s and keep their Osafe money' in CDs and money-market accounts in taxable accounts," says Cortazzo. "That's fine while you're accumulating assets, but once you retire you're better off flip-flopping them."
Let's say you have $100,000 invested in stock-index mutual funds inside your 401(k) and another $100,000 worth of certificates of deposit in your taxable account. When you retire and roll your 401(k) into an IRA, you could sell your mutual funds -- with no tax consequence -- and use the money to buy CDs or bonds. You would defer tax payments until you withdraw money from the IRA. At that time, the entire distribution, including the CD and bond interest, would be taxed at your ordinary tax rate -- the same rate you'd pay on the interest from the CDs if they were held inside a taxable account.
But you'd save considerably in your taxable account by cashing in the CDs and buying the same index funds you once held in your 401(k). You'd create a whole new cost basis for the stock funds in your taxable account, and as long as you held the assets for at least a year before selling them, you'd be taxed at the maximum 15% capital-gains rate -- and only on your profits. In addition, you could use any investment losses in your taxable account to offset profits and reduce your overall tax bill -- something you can't do with investments in an IRA.
So just by swapping the location of your investments, you maintain your portfolio's asset mix and increase your after-tax returns without taking on any additional risk, Cortazzo says. Your money will also last longer because you won't have to withdraw as much from your taxable accounts each year to generate the same amount of after-tax income. (To get an idea of how to divide your assets among taxable and tax-deferred accounts, take the quick quiz at www.trivant.com/ira-tax-benefits (opens in new tab).)
Golden years. You are required to start withdrawing from your IRA by April 1 following the year you turn 70, and to make withdrawals each year afterward. Your withdrawals are based on your account balance at the end of the previous year divided by your life expectancy, as determined by IRS mortality tables.
But if you have a large IRA balance and wait until the deadline, your required distributions could be substantial, pushing you into a higher tax bracket. To save on taxes once you retire, you could start taking voluntary, penalty-free distributions anytime after you reach age 59.
Touch your money before age 59 and you'll have to pay a 10% early-withdrawal penalty on top of the usual federal and state income taxes. But retirees between the ages of 59 and 70 enjoy a golden period during which they can withdraw as much or as little of their retirement funds as they choose -- and adjust their taxes accordingly.
In fact, like Norm and Cheryl Thomas of St. Charles, Ill., you may be surprised at how much you can control your tax bill by shifting the sources of your retirement income. Even though their income has approached six figures each year since Norm retired from a telecommunications manufacturing company in 2001, the Thomases seldom pay more than 15% in federal taxes and 3% in state income tax. That's because the bulk of their income comes from dividends and capital gains held in taxable accounts that are taxed at a maximum 15%. They supplement their investment income with a modest pension (exempt from Illinois taxes), Norm's Social Security benefits (only partially taxed) and some IRA distributions (fully taxed at ordinary rates).
Three years ago, Norm, now 67, and Cheryl, 60, decided to use some of his IRA money to buy property in St. Georges, Utah, and they recently built a second home on the lot. By using the money in his IRA rather than his investment account, Norm preserved the couple's source of low-tax income for years to come, says his financial consultant, Michael Lantz, of A.G. Edwards. Tapping the IRA will also reduce the size of Norm's required IRA distributions once he turns 70.
Maximum tax breaks. John Barber, chief investment officer of TriVant Custom Portfolio Group, in San Diego, urges retirees to follow the Thomases' example and take income out of an IRA whenever there will be little or no tax consequences. Healthy retirees may even want to forgo claiming early, reduced Social Security benefits as a way of minimizing taxes now and boosting their retirement benefits later, he says.
For example, a retired couple with no income other than IRA distributions could withdraw $17,500 tax-free this year, thanks to a $10,700 standard deduction and personal exemptions of $3,400 each. (If they are 65 or older, they qualify for an extra standard deduction of $1,000 each.) The next $15,650 of income would be taxed at 10%, the lowest federal tax bracket.
And your heirs will thank you for tapping your IRAs now. Heirs must pay income taxes on inherited IRAs at their top tax rate (the exception is inherited Roth IRAs, which are tax-free). With taxable accounts, beneficiaries inherit the stepped-up basis of the assets' value on the date of death of the original owner. That means that when they sell the assets, they'll pay capital-gains taxes only on the appreciated value since they inherited them.
(Kitco News) - Commerzbank hiked its year-end gold forecast by $100 to $1,350 an ounce and expects $1,450 sometime next year as the market continues to benefit from safety flows after the U.K. Brexit vote to leave the European Union.
In a report released Monday, the bank also upped its year-end silver forecast to $19.50 an ounce and called for $21 at the end of 2017.
The Brexit referendum has sent the gold price to a multi-year high, Commerzbank said. The next rate hike from the U.S. Fed is likely to take even longer as a result of uncertainty. Massive inflows to gold ETFs (exchange-traded funds) continue.
However, some of the price increase was driven by speculation, which implies some scope for a correction. Even so, the gold price is unlikely to drop to pre-Brexit levels, in our view, which is why we raised our year-end price forecast to $1,350 per troy ounce.
Investor worries about Brexit have begun to abate, but markets will probably have to deal with the issue for some time, Commerzbank said. Further, the U.K. referendum could impact elections and votes in other European nations, such as the autumn presidential election in Austria and a constitutional referendum in Italy.
Also in autumn, a new president will be elected in the USA, Commerzbank said, commenting that uncertainty about political developments generally should keep gold well supported in the next few months.
An Italian banking crisis provides further support for gold, Commerzbank said.
Interest from ETF investors is therefore likely to continue, the bank said, citing Bloomberg data showing holdings of gold ETFs increased by 491 tonnes, or 34%, in the first half of the year to their highest levels since August 2013.
Still, one risk factor for gold is the already heavy net-long, or bullish, positioning of speculators in the Comex futures, the bank said. Presumably, these participants at some point will want to exit positions to capture their profits, meaning at least short-term selling pressure.
Speculative financial investors expanded their net-long positions in gold in five consecutive weeks between the end of May and early July by a total of 84% to a record level of 273,000 contracts, Commerzbank said. This contributed to the price increase, but also harbors scope for a correction of the gold price. A renewed retreat of speculative financial investors would put pressure on the gold price, just as it did in May when the price dropped by $80 within two weeks.
Back then, this had been triggered by the return of Fed rate-hike expectations on the market. Consequently, signals from the U.S. central bank will be very significant for gold price performance in the weeks ahead. Yet, given uncertainty after the Brexit vote, the U.S. central banks next rate hike is likely to be postponed until the end of the year.
Commerzbank was not as upbeat on silver as it was gold. This metal has also risen sharply since the Brexit vote, helped by large ETF inflows.
As is the case with gold, the net-long position of futures speculators is high, meaning correction potential, Commerzbank said. However, analysts continued, Chinese silver imports have lost momentum in recent months and the sharp rise in silver prices could adversely impact industrial use for this metal.
Under the banks forecast, the silver price would underperform the gold price and the gold/silver ratio would rise to 69 again from a current level of just under 67.
By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com
Follow @KitcoNewsNOW
Derill Anderson, 16, holds a candle alongside his mother, Lynn, at a unity vigil Sunday evening in Bremerton. The vigil was organized to remember lives "both black and blue" lost in recent shootings.
SHARE Candles lit in honor of the victims of recent shootings line a table at a unity vigil held Sunday at the Opal Robertson Teen Center in Bremerton. Dorothy Jacob-Rabb prays for the victims of recent shootings during a unity vigil held Sunday evening in Bremerton. Bremerton Police Chief Steve Strachan speaks at a unity vigil Sunday in Bremerton, hours after three law enforcement officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Youth minister Amanda Scott-Thomas speaks at a unity vigil Sunday evening in Bremerton organized to remember the victims of racially charged shootings across the country.
By Tad Sooter of the Kitsap Sun
BREMERTON Bremerton hasn't experienced the pain of Baton Rouge.
It hasn't felt the same fear as Dallas or been wounded by the kind of racially charged violence tearing at the seams of other American cities.
That's all the more reason for people in Bremerton to begin building unity now, said Pastor Larry Robertson of Emmanuel Apostolic Church.
"We have an obligation to get out and coalesce around this notion of love," Robertson said, speaking at a vigil Sunday evening at Opal Robertson Teen Center. "... Violence is not the answer nationally, and violence is not the answer here."
The Bremerton African American Ministerial Alliance announced the unity vigil last week as a gathering to remember lives "both black and blue" lost during the spate of shootings this summer involving police and black communities. By the time the crowd gathered Sunday evening at the teen center, there were more lost lives to mourn.
A gunman killed three law enforcement officers Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, before being shot by police. The killings came less than two weeks after police shot and killed a black man outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, and the shooting deaths of five officers in Dallas days later.
As Robertson spoke in Bremerton, a TV screen in a corner of the room flashed images of helicopters and police barricades in Baton Rouge. The Sunday morning shooting made the vigil "all the more relevant," he said.
Robertson and other speakers urged Bremerton residents of different backgrounds to work to better understand each other and prevent similar violence at home. Bremerton Police Chief Steve Strachan, who received warm applause from the crowd of about 50, said he didn't want his city to be caught up in the extreme rhetoric being exchanged at the national level.
"All of these dynamics out there, all these people doing horrible things are trying to draw us apart," Strachan said. "That makes it way, way more important for us to come together, because we are in this together. ... We're human beings making human judgments, and doing the best we can."
His sentiments were echoed by youth minister Amanda Scott-Thomas, who called for a more tolerant dialogue.
"We cannot always agree, we can have different perspectives and different experiences, but I can still love you and I can still stand beside you," Scott-Thomas said.
When the speakers had finished, a closing prayer was offered, and attendees held candles to honor the shooting victims. Many lingered after the event to greet friends and visit.
William Hagenson, of Bremerton, said he'd come to the vigil simply to feel some calm.
"It's been crazy all over," Hagenson said. "Coming down here for some peace is nice."
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I'll save you the guesswork. On July 21, Donald Trump will become the Republican nominee for president of the United States. On July 28, Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee.
Trump's pending coronation won't please elected Republicans who put the nation's welfare above party loyalty. Nor will it please demonstrators who in all likelihood will storm around parts of downtown Cleveland to protest the nomination of someone who has gone out of his way to denigrate Latinos, blacks, Muslims and immigrants.
Clinton's nomination won't please Bernie Sanders' delegates and others who want big money out of American politics. Nor will it assuage other anti-establishmentarians who may demonstrate outside the convention center in Philadelphia.
But these will be sideshows.
So why have the conventions at all?
First, because they're perks awarded to people who worked hard for candidates during the primaries just as top sales reps in companies are awarded trips to national sales conventions. Delegates will have fun and spend money, which hotels and restaurants in downtown Cleveland and Philadelphia will sop up like dry sponges.
They'll enjoy circulating on the convention floors for five or six hours each night exchanging gossip and business cards, hugging old friends and meeting new ones, and taking selfies.
And they'll feel important when they hear party leaders, heads of state delegations, members of Congress and occasional celebrities tell them how critical it is to defeat the opposing party in November, how strong their nominee will be, and what makes America great.
Second, the conventions will generate prime-time TV infomercials featuring celebrities, heroes and former presidents (Bush 1 and 2 say they won't appear at the Republican one) and, most importantly, the nominee on the last night. All will speak about the same three themes, although Trump will talk mainly about himself. These segments will be produced and directed by Hollywood professionals and marketing specialists whose goal is to get the major networks (or at least CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) to project stirring images into the living rooms of swing voters.
Intermittently, TV anchors and their pundit panels will offer trivial or cynical commentary, and will interview congressional leaders and key advisers to the nominee, who will repeat what they've heard everyone else say.
The third reason for these conventions is hidden far away from the delegates and the prime-time performers: It's to ingratiate the big funders corporate executives, Wall Street investment bankers, partners in major law firms, top Washington lawyers and lobbyists, and billionaires.
The big funders will travel either to Cleveland or to Philadelphia (many will go to both) in their private jets and be discretely whisked by limo to the VIP suites of downtown hotels.
In the evenings, the big funders will fill the skyboxes of the convention centers just above where the media position their cameras and anchors and high above the din of the delegates, whom they will never see and will feast on shrimp, lobster tails and caviar, and will sip wine.
Each party will try to make these big funders feel like the VIPs they've paid to be, letting them shake hands with congressional leaders, Cabinet officers and the nominee's closest advisers, who will be circulating through the skyboxes like visiting dignitaries. If they're lucky, the big funders will have a chance to clench the hand of the nominee himself or herself.
The three conventions for delegates, for prime-time audiences at home and for big funders will occur simultaneously, but they will occupy different dimensions of reality.
Our two major political parties no longer nominate people to be president. Candidates choose themselves, they run in primaries, and the winners of the primaries become the parties' nominees.
The parties have instead become giant machines for producing infomercials, raising big money and rewarding top sales reps with big bashes every four years.
That Donald Trump, the most unqualified and incendiary person ever to become a major party's nominee, and Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most qualified yet least trusted person ever to become a major party's nominee, will emerge from the conventions to take each other on in the general election of 2016 is almost beside the point.
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and author. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)
Today
A shower is possible early. A few clouds. Low near 35F. ESE winds at 10 to 15 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph..
Tonight
A shower is possible early. A few clouds. Low near 35F. ESE winds at 10 to 15 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph.
Two of the copper pot stills at the Popcorn Sutton distillery in Newport are shown in this photo. The distillery opened in 2009, producing an unaged white whiskey based on the recipe of legendary moonshiner Popcorn Sutton. SUBMITTED PHOTO
SHARE Allisa Henley, formerly master distiller at the George Dickel distillery near Tullahoma, has joined the Popcorn Sutton distillery in Newport as master blender. SUBMITTED PHOTO The Popcorn Sutton distillery in Newport makes legal moonshine in large copper pot stills, including this one. SUBMITTED PHOTO Popcorn Sutton Distilling in Newport recently introduced first batch of barrel-aged spirits in commemoration of the legendary moonshiner Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, who took his own life on March 16, 2009. The product is aged a minimum of three years in charred oak barrels. SUBMITTED PHOTO
By Chambers Williams of the Knoxville News Sentinel
Popcorn Sutton Distilling LLC, the Ohio-based whiskey maker that operates a large distillery in Newport, has poached another master distiller away from Tennessee competitor George Dickel.
Allisa Henley, 39, of Manchester started work Monday as the new master blender at the Newport distillery, making her the second master distiller in a row to leave Dickel for the Popcorn Sutton operation.
Henley was named to the top distiller spot at the Dickel distillery near Tullahoma in 2014, replacing John R. Lunn, who left to take the same post at Popcorn Sutton. Henley worked with Lunn for 10 years at Dickel before being elevated to the top spot at the famous distillery, which is owned by London, England-based beverage giant Diageo PLC.
Popcorn Sutton Distilling is a subsidiary of J&M Concepts LLC, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
As master blender, Henley will again work under the supervision of Dunn, who remains master distiller, with a goal of broadening Popcorn Sutton's product offerings.
"I can't give any specifics yet, but I have a lot of ideas," Henley said from her Manchester home on Monday. "I hope to narrow them down a little. Gin is a project John has been working on for close to a year, and we should be launching that within a month. We will take it from there and see what else we want to play around with."
Henley said she believes that she and Lunn have complementary skills that they can combine to help grow the Popcorn Sutton brand.
"He's a chemical engineer from Vanderbilt and I have a business background and I bleed orange," she said, noting that the two will have an ongoing personal discussion about Vanderbilt versus UT sports.
Henley has a bachelor's degree from UT-Chattanooga and an MBA from Lipscomb University in Nashville.
During her time with George Dickel, she helped introduce Dickel's Barrel Select Tennessee Whiskey, Rye Whisky and Single Barrel products. She led the creation and operation of the brand's consumer-experience center, and, most recently, rolled out a rare 17-year-old limited edition Tennessee Whiskey.
She hopes to build up the Newport distillery's public image and promote it as a visitor destination, just as she did for Dickel.
"I don't know how many people know there is even a distillery in Newport," she said. "We have three giant copper pot stills that are quite impressive, and we are open to the public for tours."
Henley was born in Tullahoma and grew up in Manchester, just a few miles from the Dickel distillery, but also in the shadow of the state's most-recognizable whiskey operation, the Jack Daniel Distillery in nearby Lynchburg. That world-renowned operation hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
She said she will continue to live in Manchester while she's working for Popcorn Sutton, but will make regular trips to Newport. In addition, she will travel extensively to represent the Sutton brand outside of the region, she said.
"I am so pleased to have individuals of John and Allisa's caliber on our team," Popcorn Sutton Distilling CEO Megan Kvamme said in a statement. "Their passion for authenticity and quality is a perfect fit for our organization and mission. I know their history together, complementary skill sets, and collaboration moving forward will result in many creative things to come."
Design and decorate a woodland forest during The Kids Club at Michaels.
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WOODLAND CRAFTS
Michael's Camp Creativity enters its second-to-last week for the summer with a woodland forest theme. Sessions start on the half hour from 10 a.m.-noon. Make critter masks, cardboard owls and design an enchanted forest on July 18, 20 or 22. Camp Creativity classes cost $5 per session, in store or online or $12 for three in store.
Design and decorate a woodland forest during The Kids Club from 10 a.m.-noon Saturday, July 23. The Kids Club costs $2 per child. Michaels is at 11348 Parkside Drive.
Info: 865-982-2970, www.michaels.com/classes-and-events/classesandevents
FREE MOVIE
It is the last week for the 2016 Summer Kids Festival at the Halls Cinema. At 10 a.m. see "Cinderella" on Wednesday, July 20, or "Big Hero 6" on Thursday, July 21. Seating is first come, first served and is limited to 200 people per day. Admission is free and concession packages start at $3.50 each. The theater is at 3800 Neal Road.
Info: 865-922-1417, www.hallscinema7.net/showtimes.htm
DO IT HERSELF
Learn how to build a DIY Dog Feeder between 6:30-8 p.m. Thursday, July 21, at all area Home Depot stores. At this Do-it-herself workshop learn how to use a circular saw, brad nailer and other tools to craft an elevated dog bowl holder with interior space for pet food and treat storage with a swing lid. Then give the project a coat of paint or wood stain. Materials can be purchased to make own project. Available at all Knoxville-area stores.
To find a local store or register go to http://workshops.homedepot.com/workshops/do-it-herself-workshops
LITERACY LUAU
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Friends of Literacy is hosting a fund-raising Literacy Luau 6:30-10:30 p.m. on Friday, July 22, at the home of Eddie Mannis. The event includes an island-themed dinner prepared by Sweet P's, an open bar, the Carib Sounds Steel Drum Band and the Polynesian Paradise Dancers performing poi fire spinning and hula dance. Suggested attire is Hawaiian vacation. Tickets of $65 may be purchased at www.friendsofliteracy.org. Parking will be free at Heska Amuna Synagogue, 3811 Kingston Pike.
FINAL 'FIDDLER'S
The Oak Ridge Playhouse wraps up its run of the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" at 8 p.m. July 22-23 and 2 p.m. July 24.
The 40-member cast performs in the musical with such songs as "Sunrise, Sunset" and "If I Were a Rich Man." Set in a small village in Tsarist Russia of the early 20th century, "Fiddler" is based on short stories in "Tevye and His Daughters" by Yiddish humorist Sholem.
Tickets are $18 or $22 for all shows. Tickets are available at www.orplayhouse.com or 865-482-9999.
Former Knox County Trustee Mike Lowe attends a hearing to determine restitution in the Division I criminal courtroom of Judge Steve Sword Thursday, June 9, 2016. (AMY SMOTHERMAN BURGESS/NEWS SENTINEL)
SHARE Former Knox County Trustee Mike Lowe arriving for a during a restitution hearing before Knox County Criminal Court Judge Steven Sword Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015. Lowe was ordered to begin paying $1,850 a month, an order that was upheld last week. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL) Richard "Bud" Armstrong, Knox County Law Director and a 2016 candidate for re-election.
By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel
The Knox County Law Director's office has upped the ante in a false claims lawsuit against former Trustee Mike Lowe to more than $19 million, but Lowe's attorney contends the lawsuit came too late and should be tossed out.
In dueling motions filed in Knox County Chancery Court, Deputy Law Director David Wigler and defense attorney Gregory P. Isaacs are asking that the other's case be dismissed without a trial or further legal wranglings.
For the first time since the False Claims Act lawsuit was filed, the county has put a final price tag on damages and civil penalties the law department insists Lowe should pay for his thievery while in office. It totals $19.4 million, with just more than $785,896 of that in actual theft via the payment of two "ghost employees" and a scheme to overbill the county for title work. The rest represents treble damages allowed under the False Claims Act and fines of $10,000 each for 1,763 separate false claims.
Because Lowe pleaded guilty last year to felony theft for paying two friends for wages not earned and ripping off the county with inflated title work fees, Wigler insists in his motion it is game over for Lowe.
"There being no genuine issue Knox County asserts that it is entitled as a matter of law to judgment against defendant Charles Michael Lowe," Wigler wrote.
Not so, counters Isaacs.
The False Claims Act carries with it a time limit of three years from the time of discovery of the thievery to file a lawsuit. Isaacs contends the law director's office and the Knox County administration on whose behalf the lawsuit was filed knew about allegations of thievery by Lowe as far back as 2007 when an audit revealed suspected payroll thievery and had direct knowledge in 2009 when an employee of the trustee's office met with former Law Director Bill Lockett to detail theft allegations. That meeting led, in large part, to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation probe of Lowe.
Isaacs also noted the News Sentinel reported in 2011 that Lowe was under criminal investigation. Yet, he argues, current Law Director Richard "Bud" Armstrong did not file the lawsuit until January 2015 when the clock for filing had already run out.
"Simply put, it is not possible that the Knox County Law Director's office was unaware of such an extensive investigation and its findings," Isaacs wrote.
He also is fighting the $17.63 million in civil penalties sought, arguing the $10,000 fine per claim is both excessive under the U.S. Constitution and a violation of state law, which only allows a jury to set a fine above $50.
A hearing date for the motions has not been set.
Lowe served as Knox County's trustee for 13 years before a Tennessee Supreme Court decision upholding term limits forced him out of office in 2007. He remained an employee, wielding essentially the same control of the office as he did as trustee through 2008, his successor, Fred Sisk, has admitted in court.
Last year, he confessed to stealing from county coffers by paying two pals Delbert Morgan and Ray Mubarak more than $196,000 each in a four-year period for work they did not perform and profiting from a scheme by Mubarak to bill the county at an inflated rate for substandard property title research.
In a plea deal approved by Knox County District Attorney General Charme Allen, Lowe's restitution was capped at $200,000. He was sentenced to one year behind bars and nine years on probation. He spent seven months in jail after being awarded credits for good behavior. Knox County Criminal Court Judge Steve Sword has ordered Lowe to pay $1,850 monthly toward restitution. He has paid just more than $19,000 so far.
Testimony in prior court hearings and a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation report filed in chancery court shows Lowe took a cut from the salaries and benefits paid to Morgan and Mubarak, although prosecutors have never been able to prove that. The TBI report details even more thievery allegations none of which Lowe has admitted or has been criminally accused of doing. According to the report, Lowe paid employees for accrued compensatory time but included in the checks campaign fundraising tickets, compelling the employees to give him a portion of that pay and paid via county coffers two employees to do construction work on a house.
The report does not quantify the losses to the county for those acts of thievery nor does the False Claims Act lawsuit cite any of it. The Knox County District Attorney General's office did not include any of those allegations in the felony theft case filed against Lowe in 2012. There is no indication in any court record that employees unjustly paid for compensatory time, which is supposed to be paid via extra time off rather than cash, were forced to repay the money.
A hearing date in the false claims lawsuit motions has not been set.
Samantha Yarborough 7/19/2016 Anderson County Sheriff's Office mugshot
SHARE Nathaniel Johnson 7/19/2016 Anderson County Sheriff's Office mugshot
By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel
CLINTON Anderson County grand jurors considered two different murder charges against the parents of a 10-day-old baby boy who died while sleeping with them, but opted instead for a misdemeanor reckless endangerment indictment.
The baby, Nathaniel Johnson Jr., died after the mother, who weighs 230 pounds, rolled on top of him as she slept, according to police reports and jail records.
The mother, Samantha Yarborough, and father, Nathaniel Tyhiene Johnson, had received "safe sleep counseling" during a Tennessee Department of Children's Services home visit four days before the child died.
That counseling was performed "because the mother and father stated they did not follow it (safe sleep practices)," according to a follow-up report from the Oliver Springs Police Department.
Johnson, 28, and Yarborough, 26, of Oliver Springs, are to be arraigned July 25 in Anderson County Criminal Court and are free on $2,500 bonds.
In the initial report of the Feb. 1 incident, the parents gave a starkly different version of events from the account that later emerged in a statement from the infant's 4-year-old brother, according to Oliver Springs Police Department records.
Nathaniel Johnson said he was awakened by the infant coughing, raised him up and "milk came out of his mouth." Johnson said he noticed the child was limp as he changed his diapers, the initial incident report states.
Johnson told police that when he started CPR, he "noticed that the infant had milk and blood coming from his mouth," The mother, meanwhile, had called E-911, and emergency personnel took over resuscitation efforts when they arrived.
A dramatically different version of events emerged later during a Department of Children's Services employee's interview of the infant's 4-year-old brother.
The boy told the DCS worker "he was upset with his mother for hurting his little brother." That statement abruptly stopped the initial questioning of the child, and an emergency forensic interview was scheduled.
During that follow-up, the boy said he was awakened by a nightmare and went into the bedroom where his mom and stepdad were asleep.
"When his mother rolled over, his baby brother was underneath her and that is why he died," the DCS worker reported the boy told her.
The mother had tested positive for THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, during her pregnancy, and both parents had THC in their systems on the morning their son died, according to police records.
Grand jurors first considered a reckless homicide indictment against the couple but rejected it.
The panel during its June 7 session was also asked to decide whether to indict them for criminal negligent homicide, which alleged they had "unlawfully and recklessly" engaged in "criminally negligent conduct" that placed the baby in danger. That, too, was rejected.
The misdemeanor indictment alleges the couple recklessly engaged in conduct that placed the baby in danger.
"In essence, it appears the grand jury chose the charge they felt was appropriate," 7th Judicial District Attorney General Dave Clark said in an emailed statement.
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers are searching for two people who were involved in a boating accident while riding a Sea-Doo on Tellico Lake. They left the scene in this Chevy pickup before exchanging information with the victim. (TWRA)
SHARE Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers are searching for two people who were involved in a boating accident while riding a Sea-Doo on Tellico Lake. They left the scene in this Chevy pickup before exchanging information with the victim. (TWRA)
By News Sentinel Staff
Authorities are seeking two people who were involved in a boating accident on Tellico Lake that injured one person last week.
The incident was reported about 7 p.m. Friday near the Rasar Landing Access Area in Monroe County, according to a Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency news release.
A 24-year-old Maryville man fell into the water while wakeboarding and subsequently was struck by a personal watercraft (PWC) carrying two riders.
The riders checked on the wakeboarder and all parties returned to the access area where they briefly spoke about the accident, the release states.
The PWC operator and passenger, however, left before information could be exchanged.
The wakeboarder was transported the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, where he was treated for a concussion and lacerations to his side, shoulder and head, according to the release.
"We're grateful (the victim) had only slight injuries," said TWRA Officer Kip Kite. "We'd like for those involved to come forward so we can finish our investigation."
TWRA released two images of the PWC, described as a Sea-Doo with green or blue seats and cowling. It was being towed from the scene, along with a second PWC, by a full-size black or gray Chevy pickup, possibly a 2003-2006 model.
Anyone with information on the incident is asked to call TWRA at 931-484-9571 or toll-free at 800-262-6704.
More details as they develop online and in Tuesday's News Sentinel.
SHARE Penelope "Penny" Sissom
By News Sentinel Staff
OAK RIDGE Although her retirement was officially last Friday, Oak Ridge Personnel Director Penelope "Penny" Sissom was still in the municipal building Monday, clearing her office of decades of paperwork and memories.
Sissom has ended a 52-year career with Oak Ridge the longest service of any employee to date.
"It is rare to find those that are motivated to public service for a lifetime," City Manager Mark Watson said.
During her time with the city, she was a trailblazer, both in the community and statewide. She was Tennessee's first female personnel director and the first woman member of the Tennessee City Manager's Association. She was also the first member of the Southern Region of the International Personnel Management Association to serve in all of the organization's leadership positions.
Active in the community, Sissom played a significant role during the successful campaign years ago for a new public library and community recreation center. She also helped organize the city school system's Student-in-Government Day.
Sissom said she's had the "pleasure and occasional frustration of working for eight different city managers and with numerous department directors."
She started work for the city as a personnel clerk on June 8, 1964, and rose through the ranks: human resources manager, personnel administrator and finally, personnel director.
She said she's had "something to do with the hiring" of almost 3,500 individuals employed by the city since she landed her city job. During that process, she said, "I have made many friends and acquaintances, and probably some enemies "
In recognition of her long career, the city declared July 15 as "Penelope H. Sissom Day."
"Penny has provided leadership and guidance to the city of Oak Ridge organization as it has grown and changed through the years," Watson said. He said the city "will miss her vast knowledge of this organization and service to our employees."
Sissom is the mother of sons David and Morgan and has three grandchildren.
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By News Sentinel Staff
Frank Barnett, the former governor of American Samoa and Knoxville native, was always looking for the next adventure, according to his obituary.
"Frank led an amazing life believing there was no excuse for being bored," it reads. "He traveled all 50 states, 5 U.S. territories and 47 foreign countries."
Mr. Barnett, 82, died on Friday.
A 1950 graduate of Knoxville High School, Mr. Barnett attended the University of Tennessee, served in the U.S. Marine Corps and graduated from UT's law school in 1959. During his time at UT, he was captain of the swim team.
While he first served as a special agent for the FBI before becoming a founding partner of the Baker, Worthington, Barnett and Crossley law firm, his career ultimately took a more political turn.
When he left the law firm, he became executive assistant to former Gov. Winfield Dunn and would later manage the statewide campaign for President Richard Nixon.
From 1975 to 1977, Mr. Barnett served as lieutenant governor and governor of American Samoa, which he was appointed to by President Gerald Ford.
Other accomplishments included helping to bring China as an exhibitor to the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville; being instrumental in the formation of the Tennessee Center for International Studies in Knoxville; and serving as a general development officer for the United States Agency for International Development in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where in 2010 he was involved in a portable water project, infrastructure development and obtaining funding for a new law school.
Mr. Barnett is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, Carolyn, two children and a brother.
The family will receive friends 5-7 p.m. Wednesday at Rose Mortuary Mann Heritage Chapel. There will be a private family burial.
SHARE Tim Burchett, Knox County mayor.
By News Sentinel Staff
Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett's support of a "safety center" as an alternative to jail for misdemeanor lawbreakers who have mental illness has earned him a "Spirit of ADA Award" from the disAbility Resource Center.
Burchett will speak at Friday's Spirit of ADA Awards Celebration, said Katherine Moore, service coordinator for the nonprofit, which provides resources and advocacy for people with any disability.
DRC hosts the annual luncheon, which commemorates the July 26, 1990, signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act by President George H.W. Bush, and honors those in the community who demonstrate empowerment, accessibility and equal opportunity to transportation, employment, housing, government services, and other community activities the " spirit " of the law, said DRC Executive Director Lillian Burch. This year, the event, which is at 11:45 a.m. Friday at the Foundry, also will mark the DRC's 20th anniversary.
Burchett will be given the "Community Member" award at the luncheon, which will be emceed by WATE's Don Dare. The "Individual" award will go to Sue Buckley, co-founder of Club VIBES Visually Impaired and Blind Enhanced Services a mentoring program to help blind or visually impaired teens and young adults transition from high school to the workforce or college and living independently.
This includes both teaching them life skills such as cooking and chores, and offering tips on how to find employment and arrange transportation. Both Buckley and her husband, John Buckley, who cofounded the program, are blind.
Regions Bank was given the "Business" award, both because it offers accessible parking beyond what the law requires, and because it has an Americans with Disabilities department to provide extra services.
"If I were a member there and needed my checking account in Braille, they could send it to me that way," Moore said. "They go above and beyond, we think."
Other award recipients are Carolyn Knight, "Advocate"; Christy Hill of Vocational Rehabilitation Services, "Service Provider"; Pigeon Forge's Titanic Museum, "Employer"; Jeremy Duchow, "Consumer"; and Doug Dewitt, "Staff."
Tickets for the luncheon are $10 each. To register, call 865-637-3666 by Wednesday.
Controversial Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders is among the 151 guests of Tennessee's delegation attending the Republican National Convention.
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By Joel Ebert And Dabe Boucher, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee
CLEVELAND A controversial Dutch politician who is an outspoken critic of Islam was invited to the Republican National Convention by a sitting Tennessee state senator and Donald Trump delegate, drawing criticism from Tennessee and national Muslim advocacy organizations.
Geert Wilders, founder of the right-wing Party for Freedom who told The Tennessean he could become the next prime minister of the Netherlands is attending the convention thanks to an invitation from state Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro.
Ketron said the controversial figure, who has been an outspoken critic of Islam and has called it the "ideology of a retarded culture," is his friend.
"Muslims are not necessarily my problem, but Islam is. Islam and freedom are not compatible," Wilders told The Tennessean at a Monday morning Tennessee delegation brunch, hosted by Gov. Bill Haslam and U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker.
Several Tennessee delegates were excited to see him, as he shook hands and took pictures with many attendees, including Corker, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In addition to his anti-Islam stance, Wilders is a supporter of the recent vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, vowing to pursue a similar "Brexit" vote in the Netherlands in order to further push to end the union's open-border policy.
He is often criticized by immigrant-rights organizations around the world who believe his views are extreme and inciting fear.
"The Republican Party should not be importing foreign anti-Muslim bigots at a time when it should instead be addressing the growing Islamophobia within its own ranks," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim advocacy organization.
After stopping through Nashville on Sunday before joining the state's delegation in Cleveland, Wilders said Monday that one of his key political focuses is stopping the spread of Islam.
"Islam is a problem. I'm not talking about the people, I have nothing against the Muslims. Not all Muslims are terrorists, unfortunately in Europe all terrorists are Muslims," Wilders said, adding that he would like to see a full ban on immigrants from Islamic countries, which is similar to a plan floated by Trump, presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
"I just said to my friends here in Tennessee at this lunch, imagine Mexico would be an Arab country, or Syria or whatever, and jihadists would flow all the way. It would be different," he said.
"We have an enormous problem with the Islamization. People are fed up with governments not acting as they should, maybe a little bit like here, the blue-collar people who pay most of the price and get not what they really want, which is security, safety and a good life for their families."
Wilder's policy stance has gained him significant notoriety and some fans in Tennessee, including Ketron and state Sen. Mae Beavers, R-Mt. Juliet, the state delegation's chairman for the Republican National Convention. She called Wilders someone who has "been a friend of some good Republicans in Tennessee."
"He's actually come and spoken to some of us Republicans at dinners and things about the circumstances in his country to warn us about what can come if you just have immigration you can't control," said Beavers, who has praised Trump's proposed ban on Muslims.
By having Wilders as a guest of the delegation, Beavers said it would provide a "clearer view of where our country could go if we don't do something immediately."
"All he's trying to do is sound the alarms here in this country to keep it from happening as what's already happened in this country," said Ketron, who has also hailed a ban on Muslims.
When asked what Muslims in Tennessee would think of his stance, Ketron said, "I have a Muslim who's one of my best friends who lives in Nashville. He runs a very successful business. He's not radical. However, those who truly follow the books of Sharia become radicalized because they want world domination."
Ketron has sponsored several bills in Tennessee aimed at Islam, considered derogatory by advocacy organizations in the state.
In 2011, Ketron sponsored the "Material Support to Designated Entities Act," which, according to the Associated Press, was a "watered-down" version of a bill that would have made it a felony to follow some versions of Shariah, an Islamic code.
At the time, Ketron said the legislation, which was given approval in both chambers and signed into law by Gov. Bill Haslam, was intended to stop home grown terrorists.
The ACLU of Tennessee blasted the legislation because it also authorizes the governor and attorney general to designate domestic groups as "terrorist organizations."
Wilders' involvement in the Tennessee delegation received significant criticism by both Tennessee and national organizations.
Paul Galloway, executive director of the American Center for Outreach, a Tennessee-based Muslim advocacy organization, called it disappointing.
"While it's disappointing, but not unexpected to see one Tennessee's most ardent opponents of religious freedom associating with a European anti-Muslim fascist," Galloway said. "It is far more concerning that the very same person is a leading Tennessee legislator with a long track record of opposing the first amendment under the guise of security."
GOP delegate Michael Hensley, left, with U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., on Monday at a brunch in downtown Cleveland before the 2016 Republican National Convention is called into session. (VICTOR ASHE/SPECIAL TO THE NEWS SENTINEL)
By Victor Ashe
CLEVELAND Tennessee delegates led by state Sen. Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet heard Ohio Attorney General and former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine speak at their breakfast Monday morning before the 2016 Republican National Convention was gaveled into session.
DeWine said is predicting a tight race in Ohio but that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump would prevail. DeWine is a likely candidate for governor of Ohio in 2018.
Tennessee state Sen. Mark Norris hosted a reception for delegates Sunday and will stay thru Thursday, making contacts among the delegates.
Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Randy Boyd of Knoxville arrives Tuesday and will hold a luncheon for delegates on Thursday. Boyd also is being mentioned as a possible candidate for governor.
Congresswoman Diane Black, another possible gubernatorial candidate, is staying in her Middle Tennessee district this week fighting off a primary challenge from former state Rep. Joe Carr.
Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell is not attending the convention as she, too, has a competitive general election opponent from the Democrats.
Gov. Bill Haslam, U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker all spoke to the assembled delegates during a brunch they hosted Monday morning at a downtown Cleveland restaurant. Haslam warmly endorsed Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as the vice presidential candidate.
Many delegates are first time delegates and very excited to be in Cleveland.
Platform committee
U.S. Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming called the convention's Platform Committee, of which I am a member, together Monday afternoon and the platform tentatively adopted last week was formally adopted by a lopsided voice vote.
There was discussion that the Republican National Committee for the 2020 convention should review the merit of a shorter platform as a sales document to the American people.
The topic received currency and will be reviewed after this year's elections in November election.
Back in session
After recessing for a few minutes to allow its committees to meet, the afternoon inside Quicken Loans Arena was devoted to countless speeches from well known and lesser persons. What makes it hard for the speakers is that the delegates are milling around talking to others on the floor while ignoring the speeches. This is typical of all conventions.
The real interest tonight is Melanie Trump.
Floor outburst
An afternoon debate on rules broke out in demonstrations on the floor of the convention.
The issue was whether there would be a debate on rule changes freeing delegates to vote for the candidate of their choice as opposed to state law. It took seven states to ask for a debate and vote. It was announced that three states had pulled their support but no names were given. This triggered strong criticism led by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.
From the stage
Former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell electrified the audience Monday night after strong introduction by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The mother of a soldier, Pat Smith, killed in Benghazi, Libya, spoke in very emotional tones blaming Hillary Clinton personally for the death of her son in 2012. Three others were killed, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Victor Ashe, former Knoxville mayor and U.S. ambassador to Poland, is writing a "Delegate Diary" for the News Sentinel from the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
A quick peek from the floor of the @GOP convention floor pic.twitter.com/f0P6iq5sIN
9:01 p.m.: Boxing promoter and Trump supporter Don King visited the convention Monday afternoon. King called Trump a "pioneer" and advocated for him saying, "he's the only one with guts."
8:30 p.m.: Mick Cornett, Mayor of Oklahoma City and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, discussed the country's Republican mayors and how they'll work with a 'President Trump.' Watch the video below:
1:33 p.m.: Right as the Republican National Convention officially began, Myra Simons, one of Tennessee's 16 alternate delegates for Ted Cruz, took to social media to say that Michael Brown, the 18-year-old black teenager who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, was a "thug."
Michael Brown was a thug! https://t.co/Yi3A6ciwp5 Myra Simons (@myra_simons) July 18, 2016
Simons' comment came in response to a tweet in which a blogger mentioned that Brown's mother is set to speak at the Democratic National Convention.
1:15 p.m.: Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry joined a horde of people streaming to the Quicken Loans Arena, where the Republican National Convention officially started at 1 p.m.
The line to enter the facility stretched for blocks, with some delegates engaging with several people holding signs. Several people with anti-abortion signs spoke with delegates waiting outside the restaurant where Tennessee delegates and politicians met Monday morning.
11:45 a.m. ET: Gov. Bill Haslam joined U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker in predicting this Republican National Convention will be different than many in the past as they greeted the Tennessee delegation for a brunch at a downtown Cleveland restaurant a few blocks from Quicken Loans Arena.
As delegates and guests ate from a buffet at a trendy restaurant called Zocalo, the Tennessee political leaders noted the dynamic nature of the GOP campaign that spurred Donald Trump to the nomination.
"Democracy is an incredible, incredible adventure. Right now a lot of people would say we're in waters that we haven't seen before in this country," Haslam said.
"But the fact that we have people who care enough to be a part of this process, to make sure that America is the country we want it to be, is encouraging to all of us."
Corker spoke at the New York delegation breakfast Monday morning, joking that it's one of those rare Republican conventions where the New York delegation carries some clout. Alexander mentioned a recent meeting with Trump and Senate Republicans, where the presumptive nominee said he favored local control when it comes to making education policy.
Haslam is expected to speak Wednesday morning at the delegates breakfast.
10 a.m.: U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, RChattanooga, discusses national security issues during a breakfast at the Republican National Convention.
8:45 a.m.: Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine passed out copies of his wife's favorite recipes and focused on the need to unify the party as he welcomed Tennessee Republican delegates to Cleveland and the start of the Republican National Convention.
In a short speech over breakfast Monday morning, DeWine said his first choice for president was former candidate and current Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
"I was a Kasich delegate. I'm still a Kasich delegate. But I frankly think this week, it's time to get behind our nominee," DeWine said to applause.
The first sessions of the convention are set to start at 1 p.m. Monday's theme is "Make America Safe Again," with speeches expected to focus on national and local security issues.
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The U.S. Department of Energy's decision to divest itself of the American Museum of Science & Energy Museum in Oak Ridge presents many opportunities for the museum, for the city and for private development.
There are many moving parts and potential pitfalls, however, so cooperation among stakeholders will be required to arrive at solutions that benefit the entire community.
The museum is owned by DOE and operated by UT-Battelle, the management contractor for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Last month DOE asked the federal government's General Services Administration to dispose of the museum building and the property in front of it.
With the National Park Service in the planning stages for the Oak Ridge component of the newly created Manhattan Project National Historical Park and the redevelopment of Oak Ridge Mall into Main Street Oak Ridge, the timing is promising.
Selling the museum building and the 17.12-acre expanse in front of it to a private developer would put the parcel back on the tax rolls. Because the property fronts busy Illinois Avenue, interest should be strong. In fact, the developer of nearby Main Street Oak Ridge, Greenville, S.C.-based RealtyLink, wants to have the first crack at buying the property to block competitors from the prime commercial spot.
That could prove difficult because the federal government is no ordinary seller. According to the GSA, the agency uses one of three methods when selling surplus property to the private sector: online auction, public auction and sealed bid.
Plus, government agencies get first dibs. Claire Sinclair, spokeswoman for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Site Office, said every federal agency has to be contacted first to see if they can use the property. Agencies that help the homeless are then asked if they're interested in the property before other options are considered. State or local governments can then negotiate a sale, if they are interested.
Between now and the transaction, the museum will have to scout for a new home while finding a new operational organization. There is the AMSE Foundation, but it primarily supports the museum's programs and does not have a museum management role. DOE's operational budget for the museum this year was $1.5 million, but Sinclair said that amount does not meet all the museum's needs.
Finding or building a suitable home for the museum will be a challenge if a long-term management organization is not in place. That organization would be wise to work the with National Park Service to make sure the two efforts do not work at cross purposes. The city of Oak Ridge should continue to work with all the stakeholders to facilitate the various projects.
Meanwhile, ORNL will continue to operate ASME and provide space for the Park Service's temporary visitor's center. And work already has begun to tear down most of Oak Ridge Mall Belk and J.C. Penney have long-term leases to prepare the property for its transformation into a shopping and dining district in the heart of the city.
With communication, good will and collaboration, a solution can be found that will support the American Museum of Science & Energy for years to come.
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The Republican Party has had a devastating effect on the U.S. in the last century. In 1929, when Herbert Hoover was president, the Great Depression inflicted great misery on the majority of U.S. citizens. Today the GOP-controlled Congress is working to repeal the laws put in place to prevent another economic disaster. In 2008, while George W. Bush was president, another economic meltdown occurred.
In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected, at least in part on his pledge for an honorable peace in Vietnam. The result was the first major military defeat for the U.S. If Nixon had just withdrawn all troops on Jan. 21, 1969, the results would have been the same except that 21,195 U.S. military men and women would not have died needlessly and others would have not been needlessly wounded and maimed. The number of civilians killed and wounded from Jan. 20, 1969, until the withdrawal of U.S. forces is really unknown. Nixon was the only U.S. president to resign because of misconduct.
The next Republican president was Ronald Reagan, whose repeated mantra about the need for smaller government was not supported by his increasing the national debt by 200 percent during his presidency.
The next two Republican presidents were George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. While the first was only a one-term president, he increased the national debt by $1.4 trillion. The second had two terms to increase the national debt by $4.36 trillion. He also propelled the U.S. into two long wars of aggression.
William H. Cox, Knoxville
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I have read with amusement and growing concern the initial article and several letters to the editor regarding Phoenix Energy of Nevada. This company's website describes its "revolutionary, evolutionary" induction power cycle as a "power plant design and technology known and described as the PENV Steam Waste Heat Energy Recovery Dry Cooling Reverse Condenser Induction Energy Induced Feed Water Re-Heat Electric Power Generation Plant."
Any power technology known by a 20-word title should be subject to scrutiny. Someone is using a lot of big words to make a gullible public think their process sounds very scientific.
Phoenix Energy's website and publicity releases state that no fuels are used for the continuation of the energy production cycle once the cycle is initially started with a small amount of electricity, after which large amounts of power are continuously released to the electric grid, while only 15-20 percent of the output is required to maintain the cycle. As any student of physics knows, any device or system that promises more total energy output than total energy input is, by definition, a perpetual motion machine. Perpetual motion machines are, like the Phoenix in the company's name, allowed only in the magical realm of Harry Potter.
I keep waiting for someone at Phoenix Energy to belatedly say, "April Fool!" I hope that no one has invested any money in this so-called technology.
Philip Bartok, Knoxville
From instant noodles to bread and beef broth soup, Korean food is gaining interest overseas from consumers outside of the usual group of Korean residents and a handful of Korea followers, a leading trade body said Monday.
South Korea's instant noodles, ramyeon, ranks second after Taiwan in the Chinese market for the product, but the speed of its growth in China's imports is obvious, according to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) in Wuhai. China's imports of ramyeon increased 65.5 percent in 2015 to $21.81 million from $13.37 million the previous year. Ramyeon sales are likely to increase more once China's import tariffs on the product are fully eliminated under the bilateral free trade agreement that took effect in December, the office said. The current tariff rate is 13.5 percent.
Ramyeon has also earned customers in Malaysia. KMT Tradings, the exclusive importer and distributor of Nongshim's product in the country, said it now records an annual sales of 15 billion won ($13.21 million). The company is regarded as a mid-size enterprise, having over 100 employees.
KOTRA offices in Wuhan and Kuala Lumpur cite the different taste of Korean ramyeon as the source of its success, highlighting the tangy and spicy side of the food. The Kuala Lumpur office said the popularity of Korean pop music and dramas in the country helped create synergy and recommended that South Korean food exporters focus on getting halal certification for bigger market access to the country's Muslim population.
Kimchi exports have sagged in traditional markets like Japan and Hong Kong, but it has picked up new customers in the United States and Australia. South Korea exported $5.34 million worth of the fermented pickled cabbage to the United States last year, being used in various fusion dishes. For instance, it has been successfully mixed with tacos to add the spicy hot flavor. In Utah, food trucks selling Korean-style cup rice have received good customer reviews. Soups cooked with beef broth, made through long hours of boiling in low heat, have been described by local media as healthy slow food.
According to the KOTRA office in Chicago, sales at Korean restaurants in the United States, estimated at $2.1 billion at present, are expected to grow 2.8 percent every year until 2021.
Australians have also grown fonder of kimchi. South Korea exported $2.27 million worth of the side dish to Australia last year, making it the fifth largest kimchi export market.
South Korea's bakery chains stand tall in China with menus developed to please local consumers. Paris Baguette, who opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai in 2004, now operates 134 shops in the country. Making its luxurious interior design and premium image its corporate trademark in China, the confectionery company fills 20 percent of its menu with locally developed products, including mango-laced and oil-rich breads.
Tous Les Jour made a hit with its bread using red beans, another popular ingredient with Chinese customers.
"China is the next biggest market after the United States in confectioneries, recording over 10 percent annual growth," KOTRA's Guangzhou office said. "Customers in large cities care more about product freshness, store sanitation, taste, interior design and brand image than price," it said.
In Russia, the new interest has been on South Korean-made frozen dumplings. Exports of the product to Russia last year reached $43,000, a 134 percent increase from the previous year.
"Russia's Far East is geographically close to Korea, so quite a number of people there have tried frozen dumplings and are favorable to them," the trade body's office in Vladivostok said. (Yonhap)
A clearly visible copy of a passenger's passport is among hundreds of documents obtained by The Korea Times from Asiana Airlines' website. An estimated 47,000 scanned personal documents, including resident registration numbers, passport information, home addresses, bank accounts, phone numbers and family relations records, are believed to have been left unsecure on the website. / Korea Times photo by Park Si-soo
By Park Si-soo, Lee Han-soo
Tens of thousands of items of sensitive passenger information have been leaked on the Internet in a large-scale private data breach against Korea's second-biggest airline, Asiana Airlines.
The information includes citizen resident numbers, passport information, home addresses, bank account details, phone numbers and family relations records. The information, saved on the company's website (flyasiana.com) for the past several years, is believed to have been compromised.
Victims are Koreans and foreigners who traveled or will travel using Asiana or its affiliated airlines, such as United Airlines, Lufthansa, Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines, among others.
The Korea Times was able to access hundreds of scanned private documents belonging to customers. They are part of an estimated 47,000 documents believed to have been compromised.
The oldest document obtained by The Korea Times is a flight ticket invoice issued in September 2014. But it is possible the leak extends farther. It is unknown whether the data has already fallen into criminal hands.
Computer engineers who analyzed the exposed data and the way it was accessed said the scanned documents appear to have been attached to customers' query emails to Asiana.
By Choi Sung-jin
Korea's export products enjoy competitive advantages in global markets thanks to their good designs but their brands suffer from low awareness among foreign buyers, a report said Monday.
The report, entitled "The current state of Korean products' competitiveness as seen by foreign buyers," was released by Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), based on its survey of 961 foreign buyers of Korean exports dealing with 111 KOTRA offices in 79 countries.
According to the survey, the biggest strength of Korean goods was their "good designs," it said.
Korean products were ranked at second highest, after the Chinese goods, in quality compared to price. In the area of function, they were at the third place, following Germany and Japan. In durability, Korean goods were at fourth, chasing Germany, Japan and France. In brand recognition, however, Korea was at the sixth place, following Germany, Japan, the United States, Italy and France.
Foreign buyers pointed to China as Korea's biggest export competitor.
Up to 63 percent of buyers said they compare Korean products with their Chinese counterparts when they import goods from Korea. Particularly, 88 percent of North American buyers and 80 percent of Japanese buyers compare Korean products with Chinese goods.
By industry, electric-electronics, machinery-equipment and bio sectors are competing most fiercely with Chinese industries. Particularly, 87.6 percent of buyers compare Korean and Chinese products in importing electric and electronic goods, the report said. In the areas of agricultural and fishery products and household consumer goods, Korean products are most frequently compared with Japanese items, it added.
Chinese buyers highly rated the Korean products' designs and qualities compared to their prices. North Korean buyers also evaluated Korean goods' functions and designs but rated their brand recognition as low. European buyers gave high marks to Korean products' quality per price but relatively lower points to their designs, compared with buyers in other regions.
Industry-wise, Korean products' competitiveness in function and design took the top place in electric-electronic industries. In their brand awareness, however, Germany and Japan took the top two places with Korea pushed down to fifth place. In the area of household consumer goods, Korean products were the best in quality per price, and second in the aspects of function and design. In bio and medical industry, too, Korean goods were rated the best in quality per price.
"Amid global economic slowdown and export setback, Korean export products' competitiveness remains pretty strong," said Yoon Won-seok, chief of KOTRA's headquarters for information and trading support. "However, exporters should strive harder to jack up their low brand awareness."
By Choi Sung-jin
In the run-up to the parliamentary elections in April, both ruling and opposition parties pledged to raise the minimum wage to 10,000 won ($8.8) an hour, immediately or gradually.
Labor unions' expectations also rose that workers would be able to get at least a double-digit raise this year. On Saturday, however, a trilateral committee decided to raise next year's minimum wage by 440 won, or 7.3 percent, from this year to 6,470 won ($5.69) an hour.
Out of the total 27 members nine each from the labor, management and public interests of the minimum wage committee, only those representing employers and public interests took part in the yes-or-no vote. All of the nine members representing the labor walked out in protest to the increase even smaller than this year's 8.1-percent hike.
The committee held 14 meetings this year, more than ever before, reflecting heated arguments between employers and employees. Unlike in the past when both sides presented several counterpropositions, they stuck to their respective original proposal of 10,000 won per hour and 0 won. And as were the cases in seven of the past 10 negotiations, members representing public interests decided it, by compromising between the two extremes.
Park Joon-sung, the committee's chairman, said, "Although next year's raise is a little smaller than this year's, the committee did its best to narrow the widening income gap in labor markets."
But the union said next year's minimum wage, equivalent to 1.35 million won in monthly salary provided they work 40 hours a week, falls far short of the 1.67 million in the actual cost of living for a single worker, as it failed to reflect the rise in living expense in the past year.
In reality, however, there are 2.64 million workers, or 13.7 percent of total wage earners, who do not receive the legal minimum wage in large part because of the government's leniency toward employers who violate the rule, according to a report by Kim Yu-seon, a researcher at Korea Labor and Society Institute.
The current law calls for sentencing violators to a maximum prison term of three years or fines of up to 20 million won. Out of the total 32,997 violators ferreted out from 2011-2015, only 64 were prosecuted, however. That is because employers have only to pay back wages to avoid legal punishment.
Also problematic is the operation of the three-way committee. Out of the total 27 members, it has almost always been the nine members representing public interests that have the casting ballots when the labor and management are at loggerheads.
The government recommends and appoints all of the nine members who are supposed to remain neutral but end up taking sides with the management at the behest of the government, however, the experts said.
To rectify this unfair practice, they added, the nation needs to either diversify the recommendation of public interest members or make the National Assembly determine minimum wages, they added.
By Lee Hyo-sik
Ticket Monster (TMON), a struggling e-commerce site, is drawing complaints for its controversial plan to dismiss 170 workers, including new recruits, in the name of improving business efficiency.
The company said Monday that it had sent an email message on July 13 to all 170 employees at a business division dealing with restaurants, hotels and other hospitality-related establishments, asking them to quit through a voluntary retirement program.
TMON, headed by CEO Daniel Shin, said it will downsize the division due to falling sales.
However, employees strongly protest the firm's decision, arguing that it should take other steps to solve the problem rather than blindly resorting to slashing the number of workers.
Several employees who were asked to apply for the early retirement scheme by July 24 have posted their complaints on Blind app, where employees of a company or people working in the same industry can upload instant messages and communicate anonymously.
One TMON employee wrote that "I have been working really hard for the company over the past few years, setting aside family-related and other personal matters. I am really angry to find out what this company thinks of its workers that I am expendable."
Another worker posted a message, saying, "I don't understand why TMON has recruited so many entry-level workers, while letting go other more experienced workers. The company seems to behave like an amateur group that closes a shop when it fails to make money instantly."
However, TMON said it is not forcing any employees to quit, stressing that they can remain on the payroll if they want to.
"It is true that we asked 170 employees to file for early retirement. But this is on a strictly voluntary basis," a TMON official said. "Some workers have expressed their intent to leave. Those seeking to remain will be transferred to other divisions."
The e-commerce site reportedly plans to offer a special bonus, in addition to regular severance pay, in accordance with workers' employment periods. Workers who have been on the payroll for more than five years will likely be given a 17 million won bonus.
TMON has been struggling to make a profit over the past few years amid intensifying competition with its two larger rivals Coupang and WeMakePrice.
Last year, Shin formed a consortium with two private equity funds Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Anchor Equity Partners to acquire a 59 percent stake in the company from U.S.-based e-commerce site Groupon. Groupon still holds the remaining 41 percent.
The company had 195.9 billion won in sales in 2015, up 24 percent from a year earlier. But its operating losses expanded by 24.6 billion won to 141.9 billion won.
Workers at the country's major shipbuilders will stage a joint strike this week, demanding that tough restructuring moves currently underway be scrapped.
According to the sources, unionized workers at the country's Big Three shipyards -- Hyundai Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and Samsung Heavy Industries-- and five other smaller shipbuilders plan to launch a partial strike for four hours on Wednesday.
An estimated 30,000 workers may join the walkout, the sources said.
Samsung Heavy workers already staged a partial strike last week. Workers at Hyundai Heavy and Daewoo Shipbuilding approved a strike proposal.
South Korean shipbuilders have been under severe financial strain since the 2008 global economic crisis that sent new orders tumbling amid a glut of vessels and tougher competition from Chinese rivals.
The country's top three shipyards suffered a combined operating loss of 8.5 trillion won ($7.4 billion) last year due largely to increased costs stemming from a delay in the construction of offshore facilities and an industry-wide slump, with Daewoo Shipbuilding alone posting a 5.5 trillion won loss.
The shipbuilders have recently drawn up sweeping self-rescue programs worth 10.35 trillion won in a desperate bid to overcome a protracted slump and mounting losses.
Meanwhile, workers at Hyundai Motor, the country's top automaker, are set to go on a partial strike on Tuesday, and may extend it to Thursday, demanding a pay raise and better working conditions. (Yonhap)
GM Korea President and CEO James Kim, left, poses with Global Cadillac Chief Marketing Officer Uwe Ellinghaus, right, and Cadillac Korea Representative Director Chang Jae-joon during the CT6 launch at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel in Samseong-dong, southern Seoul, Monday. / Courtesy of Cadillac
By Jhoo Dong-chan
The American premium carmaker, Cadillac, has unveiled its large-size CT6 sedan, suggesting a new standard in the nation's luxury sedan market dominated by German automakers BMW and Mercedes Benz.
"Cadillac is the car that first introduced the large-size luxury car to the auto market," Cadillac Representative Director Chang Jae-joon said during the launch at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel in Samseong-dong, southern Seoul, Monday.
"The CT6 sedan offers the essence of Cadillac's characteristic design identity along with its latest technological developments. I am confident that the model will be one of the top three in sales in the large-size luxury auto market."
Jang's ambition indicates that it will beat sales of Audi A8 and Lexus LS sedans, which are considered to be No. 3 models in sales after Mercedes S-Class and BMW 7-series.
Under the concept of the "First Class" sedan, the CT6 offers powerful performance along with differentiated design identity that lives up to its name.
It mounts a 3.6-liter V6 gasoline direct-injection engine that can deliver a maximum 340 horsepower with 39.4 kg-m torque to its all-time four-wheel driving. Famous U.S.-based auto magazine Ward's Auto has selected the engine as one of this year's 10 best engines.
The CT6's Active Chassis System monitors the condition of each wheel individually and controls the suspension dampers every 1/1,000 of a second to maintain smooth and agile driving performance.
Its 8-speed transmission offers a punchy response as well as improved fuel efficiency by 5 percent compared to the older 6-speed transmission.
The frame of the CT6 is made of light-weight Omege architecture, reducing more than 50 kilograms of weight compared to its rival Mercedes' S-Class or BMW's 7-series.
Cadillac's signature grille and vertical-type LED headlamps boast its differentiated identity along with its dynamic and sleek bodyline.
Its sizable interior, which features natural leather and quality hardwood, cherishes American luxury sentiment in detail. And the CT6's BOSE Panaray Sound System delivers concert-like quality to the driver and passengers.
It also has two 10-inch monitors mounted on the back of the front seats so that rear seat passengers can watch movies or TV programs independently.
The CT6's latest IT and optical technologies also enhance the driver's safety and convenience.
The Night Vision System detects pedestrians' thermal signatures to warn drivers at night or even in bad weather. The CT6 also features the industry-leading and award-winning Rear Camera Mirror and the Surrounding Vision System to provide optimal visibility for the driver.
Receiving orders beginning in August, the price range starts from 78.8 million won ($69,341), much less expensive than its rivals in the segment including Mercedes' S-Class and BMW's 7-series.
By Kim Jae-won
High-income foreigners will face a higher tax rate here as the government considers increasing its 17-percent fixed rate levied on non-Korean workers, seeking to raise tax revenue amid low economic growth.
The Ministry of Strategy and Finance said that it was considering changing its tax rule on foreign employees and executives which imposes a 17-percent rate on their income regardless of the amount for the first five years after they started working in the country.
The regulation has been regarded as a special treatment for high-income foreigners as their Korean counterparts pay up to 38 percent in income tax based on their salaries. Reflecting complaints from Korean workers for equal treatment, the country raised the rate to 17 percent from 15 percent in 2012.
"We are considering changing the income tax rules for foreign workers," said a director at the finance ministry, asking not to be named. "But, nothing has been decided yet."
By Yoon Ja-young
Following Britain's decision to leave the European Union (EU), investors are turning to "safety" assets. What is notable is that the price of silver is rising steeper than gold.
Silver traded at $40.40 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange on July 6, surpassing $20 for the first time since August 2014.
Cho Byung-hyun, a market analyst at Yuanta Securities, noted that the market's interest in precious metals such as gold and silver has been strong since early this year _ gold has risen 27 percent this year while silver has risen 45 percent.
"It is true that gold got the spotlight earlier but the price change in silver is more overwhelming than that of gold," the analyst said.
He said silver's steep rise reflects the market's expectation on economic recovery. While silver is less valuable than gold as a precious metal, it is more useful than gold as an industrial material. Silver is used in goods such as smartphones, flat-panel TVs and solar-energy panels. Around half the silver consumed last year is estimated to have been used for industrial purposes.
"If it was simply due to increasing demand for safety assets triggered by Brexit, gold should have been stronger than silver," Cho said. "However, silver is rising steeper and it means expectations on economic recovery are gaining as much momentum. Expectation on economic stimuli through fiscal spending is the driving force."
Jewelry retailers say silver is more accessible for investors than gold. According to the Korea Gold Exchange, a jewelry shop in Jongro, downtown Seoul, a 100-gram silver bar is 128,000 won while the same amount of gold is 5.6 million won. The shop noted that its silver sales had more than doubled from early this year, and banks are also seeing more investors looking for silver.
But analysts say silver's price is volatile.
Kim Hun-gil, an analyst at Hana Financial Investment, said gold is still better than silver over the long term. "Gold rose nearly 30 percent during the past six months, surpassing $1,300 per ounce," he said. "It has risen considerably, but we think it still has room for a further rise." He expects it to continue rising until the end of the year to nearly $1,500 an ounce amid increasing volatility in stock indices.
"Silver has surpassed the performance of gold, but investors should note that silver used to not only rise faster than gold but also cooled down quicker," Kim said. Silver is still far below $49, the top price it touched in 2011.
"Silver is twice as more volatile than gold and is thus vulnerable in terms of investment stability," Kim said. "Silver can be just another form of risk in the current market, where avoiding risks should be the top priority."
/Courtesy of Twitter
By Lee Han-soo
Actor Lee Jin-wook, who had been accused of sexual assault, returned home Monday morning after eleven hours of questioning by police.
Lee strongly denied allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in her 30s. He said the intercourse in question was "consensual." The actor added he has filed a countersuit against the women, demanding she be punished for defamation.
A South Korean government panel presided by the prime minister said Monday it has confirmed an additional 142 people abducted by Pyongyang during the 1950-53 Korean War.
The government launched the committee in 2010 under a special law aimed at recovering the honor of those who were abducted by the North. So far, South Korea confirmed 4,782 people were abducted during the three year conflict.
Among the newly listed victims, farmers and fishermen accounted for the majority at 57.8 percent, followed by students and industry workers with 14.1 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively.
By age group, those in their 20s took up 38.7 percent, followed by teens and those in their 30s each accounting for 37.3 percent and 16.9 percent of the total. (Yonhap)
President Park Geun-hye left for Seoul on Monday after wrapping up her five-day trip to Mongolia that focused on strengthening international cooperation in coping with North Korea's nuclear and missile threats, and promoting free trade.
During her first presidential trip to Ulaanbaatar, she attended the two-day Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), which ended Saturday, and then began a two-day official visit, which was arranged on the invitation of her Mongolian counterpart Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj.
At the ASEM summit, Park held official and unofficial meetings with the leaders of the European Union, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Japan and other countries, which Seoul officials said helped "deepen and widen" South Korea's diplomacy with Asia and Europe.
Park, in particular, revved up her summit diplomacy to call international attention to Pyongyang's persistent military provocations and its woeful human rights situation, and promote her policy for national reunification.
At home, Park faces an array of important challenges, such as revitalizing the economy and addressing resistance to a plan to deploy an advanced U.S. antimissile system in a southern town to better deal with North Korea's evolving nuclear and missile threats.
The residents of Seongju County in North Gyeongsang Province have opposed the decision to install a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in the county.
They are concerned over the rumors that electromagnetic waves emanating from the THAAD radar system could cause cancer and infertility, and hurt their agricultural crops. They have also criticized the government for pushing ahead with the deployment plan without the due process of securing their consent.
Before departing for Mongolia, Park convened a session of the National Security Council and called for an end to "needless" squabbling over the deployment of THAAD and for public understanding over the "grave" security situation the country is in at the moment.
While in Mongolia on Saturday, Park reiterated her call for public understanding and cooperation in ensuring national security, pointing to "many difficulties" arising from the decision to deploy a THAAD battery to Seongju. (Yonhap)
By Choi Sung-jin
Political freedom has been retrogressing in Korea since President Park Geun-hye took office, Foreign Policy, a U.S. diplomatic journal, said recently.
The Park administration is squelching protests, suing journalists and jailing opposition politicians, said the bimonthly journal in an article headlined "Is South Korea regressing into a dictatorship" in its Internet edition last Thursday.
Citing that Han Sang-gyun, leader of the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions, was recently sentenced to five years in prison for organizing a massive anti-government protest last November, the journal quoted Amnesty International, which described it as part of the "shrinking right to freedom of peaceful assembly in South Korea."
The article noted that until the early 1990s when the election of opposition leader Kim Young-sam ended more than 40 years of authoritarian rule, the repression of protests was common as well. "But over the last few years, the country has regressed," it said.
"Since taking office on Feb. 25, 2013, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and her Saenuri Party have sued journalists, jailed labor leaders, and opposition politicians, censored the press, and dissolved political parties," the article said.
It then cited as such examples the millions of illegal tweets for Park by the agents of National Intelligence Service during the 2012 elections, the disbanding of the Unified Progressive Party in December 2014, and replacing eight history books for secondary school children with a single state-written text.
To deal with North Korea, which threatens to destroy the South by testing nuclear weapons and launching long-range missiles, the journal said, Park has developed ability to find communists everywhere in the country. "It's a common slur in South Korea to accuse anyone mildly progressive of being jongbuk pro-Pyongyang apparatchik but it has reached a fever pitch under Park," it said.
The journal noted press freedom has also gone backward since President Park took power.
It pointed to the government's frequent accusations of journalists on charges of defamation. For example, it said, Seoul indicted Tatsuya Kato, the Seoul bureau chief for Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, claiming his story questioning the president's activities during first seven hours of the April 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, allegedly because of mismanagement from both the ferry company and the government -- amounted to criminal defamation.
"As a result, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked the country 70 out of 180 in its World Press Freedom Index, down 10 places from 2015, and the lowest since RSF began tabulating the index since 2002," it said. The article also quoted RSF's comment that "the South Korean government has displayed a growing inability to tolerate criticism and its meddling in the already polarized media threatens their independence."
It conceded that the Park administration has not tortured or hanged anyone or overthrown a democratically elected government in a coup (like her father did). "But while the torture and killing have not returned, the clampdown on freedom has," the journal said.
"It's done in the name of anticommunism, but North Korea isn't the bigger concern of South Koreans today: it's inequality, job opportunities, and realizing a decent standard of living," Foreign Policy said. "Park has failed to address these concerns and, as a result, needs someone to blame. Liberals and communists will do just fine."
Korea's national police chief expressed regret on Monday over the rising criticism that he failed to properly cope with last week's protest rally in the southern county of Seongju that turned violent, triggered by Seoul's decision to deploy an advanced U.S. missile defense system there.
"I hope the incident will induce people to treat each other in a law-binding manner," Kang Sin-myeong, Commissioner General of the National Police Agency, said, urging protesters to respect the rules.
The remark came as protesters who opposed the deployment the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in the southern town blocked Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn's car for hours and threw water bottles and eggs at him last week, while he tried to explain the government's position on missile defense and alleviate health concerns expressed by locals.
Residents expressed discontent with the move, questioning the transparency of the decision-making process as well as the potential risks to their health.
The police established a special investigation team, which focuses on whether water bottles and eggs can be considered "hazardous tools" or the demonstration itself broke relevant laws.
Residents of Seongju plan to hold a rally in Seoul on Thursday.
Kang, however, did not directly express his opinion on whether the so-called "outsiders" were involved in the violent protests.
"We are currently finding out details of non-resident protesters on the day," Kang said. "But there are no investigations under way (on specific organizations or individuals).
"Rather than define them as outsiders, I believe such people can be sorted as we start investigations into wrongdoings," the police chief added. (Yonhap)
A South Korean officer, second from right, measures electromagnetic waves emitted from the AN/TPY-2 radar of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, Monday, while South Korean journalists and a U.S. officer look on. The inset photo shows the levels of the electromagnetic waves at 0.001 watts per square meter, which is much lower than the 10 watts per square meter permissible level in daily life set by the Korea Communications Commission. / Courtesy of U.S. Air Force
Electromagnetic wave levels found safe
By Jun Ji-hye, Joint press corps
South Korean journalists and military officials hear explanations from a U.S. officer about the THAAD system during their visit to "Site Armadillo," the location of a THAAD battery inside Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, Monday. / Courtesy of U.S. Air Force
The U.S. military showed its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery stationed in Guam to a group of South Korean journalists, Monday, as part of efforts to calm mounting safety concerns over its radar.
During the tour to "Site Armadillo," the location of the THAAD unit inside Andersen Air Force Base, the journalists and officials from the Ministry of National Defense received explanations from U.S. soldiers about how the unit was operated, the system's AN/TPY-2 radar and the noise level of generators, the ministry said.
The THAAD unit in Guam, nicknamed "Musudan manglers," was set up in 2013 in response to the growing threats from North Korea's Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The radar in Guam is the same model as the one to be deployed in Seongju County in North Gyeongsang Province next year.
A South Korean Air Force major was allowed to measure electromagnetic waves with Korea's own devices for six minutes at a spot 1.6 kilometers away from the radar while it was operating.
The result showed the average level was 0.0003 watts per square meter with the maximum value of 0.0007 watts per square meter, which was much lower than the permissible level of electromagnetic waves on daily life set by the Korea Communications Commission, which is 10 watts per square meter.
The reason why the measurement took place at a spot 1.6 kilometers away from the radar was because a residential area is located about 1.5 kilometers away from the envisioned site in Seongju, officials said.
A U.S. official said, asking not to be named, that his country will thoroughly check safety concerns before the deployment as its troops serve near the radar, adding that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency will accurately set up a safe zone in Seongju.
By Kim Se-jeong
The recent terrorist attack in Nice, a seaside town in southern France, and a failed coup attempt in Turkey have been causing people to reconsider their summer holiday destinations.
As Western Europe and Turkey are top tourist destinations among Koreans, particularly in summer, concerns and inquiries are growing over whether they should push ahead with scheduled trips or cancel them.
"I think I have to cancel my trip to France," one Internet user said. "Terrorist attacks are so frequent there. If I cancel it, I will not get a refund for the 1.5 million won I've spent. I don't know whether that dangerous place is worth 1.5 million won. Even if I go, I don't think I can fully enjoy the trip because of safety concerns."
Another blogger said, "Nice used to be considered safe from terrorist attacks. Now I don't know which place is safe. It seems no city can guarantee safety."
By Kim Hyo-jin
The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) harshly criticized the government, Monday, for trying to quell protests against the planned deployment of the High Terminal Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system by claiming that anti-government activists are leading the rallies.
Expressing concerns about the way the government responded to a recent rally held in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, which has been picked as the location for a THAAD battery, the party said the government's move to crack down on protesters reminds it of the era of the "police state."
The party's interim leader Rep. Kim Chong-in urged President Park Geun-hye to apologize for causing social division with what he called a hasty announcement of the deployment.
The party is apparently toughening its stance on the Park administration's handling of protesters in an effort to overcome criticism by other opposition parties and its supporters, who claimed the MPK remains ambiguous over the deployment of the anti-missile system.
The party has yet to decide its official position about the deployment while the minor opposition People's Party has pressured it to join hands in nullifying the government's decision.
"The government is attempting to evade its responsibility by launching an investigation of the protesters," MPK spokesman Rep. Ki Dong-min told reporters. "It's an outdated practice reminding people of the previous police state."
President Park Geun-hye's five-day visit to Mongolia has added fresh momentum to her efforts to cement international cooperation in dealing with North Korea's nuclear ambitions and forestall trade protectionism, observers said Monday.
Park also capitalized on her first presidential trip here to renew global attention to the North's human rights violations and promote her policy drive to lay the groundwork for reunification, which she said would offer a "fundamental solution" to various North Korea problems.
But her brisk summit diplomacy was partly overshadowed by a terrorist attack in France, a botched military coup in Turkey and violent protests in a town in southern South Korea against the plan by Seoul and Washington to deploy an advanced U.S. anti-missile system.
Park's official schedule in Mongolia began Friday with her attendance at the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit, which was held until Saturday under the main theme of "20 years of ASEM: Partnership for the Future through Connectivity."
During the first round of the summit, Park focused on warning against the recrudescence of protectionist and isolationist tendencies.
After Britain's shocking vote last month to exit the European Union (EU), Park has repeatedly stressed the importance of fostering open, free trade across the world, underscoring the fact that South Korea's export-reliant economy has benefited much from free trade.
"Uncertainties in the environment of the global economy are increasing. But we should not forget the historical lesson that the growth of the world economy has come in tandem with the spread of free trade," Park said as a lead speaker at the first session of the ASEM summit.
Park's free trade mantra did not end only with verbal statements.
During her talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk on Friday, the two sides shared the need to revise the bilateral FTA, which was signed in 2010 and provisionally took effect in 2011.
The two sides concurred that a revision of the South Korea-EU FTA is needed to "in consideration of the situational changes" over the last five years -- in an allusion to Britain's decision to quit the EU.
In addition, Park reached an agreement Sunday with her Mongolian counterpart Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj to seek an "economic partnership agreement (EPA)," similar to a free trade pact. The two sides will launch joint research on the EPA as early as late this year.
To further strengthen multilateral cooperation in curbing trade protectionism and promoting open trade, Park proposed resuming the ASEM economic ministers' meeting in South Korea next year. The talks have not been held since 2003.
During her stay in Mongolia, Park also revved up her diplomacy to further catalyze an international campaign to cajole Pyongyang into renouncing its nuclear and missile programs through sanctions and other forms of pressure.
The president called on the ASEM leaders to join forces to pressure the communist regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, highlighting that the North remains the biggest "stumbling block" to the ASEM's vision for a free, peaceful and interconnected Eurasia.
Park, in particular, stressed that the unification of the Korean Peninsula would be a fundamental solution to a series of "North Korea problems," including its rights abuses and persistent military threats.
Her efforts culminated in the ASEM leaders' adoption of the chair's statement that condemned Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs in the "strongest terms," and called for "vigilance" against any activities supporting the country's various weapons programs.
Such a chair's statement came after the South Korean chief executive made an emphatic appeal for the North's denuclearization during her official and unofficial meetings with top officials of the EU, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and other countries.
"(Park) helped spread (international) support for Seoul's policy to tackle North Korea problems and (prepare for) the reunification of the Korean Peninsula," Kim Kyou-hyun, the senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs, told reporters.
"This has helped deepen and widen our diplomacy with Asia and Europe," he added.
Cashing in on her second summit this year with the Mongolian leader, Park also sought to expand economic ties with the resource-rich country.
The two sides reached an understanding to seek South Korea's participation in 14 large scale projects being pursued by Mongolia, including some urban development schemes and infrastructure programs to build power plants and railways. The project moreover calls for expanding the country's electricity transmission networks.
The projects are estimated to be worth $4.49 billion in total. To support South Korea's participation in these projects, the two sides signed 20 memorandums of understanding, mostly over bilateral economic cooperation. (Yonhap)
Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam, fourth from left, poses with five delegates from the U.S. Democratic Party during a breakfast meeting in Seoul, Monday. The delegates are, from left, John Garamendi, Brian Schatz, Donna Edwards, Chris Murphy and Ted Deutch. / Courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
By Yi Whan-woo
Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam met with a delegation from the U.S. Democratic Party, Monday.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said five Democrats shared their thoughts on South Korea-U.S. relations, and security on the Korean Peninsula during a breakfast meeting with Lim.
The five were two senators Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy and three members of the House of Representatives Donna Edwards, John Garamendi and Ted Deutch.
"The vice foreign minister assessed that the U.S. Congress actively participated in the relations of the two countries and also issues concerning North Korea's nuclear program," the ministry said. "He called for Washington's continuous support of Seoul's key diplomatic policies."
Lim stressed the importance of pressure on North Korea as well, citing U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270 and independent sanctions from both South Korea and the U.S.
Schatz, who led the delegation, said the Seoul-Washington alliance is critical for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. He welcomed a joint decision made between the two allies July 8 to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in South Korea to deter North Korea's nuclear and missile provocations.
Schatz said the U.S. Congress has been throwing its bipartisan support behind bilateral relations on a wide range of issues, including diplomacy, military, the economy and culture, although there has been heated debate over Washington's foreign policies on its way to the presidential election in November.
The foreign ministry said the Democrats' visit is seen as a chance for the U.S. to assure congressional support for the alliance.
A delegation of U.S. lawmakers visiting Seoul on Monday voiced their Congress' bipartisan support for cooperation with South Korea in diverse areas including diplomacy and military affairs, the foreign ministry said.
The delegation consisting of five lawmakers from the Senate and the House of Representatives held a breakfast meeting with South Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam on Monday, according to the ministry. They all came from the Democratic Party.
The ministry quoted Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who is leading the delegation, as saying that the U.S. Congress is sending "bipartisan" support for cooperation with South Korea in areas ranging from diplomacy and military matters, to economic issues and culture.
The senator also "welcomed" the decision recently announced by the two allies to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile interception system in South Korea, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, Vice Foreign Minister Lim asked the visiting U.S. lawmakers to make more efforts to strengthen bilateral cooperation between Seoul and Washington and lend support to critical issues that the Seoul government is pushing forward.
Lim also said that it is important to keep pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions, mentioning that the latest resolution adopted by the U.N. Security Council in the wake of Pyongyang's fourth nuclear test earlier this year is the right step to take, according to the ministry. (Yonhap)
Korea Foundation President Lee Si-hyung / Courtesy of the Korea Foundation
Korea Foundation chief vows to boost outreach programs
By Rachel Lee
Korea needs to build strong brand power that corresponds to its high level of economic achievement so it is more influential on the international scene, the new Korea Foundation (KF) chief says.
Lee Si-hyung, appointed in May, said public diplomacy was important when Seoul is receiving so much world attention because of the success of Korea's companies, and as its culture spreads rapidly.
"Now is the time for the KF to do its proper job as an organization specializing in public diplomacy," Lee said.
The KF was founded in 1992 for international exchange and public diplomacy initiatives.
Lee, 59, is a career diplomat with 35 years' experience. He served as ambassador to Poland for three years from 2006, and was deputy minister for trade at the foreign ministry for two years from 2011. After returning from Warsaw, Lee served as chief of protocol in the presidential committee in preparation for the G20 Seoul Summit in 2010. Before joining the KF, Lee was for two years ambassador and permanent representative of Korea to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Participants of the Korea Foundation Field Research Fellowship Program pose at the Korea Foundation
Gallery in Seoul on May 4. / Courtesy of the Korea Foundation
Marking the 25th anniversary of its founding, the organization is eager to seek original ideas for business plans and strengthen its position following the enforcement of a law on public diplomacy in August.
"The key role for the KF lies within Korea promotion,'" said Lee, calling for citizens' understanding and participation in the organization's long-term projects.
"We are considering ways to inform well our citizens on what we are doing."
The KF chief believed Korea's "soft power," cultural diplomacy to influence international public opinion, has gained remarkable strength over the past few decades, thanks to fast economic development, democracy achievement and the spreading of Korean culture.
However, the president said there was an inadequate level of understanding about Korea despite several decades of effort.
"Even in the United States, regarded as our closest ally, the reality falls short of expectations, meaning that Korea is not well understood as much as it should be," Lee said, mentioning that the country's stance on key issues including the historical controversy between Korea and Japan and the situation on the Korean Peninsula still seemed relatively unknown.
"Compared with Japan, we fall behind when it comes to soft power," the president said.
"They have invested a great deal of money in public diplomacy, telling the world out there their stance on controversial issues, but it's not the case here."
Advanced nations such as France and Japan have been conducting numerous public diplomacy campaigns and projects.
Japan has its Japan Foundation, set up in 1972, which is dedicated to international cultural exchange programs. It has built a global network consisting of the Tokyo headquarters, the Kyoto Office, two Japanese-language institutes and 22 offices in 21 countries, with more than 200 staff members.
France also has had one of the world's leading cultural networks since 1883. Alliance Francaise boasts 1,040 establishments in 136 countries. Every year, more than 450,000 people of all ages attend Alliance Francaise schools to learn French, and over 6 million people take part in the cultural activities on offer.
"It has become of utmost importance to deliver our stance whenever diplomatic issues are raised, especially in this borderless, timeless global era," the president said. "We will make efforts to raise understanding about Korea around the world, including the U.S., China and Russia, through public diplomacy."
With Lee taking the lead for three years, the KF will focus on changes and challenges under the slogan "Small, but strong & smart KF," with this year's budget 49.6 billion won.
"The KF will spread nationwide our public diplomacy activities so that all Koreans can eventually join us promoting our country with pride," Lee said.
The KF has embarked on several projects to promote the country since its founding.
In April, the KF organized "Korea through eyes of foreigners" to find out what people from overseas think about Korean society, and how perceived problems can be improved.
Lecturers included medical interpreter Ilya Belyakov, John Riley, deputy head of mission at the New Zealand Embassy, and Korean zither player Jocelyn Clark. They shared their experiences of Korean food, traditional culture and prejudice,
The organization also launched the "KF Together Program" to help foreign residents understand Korea better through field trips to the Demilitarized Zone and other historical locations, discussions about Korean culture and issues, and networking opportunities to interact with Koreans.
As part of a long-term plan to nurture the next generation of such specialists, since 2009 the KF has set up Korea-related programs with four think tanks in the U.S. the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The KF has seven offices in six countries, with 91 staff.
For more information, visit www.kf.or.kr.
By Yi Whan-woo
North Korea is attempting to disrupt international sanctions against its nuclear program, taking advantage of a new Cold War rivalry stemming from a joint decision by Seoul and Washington to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here, analysts said Monday.
"North Korea is eager to ensure its strategic value by separating its two Cold War allies China and Russia from other members of the six-party talks," said An Chan-il head of the World Institute for North Korea Studies in Seoul.
He claimed North Korea is deliberately underscoring Seoul's security alliance with Washington and their diplomatic relations with Tokyo in an attempt to trigger conflict in the region.
On July 11, Pyongyang said the latest decision to deploy THAAD, an advanced U.S. missile system against North Korean missile attacks, is part of a scheme to "form an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization led by allied forces of the U.S. and South Korea against other regional powers."
Concerning the vice-ministerial talks among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan last week, North Korea denounced them Sunday as "an occasion in which Washington revealed its ambitions for regional hegemony through the establishment of a missile defense system and trilateral military alliance."
"It can be said North Korea is using THAAD as a reason to form a counter-military alliance against the U.S.-led allies," Kwak Jin-o, a senior researcher at the Northeast Asian History Foundation said.
North Korea fired off three ballistic missiles Tuesday morning following South Korea's recent decision to deploy an advanced U.S. anti-missile system in the country, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
The latest launch is thought to be part of Pyongyang's response to the July 8 decision by Seoul and Washington to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system here by the end of 2017 to deal with the ever-growing nuclear and missile threats from the North.
It is the latest in a recent series of missile provocations, including the firing of a submarine-launched ballistic missile earlier this month.
The missiles, presumed to be Scud-types, were launched from Hwangju, North Hwanghae Province, and flew some 500 to 600 kilometers into the East Sea, the military said. It said the missiles were launched between 5:45 a.m. and 6:40 a.m.
By Casey Lartigue Jr.
I recently attended a United Nations conference in Seoul at which a couple of distinguished speakers asked: Why aren't more of the almost 30,000 North Korean refugees directly involved in activism against North Korea? A few others at the conference asked: Why don't South Koreans care more about their Northern brethren? And others asked: Why are so many expats in Korea interested in helping North Korean refugees?
To start with the last question, many people get surprised when I tell them that there are not many expats in Korea involved in North Korean issues, that people are mistaking a handful of changing foreign faces with a revolution.
To be clear, I have had the privilege the last few years of collaborating with some wonderful volunteers who have given a tremendous amount of time volunteering for North Korean refugees. Some travel three and four hours by bus each way to come to Seoul to tutor or mentor North Korean refugees. We even had one tutor who flew from Jeju to Seoul once a month to tutor back-to-back days. Other tutors have held extended study sessions lasting up to six hours. I get to read many of the lovely messages of thanks and congratulations that are shared by North Korean refugee learners and tutors in a project I co-founded.
As wonderful as they have been, most of the expats are involved short-term. There are a variety of reasons expats get involved: To make a difference, to help refugees, a nice line on a resume in preparation for graduate school or to build their careers, a neat anecdote to share on Facebook, out of curiosity, love volunteering, or because they are interested in North Korea. Rare is the expat who stays involved, becomes a leader, or develops a significant role. When I hold Open House sessions recruiting volunteers, I am thrilled if just one or two remain with us six months later. The few expats that remain committed are like flowers in a desert, even more beautiful because they are so rare.
The level of support from expats is a mile wide and an inch deep. They will attend occasional events and also volunteer, but in many cases, they are squeezing NK activities into their schedules, attending a speech or volunteering before rushing off to join flash mob snowball or pillow fights, mud wrestling festivals or their own lives of work or study. The most common question prospective volunteers ask me before an event or meeting: "How long will it last?"
This is not to criticize them, many people come to Korea short-term, we are lucky to have them join us during their time here. My point is that it doesn't make sense to compare people jumping on-and-off an elevator with those who can't easily exit.
North Korean refugees getting involved in activism about North Korea face serious consequences about the security and privacy of their families in North Korea. They can expect harsh attacks if they don't remain both poor and pure. They even get blamed by some idiotic South Koreans accusing them of "selfishly" running away from their families. Expats can leave or rejoin at any time without real consequences to their lives, families or careers.
Instead of debating why more refugees don't get involved, I ask the questioners: How are you collaborating with those who have already stepped forward? Based on human rights scuttlebutt I have heard, either refugees aren't authentic, educated, or polished enough. The search continues for hypothetical refugees to replace the flawed ones who have already emerged.
It isn't just North Korean refugees who are considered flawed by those calling for more to get involved. There are as many as 50 North Korean focused NGOs and schools that I am aware of that are operating in South Korea (others have higher estimates), with almost all of them being led and staffed by South Koreans. They are typically underfunded, understaffed, relying on underpaid staffers, volunteers, and interns. Working with them would be a great start, instead of hoping that people who have not gotten involved will a) suddenly get inspired and b) be more effective than those already helping.
I often turn the question around: If there aren't enough refugees and South Koreans engaged now, then what are human rights leaders doing differently to attract more refugees? When your strategy is failing, then it may be time to adopt a new approach.
Most people don't get involved in politics, and that includes North Korean refugees who have risked their lives to escape a brutal dictatorship. With their new freedom, they also have the freedom to join flash mob pillow fights, mud wrestling festivals or study in my project instead of making themselves targets by trying to topple the North Korean regime.
Casey Lartigue Jr. is the co-founder of Teach North Korean Refugees (TNKR) in Seoul. He can be reached at CJL@post.harvard.edu.
By Duncan Harrison
There is no doubt that almost everyone, including executive recruiters like myself, was caught off guard by the recent referendum vote in the U.K. to leave the European Union. The decision to leave the EU has created a shockwave internationally and has affected financial and labor markets around the world.
The potential impact of Brexit on the global economy is significant, and while many experts feel things may calm down over time, we are still entering an era of economic and political uncertainty.
As we venture into the unknown, one of the main issues will be the time required to negotiate the many details of separation. Other issues include the potential departure of Scotland from the U.K., pressure on the pound sterling as well as on other currencies and the U.K.'s international trade.
Several sectors of the U.K. economy are already being affected, including the finance and property sectors. Large multinational banking institutions, which currently employ tens of thousands of people, are considering moving large portions of their staff to other countries in Europe due to Brexit. While this may be premature strategically, the overall perception and lack of confidence in the U.K. could still negatively affect the recruitment sector.
Another area that will most likely take a hit is inward investment into the U.K., which has been quite appealing to international firms over the last 5-10 years due to the competitive advantages the U.K. has to offer as a gateway to Europe. Without the ease of access and convenience of trade with the European mainland, companies may be forced to reconsider their base of operations.
In terms of the Korean market, one of the pressing questions moving forward is how Korean companies will do business with the U.K., as they will no longer benefit from the Korea-EU FTA which took effect in July 2011. With this in mind, the Korean government's recent statement about pursuing a bilateral free trade agreement with the U.K. is a prudent move to minimize the impact on Korean firms.
As the head of Robert Walters Korea, I am often asked what impact Brexit will have on the Korean recruitment market. At present, Brexit may be a particular setback for British legal firms that have entered Korea over the last couple of years, as the Korea-EU FTA has allowed them to enter a complex market with relative ease. The absence of an FTA between the U.K. and South Korea will make it very challenging, if not impossible, for British legal firms to operate here.
With the British pound weakening and the Japanese yen gaining ground, Japanese automakers could ultimately lose competitiveness in Korea. However, the Korean automotive industry may face increased tariffs of 10-20 percent after the U.K. finalizes its exit from the EU. In general, trade will be more costly between firms in different countries and it is likely to have a negative impact on recruitment in the Korean automotive industry.
Despite a downturn and worries concerning the world economy, FDI in Korea hit a new record high in the first half of the year, and Korea is the only OECD country that has FTAs with the U.S., EU and China. Since these trade pacts encourage many European investors to use Korea as a bridgehead, I do not see many problems in the labor market due to Brexit's impact. However, for new businesses entering the Korean market it will be more complex due to uncertainties caused by changing regulations.
Another positive note is that the Park Geun-hye administration has requested the government to allocate 10 trillion won (USD 8.4 billion) in extra budget to prop up the sluggish economy, create jobs and assist corporate restructuring as a result of Brexit. With Brexit high on the government agenda, we expect that this decision will help curtail a ripple effect from Brexit and help continue to support a buoyant recruitment market across Korea for multinational companies.
Duncan Harrison is the Country Manager of Robert Walters Korea, one of the world's leading specialist professional recruitment consultancies and outsourcing firms. Reach him at Duncan.harrison@robertwalters.co.kr.
By Christine M. Flowers
I watched Paul Ryan's 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 Romney's 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 didn't 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. I've been accused of being a drama queen who focuses too much on abortion, on the Supreme Court (and, thanks to Justice Ruthie, I'm 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, I've been attacked by those who think Ryan doesn't like Trump enough, for not believing in the righteous necessity of a wall subsidized by pesos, a blanket ban on Mohammed, Fatima and their kids, 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 don't 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 it's 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 you've 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 have 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 don't 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 don't 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 doesn't 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.
Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. Readers may send her email at cflowers1961@gmail.com. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
By Andrew Salmon
It's big news.
A senior education ministry official, Na Hyang-wook, speaking pompously in a boozy meeting with journalists, likened the public to "pigs and dogs." Several reporters were present, but only one, from a leftist newspaper, dared report Na's comments. A public uproar resulted and Na was flagellated and fired.
I don't know what happened. I was not there. Nor do I know the parties involved. But having been a reporter here for over a decade, let me hazard some guesses.
Korea's mediascape is, to a large degree, dominated by "press pools" assigned to ministries and government agencies. These pools are exclusive and (arguably) collusive; they generate ties between reporters and government officials. Officials sometimes invite reporters out for dinner, drinks and "off-the-record" chats (officials usually pay).
The resultant problem is obvious. As a colleague said: "I don't want to be friends with the people I cover."
What happened that evening? I cannot say for sure, but I guess this. Na, believing (naturally) that the meeting was unofficial and off-the-record, relaxed. He drank. He talked. He had a few too many. Egged on, he made outrageous comments. One reporter reported this. Should the reporter be praised for busting a collusive system and breaking a story?
No. I have major problems with press pools, but I have even greater problems with this story. Its ramifications are horrendous and not, perhaps, in the way you may expect.
"Off the record" ("Don't mention my name/title") is a sacred trust in journalism. Ideally, sources are named and identified, but in our imperfect world, there are circumstances in which a person cannot speak openly for fear of losing his/her privilege, position or even life. In these cases, a journalist grants anonymity in order to report.
"Off-the-record" is dubious. It provides a convenient excuse for officials, bureaucrats and businessmen to float trial balloons and to evade responsibility for what they should state openly. It provides unscrupulous journalists the leeway to invent quotes (or even stories). So problematic is it that some leading global media outlets insist only on named, titled sources.
But Korea is neither an ideal nor a transparent society. While I despise "off-the-record," it is standard here for "sensitive" (translation: "newsworthy") issues. "Off-the-record" briefings provide a conduit through which Korean leaders pass information to reporters, who then report to the public.
The abuse by a reporter of this privilege deals a serious blow to one of the few channels of transparency that exists in Korea. How serious?
I have heard again, I can't confirm this, but it has the whiff of veracity that a very senior businessman gave an off-the-record briefing about government policy to local reporters in the late 1990s. One reporter breached trust and named the source to the source's embarrassment and endangerment. The businessman (a second-generation chaebol head) never again spoke to the media. Other chaebol bosses followed suit.
So, one reporter's breach of trust dealt a massive blow to Korean transparency. It is a bitter joke among Seoul correspondents that it is easier to interview crowned royalty than a chaebol head.
I suspect that, in Na's case, the reporter got a pat on the back for his "scoop." If I were his editor I would have killed the report, dead. For what exactly was the report? "Senior official is anti-democratic?" Or, "Official talks piffle while drunk?"
This was an abuse of journalistic privilege, sans reason. If Na had admitted corruption or boasted of a forthcoming abuse of position, public interest would have been involved. But as far as I know, Na was clean. He was an efficient bureaucrat, with no plans to abuse his position.
That is the problem with this "story:" There was neither victim nor public damage. A shrewd recorder judges deeds, not words especially not drunken words.
(And please: No holier-than-thou attitudes. If you, kind reader, or I, were on-record 24/7, we might say things that could incriminate ourselves with one or more indignant groups in society. Such is the nature of free speech, gossip and inebriation.)
Anyway, an indignant public, bristling with "the politics of envy," feels righteously satisfied to see a senior bureaucrat hung out to dry. I do not share their schadenfreude. This was no victory for free reporting or public morality. Instead it was a victory for populist journalism and lynch-mob sentiment.
Abuse of "off-the-record" for no public good is not praiseworthy. It erodes trust and corrodes one of the few channels of transparency that exists in an opaque society. Henceforth, officials, bureaucrats and businessman have an excuse to distrust the press and shut their traps even more firmly.
That makes the media's job more difficult. And that is most definitely not in the public interest.
Andrew Salmon is a Seoul-based reporter and author. Reach him at andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk.
The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary
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Cropped 1934 photo of Angeles Crest from the Automobile Club of Southern California.
The Angeles Crest Highway in the San Gabriel Mountains lets you drive 66 miles through "some of the most difficult terrain in the U.S." The drive is never particularly steep or challenging, which masks just how hard it was to build. Or maybe it was just crazy.
Nathan Masters of the LA As Subject project of KCET and the USC Libraries explores the backstory.
The ease of the drive belies the difficulty of the highways construction, which began in 1929 and continued for 27 years under the direction of the California Department of Highways (now Caltrans) and the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads (now the Federal Highway Administration). During the Depression, homeless men performed much of the back-breaking work. Later, convicts from San Quentin and Chino took up the shovels and pickaxes and were even permitted to handle dynamite. Good living conditions and a feeling of accomplishment make the assignments to this highway camp coveted by the prisoners, engineer John Ritter reported in California Highways and Public Works. There are no fences, no iron bars and no firearms in evidence, but even so attempted escapes by any of the inmates have been very infrequent.
Engineer J. B. Lippincott, who surveyed the highway for the Automobile Club of Southern California in 1919 (and who had previously surveyed the Los Angeles Aqueduct for William Mulholland), routed it high above the narrow, winding canyons below. It hews to mountain slopes and surmounts ridge crests. Where nature failed to provide a way, workers created one, blasting roadcuts into granite and erecting bridges over drainages. Some cuts are as deep as 240 feet. In the high country near Islip Saddle, the highway tunnels twice through the mountainside. It achieves its highest elevation, 7,901 feet, at Dawson Saddle. The highway forever changed the Angeles National Forest....
More story and photos at the KCET website.
Tronc watcher Ken Doctor says the recent media silence surrounding the oddball corporate parent of the Los Angeles Times belies some potentially big offstage happenings.
In Delaware courts, two shareholder lawsuits have been combined, alleging the company screwed its own investors by not taking seriously Gannett's offer to buy Tronc. But it's the threat of a third lawsuit, by LA's Oaktree Capital Management, that poses a bigger threat to the company being run by Chicago media mogul Michael Ferro. The end game could be an Oaktree suit that succeeds in undoing the original sale that made Ferro the top shareholder in what was then known as Tribune Publishing.
Writes Doctor:
Of course, such an eventuality could force an unraveling of all the many changes Ferro has brought in his tumultuous six months of completely changing out top leadership, eliminating independent publishers, proclaiming artificial intelligence as the news business savior and renaming legendary Tribune with a Popsicle- colored tronc logo. Finally, tronc iced its new cake with the release of promotional videos that have met near-universal ridicule.
Ferro's Tronc newspapers have also begun implementing his plan to create more videos to sell more ads on, to widespread disbelief in the industry that it will help more than hurt those papers. (Also, as difficult to use as the LA Times website is already, can you imagine using it to consume news via dumbed-down video nuggets?)
But Doctor saves his bombshell for the end of his Politico story. He says sources indicate that Ferro may be contemplating his own exit strategy from the mess he created.
"It could be his own assessment of an end game, or it could be the whispers or louder that he is hearing from his highly paid bankers. Or he could be tired of the several reporters nosily poking into his personal life and work history, working current and former associates, or of Internet trollers questioning the credentials of some his own top execs.
"Ferro could point to so many reasons to simply accept Gannetts offer which would more than double the $44M price his group paid for the Tribune stake and walk away.
Yes, even the entrepreneur who is used to having it his own way is doing some contingency planning, as we await the next explosion of the powder keg that tronc has become."
Doctor and Politico use the company's preferred form of address, with the "t" in Tronc lower-case.
Meanwhile: Here's a spoof of the Tronc video to employees about the video-is-the-future gambit.
The legal complaint and settlement with Herbalife unveiled Friday by the Federal Trade Commission answers several questions about the Los Angeles-based nutritional supplement marketing company, but leaves the most important question wide open.
The answered questions involve Herbalifes business model. The FTC says in its complaint, filed Friday in Los Angeles Federal Court: Yes, Herbalifes business model is deceitful. Yes, the company has misrepresented itself as a nutritional supplements company, when what its really selling are business opportunities, the value of which it has consistently and grossly exaggerated. And yes, its a ripoff; or to put it in the FTCs language: Consumers have suffered and will continue to suffer substantial monetary loss as a result of [Herbalifes] violations of Section 5(a) of the FTC Act.
Herbalife is going to have to start operating legitimately. FTC Chair Edith Ramirez
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That section outlaws unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.
The FTCs findings about Herbalife, in other words, couldnt be clearer. The agency extracted a $200-million settlement from the company, along with a promise to straighten up and fly right. (The sum is a pittance, compared to Herbalifes revenue and profits.)
Herbalife is going to have to start operating legitimately, FTC Chair Edith Ramirez said Friday, 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.
So heres the unanswered question: Why is the FTC allowing Herbalife to remain in business? The answer, sadly enough, looks to be money. Reading between the lines, Herbalife has become too rich to shut down.
RELATED: Herbalife cozies up with UCLA
Its not as though the agency is powerless to act against pyramid schemes, which is what Herbalife has been alleged to be. Last August, the FTC shut down Vemma Nutrition Company, a Phoenix multilevel marketing outfit it said was targeting college students and recent college graduates. The agency froze Vemmas financial accounts and got it placed in receivership.
The FTC alleged in its lawsuit that Vemmas business model depends upon recruiting individuals to participate in Vemma as Affiliates and encouraging them to purchase Vemma products in connection with such participation, rather than selling products to ultimate-user consumers.
Heres how the FTC described Herbalifes model: [Herbalifes] compensation program incentivizes not retail sales, but the recruiting of additional participants who will fuel the enterprise by making wholesale purchases of product. The FTC said that Herbalifes program does not offer participants a viable retail-based opportunity.
Is there a material difference between these two assertions? Not that we can tell. Yet the FTC called Vemma an unlawful pyramid and Herbalife merely as a multi-level marketing company.
The details in the FTCs complaint against Herbalife are damning. It enticed individuals to sign up as distributors of its products by plying them with testimonials from previous recruits who talked about transforming themselves from near-bankrupts to earners of six figures or more a year hawking Herbalife inventory. Its promotional material bristled with pictures of big houses, fancy cars, cash, and boats.
In truth, the FTC observed, the vast majority of Herbalife distributors dont make anything approaching full-time or even part-time minimum wage. Of the more than 680,000 distributors counted by Herbalife in 2014, only 205, or 0.03%, earned more than $600,000. And they earned most of their money by recruiting new distributors, not by selling product.
In 2013, shortly after hedge fund manager Bill Ackman launched a painstakingly detailed attack on Herbalifes business model, paired with a $1-billion short bet on the companys stock, Herbalife changed its pitch. Rather than promoting itself as a business opportunity for the little guy, Herbalife began asserting that some three-fourths of its distributors werent in it for the career, but merely to get a chance to buy Herbalife products at a distributors discount. The FTC didnt fall for it. It says that many recruits start out as wanna-be business successes, but fail, and that more than 75% of Herbalifes products are bought by people clearly pursuing a business opportunity. Just not a good one. (Ackman has been proved mostly right about Herbalife, though hes lost as much as $500 million on his short bet, according to some observers; he was counting on the companys stock falling to zero, but it closed Monday at $64.78.)
One striking difference between Vemma and Herbalife is size: Vemma was collecting about $200 million a year in revenue when the FTC went after it. Herbalife, which has been treated indulgently by government regulators almost since its founding in 1980, last year reported profit of $339 million on net sales of $4.5 billion.
That sort of wealth buys a lot of influence. Enough to keep the words pyramid scheme out of a federal regulators lawsuit, for example.
Herbalife has not been shy about putting its connections on public display. For years it boasted of its close connections with UCLA Medical School, which as we reported in 2013 it exploited to give its nutritional shakes and other products the veneer of scientific credibility. The company kept medical school faculty members on its payroll and promoted its ostensibly altruistic contributions toward the schools Mark Hughes Cellular and Molecular Nutrition Lab at the medical schools Center for Human Nutrition. Herbalife contributed $1.5 million in cash, equipment and software to the lab from 2002 to 2013. (The lab is named after Herbalifes founder, who died in 2000 after a four-day drinking binge not the greatest advertisement for the healthful, active living Herbalife claims to promote.)
The FTCs complaint implies that the luminaries who have been trotted out by Herbalife to attest to its integrity should hang their heads in shame. Among them is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who seems to have sold her soul to lobby for Herbalife internationally.
I wouldnt be here if I werent proud to be associated with Herbalife, Albright told a company gathering in Europe in 2013, and Herbalife wouldnt be operating in more than 80 countries if it werent satisfying customers wherever it goes. (See video.) Albright touted Herbalife as a paragon of corporate responsibility and community service, and as an ethics-driven company.
What does she think now? We queried Albrights consulting firm, Albright Stonebridge Group, but havent received an answer.
In addition to the $200-million penalty the FTC extracted from Herbalife, its forcing the company to restructure its marketing pitch, its distributor compensation, and its treatment of the lowest level of aspirants. Herbalife will have to knock off the intimations that joining up will result in a lavish lifestyle and drop the images of opulent mansions and personal helicopters that beckoned to the unwary. It will have to connect the compensation of top-tier agents those tiny few who make big money from lower-level distributors to retail sales, not to potentially bogus purchases, especially by the distributors themselves. Recruits will be allowed to get their money back from purchases of products or distributor promotional packages for up to a year.
Will this hurt Herbalife? Its questionable. Some say that forcing the company to make its money from actually selling its nutritional supplements to retail buyers will be its death knell, since a small percentage of the product actually goes to such customers.
Its also possible that Herbalife will cry all the way to the bank. The stock market treated the $200-million settlement as a triumph for the company, sending its shares up nearly 10% Friday after the FTC settlement; they also gained about 9% in May, after the company disclosed the pending penalty in a quarterly report. The company already has pointed out that the FTC settlement applies only to its activities in the U.S., and those account for only 20% of its net sales. So its free to continue its old model in the rest of the world.
Its chairman and chief executive, Michael O. Johnson, said in a release that the FTC settlement, along with a second deal with the state of Illinois, are an acknowledgment that our business model is sound. If thats not thumbing his nose at government regulators, what is it?
Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.
Return to Michael Hiltziks blog.
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For Chinese consumers, what you search for online soon could determine whether youre eligible for a loan.
Through a landmark deal with Hollywood credit scoring firm ZestFinance, Chinas leading search engine, Baidu, soon will assign credit scores to its users based on search, location and payment data.
A handful of Chinese companies already judge creditworthiness based on the shopping and payment histories of their customers, but Baidus plan to use search data appears to be a first.
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Nobodys ever been able to turn search data into credit data, said Douglas Merrill, chief executive of ZestFinance, which also will get an equity investment from Baidu as part of the deal. Merrill would not disclose terms of the investment.
Aaron Rieke of consulting firm Upturn, which has tracked various alternative credit scoring firms, said the deal, thanks to Baidus size, would mark the first time a company has taken such a vast amount of information about online behavior and used it to make credit decisions.
Theyre going to have a lot of data, Rieke said. Its an important moment. Once youre going to be judged by the byproducts of online activity, thats a brave new world.
ZestFinance, founded in 2009, specializes in scoring the creditworthiness of borrowers who have little or no credit history. The firm uses complex algorithms that look for correlations between creditworthiness and all kinds of nontraditional credit information.
In the U.S., it makes consumer loans under the brand Basix, and judges customers based on a wide array of information gleaned from data brokers and other sources. In China, e-commerce site JD.com uses ZestFinances systems to underwrite loans to its customers based on their browsing and transaction history.
But the deal with Baidu takes things a step further, setting ZestFinances system loose on a huge trove of information about what consumers are looking for online, where they go and what they purchase through merchants on Baidus e-commerce platform.
Though much of that information has nothing to do with money, Merrill said behavioral data can weed out fraud and produce solid credit information.
If you get enough data about peoples behavior, youll be able to extract information about ability to repay and willingness to repay, Merrill said.
Because of the vagaries of ZestFinances system, which may find correlations that are far from obvious, its difficult to say precisely how the Baidu scores will work or what factors will lead to a good or bad score.
For instance, in ZestFinances U.S. lending practice, Merrill has said that borrowers who fill out a loan application using proper capitalization are more likely to repay than those who use all capital letters though Merrill also acknowledges hes not sure why that is.
The deal with ZestFinance comes less than a year after Baidu and Chinese finance firm Citic Group announced plans to start a new bank, to be called Baixin Bank.
At the time, Baidu said in a statement that its search data could help the bank understand the individual needs of customers. Now, by working with ZestFinance, its likely planning to use that same data to help it underwrite credit cards, loans and other financial products for hundreds of millions of potential customers.
In a statement announcing the deal with ZestFinance, Tony Yip, Baidus head of investments, said the deal will help transform the financial services market in China. The company declined to comment beyond a news release announcing the deal.
Chinas consumer credit market is growing fast, but its still relatively small, and most Chinese consumers dont have a traditional credit score.
In December, Fitch Ratings estimated about 35% of Chinese consumers or about 350 million out of an adult population of more than 1 billion had a formal credit history. By comparison, about 89% of American adults have a credit record, according to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
That gap has pushed other Chinese firms to look for new ways to estimate consumers creditworthiness.
Last year, Ant Financial, an affiliate of Beijing e-commerce giant Alibaba, unveiled Sesame, which builds a credit score based on factors including the volume of purchases a customer makes with Ants Alipay payment system and whether a customer pays bills on time.
Though it may seem creepy to judge creditworthiness based on someones Web search or location history, Rieke of Upturn said its likely that such a system will give consumers more access to credit.
If someone has no traditional credit, those things will yield something thats better than nothing, he said.
Indeed, Merrill said the Baidu-ZestFinance deal is aimed at scoring consumers who are left out of the system now.
Today, three out of four Chinese citizens cant get fair and transparent credit, he said. For a small amount of very carefully handled loss of privacy, to get more easily available credit, I think thats going to be an easy choice.
james.koren@latimes.com
Follow me: @jrkoren
Yahoo Inc. remained tight-lipped Monday about its ongoing sale, but unexpectedly dished some dirt on itself, revealing to shareholders that it overpaid for the microblogging platform Tumblr.
Nestled among its weak second-quarter financial results were impairment charges write-offs for intangible assets totaling $482 million, which were chalked up to the fair value of the Tumblr reporting unit [being] less than its carrying amount.
For the record: This article misidentified analyst Colin W. Gillis firm as BCG Partners. It is BGC Partners.
Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr in 2013. The impairment charges wipe more than 40% from the platforms value.
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Yahoos evaluation of the Tumblr platform was long overdue, said Erik Gordon, a professor of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, who said companies are meant to regularly reassess the value of their intangible assets.
Since the day the Tumblr deal was announced, people have said Yahoo paid too much for it, Gordon said. Now the company can no longer pretend that Tumblr is today worth $1.1 billion. Its worth, in their view, a lot less, and its past time for them to face the facts.
Tumblr has long been viewed as a dud for Yahoo because it has been slow to grow and even slower to make money. The company took a $230-million write-down on Tumblr earlier this year after the platform failed to meet is revenue goals.
Tumblrs performance has paled in comparison to Instagram a similarly priced social network that Facebook snapped up a year earlier. Instagram has experienced double-digit user growth every year since its acquisition.
While the Tumblr loss doesnt hurt Yahoos credit rating or financial position, its another blow to Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who defended the $1.1-billion acquisition in 2013, and is now defending her leadership from activist shareholders critical of her turnaround strategies.
Earlier this year, Mayer detailed yet another strategy to turn around the ailing Internet company, of which Tumblr is a pillar.
During a call with investors, Mayer said Yahoo is continuing to make solid progress with our 2016 plan. But its numbers illustrated a company on the decline.
Yahoo reported $1.3 billion in revenue in the three months that ended June 30, up $65 million from a year earlier. Tumblr aside, the company lost an additional $8 million from operations. Its earnings per share fell to 9 cents from 16 cents a year earlier.
Mayer declined to comment on the companys sale process, but it was all analysts focused on with Recode reporting that final bids are expected this week.
Ahead of the second-quarter earnings report, BCG analyst Colin W. Gillis said in a note to investors that the key metrics are not going to be the woeful underperformance of [Yahoos] core business, or a discussion of whether GeoCities or Tumblr was a worse acquisition, or even [its mobile advertising strategy] MaVeNs an acronym as successful as the current management team, he said. The focus is going to be on the separating out the minority value that is the core business via a sale.
Gillis said any offer of about $5 billion or more should be accepted by the Yahoo board.
Former Yahoo interim Chief Executive Ross Levinsohn, who preceded Mayer, offered a more conservative estimate, telling CNBC on Monday that he expects the company to trade in the $3.5 billion to $4 billion range. Levinsohn was part of a group led by Bain Capital that expressed interest in acquiring Yahoo.
The state [of Yahoo] is troubled, clearly, Levinsohn said. We can look back over the past four years and say the strategy did not pay off.
Verizon and private equity fund TPG are among the main contenders to buy Yahoo.
Yahoos stock closed Monday at $37.95, up 23 cents, or 0.61%. It rose to $38 in after-hours trading.
tracey.lien@latimes.com
Twitter: @traceylien
The Last Tiger in Haiti, a new play by Jeff Augustin thats receiving its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, begins in a tent shack in Port-au-Prince that is the home for a group of unfortunate youngsters who for one reason or another were discarded by their families.
The terms for these Haitian children is restaveks (from the French rester avec, to stay with), though these are not what we would think of as foster kids. They are more or less slaves, working until they turn 18 to pay off the debt they owe whoever has agreed to house them often in the most brutal conditions imaginable, with abuse rampant and opportunities for education minimal at best.
A program note reminds us that even before the devastating 2010 earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. The ramifications of this poverty are everywhere apparent in the plays first half, set in 2008 in a ramshackle hut with scattered bedding on the ground and no modern conveniences whatsoever.
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The ages of the five characters range from 18 to 11. Max (Andy Lucien), the eldest and most responsible, is about to earn his freedom. Rose (Brittany Bellizeare), the youngest and most childlike, doesnt want to see him leave. Max is her protector, an older brother figure in an environment that doesnt promote familial closeness.
Joseph (Reggie D. White), whos a year away from earning his freedom, is the most mischievous of the bunch. He steals Roses doll and torments her with frightening tales of her restavek future cleaning toilets, mopping up other peoples slop and eventually satisfying adult sexual needs.
Emmanuel (Clinton Roane) is Josephs younger sidekick who has stolen a bottle of rum from the master during this final night of carnival celebration. The usual routine has been so relaxed that Laurie (Jasmine St. Clair) has yet to return to the tent, but she comes back just in time for a little rum and storytelling.
Collectively sharing stories is how these characters cope with their predicament. The act has been ritualized when one says, Krik? another must answer krak for the narrative to properly commence.
Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat wrote a story collection called Krik? Krak! Augustin acknowledges in an interview in the program the influence of her work. In particular, he was drawn to a question Danticat has wrestled with (sometimes controversially) about the ownership of Haitian tales.
This notion of storytelling as an agreement between teller and listener krik must get the green-light from krak becomes a crucial point in the plays second act, set in the near future in a glamorous waterfront condo in Miami Beach. Rose, now a confident, well-dressed grown-up, has published a memoir of her travails as a restavek, but the veracity of her account is challenged by Max, whose life has taken a very different turn.
The production, a collaboration with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is directed by Joshua Kahan Brody, who like Augustin is a graduate of UC San Diegos MFA program in theater. Its nice to see La Jolla Playhouse nurturing these rising talents, though this premiere of The Last Tiger in Haiti still seems at the workshop-level phase promising but blurry.
Augustin trusts that the audience will be able to piece together the plays context from the interactions of his characters. The play is free of lumpy exposition, but the drama has difficulty coming into focus.
Many of the stories that are told the most important of which is the one Max tells of a young mans confrontation with the last tiger in Haiti leave an indistinct impression. Worse, not all the relationships are well delineated and none is satisfyingly developed.
At times, it seems as if the author is purposely concealing his hand. (The betrayals that occur take place in a playwriting fog.) At other points, the production just seems to lack clarity.
The scenic design by Takeshi Kata is wonderfully vivid in both the impoverished first half and the ritzy second. But the actors, many of whom swallow their lines, fail to include the audience in the plays narrative games. Theres something frustratingly hermetic in the way this is all handled.
Augustin wants to explore the double-edged nature of storytelling. He honors its communal power but also draws our attention to the exploitative possibilities. This understanding is refreshingly balanced, but it would register more powerfully if the playwright were more attuned to his theatergoers if he would wait for their krak after uttering his krik.
------------
The Last Tiger in Haiti
Where: Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 24
Tickets: Start at $20
Info: (858) 550-1010 or www.lajollaplayhouse.org
Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes
charles.mcnulty@latimes.com
The future of Fox News founder and chief executive Roger Ailes could be hanging in the balance over sexual harassment allegations made by former anchor Gretchen Carlson.
An internal review of the accusations is still underway at Fox News parent 21st Century Fox, which has led to speculation that Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, the companys executive co-chairmen, are moving towards jettisoning Ailes from the highly profitable division he has led for 20 years ago.
A report in New York magazine said Monday that the Murdochs will soon force Ailes to depart, which prompted a statement from 21st Century Fox that said: This matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded.
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In a suit filed July 6 in a New Jersey Superior Court, Carlson alleged that Ailes sabotaged her career because she rebuffed his sexual advances and complained about a hostile work environment at the cable channel where she worked for 11 years. Ailes has denied the allegations. He has also denied accusations of inappropriate behavior made by other women who have come forward after contacting the lawyers representing Carlson.
Carlson left Fox News after her contract expired on June 23. Fox News spokespersons have said she was released because her ratings were not strong enough to remain at the cable news network. Carlsons attorneys have dismissed that claim.
While the two sides battled over where the case should be heard with Ailes lawyers arguing that a clause in Carlsons contract required the matter to be handled in arbitration 21st Century Fox brought in the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to conduct an internal review of the charges.
The plan at 21st Century Fox was to have the review which included interviews of other Fox News employees concluded before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Ailes, 76, has been with Fox News since its launch in 1996. Under his leadership, it became the countrys most-watched cable news channel and one of the most profitable divisions of 21st Century Fox.
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Shares in Netflix fell sharply in after-hours trading on Monday after the streaming giant reported slower than expected subscriber growth in the second quarter.
Netflix added 1.7 million subscribers worldwide, well below the 2.5 million subscribers the company predicted it would add in the three-month period ending June 30. Netflix rolled out a new season of Orange Is the New Black and a second Adam Sandler film (The Do Over) during the quarter.
The Los Gatos, Calif. company posted second-quarter earnings of $41 million, or 9 cents a share, beating analysts expectations of 3 cents a share for the quarter. Revenue during the quarter climbed to $2.1 billion, up from $1.6 billion from the same period a year ago.
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Nonetheless, the slower than expected subscriber growth sent shares in Netflix tumbling by $14.60, or 15%, to $83.30 in after-hours trading. Shares had closed Monday at $98.81, down less than 1%.
Netflix said it added 160,000 subscribers in the U.S. during the quarter, below the 500,000 it had predicted. New international subscribers, meanwhile, totaled 1.5 million, compared with the 2 million that had been forecast.
The company acknowledged in its letter to shareholders that while Netflix is growing, its not as fast as we would like or have been.
Investors have been anxious over the slowdown. Netflix stock is down 14% for the year, and shares for the company are down more than a quarter since Decembers record.
Subscriber growth continues to be a key metric of success for Netflix, particularly as its business matures in the U.S. and as it expands globally.
Netflix is available in 190 countries, including South Korea, India and Russia, and has over 83 million members worldwide. But with just over 47 million users in the U.S., the company has some work to do in its quest to procure between 60 million and 90 million domestic customers. Netflix faces more competition from Amazon Prime, Hulu and other emerging platforms.
Higher prices may also have stalled growth. This last quarter Netflix implemented higher prices for its standard two-screen service, from $7.99 per month to $9.99 per month. Customers who had signed on with Netflix before May 2014 were exempted, but only until October of this year. Eventually, all customers will be subjected to the increased rate.
Netflix said that membership turnover increased slightly during the quarter, probably because of confusion over news coverage of price changes for veteran members. Some members, Netflix executives said, perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering.
People dont like price increases, we know that, Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings said during a call with investors. Its a necessary phase for us to get through. With the increased revenue, were continuing to invest in better and better content. Thats what makes us feel very strong and positive about the long term and that this is a short-term phenomenon.
Netflix said it expects to add 2 million subscribers internationally and 300,000 in the U.S. for the third quarter, acknowledging some impact from the Olympics.
In advance of reporting its second-quarter results, the company announced that CBS upcoming Star Trek series will stream exclusively on Netflix in 188 countries outside the U.S. and Canada.
The new episodes of the series, which is set to roll out in January, will debut globally within 24 hours after they appear domestically on the online streaming service CBS All Access.
Under the deal, Netflix will also have all 727 episodes of previous Star Trek series such as Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.
Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.
yvonne.villarreal@latimes.com
Twitter: @villarrealy
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UPDATES:
4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.
This article was originally published at 2:25 p.m.
CBS Studios International has sold the streaming rights to the upcoming Star Trek series to Netflix, which will be the shows exclusive home in 188 countries outside of the U.S. and Canada.
The new episodes produced by CBS Television Studios will debut globally within 24 hours after they appear domestically on the online streaming service CBS All Access.
CBS Corp. is banking on the new Star Trek, which is set to debut in January, to drive new users to its video subscription service. It will be the first exclusive original series available on CBS All Access, which for $5.99 a month provides subscribers with online streaming of their local CBS broadcast signal and a library of older series. Only the premiere episode will air on the CBS broadcast network.
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CBS made it clear when it announced the new Star Trek that it would sell the streaming rights to the new Star Trek to other services outside of the U.S. and Canada. Netflix expressed interest in having the series in the U.S. before CBS decided to distribute it through CBS All Access.
Star Trek is one of the most iconic shows in television history and were thrilled to partner with CBS to bring the beloved series to Trekkies around the world, Sean Carey, vice president of global television at Netflix, said in a statement announcing the deal Monday.
Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller are co-creators and executive producers for the new Star Trek, based on Gene Roddenberrys original series.
CBS also announced that Toronto-based Bell Media will have the exclusive Star Trek rights in Canada. The series will air on Bells cable channels Space and the French-language Z, before moving to its video-on-demand service CraveTV.
As part of the streaming deals, both Netflix and Bell Media will get the rights to CBSs library of previous Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise.
Twitter: @SteveBattaglio
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Outfest Los Angeles awarded nearly 20 honors Sunday to films that screened at theaters throughout the city during the 11-day film festival. Major awards went to Spa Night, Major! and Kiki.
Spa Night, from director Andrew Ahn, was awarded with a special mention for outstanding performance for its lead, Joe Seo, and the best narrative feature prize by the grand jury. The film, a coming of age and coming out tale set in Los Angeles Korean spas, was also a standout at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Seo won the breakthrough performance prize at Sundance.
This evocative narrative succeeds, from its subtle script to its expressive cinematography, the Outfest jury said of the film. A profoundly American story that takes place within an often underrepresented community, this moving film conveys the simple truth that many of us discover our identities in small moments of desire rather than in bombastic narrative twists.
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Of Seo, the jury added: This actors nuanced, textured portrayal brings to life a main character who often has little to say, but speaks volumes through a subdued physical and emotional performance. In a delicate film where the main character struggles with the weight of the conflicts, it is this actors compelling emotional specificity that keeps the audience engaged from start to finish.
Major!, a documentary about transgender icon Miss Major Griffin-Gracy from director Annalise Ophelian, won the audiences documentary award as well as a special mention by the judges who praised the film for its depiction of undying activism. Griffin-Gracy is a Stonewall riots veteran who has been advocating on behalf of the trans community for over 40 years.
This documentary shines a light and shows compassion for so many who would otherwise remain unheard, the judges comments read. This is a film that deserves to be seen and celebrated by audiences around the globe. From Stonewall to the fight for trans rights and visibility, Miss Major was and continues to be one of the most important and legendary heroes in the community.
Kiki creators Twiggy Pucci Garcon and Sara Jordeno won for emerging talent. Kiki, another well-received picture from Sundance, reintroduces the world to New Yorks ballroom and voguing scene, an updated version, some have said, of the seminal Paris Is Burning. The judges believed the pairs highlighting [of] the diverse array of issues facing Black LGBTQ people today while also celebrating their vibrant culture with warmth, humanity, and a sharp eye for detail, in their first feature documentary to be worthy of recognition.
Below is the full list of winners and honorees from Outfest 2016:
U.S. Documentary Audience Award
Major!, directed by Annalise Ophelian
U.S. Narrative Audience Award
Miles, directed by Nathan Adloff
Audience Award for Best First U.S. Dramatic Feature
Suicide Kale, directed by Carly Usdin
Documentary Special Mention
Major!, directed by Annalise Ophelian
Documentary Grand Jury Prize
Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, directed by Deborah Esquenazi
Special Mention for Outstanding Performance
Joe Seo, Spa Night
Best Screenwriting in a U.S. Feature
Ingrid Jungermann, Women Who Kill
U.S. Grand Jury Prize
Spa Night, directed by Andrew Ahn
International Grand Jury Prize
Being 17, directed by Andre Techine
International Special Mention
The Nest, directed by Filipe Matzenbacher and Marcio Reolon
Best Documentary Short
These Tears, directed by Dan Taberski
Best Narrative Short
Fake It, directed by Tzurit Hartzion
Special Mention for Artistic Achievement
B, directed by Kai Stanicke
Emerging Talent
Twiggy Pucci Garcon and Sara Jordeno, Kiki
Freedom Award
Tiffany Rhynard and Moises Serrano, Forbidden: Undocumented and Queer in Rural America
Artistic Vision
Kuba Czekaj, Baby Bump
Get your life! Follow me on Twitter: @TrevellAnderson.
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Sometimes lately I wish Woody Allen would just go away. And other times I cant imagine the world without him.
Every new film from him forces audiences to confront again their feelings about Allen as both artist and person, and to reexamine the evolution of those responses over time. He has gone from being the prototypical cool nerd and paragon of urbane, intellectual wit to a troublesome and, for some, villainous figure. Wrestling with all of that is an ongoing, uncomfortable process, made all the more tortured by Allens movie-a-year schedule and his restless creative impulses. He never gives us a break.
And yet his latest, Cafe Society, a comedy with dramatic underpinnings, reveals that as much as his films can seem blithely self-same, there are shadings and distinctions that signal more dynamic shifts in his thinking. Always marked by a neurotic pessimism, his recent films have taken a darker, violent turn, verging on nihilism. His work has become a thorny conversation with himself, his past, his problems and his audience. Perhaps it always was.
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Cafe Society, a wistful story of romantic yearning set in New York and Hollywood in the 1930s, centers on a love triangle among Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell, with supporting performances by Jeannie Berlin, Blake Lively, Parker Posey, Paul Schneider and Corey Stoll. Though Allen does not appear onscreen, he voices an ongoing narration, a not-so-subtle reminder as to who is the real guiding hand of the goings-on.
One of the new movies main themes seems to be that you cant outrun your past and that things have a way of coming back around, whether people or crimes or feelings long compartmentalized.
Indeed, the specter of allegations that Allen had sexually molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992 roared back around the time of his piercing 2013 drama Blue Jasmine when she publicly spoke out. And a recent essay by Allens estranged son Ronan Farrow, timed to the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Cafe Society, questioned journalists for not continuing to ask hard questions of his father.
Changing dynamics between men and women, evolving attitudes toward survivors of sexual assault and an accelerated media landscape have meant that these renewed allegations have played out differently than they did in the 90s. This time, as in Allens latest movie, the past may not be so easy to leave behind.
At Cannes, journalists did confront Allen about Ronan Farrows essay. He deferred their questions by referring them to his 2014 op-ed in the New York Times.
Sometimes lately I wish Woody Allen would just go away. And other times I cant imagine the world without him.
So where does that leave the rest of us as moviegoers? Would this all be made easier if Allen would just hit pause?
Personally, Ive always read Allens work ethic as an attempt to put his head down and push past any and all controversy, while I also wonder whether he now feels that slowing down would be a tacit acknowledgement that his presence had become so troubling. But rather than give his audiences a moment to process their complicated, conflicting feelings about the distinctions between life and art, the life of the artist and the work created, he defiantly insists on remaining visible.
Because of his prolific output, there is often an unfiltered quality to Allens work, as if its an outpouring of his subconscious into the script and onto the screen. So the constant appearance of older men with younger women, the preoccupation with guilt and murder, class anxiety, a sense of existential futility, could all be read as signs that he genuinely cant help himself. These truly are the things most on his mind.
Allen maintains that he does not read any press about himself, good or bad, none of the reviews or interviews or think pieces. I dont know that I entirely buy that line, as he frequently seems to be addressing what is being said about him through his work. It may seem odd to invoke Beyonce to discuss Woody Allen, but he often, it seems to me, will twirl on them haters.
Last years Irrational Man felt acutely aware of Allens critics, as a college professor engaged in an affair with a young student and attempted to get away with the murder of a family court judge. In Cafe Society a man leaves his wife of 25 years to take up with a 25-year-old woman. (And then is seen staying with her for a number of years, longer than some passing fling.)
Aside from that uncomfortably precise age differential, one of the more troubling elements in Cafe Society is that as part of a gangster subplot, a number of violent murders are shown that have little precedent in Allens work. A garish moment in which a man is shot while in a barbers chair, blood staining the towel wrapped around his head, is especially jarring. A comic callback is made of bodies being disposed of under freshly laid slabs of cement.
Though there is (spoiler alert) comeuppance in Cafe Society, the movies flip attitude toward these deaths is especially odd because Allen has so frequently turned to the notion of murder, and getting away with it, as the most elemental moral dilemma. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point, Cassandras Dream and Irrational Man he has returned again and again to whether a person can commit the ultimate crime and continue living a normal life.
He has depicted murder in a comedic way before Manhattan Murder Mystery comes immediately to mind but the throwaway lightness with which he treats the subject here seems to further signal the ongoing darkening of his worldview. Whats a little death among family?
The romantic machinations and manipulations of Jesse Eisenbergs character in Cafe Society might at a different time have seemed charming and the product of a plucky persistence. Today they read with an edge of obliviousness and selfish desperation. Likewise Carells Hollywood power broker wavers between an abrasive, earnest rawness and a steely calculation.
If Woody Allen were to stop making movies what, really, would be lost? The free-flowing precision of Annie Hall, the bittersweet reveries of Hannah and Her Sisters, the angry agitation of Husbands and Wives and the sun-kissed psychopathology of Vicki Cristina Barcelona would all still exist. If he were to stop working it wouldnt even much fix his legacy in place, as the regard for certain films is already in flux.
Manhattan, long considered one of his greatest achievements, has of late seemed just a morass of cringing and bad vibes, not only for a fortysomething Allen romantically pursuing an underage high school girl but also for its general tone of smug, posturing self-regard. At the same time, an unassuming film like Broadway Danny Rose has an emergent tenderness and humanity that was once easy to overlook.
With Cafe Society, Allen again signals his audience about whats on his mind and that he knows what they think about him. He occupies a distinctly complicated, tangled position and now always will, regardless of whether the 80-year-old filmmaker stops working or not. These are not signs of an autumnal reconciliation of lifes contradictions, but rather something intense and disturbing.
Woody Allen does not make it easy to be a fan of Woody Allen. But as in his The Purple Rose of Cairo, where an actor steps out of a movie and into the real world only to cause chaos and a struggle to get him to return onscreen, any ongoing doubts and recriminations about Allen will not be easily put back.
mark.olsen@latimes.com
Follow on Twitter: @IndieFocus
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In the wake of two grisly attacks on European airports, one name has been on the lips of U.S. lawmakers and airport executives: Ben Gurion International Airport.
The airport near Tel Aviv, named for Israels first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, has a reputation as one of the worlds most secure airports, where layers of security measures have kept the facility free of hijackings and terrorist attacks since the 1970s.
U.S. airport executives and lawmakers have increasingly debated whether the security measures used at Ben Gurion could prevent the kind of bloodshed that took place in the Brussels and Istanbul airports this year. Those measures include widely accepted passenger profiling based on appearance and behavior, multiple security screenings in the terminal and checkpoints in the general vicinity of the airport.
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Ben Gurion hosted a conference last month attended by airport officials from more than 40 countries to learn about the airports security tactics, and former Ben Gurion security officials have testified several times at U.S. congressional hearings over the last few years.
A lot of what the Israelis are doing has informed what were doing, Peter Neffenger, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, said during a senate committee hearing on airport security last month.
But to adopt most or all of Ben Gurions security measures at a facility like Los Angeles International Airport likely would mean higher ticket prices to pay for extra screening measures and longer wait times for more intense questioning by security agents, aviation experts say.
At Ben Gurion, travelers are told to arrive at least three hours before any flight, while U.S. officials recommend fliers arrive two hours before a domestic flight.
As it is, even a two-hour wait for security screening raises protests among U.S. travelers.
In Israel, they have a security mentality, said John Halinski, a security consultant and former deputy administrator at the TSA. They are willing to accept a lot of things that American travelers are not willing to accept.
Several polls, including the annual JD Power airline satisfaction survey, show that passenger satisfaction levels drop significantly if travelers must wait 15 minutes or longer for a boarding pass.
It would be ideal to adopt the Israeli process for security, but its about risk versus return on investment, said Johnathan Tal, a former anti-terrorism security specialist for the Israeli government and president and chief executive of Tal Global, a San Jose-based security firm.
Another problem is sheer size: LAX served 74 million passengers last year, while 16 million travelers passed through Ben Gurion.
Still, huge passenger numbers are not a barrier to adopting sound security measures, said Rafi Ron, president of New Age Security Solutions and former director of security at Ben Gurion airport.
That is one of the typical excuses that people use when they dont want to go into greater investment or adopt a more far-reaching approach to security, he said. Its not a valid excuse.
Oversight of airport security measures also differ.
In the U.S., the responsibility for airport security is shared by local airport police and the TSA.
At Ben Gurion, the responsibility for security falls under the airport manager and the airports security director, eliminating bureaucratic red tape when changes are needed and finger-pointing when problems arise.
Everything goes under that umbrella, Ron said.
Travelers also are questioned more often, starting more than a mile outside of the Israeli airport, where all incoming vehicles are stopped and inspected for car bombs and other weapons. The drivers and passengers also are questioned.
At LAX, police sometimes operate a vehicle checkpoint on the ramp leading into the airport but the dates, times and duration of the checkpoint operation are determined randomly by a computer program to ensure terrorists dont know when to expect the checkpoint.
At Ben Gurion, armed security agents patrol the airport property and terminals with the authority to stop and question any passenger and demand to see identification and other documents. The security agents are typically former members of the Israeli military who have been known to ask travelers to show hotel receipts or even open their email accounts to prove they are who they say they are.
Since 2007, the TSA has operated a similar program staffed by behavior detection officers, specially trained TSA agents who question passengers acting suspicious or looking nervous.
But the program has been under attack by civil rights groups and members of Congress who question whether the tactics are effective and whether the officers target minorities. TSA officials defend the program, saying it does not profile travelers based on race or ethnicity.
In the face of such criticism, the TSA reduced the number of behavior detection officers to 2,660 from 3,130 in the last year and cut the number of airports where they serve to 87 from 122. The program is still in place at LAX.
But in Ben Gurion, security experts say race and ethnicity are among several factors used to determine who should undergo extra questioning.
It is absolutely true that you are profiling on risk factors, and appearances are one of those factors, Tal said.
After questioning travelers at Ben Gurion, security agents affix a yellow sticker on each travelers passport, showing 10 numbers, with the first digit ranging from 1 to a 6. A 1 represents a low-risk traveler, and 6 represents an extreme threat. The higher the number, the greater scrutiny a passenger can expect, according to several travelers who have flown through Ben Gurion.
Tal declined to comment on the 10-digit number system.
Ben Gurion also puts luggage through extra screening. Passenger luggage at Ben Gurion is screened when travelers enter the terminal, even before getting a boarding pass, and again after travelers get their boarding passes and go through the security checkpoints.
At LAX, luggage is screened only once, after passengers get their boarding passes.
Adopting the Israeli-style security measures would increase the time it takes passengers to clear security screening in the U.S. unless airport fees are raised to pay for extra screening agents to perform the added measures, aviation experts say.
Instead, the TSA has cut back on screeners in the last year, which explains why the wait times at airports surged at the start of the busy summer travel season, said J. David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA agents.
The TSA now employs about 42,000 screeners, down from 47,000 in 2013. Meanwhile, the number of passengers flying through U.S. airports has jumped 15%, to 740 million a year from 643 million, in that same period. Congress has approved funding to speed up the hiring of 600 new TSA agents and convert hundreds more officers from part-time to full-time employees.
If you increase the security, you are going to have to increase the staff, Cox said. It goes hand in hand.
hugo.martin@latimes.com
To read more about the travel and tourism industries, follow @hugomartin on Twitter.
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Aug. 25, 2016, 10:40 a.m. Reporting from imperial beach, Calif.
We made it, Oregon to Mexico, along an 1,100-mile beach The drive began at the Oregon border. It ended five weeks later at the Mexican border. Where I almost got arrested. OK, thats an exaggeration. When photographer Allen Schaben and I got to the border of Tijuana and Imperial Beach, the party was much better on the Mexican side. Families were in the water and on the sand, a Mariachi band played, and the whole scene was rather festive compared with two people strolling quietly on the Imperial Beach side. I thought briefly about defecting. One man stood at the fence on the Tijuana side, so I walked up to say hello. I asked why he wasnt swimming and he said he didnt have a bathing suit, then he stuck his hand through the fence to shake my hand. A Border Patrol agent sped toward me in an SUV and yelled for me to stand back from the fence. I hesitated, because what was the big deal? But then I noticed a sign warning against contact or the passing of narcotics through the fence, etc. So I stepped back from the fence because I didnt know if Id be able to write my last road trip columns from a jail cell. Im going to wrap up the series on Sunday, but that wont be the end of my coverage of the California Coastal Commission on the 40th anniversary of the Coastal Act. Theres lots to keep an eye on. Legislation to ban private meetings between commissioners and developers could move forward later today. A vote has been delayed on the controversial proposal for a desalination plant in Huntington Beach, a project that doesnt make a lot of sense in my opinion but has big money backing it. The ever-controversial Newport Banning Ranch project -- a massive hotel/housing development on the last undeveloped plot of privately owned coastal property in Southern California -- will be up for a vote in early September. And the City Council election in Pismo Beach has gotten very interesting because Erik Howell, a councilman and coastal commissioner who ticked off Pismo residents by supporting a development that will block ocean views, now has challengers in his reelection campaign. Howell, if youve forgotten, accepted a $1,000 campaign donation from the domestic partner and business colleague of the lobbyist who represents the Pismo development. If he loses his council seat, he loses his Coastal Commission seat too. So stay tuned. The Coastal Commission will have a new director soon, a new chair and at least two new commissioners, and we need to watch closely because whats at stake is the greatest 1,100-mile coast in the world.
10:25 A.M. reporting from san diego
Lawmaker who led 72 coastal preservation bike ride from San Francisco to San Diego still has Schwinn that delivered win Former senator James Mills, 89, stands with the bike he rode from Sacramento to San Diego in 1972 to promote Prop 20, which created the Coastal Commission and led to the Coastal Act. The photo was taken overlooking the San Diego skyline from Mills Coronado apartment Wednesday. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The bike. I wanted to see the bike, and meet its owner. Arriving in San Diego meant our coastal trek from Oregon to Mexico was coming to an end, and it meant that it was finally time to pay a visit to Jim Mills. Mills, a state legislator from 1962 to 1981, was Senate president pro tempore in 1972 when he decided to support Proposition 20, the coastal preservation act. Without it, conservationists feared, coastal development would run amok, Highway 1 would be widened, and a string of nuclear power plants would spring up on some of the greatest beach fronts in the world. But there wasnt much money to fight Prop. 20s foes, said Mills, who had grown up wading in La Jolla Cove and has a deep appreciation of the states greatest natural resource. So in September 1972, he hopped aboard his canary yellow Schwinn Super Sport and led a bike rally from San Francisco to San Diego. The number of riders swelled at times, Mills said, and bikers were greeted each evening by locals serving plenty of carbs. We ate a lot of weenies and beans, and spaghetti too, he said. He recalled PG&E executives following the cyclists in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, doing their own spin on Prop. 20. The bike rally drew lots of publicity, Mills said, and whether it made the difference is anyones guess. But Prop. 20 won 55% of the vote and led in 1976 to the Coastal Act that to this day protects the coast for the benefit of fragile marine and land habitats and the enjoyment of everyone. Mills was 45 when he rode down the coast, and 89 now. He greeted me and photographer Allen Schaben at his Coronado condo and said he hasnt done any riding lately, but hes doing a lot of writing. Mills has written several books and is working on another. He leads us down to the basement, and there it is. The dusty, canary yellow Schwinn that Mills rode in 1972, and for many years after the Prop. 20 campaign. He was an avid cyclist. Mills also kept the helmet he wore in 1972. We took the bike upstairs, where Mills put on his helmet and posed next to the bike that is a piece of California history. The Coastal Act has done a great deal of good over the years, Mills said, and the cause is no less important now than it was when he rode south from San Francisco. We need to preserve the coast for the benefit of future generations, he said, and I thank him for his contribution.
Aug. 21, 2016, 10:50 p.m. Reporting from the Mexican border
Steve Lopez reflects back on his 1,100 mile trek down the California coast
6:57 P.M. Sometimes the sausage is good enough to eat Two things will happen soon. The last column from my 1,100 mile road trip down the California coast will be done. And the reform bill banning private communications between California Coastal Commissioners and developers, as well as others, could finally emerge from the factory. As Ive been saying, Hannah-Beth Jacksons bill sailed through the Senate and should have done the same in the Assembly, but it got pushed off into a dark corner after a very fishy report claimed that reform costs money. The thing has come back to life, though, with amendments that arent as bad as the original amendments. I dont see why we need the amendments at all, or why the wrangling has to take place behind closed doors and out of public view. While I was thinking about that, a reader emailed me a clever idea about how to keep coastal commissioners honest -- make them strap on body cameras, like cops. I like it, and why not do the same with legislators, so we can all see whats going on? Having said all this, though, Im hearing from supporters of Jacksons bill that they think theres actually a chance the legislation is going to be OK, once all the cooks are done tweaking the recipe. Sausage is full of awful stuff, but just about all of it is good on the grill. So as much fun as Ive had telling you to ping Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, @Rendon63rd, and Appropriations Chair Lorena Gonzalez, @LorenaAD80, and ask what gives, maybe we should try another approach. Im told that Rendon, Gonzalez and other Assembly leaders have done some decent work rescuing this much-needed bill from the trash. So go ahead and tweet them again, and tell them youre encouraged, and still watching -- to the extent thats possible -- and counting on them to do whats necessary to get the bill to Gov. Jerry Brown, which is when the real fun will begin.
8:46 A.M. When it comes to coastal protection, why does state Assembly have such a problem with transparency? The need to clean up the way the California Coastal Commission operates was obvious. Commissioners meet privately with developers more than with any other group, by far. They have repeatedly failed to fully explain the nature of those meetings, and have even failed to report them on occasion. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) penned a bill to ban such meetings. It cleared the Senate and bounced over to the Assembly, which nearly killed it, but finally decided this week to merely beat it to a pulp. The toothless mess that emerged from the Assembly Appropriations Committee this week would allow private meetings to continue under certain circumstances, and now Sen. Jackson has the task of trying to put some punch back into her bill. And heres the irony: We dont know which Assembly members, or higher powers, conspired to water down Jacksons bill because there is no transparency in the process. You cant peer through a window into the sausage factory. These amendments were hammered out privately. One can guess that the development lobby and labor groups did not like Jacksons reform bill because it would get in the way of a process that gives an advantage to those who want to build on the coast. One can even guess that the Brown administration shares their view. But we dont know, because a bill to shine a light on important decision-making got pummeled in a dark room, and the perps left no fingerprints. See Dan Weikels story at latimes.com. Ive sent in a request for an explanation to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount). He has appointing authority for four coastal commissioners and itd be nice to hear what he thinks about the handiwork by his Appropriations Committee. If youd like to ping him or Appropriations Chair Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) to ask what happened, try @Rendon63rd and @LorenaAD80. Or you can drop a line to The Silent One @JerryBrownGov, but Ive tried, and despite months of turmoil and controversy on the 40th anniversary of the Coastal Act he signed into law, the governor doesnt want to be disturbed.
7:36 A.M. Summer is in the rear-view mirror, end of journey just down the road The tide splashes up on the beach at sunset on a warm summer evening at Windansea Beach in La Jolla. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Carlsbad. Leucadia. Encinitas. Cardiff. Solana. Del Mar. Summer is disappearing in my rear-view mirror. Week Five of my trip from Oregon to Mexico will be over in just a few days, 1,100 miles after it began. Photographer Allen Schaben is farther down the road, waiting for me in San Diego. Soon well stand at the Mexican border and reflect on a deeper love of the California coast, a greater appreciation of the Coastal Act on the 40-year anniversary of protections that became law. Ill wish Id had a week to spend in places where I only had an hour or two. Ill thank the people we met along the way, and tell others well take up their offer the next time through. Californians are passionate about their coast. Theyre closely watching those in public office whose job is to protect fisheries and dunes, to limit development and maximize access. Ive got one eye on Sacramento myself. On legislative reforms that would serve all Californians. On coastal commissioners, some of whom seem to have forgotten their purpose. Im pulling into San Diego, where the air is warm, the water blue, Mexico in the near distance.
4:14 P.M. La Jolla The palm fronds of a palapa reveal a surfer, a couple and children taking in a warm summer sunset at Windansea Beach in La Jolla. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
1:07 P.M. newport beach
Watts in a name? Find Amp-le answers in Newport Beach On Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach. (Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times) Im driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway and spot the sign. The boat name of the week, it says, is Watt A Man. Thats not a mistake. This is the headquarters for Duffy, which makes the electric boats that are part of the culture in the Newport harbor. Many years ago, I wrote a column about a day of hobnobbing and bar-hopping, by boat, with local residents. I also wrote, at the time, about boat owners trying to out-do each other with clever names for the battery-powered boats. One of my favorites was Salt n Battery. So what are some of the newer ones? I walk into the office, and salesman Jim Drayton says one of the best ones this summer was Amp-ly Endowed. Not bad. Tyler Duffield, of the Duffy family, shows me a list with a few more recent winners. Your name here. (Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times) Its a Ohm Run. Watt the Hey. Watta Yacht. Going back through the years, some of the better names include: Current Affair. Carry Us Ohm Watts the Hurry. Shock Cousteau. Ohmer Simpson. Knots and Volts. I could go on, but why dont you, instead? Send me your best names. Its not as easy as it looks, Duffield said. Its usually the hardest part, he says. Someone comes in and orders a boat, and they get the colors and everything figured out, and the last thing to do is come up with a name before the boat leaves the factory. Yeah, Its a Duff Life out here, where people are Ohm on the Watter, but It Is Watt It Is.
9:13 A.M. Going under in Laguna Beach A snorkeler looks for fish at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Garibaldi swim and feed on rocks at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
2:41 P.M. Catching waves in Huntington Beach
10:53 A.M. On our way toward Mexico A view of the beach through a telescope at Pacific City, a new 31-acre mixed-use development in Huntington Beach, also known as Surf City U.S.A. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The site of the proposed Banning Ranch development now before the California Coastal Commission. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The tide rolls in at twilight at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station located on the border of San Diego County and San Clemente. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
4:52 P.M. Laguna Beach
4:45 P.M. Laguna Beach
12:51 P.M. Dana Point A pod of dolphins leaps out of the water with a view of south Laguna Beach in the background on Aug. 12, 2016. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
10:37 P.M. sacramento
Profiles in courage: Legislators soften Coastal Commission reform, leave no fingerprints A perfectly sensible bill to clean up the way California coastal commissioners do business has been getting the waterboard treatment. First, Santa Barbara Sen. Hannah-Beth Jacksons SB 1190 was submerged by a ludicrous report claiming it would cost too much money to prohibit private conversations between developers and commissioners. Then it was tossed overboard and dragged like chum. Then on Thursday, legislators pulled SB 1190 back into the boat so badly decomposed its barely recognizable. As my colleague Dan Weikel reports at latimes.com, five amendments gutted the good intentions. The most egregious one allows commissioners to meet privately with developers during on-site visits. This comes just weeks after reports that Coastal Commission Chairman Steve Kinsey met twice with developers of the massive Newport Banning Ranch development and failed to properly report those confabs. Environmental groups, however, would not be able to have such meetings in the bills current form. On my best day, I could not have come up with a more Alice in Wonderland outcome. Details were still emerging, and it wasnt clear which legislators were responsible for the hatchet job, or whether they caved in to political, development or union pressure, or all three. No fingerprints on the body, in other words. Three environmentalists I checked with were livid, and understandably so. Stay tuned for updates on the autopsy, and dont stop letting @JerryBrownGov know how you feel about whats happening to coastal preservation on his watch. #SaveYourCoast
7:46 A.M. Sunset at Crystal Cove Beach Cottages Children run along the beach at twilight near the Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The sun sets over the Crystal Cove Beach Cottages in Newport Beach. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Isabella, 9, and Holden, 7, roast marshmallows over a beach fire with their parents, Steve and Amy Knuff, of Aliso Viejo at twilight at Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Incoming tide rolls onto the beach at twilight at Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
1:29 P.M. Column: Fighting for the California coast from a tiny office in her kitchen nook Susan Jordan, who created and runs the California Coastal Protection Network, is seen in her Santa Barbara office. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) If you were a coastal conservation activist in California, with 1,100 miles of shoreline to look after, how would you even decide where to begin? Theres always a battle somewhere, and let me give you just a couple of examples from one tiny section of the coast. Moss Landing is in the news again this week as the Surfrider Foundation and other activists try to stop Cemex, an international sand mining company, from trucking away the beach as it has done for decades, causing erosion that has begun to set off lots of alarms. Read more
8:49 A.M. Hermosa Beach
Remember when you could spend a night at a California beach motel for less than a weeks pay? A third-generation motel owner in this seaside town tells me he gets an offer, about every other day, from someone who wants to buy his property, bulldoze it and rebuild. But hes hanging on because three generations of families have been staying at his low-budget, no-frills motel since the 1960s, and he doesnt want to end those summer vacation traditions. Elsewhere on the California coast, motels and hotels have been bought out by chains and developers, driving up the cost of affordable family vacations. Look for my column on the Hermosa Beach motel in the coming days. And if you know of good low-budget beach lodging, or if youve seen your motel go from cheap to chic, drop me a line at steve.lopez@latimes.com Over the next two days, photographer Allen Schaben and I will be in Hermosa and Huntington Beach, reporting on the proposed desalination plant there. And, by the way, we should find out in the next day or two whether legislation banning private meetings between coastal commissioners and developers is released from legislative prison and put up for a vote in the state Assembly. Theres still time to weigh in at #SaveYourCoast and be sure to give a poke to @JerryBrownGov and Assemblywoman, Lorena Gonzalez @LorenaAD80. Read more
Lee Baca was never an easy man to define.
Throughout a remarkable, albeit flawed, career as sheriff of Los Angeles County, Baca defied tough-guy police stereotypes with an affectionate, oddball style of leadership that earned him the nickname Sheriff Moonbeam.
For the record: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Lee Baca had ceded day-to-day operations of the Sheriffs Department to Merrick Bobb as well as to Undersheriff Paul Tanaka. As was mentioned in the story, Bobb was a monitor of the department for more than two decades and so was not ceded control over the agency.
He was at once admired for his progressive ideals and criticized for failing to put his thoughts into action. He succeeded in building ties with minority communities, promoted programs to rehabilitate inmates and pushed for more services to help homeless and mentally ill people.
But at the same time, many of the departments deep-seated problems persisted or worsened under him.
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NEW: Judge throws out ex-L.A. County Sheriff Lee Bacas plea deal, saying 6 months in prison not enough
The elusiveness that marked Bacas time in office will meet hard reality Monday morning when he is sentenced in federal court for lying to federal authorities who were investigating attempts by sheriffs officials to obstruct an FBI inquiry into abusive deputies working in county jails an undeniable reckoning that will color his extensive career with disgrace.
Here you had somebody who had good ideals and who, on several important issues, like homelessness and the mentally ill, seemed capable of sounding different and being more understanding, said Merrick Bobb, who monitored the Sheriffs Department for the county for more than two decades. But after a while, all people will remember is that the sheriff resigned and pleaded guilty to a federal crime. Whatever else he did that was good will be lost.
Bobb and others who worked closely with the sheriff criticized Baca for taking a detached approach to running the department and ceding control to Paul Tanaka, his undersheriff. Tanaka, who was sentenced last month to five years in prison, is one of several sheriffs officials and deputies who have been convicted of playing roles in the scheme to obstruct the FBI.
Former L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca admitted lying to federal prosecutors who questioned him about whether he was involved in attempts to obstruct an FBI investigation into the county jails. In this audio, assembled from a nearly four-hour recording
Baca, 74, admitted in February that he lied during a 2013 interview with investigators in which he maintained he knew little of the efforts by subordinates to thwart the FBIs probe into the county jails. In fact, Baca conceded, he had known in advance of a plan to have deputies confront an FBI agent and threaten her with arrest. And he did not contest other allegations, including that he was aware an inmate working as an FBI informant had been hidden from agents. Baca retired months after the interview.
The admission came as part of a surprise plea deal with the U.S. attorneys office that Baca struck after prosecutors made it clear to him that they were prepared to ask a grand jury to indict him on criminal charges.
Mondays sentencing hearing in U.S. District Judge Percy Andersons downtown courtroom is expected to be more tense and dramatic than most as it remains an open question how much prison time, if any, Baca will serve.
Before sentencing Baca, Anderson must decide whether the terms of the plea deal Baca and prosecutors reached are acceptable. The agreement calls for Baca to receive no more than six months behind bars.
Anderson, who has dealt harsh punishments to Tanaka and the others caught up in the obstruction case, could decide six months in prison is too lenient. If he does, Baca would then have to choose between two unappealing options: Go ahead with the sentencing and accept whatever sentence Anderson has in mind, or withdraw his guilty plea and take his chances with charges the government might decide to bring.
The question of how Baca should be punished has grown more complicated in recent weeks after Assistant U.S. Atty. Brandon Fox and Bacas attorney, Michael Zweiback, revealed in court filings that the former sheriff was in the early stages of Alzheimers disease.
Despite the diagnosis, Fox, who heads the public corruption and civil rights unit, argued to Anderson that Baca still should go to prison for six months.
The former sheriffs cognitive impairment is slight, Fox wrote in court records, adding that there was no evidence Bacas condition played a role in his lying to federal authorities. The lies came during an interview a year before Baca first consulted a doctor about memory issues, Fox wrote.
And although Fox conceded Baca did not play as direct a role in the obstruction as the others who have been convicted, a six-month sentence was necessary not only to punish him but to send a message that no one in law enforcement was above the law, even a popular elected official atop one of the countrys largest law enforcement agencies.
Zweiback did not deny his clients misdeeds, writing in a court filing that Baca had failed the people he was elected to serve.
His lifes work has ended in a large scale breakdown of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department at a time when he was its leader, the attorney wrote.
But Zweiback implored Anderson to take into account the good Baca did in the Sheriffs Department and spare him time in prison. It would be unjust, he said, to let Bacas failures at the end of his career overshadow his accomplishments.
Among dozens of letters filed in support of Baca -- including ones from former California governors Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as former Mexican President Vicente Fox -- was one from an ex-inmate who took education and rehab classes in county jail and said his life was forever changed by the forward thinking and vision of one man Sheriff Lee Baca.
Zweiback also raised concerns about whether Baca could receive appropriate medical care in a prison setting, saying his diagnosis of Alzheimers has left him in need of consistent monitoring and treatments that hope to slow the progress of the disease.
Prosecutors rebuffed the questions about Bacas care with a declaration from a Bureau of Prisons medical director, who assured Anderson that Baca would be cared for adequately.
Whatever the sentence, the sight of Baca standing before Anderson and being tagged as a felon will serve as an epilogue few could have anticipated during the 15 years Baca ran the Sheriffs Department.
I always thought of Baca as the anti-sheriff thoughtful, philosophical, someone who cared as much about prevention as traditional policing, said Fernando Guerra, who heads the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Its still a shock for me to think that he got caught up in this.
To be sure, Baca never followed any conventional playbook for law enforcement leaders.
A rail-thin man who rarely carried a sidearm, Baca often greeted other men at public events with a kiss on the cheek and a hug.
In 2005, with Compton in the grips of a spasm of gang violence and homicides on a near-record pace, he sent deputies door-to-door in the city to deliver letters inviting gang members and their parents to meet with the sheriff to discuss the ramifications of their decision-making process.
And determined to reform inmates during their time in his county jails, Baca created programs for drug addicts, domestic abusers and the mentally ill. He also launched a corporate-style training program for his deputies to tap employees potential.
Bacas unorthodox style and endeavors left many inside the department grumbling that he cared more about social work than police work a charge the sheriff said he wore with pride.
And in many ways, it was an attitude ahead of its time. The hard work Baca put in to make the department more inclusive and build ties with minority communities has become standard for police chiefs and sheriffs.
But there was no shortage of outright failures and missteps.
I always thought of Baca as the anti-sheriff thoughtful, philosophical, someone who cared as much about prevention as traditional policing. Fernando Guerra, Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
He was initially defiant in the face of allegations that inmates were being beaten, even though internal department memos had raised concerns about deputies meting out jailhouse justice.
He came under fire for releasing thousands of inmates early, some of whom went on to commit violent crimes.
Baca blamed budget cuts that he said gave him little choice but to close portions of his jails and freeze deputy hiring. Still, he drew worldwide notoriety in 2007 when he released hotel heiress Paris Hilton early from jail.
In 2010, the Sheriffs Department hired nearly 300 officers from a little-known county police force, including some who had accidentally fired their weapons, had sex at work and solicited prostitutes. Nearly 100 had issues with dishonesty, including lying or falsifying police records, according to documents review by The Times.
Baca said his top aide at the time was responsible for the hires.
Baca also traveled the world relentlessly, making trips to Pakistan, Jordan and Europe to discuss international terrorism and other issues only tangentially related to the job of a sheriff.
The wanderlust was a symptom of a larger shortcoming, said a former county official who worked closely with Baca for many years and considers him a friend.
Lees biggest problem was that he saw himself as more than sheriff to L.A., he really thought of himself as a sheriff to the world. He didnt take care of the work he needed to do here, the former official said.
It was a flaw that ultimately led to Bacas downfall as the distracted sheriff increasingly ceded control of the day-to-day operations to Tanaka, said Guerra and others.
There was always the worry that when you have a philosopher king in charge that the people below him will run roughshod, Guerra said. Now, whenever I give a lecture to students about Lee Baca, the first thing Ill have to say is, This is how it ended.
joel.rubin@latimes.com
For more news from the federal courts in Southern California, follow me on Twitter: @joelrubin
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A UC Berkeley student missing in Nice since Thursdays terror attack has been confirmed dead, according to university officials.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was on a study abroad program and had gone to the citys promenade to watch the Bastille Day celebration when a truck raced through the packed crowd, killing 84 and injuring more than 200.
Three other UC Berkeley students were injured in the attack, two with broken legs and one with a broken foot.
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But Leslie was missing, prompting a frantic search by the university, local officials and family.
French officials confirmed his death on Sunday, according to a statement released by the university.
Leslie is the second UC Berkeley student killed in a terrorist attack this summer. Sophomore Tarishi Jain was killed in an attack on a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh about two weeks ago.
This is tragic, devastating news, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said Sunday. All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence.
Leslies Facebook page said he was from Milan, Italy. He had been living in Southern California and attended Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, before heading to Berkeley.
Leslies mother, who is Italian, dispatched family and friends in Europe to check hospitals to try to find her son, according to a family friend who was with her at her Del Mar home Friday. The friend asked to be identified only by her first name, Antonella, to protect her privacy as well as the familys.
Leslie was an only child who was adored by everyone who knew him, said Antonella, who described him as a wonderful, caring young adult, extremely motivated.
Leslies uncle and aunt searched the hospitals of Nice, with no luck, according to published reports.
The 20-ton truck, driven by 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian man living in Nice, plowed through the crowd gathered on the citys promenade for the Bastille Day celebration. The truck traveled nearly a mile, crushing people along the way, before police were able to shoot and kill Bouhlel.
Identifying all of the victims has been a slow, painstaking process. French investigators informed the FBI that Leslie was among the dead Sunday, according to the universitys statement.
Leslie, a junior, had been studying environmental science. He was one of 85 Berkeley students participating in a summer entrepreneurship program in Nice. Two other students injured in the attack have been released from the hospital and returned to their dorms. A third injured student remains hospitalized with a broken leg.
The school said a vigil will be held for Leslie on the Berkeley campus at 4:30 p.m. Monday.
jack.dolan@latimes.com
Twitter: @jackdolanLAT
Times staff writer Veronica Rocha contributed to this report.
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This article was originally published at 5:10 p.m.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, a nationally recognized leader in public education who heads the Long Beach Community College District, was named Monday as the new chancellor of Californias community college system.
He will become the first Latino chancellor of the 113-college system, which serves 2.1 million students and is the nations largest higher education system. He replaces Brice W. Harris, who retired in April after leading the system through a crucial period of budget cuts, academic reform and controversies over accreditation.
The community college Board of Governors announced their unanimous selection of the systems 16th chancellor at a board meeting in Sacramento on Monday.
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Addressing the board, Oakley emphasized his commitment to student needs in a fast-changing economy, particularly to those who have been historically underrepresented in higher education.
We must pay particular attention to African Americans and Latinos in this state. This is the backbone of our workforce, he said. Our economy no longer has a spot for those who lack skills. We need to redouble our efforts as a system to ensure that every student in California has the opportunity to obtain a college credential.
Oakley was a first-generation college student who served four years in the Army and then enrolled at Golden West College. From there, he was able to transfer to the UC Irvine, where he received a bachelor of arts in environmental analysis and design and a masters in business administration.
I, like so many people in our great state, grew up in a working-class family, and the opportunity to go to college was not something that we spoke too much about or thought too much about, he said. Golden West College opened that door for me and gave me the opportunity to be here today.
He was praised for establishing innovative partnerships and programs while leading the Long Beach district.
He struck me immediately as an individual with deep commitment to, and a unique understanding of, the needs of our students, board President Geoffrey L. Baum said. In Oakley we see a change agent someone whose relentless focus on student success will help more students obtain certificates and degrees or transfer to four-year institutions on time.
Oakley, who has served as superintendent-president of the Long Beach Community College District since 2007, is most notably known for the Long Beach College Promise, which brought high school and college administrators and instructors together to create a pathway for students transitioning from K-12 to higher education. Students are guaranteed a tuition-free year at Long Beach City College and preferred admission to Cal State Long Beach after completing the transfer requirements.
In 2015, President Obama introduced Americas College Promise, an initiative modeled after the Long Beach program.
Oakley was also cited for a creative partnership with Goldman Sachs to jump-start Long Beachs economy by helping more than 600 local business owners expand operations, which created more job opportunities.
Those who have worked with Oakley in the Long Beach district said he earned respect for being open-minded.
Hes known up and down the state as one of the most supportive presidents of the faculty senate, said Karen Kane, president of the Long Beach City College Academic Senate. [Oakley] has the right vision and the ability to see things that other people dont see. And he lays it out there and has the patience to wait for most people to catch up and understand where it is hes trying to go. Hes the right leader at the right time.
Oakley said that in his first 90 days, he will focus on building relationships and continuing the priorities begun under Harris and former Chancellor Jack Scott.
They did a wonderful job of setting a very aggressive agenda for our system. So were going to continue to move forward on the various student success initiatives, the workforce initiatives that are already well underway, he told The Times.
Community colleges were hit hard by the recession, with more than $1 billion in funding cuts that forced campuses to ration course offerings and shut out more than 500,000 students.
The system has yet to recover fully from the cuts. The states final budget agreement for 2016-17 provides funding to increase enrollment by an additional 50,000 students. The budget deal included an additional $200 million to improve career technical training.
Another challenge that will confront Oakley is resolving the ongoing controversy over accreditation after the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges was heavily criticized for meting out a disproportionate number of sanctions on California colleges compared with accrediting agencies in other parts of the country.
Oakleys experience, prior to leading the Long Beach district, will also prove useful in his new role, Baum and others said. He first joined the Long Beach district in 2002, overseeing the budget as the executive vice president of administrative services. He also served as vice president of college services at Oxnard College.
His relationships run deep across the state: He served on the boards and committees of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the American Assn. of Community Colleges.
Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Oakley to the UC Board of Regents in 2014.
In a statement, UC President Janet Napolitano said Oakley distinguished himself by always asking the right questions and his unwavering commitment to expanding access to higher education in California. I look forward to working with him, especially on further improving the pathway to UC for California transfer students.
Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White added: Eloy challenges and empowers all of us to think deeply about higher educations role in our society and act accordingly. He understands the needs of Californias communities and is dedicated to our shared success.
Oakley will receive an annual base salary of about $280,000, plus benefits. This is higher than Harris $213,000 salary but less than Oakleys current salary of $320,000 at Long Beach City College. He will assume duties Dec. 19.
Follow @RosannaXia on Twitter for more higher education news.
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8:35 p.m.: This post has been rewritten.
4:35 p.m.: This post has been updated with additional facts and comments from Oakley and other university officials.
This post was originally published at 12:50 p.m.
Herman Quillion, an out-of-work welder from Georgia, wasnt worried about a serial killer striking homeless men in San Diego until it was time to lay down to sleep.
I was sleeping with a bat, said Quillion, 41, who made his way to San Diego two months ago in hopes of finding work. Sometimes I couldnt sleep, when I first heard about it.
His was a familiar story of homeless men, several of whom on Saturday expressed relief that a suspect was in custody.
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Homicide investigators on Friday arrested Jon David Guerrero, 39, of San Diego, saying he is the man behind the attacks.
Kenneth Moyd, 62, resting on a trolley station bench, said the arrest meant one less thing to worry about on San Diegos streets, where he has lived since 1980.
One man stopped rummaging in trash cans at C Street and Fifth Avenue long enough to acknowledge hed been using the buddy system for safer sleeping. My hats off to SDPD for catching him, he said before moving on.
Joshua Jones, 22, spent three months traveling to San Diego from Maine, arriving about the time the killings started. He and six to 10 other homeless individuals have been bedding down near one another in a parking lot, with the business owners permission.
Im really glad he got caught, he said.
He and scores of other homeless across the city were aware that a man was creeping up on people, some while they slept outdoors, and inflicting major wounds on them with some type of weapon that police wont describe. Three of the five victims died.
The attacks started July 3, when a man was killed and his body burned in Bay Park. The next day a man was killed in Ocean Beach and another man critically injured in the Midway District. A fourth man was attacked in downtown San Diego on July 6 and died three days later. The last attack, in Golden Hill on Friday, was on a man who survived. Guerrero was caught about an hour later. Police said there is clear evidence linking him to the crimes.
Guerreros father, Jose Guerrero, reached by telephone at his home on Saturday, took issue with the police view.
I think hes innocent, he said of his son, adding that his lawyer has advised him to not talk about the case. I dont want to make things worse. I think hell be released soon. Last night there was another killing, and my son was in jail.
A man was found dead about 10 a.m. Friday, not at night, along Kettner Boulevard. Homicide investigators called the death suspicious but have not said why, nor have they identified the man.
Christopher Middleton, 33, who has been sleeping in a tent on an East Village sidewalk for a few weeks, said his girlfriend told him about the killer.
I thought, thats nice, now I have to worry about some crazy guy. Ive never been in a city that has a mass murderer. You dont hear about that stuff in Pennsylvania especially not in Erie, Middleton said of his hometown, where he once worked as a mechanic.
Nearby, a 43-year-old man who identified himself only as Robert, an accountant from Phoenix who is hoping for work in San Diego, said he arrived in town a few days before the first attack.
For the first two or three nights, I was really worried about that, he said. Anytime anyone went by me, Id sit bolt upright. After a few weeks its weird you get used to it.
pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com
Repard writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
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Under a newly announced deal with Los Angeles city officials, Airbnb will soon start collecting lodging taxes from rental hosts, providing millions of dollars in revenue to the city annually.
Angelenos who rent out rooms or whole homes for short stays are already supposed to pay the same kind of lodging taxes as hotels, but L.A. tax officials have struggled to track down hosts and make sure they pay.
Now Airbnb, one of many websites that help people rent out their homes to travelers, will facilitate that process by collecting the taxes and handing them over to the city of Los Angeles.
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The deal, which was worked out with city budget and tax officials, would go into effect in August. Los Angeles had been banking on more than $5 million in tax revenue from such rentals for the budget year that began in July money that would help pay for homeless programs.
The hosts are required to pay that tax, said City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, L.A.s top budget official. Were simply creating a mechanism to facilitate that.
Airbnb praised the move, saying it would help Angelenos and ensure that the city shared in the economic benefits of such rentals. Our community of hosts wants to pay their fair share and we want to help, John Choi, Airbnb public policy manager for Southern California, said in a written statement Monday.
Santana cautioned that the agreement does not legalize short-term rentals. Despite the booming popularity of such rentals, it is currently illegal to rent out a home for less than 30 days at a time in much of Los Angeles, according to planning officials. L.A. is now mulling a new law that would legalize and regulate such rentals, restricting the number of days that a room or home can be offered to travelers and requiring hosts to register with the city.
There is going to be a lot of debate about how this industry is regulated, Santana said. We just want to make sure that while that conversation is taking place, the city is not missing out on millions of dollars in revenues.
Critics of the industry were nonetheless alarmed by the announcement. Keep Neighborhoods First co-founder Judith Goldman, whose group has raised concerns about commercialized rentals, said it would validate illegal activity by Airbnb.
Last year, city lawmakers opted to hold off on negotiating a tax deal with Airbnb, despite the fact that Mayor Eric Garcetti had already included $5 million from such an agreement in the city budget. At the time, Councilman Paul Koretz said he was worried about legitimizing what he dubbed the cheating economy before regulations were in place.
This year, however, the council approved budget recommendations that called on finance officials to finalize negotiations with Airbnb and similar websites to collect the 14% tourist tax.
The city had once again included $5 million from such taxes from rental hosts in its annual budget. Airbnb has estimated that collecting such taxes from its hosts could have yielded more than $20 million for Los Angeles last year.
City Councilman Mike Bonin said he was glad to see the agreement, but reasonable regulations were still urgently needed.
We need to let our regulations dictate how much revenue we receive, and not let potential revenue dictate what sort of regulations we craft, Bonin said in an emailed statement.
The roiling debate over L.A.s proposed law has pitted rental hosts who rely on the flourishing business against housing and neighborhood activists who argue that it has worsened the housing crisis.
Under the proposal, rental hosts could be fined for flouting the rules, and online platforms such as Airbnb could also face fines if they advertise unregistered rentals. That could set up the city for a legal battle with the rental giant: Airbnb recently sued its hometown of San Francisco, seeking to block similar rules.
Santana said that the tax agreement with Airbnb can be amended or revoked as soon as the city adopts any new regulations
The agreement includes a mechanism for the city to audit the tax payments. And the city is not prohibited from pursuing hosts for lodging taxes they failed to pay in the past, according to a report released by his office Monday.
Airbnb has reached similar agreements with other cities across the country to collect the required taxes from its hosts. Los Angeles is also seeking to strike such agreements with other online rental platforms.
emily.alpert@latimes.com
Twitter: @LATimesEmily
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UPDATES:
4:47 p.m.: This article was updated with additional reactions.
12:38 p.m.: This article was updated with comment from City Councilman Mike Bonin.
This article was originally published at 12:15 p.m.
The PCA said on July 12th that Chinas claims to historic rights for waters within the nine-dash line are contrary to the 1982 UNConvention on the Law of the Sea (Photo: BBC)
Philippines, Japan urge China to respect PCA ruling
Secretary of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs Perfecto Yasay (Photo: EPA/VNA)
Both the Philippines and Japan have called on China to respect the Permanent Court of Arbitrations (PCA) ruling that rejected Beijings nine-dash line claims in the East Sea, as part of their participation at the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit. Both the Philippines and Japan have called on China to respect the Permanent Court of Arbitrations (PCA) ruling that rejected Beijings nine-dash line claims in the East Sea, as part of their participation at the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit.
PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc active on ASEM sidelines
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe (Photo: VNA)
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc had bilateral meetings with leaders of Asian and European countries on the sidelines of the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, on July 15th. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc had bilateral meetings with leaders of Asian and European countries on the sidelines of the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, on July 15th.
Photo exhibition on East Sea opens in Seoul
An overview of the exhibition (Source: VNA)
A photo exhibition on the East Sea was held in Seoul, the Republic of Korea (RoK), on July 10th as part of the second Vietnam Culture Day in the country. A photo exhibition on the East Sea was held in Seoul, the Republic of Korea (RoK), on July 10th as part of the second Vietnam Culture Day in the country.
Industry insiders talk Brexits effects on Vietnamese wood sector
Wood processing for exports (Photo: VNA)
Industry insiders discussed the impacts of Britains exit from the European Union (EU) on the Vietnamese wood sector during a workshop in Hanoi on July 14th. Industry insiders discussed the impacts of Britains exit from the European Union (EU) on the Vietnamese wood sector during a workshop in Hanoi on July 14th.
Con Dao wins Lonely Planet renown as one of best spots in Asia
A corner of Con Dao Islands. (Photo: Lonely Planet)
Con Dao Islands have been listed among of Lonely Planets Top 10 places to visit in Asia in 2016. Con Dao Islands have been listed among of Lonely Planets Top 10 places to visit in Asia in 2016.
Writing contest about sovereignty over sea and islands for overseas Vietnamese youth launched
Mr. Truong Minh Tuan, Minister of MIC, speaking at the launching ceremony (Photo: VNA)
A writing contest with the theme Overseas Vietnamese students and youth with the task of protecting sovereignty over sea and islands of Vietnam" was officially launched by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and the Vietnamese Youth Federation Central Committee in Hanoi on July 13th./. A writing contest with the theme Overseas Vietnamese students and youth with the task of protecting sovereignty over sea and islands of Vietnam" was officially launched by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and the Vietnamese Youth Federation Central Committee in Hanoi on July 13th./.
Chinas claims to historic rights over waters within the nine-dash line are contrary to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague, the Netherlands, said.
A federal judge on Monday threw out a plea agreement that would have given former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca a maximum of six months in prison, saying the sentence was too lenient considering Bacas role in obstructing an FBI investigation into the county jails.
Addressing a downtown courtroom packed with Bacas supporters, U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson said the deal would trivialize the seriousness of the offenses the need for a just punishment [and] the need to deter others.
Baca, 74, had pleaded guilty in February to a single charge of lying to federal investigators. But the former sheriffs involvement in trying to derail the investigation reached further than that, Anderson said.
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At stake was what the investigators were trying to expose, Anderson said: an us-versus-them culture in which deputies covered up for one another and responded to inmates with enough violence to send them to the hospital.
Six months in prison for the man who ran the Sheriffs Department would not address the gross abuse of the publics trust including the need to restore the publics trust in law enforcement and the criminal justice system, Anderson said.
The judge said he would allow Baca to withdraw his guilty plea, setting a new hearing date for Aug. 1. The maximum sentence for the false statement charge is five years -- the same amount of time that Bacas former No. 2, Paul Tanaka, received last month after going to trial in a related obstruction-of-justice case.
Seven lower-ranking sheriffs officials who have been convicted and sentenced in the obstruction case received a year and a half to more than three years in prison.
Bacas plea agreement had called for a sentence ranging from probation to six months in prison. Prosecutors have said they agreed to the deal in part because of Bacas willingness to plead guilty. Bacas attorney, Michael Zweiback, argued that the former sheriff should not serve any prison time because he is in the early stages of Alzheimers disease.
Former L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca admitted lying to federal prosecutors who questioned him about whether he was involved in attempts to obstruct an FBI investigation into the county jails. In this audio, assembled from a nearly four-hour recording
Baca must now choose among several unappealing options. He could go ahead with the sentencing and accept whatever punishment Anderson has in mind. He could withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial, taking his chances with whatever charges the government might decide to bring. He could negotiate a new deal with federal prosecutors for a longer sentence that the judge would find more acceptable.
After Mondays hearing, Zweiback said he was disappointed with the judges decision but hoped to resume talks with prosecutors. He said that if he cannot reach an agreement that includes a specific sentence, rather than an open-ended guilty plea, he will not leave his clients fate in Andersons hands.
At that point, we might as well take our chances at trial, Zweiback said.
Bacas Alzheimers could be a factor if the case heads to trial and his ability to understand the proceedings deteriorates. The trial could be put on hold if he is declared mentally incompetent.
If the government believes its two years in ... getting to trial and sentencing him, that could leave Mr. Baca in very bad shape, Zweiback said.
Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorneys office, said prosecutors would not comment because the case is ongoing.
Legal experts said Andersons move was unusual but not unexpected, considering his law-and-order reputation and comments he has made during sentencing in the related cases.
We already knew the defendant was facing a federal judge who believed these kinds of acts were as serious as they come, said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who was the executive director of a county commission that investigated brutality by jail deputies and who served as a top aide to Bacas successor, Jim McDonnell, during his first year in office.
Anderson, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2002, is a former federal prosecutor who served on the Christopher Commission, which investigated excessive force by LAPD officers after the 1991 Rodney King beating.
In 2006, an appeals court removed Anderson from a wrongful conviction case, saying that the judges impartiality might be questioned. He was criticized again a few years later after the Daily Journal, a legal publication, published a story highlighting his delays in granting relief to three inmates deemed wrongfully convicted by lower judicial officials.
The Times reported in 2011 that Anderson allowed the cases to languish for several years, including one case in which a prisoner died behind bars while waiting for a ruling. But the chief judge at the time defended Anderson, telling The Times she didnt believe bias played any role and that the districts heavy caseload was to blame.
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, said Anderson was not likely to be swayed by sympathy or the emotional aspects of the case. She said he was likely to be especially unforgiving of law enforcement officials who did not fulfill their duties.
He views this type of abuse of trust more seriously, notwithstanding Bacas health concerns, Levenson said.
Federal sentencing law provides that people who are higher up in an organization -- mob bosses, for example are more culpable than lower-level members, said Joseph Akrotirianakis, another former federal prosecutor now in private practice.
Todays events are not entirely surprising in light of the sentence that Mr. Tanaka received, Akrotirianakis said. That was not a fact known to the government at the time that Baca entered into his plea.
I did not lead, instead I delegated the responsibility for this important duty and I should not have. Former L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca
Baca, who retired in 2014 before completing his fourth term as the head of the nations largest sheriffs department, won praise in office for establishing close relationships with local Muslim leaders and championing education for jail inmates.
Meanwhile, some of his deputies were brutally beating inmates as well as a jail visitor. He adopted a hands-off management style, delegating many day-to-day decisions to powerful underlings such as Tanaka.
In 2010, federal officials secretly launched an investigation into corruption and brutality by jail deputies. After sheriffs officials discovered that an inmate, Anthony Brown, was an FBI informant, they booked him under false names and shuttled him to different locations. They also went to the home of an FBI agent and threatened her with arrest.
Prosecutors alleged that Tanaka directed the efforts to hide Brown from the FBI and intimidate the FBI agent, with Baca playing a lesser role.
In his plea agreement, Baca admitted to lying in an April 12, 2013, interview with investigators, stating that he was not aware of the plan to confront the FBI agent at her home. In fact, according to the agreement, Baca was at a meeting where officials came up with the plan, telling his subordinates that they should do everything but put handcuffs on her.
Baca was also involved in a conversation with subordinates about keeping Brown away from the FBI, though he denied knowledge in his interview with federal investigators, the agreement said. He was also aware that his subordinates had stopped FBI agents from questioning Brown, contrary to what he had said in the interview, according to the agreement.
In entering his guilty plea, Baca admitted only to lying about the visit to the FBI agents home while agreeing not to contest the prosecutors other allegations.
In the courtroom Monday, many of Bacas supporters wore yellow pins to express solidarity with the former sheriff.
Zweiback quoted from some of the more than 200 letters filed with the court in support of Baca. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, local elected officials, religious leaders and former jail inmates were among those who wrote to the judge describing Bacas good deeds and empathetic nature.
A letter from Bacas wife, Carol, included a passage about her husbands deteriorating mental abilities. The former sheriff loses his keys and forgets appointments, Zweiback said in court on Monday, referring to the letter.
Because his short-term memory is increasingly unreliable, Baca would have trouble following the rules in prison, exposing him to punishment from staff as well as fellow inmates, Zweiback said in arguing for a sentence of probation only.
Wearing a dark suit, with sheriffs star pins affixed to his lapel and shirt cuffs, the former sheriff addressed the judge. He said he regretted not taking control of the investigation into Brown.
I stand here today humbled and filled with remorse for my mistakes as sheriff of Los Angeles County, Baca said. I did not lead. Instead, I delegated the responsibility for this important duty, and I should not have.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Brandon Fox told Anderson that Bacas lies were part of an attempt to cover up what had been going on in the Sheriffs Department.
Thats not what a leader does, Fox said. Thats what a coward does.
Brian Moriguchi, head of the union that represents Sheriffs Department supervisors, said Baca is responsible for the actions of his subordinates, especially Tanaka, and should receive more than six months considering the sentences the others will serve.
Many sheriffs deputies have been closely watching the criminal prosecutions to see if the punishments for former bosses would approach those of lower-ranking employees following their orders.
Its not only widespread in the department, its widespread in society the feeling that those who have power seem to be exempt from the same rules as everyone else, Moriguchi said.
cindy.chang@latimes.com
marisa.gerber@latimes.com
For more Southern California news, follow us on Twitter: @cindychangLA and @marisagerber
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UPDATES:
7:55 p.m.: This article was updated with minor rewriting and additional comments from legal experts.
3:20 p.m.: This article has been updated with additional comments from Bacas attorney.
1:15 p.m. This article has been updated with comments from a legal expert.
10:45 a.m.: This story was updated with more details from the court hearing.
10:20 a.m.: This story was updated with a comment from Bacas attorney and an explanation of the decision Baca must now make.
This story was originally published at 9:50 a.m.
A woman was driving intoxicated and with four children not wearing seat belts inside the car when she lost control and smashed into a house in South L.A., killing a young passenger, police said.
Erica Lynn Naranjo, 36, was released from the hospital and booked into county jail about 3:30 a.m. Monday on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence in connection with the crash on East 93rd Street in Green Meadows, Sheriffs Department records show.
For the record: This article says Naranjo was released from the hospital. As of July 20, she had not yet been released.
Authorities said that Naranjo was southbound on McKinley Avenue when she lost control of her beige sedan and crashed into a home on the southeast corner of 93rd Street about 5:45 p.m. Sunday.
Inside the car with Naranjo were a 7-year-old girl and three boys, ages 6 years, 4 years and 18 months, Los Angeles Fire Department officials said.
The girl, identified as Angelina Lynn Naranjo, died from her injuries. The boys were rushed to the hospital with critical injuries, police said. None were wearing seat belts when the crash occurred, police told KTLA.
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Seat belts certainly wouldve made a difference, LAPD Sgt. Allan Rabina said. Sometimes speed is such an overwhelming factor at least seat belts wouldve minimized or mitigated the injuries.
Los Angeles fire dispatchers received a series of 911 calls from witnesses beginning at 5:47 p.m. Sunday, after the sedan crashed through a white fence and smashed into a brick exterior wall of the house in the 700 block of East 93rd Street.
The driver was temporarily trapped in the wreckage, LAFD spokesman Brian Humphrey said. The 7-year-old girl was, sadly, beyond our help, Humphrey said. Rescuers pronounced her dead at the scene.
DMV records show Naranjos drivers license expired in May. She is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail.
No one inside the home was injured.
Staff writer Jack Dolan contributed to this report.
For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.
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The scene was like a modern twist on William Faulkners short story A Rose for Emily, which concludes in a musty bedroom with the cadaver of an old beau lying on a bed.
Having paid $430,000 on June 22 for a house in the 6200 block of Anastasia Street in Simi Valley, according to property records, the new homeowner was eager to move in.
But when the unidentified buyer went to the home on Sunday afternoon, around 4:15 p.m., and walked through an open door into a bedroom, they found the body of Salvatore Orefice, 84, his body covered and lying on a bed.
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The gruesome discovery led to the arrest of the dead mans girlfriend, Mary Karacas, said Simi Valley police Cmdr. Roy Jones.
After hearing from the person who purchased the home, detectives went there and called Karacas asking that she meet them there, Jones said.
Karacas, 75, told detectives she and Orefice had gotten into an altercation, he said. At some point during the fight, Karacas told detectives, she shot him. She was arrested on suspicion of murder, Jones said.
Orefice and Karacas had 30 days to move out of the home after selling it, Jones said.
Jones said investigators dont know exactly how long Orefice had been dead.
veronica.rocha@latimes.com
For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.
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The oldest park ranger in the U.S. received a new presidential commemorative coin Sunday to replace one that was stolen last month during a violent home invasion robbery in Richmond, Calif.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell gave Betty Reid Soskin, 94, the coin and letter from President Obama during a speech at the 72nd anniversary of the Port Chicago Disaster at the Concord Naval Weapon Station. Obama had given her the coin at the national tree-lighting ceremony in December.
Betty is pretty tough, Jewell said.
The letter and coin presentation came as a surprise for the longtime ranger, who was attending the ceremony to honor the lives of 320 Americans, mostly African American sailors, killed in 1944 when two ships being loaded with ammunition and bombs suddenly blew up. Soskins family hosted sailors who served in the U.S. Navy during that time, Jewell said.
Seventy-two years ago, she was a witness to that explosion, Jewell said.
Soskin returned to work last week after she was severely beaten by a robber during the June 27 robbery.
The coin, electronics and jewelry were stolen last month from her town home in Richmond, police said. Soskin told KTVU-TV her attacker dragged her from the bed through a hallway and hit her face. She thought he was going to kill me, she told the news station.
At some point during the robbery, Soskin locked herself in a bathroom until he left.
Soskin is a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, where she leads tours and provides a detailed history of women who worked in factories during wartime. She began working with the park service at 85.
Soskin, who is the great-granddaughter of a slave, worked as a file clerk during World War II when she was 20.
The Rosie the Riveter Trust has established a fund for Soskin to help replace the stolen items.
veronica.rocha@latimes.com
For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.
Los Angeles police are seeking to identify a woman who they said was illegally photographed by Playboy model Dani Mathers inside a locker room shower at an LA Fitness gym to move forward with their investigation.
Without a victim, we cant go forward, LAPD spokeswoman Officer Jenny Houser said.
Detectives need the woman to contact police, so they can continue to investigate the misdemeanor offense, she said. Houser urged the victim to report the incident to any Los Angeles police station, or call Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-TIPS (8477).
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Detectives had been looking into the matter after receiving a report from LA Fitness of illegal distribution of the image, LAPD Capt. Andrew Neiman said.
Mathers was slammed by the public on social media after she shared the photo on Snapchat of the naked woman inside the gyms locker room with the caption: If I cant unsee this then you cant either.
See the most-read stories in Local News this hour >>
After learning about the photo on social media, LA Fitness permanently revoked Mathers membership at all of its health clubs.
Her behavior is appalling and puts every member at risk of losing their privacy, said Jill Greuling, the companys executive vice president of operations.
The company did not say at which gym the incident occurred. Greuling said cellphone use and photography are forbidden in gym locker rooms.
This is not only our rule, but common decency, she said.
Critics accused Mathers of body-shaming the woman. Mathers later deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts.
Mathers apologized on Snapchat for taking the photograph, saying the picture was meant to be sent as a private message, but was posted publicly.
That was absolutely wrong and not what I meant to do, she said. I know that body-shaming is wrong. That is not the type of person I am.
veronica.rocha@latimes.com
For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.
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Hundreds to attend vigil for UC Berkeley student killed in Nice terror attack
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Hundreds of students are expected to gather at a vigil for a UC Berkeley student who was one of 84 killed in Thursdays terror attack in Nice.
Organized by the Associated Students of the University of California, the vigil for Nicolas Leslie, 20, will be held at 4:30 p.m. at Sproul Plaza on the campus.
It is with a heavy heart I share with you all that unfortunately we have lost another fellow Bear to senseless violence, the organizations president, William Morrow, said on Facebook in announcing the vigil.
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Leslie is the second student to be killed overseas in terror attacks in less than a month. Sophomore Tarishi Jain, who was studying abroad, was one of 20 hostages killed July 1 during a standoff at the Holey Artisan Bakery in Bangladesh.
1 / 33 Thousands gather on Monday on the Jardin Albert and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice to observe a minute of silence for victims of the deadly attack. (AFP/Getty Images) 2 / 33 The crowd applauds police officers and rescue teams after a minute of silence on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice. (Francois Mori / Associated Press) 3 / 33 Ghassan Zaour watches people gathered around a makeshift memorial after observing a minute of silence to honor the victims of deadly attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. (Luca Bruno / Associated Press) 4 / 33 People observe a minute of silence on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, to honor the victims of the attack. (Francois Mori / Associated Press) 5 / 33 A man scans notices of people missing after a man drove a truck into a packed crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. (Boris Horvat / AFP/Getty Images) 6 / 33 A woman reacts after learning of the death of a relative at a Nice hospital. (Claude Paris / Associated Press) 7 / 33 A woman walks alone on a deserted beach beside the Promenade des Anglais on July 6, 2016, in Nice, where the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations. (Ian Langsdon / EPA) 8 / 33 People hug outside Pasteur Hospital in Nice after the July 14 truck attack that killed 84 people. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP/Getty Images) 9 / 33 The Eiffel Tower in Paris is illuminated in the colors of the French flag in solidarity with the victims of the terror attack in Nice. (Christophe Petit Tesson / EPA) 10 / 33 A woman sits under French flags lowered at half-mast in Nice, following the deadly Bastille Day attacks. (GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP/Getty Images) 11 / 33 Police secure the area where a truck drove into a crowd during Bastille Day celebrations, killing scores of people in Nice, France. (Andreas Gebert / EPA) 12 / 33 A forensic expert examines dead bodies covered with a blue sheet on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in Nice, a day after a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day. (Boris Horvat / AFP/Getty Images) 13 / 33 People react near the scene where a truck drove through revelers in Nice, France. (Francois Mori / Associated Press) 14 / 33 Crime scene investigators work on the Promenade des Anglais after the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France. (Olivier Anrigo / EPA) 15 / 33 People gather 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, France. (Ian Langsdon / EPA) 16 / 33 A man holding the French national flag stands near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice, France. (Luca Bruno / Associated Press) 17 / 33 Flowers placed near the site of the deadly attack on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images) 18 / 33 Floral tributes are placed near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice. (Luca Bruno / Associated Press) 19 / 33 Riot police officers and gendarmes are seen Friday outside the Pasteur Hospital in Nice, France. (Claude Paris / Associated Press) 20 / 33 Police researchers inspect the cab of the truck that crashed into Bastille Day revelers in Nice, France. (Alberto Estevez / EPA) 21 / 33 Roses are attached to a barrier near the scene of the truck attack in Nice. (Francois Mori / Associated Press) 22 / 33 An image grab from the Twitter account of harp_detectives shows people fleeing the scene of the truck attack Thursday in Nice, France. (AFP/Getty Images) 23 / 33 An image grab from the Instagram account of GA Morrow shows people fleeing the scene of the truck attack in Nice, France. (AFP/Getty Images) 24 / 33 The truck that plowed through Bastille Day revelers, its windshield riddled with bullets, is examined by forensics officers in Nice, France. (Claude Paris / Associated Press) 25 / 33 Emergency workers tend to a woman injured in the truck attack. (Olivier Anrigo / EPA) 26 / 33 Soldiers, police officers and firefighters walk amid bodies covered with blue sheets along the Nice seafront. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images) 27 / 33 A body lies on the ground after the Nice attack. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images) 28 / 33 People gather near the scene of the attack. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images) 29 / 33 Police officers and rescue workers stand near a truck that plowed into a crowd of people leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on Bastille Day. Dozens of revelers were killed. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images) 30 / 33 Ambulances line up near the scene of the attack. (Claude Paris / Associated Press) 31 / 33 A soldier stands guard alongside police officers near the site of the truck attack. (Ciaran Fahey / Associated Press) 32 / 33 Residents walk with their hands up as police conduct checks. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images) 33 / 33 Police officers inspect a vehicle after the truck attack in Nice. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images)
Leslie was also studying abroad through a campus program and had gone to the citys promenade to watch the Bastille Day celebration when a truck raced through the packed crowd, killing 84 and injuring more than 200.
Driven by 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian man living in Nice, the 20-ton truck plowed through the crowd gathered on the citys promenade for the Bastille Day celebration. The truck traveled nearly a mile, crushing people along the way, before police were able to shoot and kill Bouhlel.
UC Berkeley students Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, Daryus Medora, 21, and Diane Huang, 20, were injured in the attack. Huang suffered a broken foot and Kostiuk had a broken leg. Both were released from hospitals. Medora remains hospitalized with a broken leg.
Immediately after the attack, Leslie, a junior, was reported missing, prompting a frantic search by the university, local officials and family. Leslies mother, who is Italian, dispatched family and friends in Europe to check hospitals to try to find her son, according to a family friend.
French officials confirmed his death on Sunday, according to a statement released by the university.
This is tragic, devastating news, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said Sunday. All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence.
Leslies Facebook page said he was from Milan, Italy, and grew up in Del Mar, where he attended Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, before heading to Berkeley. The environmental studies major planned to begin his studies at the Haas School of Business in the fall, the university said.
Nick was a very involved student in Berkeley through his fraternity, his club involvement, and his academic work trying to make a more environmentally sustainabl e world, Morrow said.
Leslie was an only child who was adored by everyone who knew him, said a family friend. The friend asked to be identified only as Antonella, to protect her privacy as well as the familys. Antonella described him as a wonderful, caring young adult, extremely motivated.
Leslie and the other three students were among 85 Berkeley students participating in a summer entrepreneurship program in Nice.
Leslies advisor in the universitys College of Natural Resources told campus officials that he was very excited about the upcoming year.
About 60 students remain in Nice, where counselors were sent to speak with those grieving.
veronica.rocha@latimes.com
For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.
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A UC Berkeley student missing in Nice since Thursdays terror attack has been confirmed dead, according to university officials.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was on a study abroad program and had gone to the citys promenade to watch the Bastille Day celebration when a truck raced through the packed crowd, killing 84 and injuring more than 200.
Three other UC Berkeley students were injured in the attack, two with broken legs and one with a broken foot.
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But Leslie was missing, prompting a frantic search by the university, local officials and family.
French officials confirmed his death on Sunday, according to a statement released by the university.
Leslie is the second UC Berkeley student killed in a terrorist attack this summer. Sophomore Tarishi Jain was killed in an attack on a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh about two weeks ago.
This is tragic, devastating news, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said Sunday. All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence.
Leslies Facebook page said he was from Milan, Italy. He had been living in Southern California and attended Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, before heading to Berkeley.
Leslies mother, who is Italian, dispatched family and friends in Europe to check hospitals to try to find her son, according to a family friend who was with her at her Del Mar home Friday. The friend asked to be identified only by her first name, Antonella, to protect her privacy as well as the familys.
Leslie is an only child who is adored by everyone who knows him, Antonella said. Hes a wonderful, caring young adult, extremely motivated.
Leslies uncle and aunt searched the hospitals of Nice, with no luck, according to published reports.
The 20-ton truck, driven by a 31-year old Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian man living in Nice, plowed through the crowd gathered on the citys promenade for the Bastille Day celebration. The truck traveled nearly a mile, crushing people along the way, before police were able to shoot and kill Bouhlel.
Identifying all of the victims has been a slow, painstaking process. French investigators informed the FBI that Leslie was among the dead Sunday, according to the universitys statement.
Leslie, a junior, had been studying environmental science. He was one of 85 Berkeley students participating in summer entrepreneurship program in Nice. Two other students injured in the attack have been released from the hospital and returned to their dorms. A third injured student remains hospitalized with a broken leg.
The school said a vigil will be held for Leslie on the Berkeley campus at 4:30 p.m. Monday.
The recent fatal shootings of police in Dallas, Baton Rouge and San Diego recall a treacherous, not-so-distant past for law enforcement, when groups like the Black Panthers called on their supporters to execute officers.
Violence against police had risen steadily throughout the 1960s.
Twenty-eight officers were killed in 1960. The total in 1966 was double that.
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When the Black Panthers formed in Oakland in 1966, their espousal of violence was a sharp turn from the peaceful protests of the civil rights era. They said only force could effectively counter a culture of white superiority and police abuse, and called on their supporters to kill cops.
A spin-off group, the Black Liberation Army, did exactly that, launching numerous attacks in the early 1970s. Members were suspected in bombing a police officers funeral, and they were charged with killing four officers in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco. The next year, members shot two officers to death on a sidewalk in New Yorks East Village.
Slayings of officers peaked in 1973, when 134 died, according to a 1996 report, Death on Patrol: Felonious Homicides of American Officers, to the National Institute of Justice.
The militant groups were never responsible for the bulk of the killings, which were committed by a variety of criminals. And although the racial animus toward police didnt vanish with the disintegration of the black power movement, race wasnt the prime motivator of the violence in ensuing years.
The report found that from 1980 to 1992, 54.6% of suspected cop killers were white, and 42.8% were black.
By 2005, the number of officers murdered had dropped to 55, and the figure has hovered around that ever since, averaging 49 a year, according to the FBI.
About 10 officers a year have been killed in ambushes either premeditated or unprovoked attacks between 2005 and last year.
Motives of the attacks have been varied, along with the races of the killers. In 2012, in LaPlace, La., two deputies were killed by an anti-government group called the Sovereign Citizens. Of the six suspects arrested, five were white and one was black.
In 2013, Riverside Officer Michael Crain was shot at a traffic light by Christopher Dorner, the disgruntled former LAPD officer, who was black. The next year in Las Vegas, a white couple with anti-government leanings shot police Officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck while they were eating pizza.
A month later, an officer in Gary, Ind., was shot to death in his patrol car, and a 25-year-old black man was charged with the crime. In September, a white survivalist was accused of fatally shooting a Pennsylvania state trooper as he stepped out of his barracks.
During a period of furious protest over the police shootings of black men, one attack in particular stirred fears among law enforcement that they could face retaliatory ambushes. On Dec. 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, an unemployed black man who reportedly told his ex-girlfriend he wanted to commit suicide, walked up to a patrol car in Brooklyn and shot Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu to death, then killed himself.
Hours before, in a post on Instagram, he said he planned to kill two officers and referenced the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., as the reason, according to news reports.
Anxiety heightened when an officer pumping gas in Texas was gunned down by a black man in August.
Late Thursday night, two San Diego police gang-detail officers making a traffic stop were shot several times, one mortally wounded, triggering a massive police search into the daylight hours. One suspect is in custody.
The latest shooting added to the other recent attacks, which left eight officers dead in 10 days in Dallas and Baton Rougeand left many wondering if it was 1973 again.
joseph.mozingo@latimes.com
UPDATES:
This story was updated on July 29, 2016 with news of a fatal attack on police officers in San Diego.
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.
Speaking at a supermarket promotion event on July 16th in Ho Chi Minh City, Senior Trade Commissioner Ms Barbara Nadeau said last year Canada secured market access for its cherries in China and sales in the Asian marketplace have been on the upswing ever since.
The Trade Commissioner said Canadian consignments of cherries in 2015 to Vietnam alone skyrocketed nearly 50% year-on-year to USD1.7 billion and are on track to hit a new record high this year.
Canadian growers place a great deal of emphasis on quality to ensure that they are of the highest calibre and stand out above all the other cherries on the market, said Ms Nadeau.
In addition, Canadian growers are resourceful and innovative always searching for better techniques to improve their product and protocols to guarantee only clean fruit is entering export markets.
It all ties back to the nations farmers wanting to grow quality cherries and keep our reputation and image very high, said Ms Nadeau./.
9:47 A.M. Texas governor wants to add police to hate crimes law
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott discusses police shootings in Dallas during a news conference on July 8. (Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press)
Texas Governor Greg Abbotts office proposed a measure on Monday that would classify crimes committed against law enforcement officers out of bias against the police as hate crimes.
At a time when law enforcement officers increasingly come under assault simply because of the job they hold, Texas must send a resolute message that the State will stand by the men and women who serve and protect our communities, Abbott said in a statement.
Louisiana legislators passed a similar bill earlier this year.
Gavin Eugene Long, the gunman who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, left a vast and angry online trail documenting his interest in black separatism and fury at police shootings of black men.
Long, whose identity was confirmed by a law enforcement official, was shot to death by police after opening fire on officers on Airline Highway, less than a mile from the citys police headquarters in Baton Rouge.
One law enforcement official described him as a black separatist. He carried out the shooting on his 29th birthday, and was from Kansas City, Mo.
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Its unclear when he came to Baton Rouge.
Long went by Cosmo online and had registered the domain name ConvosWithCosmo.club in April using his Kansas City address. The website shows a generic page with ads but a similarly named site, ConvosWithCosmo.com, includes links to podcasts, YouTube videos, books of his for sale and various social media accounts.
Throughout his postings, Long described violence as the solution to what he saw as oppression of black Americans. He railed against the July 5 police shooting of 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.
One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors, from victims fighting their bullies, 100% have been successful through fighting back through bloodshed, he said in a video. Zero have been successful through simply protesting. It has never been successful and it never will.
In a tweet, he called violence an answer.
At what point do you stand up so that your people dont become the Native Americans EXTINCT? it said. In another tweet, he praised Micah Johnson, the man who shot and killed five police officers in Dallas, saying he was one of us! and my religion is justice.
In a July 8 video, Long suggested that if anything happens to me dont affiliate me with anybody. In a tweet with a video, which he said was filmed with a body camera in Dallas on July 10, Long shouted at black men getting haircuts at a barber shop: Everyone in this room got a purpose, just figure it out!
He also wrote about his experiences as a U.S. Marine.
While stationed in San Diego, California, Cosmo became a highly esteemed and sought after nutritionist and personal trainer, Long wrote on his website.
According to military records, Long served for five years, including deployments to Iraq for seven months in 2008 and 2009 and a post in Okinawa, Japan. Much of his time was spent in California. He worked as a data network specialist.
Reports say he was honorably discharged in 2010.
After leaving the military, he received an associates degree in General Studies at Central Texas College and studied for three semesters at Clark Atlanta University, according to his online postings.
Long dropped out after having a spiritual revelation, gave away all of his material possessions and traveled to Africa, he wrote. The website says he crisscrossed Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Ghana and Burkina Faso, and wrote three books, including a two-part series called a A (W)holistic Guide for the Total Transformation of Melanated People.
Longs attendance at those universities could not be confirmed, but a spokesman for the University of Alabama said that a student with Longs name took classes there in 2012. He made the deans list that spring.
Besides posting on his own sites, Long appears to have contributed frequently to other forums. On one website, a user named Cosmo Setepenra with an email address associated with Long complained about government surveillance. On stoporgangstalking.com, a user named Cosmo commented about the importance of wearing body cameras and exposing people involved in gang stalking.
Long also appeared to follow at least one online radio show hosted by Lance Scurv, who said he featured a Cosmo Setenepra on his radio show this year in a long conversation about nutrition and health. They stayed in touch, talking on the phone every now and then. Scurv, who is based in Orlando, Fla., said Cosmo spoke from a phone number with a Kansas City area code.
He seemed to be like a guy in transition, he said. But he never expressed rage like there was something brewing.
On July 9, Scurv posted an email that Cosmo asked him to share on his Facebook group.
It began: I just want everyone to know that if anything may happen to me or with me... The post went on to reference YouTube videos about Sterling and standing up when you know you are right.
Scurv said he barely read the email, but shared it because he helps pass along social media updates for everyone who comes on his show, which discusses current events and activism.
Near the end of the post, Long offered a message to readers: You will win this war not with your actions, but with your responses to their actions.
Times staff writers W.J. Hennigan and Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.
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The Marine Corps veteran who engaged police officers in a shootout here Sunday, killing three officers and wounding three, hunted down his targets with deliberate and methodical precision, officials said Monday.
Gavin Eugene Long, a 29-year-old black separatist from Kansas City, Mo., was dressed in black and armed with two rifles and a 9-millimeter handgun as he ambushed officers at the B-Quik gas station on Airline Highway, less than a mile from the citys police headquarters.
Long completely dismissed civilians who were walking through the area, instead stalking police officers and positioning himself to shoot at close range, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said at a news briefing Monday afternoon.
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Within minutes, Long had left a scene of carnage.
There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated, Edmonson said. It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day.
Long was extremely accurate during the ambush, which unfolded outside the gas station and a beauty salon, Edmonson said. And he seemed skilled in handling the IWI Tavor SAR 5.56 rifle he carried, keeping a strap over his shoulder to keep the rifle in place as he shot officers.
Surveillance video showed a scene that was chilling in the sheer brutality, Edmonson said.
As Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge sheriffs deputy and a father of four, moved toward a crawling officer in an attempt to help him, Long opened fire, fatally wounding Garafola.
He went down fighting, lying in a prone position, returning fire as bullets flew all around him, Sheriff Sid J. Gautreaux III said.
After killing Garafola, Long went back to the wounded officer and fired two shots, killing him.
A SWAT team officer ultimately shot Long from about 100 yards away, taking him down as he approached two other officers
I could not be more proud of my SWAT team, said Carl Dabadie Jr., chief of the Baton Rouge Police Department, calling the fatal hit a helluva shot. Without it, he said, he had little doubt the gunman would have attacked more officers.
They did exactly as they were trained, without hesitation, without fear,
Officials suspect Long, who drove a Chevrolet Malibu rental car 800 miles from Kansas City to Baton Rouge, had been in the city for several days planning the attack and looking for locations to target police officers. Long probably intended to keep killing officers as long as he could, Dabadie said.
After he was finished here, I have no doubt he was headed toward our headquarters and he was going to take more lives, Dabadie said.
The police chief vigorously defended the use of military-style tactics against protesters in the city the focus of criticism in the days since officers fatally shot Alton Sterling, igniting noisy street demonstrations.
Weve been questioned for the last two weeks about our militarized tactics and our militarized law enforcement. This is why. We are up against a force that is not playing by the rules. Our military tactics, as theyre being called here, saved lives.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards contrasted the innate goodness of those officers with the pure unadulterated evil of the shooter, who came in here from somewhere else to do harm to our community.
He described the shooting as a diabolical attack on the very fabric of our society.
Longs military service record included assignments at Camp Pendleton, San Diego and Twentynine Palms before his discharge from the Marines in 2010.
But over the last few years, Long left a lengthy Internet footprint documenting a growing interest in black separatism. In videos and in social media postings, he described violence as the solution to the oppression of black Americans and railed against Baton Rouge police for shooting Sterling. That case is being investigated by the Justice Department.
Last year, Long sought to legally change his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, identifying himself as a member of a largely black separatist sovereign nation. According to a document filed in May 2015 with the Jackson County, Mo., recorder of deeds, and first reported by the Kansas City Star, Long claimed he was a vet national of United Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah Muur Nation.
Also known as the Washitaw Nation, the Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah is a Louisiana-based group that claims to be a sovereign Native American nation within the U.S. The Washitaw Nation is made up of African Americans, and its core tenet is that followers are descendants of the Ancient Ones, or black ones, who occupied North America tens of thousands of years before white Europeans.
It is part of the larger sovereign citizen movement in America, a fringe phenomenon that has gained attention on the Internet.
One of the Washitaws core beliefs is that the federal government has essentially imprisoned people, said Ryan Lenz, a senior writer at the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project. One way they believe the government controls them is through taxation. Followers of the movement, and other sovereign citizen groups, often try to dodge paying taxes.
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.
Killed in the shooting were Garafola; Baton Rouge Police Officer Montrell Jackson, 32, an African American who had worked on the force for a decade; and Matthew Gerald, 41, a white man who had been with the department for less than a year. Deputies Nicholas Tullier, 41, and Bruce Simmons, 51, and an unidentified Baton Rouge police officer were wounded in the shooting.
Tullier, who was critically injured and remains in an intensive care unit, had spotted the gunmans car and was about to run his license plate when Long shot him in the head and stomach.
At this point, were just praying for him, Gautreaux said. Hes not in good shape at all.
Simmons is in serious condition, the bone running from his elbow to his shoulder shattered by the gunmans bullet. Physicians used a titanium rod to replace the bone.
Dabadie described Gerald as a devoted husband and father of two who had served in the Marine Corps and Army. He was a Black Hawk crew member and served three tours in Iraq. He spent his whole life serving this country and our city, Dabadie said.
The police chief also praised Jackson, a father of four, noting that just a couple of days before the shooting, when he went to talk to his officers to try to lift their spirits, Montrell ended up giving me a pep talk.
That was the last time that I spoke to Montrell and Ill never forget it, he said. He is a true hero.
During a speech before the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement in Washington Monday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch read from a Facebook post by Jackson in which the officer pleaded for an end to the anger that crested after five police officers were shot and killed this month in Dallas.
She added: If we are truly to honor his service and mourn his loss and the loss of his friends and colleagues, and of too many others who have been taken from us we must not let hatred infect our hearts. We must remember that no matter who we are, we all feel the same pain when we lose a friend or loved one.
Hennessy-Fiske reported from Baton Rouge and Jarvie from Atlanta. Times staff writer Del Quentin Wilber in Washington contributed to this report.
ALSO
Slain Baton Rouge officer had said on Facebook that recent violence had tested me to the core
Deadly attacks in Dallas and Baton Rouge echo a more dangerous time for police
Its not just Dallas or Baton Rouge police officers have been killed across the country
UPDATES:
6:50 p.m.: Updated throughout.
2:06 p.m.: This article was updated with more detail from a press briefing.
1:35 p.m.: This article was updated with new information about the attack and the gunman.
This article was originally published at 8:05 a.m.
The way President Obama tells it, retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Kettles is an action movie hero.
The president described May 15, 1967 as a hot Monday morning in Vietnam, during which outnumbered American soldiers needed support while fighting North Vietnamese forces.
Enter Kettles, who volunteered to fly soldiers to the front lines and take the wounded out of battle.
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Death or injury was all but certain, Obama said. The enemy unloaded everything they had on Chuck as he landed.
After initially being told everyone had been moved to safety, Kettles was midair when he heard eight soldiers were left behind.
He decided to turn back around without any aerial or artillery support. His helicopter was 600 pounds overweight and severely damaged, but Kettles is credited with saving 44 people.
I couldnt make this up, the president said before comparing Kettles story to the movie Rambo.
Obama presented Kettles, 86, the Medal of Honor for his service Monday. Kettles was previously awarded the Armys Distinguished Service Cross and the Bronze Star.
His Medal of Honor came after a five-year campaign spearheaded by Kettles son and a social worker who interviewed Kettles for a local rotary club. Kettles, a resident of Ypsilanti, Mich., was joined at the White House ceremony by his wife, eight of their 10 children and three of their grandchildren.
Obama praised Kettles for giving his fellow soldiers the opportunity to return home and make their own families.
Following the ceremony, Kettles told reporters that the whole mission was worth it because it saved lives.
Thats the only thing that really matters out of all the details, he said.
jill.ornitz@latimes.com
Follow me: @Jill_Ornitz
Tales from the streets outside the GOP convention, where thousands were holding their own debate over Americas future.
Day 1: Paranoid in Cleveland | Dysfunctional veteran | Demilitarized zone | Day 2: Rock n roll moment | Water guns | Protest bingo | Day 3: The courts | Merchandise | Flag burning | The revolution | Protest? | Vermin Supreme
Love will see us through
Performance artist, activist and perennial political candidate Vermin Supreme, seen earlier in the Republican National Convention (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA) (Test)
Day 4, 11:18 p.m.: The streets outside the Quicken Loans Arena were calm as Trump ascended the stage and accepted the nomination for president. Police officers loitered on Prospect Avenue, waiting for a threat to face as partiers watched Trump's speech from behind the glass windows of Flannery's bar.
Things were nearing an end out on the streets. Sitting on a sidewalk outside the Secret Service security zone, I listened on my phone as Trump promised to end crime when he took office on Jan. 20, 2017, and as he thundered that the country had become weak, disrespected and violent.
Then I heard a voice on a bullhorn.
It was coming up the narrow street where the media outlets had rented out storerooms and where a group of Hare Krishnas was banging a tambourine.
"Love is on our side," the performance artist and political prankster Vermin Supreme sang through his bullhorn, wearing a rain boot on his head, and dragging a retinue of followers, reporters and police with him. "Love will see us through."
Vermin Supreme, one of the Republican National Conventions celebrity street urchins, has served as a kind of left-wing counterweight to the provocations of Alex Jones. Where Jones has sown chaos around the convention, at one point interrupting a filming Thursday of the left-leaning Young Turks show, Vermin Supreme has inserted himself more playfully into the confrontations with protesters and police on the streets. Vermin or does he go by Supreme? looks like a scrawny, anarchist Santa, wearing a black vest that says "RESIST TELEVISION, POLICE ARE YOUR FRIENDS," a fake plastic butt, and a necktie that really couldn't get any looser.
He's teased the fundamentalist preachers who have been howling hellfire at every gathering, and he has pranced in front of the police, just like he was doing now as the crowd sang the national anthem.
"...Oer the land of the free, and the home... of the... brave."
Things in Cleveland were coming to an end.
"Soon you'll be in your living rooms drinking beer," Vermin Supreme told the crowd. "Keep it cool."
He skipped down Prospect Avenue, which was now empty except for a bank of police horses, state troopers, and cameras. The street was filled with people but nearly silent, except for the sound of the Hare Krishnas in the distance, and the quiet drone of a journalist playing video of Trump accepting the nomination for president.
"What's the name of the gentleman with the boot on his head?" an officer asked me.
"Vermin Supreme," I said.
"Vermin Supreme!" the officer said. "I'll have to look him up later."
"Please move along!" Vermin Supreme hollered from down Prospect Avenue, which was lined now by dozens of police. "Please ignore the man with the bullhorn. Thank you. I am Vermin Supreme, and I am running for president."
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What if they gave a protest, and only the reporters came?
The Stand Together Against Trump march across the Hope Memorial Bridge (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times) (Test)
Day 4, 3:31 P.M.: If you hold a protest march on a bridge where nobody except the police and media can see you, are you really marching? Or are we all just slowly descending into madness together?
I've seen a lot of stuff outside the Republican National Convention that I could appropriate for a graphic novel about the end times. Bicycle officers dressed like Robocops. Police horses dressed like Robocops. Bikers chasing Communists. An activist in a diaper. Alex Jones.
But we may have reached the height of absurdity Thursday afternoon when the activist group Stand Together Against Trump held a permitted parade rally on the city-approved parade route outside the RNC.
Before the convention began, activists had complained that the city's protest restrictions violated the 1st Amendment. To hold a parade, you had to have a permit, and you had to follow a route over the Hope Bridge, which isnt particularly close to the convention. Activists called it the "bridge to nowhere."
Most of the organized protesters here this week have ignored the rules and just marched wherever they wanted, or at least wherever the hovering brigades of bicycle police would let them. They made a lot of noise and lots of bystanders saw them, and I can report that things basically ended up fine.
By contrast, Stand Together Against Trump followed the rules, got a permit, gathered at the permitted time, at the permitted place it appeared to be the only significant march held along the official parade route all week.
And it turned out like a zombie movie.
At the front of the march, about nine activists held up a long banner that read, "STAND AGAINST TRUMP: STAND FOR AMERICAN VALUES." Others held signs that said, "HISTORIANS SAY NO TO HATE," "A HATE-FILLED MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING," and "LOVE HAS NO BORDERS."
As about 100 activists began marching across the bridge, it became pretty clear that the only people who could see the messages of love were the bee swarm of journalists and a cluster of religious protesters who had come to tell everybody they were going to hell.
The protesters and the journalists proceeded to march over the river, lots of people chanting and somebody banging a drum. As far as I could tell, nobody back near the convention hall in the distance was even looking at us. When we reached the end of the route, a small army of police was waiting.
The surrounding streets were empty. Nary a delegate nor a casual passerby was to be seen. At one point I counted about seven construction workers watching from an overpass.
The protesters milled around a bit, realizing the route was a dead end. Then parade organizer Brian Hambley took a bullhorn: "Back over the bridge!" he boomed.
They pivoted back toward the action.
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The revolution is coming. Or not.
Carl Dix, a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, says supporters will challenge the arrests of 17 people in Wednesdays flag-burning protest. (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
Day 4, 10:57 A.M.: I wonder when's the last time American Communists got this much media attention.
It's the final day of the Republican National Convention, and so, of course, I'm at a news conference for Revolutionary Communist Party supporters. To be honest, there's not much else going on. The '60s this is not. Norman Mailer's armies of the night have not materialized on the streets of Cleveland. Which is why I have ended up here with a couple dozen other journalists, clogging the sidewalk in front of the Cleveland Justice Center to hear what supporters of communist revolution had to say.
"America was never great," Sunsara Taylor, a Revolutionary Communist Party supporter, told a bank of television cameras. She ticked through America's sins: slavery, imperialism, capitalism, police killings, and now, the "Nazi rally," otherwise known as the GOP convention, happening inside the nearby Quicken Loans Arena.
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FOR THE RECORD
8:18 p.m. July 21: An previous version of this report misspelled Sunsara Taylors first name as Sansara.
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RCP supporters were responsible for the most dramatic bit of activism outside the convention thus far: an American flag-burning ceremony Wednesday that ended with 17 arrests, including the flag burner, Gregory Lee Joey Johnson. He was the one who burned the American flag outside the RNC in 1984, and whose arrest led to a Supreme Court ruling that flag burning was constitutional.
The Communists say the arrests were illegal, and have signaled that Wednesday's arrests could lead to another battle in court.
Police claim they moved in not to stop the flag burning, but because the protesters had accidentally set themselves on fire.
I've seen video showing that an official almost instantly tried to douse the burning flag with an extinguisher, and things turned chaotic as Johnson tried to protect the flame."The police have lied," Taylor said this morning.
The RCPs supporters are a pretty common sight out on the activist circuit; if there were a protest Olympics, they might send a delegation. I remember seeing them in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 when the city's black residents began rising up against their Police Department.
Even there, in a scene known for its stridency, they were not exactly popular among other activists, some of whom accused them of instigation. At one point, protesters and St. Louis City Councilman Antonio French shoved one of the groups members, apparently Johnson, to the ground.
Maybe its because they are, as their title suggests, revolutionary. They want to overthrow capitalism because they think nothing good can come from it. And it's probably worth saying that they're probably as far away from the Democratic and Republican nominees as you can get ideologically. They think Donald Trump is a fascist and Hillary Clinton a war criminal.
In other words, you can expect to see them right back outside the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, calling for the same revolution.
But first, there's the matter of Trump's acceptance speech tonight. "Everybody who's in Cleveland or who can get here needs to be a part of these protests," said Carl Dix, a founding member of the RCP, adding that the party was "organizing for an actual revolution at the soonest possible moment."
As they have been for years.
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The Star-Spangled Banner in flames
Police arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party as they burned an American flag. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
DAY 3, 5:06 P.M.: There is enough international media in Cleveland to cover a nuclear catastrophe, and it's starting to feel like we're all photographing the same 50 protesters antagonizing one another.
Take what happened outside Quicken Loans Arena, headquarters for the Republican National Convention.
For days, the Revolutionary Communist Party an old-school Maoist group led by Bob Avakian had given notice that its members were planning to burn an American flag outside the convention on Wednesday at 4 p.m.
Burning an American flag is constitutional. The Supreme Court said so after a communist burned the flag outside the RNC in 1984. Yet burning the flag remains reliably infuriating, especially for veterans, who have been patrolling the streets outside this year's convention on the lookout for protesters who might be up to no good.
By the time 4 p.m. rolled around, the intersection at 4th Street and Prospect Avenue was clogged with journalists, police, veterans, communists, religious proselytizers, onlookers and a guy in a baseball hat that said Make Serbia Great Again.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams stood in the street, trying to personally clear the intersection. TV cameras formed debris clouds around anybody who looked as though he was about to do something.
Finally, the communists burned the flag, photographers bobbed around the action, police officers crashed through the wall of journalists' bodies, and a series of arrests began, for unknown charges. I wasn't close enough to see, but police said that two officers were assaulted and suffered minor injuries, and that officials took the flag after dousing it.
At that point, mounted police began pushing down the street, blowing whistles. Officers marched an older woman in a purplish shirt into the back of a van, with a contingent of communists in pursuit, chanting, "Let her go!" A woman hollered on her bullhorn, "You've got to get with the world-class revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian!"
By the time it was over, 16 members of the communist group had been arrested, according to supporter Sunsara Taylor. (Police later said 17 were arrested there, while they made an additional arrest elsewhere.) One of them was Gregory Lee Joey Johnson, who burned the flag the same guy who had burned the flag at the RNC in 1984.
His message was that 'America was NEVER great! We need to overthrow the system,' Taylor wrote later in a direct message on Twitter. "The U.S. flag is even more blood-soaked than when he burned it the first time. She proceeded to tick off names of African Americans killed by police, then threw in victims of the Iraq war for good measure.
"Pisses me off," said an Arizona Sons of Liberty member in a leather jacket as it all unfolded. He told me his name was Hoss and said he and some of his fellow Sons of Liberty were keeping a close eye on the communists.
Hoss said he had served in the Army, had family members who had died serving. Hed taken an oath, he said, to protect America from enemies foreign and domestic, and now it was time to make good on it.
He was there to protect the Republican delegates from the kind of violence that broke out outside a Donald Trump rally in San Jose in May, Hoss said. "We didn't want to see a repeat of what happened."
As it was, there wasn't much for him to do. The police presence in Cleveland has been overwhelming, and up until then, things had been pretty mellow.
Tomorrow, Hoss predicted, all that would change. Tomorrow, Trump would accept the Republican nomination. Look out, he said.
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Keep the merchandise coming, please
Shy Drayton of Indiana, a street vendor at the Republican National Convention. (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
DAY 3, 1:36 P.M.: Once upon a time, there were a bunch of buttons being sold on the streets outside the Republican National Convention, and this would not normally be news, except my mother would disown me if I ever bought some of them.
Euclid Avenue outside the Quicken Loans Arena has the feel of a souk, where protesters bark like street prophets (and are mostly ignored, just like street prophets) and street vendors peddle Trump hats, Trump shirts, Trump magnets, Trump buttons.
And Hillary Clinton buttons.
LIFE'S A BITCH. DON'T VOTE FOR ONE.
VOTE NO TO MONICA'S EX-BOYFRIEND'S WIFE IN 2016.
KFC HILLARY SPECIAL: 2 FAT THIGHS, 2 SMALL BREASTS ... LEFT WING.
I've seen them displayed at the eye level of a child by several street vendors, who are overwhelmingly male.
Except for Shy Drayton.
"Oh my gosh jeez," Drayton said as I showed her photos I'd taken of other vendors' Clinton buttons. "I think that's very rude."
Drayton had a stand of merchandise set up in the shade of the House of Blues, where she was selling buttons (one for $3, four for $10) and shirts ($15 to $20).
"This is how I make my everyday living," said Drayton as she folded a HILLARY FOR PRISON 2016 T-shirt. "I'm not too much into politics."
Drayton, who is from Indiana, has been hawking whatever sells at public events since she was 14, starting with Obama's election "back in the day." Most recently, she has been peddling gear in Atlanta, North Carolina, Iowa, Alabama and now Ohio.
"I've been to 42 states already, and I'm only 21," Drayton said proudly. "I meet people from all over the world."
Her personal philosophy: The president matters less than your personal motivations. "If you want to be rich, you can be rich," Drayton says. "You got to figure out how to do it."
Everybody at the convention has been nice to her, Drayton said. Her perch on Euclid Avenue has given her a front-row seat at the circus.
Recently, she watched as a group of armed men calling themselves defenders of the 2nd Amendment marched down the road with rifles, a brigade of police bringing up the rear.
But nothing much happened. Drayton turned away and kept selling her merch.
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The courts: All dressed up, but nobodys at the party
One of the protesters who appeared in court Wednesday is seen during her arrest the previous day outside the Republican National Convention. (Collin Rees) (Test)
DAY 3, 9:56 A.M.: A sign outside Cleveland Municipal Courtroom D says NO LO TERING. The "I" has fallen off, sadly. "Is there anyone here scheduled for a protection order hearing?" a court worker asked the young men and women waiting in the rather Soviet-era hallway.
Nope. This morning, a group of activists sat outside Courtroom D, not loitering, but awaiting judgment.
Municipal court is maybe the closest thing protesters have to a stern church: hard benches, rules that cannot be broken and a rather stiff penalty for skipping attendance. Jails and municipal courts often form the crucial backstage to all the protests you see on Twitter and TV, the place where the system takes in arrested activists, parks them behind bars and then spits them out after a fine or, more rarely, jail time.
For defense attorneys, representing activists can be a little weirder than regular criminal cases. As opposed to 99% of your other clients, your activist client might want to be guilty, want to go to jail for what he or she believes, or at least want to have a bonkers political trial in which a spectacle can be made in court, in front of the public, to draw attention to a cause. Sometimes it works.
There are three people who have been arrested for protesting in the first three days of the Republican National Convention, which was widely expected to be the most chaotic convention since 1968.
Yesterday, Jacqueline Zepeda, 28, and Sharon Spencer, 34, shimmied up two flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to hang an anti-Trump banner as Liz Butler, 44, watched out from below. The police, of course, busted them on suspicion of trespassing and generally causing a ruckus. After spending about eight or nine hours behind bars Tuesday, they were released, and this morning they came to cut a deal.
No spectacle here, I can report. It was all very quiet. One by one, the women came in front of Administrative and Presiding Judge Ronald B. Adrine, listened to a series of brief charges from a municipal prosecutor and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. They were released with fines as low as $75. It went by so fast that I could barely catch what they were charged with.
It's probably here in municipal court where you can best see how surprisingly calm the Republican National Convention has been. Cleveland's municipal courts had cleared out all their dockets and kept staff and judges on call in preparation for facing as many as 1,000 protester arrests a day. They even set up live streaming in three courtrooms in anticipation of huge dockets and packed galleries. They've needed none of it.
"So far, it's worked out perfectly," Adrine told me after the arraignments, knocking on the wooden walls of the court. "If somebody told me that three days in, we'd have a grand total of three convention-related arrests, I'd probably ask them what they'd been smoking."
Outside the courthouse, Zepeda, Spencer and Butler were ready to talk. They are anti-fracking and pro-immigration activists who said they met through friends. Butler said it was a "small price to pay to lose a day of freedom" to oppose deportations and "climate injustice."
"I'm glad we did it. It's a privilege to stand up for these communities," she said.
Spencer said it was unfortunate that for police and court systems, "their first priority is to protect corporations. I would like to see that changed." Then she had a word about fracking, an oil extraction process that has been blamed for fouled groundwater, earthquakes and other environmental ills.
"I'm just not interested in Ohio being a dumping ground for surrounding states," she said.
Zepeda, of northeast Los Angeles, munching on dry Trix cereal, said it was her first time getting arrested for anything. "It wasn't horrible," she said.
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Im here today to say what I want to say
Alex Jones, center, an American conspiracy theorist and radio show host, is escorted out of a crowd of protesters after a scuffle with some of them. (John Minchillo / Associated Press) (Test)
DAY 2, 6:03 P.M.: Remember when I wrote that things were calm, that it almost seemed as if the world outside the Republican National Convention was falling asleep? Ignore that. That was wrong. I was wrong.
The chaos seemed to begin I suppose it's fitting with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose airplane banners, truck advertisements and calls for Hillary Clinton's imprisonment have rivaled Donald Trump for setting the dominant tone in downtown Cleveland.
Jones was passing through Public Square when, he says, he was confronted by communist protesters. A scuffle followed. By the time Jones was whisked away in an SUV, the scene had become a psychodrama.
The plaza filled with hundreds of people police, Christian fundamentalists, communists, reporters, curious bystanders and a famous performance artist named Vermin Supreme wearing a boot on his head.
It was like protest bingo.
A group of grizzled men calling themselves the Bible Believers warned of the hell to come, and they stood on a ledge with signs; one said, "Jesus Christ, God manifested in the flesh, crucified, resurrected, and coming again, has a pressure cooker (THE LAKE OF FIRE) for every dead Muslim!"
On a different side of the square, the chronically inflammatory Westboro Baptist Church stood with its batch of fundamentalist signs warning "GOD HATES PROUD SINNERS."
On the opposite end of the square, the signs of the Revolutionary Communist Party could be seen bobbing in the distance over the heads of the police. They were using their bodies to build human picket fences between all the ideological factions in the square, which was starting to bulge like an angry neck vein.
The Bible Believers screamed damnation to the crowd on a megaphone, and Vermin Supreme jovially shouted back on his own megaphone, saying he couldn't understand them.
The Bible Believers then started chanting, "Police lives matter," and a different group with red, white and blue parasols started drowning them out with chants of "All lives matter."
At that point, in an unexpected turn, the Bible Believers started condemning the Westboro Baptist Church, calling them a "hate group." By then, more than 100 police had filled the square, slowly squeezing out lingering civilians like white blood cells trying to purge an infection.
The voice of a boy in a red yarmulke pierced the crowd as he started shouting at the Bible Believer, and as they started marching away, the boy confidently extended a middle finger for all the world to see.
I had to talk to him.
He said his name was Ranan Steiger, of Cleveland, and that he was 16, but he sure looked a lot younger. He had a sign that said, "Just say no to white supremacy."
"I'm here today to say what I want to say," said Ranan, making it clear he was offended to have been told he was going to hell. "Jerks like those, you can't let them do what they want to do."
What did he think about Donald Trump? He's an "idiot," Ranan said.
Was he a Republican or a Democrat?
Ranan shrugged. He didn't know yet.
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The guns come out in Cleveland. But do they squirt?
Stevedore Crawford Jr. of Delaware, Ohio, shouts at a police officer in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
DAY 2, 2:29 P.M.: "They're both carrying AR-15s," the police scanner barked.
I was sitting in the shade at Public Square when I heard the descriptions of two armed men come over an officer's radio not with any seeming urgency. There have been other armed men, 2nd Amendment advocates, wandering around with their weapons outside the Republican National Convention, which is their right in Ohio. Up to now they haven't caused any trouble.
Still, I hopped up to see whether I could find these two who had caught the police's attention, to see what it looks like when you bring weapons to what feels like one of the most heavily guarded places on Earth.
It's probably a sign of how well things are going in Cleveland that I couldn't find anybody with AR-15s, or even any other sign of trouble.
Public Square in downtown Cleveland has become a pulsing jugular of the republic, where pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators mill about with signs and score TV interviews. It's peaceful. There are no brawls between sides. Protester riots have not materialized. Guns haven't been fired or wielded in anger. When I wandered past the square, I saw two groups of performance artists dancing in a grassy lawn, moving in slow motion, figures from a hallucination, as if this weird little world outside the convention had started falling asleep.
"I see people with water guns," one of my photographer co-workers, Marcus Yam, texted me.
AR-15s are legal in the protest zone, but water guns are not. They were temporarily banned by the City Council as a security measure. I decided to check it out.
I found Stevedore Crawford Jr., 53, of Delaware, Ohio, standing in a white T-shirt that said TAMIR RICE ONLY, with what looked to be three technically prohibited lime-green squirt guns on the sidewalk. (Actually, I couldn't tell whether they were squirt guns or regular toy guns.) Rice was the 12-year-old shot and killed by police while playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park in 2014. The officer who shot him was not charged.
Crawford was there with a woman and two very young girls who appeared to be his daughters. "I find it hard to live my life ... knowing Tamir Rice was shot down where she will be playing," Crawford, who is black, shouted to anyone who would listen, patting one of the girls on the head. "They murdered Tamir Rice in this city!"
A group of police officers walked past, and a white officer hailed Crawford: "Hey, boss." They bumped fists as cameramen circled one of those made-for-media moments when a black American and a white cop come together for something a visual metaphor for the idea that we can bridge our differences, even though the reality tends to be much, much harder.
The fist bump was a little awkward. Crawford began crying and bent over after the officers passed, overcome by emotion.
The officers left the play guns alone. After Crawford collected himself, he wandered down the street in the other direction.
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A rock n roll moment in Cleveland
Activist Jacqui Zepeda of Los Angeles is arrested outside Clevelands Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Collin Rees) (Test)
DAY 2, 10:25 A.M.: I've never been around so many police in my life.
In downtown Cleveland, there are thousands of them, roving in specially sworn patrols on seemingly every block. They might be from California, Texas or Georgia, and the units all have different uniforms black, blue, tan. It's got a quasi-multicultural flair, kind of like a gathering of Olympic delegations where the pole vaulters from Ukraine have guns and the power to arrest you.
Which is what makes Tuesday morning's first protest so interesting.
Despite the city's enormous police and surveillance presence, about 7:15 a.m., two women began shimmying up the two flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which has been hosting Republican National Convention guests. The two had managed to unhook and slip past the least rock n roll thing imaginable: metal barricades around the hall, draped with signs that say "MUSIC DEFIES BARRIERS."
"Slightly ironic in its own right," said activist Collin Rees, who was assisting with the protest from the ground and whose favorite group is the Temptations.
It was immigration and anti-fracking activists who were defying the barriers this time. As police arrived about 15 minutes later and helplessly barked for the two women to stop what they were doing, according to Rees, the activists hung a 25-by-25-foot banner that said, "DON'T TRUMP OUR COMMUNITIES: Ban fracking, tear down the wall, stop climate injustice."
The flag hung slightly above the American, Ohio and Cleveland flags, which had been lowered to half-staff for the recent killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.
The two women, Jacqui Zepeda of Los Angeles and Sharon Spencer of Akron, Ohio, were arrested as soon as they climbed down, Rees said. A third activist helping from the ground, Liz Butler of Mount Rainier, Md., was also arrested, he said.
"They were doing their job; we were doing our job," Rees said of the officers, adding that the activists were not part of a formal group. "We were sending out the message we set out to send."
By the time I got to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the protest had ended, the women were arrested, the banner was already gone gone, like dust in the wind. Because all we are is dust in the wind.
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The demilitarized zone between left and right
DAY 1, 5:35 P.M.: This afternoon, the eastern and western ends of downtown Cleveland could have been mistaken for two halves of an American brain no longer communicating with each other.
There was the right-wing rally on the waterfront to the west, where InfoWars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones sort of a human volcano who is always erupting led the crowd in a near-screaming of "HILLARY FOR PRISON! HILLARY FOR PRISON! HILLARY FOR PRISON!"
It was a great show for the conservative-minded crowd gathered on the banks of the Cuyahoga. "Don't tread on me" Gadsden banners flapped in the wind. Vendors outside the event sold Trump swag, including family-unfriendly buttons that said things like "KFC Hillary Special: 2 Fat Thighs, 2 Small Breasts... Left Wing."
Elsewhere at the rally, Mike "H.P." Roberts, 29, of New York proudly wore a button that said "Hillary 4 Prison" (complete with the presumptive nominee in an orange prison jumpsuit). Yes, he's for Trump, and, full disclosure, yes, he's black.
"Not all of us think like a herd of sheep," Roberts said. "There's a lot of black people like us, but they're intimidated, they're scared."
Roberts stopped as he heard a man speaking in the distance. "That's Alex," Roberts said Alex Jones. "I know that voice."
At the worldview to the east, there was the antipoverty rally filled with anarchists, communists, assorted other lefty types and one Sikh cartoonist dressed in a Captain America costume holding a sign that said "LOVE TRUMPS HATE." (His name is Vishajvit Singh.) Muscle-bound men whose haircuts and concealable body armor screamed plainclothes police or paid security strolled through what was clearly not their kind of crowd, trying to keep a low profile. Nor was this a Clinton kind of crowd.
Alex Chabbott, a rangy 35-year-old from Santa Barbara, laid out neat rows of photocopied pamphlets with titles including "Guide to Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Destruction," "Autonomous Resistance to Slavery and Colonization," and an antifascist tract called "Claim No Easy Victories: A History and Analysis of Anti-Racist Action."
"The real power comes from people grass-roots action," Chabbott said, ticking off historical human-rights victories, like the end of slavery in the United States. Chabbott had been in Michigan for an environmental conference and decided he had to drop by the RNC, to "talk to people, hang out get rid of all of these zines, so I don't have to take them home."
After the protest, music group Prophets of Rage played a short set on the abandoned lot where everyone had gathered and the crowd marched dozens of blocks toward downtown holding signs like "NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR."
At the front of the group, way ahead of the crowd, marched Mildred Lee, 82, dressed in a green and gold embroidered dress, an elegant red hat, and long, white gloves. She called it the outfit of an African Queen.
"I'm walking faster than the people," Lee beamed, as a human fence of bicycle police rolled past her and kept the crowd in the road from spilling onto the sidewalks. "I walk every day, so I'm used to it."
Lee was also probably an anomaly: She was a pro-Clinton Democrat and said she thinks it's time for a woman to be president. Asked if she was worried that the protest might turn violent, she shrugged. "When God gets ready for me, I'm ready."
But after the crowd had walked about two miles in the sun, nearing convention headquarters, its energy dissipated. Participants followed the routes blocked out by police without resisting. And by the time they spilled into a small park less than half a mile from Quicken Loans Arena, they were clearly done.
They flopped onto the cool grass, shaded by high-rises. And the small army of police that formed around them was left with nothing to do.
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Dysfunctional veteran leave me alone
I dont want terrorism to come to nobody, says Mike Welch, whose brother was killed in a Beirut bombing. It destroyed my mom. It destroyed our family. For what? (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
DAY 1, 12:25 P.M.: At a pro-Trump rally on the Cuyahoga River waterfront, I saw a man in a U.S. Marines vest with a patch that said, "DYSFUNCTIONAL VETERAN LEAVE ME ALONE."
Of course I had to talk to him.
"Los Angeles Times!" Mike Welch barked, immediately fearing a liberal reporter who would twist his words. He took out his phone to take a picture of my ID badge. I promised I would record what he had to say and give him a fair shot, so Welch, still feisty, said he came from Michigan to prevent leftist protesters from shutting down the Republican National Convention.
"Bill Ayers I would like to meet. I come to these to find him," Welch, said, referring to the man who co-founded the Weather Underground during the leftist domestic bombing campaigns of the 1970s. "And when I do you can have that I'm going to kick his ass."
Welch wanted tougher immigration laws, a tougher fight on terrorism. He was sickened by the recent terror in France, sickened by the recent nuclear deal with Iran. Terrorism, in fact, was deeply personal to him. That's why he was for Trump.
"They killed my brother. They killed him," Welch said, projecting disbelief. "Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth Welch. Defense intelligence. The last bombing in Beirut." A suicide car bomber attacked the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon on Sept. 20, 1984, and two Americans were among the dead. "Michael Ray Wagner, of the Navy, and my brother. Nobody gives a damn today because they're too busy running around."
Welch had a photo of his brother and his brother's name and rank sewn onto the front of his vest. On the back of Welch's vest were the names and photos of other fallen service members: Staff Sgt. Gregory McCoy. Sgt. Chad J. Vollmer. Spc. Holly McGeogh. Pfc. Casey Mason.
"I don't want terrorism to come to nobody. It destroyed my mom. It destroyed our family. For what?" For international politics, Welch said.
"Now we go to Arlington to see him, see a name on the wall. George Bush Sr. asked if we were proud of him. You know what? I was proud of him while he was alive. I don't need him blown apart to see his name on the wall, we didn't need that from him. So when families are affected, you see the bitterness that comes back. You think I am, my mother was five times worse. So I'm here for him, and people like him that served."
Welch sounded sad now. "Sorry about the cuss words."
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Hot, sweaty and paranoid in Cleveland
Police officers stand guard as anti-Trump protesters take to the streets on the eve of the Republican National Convention. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
DAY 1, 10:40 A.M.: Cleveland is already hot, sweaty and paranoid, as if a slice of the Rust Belt had been colonized by Washington, D.C., and turned into an outdoor airport security checkpoint.
Men in suits and women in dresses (I suspect this is not how most Clevelanders normally dress) drift past black metal fencing that surrounds the arena, the mayor's office, the city's convention center.
Police officers roam alleyways between the buildings downtown, guarding vulnerabilities unknown to the public. Local activists have been spooked by FBI agents knocking on their doors, looking for information or threats to this week's proceedings.
Through all this, I watch two men rolling a cart of transparent tubs filled with thousands of tortilla chips down the sidewalk, headed to parts unknown.
For the last week, almost everyone who finds out I'm going to be covering the protests outside the Republican National Convention has asked me a version of the same question: How bad do you think it will be? Will there be riots? Will protesters get in fights with Trump supporters? Will a lot of people bring guns (which is allowed under Ohio law)?
My answer each time has been: I really don't know. But like many other journalists, I packed body armor just in case, and would have brought a gas mask if the Cleveland City Council hadn't banned them. Sunday a man was arrested when officials said he tried to rip away the gas mask strapped to a state trooper's side. They think he may have been mentally ill.
"Can you hit ctrl+alt+delete for me?" a security agent asks as I try to enter the fenced-in security zone, where journalists are prompted to open their laptops and power them on. A woman in front of me can't get hers to turn on. Dead battery. She's sent away to plug it in. The security agent sees my password screen, swipes his finger randomly across the keyboard to enter a gibberish password and hits Enter. Incorrect password, but the right answer. It's not a bomb.
I regret to report that my mother isn't pleased that I'm here.
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Ready for Day 4? Find our coverage here As Day 4 of the Republican National Convention begins, were posting news and analysis over here. Below youll find our news feed from the first three days of events in Cleveland. Read More Facebook
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Mike Pence stuck to the script on an off-script night By Melanie Mason Indiana Gov. Mike Pence hit all the standard notes for a high-profile political address Wednesday night: introducing himself to unfamiliar voters, extolling his running mate and making an explicit appeal to independent and Democratic voters. That typical approach has been in short supply at the GOP nominating confab in Cleveland, with its outsized focus on base-pleasing issues like Benghazi and speakers whose anti-Hillary Clinton rhetoric is matched only by the audiences preferred chant of Lock her up! Adding to the unreality was Sen. Ted Cruzs non-endorsement of Donald Trump just an hour before Pence took the stage, prompting a chaotic backlash from attendees. But Pence appeared unfazed by the clamor, smoothly delivering a recitation of Trumps attributes and promising a capable team to win the White House in November. Facebook
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California delegate mad at Ted Cruz By Michael Finnegan Donald Trump supporter Michael Der Manouel, a California delegate from Fresno, is not happy with Sen. Ted Cruz. Everybody believed he was building to a point in his speech where he would endorse Donald Trump, and he couldnt bring himself to do it, and the convention expressed its displeasure, Der Manouel told The Times. He couldnt bring himself to do what Reagan did in 76, and its very disappointing, he said. Were going to move forward without all of these guys who reneged on their endorsement pledge. Were going to move forward without them. Facebook
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A dark star named Ted Cruz blots out the sun for Mike Pence By Robin Abcarian It wasnt supposed to be like this. The third night of the convention was supposed to belong to Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trumps running mate. No one anticipated that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, giving a surprisingly restrained speech, would nevertheless fail to endorse Trump, infuriating convention delegates. To those listening, please, dont stay home in November, said Cruz, in his typically languid debaters cadence. If you love our country, and love your children as much as I know you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience; vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution. Thats when the booing began, the Twitter volume went to 11 and, it seemed, no one could speak of anything else. Lost in the noise: Pences perfectly serviceable speech. Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence blows a kiss to his wife as he speaks during the third day of the Republican convention. (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press) Facebook
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Retired astronaut Eileen Collins skips over line endorsing Trump in prime-time speech By Christine Mai-Duc In her Wednesday night convention speech, retired astronaut Eileen Collins lamented the fact that the last time the U.S. launched astronauts on American soil was more than five years ago, imploring leaders to do better than that. She called for leadership that will make Americas space program first again, but skipped a line in her prepared remarks that would have endorsed newly-minted Republican nominee Donald Trump. She said she wanted to keep not political. She also passed up an opportunity to slam Obama for space program cuts. It was weird. Laura Keeney (@LauraKeeney) July 21, 2016 Earlier this week, Collins told Mashable that her speech was not meant to be political. This is a chance I could not pass up: We can raise awareness of how the U.S. human space program has slowed over the years, Collins said in a statement to the website. Facebook
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FBI may have resumed controversial checkups on Cleveland-area activists, legal group says By James Queally Federal Bureau of Investigation agents may have knocked on the doors of several Cleveland-area activists Wednesday morning, resuming a controversial checkup practice that put the local civil rights community on edge in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, a legal advocacy group said. In a statement issued Wednesday night, the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild alleged the FBI conducted a series of raids and may have entered a home without a warrant, continuing a practice that disturbed local demonstrators earlier this summer. Its been a consistent theme throughout all of these visits that law enforcement are looking for links and relationships among activists or people known to be activists around the Cleveland area and around the state of Ohio and also in some other locations outside of the state, said Jacqueline Greene, co-coordinator of the guild. Ultimately theyre on an information-fishing expedition. The purpose of these visits is to intimidate and chill First Amendment expression. National activists with Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero have also said they received unnerving visits from the FBI in the weeks leading up to the nominating conventions, according to the Washington Post. Greene said her office had also reviewed video that appeared to show FBI agents and officers entering a home without consent. Asked about the incident Wednesday night, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said he was not sure if his officers were involved in any door knocks, as some are on loan to the local FBI office. He said he generally supports the tactic. Were not accusing them of anything, Williams said. Were going around and talking to them. The FBI said earlier this year that the visits were simply about ensuring safety during the convention, but local organizers have criticized the tactic as intimidation. FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said the FBI and police officers from Elyria, a Cleveland suburb, conducted interviews this week in response to investigative leads. The occupants were interviewed outside the residence and no arrests were made, Anderson said in an e-mail to The Times. Law enforcement will continue to respond to investigative leads to ensure the security of the RNC. 9:10 p.m. Updated with a response from the FBI in Cleveland. Facebook
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Gingrich immediately tries to mend the Cruz rift at Republican convention By Seema Mehta Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sought Wednesday night to get the Republican National Convention back on track after disharmony erupted in full, prime-time view when delegates booed Sen. Ted Cruz for declining to endorse nominee Donald Trump. Veering from his prepared remarks, Gingrich told the thousands of delegates and guests that they had misunderstood Cruz when he urged Americans to vote your conscience. Gingrich said that Cruz had actually urged voters to abide by their conscience and vote any candidate who will uphold the Constitution. In the presidential contest, Trump is the only candidate who would do so, Gingrich said. So to paraphrase Ted Cruz, if you want to protect the Constitution of the United States the only possible candidate this fall is the Trump-Pence Republican ticket, he said. Gingrich, whom Trump passed over as his running mate, also hailed Trump for being generous in allowing his GOP primary rivals to speak without requiring an endorsement. Facebook
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Watch Marco Rubios message to Republican delegates Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) speaks in a video address played at the Republican National Convention. Facebook
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Ted Cruz to delegates: Vote your conscience By Seema Mehta Please, dont stay home in November, Ted Cruz said to convention-goers. If you love our country and if you love your children as much as I know you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution. Delegates chanted at him to endorse Donald Trump, and the phrase vote your conscience appeared to infuriate the crowd. Anti-Trump forces had unsuccessfully sought to make rules changes that would have unbound delegates and allowed them to vote their conscience. The lack of endorsement by Cruz, who mentioned Trumps name only once, was not surprising. Read More Facebook
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Gov. Scott Walker -- a Trump critic, then backer, then skeptic -- got the party memo on GOP unity By Lisa Mascaro @ScottWalker hanging in the Digital Loft at the @GOPconvention. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/JUqjfqeTYO GOP Convention (@GOPconvention) July 21, 2016 When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker addressed the Republican convention Wednesday, it was as if a memo had gone out from party headquarters that the time had come to step up the effort to unify the party behind Donald Trump. The first two nights of the convention had resulted in start-and-stop progress. Lots of pro-Trump voices. Few new converts. Convention crowds that began to thin toward the end of the evening. Walker, in some ways, was a prime messenger, thanks to his own discomfort over Trump. If Walker -- a onetime Trump rival, who endorsed Trump only to walk it back later -- could vote for the ticket, so could so many other Republicans who preferred someone else. The former presidential hopeful argued his case the way so many Republicans are doing it not so much a vote for Trump as a vote for the alternative to Democrat Hillary Clinton. He made a point of not just naming Trump but also including the vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, who many believe will help persuade conservatives who are cool to Trump to fall in line with the GOP ticket. Hillary Clinton is the ultimate liberal Washington insider. If she were any more on the inside, shed be in prison, Walker said. America deserves better than Hillary Clinton, he said. That is why we need to support Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be the next president and vice president. Let me be clear: A vote for anyone other than Donald Trump in November is a vote for Hillary Clinton, he said. The speech was full of Walkers sensible Midwestern passion, and it roused the crowd. After House Speaker Paul D. Ryans address the night before, it was among the few speeches that gave prime time the feel of a traditional convention otherwise filled with B-list actors and Trumps business allies. Walker may have lost his chance to be the one onstage as the GOP nominee. But on Wednesday, he did his part to salvage the Republican Party in the age of Trump. Watch the full speech: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speaks at the Republican National Convention. Facebook
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Mike Pence can bring it in a speech when he needs to By Javier Panzar Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is giving the biggest speech of his life tonight. If you are looking for a preview of what the man can do to a crowd it helps to look at the speech he gave to the Family Research Council Values Voter Summit in September 2010. Pence, then a congressman, was so well received he won the straw poll there, beating out former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Speaking shortly before Republicans won back a majority in Congress, Pence jabbed at then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and promised the crowd not to compromise with Democrats. I am here to say House Republicans are back in the fight and they are back in the fight for conservative values on Capitol Hill, he told a rapturous crowd. The crowd ate up the Republican red meat Pence offered throughout about the nation being trapped in bondage to big government. But Pence also managed to maintained a light touch. He put the crowd in stitches, joking that while MSNBC said Republicans would win just a couple of seats in the House, Fox News said Republicans will win all 435 seats in the Congress. Pence used one of his common lines -- I am a conservative but I am not in a bad mood about it. -- that he has repeated on television since Trump selected him as his running mate. Pence also flashed his socially conservative bonafides that made him attractive to a Trump campaign looking to broaden its appeal to the right wing. Dont ask, dont tell must remain the policy of the United States Armed Forces, he said. Watch: Facebook
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Watch: Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham tells those with bruised egos its time to support Trump It was a speech to fire people up, and included marching orders. We should all, even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos, and we love you, we love you, but you must honor your pledge to support Donald Trump now, Laura Ingraham told delegates at the convention. Watch the full speech: Laura Ingraham, conservative commentator, speaks at the Republican National Convention. Facebook
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The hot and cold relationship between Scott Walker and Donald Trump By Kurtis Lee His support of Donald Trump has fluctuated in recent months. Ahead of his states April primary, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who at the time was seen as the strongest candidate to derail Trumps quest to become the Republican nominee. Trumps response? He said that countries like Mexico and China had taken jobs away from Wisconsin and that immigrants in the country illegally were burdening the states taxpayers. Trump blamed it on a lack of leadership by Walker, whose own presidential bid last year faltered after only a few months. I wouldnt do this, except that he endorsed this guy Cruz, and Cruz would be a terrible president, Trump told Wisconsin Republicans at the time. But the effort to assail Walker, who is popular among Republicans in his state after staving off a 2012 recall spearheaded by Democrats, was not a formula for victory. Trump ended up losing to Cruz in the primary by 13 percentage points. As Trump has mended some relationships with establishment figures, the one with Walker remains complicated. Though the governor plans to make clear in his speech Wednesday night his support for Trump over Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, hes wavered in his applause of the billionaire businessman. During an interview with a local Wisconsin television station last month, Walker, who had initially said he would support the GOP nominee, backtracked. Alex and I with our great friend Mike Pence! #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/VS5r5rFuF1 Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) July 20, 2016 Its just sad in America that we have such poor choices right now, Walker said, a direct jab at Trump and Clinton. Walkers comments came on the heels of Trumps inflammatory statements about a Latino judge overseeing a fraud lawsuit against the now-defunct Trump University. Yet in recent weeks, Walker has not been as vocal in his criticisms of Trump. In fact, after Trump announced the selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence last week as his running mate, Walker offered plaudits. The Mike Pence decision this week to me is a sign that this is somebody who is actually thinking about how to govern, Walker said of Trump in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. For Walker, who some political observers believe is eyeing another presidential run in 2020, it was a step toward unity. Facebook
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17 arrested at flag-burning protest outside RNC; observers dispute police account By James Queally (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) Cleveland police arrested 17 people on suspicion of assaulting officers and failure to disperse after a U.S. flag was set on fire outside the Republican National Convention on Wednesday afternoon, but legal observers are disputing the police narrative of the incident. Police Chief Calvin Williams said two people have been booked on charges of felony assault after they pushed and punched police who were trying to extinguish the fire outside the entrance to the Quicken Loans Arena on Wednesday. Fifteen other protesters face various misdemeanor charges, including failure to disperse, he said. Police had no plans to stop Revolutionary Communist Party members from burning the flag, which is a legal but controversial form of protest, and Williams said officers only moved in because several protesters clothes caught on fire. But Jocelyn Rosnick, co-coordinator of the Ohio Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, said 10 legal observers on the scene did not see any of the protesters clothes aflame and contended that no dispersal order was given. She also noted that officers are required to give multiple dispersal orders before making arrests. Flag burning as a means of speech is protected. It has been argued in a number of court cases all the way up to the Supreme Court, Rosnick said. Officers moved in seconds after the flag caught fire. One could be heard yelling, Youre on fire, stupid at a protester as he sprayed a fire extinguisher. A Times reporter who was standing feet away from officers when the flag was set on fire did not hear a dispersal order, however. All 17 people arrested were adults involved in the protest. Williams said police were only at the scene to prevent clashes between members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which organized the flag-burning protest, and counter groups who had come to stop them, including Bikers 4 Trump. There were people on the corner that were basically saying, Why are you guys doing this? and the whole area got kind of amped up, the chief said. A city police officer and an Ohio state trooper were treated for minor injuries at the scene. None of the protesters whose clothes police said caught fire required medical treatment for burns, Williams said. Facebook
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Potential Trump Cabinet pick Harold Hamm makes convention debut By Javier Panzar Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, says climate change is not a problem, its Islamic terrorism, in his speech to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 20. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) On Wednesday Reuters reported that Donald Trump will consider Harold Hamm, chief executive officer of oil and gas giant Continental Resources, as Energy secretary should he become president. In 2012 Hamm chaired Republican nominee Mitt Romneys Energy Policy Advisory Group, attacked President Obamas policies on oil and gave almost $1 million to a super PAC supporting Romney, according to Politico. Hamm isnt new to politics. Reuters reported that in 2009 Hamm formed a lobbying group to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, fearing it would flood his companys territory with Canadian oil. But Hamm dropped his opposition after the pipelines operator agreed to add an extension that would pick up his companys oil and take it to refineries, according to the report. Hamm backed Trump in April. He is someone who is not beholden to special interests and has the fortitude to make tough decisions, he said at the time. With a slew of onerous regulations now threatening to cripple American business, the next president of the United States must have the courage, determination and intelligence to disrupt politics as usual. Facebook
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Band at RNC goes patriotic, then plays antiwar song By Colleen Shalby Country singer Chris Janson joined G.E. Smiths house band on stage tonight at the Republican National Convention. Janson was in the middle of playing his band LoCashs song Love this Life when he stopped to address the delegates dancing on the floor. Let me hear you if youre proud to be from the U.S.A.! Then he broke from his band to play the chorus from Born in the U.S.A. Chants of U-S-A followed. Bruce Springsteens 1984 hit is often deemed a patriotic song, despite its antiwar origins. The song is a criticism of the Vietnam War and the U.S. government, and if you know it, youll recognize the lyrics that surround the catchy chorus: I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
Theyre still there, hes all gone Heres the playlist (so far) from the convention. Facebook
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Eileen Collins, the first female U.S. space shuttle commander, urges investments in space exploration at RNC By Christine Mai-Duc In her speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention, astronaut Eileen Collins urged investments to make Americas space program first again. Collins herself has seen a few firsts in her career. She was the first female pilot of an American space shuttle, and in 1999 became the first woman commander of a U.S. shuttle mission. Before becoming an astronaut, Collins was a career military pilot and trained at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. She also worked as an instructor pilot at Travis Air Force Base in California from 1983 to 1985. She was picked for the astronaut program after attending pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base. Shes also terrified of roller coasters. Facebook
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Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi was questioned over Trump donation By Javier Panzar Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, who will speak at the Republican National Convention Wednesday, has drawn scrutiny for soliciting a political campaign contribution from Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump when her office was considering joining an investigation into Trump University. The Associated Press reported last month that a Trump family foundation gave a $25,000 donation to a political group supporting Bondis reelection after she solicited the contribution. The donation alone appeared to be a violation of rules governing political activities by charities. The timing of the contribution also raised questions: The check arrived four days after Bondi said her office was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University. Her office declined to join the suit against Trump after the check came in, citing insufficient grounds to proceed. The news made waves because Trump has been open about what he expects when he makes political contributions. I give to everybody, he said in an debate last August. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And thats a broken system. Bondi was highlighted in a 2014 New York Times investigation that uncovered lobbyist spending on meals, trips and other contributions for several state attorneys general. Facebook
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The architecture of the convention stage By Christopher Hawthorne In Cleveland, the stagecraft is sleek, anodyne and less traditional. There are no Obama-style Greek columns for Donald Trump. Nor has he revived the domestic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright the way Mitt Romney did during the 2012 GOP convention in Tampa, Fla. Instead the set is a shotgun marriage of Star Trek and Macbook modern, with perhaps a touch in the rounded stairs, lighted from below of Art Deco. A dark oval stage is flanked by a pair of canted silver walls, between which hang several giant video boards. The goal seems to be a series of smooth surfaces to which none of the more direct ad hominem verbal attacks or accusations of plagiarism might stick a slate that can be wiped clean whenever a change in tone or direction is wanted. Call it Teflon minimalism. For those of us watching on phones, tablets and television screens, this gap between the nostalgic and often aggressive rhetoric of the speeches and the sleek, vague futurism of the set design has been among the conventions most striking elements. Read More Facebook
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Trump business associate Phil Ruffin takes the stage next By Javier Panzar At the Republican National Convention, many of the speakers have something in common: They arent politicians. Instead, they are friends or business associates of nominee Donald Trump. Take Wednesday night speaker Phil Ruffin. The billionaire owns the Treasure Island Resort & Casino in Las Vegas and worked with Trump to develop the Trump International Hotel. Ruffin has developed properties across the U.S., including in California. He was on hand when Trump was campaigning in Las Vegas this February. Trump's Las Vegas supporters gathering for rally at the Treasure Island casino of Trump biz partner Phil Ruffin pic.twitter.com/Q5VWpxjbfW Michael Finnegan (@finneganLAT) June 18, 2016 He has also stumped for Trump in his native Kansas. Hes a brilliant businessman, one of the best Ive ever seen, Ruffin told members of the Wichita Pachyderm Club in downtown Wichita, according to the Wichita Eagle. If he ever offers you a partnership, take the deal. Right now hes offering a partnership for the country: Trump and the country. He would do a great job. Hed make a great president. Facebook
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Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham chides John Kasich ahead of prime-time speaking slot By Christine Mai-Duc Conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham is expected to address the need to restore respect across all levels of society in a night themed Make America First Again. Ingraham, who said she would not choose between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump during the primaries, has taken to rallying conservatives behind Trump in recent days. On Twitter, shes criticized Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who dropped out of the race in May, for not attending the convention in his home state. How incredibly short-sighted & self-absorbed for John Kasich not to attend the RNC. What did he accomplish by skipping? Zippo. Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 19, 2016 Hey @JohnKasich, you can have my speaking slot tonight. Endorse Trump. Put America first. No one agrees on all issues. We need you. Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 20, 2016 It won't help Cruz or GOP if the story coming out after his speech tonight is that he didn't endorse Trump. He's smarter than that. Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 20, 2016 Ingraham told the New York Times in May that the anti-Trump effort within the Republican Party was a little juvenile. There are a lot of purists out there who, if they dont get everything checked off on their little bucket list, then they say take your pail and go home, she told the newspaper. Come to the real world. How original. I address this level of disrespect in my speech tonight. Tune in--8:10pET! https://t.co/dZgtmV5CsL Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 20, 2016 On Twitter, Ingraham cited a flag-burning protest and subsequent arrests outside the convention hall Wednesday, saying shed address this level of disrespect in her prime-time remarks. Facebook
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Obama praises Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Tonight, Scott will bash him at the Republican convention. By Noah Bierman The White House released a long statement Wednesday afternoon praising Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, for responding to a suspected case of Zika. The statement recounted a phone call between the two men earlier in the day in which Obama touted an additional $5.6 million being sent to Florida from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The president recognized Floridas strong record of responding aggressively to local outbreaks of mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, and offered federal support and technical assistance. It was a nice bipartisan moment, expressing how state and federal officials can make government work across party lines. Right? Well, heres an excerpt of the speech Scott plans to deliver at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night. Today, America is in terrible, world-record-high debt. Our economy is not growing. Our jobs are going overseas. We have allowed our military to decay, and we project weakness on the international stage. Washington grows while the rest of America struggles. The Democrats have not led us to a crossroads; they have led us to a cliff. Facebook
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California delegation afflicted by norovirus: Heres what it does By Melissa Healy At least a dozen GOP staffers from Californias delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are experiencing vomiting, cramps and diarrhea, and the dreaded norovirus is being blamed for their gastrointestinal misery. Erie County Health Department officials have been called to the scene of the delegations quarters at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio, about 60 miles from the convention site, and have collected fecal samples to confirm the diagnosis. Norovirus is the most common cause of diarrheal episodes globally and one of the leading causes of food-borne disease outbreaks in the United States. Treated with rest and fluids, its symptoms of severe gastroenteritis generally wane after two or three days. But it claims the lives of 212,000 annually worldwide, mostly children and the elderly living in low- and middle-income countries. Read More Facebook
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Man who burned flag outside Republican convention has done it before, group claims By James Queally Police officers arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party as they try to burn a flag. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/GGimuzX6he Marcus Yam (@yamphoto) July 20, 2016 The man who set fire to an American flag outside the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, touching off a struggle between police and protesters, did the same thing outside the convention in 1984, according to a statement issued by the group that organized the protest. The Revolutionary Communist Party has claimed Gregory Lee Johnson was the man who lit the flag on fire about 4 p.m. outside Quicken Loans Arena. Johnson was the plaintiff in a 1989 Supreme Court case that invalidated restrictions that criminalized burning flags in the U.S., the group said. Johnson also burned a flag outside the GOP convention in Dallas in 1984, according to the statement. Several people were arrested as police used fire extinguishers and pepper spray to stop the protest just seconds after the flag was scorched. The Revolutionary Communist Party had announced the protest earlier in the week, drawing the attention of a number of groups attempting to stop them. A dozen protesters emerged from a tightly packed crowd near Quicken Loans Arena, donning black T-shirts bearing the groups name and chanting America Was Never Great before setting fire to the flag. At least six people were seen being led away by police in zip-tie handcuffs. In its statement, the Revolutionary Communist Party said 14 people were arrested. On Wednesday evening, the Cleveland Police Department said 17 arrests were made. Two officers sustained minor injuries, police said. 17 arrests total:
Charges include Felonious Assault on Police Officer, failure to disperse and resisting arrest. Cleveland Police (@CLEpolice) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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The ghost of Richard Nixon is haunting the GOP convention By Mickey Edwards It has been a long time since Richard Milhous Nixon has found such love. Law and order, the mantra that elected Nixon president in 1968, has become a central focus of Donald Trumps convention. In the midst of Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, dueling but not incompatible perspectives, varying in emphasis but capable of being reconciled, comes the ghost of Nixon, in the form of Trump, rallying what he hopes are majorities to shout down and shut up the voices of grievance. Like Nixon, Trump is a modern-day incarnation of poor besotted Thomas Hobbes, railing against a world he thought a bleak and forlorn home to a multitude whose lives were nasty, brutish and short. Donald Trump, bless his soul, is standing firm against the darkness. His anger makes Trump grate again. Read More Facebook
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With his double-aerial arrival, Donald Trump reminds the media whos in control By Melanie Mason (AFP/Getty Images) Donald Trump, newly minted as the Republican presidential nominee, was about to land on the shores of Lake Erie in a helicopter and nobody knew where to look. Journalists, penned in on a field near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, pointed their cameras in all directions, making sure they had every possible angle. Unlike the raucous rallies filled with fans that have propelled his candidacy, Trumps arrival in Cleveland, advertised as closed to the public, was all about his media horde a relationship that has been rancorous, but undeniably mutually beneficial. The elaborately staged proceedings left no question as to who was calling the shots. Every time a helicopter passed, heads snapped skyward. But fears that Trump would somehow sneak past were unfounded. As his private jet swooped past, the blaring soundtrack suddenly switched from the Rolling Stones to the operatic swells of Puccinis Nessun Dorma. But where to look next? From the south, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trumps running mate, strolled in, flanked by family. Overhead, from the east, a Trump-branded helicopter circled and then reversed course. With each new sight of an aircraft, a Trump family member, the man himself the media gaggle dutifully pivoted to capture it. They shot photos and videos. They tweeted and Periscoped. They looked up and down, turned left and right the collective herky-jerky dance of covering the quintessential cable news candidate. Finally, Trump emerged from the chopper, greeted Pence and strode to a grassy field, family in tow. He spoke uncharacteristically briefly. No questions, no news made. But no matter. The double-aerial landing got wall-to-wall coverage on television, Trump reinforced his reputation for showmanship, and the news media got another chance to practice the choreography of covering Trump. Facebook
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The Trump kids, making their national political debut, soften their fathers sharp edges By Robin Abcarian From left, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump on the convention floor (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) The four eldest children of Donald J. Trump have become the unlikely stars of the show in Cleveland. Its not even really what they have said or will say; its simply who they are. Their father can be uncouth; they are refined. He can be a bully; they are unfailingly polite. He often rambles and digresses; they stick to their scripts. In this, they are following the recent tradition of other candidates children, including Mitt Romneys five sons, and Chelsea Clinton. In two presidential campaigns, 2008 and 2012, the Romney brothers job was to humanize a father who struck some as robotic and rehearsed. In 2008, Clinton was selling her mother as more capable and experienced than her upstart opponent, Barack Obama. Like her mom, Chelsea was a bit rigid on the trail, but she was poised. When college students asked her about Monica Lewinsky, she replied, I do not think that is any of your business. (Contrast those political offspring to a star of the 2008 presidential campaign, Megan McCain, then a free-spirited 23-year-old who posted photos of herself jumping on hotel beds as she blogged about life on the trail, complete with music playlists.) In an impressive national debut Tuesday night, 22-year-old Tiffany Trump, Donald Trumps daughter with second wife Marla Maples, shared a couple of meager anecdotes about her father. Read More Facebook
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Multiple arrests apparently made after demonstrators burn flag outside GOP convention By James Queally Outside #RNCinCLe a group of protesters tried to burn two flags; riot police moved in to arrest at least 8 people. pic.twitter.com/WRPf7UdluF Carolyn Cole (@Carolyn_Cole) July 20, 2016 Warning: Graphic images and language. A dozen people changed into T-shirts bearing the Revolutionary Communist Party name shortly after 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. The group set a flag on fire after chanting America Was Never Great, before Cleveland police officers moved in with a fire extinguisher. Youre on fire, stupid, one police officer yelled as he moved in on the group. To the east of the convention entrance, several protestors chanted, Whats the problem? The whole damn system. Several people were seen wrestling with police, and a few were led away in zip-tie handcuffs, with at least six moved to a police transport van. Jocelyn Rosnick, executive director of the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild told the Times up to 20 arrests may have been made, though the Cleveland Police Department has not confirmed the number. The protest was announced earlier in the week. Firefighters were on the scene and Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams reported that the entrance to the Republican National Convention had been shut down by police before it was later reopened. The police department reported at least two officers were assaulted. Two officers assaulted. Minor injuries. Cleveland Police (@CLEpolice) July 20, 2016 Things getting physical pic.twitter.com/tKz8HGuzIY James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Flag was set on fire. Cops used pepper spray to break it up. Melee erupted #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/K6MGSjKI7L James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Crowd members were split over the incident. Its freedom of speech. Its the purest form of free speech, said Martha Conrad, an attorney from Chicago who said she would offer to represent those arrested. Its disrespectful. People fought and died for that flag, countered Jeff Jagels, 15, of Dayton. The scene has been tense for at least an hour. Minutes before the protest, a religious group that had been spotted around Cleveland earlier in the week said it could burn a gay pride flag instead of the American flag. And a U.S. Marine carrying an American flag was swarmed by media and later escorted away by police after cameras circled him. Bikers 4 Trump got down here but after flag caught fire #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/vjZU9txqJD James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Riot gear is out but things have calmed. Arrestees still chanting against police #RNC2016 pic.twitter.com/PSWSQvR9sP James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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Dog owners get the chance to express a political preference Facebook
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There have been a grand total of three arrests at RNC protests so far By Matt Pearce A sign outside Cleveland Municipal Courtroom D says NO LO TERING. The I has fallen off, sadly. Is there anyone here scheduled for a protection order hearing? a court worker asked the young men and women waiting in the rather soviet hallway. Nope. This morning, a group of activists sat outside Courtroom D, not loitering, but awaiting judgment. Municipal court is maybe the closest thing protesters have to a stern church: hard benches, rules that cannot be broken and a rather stiff penalty for skipping attendance. Jails and municipal courts often form the crucial backstage to all the protests you see on Twitter and TV, the place where the system takes in arrested activists, parks them behind bars and then spits them out after a fine, or, more rarely, jail time. Read More Facebook
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Loyal supporters cheer Ted Cruz and boo as Donald Trumps plane flies overhead By Seema Mehta Now on the stage: Ted and Heidi Cruz. pic.twitter.com/HPx8NoBT8v Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) July 20, 2016 Hours before Ted Cruz was to address the Republican National Convention, the second-place finisher in the nomination contest gave no indication he would endorse GOP nominee Donald Trump. In an amazing campaign field of 17 talented, dynamic candidates, we beat 15 of those candidates. We just didnt beat 16, Cruz told hundreds of supporters gathered at a riverside restaurant on Wednesday. Just then, Trumps plane flew overhead as the nominee returned to Cleveland ahead of the conventions third night. The crowd booed and Cruz laughed. That was pretty well-orchestrated, he joked, before continuing. Let me say to the men and women here, I dont know what the future is going to hold. What I do know is everyone has an obligation to follow our consciences, to speak the truth, and the truth is unchanging, to defend liberty. Theres a lot of talk about unity, he said. The way to see unity is for us to unite behind shared principles. Cruz pointed to his campaigns accomplishments in the 2016 campaign: winning nearly 8 million votes, 12 states and nearly 600 delegates; raising 1.8 million donations; and amassing 326,000 volunteers. All of which could lay the groundwork for a future presidential campaign, which was clearly the hope of many of the supporters. As Cruz was talking, a man yelled, Gods not done with you yet! and the crowd chanted 2020! 2020! 2020! Facebook
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Trump flies back into Cleveland for a campaign rally (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) Donald Trump ultimately landed at his Cleveland rally on a similarly styled Trump helicopter. He was greeted by vice presidential pick Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Pences wife and his own adult children. Pence will speak at the convention tonight, and Trump is scheduled to join him on stage. Facebook
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Paul Ryan manages to endorse Trump without praising him in the slightest By Barton Swaim Paul Ryans speech to the Republican National Convention was far and away the best thus far. That must be because Ryan had an actual purpose a purpose, I mean, other than to spout a few platitudes in the hope that no one would remember you had once praised Donald Trump on television. (That was manifestly the case with Sens. Tom Cotton and Roger Wicker, among others, on the conventions first night.) Ryans purpose was to recommend Trumps candidacy without in any way praising the candidate, or, in other words, to endorse Trump in the abstract without praising the man indeed, almost without mentioning him at all. Read More Facebook
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California GOP is optimistic norovirus outbreak among staff at convention is contained By Seema Mehta California GOP officials said Wednesday they were optimistic a highly contagious virus that led to the quarantine of at least a dozen staff members was contained. Weve had no new outbreaks for the last 24 hours, which makes me feel like all of our efforts to fight it have worked, executive director Cynthia Bryant told the delegation at its breakfast meeting. So knock on wood and say a prayer. The staff members had come down with what was confirmed to be norovirus, which causes stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, fever and diarrhea. They could not leave their hotel rooms until they had been symptom-free for 24 hours. The affliction is generally short-lived but can be dangerous and even fatal, especially for the elderly and the young. Erie County health officials have been involved in testing for and monitoring the outbreak. The 550-member delegation was warned of the outbreak by the state GOP early Tuesday and advised to avoid shaking hands with others, to wash hands frequently, to avoid sharing food and to not use the delegation buses if they had any symptoms. No delegates, alternates or guests had reported any signs of the virus, Bryant said. Facebook
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Ann Coulter warns California Republicans the nation could turn into California By Seema Mehta Conservative author and TV personality Ann Coulter warned California Republicans on Wednesday that the nation could become like California if Donald Trump is not elected president in the fall. Trumps slogan is make America great again. Hillarys slogan is make America California without the nice beaches, without the good stuff, Ann Coulter told the states delegates at a breakfast meeting. Youre always ahead of the curve, Coulter said. You sent us two of our greatest presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And now a Republican cant get elected statewide in California. That is because of immigration. This is why Trumps campaign is absolutely crucial. Coulter, who was applauded by the Californians, contended the influx of immigrants over the past four decades had given Democrats an edge, and that the Republican establishment betrayed its base of supporters on immigration and trade issues. We all know there are certain flaws with our candidate, she said, laughing. Its not like we looked around the country and said, I know who we need to run. Lets get a reality TV star who has never held elected office. No. Hes the only one who will speak for Americans. . @AnnCoulter says she hasn't watched a minute of #RNCinCLE , is only here 'about town' pic.twitter.com/AwXUtEZ77p David Siders (@davidsiders) July 20, 2016 Earlier, Omarosa Manigault, Trumps newly named director of African American outreach, told the crowd that Trump had changed her life by casting her in the first season of The Apprentice. Donald Trump really in that first season taught America that we can work hard, that we can accomplish whatever we put our minds to, and most importantly, sometimes folks arent going to like you, she said. Facebook
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Speechwriter takes fall for Melania Trumps plagiarism, says her offer to quit was refused By Mark Z. Barabak Social media lit up Monday night as some on Twitter pointed out that Melania Trumps prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention sounded strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech. The in-house staff writer did it. After more than two days of evasion, denials and contradictory explanations, the Trump campaign released a statement Wednesday to whom it may concern ascribing the plagiarized passages in Melanie Trumps convention speech to a scribe working for his corporate operation. In working with Melania Trump on her recent first lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people, said Meredith McIver, who described herself as a longtime and admirer of the Trump family. A person she always liked is Michelle Obama. By McIvers account, Melania Trump read her some passages from Obamas speech at the 2008 Democratic convention and they inadvertently made their way into the final draft that she delivered Monday at the GOPs gathering in Cleveland. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as Mrs. Obama, McIver said. No harm was meant. She said she offered her resignation to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, as well as his family, but it was rejected. Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow these experiences. McIvers account was one of several explanations offered by the Trump campaign and its representatives, including denial that any plagiarism had taken place. Before the controversy erupted, Melania told NBC she had written virtually the entire speech by herself. Far from laying the matter to rest, the statement reignited the issue, which overshadowed the convention for a second straight day and sparked a new round of finger-pointing at Trumps barebones political operation and its repeated stumbles. NEW: Melania staffer falls on sword, says campaign rejected her resignation pic.twitter.com/6ZgfX2cEXQ Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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Government should favor the hard-working middle, not protected minorities, Donald Trump Jr. says By David Lauter The government needs to do more for the hardworking men and women who built the great nation we live in, not members of minority groups who have status as a protected class, Donald Trump Jr. said Wednesday. The Republican presidential nominees eldest son, whose speech at the GOP convention Tuesday drew praise, also criticized his fathers detractors within the party. Some delegates who opposed Trump during Tuesdays roll call look like idiots, Trump Jr. said. I dont think anyone would ever accuse us of being appeasers of the opposition, Trump said of his family. Still, he agreed that his fathers decision to pick Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate was, to some extent, an effort to placate restive conservatives within the party. Describing a vice presidential selection process in which he and his siblings Eric and Ivanka served as chief advisors to his father, Trump said that they had chosen Pence over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie mostly because it made sense to have someone to counterbalance my father. We dont need two Donald Trumps up there, he said, referring to the outsize personalities that his father, Gingrich and Christie share. Speaking to a large crowd at a breakfast sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, the younger Trump said he has thought about following his fathers path into politics, although not until his five children are older. Id love to be able to do it, he said. He described himself, jokingly, as a Fifth Avenue redneck, referring to his love of guns and the outdoors, and he made clear that he shares some of the views and blunt expressions that have distanced his father from minority voters. Responding to a question about the rise of identity politics on the political left, Trump said that the hardworking men and women who built the great nation we live in, theyre the only people who arent protected anymore; theyre the middle class. Currently, he said, the government benefits people who can show theyre one-sixty-fourth of some protected class. That has to stop, he said, adding that members of the middle class are the people we actually have to start catering to. Those are the people that are forgotten. We have to take care of the problems we have, but we also cant forget the people who built this nation. The hardworking middle, who pay taxes, the middle class. Facebook
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Donald Trump on Melania Trump plagiarism fuss: All press is good press Facebook
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Heres whats on tap for Day 3 of the Republican National Convention By Melanie Mason Were halfway through the four-day GOP convention in Cleveland and after last nights festivities, its official: Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president. Tonight, well hear from Trumps pick for his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Also slated to speak are several of Trumps primary foes, including at least one who still harbors future presidential ambitions. Here are the highlights of tonights schedule of speakers: Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trumps fiercest primary rivals
Other 2016 runners-up: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (appearing via video) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker
Trumps son Eric
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who was a finalist for Trumps VP pick 8:51 a.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly listed Ivana Trump as a speaker. Facebook
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Brexits Nigel Farage says some of Donald Trumps ideas are pretty out there By Lisa Mascaro Why is Nigel Farage at #RNCinCLE? He says GOP is asking: If #Brexit could reach "beer drinker" voters... how do we? pic.twitter.com/jVVerYlhB7 Lisa Mascaro (@LisaMascaro) July 20, 2016 Turns out that even the leader of Brexit finds Donald Trump a bit too much for British political sensibilities. Nigel Farage, the brash former leader of the United Kingdoms Independence Party, is visiting the GOP convention in Cleveland, and marveled Wednesday at the tone of the American political debate. Some of Donald Trumps comments are pretty out there, said Farage, the chief proponent of Britains divisive campaign to exit the European Union. To say that you would ban all Muslims coming into America ... I can see what hes trying to do; hes trying to reach voters who feel frustrated and, perhaps, a little bit scared, Farage said at a breakfast hosted by the McClatchy news organization in Cleveland. Occasionally, the style of it, it makes even me wince a little bit. The British politician, whose Brexit campaign is often compared to the outsider revolt underway in Republican politics this election year, said hes not about to tell Americans how to vote. Though its no surprise his politics align with Republicans, who invited him to Cleveland, Farage is no fan of President Obama. Its a big mistake for foreign politicians to tell people how to vote, he said, referring to Obama, weeks before the vote, laying out the consequences from the U.S. view if Britain voted to leave the EU. Obama came to the United Kingdom during the Brexit debate. He came to our county. He was rude to us; he told us what we should do, and he led to a big Brexit bounce. He added, Although I have to say, I wouldnt vote for Hillary if you paid me. There is that sense of entitlement, he said about Clinton. Farage is a bit of a political tourist making his way through the GOP convention and U.S. politics. And even the leader of the Brexit campaign that shocked the world had the capacity to be surprised by what he saw in Cleveland particularly the protests outside the hall. It was interesting seeing some of the language displayed on those protest cards in particular on subjects around gay marriage, etc. which in the United Kingdom would be hate crimes, he said. There were some big cultural differences. Facebook
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Donald Trump really, really wants to win California By Melanie Mason House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, asked on Wednesday what its like to meet with Donald Trump, described the GOP presidential nominee as inquisitive. And theres one question Trump asks again and again. Every time he meets with me, he asks me...'Can I win California? said McCarthy, a Republican from Bakersfield, at an event hosted by Politicos Playbook. McCarthy said he replies: Well, I dont think so. Its pretty difficult. Thats an understatement. California is one of the deepest blue states in the country. It hasnt backed a Republican for the White House since George H.W. Bush won in 1988. The Trump team insists theyll play well in Democratic-friendly terrain like Connecticut, Oregon and New Jersey, and that Trump will campaign in blue states. That has made veteran GOP strategists worry the Trump campaign will pull resources from pivotal swing states like Ohio, Florida and Colorado. But McCarthy put a positive spin on Trumps preoccupation with California, saying it illustrates the businessmans pluck. Hes probably the most confident person I ever met, McCarthy said. I like people who are willing to take a risk. McCarthy likened Trump to Californias own mold-breaking politician -- the Governator. During his gubernatorial run, Arnold Schwarzenegger had the biggest rallies youve ever seen, McCarthy said, noting both Trump and the former California governor would play the same song at their events: Twisted Sisters Were Not Gonna Take It. Both celebrities-turned-politicians were tapping into the frustration that nothing was happening for many Americans, McCarthy said. Fittingly, McCarthy noted, Schwarzenegger -- who endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich during the Republican primaries -- is taking over Trumps storied The Apprentice franchise on TV. Facebook
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Ben Carson explains how he draws a line from Hillary Clinton to, yes, Lucifer By megan.garvey@latimes.com Ben Carson explains linking Hillary Clinton to Lucifer in his #GOPConvention speech https://t.co/FdJfzaRI9I https://t.co/zwsTHyhMqz CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 20, 2016 Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson expounded Wednesday on a rather unusual claim he made during his GOP convention speech that Hillary Clinton has ties to Lucifer. Yes, the devil. Carson, himself a former candidate who now backs GOP nominee Donald Trump, laid out an elaborate thesis during his prime-time address Tuesday that began with Clintons study of Saul Alinsky, a community organizer who advocated disruptive tactics to bring about change. His methods were the subject of Clintons college thesis. We all have people who are our mentors; we all have people we admire, Carson said on CNNs New Day. As a college student at Wellesley, she was on a first-name basis with Saul Alinsky. In Alinskys book Rules for Radicals, he employs Lucifer as a rhetorical tool to make a provocative point. The first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom Lucifer, Alinsky wrote. The book was published in 1971, two years after Clinton wrote her thesis at Wellesley, Theres Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. Carson suggested Alinskys ideas still shape Clintons thinking. Its very interesting how it uses controlled anarchy in order to change us from a democratic republic to a socialist society, Carson said of Alinskys book. Facebook
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Analysis: Anger and optimism vie for dominance in the Republican Party By Cathleen Decker Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination by harnessing the dour mood of GOP voters put off by the nations political class. Now, as he turns to the general election, he faces the challenge of incorporating something he has mostly omitted to this point an overarching, positive vision for the nation. His best opportunity to date will come during his Thursday night convention address. Hillary Clinton will have the same opportunity and the same demand one week later. For Trump and his fellow Republicans, crafting an appealing argument requires a deft touch. They must persuade even parts of the country that have benefited under President Obama that what they say would be his third term under Clinton would be untenable. That requires a heavy dose of negativity. But history suggests that shifting gears toward an upbeat message is also a necessity. Read More Facebook
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Down-ballot Republicans whod like to network in Cleveland are instead navigating the Trump effect on the GOP By Lisa Mascaro Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)) Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio spent this week building houses with Habitat for Humanity, motivating young campaign volunteers and kayaking with wounded veterans on the Cuyahoga River. Sen. Marco Rubio was home in Florida, stumping for votes before investigating mold contamination in a federal courthouse in Pensacola. And Sen. Kelly Ayotte was busy in New Hampshire fighting the scourge of opiate addiction crushing the state. As the Republican Party gathers in Cleveland to nominate Donald Trump as their candidate for president, some key lawmakers are steering clear of the GOP convention. Read More Facebook
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Second night of RNC is suffused with anti-Clinton message By Mary McNamara On Tuesday, the theme of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland was Make America Work Again but the subtext was We Hate Hillary Clinton. Once again the festivities were fueled by the festering personal rage that unites so many disparate groups in reality television, and once again the evening sparkled with oratorical oddities. The president of Ultimate Fighting Championship spoke, as did a professional golfer and former Celebrity Apprentice contestant and yet another cast member of The Bold and Beautiful, as well as some of Trumps children. On Tuesday, however, the lineup also included several of the GOP luminaries who did not decide to skip the convention altogether. Read More Facebook
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Are you signed up for Essential Politics? By Christina Bellantoni We hope youre enjoying our convention liveblog this week. If youre coming to us for the first time or are a loyal reader, you may not know that we have a daily politics newsletter. The email blast is free and rounds up the important political stories of the day, both at the national level and here in California. And we try to have a little fun with it, too. Heres todays. You can sign up here to get Essential Politics in your inbox Monday through Friday. Read More Facebook
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Day 2 of the convention in less than 3 minutes By Christina Bellantoni Relive the highlights of the second night of the Republican National Convention. Ray Whitehouse and Cleon Arrey present the evening in less than 3 minutes: Facebook
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Chris Christies Hillary Clinton show at the RNC, the supercut By Jessica Roy New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke forcefully Tuesday night about Hillary Clintons record. Though the nights theme was Make America Work Again, Christie chose to focus on the presumptive Democratic nominee, putting her on trial for the audience. They responded favorably, chanting, Lock her up! Lock her up! Watch: Facebook
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Watch: Ben Carson tries to link Hillary Clinton to Lucifer (Carolyn Cole/ Los Angeles Times ) Are we going to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that. Dr. Ben Carson speaking at the Republican National Convention Facebook
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Vice President Biden was tweeting Republican National Convention videos. Heres why. By Colleen Shalby Anyone who follows the @VPLive account associated with Vice President Joe Bidens travels might have been surprised this evening when it started tweeting videos tagged with the Republican National Convention hashtag #RNCinCLE. Several went out. The tweets were quickly deleted, but the vice presidents account did not offer an explanation. A Twitter spokesperson told The Times that the tweets were accidentally sent by someone in Cleveland -- a mishap due to a technical error. Twitter had previously worked with the @VPBidenLive account during Bidens Cancer Moonshot Summit in June, using whats called Twitter mirrors. The devices are essentially iPads that allow people to take and send photos through Twitter using an official hashtag. Theyve been used during the Oscars, MLB All-Star game and political events. The Biden account was not properly logged out today, and thats how these @GOPConvention tweets ended up on the official vice presidential feed. Its not because Biden was hanging out with actor Tim Daly and Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who once shouted You lie! at President Obama. The Twitter spokesperson says the Biden team knows about the situation. Mike Memoli contributed to this report. Facebook
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Social media explodes with more Trump plagiarism allegations By Javier Panzar Another day, another speech by a member of the Trump family and another round of plagiarism charges coursing through social media. The Daily Shows Twitter account seemed to pounce first when it pointed out lines from Donald Trump Jr.'s speech that seemed to be identical to words first used in a May article by F.H. Buckley in The American Conservative called Trump vs. the New Class. Within 45 minutes The Daily Shows tweet had been retweeted 9,900 times. pic.twitter.com/QEftnTTwy3 The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 20, 2016 In his speech, Donald Trumps son said: Our schools use to be an elevator to the middle class, now theyre stalled on the ground floor. Theyre like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students. From Buckleys article: What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the systems entrenched interests: the teachers unions and the higher-education professoriate. Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers. The relevant part of Trumps speech begins at the eight-minute mark here: In response, Buckley took to Twitter to defend the younger Donald Trump, saying the speech wasnt stealing. He later told Business Insider he was, in fact, a writer for the convention speech. Except it wasn't stealing... Frank Buckley (@fbuckley) July 20, 2016 View Twitter post James Fallows, former chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, responded to the hubbub on Twitter and in a piece for The Atlantic: You dont recycle, without attribution, things youve written and let someone else present them as his or her own words, Fallows wrote. At least I havent done it myself or previously known of people doing this. On the recycling issue re DJT Jrs speech tonight, my initial take https://t.co/PWZdi4IvmP item by me James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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Watch: Donald Trump Jr. hails father as mentor and best friend (Robyn Beck/Associated Press ) Donald Jr. gave a stirring speech Tuesday night that sparked immediate speculation about his own political future. The younger Trumps address was far more detailed than the traditional policy speeches his father usually delivers. In addition, Trump Jr. spoke of my father, my mentor, my best friend, Donald Trump as a businessman who hung out with guys on the construction sites, pouring concrete and hanging Sheetrock. Watch: Facebook
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How has the labor force really been doing since the Great Recession? By Priya Krishnakumar The theme of the second night of the Republican National Convention is Make America Work Again. In June, the U.S. economy added 287,000 jobs, the highest increase in job growth in eight months. The unemployment rate has declined steadily since reaching a high of 10% in October 2009, becoming 4.9% in June. It increased slightly from a 4.7% unemployment rate in May. Participation in the labor force is down overall since 2008 but has remained between 62% and 63% since 2014. Still, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito used Tuesday night to go after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on the U.S. workforce. We know [Clinton] will double down on an economic agenda thats led to the lowest workforce participation in decades, she said. Facebook
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Shelley Moore Capito goes after Hillary Clinton on coal (Steve Helber / Associated Press) Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Va.) assailed Hillary Clinton during her prime time speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night, alluding to the former secretary of States comments earlier this year about putting coal miners out of work. Since 2001, use of coal has gradually declined, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Still, the issue of coal is important to many voters in the country. In May, The Times Michael Finnegan explored the clash between Donald Trump and Clinton over coal. Read More Facebook
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All about Kimberlin Brown, the soap star-turned-California avocado farmer who is closing Tuesdays GOP convention By Christine Mai-Duc (Earl Gibson III / WireImage) The Republican National Convention lineup has featured several television stars, and tonight soap opera actress Kimberlin Brown will close out the festivities on Day 2. Brown, 55, hop-scotched between roles on shows including General Hospital, Port Charles and One Life to Live. Best known for her role as daytime villain Sheila Carter on The Young and the Restless, Brown later joined The Bold and the Beautiful. View Instagram post More recently, Brown has hosted a Design Network show called Dramatic Designs in which she helps homeowners with interior design projects. The GOP convention website describes Brown as a small business owner, and she and her husband own an avocado farm in Southern California. It doesnt appear either of them have contributed to federal or state political campaigns in the past. Facebook
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UFCs Dana White says Trump will fight for this country By Lance Pugmire UFC President Dana White spoke in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, telling the supportive crowd, Donald Trump is a fighter and I know he will fight for this country. White recounted how after his close friend and former UFC Chairman Lorenzo Fertitta purchased the company in 2001 for $2 million, Trump was supportive of staging UFC fights at his property in Atlantic City. Tuesday, the deep appreciation for that early support was noted in Whites speech, which began minutes after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan confirmed Trump as the Republican nominee. Im sure most of you are wondering, What are you doing here? White said. I am not a politician. I am a fight promoter. But I was blown away and honored to be invited here tonight and I wanted to show up and tell you about my friend, Donald Trump the Donald Trump that I know. Read More Facebook
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Unifying a party against Clinton, not for Trump By Doyle McManus The view from inside the hall: The first half of Tuesday evenings program has been, to borrow a Trumpism, strangely low-energy. House Speaker Paul Ryan formally declared Trump and Pence the nominees to brief cheers from a partly empty floor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got booed, twice. Even a brief video appearance by Trump himself drew only moderate enthusiasm. But, to be fair, this was always going to be the least exciting program for the mostly pro-Trump delegates: a parade of congressional leaders, most of whom endorsed Trump only reluctantly. The evenings theme was supposed to be GOP plans to create jobs -- Make America Work Again -- but most speakers barely touched on it. Instead, most of them, from McConnell to Ryan, focused on criticizing Hillary Clinton. The Clinton years are way over; 2016 is the year America moves on, Ryan said. McConnell drew a lusty cheer when he promised that the Senate will continue to block Obamas attempt to fill Scalias seat on the Supreme Court. That honor will go to President Donald Trump next year, he said. Ryan finally roused the pro-Trump crowd to its feet with as close to a full-throated endorsement of the nominee as hes given. Whaddya say we unify this party? he said. Lets win this thing. And Christie drew ecstatic cheers -- plus chants of Lock Her Up! and Guilty! -- when he presented what he said was the prosecutors case against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Facebook
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Majority Leader Kevin McCarthys priorities: Congress, then Trump By Lisa Mascaro @kevinomccarthy hanging in the Digital Loft at the @GOPconvention. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/mWkgOfM8yd GOP Convention (@GOPconvention) July 20, 2016 House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy backs Donald Trump, but he hasnt been anywhere near the forefront of the Trump movement. A speaking role at the Republican convention was not a role he was initially expecting to have. That might help explain why he barely mentioned Trump, now the GOP nominee, in his prime-time address. I have good news in just 112 days its over, said the Republican from Bakersfield. We have listened and you have told us enough. House Republicans have other issues on their minds, namely preserving their majority in Congress, particularly with an unpopular nominee at the top of the GOP ticket. McCarthy is a powerhouse fundraiser and political strategist working on that goal. Together, by electing a Republican Congress, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, we can build a better America. Congress. Trump. In that order. Facebook
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Donald Trumps most ardent supporters his kids set to address convention By Kurtis Lee (Patrick Semansky / Associated Press) Among Donald Trumps most trusted advisers are his children. And on Tuesday night, Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump are taking the stage at the Republican National Convention to address the nation, offering insights into the man who just became the official nominee of the Republican Party. Ivanka and Eric Trump are also set to speak at the convention later in the week. The elder Trump frequently boasts about his children on the campaign trail appreciation they plan to reciprocate in their convention addresses. These wont be typical child-of-candidate speeches, Donald Trump Jr., 38, told the Wall Street Journal. We will talk about him as a father, but I dont foresee a lot of the joking and the fluff we have grown so accustomed to from prior conventions. View Instagram post While the Republican nominee criss-crosses the country speaking to supporters, Donald Trump Jr., Eric and Ivanka run his real estate company. Ivanka Trump, 34, who will speak at the convention on Thursday night, has, according to her father, overseen the conversion of the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., into a high-end hotel. Its scheduled for completion this fall. Tiffany Trump, 22, the Republican nominees youngest daughter, recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where she majored in sociology and urban studies. Facebook
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Why is it so hard for the Trump campaign to admit that Melania cribbed Michelle Obamas words? By Robin Abcarian We hold this truth to be self-evident, that Melania Trump borrowed thoughts and words from Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech Monday night. No, wait. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Melania Trump uttered words that sounded exactly like Michelle Obamas words, she didnt do her husband any favors. Hey, did I just plagiarize the Declaration of Independence and the opening sentence of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice? Nope. Those words are so famous, so cliched even, that they dont need to be attributed because everyone knows who wrote them. But what about lifting less famous turns of phrase? What about what happened Monday night, after a guy named Jarrett Hill, who has a YouTube channel on home design, noticed that Melania Trumps convention speech sounded an awful lot like the one delivered by Michelle Obama in Denver in 2008? He noted that two passages in particular used parallel language to describe parallel thoughts. Did Melania Trump or her speechwriters do something wrong? Did borrowing Obamas words cross the line? Or was it all just an embarrassing coincidence? Read More Facebook
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Watch: Top congressional leaders speaking at convention have one thing in mind: Keeping Congress in GOP control Three top congressional leaders addressed convention delegates Tuesday in prime time. They offered different messages, but all pushed a similar goal -- keeping Republicans in control of Congress. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy have less to worry about given large GOP majorities. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells party is in real jeopardy of losing the chamber this fall. Listen to how each man framed the contest as a need to shore up their ranks. And consider the message Sen. Roger Wicker, who leads the Republican Senate campaign arm, telegraphed yesterday at the convention: When Donald Trump is elected president he will determine the future of the Supreme Court and he will lead our troops as commander in chief.... He and Vice President Mike Pence will need a Republican Senate to get that job done. Sen. Roger Wicker, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, talks about how Donald Trump would work with Congress. Facebook
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Its official: Trump will appear all four nights By Christina Bellantoni Donald Trump appeared briefly on screen to address convention delegates tonight, marking the second evening in a row hes been a presence at the party. He told the crowd hell join his vice presidential nominee Mike Pence Wednesday night, and of course hell formally give an acceptance speech Thursday night. That means convention-goers will get four nights of Trump in a row. Facebook
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Trump sends message to GOP convention: We have to go all the way By Lisa Mascaro .@realDonaldTrump: "This is going to be a leadership... that puts the American people 1st." #RNCinCLE #gopconventionhttps://t.co/YSrHfP190b Fox News (@FoxNews) July 20, 2016 Donald Trump just cant stay away from his convention. From New York, he sent a video message Tuesday shortly after delegates delivered him the GOP nomination. Today has been a very, very special day, watching my children put me over the top, he said. Getting the partys nomination, Ill never forget it. Its something I will never, ever forget. But the convention in Cleveland is just the start, he said. This is a movement, but we have to go all the way. Most importantly were going to make America great again. Facebook
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Senate GOP Leader McConnell warms to Trump, hits Hillary Clintons tortured relationship with the truth By Lisa Mascaro Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is known as a skilled tactician, if a cautious politician. But on Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican showed the punch he packs behind the Southern pleasantries and penchant for home-state bourbon. Ladies and gentlemen, Ive been around a while.
And Ive been around the Clintons more than anybody should ever have to, McConnell opened. A couple years ago, Bill and Hillary camped out in my state telling anybody whod listen why they ought to vote against me, he said. Tonight Im here to return the favor. McConnell has long wanted the position he now holds as the Senate majority leader, and he once famously said his goal was to make President Obama a one-term president. Ive had my differences with Barack Obama, but l will give him this: At least he was upfront about his plans to move America to the left, he said. Not Hillary. Clinton, he said, has a tortured relationship with the truth. He said: I am here to tell you Hillary Clinton will say anything, do anything and be anything to get elected president. And we cannot allow it. McConnell was initially slow to warm to Donald Trump, but once it was clear Trump would become the nominee he cautiously embraced him. With Donald Trump in the White House, Senate Republicans will build on the work weve done, he said. Not McConnells first choice for the GOP nominee, but the one hes ready to negotiate with. Facebook
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As NRAs Chris Cox speaks, some context for U.S. deaths by firearm assault By Kyle Kim Chris Cox of the NRA went after Hillary Clinton as someone who would not protect the 2nd Amendment if she is elected president. He kept his remarks brief, focusing more on the type of Supreme Court justice Clinton would appoint than specific claims about gun violence. Heres some context for the topic. Violent gun deaths in the United States have hovered between 10,000 to 13,000 over the last 15 years. Facebook
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Heres the shortlist of 11 conservative judges Trump said he could nominate to the Supreme Court By Christine Mai-Duc (Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press) In his speech before the convention Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke of the importance of Republicans winning the White House in November, particularly as it relates to Supreme Court nominees. Let us put justices on the Supreme Court who cherish our Constitution, McConnell said. In May, Donald Trump released a list of 11 judges he might pick as Supreme Court nominees. They are: Steven Colloton: An Iowa judge appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003. He previously worked as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and was a clerk for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
An Iowa judge appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003. He previously worked as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and was a clerk for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Allison Eid: A Colorado Supreme Court justice since 2006 and former solicitor general for the state of Colorado who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.
A Colorado Supreme Court justice since 2006 and former solicitor general for the state of Colorado who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Raymond Gruender: Appointed in 2004 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Missouri by President George W. Bush. A former federal prosecutor in Missouri.
Appointed in 2004 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Missouri by President George W. Bush. A former federal prosecutor in Missouri. Thomas Hardiman: A federal judge on the 3rd Circuit of Pennsylvania who was appointed by Bush in 2003. Hardiman, the first in his family to attend college, graduated from Notre Dame University.
A federal judge on the 3rd Circuit of Pennsylvania who was appointed by Bush in 2003. Hardiman, the first in his family to attend college, graduated from Notre Dame University. Raymond Kethledge: A Michigan federal appellate judge for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed by Bush before his departure from office in 2008. Kethledge was previously in private practice and worked as a corporate attorney.
A Michigan federal appellate judge for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed by Bush before his departure from office in 2008. Kethledge was previously in private practice and worked as a corporate attorney. Joan Larsen: Sits on the Michigan Supreme Court and was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death has left a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Sits on the Michigan Supreme Court and was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death has left a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Thomas Lee: A justice on the Utah Supreme Court since 2010 and a former faculty member at Brigham Young University Law School. Son of former Reagan-era Solicitor Gen. Rex Lee and brother of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).
A justice on the Utah Supreme Court since 2010 and a former faculty member at Brigham Young University Law School. Son of former Reagan-era Solicitor Gen. Rex Lee and brother of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). William Pryor: A Bush appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Alabama. Took Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions place as state attorney general when he entered the Senate.
A Bush appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Alabama. Took Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions place as state attorney general when he entered the Senate. David Stras: A justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court since 2010. Previously worked as a legal scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Diane Sykes : A federal appellate judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th District, appointed by George W. Bush in 2004. A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice.
Don Willett: A justice on the Texas Supreme Court since 2005 who was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry. Willett has publicly mocked Trump on Twitter in recent months. Facebook
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Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey has called for charges against Hillary Clinton By Javier Panzar U.S. Attorney General Mike Mukasey speaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC on April 23, 2008. Mukasey spoke on on combating the growing threat of international organized crime. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images) Former U.S. attorney general and Republican National Convention speaker Michael Mukasey has not been shy about criticizing Hillary Clinton. Last year, George W. Bushs former top lawyer said that if Hillary Clinton was convicted of destroying government records by erasing emails from her private server, she couldnt legally run for president. He eventually walked those comments back. But this year he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying criminal charges against her were justified. Facebook
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House Speaker Paul Ryan announces tally for Trump Paul Ryan announces Trump has been selected as the GOP nominee #GOPConvention #RNCinCLE https://t.co/KjpeNheq0X https://t.co/1lQZ9dTw0L CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 20, 2016 House Speaker Paul D. Ryan announces the tally: 1,725 Trump 475 Cruz 120 Kasich 114 Rubio 7 Carson 3 Bush 2 Paul The chair announces that Donald J. Trump, having received a majority of these votes entitled to be cast at the convention, has been selected as the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan as convention chair Facebook
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Mood uneven in convention hall as the GOP nominates Trump By Seema Mehta (Win McNamee / Getty Images) The mood was celebratory, but also subdued and uneven, around the Republican National Convention as Donald Trump became the partys official nominee Tuesday evening, a reflection of how divisive this years primary contest became. Keiko Orall of Massachusetts, an incoming member of the Republican National Committee, described the feeling as hopeful. People are really excited to do something different, she said. Orall said full acceptance of Trump by the GOP establishment was going to take some time, but predicted the party would be united in November because of the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Theres a binary choice, she said. And theres a long game in the Supreme Court. New Yorkers were jubilant as their vote pushed their native son over the 1,237 delegates needed to claim the nomination. Congratulations, Dad we love you! Donald Trump Jr. shouted as the band began playing New York, New York. Among some delegations, the mood was sour. When Ohio cast its 66 votes for its governor, John Kasich, some near the delegation booed and flashed their thumbs down. Many of its delegates left once Trump was named the nominee. Utahs state rules dictate that it can only vote for a candidate who is put into contention, yet tried to cast its 40 votes for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Delegates said they were informed only just before the vote that they could not cast their votes for Cruz, even though he won the states caucus decisively. Chris Herrod, a mortgage officer from Provo, said it felt like a ham-fisted push for party unity. Utahans have been slow to come around to Trump. Were trying to get behind Trump. We obviously dont want Hillary, Herrod said. But, he added: Its a lot harder when theres a spear at our back. He said several delegates had told him they wouldnt have spent the money to travel to the convention if they had known they would not be able to vote for Cruz. Im not a Never Trump person, he said. I just believe in the process. The Alaska delegation was displeased when party rules dictated that all their votes be given to Trump, and demanded a poll of its vote. Party leaders halted the dispute by saying Alaska was among the states that didnt allow votes to be cast for candidates who have dropped out of the race. Others appeared to have put their differences aside. As Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced his delegations votes, he called primary winner Cruz our dear friend and our favorite son as he announced he had won 104 votes, compared with 48 for Trump, whom Patrick described as our new friend and our latest adopted favorite son. The California delegation a 100% pro-Trump delegation since the state primary took place after the contest was decided was seated in the front row and among the most enthusiastic in the room. We are rock-solid for Trump, said Shirley Husar, a delegate from Pasadena who announced Californias vote. Facebook
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Dana White said he wasnt a political guy. Now he is speaking at the RNC By Javier Panzar UFC President Dana White may seem like an unconventional choice to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland: Just last December he told Yahoo Sports, Im not a political guy, at all, not a little bit. So what is he doing here? He told TMZ this week the speech will be about my relationship with Trump and the Trump that I know. That makes sense given that the nights theme is about the economy and that White has spoken about Trumps early support of the ultimate fighting league in the past. Donald Trump was the first one to have us come out at the Trump Taj Mahal, he told TMZ. Not only did we host the events there, but he actually showed up and supported the events. Youll never hear me say a negative thing about Donald Trump. Facebook
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Get your groove on to the music of the Republican National Convention Facebook
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Mike Pence nominated for GOP vice president Some know Mike Pence as congressman. Others know him as governor. But back home, most call him Mike. Indiana Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb on Gov. Mike Pence as vice presidential nominee Facebook
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Trump tweets on becoming GOP presidential nominee Such a great honor to be the Republican Nominee for President of the United States. I will work hard and never let you down! AMERICA FIRST! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2016 Facebook
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Alaska contests the way its votes were counted at RNC and roll call vote pauses House band plays while RNC polls Alaska delegates after the state said their vote was improperly recorded. #RNCinCLE Seema (@LATSeema) July 20, 2016 After a brief dust-up over the roll call votes of Alaska, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus took the stage to explain the procedure. Initially, all of Alaskas delegates went to Donald Trump. However, Alaska state rules have a provision that notes that when a presidential candidate drops out, those delegates remain with that candidate. Alaskas vote would have been 12 Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 11 Trump and five for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. The discrepancy was eventually alleviated with all delegates going to Trump. Chairman of Alaska's Rep party said he doesn't know why 28 delegates went @realDonaldTrump but "it's going to be corrected in record" @ktva Emily Carlson (@emilyreporting) July 19, 2016 Facebook
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Donald Trump Jr. announced the votes to send his dad over the top By Lisa Mascaro Donald Trump Jr. announces New York's votes, putting his father over the top #GOPConvention https://t.co/4eFzMqhZI3 https://t.co/eVhTTogNvU CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 19, 2016 I have the incredible honor of not only being a part of the ride thats been this election process and to watch, as a small fly on the wall, what my father has done in creating this movement because its not a campaign anymore, its a movement -- speaking to real Americans, giving them a voice again. Its my honor to be able to throw Donald Trump over the top in the delegate count tonight.... Congratulations, Dad, we love you. Donald J. Trump Jr. at GOP convention Facebook
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Rowdy protest outside RNC ends peacefully after police threaten arrests By James Queally (Marcus Ya
The Journal of the American Medical Assn. recently published a very unusual article: a scientific study authored by a sitting president of the United States. Thats never happened before.
In a sense, its cool that President Obama cares enough about science to want to publish a paper in one of the worlds leading medical journals. But JAMA has set a bad precedent. The article, on healthcare reform in the United States, is problematic not only in its content but in the threat it poses to the integrity of scientific publishing.
Lets set aside the debate on whether the specific numbers in the article are factual. (Of course, there is certainly room to question Obamas data. The president writes that [t]rends in healthcare costs have been promising, even though healthcare spending per capita continues to increase.)
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Far more troubling is the presidents tone, which is often self-congratulatory. I am proud of the policy changes in the [Affordable Care Act], he writes, and the progress that has been made toward a more affordable, high-quality, and accessible healthcare system.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find another paper in any scientific journal in which a politician was allowed to subjectively analyze his own policy and declare it a success. This is a textbook definition of conflict of interest.
Moreover, despite the scholarly nature of this academic journal, the president seems incapable of resisting political rhetoric. He glazes over contentious details of the ACA with poorly substantiated claims. For instance, he writes, For most Americans Marketplaces are working. Are they? A majority of Americans want ACA repealed, while others would prefer a universal healthcare system.
Worse, when it comes to those who disagree with his ideas, Obama responds with petty jabs. After denouncing hyperpartisanship, he then goes on to criticize Republicans for excessive oversight and relentless litigation that undermined ACA implementation efforts.
One-sided commentary is perfectly fine for the campaign trail, but it has no place in a scientific journal, or in the scientific record alongside the discoveries of DNA and black holes. On the contrary, a good scientific paper devotes space to seriously considering the objections of other scientists. Failure to do so would often be grounds for rejection. Rather than ignoring or belittling opposing ideas, it is the authors job to convince his readers that his data and ideas are superior.
Obviously, JAMA held the president to a different, lower standard than it would an academic scientist. In fact, JAMA editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner admitted as much. In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, he said that Obamas article was peer reviewed, but that he was allowed a bit more flexibility because of who he is. He also acknowledged that we dont fact-check every fact.
One-sided commentary is perfectly fine for the campaign trail, but it has no place in a scientific journal, or in the scientific record.
Thats outrageous. Fact-checking is integral to peer review. Scientific publications earn their reputations by publishing only studies that hold up under intense logical and empirical scrutiny. The referees who administer this process will often reject an article outright or ask for months of painstaking corrections if they find even a small error.
It is neither ethical nor scientifically rigorous to bend the rules based on the identity of the author. Facts, not famous bylines, determine the quality and significance of a scientific study.
The bottom line is that the president of the United States patted himself on the back and mocked his political opponents in a highly prestigious scientific journal. No scientist or doctor would have been allowed to publish what he published. It is difficult to fathom what JAMA was thinking.
As a major voice in the medical community, it is within JAMAs best interest to stay out of politics. Otherwise, people, including doctors and scientists, may begin to tune out.
Alex Berezow is senior fellow of biomedical science at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on Twitter @AlexBerezow. Tom Hartsfield is a nuclear physicist living in Los Alamos, New Mexico and a writer for RealClearScience.
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Imagine that you are a person with great influence, highly respected and with a powerful voice that commands enormous attention. Imagine that you see the country heading down a potentially destructive and very dangerous path. Do you sit quietly and, if the worst happens, always regret your silence, or do you speak out even if doing so will subject you to criticism?
That is the choice that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg faced before she publicly criticized Donald Trump and, unlike most commentators, I applaud her decision. Nor do I think she needed to apologize, as she did on Thursday.
In three interviews, with reporters from the New York Times, Associated Press and CNN, Ginsburg spoke on a wide array of topics.
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Much of what she said was unsurprising and not controversial. She expressed pleasure at the Supreme Courts recent abortion and affirmative action cases, where she was in the majority. She praised President Obamas nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, and said that the courts work is hindered by the Senates failure to consider him.
I wish more of the justices would explain that the Senates refusal to consider this nomination, as well as nominations for lower federal court judgeships, is seriously interfering with the functioning of the courts.
Ginsburg knows that too often bad things happen because as the saying goes good people do nothing. She knew she had a platform and she used it.
What attracted attention was her sharp criticism of Trump, whom she called a faker. She also said that her late husband would have wanted to move to New Zealand if Trump were elected.
Ginsburg is 83 years old and has seen in her lifetime the great damage that can be done by a demagogic candidate who professes extreme nationalism and peddles unsubtle racist and anti-Semitic messages. I wonder whether it is a coincidence that Ginsburg criticized Trump soon after his campaign tweeted a six-pointed Star of David superimposed over $100 bills and a photo of Hillary Clinton, perpetuating the age-old offensive association of Jews and money.
Ginsburg knows that too often bad things happen because as the saying goes good people do nothing. She knew she had a platform and she used it.
Uninformed punditry to the contrary, her comments violated no law or ethical rule. The judicial code of ethics says that judges are not to endorse or oppose candidates for elected office. These provisions, however, do not apply to Supreme Court justices. (Whether that exception is reasonable is a separate question.)
Its true that, conventionally, justices steer clear of electoral politics. But that wasnt always the case: In 1800, the members of the Supreme Court openly campaigned for the reelection of John Adams. This convention of silence, moreover, is inconsistent with one of the most basic underlying principles of the 1st Amendment: that more speech is better in a democracy because it leads to a better-informed population.
Many have claimed that Ginsburg will have no choice but to recuse herself if a case involving Trump comes to the court. I dont think so. She was not speaking about a pending case. Besides, Sandra Day OConnor was widely quoted as saying that Al Gore would be terrible for the country, and she participated in Bush vs. Gore anyway. Whatever should happen, the reality is that Ginsburg will not recuse herself. It is left to each justice to decide whether to participate, and I cannot imagine that Ginsburg will see her comments as disqualifying. She will feel, rightly, that she can decide specific issues that she has not discussed publicly.
Nor am I convinced that her comments tarnished the image of the court. Is anyone surprised that a liberal Democrat like Ginsburg perceives Trump as a threat to democracy? Did saying it aloud really change that much?
On Thursday, Ginsburg tried to put the matter to rest. In a brief statement issued by the court, she said that judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office, and acknowledged that her remarks were ill advised. In the limited sense that her statements attracted criticism, who could disagree? Otherwise, she had nothing to repent.
Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
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Watching the 60 Minutes interview of Donald Trump and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in my hotel room, all I could think of was Sansa Stark. For those of you who arent Game of Thrones addicts, Ill explain. When we are first introduced to Sansa in the first season, we meet an innocent, doe-eyed girl who cant wait to get out of her backwater province and marry the dashing young king Joffrey. An idealist and a romantic, Sansa learns all too slowly that Joffrey is a sadist and a bully.
In order to survive at court, Sansa has to learn to lie about her devotion and admiration for Joffrey even when speaking privately to sympathizers. With her lips she says Joffrey is the bravest, wisest King who ever lived, while her eyes have that glassy POW look. And when shes in the same room with the mercurial, narcissistic boy king, she seems internally at war with her bodys urge to flinch or flee.
So, yeah, Trumps vice presidential pick reminds me of Sansa.
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Over and over again, CBSs Lesley Stahl asked Pence to reconcile his long-held positions on free trade (hes for it), negative campaigning (hes against it), the Muslin ban (Pence was against it, but now hes for it because Trump has changed his position, sort of), the Iraq war (Pence voted for it) and so on. Pence would look to Trump for permission to answer, like a dog not sure whether hell get the rolled-up newspaper again if he jumps on the furniture. When Trump let the governor go ahead, which wasnt often, Pence kept falling back on Sansa-like assurances that Trump is a good man.
Towards the end of the interview, when Stahl asked Pence whether he agreed with Trump that Sen. John McCain is not a hero because he was captured. Pences unease was palpable. He started to ramble about his great deal of respect for the former POW before Trump let him off the hook.
You could say yes thats okaythat one, you could say yes, I mean, youre not its fine, Trump said as if he was trying to keep Pence from having a panic attack.
Pence [looks] to Trump for permission to answer, like a dog not sure whether hell get the rolled-up newspaper again if he jumps on the furniture.
The spectacle was consistent with the awkward, all-too-public process by which Trump settled on Pence reportedly at the insistence of his family in the name of party unity. But Pence is hardly a game-changer.
Trump and his aides claim that conservatives are ecstatic over the selection of Pence. Though its true the Indiana governor has friends and admirers within the conservative and Republican establishments, theres little evidence of a pro-Pence prairie fire out there. And watching Pence renounce, abdicate or rationalize away 30 years of principles, like a decorated military officer voluntarily ripping off his medals and badges, is unlikely to spark one. Most Americans dont know enough about him to form an opinion (86% of registered voters, according to a CBS poll), and introducing him to the country as an ideological vacillator may not make the best first impression.
Certainly Pence wont convert many anti-Trump holdouts. Besides, the Stop Trump movement almost certainly died last week at the hands of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his minions on the rules committee. Pences ongoing humiliation will, if anything, confirm worries that Trump will demand blind loyalty to his agenda, or at least his cult of personality.
The Pence pick is even odder in the larger context of the Trump campaign. Trumps greatest asset is Hillary Clinton. For conservatives of a Pencian bent, Trump can wield the prospect of a Clinton presidency like a Medusas head, petrifying any who gaze upon it. What Trump really needed was a candidate who could help him win over potential Clinton supporters among independents. Its unclear that Pence has the skill sets or positions to do that. Awkward promises that his betrothed is a good man probably arent enough.
Pence is man without a natural constituency. He wont win over steadfast Never Trumpers, and he wont woo any moderate Independents. Though he may pick up a few sympathy votes from Sansa Stark fans, thats about all.
jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
To the editor: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.s efforts to keep the court separate from the poisonous partisan politics of Washington have a long way to go if he wants the Supreme Court to move on after it voted along political lines in favor of George W. Bush in Bush vs. Gore, which decided the 2000 election. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg apologizes for ill-advised criticism of Donald Trump, July 14)
Plus, over the years we have seen politics in many decisions coming from the high court, so lets stop trying to make Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs recent statements on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump such an issue.
There is nothing in the code of conduct for federal judges that prevents members of the high court from actually speaking their minds. So lets look at the bigger picture and acknowledge that the Supreme Court is political, and its no wonder the public cant accept its more controversial opinions.
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Conrad Corral, Cathedral City
..
To the editor: The article says Ginsburg issued an apology for her comments critical of Trump.
She did not apologize to Trump; rather, she said she had been ill-advised to comment publicly because she is a judge.
Theres no need for Ginsburg to apologize to Trump, since what she said about him was accurate. If the other institutions of our democracy had sooner and more forcefully spoken out, it is unlikely that she would have been moved to criticize Trump publicly.
That includes the media. Unfortunately, far too many participants in an ever-shorter news cycle speak with very little regard for the traditional standards of journalism. Also unfortunately, far too few citizens even consult media that conform to sound journalistic standards.
John C. Nangle, Palm Springs
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
As Republicans gaveled in their national convention in Cleveland on Monday, Hillary Clinton wasted no time launching counter-programming, taunting Donald Trump and offering a vision for confronting the recent spate of violence in American communities that is starkly different than his.
Taking the stage at an NAACP conference in Cincinnati, Clinton mocked Trump for declining to join her at the event. She described him as a bigot, a sexist and a xenophobe, among other things, before launching into an anecdote about the first time her publicity friendly opponent spoke to the New York Times.
It was in 1973, she said, when his family businesses was accused by the government of discriminating against black people seeking to rent apartments.
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We have heard a lot of troubling things from Donald Trump, she said. But that one is shocking.
The attacks from Clinton, which were to continue later in the day during an address before the American Federation of Teachers in Minnesota, were the apex Monday of a large-scale disruption effort by the Democrats. Following a time-honored tradition during conventions, the Clinton campaign and its allies are working furiously to get voters to question everything they are seeing in Cleveland.
They attacked on multiple fronts. The lead pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA, rolled out an anti-Trump ad that will play on screens inside the taxi cabs of Cleveland an estimated 28,000 times. The PAC is also spending heavily to treat social media users who log in at the convention site to images of some of the more notorious figures who have praised Trump, including former Ku Klux Klan head David Duke and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, alongside the words Hes with Trump.
Back at Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, they created an expertly produced reprisal of an ad Democrats ran back in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the GOP nominee. The current installment is a web ad titled Confessions of a Republican II. In it, a self-identified Republican actor who as a young man appeared in the original ad against Goldwater, returns to say Trump does not represent his values, and frankly, scares him. The Clinton campaign also invited its supporters to sign an open letter to Donald Trump that lists the many reasons it finds him detestable. By late afternoon, it had 20,000 electronic signatures.
Clinton also announced at the NAACP convention a registration drive intended to bring 3 million new voters to the polls.
Her speech to the NAACP came as both she and Trump find their campaigns overshadowed by the shooting deaths of three police officers in Baton Rouge over the weekend, the latest incident in an epidemic of violence that has claimed as victims several police officers, as well as African American civilians who were killed by police.
As Trump positions himself as the law and order candidate whose answer to the violence is cracking down on lawbreakers with little patience for movements such as Black Lives Matter, Clinton warns that the problems can only be solved by rooting out racism from the criminal justice system. She is also pushing for new gun-control laws.
The conflicting approaches reflect the different groups of voters each candidate is targeting. Trump won the Republican nomination in large part because of his appeal to disgruntled whites. His message continues to target white voters, and particularly white male voters, even as they have shrunk considerably as a share of the overall electorate. He is looking to his anti-free trade message to nonetheless increase the number of whites who vote Republican by attracting Democratic-leaning blue collar voters.
Clinton is seeking to rebuild the diverse coalition of voters that twice propelled President Obama to victory. Even amid the shootings of police that have raised concerns about personal safety among Americans, Clinton is not backing away from railing against the different ways whites and minorities are treated by police, the deaths of black men in police custody and the surge in the countrys prison population.
Lets admit it, Clinton said. There is clear evidence that African Americans are disproportionately killed in police incidents compared to any other group. Something is profoundly wrong. We cant ignore that. We cant wish it away. We have to make it right.
Clinton used her platform before the NAACP to tear into Trumps record on issues of equality, accusing him of demeaning the first African American president by accusing him of not being an American citizen, playing coy with white supremacists, showing disrespect for women, and wanting to ban an entire religion with his plan to block Muslims from entering the country.
At times like these, we need a president who can help pull us together, not split us apart, Clinton said. I will work every single day to do just that. The Republican nominee for president will do the exact opposite. He might say otherwise if he were here, but of course he declined your invitation. So all we can go on is what he has said and done in the past.
evan.halper@latimes.com
Follow me: @evanhalper
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Ideally, political parties use their conventions to fire up the troops for the battle ahead, but as the Republicans convene here, party leaders continue to face a more basic problem: getting everyone to march in the same direction.
At a gathering of Iowas delegation Monday, for example, the states veteran senator, Charles E. Grassley, addressed those in the party who have doubts about Donald Trump.
Tell them two words, Grassley said: Supreme Court. He went on to warn about the risk that Hillary Clinton, if elected, could appoint several justices.
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Earlier, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker hit the same note with the delegates: Whether Donald Trump was your first choice, your second choice or your 17th choice, he is better than Hillary Clinton.
And so it went around Cleveland on Monday as GOP leaders appealed for at least a show of unity, even as the partys wounds remained on vivid display on and off the convention floor.
Republicans have been through a very, very divisive primary, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who is also the convention chair, told reporters at a lunch Monday. I doubt that people are lost forever, he said, but salving the divisions takes some time.
Time, however, dwindles quickly in a presidential contest. Although the fall general-election campaign almost always does pull partisans together, a party that leaves its convention divided seldom prevails, a lesson Democrats learned through bitter experiences in 1968, 1972 and 1980.
A lack of unity hurts a party in at least two ways: It depresses turnout of the partys supporters, and the time and energy spent on fixing internal divisions get in the way of the pressing business of conveying the partys electoral message.
Thats especially a problem for Trump, who faces an unprecedented level of doubt among voters about his fitness for office. His campaign needs as much time and focus as possible to try to overcome those.
Trump, however, has not made the party unity effort much easier: The nominee and his top aides keep reopening past wounds.
On Monday, Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign chair, disparaged former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, the only two living former Republican presidents, while criticizing John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, the conventions host state. All three have declined to endorse Trump.
Kasichs decision to sit out the convention and not back the nominee was embarrassing, Manafort told reporters at the conventions official daily news briefing.
As for the former presidents, certainly the Bush family, while we would have liked to have had them, theyre part of the past, he said. Were dealing with the future.
The depth of the GOPs divisions remains striking. In a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey released as delegates arrived here, only 13% of Republicans said they believed the party was unified, and 78% said it was not. Six in 10 Republicans said they would have preferred to see someone other than Trump as their nominee, although despite that, about 8 in 10 said they would vote for him over Clinton.
Democrats have divisions as well, but of a more muted variety. Most Democrats say their party is unified; the share saying it wasnt was about half as large as among Republicans in the poll. Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsement of Clinton last week and his expected work for the ticket in the next several months seem likely to improve those numbers for Democrats.
Polls consistently have shown Clinton winning a higher share of Democratic votes than Trump gets among Republicans. Although the gap is not large just a few percentage points in most surveys its problematic for the GOP, which starts out with a smaller partisan base than the Democrats have.
Counterbalancing those divisions is dislike and mistrust of the other side the feeling that Grassley and Walker hammered at during their meeting with Iowa delegates.
With both candidates setting records for the share of voters who view them unfavorably, large numbers on both sides say they are making up their minds more on the basis of which candidate they are against than which they are for.
Among Trumps voters, distaste for Clinton is the primary motivating force, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found. Almost 6 in 10 of Trumps voters, 57%, said they were backing him mainly to oppose Clinton. Only 38% said their votes were mainly to support him.
Among the vast majority of the GOP delegates and activists gathered here, opposition to Clinton is enough to quash doubts about Trump. Convincing the rest of the country has so far proved to be more difficult.
David.Lauter@latimes.com
For more on Politics and Policy, follow me @DavidLauter
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The day before Republicans were to open a convention meant to serve as a fresh opportunity to redefine Donald Trump, organizers had to delay their long-awaited preview of the gathering so as not to collide with President Obamas remarks to the nation about yet another shocking act of violence.
This time it was in Baton Rouge, La., where three police officers were shot dead Sunday morning. When the GOP briefing began, the first topic was Baton Rouge.
Across Cleveland, worries about violence led the head of the local police union to ask Ohio Gov. John Kasich to rescind the right of gun owners to openly carry weapons near the convention areas. Kasich said that under state law, he did not have the power to limit firearms, which were in evidence Sunday.
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Convention organizers, who had hoped to use the afternoon briefing to strike an optimistic tone, were forced to reassure attendees Sunday that the area outside the convention arena inside is the one place guns will not be allowed would be safe.
Ohio has held several high-profile events under the so-called open carry law, convention Chief Executive Jeff Larson said, without any issues.
Theres going to be plenty of law enforcement in downtown Cleveland, he said. I think its going to be fine.
The events put a fresh focus on the imperative pressing on Trump in coming days: to convince Americans that he can keep them safe, both domestically and abroad.
That is a notion he has pushed repeatedly. But more often than not, his detours into other subjects have diluted his message.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort indicated Sunday that he sees the convention as an unalloyed opportunity for Trump on that score. The conventions first night, he said, will be focused on how to make America safe again.
Whether the convention accomplishes that goal rests on two things that are uncontrollable by Manafort or event organizers: an outbreak of violence here or elsewhere, and Donald Trump.
Under some circumstances, Trump could benefit from the environment of violence this year. Candidates who portray themselves as the law and order alternative have succeeded before; unrest has, if anything, amplified the message of candidates like Richard Nixon, who benefited from protests at his 1968 convention.
But Trump himself has been accused this year of fomenting violence with remarks aimed at protesters inside his events, so he could be seen in some quarters as lacking real concern for outbreaks. That possibility is magnified by his reactions to charged events, which have sometimes been layered with insouciance rather than sobriety.
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Trump dealt with Sundays Baton Rouge news on Twitter, his favorite communications vehicle.
President Obama just had a news conference, but he doesnt have a clue, he wrote. Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse.
Minutes earlier, he alluded to his regular campaign assertions that only he can bring the required toughness to bear in the White House.
Our country is totally divided and our enemies are watching, he said. We are not looking good, we are not looking smart, we are not looking tough!
As is typical, Trump offered no details about what should be done. Further, his approach touched on one of the elements which has complicated his campaign: His personality and self-focus can get in the way of his message.
Trump demonstrated that at one of the highest-profile events of the general election campaign, the unveiling Saturday of his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Typically, the presumptive nominees introduction speech plays heavily on the overarching goals and desires of the ticket, the feats the chosen person has accomplished, and how the choice expands the partys reach into the electorate.
Not Trumps.
His speech drove repeatedly into rhetorical cul-de-sacs that had one thing in common: They were about him.
He spoke of the campaign he had waged and how definitively he had defeated adversaries. He went on at length about Hillary Clintons State Department emails, asserting that she had committed crimes for which she would be punished in November.
He went on a long soliloquy about the Johnson Amendment, which bans churches from political activity. He talked about his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Iraq war, both of which were supported by his new running mate, Pence.
Worse, he stood in front of the podium alone, with Pence offstage as if to telegraph that the campaign was still, regardless of his new partner, all about Trump.
The problem wasnt Pences feelings vice presidential candidates quickly get used to serving at the whim of the nominee.
The problem was that Trump didnt cast any of his remarks in the context of American voters. There was no outline of what this new ticket would mean for the lives of the people who will decide the presidency.
American voters prefer their candidates to care about them, not themselves. President Obama, in 2012, trailed his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, when it came to several qualities important to voters. Exit polls found that voters thought Romney had a better vision, shared their values and was a strong leader.
Obama, however, overwhelmed Romney by a 4-1 margin when it came to which candidate was seen by voters as caring more about them. His victory showed the importance of that attribute.
Trump now trails Clinton on that count by 10 points in a recent McClatchy/Marist poll.
Its not that Trump is unable to put himself in the place of voters and see the election options from their perspective.
In June, in his first focused speech on Clinton, he directly took on the Democrats campaign slogan of Im with her.
You know what my response is to that? Im with you, Trump said.
That message held promise but it has been repeated only sparingly since then.
Much as Trump wont stop repeating falsehoods that make him look good he didnt oppose the Iraq war initially, for example, even though he says he did he also makes clear that his comfort zone is talking about himself and his accomplishments, not anyone else.
At the very least, he is now under increased pressure to make the election less about his desire to quash Hillary Clinton and more about whether he can make Americans feel safe in the process.
cathleen.decker@latimes.com
Twitter: @cathleendecker
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Mixing put-downs with protest, Republicans opened their national convention Monday still working to reconcile themselves to the takeover of their party by business tycoon Donald Trump, who put his unmistakable stamp on the program.
Onstage in a hall bathed in red, white and blue, a parade of speakers sung Trumps virtues, portraying him as strong and decisive, canny and compassionate, unbeholden to Washington and selfless in a way the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, is not.
Instead of a woman who somehow feels that shes entitled to the presidency we can go for Donald Trump, a man doing this from the goodness of his heart [who] genuinely wants to help, said actor Scott Baio, one of a grab bag of speakers that included Trumps wife, Melania, but few of the political stars who normally populate the convention stage.
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Breaking with the usual protocol, which calls for him to absent himself until his Thursday night acceptance speech, Trump swooped in from Manhattan to offer a brief introduction of his wife, calling her an amazing mother, an incredible woman.
She responded in kind.
With all of my heart, I know that he will make a great and lasting difference, the potential first lady said in the accent of her native Slovenia. Donald has a great and deep and unbounding determination and a never-give-up attitude.
If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy, she went on. He will never, ever give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever let you down.
The speech won raves inside the convention hall, but the response quickly turned to criticism when it became evident that several lines were strikingly similar to the speech First Lady Michelle Obama delivered at the Democratic convention in 2008.
And on the streets of downtown Cleveland, in hotel function rooms and, for a time, on the convention floor, the tone was considerably less welcoming toward a figure who has upended not only the GOP but also many of the norms of politics and civil discourse.
Just three hours after the four-day convention was gaveled open, chaos briefly descended when anti-Trump activists sought to force a vote on a rule that would have allowed delegates to vote as they wished instead of being bound to the presumptive nominee.
The presiding chairman briefly fled the stage rather than allow a potentially embarrassing roll call vote, prompting a wave of boos and shouts, which Trump backers sought to drown out with chants of U-S-A!
After several minutes of tumult, Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas took the stage wielding the gavel and called for a voice vote instead of polling delegates. With that, a majority shouted its affirmation and turned back the anti-Trump forces, who nevertheless vowed to fight on.
But on the convention stage at least, there was not a discouraging word.
In the sessions most robust appearance, a hollering and arm-waving Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, shouted out a vociferous endorsement of the presumptive nominee.
I am sick and tired of the defamation of Donald Trump by the media and by the Clinton campaign! he said as delegates leaped to their feet with a roar. I am sick and tired of it!
1 / 72 Cleveland Police Officers stand guard at the entrance to the Quick Loans Arena for the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 72 Protesters from Stand Together Against Trump make their voices heard at the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 72 Protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party march around the downtown area during the last night of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 72 Protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party march around the downtown area during the last night of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 72 Men open-carrying rifles watches Donald Trump give his acceptance speech during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 72 A bystander films the protesters from Stand Together Against Trump at the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 72 A woman covers her ears as protesters march by during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 72 Police officers sit together as protests have calmed down at the Public Square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 72 Protesters get into a heated argument at the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 72 Tony McConaghy, from left, Basheer Jones, Randy Grass, pray together at the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 72 A Trump supporter watches protesters standing in the fountain area of the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 12 / 72 Protesters stand in the fountain area of the Public Square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 13 / 72 A protesters lays on the ground to rest in front of a line of police officers standing guard at the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 72 Police officers stand guard at the public square during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 15 / 72 Protesters get into a shouting match with counter-protesters during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 72 A protesters, who declined to give his name, sports a flower during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 72 Father Jose S. Landaverde, 45, a priest with the Diocese of Quincy in Chicago, with Stand Together Against Trump March, during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 72 Protesters from the Stand Together Against Trump March walk within shouting distance of the Quicken Loans arena during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 72 Protesters supporting socialism get into a shouting match with protesters supporting capitalism, during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 72 Protesters from the Stand Together Against Trump March make their way through an underpass, which is on the permitted parade route during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 72 Police officers move in to arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Community Party attempting to burn an American flag during a demonstration. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 72 Police officers arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Community Party before they could burn a U.S. flag at the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 23 / 72 Chaos broke out Wednesday near the entrance to Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland when a group of protesters tried to burn two U.S. flags. Riot police moved in to arrest at least eight people believed to be anarchists. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 72 A police officer on Wednesday tells the crowd outside Clevelands Quicken Loans Arena to back up. The officer is holding a flag confiscated from the Revolutionary Community Party before members of the group could burn it during a demonstration at the site of the Republican National Convention. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 72 Police officers arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Community Party before they could burn a flag during a demonstration at the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 26 / 72 Riot police try to take control of the situation when chaos breaks out near the entrance to Clevelands Quicken Loans Arena after a group of protesters tried to burn two U.S. flags. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 27 / 72 At least eight people were arrested after a group of protesters tried to burn two U.S. flags at the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 72 A police officer can be seen bleeding after protesters from the Revolutionary Community Party were arrested Wednesday at the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 29 / 72 Police officers arrest members of the Revolutionary Community Party outside the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 30 / 72 A protester smiles for her mug shot while being processed near the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) 31 / 72 Police officers from Georgia form a human barrier during a protest by the Revolutionary Community Party outside the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 32 / 72 Protesters from the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance hold hands to keep photographers from stepping closer to their long Wall off Trump banner outside the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 33 / 72 Protesters from the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance march with a Wall off Trump banner. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 34 / 72 Protesters hold an anti-Trump banner outside the convention site in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 35 / 72 A protester gets into an argument with Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams outside the 2016 Republican National Convention on July 19. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 36 / 72 Protesters sprint down a back alley to get ahead of the police as they try heading into the convention area during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 19. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 37 / 72 Police officers use their bicycles to push back protesters and photographers during a confrontation on the second day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 19. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 38 / 72 A Michigan state police officer pushes back photographers at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 39 / 72 Pro-Trump supporters exchange words with anti-Trump protesters at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 40 / 72 A protester shouts at a Trump supporter in downtown Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 41 / 72 Protesters yell, Black lives matter! during a demonstration outside the convention hall in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 42 / 72 Police officers separate rival groups of demonstrators. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 43 / 72 A flower is held up as a protesters are escorted away in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 44 / 72 Members of Bikers for Trump scold a protestor for allowing the American flag to touch the ground. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 45 / 72 Demonstrators and law enforcement officers mingle on a public square. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 46 / 72 Tevor Leis, exercising his Ohio open carry rights, stands armed in Public Square in Cleveland, during the second day of the Republican convention. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 47 / 72 West Ohio Minutemen, an armed militia, march through the Public Square during the second day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 48 / 72 Police officers stand guard with assault rifles at the Public Square during the second day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 49 / 72 Lou Pumphrey, a U.S. Army E4 is attending the convention and brought along his peace flag. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 50 / 72 Stevedore Crawford, Jr. of Delaware, Ohio, shouts at police officers during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 51 / 72 Protesters from the End Poverty Now, March for Economic Justice, make their way downtown on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 52 / 72 Protesters from the End Poverty Now, March for Economic Justice, make their way downtown on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 53 / 72 Protesters from the End Poverty Now, March for Economic Justice, make their way downtown on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 54 / 72 Anti-Trump protesters cross a barricade as march in downtown Cleveland, a block away from where the Republican National Convention is being held. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 55 / 72 Anti-Trump protesters march in downtown Cleveland near the Quicken Loans Arena where the Republican National Convention is being held. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 56 / 72 Randy Grant from Los Angeles say the pledge of allegiance at the start of the America First Unity Rally at Settlers Landing Park during the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 57 / 72 Joshua Glaspie, from Chicago is relishing the opportunity to open carry his weapon, a Kimber Ultra Carry 2 9mm handgun, at the America First Unity Rally in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 58 / 72 Elan Stoltzfuz, holds his rifle up for photographers at Settlers Landing Park for the America First Unity Rally in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 59 / 72 Anti-Trump protesters gather in downtown Cleveland prior to a Stop Trump march to Quicken Loans Arena for Mondays opening of the Republican National Convention. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 60 / 72 Anti-Trump protesters gather in downtown Cleveland prior to a Stop Trump march to Quicken Loans Arena for Mondays opening of the Republican National Convention. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 61 / 72 Anti-Trump protesters gather in downtown Cleveland prior to a Stop Trump march to Quicken Loans Arena for Mondays opening of the Republican National Convention. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 62 / 72 Security personnel greet protesters during an anti-Donald Trump march toward downtown Cleveland on the eve of the Republican National Convention on July 17, 2016. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 63 / 72 Anti-Trump protesters. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 64 / 72 Members of the antiwar group Code Pink stand in front of the police guarding the anti-Trump protesters. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 65 / 72 Police officers in protective gear. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times ) 66 / 72 About 200 anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter protesters, including Henry Edward of Detroit, march through downtown Cleveland. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 67 / 72 Protesters and police. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 68 / 72 Protesters in Cleveland. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 69 / 72 Cleveland police wait for a 2nd Amendment rally, but few people showed up for the event at Public Square in downtown. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 70 / 72 Steve Thacker, 57, center, a retired Marine, is interviewed by numerous journalists in downtown Cleveland, where a 2nd Amendment rally was scheduled. Two participants showed up for the rally. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 71 / 72 Brian Lange, a Trump supporter from Lima, Ohio, buys a flag in Cleveland to show his support for the 2nd Amendment. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 72 / 72 Spencer Tunick photographs a group of nude women holding large round mirrors near Clevelands Quicken Loans Arena, where the 2016 Republican National Convention will start Monday. The photo shoot, on the eve of the convention, is part of Tunicks large-scale art installation Everything She Says Means Everything. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
The program had the politically idiosyncratic mark of Trump, though it fell short of his boastful preview; he had promised A-list stars, but several on the podium were no longer household names or never had been.
Although the days theme was security at home and abroad, and the lineup of speakers included several with military and other backgrounds to inform their views, there were many more personalities with no obviously relevant credentials, and the scattershot nature of their addresses reflected that.
Melania Trump, who appeared as the featured speaker in TVs prime time, is a former fashion model who studied architecture and design.
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Willie Robertson, who stars in the reality show Duck Dynasty, opened the program with his long hair wrapped in a star-spangled bandanna.
I can promise you this: No matter who you are, Donald Trump will have your back, Robertson said, a line he repeated several times referring to Americas service members, business owners, police officers, job hunters and those who feel the deck is stacked against you and you just cant win.
He may not always tell you what you want to hear. You may not always agree. And it may not always be politically correct, Robertson said. But Donald Trump will always, always, tell you the truth as he sees it.
Moments of gravity mixed in with the celebrity froth.
Several speakers spoke intimately about the 2012 attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans an event Republicans blame on Clinton. Several in the convention hall were moved to tears.
The mother of one victim, Sean Smith, spoke of her frustration dealing with the State Department, which Clinton led at the time, and accused Clinton of lying to her about the cause of the attack, which was initially attributed to an inflammatory video.
How could she do this to me? Patricia Smith said, her voice choked with emotion. How could she do this to any American family?
But in a fitting coda to one of the odder days in recent convention history, the evening petered to a close after Melania Trump finished her speech, walking off arm in arm with her husband.
The overwhelmingly majority of delegates quickly abandoned the hall. By the time one of the nights featured speakers, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, took the stage, she addressed a cavern of empty seats.
The upheaval at the afternoon session was just one of many signs this would not be a typical convention, robotically scripted and hermetically designed to eliminate the slightest discord.
The sun had barely cleared the high rises overlooking Lake Erie when the chairman of Trumps campaign, Paul Manafort, took a rhetorical jab at the host governor, Ohios John Kasich, an erstwhile Trump rival for the GOP nomination. Kasich has refused to endorse Trump and said he would steer clear of the convention stage, while keeping an active schedule of appearances in and around Cleveland.
Hes making a big mistake, Manafort said on MSNBC, drawing groans from an audience sitting in. Hes hurting his state and embarrassing his state, frankly.
Kasich defenders immediately fired back on Twitter, one of Trumps favorite creative outlets, defending the governor and suggesting Manafort, in the words of Ohio Republican Chairman Matt Borges, still has a lot to learn about Ohio politics.
Manafort, however, was far from contrite.
At a morning briefing with reporters, he reiterated his criticism of Kasich, then turned his sights on Republicans dynastic Bush family. In a break with custom, former President George H.W. Bush and his son, former President George W. Bush, are boycotting the convention along with others in their extended political clan.
Certainly the Bush family, while we would have liked to have had them, theyre part of the past, Manafort said. Were dealing with the future.
Setting out the weeks intended themes getting voters to look anew at Trump, litigating the failures of the Obama administration, attacking Clinton Manafort suggested the lowest priority was unifying the party.
The unification is happening, he said despite evidence to the contrary. We hope that when the Bush family decides to participate again in the political process, they will join us. But healing takes time, and we understand that.
It was clear many in the party were still coming around to accepting Trump, who defeated a number of long-serving stalwarts, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to seize the GOP nomination.
At a gathering of Iowa delegates, the states veteran U.S. senator, Charles E. Grassley, plainly acknowledged many in the party still have doubts about Trump. Tell them two words, Grassley advised: Supreme Court.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker hit the same note, telling Iowans that whether Donald Trump was your first choice, your second choice or your 17th choice, he is better than Hillary Clinton.
Staff writers Cathleen Decker, David Lauter, Lisa Mascaro, Seema Mehta, Melanie Mason and James Queally in Cleveland contributed to this report.
mark.barabak@latimes.com
Twitter: For more political news and analysis follow me @markzbarabak
Live convention coverage
Analysis: As violence cuts into GOP convention, Trump under pressure to stay on safety message
Ive got to mow my lawn: Here are the prominent Republicans skipping the convention and why
For Donald Trump to become president, the difficult road begins at the Republican convention
UPDATES:
8:40 p.m.: This story has been updated with crowds streaming out as the last speakers of the night took the stage.
7:25 p.m.: This story has been updated with comments from Donald and Melania Trump.
6:15 p.m.: This story has been updated with comments from RNC speakers.
4:55 p.m.: This story has been updated with excerpts of prepared remarks from Sens. Joni Ernst and Tom Cotton.
2:30 p.m.: This story has been updated with details of chaos over a rules vote.
12:55 p.m.: This story has been updated with details of protesters gathering.
This story was originally published at 12:25 p.m.
Republicans from across the country have convened in Cleveland for their 2016 national convention, which begins Monday and ends Thursday.
Well, some of them have.
Donald Trumps campaign has so divided the party that several prominent figures have declined to attend. Some directly condemned his campaign in doing so; others came up with more elliptical excuses. Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake notably said hed be home in the desert because he has to mow his lawn.
Heres a look at who is skipping and who is going:
Who is staying away
Past presidents
Former President George H.W. Bush shakes hands with his son, former President George W. Bush, during the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. (David J. Phillip / Associated Press) (David J. Phillip / Associated Press)
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush will not be in Cleveland for the GOP convention, according to Politico. Both said they have no plans to endorse Trump, and a spokesman for the elder Bush told the Texas Tribune his boss has retired from politics, though he did make an exception when his son Jeb campaigned for the nomination.
Past nominees
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, has called Trump a fraud, putting himself in Trumps line of fire. Trump has repeatedly criticized Romney for losing to President Obama.
And John McCain, who will also sit out the convention, has been another target of Trumps, who said last summer in referencing McCains years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam that he prefers soldiers who have not been captured.
https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/705434937336451072
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/710928141112332288
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/741590381503086592
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These Republicans are skipping Cleveland.
McCains running mate, Sarah Palin, though she has endorsed Trump, will not attend. Trump told the Washington Examiner that distance complicated her situation, as Alaska is a long ways away from Cleveland.
Republican primary challengers
https://twitter.com/JohnKasich/status/743594477634392064
Of the 2016 Republican primary challengers skipping the convention, the most notable may be John Kasich, the governor of Ohio.
Republicans have worked to convince Kasich to attend the convention in the state he represents, but to no avail, according to CNN.
Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Jeb Bush spar during a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley on Sept. 16. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) (Los Angeles Times)
Jeb Bush, who has long criticized Trumps temperament and preparedness for the presidency, will join his brother and father in staying out of Cleveland.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio announced recently that he will campaign for his Senate seat instead, backtracking just last month on his longtime plan to give up the seat.
"Florida has always been a competitive state and it will be this fall," said a Rubio spokeswoman.
Still, Rubio was on the list of speakers released by the party Sunday afternoon. He will address delegates via video.
And Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will instead perform pro bono eye surgeries and hold town-hall events across his state.
Live coverage of the convention
Capitol Hill
Heres why some lawmakers say theyre skipping the trip to Cleveland:
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, foreground, will not attend the GOP convention in Cleveland. (Win McNamee / Getty Images) (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) Ive got to mow my lawn.
Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.) Since the Missouri primary election is two weeks after the convention hell be in Missouri, his communications director said in an email.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) She will be holding events in New Hampshire instead, said her press secretary.
Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.) A spokesman told The Hill that Sasse would watch some dumpster fires with his kids instead.
Sen. Steve Daines (Mont.) Daines plans to be fly fishing with his wife.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) Grahams office confirmed he will not attend. Graham has continued to criticize Trump since he dropped out of the presidential primary.
https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/699963954248949760
https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/710134852427841540
The Hill reports Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) will not attend the convention.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (S.C.) He has never attended a convention at the state or national level in the past. And this year is no different, his press secretary said in an email.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) A spokesperson confirmed he will be overseas.
Rep. Mia Love (Utah) Rep. Love will be working in her district next week, a spokesperson emailed.
Sen. Mark Steven Kirk (Ill.)
Sen. Michael D. Crapo (Idaho)
Sen. David Vitter (La.)
Who is headed to Cleveland
Ted Cruz will speak at the Republican National Convention. (Anthony Wahl / Associated Press) (Anthony Wahl / Associated Press)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz agreed to speak following a positive and productive meeting with Trump in Washington this month, but he stopped short of offering a formal endorsement.
Trump and Cruz dealt each other harsh criticism as the Republican primary field whittled down. Cruz repeatedly questioned Trumps ability to run the country. Trump launched several personal attacks on Cruz, including falsely linking Cruzs father to the assassination of President Kennedy.
https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/723544858128879616
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a former Trump challenger, will speak at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press) (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, another former Trump challenger, has said he will support Trumps candidacy, though without the enthusiasm of typical endorsements. He had thrown the same support behind Ted Cruz when he was still in the race in April.
https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/722913494073524224
https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/750718195548430336
Other former primary opponents of Trump speaking at the convention include Dr. Ben Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Senators slated to speak include Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Joni Ernst (Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.). Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) will also address the convention.
jill.ornitz@latimes.com
Follow me: @Jill_Ornitz
Live convention coverage
Donald Trump provides unconventional story for TV coverage of convention
Analysis: In a time of tumult, Trump and Clinton compete to be seen as the better leader
Party conventions have a long history of getting out of control
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 Washington Post/ABC News poll released over the weekend, for example, found 58% of voters were 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.
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An NBC News/Wall Street 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 was the worst in the history of the poll.
But Clintons image was only somewhat better: 34% positive, 56% negative.
Despite the unpopularity of the two major-party presumptive nominees, third parties arent garnering a 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 Street Journal survey.
The two drew roughly equally from 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 four 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 was 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 almost all show a very close race, with most showing a slim lead for the Democrat. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had Clinton ahead 46%-41%. The Washington Post/ABC poll had her leading 47%-43%. Both leads were 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, with Trump ahead by less than a point. The small lead that Trump had in the poll last week appears to have dwindled, with Clinton at least partially recovering from the slide in her support that came after harsh criticism from FBI Director James Comey over her emails.
Similar verdicts have come from recent polls of swing states, which show close contests in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Virginia and elsewhere.
David.Lauter@latimes.com
For more on Politics and Policy, follow me @DavidLauter
Live convention coverage
Analysis: As violence cuts into GOP convention, Trump under pressure to stay on safety message
Ive got to mow my lawn: Here are the prominent Republicans skipping the convention and why
For Donald Trump to become president, the difficult road begins at the Republican convention
Californias delegates will have the longest commute to the GOP convention this week. Theyll have to travel a staggering 60 miles each way to get to the Quicken Loans Arena.
Thats part of a pattern. Delegations from states Donald Trump would be unlikely to win or ones that are not competitive this fall got less favorable geographic turf for their hotels, with the exception of the presumptive presidential nominees home state of New York.
The assignments were made by the Republican Party, long before it was clear Trump would be the last man standing.
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Not to worry, though. California got prime front-and-center seating on the convention floor.
See how far your delegation has to travel from the hotel to the convention site.
jon.schleuss@latimes.com
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California delegation gets great seats on convention floor for a reason
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Erdogan's purge picks up pace as allies warn him not to go too far
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's retribution against this weekends coup-plotters picked up pace Monday as his EU allies warned him not to go too far, matching talk of reintroducing the death penalty with threats to suspend the path to EU membership.
GALLERY
A handout picture provided by Prime Minister Press Office shows Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim speaks after ministerial cabinet meeting in Ankara, Turkey, 18 July 2016.
Istanbul (dpa) - Less than two days after the attempted coup was shut down, government officials reported thousands of arrests and detentions, essentially hollowing out parts of the armed forces and the civil service.Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday that the most recent tally of coup-related arrests was 7,543 arrests, including 6,038 soldiers, 100 police officers, 755 judges and prosecutors and 650 civilians.In all, more than 13,000 government workers - excluding the armed forces - have been suspended, according to Yildirim. There appeared to be some overlap between non-military suspensions and the arrests of civil servants.All civil servants in the country - more than 3 million people - were ordered to return to their duties as soon as possible and all annual leave for employees was cancelled until further notice, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.The question in Turkey now turned to how to punish all the alleged coup plotters, who stand accused of leading an uprising that started late Friday before being crushed by loyalists. Yildirim said Monday the death toll among loyalist forces was 60 police officers and three soldiers, on top of 145 civilians killed.Among putsch backers, Yildirim reported 24 dead and 50 injured. That contradicted earlier Foreign Ministry figures stating more than 100 had died. Nearly 1,491 people - loyalists and civilians- were reported injured.Erdogan said he and legislators will discuss reviving the death penalty, which has not been used in Turkey since 1984 and was abolished in 2004."It will take a parliamentary decision for that to take action in the form of a constitutional measure. So the leaders will have to come together, discuss it. If they accept to discuss it then as the president I will approve any decision to come out of the parliament," Erdogan told CNN from Istanbul.In his first interview since the failed putsch, Erdogan denounced the "clear crime of treason."Reinstituting capital punishment would be diplomatically troubling to many of Turkeys Western allies. The EU - which Turkey has sought to join since 1999 - has no member that allows the death penalty.Germany said that restoring the death penalty would lead to a suspension of EU membership talks.Nonetheless Erdogan has pledged the "cleansing" of state institutions will continue, saying a cancer had spread like a "virus" and needed to be eradicated.Turkish authorities, including prosecutors, on Monday began a search at Incirlik airbase in the south of the country, Hurriyet newspaper reported.General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of Incirlik airbase, was arrested with 10 of his soldiers for alleged complicity on Sunday.The joint US-Turkish base, which is also host to soldiers from several countries, including Germany, was reportedly used during the failed coup attempt, which saw mutineers hijack fighter jets. The base is used by the US for its air campaign against Islamic State.The alleged ringleader of the coup, former air force head Akin Ozturk, has denied involvement. Ozturks testimony to prosecutors was leaked to private media outlets, who posted it online, showing he categorically denied being part of the coup plot at any level.Ozturk has been shown on state media in custody, badly battered and bloody, his ear bandaged. Many of those in custody - including some of the more than 100 generals and admirals detained - have been shown with severe bruise marks, some stripped to their underwear.The diplomatic fight was also touching the United States, where alleged coup organizer Fethullah Gulen, once a close Erdogan ally, resides. Turkey has demanded Gulen be extradited, despite Gulens insistence he had nothing to do with the coup.The United States has said it would look at any extradition requests, but US Secretary of State John Kerry also made clear Monday that Turkey should respect the rule of law. Erdogan said a request would be made soon.The US embassy in Ankara also reacted to news reports and comments from public figures that Washington "in some way supported the coup attempt.""This is categorically untrue, and such speculation is harmful to the decades-long friendship between two great nations," a statement from the embassy said.Meanwhile, the US has lifted a ban on flights to and from Turkey that was put in place following the coup attempt.
Forty years ago, Republicans held a riveting, robust convention in Kansas City, where a rebel Californian nearly wrested the partys nomination from a powerful sitting president.
Compared to this weeks horror tale in Cleveland, the Kansas City story was like a Frank Capra feel-good movie starring a popular but underestimated former so-called B-movie actor.
I hated that expression, says Stu Spencer, who was Ronald Reagans chief strategist for most of his winning election campaigns. In 1976, however, he was advising the other side: President Gerald R. Fords.
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Back then everyone was taking Reagan too lightly, Spencer recalls. I was running around the White House saying, This guy is tough. Hes serious. He can really win.
The convention showed American politics at its best: Rough but respectful, cutthroat but civil.
No Donald Trump-like Lyin Jerry or Corrupt Ron.
There was no anti-Ford animus in our meetings, says Steve Merksamer, then a California delegate, later chief aide to Gov. George Deukmejian and since then a highly successful Sacramento-based political attorney.
Jerry Ford was a good man, well-respected and well-qualified to be president. Its just that Reagan was exciting and he energized people. Ford didnt.
Or, as I quoted California state Sen. H.L. Richardson at the convention for a Times story: Reagan could get a standing ovation in a graveyard. Ford puts you to sleep by the third paragraph.
Reagan and Ford had fought throughout the primaries. As the convention began, neither had enough delegates to clinch the nomination. But Ford led by an estimated 72, with 119 uncommitted.
The former two-term governor with the uplifting message flew to the convention committed to stopping the president.
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That was one huge difference between then and now and why the #NeverTrump movement has been doomed from the start. He may be highly unpopular, but Trump has no rival fighting to be the partys alternative standard bearer.
Trump has gotten this far because his opposition could never consolidate behind anyone, says Robert Naylor, a California delegate in 1976, later the Republican leader of the state Assembly and now a veteran lobbyist.
One thing Trump has proven is that philosophical purity is not necessary to get nominated. I dont find him charismatic at all, but he does have the ability to excite a lot of people.
Weak anti-Trump forces have banked on trying to repeal a convention rule that the Ford camp rammed through in 76: a requirement that delegates, on the first ballot, be bound by the wishes of their states primary voters. No conscience voting.
Strangely, Reagans strategists didnt aggressively contest that rule. Instead, they staked their insurgency on trying to force a candidate to name his running mate before the presidential nomination roll call.
They figured if Ford did that, he would make enemies of several vice presidential wannabes. And it might mitigate some of Reagans self-inflicted damage from having selected liberal Sen. Richard B. Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his veep three weeks earlier.
Reagan was desperately trying to attract moderate Rust Belt delegates. But the surprise move angered many southerners.
I had followed Reagan on a damage-control trip to Mississippi, where one delegate, asked about Schweiker, told me: I am still chewing on him. I cant get him down.
In Kansas City, Californians were given daily assignments to lobby specific delegates from other states. The main organizer was Lyn Nofziger, an aggressive former chief political writer for Copley newspapers who had been Reagans first press secretary.
Lyn instructed us how to conduct ourselves, Naylor recalls. One of our delegates asked him, What should be our demeanor? Lyn answered, The meaner the better.
In fact, one of my most vivid memories of that week was Nofziger grabbing a delegate from another state by the collar and shoving him into a tiny makeshift enclosure on the convention floor for a finger-jabbing, intimidating lecture.
But the president had unmatched powers of persuasion White House dinners, rides on Air Force One and barrels of pork.
A lot of people got flights, got hospitals in their districts, a few guys got pardons, Spencer remembers, chuckling.
The California delegation was relegated to the back of the hall by Ford-directed convention planners. From there, they loudly cheered or booed, and stood on their seats, thumbs up or down depending on the situation. As the week progressed they became more disruptive and depressed.
Reagan narrowly lost the test vote on the vice presidential mandate. That led to Fords first ballot nomination by a relatively small margin of 117 votes. California cast all 167 of its votes for Reagan.
This week, all 172 California votes are in Trumps column.
Before Kansas City, there hadnt been a tightly contested Republican convention in 24 years, since Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Sen. Robert Taft in 1952. And there hasnt been another one for either party since 1976.
Spencer thinks Reagan strategists blew it by choosing a procedural rule for the test vote. If theyd made it over a question of philosophy or just gone straight to the nominating vote, he says, I dont think we could have held our delegates. Many loved Reagan.
The morning after the convention ended, Reagan thanked the California delegation. Reciting an English warriors ballad, he said: Ill lay me down and bleed awhile. Though I am wounded, I am not slain. I shall rise and fight again.
There werent many dry eyes. And the triumphant 1980 campaign was launched.
george.skelton@latimes.com
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An Irvine man pleaded guilty Tuesday in New York federal court to playing a part in a mortgage scam that bilked 8,000 homeowners out of $18.5 million, authorities said.
From 2011 through May 2014, Ped Abghari, also known as Ted Allen, was president of an Irvine telemarketing company that sold bogus loan modification services, according to a news release from the U.S. attorneys office in Manhattan.
Prosecutors said Abgharis company targeted homeowners across the nation who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments and convinced them to pay up-front fees for services they would never receive.
The companys sales force falsely told the homeowners that they would be getting services from a law firm, that they were pre-approved for a better loan or that any fees they paid would be passed on to the mortgage lender, according to authorities.
Abghari, 38, and his co defendant, Justin Romano, 41, of Blue Point, N.Y., each pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Each of those counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Abghari also pleaded guilty to misprision or failure to report a felony, which could carry a three-year prison term.
Both defendants are scheduled for sentencing in January.
Instead of helping to lift desperate homeowners out of debt, Abghari and Romano pushed them deeper in through exorbitant fees for mortgage modification services they never intended to provide, U.S. attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said.
A Toyota Prius crashed into the side of a well-known bar on the Balboa Peninsula on Monday morning, resulting in significant damage but no injuries, authorities said.
Just after 9 a.m., Newport Beach police responded to reports that a vehicle had jumped a curb and slammed into the side of Cassidys Bar & Grill at 2603 Newport Blvd. The car bore the logo of AAA Emergency Services.
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FOR THE RECORD
The original version of this story stated incorrectly that the vehicle was an SUV. In fact, it was a Prius.
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The cost of the damage to the building was not immediately known.
The driver remained at the scene. No arrests were made.
Newport Beach City Council candidate Mike Glenn launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to help bar employees who are expected to be out of work for weeks. By Tuesday afternoon, the campaign had raised $2,285, exceeding its $1,000 goal.
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Hannah Fry, hannah.fry@latimes.com
Twitter: @HannahFryTCN
Donald Trumps presidential campaign has cut a check to the city of Costa Mesa for more than $15,000 to cover some of the costs the city racked up for policing an April 28 rally at the OC Fair & Event Center that sparked a massive protest that snarled traffic and left police cars vandalized.
On Friday, the city received a check for $15,655.81 from the presumptive Republican nominees campaign as reimbursement, according to city spokesman Tony Dodero.
Thousands of people flocked to the event, easily filling the 8,500-seat Pacific Amphitheatre. Hundreds of backers were turned away as the amphitheater reached capacity.
After the rally, protesters flooded the streets near the fairgrounds, blocking traffic. Some police vehicles were damaged as demonstrators smashed their windows or jumped on top of them.
There also were reports of minor scuffles and shouting matches on the fairgrounds property.
All told, the city incurred nearly $47,000 in costs related to the event, Dodero said.
The city determined that the significant costs and challenges that resulted after the event and outside the fairgrounds were part of the protest and not part of the event itself, according to an emailed statement from Dodero.
Therefore, the city only requested that the campaign reimburse the city for ... $15,655.81" for the cost of additional officers and overtime that the event required, Dodero said.
The cost for Trumps campaign to use the Pacific Amphitheatre for the rally was $39,670, according to the rental agreement.
Members of the Orange County Fair Board later apologized to Costa Mesa residents who were adversely affected by the rally and its aftermath.
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Luke Money, lucas.money@latimes.com
Twitter: @LukeMMoney
April 24 will be now designated Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day in the Glendale Unified School District after a unanimous vote by school board members on Tuesday.
Since the 2013-14 school year, students and teachers have been given the day off on April 24 globally observed as the recognition of the Armenian Genocide because so many of them take part in genocide events, such as the annual remembrance march through Hollywood.
However, school officials wanted to locally brand the day, which until now was referred to only as a non-instructional day.
Every calendar in the school district, its going to be printed Armenian Genocide [Commemoration] Day, said board member Greg Krikorian. Its going to be embedded in there.
Glendale Unified is the first school district in the country to establish a day in remembrance of the genocide, which began in 1915 and resulted in the killing of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
Naming the day has a lot more value and meaning to our students, to our teachers, to the whole entire district and the city. Glendale school board member Armina Gharpetian
Glendale has one of the largest Armenian populations outside of Armenia.
Krikorian said the genocide remembrance day is also about welcoming other ethnicities to participate and learn about the genocide, adding that while growing up in Hartford, Conn., he learned a lot about the local Irish and Italian populations.
I think its good to know what your neighbors and co-workers went through, he said.
Christine Walters, board president, echoed those statements, saying the commemoration day is also a lesson about mans inhumanity to man.
I think for us to be able to really embrace our cultural history and our collective cultural history is extremely important and really educating students about how things can get out of control, she said.
While it is important to afford people the time to observe April 24 in their own ways, its also significant for the day to have a label, said board member Armina Gharpetian.
Naming the day has a lot more value and meaning to our students, to our teachers, to the whole entire district and the city, she said.
Elen Asatryan, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America - Western Region, praised the decision during the school board meeting.
She spoke of the massive relief effort by the United States immediately following the Armenian Genocide in the form of aid, including opening 400 orphanages and caring for 132,000 orphans. Establishing Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day is a way of expressing appreciation for that aid, Asatryan said.
Youre also commemorating those who have really risked their lives and gone overseas during that time to really help save the Armenian nation, she said.
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Arin Mikailian, arin.mikailian@latimes.com
Twitter: @ArinMikailian
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Do all hotel booking sites look the same after a while? Get ready to be amazed.
Name: Little.Voyage
What it does: This website opens the door to immersive travel through distinctive properties around the world. Hotels are grouped according to category: boutique, eco-friendly, fabulous, hideaway, quirky and shoestring.
Whats hot: Its refreshing to search for travel by image and experience rather than destination and date. Next to the photos is essential information such as closest airport, destination facts, and currency and visa requirements. You can look at pictures of islands, beaches and cities, but if you want to expand your travel to the ice canyons of Greenland, the northern lights of Lapland, the prehistoric lakes of Bolivia or the neon glow of the oceans in the Maldives make sure you click on Surreal in the Destinations section. Succinct information at the bottom of the page directs travelers to local weather and time-to-go options, what makes the destination special and a short list of things to do.
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Whats not: Its a bit of a chore to book a property its not a one-click process. If youre used to that hotel room price tag front and center, you wont find it here. Scroll down to the lower-right section of the propertys description page and look for your next click under Where to Book. You might find three websites to choose from or just the direction and link to Book Direct.
New York City wasnt what I envisioned as a fun vacation destination with a toddler in tow. Just the thought of lugging my wiggly half-pint to a city filled with persnickety urbanites sparked anxiety dreams before our departure.
I happily discovered Id worried needlessly.
With a little bit of planning, our 17-month-old daughter and her parents found the Big Apple to be a big, fun playground with accommodating natives.
Simply strolling down the streets during rush hour and watching New Yorkers hustle home is amusing enough for a babe. But here are some suggestions to keep the little ones further entertained.
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Central Park
Manhattans iconic green oasis is a definite kid-pleaser. Initially, we aimed for Billy Johnson Playground at the southern end of the park to check out its popular granite slide set into a hill. Its touted as one of Central Parks best play areas, with its stone bridge, generous shade, swings and a small amphitheater.
We also hoped to picnic with the baby, but she had other ideas: She was so fascinated by the blinding green landscape on our way to the playground that she insisted on getting out of her stroller.
She spent a good hour running around a meadow-like expanse of lawn, exploring the trees and rocks while tourists and New Yorkers sunbathed on the grass.
The activity tuckered her out, and she fell asleep before we could get to the playground. But its a good lesson to remember: Sometimes you need to let your child set the schedule.
The park is so ginormous 840 acres, about 10 time the size of Disneyland and child-centric that families could take several trips during a stay and still not see it all.
Some fun offerings include the Central Park Zoo, where kids can spend time with an estimated 130 species that call the 6- acre corner of the park home.
Costumed street performers wait to pose with tourists for tips in Times Square. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images )
About a 10-minute walk northwest, kids can choose from 57 vintage horses on the popular Friedsam Memorial Carousel. The carousel dates to 1908, when it was crafted by Brooklyn firm Stein & Goldstein. The current carousel, found at an old trolley terminal on Coney Island, was installed some time after 1950 when the previous carousel burned down in Central Park. It remains one of the largest carousels in the nation.
Farther north, children can peer into microscopes and telescopes and take in the panoramic views of Turtle Pond at Belvedere Castle, which is set on one of the highest points in the park.
The park is open daily from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., with free entry. Ticket prices vary for the carousel and zoo.
Info: Central Park
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
This longtime Polish enclave with homey restaurants and green spaces to spare is incredibly kid-friendly and sometimes downright kid-focused. My family stayed in the neighborhood a few nights and found that children were the norm at sidewalk eateries.
My daughter and I developed something of a routine during our stay. We started our day at the Brooklyn Label cafe, where we gorged on a fluffy, cheesy omelet, country-style potatoes and kale salad.
The waitress was so accommodating that she brought over a high chair immediately and didnt seem annoyed when my toddler at the stage of saying hi to everyone, repeatedly smiled and waved at her.
Next, we strolled to McCarren Park, a 35-acre stretch of greenery that bleeds into Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood of hip restaurants and high rents.
On a weekday morning, the parks Vincent V. Abate Playground buzzed with children climbing up and down slides, zipping through the air on swings and chasing one another in circles.
The equipment is a bit worn but functional. We soon ventured across the street, where my daughter could run around in grassy fields.
For dinner, we chose a slice of pie at Franklin Pizza. The manager waved at my babe and invited us in, making sure I had enough napkins for the messy pizza, which even still resulted in a messy baby. My babe yelled Ummy immediately after she bit into her cheesy slice.
Info: The Brooklyn Label, 180 Franklin St., Brooklyn; (718) 609-1901, brooklynlabelnyc.com/
Vincent V. Abate Playground at McCarren Park, corner of Lorimer Street and Driggs Avenue, Brooklyn; www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mccarren-park/facilities/playgrounds
Franklin Pizza, 109 Franklin St., Brooklyn; (718) 349-2472; www.franklinpizzamenu.com
Times Square
There was a time when setting foot in Times Square with a child was scary, but not anymore. The area has undergone major changes, and its now pretty safe and family-friendly, compared with a couple decades ago.
For instance, parts of the streets are closed to traffic, so you dont have to worry about getting run over.
But make sure your child is ready for a high-sensory experience. The giant screens, neon lights and throngs of humanity can quickly become overwhelming.
Still, for those with tykes who thrive on intense visual stimulation, this is the place to be. M&Ms World, where you can find every kind and color of the candy, and the Disney Store with its magical mirrors and vast selection of products are fun, particularly for the older set.
Younger kids may be pleased with all the high-wattage marquees and knock-off Elmos, Elsas and superhero characters. Look for them in designated activity zones. (The recent move is intended to curb aggressive tip solicitation.) Still, if the kiddo insists on taking a photo with a character, a tip is expected.
The lights and crowds enthralled my toddler for about an hour. She waved and yelled Hi at everyone. We knew it was time to go when she put her hands over her ears. Thats when we headed to Central Park.
You can also skip the chaos on the streets and duck into a show. The New Victory Theater on 42nd Street connects children with New York theater by using dance, music and even puppetry. Some shows cater to children as young as 2.
Info: Times Square, and New Victory Theater
Tip for visiting New York with a child:
Lodging: Stay in an Airbnb in Brooklyn. If not, try a family-friendly hotel, such as the Franklin Guesthouse in Greenpoint. We did both. Its cheaper than Manhattan and you get more space for your greenback. Its also an easy subway ride to Manhattan, in most places.
Transportation: If the subway will be your main mode of getting around, take a lightweight stroller that you can fold easily. Bring the baby carrier too. Many subway stops dont have elevators. Thats when its time to fold the stroller and strap on the baby carrier.
Thankfully, we had a tiny stroller, which my husband carried over his shoulder while I wore the kiddo. My daughter squealed with excitement as I braced myself to board the packed car. Of course, she proceeded to say hi to everyone, drawing smiles from many of the otherwise stoic passengers. A man urged me to take his seat. I thanked him and sat down. The grandpa to my right played peek-a-boo with with my babe, entertaining her most of the way.
Lighten your load: Consider renting a stroller, Pack N Play, baby swing and other baby gear. There are rental places that will deliver to your hotel. I looked into Baby Chic NY, but I ended up not using the service when I found out the Franklin Guesthouse offered free use of Pack N Plays.
Ship it: Consider shipping bulky items ahead of time, such as diapers and baby formula. I used Amazon for my diaper deliveries.
cindy.carcamo@latimes.com
Does diving into a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken make you a Chinese traitor?
Thats the in-your-face message some KFC customers in China received over the weekend in wake of a ruling by an international tribunal in the Netherlands in a case that pitted the Philippines against China.
For the record: A previous version of this article referred to Jessica Chen Weiss as an assistant professor of government. She is an associate professor.
Colonel Sanders was no party to the arbitration, in which Manila (backed by Washington) prevailed in a dispute over maritime rights in the South China Sea.
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But globalization means the chicken restaurant of your enemys friend can also become your enemy. China, which found the ruling to be anything but Finger Lickin Good, called the Philippines case a trap and said the proceedings had been hyped and manipulated by the U.S.
And now KFC is paying the price.
At an outlet of the restaurant chain in the city of Tangshan, scores of protesters carrying Chinese flags unfurled a red banner outside one of the fast-food outlets. Boycott the U.S., Japan, South Korea and the Philippines; love our Chinese nation, it declared. What you eat is American KFC; what is lost is the face of our ancestors.
A video that circulated on Chinese social media sites captured a protester outside the restaurant trying to persuade three young men not to go in. If there is a war, every bomb the U.S. uses on us will have some share of your money, he chides. If you stop now, you are still Chinese. If you enter, when the U.S. and the Philippines start the war, you will all be traitors. The prospective customers then appear to walk away.
What you eat is American KFC; what is lost is the face of our ancestors. A banner outside a KFC restaurant in Tangshan, China
Other videos online showed boycott advocates harassing patrons inside other KFC restaurants.
KFC is not the only foreign brand that has been targeted with boycott calls since the ruling some self-declared patriots have called on their fellow Chinese to stop buying Nike shoes and iPhones (even though theyre assembled in China) and refrain from eating McDonalds hamburgers and dried mangoes grown in the Philippines.
One mango vendor on the EBay-like website Taobao posted a message to his own online store proclaiming: I love China. Ban sales of Philippine dry mangoes. Everyone is responsible for the fate of the nation. Let Filipinos starve to death.
It was unclear how many KFC outlets had been targeted for boycotts; the company opened its first Chinese branch in 1987 and has more than 5,000 stores in China. Reached by phone, a spokeswoman for Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, said the company had done nothing wrong and was a victim.
The people who are doing this dont understand what being patriotic really is, said the spokeswoman, who refused to give her name. She said the company had gone to great lengths to localize its operations in China.
In September 2012, a dispute between China and Japan over some uninhabited islets in the East China Sea stoked protests that began with online calls for boycotting Japanese automakers and stealing videos from Japanese porn websites. But that Internet rhetoric later spilled into the streets, with crowds smashing Japanese-made cars and attacking Japanese restaurants and 7-Elevens, a chain owned by a Japanese company.
That year, Chinese authorities seemed to tolerate and even encourage some of the protests, with demonstrators who marched on the Japanese Embassy in Beijing saying theyd been given the day off by their employers and police appearing to play a large role in guiding marchers where to go and what to do.
So far, Chinese authorities have appeared reluctant to permit, let alone encourage, any protests at Philippine diplomatic missions.
And Jessica Chen Weiss, an associate professor of government at Cornell University and author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in Chinas Foreign Relations, noted that the government has tried to keep news of the KFC protests from spreading online.
She said the government wants to maintain diplomatic flexibility after the ruling and prevent the situation from getting out of control. It may also be a sign of reassurance that Beijings offer to pursue negotiations with the Philippines is not empty.
Internet censors have removed some of the most heated online messages in the wake of the tribunals ruling, including some warning that war between the U.S. and China was imminent in the South China Sea.
Since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power nearly four years ago, his government has been fairly adept at both stoking and quashing nationalist sentiment according to its needs. Patriotic propaganda can be effective in drumming up support for Communist Party rulers, but once public opinion is inflamed, it can become destabilizing if crowds become too rowdy or turn their anger toward the government for failing to protect Chinas interests.
In the weeks leading up to the ruling, a drumbeat of articles in the state-run media called into question the tribunals legitimacy and claimed that scores of countries (many of them developing nations in Africa dependent on Chinas checkbook diplomacy) supported Beijings stance.
And after the decision last Tuesday, Chinas state-run press unleashed a huge wave of ink denouncing and rejecting the ruling, including a 20,000-character white paper.
Any sustained boycott of KFC restaurants could be a major blow to the Kentucky-based Yum, which also owns the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell brands.
Powered mostly by sales at KFC, China has become the largest source of revenue for the company, responsible for about $1.6 billion of its $3 billion in revenue in the second quarter, the company reported last week. Yum plans to spin off its China operations into a separate entity this fall.
julie.makinen@latimes.com
Yingzhi Yang and Nicole Liu in The Times Beijing bureau contributed to this report.
Follow me on Twitter @JulieMakLAT.
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As Greeks watched with concern the evolution of what became a failed military coup in neighboring Turkey, a lone Turkish Black Hawk helicopter appeared in Greek airspace.
It was early Saturday, the morning after factions in the Turkish military attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The chopper sent out a mayday signal. Eight Turkish military officers were on board.
Escorted by two F-16s scrambled by the Greek air force, the helicopter arrived at an airport in Alexandroupoli, posing a huge new political and diplomatic problem for Greece, possibly dragging the country into conflict with its bigger traditional rival after years of relative peace.
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It is the first time members of the Turkish military have sought refuge in Greece, a country with which Turkey has been at odds for centuries. The two almost went to war in 1996 over an uninhabited islet in the Aegean Sea and have been at odds for decades over the still-divided island of Cyprus.
The Turkish officers who fled to Greece three colonels, three captains and two sergeants now find themselves at the heart of a burgeoning diplomatic and political mess that Greece, already at odds with most of its European Union partners because of its financial woes, does not need.
Complicating Greeces position is a newly minted deal with the EU and Turkey in which Turkey gets certain benefits visa-free travel, for example in return to stronger policing of its sea borders with Greece. The aim of the effort is to return migrants to Turkey and stem the flow of immigrants into Europe.
In the last year, about a million people have sought to cross from Turkey to Greece to reach Northern Europe, sparking the continents biggest refugee crisis since World War II. The March 18 deal, criticized by human rights groups as trampling on due process, has stemmed the flow of refugees.
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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke with Erdogan on Sunday, telling him that procedures for the Turkish asylum seekers will be swift but in line with international law and human rights treaties. That followed conversations his foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, held with his counterpart in Turkey, Mevlut Cavusoglu. Those talks gave rise only to confusion, with the Turkish minister saying Greece had promised to hand over the eight traitors.
In a tweet, Cavusoglu said of Kotzias: He said that eight traitors who fled to Greece will be returned to Turkey as soon as possible.
The Greek Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Kotzias reiterated to his Turkish counterpart the Greek governments view that the attempted overthrow of the democratically elected Turkish government constitutes a punishable act.
The asylum request will be examined based on the provisions of Greek and international law, and the procedures provided for under international law will be complied with, it will be borne very seriously in mind that the arrested parties stand accused in their country of violating constitutional legality and attempting to overthrow democracy.
A second Turkish Black Hawk with an extra crew landed in Alexandroupoli late Saturday to fly the first chopper back to Istanbul. On Sunday, the eight Turkish officers were photographed arms across faces, in civilian clothing being taken to and from Greek courts where they were interrogated on charges of illegally entering the country and of disrupting friendly relations between Greece and Turkey. They will not face prosecution on the latter charge.
Vassiliki Marinaki, representing four of the eight, told Greek TV that her clients were unaware of the coup and learned of it after being ordered to transport casualties from the streets of Istanbul. After coming under fire from police, two helicopters were hit and the crews decided to use one to seek refuge in Greece. All are younger than 40 with families in Turkey, according to Greek TV.
Involvement in a coup would be a political crime, which means they might be eligible for protection as long as they werent directly involved in violence, said Marty Rosenbluth, a U.S.-based human rights and immigration attorney. Also, the fact they would almost definitely be subject to torture if they were returned might give them protection under the Convention Against Torture in any case. My guess would be that this will probably go to the European Court of Human Rights before it is resolved.
Rosenbluth added, I would not want to be the Greek government right now. They need Turkeys cooperation to deal with the EU-Turkey refugee deal, but they also cant violate the Convention Against Torture. Perfect Catch-22.
Petrakis is a special correspondent.
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Rebel commandos barged into an Aegean resort hotel with a key mission: capture Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He had been vacationing there. At first, the soldiers couldnt find his villa. When they finally did, the president was long gone. The soldiers were at least an hour late.
They took a top presidential aide hostage as well as two bodyguards. But Erdogan was already on a jet.
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His escape stands as the biggest blunder of the coup plotters who tried and failed to overthrow him. But it was far from their only one.
The string of errors suggested a coup attempt that was poorly planned and coordinated. Despite a long history of frequent coups in modern Turkey, the rebels seemed to bumble through some of the most basic aspects of seizing power.
To begin with, the dissident generals who organized the coup attempt also failed miserably at public relations.
The plotters seized the two bridges over Istanbuls Bosporus strait and the control tower at the citys main airport and attacked the MIT national intelligence agency, a major police headquarters, the parliament and the presidential palace in the capital, Ankara.
But they forgot to say who they were and what they were up to.
Binali Yildirim, the prime minister, beat them to it. Speaking to the news media at 11 p.m. Friday, about an hour into the coup attempt, as tanks sent by the would-be junta were rolling through Ankara toward his office, he said that a group in the Turkish military was attempting to topple the government but would fail.
It wasnt until 12:15 a.m. Saturday that the coup plotters took control of the state television broadcaster in Ankara, pointed guns at a news reader and forced her to read a statement declaring their armed takeover.
The statement identified them for the first time by their preferred name, the Peace at Home Council, a reference to a famous phrase of Kemal Ataturk, the staunchly secularist founder of the modern Turkish republic, who spoke of peace at home, peace in the world. The name choice was the first indication that at least some of the coup leaders were unhappy about Erdogans moves to elevate the role of Islam in state affairs.
Minutes after the statement was read, the president responded, possibly from his vacation villa. Blocked from state television, he called the private television network, CNN Turk, using Facetime on his iPhone and exhorted the Turkish public to take to the streets to oppose the coup.
NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>
He said the coup attempt was being conducted by a minority within the military with links to with Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim preacher living in self-exile in the United States, and warned that the plotters would pay the highest price at the end. He said that he would return to Ankara.
Erdogan got on a helicopter on the advice of a trusted military general, flew to Dalaman airport, near the Aegean coast, and boarded a business jet. But instead of returning to the capital, he flew to Istanbul.
That carried its own risks, because the control tower was still under the control of the coup plotters, who had turned off the runway lights and easily could have been using parked vehicles to block landings.
The president discussed the dangers with the pilot, he later told his justice minister, Bekir Bozdag, asking: Can you land with your own lights even if they dont allow you to land?
With enough fuel to fly for four hours, the president and the pilot had many options. Finally, they agreed to circle the airfield before deciding whether to land using only the lights of the plane.
1 / 89 Mourners carry the coffin of a man who died during the coup attempt at a funeral ceremony at Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey. Support from the highest ranks in the army helped keep President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in power. (Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP/Getty Images) 2 / 89 Women react during the funeral of a victim of the failed coup attempt in Istanbul, Turkey. (Gurcan Ozturk / AFP/Getty Images) 3 / 89 A Turkish police officer restrains a man during an operation in front of the courthouse in Ankara. Turkey has detained more than 7,500 suspects it says were involved in the failed coup attempt. (Ilyas Akengin / AFP/Getty Images) 4 / 89 Turkish police patrol during an operation in front of the courthouse in Ankara. (Ilyas Akengin / AFP/Getty Images) 5 / 89 A boy is wrapped in a flag of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in Taksim Square. Turkish authorities pressed on with a crackdown against suspects in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Daniel Mihailescu / AFP/Getty Images) 6 / 89 Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire Friday while protesting the coup attempt, mourn at his funeral in Ankara. (Hussein Malla / Associated Press) 7 / 89 Members of the public cheer as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim speaks after a meeting with the Turkish Speaker of Parliament at the Turkish Grand Assembly in Ankara. (ADEM ALTAN / AFP/Getty Images) 8 / 89 Women try to take pictures of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan walking through the crowd of supporters, as security officers stand on a roof in Istanbul (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 9 / 89 Turkish anti riot police officers escort Turkish soldiers who allegedly took part in a military coup in the Bakirkoy district in Istanbul (OZAN KOSE / AFP/Getty Images) 10 / 89 People kick and beat a Turkish soldier that participated in the attempted coup, on Istanbuls Bosporus Bridge. (Selcuk Samiloglu / AP) 11 / 89 Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans and hold flags during a demonstration, against the failed Army coup attempt. (SEDAT SUNA / EPA) 12 / 89 A woman takes a picture of herself in front a damaged Turkish military APC that was attacked by protesters near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara. (Hussein Malla / AP) 13 / 89 Pro-Erdogan protesters wave Turkish flags and shout slogans as they demonstrate in Istanbul in support the government following a failed coup attempt. (ARIS MESSINIS / AFP/Getty Images) 14 / 89 Turkish citizens wave their national flags as they protest against the military coup outside Turkeys parliament near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara, Turkey. (Hussein Malla / Associated Press) 15 / 89 A Turkish police officer embraces a man atop an empty tank that had been used in the coup attempt in Istanbul. (Bulent Kilic / AFP/Getty Images) 16 / 89 People wave Turkish flags at the Ataturk airport in Istanbul, which was taken over by supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Gurcan Ozturk / AFP/Getty Images) 17 / 89 A lawmaker addresses a nearly empty chamber of Turkeys parliament in Ankara on July 16, 2016. (Burhan Ozbilici / Associated Press) 18 / 89 Passengers whose flights were canceled because of the coup attempt wait at Ataturk airport in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (Tolga Bozoglu / EPA) 19 / 89 People waving Turkish flags take to the streets of Ankara in opposition to the military coup attempt. (Adem Altan / AFP/Getty Images) 20 / 89 People sit next to a giant Turkish flag after they took over a military position at the Ataturk airport in Istanbul. (Gurcan Ozturk / AFP/Getty Images) 21 / 89 People react after they take over a military position on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (BULENT KILIC / AFP/Getty Images) 22 / 89 Turkish people holding flags are driven in a car, backdropped by Istanbuls iconic Bosphorus Bridge, Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 23 / 89 Turkish people celebrate as Turkish police officers, loyal to the government, stand atop tanks abandoned by Turkish army officers against a backdrop of Istanbuls iconic Bosporus Bridge, Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 24 / 89 Women react after people took over military positions on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (OZAN KOSE / AFP/Getty Images) 25 / 89 People try to stop a Turkish police armored vehicle carrying Turkish soldiers that participated in the coup and surrendered, Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 26 / 89 Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge. (Gokhan Tan / Getty Images) 27 / 89 Clothes and weapons beloging to surrendered soldiers involved in the coup attempt lie abandoned on the ground on Bosphorus Bridge. (Gokhan Tan / Getty Images) 28 / 89 Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge. (Gokhan Tan / Getty Images) 29 / 89 Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge. (Gokhan Tan / Getty Images) 30 / 89 A police officer talks with soldiers involved in the coup attempt after they surrendered on Bosphorus bridge. (Gokhan Tan / Getty Images) 31 / 89 Turkish anti-riot police officers use water cannon on people as a police bus carrying detained Turkish soldiers passes over the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. (Ozan Kose / AFP/Getty Images) 32 / 89 People react after they took over military positions on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. (OZAN KOSE / AFP/Getty Images) 33 / 89 In this image taken from video provided by Anadolu Agency, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to the media Saturday, July 16, 2016 in Istanbul. Erdogan said that his government was working to crush a coup attempt after a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens dead and at least 150 people wounded. (Anadolu Agency / Associated Press) 34 / 89 Turkish people gather near a burned car in Istanbul, Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 35 / 89 People gather around a car which was crushed by a tank in Kizilay Square. (Burhan Ozbilici / Associated Press) 36 / 89 A car burns during a firefight between Turkish army and Turkish police in Istanbuls Taksim Square. (Cavit Ozgul / Associated Press) 37 / 89 Turkish soldiers arrested by police sit in a police bus in Istanbuls Taksim Square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Selcuk Samiloglu / Associated Press) 38 / 89 People take to the streets in Ankara, Turkey. (ADEM ALTAN / AFP/Getty Images) 39 / 89 A Turkish soldier, arrested by civilians, is led to be handed to police officers in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Selcuk Samiloglu / Associated Press) 40 / 89 A man holds the flag of Turkey in front of a destroyed car, crashed by a military tank. (Burhan Ozbilici / Associated Press) 41 / 89 Turkish soldiers, arrested by civilians, are handed to police officers in Istanbuls Taksim Square. (Selcuk Samiloglu / Associated Press) 42 / 89 Turkish people, protesting against the coup, in Istanbul early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Omer Kuscu / Associated Press) 43 / 89 A Turkish soldier, arrested by civilians, is walked to be handed to police officers, in Istanbuls Taksim Square. (Selcuk Samiloglu / Associated Press) 44 / 89 People gather in Ankaras main Kizilay Square to protest an attemped military coup. (Burhan Ozbilici / Associated Press) 45 / 89 A Turkish soldier that participated in the coup and apprehended by civilians is escorted to be handed over to police, in Istanbuls Taksim Square. (Selcuk Samiloglu / Associated Press) 46 / 89 Supporters of Turkeys president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, protest in Istanbuls Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 47 / 89 A woman lies on the ground in Ankara, Turkey. (Gokhan Sahin / Getty Images) 48 / 89 People take over a tank near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge during clashes with military forces in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (GURCAN OZTURK / AFP/Getty Images) 49 / 89 People take over a tank near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge during clashes with military forces in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (GURCAN OZTURK / AFP/Getty Images) 50 / 89 People take over a tank near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge during clashes with military forces in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (GURCAN OZTURK / AFP/Getty Images) 51 / 89 People take over a tank near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge during clashes with military forces in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (GURCAN OZTURK / AFP/Getty Images) 52 / 89 People take to the streets near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge during clashes with military forces in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. (GURCAN OZTURK / AFP/Getty Images) 53 / 89 Turkish solders at Taksim square as people react. (OZAN KOSE / AFP/Getty Images) 54 / 89 A tank is parked in the entrance to Istanbuls Ataturk airport, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Ismail Coskun / Associated Press) 55 / 89 People protesting against the coup wave a Turkish flag in Istanbuls Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 56 / 89 An injured man is attended to by police when Turkish soldiers opened fire to disperse the crowd in Istanbuls Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 57 / 89 Turkish army vehicles enter the Ataturk Airport on July 16, 2016 in Istanbul. (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 58 / 89 Turkish armys tank enter the Ataturk Airport on July 16, 2016 in Istanbul. (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 59 / 89 A passenger walks with her luggage as Turkish armys tanks enter the Ataturk Airport on July 16, 2016 in Istanbul. (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 60 / 89 A man lies in front of a tank in the entrance to Istanbuls Ataturk airport, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Ismail Coskun / Associated Press) 61 / 89 A man shot during clashes between Turkish solders and police near Taksim square in Istanbul on July 16, 2016 is treated by paramedics. (OZAN KOSE / AFP/Getty Images) 62 / 89 People occupy a tank in Istanbul. (TOLGA BOZOGLU / EPA) 63 / 89 Supporters of Turkeys president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, gather, waving Turkish flags, in Istanbuls Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (Emrah Gurel / AP) 64 / 89 Turkish military control a road in Istanbul on July 16, 2016, after Turkish troops launched a coup. (GURCAN OZTURK / AFP/Getty Images) 65 / 89 Supporters of president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans at the Taksim Square in Istanbul. (SEDAT SUNA / EPA) 66 / 89 People take to the streets in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 16, 2016 in Antalya, Turkey. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images) 67 / 89 People take to the streets in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 16, 2016 in Antalya, Turkey. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images) 68 / 89 People take to the streets in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 16, 2016 in Antalya, Turkey. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images) 69 / 89 People take to the streets in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 16, 2016 in Antalya, Turkey. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images) 70 / 89 Turkish army tanks move in the main streets in the early morning hours of July 16, 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. (Gokhan Sahin / Getty Images) 71 / 89 A man approaches Turkish military with his hands up at the entrance to the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. (BULENT KILIC / AFP/Getty Images) 72 / 89 upporters of president of Turkey Recep Tayyup Erdogan shout slogans at the Taksim Square in Istanbul. (SEDAT SUNA / EPA) 73 / 89 Supporters of president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans at the Taksim Square in Istanbul. (SEDAT SUNA / EPA) 74 / 89 A military tank at entrance to the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. (BULENT KILIC / AFP/Getty Images) 75 / 89 People carry a man shot during clashes with Turkish military at the entrance to the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. (BULENT KILIC / AFP/Getty Images) 76 / 89 A man performs CPR on a wounded man after clashes with Turkish military at the entrance to the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. (BULENT KILIC / AFP/Getty Images) 77 / 89 A supporter of Recep Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans at the Taksim Square in Istanbul. (SEDAT SUNA / EPA) 78 / 89 A military tank crushes a car in Istanbul. (Burhan Ozbilici / AP) 79 / 89 Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 80 / 89 People run along the main streets of Istanbul. (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 81 / 89 Turkish army APCs move in the main streets on July 15, 2016 in Istanbul. (Defne Karadeniz / Getty Images) 82 / 89 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks on CNN Turk via an iPhone Facetime call. (Burak Kara / Getty Images) 83 / 89 Tanks move into position as Turkish people attempt to stop them in Ankara. (Burhan Ozbilici / AP) 84 / 89 Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbuls Taksim Square. (Emrah Gurel / AP) 85 / 89 Supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans at Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey. (SEDAT SUNA / EPA) 86 / 89 Turkish soldiers block Istanbuls iconic Bosphorus Bridge as an apparent coup attempt unfolds. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press) 87 / 89 A group of Turkish internal security officers passes a soldier on the streets of Istanbul. (Bulent Kilic / AFP/Getty Images) 88 / 89 Turkish soldiers take up positions along the road to the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, which was closed during an apparent coup attempt. (Bulent Kilic / AFP/Getty Images) 89 / 89 Police officers stand guard near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara, Turkey. (Kutluhan Cucel / Getty Images)
They touched down in Istanbul shortly before 3 a.m.
Back in the Aegean coastal town of Marmaris at the Turban hotel, where Erdogan had been vacationing, the rebel commanders had just arrived.
Three helicopters deposited more than two dozen soldiers in red berets and camouflage uniforms, according to Ali Gundogan, a local journalist who had come on his motorbike and climbed over a hotel wall. I came face to face with them, he said.
Shoot him! one of the men ordered.
I am a journalist, said Gundogan, who added that he showed them his video camera and refused to leave.
The soldiers circulated among the hotel guests and security staff, asking for directions to the presidents villa, since they didnt know the exact location, he said.
When they found the villa, they threatened to throw a grenade inside. Fahri Kasirga, the secretary-general of the presidency, and two presidential bodyguards were still at the hotel. The soldiers took all three hostage.
As the night wore on and they were unable to find the president, the soldiers told Gundogan that they had no intention of harming him or anyone else. It seemed they intended only to capture the president and not kill him.
The town mayor, Muhammet Ali Acar, said that the soldiers had fired in the air upon arriving at the hotel and that panicked guests called the police to report that armed men had taken over.
When large numbers of police finally arrived about 4:30 a.m. and tried to arrest the renegades, a gun battle ensued in which a policeman and a bodyguard were killed, the mayor said.
Eventually about 15 of the soldiers got back in their helicopters and flew off, while the rest fled on foot.
They left all their machine guns in the hotel rooms, said Gundogan. I guess they didnt want to carry any heavy equipment with them.
Gutman is a special correspondent.
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A man armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled.
Police in the city of Wuerzburg said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and that one was slightly injured. An additional 14 people were being treated for shock.
Police said there was not yet any information on the motive behind the attack, nor details on the identity of the attacker.
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The train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg, which is about 55 miles northwest of Nuremberg.
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UPDATES:
3:05 p.m.: This article has been updated with news on the number of people injured and more details of the attack.
This article was originally published at 2:50 p.m.
In this nondescript Tunisian suburb, friends and family members of the man who drove a truck into a crowd of French revelers are at a loss to explain how one of their own could have been responsible for a deadly attack claimed by Islamic State.
We are not Daesh! We are not Daesh! You must write that, neighbor Mohammed Dahmoul shouted at reporters outside the family home, using the Arabic acronym for the militant group.
Msaken, an affluent community about six miles from the coastal resort city of Sousse, is not known as a hotbed of extremism. News that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian emigre, had been identified as the perpetrator of Thursdays carnage in Nice came as a shock.
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The people here are more interested in socializing and making money than in remodeling the world according to a bloodily fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, said a government official who asked to be identified only as Mehjed, because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The suburb has wide boulevards and cafes accented in chrome. Many cars carry the number 06 license plates of Alpes-Maritimes, an indication of the number of locals who have found work in the French region to which Nice belongs.
Those who knew Bouhlel say he showed no signs of radicalization before he left for France around 2005.
He was a normal boy, happy, said Hedi Garmoul, who was among a group of friends and neighbors gathered Saturday at the family home, a two-story, white stucco house set amid a maze of narrow streets.
For his father, he was a treasure, but everything changed when he went to France.
Bouhlels father, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel, described a troubled young man, always alone, always depressed, but one with no connection with religion.
He did not go to prayer; he did not fast; he drank alcohol; he even took drugs, the father told Agence France-Presse news agency.
Between 2002 and 2004, Bouhlel suffered a mental breakdown that required medical treatment.
He screamed, he broke everything he found in front of him, the father said.
After he recovered, the young man moved to France, where the family hoped he would make a fresh start. He found work as a delivery-truck driver and married a Franco-Tunisian woman, with whom he had three children.
But he was not on good terms with the woman, according to the father. The French authorities said there were charges of domestic violence.
It remains unclear what, if any ties Bouhlel had to the militants blamed for a series of high-profile attacks in Europe and elsewhere around the world. A news agency affiliated with the group claimed Saturday that Bouhlel was a soldier of Islamic State, but there is no evidence that it directed Thursdays attack.
Before last week, Bouhlel was not known to have any links to terrorist groups and was not on the radar of the French intelligence services.
We know now that the killer was radicalized very quickly, the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, told reporters Saturday.
Msaken has reason to resent the association. It was near Sousse that Seifeddine Rezgui, a militant from the Tunisian interior, killed dozens of tourists on a beach, dealing a body blow to the regions thriving tourism industry.
After Thursdays bloodshed, many here worry that there will be a backlash against the large North African community in Nice and other French Riviera cities.
Ben Mohamed Ben Abdeljalil, who was drinking coffee with friends at one of Msakens popular cafes Saturday, is afraid for the safety of a brother in Nice.
This will make it bad, he said. This will make it very bad.
Still, those gathered outside the family home insist they will stand by the Bouhlels.
We are a close neighborhood. Everyone knows everyone. We are a family, said Garmoul, gesturing toward the surrounding streets before drawing the fingers of each hand together.
We will support the family -- but not what their son did.
Cordall is a special correspondent.
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From 1518 July the US Special Envoy for the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) Persons, Randy Berry, visited Colombia and Bolivia to assess ways in which the US government may assist in local efforts to reduce violence targeting LGBTI persons, and in particular, transgender persons. According to a US State Department press release, Berry was due to meet with senior leaders from both governments and civil society. His visit followed a trip to Montevideo, Uruguay, on 11 July, as part of the US delegation that attended the Global LGBTI Human Rights Conference hosted by Uruguay and the Netherlands.
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A power outage couldn't keep Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf from making the trek Monday to Allentown to discuss $20 million in new funding to treat the state's heroin and opioid-painkiller crisis.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on July 18, 2016, visits Treatment Trends in Allentown. Treatment Trends is one of 20 addiction treatment programs designated as Centers of Excellence by the state for coordinating care for opioid addicts with Medicaid. (Sarah Cassi | For lehighvalleylive.com)
Wolf's visit to Treatment Trends, 24 S. Fifth St. in Allentown, was to recognize it as one of 20 Centers of Excellence in the state, and the governor went forward with the news conference in a darkened auditorium after the afternoon storm knocked out power to the area.
Treatment Trends operates inpatient and outpatient programs including Keenan House, Halfway Home of the Lehigh Valley and Confront. It's the only Lehigh Valley location so far to receive the state's designation as a Center of Excellence.
"(Opioid addiction) is a human tragedy, but it's also a drain on our economy, it's a drain on our society. So we need to do something about this," the governor said. "(Treatment Trends) has been in existence since 1969. So you'll have to forgive us in Harrisburg for just waking up to it recently."
A Center of Excellence coordinates treatment for opioid addicts with Medicaid, developing a team-based treatment program that helps consumers navigate the medical system.
Before, Department of Human Services Secretary Ted Dallas said, residents were almost left alone to handle the "maze" of services, programs, and providers.
Speaking to a group of Treatment Trends residents, Dallas said, "The hardest thing in the world to do sometimes is to ask for help or to take that step over to get services, and you've done that. That is the thing that we need if we're going to be successful."
The department secured funding in the state's 2016-2017 budget to open 20 Centers of Excellence by Oct. 1. A second round of centers will be announced in August, Dallas said.
"The care that we provide is what you all deserve ... so that the whole community helps treat the person," Dallas said.
Wolf had asked the Legislature for $34 million, and legislators approved $15 million for programs to fight heroin and opioid addiction -- $10 million for behavioral health and $5 million for medical assistance. That money will allow the state to get $5.4 million in federal funds, according to the governor.
"That's a start. That's a down payment," Wolf said.
Last month, Wolf visited Northampton Community College in Bethlehem to talk to local law enforcement and officials about the opioid crisis.
State Rep. Peter Schweyer said Monday's celebration of the center-designation for Treatment Trends shows how far treating addiction has come.
"These facilities are not a problem in our community. These are as vital as the hospital next door," he said.
Layne Turner, drug and alcohol administrator for Lehigh County, said right now there is about a two- to three-day wait to find a bed for someone seeking treatment.
There are a lot of factors that go into the type of treatment a person can qualify for, including gender, mental health diagnosis and the level of addiction, Turner said.
"We're overloaded," Turner told Wolf. Wolf asked if the numbers were increasing because more people were seeking treatment, and Turner said that was the case.
Our fight against Pennsylvania's opioid epidemic isn't finished.
More: https://t.co/FoGwSXFwWt pic.twitter.com/yHxHxbhtjx Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) July 18, 2016
Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The Lehigh Valley's first Mission BBQ restaurant opened its doors Monday.
The restaurant is located in the lot of the Whitehall Mall at 1421 Grape St. in Whitehall Township.
The chain recognized first responders and those who served in the military during the celebration.
Local fire departments, rescue squads and members for the military were on hand for the grand opening. Afterwards, they joined the crowd to sample the food.
Owners Bill Kraus and Steve Newton greeted the crowd after Catasauqua Police Chief Douglas Kish sang the National Anthem.
According to Mission BBQ's founder Bill Kraus, the "mission of Mission BBQ is to serve, honor, and thank America's hero ... To experience Mission BBQ at it's best come at noon, every day in every Mission BBQ ... we shut our kitchens down and everything comes to a halt. We make an announcement; we play the National Anthem. We play that anthem because we can, because we are free and we are safe and we don't take that for granted." (See Kraus's complete statement on video)
The restaurant will be open seven days a week: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday.
Sue Beyer may be reached at sbeyer@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sbeyer_photo. Find lehighvalleylive on Facebook.
Bethlehem police and city officials are teaming up with the local NAACP chapter to hold a community forum tackling race relations and policing policies in the city.
Bethlehem NAACP President Esther Lee, left, speaks as Bethlehem police chief Mark DiLuzio, right, stands by her side as community members gather June 24, 2015, for a prayer vigil to remember the nine individuals murdered June 17 inside the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. (Matt Smith | For lehighvalleylive.com)
Bethlehem NAACP President Esther Lee, Mayor Bob Donchez and police Chief Mark DiLuzio are organizing the forum at 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 22, in Bethlehem's town hall.
The open forum will include discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement, community relations, the department's community policing strategies, police training, diversity in the department and its police programs for kids, like the junior police academy, according to a news release.
More information will be released as the date nears, organizers report.
The event comes following a tumultuous few weeks across the nation as two black men were shot and killed by police in separate incidents, a lone gunman killed five Dallas police officers and on Sunday another solo gunman killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, La., and wounded three others.
On July 11, the Lehigh Valley came together in gatherings to draw attention to national incidents of deaths at the hands of police and violence against officers.
In Easton, the city's chapter of the NAACP sought to open a community dialogue. Bethlehem's NAACP branch held a peaceful, public protest in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in Payrow Plaza, outside City Hall.
In a Morning Call article, Lee criticized city officials for not showing up to the July 11 event. Both DiLuzio, who was attending a police accreditation event in Erie, and Donchez sent statements to be read at the event.
Lee was most critical of members of Bethlehem City Council, but the Allentown newspaper reports they were not formally invited. Some were unaware, while others had prior commitments.
In Allentown, 200 people gathered to call for unity during an interfaith, multicultural rally organized by the city.
Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
For years in the Lehigh Valley, there were several YMCAs and, outside of the agreement among some that a member of one could be a visitor at another, they were very much their own operations.
That began changing several years ago as mergers began to create more centralized and more effective management.
On Monday, the Allentown YMCA and YWCA announced they were joining the Greater Valley YMCA, which already includes Bethlehem, Easton/Phillipsburg, Nazareth, Slate Belt and Suburban North YMCAs and the Forks Education Center.
A majority of voting members of the Allentown YMCA and YWCA approved the merger on May 23, according to a news release.
Earlier in the year, the Allentown organizations approved a management deal with the Grater Valley Y that brought in Executive Director Cheryl Tuturice to run the Allentown facilities, the news release said.
Membership at the Allentown organizations has grown 17 percent in the past year to 3,800, the news release said.
"This is the fifth merger in the last six years and will make us the fifth largest YMCA in the state of Pennsylvania," Frank Frey, who just retired as president and CEO of the Greater Valley YMCA, said in the news release. "We are proud to say the Greater Valley YMCA now includes all YMCA facilities in Northampton and Lehigh counties."
Members of the Allentown Ys will be able to use any of the other regional facilities and take free classes there, the news release said.
"Having this agreement with the Greater Valley YMCA and working together allows us to develop more opportunities," Peter Dent, president of the Allentown YMCA Board of Directors, said in the news release. "It gives us the ability to advance the Y's mission regionally more than we could on our own. And Cheryl is a great YMCA professional with significant nonprofit experience, especially in early childhood education."
A leader of the Allentown YWCA was equally glowing about the opportunity, the news release said.
"The merger with the Greater Valley Y puts us in the position to share resources, including staff, and brings additional expertise to our operation," Mar Haeussler, president of the Allentown YWCA Board of Directors, said in the news release. "We will benefit from a bigger marketing budget and grant-writing and Cheryl's experience will help us adjust and expand our fitness programs and facilities, along with other programs, to better meet the needs of our members."
Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The Portlaoise Hospital Action Committee believe the time has come for action to defend Portlaoise in the wake of another report which they see as another attempt to downgrade services.
Kathleen O'Brien, Committee chairperson, believes the time has come for the people of Laois to march to demonstrate their opposition to moves to cut services.
She said the committee is very annoyed by the report leaked to the Sunday Business post which proposes that accident victims and other major trauma victims can be no longer taken to A&E units in Portlaoise, Naas, Mullingar, Kilkenny, Tipperary, Ballinasloe, Wexford , Cork and Cavan.
Some hospitals such as Portlaoise are already bypassed, but the proposal might only work if A&Es are downgraded and are closed.
They are attacking the hospital every way, said Ms O'Brien.
The Trauma Steering Group is due to complete its work later this year and present its plan to the Minister for Health, Simon Harris.
Ms O'Brien said the public is being left out of all consultations on hospital services.
I can't understand it. All these reports but nobody has seen any reports, she said.
She indicated that the campaign group would ramp up its campaign.
It is time to take to the streets. That is what we will have to do. They keep chipping away and do not give us a straight answer on the 24 hour service. They keep saying patient safety first, she said.
She said it made no sense to downgrade services at nine hospitals. She claimed people behind such proposals were out of touch with reality.
They are just pushing pens. They don't see the reality of the situation and the danger, she said.
She did not believe any political reassurances on the hospital. She said there were too many reports or plans about to believe that a downgrade was not being seriously considered.
There is no smoke without fire, she said.
No update was given on Dr Susan O'Reilly's plan for the hospital when it was raised a the Dublin Midlands Health Forum last week. No Laois councillor raised the issue with health managment.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group said the Trauma referral plan was separate from the proposals for its plan for the hospital which also refers to A&E.
There has been a swift political condemnation of the latest report on A&E downgrades that appeared to undermine services at the Portlaoise hospital, but Laois' Minister has insisted that there is no plan to cut care.
There are no plans to close or remove services from Emergency Departments, said Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan.
He said the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland asked for work be done to examine the concept of a trauma network in hospitals. He added that complex surgery referred to in the report has not been carried out in Portlaoise for some time.
The former Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar agreed to this and set up a group to look at it.
The group has not yet reported and the Minister for Health, Simon Harris has not seen any output from this group, he said.
Meanwhile, the Minister said he had spoken with the author of the main report on Portlaoise hospital.
In the meantime I wish to confirm that I spoke last week with Dr Susan OReilly and I conveyed to her directly the sense of unease and dissatisfaction in the Laois area following recent reports as highlighted at a public meeting last month, he said.
He said Dr OReilly assured him that she would engage closely with all interested stake holders medical and otherwise in Laois to ensure that services provided at MRHP meet the needs and requirements of patients and health care partners into the future.
Let me be clear there has been no agreement between the HSE and the Department of Health in relation to any reduction of services at Midlands Regional Hospital Portlaoise, he said.
Fianna Fail TD Sean Fleming said the leak painted a picture of a disjointed health service.
The latest revelations clearly show the HSE has no overall plan and there is absolutely no joined up thinking within the organisation on this matter.
A recent report prepared for the Minister suggests downgrading the A&E unit in Portlaoise and that some people could be transferred to Naas.
Yesterdays report now talks about downgrading the A&E Department in Naas. Clearly the right hand of the HSE does not know what the left hand is doing, he said.
The TD said there are massive problems in the health service, especially with people on trollies .
The idea of curtailing the services in nine A&E Departments makes no sense, he said.
Deputy Fleming called on the Minister for Health, Simon Harris to make a clear statement on these proposals.
Sinn Fein TD Brian Stanley also wanted answers.
This would create a situation where there would be no Emergency Department between Dublin and Limerick - a distance of 200km!
If this is being proposed by the Government or the HSE, they will learn very quickly that the people of Laois and Kildare wont tolerate it.
This is an outrageous proposition and will endanger lives in the midlands and county Kildare.
He said recruitment problems were being blamed, but he said there would be problems if it is continually stated that the hospital faces closure.
What the Government and the HSE will not say is that their relentless war of attrition against Portlaoise over the years has created this difficulty in recruiting staff.
If a person has a reasonably good job with a company, they will not apply for another job with a business that is rumoured to be at risk of closure every other week for the past two decades.
Proposals by the Department of Health and the HSE to close nine A&E units across the country is dangerous and will put lives at risk, said Labour Party's Cllr Noel Touhy.
He said units in Mullingar, Naas and Portlaoise are being targeted leaving heavily populated areas without adequate 24 hour A&E care.
Just after 11.30pm last Friday night, the Portlaoise Heritage Hotel fell silent as they waited for the crowning of the 2013 Laois Rose.
Just after 11.30pm last Friday night, the Portlaoise Heritage Hotel fell silent as they waited for the crowning of the 2013 Laois Rose.
Chairperson of the juding panel, former Rose of Tralee winner, Muirne Hurley had handed the all important envelope to compere Brendan Hennessy, who had the tough task of interviewing all 19 girls on stage that night.
But the silence was shortlived as Sarah Conlon was crowned Laois Rose for 2013 and the roof was almost lifted off the ballroom of the Heritage Hotel with the cheers of delight from her supporters.
As the outgoing Rose handed over her sash, Ben Tighe, who was also a judge for the competition, sang the Rose of Tralee to Sarah.
I have massive shoes to fill, Sarah said, referring to the outgoing Rose, Niamh Bracken.
The other 18 girls are all fabulous and we have had a great day.
Sarah thanked her sponsor, Dave Power and The Welcome Inn, who support a Rose every year, and the Laois Rose co-ordinator Sharon Preston and her team.
You dont realise the work that goes on behind the scenes, she said.
The Portlaoise native recalled how she had entered the Carlow Rose while studying in Carlow IT and had met Brendan before.
Brendan has been asked to drive us to the event. I opened the door of the car and he asked me if I had my bikini with me. I almost turned around to walk away, she told the audience.
Sarah said she later pulled out of the Carlow Rose due to her college commitments.
Now working in Sales and Marketing in Dublin. She told the crowded ballroom in the Heritage Hotel that she was the only girl in her office with eleven men, who had started calling her Rosy when they found out she had entered the Laois Rose. A nickname that is sure to stick as Sarah prepares for the Regional Finals which will take place in Portlaoise over the June Bank Holiday weekend.
After the show, Barbara Aldritt from Bankz Hair and Beauty offered Sarah free hair cuts, colours and styles for any events will attend as Laois Rose.
Im absolutely shocked, it has been an amazing experience, Sarah said backstage.
She praised her sponsor: Thanks to Dave Power from the Welcome Inn, he has sponsored Rose for the last nine years and has always been extremely generous.
Niamh (Bracken) has done an amazing job, I hope I can be as good an amabassador for the county over the next 12 months.
The joint declaration of Illulissat in 2008 excluding the 3 other Arctic area States as well as the observer members of the Arctic Council wished to prove this. They committed to solve their mutual disputes in a peaceful and concerted way, thus avoiding a universalization of the area that a UN regime, for instance, would have represented. This was the same case regarding a motion for common management of fishing. These meetings between the 5 countries, which may be seen as a form of privatization of the Arctic in the eyes of the other Arctic area nations, seem unlikely to be repeated in the future. This is partly due to the increasing power of the Arctic Council, but is also due to the lack of unity within the G5.
The decision about whether to expand Heathrow is imminent. In fact, it has been imminent for quite some time.
A year ago the Davies Commission recommended that a third runway should be built at Heathrow, not at Gatwick, the only other contender at the time.
We were expecting to hear an announcement from Government before Christmas, but then the Department of Transport said that the decision would be delayed until summer 2016, conveniently after the May elections. This delay was not unconnected with the fact that Zac Goldsmith was the Tory candidate for London Mayor. Zac has famously declared that he will resign as MP for Richmond Park if Heathrow is chosen. He has now said he regrets this but will still stick by his plan to resign as an MP.
Within London, there is considerable opposition to expanding Heathrow. Boris Johnson was against , and Sadiq Khan has recently called for a second runway at Gatwick instead.
After Camerons resignation the Conservatives announced that the decision would have to wait for the new Prime Minister which happened rather quicker than anyone was expecting.
Over the weekend Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said that the Government must move quickly on this.
Tom Brake has made this statement:
We need an urgent decision on whether to expand our airports, but it needs to be the right one. Both David Cameron and Theresa May have previously stated their opposition to Heathrow expansion, indeed Cameron once famously said no ifs, no buts on whether a third runway would not be built. Will they be able to resist the Heathrow quick-fix now that Brexit is rocking our economy? The Government must look beyond London, expansion of regional airports has great potential and would help rebalance development away from the disproportionately congested London and the South East.
So watch this space Liberal Democrats in Richmond Park are on high alert.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
Good news! There is optimism in the air unfortunately it seems to be emanating from the Leave camp.
Is that good news?
Paradoxically yes. Leave campaigners are now in effect held by the political equivalent of the South Indian monkey trick. They cant let go of whatever Brexit nut they grabbed hold of in the tree because, to let go would mean they no longer have the certainty they believed they voted for. They got to this position because the referendum was really only half a decision. Coming to a crossroads and rejecting one route is not the same as deciding which route to take. The Brexit camp understood this. To win they employed a number of techniques most notably what Id term future curtailment, i.e. reducing the argument to one point of direct concern to the voter and then falsely attributing its negative effects to the EU. And, at no point did they offer an alternative. Many voters just simply filled in the blanks with whatever they thought most attractive to their world view and now they are waiting for that world to take substance (If only they could get that nut out).
Consequently, we hear Just get on with it for which we can read Ive got hold of the nut now we just need to get my hand out of this hole or Be optimistic for which we can read Ive got the nut and Im sure someone will rescue me as I seem to have my hand stuck in this hole. The only way theyll get their hand back seemingly is if they let go of the nut but, that might mean considering the decision as a bad one and therefore getting rid of the certainty.
Isnt that all depressing rather than good news?
Well it could be except for the future curtailment bit. Voters who have now (rightly or wrongly) registered their displeasure will soon get frustrated (that the nut aint coming out) and will, once they let go, have a blank space into which theyd want to re-introduce the certainty they are looking for.
So, if the last 9 months can be characterised by a race to the bottom the time until the next general election may be a race to the top.
Now lets give Theresa May due respect here as she seems to understand this and her first speech set out a cake and eat it approach. I dont think that is achievable against the background of Brexit and voters may bite if they detect further flannel. Also, there is a miscalculation here. If the Brexit vote had elements of protest, it was more about unfairness than self-interest.
Therefore, we need a different approach that surpasses that outdated politics. One that fills that blank space to invigorate an electorate with the British qualities of compassion, equitability and graft: exporting those attributes to whatever international organisations those people choose to be a part of. I am optimistic this is achievable and so should you be.
* Phil Craxford is a new member
ARTS minister Heather Humphreys has urged Limerick to keep the momentum going despite not winning the European Capital of Culture 2020 bid.
There was agony for the Limerick 2020 bid team at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Friday as Galway was named as the winner of the prized designation, worth an estimated 170m, according to some estimates.
The City of Tribes squeezed past Limerick and the Three Sisters bid of Waterford, Wexford and Kilkenny in being named European Capital of Culture (ECOC), the third time an Irish city will hold the designation after Dublin in 1991 and Cork in 2005.
Minister Humphreys told the Limerick Leader after the decision that there was a huge amount of work put into this in Limerick and the Three Sisters as well, and I think, I know, that there is great plan in terms of culture and of course Limerick will continue to build on the very successful National City of Culture.
So I would encourage Limerick to engage with communities, to continue to develop this cultural strategy that they have, and their application, it is all in there, and to keep the momentum going, she added.
Steve Green, chair of the judging panel which went right to the wire in making a difficult decision said that they were three very, very strong bids.
It is a momentous day for Limerick and the Three Sisters, not just Galway. Because it is more, in a sense, the ECOC competition has become a journey and one city is going to get higher publicity, but the other two now have got cultural strategies and that momentum and enthusiasm that we saw earlier in the week in the streets of Limerick, that has to continue, he said.
What no longer happens is the bid is put on a bookshelf and everybody forgets about it; everybody, whether media or citizens (must ask) what are going to do now? So that makes it a really positive activity.
Magnanimous in defeat, Limerick 2020 bid director Mike Fitzpatrick said that Galway obviously put in a fantastic effort to win the title, because all three cities worked incredibly hard.
Limerick saw on Tuesday the feeling and the ambition of the people getting behind the bid. I suppose we have to figure out a way that doesn't dissipate, that we don't lose that, he said.
Obviously we are disappointed, but fair play to Galway, they have really had to work hard to get this and it will be a fantastic year for them. Certainly, we have every intention of working with them and collaborating with them. So it will be of benefit to Limerick also, and we will just have to treat it like that.
We have learned so much, we have gained so much, we have made so many plans, if we can put part of those in use, that is the way forward, and that is all you can do, he added.
UP to 2,000 people are expected to take part in a gruelling military style assault course in Adare this September.
Adare to Survive returns for a fourth year running on Sunday, September 25, in the grounds of Clonshire equestrian centre, and this year in addition to the standard 7.5km route, there will be an option for elite athletes to undertake the course twice covering 15km.
The numbers are continuing to grow year on year, enthused organiser Ray Nash.
We had about 1,650 competing last year, and hope the numbers will be up to around 2,000 this year. Many of the entrants are from Limerick and Munster generally, but we have people travelling from across the country, particularly along the west coast, down to Adare for this event, he told the Limerick Leader.
In line with their tagline Endeavour, Endure & Enjoy, the race is not timed, and there is no prize for the fastest athlete, as the spirit of the event is about camaraderie and helping others through obstacles of varying degrees of difficulty.
Competitors will face obstacles involving water, ice, lots of mud, electric shocks, barbed wire, and will have to climb over and crawl under various challenges along the route.
The course is tough! There is no point in lying about it - you will get wet, cold, tired, mucky and sore but you wont be sorry. Many people who have finished the race have said 'Wow, I cant believe I just did that', he said.
There will also be a smaller route for kids to take part in on the day. Entry costs 45 per person, rising to 55 closer to the time, and a booking fee also applies. There are concessions for groups of 20 or more. Entrants are also welcome to take part in fancy dress.
To register see www.adaretosurvive.com.
COUNCILLORS around the county are becoming increasingly worried over a draft fire services plan that is currently under discussion and which they fear will ultimately lead to downgrading of fire stations and redundancies.
There are fears, in particular, that Abbeyfeale and Cappamore will be reduced from a two-appliance station to one, with a consequent fall in firefighter numbers.
The Section 26 plan, as it is called, was discussed at both the Adare Rathkeale Municipal District and the Newcastle West Municipal District last week where a new categorisation of stations according to risk was revealed.
Ranging from very high to very low, Limerick, which is a full-time service, is now ranked as high risk. But the retained stations around the county are all ranked either as medium or low risk.
Councillors were assured the new categorisation did not equal downgrading or a reduction in staffing numbers. Currently all six fire stations in the county have two appliances and a quota of 10 or 12 firefighters and the Section 26 plan does not include any proposal to change that, councillors were told.
Instead, Assistant Chief Fire Officer Scott Keenan explained, the plan includes the what of the fire and emergency services, not the how. It was not an operational manual, he stressed.
Councillors at both meetings however remained unconvinced and fear that one of its unintended consequences will be a downgrading of the fire service in the county. In particular, they fear that firefighters will not be replaced in future.
Adare Rathkeale councillors, who had previously met firefighters to discuss the issues, alsoraised concerns about the age of fire appliances at the countrys six fire stations.
Some were up to 15 or more years old, councillors said. They also voiced their concern that older appliances were being sent to county fire stations while any new appliances were allocated to the full-time station in the city.
Following the Newcastle West meeting this Wednesday, Cllr Liam Galvin, who is based in Abbeyfeale said he was not prepared to support the Section 26 plan if it leads to any downgrading of Abbeyfeale or any reduction in staff.
The Section 26 plan is now required under new regulations from the National Fire Directorate but it remains a reserved function of councillors which means that it needs to be passed by the full council.
I am not going to be supporting that plan until we get a commitment that the numbers and the appliances stay the same, Cllr Galvin said.
Meanwhile, senior Siptu official Con Casey, said they had not received a copy of the Section 26 plan for Limerick and that no consultation had taken place.
He continued: We have not had discussions with Limerick City and County Council about the area risk categorisation process. Common sense would dictate if you are doing risk assessment you would consult with the men and women who are firefighters on the ground.
He pointed out that at a national level, the union had signed up to a formal structure where the different stakeholders could discuss the emergency and fire services. But redundancies were not part of that.
We are not in the business of seeing an emergency service having its numbers reduced.
Firefighters, who are members of Siptu, were due to hold a meeting on the issue this Wednesday.
It is our understanding that Abbeyfeale and Cappamore will be cut, one source told the Limerick Leader.
An appliance bought by the former County Council in 2008 is to be transferred into service in the city while a 1999 appliance is to be sent to a station in the county, the source added.
We were told no new appliances would come to the county, he said.
THE controversial 18m Limerick city footbridge project will take a fresh twist later today, with the public finally asked to get involved.
At this afternoons full council meeting, there will be a presentation on the proposal which would link Arthurs Quay and the courthouse before councillors will ask for the matter to be adjourned to allow the public have their say, the Limerick Leader has learnt.
Mayor Kieran OHanlon said: this should have been done a long time ago.
The footbridge project which is being funded in part thanks to a 6m grant from a private donor has divided opinion in the city, and even seen top architectural firm Healy and Partners to submit an alternative proposal.
Campaigners opposed to the bridge have expressed reservations about the impact the structure will have on the quayside view, plus there are concerns over the flow of the river, and the cost of the plans.
Mayor OHanlon confirmed: We will be putting out a request for everybody to put their thoughts forward. After this, we will engage with consultants. It should have been done this way in the first place.
Chairman of the economic committee Cllr Noel Gleeson added: The consensus is the council needs to look for other designs.
And councillor Cian Prendiville, who has lodged a motion calling for a full consultation on all of Limericks riverfront, added: The decision to have a bridge seems to have come from on high, and there has been a backlash in the community. We are trying to correct that now going back a step and having a full discussion involving ordinary people in Limerick.
Brian Leddin, of the Footbridge Folly action group said: If we are to have an iconic project, and if a generous benefactor is happy to give the city money surely that should come through a public forum. It should be a peoples project.
A council spokesperson said, however, that a design team will be put in place first, before a full public consultation would happen. This, she added, is normal practice.
BROTHERS Brian and Kieran Collopy are due to be sentenced this Wednesday for possession of over 37,000 worth of heroin due for wholesale distribution, which was found in their home in December last.
Judge Tom ODonnell at Limerick Circuit Court has heard that Brian Collopy, 43, with an address at Killonan, Ballysimon, and Kieran Collopy, 40, with an address at St Itas Street, St Marys Park, were involved in a joint enterprise on December 15, 2015, when gardai received confidential information and went to search adjoining properties at 34-36 St Itas Street, St Marys Park.
The court heard that the houses have effectively been merged into one, as there is a common kitchen providing access from one to another.
Detective Sergeant Alan Cullen, head of the divisional drugs squad at Henry Street garda station, told the court when a team of gardai arrived they found 36,021.60 worth of heroin amounting to approximately 10 ounces, or 264.44 grams, on the kitchen counter-top.
Ounces of heroin would normally be sold to wholesalers, who would break it down and sell it on, normally at around three to four grams to dealers. This [operation] was at the top of the pyramid as regards heroin, and the operation was in progress as gardai went in. They effectively ran themselves into a corner, as opposed to trying to escape, Det Cullen told the court.
The court heard that 11 months prior to this incident, and upon his release from prison, Brian Collopy travelled to Spain and other locations for about a week every month, travelling abroad about 11 times.
This is not the norm for someone drawing a single disability allowance, said John OSullivan, BL, for the prosecution.
However, Brian Collopys defence maintained that he has a serious heart condition, and had been travelling there to obtain cheaper medication.
When gardai arrived at the house before 8pm on that date, they entered by force and prior to do so heard the distinct sounds of footsteps going up the stairs.
In the kitchen, the heroin was wrapped up in plastic from black refuse sacks and the entire area was covered in brown dust, which when analysed was found to be diamorphine or heroin.
DNA analysis of the telephone on the kitchen counter matched it to Brian Collopy.
A saucepan containing damp brown powder was also found in the bath. Gardai believe that the bulk of the work had been completed at this point, and that the accused were tidying up their operation, and wiped some of the remaining heroin into a saucepan, before taking it upstairs.
The court heard that Kieran Collopy emerged from the bathroom when gardai entered the property, while Brian Collopy was in the front bedroom.
Numerous photographs of the scene were produced in court.
Some 800 in cash was seized from a kitchen press, and 340 was seized from a wallet in an upstairs bedroom.
In interviews with gardai following his arrest, Brian Collopy said that he knew nothing about any operation in the kitchen or in the bath, and denied that his fingerprints would be found on any items.
He claimed that that windows were being shot in by gardai when they breached the door, to explain his presence upstairs, but this was refuted by gardai.
He admitted to using Xanax but denied being involved in the sale or distribution of heroin. The clothes he was wearing that day were taken from him by gardai, but nothing of an evidential value was found on the items.
Nothing of an evidential value arose from interviews with Kieran Collopy, however there was a trace of heroin found on his hoodie and shoes.
An analysis of the phone was also carried out which showed that it had been used to book holidays abroad through a local travel agency.
Mr OSullivan said that the State has produced a coercive case against both men, who were caught in the act of bagging heroin for wholesale distribution.
In mitigation, the court heard that both men had indicated an early plea of guilty, and have now been in custody for seven months. Both brothers have been remanded in custody to appear before Limerick Circuit Court this Wednesday, July 20.
They face a minimum of ten years in prison. Both are charged with possession of drugs valued at more than 13,000, and two subsidiary charges possession of drugs for sale or supply, and possession of drugs for their own use.
Brian Collopy, who is married and has two children, has previous convictions for drugs for his own use, for possessing a phone while in prison, and received a six-year sentence for threatening to kill.
He personally feels he has left of family down but accepts it was his own fault, said his defence, Michael Collins.
Kieran Collopy, also a father of two, has convictions dating back to 1992 for assault, receiving two years in prison, as well as seven months for handling stolen property.
He has also been charged with larceny, two counts of obstruction and escaping from lawful custody.
Kieran, along with his other brother, Damian, were both jailed in 2011 for five years for threatening to kill Willie Moran.
He is also unemployed and in receipt of social welfare, which the court heard was approved after a considerable time following consultations with the Criminal Assets Bureau.
ASKEATONS annual festival of contemporary art returns this month with an eclectic programme of events throughout the town and wider community.
Now in its eleventh year, the Welcome to the Neighbourhood festival, has brought over 70 artistic projects to fruition since it was established in 2006.
This years programme will see a host of Irish and international artists living and working in the town throughout July. A series of public events, free and open to all, occur during the artists stay, with a special open day on Saturday, July 23, featuring artworks to be encountered throughout Askeaton.
Among the artists taking part are Limericks Liz Ryan and Martyn Turner, cartoonist for The Irish Times, each of whom are developing new artworks as part of the ongoing state centenary programme entitled The Askeaton Commune. Also taking part will be artists from Mexico, Colombia, Brussels and Barcelona.
The festival kicks off this Friday with the launch of a new publishing initiative by Askeaton Contemporary Arts and a discussion about independent publishing and artist books. Copies of new issues will be available, including a reissue of John Carsons seminal 1978 artwork A Bottle of Stout in Every Pub in Buncrana.
Next Tuesday, theres a treat for cheese lovers, with a talk by one of Londons most prominent art critics, Chris Fite-Wassilak. Afterwards, there will be a chance to taste a selection of cheeses especially chosen by Chris for Welcome to the Neighbourhood.
Both events will take place in the offices of Askeaton Civic Trust.
The open day, on July 23, will see the resident artists presenting their projects in venues throughout the town. There will also be a walking tour of Askeaton accompanied by resident artists and curators and hosted by artist Sean Lynch.
Also taking place as part of the festival is an exhibition by local wood carver Seanie Barron and Quim Packard, entitled Sticks and Stones Will Break Our Bones. Located in the Limerick City Gallery of Art and the neighbouring Peoples Park, this joint exhibition explores ideas of nature and folklore through sculptures, found objects, drawings and wood carvings.
See www.askeatonarts.com for more information.
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Toil and trouble
A depiction of the devil giving magic puppets to witches, from 1591. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Although the persecution of alleged witches took place in Christian Europe during the medieval period, it reached its peak during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. In that period, laws in many Catholic and Protestant countries brutally enforced the belief that witchcraft was the work of the devil.
Historians estimate that between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies from the 15th to the early 18th centuries, and up to 75 percent of the victims were women.
Here are six of the most infamous witch trials in Europe and the United States.
Weather witches
An image of a witch from a publication in 1579. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Denmark was the scene of some of the earliest witch hunts in Europe. These accusations were often linked to magical conspiracies about the weather.
In one of the earliest recorded witch trials, in 1543, a woman named Gyde Spandemager, the wife of a merchant, was accused of casting spells that caused the winds to fail as Danish warships pursued an enemy Dutch fleet.
After being tortured, Spandemager confessed to witchcraft and named several other people as accomplices, who were then also tortured and put on trial. None of the others confessed, but authorities executed Spandemager by burning her at the stake.
Several celebrated witch trials in Denmark resulted in the executions of hundreds of people. Historians estimate that around 250 alleged witches were executed in the Danish district of Jutland alone during the 1600s.
Bewitching the waves
A woodcut, from 1508, depicting witches. (Image credit: R. Decker, Hexen, Frontispiz (2004) | Public Domain)
The Danish witch panic spread to Scotland in 1589, when Princess Anne of Denmark left by ship to marry King James VI of Scotland, who would later become James I of England.
After storms almost wrecked the ship carrying the princess to Scotland, the royal couple met in Norway to be married. But storms also struck the ship carrying the newlyweds back to Scotland.
When the Danish minister of finance was accused of underequipping the ships for the storms, he then accused a group of women in Copenhagen of casting spells to raise the bad weather.
One of the suspects, a woman named Anna Koldings named five other women as witches, who all admitted under torture they had sent the devil to climb up the keel of the ship carrying the princess. Koldings and 12 other women were burned at the stake in 1590.
Scotland's witch scare
The North Berwick witches from a contemporary pamphlet. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)
The Danish witch trial and the alleged magical attack on his bride spurred King James to start the first of five "great witch hunts" in Scotland.
In 1590, James set up his own tribunal to investigate accusations of witchcraft in the town of North Berwick, near Edinburgh. By 1592, the tribunal had tortured and put on trial approximately 70 suspected witches, including some Scottish nobles.
Many were burned at the stake, including Agnes Sampson, an elderly and respectable woman who denied, while under severe torture, that she was a witch. Finally, however, she broke down and confessed to plotting with the devil to kill the king.
The astronomer and the witch
A portrait of Johannes Kepler, from 1610. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)
The German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) helped prove that the Earth orbits the sun, but his family suffered under the superstitions of the time.
In 1615, Kepler's 68-year-old mother, Katharina, was accused of witchcraft by neighbors in her hometown of Leonberg. The accusers claimed Katharina used spells to make her enemies ill and that she could transform herself into a cat.
Although Katharina was never put on trial, her investigation lasted six years, including 14 months when she was chained to the floor of a prison cell in an effort to get her to confess. Johannes Kepler loyally defended his mother throughout her ordeal, and Katharina was set free in 1621 but died just six months later.
Salem witch trials
A painting that depicts a witch trial in Salem. (Image credit: T.H. Matteson, Examination of a Witch (1853))
The Puritan founders of English colonies in the Americas brought Europe's ideas about witchcraft with them, and in 1692, witch hysteria reached its peak in America with the infamous Salem witch trials.
The trials began after a group of young girls in Salem Village began having fits of contortions and screaming, and accused several local women of bewitching them.
A special court was set up to hear the cases, and by September 1692, more than 150 men, women and children had been accused of witchcraft. The town executed 19 of the people by hanging.
But public opinion turned against the witch trials, and in 1711, a different Massachusetts court annulled the guilty verdicts against those in Salem still accused of witchcraft.
The witch who got away
A woodcut of witches flying, from Mathers "Wonders of the Invisible World" (1689). (Image credit: Public Domain)
One of the last witch trials in England was that of Jane Wenham in Hertfordshire, in 1712. Following a quarrel, a local farmer accused Wenham of witchcraft, claiming she had caused his cattle to sicken and die.
Wenham initially denied being a witch, but a potion was found in her rooms, and she stumbled while reciting the Lord's Prayer, which people suggested was evidence of witchcraft.
But Wenham's witch trial became a cause celebre in English society, and even the judge took a lenient view. When the prosecutors suggested that witnesses had seen Wenham flying, the judge remarked that flying was not illegal.
The trial eventually found Wenham guilty, but the judge set aside her conviction and suspended the death penalty. She died a free woman, in 1730.
The characteristic flushed cheeks and occasional sheen of sweat on someone whos been imbibing certainly suggest that alcohol has an effect on body temperature, but when you drink an alcoholic beverage, does it really warm you up?
The culprit behind that warm, fuzzy feeling you get after a few drinks? Blood. Many side effects from alcohol consumption can be tied to its properties as a vasodilator (blood vessel widener), including the so-called "beer blanket" phenomenon.
"[Alcohol] causes the blood vessels in your skin to dilate, shunting blood from your core to your periphery," said Ted Simon, a neuroscientist and board-certified toxicologist who serves as an expert witness in drug and alcohol cases. [7 Ways Alcohol Affects Your Health]
"Your body temperature isn't actually changing; you're just redistributing the heat," he told Live Science.
Humans maintain a core body temperature of approximately 98 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius), and most of this heat is generated by your metabolism: a term which refers to all the chemical reactions involved in keeping you alive, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Your skin is inundated with sensory receptors keyed in to temperature changes, so the blood redistribution that occurs when you drink alcohol sends a flood of messages to your brain saying, "Its hot!"
While this may seem like a perk, it can actually be quite dangerous. The natural tendencies of your body to detect cold, for example are there to protect you from frostbite or hypothermia. Usually, your blood vessels constrict in lower temperatures in order to direct blood to your vital organs, Simon said. Alcohol reverses this process. What's more, because your body thinks it's hot, you can begin to sweat a response that is also designed to lower body temperature. Compounded with the cognitive effects of alcohol, serious complications can arise. Last year, the New York Daily News reported that "a drunken student died of hypothermia after he tried to walk nine miles home without a coat on a freezing cold night in England."
A student at Onondaga Community College, in Syracuse, New York, was also found dead earlier this year as a result of hypothermia and alcohol intoxication, according to syracuse.com.
Everything you consume gets filtered through your liver, where enzymes break down what you ate or drank. Alcohol is metabolized by four primary enzymes: aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), cytochrome P450 and catalase, according to a 2006 report by Samir Zakhari, the former director of the Division of Metabolism and Health Effects at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Because your genes code for these enzymes, and everyone's genes are unique, individuals metabolize alcohol to different efficiencies. [11 Interesting Facts About Hangovers]
Alcohol that doesnt get broken down in your liver then enters your bloodstream and travels throughout your body. Alcohol is considered a generalized drug, meaning that it acts on a lot of different body systems, including your brain, Simon said.
"Alcohol breaks down [cellular] membranes; as you fluidize these membranes, you get the feeling of being drunk.
As time passes and your blood recirculates through your liver, alcohol continues to get broken down until it is cleared from your system and you sober up. A number of factors impact how different people tolerate alcohol and experience its subsequent side effects, but in the case of this particular myth, experts agree: Alcohol does not warm you up.
Original article on Live Science.
By studying the genome of the Goodman's mouse lemur (Microcebus lehilahytsara), researchers have figured out the ancient Madagascar landscape.
Mouse lemurs, the world's tiniest and perhaps cutest primate, have helped solve a whodunit about who (or what) disrupted the green forests on the island nation of Madagascar.
Madagascar is a mosaic of different landscapes, with open highlands separating a lush rainforest in the east from a dry deciduous forest in the west. But studies showed that the island was once covered with a patchwork of forests, and many scientists have held humans responsible for disrupting these green spaces, particularly in the island's Central Highland forests, the researchers said.
But an analysis of DNA from the mouse lemur (Microcebus lehilahytsara) clears ancient humans of any major wrongdoing, at least in the Central Highland forests, the researchers said. [Wild Madagascar: Photos Reveal Island's Amazing Lemurs]
"For a long time, scientists weren't sure how or why Madagascar's biogeography changed in very recent geological time, specifically at the key period around when humans arrived on the island a few thousand years ago," study co-author Steve Goodman, MacArthur Field biologist at The Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement. "This study shows the landscape was changing thousands of years before humans arrived."
Two mouse lemurs play at Zoo Zurich. (Image credit: Copyright Robert Zingg Zoo Zurich)
The lemur's DNA worked as a useful tool for studying Madagascar's environmental changes. The tiny primates breed quickly, and are resilient and unique to the island.
"They reach reproductive maturity within a year, and that means that a lot of generations are produced very quickly," Goodman said. "That enables us to see evolution at work faster than we would in an animal that took, say, five years to first reproduce."
Mouse lemurs live across much of Madagascar, even in forested areas that humans have damaged with logging.
"The mouse lemurs are forest-dependent as the forest changes, they change," Goodman said. "By studying how mouse lemurs evolved in different areas of the island, we're able to glimpse how the island itself changed, and learn whether those changes were caused by humans."
Genetic clues
To investigate, the researchers analyzed DNA from five different mouse lemur species. This genetic data helped them draw a lemur family tree, determining when the different types of lemurs branched out from one another.
"We were able to characterize tens of thousands of changes in the genomes of mouse lemurs that are now isolated and form separate species," said study lead author Anne Yoder, director of Duke University's Duke Lemur Center. "By analyzing these DNA changes, we were able to understand when the species diverged from each other, and by inference, identify the ecological forces that might have driven them apart."
Moreover, the DNA analyses revealed that closely related modern lemurs actually live far apart from one another.
"That suggests that their ancestors were able to disperse across forested habitat that no longer exists portions of the Central Highlands that formed the bridge between the eastern and western parts of the island today," Goodman said. It's likely that a patchwork of forests once covered Madagascar, allowing the mouse lemurs to slowly spread out over tens of thousands of years, he said.
A mouse lemur takes a bite out of a persimmon fruit, a lemur favorite. (Image credit: David Haring Duke Lemur Center)
Once these forested bridges disappeared, these mouse lemur populations became isolated, Goodman said. [In Images: An Underwater Lemur Graveyard]
The DNA also provided a timetable of sorts indicating that the Central Highland forest changes occurred thousands of years before people came to the island.
"At least at first, the changes to this region of the island were almost certainly the result of natural climate change over the past approximately 50,000 years," Goodman said.
The former forested areas in the Central Highlands were likely an essential zone for ecological transition between the humid east and dry west, the researchers found. This transitional area would have helped animals disperse between the two extreme coasts.
"Weve learned that its probably incorrect to talk about Madagascars humid east and dry west like they're two completely separate habitats," Goodman said. "The eastern and western parts of the island are just different extremes on the continuum."
The study was published online today (July 18) in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Original article on Live Science.
This digitally-colorized image shows particles of Zika virus, which is a member of the family Flaviviridae. The virus particles are colored red in the picture. They are 40 nanometers (0.00004 millimeters) in diameter.
In a puzzling case, a person in Utah became infected with the Zika virus, but health officials can't figure out how the person contracted it.
The infected person was a caregiver for an elderly man who had Zika. But the case is mysterious: As far as health officials can tell, the caregiver wasn't exposed to Zika in a way that would transmit the virus, at least from what's currently known about Zika. So far, the only way Zika was thought to spread from person to person is through sexual contact, and the caregiver did not have sexual contact with anyone who had Zika.
"Zika continues to surprise us," and there's still a lot we don't know about the virus, Dr. Satish Pillai, incident manager for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Zika response, said at a news conference today (July 18). [Zika Virus News: Complete Coverage of the 2016 Outbreak]
Health officials are currently investigating how the caregiver could have caught the virus, including whether Zika could be passed from person to person in special situations, even if the situation does not involve sexual contact.
"We're still doing a lot of investigation to determine whether Zika can be spread from person to person through contact with a sick person," Pillai said.
But the health officials stressed that the primary way that Zika is spread is through bites from mosquitoes that carry the virus. Of the more than 1,300 cases of Zika in the United States, nearly all involve people who caught the virus while traveling in an area where Zika is spreading. Fourteen people in the United States have now caught the virus through sexual transmission, and one person caught Zika while working with the virus in the laboratory.
"We don't have evidence right now that Zika can be passed from one person to another from sneezing or coughing," or from other types of casual contact, such as touching or sharing utensils, Pillai said.
The caregiver in the Utah case had not traveled to an area where the Zika virus is spreading, and mosquitoes that spread Zika have not been found in Utah.
But the person did take care of an elderly man who caught Zika virus while traveling to another country. The elderly man later died, although it's not clear if he died from Zika or another underlying condition, officials said.
There was an unusual aspect of the elderly man's case: He had extremely high levels of the Zika virus in his blood before he died more than 100,000 times higher than the levels seen in other people infected with the virus so far, officials said.
"This is a very unique situation," with such high levels of the virus, Pillai said. But researchers still don't know whether this high level of the virus played a role in how the man's caregiver caught Zika.
Health officials are currently interviewing the newly infected person and the person's family members to learn more about the types of contact the caregiver had with the elderly man, according to the Utah Department of Health.
The caregiver showed mild symptoms of Zika, and has since recovered from the infection, officials said.
Original article on Live Science.
A solar-powered airplane buzzed the pyramids in Egypt, flying over the iconic, haze-cloaked monuments, during the most recent leg of its historic journey around the world.
The aircraft, known as Solar Impulse 2, landed in Egypt on July 13, after flying nonstop for nearly 49 hours from Spain. It was the second-to-last leg of the plane's ambitious round-the-world flight to promote renewable energy sources and spur the development of "green" technologies.
The dramatic photos of Solar Impulse 2 soaring over the pyramids offer a striking contrast between ancient and futuristic technology, with the solar-powered aircraft representing a way that some machines, including airplanes, could be powered one day. [See more photos of the plane's round-the-world flight]
"This was an emotional and meaningful leg for me, being able to enjoy once more the incredible sensation of flying day and night thanks only to the energy of the sun and enjoying fully the present moment," pilot Andre Borschberg, Solar Impulse's co-founder and CEO, who flew the plane from Spain to Egypt, said in a statement.
Solar Impulse 2 is designed to fly day and night without using any fuel. The single-seater plane is powered entirely by 17,000 solar cells and onboard batteries, which charge during the day to enable the plane to fly continuously through the night and during cloudy weather.
The ultralightweight plane weighs only 5,070 pounds (2,300 kilograms), roughly equivalent to a car, but has an impressive wingspan that stretches 236 feet (72 meters), according to company officials.
Borschberg and his fellow co-founder, Bertrand Piccard, have been alternating being at the controls of the solar plane for each leg of the round-the-world journey. Piccard is expected to fly Solar Impulse 2 on the last leg of the expedition, from Egypt to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.
"This landing in Cairo brings Solar Impulse back to the origin of my dream," Piccard said in a statement. "Egypt is the country where I landed after my non-stop round the world balloon flight in 1999, and it's precisely here that I had the idea of an airplane flying around the world on solar power."
Solar Impulse 2 embarked on its journey around the world in March 2015, taking off from Abu Dhabi's Al Bateen Executive Airport on a flight to Oman. The plane next made stops in India, Myanmar, China and Japan before completing a record-breaking flight across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, in the United States, in July 2015. The plane was then grounded in Hawaii for almost a year because overheated batteries had caused irreversible damage to the plane.
The aircraft resumed its journey earlier this year, in April, flying from Hawaii to California. It then crossed the U.S., making stops in Arizona, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. The plane became the first solar-powered aircraft to cross the Atlantic Ocean, after it flew from New York to Spain in 71 hours and 8 minutes. If the next and final leg of the expedition is successful, Solar Impulse 2 will become the first solar-powered plane to circumnavigate the globe.
In 2013, Borschberg and Piccard completed an unprecedented coast-to-coast flight across the United States, using a first-generation prototype of the Solar Impulse plane. That two-month journey included five stops between California and New York.
Original article on Live Science.
Cllr PJ Reilly said this week that there was no danger of St Josephs having bed numbers reduced.
The newly elected chairperson of the Dublin Mid-Leinster Regional Health Forum was part of a delegation that met with Pat Bennett, general manager of the HSE Dublin-Mid Leinster region and senior officials last week to discuss the issue of St Josephs.
This followed revelations that six long stay beds were temporarily closed in March, sparking fresh fears over the centres bed capacity levels.
However Cllr Reilly said the delegation received assurances about the future of the facility.
The three members of the Health Forum (in Longford), myself, Cllr Pat OToole and Cllr Paraic Brady met with Pat Bennett, Joe Ruane (HSE regional manager), Grainne McGowan (St Josephs Care Centre) and Doreen Mannion and were assured there is no threat to St Josephs, he told the Leader.
A recent HIQA report recommended a bed capacity of 68 at St Josephs and Cllr Reilly said that this number was being filled and would remain at its present level.
It just wouldn't be feasible to reduce the number of patients that are there, he said.
The Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA) has advised local holidaymakers who booked holidays with lowcostholidays.ie (lowcostholidays Spain S.L.) to contact the Commission for Aviation Regulation (CAR).
Lowcosttravelgroup announced on Friday that it was to cease trading with immediate effect. In a statement on its website, the company said that it was closing following exhaustive attempts by the group's directors to rescue the group, which were hampered by the recent and ongoing turbulent financial environment.
The notice applies to four companies in total: Lowcosttravelgroup Limited;Lowcostholidays Spain S.L.; Hoteling.com part of Lowcostholidays Spain S.L.; and Lowcostbeds.com A.G..
Lowcostholidays Spain is licensed and bonded by CAR and details on how to claim, and who should claim against the bond, will be posted on the CAR website (www.aviationreg.ie) early this coming week.
The ITAA is advising holidaymakers who booked hotel accommodation with lowcostbeds through their travel agent, to contact that travel agent directly and they will advise them. Any consumer who booked accommodation only through lowcostbeds and paid by credit card may be able to reclaim against their credit card provider for services not received. It is advisable for consumers to keep all receipts of expenses incurred in order to claim a refund or compensation.
The ITAA notes that consumers who booked accommodation only through lowcostbeds are not covered under any bond. Travel bonds apply to package holidays only.
The statement posted on the lowcostholiday group website Friday evening can be read here - www.lowcosttravelgroup.com.
Patient Protection Oversight Committee to Discuss Consumer Assistance Program for the Aged, Blind and Disabled at Meeting
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Health & Wellness, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events
By Long Island News & PR Published: July 18 2016
The Suffolk County Department of Health Services Patient Protection Oversight Committee's next meeting is on Wednesday, July 27, 2016.
The next meeting is Wednesday, July 27, 2016 from 2-4 p.m. at the Suffolk County Department of Health Services Administrative Building in Great Neck, NY.
Great River, NY - July 15, 2016 - The Suffolk County Department of Health Services Patient Protection Oversight Committee will be discussing The Consumer Assistance Program for the Aged, Blind and Disabled (ABD), at its next meeting in July.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
2:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m. at
Suffolk County Department of Health Services Administrative Building
3500 Sunrise Highway, Building 200
Great River, NY 11739-9006
Administrative Board Room
Agenda
Michelle Bates, Program Coordinator for the ABD, will discuss the ABD program, which opened in October 2015 to provide education, outreach and enrollment assistance into government-sponsored health insurance programs to those who are certified blind, certified disabled or 65 years of age or older.
Lauren Barlow, MS, RD, PHN III, specialist in epidemiology with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, will present CDC-Zika 101 and will provide the latest information on the prevention, transmission, and symptoms of Zika virus
Overview of general activity of the Patient Advocacy Unit
For more information about how to join this meeting on a conference call, or if there are specific items you would like to add to the agenda, please call 631- 854-0337.
The Patient Protection Oversight Committee was created in 2013 by the Suffolk County Legislature to assist vulnerable residents with accessing needed health care services.
The Consumer Assistance Program for the Aged, Blind and Disabled is overseen by the Suffolk County Department of Social Services, which subcontracts with the Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council (NSHC) to provide in-person application assistance at convenient locations throughout Suffolk and Nassau counties.
Local News, Crime, National & World News, Press Releases
By Long Island News & PR Published: July 17 2016
Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano and Acting Commissioner of Police Thomas C. Krumpter respond to the latest shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Nassau County, NY - July 17, 2016 - Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano and Acting Commissioner of Police Thomas C. Krumpter express their heartfelt prayers and condolences to the Police Officers, their families and the Baton Rouge Police Department for the police officers that were killed and injured in the Line of Duty in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. County Executive Mangano has ordered that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at all Nassau County government buildings.
The Nassau County Police Department is taking all steps necessary to ensure the safety of the public and its Police Officers. There will be intensified patrols in areas of mass transit, public gatherings and near critical infrastructure. Social Media outlets will be intensely monitored and we request the publics assistance in any way possible to stop threats to public safety.
The NCPD is coordinating with other federal and local authorities and are assessing national and local threat levels. For the safety of our police officers, the Nassau County Police Department will double the officers in each of their patrol vehicles while this assessment continues.
If you see something, say something. If you hear something, say something.
Immediate threats should be called into 911 and tips can be called into Crime Stoppers at 1-800- 244-TIPS.
Press Releases
By Phil Andrews Published: July 18 2016
Dr. Roscoe Brown, Jr. the famed Tuskegee pilot flew a total of 68 combat missions as a fighter squadron commander for the Tuskegee Airman in Tuskegee, Alabama.
New York, NY - July 18, 2016 - Dr. Roscoe Brown, Jr. the famed Tuskegee pilot flew a total of 68 combat missions as the squadron Operations Officer adn flight leader of the distinguished group known as the Tuskegee Airman in Tuskegee, Alabama. Dr. Brown was also a founding member of the 100 Black Men of New York, Inc. a civic group founded in 1963. He also served as a chapter president of 100 Black Men. I am proud to have met him on several occasions during my tenure at 100 Black Men.
I too was a president of a 100 Black Men local chapter in the New York State for two terms. As the Business Editor of Star Journal News visitors guide, I can speak directly to the influence of men such as Dr. Roscoe Brown who turned over every stone to achieve fairness and equality in all phases of life for African Americans in Society. I recently was interviewed in Black Enterprise Magazine as a BE Modern Man and made mention of one of my mentees former Tuskegee Airman Ed Monroe whispering in my ear on many occasions and stating that We all have a little Tuskegee in us.
Men such as Dr. Brown did not rest on their laurels during their lifetime, and set the bar high for us to emulate during our lifetime. Star Journal News will continue to honor the memory of Dr. Roscoe Brown through the work we are doing by going above and beyond the normal call of duty in every phase of our operation.
Posthumously we are submitting Dr. Roscoe Brown famed Tuskegee Airman as Person of the Week!
Dont forget to follow Star Journal News online on Facebook. Lets pay tribute to his life by liking the post to commemorate Dr. Roscoe Browns tremendous legacy!
Visit Star Journal News online
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
Columnists Press Releases
Muqtada al Sadr, from his website.
Radical Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr said that US troops supporting the Iraqi militarys offensive to retake Mosul from the Islamic State should be targeted by his militias.
Sadr, who openly fought US troops several times during the US occupation, made the statement in response to a question from a follower on how they should respond to the US militarys deployment of additional troops to aid Iraqi forces in retaking Mosul.
They are a target for us, Sadr said on his website, according to Reuters.
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced last week that the US military would send 560 more troops to Iraq to capitalize on recent Iraqi military success in Qayarra south of Mosul.
These additional US forces will bring unique capabilities to the campaign and provide critical enabler support to Iraqi forces at a key moment in the fight, Carter said on July 12 during a visit to Baghdad.
Sadr has previously said his Peace Brigades was preparing to deploy to Mosul to fight the Islamic State.
In the past, Sadr has threatened to attack US forces operating in Iraq against the Islamic State. In May 2015, Sadr said he was prepared to unleash his militia and target US personnel inside Iraq and beyond if the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would have recognized Kurdistan and Sunnis in western Iraq as their own independent countries.
If the time comes and the proposed bill is passed, we will have no choice but to unfreeze the military wing that deals with the American entity so that it may start targeting American interests in Iraq and outside of Iraq when possible, Sadr said. If America persists then it will cease to exist.
Sadr controls two militias inside Iraq: the Saraya al Salam, or Peace Brigades, and the Liwa al Yaom al Mawood, or Promised Day Brigade. Both groups are offshoots of the Mahdi Army, Sadrs militia that fought US forces in pitched battles in Baghdad and central and southern Iraq between 2004 and 2008. Sadr purportedly disbanded the Mahdi Army in the spring of 2008 after US forces battled the group in Baghdads sprawling neighborhood of Sadr City, and created the Promised Day Brigade. Saraya al Salam was formed in 2014 to combat the Islamic State as Iraqi forces in northern, central, and western Iraq disintegrated in its wake.
In February 2015, he purportedly suspended the activities of the two militias, however the groups have been spotted fighting in Iraq since then. Sadr also frequently claimed to have halted the activities of the Mahdi Army during the US occupation, but these ceasefires rarely held.
While Sadr has denied receiving Iranian support, the US military and government consistently contended that his militias have the backing of Qods Force, the special operations branch of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp. US military officials called the Iranian-backed militias who battled American forces up until 2011, such as Hezbollah Brigades and Asaib al Haq (League of the Righteous), the Mahdi Army Special Groups.
With the backing of Qods Force, Sadrs militias maintain the ability to strike US interests in the Gulf region and the Levant.
Iran backs multiple Shiite militias that are fighting the Islamic State, all of which are hostile to the US. One of these groups, Hezbollah Brigades, is listed by the US as a Foreign Terror Organization, while senior leaders in others, such as Asaib al Haq, Kataib Imam Ali (Imam Ali Brigade), and Harakat Nujaba, are listed by the US as Specially Designated Global terrorists. Additionally, the Popular Mobilization Committee, the Iraqi-government sanctioned body that organizes the Shiite militias, is led by a Specially Designated Global Terrorist who the US described as an advisor to Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Qods Force.
[See LWJ report, US begins airstrikes against Islamic State in Tikrit, supports Shiite militias.]
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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Discovering the Best of Norway with Hurtigruten
Escaping to unspoiled nature is the ultimate luxury in this world we are living in. Norway, with its mountains, glaciers, and deep coastal fjords is one of the world's most beautiful locations to get away from it all.straddles the Arctic Circle, wrapping up around Sweden, over Finland and reaching Russia at its furthest east port ofhas been traveling the 2,500 nautical mile route from Bergen to Kirkenes for 120 years since 1896. This Norwegian coastal voyage has been namedby National Geographic.We traveled on the, named after the company's founder -- this is one of Hurtigruten's 11 "discoverer" ships that depart Bergen every day serving 34 ports -- 12 ports below the Arctic Circle and 22 ports above it. The roundtrip from Bergen to Kirkenes takes 12 days and northbound ports differ from southbound ports.Hurtigruten does not consider themselves a cruise line, but rather a "basecamp" for adventure. A journey offering overto explore Norway's nature, wildlife, and culture. The emphasis on board is discovery in a relaxed atmosphere.Troms "Gateway to the Arctic" with the Arctic Cathedral as its focal point (this is 11:00pm at night in July)We started our voyage in, a city of 72,000 about 217 miles above the Arctic Circle. In July the sun never sets which is a strange phenomenon to get accustomed to. We arrived a day early so we took advantage of the extra time to do someand got an amazing aerial view point of the island city on theirTroms offers some great dining options. We had a wonderful meal with water views atand afterward visited the Mack Brewery founded in 1877 where they have 67 beers on tap -- more than anywhere else in Europe. They are unique because they brew their beer by the sounds of rock music and have named beers after rock stars like Lemmy from Motorhead.'s focal point is the architecturally stunningwhere we enjoyed a hauntingly beautiful concert with soprano, flute and piano, under the midnight sun.RIB Safari from Stokmarknes to Svolvaer in the Lofoten archipelagoWe board the ship after the midnight concert and as we sleep, the ship takes us towards one of the most stunning areas of Norway -- with its incredibly dramatic mountain peaks and islands. When the ship docks in the afternoon, we take an excitingthat jets us through thewith its steep waterfalls and sightings of huge sea eagles.Back at port inwe are treated to a once-in-a-lifetime experience - the christening of Hurtigruten's second "explorer" ship, the. The company's other explorer ship,, stays in the southern hemisphere exploring Antarctica. The setting is picture-perfect, with the natural phenomenon of the midnight sun casting a magical light on the event as the ships godmother, Norwegian explorer, christened the ship with a Champagne bottle into its side. Cecilie is an amazing adventurer having climbed the Seven Summits to stand on top of the highest mountain on each of the world's seven continents, as well as completing expeditions to the North and South Poles, Mount Everest, Antarctica, and Greenland. She is a great match for Hurtigruten's newest vessel that will explore Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe and Shetland Islands, as well as Arctic Canada.MS Spitsbergen's Captain Engvik and Godmother Cecilie Skog. Photo: rjan BertelsenThe next morning our voyage continues south and we cross the. There is a celebration on deck with the ship's activities' director dressed as a Viking handing out shots of cod liver oil! I did not partake, but it was a fun event to watch.Crossing the Arctic Circle monumentNext stop is the picturesque, a cluster of dozens of islands. For the past 1,500 years, life here has been based on fishing and the harvesting of the down of eider ducks. Here we find fishing villages, quays, warehouses, eider houses (built for eider ducks to nest in), farming landscapes, lighthouses and charming shops.The town of VegaA small shop in Vega sells high quality, handmade woolen goodsBack on the ship, I was on deck enjoying the scenery, when the sight of Torghatten stunned and suprised me. Torghatten is a granite mountain on Torget island known for its characteristic hole through its center.TorghattenOne of the many picture-perfect coastal villages we passA large city by Norwegian standards (180,000),has managed to preserve the charm and atmosphere of a small town. After a catastrophic fire destroyed most of the city houses in 1681, the new streets were made wide to prevent fires from spreading. Some of the narrow alleys and streets - many originating in the Middle Ages - still exist, contrasting with these wide boulevards. Even today Trondheim is known as one of the typical wooden cities of Europe, and the city center has many special wooden buildings, some built as far back as the 1700's.Here we visit, the world's northernmost cathedral and Norway's national sanctuary. Construction began in 1070 over the shrine of Viking King Olav Tryggvason who became Saint Olav. He is the one who brought Christianity to Scandinavia. Nidaros was an important Christian pilgrimage site during the Middle Ages and Norway's coronation regalia are displayed in the Archbishop's Palace.Trondheim Nidaros Cathedral. Photo: Hurtigruten/Klaus PredigerBy the time we reachwe are on sensory overload with all the spectacular scenery we've seen. The road zigzags across bridges and rock-fills from island-to-island right to the ocean's edge. The trip covers over five miles, crosses a total of eight bridges, and winds through a stunning coastal landscape.The Atlantic RoadAt a local tavern we enjoy the specialty of the house, bacalao, a codfish and tomato stew made from local ingredients. We continue along the Atlantic Road to, where we finish with a short sightseeing tour through the seaside city known as the city of roses with its stunning backdrop of the Romsdal mountain range with 222 snow covered peaks.Spectacular view from, one of 28 stave churches in Norway.Our Hurtigruten voyage ends in, Norway's second biggest city and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Bergen is built on seven mountains centered around a scenic harbor. Founded more than 900 years ago, Bergen has roots to the Viking Age which are evident in the Hanseatic heritage that is preserved through buildings and artefacts in the Old Town.Bergen Old Town in July (notice how people are dressed)We walk through the lively outdoor fish market in the heart of the city that also sells seafood, fruits, vegetables, handicrafts and souvenirs and reach the base of the Flibanen,which takes us up to a magnificent view point of the city atop Mt. Flyen with goats living on the mountainside.Goats on Bergen hillsideWith 1,190 fjords, so many picturesque villages, and the changing seasons in Norway, there is always something new to discover and we look forward to many happy returns!Hurtigruten visitson the northbound journey. Photo: HurtigrutenAs you can see from our photos, we got a mix of sunshine, clouds and rain. The weather is ever changing in Norway just like the scenery on a Hurtigruten voyage. Summer temperatures mainly range from the 40s to the 60s, so make sure towith your outer layer being wind and waterproof.on Hurtigruten is excellent and accommodates all tastes from vegans and vegetarians to meat and seafood lovers.For a luxury experience, book a Suite or Mini Suite. Hurtigruten has five newly refurbished ships which have a chic, boutique luxury style: the new MS Spitsbergen, MS Kong Harald, MS Nordkapp, MS Nordnorge, and MS Polarlys.Hurtigruten provides airport transportation in Bergen. WiFi and computers are available on ships.June-July for the Midnight Sun; July-August for warmest weather; September for fall foliage and vibrant sunrises/sunsets. January-March for Northern Lights. Avoid October-December because of stormiest weather.
Ukraine counts on new projects with the European Investment Bank (EIB) in infrastructure and energy efficiency, Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk reported after a meeting with EIB Vice-President Laszlo Baranyay on Friday.
"We have agreed about the continued support of Ukraine by the EIB, in particular in new projects in the field of infrastructure and energy, which means new roads and winterized schools," the finance minister wrote on Facebook.
According to him, during the meeting they also discussed the current state of the implementation of ongoing projects.
According to the information on the EIB website, three projects for Ukraine are currently waiting for approval by the EIB board. These are a EUR 150 million project with Ukrzaliznytsia for the railway modernization, a EUR400 million project with Ukrhydroenergo on Kaniv pumped storage hydro station and a EUR200 million project for the development of local transport to 20 cities.
This week, the Ukrainian government has approved the concept of Energy Efficiency Fund, which is planned to be launched in 2017 with the support of international financial institutions.
EIB Senior Corporate Banker Jean-Jacques Soulacroup reported earlier the European Investment Bank (EIB) intends to invest about EUR 800 million in projects in Ukraine in 2016, while in future mulls the annual funding of up to EUR 1 billion for the country. Last year, the EIB provided loans worth EUR 1.2 billion to Ukraine.
Mary Boney Denison Mary Boney Denison
Its exciting to be in Beijing this month attending the latest meeting of the TM5, an organisation of the worlds five largest trade mark offices. This is the first time well be gathering in China since the country became a TM5 partner. In meeting with representatives from the European Union, Japan, South Korea, the Peoples Republic of China, and the United States, Im representing the USPTO in advancing our agencys mission to cooperate and coordinate with other TM5 members to create a more user-friendly and, if possible, interoperable international trade mark system. Ill be updating the attendees of this mid-term meeting on the status of the TM5 ID List Project. What is that? An effort aimed at transforming the global trade mark system by offering applicants a global, harmonised pick-list of identifications of goods and services when preparing trade mark applications. A more consistent trade mark application process results in fewer problems due to inconsistencies in terminology and classification from country to country. As part of this effort, a TM5 working group in Beijing is discussing how to leverage IT to better display TM5 ID List entries, thus improving the user experience for everyone exploring this shared database.
Pick-lists
"If a trade mark applicant chooses an ID from a national pick-list, it is unlikely that the pre-worded ID will be questioned by the office receiving the application."
Applicants who seek trade mark registrations from national IP offices must provide those offices with descriptions IDs or identifications of the goods or services associated with the trade marks. Applicants typically prepare these IDs in one of two ways: they either craft the IDs on their own, or they select an ID, or a combination of IDs, from pick-lists maintained by the national IP offices.
If a trade mark applicant chooses an ID from a national pick-list, it is unlikely that the pre-worded ID will be questioned by the office receiving the application. These pre-approved IDs also contain pre-approved classifications now 34 categories of goods and 11 categories of services provided under terms of the WIPO Nice Agreement and used by 150 national offices.
Because such pre-approved IDs with pre-approved classifications create efficiencies for both national IP offices and trade mark applicants, the Madrid System features an online tool called the Madrid Goods & Services Manager. This is a pick-list that applicants can consult when selecting an ID for international trade mark applications.
TM5 ID List Project
Over the past decade, the TM5 has been developing the TM5 ID List, a global, harmonised pick-list of identifications of goods and services for trade mark applications. The USPTO leads this project, under which the TM5 partners propose and vote on identifications of goods and services and their classification under the Nice Agreement. The advantage for trade mark applicants is that if a harmonised ID is entered in an application for registration in any of the member TM5 offices, it will be accepted without a refusal.
We continue to work aggressively with our international partners in expanding the entries and their translations, as well as recruiting more countries to join the TM5 ID List. To date, the TM5 has already developed more than 16,500 pre-approved IDs for applicants to use in trade mark applications, and more are added every month. Seven observer countries are also participating in this harmonization effort, including two new additions, Chile and Colombia. Like the TM5 partners, the observer countries can propose IDs for inclusion in the list and are responsible for translating each of the IDs into their offices national language.
Resolving inconsistencies
"In reality, the Nice Committee process is slow and frequently does not embrace big changes to the system due to the IT implications on national databases."
In the process of developing the TM5 ID List, the TM5 partners found discrepancies in national practices regarding where a particular good or service should have been classified under the Nice Classification System. In theory, any discrepancy should be reconciled by the Nice Committee of Experts, which meets once a year to review proposals to transfer goods/services from one class to another or to make other changes to the Nice Systems alphabetical list of goods and services. In reality, the Nice Committee process is slow and frequently does not embrace big changes to the system due to the IT implications on national databases. Thus, many of these inconsistencies in classification have been left unsettled, and Madrid applicants in particular can face refusals because of inconsistent classification.
With the TM5 ID List, the TM5 is seeking to resolve these problems by means of discussion and, ultimately, consensus among the five partner trade mark offices and participating observer national IP offices.
Global benefits
The incorporation of the TM5 ID List into the Madrid Goods & Services Manager is one example of how TM5 cooperation benefits applicants. In short, trade mark applicants filing through the Madrid System can now experience a smoother application process that saves both time and money if they use an ID that has been pre-approved, pre-classified, and pre-translated as part of the TM5 ID List project. The benefits of TM5 cooperation for applicants can be amplified if the most recent TM5 initiatives are adopted into the Madrid System.
One of the things I hear frequently in my discussions with stakeholders is the value they place on consistency and efficiency in the trade mark application process. The TM5 ID List is one of our responses to this feedback. The bottom line is that it is a big step toward a world of timely examination and registration of high-quality trade marks around the world. More and more pre-approved IDs are becoming available for use by global trade mark applicants, who also enjoy certainty that the appropriate classification of goods and services will also grow.
For more information on TM5 and its current projects, visit its website. The TM5 ID List can be accessed at http://euipo.europa.eu/ec2/tm5.
Ten Hag always demanding more
Article
The boss provides his analysis of the win over Sheriff and our hopes of reaching top spot in Group E.
Interview with Fred Murimi, Director of Centum Capital at Centum Investment Company
How would you evaluate your sector? What are the trends at the moment?
Centum is actually in 7 sectors of the economy. We are in real estate, financial services, fast moving consumer goods, power, agribusiness, health and education. We are privileged in the sense that we have a good view of what is happening in different sectors of the Kenyan economy. Our business is to create investment opportunities that we can give to other investors. Across the 7 sectors that we are in we have seen a lot of growth and these are all very consumer facing sectors. These are the sectors that are benefiting from an increase in purchasing power from consumers. These are also sectors where many investors, both local and international, are looking for opportunities to enter. Specifically with the foreign investors, I would say that they are looking for opportunities of quality and skill. Our business is to create and provide them with these opportunities. Across the board in the companies we have set up or invested in, we see a lot of growth and volumes are growing and that is mostly because of increasing consumer purchasing power.
How structured is the market here?
We take the early stage risks of putting opportunities together, turning them into bankable projects and then bringing other investors into the opportunities we have created.
The way the market and the economy are structured will vary from sector to sector. Some will be heavily regulated and some not. The financial services sector is one that is heavily regulated. We have invested in banking and fund management and we are seeing the regulators increasingly upping the ante in terms of regulations. Those are welcome moves because they are important sectors to the economy and the more stable they are, the better platform for growth of the economy. We welcome the improvements in regulations. Other sectors such as the real estate sector are not as heavily regulated and there is still a lot of opportunity there. There is a huge demand for homes with a growing population looking to live and work in decent areas. Looking at trends, when you speak about urbanization in Africa in general, I think in 15 years about half the population will be living in cities that are yet to be built. There are lots of opportunities for investors to build those cities. Agriculture is also not a heavily regulated sector but that too will have to expand as the population expands and that will also present many opportunities. Typically, in our markets, we havent seen much in production and processing and those are areas we want to get involved in. There are plenty of opportunities for local and foreign investment as demand grows for food that is grown organically and meets certain standards. In terms of how the markets are structured in Kenya, we are fortunate that we have had an open economy and a free market for years. Business is used to competing both locally and internationally. I believe Kenya has a very well structured economy.
Centum's speciality is to create investment opportunities for other investors
Next year's elections might cause some tension in the market. What is your view on that?
Elections always bring uncertainty with them, which is expected. In business, elections are just one of the uncertainties that we have to face. We will look at all the uncertainties we face and then take a position and align accordingly. Particularly in Kenya, we have demonstrated that we are able to go through elections mostly peacefully. We have had incidents such as the one in 2007 but I think we have largely overcome them. Our last elections in 2013 were contested but we followed a very judicial process to determine the outcome and it went peacefully. For the most part, I believe business has continued to do well in spite of the elections. Uncertainty does bring risks but it also brings opportunities. As markets lower because of uncertainties, there are opportunities to invest that will become more valuable post-election. There will always be pains in democracy and that will come and go, but for businesses, especially in Kenya, we are here for the long run. We dont make 3 year decisions. We make decisions based on a 10 or 20 year outlook.
What does Centum bring to the market?
Centum is a very unique company in that we create investment opportunities for other investors. We take the early stage risks of putting opportunities together, turning them into bankable projects and then bringing other investors into the opportunities we have created. If you look at it from an investors perspective that has a pool of capital when he comes to Africa, there are few investment opportunities that are of scale and quality. If investors are looking to invest or acquire a bank, there are few viable opportunities available. If they want to invest in the power sector there are not many power opportunities that investors can put their capital into. The constraint is really not on the capital side but on the supply side. How many people or companies are actively putting together investment opportunities? Do they do a package that they give investors access to? That is what makes Centum unique, because that is our business model. We take that early risk and create the opportunities for investors. There are not that many players in that space and there are many private equity players and strategic investors who are looking for opportunities.
Do you believe that international investors dont see the market as you do?
Because of the nature of start-up business models, for any company that doesn't understand the local landscape fairly well, there are certain risks that may not become apparent or they may be apparent but because of the lack of local knowledge or contacts, they might not be able to react to them as quickly or as easily as a local player might. That is the unique advantage we bring. The local experience we bring to the east African region. We understand the local landscape very well because this has been home for us for the last 50 years. We have the knowledge and contacts to get projects off the ground to be able to turn ideas into bankable projects. While someone could enter the country and do the same as we are doing, it is most likely that they may take longer to build a successful project than a local player.
In agriculture, Centum has recently started planting herbs for export
How do you overcome the fact that international companies tend to stick to companies they know?
For us, it is about creating partnerships. In everything we do it is always about giving access to other investors. Some of those investors are strategic investors, some are private equity and some are funds that are looking for opportunities and what we provide is the access to the investments. It is through partnerships with such investors that we then have access to an even wider pool of investors. One fund could possibly have thousands of investors behind it. We are not looking to compete with those investors. We want to supply them with opportunities that they may not have been able to get into otherwise.
What are the current trends? Is there a sector that dominates?
We have been investing in real estate, financial services, fast moving consumer goods and power for a number of years now. Those are sectors that we understand fairly well and we have seen a lot of growth there. In terms of dominance, I think real estate, financial services and FMCG have been our largest sectors. We now see opportunities to really set up and create investments of quality in the health care space and the education space, as well as agriculture. That is where we have recently begun putting together various bankable investment opportunities for other investors. Overall, I believe that across all 7 sectors that we are invested in, I dont necessarily see one being more dominant than another. In the long run, I dont think that Centum will be exposed to any one sector by more than 20%.
What challenges do you face?
Our challenge is not in capital. There is a lot of capital. There are many investors looking to bring their money into this region. The sectors we are in are all growing and there are many opportunities so that is not a challenge either. Our challenges are in how quickly we can execute our ideas into bankable investment opportunities that will attract significant amounts of capital. In the last 7 years, we have been able to create significant investments and we have grown our own assets from about 70 million dollars in 2009 to about 500 million dollars this year. It is a challenge that we have been able to address. The challenge will always continue but we see that as an opportunity to grow in the different sectors that we are in. To execute our projects quickly, it boils down to people. It depends on getting high calibre people and bringing them into a high performance organization and ensuring that we are supporting them to deliver on each of their different opportunities.
As I was saying, we have been fortunate in being able to attract significant foreign investment into this country. Last financial year, we were able to bring in approximately 122 million dollars into the country in direct foreign investment and that was about 9% of Kenyas direct foreign investment. It is a significant sum for one company. This money came from South Africa, London and China. We are looking to increase our reach into potential investors for the different projects we have available. So far we have done well and we will continue to be a significant player in attracting large amounts of capital into the country.
Power is one of Centum's areas of focus
How interested are you in joint ventures or bringing partners into the company?
Everything we develop is for other investors. We are always looking to bring in other investors into the different projects we have created. In real estate, we have an urban master plan development on 102 acres. One of the components of that development will be a five star hotel and we are looking for operator investors in that opportunity. On that same development we constructed the largest retail mall in sub-Saharan Africa excluding the malls in South Africa. That has brought in a host of international as well as local retailers. One of those is the French supermarket Carrefour. We are looking to go into healthcare. There are many healthcare operators globally who are looking to expand into this region but they dont have an asset they can work with or acquire. That is something we are developing. In agriculture, we have recently started planting herbs for export and again we have a partner who is providing us access to the European markets. Everything that we do is to attract other investors into the opportunities we have created.
Where do you see your company in 5 years time?
We have our Centum 3.0 strategy that covers 2014-2019. In that strategy, we will look to grow our assets from 300 million dollars in 2014 to 1.2 billion dollars in 2019. The way we will achieve this is through all the opportunities we are creating across different sectors. I see us managing our assets of 1.2 billion dollars across 7 sectors in the Kenyan economy. I see us having attracted significant sums of direct foreign investments into Kenya and the East African region by virtue of the opportunities we have created. I see us being a significant partner to the governments in the region because the sectors we are creating investment opportunities in are important sectors of the economy and the kind of investments we are making are investments of impact. For instance, in real estate, we are creating urban centres for cities across East Africa. One of our latest real estate projects is in Mombasa on the coast of Kenya. Its a 10 000 acre parcel of land where we are looking to provide the entire infrastructure to support growth of an industrial city. That is significant for Kenya as well as the company and there will be many jobs created out of that opportunity and new products that might not have to be imported anymore.
A real estate project: the Two Rivers Mall in Nairobi
What about your social responsibilities?
In our core business of creating investment opportunities, we look to be socially responsible in each of them. In the real estate project Two Rivers Mall in Nairobi, we are looking to develop a green space. Part of our social responsibility is also the amount of jobs we have created on this project, which is approximately 2000. In the project in Mombasa, we are looking to work with the community. We want to empower them with skills and then the community will be in the position to take up some of the job opportunities that will become available. In each of our investments, we always keep social responsibility in mind. In power, we are working with the local community to green the area around the project. We have actually given jobs to some of the youth to buy trees and we will buy trees from them. We hope to teach them skills that will enable them to go into business. Two years ago, we set up the Centum Foundation. The Foundation is about supporting entrepreneurs and particularly young entrepreneurs. The program involves providing young entrepreneurs with skills, mentoring them and in some cases providing them with seed funding for their different projects. To date, we have funded about 7 different organizations. These are young people who have not been able to get access to funding, mentors or skills. We hope to have an impact with these entrepreneurs and we hope to make the Foundation even bigger.
Governor of California Jerry Brown has invited Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko to visit the U.S. and see the economic potential of California in high-tech and defense industry.
During the meeting with Brown, Poroshenko noted huge potential of Ukraine in information technologies and agriculture. He also expressed interest in cooperation in these promising areas and in attracting investments from California, the president's press service reported on Friday.
"The head of state thanked the governor for his personal role in enhancing the Ukraine-U.S. ties and the implementation of important projects in the area of security, particularly holding trainings in the framework of cooperation between the National Guard of Ukraine and the National Guard of California, as well as the formation of the new patrol police," the press service said.
During the meeting, Poroshenko stressed that California had been the first state to commemorate the Holodomor (Famine) tragedy of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and to open a memorial to millions of Ukrainians killed by the Stalin regime.
California is the world leader in computer industry and high technology. The GDP of the state in 2015 was almost $2.45 billion. Today, it hosts headquarters of the world's largest IT companies, 18 of which are in the Fortune Global 500 ranking and have combined annual revenue of about $350 billion, the Ukrainian president's press service said.
China will send more ships flying its flag to take the Northwest Passage via the Arctic Ocean to cut travel times between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, says the state news agency Xinhua.
The world's largest maritime carrier China COSCO Shipping Corporation 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.
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.
Shorter shipping routes across the Arctic Ocean would save Chinese companies time and money. For example, the journey from Shanghai to Hamburg via the Arctic route is 2,800 nautical miles shorter than going by the Suez Canal.
Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) will start the process to appoint a new chief executive officer (CEO) when Hyundai Group loses control on Aug. 5, reports Korea Times quoting un-named industry sources.
The challenged shipper will begin a new chapter in its 40-year history, breaking free from Hyundai Group and becoming a subsidiary of Korea Development Bank (KDB).
KDB is bent on installing a new leadership at the shipping line and is open to hiring a foreign chief executive. To make a pool of candidates, the creditor reportedly appointed a number of executive search firms.
Last week, KDB Chairman Lee Dong-geol suggested standards for appointment, saying it will not exclude "people who have no relation with HMM" including foreign experts.
The KDB chairman emphasized performance above anything else in recruitment of the new CEO.
The remark sparked speculation that executives from Maersk or the Mediterranean Shipping Company may be chosen to head the company. The world's two largest container shippers are members of the 2M vessel-sharing alliance, which HMM managed to sign a preliminary deal to join last week.
The KDB is already suffering criticism for "unsuccessful" appointments at Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, as its selections parachuted into the shipbuilder failed to contain the company's debacle.
HMMs current controlling shareholder Hyundai Group will see its 22.64 percent stake, held jointly by group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, Hyundai Elevator and Hyundai Global, reduced to 3.64 percent in a 7-to-1 capital reduction approved by shareholders Friday.
British oil company BP has chartered a foreign flagged vessel to transport Alaskan North Slope (ANS) crude, pending regulatory approvals, a spokeswoman for the company said by email on Monday.
The company will receive required approvals from the State of Alaska and the United States Coast Guard (USCG) before the vessel sails, the spokeswoman added.
The spokeswoman declined to comment on the destination of the cargo.
Reporting by Liz Hampton
Verweij Hoebee Groep, a subsidiary of BMT Group, expanded its service portfolio with the introduction of management audits of ship owners.
This unique prevention concept goes beyond the standard condition surveys which are conducted on board ships and extends to the examination of both management and technical operations. Director Bruce Verweij explains: The primary goal is to limit the risk of damage to ships or ships that are under repair. We are the only marine surveying company to offer such a thorough service whereby ship owners are audited, more often than not at the request of Underwriters, in the field of damage prevention.
Rob Voskamp, Surveyor at Verweij Hoebee Groep adds: We not only observe operations on board the ship and provide recommendations, if required, concerning necessary maintenance and repair jobs to be carried out, we also carefully examine existing technical management procedures. Often the communication bottleneck is between office personnel onshore and the ships crew where safety regulations and other working arrangements may not be received properly or are not interpreted as was originally intended. Its important that the quality of the crew is considered within these audits in relation to employee education, experience and skills as we regularly advise ship owners to adjust their personnel policy accordingly.
Bruce Verweij concludes: This approach is already producing tangible results for clients. Maintenance is receiving more attention and repairs are being carried out more quickly, resulting in less damage and fewer repairs, the latter, being of particular advantage to the owner and, ultimately, underwriters.
A record number of around 150 container vessels are expected to be scrapped in 2016 but it will not be enough for an industry battling over capacity, low demand and falling rates, consultancy firm Drewry said.
In 2015, demolitions were less than half of the expected 2016 level but it will not be a real relief for the struggling container shipping industry.
"This will only make a dent into the over-capacity built during the 2010-15 period," Drewry wrote in a note.
Demolitions are expected to reach 450,000 twenty-foot equivalent units this year and based on an average size of 3,000 TEU for ships which are being scrapped, this means that about 150 mainly old and medium-sized container ships will be pulled out of the market.
The world's largest container shipping company, Maersk Line, a unit in conglomerate A.P. Moller-Maersk, said in February it would scrap more vessels and therefore begin to use four shipyards along India's Alang beaches to handle it.
German container line Hapag-Lloyd also warned investors that profit would fall in 2016 and signed a binding agreement with Arab peer UASC to form the world's fifth largest shipping company in response to a global industry crisis.
Container vessels are normally in service, depreciating, over 25 years but some owners have pulled ships only 15 years old because freight rates have been on loss-making levels.
Owners of older container vessels can chose between chartering out ships at historically low and loss-making levels, or paying for idling costs until any market recovery - or simply scrapping the vessels, Drewry said.
Roughly 90 percent of the world's goods are carried by sea, with over 70 percent in containers carrying everything from flat-screen TVs to sportswear from Asia to the rest of the world.
Container transportation growth was once easily outpacing economic expansion, but no longer.
Reporting by Ole Mikkelsen
The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index, tracking rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities, rose on Monday on firmer rates for panamaxes and smaller vessels.
The overall index, which factors in rates for capesize, panamax, supramax and handysize shipping vessels, was up 3 points, or 0.4 percent, at 748 points.
The panamax index was up 11 points, or 1.27 percent, at 874 points.
Average daily earnings for panamaxes, which usually carry coal or grain cargoes of about 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes, increased $91 to $6,987.
The capesize index fell 7 points, or 0.68 percent, to 1,016 points.
Average daily earnings for capesizes, which typically transport 150,000-tonne cargoes such as iron ore and coal, were down $67 at $7,481.
Among smaller vessels, the supramax index rose 4 points to 697 points, while the handysize index rose 3 points to 366 points.
Reporting by Eileen Soreng
Q2 adjusted EBITA SEK is 1.39 bln vs year-ago 1.82 bln and 1.44 bln seen in Reuters poll.
Other highlights include:
Q2 adjusted EBITA margin 15.6 pct vs year-ago 17.8 pct and consensus forecast 16.3 pct
Q2 net sales decreased to SEK 8.95 bln vs year-ago 10.18 bln and 8.83 bln seen in Reuters poll
Q2 order intake decreased to SEK 8.10 bln vs year-ago 9.15 bln and consensus forecast 7.90 bln
CEO says "We expect that demand during the third quarter 2016 will be in line with or somewhat lower than in the second quarter"
Shares in Alfa Laval drop 4.6 pct after results while Stockholm large cap index OMXS30 sheds 0.6 pct
CEO says sees slightly lower demand in Marine & Diesel division in Q3 vs Q2. Sees Equipment division demand flat or somewhat lower in Q3 vs Q2.
CEO says operating margin in Process Technology continued to be burdened by a negative mix, which is expected to remain during the rest of the year
CEO says oil & gas segment will pick up at some point ahead, but timing is uncertain: "At the current (oil price) level around 50 dollar many investors begin to look into their investment plans to see what can be done ahead," Alfa CEO Tom Erixon said in a conference call
Alfa sees positive FX impact of SEK 475 million in 2016 and 100 million in 2017 and says strategic review that was announced in previous quarter is continuing according to plan. Additionally, the firm says result of this review will be presented before end of year.
By Oskar von Bahr
Natural preserve facilities for research can be created in Chornobyl Exclusion Zone
Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada has amended some laws that regulate the specifics of land utilization, special water use, town planning in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
An Interfax-Ukraine correspondent has reported that the law amending some Ukrainian laws that settle the legal regime for the area radioactively contaminated after Chornobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) disaster (No. 4437) was backed by 234 lawmakers last week.
Earlier all scientific information and the results of research conducted in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone was considered of Ukraine's heritage and could be used only under a permit of Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers. Now this requirement is removed from Ukrainian legislation.
According to the document, research activities, studies to determine the influence of nuclear radiation on humans and the environment and ways to minimize this impact can be carried out in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
Natural preserve fund facilities and areas can be created in the zone to conduct environmental research.
According to the Land Code, the government can transfer land parcels in the zone for usage. Land utilization projects to use land in the zone are submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers by the central executive power agency that implements the state policy to manage the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
Land parcels in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone cannot be sold.
A Coast Guard Station Grays Harbor crew aboard a 29-foot Response Boat-Small II rescued a man who was swept out to sea while wading in the water near the Grays Harbor north jetty at Ocean Shores, Washington, Sunday.
The man, in his early twenties, who drifted approximately 300 yards past the tip of the jetty, was rescued from the water by the small boat crew, treated for hypothermia, and taken back to Station Grays Harbor where he was met by local emergency medical services for further medical care.
Watch standers at Coast Guard Sector Columbia River received the call from personnel at Grays Harbor County 911 dispatch about the man in the water without a life jacket, who was reported as being swept away from the jetty and calling for help. Sector Columbia River directed the launch of a Coast Guard Air Station Astoria MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew and the Station Grays Harbor small boat crew.
The small boat was first to arrive on scene and assisted the man in the water.
This case illustrates the possible dangers beach goers can face along the Oregon and Washington coast where waves, rip currents, and unseen deep holes or drops offs can be an unexpected surprise, said Mark Dobney, a search and rescue controller at Coast Guard Sector Columbia River. Thanks to the professional training of all the Coast Guard crews involved in this rescue, we were able to get this man out of danger and to the help he needed.
The man received no other reported injuries during the incident.
Weather on scene at the time of the incident was reported as 12 mph winds and 4-foot seas.
Rolls-Royce has signed a contract worth about $33m with the ship building company Kleven in Norway for design and ship equipment to two new polar cruise vessels, with an option for two additional vessels.
The contract between Kleven and Rolls-Royce follows the conversion of a letter of intent into a firm contract signed between Kleven and Hurtigruten.
Helge Gjerde, Director of Offshore and Merchant Solutions, Rolls-Royce, said: Hurtigruten and Kleven have agreed to build state-of the art passenger vessels, and Rolls-Royce will provide some of the most innovate ship technology on the market today. Im confident that these new polar cruise vessels will bring the proud heritage of the Hurtigruten into a similarly proud future.
In addition to the innovative ship design with a wave piercing bow, Rolls-Royce will supply an integrated package of technology and equipment. Among the deliveries will be the innovative Rolls-Royce Unified Bridge, which represents a complete redesign of the ship bridge environment. Consoles, levers and software interfaces will have a common look and feel, resulting in a more comfortable, clutter-free and ultimately more safe and efficient working environment for the captain and his team on the bridge.
Stolt-Nielsen buys competitor's chemical tanker operations. Deal includes 13 chemical tankers and 50 pct in 8 newbuilds.
Details of the deal include:
Stolt-Nielsen agrees to acquire the chemical tanker operations of Jo Tankers.
Stolt-Nielsen says total purchase price is approximately $575 million, including proportional share of newbuildings in joint venture.
The transaction comprises 13 chemical tankers and a 50 pct share in a joint venture with eight chemical tanker newbuildings.
Stolt-Nielsen says funding for transaction has been secured through some of Stolt-Nielsen limited's main banks with a combination of bridge financing, secured term loans and available corporate funds.
Stolt-Nielsen ltd says transaction is subject to competition authority approval, with a decision expected before end of September 2016.
CEO Niels G. Stolt-Nielsen says transaction covers the tonnage replacement needs for the next several years and that the deal will give some operational savings and add new trade routes
Stolt-Nielsen shares traded up 2.3 percent to NOK 111.5 after the announcement compared to a rise of 0.5 percent just ahead of the announcement. The 13 chemical tankers consist of eight all stainless steel ships, ranging from 19,000 dwt to 38,000 dwt, and five ships with a combination of stainless steel and coated tanks, all of approximately 37,000 dwt. Six of the 13 ships have been on time charter to Stolt Tankers for the last five years. The newbuildings included in the transaction consist of eight all stainless steel eco-friendly ships of 33,000 dwt on order from New Times Shipbuilding in China, the first of which was delivered in early July 2016. The seven remaining newbuildings are to be delivered in the second half of 2016 and in 2017.
Reporting By Ole Petter Skonnord
With less cash to Spend Abroad, avoid unwanted Credit and Debit Card Fees
As holidaymakers prepare for their trip abroad, they may begin to realise that their travel cash will not be going as far as before. Thanks to fluctuating exchange rates, buying 200 worth of Euros today means 49 less spending money than a year ago, and a similar picture can be seen when buying 200 worth of dollars, with almost $48 less back compared with 2015. With this in mind it is vital for consumers to save cash where they can, and one way to do this is to be wary of using cards abroad.
The latest research by Moneyfacts.co.uk shows that some debit cards can charge 9.50 for a 200 cash withdrawal, while credit cards can charge 11.96 for the same transaction - an unnecessary expense when there are fee-free cards specifically designed for use abroad.
Rachel Springall, Finance Expert at Moneyfacts.co.uk, said:
In the run-up to the school holidays its clear to see why holidaymakers will be less than impressed, with exchange rates falling just as theyre preparing to get their holiday cash. With less cash in their pockets, those travelling abroad must make sure they dont lose any more of their money when using debit or credit cards through unnecessary fees. Most cards will charge customers for use abroad, so planning ahead is vital.
Cash isnt always king due to the danger running out of money in emergencies, or losing it. Debit or credit cards and even prepaid cards can make it simpler for people to track their spending, and they can be more secure than carrying around bundles of cash. The only downside is using cards that charge for each use, and one of the most expensive transactions is withdrawing cash from an ATM.
A typical debit card charges 9.50* when consumers withdraw 200 in cash abroad, and charges apply every time the debit card is used. There is typically a 2.75% to 2.99% conversion fee on the amount you spend on top of a set charge for ATM withdrawals, which can be between 1 and 5 for each transaction. The equivalent withdrawal on a credit cards can cost 11.96** before interest applies, but the reality is that all of these charges could be avoided if consumers used a card specifically designed for use abroad which can be much more cost effective. MBNA, Creation Financial Services and Halifax all offer credit cards that charge absolutely no fees when used overseas.
At times, consumers are reluctant to take out a credit card specifically for overseas use because theyll be charged interest on purchases and cash withdrawals, much in the same way as in the UK. Therefore a new current account may be a more attractive option. Norwich & Peterborough Building Societys Gold Account offers a debit card with no fees for use overseas, which could make it perfect for those who frequently travel.
Those holidaymakers hoping to stick to a tight budget may prefer to pack a prepaid card for overseas use, where they can load their spending allowance onto the card in advance. These are also a safe payment method as they can be replaced if lost. The best cards wont charge for ATM cash withdrawals either, making them perfect for buying goods in shops that do not accept card payments.
Its never been more important for holidaymakers to try and make their money go that little bit further, and if they carefully plan ahead they can avoid those unnecessary fees when using a card abroad.
*Typical debit card example is the NatWest Select Account, which charges a transaction fee of 2.00% and a conversion fee of 2.75% on cash withdrawals. **Typical credit card is the HSBC Credit Card Visa, which charges a 2.99% usage fee and a 2.99% cash withdrawal fee.
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Erdogan Might Have Known about the Coup but Didnt Prevent It on Purpose
A coup has to be carefully planned for many weeks. It requires endless meetings and preparation. Many thousands of troops, tanks, helicopters, and all the rest, must suddenly appear in the streets and take over.
And all of this planning has to take place in complete secrecy. Without the element of surprise, there is no coup.
So, how did the military organize a coup without a word of it leaking?
It seemed the coup succeeded at first
Turkeys security and intelligence services are professional and capable. Watching the military is one of their major jobs. With intrusive surveillance, how did the military keep its intentions under wraps?
The only explanation is that the intelligence organizations must have been in on it. If so, then the game was over for Erdogan. A source that Mauldin Economics has in the military, someone fairly senior, said he had no idea the coup was happening.
This source did know that Erdogan was at a hotel in Marmaris on the Mediterranean. The coup was planned while Erdogan was away from Ankara. It would be easy to isolate and arrest him. Perfect planning without a leak.
Our sources said that very senior officers ran the coup. (Not the chief of staff, though.) Erdogan was held in a resort town. He was unable to return to Istanbul or Ankara as the military took over airports.
The communication centers had been secured. There were even troops in Taksim Square, the major gathering place in Istanbul. That meant the city was saturated.
It appeared to us that the coup had succeeded.
Then suddenly everything changed
Erdogan started making statements via FaceTime on Turkish TV NTV. We thought Erdogan would be arrested soon. Maybe it was just that troops were outside his hotel, and he was still free enough to do this.
Sloppy work on the part of the coup.
Then Erdogan got on a plane and flew in to Istanbuls Ataturk Airport. The airport, however, had reportedly been secured by the military conducting the coup.
Again, sloppy work.
It was clear that Erdogan was free, as he was making threats. Then Turkish troops surrendered to policeman in Taksim Square. They also abandoned and reopened bridges.
Erdogan ordered loyal F-16s to shoot down helicopters attacking the parliament building in Ankara.
The situation morphed from a successful coup to a failed one in a matter of hours. Yet, we still have no explanation as to why intelligence services didnt prevent the coup.
Did Erdogan want the coup?
We could speculate that Erdogan wanted the coup. He knew he could defeat it. The attempt now gives him the justification to utterly purge the army. Perhaps he went to Marmaris for his own security.
Deeper meanings and geopolitical implications, however, lie behind the coup.
Deep tensions exist between Turkeys secular population and Erdogans more religious supporters in Anatolia and elsewhere.
(Anatolia is the rather vast, less densely populated region east of the Bosporus. Its generally more conservative but also includes a large Kurdish region and a few other minority ethnic groups.)
These religious minorities of Anatolia had been marginalized since World War I.
Erdogan came to power intending to build a new Turkey. He understood that the Islamic world had changed. Islam was rising. Turkey could not simply remain a secular power. He understood that fact both domestically and in terms of foreign policy.
Turkey has reportedly allowed IS to use its financial system. IS was selling its oil in Turkey and moving its people through Turkey. Erdogan has been, until recently, reluctant to attack them.
But, he shifted his strategy in recent months. ISIS, in turn, mounted attacks on Turkey.
Erdogan is caught between two forces.
One is a Jihadist faction that he has tried to manage, so it wouldnt hit Turkey. This effort severed ties with the United States and Russia simultaneously.
That strategy has put Erdogan under pressure from a domestic secular faction. But recently the strategy shifted.
He reopened relations with Israel and apologized to Russia. He got rid of what many saw as a pro-Islamist prime minister. He appeared to be trying to rebalance his policy. The people who staged the coup likely saw these moves as weakness and sensed an opening.
The room for conspiracy theories is endless now. There actually were conspiraciesand likely, conspiracies within conspiracies. So lets end with the obvious.
Turkey affects the Middle East, Europe, and Russia. It is also a significant force in shaping jihadist behavior.
Erdogan has been increasingly erratic in his behavior, as if trying to regain his balance. The coup meant that part of the military thought he was vulnerable. His supporters are now trying to reestablish control.
Erdogan must take bold action
The coup appears to be over, but Erdogans follow-up is not. He will unleash as much political intimidation as he can. He will conduct political and military purges to frighten the military.
The military seems divided. Erdogan is a master of appearing stronger than he is, though. He looked weak calling for people to come into the streets to demonstrate their support.
But he cant afford to look weak, so he has to make a decisive countermove if he can.
Also, George Friedman did a short video on Friday that is available here.
By the way, you should subscribe to This Week in Geopolitics, George Friedmans free weekly column on geopolitics at Mauldin Economics.
I find him indispensable.
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Keep an Eye on Bitcoin as the Next Financial Crisis Starts!
Bitcoin is on a tear away rally. Its performance, over the last year, has been outstanding and it has outperformed most asset classes, by a wide margin. It is probably the only asset class which beats out both gold and silver, in 2016. Why is it shooting into outer space?
People look at alternate asset classes when their confidence in traditional assets fades. Since the beginning of the year, both the stock and the commodity markets have been on a roller coaster ride while catching both the bulls and the bears, on the wrong side.
The macroeconomic situation of the world does not give confidence to the astute investors which is evident by the return of the legendary George Soros, who has come out of retirement to short the overblown markets. Similarly, other hedge fund managers are stocking up on gold, which supports our view that a financial crisis is right around the corner.
The Brexit results have also opened up a possibility of another round of easing by the central banks, around the world. The Bank of England will most likely resort to an easing schedule during the next meeting which will be followed by the European Central Bank and the FED. Post victory in the elections, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is likely to push the Bank of Japan to announce another round of easing.
Since the last financial crisis, the combined central banks have pumped massive amounts of money into the system and they continue to do so, at a rapid pace, nonetheless, the world is closer to a financial crisis than ever before.
The FEDs money printing policy had led the commodity Guru Jim Rogers to remark: The FED will continue to print money until there are no trees left in America.
Bitcoin is doing the opposite of central banks:
Compare this with the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Unlike the traditional currencies, the Bitcoin has an upper limit of 21 million coins, post which no more Bitcoins can be mined.
Every subsequent mining will become difficult and will reduce the reward associated with mining each block. Satoshi Nakamoto programmed that post-mining of 210,000 blocks, the rewards will be halved.
Initially, the reward was 50 Bitcoins for every block, which was halved by the end of 2012, at which time the reward was reduced to 25 Bitcoins per block.
The next round of halving took place, last week, when the rewards were reduced to 12.5 Bitcoins per block.
While the central banks have been on a printing spree, the Bitcoin is on a tightening route which boosts its price, as is visible in its sharp rise, this year.
A few miners will find it difficult to continue mining at the halved rewards which is likely to slow down new mining as halving will continue, in the future.
The block halving will dramatically decrease the bitcoin being added as we approach 75 percent of all bitcoin issued. People understand that in this world of ever expanding assets and printing of money, we have something thats fixed and limited in issuance. It gives a decent alternative for people who want to hold assets that can have sustained purchasing power, stated Bobby Lee, Chief Executive of BTCC which is one of the largest bitcoin exchanges, in the world, based in China reports CNBC.
I recently watch a fantastic TEDX talk on Bitcoin and digital currencies and how they are changing the world, financial systems, and lives in huge way, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. This TEDX Talk makes so much logical sense why bitcoin and other currencies are so important for us as individuals Watch Video
However, the Bitcoins volatility has dropped dramatically over the past few years with the lowest linear level of volatility seen since is this asset class started. It has become easier to use for trading, purchasing and using for purchases. I am presently only highlighting that readers will do well to keep an eye on Bitcoins and other crypto/digital currencies, along with gold and silver.
In fact, I have been researching the digital wallet solution where I can purchase many up and coming digital currencies within one location as a NEW ASSET class for my portfolio. Why? Because I firmly believe the masses will slowly migrate their money into various digital currencies a safe haven store of wealth and for ease of use. Payments can be made with your mobile phone to anyone, anywhere in the world and for any amount with ZERO fees/costs, and in many cases it cannot be traced.
Sir John Templeton, the legendary mutual fund manager and founder of Templeton Group, said:
Invest in many different places there is safety in numbers.
So in short, I will share with you in future articles and as a subscriber to my trading and investing newsletter exactly which digital wallet, and digital currencies I will be buying and interested in learning more about as the world and financial systems evolve. When the time is right to invest my followers will know.
Chris Vermeulen
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Chris Vermeulen is Founder of the popular trading site TheGoldAndOilGuy.com. There he shares his highly successful, low-risk trading method. For 7 years Chris has been a leader in teaching others to skillfully trade in gold, oil, and silver in both bull and bear markets. Subscribers to his service depend on Chris' uniquely consistent investment opportunities that carry exceptionally low risk and high return.
Disclaimer: Nothing in this report should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. Technical Traders Ltd., its owners and the author of this report are not registered broker-dealers or financial advisors. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. Never make an investment based solely on what you read in an online or printed report, including this report, especially if the investment involves a small, thinly-traded company that isnt well known. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report has been paid by Cardiff Energy Corp. In addition, the author owns shares of Cardiff Energy Corp. and would also benefit from volume and price appreciation of its stock. The information provided here within should not be construed as a financial analysis but rather as an advertisement. The authors views and opinions regarding the companies featured in reports are his own views and are based on information that he has researched independently and has received, which the author assumes to be reliable. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content of this report, nor its fitness for any particular purpose. Lastly, the author does not guarantee that any of the companies mentioned in the reports will perform as expected, and any comparisons made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect.
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Ukraine's Economic Development and Trade Ministry has published the Ukraine-Canada Free Trade Agreement in Ukrainian language on its website.
The ministry said that the agreement will take effect after its ratification by the parliaments of the two countries and exchange of ratification instruments (http://www.me.gov.ua/Documents/MoreDetails?lang=uk-UA&title=RegionalniTorgovelniUgodi).
As reported, Ukraine and Canada signed an agreement on the completion of negotiations on the free trade area between the countries in July 2015. Then the document was translated into three official languages. The agreement was signed on July 11, 2016 in Kyiv.
The agreement on a free trade area between Ukraine and Canada since the moment of taking force after its ratification by parliaments of the two countries would reduce imports duties for 98% of Ukrainian imported goods and for 72% of Canadian exports to nil, the ministry said.
"Imports duties on agricultural goods will be lifted at once (apart from 108 tariff lines and the access to them will be opened with quota) and all industrial goods (apart from passengers cars with a seven year transition period for revoking of imports duties)," the ministry said.
The ministry noted that for 22 groups of agricultural goods (108 tariff lines, including wheat, barley, dairy products, poultry and turkey, eggs and egg products, beef, pork and margarine) Ukrainian exporters will be able to supply them at a zero imports duty only as part of Canada's global quotas.
"The exceptions are severe. Three wide groups of goods were fully removed from free trade: poultry, eggs and dairy products. Canada does not give us any preferences for them. All possible goods made of milk (cheese, ice cream, for example) are excluded, while the EU opened this market for us," business envoy at the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine Taras Kachka said.
He said that these groups are sensitive for Canada, as trade with these goods is strictly regulated at the national level. These goods are also removed from the free trade area agreement between Canada and the EU, apart from the additional cheese quota.
The ministry said that the free trade area agreement between Ukraine and Canada foresees gradual elimination of imports duties on Canadian agricultural products: within three years for live poultry and sheep, beef, lamb, nuts, sauces, flour products; within five years sub-products from pigs, oilseeds, fat, vegetable oil and within seven years cooled pork and poultry, milk, cream, eggs honey, vegetable and sausages.
The partial liberalization in the form of cutting imports duties will apply to Canadian fat, cheese, margarine and mixtures. For example, imports duties for some goods made of poultry would be decreased only by 20% within seven years.
The tariff quotas for frozen pork and salo, and sugar (eight positions) will be removed from the free trade regime.
As for industrial goods, Canada introduces a seven-year transition period for revoking duties only for some positions of passenger cars, while Ukraine: a three-year period for construction materials, industrial equipment and parts of aircraft, a five-year period for electric equipment, light pipes, motorcycles, trailers, vessels, photo cameras and a seven-year period for cars, tractors and spare parts for them.
"Among key Ukrainian products that would receive advantages from the duty-free access to the Canadian market in the short-term outlook are sunflower oil, sugar, confectionary and chocolate, alcohol and beer, juices, clothes, ceramics, metal products and chemicals. The agreement would promote cooperation in the aircraft building sector," the ministry said, predicting a 3.5% rise in exports, thanks to the removal of the duty.
The ministry also pointed out the beneficial access to the participation in public procurement at the governmental level of the two countries, liabilities linked to protection of intellectual property rights and receiving technical assistance from Ottawa for the effective implementation of the free trade area agreement.
IMF could discus new tranche for Ukraine in July, $4.3 bln could be received by late 2016
Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk has said that there is likelihood that the directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) could discus the new tranche for Ukraine in July, and Ukraine could receive $4.3 billion by the end of this year.
"There is still likelihood that the board of directors could hold a meeting in July If this happen in July, the money we will receive in August," the minister said on Inter TV.
Danyliuk said that only technical issues are left in the negotiations between Ukraine and the IMF.
He said that if Ukraine's issue is not settled in July, the board could discuss it at once after their vacation in late August.
"We have a preliminary plan for the IMF: this is $4.3 billion in three tranches, and we seek to receive all three tranches," the minister said.
Danyliuk added that Ukraine's reforms would be assessed for receiving all the tranches. This will become a positive signal for other international financial institutions and foreign investors.
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. On 17 and 18 July, 1936, General Franco began his military uprising in Morocco, a prelude to the fascist uprising throughout Spain. The Popular Front government, elected in February, was suspended in mid-air. The landlords and capitalists went over to Franco. The workers, however, responded in a spontaneous fashion. Had the revolutionary upsurge been successful, it could have changed the whole course of history.
Despite their enormous heroism and courage, the workers leaders acted as a massive brake on the revolutionary movement. The Spanish Stalinists, under orders from Moscow, played an openly counter-revolutionary role. Together with the socialists, they joined the Republican government. The POUM and the anarchist leaders entered the bourgeois government in Catalonia, rather than offer a united front against Franco. The aim of this government was to destroy the workers committees, the foundations of a proletarian government. This tragic mistake allowed the Stalinists to isolate and crush the POUM, sealing the fate of the revolution.
The elements of workers power were eliminated. The military struggle of the Spanish Republic dragged on, but with the crushing of the Revolution, the outcome was inevitable. The resulting victory of General Franco prepared the way for WWII and a nightmare for the Spanish working class.
Today, the Red Army having been captured and disarmed, the national forces have reached their final military objectives. The war is over. Signed: Generalissimo Franco, Burgos, 1st April, 1939. The Year of Victory.
So reads the final communique of the Spanish Civil War. Two days earlier his troops goose-stepped into Madrid, to the cheering of the hysterical middle classes. The dark shadow of fascist reaction spread over Spain.
Pope Pius XII, the head of Mother Church, immediately communicated his blessing. Lifting up our heart to the Lord, we rejoice with Your Excellency in the victory, so greatly desired, of Catholic Spain. We pray that your most beloved country, with peace attained, may take up again with new vigour the ancient Christian traditions which made her so great.
Francos peace was to unleash a reign of terror more devastating and vengeful than the Holy Inquisition. Francos enemies, the broken workers of Spain, were on their knees. In the slums of Madrid the starving people lived on bones. For the masses, there was no bread, no meat, no fuel. The Republican army had run out of ammunition and the Government had ignominiously fled weeks before, like a dog. The people, trembling and fearful, awaited their fate at the vengeful hands of Franco. 200 military judges accompanied the Nationalist troops into Madrid.
To the north, bedraggled columns of exhausted and starving refugees fled over the Pyrenees to France. Some 500,000 people crossed the border. Anything was better than to wait passively for Francos hangmen. Those who remained were herded like cattle into bullrings in provincial towns to await their fate at the hands of the merciless military judges. The new authorities moved swiftly and against the remnants of the Red Menace. In each of the main cities more than 100 were executed every day. Many simply starved to death. Francos Minister of Justice recorded 192,000 executions between 1939 and 1945, mostly summery shootings by firing squad. Some hid away in holes and cellars for fear of death, hidden by their families, and not emerging until more than 35 years later, following the death of Franco in 1975.
The Franco dictatorship lasted a long time, until it became utterly exhausted. A new generation of workers resisted the old dictatorship and engaged in revolutionary struggles. The death of Franco in 1975 ushered in a revolutionary crisis throughout Spain. The Socialists and Communists became mass organisations. However, instead of using the revolutionary wave to do away with Spanish capitalism, the leaders of the mass organisations conspired with the old regime to guarantee a peaceful transition to democracy. This lost opportunity resulted in massive disillusionment and the consolidation of the old regime in a new democratic guise.
Today the old parties of Spain are in crisis. The decline of the Popular Party and the Socialist Party has been met with the rise of the radical PODEMOS. Politics has polarised, epitomised by the return of the language of the 1930s. Even today, they are still digging up skeletons and shallow graves of those who perished resisting Franco.
Spain today is facing a new convulsive situation. The Spanish working class will enter major battles, as in the 1930s. It is therefore vital for the new generation to lean the lessons of the Spanish Revolution. The lessons of Spain will also be important lessons for European workers as a whole. To this end we enourage our readers to read or re-read the below articles on the Spanish Revolution which analyse the revolution and its demise, drawing the lessons for today.
The Spanish Revolution 1931-37 - Ted Grant
The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning (1937) - Leon Trotsky
Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution - Pierre Broue
Trotsky on Spain (Archive) - Leon Trotsky
Exorcise the spirit of Franco - Jorge Martin
Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers has submitted the country's budget resolution for 2017 in parliament last week, Parliament Speak Andriy Parubiy said.
"The budget resolution indeed was submitted to parliament last week," he said at a press conference in Kyiv on Monday.
In his words, the document had arrived almost two days prior to the closure of the parliament's session. "It was sent to the [budget] committee for processing. It's enough time for MPs to work on it until September," he said.
He expressed hope that parliament will start debates on the 2017 budget in September. "I'm sure that we won't have urgent session as in previous years [to pass the national budget on time]," the speaker said.
As was reported earlier, the parliament on July 15 closed the 4th session of the parliament of the 8th convocation and announced that the next session would open on September 6.
Most participants in online survey support Mazepa name for Boryspil airport
The proposal to rename Boryspil airport Mazepa airport has gained more votes in an online poll conducted by the Ministry of Infrastructure.
According to the website of the ministry, 12,768 survey participants supported the initiative of renaming Boryspil airport Ivan Mazepa airport.
Some 9,297 people believe the airport is worthy to be renamed after the creator of a helicopter, Ukrainian and American aircraft designer Ihor Sikorsky, 9,224 supported naming the airport after Ukrainian avant-garde artist of Polish origin Kazimierz Malewicz.
Some 6,385 people voted for naming the airport after aircraft designer Oleh Antonov, 335 were in favor of the name of the Ukrainian ethnographer, author of the words of the anthem of Ukraine Pavlo Chubynsky.
At the same time, 6,057 people believe the airport should not be assigned any name.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has expressed sympathy for all those who lost their relatives and loved ones in the Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 crash, and stressed that Kyiv will do everything in its power to ensure those responsible for the tragedy are brought to justice.
"Like every Ukrainian, I sincerely share the pain of those who lost their relatives in the MH17 flight crash, and will continue to fight so that no criminal responsible for shooting the plane down escapes the punishment they deserve," Poroshenko said, according to his press office.
"Together with our partners, we are doing whatever is necessary to make sure all those responsible for this tragedy are held to account," the president said, noting that the Dutch Safety Board has conducted a comprehensive technical investigation of the disaster, and the criminal inquiry into the crash led by the Dutch prosecutor's office is nearing completion.
The Malaysia Airlines MH17 flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was downed on July 17, 2014, in the armed conflict zone in Donetsk region, east Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew, who were nationals of ten countries. About two-thirds of the people on board were Dutch.
The air crash is being investigated by a group of specialists from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. The Dutch prosecution service is leading the group, whose main task is to identify those responsible for the crash. This fall, the joint inquiry group is due to submit its preliminary results, in particular, specifying the weapon which downed the plane and the exact location from where the rocket was launched.
University of Wyoming president Laurie Nichols said she would like to boost American Indian enrollment at Wyomings only public, four-year university.
"A recruitment and pipeline program is probably needed," Nichols, who became president in May, said following a visit this past week to the Wind River Indian Reservation.
Full Story: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/uw-president-urges-pipeline-for-wind-river-reservation/article_d2bd0b2f-c809-59c1-93e6-87db0ff5722d.html
Three Ukrainian soldiers have been injured and no one killed as a result of hostilities in Donbas in the past 24 hours, Ukrainian presidential administration's military spokesman for Anti-Terrorist Operation issues Oleksandr Motuzianyk said.
"None of Ukrainian military servicemen was killed but three were injured as a result of hostilities in the past 24 hours. This happened in the Mariupol area as a result of hostile shell attacks," Motuzianyk said at a briefing in Kyiv on Sunday.
According to the latest reports, two Ukrainian soldiers were shell-shocked in an armed clash near Maryinka on July 15, he said. "They are now in hospital in the town of Kurakhove, their lives are not at risk," the spokesman said.
The armed group that seized the building of a police and Interior Ministry Forces unit in Yerevan has set free one of the six hostages.
"We have gotten in touch with Jirair Sefilian [the leader of the Founding Parliament opposition group whose followers are involved in the hostage situation] and he suggested that one hostage be released. We set free the police officer with a medical condition. He has an allergy," Varuzhan Avetisian, a member of the armed group, told the local media.
"We are ready to resist a possible storm of the building by the police," Avetisian said.
He also said their demands were unaltered - release of Sefilian, resignation of the Armenian president and formation of a new government.
Ukrainian police report injury of two civilians in attack on Maryinka in Donbas
Two civilians suffered injuries in a militant attack on the town of Maryinka in the Donetsk region early on Monday morning, the Maryinka police department said.
"The explosion of a shell which hit Volodarska Street injured a 67-year-old man and a woman born in 1981 [...] They were hit when they were heading for a basement," a report published on the official webpage of the Donetsk regional department of the National Police said.
"The man suffered a stomach wound from shrapnel, and the woman, his niece, had chest and limb injuries," the police said.
The patients with the shrapnel wounds were taken to Kurakhove city hospital.
The incident was reported to the Maryinka police department at 04:25 a.m. An investigative team is working on the incident scene. A criminal case was opened under the 'terror attack' article (Part 2, Article 258) of the Ukrainian Criminal Code.
Employees of the Main Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine together with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) have exposed First Deputy Head of the State Labor Service of Ukraine as a bribe taker, the press secretary of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Larysa Sarhan has said.
Sarhan wrote on her his page on Facebook on Saturday, that UAH 100,000, which were given to the official as a bribe, were confiscated during a search.
At a briefing in Kyiv on Saturday, SBU Chief Vasyl Hrytsak disclosed the detainee's name - First Deputy Head of the State Labor Service Mykhailo Bardonov.
"At night, First Deputy Head of the State Labor Service M. Bardonov received a UAH 100,000 bribe," Hrytsak said at a briefing in Kyiv.
According to the SBU chief, during the search they seized a total of UAH 109,000, $153,000 and an expensive watch.
"Ten searches are taking place as part of this... Currently, the searches are conducted at the head of the State Labor Service," he said.
Bardonov has been detained pursuant to Article 208 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The circumstances of the offense and other persons involved in this crime are being established, the Prosecutor General's Office said.
Chicken will be the best-positioned protein due to its low price position in times of pressure on consumer spending power but rises in production costs and the long-term impact of COVID-19 threaten to disrupt the sector, according to Rabobank.
by Thom Forbes @tforbes, July 18, 2016
The nearly four-year battle between activist investor William Ackman and nutrition supplements company Herbalife came to a climax Friday when the Federal Trade Commission announced a $200 million settlement with the company, which also agreed to fundamentally restructure its compensation program so that participants are rewarded for what they sell, not how many people they recruit.
But federal officials stopped short of calling the company a pyramid scheme and allowed it to keep operating, NPRs Jim Zarroli reports, although the FTC had extremely tough words for Herbalife and made clear it sees many of its practices as deceptive.
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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, FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez stated in a release announcing the settlement. She also spoke at a Webcast press conference archived here.
In the Wall Street dogfight between two billionaire investors Ackman and Carl Icahn Ackman won a moral victory but Icahn won the war in that the FTC stopped short of shutting down the company, Matthew Goldstein and Alexandra Stevenson posit for the New York Times. Mr. Ackman had wagered big on Herbalifes demise, while Mr. Icahn had been betting on its ultimate survival.
Indeed, From its tone and contents, today's complaint could almost have been written by the authors of Ackman's multi-hour presentations about Herbalife, or the curators of his anti-Herbalife Web site. The FTC seems to agree with Ackman on essentially everything except his final conclusion that regulators should shut down Herbalife, writes Matthew Goldstein for BloombergView.
And so, rather than plummeting to $0 as Ackman has been looking for, the Los Angeles-based companys shares on Friday were trading at about $65 a 10% gain after the news hit, Goldstein and Stevenson point out.
Despite the huge losses he has sustained on the bet against Herbalife, Ackman remained steadfast Friday after the ruling. He said the commission ruling puts intense pressure on the company to reform its practices, in particular a provision that distributors are only compensated for profitable retail sales and not for recruiting or buying products, CNBCs Jeff Cox reports.
We expect that once Herbalife's business restructuring is fully implemented, these fundamental structural changes will cause the pyramid to collapse as top distributors and others take their downlines elsewhere or otherwise quit the business, Ackman stated in a release posted to his Pershing Square Capital Web site.
Fortunes Jen Wieczner estimates that Pershing Square would lose about $364 million if it were to buy back today all the shares its has borrowed in its short position (and that does not include the multimillions that Ackman has spent in researching the company, creating marketing campaigns against it and maintaining the positions, which takes the tally to an estimated $500 million).
The winners were Icahn to the tune of about $457 million and the FTC, Wieczner writes, as well as similar multi-level marketing companies that must be breathing a sigh of relief today as Herbalife escaped the FTC labeling it a pyramid scheme and got off without paying a terribly painful penalty.
For its part, Herbalife said it disagreed with the FTC but would carry on stronger than ever. Chairman and CEO Michael Johnson said in a statement, The FTC settlement is an acknowledgment that our business model is sound and underscores our confidence in our ability to move forward successfully, otherwise we would not have agreed to the terms.
Icahn, who holds 18% of the company and controls five board representatives, announced that the companys board raised his ownership limit to 35% from 25%. That could allow him to take a more active role in steering the companys strategy, reportBloombergs Beth Jinks, Matthew Townsend and David McLaughlin.
The settlement requires Herbalife to reward actual retail sales instead of the recruitment of distributors. The settlement also will require Herbalife to verify, through receipts and other methods, that its product sales are legitimate, David Benoit and Brent Kendall report for the Wall Street Journal.
This will force the company to prove it has underlying users who use its products. The settlement also bars Herbalife from misrepresenting distributors potential earnings and prohibits the company from claiming that Herbalife members will be able to quit their regular jobs or live lavish lifestyles, they continue.
Herbalifes adherence to the terms, including additional strictures on its business practices outlined in the news release, must be monitored by an Independent Compliance Auditor for seven years.
Were going to short the likelihood that this story is over.
Information Week, Monday, July 18, 2016 9:54 AM
The federal appeals court decision favours Microsoft's decision to refuse federal government access to email hosted on a server in Ireland, despite the issuance of a warrant. The case may push Congress to revamp laws in an era where data is stored in the cloud.
Read the whole story at Information Week
by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 18, 2016
During the Arab Spring in 2011, many people argued about social medias role in events like the revolution that overthrew Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, with plenty of meaningless truisms deployed in what turned out to be a rather unedifying debate (no, Facebook did not throw bricks at riot police or stand on a tank waving a flag). However by now it seems pretty clear that new technologies, including social media and mobile, are playing a significant role in many of the large-scale events gripping the worlds attention, by enabling participants to communicate almost instantaneously.
On that note, no, social media did not defeat the attempted coup in Turkey over the weekend but it certainly played a big part in allowing the human actors to get their messages out. Indeed, the image that will probably symbolize the response to the coup for posterity is Turkish President Recep Tayypi Erdogan addressing the nation via FaceTime, as an anchor on CNN Turk held up a smartphone for studio cameras to broadcast the image.
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This novel combination of old and new media allowed Erdogan to circumvent the army faction trying to seize control of the country, which had targeted all the usual sources of information, including the headquarters of state broadcaster and satellite links but failed to reckon with the power of social media. By the time the coup plotters got around to closing down CNN Turk, it was too late: the broadcast proved that Erdogan was still at liberty, despite the plotters claims to the contrary.
In the crucial period that followed, Erdogan confirmed that he was fighting the coup via tweets and Facebook posts reaching millions of followers, urging them to take to the streets and resist the military. Members of the government used Snapchat as an alternative channel to share information and organize popular resistance when phone lines were blocked.
In another interesting mix of old and new, according to the Financial Times, Erdogan also asked sympathetic imams to use mosque loudspeakers to raise the alarm, attracting huge crowds of protesters opposing the coup, which were then broadcast via live streaming video on Facebook Live and Twitters Periscope. The president also communicated directly with followers by text messages.
However, social media and mobile technology is a double-edged sword: according to the FT, the coup plotters were also using Snapchat to communicate in secret. As with the Arab Spring, theres also a good chance that the victory of social media and mobile communications will prove fleeting: wherever the next coup takes place, its a safe bet the coup plotters will make it a priority to shut down the Internet and cell service in addition to traditional media. The endless game of technological cat and mouse will continue.
Usuncut.com, Monday, July 18, 2016 11:08 AM
In true Stephen Colbert fashion, the "Late Show" host tested the boundaries in Cleveland last night less than 24 hours before the GOP convention kicked off. Decked out in a "Hunger Games"-style outfit, Colbert found his way to the main stage in the Quicken Loans Arena, where he began speaking in the all-too-familiar British accent from the movie. Within a couple seconds, security was on him and physically removed him from the stage.
Read the whole story at Usuncut.com
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, July 18, 2016
Google began rolling out a search feature Monday to help U.S. eligible voters learn how they can register per their state's respective requirements.
When individuals search for "register to vote" on Google, the search engine now displays detailed guidelines, voting requirements, and information on how to register online, by mail and in person.
As the Republican National Convention gets underway on Monday, and the Democratic National Convention soon after, people will take to search engines looking for answers to questions and topics posed by the Republican and Democratic candidates, along with their respective running mates and the issues for which they stand. Some of the questions being asked of Google include "What is a conservative Republican?" and "Who is the current leader of the Republican Party?"
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Throughout the United States, the search phrase "How to sign up to vote?" spiked on Sunday during the past seven days, but add the word "where" and the searches have been pretty steady for the past week, according to Google Trends.
Google says that while information about voting is available on the Web, it can be tricky at best to understand the available options, or how to get started. States also have different deadlines and guidelines, which further complicates the process.
Those in the states of Wyoming, Hawaii and Kansas want to know "where to vote" or ""where do I register to vote," per Google Trends.
Voters also took to Google during the weekend to research "Who is Mike Pence," Donald Trump's vice-presidential running mate. Speculation late last week drove the searches from Friday through Saturday, per Google Trends.
Reporting in the journal Scientific Reports, the team describes how the vaccine formulation has proven safe and effective in mouse models of Alzheimers, and it has also successfully targeted beta-amyloid and tau proteins in human brain tissue.
Essentially thats what happens in people who get Alzheimers or dementia is they have lots of these broken down proteins in the brain.
[The proteins are] a bit like the car in your driveway, Prof. Petrovsky explained to ABC Adelaide . You need to remove them from the brain otherwise if you left broken down cars in your driveway eventually you couldnt get out.
Beta-amyloid is known to accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimers, forming plaques, while the tau protein forms tangles. Plaques and tangles are believed to disrupt signaling between nerve cells and contribute to nerve cell death.
Study co-author Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky, of Flinders University School of Medicine in Australia, and colleagues reveal how a vaccine combination generates antibodies that target beta-amyloid and tau proteins in the brain both of which are considered hallmarks of Alzheimers disease .
A vaccine for Alzheimers disease could be trialed in humans within the next 3-5 years, after researchers from the United States and Australia have uncovered a formulation that they say successfully targets brain proteins that play a role in development and progression of the disease.
Researchers have spent decades searching for ways to prevent and treat Alzheimers, but success has been limited.
Between 2002-2012, 413 clinical trials were conducted worldwide that assessed the safety and efficacy of 244 compounds against Alzheimers. Only one new drug came out of these trials representing a 0.4 percent success rate and this drug only induces short-term relief of Alzheimers symptoms.
As a result of such poor outcomes from clinical trials to date, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) increased their funding for Alzheimers research by $350 million, bringing the total funding for research in the U.S. to $1.3 billion this year.
According to Prof. Petrovsky and colleagues, such funding has led to the development of their exceptional vaccine, which they say is comprised of a MultiTEP vaccine platform and Advax.
The team explains that the MultiTEP approach produces high antibody responses to beta-amyloid and tau proteins either independently or combined, while Advax is an adjuvant vaccine that further boosts the antibody response.
In their study, the researchers found that the formulation was effective and well-tolerated in Alzheimers mouse models , with no reports of adverse reactions. The vaccine was also able to target the proteins in brain tissue from patients with Alzheimers.
This study suggests that we can immunize patients at the early stages of AD [Alzheimers disease], or even healthy people at risk for AD, using our anti-amyloid-beta vaccine, and, if the disease progresses, then vaccinate with another anti-tau vaccine to increase effectiveness. Study co-author Prof. Michael Agadjanyan, Institute for Molecular Medicine, California
According to the Alzheimers Association, around 5.4 million people in the U.S. are living with Alzheimers, and this number is expected to almost triple by 2050 unless new, effective treatment strategies are uncovered.
The researchers say they will be working with four companies to assess the non-clinical safety and toxicology of the vaccine, which is required under the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) Investigational New Drug program.
If the vaccine continues to show success in these preclinical trials, the researchers say they could be testing the vaccine in individuals at high risk for Alzheimers or those in the early stages of the disease within the next 3-5 years.
Learn how a personalized treatment plan could reduce Alzheimers-related memory loss.
The tensions remain very high in the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone in Donbas, eastern Ukraine. Monitors from the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM) have recorded an increase in the number of violations of the ceasefire regime in the Donetsk sector of the contact line.
"In the Avdiyivka-Yasynuvata-Donetsk airport triangle, the number of ceasefire violations actually doubled in number, representing more than 70% of all ceasefire violations recorded in the region. There was a 10% increase in the level of violence on the western and northern outskirts of Horlivka," OSCE SMM Principal Deputy Chief Monitor Alexander Hug told a briefing conference in Kyiv on Friday.
"There, 10% of total ceasefire violations were recorded," he added.
In his words, in contrast, areas around the villages of Shyrokyne and Kominternove saw a 50% decrease in the number of ceasefire violations, constituting 10% of the total recorded.
"The largest decrease was recorded along the Svitlodarsk-Debaltseve road. There, the number of ceasefire violations recorded last week decreased by more than 90% compared to the previous week. The numbers recorded in the area were in fact the lowest since we opened a forward patrol base in Svitlodarsk in January," he said.
Scientists at Duke Health are part of a team that has discovered a type of cell surrounding blood vessels can also serve as a starting point for sarcoma, a form of cancer that occurs in bones and connective tissues.
The findings, made through studies of mice, offer insights that could aid in the development of potential new treatments for the rare but devastating cancer, which has 15,000 new diagnoses annually in the U.S.
In an article to be published online in the journal Cell Reports, the international team of researchers describe tracing the lineage of the cancer back to the pericyte, a cell that supports the body's blood vessels. According to the findings, genetic mutations in these cells led to osteosarcoma and soft-tissue sarcoma, as well as non-cancerous tumors.
"About half of all sarcomas in the U.S. affect people under 35," said senior author Benjamin Alman, M.D., chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Duke. "This cancer is difficult to treat, and for those who survive, they are living with the effects for decades. With new chemotherapies and surgery, we have seen long-term survival improve to about 60 to 65 percent, but advances have leveled off in recent years. We hope that by looking at the biological development of the tumor, we can come up with new ways to intervene."
Alman and fellow authors - who represent Duke as well as the Hospital for Sick Children and Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Tokyo Medical and Dental University Graduate School and Faculty of Medicine, and Seoul National University Hospital - found that cancer cells contained less of a protein called beta catenin compared to the pericytes from which they originated. Alman said this suggests that at some point, the beta catenin was "turned off" in the cell.
When the researchers activated beta catenin in cells using lithium, a drug already used in patients, this appeared to limit the size and growth of the cancers that formed.
Previous studies of beta catenin in sarcoma cells lacked any means of comparison for determining whether levels were high or low, Alman said. By identifying the pericyte as a cell of origin, scientists now have baseline levels for comparison.
The researchers hope to further investigate the use of lithium to regulate beta catenin.
"Lithium has been tried in lung cancer treatments, so perhaps we could see it being used down the road to suppress sarcomas," Alman said. "It's premature to do clinical trials in humans at this point. The next step is to grow larger numbers of human sarcomas in mice and treat them with lithium to see whether this can stop or even shrink existing tumors."
he research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01 CA183811), the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (FRN 123493), the Restracomp fellowship of the Hospital for Sick Children Research Training Centre, and grants for foreign study of KANAE Foundation for the Promotion of Medical Science. The authors also received assistance from Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Center in Vancouver, which performed RNA sequencing analysis. The authors cited no conflicts of interest related to this work.
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It is essential for key populations to have access to the full range of HIV prevention options in order to protect themselves and their sexual partners from HIV. This underscores the urgent need for the UNAIDS knowing their HIV status, 90% of people who know their status accessing anti-retroviral treatment and 90% of people on treatment having suppressed viral loads.Midnight Poonkasetwattana of APCOM questioned the silence on size estimates of MSM populations in Asia Pacific countries. "Countries like China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam estimates MSM population to be over 5% when prevalence in cities like Bangkok, Hanoi and Jakarta is hiking to 15-20% or even more! Why is that access to condoms still remains very low in our region and 90% of MSM in Asia Pacific do not have access to HIV prevention services that they need because of discriminatory roles. 18 out of 58 countries in our region still criminalize same sex behavior. Since July 2012 when PrEP was approved by US-FDA and in 2014 WHO recommendations came in for PrEP as an effective HIV prevention tool for MSM, why are we not doing very well in rolling PrEP in Asia Pacific?""Spending on HIV prevention in Asia Pacific remains very low, especially for key populations. Funding for HIV prevention among MSM population in Asia Pacific is less than 7% of overall HIV budget. This unacceptable funding does not match the estimated epidemic among MSM and transgender people! Critical components like advocacy, community mobilization and prevention are still getting largely funded by international donors and not domestically" added Midnight.Meg Davis, a noted human rights lawyer and advocate, who founded Asia Catalyst a decade back, shared statistical findings to support key arguments for counting size estimates of key populations accurately. She said "In countries where same sex behaviour was not criminalized there was a reasonable size estimate of MSM population but in countries where same sex behaviour was criminalized and which imposed penalties like imprisonment or fine we had a smaller size estimate for MSM population. In countries where there were death penalties for same sex behaviour we had even tinier MSM size estimates. This is what key populations have been saying for years but now we have statistical evidence to back this up.""Second finding we had was that countries that did criminalize MSM were doing "better" in terms of HIV testing for MSM - they had reported "higher" coverage of HIV testing among MSM. This seems odd and we looked at countries that criminalized and had reported 90% to 99% HIV testing coverage among MSM (some countries reported even 100%). We found that most of these countries had no MSM size estimates, and tiny samples were used as basis to calculate the service coverage, Algeria for example, had tested 59 men and 57 of these men picked up their test results so Algerian authorities arrived at 96.6% HIV testing coverage among MSM. Hungary tested 388 men and reported a 100% HIV testing coverage. Criminalization can lead to low size estimates, and low denominators result in inflated coverage" added Meg Davis.Cash absorption is how much of the cash that comes from International aid agencies is actually getting spent on HIV, TB and malaria programs. "2015 data from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (The Global Fund) shows that top 20 countries that had very coming in the countries but sitting in banks - sometimes for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, a year or year and a half! Even for as long as 61 months money was just sitting there unspent! Commodities were not being procured, healthcare workers were not being hired, programs were not being started to serve their communities! There were many reasons for this delay in utilizing aid that goes in these countries: procurement supply chain issues, laws and policies, or reluctance to start programs for key populations for one reason or another. The Global Fund is trying very hard to address this issue and have made tremendous progress on reducing this cash balance. But with next round of Global Fund replenishment these high HIV burden countries are likely to get a important for communities to be aware of absorptive capacities that how much cash is there at the country level and how much is getting spent. We need to get that expenditure information transparent!" added Meg.Governments of all countries in Asia Pacific, and globally, have committed to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, one of which is to end AIDS by 2030. If we do not want to fail in achieving SDGs by 2030 or earlier, we need to ensure that size estimates of all key populations are accurate, components of all programs are well resourced, money is not being locked up or delayed rather getting fully utilized optimally, and HIV rates decline fast enough to keep us on track to meet the promises made for 2030.
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Currently there are 7000 rare diseases with newer ones being discovered each year.
80% of all rare diseases are genetic and usually present at birth or a little while after birth
Rare diseases may be single-gene disorders like thalassemia and sickle cell anemia or multiple-gene disorders like hereditary multiple osteochondromas
Almost 50% of those affected are children and 30% of these children will not live beyond the age of 5
It takes nearly 7 years to diagnose a rare disease
95% of rare diseases do not have a cure
He expressed his views that all patients regardless of culture and religion must have equal access to healthcare and treatment. The Pope noted that the philosophy of "profit" prevailed over "care" and patients with rare diseases were seen as economic burdens. He said that this principle of profit was against the moral philosophy of upholding the dignity and right to live of every human being. The Pope raised the significant issue of the immense suffering at all levels for patients and their families.Much of the conference was devoted to rare diseases and the prospects of using adult stem cells for curative. The meeting saw a diverse audience as scientists, medical researchers, doctors, patients, religious leaders and government officials gathered to share their views. US Vice-president, Joe Biden was present as a VIP guest at the conference. Joe's son Beau succumbed to brain cancer in 2015 and Joe was at the conference as part of his campaign tour to promote cures for cancers.The Pope emphasized the creation of interdisciplinary spaces between medical science and technology and human concerns to pay attention to moral issues. He called for investment in education and increasing funding for rare disease research and cures. Significantly, the Pope raised the vital issue of legislations as part of access to healthcare for patients with rare diseases.The conference and the Pope's forward looking statements and suggestions have generated hope among patients and families with rare diseases. The conference was a rare confluence of religion and science meeting to solve the world's critical problems especially disease and suffering.Source: Medindia
Traveling is always fun. But, having children along becomes more challenging and it involves careful planning. Traveling does take away from regular eating and sleeping schedule and is more likely that someone may get sick. Also, it takes the time to adjust to food, water and air of the new environment. In this situation, kids especially are vulnerable entities and can easily be prone to travel related sickness and disorders. However, early planning and smart packing can get rid of these menaces occurring while traveling and thus may result in a healthy and peaceful travel.
The most commonly reported health ailments among child travelers are: diarrhea, dermatological conditions, systemic illnesses like malaria and respiratory disorders. Developing motion sickness is especially higher in children between ages 2 to 12.
Though air travel is safe for healthy infants and children, it is recommended to wait till the newborns are one to two weeks old. Children <15 years of age constitute a small proportion among travelers. Therefore, their travel health is unique as they have small bodies and immune system is under development. Infants and young children are typically sensitive towards any sudden changes in altitude and ultraviolet radiations
Therefore, in order for everyone to stay healthy during the course of the journey, Dr. Nava Yeganeh, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases and director of the Pediatric International Travel and Adoption Clinic at Mattel Childrens Hospital UCLA, suggests some useful strategies.
Prevent Diarrhea
Diarrhea and other stomach problems represent common health issues among children, while traveling abroad. This is caused by bacteria/or other germs entering inside the digestive tract, from contaminated food or water. This can be prevented by:
Eating foods, which are properly boiled, cooked or peeled.
Washing hands before eating.
Use purified water for drinking, brushing teeth, mixing infant formula and foods.
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Keep handy alcohol based hand-sanitizer.
Drink plenty of fluids and make sure to be hydrated at all times. If in case, diarrhea occurs, fluid can be replenished by taking oral rehydration salts (ORS), which can also restore electrolyte imbalance in the body. This can be mixed with boiled/bottled water or by taking prepacked rehydration drink.
Immediate medical attention must be sought if blood occurs in stool, child develops a high degree fever, or is often vomiting and is not able to tolerate any drink or seems to be overly dehydrated.
Foods from street vendors should be avoided.
Ensure all dairy products are pasteurized.
Be Up-to-date on Vaccinations
There are some vaccine preventable diseases and children are more prone to them. Therefore, before you travel, check the following with your healthcare provider:
Dosing schedule of vaccine needs to be adjusted and make sure your child is safe to travel.
If the child is over 6 months, consider administering flu (influenza) shot.
If infants are traveling with you, there is a risk of vaccine-preventable disease, discuss options with your doctor.
Many countries require vaccination against yellow fever or Japanese encephalitis. So visit your healthcare provider to discuss the same and check if vaccination is required. In some cases, vaccine may not offer full immunity till few weeks on administration, therefore avoid waiting until last minute.
Ensure regular vaccination for diseases such as measles, polio and hepatitis are kept updated.
Ask your doctor if vaccine is not a regular schedule for your children. Also, there maybe certain age requirements for the same.
Though most vaccines are safe for breast-feeding mothers, in case if you are breast feeding, discuss this with your doctor.
In cases of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines, consult with your pediatrician if vaccine schedule can be accelerated, if your child has not undergone immunization.
Watch out for Vector Borne Diseases
There are many diseases like malaria, chikungunya, dengue, zika that are transmitted by mosquitoes. By following simple health tips; vector-borne diseases can be prevented in children.
Use insect repellent with N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET), wash this off before going to bed
Tie a bed net treated with insecticide around your childrens bed
Cover the skin with long-sleeved clothes
Ask your health care provider if anti-malarial medication is recommended.
Keep anti-malarial medicines out of reach of children.
Attention must be sought or medical help should be taken if child develops a high grade fever while traveling or after travel. Provide your doctor with all necessary travel details.
If anti-malarial medicines are taken or not, always protect the children from mosquito bites.
Anti-malarial medicines are difficult to be given to children due to their unpleasant taste. In such circumstances, medicines may be crushed and then mixed with small amounts of food or drink for masking its taste.
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Motion Sickness
Children between ages of 2-12 are at a greater risk of developing motion sickness and this usually occurs while traveling by boat. This can be avoided by:
If you happen to travel by car, take frequent rest stops.
Make sure the child looks out of the window, rather than a stationery object inside the vehicle.
Make sure the child has eaten something before travel and avoid greasy or heavy foods.
To minimize head movement, use headrest
Consult with your healthcare provider.
Do ask your child intermittently if feeling sick. Short walk or fresh air during that time may be helpful.
Fresh air may be helpful, so keep the windows open if possible.
Jet Lag
Flying across different time zones can be difficult, especially for children as internal body clock needs to be adjusted to local time and chances are that there is a feeling of tiredness as body has been awake for more number of hours. Here are few tips that can prove useful:
Try to schedule your family's sleeping hours 2-3 hours before departure.
Get adequate amount of rest and possibly sleep on flight.
Have children drink adequate amount of water as dehydration is associated with jet lag side effects.
On arrival, encourage kids to be active outside or inside where there is sufficient light during daytime.
Make kids stay awake until their usual bedtime by following local time at your destination.
Ear Discomfort
It's very common for kids to have pain in the ears during flights take-off and landing process. At this time kids should be encouraged to yawn or swallow and if old enough to chew gum. For infants, they can be either nursed or allowed to suck on a bottle. If any medication is to be given to your children at this time it should be discussed with your doctor.
Packing
Include all medicines and other medical supplies for your entire family as they may be hard to find in your destination.
Always include inhalers, allergy medication and insulin (if needed).
Other items that can be packed are: over-the-counter (OTC) painkiller medicines, small first aid kit, insect repellent (that preferably contains DEET), hand sanitizers.
googlebottomads Carry copies of child's medical history, all test reports, immunization records, and list of medicines your child is allergic to, your healthcare provider's name and contact number, list of ongoing health problems if any.
Take a prescription for glasses or contact lenses, if advised.
Take sunglasses along in order to protect your childs eye from harmful sunrays.
Traveling abroad is fun and can be eventful experience. However, its rather difficult when traveling abroad especially if you have kids along with you. But, this can be effectively dealt with as there are some precautions, which need to be taken into account. If these above mandatory things are given due importance, traveling to a foreign can turn out be a fruitful experience for your entire family.
Introduction
Military tension is rising between Russia and NATO. The recent NATO-Russia Council meeting, held on July 13, did not bring produce any serious development in terms of political dialogue.[1] The Head of the European Security Department RAS Institute of Europe, Dmitry Danilov, said that the meeting's goal was to reduce risks and mutual harm, since "practically no positive agenda" exists.[2] NATO accuses Russia of conducting "provocative" military activities in the periphery of NATO territory, and of destabilizing European security through aggressive actions such as the annexation of Crimea, and large-scale snap exercises that violate the spirit of the 2011 Vienna Document for building confidence and transparency amongst member states. Russia in return accuses NATO of "confrontational" actions close to the Russian border, since it considers the deployment of NATO' battalions in Poland and in the Baltic countries, and a brigade in Romania a breach of the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act. Moscow is also concerned about the U.S./NATO missile defense system deployed in Eastern Europe. NATO claims that it is directed at Iran and not against Russia, but Moscow considers it a direct threat to its nuclear arsenal.[3] According to MGIMO University Associate Professor, Mikhail Troitskiy, NATO could send a positive signal to Russia if it were to abandon its plans to make the European missile defense system capable of "intercepting intercontinental ballistic missile [i.e. nuclear-armed ballistic missile] by 2020, as neither Iran nor other Middle Eastern players seem capable of acquiring such arms."[4]
In May 2016, the pro-Kremlin Russian think tank Council for Foreign and Defense Policies published a memorandum, titled "Russia's Foreign Policy: From the Late 2010s - To the Early 2020s," that pointed to an increased risk of a nuclear war between Russian and the West. The memorandum stated: "In the world of traditional politics, such a rapid re-distribution of economic and political powers and of moral influence would almost inevitably trigger a series of large-scale wars or even a new world war. But so far, this has been prevented by the most important structural factor that has determined the world's development for the past seventy years - nuclear weapons, especially super-powerful arsenals in Russia and the US. They only prevented the Cold War from becoming a nuclear war. Had it not been for the sobering threat of a nuclear Armageddon, the 'old' world establishment would hardly have agreed to the explosive growth of influence of rising powers, primarily China and India. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons goes on, whereas the level of trust, dialogue, and positive cooperation in the military and strategic sphere is extremely low. Taken together, all this increases the probability of a nuclear war. Sustainable international strategic stability has decreased."[5]
Nuclear-Armed Ballistic Missiles Were Deployed In Massive Drills In Russia
Topol-M (Rt.com, July 12, 2016)
Ahead of the NRC meeting, Russian media outlets reported that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles were deployed in massive drills in Russia. The website of the Russian government-funded TV channel RT reported that around 400 military vehicles including those carrying Topol, Topol-M and RS-24 Yars ballistic missiles are taking part in massive snap military exercises across different Russian regions. The drills are aimed at training personnel in rapid response practice, camouflaging, locating enemy units, patrolling, and operating amid biological and nuclear hazards. [6] According to the Russian government daily, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, each regiment covers a territory, which exceeds the combined territory of some European states.[7] The drills are part of a series of different tactical staff training exercises planned for 2016 by the Strategic Missile Forces.[8] The Russian media outlet Vzglyad.ru adds that by the end of 2016, the Russian Strategic Missile Command is expected to conduct up to 40 headquarters drills, 20 command drills, 50 tactical and special-tactical trainings.[9] It is also worth mentioning that large scale strategic missiles drills were previously held on April-May 2016, which involved 400 units of heavy machinery and around 4000 troops. [10]
Commenting on the drills, military expert of the Association of Political Scientists, Andrey Koshkin, said: "This is a summer period of training which is very important since the climate conditions enable having all levels of coordinated training......The thing is that they [NATO] constantly need to prove the Russian aggression. Thus they link any of our actions having to do with mere military training to an aggression."[11]
Topol-M (Rt.com, July 12, 2016)
NATO's Drills - Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov: 'We Are Convinced That There Are No Threats In This Region To Justify Its Militarization'
At the same time that Russia kicked off massive drills. NATO launched Sea Breeze 2016 naval drills in the Black Sea. Bulgaria is hosting the Sea Breeze 2016 naval exercise from July 8 till July 17, 2016. As many as 25 naval vessels from Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Spain and Turkey, two aircraft and two helicopters, and 1700 troops will took part in the exercise. The Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group TWO joined as well the exercise.
Prior to the Sea Breeze 2016, the NATO "Anckonda -16" military drills began in Poland on June 6. "Anaconda-16," the largest military drill held in Eastern Europe since the cold war, lasted 10 days and involved 31,000 service members. Other NATO drills "BALTOPS 2016" (June 3-19) and "Saber Strike" (May 27-June 22), a long-standing U.S. Army Europe-led cooperative training exercise, took place simultaneously in the Baltic region.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reacted to the NATO military drills near the Russian border, during a joint news conference with Finland's Foreign Minister Timo Soini in Moscow. Lavrov said: "We have focused on security issues in the Baltic Sea area. We are convinced that there are no threats in this region to justify its militarization. We shared our concerns about increased NATO activities in the region, and NATO moving its infrastructure closer to our borders. We are convinced that all issues of cooperation in the Baltic Sea and the North in general can and should be resolved within the framework of existing multilateral formats in the Baltic Sea region, the Barents/Euro-Arctic Region, and the Arctic ... I can add that we have reaffirmed our belief that each country has a sovereign right to choose a security policy it considers appropriate. At the same time, we make no secret of our negative attitude to the NATO policy of moving its military infrastructure closer to our border and involving other states in its military activities. In this context, Russia has a sovereign right to use such methods to protect its security as appear to be adequate to the existing risks. I am convinced that our Finnish friends and neighbors are aware of this."[12]
On the snake: Anaconda, referring to the NATO "Anakonda- 16" military drill. The cartoon refers to the famous Russian fable, titled "The Swan, The Pike and The Crab", by Ivan Krylov (1768-1844). The three animals, who represent NATO members, don't agree and work at cross purposes. One day, the three animals wanted to pull a cart (which in the cartoon morphs into the NATO "Anaconda-16" military exercise), but the swan, the pike and crab pull in different directions. Therefore, although they exerted all their might, the cart did not budge and all their efforts proved useless. (Vk.com/13studiya, June 27, 2016)
Discussing the NATO drill in the Baltic region, Russia's Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko told the Rossiya 24 TV channel: "What we are seeing today in the Baltic States, as a matter of fact, is nothing [other] than attempts towards force development [in line] with the recent hostile policy pursued by NATO. I would not say that it is a direct threat for Russia, but nevertheless, it obviously creates serious risks as we see an absolutely new military reality forming along our border." He then added that NATO's military activity "is profoundly changing the military situation in the region," and warned that "Russia, as is known, can ensure its security very efficiently."
In the interview, Grushko also mentioned that Russia has no plans to attack Poland: "Recently the [NATO] secretary general visited Poland, and during these visits the Polish side was making statements that now Russia knows that an attack against Poland is an attack against NATO, which is completely absurd, as they are discussing a problem that does not exist...There are no plans to attack Poland." He then added that "the [NATO] policy lives in a surrealistic reality, and the most dangerous thing is that it now starts taking the form of military planning and military preparations carried out on territories along our borders," Grushko said.[13]
Endnotes:
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Qandeel Balochs murder has not just hit the headlines all over the world but has also stirred up a situation that is ugly and grave in nature. She was brutally killed by her brother in the name of honour, and the sad part is, he is unapologetically okay about the fact that he murdered his sister. We cannot comprehend the feelings of what her loved ones might be going through right now.
Her funeral rites were performed by her family in her ancestral village of Shah Saddardin in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan. Her brother might be a monster but the rest of the family is definitely not the same. Her father, in particular, mourns her death deeply. Mohammad Azeem, Qandeels father, has given a statement that he is sure about pursuing a case against her brother Waseem to get justice for her death.
She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her, he said. He also gave some sad details about the familys approach towards Qandeel. He mentioned that his sons were usually not very supportive and happy about her achievements, despite her ardent support for them.
Source: Dawn
Qandeel Baloch, a popular social media celebrity, was recently strangled to death by her in a case of honour killing in Multan. Her social media posts were rather bold and probably a bit too racy and risque for her brothers conservative taste. On Sunday, Balochs brother, Waseem Azeem, gave her a tablet to sedate her and, later, strangled her to death. He also went ahead to say, I have no regrets.
Instagram
Fauzia Azeems (Qandeel Balochs real name) last post on Facebook spoke about trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people in Pakistan. Oh! The irony! She was often subjected to death threats and misogynistic abuse because of her provocative conduct on social media.
Instagram
Honour killing happens when someone murders their own family member on account of disgrace caused by them in the society. For this reason alone, Qandeel Balochs brother refuses to understand the grave mistake he committed. In fact, he said that he did act alone and was not embarrassed at all because Qandeels behaviour was completely intolerable. Well, clearly, murder seemed like the only possible answer to him.
Illegal armed formations attacked positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 64 times in the last day, the press center of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) headquarters has said.
"The largest number of the attacks 40 incidents was registered in the Donetsk sector," the press service wrote on Facebook on Monday.
Militants used 120mm and 82mm mortars, grenade launchers, large-caliber machine-guns to shell the town of Avdiyivka, and the villages of Zaitseve and Mayorsk. They also fired 120mm mortars on the village of Dacha, and the village of Verkhniotoretske came under 82mm mortar fire. Grenade launchers, large-caliber machine-guns and an anti-aircraft system were fired at the village of Novhorodske.
Seventeen attacks were recorded in the Mariupol sector. The enemy used 120mm mortars to shell Ukrainian troops based in the villages of Starohnativka, Shyrokyne, Novoselivka, and Hnutove. The village of Pavlopil came under fire from 82mm mortars, the town of Maryinka was attacked by an infantry combat vehicle amid simultaneous sniper fire.
Ukrainian troops in the Luhansk sector survived seven barrages. The enemy used 120mm mortars to shell Ukrainian position outside the village of Novozvanivka, while 82mm mortars, an anti-aircraft gun and grenade launchers were fired on the village of Stary Aidar. Militants also lobbed 82mm mortar shells into the village of Orikhove.
BERKELEY Once again, a terror attack half a world away has stung UC Berkeley, as anguished friends and family frantically search for a student missing after the massacre in Nice, France.
Still shaken from the death of a student killed two weeks ago by armed militants in Bangladesh, Cal now fears 20-year-old Nicolas Nick Leslie was lost, hurt or worse in the aftermath of the Bastille Day attack in the French resort city. College and State Department officials Saturday said there was no update on his whereabouts.
Family and friends have not heard from Leslie since he was seen Thursday evening running from the promenade where a truck plowed into a large crowd of revelers, killing more than 80 people and injuring some 200 others. Police later killed the driver.
We are devastated. People are very upset. Its unbelievable, UC Berkeley spokeswoman Claire Holmes said. We are all hoping that Nick Leslie is found and gets returned safely.
Leslie, a junior majoring in the College of Natural Resources was among 85 UC Berkeley students in Nice participating in a 15-day conference called Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Europe, part of the International European Innovation Academy, according to the UC Berkeley media department.
Many were traumatized by the attack and some have returned home; three of them suffered injuries, the university said.
Leslies Italian aunt and uncle on Friday were in Nice traveling from hospital to hospital looking for him, as his parents said prayers in their Southern California home. Leslie is from Milan, Italy, and went to Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, according to his Facebook page.
We know he successfully avoided colliding with the truck, but we lost him in the stampede and chaos that followed, Leslies friend Abhinav Kukreja wrote on Facebook.
Leslies father, Conrad Leslie, on Friday was distressed but hopeful that his son would be found safe soon. The family is working closely with UC Berkeley and U.S. embassy officials. We are praying for the people who already lost people and praying for our son to come home safe, Conrad Leslie said from the family home in Del Mar on Friday. Our hearts go out to people who have already got bad news. We havent heard anything yet.
Consular teams in Nice, Marseille and Paris have been working with other U.S. government agencies and French authorities to account for all American citizens, according to the State Department.
We aware of reports that a U.S. citizen is missing. As in any case where a U.S. citizen is reported missing, we are in close touch with the family and working intensively to coordinate with French authorities to locate the individual, the State Department said in a statement Saturday. Due to privacy considerations, we cannot comment further.
Other Bay Area residents vacationing there witnessed the carnage. One moment, Walnut Creek resident Sara Luka was watching the beautiful fireworks show. Then chaos erupted.
Literally a big white van was driving and crushing people, children, women and men, Luka wrote in a message to this newspaper.
She grabbed her 6-year-old daughter Nell and told her 8-year-old son Tiger to run.
All the time there was huge chaos and screams and crying. I didnt know what to do, jump in a bush or lay down or keep on running, she said. They ran and made it back to their hotel room safely, Luka said.
At its daily briefing Friday, the State Department said two Americans, Sean Copeland and his 11-year-old son, Brodie, of Texas, were killed in the attacks. It made no reference to any other Americans who were unaccounted for or injured.
Three Cal students suffered injuries: Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, a senior computer science major in the College of Letters and Science, sustained a broken leg; Diane Huang, 20, a senior majoring in environmental economics and policy in the College of Natural Resources, broke her foot; and Daryus Medora, 21, broke his leg. Medora, an undeclared sophomore, remained in a hospital Friday.
Many of them had gone to be part of the celebrations and see the fireworks when the tragic acts of terrorism occurred, Holmes said.
The conference in Nice was temporarily suspended Friday because of the tragedy. UC Berkeley offered to bring its participating students home before the conferences July 24 end date. On Friday afternoon, four Cal students had already left Nice; two planned to leave Saturday and one expected to leave Sunday.
A representative of the campuss study abroad program was on a plane headed to Nice on Friday, the university said.
Within two hours of the attack, a Cal professor had accounted for all the Berkeley students except for Leslie. The students underwent training to prepare for an emergency.
Thats part of the protocol in todays world. The students are taught to share their phone numbers, stay in contact via Facebook with regard to their whereabouts, Holmes said.
Students from UC Davis, Merced, Santa Cruz and one student from the Peralta Community College District were also in Nice at the time of the attack, according to Holmes. A Stanford University official said none of its students were in Nice on summer programs.
Cals campus was largely empty Friday during the summer break. Elise Cantiran, a French citizen studying in a French and American comparative literature program, said she worried for her friends back home who vacation in Nice this time of year.
I have no news from them, said Cantiran, who arrived in Berkeley a week ago. I have tried to contact them via Facebook but so far, nothing.
Many of Leslies friends have taken to social media in the search to find him. Others in the Cal community posted about the grief and their concern for Leslies whereabouts on the universitys Facebook page.
My boyfriend and I are Cal alum and we were on the promenade watching the fireworks just a few minutes before the truck hit, Raina Verma wrote. We would have been there when the attack happened, but decided to go back to our hotel just a few minutes away to get my jacket before we headed to dinner further down the promenade.
It makes me shudder to think what could have happened had I not gone back for that jacket, Verma wrote.
This is the second time this month that UC Berkeley students working or studying abroad have been victims in a terror attack. UC Berkeley sophomore Tarishi Jain, 18, was in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for an internship when she was killed July 2 in an attack at a restaurant.
The Associated Press and staff writer Matthias Gafni contributed to this report. Contact Malaika Fraley at 925-234-1684. Follow her at Twitter.com/malaikafraley.
STANFORD Some day when your heart needs healing, your bones need bonding or your skin needs stitching clusters of new cells now growing in a Stanford University lab could offer a fix.
For the first time, researchers at Stanfords School of Medicine have quickly and efficiently generated pure colonies of 12 different specialized cell types from embryonic stem cells that could be used to repair the human body.
These various cells have been grown before, but the process has been fiendishly difficult to control. Experiments often ended up with impure mixtures of multiple cell types, with limited practical use. And it took a long time weeks or months to grow them.
The Stanford team, collaborating with the Genome Institute of Singapore, grew the cell colonies in mere days. This was made possible by the teams improved understanding of the complex symphony of chemical signals needed to direct cellular development.
It is fantastic a gateway to a lot of applications in regenerative medicine, a field that uses cells to build healthy replacement tissue, said Kyle Loh of Stanfords Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, a co-author of the study published in Thursdays issue of the journal Cell. The work was supported, in part, by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, created by California voters when they approved $3 billion in bonds in 2004.
It represents another step toward the once seeming sci-fi fantasy of repairing or restoring damaged tissue with stem cells. Last week, physicians at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, in partnership with Stanford Medicine, successfully completed a surgery injecting millions of stem cells into the spinal cord of a patient who had recently suffered a severe spinal cord injury. The aim is to replace damaged neural connections, restoring mobility. The unidentified patient, who is healing successfully, became one of only a handful of people in the world who have undergone the procedure as part of this clinical trial.
Ever since they were first isolated in 1998, embryonic stem cells have become one of medicines greatest hopes and one of its biggest frustrations.
Extracted from early embryos, they are the bodys building blocks, capable of generating over 1,000 cells. This means they could be enlisted to build replacement organs or diseases in a dish, where drugs can be easily tested.
But its been challenging to replicate the exact developmental signals that embryos used to guide their development.
Its like assembling a new car, Loh said. You need to know how its put together, in what order and what arrangement.
The Stanford-Singapore team created a detailed map of the routes through which stem cells develop into multiple cell types. They focused on the stem cells for the mesoderm, one of the three primary masses of cells in the early embryo. It is responsible for crafting bone, heart, blood vessels, cartilage, portions of the kidneys and skin and other cell types.
Then, using chemicals and proteins, they carefully guided the cells choices at each fork along the developmental road.
We were able to get the precise timing and precise combination of developmental signals, Loh said. San Jose native Angela Chen of San Jose State University and Stanford also shared in the research.
This forced the cells to follow specific paths generating pure populations of desired cell types. The identify of the cells was verified through genetic analysis.
At the Stanford lab, Loh watched the uniformly round stem cells morph into different shapes, then crawl away from one another, and move around the dish.
Within 24 hours, bone cells became star-shaped. Heart muscle cells grew long and rhythmic, twitching, spontaneously, he said.
Within five to nine days, it was possible to generate pure cell populations of almost all of the desired cells, said Dr. Irving Weissman, director of Stanfords stem cell institute and a co-author of the paper.
These kinds of research advancements are tremendously encouraging; the potential to proliferate these crucial cell populations this quickly has significant clinical applications to address acute unmet medical needs, said Morrie Ruffin, managing director of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for research, investment and commercialization of research to repair and replace tissue that has been damaged by disease, injury or natural aging.
Hank Greely, director of Stanfords Center for Law and the Biosciences, called the research really, really important if it holds up.
The problems of making or isolating pure samples of one specific cell type has been a substantial barrier to medical uses of embryonic stem cells. This research looks like a way around that problem, he said.
There are still other problems that need to be resolved, such as immune system rejection of the cells, Greely added. To prevent that, researchers are exploring how to use cells made not from embryos but from the patients own body. But every major problem solved means we are one step closer to a possible solution with great medical benefits.
The teams next step, probably within the next few years, is to show whether these cells develop into more complex tissues. Then perhaps they will be moved into animal testing.
Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 650-492-4098. Follow her at Twitter.com/LisaMKrieger and Facebook.com/LisaMKrieger.
The Ukrainian-U.S. Sea Breeze 2016 military exercise began on Monday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's official website announced.
The drills will be located in the northwest part of the Black Sea, adjacent to Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, and will last until July 30, the press center of the Command of the Ukrainian Navy has said.
The marine component involves more than 25 ships, boats and supply vessels from Ukraine, the United States, Turkey, and Romania. According to the schedule of the exercise, the shore component will be larger than in previous years, and its task will be to work out the interaction of a multinational task force that will conduct an operation "in a crisis region" in keeping with NATO standards, with the participation of the Marines and special units of Ukraine, the U.S., Moldova, and Georgia.
The drills will also include sea and air landing in Odesa region, artillery engagement in anti-airborne defense, water obstacle traverse with the involvement of engineering departments, special efforts to ensure security in the maritime sector and air cover for the landing.
The total number of troops participating in the Sea Breeze will be up to 4,000 people from 16 countries Ukraine, the U.S., Bulgaria, Great Britain, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Sweden, and Finland. The hardware will number 20 aircraft and helicopters, more than 140 units of trucks and armored vehicles.
Ukraine will be represented by its Navy and the State Border Service, as well as personnel of the Land Forces and the Air Force, and the National Guard of Ukraine, which will take part in the maneuvers.
The Ukrainian-U.S. Sea Breeze military exercise takes place every year since 1997 in accordance with the 1993 Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation on Defense and Military Contacts between the U.S. Department of Defense and the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. Their task is to train and build up combat readiness of the Ukrainian Navy on a bilateral basis, but the exercise is open to other countries.
During its fourth session of the eighth convocation, Ukraine's parliament dismissed 270 judges, Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy said.
"All in all, 270 judges were sacked during the fourth session. They include two judges from the Constitutional Court and 193 judges of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea [which was annexed by Russian in March 2014] for breaking judicial oaths," he said during a press conference in Kyiv on Monday.
He also recalled that lawmakers had sanctioned the detention and arrest of two more judges.
The speaker pledged that he, as chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine "will watch so that there will be no untouchables in the fight against corruption."
One Ukrainian soldier killed, five wounded in ATO zone in past day
One Ukrainian soldier was killed in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, while five others were wounded, according to presidential spokesman for ATO issues Andriy Lysenko.
"In the past 24 hours, one Ukrainian serviceman was killed in hostilities, another five were wounded," he said at a briefing in Kyiv on Monday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Ioannis Amanatidis met at the Foreign Ministry today, Monday, 18 July 2017, with a delegation from the Global Coordinating Committee of Pontian Youth (PASEPON).
The subject of the meeting was the Global Olympics in Modern Greek, which will take place from 24 to 31 August, in the context of the celebration of the Aristotle Anniversary Year proclaimed by UNESCO, on an initiative of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
The delegation was made up of Alkis Anastasiadis, president of PASEPON, Victoria Kravchenko, secretary of PASEPON, and Anna Iliadou and Konstantinos Samourkasidis, PASEPON members.
Mr. Amanatidis congratulated the PASEPON board on their excellent initiative and expressed his support for the organization of the Global Olympics in Modern Greek, both as Deputy Foreign Minister and as an educator. Moreover, Mr. Amanatidis underscored that our language is the bearer of our thinking and culture, and that, through the mobilization of the healthiest part of our society, youth, and Pontian youth in particular, we are conveying our values to the whole world.
First of all, I would like to express my solidarity with the people of France. We are together in the fight against terrorism.
I am very grateful to the government and the people of Mongolia for their hospitality. It is a very deep feeling to behold the spirit of the people of Mongolia.
For me, since its establishment in 1994, ASEM has played a key role as a forum for cooperation, for linking Asia with Europe, especially in promoting political dialogue, deepening economic relations, and strengthening cultural ties.
My country, Greece, is extremely proud to be closely linked, as the European Union Presidency, with the establishment of the ASEM initiative back in 1994, while during our fourth Presidency of the European Union, in 2003, we were active in giving more impetus to the process, having the position that we had to keep ASEM as an informal forum.
I would like to make two proposals on the topic of our thoughts about the future of ASEM. First, for us it would be meaningful to try to work on a more structured agenda for ASEM meetings, making them more productive, result-oriented, while placing particular emphasis on central issues.
My and our experience from international forum organization is that we have a tendency towards bureaucratization, speaking but not having a real discussion about real topics. Very specific time, very specific topics.
The second, I would like at this point to stress that, in order for ASEM to provide more added value, strengthening its coordination mechanisms, and placing more emphasis on sectorial issues of common interest, such as mobility and connectivity.
Taking this into account, it could be, in my opinion, very useful to prepare for ASEM and action plan which would outline the key issues dialogue and joint initiatives in the years ahead.
I thing we have to have more structured discussion. I think we need an action plan. And I will give an example in the session on politics, in the second section of our discussion.
Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mongolia, for the very nice and very warm hospitality.
Second Intervention
Culture unifies peoples. And at the same time culture is a smart and soft power, as well as an economic power. We shouldnt insist on only the economic aspect of Connectivity. We should also bear in mind the cultural aspect. I believe that, within the ASEM framework, we should take decisions that promote culture: actions like organized youth meetings, Asian culture weeks in European cities, European culture weeks in Asian cities, and meetings of artists. On the model originated by Melina Mercouri, who proposed the declaration, each year, of a Cultural Capital of Europe, we should annually declare, together in ASEM, a Cultural Capital in Asia and one in Europe. All together, we should protect our cultural heritage, while also promoting the intercultural and inter-regional dialogue.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Minister, what is the position of the EU 28 on the developments in Turkey?
N. KOTZIAS: There will be an announcement. I think there are three issues we agreed on. The first is that we condemn the coup and certainly support the institutions and constitutionality in Turkey. Second, we asked that the Turkish government act based on international law and the protection of human rights, as well as show self-restraint, which is something we also said yesterday at the meeting we had at the Foreign Ministry. Third and this will be apparent this evening there is a tendency toward the abolition of the death penalty being set as a condition for the continuation of EU-Turkey relations.
JOURNALIST: Was there any discussion of the eight Turkish officers who are asking Greece for asylum?
N. KOTZIAS: No, but I mentioned it to show the special problems and special nature of Greek-Turkish relations.
JOURNALIST: Do we have a position on this?
N. KOTZIAS: We will implement European and Greek law, and that is the basis on which we will handle this case, bearing in mind that these are eight officers who took part in a coup.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Minister, regarding the issue of China, of the South China Sea, how are the consultations going in the European Union?
N. KOTZIAS: As you will have seen, following many days of negotiations that ended last Saturday, and while we were still in Mongolia, en route to Greece, we achieved three excellent results: The first is for the phrasing to reflect Greeces interests, because it is a country with special interests with regard to the implementation of the International Law of the Sea, and particularly with regard to the Aegean. The second was that we blocked them from laying blame on Greece should the decision not have come out because, in the end, it was other states that were refusing to let this decision come out. Third, the tone and phrasing are such that they keep open the dialogue and friendship that exist between the European Union and the Peoples Republic of China, and especially between Greece and the Peoples Republic of China.
It's time for Ukraine to attract more foreign investment , head of the Ukrainian Presidential Administration Borys Lozhkin said after meeting with chiefs of one of the largest business conglomerates of Oman's Sultan Suhail Bahwan Group (SBG) on Monday.
"Now it is the time to intensify efforts to attract foreign investments. We have what to offer for international capital in various areas of economy, and we need to fulfill our potential. We need to create conditions for investors, ones which they are accustomed to working around the globe distinct, clear, safe [conditions]. And I am ready to coordinate the work in this direction," he said.
"We have discussed which sectors of Ukrainian economy could be interesting for SBG in terms of strategic investments," he added.
SBG holding with a multibillion turnover is a large player on a global market of nitrogen fertilizers, which owns assets in areas of energy and power, infrastructure and building, transport and medical services, and others.
In his words, volumes of foreign investments are continuing to grow in 2016, but the pace is insufficient. Ukrainian economy, as before, desperately needs participation of foreign investors. "This is one of the key factors of its growth. That's what I was saying on behalf of the president in meetings with investors in London, Washington, Baku, Kyiv," he said.
Turkey has not announced an intention to change the composition of forces engaged in the Sea Breeze 2016 exercise because of a recent coup attempt, Ukrainian Navy First Deputy Commander Andriy Tarasov told a press conference in Odesa on Monday.
"The Turkish military will report for the drills as planned," he said, answering a follow-up question from Interfax-Ukraine.
The Ukrainian-U.S. exercises Sea Breeze 2016, which involve another 14 countries, began in Odesa on Monday. In all, about 4,000 servicemen, some 25 vessels, 20 aircraft and approximately 140 motor and armored vehicles are participating in the drills.
The citizens of Armenia who were taken to a police station on Sunday to check their possible connections with the persons who took over a police department in Yerevan were released at the due time, Armenian police press officer Ashot Agaronyan told Interfax.
"Everyone has been released," Agaronyan said.
The reports on the use of violence by police officers against citizens "will be studied in detail" on the orders of the head of Armenia's police on the basis of media reports, he said.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has called the exchange of fire that occurred in Almaty on Monday a terrorist attack and extended his condolences to the victims' families and loved ones.
"A terrorist attack has occurred in Almaty today, in which, unfortunately, people were killed again. I extend my condolences to the victims' relatives and loved ones, relevant psychological and financial support should be provided to them," Nazarbayev said at a meeting of the Kazakh Security Council.
The president's words were quoted by his press service.
At the same time, Nazarbayev ordered ensuring security in the city.
"I order law enforcement agencies to take all necessary measures to ensure law and order in the city," Nazarbayev said.
The logo was released Friday as Trump announced his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
It features an interlaced blue "T'' and "P'' next to red stripes, evoking the American flag. Trump's name is featured above Pence's name, which is smaller. Trump's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again!" finishes off the logo.
The design was immediately mocked on social media. The "T'' penetrating the loop of the "P'' below it looked sexually suggestive to some. Others made the connection to T.P. being a common abbreviation for toilet paper.
The overall effect with the typography and image is pretty obvious, said Cyrus Highsmith, an internationally celebrated designer.
"I think that it's very clear that Trump is the dominant partner in this relationship," Highsmith said between chuckles. "The only thing I can guess is that Trump wants to make sure that everyone knows that he's in charge. It's totally in line with his personality."
Other designers said it seemed amateurish.
Nancy Skolos, dean of architecture and design at the Rhode Island School of Design, called the design "fussy and overwrought," and more like a "high school doodle."
Matt Luckhurst, of the Collins design firm in San Francisco, whose work includes Facebook's M app and Airbnb's rebranding campaign, said they did not think the image through.
"I think it's an oversight. I doubt they actually planned this," Luckhurst said. "It's something where they said good enough and they launched it out into the world."
Trump's is not the first logo to become an online punchline. Jeb Bush's "Jeb!" logo was widely ridiculed.
While presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's logo has been praised by many designers, it prompted intra-party grousing last year. It features an "H'' with an arrow pointing right, leading some Democrats to complain that the arrow did not point left.
Asked what a good logo should do, Skolos said it should be memorable. Highsmith said it should be recognizable quickly and not offensive, then hastened to add that he wasn't offended by the Trump logo.
"I think it's funny," he said. "Maybe that's another thing: Put it in enough focus groups to make sure you're not going to get laughed at."
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.
Thousands of U.S. Marines at the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or "RIMPAC," exercises in Hawaii and southern California are passing on hard-earned lessons to partner nation troops on the most complex of military maneuvers -- the amphibious landing.
"We've really been stressing that this is a two-way street" in working with troops from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Tonga and others in and off Hawaii and California, said Marine Brig. Gen. Raymond Descheneaux, commander of Fleet Marine forces for the exercise known in Pentagon parlance as RIMPAC 16.
"We start with completely integrating those [partner] forces, making sure they're embedded from start to finish in everything we're doing from command and control down to the most junior members of the team," Descheneaux said in an interview from Hawaii last week.
"The nations participating brought some strong impressive talent to join our ranks" in the exercises, which run through Aug. 4 and involve 45 ships, 5 submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel from 27 countries, said Descheneaux, the assistant deputy commandant for aviation (mobilization) of the Marine Corps and a career aviator with 319 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly in the AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter.
Amphibious landings have been called the most difficult and complex of military operations, requiring "an intricate coordination of numerous military specialties, including air power and naval power, naval gunfire, naval transport, logistical planning, specialized equipment, land warfare tactics and extensive training in the nuances of this maneuver for all personnel involved," according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report last month: "Landing Together -- Pacific Amphibious Development and Implications for the U.S. Fleet."
"In the long term, the United States may be able to share the amphibious burden with close allies in the region for training and crisis response," the CSIS report said. "However, in the near-term to mid-term, it is likely that U.S. Navy and Marine Corps engagements with these partners and allies will increase -- in terms of frequency and complexity -- in the Asia-Pacific as partners and allies expand their amphibious capabilities."
Stressing Interoperability
Descheneaux said the main goal of the Marines at RIMPAC was simply to enhance the ability to work together, or interoperability, in future amphibious operations for humanitarian and disaster relief, and in case of conflict.
The interoperability was demonstrated earlier this month by the successful first-time landing of a Marine MV-22 tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft aboard one of the new Royal Australian Navy amphibious assault (LHD) ships. A Marine MV-22B touched down six times on the flight deck of the HMAS Canberra on July 12.
"This was a very significant event, showing the diversity of the platform [the Osprey], what it is capable of doing," Descheneaux said. "It was a great thing for both nations" in improving the ability to interact "in the case of the next tsunami or the next humanitarian incident out in the Pacific," he said.
That interoperability had to be employed in an emergency situation last Friday when a small civilian plane went down off the Kona coast of Hawaii's Big Island. A Royal New Zealand Air Force P3K2 Orion joined in the search for the two survivors, along with a U.S. Navy MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter from the guided missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon, and an Air Force HC-130 Hercules from the 353rd Special Operations Group, based at Kadena Air Base, Japan.
Once the survivors, David McMahon and Sydnie Uemoto, were located swimming about a mile-and-a-half offshore, a Coast Guard MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew safely hoisted them aboard and they were reported to be recovering with minor injuries.
"An important part of being a mariner is ensuring safety of life at sea," said Cmdr. Tom Ogden, commander of the Chung-Hoon. "No matter if you are a U.S. destroyer, Coast Guard pilot, or a canoe paddler, you must always be ready to provide assistance," Ogden said in a Navy news release.
Russia Shadows Exercise
China has five ships at RIMPAC, led by the guided missile destroyer Xi'an. The Chinese are participating in numerous exercises, including a submarine rescue drill, but they will not be part of the amphibious operations, Descheneaux said. "We will not be working with them in this particular environment here," he said.
Russia is not a participant in RIMPAC but has at least two ships shadowing the exercises. Over last weekend, the Russian Udaloy-class destroyer Admiral Vinogradov followed the Navy's newest amphibious assault ship, the America (LHA-6), generally staying about two nautical miles away but at times closing to within 1,000 yards, according to a U.S. Naval Institute report.
Though the Russian ship at times had its bow pointed directly at the America and was closing in, Capt. Michael Baze, the America's commander, said the Russian commander had acted professionally and was "definitely doing a really good job maneuvering the ship" at such close proximity, USNI reported.
"The fact is that this Udaloy is here, he's in international waters -- like we are -- and so he's enjoying the coast of Hawaii -- like we are -- but we're all acting like professional mariners and it's safe," Baze was quoted as saying.
The America was serving as the amphibious task force command and control platform for RIMPAC, with more than 800 Marines from the 3rd Marine Regiment aboard.
In a blog posting, Baze said that rotary-wing and tilt-rotor Navy and Marine Corps aircraft, as well as multiple aircraft from other RIMPAC participant nations, will operate with USS America during the exercises, culminating with an amphibious landing and live-fire exercise at the Army's Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii on July 30.
The landings will involve LCACs (Landing Craft Air Cushioned) and other amphibious vehicles, but those will not come from the America. Baze described the America as "an aviation-centric platform." It has no well deck, and was built for the MV-22 Osprey and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as part of a new concept for amphibious warfare, although no F-35s will participate in RIMPAC, Descheneaux said.
The America was "designed with the F-35 and the V-22 in mind," he said. "It's a whole different way in which we operate. We want to get behind the enemy, get around the enemy, use that F-35 to provide a lane to allow us to get in for a period of time, and then get out."
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
President Barack Obama awarded America's highest military honor for valor today to a U.S. Army veteran for risking his life to save the lives of 44 fellow American soldiers a half century ago on a Vietnamese battlefield.
During a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House, Obama told the story of retired Lt. Col. Charles Kettles, who was serving as a flight commander assigned to 176th Aviation Company (Airmobile) (Light), 14th Combat Aviation Battalion, Americal Division, when a battalion-sized enemy force ambushed an outnumbered element of 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, near Duc Pho.
Kettles, then a major, led a platoon of UH-1D Huey helicopters again and again into intense enemy fire to help his fellow soldiers.
Now 86, Kettles sat looking "sharp as a tack," Obama said, describing his dress blue uniform.
Many of his fellow veterans have said that there is no one who deserves the Medal of Honor more than Kettles, Obama said.
"Many believe that, except for Chuck," Obama said. "As he says, 'This seems like a hell of a fuss over something happened 50 years ago.' Even now, Chuck is still defined by the humility that shaped him as a soldier."
But there are at least 44 former American soldiers who would disagree with Kettles' modest description of his actions on that battlefield.
Obama gave the following account of the Kettles' bravery:
"May 15, 1967, started as a hot Monday morning. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne were battling hundreds of North Vietnamese in a rural riverbed. Our men were outnumbered. They needed support fast -- helicopters to get the wounded out and get more soldiers into the fight.
"Chuck Kettles was a helo pilot and, just as he had volunteered for active duty, on this morning he volunteered his Hueys even though he knew the danger.
"They call this place 'chump valley' for a reason. Above the riverbed rose a 1,500-foot tall hill. And the enemy was dug into an extensive series of tunnels and bunkers -- the ideal spot for an ambush.
"Around 9 a.m., his company of Hueys approached that landing zone and looked down. They should have seen a stand of green trees. Instead, they saw a solid wall of green enemy tracers coming right at them. None of them had ever seen fire that intense.
"Soldiers in the helos were hit and killed before they could leap off. But under withering fire, Chuck landed his chopper and kept it there exposed so the wounded could get on and so that he could fly them back to base.
"A second time, Chuck went back into the valley. He dropped off more soldiers and supplies; picked up more wounded. Once more, machine gun bullets and mortar rounds came screaming after them. As he took off a second time, rounds pierced the arm and leg of Chuck's door gunner, Roland Scheck.
"Chuck's Huey was hit. Fuel was pouring out as he flew away. He landed, found another helicopter and flew Roland to the field hospital.
"By now, it was near evening. Back at the riverbed, 44 American soldiers were still pinned down. The air was thick with gunpowder and smelled of burning metal.
"And then they heard a faint sound. And as the sun started to set, they saw something rise over the horizon -- six American helicopters, as one of them said, 'as beautiful as could be.'
"For a third time, Chuck and his unit headed into that Hell on Earth.
"Once again, the enemy unloaded everything they had on Chuck as he landed -- small arms, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades. Soldiers ran to the helicopters. When Chuck was told all were accounted for, he took off.
"And then mid-air, his radio told him something else. Eight men had not made it aboard. They had been providing cover for the others. Those eight soldiers ran for the choppers but could only watch as they floated away.
" 'We all figured we were done for,' they said. Chuck came to the same conclusion. 'If we left them for 10 minutes,' he said, 'they'd be POWs or dead.'
"A soldier who was there said, 'That day, Maj. Kettles became our John Wayne.'
"With all due respect to John Wayne," Obama said. "He couldn't do what Chuck Kettles did.
"He broke off from formation, took a steep, sharp, descending turn back toward the valley -- this time with no aerial or artillery support.
"Chuck's Huey was the only target for the enemy to attack, and they did. Tracers lit up the sky once more. Chuck came in so hot his chopper bounced for several hundred feet before coming to a stop.
"As soon as he landed, a mortar round shattered his windshield; another hit the main rotor blade. Shrapnel tore through the cockpit and Chuck's chair.
"Those eight soldiers sprinted toward the Huey, running through the firestorm, chased by bullets.
"Chuck's helo, now badly damaged, was carrying 13 souls and was 600 pounds overweight. 'It felt,' he said, 'like flying a two and a half ton truck.'
"He couldn't hover long enough to take off. The cabin filled with black smoke as Chuck skipped and hopped the helo across the ground to pick up enough speed to take off.
"The instant he got airborne, another mortar ripped into the tail. The Huey fishtailed violently and a soldier was thrown out of the helicopter and was hanging onto a skid as Chuck flew them to safety."
Obama joked, "You couldn't make this up. This is like a bad Rambo movie."
The Army's warrior ethos is based on a simple principle -- a soldier never leaves his comrades behind, Obama said.
"Chuck Kettles honored that creed. Not with a single act of heroism, but over and over and over," Obama said. "And because of that heroism, 44 American soldiers made it out that night. We are honored today to be joined by some of them."
Obama asked them to stand so they could be honored with applause.
Kettles was originally awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award for valor, for his heroism that day, Obama said.
But William Villano, an amateur historian, realized that was not enough of an honor after he interviewed Kettles for a history project sponsored by a local rotary club, Obama said.
Villano started a five-year mission, along with Kettles' son Mike, a retired Navy pilot, to ensure that Kettles receive the Medal of Honor.
Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, along with her husband John Dingell, "went above and beyond to pass a law to make sure that even all these years later, we could still fully recognize Chuck Kettles' heroism as we do today," Obama said.
"And that is one more reason this story is quintessentially American -- looking out for one another; the belief that nobody should be left behind," Obama said. "
"This shouldn't just be a creed for our soldiers. This should be a creed for all of us. This is a country that is never finished in its mission to improve, to do better, to learn from our history, to work to form a more perfect union.
"And at a time when, let's face it, we have had a couple of tough weeks. For us to remember the goodness and decency of the American people in a way that we can all look out for each other, even when times are tough, even when the odds are against us. What a wonderful inspiration. What a great gift for us to be able to celebrate something like this."
-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
The U.S. trusts the conclusions of the commission of the Dutch Safety Board about the causes and circumstances of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash over Donbas on July 17, 2014, and will continue to cooperate with the Joint Investigation Team, the U.S. State Department has said.
"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," the U.S. Department said in a statement marking the second anniversary of the MH17 crash.
The State Department recalled that the October 2015 report by the Dutch Safety Board confirmed that the MH17 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 State Department said.
As reported, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all 298 people on board. Most of the victims were Dutch and Malaysian nationals. The casualties also included citizens of Australia, Indonesia, Germany, Belgium, the Philippines, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand.
The air crash is being investigated by a group of specialists from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. The Dutch prosecution service is leading the group, whose main task is to identify those responsible for the crash. This fall, the joint inquiry group is due to submit its preliminary results, in particular, specifying the weapon which downed the plane and the exact location from where the rocket was launched.
The Dutch Safety Board commission investigating the plane crash posted a report on October 13, 2015. The report said the plane was downed with a surface-to-air missile fired from a Buk anti-aircraft missile system.
In February 2016, British investigative journalists group Bellingcat presented information regarding the Russian brigade that the group believes provided, and possibly operated, the Buk-M1 missile launcher that downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. These are 20 soldiers from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk.
The attempted military coup in Turkey and the horrific truck attack in Nice pushed to the top of the agenda for meetings later this week of defense ministers worldwide convened by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to speed up the campaign against ISIS.
On ABC-TV's "This Week" program Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the meetings at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland beginning Wednesday will "lay down plans to shut these guys (ISIS) down forever."
Carter has already said that he plans to use the two-day forum to meet separately with French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian to coordinate on a French military "response" to the July 14 attack with a 19-ton refrigerator truck on revelers in Nice that killed at least 84.
The apparent collapse of the coup by elements of the military against the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also raised concerns about the stability of a NATO ally that has authorized U.S. airstrikes against ISIS from the Incirlik Air Base and taken in more than two million Syrian refugees.
Erdogan quickly blamed an exiled 74-year-old Muslim cleric and former ally who has been living in Pennsylvania for 15 years -- Fethullah Gulen -- for fomenting the attempted coup and demanded his extradition, which could prove to be a lingering sore point for the Turkey-U.S. relationship.
Outside Gulen's Pennsylvania residence on Saturday, about 100 Turkish protesters demanded Gulen's extradition and chanted "Obama, make him go." Gulen has denied any involvement in the attempted coup and said he supported democracy. "In brief, I don't even know who my followers are," Gulen said.
Hasan Goclu, a protest organizer from Delaware, told Turkey's Andalou news agency of the extradition demand that "There needs to come about an agreement between the U.S. government and the Turkish government on this. It is simply not enough to say we are allies and not act upon it."
Kerry said on "This week" that the U.S. the U.S. would consider Turkey's demands, once they are formally submitted, but added that the U.S. would strictly adhere to the law.
"We're not holding back from doing anything, nor have we ever been," Kerry said. "We've always said, look, if you have evidence of X, Y or Z, please present it to us. Turkey is a friend. Turkey is an ally," but the U.S. has "very strict standards in order to protect people's rights."
The U.S. was also wary of Turkey's recent attempts to repair relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Turkey recently apologized for shooting down a Russian warplane last November near the Turkey-Syria border and Andalou, citing sources, said Sunday that Erdogan would meet with Putin in Moscow in the first week of August.
Following the attempted coup Friday, Turkey shut down flight operations at Incirlik, which is shared by the U.S. 39th Air Base Wing and the Turkish Air Force, but the flights by U.S. F-16s, A-10 ground attack aircraft and refuelers against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria resumed Sunday, the Pentagon said in a statement. Commercial power to Incirlik also was cut off but the base was operating on internal power, the Pentagon said.
More than 6,000 members of the Turkish military and the judiciary have been arrested on suspicion of being part of the coup, the government said, and among them was Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base, 10 other Turkish soldiers at the base, and a police officer, according to Turkish media.
The meetings at Andrews which Carter is calling the "Counter-ISIL Defense Ministerial," using another acronym for ISIS, will include NATO allies plus 34 partner nations in the anti-ISIS coalition who have either contributed forces or basing to the effort to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
The U.S. has maintained that inflicting a "lasting" military defeat on ISIS was the best way to reduce the global terror threat posed by the group, although CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey have warned that the ISIS terror threat will continue long after the so-called "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria is gone.
In a statement, the Pentagon said that the meetings at Andrews "will discuss progress to date, the essential next steps in the campaign and how the nations of the coalition can accelerate the drive to deal ISIL a lasting defeat."
--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
The Military Veterans in Creative Careers podcast works to help veterans turn their creative passions into careers by interviewing veterans who have become directors, producers, actors, game developers, writers, and more.
Are you a veteran who has considered writing? Maybe you heard about that Gunnery Sergeant who was an extra in some war movie, and you want to see what that's like? If these or any other creative path sounds interesting to you, you might enjoy the podcast and the advice the cohosts and their guests have to offer.
The podcast is in the top 10 military transition podcasts and is cohosted by Justin Sloan, Jennifer Marshall, and Trevor Scott, three veterans who pursued their creative passions after the military (Justin is a writer, while Jennifer and Trevor are actors).
Author Sean McLain Brown
Many of these veterans have found that being creative acts as a sort of therapy, and this is especially true of writers. Take, for example, Marine Corps veteran, Sean Mclain Brown. After his time in the military, Sean first went to school to study journalism, but soon moved into creative writing. He focused on poetry and short fiction and has gone on to teach creative writing and play a lead role in the veteran community of writers. He is one of many veteran writers who will state that writing saved his life.
Taught to Conceal, Not to Reveal
Sean advises veterans to get out of your comfort bubble and share, because doing so can be cathartic. However, he recognizes that it can be a challenge to do so. We are often "taught to conceal, not to reveal," he says. It was a good thing he disregarded this advice, or he might have become another one of the many veteran suicides we hear about every year, if not for creative writing. In the podcast episode with Sean, he shares how he was living in his automobile and attending school while he spiraled into dark places. One day he heard about Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans Writing Workshop, and got ahold of her. She invited him to participate, and it changed (if not saved) his life.
Veterans can reach into their creative sides to deal with PTSD or any other issue they are dealing with, or just have fun. Some veterans just want to create for the point of creating. Whatever the reason, Sean recommends you look into finding a creative group near you, or start your own.
Start Your Own Writing Group
For those veterans interested in starting a veteran writing group in your area, Sean shared a document on this topic, available here: "How to Build Your Own Veteran Writers Group." To get an idea of what these groups may do aside from writing critiques, Sean shared an exercise he has beginning writers try.
Write a letter to yourself.
The act of writing the letter to yourself helps you to get distance from the experience, from the person that is the veteran that may have dealt with some form of drama. It helps you escape from self-criticism. And don't worry about the prose just yet -- allow yourself to meander, to wander, and throw form to the wind.
Listen to the Podcast
If you are interested in hearing this podcast episode with Sean, you can listen to it streaming below, or find more episodes at www.MilitaryVeteransinCreativeCareers.com.
Are You a Veteran Writer in the San Francisco Area?
If you are interested in Sean Brown's writing, he will be presenting with author Justin Sloan and Telltale Games' employee Juan Vaca at this year's San Francisco LitCrawl. Keep your eyes open for the announcement on the LitQuake website. If you want more information on this LitCrawl event or about the podcast, contact Justin.
Also, Justin is hosting this year's San Francisco Writers Conference veteran scholarship. If you are a veteran and would like to be considered for free entrance to the conference, contact Justin for more information (and have your DD214 ready).
For these and related inquiries, you can reach Justin at VeteransinCreativeCareers@gmail.com.
Kyiv's Solomiansky District Court has ordered pretrial confinement for Serhiy Perelom, deputy head of NJSC Naftogaz and chairman of the advisory board of Odesa Portside Chemical Plant, setting bail at UAH 80 million. Perelom has appealed the ruling, saying he does not have enough money to make bail.
According to a correspondent from Interfax-Ukraine, the investigating judge made the ruling on Sunday morning during a court hearing. The decision partially satisfied the requests of prosecutors from the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's office (SAP) and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).
The court remanded Perelom to 60 days pretrial confinement, setting bail at UAH 80,001,000. SAP and NABU had requested bail in the amount of UAH 205 million.
Perelom said after the hearing that he did not have enough money to post bail and had no way to raise the amount. "We hope the ruling will be overturned by appeal," he said.
SAP deputy head Volodymyr Kryvenko told journalists that the UAH 80 million bail was too little, and that he would appeal the decision on Monday.
SAP head Nazar Kholodnytsky on July 14 announced that Perelom and OPCP deputy head Mykola Schurykov had been detained for allegedly embezzling funds from the OPCP by purchasing UAH 250 million worth of natural gas at inflated prices.
knapp.jpg
Colin Knapp, left, and his boyfriend, Frank Kong, both of Detroit, were vacationing in Eastern Europe at the time of the failed coup in Turkey. Days before the military action, Knapp was injured in a vehicle crash and he remains hospitalized in Turkey.
(Photo courtesy of Colin Knapp)
ISTANBUL, Turkey - He had planned to leave Turkey by 3 p.m. Thursday
This would have placed Colin Knapp and his boyfriend, vacationing in Eastern Europe, safely on a beach on the Greek island of Mykonos by the time the Turkish military took action to quash an attempted coup, leaving hundreds dead.
Instead, Knapp was in a room on the 10th floor of an Istanbul hospital listening to helicopters and fighter jets flying so near they sounded like explosions.
Knapp, 24, of Detroit remains in the hospital as people continue to die in the country straddling Asia and Europe. He is eager to leave but he can barely walk. There is an ugly 12-inch incision running along the side of his upper left leg. It is the result of surgery made necessary by a Wednesday vehicle crash, reported before the Friday upheaval that left 290 people dead and more than 1,400 injured.
"My ultimate take is: A lot can happen very easily," Knapp said of his continued stay. "Anything could erupt. Tensions are already high."
Medical authorities said Knapp, an organist trained at the University of Michigan and an audience engagement specialist with the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit, cannot travel likely until Thursday.
Because U.S. airlines cannot presently fly in or out of Turkey, he and his boyfriend, Frank Kong, also of Detroit, plan to take a foreign airline to Amsterdam on Friday and then head home.
'I knew my leg was broken'
The quelled uprising, instigated by a military faction, began after Knapp was badly injured while riding in a taxicab to an Istanbul restaurant. "Essentially we were driving and someone entered into this road and ran straight into us."
There were no rear seat belts and the impact was on Knapp's side of the vehicle. It flipped around the car, which was then hit again by another, oncoming car. "I knew immediately. I was almost in the front seat. I knew my leg was broken."
Kong, also of Detroit, had blood gushing from his face, and as they waited for an ambulance, 15 to 20 men tried to help Knapp. "My left leg was completely immobile."
He waited four hours at a public hospital to see medical personnel and even longer for pain killers.
Uncomfortable with the facility and unable to communicate much with the hospital staff, Knapp called the U.S. embassy and learned of alternate, private hospitals.
'I was freaking out'
By late Wednesday night, he was in a better hospital and underwent surgery Friday morning. Hours later, tanks rolled onto the streets of the capital, Ankara, and uniformed soldiers blocked Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged people to take to the streets and stand up to the rebels.
Knapp's boyfriend, who was not badly hurt, had returned to the hotel. "I was freaking out," Knapp said. "I was hearing jet planes, helicopters."
None of the nurses spoke English. He tried to ask one of them if he was safe in the hospital. "No," the nurse replied.
"Definitely an unforgettable vacation," Knapp said.
The derailed plan
He and Kong had traveled to Europe to attend the wedding of Knapp's coworker, who is Bulgarian. They flew into Athens, Greece and planned to spend two weeks in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.
An Istanbul airport attack that killed more than 40 people in June made Knapp nervous about traveling to Turkey, but Kong, a 50-year-old engineer now involved in finance, has done much international travel and assured Knapp it would be OK.
When they arrived in Istanbul, Knapp said he felt fine, safe. It was gorgeous. "Perfectly blue sky." The city is like a "fairy tale place" with stunning architecture, he said. "You take away the coup, and I would tell everybody this is the first destination vacation they need to do."
Knapp now waits, trying to get himself well, disappointed he missed his and Kong's planned trip to the Greek islands, and anxious to be on a flight home. Kong took videos for him of the activities on the street, people singing and waving flags or honking horns in traffic congestion, and he is able to watch CNN on the hospital TV. "I was shocked (Sunday) when I saw the count was close to 300 already," he said of deaths attributed to the upheaval.
"The thousands and thousands of arrests they are making. It doesn't make any sense."
Erdogan vowed to continue his crackdown on alleged coup plotters as the number of those detained by the government topped 6,000, according to CNN.
Knapp is removed enough from any action that he does not feel threatened.
"I just accepted that I have to be here. I can't go anywhere," Knapp said.
A long ordeal
He walked Sunday with crutches to the bathroom. His recovery will be a "long ordeal" requiring extensive physical therapy. He is nervous about how long it will take him to return to the organ bench.
In addition to his work at the opera theater, Knapp, originally from Battle Creek, is director of music and an organist at a church in Ypsilanti. He also coordinates an annual organ conference at U of M.
Considering all he has been forced to handle in the last several days, Knapp is positive.
"I am glad I got to see what I got to see."
The crash. The attempted coup. It certainly adds drama to the narrative.
"This is going to be a very good story for many years to come."
FLINT, MI -- Contracts for lead service line replacements and waste removal are on the agenda for a special Flint City Council meeting Monday evening.
The meeting has been called for 5:30 p.m. July 18 inside the council chambers on the third floor at Flint City Hall, 1101 S. Saginaw St., in downtown Flint.
Officials said last week they're working with two vendors on pilot studies to replace lead-tainted pipes.
More than 30 pipes were replaced in a contract between Rowe Engineering and the state of Michigan as part of Mayor Karen Weaver's Fast Start program first announced in February.
But the work on replacements have stalled since then, with the city planning on the use of $2 million it was repaid for connecting back to Detroit's water system to replace additional lines.
Request for proposals to begin additional replacements have gone out, but Weaver said the bids were too high.
The cost of the waste removal contract has also been called into question, with city council members voting on June 27 against a recommendation by the mayor's office to hire Rizzo Environmental Services to replace Republic.
Several council members said they had not received the information on Rizzo's bid, $2 million less than Republic over five years, with enough time to make an informed decision.
A
was granted by Republic at the end of June to allow for the city to make a final decision on its waste removal provider.
FLINT, MI - Hope, peace, and progress was the message carrying to the crowd over loud speakers set up outside the Genesee County Sheriff's Office Sunday afternoon in downtown Flint.
The gathering organized by Bishop Urundi Knox of Ebenezer Ministries in Burton include more than 100 people in the crowd, including dozens of local pastors, law enforcement, politicians, and other concerned residents.
Knox said clergy in the Flint area are working towards a better relationship between police and residents, holding a moment of silence for three police officers shot and killed in Baton Rouge, La. Sunday morning.
While some may criticize those with a new idea, Knox urged people to share those thoughts despite what others may say.
"Dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It is hard work that makes things happen," he said, to loud applause. "It's hard work that creates change. Dreams are like hope; we need both of them in order to see a different tomorrow."
A partnership between residents and law enforcement is needed to change those feelings of angst between the groups, said Flint Mayor Karen Weaver.
"We talk about community policing and what we have witnessed today and in the last few weeks emphasizes even more the need for that to happen," she said, in regards to the officer deaths in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile.
"We ask when you see something, we need you to call, we need you to do that because we know together is the only way we are going to solve and fix this division that is occurring," Weaver said.
Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell added weeding out those officers who don't belong in law enforcement is also needed to ensure trust and respect between police and residents.
Knox asked for common ground to be found between the groups that would allow for "an appreciation and respect for life" of people of all backgrounds and places in the world.
During an impassioned speech, Rev. Victor Johnson cited words from Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and the actions taken now can be a catalyst for real change.
"Everyone here has an opportunity to change the narrative and by changing the narrative we can change our story," he said. "Whether we admit it or not there are those that attach a negative narrative to each of us."
With the eyes of the world on Flint, Knox said the people of the city can show what they are capable of doing in a time of distress.
"We have never been a quitter, nor a loser," he said. "We are a great people and I guarantee you, if we stand together with hope and expectation we can change the world."
A community forum including a discussion with law enforcement has been scheduled for 5 p.m. Wednesday, July 20 at New Jerusalem Full Gospel Baptist Church, 1035 E. Carpenter Road.
U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, leads a Congressional delegation team of 25 people as they come to listen to Flint residents and understand the water crisis on Friday, March 4, 2016 at Grace Emmanuel Baptist Church in Flint.
FLINT, MI - U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee is blasting Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette's decision to speak at the Republican National Convention Monday afternoon in Cleveland.
Both men have been mentioned as potential candidates for Michigan governor but neither has declared their candidacy.
Kildee's camp issued a statement questioning Schuette on how he can endorse presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump after making comments insulting women and ethnic groups.
"How Bill Schuette can look himself in the mirror and defend such divisiveness and hate baffles me," said Kildee. "Schuette is supporting a candidate who has called women 'slobs' and 'fat pigs,' insulted African-Americans and Arab-Americans, and mocked people with disabilities."
In an announcement ahead of the speech, Schuette said he was excited about the chance to be in Cleveland "to build a unified team" that will help Republicans "take back the presidency."
"We simply will not turn the keys to the White House over to Hillary Clinton," he said, with a tweet from Schuette's Twitter page stating he was honored to speak during the event on behalf of the state.
Honored to speak at #RNCinCLE on behalf of Michigan. pic.twitter.com/E1go9NZXCY Bill Schuette (@SchuetteOnDuty) July 18, 2016
Michigan Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna Romney-McDaniel questioned Kildee's pledged support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
"I would ask Dan Kildee how comfortable he feels in supporting Hillary Clinton who used Michigan as a backdrop and Flint as a backdrop (during the election), she said, adding since the March primary Clinton is "doing nothing to recognize the crisis that is still affecting his community."
John Sellek, spokesman for Schuette, offered a rebuttal to Kildee's comments late Monday afternoon and pulled no punches.
"It has to be demoralizing for Mr. Kildee's constituents that while the Attorney General was defending Flint families and bringing more national awareness, he and his team spent the morning plotting a smear campaign that did nothing to help a single Flint resident," Sellek said. "People expect more than that from their public officials."
During Schuette's speech, he told the crowd he would make the water crisis right, promised justice for Flint families, and honored the fallen police officers in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Berrien County.
"I would hope that Congressman Kildee has no objection to that type of honor," said Romney-McDaniel.
By endorsing the Republican nominee, Kildee said political figures are "validating Donald Trump's bigotry" and thought he needed to step forward and raise his voice like others such as U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois, who has said he will not support Trump as the party's candidate.
Kildee also stated the attorney general was seeking "to divide Michiganders by waging losing lawsuits against marriage equality, affordable health care and protections for transgender students in schools."
Romney-McDaniel challenged Kildee's assumption on Schuette's agreeance with Trump's policies, pointing out Schuette has not always seen eye-to-eye with Trump on his positions and statements made by the nominee should not be tied to the attorney general.
"Bill Schuette is supporting Republican policies being in the White House," she said. "We've seen what they've done to help the state of Michigan."
Requests for comment from Schuette were not immediately returned.
Calling Trump a "dangerous candidate," Kildee said it's irresponsible how the Republican nominee has taken advantage of the electorate's insecurities on the economy and democracy by choosing to blame immigrants and others.
"Schuette has decided loyal to his party is more important than loyalty to his country," he said, while estimating the Republican party is becoming the party of Donald Trump.
"I think people like Bill Schuette have choices to make," Kildee said. "I think responsible Republicans are making the right choice distancing themselves from Donald Trump."
On Tuesday, July 19, at 12.30, the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency's press center will host a press conference entitled "Social Policy Ministry's Verification of IDPs from Donbas and Crimea: Promises and Reality." The participants will include Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister for Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons Heorhiy Tuka, human rights activist, coordinator of the Zemliaky (Compatriots) public movement Gennadiy Borisichev; Chairman of NGO Social Youth Andriy Tymoshenko; representative of the Compatriots movement Denys Vergasov; and IDP, retiree who has faced difficulties due to the Social Policy Ministry's new policies Larysa Konokh. Representatives of the Social Policy Ministry for affairs of the occupied territories and internally displaced persons are expected to attend the event (8/5a Reitarska Street). Admission requires press accreditation. For more details, please call: +38050 755 5575.
.223 Ammunition
A round for a .223-caliber rifle.
(MLive.com File Photo)
MT. MORRIS TWP., MI - Two men are facing federal charges after authorities claim they discovered multiple machine guns in a Mt. Morris Township home.
Two criminal complaints were unsealed Friday, July 15, in Flint U.S. District Court against the men after the Michigan State Police executed a search warrant June 25 at a home on 1383 W. Humphrey Ave.
The suspects are not being identified because they have not yet been indicted or arraigned on the charges, which include being a felon in possession of a firearm and possession of an unregistered machine gun.
Affidavits filed with the complaints by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives claim troopers executed the search warrant around 2 a.m. at the home near Detroit Street and Coldwater Road.
When police entered the home they found one of the suspects in the kitchen and another in the living room running toward the master bedroom where a woman was lying in bed with an infant.
Police discovered a .223-caliber rifle, a 9-millimeter pistol with obliterated serial number, five cell phones, marijuana, ammunition and nearly $700 in the bedroom, according to the affidavit.
Two additional .223-caliber rifles, a .40-caliber pistol and ammunition were allegedly found in the home's basement. More ammunition, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, a digital scale and six cellphones were discovered elsewhere in the home, the affidavit claims.
A law enforcement evaluation of the rifles revealed the guns were modified for fully-automatic operation, allowing the rifles to shoot multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger.
The rifles also appeared to have a baffled attachment at the end of the barrels, which served as silencers, according to the affidavit.
One of the suspects allegedly told investigators that he knew a person who lived in a different state that manufactured firearms. The suspect told authorities that he could order multiple guns for $3,000-$4,000 and certain individuals would obtain the necessary parts and assemble the firearms, the affidavit alleges.
The suspect allegedly told investigators he had at least three different sources that could supply him the guns and he knew of other firearms similar to those discovered in the home.
Both men are currently in federal custody pending a detention hearing.
FLINT, MI - A retired police sergeant is attempting to withdraw his guilty plea to more than a dozen counts of sexual assault after he claimed he was pressured into making the agreement.
Lawrence B. Woods was scheduled to be sentenced Monday, July 18, on 16 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. However, the sentencing hearing was delayed after Woods wrote a letter to Genesee Circuit Judge Richard Yuille claiming he was inappropriately pressured into the plea.
In the letter, Woods, 68, claimed his attorney, Carl Jordan, forced him into making the plea.
Jordan told Yuille that he went through painstaking efforts during the plea hearing to show that Woods was entering the plea at his own discretion. Jordan asked to withdraw from the case following Woods' letter, which Yuille agreed to allow.
Prosecutors say they will challenge Woods' attempt.
"We believe the plea was properly entered and we'll ask [the] judge to deny [the] request," said Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton. "We don't want to re-traumatize the victims."
During the summer of 2014, the Flint Police Department opened an investigation regarding criminal sexual conduct allegations against Woods. The investigation began after a victim came forward and reported the crimes that had been committed against them nearly 20 years ago.
Investigators released information to the public which brought more victims forward who disclosed their horrific past experiences with Woods. The crimes committed against the victims made them fearful to come forward and file reports, according to police.
Authorities claim the attacks occurred from 1996 until 1999 while Woods was a sergeant with the Flint Police Department.
Investigators said they believed some of the alleged assaults occurred while Woods was on duty. They added that there were incidents inside the police department, on the street in police vehicles and on city property.
Police raided four homes in 2014 where they believed Woods lived or stayed and found what detectives called a "large amount" of child pornography. Police believed the victims were photographed by Woods.
The plea agreement did not include a sentencing agreement from prosecutors, but Yuille advised Woods he could face up to a minimum of 25 years in prison. The charges carry a potential sentence of life in prison.
Yuille allowed Woods two weeks to hire a new attorney who will be responsible for filing an official motion to withdraw a plea. A hearing will be held on the motion once it is filed.
In 2013, Swiss investor, Allseeds Black Sea company commissioned vegetable oils terminal with a 45 000 m3 capacity in Yuzhny port, and in 2015 - a multifunctional oil-extracting plant with 2400 tons per day sunflower seeds processing capacity. The next stage in the companys large-scale investment project until 2021 would be raising capacity of processing oil crops up to 10 000 tons per day and simultaneous construction of its own berth with a terminal for exports of oils, own and partner companies oilcakes and grains. Total investment would account for up to $600 million.
At the opening ceremony of the enterprise on July 16, 2015, M. Saakashvili, head of Odessa Regional State Administration said: ... in Ukraine, the sea ports market is monopolized - owners of private berths work under a cartel agreement and do not let other companies enter the market. This complicates investment into the region, raises the prices of goods prices and creates problems for operational efficiency. He demanded that Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority allow Allseeds construct berths in Yuzhny port, saying: Please give this plant a permit for [construction of] a berth, we will find land. But please stop protecting petty mafia that had always operated here all the time. Give the berth and the opportunity to enter to those who invest real money and create real jobs.
In July 2015, in order to implement its investment plan the company approached Odessa Regional State Administration asking to approve development of a land management project for construction of the aforementioned port infrastructure facilities.
However, in violation of the current legislation of Ukraine, Swiss investor - Allseeds Black Sea company - has not obtained such an approval, and hence an opportunity for further investment up until now. Instead, coastal land for three free berths (No. 11, 12, 12-a) were in late 2015 hastingly given by Odessa State Regional Administration to LLC Energo Product Ltd, a company affiliated with Oleh Bakhmayuk. Before that, another enterprise owned by him obtained land for construction of two berths No. 25 and 25-a in Yuzhny port.
After that, Allseeds Black Sea company, committed to transparency and openness in its actions, was forced to defend its interests through court.
Court proceedings with regard to the disputed land plots in Yuzhny port that took place in 2016, have fully proved that Allseeds Black Seas legal position is justified, as well as upheld its unquestionable right to obtain the land plot.
1. Upon the request filed by Allseeds Black Sea, Commercial Court of Odessa Region ruled on June 29, 2016 with regard to the case No. 916/1237/16:
To declare as illegal and cancel the decision No. 90-VII of December 29, 2015 adopted by Vyzyrka Village Council of Kominternivskyi district of Odessa region On approving land management project and providing a long-term lease (49 years) of a land plot to LLC Energo Product Ltd for the purposes of construction, service and operation of engineering and transport infrastruture facilities of the sea transport in the territory of the village of Vyzyrka of Vyzyrka Village Council of Kominternivskyi District of Odessa Region.
To declare as null and void onwards the lease agreement regarding the land plot (cadastral No. 5122780500:01:003:0448), located in the territory of the village of Vyzyrka of Kominternivskyi district of Odessa region, of 5,4942 hectares, concluded on January 18, 2016 between LLC Energo Product Ltd (identification No. (according to the Unified State Register of Enterprises and Organizations of Ukraine): 32497213, location: 67550, 34 Odesko-Mykolayivske highway, Novi Biliari, Kominternivskyi district, Odessa region) and Vyzyrka Village Council of Kominternivskyi district of Odessa region (identification No. (according to the Unified State Register of Enterprises and Organizations of Ukraine): 04378669, location: 67543, 56 Chapayev st., village of Vyzyrka, Kominternivskyi district, Odessa region).
2. Upon the request filed by State Enterprise Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority (third party - LLC Allseeds Black Sea) and with participation of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Odessa Administrative Court of Appeal ruled on June 1 of 2016 on the case No. 815/13/16:
To cancel the order of Odessa Regional State Administrion of 13.11.2015 No. 773/A-2015 On providing a permit to LLC Energo Product Ltd for development of a land management project on the 49-year lease of the land plot for the purposes of construction and use of buildings and sea transport facilities in the territory of village council of Novi Biliari of Kominternivskyi district of Odessa region (beyond the limits of the village).
To cancel the order of Odessa Regional State Administration of 16.01. 2916 No. 21/A-2016 On leasing a land plot to LLC Energo Product Ltd for 49 years for the purposes of construction of buildings and sea transport facilities in the territory of village council of Novi Biliari of Kominternivskyi district of Odessa region (beyond the limits of the village).
3. In accordance with the results of the mediation proposed to the parties in the dispite by M. Saakashvili, head of Odessa Regional State Administration himself, and carried out by an authoritative Ukrainian lawyer Vasyl Kysil in compliance with the European mediation practice (Directive 2008/52/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on Certain Aspects of Mediation in Civil and Commercial Matters, 21.05.2008), the motives for Odessa Regional State Administrations actions when it refused to concede the land plot to Allseeds Black Sea (absence of servitude agreements), is totally groundless and unsubstantiated. Concession of land to LLC Energo Product Ltd that filed a similar request 1,5 month later than Allseeds Black Sea bears signs of anti-competition actions on the part of Odessa Regional State Administration that provided LLC Energo Product with anti-competitive advantage.
____
On April 22 of 2016, M. Saakashvili said at Ukrainian Infrastructure Forum16 in Kyiv: I proposed to initiate a mediation, ...both parties agreed. Vasyl Kysil who, in my opinion, is the most authoritative lawyer in Ukraine, and the most integrious among those I have met, was appointed as a mediator and his decision will be the final decision for our administration and for both companies. Mediation will produce a result and... it will have the power of an administrative decision.
The mediator of the dispute, Vasyl Kysil who is, by a twist of fate, his professor, urges the same. In his Report, he mentions:
Reaching a compromise and agreement between the parties is possible, but for that OdessaRegional State Administration must act not as an observer, but as a party interested in a just, legal, competitive solution of this problem, guided by the national investment interests.
Allseeds Black Sea hopes that M. Saakashvili, head of Odessa Regional State Administration will follow these recommendations as soon as possible, as well as fulfill the promises he gave in his bold statements.
He has got every reason to do so!
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 GDPin 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.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- An attorney for a Florida man charged with fatally shooting a patient and employee at a hospital in an apparently random attack says his client is severely mentally ill.
Harley Gutin is an attorney for 29-year-old David Owens. He said Monday that his client is incompetent to stand trial.
Titusville, Florida, police say Owens entered Parrish Medical Center early Sunday and fatally shot 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and employee Carrie Rouzer, who was sitting in Zingsheim's room. Owens has been charged with two counts of murder and is being held at the county jail.
Gutin says Owen's family had been trying desperately in recent weeks to get him long-term mental health care.
Gutin says he has no idea how Owens was able to get a gun.
Myanmar Agri Foods Company has opened a factory in Nay Pyi Taw capable of producing up to 5000 tonnes of frozen fruit and vegetables for export each year.
This is the first such factory in Myanmar, said U Ye Myint Maung, the companys managing director, and its frozen products will be exported initially to Japan.
We plan to build four factories to export around 20,000 tonnes each year, he said at an opening ceremony for the factory in Nay Pyi Taw.
U Aung Thu, Union minister for agriculture, livestock and irrigation, said the factory was good news for the farmers of Nay Pyi Taw, who will be able to supply raw products.
One of the hopes of new government will be fulfilled because there is an opportunity for famers to increase their income, he said.
The factory will freeze string beans, ladyfingers, taro, pigweed, pumpkin, mango and lychee.
The company said it will work with local farmers across 12,000 acres of land.
Myanmar Agri Foods also plans to support farmers thorough seeds, technology and finance, and will guarantee the price at which it will buy fruits and vegetables.
An official from the Japan International Cooperation Team said, The trade mark is Made in Myanmar. The products will be high value, and I hope they will improve income levels for local farmers, he said.
Farmer U Tun Aung said he is interested in the project. I am not sure yet what will be planted. I am interested because of the price guarantee, he said.
Translation by San Layy
A civil society alliance has asked the Shan State government to investigate a coal mine in Namsan township, after farmers claimed their land was confiscated by force without explanation.
Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability has asked the state government whether the mine has been approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation and, if so, who holds the permit.
Farmers say that 100 acres (40 hectares) of land was taken by the military last year, according to MATA spokesperson U Moe Lwin.
The land was fenced off after the army seized it and expelled 12 farmers last year. The farmers asked for their land back. Instead, somebody dug a coal mine, he said.
Workers say the mine operates with backhoes and trucks to produce nearly 100 tonnes of coal a day, he said.
He believes the mine may be operated by Kanbawza Group, a major conglomerate with national interests. If this is the case, its operations are illegal, he said. The natural resources ministry has confirmed that it has not issued KBZ a permit to mine in that location.
Kanbawzas chief auditor U Nay Myo Aung told The Myanmar Times that the group is not mining coal in Namsan. He said the company operates a licensed coal-powered cement factory nearby, and sources the fuel from three local mines, including one near Mee Thaway Gone village in the Won Pone village tract.
He said coal is sold to Kanbawza Group by one Major Chit Ko. When questioned, Major Chit Ko confirmed he was using machinery to mine coal and said he was acting under army orders.
U Nyi Nyi Aung, Shan State minister for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, said he had sent a letter to the Department of Mines in Taunggyi, after receiving MATAs request to investigate the issue. He said he has asked the Taunggyi department to send photographs of the area, but has not yet received a response.
Translation by Khine Thazin Han
The 21st-century Panglong Conference will likely prove only partially inclusive, sources from the ethnic armed groups said yesterday.
State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi met with a senior delegation from the United Nationalities Federal Council led by General En Ben La at Yangons National Reconciliation and Peace Center yesterday.
Khu Oo Reh, general secretary of the UNFC, a bloc of nine non-signatory armed ethnic groups, said the meeting discussed the upcoming summit.
We have agreed to cooperate for the success of the 21st-century Pang-long Conference. If some armed ethnic groups are not able to be included at this stage, negotiations for their participation will continue, but if we wait for the participation of all groups, then we are not going to have the dialogue, he said.
Yesterdays meeting was the first between the state counsellor and the UNFC leadership.
The state counsellors official page released a brief statement following the meeting, describing it as a family talk.
The UNFC last year called for the inclusion of all armed ethnic groups in the nationwide ceasefire agreement signing ceremony, a major sticking point in the peace process led by the then-ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party government. Then-president U Thein Sein declined to include groups involved in ongoing fighting, including those clashing with the Tatmadaw in the Kokang autonomous region.
However, political commentators have said the relationship between the UNFC and allies the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Taang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army soared during months of severe offensives by the Tatamdaw.
Since last year the MNDAA, also called the Kokang armed group, and the TNLA had expressed intentions to withdraw from the UNFC, a move the bloc refused.
Meanwhile the United Wa State Army, one of the strongest armed ethnic groups, built closer ties with its brothers in arms, especially with the three allied groups. It has also been reported that the Wa army would form a coalition of the so-called Northern Alliance, but the groups allegedly involved denied the reports.
Khu Oo Reh said government peace negotiators and the three Kokang allies are arranging talks. He added that he has very little knowledge of the current status of the arrangement, but that how many groups participate in the coming Panglong conference depends on such talks.
The state counsellor and the UNFC delegates yesterday discussed plans for a federal Union, which they agreed must be the countrys own version of federalism.
Moreover, the armed ethnic groups leaders urged State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi that fighting on the ground needs to be halted.
The UNFC leaders also stressed the importance of halting military offensives in ethnic states as an important step for the peace process. The continuation of fighting on the ground at the same time we are at the negotiating table make it harder for us to achieve peace, Khu Oo Reh said.
Last year, when the government and eight armed ethnic groups signed the NCA in October, fighting flared in northern Shan State between the Shan State Progressive Party and the Tatmadaw.
In addition, fighting between the Restoration Council of Shan State and the local Palaung group the Taang National Liberation Army erupted in northern Shan State last November, with thousands of civilian reportedly forced to flee.
Khu Oo Reh said the UNFC leadership is convinced that the state counsellor will address the ongoing clashes with the commander-in-chief.
We know that there are frequent talks between the state counsellor and the military commander-in-chief. There is cooperation between the government and the Tatmadaw. We hope that they can solve the problem, he said.
Earlier this month, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi instructed peace negotiators that armed ethnic groups who for any reason did not sign the NCA could participate in the political dialogue. Decision-making rights are granted only to NCA signatories however.
The Shan State parliament has approved an urgent proposal imploring government intervention to bring an end to simmering conflict between the national army and ethnic armed groups in the states north, which has displaced thousands of civilians.
Nang San San Aye, a Shan Nationalities League for Democracy MP representing Thibaw/Hsipaw township, put forward the urgent proposal citing the suffering faced by affected populations.
Villagers have had to abandon their homes and businesses. Children have lost their right to study because of conflict. Some have been detained [and forced] to porter. This conflict needs to stop for the benefit of all ethnic people in Shan State, said Nang San San Aye on July 15, during the fourth session of the regional legislature since it returned from recess last week.
The urgent proposal was submitted a day earlier. The state border and security affairs minister on July 15 advised Shan State lawmakers to put the proposal on record, a less forceful parliamentary motion, but MPs voted instead on an up-down ballot on the matter.
Mostly the [motions to put on] record are not implemented. That is why I wanted the proposal approved by the hluttaw. We were able to approve the proposal with 76 votes, said Nang San San Aye.
The legislatures militarily appointed MPs voted unanimously against the urgent proposal.
The Shan Human Rights Foundation recently accused the Tatmadaw of murdering seven civilians in Lashio township late last month. Other human rights violations have also allegedly been perpetrated against civilians in the conflict zone by the government army and ethnic armed groups.
Thousands of villagers are spread across temporary camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Hsipaw, Kyaukme, Namtu and Namkham townships, having fled heavy weapons fire, landmines, arbitrary detentions or killings, and forced labour.
Some of the worst-affected townships residents have been unable to return to their homes for several months. The prolonged disruption to IDP schoolchildrens education has led some Shan and Taang political and civil society groups to set up makeshift schools in the displacement camps.
During last weeks state parliamentary session, U Aye Maung, a Taang National Party lawmaker representing Namkham township, also urged the government to find a way to end the conflict.
On July 16, thousands of ethnic Kachin, Shan and Taang youths staged a protest march in Lashio town to demand respect for the human rights of local people and peace in the region. The young activists stressed the need for a unified ethnic front in the face of a conflict that has negatively impacted populations without regard for ethnic affiliation.
The fighting, which began in November just weeks after the signing of a so-called nationwide ceasefire agreement and has flared intermittently since, has pitted the Taang National Liberation Army against the Tatmadaw, and at times has seen the Shan State Army-South a ceasefire signatory clash with the TNLA, a non-signatory.
The government has launched a crisis committee amid an upsurge in sectarian violence that saw two mosques destroyed by Buddhist mobs within less than two weeks of each other.
President U Htin Kyaw announced the Emergency Management Central Committee on July 15, charging the task force with preventing further racial or religious conflict from flaring up in the country.
According to the July 15 statement, Vice President Henry Van Thio will take the helm of the committee as chair, while Union Minister for Home Affairs Lieutenant General Kyaw Swe will serve as vice chair.
The committee was given a 12-point mandate, with responsibilities including effective communication with government security forces and prevention of sectarian conflict.
The committee will make nationwide arrangements for stopping those who incite riots from behind the scenes, said the presidents statement.
U Zaw Htay, spokesperson for the Presidents Office, said the committee will act as a kind of first response unit if any unexpected conflict erupts in the country. He added that the previous government had operated a similar task force.
International countries also form that kind of committee. Any kind of conflict can happen at an unexpected time and place. The committee needs to get information in advance to prevent such conflicts and to be able to respond if they occur, he said.
The committee is the new governments latest tactic to stem religious extremism and hate speech.
At the end of June, a Buddhist mob destroyed a mosque and attacked a Muslim man in Bago Region, and eight days later, another Buddhist contingent swept largely Christian-Kachin State, and destroyed a Muslim prayer hall. After both attacks during the Muslim holiday of Eid, members of the religious minority fled, fearing for their safety.
Long-simmering sectarian tensions previously came to a head in 2012, when riots erupted in Rakhine State between Buddhist and Muslim communities. The widespread violence resulted in at least 167 deaths and the displacement of over 140,000 people, according to government figures.
Inter-religious attacks also erupted in other areas of the country in 2013 and 2014.
In the more recent attacks, the government was heavily criticised by international rights groups for not taking swift action against the perpetrators.
During her recent 12-day visit, Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, pushed the government to more effectively combat and publicly condemn hate speech and incitement to violence against minorities.
Last week, following lobbying from a National League for Democracy chief minister, the State Buddhist authority disavowed anti-Muslim group Ma Ba Tha, raising questions about the three-year-old nationalist groups future. The Committee for the Protection of Nationality and Religion, as the nationalist force is formally called in English, is well-known for leading the charge in anti-Muslim protests, and prominent members have disseminated hate speech through social media and public lectures.
Local rights groups welcomed the presidents announcement of the new emergency committee, calling it a badly needed force in the country. However, some commentators also questioned elements of the committees mandate, warning it could infringe on human rights.
The presidents statement mentioned that the committee must launch a media counter in order to combat any incitement by media outlets. It also said a counter-protest response team would be formed in order to limit instigation to violence through protests.
U Bo Kyi, joint secretary of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, said his organisation will be watchful of the media and protest countering teams, which he added sound like a throwback to the military regime.
All citizens have fundamental rights to protest peacefully without obstruction in accordance with existing laws. The government should make that clear, he said. I dont understand why they will launch counter-media and counter-protesting teams.
U Tun Aung Kyaw, secretary of the Arakan National Party, questioned whether the committee will be effective in its aim to pre-empt religious and racial violence.
The committee is necessary for our country, but we [the ANP] are worried that the committee cannot fulfill its responsibilities, he said.
Committee member U Myint Kyaing, a permanent secretary of the labour, immigration and population ministry, told The Myanmar Times that the committee chair will call an inaugural meeting this week or the week after.
U Hla Swe, a former MP famed for his bullish remarks and homophobia, has taken up a new career that will keep him in the limelight since he lost his upper house seat in last Novembers election.
He has struck up the role of a publisher and editor at a paper he eponymously named the Bullet News Journal.
The former lieutenant-colonel was given the nickname following the first parliamentary debate on the peace process when he suggested that if ethnic armed groups did not agree to drop their weapons in favour of the negotiating table, the government would instead use bullets on them.
When I say something, it usually gets attention. Thats my way of doing business, he said.
The very first issue of the journal, published on July 7, saw distribution of 5000. The second issue the following week increased the print run to 10,000. U Hla Swe said he plans to keep up the exponential growth.
Bullet Hla Swe said he launched the new journal because he was not satisfied with the current media outlets, as he did not feel they were providing enough of a check and balance on the new government. He said most of the domestic media organisations were highly critical of former president U Thein Sein and his party, but are too soft on the National League for Democracy-backed administration.
In 2010, then newly anointed president U Thein Sein took office with a length State of the Union address in which he shared his vision and policy plans with parliament. By contrast, U Hla Swe said, President U Htin Kyaw assumed his post on March 30 with a speech that barely broke the five-minute mark and was vague on any sort of agenda.
U Hla Swe added that the new government is going through a honeymoon period, and the spell needs to be broken.
But already even in its nascent phase, the Bullet News Journal has stirred up the wrong kind of controversy. The very first issue of the journal boasted a front-page picture captured by the European Press Agency, which was used without permission or paying a licensing fee.
It was the fault of our online staff-in-charge. I have warned him not to do so again, U Hla Swe said when pressed about the image.
My journal will follow codes of conduct written for journalists, U Hla Swe said.
At least some of his readers are already questioning the boast however. A story about an explosion in northern Shan States Namtu town, reported in the second edition of the journal, ripped through social media where it was lambasted for its cheesy rhetoric and provocative title.
The article, Who will go to hell first, TNLA or RCSS?, described fighting between two armed ethnic groups the Taang National Liberation Army and the Restoration Council of Shan State and indirectly implicated their clashes as being responsible for the explosion.
The two bombers took advantage of the darkness. Booaat! Booaat! Booaat! Their motorcycle arrived and they threw two grenades into a religious compound but instead hit the wall and Bang! the explosion sounded. The men were shocked and ran quickly back with their motorcycle, but they could not control the vehicle, which went Bang! as it lost balance and crashed, a report reads.
U Hla Swe stood by the comic flair of the writing, but said that he regrets not including a quote from individuals who were in the religious compound to back up the account.
Some nuns speculated that the attack was led by the RCSS. I think we should have used the quote in the story, he said.
On Facebook, reporters and readers werent quite sure what to make of the article or how seriously to take it.
U Hla Swe defended his journals descriptive news writing as a modern appropriation of old-fashioned style.
I studied the trends of news in the parliamentary democracy era [under U Nu], in a book written by Takkato Sein Tin. News was written in those days in such very direct ways. I think it is attractive to readers, U Hla Swe said.
Asked if he has enough experience to run a media business, he claimed a wealth of knowledge dating back to his work in the Ministry of Information from 2006 to 2009.
The journal has so far employed 23 staff members including a news editor and journalists. U Hla Swe said the journal will be a critical voice, one equally sceptical of the NLD government and of opposition parties, including the Union Solidarity and Development Party.
U Thiha Saw, secretary of the Myanmar Media Council, said the news industry has become increasingly open and easier to join.
Some news journals are run for particular political parties, while others may not have an explicit affiliation, but still have a political leaning and motivation, he said. As long as they maintain their professionalism, I think they have the right to be involved in the industry.
Human rights will now be taught in primary schools starting in the 2017-18 academic year. The new addition to the curriculum is the result of an agreement between the Ministry of Education and the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC).
Since the 2004-05 academic year, human rights have been taught from Grade 6 to Grade 11, and starting in 2012 the curriculum was expanded to Grade 4.
Experts from the UN Childrens Fund (UNICEF), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will collaborate with the Myanmar Educational Research Bureau to write the new human rights curriculum, which starts with students in Grade 2. Their draft is scheduled to come out in August.
Everybody should know about human rights and they need to be educated in many different ways, said U Aung Myo Min, director of Equality Myanmar.
The governments curriculum is not starting very early so we are educated through trainings and seminars. It is actually good to teach it in schools. We welcome this plan.
The education minister was appreciative for the MNHRCs suggestion, said the commissions vice president U Sit Myaing.
Next, the commission will negotiate human rights curriculum with the Myanmar Education Research Bureau, U Sit Myaing said.
We offer teacher training because teachers need to know about how to teach human rights, he said
The MNHRC will collect Grade 4 data in 2016 in order to prepare the Grade 2 curriculum for the Ministry of Education.
Human rights education is about teaching the basic concept of respect for each other, said U Aung Myo Min. If human rights education is taught through rote, by-heart methods, there will be misconceptions.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmars state counsellor, has called for the nations students not to think of vocational training as second-best.
During a technology and vocational training workshop held by the Ministry of Education at the Myanmar International Convention Center II on July 15, the Oxford-educated Daw Aung San Suu Kyi called on students not to be solely focused on attending university.
I myself respect vocational education very much, she said. To build a successful vocational education system, everyone must take part.
Graduates are having a hard time finding work, she said. Most countries that value vocational education are developing, she added, but Asian countries, including Myanmar, undervalue vocational education, preferring to aim for university.
Vocational education is viewed as a second-class education for citizens. It will be difficult if all parents want to send their children to university and vocational education becomes a secondary priority, she said.
She added that if vocational programs are better-funded and developed, they will become more appealing and less stigmatised for those who want to master a trade.
Students who want to go to a vocational school must consider: Do students or the culture view them as second-class students? the state counsellor said. The way we answer this question can determine whether or not vocational education is a success in this country. Parents and communities do not perceive vocational education students as second-class in countries where it is succeeding.
About 60,270 students (0.13 percent of the population) attended vocational training schools, according to the 2014 census, Union Minister for Education U Myo Thein Gyi said.
Translation by Khant Lin Oo
ANKARA, July 17 -- Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that the failed military coup has left at least290 people killed.
The death toll includes at least 190 civilians and 100 coup plotters, the statement said, adding that more than 1,400 were wounded in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.
More than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the failed coup, it said.
The statement said it was the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen that staged this coup attempt.
"Our government has been constantly exposing the real motives of this terrorist group and its leader, Fethullah Gulen, to all allies and partners. The foiled coup is the latest criminal act revealing the danger posed by Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization," it said.
Energy officials will seek to better connect ASEAN members electricity grids into a regional energy network over the next five years to better utilise the countries respective strengths and weaknesses in power generation, it was announced at a meeting of the bloc in Myanmars capital Nay Pyi Taw.
We will sell extra electricity by linking the neighbouring countries. We will buy [electricity] if we need it, U Htein Lwin, permanent secretary for the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, told The Myanmar Times following the 34th ASEAN Energy Senior Officials Meeting last week.
Therefore, we are now drawing up plans for [transnational] electricity lines. We also plan to buy from China and are also discussing buying from Laos. We are also conducting physical studies. If it is convenient, well arrange for interconnection, he added.
The aim is to promote energy efficiency and redistribution of electricity from countries in the region that generate a surplus to those like Myanmar that have unmet energy needs, U Htein Lwin said.
The main point of this project is to see energy used sufficiently in all ASEAN countries; energy means oil and gas, and electricity, he said.
The first step in ASEAN energy cooperation will see Laos sell electricity to Malaysia, via its southern neighbour Thailand. Officials have set a 2016-20 window for the first phase, with a second stage to follow, bringing Singapore into the multilateral transmission grid.
The goal is to build on already existing bilateral electricity-sharing arrangements within the regional bloc, according to Datuk Loo Took Gee, the Malaysian Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Waters secretary general.
For example, Thailand has energy needs. They buy electricity by linking up with Laos. Malaysia also sells its extra energy from Sarawak to Kalimantan in Indonesia ... There are many energy-trading cases by connecting islands like Sumatra to peninsular Malaysia, he told The Myanmar Times at a press conference, through an interpreter.
According to Myanmars 2014 census, electrification in the country remains low, with less than 33 percent of households using electricity as their primary source of lighting. A slew of proposed hydropower dams would significantly expand Myanmars power generation capacity, but activists in recent years have complained that in several cases the power generated is slated for export, namely to Thailand and China.
Translation by Khine Thazin Han
In 2016, around a million babies will be born in Myanmar. Too often we forget the prospects and possibilities of these new lives, instead focusing almost all our attention on those who have already grown up.
Babies born this year will take their first breaths with a more-or-less democratic government in-charge.
If Myanmar manages to complete its transformation to a prosperous and inclusive society, then these babies will be some of the greatest beneficiaries.
Of course, for a small child, lofty matters of abstract politics rarely figure in the calculations. They want to be loved, fed, kept clean and made safe. Fathers and mothers in Myanmar dote on their little ones, hoping for the best at a time of ongoing flux and uncertainty.
So what is it like to be a baby born in Myanmar this year? According to UNICEF data, 8.6 percent of babies in the country are born with low birth weight. Intriguingly, in Thailand this number is higher: 11.3pc. In Bangladesh it is 22pc.
Even though that statistic is promising, Myanmars under-five mortality rate still deserves serious attention. It has dropped from 109 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 51 in 2013, the last year for which data is available. In 1970 the figure was 178.
However, compared to Thailand, where the under-five mortality rate is 13, Myanmars numbers are still too high. Moreover, consider Bangladesh, where in 1990, 144 out of 1000 children died under the age of five. By 2013 in Bangladesh, that figure had dropped to 41.
The top causes of child mortality in Myanmar nowadays help to illustrate the big challenge. They are often preventable: diarrhoea, respiratory infections and malaria. In almost all cases, underlying malnutrition and poverty can exacerbate what might otherwise be relatively straightforward medical situations.
The under-five mortality rate has dropped steadily, except in 2008 when it spiked back to mid-1990s levels. We should never forget the devastating effects of Cyclone Nargis; so many young children could not survive the storm.
In the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, whole villages confronted the unbearable reality that their youngsters were gone. The UN estimated that about 40pc of those who died were children.
Notwithstanding that heart-breaking loss of so many fragile lives, significant progress is being made around the country to support the chances of the next generation. Myanmar can be proud of its ongoing efforts to provide better healthcare, nutrition and nurturing to its newest citizens.
Under the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the ambition is to bring the under-five childhood mortality rate down to at most 25 per 1000 in every country on earth.
To meet that goal, much creative effort will need to focus on building better lives for the more than 9 million people in Myanmar who are aged 10-19. They need the educational, economic and personal security to, one day, create their own functional family units.
It has never been easy to start a family and bring up the next generation. Yet those who are coming of age in the decades ahead will need to adjust their expectations to match an entirely new technological and economic landscape.
Just to show how quickly things change, the UNICEF statistics from 2013 show that 12.8pc of the population had a mobile phone, and 1.2pc used the internet.
Already, a few years later, this data is a historical curiosity precisely because it is so out of kilter with the experience of people today.
I would guess that the majority of babies born this year will have their first likeness captured and transmitted on a smartphone. Facebook does seem to be a favourite vehicle for happy baby snaps.
What about the prospects for women, the precious mothers of Myanmars newborns? In Myanmar the lifetime risk of maternal death is 1 in 250, which is the same as Bangladesh. That compares to 1 in 2900 in Thailand. Norway is 1 in 14,900. Chad is 1 in 15; Somalia is 1 in 18.
Keeping pregnant women healthy is one of the miracles of our technological and scientific age. Further improvement in these crucial statistics will be immensely important for anyone who cares about the overall health of Myanmar society.
And how long might 2016s babies live? According to UNICEF, a baby born in Myanmar this year has a life expectancy of 65. That is a big leap from 51 years, which was the figure as recently as 1970.
The challenge of managing demographics is that decisions made today will have repercussions for decades, indeed generations, to come. What this means is that we should, whenever possible, remind ourselves of the impressive changes that have helped keep more of Myanmars young people alive.
Happily, the key indicators for Myanmars children have been getting better over time. With the right leadership and smart policies, there is every expectation that even more significant improvement can follow.
New Mandala
Nicholas Farrelly is the director of the Myanmar Research Centre at the Australian National University. His column appears each Monday, but he will be taking a break before returning to The Myanmar Times in September.
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The damaged parliament building is seen in Ankara, Turkey, July 16, 2016. 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. (Xinhua/Zou Le)
ANKARA/ISTANBUL, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Turkish authorities said they regained control of the country on Saturday after thwarting an attempt by a military faction to seize power from the Turkish president.
The putsch attempt appeared not to have been backed by most senior military ranks, and Turkey's main opposition groups quickly condemned the attempted overthrow of the government.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that eight rebel soldiers escaped to Greeceby a helicopter, CNN Turk reported.
Ankara demanded Athens to immediately extradite the rebels who sought political asylum, Cavusoglu was quoted as saying.
He added that Greek authorities promised that they would fully cooperate with Ankara.
At least 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the coup attempt, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said earlier on Saturday.
"The situation is completely under control," Yildirim told reporters outside his Ankara office, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been held by the plotters.
He described the coup attempt as a "black stain" on Turkish democracy.
"Those who form the backbone of the coup have been taken into custody and arrests are still being made," he said.
Yildirim vowed to consider enacting a death penalty, which is not included in Turkey's constitution, "to make sure this will not happen again."
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.
Turkey's acting army chief Gen. Umit Dundar said 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.
"A military unrest has begun outside the chain of command around several cities of Turkey, mainly in Istanbul and Ankara," Dundar said.
"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.
"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, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to finish the operation against the military plotters, saying "our army is clean and no one can harm it."
Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when the coup attempt unfolded on Friday night, with tanks rolling into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul.
Appearing on television over a mobile phone overnight, Erdogan had urged people to take to streets to defend the government, and large crowds responded to his call.
He denounced the coup attempt as "treachery," saying he was carrying out his functions and would keep on working "to the end."
"What is being perpetrated is a treason and a rebellion. They will pay a heavy price for this act of treason," Erdogan said. "We will not leave our country to occupiers."
He pointed finger at cleric Fethullah Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him.
However, Gulen "categorically" denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation "insulting." Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in the United Statesfor years.
Turkish Airlines announced that flights are due to resume as normal at 1100 GMT on Saturday, its chairman told CNN Turk.
The airline had diverted 35 airplanes and canceled 32 flights on Saturday at Istanbul's main airport, Ilker Ayci told the broadcaster.
Turkish maritime authorities have reopened Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait to transiting tankers after shutting it earlier on Saturday for several hours following the attempted coup.
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 Russiaand the Caspian Sea - passing through the 17-mile waterway that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, countries have condemned the attempted coup and stressed support for Ankara.
Morocco said it was deeply concerned over the ongoing political turmoil in Turkey, where a rebel group in the military attempted to launch a coup against the legitimate government.
In an official statement by the Foreign Ministry, Morocco pledged support for Turkey's stability, saying it refuses any recourse to force to change regimes.
Sudan voiced its strong solidarity with the legitimate government in Turkey on Saturday, declaring support for the country to bolster stability, security and development, as well as enhance its international position.
"The Sudanese government and people have followed, with deep concern, the foiled coup attempt on Friday night, July 15, 2016, against the legitimate Turkish government," Sudanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The statement congratulated the Turkish government on its victory over the foiled military coup attempt.
Iranhailed "the resistance of Turkish people against the coup attempt as a victory of democracy."
"The brave support of the Turkish people of democracy and their elected government proved that the coup has no room in the region and is doomed to failure," Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said.
Saudi Arabia welcomed Erdogan's success in standing against the coup attempt, state news agency SPA quoted a foreign ministry official as saying on Saturday.
15.07.2016 LISTEN
We guess this is another sad day for Ghana indeed? Or something else?
No, merely one of those sad days Ghanaians have always known and lived with. Nothing new, really!
Rawlings, the sacred god of probity, accountability, and transparency finally admits to accepting money, $US2 million rather than $US5 million, from one of Nigerias infamous kleptocrats, the late General Sani Abacha.
Perhaps, this news comes as a great surprise to some given his stature as a man who stood firmly and boldly against public corruption and moral decadence in the Ghanaian society, among others.
Yet whether the money itself was $US2 million rather than $US5 million, or otherwise, is not the issue here, but rather the posthumous circumstances surrounding Abachas legacy as a kleptocrat tend to adulterate Rawlings justification for accepting his friends largesse when, he, Rawlings, explained to The Guardian, that Ghana was in dire straits at the time and badly needed cash infusions into the system to salvage a drowning economy. This sounds plausible yet untenable.
One wonders if Rawlings would have openly owned up to this scandalous controversy if not for President Muhammadu Buharis moral vigilance, oversight and active investigation into public officials who have been suspected of stealing Nigerian money, of course an investigation that would eventually come to include the Abacha family and his friends, inside and outside Nigeria.
Rawlings falls within the latter, of the category of those of the Abacha circle of friends living beyond the immediate geopolitical margins of Nigeria, those worthy of his booty.
Even more significantly, perhaps, Abacha was strategically and tactically prescient and, like some of his predecessors, knew a day would certainly come when Nigerians would chase him out and for this reason, he may have sought out strategic new friends, as the international community closed in on him and tightened the noose around his government, who could offer him shelter in case the worse happened.
In other words, Abacha would certainly need a sanctuary if and when his government was toppled. And perhaps Rawlings was one of the few he could trust in Africa to provide this sanctuary when the need arose.
We may have to add that, this contention of ours is merely a working hypothesis and we have no corroborating evidence for it, and also because other than that, namely our working hypothesis, we see no reasonable, convincing explanation for Abacha to extend that largesse to Rawlings.
Perhaps also, in more ways than one Kweku Baako, Jr.s contention, which we have already alluded to elsewhere in these pages, that Rawlings admission to taking Abachas money was a preemptive maneuver on his part, a difficult position he has to take in anticipation of President Buharis publication of same. If he has any corroborating evidence to that effect, then he should divulge it for the court of public opinion to conduct an informed evaluation of it as it were!
Unfortunately, Baako. Jr.s open hatred of Rawlings sometimes clouds and even undermines the moral authority of his investigational and policy judgments. His alleged quick defense of President Mahama in the Ford Expedition Controversy, for instance, is a special case in point.
On the other hand, our critique of Baako, Jr. should not constitute a bone of contention in that his view or investigational interpretation of the matter could be correct though it calls for additional corroborating evidence.
That said, it is President Buhari and the Nigerian themselves who can help us cut the Gordian knot of this unnerving scandalous controversy.
Of course, President Buhari can do better given his association with the Umaru Dikko Affair, so-called, and the imprisonment of Fela Kuti, perhaps one of his most serious and courageous critics, though as a human being we should also acknowledge his fallibility, a highly contentious issue Wole Soyinka takes up in an essay titled The Crimes of Buhari.
Unraveling this Gordian knot in the context of legal prosecution of the matter could, however, be potentially difficult in Ghana given the divisiveness of our partisan politics, the constitutionally enshrined Indemnity Clause and other limiting constitutional instruments, the latter of which could potentially be interpreted as statutes of limitation for reasons of political expedience.
Even so by merely capitalizing on Ghanas presumed dire straits as a condition for accepting the money, Rawlings insidiously sets himself apart from the likes of Mills, a man he has never allowed to rest peacefully in death, on the moral high ground of personal incorruptibility.
But why will he consistently deny ever receiving this money for eighteen long years, if we may ask?
The protracted denials lend some credence to Baako, Jr.s and our theory that the investigation which President Buhari is presently overseeing is gradually catching up with him and, for this very reason, and possibly this reason alone, he needed to come up with a strategic excuse to help him successfully manage if not negotiate the scandalous disgrace that should potentially follow publications of any incriminating investigational reports by the Buhari government and its agents.
Perhaps Aliyu Ismaila Gwarzo, Abachas National Security Advisor and the man who allegedly delivered the money to Rawlings, can throw some light on this raging controversy in a promised tell-all memoir through which, among other things, he, Gwarzo, hopes to clear his name, to neutralize the popular or mainstream fiction of Abacha as a kleptocrat and, possibly, to expose the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his one-time boss, Abacha, a man Wole Soyinka once called a sadistic dictator, and all those who may have been interested in or behind his passing.
Of course, again Gwarzo maybe the answer to the controversy.
But his boss ordered and had Ken Saro-Wiwa, a fine writer, an activist and one of the redoubtable leaders of the Ogoni People, hanged, with some Nigerians also holding the view that Abacha may have had a hand in Fela Kutis death, rather than from HIV-AIDS complications, just as the military brutalizedmercilessly beathis mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and later threw her through a window of Felas house located on his Kalakuta Republic.
Fela Kutis cousins, Soyinkas piece The Canonization of Terror, is a tell-all blockbuster critique of the regime of Abacha! Here is Soyinka on Abacha:
Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. To round up, nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach churning even by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership.
We are speaking here of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram
Thus, that Abacha money could have been blood moneysakawa money.
Was the money a bribe?
If so, what was it for?
In other words what was the money exactly used for if we are to believe the questionable contents of the song Rawlings has been singing about since the matter resurfaced?
Thus far we appear to have only Rawlings side of the story in Ghana, and we probably will never know the details of the story if for any reason (s) Gwarzo does not spill the beans, or if President Buhari decides to protect Rawlings by covering up that part of his sweeping investigations.
Finally, we should also remember that Rawlings took up this issue with Abdulsalami Abubakar and Olusegun Obasanjo, the latter of whose gargantuan head Soyinka makes fun of in his memoir You Must Set Forth At Dawn, both of whom may not have particularly taken the matter serious enough to pursue it to its logical conclusion of investigational satisfactoriness.
Hear is Peter Toshs Glass House for you, our Dear Rawlings:
If you live in a glasshouse
Don't throw stones
And if you can't take blows brother
Don't throw blows
Caught behind I back
You lied to grumble
And before I face
You always a fumble
You build your world on lies and illusions
But you never know that
This is the conclusion
We shall return with a concluding installment, Part 2!
REFERENCES
Ghanaweb. Abacha Gave Rawlings $5M, Not $2MBaako Insists. July 13, 2016.
Ghanaweb. Abacha Gave Me $2M, Not $5MRawlings. July 11, 2016.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Egypt on Saturday blocked a United Nations Security Council statement backed by the United States condemning the attempted coup in Turkey, diplomats said, though Cairo denied the move.
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 statements 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."
It is a great time to be living outside Ghana, especially if you believe in leadership integrity and the democratic respect for law and order. The foregoing statement pretty much explains the rather curious, albeit all-too-predictable, decision by the leadership of the rump-Convention Peoples Party (r-CPP) to indefinitely suspend the partys General-Secretary, Nii Armah Akomfrah, and its National Youth Organizer, Mr. Ernesto Yeboah (See Ford Controversy: CPP Suspends General-Secretary, Youth Organizer Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/30/16).
The details continue to pan out, though as of this writing, it was quite apparent that the suspensions were primarily predicated on the decision by Messrs. Akomfrah and Yeboah to petition the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to investigate the full details regarding the recent media expose naming President John Dramani Mahama as the prime recipient of a Ford Expedition auto payola from a Burkinabe contractor with direct business dealings with the erstwhile Mills-Mahama regime.
That nobody has accused the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, the man under whose direct watch the alleged incident occurred, ought to send an unmistakable signal to all those incredulous Ghanaians who have been demanding hard evidence as proof of widespread allegations of Mahamas thoroughgoing corruptness that, indeed, there is absolutely no hint of smoke without the presence of fire nearby. What makes this titillating matter even juicier is the fact that both the payola giver and receiver have acknowledged on record that, indeed, such a transaction as has been widely reported took place between the two men.
About the only bone of contention here is the vehement insistence of the alleged recipient that the aforesaid Ford Expedition automobile, valued at $100,000, cannot be aptly characterized as a payola. What thickens this plot in an even more interesting manner is the fact that the 2016 r-CPP presidential candidate, Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, has consistently insisted that he neither sees any conflict of interest in the Ford Expedition Scandal nor any credible markings of bribery in the same. This cynical stance is what has brought Mr. Greenstreet into virulent public confrontation with the two suspended front-bench r-CPP operatives.
Regular readers of my columns may, no doubt, have heard me say time and again that fundamentally speaking, there is absolutely no difference in mindset between the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the rump-CPP. In the wake of her epic loss to Mr. Greenstreet, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah virulently accused her sometime staunch ally of having bought the votes of the overwhelming majority of party delegates who voted in the r-CPPs most recent presidential primary. Now, it is increasingly becoming clear that not only might Ms. Nkrumah have had some modicum of truth to her statement, it may well shortly turn out that, indeed, the Mahama Posse might have bought and fully paid Mr. Greenstreet and his associates to deftly and suavely hijack the rump-CPP for the benefit of the Woyome-SADA Mafia.
Unfortunately for the latter, similar overtures to the Edward Mahama-led Peoples National Convention (PNC) woefully backfired in the NDCs abortive coup attempt against the credibility of the Jean Mensa-led Institute of Economic Affairs-sponsored presidential debates. What needs to be done, if the rump-CPP is serious about regaining a modicum of its lost credibility, is to promptly fire and expel the charlatanic Mr. Greenstreet from the party. This, however, ought not to be interpreted as an endorsement of Ms. Nkrumah. It is simply a call for a new leadership devoid of the corrupt cynicism of Mr. Greenstreet. This also means that dead woods like Prof. Edmund Delle must be promptly given the heave-ho.
I have absolutely no hope for the salutary resurrection of the rump-CPP in the offing, though I can envisage Dr. Foster Abu Sakara affording this otherwise decidedly moribund party a remarkable facelift for the nonce. But I still believe Dr. Sakara would fare much better forming and leading his own party in the near future.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
Campaign Coordinator of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Kofi Adams says President John Dramani is living up to every word he uttered.
Justifying President Mahamas Accounting to the People tour which he wrapped up in the northern region recently, Mr. Adams said the government has chalked up monumental achievements in the provision of social infrastructure.
In the Upper West for instance, President Mahama commissioned a major water treatment plant that will be supplying water to a lot of communities that have never seen treated water since independence, Mr. Adams said pointing out that the sad incident where residents there used to struggle with cattle over the source of water would be consigned to history.
Mr. Adams, who is also the National Organizer of the NDC speaking in an interview on Radio Golds morning show 60 minutes on Friday Monitored by Ghanapoliticsonline.com
He identified the commissioning of the largest library project ever in Ghana as an avenue will give opportunity to both young and old to have access to materials that will enhance their learning process in the Upper West region.
During the tour also, President Mahama commissioned a basic school for the Prison Service and inspected ongoing road projects.
In Upper East, the president also commissioned another major water treatment and storage facility which will supply water to Bawku and its environs.
Then also huge irrigation dam project when completed will provide more than 5,000 jobs. What this means is that regularly there would be water supply for agriculture.
The President is doing roads, building the airports and cargo facilities to move farm produce to the markets.
In the words of Mr. Adams, President Mahama stands tall when we take the books of records in the provision of health facilities, maintaining that the NDC government has commenced work in building regional hospitals to serve as referral centers.
He was emphatic that the 8 years tenure of the NPP administration did not add to the number of regional hospitals or upgrade the existing ones handed over in 2001.
He said, seriously the President in almost every district in Ghana has something to point to in this short period that he has been president
Mr. Adams thus wants Ghanaians to judge President Mahama by the records and give him four more years to continue working.
We are not satisfied by the level of development now. There are other communities that need water, others need electricity, roads and hospitals.
The second term will see him work more, the Campaign Coordinator added. He is therefore warning critics to stop the blanket assertion that President Mahama has done nothing.
Touching on the NDC campaign , Mr. Adams expressed satisfaction that the 15-man team constituted will coordinate things to deliver a resounding victory in November general elections
He asked all party faithfuls to rally together and deliver the maximum votes for President Mahama.
The Deputy Minister of Education in charge of Tertiary Education and the MP for the North Tongu Constituency, Hon. Samuel Okudjato Abuakwa has revealed that the current crop of ministers at the education Ministry were selectively chosen to reflect the total embodiment of the education sector in the country.
According to Hon. Ablakwa, the Minister of Education Prof. Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang was selected to represent the top-notch in the education sector. Herself been a former Vice Chancellor, she represents the vice Chancellors, the professors, and the big wigs in the education sector of Ghana.
On Hon. Alex Kyereme, the Deputy Minister in charge of pre-tertiary education, hon. Ablakwa says he represents the teacher unions at the ministry. Hon. Alex Kyereme himself is a teacher and so his appointment to the ministry is a representation of the teacher unions in the ministry.
On his own appointment, Hon. Ablakwa says he was given the appointment to represent students and the student unions at the ministry. With him been a former student leader, his appointment is to be the representation of students at the ministry.
Hon. Ablakwa made this revelation when he was speaking to a group of student leaders at a leadership summit organised by the Private University Students Association (PUSAG) at the Ashesi University last Friday. The summit brought on board student leaders from all the Private universities in Ghana as well as some student leaders from the public universities.
STUDENTS SHOULD TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE AND FIGHT AGAINST THE ILLS IN THE SOCIETY
Hon. Ablakwa used the opportunity to advise the student unions to identity peculiar problems in the country and fight to solve it. Using how the National Union of Ghana Students fought for policies such as the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), the National Service Scheme, the Struggle for Independence and how NUGS led the fight for the change from military junta to civilian rule in the country as examples, Hon. Ablakwa advised the student unions that if they can regain their relevance, they should take up the challenge and fight to influence such pragmatic policies. Identify problems and solve them he advised. In identifying these problems it would not be easy for them but Hon. Ablakwa asked the student leaders to be bold and take the risk. It risky to stand up for whats right, but student activists should be bold to be there. He added.
DR. PATRICK AWUAH
On his part, Dr. Patrick AWUAH President of the Ashesi University advised private University owners not to duplicate the programmes that are already been offered in the public universities. He debunked the notion that private universities are inferior stating that in advanced countries, most of the top most universities are private owned. He therefore pleaded with private University operators to train their students to solve specific problems in the society which the public universities are not training their students to do.
MAKE USE OF WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNT TODAY
On his part, Mr. Odame President and CEO of the Private University Students Association of Ghana (PUSAG) advised the participants to make good use of what they had learnt at the summit to cause changes in their lives and in the lives of the people they lead.
Several other speakers from all walks of lives took the students through other thought provoking topics such as time management, team work etc.
Aspiring parliamentary candidate and MCE for Asunafo North, Alhaji. Mohammed Doku, has rubbished claims by some opposition members that the ongoing power crisis in the country which has come to be known as dumsor could make John Mahama lose the 2016 elections.
The government in power has done a lot in changing lives and transforming Ghana Mr. Doku posited.
Speaking at the time Ghanaian popular actor John Dumelo and celebrity journalist
Mustapha Inusah (Nii Attractive ) respectively paid him a visit, he said that dumsor is not in Brong Ahafo, specifically Asunafo North.
He also claimed that to some of the people in his constituency, the word dumsor is alien to them.
Again, he added that in his constituency, electricity or power supply is stable. Government has expanded electricity to various communities and villages who dont have light. Theres no dumsor in Brong Ahafo.
He continued that, Considering the massive development in his constituency, the people of Asunafo are going to give JM a second term.
Talking about development, he said that the governments achievements compiled journal named, The Green Book, did not capture many of the development across the country and his constituency so they have intended to come out with their constituency Green Book which will capture all Government achievements in Asunafo.
Rabat (AFP) - 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.
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.
I first heard about the late Nigerian military dictator Gen. Sani Abachas having offered Ghanas Chairman Jerry John Rawlings the whopping sum of $5 million to promote the formers image and reputation abroad some 20 years ago. And so it really beats my imagination how anybody could muster the chutzpah to claim that the infamous Butcher-of-Sogakope ought to be patted on the back and profusely serenaded for being next-to-God honest for finally coming public to confess to the same (See Rawlings Must Return $ 2 M Gift Nigerian Journalist Ghanaweb.com 7/16/16).
And then the second time around, it was Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka who held a press conference somewhere in Nigeria and publicly disclosed that there appeared to be credible evidence indicating that the late kleptocratic Gen. Abacha had given the Ghanaian strongman some $5 million belonging to the Nigerian taxpayer, and that Chairman Rawlings needed to promptly return his ill-gotten or stolen money. Now, this was at once rather funny and strange coming from the genius literary artist who has been widely and deservingly dubbed The African Shakespeare.
I have a feeling that Prof. Soyinka gloats on this accolade and may very well have encouraged it. For like the immortalized Bard-of-Avon, the legendary Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, essayist and sculptor is known to sign off the initials WS. Anyway, Prof. Soyinkas revelation was also made some 20 years ago. And back then, when Chairman Rawlings was asked by some media operatives to either substantiate or repudiate the allegation, the founding-father of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) angrily shot back to the effect that Prof. Soyinka was full of sound and fury signifying zilch.
And so many of us find this early morning public confession in the market square by the junta leader of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that he had, after all, taken some money running into the millions from Gen. Abacha, to be fraught with the same level of shock and trauma that attended the Bastille Days mowing death of nearly 100 celebrants in the southern French city of Nice a couple of days ago.
Couple the preceding with the fact that the Rawlings Revolution was about the summary liquidation of any Ghanaian citizen who owned more than 50,000 (Fifty-Thousand Ghanaian Cedis) in his/her bank account, and it begins to make sense why some relatives of many of his accountability victims and witnesses are of the view that Chairman Rawlings ought to be afforded the same deal that he self-righteously dealt his revolutionary victims in the name of probity, transparency, accountability and justice.
And, oh, I forgot to add that coming from Prof. Soyinka, the Rawlings payola scandal had the catastrophic heft of a 9.0 and above earthquake, because in his trenchant political commentary on the abjectly poor leadership caliber and rank corruption in postcolonial Africa, titled The Open-Sore of a Continent, the Nigerian literary legend and social thinker spent a remarkable amount of space and time rapturously lauding the Rawlings Revolution, in particular the summary execution of the 8 former military rulers, including Generals I. K. Acheampong, A. A. Afrifa and F.W.K. Akuffo as a salutary surgical ritual that auspiciously aimed to cauterize the postcolonial political landscape of Ghana of such inexcusable moral and cultural blight.
But even more significantly, Prof. Soyinka had called for the same revolutionary process to be replicated in Nigeria. Well, reading about the confession which Chairman Rawlings was reported to have let on in an interview that he granted a reporter from the Guardian Newspaper of Nigeria, I could not help but wonder what Prof. Soyinka would think of Chairman Rawlings today.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
The Anti-Human Trafficking Unit of the Ghana Police Service has rescued five children from the Eastern Regional Island called Biobio.
The children who are reported to be between the ages of nine and nineteen years have been on the journey for the past four years.
Speaking to Joynews, Director of Police Commercial and Crime Unit, Felix Mawusi, said the police acted on an intelligence report they gathered about the operation.
According to him, it took a careful and diligent search for the team leader of the operation to discover the hideout on the Island.
He said the children have been trafficked and re-trafficked by some persons who are in the business.
Mr Mawusi explained a child is said to have been trafficked when he is given to a master to serve for a given period, adding, when he released and given to another master, it means he has been re-trafficked.
What baffled the entire team, he said, was the nine-year-old victim who had been trafficked from the Central Region to a village called Fantekope which is near Biobio Island.
He said per their investigation, the child is said to have been trafficked at the age of two years and has been serving one master after the other.
Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Austin Brakopowers | Email: [email protected]
The Secretary-General met today with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in Kigali. The Secretary-General commended President Kagame for his leadership and the progress made in Rwanda, as well as for hosting the African Union Summit. He expressed appreciation for Rwanda's contribution to United Nations peacekeeping, including in the Central African Republic, Darfur, Sudan, and South Sudan.
The Secretary-General and President Kagame expressed deep concern at the recent escalation of violence in South Sudan, its impact on the civilian population and consequences for the peace process. They called on the South Sudanese leadership to demonstrate the commitment required to bring to an end the tragedy unfolding in their country and fulfill their peoples aspirations to peace, security and reconciliation.
The Secretary-General and the President agreed on the need and urgency of renewed international engagement to advance the quest for peace in South Sudan. The role of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the African Union (AU), including within the framework of the AU High-Level ad hoc Committee on South Sudan, of which Rwanda is a member, was stressed. The Secretary-General seized the opportunity to recall the recommendations he made to the Security Council, including an arms embargo, targeted sanctions, and strengthening the capacity of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).
The Secretary-General and the President also exchanged views on other issues, including the situation in Burundi. The Secretary-General expressed appreciation to Rwanda for hosting thousands of Burundian refugees.
Lastly, the Secretary-General hoped that Rwanda would ratify the Paris Agreement on Climate Change before the end of the year.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday that the government's actions against the organizers of the attempted coup are not over and a cleansing operation will be carried out.
"We don't have to mix soldiers who love their nation and country and parallel terrorist groups who were disguised in those soldiers' (loyal to nation) uniforms. They are not soldiers. They are riding tanks mercilessly on citizens. They are slayers who opened fire against their nation without closing their eyes. They will take punishment that they deserve."
The prime minister made the statement during a visit to the TRT state television studios.
At the height of the action on Friday, rebel soldiers took control of TRT, and announced a countrywide curfew and martial law.
Yildrim also said life will go back to normal following the failed coup attempt.
He added that the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional.
The death toll from Turkey's failed military coup has risen to more than 290 with more than 1,400 people wounded.
In the meanwhile, more than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the coup.
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.
The Supreme Court will today [Monday] hear the contempt suit against host of Accra based Montie FM, Salifu Maase, alias Mugabe and two panelists, Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn.
The court, last week Tuesday adjourned the hearing of the case to today after Salifu Maase, who appeared before the court said he was only served the contempt summons on the morning of the day the case was expected to be heard.
Mr. Maase further stated that he was in court because of a contempt writ against him by a private citizen, Richard Asante Yeboah, which was served him the day before.
Justices upset over court absences
The adjournment of the case was also to allow the directors of Montie FM to appear before justices for the hearing to proceed.
The Supreme Court Justices hearing the contempt suit questioned the failure of all the owners of the station to appear before them.
A Ghanaian citizen, Edward Addo appeared in court last Tuesday, indicating that he was representing the rest of the owners of the company.
His announcement did not go down well with the apex court justices with the presiding judge, Sophia Akuffo, demanding that all the persons cited in the contempt suit appear in person since the case was a quasi-criminal one.
Responding to the concerns of the Justices, Lawyer for the owners, Nana Ato Dadzie, explained that the owners of the station, Network Broadcasting Limited, and all the directors apart from Mr. Edward Addo, were all out of the country.
The owners of the station are expected to appear before the justices, since the court warned it could not hear the case with just Edward Addo representing the owners who were said to be outside the jurisdiction.
What led to the contempt suit?
The Supreme Court had cited the owners of the radio station and the panelists for contempt and asked them in a letter to explain why they should not be committed to prison for contempt of court, for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
The two panelists in question, Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn, have been the faces of this controversy as they allegedly threatened to finish the Supreme Court judges if they made any judgment against the Electoral Commission in the recent court case challenging the validity of the voters' register.
CJ, Gbadegbe step down from Montie FM contempt case
Prior to the hearing, the Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood, and another judge of the Supreme Court, Sulley Gbadegbe, stepped down from the panel.
According to them, they did so because their names were specifically mentioned in the comments of the three people facing the contempt charges.
The two judges were replaced by Justice Sophia Akuffo and Justice Julius Ansah.
By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana
I have already tackled that aspect of the Electoral Commission chairs attitude that has attracted quite a flurry of negative attacks, including one from the irrepressibly fractious Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the Assin-Central New Patriotic Partys Member of Parliament, to the effect that Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei may have used a means other than professional merit to secure her present position; and so I shall not bother to rehash the same issues herein.
Instead, I have decided to examine a news article captioned Charlotte Osei Neither Lazy nor Dumb IMANI Defends EC Boss Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/28/16), in which Mr. Franklin Cudjoe, Executive Director of the renowned think-tank IMANI, puts up a spirited defense for the Electoral Commissioner.
Before I venture any further, one flabbergasting aspect of the article that requires prompt highlighting is the revelation that the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) has no headquarters building of its own and has had to literally sponge on the architectural and spatial resources of the Electoral Commission (EC) in order to function. This is very shocking because the NCCE is by law the executive coequal of the Electoral Commission.
But it well appears that the NCCE receives miserly attention from the central government in terms of budgetary allocations. As the sort of first-rate administrator that Mr. Cudjoe would have the rest of the nation believe Mrs. Osei was as NCCE boss, one would have expected that her first order of business would have included a request for the NCCEs own physical plant facilities or headquarters building.
In retrospect, it well appears that Mrs. Osei was named to the NCCE chairpersonship so as to better position her to replace then fast-aging and long-jaded EC Commissioner Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan. This is also quite interesting for somebody who recently spent quite a considerable amount of the taxpayers money re-designing a new logo for her so-called Independent Electoral Commission.
And that latter act, we must quickly point out, was done without the necessary approval of Parliament, or the elected representatives of the people. President John Dramani Mahama would later come public, well after the fact, to sardonically express his unreserved approval of such a constitutionally unwarranted act.
Is there any reason, therefore, for the hip-shooting likes of Mr. Agyapong not to speculate or even directly imply that Mrs. Osei may well have secured her present job by compromising her morals and integrity with Mr. Mahama? Indeed, it can scarcely be gainsaid that it is the same level of arrogance and spirit of impunity that inform the EC chairs persistent and stubborn decision not to comply with the constitutionally sanctioned decisions and orders handed down by the Wood Supreme Court.
One would have expected that an even-minded think-tank at least that is how its key operatives would have IMANI publicly perceived would have also tackled this patently obnoxious aspect of the temperament, character and behavior of Mrs. Osei.
Alas, that is not what we find in this news report which also contains a remarkable chunk of verbatim IMANI assessment of Mrs. Oseis performance as NCCE chairperson. Needless to say, Mr. Cudjoe and his associates at the IMANI Center for Policy and Education may be entitled to their own biases, but they definitely are not entitled to their own brand of objectivity, which is sacred.
What we have parading as an objective assessment of Mrs. Oseis performance as NCCEs chairperson is literally a paean, a profuse praise-song. Unfortunately, serious political and social commentators like yours truly are not about the soft-brained business of praise-singing.
The fact that under the leadership of Mrs. Osei, the NCCE developed a quite remarkable computer database of the Commissions activities is all well and good. But it would unarguably be far better if in a country with relatively marginal access to cyber technology, particularly in the rural communities, coupled with the grim established culture of Dumsor, the Commission could also have readily made such vital and considerable corpus of civic knowledge available in print to the people.
Inadequate budgetary allocation cannot be a tangible excuse for poor leadership. Somebody is not being objectively truthful about the real Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
NPP under Nana Addo has realised that the unprecedented developmental projects Ghanaians have witnessed under Mahama government and poor leadership of the flagbearer of the NPP which has lead to divisions in the NPP party will definitely cause their defeat in 2016.
The main strategy of the NPP is to reduce the number of voters who traditionally vote for the NDC with the hope that the NPP can slip through to win the elections.
We all know that NDC as a party has a massive support in the rural areas, being a social democratic party, they have managed to improve the lives of people in the rural areas with so many pro-poor policies.
NPP on the other hand, has most of their supporters in the urban areas and only two regions out of of ten regions in Ghana even though NDC is making a huge progress by increasing their urban votes.
Most people in the urban areas have a passport or driving licence so they registered to vote using a passport or driving license as a form of identification. Most people in the rural areas don't use have a passport or driving licence so they used NHIS card as a form of ID which was backed by law at the time of registration.
NPP have realised that if they delete the names of people who used NHIS card to register, it will significantly affect the NDC votes in the 2016 elections, because most people will not be able to go and re-register. Nana Addo and his party wanted most names to be deleted from the register to have a bigger impact on the NDC votes.This strategy emerged after their ploy to get rid of the existing voters register and have a new one so that they can register minors in their strongholds failed.
My advice to the NPP is to reinstate all party members who have been unduly removed from the party or from their elected positions and unite the party, come out with a realistic and achievable campaign message not the ridiculous "free education under trees" or "factories in every district" without thinking about the factories they want to, how much they will cost and where they will get the money from? Moreover, the implications on other sectors.
The best thing to do is to change their flagbearer who has divided the party and heading them to another defeat.
To the NDC which has performed incredibly well, the deleted list should be scrutinised and their members assisted to re-register even if it will mean physically taking them to the EC office to register.
The dubious intentions to disenfranchise bonafide electorates so that Nana Addo wins 2016 elections just like they attempt to overthrow a constitutionally elected president by annulling legitimate votes and declaring Nana Addo winner through the supreme Court failed.
LONG LIVE PRESIDENT MAHAMA!
LONG LIVE NDC!
LONG LIVE GHANA!
Michael Frempong
People forced to eat human flesh and to disembowel dead bodies during South Sudans civil war that began in 2013 are among thousands suffering from trauma and psychological distress amid a chronic shortage of mental healthcare services in the country, Amnesty International said today as the country marks its fifth anniversary.
In a new report, Our hearts have gone dark: The mental health impact of South Sudans conflict , the organisationdocuments the psychological impact of mass killings, rape, torture, abductions and even a case of forced cannibalism, on the survivors and witnesses of these crimes.
While the death and physical destruction caused by the conflict and preceding decades of war are immediately apparent, the psychological scars are less visible and neglected, said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty Internationals Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
Whilst an end to atrocities including torture, rape and murder would be an obvious urgent first step to preventing additional mental health consequences, action also must be taken to heal the damage already done, by providing victims with treatment and other appropriate reparations.
Based on interviews with 161 victims of and witnesses to human rights violations, as well as mental health professionals, government and UN officials, and representatives of non-governmental organisations, the report reveals a dire lack of mental health services across the country for people in need of support and care.
This almost total absence of services is resulting in mental health conditions such as Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) going untreated. There are currently only two practicing psychiatrists in the entire country of 11 million people and mental health patients are routinely housed in prisons instead of receiving the care and treatment they desperately need.
Many of the people interviewed described a range of symptoms consistent with PTSD and Depression, including nightmares, irritability and the inability to concentrate.
Malith, a survivor of one of the wars worst incidents in December 2013 when government security agents shot dead about 300 men in Gudele, a neighbourhood of the capital city Juba, told Amnesty International: Sometimes I dream that I died with those who were killed. I wake up sweating and trembling I think about how I survived. Why did these others die? It makes me feel bad.
Another survivor of the Gudele massacre, Phillip, described how he hid under a pile of bodies during the massacre. When he was discovered by soldiers, they forced him to drink the blood and eat the flesh of the dead or be killed.
He said: At night when I sleep, those who were killed come back in my nightmares. He added, I cant eat, I dont want anything I am offered. I dont think the way I am feeling will ever change.
The government has consistently detained its perceived opponents since the conflict began. Detainees have spoken of killings, beatings, insufficient food and water among other horrors, leading to prolonged psychological distress.
Lual told Amnesty International he was forced by National Security Service (NSS) officers to disembowel the bodies of his murdered fellow detainees at a facility in Juba, so that they would not float when dumped in the river.
He told Amnesty International: I feel hopeless I feel depressed, I am never happy I think about committing suicide All of this makes me feel bad, and I hate myself.
In Bentiu, the capital of Unity state, which has the largest Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites in the country, women venturing out of the site for food, fuel or medicine have experienced sexual violence leading to significant psychological distress.
Nyawal said she and her friend were raped twice in one day by two sets of government soldiers in Bentiu when venturing off-site in 2015.
She said: I am very angry about what happened It has changed my life. I am nothing. I have nothing good I am ashamed.
The vast majority of those interviewed said they had not received any psychological support or mental care.
The government, supported by the international community, must honour its international legal commitments to respect, protect and fulfil the right to health, including mental health. It must also prevent and impartially investigate and prosecute acts such as torture that continue to cause psychological harm to many, said Muthoni Wanyeki.
Doing more to address mental health needs is not only essential for individuals wellbeing, it is also critical for South Sudanese to effectively rebuild their communities and country.
Names have been changed to protect interviewees identities.
For more information or to arrange an interview, please call Seif Magango in Nairobi on +254 788 343897 or +254 20 428 3020, or email [email protected]
Background
South Sudan became an independent country on 9 July 2011 after decades of war, lengthy negotiations and a resounding Yes vote in a referendum to secede from Sudan.
It plunged into a brutal civil war two years later after President Salva Kiir accused his influential Vice-President Riek Machar of plotting to overthrow him in a coup.
Government and opposition forces have deliberately attacked and killed civilians, abducted and raped women, committed acts of torture, destroyed and looted civilian property and attacked humanitarian personnel and assets.
Thousands of people have been killed, including women and children, entire towns and villages destroyed and approximately 1.7 million people internally displaced.
After two years of on-and-off peace talks, the two leaders agreed to a permanent ceasefire and later formed a unity government with President Kiir at the helm and Machar as his first deputy. Although the agreement ended the conflict on paper, the country continues to be wracked with violence.
The report is primarily based on research conducted by Amnesty International in April and May 2015, and in May 2016 in the cities of Juba, Malakal and Bentiu, which have all been affected by the conflict.
In May 2016, in Juba Central Prison alone, there were 82 inmates categorised as mentally ill, including 16 women. More than half of these inmates had not committed any crime.
The African Union (AU) Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan led by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo noted in its final report that trauma appeared to be a key consequence of the conflict.
A survey of 1,525 South Sudanese people in conflict-affected areas carried out by the South Sudan Law Society (SSLS) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) between October 2014 and April 2015 found that 41% of respondents exhibited symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of PTSD.
According to the Ministry of Health, there are only the equivalent of one and a half physicians and two nurses/midwives for every 100,000 citizens, all of whom are disproportionately based in urban areas.
The health sector is allocated only 3% of the 2015-16 national budget, far short of the 15% target pledged by African governments under the Abuja declaration in 2001.
Mental health is defined as the state of emotional and psychological wellbeing in which individuals can cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively, and be active members of the community.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that in situations of armed conflict and other emergencies, the proportion of the population suffering from mild or moderate mental disorders rises from about 10% to 15-20%.
In recognition of the importance of mental wellbeing to development, in September 2015, the UN included mental health as an element of the new global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on health.
Charlotte Osei last week responded to the many queries heaped upon her by both the media and politicians who find her performance not up to a scratch.
She took a subtle swipe at the media, following in the path of politicians who love hating the media when they are on the back foot and blaming them for all their self-induced predicaments.
We do not begrudge the EC Chairman for her effort at repulsing the media queries; after all, this appears to be her mode of reacting to questions, her offensive we saw it, we like it, we are happy remark still fresh in our memories when she crudely defended her pet logo for the Commission.
We wish her well as the test of her efficiency is getting clearer and nearer by the day. Suffice it to point out that ours is not a killjoy obsession but an attempt at relaying the sentiments of the people and presenting the picture of events as they unfold with a view to triggering positive changes.
Would she rather the media glossed over the dangerous shortcomings being unearthed with the so-called deleted NHIS-powered details on the voter register? The accompanying challenges these would exact on the political plane would be enormous as we commence a new week and expose the underbelly of the Commission for further attacks.
We would be shirking our responsibilities to the citizenry, were we to turn our attention from these grey areas which should be remedied before the Election Day.
Last Saturday at the eighth anniversary of the outdooring of Gifty Anti's Standpoint feminine initiative, one of the Commissioners did a yeoman's job about the image of the EC Chairman and the Commission in general. She virtually told her mainly Muslim women audience that Charlotte is a good woman with Ghana's interest at heart and ready to make a point that our female colleagues can be trusted to be efficient in their assignments. We can only hope that Hajia Sa'Adat's testimony about her boss is a reflection of the truth and that Charlotte is after all not the image we are seeing in the picture.
Her assurance that whoever would be declared winner should be the person deserving of the announcement is particularly heartwarming.
Fortunately, time will soon tell whether most Ghanaians are right regarding their impression about Charlotte. Until they are proven wrong, most of them think she is anything but humble.
Whatever she is, should not affect the delivery of credible general election for the people of Ghana who as political animals at the crossroads of their democracy, would not forgive anybody who would make this dream unattainable.
Hajia Halima Mahama one-time Gender Minister pointed out at the function that they as women yearn for the success of Charlotte, she being the maiden woman Chairman of the EC.
If this does not dispel the notion that she is hated by her colleague women what else does? Charlotte has the opportunity to change the impression about herself even as the clock ticks towards November 7 or so, and especially enhancing the integrity of her gender colleagues manning critical positions.
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has told President John Mahama to be bold and 'admit' that he has been on a campaign tour and not any 'accounting to the people' tour as the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) wants the public to believe.
Why can the president not admit that he is campaigning? Why does the NDC lie to Ghanaians that the president is not campaigning but is only 'accounting to the people?' Why is this blatant lie being told so often to the people of Ghana? What do President Mahama and the NDC lose if they tell Ghanaians the truth? a statement issued and signed by Nana Akomea, NPP Director of Communications, said.
Active Campaigning
According to the statement, Ghanaians have constantly been told President Mahama is not on a campaign tour but is engaged in some 'accounting to the people' tour. These insincerity and lies from President Mahama and the NDC are even more shocking in the light of clear and present evidence that President Mahama is engaged in outright campaigning in these so-called 'accounting to the people' tours.
Several Instances
Citing instances to buttress the party's point, Nana Akomea said, On Thursday, February 4, 2016, President Mahama, while addressing the people of Nyanoa-Kwaobaah, demanded to be given a second term so he could 'start putting money in your pockets.' On Tuesday, April 12, 2016, he told the people at Atimpoku, Apeguso and Bosso in the Eastern Region that those who had attained the age of 18 should register when the register was opened in order to ensure that they exercise their franchise to retain the NDC in power to continue the transformational agenda
The statement further indicated, On Tuesday, June 28, 2016, President Mahama told a crowd in his Ashanti Regional tour that he deserved a second term. He repeated this demand on Wednesday, 29th June. On Thursday, July 14, 2016, while addressing the chiefs and people of the Mamprugu Traditional Area, President Mahama repeated his demand for a second term.
According to the NPP, President Mahama again went to admonish the chiefs and people of Mamprugu to ignore their kinsman, Dr Bawumia, and vote 'massively' for him (President Mahama) as in his words, Your brother may not be a true brother.
The opposition party noted, These demands by President Mahama to be retained, given a second chance or voted for again, have been repeated throughout his tours nationwide.
Incumbency Abuse
Nana Akomea said in the statement that The NDC used to decry what they termed 'abuse of incumbency in political campaigning,' adding, Sad to relate, President Mahama is indulging big time in incumbency abuse.
In this campaign tour, there are over 400 billboards across the country, branding of public buses, GBC TV and radio live broadcasts etc., all at the expense of the poor Ghanaian taxpayer, the statement observed.
Footage on President Mahamas visit to Yendi for instance, shows a trail of over 40 heavy duty Landcriusers. All these expenses and the NHIS remain underfunded; and unpaid feeding grant for schools in the North keeps our schools closed.
More Exposures
According to the statement, the 'lies', 'untruths' and 'inconsistencies' were not limited to the matter of President Mahamas campaign tour saying, In the recent matter of the very important electricity tariffs, the deputy minister for power and the ECG announced on Monday, 4th July, 2016, that tariffs per unit of electricity would be reduced from 67 pesewas to 34 pesewas, to be funded from government provision of a subsidy amounting to GH300 million.
Three days later, the president himself contradicted the July 4 announcement, stating that there was no subsidy and that any reduction in tariffs would be achieved through some 'realignment' of tariff bands and pricing. While Ghanaians were in this state of confusion, the Finance Minister, Seth Tekper, also announced on Tuesday, 12th July, 2016, that subsidies would be provided, the statement recalled.
By William Yaw Owusu
18.07.2016 LISTEN
Recent acts of violence, fanatical hatred and intolerance particularly across Northern Nigeria should be of concern to thoughtful and peace loving Muslims across the country. The history of Islam in Nigeria has been stained with so much blood that any Muslim who, by some stretch of imagination still maintains that Islam is a religion of peace should begin to contend with this harsh and threatening reality.
It has become increasingly difficult to entertain the notion that Islam is a religion of peace. Tell that to the families who loved were recently killed by muslim fanatics in Niger, Kano or Abuja. It is becoming a commonplace notion that Islam is a religion of violence or that Islam evokes fear, force and hatred across the country. Suspicion and mistrust seem to becoming the defining characteristics of Muslimnon Muslim relationship in the country.
In fact, this year, there is hardly any week that passes without some act of violence or destruction by suspected Muslim fanatics somewhere in the country. Most of these savage acts take place in Northern Nigeria and they reflect negatively on the way Islam is perceived across the country and the world. Though the federal government has been fighting to neutralize Boko Haram militancy, these merchants of hate, death and destruction are still killing and maiming people.
Boko Haram militancy has in fact metastasized and today one hardly differentiates between the killings that are perpetrated by herdsmen and the terror that is unleashed by Boko Haramites. There is so much commonality between acts that are perpetrated by Muslim youths and the bloodletting activities of these peddlers of Islamic hate and harm. In fact the Boko haram militancy has morphed into Muslim youth or Fulani herdsmen attacks. One seldom differentiates sharia police extremism and Boko Haram fanaticism. Horrific instances abound of these marauding ravenous monsters.
Recently there have been reported acts of violence by Muslim youths across the region. It is either they are protesting blasphemies against Islam or Prophet Muhammad, or they are reacting angrily to acts that violate the Ramadan or they are incensed that non Muslims are preaching or practicing their faith as in the most recent case.
The latestreport says that on Friday July 13 2016,irate Muslim youths attacked and destroyed a catholic church in Baki Iku in Niger State. These youths, numbering over 200, stormed the church building; some of them scaled the wall, after their Jumat prayer and attacked members who were praying at the church. They claimed that Fridays were for Islamic prayers and that the worshippers had the right to worship only on Sundays. They beat up and injured the church workers and chased away the worshippers. The police claimed that they had made arrests and pledged to bring the perpetrators of this act of violence to book. Unfortunately, this would likely be the end of the matter. Like in most incidents of violence, vandalism and arson by Muslim youths in Northern Nigeria, the perpetrators would go unpunished. Sadly, Muslim youths who commit similar or worse crimes are hardly prosecuted for their crimes. Police may make arrests, if at all, but that is usually a stopgap measure to create the impression that something is being done. After a while, the suspects are released and normal life goes on. I mean there is so much impunity in the land. We cannot continue like this. Something has to be done
.
The Islamic community must do more to rein in these militants and combat the activities of extremists in their communities whether these fanatics are members of Boko Haram, or they are Fulani herdsmen, or members of the Sharia police or Muslim youths. All these shades of Muslim extremism must be tackled and defeated.
To all the Sheikhs, Ulama, Imam and others who claim to be the spiritual, intellectual and moral leaders of the Ummah in Northern Nigeria, you must begin to acknowledge that there is a serious problem in your Islamic house and community. You should ensure that mosques are no longer places where attacks and killings are planned, and that Jumat prayers or any of such activities are not used to incite violence and hatred. You should not only be heard of or seen protesting when Muhammad is cartooned or a Quran is burnt or a beauty pageant is staged. You should be seen equally marching on the streets and protesting when Muslim youths attack and burn down churches or kill blasphemers because these acts of violence, hatred and intolerance are giving Islam a bad name and image. Those who maintain that Islam is not a religion of peace say so not because they hate the Islamic faith, but because of the hateful behaviours of some muslims towards others. People say that Islam is not a religion of peace not because of what non muslims do to muslims but due to what muslims do to non muslims as in this case.
So when you refuse to speak out or stand by while Muslim youths launch attacks after Jumat prayers at your mosques, it is difficult to discount that you are not aiding and abetting their criminal behaviours. When you use your preachings to incite hatred, you are complicity to the atrocities they commit. I want to take Islamic politicians and intellectuals from Northern Nigeria to task. Many of you have contributed to the growing fanaticism in Northern Nigeria because you have invested much of the political capital in schemes that perpetuate ignorance and brainwashing. You have devoted much of the resources in the region to funding sharia schemes, building mosques, sponsoring higher Hajj and lesser Hajj to Mecca, to Quranic indoctrination, paying imams, finance sharia courts when we have state courts, to instituting sharia police when the state police are there, to giving financial rewards to Christians who convert to Islam when your people are languishing in poverty and penury. Instead of putting in place programs and schemes that provide young people with effective education, create jobs and attracts people of all faiths and none to come and live and work peacefully in the region, you prefer to legalize discrimination and exclusion of non-Muslims.
Many of you boast about how passionate you are about Nigerian unity and how you are ready to go to war again to keep Nigeria one. But in practice you are ready to sacrifice, that Nigerian unity on the altar on Islam or sharia law. Is it not a sad thing?
Some of you have not disguised your hatred and disgust for those agitating for Biafra or other separatist groups that exist and operate in Southern Nigeria. But you have not thought of how your divisive, exclusivist, discriminatory Islamic politics in Northern Nigeria is fuelling these agitations. Cant you see some causal connection between sharia agitation and Biafra agitation? You are correct in thinking that agitations for Biafra could lead to the dismembering the country, but you are also contributing to dividing and disintegrating Nigeria by imposing sharia law on non muslims, by refusing to separate mosque and state, by privileging Islam and providing a social and political atmosphere where muslim youths kill, maim, behead and hack to death real or imaginary infidels with impunity. Look the issue is not particularly Nigerian unity but keeping Nigeria united and addressing those issues that give justification to separatist agitations and sentiments. That has been the main challenge because the country is already at war and one of the main reasons for this war is Islamic fanaticism, which you politicians in Northern Nigeria have refused to tackle head on.
So if you are passionate about Nigerias unity then you need to confront the challenge of Islamic extremism. You need to root out this problem. I mean, how can you rightfully claim that you are desire the unity of this country when you endorse that Nigerians who do not profess Islam be treated as second-class citizens in the name of sharia implementation?
Tell me why I or anybody else would take your claim to keeping Nigeria united seriously when you are not committed to treating Nigerians of all faiths and none equally? How do you convince us that you are committed to Nigerian unity when you turn a blind eye when Muslim youths rampage, attack and kill non Muslims for blasphemy, vandalize and burn down churches, slaughter those who are preaching or practicing other faiths or beliefs with impunity?
Enough of this apathy and indifference to acts of religious hatred and intolerance. Enough of this discrimination and bloodletting in Northern Nigeria.
Masons ought to stick to the building of walls and leave the business of the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of diseases and conditions of the oral cavity to dental surgeons. Dont you agree? Our Ghana is a country where a blacksmiths apprentice will deem himself fit to deliver a public lecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technologys School of Business on Organizational Behaviour. We deserve a break!
Not a single day passes since her appointment into the high office of the Electoral Commissions chair without a plethora of damning comments targeting the person and position of Charlotte Osei. Is it because she belongs to the feminine class? Or is the case of these verbal abusers that of a man whose only tool is a hammer and so sees every problem as a nail? If you constantly cry wolf when you see a cat, people will take you for what you used to be, the day the real wolf visits.
We have an insatiable attitude of aligning every state institution with one political party or another at our whim! Sometimes, one wonders if a congress of baboons will behave the way we do. Ghanaian institutions are for Ghanaians and must be run by Ghanaians. I believe this was what the fighters of our independence stood for. Somebody should at least just pretend that, an institution of state mandated to do its work will do it without any bias, lest we should prepare to be re-colonised. Perhaps the best way to start a re-colonisation process will be to hand over the conduction of our election to a foreign organization. Enough must be enough!
Stepping into the shoes of so great a person in Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan is itself a huge task for any Ghanaian, not just Charlotte. So, what the woman and the electoral body need from us is not this vilification, denigration, condemnation, and certainly not this political marriage we often insinuate. The work of the Electoral Commission is not only done by verification machines and Constitutional Instruments, but by people with brains to think. Every brain requires some amount of peace to function. Give the workers peace!
Why have Ghanaians found it so easy to throw insults at public office holders? Where are the morals we learn at home? We so much abuse this freedom of expression, that democracy delivered to us. Remember that you have the right to swing your arm, but the tip of your finger ends where somebody elses nose begins. If you have nothing good to say about the woman, I suggest you just tell her she is a beautiful woman and you expect her to do a beautiful thing in the 2016 general elections.
My modest and unsolicited advice to Charlotte Osei and the Electoral Commission is, to always say less than necessary, since the more you say, the more common you appear and the less in control. Powerful people impress by saying less, and whether or not anybody likes it, Charlotte and the Electoral Commission are powerful and will remain so as the good books of this country continue to work.
Colleague poor Ghanaians, my appeal to you is to be alert and not allow any politician influence your behaviour. There will be Ghana after Hassan Ayariga, Dramani Mahama, Kwesi Nduom and certainly, there will be Ghana after Addo Dankwa and all the other political bigwigs for whom we are always at each others throats. If you look back into your life critically, you will realise that it is your fellow political nobodies who have made the greatest impact thereupon.
Fallibility is a trait inextricably intertwined with all human institutions. If the Electoral Commission ever makes any mistake, I am not suggesting we applaud it, but we should consider that it is not the first public institution to have made one.
Nos sunt fessi... Nous sont fatigue... Te bale yeng... We are tired!
Abdul-Rahaman Jimba Ibn Nuhu
Wa
+233207896079/242347160
[email protected]
Hennie Heymans (Middle) With Kader O. Coulibaly (left) and Randy Buday (right)
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of DHL Express Sub Saharan Africa, Hennie Heymans, says Ghana's growth opportunities make the country a preferred destination for doing business on the African continent.
He said, Ghana is one of the fastest growing markets for DHL Express. A recent report has confirmed that it is one of the top five hotspots in terms of goods and services. Although the declining commodity prices have presented some challenges, along with severe electricity challenges, the outlook remains positive for Ghana.
Mr. Heymans said this while addressing journalists in Accra yesterday after rounding off his tour of the country which saw him offer courier services to local drivers in Accra to get firsthand experience in DHL services in the country.
He announced that DHL Express is embarking on an initiative called 'Growing Beyond Borders' to give entrepreneurial training opportunities to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the country to look beyond the borders of Ghana.
He said the initiative, to be launched in the end of the year, has been specifically designed to help SMEs to understand the economic potential of international trade and the subsequent benefits to their businesses.
We consider SMEs as the engines for growth and our highly trained certified international specialists in Ghana are committed to connecting the SMEs with global opportunities.
DHL's own research, conducted with HIS Global Insight, has shown that SMEs who trade internationally are twice as successful as those who trade only within their own market.
He said, Ghana from a sub-Saharan perspective is very important for us. The economy is diversifying and what our local office keeps achieving consistently give us so much hope.
Mr. Heymans reiterated that employee engagements are critical to business success, saying our people are the lifeblood of our organization, and we believe in fostering a continuous learning and development culture.
He gave the assurance that DHL Express will continue to motivate its employees to enable them to provide and retain loyal customers.
Randy Buday, DHL Express Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said the company's investment in people, equipment and facilities is to help them to meet the needs of the customers.
He said they were adopting what he called conservative approach to improve their existing infrastructure and work continuously to get people to believe in their brand which is known in over 200 countries.
Kader O. Coulibaly, Country Manager of DHL Express, disclosed that as the first and largest express logistics company in Africa, we are well-positioned to service the growth of Ghana, ensuring its accessibility and attractiveness on a global scale.
By William Yaw Owusu
WASHINGTON, July 17 -- U.S. space firm SpaceX will on Monday launch supplies to the International Space Station, including a crucial docking port for future American commercial crew vehicles, and then try a second rocket landing on solid ground.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is scheduled for liftoff on the company's Falcon 9 rocket at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Among the cargo is the first of two international docking adapters, which will allow U.S. commercial spacecraft to dock to the station when transporting American astronauts in the near future.
Its first users are expected to be the Boeing Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, which are now in development in partnership with the U.S. space agency NASA's Commercial Crew Program and expected to begin test flights in 2017 and 2018.
The adapter, a metallic ring big enough for astronauts to fit through, also represents the first on-orbit element built to the docking measurements that are standardized for all the spacecraft builders across the world, which means other spacecraft will also be able to dock there in the future, NASA said.
"It's really good we have an international standard now that anybody can build against and come dock to the station or to anything that has the same standard," David Clemen, Boeing's director of Development and Modifications for the space station, said in a NASA statement.
SpaceX tried to deliver one international docking adapter last year, but the equipment was destroyed during a launch accident.
Overall, the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft is loaded with about 5,000 pounds (2,268 kilograms) of cargo for its ninth Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA.
Included in the payload is a pocket-size device that will allow DNA sequencing in space for the first time. The samples in this first test will be DNA from a virus, a bacteria and a mouse.
Meanwhile, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt an experimental landing on a landing zone, also at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, minutes after Monday's launch.
"I'm pretty optimistic at this point in time that we land it, but I would always knock on wood," Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability at SpaceX, said during a prelaunch news conference Saturday. "That's part of the nature of this maneuver, it's pretty challenging."
The California-based company achieved a soft landing on a land-based pad at Cape Canaveral last year. Since then, it has also had three successful landings on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Koenigsmann said the reflight of the company's recovered rocket could occur this fall.
SpaceX is one of two U.S. companies that provide space station cargo services for NASA. The other company is Orbital ATK, whose next space station cargo launch is targeted for August.
If you ever chance upon an offer to burn your certificate, as a graduate, where the compensation for doing this goes for One Hundred Thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 100,000.00), would you have taken or declined such an offer? In this hypothetical situation, there are two available answers to choose. The first is in affirmative which confirms readiness to do it without hesitation. The latter is to say No to mean a decline of the offer.Unfortunately, I am not sure this is a Venn Diagram where an intersection allows anyone to belong to both sides at a time. So those who want to belong to both should do the honorable thing.
At this point, I am equally left with no other option than to choose one of the only two alternatives as nobody is above the law under this circumstance. On this note, I choose to burn my certificate for One Hundred Thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 100,000.00).Therefore, I join the many people who will take the offer.
There are many reasons we can proffer in support of why we are taking the offer or declining it.For those who will decline, I wish to be furnished with their reasons to see if that can convince an already convinced mind to switch goal post.This, I will gladly do without shame.After all, that will be a demonstration of the human in me.Until then, I remain faithful to my position.
Why would one choose to burn his or her certificate for One Hundred Thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 100,000.00)? Could this reflect the extent to which people have so much become obsessed with money that they will trade their hard earned certificate for it? Obviously, this cannot be the reason why I support such a cause.By the time I conclude this piece, I promise I would have featured my personal reasons.For now, let us apprise ourselves with the reasons some people have as for why they will burn their certificates for such an amount.
For the very first obvious reason, People without certificates in our society are employers of graduates with certificates. Those who are not employers, even without certificates, have contributed so much to the lives of the latter. These people are admired by our society for their successes without certificates. Our society has come to the better understanding that success is not only about certificates and degrees.So, with this appreciation, why would someone want to hold on to his or her certificate when an opportunity has come for him or her to breakthrough with One Hundred Thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 100,000.00), an amount even those who have made more than that today never got one hundredth of it to start up something.To subcribers of this reason, there can never be any better opportunity than this.
The next reason, for some people, is how can they let go this golden opportunity after nearly half decade of having to look for employment with their certificates yet unsuccessful in this endeavour? The number of applications written, if luck does not meet you, your CV will be wrapped with a loaf of bread by a seller and given to you - no pun intended. To them, what have their certificates given them so far that they should have a reason to keep them and kick against this life-changing amount?
Related to the above point, taking this offer is an opportunity for some people to facilitate their entrepreneurship.At a time where our institutions overwhelmingly churn out graduates each year without commensurate efforts to get them employments, entrepreneurship remains one of the surest ways to curb the situation. This amount is more than a good startup capital for a business which can eventually employ a good number of the teeming unemployed graduates.
Again, for others, their reason is simple. They cannot be sure that in the unlikely event they get jobs early enough, their entire salaries and life savings can even fetch them this amount. This is bitter reality they have to deal with.Therefore, why settle for less when an opportunity such as this has presented itself? They will make no mistake!
For others too, choosing to burn one's own certificate is no different from when a fire outbreak takes it away whether one's permission and leaving him or her with nothing.However, in this case, you go with a compensation if you agree. The truth is, some people have been victims of burnt, missing, and stolen certificates yet they have survived. Therefore, why can't they just take this offer and take it that it is one of those unfortunate events that brings streams of tears? Yet, victims survive from this.To such people whose reason rides on the back of this logic, they will not hesitate on this offer.
And now to the smarter ones, they will burn their certificates because they can go for another one. Those who are unfortunate to have come from institutions which issue a lifetime certificate will smartly make at least one photocopy and burn the original which comes with a prize.This should not be a difficult thing to do at all and they will do it without fail.
As I early on disclaimed, my decision to also take this offer is not hinged on my penchant for money. Neither is it a show of my regret for school. I have the firmest of conviction that the best thing that ever happened to me was education.Again, one thing is clear, success goes beyond school. Whiles some will celebrate their successes outside of school, I am also glad mine will be with the school.
I choose to burn my certificate for One Hundred Thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 100,000.00) because I refuse any attempt to make me believe that the certificate is my only worth without it there is no proof of my education.As it is said, the school we attend should pass through us but we should not pass through the school. It is only when we do the latter that our proof will be the certificate. Our proof is what comes out of us but not the certificate. In a nutshell, we go to school not to get a certificate but to be schooled to have lives such that we do not have the certificate as our proof of education.
William Latsey
[email protected]
According to Confucius, When wealth is centralised, the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed, the people are brought together. In a related vein, James Baldwin opines that, We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the sentient which can change it. In effect, these great minds are advocating that we extend helping hands to individuals and organisations where we have the means to do so.
However, worrying trend, a friend has drawn my attention to, in recent times is the increasing spate of donations to a security institution such as the Ghana Police Service. It is commonplace to read in the news donations made by individuals to this security setup.
This is a recent case in point as published on 5th July, 2016 by myjoyonline.com, an online news portal of the Multimedia Group Limited:
A businessman and transport operator has made history by single-handedly building a police station with a bungalow for the Asaam District Police Command, near Asante-Mampong. Chief Executive Officer of the Yesu Dea Transport, Yaw Amponsah Marfo, has also given the command a brand new Nissan Navara pick-up vehicle and two motorbikes. The police administration describes the gesture as unprecedented by an individual in the history of the Ghana Police Service.
It is also reported recently that individuals who are constantly under armed robbery attacks in certain parts of the Greater Accra Region have donated a building so that police personnel could be stationed there to offer protection. Many of such self-help projects to offer security exists in most of the peri-urban areas in Ghana.
Do not get me wrong; these donations will go a long way to help offer adequate security and extend security protection to areas where there is none, due to logistical constraints.
I am not against philanthropic gestures to this institution. My worry is: has this any implications on the security of the country? How would the police deal with such philanthropist should they fall foul of the law? Will the Police have the moral authority to allow the laws of the land work when they have benefited from the philanthropy of these individuals?
We are told in the news report as carried by myjoyonline.com that Yaw Amponsah Marfo is a transport operator. He owns a transport company for that matter and will always come into brush with the Police from time to time. How will the Police handle him and other philanthropists who have extended philanthropic gestures to the Service should these donors fall at the wrong side of the law? Can these donations be construed as quid pro quos? What will the Police Service do should it turn out in the future that these donations are proceeds of illicit businesses?
Aside making the institution morally weak to deal with donors when they fall foul of the law, we live in an era of terrorism. Realising that the Ghana Police Service has open arms for donations, can terrorist organisations infiltrate the security service, in this case the Police Service, make donations to same, identify the weaknesses of the donated facilities and strike when we least expect?
I am no security person let alone expert. But issues that border on our safety should be brought to bare for analyses.
Whats the way forward? How can we put an end to the increasing spate of donations to the Ghana Police Service? We can effectively do this by adequately resourcing the Service to ensure that it continues to protect limb and property. We cannot afford to trade off security under the pretext of lack or inadequacy of funds.
I shall return!
Charles Lwanga Siewobr
[email protected]
+233 24 282 7039
If you are Amanfo and you happened to be in the Form Two Latin class of Mr Graham, sometime 1960-61, you would remember his knuckle knocks on the head anytime you failed one of those verb or declension drills. If you got ego, me, mei, mihi, me or tu, te, tui, tibi, te wrong, you could expect that hard knock. For me, who used to suffer the post-koko breakfast sleep effect, I couldn't completely escape the knock.
I am talking memorising Latin phrases, expressions, sentences and passages. Mr Graham would occasionally call you to recite or repeat them. Therefore, everyone would go through his class memorising some of those. I still recollect the 'Hodie est feriae (today is holiday') and 'Abite domum (Go home)' a teacher told his pupils.
There was a saying, I memorised, which I easily recall because of its recurring relevance in my journey of living a life. A farmer, by way of advice to his son to stay away from bad company counselled him: 'Poma mala maculant bona, certe mali amici maculabunt puerum bonum (Bad apples spoil good apples. Certainly, bad friends would spoil good boys).
The battle for equality of the sexes, gender balance, is not an easy one.
Yet, just like if you take along sheep to harvest anwonomo (the sweet-aroma leaf for wrapping Osino graphic), the sheep would be chewing the leaves away as you pluck, there are those women who pull the gender equality struggle back as others push it ahead. They are the spoilers who by their selfish exploits would do everything to tarnish the name of womanhood.
I see not how rallying behind someone who insists upon tearing a motherland down (but for a justice woman determined to stop the tear its tracks), helps the cause of gender. If compatriots haven't noticed, congress womanhood, in general, has become a drawback for the woman's cause.
The judgment debt debacle, including the Woyome millions yet to be collected back after the court ruling to that effect, was a woman's act. Actually, it has become the unmet responsibility of a woman to take the money back.
Children with disabilities had their schools closed while a known woman advocate for the cause of women and children sat duty derelict by watching without showing concern with cheeks full.
Our affairs with other motherlands have suffered under the incompetence and nonperforming hands of a congresswoman.
Another congresswoman was the architect in a scheme that robbed the motherland of millions of dollars and cedis over the painting of pictures of a president on buses bought with taxpayer money.
There was money for that when there was no money for school feeding or capitation grant. Merciless acts have occurred with the hands of other congresswomen.
Of course, from Nana Yaa Asantewaa through Esther Afua Nkulenu Ocloo, women have been at the forefront of the struggle to liberate the motherland from poverty, ignorance and disease. Osono women stood tall along with their men and with compassion to introduce school feeding, NHIS, MMT, capitation grant, free maternity care, LEAP and NYEP.
The congress women, contrarily, have been stealing from the state what would be used to support the vulnerable in our midst.
It's been waste of money and thievery of all the common fund and oil money which could have been injected into alleviating the poverty of women and children of the motherland.
Any woman party to that is not worth defence because she is a spoiler of gender advocacy. She is the woman who is undermining women, their status, capacity and ability which, as amply demonstrated, sometimes surpass those of men.
But that is not to say people who use bad language on radio cannot be checked. It is just a matter of concurrent admonition for akura (mouse), the one privileged to be availed the microphone space, to leave momone (stinking fish) subject of talk, alone. I have already cited a woman determined to do right to stop she who wants to destroy the motherland. I disapprove media badmouthing.
That is why I would want to thank IMANI that a 'kill the judge' congressperson could rot in jail.
Lingua Latina was an alternative to Twi. That is, either you studied Twi or you studied Latin.
I had no idea about the implications of that for the promotion and growth of our indigenous culture and the moulding of our personalities. If that was how we were being prepared to be useful citizens to our motherland by promoting growth and development, our current stagnation and looting public funds bear full testimony of the less than usefulness of that schooling.
Let not promoting gender issues be confused with cutting a dysfunctional bloated ego woman know-all, but actually little to size. Watch the congress ungendered women's squad.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
Lord Acton in his famous dictum: power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely, reveals the dangers associated with dictatorship. Definitely, democracy is the way to go from the views of many nation-builders with the framers of 1992 constitution of Ghana no exception. Certainly, democracy is an import from the western world. The essential features of democracy include: respect for personal liberty and individual rights, pursuit of happiness, diverse views, periodic elections, the rule of law and to some extent love of simplicity and disdain for ostentation.
In the view of Abraham Lincoln, No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar. Why then must election of leaders in partial fulfilment of democratic responsibilities bring acrimony, insult, conflicts, acid attacks and so on? This article tries to decipher the significance of assertive communication and how psychopathy influences leadership identity taking into accounts, the role of leaders and voters in conflict prevention during and after election 2016 in Ghana.
In the first place, there is an evidence-based empirical research that suggests the correlation between psychopathic personality trait and leadership style. For example, Lilienfeld et al (2012) asserted that notwithstanding the fact that psychopathic personality trait is basically due to faulty lifestyle or maladaptive behaviors such as impulsivity and lack of guilt, there is an association between some features of this trait such as fearlessness, interpersonal dominance inherent in certain jobs; including political position Psychopathy is a psychopathological case in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, and so on.
Psychopathic personality trait is closely related to antisocial personality disorder. Psychopathic personality trait has implications on leadership style. For instance, van Eeden, Cillier and van Deventer (2008) found the linkage between personality traits and leadership types such as transformational, transactional and laissez-faire. This means that certain leaders can naturally be violent in nature. Some individuals with psychopathy possess natural instincts which compel them to exhibit inordinate and uncompromising ambitions for political power. Some of them find it hard to accept defeat. Such psychological drives are somewhat recipe for dispute. In a country like Ghana where we dont evaluate prospective leaders psychologically, electoral dispute prevention plans must be factored into policies and programs.
Conflict management interventions such as the use of assertive communication must be adopted to complement the effort of security agencies. Assertive communication is an evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapeutic technique useful in anger management and dispute prevention and resolution. The leadership, electorates, political parties and all the stakeholders in 2016 elections have a role to play in promoting assertiveness. The national commission on civic education must be restructured with qualified staffs throughout the country and must be trained on anger management and conflict prevention tools. Our prisons are crowded with many inmates with mental health issues such as minor cognitive impairment and intermittent explosive disorder. As we approach the elections, conflict prevention must be a concern of all. Assertive communication is maximally efficient in the management of stress and anger. The leadership, the electorates and all the stakeholders of election 2016 all have a role to play in the use of assertiveness.
Being assertive is an essential communication skill. It means that an individual expresses himself or herself effectively and stand up for his or her point of view, while also respecting the rights and opinion of others. Being assertive can also help boost your self-esteem and earn others' respect. This can help with stress management, especially if you tend to take on too many responsibilities because you have a hard time saying no. Some people seem to be naturally assertive. But if you are not one of them, you can learn to be more assertive
Since assertiveness thrives on mutual respect, it's an effective and diplomatic communication style. Being assertive shows that you respect yourself because you are willing to stand up for your interests and express your thoughts and feelings. It also demonstrates that you are aware of the rights of others and are willing to work on resolving conflicts.
It is not what you say that matters but also how you say it is very important. Assertive communication is direct and respectful. Being assertive gives you the best chance of successfully delivering your message. If you communicate in a way that's too passive or too aggressive, your message may get lost because people are too busy reacting to your delivery.
We must also live in the present moment all the time. This is otherwise known as mindfulness. We must be mindful that the geographical name of our country is Ghana not NDC or NPP. We must learn to distract, relax and cope with our provocations. One basic feature of assertiveness is I language instead of he or she language. Instead of saying candidate A is a liar, an assertive communicator will say, I disagree with candidate A on this issue.
As a country, we must stop putting too much pressures on our leaders. The leadership, political parties and the electorates must learn to be assertive. The media must lead the crusade on assertiveness. As we approach elections, it is only honorable that the media, far from trying to maintain a stance of Olympian detachment must reveal their political affiliations to the public. Every successful democratic governance is anchored by a vibrant media. God bless our homeland Ghana. I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing (Socrates). I humbly stand for Corrections. Feedbacks must be emailed to
[email protected]
Reference
Lilienfeld,. S. O et al, (2012). Fearless dominance and the U.S. presidency: Implications of psychopathic personality traits for successful and unsuccessful political leadership. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), 489-505.
van Eeden, R., Cilliers, F., & van Deventer, V. (2008). Leadership styles and associated personality traits: Support for the conceptualisation of transactional and transformational leadership. South African Journal of Psychology, 38(2), 253-267.
Nana Yaw Osei (Padigo), PhD Candidate, Psychology
College of Doctoral Studies
Grand Canyon University, Arizona, USA
18.07.2016 LISTEN
Dedicated to my Spiritual Father, Prophet Emmanuel Badu Kobi, Glorious Wave Church International, Sakumono (Tema), Ghana
Black Man: Welcome to Ghana.
White Man shacking the stretched hand: We have come here to Ghana to learn from the Greatest Thieves on earth.
Black Man said smiling: Well done! We will take you around the country, explain and share with you our life-style.
White Man replied: We Whites are most grateful to find solutions for our countries to move forward.
The Black Man took the White Man through the streets of Accra with its shining buildings, street lights at nights at all times, roads with no holes, green grass and healthy trees along the way with singing birds in many colours, odd giant posters marketing Made in Ghana products proudly as the most innovative in the whole world being admired and studied closely by the Cyber Spies from China, India, USA and Germany to uncover the secrets behind the spirit of invention found in Ghana.
The White Man looked nervously to find Slums with poor vulnerable children in dirty clothes. As far as his eyes could see, there was no poverty found anywhere. Children Homes were rare, families were intact, cheating of husbands on their wives a memory of the past.
The streets were clean, sanitation problems a funny story in the history books of bad times past, corruption cases museums pieces in the Ghana National Hall of Shame, relicts of Ghanas darkest period. Helping hands were available all across the country to assist neighbours in need and give a helping hand.
Clean, gigantic factories operated in each District in their numbers to provide jobs for all and meet the demands of the world for various kind of products with a waiting list as each year the demand for Made in Ghana products increased as the world population was consistently on the rise and Made in Ghana the most sought after products.
Waste was turned into new products or Energy. Ghana had long time ago become a leading exporter of Energy into the Sub-Region giving dominance over Nigeria making the big brother to the East look like a small boy. Ghanas environment and its people was the healthiest in the world.
The street and railway network all across the country enabled all farmers to deliver their freshly harvested products speedily to the local, regional, national and international markets.
Schools produced Students, Universities Graduates, and Technical Colleges Technical Experts nowhere in the world to be found. Foreign countries sent their future Elite to Ghana for training courses to benefit from the drive and innovative spirit in these specially blessed country of West Africa.
Hospitals and Science Companies employed Scientist that were Nobel Prize Winners of the highest standard. Accra and Kumasi had the most advanced road infrastructure enabling self-driven cars to move along the country with no accident at high speed and achieve to make Ghana a Hub for People movement and flexibility. Ghana had understood not to establish a society based on Industrialization, the concept of a history better to be forgotten, but of Human Intelligence.
The political life in the country had exceeded all expectations humans have ever wanted to live side by side and interact with each other to lift all up regardless of their abilities based in Humanity and the deep rooted understanding only when humans see each other as one and act accordingly, all will subsequently benefit in the end from cooperation.
White Man: What is the secrete of your enormous success?
Black Man: We have come to our sense, discovered our identity and real potentials. Filled with wisdom and knowledge we go around the world, take bits and pieces of the best in society, culture, economics, politics, religion, sciences and study them very well. We discover with a trained sharp mind the pitfalls in all of them and implement with high speed on common, national ground with a clear and honest heart the pieces to a full picture as you can see today in our beloved country of Ghana, the center and leader of Africa. As Africa is the new Empire of the world for that matter we Ghanaians are the Ruler of the World for Generations to come. What was once a Dream from nowhere, seen more like the mindset of a mentally unstable and disturbed person, has proven itself over a few Generations to be true and real.
White Man: Who carries this vision?
Black Man: The church has transformed itself to be in close line with GOD and not with human interpretation of the Bibel finding itself divided in fractions. This unity is the backbone of our success which inspires and directs our Elite to take the right decisions at the right time making our country accessible to all regardless of their believes or unbelieves.
White Man: You are saying you have achieved what Generations past in the societies of the White Man no generation was able to accomplish either being too rich and for that matter ignoring GOD, to secular and drifting away from the core of Humanity, overshadowed by Ideology trying to make sense of life?
Black Man: We are truly the focus point of all mistakes humans have encountered in their history and we have turned bad into good for here to stay.
Covered in hot, wet sweat I woke up, shaking my head trying to make sense of it all forcing myself to keep my eyes open wide. It was deep into the night. Obviously I was dreaming a message send from GOD knowing our time as Whites has gone; the time of Blacks has come to stay for hundreds of years to come with us as their Supporters and Comrades in the fight for a happy life for all Billions around the world.
GOD give us all a strong heart and sound mind!
Author: Dipl.-Pol. Karl-Heinz Heerde, Sakumono Estate, Block D10, Aprt. 9, Tema West, Ghana, phone +233(0)265078287, [email protected] , 18.07.2016
In Western diplomats imagination, General Paul Malong Awan is a life-battery for President Salva Kiirs presidency; Presidential wheel driver; dictator and the fanner of the war. For Western sympathizers, he is the murderer of the Nuer, Dinka emperor who wants to build Dinka political hegemony, corrupt, antagonist and awaiting heir who will inherit the presidency once the president Salva Kiir retires or dies. However, General Malong have risen and stood tall above these caricatural descriptions during the recent five days fighting in Juba.
Gen. Paul Malong Awan was in the bush long before the emergency of the SPLM/A in 1983. Like other war veterans, Malong abandoned his own Anyanya two movement in Northern Bahr el Ghazal and successfully mobilized and lead thousands of youth to Ethiopia, Bilpham in 1984. Malong was so passionate about the love for his country and detest the suffering that the people of southern Sudan were subjected to by the then Sudanese government.
During the liberation war, Malong almost fought in every corner of the then Sudan. He was the commander of the forces that had managed to vigorously defeat the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) on several attempts to recapture Jebel Boma. Malong protected Jebel Boma in 1992 until he was transferred to Northern Bahr el Ghazal to protect civilians from constant raiding attacks from Murahaleen.
From 1990s up to the time of CPA, Malong was the commander in charge of all the SPLA forces in Northern Barh El Ghazal, Gogrial, Raja and other towns. Gen. Malong fought the bitter war with Mujahedeen, Murahaleen and the forces of Sheikh Abdelbaki Ayii Akol. He protected the civilians and properties from SAF until the CPA was signed.
After the comprehensive peace Agreement was signed, Gen. Malong didnt opt to joint politics but remained in the army as the country deputy Security chief. He was posted in Khartoum. He had a belief that the only viable option for Southern Sudanese to survive from socio-political marginalization from the North is to vote for secession and hence he has to make sure he gathers all intelligence plans for the SPLM/A.
In 2008, Gen. Malong was appointed by President Salva Kiir as a governor for Northern Bahr El Ghazal state on the request of the people of Northern Bahr el Ghazal. For the four years that Malong spent in the gubernatorial office, things he achieved in Aweil speak better for themselves than for me to explain them.
When Rieks bloody quest for J-1 reached the highest peak of shoot to lead in Dec 2013, Malong unreservedly took his AK-47 and joined the SPLA forces to jettison out Rieks forces in Juba and consequently dislodge him in Bor. He was the only leading high profile figure who fought in Bor liberation war from Riek.
In April 2014, President Salva Kiir appointed Gen. Malong to be the SPLA chief of General staffs on request of public. Malong accepted the appointment and left his gubernatorial position and take up a very challenging job of defending the country. As he took over the work as the SPLA chief for General staffs, a remarkable enigma surrounds General Malong. Who is he? What does he want? How does he want to fight Rieks rebellion and transform the SPLA?
Only people who see things beyond tribal line will dare not ask those questions because there are sufficient accounts of goals achieved by Gen. Malong. For those who were unable to watch Malong on Thursday night on SSTV a.k.a SSBC, his speech on that night serves as a useful guide and full definition of what human being he is and what is he up to.
Relaxed, reasonable, well-informed, nationalist, savior, the Malong who appeared on SSBC was far from the purported reckless murderer, dictator and Dinka emperor. On his Thursday night appearance on SSBC, Malong said when I joined the SPLA liberation war in 1980s, my goal was to achieve this great nation and protect all the citizens regardless of their creed, tribes, faith, political affiliation and regions. There are those who would want to inculcate the fear in our people that I am in a planning to kill Equatorians, I Therefore want to assure the Equatorians and indeed all South Sudanese that my mission as the SPLA chief for General Staffs is to protect the sovereignty and territory of South Sudan from external and internal aggressions; protect the constitution and more importantly to protect the lives and properties of all South Sudanese from any danger or harm whether from inside or outside he added.
Watching Gen. Malong on that Thursday night feels like watching history being made. Despite the relentless propaganda aimed to maculate his reputation, his star continues to rise. When the political history of the post-independence and dark days brought upon the country by Riek Machars rebellion at the behest of the U.S.A and UN is finally recorded by our generation, Gen. Paul Malong will no doubt be recognized as a great hero who tremendously transformed the SPLA into disciplinary army and protected the civilians, constitution and sovereignty of South Sudan. Indeed, he will be remembered as a man who brought to end Rieks political philosophy of shoot to lead
Gen. Paul Malong is following the same path undertaken by President Salva Kiir. When the SPLA bifurcated in 1991 and late William Nyuon who was the chief of General staffs rebelled, huge responsibilities fell on Salva Kiir as he assumed the role of Chief of Generals staff until 2005. Similarly, when the SPLA went into bad deep dichotomization in 2013, then quite unexpectedly, President Kiir put Gen. Malong at the helm in Bilpham in April 2014. Within a period of two years from now, Malong turned what was viewed as tribes army into a national army and indeed made SPLA to be one of the strongest army in the region.
I firmly believe that the current state of affairs, nationhood and political sanity in South Sudan will prove to be having been preserved as a result of sudden appearance of Gen. Paul Malong. The strong military foundation mechanism put into place by Gen. Malong will one day prove to have salvaged the SPLA from disintegration and nation from collapse.
Under the stewardship of Gen. Malong, the SPLA has become the last and only front against the foreign exploitation; the only front against any individual who wants to use national army as a mean of ascending to J-1; the only front against external aggressions that threaten the existence of South Sudan as a nation and its prosperity as a people; the only front against any individual who wants to subject the lives of citizens into suffering to pursue his personal interest; the only front against foreign intervention into South Sudans affairs; the only front that protects the constitution and sovereignty of South Sudan.
In conclusion, I dare the reader to imagine what the political and military state of South Sudan would be like today without the existence of Gen. Malong in Bilpham and President Kiir in J-1. What Malong and his team achieved in Bilpham during these two years in my opinion are historys turning points.
Simon Yel Yel is the co-editor of President Salva Kiir speeches and essential writings published as Salva Kiir Mayardit: The Joshua of South Sudan he can be reached at [email protected] or +211955246235.
If I was going to rely on the conventional farming there was no way I could survive with my family - Iddrisu Atampuri
In the Mognori community in the Upper East Region lives Iddrisu Atampuri. At 49 years old, Iddrisu is a smallholder farmer and is married with 7 children (4 boys and 3 girls).
According to him, capacity training and sensitisation meetings provided by ActionAid Ghana and partners have resulted in increased yields on his farm, making it possible for him to enrol all his seven children in school.
At the beginning of the century, the FAO estimated that about 2.7 billion people, who were either directly involved or their families, depended on agriculture as a source of livelihood. Agriculture can help to reduce poverty among people living in poverty and whose livelihoods are mainly centred on farming, like Iddrisu.
In Africa, agriculture contributes to one third of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employing 65% of the workforce, according to the World Bank. The Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GiPC) estimates 42% of the countrys GDP comes from agriculture.
Climate change
However, climate change has had a harrowing effect on the lives of farmers across the world, its most dire consequences on smallholder farmers and people living in poverty who are the most susceptible and vulnerable to erosion, pests, weeds and diseases as well as disasters such as rainstorms, floods, drought, etc. which have immense effects on their food production. Overall, climate change is one of the biggest threats to food security and poverty eradication.
In rural Ghana, specifically the three northern regions, farming constitutes the livelihoods of majority of people. However, over the years, climate change has wreaked havoc on smallholder farmers, reducing their yields and their ability to cater for the needs of themselves and their families.
When I was young, the conditions were different from now and the change in climate has really affected our crop yield. These days, crop yield is very poor and this has worsened our situation, recounts Iddrisu.
Iddrisu, like thousands of farmers in northern Ghana, have been undergoing training provided by ActionAid Ghana and partners to educate them on applying inexpensive procedures and methods that combat the effects of climate change. This is mainly called Climate Resilient Sustainable Agriculture (CRSA).
Counting the gains
ActionAid and its partner, Widows and Orphans Movement (WOM), with support from Agriculture Extension representatives trained by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), have been educating farmers in the Upper East Region on how to increase their yield whilst at the same time, using environmentally friendly practices.
According to Iddrisu, the trainings have resulted in him being able take care of his family.
We were educated to adopt the use of agro-forestry initiatives, which includes growing of trees, and intercropping with onion, okro, and green pepper which is very usual for those who farm along the White Volta Basin. Also, I have learned composting, mulching, and ploughing across the contour, as well as the use of animal droppings. Following the training, I started using the farming practices and it has been very helpful. I now have good yield and income.
The increased yields have also helped Iddrisu to create a better life for himself and his family,
I have bought two bullocks, roofed my 5 mud-square rooms with zinc and comfortably taking care of my children in schools. My first son has just completed University and is now doing his national service. If I was going to rely on the conventional farming, there was no way I could survive with my family.
Grace Sobey is also a vegetable and corn (maize) farmer from the Upper East Region. As a smallholder woman farmer, she was experiencing the same problems as Iddrisu Atampuri, when ActionAid Ghana and its partner, Botitaba Nahira Taaba Development Union (BONATADU) organised trainings to improve farm yields.
According to her, due to climate change, she was uncertain of the weather patterns, however the trainings explained the changing weather patterns, as well as supplied her with information on improved and modern methods of farming. The trainings also involved supplying and educating farmers on the food planting timetable by Agricultural Extension Agents (AEAs) and Farmer Network executives.
Multiplying the effect
I have more to feed my children and also sell some for my childrens upkeep. The meetings with the AEAs was very helpful because it was becoming more difficult each year to get information about when it was time to plant, since we did not have anyone to educate us and let us know when the time was due.
Grace Sobey selling her vegetables she harvested at the market
The World Bank estimates that about 75% of people living in poverty are farmers in rural communities, and recommends agriculture as a tool for reducing global poverty.
ActionAid Ghana believes in enhancing the capabilities and knowledge of people in marginalised communities.
This is because we believe there is Power in People the ability of people living in poverty and injustice to create the change they need in their own lives, that of their families and their communities.
There is so much we can do for people like Iddrisu and Grace to remove themselves from the 75% of people living in poverty.
Deborah Smallie Lomotey
Communications Officer
ActionAid Ghana
Renowned exiled Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who has denied allegations by the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he orchestrated the failed coup, is calling for an international probe into the allegations, saying he does not trust the Turkish government and the judiciary to carry out a fair investigation.
Turkish officials say that nearly 8,000 police officers have been suspended, reportedly on suspicion of having links to the coup attempt. Some 6,000 members of the judiciary and military, including generals, have also been detained.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to purge state bodies of the virus that caused the revolt. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has stressed the importance of democratic rule.
Gulen on Saturday condemned in strongest terms the attempted coup by some soldiers, and also denied instigating the botched attempt to overthrow the government.
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.
In one of his rare interviews, Fethullah Gulen told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound in the United States, that 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; I can say that, if there is such a claim that there were people [among the perpetrators] whom I knew, whom I motivated and lead, people who acted with my orders, lets have an international committee investigate this matter. Let them investigate if there was such a thing and let them make a decision. I will comply with whatever the result is, even if it is a lie I will comply even if the committee is bribed and signs and fills papers that calumniate. But only a big international organization should do the investigation, in my humble opinion Gulen, who has lived in the US for more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.
Watch video of the cleric's call for probe
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.
Persecuted and harassed
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 US schools has been charged with wrongdoing.
No tolerance
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.
Coup may have been staged by President Erdogan Fethullah Gulen
According to the Independent Newspaper, Fethullah Gulen has also suggested that the coup may have been staged by President Erdogan just to get at his opponents.
'There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup and it could be meant for further accusations [against the Gulenists]', Fethullah Gulen said.
He also told The Guardian: I don't believe that the world believes the accusations made by President Erdogan. 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.
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 said in a statement.
The government insisted that despite Mr. Gulen's denial, the cleric's movement was responsible for the coup attempt.
The 75-year old imam went into self-imposed exile when he moved from Turkey to the United States in 1999 and settled in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. He rarely speaks to journalists and has turned down interview requests from CNN for more than four years.
Supporters describe Gulen as a moderate Muslim cleric who champions interfaith dialogue. Promotional videos show him meeting with Pope John Paul II in the Vatican in the 1990s. He also met frequently with rabbis and Christian priests in Turkey.
Gulen has a loyal following known as Gulenists in Turkey, who all subscribe to the Hizmet movement.
Watch video of Gulen's endorsement of democratic rule in 1994 & 2016
About Hizmet Movement
Hizmet is a global initiative inspired by Gulen, who espouses what The New York Times has described as a moderate, pro-Western brand of Sunni Islam that appeals to many well-educated and professional Turks.
Nongovernmental organizations founded by the Hizmet movement, including hundreds of secular co-ed schools, free tutoring centers, hospitals and relief agencies, are credited with addressing many of Turkeys social problems.
The preacher and his movement also spawned a global network of schools and universities that operate in more than 100 countries.
In the United States, this academic empire includes Harmony Public Schools, the largest charter school network in Texas.
Within Turkey, volunteers in the Gulen movement also own TV stations, the largest-circulation newspaper, gold mines and at least one Turkish bank.
By: citifmonline.com/Ghana
The President of Family Health Medical School, the premier private medical school in Ghana, Professor Enyonam Yao Kwawukume, has been awarded by Impact Africa Summit; Ghana Health Laureate for his enormous contribution to the health sector of the country.
Professor Enyonam Yao Kwawukume, Mb ChB, FWAC, FGCPS, FACOG, Adm. & Mgt. is also the Director of Family Health Hospital and Board Chairman of the Family Health School of Nursing and Midwifery.
He is also Inaugural Professor and Chair, KK Bensti-Enchil, Chair, College of Health Sciences, UG Legon.
Professor 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 Professor Yao Kwawukume on July 7, 2016, saw his vision for the health sector as something that led to the birth of the Family Health Medical School; the premier private medical school in Ghana.
Professor Kwawukume's vision again, was also recognized for adding up to government efforts to produce more medical doctors for the country.
In 2014, Professor 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.
It should also be noted that, 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 of America.
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.
Professor describes himself as a writer and has contributed weekly in the Mirror Publications for over four years.
Apart from the many research works done and published, hes 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 will help infertile men and women achieve pregnancy.
He's accredited for successful IVF or test tube babies resulting in singletons, twins and triplets.
By: Kojo Agyeman/citifnonline.com/Ghana
Governor Okorocha
18.07.2016 LISTEN
I write as a son of the soil. I write as an Imo son who has been there for so long. I write as one who remembers things. And I recollect that at the time Nigeria had self rule in 1960, Lagos was both the commercial nerve centre and the federal capital territory of our country. Lagos had always been a thriving commercial coastal city that held massive attractions for traders and business men and women from many parts of the world. Lagos swarmed with people. Being a coastal city, men and women arrived from all nooks and crannies of the universe to add to the glamorous night life that made Lagos tick. Lagos thrived.
Traders of sorts and business men and women of all persuasions trooped into Lagos in their droves to make money. With time, Lagos became congested. The city began to find it difficult to accommodate the teeming number of people who came in daily to live and do business in the land. The infrastructure became over-used and consequently became inadequate for the swarming population that thronged into the city. Expansion became a necessity. And so was the urge to separate the seat of government from the commercial nerve centre.
When the military government of General Yakubu Gowon was toppled in a military coup on 29 July 1975, the new military Head of State, General Murtala Mohammed, appointed a panel to evaluate the possibility of relocating the federal capital. The panel approved a relocation of the federal capital and seat of government and recommended that while the seat of government should be moved to a new location, Lagos should remain as the commercial nerve centre of the nation. Government officials immediately set out to study world capitals. They looked at Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil. They visited Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. They went to Paris, the capital of France, and to Washington D.C., the capital of the United States. Nigeria was looking for a central place to build a new national capital where its entire people would be equally represented. The new territory was to have favourable climate conditions, vast acres of land and plenty of water.
In 1976, after Abuja was chosen as the land for the new national capital, General Mohammed spoke to the nation. He said: We believe that a new federal capital territory created on such virgin lands will be for all Nigerians a symbol of their oneness and unity. The Federal Capital Territory will belong to all Nigerians. The General predicted a new era of justice, peace and unity for all Nigerians. But seven days later, he was assassinated. As a soldier, General Mohammed made the supreme sacrifice for what he believed in. Look at Abuja today, sprawling with high rises and a lush topography no one would have thought possible only a few years ago.
That is one lesson Imo people have to learn. That is one lesson we have to live with. That is one lesson we have to always remember as government after government commits itself to the development of Imo State. Never say we cant. Its so difficult. Dont ever discourage government. In many democratic countries, the role of government in state development is always designed to be in continuity. A new state government which is elected into power continues from where the previous government stopped.It reviews the policies and policy thrusts of the last government, makes amendments where necessary and continues with the work at hand before new measures or dimensions are introduced into the system as the hallmark or distinct identity of the incumbent government.
Unfortunately, this has never been the case in Imo State. Created in 1976, its first three governors were military officers who stayed in office for so short a while that whatever impact they claim to have made on the development of Imo State was scarcely visible to the good people the state. Ndubuisi Kanu, a naval officer was there for barely one year, from March 1976 to 1977. Then Adekunle Lawal, another naval officer, took over. He governed for almost one year from 1977 to July 1978. A military officer, Sunday Adenihun, governed from July 1978 to October 1979. In barely three years, from 1976 when Imo State was created to 1979, the state already had three military governors. And what would anyone expect a military governor to practically achieve in the development of a state in just one year in office?
That was the situation of things when the democratically elected government of Chief Sam Mbakwe came on board on 1stOctober 1979. It was the monumental stride Imo people made in those four years Dee Sam was governor, which included the building of Imo Airport with the self-help effort of Imo people that laid the foundation for the development of their state. But seeing that the civilians were making progress, the military struck and came back to the stage.
For the next 8 years, they took turns in the Imo State Government House. First was General Ike Nwachukwu who governed for about 20 months, from January 1984 to August 1985. He was replaced by Rear Admiral Allison Madueke. Madueke governed for about one year, from August 1985 to 1986. Amadi Ikwechegh, another naval officer who replaced Madueke governed for four years from 1986 to 1990 with practically nothing to show for it. In 1990, Anthony Oguguo was appointed governor of Imo State. He governed for two years, from 1990 to 1992.
Chief Evans Enwerem, a civilian who was democratically elected under the banner of National Republican Party (NRC) governed after that for nearly two years, from January 1992 to November 1993.
For the next six years, the army was at it again. James Aneke, a naval officer became governor for about three years, from 9 December 1993 to 22 August 1996. He handed over to Colonel Tanko Zubairu, a military officer who governed Imo for another three years, from 22 August 1996 to May 1999.
A close look at the way Imo State has been governed over these 40 years shows that there is a policy pattern in place among the military brass a policy of assigning short periods of duty to the military governors who worked in Imo State, thereby making them unable to contribute meaningfully to the development of the state they were supposed to be governing. In the 40 years of the existence of Imo State, nine military governors ruled the state over a period of 17 years with practically nothing to show during or after their tenures as contribution towards the development of the state. How can this be explained? Was it, perhaps, a deliberate military policy aimed at stifling the growth of the newly created Imo State? Did other states in the Federation suffer the same fate as a result of this policy?
It was not until the advent of the Chief Achike Udenwa administration in 1999 that Imo people began to think and to talk of democracy, free trade and all that, like their counterparts in other parts of the world. It will be needless to enumerate what Udenwa achieved in his eight years as governor, from 29 May 1999 to 29 May 2007. All Imo people know what efforts his administration made to develop their state. After him came Chief Ikedi Ohakim who governed Imo State for four years, from 29 May 2007 to 29 May 2011. The developments recorded by the Ohakim administration are also visible and well known to Imo people. And now, the current Imo governor, Owelle Rochas Okorocha.
Compared with those who were there before him, it will be a travesty of justice to believe that the Okorocha administration is not on top of the list. The point to consider is that government implies continuity. Each incoming government starts from where its predecessor stopped. When a new government comes into power, it first studies what is on the ground in terms of the policies and projects the previous government initiated. It makes necessary amendments, completes the projects on the ground and then goes on with new projects and new dimensions. In the case of the current administration, the governor, it must be said, has always had his vision of creating a viable Imo State that will be the envy of many other states in the federation.
Unfortunately, this vision has affected some areas like prompt salary payments. The point is that to achieve certain ends considered as priority, sacrifices have to be made in some other areas. Take the expansion and modernisation of roads or the relocation of markets and mechanic villages in Owerri for example. These markets and workshops have been in place over the years. People have got so used to them that relocating them would seem difficult for them. They agitate. But then they tend to forget that this was exactly the same experience Imo people had when government decided to relocate the Timber Market from Wetheral Road to Naze. Today, one only needs to go to Naze and see how that place has opened up. Now who is complaining about the Timber Market any more?
There is concrete evidence that Imo people truly want to build up their state. They are anxious to see their state take a place of pride among all the other states in the federation. That means they just have to do what other developing and progressive states are doing. They know the truth. Expansion for Imo people has become a necessity, just as it once became a necessity for Lagos.
In the process of these developments, the government will inevitably step on toes, some of them raw. Okorocha knew that he would hurt some people in the process of implementing some of his decisions. And that was why he appealed to them to understand that his intention is to build a state of Imo peoples collective dreams and aspirations. He has told Imo people that his policy of Imo my Pride is dear to his heart and that he would do everything within his capability to ensure that it is realised in the overall interest of the state and its people. But even at that, no one would expect all of the problems of Imo people to be completely solved during the tenure of one governor. Democracy and state development involve consistency and time.
Today, Owerri is the fastest growing state in the federation. There is a need to maintain the momentum. The government of Owelle Rochas Okorocha is expanding the roads created by his predecessors and creating a network of new roads in the state capital to ease congestion. His government is relocating the markets and the mechanic villages from the heart of the city to more spacious areas within the city's suburbs, with plans to modernise the stalls, the shopping plazas and the new mechanic villages to international levels. And to complement his efforts, Reach-Out and Link-Up Limited is publishing the Imo State Business Link Magazine to enhance Demand and Supply in the state and thus make it easier to give Imo people a wider choice in their demand and supply needs.
Developing a state to an international standard is not one-day affair. It takes vision. It takes time. It takes money. It takes the good will of the people. It demands trust in the leadership on the part of the citizens. If that trust is lacking, enemies of state progress whose only interest is self-aggrandisement will seize the opportunity they always schemed to have, to capitalise on the situation and hamper the growth of the state. That, Imo people must resist. If Imo people can give the current government of Owelle Rochas Okorocha the support it needs to clear the state capital, Owerri, of the rubbish that litters every of its streets and make Owerri clean once again, even if that means relocating the markets and the mechanic villages, we will surely reclaim that glory for which the state was known as the cleanest city in West Africa.
The governor cannot carry the cross alone. Even Jesus was not allowed to carry His cross alone. The governor will need the trust and support of Imo people and their understanding that his government means well for them. On their part, Imo people should anchor their trust in the fact that at some point in time, the achievements of all the governors who governed Imo State will be laid down on the table for all to appreciate. Will Okorocha be the one they will congratulate most? Governor Okorocha knows the answer. Most Imo people know that at the end of the day, it shall be well.
*Mr Asinugo is a London-based journalist and Publisher of Imo State Business Link Magazine
Several weeks after the Chinese foreign ministry announced that dozens of countries, including Cambodia, expressed support for China's stance in the South China Sea dispute, several media outlets reported over the weekend that China would provide Cambodia with more than half a billion dollars in aid to reciprocate this show of support.
Perhaps it is because of the South China Sea that Cambodia receives the $600 million, Voice of America (VOA) quoted a scholar in Khemarak University as saying. VOA theorized in its report that China in return for the aid expects Cambodia's support in discussions over the future of the South China Sea.
It appears that some media outlets have over-interpreted the implications behind the economic aid to Cambodia.
In fairness, the fund, aiming to support Cambodia's election infrastructure, education and health projects, is just one of the many achievements made by the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit, held in Mongolia last week, to strengthen cooperation among the countries in Europe and Asia.
In recent years, China has played an important role in promoting development and economic integration in the region.
It is normal that China would have its own considerations in deciding which countries to provide economic aid to, but China's assistance in Southeast Asia focuses on long-term strategies, and should not be seen as the result of a temporary factor like the South China Sea dispute.
China has provided financial support to a series of projects in Southeast Asian countries, like Laos, in the past and has established cooperation mechanisms, such as the China-ASEAN investment fund. China hopes to improve regional cooperation and let Southeast Asian countries share the dividend of China's economic growth.
In fact, the Philippines - the catalyst in the South China Sea dispute - has undermined this atmosphere for cooperation. In contrast, it is normal and natural that Cambodia can benefit more from China's rise and the economic aid provided by the nation, which is now the country's largest donor.
The geopolitical picture in Asia has long been complex and uneven.
It is too simplistic to say China can buy Cambodia's voice for only $600 million. The fact that dozens of countries have expressed support for China's stance in the South China Sea dispute is not a result of economic aid, but the worry that the dispute will have a negative influence on the Asian economy.
According to media reports, related discussion over the South China Sea raised some Chinese netizens' enthusiasm for Cambodian-made agricultural products while there is a boycott against dried mango imported from the Philippines.
Two of Jerry John Rawlings closest aides during his time in office, Nana Ato Dadzie and Kwamina Ahwoi, say they did not know about his acceptance of some $2 million from the late Nigerian President, Sani Abacha, contrary to the ex-leaders claim they knew about it.
The duo have also expressed their displeasure about assertions attributed to Mr. Rawlings about their alleged commentary of his receipt of the money from the late Nigerian leader.
Ex-president Rawlings admitted in an interview with Nigerias Guardian Newspaper that he had received the money from Nigerias leader at the time, although he denied the amount was five million dollars as alleged initially.
He also suggested in the same interview that his two former appointees, Nana Ato Dadzie and Kwamina Ahwoi, also knew about the money, but instead chose to write about it when they fell out with him and got poisonous
He is quoted as having said in the interview:
My colleagues knew about it I didn't know why I should be keeping these things secret. Moreover, I didn't 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 Gwarzo's supposed $5 million just to poison my name I just felt sad that Gwarzo should do this
Nana Ato Dadzie, who served as a former Chief of Staff under the Rawlings regime and Kwamena Ahwoi, who served as Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, denied any knowledge about the money given to Rawlings by Abacha
They also denied that Professor Ahwoi had commented on the matter in his book , 'Local Government and Decentralization in Ghana'.
In a joint statement released on Monday July 18, the pair said: We are not certain that this is a correct attribution to President Rawlings but if it is, then we feel terribly upset about it because the facts are to the contrary. First of all, we did not know about the payment of any such money. Secondly, there is nothing in the book, 'Local Government and Decentralization in Ghana', which was solely authored by Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, about any Gwarzo money
They however admitted that, they had jointly written a piece about an alleged Gwarzo money in a book titled Justice Daniel Francis Annan In the Service of Democracy, an Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG) Publication published in
2010 by Sub-Saharan Publishers, P. O. Box 358, Legon-Accra.
The extract from the book Managing a Robust Multiparty Parliament The Gwarzo Affair, (pages 121-122) reads:
Nigerian newspaper published an unsubstantiated story that President Rawlings had received US$5 million from the Nigerian intelligence capo, Chief Gwarzo, in support of his Presidential campaign for the 1996 elections. The NPP Parliamentary opposition latched on to the story and insisted on forcing a debate on the issue. On the day that the motion was to be moved, tensions were very high in the House. The NDC was aware that there was nothing to the story and suspected that the NPP was also aware. However, the NDC Parliamentary caucus was apprehensive that the NPP would use the occasion to throw mud at President Rawlings and to embarrass the NDC and was determined to prevent it at all costs. The NDC therefore marshaled all its big guns; and virtually every NDC Minister of State, Cabinet and non-Cabinet, MPs and non-MPs and Deputy Ministers, were present in the House. The party had plotted a strategy that turned out to be very effective. It had assigned its front line Ministers to the front bench of the NPP and the strategy was to respond, to heckle, to cajole, to admonish and to literally make it impossible for the NPP MPs to be heard on the issue. The NDC had accurately predicted he reaction of the NPP. The latter got angrier and angrier and on one occasion, they protested that Speaker Justice Annan was deliberately refusing to catch the eye of their members who wanted to speak Things came to a head when they alleged that an NDC MP had thrown a punch at an NPP MP. Justice Annan ruled that even if it was true, it must have happened on his blind side because he did not see it. And that was it. Led by their leader, Honourable J. H. Mensah, the NPP Minority walked out of the House and boycotted the rest of the day's proceedings and that was the last that was heard in Parliament of the Gwarzo affair
Nana Ato Dadzie and Kwamena Ahwoi stated that, they appreciate their time working under Rawlings and would never intentionally seek to discredit him in any way.
We wish to state that, the two of us worked very closely with President Rawlings. We were two of his closest confidantes. The opportunity he gave us to serve the nation was a very rare one indeed which we will forever cherish. We will be the last persons to write or say anything that will detract from the quality of the service that we performed for him and the state or that will even remotely hint at disloyalty to him.
Rawlings demonstrates 'honesty'
Seasoned journalist, Paul Adom-Otchere, has said that former President, Jerry John Rawlings' admission that he took only two million dollars while still in office from then president of Nigeria, Sani Abacha, is a demonstration of his increasing commitment to honesty, and the well-being of the country. While admitting that the revelation came as a shock to him, he stated that it was a sign of the former president's evolution as a person, since handing over power in 2001.
It is completely shocking that Mr. Rawlings must have to admit this at this stage. It also helps us to understand the kind of personality that Rawlings has become. It helps us understand that after leaving office nearly sixteen years ago, Rawlings has changed and his instincts towards nation-building and towards truth and honesty and towards a great future for Ghana have completely increased, Paul Adom-Otchere said.
Go and sin no more
Former Member of Parliament for New Juabeng North, Hackman Owusu-Agyeman, believes former President Jerry John Rawlings' admission that he accepted $2 million from former Nigerian Head of State, Sani Abacha, after nearly 18 years of denial, should warrant forgiveness from Ghanaians.
He has confessed it and I think we should be magnanimous enough to say let bygones be bygones, but I think from him, we should learn lessons that the President should desist from taking gifts from persons or money and everything like that, he stated on Eyewitness News.
Rawlings may have received Abacha's $5m in full Journalist
A Ghanaian journalist who was at the forefront of reports in 1998 alleging that former President Jerry John Rawlings had received $5 million from late Nigerian President, Sani Abacha, punched holes into Mr. Rawlings' sudden confession that he only received $2 million.
Although former President Rawlings admitted in an interview with the Guardian Newspaper in Nigeria that he did receive money from the Nigerian leader, he stated that he only received $2 million dollars, instead of the $5 million alleged 18 years ago.
But the journalist, William Nyarko, who worked with The Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper at the time, said information he gathered then indicated that former president Rawlings may have received $5 million dollars .
By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana
By Morkporkpor Anku, GNA
Accra, July 18, GNA - The Supreme Court on Monday convicted two radio panelists and the host of a talk programme 'Pampaso' together with the directors of an Accra-based radio station, Montie FM.
The five-member panel presided over by Justices Sophia Akufo convicted the defendants of contempt for threatening or scandalising the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
However, the court has deferred sentencing to July 27.
The defendants pleaded liable for the charges and asked the court for mercy.
The court granted them self-recognizance bail.
One of the panelists, Alistair apologised to the court for his utterance, saying he did not know what came over him and promised never to make such comments again.
Nana Ato Dadzie, counsel for owners of station pleaded with the court that, they are first time offenders and the court should have mercy on them.
He told the court that the management of the station had put in place measures to avert any such occurrence again.
At the last adjourned date, the defendants contended that they were only served with the summons that morning, hence had not properly prepared to answer the charges against them.
The two panelists, Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn, threatened to 'finish' the Supreme Court judges if they made any judgment against the Electoral Commission in a court case challenging the validity of the voters' register, whilst the host of the programme Salifu Maase also known as 'Mugabe' was alleged to have urged the panelist on in their attacks on the justices.
GNA
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By Zhen Bo (Global Times) 09:18, July 18, 2016
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to Africa has drawn great attention globally not only because the trip was his first visit to the continent since he assumed office in 2014, but also due to the increasing focus on competition between China and India in strategic and media circles. On the issue of Africa, the view that India's influence is growing and challenging China has been quite popular, and we witnessed a similar scenario when the Third India-Africa Summit was held in New Delhi in October, 2015.
As an emerging power, it is reasonable for India to strengthen its bilateral ties with African countries. Nowadays, there are more than 2 million ethnic Indians living in South Africa alone, with some becoming members of parliament and political leaders who have enormously promoted India in that country and the rest of the continent.
It would be beneficial for India to enhance comprehensive bilateral cooperation with African countries.
First, closer interaction between India and Africa will provide India with the greater strategic space. India has been giving impetus to promote the overall integration of the Indian Ocean region since the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC) was established in 1995.
The four countries which Modi has just visited are all located on the west coast of Africa and are members of IOR-ARC, and his visit will consolidate India's influence and help his country obtain greater strategic space in Africa. Meanwhile, the visit will create strong support for India's Mausam Project, Cotton Route and Spice Route given the real competing scenario in the Indian Ocean.
Second, the trip will win African support in multilateral affairs. On the one hand, India is willing to step up its consultations with African countries, especially South Africa, on the issue of backing it to join the Nuclear Supplier Group; on the other hand, India hopes to acquire support for getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and enhancing New Delhi's discourse power in global governance.
Third, Modi is on a mission to satisfy India's trade and energy demand. The Modi government has seen trade and energy cooperation as the cornerstone of its foreign policy. Africa's evolution toward being a crucial consumer and investment market will provide India with enough cooperative opportunities. Moreover, the abundant oil and gas resources in Africa can assure the country's energy security and supply diversification for India.
Fourth, Modi aims to deepen pragmatic military and anti-terrorism cooperative relations with Africa. Defense and anti-terrorism cooperation would allow India to intensify its regional presence and secure the trade channel since maritime security is one of the utmost concerns for India's development.
Some observers believe that China and India are competing to increase their presence in the continent. It might not be wrong, however, the negative effect of this competition need not be exaggerated too much if we see it in the objective way.
The common presence of these two countries in Africa doesn't necessarily mean irreconcilable or cut-throat competition. Since China and India are two emerging powers, their increasing connections with other regions are definitely logical even if competition exists. It would be absurd to predict an absolute competition mode considering that the complementary features between China and India are very obvious as China is good at providing investment and technology while India has been doing well in people-to-people interactions.
If India's interaction with African countries can bring positive momentum to local development, China will also benefit from such moves.
Meanwhile, China and India have important common interests regarding Africa. As the members of the BRICS mechanism, China, India and South Africa have been keenly pursuing economic cooperation and reconstructing global orders.
This is one of the key and promising cooperative points for the elephant and the dragon.
The author is an assistant research fellow at the Center for South Asia-West China Cooperation and Development Studies, Institute of South Asian Studies, Sichuan University. [email protected]
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By Shan Jie (Global Times) 09:20, July 18, 2016
Turkey's failed coup attempt will have an impact on anti-terrorism efforts in China's XinjiangUyghur Autonomous Region, analysts said.
"We have decided on all necessary measures. We are in charge. No need for worry," Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek posted on Twitter Sunday after the coup was announced a failure.
According to a Reuters report on Sunday, 6,000 people have been detained in Turkey in connection with the failed coup, with more detentions expected, broadcaster NTV said on Sunday, citing Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag. "The judicial process on this will continue," NTV quoted Bozdag as saying.
Turkish authorities have also 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 Sunday.
The chief military assistant to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ali Yazici, was also detained on Sunday in relation with the failed coup.
At least 290 people were killed and 1,400 were wounded, the Turkish foreign ministry said in a Sunday statement.
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, Reuters reported on Sunday.
Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the US, has denied involvement in the attempt to overthrow the government, condemning it as an affront to democracy.
"The US views with gravest concern events unfolding in Turkey," Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday.
He later stressed Washington's "absolute support" for the democratically elected government during a phone call with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
Meanwhile, the attempted coup on Friday will not affect the US fight against the Islamic State and Turkey will reopen the Incirlik air base to US planes as coalition's air operations resume, the Pentagon said on Sunday.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said Saturday that China hopes Turkey can restore stability and order as soon as possible.
"China is paying close attention to the situation in Turkey," Lu Kang added in a press release, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Terrorism 'double standard'
"Turkey has a historic involvement with China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. However, Turkey's attitude toward the region can be controlled, because it's mainly guided by Sino-Turkish relations," Li Weijian, a professor of West Asian and African Studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told the Global Times on Sunday.
"Erdogan has established a double standard toward terrorism. On one hand, Turkey has been vowing to fight the Islamic State, but has also criticized China's effort on anti-terrorism in Xinjiang and sympathizes with Uyghur terrorists," Zhu Weilie, a Middle East expert at the Shanghai International Studies University, told the Global Times on Sunday.
Zhu added that strengthening anti-terrorism cooperation should be a significant part of Sino-Turkish relations.
"Turkey has improved its attitude toward China and its neighboring countries to seek more cooperation and friends," Zan Tao, an expert on Turkey affairs and an associate professor at Peking University, told the Global Times.
According to Li, Turkey needs to remain stable and rectify its economy, where relations with China are crucial. Even if the coup attempt might bring some short-term uncertainty, it would not affect overall relations between the two countries.
During Erdogan's visit to Beijing in August 2015, he said his government is firmly against any kind of activity inside Turkey that could harm China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
"Under Erdogan's rule, Turkey has been enjoying economic development, which has won him wide public support," Zan said.
"However, since Turkey must return to the global mainstream, Erdogan will adopt anti-terrorism policies in line with international norms, which would be good news for the Middle East," Zhu said.
Analysts said that Erdogan's attempt to amend the country's constitution and the Islamization of the country may have affected military interests.
"Meanwhile, Turkey's regional influence is declining, which also concerns some parties in the country," Li said.
Local authorities in Chengdu will soon be tracking the mentally ill by offering rewards of 350 yuan for information identifying potential patients.
The rewards system, implemented by the health bureau of Chengdu's Shuangliu district, encourages the public to be on the lookout for those who may be suffering from mental health issues. According to Weibo posts from several local hospitals, a tip-off is good for 50 yuan, with another 300 yuan available if the patient is actually diagnosed with a mental disease, Chongqing Morning Post reported.
The Weibo posts also offer 11 standards by which to judge whether a person may be mentally ill. The list suggests paying extra attention to those who have been previously hospitalized for mental illness, as well as those who speak nonsensically. Those who often smash things or attack others while sober are also on the list, along with people who are excessively suspicious and those who are exceptionally silent.
People can make their reports to health officials, local government officials or real estate property management employees, according to the Weibo posts.
An anonymous official with the Shuangliu health bureau told Chongqing Morning Post that mental patients' personal information will be kept private after they are diagnosed. The official also said that the rewards system aims to locate mental patients so they can receive subsidies for treatment. This is necessary because many families try to cover up the mental illness of relatives. The system may additionally serve as a warning to mentally ill individuals who are prone to violent behavior.
China was estimated to have about 180 million people suffering from mental illnesses in 2015. The number of registered patients with severe mental disorders was 4.8 million, Guangzhou Daily reported.
SEOUL, July 18 -- South Korea on Monday warned of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s readiness for its fifth nuclear test amid worries about increased activity in its main nuclear test site.
Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told a press briefing that the DPRK appeared to have been in a state of conducting another nuclear test at any time, saying the government is maintaining a full readiness and closely monitoring situations based on a close alliance between South Korea and the United States.
His comments came after Japan's Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday that increased activity has been detected in the DPRK's main Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the country carried out four underground nuclear tests since 2006.
The latest came in January this year when the DPRK claimed it detonated its first hydrogen bomb, causing the toughest-ever UN Security Council resolutions in response to the nuclear detonation as well as the launch in February of a long-range rocket, which was condemned as a disguised test of ballistic missile technology.
Quoting government sources in Seoul and Tokyo, the Japanese media outlet said the installation of an observatory facility was seen in the test site, raising a possibility for the fifth nuclear test as early as this month.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted multiple government sources as saying on Sunday that the move of a lot of trucks and personnel, which hadn't been seen before, started to be spotted in the Punggye-ri test site since July 8 when Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
The sources were quoted as saying that the DPRK's activities seen over the past week in the Punggye-ri test site have been the most brisk in recent months.
The DPRK's military threatened to take "physical measures" against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
After Seoul announced on July 13 that one THAAD battery would be deployed to the Seongju county, some 300 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year, the DPRK's Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement that the THAAD deployment will turn the peninsula into a battlefield between world powers and leave the fate of people in the hands of foreign forces.
China and Russia strongly expressed objection to and dissatisfaction with THAAD in South Korea as its X-band radar can spot Chinese and Russian territories. Seoul has claimed that it would adopt the terminal mode radar with a detectable range of 600-800 km, but it can be converted at any time into a forward-based mode which spots missiles as far as 2,000 km.
Furthermore, the THAAD deployment indicates South Korea becoming a part of the U.S. missile defense program, the core of the U.S. Pivot-to-Asia strategy.
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Ontarios securities regulator has launched a whistle-blower program that offers up to $5 million to for tips that lead to the prosecution of fraudsters; should the mortgage industry develop a similar program?The answer, as is the case with most regulatory questions, isnt simple according to one veteran.More transparency and more protection for the public is always good; I would support it, Ron Butler , a broker with Butler Mortgage, told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. The funny thing about tip lines is that they have a spotty history in terms of success.The Ontario Securities Commissions whistle-blower initiative encourages individuals to tip them off of potential instances of fraud, market manipulation, and other unscrupulous activities in the securities industry.The commission offers up to $5 million for information.It also offers protection to those who use its program, which is the first of its kind in Canada.And while the initiative is a step in the right direction, similar ones have had little success in the past, according to Butler.In the USA the biggest and longest lived financial services tip line is at the SEC and although there have been a few notable successes there have been so many more failures, he said. The biggest failure was the case of the securities analyst who submitted five separate letters over the course of five years about Bernie Madoff and the certainty he was operated a Ponzi scheme; all the letters were ignored by the SEC because Bernie Madoff was such a well-connected operator.So while I endorse tip lines, the problems that regulators have separating false tips from terminated agents or former employees with a grudge from factual tips often makes the success of the tip lines problematic.
Pretoria July 18 (People's Daily Online) - The world must work together to ensure Africas young can seize their potential and thrive, said Bill Gates in Pretoria, South Africa on Sunday.
Gates will meet with some African young innovators in the coming days - the 21-year-old who founded Kenyas first software coding school to provide other young people with computer programming skills, and the 23-year-old social entrepreneur in South Africa who manufactures schoolbags from recycled plastic shopping bags.
Delivering the 2016 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretorias Mamelodi Campus, Gates said he was optimistic about the future of the continent because of its young people.
Pointing out that Africa was demographically the worlds youngest continent in the next 35 years, it is estimated that 2-billion babies will be born in Africa and by 2050, 40% of the worlds children will live in Africa. Gates said he believed Africas youth can be the source of a special dynamism.
Economists talk about the demographic dividend. When you have more people of working age, and fewer dependents for them to take care of, you can generate phenomenal economic growth. Rapid economic growth in East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s was partly driven by the large number of young people moving into their work force.
But for me, the most important thing about young people is the way their minds work. Young people are better than old people at driving innovation, because they are not locked in by the limits of the past. The real returns will come if we can multiply this talent for innovation by the whole of Africas growing youth population, Gates said.
Gates used the platform of the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture to lay out his vision of how to create a better world. Among previous annual lecture speakers were former US President Bill Clinton, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan, former SA President Thabo Mbeki. It is the Nelson Mandela Foundations flagship programme to honour its founder, Nelson Mandela, and to raise topical issues affecting South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world. The theme of his speech was Living Together.
Gates said he had admired Mandela, whom he had met on many occasions. He said that one topic that Nelson Mandela came back to over and over again was the power of youth.
There is a universal appeal to the conviction that youth deserve a chance. I agree with Mandela about young people, and that is one reason I am optimistic about the future of this continent, said Gates.
A federal judge has tossed out a challenge to the recess appointment of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray.
The decision marks a blow to the case of State National Bank of Big, Spring, Texas, which filed a lawsuit against the CFPB in 2012, according to Bloomberg. The suit challenged five lending-related regulations approved by Cordray between his recess appointment in 2010 and his confirmation by the Senate in 2013. The bank claimed that the CFPBs unprecedented, unchecked power violates the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution, according to a HousingWire report.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said she would delay ruling on the CFPBs powers under the Constitution until a similar lawsuit brought by mortgage services company PHH Corp. is resolved, Bloomberg reported.
Huvelle also held that Cordrays formal ratification, after his confirmation, of rules made prior to that confirmation, was acceptable.
Plaintiffs raise three arguments to dispute the effectiveness of Director Cordrays ratification, none of which is persuasive, she wrote in her ruling.
But State National Bank has vowed to fight the ruling.
Judge Huvelles holding that Director Cordray could ratify literally thousands of invalid actions, including invalid rulemakings, by publishing three perfunctory sentences with no accompanying process at all cannot be right, and we are confident we will prevail on appeal, bank attorney Greg Jacob told Bloomberg.
The bank claims that Cordray operates as a mini-president of consumer finance, and has practically no accountability to Congress or the president, Bloomberg reported.
If New Mexico wasnt already sweating in its longstanding tug-of-war with Texas over water in the Rio Grande, this might be the summer it starts.
More than three years after Texas filed a complaint in the U.S. Supreme Court alleging that New Mexican farmers were slurping up too much water along the river illegally curbing the flow downstream into Texas the justices appear likely to take up the challenge.
Thats after Gregory Grimsal, a court-appointed special master, issued a draft report recommending that the court deny New Mexicos motion to dismiss the complaint, a major development in the high-stakes dispute.
This is a big victory for the state of Texas, said Russell Johnson, a water rights lawyer who is not involved in the case. The special master has in essence swept aside the impediments to Texas pursuing a claim.
If Texas ultimately prevails, it could receive more than just extra water. New Mexico could be forced to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, experts say.
Like most interstate water skirmishes, this one is complicated and has deep historical roots. Grimsals report, currently in draft form, spans 273 pages.
Here are five things you should know about the battle.
-- The Rio Grande holds some of the most studied and squabbled-over waters in North America. And its drying up.
The river is lifeblood for folks in three U.S. states and Mexico. Its an international border. Its ravaged by drought. The river begins about 12,000 feet above sea level in Colorado and flows southeast after cutting through New Mexico. It forms the Texas-Mexico border between Chihuahua State and El Paso, where it flows through a concrete channel.
Before reaching Texas, the Rio Grande collects at New Mexicos Elephant Butte Reservoir, which is currently just 13 percent full.
Of the American Wests four iconic river basins, the Rio Grande is facing the largest climate-change water-supply deficits, according to a December 2015 report in the journal Ecological Applications.
-- The three-state Rio Grande Compact prevents states from claiming more than their fair share of the water. Except when it doesnt.
In the 1910 Rio Grande Project, the federal government established an irrigation system aimed at helping agriculture and industry in the states the river flows through. But that project, which also upheld a 1906 treaty that promises Mexico 60,000 acre-feet of water annually, didnt specifically address state-by-state allocation. Historically, Texas has received 43 percent of the water, with New Mexico getting 57 percent.
Congress approved the Rio Grande Compact in 1938, which determined how much water folks in Texas the most downstream state should get before those upstream sucked it up. Or so Texas argues.
Now, the states are fighting over whether the compact actually requires New Mexico to cede a certain amount of water to Texas.
-- Both states arguments have quirks.
Texas claims New Mexico is siphoning off more water than the compact allows by drawing too much from the river itself and pumping too much groundwater from wells nearby.
The groundwater argument is probably what makes New Mexico go batshit crazy, said Johnson, the water rights attorney.
Thats because Texas law does not recognize the nexus between groundwater and surface water that over-pumping can lower river levels. Since New Mexicos law does make the connection, however, Texas argues that it has the responsibility to ensure its wells are not curbing the rivers flow.
New Mexico points out that the compact does not explicitly state that it must deliver 43 percent of water to the state line. Rather, the agreement aims only to ensure enough water flows into the Elephant Butte Reservoir and is properly stored, the state claims. Previous agreements, in fact, had split the water between the two states.
That line of defense may be ignoring reality, Johnson said. That seems to fly in the face of what the compact was intended to do apportion the water between the states.
-- This time, the feds are siding with Texas
Despite Texas often-testy relationship with the federal government, the Obama administration actually supports the states position here.
In 2014, the U.S. solicitor general filed a motion to intervene on the Lone Star States side, arguing that the 43 percent figure of water New Mexico must send into Texas was frozen by the time the compact took effect.
The federal government also believes it has a stake in the outcome because of its international duties to provide Rio Grande water to Mexico, as detailed in the 1906 treaty.
But the federal government might not get the chance to make those arguments before the justices. Thats because Grimsal, the special master, recommended that the court dismiss the federal motion to the extent that it fails to state a claim under the compact.
New Mexico officials have focused on that partial victory in their public statements.
We applaud the Special Masters suggestion to limit the claims of the United States, and we will continue to work diligently in protecting the interests of all New Mexicans and our water, Attorney General Hector Balderas, a Democrat, said in a statement this week.
-- Resolving this case could still take years and plenty of taxpayer money.
Its not clear when the Supreme Court will decide whether to accept the case. And if the challenge moves forward, that will take some time.
Though Grimsals report was filled with plenty of facts for the justices to evaluate, his job could be just beginning. If the case continues, he would oversee a full-fledged trial complete with extensive discovery before the justices ever heard oral arguments.
Together, the states and federal government have already been charged nearly $400,000 for Grimsals services, according to court documents. That tab will likely grow.
Meanwhile, the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has spent nearly $116,000 litigating the case, its records show.
Paxton declined to comment on the case.
A spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said that agency agrees with Grimsals recommendation. We believe we have a strong case and the draft opinion validates the need to litigate Texas' concerns, Terry Clawson said in an email.
Each party has until Aug. 1 to comment on the report. Grimsal can still make changes before submitting his final recommendations.
Rising executive pay at U.S. colleges last year crested in Texas, home to three of the nation's five highest-paid public college leaders, each of whom made more than $1 million, according to a new analysis of executive compensation.
University of Houston Chancellor Renu Khator, who is also president of the main campus, was the top-paid public university leader in the country in 2015, earning $1.3 million, according to an annual ranking of college executive pay by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Texas A&M President Michael Young and University of Texas Chancellor William McRaven also are among the top five earners. Young, who made a little more than $1.1 million, was the third-highest paid, and McRaven, who made slightly less than $1.1 million, was the fourth-best paid. Escalating administrative salaries at universities nationwide has been a sticking point for those who worry college is becoming too expensive even for students from middle-class families.
The latest compensation analysis comes on the heels of Texas political leaders leveling sharp criticism at the state's public universities after several decided this spring to raise tuition again after years of increases.
Texas was home to more college executives who earned at least $600,000 last year than any state in the nation, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's analysis. That figure was well above the 2015 median compensation for college presidents of $431,000. In Texas, university systems are led by chancellors and individual universities are led by presidents. The analysis did not differentiate between the two.
What's more, the base salary of at least $1 million that both Young and McRaven are set to make in 2016 - the first full years leading Texas public colleges for each of them - will be the highest salaries paid to a university leader since 2009, said Dan Bauman, a data reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education who worked on the analysis.
'Height of hypocrisy'
Texas universities are shelling out more to lure the nation's best college leaders, in what many in higher education have referred to as an academic arms race. But the salaries at the top have increased much faster than most faculty and staff salaries. And colleges are paying more to their top administrators, even as they make perennial pitches to the state for more education funding and charge students higher tuition and fees to attend.
"It's just the height of hypocrisy," said William G. Tierney, the co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. "For me as a citizen when I look at this, it erodes trust in the (college) administration. And that's the real problem, I think."
For years now, universities across the country have faced scrutiny over the seemingly endless mounting cost of college in the face of what some see as administrative bloat.
In April, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican, blasted Texas college leaders for raising tuition by 147 percent since 2003.
Patrick claimed that administrative costs at the universities have risen 149 percent in that time, while classroom costs have increased just 65 percent.
"The optics around it are not really good," state Rep. John Zerwas, a Houston Republican who chairs the Texas House higher education committee, said in an interview.
Despite the optics, higher education is an increasingly competitive market, and universities say they need to pay more to hire the best leadership. In Texas, Khator, Young and McRaven are all at the helm of large universities competing nationally for top students and faculty.
"If it takes this kind of money to get the results we're expecting it's how the business is," Zerwas said. "They would be a real catch for any university out there."
'Worth the investment'
When Texas A&M hired Young, the A&M system Chancellor, John Sharp, promised to make Young one of the best-paid college presidents in the nation. With a $1 million base salary, Young was just that in 2015.
McRaven, meanwhile, leads the University of Texas system - one of the largest higher education systems in the nation, with 14 institutions and 210,000 students.
This year, UT is paying McRaven - the former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command who managed the team that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 - a base salary of $1.2 million.
"When the Board of Regents selected Bill McRaven to be the next chancellor of The University of Texas System, he had recently retired as a four-star Navy admiral after a very distinguished career in the military and was a highly sought-after leader. He served two U.S. presidents in key positions and continues to be honored for his leadership by national and international organizations," Paul Foster, chairman of the UT System board of regents, said in a statement.
"We believe a leader of Chancellor McRaven's caliber is worth the investment for a complex system with global reach, and that the people of Texas will benefit from his time at the UT System for generations to come."
Also, a UT spokeswoman said about $70,000 of state funds are used to pay the chancellor's annual salary, while the remainder is paid through private donations to the university.
The University of Houston's board of regents has fought to hold on to Khator, who has guided UH through a recent renaissance of sorts in her eight years at the helm. While Khator made the most money of any public college leader in 2015, she makes less each year in base salary - $700,000 - than the chief executives at UT and A&M. She topped the U.S. public college compensation list last year after making a $200,000 bonus and bringing in $400,000 in deferred compensation.
During Khator's tenure since 2008, UH has lured several professors who are members of the prestigious national academies of science and engineering. And incoming undergraduate students earned better grades in high school and scored higher on the SAT than previous classes. Those students are returning at a higher rate, a sign that the university's sluggish graduation rate could pick up. UH broke into a national list of top-tier academic universities in 2011.
Khator's dual role
"I can say unequivocally that Chancellor Khator's salary is appropriate based on her stellar track record and the achievements she has helped the UH System and the University of Houston obtain," Tilman Fertitta, chairman of UH's board of regents, wrote in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education in regard to its 2015 pay analysis.
Khator serves a dual role at UH, leading the full UH System - which has four universities - as well as the main campus. She oversees an organization that serves more than 70,000 students, operates with an annual budget that exceeds $1.6 billion, and has a $3.5 billion-plus economic effect on the Houston area each year, Fertitta wrote.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is joining a growing number of state lawmakers wanting to make attacks against police officers a hate crime.
Abbott said Monday he will ask the Texas Legislature to pass a bill next year that adds police officers to the list of protected classes under the state's hate crime law. His announcement follows the recent fatal shootings of five officers in Dallas and three others in Louisiana.
Louisiana became the first state in May to extend hate crime protections to police. Lawmakers in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Wisconsin and other states have floated similar proposals.
Abbott says Texas "will no longer tolerate disrespect for those who serve."
Abbott also wants to strengthen penalties for crimes against law enforcement officers even when the incident wouldn't qualify as a hate crime.
ISTANBUL, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Uncertainties remain in Turkey in the wake of the failed military coup on Friday, though the Turkish parliament said Sunday that the country's security order has "returned to normal".
In a statement sent to Xinhua, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) praised "the united stance and language of all political party groups at the Parliament in countering this attempt," vowing to "make those who have attacked the nation and its sovereignty to pay a heavy price."
"As of 16th July 2016, life has returned to normal," the statement said, adding "nothing in Turkey will be as it has been in the past."
IN TURKEY: DEATH, DETAINMENT AND CLASHES
In the statement, the GNAT said the Turkish people "have foiled the coup attempt by taking to the streets and standing against the tanks of gang of coup plotters," adding the plotters' attempts to take control of national and private media have also "been quickly disrupted."
Turkey's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that the coup has left at least 290 people killed and around 1,400 wounded.
The death toll includes at least 161 civilians and 100 coup plotters, and over 6,000 have been detained due to their involvement in the failed coup attempt which the government said was staged by Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen.
The GNAT said some 3,000 plotters have been arrested and over 100 of them were "neutralized."
Meanwhile, clashes reportedly erupted on Sunday between Turkish police and the gendarmerie at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport.
According to the Milliyet daily newspaper, the confrontation occurred when the police tried to detain the commander of the gendarmerie over the coup.
The gendarmerie section, in charge of security for the international terminal of the airport, has 50 to 60 members, the report said.
In the aftermath of the clashes, the police detained all the gendarmerie staff, including the commander.
Among the detained people were top army commanders, judges and prosecutors, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to stamp out the "virus" of the putschists within state bodies, according to the state-run news agency Anadolu.
Erdogan even said Sunday that Turkey would now consider reinstating the death penalty, a clear message that the administration will show no mercy to coup-related suspects.
"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.
OUT OF TURKEY: DENIAL, ASYLUM AND TRIAL
The coup was launched and conducted by "a clique of soldiers from different ranks within the Turkish Armed Forces," the GNAT said.
Erdogan has blamed his political enemy Gulen, who lives in the United States, for plotting the coup. However, the latter has denied any involvement in the plot and condemned it "in the strongest terms," suggesting it could have been staged by Erdogan himself to cement his grip on power.
The failed coup has spilled over the borders, as eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greecewith a Black Hawk military helicopter early Saturday to seek political asylum, would face trial in Greek court, Anadolu Agency reported Sunday.
These soldiers, who landed at the Alexandroupoli airport near the Greek-Turkish border, would face accusations of "illegal entry" and "damaging the friendly relation between Turkey and Greece," according to their lawyer Lia Marinaki.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu "requested the immediate surrender of the eight traitor soldiers," adding "they will expedite the extradition process."
In Saudi Arabia, the authorities, at the request of Ankara, detained Turkey's military attache to Kuwait who had been flying through the eastern city of Dammam on Sunday evening, the Saudi-owned TV channel Al Arabiya reported.
The attache, Mikail Gullu, had been en route to Amsterdam, the report said.
WORLD: CONCERNED
After the coup, the world has voiced support to Turkey's elected authorities.
"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 U.N. General Assembly Mogens Lykketoft said Saturday.
On the same day, U.S. President Barack Obamareiterated the "unwavering support" for the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey. However, he urged Ankara to "act within the rule of law" instead of practicing retaliatory purges after the event.
Francealso warned Erdogan that the dramatic coup did not mean he had "carte blanche" to silence his opponents. Media reported that the Foreign Ministry even questioned on whether Turkey was a viable partner in the fight against the Islamic State.
Russian President Vladimir Putincalled Erdogan to express his wish for a "speedy restoration of strong constitutional order."
On Sunday, Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag urged Washington to extradite Gulen to Turkey, although the United States said it will look at evidence Turkey has to offer against Gulen, and judge accordingly.
"Does one need evidence to prove the existence of the Sun? This is just as clear a matter," he said, adding "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."
BEIJING, July 18 -- The United Statesshould stop meddling in the South China Seaissue to keep its relations with China on the right track, experts have said.
Widely deemed as one of the most important relationships in the world, the China-U.S. ties have recently been overshadowed by the South China Sea issue, in which the United States is not a direct party, experts said here during a two-day international security forum that ended Sunday.
The World Peace Forum, an annual event that groups hundreds of political figures, scholars, experts and journalists from across the world to discuss major security issues, was co-organized by Tsinghua University and the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs.
"The U.S. flexing of military muscles in the South China Sea has deeply hurt the Chinese people," said Chen Xiaogong, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.
Last month, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers in seas east of the Philippinesand started monitoring the South China Sea with guided-missile destroyers, a few days before a law-abusing ad hoc tribunal issued an ill-founded award on the South China Sea arbitration case, unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government.
U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed China to accept the award sweepingly siding with the Philippines and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
The award was excessive in its vitriol towards China's presence in the South China Sea, said Chen, who just concluded a tour to the United States, adding that it seems as if Washington had already known the results of the arbitration before the award was issued on July 12.
Meanwhile, he said, although quite a hotspot in recent media coverage, the South China Sea issue simply cannot represent the overall relationship between China and the United States, whose significance has stretched out the realm of bilateral ties.
With critical issues on the agenda such as global economic growth and climate change, it is a collective responsibility for both China and the United States to properly manage their relations, he noted.
Yuan Peng, vice president of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that despite the two countries' continued cooperation in such areas as economy and diplomacy, the South China Sea issue has garnered most attention of the public and media.
Echoing Chen, Yuan called on China and the United States to properly handle the issue.
"The ball is not in our court," he said, adding that the United States should "show sincerity" by not sitting behind the absurd arbitral farce of the South China Sea.
Foreign experts attending the the forum, themed "the Order of Common Security: Cooperation, Inclusiveness, and Open-access," also agreed on the urgency and significance of properly managing the China-U.S. ties.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Robert Carr, who is now leading an Australian thinktank, said at a panel dedicated to the South China Sea issue that the United States should not view the topic as a matter of competition for leadership, dominance and primacy against China.
Even if the United States tries to maintain its allies within the region, he said, defining the South China Sea issue as a matter of competition would generate more conflicts with China.
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An illustration shows Chinas Sky Net action. [Illustration: Xinhua]
China has seized 381 Chinese nationals from more than 40 countries in the first half of this year, under a nationwide anti-corruption campaign dubbed "Sky Net", the Beijing Times reports.
The suspects include 33 that had been tagged with Interpol red notices, the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use, and two State Owned Enterprise or SOE officials, who have been at large overseas for 18 years until they surrendered earlier this month.
Among the 33, 13 people are suspected of graft, taking up the largest proportion, while another five are suspected of bribery.
As of July 15, "Sky Net" has netted 1,400 suspects since the operation began, recovering illicit money worth over four billion yuan (or $598 million U.S dollars), since it was started in early 2015.
Some government officials and politicians are ...
Japan's meddling in South China Sea not to help ease tensions in East China Sea, experts say
BEIJING, July 18 -- Japan's meddling in the South China Seais simply a tactic of distraction, hoping to tie China down so that its island disputes with Beijing in the East China Sea will be downplayed, experts attending the World Peace Forum (WPF) said here on Saturday.
Tokyo's tricks will not pay off, said the experts, adding that the only way for Japan to improve its relations with China starts with making no new troubles.
Speaking at a WPF panel session, Gao Hong, deputy director of the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said Japan is making a serious mistake.
He said the South China Sea and the East China Sea are closely related in a way that when tensions in South China Sea heat up, the East China Sea issue will be more arrestive.
"I personally believe that the easing of tensions in the South China Sea would not reduce the tensions in the East China Sea," he added.
Citing historical and military reasons, Gao also believed that neither side wants to compromise when it comes to sovereignty, thus both are facing a security dilemma.
Also at the panel, Bonji Ohara, an analyst in the National Defense Academy of Japan, said the talk of "territorial disputes will surely bring Japan and China back to war" is only being instigated by a handful of Japan's right-wing forces, while the general public are more concerned about their own lives, instead of the disputes in the South China Sea.
Ohara urged both sides to learn more about each other and try their best to remove misunderstandings, and especially, to enhance communication over the East China Sea issue.
"The East China Sea issue is not a new topic, but it still triggers small scrambles," he said. "So we must set up the Maritime and Air Communication Mechanism."
Nobuhiro Aizawa, an associate professor at Kyushu University who echoed Ohara's remarks, also urged the two countries to clear the air and to better work with each other.
"Both Japan and China need to cooperate with other countries to develop their own economies. Cooperation is a driving force behind economic development," he said.
"So confrontations or tensions between the two would only bring failed cooperation and affect the economy," he said.
Offering his opinion on how to improve China-Japan relations, Chen Jian, a former Chinese ambassador to Tokyo, said Japan should not create new differences between the two sides.
"We have already had differences over the Diaoyu Islands, so the South China Sea issue should not become a new flashpoint," he said.
On Friday in a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abeon the sidelines of the ongoing 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator, Chinese Premier Li Keqiangtold his Japanese counterpart that Japan should "exercise caution in its own words and deeds, and stop hyping up and interfering in the South China Sea issue.
The Chinese premier called on both sides to step up exchanges on the East China Sea issue via dialogue and consultation based on the four-point principled agreement they reached in November 2014, so as to stave off misinterpretation and miscalculation.
The Chen family. (Photo/Baoji Daily)
The Chens have been living together since the 1980s in Meixian county, Shaanxi province. The family, which includes four generations, shares one large compound and eats meals together every day. Their happy life is a point of pride among local people.
A reporter from Baoji Daily recently visited the family. As the reporter entered the Chen compound, Chen Zhiping, the oldest member of the family, emerged to offer his greetings.
Chen Kuancang, the oldest son of Chen Zhiping, explained to the reporter that his father, 84-year-old Chen Zhiping, and his mother, 80-year-old Gao Guilang, are the first generation. Chen Kuancang has two younger brothers; together, the three of them are the second generation. The three brothers have altogether seven children, and those seven are the third generation. The seven children have so far brought them seven grandchildren, who comprise the fourth generation. Counting the various in-laws who have married into the Chen clan, the family contains a total of 34 people.
Chen Kuancang showed the reporter around their shared compound. A new story was added on in 2015, bringing the total floor area to over 750 square meters. The new construction was paid for by Chen Kuancang and his two brothers. They spent nearly 1 million yuan on the construction and decorations. There is one big kitchen in the compound, and it is outfitted with a jumbo-sized pan that can accommodate a meal for nearly 40 people. During every important festival, the Chen family plans a big get-together and relishes the happy family time.
U.S. experts hold an overall negative view of future Sino-U.S. relations, and many are not satisfied with President Obamas policy toward China.
China views the U.S. Asia rebalancing as a problematic strategy, and strongly opposes THAAD deployment in South Korea. Meanwhile, the U.S. does not accept Chinas assertiveness in foreign policy, especially in the case of the South China Sea, said Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow on global issues at Georgetown University, at a panel discussion on July 16 at the 5th World Peace Forum.
Elizabeth Economy, senior fellow and director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Affairs, stated that the Sino-U.S. relationship has not met Obama's expectations. Although Obama endeavored to enhance bilateral ties with China, Economy believed that American politicians have been demonstrating an increasingly reduced willingness to cooperate.
There have been eight rounds of U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue since 2009. Wilder argued that the dialogue no longer acts as a platform to promote mutual trust, as it did in its early years.
Some American companies complain that they do not feel welcome in China, and that China's "negative list" of the bilateral investment treaty (BIT) talk is too long. According to a survey conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 77 percent of surveyed enterprises claim that they currently feel less welcome in China than in the past.
Wilder expressed regret that American enterprises are reluctant to speak for China in front of the American government. He pointed out that, looking ahead, it is important for the U.S. to have a secretary of the treasury who understands and can properly deal with China.
Economy praised the cooperation between China and the U.S. on several global issues, including the fight against Ebola, the crisis in Syria and carbon emissions reduction. Economy said she views China as a leading actor rather than an emerging one on the stage of international affairs.
At the same time, Economy criticized Washington for failing to accurately evaluate some of Chinas initiatives. Echoing Economys opinion, Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing said that certain American publications tend to interpret the evolving major power relationship between China and the U.S. as a new relationship between two hegemonies. Su said that, in fact, what President Xi really wants is to build a stronger Sino-U.S. relationship that benefits both nations.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Armenian armed forces have 15 times violated the ceasefire on the line of contact of the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops over the past 24 hours, said Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry July 18.
Armenian armed forces, stationed in the village of Voskevan of Armenias Noyemberyan district and nameless heights of the Krasnoselsk district, opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the village of Gushchu Ayrim and the nameless heights of the Gadabay district.
Moreover, Azerbaijani positions underwent fire from the positions located near Horadiz village of the Fizuli district and nameless heights of the Goranboy district.
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.
Just hours after three Baton Rouge Police officers were gunned down about 1 mile from police headquarters, the Republican National Convention announced it would change the theme of the four-day event in Cleveland.
Jeff Larson, CEO of the 2016 Republican National Convention, said Sunday that each day will have a different theme. The themes are as follows:
Monday: America Safe Again
America Safe Again Tuesday: Make America Work Again
Make America Work Again Wednesday: Make America First Again
Make America First Again Thursday: Make America One again
Convention delegates, most of whom began arriving in the city late Sunday, said in light of the recent violence across the country, they can feel the tension.
"It makes us all nervous," said Cheryl Howell, a delegate from Michigan. "So, I'm very thankful for the heightened security thats taking place."
Howell attended the 2012 RNC in Tampa and said the political climate is much more volatile now.
"There's definitely a much higher level of security, which I'm thankful for, in light of everything, as well as today," she said.
But despite the tension, Cleveland's historic downtown area also has a fun and exciting vibe one that displays kindness and unity, appreciation toward law enforcement officers and people taking pictures and videos and, of course, selfies.
"There's always got to be tragedy," said John Young, a Cape Coral resident. "Hopefully, this can be a shining light. We hope so."
Young splits his time living between Cape Coral and Cleveland. He wanted Jeb Bush to become the next president, but he said he plans to vote for Donald Trump.
The Trump campaign is also focusing on positives. Paul Manafort, Trump's convention manager, said the stage is set for a "one-of-a-kind" convention.
"The stage is great," he said. "Mr. Trump loves it. Mrs. Trump loves it even more."
Manafort said don't expect Trump to be scripted, either. That just wouldn't be Trump.
Associated Press Writer
Ministers and residents of this eastern Oklahoma town gathered at a temporary memorial Sunday and prayed for 14 people, including two Texans, who died when a bridge collapsed a week earlier.
Holding hands beneath the hot afternoon sun, pastors and local officials remembered victims and their families a short distance from the bank of the Arkansas River, where a barge tow collided with an Interstate 40 bridge during the Memorial Day weekend.
"We ask that thy spirit be with the victims and their families," said Hazel Warren, wife of Sequoyah County Commissioner Lewis Warren.
"These families who have lost loved ones need you," said the Rev. Andy Webb of Green Valley Baptist Church.
More than 70 people gathered at the temporary chain-link fence memorial that was erected Saturday night in a public park within eyesight of the I-40 bridge and a missing 500-foot section about a mile downstream.
Mayor Jewell Horne said the memorial, festooned with bouquets and ribbons, was planned to remember the victims and help their families cope with their loss.
"I felt we needed to come together," Horne said. "Those families will be in our thoughts and our prayers from now on.
"It's a time of sorrow. We deeply regret this."
No members of victims' families attended the ceremony. Horne said she hopes some will be available for another service that is planned in about a week.
She said local officials are seeking ideas from family members for a permanent memorial to the victims that is planned at the same site.
Aaron Gage, a chaplain with Friendship Freedom Church, said many residents were deeply affected by the May 26 tragedy and felt a need to erect a memorial.
"I think it's the least thing you can do," Gage said.
Gage said the 20-minute ceremony would help residents move beyond the bridge collapse and the death toll that mounted daily as more vehicles were pulled from the murky water.
"It's like the storm has passed," he said. "All things pass. We just have to hold on and look forward to a better place."
Several residents placed flowers on the makeshift memorial. A young boy shoved the staff of an American flag through a link in the fence.
Nearby, tractor-trailers and other vehicles rumbled across the Oklahoma 64 bridge that spans the river between Webbers Falls and Gore, one of several detour routes.
O.L. Hefton, 89, watched the ceremony from a folding chair and worried about the impact detours will have on small communities that are served by two-lane roadways.
"It's unavoidable. But it is a mess," Hefton said. "We don't think about it until it happens in our own back yard."
The memorial was made from materials donated by the city and a local floral shop.
Horne said city workers mowed a pathway along the grassy riverbank to allow mourners to walk to the water's edge and get a clear view of the collapsed bridge.
"We cleared it out so they can go to the water. That's why we chose this spot," she said.
State Department of Transportation officials are finalizing plans to demolish damaged portions of the bridge, including a section that fell on the barges that struck it, spokeswoman Terri Angier said.
Angier said demolition work on the span is scheduled to begin Monday. Engineers plan to use small explosives, a wrecking ball and other equipment.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Elchin Mehdiyev Trend:
Azerbaijan immediately responded to the terrorist attack in Nice, France, at the level of government and ordinary citizens, and this support is an evidence of the friendship between the two countries and peoples, said Frances Ambassador to Azerbaijan Aurelia Bouchez.
Bouchez made the remarks July 18 during opening of a book of condolences at the French embassy in Baku.
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev, First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and other officials expressed condolences to France in connection with the terrorist attack in Nice, said the ambassador. In such a difficult moment, they expressed their support for us.
A book of condolences has been opened by the French embassy in Azerbaijan in memory of the victims of the Nice terror attack.
French city of Nice was hit by a terrorist attack on July 14 night.
Reports indicate that a truck plowed into crowds watching a fireworks display on France's Bastille Day national holiday on the Nice seafront.
Frances Interior Ministry said 84 people were killed in the attack.
SAN ANTONIO New renderings of the proposed Frost Bank headquarters show a vibrant, transformed area of downtown San Antonio as the city gears up to begin its review process of the design Wednesday.
Released over the weekend by the Historic and Design Review Commission, the renderings lay out where the 23-story glass skyscraper would lie amid a sea of concrete and stone buildings.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev made a phone call to Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan July 18, said the press service of Azerbaijans president.
President Aliyev strongly condemned the military coup attempt in Turkey and noted that the Azerbaijani people and state stand by Turkish people and state, as always.
Azerbaijani president extended condolences to families of the people killed while preventing the coup attempt and to Turkeys president, and wished recovery to the injured.
President Aliyev expressed confidence that no force will be able to turn Turkey from the path of development and democracy further.
Erdogan, for his part, praised the brotherly position of President Aliyev and Azerbaijani people, and noted that Turkish leadership is taking all measures to normalize the situation in the country.
The thought of two Texas tastes has led some online to dream up what a night of eating a toasted Whataburger while toasting a cold Shiner Bock would be like.
Redditor Goto10 opened a conversation on the Texas subreddit and tantalized taste buds of his fellow Lone Start State residents when he posted a photo purporting Whataburger as selling Shiner Bock along with other drink options.
BROWNSVILLE San Antonio has the Alamo; Brownsville has a trilogy of U.S.-Mexican War battlefields. That was my mantra as I set out on a whirlwind tour of the Rio Grande Valley.
In truth, this border city at the southern tip of Texas oozes history like few places in the Lone Star State. It was here, in 1846, that Gen. Zachary Taylor ordered a fort to be built on the northern banks of the Rio Grande, across from Matamoros. If the Alamo shaped Texas, what began on the fields of Brownsville changed the face of the North American continent.
History buffs have a unique opportunity to retrace the path of Taylors army with ranger guided tours of the decaying earthwork Fort Brown, Resaca de la Palma Battlefield the site of the second major battle of the war and Palo Alto Battlefield. Each location offers a lesson into the causes of this little understood war, the six-day siege and how the battles developed. There are also demonstrations of U.S.-Mexican War era weapons and tactics, and live musket and artillery demonstrations.
With my curiosity for history sated, I stopped at Rutledge Hamburger Stand in downtown Brownsville for a hamburger. This sliver of a restaurant, no wider than the average mans wingspan, is a historic landmark. Opened in 1922, the original owner sold the restaurant to a longtime employee, whose daughters still flip burgers today. The burgers are small, so if youre hungry, try the triple meat, triple ham and triple cheese all the way.
More Information If you go What to do Palo Alto Battlefield: History tours, 7200 Paredes Line Road, Brownsville, 956-541-2785, ext. 333, nps.gov/paal/index.htm Sabal Palms Sanctuary: 8435 Sabal Palm Road, 956-541-8034, Brownsville, sabalpalmsanctuary.org/ The Prelude: 113 E. Jackson Ave., Harlingen, 956-335-5173. http://theprelude.net/ Quinta Mazatlan World Birding Center:600 Sunset Drive, McAllen, 956-681-3370. quintamazatlan.com/ Riverside Club: 214 E. Chimney Road, Mission, 956-581-1033 Where to eat Rutledge Hamburger Stand:1126 E. Washington St., Brownsville, 956-544-2628 Rio Grande Grill: 417 W. Van Buren Ave., Harlingen, 956-423-1817, harlingenbbq.com/ Schneider's German Gasthaus & Bier Garten:5507 N. Ware Road, McAllen, 956-242-0335 Where to stay The Inn at Chachalaca Bend: 36298 Chachalaca Drive, Los Fresnos, 956-233-1180, chachalaca.com/ Casa De Palmas Renaissance:101 N. Main St., McAllen, 956-631-1101. www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/mfebr-casa-de-palmas-renaissance-mcallen-hotel/ See More Collapse
Harlingen
I hopped in the car and headed for Harlingen, a hub for bird lovers who flock from across the globe to catch a glimpse of birds found nowhere else in the country. I settled for a leisurely stroll through the citys historic Jackson Street district. Murals dot the cityscape, each depicting scenes of Rio Grande Valley history and culture. The first Saturday of every month Jackson Street is host to Market Days, a street fair featuring crafts, local produce and other food.
Between antiques stores and art galleries, I stopped for a coffee at the Prelude, a local hangout that owners describe as a musicians incubator focused on helping budding musicians. For the casual visitor, however, its just a great place to listen to live music. The more adventurous might even take a turn at the mic.
Try the stellar Rio Grande Grill for a plate of brisket, barbacoa (a staple in the Valley) or fish tacos. This centrally located restaurant serves up a variety of meats imbued with mesquite flavor.
McAllen
The next leg of my Valley tour brought me to Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen. This oasis in the middle of the city is one of nine World Birding Center locations in the region, and perhaps the most distinctive. The park headquarters is a beautifully refurbished 1930s country estate, and the park grounds are a carefully groomed maze of trails with native plants and animals. The park has a host of activities throughout the year, but a stroll through sub-tropical landscape is plenty ambitious.
A short drive from Quinta Mazatlan in nearby Mission is the Riverside Club. Despite the outsized place the Rio Grande holds in the imagination, there are few places to actually enjoy the river in deep South Texas. The Riverside Club features country music and riverboat tours year round for a truly one-of-a-kind border experience. The restaurant deck is a terrific place to have a cold drink and watch the U.S. Border Patrol boats zip by.
To cap off my day I dined at Schneiders German Gasthaus and Bier Garten for a bit of schnitzel and German lager. There is no shortage of Mexican food along the border, but for something different try sipping on a frosty Spaten in a biergarten while enjoying live music.
anelsen@express-news.net
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CLEVELAND The must-have convention swag for some Republicans goes beyond the traditional elephant hats or state buttons this year.
Anti-Hillary Clinton novelties have become a cottage industry outside Donald Trumps campaign events and now at Quicken Loans Arena, site of the GOPs national convention. But to some, the photos and slogans on merchandise have crossed a line from anti-Democratic candidate to being anti-woman.
Even some of Clintons harshest critics in the Connecticut GOP are distancing themselves from this political kitsch, which on Monday they denounced as misogynistic and counterproductive to the Republican brand.
They also condemned a tweet of a photo by Trump supporter and former child star Scott Baio that showed Clinton under a banner with vulgar term for a female body part. The former Happy Days and Charles in Charge actor was invited by Trump to speak Monday night at the convention.
I think thats pretty crude, said Leora Levy, a Trump delegate from Greenwich and a Republican National Committee member-elect. I cant defend somebody who is low class.
Among the items for sale to convention-goers are buttons that say, KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts ... left wing. Vendors are also peddling T-shirts with Clinton and Monica Lewinskys image and the words: Hillary sucks, but not like Monica.
I certainly dont support anything that is misogynistic or insulting to people, said state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides, a Trump delegate from Derby who has been critical of the partys presumptive nominee. I dont think there is any place for name-calling and bullying.
State GOP Chairman J.R. Romano said the hawking of anti-Clinton merchandise is similar to the lengths fans of bitter arch rivals go to tweak their opponents.
"For people in politics, it's like sports," Romano said, citing the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry.
Romano said he wouldn't wear one of the Clinton shirts, however.
Republicans emphasized that the anti-Hillary swag, which was also sold outside Trumps Connecticut rallies this spring, is not sanctioned by Trumps campaign or the party.
Thats some businessman who has very low-class taste and decided he can make a buck selling something like that, Levy said. Youll see it on both sides. Thats not a mainstream thing.
Betsy McCaughey, a former New York lieutenant governor and Trump delegate from Greenwich, dismissed Baios controversial tweet.
Its just a joke, a joke, McCaughey said. I dont take that stuff seriously. Its irrelevant to the campaign.
neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
STAMFORD The number of gun permits issued in the city is on pace to reach an all-time high this year.
Stamford residents are obtaining permits this year at a faster rate than they did in 2013, when applications spiked across Connecticut in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings.
Were seeing people applying at an unprecedented rate, Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said.
Observers say people who until recently had no need for a gun are suddenly reserving the right to own one for two main reasons:
They are concerned they will lose their right to protect themselves if federal lawmakers succeed in passing gun control legislation.
They are concerned about the governments ability to protect them in the wake of terrorism and mass shootings.
The number of gun permits issued in Stamford nearly doubled in 2012 when 330 were granted compared to 175 in 2011. When the states gun laws tightened in 2013 in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, the number of gun permits issued in Stamford rose to 481. The number dipped below 400 in each of the past two years, but is now on pace to reach an all-time high in 2016. There have been 380 permits issued through just the first six months of the year.
Statewide numbers tell a similar story. So far this year, 16,000 people have received pistol permits, compared to 25,000 in all of 2013.
Conklin believes the gun control debate that often follows mass shootings across the country, like in San Bernardino in December and Orlando last month, is one of the main reasons for the spike.
More Information Pistol permits issued in Stamford 2011 175 2012 330 2013 481 2014355 2015 377 2016380* *January through June See More Collapse
Every time an event like this happens, it triggers people to apply, he said. There seems to be a lot of concern in the community over gun control.
Conklin noted the upward trend picked up steam after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December 2012.
I think Sandy Hook came into play. I think politics came into play, he said. These things are upfront and present in peoples minds.
These are catalysts, or triggers, for someone who is thinking about getting a gun.
One negative consequence of the surge in pistol permits is an increase in gun-related incidents.
Unfortunately, a byproduct of many people getting pistol permits is that you have incidents, you have rounds shot accidentally, you have guns misplaced, Conklin said.
Meanwhile, the departments forensics team, which reviews and revokes pistol permits, has become very busy over the past few years.
Its becoming more and more of a time-consuming process between issuing, revoking, Conklin said. We dont have anyone dedicated full-time.
The filing of DPS-3 forms, which are required for the sale and transfer or firearms, is also exploding, he added.
Observers said more people decide to get gun permits after a terrible crime for the same reason gun sales increase after mass-casualty events.
Bethel is the most dramatic example of a larger trend across the state in a year where terrorism and domestic gun violence have been prominent and divisive topics in the presidential primaries.
Bethel issued 77 permits in 2012, which was average for the town. That number spiked to 122 permits in 2013 following the deaths of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the intense debate about gun control that resulted. In 2016, the town has surpassed that number, issuing 123 gun permits, with six months left in the year.
Bethel is a microcosm of the rest of the state and indicative of the realization by Connecticut residents that the police are not going to be everywhere to protect you, said Scott Wilson, president of the 23,500-member Connecticut Citizens Defense League, a Second Amendment advocacy group, which has added about 2,000 members since the beginning of the year. So, every day, you see more ordinary people who have never owned a gun starting to realize they need to be responsible for taking action for their own safety.
A gun industry spokeswoman said the surge in gun permits is part of a trend across the country, although national permit numbers were not immediately available.
We are seeing all over the country, Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights because they see the government cannot always be there, NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen said. From the San Bernardino shooting in December to the Orlando shooting last month, Americans want to protect and defend themselves, and that is part of what you are seeing in Connecticut.
Security questions
The irony about the widespread spike in gun permits is that it comes at a time when serious crime is in decline.
Shooting instructors, such as William Reed, said popular perception is a powerful influence on peoples actions when it comes to gun permits.
It goes up and down based on what is going on in the world. You have these mass shootings, and nobody wants Hillary (Clinton) to win because they think she is going to take away their guns, said Reed, an NRA-certified instructor. After the Paris attacks happened, we had a huge increase in permits because people were afraid.
Reed was referring to the terrorist attacks in Paris in mid-November that killed 130 people.
A local police chief said he expected the rise in permits to continue.
Last month, we had 21 new applications come in, said Monroe Police Chief John Salvatore, president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, whose town issued 97 permits in 2012. We are seeing about three times as many permits this year, and it does seem to be connected to the national discussion about restricting access to firearms.
The president of a Ridgefield shooting range said he has nothing against expanded background checks and other modest forms of gun control, but others are suspicious of it.
We are generally going to see a spike in gun permits in an election year, and this year obviously guns are a hot topic, said Rob Power, president of the Ramapoo Rifle and Revolver Club. I have talked to a couple of students recently who have told me, Im getting this (permit) now while I can, because I just dont know what is going to happen.
rryser@newstimes.com; 203-731-3342
A microphone was thrust into his hands, and for one bright moment, the words he yelled were chanted hundreds of times over, the sounds reverberating in the air and echoing from building walls in a way Eric Cruz Lopez will never forget.
It felt powerful. I could hear all the voices, when we were doing chants. I could hear all the voices and as they chanted, and it repeated We were hearing what we were feeling, the 20-year-old from Bridgeport said.
Cruz Lopez, Laura Veira, a valedictorian of Norwalk who announced her immigration status at her graduation ceremony this spring, and Yenimar Cortes of New Haven are all undocumented immigrant students in Cleveland for the Republic National Convention. Theyre there through the Connecticut for a Dream organization, which advocates for the rights of the undocumented.
The three flew there together Sunday night and by Monday morning were joined by hundreds of others. Connecticut Students for a Dream is an affiliate of the national United We Dream organization dedicated to immigrant rights, which brought over 60 members from across the country to protest at the convention.
They had their first rally on Monday, with plans to hold two more events on Tuesday and Thursday.
Onlookers watch the convention with apprehension, expecting an angrier crowd in light of recent events. The protestors are fueled by recent media coverage of violence between police and people of color across the nation, and by presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, who has platformed on policies that many consider violations of human rights: building a wall to prevent immigrants from entering the country, banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. and advocating to ban same-sex marriage in the landmark Supreme Court case last year.
The Republican National Convention will also allow the open carry of guns, in adherence with Ohio state law.
I was pretty scared coming here to be honest. But once I saw the hate and the amount of Trump supporters, it empowered me more, it reminded me of why were here, said Veira, 19, a Brien McMahon graduate who will be attending Harvard University this fall.
She and other United We Dream members had media training and safety training, she said, before they began their protest at noon on Monday.
We are their voices
Out of the shadows and into the streets, they chanted. No papers, no fear, they yelled. United against hate, read a white poster in red writing.
Veira, Cruz Lopez and Cortes marched in a circle around the convention center chanting for change with hundreds, if not thousands of others from noon until around 3 p.m. Monday. Members of United We Dream chanted alongside many other organizations advocating for the rights of marginalized populations, including NextGen, Code Pink and MPower.
Its important that other people that cant be here, like day laborers or unaccompanied minors who actually dont have time or are too scared to be involved, have us. We are their voices and we make sure the whole is heard, Veira said.
She said they were representing not only the undocumented community, but all the other marginalized communities that were denied the rights and opportunities that others of more privileged circumstances get to enjoy.
Veira and Cruz Lopez emphasized the importance of intersectionality, between all of the organizations. They chanted black lives matter, too, they said, because there are black immigrants, and undocumented black people, and so to support one minority was to support multiple.
Were all connected and thats why were here supporting each other, so we can work together for one cause, Veira said.
And everyone there had a common goal.
The main reason for going to the RNC is to stand up against the hate and the hateful rhetoric that the Republican Party is using, said Carolina Bortolleto of Danbury, who co-founded Connecticut Students for a Dream. She started the organization in 2010 when she was 22. Now, 28, she said there are 30 leaders across the state and she has an e-mail list of about 3,000 people.
Veira said that by demanding for equality, she was also demanding to make sure Trump does not get elected to the presidency. Veira listened to a Trump supporter on the train to the convention center, who was talking to the media and said that if she had to live through President George Bush and Barack Obama, then others could live through a Trump presidency.
But the thing is our lives are at risk under Trump, Veira said. Its not like Oh we just dont like this guy. With his immigration policy, we wouldnt be here anymore. We have a lot more at risk than she ever did.
But Connecticut Students for a Dream will also be protesting at the Democratic National Convention the following week. Of the three at the RNC, only Cruz Lopez will head to that convention, accompanied by Danbury siblings and undocumented immigrants Angelica and Pablo Idrovo.
Bortolleto pointed out that Obama, a Democrat, deported more immigrants than any other president before him.
No matter which party is in power, hopefully theyll fight for the rights of our community, she said. So we want to make sure the Democrats have us in mind, too.
A time of fear
Right now Im looking at about 15 cops walking past me from Wisconsin, said Cruz Lopez around 3:30 p.m. Monday.
That wave came after about 10 state patrol members from Missouri, dressed in almost full riot gear, who he said followed them around their loop of the convention center, protesting the protestors, advocating for police safety.
We dont want to talk to them. We dont want to incite anything. As the current political system stands, you dont talk to cops. As a person of color thats undocumented, that doesnt end well, he said.
Cruz Lopez said this kind of intimidation, however threatening, isnt new to him.
Throughout my life in Bridgeport, in walking, biking, physically traversing through different spaces, Ive gotten pulled over by cops for being brown, Cruz Lopez said, though now he mostly lives in Storrs he's heading into his junior year at University of Connecticut. Theyve searched me from head to toe. So being around cops here in a place that is literally the belly of the beast, where hateful rhetoric is rising out and spreading everywhere, its not the safest environment.
Veira said the Trump supporters are threatening, too. But for Cruz Lopez, he always feels protected by his community, he said, and right now, his community is hundreds-strong.
At first, it wasnt easy to bond with others during the rally, he said, because everyone was too absorbed in the protest.
Its kind of hard as youre in the moment, mobilizing and moving. But as it dies down you really start to shake and hands and see the humanity in this all, he said. That its not just a mass movement of people but its individuals coming together and showing issues that affect their lives, their families lives, their peers lives.
SFoster-Frau@CTPost.com; @SilviaElenaFF
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New York
In an election year filled with debate over immigration, Adriano Espaillat hopes his personal story makes its own statement. After living at one point in the country without documentation, he could become the first Dominican-American in Congress.
After winning the Democratic primary in a strongly Democratic district that includes Harlem and parts of the Bronx, Espaillat is heavily favored in November's general election to succeed the long-serving Rep. Charles Rangel, who is retiring.
It would break new ground for the historically black district, which includes Harlem and has been represented by only two African-Americans, Rangel and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. before him, for more than 70 years even as Hispanics have been the majority in the district for at least the past several years.
As an immigrant, Espaillat sees his rise as a "strong message against the intolerance that's being spewed by the Trumps of the world." He was especially looking forward to seeing how his story could resonate in Congress, especially among those opposed to immigration reform.
"How will they feel knowing that I have the same vote as they have on the floor of Congress?" he said. "I would love to see what the reaction is."
Espaillat, a 61-year-old state senator whose resume also includes the state Assembly and years spent in community work, has come a long way from his introduction to the U.S. as a 9-year-old on vacation in 1964.
That trip started out as a visit to grandparents, who were already in New York City, but continued past the expiration of his family's visa. His grandparents petitioned for the family to gain U.S. residency, but they lived in the country without legal authorization for several months in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood while waiting for paperwork.
His grandmother worried about immigration officials deporting them and often warned the young Espaillat and his brother to be careful when they went out. In the neighborhood, he said, "there was a level of fear ... that Immigration would come in, at any time."
Espaillat said that perspective "gives me an advantage, a clear advantage, because I see life through a different optic."
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Amendments to the constitution have been proposed in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree on submitting the draft Referendum Act On making amendments to Azerbaijans constitution to the Constitutional Court.
It is proposed to establish first vice-president and vice-president positions in Azerbaijan. First vice-president and vise-presidents are appointed and dismissed by Azerbaijans president.
It is proposed to remove not younger than 35 in Article 100 on requirements to candidates to the post of the president of Azerbaijan: Citizen of the Azerbaijan Republic not younger than 35, permanently living on the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic longer than 10 years, possessing voting right, without previous conviction, having no liabilities in other states, with university degree, not having double citizenship may be elected the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
Moreover, it is proposed to make amendments to the part 1 of Article 101 on procedure of elections of the president of Azerbaijan, according to which it is planned to extend the office term of the president from 5 years to 7 years.
At the same time, it is proposed to add the following words to the part 1 of the Article 101: Azerbaijans president can declare extraordinary election of Azerbaijans president.
Moreover, the following amendments have been proposed:
To replace within three months with during the period of 60 days in Article 105 on implementation of powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic on his resignation: Whenever the President of the Azerbaijan Republic resigns from his post ahead of time, extraordinary elections of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic are held within three months.
To replace prime minister with first vice-president in the following sentence: In such case, until new President of the Azerbaijan Republic is elected, the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Republic will carry out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
To replace prime minister with first vice-president in the second part of this article: If during said term the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Republic carrying out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic resigns, becomes incapable of carrying out his powers due to illness, Chairman of Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan Republic will carry out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
At the same time, according to the amendments to this article, if the first vice-president resigns, becomes incapable of carrying out his powers due to illness, vice-president of Azerbaijan gets the status of the first vice-president and carries out duties of the president.
Additionally, according to the proposed amendments, persons who have the right to participate in the elections (at the age of 18) can be elected to Milli Majlis. Previously, persons no younger than 25, had the right to be elected to the parliament.
It is also proposed to add an article on dissolution of parliament, rights to conclude interstate and intergovernmental international agreements, responsibilities of municipalities and others.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Azerbaijan is a strategic partner for Romania, said NATO resident coordinator and Romanias ambassador to Azerbaijan Daniel Cristian Ciobanu.
Ciobanu made the remarks July 18 at the event on the occasion of his diplomatic missions completion in Baku.
The ambassador said the cooperation between Azerbaijan and Romania has strongly developed in all fields during his diplomatic term since November 2011.
I want to express my warmest gratitude to Azerbaijani authorities for their permanent support during my mission, said Ciobanu.
The diplomat noted that during these years, firstly, an expansion of political dialogue was achieved through joint visits.
Secondly, the cooperation at the level of the two countries Ministries of Foreign Affairs intensified and the first ever official visit of Romanian Prime Minister to Azerbaijan took place, he added.
Thirdly, the export of Romanian goods to Azerbaijan increased significantly over four years, and the figures of the last two years were the best in the history, said the diplomat.
Romanias export to Azerbaijan increased by 4.3 times in 2015 compared to 2011, noted Ciobanu. During the first five months of 2016, the countrys export to Azerbaijan increased by 106.89 percent, compared to the same period of 2015.
Fourthly, Azerbaijan increased investments in Romania and Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR substantially expanded its presence on Romanian market, added the envoy.
Azerbaijan and Romania consolidated cooperation in the field of energy, he noted adding that the two countries also diversified bilateral relations in the cultural field.
Last, but not least, Romanian embassy successfully fulfilled the tasks of NATO coordinator in Azerbaijan, said the ambassador.
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AUSTIN Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday he will push to enhance the punishment for attacks on law enforcement officers and allow them to be treated as hate crimes, citing the heroes lost in Dallas to a mass shooting.
At a time when law enforcement officers increasingly come under assault simply because of the job they hold, Texas must send a resolute message that the State will stand by the men and women who serve and protect our communities, Abbott said. While our state and the nation continue to mourn the heroes lost in Dallas, it is time for us to unite as Texans to say no more.
Five Dallas officers were killed following a peaceful protest earlier this month, and police said the sniper in part talked about his desire to kill white officers in the wake of recent incidents in which black men were killed by police in Minnesota and Louisiana. State police in Louisiana said a man who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge was targeting officers.
Similar proposals have been lofted around the country after police officers have been killed. Some have pointed out that crimes against law enforcement already may be enhanced. In Texas, for example, the murder of an officer who is performing duties of the office can qualify for the death penalty.
Abbotts office said he will ask lawmakers who meet in regular session in 2017 to approve the proposed Police Protection Act.
His proposal would make it a hate crime to commit a crime against a law enforcement officer if the offense is rooted in bias against the police. It also would increase criminal penalties for any crime in which the victim is a law enforcement officer, regardless of whether its a hate crime.
Abbotts office, as an example, said that assault with bodily injury now is generally punishable as a Class A misdemeanor. If a public servant such as a law officer is assaulted, the crime is escalated to a third-degree felony. Under Abbotts proposal, someone assaulting a law enforcement officer would face a second-degree felony charge.
The governors proposal also would organize a campaign to educate young Texans on the value law enforcement officers bring to their communities.
In releasing his proposal, Abbott included comments from several law enforcement interests praising the idea.
As a 26-plus year police officer in Houston, Im extremely encouraged by Governor Greg Abbotts legislative priority to make the State of Texas a national leader in protecting the lives of law enforcement officers. The attacks on law enforcement in Texas and the rest of our nation are unprecedented. Governor Abbotts solution is the right approach for Texas law enforcement officers and the people of Texas who support them, said Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Association.
Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, applauded Abbott. So did Ron Pinkston, president of the Dallas Police Association.
Now is the time for our elected leaders across our state and country to do the right thing and join our Governor in his call to better protect police officers, Pinkston said.
U.S. Sens Ted. Cruz and John Cornyn of of Texas earlier introduced a federal measure aimed at violent offenders who target police officers.
pfikac@express-news.net
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President Obama presented the Medal of Honor to a former San Antonio resident Monday, telling the nation that dozens of troops survived because of his heroism.
In receiving the award, retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Kettles, who lived in the Alamo City after returning from the war, downplayed his role in the extraction of troops caught in a fierce firefight.
I didnt do it by myself. There were some 74 pilots and crew members involved in this whole mission that day, he said. They did their job, above and beyond. So the Medal is not mine. Its theirs.
A major on the day of battle, May 15, 1967, Kettles was flight commander of the 176th Aviation Company. He led a platoon of UH-1D Huey helicopters that provided support to the 101st Airborne Divisions 1st Brigade during an ambush.
The Americans faced a much larger enemy force, one the size of a battalion, along the Song Tra Cau riverbed in Vietnam. After flying several missions into what the Army described as a hot landing zone, Kettles returned without additional aerial support.
His task: Rescue a squad-sized element of soldiers who had been left behind. In an interview Sunday with the San Antonio Express-News and other media, he was credited with saving the lives of 40 soldiers and four of his own crewmen, but played down his role in the action.
Kettles, who was presented the Distinguished Service Cross in a ceremony at Fort Sam Houston after returning to the United States, flew every extraction mission.
In a Tweet before the ceremony, Obama wrote, 44 men came home because Chuck Kettles believed that we leave no man behind. Thats America at our best.
sigc@express-news.net
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SAN ANTONIO An area youth minister suspected of having sex with a 16-year-old girl has been arrested.
Edgar Gonzalez, 24, was booked into the Bexar County Jail on Friday and charged with a felony count of sexual assault of a child, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
RELATED: SAFD: 'Hero' officer catches 3 young children who jumped from burning second-story apartment
The document said that Gonzalez was the former minister to the child at a local church, and that he worked with youth at the time of his arrest.
The document, however, did not name the specific church.
The affidavit said that Gonzalez communicated with the teen on Snapchat, and that he asked the girl to keep their relationship a secret so he would not get into trouble.
The child victim told the SANE nurse that the defendant promised to marry her and take care of her, the warrant said.
RELATED: SAPD: Thieves use forklift to break open ATM, steal money
According to the document, the pair engaged in sexual activity at least two times in July. The pair allegedly had sex in Gonzalez' silver Nissan sedan.
Gonzalez was released from jail the day after his arrest, the report said.
Mdwilson@express-news.net
Twitter: @MDWilsonSA
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SAN ANTONIO -- Hours after a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that claimed the lives of three police officers and wounded three others, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus participated in a forum on the Northeast Side on Sunday evening to discuss the current state of law enforcement and community engagement.
McManus fielded questions at the New Creation Fellowship Church, following the second ambushed police officer killings in the last two weeks.
RELATED: 3 Baton Rouge officers killed in shooting; suspect dead
The shooting occurred less than one mile away from the Baton Rouge police headquarters according to the Associated Press. After several minutes of gunfire, the suspected gunman was shot and killed.
"Unheard of," McManus said. "I've never seen anything like it. That city is gonna be reeling right now just like Dallas was."
Last week, authorities arrested one man and another suspect still was at large after shots were fired at the San Antonio Police Department headquarters. McManus said there were no new developments in that case.
RELATED: Off-duty SAPD cop injured in New Year's Eve hit-and-run has died
"This is a bad time in law enforcement with all this going on," McManus said.
McManus spoke at the public forum Sunday to address what he calls the "elephant in the room."
"It's very important that we've been involved to a greater extent to improve communication," McManus said. "This (event) is intended to make a bond between police and community stronger. It's to achieve a higher level of understanding."
McManus said police will push to acquire more information so officers can have more awareness of their surroundings. He wants officers to be more careful than ever before.
"It certainly puts everyone on edge," McManus said. "It makes everyone more cautions and on edge and relying on each other for cover."
RELATED: The latest on the ambush killing of Baton Rouge 3 cops
Engaging the community, McManus said, is essential because officers rely on public information to assist them.
"The outpouring from the community has been outstanding," McManus said. "I've never seen it stronger.
Twitter: @quixem
qramirez@express-news.net
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SAN ANTONIO The San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriffs Office are two of several local law enforcement agencies coming together as part of a new initiative to combat gang violence and activities in the Alamo City.
The new anti-gang unit will potentially include officers from the Texas Department of Safety, the U.S. Marshals Service, FBI and other agencies, said BCSO spokesman James Keith.
A lot of the violent crime we see in Bexar County is gang-related, Keith said in an interview with mySA.com. That gang activity doesnt just stay within the gang.
RELATED: More than 600 arrested in lengthy SA anti-gang operation
Keith said innocent people are continually getting caught in the middle of gang activity on the East Side and in nearby unincorporated parts of Bexar County. He said residents are being terrorized, and that this type of activity needs to come to an end. Keith anticipated this program will be up and running by the end of the year.
These gang members are running wild, he said. Weve got to take them on.
Sgt. Jesse Salame, SAPD spokesman, told mySA.com there are currently 10 agencies committing up to 84 personnel currently for the program. He said its not the formation of a new unit, but rather a centralization of forces in one facility in order to coordinate investigations and other activities.
The program has received a nearly $2 million grant from the Governors Offices Criminal Justice Division, Salame said.
The agencies involved will be conducting their regular anti-gang operations, investigations and activities, Salame said, but with a bit more unity between the various agencies.
It will help coordinate all Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies anti-gang investigation allowing them to share intelligence and de-conflict operations, Salame said in a statement Friday.
RELATED: Barrio Azteca gang member pleads guilty in Texas to racketeering, drug trafficking
Keith said the new program will eliminate barriers and obstacles that have previously gotten in the way in terms of coordinating activities against gangs.
One agency cannot take on gangs and stop them by themselves, Keith said. We have to work together. We have to make sure that we are targeting the gangs that are causing the biggest problems.
Program based on other successful units
Keith said the program was designed off of a previous Texas Anti-Gang (TAG) unit in Houston and Dallas.
Cpt. Matthew May, who works in that TAG unit in Houston, said it started as a three-year program and currently has about 120 investigators, analysts and support staffers. Those involved have come from the Houston Police Department, the Harris County Sheriffs Office and several federal agencies.
May said one of the problems the law enforcement agencies in Houston encountered was a duplication of efforts regarding anti-gang activities. The TAG unit allowed for those agencies to all get on the same page, and resulted in better cohesion in executing anti-gang activities, such as arrests, warrants and more.
Houston has more than 300 criminal street gangs, May said, and the time and labor needed to understand the culture and numbers of those gangs is intense. Some of those gangs include the MS-13 and the Tango Blast prison gang.
Those gangs are involved in drug activity, burglaries, robberies, human trafficking and other crimes, May said.
He said the TAG unit has made a significant positive impact in terms of executing anti-gang initiatives. Theyve made numerous arrests as a result, and made the streets of Houston much safer for residents.
RELATED: Whites-only Oregon gang members suspected in brutal murder of 'brother' who broke club rules
The various agencies are able to share databases and other resources that other agencies may not have access to, allowing everyone involved to bring their best assets forward, May said.
In order for officers to participate in the Houston TAG unit, the officers must go through an internal background check and a set of interviews. May calls the unit a prized position, that officers really have to want to be a part of in order to be successful.
twhite@mysa.com
Twitter: @tylerlwhite
SAN ANTONIO Police are searching for suspects who used a forklift to destroy an ATM at a bank on the Northwest Side on Monday morning.
Police received reports of the robbery around 2:38 a.m. at a Chase Bank in the 4000 block of Northwest Loop 1604.
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Speaking to reporters Monday morning at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, twice-failed presidential candidate and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he would serve in a Donald Trump administration, should the presumptive Republican nominee beat Hillary Clinton in November.
RELATED: Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Trump's wall is 'not' going to happen
Perry said the Trump campaign is aware of his interest in filling a position, should it be a role that he is "passionate" and "knowledgeable about," according to Patrick Svitek, a Texas Tribune reporter at the convention.
"I get more and more comfortable every day that Donald Trump truly has that vision," Perry said on the real estate mogul making America great again.
RELATED: All eyes on Donald Trump and 8 other things to watch as the Republican National Convention starts
And although Perry thought of himself qualified enough to run for president two times, he told reporters he wasn't "the guy" for vice president because he doesn't "know the Washington inside legislative game."
He said that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who was announced last Friday as Trump's running mate, has a "steady hand" and is one of the "calmest individuals" he's met.
RELATED: Melania Trump headlines Republican National Convention Monday night
"I don't think (Trump) could've chosen a better individual to be his vice president," he said.
And although Perry has thrown his full support behind Trump after Ted Cruz dropped out of the race in May, he lamented this wasn't his original plan.
"Hell, Donald Trump wasn't my first choice," he said. "I was my first choice."
kbradshaw@express-news.net
Twitter: @kbrad5
SAN ANTONIO A U.S. Office of Special Counsel report released Monday found that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro violated the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activity of some federal employees, during an April interview with Yahoo News.
Castro's statements during the interview, according to a OSC news release, mixed his "personal political views with officials agency business despite his efforts to clarify that some answers were being given in his personal capacity." The department found he violated the act by "advocating for and against presidential candidates while giving a media interview in his official capacity on April 4, 2016," the report states.
RELATED: Former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro being vetted as Hillary Clinton's potential running mate
The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits employees from using their official authority or influence to affect the outcome of an election, according to the report. The OSC submitted the report and Castro's response to President Barack Obama for "appropriate action."
After receiving an analysis of the interview, Castro sent a letter to the OSC Friday, where he addressed the violation saying, "When an error is made even an inadvertent one the error should be acknowledged. Although it was not my intent, I made one here."
Previously, former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was found to have violated the Hatch Act in 2012 when she made an off-hand remark at a gay rights group's gala about who should be North Carolina's next governor. Sebelius personally reimbursed the U.S. Treasury for all travel expenses to North Carolina, which resolved the violation.
In the April interview, the former San Antonio mayor, who is reportedly being vetted to be Hillary Clinton's vice president, tells Katie Couric, "Now, taking off my HUD hat for a second and speaking individually, it is very clear that Hillary Clinton is the most experienced, thoughtful and prepared candidate for president that we have this year."
He went on to discuss Clinton's accomplishments before criticizing the Republican party and its candidates for president.
"In the end, the American people understand that she has a positive vision for the country that includes opportunity for everybody and she can actually get it done," Castro said near the end of the 17-minute interview.
RELATED: Castro's youth seen as a plus and a minus for Clinton ticket
He also went on to say that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was not prepared to hold the position. Couric also referred to Castro as "Mr. Secretary" during the interview, where the official HUD seal appeared behind him.
According to the OSC report, Castro said at the time of the interview he believed "he was acting in accordance with the Hatch Act." Since July 2014, the beginning of his appointment, Castro was briefed on the Hatch Act four separate times, including one time two months before the interview in February 2016, according to the report.
RELATED: Castro defends mortgage insurance program changes to House Republicans
Castro, according to the report, has since said:
"Based on the information I received regarding the interview in advance of
the meeting, I expected that Ms. Couric's questions would focus primarily
on HUD's activities and the growth of cities. When, during the live
broadcast, I received the direct questions regarding specific candidates, I
used the inelegant phrase "taking off my HUD hat" to indicate my intention
to respond in my personal capacity, and not as a representative of HUD. My
aim was to make clear to anyone viewing the broadcast that, when
answering those direct questions regarding candidates, I was not acting in
my official capacity ... I now have watched the recording of the interview
and appreciate that, while my intention was to avoid any blurring of roles
and make clear that I was not speaking as a representative of HUD, that fact
may not have been obvious to viewers. At the time, I believed that, so long
as I clearly stated that I was not speaking in my official capacity, my actions
would be consistent with Hatch Act requirements. I now understand that the
mixed-topic interview, even with a proviso, is problematic."
Castro also expressed regret about his actions during the interview and never intended to violate any federal law, according to the report.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
kbradshaw@express-news.net
Twitter: @kbrad5
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Accusations of physical and psychological torture continue to come from famed drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's attorneys, the latest of which allege "El Chapo" has gone bald and crazy amid a diagnosis of anxiety and high blood pressure.
According to Radio News one of Guzman's attorneys, Jose Refugio Rodriguez, relayed the conversation he had with the drug lord, saying Guzman told him he was becoming crazy to the point of hair loss.
RELATED: 'El Chapo' is still behind bars, but Twitter users showed preparedness amid rumors of a third escape
Rodriguez said he recently visited the cartel capo for the first time in months and found him in a "deteriorated state," according to Yahoo! News.
Additionally, El Chapo allegedly told his attorney he preferred physical torture to psychological torture as the physical pain eventually subsides, according to Radio News.
Guzman said he has become dependent on his blood pressure medication, and fears his isolation will drive him insane.
RELATED: Beauty queen wife of drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman visits him in prison near Texas border
Rodriguez previously told Radio News he requested surveillance footage of Guzman's cell in an effort to corroborate Guzman's accounts of the conditions he's subject to, however, the request was denied.
It was rumored Guzman had made a third escape in early July, but the rumors were quickly dispelled by a government official from Mexico who shared a photo of the twice-escaped drug lord in prison.
RELATED: Mexican authorities probe 'El Chapo' after prison guard found brutally killed near Texas border
El Chapo escaped from his maximum security prison in 2015 his second escape and was subsequently arrested after months on the run.
It is speculated Guzman will be extradited to the U.S., but in the meantime, the former cartel leader spends his days in a maximum security jail in Ciudad Juarez, just south of the Texas and Mexico border.
Click through the slideshow above to see Twitter users' reaction to rumors of a third "El Chapo" escape.
MMedina@mySA.com
Twitter: @Mariahmedinaaa
Though artist Spencer Tunick said more than 1,500 women applied to be part of his nude art installation photo protest at RNC National Convention in Cleveland Sunday morning, he only had room for 100.
And so a hundred women gathered holding large mirrors toward Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland off the Cuyahoga River for the "Everything She Says Means Everything" project, both in protest and as a statement of empowerment.
Details added (first version posted on 20:14)
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Amendments to the constitution have been proposed in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree on submitting the draft Referendum Act On making amendments to Azerbaijans constitution to the Constitutional Court.
It is proposed to establish first vice-president and vice-president positions in Azerbaijan. First vice-president and vise-presidents are appointed and dismissed by Azerbaijans president.
It is proposed to remove not younger than 35 in Article 100 on requirements to candidates to the post of the president of Azerbaijan: Citizen of the Azerbaijan Republic not younger than 35, permanently living on the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic longer than 10 years, possessing voting right, without previous conviction, having no liabilities in other states, with university degree, not having double citizenship may be elected the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
Moreover, it is proposed to make amendments to the part 1 of Article 101 on procedure of elections of the president of Azerbaijan, according to which it is planned to extend the office term of the president from 5 years to 7 years.
At the same time, it is proposed to add the following words to the part 1 of the Article 101: Azerbaijans president can declare extraordinary election of Azerbaijans president.
Moreover, the following amendments have been proposed:
To replace within three months with during the period of 60 days in Article 105 on implementation of powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic on his resignation: Whenever the President of the Azerbaijan Republic resigns from his post ahead of time, extraordinary elections of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic are held within three months.
To replace prime minister with first vice-president in the following sentence: In such case, until new President of the Azerbaijan Republic is elected, the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Republic will carry out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
To replace prime minister with first vice-president in the second part of this article: If during said term the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Republic carrying out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic resigns, becomes incapable of carrying out his powers due to illness, Chairman of Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan Republic will carry out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
At the same time, according to the amendments to this article, if the first vice-president resigns, becomes incapable of carrying out his powers due to illness, vice-president of Azerbaijan gets the status of the first vice-president and carries out duties of the president.
Additionally, according to the proposed amendments, persons who have the right to participate in the elections (at the age of 18) can be elected to Milli Majlis. Previously, persons no younger than 25, had the right to be elected to the parliament.
It is also proposed to add an article on dissolution of parliament, rights to conclude interstate and intergovernmental international agreements, responsibilities of municipalities and others.
Re: Negative action, Your Turn, July 12:
A high degree of naivete is expressed by the letter writer in his comments on a recent column regarding the 8 percent rule in college admissions (Denied because of mediocrity, not bias, Ruben Navarrette, Other Views, July 1).
The number was originally 10 percent, but it was lowered to 8 percent after much debate. It was generally proposed by legislators around the state who felt their constituents were not being considered for admission even after sterling graduation records.
Before the 10 percent rule, a cluster of schools in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area was getting the lions share of University of Texas admissions.
Of course, legacy admissions top all of them because money becomes a factor in admissions. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ivy League schools and top state universities provide legacy admissions meaning if your parents went there, your chances are higher that youll get a seat. The following statistics prove my point:
Harvards legacy admissions rate hovers around 30 percent.
For Princetons class of 2015, 33 percent of legacy applicants were admitted.
Yale says it admits 20 to 25 percent of legacy applicants.
Thats why the Supreme Court decided to intervene and level the playing field.
George W. Bush is a good example of legacy admissions. After being rejected by UTs graduate school of business, Bush was admitted at Yale University through legacy admissions. His father, President George H.W. Bush, had attended Yale.
Not to mention our illustrious former governor, Rick Perry, who attended Texas A&M University only to end up with a transcript of mediocrity and cheerleading skills.
Leo Pacheco is an adjunct professor in public administration at San Antonio College.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown spoke volumes when he said recently that Americans expect police officers to do too much, provide too many services and serve too many functions.
Yet the problem is bigger than that. Many people also have unrealistic expectations about what is required for police officers to do their jobs.
Take, for instance, the fact that in the aftermath of a series of police shootings of African-American men by police officers some Americans seem bothered that police are armed at all.
At a recent protest in Baton Rouge, a young woman screamed at the officers standing in front of her in riot gear: Youre the only ones here with guns. Put your guns down, and then we can talk.
Oh, please. Where do they find these people? A gun is a tool police officers need to do their job.
Its been said that police often encounter people at their worst. And even at their best, human beings dont always act rationally. So police learn to expect the unexpected.
For example, one of the most dangerous calls that any cop can get is a report of domestic violence, where a female victim might, one minute, shout expletives at her husband and, the next minute, fight officers who try to arrest him.
But there is another way to look at what that protester in Baton Rouge said about how police should lay down their firearms. Its about the larger notion of equality. Some people mistakenly assume that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, he meant that we should all be given the same privileges.
The way the activist saw it, there was an inherent unfairness in the fact that police were armed and the protesters werent. It didnt matter to her that police officers go through special training on how to properly handle weapons.
As Americans, what are we supposed to do when our need for public safety conflicts with our assumptions about equality?
As the five Dallas police officers who died in an ambush recently are memorialized and laid to rest, thats where we have arrived. Some anti-police violence activists on the radical fringe want police departments disbanded altogether, while others would be content if police were simply disarmed and placed at the mercy of violent criminals who would still have access to deadly weapons.
This perverted notion of equality even carries over to how were supposed to talk about the victims of street violence. Here, the police reform activists and their liberal advocates in the media have painted themselves into a corner.
On the one hand, maintaining that all lives are equally precious, they insist that Americans should mourn not just the dead officers in Dallas but also the various victims of police violence.
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recently wrote that President Barack Obama had gone to Dallas in an attempt to calm a nation reeling from [the officers] deaths and the ones just beforehand of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Does anyone believe that most Americans would equate the murderous ambush in Dallas which resulted in five police officers targeted and killed, seven other officers wounded, and a major city paralyzed for several hours with the unfortunate deaths of two individuals during encounters with police?
But on the other hand, the reform advocates push back against the suggestion that they should be more concerned about black-on-black crime because, they claim, theres a difference between someone meeting his demise at the hands of a fellow citizen and that person being killed by an agency of the state i.e. the police.
They cant have it both ways. Are the police just like everyone else, or arent they?
Heres the answer: They arent. When someone kills a police officer, its a blow against civilization. After all, if someone were to kill enough of them, the result would be chaos and the end of society.
ruben@rubennavarrette.com
Posted on 07/18/2016, 9:00 am, by Farmscape.Ca
The General Manager of Manitoba Pork suggests government can best assist farmers by creating a regulatory climate that allows agriculture to access the resources needed to remain competitive in a global market.
Manitobas Minister of Agriculture hosted a consultation session last week to gather input for the development of a Targeted Growth Strategy for the agriculture sector.
Andrew Dickson, the General Manger of Manitoba Pork, says the session provided a chance for organizations to learn about problems in other sectors and find where they can come together to lay out a game plan.
First is you have to have farmers. You have to have a productive work force, you have to have a well trained work force, you have to have farmers who are highly educated and understand their farms and the opportunity that the land provides in terms of productive capacity. You need capital, you need to have competitive rates. Producers will borrow a lot of money to run their business and we need to have access to that through good times and bad. We need regulations that help the industry grow and develop and not that impede its development. We need to continue to focus on our export markets. We need trade agreements to make sure that we have competitive access to those markets so we dont get excluded. Weve had bad experiences on that. We need to reduce our impact on the environment. We understand that. We have to do it in a sustainable way so that theres business opportunities and a lifestyle that can be passed on to the next generation of producers. We need to maintain the confidence of the general public in that were following good management practices and were doing the sorts of things on our farms that a rational clear thinking person would support. ~ Andrew Dickson-Manitoba Pork
Dickson says, when you add it all up, the food sector is a very significant part of the employment picture in the province and a major driver of the economy.
Posted on 07/18/2016, 1:04 pm, by mySteinbach
On July 8, 2016, at approximately 7:45pm, the Dakota Ojibway Police Service received a report of an injured male at a residence in Birdtail Sioux First Nation.
Officers from the Dakota Ojibway Police Service and paramedics attended the residence and located an unresponsive adult male with serious injuries. The 59-year-old male from Birdtail Sioux First Nation was pronounced deceased at the scene.
The same evening, the Manitoba RCMP Serious Crime Unit was contacted for assistance and is currently leading the investigation.
Investigators have arrested and charged two persons in connection with this homicide. RCMP report that 32-year-old Steven Lee Gregory and 48-year-old Lisa Phyllis Bunn, both from Birdtail Sioux First Nation, have been charged with manslaughter.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Elmar Gasimov, Rector of Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) visited the Ethylene - Polyethylene Plant of Azerkimya production union (PU) in Sumgayit together with the schools staff to be familiarized with the work of BHOS students taking internship at the PU.
The rector accompanied by the PU management had a tour in various production sites of the plant and met the students and their supervisors, having discussions about the plant operations and the internship. In an informal atmosphere, the students shared their impressions about the internship with the rector who called them to be responsible and take maximum benefit of the provided opportunities.
Emphasizing that knowledge and experience have always been the main factors for career development of young people, Gasimov said that every student should think of his/her future career during their studies at universities.
Mukhtar Babayev, MP and Chairman of the Azerkimya PU Supervisory Board, briefed on the reconstruction and modernization measures taken at the PU facilities, as well as the perspective projects.
Babayev also spoke about the importance of the capacity building and the collaboration implemented with the leading national higher education intuitions in this regard, underlining the contribution of this mutually beneficial partnership not only for the higher education institutions, but also for the chemical industry and the country.
It is worth to underline that last year BHOS and Azerkimya PU signed a collaboration agreement which envisages a number of provisions including support in organizing PU expert presentations on development of petrochemical technologies, organization of joint seminars and conferences on related topics, as well as offering internship opportunities for students to facilitate enrichment of their academic knowledge with practical experience.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17
By Khalid Kazimov Trend:
The volume of annual investment in the industrial sector of the Islamic republic surged by 19.5 percent over the last Iranian calendar year that ended March 20, the countrys central bank suggested in its latest statistics.
Some 1160.7 trillion rials (according to the official rate on July 17 per US dollar makes 30,885 rials) worth of investment was made in the countrys industries in the mentioned period, IRNA news agency reported.
Over the last Iranian year, the number of permissions issued for launching industrial unites decreased by 11.9 percent year-on-year reaching 14,844 permissions.
This while in the winter (December 21, 2015 and March 19, 2016) 371 trillion rials worth of investment was made in the industrial sector indicating 179.4 percent growth year on year.
Dear readers,
Lambert and I are going to focus Links more tightly on finance, economics, and political news than we have in recent weeks. This is not a general news site. By addressing too many topics, we are diluting our focus on our beats. And quite frankly, the quality of comments has also suffered as a result of incorporating too many stories that are well covered in the MSM. So please refrain from Why did you not cover X? The general answer is that we are not omniscient and we also have limited resources, and we are therefore not an answer to a wire service. But the specific answer may be, Because we chose not to. Please do not ask us to be something that weve never said we are or aspired to be.
Baby ducks can learn differences between objects France 24
10 reasons why weights can help burn fat, quit smoking and even help cancer recovery Daily Mail (Chuck L) MSM catches up with NC health tips.
Brexit
EU set to hit truck groups with record fine for price-fixing Financial Times
Europe awaits last-ditch effort to save its milk farms Politico
Why Italys banking crisis will shake the eurozone to its core Telegraph
China
Refugee Crisis
All the East is Moving First Things (resilc)
Ukraine/Russia
Turkey. Note that my e-mailed European edition of Politico had as one of its top headings, Erdogans Reichstag Fire
Syraqistan
What Comes Next After Raqqa and Mosul? Defense One (resilc)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Imperial Collapse Watch
2016
Justice department uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests Guardian (Chuck L)
Black Injustice Tipping Point
Police union head who blamed menacing Tamir Rice for his own death faults Obama for cop shootings Raw Story (furzy)
Toy Models by and via @kocherlakota009
This is Whats Cannibalizing the US Economy Wolf Richter
As Rates Sink, Housing Bubbles Rise Wall Street Journal
Why Oil Prices Might Never Recover OilPrice (reslc)
Goodbye Lenin, Hello Bernanke ABC (Chuck L)
A Bank Too Big to Jail Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times
Asset management: Actively failing Financial Times (David L)
Class Warfare
Antidote du jour. A wild-long tailed macaque monkey has adopted an abandoned kitten at Ubuds Monkey Forest in Bali @planetpics. Your humble blogger has been to the Monkey Forest! Dunno how a monkey can make sure that cat gets fed, though.
See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Yves here. The updates in this MacroBusiness report are consistent with our reading on the arm-wrestling between Matteo Renzi versus the ECB and other Eurocrats. Short version: since early this year, Renzi has been trying to get what has widely been described as a bail out for sick Italian banks, of which there are many. The term bail out makes Renzis plan seem more generous than it is, since he is not proposing to prop up diseased banks, but to have them spin out their bad assets into a bad bank. This is similar to the approach used in the US savings & loan crisis and in Swedens widely praised early 1990s bank rescues. A good bank/ bad bank approach leave the cleaned up banks considerably smaller. Some banks may have so many bad loans that there is no or pretty much no good bank left, so you can expect this approach to lead to some consolidation too. I have to confess that am not clear as to how Renzi proposes to change the operations of the good banks that needed state intervention to survive.
It would seem to make eminent good sense to give Renzi the waivers he needs to rescue the banks since:
If Italian banks start falling over, the dominoes will quickly reach Deutsche Bank As the article below points out (and weve stressed earlier), if Renzi is forced to do bail-ins, small Italian savers will take a big hit. Many were fraudulently sold subordinated bonds and told they were the same as deposits. Thats not true, since they will be next in line after bank equity to be wiped out in a bail-in. Any meaningful losses to these small savers would both further damage Italys already weak economy, and boost the Five Star movement, which already has good odds of winning in elections this fall. Five Star has promised a referendum on exiting the Eurozone. The UK leaving the EU would be very damaging economically but its remotely possible that it might not be a total disaster. By contrast, Italy leaving the Eurozone would be cataclysmic.
So with the stakes so high, one would think the ECB and Eurocrats would relent, since they have a perfectly good face-saving excuse for retreating from their barmy bail-in scheme: with Brexit in play, banks are already looking wobbly, and the new bail-in rules allow for rescues under extraordinary circumstances. But Renzi tried that argument, as well as another escape hatch, public interest, and was told Nein both times.
Why are the European banking regulators being so self-destructive? Part of the answer may be prejudice against periphery countries. But as David Llewellyn-Smith indicates, again consistent with what other analysts have sad, the authorities are wedded to the newly-nstituted bank regulations, even though banking experts all deem the bail-in procedures to be guaranteed to produce runs and shake confidence. While bail-ins would be a useful tool in a regulators arsenal, the bail-in rules are one size fits all, making them unsuitable for real-world use.
This situation is disturbingly analogous to Lehman. After the Bear Stearns rescue, there was such a strong political backlash that the Bush Administration decided it was not doing that again. Moreover, it was obvious from the media that they were not going to relent. Yet Dick Fuld nevertheless convinced himself that Lehman would get government help if he could not find a moneybags to save Lehman. That led him to blow up the one deal he could have had, an investment by the Korean Development Bank in a Lehman good bank. Fuld regarded it as unacceptable to have to wind down the bad parts of Lehman.
Oh, and in a telling bit of historythe successor to Creditanstalt is over 96% owned by Unicredit, Italys biggest bank.
While the politics are different, we again have political imperatives trumping real-world consequences. And here, the downside is more obvious than it was with Lehman.
By David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat magazine, now the Asia Pacifics leading geo-politics website. Originally posted at MacroBusiness
From the AFR:
Platinum, the Sydney-based global value investor, is defying the bearish mood and buying more European bank stocks after its positions in banks accounted for almost half of the fund managers losses so far this year. The Platinum Unhedged Funds latest report shows that its value fell 10 per cent in 2015-16 compared with a 1 per cent fall for global equities. Platinum is not alone; many Australian fund managers who invest globally have seen returns hurt by the Brexit vote through falling positions in European bank stocks such as Lloyds Banking Group, including at PM Capital and Magellan among others. What is unusual is Platinums willingness to buy more The banks share prices are factoring in fear of further political risk, namely, a full break-up of the European Union. The impact of recency bias plays a big role here. As we have just seen, a large country making a shock exit, suddenly the probability of further exits feels significantly heightened, the fund manager told clients. But we need to take into account that the European governments will react and concessions will be made.
I am sure that Platinum is joking when it says that European banks are priced for a full break-up of the European Union. They have fallen a long way, however, and that rather amusing statement does not mean that it is wrong about Europe giving ground on Italy, from Bloomie:
It may seem like there are many different ways this critical situation can pan out, but all bar one would be fatal for the euro zone. The only option is to bail out the banks without bailing in investors. Of course the banks will be rescued. This column has previously outlined how Italian banks will be saved precisely because the alternative is the collapse of the Italian economy, which would likely precipitate the breakup of the euro. So the crunch decision is whether bond investors share some of the cost of that bailout. Since January, the EU has legislated that investors must be bailed in, and bail-ins have happened elsewhere, e.g. 54% haircut for senior creditors of Heta Asset Resolution in Austria. Surely the EU cant blatantly break its own new rules just for Italy? That would set a bad precedent, completely undermine its authority, create large moral hazard within the euro zone, and weaken the euro. But it can. And it most likely will. Because the alternative is much scarier. In Italy, too much of the subordinated bank debt is owned by private individuals. If theyre made to pay for this, then Italys constitutional referendum in October will fail, resulting in Prime Minister Renzi resigning and the collapse of the government. Italy will be in crisis, and anti-EU sentiment will gain a significant boost at a time when the euroskeptic Five-Star Movement has already become the most popular party. Again, the euro zone will be in serious jeopardy. So theres really only one path to be followed: the one that doesnt threaten to break up the euro zone. The Italian banks will be bailed out and investors will not be bailed in. This will be a boost to global equities and positive- yielding bonds, yet another boon for emerging markets. It will be less good for the euro, which is trading within 1% of its 18-month high versus a trade-weighted index.
That is probably too black and white and a partial bail-in is more likely with a distinction made between small and large bond holders. So, to that extent, Platinum is probably right.
Except that that is not the real problem. This is, from The Telegraph:
The bondholders losses risk harming the governments reputation at a delicate moment. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is already facing a close-fought referendum over a planned constitutional reform. If he loses the vote, it could mean the end of his government, and polls indicate that the eurosceptic Five Star party, headed by Beppe Grillo, could perform well in a general election, spreading further political instability through the European Union. Italian pragmatists argue the cost of a government-backed bailout would be worth paying, to avoid financial instability. Yet the equation is not that simple. The EU insists bondholders have to bear the cost of the recapitalisation, sparing taxpayers and forcing investors to think about the risks they are taking, to help stop future crises at banks and in governments finances. Officials at the Eurogroup and European Central Bank are digging in their heels they do not want the past five years of financial reforms undermined immediately by Italy. Such a result would sap their own authority and open the door to similar state-backed deals in Portugal, which is also suffering from bad bank loans. Still, even a bailout would bring political risks to Mr Renzi. Lorenzo Codogno, former director- general of the Treasury Department at the Italian economy ministry, says there is a risk that a bail-in of retail investors could be politically toxic, even if a conversion of debt into equity, could be a gift for many bondholders who now have illiquid subordinated debt. The risk is clearly that it is not taken well by the electorate, affecting political support for the PM, says Codogno, the current chief economist of LC Macro Advisors.
Does Platinum understand Italian politics so deeply (making it pretty unique) that it knows how this is going to play with the polity amid BREXIT, French attacks, a rising Five Star Movement, as well as the likelihood that any European bailout concession will very likely come with reform conditions that will do great harm to growth before anything improves? Platinum clearly did not see BREXIT coming so why would it be any better on Italy? The blood is up in Europe, this is not just a numbers game anymore.
Perhaps holding on at this juncture makes sense given Platinums losses but buying more?
Chemical breakthrough in quantum computing (Nanowerk News) The key to quantum computing could be as simple as burning the active ingredient in moth balls; using this method, the holy grail of quantum computing the ability to work in real-world room temperatures has been demonstrated by an international group of researchers, combining chemistry with quantum physics.
Co-led by Dr Mohammad Choucair who recently finished a University of Sydney research fellowship gained as an outstanding early career researcher in the School of Chemistry the 31-year-old has been working with collaborators in Switzerland and Germany for two years before the breakthrough.
The team has made a conducting carbon material that they demonstrated could be used to perform quantum computing at room temperature, rather than near absolute zero (-273C).
The material is simply created by burning naphthalene; the ashes form the carbon material. Not only has it solved the question of temperature, it also addresses other issues such as the need for conductivity and the ability to integrate into silicon.
The results are being published tonight in the high-impact journal Nature Communications ("Room temperature manipulation of long lifetime spins in metallic-like carbon nanospheres").
Dr Choucair said the discovery meant as a result, practical quantum computing might be possible within a few years. We have made quantum computing more accessible, he said. This work demonstrates the simple ad-hoc preparation of carbon-based quantum bits.
Chemistry gives us the power to create nanomaterials on-demand that could form the basis of technologies like quantum computers and spintronics, combining to make more efficient and powerful machines.
The next step is to build a prototyping chip but Dr Choucair said he was particularly interested in the possibilities that could come from longer-term research. Rather than seeking comprehensive commercial opportunities, he plans to use the facilities at the University-based Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology and further the work at its headquarters, the new $150m Sydney Nanoscience Hub.
Dr Choucair said he was passionate about improving technology for the public and supported open access research. Quantum computing will allow us to advance our technology and our understanding of the natural world, he said.
Pedestrians walk in front of a Bank of America Corp. branch in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, March 14, 2012. Federal Reserve stress tests on 19 of the biggest U.S. lenders show that most of the banks are "getting stronger," according to former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Bank of America's consolidated second-quarter mortgage banking income declined to $312 million from over $1 billion for the same period one year prior as the company continued to put more of its originations on its balance sheet, which reduced gain-on-sale revenue.
Specifically there were four items that affected this quarter's mortgage income, said Paul Donofrio, chief financial officer in response to a question during a conference call. "First, we sold an appraisal business last year, so there was revenue in last year's second quarter that isn't in this quarter. Second, we had some servicing sales in the second quarter of last year for a gain that we didn't have this quarter.
"Third and probably most significant from a revenue perspective is that we had the ACE decision in the second quarter last year. So we released last year some reps and warranties and that was a significant amount of benefit last year.
"And then fourth, and probably strategically most important, is we are selling less mortgages, choosing instead to hold them on our balance sheet. And, obviously, this decreases mortgage banking income but increases net interest income over time," he said.
During the quarter, between its consumer banking and global wealth and investment management businesses, Bank of America originated $20.6 billion of mortgages, up from $19.2 billion one year prior.
The consumer banking unit reported $11.5 billion of first mortgage originations and $3.9 billion of home equity loan originations, compared with $11.3 billion and $2.9 billion, respectively, one year prior. Production income was $182 million, down from $272 million.
The unit's mortgage servicing rights portfolio took a fair market valuation adjustment hit of $223 million plus amortization of $165 million to end the quarter with a value of $1.8 billion, down from $2.2 billion at the start. Servicing fees slipped to $179 million from $208 million.
Bank of America's corporate earnings fell to $4.2 billion from $5.1 billion.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Dalga Khatinoglu Trend:
Iran suffered severely from the lack of investments and foreign technology during the sanctions era, which pushed the countrys net electricity export from above eight billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2013 to around zero in the first half of current Iranian fiscal year (started on March 21).
During the sanctions era, the efficiency of Irans power plants remained unchanged at 37 percent in average, while the power lost during transmission and distribution process remained high at 14 percent.
As for power output, Iran experienced less than 1 percent growth last fiscal year (ended on March 21) due to low investments in the past years. Iran was planning to increase the output by 5 percent.
The combined-cycle power plants still share 25 percent of Irans total power generation, despite a plan to increase this figure by converting old gas thermal power plants into combined-cycle ones.
Meanwhile, Iran and Turkey have a $4.2-billion memorandum of understanding (MOU) to construct power plants. Iran is also in negotiations with European companies, such as Siemens, for import of turbines in first stage, and then establishing a joint venture to produce turbines.
Iran needs $15 billion in the next five years to construct new power plants with 26,000 MW capacity and $5 billion to boost transmission and distribution systems.
Iran also needs more investments to increase power plants efficiency and decrease power lost in grid.
Currently, the countrys power plants have 75,000 MW generation capacity and they produce 282 billion kWh of electricity.
Iran direly needs to lure foreign investment, because the country has no choice but to boost the power generation capacity. Irans electricity export plunged during last two years due to rapidly increasing domestic demand.
Meanwhile, the removal of sanctions will pave a way for resuming industrial activities. This sector shared 31.5 percent of total power consumption last fiscal year, 2.3 percent less than in the previous year.
Irans power network should be developed, enhanced and upgraded as well.
Iran needs at least 5 percent power output growth per year.
Iran also exported above 11 billion kWh and imported three billion kWh of electricity in 2013.
During last two years, the figure drastically declined. In first quarter of current fiscal year (March-June), Iran exported only 1.341 billion kWh of electricity and imported 1.321 billion kWh.
Iran says it needs $50 billion in total in power sector in next seven years, including $12 billion investment in the renewables.
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Dalga Khatinoglu is the head of Trend Agency's Iran news service, follow him on Twitter: @dalgakhatinoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Elena Kosolapova Trend:
Kazakh Almaty citys anti-terrorism headquarters dismissed the information spread in media and social networks July 18 about new armed seizures in various parts of the city, including in Zhuldyz district and Spa center in Bostandyk district.
In its message, the Almaty citys anti-terrorism headquarters urged the citizens to stay calm and not to give way to groundless panic.
Earlier, the building of the Almaty District Interior Department and a department of the National Security Committee were attacked.
The suspected attacker was wounded and detained by the police.
Currently, an operation is underway to detain the attackers accomplice.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
Vancouver city council votes to ban use of neonicotinoids
Scientists identify unlikely organic alternative to neonics
(NaturalNews) Last week, the Vancouver city council cast a unanimous vote to issue a citywide ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. Neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, are a group of pesticides first introduced into large scale agriculture in the 1990s, and are believed to be one of the leading causes of recent honeybee die-offs Initially presented as a safer alternative to DDT pesticides, neonics have been widely used on Canadian crops by industrial farmers for more than two decades. Since their introduction, British Columbia has experienced 12 to 38 percent losses in honeybee populations each winter.According to the Montreal Gazette , "Research has shown that lethal impacts to bees caused by neonics range from impaired memory and less success in breeding, to reduced resistance to illness."In light of the mounting reports displaying the toxic effects neonics have on honeybees, Vancouver made history by becoming the largest city so far to outlaw their use.The Vancouver city council's decision came as the result of a federal lawsuit filed by the environmental groups The David Suzuki Foundation, Friends of the Earth Canada, Ontario Nature and the Wilderness Committee, against Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PRMA), for allowing the use of neonicotinoids without conducting the proper scientific research to evaluate their potentially harmful environmental impacts.In Vancouver's case, it wasn't just the farming and agricultural industries' use of neonics that became alarming it was its residents' use as well. The greater population of Vancouver has allegedly been drowning their lawns with the toxic stuff in attempts to keep out chafer beetles, a nuisance grub that kills grass roots.A series of city reports found that when pollinating insects, including honeybees, rest on plants sprayed with neonics, they become extremely vulnerable to being poisoned by the presence of the pesticide.Instead of using neonic pesticides to treat their lawns, scientists are urging citizens of Vancouver to use nematodes, microscopic worms that effectively infect and destroy chafer beetles without harming honeybees, to rid their lawns of the root-killing grub.Mark Winston, SFU researcher and honeybee health advocate, praised Vancouver's ban of neonics . "We overuse pesticides," he said. "There's a huge fallacy in policy making that the only way we can feed the world is by using pesticides, and that doesn't stand up to the data. Organic and sustainable systems are as close to or as productive as pesticide farming."While Vancouver joins Montreal and the entire province of Ontario as the first Canadian regions to outlaw the use of neonics, Canada's federal government remains divided on the issue.According to Gwen Barlee, spokeswoman for the Wilderness Committee, Canadian environmentalists are not happy with Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency's delay in issuing a nationwide ban on neonics, despite the surplus of information linking them to honeybee population declines.In response, Rebecca Gilman, spokeswoman for Health Canada, claimed, "Health Canada is actively reviewing the emerging body of scientific and monitoring data and is conducting an extensive re-evaluation of all agricultural uses of neonicotinoid pesticides in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation."Here's to hoping that the same corporate lobbyist corruption by the pesticide industry that's been preventing the U.S. government from tackling the issue of neonics, won't seep its way into the Canadian federal government as well. Check back for updates.
Hurry and sign up for the FREE online Alzheimer's and Dementia Summit from July 25 August 1
Music finds way to shine through 101 year-old woman with dementia
(NaturalNews) Alzheimer's disease is one of the most debilitating, cruelest diseases on the planet. The sixth leading cause of death in the world, Alzheimer's is most often the culprit behind the development of symptoms associated with dementia , such as memory loss, confusion, and the inability to recognize people and places once known by heart.Affecting nearly 35 million people per year, Alzheimer's normally costs families caring for a loved one with late-stage dementia roughly $300,000.While Alzheimer's is, for the most part, an atrociously awful degenerative process, there are ways to prevent and reverse symptoms associated with Alzheimer's and dementia. Events like the Alzheimer's and Dementia Summit being held from July 25 August 1 are great examples of communally informative ways to gain a greater insight on how to find natural ways to slow down and even halt the onset of Alzheimer's.Featured speaker, Christopher Shade , PhD, will be offering insightful advice on the relation between heavy metal toxicity and the development of Alzheimer's. "I was just shocked what the overlap is between mercury neurotoxicity and Alzheimer's ," Shade wrote in a recently published article.Events like Shade's "Brain Defense What to do About Heavy Metal Toxicity" can help shed a slight shade of light on Alzheimer's and all of the suffering that goes along with it.While most people will only be able to find hope in events like the Alzheimer's and Dementia Summit, there are a few cases that have found ways to be blissfully hopeful all on their own.Take for example, ME, a 101 year-old woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's when she was in her eighties, who has somehow managed to retain the ability to play the piano just as eloquently as she could when she was in her twenties.Preferring to go by ME for the preservation of her privacy, the 101 year-old miracle woman is rarely aware of her surroundings, often confused, and cannot recognize anyone she has met in the last few decades.When she hops on the piano though, a different story unfolds. Performing regularly at an assortment of California assisted living facilities, ME can play over 400 songs by ear from a variety of genres, including ragtime, show tunes, pop, and gospel."Her sense of memory and the richness of her harmonic arrangements is really very impressive," wrote Eleanor Selfridge-Field, a music and symbols researcher at Stanford University.Born in Tennessee in 1914, ME first learned to play the piano and violin as a child. As she honed in her craft, ME went on to earn two degrees in music education and served a brief stint as a violinist in a woman's orchestra.Since experiencing a stroke and being diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementia, ME now claims to not know how to read music, and that "[S]he just finds the starting note and her fingers do the rest."It's not unheard of for Alzheimer's patients to be able to retain their musical abilities after diagnosis. According to New Scientist, "[E]vidence suggests that music is more diffusely located in the brain than language networks," perhaps a possible reason for its ability to sustain itself in the memory of dementia patients.Heart-warming stories like ME's provide hope for research dedicated to finding cures for the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's disease. To learn more on how to prevent and reverse Alzheimer's and dementia, sign up for the FREE online Alzheimer's and Dementia Summit taking place from July 25 August 1.
'Most brutal ideology'
Not 'obscene,' just honest
(NaturalNews) Pamela Geller is an explosive figure who is not daunted by the "politically correct." In particular, when it comes to discussing the reality of violent Islamic extremism her bailiwick she is not only vocal, but relentless.Only, Facebook can't seem to handle the truths that she and her supporters put forth. So the world's biggest social media site tends to block, remove and ban people and posts on the subject, which its censors find injurious to their consciences. And that includes Geller.Well, Geller has had enough of it. So she's taking the social media behemoth to court.In a column she wrote for Breitbart , she explained, in detail, why she's taking legal action. In a nutshell, she's tired of being treated like women are treated in Islamic countries."Every day I received emails from readers and members of my various Facebook groups, asking for help after having been blocked for posting a story or comment that might offend Muslims," she wrote. "This is America, not Saudi Arabia. Enough. I am suing."She stated further that she is being assisted by the American Freedom Law Center , or AFLC, a Judeo-Christian law firm, and that she filed suit in recent days in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit, which was brought on behalf of Geller, the group Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer (director of Jihad Watch) and the American Freedom Defense Initiative, challenges Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act under the First Amendment.In a press release, AFLC stated that, "Section 230 provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge."The AFLC explained that Geller and Spencer, together with the organizations that they operate, are regularly subjected to discrimination by social media sites including Facebook , YouTube and Twitter, because of their beliefs and views that radical Islam is dangerous and deadly. The social media sites, the organization said, view such truths as offensive to Muslims, though clearly Geller and Spencer are not singling outin general, but rather the radical elements within it."Such discrimination, which is largely religion-based in that these California businesses are favoring adherents of Islam over those who are not, is prohibited in many states, but particularly in California by the state's anti-discrimination law, which is broadly construed to prohibit all forms of discrimination," the AFLC said. "However, because of the immunity granted by the federal government, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are free to engage in their otherwise unlawful, discriminatory practices."Geller says that she has been documenting Facebook's "outrageous bias" for a number of years. She said that her documentation shows that Facebook is "notoriously one-sided" in the way it views those who oppose terrorism and who voice support for Israel. Geller also noted that her stance against what she has called "the most brutal and extreme ideology" on the planet namely, Islam-based sharia law has consistently been blocked or banned.In June, she said, the social media giant took down a Facebook page she had established in the wake of the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., because censors claimed it contained "hateful, obscene, or threatening" content. But, she said, opposing violent terrorist acts should not be considered any of those things. Neither should pointing out the obvious that the act, and so many others before it, was committed by a radical terrorist who stated plainly before he was killed by police that he acted in the name of Islam."What is hateful, obscene and threatening is that Facebook is moving to silence everyone who speaks honestly about the motivating ideology behind such attacks," she wrote.readers are well aware of Facebook's censorship. We have reported in the past that the social media site bans or blocks many alternative media outlets, holistic health products and other non-standard content, preferring instead to push a globalist agenda."This is so typical of the elites. They control policy, they control the media, they control the culture but they can't control the people. And this makes them crazy. If they could, they would change the people," Geller wrote.She is right, of course.
'Someone was really sleeping'
'I'm sort of raising a red flag'
(NaturalNews) It doesn't seem to make sense to apply for a publicly-funded grant to study the effects of a certain vaccine , receive the grant, and then warn everyone against that vaccine. But that's what one Canadian researcher did recently.As reported by Canada's, Montreal-based social scientist Genevieve Rail of Concordia University received a $270,000 grant to study the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine and then condemned it, saying the country should establish a moratorium on its use.Rail, who is under fire from critics along with the federal agency that gave her the grant, also said that there is little proof that HPV causes cervical cancer, despite the findings of a Nobel Prize-winning study by a German scientist five years ago that unearthed the link.Establishment medical types are lambasting Rail's public attacks, calling them seriously misinformed. Critics also said that her remarks are bound to undermine a priority public health program in the country, while wondering aloud how the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) could provide her with grant money in the first place.Rail, who has a doctorate in kinesiology the study of body mechanics and movement received the grant in order to study HPV vaccination "discourses" and how they affected teenagers, using both interviews and drawings."This is akin to funding research that purports to show tobacco smoking does not cause lung cancer," said Eduardo Franco, head of cancer epidemiology at McGill University, according to the. "And that tobacco cessation, rather than helping reduce risk, is actually causing harm ... CIHR would not fund such a study , would it?"Dr. Marc Steben, a family physician in Montreal, and head of the Canadian Network on HPV Prevention, was even more direct."I don't know who was on her (grant awarding) jury," he said. "Someone was really sleeping."It wasn't clear from thereport whether anyone at CIHR was aware of Rail's viewpoints prior to awarding the grant some four years ago.The controversy started after Rail and a co-author, Abby Lippman a professor emeritus at McGill University published an opinion piece innewspaper that questioned the safety of the HPV vaccine and whether it was of any real benefit. The piece also urged the Canadian national government in Quebec to end HPV vaccination until it could be fully vetted and its safety established by an independent investigatory body.In additional to Rail, others have criticized the HPV vaccine lately as well. The criticism has come from divergent sources from Catholic boards of education to a newspaper article that was supposedly discredited, thereported. However, Rail's views stand out because of her position at her university, and because she received public funds to study the vaccine and surrounding issues.Rail and Lippman voiced some of the same views at the World Congress on Public Health that was held in India in February. The pair also led a workshop that encouraged participants to be "on the offensive against the vaccine," while hinting that "politicians are paid off" by Big Pharma and other interests to put such public health policies in place.In an interview with the, Rail said that she does not regret her public statements. Rather, she noted that she wants her comments to help drown out the "dominant discourse" regarding the vaccine.She also noted that some of the parents among the 170 interviews she conducted during her four-year study into the vaccine, said they believed the shots had caused some serious medical side effects."I'm sort of raising a red flag, out of respect for what I've found in my own study, and for the despair of parents who had totally perfect 12-year-olds who are now in their beds, too tired to go to school," she told the. "Yes, we're going against the grain, and we are going against those who are believed, i.e. doctors and nurses and people in public health."
Governments are 'turning a blind eye'
Globalization: the human and environmental cost
(NaturalNews) Environmental activists are being murdered at record rates, with as many as three deaths occurring per week , according to London-based advocacy group, Global Witness.A report released last year by Global Witness, found that 185 killings occurred in 2015 a 60 percent increase over the previous year, and "the deadliest year on record."The majority of the murders were committed against activists involved in opposing logging, mining, agribusiness and dam projects, with Brazil's logging protestors being the most common victims of violence.In Brazil's Amazon states and elsewhere throughout the world the murderers are being shielded by "collusion between state and corporate interests.""In cases that are well-documented we found 16 were related to paramilitary groups, 13 to the army, 11 to the police, and 11 to private security strongly implying state or company links to the killings. There was little evidence that the authorities either fully investigated the crimes or took actions to bring the perpetrators to account."And, although the Global Witness report finds these trends more prevalent in locations such as South America and Africa, the United States government is also complicit in the persecution of activists, labeling them as terrorists , and using infiltration and illegal surveillance tactics against their organizations.In fact, many governments throughout the world are not only "turning a blind eye to corruption, illegalities and environmental degradation," but are also publicly condemning activists as being "anti-development."The sad truth is that most of the violence is being perpetrated against indigenous people trying to protect their land from pillaging by loggers, ranchers and plantation owners.Indigenous people accounted for 40 percent of the total deaths.Anti-logging activists were the most frequently targeted, but the palm oil industry in places like the Philippines was also responsible for a number of deaths.From"The top five most deadly countries for environmental activists and land defenders were Brazil, with 50 deaths; the Philippines, with 33; Colombia, with 26; and Peru and Nicaragua, with 12 fatal attacks each."Globalization has created a whole new level of government and corporate collusion in terms of exploiting resources and crushing any opposition.The rise of corporate fascism has led to extreme levels of violence and corruption amid the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems and, at this point there seems to be little hope of stopping it.Free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will make it even more difficult to oppose global corporate interests, leaving activists squeezed between legal obstacles and government-sanctioned persecution.The TPP will weaken regulatory agencies globally, making it easier for corporations to exploit natural resources, and leaving little legal recourse for those who oppose them.And, as long as governments continue to turn a blind eye to violence against activists, while simultaneously passing legislation favoring corporations, the problem will only continue to grow worse.Global Witness is calling for the protection of activists and their right to speak out, as well as a full investigation into, and prosecution of, those responsible for the violence.To find out more about their work, and to join in the struggle against the corruption and violence being carried out by those who wish to exploit the world's natural resources, visit the Global Witness website And, as corporate influence becomes more powerful by the day, it's crucial for the average citizen to become as self-reliant as possible. Don't wait for the total collapse of the system; start preparing today It's becoming increasingly clear that our governments do not represent the people anymore, but rather the corporations who get them elected while lining their pockets. And these corporations have shown that they will stop at nothing even murder to get what they want.
Journey to Mars will get a rover upgrade and it's one of the most advanced machines to be designed for deep space explorations. After Mars Curiosity Rover, NASA will build a better life-hunting machine for the red planet the Mars 2020 Rover. It can collect samples and store them in tubes, it can also navigate better and identify danger zones and it is equipped with a microphone!
NASA's Mars 2020 rover will search for signs of past life https://t.co/KiGopbS52I pic.twitter.com/O392nKXUUQ Engadget (@engadget) July 15, 2016
People can expect to hear Martian sounds when the 2020 rover set foot on the red planet. But aside from that, the new machine is equipped with instruments that could potentially help scientists find evidence of ancient Martian life.
What makes Mars 2020 rover different is the fact that it is designed to allow multi-mission approach. Sample materials from the red planet will be collected by the new rover in the course of its mission for future retrieval with the intention of bringing them back to Earth. Another difference between the old and new rover is that the latter has a new subsystem that can collect and prepare samples. The rover is equipped with tubes where samples will be stored and about 30 of them will be deposited at specific locations throughout the planet's surface for potential retrieval missions in the future.
"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," Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate said in a press release. "This mission marks a significant milestone in NASA's Journey to Mars - to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars, and to advance our goal of sending humans to the Red Planet," Yoder added.
NASA reveals that the 2020 rover will look like its older predecessor but will be carrying more advanced science instruments to enable a futuristic approach in the search for ancient Martian life, in a way that has never been done before.
The 2020 rover will conduct its first oxygen usability test for the Journey to Mars manned mission to the red planet set to launch in 2030. An instrument aboard the rover, called Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resources Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is designed to generate oxygen from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the rover 2020 will get to try that as well.
A battalion of sensors will also make the search more effective. These sensors will monitor weather conditions, dust environment and even sub-surface geologic structures by using ground-penetrating radar. It'll also carry a SuperCam that can use lasers to vaporize rocks. But one of the most important upgrades for the rover is its smarter navigational system. "As it is descending, the spacecraft can tell whether it is headed for one of the unsafe zones and divert to safe ground nearby," Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent and landing lead said in a statement published by Space.com.
The rover was carefully planned and underwent a rigorous review process, but the agency is now ready to build the final design construction for the latest and innovative Mars rover that is set to launch in the summer of 2020 and is expected to arrive on Mars in February 2021.
NASA will now proceed on the final design and construction of their newest Mars rover that is expected to be launched on summer of 2020 and reach the red planet on 2021.
Like its predecessor, the 2020 rover will have six wheels and weigh about a ton. However, unlike Curiosity, the new rover boasts an array of new science instruments and enhancements capable of exploring the red planet like never before.
With its main mission of searching evidence of early life on the Red Planet, the Mars 2020 rover is equipped with entirely new subsystem, including a coring drill on its arm and a rack of sample tubes, to collect and prepare Martian rocks and soil samples. The sample tubes are planned to be left at selected locations to be picked-up by future sample-retrieval missions. These samples will then be studied on Earth to search for evidence of life on Mars and possible health hazards for future human missions.
"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 NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a statement. "This mission marks a significant milestone in NASA's Journey to Mars-to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars, and to advance our goal of sending humans to the Red Planet."
According to a press release, the Mars 2020 rover will also feature two science instruments on its mast to provide high-resolution imaging and three types of spectroscopy for characterizing rocks and soil from a distance and help determine which targets to explore close-up.
Additionally, a suite of sensors will be mounted on the mast and desk of the new rover to monitor weather conditions and dust environment of the planet, while ground-penetrating radar will assess the sub-surface geological structure of the red planet. A suite of cameras and microphone will also be mounted on the rover to capture never-before-seen or heard imagery and sounds of the rover's entry, descent and landing on the red planet.
Scientists came across two mummified spiders in Burmese amber, but that's not even the most surprising discovery yet.
Upon studying the spiders, the scientists found out that they are unlike any present spiders we have here today.
The spiders, dubbed Electroblemma bifida and both estimated to be 99 million years old, have long projections extending from their upper shells. They also have horned fangs.
"The genus is distinguished by its enormous dorsal carapace projection and highly modified chelicerae. The new genus is referred to the tribe Tetrablemmini within the subfamily Tetrablemminae. The presence of a relatively derived Tetrablemmid on the south-east Eurasian continent during the Late Cretaceous suggests that the family was already well diversified in tropical rainforests at this time," said the study published in journal Cretaceous Research.
Study lead author Paul Selden, a professor of invertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas, told Live Science that the feature of the spider is unique even for their own kind.
"The new fossil is an adult male and takes these horns to an extreme," Selden said in an e-mail interview.The size of the feature is unlike the size which is found in the same family.
Because the projection expands at the end, the researchers believe it would have held the spider's eyes.
"Nevertheless, the new species can be firmly placed within the modern family and is similar to species living in Southeast Asia and China today," Selden added.
In 2007, the family Tetrablemmidae has been recorded in China for the first time. Researchers Yanfeng Tong and Shuquiang Li described them as cave-dwelling armored spiders. They are called armored spiders because of the complicated patterns of their abdominal scuta.
The natural history of Tetrablemmidae is not widely researched, but most live in litter, crevice or mosses in tropical countries.
Attempts to discover natural groups within Tetrablemmidae have been rare. According to the National Geographic, the specimens are currently housed at Capital Normal University in Beijing, but will eventually be deposited in the Three Gorges Entomological Museum in Chongqing, China.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Elena Kosolapova Trend:
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev held an operational meeting of the Security Council in connection with the incident in Almaty city, the countrys presidential press-service tweeted July 18.
Kazakh media reported about a shooting near the Almaly District Interior Department in the center of Almaty July 18 morning.
Four people, including three police officers and one civilian, were killed.
The suspect was arrested by the police.
An operation is underway to detain the criminals accomplice.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
A team of scientists has generated a way to harness clean renewable energy. Dubbed osmotic power, it comes from a natural phenomenon when freshwater comes in contact with seawater through a very thin membrane.
According to the research published in the journal Nature, scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne's Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology has created an innovative way of yielding more osmotic power by using a three-atom-thick semipermeable membrane, which separates the seawater and fresh water depending on salt concentration. The system then balances these salt concentrations until they reach equilibrium.
Made of molybdenum disulfide, the membrane has a nanopore where seawater and freshwater could pass through until they balance out.
Jiandong Feng, lead author of the research, said they had to be precise with the size of the nanopore as making it too big will result to lower voltage, while making it small will hinder the ions to pass through.
"We had to first fabricate and then investigate the optimal size of the nanopore. If it's too big, negative ions can pass through and the resulting voltage would be too low. If it's too small, not enough ions can pass through and the current would be too weak," Feng said.
Science Daily notes that the discovery could open doors to new energy alternatives. The team has estimated that osmotic power created from a 1m membrane is enough to generate 50,000 standard energy.
This revolutionary discovery also creates great potential for estuaries as energy resources. There have been pilot projects conducted in the U.S., Netherlands, Japan and Norway.
What makes osmotic power different from other types of renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy, is that it could produce energy regardless of time, weather and situation.
The scientists hope that a more powerful osmotic power could be developed to make renewable energy more accessible.
Fancy a beach holiday in sunny Denmark? As unlikely as that sounds, the Scandinavian country may someday be a top travel pick for summer seaside getaways - and it's all thanks to global warming.
Climate change may be intensifying storms in the Asia Pacific and forest fires in Australia, but it might also be improving summer weather in Denmark, according to an international research project partially funded by the Danish Meteorology Board (DMI). The study, undertaken by a group of Greek researchers, finds that the consequences can include an increase in floods, torrential downpours and the melting of Greenland's ice sheet. However, a world that is warmer by 2 degrees Celsius may prove beneficial to Denmark in some ways.
The Greek researchers sought to come up with projected summer temperatures for a range of countries in Europe. Their resulting report states that only two other European countries - Andorra and Luxembourg - are expected to see higher temperature increases than Denmark.
"Denmark takes third place amongst the countries that will see a positive increase in the tourism-climate index during summer months," comments Cathrine Fox Maule, a climate researcher at DMI who has closely followed the research project. Or as The Local DK puts it, "the broad, flat sands of Denmark's windswept coast might one day find themselves transformed into a northern Costa del Sol."
Maule proves more cautious in her conclusions. She notes that while the researchers find that present-day summer destinations such as Spain, Portugal and Greece are bound to get uncomfortably hot in the future, Spain is likely to remain the choice summer vacation pick over Denmark. What the warmer climate can offer is to make Denmark more competitive against Spain than it is today.
Nyheder TV 2 reports that John Frederiksen, a Danish trade union vice chairman, welcomes the increase in business, if not global warming in general. "Although it's not necessarily an encouraging thing overall, it's positive that Denmark will be become a more attractive holiday destination, since it will mean an increase in employment opportunities in the sector," notes Frederiksen, who oversees the hotel and restaurant industry. He adds, "It will be easier for our members to find jobs in hotels and restaurants."
The following content is created in consultation with the San Francisco SPCA. It does not reflect the work or opinions of NBC BAY AREA's editorial staff. To learn more about the San Francisco SPCA, visit sfspca.org.
Who hasnt returned home from a rough day, curled up on the couch with a favorite pet and felt their spirits instantaneously lift? From their soft fur to their understanding eyes to their unshakable loyalty, animals have an uncanny ability to make everything feel better.
In fact, its scientifically proven. In addition to helping us live richer, fuller lives, its well known that interacting with our pets has significant health benefits from lowering blood pressure to improving cardiovascular health to reducing stress and anxiety.
But animals can also actively help and assist us in many other ways. In 1981, the SF SPCA created the first humane society-based animal assisted therapy program. This year, more than 300 teams will visit more than 91,000 people across the Bay Area at schools, universities, hospitals, retirement homes, veteran facilities, prisons and even the San Francisco international airport.
SF SPCA Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) programs benefit both those receiving visits as well as those who take their animals out into the community. To see someone light up when they see a therapy animal come through the door is an unforgettable experience. In medical or nursing home situations, its not uncommon for AAT volunteers to hear that a patient hasn't spoken for some time, yet totally relaxes, talks to, and interacts with the therapy animal. Animals also can help with the healing process by reinforcing rehabilitative behaviors, such as throwing a ball or walking. And it's not just the patient who reaps the benefits. Family members and friends who sit in on animal visits say they feel better, too.
Though its not only hospital and nursing home patients that are are reaping the rewards of therapy animals. In non-medical settings, such as universities, animals can help students deal with anxiety and stress. Young children have blossomed in the SF SPCA AATs Puppy Dog Tales program, which provides a stress-free, non-judgmental learning environment where kids can practice reading aloud to a therapy animal. Reading to a therapy animal not only helps them improve their reading skills, it helps them to focus better, reduces self-consciousness and increases their confidence.
Or imagine you're a traveler at SFO and you find out that your flight has been cancelled. Youre understandably angry as you try to find a new way home. Soon after, one of the SF SPCA Wag Brigade dogs strolls by, and suddenly youre petting the dog and asking the handler a few questions. Afterwards, you realize you're smiling. You feel a little less stressed and a bit more optimistic. You can't wait to tell your family all about that charming canine. In fact, you're already looking forward to your next business trip.
The SF SPCA has more than 300 AAT teams, which consist of a pet and their guardian. Although most are dog or cat teams, the SF SPCA has a history of welcoming all kinds of animals into their AAT program, including rabbits, turtles, guinea pigs, chinchillas, bearded dragons and, most recently, a pig. The one thing all the therapy animals have in common: a calm and friendly disposition and a willingness to approach and interact with people regardless of a persons age, gender, race, size, mobility equipment usage or apparel. On top of that, both volunteers and their animals need training to ensure that they're ready for the challenges of a therapy visit. They're tested on things like training, reactivity, and friendliness.
To find out more about the SF SPCA AAT programs or to get involved, please visit sfspca.org/aat.
Law enforcement agencies from across the Bay Area and officials from throughout the state on Sunday expressed their condolences for the officers killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Authorities identified Montrell Jackson, 32, Matthew Gerald, 41 both of the Baton Rouge Police Department and Brad Garafola. 45, of East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office as the three officers who were fatally shot.
The San Francisco Police Department released a statement saying it is "deeply saddened and disturbed" by Sunday's tragic events. And "we remain vigilant in our resolve to continue to protect and serve the people of San Francisco."
The San Jose Police Officers Association also issued a statement: "When law and order breaks down to the point where out nation experiences 10 law enforcement officers killed over a 10-day period, then a serious look at who we are and what we have become must take place "
Meanwhile, some Bay Area law enforcement reacted in the name of safety. Santa Clara County Sheriff's deputies aren't taking any chances, requesting to do patrols in teams of two.
"When you see what is going on in our nation, doubling up on patrols is a way to mitigate that," said Roger Winslow of the Deputy Sheriffs' Association of Santa Clara County. "You have two people: one to drive and the other to watch for the bad stuff going on around us."
Former San Francisco police chief and current USF professor Tony Ribera said officers need to be on high alert.
"The officers need to be aware and be quick to call for backup they have to recognize there is a potential threat every day," Ribera said.
Along with extending their thoughts and prayers for the families of the slain officers, some high-ranking California Democrats reiterated the pressing need for firearms regulations.
"This morning's shooting in Baton Rouge is a heartbreaking tragedy and a grave reminder of the dangers that peace officers face every day," state Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement. "I extend my deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the fallen officers and to the men and women who bravely serve alongside them in the Baton Rouge Police Department, East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Department and across the country."
The gunman was identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri. He was a Marine sergeant who served in Iraq, according to records obtained by NBC News.
In the wake of Sunday's attack coming just a couple of weeks after five officers were shot dead in Dallas, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi called for a united but peaceful battle against hate.
"Concerned citizens in Baton Rouge and across America must create communities where inclusion, justice and peace thrive," Pelosi said in a statement. "We must continue to confront violence with peace, despair with understanding and hatred with love.
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom reacted with yet another demand for action from Congress.
"The endemic of gun violence terrorizing our society - inflicted upon police officers, nightclub goers, places of work, churches, movie theaters, schools, and disproportionately upon and within Americas minority communities is by definition a political issue, and elected leaders must not back down from calling for tougher regulation of firearms and ammunition in fear of political retribution from these defendants of death," Newsom said in a statement.
"Enough is enough," he added. "I call again upon Congress to act immediately."
Beset by an ongoing sex scandal and investigation into racist tweets at the Oakland Police Department, the city council is weighing whether to form an independent police commission to oversee the rank and file and even have the power to fire the chief.
The "Police Commission Charter Amendment Measure" by Councilmen Dan Kalb and Noel Gallo is up for a vote at Tuesday nights council meeting. If approved, it will go before voters in November. The amendment also seeks a community police review agency and a process for police discipline.
"Whereas some important progress has been made...public perception persists that the department and the city do not adequately hold its officers accountable for misconduct," the proposed charter amendment reads.
San Francisco and Los Angeles have similar police commissions.
I strongly believe that this is whats needed in Oakland a body that the citizens feel they can go to, Gallo told the San Francisco Chronicle.
But the idea has prompted fierce opposition from the Oakland Police Officers Association, whose president told the Chronicle it would violate a union contract that the council unanimously approved in November. Some community activists also say the commissions powers wouldnt go far enough.
The seven-member commission that Kalb and Gallo are proposing would replace the Citizens Police Review Board, a civilian-run body created in 1980 to investigate complaints and make disciplinary recommendations to the city administrator. The body would be empowered to fire the police chief for cause, if five members vote to do so.
Multiple investigations are underway at the Oakland Police Department, where officers have been accused of having inappropriate and illegal sex with a young woman, and for sending racist texts to each other within the department. The results of those investigations have not been completed.
About 300 members of the UC Berkeley community and beyond gathered on the East Bay campus Monday afternoon to honor Nicolas Leslie, a student killed in last week's truck attack in Nice, France.
The memorial vigil was held at Sproul Plaza and many of Leslie's friends spoke, remembering him as a great guy who lit up the room and lived life to the fullest every day.
"Nick you were the best senior associate, and more importantly, the best friend I could have had," friend Ahni Surrumpudi said at the vigil. "You were a friend I could count on to be there. I'll never forget the way you could light up a room within seconds."
Leslie, 20, was confirmed dead Sunday by FBI officials, which were notified by counterparts in France early Sunday, university officials said.
"It's pretty devastating," said Alesandra Silveria, a UC Berkeley student. "It brings it so much closer to home."
Leslie, an environmental sciences major, had been planning to begin studies at the Haas School of Business in the fall. He was also prolific on social media, his friends said, which is why they were so worried about him since his phone went quiet after the July 14 attack.
"This is tragic, devastating news," UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a statement. "All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence. I join Nicks parents, friends and the entire campus community in condemning this horrific attack, and in mourning the loss of one of our own."
Leslie, a native of Del Mar, in San Diego County, was one of 85 Berkeley students attending a summer study abroad program in the French seaside city of Nice when the attacker, identified as 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, drove a truck through crowds departing a fireworks celebration.
Friends told NBC Bay Area that Leslie avoided being hit by the truck but was separated from his group during the stampede and chaos that followed.
On Saturday, Leslie's father, Conrad, left his Southern California home and traveled to Nice in search of his son, NBC News reported. Leslie's uncle, Fabeo Bottini, had been scouring hospitals in the Nice area since the attack looking for Nicolas, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Three other Berkeley students were injured in the Nice attack. Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, and Diane Huang, 20, have been released from the hospital. Daryus Medora, 21, remains hospitalized, according to the university.
Monday's vigil comes just two weeks after the UC Berkeley campus mourned the loss of Tarishi Jain, a sophomore killed in the Dhaka, Bangladesh terrorist attack.
Menat Elattma, an incoming Egyptian-borne Cal freshman, did not know Leslie but took to Twitter using the hashtag #ForeverABear to send her condolences about him. She's not deterred from one day traveling as a university student, if the occasion should arise.
"With the recent attacks around the world impacting Berkeley, my perception of being a student there has not changed," she said. "It could have been a student from any other university. The perpetrators were not targeting UC Berkeley students specifically, or college students in general. The perpetrators utilized whatever power they have fashioned to oppress and cause violence. Coming from Egypt and a constant state of instability and lack of security, I tend not to allow the issue of safety become in conflict with my endeavors."
An Afghan teen attacked passengers on a train in Germany Monday using bladed weapons, severely injuring at least three people, and was later shot dead by a SWAT-style team, authorities said.
The incident happened on a train in Heidingsfeld, near Wurzburg, police said. The weapons were described as an ax and a knife, NBC News reported.
Officers shot and killed the attacker, police said.
The attacker was a 17-year-old Afghan man, Bavaria's interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said in an interview on German public television ARD. Herrmann said the police team shot the attacker after he exited the train and charged them.
Police said it is too early to determine a motive or whether the incident might be terrorism related.
The attack on the train comes days after a driver rammed a truck into a crowd in Nice, France, at the end of a Bastille Day fireworks show, killing 84 people. Authorities in France have called that attack an act of terrorism.
Authorities investigating the truck driver who killed 84 people in a Bastille Day attack painted a complex picture Monday of a man who did not seem devout but had recently become interested in jihadi violence and researched past attacks in France and the United States, including one on a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said by all accounts Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel drank, ate pork and had an "unbridled sex life." But his computer and phone showed online searches relating to IS and other jihadi groups.
"A search of his computer illustrates a clear ... and recent interest in radical jihadism," Molins said, adding that Bouhlel had recently grown a beard and told people it was for religious reasons. While officials have said the attack was obviously premeditated, they have not found any evidence that Bouhlel had coordinated with an extremist network.
Internet searches on Bouhlel's computer included Islamic propaganda chants, the terms "horrible deadly accidents," and the recent attacks against the gay nightclub in Orlando, police officers in Dallas, and the killing of two police officials in Magnanville, outside of Paris.
One witness told authorities that Bouhlel seemed accustomed to looking at decapitation videos, Molins said.
As investigators continue to look into the attacker's motives, his uncle in Tunisia, Sadok Bouhlel, told The Associated Press his nephew had been indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice. He said Bouhlel's family problems he was estranged from his wife and three children made him easy prey for the Algerian recruiter.
"Mohamed didn't pray, didn't go to the mosque and ate pork," said the uncle, a 69-year-old retired teacher, in the driver's hometown of Msaken, Tunisia. The uncle said he learned about the Algerian recruiter from extended family members who live in Nice.
French officials couldn't confirm Monday that Bouhlel had been approached by an Algerian recruiter, saying that the investigation is ongoing.
The July 14 carnage in the southern city of Nice has shaken and angered a country still reeling from the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people at a concert hall, restaurants and cafes, and the national stadium, and a separate January 2015 Paris attack that targeted journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Jews at a kosher supermarket.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls was loudly booed as he came and went from a memorial ceremony on the Nice shore, amid widespread criticism of security failures. Valls said later that the boos "do not touch me," but he called them undignified and divisive.
Feelings are raw. Many of the dead and injured were children watching a fireworks display with their families, and a sign posted around town demonstrates a strong feeling of solidarity, calling for blood donations and stuffed animals for injured children.
But on the city's famed Promenade des Anglais, passers-by piled garbage on the bloodstained spot where Bouhlel was killed. At least one man was seen spitting on it, while another urinated on the pile to general applause.
At the Pasteur hospital, where many injured are being treated, emergency responders and other medical personnel gathered in the courtyard for the countrywide moment of silence, standing still in a row and clapping when it was over.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said 59 people were still hospitalized after Thursday's attack, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
Officials have begun returning remains to the families, though 13 of the 84 who died have yet to be identified, the prosecutor said.
U.S. Ambassador Jane D. Hartley was in Nice on Monday, where she visited an injured American and met with American families who had lost loved ones.
"I also wanted to show my support for France at the moment of silence today because the U.S. and France are in this together in this terrible fight against terrorism," Hartley told The Associated Press as she arrived at the Nice city hall to meet mayor Philippe Pradal.
Hartley said to her knowledge there were no Americans among the missing anymore.
Six people are in custody in the probe into the attack, including one who Bouhlel sent a text message to minutes before the attack, asking for more weapons, Molins said. He also took selfies in his truck in the hours before he plowed through the festive crowd.
Three of the six suspects were brought to French intelligence headquarters in Paris on Monday to face eventual terrorism charges, according to a security official.
Investigators found 11 telephones, cocaine and 2,600 euros ($2,900) in cash at the home of one of the suspects, an Albanian national, according to a security official and the Paris prosecutor's office.
Meanwhile, Italy is investigating whether Bouhlel recently had contacts with Tunisians living in the southeastern Puglia region, according to news agency ANSA. Officials in Italy didn't immediately respond to requests for confirmation.
Italian state TV, reporting from France, said Monday evening that one of the seven detained in Nice had at one point been hosted by two Tunisians living in the town of Gravina in Puglia.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, July 18
By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:
According to Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedovs decree, the State Agency on Management and Use of Hydrocarbon Resources under the president stopped its activity.
According to the decree, the state agencys assignees are Turkmengaz, Turkmennebit (Turkmenoil) state concerns.
In particular, Turkmengaz State Concern will become an assignee according to the production sharing treaty (PSA) on the Bagtyyarlyk contractual territory signed with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and PSA on Block 1 contractual territory, signed with Petronas
Company (Malaysia), according to the decree.
Turkmennebit State Concern will become an assignee according to the PSA on the Cheleken contractual territory signed with Dragon Oil company (UAE), PSA on Nebit Dag contractual territory signed with Eni company (Italy), PSA on Khazar contractual territory signed with Mitro International Limited (Austria), PSA on Block 3 contractual territory signed with Buried Hill company (UK), PSA on Block 21 contractual territory signed with ARETI company (Cyprus), PSA on Block 23 contractual territory signed with RWE Dea AG company (Germany).
According to the decree, the funds from the foreign currency account of the state agency will be transferred to Turkmengazs special account in the central bank.
The state concerns together with the Turkmen Ministry of Justice within a month should prepare proposals to amend the laws of the country and submit for consideration to the countrys Cabinet of Ministers.
Donald Trump shifted the parameters of his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, calling for extreme vetting of people from territories with a history of terror, NBC News reported.
During an interview Sunday with 60 Minutes, he said people from suspicious territories will receive extra scrutiny when trying to enter the country.
"We're going to have a thing called 'extreme vetting.' And if people want to come in, there's going to be extreme vetting, he said. We're going to have extreme vetting. They're going to come in and we're going to know where they came from and who they are."
Trump also shifted the language of his proposal during a trip to Scotland, where he said it wouldn't bother him if a Scottish or British Muslim wanted to come to the United States.
His initial proposal came in December 2015, when he called for a temporary yet total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
In a new campaign video released Monday, Rep. Tammy Duckworth slammed her opponent, Sen. Mark Kirk, for endorsing embattled former CIA Director David Petraeus for president.
Petraeus, a retired four-star general, pleaded guilty in 2015 to a charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information.
Petraeus provided the classified information to Paula Broadwell, his biographer. The two were also embroiled in an extra-marital affair. Petraeus received two years probation and a $100,000 fine after pleading guilty to the misdemeanor.
Duckworths video bounces through a series of news reports featuring FBI Director James Comeys testimony about Petraeus and ends with Kirks endorsement of the former military leader.
"Ever since Republican Mark Kirk realized it was better politics to disavow Donald Trump than continue supporting him, hes bizarrely encouraged Illinoisans to throw away their votes on a disgraced former CIA director who had his security clearance revoked after he intentionally leaked classified information to his mistress and lied about it to investigators, Duckworth deputy campaign manager Matt McGrath said in a statement.
Kirk's campaign responded to the attack Monday afternoon, questioning Duckworth's judgment and pointing to her relationship with imprisoned former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
"When Rod Blagojevich was under federal investigation for giving jobs to his political cronies instead of deserving veterans, Duckworth not only defended Blagojevich but endorsed him for re-election," Kirk campaign spokesman Kevin Artl said in a statement. "Then, in order to advance her own career, Duckworth had Harry Reid lobby Blagojevich to appoint her to the U.S. Senate. Illinois voters are pretty clear on just how awful Duckworth's judgment has been during her political career."
During an interview on the Steve Cochran Show earlier this month, Kirk said he would write-in Petraeus instead of voting for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
In March, Kirk told NBC Chicago that he would support Trump if he were the Republican presidential nominee. Then in May, Kirk told USA Today that he would be willing to serve as a national security adviser to Trump.
Kirk pulled his backing of the divisive billionaire in June, after Trump made a series of inflammatory statements about the heritage of a Hispanic judge presiding over civil fraud lawsuits against his beleaguered Trump University.
The Duckworth campaign also faulted Kirk for endorsing Trumps newly-announced running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, even though Pence signed one of the countrys most discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws in Indiana and has a history of attacking womens reproductive rights.
Pence did partner with Kirk in Congress to oppose the rescue of the American auto industry and to support the Ryan budget, which would raise taxes on the average middle-class family by $2,000 and turn Medicare into a voucher system in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, Democratic Party of Illinois spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement.
An off-duty Chicago police officer saved a young boys life at a suburban pool party on Saturday, fire officials confirmed.
Emergency personnel from the Orland Fire Protection District responded to a home on Steeplechase Parkway in Orland Park at around 6 p.m. for calls of a young boy drowning, according to a release.
The boy, between the ages of 10 and 12, was in full cardiac arrest, authorities said.
When emergency responders arrived, officials said the boy was conscious and breathing thanks to the quick-thinking actions of a guest at the pool party, who happened to be an off-duty Chicago police officer who had emergency training.
Sergeant Cindy Guerra was attending the family party, fire officials said, and pulled the boy from the bottom of the pool. She then performed CPR, and the boy began breathing again.
I understand that Ms. Guerra was very humble and was thanking us for being there, Fire Chief Michael Schofield said. But she is a real hero and deserves to be honored for her actions today which saved the life of a young boy.
The first few minutes in any emergency situation like this are critical to saving a life and having civilians and other professionals at the scene of an emergency trained in health saving procedures will always help make a positive difference, Schofield added.
The boy was then taken to Silver Cross Hospital for follow-up treatment and observation, and he is expected to make a full recovery.
One person was hospitalized after a SWAT team responded to a situation on Chicagos North Side, authorities said Monday.
Few details were available on what happened in the 5900 block of North Ridge Avenue in the city's Edgewater neighborhood, but Chicago Police News Affairs reported police activity in the area Monday afternoon. The incident was classified as a possible hostage or barricade situation, authorities said.
Several streets were closed off around the scene.
One witness said a gunshot was heard near the Heart O' Chicago Motel, where several police cars were spotted, but authorities could not immediately confirm that information.
Police could be heard speaking to someone over a loud speaker.
Just before 4 p.m., police spokesman Frank Giancamilli said the situation was under control and one person was taken to an area hospital.
Check back for details on this developing story.
A UC Berkeley student missing in Nice, France, following Thursday's truck attack has been found dead.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was confirmed dead by FBI officials, which were notified by counterparts in France early Sunday, Berkeley News reported.
"This is tragic, devastating news," UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks told Berkeley News. "All of us in the UC Berkeley family both here on campus, and around the world are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence. I join Nicks parents, friends and the entire campus community in condemning this horrific attack, and in mourning the loss of one of our own."
Leslie, a native of Del Mar, in San Diego County, was one of 85 Berkeley students attending a summer study abroad program in the city of Nice when the attacker, identified as 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, drove a truck through crowds departing a fireworks celebration.
Friends told NBC Bay Area that Leslie avoided being hit by the truck but was separated from his group during the stampede and chaos that followed.
On Saturday, Leslie's father, Conrad, left his Southern California home and traveled to Nice in search of his son, NBC News reported. Leslie's uncle, Fabeo Bottini, had been scouring hospitals in the Nice area since the attack looking for Nicolas, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Claire Holmes, a spokeswoman for the program, said the campus is devastated.
"We have been mobilizing over the past few days, cooperating with officials on the ground to find Nick, and bring him home." Holmes said. "Unfortunately, the news was tragic today."
A vigil for Leslie is scheduled for Monday at 4:30 p.m at Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus.
Police in Louisiana have identified the three officers shot and killed by a gunman on Sunday in an ambush-style shooting.
Authorities identified Montrell Jackson, 32, Matthew Gerald, 41 both of the Baton Rouge Police Department and Brad Garafola, 45, of East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office Sunday evening as the three officers who were fatally shot.
Jackson was married and the father of a new baby boy. His former partner said Sunday Jackson was "stressed out and depressed" by the recent shootings in Baton Rouge and Dallas, according to NBC News.
"I remember Montrell got on Facebook the other day and posted that he hopes that his son won't ever become a police officer so he wouldn't have to deal with the BS that comes with the job," he said.
Gerald had been serving on the force for less than a year, according to the Baton Rouge Police Department's Facebook page.
Garafola was with the Sheriff's Office for 24 years and was working in Civil Processing-Foreclosures.
Three officers were also wounded by the gunman, including Nicholas Tullier, 41, and Bruce Simmons, 51, both from East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. Officials said Tullier was listed in critical condition, while Simmons has non-life threatening injuries. The identity of the third officer was not yet released.
"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."
Police identified the shooter, who was dressed in black fatigues, as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri.
In a surprise ceremony Sunday, Betty Reid Soskin, received a replacement for the commemorative presidential coin that was stolen from her Richmond, Calif., apartment during a violent attack.
Soskin, 94, the oldest park ranger in the U.S., was attending a ceremony at Concord Naval Weapon Station to honor those who lost their lives during a deadly explosion in 1944 and commemorate the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial when she was called up to the stage, and given the coin.
"Betty's tough," Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell told the crowd, adding that President Barack Obama wanted to replace the special coin that was stolen on June 27 from Soskin's home as she slept.
Soskin clapped her hands over her mouth to show her surprise and excitement. She didn't speak, and received a standing ovation as she left the podium. When she sat down, she quickly opened the envelope that Obama sent her and pulled out a new coin, rubbing it in between her fingers and holding it up for all to see, a big grin on her face.
The original coin was stolen by a thief who also took Soskin's cell phone, lap top and jewelry and then punched her several times before taking off, Richmond police said. No one has yet been arrested. She earned that coin when she was invited to light the national Christmas tree in December, during which she introduced Obama and gave the president a big hug.
After Sunday's ceremony, Soskin told NBC Bay Area that the first coin really meant something special to her because it had been physically touched by the president who had "cupped it in his palm" handed it to her "in secret" at that ceremony. The president must have known how "powerful" that was, Soskin said in an interview, even more so than giving her the coin publicly.
Soskin returned to work last week, the first time since the attack, where her colleagues at the National Park Service, and members of the community at large, raised more than $50,000 to help her replace those items, as well as fund a documentary being made about her, according to the park service.
Since she was 85 years old, Soskin has been working full-time at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Park in Richmond, Calif., where she moderates tours, talks to visiting groups and steps back in time to speak about living and working in the area during World War II.
She famously grabbed national attention in 2013 during the federal funding crisis when she pleaded with Congress to step up and get its act together so that she didn't have to sit at home during a furlough.
A girls wish is coming true with the help of the Make-a-Wish foundation and the Hartford Police.
The 10-year-old Danializ Marquez enjoys movies and loves one in particular: "Dolphin Tale".
"I never knew how to swim so I learned how to swim by looking at her," said Marquez.
The movie is about a dolphin named Winter with scoliosis who lost her tail. By the end of the movie, Winter gets a replacement tail with help from her human companions.
The story resonates for the 4th grader, who also has scoliosis and her own story of overcoming.
The Make-a-Wish foundation arranged for Marquez to meet Winter in person. On Monday, with a Hartford Police escort, Marquez headed to Bradley Airport to catch her flight to Florida.
Marquez will finally meet her favorite movie character, along with other cast members from "Dolphin's Tale".
Sirimarie Marquez, her sister, said that even though Marquez has had at least 22 surgeries, the movie teachers her "not to give up".
"Since she has scoliosis, she inspired me that I don't care that I have scoliosis too. Just do what I want to do," said Marquez.
The attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana hit home with law enforcement all across the nation, including Connecticut.
Social media blew up with a flood of support and condolences. State police tweeted it sadly had to re-post a memorial badge. The department also reminded residents to contact police if they see anything out of place.
Hamden police sent prayers to their colleagues in Louisiana. And Norwalk police also stood in solidarity with Baton Rouge.
In Hartford, officers were reminded to remain vigilant and report any threats so they can be vetted and investigated.
Corporal Stanley J. Parizo Jr. of the Willimantic police department released the following statement:
"The members of the Willimantic police department are saddened by the loss of more brave and courageous police officers that lost their lives this morning in Baton Rouge. These recent senseless attacks on law enforcement are on all of our minds, and our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of these fallen officers."
The Connecticut Police Chiefs Association also released a statement expressing condolences to the people of Baton Rouge and offered comments on the tensions gripping the nation.
Genuine discussions about police cannot be comprised solely of accusations against officers who are sworn to protect all citizens, not just a particular race or class of people. Careless statements can encourage those intent on harming law enforcement to act on their beliefs, no matter how misguided. Violence against police can never be excused or justified because of a person's grievance or perception of mistreatment by law enforcement officers, the statement read, in part.
Today Senator Richard Blumenthal called for support and help for police.
Recently hes been hosting roundtables with community leaders about tensions in the country involving race and police.
There may be a need to improve policing practices and policies. And we should seek improvements but these heinous, senseless attacks really are an assault on all of us, he said.
More of those roundtables are planned, including one in Hartford expected this week.
Flowers, balloons and messages of support continue to flood Dallas Police Headquarters. But on this Sunday there is fresh pain.
Pete Gonzales was already having trouble understanding the hate the took the lives of five Dallas police officers. Now with the attack in Baton Rouge he's worried for all law enforcers.
"They're not safe anymore," said Gonzales. "It's hard for them to go out there and do their job not knowing what's going to happen the next day. It's hard on their families not knowing if daddy or their husband or their son is coming back home."
Jenny and James Doran live in downtown Dallas. Their hearts are heavy knowing another community now has to deal with the senseless murder of police.
"It's, it's terrible," said Doran. "My heart aches for cops all over the world and their families."
"I can't imagine what these families are going through and all the families of police officers all over the country right now," said Jenny Doran.
Cecilia Taylor is not surprised to that there has been another attack on police but hopes this is a final wake-up call for unity.
"It's got to change," said Taylor. "I feel like we just need to sit down and talk face to face."
Aryn Feickert is from California but stopped in Dallas during a cross country trip to pay her respects. Her father is a sheriff's deputy and she worries now more than ever.
"I'm afraid for him to go to work everyday nowadays seeing what's been happening," said Feickert.
"All I can think about is at this point all we can really do is pray and pray for peace, pray for people to come and unite."
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Khalid Kazimov Trend:
Iranian Interior Ministry has dismissed rumors suggesting that some Turkish officials visited Iran following a failed coup attempt in Turkey.
The deputy interior minister for security affairs, Hossein Zolfeqari, has said that no Turkish officials or individuals have arrived in Iran over the past couple of days, ISNA news agency reported July 18.
He also said the recent developments in Turkey and Armenia did not pose any security threats against Iran.
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.
In a separate development, 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.
The number of deaths during the course of an arrest has risen in Texas during the past decade.
According to the Dallas Morning News the number of deaths has risen from around 60 in 2005 to more than 120 last year. The figures include officer-involved shootings, drug overdoses and suicides.
About one-quarter of the deaths involved black people, even though just 12 percent of the state's population is black.
Deadly interactions between law enforcement and potential suspects have come under extra scrutiny after a month in which five police officers in Dallas were shot dead following fatal shootings of black suspects in Louisiana and Minnesota.
On Sunday, three more police officers were killed in a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after days of heightened tension and protests following the shooting death of a local man captured on video.
Amanda Woog, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas, noted the figures show a disproportionate percentage of African-Americans were involved in arrest deaths.
"The disparities we see are pretty much in line with the disparities we already know exist in the criminal justice system," Woog said.
But Charley Wilkison, executive director of a key state officer advocacy group, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, said arrest deaths should be blamed on suspects, not police, and a "new kind of lawlessness, a sense that police are not necessarily on the side of the public that's being broadcast far and wide."
While other parts of the state have seen increased deaths, the Dallas Police Department has successfully reduced its number of deaths during an arrest in recent years, which the department credits to a greater emphasis on community policing and de-escalation of tense situations.
Deputy Chief Jeff Cotner said his department trains officers on the "guardian mentality" they must assume in their daily work.
"We're the good guys, and we were doing the right thing," Cotner told the newspaper.
The Alamo's mid-20th-century library building is being turned into exhibit space that could open to visitors as early as this winter.
Under a lawsuit settlement between the state and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the DRT retained ownership of 38,000 items in its library collection but agreed to move them. The collection was taken to a storage facility last week.
Guido Brothers Construction, a local contractor, began work last week on an extensive renovation of the former DRT Library that will radically change the building's use. The research library normally had been open by appointment only.
"Visitors will be invited into that building, instead of being turned away at that entrance," Kim Barker, preservation planner and construction project manager for the Texas General Land Office, said in an update last week on $5 million in improvements finished or underway at the site.
Some visitors passing through the Alamo's iconic mission-era church saw staff conservator Pam Rosser working in the building's most sacred room, the sacristy, where indigenous people and Spanish friars gathered to worship. Removing whitewash applied during the U.S. Army occupation after 1845, she used colored sticky dots to mark traces of the room's now-faded mission frescoes of the 1700s.
"If I don't mark them, I won't remember where they are. They're the size of a freckle," she told the San Antonio Express-News.
Aside from Rosser's work, there is not much in the hallowed church to halt the flow of visitors. The Alamo complex has little room, other than in its Long Barrack and gift shop displays, to show artifacts.
"Currently, we don't do special exhibits in summer, because of the high volume of visitors that we have coming through," said Brittany Eck, Land Office press secretary.
Elsewhere on the grounds, fencing is up around the gift shop for a moisture-containment project to protect that 1930s structure. Portable air-conditioned restrooms have been placed along Houston Street, on the north side of the complex, while an overhaul of public restrooms at the complex is in progress.
But the biggest change ahead for an estimated 1.6 million visitors annually is conversion of the former library -- the main rectangular "Reading Room" the DRT opened with private funds in 1950 and two 1970s additions. The building, now known as the Alamo Research Center, will likely be renamed.
The Land Office, which had requested funds from the Legislature in 2015 for priority upgrades, initially sought to reroof the library, patch and repaint ceilings and walls damaged by rainwater and remove asbestos-containing materials under the carpet.
It now plans a complete overhaul: new furniture, more offices, improved ventilation, complete asbestos abatement, replacement of fluorescent lighting with track and pendent lighting and enlargement of the vault to store artifacts from the state's Alamo collection and items donated by musician Phil Collins. Barker said the library renovation is set to cost about $600,000, not including the interior work.
"We're expanding that project to include a total interior rehabilitation," she said. "We've got lots of areas of moisture infiltration in the building. The reroofing will address that."
The DRT, meanwhile, is in talks with Texas A&M University-San Antonio to find a home for its library collection.
The building renovation is not part of the Alamo master plan, which will consider use of the city-owned plaza and surrounding area to improve the visitor experience through a modern visitor center and enhanced public art and historical interpretation. Archaeologists will begin excavations this week in the plaza to verify the location of the compound's original walls, as part of the master plan.
As that plan is implemented, use of the former library may change again.
"This space will be flexible. If we find that we have a better location for temporary exhibits in the future, this can be modified to serve a different purpose," Barker said.
Next door, workers were adding plumbing in the basement of Alamo Hall for a women's restroom upgrade and a new unisex, ADA-compliant restroom. The men's room in the hall, an event venue, may get a future face-lift. In addition to restrooms elsewhere at the Alamo that are being renovated, the ones in Alamo Hall will be publicly accessible.
At the gift shop, work at the request of the state fire marshal's office included installation of historically aesthetic fire-rated doors in the building. The shaft of a dumbwaiter, once used to transfer cash and supplies, was plugged.
To keep water from damaging the store's stone building, perimeter landscaping is being replaced with a bituminous membrane and a layer of aggregate material, sloping toward the sidewalk. The gift shop's basement has incurred water seepage "for many, many years," Barker said.
As part of a historic structures report, a subcontractor is using ground-penetrating radar to peer into the walls of the Alamo church to reveal any new archaeological or structural data.
"It provides information that can lead to further investigation or analysis," Barker said.
The Fort Worth, Arlington and Grand Prairie police departments are changing procedures in response to two deadly ambushes of police officers, including the July 7 attack in Dallas and the July 17 attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that have killed eight officers.
Fort Worth Police Department
Effective immediately, the Fort Worth department mandated all officers to patrol in two-officer units.
The order included patrol supervisors, detectives and any officers in plain clothes assignments. Special Response Team officers and supervisors must also ride with a partner.
The department also mandates that all officers should wear body armor.
Fort Worth police said it has not received any specific threat but the risk of further violence against officers is high.
Reaction to the Fort Worth Police Departments policy change came swiftly after the announcement all officers were to patrol in pairs.
Dallas Police Department
The Dallas Police Deparmtent told NBC 5 there is no plan to issue a mandate on two-officer patrols.
The department said all officers have the option of getting two man patrols, or they can ride solo if that is their inclination. After the attack, substation commanders and supervisors were asked to remind patrol cops that they could always ride two to a car if they want.
Anecdotally, a lot of cops who went solo have switched to a two-man partner patrol since the ambush. The department doesn't have statistics however on how many made the switch over the last week.
Arlington Police Department
The Arlington police department told NBC DFW that it enhanced security of its buildings, but will not get any more specific than that.
Also, officers will no longer be able to turn down back-up on certain calls, like when they respond to burglary alarms. A second officer will be sent no matter what.
Grand Prairie Police Department
A Grand Prairie police spokesperson told NBC DFW that back-ups will also be dispatached to every call, including traffic stops.
Other changes made at North Texas police departments have not been made public.
The Fort Worth, Arlington and Grand Prairie police departments have changed policies due to recent deadly ambushes of police officers, including the July 7 attack in Dallas and the July 17 attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
What to Know Officers must respond to calls in pairs.
Officers must wear body armor.
Change is effective immediately; there are no exceptions.
Police-involved shooting incidents have, sadly, been "the story" of most major media outlets over the past two weeks. After the recent events in Dallas and Baton Rouge that resulted in the deaths of eight officers and injuries to several others, the Fort Worth Police Department has chosen to take action to increase the safety of it's police officers.
As of Sunday evening, FWPD announced all of its officers, in every department and at every level, will be patrolling in pairs until further notice.
They also stated that "all officers should be wearing body armor."
This mandate is effective immediately and they said it is not optional nor will there be any exceptions. All officers responding to any call will also be required to leave with a partner.
It is unclear whether other DFW-area police departments will follow in the Fort Worth Police Department's footsteps.
Cole Hamels pitched eight dominant innings in his first game at Wrigley Field since throwing a no-hitter at the famed ballpark a year ago, and the Texas Rangers stopped a four-game slide by topping the Chicago Cubs 4-1 Sunday.
Hamels (10-2) struck out his first six batters. He fanned seven overall and gave up just an unearned run on four hits.
Last summer, the lefty threw a no-hitter and struck out 13 at Wrigley in his final start for Philadelphia. He was then traded to the Rangers.
Sam Dyson struck out three in the ninth for his 19th save in 21 chances.
Ian Desmond homered and Robinson Chirinos drove in two runs as Texas avoided a three-game sweep in the matchup of division leaders. The Cubs had won three in a row.
John Lackey (7-6) allowed four runs and six hits in eight innings as his winless streak reached seven starts. He is 14-16 in 41 starts against Texas, the team he's faced most often in his career.
Hamels fanned the side in the first two innings. The streak ended when Matt Szczur popped out and Albert Almora Jr. reached on third baseman Adrian Beltre's error in the third. Javier Baez doubled home a run.
Elvis Andrus' RBI single and Chirinos' sacrifice fly put the Rangers ahead in the second. Almora made a leaping catch in center field to rob Chirinos of extra bases.
Chirinos hit an RBI double after Lackey walked the first two batters in the fourth.
Desmond led off the eighth with his 16th home run.
The Cubs got back-to-back singles to start the bottom of the seventh before a double play and groundout ended the rally.
Lackey appeared to argue with home plate umpire Cory Blaser after the top of the sixth before right fielder Jason Heyward got between them. Cubs manager Joe Maddon then addressed Blaser.
TRAINER'S ROOM
Rangers: OF Shin-Soo Choo (back) was out of the lineup for a third straight game, but manager Jeff Banister said the team isn't considering putting him on the disabled list just yet. "It still seems to bother him when he's throwing," Banister said. . RHP Kyle Lohse (strained oblique) threw a pain-free bullpen session Saturday. Banister expects him to start Tuesday at the Angels.
UP NEXT
Rangers: RHP A.J. Griffin (3-1, 3.81 ERA) is scheduled to start Monday's opener of a three-game series at the Angels, who are expected to start RHP Nick Tropeano (3-2, 3.12).
The man identified as the shooter who killed three Baton Rouge police officers on Sunday was in Dallas one week ago and recorded a video at a barber shop, according to a Twitter account linked to the gunman.
Video posted to a Twitter account under the name @convoswithcosmo appears to show Gavin Long visiting a South Dallas barber shop.
The account belonged to Long, a senior federal law enforcement official confirmed.
The video, posted on July 10, was labeled My body-cam footage of me in Dallas out in them streets educating our people.
It was three days earlier five Dallas police officers were shot and killed during a protest downtown.
Im here for you all, the man said in the video, talking to people getting their hair cut. Im sacrificing. Im on these streets. They are going to tell theres not men like me out here. Yeah, were out here. They just dont want to show you.
Long appears to pass out a book to customers at the barber shop.
Everybody in this room got a purpose, just figure it out, he said. Even if its educating the ones up under you, thats a purpose.
In a separate video posted on Long's YouTube page the same day, he said "I had already decided that I was coming to Dallas before they even, you know, the police shooting already happened. So I was already decided."
Speaking about "victims fighting their oppressors," he said, "100 percent have been successful through fighting back," he said. "Zero have been successful just over simply protesting."
The video posts referring to Dallas werent the only Texas connection.
A LinkedIn account said Long graduated from Central Texas College in 2011 with an associates degree. Central Texas College is based in Killeen and serves 11 counties in Central Texas, according to its website.
Jonathan Dienst of NBC New York contributed to this report.
Authorities are investigating an attack on 29 goats that were being raised by students at a West Texas school district.
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reports that police say the goats were attacked overnight Thursday or early Friday morning in a barn owned by the Lubbock school district.
District spokeswoman Nancy Sharp says 18 goats were fatally shot and 11 others were injured. Of the injured goats, only one is expected to recover and the other 10 will likely have to be euthanized.
The only goat expected to survive is being given a new name: "Miracle."
The livestock animals that live at the barn are used to train students. The school district's veterinary technology and agriculture science programs make frequent trips to study the creatures.
Authorities said they're investigating a shooting at a Dallas Area Rapid Transit station Monday morning.
Police said they responded to a shooting call at the station in the 8200 block of Forest Lane just after 5 a.m.
DART spokesman Morgan Lyons said a witness heard shots fired and saw a person on the ground and a car being driven away.
Part of the parking lot is closed off for investigators as of 6:30 a.m., but the station is open.
The sign at Glen Roses city limits lists the towns population as 2,444; the ideal size for many looking for a smaller town in North Texas, but not such an ideal size for homeless animals.
Weve got lots of animals, said Animal Control Officer Loretta Adams walking through the line of packed cages in the town animal shelters dog room.
Like many, the already small shelter is packed with dogs, cats, kittens and puppies right now, but unlike many of the bigger city animal rescues, Glen Roses animal rescue team often finds themselves with little help.
"We're a rural community, and lots of people have animals already, some have 2 or 3, and, so you don't get a lot of people coming in, said Adams.
Plus, donations tend to be much smaller and fewer in between which drives up adoption fees and associated costs like spaying and neutering.
Thats why this year Glen Rose is giving the Clear the Shelter campaign a shot.
They, along with nearly 70 other North Texas locations, and hundreds nation-wide, will waive their adoption fees all day next Saturday, July 23rd.
Glen Rose received an anonymous donation to help them cover medical costs for the animals, and Mike Jones with the Glen Rose Veterinary Clinic is helping them spay and neuter the animals so they can, hopefully, clear their shelter that day.
Animal Services has also launched a Go Fund Me page to help them reach their Clear the Shelter goals.
Activists and educators on Monday called a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for use across Texas biased and poorly researched and argued that its contents are especially offensive in a state where a majority of public school students are Hispanic.
A battle over the high school text is shaping up to become the latest ideological clash for the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education. Its members have long waged high-profile debates over the teaching of evolution, climate change and Christianity's influence on America's Founding Fathers to more than 5.2 million public school students statewide.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on the board, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program. Instead, publishers were asked to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
Texas got one submission: Virginia-based publisher Momentum Instruction offered a textbook titled "Mexican American Heritage." But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
"What we have now is a deeply flawed and a deeply offensive textbook," Celina Moreno, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said at a news conference in the lobby of the Texas Education Agency, where the board meets.
Moreno and other activists are part of the new Responsible Ethnic Studies Text Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as "multiple factual errors." The coalition said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and '70s as adopting "a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society."
"Industrialists were very driven, competitive men," the textbook says, according to excerpts. "In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day's work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of `manana,' or `tomorrow."'
A phone number for Momentum Instruction rang unanswered Monday. The liberal watchdog group Texas Freedom Network says the textbook publisher is controlled by Cynthia Dunbar, a former Texas Board of Education member who has advocated for state curriculum standards downplaying the constitutional separation of church and state.
Hispanics now make up 52 percent of Texas public school students, with most being Mexican-Americans.
The education board plans to vote in November on whether to approve the "Mexican American Heritage" textbook. Texas' more than 1,000 school districts don't have to use board-sanctioned classroom materials, but most do.
As a result, Texas has an outsized influence on school textbooks nationally. Its market is so large that edits made by publishers to meet the state's curriculum standards can wind up altering content in textbooks sold elsewhere.
David Bradley, a social conservative and veteran Board of Education member, said Monday that activists who forced Texas to solicit proposed ethnic studies textbooks are now angry with the results.
"You ought to be careful what you ask for. You got it," Bradley, a Republican from Beaumont, said in a phone interview.
He said Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses.
"I'm Italian, Irish and French," Bradley said. "And I feel like I'm being discriminated against when we only have an exclusive minority studies program in Texas."
Activists and educators on Monday called a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for use across Texas biased and poorly researched and argued that its contents are especially offensive in a state where a majority of public school students are Hispanic.
A battle over the high school text is shaping up to become the latest ideological clash for the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education. Its members have long waged high-profile debates over the teaching of evolution, climate change and Christianity's influence on America's Founding Fathers to more than 5.2 million public school students statewide.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on the board, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program. Instead, publishers were asked to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
Texas got one submission: Virginia-based publisher Momentum Instruction offered a textbook titled "Mexican American Heritage." But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
"What we have now is a deeply flawed and a deeply offensive textbook," Celina Moreno, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said at a news conference in the lobby of the Texas Education Agency, where the board meets.
Moreno and other activists formed the Texas Latino Education Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as "multiple factual errors." They said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and '70s as adopting "a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society."
"Industrialists were very driven, competitive men," the textbook says, according to excerpts. "In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day's work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of `manana,' or `tomorrow."'
A phone number for Momentum Instruction rang unanswered Monday.The liberal watchdog group Texas Freedom Network says the textbook publisher is controlled by Cynthia Dunbar, a former Texas Board of Education member who has advocated for state curriculum standards downplaying the constitutional separation of church and state.
Hispanics now make up 52 percent of Texas public school students, with most being Mexican-Americans.
The education board plans to vote in November on whether to approve the "Mexican American Heritage" textbook. Texas' more than 1,000 school districts don't have to use board-sanctioned classroom materials, but most do.
As a result, Texas has an outsized influence on school textbooks nationally. Its market is so large that edits made by publishers to meet the state's curriculum standards can wind up altering content in textbooks sold elsewhere.
David Bradley, a social conservative and veteran Board of Education member, said Monday that activists who forced Texas to solicit proposed ethnic studies textbooks are now angry with the results.
"You ought to be careful what you ask for. You got it," Bradley, a Republican from Beaumont, said in a phone interview.
He said Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses.
"I'm Italian, Irish and French," Bradley said. "And I feel like I'm being discriminated against when we only have an exclusive minority studies program in Texas."
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Khalid Kazimov Trend:
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has criticized the US over the improper implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the nuclear deal.
Accusing the US of failing to fulfill its commitments regarding the JCPOA, Zarif said Iran also must enjoy the benefits of the nuclear deal, IRIB reported July 18.
Zarif further added that the improper implementation of the JCPOA does not benefit anyone in Iran.
Several Iranian officials have recently accused the US of violating the terms of the last Julys nuclear deal, which was clinched in Vienna.
As a result of the implementation of the JCPOA, some parts of international sanctions on the Islamic Republic were lifted.
Many in Iran and around the world expected that the implementation of the JCPOA would give a huge boost to the countrys economy after almost a decade of isolation from the global economy.
However, the countrys banking system is still facing considerable difficulties in re-establishing ties with major international banks.
Hillary Clinton condemned the killing of three Louisiana law enforcement officers, saying police represent the "rule of law" and the shootings amount to taking aim "at all of us."
Clinton was speaking Monday at the NAACP national convention in Cincinnati. The Democratic presidential candidate says after the shooting of the officers in Baton Rouge, "this madness has to stop."
"Killing police officers is a terrible crime...anyone who kills a police officer and anyone who helps must be held accountable," the former secretary of state said.
Clinton said the recent killings of police officers in Dallas and now in Baton Rouge threaten the ability of the nation to make progress. She says police "represent the rule of law itself. If you take aim at that and them, you take aim at all of us."
She added that,"Perhaps the best way to honor our police is to follow the lead of police departments across the country who are striving to do better."
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday a total of 232 individuals were killed after a faction within the military launched an attempted coup late Friday against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He said the toll comprises "208 martyrs" in reference to government supporters and 24 coup plotters.
With a cracked voice and tears, he repeated a question his grandson had put to him: "Why are they killing people?"
Meanwhile, a senior official said F-16 jets guarded the Turkish airspace overnight, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.
The state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency, said Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s "for the control of the airspace and security."
Earlier, government and military officials had put the fatalities in the anti-government camp at 104. The prime minister did not explain the discrepancy.
He said the pro-government dead were 145 civilians, 60 police officers and three soldiers. The prime minister also said 50 coup backers and 1,491 government supporters were wounded in the unrest.
He put the total numbers of detentions since Friday's tumultuous night at 7,543, including 6,030 military.
The coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but the rebellion which was not supported by the military's top brass was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. More than 1,400 were wounded in the rebellion that took the government and much of the world by surprise.
On Sunday, Yildirim said the coup had failed and life had returned to normal. But he and other officials also urged people to take to streets at night, saying risks remained in its aftermath.
At nightfall, thousands of flag-waving people rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere. Erdogan remained in Istanbul despite statements that he would return to the capital and address crowds in Kizilay Square. News reports said close to 2,000 special forces police officers were deployed in Istanbul to guard key installations.
The government moved swiftly in the wake of the coup to shore up its power and remove those perceived as enemies, detaining some 6,000 people including a number of generals.
As the cabinet prepared to meet for its first regular session since the attempt, security forces continued raiding military facilities in search of suspected plotters. They searched the Air Force Academy premises and residences in Istanbul early on Monday, Anadolu reported. It was not clear if any arrests were made.
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.
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.
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.
Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus defended the crackdown on judiciary officials in an interview with CNN-Turk, saying many of them would have played a role had the coup attempt succeeded.
"All of these (judiciary officials) did not necessarily have first-degree knowledge about this pro-junta initiative. Had they succeeded (with the coup) it is clear that these people would have been included into this business. Therefore, anyone connected to this group will be exposed."
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.
Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve." Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was 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.
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.
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.
Authorities are searching for a gunman believed to have shot two homeless people with a BB gun in Buena Park, officials said.
Officers responded to a shooting at Lincoln and Knott avenues around 10:45 p.m. Sunday after a homeless man was shot twice in the face by a BB gun during a drive-by shooting, according to the Orange County Fire Authority.
The victim was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
Shortly after the scene was cleared, another shooting was reported at Beach and Artesia boulevards about 3 miles from the first incident.
Officials said a second homeless man was sitting at a bus stop when he was shot in the face with a BB gun. The victim suffered minor injuries and refused to be taken to the hospital.
"It's crazy. Why would you want to pick on a homeless person," said a transient person who only asked to be named David.
Due to the proximity of the incidents, authorities believe the shootings were carried out by the same person.
There was no suspect description or motive at this time. Authorities will be seeking surveillance video from the area and said witnesses reported seeing a dark-colored car at both locations.
Southern California officials were taking to social media to express their sorrow in the wake of a shooting on Sunday in Baton Rouge that left three officers dead.
Both law enforcement agencies and politicians offered their condolences and support to all affected by the incident in Baton Rouge.
Our country is hurting. The path forward must be through unity. Please take this Sunday to #PrayForBatonRouge and @BRPD. Commander Ruby Flores (@LAPDRuby) July 17, 2016
The LAPD reported there is no credible or specific threat to Los Angeles in connection with Sunday's killings, though they are increasing services to all public service agencies in the area.
The added resources will include doubling air assets, assigning officers from the elite Metropolitan Division to back up responding patrol officers and adding additional resources to help screen 911 calls, Mayor Eric Garcetti said.
"This violence against police officers undermines our democracy,'' Garcetti said.
Garcetti also asked the city's residents to "do all you can to support and thank our officers and their families today and every day.''
My heart is with the families of the fallen officers and the police department in #BatonRouge after this morning's shootings #LAforLA Eric Garcetti (@ericgarcetti) July 17, 2016
Police Commissioner Joe Farrow praised what he called a "noble" profession and thanked officers for continuing to do their job.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing LAPD officers, issued a statement calling for justice for those whose job it is to keep their communities safe.
The statement went on to criticize what they called "anti-police activists, whose apparent sole focus is to lay blame for all the ills of society on those who wear a law enforcement uniform."
Both the LAPD and the LA Sheriff's Department said despite the lack of a threat, they are remaining vigilant and ask the public to report anything unusual or suspicious to their local law enforcement.
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 July 12 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.
The highest-ranking Baltimore police officer charged in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray has been found not guilty on all counts, marking the third acquittal of an officer charged in the case.
Judge Barry Williams found Lt. Brian Rice not guilty of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office Monday.
In his verdict, Williams said the failure to seat belt a detainee in a transport wagon is not inherently a crime, adding that the state failed to prove both that Rice was aware of his duty to seat belt Gray, and that he intentionally failed in that duty.
"The state failed to show that the defendant, even if he was aware of the risk, consciously disregarded that risk," the judge said.
Williams also said the state failed to show that Rice was aware of an updated policy that requires officers to buckle in prisoners. As a result, Williams said he operated under the impression that Rice was guided by a previous policy that allows for officer discretion when deciding when to belt.
Gray was arrested after he ran from police officers in a high-crime area of the city. He was handcuffed and later shackled in the back of the police van, but officers did not ever buckle him in, which is the department's policy. Gray died a week after his arrest.
Prosecutors had said Rice was most responsible of the six officers charged for following police procedures to fasten a prisoner in a seat belt, citing his 18 years of experience on the force.
The officer's attorney said police could use discretion, if they believe their safety is at risk. Rice attorney Michael Belsky said officers had concerns, because Gray was not cooperative and they weren't sure what onlookers would do if extra time was taken to fasten Gray in the van.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys gave different characterizations of the onlookers. Prosecutors described them as concerned observers, while Belsky said officers heard threatening comments during the arrest.
Law student Travis Robertson spoke with News4 outside the courtroom Monday morning.
"When a black man gets caught, he's convicted and prosecuted for killing a black man. But when police officers go kill somebody, judges find all kinds of B.S. not to prosecute and convict these officers," he said.
Rice was the fourth of the six officers charged to go on trial in Gray's death. Three officers' earlier trials resulted in two acquittals and a mistrial.
The other two officers charged, Sgt. Alicia White and Officer Garrett Miller, filed motions to dismiss their cases last month.
The police union is calling on Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby to drop the remaining trials. Some legal analysts agree.
"At some point in time, you would have to think that the evidence is just not going to support any further prosecutions of these police officers," Warren Brown said.
Professor Doug Colbert of the University of Maryland School of Law said Mosby's commitment should not be measured in convictions.
"The police are now on notice that the justice system stands ready to prosecute officers who commit crime," he said.
The trials are scheduled through October.
Mitchell McCluskey contributed to this report.
A number of Bernie Sanders supporters are organizing a "fart-in" for July 28 both inside Philadelphia's Wells Fargo Center and outside on the street at the moment presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accepts the party's nomination, NBC News reported.
After putting the word out about the fart-in through her national organization, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, organizer Cheri Honkala said she began receiving beans from all over the country.
Honkala said organizers will erect a shantytown dubbed "Clintonville" in Kensington, one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods, where protesters can load up on beans before Clinton's nomination is announced next Thursday.
Honkala said the organization also plans to protest for economic justice beginning at 3 p.m. at Philadelphia's City Hall next Monday, when the Democratic convention begins. Her group was also scheduled to take part in an "End Poverty Now!" demonstration in Cleveland on Monday, the first day of the Republican convention.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Khalid Kazimov Trend:
An Iranian court has indicted several individuals for raiding Saudi embassy in Tehran.
Some 21 individuals, accused of early January raid on Saudi embassy, stood a trial on July 18, Mehr news agency reported.
According to the report, the defendants have been charged with "disturbing the public order and damaging embassy buildings".
The suspects appeared in the court weeks after President Hassan Rouhanis late June call for judiciary action on those who stormed the Saudi diplomatic missions.
After execution of prominent Shia cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, by the Saudis on Jan. 2 angry Iranian protesters stormed a Saudi embassy in Tehran and a consulate in Mashhad.
Right after the attacks on its diplomatic missions, Saudi Arabia said it severed ties with the Islamic Republic.
With security at the top of the list of priorities during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, officers from the Sunshine State including the Florida Highway Patrol have been brought in to help.
NBC 6 gained exclusive access to the efforts in Cleveland of the Florida Highway Patrol that is part of the team brought in to keep things safe. Officers from across the state including South Florida are part of the team.
The city has set up several zones where protesters can voice their opinions and those zones are several blocks away from the convention site.
The Florida Delegation had armed security officers assigned to it as the members were boarding buses and making their way around Cleveland. More than 100 troopers from South Florida and across the state got the call for their expertise.
"We are just here providing security and safety for the citizens of Cleveland," FHP Lt. Col. Michael Thomas said. "We were asked to come here through the Emergency Management Assistance Comp and it's called eMac so they requested us to come and help them out on this mission."
There is quite a debate underway between the Cleveland Police Union President and gun advocates. Ohio is an open carry state where you can carry a weapon legally if it's out in the open. The union representative wants to call a halt to that over the next three days but those who want to carry their weapons say you can't dismiss the law just because the convention is in town.
Thomas said the Cleveland Police Department has done an excellent job coming up with a security plan and so far executing it. He said having to deal with hurricanes and having the RNC in Tampa four years ago really prepared them for the assignment.
More than 25 companies will be attending a South Florida job fair Tuesday.
The job fair will take place at the Don Shula Hotel at 6842 Main Street in Miami Lakes from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The event is sponsored by the Miami Dolphins, Miami Heat, Aldi and Service Corporation International. Other companies and organizations participating include Century 21 Department Stores, Kent Security, Convey Heath and Liebherr USA.
To pre-register and for more information, visit www.jobnewsusa.com/miami.
In the wake of another tragic shooting involving law enforcement officers this weekend in Baton Rouge, LA, the South Florida police community is reacting with sadness and concern.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, at a press conference Sunday, says the recent shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge will cause the department to reevaluate some procedures to ensure the safety of officers.
"I tell them to expect the unexpected, go to work different ways, (and) approach calls in different ways," Israel said.
Miami Beach Police sent a tweet of condolence for the three officers who were killed:
Miami-Dade Police Department director Juan Perez, speaking at a law enforcement appreciation event, believes the way police are looked at by some needs to change.
"We have to fight together, Perez said. We have to get out of the message we get into sometimes as a nation with the perceptions of law enforcement"
Others worry that the recent shootings may keep people from considering a career in law enforcement.
I think it's going to be tougher for us to hire more police officers and to keep police officers, Miami-Dade Police Benevolent Association president John Rivera said. I think there will be a lot of officers retiring and saying enough is enough."
Privacy, a disquieting comic-thriller inspired in part by the actions of Edward Snowden, arrives at The Public Theater at roughly the same time a national debate brews over whether Pokemon GO, with its ties to Google, can access too much of a players personal information.
Tech embracers -- or, say, anyone with an iPhone -- routinely log bits of data that together provide a glimpse into our intimate lives: finances, locations visited, sexual preferences and so on.
Why worry about Pokemon, Privacy leaves you wondering, when were clearly doing plenty on our own to strip bare before the world?
Reworked since its London debut in 2014, the collaboration between The Public and Donmar Warehouse centers on an introverted British writer (Daniel Radcliffe, in his fourth New York stage appearance). A painful breakup precedes a move to Manhattan, which he hopes will disrupt his routine. Plus, his ex is here.
Along the way, actors portraying real-world tech, academic and government figures, among them OKCupid founder Christian Rudder and FBI director James Comey, spring to life from the writers imagination, both encouraging him to use technology to help form bonds, and warning against it.
Privacy relies on audience involvement, guaranteeing no two performances are identical. Were encouraged to watch with our cellphones on, logged into a dedicated WiFi network. It also features NSA whistleblower Snowden, via previously taped video, in a contribution we can consider his New York stage debut.
Radcliffe, raised almost publicly in the Harry Potter films -- and, I'd imagine, obligated to draw boundaries from an early age -- offers another in a line of effacing and affecting performances as the scribe beset by information overload. One effective sequence has him speed-dating with audience matches and being forced to admit he lied on a dating profile about his height.
Parts of that scene require the actor to improvise; a second nod for quick-thinking is owed to SNL vet Rachel Dratch, here as the writers mum and others. The script calls for Dratch to break the fourth wall and discuss metadata tracked by the car service Uber. The night I attended, instructions she provided to examine our own data were rendered obsolete by an app update mere hours before.
Dratch learned about the software update from the audience, yet maintained control over proceedings; Radcliffe shared an explanation during curtain call.
Agreeable supporting performances are turned in by a cast in multiple roles, including DeAdre Aziza, Raffi Barsoumian and Michael Countryman.
The play changes tone in the second act, becoming less about whether the writer can learn to relate to people by relaxing control over information and more about the ways we cede control of data by using our mobile devices. Snowdens brief participation at the climax plays off an earlier observation that Shakespeares The Tempest is around the same length as the iTunes user agreement.
Theres something of a British refinement to the proceedings, crafted by co-creators James Graham and Josie Rourke (U.Ks election-night telecast of The Vote). Im not sure any of the revelations come as a jarring surprise, though they raise substantive issues in myriad original ways.
Among them: What's the best balance between security and liberty? When does social media stop helping us stay benignly connected and enable our baser impulses, like stalking? Alsoand Im asking for a friendis it such a good idea to have every photo you've snapped since 2009 available for public consumption?
Privacy glances off these ideas, concluding finally with the message that its good, every so often, to take your phone off the table and have an eye-to-eye verbal confab with your companion, even if its about nothing more substantial than your cat.
Privacy, through Aug. 14 at The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. Tickets: $95 and up. Call 212-967-7555 or publictheater.org.
Follow Robert Kahn on Twitter@RobertKahn
The New York City Police Department is taking extra precautions following an apparent ambush shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday that left at least three officers dead.
A message sent citywide informed personnel that there would be no solo foot patrols throughout the city. Additionally, officers were told to "maintain a heightened level of awareness."
The note also said that "all uniform members of service shall arrive and remain on post together. All meals and personal breaks will also be taken in pairs."
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned recent attacks on police officers.
Speaking to the congregation at First Central Baptist Church on the anniversary of the death of Eric Garner, de Blasio called violence against the police unacceptable.
I wanna say what everybody knows: an attack on our police is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on democracy; it is an attack on our values, de Blasio said.
The mayor also took to social media to mourn the officers who died in Sundays attack, saying: We weep for officers shot in Baton Rouge. We mourn with their families. We hope for conversation. We've got to be better.
Officials say a body found in the Shark River Inlet is believed to be that of a 17-year-old diver who went missing there this weekend.
Avon police say the body was found Sunday afternoon at the base of a bridge. But a formal identification has not yet been made.
Authorities had been looking for a 17-year-old Westfield boy who was reported missing around 5 p.m. Saturday. They say the teen was a free diver, meaning he wasn't using scuba gear, and had been spear fishing when he disappeared.
Coast Guard boat and helicopter rescue crews were dispatched to the scene and searched throughout most of the night before resuming their efforts Sunday morning. Members of the Avon and Belmar police departments were also involved.
The teen's name hasn't been released.
What to Know A homemade explosive was inside a plastic bag in Central Park when it went off July 4th weekend
The teen who stepped on a rock covering it, setting it off, had part of his leg amputated at Bellevue Hospital
Connor Golden's parents say he is resilient after the operations and won't let it define who he is
The college student whose foot was blown off by an abandoned homemade explosive inside Central Park over the July 4th weekend is recovering after three operations at Bellevue Hospital and is planning to return to school in the fall and resume an active lifestyle, his family told reporters in New York Monday.
Connor Golden's parents spoke from the hospital Monday, partly to thank the doctors, caregivers, friends and family for their support after the traumatic accident.
Father Kevin Golden said the family was driving up Interstate 95 from their home in Virginia when they learned their 19-year-old son was in the hospital.
"The first thing he said is he stepped on a bomb," Kevin said. "We had to pull off so as not to get into an accident."
"You raise your kids teaching them how to be safe. What does a parent do when something like this happens?" said Kevin.
Breaking. Loud boom in Central Park. Man suffers major injury to leg. #nbc4ny pic.twitter.com/qI6reOjvuN Lori Bordonaro (@Lori4NY) July 3, 2016
When they learned he needed to amputate his foot and part of his left leg, "at that point, Connor said, 'That's OK,'" Kevin recounted, choking up. "He's happy his hands were intact. He's a musician."
Connor Golden has been released from intensive care after multiple operations and is healing well, doctors said Monday. He's getting stronger every day, and they're hopeful he can be released soon and return to northern Virginia with his family.
Breaking. Loud boom in Central Park. Man suffers major injury to leg. #nbc4ny pic.twitter.com/qI6reOjvuN Lori Bordonaro (@Lori4NY) July 3, 2016
Doctors said advancements in prosthetics will allow Connor to have a normal active lifestyle, and a program will help him learn to walk again.
"He is a very strong and resilient young man," said Kevin. "He will not let this define who he is. He's been comforting himself playing music. One of the instrutments that was with him at the explosion, he's been playing for nurses."
Connor is planning to go back to school at the University of Miami in the fall, where he's studying music engineering. The university's Frost School of Music and Miller School of Medicine have jointly developed a software application and treatment that uses music to train amputees to walk with prosthetics -- and that application will be made available to Connor.
In the meantime, his family is "very anxious to identify who is responsible for this."
Investigators believe the person who left behind the homemade explosive inside a plastic bag was experimenting with chemical mixtures to make a small explosion, law enforcement officials have said. When the bag failed to detonate, the person left behind the volatile mixture of chemicals in the park. There was no sign of any triggering mechanism, and authorities don't believe the device was designed to intentionally hurt people.
Police said they believe it was created by "an explosive hobbyist or experimenter" who had some knowledge of chemistry. Connor's parents said they spoke to one of the good Samaritans who came to his aid right after the explosion to thank him. They said the good Samaritan, a former member of the U.S. military who's familiar with explosives, told them he too did not believe the explosive was a firework.
"In this world we live in, it's difficult to make sense of this type of incident," said Kevin Golden. "We would love to get some answers to make sense of this."
The NYPD is offering a $12,000 reward for information.
Police in New Jersey shot and killed a retired New York City police officer after he fled into the woods with a gun over the weekend, said authorities.
Paul Loriquet, spokesman for the state attorney general's office, said Sunday 57-year-old Patrick Fennell was shot and killed by an Ocean County SWAT team around 10:30 p.m. Saturday.
The Little Egg Harbor man's wife called police and told them her husband was in the basement of their home, where Fennell had weapons, and she thought she heard gunfire, said Loriquet.
Fennell fled into the woods and was seen holding a handgun as he left his home, said Loriquet. Authorities confronted Fennell and fired multiple shots, killing him, said Loriquet.
Investigators said a handgun was recovered at the scene.
The Attorney General's Shooting Response Team investigated the incident.
What to Know Four people were standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk when they were struck by a car driven by an off-duty NYPD officer.
Manhattan resident Andrew Equisdel, 21, died in the crash.
The off-duty officer, who was scheduled to report to duty hours after the incident, faces a slate charges, including DWI and manslaughter.
A pedestrian killed by a speeding off-duty police officer in Brooklyn has been identified as a 21-yer-old Manhattan resident, police said Sunday.
Andrew Esquivel, of 205 Avenue A, died early Saturday morning when an SUV jumped a curb in Williamsburg and slammed into him and three other pedestrians standing on the sidewalk, police said.
Two women and another man, all in their 20s, were taken to the hospital with serious injuries after the 3 a.m. crash. Information about their conditions wasn't available.
Officer Nicholas Batka, 28, the driver of the SUV, has been charged with driving while intoxicated, manslaughter, second-degree vehicular manslaughter, three counts of assault and driving on a sidewalk.
Batka was supposed to be reporting for duty at 7 a.m. on the day of the crash.
Batka joined the NYPD in January, 2015. He was assigned to the transit bureau Manhattan task force. He has been suspended from the force.
There has been no information as to whether he has obtained an attorney who could comment on the charges.
President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday he was pleased with survival of the democratically-elected government in Turkey, IRNA reported.
'We are happy that today we are witnessing the return of stability and security in Turkey,' the president said in his official Twitter account.
Turkey faced a coup attempt by a number of Army forces early on Saturday.
After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's call on the people to rush to the streets and the cooperation of part of the country's armed forces, the coup failed and security was restored across the country.
Some 290 people were killed and 1440 others were reportedly wounded in the abortive coup attempt in Turkey.
A speeding SUV struck a car carrying a woman and her 9-year-old daughter in Queens Sunday, killing the mother and critically injuring the little girl, police said.
Zaalika Rasool, 40, and her daughter were back-seat passengers in a 2010 Toyota Corolla that was hit by a BMW X5 that barreled through a stop sign near 115th Avenue and 130th Street in South Ozone Park around 5 p.m., investigators said.
Rasool's daughter was taken to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in critical condition, police said.
The mother and daughter were among four people in the Toyota, police said. One passenger, a 71-year-old man, was also taken to a hospital. The 47-year-old driver of the car was uninjured.
A passenger in the BMW was also taken to the hospital.
After the collision, the BMW struck three parked cars before it came to a stop, police said.
The BMW driver fled on foot and is still being sought by police.
The head of the NYPD says the country and the police profession are "in uncharted waters."
Commissioner William Bratton spoke to "CBS Evening News" on Sunday evening, after three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot to death and three others wounded by a gunman. Less than two weeks earlier, five officers were killed and nine others were injured by a sniper in Dallas.
Bratton said the police's dual obligation to protect the public as well as themselves put law enforcement in "uncharted waters here at this particular point in time in American policing."
He also said it's clear police face a lack of trust in minority communities, and there has to be a way to find common ground.
After the deadly apparent ambush of officers in Baton Rouge, the NYPD said it's taking extra precautions and that NYPD officers could not do foot patrols alone.
The NYPD said, "all uniform members of service shall arrive and remain on post together. All meals and personal breaks will also be taken in pairs."
A day after the shooting in Dallas, the NYPD said that it had received 50 threats against officers but that none of those threats have been deemed credible.
Sen. Charles Schumer is pushing legislation to add 22 substances to the federal list of banned drugs following a mass overdose in Brooklyn last week that sent 33 people to hospitals.
Five bodegas in Brooklyn were raided Wednesday by police following Tuesday's mass overdose blamed on the drugs sold as K2.
Witnesses reported seeing victims lying on the sidewalk, shaking and leaning against trees and fire hydrants in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
Schumer's bill would ban substances, including three derivatives of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and 19 others that are used in efforts to mimic the main psychoactive ingredient of marijuana.
He says that since 2015, more than 6,000 synthetic drug-related emergency department visits in New York City and two confirmed deaths have been blamed on K2.
President Barack Obama awarded the nation's highest military honor to a Vietnam War veteran on Monday, noting that the story of retired Lt. Col. Charles Kettles' bravery nearly 50 years ago serves as great inspiration at a time when Americans could use some.
Kettles led helicopter flights carrying reinforcements to U.S. soldiers and evacuated the wounded after they were ambushed in combat operations near Duc Pho in May 1967, helping to save more than soldiers.
Obama said the story was quintessentially American because Kettles showed the importance of looking out for others and how nobody should be left behind.
"This shouldn't just be a creed for our soldiers. This should be a creed for all of us," Obama said.
Obama said during the ceremony that after police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the nation has had "let's face it, a couple of tough weeks."
"For us to remember the goodness and decency of the American people in a way that we can all look out for each other even when times are tough, even when the odds are against us, what a wonderful inspiration, what a great gift for us to be able to celebrate something like this," Obama said.
Obama told how Kettles repeatedly returned to a landing zone under heavy fire. He is credited with helping to save 40 soldiers and four members of his unit. During the final evacuation effort, he was advised that eight soldiers had been unable to reach the helicopters, so he returned without benefit of artillery or tactical aircraft support.
The Army said his helicopter was hit by a mortar round that damaged the main rotor blade and shattered both front windshields. Small arms and machine gun fire also raked the helicopter.
"In spite of the severe damage to his helicopter, Kettles once more skillfully guided his heavily damaged aircraft to safety," the Army said in describing his actions. "Without his courageous actions and superior flying skills, the last group of soldiers and his crew would never have made it off the battlefield."
The Veterans History Project launched a formal campaign to upgrade Kettles' Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that day to the Medal of Honor. After the Pentagon agreed his actions merited an upgrade, Congress passed legislation waiving a time limitation for the award, and paving the way for Obama's action.
Obama said Kettles was humble and described how Kettles had noted there were some 74 pilots and crew members serving in that mission. Obama said that Kettles had remarked of the ceremony: "This seems like a hell of a lot of fuss for something that happened 50 years ago."
As Seen On
As seen on News 4
Ninety-two ducks were dumped in New Jersey and are now in need of a home, according to officials.
The ducks were rescued by New Jersey State and Wildlife officials Friday after being dumped near the Mill Creek Mall Secaucus on Friday.
They were temporarily relocated to The Barnyard Sanctuary in Columbia, New Jersey, an organization that rescues pet farm animals.
Tamala Lester, the sanctuarys managing director said they're young Khali Campbell ducks, a domesticated breed that does not fly. The group is now looking for help to care for the ducks, and hopes they can go to a good home.
Officials are looking for information about who dumped the ducks.
Firefighters battled a fire at an Applebees restaurant in Philadelphia.
The fire started at the Applebees on 9100 Roosevelt Boulevard around 6:45 p.m. Sunday. Officials believe it began in the center of the restaurant. [[387253681, C]]
The Applebees was evacuated and no injuries were reported. Firefighters were able to bring the flames under control at 7:54 p.m. Officials continue to investigate the cause of the blaze.
A police pursuit of a stolen car that authorities say was fleeing the scene of a double shooting in Atlantic City ended with a crash and three people under arrest.
The chase started shortly after 12:30 a.m. Sunday as officers responded to North Virginia Avenue after getting an alert through the city's gunshot detection system.
Two adult males were found shot and wounded at the scene. They were being treated at a hospital for injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
Around this time, two officers responding to the scene saw and tried to stop a vehicle that was fleeing the area. They recognized the car as one that had been stolen at gunpoint on Saturday.
The ensuing pursuit continued until a 17-year-old boy driving the car crashed on Brigantine Boulevard.
Gov. Chris Christie, as a friend and adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, is gearing up to lead New Jersey's delegation to the Cleveland convention this week, but some of the state's leading GOP figures won't be following him there.
The division in the New Jersey Republican party's ranks comes as Christie, who was passed over this week after being vetted to be Trump's running mate in favor of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, enters the final year of his second term as governor.
Former governors Tom Kean Sr. and Christie Todd Whitman have distanced themselves from Trump and have said it would be difficult to support their party's nominee. Kean said he's not going to the convention; Whitman, after saying she may vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, says she wants a viable third-party candidate to emerge.
The convention hits at a politically volatile time in New Jersey: Christie has stopped transportation projects over a disagreement about how to pay for the transportation trust fund; a top former appointee and mentor pleaded guilty Thursday to federal bribery charges for using his role as chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for personal gain; and the George Washington Bridge lane closure case is headed for court in September.
Whitman and Kean are not alone in backing away from Trump. Nationally, former Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are not attending the convention and neither is 2012 nominee Mitt Romney.
The lack of support has Trump's backers in New Jersey seeing red.
"I think they're totally out of step, and I think you have to question where they are," said Republican state Sen. Michael Doherty, who backed Trump even before Christie and is attending the convention for the first time as a Trump delegate. "I guess we don't need them."
Christie has said he backed Trump because he's a long-time friend and that the businessman can beat Clinton.
Some Republicans sitting out of the convention and not embracing Trump is a sign of just how split the Republican Party is, said Montclair State University political science professor Brigid Harrison. She pointed to the Bushes as proof that the dislike of Trump reaches wider than just New Jersey.
"To a great extent New Jersey is a microcosm of what's going on in the Republican Party nationally," Harrison said.
Some New Jersey Republicans are splitting the difference, attending the convention but not fully supporting Trump.
Senate Republican Leader Tom Kean Jr., the former governor's son, said he's "undecided at this juncture," and declined to detail why. But he added that the convention gives state Republicans a chance to network and build bridges beyond just the presidential contest.
"Conventions are always fascinating," Kean Jr. said. "Not only are they hundreds of people from New Jersey and thousands from around the country getting together to discuss the party and races in the nation and around the states, it's fun to catch up with people who you only see every four years."
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Khalid Kazimov Trend:
The Sistans 120-day wind has whipped up 400 villages in Irans southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan.
Naser Charkhsaz, an official with the Red Crescent Society of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRCS), said that over 1,300 individuals have been hospitalized following the dust wind, Iran Daily reported July 18.
The powerful wind has also blocked roads leading to several villages in the province.
The Sistans 120-day wind is a strong wind blowing during summer in southeastern parts of Iran and in some parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The usual speed of the wind is estimated to be around 30-40 km per hour.
The wind originates from the central deserts in Iran and blows toward Sistan and Baluchestan Province. It is a hot wind and carries abrasive sand and particles.
A large police presence descended on an apartment complex in New Castle, Delaware after a man shot a woman then turned to gun on himself, said county police.
Police advised residents in the Georgetown Manor Apartment complex on Christiana Road in New Castle to remain inside throughout the incident, which began around 6:15 p.m. as officers arrived to hear a gunshot ring out from an apartment.
The New Castle County Police Crisis Negotiation Team eventually got a hold of hate gunman over the phone and spent several hours trying to convince him to surrender before negotiators heard what sounded like a gunshot over the phone.
Officer then entered the apartment to find a man and woman dead of gunshot wounds, said police.
Police closed Delaware Route 273 from Airport Road to Churchmans Road and Christiana Road between Airport Road and Edinburgh Road into Monday morning as they investigated the shooting and spoke to the shooter.
SUICIDE PREVENTION HELP: The National Suicide Prevention Hotline (1-800-273-8255) is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
CLICK HERE to view SEPTAs new Regional Rail Interim Weekday Schedule which will be effective Monday.
As SEPTAs Regional Rail slowdown hits its third week, the transit authority will once again adjust its schedule to help with overcrowded trains and ease the burden on passengers.
SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch announced that five more cars, which are being leased from the Maryland Area Commuter Service (MARC), will be put into service on SEPTAs Regional Rail system Monday while another five are expected by the middle of next week.
This adds to the 18 leased passenger cars that were put into use this week, including five from Amtrak, eight from NJ Transit and the first five from MARC, Busch wrote in a released statement. When the last of the MARC vehicles arrive mid-next week, SEPTA will have 28 leased passenger rail cars in service.
Changes to the Regional Rail Interim weekday schedule will also go into effect Monday and include enhancements on some of SEPTAs most heavily traveled lines. Timetables for the new schedule can be viewed HERE.
List of Major Changes to Service:
SEPTA removed 120 Silverliner V trains a third of its rail fleet from service earlier this month after workers discovered a serious structural defect on the trains. Since then, riders have faced overcrowding and lengthy delays even after SEPTA added more train cars and modified its schedule last week.
This is an evolving process, and we will continue to make changes to optimize service for our customers, said SEPTA General Manager Jeffrey D. Knueppel. We are extremely grateful for the use of this additional rail equipment. MARC, Amtrak and NJ Transit have been great partners in what is a very challenging time for our customers.
In addition to the Regional Rail schedule changes, customers can also find alternate modes of travel HERE.
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.
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.
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.
The wife of a western Pennsylvania county commissioner is accused of shooting her husband in the neck at their home.
Deanna Vicites, 47, was charged Sunday with attempted homicide and related offenses in the shooting of Vincent Vicites.
Officials say Vincent Vicites was flown to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Vicites was in stable condition, District Attorney Richard Bower told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
No one responded to a knock at the couple's home from the newspaper. It wasn't immediately clear if Vicites had an attorney to comment on her behalf.
Vincent Vicites, a Democrat from Uniontown, served four terms as a Fayette County commissioner from 1996 to 2011.
He ran again for the board last year and won a seat in November.
Evacuations have been lifted for residents living near the 133-acre brush fire burning in Barona, dubbed the Feather Fire.
The fire broke out around 1:15 p.m. Monday near Featherstone Canyon Road in Barona in the Four Corners area. The area is just east of the Barona Resort and Casino in San Diego's East County, 32 miles northeast of Downtown San Diego.
As of 2 .m. Tuesday, Cal Fire officials reported the fire was holding steady at 133 acres and was 90 percent contained.
For several hours, Cal Fire crews said the brush fire was threatening homes in the Barona Mesa community. San Diego County Sheriff's (SDSO) deputies worked on scene to help those in the area evacuated. The evacuations have since been lifted.
No other evacuations have been issued at this time.
The fire was caused by some sort of mowing equipment malfunction, Cal Fire San Diego investigators said.
A temporary evacuation center was set up at El Capitan High School, located at 10410 Ashwood Street in Lakeside. Pets are welcome. Large animals could be taken to the San Diego Country Estates Equestrian Center located at 16911 Gunn Stage Road in Ramona.
According to Cal Fire, crews will be there through the night and tomorrow to fully contain the fire.
No other information was immediately available.
The fifth victim in a series of homeless attacks in San Diego is likely to survive, San Diego police confirmed Sunday.
The 55-year-old homeless man was found screaming under an overpass early Friday morning near 18th and C street downtown. He had significant wounds to his upper torso, according to police.
The victims condition has not been confirmed by a doctor, but police believe he will live and may testify against accused killer Jon David Guerrero, 39.
Last Friday morning police arrested Guerrero, who was living in a subsidized housing complex for the poor and homeless in downtown San Diego, for the killings.
Guerrero is accused in five attacks that began July 3, killing three and leaving two severely injured.
Police originally arrested Anthony Padgett, 36, of Chula Vista, but released him after new evidence lessened their confidence that he was the suspect, San Diego Police Capt. Dave Nisleit said in a news conference last Monday.
Guerrero faces three counts of first degree murder, two counts of attempted murder and two counts of arson.
He is scheduled to be arraigned this coming week.
Gavin Long, 29, the suspect in a shooting that killed three Baton Rouge police officers and injured three others, was formerly a Marine sergeant assigned to Camp Pendleton, MCAS Miramar and the Marine Corps Training Depot, according to military records obtained by NBC News. He also served at the Marine base at 29 Palms.
Long, who lived in Kansas City, Missouri, served from 2005 to 2010, and deployed once to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009.
During his service he received several awards, including the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and the Navy Unit Commendation Medal.
Longs marriage license in Kansas City also lists San Diego as his address.
Long, believed to be the only shooter in what police are describing as an ambush, was killed by police during Sundays shootout.
The attack comes less than two weeks after the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling by police sparked protests in Baton Rouge.
The officers were responding to a call of shots fired when they were gunned down around 9 a.m. local time, said Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden.
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, were identified as the officers killed.
Nicolas Leslie's death has taken an emotional toll on his Del Mar community.
Leslie, 20, was confirmed to be among the 84 people killed by a truck that barreled through a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, France last Thursday.
The sophomore at UC Berkeley was from Del Mar and graduated from Torrey Pines High School.
Longtime neighbor Geert Schmid-Schoenbein said hes angry Leslies promising life was cut short.
Schmid-Schoenbein said Leslie was an excellent student who came to visit his parents on weekends.
Very intact family, about as good as you can get, he told NBC 7. [He was] academically very strong. What else could you hope for from a kid?
Leslie had been reported missing following the attack, and travel companions in Nice posted flyers in hopes of finding him. His uncle had been searching hospitals in Nice since the attacks for news of his nephew.
On Sunday the unfortunate news of Leslie's death was reported to campus officials by the FBI.
A neighbor, who grew up across the street from Leslie told NBC 7 he was a role model and a kind person and that she wished she had taken the time to get to know him better.
"I always just assumed that I would just watch him carry out his life. So, it's the type of thing where you never know," Naz Etemad said.
Estemad said she would always see Leslie and his dad packing up their car to go surfing, windsurfing or spear fishing.
"They were always doing the coolest stuff. Super close with his dad. Definitely had a good relationship with him," she told NBC 7.
One of his companions who'd been distributing flyers in Nice posted to Facebook in part:
"Survivor's guilt is one of the strongest emotions I've felt... The one night I was sick, and wanted to stay home, this happened. You're the happiest person I ever knew. Thank you for the best three weeks of my life. "
Leslie, an environmental science major, was in Nice as part of Berkeleys study abroad program.
The University Tweeted this message on Leslie's death:
We are brokenhearted about the death of Nicolas Leslie. Our thoughts are with his family & friends. #ForeverABear https://t.co/yKYykdpfqk UC Berkeley (@UCBerkeley) July 17, 2016
Another friend posted in part:
"I've been waiting all weekend for you to walk through the door with a crazy story to tell me... But, you didn't. The world is an unfair place, where people are taken before their time... Where one selfish act of a crazy person can destroy so many peoples lives... My prayers go to you and your family. With a heavy heart I say fare well.
On Saturday, Leslie's father, Conrad, traveled to Nice from San Diego in search of his son, NBC News reported.
Details added (first version posted at 11:45)
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
The gunmen, who have seized a police station in Yerevan, released two of the six hostages, but refuse to lay down arms and surrender, RIA Novosti reported July 18 citing the Armenian National Security Service.
A group of gunmen entered a police station in Yerevan and took hostages July 17.
One police officer was killed and four were wounded in the incident. Currently, the gunmen are holding four police officers as hostages.
One police officer and an ambulance driver were released following the long negotiations on July 17 night, the message said. The gunmen refuse to release the rest of the hostages, including senior police officers, lay down their arms and surrender.
It was reported that one of the hostages was released July 17 night.
According to the message, the Armenian law-enforcement is using all available and possible means to resolve the problem peacefully, but it may be insufficient in this situation.
"We urge the members of the armed gang to refrain from the actions that could lead to new casualties and grave consequences, and stop armed resistance, the message said. There is still time and opportunity to do this."
Three officers were killed in Baton Rouge Sunday morning, the latest attack during several weeks of unrest in the country.
Just 10 days ago, another attack on police in Dallas killed five officers, and the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were just days before that.
Law enforcement and citizens across the country and in San Diego are trying to find common ground.
One of the first things I thought of this morning is the [mourning] band will be on the badge for at least another week. Its just, it's just tragic, a somber Sheriff Bill Gore told NBC 7.
Gore said he urges the public and officers not to overreact because then the attackers win.
To let the acts of some deranged people in other parts of the country drive a wedge, which is what they're trying to do, they're trying to create civil unrest. This serves no productive end, Gore said.
This is not the time to get angry and come out and slam the police or slam citizens or slam anybody, National Action Network activist Shane Harris agreed. Its a time to stand together and pray and love on each other.
Sheriff Gore explained he wants people to not fall into the trap of division.
I'm not saying there aren't mistakes made in law enforcement, Gore said. Were not perfect and nobody isWe have to be able to step back and talk about these issues and come to some constructive answers and solutions."
During the San Diego Pride Festival this weekend, where there was a heightened security presence, people went up to officers to thank them and mourn with them.
I think it's really ignorant and I really think it's sad, paradegoer Alex Malkim said. I know youre mad at the cops, but why not make it better?"
The question is poignant as officers must, one more time, put on the mourning band.
San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman reacted on Twitter to the horrific attack on officers in Baton Rouge saying, "The terrible acts of violence in #BatonRouge will never break our resolve to protect & serve our community. We must all stand together."
Law enforcement officials from across San Diego County held a conference Monday, asking members of the public for support in wake of the Dallas and Baton Rouge attacks.
The Law Enforcement Chiefs and Sheriff, County Supervisors, city council members, community members and the mayor met at The Fountain in Balboa Park Monday at 12 p.m. The spot is located at 1875 El Prado, near the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center.
SD Mayor Faulconer: "There is no doubt our nation is hurting. This is an opportunity for all of us to come together. pic.twitter.com/8tKBl5RGkg Artie Ojeda (@ArtieNBCSD) July 18, 2016
"We are saddened and horrified to see that another three of our fellow officers have been murdered by a senseless killer, President Brian R. Marvel said, the President of the San Diego Police Officers Association, in a statement.
The San Diego County Chiefs and Sheriff Association implored residents of San Diego to maintain solidarity with law enforcement in light of the latest events.
"This is about coming together as one county. More violence, of course, will not heal these wounds. These wounds can only be healed through love and understanding," San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said.
Violence aimed against police in Dallas and Baton Rouge killed eight law-enforcement officials in the past two weeks.
Yesterday morning's shooting in Baton Rouge is a grave reminder of the dangers that peace officers face every day and we stand with our law enforcement brothers and sisters not just in Baton Rouge, but nationwide, Marvel said.
Civil unrest and protests against police have spread across the nation, since white officers shot and killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge on July 5 and Philando Castile in Minnesota on July 6. A 12-year-old boy was also arrested last Friday in connection with a suspected plot to kill Louisiana police officers.
During law enforcement "Unity Rally" this man asking police to "understand community plight." #nbc7 pic.twitter.com/cwV3bXOYph Artie Ojeda (@ArtieNBCSD) July 18, 2016
Once again we see our fellow law enforcement officers shot and killed, first Dallas and now Baton Rouge. At the same time we have innocent people killed in Orlando, Turkey and Nice by uninformed, hate-filled mentally unstable individuals who have a warped view of the world, Chief of Police in National City Manuel Rodriguez said in a statement.
The afternoons conference explained how local law enforcement is responding to the deaths of more officers and why its important for the community to show understanding and compassion.
San Diego Police Department (SDPD) Chief Shelley Zimmerman said she wanted to set the national model for police and community relations. She told NBC 7 that SDPD is taking precautions when it comes to protecting officers.
"We've been talking with our officers to make sure they're very vigilant, to make surt that they're very aware, and we have teamed up our officers, so they have a partner. And we realize what's going on across the country and we want to make sure everyone is safe," Zimmerman said.
Youngsters pose with police officers at Unity Rally. #nbc7 pic.twitter.com/g6wfXuhKfU Artie Ojeda (@ArtieNBCSD) July 18, 2016
With so much tragedy its easy to forget the majority of our communities support us and count on us to protect them from these senseless acts of violence, Rodriguez said.
But not everyone was on board with the unity conference.
"I'm not condoning any violence at all. What I'm saying is violence is invevitable. If you don't really sit down at the table, if you don't really sit down at the table with people, it's gonna get worse," Lincoln Park resident Dwayne Harvey said.
Harvey walked through the crowd, holding a sign that read "It's a Slave Revolt." He told NBC 7 that law enforcement is not understanding the concerns of the community.
Crews are working to put out a series of spot fires that broke out just off Interstate 15, near the border between San Diego County and Riverside County.
The spot fires stem from a brush fire in unincorporated Temecula County that broke out around 1:56 p.m. Monday.
Crews on scene found six to seven spots fires spread along the northbound shoulder of Intersatte 15 when they arrived on scene. Three of those fires spread 20 feet by 20 feet.
A Sig alert has been issued for I-15 northbound just south of State Route 79 in Riverside County. The number four lane will be closed for several hours as crews work.
Heavy traffic has been reported from SR-76 to SR-79.
Additional units are heading to the Temecula Creek Inn for structure protection. In NBC 7 San Diego viewer video, thick smoke and flames could be seen rising above the nearby gold course.
Cal Fire Riverside, Cal Fire San Diego and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers are responding.
No other information was immediately available.
Check back for updates on this breaking news story.
A SWAT incident that started in Pacific Beach late Saturday night was over by Sunday morning, but the suspect remains at-large, San Diego police confirmed.
Officers were serving a felony warrant on the man who was holed up in the 1400 block of Pacific Beach Drive.
Police fired off a flashbang and tear gas, but said the suspect must have slipped out.
The standoff started around 11:21 p.m. Saturday night and was cleared just after 6 a.m.
Police continue to search for the suspect.
A woman killed in a suspected DUI crash when coming home from a Friday night concert was an Illinois native and animal lover who had been living in San Diego for several years, according to her landlord.
Suspect Gabriel Jones, 33, was driving home from a Dixie Chicks concert at the Sleep Train Amphitheatre with Kendra Carperter, 39, in the passenger seat just before midnight Friday, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) said.
According to investigators, Jones admitted to drinking alcohol prior to getting behind the wheel. She was traveling westbound on Main Street when she lost control of her car and drove onto the area surrounding a home, striking a concrete block. This caused the car to roll over.
Carperter suffered a fatal head injury in the suspected DUI crash that happened just before midnight Friday in the 4000 block of Main Street, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) said.
Her landlord spoke off-camera to NBC 7 San Diego Sunday and said Carperter was a day trader who worked from home in City Heights. She is originally from Illinois.
Carperter was a big animal lover, her landlord said, and has a pit bull.
Carperter was pronounced dead on scene.
Jones suffered minor injuries, but survived. She was taken to a local hospital where she was treated and soon released. The CVPD said she was arrested for various DUI-related charges. When she is released, she will be booked into Las Colinas.
The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information on this deadly crash can call the CVPD at (619) 691-5151 or (619) 476-5374.
Kevin Dillard literally tore his pool into pieces earlier this year after police discovered the body of his 2-year-old neighbor in the above-ground pool just 20 minutes after she disappeared from her home.
Virginia Beach Police did not press charges after investigators found a hole in Dillards fence just big enough for a child to crawl through, but Dillard said he was devastated by the toddlers death.
More than 280 kids under the age of 5 drown every year in pools, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The News 4 I-Team found more than 50 of those deaths happened in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia within the past 10 years, after reviewing records from health departments, hospitals, police departments and medical examiner reports.
The CPSC reports most children die when an adult loses track of the child when they're at the pool together, but one out of every 10 child pool drownings happens after the child figures out how to get through the pool fence.
"Kids are natural born explorers, said Dr. Rich Lichenstein, a pediatric emergency doctor at the University of Maryland Medical Center who has studied the Maryland cases, including 30 near-drownings within the past three years. They see these colorful floats, tubes and noodles."
While some involved teenagers who couldnt swim, most were toddlers between 1 and 4 years old, he said.
"They don't quite understand the risk of water getting in their mouth and water causing them to choke, he said. It's just a second and all of a sudden they lose their lives."
Dr. Lichenstein cited statistics showing drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children under the age of 4, so it's critical for all adults -- even those who don't have kids -- to secure their pools.
All of the local governments in our area require pool owners to install a tall fence and locking gate, either with a self-latching mechanism or padlock.
Michael Slattery, a pool inspector for Prince Georges Countys Health Department, which inspects more than 300 pools each summer, showed the I-Team what he looks for when he inspects a fence during a recent visit to the Greenbelt Aquatic Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
He carefully walked the perimeter of the pools fence, making sure gates were locked and pulling really hard on the fence itself.
The big issue is how easy it is to pull up from the bottom, he said.
In Prince Georges County, a fence must be 6-feet tall -- higher than most adults heads, he said.
He suggested pool owners make a fist, with their thumb on the outside, to approximate the size of a small childs head. If their fist can get through, then the hole or gap in the fence is too big, he said.
Eighty-seven percent of all child drownings happen in residential pools, according to the CPSC, so the I-Team searched through hundreds of inspection reports and complaint investigations into private pools in our region and found multiple apartment complexes in Prince George's County cited for holes in their fences and broken gates before the summer season started. In Montgomery County, inspectors there visited multiple homes after neighbors complained about holes in fences. In both counties the I-Team found all of the fences were repaired or replaced after the inspector's visit.
But that's not the case in Fairfax County. Even though Virginia law gives counties the power to go after people who don't maintain their pool fences, including jail time and fines, Fairfax doesn't enforce the ordinance, a county spokesman said. Meaning Fairfax County "does not maintain any records" of "complaints or violations," according to an email sent by the spokesman.
Records from the state's medical examiner and local police show at least eight children have died in Fairfax County pools within the past 10 years.
Dr. Shireen Atabaki at Children's National Health Center told the I-Team it is critical for parents to teach their kids how to swim and to keep an eye on them at all times.
She said you just cannot assume a fence or a gate will keep a kid out, because her staff saw 21 near-drownings in their emergency room alone just last year.
"A lot of people put pool covers on the pool, Atabaki said. We have seen cases of toddlers suffocating, near-drowning, in the small amount of water you get in from the pool cover."
She and all the experts the I-Team interviewed said the same thing: Youve got to think like a toddler by looking for places where they can squeeze through.
And tackle the problem now so you never have to find a child in your pool after its too late.
Things That Can Kill You
There should always be one adult for every two children in a pool, according to Dr. Shireen Atabaki at Childrens National Medical Center. You have to actually watch them. Do not read a book or check your cell phone because emergency room doctors say drowning is nearly silent and can happen in seconds.
Make sure theres a fence at least 6-feet tall surrounding the pool on all sides.
All spaces, gaps and holes in the fence must be less than 4 inches (the size of an adult fist). Make sure you check along the ground. Inspectors say kids pull fences up and pull them down. Stronger, older siblings can pull the fence up just enough to fit a smaller child underneath.
You must have a self-latching gate that locks itself. Otherwise padlock the gate to keep curious kids out. Emergency room pediatrician Dr. Rich Lichenstein says kids are very clever and even small children can open complicated latches.
Make sure there are TWO drains at the bottom of the pool with the drain covers intact. Check hot tubs and spas, too. If theres only one, a child could be pulled down by the suction created by the drain. Covers must be intact so hair, bathing suits and other loose items dont pull the child into the drain. They need to be secured to the bottom of the pool, said Michael Slattery of Prince Georges Countys Health Department. If theyre not there, dont swim in the pool.
Make sure theres a lifeguard at public pools. They need to be able to see the bottom of the entire pool and should have their rescue tube within arms reach.
Things That Can Make You Sick:
Pool clarity. If the pool isnt crystal clear, dont swim in it, said Slattery.
The pH must be between 7.2-7.8.
Chlorine must be between 1.5 ppm and 10 ppm.
Look for major damage on the pool deck and in the pool. Cracking tiles and concrete can slice feet open.
Look for raw metal edges on ladders and other pool equipment to avoid cuts and lacerations.
Reported by Tisha Thompson, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.
A former city official who worked with three Washington, D.C. mayors pleaded guilty Monday to filing a false tax return and cheating the government out of more than $220,000.
Warren Graves -- who served as chief of staff to former D.C. City Administrator Allen Lew and worked with mayors Marion Barry, Vincent Gray and Anthony Williams -- likely will face one year to 18 months of incarceration, federal prosecutors said Monday afternoon. News4 was first to report on the charges against him.
Graves, 63, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Under a plea agreement, he will pay the U.S. Department of the Treasury $220,987. That's the amount prosecutors say he owes after he under-reported his earnings by more than $500,000 from 2009 to 2013.
Graves' lawyers did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Federal prosecutors, in their court filings, said Graves misrepresented his annual pay in a 2009 Form 1040 filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
The 2009 Form 1040, which was prepared and signed in the District of Columbia and filed with the Internal Revenue Service, stated that Defendants taxable income was $140,556, whereas, he then and there knew his taxable income was $368,937, the court filing says.
Prosecutors say Graves owned a consulting firm in D.C. that arranged meetings between D.C. officials, businesses and individuals. Most of this work was done prior to 2009, but some payments continued while Graves was a D.C. employee, prosecutors said.
He is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 25.
Laurel Regional Hospital will remain keep its doors open through 2017 after an agreement between the current managing company, the University of Maryland Medical System and city and county officials.
The agreement charts a new path forward for the hospital to keep its inpatient services going until Dec. 31, 2017 and potentially becoming affiliates of the UMMS. Dimensions Health Corporation, who currently is managing the hospital, would build a new regional medical center in Largo, if a certificate of need is issued by the Maryland Health Care Commission.
The hospital announced last year that it would begin downsizing and eventually phase out patient care for the area. Laurel, Maryland, residents expressed concerns about the lack of a medical facility within the area.
We appreciate UMMS commitment to move forward and focus on continuity of service and modernization of the current facility, Laurel Mayor Craig Moe said. And just as important, we appreciate the opportunity to have the community involved in shaping the future of healthcare here.
A work group is planning on getting community input on how to improve the delivery of healthcare in Laurel and Northern Prince Georges County. They will also weigh in on if a new facility should be built or the existing Laurel Regional Hospital campus should be renovated.
The Maryland Health Care Commission is expected to make a final decision on the Certificate of Need for the regional medical center by the end of the year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
The armed group that seized a police station in Armenia's capital of Yerevan on July 17 is holding five people as hostages, RIA Novosti quoted Armenian deputy police chief, Unan Pogosyan as saying July 18.
Earlier in the day, local media reported that four individuals, including Armenia's deputy police chief Maj. Gen. Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan's deputy police chief Col. Valeri Osipyan, were held captive.
The armed group refused to lay down their arms and surrender. They are now holding five hostages. Negotiations are ongoing. We hope for a peaceful outcome, Pogosyan told reporters.
An armed group seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, July 17, demanding the release of the participant of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, coordinator of the oppositional Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan.
He was arrested for illegally purchasing and storing weapons.
The government officials are holding talks with the armed groups members.
A 24-year-old man will spend a dozen years in prison for a violent Germantown, Maryland, home invasion that ended only when his victim recognized him as a former middle school classmate.
Devote Dixon was sentenced at the Montgomery County Circuit Court Monday for the November 2015 home invasion.
Prosecutors say Dixon and an armed accomplice broke into a young mother's apartment in the middle of the day. Dixon punched the victim several times as she held her 2-year-old daughter and asked her for money.
At one point, the victim asked Dixon, 'Why are you doing this? I recognize you from middle school.'"
Dixon and his accomplice ran away after Dixon was recognized.
Prosecutors say Dixon and the victim both attended Roberto W. Clemente Middle School in Germantown. The victim was able to identify Dixon using a yearbook from the school.
The yearbook photo and evidence collected at the scene led police to Dixon, who was on probation at the time of the attack.
Dixon tried to argue that he suffers from attention-deficit disorder and bipolar disorder, but the judge did not factor that into the sentencing.
Dixon's accomplice remains at large. Anyone with information that can help police is asked to contact authorities.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced a $229.6 million plan to ease traffic congestion along Interstate 270 and local roads in Montgomery County, a welcome proposal for the hundreds of thousands of drivers using the extremely busy roadway.
However, $100 million of that money isnt dedicated to any project. Maryland transportation officials are going outside the box and are looking for ideas for reducing traffic along I-270.
From Interstate 70 in Frederick to the beltway split in Montgomery County, I-270 carries a notorious connotation with its heavy volume of travelers.
"You know, we are standing right here along Maryland's most congested highway," said Pete Rahn, Maryland Secretary of Transportation.
The I-270 Innovative Congestion Management project hopes to gather ideas to reduce congestion and delays along the corridor in Montgomery and Frederick counties.
We are putting up $100 million to try to attract the best ideas from transportation innovators and companies from all across American to come up with the best ideas, said Hogan. So it's not what I want to see, but it's what the best ideas are. Well figure that out when we get the proposals."
The state hopes to hear an idea it hasn't heard before but said tolling systems, like the express lanes in Virginia, will not be considered. Some drivers said theyd be willing to shell out some money to get moving.
Well, paying versus sitting in the car, I'd rather pay and get to my destination rather than just sitting in my car in the traffic," said Adam Sani, a commuter along I-270.
The rest of the money will be used to construct a new $129.6 million interchange at I-270 and Watkins Mill Road in an effort to reduce congestion on local roads and improve safety for residents and commuters. The new interchange also will provide access from I-270 to the Metropolitan Grove MARC station.
The governors office said the 35-mile, I-270 corridor carries from 79,400 vehicles a day on the north end of I-270 to 261,200 vehicles a day near the Capital Beltway. By the year 2035, they said these volumes will increase to 107,000 to 290,000 vehicles a day.
The Maryland State Highway Administration will be accepting proposals until July 25. They expect final proposals to be submitted for approval by Jan. 5, 2017.
The U.S. ambassador to Turkey denied any American role in an attempted coup there, saying Monday that speculation to that effect was "categorically untrue."
Tensions between the two countries have escalated since members of the Turkish military tried and failed to seize power on Friday. Turkey's Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu has suggested Washington was behind the plot.
"Some news reports and, unfortunately, some public figures have speculated that the United States in some way supported the coup attempt," Ambassador John Bass said in a statement Monday. "This is categorically untrue."
Central to the friction between Washington and Ankara is Fetullah Gulen, a cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania and who Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed for orchestrating the putsch, NBC News reported.
Gulen denies the charges even raising the possibility the coup attempt may have been staged, but Erdogan has demanded his extradition from the U.S.
Two armed robbery suspects have been arrested and another is sought after a vehicle crashed into a telephone pole during a police chase from Lawrence to Methuen, Massachusetts.
According to Methuen Police, the accident happened on East Street around 11 Sunday night.
The state police air wing was called in to assist in the search of the third suspect.
Additional details on the suspects or the alleged robbery were not released.
National Grid and Verizon are on the scene. Power has been restored.
The incident remains under investigation.
Police say a Portland, Maine, bicyclist was injured over the weekend when a bicycle he was riding hit the side of a car.
It happened around 1:45 p.m. Saturday in Portland. Police say 23-year-old Devon Pease was riding his bike against the flow of traffic when he hit the Chevy Malibu driven by 45-year-old Idhle Gambale of Portland.
Pease was taken to the Maine Medical Center with injuries that aren't considered life-threatening. Gambale wasn't injured.
The incident is under investigation.
NECN has learned the car at the center of a police-involved shooting in Massachusetts Saturday night was stolen from a young couple just hours earlier.
"It just seems like everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong right now," said Kristen Deon.
She and her fiance were at Lowell General Hospital with their newborn daughter Saturday afternoon when they realized their car was missing from the facility's garage. It wasn't until they received a call from a credit card company that they learned someone had taken the car and a wallet inside of it.
"As I was walking back in, getting calls from the credit card company saying there's fraudulent activity," said Deon's fiance, Robert Logan Jr.
According to their records, the alleged thief made a small purchase at a local convenience store before stopping at a Best Buy in New Hampshire, where he bought laptops and phone chargers.
"I think he got $400 off our credit card," said Logan.
But that was just the beginning of their problems.
Tyngsborough Police attempted to stop the driver of their car later that night for a traffic violation. But rather than pull over, they said the driver, a 27 year old male, took off. The officer then followed him down Route 3, where the man entered the parking lot of Sully's Ice Cream on Graniteville Road in Chelmsford.
That is when things escalated.
"It really happened so fast. Definitely saw the officer getting dragged about 15 feet or so," said Myka Reeder, who watched the incident unfold from her home across the street.
According to the Middlesex District Attorney's Office, a Chelmsford officer approached the car and the driver backed up, catching him on the vehicle. DA Marian Ryan said the driver then dragged the officer several yards before another officer shot him.
"The Tyngsborough officer discharged his firearm twice, striking the suspect," said Ryan.
The driver was taken by medical helicopter to a Boston hospital, where he was listed in grave condition. Police have not released his identity.
"There was blood all over the seat and the steering wheel," said Logan. "There's a lot of damage on the driver side. The whole front headlight is smashed in."
Logan was able to see the car Sunday afternoon. While he expects police will release it to him in the next couple days, he's not sure how well it will operate.
"I hope it was worth it," said Logan.
Per department policy, authorities said the Tyngsborough officer that used his weapon is currently on administrative leave.
The incident is still under investigation.
Sides in the so-called Snapchat rape trial made their closing statements Monday in Salem, Massachusetts.
Two Saugus, Massachusetts, residents - Rashad Daihim and Kailyn Bonia - are accused of raping a 16-year-old teenager in 2014. The incident was recorded and later posted on Snapchat.
The jury will consider the alleged victim's state of mind.
The defense said that the sex was consensual. The alleged victim admitted she was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. The prosecution believes she was too intoxication to consent.
A man who allegedly stabbed a Worcester, Massachusetts, police officer in the face has been order held without bail following his arraignment.
Patxie Delorbe, 30, of Worcester, pleaded not guilty to multiple charges on Monday, according to Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.'s office.
Authorities said police were called to a home on Grand Street Sunday morning where Delorbe was combative and threatening his ex-girlfriend. During an altercation with officers, Delorbe was tased and one officer was slashed in the face with a steak knife.
Delorbe is charged with violating an abuse-prevention order, resisting arrest, two counts of assault and battery on a police officer, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and assault with intent to murder. He will return to Central District Court next week for a dangerousness hearing.
One firefighter was injured battling a fire that broke out at a barn in Seekonk, Massachusetts, Monday morning.
According to necn affiliate WJAR, the fire at 201 Miller St. broke out sometime before 5 a.m.
The barn, which was attached to a home, was completely destroyed. The home was saved, however.
No animals were inside the barn and it was being used to store construction equipment.
The firefighter is expected to be alright.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
The armed group that seized a police station in Armenia's capital of Yerevan has released another hostage from the police station, RIA Novosti reported July 18.
Earlier in the day, local media reported that four individuals, including Armenia's deputy police chief Maj. Gen. Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan's deputy police chief Col. Valeri Osipyan, were held captive.
The armed group refused to lay down their arms and surrender. They are now holding five hostages. Negotiations are ongoing. We hope for a peaceful outcome, Armenian deputy police chief Unan Pogosyan told reporters.
The armed group seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, July 17, demanding the release of the participant of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, coordinator of the oppositional Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan.
He was arrested for illegally purchasing and storing weapons.
The government officials are holding talks with the armed groups members.
Two men were killed when their vehicles collided head-on Foxon Road, or Route 80, in North Branford, Connecticut, around 5:15 a.m. on Monday.
Officers responding to the scene and a civilian worked to pull one of the drivers out of a badly mangled vehicle, but both men were severely injured.
One driver was pronounced dead at the scene and the other died at the hospital, according to police. No one else was in either vehicle, police said.
Police have identified the two men as John Fragola, 67, of Killingworth, and Mario Simmons, 51, of North Branford.
The crash was near a daycare and parents shielded their children from the tragic scene as they brought them this morning.
"It is a tragedy. My heart goes out to the families," Jacqueline McCray, of East Haven, said.
"It is a tragedy. My heart goes out to the families," Jacqueline McCray, of East Haven, said.
Residents of North Branford said there have been several crashes at the curve where this one happened. Nearby residents also had no idea how bad this crash actually was.
"I just heard ambulances and everything. I didnt know it was this bad," Maythe Carpentino, of North Branford, said. "I was actually shocked because I didnt hear any screeching, any tires. I just heard a big like-thump."
Officers are investigating, but said they believe one car crossed lanes and hit the other car.
The road was closed between Caputo and Forest roads.
The state fire marshal's office in Maine says a Lincolnville woman set a stolen vehicle on fire after driving it for more than 200 miles.
Fire marshals say they arrested Melanie Vangel after she stole a van from Rockport and drove it to New Hampshire before returning north and parking it next to a garage in Cape Elizabeth. They say she then set it on fire on Saturday.
Authorities say they charged Vangel with unauthorized use of property and two counts of arson. Investigators say the van was stolen either Friday or early Saturday.
Authorities say the van was destroyed and the garage sustained several thousand dollars in damage. It was unclear on Monday if Vangel had an attorney
A man was injured in a daytime shooting in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
The shooting happened Monday afternoon. Police say a three-and-a-half-story house was riddled with bullets.
Pawtucket Police Chief Paul King told the Providence Journal that the victim was taken to Rhode Island Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Police have not released the man's identity.
There's no word on any arrests. The shooting remains under investigation.
Severe weather, including a tornado, hit parts of New England Monday afternoon.
A trained spotter with the National Weather Service confirmed a tornado near New Sweden, Maine.
[CLICK HERE FOR FULL LIST OF SEVERE WEATHER ALERTS]
Severe thunderstorm warnings affected counties in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut and Massachusetts all Monday afternoon, resulting in hail, lightning, strong winds and heavy downpours.
A Severe Thunderstorm Watch was issued for much of the region except Cape Cod and the Islands until 8 p.m.
Keep in mind that a Severe Thunderstorm Watch means conditions are favorable for the development of damaging thunderstorms in and around the defined area, including frequent cloud-to-ground lightning, wind gusts in excess of 58 mph capable of knocking down trees, limbs and power lines, and the potential for large hail.
Already today, weve seen hail and wind across Northern New York and Northern Vermontand more storms are expected to fill in to the south and east, for most of the remainder of New England.
Stay alert for warnings, meaning severe weather is imminent, and be prepared to seek shelter indoors, away from windows when storms threaten. No change to our thinking on timing, below.
Our Early Warning Weather Team is providing live radar coverage of the storm on-air and online if your neighborhood is in a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, seek shelter inside, away from windows. Though lightning is not a factor in the issuance of Severe Thunderstorm Warnings, lightning poses a deadly threat - if you can hear thunder, you likely are close enough to be at risk and should shelter inside until the storm passes.
[CLICK HERE FOR INTERACTIVE RADAR & MAPS]
Keep in mind that even non-severe thunderstorms can produce strong winds, small hail, dangerous lightning, and heavy rain.
As always, your necn Early Warning Weather Team will continue to provide radar analysis, street-level forecasts, critical information to save life and property, and suggested actions through our continuing coverage. In addition to our live coverage, you can stay up-to-date with the latest weather information via www.necn.coms weather page, and our mobile app.
Earlier story below:
As heat and humidity reaches a climax in New England today, an approaching disturbance aloft, driving a cold front east out the Great Lakes at the surface, will ignite thunderstorms from Upstate New York, then west to east across New England, during the midday and afternoon hours Monday. Though moisture is limited through a deep layer of the atmosphere, reducing the risk of localized flooding with any thunderstorms, ample wind is present aloft to warrant a threat for damaging downburst, straight-line winds inside developing storms. Of course, strong wind gusts inside thunderstorms are capable of downing trees, tree limbs and power lines in the communities hardest hit...and even in weaker storms, cloud-to-ground lightning is always a concern, so seeking shelter indoors when storms approach is a must: if you can hear thunder, you're close enough for lightning to be a danger.
[CLICK HERE FOR WEATHER ALERTS]
Timing of the storms appears to be from as early as midday in Western New England - Vermont and the New York border with Massachusetts - to a 2-4 PM timeframe in Central New England and 4-6 PM from Boston to Hartford and some of the southern suburbs...eventually into Providence. Cape Cod should actually stay storm-free for the day, with perhaps some weakening showers during the evening.
There are some finer details we can examine in the near-term, high-resolution guidance that continue to support the notion of damaging wind with some storms. In the following image, surface wind gust speed is plotted, and it's clear the Boston area is one region forecast to receive focused, high wind gusts in storms this afternoon, as building thunderheads tap sufficient wind aloft and carry that wind down to ground level. Both of these images are valid at 5 PM and illustrate a band of strong wind gusts across New Hampshire - it's possible these extend farther south, toward the Boston area, but certainly this gives a good indication we're looking at the potential for some gusty storms today:
You can bet we'll keep you posted on NECN as the storms develop today.
Matt
Police say a 17-year-old boy was stabbed multiple times and three people were charged in connection with an out-of-control party at a Newport, Rhode Island, mansion.
The Newport Daily News reports that the unauthorized party Friday night at Kingscote drew as many as 50 teenagers.
A Portsmouth teen was stabbed early Saturday in the back, between his ribs and above his left hip when he tried to break up a fight. He was in stable condition Sunday.
Two boys charged in connection with the stabbing face arraignment Monday.
Police say 18-year-old Josiah Travers hosted the party. He's charged with providing alcohol for minors. He told police he knew the estate's caretakers were out of town so invited some friends over. It's not clear if he has a lawyer.
Kingscote was built in in 1839.
Bishop of Lynn blesses newly donated PlayVan Bishop of Lynn blesses newly donated PlayVan
The Bishop of Lynn has blessed an anonymously donated PlayVan which will add to the work of a Christian charity which brings mobile playgroups to rural communities across Norfolk that have no existing childcare provision.
The Rt Revd Jonathan Meyrick, Bishop of Lynn visited Walsingham Primary School on Wednesday, July 6 and paid tribute to the excellent work that PlayVan does across the Diocese of Norwich and thanked Lesley Gurney, the charitys development worker, for all her hard work.
Bishop Jonathan said: It was a joy to bless the PlayVan during my visit to Walsingham Primary School. The PlayVan provides an invaluable service facilitating playgroups which gives parents, carers and guardians, as well as their children , space to grow and develop in a friendly environment and usually then connects them with their local school.
The PlayVan is a van full of toys, resources and equipment for children under the age of five. Although part of the work of the Diocese of Norwich, the PlayVan is a separate charity with a board of trustees and one employed development worker.
The idea behind the van is to provide a safe, stimulating and secure location in rural Norfolk villages which have no childcare provisions where eventually, with support, the community can take this role on.
Robert Culyer, Chairman of the PlayVan trustees, said: "The PlayVan is totally dependent upon charitable donations. To receive this magnificent gift from an anonymous donor shows the value placed upon the work that the PlayVan carries out. We are so grateful to this donor and to the other trusts that help us to provide this much needed facility."
One of the locations that the PlayVan visits is Walsingham Primary School. Mr Marshall Schaitel, senior teacher at the school, said: "the PlayVan doesnt just visit our school, it is a vital part of our whole school life. Every week an excited group of young children join us. This provides an excellent stepping stone for the children to become part of our school."
PlayVan aims to establish, support and encourage sustainable groups where adults and children can have fun and learn through play in an innovative and exciting way.
Each session is one and a half to two hours long with refreshments for parents/carers and snack time for children. During the session children and parents are encouraged to make use of the zoned areas together, developing all of the skills necessary for children to enter into nursery or school with confidence using basic numeracy, literacy and social skills.
The group also provides a soundboard for parents to talk about any problems they may have, for example bedtime routines, potty training, behavioural issues and weaning. Parents offer support to each other, giving tips, ideas and general information.
PlayVan also currently works in the Norfolk communities of Binham, Hindringham and Walsingham.
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.
This story, "The H-1B positions of Clinton and Trump" was originally published by Computerworld .
Technology is not a bad thing; its not inherently scary. Sometimes new technology gets misused or tainted with mission creep. Most of the time, tech actually makes our lives easier and better. Here are two tales about new tech that could potentially predict the future. One seems scarier than the other.
Algorithm to predict at birth if a person will be a criminal
Algorithms control aspects of your life whether you are aware of it or not. They are used to come up with risk scores and even predict the future. But how would you feel about an algorithm that seems to be ripped straight from Minority Report? It would identify criminals far before they could commit a crime, since it would predict at the time of someones birth how likely she is to commit a crime by the time she turns 18.
Richard Berk, a statistician and University of Pennsylvania professor, is working on such an algorithm, according to Bloomberg. He believes it can predict at the moment of birth whether people will commit a crime by their 18th birthday, based on factors such as environment and the history of a new childs parents.
There are algorithms used to decide which blocks police officers should patrol, where to put inmates in prison, and who to let out on parole. These are suggested to be fairer than when the decision is left to individuals with prejudices or judges having a bad day. People who support such tools claim they will do away with prejudices, but critics say the prejudices are built into the algorithms.
Berk said, If you want me to do a totally race-neutral forecast, youve got to tell me what variables youre going to allow me to use, and nobody can, because everything is confounded with race and gender.
Bloomberg reported that Berks algorithms have been used by prisons to determine which inmates to place in restrictive settings; parole departments to choose how closely to supervise people being released from prison; and police officers to predict whether people arrested for domestic violence will re-offend. Hes even come up with a tool for OSHA to determine which workplaces were likely to commit safety violations. Pennsylvania will start a pilot program in the fall that uses Berks algorithm to decide how long to sentence a person to prison.
Since Berks system will be used for sentencing decisions, it was troubling to read that 29 to 39 percent of risk score predictions are wrong. Berk said, Focusing on accuracy misses the point. Um, a person who was labeled a future criminal would likely disagree, but a future criminal who was decided to be a low risk would be cool with it.
When talking about crime predictions, he said, The policy position that is taken is that its much more dangerous to release Darth Vader than it is to incarcerate Luke Skywalker.
For right now, Berk believes the only limit to a predict-at-birth-if-person-will-commit-a-crime tool is the data he can to feed into the algorithm.
I dont know about you, but to me the whole concept seems pretty scary.
Chicagos Array of Things to help predict the future
Meanwhile in Chicago, sensor-based nodes for the Array of Things (AoT) project are being installed this summer; 12 prototypes were installed previously. Here is a map of the first 42 sensors, which were dubbed a second set of prototypes. The sensors will supposedly help predict the future.
AoT summed it up as:
What if a light pole told you to watch out for an icy patch of sidewalk ahead? What if an app told you the most populated route for a late-night walk to the El station by yourself? What if you could get weather and air quality information block by block, instead of city by city?
The sensors will monitor air quality, climate, noise, sound vibration to detect heavy traffic, traffic congestion, pedestrian traffic and more. Eventually, there will be sensors to monitor other urban factors such pollutants, precipitation, wind, flooding and standing water. Chicago wants to be a smart city, and there will be 500 nodes by the end of 2018.
AT&T will provide the network connectivity. The press release stated, The data collected from the sensors will be transmitted in a highly secure manner over the AT&T wireless network to a central database server at the Argonne National Laboratory, where it will be processed and released openly to the public. Researchers, city services, and technology developers will be able to use the data to address energy efficiency, traffic safety, urban flooding, air pollution and many more urban challenges.
Unlike Berks algorithm meant to predict at the moment of birth whether a person will commit a crime by their 18th birthday, the AoT sensors and algorithms that will help predict the future are not aimed at individuals. AoT is designed to not collect any personal or private information.
It uses the Waggle platform for powerful and secure remote processing of measurements before transmission of data to a central server. For example, this capability allows images such as those of standing water or bike traffic at a street intersection to be quickly analyzed within the node, with only the numerical results such as water depth or number of bikes being transmitted and publicly released.
AoT project lead Charlie Catlett, director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data, said, We're interested in monitoring the city's environment and activity, not individuals, which is why we have built privacy protection into the design of the sensors and our operating policies.
You can view the governance and privacy policies, but it is too late to comment on them. Public comments were only allowed between June 13 - 27.
Having tech warn a person about an icy sidewalk, data that will be open to everyone and free, seems much less threatening to me than having a closed algorithm determine at birth if a person is a future criminal.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
The plan of the attempt of military coup has been found which consists of 3 pages and 20 articles, Milliyet newspaper writes.
In terms goals, objectives conducted a military coup were specified and the direction in which the rebels will move.
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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
The Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency says authorities have rounded up 29 judges and prosecutors in the Turkish province of Kayseri 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.
Turkey's military attache to Kuwait Mikail Gullu has been detained by Saudi Arabian officials at the request of Turkey on Sunday, and will soon be extradited, Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.
According to reports, Gullu was detained after he left Kuwait and was taking a transit flight from Dammam Airport to Amsterdam, following the failure of a coup attempt by the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO) in Turkey, Daily Sabah reported.
Sources said that Gullu was expected to be appointed as the president of the Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation if the coup was successful.
Saudi authorities are currently working on the extradition of Gullu, sources added.
Meanwhile, Saudi King Salman congratulated President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on stopping the coup:
"His majesty congratulated him for the return to normal in Turkey and expressed the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's welcoming of the security and stability restored by the leadership of his excellency (Erdogan) and the continuation of the activities of the Turkish government," the Saudi Press Agency said in a statement.
Details added (first version posted at 10:44)
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Orhan Guluzade Trend:
The coup attempt in Turkey was prevented, but the threat cant be said to be over, Haber 7 newspaper quoted the Turkish presidential administration as saying July 18.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for Turkish President Receb Tayyip Erdogan, urged people not to leave the streets and squares, said the report.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
According to the latest reports, 265 people have been killed as a result of the coup attempt.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Orhan Guluzade Trend:
Turkey dismissed 7,850 policemen in connection with the military coup attempt, the Turkish Hurriyet newspaper reported July 18.
According to the newspaper, a special operation has been underway in Turkey since July 17 evening to reveal the rebels in the law enforcement.
Weapons and badges were taken from the dismissed policemen, the newspaper wrote.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
According to the latest reports, 208 people have been killed as a result of the coup attempt.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Russia urges Turkey to resolve all problems in a constitutional manner, TASS quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as saying July 18.
The situation in Turkey, following a coup attempt in the country, particularly at the Incirlik air base, will not have an impact on the missions of Russian Aerospace Forces in Syria, said Lavrov.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said earlier that 208 people lost their lives in the July 15 military coup attempt.
Details added (first version posted on 14:17)
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says 208 people lost their lives in the July 15 military coup attempt, while 7,500 people were detained in connection with the attempt.
Yildirim, addressing a meeting of the countrys Cabinet of Ministers July 18, said there are 60 policemen, three servicemen and 145 civilians among those killed.
He added that 1,491 people were wounded.
Among those detained, as Yildirim said, there are 755 judges.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the prime minister thanked the opposition for its support.
He said the servicemen involved in the coup attempt were terrorists in uniform.
I would like to thank the Turkish media, said Yildirim, adding that they have supported democracy since the beginning.
He also said the Turkish people took to the streets and supported the interests of the state.
Yildirim added that the attempted coup will not affect the fight against terrorism and the countrys ability to withstand external challenges.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Turkish police have dismissed the information about the parliaments evacuation due to the attack threat, the Anadolu Agency reported July 18.
Earlier, an MP from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party wrote on Twitter that the parliament is being evacuated as information was spread about an attack on the building.
Rumors about the evacuation of Turkeys Grand National Assembly (parliament) were spread in social networks, said the report. The police are examining the source of those rumors which are absolutely false.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Over 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Details added (first version posted on 16:10)
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Turkeys parliament is being evacuated as information was spread about an attack on the building, RIA Novosti quoted Turkish MP Ziya Pir as saying July 18.
We were informed about an attackthe parliament is being evacuated, MP from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, Ziya Pir tweeted.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Over 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
By Orkhan Guluzade - Trend:
Turkish civil servants have been banned from traveling abroad after the military coup attempt in the country, the Sabah newspaper reported July 18.
Turkish citizens traveling abroad should present their social insurance card.
Holders of service passports should also present an employment letter when leaving the country.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Over 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke down in tears while speaking at the funeral of an old friend in Istanbul killed during the failed coup attempt, Daily Sabah reported.
Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son Abdullah were shot dead by pro-coup soldiers on the Bosphorous bridge in the city during Friday's attempted coup.
They had been on the bridge to protest against the putsch launched by a group within the military linked to the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO).
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 (AK Party) and had been described as "masterminding" Erdogan's presidential campaign in 2014 by Turkish media.
Among the political figures that attended the funeral along with Erdogan were Parliament Speaker Ismail Kahraman, former President Abdullah Gul and former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
Earlier in the day, Erdogan attended the funerals of other victims in Fatih mosque.
At least 2,839 pro-coup members of the military, including 29 colonels and over 40 generals, were detained across Turkey.
Turkey's top judicial body HSYK also ordered the detention of 2,745 Gulen-linked judges and prosecutors on Saturday while two members of the Constitutional Court were detained for involvement in the coup attempt.
As a result of the attempted coup, 161 people were killed, including 41 police officers and 47 civilians, while 1,440 others were injured and some 104 pro-coup figures were also killed.
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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
The EU strongly condemns the attempted coup in Turkey and reiterates its full support to the legitimate institutions of the country, according to EU Council conclusions on Turkey, EU website reported. "It deplores the high number of casualties and stands in solidarity with the Turkish people. The EU welcomes the common position of the political parties in support of Turkey's democracy.
The EU calls for restraint to be shown by Turkish authorities, including by the police and security forces. All must be done to avoid further violence, to protect lives and to restore calm"- said in the conclusions.
"The EU calls for the full observance of Turkey's constitutional order and stresses the importance of the rule of law prevailing. It is crucial to ensure full respect for all democratic institutions of the country including the elected government and the Turkish Grand National Assembly. The EU underlines the need to respect democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms and the right of everyone to a fair trial in full compliance with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, including Protocol 13 on the abolition of the death penalty. In this context, the EU recalls that the unequivocal rejection of the death penalty is an essential element of the Union acquis.
Turkey is a candidate country and a key partner for the European Union. The EU remains committed to working together with a democratic, inclusive and stable Turkey to address our common challenges"- said in Conclusions.
One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021
Vaginal seeding is a relatively new practice and involves swabbing the mothers vagina prior to C-section (caesarean) and transferring the swab to the new-born babys mouth, eyes and skin right after birth, in an attempt to stimulate a microbiome rich in mothers vaginal microbes.
Despite the kind of attention this practice is gathering, researchers could not find sufficient evidence to prove that vaginal seeding has any long-term health effects on babies born via C-section.
Conflicting Opinions and Arguments
Dr. Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello from New York University and her research team performed the vaginal seeding technique on 4 babies born via C-section. The results were compared with 7 babies born naturally or vaginally and 7 babies born through C-section but not subjected to seeding. It was found that the microbial environment of the skin, mouth and gut of gauze-seeded babies more closely resembled that of the babies born vaginally, compared to the C-section babies who were not seeded. These results have been published in the journal Nature.
While Dominguez-Bellos paper reports only microbial differences studied during the first month of the babys life, she is confident that the effects are long term. A follow up study has been planned by the research team to study the effects of seeding on the microbiome in nearly 75 children after one year of birth. However, it will need a lot more time and effort to analyze the effects of seeding on health, as that would require a long-term study extending for up to 5 years to determine any change in the frequency of infections, asthma or allergies in seeded babies compared to non-seeded ones. Dominguez-Bello also warns that mothers need to be thoroughly screened for infections before performing this seeding technique.
Meanwhile, an article published in the British Medical Journal raised concerns about the seeding technique. Experts felt that by being swabbed with the mothers vaginal microbes, the baby could be at risk of contracting infections such as Group B Strep from the mother. The article further says that this risk should be avoided as there is no proven scientific evidence for any benefits of this procedure.
Michel Odent, renowned obstetrician, challenges the assumption that babies are naturally programmed for inheriting mothers vaginal microbiota. According to him, in the absence of medical intervention, babies more often are born with the sac intact and with no exposure to the mothers vaginal bacteria. This point raises a number of important questions.
Many researchers argue that babies born via C-section have a low risk of exposure to potentially harmful microbes present in the birth canal and vaginal seeding may just help transfer these pathogenic bacteria and viruses to the baby, putting the baby at risk of a fatal infection. Currently, screening of mothers for these harmful microbes is not performed routinely. Hence they conclude that this seeding practice could cause more harm than good, if any, to babies born via C-section.
Nature also reports that the health effects of vaginal seeding are not clear. According to Alexander Khoruts from the University of Minnesota, it will be a difficult task to determine the health effects of seeding in later life, as the interpretations could be complicated by systematic differences between mothers who have undergone C-section and those who delivered naturally.
Implications for Healthcare Professionals
Many health care clinics and hospitals are undecided about whether this procedure should be encouraged or not. Doctors and midwives in many hospitals are advised against performing vaginal seeding, as the benefits of this technique are not proven yet and it may cause serious infections. Although it is a simple procedure and can be performed by the parents themselves, they are advised to discuss the potential risks and benefits of this procedure with their physician before making a decision. Many healthcare professionals feel that the focus of parents should rather be on scientifically proven practices such as breastfeeding to alter the microbiota of the baby.
Summary
The technique of vaginal seeding is still in its infancy and there are no conclusive answers regarding how safe it is yet. The need of the hour is a major research study that involves follow up of seeded and non-seeded infants for a considerable period of time to determine health outcomes. Unfortunately, it will be a long way off before we know if vaginal seeding is safe for the babies and if it offers any health benefits.
References
Further Reading
Kallmann syndrome is considered to be a rare condition. Precise epidemiological data is lacking due to difficulty with the diagnosis of the condition and the acquisition of accurate data about the condition.
Males are more likely to be affected than females. This is thought to be linked to the X-linked inheritance pattern of Kallmann syndrome type 1, as well as a higher tendency to seek medical help when sexual development fails to take place in males.
Epidemiological Studies
A retrospective study recently conducted in Finland found that the incidence of Kallmann syndrome was at least 1 in 48,000 newborns. Baby boys were much more likely to be affected, with an incidence of 1 in 30,000, compared to the incidence in girls of 1 in 125,000.
According to a study of French conscripts, the incidence of Kallmann syndrome was approximately 1 in 10,000 men. A study of Sardinian military recruits found the prevalence of hypogonadism associated with Kallmann syndrome was approximately 1 in 86,000 men.
Incidence and Prevalence
Based on the studies outlined above, the prevalence of Kallmann syndrome is estimated to be 1 in 8,000 males and 1 in 40,000 female. However, it is likely that this is an underestimation due to difficulties in the diagnosis of the condition, and gross variation in the phenotypic presentation of the syndrome, especially for females.
Age
Although Kallmann syndrome is present from birth in most individuals, the diagnosis is not usually made until the age of puberty, and is then prompted by the lack of sexual development. However, it is sometimes diagnosed earlier in males due to signs such as cryptorchidism and micropenis.
Gender
Males are more likely to be affected, with a male: female ratio of about 4:1. This susceptibility of men to Kallmann syndrome can be explained in part by the genetic inheritance pattern, and may also be related to an increased tendency on the part of males to seek medical advice when puberty is delayed. It follows an X-linked recessive inheritance pattern, which means that a male child only needs to inherit one mutated ANOS1 gene from the mother to be affected, whereas females need to inherit gene mutations on both X-chromosomes to develop the syndrome.
Morbidity and Mortality
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The complications associated with Kallmann syndrome can have an impact on the quality of life of the affected individual, as they affect both physical appearance and functioning of the body in the area of sexual maturation, and thus threaten psychological health.
There is no change in long-term survival rates for most patients unless they are affected by other health conditions, such as congenital heart disease or neurological manifestations. Complete adrenocortical insufficiency is one linked condition, though in rare cases, which can be fatal if it is not diagnosed and treated promptly.
Related Disorders
Deficiency in gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) production or release can sometimes present later in life, after the individual has already passed the age of puberty as normal. This is associated with symptoms of decreased libido and infertility, although the major pubertal body changes have already occurred. Individuals with a family history of GnRH deficiency are more likely to be affected by Kallmann syndrome, when contrasted with the incidence of the general population, which is less than 1%.
References
Further Reading
Kallmann syndrome is a medical condition marked by the delayed onset or absence of puberty, along with an impaired or absent sense of smell, known as hyposmia or anosmia respectively. It is a type of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, which involves the deficient production of sex hormones responsible for secondary sexual development and maturation.
This is because of the failure of the hypothalamus to release the corresponding stimulating releasing hormones, or gonadotropins. As the sex hormones and their function differ according to gender, the symptoms of the condition vary accordingly.
The syndrome affects approximately 1 in 10,000 to 86,000 people and is more common in males than females. There are four different types of the conditions and, of these, Kallmann syndrome 1 is the most prevalent.
Neil's Story Play
Signs and Symptoms
The signs and symptoms of Kallmann syndrome are primarily gender-specific as they are related to the reduced function of sex hormones in the body.
Male patients are often born with a particularly small penis, known as micropenis, and undescended testes. At the normal age of puberty, they show reduced growth of facial, pubic and body hair, and continue to have a high-pitched voice that does not deepen. Female patients do not begin menstruating at the normal age of puberty and there is little or no evidence of breast development.
Hyposmia or anosmia is another characteristic symptom that affects both females and males. This diminished sense of smell sets Kallmann syndrome apart from other types of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism conditions. However, the impairment of smell is usually discovered in diagnostic tests because most patients are not aware of their reduced olfactory sensitivity.
Other symptoms may include:
Cleft lip only in types 1 and 2
Cleft palate in types 1 and 2
Abnormal eye movements
Loss of hearing
Abnormal tooth development
Genetic Involvement
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Several gene mutations have been linked to Kallmann syndrome as causative factors. Most of these are involved in various parts of fetal brain development. These include:
ANOS1 (Kallmann syndrome 1)
FGFR1 (Kallmann syndrome 2)
PROKR2 (Kallmann syndrome 3)
PROK2 (Kallmann syndrome 4)
These genes are also linked to the production of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) and other hormones that are needed to initiate puberty and promote sexual function and development.
Treatment
The standard treatment for Kallmann syndrome is replacing the deficient hormones to induce puberty and normalize the hormone levels. In male patients, this involves testosterone replacement, whereas females require estrogen and progestin therapy to induce secondary sex characteristics at puberty.
Various formulations may be used, including intramuscular injections and topical patches, gels or liquids. The dose usually needs to be tailored to each individual, particularly during certain life stages.
If the patient desires to conceive a child, further treatment may be required to induce fertility. For males, gonadotropin medication to stimulate testicular growth and initiate sperm production is recommended. For females, treatment with gonadotropins of pulsatile GnRH can stimulate folliculogenesis, or the production of mature egg cells. In vitro fertilization may be needed in some cases to allow patients to conceive.
Epidemiology
Kallmann syndrome is considered to be a rare condition. One French study found the prevalence of the condition without an identifiable cause was 1 in 10,000 men. Another study involving the Sardinian military reported a lesser prevalence of 1 in 86,000 men. Males are more likely to be affected than females, with a ratio of 4:1. This is because the condition is transmitted in an X-linked recessive manner.
The survival rates with the condition are not lower than the average. In other words, the life expectancy is not expected to change unless the individual is also affected by another condition, such as congenital heart disease or neurological disorders.
References
Further Reading
How would you define fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is a common disorder that is diagnosed in people who have pain in many areas of their body together with important symptoms such as:-
Severe fatigue
Difficulty in memory and thinking
Sleep problems
Many general somatic symptoms
What are the main symptoms of fibromyalgia?
The main symptoms are:
Pain
Sleep disturbances
Stiffness
Cognitive symptoms
Fatigue
People who have this disorder tend to have many other symptoms as well. They may have:
Headaches
Stomach pains
Numbness in their hands
It is a disorder in which there is a general increase in symptomatology.
Who does fibromyalgia affect?
It depends. In clinical practice it has generally been an illness in which 90% of the people who are diagnosed with it were women.
In 2010 we changed the diagnostic criteria somewhat to eliminate one of the factors that might have led to this female predominance. That factor was pain on pressure.
When the examining physicians would touch people in certain areas, women would tend to complain of pain more than men.
This probably was related to a couple of things. One of which was related to the body habitus women were generally smaller than men and less muscular.
Also human and animal studies have shown females have a decreased threshold for pain compared to males.
The change in criteria that occurred in 2010 eliminated this criterion. The consequence has been that studies that are beginning to be done tend to show that the prevalence of the disorder may be approaching 50% - that is to say the prevalence may be quite similar in women and men.
In the study that we just did there was only a very slight predominance of women.
Your recent research found that the prevalence of fibromyalgia in the general German population in 2012 was 2.4% and 1.8% in women and men respectively. Is this difference statistically significant?
Statistical significance is often a function of the size of the sample. So if instead of examining slightly more than 2,000 patients we examined more than 4,000 patients, that difference would have been statistically significant.
I think one can overplay the statistical significance in a study like this. That is why we tend to report things with confidence intervals which is another measure of how certain we are about the level we observe.
I would say that the prevalence is around 50:50 but it is probably more in women. I say that because other studies that have been done using survey methods have found a female predominance but only a very slight predominance.
That is not entirely clear because what one sees in a population study might not be the same as what one sees in the clinic. Women tend to go to physicians more than men and so theyre more likely to be diagnosed than men.
In societal terms it may be more acceptable to have certain diagnoses if you are a woman rather than a man and vice versa depending on the situation.
So we have to be careful in extrapolating the results of this study to the clinic. In clinical studies of fibromyalgia, it has often been 90% women. Maybe the change in criteria will result in a change in diagnosis in the clinic but that remains to be seen.
How prevalent is fibromyalgia?
It is about 2%. Some countries will have slightly higher or lower percentages, but in general they will be around 1-5%. This is a high or low prevalence depending on perspective.
Fibromyalgia has been described as a spectrum disorder rather than a categorical illness. Please can you explain what this means and whether you agree with this statement?
What the results of our study showed is that we provided reasonably good evidence that fibromyalgia exists as a continuum rather than a dichotomous diagnosis.
A dichotomous diagnosis is a yes/no diagnosis. There are examples of this in medicine and in life. For examples:
One has cancer or one does not have cancer
The bone is either fractured or it is not
There is an infection or not an infection
When we take a look at things such as hypertension (high blood pressure), we see that it is a continuous characteristic.
For example, taking the systolic number (the top number), blood pressures tend to go from 90 190. Somewhere along that line, groups have to decide that the value is abnormal.
Imagine they pick 140. If you have 141 you are hypertensive; if you are 139 you are normal.
There are obvious limitations to that, as the people at 139 and 141 are almost exactly the same. But there has to be a practical cut-off.
Those cut-offs are not made on the basis of disease, but they are made based on communities getting together and deciding which point is abnormal. For hypertension, the consequences of having high blood pressure might be heart attacks and strokes.
People decide if you get to a certain level it is serious enough that we think we should call it abnormal.
Recently, people have talked about reducing the cut-off for hypertension. So these are arbitrary cut-points.
In fibromyalgia, studies have shown that the symptoms of fibromyalgia exist on a continuum. From a little pain and a little distress: to a lot of pain and a lot of distress. In fact we call the measures that we use to diagnose fibromyalgia measures of polysymptomatic distress.
This is termed by the UK psychiatrist Simon Wesley who first described illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia being at the end of a continuum of polysymptomatic distress.
What do we mean by polysymptomatic? Many different symptoms. One might have headaches, but not have all of the symptoms of fibromyalgia.
To put it another way, people with fibromyalgia tend to have a lot of fatigue, a lot sleep disturbance and pain and symptoms and difficulty with thinking and functioning. So it isnt just distress in one area, but it is polydistress.
You can think of polysymptomatic distress as a condition of humankind which represents both some people who have almost no symptoms and some people who have a major amount of symptoms.
Those who have studied fibromyalgia came up with a cut-point in which they said this is sufficient symptoms to call it fibromyalgia and less than that is not sufficient.
Although this may be helpful in the clinic, it is scientifically useless because we exist as a continuum.
One of the results of the study that we just did was to show that people who satisfy the fibromyalgia criteria in the general population often have very high levels of all of these characteristics and they satisfy this idea of a continuum.
This is an important point when thinking about some of the hypotheses about what causes fibromyalgia. Imagine we were talking about what causes high blood pressure and the issue was that you went from a blood pressure of 139 to 140. The idea of what causes something on a continuous scale is a much more complicated idea.
People who almost have fibromyalgia almost have it. So the idea that there are differences between people who have fibromyalgia and those who dont have it is an idea which may not really be true.
The third thing we found in the study has to do with a new set of criteria that the psychiatrists are proposing in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5). DSM-5 have created a condition that they call physical symptom disorder.
One of the issues that had come was whether people that had lots of symptoms should be classified in a book that measures psychiatric illnesses. There has been some discussion about all of this and we had the opportunity to make estimates on what population of people in the general population who had fibromyalgia would satisfy the new DSM-5 criteria. We came up with roughly 40%.
We dont believe for a moment that these people have a mental illness. I think what weve shown is that there is a limitation about the way that DSM-5 looks at these sorts of conditions. Theres no real benefit to anybody to consider this in the way that DSM is considering it.
Our point is not really to argue one way or the other but just to provide information. This also touches on a long debated issue as to what constitutes a mental or a psychiatric illness. So when we mention this we are not mentioning it on the basis of showing that people have this sort of illness but rather that they fit these sorts of criteria. I dont think the criteria are particularly useful. Theres also been a lot of general critique of the new DSM-5.
What we have done is provide data which will help people in the future make decisions on how to classify things. One could say that people who satisfy the fibromyalgia criteria also tend to satisfy the criteria for somatic symptom disorders, that gives us some additional insight into fibromyalgia.
Does the continuous nature of fibromyalgia make it difficult to diagnose?
Yes and no. It depends on how much fibromyalgia is present.
One of the problems with fibromyalgia is that people may be identified on the basis of behavioural symptoms. People who are having more pain or being more deliberate in demonstrating to observers that they have pain, or having more complaints that seem a little bit more severe, tend to be identified more easily as having fibromyalgia. Whereas, people who have the same disorder but arent as demonstrative about it may be missed.
There is a difficulty, but in clinical practice I think the question comes when people come and complain of multiple symptoms, the doctor has to make some sort of determination as to when they are serious enough to classify them separately.
Although weve had criteria for fibromyalgia for many years now since 1990 we know that these criteria are not really used in General Practice. Instead physicians tend to interview patients and listen to their symptoms and then make decisions based on the severity of the symptoms.
The new criteria that we developed in 2010 are based on the severity of symptoms. Although we suspect that physicians wont use these criteria as strictly as weve written them, I think that they will tend to follow them.
Whether this is a legitimate way of looking at the illness is still in dispute. There are people who believe that this is an illness that is caused by underlying neurobiological abnormalities; there are other people that believe this illness represents a cultural illness illnesses which have their basis in part in how society treats their symptoms and benefits and difficulties that are associated with them.
There are people who believe that this disorder has a predominant psychological basis. The underlying basis of this disorder is not entirely clear. One thing that is clear is that people who have these symptoms have severe distress.
We doctors may argue about the nature of the distress and what causes it, but theres no question that people are very distressed by it and it may be a limiting problem.
How is fibromyalgia currently diagnosed and how do you think this method could be improved?
It is diagnosed right now by self-report on the basis of patients. Self-report is both good and bad. Self-reporting is inherently problematic. Inherently it has a degree of validity problems.
At the same time, self-reporting is very important. When I wake up in the morning with a headache, no one else knows I have a headache or how severe it is. Whether I choose to go to work or not go to work, it is based on the severity which is only known to me. So self-report is extremely important.
On the other hand, in illnesses such as fibromyalgia, this severity in the eye of the beholder may be problematic.
To diagnose fibromyalgia patients should:
have pain in a number of areas of the body - widespread pain
be substantially bothered by fatigue
have difficulty in getting restful sleep
often report problems with memory or thinking clearly
One problem that can arise from diagnosis is that people can gain disability benefits based on self-reported symptoms. Societies are not always certain as to how they should handle self-reported illnesses. This goes through all aspects of ones life. People with fibromyalgia look healthy but they dont feel healthy.
In the United States we have handicapped parking spaces, there are always letters to the editor of the newspaper saying they saw people park in the handicapped parking space and get out and look healthy. The idea that people have some of these disorders get benefits that are based on self-report.
The problem in self-reported illnesses is that the definition of illness is something that society needs to accept and verify as well. Some self-reported illnesses are not taken seriously. For example, people dont take the illness Multiple Chemical Sensitivity very seriously. There are illnesses such as Recovered Memory Syndrome that was important as an idea in legal areas in the last decade.
These are illnesses that, regardless of what doctors do and dont say about them, society has to give an OK about. Illnesses, such as fibromyalgia, tend to exist not just in the medical basis, theres no microscope that finds the cancerous cell here, and it has in part to do with how society deals with this sort of thing.
The very wise and great Canadian historian Edward Shorter points out that the symptoms have to be legitimate in society. Some symptoms are allowed by society and some are not. The nature of what societies allow differs over time. The UK has had a great deal of problems over the years trying to decide what happens to fatigue syndromes, also known as ME. The issues in ME are the same as in fibromyalgia.
It is a complicated situation. Patient support groups, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, all have something to say about this sort of illness, so it is not an easy illness.
What is currently known about the causes of fibromyalgia?
The causes are controversial in a sense. Some of the best work in this area has been done by the UK groups. The UK groups have used validated epidemiological methods to study something called chronic widespread pain. This is one of the central characteristics of fibromyalgia.
What they found is that psychological features, childhood deprivation and features like that are determinants. Their work has been really very good. They have used some great UK data that was collected generations ago and they were able to get their hands on this data and find out what happened to the people.
They could then link childhood deprivation, trauma, sexual abuse and things like that. They found that people that had those things were more likely to develop widespread pain. We also know that familial depression is higher in people that have this sort of disorder.
On the other hand there have been recent advances in understanding what chronic pain is like within the brain in neurobiological systems. There have been proposals that something happens to the central nervous system in people who have this disorder and this change in the CNS makes pain chronic and is responsible for all of the symptoms one sees.
One has to go very far with that idea before it is really accepted. It is one of the major ideas of today.
The problem that we have with all of these ideas is that if one takes function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain of people who have fibromyalgia and compares it to normal people, one finds there are differences.
The problem with all this is that it is really in part the chicken and the egg, or cause and effect. If some terrible thing happened to your family for example and somebody said before you go anywhere get in this fMRI machine and lets see what your brain looks like I wouldnt be surprised if they found abnormalities compared to normal people because that is the way that humans function we all function through these neurobiological mechanisms and the fact that we see differences does not mean that the differences we see are the causes.
These are issues that people are studying on and working on right now. My own view is that there are many factors that produce these symptoms some are psychological and some are physical and it does exist on a continuum.
Our ability as physicians to help people is to understand that everybody needs help regardless of whether they are symptomatic or distressed. Some people dont need help and it exists on a continuum. Rather than oftentimes falsely finding our way into this is sickness this is health we should understand that symptoms exist over a continuum for humans and as physicians and healthcare workers everyone is entitled to good care and understanding not just those who have the most severe symptoms.
If we take from fibromyalgia some of the distress that we see and realise that it exists in people who dont quite meet the criteria and it is important to understand how they feel, well have made important advances.
How far do you think we are from finding a cure for fibromyalgia?
If this is part of something that happens with mankind then maybe there wont be such a thing as a cure. There are people who are anxious, people who worry a lot, there are some people whose personalities tend to be more down and depressive and others that tend to be happier. It is the nature of mankind to be that way.
The idea that they all have to be cured is a bad idea. We should not medicalise normal aspects of their lives. In any sort of situation we should help people that need help and perhaps we should leave people alone who dont need help.
Currently what were doing with treatment for this disorder has not been very successful. The treatments that are most effective seem to be physical treatments such as exercise. Exercise helps people substantially.
Pharmacological treatments are less effective. In the United States we have 3 drugs that are approved for the treatment of fibromyalgia, in the European Community none of those drugs were approved because the regulators thought that the drugs didnt work very well and they had hazards without benefits. Their studies of the drugs showed that the benefits were very minor.
My co-author on the study Dr Winfried Hauser has done the most important studies in understanding how effective or ineffective these drugs are and it is his work that I think is some of the most important work that has been done on this illness in the last decade.
Where can readers find more information?
Weve recently started a website for physicians and health workers about fibromyalgia and it is called the Fibromyalgia Perplex: www.fmperplex.com
We just started the website a few weeks ago and it comes from A.A. Milnes Winnie the Pooh. Specifically it comes from a title that Frederick Crews wrote in the 1960s called the Pooh Perplex which was a take on academia.
Here we are trying to discuss some of the issues associated with fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia in many respects has become a dominant theology. There has been enormous amount of pharmaceutical money, especially in the United States, on direct to patient advertising and sponsorship of groups.
In the US for example when you turn on the TV you can watch people advertising to patients about how much pain they had until they took these medicines. Then they say it is thought to be caused by over-reactive nerves.
There has been a large campaign to recruit people to the diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Remember that as a self-reported illness, people with pain often why they have it. The answer that often comes on the television ads is that you may have fibromyalgia and that there are drugs to help with it.
Fibromyalgia represents a dominant theology. There are others that say we would be better off if we just treated people instead of trying to make this into a disease which it is not.
In the medical literature, however, fibromyalgia is a well-established condition which has little opposition. I think it is important to recognise that the reason that there is little opposition in the medical literature is that you cannot write articles on a condition that you dont think is a valid and useful entity.
If you ask physicians, and there are many studies like this in Canada and the UK, about how they think about illnesses like this. There is a lot of doubt about how doctors feel about this as a separate illness.
A study published a year ago in the UK by Gareth Jones looked at whether or not trauma could cause chronic widespread pain. This is a very important issue because for example if you are in the US and you are in an automobile accident and you have symptoms that are alleged to be fibromyalgia, this is where you can see the reported symptoms might be a bit of a problem, the question is whether the trauma caused the fibromyalgia. There have been very extensive lawsuits there is a whole legal industry that has been developed that surrounds this particular issue.
Gareth Jones did this wonderful study where they got people who did not have widespread pain and they followed them and they saw which people developed widespread pain and they looked at the role of trauma. It seems as if motor vehicle accidents were associated with the development of chronic widespread pain.
Then they analysed the data on the basis of baseline characteristics and they found that if you adjusted for the baseline psychological characteristics of the people in the study that this difference disappeared.
The meaning of this was that the trauma itself for the most part didnt cause fibromyalgia but the characteristics of the people played the important role.
These kinds of studies are very important for understanding the nature of the illness, but they also show what the problems are.
One thing to note is that the severity of the trauma, at least according to current observations, isnt necessarily thought to be so important. One idea is that if you have trauma it may disturb you and cause mental stress which may then cause fibromyalgia.
Without saying whether that is correct or incorrect you can see how that may cause a problem within societies and in courts and in governments knowing how to handle these sorts of things. So fibromyalgia turns out to be a very complicated problem.
What our study did was to take out these issues and just look at a population of people and 97-98% didnt have fibromyalgia. Out of that we were better able to understand some of the characteristics as people didnt need to worry about being sick or being well and answering these questions.
The famous American author and physician Nortin Hadler wrote that if you had to prove you were sick, you couldnt get better!
In the United States for example suppose you got injured and you tried to get compensation for your injury, if you got better you dont get compensation so you have to stay sick. You have to convince people that you are really ill and its a system that creates substantial problems.
These are not easy problems and they have been around for long periods of time. In fact you can find evidence of fibromyalgia that goes back well into the 19th century and up until the mid-1920s in an illness that was called neurasthenia which looks almost exactly the same in many of its aspects as fibromyalgia.
So fibromyalgia is a social illness, its a societal illness, its a personal illness it has social consequences for patients and doctors and financial consequences that are worth a lot of money for pharmaceutical consequences, it is worth a lot publications to physicians. There is a lot invested in what I would
call a psycho-cultural illness.
About Dr Frederick Wolfe
Dr. Wolfe is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine Wichita, and Director of the National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases.
He received his medical degree from the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, and completed medical residencies at the Downstate Medical Center and the University of Kansas Medical Center.
The author of more than 400 scientific articles, he received 1995 Distinguished Rheumatologist Award of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), and was elected as a Master of the ACR.
He was the senior author of the 1990 and 2010 ACR classification criteria for fibromyalgia.
He is author of numerous papers on the longitudinal outcomes of rheumatoid arthritis, including work disability, functional disability, psychological status, mortality, and the effect of treatment on rheumatic disease outcome.
His current work involves the use of patient and physician data banks to understand the outcomes of rheumatic diseases (www.arthritis-research.org).
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18
Trend:
Turkeys National Intelligence Organization (MIT) has disclosed details of military coup, Milliyet newspaper reported.
According to the information, a military coup was scheduled for 3:00 July 16. However, due to the fact that the coup plan was declassified, the rebels had to start the action a few hours earlier.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Over 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have found evidence that bone marrow transplantation may one day be beneficial to a subset of patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disorder more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
ALS destroys the neurons connecting the brain and spinal cord to muscles throughout the body. As those neurons die, patients progressively lose the ability to move, speak, eat, and breathe.
The mouse-model study, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, suggests the most common genetic mutation associated with ALS plays an important role in not only the nervous system, but also the blood and immune systems.
"The point of our paper was to determine the function of this gene and what it normally helps to do in the body," said lead author Kevin Eggan, a professor in Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (HSCRB) and an HSCI principal faculty member who has been studying ALS for more than a decade. According to Eggan, one way to better understand the gene is to catalog what is missing or goes awry when it is "knocked out," or inactivated.
The scientists found that mice without a functional copy of the gene C9ORF72 had abnormally large spleens, livers, and lymph nodes, and got sick and died. Mice with one working copy experienced similar but less severe changes.
"I realized immediately that the mouse knockout had immune dysfunction," said Leonard Zon, a professor in HSCRB, after seeing the preliminary data at an informal presentation.
The research team predicted that the gene mutation would affect neurons, but the finding that it also inflamed other cells, namely those involved in autoimmunity, was "unexpected." With input from Zon and immunologist Luigi Notarangelo of Boston Children's Hospital, the team decided to change direction and further explore the gene's impact on the immune system.
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First author Aaron Burberry, a postdoctoral fellow in the Eggan lab with a background in immunology, designed an experiment to test whether providing the sick mice with cells capable of making new immune cells via a bone marrow transplant would help.
Knockout mice that received a bone marrow transplant lived on average 43 days longer, weighed more, and had a greater number of blood platelets throughout their lifespan.
"The mice seemed to get better," said Eggan, though he stressed that the bone marrow transplant did not wholly rescue the animals, suggesting that there may also be functions of C9ORF72 in other organs.
Whether or not anti-inflammatory drugs or bone marrow transplants help ALS patients has been studied and debated for years. "When doctors look for autoimmunity and inflammation in ALS patients there have been confusing and conflicting views," Eggan said. "Some people find it, others don't."
Historically, clinical studies have tested the general ALS population, likely without accounting for the variety of gene mutations that gave rise to individual cases. More than 100 distinct mutations in any one of 20 genes can contribute to ALS.
"Most people have their own private mutation that is making them sick," Eggan said, which makes developing therapies particularly complicated. He believes clinical trials could be redesigned to test the effects of bone marrow transplantation on particular subpopulations of ALS.
Today some of the world's foremost experts on antibiotic resistance called on the United Nations General Assembly to decisively act to reduce the growing number of deaths due to limited access to effective antibiotics. Writing in the Lancet, they call on those attending the upcoming High-Level Meeting of Heads of State in September in New York City to use the opportunity to create and implement a four-part global action plan, similar in scope and ambition to the plan created in 1996 to address the AIDS crisis.
This is only the third time in its history that the UN General Assembly will use its High-Level Heads of State meeting to deliberate on a health issue that threatens the health of populations worldwide. This is also the first time that a One Health issue, a concept which involves the health of humans, animals and the environment, is being discussed at this high-level forum.
"Since antibiotics are used widely in livestock, humans and in the environment, the problem of antibiotic resistance can be tackled only by involving all of these sectors," said Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, and a lead author of the call to action. "The United Nations is the appropriate forum for countries to set goals and commit themselves to global collective action to ensure that our children and grandchildren are able enjoy the benefits of effective antibiotics."
Millions of people do not have ready access to effective antibiotics, and many current antibiotics are losing their effectiveness. Antibiotic resistance is responsible for over 700,000 deaths worldwide, including 214,000 sepsis-related deaths of infants within four weeks of birth, according to a commentary piece published in the Lancet today.
According to Laxminarayan, many deaths are caused by insufficient access and delays in getting antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance-related deaths are being reported in all countries and at all income levels. UN organizations, countries, civil society, non-governmental organizations, industry and development agencies must work collaboratively to change how the global community treats bacterial infections. Laxminarayan gave a TED Talk on antibiotic resistance in September 2014.
Laxminarayan and his co-authors are calling on the UN General Assembly to establish a UN High-Level Coordinating Mechanism on Antimicrobial Resistance (HLCM) that will also require the involvement of organizations such as UNICEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, and the World Bank. The effort would have four core responsibilities:
Launch a global advocacy campaign to raise awareness about the lack of access to antibiotics and drug resistance
Monitor and evaluate defined, enforceable targets to reduce the number of deaths globally due to lack of access and inappropriate use of antimicrobials in humans as well as animals
Mobilize resources from donors, aid agencies and countries to effectively finance the effort, and
Support and coordinate multisectoral action to implement the World Health Organization's Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance alongside national efforts to improve access to effective antimicrobials
The UN meeting in September offers a rare opportunity to change how the global community responds to this health crisis that will become exponentially more deadly in all countries without any sustainable, coordinated action.
"The UN General Assembly discussions in September present an unprecedented opportunity for the world to advance its response to rising drug-resistant infections," said Lord Jim O'Neill, chairman of the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. "The authors are right that the UN must play a central role in the fight against a global health problem that could undo much of the progress the world has made against disease and poverty. Over the next few months we should all continue to push for a robust and ambitious set of commitments at the UN which will see this problem being tackled head on."
Japanese researchers centered at Nagoya University reveal a role for orexin neurons of the hypothalamus when mice respond to painful stimuli, and suggest a link between stimulus response and consciousness.
An animal's response to potentially harmful stimuli is known as nociception, and is determined, to some extent, by the level of consciousness. The absence of nociception or the inability to feel pain can cause an animal to unknowingly incur severe injury, while hypersensitivity to pain prevents quick defense responses to a threat to survival (the fight-or-flight response). Neurons in the hypothalamus that produce the neurotransmitter orexin (a chemical messenger) are known to control nociception, and to play a role in wakefulness and reward processing. Pathways involving orexin neurons are also important during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. However, the precise functioning of orexin neurons in nociception has remained unclear. A research team centered at Nagoya University has now uncovered a role for orexin neurons in the link between nociception and the inability to feel pain (analgesia) in mice. The study was recently reported in Scientific Reports.
The researchers bred mice with orexin neurons that could be selectively and temporally destroyed by a toxin. This specific cell death was controlled by the presence or absence of a chemical added to the animals' food. Mice lacking orexin neurons were found to be more sensitive to nociception than control mice, as demonstrated by pain-related behaviors such as withdrawing their paws from a hot plate or licking paws injected with a chemical irritant. Conversely, the artificial activation of orexin neurons significantly decreased such pain-related behaviors, suggesting its analgesic effect.
Selective removal of orexin neurons also reduced neurons expressing another chemical messenger, dynorphin, within part of the hypothalamus. "This indicates that the analgesic effect of activating orexin neurons could involve the combined action of orexin and dynorphin, or other messengers," first author Ayumu Inutsuka says.
Development of a novel measurement system enabled the researchers to record real-time orexin neuronal activity. "We selectively engineered orexin neurons to express a calcium indicator that could be illuminated by an LED light source, and the resultant fluorescence was detected," corresponding author Akihiro Yamanaka explains. "Strong mechanical stimuli applied to the mouse tail in the form of pinching with forceps brought an increase in the indicator signal. No such response was elicited when weaker stimuli were used, nor when the mice were anesthetized."
Temperature-dependent increases of heat stimuli also induced a similar response, which again could not be detected under anesthesia, suggesting that anesthetics may function by inhibiting orexin neurons.
Prof. Peter Fleming THOUGHT LEADERS SERIES ...insight from the worlds leading experts
What is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and how many babies and toddlers die from SIDS each year?
SIDS is the sudden and unexpected death of a baby, which usually occurs during sleep. The great majority of the babies are aged between about two weeks and seven or eight months.
Despite very thorough investigation after the death, including a detailed post-mortem and investigation of the circumstances, no adequate cause is found.
The death has a natural cause and seems to be something related to the developmental stage of the baby, but there's no simple explanation for it and it remains unexplained after all investigations.
Most years in the UK, somewhere between 200 and 250 babies die from SIDS.
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Can SIDS occur in babies older than 8 months?
Technically, the international definition of an infant is a baby under the age of one year. Children can die suddenly and unexpectedly beyond that but typically the term SIDS is only applied to children under the age of one year because that's what the definition of an infant is.
A very similar circumstance occurs in children of 13 or 14 months, but that is very rare. Of all the young infants and young children who die suddenly and unexpectedly, 90% of them are under the age of seven months and about 98% are under the age of one year.
Please can you outline the study being launched to investigate the potential to identify babies at greater risk of SIDS?
Work that we did a few years ago, and our collaboration with a group in the US that has done similar work, have shown that the routine hearing test that all babies in the UK have now is a direct measure of the function of the back part of the brain, which is where hearing is dealt with.
There are also some very important other functions in the back part of the brain, including the control of temperature, breathing, blood pressure and heart rate. We think those are all really important in terms of the things that can go wrong and cause babies to die suddenly.
The question that arose was whether we could look at those routine recordings for all infants and identify any aspect of them that was different in the babies who subsequently died suddenly and unexpectedly?
The answer was that yes, we could. In a small study from Rhode Island, we found that there were some very subtle differences in the recordings between babies who survived and babies who subsequently died. It's not that the babies who died failed their hearing test; they all passed it. It's much more subtle than that and involved a complex mathematical analyses of the wave forms.
The question then was whether we could confirm that and take it to a much larger scale, because if we can identify the babies who are at risk of dying suddenly, clearly we're then in a position to start making some very focused, individual-level attempts to prevent the deaths happening.
We've done a lot over the years to reduce the risk across the population, but for the individual baby who is particularly at risk, we've not been able to do much because we've not had a reliable way of identifying the baby who is at significant risk.
We can tell you that babies of parents who smoke are at an increased risk, as well as babies with other features, but those increases are still relatively small. More than 99% of the babies with those features still survive.
What we're trying to do is to look at whether using a combination of what we know currently about risk factors such as parental smoking, low birth weight and pre-term delivery, combined with some features of the routine new-born hearing screening, will enable us to identify a group of babies who are at a significantly increased risk. Then, we might be able to start some interventions that will look at the effectiveness of trying to prevent those deaths.
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How much evidence is there to suggest that differences in new-born hearing test results could be indicative of a babys risk of SIDS?
There are several studies now and we've now got quite a lot of additional work. In work that I did 30 or so years ago, when we were measuring the transmission of signals across the baby's brain stem using some special electrodes that allowed us to test hearing in a slightly different way, we found that abnormalities of breathing control were associated with particular features of that.
Subsequently, a study from Italy that was done last year showed that among babies who had SIDS, using very careful and special testing of the area of the brain involved in hearing, it was possible to identify specific features that would fit in with what we'd already observed.
Thirdly, a group in Boston led by Professor Hannah Kinney who is the head of pathology at Boston Children's Hospital, have made some very similar observations. They found specific abnormalities in a part of the brain stem in babies who had SIDS.
Now, we want to see if we can establish a marker while the baby is alive and apparently quite healthy that would identify those babies who are at a real risk, so that we can start to try and do something about it.
What is thought to be the underlying mechanism of this association?
In terms of the final event or trigger event that may cause the baby to get into trouble and die suddenly and unexpectedly, there are probably a lot of different factors involved.
However, the final sequence of events seems to be that something goes wrong with the baby's ability to coordinate and maintain their breathing and blood pressure control. Those two factors are really tightly connected because you've got to be able to get the blood and oxygen to the organs that need it.
Breathing and blood pressure control are very tightly linked in babies and also in adults. If something goes wrong with that, then the baby will deteriorate and die quite quickly.
The final event is that, whereas normally, when something starts to go wrong, the baby would wake up, in these babies, something has gone wrong with the link from that area to the front of the brain which is the area that would tell you to wake up.
The mechanism seems to be that something either within the appreciation of a problem arising with breathing and blood pressure or something that tells the front part of the brain to wake up, has gone wrong. All of that is concentrated in this very tiny area of the brain stem, through which these hearing pathways go.
If a baby is found to be at a higher risk of SIDS, are there processes that can be followed to reduce the risk of the baby dying? Why are these processes not followed for all babies?
We know a lot about how to reduce the risk of SIDS in babies. In the 1980s in the UK, about 2,000 babies died this way. In the late 1980s, myself and my research group as well as a few other research groups around the world started to identify features of how the babies had been looked after that increased the risk.
For example, babies who were put down to sleep on their tummy, babies who got too warm (particularly at the time of infection), babies who had their heads covered or were exposed to tobacco smoke.
By taking away those factors, we've already reduced the occurrence of SIDS by about 90%. The number of babies dying now is a little over 10% of what it was 25 years ago. We've had a huge impact already, but those factors are generic and they apply to all infants. We're now trying to find out how to stop the deaths of individual babies who are, if you like, intrinsically at an increased risk.
There's no validated technique that has been shown to reduce the risk of dying in those babies. In the US, during the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of attention was paid to the idea that if we monitored breathing very carefully in these babies, we might be able to protect them.
That's never been shown to work and it doesn't work. They stop breathing and can't be resuscitated. That was a simplistic approach that everybody thought was going to be an answer, but it wasnt.
We've known now for 25 years that that doesn't work on a population basis. However, there are now some much more sophisticated, more expensive and much more complicated ways of monitoring babies' ability to deliver oxygen to the right tissues and so on. We still don't know whether they work, but we think they've got a better chance of working than the old, simple breathing monitors.
If we tried to apply that and see if it works on a population basis, where one in two thousand babies has SIDS, we would need to monitor about half a million babies. The cost of the monitoring equipment is several thousand pounds each, so the cost of doing that when we don't even know whether it will work would be astronomical and inappropriate.
If, on the other hand, we can identify a group of babies where the risk of dying is not one in two thousand, but perhaps one in ten, then starting to look at using more sophisticated technology to help those babies starts to become more of a realistic possibility. We have to be able to apply something to the group who are going to benefit rather than across the board. That's when this starts to become valuable.
In addition, there are a number of potential routes that involve using certain types of medication that might affect these particular pathways. Again, we have evidence from animal studies that this might be the case, but obviously you don't go giving medications for long periods to babies unless you're absolutely confident you've got it right. Without being able to identify the babies for whom it would be appropriate to try some of these techniques, we can't tell whether they work.
This current study is the first phase. If we can confirm that this does work and can identify babies by doing these other complicated analyses, we can eventually identify a group of babies where as many as one in ten of them might die if they are not helped. Then, we can start focusing on that group and really trying to work specifically for them and with them to try and help them.
What implications could a screening tool for SIDS have?
Well, I think the first and most simple point is that if we can identify a group of babies who are at very high risk, then we can actually work with families and make absolutely sure that those babies are never put in a position where their risk is increased by having their heads covered, being positioned on their tummies, being exposed to tobacco smoke, getting too hot or being in the wrong place, for example.
The evidence we have suggests that if we can work with families on a one-to-one basis and use those very simple techniques to take away all the risk factors that we can identify, we may well be able to prevent quite a few deaths. However, we cant do that level of one-to-one investigation and care when we're dealing with 700,000 new-borns a year, which is what we have in the UK.
How does your study aim to learn more about unexpected death in older children?
SIDS is very rare in children aged as old as 3 or 4 years, but there are some who die suddenly and unexpectedly. Because that is so uncommon, relatively little is known about the deaths of those children. I've been collaborating with a group in the US for about 15 years now trying to learn as much as we possibly can about those children and what contributes to their deaths.
Many of the features are rather similar to those of babies who die at a younger age. We really have very limited information about those individuals because most of the studies of SIDS have been from limited populations, in a part of the country and over a part of a period of time.
What we now want to do is to collect information about any of those babies across the whole of the UK who have died in the last few years, so that we can learn as much as we possibly can about the characteristics that contribute to their deaths and, by implication, how we might be able to prevent them.
How is this research being funded?
The funding comes from the Lullaby Trust, which is the organization in the UK that leads the way in terms of the investigation and understanding of SIDS in infants and children. The Lullaby Trust, which used to be called the Foundation for the Study of Infant Death, is the main agency that is coordinating and providing the funding for this and, indeed, will be helping us to recruit the families whose babies have died.
They have acquired the money through a number of routes. We have very generous donations from families in Australia we have donations from two family organizations in the US.
We also have parents whose baby died a couple of years ago in the UK, who have been very generous and raised a lot of support funding for the Lullaby Trust to support this project. Very much of the money has come from families who have been affected by the tragic loss of a child.
When will recruitment for participants begin and how can people get involved in the study?
We're recruiting two groups of babies. The first is through the families of babies or young children who have died suddenly and unexpectedly at any time in the last six years anytime from 2010 onwards.
Were asking that any family who has had a baby or young child die suddenly and unexpectedly makes contact with the Lullaby Trust. Well tell them about the project and if they agree to take part, then we will interview them and collect all the information about their baby and what happened.
Most importantly, well also be able to go to the repository and actually pull out the hearing test for their baby. We have arranged that every hearing test on every baby in England that's been done since the beginning of 2010 is now stored on a single computer in London, in a way that will be accessible if we have parents permission. We can't access it without their permission, but if they give us that permission we'll be able to access their recording and use that to investigate.
The other groups we're looking at are babies born in Bristol and babies born in Birmingham. Those are normal, healthy babies because obviously we need to know what the difference is between healthy babies and babies who die.
We started the recruitment in Bristol in June and were starting in Birmingham on 1st September. We'll be talking to each family, asking them to allow access their baby's hearing recording and collecting some information about the baby and their family.
The reason we're doing this in these two different cities is that Bristol and Birmingham are very different cities, with a very different ethnic and cultural mix. Also, there are two systems that are used to record the hearing screening in the UK. One of those systems is used in Bristol and one is used in Birmingham.
They give a similar recording, but you can only compare directly things that are made on the same system, so we're recruiting half the control babies in Bristol and half in Birmingham.
How many babies are you looking to recruit?
We're hoping to collect information from about 160 families whose babies have died suddenly and unexpectedly, from the beginning of 2010 to the end of this year. Over that six year period, we anticipate there probably being around 1,500 babies who have died suddenly and unexpectedly. We want to recruit about 160, so just over 10% of them.
For the controls, we're going to recruit 100 in Bristol and 100 in Birmingham, so that we'll be able to make very detailed comparisons.
If anyone who is reading this knows of a family who has lost a child or baby in the last few years, please put them in touch with the Lullaby Trust. I've now personally interviewed and met almost a thousand families who have lost a child in this way and one thing that is so important to almost all of them is that everything that has happened to them, they don't want to happen to anyone else and they're so willing to share their information so that we can make that progress.
All of the progress that we have made to date has depended on families who have gone through that awful tragedy being willing to share their experience and to tell us what happened so that we can try and stop it happening in the future.
Where can readers find more information?
http://www.lullabytrust.org.uk/
About Professor Peter Fleming, CBE, FRSA, PhD, MB ChB, FRCP (London), FRCP (Canada), FRCPCH
After undergraduate training in Bristol and postgraduate training in pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, and the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, I returned to Bristol.
From 1978 - 2012 I worked in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at St Michaels Hospital and the Childrens Sleep and Developmental Physiology Laboratory at Bristol Childrens Hospital, and also led the service for children on long term ventilatory support for the Southwest of England.
Since January 2013 I have worked primarily in research and teaching.
In 1983, I established the Avon Infant Mortality Study and since that time have continued to provide care and support to families bereaved by perinatal and infant deaths particularly the sudden or unexpected death of an infant or child within the Avon area (population 1million).
My research has included extensive studies of normal physiological development of infants and children, both in the laboratory and community setting and over the past 35 years I have led several large-scale epidemiological studies of factors contributing to unexpected deaths in infants and children.
Our studies in Avon were amongst the first to identify the importance of infants sleeping position, heavy wrapping, exposure to tobacco smoke and other features of the sleep environment as contributory factors to unexpected death in infancy.
I was the lead clinician in the UK Black to Sleep Campaign in 1991, which led to a dramatic fall in the numbers of infants dying suddenly and unexpectedly. I have been involved as a collaborator and advisor to several similar campaigns in other countries. This work is estimated to have led to the saving of over 15,000 infants lives in the UK, and over 100,000 worldwide.
I continue to conduct detailed research on epidemiological and physiological factors contributing to unexpected deaths in infancy and have co-authored more than 360 scientific publications.
The approach to the care and investigations of families bereaved by the sudden expected death of their child that we pioneered in the Avon area has since 2008 been adopted nationally in England under The Children Act 2004.
Since 2010 I have led a project in Neonatal Units in the Southwest of England developing approaches to better inform parents of preterm infants about their needs and care, before and after discharge from hospital. The Train to home that we have developed improves parents knowledge and confidence, and has led to reduced use of out of hours services after babies are discharged home.
We applied the techniques and knowledge derived from the studies of childhood deaths in the largest study yet conducted into factors contributing to premature deaths of people with learning disabilities.
Publication of the results of this study in the Lancet in 2014 led to government pledges to respond to the deficiencies and service failures identified. In May 2015 we were awarded a 2.3 million 3-year Grant by NHS England and are now establishing a National monitoring system for deaths of people with Learning Disabilities, modeled on the Child Death Review Programme.
In May 2016, with funding from the Lullaby Trust, we commenced a new national study investigating the possible links between subtle features of the routinely collected new-born hearing screening test and the risk of Sudden Infant Death. This study aims to identify infants at increased risk of unexpected death in infancy or early childhood, in order to facilitate targeted interventions that may reduce the risk to these infants.
Everybody knows the force that is required to activate a light switch on a wall - a finger is enough. But how much force do you need to apply if the device was dramatically reduced to the "nanoscale world", that is, how much force do you need to operate a "single-molecule switch"? This fundamental question is related not only to basic science but also to potential future applications of molecular devices.
Researchers at Donostia International Physics Center, San Sebastian (Basque Country, Spain), Fritz-Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin (Germany), University of Liverpool, (UK) and Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw (Poland) have succeeded in activating in a controlled manner a "single-molecule switch" by the force from the atomically-sharp needle of a state-of-the-art scanning probe microscope.
The experimental and theoretical study, reported today in the prestigious journal Nature Chemistry, demonstrates that an intramolecular hydrogen atom transfer can be triggered in a suitable organic molecule adsorbed on a surface by bringing the sharp metallic tip sufficiently close. The reaction, called tautomerization, is important in organic chemistry and molecular biology and also an interesting phenomenon for molecular electronic devices.
The researchers could not only quantify the force needed to operate their tiny switch, a porphycene molecule on a copper surface, but also reveal that the switching can be only induced at a very specific positions of the tip over the molecule, with a spatial resolution of a fraction of a chemical bond length, namely about 0.00000002 millimeter. Furthermore, they demonstrated the significance of the "chemical reactivity" of the tip apex in the force-induced process as the molecule cannot be switched when the apex of the needle is decorated by a single xenon atom - an inert element that lacks the required chemical reactivity.
Takashi Kumagai at FHI-MPG, who conceived this study, constructed the experimental setup in which an oscillating needle of a combined atomic force and scanning tunneling microscope is approached within a few atomic distances to the molecule. The switching showed up as a characteristic feature in the frequency shifts upon approach of the tip and was also confirmed by changes at the atomic-scale images by simultaneously scanning the tip over the molecule. It was measured that the force required was about one nano-Newton, which is a little less than the force needed to break a typical covalent bond between two atoms.
The research team also carried out extensive computer simulations in order to elucidate the atomistic mechanism behind the force-induced switching. The simulations successfully reproduced the experimental results and provided atomistic description on the operation of the single molecule switch. Thomas Frederiksen, Ikerbasque Research Professor at Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) - UPV/EHU explains that "our calculations revealed that the tautomerization, that is the switching, occurs by a reduction of its energy activation barrier upon approach of a metallic tip. However, the behaviour dramatically changes with a xenon-terminated tip and no tautomerization could be induced because of its inertness and softness".
The researchers emphasize that the studied force-induced reaction involving changes in the reaction pathway resembles an elementary step in catalytic processes. Therefore, their results also provide a novel strategy to gain a deeper atomistic insight into catalytic reactions, leading to a new control of chemistry at the atomic level.
Scientists at the John Innes Centre have discovered a key "twist" in a Rubik's cube-like plant puzzle, which could pave the way to new, or more effective pharmaceuticals.
Several members and derivatives of a group of natural plant compounds called heteroyohimbines, are, or have potential to be, important in medicine. One called ajmalicine, for example, is used as a treatment for high blood pressure, and the oxidised alstonine shows promise as an anti-psychotic drug. Piecing together the puzzle of how these compounds are made in plants could have enormous potential for developing new and improved therapies.
But the heteroyohimbine puzzle is not a simple jigsaw in which the picture becomes clearer with each new piece discovered; it's more like a Rubik's cube. New research, published in Nature Communications by researchers working in Professor Sarah O'Connor's laboratory at the John Innes Centre, reveals a crucial "twist" in the puzzle that could make the rest easier to solve.
Dr Evangelos Tatsis, a postdoctoral researcher at the John Innes Centre, and a first author of the work along with PhD student Anna Stavrinides, said:
"The small group of heteroyohimbines are all stereoisomers of each other, that is, they all have the same molecular formula, but they differ in the way their atoms are arranged - just like a Rubik's cube has the same number of coloured squares, but the way you twist the cube gives different patterns. Different stereoisomers have different biological activities, so we have been trying to understand how those different conformations arise, and why."
In previous work the research team showed that an enzyme called THAS is involved in taking a precursor molecule called strictosidine aglycone (SA) and converting it into the heteroyohimbine molecule tetrahydroalstonine. However, it was not known how or why the different stereoisomers formed.
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As a starting point, the group explored the transcriptome of the flowering plant Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar Periwinkle), a known source of tetrahydroalstonine, and found 14 candidate enzymes with very similar sequences to THAS. The scientists then expressed each of these enzymes in a different bacterial colony 'fed' with SA, and compared them to see which heteroyohimbines were produced.
Heteroyohimbine compounds were produced in four of the 14 experiments. In three of these, production of the heteryohimbines tetrahydroalstonine and mayumbine was very similar: a ratio of 85:15. The fourth enzyme, called HYS, gave a completely different production profile of ajmalicine, tetrahydroalstonine and mayumbine in a ratio of 55:27:15.
Dr Tatsis said:
"Each of our four candidate enzymes had very similar structures, and each was given the same substrate to start with. But, one of them produced different heteroyohimbines in different amounts - why? By resolving the crystal structures of these four enzymes, we determined what was different about HYS, and found that a particular loop of amino acid sequence is important in producing these different stereoisomers."
Conversion of SA into different heteroyohimbines seems to be a critical 'branching point' - after this, derivative 'scaffolds' can be further altered by other enzymes to produce a whole suite of alkaloid products with potentially useful and valuable properties.
The discovery of HYS, along with systems recently developed at the John Innes Centre to produce plant compounds in large quantities, means we might be able to not only solve this Rubik's cube-like puzzle, but perhaps engineer improved or completely new compounds for use in medicine.
Actor-comedian Gaurav Gera recently shared his views on Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch's murder and condemned the act.The actor better known for his social media appearance as Chutki, made a Snapchat video discussing Baloch's fearless approach and what made him watch the social media sensation. He also confessed that he admired her bold approach and was a fan of her marketing skills.Baloch was strangled to death by her own brother at her residence in Multan, Pakistan on Saturday. Her brother confessed his crime stating that he saved his family's honor by killing Baloch, who used to to post 'controversial' things on social media.Gera in his video appeared to be quite disturbed by the murder of Baloch in name of 'honor'. "Where is the honor in killing? She deserved to live", says Gera. The actor also apologises to late Baloch asking her forgiveness for not making a video on her birthday which she had requested.Watch the video below to find out what made Gera admire Qandeel Baloch so much:
Kerala High Court on Monday has upheld a college - Mar Thoma College of Science and Technology - management's decision to rusticated two students after they decided to go for a live-in relationship.
Justice K Vinod Chandran in his judgement said that the adults should be ready to face consequences if they take such drastic steps.
"This is not a mere case of falling in love; but two students taking the drastic step of eloping and living together without even contracting a marriage. As consenting adults they could definitely act according to their volition. But, here they could not have even legally entered into a marriage," he said.
"When taking such drastic step for the sake of love, as adults, they should also be ready to face the consequences," he added.
The girl, a BA English literature student had approached the high court challenging the college management's decision to rusticate them.
I have volunteered this resignation to make way for a free and fair probe. I will also tAke legal remedy after consulting with legal experts," George told CNN-News18.
Ganapathi, 52, was found hanging in a lodge in Madikeri area by the police on 7 July. A few hours before his death, in a video message, he had blamed George and the two seniors of harassing him.
In a major setback to Siddaramaiah led Congress government in Karnataka, Bengaluru Development Minister KJ George resigned from his post after a local court in Kodagu ordered the police to register on FIR on Monday against him and two top IPS officers in the suicide case of Dy SP MK Ganapathi.Two IAS officers A M Prasad and Pranab Mohanty were also mentioned in the court order on the basis of a complaint filed by deceased police officer MK Ganapathy's son Nehal.George however remained unfazed and expressed confidence that he will come out clean.George also expressed faith in the judiciary and requested the media to avoid speculation till the entire probe was over.A suicide note found next to Ganapathi inside the lodge also mentioned the three names and blame them for this extreme step.Even after 15 days, and despite relentless protests by the opposition BJP and JDS, the government had refused to file an FIR against the three individuals.
Mumbai: A minor girl was allegedly gangraped and murdered in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district. The accused broke the hands and legs of the 15-year-old girl and then killed her.
Three suspects have been arrested and the fourth one is on the run. The trio have been charged under POCSO act and other IPC sections.
The victim had gone to her grandparents house on Thursday but she did not return home. Search parties were sent out who found her cycle near a farm. Later, they found her body in a farm.
DNA tests are being carried out and all forensic evidence has been gathered.
Ujjwal Nikam has been appointed as special public prosecutor in the case.
"I have conducted one serious case like the Shakti Mill gangrape case. The incident in Ahmednagar district is also very serious. The police are investigating the matter. The Chief Minister had requested me to act in this matter as the prosecuter and accordingly I will act as a prosector. It would be too premature to comment upon the sentences at the present. It will only depend on what type of evidence is collected by investigation agencies," Nikam said.
The case has now been raised by the Congress in the Maharashtra Assembly.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has strongly rejected claims that Turkey's government had prepared arrest lists before Fridays failed coup attempt, Anadolu reported.
Speaking in Brussels on Monday, the EUs Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn was quoted as saying: "It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage."
He was speaking after the failed coup attempt in Turkey on July 15 which claimed more than 200 lives and injured thousands. More than 6,000 suspects have been arrested in connection with the plot, including military figures and judges.
Cavusoglu later tweeted that Hahn "is far from thoroughly comprehending what is going on in Turkey". He added that Turkeys "primary expectation" from its European allies was their "support [for] the democratic process in Turkey and strong condemnation of the coup attempt."
"Turkey will never compromise on human rights, the rule of law and democracy," Cavusoglu said, adding: "Therefore, no one, including Mr. Hahn, can prejudge the ongoing legal process regarding the bloody coup attempt in Turkey."
The coup-plotters are accused of having links to U.S.-based Fetullah Gulen, who is said to have pursued a long-running campaign against the government through supporters within the Turkish state.
Gulen is the main suspect in two investigations launched into the attempted coup by Istanbul prosecutors, judicial sources told Anadolu Agency on Sunday on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media.
A total of 8,777 personnel were dismissed from their duties, including 30 governors, 52 civil inspectors and 16 legal advisers, Turkeys interior ministry has said.
New Delhi: Digitalisation of Parliamentary documents have helped save 1000 trees, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan 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 per cent," she said after meeting the leaders of various political parties in Parliament Library Building in the national capital.
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 as per 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 on Sunday 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.
Chennai: In the brutal murder case of Infosys software engineer S Swathi in Chennai, the prime accused Ramkumar's Judicial Custody (JC) ended on Monday.
Police sources said, he confessed to the brutal crime and a chargesheet in this case will be filed soon.
On July 4, he was sent to 14 days JC by a court in Chennai.
24-year-old Swathi was brutally hacked to death at Nungambakkam railway station on June 24.
Around 6 am Swathi's father dropped her at the railway station and left. Soon after Ramkumar approached Swathi and they were heard arguing over some unknown issue.
He suddenly pulled out a chopper from his travel bag and hacked her to death in front of other commuters and walked away unchallenged.
Jun (pronounced hoon), a small town in Spain hit international headlines for using Twitter as its principal medium to run the municipal administration.Nearer home, we have a similar story of digital innovation.Goli Thottu, a small Gram Panchayat near Mangalore in Karnataka, has begun efforts to bring interaction between villagers and administration on a WhatsApp platform.To put an end to personal visits to the Panchayat office, and to make it a paperless office, Panchayat Development Officer Tirupati T Uppar has created a WhatsApp group and added 1,850 families residing within the Panchayat limits.We started with just 35 to 40 families and asked them to add others. In turn they asked the others to add the remaining families. We are hoping to add all 1,850 families soon, he says.All public notices and information on various government schemes will be shared via WhatsApp, Tirupathi adds.Villagers can also share their grievances, such as issues related to water supply, power supply or flooded areas, on the WhatsApp group.Even personal issues, such as health and security, can be intimated on the WhatsApp group, and the administration assures their concerns will be answered immediately.All 1,850 families have smartphones and Internet connection is good. It has made our job much easier, says Babu Naik, bill collector at the Gram Panchayat office. Sadhu Shetty, a villager, the initiative is welcome and has come as a boon for the people. We are really enjoying it, he adds.When asked "Do they know anything about Jun?" Gram Panchayat officials say that they dont even know where it is.
The Monsoon Session of Parliament got off to a stormy start over unrest in Kashmir. The Centre came under pressure from Congress which accused the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of failing to win the trust of the people.
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad questioned the action on civilians and asked if civilians should be treated in the same manner as terrorists.
The government however, said the battle in Kashmir was between the country and the separatists adding that violence fometed from across the border will not be tolerated.
"The battle in Jammu and Kashmir is between the separatists and the country. In the fight against separatism, people of Kashmir are with the country," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in a short duration discussion in the Rajya Sabha.
On being questioned by the Congress as to why "extra force" was used in which more than 40 people were killed and thousands injured, Jaitley said, "We are pained by every injury that a Kashmiri suffers. The security forces controlled the situation."
He appealed to all the parties to speak in one voice and "help restore peace" in the Valley.
"We do not want people to get hurt. The youth of the Valley have joined the civil services and they participate in the mainstream as well. In this scenario, the violence inspired from across the border will not be tolerated," Jaitley said.
The Monsoon Session of Parliament began on Monday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached out to the opposition parties seeking their support in passing of Bills including the crucial Goods and Service Tax Bill.
The session could see another round of face-off between the Modi government and the opposition parties. The latter is likely to raise the issue of unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, the political upheaval in Arunachal Pradesh, among other stories .
The government has tried to build consensus on GST in an all-party meeting. It remains to be seen whether the governments attempt can push the bill through Rajya Sabha where Congress has blocked its passage due to numerical strength.
The governments legislative agenda includes taking up 16 bills, including three to replace ordinances.
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New Delhi: Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday reached out to the opposition parties seeking their support in passing of Bills including the crucial Goods and Service Tax Bill.
"I spoke to all parties over the past days, everyone is in the mood to further development. Hope Monsoon Session observes high standards of discussions and important decisions are made," Modi said outside Parliament building.
"As the nation nears its 70th Independence Day celebrations I hope that we are able to take the right decisions and help the nation to progress faster. All parties should work together to see to it that constructive discussions take place in Monsoon Session," he added.
The session could see another round of face-off between the Modi government and the opposition parties. The latter is likely to raise the issue of unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, the political upheaval in Arunachal Pradesh, etc.
The government has tried to build consensus on GST in an all-party meeting. It remains to be seen whether the government's attempt can push the bill through Rajya Sabha where Congress has blocked its passage due to numerical strength.
The government's legislative agenda includes taking up 16 bills, including three to replace ordinances.
Besides the GST, another key legislation pending passage is the Whistle Blowers Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2015, which was moved in December 2015 but the discussion on it had remained inconclusive. In the Budget Session, 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 as the completion of government business was concerned. after obituary references to Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP from Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh who passed away on June 1.
Lucknow: Congress's newly-elected office-bearers of Uttar Pradesh unit on Sunday 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 ND 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 in August 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.
New York: The popular Pokemon GO that requires you to keep the screen on all the time may drive smartphone manufacturers to insert a large battery, making smartphones thicker.
As Pokemon GO continues to gain steam, smartphone manufacturers will turn out devices that have features aimed specifically at this next generation of smartphone users -- mobile phone users that are actually mobile, Slashgear.com reported on Saturday.
Pokemon GO is not going to drive innovation in battery power storage all on its own.
"What will drive the need for better batteries is the continued success of Pokemon GO and resulting apps and games, the report noted.
We will also likely see the return of the removable, replaceable battery as a big selling point -- again, if Pokemon GO lasts, the report added.
The newly-launched famous Augmented Reality (AR) game Pokemon Go has overtaken Twitter in terms of daily users and has seen people spending more time on its app than on Facebook.
This is how the game works.
It uses the GPS capabilities of your device in conjunction with Google Maps to "place" creatures in real world locations, which you then try to find using your device as a guide.
Once you are in proximity to the "placed" creature, you then use your device's camera to "view" the creature and try to "capture" it.
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.
Samsung is all set to launch the next generation Note device on 2nd August, 2016 at their unpacked event in New York.They are skipping the Note 6 and will name the next device Galaxy Note 7. The phone is expected to launch in India in the second week of August 2016.Here's what we know so far what the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will offer in 2016.The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is likely to come with a a 5.7-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display. The phone might also feature the dual edge design that's seen on the Samsung Galaxy S7. The device is expected to come with 6GB of RAM and right now there are just two smartphones in India that offer that much of RAM, the OnePlus 3 and the LeEco Le Max 2 The camera on the Note 7 is expected to be a 12 megapixel rear and a 5 megapixel front camera that's similar to the one found on Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 Edge.Coming to the processor of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, if rumours are to be believed this will be the first Samsung device to come with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 (Dual-core 2.3 GHz Kryo & dual-core 1.6 GHz Kryo) processor for US markets. Asus has already announced world's first device that will run on Qualcomm's latest flagship processor and Samsung might want to capitalise on that with the Galaxy Note 7.For the Indian market though, Samsung will get the Galaxy Note 7 with it's own Exynos 8890 (Quad-core 2.6 GHz + quad-core 1.6 GHz) SoC.This will also be Samsung's most powerful smartphone in 2016 and might feature the iris scanner for unlocking the phone.Samsung will also be getting a USB Type-C port for the Galaxy Note 7 for charging and data transfer. It will retain the 3.5mm audio jack though and is likely to come with CDLA support . The phone is also expected to come with a massive 4000 mAh high density Li-Po battery with fast charging on the Note 7.The phone is expected to be launched in 64/128/256 GB storage versions with colour options of Onyx, silver titanium and blue coral.The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is one of the most anticipated device of 2016 as it will be competing with the next Apple iPhone 7 Plus that will be launching in September 2016.Watch this space for more.
Beijing: China on Monday closed a part of the South China Sea for military manoeuvres as it moved quickly to assert control over the disputed waters after an international tribunal struck down its claims over the region.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force has conducted a combat air patrol with long range bombers in the South China Sea recently, which will become "a regular practice" in the future, a military spokesperson said.
The PLA sent H-6K long range strategic bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force as saying.
During the mission, the aircraft carried out tasks including aerial scouting, air combat and island and reef patrol, fulfilling the patrol's objective, Shen said.
The air force aims to promote real combat training over the sea, improve combat abilities against security threats and safeguard China's sovereignty and security, he said.
"To effectively fulfil its mission, the air force will continue to conduct combat patrols on a regular basis in the South China Sea," he said. Shen pointed out that the South China Sea islands have been China's territory since ancient times, and China's rights and interests in relevant maritime areas should not be infringed upon.
"The PLA Air Force will firmly defend national sovereignty, security and maritime interests, safeguard regional peace and stability, and cope with various threats and challenges," he said.
Separately the maritime administration in Hainan province, which overseas China's expansive claims over the South China Sea said it is closing off a part of the sea for military exercises this week as China simultaneously moved on both air and the sea to establish firm control over the area which was awarded by the tribunal to the Philippines.
The maritime administration said that an area southeast of the island would be closed until July 12 without providing details about the nature of the military exercises.
Beijing's moves followed after the tribunal appointed by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration last week quashed China's claims of historic rights over the vast expanse of the South China Sea and upheld the Philippines' claims under the UN Convention on Law of Seas (UNCLOS).
China which boycotted the tribunal angrily rejected its verdict and said the award would not impact its claims over 90 per cent of the resource-rich sea. Besides the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also firmly contest China's claims in the region.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will pay a visit to the USA on 19, RIA Novosti reported.
Turkish FM will discuss the extradition of Fetullah Gulen.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said earlier that 208 people lost their lives in the July 15 military coup attempt.
The Mockingbird Foundation, a nonprofit organization made up of fans of the band Phish, has announced donations of more than $20,000 in grants for music education, including a $1,500 grant for Nelson County High School.
According to Ellis Godard, the foundations executive director, the grants were distributed to one school in each of the cities or counties that are stops on Phishs current tour.
Phish will travel to Arrington to perform at the Lockn Festival, which takes place Aug. 25 to Aug. 28. Phish will perform Aug. 26 and 28.
Godard said Nelson County High School was chosen largely because of its extensive band program.
Godard called the Mockingbird Foundation the little guy, providing smaller grants to smaller programs. The program has awarded more than 300 grants totaling more than $1 million.
Its about supporting music education to the fullest, he said.
Godard said there are no requirements for what exactly the money is used for; the only stipulation is that grants be used to further music education.
Godard said while he hopes the $1,500 will go a long way for NCHS, he encouraged residents to show their support, as well.
SpaceXs Dragon cargo craft launched at 12:45 a.m. EDT on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida with almost 5,000 pounds of cargo. (Photo : NASA)
On Saturday, a Russian supply cargo ship launched from Kazakhstan where two space flights to deliver food, supplies and equipment will reach the International Space Station, as these two supply runs will be launch one day apart. On Monday early morning, SpaceX launched another cargo supply ship from Florida.
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The Soyuz U booster rocket was carrying a Progress MS-03/64P cargo ship and launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:41 P.M. EDT as the rocket released the spacecraft shorty after nine minutes into flight.
To date, the new version of the MS-series cargo ship is en route to the orbiting space laboratory some 242 miles above the surface of Earth, and is estimated to reach the ISS at 8:22 P.M. on Monday, which will dock at the Pirs module, facing Earth.
The Russian cargo supply ship is carrying 1,940 pounds of propellant for fuel, 110 pounds of oxygen, 926 pounds of water, including 2,833 pounds of supplies and equipment along with spare parts.
Meanwhile, after the Progress rocket blasted off from Central Asia, SpaceX engineers have test fired the Falcon 9 rocket that possesses nine Merlin 1D first-stage engines for a short burn to check and confirm engine operations before finally launching on the first hours of Monday.
SpaceX confirms that this short engine burn is successful, already launched at 12:45 A.M. Monday as forecasters predicted a 90 percent chance of favorable weather.
SpaceX's Dragon cargo ship is on top of the Falcon 9's second stage rocket, which will be transporting 3,946 pounds of supplies, scientific equipment and research samples inside its pressurized cabin. The Dragon capsule is also scheduled to reach the space station at around 7 A.M. on Wednesday.
This will also mark SpaceX's ninth resupply mission for the space station, after the failed resupply mission last June 2015, where the second stage rocket exploded during mid launch and destroyed precious scientific equipment and hardware.
Chris Hemsworth arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere of 'Thor' at the El Capitan Theater on May 2, 2011 in Hollywood, California. (Photo : Gregg DeGuire/FilmMagic)
J.J. Abrams has confirmed that Chris Hemsworth is set to return in Star Trek 4 and the Australian actor is likely to resurrect his role as George Kirk, father of Captain James T. Kirk.
Scott Mantz of Access Hollywood tweeted Thors return following a recent junket for Star Trek Beyond.
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Mantz tweeted: BREAKING!! #JJAbrams confirms to me that a 4th #StarTrek movie will bring together #ChrisPine & #ChrisHemsworth!!
Hemsworth was just making his way to the movie industry when he joined Star Trek as George Kirk, when the Abrams reintroduced the franchise in 2009.
In the film, Hemsworth played a heroic George who opted to give his life in an effort to save 800 others, as his ship crashed in the opening sequence of the film.
As short-lived as his role was, Hemsworth has had a long journey to what he has become today. He made his name in big films including Thor: The Dark World, The Huntsman: Winters War, In the Heart of the Sea, and more.
Abrams could not be more excited to have Hemsworth reunites with Chris Pine, who plays Captain James T. Kirk in the next sequel.
Theres something that hopefully were figuratively minutes away from talking about, Collider quoted Abrams as saying in a press conference for Star Trek Beyond, before adding, The answer is 100 percent yes, and its incredibly exciting.
Reports have anticipated the plot for the next sequel, suggesting Star Trek 4 will involve time travel, or a Star Trek Generations style reunion or another Finding Nemo featuring a father in search of his lost son.
In other news, writer Simon Pegg hints that he would welcome another opportunity to write the next sequel reportedly having Hemsworth on board.
Yeah always, its a pleasure to be given the keys to this kingdom and Id be happy to go back into it. You know its been a real treat and Id embrace another one yeah, Pegg said, according to Red Shirts Always Die.
Star Trek has been developed in three phases since it was created in 1979. The original series had six films to date, beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, (1991). The second phase called, The Next Generations began in 1994 with Star Trek Generations, and Star Trek Nemesis (2002). The last phase of the franchise was reintroduced by J. J. Abrams in 2009 simply titled, Star Trek with Chris Hemsworth playing the role of a Space Hero, George Kirk.
WATCH Chris Hemsworth in Star Trek (2009).
Putting his mark on pan
The advent of the Internet and the corresponding rise of its accompanying technologies are seeing many old things being done anew. The introductions of the G-pan and E-pan are demonstrable proof of the evolving pan.
Chris Harewood is adding yet another dimension to the evolution of the pan. No he is not altering the sound, nor is he creating a new kind of pan but rather Harewoods work is altering the image of pan. By branding the mini-pan best described as a collectible miniature pan, Harewood is giving a facelift to how the national instrument is conceived and viewed.
With strips that look like stickers, Harewood, the managing director of Pan Plus, adorns the pan with images ranging from the countrys magnificent seven, to American president Barack Obama from the fifth summit of the Americas held here in 2009, to even Disney characters. Harewoods designs are printed from high-grade paper that is sealed and waterproof.
While the idea is not entirely new he began doing them since 2004, what is new is that Harewood is attempting to internationalise the look of the miniature pan.
He sent a proposal to The Walt Disney Company, proposing that the branded miniature pans filled with some of Disneys most popular characters be sold at the theme parks operated by the company.
Although his proposal was rejected, Harewood plans to take the idea to other movie companies such as Universal.
This, Harewood said in his interview with Newsday, would bring a wider market to the pan and open the world to wider possibilities for pan.
The branded miniature pan has already garnered a strong regional market with the pans being sold in other Caribbean islands such as Aruba, Barbados, St Lucia, St Maarten, The US Virgin Islands, Grenada and the Bahamas.
Asked if this idea could be replicated to bigger pans, Harewood said, no, since it might interfere with the sound of the pan.
It is said that it might dull the sound of the pan, he said.
The idea to give pan a new wrapping, so to speak, came to him one morning at approximately 2 am, as most of his ideas do.
From that fateful morning in 2004, he said, I did the first one around 2004 and I found it looked so beautiful with the trim [silver] around the pan.
It was beautiful. I immediately went to local souvenir shops and started producing. The initial design blossomed into the over 12 designs he has today.
For him, the product is a tourist one, divinely inspired.
He has also attempted to market the product to corporate TT with mild success. But it is his hope that with the upcoming Olympics that his branded pans be taken as trade gifts by the national team for other countries.
For Harewood, this is the perfect symbol of the innovativeness of many a Trinbagonian.
One was done for the Trinidad and Tobago Taekwondo Federation, and it was well-received.
I would like for every group to take up this idea as gifts for their foreign visitors. My dream is for every Trinbagonian company to showcase this product.
For every team to say, hey I am Trinidadian. The possibilities are endless. Harewoods branded pans range from US$30 to $50 from various sizes and designs. Interested corporate clients could have a custom image printed on it.
The pans come with stands, music sheets, two sticks in either a box or gift bag, adorned with images of Maracas Bay, the Tobago goat race, limbo and of course, doubles.
Thorny road to healing
Author: LeRoy Martin James
LEROY MARTIN JAMES captures the Jekyll and Hyde of Father Time in measured, constrained terms. Hemmed in by tradition and protocol, his writing fails to dare but it manages to hold serve. There is a need for artistic perfection.
Every scene is painstakingly set; every hue and shade, deliberately recorded; every dialogue basking in literalism.
James is consummately conservative and we are served the rudiments of sound writing. And there is so much to savour here.
The Fisherman portrays island imaginary in raw terms.
James fictional fishing village is idyllic, at least on the surface.
The people are simple, unpolluted by the pretensions of urban living. They are drawn to the impulse and beneficence of the sea.
Drysdale and his vessel stretch their imagination.
It is the pride of a people longing for magic and creativity.
Drysdale waters an arid existence.
He is the father of two boys competing for his attention and two women sparring over his resources.
There are stark, multiple statements by the writer.
Life never lets up on the weary nor is ever compassionate to innocents. Life metes out its brutality, levelling the field of all comers.
Rolph experiences the passing of his mother at a tender age.
He struggles to find meaning - to win despite the hand he is served. Of his mother, his father said, She done dead and gone. It is useless thinking about her now. James follows with, That was what the man (Drysdale) had told him once, when he was smaller and in greater need of parental care and consolation. The boy had not said another word. That evening, he had sat in a corner by himself and wiped tears flowing like a silent stream, down his cheeks. He had long given up all hopes; his father seemed to care very little about him and his happiness. He learns that a young man named Alan is his brother.
His world already suffering violence and emptiness is again taken by force.
The stormy relationship between the boys seems implacable but abruptly quiets, and they bond.
A thorny path leads to healing, many agree.
And when life seems to have simmered, Rolph is called to the plate another time to grapple with the sudden demise of Sophia, a woman his father loved.
Shell-shocked by the dreadful turn of events Drysdale collapses.
Is he another victim of deaths overreach? Rolph ventures out to sea seeking medical help.
He just cannot take a chance. He well knows that death assails us indiscriminately with no regard for boundaries.
Rolph has always been troubled, strapped for psychological nurturing.
His father, we learn, probably had his interest at heart, but he had a way of keeping his thoughts to himself, hidden behind a coldness which made him almost a stranger. But he is not alone.
His half-brother, Allan, starved for love, also needs validation from his father. His mother, an incendiary woman is a past lover of the fisherman who walks a tight rope. There is palpable tension between the two. Allan is doubly victimised.
For sure, appearances are deceptive. Beneath the tranquillity, simplicity of bucolic living, the heart and mind are unruly.
The Fisherman teaches forbearance.
Life, cruel as it is, offers redemption. The whirling cycles of life is captured following Sophias death: Around midnight a group of men came, carrying musical instruments.
They sat down together and immediately caused a change in the air [T]hey began making music, strumming out tunes both melodious and solemn, which soon caught hold of everyone.
What had begun as an event of sadness soon turned into one of joyful songs of praiseIn the east the darkness was thinning away, a sign that the new day was not far off. Not long after, howling winds and gushing water destroys property as small crowds gathered everywhere, talking, viewing with consternation the work of the Almighty. Still insatiable, the sea confronts Tom, a friend and employee of Drysdale desperately seeking to salvage whats left of his house. Will the dark side of Providence back off this one time? No such luck.
But Nature always restores balance.
The river, we read was back to normal, but with the banks much cleaner than they were before the flood. In the clear water, the fishes looked as though filled with new life. And again, mercy is shown upon the two brothers torn apart by cruel circumstances.
Surely, The Fisherman offers hope amid despair. It delivers the enduring message of love the eternal truth that heals broken and forlorn spirits. It is a truth that unites families torn by excesses and the icy hand of nature. James, the reluctant messenger, delivers unassumingly and poignantly.
The Fisherman by LeRoy Martin James ISBN 978-976-648- 330-2 Publisher: Caribbean Educational Publishers, Trinidad and Tobago Available: +1 868 657 1012 Feedback: glenvilleashby@ gmail.
com or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashb
ROBOCOP KILLED
Alexis was killed in what appeared to be a shootout at Freedom Street, Enterprise, which took place at around 4.30 pm. Two other men were also shot dead in the incident, while a child, said to be five years old, was left critically injured.
A large contingent of police and law enforcement authorities cordoned the area as a pall of fear and silence overcame the district. Residents said they feared the start of reprisals in an area which has been plagued by deadly gang violence, particularly over the last two years.
Police said Alexis, who gained notoriety as an underworld character because of links to kidnapping, extortion, perversion of justice, larceny, drug and other offences, was at the premises of his car-wash business which is not far from the Southern Main Road. It is unclear how many persons were involved in the ambush.
According to preliminary reports, two cars drove up. A shooter alighted from one.
Robocop is said to have been armed and to have fired back at his assailants. A shooter and Robocop slumped to the ground, dead.
A third man at the scene who was also killed was said to have been a customer. Other assailants fled.
Though police blocked off the scene, photographs circulated on social media yesterday picturing three dead bodies, including of one person close to what appeared to be a hairpiece and another person holding what is believed to be a firearm.
A district medical officer arrived at the scene, as did crime scene investigators.
Onlookers described a haunting aura of death. Bullets had been sprayed all over the bloody scene.
The boy, identified as Kirchard Scott, was rushed to a nearby health centre where attempts were made to treat with him as a priority.
The two other persons killed were identified as Kevin Escayg and Thomas Hamza Sharpe.
They were said to come from San Juan.
With gang legislation due to expire at the end of August, police sources linked the incident to gang activity. A specific gang was named and said to be in a battle for turf.
Persons said Alexis was the owner of a mosque in the Enterprise area.
Residents last night braced for what some said could be a deterioration of the security environment.
It is feared the incident will lead to revenge attacks and vows of bloody retaliation were reported at the scene. Imam Haji Abzal Mohammed, a member of the Inter-Religious Organisation, last night called for peace.
God created the world and he does not mean for it to be a jungle world, Mohammed said. Let us live in harmony. Let us not paint Islam as a religion of war. Islam preaches peace. Eyewitnesses told police that Alexis was accustomed attending to customers at his car wash on a Sunday afternoon. Officers believe that the attackers were monitoring his movements.
A man who preferred to remain anoymous said that he saw a heavily tinted vehicle drive up the street.
Loud explosions were heard. The vehicle sped off. Three men were left lying on the ground while the five year old boy was screaming out in excruciating pain.
The eyewitness said he used his mobile phone to alert Chaguanas police who arrived quickly on the scene and cordoned off the area.
Alexiss wife and children arrived shortly thereafter, as well as employees of his mini-mart. They looked on helplessly at the three bodies while residents of Enterprise quickly gathered at the scene and looked on at the police activities.
Some wept openly, others recited Islamic prayers, while some looked on in a daze.
Late yesterday, a contingent of law enforcement officials were still at the scene.
Newsday understands that crime scene officers recovered high-calibre bullets. Sources also revealed that Alexis had surveillance cameras inside his carwash business place. That footage will be used by investigators to identify the killers.
Senior police officers said that Alexis exercised every precaution because he knew he was a man marked for death. They added that based on intelligence, the hit was ordered by a local person who was aligned with dangerous and unacceptable radical causes and who has been attempting to recruit.
Yesterday, Snr Supt Jayson Forde, Head of the Central Division, whose incidentally marked his last day on the job, told Newsday, What a way to end my last day by being on a crime scene with Selwyn Robocop Alexis and two others being killed. The shooting death of Alexis brought to an end the life of a man infamous for his criminal record dating back decades. He was said to be 41-years old.
In September 2011, Robocop was detained under emergency powers after being held at One Woodbrook Place in what was said to be a plot to kill the then Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and several Cabinet members. He was later released and denied a plot, though security officials stood by their concerns in written internal documentation.
It was only in April this year that Alexis appeared in court on rioting offences and was granted $50,000 bail. He was jointly charged with his 25-year old son Kerron Alexis and Imam Moilan Lynch, 52, in relation to an incident that took place that month at Circular Drive, Crown Trace, Enterprise.
As the years went by, death seem to creep closer to the Robocop.
Christopher Terrence Roberts, who was murdered in December last year, was said to have had close relations with Alexis.
In March 2014, Alexis appeared in court on two charges alleging he assaulted Sgt Doniphon Thompson of the Chaguanas 500 patrol unit and trespassing on a property.
The incident stemmed from an eviction warrant being executed at a property near the north bound lane of the Uriah Butler Highway at Guayamare Village, Caroni.
On November 11, 2011, the same year of the state of emergency, Alexis was freed by Chaguanas magistrate Gillian David-Scotland for the October 7, 2008 murder of Vincent Emmanuel Simmons who was shot and killed at Niblette Street, Enterprise, Chaguanas. The magistrate freed Alexis after the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Roger Gaspard offered no further evidence in the matter because of certain material provided to them about the credibility of the main witness in the murder trial of Alexis.
If high-ranking members of the Government had cause to be concerned about Alexis, so too did low-ranking police officers.
KIDS TALK OUT ON CHILD MARRIAGE
Since Chief Justice Ivor Archie made a call in April for a debate on the issue, a heated and at times acrimonious discussion has taken place in the media, at public events, in offices, at homes. It seems everyone has had a say. Or have they? The State is poised to present legislation on the matter, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi told Newsday yesterday. But not before one final consultation.
On Friday, the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs will ask the persons most directly to be affected by this issue for their views.
A special consultation event for teenagers, 13-years and up, will be held at the Hyatt Regency, Dock Road, Port-of-Spain, between 10 am and 1 pm. The consultation is open to the public, and participants must register by sending an email to events@ ag.gov.tt.
We have been talking about child marriage and thinking about child marriage for so long, the Attorney General said. And in watching the national reaction, we have had many people give an adults perspective on this issue which affects children most. But Al-Rawi, 45, a father of three children Abraham 16, Jinan 14, and Julian 13 said much can be gained by listening to children.
Given the work I have been doing with children in court including at the Family Division and being the father of three teenagers myself, it is undoubtedly important to have a childs perspective, the Attorney General said. I have spent many years working with kids, whether through career guidance seminars or as a karate instructor.
There are bright and strong-minded children. You would be surprised at the input you get from them. You really learn patience. Al-Rawi, who is married to Mona Nahous, continued, We have put out a call for young people. I am sure we will have a lot of responses. The Attorney General said a peer resolution team established in relation to recently legislated court processes involving minors was geared to participate in the event.
I have a had a couple sessions with them and they are excited about giving their perspectives on child marriage, Al-Rawi said.
He said the age group of 13 and above was selected for the consultation given the provisions of the laws which authorise the marriage of minors 12 and above and the likelihood that that demographic would engage in issues related to rights.
The Attorney General said while input is still being received, a bill has been drafted and the Government is poised to table legislation in Parliament in coming weeks after the end of the current recess in September and possibly even before the Budget.
We do have a draft bill and we have received a massive amount of inputs and recommendations, Al-Rawi said. When all is said and done, this is going to be legislation for which there is a significant amount of input and consultation. At a school graduation event at the Queens Park Savannah in May, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley told youthful graduates of the University of the Southern Caribbean to speak up and let their voices be heard on the issue.
So if today the change which is being demanded in this country is that we do not marry 12-yearolds and girls that are under 18, Rowley said. Then you ought to have a point of view on this and you ought to express that point of view to enact change. The Ministry has hosted several meetings and consultation events over the last few weeks. At one stage, a bitter war of works broke out between religious officials on the issue, as members of civil society warned the matter was not a religious one.
The move to consult children follows a similar move by a Parliament committee in April to call children to share their views on the education system.
Though religious leaders have dramatically disagreed, there is consensus among politicians.
Government proposes to raise the marriageable age to 18 and Opposition Leader Kamla Persad- Bissessar has also urged the Government to raise the marriageable age to 18.
According to information released by the Ministry, there were 548 marriages of minors over the period 2006 to 2016. All of the minors involved were female.
In the same period, child marriages occurred in relation to the Hindu (328); Christian (117) and Muslim (103) faiths. Between 2006 and 2015, under-age females married per year decreased from 69 to 10. Most of the marriages occurred in Port-of-Spain, San Fernando and Laventille.
Youth Council braces for high UWI drop-out rate
In response to the GATE task forces recommendations, Edwards said the recommendations put forth by the task force, if implemented, will lead to a high dropout rate come September 2016 as students would not have been given sufficient time to prepare for the changes.
He said thousands of tertiary-level students have now entered panic mode and due to the recommendations of the GATE task force setup by the government.
Edwards said the UWI St Augustine Guild of Students provided inadequate representation.
He continued, Approximately 30 students attended the consultation as a result of poor marketing of the event.
No other attempt was made to consult with other Guilds to come up with a collective response to the move to restructure the programme, which was introduced in 2014. Edwards said any decision should become effective September 2017, and students already enrolled in a programme funded by GATE should be able to complete their course of study without the fear of having to pay their way.
He said if the Government were to swiftly and blindly implement the recommendations of the GATE task force as delivered, TT would be in a similar position as of the people of Barbados who had to pay their tertiary education tuition following an austerity decision by the Barbadian Government in 2013.
Edwards said more than 50 percent of students enrolled at various institutions were unable to register at the start of the new semester following the decision.
SEA achiever following her passion
First on the list was a visit to the Emperor Valley Zoo, a place that Aadi has been familiar with even before she could walk and talk.
President of the Zoological Society of Trinidad and Tobago, Gupte Lutchmedial is her proud grandfather and by association has introduced her to the wonderful array of this countrys biodiversity both at the Zoo and in the wild. Aadi has her eyes set on a career in marine biology.
For a child who grew up among a family that has been in the forefront in Trinidad of efforts to protect aquatic animals, including the manatees, dolphins and whales, this passion and aim seems a fitting aspiration.
Aadis parents, Keith and Shabnam were also pleased to point out her love for reading. They indicated that Aadi is in her element in a bookstore and would spend time deliberating on choices. As she reads both fiction and non-fiction, there is no short supply for this voracious reader.
What is Aadis reward for her outstanding achievement? Her parents responded that she would like a family trip to Tobago to visit the marine reefs and view the spectacular reef fauna.
An unidentified flying object, or UFO, is any apparent anomaly in the sky. (Photo : YouTube/ Mystery Universe)
A UFO sighting has been reported in a recent live stream from the International Space Station (ISS). However, people who love conspiracies and those who do not fail to look for signs of aliens from the outer world claim that the American space agency, NASA, has once again tries to hide the truth about UFOs from the rest of the world.
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A part of the live stream, uploaded on YouTube, shows a bright, small object entering the frame of the video and approaching toward the Earth's atmosphere. But as the object continues to get closer to the surface of the Earth, NASA cuts the live feed. It makes it obvious that the space agency may be hiding something from everyone else, according to TechnoBuffalo.
However, it is not yet clear whether the object that entered the frame is actually a UFO. The NASA, on the other hand, claims that it has never seen a UFO, especially the ones represented in the strange and frightening videos circulating online.
When asked why the video was cut just as the strange object approached the Earth's atmosphere, a NASA representative said that the video is actually not in the control of the signals.
"The feed is not switched manually," the NASA spokesperson said, according to the publication. "It's all done automatically. There's nobody at a control board. We use a space-based data relay network. It gives us a very good coverage area, but you do lose signal occasionally-anywhere from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes."
The object seen in the video could be anything - a satellite, meteor or space debris - or it could just be a reflection of light. However, there is no denial to the fact that NASA has remained in controversy since long for hiding truth about UFO sightings and alien life.
Meanwhile, The Express has posted photographs from a 19-second video filmed in Nairobi, Kenya, that shows a huge UFO in the sky. The UFO footage was sent to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and was allegedly filmed by someone from a vehicle.
The footage has been marked as a CGI hoax by a number of people as it shows a huge flying saucer with an airplane-like noise. The movie-style UFO flies over the road as if it is descending into the land. Soon, the UFO disappears behind the trees and an echoing boom is heard toward the end of the footage.
The following is the ISS live feed that NASA has been accused to cut at the right moment:
US: We See
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Montage of MeerKAT First Light 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 (Photo : MeerKAT/Square Kilometer Array)
The world's most powerful radio telescope just revealed for the first time, never before seen galaxies lurking in the deepest regions of the known universe, that amounts to more than 1,300 clusters.
This radio telescope is known as MeerKAT, located in the Northern Cape town of Carnarvon in South Africa, where it captured new imagery of galaxies from a specific region in the sky where only 70 galaxies was previously detected.
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Even if the MeerKAT is still undergoing construction, this powerful instrument will become integrated with the Square Kilometer Array which is a massive radio telescope project that will be established in Australia and South Africa. These new images are a first look of the telescope's great capabilities when it later becomes fully operational.
This major breakthrough is also considered as a scientific milestone when it comes to radio telescope technology, as it is also the best one located in the southern hemisphere. These first set of images are captured by 16 dishes of MeerKAT that are continuously scanning the skies, where a total of 64 dishes will be completed for this project.
According to SKA South Africa chief technologist, Justin Jonas, based on these newest results, the team is confident that when 64 dishes are completed, MeerKAT will become the world's leading telescope of its kind.
The entire SKA project will become fully operational in 2020 where 3,000 dishes will span across 0.4 square miles across a remote region around several countries, as astronomers observe the most unknown and deepest parts of space. It is also slated that SKA will be 10,000 times more powerful that the most advanced modern scientific instruments, which will also be able to explore black holes, supernovae and dark energy, providing answers to the mysteries of the universe.
There are now 20 nations who are members of the SKA project, where Australia and South Africa are the main bases for the telescope operations, as the headquarters are located in the United Kingdom. According to SKA South Africa chief scientist, Fernando Camilo, these images will yield the best results, far better than what was initially expected. To date, it is only operating at a quarter of its full capacity, and it has already become the best radio telescope in the southern hemisphere.
These newly discovered galaxies are estimated to be 200 million light years away, in a region where new stars are being born, revealing massive stellar activity due to an abundance of hydrogen, including a supermassive black hole emitting powerful jets of energy across the universe.
(Newser) A Massachusetts man has been charged with murder after he allegedly fired a bullet through his door, striking a teen who mistakenly thought he was at a friend's house, MassLive.com reports. According to the Boston Globe, police found 15-year-old Dylan Francisco on Saturday afternoon outside the Chicopee home of 42-year-old Jeffrey Lovell bleeding from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The teen was treated at a hospital, but died that evening. Police say Francisco and a friend had been drinking alcohol at another residence and later mistook Lovell's home for that of another friend. Lovell told police that, after he saw Francisco walk through the backyard and begin banging on a side kitchen door, he thought someone was trying to break into his house, the Globe reports.
Despite a verbal warning from Lovell, Francisco kept banging and broke a window in the door. That's when Lovell allegedly fired a deadly single shot. "He said he felt threatened and then shot and killed this young boy," Assistant District Attorney Eduardo Velazquez tells the Globe. A grand jury will ultimately decide what charges Lovell will face, he says, adding, "Certainly we have a situation here that was a homicide, and at this point it is our belief that it was not justified. MassLive.com reports that Lovell's Facebook page has several posts supporting the Second Amendment, and the main photo portrays him aiming a gun. A neighbor, calling the situation "devastating," tells WWLP, I think its very unfortunate at this time and tragic for both families to be going through this. (A Montana man got 70 years for killing a teen at his house, despite his "Castle Doctrine" defense.)
(Newser) Nicolas Leslie, a 20-year-old UC Berkeley student missing since Thursday, has been confirmed as the third American victim of the truck attack in Nice. He was in the French city as part of the university's Study Abroad program, NBC News reports. "This is tragic, devastating news," UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a statement. "All of us in the UC Berkeley familyboth here on campus, and around the worldare heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence." Relatives had been searching desperately for Leslie, who sent a Snapchat video of himself just 15 minutes before the Thursday night attack.
Two other UC Berkeley students in the same program, 23-year-old Vladyslav Kostiuk and Daryus Medora, 21, suffered broken legs in the attack, People reports, while 20-year-old Diane Huang suffered a broken foot. Another seven of the 85 UC Berkeley students who had been studying in Nice have decided to return to the US before the official end of the program next week. A father and son from Texas were also killed in the Nice attack. The AP reports that French authorities are still working to identify all the people killed, and as of Sunday afternoon had only confirmed the identities of 35 of the 84 who died. (Read more Attack in Nice stories.)
(Newser) Interesting times indeed: The Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland on Monday and the chief of the city's largest police union feels that the situation is so volatile that gun rights should be temporarily rolled back. Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, tells CNN that after the shooting of three officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday, he thinks openly carrying firearms during the convention would be "irresponsible" and he wants open carry to be banned in the whole county until the RNC is over. Loomis says he wants Gov. John Kasich to issue an order, and "I don't care if it's constitutional or not at this point." Kasich, however, says Ohio governors "do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws."
Two men with long guns briefly turned up at a protest Sunday, apparently to demonstrate their open carry rights, Cleveland.com reports. Other demonstrators including 100 nude women in an art installation, assorted anti-Donald Trump groups that held marches and rallies, and a gathering of thousands of people on the Hope Memorial Bridge with a message of love. Some 11,000 attended a GOP event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with entertainment including Three Dog Night.
The GOP released its convention program Sunday and it looks like it will be one big Trumpfest at the Quicken Loans Arena: With daily themes like "Make America Safe Again" and "Make America First Again," there will be a Trump speaking each day, starting with Melania on Monday and finishing with both Ivanka and Donald on Thursday. Other speakers include Rick Perry, Scott Baio, Duck Dynasty's Willie Robertson, and Ted Cruz.
There will be around 50,000 people attending, the AP reports in its convention preview, but prominent Republicans including the party's last two presidents and last two nominees will not be among them. Kasich is also skipping the convention.
Marco Rubio will also be appearing, but only via video, Roll Call notes.
In a look at what to expect on Day 1, the New York Times predicts that the Baton Rouge police shooting will lead to even stronger Republican calls for law and order. In the evening, Melania Trump's speech may mark the start of a Trump effort to improve his dismal ratings among women voters.
This promises to be a memorable convention, but it will have a long way to go to rank among the wildest in US history, Politico finds in a look at convention craziness in years past, including 1924, when Democrats exchanged taunts of "Ku Klux McAdoo" and "Booze, booze, booze!"
(Trump is expected to officially become the GOP nominee Thursday, but the Never Trump movement hasn't given up yet .)
(Newser) It was "much more troubling or disturbing than I thought it would be." That's what Bill Nye has to say about Ark Encounter, Kentucky's new $100 million Bible-themed attraction featuring the largest timber-frame structure in the world and dinosaurs. The park suggests the world was created 6,000 years ago and that dinosaurs were still roaming when Noahwho park organizers say lived to be 950, per the Washington Postbuilt an ark to house two of each animal, as told in the Book of Genesis. "Every single science exhibit [located on the ark's third deck] is absolutely wrong," says Nye, who visited the site as a guest of his former debate partner and Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham, per NBC News. "This guy promotes so very strongly that climate change is not a serious problem, that humans are not causing it, that some deity will see to it that everything is OK."
"I'm not busting anyone's chops about a religion," he adds. But "it's all very troubling. You have hundreds of school kids there who have already been indoctrinated and who have been brainwashed." On Facebook, Ham appears happy with the "clash of world views" and opportunity to "share the gospel" with Nye. He notes he took a moment to pray for Nye, who "said I could do whatever I want as he couldn't stop me." Hamwho notes visitors to his nearby Creation Museum have doubledaims to attract 2 million visitors to the 120,000-square-foot structure in the first year. A rep says 30,000 people visited in the first six days. However, Nye says visitorsforking over $40 for an adult ticketwill see only a partially-finished ark. "I guess theyre using the same cranes Noah used. The same brand," he quips. (Nye actually helped the park get its funding.)
Ahmed Naji can still appeal the sentence at a higher court
A Cairo court on Sunday ruled against a request to overturn the two year prison sentence handed down to novelist Ahmed Naji for publishing a sexually explicit novel.
The misdemeanour court stated in its reasoning that Naji did violate public decency by using "explicitly obscene phrases and words" in the novel's chapters.
The court added that the novelist did not denying writing the novel.
Naji was sentenced to two years in prison in February over charges of violating public decency after excerpts of his novel The Use of Life were published in a literary magazine in 2014.
Naji had been acquitted in January but the prosecution appealed the verdict and he was sentenced in a retrial.
The case was brought against him by an individual who claimed to have experienced health issues after reading the excerpt.
Naji's defence team have filed an appeal before the cassation court against the two year sentence, but the appeal has not yet been scheduled.
Egyptian novelists and intellectuals declared their support to Nagy, demanding his releasing and stating that his prison sentence is unconstitutional.
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(Newser) A master's student at India's MD University in Rohtak was found in the bushes last week, her clothes torn and the victim of an apparent abduction and rape, cops sayand her attackers look to be the same five men who gang-raped her three years ago, the Times of India reports. Two of the accused had been arrested after the last rape in Bhiwani but were eventually let out on bail, while the other three were never arrested at all. Her family says she was attacked again because they kept pursuing the case, seeking to have all five put behind bars despite offers to settle the case out of court for a relatively large sum of money. "We were getting constant threats from the accused to reach a compromise outside the court, but we remained firm," the brother of the woman, said to be either 20 or 21 years old, tells the Hindustan Times. The case underscores ongoing struggles with the country's caste system, technically illegal for more than 60 years, but far from disappeared.
The young woman is a Dalit, considered the lowest, "untouchable" caste, while at least three of the accused are said to be from an upper caste. The Washington Post notes that the outcry against rape cases involving victims from lower castes is often "muted," and that the region where this most recent rape took place is still held in a patriarchal grip, where, "male-dominated village councils often mete out their brand of misogynistic justice with impunity." The Indian Express reports that the woman's family had moved to Rohtak from Bhiwani after the last assault, fearing she would be ostracized and because they feared the accused men, who are all in their late 20s. The victim was hospitalized and treated; the five men have yet to be arrested. (An elderly nun was gang-raped in India last year.)
(Newser) An attempted military coup in Turkey over the weekend that killed hundreds was put down, but more details continue to trickle outand this one has some scratching their heads. As President Recep Tayyip Erdogan jetted back to Istanbul from his vacation in Marmaris during the uprising, rebel fighter jets apparently had his airplane right on their radar, an ex-military officer with "knowledge of the events" tells Reuters. "At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan's plane while it was in the air," he says. "They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him. Why they didn't fire is a mystery." At least two senior Turkish officials acknowledged there had been an incident involving Erdogan's aircraft, with one simply noting the plane had been "in trouble in the air."
Flight tracker data shows a Gulfstream IV plane like the one owned by the country's government had taken off from an airport near Marmaris late Friday night and then circled outside of Istanbul, where sounds of gunfire could still be heard, before eventually touching down. One of the officials also says Erdogan had "evaded death by minutes" in the resort town of Marmaris, with local media saying about 25 coup troops had descended from choppers on ropes and infiltrated a hotel to try to abduct him (he had already fled). Haaretz notes Erdogan's vacation home was bombed after he had left, per reports. One of the officials also noted Prime Minister Binali Yildirim was a target during the coup but just barely got away in Istanbul. The Wall Street Journal documents Erdogan's tech savvy during the coup, including how he sent a text message during the turmoil to every cellphone in the country and used FaceTime to speak to Turkish citizens. (Read more Turkey stories.)
(Newser) A Taco Bell employee in Alabama has been fired after authorities say two Lee County deputies were denied service. Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said in a statement that the uniformed deputies were told by the cashier at 9:40pm Saturday in Phenix City that they wouldn't be served and they needed to leave. "They initially thought that she was joking," Jones said, per the Opelika-Auburn News. "They even asked her if she was kidding. Her response was, 'No, I'm not. We dont serve law enforcement, and you need to leave."
Taco Bell spokeswoman Laura Nedbal said in a statement to news outlets that the restaurant's franchise owner has since fired the employee. Nedbal says Taco Bell does not endorse the employee's sentiment, reports the AP. She says the franchise owner has apologized to the sheriff's office. Jones says the sheriff's office appreciates the restaurant's response to the incident, which comes amid rising tension nationwide over fatal police shootings. (Deputies in Washington state reported a similar experience.)
(Newser) A website for a government-run long-term care facility in Canada promises residents will be treated to birthday parties, sing-a-longs, and a "foot spa day." Unsurprisingly, there's no mention of the incredible violation of privacy many residents suffered at the hands of a single employee. A government investigation reviewed by the CBC notes an unnamed employee at Margaret Stewart Ellis Home in Prince Edward Island took a "head shot" of a dead resident, then shared it on Snapchat "with a very inappropriate caption." But investigators also found that over several months last year, the employeewho was firedsent "inappropriate and degrading photos and videos" to coworkers showing "vulnerable residents while they were eating, sleeping, using the commode," and receiving care "after a bowel movement."
The documentswhich note the employee claimed no involvement in the Snapchat photo and did "not recall" involvement in other allegationsdon't say whether the worker took the images. The investigation revealed staff members were breaking the rules in using their cell phones at the home, so PEI's health authority held a refresher course on cell phone policies. But federal police say they weren't notified, which a law professor says is the most "extreme" case he's heard of in Canada. "The severity of this, where you're dealing with a vulnerable person and, in one case, even a person who is dead is outrageous and shocking to me." When contacted by the CBC, the employee "said they had their own side of the story but did not wish to speak to the media." PEI's privacy commissioner has ordered authorities to release more details of the case within 40 days. (Read more Canada stories.)
(Newser) A Vietnam War veteran who helped save 40 soldiers under enemy fire was presented with the Medal of Honor on Monday. Retired Lt. Col. Charles Kettles of Ypsilanti, Mich., led helicopter flights that brought reinforcements to soldiers and evacuated those who were injured, the AP reports. He repeatedly returned to a landing zone that was under heavy fire near Duc Pho on May 15, 1967, and during the final evacuation effort, he found out that eight soldiers hadn't been able to get to the helicopters. He went back for them without artillery or tactical aircraft support. His helicopter was damaged by enemy fire, but even so, he got the final group of soldiers to safety.
"As many people have said, nobody deserves it more than Charles Kettles," President Obama said during Monday's ceremony at the White House, per USA Today. "Many believe that, except for Chuck," the president continued, noting that the 86-year-old said a big deal "was made about something that happened 50 years ago." But, Obama noted, there "are entire family trees made possible by this man." Kettles had already been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest military honor for bravery. But an amateur historian learned about Kettles' rescue mission and got the Army to reopen his case, which led to his Distinguished Service Cross being upgraded to the Medal of Honor, the country's highest military award for valor. (Read more Medal of Honor stories.)
(Newser) Pakistan's so-called blood-money laws won't help Waseem Azeem avoid punishment in the death of his sister, 26-year-old fashion model and social media star Qandeel Baloch. That's because police took the "rare step" of becoming the main complainant in the case, the Guardian reports. Under the "sharia-inspired" blood-money laws, relatives of victims have the power to forgive killers. Azeem admitted to drugging and strangling his sister on Saturday because she "brought dishonor on the family name." It was Baloch's father who filed a police report against Azeem and another son, Muhammad Aslam, after his daughter's death, Reuters reports. However, per the Guardian, some were concerned that Azeem would ultimately get away with the killing even though his father had vowed to press charges.
Also being investigated in the case is Abdul Qavi, according to reports. According to the Guardian, Baloch's mother says the prominent Muslim cleric encouraged Azeem. Last month, Reuters reports, Baloch posted photos to social media in which she posed with Qavi, who was subsequently censured. Qavi has denied involvement and said he had "forgiven her," though he also said her death should be an example to others who attempt to "malign the clergy," per Reuters. As for Aslam, Baloch's father says Aslam encouraged his brother to kill their sister, but police are not commenting on his alleged role. According to Reuters and the BBC, Baloch's father told a local English-language newspaper that his daughter was the family's breadwinner: "She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her." (Read more Pakistan stories.)
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 military aide of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was taken into custody on Sunday after Fridays attempted coup, state-run news agency Anadolu reported.
Ali Yazici is accused of involvement in the coup plot and was in Ankara during the putsch, CNN-Turk said. He had only begun working for the president in August last year, according to Anadolu.
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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 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 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 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.
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.
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New Delhi :
Rajya Sabha witnessed a brief adjournment on the opening day of Monsoon session as BSP members trooped into the Well alleging atrocities on dalits in BJP-ruled Gujarat. Soon after laying of papers when the Question Hour began, BSP chief Mayawati raised the issue of recent incident in which some members of the dalit community, engaged in skinning dead animals, were beaten up in Gujarat.
She said some anti-social elements tied their hands, stripped them and beat them up in a market in broad daylight. The police did not take immediate action and the crowd too did not intervene, the BSP leader alleged and blamed the state government too for not taking prompt action against the culprits.
Accusing the ruling BJP of being anti-dalit, she said the state police swung into action only after the incident was highlighted by the media.
This shows the anti-dalit mindset of the BJP, she said and alleged that such incidents of atrocities against dalits have increased ever since the BJP-led government has come to power at the Centre.
Countering the allegations, Urban Development and Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the saviour of the entire country and said that as per convention, name of any political party should not be taken while raising issues.
As Mayawati was speaking on atrocities against dalits, some BSP members trooped into the Well raising slogans.
Chairman Hamid Ansari adjourned the House for ten minutes. Earlier, Sitaram Yechury (CPI-M) pointed out that he has given a notice for adjournment of Question Hour for taking up the issue of rising prices.
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New Delhi:
The Rajya Sabha on Monday debated the Kashmir unrest on the first day of Monsoon Session of Parliament. Ghulam Nabi Azad, leader of Opposition in the Upper House, questioned the killing of around 40 civilians by the security forces in the Valley in the aftermath of Burhan Wanis death. He demanded that the government should show accountability towards the deaths of civilains.
No one has battled militancy in the manner in which we (Congress) have done. The highest number of militants were killed during the 1990s. We were in power in the State as well as Centre. Even when I was the chief minister of Kashmir, we battled the militants. But never did we unleash such an onslaught against the innocent civilians. How can you use the bullets meant for militants against a six-year-old boy? Azad said.
Azad accused BJP of the rising anti-India sentiment in Kashmir. We had warned you (PDP) before that alignment with BJP will remain unacceptable with people of Kashmir. BJP will require another 200 years to make inroads in the valley. Due to this (PDP-BJP) alliance, the anti-India sentiments in the Valley have escalated.
Im not saying that during our rule, people of Kashmir had trust in New Delhi. But we had taken concentrated efforts in the past 40 years to bring them in the mainstream. We had announced a scholarship scheme for Kashmiri Pandits. The scheme is now lying dead ever since UPA went out of power.
If you think that by hoisting the RSS flag in the valley, you will inculcate nationalism in the people of Kashmir, then you are sadly mistaken. Your actions have made the wounds of valley deeper. You are taking the state back to the 90s, said Azad.
Leader of House Arun Jaitley responded to Azad, I agree that the situation in Kashmir has turned extremely seriousI also agree that the mass protest is not directed towards the tourists or the pilgrims of Amarnath Yatra. They were expressing their anger against the police and CRPF who killed one of the most famous militant (Burhan Wani).
We want to make it clear that battle is against the separatists, not the people of Kashmir. We want them to be included in the mainstream. We appeal the people of Kashmir to alienate themselves from the negative forces who do not want peace to prevail in the region.
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According to reports published in Scientific Reports, it is believed that the extinction of dinosaurs was caused because of the ejecting soot coming out of the rocks which absorbs strong light aerosol from asteroid crash.
The latest study revealed that the shoot slammed earth resulting to 180Km big hole which resulted in the dinosaurs' extinction.
According to Tohuku Universitys professor, KunioKaiho and his team has made analysis on sedimentary organic molecules from the place near to the collision, and also away from it. The flaming organic molecule of places near to it and away from it found similar results showing high energy level. Its also believed that result similarity can explain the whole idea of extinction and life on earth
The earlier study reports manifests that the atmosphere which is contaminated with asteroid and presence of dust particle blocked the sun. Meanwhile, the researchers also said that it was not attainable for the asteroid to operate the extinction all alone but the only explanation they had proved it to be right then.
Also, researchers from Tohuku University and Japan Meteorological Agency suggested about the impact of asteroid was possible due to tremendous spread amount of soot when it hit the oil-rich region of Yucatan. It was the soot which caused extend period of gloaming and resulted to cold climates at mid-high latitudes and dry period with mild coolness at low latitudes on the earth surface
In the first two years of impact, there was excess release of photosynthesis in the oceans resulting to cooling down of oceans water surface. The continous dark years with very low temperature resulted to loss of marine beast and land.
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Coptic officials and Minya locals called on authorities to help put an end to sectarian violence in the Upper Egypt governorate after families of two priests in the Tahna El-Jabal village were attacked by assailants wielding knives and batons on Sunday, killing a 27-year-old man and injuring three others, including a woman.
According to an Ahram Arabic website correspondent in Minya, most eyewitnesses and security sources stated that the attack started as an argument between young Muslim men and Christian children over right of way on the narrow streets of the village.
The disputing parties then involved the families of the Christian children, including the son of the local church's pastor according to the eyewitnesses.
A security source told Ahram Arabic website that 4 suspects from the Muslim party were arrested and are accused of attacking the Christian families. The source added that one 15-year-old suspect was on the run.
Earlier Monday, the funeral of Fam Mary, the 27-year-old man killed in the fight, was held and attended by the Christians in the village who demanded justice for their neighbor.
Bishop Macarius of Minya and Abu Qirqas criticised the government's handling of what happened to be the third sectarian-related incident in the Upper Egyptian governorate over the last two months.
"As a reminder only, Mr. President, Christian Copts are Egyptians," the Bishop said on his official Twitter account on Sunday.
The secretary of the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Bishop Raphaeil, slammed the governor of Minya as well local leaders in the area.
"A question to the executive powers in Egypt: does what happens in Minya on a daily basis -- meaningless humiliation and murder of Christian Copts -- require a change in local leadership?" He said.
Al-Azhar, the country's top Sunni Muslim authority, called on both sides to resort to law and not to provide the opportunity for "malicious" attempts "to sow discord and ignite sectarian strife.
"The prestigious Muslim body said a delegation from the Family House, a group of Muslim and Christian leaders that promotes peaceful coexistence, was sent to the village to help settle the matter.
Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 90 million, have long complained of discrimination and sectarian attacks in the predominantly Sunni Muslim country.
In May, Muslim villagers set ablaze seven Christian homes and assaulted a Christian man's elderly mother, parading her naked in public. The assault in in Minya's El-Karm village was sparked by rumours that the man was having an illicit relationship with a Muslim woman.
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80 people were killed and over 100 got injured after an explosive laden truck ploughed through a crowd in the French resort of Nice last week. The infamous terrorist group, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the deadly truck attack.
A video has emerged that shows people throwing trash and spitting where the Nice attacker was killed. The disgust is unprecedented, as the number of terrorist attacks is on a rise.
The Islamic State has carried out uncountable terror attacks with an aim to terrorise the whole world. The new wave of terrorism is now being seen as the major threat to world peace.
There are tears, solidarity, empathy in the eyes of all for the victims and their families who have lost their lives in the terror attacks.
Who is the attacker?
The man who drove the lorry has been identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old man of Franco-Tunisian origin.
Who became the victims of Nice attack?
84 people, including 10 children and teenagers.
Since January 2015, Islamic State has targeted France on several occasions.
Anger where Nice attacker was killed. People throw trash and spit. Never seen aggression like this after an attack. pic.twitter.com/G0UPSy4Voq Michael Birnbaum (@michaelbirnbaum) July 18, 2016
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New Delhi:
Global warming has become one of the major concerns across the globe. The government today said that a US-developed weapon system that strikes the atmosphere with a focussed electromagnetic beam may cause global warming. It also acknowledged that climate change is likely to reduce the yield of major crops like wheat and maize in India.
The US has developed a type of weapon called High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme (HAARP). HAARP strikes the upper atmosphere with a focussed and steerable electromagnetic beam, Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.
HAARP is an advanced model of a super powerful ionospheric heater which may cause the globe to warm and have global warming effect, he said. Dave was replying to a question on whether the government is aware of HAARP, capable of effecting devastating impact on the worlds climate including that of India and resulting in destabilisation of agricultural and ecological systems.
He said a study conducted by Indian Council of Agricultural Research has projected the impact of climate change to be adverse in terms of reduction of yield of major crops including wheat, maize, mustard, potato and sorghum.
Recognising the adverse impact of climate change, the minister said that the government launched the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in June 2008 to deal with climate change-related issues.
NAPCC comprises eight missions in areas of solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, habitat, water, sustaining Himalayan ecosystems, forestry, agriculture and strategic knowledge of climate change.
It also addresses the issues relating to mitigation of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change on environment, forest, habitat, water resources and agriculture. Dave said 32 states and UTs have also prepared a State Action Plan on Climate Change (SAPCC).
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Aden:
Suicide bombers today attacked two army checkpoints in a former stronghold of Al-Qaeda in southeastern Yemen, killing 11 people, health and security officials said.
One attacker drove his bomb-laden truck into a checkpoint in a western district of Hadramawts provincial capital Mukalla, security officials told AFP.
The second attacker simultaneously blew up his vehicle at an army checkpoint in the nearby town of Hajr, located some 15 kilometres to the west of Mukalla, the sources said.
The commander of Hadramawts second military region, General Faraj Salmeen had earlier told AFP that the second bombing struck the centre of the city, blaming the attack on terrorists.
Eleven people were killed and 18 were wounded in the twin bombings, said Riad Jariri, head of the health department in Mukalla.
Four civilians were among those killed, he told AFP. No group has yet claimed responsibility. Mukalla and surrounding towns were under the control of Al-Qaeda for one year until pro-government troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured the city in April. In March, a US air strike on an Al-Qaeda training camp in Hajr killed more than 70 jihadists, provincial officials said.
Yemen has been gripped by a devastating conflict that escalated in March 2015 when Saudi-led air strikes began against Iran-backed Huthi rebels after the insurgents seized northern and central parts of the country including the capital, Sanaa.
The violence has allowed extremists such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group to extend their influence and launch scores of attacks on security forces. Last month, IS claimed a wave of suicide bombings targeting Yemeni troops in Mukalla that killed at least 42 people.
The Pentagon said in May that a very small number of US military personnel had been deployed around Mukalla in support of pro-government forces.
Washington considers the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be the networks deadliest franchise and its drone strikes have taken out a number of senior AQAP commanders in Yemen over the past year.
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Amritsar:
An Amritsar court today issued summons to AAP national convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and two others of his party asking them to appear before it on July 29 in a defamation case.
Besides Kejriwal, summonses were issued to journalist-turned-politician Ashish Khetan and AAPs Punjab affairs in-charge Sanjay Singh by Chief Judicial Magistrate Gurpartap Singh in a case filed by Punjab Revenue Minister Bikram Singh Majithia.
The development came on a day when Kejriwal visited Golden Temple to perform volunteer service.
On May 20, Majithia had filed a criminal defamation case against the three in a court here alleging that AAP was bent upon tarnishing his and his familys image by levelling baseless allegations.
This is the second case he has filed against AAP leaders. On January 12, 2015, he had filed a case in a Ludhiana court against some of its leaders for accusing him of patronising the drug mafia and for threatening to put him in jail if the party was voted to power in Punjab in 2017. Those named as accused in the case are out on bail.
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Cincinnati:
Hillary Clinton today called for an end to the madness after the death of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saying that if she is elected president she will use all her powers to hold those who kill police officers legally accountable.
They represent the rule of law itself if you take aim at that and at them you take aim at all of us, Clinton told civil rights activists at the annual convention of the NAACP. There can be no justification, no looking the other way.
The Democratic presidential candidate condemned the killing of three Louisiana law enforcement officers, the latest in a recent string of shootings involving black men in Louisiana and Minnesota and police officers in Dallas. She said anyone who kills a police officer or acts as an accomplice must be held accountable.
This madness has to stop, Clinton said. A former Marine ambushed police in Baton Rouge yesterday, killing three law enforcement officers in the attack. Three other officers were wounded, one critically. The shooting, the fourth high-profile deadly encounter involving police over the past two weeks, added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police.
Recent violence has cost the lives of eight officers, including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians, and it has sparked a national debate over race and policing.
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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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Egypt's press syndicate condemned an alleged assault on journalists covering a general assembly of the Lawyers Syndicate on Sunday, and called for the assailants to be held to account.
The press syndicate said in a statement late on Sunday that "a group of lawyers attacked a number of journalists, seized their equipment and smashed their cameras" while they were covering the assembly that renewed confidence in syndicate head Sameh Ashour.
It said the attackers chased journalists to the doors of the nearby press syndicate in downtown Cairo, and published video footage of what it said was lawyers trying to storm the syndicate building and attack photographers.
The syndicate "does not in any way accept assault on any colleague and that it will spare no effort to take all measures to obtain the rights of colleagues."
Ashour ordered an urgent probe be opened into the alleged attack and urged journalists to provide any evidence they have.
He also said that the crisis appeared to be intentionally provoked.
"What is the interest of the syndicate to invent a crisis with journalists during the general assemblywhere it allowed all journalists and photographersinside and outside polling rooms?" he wondered in a statement late on Sunday.
Sunday's assembly was held to vote whether to withdraw confidence in Ashour after many members protested his "failure to protect lawyers" following many recent incidents of lawyers being arrested during their work, particularly when representing clients in police stations.
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A Coptic Orthodox cleric in Egypt's Minya governorate has said a sectarian attack in a village there on Sunday killed one person and wounded three others.
Bishop Makarious of Minya said in a brief statement Sunday that the families of two priests in the Tahna El-Jabal village were attacked by assailants wielding knives and batons, killing a 27-year-old man and injuring three others, including a woman.
The cleric did not elaborate on the reasons behind the violence, but local media reports suggest the fighting resulted from an argument between Muslim and Christian children over priority to pass through the street.
Emad Nabil, a local lawyer, was quoted in a Christian forum as saying that police had arrested four suspects in relation to the attack.
Al-Azhar, the country's top Sunni Muslim authority, called on both sides to resort to law and not to provide the opportunity for "malicious" attempts "to sow discord and ignite sectarian strife."
The prestigious Muslim body said a delegation from the Family House, a group of Muslim and Christian leaders that promotes peaceful coexistence, was sent to the village to help settle the matter.
Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 90 million, have long complained of discrimination and sectarian attacks in the predominantly Sunni Muslim country.
In May, Muslim villagers set ablaze seven Christian homes and assaulted a Christian man's elderly mother, parading her naked in public. The assault in in Minya's El-Karm village was sparked by rumours that the man was having an illicit relationship with a Muslim woman.
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In 2014 the Egyptian armed forces announced that its engineering department had invented devices to diagnosis and treat HIV and hepatitis C
The Egyptian Doctors Syndicate has referred four doctors to a syndicate disciplinary committee on accusations of promoting an apparent hepatitis-treatment device that has not been scientifically verified.
On its official website, the syndicate accused the four doctors who promoted the device of being responsible for "harming millions of Egyptian citizens who waited for treatment by the named device."
In 2014, the Egyptian military announced at a press conference that its engineering department had developed a breakthrough device that could diagnosis and treat HIV and hepatitis C.
Major-General Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, a physician and the man behind the device, said its HIV and hepatitis C treatments had a 100 percent success rate. The device was supposed to be deployed publicly in Egypt by June 2014, according to armed forces, but such treatments have yet to materialise.
The device was widely criticised at the time for being scientifically unfounded. Essam Heggy, scientific advisor to then-president Adly Mansour, argued that the device appeared to have no clear scientific basis.
Egypt has one of the highest hepatitis C rates in the world. The number of patients reached 8 million in 2008, according to health ministry figures, or nearly 10 percent of the population. In some parts of Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta infection rates reach 20 percent.
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State Rep. John Shaban (R- Redding) is disappointed that a bill he sponsored that would establish brownfields land banks was vetoed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy last month.
The bill, which would have created tax-exempt land banks that facilitate cleanup of polluted brownfields sites in Connecticut, was vetoed on June 2 because of technical language in the bill that Malloy said would have created millions of dollars of revenue loss for the state.
A land bank is a governmental entity or nonprofit corporation that attains abandoned or tax delinquent properties, fixes them up and transfers them to back to responsible ownership, according to the Center for Community Progress. Land banks have special powers, which vary by state, to help them do this.
Connecticut does have brownfield land banks now, said Tim Sullivan, deputy commissioner at the Department of Economic and Community Development. These land banks can acquire property and provide support for municipalities, but they do not have access to certain programs that would help them remediate sites. Shabans bill would have allowed these land banks to use a grant program and liability relief program, as well as given them tax-exempt status, Sullivan said.
Shaban said the problem Malloy saw with the bill is two-pronged. First, the state needs all available tax revenue, given its budget deficit. Second, the bill overlooked parity treatment required between state and federal securities related to corporate taxation.
The parity treatment, as decided by a Supreme Court case, explains that if a municipality such as a land bank is tax-exempt, a corporation could also argue for tax exemption. The governor wrote in his veto letter that the language of the bill violates the parity treatment and could put corporate tax revenues at risk.
Shaban said he wanted it to be passed now and amended later to address those concerns, but the governor was more cautious. Shaban understood the delay, and said he is glad the governors office takes environmental issues seriously.
In vetoing the bill, the governor wrote, I would urge the proponents to adopt a revised version of this bill early next legislative session so that this important program can move forward.
Redding First Selectman Julia Pemberton said she could not speak to why the bill was veteod, but said the state recognizes the importance of public investment in brownfield remediation. Private developers need state grants and funding to be incentivized to embark on a brownfields project, she said.
I dont think in any way the commitment to cleaning up these very important sites is reduced, she said. I believe it remains a high priority for the state.
Redding is home to one of the largest brownfields in the state, the 55-acre Gilbert and Bennett property. The plan to remediate this site is in limbo, Pemberton said, because the owner of the property, the Georgetown Land Development, is in debt and cannot act on a $5.6 million grant that would have led to redevelopment. Redding filed for foreclosure on the property last year, and Pemberton said she is confident a developer will remediate the property once the foreclosure proceeding is complete.
Shaban said that a lot of Connecticut mill towns would benefit from rehabilitated brownfields, but even smaller towns like those in his district of Redding, Ridgefield, Easton and Weston have pollution problems that are left over from the mid-1900s.
The work now is going to lie in making the land banks tax-exempt, but not violating other tax laws, Shaban said. Even if we cant do that, the bill will still be pushed forward next year.
Shaban said that without tax exemptions, the brownfield advocates might have more expenses to cover, but can ultimately clean up pollution sites.
The land banks are another arrow in the quiver in programs that Ive sponsored to clean up brownfields, Shaban said.
Danbury Deputy Planning Director Sharon Calitro said while she does not know the intricacies of Shabans bill, the city benefits when brownfields are remediated.
In general, its good to get sites redeveloped and back on the tax rolls and being productive, she said.
Kennedy Flats, the apartment complex on Kennedy Avenue in Danbury, sits on what used to be a brownfields site, but now it hosts luxury apartments, Calitro said.
The most recent progress in brownfields cleanup occurred last week when the federal Enviromental Protection Agency awarded Connecticut $600,000 in federal funding to clean up brownfields in Southington, Waterbury and Hartford.
The committee will draft a report detailing their evaluation of airport security
A British committee inspected security measures and facilities at Cairo International Airport on Monday, state news agency MENA reported.
The committee, which is focused on cargo and airplanes heading to London, will issue a final report to evaluate security at the airport at the conclusion of their three-day mission.
Airport sources noted that the committee comprises of five aviation security experts.
The committee observed security measures in airport terminals as well as for British Airways flight 154 and EgyptAir flight 777 that fly to Heathrow Airport in London.
A number of European airlines have banned flights to Egypt -- and Sharm El-Sheikh in particular -- over security concerns following an October 2015 crash of a Russian airliner in Sinai that resulted in the deaths of all 224 people on board.
In June, British Airways announced that it would indefinitely extended its suspension of flights to Sharm El-Sheikh.
The UK government deployed experts to assess security procedures in Egyptian airports following the suspension of flights to and from Sharm El-Shiekh.
The committee, which is focused on cargo and airplanes heading to London, will issue a final report to evaluate security at the airport at the conclusion of their three-day mission.
Airport sources noted that the committee comprises of five aviation security experts.
The committee observed security measures in airport terminals as well as for British Airways flight 154 and EgyptAir flight 777 that fly to Heathrow Airport in London.
A number of European airlines have banned flights to Egypt -- and Sharm El-Sheikh in particular -- over security concerns following an October 2015 crash of a Russian airliner in Sinai that resulted in the deaths of all 224 people on board.
In June, British Airways announced that it would indefinitely extended its suspension of flights to Sharm El-Sheikh.
The UK government deployed experts to assess security procedures in Egyptian airports following the suspension of flights to and from Sharm El-Shiekh.
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OAKVILLE, ON, July 15, 2016 /CNW/ - Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. ("APUC") (TSX: AQN) today announced plans to release 2016 second quarter financial results on Thursday, August 11, 2016 after market close. APUC will hold an earnings conference call at 10:00 a.m. eastern time on Friday, August 12, 2016, hosted by Chief Executive Officer, Ian Robertson and Chief Financial Officer, David Bronicheski.
Conference call details are as follows:
Date: Friday, August 12, 2016
Start Time: 10:00 a.m. eastern time
Phone Number: Toll free within North America: 1-800-319-4610 or Toronto: 1-416-915-3239
Conference Access: please ask to join the Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. conference call
Presentation Access: http://services.choruscall.ca/links/algonquinpower20160812.html
For those unable to attend the live call, a digital recording will be available for replay two hours after the call by dialing 1-604-638-9010 or 1-855-669-9658, access code 00660 from Friday, August 12, 2016 until August 26, 2016.
About Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp.
APUC is a $5 billion North American diversified generation, transmission and distribution utility. The distribution business group provides rate regulated water, electricity and natural gas utility services to over 560,000 customers in the United States. The generation business group owns a portfolio of North American based contracted wind, solar, hydroelectric and natural gas powered generating facilities representing more than 1,100 MW of installed capacity. The transmission business group invests in rate regulated electric transmission and natural gas pipeline systems in the United States and Canada. APUC delivers continuing growth through an expanding pipeline of renewable energy development projects, organic growth within its regulated distribution and transmission businesses, and the pursuit of accretive acquisitions. Common shares, preferred shares, and instalment receipts are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbols AQN, AQN.PR.A, AQN.PR.D, and AQN.IR.
Visit APUC at www.AlgonquinPowerandUtilities.com and follow us on Twitter @AQN_Utilities.
SOURCE Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp.
For further information: Additional information can be found on APUC's web site www.AlgonquinPowerandUtilities.com or by contacting Investor Relations. Ian Tharp, CFA, Vice President, Investor Relations, Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp., 354 Davis Road, Oakville, Ontario, L6J 2X1, E-mail: [email protected], Telephone: (905) 465-6770
TORONTO, July 18, 2016 /CNW/ - Today, the court will hear a case against the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. One nurse in the case was so badly assaulted by a patient at CAMH in January 2014 that she was left with serious vision impairment. Nancy Pridham, President of Local 500, said of the nurse, "the trauma she experienced has left her so fearful, it is unlikely she can ever work again." A second nurse in the case was also seriously injured following an assault that happened at the hospital. Neither employee ever returned to work.
The hearing will be held at Old City Hall at 2:00p.m. Monday, before Justice Bigelow.
The trial coincides with the Faas Foundation's announcement that it has withdrawn its $1 million donation from CAMH's [email protected] program after CAMH failed to demonstrate that the first instalment was used towards the designated program.
"This is a symptom of a massive, systemic management problem around violence and psychological safety we see in mental health care," said Ontario Public Service Employees Union President Warren (Smokey) Thomas. "My members have been pushing for years to see hospitals take this issue seriously and implement the necessary safeties."
This is not the first charge of its kind at CAMH. In 2009, the hospital was fined $70,000 after pleading guilty to two charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act following two separate incidents involving nurses who were assaulted on the job.
"How many trials do we have to see before something finally changes?" asked Pridham. "We know employees experience vicarious trauma on a daily basis, reading transcripts about pedophiles, hearing horrific stories of abuse, and that they have witnessed repeated assaults on their own colleagues.
"What does CAMH offer, you ask? Online surveys for staff. An online survey doesn't scratch the surface of what we need," Pridham said.
"We need safe workplaces now."
SOURCE Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU)
For further information: Nancy Pridham, 416-625-6363, or Warren (Smokey) Thomas, 613-329-1931
Bog fire highlighted fact that fire protection is an investment, not just a cost
DELTA, BC, July 18, 2016 /CNW/ - Though it burned for three days, it was in the critical first few hours of a recent peat bog fire that Delta firefighters won their biggest battle, saving an industrial park from destruction and preventing what could have been a major economic disaster for the region.
The fast, effective response made possible by the fact that the Corporation of Delta chooses to provide adequate frontline fire protection resources that are appropriate for the community's risks, likely saved millions in property loss, millions in lost tax revenues and thousands of jobs.
The bog fire, which started July 3, quickly jumped a highway where it threatened the Tilbury Industrial Park, which is home to hundreds of industrial and commercial facilities, including a lumber yard, chemical companies and other high-hazard uses.
If the densely-packed lumber in the lumber yard had caught fire, the ensuing inferno would likely have spread quickly to other businesses. But the Delta fire fighters on duty that leaped into action, positioning themselves strategically between the fire line and the industrial park attacking hot spots and the leading edge of the fire, and protecting the lumber yard with an aerial water tower truck.
"We stopped this fire where we did only because Delta has a staffed, full-time fire department that has invested wisely in apparatus, equipment and training," says Delta Firefighter Mike McMillan, who is also President of the Delta Professional Fire Fighters Association. "Every year all our suppression staff re-certify in wildland firefighting and train on all our equipment including a wildland firefighting apparatus, which proved itself at this fire."
The industrial park has a property assessment value of $2 billion and generates $22 million in taxes to the city every year, which would also have been lost if the park had been consumed by fire.
The city's level of preparedness not only saved residents and businesses from major impacts from the bog fire, fire fighters simultaneously responded to an unrelated structure fire in another area of the city, responded to a highway rollover and used their enhanced medical skills to provide immediate medical attention to a fellow fire fighter who suffered a medical emergency during the response.
While all professional fire fighters across Canada provide some level of medical response, Delta fire fighters, who often arrive on scene before ambulances, last year began offering enhanced medical response including pain relief, IV maintenance and symptom relief. The enhanced medical response is a value-added service takes advantage of existing personnel and vehicles to improve patient care in a cost-effective manner.
Case study in emergency preparedness
As the bog fire continued, the city got help from other sources including BC Wildfire Service and Metro Vancouver Parks personnel, who were crucial in helping finally control and extinguish the remaining fire. As Delta firefighters were tasked to the initial attack and responding to other emergencies within the community, Delta fire halls were backfilled by crews from New Westminster and Richmond to maintain a level of protection for other emergencies that may have arisen. As well, Surrey was on stand-by, ready to assist if necessary. In all, the response was a case study in proper emergency preparedness, as evidenced by the fact there were no casualties from the fire and loss and disruption were kept to an absolute minimum.
Like the recent wildfire that ravaged Fort McMurray, the Delta Burns Bog fire proves that adequate frontline emergency response resources such as personnel, vehicles, equipment and training can be a major determining factor in the outcome of a large-scale disaster.
"The media often reports fire loss, but they rarely report what was saved," says Scott Marks, a retired Toronto fire fighter who now heads the International Association of Fire Fighters' (IAFF's) Canadian Operations. "These fires prove once again that fire protection is an investment that pays dividends in the form of lives and property saved and reduced economic impact when jobs are saved." Investments in fire protection also pay off in the form of generally lower commercial and residential insurance rates.
On the flip side, cities that understaff and under-resource their fire departments put their residents, property and their infrastructure at unnecessary risk, while any tax savings are likely more than eaten up by higher residential and commercial insurance premiums.
For example, in October the city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario slashed its frontline firefighting resources by almost 25 per cent, even though the average household was only paying 66 cents a day for fire protection. Now, the city of 75,000 people has only 13 fire fighters on duty at a given time, which according to accepted public safety standards such as National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1710, is not enough to safely and effectively respond to a residential fire, let alone to simultaneous emergencies or fires in high-occupancy or high-risk settings such as nursing homes, schools, strip malls, industrial parks and other commercial facilities.
"Sault Ste. Marie is extremely vulnerable right now due to a lack of frontline resources, Marks said. "Their capacity to respond to a serious disaster like this is extremely limited."
More than just fires
Full-time fire fighters are skilled, certified and highly-trained professionals who on duty in cities across Canada 24/7/365, ready to respond to virtually any emergency in minutes, all for less than $1 per day to the typical household (based on average property assessments). Today's fire departments provide services that include not only firefighting but emergency medical response and things like water/ice rescue, haz-mat response, vehicular extrication and more. When a major disaster strikes, cities with adequate frontline resources are better positioned to get a jump on their response and mitigate the impacts from the earliest stages.
This reality flies in the face of a report issued by the Fraser Institute last year that argued unsuccessfully that Canadian municipalities employ too many fire fighters. The report used flawed data and overestimated the number of municipal full-time fire fighters in Canada, ignored the fact that fire fighters do more than fight fires, and ignored the fact that fires burn much hotter and faster than they used to. The Fraser report was subsequently cited in some newspaper opinion pieces that built on its flawed data to reach flawed conclusions about fire fighters and what they really do.
"We didn't see any newspaper columnists arguing that there were too many fire fighters during the Fort McMurray crisis or the Delta bog fire," Marks points out. "That's because people ultimately realize that having effective fire protection is like insurance, you may not need it every day, but when you do, you're extremely glad it's there."
The media recently reported that the wildfire that ravaged Fort McMurray was the most expensive disaster in Canadian history, with a cost of $3.58 billion in damage. But few media reported that firefighters, who saved almost 90 per cent of the city through their heroics, potentially averted $30 billion in losses and untold levels of loss and grief for the vast majority of homeowners whose homes and possessions were saved.
Meanwhile in Delta, Leslie Forest Products, one of the businesses saved by fire fighters during the bog fire, shared its gratitude with citizens by hanging a large 'THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS' banner on a large pile of lumber in its yard lumber that will be sold and used because it's in perfect condition and not a pile of charred embers and ash.
SOURCE British Columbia Professional Fire Fighters Burn Fund
Image with caption: "Delta Firefighters' Fast Response Averted Economic Disaster (CNW Group/British Columbia Professional Fire Fighters Burn Fund)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160718_C2622_PHOTO_EN_736914.jpg
For further information: Mike McMillan, President- Delta Professional Fire Fighters Association, (778) 968-7763, [email protected]; Scott Marks, International Association of Fire Fighters, (613) 567-8988, [email protected]
The court ordered the policemen, who have been detained since February, be detained for an additional 45 days
A Cairo criminal court accepted on Monday a prosecution appeal against a motion to release seven low-ranking policemen pending trial for inciting their colleagues to strike.
The court ordered the men, who have been detained since their arrest in February, to be detained for an additional 45 days. The detentions may be further renewed if no verdict has been issued.
A court had on Sunday ordered the seven men released pending trial.
The policemen are charged with "forming a cell inside the interior ministry inciting their colleagues to strike."
They also face charges of "joining a group that aims to negatively affect and harm one of the state's executive authorities."
They were arrested at the Egyptian Media Production City on the outskirts of Cairo, where they were on their way to participate in the talk show "10pm" on Dream channel.
They were scheduled to speak on controversies involving alleged police violence in Egypt.
Among those arrested was Mansour Abu-Gabel, the spokesperson for the coalition that led the sit-in of lower-ranking policemen in the Nile Delta governorate of Sharqiya last summer, demanding financial and social benefits.
Following their arrest, police reported the seven policemen were in possession of drugs and an unlicensed gun.
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WINNIPEG, July 18, 2016 /CNW/ - Winpak Ltd. (WPK) today reports consolidated results in US dollars for the second quarter of 2016, which ended on June 26, 2016.
Quarter Ended
Year-To-Date Ended
June 26
June 28
June 26
June 28
2016
2015
2016
2015
(thousands of US dollars, except per share amounts)
Revenue 204,129
198,257
402,283
397,697 Net income 26,164
27,639
53,464
50,363
Income tax expense 13,315
12,634
25,625
23,548 Net finance expense 24
20
5
55 Depreciation and amortization 8,391
7,928
16,722
15,675 EBITDA (1) 47,894
48,221
95,816
89,641
Net income attributable to equity holders of the Company 25,166
26,845
51,730
49,308 Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 998
794
1,734
1,055 Net income 26,164
27,639
53,464
50,363
Basic and diluted earnings per share (cents) 39
41
80
76
Winpak Ltd. manufactures and distributes high-quality packaging materials and related packaging machines. The Company's products are used primarily for the packaging of perishable foods, beverages and in healthcare applications.
1 EBITDA is not a recognized measure under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Management believes that in addition to net income, this measure provides useful supplemental information to investors including an indication of cash available for distribution prior to debt service, capital expenditures and income taxes. Investors should be cautioned, however, that this measure should not be construed as an alternative to net income, determined in accordance with IFRS, as an indicator of the Company's performance. The Company's method of calculating this measure may differ from other companies, and, accordingly, the results may not be comparable.
(presented in US dollars)
Forward-looking statements : Certain statements made in the following report contain forward-looking statements including, but not limited to, statements concerning possible or assumed future results of operations of the Company. Forward-looking statements represent the Company's intentions, plans, expectations and beliefs, and are not guarantees of future performance. Such forward-looking statements represent Winpak's current views based on information as at the date of this report. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions and the Company's actual results could differ, which in some cases may be material, from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Unless otherwise required by applicable securities law, we disclaim any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise this information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The Company cautions investors not to place undue reliance upon forward-looking statements.
Financial Performance
Net income attributable to equity holders of the Company for the second quarter of 2016 amounted to $25.2 million or 39 cents in earnings per share (EPS) compared to $26.8 million or 41 cents per share recorded in the corresponding quarter of 2015. Although the current period's result fell 6.3 percent short of the record level set in the quarter a year ago, it represented the next highest second quarter earnings performance in Winpak's history. Organic volume growth boosted EPS by 3.0 cents and was supplemented by favorable foreign exchange impacts of 1.0 cent per share. A lower relative gross profit margin reduced EPS by 2.5 cents while increased operating expenses and a higher effective income tax rate subtracted 2.0 cents and 1.5 cents respectively from EPS.
For the six months ended June 26, 2016, net income attributable to equity holders of the Company of $51.7 million or 80 cents per share exceeded the corresponding 2015 result of $49.3 million or 76 cents per share by 4.9 percent. Organic volume growth propelled EPS forward by 5.0 cents while foreign exchange had a net positive impact of 2.5 cents. These gains were partially offset by greater operating expenses, a larger proportion of earnings attributable to non-controlling interests, and gross profit growing at a slower pace than sales volumes, which each negatively impacted EPS by 1.0 cent. An additional 0.5 cents was subtracted from EPS due to higher income taxes.
Revenue
Revenue in the second quarter of 2016 climbed to $204.1 million, eclipsing the prior year level of $198.3 million by 3.0 percent. Volume growth was particularly strong at 7.8 percent when compared to the second quarter of 2015. All product groups advanced with the exception of packaging machinery and parts sales, where volumes were off by less than $0.5 million from the previous year's quarter. Foil lidding and rollstock led the way with volumes soaring by over 20 percent in the quarter. Custom die-cut lidding and new product offerings in multi-pak yogurt lidding helped drive growth. Biaxially oriented nylon volumes continued where they left off in the first quarter, advancing by over 15 percent versus the corresponding quarter of 2015. Specialty film shipments also exhibited low double-digit percentage growth in the quarter with customer gains in chub film packaging for ground meats, a new product initiative for the Company. Rigid container volumes were solid in the mid-single digit percentage range as condiment and tray volumes were robust, offsetting declines in specialty beverage shipments. Modified atmosphere packaging shipments were more modest, advancing in the low single-digit percentage range in comparison to a very strong second quarter in 2015. Selling price/mix changes had an unfavorable impact of 4.3 percent on 2016 second quarter revenue as indexed selling prices responded to the decrease in raw material costs. The decline in the value of the Canadian dollar in comparison to its US counterpart had a further 0.5 percent negative effect on revenue versus the comparable prior year quarter.
For the first six months of 2016, revenue grew by $4.6 million or 1.2 percent to $402.3 million from $397.7 million recorded in the first half of 2015. Volume growth was solid, progressing by 6.3 percent in contrast to the first two quarters of the prior year. As with the result for the second quarter, first half volumes were driven by gains in foil lidding and rollstock, biaxially oriented nylon and specialty films which rose between 10 and 15 percent. Retort die-cut lidding, multi-pak yogurt lidding and chub film packaging were new product offerings which propelled shipments forward. Rigid container and modified atmosphere packaging volumes grew in the mid-single digit percentage range versus the first half of 2015. Lower specialty beverage container shipments were more than offset by gains in condiment and retort containers as well as trays for the meat industry. Packaging machinery shipments declined from the strong performance in the first six months of the previous year. Revenue was negatively affected by 4.1 percent due to selling price/mix changes in response to lower indexed raw material costs and a further 1.0 percent due to the impact of foreign exchange from a lower Canadian dollar compared to the first half of 2015.
Gross profit margins
Gross profit margins in the second quarter of 2016 inched up to 33.3 percent of revenue from 32.9 percent of revenue in the comparable 2015 quarter. However, gross profit increased by only 4.2 percent from $65.2 million in the second quarter of 2015 to $68.0 million in the current quarter, while volumes rose in the same period by 7.8 percent. This resulted in a relative decrease in EPS of 2.5 cents. A reduction in current revenues due to the lag effect from previously declining raw material costs was partly responsible for the smaller increment in gross profit in addition to the impact from unfavorable manufacturing variances as a result of capacity constraints and the inherent learning involved with the introduction of new product offerings by the Company.
For the first half of 2016, gross profit margins totaled 33.7 percent of revenue versus 32.2 percent of revenue recorded in the comparable prior year period. Whereas volumes advanced by 6.3 percent in the first six months of the current year versus the corresponding 2015 period, gross profit increased by 5.9 percent, resulting in a reduction in EPS of 1.0 cent. The previously mentioned manufacturing challenges were mainly responsible for the slight drag on margins.
For reference, the following presents the weighted indexed purchased cost of Winpak's eight primary raw materials in the reported quarter and each of the preceding eight quarters, where base year 2001 = 100. The index was rebalanced as of December 28, 2015 to reflect the mix of the eight primary raw materials purchased in 2015.
Quarter and Year 2/16 1/16 4/15 3/15 2/15 1/15 4/14 3/14 2/14 Purchase Price Index 138.1 136.4 139.1 147.7 152.1 156.9 175.1 176.2 178.1
After eight consecutive quarters of decline, the purchase price index showed a slight uptick of 1.3 percent in the current quarter compared to the first quarter of 2016. Escalations in the price of polyethylene resin in the second quarter had the most influence on the upward movement of the index. Nonetheless, the purchase price index has decreased by 9.2 percent from a year ago and this decline was directly related to the fall in the price of oil and natural gas, from which resins used by the Company are derived.
Expenses and Other
Operating expenses in the second quarter of 2016, after eliminating the impact of foreign exchange, increased by nearly 18 percent compared to the corresponding quarter in 2015, well above the growth in sales volumes of 7.8 percent over that same period. This resulted in a reduction in EPS of 2.0 cents and was due to two main factors. The first, which accounted for 85 percent of the reduction in EPS, was a one-time pre-tax gain recorded in the second quarter of 2015 of $1.8 million realized upon the settlement of the Company's withdrawal liability in relation to a US multiemployer defined benefit pension plan which Winpak previously had participated in. The balance of the EPS decrease was due to higher research and technical expenses in support of the Company's new product initiatives. The lower value of the Canadian dollar in the second quarter of the current year versus the comparable 2015 period expanded EPS by 1.0 cent as Canadian dollar expenses exceed Canadian dollar revenues. A higher effective income tax rate in the 2016 second quarter contracted EPS by 1.5 cents as a greater proportion of income was allocated to jurisdictions with heightened corporate income tax rates.
Adjusting for foreign exchange, operating expenses for the first half of 2016 grew by 8.8 percent while sales volumes expanded by 6.3 percent, resulting in a contraction in EPS of 1.0 cent in comparison to the first six months of 2015. However, if the impact of the one-time gain on retirement of the Company's withdrawal liability referred to previously was removed from the comparison, the increase in operating expenses would have only been 5.0 percent and would have had a favorable impact on EPS. A greater proportion of earnings attributable to non-controlling interests further reduced EPS by 1.0 cent in the January to June period. Additionally, a higher effective income tax rate decreased EPS by 0.5 cents in relation to the first six months of the previous year. Partly offsetting these reductions was the favorable impact of foreign exchange on EPS of 2.5 cents as the lower average value of the Canadian dollar in 2016 in contrast to its US counterpart had a positive effect when applied to the Company's net Canadian dollar expenses.
Summary of Quarterly Results
Thousands of US dollars, except per share amounts (US cents)
Q2
Q1
Q4
Q3
Q2
Q1
Q4
Q3
2016
2016
2015
2015
2015
2015
2014
2014
Revenue 204,129
198,154
205,746
193,726
198,257
199,440
206,269
192,982 Net income attributable to equity holders
of the Company 25,166
26,564
27,635
22,305
26,845
22,463
23,343
19,448 EPS 39
41
43
34
41
35
36
30
Capital Resources, Cash Flow and Liquidity
The Company's cash and cash equivalents balance ended the second quarter of 2016 at $176.3 million, an increase of $6.8 million from the end of the previous quarter. Winpak continued to generate strong and consistent cash flows from operating activities before changes in working capital of $48.7 million, outpacing the second quarter of 2015 by $2.0 million. Cash was utilized to supplement working capital of $12.5 million to support volume growth. Of this, $8.6 million was applied to an increase in trade and other receivables as certain customer payment terms were extended as part of contract negotiations. Cash was also used for income tax payments of $13.4 million, plant and equipment additions of $13.1 million, dividends to equity holders of the Company of $1.5 million and other items totaling $1.4 million.
For the first half of 2016, the cash and cash equivalents balance rose by $11.3 million to $176.3 million as a result of significant cash flow generation from operating activities before changes in working capital of $96.2 million. Working capital additions utilized $22.9 million of cash primarily in trade and other receivables of $9.9 million and inventories of $7.6 million. A substantial element of the increase was due to the growth in sales volumes and the necessary expansion of working capital required to support that growth. Other uses of cash and cash equivalents consisted of $28.6 million in income tax payments, $28.2 million in plant and equipment additions, $2.9 million in dividends paid to equity holders of the Company, $1.0 million in employee defined benefit plan contributions and other items totaling $1.3 million. The Company remains debt-free and has unutilized operating lines of $38 million, with the ability to increase borrowing capacity further should the need arise.
Looking Forward
Building on the momentum generated in the first half of the year, the Company remains optimistic with regard to volume growth and earnings performance for the balance of 2016. Opportunities in the sales pipeline continue to progress along the path to future success. World oil prices have risen in the last few months and this has put upward pressure on the pricing of certain resins, with some limited price hikes expected in the third quarter for several of the Company's main raw materials. It is difficult to predict the future beyond the next few months but at present, it appears as though changes to raw material costs in aggregate should not be overly significant. Gross profit margins will likely fall a couple of percentage points from the heightened levels experienced in the first half of the year as higher resin costs make their way into cost of goods sold and eventually into higher indexed selling prices. Operational performance should improve in the short to medium term in areas where capacity has been constrained and in the manufacture of new products that have recently been introduced as more experience is gained in their production. The commissioning of the massive cast coextrusion line at the Company's modified atmosphere packaging plant in Winnipeg, which is at the leading edge of technology, will remain a prime focus for the business as commercialization is anticipated before the end of the current year. This will lead to elevated pre-production costs during the commercialization period, the magnitude of which will be dependent on the technical challenges encountered, but will be money well spent as the future benefits of the line should be substantial. The Canadian dollar still remains at a lower level versus its US counterpart than a year ago and will continue to be favorable to the Company's earnings in the second half of the year as foreign currency forward contracts that are part of the Company's foreign exchange hedging policy mature at more favorable rates than those that came due in the same period in 2015. Capital spending for 2016 is projected to be between $80 million and $90 million as both the rigid container operations in Sauk Village, Illinois and the shrink bag production unit in Senoia, Georgia are in the midst of facility expansions of 350,000 and 85,000 square feet respectively. The Company will continue to pursue acquisition opportunities in Winpak's core competencies of sophisticated packaging for food, beverage and healthcare applications while remaining committed to substantial organic growth through capital investment. With Winpak's solid financial position, it has the resources necessary to complete an acquisition when the proper strategic fit and price are present to provide long-term shareholder value.
Winpak Ltd.
Interim Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements
Second Quarter Ended: June 26, 2016
These interim condensed consolidated financial statements have not been audited or reviewed by the Company's independent external auditors, KPMG LLP. For a complete set of notes to the condensed consolidated financial statements, refer to www.sedar.com or the Company's website, www.winpak.com.
Winpak Ltd.
Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets
(thousands of US dollars) (unaudited)
June 26
December 27
2016
2015
Assets
Current assets:
Cash and cash equivalents
176,343
165,027
Trade and other receivables
117,714
107,805
Income taxes receivable
2,795
2,050
Inventories
104,147
96,498
Prepaid expenses
4,774
3,411
Derivative financial instruments
1,367
40
407,140
374,831
Non-current assets:
Property, plant and equipment
380,414
369,436
Intangible assets
14,529
14,745
Employee benefit plan assets
6,341
5,723
Deferred tax assets
1,231
1,408
402,515
391,312 Total assets
809,655
766,143
Equity and Liabilities
Current liabilities:
Trade payables and other liabilities
64,646
68,534
Income taxes payable
4,603
10,569
Derivative financial instruments
32
1,683
69,281
80,786
Non-current liabilities:
Employee benefit plan liabilities
10,090
8,885
Deferred income
13,368
14,071
Provisions
760
760
Deferred tax liabilities
41,350
38,250
65,568
61,966 Total liabilities
134,849
142,752
Equity:
Share capital
29,195
29,195
Reserves
993
(1,208)
Retained earnings
625,116
576,359 Total equity attributable to equity holders of the Company
655,304
604,346 Non-controlling interests
19,502
19,045 Total equity
674,806
623,391 Total equity and liabilities
809,655
766,143
Winpak Ltd.
Condensed Consolidated Statements of Income
(thousands of US dollars, except per share amounts) (unaudited)
Quarter Ended
Year-To-Date Ended
June 26
June 28
June 26
June 28
2016
2015
2016
2015
Revenue
204,129
198,257
402,283
397,697 Cost of sales
(136,178)
(133,042)
(266,565)
(269,511) Gross profit
67,951
65,215
135,718
128,186
Sales, marketing and distribution expenses
(15,646)
(14,781)
(30,878)
(29,863) General and administrative expenses
(7,240)
(7,213)
(15,186)
(16,180) Research and technical expenses
(4,871)
(4,047)
(8,616)
(7,746) Pre-production expenses
(187)
(88)
(356)
(434) Other (expenses) income
(504)
1,207
(1,588)
3 Income from operations
39,503
40,293
79,094
73,966 Finance income
124
86
257
171 Finance expense
(148)
(106)
(262)
(226) Income before income taxes
39,479
40,273
79,089
73,911 Income tax expense
(13,315)
(12,634)
(25,625)
(23,548) Net income for the period
26,164
27,639
53,464
50,363
Attributable to:
Equity holders of the Company
25,166
26,845
51,730
49,308
Non-controlling interests
998
794
1,734
1,055
26,164
27,639
53,464
50,363
Basic and diluted earnings per share - cents
39
41
80
76
Condensed Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income
(thousands of US dollars) (unaudited)
Quarter Ended
Year-To-Date Ended
June 26
June 28
June 26
June 28
2016
2015
2016
2015
Net income for the period
26,164
27,639
53,464
50,363
Items that will not be reclassified to the statements of income:
Cash flow hedge (losses) gains recognized
(12)
(43)
20
(43) Cash flow hedge losses transferred to property, plant and equipment
-
-
52
- Income tax effect
-
-
-
-
(12)
(43)
72
(43) Items that are or may be reclassified subsequently to the statements of income:
Cash flow hedge gains (losses) recognized
604
621
2,016
(947) Cash flow hedge losses transferred to the statements of income
166
667
890
1,226 Income tax effect
(206)
(344)
(777)
(74)
564
944
2,129
205 Other comprehensive income for the period - net of income tax
552
901
2,201
162 Comprehensive income for the period
26,716
28,540
55,665
50,525
Attributable to:
Equity holders of the Company
25,718
27,746
53,931
49,470
Non-controlling interests
998
794
1,734
1,055
26,716
28,540
55,665
50,525
Winpak Ltd.
Condensed Consolidated Statements of Changes in Equity
(thousands of US dollars) (unaudited)
Attributable to equity holders of the Company
Non-
Share
Retained
controlling
capital Reserves earnings Total interests Total equity
Balance at December 29, 2014
29,195 (641) 555,697 584,251 17,136 601,387
Comprehensive income for the period
Cash flow hedge losses, net of tax
- (737) - (737) - (737)
Cash flow hedge losses transferred to the statements of income, net of tax
- 899 - 899 - 899
Other comprehensive income
- 162 - 162 - 162
Net income for the period
- - 49,308 49,308 1,055 50,363
Comprehensive income for the period
- 162 49,308 49,470 1,055 50,525
Dividends
- - (3,131) (3,131) (646) (3,777)
Balance at June 28, 2015
29,195 (479) 601,874 630,590 17,545 648,135
Balance at December 28, 2015
29,195 (1,208) 576,359 604,346 19,045 623,391
Comprehensive income for the period
Cash flow hedge gains, net of tax
- 1,497 - 1,497 - 1,497
Cash flow hedge losses transferred to the statements of income, net of tax
- 652 - 652 - 652
Cash flow hedge losses transferred to property, plant and equipment
- 52 - 52 - 52
Other comprehensive income
- 2,201 - 2,201 - 2,201
Net income for the period
- - 51,730 51,730 1,734 53,464
Comprehensive income for the period
- 2,201 51,730 53,931 1,734 55,665
Dividends
- - (2,973) (2,973) (1,277) (4,250)
Balance at June 26, 2016
29,195 993 625,116 655,304 19,502 674,806
Winpak Ltd.
Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows
(thousands of US dollars) (unaudited)
Quarter Ended Year-To-Date Ended
June 26
June 28
June 26
June 28
2016
2015
2016
2015
Cash provided by (used in):
Operating activities:
Net income for the period 26,164
27,639
53,464
50,363
Items not involving cash:
Depreciation 8,606
8,190
17,161
16,174
Amortization - deferred income (380)
(406)
(774)
(798)
Amortization - intangible assets 165
144
335
299
Employee defined benefit plan expenses 944
749
1,822
1,725
Multiemployer defined benefit pension plan withdrawal liability settlement gain -
(1,815)
-
(1,815)
Net finance expense 24
20
5
55
Income tax expense 13,315
12,634
25,625
23,548
Other (111)
(435)
(1,488)
(1,558)
Cash flow from operating activities before the following 48,727
46,720
96,150
87,993
Change in working capital:
Trade and other receivables (8,554)
3,701
(9,909)
5,955
Inventories (6,605)
(2,344)
(7,649)
787
Prepaid expenses (57)
(19)
(1,363)
(951)
Trade payables and other liabilities 2,691
4,665
(3,990)
(3,117)
Provisions -
(4,503)
-
(4,467)
Employee defined benefit plan contributions (90)
(90)
(1,037)
(1,168)
Income tax paid (13,389)
(9,370)
(28,574)
(13,084)
Interest received 147
66
198
128
Interest paid (58)
(8)
(62)
(15)
Net cash from operating activities 22,812
38,818
43,764
72,061
Investing activities:
Acquisition of plant and equipment - net (13,100)
(9,462)
(28,161)
(22,266)
Acquisition of intangible assets (119)
(114)
(129)
(169)
(13,219)
(9,576)
(28,290)
(22,435)
Financing activities:
Dividends paid (1,473)
(1,548)
(2,881)
(3,226)
Dividend paid to non-controlling interests in subsidiary (1,277)
(646)
(1,277)
(646)
(2,750)
(2,194)
(4,158)
(3,872)
Change in cash and cash equivalents 6,843
27,048
11,316
45,754
Cash and cash equivalents, beginning of period 169,500
162,467
165,027
143,761
Cash and cash equivalents, end of period 176,343
189,515
176,343
189,515
SOURCE Winpak Ltd.
Image with caption: "WINPAK (CNW Group/Winpak Ltd.)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160718_C4811_PHOTO_EN_735631.jpg
For further information: K.P. Kuchma, Vice President and CFO, (204) 831-2254; B.J. Berry, President and CEO, (204) 831-2216
By GMM 18 July 2016 - 11:47
The future of the historic Italian grand prix at Monza continues to hang in the balance.
Ansa, an Italian news agency, quoted F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone as having said sustained efforts to ensure the race is on the 2017 calendar are yet to bear fruit.
"We are trying to solve the problem of Monza, but it is very difficult because it is a political problem," the 85-year-old reportedly said whilst on holiday in Croatia.
"We are working to transfer the Italian grand prix to Imola, but if we do not succeed, we will have to say goodbye to F1 in Italy," Ecclestone added.
When faced with Ecclestones comments, Italian automobile club chief Angelo Sticchi Damiani played down suggestions Monzas chances are now definitely over.
"In the last few hours, we have finally solved all of the problems between the territorial entities," he is quoted by La Gazzetta dello Sport.
"We found an agreement and are preparing a binding offer to be sent to FOM within the first days of the week, probably Tuesday. At this point, there are no more political problems," Sticchi Damiani added.
Security staff were forced to intervene as Real Madrid star Karim Benzema was pounced on by a fan looking for a selfie during their summer tour.Los Blancos are in Canada for the start of their pre-season preparations as Zinedine Zidane's men look to steal Barcelona's crown this coming campaign.However, Benzema was involved in an unsavoury incident outside the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montreal as he left the team bus.An eager man made a beeline for the unsuspecting French frontman in a bid to get a picture.Benzema was grabbed by the shoulders before fast-acting hotel staff stepped in to drag the selfie-seeking supporter away.The 28-year-old will be looking to put the incident behind him when they head to the US to take on Paris Saint-Germain in Colombus next week.They then face Antonio Conte's Chelsea on July 30 before completing their trip with a clash against German giants Bayern Munich at the beginning of August.
Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola has decried Nigerias current economic situation, saying the hardship now is worse than what was expe...
Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola has decried Nigerias current economic situation, saying the hardship now is worse than what was experienced during the civil war between 1967 and 1970.Aregbesola, however, blamed the current hardship on the inability of the former President, Goodluck Jonathan to secure the countrys pipelines, stressing that $40m was lost to oil theft per day under Jonathans regime.Speaking with reporters in Lagos, the Osun State Governor declared that the bad economic situation was responsible for his inability to pay salaries as he has been receiving less than N200m monthly allocation from the federal government when the Stae actually needed N1.7bn to pay workers.According to Aregbesola, the country lost 200 barrel of crude oil per day under the immediate past administration.He said, What we experience in Nigeria today is due to the inexplicable theft of 400, 000 barrel of oil every day during the regime of President Goodluck Jonathan-led PDP.It is disheartening to know that from June 2013 till when the regime left in May, 2015, that theft amounted to about 19 per cent of the Nigerian common wealth. If we calculate what the nation is losing by 100 dollars, Nigeria loses 40 million dollars daily to oil theft.Nobody has ever asked us how we are managing to pay salaries since we started getting less than N200m as allocation since September 2015. A sum of N1.7 billion is spent on workers salaries every month.Even the civil war was not as biting as what we are facing in Nigeria now. Because they did not declare economic state of emergency in Nigeria does not mean that Nigeria is not near to that.
The Court of Appeal, Abuja division has dismissed an appeal filed by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) against the ju...
The Court of Appeal, Abuja division has dismissed an appeal filed by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) against the judgment by the National Industrial Court (NIC) reinstating 181 of its (NSCDCs) personnel wrongly dismissed.The National Industrial Court (NIC) had, in a judgment on March 19, 2015 ordered the NSCDC to reinstate the sacked staff led by Oboni Musa, with their full emoluments from the time they were illegally dismissed.Justice Oluseun Adefolake of the NIC in the judgment directed the NSCDC to return the employment letters to the affected 180 personnel and ordered it to pay all arrears of their salaries amounting to about N1.2 billion.Justice Adefolake also restrained the NSCDC from further tampering with the employment of the affected personnel.Having reviewed the evidence before the court and the submissions of counsel, it is obvious that the Commandant General of the NSCDC was not diligent enough in the recruitment.Dissatisfied, NSCDC, the Director, Civil Defence, Immigration and Prisons Service Board (who were respondents at the NIC) appealed the judgment, but failed to diligently prosecute it.A three-man panel of the Court of Appeal, led by Justice Moore Adumein, in a ruling, upheld the respondents request and dismissed the appeal for lack of diligent prosecution.
The Ministry of Finance on Sunday said the list of those suspected to be involved in the manipulation of government payroll and allegedly ...
The Ministry of Finance on Sunday said the list of those suspected to be involved in the manipulation of government payroll and allegedly injected ghost workers had been sent to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for investigation and prosecution.The development was confirmed by the Media Adviser to the Minister of Finance, Mr. Festus Akanbi, while responding to enquiries from one of our correspondents.Akanbi stated, The ministry has sent the list of those involved in the ghost workers scam to the EFCC and they (EFCCs operatives) are the ones investigating the matter.Findings revealed that while some of the perpetrators of the ghost workers scam were being investigated, others had been charged to court by the anti-graft agency.An official in the Ministry of Finance confided in The PUNCH that the prosecution of some of those that were charged to court was being slowed down owing to the fact that the court was in recess.The Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit had, last week, said it found discrepancies on the payroll of the Federal Governments Ministries, Agencies and Departments to the tune of N6.4bn.The Head of the Continuous Audit Team, Mr. Mohammed Dikwa, had told journalists in Kano on the sidelines of the two-day National Revenue Retreat, organised by the Ministry of Finance, that the amount was the true state of their findings as of June 30, 2016.President Muhammadu Buhari had set up the Continuous Audit Team to look into the finances of Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies to arrest the menace of ghost workers, over payment of allowances, fraud and embezzlement in then MDAs.Dikwa had said, The Continuous Audit Team plans to conduct regular checks on the control and risk assessment of MDAs. We look at the records that are being kept to ensure transparency and accountability of the financial transactions carried over time.In terms of ghost workers, we have found about 43,000 ghost workers so far and as of May 30, we had N4.2bn that is saved on a monthly basis.But as of June 30, we were able to make more recoveries of N2.2bn, which has led to an additional savings of N6.4bn monthly.Recently, the Adamawa State Government said the recent clean-up of its payroll, involving local government employees in the state, which uncovered 12,000 ghost workers, saved the state government N500m.The state Commissioner for Finance, Mahmood Yunusa, who made the disclosure in Yola, the state capital, stated that the state government derived the figure from the report submitted by the committee which carried out the verification.He said, According to the report submitted to the state government by the Staff Verification Committee, it said N500m has been saved. This is the amount which could have gone into lining the pockets of ghost workers.He, however, admitted that the amount was fluid since there might have been some genuine workers whose names could have been omitted.The state government had alleged that the state verification had uncovered 12,000 ghost workers in the state, which had been denied by some union officials.Also, a total of 3,916 ghost workers were uncovered in Enugu State.The discovery followed a staff audit conducted in the 17 local government areas in the state.The audit verified the number of workers employed in all the councils, including teachers.Presenting the report of a verification panel to Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, the Speaker, Enugu State House of Assembly, Edward Ubosi, who headed the committee, said the discovery of the ghost workers saved the state N161.4m monthly.
Despite social media campaigns calling for his release and improved treatment, prosecution renews detention of lawyer Malek Adly for 15 days
Egyptian prosecutors renewed on Monday the detention of renowned human rights lawyer Malek Adly for 15 days pending investigations on charges of attempting to overthrow the regime.
Adly, who was arrested on 6 May, is accused of inciting violation of the protest law by calling for protest against an 8 April Egyptian-Saudi border demarcation agreement.
Among other charges levied against the lawyer are destabilising security, trying to destabilise the country and planning to overthrow the regime.
The decision to renew Adlys detention comes on the heels of a huge social media campaign calling for his release.
For several hours Sunday night, the hashtag "#Malek_Adly_Free" was trending in Egypt, where thousands of Twitter users demanded the release renowned lawyer.
Prominent Egyptian figures like TV host Bassem Youssef and award-winning author Ibrahim Abdel Magid participated in the hashtag and called for Adlys release.
Earlier Sunday, the Egyptian Lawyers Syndicate filed an official demand calling on authorities to allow the detained lawyer out of solitary confinement where he has been held since his arrest in May.
According to Adly's wife, activist Asmaa Ali, his health has deteriorated rapidly because of his solitary confinement.
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Suspected militants in a twin attack, Monday morning, bombed two oil installations belonging to an oil exploration company, near Batan com...
Suspected militants in a twin attack, Monday morning, bombed two oil installations belonging to an oil exploration company, near Batan community in Delta State.Details of the incident were sketchy at the time of this report, but locals said the explosions occurred at about 12.05 am on Monday. The double strike came as Niger Delta Avengers, NDA, debunked the claim by the Minister of Youths and Sports, Mr Solomon Dalung, that he met with the militant group at Oporoza, saying he was apparently defrauded by Niger Delta fraudsters.Meanwhile, the Niger Delta Suicides, NDS, another militant group in the region, has warned that it would devastate the economy in different forms if government refused to create a genuine platform for talks with militants.Chairman of Batan community, Dickson Ogugu, who confirmed the attack, said: We heard a double explosion at about 12:05am between Camp 3 and Kokologbene communities.A security officer attached to 3 Battalion, Effurun, near Warri, who also spoke to Vanguard, said a team of military personnel has been drafted in company of a surveillance team to ascertain the extent of damage.Dalung scammedSpokesman of Avengers, self-styled Brig Gen Mudoch Agbinibo, while reacting to the alleged visit of Dalung to Oporoza, yesterday, said:The Minister of Youth and Sports, Solomon Dalung, narrated how he met some self-acclaimed Niger Delta Avengers in Oporoza, Gbaramatu kingdom. We are here to let the public know that Niger Delta fraudsters have defrauded the Minister.Suspected militants in a twin attack, Monday morning, bombed two oil installations belonging to an oil exploration company, near Batan community in Delta State.Details of the incident were sketchy at the time of this report, but locals said the explosions occurred at about 12.05 am on Monday. The double strike came as Niger Delta Avengers, NDA, debunked the claim by the Minister of Youths and Sports, Mr Solomon Dalung, that he met with the militant group at Oporoza, saying he was apparently defrauded by Niger Delta fraudsters.Meanwhile, the Niger Delta Suicides, NDS, another militant group in the region, has warned that it would devastate the economy in different forms if government refused to create a genuine platform for talks with militants.Chairman of Batan community, Dickson Ogugu, who confirmed the attack, said: We heard a double explosion at about 12:05am between Camp 3 and Kokologbene communities.A security officer attached to 3 Battalion, Effurun, near Warri, who also spoke to Vanguard, said a team of military personnel has been drafted in company of a surveillance team to ascertain the extent of damage.Dalung scammedSpokesman of Avengers, self-styled Brig Gen Mudoch Agbinibo, while reacting to the alleged visit of Dalung to Oporoza, yesterday, said:The Minister of Youth and Sports, Solomon Dalung, narrated how he mer some self-acclaimed Niger Delta Avengers in Oporoza, Gbaramatu kingdom. We are here to let the public know that Niger Delta fraudsters have defrauded the Minister.Niger Delta Avengers cannot stoop so low to send representatives to meet a common Minister of Youths that does not know his work.Solomon Dalung has been defrauded and played by Niger Delta fraudsters, he did not hold any meeting with us, Niger Delta Avengers.Let me make it clear that any meeting with the Avengers that the international community is not part of, we will not be part of such dialogue as well, Agbinibo added.Trouble loomsNDS, in a statement by its spokesperson, Amakiri, asserted: We, the Niger Delta Suicides, NDS, wish to warn the present government and those clamoring to frustrate the efforts of Niger Delta Avengers to have a rethink and create a genuine platform for dialogue, otherwise, we will use our oil to survive and they will eat their yam.This fight is a fight by everyone, including children yet unborn. Thank God, we have successfully planted Adaka Borohs and Tompolos everywhere. So, we are waiting, he said.Niger Delta Avengers cannot stoop so low to send representatives to meet a common Minister of Youths that does not know his work.Solomon Dalung has been defrauded and played by Niger Delta fraudsters, he did not hold any meeting with us, Niger Delta Avengers.Let me make it clear that any meeting with the Avengers that the international community is not part of, we will not be part of such dialogue as well, Agbinibo added.Trouble loomsNDS, in a statement by its spokesperson, Amakiri, asserted: We, the Niger Delta Suicides, NDS, wish to warn the present government and those clamoring to frustrate the efforts of Niger Delta Avengers to have a rethink and create a genuine platform for dialogue, otherwise, we will use our oil to survive and they will eat their yam.This fight is a fight by everyone, including children yet unborn. Thank God, we have successfully planted Adaka Borohs and Tompolos everywhere. So, we are waiting, he said.
Federal Government Monday, cancelled the second test, otherwise known as National Common Entrance screening test conducted by the Nation...
Federal Government Monday, cancelled the second test, otherwise known as National Common Entrance screening test conducted by the National Examination Council (NECO) for admission into Federal Government Colleges.The cancellation is with effect from the 2017/2018 academic year. Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, announced the cancellation in a statement signed by the Deputy Director, Press and Public Relations, Federal Ministry of Education, Mr Ben Bem Goong.On reasons for the cancellation, Adamu Adamu stated that the second test was an unnecessary additional financial burden on parents/guardians, describing it as unacceptable. The Minister said the era of multiple examinations attracting prohibitive fees could be accommodated by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, especially against the backdrop of governments determination to increase access to education as a platform for breaking the cycle of poverty.The Minister therefore directed the National Examinations Council (NECO) to strengthen its examination processes with a view to achieving a quality and credible National Common Entrance Examination for admission into unity schools at the first test.
Factional National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff, has said that he will not relinquish his claim to the...
Factional National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff, has said that he will not relinquish his claim to the leadership of the party.Rather, he said his rival, who is the Chairman of the partys National Caretaker Committee, Sen. Ahmed Makarfi, must resign before peace would return to the troubled party.Sheriff spoke in Abuja on Monday when he hosted a delegation of the party from Abia State.He said it was true that a meeting was held in Abuja last week Tuesday on how to bring all warring factions in the party together.Unfortunately, he said the meeting could not agree with the most important aspect of his conditions.Apart from the resignation of Makarfi, Sheriff said that he (sheriff) must be allowed to nominate the chairman and 10 others into the new convention committee.He said he was ready to accept another 10 members for the committee from the Makarfi group.The former governor said these were the demands he made at a meeting held with leaders of the party, including Markafi last Tuesday at the Taraba State Governors Lodge, Abuja.Senator Buruji Kashamu, who represents Ogun East in the Senate, confirmed that the meeting was held in a statement.Buruji listed those at the meeting to include the Deputy President of the Senate, Sen. Ike Ekweremadu; Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State, Governor Darius Ishaku of Taraba State, Governor Ibrahim Dankwambo of Gombe State, Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State, Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State and the Minority Leader of the Senate, Sen. Godswill Akpabio.Others, he said, were the Deputy Minority Whip of the Senate, Sen. Biodun Olujinmi; Sen. Suleiman Adokwe from Nassarawa State; Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Sen. Walid Jubrin; House Minority Leader, Mr. Leo Ogor; former Deputy President of the Senate, Sen. Ibrahim Mantu and himself.Sheriff also said that he told those at the meeting that the proposed national convention should not hold in Port Harcourt, but in Abuja.He said these were the conditions he said should be met before he would speak to members of his National Working Committee.These members, he added, would be persuaded to resign and present themselves again for election and if they so wish, give-up their offices in the interest of the party.According to sheriff, People are very interested in our party and how the impasse will be settled, before the Port Harcourt convention was aborted by a court order.
President Muhammadu Buhari, yesterday, directed the Acting Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to reopen investigation into the ...
President Muhammadu Buhari, yesterday, directed the Acting Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to reopen investigation into the unresolved murder of former Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, and ex-Deputy National Chairman, South-South, of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Aminosari Dokubo, and fish out the perpetrators. The killing of the two personalities caused national outrage, with Nigerians calling on the government of former President Olusegun Obasanjo to fish out the killers who have still not been found.NE recalls that Chief Bola Ige was shot dead in his bedroom in Bodija, Ibadan, home at about 9pm on December 23, 2001, after he arrived Ibadan from Lagos at about 8.30pm.His security details were said to have sought permission from the former Attorney General to go and eat before the incident occurred.The gunmen, who were said to have been waiting in the vicinity, then stormed the house and tied up family members.One of the gunmen reportedly pointed a gun at a family member and asked him to lead them upstairs to Chief Bola Iges room.They allegedly moved the wife and his son to an adjourning room, locked them up before shooting their target in the chest.In a bid to unearth the perpetrators of these unresolved murders, the Acting Inspector General of Police has instituted a high powered investigation team, headed by an Assistant Inspector General of Police, to crack the case.Following the death of the late Bola Ige, several unsubstantiated allegations were made against several politicians and interest groups, with some even saying the Cicero, as he was fondly called, was killed to halt the rise in his political profile, while others said it had to do with his impending probe of the corruption in the power sector of the nations economy.On the part of Chief Aminosari Dokubo, the late PDP Deputy National Chairman was said to be returning to his base from Abuja after a meeting when he was waylaid by suspected assassins on entering Delta State.He was killed near Asaba on October 22, 2004.Dokubos assassination at the time was alleged to have been caused by certain disagreements with the powers that be in his political party, prior to the general elections.A source stated that the fact that the killers and their sponsors were still prowling the streets without arrest and prosecution for crimes against humanity, was a dangerous trend which, if not addressed, might lead to killing of more political leaders either now or in the future.Its a new day Bola Iges son Reacting to the development, Architect Muyiwa Ige, son of late Chief Bola Ige, said last night that it would be glorious, if the family could get justice 16 years after. Muyiwa, who could not hide his happiness, said President Buhari did not disappoint him, saying the matter was now in the right direction. He said: I knew right from the advent of the administration of President Buhari that the matter would be resurrected.The President is in the right direction. To God be the glory. Its a new day; we are happy, we will get justice after 16 years. We are happy that all those who murdered our father, including the star witness, will be brought to justice. Its good news.
Another crude oil facility, belonging to Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), was reported to have been attacked by suspected ins...
Another crude oil facility, belonging to Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), was reported to have been attacked by suspected insurgents in the early hours of Monday around the Batan area in Warri South-West council area of Delta state.The attack, which reportedly created a massive impact on a trunk line around Camp 3 in Batan oil field, was said to have happened at about 12:05am. The Nation gathered crude was still gushing into the surrounding aquatic environment as at the time this report was filed, all efforts of experts to curtail the spill notwithstanding.Neither the notorious Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), which had claimed responsibility for most of the attacks in the region, nor any other group had owned yesterdays development as at the time this report was filed.Chairman of Batan community, Dickson Ogugu, when contacted, confirmed the incident while appealing to the militants to halt further hostilities on oil installation in the region especially within the Batan axis.When reached for confirmation, the spokesman of the newly constituted military Joint Task Force (JTF), Lieutenant Colonel Olaolu Daudu, said he was going to check and get back with information.
Heavy surf, high winds cause beach erosion
Three more former Vacation Ownership Group employees have been sentenced for their roles in defrauding timeshare customers. (Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
CAMDEN -- To help pull off their scheme to swindle timeshare owners, employees at the Vacation Ownership Group in south Jersey needed glowing customer references.
Former employees Jeffrey Sawyer of Mullica Hill and Aimee Allen of Myrtle Beach, S.C. pretended to be those outside voices, prosecutors said, and, along with Vincent Giordano of Westampton, helped to dupe customers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For their roles in defrauding numerous investors, a federal judge Friday sentenced each to prison or home confinement, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman.
All three pleaded guilty earlier to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud before U.S. District Judge Noel Hillman.
According to court records, employees at Vacation Ownership Group, which had offices in Mays Landing and Egg Harbor Township, got lists of timeshare property owners and contacted them. They falsely told the owners that they worked with banks to pay off timeshare mortgages at substantial discounts, saving the owners tens of thousands of dollars, they said. In fact, Fishman's office said, the company had no authority to pay off the mortgages at a discount.
To convince the owners, Fishman's office said, Sawyer pretended to be a satisfied Vacation Ownership customer and talked various owners into sending the company as much as $70,000.
Allen and Giordano also called customers and gave them the false impression they were in contact with banks to satisfy the loans and that Vacation Ownership could pay off the loans or cancel the timeshare, court records said. Allen also pretended to be a customer, Fishman's office said.
Not only did Vacation Ownership fail to pay off the customers' loans, in many cases, court records said, they saddled the owners with additional loans without their knowledge.
Allen admitted causing more than $200,000 in losses, Fishman's office said. Giordano caused more than $120,000 in losses, according to court records.
Combined with other defendants' acts, Vacation Ownership victims lost a total of about 3 million, court records said.
Hillman sentenced Sawyer, 53, to a year in prison and three years of supervised release; Allen, 30, to three years of probation with eight months of home confinement, 50 hours of community service and restitution of $197,440; and Giordano, 31, to four months in prison, four months of home confinement, 200 hours of community service and three years of supervised release.
A number of other Vacation Ownership employees have been sentenced, including the company's Chief Executive Officer Adam Lacerda and his wife and its Chief Operating Officer, Ashley Lacerda.
Adam Lacerda was sentenced to 27 years in prison in 2015 and Ashley Lacerda was sentenced to six years in prison last month.
Ian Resnick, the company's "enforcer," also was sentenced to more than 18 years in prison in the conspiracy.
Tim Darragh may be reached at tdarragh@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @timdarragh. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEWARK -- U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton looked at Chung Kho Monday in her courtroom and said she saw two men.
One, 69 years old, was a successful real estate developer and commercial property landlord who raised a loving, successful family and gave back to Korean communities in the metropolitan area.
The other was an admitted felon who facilitated a $50,000 bribe for another prospective business owner to get approval for a karaoke bar.
Considering those two lives and Kho's frail health -- the Fort Lee man suffers from diabetes and had to have a kidney transplant-- Wigenton spared Kho prison time, sentencing him to eight months of home confinement and five years of probation for arranging the bribe.
He admitted guilt before Wigenton in April.
The judge said Kho was "somewhat of a victim of corrupt officials," but that he contributed to the "culture" of corruption in the region by planning the bribe. "It seems like that has been somewhat of a practice in Palisades Park," she said.
Indeed, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacques Pierre said public corruption has become so routine in North Jersey that "it almost becomes a punch line."
According to court records, Kho in 2010 was approached by a businessman who wanted to open a karaoke bar in a commercial building Kho owned on Broad Avenue in Palisades Park. The property would need the borough to grant a change of use to be used as a nightclub, and Kho told the businessman that he was close to a Palisades Park official who could use his influence to get approval, records said.
He told the prospective karaoke owner that he would have to pay a bribe of $50,000 to get municipal approvals, records said.
After objecting at first, the individual agreed to pay the bribe weeks later, but it was too late. Later that same day, municipal officials denied the change of use application, a criminal complaint says.
No one else has been charged in the incident, but an investigation is ongoing, said Matt Reilly, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.
Kho and his three adult children spoke in the courtroom Monday.
His children told Wigenton he was a good father who installed a hard-work ethic in them. They also spoke highly of a man who came to the United States after his parents were killed in the Korean War, worked hard for his family and volunteered in civic and Korean-community activities and his church.
Speaking through an interpreter, Kho was repentant. "I am so sorry," he said. "Please forgive me."
He said he would still like to do something to help society with whatever time he has left.
But Pierre said prosecutors thought some of that time should be in confinement. Bribery, he said, "leads to the exploitation of legitimate business people."
Wigenton reduced the sentencing range for Kho, noting his good works and poor health. She then sentenced him and imposed a fine equal to the bribe he facilitated -- $50,000.
Tim Darragh may be reached at tdarragh@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @timdarragh. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Steven Kenner came home to a nasty surprise after a two-week vacation in Florida.
Papers were strewn about the house. Cabinets were left open. Cigarette butts were ground into the floor. A lock on the door to the laundry room had been tampered with.
Kenner, 71, thought his East Hanover home had been burglarized.
But what actually happened may have been worse.
It wasn't a burglar.
Instead, Kenner's mortgage lender hired subcontractors to break into Kenner's home as part of efforts to see if the home was vacant or abandoned, according to a lawsuit filed by Kenner against Citizens Bank, Citizens One Home Mortgage, subsidiaries of the bank and its subcontractors. The suit was filed in May in Morris County Superior Court.
While subcontractors broke into his home, Kenner was in touch with the bank about a pending mortgage modification and no one reported anything was amiss, he said. And the bank even knew he was away on vacation, Kenner said.
Citizens Bank said it doesn't comment on ongoing litigation.
Before it all happened, Kenner said, he broke a bone in his back and was unable to work. In January 2015, he fell behind on the mortgage payments for his home, which he had owned for nearly 40 years.
He contacted his lender to request a mortgage modification.
Kenner entered into a trial plan in December 2015. If he paid the agreed monthly payment on time and in full for January, February and March of 2016, he would enter a mortgage modification that would start in April.
Citizens took automatic monthly payments from Kenner's bank account, and payments were on time for the trial period, Kenner said.
While Kenner was on the two-week trip in late February and early March, he said, he called the lender to check on the status of the modification, and the lender said his payments were not received.
But that wasn't so, Kenner said, and he arranged for his bank to send the proof to Citizens.
When he next spoke to Citizens, Kenner said, he was told there had been an error and yes, his payments were on time. Kenner qualified for the modification, he said he was told, and he was instructed to look for packages with all the paperwork he needed to sign when he returned from vacation.
When Kenner got back to his East Hanover home on March 14, Kenner said he entered the way he usually does: through an unoccupied first floor apartment where his mom used to live.
"The lights were on. Cabinets were open and there were papers all over the place," Kenner said. "I didn't know if I was robbed or what. I didn't know what was happening."
He next entered the home proper through a laundry room that's next to the apartment.
The inside of the laundry room showing the removed lock and the messy floor as it was found when Steven Kenner came home from his vacation.
The laundry room has a door with two locks. Kenner said one of the locks was removed and a round cylinder was placed to cover the space where the lock was.
"They must have put their hand around the round opening to open the other lock to enter my home," Kenner said.
Next, Kenner entered the main house, he said.
More lights were on, more cabinets were open, and cigarette butts were all over, he said.
He called police.
When officers arrived, they proceeded as if there was a burglary, Kenner said. They dusted for fingerprints and took photos, and they asked Kenner to see if anything was missing.
As officers searched the home, Kenner opened the front door, looking for the packages he was expecting from the mortgage company.
That's when he saw a "6" -- Kenner's house number -- written on the outside of the door with some kind of marker. And then they saw a sticker affixed to the door.
"This property has been determined to be vacant/abandoned," the sticker said.
Police called the number on the sticker and learned it was all a mistake by Kenner's mortgage company, Kenner said.
That's some mistake.
"The police said they were told that the mortgage company more or less made a mistake," Kenner said. "The mortgage company had contracted with the company that broke into my home to see if the home was vacant."
But the home was not vacant, nor had the bank ever started any foreclosure proceedings, said Kenner's attorney, Philip Vinick.
Vinick said the New Jersey Supreme Court adopted amendments to court rules governing the foreclosure of vacant and abandoned residential properties in December 2012.
Steven Kenner's front door, showing the sticker and number "6" that was written on the door.
If a lender brings a foreclosure action and it believes a property is vacant or abandoned, the lender can ask for a quicker judgment from the court so it can take steps to maintain the property. For that to work, the lender must prove that at least two of 14 conditions must be present at the property, such as overgrown or neglected vegetation, disconnected utilities, the accumulation of mail or newspapers and the absence of window treatments.
None of the 14 conditions applied to Kenner's home, the attorney said.
"In Mr. Kenner's case the lender did not even institute a foreclosure action much less prove that Mr. Kenner's house was vacant, which it obviously was not," Vinick said.
Even after Citizens was made aware of the error, the bank's subcontractors continued to contact Kenner, the homeowner said. One wanted to come into the home. Another wanted to shut off his water.
And two days after Kenner returned home, Kenner's son passed the home and saw workers on property, according to a statement provided to Kenner's attorney. The son said he asked the workers what they were doing, and they said they were hired by the mortgage company to remove some shrubs. The workers then called the mortgage company, which in turn told them to leave the property, the statement said.
And, Kenner realized, the cylinder that replaced the lock on the laundry room door could be removed by anybody at any time.
At first he moved a washing machine in front of the door. Now a table blocks the passageway.
"I've been very upset," Kenner said, noting that he doesn't feel comfortable in his own home. "I'm thinking very seriously of selling because of what happened to me."
After the suit was filed, Citizens offered to settle, but Kenner's attorney called the amount "insufficient" to "compensate him for his physical and psychological damages, including being embarrassed and having to explain to his neighbors what happened."
"The laws were bypassed or disregarded. It will eventually be left up to jury to determine how much Mr. Kenner's nightmare is worth," Vinick said.
Have you been Bamboozled? Reach Karin Price Mueller at Bamboozled@NJAdvanceMedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KPMueller. Find Bamboozled on Facebook. Mueller is also the founder of NJMoneyHelp.com.
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The Republican National Convention is officially underway in Cleveland and Donald J. Trump is not the only member of the GOP creating a stir.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan -- at an event hosted by the Pennsylvania delegation -- snubbed the Browns and Eagles by waving a Pittsburgh Steelers Terrible Towel at Quicken Loans Arena, in an odd gesture a mere blocks from FirstEnergy Stadium, where the Browns play.
Ryan, who represents Wisconsin, predicted during a convention event on Monday that the Steelers and Packers would meet in the Super Bowl next February in Houston.
"I want to win this election so darn bad that I'm willing to do this," Ryan said, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, before picking up the Terrible Towel and waving it at the podium.
Waving the Terrible Towel likely played well to the contingent from Western Pennsylvania -- a swing state -- but was sure to ruffle the feathers of Eagles fans. To win Pennsylvania, GOP candidate Donald Trump likely will need to dominate the western part of the state, with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton expected to win Philadelphia.
Packers fan Paul Ryan waves Steelers 'Terrible Towel' for Pennsylvania delegation https://t.co/HeTbAUFVnF pic.twitter.com/Df23jF1dD2 For The Win (@ForTheWin) July 18, 2016
Paul Ryan waves a Steelers fan's Terrible Towel at Republican National Convention https://t.co/YMNZznZRA7 #Steelers pic.twitter.com/FERgOaJt29 WTAE-TV Pittsburgh (@WTAE) July 18, 2016
Matt Lombardo may be reached at MDLombardo@yahoo.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattLombardo975. Find NJ.com Eagles on Facebook.
NEW BRUNSWICK -- Five of the nation's university presidents or chancellors made more than $1 million in 2014-15 as compensation for college leaders continues to rise, according to a study by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The publication's annual survey of presidential pay found that University of Houston President Renu Khator took home the highest total compensation, $1.3 million.
Khator also serves as the Chancellor of the University of Houston system and receives a single salary for both positions.
Four of the ten highest-paid college leaders worked only a partial year and made the list in part because of generous severance packages or signing bonuses, along with reimbursement of moving costs. Browse the gallery above to see the 20 college that paid their presidents the most.
"One thing we saw is that it can pay to come or go," said Dan Bauman, a data reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The rankings are based on total compensation for the 2014-15 school year, including base salary, bonus pay, deferred compensation and severance pay. Other perks like houses and cars are not included.
The median total compensation of the public college presidents who served the full year was $431,000, a 4.3 percent increase over 2013-14.
Rutgers University President Robert Barchi ranked 19th with $742,509 in total compensation. Barchi received a base pay of $647,509 in 2014-15 and a $95,000 bonus, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education data.
He also lives in a university-owned home in Piscataway valued at $1.1 million.
Two other New Jersey college administrators were also included in the survey.
Joel Bloom, president of New Jersey Institute to Technology, received $632,000 in total compensation. His pay ranked 39th nationally.
Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor made $403,365 and ranked 131st.
The rankings include all public doctoral universities and all state college and university systems or governing boards with at least three campuses and 50,000 students.
Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Three of Egyptian parliament's committees said Monday that a crisis management group was formed in a bid to contain tension with Italy over the killing of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni in January
After a two-hour meeting on Monday, an joint Egyptian parliamentary committee said it will refrain from adopting a "confrontational stand" against Italy following the nation's hostile reaction to Egypt in the aftermath of the killing of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Cairo last January.
Kamal Amer, chairman of the joint committee, said the Monday meeting recommended that the Egyptian government should maintain a kind of "soft diplomacy" in dealing with "the Regeni crisis."
"In the short term we decided that 'rough diplomacy' or 'a confrontational stand' should be ruled out in favor of adopting soft diplomacy," said Amer, the former chief of Egyptian military intelligence.
The meeting was attended by Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat, head of the Human Rights Committee, Mohamed Al-Orabi, head of the Foreign Affairs Ccommittee, and Amer, head of the National Security and Defence Committee.
The meeting also included the deputy interior minister, representatives from the interior ministry's departments of National Security and General Security, representatives from the Justice Ministry, the prosecution general and the intelligence apparatus.
Amer said the participants in the meeting put forward proposals aimed at containing the Regeni crisis.
"They all agreed that these proposals should be based on quiet and soft diplomacy," said Amer, adding that "it was also agreed that a crisis management group be formed to follow up the developments of the Regeni crisis."
"The joint parliamentary committee would also become a fact-finding parliamentary committee to be tasked with holding periodical meetings and gathering information from prosecution authorities in charge of investigating the Regeni case," Amer continued.
Amer disclosed that "parliament will keep in touch with prosecution authorities in charge of investigating the Regeni case to get firsthand official information about it."
"All authorities entrusted with investigating this case should know that parliament now has a fact-finding committee on the Regeni case and it has the right to get all necessary available and transparent information on it," said Amer.
Amer also indicated that the committee proposed that Egyptian parliamentary delegations pay visits to European parliaments to discuss the Regeni case.
"We proposed that Egyptian parliamentary delegations visit some European parliaments in Italy, France, England, and Greece," said Amer. "The fact-finding committee will be also tasked with assuring whether Italy intends to maintain its recent decision not to supply Egypt with spare parts [for] F-16 fighter aircraft."
Margaret Azer, deputy chairman of the human rights committee, told reporters that the committee asked officials representing the interior ministry questions on the mystery surrounding 'the liquidation' of five Egyptians accused of killing Regeni.
Azer, however, said the information available about Regeni in not yet complete. "Most of the information on this case come from unreliable media sources," said Azer, adding that she advised that statements from Egypt on the Regeni case do not only come in reaction to Western media or Italian authorities.
"This was clear in the reaction to the accusations leveled at the interior ministry, all alleging that its officers had killed Regeni," said Azer.
On Sunday, Mohamed Al-Orabi, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told a meeting that he advised his Italian counterpart to maintain open dialogue with Egypt over the Regeni crisis rather than opt for escalatory steps.
Al-Orabi indicated that during a visit to Rome this last week, he urged the Italian side to discuss ideas that were 'out of the box' and that could unravel the mystery of the Regeni case.
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Saul Vazquez spirit photo
Saul Vazquez snapped this photo of an auto accident while passing by in his tractor trailer on July 12. (Photo provided by Saul Vazquez)
(Saul Vazquez)
Cell phones cameras have made it possible to take photographs of anything and everything, all day every day.
Because of this, the Internet -- specifically social media websites -- have exploded with photos that have gone viral. Less than 15 years ago, these same photos would have been developed, printed, out and maybe passed around the family or work crew, but most likely not be seen by millions of people around the world.
While driving on Mountain Parkway between Campton and Stanton, Kentucky, truck driver Saul Vazquez took a picture of an accident scene and posted it on Facebook.
"Zoom in and pay attention to the shadow just off the top of the state trooper's hat," Vazquez wrote in a Facebook post. "All I say is, I hope everyone involved is OK."
According to 6abc.com, a motorcyclist involved in the crash died later at the hospital, but it seems many people who have seen Vazquez's photograph believe he captured the man's spirit leaving his body at the scene.
On July, Vazquez posted the photo on his Facebook page. It has since been seen by thousands and shared on the social media site more than 14,000 times.
Comments on his original post range from "God bless the soul. Hope he or she goes to the light. Thank you for sharing," to "Simply amazing."
The picture seems to show a white mist shaped like the silhouette of a human hovering above the accident scene.
State troopers and bystanders can be seen standing around the scene, surrounded by ambulances and other vehicles. It looks like a normal accident scene except for the mist just above one trooper's head.
This is not the first picture of this kind to go viral.
In 1984, four teenage boys were in an accident in Minnesota. The boy in the passenger seat was not buckled in at the time of the crash, and died from his injuries.
After a Minnesota State Trooper arrived and discovered the boy was deceased, he awaited began taking pictures of the accident scene with a 35mm camera.
Later, the trooper gave the camera to a police lab technician who developed the film and noticed that several photographs contained unexplainable elements.
Just above the car is an image that resembles a boys face -- mouth wide open in what appears to be a scream.
According to an article on the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition, and Spirit website, the appearance of what is believed to be the boy's face screaming "No," could possibly show proof of the energy that is believed to be connected to the soul.
The Institute website explains this as "an energy template or hologram projected from the soul into the body which is responsible for similar physical appearances from one incarnation to another."
These are only two examples of the hundreds of similar photographs and even videos that are floating around out there on the World Wide Web. I even saw a disturbing video of a rat dying and something that looks to be its soul rises up and leaves its body as it takes its last breath.
Are the mists or anomalies in these pictures actually the souls of the victims leaving their bodies?
Or could these strange photos just contain reflections or abnormalities in the film or digital process?
This is one of those phenomena that gives some people comfort in believing the soul does go on.
So if the mist in the photo is a spirit or a smudge on the lens, we may never know.
Kelly Roncace is a senior investigator and team leader with Jersey Unique Minds Paranormal Society, a professional paranormal investigation team based in Salem County. Do you know of a haunted location that JUMPS could research and investigate? Contact Kelly at kroncace@njadvancemedia.com and follow her on Twitter @KellyRoncace with your suggestions.
joe-budden-drake-diss-afraid-no-shopping.jpg
Joe Budden and Drake: partners in beef. (Angela Jimenez/ for The Star-Ledger; Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Maybe you're already over the whole row between Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift and Kanye West. And maybe you've caught all the Pokemon in your neighborhood.
But have you been following another hot, sizzling beef with a decidedly Jersey flavor -- the ballad of Joe Budden and Aubrey Drake Graham?
Yes, Joe Budden, 35, Jersey City's own emcee, has been ragging on Drake, 29, Canadian darling of Top 40 radio and the pop charts. It all began in May when Budden criticized Drake's latest album "Views" as being "uninspired." In June, Drake hit him with a subliminal diss on "4PM in Calabasas," and Budden shot back with "Making a Murderer (Part 1), using clips of an old interview with a young Drake from his web series.
"I'm honored to be around you," Drake can be heard telling Budden in the recording. On July 6, Budden issued another Drake diss called "Wake," a 4-minute track featuring clips of Kenny Powers of HBO's "Eastbound & Down." He said he had already waited five days for a response. Budden's lyrics centered on what he seems to think is a lack of identity in Drake's music:
Caution: Lyrics contain explicit language
"I think you rap good, but you a movie star/So that owl's appropriate, we don't know who you are." The owl refers to the logo for OVO (October's Very Own), the name of Drake's music label, Beats 1 radio show -- OVO Sound -- and clothing brand.
Drake finally responded to Budden's numerous shots on Saturday in a featured spot on the French Montana song "No Shopping."
"Pump, pump, pump it up," Drake begins, clearly referencing Budden's 2003 hit song "Pump it Up."
Caution: Lyrics contain explicit language
"I'm not a one-hit wonder, they know all my stuff," he says on the track, calling out the fact that Budden's greatest commercial success as a solo artist was back in the aughts.
But Budden was swift in issuing another lengthy diss the same night called "Afraid," over a sample of the Drake song "The Resistance." The track's album art features smoke billowing out of the CN Tower, the same Toronto building memorably featured on Drake's "Views" album. Budden's complaint seems to be that he misses the old Drake, and isn't exactly pleased about what he perceives to be the new Drake.
"I just feel like you broke a promise to me," he starts, talking about the "Aubrey that we trusted, not this new Aubrey with his stomach sculpted."
To catch up on the lyrical barbs, play the songs above and below.
Caution: Lyrics contain explicit language
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
Egypt's education minister announced on Monday that the results of final year exams for secondary students, called Thanaweya Amma, are expected by the middle of next week.
In a press conference in the ministry's headquarters, Minister of Education El-Hilali El-Sherbini said that the ministry has not decided on a certain day to release the results, instead adding that they were expecting the results next week.
"We called on the exam graders and checkers to take highest degrees of caution and deliberation so students and parents would be reassured," he said.
El-Sherbini also announced the success rates of some of the subjects, with 95% of students passing the Arabic Language exan, 84.7% passing English Level One and 98.3% passing the Second Foreign Language French or German exams.
The minister added that 95.5% of students passed the Geography exam and 90.7% passed Philosophy, adding that 88.7% were able to pass the Psychology exam.
In sciences subjects, the minister noted that 87% of students passed the Biology exam while 80.3% passed Chemistry and 77.6% in Physics.
In maths-related subjects, 88.7% of students passed the Pure Math exam and 90.6% passed the Applied Math exam.
Around 600,000 students sat for the exams this year.
Violations
The education minister also discussed the violations that took place during examinations and procedures undergone by the education ministry, interior ministry and telecommunications ministry so that a repeat of this year's exam leaks will not occur in the future.
El-Sherbini said that during the exams the ministry observed an increase in the possession of mobile phones and electronic devices used for cheating in exam rooms.
According to the minister, the ministry voided 662 exam papers in for one of the subjects due to cheating , while 333 other cases were cancelled for cheating. Ninety-five were referred to general prosecution.
The minister pointed out that for the first time in the history of the Thanaweya Amma exams, eye glasses and watches with wireless technology were used for cheating, adding that some students surgically implanted ear pieces to aid in their cheating attempts.
El-Sherbini has been under fire and students called for his dismissal during the June examination period after a number of exams were leaked.
In June, hundreds of high school students protested in downtown Cairo against the education ministrys decision to cancel or postpone the exams after earlier versions were leaked. The students were dispersed by the police using tear gas.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said following the leaks that they would not be repeated next year, adding that the country was currently reconsidering the system of high school exams.
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A powerful Iraqi Shiite cleric says the additional 560 U.S. troops to be sent to Iraq to upgrade an air base recently retaken from the Islamic State group would be a "target" for his supporters.
Muqtada al-Sadr's threat came in response to a question from a supporter about the deployment, announced last week by U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
Al-Sadr wrote on his official website late Sunday that "they are a target for us," without elaborating.
Al-Sadr's supporters fought major battles against American troops during the 2003-11 U.S. intervention in Iraq and have been fighting IS in the two years since the Sunni militants swept across much of northern and western Iraq.
In recent months, al-Sadr has been campaigning for reform and an end to government corruption.
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Turkey has detained a total of 103 generals and admirals in the wake of the failed coup aimed at overthrowing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, state media said on Monday.
The top military figures have been detained in sweeps across the country after Friday's attempted putsch, the agency added, in what appears to be a major purge of the armed forces. They are now being taken to courts to decide on remanding them in custody.
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The United States and European Union on Monday sternly warned Turkey to respect the rule of law after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government launched a massive crackdown following the failed coup.
Germany and the EU also said any move by Turkey to reinstate the death penalty for the coup plotters would derail Ankara's long-stalled membership bid.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in Brussels that Friday's attempted putsch was "no excuse" for excessive action, as Turkish authorities said they had arrested over 7,500 people and sacked more than 9,000.
"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 told a press conference with Mogherini.
The EU and US "urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions and the rule of law", he added.
Mogherini said as EU foreign ministers met that the "rule of law has to be protected in the country, there is no excuse for any steps that take the country away from that", adding that it was "for the sake of the country."
The EU commissioner dealing with Turkey's long-stalled bid for membership of the bloc said it appeared that the government had already prepared a list before the coup of people to be rounded up.
"I mean, (that) the lists are available already after the event indicates that this was prepared and at a certain moment should be used," enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn told reporters.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman denounced "revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets" after disturbing pictures emerged of the treatment of some detained suspects.
After Erdogan said Sunday that Turkey would consider a return of capital punishment, spokesman Steffen Seibert said such a move "would mean the end of EU membership talks".
Mogherini was quick to echo the German position.
"Let me be very clear... no country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty," she said.
Turkey has called on Washington to hand over exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, Erdogan's chief foe, over the failed coup, but Kerry said Ankara must produce proof.
He said he had told Turkey's foreign minister "to make certain that in whatever portfolio and request they send us, they send us evidence, not allegations".
Turkey's attempts to join the 28-nation European Union have been hobbled in recent years by concern over the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan's record on human rights and press freedom.
But the EU agreed to speed up its membership bid and give visa-free travel to Turks as part of a migrant crisis deal in which Ankara agreed to take back people landing in the Greek islands.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said that "the rule of law must prevail".
"France has condemned the coup, you can't accept the military taking power," he said. "At the same time we have to be vigilant that the Turkish authorities don't put in place a system which turns back democracy."
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders also urged restraint, saying: "It's normal to punish those involved in the coup, but it's (also) normal to ask for respect for the rule of law."
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Air strikes by the US-led coalition killed at least 21 civilians in and around a stronghold of the Islamic State group in northern Syria on Monday, a monitor said.
At least 15 civilians were killed in raids in a northern district of Manbij while six others were killed in a village near the city, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The militant bastion has faced a more than month-long US-backed offensive by Kurdish and Arab fighters that has caused thousands of civilians to flee.
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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.
Two acting chief prosecutors, accompanied by police, have started searching a key air base in southern Turkey used by the United States for air raids on the Islamic State group, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported Monday.
Authorities had earlier detained a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup at the Incirlik air base in the Adana province close to Syria, officials said at the weekend.
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 report did not specify what evidence the investigation team was seeking.
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.
Washington said Sunday that strikes had resumed from the base, after Turkish authorities imposed a security lockdown on the base and closed airspace in the surrounding area.
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Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday he had spoken with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan to express his happiness at the return of security to Turkey after a failed military coup.
"In a phone call with the Turkish president, (I said) we are happy that stability and security have returned to Turkey today," Rouhani said on his Twitter account.
Iran said on Saturday it fully supported the government of neighbouring Turkey against the attempted coup launched on Friday night, despite Tehran and Ankara's differences over Syria and other regional issues.
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The Council of Europe warned Turkey on Monday that restoring capital punishment after an attempted coup would be incompatible with its membership of the pan-European human rights organisation.
"No member state can exercise capital punishment," said Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland, quoted by a spokesman.
"This is an obligation," he added, stressing that Turkey had ratified human rights protocols which "abolish death penalty under all circumstances".
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to wipe out the "virus" of the putschists after facing down last week's coup bid by elements of the military.
On Sunday Erdogan told supporters that Turkey could consider reintroducing the death penalty, which it had abolished in 2004 as part of its longstanding EU membership bid.
Signed in Strasbourg in 1983, protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted by the Council of Europe, excludes all capital punishment except in time of war or imminent threat of war.
The convention's later protocol 13, dating from 2002, closes the time-of-war loophole, stating clearly that "no one shall be condemned to such penalty or executed."
Turkey joined the Council of Europe three months after it was inaugurated in 1949.
The death penalty was abolished in Turkey in 2004, as part of the country's bid to join the European Union. Its application has been moving at glacial pace.
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EVANSTON - A new Northwestern University study shows that even in infants too young to speak, the object categories infants form and their predictions about objects behavior, are sculpted by the names we use to describe them.
As English speakers, we might encounter a natural scene and describe the blue lake, green grass and light blue sky in front of us. But speakers of Berinmo, an indigenous language of Papua New Guinea, have a single term for the colors we describe as blues and greens. They would describe the lake, grass and sky all as nol.
This cross-linguistic difference reveals that the particular categories we impose on our experience of the world are shaped by the language we speak. And this has consequences for thinking and memory, said senior author Sandra Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and faculty fellow in the Universitys Institute for Policy Research. Berinmo speakers are less likely to remember distinctions among shades that English speakers describe as blue versus green.
This compelling cross-cultural evidence leaves little doubt that the categories we form bear the imprint of our language. But how early in life does naming shape the categories we perceive?
To answer this question, the Northwestern researchers created a continuum of colorful cartoon-like creatures. First, in a learning phase, 9-month-old infants had an opportunity to observe several of these creatures, presented in random order: Each appeared at the center of the screen, moved in one direction or another, and then disappeared. By experimental design, creatures from one end of the continuum moved to the left, and those from the other end moved to the right.
What varied was how the creatures were named. Some infants heard the same novel word applied to all objects along the entire continuum; others heard two different names, one for objects from one end of the continuum and another for objects from the other end. Next, in a test phase, new creatures from the same continuum appeared in the center of the screen.
The researchers were interested in whether infants could anticipate the side to which the new objects would move, and whether this varied as a function of how the creatures had been named in the phase.
The results were striking, according to lead author Melanie Havy of the University of Geneva.
Infants who heard two different names discerned two categories and therefore were able to anticipate correctly the likely location to which the test objects would move, she said.
In sharp contrast, infants who heard one name formed a single overarching category and therefore searched for new test objects at both locations.
These results constitute the first evidence that for infants as young as 9 months of age, naming not only shapes the number of categories they impose along a perceptual continuum but also highlights the joints or boundaries between them, Havy said.
Naming influences 9-month-olds identification of discrete categories along a perceptual continuum will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Cognition.
Suicide bombings killed 11 people Monday at two army checkpoints in Al-Qaeda's former stronghold in southeastern Yemen, officials said, in attacks claimed by the jihadist group.
One attacker drove his bomb-laden truck into a checkpoint in a western district of Hadramawt's provincial capital Mukalla, security officials told AFP.
The second attacker simultaneously blew up his vehicle at an army checkpoint in the nearby town of Hajr, some 15 kilometres (nine miles) to the west of Mukalla, the sources said.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the two attacks in a report on its Telegram account.
AQAP said "dozens were killed and wounded" from forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and it posted photographs of the two bombers.
The commander of Hadramawt's second military region, General Faraj Salmeen, had earlier told AFP that the second bombing struck the centre of the city, blaming the attack on "terrorists".
Eleven people were killed and 18 were wounded in the twin bombings, said Riad Jariri, head of the health department in Mukalla.
Four civilians were among those killed, he told AFP.
Mukalla and surrounding towns were under the control of AQAP for one year until pro-government troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured the city in April.
In March, a US air strike on an Al-Qaeda training camp in Hajr killed more than 70 jihadists, provincial officials said.
Yemen has been gripped by a devastating conflict that escalated in March 2015 when Saudi-led air strikes began against Iran-backed Houthi rebels after the insurgents seized northern and central parts of the country including the capital, Sanaa.
The violence has allowed extremists such as AQAP and the Islamic State (IS) group to extend their influence and launch scores of attacks on security forces.
Last month, IS claimed a wave of suicide bombings targeting Yemeni troops in Mukalla that killed at least 42 people.
The Pentagon said in May that a "very small number" of US military personnel had been deployed around Mukalla in support of pro-government forces.
Washington considers the Yemen-based AQAP to be the network's deadliest franchise and its drone strikes have taken out a number of senior commanders of the group in the country over the past year.
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US Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that a massive EU-US trade deal could soften any damage caused by Britain's exit from the European Union following last month's referendum.
The treaty, bogged down in negotiations, has "a very significant ability to act as a counter" to the negative effects of Britain's eventual divorce from the EU, Kerry told a press conference in Brussels.
"It's our job to make sure that we adequately inform people about the facts of how TTIP will actually work for the people of Europe," Kerry said.
"It will protect jobs, it will protect their regulatory rights, protect their abilities with respect to labour and the environment," he said.
Negotiators from the US and the EU are currently in trade talks to finalise the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that would create the world's largest free trade area.
But the shock setback of Brexit and rising opposition to the deal in France and Germany have raised serious doubts that it will be achieved by the end of the year as hoped.
Kerry said that he would embark on a European tour in "the coming month ... to lay out the facts for people to understand exactly the positive side" of a potential deal.
Kerry's comments came just days after the top US trade official said that Britain's vote to break with the EU opens new questions over the deal.
Britain "is a very significant part of what makes TTIP attractive," said US Trade Representative Michael Froman on Thursday in Washington.
Those comments came amid strong opposition by activists who have opposed TTIP since negotiations began in 2013, believing it will only benefit multinationals and harm consumers.
Earlier this month, France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it would be "impossible" for the two sides to conclude negotiations on a trade deal by the end of 2016, which coincides with the end of the Obama administration.
Behind the scenes, top diplomats told AFP talks may be suspended until after the US presidential elections in November as well as elections in France and Germany next year.
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Latrell Mitchell and Ben Barba go head-to-head in Round 19 of the NRL Telstra Premiership as the Sydney Roosters take on the Cronulla Sharks.
The Sharks sit atop the Telstra Premiership ladder with the Melbourne Storm, while the Roosters are second last after an injury-plagued season.
Cronulla scores an average of 26 points per game and concedes an average of 16, while the Roosters score an average of 16 points per game and allow an average of 24 points against.
While the fortunes of these teams in 2016 is vastly different, the stats between the two fullbacks are very similar. Which No.1 will come out on top?
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Horizon Bank has completed its purchase of the LaPorte Savings Bank, in a merger of the two largest community banks in LaPorte County that will result in the closing of four branches in October.
Michigan City-based Horizon bought the LaPorte Savings Bank for $98.9 million in its fifth acquisition in the last few years. LaPorte Bancorp shareholders are getting their choice of $17.50 per share in cash or 0.629 shares of Horizon stock, which closed at $26.31 per share on July 15.
"As two long standing community banks within LaPorte County holding similar core values, we are confident that this merger will prove beneficial to our customers and the community," Horizon Chief Executive Officer Craig M. Dwight said.
Horizon Bank now has 54 branches in Indiana and Michigan, and is in the process of acquiring The Central National Bank and Trust Company in central Indiana.
It plans to close four of LaPorte Savings Bank's offices Michigan City, Chesterton, LaPorte's west side branch and the loan production office in St. Joseph Michigan since Horizon already serves those markets with offices of its own that are 1.5 miles away or less. They're slated to close on Oct. 21.
Affected employees at LaPorte Savings Bank will go to work at Horizon branches to help with integration, which goes into effect on Oct. 24. Horizon expects there will not be excess staffing by 2017 because of retirements and attrition.
The LaPorte Savings Bank has served LaPorte and the surrounding area for 145 years.
We are excited about joining the Horizon Bank family and look forward to the increased opportunities this union will provide our existing customers, employees and the communities we have served over the years," said LaPorte Savings President and Chief Financial Officer Michele Thompson, who joined Horizon's board of directors. "I believe that our shared philosophy will help to ensure that a major and growing community bank remains in the LaPorte area."
Affected customers will get Horizon accounts and don't have to do anything to make the change. Account numbers, checks, direct deposits and scheduled payments won't change.
Eight people were hospitalised after a mass brawl involving some 200 migrants broke out at a migrant camp in Hungary Sunday, a senior government official said.
A group of around 20 asylum-seekers -- including Algerians, Syrians, Pakistanis, and Mongolians -- triggered the violence when they exchanged blows before attacking each other using furniture, said Gyorgy Bakondi, chief advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The incident happened at around 8 pm (1800 GMT) in Kiskunhalas, 150 kilometres (95 miles) south of the capital Budapest, close to the southern border with Serbia.
As many as 200 police were needed to restore order, Bakondi told state news agency MTI.
Nine people sustained non-life threatening injuries.
The Kiskunhalas facility is one of three closed camps in Hungary where claims by asylum-seekers are processed.
An estimated 740 migrants were kept in the camps in June, according to refugee rights group the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
Around 400,000 migrants and refugees passed through Hungary in 2015 before Orban's right-wing government sealed its southern borders with razor wire and fences in the autumn.
Numbers have been rising sharply again in recent months however, rising to a total of around 17,500 by the end of June.
Earlier this month, Budapest introduced new security measures including the forced return to no-man's land between Hungary and Serbia of any migrant found within eight kilometres (five miles) of the southern border .
In a report released in mid-July, Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced Hungary for "cruel and violent treatment" of migrants in April and May, accusing police and soldiers of beating people before forcibly expelling them back into Serbia.
The government rejected the claims, saying HRW was "misconstruing the rules relating to the asylum proceedings out of obvious ignorance of the situation".
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The U.S. Department of Commerce is looking at slapping tariffs of up to 59 percent on heavy walled structural tubing steel from Korea, Mexico and Turkey.
U.S. steelmakers had sought tariffs on the steel products that are used in oil exploration and energy production, and often shaped from flat-rolled metal from Northwest Indiana steel mills.
They won anti-dumping duties that range between 2.34 percent and 35.66 percent on imports from various steelmakers from Korea, Mexico and Turkey. Those are meant to offset the difference between what the foreign steel companies sold steel for in their home countries and the cut-rate discount they sold it for in the United States.
The Turkish steel company Ozdemir avoided anti-dumping tariffs, but got hit with a 15.08 percent countervailing duty.
The U.S. Department of Commerce imposed countervailing duties between 15.08 and 23.37 percent on steel from Turkey. The countervailing tariffs are meant to offset subsidies steelmakers got from the Turkish government. The idea is to level the playing field, since the United States does not offer such subsidies to its steelmakers.
Turkey's MMZ steelmaker got countervailing and anti-dumping duties that added up to 59 percent.
Congressman Pete Visclosky had testified in favor of the tariffs, which he's stridently supported to protect Northwest Indiana's steel industry.
"American steelworkers and steel companies make the best steel in the world, more efficiently than anyone else," he said. "We should be using that steel in our infrastructure and transportation systems. We should be using that steel to build our nation."
The final duties will come up for a vote before the International Trade Commission on August 17, steel industry lobbyist Tamara Browne said.
PORTAGE A Portage man was arrested early Sunday morning after he allegedly crashed into a mailbox and fire hydrant and left a trail of debris in his wake.
Alexander Criswell, 27, was charged with three counts of operating while intoxicated and two counts of leaving the scene of an accident.
According to police, Criswell was driving a 2012 Kia hatchback about 2 a.m. Sunday when he struck a mailbox and fire hydrant in the 5700 block of Stone Avenue. The fire hydrant was dislodged from the curbside.
Police followed a trail of debris, including head light, windshield washer reserve tank, fluid and marks in the roadway to his home in the 2800 block of Monnier.
Criswell allegedly told police he fell asleep on his way home and striking the hydrant jarred him awake. He was aware he had struck the mailbox.
His initial blood alcohol content level on a portable breath test measured 0.18. A level of 0.08 is considered intoxicated. He was transported to Porter County Jail.
PORTAGE A man saved from a heroin overdose on Saturday ended up arrested.
Police were called to the 100 block of Camelot Estates about 7:30 p.m. on the report that a man had overdosed.
Police found Joseph Bak, 31, of Naperville, Illinois, on the floor unresponsive. The officer administered a dose of Naloxone.
At the hospital, Bak allegedly told police he had been drug-free for six months, but relapsed that day, purchasing heroin on the south side of Chicago and injecting himself in the bathroom of a relative he was visiting.
After being cleared at the hospital, he was transported to Porter County Jail and charged with possession of a hypodermic needle and possession of a controlled substance.
VALPARAISO A judge agreed with the defense Monday there may not be a lot of physical evidence linking former Hammond and Gary police officer Kevin Campbell to the slaying of his childrens mother.
But the presumption of his guilt is strong based on circumstantial evidence and that is enough to justify continuing to hold Campbell without bond while his case proceeds, said Porter Superior Court Judge Roger Bradford.
Thank you, Jesus, someone said aloud in the courtroom after Bradford announced his decision.
The decision came after about an hour of testimony from Portage police Detective Lt. Dennis Meyers, who summarized the prosecutors case against 32-year-old Campbell.
Campbell is charged with killling Tiara Thomas, 30, who was found covered in blood about 7:30 a.m. Nov. 18 in her unit at Park Place Apartments, 5970 Old Porter Road in Portage. She died later at the hospital.
Court documents point to arguments over child support and other money-related matters as a motive.
Defense attorney Susan Severtson asked for a bond Monday, arguing the case against her client is weak and his incarceration is hindering preparation for trial.
It doesnt show the court the evidence is strong, she said of the detectives testimony.
During questioning from Severtson, Meyers testified there were no fingerprints or other bodily evidence from Campbell found at the crime scene.
None of Campbells weapons were linked to the shooting, he said, and none of Thomas neighbors saw Campbell at the apartment at the time of the shooting.
Severtson downplayed evidence from Campbells son that his father threw a bag away at Columbus Park in Lake Station. The bag was never found, Severtson said, and neither was a key to Thomas apartment that Campbells 11-year-old son reportedly said his father asked him to bring along ahead of the shooting.
What police did discover is that while Campbell claimed to have been at home in Hobart at the time of the shooting, records show his cellphone active in Portage, Meyers said.
His home security system also recorded his front door opening and closing before the suspected time of the shooting and then again following the shooting, Meyers said.
Meyers said witnesses also said it was unusual that Campbell, rather than their mother, had the children on the day of her shooting, which was a school night.
Campbell also told police he had the same clothes on the entire day of the shooting, but his son disagreed, Meyers said.
Bradford scheduled the next hearing in the case for Sept. 26.
Editor's note: A possession of paraphernalia charge was dismissed against Justin Brookover, according to the Porter County Superior Court 1. Prosecutors decided on July 19 to not charge Brookover and Victoria Vargas with failing to report a dead body.
UNION TOWNSHIP Two local people face a series of charges, including failing to report a third person, who was found along a county road and presumed dead before being revived of a suspected drug overdose, according to Porter County police.
Victoria Vargas, 21, and Justin Brookover, 26, both of Valparaiso, were arrested following the incident around 7 a.m. Sunday.
The 26-year-old patient was found alongside the road near County Road 500 North and County Road 450 West by a passerby, who assumed he was dead, police said.
The man was revived using CPR and the opiate-reversal drug Narcan, police said. He is reportedly still at the hospital recovering.
Vargas and Brookover face charges of failing to report a dead body, possessing a hypodermic needle and possessing paraphernalia.
GARY Two people were wounded in separate shootings Sunday, police said.
Gary police were dispatched at 4:53 a.m. to Methodist Hospitals Northlake Campus for a man with a gunshot wound, Lt. Dawn Westerfield said.
A 60-year-old Gary man told police he got into an argument with another man while driving on Central Avenue behind the Dorie Miller housing complex and struck the other man in the face, she said. The man claimed the other man pointed a gun at him and he was shot as they struggled.
The man suffered a graze wound to his chest and arm, Westerfield said. He drove himself to the hospital.
At 5:20 a.m., police were dispatched to the 300 block of Durbin Street for a report of shots fired and found a woman with a gunshot wound to her ankle.
The 41-year-old Gary woman told police a man followed her from a bar to a restaurant and then home, Westerfield said. The woman claimed she told the man to leave and he refused, so she smashed his vehicle window with a bat and he shot at her.
Detective Sgt. Michael Barnes is investigating the shooting on Durbin Street. Anyone with information is asked to call detectives at (219) 811-1210. To remain anonymous, call (866) CRIME-GP.
BOONE GROVE The Porter Township school board will entertain a proposal to change its insurance program from a traditional program to an insurance cooperative.
At its July meeting, the group heard a proposal by Ryan Doyle, area assistant vice president of ESCRFT Educational Services Risk Funding Trust.
Doyle said the program is a protected self-insurance pool of Kindergarten through 12th grade school corporations and educational service centers in Indiana. ESCRFT currently has 45 members across the state and there are more than 500 such organizations across the country.
Doyle said the cooperative provides benefits, including more competitive pricing and broader coverage terms than traditional insurance companies.
ESCRFT will provide coverage for property, workers compensation, and liability, including cyber and pollution liability, two areas in which the district currently does not have coverage. The group contracts with third party administrators to handle claims and provide loss control services.
Doyle estimated the school districts annual insurance cost through ESCRFT would be $132,000, a 17 percent savings over the districts current program.
Its your policy, your program, you own it, Doyle said.
Stacey Schmidt, superintendent, told the board the districts attorney, Cheryl Zic, is currently reviewing the ESCRFT plan and performing due diligence.
In other business, the board also increased the rate of pay for substitute teachers. Those who have a teaching license will now earn $80 per day, while others will earn $70 per day. The increase is in line with that of other districts in the county, Schmidt said.
Schmidt said staff and administration are busy preparing for the first day of school, which is Aug. 17.
INDIANAPOLIS Munster native Sarah O'Brien is resigning next month from the State Board of Education to take care of her ill daughter.
The suburban Indianapolis fourth-grade teacher, who was elected vice chairwoman of the state school board last year, announced that the Aug. 10 meeting of the 11-member education policy panel will be her last after eight years of service.
"I strongly believe that we have increased the quality of educational opportunities across our state and have confidence that this board will continue to do so in the years to come," O'Brien said in a letter to board members explaining her resignation.
O'Brien was expected to contend for State Board of Education chairwoman in January when the post no longer automatically will be held by the state superintendent of public instruction.
According to Josh Gillespie, the board's spokesman, O'Brien's daughter has dealt with a variety of medical issues over the years.
State Rep. Bill Fine, R-Munster, is O'Brien's father.
INDIANAPOLIS The Republican nominee for Indiana governor will have a lot of catching up to do once he or she is selected July 26 by the partys 22-member state central committee.
The three most prominent candidates seeking to replace Gov. Mike Pence on the ballot Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb; U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita, a Munster native; and U.S. Rep. Susan Brooks significantly lag Democrat John Gregg in fundraising, and none have the staff or organization in place to immediately launch a statewide campaign.
As of June 30, Gregg had been running for governor for 14 months and recorded $5.83 million cash on hand in his campaign account, according to state records.
While that is less than Pences $7.4 million, its significantly more than Brooks $1.28 million and Rokitas $1.02 million in congressional campaign funds they could transfer to a state race if selected as the gubernatorial nominee.
Meanwhile, Holcomb had just $20,721 in his war chest after donating $100,000 to Pence on the last day of the reporting period to help Pence outraise Gregg for the second quarter of the year.
Pence has not yet said what he plans to do with his campaign account now that he is the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, alongside former Gary casino owner Donald Trump.
Though it seems likely Pence will use a portion of it to further his national ambitions rather than donating all the money to whoever is picked to succeed him on the Indiana ballot.
Rokita, who served two terms as Indiana secretary of state, and Holcomb, who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate earlier this year and previously was chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, do at least have supporters across the state they can turn to for help.
However, Brooks political career as former deputy mayor of Indianapolis and U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana means her backers generally are concentrated in central Indiana.
Further complicating matters for whoever becomes the Republican nominee is that Pence took his top gubernatorial campaign staff with him to the national GOP ticket, leaving his large (and costly) cadre of campaign workers in limbo.
Holcomb, Rokita and Brooks all have formed nascent campaign teams since withdrawing Friday from their re-election bids, but even something as simple as knowing who their running mate is wont be decided until six days after someone is selected to run for governor.
The Republican State Central Committee is set to meet Aug. 1 to pick a new lieutenant governor nominee.
Jon Thompson, communications director at the Republican Governors Association, said his organization which so far has spent nearly $2 million on ads attacking Gregg wont be letting up, since electing John Gregg as governor would send Indiana straight to the bottom.
We are confident Indiana Republicans will select a strong new gubernatorial nominee who will win this November and build upon Gov. Pences successful legacy of sound fiscal management and economic success, Thompson said.
Drew Anderson, spokesman for the Indiana Democratic Party, said any candidate replacing Pence must take a stand on the governors disastrous Religious Freedom Restoration Act and other missteps over the past four years.
Its not enough to hide behind closed doors and leave Indiana voters in the dark, Anderson said. If they want to govern, voters need to know now where they stand on RFRA, Pences choice to decline pre-K funding and one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation.
Hoosiers on Nov. 8 also will elect a new attorney general, because Republican Greg Zoeller is not seeking a third term, and decide whether Glenda Ritz, the Democratic state superintendent of public instruction, deserves a second term.
In the attorney general race, Republican Elkhart County Prosecutor Curtis Hill raised $175,950 between March and June and has $103,144 cash on hand.
Former Lake Circuit Judge Lorenzo Arredondo, the Democratic candidate, took in $11,225 in the second quarter and has $17,488 to spend.
Ritz leads financially in the state superintendent race with $536,636 in the bank after raising $242,909 during the past three months.
Yorktown Schools Superintendent Jennifer McCormick, the Republican nominee, collected $121,478 in the most recent quarter and has $67,791 left in her campaign account.
EAST CHICAGO Becoming an East Chicago firefighter is somewhat of a family tradition for Jacob Rehm, seeing that his stepfather and uncle are also firefighters in the city.
Its kind of been a passion for me to follow in their footsteps, but more importantly, I just feel like Im here to save people. Thats what I was put on this earth to do, Rehm said.
The 2013 graduate of Bishop Noll Institute is one of 13 new firefighters hired in East Chicago last month and the fire department has now reached the total of 76 members allowed by city ordinance.
That number was reached with the help of four retirements that also occurred in June.
Mayor Anthony Copeland was a member of the East Chicago fire department for more than 27 years and said he does not recall the city ever having hired such a large group of firefighters at once.
He attributed a balanced budget and new revenue coming from the Local Option Income Tax as reasons the city could afford the new hires.
The citys new firefighters are: Anthony James Adair, Matthew John Aponte, Kyle Daniel Dunlap, Phillip Michael Espinosa, James Flores, Brandon Lee Foster, Robert J. Groszewski III, Nigel Magee, Robert Nunez, Manuel R. Paredes, Nicholas Prodanic, Jacob Mario Rehm and Douglas Uriah Sloss.
Four of the new firefighters (Flores, Magee, Rehm and Sloss) are East Chicago residents.
Copeland said sound fiscal practices have also allowed an increase in the fire departments training budget and an investment in new equipment, including protective gear.
He said the department will receive a new aerial truck and a new fire engine sometime this month.
Copeland said he believes the new recruits saw the investment the city is making in the department and that they were also likely attracted by what he called a sound career with a close-knit brotherhood.
You can look across the nation and see that people who tend to be firefighters, where they start at is where they end at, Copeland said. Its just a career that once you get in, its a rewarding job.
Rehm said he agrees with Copelands comments regarding noticing the citys commitment to the fire department and the relationship among firefighters.
Weve been in the academy now for, I believe six weeks, and we already formed a brotherhood, Rehm said.
Other attractive aspects of the job are that those who live in East Chicago receive a residency bonus on their entrance exams, and Copeland said that each fire station in the city has its own workout facilities.
A huge one was that we can work out at E.C. Centrals High School for free, Aponte said. Thats a beautiful gym.
Aponte, 23, is a lifelong Whiting resident whose brother is a firefighter in that city.
Aponte applied for a position in East Chicago after his brother, George, told him of positive experiences in dealing with the East Chicago Fire Department.
Like Rehm, Aponte feels a call to service. He joined the Army Reserves at the age of 19 but was never deployed.
I was punching the clock at a refinery every day, and just, I didnt feel like I was bettering myself or bettering the community or bettering anything, Aponte said. I just feel like it was something I was here to do, is just to help people.
Copeland said the new firefighters will provide an infusion of youth into what he called a physical and demanding profession.
He said the city has been able to provide all firefighters with an annual bonus for the last four years.
And last year they got a three percent raise and a bonus in the same year, Copeland said.
Anthony Serna, a 21-year member of the East Chicago Fire Department, began serving as interim chief on July 4.
The 13 new candidates provide us with a tremendous opportunity to shape the future of the East Chicago Fire Department, Serna said.
He said the new hires will undergo a year-long probationary period that will involve both classroom and field training and that the department will continue to take advantage of situations such as an abandoned bar on Alder St. that recently provided the opportunity for hands-on search and rescue training for the probationary firefighters.
They definitely push your limits, Rehm said. But itll definitely be worth it at the end.
Serna believes people may initially become firefighters simply because they want to help people and their community.
But once theyre on for a length of time, theyll realize its the greatest career in the world, he said.
Serna took the place of former interim Fire Chief Carlos Aburto, whom Serna said continues to serve the department as a district chief in fire suppression.
Serna, a 1988 East Chicago Central High School graduate, said his vision for the department is for it to be the best-equipped, well-trained fire fighting force in Northwest Indiana.
He believes the combination of a veteran core and the 13 new candidates creates a recipe for success in the department.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Monday that the truck attack that killed 84 in the Riviera city of Nice was "of a premeditated nature."
Investigations have shown that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel staked out the Promenade des Anglais on several occasions, taking selfies there throughout the day of the attack, and had reserved the rented truck on July 4.
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HAMMOND The Hammond Police Department confirmed an allegation of abuse that was reported Jan. 25 at St. Casimir School in Hammond has been investigated and the information provided to the Lake County Prosecutors Office.
Lt. Richard Hoyda said the department is not aware of any criminal charges pending so far as a result of the investigation. However, Hoyda said he could not release details of the investigation because it's still open, thus exempted from public access per Indiana law.
Background
Earlier this year, police said a parent reported an alleged molestation occurred during regular school hours Jan. 25. Hoyda said then St. Casimir School representatives were cooperating with the investigation.
Immediately following the parent's report to police, St. Casimir Principal Lorenza Pastrick sent a letter to parents alerting them to the incident. She told parents that police contacted her about the molestation complaint.
"The child involved was not able to put a name with the face," Pastrick said then.
"St. Casimir has been cooperating fully with police and in the interest of timely communication, the notice was sent to parents."
In the letter, Pastrick said the circumstances surrounding the event are nebulous and unclear. She said specifics of the incident, including when and where it took place and who was involved remain unknown.
"I need to stress that no one, at this point, has been identified as the person involved," Pastrick wrote to parents in January.
According to diocesan standards, many security measures are in place and continue to be observed in the children's best interests, she said then.
What's Next
Hoyda said Friday his department is not aware of anyone being charged in this case. The case investigation is currently in the custody of the Lake County Prosecutors Office. The prosecutor's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Have an idea of story for us to update? Send tips to newstips@nwi.com with Follow-up File in the subject line.
VALPARAISO Red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures are often seen soaring high above Indiana cornfields and woodlands.
But one bird of prey is fairly common, yet few are lucky enough to spot it.
A Festival of Owls at Moraine Ridge Wildlife Rehabilitation Center celebrated that bird Saturday, with kids crafts, owl viewing, and information about these stealthy, mostly nocturnal, creatures.
Nicole Harmon, the centers wildlife humane educator, said Indiana is home to nine species of owls, including burrowing, northern saw-whet, short-eared, long-eared, barred, and barn owls. For several months in winter, snowy owls from arctic regions pass through northwest Indiana and can be seen on open farm fields, Harmon said.
Owls do not build their own nests, but take over the nests of other birds, while screech owls are cavity nesters that make their home in tree trunk holes. Harmon said owls make up for their lack of peripheral vision by swiveling their heads 270 degrees, and their hearing is so keen that some can hear a mouses heartbeat under three feet of snow.
They could hear everyones heartbeat in this room, said Harmon.
Multiple types of feathers including contour, down, semiplumes, and bristles allow owls to fly and hunt silently, Harmon said. Ear tufts on some owls are simply feathers used to indicate moods and signal to each other.
Their silence allows them to capture prey with complete stealth, Harmon said.
Male owls help raise youngsters, said Harmon, a trait that is interesting and unique to owls.
The wildlife center currently has two eastern screech owls in rehabilitation, both of which have eye injuries that prevent them from hunting successfully in the wild. Because they cannot be released, they will be used as ambassador animals to teach the public about owls and wildlife conservation.
Harmon held a screech owl calmly on a gloved hand joined to the owl with a tether, using operant conditioning to train the owl to be calm around people.
The birds are not treated as pets and are not allowed to be petted, as it stimulates and stresses them.
He is getting used to people, movement, and new things, Harmon said. I want him to be calm and comfortable, and I reward him with mouse pieces when he is. When hes stressed, I wait until he calms down and then reward him for that.
Last year, the center rehabilitated a saw-whet owl and a long-eared owl, and is now home to a great horned owl named Bert, another ambassador animal.
Bert, who is 13 years old, came to the center when Carol Riewe, of South Bend, retired as a wildlife rehabilitator.
Great horned owls are tough, ferocious, aggressive birds, but they are the gentlest mothers, said Riewe.
The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning until 10 p.m. for southwestern Lake County.
A severe thunderstorm was located near Beecher, Illinois moving east at 35 mph with 60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail. The NWS reports hail damage to vehicles is expected as well as wind damage to roofs, siding and trees.
Region under thunderstorm watch until 1 a.m.
Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties are among several in Indiana under a severe thunderstorm watch until 1 a.m. Monday.
The watch, issued by the National Weather Service, also includes the following Indiana counties: Benton, Cass, Fulton, Jasper, Marshall, Newton, Pulaski, St. Joseph, Starke and White.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is saying arrivederci to the city and embarking on a European getaway.
The mayor and First Lady Chirlane McCray are heading to Italy for a week-long family vacation.
He's expected to return on Sunday.
The city's first family vacationed in the country two summers ago.
The mayor also traveled there last July to deliver a speech at the Vatican.
A woman is dead and her 9-year-old daughter is in critical condition following a hit-and-run crash in Queens over the weekend.
It happened just after 5 p.m. Sunday at the intersection of 115th Avenue and 130th Street in South Ozone Park.
Police say a BMW X5 was speeding when it blew through a stop sign and slammed into a Toyota Corolla.
NY1 spoke with the driver of that vehicle, Assam Rasool, who says his wife, Zaalika, and daughter were thrown from the car.
"I tried to sway the car so I could miss him, unfortunately he hit the back end of it. And the rest of it, I don't know what happened, all I know is when I came to I couldn't find the two of them. And when I came out she was under my car and my daughter was about five feet in front," Rasool said.
"Oh they're a wonderful family, very close, very close. It's just heartbreaking, very sad that this happened," said a family friend.
Zaalika Rasool died at the scene, according to police.
Her daughter is currently at Long Island Jewish Hospital.
Rasool had worked at the city transportation department.
Officials said the department is looking into making road changes to make the intersection safer.
Police said the driver of the BMW ran off.
Anyone with information on the case should contact the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS, or text CRIMES and then enter TIP577, or visit www.nypdcrimestoppers.com.
Season 1, Episode 2: Subtle Beast
Friend of the family or right place, right time?
Jack Stone flashes a grin. Right place, right time.
This exchange, between a judge and a lawyer, happens after the judge has just denied bail to Stones client, because of the severity of the charges against him. Stone was never going to win this ruling, but he puts up the obligatory fight anyway, beating back the insidious argument that Naz is a flight risk because of his familys extensive roots in Pakistan. Though the judge says that he normally likes to split the baby when weighing the suggestions of the prosecution and the defense, the allegations of murder, rape and resisting arrest in this case make it impossible, and Stone takes the defeat in stride. He advises Naz, for the umpteenth time, not to talk to anybody. And then the judge offers a verbal pat on the back.
Good for you, the judge says.
They know each other. The judge has no doubt seen Stone shuffle in and out of his courtroom for years, absorbing decision after decision, and he recognizes this case is a big deal for a lawyer who trolls lockups for clients. In other words, they work together. Theyre part of the system. It doesnt mean that Stone is a compromised advocate for Naz, but his cordial relationship with the judges, detectives and prosecutors doesnt exactly position him against the people who will determine his clients fate. Hes a cog in the machine. This is a huge paycheck for him. Congratulations are in order.
For as much as The Night Of engages in the minutiae of this particular case, it is also a show about the system and how the institutions of justice process the people who pass through them. As a first-time offender, Naz doesnt know the culture within a police precinct or a lockup and he believes, as an innocent man perhaps would, that the detective could help him clear up the situation, when in fact, everything he says may be turned against him. Stone is his sole advocate, but he will not be following Naz to prison if he loses. He will have soaked up every last dime from Nazs working-class family, and he will continue to have a cordial working relationship with the people responsible for sending his client to prison. The case is a big get for Stone, but the true stakes are for Naz and Naz alone. The machine will grind on no matter what.
After years of rapid internal growth, the worlds biggest hedge fund appears to be slowing down.
The $154 billion hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, run by the billionaire Ray Dalio, is known for hiring hundreds of people every year. Yet it is now telling recruitment firms to cancel interviews with prospective employees, according to three people briefed on the matter.
In recent weeks, dozens of interviews were canceled and advanced negotiations with prospective employees were cut short by the firm, those people said.
And some of the firms external recruiters have been told Bridgewater will not use them for the time being, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Bridgewater emphasizes secrecy in its communication with investors and the external recruiting firms, and the people requested anonymity because they did not want their relationship with the firm to be affected.
It was unclear whether the suspension of recruiting in some areas was temporary or a reflection of a new push to gradually shrink the size of the firm. At the moment, there does not appear to be any talk of layoffs. The firm employs 1,500 people, most of them at its sprawling headquarters in Westport, Conn.
When the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland on Monday, The Washington Post will be there at Quicken Loans Arena. So will Politico, The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. Ditto The Des Moines Register.
These news organizations are among the dozen or so that Donald J. Trump has barred in the last year from his rallies and events. Mr. Trump, who has antagonized the news media and restricted access throughout his campaign, does not control the credentialing for the convention. That job is left to the Congressional Press Galleries. As a result, some news organizations will enjoy official entry to a Trump-led event for the first time in months.
Its easier we dont have to worry about using guest passes or potentially getting thrown out, said John Stanton, the Washington bureau chief for BuzzFeed News. This is how its supposed to be.
It could very well be a smooth operation for the news organizations on Mr. Trumps bad side. But the convention, which concludes on Thursday, is also a chance to see how much the rest of the Republican Party embraces Mr. Trumps battle with the media.
Founded by seven dairy farmers in 1988 in La Farge, Wis. (population: about 750), Organic Valley now counts as members more than 1,800 farmers, mainly in the United States. Of those, 1,456 are dairy farmers, 342 raise beef cattle and 174 grow produce. The members total sales for 2015 reached $1.04 billion. About 40 percent of the dairy produced by the cooperative is sold as bulk milk and other ingredients to manufacturers like Stonyfield, while dairy products made by Organic Valley and carrying its brand are sold by retailers including Whole Foods Market, Costco, Walmart and Target, as well as by conventional grocery, convenience and specialty food stores.
The cooperative, which for many years invited retailers and others in the food industry to visit its members farms, began offering free farm discovery tours to the public in 2014. This year it is offering four: in Kutztown, Pa., and Kewaskum, Wis., in June; in Enumclaw, Wash., in August; and in Petaluma, Calif., in October. The June tours catered to visitors from New York, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and the later tours are aimed at visitors from Seattle and San Francisco.
For every person who goes there, theyll tell many of their friends, who will spread the word, Ms. Masoni said. Conversation will happen across communities.
Regina Beidler, who runs an Organic Valley dairy farm with her husband in Randolph Center, Vt., advises the cooperative on its marketing efforts in the eastern United States. She suggested that the visits were a good way to get entire families excited about organic food.
They love to give an opportunity to a child to see what farms are like, she said of visitors who are parents. And its interesting for us to hear the questions people have.
Farm visits also are central to Organic Valleys new social media efforts. The cooperative invited so-called social influencers like Eva Amurri Martino of Happily Eva After, Naomi and Josh Davis of Love Taza, and Naomi Robinson of Bakers Royale to participate in the Kutztown farm tour last month, and it plans to work with others in the future. The hope, according to Karen Zuckerman, chief creative officer of the agency HZDG, which worked with Organic Valley on its marketing strategy, is that the influencers will share their experiences on the farm with their many followers on social media, who will then investigate organic farming for themselves.
Our hope is by building the movement, our business will grow with it, said Lewis Goldstein, vice president for brand marketing at Organic Valley, which is spending $500,000 to $1 million on the new website, and social media initiatives.
Conspiracy theories were rampant in these complaints: I was secretly on the Republican payroll; I was secretly on the Democratic payroll; I was slated for a job in the Clinton, Cruz, Rubio or Bush administrations. The cynicism of the angry Trump supporters was so deep that my criticism of all these people in print was either dismissed or taken as evidence of an elaborate effort to conceal my true agenda, whatever it was.
There is also a triumphalist streak among the Trump supporters, who never tire of crowing about how old-school Republicans like me have lost, that the party has changed hands and that my kind needs to get in line or get out. Friendlier critics may not tell me I have to leave the party, but instead plead with me to understand how Trumps primary victories were an important step toward getting even with the elites whom they believe control their lives. That term the elites slips from the mouths of not just casual acquaintances but also from friends and family. Even if theyre not trying to offend, the meaning is clear: Theyre referring to people like me.
Its not an entirely new line, of course. One of my uncles was a retired factory worker who for most of his life resented almost anyone who didnt work with their hands. At dinner one evening many years ago, he issued the blanket declaration that everyone who works in Washington is corrupt. When I pointed out that I someone hes known for my entire life was working in Washington as a Senate aide at the time, he blurted out: I dont care! Then youre corrupt too!
What he meant, of course, is that he saw me as part of system that was rigged against him. He saw the government as the servant primarily of rich corporations on one side and of unemployed minorities on the other. Like many of todays Trump voters, he saw no middle ground, no connection between his own life and the many government programs like Social Security and Medicaid of which he was a beneficiary. For him, the government was just a group of bureaucrats stealing his money and then giving it away again after taking their cut.
Today, I dont even have to work in Washington to be accused of being corrupt. I just have to be someone who doesnt love Donald Trump.
If Never-Trump Republicans are targets of rage to strangers and sources of disappointment to some of our friends and family, we are also objects of curiosity, especially among Democrats. Many people to my left see my opposition to Trump in the Oval Office as so obviously correct that it is ludicrous even to call attention to it, as though I have just bravely declared that I object to driving while blindfolded or to further wars with Britain. They treat me, somewhat condescendingly, as though I have finally come to my senses after years of misguided fraternization with the Republican enemy. For many liberals, of course, Trump is merely the natural endpoint of Republican evolution since the late 1960s. They might regret that it took the extremism of Donald Trump to make me finally see it, but better late than never.
Except that I dont see it that way at all. To me, Trump is an alien presence in the Republican Party, an opportunist who could just as easily have hijacked white working-class voters among the Democrats or as part of a third-party bid. Nonetheless, strangers on social media and friends in my daily life mistakenly assume that my opposition to Trump equates to some sort of new sympathy for liberalism in general or for Hillary Clinton in particular. Some of them actually send me Clinton-friendly talking points, as though I might find them useful.
New British foreign minister and lead Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson urged the EU Monday to leave its doors open on strategic issues and promised Britain would continue to play a "leading role" in Europe.
Meeting his EU peers in Brussels for the first time since his shock appointment, the normally ebullient Johnson was on his best behaviour after infuriating them in the Brexit run-up by comparing EU ambitions for closer integration to Adolf Hitler's.
He told reporters after "a long productive day" that while the government would press ahead with leaving the 28-nation club, "that in no sense means the end of Britain's part in Europe."
This would be especially true in foreign policy, and London saw no reason to fear EU efforts to develop a more active global role as championed by bloc foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, he said.
"We are very keen to see the EU develop and go forward," he said.
"What we would say is to make sure that there are kinds of docking stations and doorways open for further UK involvement down the track."
US Secretary of State John Kerry, attending his first EU foreign ministers meeting in a high level gesture of solidarity with the EU, said Johnson had told his peers Britain intended to remain a "vital component" of Europe.
The prospect of Britain leaving has stoked fears the bloc could struggle to establish a global role since it will be losing a nuclear-armed power with a permanent, veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council.
Britain's parliament was due to vote later Monday on replacing the country's ageing Trident nuclear deterrent, a massive commitment costing 41 billion (49 billion euros, $54 billion).
The foreign ministers' meeting was overshadowed by the failed military coup in Turkey and last week's deadly attack in Nice, the third major terror incident in France since 2015.
Johnson said they discussed both issues, offering support for France and trying to balance backing for the Turkish government against the need for it to uphold EU democratic and rule of law norms in the coup aftermath.
The new foreign secretary was a key player in the June 23 Brexit referendum.
His appointment stunned many in Europe, with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying he had lied to voters during the campaign.
"There are lots of things to work on with Britain. I will always talk to Boris Johnson with the greatest sincerity, the greatest frankness, I think it's like that we have to move on," Ayrault said.
Asked if Johnson had apologised over his comparision of the EU with Hitler, Ayrault said the Briton had not, but like other ministers Johnson knew well "that Europe represents the (best) chance for freedom and democracy."
Johnson held bilateral meetings with Mogherini and the foreign ministers of 19 EU countries including Germany and France.
Johnson's visit caused some trepidation given his reputation for quips which have often landed him in hot water.
The former mayor of London and one-time schoolmate of former prime minister David Cameron is well known in Brussels where he worked in the 1990s as the Daily Telegraph's EU correspondent.
His critics say he routinely exaggerated or skewed his stories to play to the eurosceptic gallery at home.
Officials in Brussels stressed they would welcome Johnson but there is little doubt his Brexit role ruffled feathers.
Johnson was supposed to have met all his EU colleagues on Sunday for an informal dinner but several member states objected, saying it would amount to "informal talks" with London before it began formal divorce negotiations, one European diplomat said.
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News of the shootings in Louisiana had not reached most people at a special service at Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington, N.J., on Sunday morning. Gwen Carr, Mr. Garners mother, and over a dozen other mothers of black people killed by the police were guest speakers. Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of Amadou Diallo, who was shot by police in 1999, begged for peace but feared it was still far off. We have not seen the changes so we dont have to lose any more children, so we dont have to lose any more police officers, she said.
The continued calls for calm and unity by President Obama and other leaders this bloodstained July did not seem to temper the anger at the police that pervaded the events on Sunday. Benjamin Lawton, a first cousin of Mr. Garners, seemed to strike a tone of understanding toward the New York Police Department as he opened the first of two marches along Bay Street to the 120th Precinct police station. I have no hatred for law enforcement, we need them, Mr. Lawton said, adding that members of his extended family had served in the Police Department, in the military and as corrections officers.
But an hour later, he grabbed a bullhorn and led the crowd, an ethnically diverse group that appeared to be predominantly white, in a chant of obscenities directed at the police.
As Michael Houston, a 20-year-old student, marched, he struck up a conversation with the commander of the Staten Island police, Edward Delatorre, asking what he could do to help. Mr. Delatorre suggested he join the department. Suddenly, Shannon Jones, a member of an organization called Bronxites for NYPD Accountability, interjected, screaming until Mr. Delatorre walked away. Dont join a racist institution, Ms. Jones yelled.
How do you expect to change it if you dont get involved? Mr. Houston asked her. The two debated for several blocks before Ms. Jones became exasperated and moved away. Theres nothing wrong with listening, Mr. Houston called to her.
The birds and the bees are no longer confined to uncomfortable living-room conversations. They will start popping up as emojis in teenagers Facebook feeds on Monday.
Eggplant and peach emojis will appear with the words: Need to talk to someone about it? A monkey emoji with its hands over its mouth will offer advice on how to get confidential access to emergency contraception.
The social media posts are part of a campaign by NYC Health & Hospitals to reach young people ages 12 to 21 and encourage them to seek confidential care for sexual and reproductive health, like testing for sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, at one of the 20 YouthHealth centers across the five boroughs.
The public hospital systems messages on Facebook and Instagram will direct readers to a new Health & Hospitals website. The website maps out the locations of all the YouthHealth services sites in New York City and reminds young people that they can get health care services regardless of ability to pay, immigration status, gender identity or sexual orientation.
MILLBURN, N.J. Intricate little fairy houses started appearing in the woods of South Mountain Reservation here about five years ago.
They were delicate creations made largely of the natural materials one might find in the woods: a chair seat made of an acorn, a ladder of twigs, a seat back fashioned from a fungus fan, a sofa cushioned with moss.
And they mainly dotted a part of the Rahway Trail in Locust Grove, a short walk from downtown Millburn that draws dog walkers and runners from the surrounding towns.
There were 20 to 30 of them, new ones replacing old ones over the years, discreetly tucked in a tree hollow or artfully incorporated into a root. They all had a similar enchanting style and looked like the work of one person, but nobody seemed to know exactly who.
1. The official theme for the first day of the Republican National Convention was Make America Safe Again, but infighting and protests were undercurrents.
Tonights prime-time speakers included Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and Donald Trumps wife, Melania. Mr. Trump introduced her, walking on stage to Queens We Are the Champions and telling the crowd: Oh were gonna win, were gonna win so big. Our live coverage is here.
IN the days before yesterdays killing of three officers by a gunman in Baton Rouge, La., a remarkable image surfaced that captured the protests over the shooting of Alton Sterling in that city on July 5. It communicated more powerfully, and globally, than any other the standoff between aggression and civility in the current turmoil around race relations in America: that of the woman in the summer dress.
Taken by Jonathan Bachman, a photographer for Reuters, the photograph shows a young African-American woman in a long black-and-white dress that is blowing gracefully in the wind, staring serenely at two policemen in black riot gear who have come to arrest her, in front of a much larger corps of police officers also in riot gear.
It has, in the days since the event, gone viral, but the woman in question, Ieshia Evans, who spent a night in jail for obstructing traffic, has said little beyond a couple of brief statements, thus allowing the image to speak for itself. And it has, becoming a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement and inspiring such words as legendary, iconic and gorgeous.
The picture has become the latest in a series of photos capturing the violent bifurcation of contemporary society: The woman in a red dress turning her head as she is being tear-gassed by riot police officers in Istanbul during an anti-government demonstration in 2013; the man in a white shirt and black trousers facing the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989; the young man in the big sweater putting flowers into a gun held by a National Guardsman on the Mall in Washington in 1967.
To the Editor:
Re Why the E.U. Had It Coming, by Tim Parks (Sunday Review, July 10):
Like Mr. Parks, I am a British expatriate. I have lived outside Britain for more than 30 years, and I was not too surprised that England and Wales, but significantly, not Scotland, Northern Ireland or the young, voted to leave the European Union. But I cannot disagree more with him on his views of the E.U.
When Britain joined in 1973, the country was in political and economic decline. Britain had become insular and increasingly irrelevant. Joining the E.U. repositioned Britains place in the world as a critical player within the new European bloc and economically as a gateway to Europe.
A huge influx of overseas investment and human capital has been transformative. London has become the de facto capital of Europe, and English its lingua franca. Young people see themselves as Europeans.
The E.U., despite its problems, has become a family of nations. Britains leaving the European Union is a retrogressive step for all Europeans, including the English.
Arthur: So you think this was a political mistake for Trump.
Gail: I guess it makes perfect sense for calming down the party leadership heading into the homestretch. But if I ever had any delusions that Trump actually had a genuine plan for change, I would be depressed.
Enough about me youre the one who knows Pence. Tell me why hes a good choice.
Arthur: The first thing to know is that for conservative activists, there are actually two Mike Pences. The first is Congressman Mike Pence, who was indeed a conservative in the policy mold of Paul Ryan. He was so popular when he was in the House that many people thought he should run for president.
The second is Governor Mike Pence, who is seen somewhat less positively by some of the conservative base, because he allowed Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, and for the way he handled the controversy about religious freedom i.e. the gay wedding cake controversy, in which he initially supported legislation guaranteeing freedom of conscience for certain small business owners and then changed course when it became a national controversy.
Gail: You mean the fact that he backed down under pressure and supported a bill that sort of said But some of our best friends are gay people? Hehehe.
Arthur: Thats the one.
So all in all its not clear to me how he will be received, once the news sinks in. But in any case, I think he will turn out to be a positive asset in the long run because of his personality, which is fundamentally friendly, optimistic and aspirational. I promise you that if we had lunch with him, youd like him. The offset to Trump is not his policies, but rather the fact that Pence is always nice to people. Thats almost an eccentricity in todays politics, like wearing a monocle.
Another plus about Pence is that people can imagine him being the president. Just in case Trump gets bored, I mean.
Ill be keen to see how this bumps Trumps (hey, that rhymes) poll numbers along with the convention. And speaking of that, I think I was right that the FBI email thing really brought Clinton down. Recent polls have them tied, and the accompanying qualitative analysis suggests that people really think shes dishonest. How can she win back some trust and get back in the lead?
One of the most fervid ideologues expected at the Republican convention this week the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach has been busy shaping extremist positions in the party platform to suppress immigration, gun controls and same-sex marriage. But he also found time last week to do actual damage to Kansans with a devious, 11th-hour policy that would disqualify 17,000 of them as state voters, even though they are allowed by law to vote in federal elections.
At issue is Mr. Kobachs zealous enforcement of a notorious law he urged Kansas Republicans to pass that requires new voters to prove their citizenship with a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers. Federal law imposes no such burden. But Mr. Kobach continues to try to force the state requirement onto the books brazenly persisting in the face of recent federal and state court findings that these legitimate voters are being suppressed and must be allowed their full ballot rights.
Nevertheless, Mr. Kobach, claiming the issue is unsettled while he appeals to higher courts, has ordered election officials to count the ballot choices for federal offices from the 17,000 disputed voters but ignore their state and local choices in the coming primary contests. He obviously timed this bit of contumely so that any rulings on appeals would be unlikely before this summers voting.
To the Editor:
It is interesting that when Belgium had serious terrorist incidents this year, your newspaper described Belgium as a failed state. (ISIS blasts shake European security, March 24). The United States government has even recommended citizens not travel to Belgium. With hundreds of killings over the last few years and especially recently, and with Congress cowardly unwilling to stand up to the gun lobby, along with the prevalent and continuing racism, writers should label the United States the failed state that it is and warn travelers against visiting such a dangerous place.
LARRY BROWN
Oostende, Belgium
To the Editor:
Re Marine Le Pens After Brexit, the Peoples Spring is Inevitable (Op-ed, June 28):
Regarding the European Union, Le Pen asserts that Its democratic in appearance only, because its based on a lie: the pretense that there is a homogeneous European people.
True, in the sense that there is no such thing as a homogeneous people, so no political entity can possibly act according to the will of all of the individuals it governs. The U.S. government sometimes enacts laws that the majority of Californians oppose. Or in terms that Ms. Le Pen will understand: Normans and Corsicans dont always agree on what rules are best.
And yet we choose to have governments, because the alternative is every man for himself.
The European Union came about, in no small part, to stop the ancient cycle of war that had beset Europe for millenniums. Yes, it required the individual states to surrender some of their sovereignty, but that was a sacrifice people were willing to make. Let us hope that as we look towards the future, we dont lose sight of the past.
WILLIAM COLE
Sitges, Spain
Azerbaijan on Tuesday shut down a private television channel over plans to broadcast an interview with Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara accuses of being behind the failed coup in Turkey.
Baku is an ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has furiously pointed blame at his arch-enemy Gulen for the weekend's botched military takeover. The US-based preacher denies any involvement.
Azerbaijan's National Television and Radio Council said in a statement that it has "ordered temporary suspension of broadcasting by the ANS TV channel in order to avoid provocations aimed at damaging the strategic partnership between Turkey and Azerbaijan and to prevent obvious promotion of terrorism."
Erdogan wants Washington to extradite Gulen to Turkey, but US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that Ankara must produce evidence to support the extradition request.
The reclusive Muslim cleric lives in self-imposed exile in a mountain town in Pennsylvania. His Hizmet movement has a powerful presence in Turkish society, including the media, police and judiciary.
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To the Editor:
Re As NATO leaders gather, rifts over Russia deepen (News, July 9-10): Angela Merkel is certainly more experienced on Russian issues, and political thinking, than any British prime minister since she spent the first 36 years of her life in East Germany.
Once again, Ms. Merkels party is called conservative, which even by European standards is absurd. Social market economy has been a main principle of the German Christian Democrats since 1949. In 2007 it was written into the text of the Treaty on European Union. Conservative? The wording was also accepted (although reluctantly) by the French Socialists, most of whom are now center-left.
NORBERT PRILL
Strasbourg, France
The family detention centers the Obama administration has been operating in Texas and Pennsylvania have been an expedient way to handle the soaring numbers of Central Americans, many of them young children, who have arrived at the Southern border since 2014. They give a sense that Homeland Security has the border situation under control, and they supposedly send a message to other would-be refugees not to come.
But these privately run, unlicensed lockups are no place for children. Or mothers. Their existence belies President Obamas oft-professed concern for the humane treatment of people fleeing crime and violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
And the centers stand on dubious legal ground. Last year, a district judge ruled that the administration was violating a 1997 court-ordered settlement, called the Flores agreement, that governs the treatment of underage migrants who seek asylum or enter the country illegally. The judge said the children were being held for too long, and ordered the administration to release them as quickly as possible to the care of relatives or other guardians as their cases move through the immigration courts.
The administration appealed, saying that the agreement applied only to children who had crossed the border alone, not those who were accompanied by parents or other adult relatives. On July 6, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disagreed, upholding the district ruling that Flores covers all children, accompanied or not. But it said the administration could still detain their parents.
It was ironic that, as members of the military launched a coup against him on Friday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey resorted to guerrilla media tactics broadcasting via the FaceTime app on his cellphone to urge Turks to oppose the plotters. Mr. Erdogan has been no friend to free expression, ruthlessly asserting control over the news media and restricting human rights and free speech. Yet thousands responded to his appeal, turning back the rebels and demonstrating that they still value democracy, even if Mr. Erdogan has eroded its meaning.
That erosion is now accelerating, exacting a terrible price from Turkeys citizens and posing new challenges to international efforts to confront the Islamic State and halt the killing in Turkeys neighbor, Syria. After the chaotic and bloody events of the weekend, Mr. Erdogan is becoming more vengeful and obsessed with control than ever, exploiting the crisis not just to punish mutinous soldiers but to further quash whatever dissent is left in Turkey.
They will pay a heavy price for this, he said, chillingly. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.
Since coming to power as prime minister in 2003, Mr. Erdogan has become an increasingly authoritarian leader who has steered his country far from the vision of a model Muslim democracy that many had longed for. The volatile Middle East cannot afford to have another state unravel, especially one that is also a bulwark of NATOs eastern flank. Over the weekend, the United States emphasized its absolute support for Turkeys democratically elected, civilian government and democratic institutions but also urged restraint and a commitment to due process.
Swimsuits should be made for swimming yet surprisingly few on the market actually are. Unlike many lines, the just-debuted Babes in Bathers, founded by 27-year-old Maayan Sherris, not only facilitates swimming, but celebrates it. The brand evolved out of a passion project that Sherris, a recent Parsons graduate and former employee at The Row, began last year when she shadowed the Columbia University womens swim team for months in search of inspiration. I had this idea of using real women and real situations to provoke fashion and original beauty, she says. Sherris chose to focus on female swimmers in part because shed always been fascinated by water (the element served as a springboard for her Parsons thesis collection) and in part because shed always found swimmers bodies to be quite beautiful. I always thought female swimmers didnt get enough attention in terms of the way they look, she says. The bodies of male swimmers are idolized; women who play sports, their bodies are often considered distorted.
Speaking with the young women on the team, Sherris became inspired by not only their muscled physicality, but also their drive, ambition and positive body image. As someone who comes from a fashion background, where models are very apathetic over the way they have to look, it was really eye-opening to hear these swimmers talk about their bodies, she says. For them, its about being strong and healthy. Sherris wanted to celebrate that, so she created a handful of swim styles for the team to wear that, besides being functional, would show off all the muscles, and stuff that swimsuits often try to hide.
These are not Speedos: they might be built for speed and force, but theyre also undeniably cute. Available in colors selected for their ability to blend in with water (aquamarine for the pool, deep blue for the ocean), many of Babes and Bathers sporty styles come in sleek cuts or are adorned with girlie ruffles. The feedback Sherris received was ecstatic. Everyone told me, you have to make these, she says. So, I did.
Shuna Lydon has just finished cleaning up the weekly Friday brunch she prepares for 23 people and is off to walk Suzy the Dog, her sole companion at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. For the last three months, she has been installed as that institutions first chef-in-residence, cooking for the staff and visiting artists-in-residence. Shes also there to answer a personal question: What is it that feeds me about being a professional cook? Her tenure will last through the end of the year, but shes already begun to find answers. Its a magnificent opportunity, the pastry chef and restaurant veteran says, to get back to the real basics of cooking; youre making lunch and dinner. Its not about being fancy. Some of these artists are doing really physical work in their field sometimes its like feeding a bunch of workmen. Theyre hungry.
Most rewarding is listening to and interacting with artists from a myriad of practices and seeing how they all think and work differently. She gets to work differently, too, pushed out of her comfort zone to focus on savory food. Leaving New York City, where she was the pastry chef at Bakeri in Brooklyn, has enhanced the experience. For 40 years, Rauschenberg called this island a splinter of land along the Sunshine States southwest coast home. And four years after his death in 2008, his property was turned into an artists community in the tradition of Black Mountain College, where Bob, as hes referred to by everyone on-site, spent his early years. The building Lydon cooks in, the Weeks House, is a communal space, and although Rauschenberg didnt live in it, he did transport a fantastically massive restaurant stove from the Bowery, so, Lydon says, cooking here is like cooking in a chefs home kitchen!
The location does have its challenges. The first is the lack of an OFF button, which makes the situation a little like the French Laundry, where Lydon was the pastry sous chef, and the given was you worked from dark to dark, seven days a week. But she knew she wasnt signing up for the regular hours of a restaurant or a country club. Its like nothing else; it defies definition its a brand new thing, so the people who work it are writing it. There are also limited grocery options, so she drives to between half a dozen and a dozen stores a week to buy ingredients. Lydon assumed, due to the large Jewish population of places like Boca Raton and Palm Beach, or the vibrant Cuban community of Miami, that their respective foodstuffs would be readily available where she was. But there are, she says, no East-Coast ingredients here. On top of that, she has a seasonal setback: The local farmers stop planting in April and dont start again until the fall. Nothing grows near Captiva in the summer. And on Captiva, its always summer.
The constraints, though, have only fueled Lydons creativity they, along with the lack of restaurant pressures, allow for what she calls a more pure cooking experience. She will whip up a Southern-style brunch of biscuits and gravy with peach galettes one day, and a Thai-inspired meal of smoky charred eggplant with yuzu and soy with peanut-topped sesame noodles the next. She can pick the mangoes from Bobs trees and use them in a black-rice salad, or turn a local calabash squash into a warmly spiced, coconutty soup. Theres a reason, she notes, that artists residencies are always in remote places: You can go where theres big wide open spaces so that no matter what your practice is, you can focus inward, you can really get to your core with as little or as few distractions as possible Its like my soul is getting fed by being in the place.
The violence against officers is also causing angst among community leaders pushing for better policing.
What happened today will make our task harder, said Joe D. Connelly, the pastor of Wesley United Methodist Church, who has been active in rallies and protests in Baton Rouge since Alton B. Sterling was killed by the police on July 5 in a shooting caught on video. The challenge is that what we face has been heightened because of both the killing of Alton Sterling and the officers.
While the total number of officers killed by gunshots while on duty is lower than in recent decades, the nature of the attacks this month in Dallas and Baton Rouge, along with continuing protests around the nation spurred by videos showing fatal shootings of African-American men by the police, have led to considerable tensions.
Police officers including David O. Brown, the Dallas chief, say they are being threatened on social media, and other officers complain that protesters sometimes chant for them to be killed. Were all on edge, Chief Brown said last week, and were being very careful.
Twenty-eight officers have died from gunshots this year, compared with 18 at the same point last year, a 56 percent increase, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which tracks law enforcement deaths.
What officers say concerns them most: 14 of the deaths this year have come in ambushes, six more than in all of 2015 and only one fewer than in 2014. The officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge were ambushed by gunmen, officials said.
The congressman from Indiana reminded his colleagues of the necessity of confronting tyranny. He affirmed that he stood with President George W. Bush. And he declared Baghdad, simply, as guilty.
It has come from time to time upon the free nations of the world, and it seems most especially on the United States of America, to be willing to employ the arsenal of democracy to confront force with force as a last resort, the congressman, Mike Pence, told his fellow representatives in a speech shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And we may well become upon such a time again.
As the fighting continued year after year, Mr. Pence kept up his support, speaking forcefully in favor of the Iraq war even as many Americans turned against it. But his firm stance on that invasion now represents one of the most jarring differences in his abrupt political marriage to Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly emphasized his opposition to the war.
From the use of force to free trade to diplomacy, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence hold very different views of the United States role in the world, and reconciling them as they enter the heart of the campaign may prove to be a challenge.
CLEVELAND Senator Rob Portman of Ohio plans a very busy convention week as Republicans pour into his home state beginning Monday.
On two mornings, he will remodel houses in inner-city Cleveland with Habitat for Humanity. On Tuesday, he will kayak on the Cuyahoga River with wounded veterans. As the convention is gaveled to order on Monday afternoon, Mr. Portman, a Republican facing a tough re-election fight, will address hundreds of his campaign volunteers at a community college.
One place he will not speak, having addressed the past six Republican conventions, is inside Quicken Loans Arena, where Donald J. Trump will accept the nomination of the most divided national party of modern times.
Mr. Portman once looked forward to a convention in Cleveland that would turbocharge his re-election campaign. Now he joins other swing-state Republican senators who are shying away from the party gathering. They will be busily campaigning at home, running local races as if for sheriff, offering a split-screen view of a party that fears its Senate majority will be the collateral damage of a polarizing nominee.
CLEVELAND The attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, La., cast a grim mood over the opening of the Republican National Convention here, as Donald J. Trump responded to the killings with a stark warning that the country was falling apart.
A string of shootings targeting police officers, as well as the recent killings of two black men by police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana, had already pushed gun violence and social unrest to the center of the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump has campaigned on the theme of law and order since the assassination this month of five police officers in Dallas, and he is likely to amplify that message in the coming days.
Within hours of the killings on Sunday, in which three law enforcement officers were fatally shot and several others were wounded, Mr. Trump declared that the nation had become a divided crime scene and said that the Islamic State was watching as Americans murdered police officers. After President Obama issued a call for calm, Mr. Trump jabbed on Twitter that Mr. Obama doesnt have a clue.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has long battled criticism of his volcanic temper and questions about his temperament and readiness for the presidency, and it was unclear if a thunderous response to the shooting in Louisiana will help allay voters concerns. While Republicans often run on law-and-order themes, an indelicate approach could carry considerable danger at a moment of such unusual political instability.
The attacks have been so costly that Mr. Buhari sent troops that had been fighting in the north against Boko Haram the extremist group that has killed thousands and forced more than two million people to flee their homes to battle the Avengers in the south instead.
Mr. Buhari then reconfigured those efforts after complaints that marauding soldiers had roughed up people and property while looking for militants in the south, creating even more resentment among the impoverished people who live there.
Militants have struck in the south in the past, kidnapping or killing oil workers and police officers to demand a greater share of the nations oil wealth. But the Avengers seem bent on crippling Nigerias economy while it is particularly fragile, striking at the core of Mr. Buharis plans for the nation.
The Avengers have sent oil, power and gas workers fleeing, torturing the multinational companies that burrow for oil underneath the waters. Fuel deliveries around the country have stalled because almost everything that has to do with oil in Nigeria right now has been tangled up by the militants.
On the main highway in the southern port city of Warri recently, a long row of fuel tankers sat on the side of the road, idle. A bent-back windshield wiper served as a makeshift clothesline. A mini tube of toothpaste rested on the dashboard of one truck. The truckers were stranded, waiting to fill up.
They had been there a month.
We are not asking for much, but to free the people of the Niger Delta from environmental pollution, slavery and oppression, the Avengers wrote on their website, explaining their attacks. We want a country that will turn the creeks of the Niger Delta to a tourism heaven, a country that will achieve its full potentials, a country that will make health care system accessible by everyone. With Niger Delta still under the country Nigeria we cant make it possible.
A man sits on one side of a sofa, his face covered with a white mask, and he carries a yellow yarn ball in one hand. A white piece of clothing sits next to him, with tangled threads on top. A knitted piece along with two knitting needles rest upon the vacant part of the sofa, some how suggesting that it once housed the body of another person, possibly the mans own partner.
In the next photo the scene is reversed. The man is gone, but his white shirt rests on the sofa. His partner has retaken her position on the sofa and has picked up her yellow knitted piece with the yarn ball resting on her lap. Her face is sheathed in a white mask and shes knitting again, with threads from the yarn ball resting on her now vacant side.
In the third and last photo, both partners occupy the sofa. The mans hand is wrapped around the womans shoulders as he holds on to the yarn ball, she to the knitted piece, and tangled threads bind them together.
Such is a photo series titled July Tale which garnered its maker, Egyptian photographer Nourhan Refaat Maayouf, the main prize at the 2016 Barclays LAtelier, an annual South Africa-based contemporary art competition, announced in a ceremony held last week.
Nourhan Refaat Maayouf is the only Egyptian artist to have reached the finalist shortlist this year and the only Egyptian to have won the main award in the competition's history.
On miscommunication and human relationships
July Tale, as the notes accompanying the work reveal, tugs at "the complexity of a relationship. The attachment of two souls in spite of being blind and silent about their mutual issues."
The project was a product of what Maayouf calls a personal challenge she undertook in 2015 to create one artwork a month for the duration of a year, explains the artist in a recent phone interview with Ahram Online.
I produced an amalgam of single photos and some photo series. In my single photos, I was very adamant on creating staged scenes, each with its own story, she adds.
In July of that year, Maayouf embarked on a maskmaking and photography project that sought to meditate on the issue of communication in human relationships.
The final product was the July Tale project, in which she explored the different understandings of and approaches to relationships. While in the past people remained with one another regardless of problems they suffered, nowadays people do not invest in preserving their relationships and let any issues get in the way.
In July Tale, the exhibited couple are clearly battling with miscommunication. On the one hand, the husband does not speak up about whats going on within him, while the woman is metaphorically blind and does not really see him.
But in spite of this communication problem, the couple, Maayouf explains, remains attached to each other, which is manifested by the knitting process as a proof of the womans unceasing investment in the relationship. You also see that threads from the yarn ball bind them together as a further manifestation of this perpetual attachment. So that when one partner is gone, the other remains holding on to them.
Maayouf first exhibited July Tale at the 26th Youth Salon held last year, and was this year encouraged to submit it to the Barclays LAtelier's open call announced last January.
Good news arrived last month when Maayouf was informed that she had made it to the top 10 list of finalists. Maayouf then travelled to South Africa where she, along with the other finalists, attended a workshop in art professionalism and the opening of an exhibition held at Johannesburgs Absa Gallery displaying this years submissions.
Maayouf won this year's Barclays LAtelier's main prize and is due to spend a six-month residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2017, followed by a solo exhibition of her work at Absa gallery.
I finished this artwork on 18 July 2015 and now, exactly one year later, Im celebrating this major award for it. I didnt seeing this coming at all, especially [since] all the other submissions were beautiful. But I felt so proud because I really love and appreciate my work.
As Maayouf puts it, her work finds appeal among the audience because it employs a global language without focusing on one specific culture. Rather Im always keen that my concept photography and visual work speak to as many and diverse categories of people as possible.
Beginnings
Maayouf was 21 when she first embarked on photography. She was in her senior year as a student at the Faculty of Commerce at Ain Shams University, and had nurtured a passion for the arts, especially drawing, since an early age.
Upon graduation, she obtained an Integrated Marketing Communications Diploma from the American University in Cairo (accredited by the International Advertising Association) and worked in the fields of social media and marketing research, pursuing her artistic vocation in parallel.
At first, I was taking very generic photos of landscapes, portraits, etc. but step by step you figure out what is it that you want to capture with your camera exactly," she asserts.
I made use of whatever tools were available. Even today, I still take photos in a small corner in my room, use an entry-level camera and depend on natural day-light; all very simple and accessible tools because I believe theres much beauty in simplicity.
Maayouf began with some experimental photography work, relying on wigs, masks, and dresses. Id set the camera on self-timer and enter the scene, posing as the subject of my own photo.
As she cultivated her passion for staged photography, Maayouf spent 2013 and 2014 further exploring this genre through single shots.
I start in a setting and at times do not necessarily have a specific idea to begin with, but keep experimenting and at the end come up with a concept. I really enjoy the process of creating a whole new scene and molding a story from scratch.
Maayouf chooses to revisit two particular photos from this repertoire. The first is titled After the Party; it shows a girl whose two legs stretch out from under the bed where she seems to be hiding from society. A wig rests on the bed, a dress is thrown on the adjacent chair, and black heels are scattered on the floor.
The idea was to question this issue of identity and show how the girl is at peace with herself the most when shes under the bed, away from people, and how she wears the wig, dress and heels just to appeal to society.
The other photo, titled Kitchen Tales, was also a staged scene. It took place in a kitchen setting and featured a girl standing next to a stove, with blood stains across the stoves surface, a doll head coming out of a cooking pot, and a wig appearing from the sides of the cooker in what can be described as a very disturbing scene, depicting a stolen childhood; one that is being killed.
Further experimentation
In 2015, Maayouf chose to take her passion for concept photography a step further, experimenting with photo series.
One such project was titled Faces of September, and was part of the artist's 2015 challenge discussed above. This series of three photos features characters wearing masks, which Maayouf created herself thanks to a mask-making workshop she had attended. Each of the three created masks, Maayouf explains, sought to negotiate a certain concept.
The first mask was covered with labels and sought to portray todays hyper consumerism, showing how brands influence us and made us weak vis-a-vis our purchasing power. The second mask featured one eye adorned with flowers and which tugged at unuttered feelings. The third mask comprised a black and white half and another colorful one, and it represented what we call the Left Brain-Right Brain Conflict.
As is true of most of her other works, this series was inspired by a personal experience, explains Maayouf.
That Maayouf is invested in storytelling does not suggest rigidity when it comes to accepting other, varying readings of her work.
If anything, Im not spoon-feeding my concepts," she explains. "And this is the beauty of art. You create your own message and you make other people think and translate their own message out of it too.
While it is apparent that Maayoufs artistic vocation is steeped in experimentation, what unites her different projects is a profound interest in discoursing about human relationships, an interest that she has managed to tackle masterfully.
For the award-winning 26-year-old artist who also manages a full-time job as a communications manager, practice is the key word.
I am a self-taught artist and only attended one course to help me with the techniques of photography. Everything developed through practice.
For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture
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ISTANBUL Turkeys liberals have spent years feeling that the country was being piloted in the wrong direction by a very powerful captain. They have watched with trepidation as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expanded his powers, enriched his allies and increased the role of religion in public life.
But none of that made young liberals like Koray Suzer, a 25-year-old fitness trainer, sympathize with the renegade military officers who launched a failed coup against Mr. Erdogan on Friday night. Turkey, Mr. Suzer said, has moved past the days when its military should intervene in politics.
The worst democracy is better than the best coup, he said on Sunday.
Turkeys politics are notoriously polarized, and its history of coups remains branded in the memories of its older generations. But the scarcity of popular support for the attempt to topple Mr. Erdogan over the weekend suggests a broad commitment among Turks to the processes of democracy, even if they do not always like the results.
NICE, France There is the Nice of popular imagination, the old-world resort dotted with palm trees and cafes that look out on the Mediterranean Sea, suffused with an incandescent light prized for centuries by artists.
Then there is the other Nice, one that begins to show its face a few blocks inland from the seaside Promenade des Anglais, the majestic arc of a boulevard where 84 people were killed by a 31-year-old Tunisian immigrant at the wheel of a 19-ton truck. This Nice is home to many Muslim immigrants from North Africa, including a secular middle-class that has lived alongside non-Muslim French, and is also a place that local officials estimate has sent as many as 100 young people to fight in Syria with extremists.
It is rare that these two worlds mix with each other except at the moment of festivities or of agreement, like the gatherings on Saturday, said Feiza Ben Mohamed of the Muslims of the South, an organization that fights radicalization, referring to the public mourning for those killed in the truck attack.
Yet the first victim was Muslim, and a good number of the victims were Muslims, Ms. Mohamed added. Just yesterday I was on the promenade reflecting on what had happened, and a journalist asked me if I was there to apologize in the name of Muslims. I said to him, No, I came to weep for the dead like everyone else.
BANGALORE, India The last months of U. R. Ananthamurthys life were tumultuous. One of Indias foremost novelists and political commentators, Mr. Ananthamurthy, who died in August 2014 at 81, had threatened to leave the country if Narendra Modi, then leading the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, won the vote in the national election. Mr. Ananthamurthys remarks drew vitriol, abuse and death threats from Mr. Modis supporters, and he remained under round-the-clock police protection for months.
In June, a political tract Mr. Ananthamurthy wrote during the final stage of his life, the parting shot of a writer who devoted substantial time to warning of the dangers of Hindu nationalism, was published to widespread acclaim. More than two years after Mr. Modis election as prime minister, even as many continue to fear that Indias founding values of secularism and diversity are under threat, Mr. Ananthamurthys voice has served as an urgent reminder of the perils of majoritarianism and hyper-nationalism.
The tract, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj, an excoriating critique of Mr. Modi and Hindu nationalism in India, was completed between Mr. Modis election in May 2014 and Mr. Ananthamurthys death. A novella-length tract, in the manner of Ta-Nehisi Coatess Between the World and Me, the book takes the form of a conversation with the nation.
I feel an urgent need to talk to myself, Mr. Ananthamurthy writes in the book as he reflects on a country he says he barely recognized, both because of the nationwide humiliation that came my way when I rejected Modi and because of Modis overwhelming victory that left me astounded.
Of course, digital information does not exist in the same sense that a piece of paper can be found in a specific location. With a few keystrokes, electronic files can be whisked across the globe, and it would have been easy for Microsoft simply to move the information in the customers email account to the United States. While the files were in Ireland, that was more a product of how the company chose to store them rather than a conscious decision by the account owner to try to keep them outside the United States.
A concurring opinion by Judge Gerard E. Lynch of the Second Circuit makes it clear that the decision to limit the scope of the warrant resulted from an outdated law, not a choice by Congress to hamstring investigations of foreign conduct that might violate American laws. He pointed out that there is no evidence that Congress has ever weighed the costs and benefits of authorizing court orders of the sort at issue in this case, because in 1986 that was simply not an issue.
The whole idea behind cloud storage is that electronic information would be available anywhere, so focusing on a particular server may not reflect how the data is stored and retrieved. The very notion that electronic communications are in one particular country may be unrealistic about what actually takes place with data. Email files can be scattered throughout the world and broken into different parts, and may be shifted almost continuously through a companys system. This is far from the storage of files in the equivalent of locked cabinets that much of the law seems to envision.
Nor is this Microsofts first tussle with the government over the Stored Communications Act. In April, the company filed a lawsuit claiming that secrecy orders issued under the law to prevent providers from notifying customers of demands for their information violated its First Amendment rights along with the Fourth Amendment. So it has taken a harder line in its dealings with the government rather than making an easy accommodation to produce the emails sought in an investigation.
The incentives created by the Second Circuits decision are likely to prove highly problematic for investigators dealing with foreign suspects. It could even affect cases involving domestic conduct if communication providers were to read the opinion as authorizing them to shift data overseas to avoid having to produce customer information in an investigation.
Take it a step further by imagining the possibility that a company might offer an email service perhaps called Crim Mail guaranteeing users that their electronic files would be stored overseas. It could even choose to put servers in a location that is notably hostile to the United States and that would welcome the chance to throw a wrench in law enforcement efforts. The company could charge a premium to have files maintained only in specified locations, making it almost impossible for investigators to ever gain access to them.
No doubt such a series of events is far-fetched, but where there is an opportunity to take advantage of the law, someone may try to pursue it. Recall how the Panama Papers showed that lawyers could exploit gaps in how business entities can be created, with virtually no oversight, to help move money across the globe anonymously.
LONDON Its another reunion of Morgan Stanley alumni.
When SoftBank of Japan announced on Monday a $32 billion deal to acquire the British chip designer ARM Holdings, it was notable for a number of reasons, including its being the first major deal to be announced since Britains vote to leave the European Union.
But the deal also represented a reunion of former Morgan Stanley bankers who, working from newly minted independent investment banks and at the client, SoftBank, convened from different parts of the globe to advise Japans third-largest telecommunication company.
SoftBanks lead adviser was Jeffrey Sine at the Raine Group, which was founded in 2009 by a former Goldman Sachs banker, Joseph Ravitch, and Mr. Sine. Until 2001, when he left to take a senior position at the Swiss bank UBS, Mr. Sine was the global head of media and communications investment banking at Morgan Stanley.
He first got to know SoftBank in the mid-1990s. While working for Morgan Stanley he helped the Japanese company, then under the radar, acquire a trade show production company for $200 million. The tiny deal was the start of a long relationship between Mr. Sine and Masayoshi Son, SoftBanks founder and a gifted investor.
When Masayoshi Son, the billionaire Japanese technology investor, solidified his control over his SoftBank internet conglomerate last month, he told shareholders he still wanted to work on a few more crazy ideas.
One of those ideas materialized on Monday, when SoftBank unveiled an audacious $32 billion deal to acquire ARM Holdings, the British semiconductor designer. The deal one of the biggest of the year would give the Japanese company control of a firm whose chip designs can be found in most of the worlds mobile gadgets, from iPhones and drones to a growing array of smart devices and appliances for the home.
The deal is the first major cross-border transaction in Britain since it voted to exit the European Union last month. Worries over the impact to the British economy have weakened the value of the countrys currency and made it cheaper for foreign companies like SoftBank to hunt for deals there. Compared with this same time in 2015, for example, pound-denominated assets are 30 percent cheaper for buyers holding yen.
For SoftBank, the deal signals another reinvention, this time with a major bet on a future filled with interconnected devices. While major technology companies see a future in smart thermostats and toasters, the technology has not yet become widely available. At the same time, global sales of smartphones have slowed, showing the mobile future has limits.
Calls to public health hotlines can predict dengue fever outbreaks two or three weeks earlier than local hospitals can confirm them, according to a new study from Pakistan.
The study looked at 300,000 calls to a health hotline in Lahore over two years. By asking callers to describe their symptoms and give their addresses, operators were able to pinpoint which districts in the city were having dengue outbreaks.
Getting that information quickly was important because mosquito-control teams could be quickly dispatched to the right neighborhoods instead of arriving late or working at random in Lahore, a city of more than 10 million people, said Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, a computer science professor at New York University and one of the authors of the study, which was published this month in the journal Science Advances.
The idea works a bit like Google Flu Trends, which tries to spot influenza outbreaks early by identifying clusters of people searching for flu symptoms or flu remedies. But in poor countries like Pakistan, few people have internet access while many have cellphones, Dr. Subramanian said.
WASHINGTON In another puzzling twist to the Zika epidemic, the Utah Department of Health on Monday reported the diagnosis of a new case of the virus that did not appear to have been contracted through either of the known sources of transmission: a mosquito bite or sexual contact.
The patient, who has fully recovered, was a family contact who helped care for an older man who had become infected with the virus after traveling abroad. That man, from Salt Lake County, died in June. He also had other ailments, and it was unclear whether the virus had contributed to his death.
MADISON, Wis. Of the hundreds of monkeys in the University of Wisconsins primate center, a few including rhesus macaque 827577 are now famous, at least among scientists tracking the Zika virus.
Since February, a team led by David H. OConnor, the chairman of the centers global infectious diseases department, has been conducting a unique experiment in scientific transparency. The tactic may presage the evolution of new ways to respond to fast-moving epidemics.
Dr. OConnor and his colleagues have been infecting pregnant female macaques with the Zika virus, minutely recording their symptoms, and giving them blood tests and ultrasounds. But then, instead of saving their data for academic journals, the researchers have posted it almost immediately on a website anyone can visit.
The openness of the process thrills scientists, who say it fosters collaboration and speeds research.
As scientists learn more about how the Zika virus can cause brain damage in a developing fetus, a major question has remained: How does a virus that infects a pregnant mother through a mosquito bite on her skin get into her womb?
It is not a simple question. Most viruses that infect a pregnant woman cannot cross from her bloodstream through the placenta, the organ that forms to nourish and protect the fetus as it grows and develops.
Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Technical Cooperation visited the Grand Egyptian Museum and the Giza Plateau
During his visit to Egypt, Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Technical Cooperation Dazhu Yang paid a visit Monday evening to the Egyptian Museum and the Giza Plateau.
Yang was guided by Tarek Tawfik, General Supervisor of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), during his visit to the museum's wooden artefact laboratories and a number of the Tutankhamun collection exhibits that were transported to GEM for restoration.
Yang was very happy with the efficient work carried out in the labs and described the Egyptian restoration technicians as 'skillful'.
Tawfik also led Yang on a tour of GEM construction work and explained the museum's different construction phases, which began in 2002 and are still presently underway.
Yang then toured the Giza plateau, where he visited Khufu's Pyramid and the Sphinx
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Every Thursday night, Bill Korbel, a veteran meteorologist, offers his standard weather forecast to viewers on a Long Island cable channel. Then he follows up with his outlook for toxic algae.
On a map, Mr. Korbel points out areas with high concentrations of algae natural gatherings of microscopic plankton that, while often innocuous, can degrade water quality and even be dangerous.
Brown or red tide is much catchier than harmful algal bloom, Mr. Korbel joked about the right wording to use in his broadcast. Its a relatively new topic for him, something that was never part of his decades-long career. Nor was it part, he said, of his meteorology training at New York University. That was down the hall, in oceanography, he said.
Mr. Korbel may not be an outlier for long. If a growing number of scientists have their way and can get federal funding they say is desperately need to protect the public algae forecasts could become as common as weather reports, and as essential.
By 2012, Mr. Long had moved briefly, apparently to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he spent one semester at the University of Alabama. He majored in business. He made the deans list. The University of Alabama police had no interactions with him during his time there. Mike Mansur, a spokesman for the Jackson County prosecutors office, which covers most of Kansas City, said his office also had no record of contact with Mr. Long.
He also attended Clark Atlanta University during the 2012-13 school year, and was in good academic standing, a university spokeswoman said. Although he claimed to be on the deans list there, he said he had dropped out, sold his two cars, gave away his possessions and traveled to Africa.
Mr. Long appeared to be obsessed with the idea of self-improvement, for himself and for others, and he embraced more esoteric means of achieving those goals.
While traveling to Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, he said, he wrote three books, covering topics like holistic detoxification for health, well-being and success; the ancient esoteric secrets of the Pineal Gland; and the 124 Universal Laws and their use in the Laws of the Cosmos.
In 2015, Mr. Long filed the petition to change his name. In his statement of intent, he said he was a member of an indigenous society called the United Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah Muur nation. It was apparently a reference to the Empire Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah. On its website, the group says it is a multicultural, highly spiritual nation of aboriginal, indigenous Americans.
The group is largely African-American and subscribes to a sovereign citizen ideology holding that members are no longer beholden to any form of government, said Ryan Lenz, a senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups.
On Monday morning, a man who answered a phone number on the website and said he was a leader of the group, Fredrix Joe Washington, said he had never heard of Mr. Long.
BALTIMORE It was the third straight acquittal, by the same judge, on the same set of facts: On Monday, Lt. Brian Rice, the highest-ranking Baltimore police officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray, was found not guilty of three charges, including involuntary manslaughter.
And a question that has been simmering among some legal observers ever since acquittals began piling up in the multi-defendant prosecution immediately turned to a full boil: With no convictions to show in four trials related to the death of Mr. Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury during an arrest in which he rode unsecured in a police van, should prosecutors drop a retrial and the two others that remain?
It would seem at this point the state has exhausted all of its possible theories, and should give real consideration to ending these prosecutions, said Warren Alperstein, a defense lawyer in Baltimore who has been closely following the trials. There are many that would argue its time to cut the losses.
Another local defense lawyer, Warren A. Brown, put it differently as he reflected on the fact that Judge Barry G. Williams had again determined that prosecutors did not present enough evidence to prove that the officer on trial had committed a crime.
For days, Mr. Leslies whereabouts had remained unknown. He was not listed among the injured or the dead. His friends posted frantic messages on social media, searching for information about his whereabouts or condition.
His parents flew to France, and learned over the weekend that Nicolas had been struck by the truck and had died instantly, his father, Conrad Leslie, said.
Paola Leslie, Mr. Leslies mother, said by telephone from France that her son had packed a lifes worth of activity into his 20 years. It looks like he had the life of someone who lived 70 years, she said.
The Berkeley campus had already been reeling from the death of an 18-year-old sophomore, Tarishi Jain, in a terrorist attack on a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh, early this month. Ms. Jain was an Indian citizen working on e-commerce growth at Eastern Bank Limited in Dhaka through a university internship.
Nicolas Leslie was born in Italy, and his family moved to Southern California when he was a child.
Living in Del Mar, outside San Diego, he made the ocean something of a second home. By 16, he was certified as a kite surfing instructor and could do flips in the air. He kept a list of the types of sharks he saw while scuba diving he was up to 12 and he loved spear fishing. His father said Nicolas once wrote an academic essay on how spearing was the most sustainable way to fish.
Its real out here, man. Im here for yall, Mr. Long tells the group of mostly black patrons.
Be great, have knowledge, he says as he walks out the door.
From Gavin to Cosmo
Mr. Long filed a form last year in Jackson County, Mo., to change his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, a name freighted with ancient Egyptian references.
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.
CLEVELAND As Hillary Clinton prepares to announce her running mate later this week, the political calculations have suddenly changed.
Had Donald J. Trump chosen a woman or a minority as his vice-presidential candidate, Mrs. Clinton would have faced pressure from liberals to make her own bold choice. If Mr. Trump had picked a fiery raconteur like Newt Gingrich or Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, two of his finalists, the decision would have given Mrs. Clinton pause about putting a young fresh face on the debate stage this fall rather than an attack dog, according to several Clinton campaign advisers. And if the Republican No. 2 was from a critical swing state, the electoral map might have loomed larger in her considerations.
Instead, Mr. Trump picked Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana a button-down, deeply conservative white man from a Republican-leaning state whose record appeals strongly to his partys base.
By choosing someone so conventional, Mr. Trump has made it easier for Mrs. Clinton to follow suit with an unadventurous pick of her own, like Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia or Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa. She could send Housing Secretary Julian Castro out to debate Mr. Pence without fearing a blowout. Or she could pick Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, who is from the reliably Democratic state of Maryland.
WASHINGTON It was near dusk on a Monday in May 1967, and six American helicopter crews were on their third trip that day to rescue dozens of American paratroopers pinned down by North Vietnamese troops.
With each trip into the battle, the aircrews faced heavy fire. And then, as they were lifting clear for what they all thought was the last time, a call came over the radio: Eight paratroopers were still on the ground.
At that moment, the lead pilot, Maj. Charles S. Kettles, flew back into the line of fire, already carrying a full load, for a fourth time to save the stranded paratroopers.
A soldier never leaves his comrades behind, President Obama said on Monday as he presented Mr. Kettles, 86 and a retired Army lieutenant colonel, with the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony. Chuck Kettles honored that creed not with a single act of heroism, but over and over and over.
Our efforts will remain focused on the Senate, Mr. Davis said.
But for Mr. Trump, who has only recently begun to build a modern presidential fund-raising apparatus, the choice of Mr. Pence could yet yield financial dividends. Mr. Pence has his own relationships to donors aligned with the Kochs, along with many other big givers who have until now been reluctant to get behind Mr. Trump or contribute to pro-Trump groups.
David M. McIntosh, a longtime friend of Mr. Pence and also a former Indiana congressman who is now the president of the Club for Growth said his group was not planning to get involved in the presidential race. But he predicted that Mr. Pences presence on the ticket would prompt some club donors to give or raise money for Mr. Trump.
There will be some who say, I will give to Mike Pence and help the ticket because of him, Mr. McIntosh said. And youll see others who will say, I am still not going to support that financially, but will contribute in other ways.
In Indiana, where state law puts no limits on the amount of money individuals can give to candidates for governor, Mr. Pence has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy businessmen like Frederick S. Klipsch, the retired founder of an Indiana-based loudspeaker company, and John Childs, the Florida-based leveraged-buyout investor. Both are involved in Freedom Partners, and Mr. Childs is a major donor to the Club for Growth.
David Koch is Mr. Pences third-largest all-time individual donor, while Mark Holden, the general counsel of Koch Industries, is sixth on the list.
In an interview, Mr. Klipsch said he had enormous respect for Mr. Pence, particularly the governors education initiatives, such as expanding charter schools in Indiana.
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We often allow ourselves to be oblivious to the struggles of the working class.
Some white readers were aghast at the resentment and racism they saw on display in the article, and they argued that the anger of some Trump voters was misplaced. Other readers said that affluent whites had a duty to empathize better with the economic travails of those less well off.
Well, Im a deeply ashamed, old, white guy who is worried that, by my appearance alone, I could be mistaken for belonging to this group of knuckleheads. The truly puzzling thing about all this is the illogical mental Jiu Jitsu that must be accomplished to blame white decline on those who are doing even worse than they are and not on the ones pulling the strings in government (the 1%). Rick Gage, Mt. Dora
We read books and watch documentaries that teach us the right things to say and do about the poor. But we often allow ourselves to be oblivious to the struggles of the working class. We scoff at lost manufacturing jobs, when those lost jobs devastated whole communities. ZAW, Houston, Tex.
Whites are losing political, social and economic supremacy in this country; the country is going from one run predominantly by whites to one where whites are increasingly one among equals. That means increased clout for minorities and the disadvantaged; thats a good thing. Alex Dersh, Palo Alto, Calif.
Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are not threats to Euro-American culture. Whites are. It is true in Europe as well. When the birthrate drops below the replacement level, cities and towns, jobs and organizations will either start to be abandoned or will be taken over by other people. Take a look at Japan. They havent allowed immigrants because they want to maintain their pure culture. Now their towns are dying. Philip Greider, Los Angeles
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I am not a Trump voter, but I understand them.
Some readers argued that our article had glossed over the distinction between dangerous racial resentments and a simple belief in the old idea of the melting pot. If whites and other Americans were more uncomfortable with new arrivals, they wrote, it was partly because those new arrivals did not seem interested in becoming Americans.
Throughout our history, people from all lands have been welcomed here. While they have all brought unique aspects of their heritage and culture which makes America so unique it its diversity, there was an understanding, in fact a willingness, to become AMERICAN! That especially includes adopting the mores and norms of the American society and learning the American English language. Tim DuHaime, St. Petersburg, Fla.
The morning after five police officers were killed in Dallas this month, part of the turmoil that spread in the wake of killings by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Corporal Jackson, who was black, typed out his thoughts on Facebook.
I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me, he wrote. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.
He added: Please dont let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better.
Nine days later, Corporal Jackson was dead, just over a month after his 10th anniversary on the Baton Rouge force. He was assigned to the Police Departments uniform patrol bureau.
When they graduate from the academy, were all in our finest gear and our dress uniforms, and they walk across the stage one at a time and they greet me, Jeff LeDuff, the former police chief in Baton Rouge who hired Corporal Jackson, said in an interview.
Esprit de corps is high, Mr. LeDuff continued. I remember he couldnt hold it. He was so happy to get that commission that he was smiling, and it lit up the stage with that smile on his face. That was the sort of man he was.
The terror and death and protest and racial resentment in the United States have revived an old question: Does the United States need to join South Africa, Cambodia, Rwanda and others in pursuing a truth and reconciliation process?
In May, the United States government put out a white paper extolling such processes. It said they can reduce violence, strengthen security and deepen cohesion.
The paper endorsed economic reparations, truth commissions and memorial building. The government even expressed a willingness to pay for national healing processes. Truth and reconciliation are, after all, a core moral responsibility of the United States.
But not for the United States. The State Departments endorsement of truth and reconciliation applies, potentially, to any country on earth but its own.
NAIROBI, Kenya A high court in Kenya charged four police officers with murder on Monday in connection with what human rights groups are calling the extrajudicial killings of an activist lawyer, his client and their taxi driver in late June.
Rights groups believe that foul play was behind the deaths of the three, and have demanded an investigation into this case and other allegations of police corruption and heavy-handed tactics.
The four officers Frederick Leliman, Leonard Maina, Stephen Morogo and Silvia Wanjohi pleaded not guilty on Monday, court documents showed.
They are accused of killing Willie Kimani, 32, a human rights lawyer, and his client Josphat Mwenda, 27, along with their driver, Joseph Muiruri, 27, on June 23. The three disappeared after Mr. Kimani and Mr. Mwenda made a court appearance in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and their bodies were found in a river a week later.
BRASILIA Before becoming Brazils interim president, Michel Temer had a bit more free time on his hands. As a lawmaker shuttling between Brasilia and Sao Paulo a few years ago, he found himself jotting his musings on cocktail napkins in airport lounges.
In 2013, his first book of poetry, Anonymous Intimacy, was published, drawing mostly yawns from Brazilians.
Mr. Temer, 75, a button-down career politician whose demeanor is so cryptically ceremonious that his rivals liken him to a butler in a horror movie, was apparently inspired by an array of themes.
He brooded about the demise of letter-writing in the text-messaging era. He described a rookie lawyers pride in winning a case. Then there was his septuagenarians lustful ardor after all, he had courted a new bride 42 years his junior.
HONG KONG China said Monday that it had begun what would become regular military air patrols over disputed islands and shoals of the South China Sea, highlighting its claim to the vast area a week after an international tribunal said Beijings assertion of sovereignty over the waters had no legal basis.
Chinas air force flew a combat air patrol over the South China Sea recently, Xinhua, the official news agency, reported, citing Shen Jinke, an air force spokesman. The patrol consisted of bombers, fighters, scouts and tankers and would become regular practice, Mr. Shen said, according to Xinhua.
The announcement of the air patrols, plus a separate statement that China would conduct military exercises in the South China Sea off the coast of Hainan Island, came as Adm. John M. Richardson, the chief of United States naval operations, was in Beijing to discuss the South China Sea and other issues that arose after the tribunal rebuked Chinas claims over the waters on July 12.
The landmark decision rejected Chinas assertion that it enjoys historical rights over a huge area of the South China Sea encompassed by a nine-dash line. China had argued that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in the matter.
MOSCOW A gunman stormed a police station on Monday in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, and killed three officers and two civilians in an attack attributed to radical Islamist motivations.
The attack elevated concerns about the spread of terrorism in former Soviet Central Asia as an oil bust ripples through regional economies and the Islamic States footprint expands.
The police in Almaty said the attacker wrested a rifle from a guard at a police station, wounded him and then used the weapon to kill three police officers. As the battle raged, the gunman shot and killed one of the two civilian victims before hijacking his Toyota Corolla. He was later caught by the police and taken into custody.
Early on Monday, officers said that two men had attacked the police station. But later, in a clarification, they said that the second suspect was in fact a hostage a taxi driver who had been forced to drive the gunman to the scene of the attack.
They said that officially you cannot publish the newspapers for at least three days because the situation was volatile, Mr. Bukhari said. In a way, they told us that the newspapers were a threat to peace.
In 2010, newspapers were not printed for several days during monthslong unrest, partly Mr. Bukhari said, because a curfew prevented the staff from reaching the office. In another wave of unrest in 2013, the police seized newspapers in response to popular protests, he said. But Saturday was different.
This is the first time we have been officially censored, Mr. Bukhari said.
The authorities have been known to operate with a heavy hand in Indian-administered Kashmir, the source of a bitter dispute between India and Pakistan. The region has been scarred by a cycle of insurgency, civil unrest and crackdown. The violence peaked in the 1990s, but a heavy military presence remains, as India accuses Pakistan of continuing to support violent militants there; Pakistan accuses India of unjustly annexing Kashmir and abusing its Muslim-majority population.
It is a temporary measure to address an extraordinary situation, Naeem Akhtar, the state education minister and government spokesman, told The Indian Express of the suspension of newspaper printing. Young people, he told the paper, get charged up due to certain projections in the media, which results in multiplication of tragedies.
Mr. Akhtar was not reachable by phone on Monday, and the divisional commissioner of Kashmir did not confirm or deny the ban. But on Monday evening, Amitabh Mattoo, the adviser to the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir State, denied that the government had issued a ban.
MOSCOW Militants who attacked a police building in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, killing one person, remained holed up with a number of hostages for a second day on Monday, demanding that the government resign and that it release an opposition leader.
Two hostages were released overnight on Monday after intense negotiations, the National Security Service of Armenia said in a statement, and special forces helped release two others a day earlier.
Those who were still believed to be held included the deputy head of Armenias national police, Maj. Gen. Vardan Egiazaryan, and the deputy head of Yerevans police, Col. Valery Osipyan, according to local news websites.
The confrontation resulted in one death on Sunday during the initial capture of the building. A police officer, Col. Artur Vanoyan, was killed and three others were wounded, the local news website Panorama.am reported.
WEIMAR, Germany A 17-year-old Afghan youth who came to Germany as a migrant last year attacked several passengers with an ax and a knife on a train in the south of the country late on Monday, injuring at least four people, while 14 others were treated for shock, the police said.
After the train made an emergency stop, the attacker fled and was pursued by police officers, who fatally shot him, according to the interior minister of the state of Bavaria, Joachim Herrmann. The motive for the attack remained unclear.
The young man had entered Germany without his parents and applied for asylum, Mr. Herrmann said. According to government figures, more than 14,400 unaccompanied minors arrived last year among the more than one million migrants who entered the country.
Mr. Herrmann said the attacker had initially lived in a group home, but had most recently been taken in by a foster family. The German authorities have worked to place as many of the minors as possible with families, in hopes of helping them to better integrate into society.
BRUSSELS The United States and the European Union stepped up pressure on Monday on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to not use an attempted coup as an excuse for an authoritarian crackdown.
Officials even suggested that Turkeys continued membership in NATO and its aspirations of joining the European Union could be at stake.
Meeting in Brussels, Secretary of State John Kerry and European Union foreign ministers called on Mr. Erdogan to show restraint in the wake of the failed coup, even as he continued to round up political opponents and as Turkey debated whether it should reinstate the death penalty to deal with the plotters.
Obviously, NATO also has a requirement with respect to democracy, and NATO will indeed measure very carefully what is happening, Mr. Kerry said. And my hope is that Turkey is going to move in ways that do respect what they have said to me many times is the bedrock of their country.
ISTANBUL When the army cut off traffic in Istanbul on Friday night by shutting two bridges in the opening moments of a coup, the municipality ordered ferries to work overtime. City trucks blocked roads near army barracks. Buses and subways operated free of charge, and local officials and mosque preachers helped mobilize government supporters to the streets.
And when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally emerged in public, after uncertain hours in which he narrowly missed being seized at a seaside hotel by soldiers trying to topple his government, he flew, not to the capital, Ankara, but to Istanbul, where he remained throughout the weekend and on Monday.
Ankara may be the seat of Turkeys government, but it was Mr. Erdogans grip on Istanbul, a city he once governed as mayor, that was crucial in putting down the coup.
In the failed coups aftermath, it was in the streets, mosques and public squares in Istanbul that his Islamist supporters raucously celebrated, and where Mr. Erdogan consolidated his hold on power.
PARIS The moment of silence on Monday for the victims of Thursdays attack in Nice ended abruptly as boos and jeers rose from the crowd of thousands filling the Promenade des Anglais, where 84 people had been killed. The object of the derision was Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who had arrived flanked by national and local political leaders to pay his respects.
Cries of Resign, resign swept the crowd when Mr. Valls arrived, and as he left. A couple of people could be heard on a televised clip saying, Assassins, while others disapproved of the heckling: They should show some respect, one woman said.
The catcalls came after a weekend of finger pointing at the Socialist government by right-leaning opposition politicians. Hours later, the Paris prosecutor, Francois Molins, described what the investigation by the French authorities had so far revealed about the killer, who used a cargo truck and an automatic pistol to carry out a deadly assault on a crowd celebrating Bastille Day.
The new information further fleshed out a portrait painted by the family of the killer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a Tunisian citizen, as a troubled man who had uncontrolled fits of anger and a fascination with extreme violence.
LONDON Prime Minister Theresa May, in her first major parliamentary appearance since taking office last week, won a vote on Monday to authorize and update Britains nuclear arsenal, a move intended to underscore the nations commitment to remaining a global power despite its recent decision to leave the European Union.
The vote in Parliament on maintaining Britains nuclear missiles and the submarines that carry them also gave the new British leader a chance to highlight the deep divisions in the opposition Labour Party over the issue, and the relative unity of her own Conservative Party after months in which the Conservatives were deeply split over whether to leave the European Union.
But the issue also illustrated the deep strains afflicting Britain after the Brexit vote. The Scottish National Party, which dominates representation of Scotland, fiercely opposes the nuclear system as well as withdrawal from the European Union, and it has indicated that it might seek another referendum on Scottish independence, after a failed vote in 2014, if Britain goes through with its departure from the bloc. Britains nuclear submarines are based in Scotland, which complicates the question of how the nation could retain its capacity as a nuclear deterrent if Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom.
Making her first statement in the House of Commons since becoming prime minister, Ms. May told lawmakers that it would be an act of gross irresponsibility not to replace the nations aging fleet of nuclear-armed submarines at a time when threats were increasing. Lawmakers later supported renewal of the Trident nuclear program by a vote of 472 to 117.
ISTANBUL The Turkish governments crackdown after a military coup attempt widened into a sweeping purge on Monday, cutting a swath through the security services and reaching deeply into the government bureaucracy and the political and business classes.
The sheer numbers being detained or dismissed were stunning: nearly 18,000 in all, including 6,000 members of the military, almost 9,000 police officers, as many as 3,000 judges, 30 governors and one-third of all generals and admirals, as well as President Recep Tayyip Erdogans own military attache.
The magnitude of the backlash by Mr. Erdogan suggested that the depth of support for the coup was far greater than it initially appeared, or that the president was using the opportunity to root out all perceived adversaries, or both.
As hopes faded that Mr. Erdogan would try to use the moment to unite the country, instead taking a security-first approach, Western allies began to express alarm at what looked like score-settling. On Monday in Brussels, Secretary of State John Kerry and the European Unions top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, urged Turkey a member of NATO and a candidate for membership in the European Union to show restraint and preserve the rule of law.
CAIRO Egyptians watched raptly over the weekend as military forces moved to unseat a democratically elected Islamist president in Turkey, reminding many of a similar move by the Egyptian military three years ago.
That political intervention in 2013 led by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ousted the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, and all but wiped out his Muslim Brotherhood.
Many Egyptians had hoped to see a similar result when Turkish soldiers tried to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist ally of Mr. Morsi who has criticized his removal, and the crackdown that followed.
I will not deny there was a lot of excitement, said Dalia Youssef, the deputy chairwoman of the foreign affairs committee in Egypts Parliament, after images of military vehicles rolling through the streets of Ankara and Istanbul interrupted her vacation.
Israel has also invested hugely in intelligence, its tactics evolving as its enemies change theirs.
Several psychological studies in Israel have found that people habituate quickly to threats, making adjustments to daily life keeping children at home, for example, rather than sending them to summer camp and adopting dark humor about the randomness of the threat.
If I dont get blown up, I will meet you at Dizengoff Center in about 45 minutes, a Tel Aviv bus rider told a friend over a cellphone, in a conversation overheard by Israeli psychologists researching the aftermath of the second intifada.
The survey of 458 people, led by Yechiel Klar of Tel Aviv University, found that 55 percent had changed their behavior spending less time outside the house, for instance, or making fewer long trips by public transportation. The other 45 percent said they had made no changes.
A separate study, done in 2003-4 at Ben Gurion University, found that residents close to attack sites in this case, those living in Israeli settlements then in the Gaza Strip reported a lower sense of personal threat and stress than those in two other communities, one in a Tel Aviv suburb and one in a larger settlement near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The research suggested that the religious fervor of the Gaza residents might have been a key factor.
Some Israeli politicians have been disparaging about what they view as European negligence in security matters. After the attacks in March in Brussels, for example, a senior minister, Israel Katz, said Belgium would not be able to fight Islamist terrorism if Belgians continue eating chocolate and enjoying life and looking like great democrats and liberals.
In a radio interview on Sunday, Yaakov Perry, a former Shin Bet chief now in Parliament, recommended deeper intelligence supervision of neighborhoods where Muslims, refugees, Daesh supporters of various sorts live, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the Islamic State. He also suggested that the French police were complacent, referring to news reports that the driver in Nice had told officers he was delivering ice cream. If the driver says he has ice cream, open the truck and check if he has ice cream, Mr. Perry said.
That the attack occurred at a mass gathering for Bastille Day, Frances national holiday, had Israelis shaking their heads. Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, said that to secure a major event like Independence Day celebrations, when tens of thousands of people gather along the Tel Aviv seafront to watch an air and naval display, officers gather intelligence for weeks beforehand, and erect a 360-degree enclosure of the area, with layers of security around the perimeter.
If you visit a certain beach in northeastern Madagascar, dont wear red and dont even think of speaking French. Across most of the island nation, be very careful where you point, lest your finger accidentally find an ancestors grave. And in certain areas of the country, do your best not to defecate in the same place twice.
Behavior in Madagascar is governed by thousands of cultural taboos, or fady (pronounced FAH-dee), many of which involve food (dont eat goat or eel), days of the week (no funerals or farming on Tuesday) and objects (dont use shovels with firm handles to bury the dead).
Specific places associated with ancestors, who are revered, also carry a lot of fady (no playing of a game similar to kick-the-can near a tomb). Some of these prohibitions apply only in a single community, or even to a single family, while others are followed regionally.
Breaking a fady invites both social shame and even direr consequences from the ancestors believed to enforce them. The repercussions can be as specific as the taboos: Sing while eating and your teeth will grow uncomfortably long.
Ten years ago, I attended a seminar on the history of vodka at Tales of the Cocktail, the annual New Orleans convention. The moderator mentioned a cocktail named the Moscow Mule as the drink that started it all that is, vodkas popularity in the United States. Invented in 1941, the drink was a mix of vodka, lime juice and ginger beer, typically served in a copper mug.
I had never heard of it.
Last year, in a nothing-special bar in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. (population 9,500 or so), I sat with my niece, who had recently reached drinking age. She struggled over what to order. The waitress suggested, How about a Moscow Mule?
Freshly picked peaches from Pee Dee Orchards, less than two miles from the orchards stand in Lilesville, N.C. The peach stand is a regular summer stop for people traveling to North Carolina beaches.
Credit... Andar Sawyers for The New York Times
ANTALYA, Turkey When I was stuck at the airport in this city in southern Turkey, on Friday night, I had many things to worry about. A coup attempt had just begun and the country was in turmoil. My plane to Istanbul had almost flown into the worst of the fighting, but luckily we were prevented from taking off at the last minute when the airspace was closed.
One thing I did not have to worry about, though, was running out of data on my phone. In the early morning hours, Turkeys leading cellphone provider topped up the internet allowance of every subscriber. This was more than unusual. Turkey has experienced many crises recently, including deadly terrorist attacks, and they usually lead to a closing of information flows, not the government-aligned service providers making it easier to transmit information.
The reason was simple: In the confusing hours after the coup attempt began, the country had heard from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and even learned that he was alive when he called a television station via FaceTime, an easy-to-use video chat app. As the camera focused on the iPhone in the anchors hand, the president called on the people of Turkey to take to the streets and guard the airports. But this couldnt happen by itself. People would need WhatsApp, Twitter and other tools on their phones to mobilize. The president also tweeted out the call to his more than eight million followers to resist the coup.
The effect was immediate. On my drive back into the city from the airport, I encountered throngs gathering in squares, waving Turkish flags. Everywhere, their screens flickered as they held their phones out, taking defiant selfies to share with their friends, inviting them to join the protests. Within hours, most of the soldiers backing the would-be coup had been overwhelmed. Despite Turkeys deep political and social divisions, every opposition party, too, immediately came out against the coup. Most did so by posting statements on Twitter.
BUSH
By Jean Edward Smith
Illustrated. 808 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.
Its an axiom of American politics that presidents become more popular once they are ex-presidents. Admittedly, George W. Bush had nowhere to go but up. With two months left in his second term, Bushs approval rating sat at an abysmal 25 percent, just one point higher than Richard Nixons during Watergate. On the day of Barack Obamas inauguration, when a Marine helicopter ferried the outgoing president away from the United States Capitol, many in the crowd serenaded him with chants of Bye-bye Bush! and Go home to Texas!
Then the predictable happened. Bushs absence from public life made Americans hearts for him grow fonder. Out of the spotlight, he busied himself painting oil portraits of family pets and world leaders; when he did dip his toe into political waters, it was for laudable and uncontroversial causes like fighting AIDS and malaria in Africa. His poll numbers began their inexorable climb. By June of last year, Bushs favorability rating was 52 percent higher than Obamas at the time. His younger brother, Jeb, started his ill-fated 2016 presidential run with the declaration, I am my own man. But by the end of Jebs run, he was appearing alongside Dubya at rallies. Although Jebs fraternal Hail Mary ultimately fell short, his older brothers re-emergence on the campaign trail only served to confirm that, fewer than eight years after being hounded from the White House, George W. Bush had become a less polarizing, fairly popular, at times even lovable figure.
Readers of the presidential historian Jean Edward Smiths mammoth new biography, Bush, will surely be cured of this political amnesia. Smith who has written biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower is unsparing in his verdict on our 43rd president. Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush, Smith writes in the first sentence of the preface. And then he gets harsh.
In Smiths clipped retelling of his subjects early years, Bush was an unaccomplished, callow son of privilege who cashed in on his familys connections for everything from his admission to Yale to his avoidance of Vietnam. Quoting Bushs tautological explanation of his wasted youth When I was young and irresponsible, I behaved young and irresponsibly Smith concludes, That pretty well says it all. Being Texas governor was scarcely a full-time job, and his 2000 victory in the presidential race owed as much to the ineptness of his Democratic opponent, Al Gore who came across as wooden and self-important as it did to Bushs ease on the campaign trail.
I get tired of talking about this. I get tired of living with it. The more I have to think about this, the more it makes me feel more like a politician and less of an artist. In the long run, thats not good for me or anyone else. I dont like when an Asian-American actor says, Im entering this business to change Hollywood. It feels like the wrong reason I would prefer they entered the business for artistic reasons, because they need to do it. I used to get offered roles, and if I felt they were a stereotype, I would [ask] my Korean friends, What do you think of this? I would go through these exhausting mental hoops, arguing both sides in my head, picturing this imaginary Asian-American council judging the role. I spent so much energy on that. Now Im older, and Im thinking, thats not healthy! Its antithetical to the artistic impulse. Actors are supposed to be these runaways that get in a covered wagon filled with hats and tambourines and go from town to town making people smile. Though its logical and necessary to think and talk about all of this, its a bummer as an artist to have to do it all the time.
What are some roles youd love to take on?
Id love to do a Shakespearean role onscreen. There are some radical things Id like to do. Id like to be in a western. Id like to be ultraviolent onscreen; its completely different from anything Ive done. Because I sidestepped all the stereotypical roles, in a way Ive made a career out of not being Asian a lot of my roles werent written as Asian so theres an impulse in me that wants to take a U-turn and play a very grounded, real Asian character, maybe an immigrant.
Im also tuned in lately to my parents generation, thinking about their mortality and all the history that will go with them. Ive wanted to do a project and record Korean-American kids interviewing their parents and grandparents, so we can preserve stories of the Korean diaspora. I guess its part of getting older and having kids, you think more about that kind of thing.
What are you working on next?
Right after this, Im doing a small-budget movie about a Korean man visiting his father, who has fallen ill in Columbus, Ind. He meets a woman, and theyre both mourning their parents in different ways; theres an interesting relationship. The announcement hasnt been made, so I cant talk about it in detail yet, but Im also acting in and producing a drama in the cable space.
What do you like to do when youre not acting?
Its more like, what do my kids want me to be doing? [My wife, the actress Kerri Higuchi, and I] have two kids, 8 and 3. I have this fantasy of just being left alone for a week, so I can clean out the house and garage.
"John Brademas was the president emeritus when I came to New York University in 1998, but I saw immediately the magnitude of his presence and achievements. However, he never rested on his laurels, though laurels he had aplenty. He was a crucial spokesperson for many important causes, and we must be grateful for his devotion to all of them, but I am particularly appreciative of his support for the arts and humanities at a time when they can seem battered. I always liked hearing him talk about the importance of the Rhodes Scholarship program and his work on Spain and Spanish culture and the fundamental importance of culture to any good society. He was a great figure, and I am privileged to have known him."
Catharine R. Stimpson, University Professor and Dean Emerita, Graduate School of Arts and Science.
"John Brademas was a great guy to work for. He was the first person to take me out of the classroom and into the political arena. And no one brought people together like John. His penthouse dinners attracted leaders from the media, finance, the arts, and government. After dinner, John would explain how the 50 or 60 guests were connected to the city, the university, and each other without any notes. At a Brademas dinner, each guest was a star.
Mitchell L. Moss, Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
"John was recognized by his presence in the larger world of the city and nation, and he thickened the administrative structure of the universityboth needed as NYU moved to the rank of major universities. But in my 40 years at NYU he was the only president who met regularly with the department chairs of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And he took questions and gave straight answers."
Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History.
"John Brademas was a great leader and in some ways even more impressive as a person. His projection of NYU as a university on the move began to put NYU into places and conversations where we had never been before. John was an ambassador, both for NYU and for an expansive role of higher education, especially the arts, humanities and politics. John came from a great tradition of elected officials who saw opportunities for a better world, and he consistently made change occur through government to effectuate positive outcomes, a seemingly lost art in today's depressing political world. John is among the group of leaders who made NYU what it is today and he did it with intelligence and grace. He will be missed.
Bob Berne, NYU Executive Vice President for Health
"I had the privilege of working closely with John Brademas from 1995-2007, when I served as director of NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, one of John's many pride and joys at NYU. John always loved to tell the story of how this Hoosier son of a Greek immigrant ended up becoming an expert on the history and politics of Spain. As a young man he hitchhiked from Indiana to Mexico to participate in a humanitarian program that was a kind of forerunner to the Peace Corps., digging latrines with an indigenous community in central Mexico. He always spoke highly of his high school Spanish teachershis fluency in Spanish was, indeed, quite remarkable throughout his life. At Harvard, he wrote a senior essay on "Sinarquismo," an extreme right-wing Mexican movement; as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he wrote a PhD dissertation on an extreme left-wing political movement: anarchism in Spain in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to all of the times I got to hear the thumbnail biography with which John began all of his Spain-related speeches, I can still hear his voice: "Though I studied anarchism, I never practiced it; in 1958, after two unsuccessful bids, I was elected to the US Congress, where I served for 22 years." When he became NYU's president, and announced his ambitious goal of internationalizing the university, his vast experience in Spain and Latin America positioned him extremely well to promote research, teaching, and dialogue about those parts of the world. And that is precisely what he did. All of us who work in those fields owe a profound debt of gratitude to his vision and hard-work on our behalf.
John Brademas was such an extraordinarily multi-faceted man, I am sure that not all of his colleagues are aware of his extraordinary links toand accomplishments inthe Spanish-speaking world. But even within this single facet, I think that John's most remarkable traits are fully present: his profound and wide-ranging intellect, which he managed to combine, like few people I've ever known, with pragmatism and decisive action, both as a politician and as a university administrator; and, perhaps above all, the wisdom, decency, and compassion of a truly great man who never forgot from where he came."
James Fernandez, professor of Spanish and Portuguese
"When John was recruiting me to come to NYU from Capitol Hill, I worried aloud that I would miss the action and 'being in the know' in DC. He replied 'You might feel that from time to time. I did at first. But here's what I promise: You will never be bored.'
So I came and he was true to his word. And here I am, 30 years later and still not bored.
Beyond the fundraising and networking and VIP connections, John's great gift to NYU was infusing the place with his energy and optimism and forward thinking. He held up a mirror to the community of the great potential contained within the universityand people saw their reflection. And they were motivated to make his vision of NYU's future come true."
Lynne P. Brown, Senior Vice President for University Relations and Public Affairs, who worked for John Brademas in Congress
"John Brademas became president of NYU when we were just beginning to plan a strategy to transform ourselves from a local, regional university to a national one. John was a big thinker and brought a sophistication and knowledge of the world that inspired confidence within the University and with our many publics. His leadership role in national and international education commissions, his personal connections, his sincere interest in other countries and international relations, and his public ease and grace, gave NYU a new sense of possibilitywell before the word 'global' entered our discourse."
Ann Marcus, Professor of Higher Education; Director of The Steinhardt Institute of Higher Education Policy, and former Dean of the Steinhardt School
John Brademas was one of the last true Statesmen of our time. The Congress would be a far different place today if our lawmakers held true to the virtues that John embodied. He will be missed.
Thomas M. McIntyre, Assistant Director, The John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress
"As a sophomore undergraduate student at NYU, I was fortunate to participate in the Brademas Center's Congressional Internship Program. President Brademas was selfless is leveraging his connections on Capitol Hill to help educate NYU students and the next generation of political leaders. The Center's Program gave me and dozens of other students an invaluable opportunity to see Capitol Hill in action.
I often think back on that summer and realize that without President Brademas's connections to Congressman Hoyer, there's no chance I would have ever had the opportunity to intern for the Majority Leader of the House. Everyone else I worked alongside that summer had a donor family or personal connections to Hoyer. For someone without a legacy of family connections to DC, I'm really appreciative of the program. This experience is the reason I was able to land future internships and jobs."
Max Zorick, NYU Class of 2010
"I am so sorry to learn of Dr. Brademas's death.
NYU has been fortunate to have enjoyed a lineage of presidents who each in his own way advanced NYU exponentially. John had the distinction of being the pioneering president who envisioned new frontiers for NYU that pushed the university from commuter to residential, from local to global.
His vision served and continues to serve NYU exceedingly well.
To think that NYU was but one of his many career identities is mind boggling. Of course, I knew and revered John, long before he came to NYU, for his contribution to the design and execution of the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities, when he was a congressman. That legislative, public policy legacy is every bit as powerful as his contribution to academia.
What a decent man, so warm and witty and smart. He made a lasting mark during his time on earth and we have benefitted enormously."
Mary Schmidt Campbell, president, Spelman College; former dean and university professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts
***
Read the New York Times obituary for John Brademas.
Read a letter to the NYU community from William Berkley, Chair of the NYU Board of Trustees, and President Andrew Hamilton.
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 become radicalized, authorities said Sunday.
French authorities arrested an Albanian man and woman who they believed supplied weapons to the 31-year-old attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel. Authorities also said Bouhlel, who has been described by family and friends as a troubled loner, had sent a text message saying Bring more weapons to another suspected accomplice and had visited the scene of the attack days before the carnage.
Late Sunday night, authorities announced that they had detained the man believed to be the recipient of the text message. Seven others had been detained earlier in connection with the Thursday attack. They included Bouhlels ex-wife, but she was reportedly released from custody Sunday morning, according to authorities speaking to local media.
The image of Bouhlel as 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 Thursdays 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 Frances security services.
But officials said Sunday that the 31-year-old apparently had undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam and had carefully planned the attack, which killed at least 84 people, including 10 children. This has raised 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 on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attack, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities now know that the killer radicalized very quickly.
Neither the Islamic State nor the French government has provided tangible evidence of a link between the group and Bouhlel. But Valls told 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 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 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 wasnt authorized to be publicly identified speaking about an ongoing investigation.
On Thursday, 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 wouldnt comment on the content of the text messages or confirm reports that they included a request for more weapons.
At least two of three people detained Sunday are suspected of helping Bouhlel obtain the pistol found in the truck, the official said.
A lawyer for one of those detained said his client hadnt 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 wasnt 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.
PARIS The Tunisian man who used a cargo truck and an automatic pistol to carry out a deadly assault on a crowd of Bastille Day revelers in Nice, France, Thursday evening had searched the internet for articles about the recent terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and the killings of five police officers in Dallas, according to Frances top counterterrorism prosecutor.
The investigation of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, whose rampage ended when the police shot him to death, has so far produced contradictory portraits.
On the one hand, Lahouaiej Bouhlel was hardly a devout Muslim: He ate pork, drank alcohol, used drugs and led an unbridled sexual life, the prosecutor, Francois Molins, said at an afternoon news conference in Paris, citing witness statements.
On the other hand, Lahouaiej Bouhlel had in just the two weeks before the attacks searched on a near-daily basis for information on suras, or chapters of the Quran; on nasheeds, or chants, that have been used by jihadi groups like the Islamic State; on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan; and on attacks in Orlando, Dallas and Magnanville, France, where an Islamic State militant killed a police captain and his companion last month. And Lahouaiej Bouhlel had recently begun to grow a beard, evidently for religious reasons.
Investigators also found very violent images on his computer of corpses; fighters brandishing the Islamic States flag; covers of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the target of a January 2015 attack in Paris that killed 12 people; Osama bin Laden; and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Algerian operative who helped lead al-Qaidas affiliate in North Africa.
Lahouaiej Bouhlel killed 84 people and wounded 256 in the third terrorist assault to inflict mass casualties in France since January 2015. He had a record of petty crime and of domestic violence, but he seemed at first more like a surly misfit a man who beat his wife until she threw him out than a determined jihadi.
Although the Islamic State has claimed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as a soldier who had responded to its call to wage war against countries that are fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Molins said the authorities had not uncovered any links between Lahouaiej Bouhlel and the Islamic State.
Although no evidence in the investigation at this stage demonstrates an allegiance to the Islamic State, he said, or links with individuals aligning themselves with this organization, investigators found on Lahouaiej Bouhlels computer a certain and at this stage of the investigations, recent interest in radical jihadist movements.
The line between people who carry out terrorist acts because of deep-seated political beliefs and those who go on violent rampages mostly because they are mentally disturbed has become blurred. The Islamic State has intentionally muddied the distinction by lumping together those who carry out attacks under the terrorist groups direction like the militants who attacked Paris in November and Brussels in March and sympathizers who, lured by the Islamic States message, carry out attacks in its name.
The painful news of this past month shows that terrorist attacks come either from commandos or cells that carry out attacks that were planned in the Iraq-Syria area, or from individuals who obey the constant messages calling for murder, by any means, that are put out by terrorist organizations, which have made France a chosen target, Molins said.
He added, Support for these messages, and radicalization, can occur all the more rapidly when they are addressed to disturbed personalities or individuals who are fascinated by extreme violence.
That appears to have been the case for Lahouaiej Bouhlel. He not only searched the internet for information about the Bastille Day festivities in Nice, but also for videos of deadly car accidents, using search terms like horrible deadly accident and shocking video, not for the faint of heart.
In Tunisia, Lahouaiej Bouhlels relatives have described him as not particularly religious.
But on Monday, The Associated Press quoted Lahouaiej Bouhlels uncle, Sadok Bouhlel, as saying that about two weeks ago, his nephew had come under the influence of an Algerian member of the Islamic State in Nice, and that the Algerian had found in Mohamed an easy prey. The uncle said he had learned about the Algerians involvement from relatives who live in Nice.
On the computer, investigators found violent images and evidence that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had searched for information about the Orlando and Dallas attacks. The killer in Orlando, Omar Mateen, had pledged loyalty to the Islamic State, but the killer in Dallas, Micah Johnson, was an Army veteran who appears to have been motivated primarily by his views of the treatment of African-Americans by the police in the United States.
Molins said a witness had told investigators that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had shown him a video about seven or eight months ago of a hostages decapitation. When the witness expressed shock at the video, Lahouaiej Bouhlel responded, I am used to it.
Molins did not provide more details about the video or the hostage in it, nor did he identify the witness.
Monday was the last of three days of national mourning in France for the victims in Nice, and at noon, the nation observed a moment of silence for the victims.
At a ceremony near the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, the site of the attack, tearful mourners holding flowers stood on the rocky beach in silence Monday. Among those paying their respects was Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who was heckled and booed as he arrived at and left the promenade.
President Francois Hollande and other officials have been faulted for not doing more to improve the gathering and analysis of intelligence, and the protection of large crowds and high-risk events, after two sets of attacks in and around Paris in January and November 2015 that killed a total of 147 people.
On Monday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve lashed out at the critics, singling out Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front Party, and Hollandes predecessor as president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Cazeneuve said that Le Pen only has one angle its to point the finger at the Muslims of France and noted that Sarkozy, as part of efforts to cut government spending, had reduced the number of employees devoted to law enforcement.
Of the 84 people killed in Nice, the authorities have identified 71, Molins said. Three Americans a father and son from near Austin, Texas, and a 20-year-old student at the University of California, Berkeley, who was studying in France were among the dead.
Of the 256 wounded, 74 remain hospitalized, 28 in intensive care and 19 in critical condition, Molins said Monday.
In California, a bill can start in the Legislature with a title like The Prosperity For All Act, yet end up being a law regulating the manufacture, sale and use of dog leashes or floor tiles. Or a law that adds another tax. Or a law that does whatever lawmakers want it to do, with none of its provisions being even remotely related to its original title.
The mechanism for this misdirection is called gut and amend, and its such an accepted drill in Sacramento lawmaking that the phrase is included in the Legislatures Glossary of Legislative Terms. It occurs, says the guide, When amendments to a bill remove the current contents in their entirety and replace them with different provisions. These substitute bills dont get the scrutiny all legislation should receive in committee hearings.
One of the worst examples of gut and amend was 2014s Proposition 1. It began its legislative life as Assembly Bill 1471 pertaining to fireworks sales before becoming a law authorizing a ballot measure to issue $7.5 billion in water bonds. Deceptions such as this promote murky legislating, which produces poor public policy.
There may be light coming to the lawmaking process through the Legislature Transparency Amendment ballot measure on Nov. 8. If the initiative the product of former lawmaker Sam Blakeslee and Charles Munger Jr.s longtime efforts is authorized for a constitutional amendment, the Legislature will be prohibited from passing a bill until the text has been in print and published online for 72 hours prior to the vote.
The amendment would also, says the secretary of states office, require the Legislature to make audiovisual recordings of all its proceedings, except closed session proceedings, and post them on the internet. It further authorizes any person to record legislative proceedings by audio or video means, except closed session proceedings. The recording can be done without payment of any fee to the state.
This last provision is an important safeguard against legislative tyranny. With any member of the public free to record legislative proceedings, lawmakers will be unable to censor what is recorded, such as a committee chair cutting off another member from asking questions. The public also has the right to re-broadcast recordings for any legitimate purpose. Under current law, its a misdemeanor to use legislative proceedings for commercial or political purposes. That will no longer be the case.
The state Senate has passed its own version of the initiative Senate Constitutional Amendment 14 but dont be fooled. It is a diluted rendering that gives lawmakers opportunities to dodge the bright light of day.
If approved by voters, the transparency amendment wont end gut and amend, but it will compel more honest, open lawmaking across the board. Legislators working under these constraints wont be able to so easily mislead the public, particularly at the end of sessions when laws are rammed through while the media and public are in the dark.
Support for the amendment ripples across the political spectrum. For instance, Common Cause, the California Forward Action Fund and the League of California Cities, all of which are from the left, are on board, as are the California Taxpayers Association, the California Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, on the right.
Among many other supporters are the California Business Roundtable, the League of Women Voters of California and the California State Conference of the NAACP. Two Democrats have even introduced separate legislation that, together, would hold lawmakers to a similar standard.
Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, another supporter, believes that if the 72-hour rule been in effect over the last decade, a lot of poor public policy would have been stopped. He said the way the Legislature has operated for decades has been a huge disservice to not only the public and the media, but to legislators themselves, who have not had a chance to read bills before voting on them.
The California Legislatures reputation for slinking in the shadows rankles. The bipartisan group Hold Politicians Accountable says special interests have too much influence in the California Legislature, locking average voters out of the process by striking backroom deals to pass legislation at the last minute without any public review.
California needs a fresh direction. It should be a model of government openness that the rest of the country can follow. The sanitizing effects of sunshine would sharply cut the stream of sloppy public policy thats been flowing from Sacramento for decades and taking the rest of the state downstream with it.
Kerry Jackson is a fellow in the Center for California Studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
CINCINNATI Donald Trump no doubt will dominate the political news in coming days, as Republicans convene in Cleveland to make his nomination for president official. But Hillary Clinton will hardly go dark.
The presumptive Democratic nominee also plans to start her day here Monday in the battleground state of Ohio, with an address to a gathering of the NAACP that shell use to announce a major voter mobilization drive.
And thats just the start of a busy stretch during which Clinton also plans to touch down in Minnesota and Nevada, where shell speak to large gatherings of teachers and labor leaders and continue to tout her campaigns goal of signing up 3 million new voters before November.
There was a time not too long ago when it was common for presidential hopefuls to lie low during the other partys nominating convention. That began to change during recent cycles, however, and Clinton appears to be setting a new standard.
Counterprogramming makes a lot more sense in 2016 than it ever has before, said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic operative. I think its going to become the norm.
With a 24-hour news cycle and a greater variety of news outlets than ever before, it has become much easier for candidates to break through, even when much of the countrys collective political attention is focused elsewhere.
Being visible also will help Clinton work her way into news coverage of the Republican National Convention. When Republicans call her Crooked Hillary and criticize her in countless other ways, television stations will have very recent footage of her available to air as they round out their reports.
Clinton aides say their efforts are designed to draw a stark contrast between the message that will be coming out of Cleveland and their candidates agenda.
This week gives voters a chance to see clearly the choice in this election, said Jesse Ferguson, a Clinton spokesman. Hillary Clinton is standing with advocates of civil rights and justice, teachers and working families during the week while Donald Trump is putting his dangerous, backward agenda on display for the nation. Were going to highlight that choice every day.
In another bid to get their message out, the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee are staging a counterconvention operation from a temporary headquarters in Cleveland set up less than a mile from the GOP convention site.
There are plans to hold daily news conferences, arrange conference calls with reporters and take to Twitter with the hashtag #BetterThanThis.
A news conference advertised for Monday morning will focus on Trumps dangerous national security proposals, including his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country and his support for waterboarding and other interrogation methods that Democrats say amount to torture. A trio of Clinton supporters including DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be featured speakers.
Clinton is set to appear here late Monday morning to address the 107th NAACP convention. A couple of hours later, she is scheduled to hold an event with volunteers who are helping register new voters.
By early evening, she plans to be in Minneapolis to address a convention of the American Federation of Teachers, a union that got behind her early in the Democratic primary season.
Clinton also has an address scheduled Tuesday in Las Vegas to a convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, another labor union strongly backing her.
Before leaving the battleground state of Nevada, Clinton is scheduled to hold another event highlighting her campaigns voter registration initiative.
By weeks end, she is planning to make much bigger news with the announcement of her running mate. That announcement is widely expected to come Friday or Saturday, in an effort to cut short any lingering coverage of the Republican convention, which will be capped off Thursday night with Trumps acceptance speech.
BALTIMORE A judge further hollowed out the case against six police officers charged in the death of a young black man, delivering a third consecutive acquittal and ruling once again that prosecutors failed to prove officers intentionally hurt Freddie Gray.
In acquitting Lt. Brian Rice, the highest ranking officer charged, Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams was unequivocal in his ruling Monday. He told prosecutors they failed to establish that Rice was aware of his duty to buckle Gray into a seat belt, and more importantly, that he deliberately breached his duty in order to put Gray in danger.
There are a number of possibilities this court could entertain, some that are innocent and some that are not, Williams said. However, the burden of proof rests with the state, and the courts imaginings do not serve as a substitute for evidence.
Gray was arrested in April 2015 when he ran from police in a high-crime area. He was handcuffed and shackled but left unbuckled in the back of a police van and suffered a critical neck injury. Grays name became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, fueling outrage nationwide over the treatment of black people by the criminal justice system and prompting the worst rioting in the city in decades.
The U.S. Justice Department launched a patterns and practice investigation into allegations of widespread abuse and unlawful arrests by the Baltimore Police Department.
Rice was cleared of manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Earlier this year, officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson, the van driver who was facing a murder charge, were also found not guilty. Officer William Porters trial ended in a hung jury in December and his retrial is scheduled for September. The last two officers have trials this month and in October.
Gray died April 19, 2015, a week after he suffered a critical spinal injury in the back of Goodsons police wagon. Prosecutors say the officers were criminally negligent when they failed to buckle Gray into a seat belt or provide medical attention after he indicated that he wanted to go to a hospital.
With no courtroom victories, activists are focusing on protests and police department reforms. A protest Saturday that blocked the interstate through downtown resulted in more than 60 arrests. Activists said they were demonstrating in support of having civilians sit on boards that review police misconduct cases, and spending more public money on community programs instead of policing.
Im disgusted, as usual, and theyre sending a daily message all across the world that our lives dont matter, and thats sad, said Tawanda Jones outside the courthouse Monday. She was there marking the third anniversary of her brothers death in a separate case involving Baltimore police.
Were more than hashtags and body bags, she added.
The Gray case hasnt fit quite so neatly into the narrative of white authorities imposing unfair justice on minorities.
Three of the officers charged are white and three are black. The victim, judge, top prosecutor and mayor are African-American. At the time of Grays death, so was the police chief.
In his verdict, Williams said the failure to seat belt a detainee in a transport wagon is not inherently a crime.
The state failed to show that the defendant, even if he was aware of the risk, consciously disregarded that risk, the judge said.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys are barred from commenting due to a gag order.
During the trial, prosecutors had said Rice was most responsible of the six officers charged for following police procedures to fasten a prisoner in a seat belt, citing his 18 years of experience on the force.
The officers attorney said police could use discretion, if they believe their safety is at risk. Rice attorney Michael Belsky said officers had concerns because Gray was not cooperative and they werent sure what onlookers would do if extra time was taken to fasten Gray in the van.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys gave different characterizations of the onlookers. Prosecutors described them as concerned observers, while Belsky said officers heard threatening comments during the arrest.
Williams said Monday that the definition of a crowd is not set in stone, however it is clear from witness accounts that emotions and tensions ran high, and information did not flow efficiently.
The reality of what happened is not clear cut, he said.
Baltimore States Attorney Marilyn Mosby vowed to bring justice to an aggrieved citizenry when she announced the charges last year. But she has yet to find success in court, and is being sued for defamation by five of the officers.
Warren Alperstein, a prominent lawyer in the city who has been observing the case, questioned whether the other cases should go to trial.
There are no more theories to put forth to a judge or a jury for that matter, and the state really has to think about, you know, not prosecuting anymore, Alperstein said outside the courthouse.
Despite increasing pressure from critics to drop the three remaining cases, it is unlikely Mosby will dismiss the charges.
At a news conference, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 President Gene Ryan called for the remaining cases to be dismissed, calling it malicious prosecution against the remaining three officers.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Monday he doesnt see the point of moving forward with trials against the three remaining officers.
Matt Clark, a Hogan spokesman, said the Republican governor responded to a question after the acquittal of Lt. Brian Rice. The Washington Post reported Hogan said: Its a waste of time and money, adding but thats up to the court system to decide.
Grays family received a $6.4 million settlement from the city.
Heres where well be bringing you news, analysis and interesting tidbits from the Republican National Convention throughout the week, including exclusive items from our reporters with the California delegation in Cleveland. Check back frequently for the latest.
7:15 p.m. Party backs natural family units, border wall, more energy extraction on public lands
The GOP platform approved Monday in Cleveland offers a strong defense of the natural family unit and says a majority of the Supreme Court robbed Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
But the New York Times reports the document also endorses a less traditionally conservative approach to criminal justice reform and supports targeted modifications to mandatory sentencing requirements.
The platform is a formal expression of the principles the party stands for going into the fall campaign.
It urges Congress to use its power to impeach more federal judges, calls for a wall along the Mexican border and advocates for more energy development on public lands.
It promises a Republican president, working with a GOP-controlled Congress, would shift the balance of power on the Supreme Court and begin reversing activist decisions, such as those legalizing abortion and supporting Obamacare.
5:49 p.m. Law and order night
Two parents from Southern California are among tonights speakers.
Both lost children in incidents that involved undocumented immigrants, and both are big supporters of Donald Trumps ideas on immigration.
Jamiel Shaw Sr., from Los Angeles, lost his son, Jamiel Shaw Jr., when he was shot in a drive-by murder. The gang member who shot the younger Shaw was an undocumented immigrant.
Shaw Jr. was 17 when he died, walking home from school. He was a standout running back who had drawn interest from Stanford and Rutgers. His killer thought he was shooting somebody else.
Shaw Sr. has spoken at Trump rallies, including an April event in Costa Mesa. At a Las Vegas rally, last July, Shaw described the killer of his son, Pedro Espinoza, as someone who was brought here when he was 4 years old, and then allowed to grow up kind of like a wild animal.
Sabine Durden has a similar story. Her son Dominic was killed in 2012, in a motorcycle accident that involved a man in a truck who was an undocumented immigrant driving without a license or insurance. Since Dominics death, Durden has appeared on CNN and Fox News, and spoken for Trump at rallies.
She is lobbying to cut federal tax money away from so-called Sanctuary Cities, which dont actively help enforce immigration laws.
5 p.m. Protesters staying in their lanes, at least initially
Groups of boisterous protesters, wildly at odds politically and in just about every other way, marched just a few blocks apart in Cleveland Monday, but never crossed paths.
One group chanted Hillary for Prison, another Dump Trump! but no major clashes were reported, at least initially. Thousands of police officers from across the country and as far away as California were on hand trying to keep the peace and guide marchers along barricade-lined corridors, the Washington Post reported.
4:24 p.m. No, really, its art
There are about 100 women wearing about zero clothes, hanging out fairly close to Quicken Loans Arena this afternoon.
The demonstration is a combination of performance art and protest, says People magazine.
Whats it about? The statement of purpose from the website of artist/naked lady organizer Spencer Tunick says the display is intended to denounce the hateful repressive rhetoric of many in the Republican Party towards women and minorities.
Its warm and muggy today in Cleveland. So comfort isnt an issue.
The link, by the way, is totally SFW.
3:25 p.m. Media overkill?
There are 15,000 journalists at the Republican National Convention or six for every one of the 2,500 delegates, says the Washington Post. Why so many? Well, theres the unpredictable, media magnet of Donald Trump, as well as the deep divisions in the country over his policy proposals. Theres also just a lot more online reporters these days. And then theres a threat of violence in the streets when the nation is on edge over law and order and police-community relations.
If you want to cover the fire, you have to go to the fire, said James Warren, the former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, who now writes for Vanity Fair and the Poynter journalism institute.
2:37 p.m. Mr. Trumps Wild Ride
Talking Points Memo reports that Donald Trumps motorcade was involved in a minor traffic accident on the way to the Republican National Convention. Nobody was hurt.
Important? Proably not. But its an opportunity for the Wild Ride subhead.
1:28 p.m. Its off!
OK, the yeah/nay thing (which, if you closed your eyes, made the 2016 GOP Convention sound like a newsreel from 1932) broke down like this:
The anti-Trump crowd was actually a mix of anti-Trump folk and pro Sen. Ted Cruz folk, according to CNN and others. And the vote they wanted (but failed to get) was less about dumping Trump in 2016 and more about greasing the path for Cruz in 2020.
But that plan didnt win. So its not happening, for now.
And GOP unity? So far, its not happening either.
Heres a deeper explanation from the Washington Post.
1:18 p.m. Its on!
Some Never Trump people are on the convention floor, chanting for a floor vote that apparently would let delegates un-tether to Donald Trump.
The anti-Trump folks are screaming eye, as in please let delegates vote differently than their pledge suggests, while the pro-Trump forces are screaming nay, as in uh, didnt we just have primaries in every state and about 64,000 debates to sort this out?
Stay tuned.
1:15 p.m. Big Blues front and center
The Golden State delegation is staying at a hotel 60 miles from the Cleveland Republican convention. But California and other blue states, partly as sign of party unity, are being featured prominently right in front of the stage, Martin Wisckol on his Total Buzz blog. Heres a Washington Post map of the where the states are located on the convention floor, coded by their political leanings in presidential elections.
12:42 p.m. Trump embarrassed? Its not impossible
Politico is reporting that the Never Trump crowd has, in fact, pulled enough support to force a floor vote to Trump. The mechanics of this arent clear, for now. Also, its unlikely to win.
But were guessing itll probably bum out a certain candidate and probably a few thousand of his supporters in and outside the convention hall.
12:25 p.m Convention curtain goes up; unity fight continues
Against a backdrop of national angst over race relations and law and order, Republicans have opened their convention in Cleveland with calls for party unity, but signs indicate that is still a work in progress.
Shortly after the convention was gaveled into session, a dissident group called Delegates Unbound said in an email that it had gathered statements calling for a roll call by a majority of delegates from 10 states. Under GOP rules, a roll call can be demanded if most delegates from seven states sign such a statement.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich said last-ditch efforts by conservative delegates to block the presumptive nominee are silly and should stop. Gingrich, of course, is the former House speaker and, more recently, a would-be pick for vice president.
Its unclear how many people agree.
Some delegates are trying to force GOP rule changes that would allow previously pledged delegates to back any candidate theyd like. That, in turn, would weaken the power of Republican Party leaders.
The Georgia Republican suggests math isnt in the dissidents favor.
Trump carried 37 states. Hes going to be the nominee.
Artist Song Peilun is being hailed as The Father of Yelang Valley after spending the last two decades turning a forested patch of land into an artistic village as a tribute to the ancient civilization that once thrived in the area.
Yelang was an ancient political entity first described in the 3rd century BC centered in what is now western Guizhou province, China. Experts believe that many ancient cultures were rooted here, but there are unfortunately no architectural remnants left standing in the great valley. Inspired by Crazy Horse, a mountain monument dedicated to a Native American warrior, in the US state of South Dakota, after visiting the United States, Chinese artist Song Peilun dedicated his life to building a memorial to the artistic heritage of Yelang Valley and restoring part of its former glory.
It all started in 1996 when Song quit his job as a professor and purchased a 200,000 square meter patch of land in an isolated mountainous forest area. He had been studying the colorful minority cultures that have existed in the Guizhou region for years, and was saddened by the loss of age-old traditions and heritage due to cultural infiltration. After visiting the Crazy Horse monument, he took it upon himself to build something similar in the mountains of Guizhou.
When he first arrived in the area, most of the locals were working as masons or mining in the mountain and selling the stones to make ends meet, but he convinced many of them to help him in his quest to restore the artistic glory of Yelang instead. Its not fun selling them, lets build blocks, Song remembers telling the villagers. They listened, and together they started creating all kinds of beautiful stone artworks on his land. They became a close-knit artistic community, and although some of the original architects died or moved away, their collective dream thrived. Locals got deeply involved in Songs project and when he ran out of money, they all pitched in to help .
In the last twenty years, the forested land Song Peilun bought has turned into an artistic village full of stone sculptures inspired by Chinese Nuo culture. It is now a relatively popular tourist attraction and a testament to the Chinese artists ambition and perseverance.
When he first started this project, Song dreamed of of creating a village far from the hustle and bustles of city life, but now signs of modernization are seeping into his rural community. That doesnt seem to worry him though, as he says that if modern life ends up destroying his dream, he will simply spend another 20 years rebuilding his village in the other end of Yelang Valley.
Photos: CCTV News
Source: Chuansong
An Indonesian woman who went to great lengths to impersonate a man and even married another woman was recently detained by police after his wife alerted authorities about the deception.
40-year-old Surwati, who like most Indonesian goes by a single name, admitted to falsifying her identity and impersonating a man. She had taken the name Muhamad Efendi Saputra and told people he was a police officer. Her male impersonating skills were apparently stellar because she managed to full everybody and even convinced a woman into marriage. After a whirlwind romance lasting a couple of months, Muhamad married 25-year-old Heniyati in a ceremony on Java island. To avoid raising any suspicions, Surwati reportedly hired a number of people to pose as relatives of her male alter ego at the wedding.
The young wife learned that Muhamad Efendi Saputra was actually a woman a few months into the marriage. She became suspicious after her husband kept refusing to consummate their union, and after going through his things while he was away, she found an identity card that showed who he really was a woman named Surwati. She falsified all the documents for the marriage My family and I were deceived. We feel so embarrassed, Heniyati told the Jakarta Post newspaper.
Surwati was arrested after her wife alerted the police, and she admitted to falsifying her identity, a crime that could send her behind bars for seven years. Authorities have yet to uncover the reason behind the womans male impersonation, but she did reveal that she had been disappointed by a previous marriage, from which she had a 17-year-old child.
The LGBT community often faces discrimination and a lack of acceptance in Muslim-majority Indonesia, especially in rural areas, which could also explain Surwatis decision to pose as a man.
This story comes just a few weeks after another unusual impersonation case in China, where a man managed to successfully pose as a woman in order to swindle gullible men of their valuables.
via The Sun Daily
President Obama, one day after the FCC voted to adopt new 5G wireless technology that is called unsafe by health advocates, committed $400 million to 5G research.
Obama said July 15 that the National Science Foundation, funded by $7 billion in government funds, will pledge $50M over the next five years as part of an $85M investment by NSF and private sector companies to build the testing platforms starting with the 2017 fiscal year. NSF is also committing $350M over the next seven years that will take research from the concept phase to real-world testing at scale, he said.
Health advocates noted that health and environmental considerations were absent from Obamas statement.
They also wonder if politics is involved since Obama has come out in support of Hillary Clinton as President and she has expressed strong support of 5G technology in a position paper.
Her support of 5G has drawn the ire of Wi-Fi health advocates who say she ignores radiations health effects.
Her position paper says: Hillary will accelerate this progress and help foster the evolution to 5G, small cell solutions, and other next-generation systems that can deliver faster wireless connections. Widely deployed 5G networks, and new unlicensed and shared spectrum technologies, are essential platforms that will support the Internet of Things, smart factories, driverless cars, and much moredevelopments with enormous potential to create jobs and improve peoples lives.
Devastating to Health
The proposed 5G Spectrum Frontiers is a boon to industry and a devastation to our health, says Parents for Safe Technology under the headline, Take action against 5G now!!!
Joe Esposito of emfsafetynetwork.org says there is a palpable danger from untested 28GHz radiation blasting from millions of new hidden antennas and tuned-up smart meters.
He describes it as a corporate free-for-all, with oversight eliminated, total, for-profit surveillance, an internet of everything with hundreds of billions of microchippable products, everywhere and everything... and eventually, everyone.
Our Government and industry, said Esposito, have come together for control and profits at huge expense to the publics health and their physiological existence. Wireless smart utility meters represent the same kind of threat. 5G is smart meters on steroids or full warp speed ahead.
Electricity was supposed to be inside wires, he said. Wireless is simply raw electricity outside of wires being blasted at everyone. The reality of wireless is that everyone is being 'subtly electrocuted'."
He asks if the FCC will place 5G small cells without public consent wherever it wants as it has done with cell towers; whether the public will be allowed to sue the owners due to health effects, and whether 5G small cells will be forcibly installed in homes?
Mary Adkins, Rhode Island Director for Citizens for Safe Technology, said in a filing to the FCC that 5G is a death sentence for the millions being crippled by wireless radiation.
Friedman: Fox Guards FCC Chicken House
Ed Friedman, spokesperson for the Maine Coalition to Stop Smart Meters, said the FCCs action, lacking any stipulations regarding health and safety or environmental impacts, is in clear violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA review is required for any major federal action affecting the human environment. President Obama must be blamed for appointing Tom Wheeler, director of the former Cellular Telephone Industries Assn., now known as CTIA, as chairman of the FCC and chief fox guarding the hen house.
Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an open letter to the FCC that its electro-magnetic radiation standards were adopted 20 years ago. Many scientists believe they are obsolete because they do not protect the population from established, non-thermal risks from RF radiation exposure. Thus, to ensure public health and safety, the FCC should commission an independent review of the biologic and health research to determine whether the RF standards should be modified before allowing additional spectrum to be used for new commercial applications.
He also noted that the FCC has yet to act in a proceeding it launched in 2013 to explore whether it should modify its RF exposure standards for the first time since they were adopted in 1996.
5G Must be Stopped
I'm writing to demand that our elected officials and those working on their behalf put a stop to Tom Wheeler's insane plan to roll out 5G across the country, said an EMF healthcare advocate. Mr. Wheeler is apparently unaware or unconcerned that there are literally millions of people in this country whose health has already been devastated by wireless technology,
Healthcare advocates were quoted by Paul Kirby of Wolters Kluwers who did an extensive analysis of the FCCs July 14 action for TR Daily, a unit of WK.
Kate Kheel, director, Maryland Smart Meter Awareness, said implementation of 5G will increase the amount of RF radiation in the environment and result in additional adverse health impacts to the public.
Most disturbing, she said, was that in light of all the science, and the recent National Toxicology Study results that were just released, not once was health brought up. Money, technical hurdles, etc., but no mention of health. These frequencies require an extremely dense infrastructure, necessitating a small cell tower on nearly every home or lamppost, she told TRDaily in an e-mail. Shame of the FCC!!!"
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Family members were convinced he couldnt get a job. Even his mother said so.
My family doubted that a person with a disability can get a job, said Dahir Talasow, who attends Omaha North High School.
This summer, the ambitious 18-year-old proved them wrong.
Because of a spinal cord injury, Talasow uses a wheelchair. But supervisors at the Goodwill at 4805 N. 72nd St. where he works are quick to point out that Talasow has no trouble zipping through the store, and hes always eager to clock in.
On a recent afternoon he was reaching up, up, up with a sheet of waxed paper and polishing a steel-chromed clothes bar. Customers like to thumb through the clothing, he explained, and hangers that slide smoothly along the bar make it easier to shop.
What 18-year-old wants to work? Goodwill Work Experience trainer Jake Pedersen said good-naturedly. Dahir is the complete opposite. Hes got a motor running.
Talasow is one of 16 disabled youths who were given the opportunity to beef up their job skills when Goodwills Work Experience program offered its first Omaha summer session. Until now the program for disabled youths operated only during the school year.
The six-week summer session, which includes two weeks of follow-up, was made possible by a $33,600 grant from Nebraska Vocational Rehabilitation, a state and federal vocational program that serves people with disabilities.
Vocational Rehabilitations partners include Goodwill Industries of Greater Nebraska, a nonprofit, and state agencies such as the Nebraska Department of Education, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services and others.
Nebraska Vocational Rehabilitation serves more than 6,000 state residents each year. Last year 1,887 of those it served entered the workforce, the program reports.
Being able to offer a six-week, four-day summer session is important, said Sam Comfort, a Goodwill Work Experience trainer. The three-month stretch is a time when disabled teenagers in particular can find themselves bored or isolated from teachers and schoolmates, Comfort said.
The grant money pays the wages of two Omaha Work Experience trainers and 16 Omaha-area students who work about eight hours a week, earning minimum wage, along with six students and trainers at the Goodwill store in Blair, said Holly Schwietz, coordinator of the Goodwill Work Experience program.
The goal is not for students to work at Goodwill, but if it works out, OK, Schwietz said.
The program serves students with autism, Down syndrome, developmental and behavioral issues and other disabilities, Schwietz said.
Participants, who are referred by teachers and counselors, spend about 30 to 45 minutes polishing their resumes and practicing interviewing skills before moving to their assigned jobs at the store or its sorting room.
For reticent teens, that can mean increasing eye contact, speaking in an audible voice or being more talkative. For others, its learning to put the brakes on during a job interview and not sharing your whole life story, Schwietz said.
Workplace tasks that some might take for granted making eye contact with customers, smiling, saying thank you, remembering to hand a donor a tax receipt, learning to categorize items (saleable as is or in need of repair) help students develop job skills and confidence. Depending on a participants progress, each week can bring new on-the-job responsibilities, Schwietz said.
Other program activities included a visit to Metropolitan Community College, which offers classes outside of those geared to a two-year degree, and to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska.
Playing host to the group, said Pat Bourne, senior vice president of commercial business and government affairs at Blue Cross, gave students the opportunity to view a real work environment.
We gave them pointers on how to put together a resume that will catch the eye of a recruiter, and tried to give them a sense of how much training different jobs require, Bourne said. Its important to give young people opportunities like this so they have a better idea of what to expect.
Comfort said he estimates that about 40 percent of participants in the Work Experience nine-month program find employment.
Students with disabilities can sometimes struggle to make the transition from school to work, Comfort said. Work provides meaning and benefit to our lives ... and earning a wage gives value to our time.
Travis OConnell, 19, not only works part time at Goodwill but part time for an Omaha-area call center as part of its customer service staff, he said. OConnell takes the bus from Hastings, Nebraska, to attend the summer program.
The program has helped him summon the courage to tackle new tasks, he said.
I started with a lack of willingness to do things, he said. Im way better now. I thought I couldnt do some things, but Id try it and find out Hey, thats not that hard, said OConnell, who said he is autistic. Its just a matter of paying attention to details and focusing.
As part of the summer program, Talasow learned to navigate the public transportation system to commute to and from work.
It was hard at first. I got lost. But its pretty easy now, he said.
After his job at Goodwill ends, Talasow said he plans to get another. He recently lined up a job interview at an Omaha video game store.
And his family?
Theyre surprised Ive gotten a job, Talasow said, smiling shyly.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1142, janice.podsada@owh.com
A top Chipotle Mexican Grill marketing executive might have been driven to drugs as the fast-food chains brand was tarnished by health scares at the burrito restaurants.
Mark Crumpacker, 53, the chains chief creative and development officer, appeared in New York state court on misdemeanor charges that he bought cocaine on seven occasions since January, according to prosecutors. Hes accused of being one of 18 repeat customers of a cocaine-delivery service who were indicted last week along with three ringleaders.
Crumpackers alleged drug purchases coincide with some of the companys worst days of 2016, with Chipotle struggling to bounce back from a string of E. coli and norovirus outbreaks. Crumpacker, whose compensation was $4.28 million last year, led the marketing effort to restore the companys image. He helped unveil a new loyalty program recently called Chiptopia Summer Rewards, aiming to get customers to come back.
He surrendered to authorities on Tuesday and was escorted into court Thursday in handcuffs, flanked by New York City Police Department officers. He didnt enter a plea and was released after posting bail. His attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, declined to comment outside court.
According to Assistant District Attorney Patrick Doherty, Crumpacker was caught on wiretaps 13 times ordering drugs, mostly to his apartment near Union Square, and most recently on June 18. He spent almost $3,000 on the deliveries, Doherty said.
Crumpacker is accused of making the first cocaine purchase on Jan. 29. That was just days before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the results of a probe into two E. coli outbreaks that sickened dozens of Chipotle customers.
The second purchase came on March 8, prosecutors said. On that day, Chipotle said it temporarily shut down a restaurant in Massachusetts after four employees got sick. Another purchase allegedly occurred April 27, the day after Chipotle posted its first quarterly loss as a public company.
And yet another took place on May 11, according to prosecutors. It was the day of the companys annual meeting, where shareholders voted to approve a proxy-access proposal backed by activists in a rebuke to the board.
Chipotle put Crumpacker on administrative leave on June 30. He was named marketing head of the Denver-based restaurant chain in 2009 and more recently took on the title of chief creative and development officer.
We are aware that Mark presented himself to authorities earlier today, Chris Arnold, a spokesman for Chipotle, said in a statement. He remains on a leave of absence from his job to focus on these personal matters.
A ring based on Manhattans Lower East Side allegedly used livery vehicles to deliver cocaine to locations throughout New York City, including apartments, bars, delis, hotels, pharmacies, restaurants and workplaces, according to prosecutors. The investigation began last year after a banker died leaping from his Manhattan residence, authorities said.
The alleged repeat customers were all charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum prison term of one year. Three men were also indicted for running the ring.
Crumpacker was a co-founder and executive at brand adviser Sequence LLC before taking over Chipotles marketing. The company has used the company to help with its Food With Integrity campaign, which promotes its use of local ingredients and meat from naturally raised animals.
LOS ANGELES Its a rite of summer: grilling on the outdoor barbecue.
Cooking hamburgers, hot dogs and steaks outside is such an ingrained part of Americana, and a grill is such an established feature of homeownership, that three out of four U.S. adults own a grill or smoker.
Demand for the outdoor grill also is egalitarian, not unlike the television set. Theyre found everywhere from the backyards of posh Beverly Hills homes to the infields of NASCAR speedways.
But the fact that grills are so commonplace is one reason why theres only modest sizzle in new product sales for the U.S. barbecue and grill manufacturing industry. Its simply a mature business.
Grill sales in America are growing only by low single-digit percentages each year, and the market is nearly 20 percent smaller than it was a decade ago, according to the research firm IBISWorld.
U.S. grill manufacturers led by Weber-Stephen Products, maker of the iconic Weber grill also face stiff competition from imports, which now account for 56 percent of U.S. sales, up from 46 percent a decade ago, the IBISWorld data show.
Grill sales are closely tied to changes in the U.S. economy, especially the housing industry. So, not surprisingly, the grill business was hammered between 2008 and 2010, when the housing crisis and severe recession took hold.
The industry has been gradually recovering since then, in step with the economys rebound, with annual U.S. grill sales climbing to $1.44 billion last year from $1.21 billion in 2009, according to IBISWorld. But thats well below the $1.78 billion in sales in 2006.
We think well continue to see steady sales, said Carrie deGuzman, a spokeswoman for the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association, the industrys trade group.
The Fourth of July is the most popular day of the year for outdoor grilling, with 76 percent of grill owners saying they planned to fire up their barbecues on the recent holiday, the association said. Summer bookends Memorial Day and Labor Day tied for second place at 62 percent.
In the groups most recent consumer survey, conducted last summer, 37 percent of U.S. adults planned to buy a new grill or smoker this year; 56 percent of those purchases would be for replacement grills.
And in the heated debate between gas and charcoal, gas has the edge. Gas grills outsold charcoal grills 57.7 percent to 40.1 percent. The remaining 2.2 percent of grills sold were electric.
The millennial generation buyers ages 18 to 34 is just as hooked on outdoor grilling as its forebears, partly because they watch BBQ Pitmasters and other cooking shows on television, said Richard Wachtel, founder of the barbecue website GrillingWithRich.com.
People are looking to bring those barbecue techniques home, he said.
The word barbecue, incidentally, dates back hundreds of years to the Caribbean words barabicu or barbacoa, which was a wooden structure used by the Taino people to smoke food, according to some etymologists. Later it also became a verb for outdoor grilling.
The leading U.S. grill supplier is Weber-Stephen with 30.3 percent of the market by dollar sales, according to IBISWorld. Next is Middleby Corp., an Elgin, Illinois-based company that has a 16.6 percent share with brands that include MagiKitchn and Viking.
In December, Middleby acquired Lynx Grills Inc., a maker of high-end outdoor grills that include some elaborate models that are voice-activated and can cost more than $8,000.
Weber has been growing faster than the overall market in recent years, aided by its brand recognition, product reputation, the improved economy and higher exports.
Overall, outdoor grill sales should keep modestly rising the next few years provided that the economy keeps growing and consumers have enough disposable income, IBISWorld analyst Edward Rivera said.
After all, Rivera said: Its part of the American identity to have a grill.
Just before 8:30 a.m. Friday, Dale and Darla Langendorfer walked into Arbor Banks branch near 168th Street and West Center Road, sat down and signed their names and initials on mortgage closing documents for a new home in the Elkhorn area.
It has become a familiar drill, this being the couples third home in the Omaha area. They also own investment properties through their local property management business.
But this time was different. In the time it takes to get a burger at the drive-thru, the Langendorfers signatures and initials landed in 48 places across about 75 pages worth of documents.
By 8:33 a.m. they had signed all the bank documents and they never had to touch an ink pen.
Thanks to new digital closing technology, writers cramp could become a thing of the past at least at Arbor Bank and others that are considering adopting e-signing technology. (The couple did have to put ink signatures on documents for Douglas County and federal records.)
In the wake of the housing crash, new regulatory disclosures and other documents have swelled the thickness of the average mortgage file, said Laura Lasher, mortgage division president at Arbor Bank. The new technology lets homebuyers digitally review and sign documents on a tablet, making paper files virtually obsolete.
Its a big time-saver, too.
Closings weve recently finished that were all-paper have lasted 45 minutes to an hour. Two weeks ago we had a closing that took 13 minutes, Lasher said.
Throughout the mortgage application process, borrowers can sign in to a secure website that stores and keeps track of the multitude of documents, disclosures and other forms required by banks and their regulators. If borrowers havent viewed every document, theres a red flag, and they cant advance to the final closing phase.
A federal pilot project that concluded about this time last year found that borrowers who used this kind of technology generally had a better understanding of the increasingly muddled process.
While technology alone will not address all consumer concerns in the closing process, our study showed that e-closings do offer the potential to make the process less complex, said Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which conducted the pilot.
Arbor Bank appears to be the only metro-area institution using the technology. A check with larger banks across Omaha indicated none were using the technology, but it is on some radar screens. Bank of the West is evaluating several different options for how to provide the capability, a spokeswoman told The World-Herald.
Still, its so new that it doesnt quite jibe with all banks procedures.
For example, at Charter West Bank, which is based in West Point, Nebraska, and has locations in Papillion and Elkhorn, the investors that buy the mortgages it sells into the secondary market are not yet on board with the format.
Even though Fannie Mae or the Federal Home Loan Bank say (digitally signed documents) are acceptable, if our investors arent accepting them, were not doing them until we can sell the mortgages, said Sara Kelley, mortgage loan officer at Charter West and president of the Nebraska Mortgage Association.
That also goes for certain loans at Arbor Bank, Lasher said. Borrowers seeking loans through the Federal Housing Administration or the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs still have to go through the conventional process. That means lots of signatures, at least for now.
During the Friday morning closing at Arbor Bank, Dale Langendorfer quipped that he should have had his signature made into a stamp long ago.
If Melanie Doeschot, business development manager for Omaha-based Ambassador Title Services, gets her way, that quip may soon become passe: If all the lenders could get on board with this, it would be phenomenal. I wish my 11 other closings today would go this fast.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1534, cole.epley@owh.com
The driver of a vehicle involved in a fatal crash early Saturday with a motorcycle has been charged with felony motor vehicle homicide.
Nicholas Colabello, 27, of Papillion, was arrested Saturday after the accident near 60th and Center Streets. He was charged Monday with the crime, according to a press release from the Douglas County Attorneys Office.
Police said the accident occurred about 1:30 a.m. Saturday when Colabello, westbound on Center in his 2002 Toyota Camry, turned left in front of Dustin E. Roof, 31, and his eastbound Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Police said Roof, who was wearing a helmet, was pronounced dead at the Nebraska Medical Center. Colabello was not hurt.
The release said Colabello failed a breath test and had a blood alcohol content of .119.
His bail was set at $150,000 on Sunday.
At Colabello's first court appearance Tuesday, Douglas County Judge Lawrence Barrett scheduled a preliminary hearing for Aug. 30. Prosecutors allowed Colabello, a golf pro at Shoreline Golf Course in Carter Lake, to attend work.
People with Colabello, believed to be relatives, told a reporter they didn't know him, then followed him out of the courthouse.
The man approached the couple outside their Iowa home earlier this month.
"You owe me money," he said, according to a report obtained by the Des Moines Register.
Then, he punched 32-year-old Ryan Thompson.
It was a single blow, which landed on the side of Thompson's face.
The man drove away, leaving Thompson dazed and reportedly slurring his speech.
One day later, Thompson died in a local hospital.
When he was hospitalized, Thompson was "pretty much kept alive by machines and his mother made the best decision and decided that he should just go and be at peace," his fiancee, Lindsey Engquist, told NBC affiliate WHO.
Did the punch cause Thompson's death? That's not yet something that authorities can say.
The Register reported that Gregory Schmunk, the Polk County medical examiner, "will not determine a cause of death until all test results are available" a process that could take several weeks.
Schmunk told The Washington Post in an email Monday that he couldn't confirm the cause of death at this time.
"The autopsy is going to determine whether or not it was a direct relation to the assault, if there was a pre-existing medical [condition]," Sgt. Paul Parizek, Des Moines police spokesman, told KCCI, a CBS affiliate.
A suspect has been identified, Parizek told The Post, but authorities are awaiting the cause-of-death determination before moving forward with criminal charges.
The suspect, who knew Thompson, is not yet in custody, but authorities have interviewed him and are "confident he will be available if and when he is charged," Parizek said.
"The case is still under investigation," he wrote.
Thompson's fiancee, Engquist, witnessed the attack and told investigators that it was unprovoked, the Register reported.
In her interview with the NBC outlet, Engquist called the blow a "sucker punch" and characterized her fiance's death as a "freak accident."
Parizek told the station that some details were "still a little sketchy" in the aftermath of the incident, but investigators believed they might have pieced together why Thompson was attacked.
"If you assault someone and they die, there is some culpability on your part and it's probably going to be criminal," Parizek told WHO-TV. "You assume those risks when you take those actions."
Thompson was remembered as a caring father and the "life of every party" who was devoted to his son and daughter.
"He was in love with his children," his ex-wife, Ashley Waddell, told the Register. "They hold him on a pedestal that no one can touch."
Thompson, Waddell told the newspaper, "truly made every one light up the moment he stepped in the room."
Authorities in the Kearney, Nebraska, area say they handled 369 calls during the 29th annual Cruise Nite that wrapped up Sunday night in Kearney.
The vintage auto show began Friday at 6 p.m. and finished at 6 p.m. Sunday.
Authorities said 65 tickets were issued, 26 people were arrested and 47 crimes were reported. Also, 28 vehicles were towed from the downtown area.
About 80 officers from Kearney, University of Nebraska at Kearney police, the Buffalo County Sheriffs Office and the Nebraska State Patrol worked the event, authorities said.
Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer was in Australia with his daughter when he received news from his command staff of the ambush of Dallas officers.
Schmaderer first made sure that his fellow Omaha officers were safe.
He thought of their families and remembered talking to relatives of fallen Officer Kerrie Orozco. He got angry.
And then he started working to prevent a similar tragedy from happening in Omaha.
In the wake of attacks like the one July 7 in Dallas and the ambush Sunday in Baton Rouge, Schmaderer said Monday that all Omaha officers will soon receive additional daylong active-shooter training.
In addition, security will be tightened for the publics safety at major events, like the minute of silence ceremony at Stinson Park this Sept. 11.
We are expanding our security protocol and our resources to do everything in our power to make sure those go off safe, he said.
Schmaderer spoke with The World-Herald about the state of police-community relations in Omaha, the Black Lives Matter rally on July 8 in Omaha and being a police officer in todays climate.
The chief said Omaha police officers have received threats in recent days, but he said its to be expected with the national furor. Amid the tension, Omaha has also seen its recruiting numbers dip, he said, mirroring a drop in applicants that departments are seeing nationwide.
After five officers were killed in Dallas, Schmaderer was appalled.
When law enforcement officers are killed in that manner, he said, it becomes the most egregious act that you can think of.
But Schmaderer commended the Omaha community and his department for working for years to cultivate a positive relationship that has helped curtail violence and crime. He partly attributed this years drop in homicides from an all-time high of 50 in 2015 to starting 2016 with the second fewest homicides in a decade to the strong relationship between police and the community.
When you break down these issues, were all on the same page. We want proper policing, and we want to reduce violent crime, he said.
The new training for officers will address some of the tactics that have been used in recent attacks, the chief said, citing the sniper in Dallas and the truck attack in Nice, France, last week.
Some tactics have changed by some of the extremists out there that we need to adapt to, he said.
And he remains committed to community relations. Echoing Mayor Jean Stothert, Schmaderer said he would have attended the July 8 Black Lives Matter rally if he had been able.
The Omaha event and others that followed have largely been unity rallies to show solidarity with whats occurring nationwide, Schmaderer said, and they havent turned violent. He is proud of officers who passed out stickers or blew bubbles during the rallies. The department, he said, is a product of good leadership and good employees.
He said the Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter slogans have been turned into hyperbole, but he agrees with both. He recognizes that Black Lives Matter was created when the black community felt it was treated differently, but he also said that everyones life does matter.
The title became natural Black Lives Matter. Thats not to say that all lives dont matter, he said. The discussion of the label is really irrelevant and sidetracks this whole process, in my opinion.
After Omahas first rally, Officer Bryan Kulhanek was condemned by many for a Facebook post that criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and for other posts that the department called potentially inappropriate. Kulhanek was placed on leave a few days after the rally.
Schmaderer couldnt comment directly on the social media comments because an internal investigation is pending, but he said all Omaha police employees must follow the departments policies and procedures. He also clarified that paid administrative leave is not considered a form of punishment.
Looking around, when he compares his city to others, hes pleased with what he sees.
Omaha and its police-community relations are an envy of a lot of major cities right now.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1068, alia.conley@owh.com
A 50-year-old woman who allegedly aided one of the recent prison escapees will stand trial, a judge ruled Monday.
Wanda T. Minor of Omaha is charged with being an accessory to a felony. She is being held on $500,000 bail.
Timothy Clausen and Armon Dixon escaped from the Lincoln Correctional Center on June 10 by hiding in laundry baskets in a truck headed for the Tecumseh State Prison.
Minor initially withheld information about Clausen but later told the Nebraska State Patrol that she picked him up in Lincoln and drove him to Omaha, a prosecutor has said.
Minor told Clausen that he couldnt stay at her home, the prosecutor said.
Minor waived her preliminary hearing Monday, and her next hearing date is yet to be set.
When the U.S. or another nation needs a drought expert, one of the first places they turn is Nebraska, home of Dr. Drought.
Don Wilhite, who arrived at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1977 and founded the National Drought Mitigation Center after the searing drought of 1988-89, retired this summer.
Dons probably among the leading couple of people around the world in expertise in drought, said UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green. When the U.N. calls on drought, they call on Don. ... His impact has been huge.
Wilhite, who also once headed the universitys School of Natural Resources, said retirement is allowing him to continue work in a few select areas.
As professor emeritus, Wilhite will focus on illuminating the threat that climate change poses to Nebraska. Internationally, he said, he will continue to work on both climate change and drought preparedness.
Many of the concepts used around the globe in preparing for drought were developed by Wilhite and his team at UNL, said Robert Stefanski, who heads the agricultural meteorology division for the World Meteorological Organization.
Dr. Wilhite is THE leading expert in advocating for better drought preparedness for countries and local communities around the world, the Geneva-based Stefanski said via email.
Stefanski described Wilhite as a tireless traveler in advocating for drought preparedness. The message Wilhite delivers abroad is the same that he has for Nebraska.
He will give advice to anyone, but strongly stresses that the work on drought preparedness has to be done by local stakeholders and not by expert consultants like himself, Stefanski said.
Wilhite was a leading force behind UNLs landmark 2014 report on the effects of climate change on the state. In 2015 he took that public education campaign out into the field, holding eight workshops with people from various social and economic sectors. This summer he briefed state legislators on the issue.
For Nebraska to be prepared for climate change, much work remains, Wilhite said.
Its become such a political issue in the United States that some people discard it because of the politics, he said. This is really a science issue.
At minimum, he said, the state needs to bring its drought plan up to date. Droughts are expected to become more frequent and severe in Nebraska because of climate change, and the state has lapsed in drought preparedness, he said.
Weve been lulled into a false sense of security in Nebraska in regards to drought, he said. The states drought plan is about 16 years old, and its time the state take a hard look at it.
If you ask Wilhite for some actions the state could take, hell rattle off a long list that ranges from basic equipment more soil-moisture sensors and automated weather stations to technological advances that help farmers with time-sensitive decisions such as planting and irrigation. And, he said, theres the fundamental need to help communities improve their water supplies.
Nebraska lucked out in 2013 when it didnt experience a repeat of the flash drought that occurred in 2012, the states hottest, driest year on record, Wilhite said. Drought typically spans multiple years, and a multiyear extension of the 2012 drought would have caused havoc in the state, he said.
As it was, that one year of drought caused some domestic wells to run dry and led to voluntary and mandatory community restrictions on water use, reductions in crop yields and an unprecedented decline in groundwater levels.
Internationally, Wilhite will continue working with several countries, the United Nations and the U.S. on drought preparedness.
Drought preparedness ties directly to food security and social and economic stability, he said, citing the Syrian upheaval as an example. More than 11 million Syrians have been displaced, internally or externally, by war and social unrest. Long-term drought there, intensified by climate change, contributed to the instability, he said.
Experts say the Middle East is primed for greater droughts as a consequence of climate change.
The (U.S.) Defense Department is very concerned about climate change from a perspective of national security, and part of that is tied up in the issue of drought and how it impacts the stability of political systems around the world, Wilhite said.
Drought preparedness begins with comprehensive monitoring of climatic conditions and water resources, he said, so that an early warning can be sounded and proper actions can be taken.
The goal is to lessen societal vulnerability, he said.
The same is true of climate change, he said. The magnitude and speed of projected changes are unprecedented, so it becomes imperative, he said, to prepare.
Climate change is happening on a global scale, Wilhite said, but adapting to change must begin at the local level, where climatic impacts are felt.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1102, nancy.gaarder@owh.com
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Climate change in Nebraska
Temperature: Nebraskas average temperature is projected to increase as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the last quarter of this century.
High temperature days: The number of days with highs greater than 100 degrees should increase substantially. By mid-century, the temperatures experienced during the 2012 drought and heat wave will be typical.
Precipitation: Nebraska is in a transition zone in terms of future changes in precipitation. To the north and east, more precipitation is expected; to the south and west, less. Projections for Nebraska show little change in annual precipitation, and perhaps a decrease in the summer months. With hotter weather, though, any precipitation will become less effective.
Drought: Nebraska is expected to experience more frequent and severe droughts in summer because of the combination of increasing temperatures and the increased seasonal variability in precipitation.
Snowpack: Summer flows on the Platte and Missouri Rivers could be greatly reduced because of projected declines in snowpack.
CLEVELAND Defend Donald Trumps weak spots and train the big guns on Hillary Clinton.
Thats the mission tonight for Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa as she delivers a prime-time address at the Republican National Convention.
Fortunately, the retired Iowa National Guard lieutenant colonel came prepared: She packed her camo heels and plenty of rhetorical ammunition.
We cannot afford to have Hillary Clinton as our next president, Ernst told delegates from Iowa on Sunday in a bit of a preview of tonights speech. We cannot take another eight years of Obama policies in the White House.
Ernst spoke as the featured guest at a Make Em Squeal barbecue dinner for the states delegation on the eve of the four-day convention.
The name was a reference to Ernsts career-defining television ads in 2014 featuring hog castration and promises to cut the pork in Washington.
As the delegates dug into heaping plates of Cajun food, Ernst worked the room doling out handshakes and hugs.
And she gave a little preview of tonights speech. Its a big moment for the rookie senator, a promising GOP star who was previously tapped to provide the Republican response to President Barack Obamas 2015 State of the Union address.
Given tonights convention theme of Make America Safe Again, the focus of Ernsts 10-minute speech will be national security. And she promised the Iowa delegation that she would come out swinging.
She said she would highlight what she characterized as failures of the current administration and tie them back to Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who served as secretary of state during Obamas term.
She cited continuing terrorist attacks around the world that are either directed by or at least inspired by the Islamic State, which she said Obama claims is weakening.
I disagree, President Obama, Ernst said. And if we elect a Hillary Clinton as president, we will continue to see more of the same failed policies in addressing this terrorist threat. And it is an extreme Islamist terrorist threat. But our administration refuses to call it as such. They need to step up to the plate because only when they recognize what a threat it is can we actually start to do something about it. So we need to regain our place in the world again as a global leader.
The world is hungry for a strong U.S. leader, she said.
While Donald Trump has sought to project that strength, he also has seen his national security credentials questioned.
There was the time he seemed unfamiliar with the basic structure of the nations nuclear forces. Or the time he said he gets his military advice from watching television.
But Ernst defended Trumps knowledge on national security, saying he has a deeper understanding than he lets on. Ernst met recently with Trump amid talk that he was considering her as a potential running mate.
Based on her one-on-one conversation with the presumptive GOP nominee, Ernst said she is comfortable that Trump understands Americas role in the world.
He is not an isolationist, Ernst said. But what he wants to make sure is that were putting America first, that were keeping America safe.
She said the men and women she served with will be very much on her mind. The headquarters unit of the support battalion that she commanded is overseas again, deployed to Afghanistan.
She cited them as she criticized Senate Democrats for blocking a defense spending bill.
She told the Iowans that they need to work hard up and down the ballot in November to make sure that Republicans are successful.
Were gonna make em squeal, she said. Were going to make those Democrats squeal, thats for certain.
Her speech will be at 9:36 p.m. Central time.
Ernst told reporters that her mother plans to go to her house in Red Oak to watch with her husband and daughter because her moms television has been cutting out lately.
Ernst said shes more excited than nervous, although she conceded that it will be more intimidating than her last high-profile speech, after the 2015 State of the Union address.
She said shes never spoken in front of such a large audience. She said she plans to do plenty of rehearsing to get her timing down, although shes also trying to protect her voice, given that she has a slight head cold coming on.
Ill be drinking lots of tea, she said.
Each day during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, The World-Herald will introduce readers to several of the delegates representing Nebraska and Iowa.
* * * * *
Coby Mach
Age: 51 / Hometown: Lincoln / Occupation: president and CEO of Lincoln Independent Business Association
Q. This is your first convention. What do you think?
A. The energy, the electricity in the room (and) the thought of being a part of the process in nominating the next president is absolutely amazing. There is just an electricity about the whole thing. You cant even imagine.
Q. Were you on the floor when Ted Cruz took the stage last night?
A. Yes. Ted Cruz had people absolutely fired up. He had the crowd believing in him as someone who would support Donald Trump. And then he never said the words. You could just feel the energy being sucked right out of the room.
Q. How loud were the boos?
A. The boos were extremely loud and probably well deserved.
Q. You realize you picked a good convention for your first.
A. Everybody is talking about being a part of a very historical convention. Its historical in that Donald Trump is not everything to all people.
Q. Have you purchased any mementos?
A. No. But when I arrived I was given two Donald Trump hats. I have yet to wear one. Im not a hat guy.
Q. Are you an original Donald Trump fan?
A. I was not. I was originally supporting Ted Cruz.
Q. And after last night?
A. I was disappointed in him last night.
Mary Jane Truemper
Age: 56 / Hometown: Omaha / Occupation: real estate agent
Q. What was it like on the floor last night when Ted Cruz spoke?
A. The question I was asking myself all day was: Why would the Trump campaign allow him on the floor? Afterward, I thought it was brilliant. He was given an opportunity to redeem himself or hang himself, and he did not take the high road. No one likes a sore loser.
Q. What speakers have you enjoyed the most?
A. I like all the Trump kids. My husband told me children are a window to your soul. And you see these hard-working, intelligent children who come from privilege but they still work and are still productive.
Q. This is your second convention. How does it compare to your first?
A. Better weather than August in Florida. There are a lot of similarities in that there was contention (in 2012) with the Ron Paul delegation.
Q. What do you think of all the security in Cleveland?
A. I think theyve done a tremendous job, and Im so grateful to all the law enforcement people who came from all over the country to provide security.
Westhenry Ioerger
Age: 19 / Hometown: Alden, Iowa / Occupation: Drake University student
Q. Youre the youngest member of the delegation. What made you want to come to Cleveland?
A. For the experience, just being here. I didnt realize when I first was elected to come here that Id be hanging out with the governor and congressmen and senators and stuff. But thats been really neat so far and just meeting all the big Republicans in Iowa has just been fantastic.
Q. How did you get interested in politics?
A. My familys always talked about politics and listened to the news and things. Really, I just see where our countrys going and I dont like it. For my generation, I dont see good things ahead, and I wanted to make a difference and hopefully turn this thing around.
Q. Youre getting a big head start on a political career.
A. Its been crazy, yeah. Sen. Grassley offered me an internship a couple days ago and Ive been talking to the lieutenant governor a lot and its just been a great networking experience. I think if I decide to go into politics, I will definitely find a place.
Jake Chapman
Age: 32 / Hometown: Adel, Iowa / Occupation: state senator and chief operating officer for private ambulance service
Q. Hows your week going?
A. Its been great. Weve seen excitement increase day after day.
Q. Whats been your best experience?
A. I think weve had some incredible speeches, really firing up the base, making the case as to why we need to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Q. Which speech was your favorite?
A. Mike Pence gave a great speech last night. But I think hearing first-hand from some of those family members, whether it be the mother of the son that died in Benghazi or families that have been impacted by crimes committed by illegal aliens. Those speeches are most powerful because theyre talking first-hand about how its impacted their lives personally.
Q. Have you done any fun stuff?
A. Weve kind of toured down by the market areas. And Ill tell you one of the coolest things Ive seen is just the amount of law enforcement, and the amount of people that are thanking law enforcement for being there.
JoAnn Smith (mother of U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb.)
Age: 69 / Hometown: Gering, Nebraska / Occupation: retired teacher and retailer
Q. Whats the best part of this convention?
A. I just love the speeches, one right after another. Theyre bringing out things Ive been thinking and care about. The convention is another world. I like the fact we care about the same things.
Q. How many conventions does this make?
A. This is my fourth.
Q. Who has been your favorite speaker so far?
A. Its hard to pick one. Marcus Luttrell I was riveted by him. (Luttrell is a former Navy Seal who served in Afghanistan.)
Q. You always wear red, white and blue outfits at the convention. Do you shop before you come?
A. My closet is laced with it (because) its Nebraska and Republican colors. And red is my best color.
* * *
Bob Evnen
Age: 63 / Hometown: Lincoln / Occupation: attorney
Q. Have you bought any souvenirs?
A. I purchased a tie with an American flag motif and the Statue of Liberty superimposed on it. And I purchased a couple of GOP ties.
Q. Who is your favorite speaker so far?
A. I would have to say weve had really terrific speakers. Rudy Giuliani, Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Chris Christie and Mitch McConnell. Theyve all been terrific.
Q. Are you pleasantly surprised with Cleveland?
A. The people of Cleveland have provided us a very wonderful experience. Everyone we encountered here has just been terrific and its a beautiful city.
Q. Were you an original Trump fan?
A. No. Marco Rubio.
Q. Are you disappointed Rubio didnt come to Cleveland?
A. Im disappointed there are a few Republican leaders who are not part of the convention. I think its more important we are united as a party. Donald Trump won the nomination. It wasnt handed to him.
Q. Would you describe yourself as more pro-Trump or more anti-Hillary Clinton?
A. Both. I started out being very concerned about the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency. As Ive learned more and more, though, Ive become quite pro-Trump.
* * *
Gregg Cummings
Age: 51 / Hometown: Lamoni, Iowa / Occupation: national network coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots
Q. Who are you most looking forward to hearing speak?
A. Ted Cruz. Ive known Ted Cruz for many years. I know his heart. I know hes a true, strong constitutionalist.
Q. Outside of convention business, do you have any other plans while youre in Cleveland?
A. Im a military veteran and I havent seen one of my soldiers we served together for 26 years. We met yesterday, and my wife and his wife, we went to the local zoo. A lot of catching up.
* * *
Marlys Popma
Age: 60 / Hometown: Kellogg, Iowa / Occupation: campaign director at Campaign Headquarters, a political calling center
Q. Hows your week going?
A. Its great. Cleveland has been wonderful. The staff everywhere, the people that are volunteering at the civic center, have been very, very good. Weve had some robust discussions within the Iowa delegation.
Q. What have you done outside of convention business?
A. Ive done very little sightseeing, but I have done some business-business. My office does a lot of voter ID and get out the vote and fundraising for conservative candidates and organizations. Ive had the opportunity to connect with some of our clients and some of those people we would like to have as clients.
Q. So youre working all the angles?
A. Im working the angles while Im here. The convention is where everybody comes and so you get to see a lot of your clients at one time. We get to see them face-to-face.
* * *
Carol Hanson
Age: 64 / Hometown: Cedar Falls, Iowa / Occupation: special education teacher
Q. Why did you want to come to Cleveland?
A. I originally agreed to have my name put in nomination to be a delegate because Im a supporter of Ted Cruz. I just believe in conservative principles.
Q. Who are you looking forward to hearing most?
A. Ted Cruz. Hes my guy. I, for a long time, have just felt like he would make a great president.
Q. Any particular tourist destinations youd like to hit while here?
A. Im interested in this Jewish museum (the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage). Thats probably number one on my list.
Q. Any souvenirs youre looking for?
A. No. Im not even taking many pictures. Itll just be in the memory bank.
* * *
Sally Ganem (wife of former Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman)
Age: 68 / Hometown: Fremont, Nebraska / Occupation: retired educator
Q. How many conventions does this make for you?
A. Ive been a delegate to three conventions over the years. One in Detroit cant remember the year, it was a hundred years ago and one in Florida (2012). And this one.
Q. Why do you come?
A. I really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of history making and decision making. We get to vote and represent our state on presidential matters.
Q. What was your favorite part of Mondays event, the first night of the convention?
A. It was kind of exciting to be a part of and listening to the differences of opinions over the rules and platform. (That included an attempted rebellion by anti-Trump delegates.)
Q. Did you side with the rebels?
A. No I didnt. Trump was not my (first) candidate, but I really believe that the people did vote for him.
Q. Trump has said some pretty questionable things about women, including his remarks on Carly Fiorinas looks. How do you square that with your support?
A. Yes, he has. I think action speaks louder than words, and in his organization, he does promote women.
* * *
John Dinkel
Age: 61 / Hometown: Norfolk / Occupation: co-owner of Dinkel Implement Co., which sells farm equipment
Q. Was Trump your first pick?
A. No. Rubio. Candidly, I thought he was more electable than Trump at the time.
Q. What was the best part of Monday nights convention speeches?
A. Melanias speech. She brings a womans perspective to Donald and their entire family.
Q. What was the craziest thing you saw last night on the floor of the convention?
A. The shouting on the floor, when the Utah delegation was yelling for a roll call vote. That was unfortunate.
Q. You obviously didnt side with the rebels (who wanted to deprive Trump of the nomination).
A. Well, it makes news. But we wanted the headlines to be about Melania talking and not about that. But I think in the end we will all come together. We have to, for the good of the country.
* * *
David Chung
Age: 55 / Hometown: Cedar Rapids, Iowa / Occupation: software engineer
Q. Why did you want to come to Cleveland?
A. I decided to come to Cleveland after Ted Cruz won Wisconsin. I was a Ted Cruz supporter and I thought there might be an opportunity for him to be the candidate. But I am supporting the candidate (Trump).
Q. Any tourist or other plans beyond convention business?
A. Its a chance to meet old friends and make new Republican friends. And maybe a little Pokemon Go.
Q. Have you found any Pokemon at the convention?
A. Yeah, but no really special ones. But when youre standing for an hour trying to leave the venue in a security line, thats why Ive got the phone on. Oh theres a Poke Stop.
Q. Who are you looking forward most to hearing speak?
A. I heard some of them yesterday. I thought Marcus Luttrell was awesome. Rudy (Guiliani) was on fire. I love to hear Joni (Ernst) all the time.
Craig Safranek
Age: 42 / Hometown: Merna, Nebraska / Occupation: farmer
Q: How many conventions have you gone to?
A: Two.
Q: Why did you want to come again?
A: The party and being a part of the process.
Q: Did you enjoy Sunday nights welcoming party for delegates at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?
A: It was good. It was pretty spread out. There was music and free food. They had food vendors giving out food out of their trucks.
Q: What time did you go to bed?
A: I dont know. About 11 (p.m.). Is that very late? We watched CNN. Dont put that in there. We watched Fox and CNN.
* * * * *
Debby Brehm
Age: 66 / Hometown: Lincoln / Occupation: president of Brehm Enterprises, a real estate holding company
Q: Is this your first convention?
A: Its my first as a delegate. I went to Philadelphia in 2000 as a guest.
Q: Why did you want to attend another convention?
A: Ive been on the Trump train since Day One. Ive been in favor of him since the day he and Melania (his wife) came down the escalator in June of 2015. I think hes a businessman who has real experience.
Q: What do you think of the Never Trump folks?
A: I think its pretty sad because at the very first debate, all those candidates signed a pledge to support the nominee. Jeb (Bush) signed and hes backing out of his pledge. Thats bad.
Q: Who do you most want to hear speak?
A: Im waiting for Trump. I would like to hear Newt Gingrich. And, Im also anxious to hear Melania and Ivanka.
* * * * *
Nancy McCabe
Age: 64 / Hometown: Omaha / Occupation: office manager of Drakon LLC, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts private business venture
Q: How many conventions have you attended?
A: This is my third. Tampa, Minneapolis and, now, Cleveland.
Q: Why come back? Its madness, I tell you.
A: I thought about not coming but then I thought I need to support my party and it was coming down to a historic election.
Q: What was the best part of Sunday nights welcoming party?
A: Going to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame .... They had a display on Mick Jagger. It had a video with him singing when he was young and now a video of him singing the same song when hes much older.
Q: Were you on the Trump train from the get-go?
A: No. Marco Rubio.
Q: Are you on the train now?
A: Yes I am. Im firmly a Never Hillary.
* * * * *
J.R. Bloom
Age: 23 / Hometown: Lincoln / Occupation: third-year law student at the University of Nebraska
Q: Why did you want to come to a political convention?
A: Im a lifelong Republican already and I want to be here at a historic moment.
Q: Are you an original passenger on the Trump train?
A: No. I went from Scott Walker to a Rubio guy. Then I saw the writing on the wall and jumped on.
Q: Who is the person you most hope to hear speak?
A: Boy, its tough. Alex Smith. She is the chairman of the College Republican National Committee.
Q: Do you have a Trump hat?
A: I do have a Trump hat. Actually, the first one I got I gave to my brother and then I got two more. They came in the (gift) bag (the Trump campaign) gave us yesterday.
* * * * *
Chelle Adkins
Age: 40 / Hometown: Cedar Falls, Iowa / Occupation: mortgage processor/closer
Q: Who are you most excited to hear speak this week?
A: Joni Ernst, of course! Other than Joni, Id really like to hear from Mike Pence. Ive never seen him speak before. I know hes very conservative, but Id really like to hear more from him and kind of get a good feel for who he is.
Q: Any tourist plans while youre in Cleveland?
A: Everything I wanted to see is right here at the convention, but I am eager to meet other delegates from other states.
Q: Whats one thing you brought that you couldnt leave home without?
A: We have this frog that we take everywhere with us. We take pictures at different places with this frog. I dont know if well get him into the convention to take pictures. Security is pretty tight.
Q. This is a stuffed frog, not a real one, right?
A: Its a stuffed frog. Hes wearing a Joni Ernst T-shirt.
* * * * *
Linda Stickle
Age: 60s / Hometown: Anamosa, Iowa / Occupation: Retired
Q: Who are you looking forward most to hearing from this week?
A: Ted Cruz. I am a Ted Cruz fan. Hes my candidate and I just want to hear what he has to tell us. Hes all for Constitution and liberty and conservative values that hes continuing to fight for in the Congress. And I just think hes going to verify or tell us how important it is to stick with conservatism in this world that we live in. You know, its a little nuts.
Q: Any tourist plans this week?
A: The Rock and Roll Hall of fame was on my list and we did that. That was really good. I have no idea how much extra time were going to have.
* * * * *
Keith Trullinger
Age: 48 / Hometown: Waukee, Iowa / Occupation: ADP consultant
Q: Why did you want to come to Cleveland?
A: Im trying to keep the party conservative and make sure that the grassroots, conservative activists have a voice.
Q: What are you looking forward to most this week?
A: Im a Ted Cruz supporter and I worked for the campaign over the last year. So Im really looking forward to seeing him again.
Q: Any tourist attractions?
A: We went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last night and that was wonderful really, really nice. I think we may go back there again before its all over with. We saw Jimi Hendrixs guitars, so that was great, and we got to hear a couple bands. That was fun. The big one was Three Dog Night.
Q: Any particular political souvenirs youre on the hunt for?
A: Probably buttons. I see everybody with all these really old Reagan buttons and things like that. So I think I should grab some buttons and hold onto those so my grandkids, whenever I have any, will have something to look back on.
State revenues ebb and flow, and government has a duty to adjust its budgeting to meet the challenge as part of sound management. Thats the message Gov. Pete Ricketts has rightly sent in directing state agencies to tighten their belts in the face of a $95 million revenue shortfall.
This is not a crisis, Ricketts said Thursday. This is what we get paid to do, to manage our budgets. Agencies under the governors control will review all hiring, limit travel to essential services, coordinate technology and other purchases and work with fellow agencies to find efficiencies. Agencies should not expect to carry over any funds from the fiscal year that ended June 30, Ricketts made clear.
The governor is asking for similar action from agencies and boards not under his authority. All state agencies will be affected by his decision to cut quarterly allotments to state agencies by 1 percent every three months.
That doesnt mean agencies should blindly adopt an across-the-board cutting mentality, however. A key principle is that state resources be prioritized so essential services are not jeopardized.
It wont be long before the governor presents his 2017-18 budget proposal at the start of next year and the new Legislature begins its deliberations on taxing and spending questions.
Nebraska leaders have a crucial responsibility to craft the next two-year state budget responsibly, without putting the state in fiscal jeopardy in the fashion of a blue state such as Illinois or a red state such as Kansas.
Nebraskas state revenues remain uncertain for the near future, as the governor acknowledged last week. Such warning signs make clear the need for prudence.
Fisher is superintendent of South Sioux City Community Schools. Skretta is superintendent of Norris Public Schools.
Lets change the rhetoric around school finance.
At this moment, your local school superintendent and school board are hard at work preparing budgets for the next school year. They are doing so without a unified, statewide vision for public education, in an environment of fiscal uncertainty and under the cloud of a divided political climate.
Nebraskans must exert the will and display the courage to change our rhetoric and participate in the challenging process of collaborating on a vision for public education and providing a more equitable tax structure; neither can be accomplished in isolation. This will not be an easy task, nor will any meaningful change occur without fully understanding the complexities behind tax relief and school spending.
As two Nebraska school superintendents, we will use our districts to illustrate the complexities of this task.
Norris and South Sioux City are growing districts in different locations and with different demographics. Both have experienced increasing enrollments combined with limited state resources. How our schools are funded looks different and illustrates the complexity of addressing tax relief in Nebraska.
The Norris story
Norris is a school district that receives fewer resources annually from the state, becoming more and more dependent on revenue generated through property taxes to support quality education for its students.
Norris certified state aid for 2016-17, $4.86 million, is the lowest level of funding our district has received in more than a decade. It is down more than 10 percent from the previous year, which was an 8 percent cut from the $5.9 million received in 2014-15.
A decade ago, when our state aid was $4.45 million, Norris was a school district of 1,772 students, and costs were considerably lower. Norris enrollment last year was 2,241, a 2.89 percent enrollment increase from the year before.
Norris is now in the distressing plight of having almost three-fourths of its funding reliant on local property taxes. This phenomenon is playing out in many districts across our state, which is why Nebraska has the unenviable distinction of being top in the nation in the use of local revenue as a percentage of the total needed to fund K-12 education.
The reduction in state aid to Norris has occurred at a time of perennial growth for the district. Each year brings new enrollment highs, as residential development increases in southern Lancaster County in the form of acreages and housing development in rapidly growing Hickman, one of a number of small communities making up the Norris system.
The disproportionate burden of property taxes has fallen on the shoulders of our farmers. While the total number of agricultural acres has declined in our district because of increasing residential development, the value of this precious commodity has skyrocketed.
Lancaster County data from the Nebraska Department of Revenue notes that the cumulative percentage increase in real ag land valuations since 2011 is a mind-blowing 106 percent. Ironically, however, these increases are occurring in a context of three straight years of declining farm income because of low commodities prices, with debt-to-equity ratios for farms increasing.
While valuations have continued to rise, figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that the price of corn has fallen 87 percent during this same five-year span.
In short, the bank ledger is not penciling out for Nebraska farmers, the backbone of our states economy. While assessed values based on sales of comparable parcels have resulted in significant valuation increases, if the production value of the land does not equate to these increases, it puts our farmers in a negative revenue cycle, as it has for the last several years.
The South Sioux story
South Sioux City is considered the poster child for equalization aid because of our unusual situation of existing needs vs. resources.
South Sioux City is a community of 14,000 and is expected to realize steady population growth in the foreseeable future. The school district has seen consistent growth in student enrollment, with a current population of 3,900. More than 12 percent of our South Sioux students (nearly double the state average) are English Language Learners, whose native language is not English. These students require additional resources to educate so they become proficient users of the English language.
Couple that with the fact the district hovers around the 75 percent mark in terms of students identified for free and reduced price lunch, and it is quite apparent that more students are enrolling from families who live in poverty.
South Sioux City is a property-poor district, as reflected in the total valuation per student. According to the Nebraska Department of Revenue, South Sioux City Community Schools has the fifth-lowest total valuation per pupil in Nebraska.
The district is heavily dependent on resources from the state, with approximately 60 percent of its budget supported by state aid. However, such aid has remained relatively flat over the past six years.
In the 2010-11 school year, the district received $26.17 million in state aid. This past school year, the district received $26.58 million.
In terms of per-pupil cost, this was only $17.35 more each year per student. To put this in real-world perspective, this increase in revenue does not cover the cost of purchasing a textbook, let alone other valuable resources for students.
From a property tax perspective, 20 percent of the districts budget is composed of revenue generated through property taxes, and approximately 5 percent of the property taxes come from agricultural land. The school districts valuation growth has slowed over the past four years, moving from increases of 4.8 percent to 1.75 percent this last year.
These slight valuation gains have resulted in revenue increases that do not cover costs associated with career and technical education or technology.
Even when adding the two revenue sources together (state aid and local property tax revenue), our school district struggles to keep up with increases in costs required to provide quality programs.
Investing in education
If the focus of our elected officials manifests itself mostly in tax-cut proposals and restrictions on spending that rob school boards of local control, this is a sad sign for the future of education in Nebraska.
We urge all our elected state officials to join the ranks of public education advocates who are working hard to marshal the forces and gather the resources needed in order to:
Make universal preschool a reality.
Ensure every child has technological literacy.
Commit to college- and career-readiness.
As schools transition from budget planning to budget adoption, take an interest in your local school and its governing board.
Understand that, while alluring, conversations about tax cuts must be seen in the broader context of the value of public education and prosperity of future generations.
Public education in Nebraska continues to be an excellent investment in our children, and therefore, in our future.
3 years after assault, Dalit woman raped by the same 5 men on bail
India
oi-Pallavi Sengupta
Rohtak, July 18: In an incident that shows that even the judiciary is not spared from the evils of caste system, 5 upper caste men rape a Dalit college going girl in Rohtak. Incidentally, these were the very men who had raped her 3 years ago in Bhiwani. 2 of the assaulters were arrested back then but released on bail.
The girl in her 20s, was kidnapped by the men when she left her college. She was kidnapped in a car, drugged and raped when she was unconscious. Her body was found in the bush afterwards. Passers-by, who found her in a bad shaped and semi-naked took her to the nearby Rohtak Civil Hospital. They also informed the police.
Since the last incident, the culprits have been trying to settle the issue out-of-court with the girl's family at a price of Rs 50 lakh. In return, the family was urged to withdraw the case that demanded the arrest of the remaining three and the re-arrest of the two who had been released on bail. Following pressure from the men, the girl's family shifted to Rohtak from Bhiwani.
The men are all in their 20s and are students of the same college that the girl studied in 3 years ago. Several Dalit organizations held demonstrations yesterday at the residence of Rohtak MLA, Manish Grove, to protest against the crime.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 11:18 [IST]
Demonstration in Jaipur in support of Naik, Owaisi
India
oi-PTI
Jaipur, Jul 17: A Muslim organisation Popular Front of India today held a demonstration in support of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik 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.
"Zakir Naik 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.
PTI
HL: Dy SP Ganapathy case: Cops chased scribes to plant story
India
oi-Shreyas
Bengaluru, July 18: The suicide of Mangaluru Dy SP MK Ganapathy continues to rock the Karnataka Assembly and what has in particular fulled this furore is the alleged leak of the preliminary report of the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) that is probing the suicide.
The demand for the resignation of Bengaluru Development and Town Planning Minister KJ George is only growing at this moment with opposition parties sticking to their guns.
It could be recalled that Ganapathy, before committing suicide in a lodge at Madikeri, spoke to a local TV channel. He alleged pressure from his own department and political bigwigs.
The deceased officer in the interview had named former Home Minister KJ George, senior IPS officers AM Prasad, ADGP (Intelligence) and Pronab Mohanty, IGP, Lokayukta Police, and held them responsible in case anything happened to him.
According to top sources in the police department, this is a case of cops chasing scribes to plant a story meticulously and selectively and not scribes chasing cops for exclusives.
An officer speaking to OneIndia said: "The leak that was reported in mainstream Kannada electronic media on Friday, July 15 was a deliberate move by the CID."The leaked report said the suicide of Ganapathy was not due to personal reasons and hinted at possible pressure from officers of higher rung."
An officer in the investigation team managed this leak and there is a strong reason for this officer to do so. This officer, while he was serving as an Inspector in a police station at Bengaluru, dealt with a case that cost him an 'unfair' suspension. Sources say, "during his tenure in Bengaluru, due to this controversial case, he faced the consequences from the then Home Minister KJ George."
This officer who is currently working with the CID investigation team on Ganapathy's case had a case on his table that was bothering KJ George and his son Rana George. The officer was allegedly lambasted for handling the case without bringing it to the notice of the minister.
A section of officers in the department OneIndia spoke to say: "This episode of the previous case concerning Geroge kept lingering in his mind because of which he underwent harassment. This could be the key reason for the officer to plant the story in the media."
However, other sources tell that Chief Minister (CM) Siddaramaiah has taken this case very seriously and is taking personal interest too. The officer who was allegedly harassed by George was given the task to investigate the case after Siddaramaiah's instruction.
The idea behind CM including this officer in the investigation team is for thorough 'fact finding'. "The CM wants the investigation team to uproot the real reason behind Ganapathy taking the extreme step."
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 16:28 [IST]
George quits as minister, dead cop's son now hopeful of getting justice
India
oi-Oneindia
By Oneindia Staff Writer
Bengaluru, July 18: Karnataka minister K.J. George resigned from the Siddaramaiah cabinet on Monday evening after a court ordered registration of an FIR against him and two senior police officers in the DySP Ganapathy suicide case.
It may be recalled that Ganapathy had named George and two IPS officers in his interview to a local news channel just before ending his life in a lodge in Madikeri, saying "they are responsible if anything happens to me."
The opposition parties raked up the issue during the ongoing assembly session and demanded that George resign and be probed in the case, but it was the court direction to file an FIR against George that forced him to resign.
Earlier in the day, the sessions court in Madikeri directed the police to file an FIR against George, senior IPS officer A.M. Prasad, ADGP (Intelligence), and Pronab Mohanty, IGP, Lokayukta Police. Ganapathy's son Nehal had approached the court after the police department refused to heed the family's demand for a probe against those the cop had named in his last interview.
Admitting the plea, the court directed the state government to consider Ganapathy's statement as 'dying declaration' and file the FIR.
Speaking to OneIndia, Nehal said the court had directed the police to register the FIR and said now "We have hope of getting justice."
OneIndia News
Fourth Tranche of Sovereign Gold Bonds opens Today
News
oi-Lisa
By Lisa
The Ministry of Finance has launched the 4th Tranche of Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGB) and it will be open for investment by resident individuals and institutional investors from 18th to 22nd July 2016.
The 4th tranche of the SGB scheme is the first series in 2016-17. Based on average of last week prices of physical gold, the issue price of the 4th tranche has been fixed at 3119 per gram of gold.
Sovereign #Gold Bond scheme tranche 4 opens today; Govt fixes Rs 3119/gm as rate pic.twitter.com/MTl7cXhUoz All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) July 18, 2016
The investment in SGB is also eligible investment for Statutory Liquidity Ratio of Banks. SGB is eligible to be converted into Demat form and can be used as collaterals for availing loans.
SGB shall be repayable on the expiration of eight years from the date of the issue and premature redemption is permitted after 5th, 6th and 7th years from the date of issue of SGB.
Further, SGB is also exempt from capital gains tax on redemption. Indexation benefit is also be available to long term capital gains on transfer of bond.
RBI has already made the first tranche of SGB tradeable and the other tranches, including the present one, are expected to become tradeable in 3 months' time.
How to invest in SGB:
To attract small investors, the minimum subscription has been reduced to 1 gm, although the maximum remains at 500 gm per person/institution.
SGB can now be purchased from NSE and BSE, besides all Bank branches, select Post Offices and the Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (SHCIL).
How has previous tranches of SGB fared:
The first 3 tranches had attracted an investment of 1318 Crores, equivalent to 4.9 metric tons of gold at the then prevailing prices.
With the added features, it is expected that the 4th tranche of SGB would garner much higher investment.
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 9:43 [IST]
HC rejects interim bail plea of Asaram Bapu
India
oi-PTI
Jodhpur, Jul 15: The Rajasthan High Court today rejected the interim bail plea of self-styled godman Asaram, facing rape charge, on health ground, saying he did not have any serious ailment.
Asaram, 74, had moved the bail application last month citing a medical report by an ayurvedic doctor mentioning 12 different types of disease and had sought the permission to go to Kerala for proper treatment.
In her order, Justice Nirmal Jeet Kaur observed that he did not have any serious health problem citing a medical report prepared by a medical board, said P C Solanki, counsel for the victim girl.
"The high court had asked for a detailed medical report by a medical board. Based on the report, which did not mention Asaram to be afflicted with any serious disease, the high court rejected his bail plea," he said.
Solanki said that the court decided to issue a guideline to the state government for the treatment of Asaram so that all the recommended diagnostic tests are done and medication ensured.
The court also sought a progress report on the trial in the case for the past two-and-a-half years, while listing for hearing a regular bail application of Asaram on July 26.
He was sent to jail in August 2013 for allegedly sexually assaulting a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
PTI
Monsoon session: Forget GST, Modi govt may have tough time dealing with Arunachal, U'khand issuE
India
oi-Pallavi Sengupta
New Delhi, July 18: The monsoon session of the Parliament may see the Modi government having a rough time seeking the support of all-party members for its GST Bill.
Congress is yet to settle from the Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh shock when the Congress government there was forced to experience the floor test (to be noted: Arunachal's date is yet to be fixed). The scars are fresh and Congress would not leave a chance to target the government in the Parliament for the cause.
Sensing trouble, the Modi government scheduled an all-party meet on Sunday requesting all th eparties to support the GST and not indulge in things that are of lesser importance than the GST.
Mosi said, "GST is of national importance; the issue here is not which government gets credit for its passage. All of us represent both the people and parties and let's keep national interests above everything else."
Modi also thanked all the parties for their support to the government on the Kashmir issue. "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," he said, while complimenting them for speaking in "one voice."
The opposition, however, said that the only thing that may come in GST's way is the lack of trust between any two states.
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said, "How can you proceed in this context?"Jyotiraditya Schindhia, the congress chief in Lok Sabha said, " the party wants a concrete draft proposal from the government on GST. If we know how they plan to address the three contentious issues, we can revert."
On raising apprehensions that the passing of the GST may prove to be a bilateral negotiation between the Centre and the congress, CP(I)M leader Sitaram Yechury was assured that all the parties will be spoken to individually.
However, apart from the GST, the other things to be discussed include the incidents in Jammu and Kashmir, the NSG bid, floods in some states and agragarian issues.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 10:32 [IST]
Nilgai, monkey, wild pig declared vermin on request of states: Govt
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, Jul 18: The Environment Ministry had issued notifications declaring three wildlife species as vermin in five states on their request, the government said today.
"Section 62 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act empowers the central government to issue notifications declaring any wild animal, other than those specified in Schedule I and Part II of Schedule II, as vermin for any specified area and a specified period by including the species in Schedule V of the Act.
"The Ministry has issued notifications under this provision of the Act based on the request of states," Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave said in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha. Bihar had sought a notification declaring Nilgai and wild pigs as vermin in 31 districts and 10 districts, respectively.
Uttarakhand had asked for a notification for wild pigs in 13 districts, he said. Himachal Pradesh had sought a notification for Rhesus Macaque in 10 districts, Gujarat for Nilgai in 19 districts and Maharashtra for Nilgai in one district, and wild pigs in four districts.
The notifications are not applicable to forest areas of the respective states and only cover selected areas outside forests.
They are valid for one year from the date of their publication, he said. "The notifications do not prohibit enforcement of any law related to welfare of animals. As such, the existing animal welfare laws continue to be in force," the minister said in reply to another question.
Dave said that representations were received from several organisations pursuant to the Ministry's notifications declaring Nilgai, wild pig and Rhesus Macaque as vermin in specified areas of these states. Recently, Union ministers Maneka Gandhi and Prakash Javadekar had locked horns over culling of animals with the former saying there was "lust" for killing in the Environment Ministry.
Terrified' Nilgai rescued near Parliament, no tranquiliser used
Javadekar, who held the post of the Minister for Environment and Forests before the Cabinet reshuffle, had defended animal culling, insisting it is done on the request of states to protect crops. Animal rights bodies had also expressed "shock" over the Environment Ministry's stand, saying such killings will not help mitigate human-animal conflict.
PTI
Consider paid if broken: Gujarat to not fine for traffic violation till Oct 27
Make in India: Not Spain, Gujarat facility to build C-295 for Indian Air Force now
Over 1,000 residents evacuated after chlorine leak from tanker in Gujarat
India
oi-PTI
Ahmedabad, Jul 18: More than a thousand residents of Prahladnagar locality in Kheda district were asked to vacate their houses today following chlorine gas leak from a tanker belonging to the city's civic body, officials said.
"One of the three tankers parked at a water supply department's storehouse at Prahladnagar leaked, causing breathing problem to residents of nearby locality.
We ordered evacuation of around 1,200 people living in nearby residential societies as precautionary measure till the situation is brought under control," Kheda Collector Kuldeep Arya said.
"As many as 22 persons complained of breathing problem and were admitted to the government hospital. Some of them have already been discharged," Arya said. Around six fire-brigade vehicles were called in from Nadiad, Anand and Ahmedabad to control the leak, he said.
"The leaking portion of the tanker, which contained around 900 kilolitre of chlorine, was eventually sealed and chlorine that escaped in the air has subsided and settled," Arya said.
The chlorine tankers belonged to the city's civic body and it is used as a disinfectant.
PTI
PM Narendra Modi appeals for a fruitful monsoon session
India
oi-Preeti Panwar
New Delhi, July 18: Minutes before the monsoon sesion is all set to begin in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday, July 18, appealed opposition for a "fruitful session" ahead.
While saying that Parliament should guide the nation, PM Modi said, "all parties must work together and there should be a discussion of high level among all political parties."
In a loud and clear message of "cooperation" from the opposition, PM stated that he is hopeful of a good debate, while adding that he "had spoken to all political parties and there was general mood among them to take good decisions" in the session.
[Monsoon session: Forget GST, Modi govt may have tough time dealing with Arunachal, U'khand issue]
PM concluded his pre-monsoon session address by saying that this year nation will celebrate 70 years of independence and all the freedom fighters who strived hard to achieve freedom for their country will be remembered.
"In this session we wish to take the journey of these 70 years to greater heights, a new direction, and momentum by indulging in the best of discussions and take excellent decisions for the larger interst of the nation," he added.
Modi further said "For the nation to move ahead with great speed, we need to walk shoulder-to-shoulder in the Parliament to give a direction to the nation."
Before the much-awaited monsoon session proceedings begin, PM Modi on Sunday reached out to the opposition, seeking its cooperation over the long-pending Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill.
Later in the day, BJP Parliamentary party executive is also likely to hold a meeting. [Sparks set to fly during Monsoon Session]
The government is hopeful of a breakthrough on the key GST bill, which it wants passed during the session, following a recent meeting between senior ministers and top Congress leaders. The two sides are likely to meet again during the session.
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.
The monsoon session comes at a time when the ruling BJP's morale is high after its maiden victory in Assam Assembly elections and its performance in Kerala and West Bengal elections.
OneIndia News
Rajini craze reaches heights; A company declares holiday on Kabali release date
India
oi-Pallavi Sengupta
Chennai, July 18: Rajinikanth's fanfare has spared no one, not even corporate entities even if it is at the cost of day's productions. A company named Fydnus has declared a holiday on the date of Kabai's release and is also providing free tickets to employees. That is not all.
The company, in a notice, revealed that they would be providing tickets for the show too.
The circular went this way:
"On account of the release of Superstar Rajini's movie "KABALI", we have decided to declare holiday on 22nd July 2016 in efforts to avoid piled up leave requests to the HR department.
We also take the privilege of going the extra mile to support antipiracy by providing free tickets for the former to Fyndus employees.
The letter was undersigned by Vice President- India Operations, Vinoth Sudaroli.
4 days to go for the release, Tamil Nadu is gearing up to welcome Kabali.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 12:17 [IST]
Pak committing atrocities against people in PoK, will have to bear consequences: Rajnath Singh
Rajnath slams Pakistan, asks it to mind its own business
India
oi-IANS
By Ians English
New Delhi, July 18: Slamming Pakistan for supporting terrorism and separatism in India, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday said the neighbouring country was responsible for what was happening in Jammu and Kashmir.
"Kehne ko naam Pakistan hai lakin harkatain napaak" (The name is Pakistan - Land of the Pure - but its actions are unholy)," the Home Minister said while replying to a discussion in the Rajya Sabha on the situation in Jammu and Kashmir.
He said Pakistan must mind its own business as India is capable of dealing with its issues.
The minister told the house that Burhan Wani was a terrorist who was involved in many cases and as many as 17 FIRs were registered against him in India.
Singh said Wani was involved in enticing youths of Jammu and Kashmir to pick up guns and work against the country's interests.
Terming the situation in Kashmir as "unfortunate", the minister said all possible efforts were being made to restore normalcy in the state.
"I am in constant touch with the Chief Minister there. We discuss the situation at least twice a day. I am also in touch of the heads of the security forces," Singh said.
He said the security forces have been advised to use "maximum restraint" and use force only if they have no other option.
The minister categorically said that security forces will continue to fight against terrorists but efforts will be made to bring back misguided youths into the mainstream "as they are ours".
Singh said he will soon visit the state and initiate dialogue with the common people there.
Giving details about the killed and the wounded in violent incidents after Wani's death, the minister said that 43 civilians were killed and 1,948 injured, while one security personnel was killed and 1,671 personnel got wounded in clashes that followed the killing of the militant.
"Out of these 1,948 civilians who got wounded in different incidents, 1,744 have already been discharged after medical treatment while 204 are still hospitalised," Singh told the house.
IANS
Salaries in India likely to increase by 10.4%: Here is why
Seventh Pay Commission: Employees to get only 14.27% hike in basic pay now
India
oi-Jagriti
New Delhi, July 18: The Central government employees and pensioners will get only 14.27 % hike in their basic pay against recommended overall 23.55 percent.
The Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission last month only.
Panel headed by AK Mathur had recommended recommended a 23.55 per cent overall hike in salaries, allowances and pension involving an additional burden of Rs 1.02 lakh crore, or nearly 0.7 per cent of GDP.
The further decision to hike the allowance will be taken by a Committee headed by Finance Secretary. The decision expected only after 4 months.
Modi government to notify 7CPC early next week
Notification towards implementation of the Pay Commission is likely to be issued soon.
The government in January had set up a high-powered panel under the Cabinet Secretary to process the recommendations of the 7th Pay Commission that will have a bearing on remuneration of nearly 50 lakh central government employees and 58 lakh pensioners.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 12:55 [IST]
Man booked for rape of 12-year-old after video of injured girl surfaces on internet
UP: 5, including a child, killed and 5 seriously hurt as car hits electric pole
Sheila Dikshit hurt in road mishap in UP
India
oi-PTI
Lucknow, July 18: Congress' chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh Sheila Dikshit on Sunday escaped with minor injuries after a makeshift platform on an open mini-truck collapsed during a roadshow here.
Dikshit, 78, reportedly lost her balance after the plank dislocated when her cavalcade was on its way to the party headquartes on Mall Avenue from the Amausi airport in Lucknow.
UP elections: Starting fresh at 79, Sheila Dikshit is now just a pawn on the political chessboard
Dikshit was then extended a helping hand by other leaders present there and later shifted to a car, a senior party functionary said.
The three-time chief minister of Delhi was on her first visit to Uttar Pradesh 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 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 Uttar Pradesh.
The newly-appointed chief of Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee 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.
PTI
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 15:56 [IST]
UP ATS nabs 8 with links to al-Qaeda and its affiliate from UP, Uttarakhand
To stay 'undetected', terrorists use technology & smarter devices
India
oi-Vicky
New Delhi, July 18: In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a technology was devised through which mobile communications could be sent without using mobile towers. This was possible as mobile phones were paired with radio sets.
While this is an extremely smart technology which helps a great deal during rescue operations, the flip side to it is that Pakistani terrorists have picked up this technology now.
With this technology being used by Pakistan terrorists, intercepting their communication has become extremely difficult.
The intercepts are usually picked up through the mobile towers and with this new technology in use, it has become difficult to track the movement of terrorists when they attempt an infiltration into India.
Smarter terrorists:
Terrorists and their groups have across the world used technology to their advantage. Recently when the Indian security forces nabbed Lashkar-e-Tayiba militant Sajjad Ahmed, they had found that he had paired his mobile device with a radio set. He had said during his questioning that this new method was suggested to him by the Pakistan's ISI.
After pairing the device, he was able to send out messages and also location details. The Indian agencies were unable to track these messages as the signal was not being picked from the mobile tower. Investigations revealed that this had become a secure form of communication. Terrorists were able to communicate in remote areas and also securely without the fear of their location details being detected.
After it had been found that the mobile devices were being paired with very high frequency radio sets, a patch was worked upon. However, the software patch was unable to detect any signal when terrorists were using this new technology. Sources say that they are working on it and will find a fix soon.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 18:31 [IST]
Vice President Hamid Ansari returns after attending ASEM Summit in Mongolia
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, Jul 16: Vice President Hamid Ansari returned home on Saturday night from Mongolia where he attended the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting Summit and held a number of bilateral meetings with leaders from the region.
During the visit, Ansari, who was the lead speaker for the Plenary Session on Promoting ASEM Partnership for Greater Connectivity, made a strong pitch for the need to isolate sponsors and financiers of terror and urged the leaders to go beyond condemnation to practical action.
The ASEM meeting also deliberated upon issues arising out of recent developments affecting the Korean Peninsula and maritime security, including preservation of global commons in accordance with the international conventions.
Ansari, during his stay in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, also held a number of bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the summit. Ansari and Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina today met in the Mongolian capital and discussed bilateral and mutual interest issues.
The Vice President also held separate bilateral meetings with Prime Minister of Estonia Taavi Roivas and Prime Minister of Lithuania Algirdas Butkevicius. He held a bilateral meeting with Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis.
Ansari yesterday held talks with the top Mongolian leadership and the Prime Ministers of Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. ASEM comprises of 53 entities - 51 countries from Asia and Europe and two regional bodies - the European Union and the ASEAN Secretariat.
It represents around 62.3 per cent of the world's population, 57.2 per cent of the global GDP and almost 60 per cent of the world's trade. India's engagement with ASEM began in 2007 and has since actively participated at the Summits level and Foreign Ministers' Meeting held biennially.
PTI
Amid security concerns, GOP Convention to kick off today
International
oi-Shubham Ghosh
Cleveland, July 18: The Republican Convention will begin on Monday (July 18) night here with a speech by Melania Trump, the wife of the party's nominee-in-waiting Donald Trump and a former model, GOP officials said on Sunday (July 17).
The latter may also be present at the programme, they said.
Paul Manafort, one of Trump's top campaign aide, though said that the question on whether Trump would be present during his wife's speech would be dealt on Monday itself, the USA Today reported. The former, however, added that the GOP has now stood firmly behind Trump and the convention would be a "solid" one. The Republicans were sharply polarised over the nomination of Trump, who eclipsed all his rivals during the primaries that started in February and ended last month, to emerge the presumptive candidate for the November 8 general election. [Over 100 women pose nude against Trump ahead of GOP Convention]
Convention to be held amid security concerns
Trump and his new running mate Mike Pence did not attend the campaign trail on Sunday even as the officials prepared for the big occasion. They also assured that the venue city will be safe during the convention, allaying the fears that have engulfed the United States of late in the wake of several instances of violence.
On Sunday, three police officers were killed while many were injured in a shooting in Baton Rouge in Louisiana, making it the second such incident within a week since the killing of five policemen in Dallas on July 7. And both these incidents happened after the mass killings in a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 12.
The GOP convention schedule, however, kept on changing till the last minutes. According to the USA Today report, Trump wanted non-traditional speakers to address the convention and a number of speeches were being rewritten, marking a departure from the routine exercise.
The convention will continue till July 21.
Oneindia News
Even if not contesting 2020 polls, Hillary Clinton will not be entirely out of scene
Hillary Clinton says Julian Assange must 'answer for what he has done'
Clinton vs Trump: Children are watching, says Hillary
International
oi-PTI
Washington, July 18: 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.
Soda maker's campaign drinks: Trump Tonic and Hillary Hooch
"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.
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 11:17 [IST]
Morocco wants to rejoin African Union after 32 years
International
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Rabat, Jul 18: Moroccan King Mohammed VI announced that his country wanted to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member.
"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 yesterday said in a message sent to an AU summit taking place in Kigali, the MAP Moroccan news agency reported. Morocco quit the grouping in protest in 1984 when the Saharan 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. Morocco has occupied the sparsely populated Western Sahara area since 1975 in a move that was not recognised by the international community.
It maintains that Western Sahara is an integral part of the kingdom even though local Sahrawi people have long campaigned for the right to self-determination.
In 1991, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire between Moroccan troops and Sahrawi rebels of the Algerian-backed Polisario Front but a promised referendum to settle the status of the desert territory has yet to materialise. In his address to the African Union, King Mohammed urged the bloc to rethink its position on the "fantom state" of Western Sahara, saying that a political solution was being worked on under the auspices of the UN.
AFP
Pakistan off the FATFs grey List: What this means
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Qandeel Baloch laid to rest in her ancestral village
International
oi-IANS
By Ians English
Islamabad, July 18: Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch, who was strangled to death by her brother in the name of "family honour" two days ago, was laid to rest in a local graveyard at her ancestral village near Multan, a media report said on Monday.
The funeral prayers of Qandeel were offered in the village Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan district on Sunday, Dawn news online reported.
Meanwhile, a Duty Magistrate in Multan remanded her brother and confessed killer, Waseem, in police custody for three days.
Qandeel's body was taken to her village, where a large number of people had gathered.
Before the funeral, women relatives of Qandeel applied henna to her hands and feet as per local tradition. Her mother repeatedly kissed her hands. Her brothers and two married sisters were also present to perform the last rites.
Talking to the media, Qandeel's father Mohammad Azeem said he would pursue the case against Waseem.
"She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her," Dawn news online quoted Azeem as saying.
His sons were unhappy over "her achievements" and turned against her even though she supported them, he said.
The residents of the village condemned the killing of Qandeel, terming it "a brutal act".
Waseem confessed to having killed Qandeel in the name of honour. He said that he had no regrets, a police official told the media at a press conference on Saturday.
A woman in Multan, who lived in a house adjacent to Qandeel's, told the media that the deceased had asked for the hand of her daughter for Waseem. "It seems unbelievable that she has been killed by a brother for whom she was trying to arrange a marriage," she said.
IANS
Man booked for rape of 12-year-old after video of injured girl surfaces on internet
UP: 5, including a child, killed and 5 seriously hurt as car hits electric pole
3 newborns die in state-run hospital in UP
Lucknow
oi-PTI
Sambhal (UP), July 18: Three newborns died in a district hospital here with families alleging negligence of doctors, prompting the District Magistrate to order an inquiry in to the matter.
The incident took place last night when newborns of three women -- Sonika, Aasma and Sana -- died in the hospital, where they were admitted for delivery.
The victims' family members alleged that the newborns had died due to negligence of doctors and hospital staff.
Taking note of the incident, District Magistrate N K S Chauhan has ordered the probe in to the matter.
"The matter came to my notice last night and I have ordered the Chief Medical Officer to probe it. Stern action will be taken against the guilty," he said.
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 12:59 [IST]
Sunanda Pushkar case: Not sent any objectionable mail, says Mehr Tarar
New Delhi
oi-Vicky
New Delhi, July 18: Mehr Tarar, whose name had cropped up during the probe into the mysterious death of former Union minister Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar in 2014, has denied any wrong doing and told the Delhi Police that she had not sent any objectionable mail to Tharoor.
Mehr, a Pakistani journalist, visited India several weeks ago at the request of Delhi Police, whom she met for over three hours at a five-star hotel in Central Delhi.
Sunanda case: Swamy writes to Home Minister for setting up SIT
Delhi Police are, however, not calling this an interrogation as there is no legal binding on Mehr to consent to be questioned by Indian police.
Sunanda Pushkar was found dead at Leela Hotel's suite 345 on January 2014, a day after she had a spat with Mehr on Twitter, alleging that the latter had an affair with her husband.
What Mehr Tarar said
Sunanda Pushkar prior to her death had alleged that her husband's family too was encouraging the alleged affair between Shashi Tharoor and Mehr.
The Delhi Police also learnt while recording the statements of various other people that Mehr is alleged to have sent Tharoor a mail in which it had been claimed that she was unable to live without him.
The Delhi Police will now corroborate the versions given by the rest with what Mehr told them. The police had been told by journalist Nalini Singh that Sunanda had once sought her help in retrieving the messages sent by Mehr to her husband.
OneIndia News
Chhath Puja fasting rules: What one must keep in mind during the 4-day festival
Will the Enemy Property Bill be passed in Rajya Sabha?
New Delhi
oi-Vicky
New Delhi, July 18: With the monsoon session of Parliament starting on Monday all eyes would be on the GST Bill. However, there is another bill that the government would want to be passed and that is the Enemy Property (Amendment and Validation) Bill of 2016. The same had been passed in the Lok Sabha in March this year.
The Enemy Property Bill was later sent to the 23 member Select Committee of the Rajya Sabha. While the BJP wants the bill passed, several representatives of the Samajwadi Party, CPI, JD(U) and Congress have opposed this while sending out dissent notes to the committee.
What is the Enemy Property Bill?
Following the migration that took place in the aftermath of the 1965 and 1971 wars, the government took over the properties and companies of those persons who then became Pakistani nationals. These properties and companies were declared as enemy properties.
The properties were then vested in the Custodian of Enemy Property for India, which is an office under the union government. The highest number of such properties were found in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Delhi.
Through this amendment, the government proposes to ensure that no claims of succession or transfer is made.
Following the death of the person who had migrated to Pakistan, the tag enemy ceases to exist and hence his or her relatives can claim the property.
The government however, wants to ensure that this is not allowed and all such properties remain vested with the Custodian of Enemy Property for India.
However, many are opposed to the amendment. The JD(U) will oppose the bill and is likely to get the support of the CPI and the TMC as well. The BJP however is insistent that this Bill goes through and will place the ordinance copy before the House which will be followed by the Bill.
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Story first published: Monday, July 18, 2016, 10:18 [IST]
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by Graham Pierrepoint
THE LEGEND OF TARZAN
IMDb
Dir: David Yates
Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Samuel L Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent
2 STARS (out of 5)
Some stories find themselves retold again and again some of them enduring, some of them grating and while the tales of Tarzan have been handled well in the past, particularly in Disneys 1999 animated adaptation, the story of the man raised by apes appears to have caused some film-makers with a genuine struggle. How do you give an original slant to a story thats been told a thousand times before? This is sadly the plight of many movies going into remake or reboot territory, and on this occasion, theres much to be said for what could have been achieved.
The Legend of Tarzan sees the eponymous Tarzan now living as Lord Greystoke in London with his wife, Jane Porter. Its been ten years since he first left Africa, and as result, hes become quite enamored with living in British society. However, he soon finds himself returning to his homeland upon the invitation of King Leopold, after being convinced by a US envoy to do so to investigate unrest in the Congo. Little does Tarzan know, however, that Leon Rom a Belgian envoy in the Congo looking to claim a particularly fabled set of diamonds has been offered a deal a deal which involves trading Tarzan over to an adversary from the Ape Kings past. What transpires is a battle between Tarzan and his enemies of old to save his wife and put paid to old rivalries for good.
The first problem with Legend of Tarzan is, as discussed, it is a story that has been told multiple times from multiple directions in myriad different ways. Of course, this is no bad thing, as it remains a classic story and one that will likely resurface again in future. However, the manner in which the story has been handled here is rather plodding and uninspired its nothing that we havent seen in some form or other before while we may not know the new story being played out to us on screen, the interwoven flashbacks which give us a backstory to Tarzan are scripted and shot in ways that we can entirely predict. The direction from David Yates is well put-together and planned, however, it is ultimately a very safe movie. A good spin on Tarzans story in todays climate should be one that offers something so new, so unexpected, that it creates new memories along with the old. This adaptation, unfortunately, offers little challenge or motivation for audiences.
The action scenes and acting in general is expectedly good but nowhere near as memorable as they could be coupled with a little more originality. Skarsgard is sadly a little too wooden in places, offering a fairly cut-and-dried Tarzan that has, admittedly, grown used to British society but who offers little character outside of basic motivation. Margot Robbie suits the role of Jane well and gives the main relationship the boost of character it needs. Jackson is, as standard, superb, injecting energy and enthusiasm in almost every scene it is again part of his enduring charm as a screen actor. Waltz, similarly, while riding on the coat-tails of his marvelously evil turns in Inglorious Basterds and Spectre, provides a sneering, calculative and creepy villain almost effortlessly. Waltz in particular is a superb character actor who we have much more to see from and regardless of the movie or the motivation, almost every performance he turns in is worth watching.
The Legend of Tarzan - Official Trailer (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Certainly, there is little to keep this movie running at pace apart from the cast and the direction from Yates, who was responsible for some of Harry Potters darker moments but its ultimately let down by a plodding, un-engaging script and pacing that will leave you wondering how much is left to run. Well-intentioned though it might be, there is very little here to be considered consistently entertaining while on paper it ticks most of the boxes, it is its lackluster execution and lack of originality that ultimately prevents it from being the best adaptation it could be. Its somber moments are delivered carefully, and its cinematography is consistently up to scratch but there is just something lacking in this movie that prevents it from being the memorable retelling of Tarzan that it so desperately wants to be.
This being said, how does one remake Tarzan? How would one take to breathing new life into the stories? While Yates movie has attempted to do so with gusto and there is an immense amount of effort on display here it is sadly poorly-realized and simply not as entertaining as it could have been. For anyone interested in the original story, or in a harmless action adventure, its worth a watch but its certainly not worthy of the plaudits that it could have had heading in its direction.
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obama
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"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
-George Orwell
I've certainly had my share of run-ins with Democratic Party apologists, the ones who insist that all the evils of today's world are Bush's fault, and who are impervious to contrary evidence. As if seven-and-a-half years of Obama's imperial reign simply didn't happen, or worse yet, that Obama is just a passive victim of circumstance. He's merely responding to the big bad Bush world, and can only do positive things.
This is the mindset over at places like Mother Jones. You can post damning comments from Obama's own Vice President, and yet those will not sink in. At all. The cognitive dissonance is beyond controllable levels. No truth shall pass.
"[Erdogan"the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc.]"poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world." -Your Sitting Vice President
Biden was told to shut up and to apologize immediately for telling the truth. Nothing was done about Erdogan, the Saudis, the Emiratis etc., except to send them more arms, such as those used to massacre the civilians of Yemen. Joe Biden thought he was informing the next generation of imperial technocrats, the Harvard graduating class, but apparently, they don't yet possess the required security clearances to be shown the true inner workings of the empire.
The problem today is that radical fundamentalist Sunni Jihadis are willing to murder crowds and blow themselves up in the process. This was easily predicted, and little events like 9/11 may have pointed in that direction from the start. These Islamists are dedicated, well-trained, experienced in combat, and now spilling out across the world, as Syria becomes less tenable for them (mostly thanks to the Russians).
In Syria, they are proxy armies, much the same as those supported by our CIA in the Mujahadeen of the 1979-1989 Afghan War (launched by Democrat Jimmy Carter). There's already a long history of using these types of people and having "allied" nations provide much of their weapons, money, and training to wage war covertly. It is a formula, a very successful formula. The people entrenched in the bowels of the American Empire credit this formula with bringing down the Soviet Union! Of course they'd do it again, and again, and again.
Now in 2016, American foreign policy has aided and abetted these ISIS terrorists for years. The buck stops at the Oval Office of Barack Obama. Most deluded Democrats are incapable of comprehending this, and they never will no matter the evidence.
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The willingness of humanity to continue to accept the white world's profitable investments in genocide will end in 25 years when world economic power shifts from Europeans, and their descendant nations, to the six sevenths of humanity they plundered. Realizing this, leaders of 1/10th of 1% who rule America have Trump demanding investment in the US instead of in the low wage 3rd World that China will soon lead.
TEXT:
Our Sick World
Russia and China, not using their veto power to prevent a UN authorized neocolonial powers murderous reconquest and destruction of a wealthy and prosperous independent socialist Libya [see Russians Calling Medvedev a "Traitor" for Not Vetoing UN NATO War on Libya in Larger Context] is only an extreme example of a general world wide 'might makes right' acquiescence to the colonial-neoclonial profitable genocide that has gone on for centuries, and will most probably continue to go on until world economic power shifts from Europeans and their descendant nations over to the more than six sevenths of humanity they have plundered.
Russia, and China, have made no noise about an all Caucasian nations murderous fifteen year occupation of poor Afghanistan for fifteen years, and both adhere to a worldwide unwritten etiquette of diplomatic politeness not to identify the United States with its genocides in Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere, not alerting the constantly targeted Third World that the US has either invaded or overthrown the government of every nation in Latin America. Indeed, most diplomates repeat blatant US lies about President Assad of Syria and play along with the farce that the US did not fund the creation of ISIS, as it did al Qaida earlier, to destroy America's designated enemies .[1]
No leader anywhere ever seems to call for prosecution of US invasions under the Nuremberg Principles of International Law. Even the very leaders of nations under illegal US NATO attack fail to even speak of laws broken. [see
At UN Syria Failed to Call for Nuremberg Justice re US Funded Terrorist Invasions
In UN of Appearances Latin Americans Don't Call for Nuremberg Prosecution - In 2009 Gaddafi Did
At UN General Debate Iran Fails to Call for Nuremberg] People will one day look back in astonishment to UN debates in which nations bombed and invaded by the US and NATO did not call for justice under the Nuremberg Principles of International Law, allowing the US to get away with genocide after genocide. (Read US signed Genocide Convention's definition) [2]. The single exception this author could find is Gaddafi's comprehensive UN General Assembly address in 2009 calling for investigation of all wars and restitution for victims of US NATO UN crimes against humanity beginning with the intentional torching of Palestine.[3].
The finest journalist, top intellectuals and historians, to a man, stick to reporting and chronicling events of human horror as if they were simply RealPolitik, as unchallengeable as the weather, never including the whole truth that they are obvious prosecutable genocidal crimes against humanity. Inversely, in the case of domestic homicide on a city street anywhere, the first issue to clarify whether what happened was a crime or not. Amazingly, in world coverage journalism the word 'crime' is never employed. Journalists report mass murderous world events as terrible or mistaken foreign policy, rarely, if ever, citing a need for reparations, indemnity, or compensation for surviving victims. Presently even RTTV, the most popular source of anti-Western imperialism news claiming "more than 3 billion views across its channels and 3.5 million subscribers," seems to present horrific upon horrific news as entertaining information. Among the "Shows" it presents with RT's own descriptions are: ' The News Thing' "a satirical show;" 'Redacted Tonight' "perhaps only comedy can truly bring truth to the people;" 'Watching the Hawks' "media, politics and pop culture;" 'The Big Picture' "hottest political show;" ' CrossTalk' "hot-topic discussions on politics and trends;" (wherein obvious lies are represented by US officials); 'Politiking' "with Larry King;" Kirby's War of Words' "RT's most opinionated personality."
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With the piling up of criminal affairs, linked to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his family, the question is whether the Shin-Bet is charged only with securing senior politicians, or also securing the nation against its senior politicians... In the US similar questions were answered already in the 1950s, in Eisenhower's Farewell Address...
The list of criminal affairs associated by Israeli media with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his immediate family is steadily growing. Some of the latest involve suspected massive voting fraud, [1] unlawful receipt of substantial funds, detailed in a French court by "Sting of the Century" convict Arnaud Mimran, [2] and unlawful receipt of substantial funds, funneled through a close family member (rumored to be his unemployed son), from US donors, some of whom are also the target of criminal investigations in the US. [3]
Opinion piece by Amir Oren in Haaretz (Hebrew only, missing in the English edition) today is titled: "What is the Shin-Bet afraid of". [4]
Oren is a reputable Israeli security analyst, who also worked for CBS during the 2003 Gulf War and the 2006 Israeli invasions of Lebanon, published in the New Republic and The Economist, and was affiliated with the The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Oren raises the question, whether the Shin-Bet would, should, could cooperate in investigations against Netanyahu and his family members, in case the personal security detail were witnesses to some of the suspected criminal conduct, now under "examination". (According to new routines of the justice system, "investigation" is initiated against normal citizens following credible criminal suspicions. Under similar circumstances, pertaining to senior political figures, only an informal "examination", which is not defined by law, is initiated.)
Oren's opinion is that the Shin Bet is charged with protecting the Prime Minister, but also with protecting the public against criminality by the Prime Minister and his family...
The opinion piece concludes:
The most dangerous risk is internal, including the security detail itself, as seen in numerous assassinations worldwide. The Shin-Bet requires periodic polygraph tests for high security clearance individuals. The Attorney General should order that the security detail also be asked whether they were witnesses to criminal conduct by the personality, whom they secure, and his family members. It is the national duty of the Shin-Bet to abandon its passive acquiescing partnership in such criminality. Lying in such polygraph tests should lead to relieving security personnel of their duties. The truth should assist police investigations and State Prosecution discussions regarding the Netanyahu files. Securing the State against its senior leaders, if they sinned, is of no lesser importance than securing the person himself.
It is doubted that such opinion is shared by the Shin-Bet... It is also often doubted that the Israeli justice system today can deal with such matters: The Attorney General, Police Chief and Shin-Bet Head are personal appointments by Netanyahu. Some of them were opined dubious appointments, specifically regarding conflicts between interests of the office and Netanyahu's interests.
The Israeli regime was hijacked by a Shin-Bet-judiciary gang. [5] The Shin-Bet and the judiciary two are central power groups, whose loyalty, the evidence shows, is only to themselves..
In the US similar questions were answered already in the 1950s, in Eisenhower's Farewell Address, and Hillary Clinton's email scandal was only the latest episode of this kind.
LINKS:
[1] Zernik, J. "ISRAEL: Computer fraud in the Central Election Commission? Where is the Shin-Bet?"_OpEdNews.com
http://www.opednews.com/articles/ISRAEL-Computer-fraud-in-by-Joseph-Zernik-Election-Fraud_Israel_Netanyahu_Shin-Bet-160614-259.html
[2] Alfon, D. "Benjamin Netanyahu's Shady French Connection"_Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.710864
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By Dave Lindorff
Obama steals and misuses Irish writer's words of peace, while pursuing endless wars and drone killings
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President Barack Obama made an eloquent plea for sanity and peace following the latest deadly assault on police officers -- this time a gunman with an assault rifle shooting and killing three cops in Baton Rouge and wounding another three, one critically injured.
He struck just the right tone, condemning the killings but also warning against politicians and media talking heads using the incident to stir up more divisions. As he put it:
Someone once wrote, "A bullet need happen only once, but for peace to work we need to be reminded of its existence again and again and again."
The president continued:
"My fellow Americans, only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided. And we're going to have to keep on doing it "again and again and again." That's how this country gets united. That's how we bring people of good will 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 for our children."
It was a moving call to bring this violence-plagued feuding country together -- people respecting the police, and police respecting the people, black, brown, red, yellow and white.
And yet I wonder, why did the president say this only applying to violence in our own country? This is, remember, the same president who chairs weekly meetings to decide who will be killed next somewhere in the world by our high-tech drones -- remotely piloted killing machines with grotesque names like Predator and Reaper, armed with their obscenely but aptly named Hellfire missiles. Victims who include not just suspected or alleged "terrorists" but also innocent members of their families, including young children, not to mention the all too many innocents who either happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who are simply victims of targeting errors or "intelligence" errors.
How can this president, who is so quick to approve bombing campaigns in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Somalia, or to send in Special Forces death squads to countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, or to extend a war launched in 2001 by his predecessor against one of the poorest nations in the world -- Afghanistan -- for not just the eight years of his own violence-plagued presidency, but into the next one, be so eloquent about not turning to violence in the US?
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Global Clinical Trials Review on Cutaneous B-Cell Lymphoma Industry 2016 | Researchmoz
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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Hormone Refractory (Castration Resistant, Androgen-Independent) Prostate Cancer Global Clinical Trials Review, H1, 2016" to its huge collection of research reports.Hormone Refractory (Castration Resistant, Androgen-Independent) Prostate Cancer Global Clinical Trials Review, H1, 2016" provides an overview of Hormone Refractory (Castration Resistant, Androgen-Independent) Prostate Cancer clinical trials scenario. This report provides top line data relating to the clinical trials on Hormone Refractory (Castration Resistant, Androgen-Independent) Prostate Cancer. Report includes an overview of trial numbers and their average enrollment in top countries conducted across the globe. The report offers coverage of disease clinical trials by region, country (G7 & E7), phase, trial status, end points status and sponsor type. Report also provides prominent drugs for in-progress trials (based on number of ongoing trials). GlobalData Clinical Trial Reports are generated using GlobalDatas proprietary database - Pharma eTrack Clinical trials database. Clinical trials are collated from 80+ different clinical trial registries, conferences, journals, news etc across the globe. Clinical trials database undergoes periodic update by dynamic process.The report enhances the decision making capabilities and helps to create an effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Scope- The report provides a snapshot of the global clinical trials landscape- Report provides top level data related to the clinical trials by Region, Country (G7 & E7), Trial Status, Trial Phase, Sponsor Type and End point status- The report reviews top companies involved and enlists all trials (Trial title, Phase, and Status) pertaining to the company- The report provides all the unaccomplished trials (Terminated, Suspended and Withdrawn) with reason for unaccomplishment- The Report provides enrollment trends for the past five years- Report provides latest news for the past three monthsReasons to buy- Assists in formulating key business strategies with regards to investment- Helps in identifying prominent locations for conducting clinical trials which saves time and cost- Provides top level analysis of Global Clinical Trials Market which helps in identifying key business opportunities- Supports understanding of trials count and enrollment trends by country in global therapeutics market- Aids in interpreting the success rates of clinical trials by providing a comparative scenario of completed and uncompleted (terminated, suspended or withdrawn) trials- Facilitates clinical trial assessment of the indication on a global, regional and country levelMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Cardiac Pacemakers Industry Analysis and Medical Devices Pipeline Assessment Report 2016
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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Cardiac Pacemakers - Medical Devices Pipeline Assessment, 2016" to its huge collection of research reports.Medical Devices sector report, Cardiac Pacemakers - Medical Devices Pipeline Assessment, 2016" provides an overview of Cardiac Pacemakers currently in pipeline stage.The report provides comprehensive information on the pipeline products with comparative analysis of the products at various stages of development. The report reviews major players involved in the pipeline product development. It also provides information about clinical trials in progress, which includes trial phase, trial status, trial start and end dates, and, the number of trials for the key Cardiac Pacemakers pipeline products.This report is prepared using data sourced from in-house databases, secondary and primary research by GlobalData's team of industry experts.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Scope- Extensive coverage of the Cardiac Pacemakers under development- The report reviews details of major pipeline products which includes, product description, licensing and collaboration details and other developmental activities- The report reviews the major players involved in the development of Cardiac Pacemakers and list all their pipeline projects- The coverage of pipeline products based on various stages of development ranging from Early Development to Approved / Issued stage- The report provides key clinical trial data of ongoing trials specific to pipeline products- Recent developments in the segment / industryReasons to buyThe report enables you to -- Formulate significant competitor information, analysis, and insights to improve R&D strategies- Identify emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage- Identify and understand important and diverse types of Cardiac Pacemakers under development- Develop market-entry and market expansion strategies- Plan mergers and acquisitions effectively by identifying major players with the most promising pipeline- In-depth analysis of the products current stage of development, territory and estimated launch dateMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Vacuum Pump Market: high scope of applications in Asia Pacific region due to rise in industrialization.
Global Vacuum Pump Market 2016
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Vacuum Pump Market is a growing market with various applications in industries. There are various types of vacuum pumps such as liquid ring pumps, turbomolecular pump etc. these pumps used vacuum pressure for its mechanism. The vacuum pump operation is to remove gas molecules from occupied volume and leaving partial vacuum.Check Complete Report @Scope and Regional Forecast of the Vacuum Pump Market:North America is the prominent region in the Vacuum Pump Market with many industries utilizing the vacuum pumps for various applications in industries and medical equipment. This market is expected to witness high demand in the US owing to the high industrialization in the region. Europe is expected to witness stable growth in demand of vacuum pumps for industrial uses.Asia Pacific is expected to witness maximum growth in the Vacuum Pump Market due to rise in industrialization and high population in the region. China is expected to emerge as the biggest supplier and manufacturer of the vacuum pumps with high supplies in upcoming term.Vacuum Pump Market products are used in high scale in many industries to remove the unwanted gas molecules. Some of the applications of vacuum pump in various end user Industries are: composite plastic moulding processes, production of many types of electric lamps, vacuum tubes, CRTs etc. there is high demand for the liquid ring vacuum pump in the market.Get Sample Brochure of the Report @Segmentation and Key Players of the Vacuum Pump Market:The Vacuum Pump Market is segmented into various categories by product type, by application, by company and by region. By product type: cast iron, stainless steel and others By application: OEM, aftermarket By company: Shanghai Liancheng, WILO SE, GeLanFu, ShanghaiKaiquan, EBARA, KSB, FLOWSERVE, IDEX, BinTeEr, SULZER, TianjinShangbeng, ALLEGRA, ANHUI LVHUAN, Shanghai Pate, ShanghaiChaole, Shandong Shuanglun, PEDROLLO, Shanghai Xiongmao,Guangdong Foshan, Shanghai Dongfang, Shanghai Kaili, ITT,Shanghai Tianquan, Shanghai Xijin and Botai By region: the USA, China, Germany, Swiss, Italy, Danish, France, UKand othersThe key players in the Vacuum Pump Market are as follows: WILO SE ALLEGRA ITT Shanghai Liancheng EBARAThe Vacuum Pump Market is a competitive market both on global level as well as among the regional level. Vacuum pumps have wide scale of applications in various end user industries, thus this market is profitable for investment and this market is expected to witness high growth in various industrial sectors in upcoming years.About us:MarketIntelReports (MIR) aim to empower our clients to successfully manage and outperform in their business decisions, we do this by providing Premium Market Intelligence, Strategic Insights and Databases from a range of Global Publishers.A group of industry veterans who are well experienced in reputed international consulting firms after identifying the sourcing needs of MNCs for market intelligence, have together started this business savior MarketIntelReports.MIR intends to be a one-stop shop with an intuitive design, exhaustive database, expert assistance, secure cart checkout and data privacy integrated. It curates the list of reports, publishers and studies to ensure that the database is constantly updated to dynamically meet the targeted, specific needs of our clients.MarketIntelReports currently has more than 10,000 plus titles and 35+ publishers on our platform and growing consistently to fill the Global Intelligence Demand Supply Gap. We cover more than 15 industry verticals being: Automotive, Electronics, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Chemicals, Building & Construction, Agriculture, Food & Beverages, Banking & Finance, Media and Government, Public Sector Studies.Contact us:Mayur SSales Manager2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400,Wilmington,Delaware,19808United Statessales@marketintelreports.comTelephone: 1-302-261-5343
New YA novel that centers on a little girl dealing with the violence and substance abuse in her family
Contact Information:Lis Anna-Langstonlisannalangston.combluerumorproductions@hotmail.comFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASELis Anna-Langston launches new YA Novel Tupelo Honey that centers on a little girl dealing with the violence and substance abuse in her family.Publishers Weekly has this to say about TUPELO HONEY."A humorous, unconventional family yarn about a young girl navigating a hardscrabble upbringing in northern Mississippi. She divinely lays out the framework and quirky intricacies of growing up in a house only slightly better than an orphanage, her days spent chattering with imaginary friend Moochi, and navigating sleepovers at her pious, curmudgeonly grandmother Marmalade and mentally unstable Uncle Randalls ramshackle house. Things change when her mother, a callous, irresponsible junkie, brings home Nash, a paranoid local drug dealer whom Tupelo surprisingly bonds with during treacherous expeditions to New York and Mexico. Through bong smoke-filled hallways at home, the pageantry of kiddie beauty contests, Sunday School, and spying on Nash burying his stockpiles of drug money in the backyard, Tupelo somehow survives. A loveable, engaging, original voice, Tupelo brightens this accomplished tale of dysfunction in a family where nothing had ever been right.TUPELO HONEY is a work of fiction based on the Author's conflicts with addiction, substance abuse and mental illness in her own family. It is important that children and teens know they are not alone in the issues, that you can escape cycles. Help is available but comes only when you ask and sometimes only when you demand. These are important times and important social issues. Cycles of abuse perpetrate more cycles of abuse. Children who feel safe and loved flourish. Families full of love take many forms and we need to be vigilant in making sure children have the tools to succeed in life. This starts with knowledge, education and the belief that everyone be treated with respect and equality.Dana Cox, operations director at Ashby House, a family shelter in Salina, said she's also seeing demand for services outstrip supply. "Increased public awareness may be playing a role," she said. "Mental health is a huge issue. Substance abuse is too, definitely.Magistrate Judge Ann Dixson, who presides over most of the foster care caseload in Dodge City, said she's noticed an increase in the number of criminal drug-possession charges filed against adults whose children were present at the time of their arrest. "That is a grave concern, to know that children are in a house where needles and drugs are present. It is neglect for these kids to grow up having no concept of what a normal healthy family is, thinking that drugs being out on the table is just the way it is. The severity of cases is up," she said. "The resources for responding to that severity are down.Boys and girls become runaways at an equal pace each gender accounts for 50% of the runaway population, although some studies show 75% of runaways are girls. 40% of kids that end up in shelters or out on the street come from families that have either received public assistance or live in housing that is public assisted. 46 percent of runaway and homeless youth reported being physically abused, 38 percent reported being emotionally abused. Many youth run away, and in turn become homeless, due to problems in the home, including physical and sexual abuse, mental health disorders of a family member, substance abuse and addiction of a family member, and parental neglect.The leading causes of neglect are poverty, poor social skills, substance abuse, depression, misconceptions about child development and a lack empathy.Books are bridges that offer support. Tupelo Honey is available for purchase here on Amazon.Visit the author's website for more information.New book launch.383 Jayson AvenuePittsburgh, PA 15228
Messaging App Valued at Over Six Billion on Listing
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Japan's Line Corp has set itself up to be the biggest IPO in the tech sector so far in 2016 as the price range set for the messaging app operator could value the company at well over six billion dollars.Beijing, China, July 16, 2016 -- The valuation reflects the Korean owned companys solid demand and shows the firm have turned from a reasonably wise investment into a rapidly growing start-up.The range of 2,800 to 3,300 yen is seen by many as cautious, but even that range could see Line raise over a billion dollars from the sale of up to forty million shares.The timing for Lines statement to the press regarding the IPO was mildly surprising considering the state of the global markets as it attempts to recover from losses and a sentiment of general uncertainty following Britains vote to leave the E.U. on Friday.The company refused to delay any longer, however, as its bullish pricing yesterday defied the expected cautious outlook that many investors thought would prevail and force many firms to suspend their IPO strategies.Investors seem enthusiastic towards the top end of the IPO range as they will feel it gives them the best opportunity to gain reliable returns at a good value in its most important marketplaces in Asia like Japan and Thailand.Nonetheless, many local investors and fund managers were put off by the pitch saying that although it might suit this short time of uncertainty, Line would have been better off listing the company at the period when its growth was most rapid.Line took off as a cobbled together communication tool used after the tsunami of 2011 but has grown to be the dominant messaging app of choice in the Japanese marketplace.The situation remains though, that many in the retail sector and international speculators alike are looking to buy in to the IPO, according to certain insiders.I wouldnt say it has been difficult for Line to attract investors, said Michael Lane, Global Co-Head of the Investment Management Division at Shizuoka Capital Wealth Management who manage over a billion dollars of funds in the region. The kinds of firm who want to improve their short-term profit strategies are jumping on this, he added.Line has hired a whos who of financial brokers, including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, to handle the listing and will go public first in New York on the 14th July and then in Tokyo the day after.Founded in 2006 with Headquarters in Tokyo Japan. Privately owned by senior management previously with Shizuoka Bank. The company is engaged in discretionary and advisory wealth management services such as the buying and selling of corporate debt, handling mergers and acquisitions, private equity and fixed income. As of 2015 the company assets were in the region of $6bn.Naoko YoshiShizuoka Capital Wealth ManagementTokyo, Japan+81-387522047fbact@shizuokafinancial.com
Global Laser Treatment Devices of Varicose Veins Market size, share, growth, trends, demand and forecast
Global Laser Treatment Devices of Varicose Veins Market
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The Global Laser Treatment Devices of Varicose Veins Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Laser Treatment Devices of Varicose Veins industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Laser Treatment Devices of Varicose Veins market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions development status.Check Complete Report @Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. Whats more, the Laser Treatment Devices of Varicose Veins industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Get Sample Brochure of the Report @Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered.In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.About us:MarketIntelReports (MIR) aim to empower our clients to successfully manage and outperform in their business decisions, we do this by providing Premium Market Intelligence, Strategic Insights and Databases from a range of Global Publishers.A group of industry veterans who are well experienced in reputed international consulting firms after identifying the sourcing needs of MNCs for market intelligence, have together started this business savior MarketIntelReports.MIR intends to be a one-stop shop with an intuitive design, exhaustive database, expert assistance, secure cart checkout and data privacy integrated. It curates the list of reports, publishers and studies to ensure that the database is constantly updated to dynamically meet the targeted, specific needs of our clients.MarketIntelReports currently has more than 10,000 plus titles and 35+ publishers on our platform and growing consistently to fill the Global Intelligence Demand Supply Gap. We cover more than 15 industry verticals being: Automotive, Electronics, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Chemicals, Building & Construction, Agriculture, Food & Beverages, Banking & Finance, Media and Government, Public Sector Studies.Contact us:Mayur SSales Manager2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400,Wilmington,Delaware,19808United Statessales@marketintelreports.comTelephone: 1-302-261-5343
ProctorU Announces New Partnerships with Innovative Institutions
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ProctorU combines technology and a human element to test students anywhereBirmingham, AL, July 15, 2016 ProctorU is pleased to announce partnerships with the Arizona State University (ASU), the University of Virginia (UVA) and the Florida Virtual School (FVS). In collaboration with ProctorU, each institution is able to embrace the use of technology to offer their students flexible options in test-takingUVA, a nationally recognized institution, has over 21,000 students and is located in Charlottesville, Va. ASU, recently ranked #1 by U.S. News & World Report on its "Most Innovative Schools" list, has five campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area and has over 69,000 students. FVS is the largest and most successful state virtual school in the nation. It offers both full-time and part-time virtual options for Florida students, as well as virtual solutions for students in other states and nations.ProctorU provides live student identity management and proctoring services to make online testing more secure. Its unique service will allow these institutions to securely identify and test students anywhere.Since it was established in 2008, ProctorU has worked with more than 800 colleges and universities around the world and has administered over 2 million exams for test-takers in 129 countries. Their unique approach to proctoring enhances the online testing experience while ensuring the academic integrity of an institution and that of its students.To learn more about ProctorU, visitAbout ProctorUProctorU helps protect the academic integrity of online programs around the world. With an evolving online education environment, institutions are faced with the challenge of maintaining quality, rigorous standards and a consistent experience in online courses and assessments. ProctorUs digital solutions, including student identity management and exam management, are designed to address the most common challenges to the academic integrity of online programs. Trusted by over 800 institutions and serving students in countries all around the world, ProctorU works to meet institutional and student needs while enhancing the online education experience. The company has four offices in the United States, as well as an international support center in the Philippines, and employs more than 600 people. For more information about ProctorU visitor follow them on Twitter or Facebook.Contact:Franklin HayesProctorU2200 Riverchase Ctr.Suite 600Birmingham, AL 35244850-512-4552fhayes@proctoru.com
Bin with a brain built in!
Bin with a brain built in!!
Bin with a brain built in!Leading waste bin designer Angus Carnie has developed a bin specifically for the clinical waste and the confidential shredding sectors that uses ultrasound to ensure the bins are never full!Carnie in a recent interview explained that in the confidential waste and clinical waste it is imperative that waste containers are not EVER over filled for obvious reasons in the clinical waste sector and the huge statutory penalties for breaches of the data protection laws (up to 500,000 in UK) in the confidential waste sector.The bins use highly sophisticated ultrasound with multiple sensors which are calibrated to exactly match specific types of bins. The readings these sensors provide are exceptionally accurate. The sensors are totally wireless and cannot be accessed inadvertently and are built in at the manufacturing stage. The sensors provide a traffic light system which instantly indicates bin status green for empty, amber for 50% full and red for full. Plus, a plethora of other information which could be used to help plan collections.The information can then be monitored 24hours per day via any computer or internet connected device by the contactor and/or customer.Whilst not every site will require this system it will be a huge benefit where operators or members of staff have to be allocated to check these bins which may mean travelling considerable distances to manually check the bins.This system is now fully operational and manufactured in the UKCarnie already supplies most waste companies, Police Forces, hospitals and virtually the entire security shredding industry in the UK and Europe.Shredding Console Group the number one designer and supplier of secure bins in EuropeShredding Console GroupCotebrook House19 Oughtrington LaneLymmCheshireWA13 0QY
Aesthetic Equipment Market - Global Industry Analysis, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2013 2019
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Get Free Sample Report Copy :The word aesthetic is used in reference of beauty or pleasing appearance and is derived from the Greek word aisthetikos which means esthetic, sense and sentient. Growing aesthetic consciousness among people, especially elderly population, is creating the demand for various devices being utilized in aesthetic procedures. Hair replacement, liposuction, skin rejuvenation, body lift, bra line back lift, tummy tuck, thigh lift, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, face lift surgery, brow lifts and chin surgery are some major aesthetic procedures being carried out globally. Aesthetic procedures are performed in order to enhance appearance and self-esteem of individuals with positive attitude and this garners immense confidence in people. Dermal fillers, light emitting diodes, dermal lasers, microdermal abraders, intense pulsed light devices and energy based devices are among the major equipment used in aesthetic procedures.The growth of the Aesthetic Equipment Market is expected to expand globally due to factors such as increasing aesthetic consciousness, evolving minimally invasive procedures, rise in number of obesity cases and technical advances leading to device innovation. These factors lead to increase in number of aesthetic procedures worldwide. Though aesthetic procedures are more common among elderly population, the industry is experiencing greater demand for aesthetic procedures among younger population too. However, there are some factors which may restrict the market growth to some extent. These factors include high procedure cost and exclusion of aesthetic procedures from reimbursement policy. These factors are likely to induce hesitance among people thinking of going under an aesthetic procedure.Geographical, North America and Europe represent the first and second largest market for aesthetic equipment. In North America, a large number of elderly populations concerned about their appearance represent targeted customers for aesthetic centers across the region. According to statistics from American Society of Plastic Surgeons, an estimated 14.6 million cosmetic plastic surgeries (minimally invasive as well as surgical procedures) were performed in the U.S. in 2012, 5% up from 2011. Breast augmentation, nose reshaping, eyelid surgery, liposuction and face lift were identified as the top five surgical procedures among others.Therefore, rise in number of aesthetic procedures is expected to drive the demand for aesthetic equipment in the North American region. In emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil and Mexico, the market is expected to grow at an impressive CAGR due to rising disposable income, adoption of technically advanced procedures and rise in awareness level regarding the aesthetic procedures. Emerging markets are also characterized by increasing penetration by the U.S. and Europe based companies that are likely to propel the market growth in these markets. Under the influence of these factors, Asia-Pacific market is expected to record the highest growth during coming years. In Japan, continuous rise in elderly population is one of the major factors which are expected to drive the aesthetic equipment market growth in the Japanese market. Various sources including The Economist, suggest that by 2050, 40% of Japanese population is going to be aged over 65 years.Allergen Inc, Carol Cole Company, Alma Lasers, Ltd., Johnson & Johnson, Lumenis, Inc., Quantel S.A., Solta Medical, Syneron Medical Ltd., Miramar Labs, Inc., PhotoMedex Inc., IRIDEX Corp., Cynosure, Inc., BioForm Medical, Inc., Candela Corp., Focus Medical, Alcon Inc., Genzyme Corporation, Dornier MedTech, Light BioScience LLC, Medicis Pharmaceutical, Chromogenex plc and Dynatronics Corporation are some key players engaged in the designing, development, production and distribution of medical devices widely used in various aesthetic procedures.About Us :Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact Us :-Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030Email:sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Global Blind Spot Detection (BSD) System and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) System Market 2020
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Transparency Market Research Added A New Report "Blind Spot Detection (BSD) System and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) System Market". Blind Spot Detection (BSD) system is a sensor based detection system implemented in automobiles that is used for monitoring vehicles at the rear and side of the driver/vehicle. Such systems generate tactile, audible, vibrating or visual form of warnings. They also assist the driver at the parking lots when there are other vehicles approaching from the sides. Blind spots are caused due to various objects such as passengers, headrests and window pillars. Mirrors are generally used to remove the blind spots but the disadvantage being that they leave huge dead on all the sides of the vehicle. BSD systems, with the help of cameras and sensor systems generate information about various objects that are outside the range of drivers vision.Get Free Sample Report Copy :Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system is a sensor based cruise control system that automatically adjusts the speed of the vehicle in maintaining safe distances from the vehicles ahead. Such a system is integrated with pre-crash systems and automatically applies brakes after generating alerts. BSD and ACC systems have become efficient, sophisticated and advanced over a period of time and play an important role in reducing the number of accidents.The rising number of accidents due to increase in traffic flow is one of the prime reason that is contributing to the growth of BSD and ACC system market. The implementation of such safety systems by the automobile industry has rapidly increased. Since BSD and ACC systems ensure safety of the passengers, customers are frequently looking for such advanced safety features and are also willing to pay. Another factor that is contributing to the growth of this market is the stiff competition among the automobile manufacturers. The manufacturers are continuously upgrading their models so as to cater to the huge demand of innovative safety features that can be used for various applications. Organizations such as New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), are investing in research and development to design automobiles possessing various safety features. The increasing use of sensors due to the advancements in technology is another factor that is contributing to the growth of this market. Sensors are integrated with BSD and ACC systems to increase the performance of engines by reducing carbon emissions. Government initiatives for fuel efficiencies and safety attributes of the vehicle are encouraging manufacturers to implement such integrated systems that can ensure safety as well as comply with such regulations.However, BSD and ACC systems are not efficient in regions with adverse weather conditions. Regions with continuous snowfall and rainfall make such safety systems inefficient in tracking and monitoring the surrounding objects. This makes the owners of such regions reluctant in implementing these systems. Another challenge to the growth of this market is the standardization of such systems. Since every manufacturer competes for offering unique safety features, each manufacturer integrates high-tech sensors having different applications. Such integrations make car owners difficult and confusing to understand the exact operating procedures for different car models. Hence, due to the technicality involved, the car owners are reluctant to install innovative safety systems.To overcome such technical barriers to the market growth, the vendors are taking initiatives that can address to such flaws. For instance, Autoliv Inc, One of the key players in this market, in August, 2014, announced a new operating structure that shall discuss their safety products and the methods of usage. The key players in the market include Denso Corporation, Delphi Automotive PLC, Magna International Inc., Mando Corporation, Valeo SA and TRW Automotive.About Us :Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact Us :-Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Railway Traction Motor Market - Global Industry Analysis, Trends, Analysis, Growth and Forecast 2015 2023
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The incredible development of the railways in the 20th century is linked to the electrification of the railway lines. Prior to that, railway were operated with the help of steam engines. Traction is defined as frictional forces acting between the drive wheel and the surface on which it moves. Countries worldwide are moving towards railways electrification and preferring monorail systems and metros. With advancing railways technologies and varying vehicular emission limitations imposed on transportation systems across the systems, the progress of the Railway Traction Motor Market is expected in future.Get Free Sample Report Copy :One of the main concerns in an electrified railway system is the shortage of power that can result into various power disturbances such as power distortion, harmonic distortions, and flickers. Such problems are frequent in freight trains that run in a low speed and high power mode. Use of traction motors in railway systems enables desired speed control achievement other than shock less smooth starting and higher efficiency range. Such motors are designed to ensure a constant output of the diesel engines by automatically adjusting to varying load and gradient. Hence, traction motors prevent overloading of the railway engines.Some of the key benefits achieved by incorporating traction motors in the railway engines include reduced starting time of the railways as compared to thermal motor railways and less vibrations of the train. In addition, such devices guarantee fewer emissions and minimized manufacturing and maintenance costs as a result of their small sizes. Furthermore, the traction motors lower down the performance loss in case of failure of the propulsion unit in powered train. Hence, such factors are expected to promote the railway traction motor market improvement in the coming years. The concernslimiting railway traction motor market progress are the increasing prices of such motors due to their design modifications resulting in lighter on-board devise. Furthermore, the emission and energy norms are causing integration of energy saving facilities with traction motors in the trains. Such system alterations have resulted in high harmonic noises intervening with the communication and signaling systems of the railway car.The railway traction motor market is segmented upon the technology type and application. The conventional (direct current) DC traction motor is preferred in trains where speed alteration is not mandatory and power requirement is also low. For instance, the speed changing activity is not frequent in freight railway trains. AC (Alternating Current) traction motors are used in trains requiring rapid speed changes such as in metros. Traction motors are used in various types of railways such as light rail vehicle, metros, commuter train, very high speed electric multiple unit (EMU), Electric locomotive and diesel-electric locomotive.The railway traction motor market is expected to prosper worldwide due to the high speed range availability to the railway car drivers. The Europe is expected to be the largest railway market followed by Asia Pacific. The huge investments by the European nations in the advanced railway technologies are expected to contribute to railway traction motor market expansion in such region in the forecasted period. In Asia Pacific, China is assumed to be stable for such market enlargement due to the rising demand for high speed railways. Thus, such market is likely to grow in the years to come. The improving infrastructure of the railways in the U.S tends to result in railway traction motor market advancement in North America. In the rest of the world, Latin America is expected to lead such market development as a result of the growing demand for freight trains and urban transportation systems in Brazil. With the growing (gross domestic production) GDP of the rising economies of the Middle East, huge fund flow is expected in their railway sectors. Hence, such sectors progress is likely to result provide significant benefits to the railway traction motor market.Some of the key players in the global railway traction motor market include ABB group, Aisin Seiki Co. Ltd., Sulzer Ltd., ALSTOM, Bombardier Inc., Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.,Hyundai Rotem Company, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Saini Heavy Electrical & Engineering Co Private Ltd., VEM Sachsenwerk GmbH and Zytek Automotive Ltd. among others.About Us :Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact Us :-Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030Email:sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Halal Pharmaceuticals Market Growth, Forecast and Value Chain 2016-2026
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Halal pharmaceuticals are those medicines that stringently adhere to Shariah law. More specifically, halal pharmaceuticals refer to medicines that should not contain any parts of animals (dogs, pigs and ones particularly with pointed teeth), insects (bees), alcohol and other substances prohibited as haram under the Shariah law. Competent religious local regulatory bodies in countries generally provide a better segregation regarding the classification of drugs as halal or haram (unlawful) across the world. Halal pharmaceuticals are subject to normal pre-marketing and post-marketing controls by the relevant national pharmaceutical regulators such as the National Pharmaceutical Control Bureau in case of Malaysia. Halal medicines market has vast potential globally in terms of revenue generation supported by growing demand for faith-compliant medicines from an expanding Muslim population. Drugs approved by halal drug certifiying agencies such as Lembaga Pengkajian Pangan Obatobatan dan Kosmetika Majelis Ulama Indonesia (LPPOM MUI) of Indonesia and Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia are expected to witness rising consumption globally. Currently, halal medicines are estimated to have contributed close to one-third of the total revenue from the global halal market, posing an extremely attractive opportunity for Shariah compliant drugs. This is supported by the fact that demand outstrips supply of halal medicines by a significant margin, creating potential for future economic value added in the industry.Halal Pharmaceuticals Market: Drivers and RestraintsDrivers of the halal pharmaceuticals market include a growing Muslim population. Given that Muslims have been estimated to account for close to 25% of the global population in 2015~1.6 billion people (PewResearch) the annual growth rate of the Muslim population has been estimated to be ~1.6%, which is higher than the growth rate of the world population (1.1% per annum). Increasing awareness among Muslims regarding wellness and medicines is propagating mainly through increased education. This is another prime factor contributing to growth of the halal medicine market. Other socio-economic factors driving the need and uptake of halal medicines include rising purchasing power parity, increasing access to critical medicines in resource-constrained nations supported by public organizations such as World Health Organization, safety of consumption, assurance of product efficacy and hygienic processing among others. Increasing need to get medicines certified from an approved regulatory body is driving regulatory convergence in the halal medicines market among countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, Turkey, France and others.Request Free Report Sample@Key restraints include lack of adequate infrastructure in non-Islamic countries to avoid cross-contamination between halal and non-halal production lines, and lack of sufficient halal advisory and certification agencies to approve medical products. Other restraints include dearth of sufficient R&D for halal medicines globally and omission of critical medicine classes such as vaccines and biologics as they do not comply with Shariah norms. Ban on use of forbidden components such as porcine excipients also limit the number of drugs that can be produced. Industry experts have noted that formation of a proper, well-regulated and harmonized accreditation and halal management system could serve a long way in raising demand for halal medicines.Halal Pharmaceuticals Market: SegmentationHalal pharmaceuticals market can be segmented as indicated below:Segmentation by drug classesRespiratory drugsCardiovascular drugsEndocrine drugsPain medicationsAllergies (cough &cold)OthersSegmentation by product typeTabletsSyrupsCapsulesOthersSegmentation by source materialPlant and plant derivativesAnimals (compliant under religious laws)Synthetic and semi-synthetic sourcesRecombinant DNASegmentation by regionsHalal Pharmaceuticals Market: OverviewUptake of Halal medicines is gaining major traction globally, primarily due to two reasons. Firstly, these medicines are fully compliant with faith and so are readily acceptable under religious laws. Secondly, these medicines are very well assessed for quality and certification before being released into the market and are mostly made using herbal and synthetic materials. The market for halal pharmaceuticals is expected to register a significant CAGR as well as annual growth rates over the forecast period. Regulatory harmonization and regional regulatory convergence is expected to emerge as the key market trends in the near future.Request For TOC@Halal Pharmaceuticals Market: Region-wise OutlookOn the basis of geographic regions, halal drug market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, South America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East & Africa.In terms of geography, Asia Pacific region is the main region exhibiting development and uptake of halal medicines, particularly in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. However, R&D activities related to halal medicines are gaining traction in the European and North American regions. Discussion on formation of halal medicine certification agencies and guidelines are key features found in the traditionally pharmaceutically developed markets. Companies producing halal medicines are expected to enter Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, Qatar, Russia, France, Libya, Algeria and Singapore as well as the UAE to cater to the high demand base for better revenue generation, either through distributor route or via tie-ups with established players.Halal Pharmaceuticals Market: Key PlayersSome key accredited players in the halal medicine market include Chemical Company of Malaysia Berhad (CCM Pharmaceuticals Sdn Bhd), Pharmaniaga Bhd, Simpor Pharma Sdn Bhd, EMBIL Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, Nutramedica Incorporated, etc. among others.Browse Full Report@Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Hypercalcemia Treatment Market To Increase at Steady Growth Rate
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http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/hypercalcemia-treatment-market
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Hypercalcemia is a medical condition which involves elevation of calcium level in the blood. Surplus calcium levels in your blood can create kidney stones, obstruct the way your heart and brain functions and weaken your bones. Hypercalcemia is commonly result of hyperactive parathyroid glands. Hypercalcemia is generally accompanied by several symptoms like feeling sick, tiredness, vomiting, bone pains and kidney stones. Hypercalcemia is the most common metabolic disorder related with neoplastic diseases. It has estimated that hypercalcemia occurs in about 10% to 20% of all patients with cancer. Hypercalcemia is caused due to excessive release of calcium in the skeletal system and due to increased intestinal calcium absorption in the body. Hypercalcemia treatment focuses on lowering the serum calcium concentration in the body. Some of the non - pharmacological therapies used in the treatment of hypercalcemia are as mobilization, saline diuresis and volume expansion, Inhibition of bone resorption, reduction of gastrointestinal calcium absorption and dialysis.Hypercalcemia Treatment Market: Drivers and RestraintsPresently, the global hypercalcemia treatment market is an attractive market, and is primarily driven by the high adoption rate of novel therapies. Moreover, factor such as increased government support for developing effective medications for rare disease such as hypercalcemia is expected to drive the growth of this market. However, factors such as high cost of therapy and stringent drug regulatory policies might impede the growth of the market.Hypercalcemia Treatment Market: SegmentationHypercalcemia Treatment market is classified on the basis of drug type, indication, end user and geography.Request Free Report Sample@Based on the drug therapies type, the global hypercalcemia Treatment market is segmented into the following:BisphosphonatesAntidote or Hypercalcemia AgentsCalcimimetic AgentGlucocorticoidsAntineoplastic drugsMineralsBased on the indications, the global hypercalcemia Treatment market is segmented into the following:Primary HyperparathyroidismSecondary HyperparathyroidismTertiary HyperparathyroidismHumoral Hypercalcemia of MalignancyOther (Thyrotoxicosis, Immobilization etc.)Based on the type end user, the global hypercalcemia Treatment market is segmented into the following:Hospitals ClinicsPrivate ClinicsRetail Pharmacies and Drug Storese-commerceHypercalcemia Treatment Market: OverviewThe primary hyperparathyroidism and humoral hypercalcemia of malignancy type is expected to dominate the global hypercalcemia market over the forecast period as they account for 90% of the hypercalcemia cases. Growing incidence of hypercalcemia, increasing awareness among the people and developments in new advance treatment are some other factors which are expected to support the growth of global hyperparathyroidism market over the forecast period.Request For TOC@Hypercalcemia Treatment Market: Region-wise OutlookDepending on geographic regions, global hypercalcemia market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa. In terms of geography, North America is the leading market owing to the high incidence rate of hypercalcemia in the U.S. various research studies suggests that the incidence of hypercalcemia in the U.S. is almost 1 to 2 cases per 1000 adults. However, other regions such as Latin America, MEA and APAC are estimated to witness sluggish growth due to the high costs of these therapies and low awareness among population.Hypercalcemia Treatment Market: Key PlayersThe companies involved in the development and commercialization of hypercalcemia treatment products are Cipla Inc., Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Amgen Inc., Genta Inc., Par Pharmaceutical Companies, Inc., Novartis International AG Pfizer Inc. and others.Browse Full Report@Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
New Research Report on Small Animal Imaging (In Vivo) Market, 2016-2026
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Small animal imaging (In vivo) is a technique used for imaging biological processes in living animals which shows the changes in cellular activity to study the effect of drugs and disease progression. Small animal imaging is used in clinical research for drug development. Small animal imaging helps to study the drug assessment on various diseases. The small animal imaging includes whole body scan of small animals which is a cost effective method for regular validation and commercialization of new drugs. Small animal imaging is in vivo classification and measurement of biologic process at molecular level which involves the study of specific targeted molecule. Small animal imaging includes micro CT, micro MRI, digital angiography, micro SPECT, micro PET magnetic particle imaging and x-ray imaging.Small Animal Imaging (In vivo) Market: Drivers & RestraintsSmall animal imaging market is an emerging due to the advancements in technology and increase in healthcare expenditure. There is an enormous increase in pharmaceutical companies and research institutions elevation in usage of small animal imaging techniques across the globe. Although, high equipment cost and limitation in technology is expected to hinder the market growth of small animal imaging market over the forecast period. Also, surviving in highly competitive market and inaccessibility of radiopharmaceuticals are the main challenges to overcome for small players. Whereas, innovations in MRI imaging techniques as well in other imaging techniques, usage in many applications and emerging markets are some of the favorable factors for small animal imaging market growth. Small animal imaging market is also being affected by some factors such as insufficient infrastructure for research amenities and shortage of skilled personnel in developing regions.Small Animal Imaging (In vivo) Market: SegmentationSmall animal imaging Market is classified on the basis of application, technology and geography.Request Free Report Sample@Based on application, the small animal imaging market is segmented into the following:Monitoring Drug Treatment ResponseBio Distribution StudiesCancer Cell DetectionBiomarkersLongitudinal StudiesEpigeneticsBased on technology, the small animal imaging market is segmented into the following:Micro-Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Micro-MRI)Digital AngiographyUltrasoundNuclear ImagingMicro-Positron Emission Tomography (Micro-PET)Micro-Single Photon Emission Computerized Tomography (Micro-SPECT)Optical Imaging (OI)Bioluminescence ImagingCerenkov Luminescence ImagingOthersMicro-Ultrasound ImagingMicro-Computerized Tomography (Micro-CT)Based on geography, the small animal imaging market is segmented into following:North America (U.S., Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil)Western Europe (Germany, Italy, U.K, Spain, France, Rest of Western Europe)Eastern Europe (Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, ASEAN, Australia & New Zealand)JapanMiddle East and Africa (GCC, S. Africa)Request For TOC@Small Animal Imaging (In vivo) Market: OverviewSmall animal imaging market is expected to grow at a good pace. Enormous increase in number of pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, rise in usage of functional imaging and growing adoption rate for small animal imaging are the factors expected to boost the market growth over the forecast period.The swift progression in technology, many applications and growing base of research are some of the key factors to drive the growth of small animal imaging globally.Emerging countries will be growing with a faster CAGR related to other parts of the world as expenditure in these region on research is growing.Small Animal Imaging (In vivo) Market: Region-wise OutlookDepending on geographic region, small animal imaging market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa.North America contributes the maximum share in small animal imaging market. Eastern and Western Europe will show a good growth as the need for drug development through small animal imaging will be increasing. Asia Pacific is growing with a significant CAGR for small animal imaging market due to increase in healthcare expenditure and investment in research. Amongst the Asian countries, China, India and South Korea will be the more promising because of having a good economy and more expenditure on research.Browse Full Report@Small Animal Imaging (In vivo) Market: Key PlayersSome of the key participating global players in small animal imaging (In vivo) marketare Berthold Technologies, Spectral Instruments Imaging, Agilent Technologies, Inc., Aspect Imaging, Bioscan, Inc., Bruker Corporation, Gamma Medica-Ideas, Inc., Genovis Ab, Li-Cor Biosciences, Life Technologies Corporation, Mediso Medical Imaging Systems, Miltenyi Biotec Gmbh, Perkinelmer, Inc., Promega Corporation, Scanco Medical Ag, Siemens Ag, Sofie Biosciences, Inc., Targeson, Inc., Uvp. LLC, Fujifilm Holdings Corporation, Thermo Fischer Scientific.Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Chlorobenzenes Market Regulations and Competitive Landscape Outlook to 2026
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Chlorobenzene is an aromatic organic compound with the chemical formula C?H?Cl. It is colorless, flammable liquid and acts as a common solvent for use as an intermediate in the manufacture of other chemicals. These compounds are primarily used as an intermediary in the manufacture and synthesis of pesticides and various other chemicals. Chlorobenzene came into existence in 1851 and at present is produced by benzene chlorination in the existence of catalyst, acids such as sulfur dichloride, ferric chloride and anhydrous aluminium chloride. This chlorination process of benzene can ideally produce 12 different chlorobenzenes, however, world events and technology has decreased the chlorobenzene to production of three primary products such as monochlorobenzene, p-dichlorobenzene and o-dichlorobenzene. Other chlorobenzenes that are not produced on a large scale include m-dichlorobenzene, tetrachlorobenzenes, trichlorobenzenes and hexachlorobenzene. Approximately 50% of total production of chlorobenzene is represented by monochlorobenzene that are used for production of nitrochlorobenzene. These nitrochlorobenzenes are used to manufacture pigment intermediates, dye, pesticides, rubber processing chemicals, organic intermediates and pharmaceuticals among others. O-dichlorobenzene are used for treatment of garbage and p-dichlorobenzene covers the largest market for moth control and deodorant blocks and also in production of high performance polymers.Chlorobenzenes are widely used in manufacture of various pesticides, insecticides and chemicals. In addition, they are used as deodorizers, degreasers, fumigants and herbicides among others.Chlorobenzenes Market: Drivers and restraintsThe key driving factors of chlorobenzenes market are the growing demand for chlorobenzene from the chemical industry for manufacture of various chemicals. In addition, owing to its use as deodorant, huge demand from the personal care industry is also anticipated to boost the demand for chlorobenzenes in the market.Request Free Report Sample@However, the markets for chlorobenzenes, except for high performance polymers are declining owing to substitution of alternative chemistry in manufacture of products such as phenol and moth control agents. The demand for chlorobenzene in the market is expected to slow down owing to the various factors that volatilize the environment. The use of chlorobenzene as herbicides, pesticides and solvents, with environmental problems related to them has declined the market for chlorobenzene.Chlorobenzenes Market: SegmentationThe Chlorobenzenes market can be segmented based on type as:Monochlorobenzenep-Dichlorobenzeneo-Dichlorobenzenem-DichlorobenzeneTetrachlorobenzenesTrichlorobenzenesHexachlorobenzeneOthersRequest For TOC@Chlorobenzenes Market: Region wise outlookChina is the largest consumer of chlorobenzene. It holds more than half of the global consumption market. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market for chlorobenzene due to large number of end use industries in China and India. Japan also contributes with a good percentage in global consumption. Western Europe and the U.S. also consume chlorobenzene on large scale for production of various chemicals.Chlorobenzenes Market: Key market playersSome of the key players identified in the global chlorobenzenes market are:Arkema SAHenan Kaipu Chemical Co., Ltd.Bayer AGKureha CorporationPPG Industries, Inc.Jinhua Chemical (Group) CorporationNanjing Chemical Industry Co.Ltd, Solutia, Inc.Tianjin Bohai Chemical Co. LtdBrowse Full Report@Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Night Vision (IR) Surveillance Cameras Market Driven by Rising Demand from Residential Areas
Market Research HUB
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ALBANY, New York, July, 18, 2016 In todays era of a growing awareness of safety and security, surveillance cameras help people better protect their business premises and residential areas. One of the latest trends in surveillance cameras is infrared (IR) night vision cameras, which provide enhanced vision. Night vision surveillance cameras have become popular and more accessible in recent years as the product technology has been developed at a steady rate. Modern night vision surveillance cameras are increasingly being used by various industries such as retail, the public sector and defense, transportation, stadiums, and residential and business organizations. These are some of the findings of a new report added by Market Research Hub to its repository.The report, titled Night Vision (IR) Surveillance cameras Market (By Shape - Box Cameras, Dome Cameras, and Bullet Cameras; By Type - Fixed Cameras and PTZ Cameras; By End-use - Public Sector and Defense, Retail, Transportation, Industrial, Stadiums, Business Organizations and others) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024, states that the market will benefit from the growing occurrence of thefts and security breaches. Moreover, the rising fear of terrorism and cross-border infiltration will create more demand for night vision cameras across national boundaries, predict the reports authors. The report defines night vision cameras and then focuses on summarizing the changing trends in the global surveillance cameras market. Night vision (IR) surveillance cameras find application in face recognition, traffic management, asset management, and threat detection.Read Full Report on Global Night Vision (IR) Surveillance cameras Market:The report highlights the major factors driving and restricting the global market for night vision surveillance cameras. The demand for the latest night vision surveillance cameras is expected to increase from business organizations, the residential sector, and the retail sector owing to their attributes such as timely alerts and alarms, cloud recording, facial recognition, night vision, motion detection, and enhanced viewing angles. Night vision cameras are easy to use and available at affordable rates. This is expected to benefit the global market in the long run.For a competitive analysis, the reports authors have segmented the global night vision surveillance cameras market on the basis of region, end use, shape, and type. Based on type, the global night vision surveillance cameras market is classified into PTZ cameras and fixed cameras. Considering their wide-angle view, the demand for fixed cameras is expected to increase. By shape, box cameras, bullet cameras, and dome cameras are witnessing more demand than others.The global night vision surveillance cameras market is regionally divided into the Middle East and Africa, North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America. The market is highly competitive in nature, with many leading players operating across various locations. Currently, FLIR Systems, Robert Bosch GmbH, Raytheon Company, L-3 Communications Holdings, Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Axis Communications AB, Pelco Corporation, and BAE Systems plc. are some of the leading players operating in the global night vision surveillance cameras market. Leading players are currently focusing on partnerships and mergers to introduce new products. With mergers, the new entrants are expected to gain more momentum in the competitive market.Download Sample Report For Free with TOC in a PDF Format:At present, vendors are focusing on improving key areas of IR cameras such as intelligent imaging and video analytics. Technological advancements and the rising government funding will assist companies in introducing new night vision surveillance cameras, predict the analysts.Market Research HUB (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of market research reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Us90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free : 866-997-4948 (US-Canada)Tel : +1-518-621-2074Email : sales@marketresearchhub.comWebsite :
microDimensions receives Series A Financing for Digital Pathology Solutions
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microDimensions GmbH, a Munich-based software and service provider for digital pathology that specializes in automated image analysis raised a Series A financing round. The companys unique image processing technology can significantly speed up and automate workflows in (pre-)clinical drug development studies and clinical diagnosis. A consortium of five investors, led by Business Angel Dr. Adriaan Hart de Ruijter and complemented by High-Tech Grunderfonds, Bayern Kapital and a group of business angels, provided a seven-digit investment to enable microDimensions to further extend its product portfolio.The market for digital pathology is estimated to reach a market volume of 5.2 Billion USD up until 2020. The main drivers for digitization are the stagnating number of pathologists and the high complexity of biomarker analysis. This increases the demand for efficient workflows and cost-effective solutions in the life science industry as well as clinical pathology institutions. explains Dr. Martin Groher, CEO of microDimensions. The fresh capital enables us to fully exploit the potential of state of the art technologies such as automated image analysis, big data and deep learning to develop software solutions that help our customers to find the right answers to major health threats such as cancer.microDimensions has successfully launched a series of software products that are used by major pharma, biotech, and medtech players, and various university pathology departments. The Series A funding will be used to further develop the product line for biomarker image analysis. Besides its standardized software solutions, microDimensions offers the development of custom applications as well as a range of image analysis services. Many research organizations are pioneers in their field and their software requirements cannot be fulfilled with an off-the-shelf product. Based on the technology and in-house expertise microDimensions can provide them with tailored solutions and on demand image analysis services in exactly the way they need it. says Dr. Adriaan Hart de Ruijter.About microDimensionsmicroDimensions develops and distributes software for microscopic image processing and analysis. Their solutions and services can be tailored to individual requirements and seamlessly integrated into digital pathology workflows. microDimensions cutting-edge products Voloom, Slidematch, and Zoom are the worlds fastest tools for convenient and accurate 3D histology reconstruction, whole slide image alignment, stereology, and digital pathology viewing. They enable pharmaceutical and biotech companies to accelerate early drug testing and allow clinical and research organizations to gain new insights into cancer, multiple sclerosis, chronic infections, and other diseases.Contact:microDimensions GmbHDr. Martin GroherRupert-Mayer-Str. 44 // 64.0781379 MunchenGermanyTel.: +49.89.1894253.30info@micro-dimensions.comAbout Bayern KapitalBayern Kapital GmbH, based in Landshut, was founded on the initiative of the Bavarian government in 1995. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bavarian LfA Forderbank. As the venture capital organisation of the Land of Bavaria, Bayern Kapital provides equity capital financing for the founders of young innovative technology companies in Bavaria.Presently Bayern Kapital manages eleven investment funds with a total volume of around 340m. So far, it has invested almost 227m in 245 innovative companies in the fields of technology in various sectors including life science, software & IT, medical technology, materials and new materials, nanotechnology and environmental technology.In this way, almost 5000 long-term jobs in sustainable companies have been created in Bavaria.Contact:IRA WULFING KOMMUNIKATION GmbHDr. Reinhard SallerTel.: +49. 89. 2000 30-30bayernkapital@wuelfing-kommunikation.deAbout High-Tech GrunderfondsHigh-Tech Grunderfonds invests in young, high potential high-tech start-ups. The seed financing provided is designed to enable start-ups to take an idea through prototyping and to market launch. Typically, High-Tech Grunderfonds invests EUR 600,000 in the seed stage, with the potential for up to a total of EUR 2 million per portfolio company in follow-on financing. Investors in this public/private partnership include the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy, the KfW Banking Group, as well as strategic corporate investors including ALTANA, BASF, Bayer, B. Braun, Robert Bosch, CEWE, Daimler, Deutsche Post DHL, Deutsche Telekom, Evonik, Lanxess, media + more venture Beteiligungs GmbH & Co. KG, METRO, Qiagen, RWE Innogy, SAP, Tengelmann and Carl Zeiss. High-Tech Grunderfonds has about EUR 576 million under management in two funds (EUR 272 million HTGF I, EUR 304 million HTGF II).Contact:High-Tech Grunderfonds Management GmbHDr. Marianne MertensSchlegelstr. 253113 BonnTel.: +49 228 823001-00Fax: +49 228 823000-50m.mertens@htgf.deRupert-Mayer-Str. 44 // Gebaude 64.0781379 MunchenGermany
United States Fiber-optic Cable Industry 2016 Market Research Report
Fiber-optic Cable
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United States Fiber-optic Cable Market 2016 Industry Size Share Growth Forecast Research and DevelopmentThe United States Fiber-optic Cable Industry report gives a comprehensive account of the United States Fiber-optic Cable market. Details such as the size, key players, segmentation, SWOT analysis, most influential trends, and business environment of the market are mentioned in this report. Furthermore, this report features tables and figures that render a clear perspective of the Fiber-optic Cable market. The report features an up-to-date data on key companies product details, revenue figures, and sales. Furthermore, the details also gives the United States Fiber-optic Cable market revenue and its forecasts. The business model strategies of the key firms in the Fiber-optic Cable market are also included. Key strengths, weaknesses, and threats shaping the leading players in the market have also been included in this research report.The report gives a detailed overview of the key segments in the market. The fastest and slowest growing market segments are covered in this report. The key emerging opportunities of the fastest growing United States Fiber-optic Cable market segments are also covered in this report. Each segments and sub-segments market size, share, and forecast are available in this report. Additionally, the region-wise segmentation and the trends driving the leading geographical region and the emerging region has been presented in this report.Get Complete Report with TOC :The study on the United States Fiber-optic Cable market also features a history of the tactical mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships activity in the market. Valuable recommendations by senior analysts about investing strategically in research and development can help new entrants or established players penetrate the emerging sectors in the Fiber-optic Cable market. Investors will gain a clear insight on the dominant players in this industry and their future forecasts. Furthermore, readers will get a clear perspective on the high demand and the unmet needs of consumers that will enhance the growth of this market.Table of ContentChapter One Fiber-optic Cable Industry Overview1.1 Fiber-optic Cable Definition1.1.1 Fiber-optic Cable Definition1.1.2 Product Specifications1.2 Fiber-optic Cable Classification1.3 Fiber-optic Cable Application Field1.4 Fiber-optic Cable Industry Chain Structure1.5 Fiber-optic Cable Industry Regional Overview1.6 Fiber-optic Cable Industry Policy Analysis1.7 Fiber-optic Cable Industry Related Companies Contact InformationGet Sample Copy of Report @MarketResearchStore.com is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Global and China Mobile Router Industry 2016 : Industry Value Share, Supply Demand, share and Value Chain 2022
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The Global Mobile Router Industry 2015-2022 Market Research Report is the professional and comprehensive in-depth analysis of the global as well as China market. The report provides quantitative forecasting and trends analysis on the Mobile Router market status. The report also provides important and manufacturers and key sources includes in the study which guide and direct companies and individuals interest in the industry.Request For Sample:The global Mobile Router market is affected by many internal and external elements. The report represents synopsis of the industry including definition, types, applications, DROS, technology and others. The report has provides forward-looking insight of the experienced team of analysts and researchers. The report includes major competitors in global Mobile Router us sources, tool and techniques use to gather information like company profile, product specifications, future trends, value chain analysis and 2015-2022 revenue for each company.The report helps to clear market picture with suitable schematics diagrams, statistical analysis, company profit, supply-demand and Chinese importexport. The global Mobile Router market is categorized on the basis of types, application, technology and end-users, geography whichever is applicable.The report has studies in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels and possible segmentation, dominant segments in terms of types, application, end-user, downstream demand, along with current market dynamics. Moreover, includes future projects in the market with most reliable information indispensable for marketplace.Access Full Report With TOC:Table Of Content:Chapter One Introduction of Mobile Router Industry1.1 Brief Introduction of Mobile Router1.2 Development of Mobile Router Industry1.3 Status of Mobile Router IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology of Mobile Router2.1 Development of Mobile Router Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of Mobile Router Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of Mobile Router Manufacturing TechnologyChapter Three Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers3.1 Company A3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Product Information3.1.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.1.4 Contact Information3.2 Company BFull Report With Toc:MRS Research Group provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of MRS Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 FREE (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803 FREEEmail: sales@mrsresearchgroup.comWebsite:
Organic Dairy Products Market will Reach a Valuation of US$418.6 mn by 2017
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Volume-wise, liquid milk continues to be the most consumed dairy product throughout the emerging regions. Why? Increasing consumer awareness about the health benefits of milk and dairy products is driving this demand. The demand for organic milk and dairy products is significantly high in South Korea. Primary factors encouraging the purchase of organic dairy products are increasing health awareness and rising demand for toxin-free food products. Strangely, taste is the last factor consumers considered, when buying organic dairy products. Freshness of organic dairy products is also one of the important factors that attracts consumers towards these products.Interpret a Competitive outlook Analysis Report with free PDF Brochure:The global organic dairy products market is currently dominated by Europe and North America and it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. However, the global organic dairy products market has witnessed elevated demand for organic dairy products in the past decade, which is fueling the growth of the overall market. The report on the global organic dairy products market is broadly segmented on the basis of geography and products.The research study on the global organic dairy products market presents a comprehensive analysis of this industry. It delivers keen insights into the regional dynamics of the global organic dairy products market. Furthermore, the report provides valuable statistics and forecasts of these regional organic dairy products markets that will help readers understand the consumer trends shaping these market.Overview of the Global Organic Dairy Products MarketThe global organic dairy products market is highly influenced by the consumers preference towards quality-centered food items rather than price-centered ones. Additionally, the rising awareness worldwide about the health benefits of consuming organic dairy products is also fueling this market. The growing demand of organic milk coupled with its availability will further drive the global organic dairy products market.The global organic dairy products market will expand at a 9.1% CAGR during the forecast period from 2011 to 2017. In 2011, the global organic dairy products market was valued at US$9,357.4 million. Organic dairy foods such as milk, yogurt, cheese, ice-cream, and butter collectively accounted for the sale of US$8,987.7 million in 2011, which is approximately 19% of the global organic dairy products market.Geography-wise, Europe and the U.S. together contributed to a massive 93.1% of the global demand in 2011. Furthermore, the U.S. and Europe are expected to show a growth of 8.2% and 7.9% respectively, during the forecast period. On the other hand, the South Korea organic dairy products market is expected to show a high growth rate during the forecast period and reach an estimated value of US$418.6 million by 2017.The global organic dairy products market will continue to demonstrate strong growth in the coming few years. However, factors such as the high pricing of these products, lack of promotion, private labels faking organic dairy products labels, and the increasing R&D cost will suppress the global organic dairy products market.Companies mentioned in the report areSome of the key companies operating in the global organic dairy products market are Kroger, YogiTea, Costco Safeway, Publix, Ben & Jerry, Aspall, VerdeGrass, BJs Wholesale Club, Purity Foods, Eden Foods, Organic Valley, and Whole Foods Market.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
CW Associates CPAs on 5 benefits of an integrated risk management program
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Risks facing companies can come from anywherecurrency-fluctuation risk related to the U.K.s decision to leave the European Union is a recent examplewhich is why enhancing enterprise risk management (ERM) efforts is a popular topic among boards and the C-suite.Here are five benefits of an integrated ERM program from the proposed framework released by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO):Increase the range of opportunities. By considering all possibilitiesboth positive and negative aspects of riskmanagement can identify new opportunities and challenges associated with current opportunities. Take the extra five minutes as you make a decision, COSO Chair Bob Hirth said. Ask, What have we missed here? What have we left out? Is there some unintended consequence? As you have that discussion, you end up confirming your decision, or you say, Wow, I didnt realize we could look at it that way. This richer discussion gets you more possible opportunities.Identify and manage risk entity wide. Risks can affect many parts of an organization. Sometimes, a risk can emanate from one part of the business but have an effect on another part. As a result, management identifies and manages these entity wide risks to sustain and improve performance. The framework document cites the example of a bank that developed a system in response to trading risks it faced. The system combined internal transaction and market information with external information to provide an aggregate view of risks and allow the bank to quantify relative risks.Reduce negative surprises and increase gains. ERM allows organizations to improve their ability to identify risks and establish appropriate responses, reducing surprises and related financial loss, and allowing them to profit from advantageous developments. If you have richer discussions about alternatives and unintended consequences, bad things arent just going to stop, but over time, you will be less surprised, Hirth said. For example, a manufacturing company setting delivery schedules realized that not all delays in highway traffic can be avoided, but it developed alternate routes and protocols to alert clients about potential delays.Reduce performance variability. The challenge for some entities has less to do with surprises and more to do with variability in performance. For example, a public transportation system can aim for better on-time performance, but having buses and trains go from running 10 minutes late to 10 minutes early is too wide a swing in performance. Hirth said that having an integrated ERM program means doing a better job of judging performance on more than one target.Improve resource deployment. Having a wealth of information on risk allows businesses to assess overall resource needs and enhance resource allocation. For example, a thorough risk assessment of a gas distribution companys infrastructure enabled the organization to decide what parts were so old that they needed replacing and what parts could function a few more years with repairs. Having a greater focus on resources makes those resourcestime, money, and peoplemore efficient, Hirth said.COSO released its proposed framework on enterprise risk management in mid-June, and public comment is open until Sept. 30. Specifics of the framework update, Enterprise Risk Management: Aligning Risk with Strategy and Performance, could change as a result of feedback from stakeholders. COSO is a committee of five sponsoring organizations, including the AICPA. Comments on the exposure draft can be made by visiting coso.org.CW Associates, CPAs, provides big firm expertise from a local firm platform. With a professional staff of over 40 accountants, including five partners, our firm was ranked as the 8th largest CPA firm in Hawaii in the 2015 and 2016 Pacific Business News Book of Lists and was recently awarded the 2014 Business Leadership Hawaii Award as the Best in Small Business category by the Pacific Business News We were also selected by Hawaii Business Magazine as one of the Best Places to Work in the small business category for 2 consecutive years. All of our partners and many of our professional staff are licensed certified public accountants with Masters degrees in business administration or accounting who have experience with an international accounting firm. In addition, our hands-on approach and low partner-to-staff ratio assure you that you will have direct contact with experienced certified public accountants.CW Associates, CPAs700 Bishop Street, Suite 1040Honolulu, Hawaii 96813Telephone: (808) 531-1040Facsimile: (808) 531-1041info@cwassociatescpas.com
Healthcare Cloud Computing Industry Set To Be Worth of $9.48 Billion by 2020
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The report Healthcare Cloud Computing Market by Application (PACS, EMR, CPOE, RCM, Claims Management), by Deployment (Private, Public), by Service (SaaS, IaaS), by Pricing (Pay as you go), by End-User (Providers, Payers) - Analysis and Global Forecasts to 2020, the global healthcare cloud computing market is expected to reach $9.48 Billion by 2020 from $3.73 Billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 20.5%.Browse 83 market tables and 41 figures spread through 209 pages and an in-depth TOC on Healthcare Cloud Computing MarketEarly buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.In recent years, the healthcare industry has shown increasing interest in cloud computing technology and services. The potential benefits and cost-saving aspects of cloud services have led to the migration of healthcare applications to the cloud. Companies such as athenahealth, Inc. (U.S.), ClearData Networks, Inc. (U.S.), CareCloud Corporation (U.S.), Carestream Health, Inc. (U.S.), Merge Healthcare, Inc. (U.S.), and Dell, Inc. (U.S.) are the leading players in the cloud computing market.athenhealth, Inc. is one of the leaders in the healthcare cloud computing market owing to the high demand for its cloud based productsthe athenaClinicals (EHR service), athenaCollector (medical billing and practice management service), and athenaCommunicator (patient communication service).Get PDF Brochure For This Report:ClearData Networks, Inc. is a leading provider of HIPAA-compliant cloud platforms. Its cloud platform are in high demand amongst healthcare providers for the hosting of their healthcare applications such as EHR, EPMM (Enterprise Patient Media Manager), practice management solution, medical image content (both DICOM and Non-DICOM), offsite backup and recovery services, and others. Being HIPAA-compliant, its platforms offer increased security for data being transferred on the cloud.Cloud solutions and services are also in demand amongst healthcare IT application providers. athenhealth, Inc. and ClearData Networks, Inc. partnered with several IT application provider companies to jointly offer better cloud solutions to healthcare providers and payers. These partnerships are aimed at combining the cloud expertise of athenahealth and ClearData Networks with the IT application expertise of their partners.Get The Sample Copy Of This Report:For instance, athenhealth, Inc. partnered with CECity (U.S.), Quantros (U.S.), Medley Health (U.S.), Proxsys, LLC (U.S.), among others; whereas, ClearData partnered with IT application providers BRIT Systems (U.S.), Topaz Information Solutions (U.S.), VisualShare (U.S.), Aprima Medical Software, Inc. (U.S.), Apollo (U.S.), TeraMedica, Inc. (U.S.), MediQuant, Inc. (U.S.), and Acuo Technologies (U.S.).Partnerships with healthcare providers, payers, and healthcare IT application sellers were undertaken to increase customer base and offer a range of deals to the clients as per the market demand.About MarketsandMarketsMarketsandMarkets is the largest market research firm worldwide in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to a multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.M&Ms flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository.Contact:Mr. RohanUnit No. 802, 8th Floor,Tower - 7, Magarpatta City SEZ,Hadapsar, Pune 411013,Maharashtra, India.Tel: +1-888-6006-441.
Radio Frequency Components Market : Latest Innovations, Drivers and Industry Key Events 2015 - 2021
Radio Frequency Components Market
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Radio frequency components are the fundamental components required by any communication device for its proper functioning. The advancements in technology and miniaturization property (capability to fit in small size) of RF components are the factors driving this market forward. In addition, with advancements in universal mobile telecommunication network (3G and 4G), the market has seen high demand for tuners and switchers for offering precise functionality to other radio frequency devices such as demodulators, power amplifiers, etc. Although, the radio frequency components market is witnessing good growth, the production of radio frequency components requires significant investment from vendors, posing a challenge to the growth of radio frequency component market.View Sample Report @The radio frequency components market is segmented on the basis of components, modules, applications, and geography. The radio frequency components market is segmented on the basis of its components into five major categories, namely- RF filter (RX/TX FILTERS), duplexers, power amplifiers, antenna switches, and demodulators. On the basis of applications, the radio frequency components market is segmented into four major categories, namely- cellular phones, tablets and note books, SMART TVs, and STB (Set Top Box). The global traction transformer market is further segmented on the basis of modules into six major categories, namely- TX module, RX module, antenna switch module, duplexer + PA module, multi duplexer module, and RX + duplexer module. The radio frequency components market is segmented on the basis of geography into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Rest of World (ROW).Request Report TOC @Some of the leading players in the radio frequency components market include Triquint Semiconductors (U.S.), Murata Manufacturing (Japan), RDA Microelectronics (China), Skyworks Inc. (U.S.), RF Micro devices (U.S.), and AVAGO Technologies (U.S.). Other key players in the market include, ANADIGICS Inc., Vectron International, Tektronix, Inc., Epson Toyocom, WIN Semiconductors Corp., and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United StatesUSA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353
Wireless Chipsets Market : Quantitative Market analysis, Current and Future Trends to 2015 - 2021
Wireless Chipsets Market
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A wireless chipsets are a part of internal hardware made to enable a device to communicate and connect to another wireless device. A wireless adapter or chipset internet card is an inner hardware design, which is used in wireless communication systems or computer to connect with other devices. The market is expected to grow with a double digit CAGR. The consumers shift towards portable devices coupled with the increase usage of wireless devices increases the use of wireless chipsetsView Sample Report @The growth of the market is fueled by increased demand of the wireless devices and increased application areas of wireless chipsets. In addition, the shift from wired to wireless technology acts as a driving force for the wireless chipsets market. Some other drivers for this market are fast growth in the tablets and PC market and technology advancement related to the communications protocol and introduction of frequency bands in some emerging countries. However, complex inserted systems increases the cost of production and swiftly changing technological requirements acts as a restraint for the market.The total market can be segmented on the basis of type, application and technology. The segmentation by type includes mobile ZigBee chipsets, WiMAX chipsets, wireless/Wi-Fi chipsets, LTE chipsets and wireless display/video chipsets. The application segment includes Computers, laptops, mobile phone, global positioning system (GPS), routers and other wireless devices. The technology segment includes such as HD Display and Video, Low-power WLAN, Dual-protocol ZigBee and Multi-mode LTE. The market can be segmented by geography into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and RoW.Request Report TOC @The key players of the wireless chipsets market are Greenpeak Technologies Ltd., Atmel Corporation, Altair Semiconductor, Inc., Amimon Ltd., Gainspan Corporation, Broadcom Corporation, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Intel Corporation and GCT Semiconductor Inc., among others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United StatesUSA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353
New EU Regulations Mean Changes to PPE Legislation
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The European Commission has replaced Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Directive 89/686/EEC with Regulation 425/2016/EU. This requires companies working in this sector to be aware of a number of key changes to the regulations relating to PPE.Regulation 425/2016/EU was approved on March 9, 2016, and published in the Official Journal of the European Union on March 31, 2016. The directive will come into effect on April 21, 2018.The acceptance of Regulation 425/2016/EU has resulted in a number of key changes for manufacturers of PPE. The Key changes relate to: A re-definition of PPE to include products which were previously exempt. These include products for private use against heat for example, oven gloves and mittens. EC Type examination certificates will be renamed EU Type examination certificates, issued under Module B in Annex V. These will remain valid until April 21, 2023, unless they expire before that date. Renewal of EU Type examination certificates should be submitted between 12 months and six months before the expiration date. SGS can advise on renewal depending on the product. A re-specification of technical file (Annex III) requirements. Categories I and III definitions have been refined:Category I now includes protection against several minimal risksCategory III now exclusively includes risks that may cause very serious consequences, consequences such as death or irreversible damage to health.Category II, as above, contains products not included in Category I or III. In a new section entitled, Obligations of Manufacturers, the legislation unambiguously outlines the responsibilities of makers of PPE products.SGS provides a one-stop solution for companies working in the PPE sector. SGS can advise companies on how the changes in PPE legislation affect their business. In addition, their accredited laboratories can assist with testing, certification, and compiling technical files to help manufacturers remain compliant.SGS Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) ServicesSGSs global network and experts provide a one-stop simple solution for PPE product compliance. Our accredited laboratories can satisfy all testing and certification requirements and provide assistance in compiling technical files and coordinate with Notified Bodies for application of EC type examination. Learn more about SGSs Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Services (SGS SafeGuardS keep you up to date with the latest news and developments in the consumer goods industry. Read the full Regulation (EU) 2016/425 Personal Protective Equipment SafeGuardS. (To receive SGS SafeGuardS direct to your inbox, subscribe here:For further information contact:PPE HelplineTel: +44 (0)1934 522917 Option 4Email: cts.media@sgs.comWebsite: sgs.com/cgnrSGS is the worlds leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. SGS is recognized as the global benchmark for quality and integrity. With more than 85,000 employees, SGS operates a network of over 1,800 offices and laboratories around the world.Sugarloaf MarketingUnion StreetFlimwellEast SussexTN5 7NY
The Korean government has decided to prohibit its citizens from traveling to Libya for the time being in light of the dangerous situation there.
In a passport policy commission meeting on Wednesday, Foreign Ministry officials agreed to raise the travel alert to the highest level, banning departures to the country and requiring those already there to get individual permission to extend their stay.
The ban, which is likely to come into effect early next week, will be reassessed on a monthly basis to minimize the impact on Korean businesses.
Smart View Systems Market : Drivers, Challenges, Historical and current Sizes (2015 - 2021)
Smart View Systems Market
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With growing population and increasing crime across the globe, the individual safety is becoming a major concern. In order to overcome such problems, technological implementations such as installations of video camera play a vital role which is realized by many entities and individual around the world. Smart view system comprises set of various hardware and software such as video surveillance system and recorders. Nowadays, smart view systems can be easily be installed in commercial as well as residential places to ensure the seamless operation while ensuring the high-level security. By implementing such system within the cities and commercial facilities the local government/municipalities and an individual has benefited in many ways such as increased safety and reduced level of pollutants.View Sample Report @Rising concern over safety, stringent government laws towards video surveillance in commercial places are some of the major drivers along with macroeconomic factors such as increasing national income resulting in infrastructural developments and growing GDP are fuelling the growth of the global smart view systems market. However, the high cost of implementation and slower adoption rate in some countries can pose a major challenge towards the growth of the global smart view systems market.Global smart view system market is segmented on the basis of geography, by a range and by end users. On the basis of range, the market is segmented into three categories;Short RangeMedium RangeLong RangeOn the other hand, on the basis of end-users the market is categorized into two segments namely; residential and industrial & commercial.The global smart view system market is expected to grow with the significant rate over the forecast period from 2015 to 2025. As of 2014, the medium range of smart view camera dominated the market, while long rage is expected to expand at higher CAGR. In terms of volume commercial & industrial segment accounted for more than 60% shares due to expanding industrial and commercial infrastructure activity in developing economies such as India and China.The global smart view systems market is geographically segmented into seven key regions which are, North America, South America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan and the Middle East & Africa. As of 2014, Asia Pacific dominated the global smart view system market followed by North America and Europe. In terms of value and volume, Asia Pacific is anticipated to remain dominant over the forecast period. On the other hand, BRIC countries are expected to grow at higher CAGR when compared to other countries in their respective regions.Request Report TOC @Some of the key players identified in global smart view systems market are CBS Interactive Inc., ADLINK Technology Inc., CCTV Camera Pros, Secureye Pvt Ltd., Trinet Internet Solutions, Inc. among others.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to categories such as market segments, geographies, types, technology, and applications.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United StatesUSA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353
Starlet Han Ye-ri starred in an action thriller which might be mostly appealing to male viewers due to the jam-packed masculine scenes.
"The Hunt," which hit local theaters early this month, is set deep in the woods and follows hunters who arrive to mine gold.
"I think the sound of gunshots is one of the most impressive parts of this film," Han said. She added that she practiced shooting at an indoor shooting range in preparation for the film.
The government here has issued a travel alert for the whole of Turkey after a failed coup attempt there on Friday night.
The government recommends travelers cancel or delay their visit and leave the country.
The alert will be effective until July 29.
"Korean nationals staying at or visiting Turkey are advised to leave the country unless they have urgent business," a Foreign Ministry spokesman here said.
Meanwhile, 110 Koreans who had been stranded at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport due to the coup attempt arrived at Incheon International Airport on Sunday morning on a Turkish Airlines flight.
The Islamist government in Ankara controlled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was able to quell the coup and has started a brutal crackdown on those allegedly involved.
Korean Air and Asiana Airlines are taking different approaches to deal with changes in industry conditions due to the growth of low-cost carriers.
Asiana has decided to divide up flight routes with its budget daughters Air Seoul and Air Busan, while Korean Air is sharing routes with its cheaper affiliate Jin Air.
Air Seoul said Friday it will take on two of Asiana's 20 routes to Japan and begin flights on Oct. 7. They are Incheon to Shizuoka and Takamatsu. It will also launch new flights to Nagasaki and Ube, while taking over from Asiana some Southeast Asian flights.
An Air Seoul staffer said, "Air Busan will focus on domestic flights, while Air Seoul will concentrate on short-range international flights, leaving Asiana to handle mid- to long-distance international flights and minimizing overlapping routes and unnecessary costs."
Saginaw Valley State University has hired an advocate for students with more than 23 years of higher education leadership experience to serve as its new associate provost for student affairs.
Sidney R. Childs will begin his work at SVSU in July after serving at Bowling Green State University since 1993. For the last two years, Childs has worked as both interim vice president and assistant vice president for student affairs at the Ohio campus, located south of Toledo.
During that time, Childs led programs to enhance student retention and persistence to graduation, and also to strengthen community partnerships. Furthermore, he has provided direction for underrepresented student populations, offering guidance on campus issues relating to diversity, inclusion, multicultural affairs, as well as the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
Throughout my professional career, I have been intentional about cultivating a campus and community environment where students feel welcomed and strive to create a more just and equitable world, one in which all of our students see themselves as valuable individuals and feel confident and competent in their own identities, Childs said.
Prior to his work in Bowling Greens student affairs office, Childs led the universitys TRIO programs, which offered educational outreach and academic enrichment programs for first generation and underserved students.
His new role at SVSU also will involve nurturing an inclusive and empowering campus environment. Deborah Huntley, SVSU provost and vice president for academic affairs, said Childs will provide an engaging leader and supportive voice for students.
Dr. Sidney Childs brings a wealth of experience to SVSU, Huntley said in a news release. His work as interim vice president for student affairs at Bowling Green, leadership in TRIO and innovation in student programming has helped countless students meet their potential as engaged citizens. He has shown an ability to work across units within the university to foster student development in and out of the classroom. We are very excited to have Sidney join SVSU.
Childs earned a doctor of education degree in leadership studies in 2013, a masters of public administration in organizational development in 1993, and a bachelor of science in business administration in business law in 1990, all at Bowling Green.
He will replace Merry Jo Brandimore, who plans to retire in August after 33 years at SVSU.
I had promised myself some time ago that any articles written by Daily News columnist Chris Stevens on politics I would simply ignore as not worthy of reading. But with each of his headlines I become curious if the latest will sink to a new low. His articles are really not journalism, but one-sided rants against our president and anyone that is a Democrat or in disagreement with Stevens right wing extremist point of view. It appears that for information, he consults Fox News, which is not news but opinions that have been fact checked as 60 percent false.
His article on Ferguson, Mo., Take the Race Out of Ferguson showed a lack of understanding of the racial problems of that area and the minority abuse by predatory police that has been going on for years. I brought his editor an analysis of the Ferguson situation from Business Week, but I imagine Stevens did not read it. He certainly did not publish any follow up to show that he had benefited from a more objective article. The U.S. Justice Department found plenty of illegal and improper police practices in Ferguson and a number of other U.S. cities where unarmed black people have died at the hands of trigger happy police.
The state of Missouri has a law that police departments cannot have more than 14 percent of their budget coming from fines. Several police departments in that St. Louis vicinity far exceed that, one even to 40 percent, showing a consistent abuse of minority populations of those towns. Has Stevens far reaching journalism discovered that? I believe that Stevens grew up in Flint and went to a high school where he might have been in the minority. He must have resented that because he seems to take particular aim at President Obama as the source of all our countrys problems. Has he forgotten that the Republican Tea Party types hijacked the Congress, refusing to work with their more moderate members let alone the Democrats to craft compromise legislation. The result of Republican obstruction: virtually no legislation for the last four years. Ted Cruz even shut down the government briefly trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act instead of passing a clean budget bill. Is that leadership? Who is lying to the American public?
The Republicans in Congress have said that they want to solve problems when in reality their objective has been to cram an ideology down everybodys throat regardless of the harm to the American public. Stevens seems to have a common theme that President Obama and anyone in his administration is constantly lying to the American people. It is surprising to me that he gives a pass to all the right wing lies coming from people like Sean Hannity, Bill OReilly and their merry band of shills for Foxs owners. I have not seen any commentary from Stevens on the lies of Fox or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Remember when Hannity called Cliven Bundy a great American patriot until Bundy spewed racist comments and Hannity and the rest of Fox went running for cover? Bundy was no more than a deadbeat cowboy, disowned by the Cattlemens Association, refusing to pay his cattle grazing fees for 20 years worth over a million dollars. When the federal government, his creditors, attempted to seize his cattle for his debts, Bundy gathered a bunch of gun-toting folks to his ranch to prevent the legal seizure of his cattle for his past debt. Bundy is now in jail for his unpaid debts, while his idiot son Ammon and his friends tried to take over a national park property illegally and are also in jail.
Oh, and Stevens doesnt seem to understand that Planned Parenthood has been exonerated from the false accusations of selling fetal tissue. And the perpetrators of the false accusation have been arrested. By the way, Chris should know that Planned Parenthood provides many health care services for women who could not afford other health care services.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is the King of all Liars. He even one-ups Fox. In the process he has called Mexicans rapists, called all Muslims terrorists, has made disparaging comments about women and womens rights, mocked a disabled reporter, has no comprehension about any aspect of the operations of government, has never held any political office, has no idea how to solve any problem of this country let alone understand what those problems are, wants to isolate America from the rest of the world, and is a hypocrite. But I guess in Stevens world, Trump gets a pass.
A recent quote in the Midland Daily News characterizes Trump pretty well: In politics and life, ignorance is not a virtue. Its not cool to not know what youre talking about. Thats not keeping it real or telling it like it is. Thats just not knowing what youre talking about. President Obama said that.
That is a quote that Chris should really think about before writing another article.
Ron Parmele is a resident of Midland.
Perhaps there is hope for the Republican Party, after all.
The Iowa caucuses were not noteworthy because Ted Cruz won or because Donald Trump came in second. No, what was good to see and provides hope for the GOP is how Marco Rubio did, coming in third, but very close behind both Trump and Cruz.
This is important for a couple of reasons. First, it means when decision time came for Republicans in Iowa, many of them decided to back Rubio, who had been a distant third in polling before the caucuses. Second, in backing Rubio, Iowa voters threw their support behind the one GOP candidate who actually has a chance to win in November.
Let face it, even if you like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump they have little if any chance of winning in the general election. Cruz is too far right, too connected to the tea party movement and the obstructionist government that the nation has endured for the past several years. Voters nationwide are not going to provide Cruz with enough electoral votes to win. And Trump, well, he also appeals to a select audience, one that I hope will keep getting smaller as the Republican Party Convention approaches.
Then theres Rubio, a candidate that is more moderate than Cruz and Trump and more likely to do much better with all the demographics the Republican Party desperately needs to win in November: Women, minorities and younger voters.
As for the remaining candidates in the GOP field, such as retired American neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and others, their time probably has passed. The New Hampshire vote will likely cement many of their withdrawals from the race.
Meanwhile, recent polling showed Rubio gaining traction in New Hampshire, though Trump still had a comfortable lead. Whether that lasts when people actually have to vote on the candidates remains to be seen.
Surprisingly, a question from an atheist concerned about Rubios Christian faith may have helped give his campaign a needed boost in Iowa. The atheist told Rubio at a town hall meeting that people like him are looking for somebody that will uphold their rights as Americans, and not pander to a certain religious group.
No one is going to force you to believe in God, but no one is going to force me to stop talking about God, Rubio told the man.
He went on to say that the atheist should not be worried that he is a Christian, because his faith teaches him he has an obligation to love his neighbor, to help those who are hungry or naked, to minister to those in prison and to serve others.
Rubio showed a lot of poise and compassion in answering the atheist. He wasnt confrontational, but honest and forthright. And a few days later, he found himself in a close race with the top candidates in Iowa. The more people find out about Rubio, the more momentum he will gain. And, perhaps, the GOP will have a chance when the general election rolls around this year.
Jack Telfer is editor of the Daily News.
President Park Geun-hye and her Mongolian counterpart Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj on Sunday agreed to study a kind an economic partnership between their countries.
The two met on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Meeting in Mongolia.
Speaking in the Mongolian capital of Ulanbaataar, Park said the partnership would lead to "expanded bilateral trade and investments" and added that talks should start soon.
Cheong Wa Dae said it will take around four years before the actual pact is inked.
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.
Germany refused to accredit a new North Korean ambassador apparently because he has a background in espionage, Radio Free Asia reported Friday quoting an unnamed German source.
Germany deported two North Korean diplomats early this year on charges of illegally raising cash for the regime, and Pyongyang recalled former Ambassador Ri Si-hong because he was being blamed for the debacle, the radio station speculated.
North Korea had earned some 200,000 euros from dubious business activities.
But Ri is now back in the saddle after his successor was rejected.
RFA said the North Korean Embassy is in a spacious building in the former East German part of central Berlin and makes money from renting out parts of it. This makes it an attractive posting compared to the North's often puny out-of-town embassies elsewhere.
Life, of course, can pack big surprises.
But this is about a big surprise.
Literally.
Meet Henry Koetters.
He was born the other day at OSF St. Joseph Medical Center in Bloomington, the fourth boy for Matthew and Michelle Koetters, a slim woman who in previous deliveries had what you'd call close to average-sized babies.
That's 7-year-old Paul (born 8.6 pounds), 4-year-old Noah (9 pounds), and 2-year-old Luke (8.3 pounds).
Henry?
He weighed in at (breathe in) 11 pounds and (breathe out) 15 ounces.
(Repeat, as necessary).
"He surprised everyone, even my doctor, says Michelle. My 30-week ultrasound showed him only a few ounces bigger .
But then
... Oh Henry!
While there are no official records at OSF for large baby deposits, the Koetters' obstetrician said she'd never delivered a baby as big as Henry. The lactation consultant said shed not seen, nor could ever remember, a bigger babe, and thats in 33 years of assisting pregnancies.
As for Michelle?
Before opting out for full-time motherhood, she was a business writer at this newspaper and her job was coming up with words. And she has several for this life situation.
"Completely uncomfortable are two of them.
But all is well, so is Henry, so is Michelle, and good-natured humor thrives as well. One friend, chuckles Michelle, "said there are bowling balls lighter than that.
... Breathe out.
Hes got the hair for it: While serving a 14-year federal prison term on a 2011 corruption conviction, ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, as you might have read, has taken up guitar lessons and now is playing and singing in a prison band, The Jailhouse Rockers.
They've become quite popular, according to an AP dispatch, at a federal facility in Littleton, Colo.
Now, we have an update via a Facebook post on the page of his wife, Patty: The band is on hiatus. The lead guitarist has been released from custody. That'd be an obvious problem when you form a prison band.
No word yet, though, if Blago's band does a rendition of the Animals hit, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.
The Press makes the press!: Sometimes in life the gems are right in front of you.
In a just-released Food Network list Where Cooks Shop: 10 Great Cookware Shops from Coast-to-Coast are places like The Chopping Block in Chicago, and Cooks Companion in Brooklyn, N.Y., Artichoke in Cincinnati, Pepperoni in Boulder, and Fantes Kitchen Shop in Philadelphia, and one other.
Its the Garlic Press in uptown Normal, now in its 40th year. Our own kudos to originator Dotty Bushnell, a nice nice lady who cooked it all up.
So there really is one: In a life where theres no telling how many times youve heard or exclaimed, Well, thatd be like trying to find a needle in a haystack! here now is breaking news:
It's finally been found.
Its in a field just north of Clinton, just off the first exit from Bloomington, on the east side of old U.S. 51. (Thanks to John Eckley of Bloomington for snapping us a picture.)
Today's civic question:
This being the birthplace of not only Steak n Shake but also the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, wouldnt it be appropriate if, for just one year, the two got together for a Steak n Shakespeare Festival?
Another irony of ironies: In 35 well-traveled years as a columnist at this newspaper, your humble correspondent already has been to Rome (a town near Peoria), Venice (in southern Illinois, on the way to a Cardinals game) and Florence (a street in east Bloomington).
And now this newspaper wants to send your humbleness to the same places except in Italy this time to lead a travel group for 10 days in late October.
A bit apprehensive at the start (travel? with me?), we've nonetheless become highly impressed with the itinerary, its fun quotient and its amenities (they even carry around our darned luggage for us!).
Check it out at http://suzidavis.com/pantagraph. As of early Friday, as we understand it, there were still some openings.
First to commit: a nice couple from Paris.
Thats Paris, Ill., of course.
NORMAL Normal Community High School students and parents will face an extra roadblock when school starts next month.
Raab Road will continue to be closed east of NCHS after work to improve Raab from the school to Towanda Barnes Road this summer was unexpectedly delayed, said City Manager Mark Peterson.
Its hard to say (when it will reopen). Id say sometime in September, he said. It depends how quickly this remediation work that were proposing proceeds, and (on) weather.
The work is a $1.7 million project that will turn a main artery to NCHS from a county road into a street with a sidewalk. Previously, Peterson said the work would improve safety and traffic congestion during the school year.
We know this is going to create some disruption for people who use that to get to (NCHS), he said Friday. In the long run, this improvement will be helpful for everyone.
Because Raab Road is the only route to the school, a delay would give McLean County Unit 5 no choice but to cope with extra traffic at NCHS and tell drivers to come in from the west until work wraps, said Operations Director Joe Adelman.
Thats going to be a very big challenge getting all the students to school," he said of a possible delay.
Normal City Council will consider Monday approving an additional $300,000 for the project, which was delayed due to problems with the soil and groundwater table at the site, according to a memo from City Engineer Gene Brown.
"It was quickly discovered... that the original plan for a 12-inch depth lime modified road base would not be feasible," he wrote. "Engineers spent several weeks in June analyzing the conditions and proposed several alternatives."
Brown referred to the problem as "the most radical undercut situation I have encountered in my career in Normal." Officials plan to build drains on the north and south sides of the road under 18 inches of rock, an "undercut."
Although the Illinois Department of Transportation approved $1.2 million in federal money for the project, it has not approved any additional funding. The council previously approved $500,000 in motor fuel tax money for the project.
The council meets 7 p.m. Monday on the fourth floor at Uptown Station, 11 Uptown Circle.
BLOOMINGTON People with chronic mental illness die on average 10 to 20 years earlier than other people because they are less likely to get adequate physical health care, said advance practice nurse Melinda Roth.
"Mental illness is associated with chronic physical illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and pulmonary disease," Roth said last week at the Center for Human Services (CHS), McLean County's mental health agency, where she is psychiatric services program manager.
In response, Roth and representatives of the Community Health Care Clinic and Home Sweet Home Ministries have developed an innovative solution.
Beginning July 25 and continuing on the fourth Monday afternoon of each month, a mobile health clinic will operate at CHS, 108 W. Market St., for CHS patients without a primary care physician.
The clinic will provide primary care exams by a Community Health Care Clinic nurse practitioner, followed by an assessment by Home Sweet Home's outreach coordinator to see whether additional community support could assist the patient.
"This is holistic care," Roth said. "It's going to mean a quality of life that they deserve to have."
"It just makes sense," said Matt Burgess, Home Sweet Home (HSH) chief operating officer. "This level of innovation and creativity among longstanding organizations is what it takes to address physical and mental health needs and homelessness in a cost-effective manner."
The mobile health clinic is an expansion of the HSH/Community Health Care Clinic mobile health project.
That project involves taking a 40-foot-long used truck that was restored in 2014 into a mobile clinic and driving it to locations where low-income people who are uninsured or under-insured and without regular medical care gather.
Inside, Community Health Care Clinic staff provide medical exams and Home Sweet Home (HSH) staff make sure the patient is connected to human service agencies that can help, said HSH Outreach Coordinator Brittany Cline.
Since the first clinic in October 2014, there have been 22 mobile clinics at several sites with most of them outside Home Sweet Home, 303 E. Oakland Ave., Bloomington, said Community Health Care Clinic Operations Manager Mike Romagnoli. "We've seen 147 unduplicated patients," he said.
Even as monthly mobile clinics continue outside Home Sweet Home from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. during the third Monday of the month, HSH and the community clinic are looking for additional partners.
Some CHS patients who also are low-income, uninsured or underinsured don't access primary care for chronic physical health needs because they have anxiety, Roth said.
Roth met with HSH and community clinic representatives, who concluded that bringing the mobile health truck to CHS would intimidate some patients.
Instead, the mobile clinic will consist of a community clinic nurse using a psychiatric services office at CHS. The office will be equipped with a portable exam table and medical backpack equipped with wound care supplies, thermometers, otoscopes (to check ears), glucose meters, gloves, urinalysis strips, urine pregnancy test kits, rapid strep test kits, antibiotics, medicines for chronic disease and skin creams, Romagnoli said.
The table, backpack and initial supplies are covered by a $1,300 grant from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation, said Angie McLaughlin, community clinic executive director.
BLOOMINGTON Two Bloomington Police Department officers are retiring after a combined 50 years of service to the department.
Assistant Chief Gary Sutherlands retirement will be effective Aug. 5, said Bloomington Police Chief Brendan Heffner.
Police School Resource Officer Brian Evans is leaving the department, effective July 29, said Sgt. Steve Sicinski.
Sutherland "retires as one of the most decorated officers in the department and is well-respected for the multitude of assignments he fulfilled in his career, Heffner said in a press release. He was the first assistant chief of the Office of Professional Standards and did an outstanding job of laying the foundation for this very important division."
Heffner added that Sutherland "is someone for whom I have great respect and he will be missed.
An Army veteran, Sutherland joined the department in 1991 as a patrol officer, and joined the Criminal Investigations Division as a detective in 2000. In 2011, he was promoted to sergeant with assignments in the patrol division, K-9 unit and the Office of Professional Standards. He served as a team leader on the SWAT team and also was a field training officer.
Sutherland has been honored with 35 Letters of Commendation, a unit citation for his work in CID and three merit awards including a military ribbon, a Bravery Commendation and a Distinguished Achievement award.
Speaking of Evans, Sicinski said, "Over the years, officer Evans has been a mentor to me as well as his fellow school resource officers.
Evans has worked with both the District 87 and Unit 5 school districts.
His quick thinking and his ability to solve problems are second to none," Sicinski said. "He is one of the most empathetic people I have ever known, for he is genuinely concerned for those he works with and those he serves.
Evans joined the department as a patrol officer in 1991. He has been a school resource officer since 2003.
DECATUR Gary Sawyer, editor and general manager of the Herald & Review in Decatur, announced his resignation on Monday. He has accepted a position as a lecturer in the Iowa State University Journalism and Mass Communication Department, beginning with the fall semester.
Sawyer, 60, has been editor of the Herald & Review for the last 15 years and has worked for the organizations parent company, Lee Enterprises Inc., for 35 years.
``It was a difficult decision to leave Decatur, the Herald & Review and Lee Enterprises, said Sawyer. ``But the combination of returning to my alma mater to teach and the location near much of our family won out. My family and I will always have fond memories of the many friends we made, both in Decatur and at the Herald & Review.
``Gary has been a wonderful leader at the Herald & Review and for Lee. We will miss him, said Julie Bechtel, president and publisher of the Central Illinois newspapers for Lee Enterprises that includes The Pantagraph. She said succession plans at the Herald & Review are under consideration and will be in place in a couple of weeks.
Sawyer graduated from Iowa State in 1978 with a degree in journalism. He also received an MBA from the school in 1995. He worked at newspapers in Iowa and Oregon before coming to Decatur.
SPRINGFIELD Stopgap funding the state approved last month hasnt ended ongoing budget worries at state universities.
Southern Illinois University and Eastern Illinois University leaders have voiced the same concerns about long-term funding.
The deal that the Democratic-controlled General Assembly and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner reached in June provided the SIU system $106.2 million on top of the $57.5 million it received in an April emergency funding bill for higher education.
But that represents just 82 percent of what the university received for the 2014-15 school year, and its supposed to cover expenses from July 1, 2015, through Dec. 31.
SIU President Randy Dunn earlier warned trustees of the consequences the campuses in Carbondale, Edwardsville and Springfield would face without the guarantee of state support.
You can just rewind that speech once again and this time start inserting the date of January 2017, February 2017, Dunn told the board Thursday.
Although the stopgap funding is sufficient for us to be able to move forward with relatively normal operations through the first of the calendar year, he said, were going to be right back to the position we were in last March once we come to that point.
Despite the infusion of cash, the Carbondale campus has announced nearly $21 million in permanent budget cuts, including layoffs and leaving more than 150 positions unfilled, Chancellor Brad Colwell said.
Speaking after the meeting, Dunn said the university system has decided to apply all the state money it has received thus far to expenses from the 2015-16 school year and to continue urging lawmakers to provide adequate funding for the full 2016-17 school year.
Eastern Illinois University will have to remain sparing with expenses into the fall semester, but EIU President David Glassman does not anticipate additional "major cuts in EIU's personnel."
The state appropriated $26.2 million to Eastern to assist in operational expenses through the end of the calendar year. The university will receive the remaining MAP funding ($3.5 million) that Eastern advanced to its students in spring 2016.
"Because EIU has not received a full (fiscal year 2017) budget, we do not know what level of funding to expect after Jan. 1, 2017," he said. "Therefore, we must continue to be very fiscally prudent and cautious on our expenditures throughout the fall."
Glassman said the university has been able to call back a few individuals who were laid off.
"The importance of receiving a full (fiscal year) budget cannot be understated," he said. "It is the only way in which universities can make essential planning decisions and implement strategic initiatives necessary for improving the institution and enhancing academic excellence."
"The Leftovers" received no major nominations in this year's Emmys and avid viewers of the series are upset about the snub. Also expected to receive a nomination -- but didn't -- was Ann Dowd, whose character, Patti, is one of the most compelling on TV. Fans are also wondering if Patti will be back for "The Leftovers" Season 3.
'The Leftovers' Emmy Snub Upsets Viewers
TV critics from The Hollywood Reporter cite that "The Leftovers" and its actors should have received Emmy nominations during its announcement last Thursday, July 14. Ditto the TV critics from Huffington Post, who point out that "The Leftovers" has the strongest groups of actors in television. Inverse cites that "The Leftovers" is TV's smartest show, which the Emmy voters have failed to recognize again this year.
Over at Reddit, fans try to process the Emmy snub, especially when "The Leftovers" Season 2 delivered the most intrepid moments on television that other shows haven't done at all. The reality is that "The Leftovers" isn't the kind of show that a typical viewer would pick out and Emmy voters are a varied lot. It should be noted that the series has been given high honors before as Best Drama from the Peabody Awards and the Critics' Choice.
Another show that is totally and unfairly snubbed... The Leftovers. One of best show/cast in the past few years. 0 nomination. #Emmys Aimee (@AimeeLoved_B) July 14, 2016
I'm amazed The Leftovers got snubbed entirely from the Emmys. Just thinking of some of those scenes from season 2 gives me chills. James Harris (@modsuperstar) July 14, 2016
The fact The Leftovers got snubbed pic.twitter.com/Z3ANpJWV91 Anna P (@Madworld430) July 14, 2016
'The Leftovers' Season 3 Ann Dowd Not Returning?
Meanwhile, "The Leftovers" is in the midst of filming its third and final season while on location in Australia and Ann Dowd's return remains uncertain. Her character, Patti, was pretty much only a figment of Kevin's imagination in "The Leftovers" Season 2, and it was clear that Kevin was able to deal with this already. Or did he?
Speaking with Bustle in May, Ann Dowd was being mysterious about Patti's return in "The Leftovers" Season 3. She said that she's been prepped by Damon Lindelof, the show's creator, about this sort of question, but she is hopeful that her character will be back.
Lindeloff did hint that Ann Dowd's Patti could make her final appearance if only to mark the show's finale as well. "I can't confirm that you've seen the last of Ann, but I can confirm that there is a finality to what you've already seen," Lindeloff said via Vulture. The statement hints that Ann Dowd/Patti could still be in "The Leftovers" Season 3, but perhaps as a flashback scene.
"The Leftovers" Season 3 is expected to be back in 2017. The show airs on HBO.
A 16-year-old autistic teenager has turned himself in after he allegedly had an altercation and attacked a Burbank police officer during a traffic stop. The teenager was said to be subdued with pepper spray and a Taser during the confrontation with the officer.
The mother of the teen claimed at a press conference that the actions of the officer caused her son with autism to act the way he did. The mother, identified as Tawnya Nevarez, said in a statement, "Seeing my child on the ground being Tased by a police officer was the worst moment of my life."
She and her son went to the Burbank Police Department station on Friday. The teen was then booked into the juvenile system. He was released after being cited and is facing a possible felony charge in connection to the alleged attack last July 8.
KTLA 5 added that the mother of the teenager with autism insists that her son was the victim as the officer did not have to use pepper spray and a Taser. The attorney of the Nevarez family, Areva Martin, added that the teenager had a seizure and the mother witnessed all of it not being able to do anything.
Nevarez was approached by the officer last Friday near Burbank Boulevard and Hollywood Way and told the officer beforehand that her son has special needs. The teen also told the police officials that he forgot to put his seat belt on. Navarez added that they were in a rush to get to her destination and that she wanted to talk to her son before the officer would continue. However, the officer reportedly continued to talk to them aggressively then the incident escalated resulting to the teen allegedly attacking the officer.
Burbank police Sgt. Claudio Losacco said that the teenager pushed open the car door striking the officer in the knee and the leg. The mother reportedly tried to stop her son but he was still able to get out and attack the officer again.
The release added that the teen said he would only put his seat belt on if the policeman stepped back from the vehicle. The teenager did what he said but allegedly started to use profanity and told the officer to call for back up as he would fight him at that time. The officer used a pepper spray but the teen allegedly punched the officer on the head and upper body multiple times. That was the time when the officer used a Taser.
It is unclear when the first court appearance will be.
The World AIDS Conference will be making a comeback in Durban, South Africa. The conference will reveal how many deem AIDS as no longer a death sentence, thus people are less cautious when it comes to using protection.
NPR's Jason Beaubein, in the conference will share the evolution on HIV/AIDS and how it has changed people's perspective of the disease. The conference which would start on July 18 will be a massive gathering of doctors, health care providers, and medical experts.
The conference occurs every two years and is hosted by different countries. It's been 16 years since Africa first hosted the conference. According to Jason Beauber, a lot has changed in regards to people's views on HIV.
"Things have changed dramatically around HIV over the last 16 years," Jason Beuben told Lynn Neary of NPR. "I mean, if you think back to the year 2000, HIV and AIDS was viewed as a death sentence back then. And now this is a manageable health condition.
Beuben then shared that as the medical advancement in regards to HIV treatment progressed, people are taking the disease less seriously. In one of his conversations with a sex worker from Mozambique, he found out that most of her customers would prefer not to use protection despite the fact that she herself is HIV positive.
Part of people's opinions in regards to getting lax when it comes to HIV contact is the fact that there is a possible cure to either minimize the impact of HIV or medical professionals will eventually find a cure to the disease.
#mce_temp_url# Parent Herald previously reported that health experts from Barcelona, Spain, were able to find the cure for HIV. It was then mentioned that the doctor needs to dig deeper into the case of Timothy Brown, who is one of the most popular HIV patients mentioned to have been cured.
A report on special education for Irish children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has said that a government-supported autism summer school may result to an unsafe environment for the students. The report also said that one in 65 school children in Ireland have autism.
The report, called Policy Advice on Supporting Students with ASD in Schools, was made by the National Council for Special Education (NCSE). According to the Irish Independent, the activities in the July provision scheme for autism students in the country may pose a threat to the well-being of students when there are new staff members that are hired who are not familiar with the students' behavior and medical needs.
Environment May Be 'Potentially Unsafe'
The Irish Times reported that the NCSE believes that the July Provision Scheme or Extended School Year for students with learning disabilities such as autism can have "potentially unsafe" environment for students and staff members dealing with students. The NCSE called for a new "safe, social summer day-activity programme (sic)."
Meanwhile, the new statistic of one in 65 school children or 14,000 students having autism documented by the NCSE is reportedly a jump from the one in 100 school children estimated three years ago. This number is said to be around the same for the United States and the United Kingdom.
Autism And Education In Ireland
According to the Irish Examiner, the NCSE's report said that from the 14,000 school children with autism, 63% are in mainstream classes, 23% are in special classes in mainstream schools, and 14% are in special schools. Since 14 years ago, 2,200 teachers have been hired in mainstream schools have reportedly been hired to help students with autism.
The NCSE also found that since 14 years ago, the number of special classes for children with autism has risen to 900 from 80. In terms of funding, the governments makes a yearly investment of more than 300 million for the education of students with autism.
Boarding schools in the United Kingdom will not address transgender children with 'he' or 'she' anymore. Teachers have been ordered to call transgender students with a gender-neutral address so the kids won't get offended.
Gender-Neutral Address
According to the official guidance issued by the U.K. Boarding Schools Association, teachers will now have to address transgender children as 'zie.' The new form of address is part of the association's move to provide a "new language" for students who don't want to be called as 'he' or 'she,' The Telegraph reported.
Teachers across Europe and Britain are being encouraged to refer to students using the children's pronoun of choice such as 'they' or zie, which is considered as a gender-neutral address. Elly Barnes, the author of new guidelines and founder of U.K.-based charity Educate and Celebrate, said the new guidelines are important because it signifies equality and fair treatment for all students.
The new guidelines are in accordance with the Equality Act 2010. The law legally protects people from discrimination and inequality in the workplace and in society.
Barnes added that the new guidelines will require teachers to learn new vocabularies to address different gender identities. This includes genderqueer (people who don't identify as male or female) and pansexual (individuals who are attracted to men, women, and transsexual).
Alex Thompson, deputy chief executive of the UK Boarding Schools Association, said the new guidelines will educate teachers and other school staff about the issues that the LGBT community faces. Educators are not that aware when it comes to those issues, and they are open to learning more information about them in order to avoid offending LGBTs.
Number Of Transgender Children Increasing In The UK
Aside from these, single-sex private schools in the U.K. are on the verge of removing terms like 'girls,' 'young women,' and 'young ladies,' The Telegraph listed. Teachers are advised to adopt gender-neutral terms like 'students' or 'pupils.'
More and more pupils are coming out as transgender in the U.K. This year, children as young as three are seeking to change their genders, The Guardian reported. Because of this, the nation's schools are planning to introduce new gender-neutral environments and "transgender days" to demonstrate their support for transgender children.
According to RT, approximately 80 state schools will now implement gender-neutral uniforms. The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, a center for transgender children and adolescents in the U.K., said they have seen a 100 percent increase in kids seeking to change their gender this year, The Guardian noted.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is no strangers to accusations that the agency is hiding evidence about UFO sightings or alien existence from the public. As a matter of fact, the agency is currently facing a new set of accusations after a live video feed from the International Space Station (ISS) was cut off earlier this month.
What really ignited the UFO sighting speculation, however, was the footage that showed a peculiar unidentified flying object entering the Earth's atmosphere. According to Sputnik International, the said video was uploaded on YouTube on Jul. 9 and has since gone viral with more than 2.3 million views.
NASA Denies Concealing Evidence Of Alien Life Existence
Due to the emergence of the alleged UFO sighting video, several extraterrestrial conspiracy theorists claimed that NASA is "intentionally concealing" something from the public, noting the extremely low quality of space footages. But as per NASA's explanation, the video feed in question was a "High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV)" experiment that can lose signal occasionally in spite of the fact that it's "fully automated and can't be turned off at a request."
"We used a space-based data relay network," the agency explained. "It gives us a very good coverage area, but you do lose signal occasionally - anywhere from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes. It varies from day to day."
With the advancement and quantity of cameras, however, conspiracy theorists pointed out that space videos should have been of high quality and not the other way around. But NASA stressed that the agency did not cut off the supposed UFO sighting video to hide evidence of alien life existence, instead the signal of the camera was "simply interrupted."
UFO Within 50 Meters Of Space Station On Live Cam, July 2016, Photos, UFO Sighting News. https://t.co/MJA4zb7lxY pic.twitter.com/WDGyIscVuM Scott (@SCWBooks) July 17, 2016
Another UFO -- another feed cut --Another reason to question why NASA always has a problem with the neighbors... https://t.co/lsEf0mhPRN Clyde Lewis (@ClydeLewis) July 13, 2016
No UFO Sighting On ISS Live Video Feed
UFO hunters and conspiracy theorists surely went a bit crazy speculating that the bizarre and blurry object seen in the ISS live video feed approaching the Earth was indeed a UFO sighting proof. However, some reports suggested that the object may be Chinese space station Tiangong-1 that was launched in 2011 but a NASA spokesperson it may be some space debris.
"It's very common for things like the moon, space debris, reflections from station windows, the spacecraft structure itself or lights from Earth to appear as artifacts in photos and videos from the orbiting laboratory," NASA spokesman Daniel Huot said, The Daily Galaxy quotes.
Meanwhile, this was not the first time that NASA denied a UFO sighting through the live ISS feed video. In fact, the agency also denied the accusations that it intentionally cut off the live ISS video stream following the appearance of a "horseshoe-shaped" UFO (as seen on a YouTube clip) in April, Inquisitr notes.
Aliens Exist!
In other extraterrestrial sighting-related news, a former British soldier has sensationally claimed that aliens do exist after he was abducted by them. Based on the report of Daily Express, 66-year-old Bill Brooks detailed his alleged abduction by the aliens as well as being subjected to mind control experiment in a new book titled, "44."
Do you think NASA is hiding alien life evidence? Share your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
The right treatment of an employer to his/her employee is easy to practice. It has to be humane. Unfortunately, some bosses find it hard to fathom labor rights and they overide them, treating their employees like animals. A Chinese national brought to the US for work had to endure her master's iron fist and suffer physically at a country many people think would help them reach their dreams.
Fox News reports a Minnesota woman, 35-year-old Lili Huang who is facing five felony counts including labor trafficking, false imprisonment and assault after police found her employed Chinese nanny, 58, in the streets. The nanny wanted to go back to China after working nonstop for 18 hours a day with only crackers as food and without the agreed pay.
The Chinese woman, unidentified by the police, flew to the U.S. last March and found work as the nanny of the Huangs and the family's housekeeper. She was in charge of child care, cooking and cleaning. When she was taken to United Hospital in St. Paul for check-up, many broken bones were found. A bag of her hair was also found tucked under her pillow which Huang reportedly pulled out from her head (via Fox News).
She finally had the guts to run away from her abusive boss when the latter threatened to kill her with a knife. It was the first time she left the Huang home because she wasn't allowed to for the past months that she had been working as their nanny.
According to Daily Mail, the Chinese national had already worked for Huang's family in Shanghai. The family would pay her $890 a month in her Chinese bank account if she agrees to work in Minnesota. Unfortunately, the working conditions were far from ideal and turned out to be the Chinese woman's nightmare.
Regularly, she would be physically assaulted by Lili Huang. The Chinese woman was punched, kicked, thrown to the floor, hit to the tables and beaten until her legs could no longer stand up. She was also made to walk in her hands and knees like a dog for four hours (via Daily Mail).
As per Nanny.org, rights of nannies and other domestic workers, regardless of citizenship, are protected in the U.S. by the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). They must be paid for all the hours they worked, must receive no less than $7.25 per hour, must be taxed, must not be kept away from their identity documents and must not be physically or sexually abused among all else.
Clearly, Lili Huang violated the act when she first laid her hands on the Chinese nanny and decided not to pay her at all for the work that she does. What do you think should be the punishment of Huang for domestic abuse? Comment your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
If "Gotham" season 2 was made of fantastic episodes, wait until the series' season 3. In fact, latest spoiler reports are suggesting that "Gotham" season 3 will be equally interesting and wicked as several atrocious villains are set to ravage Gotham City.
Prior to "Gotham" season 3, the previous season showed how Detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) investigated Dr. Hugo Strange (B.D. Wong) and the Arkham Asylum. "Gotham" season 2 concluded with a revelation about the secret of Indian Hill, a research facility underneath Arkham Asylum that houses Strange's experiments including the resurrections and transformation of Theo Galavan (James Frain), Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Mr. Freeze aka Victor Fries (Nathan Darrow).
The Looming Arrival Of The Court Of Owls In 'Gotham' Season 3
Fox has recently ignited fans' curiosity over "Gotham" season 3 as the network revealed the show's San Diego Comic-Con poster, suggesting the arrival of the secret council of the Court of Owls. According to Zap2it, the council was responsible for setting Dr. Hugo Strange free.
"We will dive much more deeply into them in Season 3," "Gotham" season 3 executive producer John Stephens told the publication. "The Court of Owls, this sort of illuminati group that's been pulling the strings behind Gotham for centuries and might be the real culprits in the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, among other things."
New 'Gotham 3' Characters
Aside from the Court of Owls, "Gotham 3" will also feature new set of characters on the show. These characters include journalist Valerie Vale (Jamie Chung), Gotham City mob boss' son Mario Falcone (James Carpinello) and older Poison Ivy (Maggie Geha), Screen Rant reveals.
The Resurrection Of Fish Mooney In 'Gotham' Season 3
In the upcoming "Gotham" season 3, fans will see the resurrection of Fish Mooney (Pinkett Smith) and the destruction of Gotham City under her control. Based on a Vine Report article, Dr. Strange reanimated Mooney and infused her DNA with a cuttlefish's genes.
'Gotham' Season 3 Other Villains And Air Date
In addition to Fish Mooney, "Gotham" season 3 will also introduce the arrival of other "horrendous villains." These include the "Dark Knight" Mutants as well as the other patients that have escaped the Arkham Asylum bus such as Jerome Valeska (Cameron Monaghan), zombie with superhuman strength Solomon Grundy, new crime bosses The Tweedle Brothers, monster Killer Croc, iconic Batman villain Jervis Tetch aka Mad Hatter and Bruce Wayne's childhood friend, Tommy Elliot A.K.A. Hush, University Herald reports.
As for "Gotham" season 3 air date, the upcoming season is set to premiere on Monday, Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. on Fox. At 9 p.m., "Gotham" season 3 premiere will then be followed by the fall premiere of "Lucifer."
Are you excited for "Gotham" season 3? Sound off below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
Good news for "Limitless" Season 2 fans as you will be able to rejoice. Netflix has now answered your call and will have "Limitless" Season 2.
'Limitless' On Netflix
CBS already confirmed the cancellation of "Limitless" however, producers were also searching if they can find a new home for "Limitless" Season 2. According to Hollywood Reporter, CBS Television Studios has already talked with Amazon and Netflix for a possible "Limitless" Season 2.
And great that Netflix answered the call and will now take "Limitless" Season 2 under its wings. CBS president Glenn Geller announced that CBS was looking for a possible buyer for "Limitless" as they have already cancelled the show, Variety reported.
New Hope, New Season For 'Limitless'
Two possible buyers that they were in talk for "Limitless" Season 2 were Amazon and Netflix. And while people thought, Netflix was not interested, a recent post from Craig Sweeny also gave fans hope that they will now be able to see Brian and if he will still be part of the FBI team.
"Limitless" is based on 2011 movie which starred Bradley Cooper. The "Limitless" TV series which starred Jake McDorman together with Jennifer Carpenter also had Cooper as a guest star. It also started good at the beginning of the TV series but failed to impress at the end of its full-season run.
"Limitless" low performance made CBS to cancel the show afterwards. Craig Sweeny also showed that he did not want to give up on the show just yet and sees that there is still a bright future for Brian and his team, according to a recent post from Parent Herald.
With Netflix getting "Limitless" Season 2, it will just be a matter of time whether it can get good ratings. With the clamoring of viewers to have the show reboot, we can now rest easy to see what Craig Sweeny's next move be and how he can make "Limitless worth even of a season 3.
Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. agreed to buy ARM Holdings Plc for 24.3 billion pounds ($32 billion), securing a slice of virtually every mobile computing gadget on the planet and future connected devices in the home. ARM's technology is the engine behind Apple's AX processors for all iOS devices.
The Japanese company is offering 1,700 pence in cash per share or a 43 percent premium to Friday's close, according to a statement Monday. The deal would be the biggest-ever for SoftBank, which under Chairman Masayoshi Son became one of Japan's most acquisitive companies with stakes in wireless carrier Sprint Corp. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
"This all happened very, very quickly," ARM Chief Executive Officer Simon Segars said in a telephone interview. "They made an offer that was very, very compelling for our shareholders and a proposal for how to invest in the company for the future."
He said there will be no changes in the way ARM operates, and Softbank will allow the company to continue to exist as a standalone unit. "We've been completely independent since our IPO and that is something that our partners value," Segars said, referring to ARM's semiconductor manufacturing customers. He added that Softbank "will keep investing in our roadmap of existing technologies" and that "we are not getting acquired by someone who wants to strip costs out of the business.
SoftBank will gain control of a cash-generating mobile industry leader that gets royalties every time clients such as Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. or Qualcomm Inc. adopt its designs, which are considered power-saving and efficient. The deal is the biggest takeover of a British company since the country last month decided to leave the European Union and comes after the pound plummeted against the Japanese yen.
"Just three weeks after the referendum decision, it shows that Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors," U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said in a statement.
ARM is growing at 10x the rate of the semiconductor industry it serves and is increasingly the glue that binds the disruptive forces of the entire digital world, not just $700 smartphones." For more on this story, read the full Bloomberg report here.
The Financial Times adds that "Masayoshi Son, the charismatic 58-year-old chairman of the Japanese group has built SoftBank into a sprawling global telecoms and media conglomerate, worth $68bn and comprising holdings that range from a majority stake in Sprint, the fourth-largest US mobile carrier, to Yahoo Japan, the country's most popular internet search engine.
With a fondness for big "crazy ideas", Mr Son has been looking to deploy a huge war chest of cash he has accumulated from successful investments.
ARM was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for their Newton project. While it's too late now, you have to wonder if Apple could have tried a run at ARM, as Apple has always said that they love to own the technology behind their inventions/products.
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In June of 2015, the Central Eurasian Mission was established in Istanbul, responsible for Church affairs not only in Turkey but in several other countries adjacent to it. My friend and colleague Dr. James A. Toronto, formerly president of the Italy Catania Mission, was called to serve as its president. (His is one of the very few Church callings for which I actually feel just a tiny bit of envy.)
There were already small branches in Turkey, but having a mission headquartered in Istanbul represented a major new step.
As you probably know, though, things have been a bit unsettled in Turkey of late.
I read a note today from the president of the LDS branch in Istanbul, a native Turk, a graduate of BYU, and the translator of the Book of Mormon into Turkish. Hes a wonderful leader, very dedicated. He announced that, on the regular fast day in August, members of the Istanbul Branch will be fasting for our country, for peace and stability in Turkey. During this fast, we would like to pray for the safety of our volunteers and members and that our religious freedom will be preserved in this country. The political and religious climate in Turkey, he reports, is more problematic daily, and he is concerned for the rights of religious minorities there. If any of you desire to join us in our fasting, we would really appreciate it.
Imagine, he continued, a few hundreds or a few thousands of souls join us in fasting for Turkey. Imagine the power this may generate. Please invite all Turkey LOVERS around the world to join us if they desire. At least they can offer a few prayers during their fast for Turkey so that our country or government may stay loyal to the secular principles and freedoms which Ataturk established, which we dearly cherish like US Constitution. Please pay also a generous fast offering for this purpose if possible. A fasting is more complete after we pay a generous fast offering.
Today, Istanbul was very peaceful. We enjoyed our meetings. We have several investigators who will be joining our Church very soon. They will be a great strength to us. May God bless you! May God heal those who are suffering from any illness or problems. May we stay loyal to our covenants until the end! We are grateful to your support and love for us and for this country in these latter-days!
My wife and I love Istanbul and Turkey, and we will be joining in prayer and fasting for the people there in general, and for the Saints in particular. We invite others to join us. And youre welcome to pray sooner, as well.
I can count on one hand the number of times Ive been pulled over by police. The first time, it was late and I was tired, driving across the state to a friends house. I was weaving slightly, and I think the cop who pulled me over thought I was drunk. When he saw that I wasntand he didnt even breathalyze mehe let me go, urging me to be more careful. The second time, I didnt come to a full stop at a stop sign. Again I was only given a warning, a reminder to be more careful. I cant recall any other times Ive been pulled over by police, and Ive been driving for over ten years. And no, Im not the worlds most cautious driver. Im pretty normal. Im also white.
The story is very different for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina:
Scott revealed that he has been stopped seven times in the course of one year as an elected official. Was I speeding sometimes? Sure. But the vast majority of the time I was pulled over for driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or something else just as trivial. Scott is one of two current African-American senators, and hes the only black Republican in the body. He described several encounters with police, including one where he was stopped because the officer suspected his car was stolen. He described a similar incident that happened to his brother, a command sergeant major in the U.S. Army. And he told the story of a staffer who was pulled over so many times here in D.C. for absolutely no reason other than driving a nice car. The staffer eventually traded in his Chrysler for a more obscure form of transportation because he was tired of being targeted. I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell no matter their profession. No matter their income, no matter their disposition in life, he said.
I suspect that many white Americans dont understand why so many African Americans are talking about police issues today because they, as white people, have not experienced it. What is too often missed is that white people dont experience racially unjust policing because they are white. Add to this the sad reality that most white Americans have only a very small number of black friends, if any. The result is that white Americans know their own reality, but they do not know the radically different reality inhabited by their black neighbors and fellow citizens.
If youre white and you cant imagine a world in which you would literally sell your car to get the police to stop pulling you over for no reason whatsoever, that might explain why you dont understand why so many people are talking about problems with race and policing. Last week I walked home after dark, almost a mile and through an area Im not very familiar with. A police car crossed the street in front of me, and I felt safer. But, again, Im white. Black people often dont have this luxury. Black people run the risk of being stopped because they look suspicious, and lest you think Im exaggerating here, bear in mind that there are multiple stories of black people being arrested in their own houses because police assume they must be burglars.
I spent half a decade living in a college town not far from a much larger city. In between the two was an even smaller town well known for its white supremacist history and present. Well call it Franklin. There are Christian identity churches there, and there is Klan activity there, and there were racially charged murders there back in the 1960s. Do you know what a black college student from the city once told my husband, who was a college instructor at the time? A black girl knows to drive the speed limit through Franklin, she said. Because, it seems, cops in Franklin were all too happy to pull African American drivers over for the smallest infraction.
As a child, I was taught to admire Martin Luther King Jr. And yet, I was also taught that present-day racial inequality was the result of problems with black culture. To be specific, I was taught that if a black person worked hard and studied hard and was honest and upstanding and morally sound, he or she could get ahead, that the only thing holding black people back was their culture (i.e. laziness, drugs, a victim complex, lack of value for education, government dependence, etc.). I had no idea that neither money nor political success exempts African Americans from either discrimination or racial profiling. (This is without getting into the way black culture was portrayed to me.)
For black Americans, the police too often feel like an occupying forceand there are very real reasons for this. Now yes, I get that this shit is complicated. I get that there are good cops out there and I get that police play a very important social role. Amen and amen! I also know that something is very, very broken, and that its broken in such a way that it is largely invisible to white people. And thats a problem.
Take a look at this video. In it, two white cops attempt to arrest the wrong man. They dont realize theyve got the wrong man until after they tase him, twice, for staying in his car and asking to see the warrant rather than letting them handcuff him. They proceed to arrest him anyway because, and I am being perfectly serious here, they claim that they asked for his ID four times and that he refused to give it to them, and that the video will back that up, despite the fact that as anyone watching the video knows, they in fact never once asked for his ID. I found this video particularly startling because of the ease with which these cops were willing to lie rather than owning up to their mistake.
I think about all of this when I hear white people claim that if black people would just comply with police they wouldnt get in trouble. This isnt just about black people killed by police. Its also about all of the times black people are stopped and asked for their ID for no reason whatsoever, all of the times black people are treated by police as inherently criminal, all of the times when black individuals are given longer sentences than white individuals accused of the same crime. Its about black parents having to give their sons the talk to ensure they wont end up killed by police, and about a population that feels under siege every single day.
Under New York Citys stop and frisk policy, which allowed police officers to stop anyone at any time and search them for guns or contraband, only 9-12% of those searched each year were white, despite the fact that roughly 45% of the population is white. Similarly, 53-56% of those stopped were black, despite the fact that only 25% of the population is black. Think about that for a moment.
Remember that I was taught that the problem was black culture? A lot of people believe, based on their overrepresentation in prison, that black people are commit more crimes than other demographics. I once believed that too, until I learned that white people do more drugs than black people, but are significantly less likely to be caught or charged. In fact, white people are more likely to deal drugs than black people. In other words, the overrepresentation of African Americans in the prison system appears to be a product not of higher criminality but rather of a racially biased criminal justice systemthe very system so many African Americans are protesting today. Take a look at this analysis:
Racial disparities at every stage of the criminal justice process build upon one another. So, if 1,000 white people and 200 black people (a ratio of 5:1 to reflect the U.S. population) commit the same crime, here is what the eventual prison population could look like: 100 white people and 74 black people might be arrested. It is impossible to determine what percentage of crimes committed result in arrests because there can be no data on un-observed crimes. As noted above, however, it has been found that while black and white Americans smoke marijuana at similar rates, blacks are arrested 3.7 times as frequently for marijuana possession. These numbers were picked to reflect the 3.7:1 ratio of black to white arrests for marijuana possession. 100 is 10% of 1,000 and 74 is 37% of 200, so these numbers would represent an arrest disparity equivalent to that noted in the example above. 50 white people and 48 black people might be convicted. If black people account for 35% of drug arrests and 46% of convictions, this indicates a conviction rate that is approximately 1.3 times higher than it should be based on the black arrest rate. So, if 50% of white arrestees were convicted we would expect to see 65% (.5 x 1.3) of black arrestees convicted: 50 is 50% of 100 and 48 is about 65% of 74. (50% was picked at random; the important factor here is the comparative proportion.) 19 white people and 24 black people might be sentenced to prison. Using the example felony incarceration rates cited above, we might expect to see 38% of the 50 convicted white defendants (19) and 51% of the 48 convicted black defendants (24) incarcerated for their crimes. In this scenario, 12% of black people who commit a crime and less than 2% of white people who commit the same crime might eventually go to prison. This example demonstrates that there are systemic differences in how blacks and whites are treated by the law. These differences, which are compounded in each successive phase of the criminal justice process, increase the percentage of black people incarcerated for committing a particular crime.
This isnt just about the high profile police killings of African American men; its about a system that disadvantages African Americans in both everyday policing and in every stage of our criminal justice system. Andas I hope I have made clearthese disadvantages are completely invisible to most white Americans. This is why it is so important to listen to stories from our African American fellow citizens. We as white people need to not assume that our (largely positive) experiences with the police are universal.
Let me be clear that the recent killings of police officers are absolutely reprehensible. Violence is not the answer. Maintaining the status quo is not the answer, either. Ive seen a lot of people, in the wake of the murder of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, suggest that African Americans need to end their antagonistic rhetoric and relationship with the police. Its not that simple. African Americans cannot choose to stop being pulled over for no reason, to stop being accused of being burglars in their own homes because of the color of their skin, to stop being viewed as suspicious or dangerous simply because they are black. There is a reason so many African Americans feel antagonism toward law enforcement, and it has a lot to do with the fact that law enforcement displays a systemic antagonism toward them.
How do we fix this? I dont have any easy answers. I dont think there are any easy answers. All I can do is urge other white Americans such as myself to listen, and to remember that this isnt just about high profile police killings. Its also about the fact that Tim Scott was pulled over by police seven times in the last year and while Ive been pulled over by police two times in the last ten years.
Something is very, very wrong.
Podcast
About 75% of military recruits arrive at a training base with no bank account and have to be bussed to a local bank to open one, says Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond. The bank's team is building a platform that will help service members save and build credit.
Iran court begins trials over Saudi embassy raids
07/15/16
Source: Press TV
A court in Iran has begun the trial of the individuals involved in raids earlier this year against vacant Saudi diplomatic perimeters in the country.
The Saudi embassy building in the Iranian capital, Tehran, is seen during a raid by certain individuals on January 2, 2016. The building was vacant at the time. (File photo by
The Saudi embassy building in the Iranian capital, Tehran, is seen during a raid by certain individuals on January 2, 2016. The building was vacant at the time. (File photo by ISNA
Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the spokesperson for the Iranian Judiciary, had said back in June that 48 individuals had been indicted in the case and that the trial of most of them would be launched on Monday, July 18.
He said back then that judicial proceedings were underway for several of the 48 individuals in a separate court for clerics.
The raids occurred on January 2, when demonstrations were held in front of the Saudi embassy in Tehran and its consulate in Mashhad - both of which were vacant at the time - over Saudi Arabia's move earlier to execute a prominent Saudi cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
Some angry protesters mounted the walls of the consulate in Mashhad and incendiary devices were hurled at the embassy in Tehran during the otherwise peaceful protests.
A day later, Saudi Arabia cut its diplomatic ties with Iran.
Iranian officials had promptly condemned the attacks, and some 100 people were initially arrested over the acts of transgression.
In late June, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for firm judicial action against the individuals involved in the raids on the Saudi diplomatic perimeters.
"The public wants to know how the Judiciary deals with the perpetrators of and those behind the move - who are well-known - and how the public is notified of verdicts [against them]," President Rouhani said at a ceremony that marked the beginning of the Judiciary Week in Iran and that was attended by Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli-Larijani.
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In the latest attack that shows how hard it is for users to identify phone numbers with premium call charges, a researcher has found that he could have earned millions by abusing the online phone verification systems used by Google, Microsoft, and Instagram.
Many websites and mobile apps allow users to associate a phone number with their account. This can be used for two-factor authentication or as an account recovery and verification option. Many of these systems rely on codes sent via text messages, but also offer the option to call the user and dictate such codes.
Last year, a Belgian IT security consultant named Arne Swinnen started wondering if such systems test if the numbers entered by users have premium charges attached to them and set out to test several popular services.
Swinnen started out in September with Instagram and quickly found out that the service will call user-supplied, premium-rate numbers, if the Instagram security codes sent to those numbers via SMS are not entered within a three-minute window. He also found a way to trigger such Instagram calls, which are made from California and last 17 seconds, through an API (application programming interface) every 30 seconds.
Swinnen set up a phone number that costs 0.06 British pounds per minute and was able to earn 1 pound in 17 minutes by abusing Instagrams system. The attack could have been automated by registering additional numbers and Instagram accounts to earn thousands of pounds per day.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, initially told the researcher this was not a vulnerability, but part of the way the service was intended to work. The company said it monitors and blocks abuse attempts, and those slipping through represented an accepted risk.
Facebook later fine-tuned some call-rate limits, made changes to its outbound calling service, and decided to reward the researcher with a US $2,000 bug bounty.
In February, the researcher reported a similar attack to Google. Its phone-based two-factor authentication service was also open to abuse, although using a more difficult process.
Swinnen calculated that he could steal 12 euros a day with a single Google account and a premium rate number, a sum that could be multiplied by registering more numbers and accounts.
Google responded by saying it has mitigations in place, but because of how the telecommunications industry works, its impossible to completely prevent such abuse from happening.
Microsofts Office 365 trial registration, which requires phone verification, was the most ripe for abuse. The researcher found two methods of bypassing the websites existing call rate limits, allowing him to theoretically make more than 13 million calls to the same premium number.
Additionally, the service allowed concurrent calls, each lasting around 23 seconds. With a phone number that charges 0,15 euros per minute, the researcher was able to earn 1 euro in less than a minute.
Microsoft said that the actual impact of this vulnerability would have been to a third-party partner the company uses for the calling service. The vendor decided to award a $500 bounty, nevertheless, and worked to fix the issue.
While this type of attack has now been mitigated for Instagram, Google ,and Microsoft, there are more online services and apps likely to be vulnerable. Swinnens research, which he made public Friday in a blog post, highlights how hard it is in generalfor both companies and consumersto differentiate between regular and premium rate numbers.
Japans SoftBank will acquire UK chip design company, ARM Holdings, to cash in on growing demand for processors and other technologies for the internet of things and mobile markets.
SoftBank is paying 24.3 billion (US$32 billion) in cash for the chip company that licenses its designs to a large number of chip suppliers to smartphone makers and to the emerging IoT market.
The Japanese company will retain ARMs headquarters in Cambridge and plans to double the number of employees in the U.K. over the next five years, when it will also increase the companys headcount outside the U.K.
ARM, with 4,064 employees, will be an independent business within SoftBank, which will pay for the acquisition from existing cash resources and a loan facility. SoftBank said it intends to retain the current ARM organization including the existing senior management team, brand, and partnership-based business model and culture.
SoftBank has invested in a number of media and technology companies, including Internet retailer Snapdeal in India and ride-hailing app company Didi Chuxing in China. It also acquired Sprint Nextel in 2013.
GSMA Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, speaks at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Feb. 23, 2016.
The acquisition of ARM would place the company in a market where it would be an upstream supplier to some of the biggest names in the tech industry as licensees of ARMs designs like Qualcomm gear up to supply chips to the connected devices market.
ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the Internet of Things,' said SoftBank Chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son, in a statement Monday.
ARM and partners have been looking at new opportunities in markets such as robotics, connected vehicles and smart cities. It acquired recently Apical, a provider of imaging and embedded computer vision technology for next generation devices to understand and act intelligently on information from their environment. Apicals technology will complement the ARM Mali graphics, display and video processor roadmap, ARM said in May.
ARM has been successful in the small devices market, which requires low-power processors that consume far less battery than traditional microprocessors used in bigger gear like PCs, a market in which Intel has been dominant.
ARM has long-term contracts with its customers so I wouldnt expect anything to change quickly, but all bets are off for the next generation architecture, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies. In the long-term SoftBank could restructure anything they wish and could invest more than ARM did to drive the enterprise products forward, he said.
This could ultimately impact mobile tech giants Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung. Im surprised ARM wasnt purchased sooner, Moorhead added.
Not many are using smartphones with Microsofts Windows 10 Mobile, but HPs flagship Elite x3which ships this monthcould boost the OSs sagging fortunes.
The premium smartphone will be priced starting at $699 in the U.S. It feels more like a phablet, but HP believes it could also be a PC in a pinch with its top-line mobile processor, OS and innovative accessories.
HP first announced the Elite x3 at the Mobile World Congress trade show in February.
It has a 5.96-inch AMOLED screen that can display images at a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, matching top smartphones like Samsungs Galaxy S7 and LGs G5. The rugged screen has Gorilla Glass 4 technology.
The device weighs 194 grams and is 7.87 millimeters thick. Other features include dual-SIM slots, a 16-megapixel rear camera, an 8-megapixel front camera, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, 64GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for expandable storage up to 2TB.
The Elite x3 has Qualcomms Snapdragon 820 chip, which has a graphics processor capable of processing 4K video. The smartphone also has biometric authentication features like iris detection and a fingerprint reader.
The launch signals HPs re-entry into the smartphone market, which hasnt been kind to the company. HPs last big play in smartphones came with the ill-fated 2010 acquisition of Palm, which it jettisoned in 2014.
Re-entering the competitive smartphone market wasnt an easy decision for HP. But as a premium device, Elite x3 fits into HPs plan of selling high-priced, high-margin devices to professionals and businesses. There are no plan to sell budget handsets.
The Elite x3 can deliver a PC-like experience when the mobile version of Windows 10 is in Continuum mode. Its much like the experience Microsoft has portrayed with some of its Lumia handsets. The Snapdragon 820 chip can deliver adequate processing power, though it doesnt match the capabilities of Intels Core PC processors.
Itll be possible to connect an external display and accessories to the smartphone via a Desk Dock accessory, which HP will sell with the Elite x3 for $799. Users get the desktop feel when browsing the web or editing Microsoft Office documents. The dock has a DisplayPort port, an ethernet slot, and USB-A and USB-C ports to attach a keyboard, mouse or external storage.
HP will also sell an accessory called Lap Dock to turn the smartphone into a laptop. The laptop accessory has a 12.5-inch full HD display and keyboard, and it can be hooked up to the Elite X3 wirelessly or through a USB Type-C cable.
Over time, HP will help companies export desktop applications into Microsoft Azure cloud as it tries to make Elite x3 a more viable PC alternative. Elite x3 users will be able to run cloud-based desktop applications via HP Workspace, a virtualized desktop program.
The smartphone will ship in many countries including the U.S., HP said, without providing specific details.
Windows phone shipments totaled 2.4 million in the first quarter of 2016, which gave the OS a meager 0.7 percent market share, according to Gartner. Thats a decline from 8.27 million units shipped in the same quarter in the previous year, which was a 2.5 percent market share. Windows was behind Android smartphones, which held a 84.1 percent market share with 293.8 million units shipped, and iOS, which held a 14.8 percent market share with shipments of 51.6 million units.
Google recently added Google Play support to two more Chromebooks in Chrome OSs developer channel. That means you can now run Android apps on three separate Chromebooks. The two new Chromebooks include the Acer Chromebook R 11 C738T, and Googles own Chromebook Pixel, although in the 2015 version only.
Google had previously announced on its Chromium site that support would be coming to the two Chromebooks in either June or July, but didnt provide a firm date. The Play Store update recently went live for users running the developer version of Chrome OS, as first reported by Chrome Story.
More than 60 Chromebooks and other Chrome OS devices are slated to get Google Play support sometime in 2016 or 2017. The Asus Chromebook Flip was the first device to get early Google Play support in mid-June.
When Google Play support rolls out to these devices they will be able to run Android apps just like they would on an Android device. Specifically, Chromebooks run the Play Store as if they were tablets running Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The impact on you at home: In our early tests with the Play Store on a Chromebook Flip the overall experience was pretty amazing. You get incredible access to the wealth of apps on the Play Store, and the apps themselves work very well. Its not perfect, mind you. There are problems with notifications, and sometimes youll experience an app crash or freezeit is an early preview release, after all. You also either have to run the apps in full screen mode or in a window with a fixed size.
Nevertheless, its a promising start to Android apps on a Chromebook, which will likely improve by the time the feature officially rolls out to the mainstream build of Chrome OS.
Dominating the news the last couple of weeks have been the shootings of African Americans and police officers. Emphasis has been put on having the talk with your kids you know, how to behave and talk to cops so they wont shoot you, or so says the media bias. As a father and retired teacher, I feel like Im somewhat qualified to give the talk.
Be home at a reasonable hour. Rarely does anything good happen late at night. Dont join gangs or participate in crime or drugs. Pull your pants up and dont get tattoos. Get an education. Show respect for yourself, your parents, teachers, police and any authority figures. Comply at all times with police officers. Search out a good role model. Dont allow yourself to be a victim. Learn the term the soft bigotry of low expectations the Left has been beating this drum for decades.
Follow these rules and you will be a success in life. Simple, succinct and guaranteed.
Larry Crawford
Moreno Valley
Hillary treading water
I just recently returned from Colorado. While I was there, I saw a Hillary Clinton advertisement. Its of Hillary meeting with world leaders, along with a voice-over extolling her many successes as secretary of state. It is nothing but a bunch of lies.
Im reminded of the press conference held by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, which was held when Hillary announced that she was running for president. Ms. Psaki couldnt answer when a reporter asked her to point out one accomplishment Hillary could take credit for. So, I find it hard to fathom how President Obama can stand next to her on the campaign stage and brag about what an outstanding secretary of state she was.
It must be a serious wake-up call for both Clinton and Obama to see that even with Obama promoting her, her polling numbers are sinking like the Titanic. All of the lies that Clinton repeated during emailgate are catching up with her. This also speaks volumes about what the voters really think of the job Obama is doing.
David Baker
Riverside
In honor of the parks anniversary, this is the last of a seven-part series looking at how Disneyland has changed decade by decade. Part 1: 1955, the year Disneyland opened. Part 2: 1956-1959. Part 3: 1960-1969. Part 4: 1970-1979. Part 5: 1980-1989. Part 6: 1990-1990.
The new century started out with few changes inside Disneyland, as the company was focused on big changes outside the park, but things would liven up as the century progressed.
2000
Parking at Disneyland changed with the opening of the Mickey & Friends parking structure on the land that was a strawberry farm for decades. The more than 10,000-space structure was the largest one when it started parking cars in 2000.
Inside the park, a change was underway to the Tomorrowland Autopia for its new sponsor, Chevron. It also got a new route for the miniature freeway one that included portions of the track for the Fantasyland Autopia, which was closed and sent to Yesterland.
Another attraction that closed was the short-lived Rocket Rods, due to high maintenance costs and very low capacity. The track is still visible throughout the land.
2001
More big changes outside Disneyland happened this year with the opening of Disneys California Adventure. Also debuting was a new hotel in the form of Disneys Grand Californian Hotel & Spa and a new day and night shopping and dining area called Downtown Disney, which required no admission ticket, unlike the theme parks.
Inside Disneyland, the Haunted Mansion received a haunting overlay for both Halloween and the Christmas seasons. Jack Skellington, a character from the Tim Burton-directed A Nightmare Before Christmas, took over the mansion for the three month period, and has done so ever since.
2003
As the Disneyland Resort dealt with lackluster attendance at its new theme park, there was little capital to spend on new attractions at Disneyland, but there was one that blew into the park: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. It landed in the building that had housed the Country Bears and their various musical shows since 1972. Now the only bear was Pooh, along with his friends Rabbit, Piglet, Kanga, Roo and Eeyore.
In Tomorrowland, the American Space Experience was shuttered to make room for a new attraction in two years.
2005
After no additions in 2004, Disneyland got a new ride in its Golden Anniversary year and a retro-exhibit.
Since the park was turning 50, an exhibit with a film narrated by Steve Martin was installed into the Main Street Opera House. It was called The First 50 Magical Years. Steve Martin was picked as he had a connection to the park. Martin had worked as a magician in the Magic Shop in the early 1960s.
In the Tomorrowland building that once housed the Circlevision movies, and for a short time the queue for Rocket Rods, a new interactive ride landed. Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters took off with immediate popularity. Based on the characters from the Toy Story movies, riders could rack up points by defending the Earth from the evil Emperor Zurg. In addition, after exiting, riders could see how their score stacked up against others.
Outside of Disneyland, corporate issues dogged the executive suite, as a group led by Roy E. Disney demanded that Michael Eisner step down. Before the year was out, Eisner would exit the company and Bob Iger would be tapped as the new CEO.
2006
The success of the movies based on the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction meant it was time for Captain Jack Sparrow to invade the ride. The character, played by Johnny Depp, was added to the attraction, along with others from the movie series, with an ending where Jack Sparrow, sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow, finds the treasure.
2007
Tom Sawyer Island got a makeover and was also transformed into a pirate theme, with a new name for the island: Pirates Lair at Tom Sawyer Island.
That year also saw the return of the Submarines in Tomorrowland, only they were found with Nemo, from the movie Finding Nemo. The totally rebuilt attraction also featured electrically powered submarines, instead of the diesel-powered engines they used to use. The ride had been shut down in 1998 due to increased maintenance and high operating costs. But some Disney Imagineers rebeled against the cost-cutting management running the park and insisted it would return. In 2007, they got their wish.
2008
Tinkerbell and other fairies from the movie Peter Pan and the Tinkerbell home videos got a home in the form of Pixie Hollow, on the land once occupied by the Monsanto House of the Future. The area gives boys and girls a chance to meet with Tink and her friends and take a picture with them.
The Sleeping Beauty Castle Walk Through attraction also opened up with a new version after being closed after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The new version featured dioramas with fully animated scenes telling the story of Sleeping Beauty.
2009
Word leaked out that during a refurbishment of its a small world that many of Disneys classic characters would be put into the attraction. That caused a huge outcry among some fans on social media, protesting against changing the canal boat ride with singing dolls from around the world that first premiered at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair.
But Disneys Imagineers had a secret weapon in the form of Kim Irvine, daughter of Leota Toombs, who had also been an Imagineer. (Yes, that Leota who is Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion. Irvine plays the character in the version for the Haunted Mansion Halloween overlay.) When the attraction reopened with many of the Disney characters, the protests disappeared and most agreed that it was a good addition to the classic ride.
Abraham Lincoln also got an upgrade that year. Advances in Audio-Animatronics meant a new figure for Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, adding facial expressions previous versions could not do. Disney Imagineer and Audio Engineer Glenn Barker also went into the vaults and remastered new digital versions of the original soundtrack for the updated show.
This was also the year Space Mountain received a holiday overlay in the form of Ghost Galaxy for the Halloween season at the park.
2010
The sudden death of pop star Michael Jackson sparked an outcry from fans to bring back Captain EO. Disneyland brought the 3D pop music film back to the same theater that year, kicking out Honey, I Shrunk the Audience.
2011
It was finally time to go to new destinations in the Star Wars universe when Star Tours was updated as Star Tours The Adventure Continues. Utilizing new digital projection technology, riders in the Starspeeder 1000 never knew what destination their adventure would take them. Some of them would be considered Rebel spies by Darth Vader and the Empire. The way the technology was programmed meant there were 54 possible scenarios for those making the journey into space.
2012
Nothing new in Disneyland, but its sister park was rebranded and after a one-day closure, reopened as Disney California Adventure (no more apostrophe in the name) in 2012 with Cars Land and Buena Vista Street, among other changes, as part of a $1.2 billion makeover of the park.
2013
After a one-year break from changes, another one was coming that upset some fans. Plaza Gardens was going to disappear into Yesterland. The bandstand where some would dance the night away, would be absorbed into a new mini-area called Fantasy Faire. It included a Royal Hall, where fans could meet up with many of their favorite Disney princess.
The old bandstand became the Royal Theatre, where Mr. Smythe and Mr. Jones would put on comical and satirical versions of many of Disneys animated movies. The new live show became an immediate hit with regular visitors.
Meanwhile, over in Tomorrowland, Disney unleashed some new characters from a recent purchase. The character of Iron Man took up residence on the second floor of the Innoventions building, while the first floor was still the home of the future. He would be joined by Thor and eventually Spiderman over the next two years as the second floor was renamed Super Hero Headquarters. But the superheroes would be moved out and over to Disney California Adventure in 2016.
2014
After 35 years, the tracks for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad were getting very rough from the years of wear and tear, so the decision was made to refurbish it by replacing nearly all the track. Besides a new smoother ride, the finale scene got a new look in the form of a mock explosion inside the mine as trains ascended the lift hill.
2015
The Matterhorn got some TLC in 2015. The bobsleds were replaced with ones with a single seat configuration and interlocking seat belts to deal with safety concerns. In addition, a new version of Harold, (the name given to the abominable snowman by cast members) was replaced with an upgraded figure. In addition, new projection effects were installed adding to the illusion of being on a snowy mountain.
Innoventions was also closed down in favor of Star Wars in 2015. Late in the year, the Star Wars Experience invaded Tomorrowland. Space Mountain was renamed Hyperspace Mountain as part of the Star Wars theming, and the first floor of the carousel building became the Star Wars Launch Bay. The experience was timed with the release of Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens late that year.
This was also a precursor to the announcement that year of new land coming to Disneyland: Star Wars land.
2016
As the construction rigs began invading parts of Frontierland and backstage areas of Disneyland, Disney released concept art for the new 14-acre land that would land in a few years.
Of course it meant several things in the way of the Millennium Falcon would have to go. The Circle D Corral, where the horses and other critters used at Disneyland would be moved to a stable in Anaheim. The Big Thunder Ranch, petting zoo, and barbecue restaurant were closed and torn down. Finally, the long shuttered Fantasyland Station for the Skyway, called the Chalet, was torn down. The barely visible structure had sat unused for 22 years, but some still protested the destruction of the building.
But the new land is coming and nothing is standing in its way. Recently, Disney released new concept art that shows what the new land will look like from a birds eye view, but also of how the Rivers of America will look in the northern area when it becomes a teeming busy waterway some time in 2017.
The Future An opinion from a former Disney Imagineer
As Walt Disney said, Disneyland will always change as long as there is imagination left in the world. That saying is used by many about changes to Disneyland, and it is one I like. While some dont always like changes, if Disneyland is to be around for our children, grandchildren and later generations, it has to change to keep up with the times.
Sure, its great to be nostalgic about long-gone attractions, lands and more that we grew up with. But to not move forward would be an insult to Walt Disneys memory and his legacy.
I was fortunate enough to work at WED Enterprises, which is now known as Walt Disney Imagineering, with many of his original Imagineers. Many of them (including Claude Coats, Herb Ryman, John Hench, Randy Bright and Marty Sklar) would tell me that Walt would never stand still and was always pushing them for new things for his parks and beyond.
I think its important for fans to remember that legacy as Disneyland continues to change and evolve into the future.
MORE FROM THIS SERIES
Part 1: 1955, the year Disneyland opened
Part 2: 1956-1959
Part 3: 1960-1969
Part 4: 1970-1979
Part 5: 1980-1989
Part 6: 1990-1990
Mark Eades worked as an Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering, the arm of the Walt Disney Company that designs its theme parks, from 1982 to 1993.
Contact the writer: meades@ocregister.com
A group that supports the Inland law-enforcement community is planning to host a candlelight vigil Sunday night, July 17, in Eastvale.
The event, organized by three local churches and being promoted by WOLFF Wives of Law Enforcement and Fire Fighters had been planned prior to Sundays shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, La.
It will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. at New Day Christian Church of Eastvale, 7155 Hamner Ave.
This vigil will bring our community together for a night of peace, unity and friendships, organizers say on Facebook. We honor the memory of law enforcement officers and all citizens who have lost their lives due to violent crime. Together, we are strong.
If you are organizing a vigil in Riverside or San Bernardino counties related to the Baton Rouge shooting or related issues, let The Press-Enterprise know by emailing details to breakingnews@pressenterprise.com.
RELATED:
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All the latest updates on this developing story
A suspected drunk driver and a passenger in their vehicle were hospitalized early Sunday morning, July 17, after crashing into a power pole in San Jacinto.
By the time Riverside County Sheriffs deputies arrived at the crash scene at 3:06 a.m. on Mountain Avenue near Rue Pinot Blanc, the driver and passenger had fled the scene, according to a Sheriffs Department news release.
Deputies preliminary investigation revealed the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed when the driver unsafely passed another vehicle, lost control and collided into a power pole, the news release said.
Later in the morning, deputies learned two people were admitted to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries consistent from a traffic collision, the news release said. The deputies determined the patients were the driver and passenger in the Mountain Avenue crash.
When the driver is released from the hospital, he will be investigated for felony driving under the influence and fleeing the scene of an accident, the news release said.
A Sunday night prayer vigil in Eastvale seemed like many these days: planned ahead in response to one, maybe two or even three tragic events, only to open its embrace to encompass the latest tragedy.
The Eastvale vigil, held at the New Day Christian Church, was scheduled as a show of support for law enforcement officers. It was originally planned in response to the July 7 ambush that left five Dallas police officers dead and to address the outrage aimed at law enforcement in the wake of the officer-involved shootings around the country. But hours before the vigil, three more officers were killed and another three injured when a man opened fire in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday morning.
Pastor Rob Norris of The Crossings Church, one of the events organizers, recited the names of all the officers shot in both Dallas and Baton Rouge.
My prayer for you is that you can continue to pray for these families, he said to the 60 or so people who gathered in a rough half circle before him in front of the church. I can only imagine what theyre gong through.
The attendees, some wearing clothing emblazoned with the American flag, held long white candles. Families, boy scouts and local dignitaries stood outside the church for the vigil.
Eastvale Mayor Ike Bootsma also participated in the vigil, offering thoughts in between prayers to bolster the spirits of his constituents.
This event is really to support any person who died of violent crime, especially police officers, he said before the vigil began. He said the communitys law enforcement officers, in the wake of recent attacks against their colleagues elsewhere, are really doing pretty good, because they know the majority of people here are in support of them.
Councilman Richard Dickie Simmons said the city wouldnt support anyone who would stand against their public safety personnel.
We have so many law enforcement officers and firefighters who have made this the great community it is, he said.
Even with the communitys support, there was evidence that those close to the people protecting them were on edge due to the recent attacks. The group of law enforcement supporters that originally planned Sundays vigil downplayed its involvement and didnt want to go on the record to speak about it.
A group member who wouldnt give her name said she asked Pastor Norris and other local religious leaders to take over the gathering to broaden its focus more on the community at large.
Contact the writer: john.blodgett@langnews.com or @BlodgettJohnM on Twitter
The Hotel Association is accusing the Ghana Tourism Authority of misappropriating the one percent tourism levy. The Tourism Development levy is the one percent of the cost payable by a patron of a tourism facility.
According to the Association, monies supposed to be used for the development of the tourism and hotel sector is being used to purchase vehicles for the Authority.
As at June 2016, the fund had accrued GHC22 million since it was instituted in 2012. About 87 per cent of the collection was from the hotel industry, while drinking bars, car rentals and others collected about 13 per cent.The Hotel Association is angry the fund managers have spent about GHC11 million of the monies on operational expenses with a large amount used to purchase pick up vehicles.
According to them, even though its members are the major contributors to the fund, it has not received any direct benefit for the past four years.
No monies have been spent, not GHC1 appears to have been spent on the business of tourism development for Ghana. For that, I am talking about using it to create advertising or to improve the attraction or to improve the road ways so that more people can hear about us and be attracted to visit Ghana and visit our attraction areas , and therefore stay in the hotels and add to tourism, Ben Aidan, the Central Regional Chairman of the Hotel Association told Starr Business at the Hotel Industry Conference Monday.
But the Ghana Tourism Authority has defended its use of the 38% of the money accrued from the fund to purchase 18 vehicles for its operations. The Administrator of the Tourism Fund Abraham Tetteh told Starr Business the decision to acquire the vehicles is to intensify their operations which will go a long way to boost the fortunes of the sector.
We couldnt have visited the establishment to assess their challenges, the level of payment, collection and remittances if we hadnt bought the vehicles. It is operational vehicle that we bought, and we needed to carry on with the marketing and promotion which is why we expended that portion of the fund. So I believe it is in the interest of the industry for us to do so, so that we could be able to do more, rake in the funds as expected, the fund administrator, Benjamin Tetteh told Starr Business.
Source: Starr Business
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Morocco has formally announced its wish to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after leaving the organisation.
In a message to the AU summit in Rwanda, the Moroccan King Mohammed VI said the time had come for his country to retake its place within its institutional family.
Morocco left the AU in 1984, after the organisation recognised the independence of Western Sahara.
Moroccans describe Western Sahara as their country's "southern provinces".
For more than three decades, Morocco has refused to be part of the organisation.
In March, it threatened to pull its soldiers out of UN global peacekeeping missions because of the dispute.
Now, the Moroccan authorities seem to have concluded their absence hasn't helped them diplomatically over Western Sahara and many other issues, says the BBC's Africa Reporter James Copnall.
They sent a special envoy to lobby African leaders at their summit in the Rwandan capital Kigali this weekend.
The AU has said that it will continue pushing for the rights of the people of Western Sahara to hold a self-determination referendum.
Morocco is the only African country which is not an AU member.
Source: BBC
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The Government of Ghana loses an amount of $1.5 million every month as a result of what is seen as the bogus contract entered into between the Ghana Water Company Limited and Messrs Befessa Ghana Ltd for the construction and operation of the Teshie-Nungua Desalination Plant.
Befesa Ghana Limited, an engineering firm, was contracted by government to build the desalination plant, operate it to defray its cost and hand over to the GWCL after 25years.
Closely associated with the deal, which was signed by Kweku Botwe, then Managing Director of GWCL, include Goozie Tanoh, a leading member of the National Democratic Congress.
Befessa Ghana Limited, operators of the plant whose construction was completed in February 2015, at a cost of $115 million, has over the last nine months supplied an average of 650,000m3 of water per month to the GWCL.
Credible information available to the Daily Statesman indicates that the monthly financial obligation to the GWCL for the supply is $1.5 million per month, in addition to $300,000.00 paid to the Electricity Company of Ghana for power supply.
Strangely, however, the water company gets less than $300,000.00 from the sale of the water every month, which means the nation loses a whopping $1.5 million every month.
The water contract operates on the principle of "use or pay" contract, which compels GWCL to pay fully for the quantity of water produced by the plant, which is more than the distribution network can supply to its customers.
According to Engineers who spoke to the Daily Statesman, the "head" or elevation of the plant is not high enough to push the water by gravity to enable it reach more people and generate more revenue.
They also see the location of the plant at Teshie to be problematic because residents there are poor, and it will therefore be unreasonable or unacceptable to charge them more than everyone else.
Patronage is also low because of the aesthetics: the "yuk factor".....this is where the residents poo and dump rubbish, one engineer told the paper. Engineers say it would have been better to have located the plant at Tema for the water to be used as raw material for industries.
That would limit customers to a few key industries; and it would make for easier, more efficient revenue collection. Ghana Water Company could then charge higher/ more commercial rates per unit, one engineer explained.
Alternatively, the engineers believe the best option would have been to bring the water from Ada or Sogakope, where there is too much fresh water to require desalination.
If the decision makers were really thinking, we could have built a pipeline from the Volta Lake (largest freshwater lake in Africa) for $40 million and gotten the same effect. Or the Ada one would have been cheaper, one of them explained further.
Meanwhile, the Public Utility Workers Union has described the water contract as bogus, expressing fears that it is currently rendering the GWCL bankrupt.
While addressing the 11th Quadrennial Delegates Conference of the Union in Kumasi, the General Secretary, Bondzi-Quaye disclosed: Befessa sells this water to GWCL in bulk at $1.50, an equivalent of GH6.75 per cubic meter which they, in turn, are compelled by the Public Utility Regulatory Commission to sell to the public at GH1.47 per cubic meter. So for every cubic meter of water that GWCL buys from Befessa, it loses a whopping GH5.28.
He added that, the plants average electricity consumption of GH1.4million per month is paid for by GWCL, according to the agreement.
In addition, GWCL is under obligation to pay GH11.6million as capacity charge under the contract, he added.
Mr Bondzi-Quaye expressed regrets about the fact that consumers of utility in the country receive poor services resulting from bad contracts entered into by Government.
consumers, through no fault of theirs, have had to suffer serious deficiencies in service delivery of the utility companies through the supply of sub-standard materials through contracts by powerful and politically well-connected personalities while authorities, for very obvious reasons, dare not complainthat is why I am bold to say that, the challenges militating against efficient and reliable service delivery in the sector are self-inflicted, he complained.
With the experience of the current challenges faced by the country under the water contract between Befessa Ghana Limited and GWCL, Mr Bondzi-Quaye said the union would not allow the Electricity Company of Ghana to be privatized.
Source: Daily Statesman
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Professor Samuel Kofi Sefa-Dedeh, Department of Food Process Engineering, School of Engineering Sciences, University of Ghana has called for an end to Academic galamsey.
He defined Academic galamsey as Lecturers lecturing in more than one tertiary institution on part-time bases.
Speaking at the maiden Professor John Evans Atta Mills Memorial Lectures, under the University of Health and Allied Sciences Leadership Lecture Series in Ho, Prof Sefa-Dedeh said the practice is over stretching lecturers and reducing efficiency.
He said such lecturers get agitated easily when students seek further explanation to concepts.
Prof Sefa-Dedeh said the situation is also affecting research output of the lecturers, resulting in the delay of their promotion for which they attack Vice-Chancellors and Heads of Department.
He said the concern clearly shows that the next generation of academics are nowhere to be found, and called for a concerted efforts to address the situation.
Prof Sefa-Dedeh proposed that the National Accreditation Board should develop a special identification system for lecturers to check the situation when tertiary institutions present the list of their lecturers to it.
He underscored the need for a deliberate attempt to identify and groom high profile human resources for the about 61 private universities, nine public universities and seven other higher educational institutions in the country.
The lecture was on the theme,:Higher education and its impact on development.
Source: GNA
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Police at Walewale in the Northern region said it has foiled what could have turned to be a bloody clash between some supporters of the two main political parties, National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the district capital on Saturday afternoon.
Reports indicate that chaos broke out when the NDC party in the constituency accused a pro-NPP group named Bawumia Youth for Change of a deliberate plan to disrupt an event they held.
Supporters of the two parties reportedly attacked each other violently with stones and clubs and sharp objects after the NDC allegedly attempted to prevent the NPP from using a particular route.
Police officials told Ultimate News the NDC party was outdooring a youth group while the NPP having a campaign launch.
The sources added the NPP youth were jubilating on streets amidst chanting and blowing shofars.
Some NDC supporters who felt the NPP was destructing their event confronted them in a bid to prevent them from using a particular street where their programme was being held, but emotions went high and fight broke out.
One person identified as an activist of the NPP suffered a knife injury and is currently being treated at Walewale government hospital.
However, police in the area said their quick intervention averted what could have be a political conflict District Police Commander, DSP Sarpong Bempah told Ultimate News Eliasu Tanko that the place is calm and that it was a mild confrontation
Source: Ultimate1069.com
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A Police officer, his pregnant wife, their 3-year-old daughter and their nephew died in a horrible accident on the Adabraka road Sunday dawn.
The Police officer identified as Sergeant Francis Essuman 42, with his nephew Kobby 21, and their daughter Wilhelmina 3, were accompanying his pregnant wife, Elizabeth Essuman, 36, to the hospital to deliver when the accident occurred.
According to Chief Inspector Lilly Rockson in an interview with Adom News said, the pregnant woman delivered a bouncing baby boy in the taxi half way to the hospital prompting them to panic.
In a bid to quickly get her to the hospital to avert any complications, the taxi driver was compelled to speed but ended up crushing into a Sprinter bus which was on top speed from Tudu in Accra.
The taxi, according to reports, somersaulted several times killing the Police officer, his nephew and daughter on the spot.
His wife, Elizabeth however died en route to the Police hospital.
But the new born baby and the taxi driver miraculously survived the crush and are currently at the Ridge hospital receiving treatment.
Chief Inspector Lilly Rockson said she is still in shock because in her 35 years in the police service, she has not seen such a miracle.
the baby did not have any scratch on his body; I have been in the police service for 35 years but i have not seen such a miracle before she added.
Meanwhile, families of the deceased are in a state of shock and are yet to come to terms with the unfortunate incident.
Distraught father of the woman, Anthony Mensah said he is still in shock but believes God knows best.
Also, brother of the late police officer, Pastor Prince Twumasi expressed shock at the sudden demise of his brother and his family.
Source: adomonline.com
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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One of the Montie Fm panelists, accused of threatening justices of the Supreme Court, Alistair Nelson, has blamed his comments in which he and Godwin Ako Gunn, threatened to kill the judges to a disease called kpokpogbligbli.
According to him, kpokpogbligbli is an unknown disease that takes over a persons body and controls what he says and does. Nelson made the rather weird confession when he appeared before the Supreme Court to explain why he and others should not be committed to prison for contempt of court, for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
The Court issued a warrant for the owners of the station, host of the stations Pampaso programme, and the panelists, who threatened to kill judges over their handling of a case on the credibility of the voters register to appear before them to answer for contempt charges.
According to Citi FMs Fred Tettey Djabanor, Alistair apologized to judges saying he was under the influence of the kpokpogbligbli disease. The said disease, which is in the Ghanaian Ga dialect, is not widely known to many.
He is said to have also stated that, the producers failed to give him the topics for discussion for the day hence his comments, adding that he was sorry and would not make such comments again.
On his part, the host of the show, Maase Salifu, popularly known as Mugabe, apologized for for his comments, also adding that his producer fell ill and there was no one to control him in the studio. Mugabe also stated that he regrets his comments and pleaded with the judges to forgive him as he has been a journalist of good repute for 15 years.
The owners of the station, Harry Zakour, Edward Addo, Kwasi Attuah and Kwaky Bram Larbi were in court, after they failed to appear on July 12.
The hearing of the suit is still underway.
Source: citifmonline.com
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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Audio Attachment: Listen to Agya Kwabena reporting from the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has pronounced a staff of an Accra-based Montie FM, Salifu Maase alias Mugabe and two panelists guilty of the contempt suit against them.
The court presided over by Justice Sophia Akuffo found the trio guilty of scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing it into disrepute.
The contemnors were all given self recognisance bail by the court as they await sentencing on July 27.
During the court proceedings, presiding Judge Sophia Akuffo and her panel members played back the audio recordings of the contemnors' statements to the hearing of the court.
Prior to the airing of the tape, Counsels for the contemnors George Loh, Nana Ato Dadzie and Martin Ampofo Agyei had prayed the court not to air the audios citing that they are ashamed of the content of the tape.
The court after listening to the audios took a pause to decide the fate of the three persons for making disparaging remarks about the Judges.
Peace FM's Reporter Agya Kwabena, witnessing the court proceedings today, recounted that the contemnors together with their Counsels expressed regrets over their misbehavior on the air waves and so apologized to the Judges to temper justice with mercy.
Last week Chief Justice Georgina Wood and Justice Nasiru Sulemana Gbadegbe recused themselves from hearing the case.
Justice Baffoe Bonnie also recused himself today to avoid any conflict of interest situation due to his family relations with one of the managers of the station, Mr. Baffoe Bonnie.
Following closed-door consultations among themselves, the Justices returned to court and pronounced the culprits guilty of the contempt charge.
Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn were panelists on Montie FM's Afternoon political programme "Pampaso" where host Mugabe steering affairs allowed them to assassinate the character of the Judges.
They sternly warned the Judges of Ghana's highest court not to interfere with the work of the Electoral Commission (EC) if they did not want to suffer the fate of fellow Judges who were murdered on June 30, 1982 in the PNDC regime.
Source: Adu Gyamfi Ameyaw/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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The Presidential candidate of the All People's Congress (APC), Hassan Ayariga says the worsening economic situation in the country could be attributed to the poor leadership of the two dominant parties as a result of their inability to engage other parties in taking decisions that are geared towards the development of the country after elections.
He said this during a courtesy call on the Chiefs and people of the Christian Village to climax the five day come on board tour in Accra.
The tour began at Dome, through Dodowa, and Abokobi. Some other places the presidential hopeful visited included Adentan and Ayikuma in the Shai Osudoku district.
"The economy is retrogressing and the hardships keep worsening each day for voting for the two dominant parties. The NPP and the NDC alone cannot manage this country, when political parties win power it does not mean they should not listen to others. Everybody should be brought on board to help towards the development of the country. The main problem of this country is bad leadership and the winner takes all mentality. If the NPP wins every thing is in their hands so is the NDC with total disregard for any other party. One should either belong to these parties before they will listen to you even if you have the solution," he noted.
He maintained that under the leadership of the APC, various sectors of the economy would receive a major boost, and widespread poverty addressed utilizing the abundant resources the country is endowed with.
Health, education, employment have not received any major achievement for so many years. We move from one country to the other begging to improve on these sectors whiles resources are available here, our partys vision is to improve the well being of everybody in the country making use of these resources. Where are the leaders to make use of these resources," he quizzed.
The Party used the occasion to introduce the executives and the parliamentary candidate for the Okai koi North constituency, Mr. Joseph Akoto Lamptey to the Chiefs and elders at Christian Village.
Hassan Ayariga mentioned that chieftaincy as one of the important institutions of the state should be considered as a partner in development as it exist, adding that the idea of chiefs to refrain politics should be looked at.
"Chiefs are told not to engage in politics, I disagree. These same politicians who say this turn around and come to the chiefs during elections for your endorsement. Where lies the distinction between chieftaincy Institution and politics. If the politicians dont need you why will they come to you during elections? You play a key role in the development of the country," he added.
At Asofan in the Trobu constituency, Mr. Ayariga appealed to the chiefs and people to vote for the APC as the only party to address the widespread hardships the country particularly youth unemployment the country is faced with.
"Look around and you will find poverty all around, a lot of the youth are not in any gainful employment. We are going to tackle this head-on by creating job opportunities for the youth."
The Chief of Asofan, Nii Sei- Anertey Abbey commended the party for the respect accorded the Chiefs by visiting them in their quest to occupy the highest office of the land praying for them to achieve their goals.
Mr. Ayariga touched on agriculture as one of the sectors that the party would give priority to describing the various policies by past and present governments as inadequate to address the challenges the sector is confronted with.
"Both the NPP and NDC have done little in agriculture. We are always importing food products from outside. What are we dong to ensure that we have enough food in the country?" he quizzed.
He appealed to Muslim youth at Malam Zongo and some residents of Gbawe not to allow any political party to use them as agents of election violence to forment trouble but rather as agents of peace in their respective communities before, during and after the elections.
Source: Kofi Amponsah - GNA
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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After the shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana this morning, state authorities have confirmed that the perpetrator was Missouri man Gavin Long, who was killed after causing the deaths of three police officers and further injuring three more.
Long, who was from Kansas City, was a former Marine who had spent time serving in Iraq, achieving the rank of sergeant. The shooting took place on his 29th birthday.
Although the police originally suggested that there were multiple shooters, they no longer believe this to be the case, and it is believed that Long acted alone. There are currently no other suspects.
Police originally received a call that a masked man dressed in black had been seen walking down a highway armed with an assault rifle. When police arrived at the scene to investigate. Long began shooting.
The police have not identified any of the victims officially, but some are reporting that Officer Montrell Jackson was one of the officers killed.
Barack Obama condemned the shooting, suggesting that there was no excuse for violence:
It is not known at this point if Long was motivated by the police killing of Louisiana man Alton Sterling. Since the shooting, Baton Rouge officers have received threats.
Source: CNN.
Photo: Getty Images.
If you say all adherents of a millennia-old religion should be flat-out banned from entering the country while on national television, you can sure as hell expect to hear some counterpoints.
They certainly came thick and fast at Sonia Kruger, following this mornings statement that Muslim migration to Australia should be halted. The majority of respondents, understandably, claimed her ideas are just a lil bit totalitarian.
If youre one of many who have a problem with her Trump-like assertion, weve got some bad news. Kruger has come through with a slam-dunk counterpoint that validates her entire worldview: shes a mother, guys.
Yes, Kruger did indeed wheel out that classic piece of rhetorical solipsism to justify the total ban of Islamic peeps into our nation.
Its the kind of argument that is weaned / pried away from us early on thanks to a lil thing called empathy, and using it to justify discriminatory action against others (including mothers!) is well, as primal and reactionary as advocating the ban in the first place.
Twitter users havent taken too kindly to this comment either, with many pissed at her assumption people who aint mothers dont care about lives lost to religious extremism:
@SoniaKruger this may be news to you but non-mothers care about kids too. Its not a free pass for promoting hate. Rachael Lonergan (@RachaelHasIdeas) July 18, 2016
.@SoniaKruger and not stupidly stereotype him on the basis of his religion. ??? (@shenmaxiu) July 18, 2016
@SoniaKruger As a father, I reckon saying racist stuff is a bit shit. #asafather Nick Names Nuts (@nicknamesnuts) July 18, 2016
@SoniaKruger being a mother doesnt give you the right to presume guilt on over a billion people for their faith alone Phil (@Superchair14) July 18, 2016
To recap: nobody wants kids to die, extremism is an important issue that needs frank discussion, but that kind of black-and-white action seems dangerously divisive.
Elsewhere, Donald Trump a man who might just go through with that same plan is about to officially become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. At least the majority of our isolationist thinkers host televised reality shows, far away from politics.
Wait Shit.
Source: Sonia Kruger / Twitter.
Photo: Brendon Thorne / Getty.
Look, a Q&A with Pauline Hanson was always going to be something. Q&A aint no Frost/Nixon, but its generally a change from the incredibly softball questions Hanson is lobbed on breakfast shows.
As we posted last night, she just about lost it when she found out Sam Dastyari is a Muslim born in Iran, giving the kind of withering glare that one would reserve only for their most hated enemy. She also denied the suggestion that Indonesia is the regions largest democracy, which seems like an odd claim to make.
But despite a raging protest outside, the mood in the audience was actually far more genteel. One Muslim man in particular, psychologist Mohammed Attai, asked Pauline whether she would be willing to visit his home and dine with his family.
.@PaulineHansonOz: Would you be willing to take my offer for lunch or dinner, with me and my Muslim family? #QandA https://t.co/l5axoI5312 ABC Q&A (@QandA) July 18, 2016
As Pauline has rejected Dastyaris offer of a halal snack pack in the past, Attai was careful to suggest that though his family would be eating halal food, Hanson would not be compelled to do so instead, he offered her a haram snack pack.
Clearly not getting the joke, Pauline asked what specifically was in a haram snack pack.
Look, Im never going to be one to say that just being nice to Pauline and sitting down and talking it all out is the solution. Hanson is a far-right, populist agitator who has her grievances and is unlikely to be talked out of them, quite honestly.
But its fun to see her reflexively reject an olive branch or a display of kindness like that. It makes it pretty clear that regardless of where you come from, shes not particularly arguing in good faith.
Source: Q&A.
Photo: Q&A.
It seems like zero good has come from Pauline Hansons return to the limelight: shes inflammatory, bigoted and wildly under-equipped to wield political power. But we do have one thing the Pauline Hanson.
Way nicer than the thing its named after, Melbourne bar Belleville has created a fish and chip shop / HSP fusion poutine that is probably the best way to eat away your feelings about Australia inexplicably voting in a straight up racist.
Its lamb kebab meat (hopefully halal), mint yoghurt, chilli sauce, cheese and beer battered chips and even if it wasnt delicious you could take solace in the fact that it would on some level infuriate the notoriously humourless Hanson. As she told Sam Dastyari during Channel 7s election broadcast, she is really not a fan of the halal snack pack.
Belleville did not mince words about their reasons for creating the dish:
Fuck Pauline Hanson. We believe Australia should be a multi-cultural society which is welcoming of everyone regardless of race, religion, and whether theyre a ginger. We dont tolerate intolerance. Also we love meat on chips.
Meat on chips is something we can all get behind. Except vegetarians. Sorry vegetarians.
Belleville is in Globe Alley just off Little Bourke Street, and if youre not angry enough at her to warrant going out of your way for a food made specifically to spite her, maybe watch her disastrous appearance on Q&A.
Photo: Getty Images / Bradley Kanaris.
Good morning ladies and gents!
Todays bad take comes to you from [drum roll]: SONIA-A-A-A-A KRUGE-E-E-E-E-R.
In the wake of the devastating attacks in Nice, TODAY & The Voice host Sonia Kruger announced this morning that shed like to close all Australian borders to Muslims indiscriminately.
She was referring to a recent Andrew Bolt column in which he called for the same thing, beginning with the opinion that the right wing commentator has a point on Muslim immigration (yikes) and calling for Australia to just stop letting them in. This is also known as Lisa Wilkinson quite rightly put it Donald Trump approach.
Personally, I would like to see it (Muslim immigration) stop now for Australia, she said, deadset following that statement with: I have a lot of very good friends who are Muslim.
I want to feel safe, as all of our citizens do when they go out to celebrate Australia Day, and Id like to see freedom of speech, she said.
A visibly disgusted David Campbell jumped in here. Id like to see freedom of religion, as well as freedom of speech! he said. They both go hand in hand. This breeds hate. This sort of article (Andrew Bolts one) breeds hate.
Kruger then tried to invoke the parents of children killed in the Nice terror attacks to prove her xenophobic point, with Wilkinson with more restraint that most of us countering with the fact that the very first person killed in the attacks was a Muslim woman, and that terrorists are killing people of all races and religions indiscriminately.
But Kruger was not deterred. When Wilkinson asked her to clarify if she was saying she would like Australian borders to close to Muslims at this point, Kruger replied: Yes I would. For the safety of our citizens here, I think its important.
Unsurprisingly, Kruger is getting eviscerated online.
Sonia Kruger wants to feel safe, except in her mentions I guess. Jo Thornely (@jothornely) July 18, 2016
sad to hear sonia kruger slipped in the bath and hit her head, becoming incredibly racist as a result fancy boy (@marrowing) July 18, 2016
okay, so, i think ive narrowed it down things that make australians incredibly racist: painkillers
appearing on dancing with the stars Colley (@JamColley) July 18, 2016
Jog on Sonia Kruger. Jog. On. pic.twitter.com/b1nbcZK1gz Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) July 18, 2016
I KNOW Sonia Kruger has endorsed a ban on Muslim immigration, but Im calling to ask what Luke Jacobz thinks about Israel. Yes Ill hold. Tom Ballard (@TomCBallard) July 18, 2016
In a less bigoted world, we could write that theres still no apology from Kruger yet like that was a thing that could be expected to happen.
But. yeah, nah. Probs not happening, hey.
Watch the full shit-show below:
Andrew Bolt believes Muslim migration in France has opened the door to terror. Thoughts? #9Today https://t.co/d1VIqB0PVv The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) July 17, 2016
Source: TODAY.
Photo: TODAY.
Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
These days, grocery shopping doesn't just happen at the grocery store. In its June issue, trade publication "Food World" shared its annual market study, naming the top 20 market leaders in central Pa. selling groceries, drugs, general merchandise and tobacco products. The central Pa. market covers Adams, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon, Perry and York counties. The study was done for 12 months, ending March 31, 2015. Here are the top 20 retailers.
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Redner's Markets
No. 20
Redners Markets is a supermarket chain operating mostly on the East Coast.
Number of stores in cenral Pa.: 3
Sales: $45.80 million
Market share: 0.83 percent market share.
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Grocery Outlet
No. 19
Grocery Outlet is a discount chain that recently opened stores in Fairview Twp. and Londonderry Twp.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 8
Sales: $49 million
Market share: 0.89 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Wegmans
No. 18
A Rochester, New York-based chain.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 1
Sales: $53.20 million
Market share: 0.96 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Kennie's Markets
No. 17
Kennies operates under the Marketplace name with stores in Gettysburg, Spring Grove, Littlestown and Biglerville.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 4
Sales: $56.20 million
Market share: 1.02 percent
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Customers line up outside a Kmart store on Thanksgiving morning, Nov. 27, 2014 in Chicago, Ill. Kmart stores opened at 6 a.m. to kick off doorbuster savings. Kmart stores will be open for 42 hours straight - through midnight on Black Friday. (File photo, Jean-Marc Giboux/AP Images for Kmart)
Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Kmart
No. 16
National chain.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 12
Sales: $69.40 million
Market share: 1.25 percent
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In this June 4, 2014 photo, shoppers push carts out of a Costco in Plano, Texas. Costco on Monday, March 2, 2015 said it struck a deal for Citi to be the exclusive issuer of its co-branded credit cards, with Visa replacing American Express as the card network. (File photo, AP Photo/LM Otero)
Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Costco
No. 15
Membership-based warehouse club.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 2
Sales: $69.80 million
Market share: 1.26 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Wb
No. 14
Aldi is a global discount chain.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 11
Sales: $74.80 million
Market share: 1.35 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Rutter's Farm Stores
No. 13
Chain of convenience stores based in York County.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 55
Sales: $81.30 million
Market share: 1.47 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Sam's Club
No. 12
Sams is a division of Wal-Mart and is a membership warehouse club.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 3
Sales: $100.20 million
Market share: 1.81 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
BJ's Wholesale Club
No. 11
A membership warehouse club.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 4
Sales: $101.50 million
Market share: 1.84 percent
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File photo, Mark Pynes, mpynes@pennlive.com
Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Karn's Quality Foods
No. 10
Karns Quality Foods is based in the Harrisburg area and is privately owned.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 8
Sales: $132.50 million
Market share: 2.4 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Turkey Hill Stores
No. 9
Chain of convenience stores owned by The Kroger Co.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 118
Sales: $159.30 million
Market share: 2.88 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Target
No. 8
Number of stores in central Pa.: 10
Sales: $161.20 million
Market share: 2.91 percent
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File photo AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Rite Aid
No. 7
National drug store chain.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 60
Sales: $185.60 million
Market share: 3.36 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Sheetz
No. 6
Convenience store chain based in Altoona.
Number of stores in central Pa: 56
Sales: $188.30 million
Market share: 3.40 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
CVS
No. 5
National drug store chain.
Number of stores in central Pa. 70
Sales: $308.30 million
Market share: 5.57 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
C & S Independents
No. 4
C&S Independents Robesonia oversees stores under several names such as Stop and Shop, Superfresh and Target.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 41
Sales: $468.99 million
Market share: 8.48 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Weis Markets
No. 3
Weis Markets is based in Sunbury.
Number of stores in central Pa.: 39
Sales: $584.96 million
Market share: 10.58 percent
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Sue Gleiter| sgleiter@pennlive.com
Wal-Mart Super Center
No. 2
Number of stores: 19
Sales: $605.30 million
Market share: 10.94 percent
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File photo, Mark Pynes, mpynes@pennlive.com
Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
Giant Food Stores
No. 1
Giant Food Stores is based in Carlisle.
No. of stores in central Pa.: 46
Sales: $1.7 billion
Market share: 31.09 percent
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Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com
For more food and dining stories on PennLive, check out:
Who has the cheapest groceries?
Is Karns, Wegmans, Giant or Weis the top supermarket in central Pa.?
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift is seen in the audience at the iHeartRadio Music Awards at The Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, March 29, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision for iHeartRadio/AP Images)
(John Shearer)
So did Wyomissing's own Taylor Swift give approval to Kanye West's lyrics to "Famous," which was released last month?
Which lyrics, you ask? "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous."
The debate's been simmering for a while. Its roots go back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when he jumped onstage during Taylor's acceptance speech for best female video and basically said Beyonce, whom she had beaten, was robbed. It's been a rocky road since. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a timeline for you. With video. You're welcome.
But now that Kim Kardashian threw a little bit (a few dozen gallons) of gasoline on the fire, our Berks County gal's image and motives are being called into question.
On Sunday night's episode of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," Kim discusses an interview with GQ in which she had spoken about Kanye (her husband) getting Taylor's permission to include her name in "Famous." Kim asks her mom, Kris Jenner, for advice, and her mom suggests talking to Taylor and smoothing things over.
Seems that's not the way it went.
Just as the show ended, Kim snapchatted a clip of Kanye on the phone with Taylor reciting the lyrics, "To all my southside n---s that know me best, I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex." He left out the last line.
"I think this is a really cool thing to have," he says. "I know. I mean, it's like a compliment," she says.
Taylor tells him, "It's obviously very tongue-in-cheek either way... And I really appreciate you telling me about it. That's really nice."
But what about that last line? That's where the controversy lies. And it comes amid rumors about Taylor's very public romance with Tom Hiddleston, aka Loki, aka "the Internet's boyfriend." Spectators and critics wonder why Taylor's being so public when she's spent years trying to maintain relationship privacy, and wonder if it's just a rebound or a publicity stunt (she broke up with a long-term boyfriend just weeks before Hiddleswift became a thing.) There's also talk she knew this was going to go down weeks ago, and that's why there's so much PDA for the paparazzi - and talk that she's crafted ALL her adult romances to support her image. You can catch up on the probability of a faux-mance here.
Add that to talk about how carefully Taylor-ed (see what I did there?) her public image is. The Daily Beast earlier this month summed up pretty well how Taylor's approach has changed over the years, from inclusive Fourth of July bashes with her backup dancers to her latest gala spectacular that appears carefully posed, filtered and Instagrammed.
TMZ.com, incidentally, is reporting that Taylor allegedly threatened Kanye with criminal prosecution a few months ago for recording their phone call.
Well, anyway, Kim launched a Snapchat salvo. And Taylor took to Instagram. And Twitter.
AND THEN THE INTERNET EXPLODED.
#KimExposedTaylorParty took off.
Taylor's "squad" leaped into action, with bff Selena Gomez leading her defense. Her first veiled tweet isn't family-friendly enough to post here, but there's also this:
This industry is so disappointing yet the most influential smh Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) July 18, 2016
And then there was the rest of the Twitterverse:
#KimExposedTaylorParty First time in history, Kim has broken the internet with her clothes on. gozde \_()_/ (@gozdekaradagg) July 18, 2016
For Kim's part, she sent out this Tweet right around the time she sent the Snapchat:
do u guys follow me on snap chat? u really should ;-) Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) July 18, 2016
The big question, though, is what's Taylor up to? Is the central Pennsylvania girl who hit it big with lyrics about being an outsider and whose career has capitalized on her awkward high school years going full-on Beyonce in how she's crafting her image in adulthood? Or is she going public with her love life in an effort to remain the approachable, lovable pop star she's always been?
Maybe only Taylor knows.
mexico-champs2.jpg
San Nicolas Little Leaguers from the state of Nuevo Leon hold the championship banner after winning the Mexican title and a berth in the world series in South Williamsport.
(Little Leauge)
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT-A team from the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico, has become the third to earn a berth in the Little League World Series that begins Aug. 18 in South Williamsport.
San Nicolas Little Leaguers from the state of Nuevo Leon defeated Sonora, 6-5, to capture the Mexican title. The victory avenged an earlier loss to Sonora, 5-3, in pool play.
The champions posted a 7-1 record in the 14-team tournament, outscoring opponents 53 to 28.
The Mexican champs join Seoul, South Korea, and New South Wales, Australia, in the world series. Two more teams will be decided this week.
The seven-team Caribbean regional tournament is under way in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands with Curacao and the Dominican Republic winning opening round games Saturday by shutout.
The 14-team Europe-Africa tournament has started in Kutno, Poland, with the Czech Republic winning its first two contests. One of its victories was over a team from the U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany.
Regional tournaments to determine the eight U.S. entries will be held next month.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Just days before he was shot and killed, a Baton Rouge police officer posted an emotional Facebook message saying he was "physically and emotionally" tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, a friend said Sunday.
"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me," Montrell Jackson wrote.
Friends and family of Jackson, 32, were mourning the 10-year veteran of the police force that relatives described as a "gentle giant" and a "protector" after he and another two law enforcement officers were shot and killed Sunday morning by a gunman.
Sgt. Don Coppola Jr. of the Baton Rouge Police Department identified the other slain Baton Rouge police officer as 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been with the department less than a year. The third officer killed was 45-year-old sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, a 24-year veteran, spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said.
In the Facebook posting Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I've experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core," the posting read.
I've shared this twice recently! I just noticed it wasn't public so I took a screen shot, words from Montrell Jackson Posted by Kristi Vick Godal on Sunday, July 17, 2016
The message was posted July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge. That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the country's fraught history of race relations. Another black man was shot and killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend livestreaming the aftermath on Facebook. Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, killing five police officers.
Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
Erika Green told The Associated Press Sunday that she is friends with the family of Jackson. She said she saw the message on his Facebook page.
In the message, Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired.
"These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," Jackson wrote.
A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet but is no longer on Jackson's Facebook page.
As Bill Cosby heads to trial in Montgomery County on the only criminal charges filed against him, the entertainer was handed a defeat in civil court after a federal judge ruled in favor of the accuser in his criminal case.
Andrea Constand did not break a confidential settlement agreement when she cooperated with detectives in the investigation that led to the three counts of aggravated indecent assault he's now facing, a federal judge ruled Friday, the Associated Press is reporting.
U.S. Judge Eduardo Robreno ruled that Constand couldn't be sued for talking to law enforcement about her allegations.
The judge said preventing someone from voluntarily sharing information about a crime with law enforcement is "unenforceable," according to Philly.com.
But other aspects of the lawsuit, filed by Cosby in February, were left intact and will proceed.
Cosby's lawsuit claims all five parties - Constand, her mother, two lawyers and the publisher of the National Enquirer -- breached a 2006 secrecy deal and that Constand's actions have unjustly enriched her.
The judge is dismissing Constand's mother from the lawsuit, but he's letting the case continue regarding recent statements and actions by the accuser, her lawyers and American Media.
In his criminal case, Cosby is slated for a pre-trial conference Sept. 6.
He appeared last in court on July 7 when he was handed another defeat. Montgomery County Judge Steven t. O'Neill denied the defense's bid to throw out the charges when Cosby's attorneys argued Constand should have testified at an earlier preliminary hearing.
The lack of her direct testimony amounted to hearsay, which the defense team said denied Cosby his right to face his accuser.
Court reverses ruling, allows FishPass to move ahead in Traverse City
A press release on Thursday announced that the Court of Appeals reversed the 2021 ruling that stalled the FishPass project in Traverse City.
CLEVELAND -- I was standing in the shade of the gazebo where Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy with an Airsoft gun, was gunned down by a Cleveland police officer on a cold November day in 2014, when another journalist walked over and muttered the news that three lawmen had just been gunned down in Baton Rouge.
The nation's downward spiral of violence and rage had just taken another shocking spin, as the nation's social and TV networks began to crackle with fresh anxiety. And yet here at Cudell Rec Center playground on Cleveland's west side a landmark in the twisting road from Ferguson to Dallas and Baton Rouge there was an almost surreal calm.
To anyone who follows the news, the gazebo here is eerily familiar, like a bad dream, thanks to the grainy video that was played over and over again, with a cop cruiser screeching to a halt and a rookie officer thinking that Tamir's gun was real gunning the boy down in less than 2 seconds. On this pleasantly warm July Sunday morning, though, the swings were still and often the only sound was a bird chirping in the far distance.
The only visitors to the park at the moment the Baton Rouge news broke were a young man who said his name was Bryan Wilson and his older cousin, up visiting from Tennessee. The pair sat at the picnic table next to where Tamir was mortally wounded now covered with about every creature in the stuffed animal kingdom from teddy bears to manatees and penguins, each a homage to the boy who never made it to his 13th birthday.
"That's just not the answer," Wilson said, shaking his head at the reports out of Louisiana. "That is terrible."
The nation's eyes were at least before the distraction of the Baton Rouge tragedy starting to focus four miles east of this spot, where several thousand Republican delegates and party activists were descending on the Quicken Loans Arena, with thousands of police officers flush with millions of dollars in anti-riot gear and with demonstrators from all over America, now even more on edge than they were 24 hours ago.
There, presumptive nominee Donald Trump and an unlikely array of speakers like Hollywood's Scott Baio are expected to focus on things like the endlessly litigated 2012 attack on Benghazi and would-be First Husband Bill Clinton's past sex scandals but to say little about the issues affecting the patchwork quilt of vacant lots, squat, faded prairie houses and rusty factories that make up Cleveland's east and west sides.
The GOP not to mention a Who's Who of network news anchors and reporters will spend four energetic days near the banks of Lake Erie, but viewers will hear next to nothing about the decades of controversy over policing in Cleveland's poor neighborhoods, not just the death of Tamir but incidents like a 2012 chase in which cops pumped 137 bullets into a car whose occupants were unarmed. Or the aftermath of the housing foreclosure crisis in which Cleveland neighborhoods like Slavic Village were called the nation's "ground zero" for the mortgage crisis.
And if Trump and his advisers have a solid plan for dealing with the fact that Northeast Ohio lost nearly half of its mostly good-paying manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2010, it's the second most tightly wrapped secret in Cleveland behind only The Donald's scalp.
The convention-watchers won't hear words like those uttered Sunday afternoon by the Rev. Jawanza Colvin, the fiery 41-year-old pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church -- where Dr. Martin Luther King based himself during one of final campaigns -- was preaching. In the wake of Tamir's killing, Colvin has emerged as Cleveland's leading voice for police reform, and he played a role in the recent election defeat of the district attorney who'd not prosecuted the cops in the 2014 incident.
Seated in a tall leather chair behind a glass altar with a bronzed representation of Jesus, tightly clutching and waving a worn Bible in his right hand, Colvin's sermon -- "The Struggle Is Not Over" bounced at high-velocity from Tamir's grand jury to global warming, with a timely dig at Trump and his endorser Sarah Palin even if he refused to name them.
"'I want my country back'" a Palin mantra "had a baby and it's called "Make America Great Again,'" Colvin thundered.
The minister said Americans shouldn't act so shocked over videotaped encounters like Tamir's shooting, because systematic racism has been present and ignored for years. "The only difference now," he said, "is that it's not Rootsit's on video." He dismissed the notion that police-involved shootings or other injustice should inspire a national conversation on race, saying that talk is a substitute for action.
"The problem in America is not race!" Colvin exclaimed, as most of the 100 or so worshippers sprang to their feet. "The problem in America is racism!" He also deplored the murders in Baton Rouge and wrapped up his sermon with a clarion call for people to come together. Yet the cycle of violence -- especially the killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge has already cast a shadow over Cleveland before the first pound of the gavel.
Trump is already doubling-down on his promise to become "the law-and-order president" a direct invocation of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign, the stepping stone on the path to the "war on drugs,' stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration. On Sunday, the presumptive GOP nominee tweeted that "our country is a divided crime scene."
His words were harsh, manipulative, and divisive but sadly he also may have been part right. Trump's new confrontational tone for the Republican Party is already drawing a call-and-response in the streets of Cleveland. On Sunday at about 5 p.m., about 400 protesters against Trump and police brutality funneled down Prospect Avenue, a wall of bicycle cops hemming them in, as chanted and carried signs like "Justice for Alton Sterling Dismantle Racist Police."
Proudly wearing his backwards Phillies' cap, Gordon Smith, a 65-year-old filmmaker and radical activist from Chalfont in Bucks County, who like the majority of these marchers was white, said he came to Cleveland for one simple reason because "Donald Trump is a flaming idiot."
It capped a day when hope struggled to keep alive. At the rec center, a 32-year-old man named Richard Jones brought his 6-year-old son to the playground. When a crew from French television asked to speak with him, the dad sat with the boy a few feet in front of where Tamir's crumpled body had laid prone that afternoon on a seat where someone had written, "We miss you." He said he didn't see a peaceful resolution to America's racial problems.
"The only change..it has to be violent," Jones said at one point, later softening his words only a tad, "that black folks we need to come together and be on the same page."
Overhead was the steady roar of jets coming into Cleveland's airports, carrying convention delegates who won't get any closer than those 3,000-or-so elevated feet to Tamir's former playground -- or the problems of western Cleveland -- over the four days. As his dad spoke, little Richard squirmed away and ran to the swing set.
Full Results
For more information on the 4X ProTour, visit: www.4xprotour.com.
MENTIONS: @The4XProTour
JBC Bikepark in Jablonec, Czech Republic was the host for round 3 of the 2016 4X ProTour. After 2 superb rounds already, it was time for the riders to take on the most challenging track on the 4X ProTour. Famed for the 'Marosi Wall ride pass'; this track has it all. Gap jump from the start, huge jumps, wooded section full of roots and rocks, wall ride and technical jumps that really catch the riders out. It is the ultimate 4X challenge and the venue for what was an amazing night of 4X racing.The event was scheduled to start on Thursday with practice. Unfortunately, torrential rain all day meant that this session was cancelled and moved to an extended session on Friday. The track guys worked tirelessly throughout the night to get the track ready for practice on Friday and qualifying. On Thursday there was the opening ceremony in the centre of Jablonec town with the mayor giving out the number plates to the top ranked riders, along with interviews with them all in front of huge crowds. The atmosphere and expectation for the race was already bubbling with the locals, and it was great to see the whole city getting behind the event.On Friday the practice session was extended to 3 hours to give the riders plenty of time to get to grips with this extremely challenging track. Throughout the session, the track dried out and by the time qualifying rolled around the track was in great condition.The women went first and it was 2015 4X ProTour champion Helene Fruhwirth set the fastest time ahead of Czech BMX star Romana Labounkova and British rider Natasha Bradley in 3rd.Next up it was the men. Running in reverse order to the UCI World rankings, the fastest riders qualified at the end. As each rider left the start, the times were getting quicker and quicker by the finish line. It was local hero and crowd favourite Tomas Slavik taking the fastest time ahead of Felix Beckeman and Hynek Strouha. The scene was set for an action packed race on Saturday night.Saturday morning and thankfully the sun decided to make an appearance. The temperature was rising and the track was quickly drying. The final practice session started and the crowds were building. The crowds turned up in their thousands. At an estimate there were 10,000 passionate Czech 4X fans all with air horns, flags and whistles. There was a true party atmosphere and this was going to be a fantastic night of action. They we looking for hometown hero Tomas Slavik to take the victory, but would it be his night? First up, the top riders were introduced to the crowds. Fire, smoke and each rider's choice of music introduced them to the huge crowds.After the rider introductions, the first round of racing started at 18.00. In the first round there was a huge surprise with 3rd qualifier and former podium finisher Strouha went out after crashing on the lower section. Into the quarter finals and there were some huge shocks. Felix Beckeman, Simon Waldburger and Scott Beaumont all 3 who are fighting for the 2016 overall title went out.By the semi finals it was getting really interesting. In the women's Natasha Bradley crashed out of an intense race which left Romana Labounkova and Olga Romzaikina qualifying to the final. In the 2nd semi final it was Helene Fruhwirth and Michela Berakova qualifying through.In the men's it was the Slavik show in semi final 1 with Tomas and Hannes qualifying to the final. In the 2nd semi it was Quentin Derbier and Jan Svub making it through. Svub had been riding well all day and was stoked to make his way to the final.So it was final time. In the women's small final Mareike Bohm rode a flawless lap to take the final step on the podium with 5th overall. In the main final Labounkova got the holeshot but in turn 2 Fruhwirth made a great pass to take the lead. Romzaikina and Berakova had a great battle going on in 3rd and 4th but at the finishline it was Fruhwirth from Labounkova and Romzaikina.So finally it was the men. In the small final it looked like course builder Jiri Penc was going to take the win but in an amazing pass in the final turn Dominik Kvapil crossed the finish line in 1st and took 5th overall for his day.So the men's final lined up. Tomas Slavik in 1, Hannes Slavik in 2, Jan Svub in 3 and Quentin Derbier in 4. The gate dropped and it was Tomas in the lead. The crowds were going crazy. In turn 1 Hannes crashed out and left Jan and Quentin fighting for 2nd. Into the big doubles and Jan made a mistake giving Derbier a clear run into 2nd place. From there the positions held and Tomas Slavik was able to win his race ahead of Derbier and Svub.After huge podium celebrations, the Jagermeister guys took control and the after party began. With Dj's, bands and thousands of happy Czech fans, this race was the perfect showcase for 4X ProTour, the sport of 4X and all the riders.Thanks to the World's mtb media who supported this event, the live tv, the fans in Jablonec, the riders, the sponsors for this race and most of all Tomas Slavik and his crew for working tirelessly on this project and showcasing to the world that 4X is amazing.The final round of 4X ProTour is on Saturday October 1st, at Roquebrune in France. The overall title is pretty much in Tomas Slavik's hands now but the fight for 2nd is on with Derbier, Beckeman, Hannes Slavik and Beaumont all fighting. It's going to come down to the wire and you won't want to miss it.
As suspension quality and geometry evolve, more and more riders are moving away from relatively long-travel bikes and towards machines that manage to do the same - or more - with less. With their brand new, 120mm-travel Trail Pistol, Colorado's Guerrilla Gravity is aiming to join the list of bikes that may be short on travel but not short on abilities.
Guerrilla Gravity says that the Trail Pistol is ready for either 27.5+ or 29'' wheels thanks to its adjustable geometry, and they've also moved away from the linkage-activated single pivot layout employed on their previous bikes to a Horst Link system.
The aluminum Trail Pistol is welded in Denver, Colorado, and a frame and shock retail for $2,195 USD; complete builds start at $2,995 and top out with the 'Race build' at $5,495. Trail Pistol Details
Intended use: trail / all-mountain
Rear wheel travel: 120mm
Wheel size: 27.5+ or 29''
66.6 head angle w/ 130mm fork
Adjustable geometry for wheel size
Frame material: aluminum
Metric shock sizing
148mm Boost hub spacing
Universal Syntace derailleur hanger
Weight: 6.3lbs (frame w/ shock, claimed)
MSRP: $2,195 USD (frame w/ Deluxe RT3), $2,995 - $5,495 USD (complete bikes)
27.5+ or 29" Wheels
The Trail Pistol in 'Plush' mode with 27.5+ tires and less progressive suspension.
A slot just under the rocker link allows a Velcro (or ski) strap to be run through the frame to hold a tube or other supplies in place.
From Single Pivot to Horst Link
Flip the chip to switch between Plush mode (27.5+ wheels) and Crush mode (29'' wheels).
In other words, Montague is saying that it's not the suspension design used, but how the suspension design is used.
But if that's the case, why not stick with their long-proven single pivot system? ''Most platforms can be made to ride well, or ride poorly. So it came down to this: riders want a Horst Link bike. Can we make ours ride as well as our single pivot design? The answer was yes, so we rolled with it. On paper, the Freedom Linkage does brake 8% better, which is a noticeable improvement to only the most discerning of riders.''
''Our design goal for suspension layouts is this: create the best performing suspension in the least complicated package.''
The latest plus-sized setups offer distinct enough performance when compared to 29" wheels that it makes sense for them to be offered as an option, and like a few other companies out there, Guerrilla Gravity has designed their new machine to accept either wheel size by way of two geometry settings. ''The idea here is that plus tires are best for less aggressive riding and therefore should be paired with a less aggressive mode,'' GC's Will Montague explained of their reasoning before going on to say, ''to be sure, both modes are still aggressive by industry standards, though.''Guerrilla Gravity is aiming for consistency in handling between the two options: both modes are said to maintain the same bottom bracket height, and Montague also said that no fork swapping is necessary, which makes it reasonable to actually own and use both kinds of wheelsets so long as the tire clearance up front is acceptable.'Plush Mode' is designed for wider 27.5+ tires that are going to be ridden at lower pressures, and it offers up a 1 steeper head angle (67.8 with a 120mm fork) that's paired with a less progressive suspension rate than the slacker option. So, quicker handling and a more linear (but not linear) suspension rate. Want to mix and match wheel size and geometry settings? ''Riders looking to run 29er wheels can still run Plush Mode if they'd like a slightly more linear suspension platform and slightly less aggressive geo,'' said Montague of not being locked into either setting.'Crush Mode' combined with 29'' wheels provides a slightly slacker head angle (67.0 with a 120mm fork), but maybe more noteworthy, a suspension rate that ramps up quicker than when the bike is set to the more forgiving geometry option.There is said to be loads of tire clearance regardless of if the rider is in Plush or Crush mode, with Guerrilla Gravity saying that there is room for 29'' x 2.6'' rubber and 27.5'' x 3.0'' rubber. ''Both are actual measurements,'' the company says, ''not claimed, since all tire manufacturers seem to use a different ruler.''Up until now, Guerrilla Gravity's full-suspension bikes have all used a linkage-activated single pivot layout the company has referred to as a ''highly refined suspension platform that eliminates unnecessary complication.'' This was put to use on both the 150 - 160mm travel Megatrail and the 195 - 205mm travel GG/DH, but they've gone in a different direction and used a Horst Link design for the 120mm Trail Pistol. They're calling it 'Freedom Linkage,' and Montague said that the name is both a nod to their American-made ethos, as well as how their bikes are ''free from the bullshit. Our suspension designs are incredibly refined, without being complicated or gimmicky.''Why the change in design? ''Marketing, mostly,'' Montague says in the most straightforward way possible about the way that other companies tout their own designs as being able to allow riders to go faster while curing everything from club foot to cancer. ''There's a perception perpetuated by other manufacturers that the type of platform used is what creates ride qualities, but this is smoke and mirrors at its finest. It really comes down to the execution of a platform, where the suspension points are located,'' he went on to say.Three of the four shock options will come from RockShox, with the frame or complete bikes shipping to customers with either a Deluxe R, Deluxe RT3, or a Super Deluxe RC3 bolted in place. If you have a bit more coin to spend, you can have your Trail Pistol with Push's ElevenSix, although the delivery date for the shock, which is also manufactured in Colorado, is still a ways out.
A new vision for space exploration
On January 13, 2004, less than a year after the Columbia disaster, President Bush made the two-mile trip from the White House to NASA Headquarters in Washington to deliver a speech on a new direction for NASA's human spaceflight program. The plan became known as the Vision for Space Exploration, or VSE.
"In the past 30 years, no human being has set foot on another world, or ventured farther upward into space than 386 miles; roughly the distance from Washington, D.C. to Boston, Massachusetts," Bush said. "It is time for America to take the next steps."
The VSE called for returning the remaining space shuttles to flight as soon as possible, and using them to complete the ISS by 2010. After that, the fleet would be retired.
In the meantime, a new deep space crew vehicle would be developed and readied for astronauts by 2014. By 2020, NASA astronauts would ride the vehicle to the moon and establish a semi-permanent presence that would serve as a jumping-off point for other destinations, including Mars.
A bold plan, with details TBD
At that point, the ISS was slated for retirement around 2016, which would free up funds for the proposed moon missions. Standing down the shuttles in 2010 would create a six-year gap in which America could not access the ISSlater given a price tag of $75 billionon its own.
Instead, NASA would fly crew and cargo to the space station through "the purchase of services for cargo and crew transport using existing and emerging capabilities, both domestic and foreign." That's an apt description of how NASA currently buys astronaut seats from Russia, while relying on the private space firms SpaceX and Orbital ATK for cargo shipments.
As for the new crew vehicle, how would it be launched? And what would carry all of its accompanying moon landing hardware to orbit?
If NASA didn't build a new rocket, it would have to buy one. The possibilities included Lockheed Martin's Atlas V and Boeing's Delta IV, which were used primarily for Department of Defense payloads.
Neither launcher was certified to carry humans. Some experts doubted the necessary redundancies and safety measures could be addedat least, not without enormous costs. (Thirteen years later, the joint Boeing-Lockheed company United Launch Alliance plans to use the Atlas V to launch astronauts in Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.)
On November 1, 2004, O'Keefe gave a speech aboard the historic USS Constellation in Annapolis, Maryland. Drawing parallels between the Vision for Space Exploration and the ambitions behind the ancient sailing ship, he named NASA's new human spaceflight program Constellation.
"Today, we help continue that tradition by accepting the spirit of the original Constellation and proudly transferring it to the class of space vehicles that will carry humankind back to the moon, Mars and beyond."
A month and a half later in December, O'Keefe tendered his resignation as NASA administrator to take a job as the Chancellor of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
Constellation would take shape under someone else's watch. In part two of our series, we'll look at how the program unfolded under new NASA leadership.
Photo: Facebook
The man who fatally shot three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, LA, and wounded three others on Sunday morning "was targeting officers," state police officials said Monday.
"Our preliminary investigation shows that he definitely ambushed those officers," Lt. J.B. Slaton, a public affairs commander for the Louisiana State Police, said in a phone interview Monday morning. "We are still trying to find out what his motive was, and that's going to be part of our investigation. But we believe he was targeting those officers."
The superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said Monday that investigators were interviewing people and sifting through visual evidence to track the activities of the gunman, Gavin Long, before he shot the officers, and to find out what brought Mr. Long to the city and why he stayed, adding that it was "critical and important" to get it right, reports the New York Times.
"There was no doubt in my mind" that Mr. Long had intended to kill the officers, Colonel Edmonson said on CNN. Lieutenant Slaton said Mr. Long had been positively identified with the use of fingerprint records.
As investigators worked, details about Mr. Long, 29, of Kansas City, Mo., began to emerge. Like the gunman who killed five police officers more than a week ago in Dallas, Mr. Long had served abroad in the military.
Military records show that Mr. Long was in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, including a six-month deployment in Iraq. He was a sergeant and a data network specialist who earned several awards, including one for good conduct. He was also assigned to Okinawa, Japan, and several locations in Southern California.
On a social media site registered under the name Gavin Long, a young African-American man who refers to himself as Cosmo posted videos and podcasts and shared biographical and personal information that aligned with the information that the authorities had released, so far, about the gunman.
In one YouTube video, titled Protesting, Oppression and How to Deal with Bullies, the man discusses the killings of African-American men at the hands of police officers, including the July 5 death in Baton Rouge of Alton B. Sterling, and he advocates a bloody response instead of the protests that the deaths sparked.
Photo: Daytona Beach PD
A Daytona Beach, FL, police patrol vehicle was found completely engulfed in flames early Sunday with a note reading "Black Lives Matter," authorities said.
Officers responded about 2:30 a.m. and found the marked cruiser on fire in front of the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, where it was parked and being used as a "ghost car" to deter crime, officials said.
Fire crews responded and put the fire out. No one was reported injured in the incident, reports the Orlando Sentinel.
A note was found that read "Black Lives Matter. A. Sterling P. Castile. [Expletive] the police," authorities said in a news release. It's unclear exactly where the message was found.
Police Chief Mike Chitwood told The Daytona Beach News-Journal he believed the vehicle was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail, leaving more than $20,000 in damage.
Chitwood said it's unclear if the fire was caused by anti-police protesters, adding they have no suspects or persons of interest.
FLEOA issued a statement Sunday in response to ambush attacks on Milwaukee and Baton Rouge police officers.
Nathan R. Catura, President of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, states, "FLEOA is appalled by two more ambush attacks on law enforcement. Today's depraved ambush attacks on a Milwaukee Police Officer followed by attacks on multiple Baton Rouge Police Officers were unconscionable. We offer our prayers to the men and women of these departments, their families and friends. We offer the full support of our members in the investigation and apprehension of the perpetrators of this far to frequent heinous crime."
Catura calls upon President Obama to activate Joint Operational Command Centers in major cities where the protection of police officers is becoming extremely challenging. Catura said that in times of crisis, the combined resources of local, state, and federal entities brings a multitude of solutions to the table. For example, the combined response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated how the vast resources of the federal government, when leveraged with local resources, can assist in a crisis.
Catura stated, "Our brothers and sisters in law enforcement deserve the protection provided by a large scale unified response from Washington." He continued that the components of the command center would be predictive analysis using data matching and intelligence, followed by expanded investigative resources and specialized response teams. Lastly, he said, "It is not fair to continue using routine patrol tactics when ambushes on police officers are occurring so frequently."
About FLEOA
The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association is the largest nonprofit, nonpartisan professional association that exclusively represents over 26,000 active and retired federal law enforcement officers from over 65 agencies.
Earlier this year, Miami Police sent a bid request for 687 "active shooter kits," which consist of at least one front and one back torso stand-alone hard armor plate and a tactical carrying vest to be worn by the officers. This past March 7, a company offered a quote, claiming the purchase would cost the City of Miami $295,410. But the city didn't sign off on the order right away.
At Thursday's city commission meeting, Miami Police Chief Rodolfo Llanes argued that, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando a month ago, the department now needs to quickly purchase the equipment to keep civilians safe, reports the Miami New Times.
The City of Miami approved Miami Police's request.
But police-reform activists say the department is using a tragedy to milk expensive equipment upgrades from the public.
On June 28, Llanes sent a letter to the city commission, claiming the upgrade was necessary to keep civilians safe in the event that an active-shooter scenario were to occur in Miami. Miami-Dade County Police also requested $6.5 million for night-vision rifles and body armor last week.
"Due to the recent shooting in Orlando and those currently taking place internationally, the police department would like to take the proactive approach in getting the needed resources to provide critical protection to first responders in the aid and rescue of civilians threatened by an active shooter in a hot zone," Llanes wrote. He added later: "Should an officer respond to an active shooter incident, he will not only be outgunned, but his current body armor will not protect him or her from a serious or fatal wound."
This, he says, should justify leapfrogging the city's typical bid process, effectively ordering the active shooter kits in a no-bid deal.
Photo: Facebook
The Fayetteville (NC) Police Department shared a story of support for police officers on its Facebook Sunday night.
The post said after working a secondary employment job at Best Buy, Officer J. Wall found people leaving several thank-you notes on his patrol vehicle, reports the Charlotte Observer.
The notes were written on post-its, reading: "Thank you for your service," "Thank you for always coming when we call," "May God be with you," "We appreciate all that you do!" and "Thank you for your sacrifices! God Bless you!"
The people then asked Wall if they could pray for him, which the post said he was honored to participate in.
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In a statement on the Baton Rouge police shootings, President Obama had a message for all Americans about rhetoric that divides, but without mentioning his name, Obama also appeared to be talking about Donald Trump.
Video:
The President said, We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies attacks on law enforcement. Attacks on police are an attack on all of us. The rule of law that makes society possible.
Obama appeared to urge both parties to turn down the rhetoric at their conventions, I know were about to enter a couple of weeks of political 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 organizations you are a part of, everyone right now focus on words and actions that 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 advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts. All of us.
President Obama was correct all Americans should tone down the divisive rhetoric, but it was hard to miss who the President was talking about. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has already tried to blame the Baton Rouge shootings on President Obama.
One look at the schedule for the Republican convention shows that Trump has no intention of taking President Obamas advice. Trump has titled the first night of his convention, Make America Safe Again.
Obamas words were wise, but Donald Trump thinks that he can sneak his way into the White House by tearing our nation apart. It was clear who Obama was directing part of his message at, and it is just as clear that Donald Trump is not going to listen.
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*The following is an opinion column by R Muse*
Most Americans, and actually most human beings, are inclined to couch their extreme hatred for another person if for no other reason than to not appear inhuman. If nothing else, no matter how much a person detests another, they would never ever state publicly they want anyone killed; its just not acceptable.
However, this is America and one segment of the population is so wracked with animus for non-conservatives that calling for a Democratic politicians demise, by the harshest measures, is just not unusual any more. It is, though, unusual for a politician to call for another politician to be executed by public hanging; but then again its what many have come to expect from Republicans.
On Friday last, a West Virginia Republican, a malcontent named Michael Folk, posted a tweet stating:
@HillaryClinton You should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitutionthen hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.
Folk isnt just another Southern yokel who hates Democrats; he serves in the West Virginia House of Delegates. Now its true there is a general election upcoming and passions are inflamed, but this is going too far without severe consequences; sod this kind free speech.
After rapid criticism for the tweet, Mr. Folk posted a second tweet supporting his call for the presumptive Democratic nominee to be executed on his personal indictment; Sorry, I dont mince words read this story & watch this video & maybe youll understand. Folk provided a hyperlink to a neo-conservative site about the failed Republican congressional investigation into Hillary Clintons email server. The West Virginia Democratic Party provided a screen capture of Folks tweet, where they said he was unfit to serve as if that was hurtful in the least.
The chairwoman of the West Virginia Democratic Party, Belinda Biafore, issued a news release early Saturday morning stating:
Not only are Delegate Folks words concerning, they are disturbing. The mention of hanging and implication of murder should never, ever be acceptable. To think that a person in a leadership position in our state can say these types of things is baffling and should not be tolerated. Folks actions should deem him as unfit to serve and Speaker Tim Armstead (R) should take action if Folk doesnt resign. It makes me very 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.
With all due respect to Ms. Biafore; how on Earth is she remotely baffled that a Republican in a leadership position, particularly in the former Confederacy, is publicly calling for, not just mentioning, the public hanging and murder of any other American, much less a presumptive nominee for the presidency? For dogs sake it was the Republican Party of West Virginias neighboring state, regular Virginia, that called for armed rebellion against Barack Obama if he won re-election leading up to the 2012 general election. Calling for violence is just part and parcel of what it means to be a 21st Century Republican. In 2013, another Virginia Republican attempted to incite an assassination attempt against President Obama; so much for that Southern hospitality and Virginia is for lovers slogan.
Even West Virginians, including those who are not Hillary Clinton supporters, were appalled that one of their esteemed Republican legislators took the lowest road possible to express his opposition to Clinton. One of the first commenters said, Im no where (sic) near a Hillary supporter. Im just not a fan of having a maniac hold office in my great state.
Apparently, the news that Folk called for Clintons execution alerted many Twitter users to his regular job as a United Airlines pilot and they promptly sent screen captures to the corporation to let them know what kind of stellar character they have in their employ. United Airlines responded to the flood of messages with: We are definitely aware, and are investigating this. Thanks for letting us know.
Now, although the likes of pedophile and washed-up, one-hit wonder Ted Nugent regularly calls for the execution of Hillary Clinton and President Obama, he is not an elected official; he is a board member of the National Rifle Association and should be expected to advocate for violence against his perceived enemies. But Michael Folk is an elected official and although he is a Republican, he has to be smart enough to know that those kinds of words have terrible consequences.
For example, after Republicans spent months using a phony and highly-edited video to portray Planned Parenthood as a deviant organization selling baby parts, a gun-wielding religious maniac strolled into a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and began killing; all the while saying no more baby parts. More recently, after hearing for years that LGBT people deserved execution, a religious maniac committed a heinous mass murder at an alleged gay nightspot in Orlando.
Words have consequences and although evangelical preachers or West Virginia or Virginia Republicans arent committing horrendous acts of violence, there are enough religious and conservative maniacs in America with access to firearms that can be pushed to commit murder.
It is a mystery if the West Virginia Republicans will throw Michael Folk out of the legislature, or if United Airlines will do anything more than conduct an investigation, as if there is something more to learn than they dont already know. However, it is long past time for Republicans to take control of their own and it goes all the way to the top of the organization and leadership at the highest levels, which is probably why it continues unabated.
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*The following is an opinion column by R Muse *
For all their talk and rhetoric about personal responsibility and accountability, Republicans are inherently prone to blaming everyone under the Sun for their actions. Since before Barack Obama was elected president, Republicans were plagued with Obama Derangement Syndrome that besides refusing to govern, caused them to blame every- and anything untoward that happened in America and around the world on Barack Obama.
Despite the entire worlds governments acknowledging that George W. Bushs invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region and created the dreaded ISIL, Republicans blame President Obama, despite that he wasnt in Congress. When half-wit Sarah Palins son was arrested for physically abusing his significant other, she naturally blamed President Obama. For dogs sake, even when rogue racist cops gun down unarmed African Americans, Republicans blame President Obama. So it was not all out of character for a Republican, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, to pen an op-ed in the Washington Post blaming President Obama for Donald Trumps rise to power and takeover of the Republican Party.
Its likely the intent of Bushs op-ed, Trump does not represent the future of the country or the GOP was secondarily to express his displeasure that Donald Trump garnered the Republican nomination Jeb thought was his birthright. But he couldnt possibly condemn Trump too severely without criticizing the Party establishment and the base supporting the race-baiting fascist. Bushs not-so-clever maneuver was to blame Trumps ascension as the GOP Party leader, including the bases support of the fascist, on conservative voters fear, anger, and general antipathy toward anything non-white and non-Christian on President Barack Obama.
The only truth in Bushs entire piece was admitting that Trump had successfully taken advantage of the anxiety (read fear and hatred) among conservatives and Republicans. That was the end of the truth in Bushs screed because he went on to claim that Trump in no way reflects the principles or inclusive legacy of the Republican Party. Then he goes on to excuse the Donald after rejecting him as party leader because he did not create the political culture on his own. That hate-driven Republican culture was, according to Jeb Bush, President Obamas creation.
According to Bush, President Obama single-handedly undermined the American peoples faith in politics and government by spending the past eight years employing divisive tactics, including wielding un-Earthly power to punish his opponents, legislate from the Oval Office, and weaponized federal agencies to force liberal dogma on Americans. These imaginary tactics are, according to Jeb, responsible for Republican obstruction, refusal to compromise on anything, or engage in bipartisanship at any level that in turn further divided the electorate and caused a breakdown in governance and the (Republican) political system.
Jeb Bush actually had the audacity to assert that because President Obama was trying to divide the nation, the Republican Party responded by attempting to out-polarize the president: making us seem anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker and anti-common-sense. And, that out of the attempt to out-polarize President Obama, the stage was set for Donald Trump to emerge as the GOP standard bearer.
Bush admits all the conservative anger and fear is warranted and completely understandable, but that it hasnt inspired a debate within the party about how Republicans win the White House. All it accomplished, he claimed, was allowing a candidate like Mr. Trump to grotesquely manipulate the deeply felt anger of racist, religious, and nativistic Americans. He said Trumps abrasive, Know Nothing-like nativist rhetoric has blocked out sober discourse; but that too, like the Republicans seemingly decades-long anti-everything mindset, is President Obamas fault according to Bush.
Jeb Bush is either a ridiculously bad liar or a monumental buffoon. He is likely both for having the temerity to say that Republicans only seem to be anti-women, anti-gay, anti-worker, anti-science, anti-common sense and anti-immigrant. Republicans were anti all those things and more long before Barack Obama came on to the national scene and it is stunning that Bush would even mention one of those after eight years of Barack Obama strongly advocating for literally everything that the Republican Party seems to be against. It is also absurd for him to claim that the only reason Republicans are opposed to everything the majority of the American people support, or Donald Trumps success, is due to President Obamas attempt to divide the nation.
The sad fact is that Donald Trump does represent the Republican Party, and a significant portion of the country, and it is a fact that is beyond dispute. It is also a fact that Jeb Bush is a fool to deny his Partys responsibility for Trumps ascendance in public because from lowly Republican-led state legislatures to the United States Congress, Republicans have openly prepared for Trumps takeover by constantly assailing and demonizing women, gays, science, immigrants, people of color, and workers for the past two decades. And, it was not in an attempt to out-polarize Barack Obama. It was, and still is, because Republicans fundamentally oppose anything that may work for the benefit of all the American people, something Republicans and their conservative base oppose out of hand. And this is the only reason Donald Trump rose to lead his Republican Party not because Barack Obama is President.
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The Iowa and Colorado delegations walked out, as in less than three hours tensions have boiled over at the Republican convention. While all of this was happening on the convention floor, GOP nominee Donald Trump was sending angry tweets to CNN.
Here is what was happening on the convention floor via ABC News:
The floor of the Republican National Convention erupted into chaos Monday amid an attempt by the Never Trump forces to change the rules of the event, but the efforts were defeated, thwarting the movement to stop the real estate moguls path to the nomination.
Delegates engaged in dueling chants of roll call vote and USA on the floor after the chair forced a voice vote and judged that those who favored the existing rules prevailed. Colorados delegation even walked off of the floor in protest amid the chaos.
The Iowa and Colorado delegates walked out. It was the sort of show of division that should have bothered any nominee unless that nominee is Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, this is what Trump was obsessed with:
.@CNN is the worst.They go to their dumb, one-sided panels when a podium speaker is for Trump! VAST MAJORITY want: Make America Great Again! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2016
The Republican Party is burning itself to the ground in Cleveland, and Donald Trump is worried about his media coverage on CNN.
Trump isnt even paying attention to whats happening on the convention floor. All he is concerned with is how it looks on television. Donald Trump is letting the world know that he expects the convention to be about him, not the Republican Party.
If he were based in reality, Trump would realize that he has a major problem on his hands. But Donald Trump lives in a little fantasyland, where instead of leading the GOP, he is more worried about what cable news is saying about him.
The man who is now running the Republican Party isnt even paying attention to whats going on.
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On Saturday Donald Trump renewed his attack on Hillary CLinton for supposedly being in thrall of Wall Street, lobbyists and special interests even while he was busy illegally soliciting money from members of foreign governments, including Australian members of parliament and members of the U.K. House of Commons, all despite a previously issued FEC warning.
Crooked Hillary Clinton is bought and paid for by Wall Street, lobbyists and special interests. She will sell our country down the tubes! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2016
We have already seen that Trump owes a big chunk of money to Deutsche Bank, which alone stamps SOLD! all over him, but it is worse than that; as Mother Jones put it, Deutsche Bank is a foreign entity that has tried to evade laws aimed at curtailing risky financial shenanigans, that was recently caught manipulating markets around the world, and that attempts to influence the US government.
And then there are Trumps unusual ties to Russia and its oligarchs, including strongman Vladimir Putin, as detailed by The Washington Post.
Apparently being owned by a German bank and reliant on money from Russian oligarchs isnt enough for Trump. The Hill reported Saturday that Trumps campaign solicits illegal foreign donations despite warnings.
Thats right. Hypocrite Donald says he isnt owned by anybody. But he wants to be. He wants to be owned foreign individuals including members of foreign governments and it is not a matter of them offering to buy him, but of Trump soliciting them at their official email addresses, says The Hill.
The thing about Trumps solicitations from among foreign government officials besides being illegal, that is is that he had already been busted for doing just that, and proceeded to continue with his solicitations two weeks after a widely publicized Federal Election Commission (FEC) complain issued on June 29 by nonpartisan watchdogs Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center.
A press release from Democracy 21 says,
Donald J. Trumps presidential campaign committee is violating black-letter federal law by sending campaign fundraising emails to foreign nationals including foreign politicians in at least Iceland, Scotland, Australia and Britain. The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 today will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission highlighting this violation and demanding the agency send a clear message that foreign money is not allowed in U.S. elections.
Paul S. Ryan, CLC deputy executive director said of Trumps actions,
Donald Trump should have known better. It is a no-brainer that it violates the law to send fundraising emails to members of a foreign government on their official foreign government email accounts, and yet, thats exactly what Trump has done repeatedly. The FECs forum last week highlighted how foreign corporate money could infiltrate U.S. elections, but Trumps fundraising antics show that the FEC must also monitor candidates directly soliciting foreign money.
If the FEC fails to take action on our complaint, it could send a message that Trump and other candidates have the greenlight to fundraise overseas.
We are told The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Hill. Of course not, the Trump campaign is too busy saying Look over there! and accusing Hillary Clinton of being owned by outside interests.
Though it must be said, at least the people who reputedly own Hillary are Americans. If America is going to be sold down the tubes, as Trump puts it, it will at least be American tubes, while his plan is to, apparently, outsource the entire government to the highest bidder.
One British member of Parliament, we are told by The Hill, said he has received three solicitations from the Trump campaign. Trump doesnt have the money he claims he has, and his campaign has even less. Wall Street is terrified of what a Donald Trump presidency represents and is not surprising that the GOP is not getting the money it used to get from that source.
If Trump wants more money, he needs to show himself to be more stable and trustworthy. If he will not do that, it does not become magically legal for him to sell himself to the highest bidders in foreign governments. The presidency is not for sale, and U.S. foreign policy should not be based on who will give a washed-up former reality star the most money.
It is time for the FEC to act, and act decisively, to save American democracy from oligarchs both foreign and domestic.
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A rancher left 17 horses as a bequest for his three children. When the rancher passed away, his children opened his will.
The will stated the eldest child should get half of his 17 horses.
The middle child should get one-third of the 17 horses.
The youngest child should be given one-ninth of the 17 horses.
Because it is not possible to divide 17 into halves or thirds or ninths, the heirs started to fight among themselves as to the distribution. So they agreed to consult a wise old neighbor.
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The wise neighbor listened patiently to the will. After giving the instructions much thought, the wise man brought one of his own horses and added it to the 17, bringing the total count to 18.
Then he started reading the will again. Half of 18 is 9, so he gave the eldest child 9 horses.
One-third of 18 is 6, so he gave the middle child 6 horses. One-ninth of 18 is 2, so he gave the youngest child 2 horses.
He had distributed 9 plus 6 plus 2 horses, which came to 17. Then he took his own horse back.
Problem solved.
In this case, the wise neighbor started by acknowledging there was a problem and finding the "18th horse" -- the common ground. In order to reach a solution, you must believe there is a solution. Once the parties find the common ground, a solution may well follow.
In my opinion, this lesson should be taught not only in every problem-solving workshop but also in every team-building exercise.
Too often, we make problems larger than they are by rushing to solutions. Methodical thinking, breaking down the problem into manageable parts and considering unorthodox approaches are necessary skills that feed into practical outcomes.
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Following are a few simple steps that will lead to more successful problem-solving.
Identify the problem.Believe it or not, this step often is overlooked. You know something is wrong, but you haven't identified it. Example: Sales are down. Reason: Inferior product? Ineffective sales force? Competition? Pricing strategy? Get to the root of the problem, or you will not be able to address it.
Come up with a list of solutions.Let your brain roam freely. Even bad ideas can lead to good ideas. Stay open-minded and be willing to listen. Consider a variety of ideas and assess the merits and pitfalls of each.
Trim the list to one or two solutions.Think about how those actions would best solve the problem at hand. Do you have the resources or personnel to put those solutions into action? Will committing more money help or hurt elsewhere and create a new set of problems?
Take action.Decide what your ideal outcome will be. What help will you need? What is your strategy when you encounter an obstacle? Do you have the flexibility to alter your plans if the problem persists?
Finally, evaluate.If you have achieved a satisfactory result, can you sustain your progress? What changes would you make to improve the outcome? Can you use your plan to address other issues?
It's helpful to have a strategy prepared for when problems arise, because problems are a fact of life despite your best efforts. Accept that, but you don't have to surrender to them. Read on for a very creative solution.
A woman tells a psychiatrist: "Doctor, I have a problem and I really need help. Every night I have this terrible feeling that something or someone is under the bed, just waiting to get me."
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"That sounds very serious," the doctor replied, "but I think I can help you. It will require many hours of treatment and could take several months. And it could get expensive."
"How expensive?" the patient asked.
"Each session will cost $150," the doctor replied.
"Let me think about it and get back to you," she said.
A week later, the woman called the doctor and told him she would not require his services.
"Are you still planning on having therapy for your problem?" he asked.
"No, when I told my husband how much it would cost, he said he could cure me, and he has," she said.
"Really?" the incredulous doctor asked.
"Yes," she said. "He cut the legs off the bed."
Mackay's Moral: You can't solve a problem until you first admit you have one.
A Mayo Clinic-spawned medical-device firm has outgrown the Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator.
Resoundant Inc.makes an imaging device that works with traditional magnetic resonance image scanners to scan patient organs by using sound waves or magnetic resonance elastography.
Mayo Clinic's Dr. Richard Ehmanled the research to create the drum-like paddle to send vibrations into a patient to determine the stiffness of tissue. Currently, it is primarily used to scan livers.
This project started with an idea in 1992. A research article was published in 1995. Pioneer patents were filed in 1997. The second generation of the device was created in 2006. Eventually, a company was formed and it later moved into the Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator in the Minnesota Biobusiness Center.
Now, the growing company has become too big for the Accelerator.
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"We have five people working in an office made for two," said Jim Potter, Resoundant's vice president of sales and director of quality.
The plan is move to a new office on the second floor of the Premier Bankbuilding at 421 First Ave. SW. Potter estimates the move will happen in September.
"It will be quite a bit bigger," he said of the new office.
Resoundant's MRE device is growing in popularity as sales increase worldwide, Potter said.
Besides being designed and owned by Mayo Clinic, Resoundant's device also is made in Rochester. Benchmark Electronicsmanufactures the devices in its Rochester facility. -- Jeff Kiger
A juvenile driver rear-ended a motorcycle Saturday on Highway 52 near Rochester.
Two adults on the motorcycle were injured in the crash and transported by ambulance to Mayo Clinic Hospital - Saint Marys Campus. The motorcycle driver was Douglas Fong, 52, of Owatonna, and his passenger was Karen Kennedy, 51, of Burnsville.
According to a Minnesota State Patrol report, the motorcycle was in the northbound lane of Highway 52 shortly after 5 p.m. when it slowed for traffic ahead. The juvenile driver, in an Audi sedan, hit the motorcycle from behind.
The juvenile is not named in the state patrol report.
The Olmsted County Sheriffs Office and Chatfield Police Department assisted Minnesota State Patrol at the scene.
RUSHFORD The Rushford-Peterson School District does not have to call a special election to again put to a vote whether it should issue bonds for a new school, nor does it have to cancel the bonds.
The ruling against Rushford-Peterson Responsible Citizens Inc., which took the case to the Fillmore County District Court, was issued July 8 by Fillmore County District Court Judge Matt Opat and filed a week ago.
The citizens group had been fighting the district over whether it was correct to issue bonds for the school, which is about half done and expected to open in fall 2017. The group first tried to get the district to cancel the bonds, but the school board rejected it. The group then went to court.
One of the group's main contentions was that the district had received too much money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for damage the present school in Rushford suffered in the 2007 flood.
Stan Gudmundson, one of the group's leaders, pointed to an aerial photo of the flood at its peak that shows floodwaters never reached the school, yet the district got substantial money for it. "The building was not in the flood," he said. "There was a trivial amount of damage."
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The district, however, said the school suffered substantial damage from water and oil seeping into walls and causing other problems.
In his ruling, Opat ruled the citizens group "has failed to demonstrate that the district has a 'clear and indisputable' duty legally to call a special election to cancel bonds or to cancel bonds on its own." He also said the court doesn't have the authority to force a vote nor did the Minnesota Legislature give the district authority to redelegate authority to do that.
The group also contended the district violated the state Fair Campaign Practices Act. Again, the court ruled against it because it's too late.
The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can't be filed again.
MAZEPPA A 32-year-old Mazeppa man was injured Sunday when he lost control of an all-terrain vehicle he was riding in the Mazeppa Lions Park.
Tyler Clink was transported by ambulance to Mayo Clinic Hospital - Saint Marys Campus in Rochester.
The crash occurred Sunday around 11:40 a.m., according to the Minnesota State Patrol. The state patrol website offered no further information on the type of vehicle or conditions of the crash other than to say Clink was riding in the Lions Park, lost control of the ATV and crashed.
MANKATO Steve Gottwalt likes to surprise lawmakers with what he calls a remarkable statistic.
As the executive director of the Minnesota Rural Health Association, Gottwalt knows the difficulties behind getting quality medical care in Greater Minnesota. That's why, when speaking with state legislators, he tells them about the kind of access people have to their doctor.
"If you're in Minneapolis, you have almost 1 M.D., or medical doctor, for every 300 people," he says. "When you go to rural, and deep rural Minnesota, that's as many as 2,000 people."
Physicians have been in demand across the state for decades, but a looming boom in retirees has industry experts calling on lawmakers and medical companies alike to create more solutions and improve access to medical care before it becomes a problem.
Yet for many south-central Minnesotans, it's already difficult to access medical care.
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Parts of Blue Earth, Waseca, Faribault, Freeborn and Brown counties are considered to be medically underserved either geographically meaning there's a ratio of one doctor to 3,500 patients or more or because there aren't enough doctors to treat low-income populations, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.
There are far worse shortages in specialized medical fields. Blue Earth, Watonwan, Fairbault and Martin County don't have enough dentists to meet low-income patient demand. And only southeastern Minnesota and the Twin Cities metropolitan area have enough mental health professionals to meet patient needs.
Those needs will only grow during the next decade.
"We're facing a real need right now," said Dr. John McCabe, director of the University of Minnesota's Mankato Family Medicine Residency Program.
Greater Minnesota's population is aging at a faster rate than urban Minnesota meaning there are more older people aging in rural parts of the state.
And more doctors will be needed as baby boomers age out of the workforce a trend demographers are calling the "silver tsunami" of retirees across the U.S., which typically need more medical care than younger people.
"It lays out, demographically, a pretty tough situation going forward where we expect labor supply to continue to be a challenge," said Susan Brower, Minnesota's state demographer.
The U.S. will need about 90,000 more doctors by 2025 to meet incoming medical demands, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
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That shortage particularly affects rural areas, which have older people who live farther away from medical facilities compared to their urban counterparts. It's not a new phenomenon, but it will have harsh consequences for Minnesota, as more than half of the state's population still live in rural areas.
"It's really the areas that have been losing the younger generations for some time," Brower said.
The Mankato area is faring better than most when it comes to medical access. With two hospital systems and several area colleges, Mankato-area residents are statistically in a good position to have ongoing access to medical care.
That's not enough to solve access issues, however.
Transportation is a large part of the state's medical access issues. And area organizations keep busy driving patients to their medical appointments.
"The majority of our rides tend to be medical," said Carol Clark, transportation manager for VINE Faith in Action. "That's our primary rides that we do."
The Mankato-based interfaith volunteer organization transported people in Blue Earth, Nicollet and Le Sueur counties to medical centers 2,033 times in 2015. Of that, 1,135 rides were for senior citizens.
In addition, south-central Minnesota faces the same sort of underemployment issues hurting rural regions across the U.S.
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That's what makes initiatives like the Minnesota Valley Action Council's Wheel Get There program so popular. The Mankato office's transportation program sells donated cars for $400 to $700 dollars to buyers living in poverty.
Dan Jones, MVAC's transportation manager, gets 6,000 calls each year for a car. MVAC usually receives about 150 donated cars a year, 200 at most. It takes two days at most to sell a car, and in some cases takes less than two hours.
Most people tell MVAC they need the car so they can get to the doctor.
"There's a huge, huge need," Jones said. "A significant number of my calls come from people who are on disability."
Over the next two decades, more than 600,000 Minnesotans are expected to reach age 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Minnesota State Demographic Center. Minnesota's population as of 2014 is 5.4 million.
At the same time, Minnesota's medical care field doctors, nurses, personal care assistants, hygienists, etc. is expected to grow by tens of thousands of jobs by the year 2024.
"As employers have a hard time filling out jobs, what we hope is they're not going to stop creating jobs," Brower said.
In essence, the positions will only appear if there are candidates willing to take on those roles.
Solving that issue will require a lot more than just warm bodies in doctor jackets or nurse uniforms, however.
It's going to take a concerted effort to improve access to health care while training more people to perform more tasks within their respective roles.
Ray Christensen, associate dean of the University of Minnesota Duluth Medical School, believes primary care physicians, or general practitioners, will have a larger role to play in medical care. While many medical students choose specialized fields to pursue their careers, there's an increasing need for primary care doctors in family medicine, pediatrics and geriatrics across the U.S.
Though hospitals rush to recruit doctors nowadays, Christensen believes there could be a point where demand for specialists decrease because there could be too many of them filling roles that better suit a general practitioner.
"As of now, there's still a lot of places you can specialize," he said. "In the long run ... I'm not sure how sustainable that's going to be."
Yet the incoming senior boom means there's little time for medical companies and policy makers to put solutions into place.
"They need to be educated on that and respond accordingly," Gottwalt said. "The time is getting short."
The Rochester High School and Lourdes High School classes of 1946 will gather Friday for their 70th reunion.
The reunion will take place at the Kahler Apache hotel. The day will start at 8:30 a.m. with registration and should last until about 9 p.m.
The schedule will include a bus tour of Rochester, led by 87-year-old Richard L. Hexum Sr., the organizer of the reunion. He will show the Class of 1946 how much Rochester has grown and changed since high school.
"We will reminisce about the old spots we used to hang out at," Hexum said.
The tour will last a few hours and will be followed by lunch at the Kahler Apache hotel.
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After lunch, the group will hear from Destination Medical Center representatives.
The afternoon is going to be "low key," according to Lois (Nigon) Holland, co-organizer and Lourdes High School representative.
The afternoon will consist of a social hour, open cash bar and a whole lot of catching up.
The night will conclude with dinner at the Kahler Apache featuring representatives from Rochester High School and Lourdes High School and a sing-a-long with the class of 1946.
Sixty people have confirmed, and most of them are coming from out of town.
"It's great to see how many people have responded," said Hexum. "I mean we are all at least 87 years old!"
If you are a member of the graduating Class of 1946 and haven't received information about the reunion, contact Hexum at 507-535-2113
RED WING Three people were injured when two cars collided outside the city of Red Wing on Sunday.
According to the Minnesota State Patrol, Gayle Meyer, 70, of Red Wing, was stopped at the intersection of Highway 61 and County Road 18. When she pulled out onto Highway 61, her car was broadsided by a truck driven by 48-year-old Scott Bloom, of Burnsville.
Both vehicles were heavily damaged and Meyer, Bloom and Bloom's passenger, 45-year-old Kimberly Currier-Bloom, each sustained injuries. All three were transported by ambulance to Mayo Clinic Health Systems hospital in Red Wing.
The Goodhue County Sheriff's Office, Red Wing Police Department, Prairie Island Police Department and Red Wing Fire Department assisted the Minnesota State Patrol at the scene, according to a state patrol report.
WEST ALBANY A Fargo N.D. woman was injured Friday evening when the driver of the SUV she was in lost control of the vehicle going west on Minnesota Highway 60 near West Albany, the vehicle went into the ditch and rolled.
The State Patrol said Sylvia S. Langness, 22, was taken to Mayo Clinic Hospital - Saint Marys Campus in Rochester. She was not listed there as a patient this morning, according to a Mayo spokeswoman.
The driver was Kendell L. Vangness, 26, of Madison. The patrol said Vangness nor two other passengers had any apparent injuries.
The crash was reported at 8:05 p.m
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.
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington, Rebecca Santana and Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans, Maria Sudekum in Kansas Cit
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During the July 7 Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, no one expected the protest would end with someone shooting five police officers dead and injuring nine more.
But no one was surprised that it happened either.
That's because the last couple of years, since Black Lives Matter was created and officially organized, movement activists have intentionally increased its inflammatory anti-white racial hatred. It has peddled lies regarding the numbers of unarmed blacks shot by police in the face of clear statistical evidence to the contrary. It has defiantly increased its anti-cop rhetoric "What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now," "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon!" and has taken to taunting and assaulting officers as these racial extremists demonstrate and demand justice for blacks who have been shot by police.
Though the shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson himself a black radical wasn't an official member of Black Lives Matter, he acknowledged having been influenced by their program of black racial solidarity. He was attracted to their anti-white and anti-cop rhetoric. He was upset that blacks continued to be unjustifiably shot by police and decided to retaliate in kind, telling police negotiators that he wanted to "kill white people, especially white officers."
Black Lives Matter was indeed the catalyst for Johnson to act on his racial anger and paranoia.
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This is the same group that President Obama a former community organizer and social agitator himself has not only frequently praised and defended, but has repeatedly invited to the White House, the last invitation and meeting occurring only hours after the memorial service for the Dallas police officers in which Obama himself delivered his politicized eulogy.
With all of this in mind, people need a bit of moral clarification.
Some have suggested that Black Lives Matter is simply an extension of the civil rights movement, attempting to extend moral justification to an immoral group. But recent events should have answered that suggestion with unblemished certainty. Black Lives Matter movement isn't a successor to the civil rights movement. To claim so is offensive and trivializes the character, sacrifices, risks and accomplishments of what civil rights activists were able to achieve with less resources and less rights in a much more racist society.
Black Lives Matter unmistakably lacks the kind of moral authority that was present during the civil rights movement. Again, it calls for violence against cops. Further, due to its determined resistance to facts and evidence as it relates to the police-involved shootings of blacks, it has failed morally to convince the consciousness of those outside its racialized bubble as to the sincerity of the cause.
In essence, it has no moral agenda. Rather, these blacktivists consistently seek to provoke, antagonize, frustrate and offend the very people they claim are in need of hearing their message. Black Lives Matter encourages violence and chaos, and its activists and supporters rarely condemn it. It's an organization of belligerent, wannabe revolutionaries, who take to rioting, pillaging and burning down local businesses as they did in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore when activists marched for justice.
No, Black Lives Matter isn't a civil rights offshoot not even close. Instead, it is the ideological, racial and theatrical offspring of the 1960s-era black power movement. Black Lives Matter's aggressive and contentious tactics demonstrate as much the raised black fists and the regurgitated revolutionary chants, the celebration of black racial pride and solidarity, and their increasingly violent demands for varying definitions of "justice."
The lack of courageous condemnation of Black Lives Matter by good and decent people ensures more police officers will be shot in neighborhoods that desperately need their presence to ensure the safety of those who cannot afford to leave.
Things are going to get worse before they get better.
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Derryck Green is a political commentator, writer and a member of Project 21 a National Leadership of Black Conservatives. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
President Obama went to Dallas for the memorial service honoring the five police officers killed by a gunman while they protected a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration.
As our country attempts to grapple with a week marred by devastating violence both against African-American men at the hands of police and against police officers themselves, it's critical that we continue a conversation that the Dallas officers died trying to protect: the conversation about how to create a more just country where black lives truly matter.
On July 7 as demonstrators filled the streets of Dallas to speak out against the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, the local police department documented the march on Twitter. It posted photos of smiling officers standing with activists and described controlling traffic to make sure the marchers were safe.
Sharay Santora, who was protesting along with her two children, said the officers gave out hugs and high-fives. In her words, the message of the police was: "I'm here for you."
Against the backdrop of police officers who brutally killed a man during a traffic stop and another who was working to provide for his family, the Dallas officers were providing a powerful counter-example of policing by engaging with, serving and protecting the community. When the shooter opened fire at them, the officers died trying to defend a space for people to exercise their First Amendment rights and express their grief and rage in the wake of police shootings.
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Though some on the right have outrageously tried to point the blame toward the Black Lives Matter movement, in reality a way to honor those officers is to continue to make space for the conversation about racial justice that the officers' presence helped to facilitate. It's exactly what protesters have done throughout the history of this country and are already doing through peaceful demonstrations, vigils and marches across the country. These protesters are shining a spotlight on the fact that we live in a nation where police have killed at least 136 black people in 2016 alone (and it's only July).
Police are much more likely to use force against people of color than white people, and racism is pervasive, infecting our criminal justice system and forcing too many people to live in fear of whether they, or their child, will become the next name written across headlines and protest signs.
We have a responsibility to do everything we can to push back against these injustices. As a white woman, I believe that white people in particular need to step up and stand in solidarity with the people of color-led movements already pushing for racial justice reform along with criminal and juvenile and law enforcement reforms. We have to prioritize the conversation about how to end police violence against people of color as well as join in the work of fixing policies that have a negative effect on their social, economic, political lives.
In addition to being police officers, the five men who were murdered in Dallas were a part of the communities represented that day. They may or may not have agreed with the message that protesters were sending, but they stood up to facilitate and protect protesters' right to speak their mind.
Attempting to shut down that conversation, which the Dallas police officers were holding space for, doesn't honor them. It does exactly the opposite.
Marge Baker is the executive vice president of People for the American Way Foundation. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
One button has the power to silence a roomful of legislators.
Who knew?
"I don't know really if anyone knew," Rep. Greg Davids, R-Preston, said regarding the installation of a button to mute all legislators' microphones in the House chambers.
The button on the House speaker's podium, as well as one at the chief clerk's desk, was installed while remodeling the chamber prior to the session. Reports indicate the buttons were requested by nonpartisan clerk staff and approved by House Speaker Kurt Daudt.
Davids said he didn't know about them until he stepped up to the podium to fill in for Daudt. The Preston Republican said the primary purpose is to silence microphones during important presentations, such as the governor's annual State of the State address. It also will help during tours and events when the live microphones can cause problems.
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It makes sense to reduce the chance of added microphone noise during important messages. However, the fact that many lawmakers started this year's session without knowing they could be silenced sends a potentially troubling message.
At least two Rochester Democrats have raised concerns, In an online post Rep. Kim Norton noted "This type of autocratic maneuver, the sneaky non-transparent decision-making is so disappointing and not befitting the position."
Rep. Tina Liebling called it a "new low in Minnesota politics" and later told us the lack of information left lawmakers blindsided. "Members couldn't even protest, because we didn't know it was happening," she said of reports the button was used during debates.
Liebling said she plans to propose rules for usage of the button when lawmakers return to St. Paul, noting current rules call for all House proceedings to be recorded.
We're willing to believe the intent wasn't so nefarious, but we're more than a bit concerned about House video that appears to show lawmakers being silenced during unruly debate at the end of this year's session.
The Minnesota House has long been known for its informal nature and attempting to tether that would be a mistake in these days of partisanship that has led the legislature's inability to pass all bills as expected. Creating uncertainty through technology won't help get things accomplished in a divided House.
Davids noted many other states don't have the easy access to microphones given to Minnesota lawmakers, who can typically pick up a live microphone at their desks and start talking, even if out of order. Other states require lawmakers to ask permission before their microphones are turned on for a statement from the legislative floor.
We are proud to live in a state that believes in openness and provides our representatives a chance to be heard -- whether we agree with them or not.
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We wouldn't want it any other way.
While we don't object to efforts to improve sound quality for important events, or even silence microphones during tours, we do urge caution in use. Davids, who admits to accidently hitting the button once, says he's never intentionally cut someone off.
"I never used it," he said. "I don't see any reason to."
Neither do we.
BRUSSELS The terrorist who decimated a holiday crowd in Nice on Bastille Day was the latest incarnation of the nightmare confronting police in Brussels, Paris, Toulouse, Denmark, Orlando, and elsewhere.
How do you prevent a lone wolf from wreaking havoc on a community when the police have no previous indication of his terrorist leanings?
A team of security experts from Rutgers University, working with community leaders and police in Molenbeek, Brussels, thinks it has come up with an answer. Molenbeek, you'll recall, was home to the terrorists who attacked Paris in November and the Brussels airport in March.
I attended a workshop with the Rutgers team members and their Belgian counterparts last week in Brussels, and I'll get to their conclusions in a minute. But first, the story of how Rutgers came to be involved in Molenbeek.
The impetus for the project was the terror attack on the Brussels Jewish Museum on May 24, 2014, one of the first ISIS-linked attacks in Europe.
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That attack galvanized John Farmer, a former Rutgers Law School dean who now heads their Institute for Emergency Preparedness and Homeland Security, and who had been on sabbatical in Paris. With a grant from Rutgers alum Paul Miller, he visited Jewish communities across Europe with the goal of compiling the best U.S. and European practices for protecting vulnerable communities. Farmer was meeting with Jewish leaders in Paris when ISIS terrorists attacked a kosher grocery and the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in January 2015.
But as ISIS attacks mounted including Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March 2016 Farmer felt compelled to develop a more concrete policing model that could be used by a broader range of threatened communities even Molenbeek. He found a receptive environment in Brussels, starting with its chief police commissioner, Saad Amrani, who visited Rutgers.
The project idea to draw police, civic and business organizations, and local citizens into partnerships and develop community policing was not new. But it needed reviving and adaptation. Especially for Molenbeek or other European Muslim communities where police and citizens regarded each other with hostility and suspicion.
"What we hope to see in Molenbeek is a fundamental change in the relationship between the police and public," Farmer said.
"The missing link," adds Paul Goldenberg, a senior security adviser to the project, "is that no one is paying attention to the community." He says the project's goal is to "build communities of trust" that include business, religious, and community leaders so that local citizens are willing to share information with police and to recognize that terror attacks also threaten them.
In the past, that lack of trust in law enforcement has been a problem not just with Muslim-Belgian communities but with the Brussels Jewish community as well.
But the local Molenbeek police were eager to work with the Rutgers team, as I learned when I visited Division Commissioner of Police Johan De Becker. We met in his station house in the heart of this working-class district of shops and rowhouses.
De Becker told me a federal police reform in 2006 had basically dispensed with community policing and produced a constant turnover of officers. He is short 125 cops, with almost none from the local Moroccan-Belgian community because so few youths can meet the educational requirements.
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"We are really trying to reestablish community policing with ties to the local community," De Becker said. "The Rutgers project is indispensable because I can't do the training I need."
De Becker said something else important. "A majority of the population rejects these terrorists," he said firmly. "After the Paris and Brussels attacks, the majority reject that type of violence." No doubt the Nice atrocity will strengthen that state of mind.
I had the same impression when I visited Molenbeek in March, just before the airport bombing. I met residents whose prime concern had nothing to do with radical Islam, but rather was the need for improvement in the lousy local schools.
That impression was reaffirmed on this visit when I met Geraldine Henneghien, the mother of 18-year-old Anis Abou Bram, who died fighting for ISIS in Syria. A financial controller married to a salesman, she recounted her desperate effort to prevent her son from traveling to Syria. When she learned of his plans, she reported him to the police, in an effort to have him blocked at the airport, but a judge refused to issue the restraining order.
Henneghien later learned her son had been recruited by a son of the local imam who told Anis it was his duty to fight to save Muslim lives in Syria. The recruiter still operates freely in Molenbeek. Meantime, she says, police have not reached out to an association of parents with children who left for Syria, and died there or are still at risk. The police often harass the siblings of those who have left.
So the Rutgers project in Brussels couldn't be more timely. Last week, it brought together U.S. and European security experts and trained 21 Belgian chief police inspectors, as well as community engagement specialists, and will do a larger training in September.
The team also did a series of video interviews in Molenbeek with businessmen, community leaders, and young people that are used in the training. The most powerful film clip is of Henneghien, the mother of Anis. It provides a vivid reminder of what the police miss by not reaching out to citizens who want to fight back against terrorism.
That same willingness to help is no doubt present amongst many French citizens of Muslim faith in the banlieues (Muslim ghettos around large French cities) if the French police knew how to harness it.
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If the Rutgers team can develop a model that helps police in Europe or in America do a better job of community engagement, it will have performed a service that is desperately needed right now.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Circuit Judge Barry Williams has acquitted Brian Rice of all charges related to Freddy Grays arrest and death. This is the fourth time, in four attempts, that prosecutors have failed to obtain a conviction in the Freddy Gray case.
Judge Williams cleared Rice of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office charges this morning. Previously, he had dismissed a second-degree assault charge. Prosecutors dropped a second misconduct charge at the start of the trial.
Here is the Baltimore Suns account of the decision. Ill have more to say about it this afternoon.
UPDATE: Judge Williams read his verdict. He explained that although Rices failure to seat-belt Gray may have been a mistake and may have been bad judgment, it didnt amount to a crime. Prosecutors, he said, failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rice acted with gross negligence, putting Grays life at risk.
According to the Washington Post, about a half-dozen protesters received the news with disappointment outside the court house. (Emphasis added) The mob apparently has stopped beating this dead horse.
Its time for Marilyn Mosby to stop beating it. If anyone was guilty of a crime in connection with Grays death it was Clarence Goodson who drove the van and/or Brian Rice, the senior involved in the decision not to use a seat belt to restrain Gray.
But both officers have been found not guilty. Whats the point now in prosecuting officers as to whom claims of culpability are even weaker?
David Jaros, a law professor with the University of Maryland in Baltimore, acknowledged that its clear that this is a very difficult case to prove and that absent some new evidence, it will be very hard for the state to convict against the other officers because the theory is essentially the same. But Jaros added:
If [prosecutors] believes a crime was committed and they believe theyre sending a valuable message to the community about the value of a poor black mans life or what is appropriate responsibility for a police officer there are benefits of this trial that cant be measured in convictions and acquittals.
I would have thought it requires more than mere belief by a prosecutor that a crime has been committed before criminal charges should be brought. And Im pretty sure that its improper to bring down the hammer of the state on individuals just to send a valuable message to the community (even assuming theres value to the community in bringing weak criminal charges against those who are there to protect and serve it).
In any event, surely Mosby and her team have sent delivered the message they wanted to send in the Freddy Gray matter. Future trials would be not only unjust, but arguably counter-productive in terms of sending any legitimate message.
Future trials would, as Bill Otis says, send (or rather confirm) a pernicious message that the police are under attack, not because of misconduct but because of the culture of racial snarling.
Bill writes:
This fourth consecutive failure to convict a police officer in a politically-rigged prosecution comes less than 24 hours after three Baton Rouge officers were gunned down in the street. It comes a matter of days after five others were lured by following a supposedly peaceful BLM rally in Dallas, only once the rally reached its destination to be gunned down from ambush. If the police do not view themselves as under attack across the country, they would have to be blind. The evidence is not merely statistical ( although that too). Just pick up your morning paper.
Bill adds:
A country that attacks and intimidates the people it hires to protect it will soon enough regret is foolishness. I dont think serious observers can any longer doubt that one of the main reasons murder is surging across the country with a shocking increase of 17% last year in our nations 50 largest cities is that the police, under the weight of a toxic culture and an (at best) conflicted political leadership, are pulling back.
In Baltimore, the murder rate surged much more 63 percent last year. It seems clear that this sharp spike is due in significant part to the way Marilyn Mosby and then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake treated the police after Grays death a death as to which an African-American judge has repeatedly found no criminal responsibility attaches.
Mosby sent a message, all right. Baltimores residents, especially its black residents, are now suffering the consequences.
Im taking a sort of working vacation at the Pritikn Health Resort & Spa in Miami. My theory was that the working part would come in Pritikins location at the Trump National Doral Miami; Pritikin leases part of the propety from the Trump National Doral. My thought was that I would scout out the property to see what we could learn about Mr. Trump.
At my physical this morning, I got a little work bonus as I waited with Rep. Charlie Rangel for our first meeting with staff physician for a history and exam. At age 86, Rangel is still representing New Yorks 13th CD. Charles, as he was called by the staff, didnt seem too happy to be recognized when I greeted him and introduced myself. Im going to try to warm him up a little bit to see if he might be willing to share any observations of interest to Power Line readers.
I am stationed in the Phil Mickelson Villa of the Trump National Doral Miami. I can report that the beautiful (need I add yuge?) room is stocked with products from the Trump Hotel Collection: Trump shampoo, Trump conditioner, Trump body lotion, all Made in Canada. Comes the Trump revolution, is the Trump Hotel Collection safe?
Journalistic opponents of Trump have a couple of interesting pieces out today. These arent for Trump enthusiasts, but I do think they are, as I say, interesting.
One is Jane Mayers New Yorker article Donald Trumps ghostwriter tells all. Mayer doesnt mention Dave Shifletts discussions of his work as a ghostwriter for Trump, but they are interesting as well. James Freeman interviewed Shiflett about the experience for the Wall Street Journal (accessible via Google here. Shiflett himself wrote about the experience in Another time, another Trump (accessible via Google here). The other piece out today is McKay Coppinss BuzzFeed piece Confessions of a dishonest slob.'
Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg talk about their antipathy to Trump in the first hour of Bills most recent Conversatoin, posted in chapters here (video below). Again, this is not for Trump enthusiasts.
Toward the end of the interview, Jonah recommends a few books that proved influential in his intellectual development as a conservative. In this part of the discussion I completely identify with Jonahs invocation of his father: My dads idea of vacation was going from one side of the couch to the other side of the couch to read a different book or a different magazine.
As John points out in this post, President Obama has spent seven years stirring up racial division for the sake of political gain. The police has been one of his targets, from his earliest days as president, when without knowing the facts he derided Cambridge police, through his recent speech in Dallas, when he claimed that policing in America is infected with racism.
There isnt anything Obama can say that will undo the damage he has caused. But perhaps, during the last six months of presidency, he can avoid making matters worse. To this end, Victor Davis Hanson lists three things Obama can stop doing:
No longer invite into the White House any leaders [e.g., DeRay McKesson] whose affiliated members have marched chanting their desire to kill police officers (e.g., What do we want? Dead cops / Pigs in a blanket; fry em like bacon). Do not consult with any self-appointed leader in the White House whose past has included overt and implicit calls to shoot police officers (e.g., Al Sharpton: I believe in offing the pigs. Well, they got pigs out here. You aint offed one of them. What I believe in, I do. Do what you believe in. Or shut up and admit youve lost your courage and your guts to stand up). Do not invite into the White House any artists whose work has glorified the killing of officers of the criminal-justice system (e.g., Lamar Kendricks To Pimp a Butterfly album, one of whose songs was dubbed by Obama as his favorite of 2015), whose cover depicts a group of African-American youth celebrating with champagne and cash on the White House lawn over the corpse of a white judge with his eyes X-ed out).
Hanson believes that this is not too much to ask of the president of the United States. Hes right. Unfortunately, its a lot to ask of Barack Obama.
UPDATE: Bill Otis suggests a fourth thing Obama could stop doing: Stop inviting to the White House people whose ankle bracelet goes off during the meeting.
The President Muhammadu Buharis administration, which came to power on the plank of anti-corruption and good governance, will fully comply with the provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act and other extant laws as they relate to the submission of budget proposals of Federal Government agencies and corporations to the National Assembly, the presidency has said.
The President has lived up to this commitment of accountability and transparency with the recent submission of the proposed budgets of CBN, NNPC, Nigerian Ports Authority and others, Garba Shehu, a presidential spokesman, told journalists in Abuja.
The transmission of budgets for the MDAs to the National Assembly, particularly those regarding the Central Bank and the NNPC behemoth is clearly unprecedented.
The President is determined to make the budgeting process more transparent and participatory.
It is all part of the re-engineering of the entire processes of governance for the benefit of ordinary citizens.
According to Mr. Shehu, the President strongly believes that good governance and transparency are integral to the nations progress and key to the Federal Governments programme to revamp the economy.
He said by responding positively to the demand of the National Assembly that MDA budgets be laid before it for scrutiny, a demand mostly ignored by past administrations, President Buhari has indeed given a clear indication of his commitment to an open, transparent and people-oriented government for Nigerians.
The Presidential spokesman added that by the action, the current administration also demonstrated its respect for parliament as a principal arm of government in a constitutional democracy.
Our hope and expectation is that the National Assembly, acting in the best interest of the nation will allow the immediate operationalization of the MDAs budgets, so that the momentum of growth of the economy which has begun to build up will be sustained, Mr. Shehu said.
APPOINTED:
Hadiza Bala Usman, one of the initiators of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign group and former Chief of Staff to Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, was on Monday, July 11, appointed Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Mrs. Usman, 40, and an indigene of Kaduna State, holds a B.Sc. Degree in Business Administration from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and a Post Graduate Diploma in Development Studies from the University of Leeds, the United Kingdom in 2009.
She started her career in June 2000 as a Research Assistant with the Centre for Democratic Development and Research Training, Zaria, a non-governmental organization. Between July 2000 and August 2004, she worked at the Bureau of Public Enterprises as Enterprise Officer.
She was hired by the UNDP for the Federal Capital Territory Administration from October 2004 to January 2008 as Special Assistant to the Minister on Project Implementation. She worked as Director of Strategy of the Good Governance Group, another non-governmental organization, from 2011 to July 2015.
Tony Attah, a former Managing Director of Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company, was on Thursday appointed Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria LNG Limited by the companys board of directors.
He took over from Babs Omotowa, who held the position for nearly five years and would be returning to Shell International in the Hague, Netherlands.
Mr. Attah mounts the saddle after returning from an assignment at Shells Group Integrated Gas business as Senior Projects Advisor, working on projects in the Netherlands and Singapore.
He comes to the NLNG with a 28-year experience in the Nigerian oil and gas industry, and will be responsible for sustaining NLNGs top quartile performance in supplying liquefied natural gas to the global energy market and advancing the companys expansion programmes.
HONOURED:
Oby Ezekwesili, former Vice President of the World Bank for Africa and leading voice on the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, was on Tuesday conferred with a honorary degree by the University of Essex, England, United Kingdom.
The former minister of education was honoured for her work in promoting transparency and accountability in government and lending a voice to the importance of the office of the citizen in a country like Nigeria.
This is a humbling experience, I consider this so inspiring of the work that I have done so far in my career and the University of Essex being one of the top universities in the world, values match those of the university and my father inspired me to be diligent and continue to learn till I reach my goal in life, said Mrs Ezekwesili while addressing Essex Business School graduates at the ceremony.
Mrs Ezekwesili is a staunch advocate for active citizenship and a leading voice in sensitizing the government on the plight of the abducted Chibok girls.
She is currently a Senior Economic Advisor with the Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative (AEDPI) where she advises Presidents of African countries and their cabinets on economic development strategy, policies and implementation.
Mrs. Ezekwesili is also co-founder of Transparency international, the global anti-corruption NGO.
Toyin Oyekanmi, an alumnus of the University of Abuja, was recognized by the university as the most creative alumnus for the year 2016.
The creator of the movie, titled, Visibility Zero, was honoured during the institutions graduate empowerment training summit in Abuja.
Mr. Oyekanmi was a recipient of the most outstanding president in the university for his contribution to creativity and entrepreneurship development in the institution.
A situation where the number one judiciary officer of the country will be the one that will be flouting the Constitution is unacceptable.
Senate President, Bukola Saraki, on the seemingly refusal of the Attorney General of the Federal and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, to appear before the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters to explain why he brought charges against the leadership of the senate for the alleged forgery of the Senate Standing Order 2015. Mr. Malami later appeared before the committee (Source: The Punch)
Look this is not Bourdillon. I will beat you up, .. impregnate you and nothing will happen.
Senator Dino Melaye (APC-Kogi) reportedly said to Senator Remi Tinubu (APC-Lagos) while charging towards her during altercations between both, in a closed senate session. Mrs. Tinubu is the wife of the APC national leader, Bola Tinubu (their Lagos residence is popularly called Bourdillon). The Senate President Bukola Saraki and many of his supporters, like Mr. Melaye, believe Mr. Tinubu was behind his (Sarakis) travails (Source: Premium Times)
When the guard is the thief, only God can keep the house safe and secure. But I am optimistic that sooner than later, we will overcome.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo accusing Nigerias National Assembly of being corrupt (Source: Premium Times)
Just because you prosecuted a few rotten apples it doesnt mean that youve massively transformed the sector.
Eleonore Vidal de la Blache, of Transparency Internationals Africa defence and security programme, while assessing President Muhammadu Buharis war against corruption said major issues in Nigerias defence sector has not really been sorted out (Source: AFP)
The night has proved to be a dark stain for the Turkish state. The nation has given the best answer to terrorists.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on the failed coup attempt in Turkey (Source: Aljazeera)
These charges are politically motivated and I have been severely punished for my political views and criticisms of the government.
Femi Fani-Kayode, former minister of Aviation, and a PDP chieftain, said of his corruption trial, immediately he was released from prison on a N250 million bail. Mr. Fani-Kayode spent 67 days in prison custody (Source: Premium Times)
A battle is brewing between the immediate past Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, and his successor, Ibrahim Idris, over the claim by Mr. Idris that his former boss went away with 24 police vehicles after he retired from service.
The Punch newspaper quoted Mr Idris as saying at a press conference, Sunday, that the 24 vehicles Mr Arase refused to return to the police included two bullet-proof BMW 7 series.
He also reportedly alleged that the deputy Inspector Generals who retired alongside Mr. Arase also left with between seven and eight cars each.
Mr. Idris told journalists in Abuja that a special investigation team was already probing the number of vehicles purchased by the police in the last three years and how they were distributed.
The acting Inspector General also said he had written to his predecessor and other recently retired senior police officers to return the vehicles in their possession.
So, what I am telling you is that I have signed a directive to my SIP (I have a special investigation panel, I set it up). It is going to investigate all the vehicle purchases, contributions to the police and the distribution of those vehicles in the last three years; we are going to look into that.
When I took over, there was no vehicle, even the vehicle I would use. I discovered the last IG went away with 24 vehicles; the DIGs, some of them eight, some of them seven. The IGs vehicles included two BMW 7 series, one armoured; and he left me with an old car.
The last time I followed the President with it, he was asking me, what are you doing with this old car because if you see the headlight, the thing has changed colour, which means they parked it and rains and everything had fallen on it, but the new ones that were bought, he (Arase) went with all of them; they are part of the 24.
I wrote back to him and said, we have a policy that says when a policeman retires, if you are an IG, AIG, a CP, you are entitled to some vehicles; please, the extra, return it. Four vehicles are enough for an average human being, but what will you even do with four vehicles; but he took 24 vehicles, including two BMW cars.
I wrote to him (Arase), I wrote to the DIGs.
He said he was baffled that cars that were parked at the force headquarters transport department disappeared just a week before he assumed duties as Inspector General.
If you look through the windows of my former office and from the report from my (Force) transport officer, you would see cars but a week to the day I would resume, all these cars disappeared.
However, Mr. Arase denied the allegation, describing it as a malicious propaganda.
He said Mr. Idris should focus on confronting the security challenges in the country instead of wasting time on media propaganda.
What am I going to do with 24 cars? Do I want to open a car shop? This is a malicious accusation. There are ways of verifying issues rather than engaging in media propaganda, The Punch quoted the former police boss as saying.
Meanwhile, Mr. Idris has vowed to investigate the complaints by some officers over unfair promotions and postings. He said he has set up a probe panel to investigate if the promotions were in line with the dictates of the police service commission.
On July 16, Premier Li Keqiang concluded his four-day visit in Mongolia and returned to Beijing with productive bilateral and multilateral diplomatic achievements.
During his four days in Mongolia, Premier Li paid an official visit to the country and attended the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit.
Fifteen bilateral cooperation documents with Mongolia were signed, and a plan for the development of Asia-Europe cooperation in the next decade was put forward at the summit.
In addition, China won wide support on the South China Sea issue at the summit.
Lets take a look at Premier Lis activities during his stay in Ulaanbaatar.
Productive official visit to Mongolia
Premier Li received warm traditional welcome on arriving in Chinas close neighbor to the north.
The great importance of China-Mongolia relations was in evidence as all top Mongolian leaders, including president, prime minister and chairman of the State Great Hural, met with Premier Li.
Amid the friendly atmosphere, China and Mongolia signed 15 cooperation documents in trade, technology, infrastructure construction, radio and television broadcasting, laying the foundation to coordinate both countries economic strategies.
Visions for upgraded Asia-Europe cooperation
The 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) was another major activity in Ulaanbaatar.
Premier Li stressed that China is against all forms of terrorism, as France experienced another terrorist attack on the opening day of ASEM.
The Premier then put forward his visions for the development of the two continents in the next decade as he stressed that all parties should uphold the meetings consensus of mutual respect and friendly consultation, explore new ways to promote comprehensive cooperation of Asia and Europe, and enhance the scope of cooperation.
For an upgraded Asia Europe cooperation, he put forward three suggestions: innovating cooperation philosophies, adding driving forces of cooperation, and enhancing the humanistic foundation of cooperation.
His ideas offered a feasible and applicable plan for the development of Asia-Europe cooperation in the next 10 years, as this year marks the 20th anniversary of ASEM.
Premier Li Keqiang also had conversations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and President of the European Council Donald Tusk in the corridor after the welcome ceremony of the 11th ASEM summit.
Wide support on South China Sea issue
On the issue of South China Sea, Premier Li made efforts at the multilateral and bilateral stages during the summit and received broad support.
At an informal meeting during the summit on July 16, the Premier stressed Chinas stance on the South China Sea issue, saying that under no circumstance will the arbitration award exert any impact on Chinas territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea.
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, in order to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.
His remarks received wide backing and understanding from members at the meeting.
In addition, nations leaders, such as Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Laotian Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and Russias Medvedev, expressed their support for China on the South China Sea issue during their respective meetings with Premier Li.
Neither the Ulaanbaatar Declaration nor the chairs statement, endorsed by Asian and European leaders at the summits end, contains any specific reference to the South China Sea.
An investigative panel set up by President Muhammadu Buhari to audit procurement of arms by and for the Nigerian military between 2007 until he assumed office in 2015 submitted another interim report on Thursday.
The Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement in the Nigerian Armed Forces completed the first of its piecemeal reports in November 2015 in which a former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, was indicted for allegedly mismanaging over N13 billion budgeted for procurement of arms.
Mr. Buhari ordered immediate arrest of Mr. Dasuki as recommended by the 13-member committee and he had since remained in detention amid disputes about how he should be prosecuted.
In February 2016, the committee, which consists of individuals pooled from mainly military or security background, visited military facilities across the country to carry out a physical examination of military weaponry and equipment and verify if new deliveries were taken, how they were purchased and their quality.
The panel then found over a dozen former military chiefs culpable in fraudulent arms deal within the period under review.
A former Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh, and Adesola Amosu, a former Chief of Air Staff, were subsequently indicted. They are facing trial in various high courts.
The report submitted to President Buhari on Thursday is third in the series, and it uncovered how ex-political appointees, private individuals and former military chiefs, including two erstwhile Chiefs of Army Staff, were suspected culpable in alleged fraudulent diversion of funds meant for arms procurement.
Azubuike Ihejirika and Kenneth Minimah, who both served under President Goodluck Jonathan, were recommended for further investigation by the committee.
Mr. Buhari was, however, criticised for allegedly doctoring the outcome of the latest report.
Critics said the panel indicted a close ally of Mr. Buhari and the current Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau, but that the administration compelled the committee to have his name removed before publishing the report.
The government denied the allegations.
As supporters and opponents argued over the impact the alleged protection of Mr. Dambazau would have on Buhari governments much-avowed zero-tolerance for corruption, PREMIUM TIMES looked at the 10 biggest revelations from the latest arms panel findings.
1) Receiving big to deliver little:
The committee, led by Jon Ode, a retired Air Vice Marshal, found that, 3 contracts with a total value of N5,940,000,000.00 were awarded to DYI Global Services Ltd and Doiyatec Comms Nig Ltd (owned by the same individuals) for the procurement of military hardware including 20 units of K-38 Twin Hull Boats and 6 units of 4 x 4 Ambulances fitted with radios.
The Committee found that the 2 companies collected N5,103,500,000.00 representing 86% of the total value of the 3 contracts worth N5,940,000,000.00, but only performed to the tune of N2,992,183,705.31.
2) Inconclusive delivery:
In another instance, 2 contracts were awarded to Baram International Nigeria Limited, amounting to N420,726,799.20 for the procurement of 53 Armoured Vehicles Spare Parts at the cost of N169,916,849.77 and that of Ballistic Vests, Night Vision Binoculars and 3 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles at the cost of N250,809,949.50. Sadly, the contract worth N169,916,849.77 with 90 days completion time is yet to be completed 5 years after.
3) International embarrassment:
Similarly, between 29 April 2005 and 19 October 2010, the MOD (Ministry of Defence) awarded 2 contracts to Progress Limited for the supply of 42 units of BTR-3U Armoured Personnel Carriers and spare parts for the Nigerian Army.
However, neither the MOD nor the NA could provide the contract agreements to ascertain the cost of the APCs. Although 26 of the APCs were delivered in 2007 and immediately deployed for Peace Keeping Operations in Sudan, the APCs scandalously broke down on induction.
The Committee observed that the APCs did not meet the operational requirement for the Army, caused Nigeria international embarrassment and deprived her appropriate reimbursement from the United Nations.
4) Circumventing due process:
With respect to contracts awarded directly by the Nigerian Army, the Committee found that many of the contracts were characterised by lack of due process, breach of extant procurement regulations and tainted by corrupt practices.
In this regard, a review of the procurement carried out by Chok Ventures Ltd and Integrated Equipment Services Ltd established that between March 2011 and December 2013, the two companies exclusively procured various types of Toyota and Mitsubishi vehicles worth over N3,000,000,000.00 for the Nigerian Army without any competitive bidding.
Though the Committee found no credible evidence of delivery of the vehicles, the vendors were fully paid based on job completion certificate authenticated by the then Chief of Logistics.
Also, analyses of the various banks accounts of the two companies showed transfers to individuals related to the then Chief of Army Staff.
5) A brave colonel paid the ultimate price for the greed of his superiors:
Furthermore, the post- delivery Technical Inspection Reports revealed that the APCs were unsuitable for the North East operation. However, sequel to the deployment of the APCs in the North East, one was destroyed by RPG fire, killing a Colonel inside.
As at 13 May 2016, only one of the 10 Igirigi APCs deployed to the North East was serviceable.
6) Double jeopardy for troops attached to Operation Boyona:
It was also found out that following a request by the ONSA on 13 May 2013, the Government released N1,340,000,000.00 for OPERATION BOYONA, aimed at dislodging terrorist camps along the borders with Cameroun, Chad and Niger. In August 2013, ONSA requested and got approval for additional N2,000,000,000.00. However, DHQ (Defence Headquarters) and the Services confirmed non-receipt of any additional funds for Operation BOYONA.
7) Fictitious firms as conduit for fraudulent proceeds:
Similarly, in January 2015, the then Honourable Minister of State Foreign Affairs (HMSFA II) requested N7,000,000,000.00 to urgently fund the operation of the Multi National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) in the Lake Chad Basin which was approved and released to ONSA.
However, the Committee could not ascertain the utilization of the funds from ONSA, DHQ and the Services. The returns made by ONSA to the Committee showed that about N1,500,000,000.00 was withdrawn in cash while several disbursements were made to some companies that appeared not to have any relationship with the MNJTF or any operations against Boko Haram.
8) How dollars became orphaned:
The Committee observed that contracts awarded to SEI and its two associated companies, APC Axial Ltd and HK-Sawki Nig Ltd, fell short of established norms. Between May 3, 2014 and March 2015, the ONSA mandated CBN to release various sums totalling $386,954,000.00 to SEI and the two associated companies for procurement of technical equipment, without tying the money to particular items of procurement.
Thus, the allotment of the fund was left at the discretion of the vendor without input or consultation with ONSA or the Nigerian Army.
9) When NIMASA sub places with the CBN:
The Committee also noted that between September 3, 2014 and 30 April 30, 2015, NIMASA funded accounts of the Joint Task Force Operation Pulo Shield with various sums totalling N8,542,586,798.58 purportedly to enhance operations of the Joint Task Force in the Niger Delta.
Analyses of the accounts of the Joint Task Force showed that transfers totalling N6,277,698,885.13 were made from the account. The then JTF Commander could not justify these transfers but confirmed that the sums were changed into dollars and handed over to a private citizen. Additionally, he could not account for the balance of N2,264,887,914.45
10) Looting without limit:
Finally, going by the last flag raised by the committee, it appeared there was no limit the suspected looters couldnt go, as even accrued tax revenues were not remitted to the appropriate authorities.
The Committee observed breaches of the laws and regulations on payments of With-holding Tax (WHT) and Value Added Tax (VAT). The unremitted WHT from 2007 to 2015 amounted to about N862,962,065.99, $2,093,710.06 and 2,700.00 respectively.
However, through the intervention of the Committee, some companies remitted N109,843,495.40 to FIRS. The Committee is of the opinion that the Federal Inland Revenue Services should liaise with the Nigerian Army to recover all outstanding payments of WHT.
The Nigerian Army on Sunday released 249 detainees arrested at different times on suspicion that they were members of the extremist Boko Haram sect.
The detainees, including 34 children and 46 women, were handed over to the Borno State government at a brief ceremony in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, with the army saying they had been found innocent of the crimes for which they were held.
But there was no apology or compensation from the military or the Nigerian government to the detained persons for the pains and trauma they suffered during their incarceration.
The only compensation the suspects got was N3,000 each, which was handed them by officials of the Borno State government to transport themselves back to their homes.
Nigerian security agencies regularly engage in mass arrests of suspects, labelling them Boko Haram terrorists, and then detaining them for months, and even years.
But, in what is clearly a violation of Nigerian laws, no formal apology or compensation is ever given by the Nigerian state or its military to those so illegally detained.
About eight months ago, 182 such suspects were released (40 boys, 24 women, 100 adults and 18 children).
In February 2016, another set of 275 persons, including underaged children, were set free after prolonged detention. They comprised 142 males and 49 females.
In November 2014, the Nigerian Army released yet another batch of 125 detainees who were found not to be related to Boko Haram in any form.
They were set free shortly after another group of 42 were released after months in detention.
Human Rights Lawyer, Festus Okoye, said the military and the Nigerian government were in severe breach of the Nigerian Constitution and the Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Act 2013 by illegally detaining people for weeks, months or years, and then releasing them without public apology or compensation.
Section 35 (Subsection 6) of the 1999 Constitution provides that Any person who is unlawfully arrested or detained shall be entitled to compensation and public apology from the appropriate authorities and persons.
On its part, Section 28 (1) of the Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Act says, Where a person is arrested under reasonable suspicion of having committed any offence under this Act, the relevant law enforcement or security officer may direct that the person arrested be detained in custody for a period not exceeding forty-eight hours from his arrest
On November 18, 2015, the Army announced that its Joint Investigation Committee had cleared one Abubakar Sadiq, a Maiduguri resident who was erroneously arrested a month before then on suspicion he was one of the 100 Boko Haram terrorists wanted by the authorities..
The army had announced the arrest of Mr. Sadiq, a security guard at the residence of Mohammed Daggash in the Borno State capital, saying he was suspect number 28 on its wanted Boko Haram terrorists lists.
However, a thorough investigation carried out, as well as new Boko Haram terrorists video clip acquired and the employment of forensic analysis, the committee conclusively confirmed that it was a case of mistaken identity, the spokesperson for the army, Sani Usman, said on November 18, 2015.
The erroneously arrested person has since been released to his family.
The investigation further showed that the Daggash family have nothing to do with the incident or associated with any security breach in Borno State.
The statement did not contain any apology to Mr. Sadiq, who the army widely advertised as a wanted terrorist and detained for one month.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday said the judiciary arm of government was yet to perform its functions to the satisfaction of Nigerians given the reforms brought about by the Administration of Criminal Justice Act.
Mr. Buhari stated this at the National Judicial Institute, Abuja, while declaring open a Workshop for Nigerian Judges organized by the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption in conjunction with the NJI.
The President also said the Judiciary must take steps to ensure that it was not perceived as being partisan.
He said Judges must be aware of the sensitivities of the public and take steps towards avoiding even a shred of a doubt regarding their independence.
In justice, integrity is a necessity. Hence, Judicial Officers and all other members of this sector must always demonstrate manifest integrity, he said.
Mr. Buhari advised the judiciary to be in the forefront of efforts to develop rights-based jurisprudence as an element in the multi-disciplinary approach advocated in the fight against corruption.
He said as an arm of government, the judiciary had a role to play in the fight against corruption by enforcing the applicable laws.
Critically important also, is the sacred duty of the judiciary to ensure that criminal justice administration is not delayed, Mr. Buhari said.
I am worried that the expectation of the public is yet to be met by the judiciary with regard to the removal of delay and the toleration of delay tactics by lawyers.
When cases are not concluded the negative impression is given that crime pays. So far, the corruption cases filed by government are not progressing as speedily as they should in spite of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 essentially because the courts allow some lawyers to frustrate the reforms introduced by law, he said.
Mr. Buhari said the scenario such as the one he painted must change for his administration to succeed in its fight against corruption.
The president said he has made the fight against corruption one of the top priorities of his administration in the hope of restoring the economy and build a new Nigeria.
He said in the face of dwindling revenues and in a bid to reposition Nigerias economy, it became obligatory to swiftly tackle two ills; waste and corruption.
He said the eradication of corruption is a joint task involving not only judges and members of the legal profession, but all Nigerians.
The challenge is to come up with an integrated approach that balances process and substance, promote clarity to ensure a coherent and realistic formulation of objectives.
To this end, the Judiciary is under a duty to keep its house in order and to ensure that the public, which it serves, sees this.
Thus, we cannot expect to make any gains in the war against corruption in our society when the judiciary is seen as being distant from the crusade.
This will not augur well and its negative effect will impact all sectors of society, he said.
He advised the judiciary to always fight delay of cases in court and to also fight corruption in its own ranks, perceived or otherwise.
We expect to see less tolerance to delay tactics used by defence lawyers or even the prosecution in taking cases to conclusion, he said.
Speaking earlier, the chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), Itse Sagay, also lamented the incessant delays in the prosecution of corruption cases.
He said the delays allow people with corruption allegations to seek new offices such as the Senate or even governorship which then allowed them immunity from prosecution.
Mr. Sagay, a Professor of Law, said PACAC had so far trained over 160 prosecutors, and had also produced a manual for organized prosecution of corruption cases.
The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, said his office had so far received over 8000 case files from the Nigerian Police for prosecution.
The AGF said the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, ACJA, 2015 had been acknowledged as a revolutionary legislation, adding that what was remaining was its effective implementation.
Mr. Malami also said the act had created value chain across all levels and that there was need to make it a truly national law.
The keynote speaker at the event, Justice John Vertes, who is the President of the Commonwealth Judges and magistrates association, said corruption attacks the foundation of most democratic institutions and it often assumes many forms.
Corruption, regardless of location or language is primarily to extort money or to preserve power, he said.
Mr. Vertes, who spoke on the theme Corruption and Development: What the Courts Can Do and Have Done argued that the cancer of corruption has made economic development in Nigeria to be static.
Investors are discouraged due to high rate of corruption, he said.
He also said funding of the Courts should be independent of the executive arm in order to avoid manipulation of judges.
On his part, the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed, said the workshop was aimed at enhancing the strategies on the adjudication of corruption cases.
Mr. Mohammed said corruption in Nigeria had become complex and could not be solved in isolation.
The CJN said corruption suppresses economic growth and undermine the peoples collective security, while aggravating poverty.
Corruption cannot be tackled without transparent delivery of justice, he said.
The Senator representing Lagos Central, Oluremi Tinubu, has written the Acting Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, requesting adequate security saying her colleague, Dino Melaye, is a threat to her life.
Mrs. Tinubus letter, dated July 18 and titled Request for Police Protection, came seven days after she clashed with Mr. Melaye during a Senates closed-door session.
It also came two days after Mr. Melaye roamed her Bourdillion Road neighbourhood in Lagos and then posted photographs of his adventure on social media.
During the proceedings of the Senate on Tuesday July 14, 2016, I had a cause to contribute to a matter of national importance, Mrs. Tinubu wrote in her letter delivered to the police inspector general on Monday. Apparently dissatisfied by my contributions, Senator Dino Melaye threw caution to the winds, resorted to vulgar abuse of my person and wanted to assault me.
Mrs. Tinubu told the IGP that but for her colleagues who shielded her, she would have been physically attacked by Mr. Melaye, as the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and others who form parts of the Senate leadership were unhelpful.
It was the intervention of a number of colleagues which prevented Senator Melaye from unleashing physical attack on me. However, as the leadership of the Senate did not call him to order in the circumstance, he proceeded to threaten my life without provocation whatsoever.
In view of Senator Melayes antecedent, particularly in the House of Representatives where a brawl led by him led to untimely death of a member, I have decided to not ignore his threat to my life. Therefore, I am compelled to urge you to use your good offices to provide me with adequate security.
The Senators who witnessed the dirty clash between Messrs Melaye and Tinubu, hinted that the former threatened to beat and impregnate his female colleague.
They said Mrs. Tinubu called Mr. Melaye a thug.
But on Thursday, Mr. Melaye said he did not threaten to impregnate Mrs. Tinubu because she has already arrived menopause.
He said he hit back at Mrs. Tinubu after she called her a dog.
On Saturday, he flew to Lagos, and later posted on Facebook 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 Facebook page, 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.
Through his updates, he suggested he had received threats not to enter Lagos and doing so on Saturday was a daring move by him.
President Buhari has come under attack over reports suggesting his government may have deliberately doctored the latest report of the presidential arms audit panel.
The reports have cast doubt on the integrity of an administration that repeatedly defined honour and transparency in public service as part of its cardinal objectives, critics said.
Mr. Buhari set up the investigative panel three months after he assumed office to help uncover fraudulent practices that might have occurred in the procurement of arms for the military between 2007 and 2015.
While the committee has so far uncovered monumental corruption in military procurement, indicting many political and military bigwigs, critics say there were strong indications the government doctored the latest probe report.
At issue is the suspicion that the government may have removed the name of the Interior Minister, Abdulrahman Dambazau from the report to shield him from prosecution.
Mr. Dambazau served as Chief of Army Staff from 2008 to 2010.
A deluge of comments beneath PREMIUM TIMES report on the matter showed that even the presidents staunch supporters were opposed to the exemption of Mr. Dambazau from the report.
Many Nigerians also took the debate to Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms to express anger, with some of them questioning the presidents integrity.
Some critics also believe the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, who served briefly as Director of Procurement, Defence Headquarters, from February until May 2014, should also have been indicted.
Below are some reactions sourced from our website and social media. (Some of the comments were edited to correct spelling, syntax, grammatical or typographical errors.)
On Web site
Adekunle Ajayi:
I will be highly disappointed if these two generals are left out of this probe, but we will wait and see how they can wiggle their way out if other actors are arrested and tried. A thief is a thief, no matter what part of the country they come from. My President, your integrity and honour are at stake here.
Gaskins:
All Buhari is interested in is the investigation of his enemies while he shields his friends. Burutai, who all his life has been a soldier, earned enough salary from FGN to own properties in Dubai?
Julius:
If this report is true, it raises alarm with the way things are done with this administration and should be corrected immediately. This is where a serious and reliable Senate would come in and do their constitutional duty. But, as we all know, they are fighting for their own personal survival to hold on to power. They are failing us in every which way they can. The admin should also respond to this news. ASAP!
Maria:
Buhari is a disappointment .Hypocrite. Shame on you! I supported this government because I wanted corruption stamped out but with this selective prosecution, I have no respect for you anymore. I was happy you started fighting corrupt people but leaving out this type in your government, and in fact, appointing that man in the first place is an indictment on your socalled integrity.
On Twitter:
@Chxta:
This story will return one day. If nothing is done before then, it will be the coffin of Buharis vaunted integrity.
@StanleyAzuakola:
At some point, we have to come back and talk about how the @MBuhari government doctored that arms probe report and took out Dambazaus name
On Facebook
Austin Emy:
The hailers are now the wailers such is life! When PDP said Buhari anti-corruption fight was selective, lopsided, vindictive, vendetta, witch-hunting, perceived political enemies and to settle old wounds, most people didnt believe. Nigerians can see the full manifestations now. Anyone in APC is protected. No nation can go far or make any progress without sincerity of purpose. The APC apologists are now defending corruption. Nigeria we hailed thee. Shame of a nation.
John Hamza Hamza:
I love Premium Times. To be candid, Premium Times has fulfill all necessary requirement of being a standard newspaper based fully on international standard. Premium Times and Sahara Reporters remain my best newspapers in Nigeria. Even devil knows that Danbazzau and Buratai can never be clean in this scandal. However, since we have a government that is bent on religious, tribal as well as political bigotry, its not surprising that their names were removed. Good job Premium Times, keep exposing any foul committed by anybody as you are actually doing.
Jude Chikwendu Njoku:
Any indictment, probe, investigation and prosecutions without the involvements and indictments of Dambazzu and Buratai would amount to total and monumental failures like Buhari and APC to nigerians. In fact, the joke of the century.
Raymond Aisabor:
These guys have no shame or conscience. They keep on deceiving Nigerians with their perfidy and perdition on some corruption campaigns only to sideline their friends and family members indicted for corruption. What kind of country are we in?
Louis Akhigbe:
How can you probe arms purchase, indicate even people like Fayose that are not in military, and yet the army procurement officer has no question to answer. Nigeria has been reduced to a laughing stock. How on earth will the rest of the world take us serious? The same purchasing officer then is now having properties in Dubai and yet, the government gave him a clean bill.
Nigerian troops executing the ongoing operations to mop up fleeing Boko Haram insurgents have killed two armed insurgents and injured many others amidst harsh weather conditions around Sambisa forest.
In Marguba village of Kaga local government area, Borno State, which shares common borders with Sambisa forest, the soldiers, supported by Civilian-JTF operatives, were able to subdue a roving gang of Boko Haram fighters in an ambush attack.
Two of the Boko Haram gunmen died while others fled with gunshot wounds.
The spokesman of the Nigeria Army, Colonel Sani Usman, said the weather conditions around Sambisa environs was making motoring difficult for advancing troop whose vehicles and war machines continued to get stuck in the marshy terrain.
His statement reads;
In their bid to clear the remnants of Boko Haram terrorists hiding in some parts of the North Eastern of the country, troops have intensified efforts on clearance operations.
It is in this regard that the 29 Brigade Quick Reaction Force (QRF), in conjunction with Civilian JTF carried out an ambush against Boko Haram terrorists east of Marguba village in Kaga Local Government Area, Borno State yesterday Friday.
The troops killed 2 of the Boko Haram terrorists, while some of them sustained gunshot wounds as could be seen from traces of blood during mopping up. They also recovered 1 AK-47 rifle with 29 rounds of 7.62mm (Special) ammunition, a bow and arrows, a Tecno mobile telephone handset, 1 wallet and an Identity Card of Animal Dealers Association, amongst other items.
In a related development, troops along with Civilian JTF have continued clearance operations within Sambisa forest despite harsh climatic conditions and bad terrain occasioned by heavy down rainfalls especially within Gombale area. Despite bugging down of vehicles and equipment because of the bad terrain, the troops have continued with their clearance operations.
Scores of women under the aegis of Concern Group on Monday staged a peaceful protest in Lagos where they condemned the verbal attack on Senator representing Lagos Central at the upper legislative chamber, Oluremi Tinubu, by her colleague from Kogi West Senatorial District, Dino Melaye.
The women, drawn from the three senatorial districts in Lagos State, said they were shocked and saddened by the derogatory attack of Mr. Melaye against Mrs. Tinubu during the closed-door session of the Senate on July 12 where he (Melaye) allegedly threatened to beat up and impregnate Senator Tinubu.
The protesters, who displayed placards of various inscriptions such as Melaye, Senate is not your fathers house, Dino, leave Tinubu alone, We say no to violence against women, Women folks stand up against Dino, among others, said Mr. Melayes action was not only condemnable and disgraceful but also disgusting, irritating, shameful and most embarrassing to the collective psyche of not only the women folks but to the entire nation.
They added that the reactions to the disgraceful action of the Kogi Senator was a testament to the fact that such action was unbecoming of a distinguished Senator of the Federal Republic.
While delivering a protest letter to the Governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, at the Lagos House in Alausa for onward transmission to President Muhammadu Buhari, the leader of the group, Anike Adekanye, said with the development, Mr. Melaye had shown that he lacked the poise, panache, fitness and minimum character to occupy a seat among sane, revered and distinguished men and women in the hallowed chamber of the sacrosanct Nigeria Senate.
According to Ms. Adekanye, Dino Melayes uncouth and unguarded vituperation towards Senator Oluremi Tinubu have not only brought unquantifiable shame to himself and Kogi West, but also to the Senate and the entire country.
On this note, we the Concern Group condemned in very strong terms Dino Melayes assault on Senator Oluremi Tinubu and therefore call on him to tender unreserved public apology to the hallowed chamber of the Senate and more importantly to the person of Senator Oluremi Tinubu and the entire Nigerians which he has brought into great disrepute.
The group urged President Buhari to direct relevant security agencies to institute criminal action against Mr. Melaye should he fail to apologise within an acceptable time frame to serve as deterrent to others as well as send strong signal to young people who may have erroneously viewed Mr. Melayes disgraceful action as an ideal conduct in a sane and civilized society.
While receiving the protesters on behalf of Governor Ambode, the states Commissioner for Women Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Lola Akande, assured the women that the letter would be delivered to the President and that necessary action would be taken on the request.
She commended the women for coming out to defend one of their own, saying the cause was worth coming out for, as the action of Mr. Melaye was totally condemnable and unexpected from a Senator of the federal republic.
Mrs. Akande said: I want to commend all of you for coming out to condemn the assault on a ranking Senator by Melaye. This is a cause worth coming out for and we condemn his action in all its totally. We say no to women abuse and we are of the strong view that Melaye should be recalled by the people of Kogi West if he fails to apologise for his shameful conduct.
If we dont resist it now, they will continue to treat all of us in that manner and that is why we must stand against such behavior now.
At the Lagos State House of Assembly, the protesters were received by the Deputy Speaker, Wasiu Eshilokun and about 20 lawmakers, who all condemned Mr. Melayes action and promised to transmit the letter to the President.
While also commending the women, Mr. Eshilokun said, This is what should happen in any decent democracy rather than resorting to self help. Let me say that we will deliver your message to Mr. Speaker and let me also tell you that we are not unaware of the verbal diarrhea and vituperation of that irrational rabble rouser.
I also want to assure you that we will treat this letter on the floor of the House and we will do all that is needful and deliver your message to the appropriate authorities.
A women group, Ondo Women for Women, on Monday marched through the streets of Akure, the Ondo State capital, in protest of what it described as assault on Oluremi Tinubu, a Lagos senator, by her colleague in the Senate, Dino Melaye.
The group, which is an arm of the All Progressives Congress in Ondo State, said the attack on Mrs. Tinubu by Mr. Melaye during an executive session of the Senate was an attack on Nigerian women.
They went around the streets chanting solidarity songs and brandishing banners with inscriptions against Mr. Melaye.
Briefing journalists after the March, the leader of the group, Olaseinde Vincente, said Mr Melaye had records of assaults and physical attacks on women who either were in romantic relationships with him or in working relationship with him.
He threatened to beat up Senator Remi Tinubu at the Senate Executive Session and boasting that nothing would happen after carrying out such action, she said.
We not only find this action of Melaye appalling, this shameful behaviour of the Senator from Kogi west shocked us the entire Nigerian women.
We APC Women, Ondo State Wing, are horrified at seeing that a Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria could stoop so low as threatening to beat up a fellow Senator, and a woman for that matter during a Senate Executive Session.
Mrs. Vincent said if Mr. Dino Melaye wanted to flex his muscles, he was free to do so but not by bullying a fellow senator at the senate hallowed chambers.
Melayes excesses and uncontrolled anger towards women should be nibbed in the bud before it gets out of hand, she warned.
How would anyone imagine any reasonable man could intimidate a woman who spoke in candour at a Senate Executive Session and whose comment at the meeting was laced with utmost decorum.
But Dino Melaye did, he sprang up from his seat and charged towards Senator Oluremi Tinubu and threatened to physically assault her.
She said the women group would not allow Melayes assault on women go unpunished.
It is on this note that we condemn in its entirety the barbaric behaviour of Mr. Dino Melaye, a Senator who misrepresented the good people of Kogi West Senatorial District in the National Assembly at the Executive Session meeting of the National Assembly on Tuesday, 12th of July, 2016, Mrs. Vincent noted.
It is unparliamentary for anyone in the Legislative Assembly to exhibit aggression-verbal or physical assault, not to talk of expressing derogatory sexual harassment against a fellow female member.
Mr. Melaye had admitted insulting Mrs. Tinubu after she called him a dog and a thug.
He also vowed not to apologize for his actions, saying his political future could not be determined by the APC national leader, Bola Tinubu, who is Remis husband.
Nigerias indigenous energy conglomerate, Sahara Group, has been named one of two African firms selected among 13 global companies, including Microsoft, to lead the private sector effort to support the sustainable development goals (SDGs).
In a workshop to create awareness on collaborations between private and public sectors in support of the Universal Sustainable Development Agenda in Nigeria, Sahara Group Chief Executive, Tonye Cole, urged Nigerians to take advantage of the opportunity to support the agenda.
The SDGs agenda, which seeks to complete the unfinished business of the millennium development goals (MDGs) has 17 goals, 169 targets and 231 indicators, to integrate the economic, social and developmental dimensions to stimulate national actions in areas critical to the people.
The agenda includes a framework for a peaceful, just, equitable and inclusive world, aimed at creating an environment that would allow every person to fulfill his or her potentials in dignity and equality in a healthy environment.
The private sector now has a voice at the highest level at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Fund (UN SDG-F) private sector advisory group. Sahara group is standing as your ambassador to drive the processes the way it understand it, but at a global level. Mr Cole said.
The private sector knows what they want as far corporate social responsibility is concerned. One of the things UN discovered was that whereas the MDGs struggled to succeed, the private sector would succeed in their own development programmes on CSR, which marched what the UN was doing.
He said the advisory group would work out how the private sector and UN would work together to achieve the SDGs, adding that this was the phase for a Nigerian company to play at the highest global level.
On youth development, he said Sahara Group has always advocated for youth engagement, citing its young persons initiative which set a target to directly impact 12 million youths over the next three years.
Its an ambitious target. But, we are running with it. One of the programmes is to ensure that we reach 500,000 youths in agriculture in Kaduna State, which was launched on Wednesday in conjunction with the state government.
On corruption, he said the collaboration between private sector and government as well as UN would bring openness, accountability and transparency.
The Senior Special Assistant (SSA) to the President on SDGs, Victoria Orelope-Adefulire, said the workshop was to deliberate on the importance of collaboration and partnership between private and public sectors to domesticate, mainstream the attainment of SDGs in Nigeria.
In Africa and Nigeria, she said the challenges and threats confronting the people were more critical, including conflict, insecurity and environmental degradation, adding that the SDGs agenda would integrate the economic, social and developmental dimensions to stimulate actions in the next 15 years.
To ensure a seamless transition from MDGs to the SDGs, Mrs. Orelope-Adefulire said the SDG office embarked on a number of activities to domesticate and mainstream the new agenda in Nigeria, including the MDG 10-point report, recently produced and disseminated.
A Nigerian woman has recounted how she narrowly escaped death during the recent terror attack in France.
Zainab Usman, a Ph.D candidate in Oxford University, United Kingdom, and a member of PREMIUM TIMES editorial board, said she walked away from the target of the attack 10 minutes before a Tunisian man, identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhle, deliberately drove a cargo truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 85 people and injuring 303.
The attacker was killed in an exchange of fire between him and the police, during the attack.
I am one of the lucky ones who had left the Promenade just minutes before the incident, Ms Usman wrote on Sunday on her blog.
Heres the excerpt of her story as shared on the blog and on Facebook.
I am in a large crowd walking on one of the adjacent streets, at the main city square, Place Massena, heading home, when we see people running from the Promenade, spilling into the square.
It is frantic. Chaotic. Nothing like I have ever seen. Mothers grab their children. Friends disperse. The crowd sways and moves in all directions, with a collective look of sheer terror. Something is happening. We dont know what it is. No one knows.
My Brazilian classmate pulls my arm and urges me to run. I just had a new, revolutionary hairdo. It feels heavy and is dragging me behind. Nevertheless, I run into one of the backstreets. Holding my hair with one hand, my handbag with the other, like a cartoon character, feeling scared and ridiculous at the same time.
We stop. It feels surreal. We actually manage to crack a little laughter amidst all the confusion. We, at least I thought it might have been a false scare. There had been a bomb scare just the week before, a few meters away from my apartment, and the entire area, a 200m radius, had to be cordoned off. No one knows what is happening. Then we start running again. We hear what sounds like gunshots. Now Im really scared. I imagine gunmen shooting into the crowd. We run, until I get home, and my classmates disperse.
I am stunned and dazed. Several minutes later, I start receiving phone calls, text messages and emails from my closest friends who knew I was (and still am in Nice for about two weeks now for a summer French course) checking to find out if I was okay. It feels surreal.
Afterwards, I switch on the TV and check the internet, and gradually realise the gravity of what is happening, and what a close shave I had. As the night wears on, and gives in to daybreak, the details of the terrorist attack emerge. The death toll climbs higher. From dozens and twenties to fifty, sixty, seventy and eighty. I am more stunned the more I realise how lucky I am to have left that area immediately after the feu dartifice (fireworks display).
I get to my French language school at 09.00hrs, thankfully, a three minute walk from where I live. The mood is sombre. Many people did not show up. There is no way of knowing if they are safely hiding at home or if they are missing and are among the injured and the dead. People are huddled in corners, crying, shivering, in shock. An American girl is shaking like a leaf. Her face is wet and red. She wants to go back home. Her justified hysteria makes me emotional. The school authorities console us, urge us to be strong, give us precautionary advice. Many people were at the fireworks display. 14 July, was Bastille Day, a national holiday feted by all, which had turned to a national tragedy.
At mid-day, I go out to buy lunch and grab a newspaper at the city centre, close to the school, and about 15 minutes walk from the scene of the attack. The mood is sombre. Most stores are closed. People look downcast, most remain indoors, rightfully so. It is different from the vibrant Nice that is full of life, color, elegance and well-dressed, good looking and tanned people. An otherwise sunny and bustling city is enveloped in an unmistakable blanket of greyness.
I stay indoors the whole day. Feeling more stunned but surprisingly neither afraid nor hysterical. I cant believe how lucky I am. As the day wears on, a numbness and heaviness in my heart persists, realising those people who were not so fortunate were in so many ways like me.
Sometimes I want to cry, but I dont. The story would have been different if I had stayed at the Promenade for just 10 minutes longer, or if I had decided to walk up a few meters to the famous Hotel Negresco. So close. This realisation gnaws at me still.
A suspected suicide bomber who was primed to carry out an attack on innocent citizens using an explosive device concealed in an electronic stabilizer compartment has been disarmed by vigilant troops in a suburb of Maiduguri, the Borno state capital.
The suspect, who gave his name as Yusuf Tasiu, confessed that he was on a mission at the instance of his other members to carry out attack on the community where he was intercepted.
The prevention of what could have turned out to be another disaster occurred at a time many families within and around the state were rejoicing over the recent release of their relatives who were arrested and detained by the Nigerian military as suspected Boko Haram insurgents.
Army spokesman, Sani Usman, said in a statement that troops of 101 Battalion, 7 Division Garrison on foot patrol along with some elements of Civilian JTF, intercepted a suspected male suicide bomber at Sabon Gari Jidari.
The suspect carrying primed Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) concealed in a blue stabilizer casing gave his name as Yusuf Tasiu.
He was dispossessed of the explosives while the Nigeria Police Explosive Ordnance Devices expert safely detonated it. The suicide bomber is currently being interrogated.
Mr. Usman, an acting Director Army Public Relations, added that, in a similar occurrence, some Vigilante group operating at Njidari village, South-East of Damboa, conducted clearance operations against suspected Boko Haram terrorists hideout close to Ngwalimeri village, east of Bale in Borno State.
The vigilante destroyed the camp and recovered 1 AK-47 rifle with registration number 565203224 with locally fabricated 5 rounds of 7.62mm (Special) ammunitions and a pair of military uniform. The leader of the vigilante handed over same to the Headquarters of 25 Task Force Brigade in Damboa, he said.
Heavy gunshots on Monday rocked the Pantami stadium in Gombe, venue of the national convention of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS on Monday evening.
The umbrella body of students of tertiary institutions in Nigeria was holding a convention to elect new set of national leaders after years of factionalization of the body.
One of the delegates, Adnan Mukhtar, the secretary of the Students Union in North West University, Kano, informed PREMIUM TIMES that trouble started at about 5:30 pm when a former factional chairman of the association, Prince Miaphen was elected to chair the convention.
He said many students sustained gunshot and machete wounds after a group suspected to be loyal to one of the aspirants to the position of NANS president began shooting and attacking delegates with machetes and knives.
There has been tension between the supporters of two of the candidates for office of president, Aruna Kadiri and Chinonso Ubasi and matters came to a head when Prince was announced as the chairman of the convention
Supporters of Chinonso protested the emergence of Prince because they felt it was a ploy to ensure Kadiri wins. Prince was actually the Director General of the Kadiri campaign organization and as chairman of the convention, they felt he can work in favour of Kadiri,he said.
Mr. Mukhtar said the election of Prince was supervised by the outgoing President of NANS, Tijjani Shehu.
While Mr. Kadiri is a student of Edo State University, Mr. Ubasi, popularly known as IBB, is a student of Ebonyi state university.
Mr. Mukhtar said all the delegates have scampered away for safety, adding that he was not sure anyone would come back to the venue for the convention.
I can tell you that everyone is in serious fear now, in fact, most people have even vacated the hostel we are staying at Gombe State University for fear of the unknown, he said.
The private developer of Alade Market, Lagos, has debunked claims that he invaded the market with armed thugs to harass traders.
Lai Omotola, the Managing Director of Master Reality International Concepts Ltd, said in a statement Sunday that the traders accusing him of forceful eviction were not genuine ship owners in the market.
There was never a case of invasion into the Alade Market or forceful ejection of traders and shop owners from the market, said Mr. Omotola, the concessionaire of the soon-to-be-built Alade Shopping Mall.
Rather, series of dialogue and peace meetings were held among three key parties: Ikeja Local Government, Association of Alade Market Men and Women and the concessionaire.
The Ikeja Local Government in 2010 concessioned the market to Mr. Omotolas company to invest N6.9 billion for a 30-year project on a Build, Own, and Transfer (BOT) basis.
Some traders, last Friday, alleged that the developer used armed thugs to invade the market to harass them into moving out.
In an open letter to Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, last Wednesday, Jiti Ogunye, a lawyer, accused the Ikeja Local Government of conniving with Mr. Omotola to replace the market with a shopping mall through the backdoor.
Mr. Ogunye, counsel to a traders association in the market, said council officials had continued to forcefully eject traders from their stalls despite a pending lawsuit.
The issues of whether our clients could be relocated from the said land is part of the issues being currently litigated at the High Court of Lagos State, Ikeja Judicial Division, said Mr. Ogunye.
It will, thus, amount to a grave abuse of rule of law to resort to self help while the issues are being tried before a competent court of law that is adjudicating the matter.
In his reaction, Mr. Omotola acknowledged that an Ikeja High Court ordered all parties to maintain status quo ante until the substantive suit was determined, noting that the court made the order at the time the concessionaire had started work on the project site.
The order did not affect our construction work, he said.
There is no case of contempt here. Also, the court rejected an application in which the concerned traders were seeking to restrain us from executing the project. But the court did not grant the application.
Mr. Omotola said peace meetings between key market stakeholders had yielded enviable results, adding that parties had agreed that an alternative market should be built to avoid undue disruption of commercial activities of the traders.
In line with the resolutions of the peace meetings, the alternative market has been fully constructed, he said.
It was constructed at a location about 100 metres away from Old Alade Market with more parking lots, central generators, modern toilets, safe and secure environment and unhindered access & exit.
After completing the alternative market, a group of concerned traders suddenly rose against the relocation of old Alade Market.
The concerned traders are not shop owners in old Alade Market. They only rented shops from the original allotees and real tenants of the Ikeja Local Government.
So, the concerned traders are never legal occupants of the market because there was never tenancy agreements between the local government and these traders.
So, they lack legal grounds to either sue the parties or protest the relocation of the market.
Mr. Omotola said only 49 traders who never rented shops from the Ikeja Local Government are the ones working against his project.
We will not succumb to any blackmail from any quarters, he said.
President Andrzej Duda
"I would like the situation in Turkey to normalise as quickly as possible - this is important for security and peace in that part of the world", President Andrzej Duda said on Saturday, commenting on the recent coup attempt in Turkey.
"It is highly probable that the authorities chosen in democratic elections are gaining control over the situation, meaning that this military coup was unsuccessful", the Polish president said, adding that this meant that democracy was winning.
Duda pointed out that Turkey was a huge country, a member of NATO, and had the alliance's second-biggest army. "I would like the situation to normalise as quickly as possible, because this is also important for security and peace in that part of the world", he said.
Underlining that Turkey played a very important role in combating the migration crisis and maintaining stability in the region, President Duda expressed the hope that Turkey "will be able to return to this important role within a short time". (PAP)
( Read 7795 Times)
Helen Keller once said,"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.The fearful are caught as often as the bold. "Being bold and rebellious is what defines controversy s blue eyed filmmaker Pankaj Purohit who is ready to permeate through all obstacles. It already feels that he is divines blessed boy who has already carved a niche with Belly of the Tantra. Now Pankaj has taken the bull or should we say the Monster by its horns who has cast its evil eye on the girl child.As per the UNICEF reports since 1982 about 30 million children have been trafficked globally.Child prostitution is a multi billion dollar industry globally. With the 8% of increase in the flesh trade, today India has become one of the prominent names in child prostitution. These children are barely able to have one square meal a day as they earn around the equivalent of US $1 for sex, $2 on a good night, and less than a dollar on a bad night.As per Research conducted there are as many as 10 million children involved in prostitution world wide.Did you know that every year 2 million girls and children between the age of 5 and 15 are forced into commercial sex trade or trafficking around the world. Its indeed shameful that in a developing country like India, 40% of sex workers engaged in prostitution are actually children. Thus, every 40 out of 100prostitutes are children in India.Thus the soft or vulnerable targets are children aged between 10 and 14 years . Its alarming that a child goes missing in India somewhere every eight minutes. So, around half of Indias missing children last year were forced into prostitution. Indias flourishing flesh trade industry according to the government,has about 3 million prostitutes, of which 1.2 million percent are children aged under 18.There are around 35 villages alongside the highway in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan with pan shop and tea stall with girl attendance .This is just a cover up where asking for a 12 year old for the night is not considered unusual. These innocent girls who should have pursued school or college spend their day at such places luring customers who are mainly truck drivers.There are many kidnapped girls amongst them, in some cases even six month old babies who are brought to this ruthless tribe from far and wide. They are raised by the villagers as their own daughters. The head of the village says prostitution is a tradition in our community.The presence of policemen doesnt seem to dampen the spirits of these miscreants.The menace of oxytocin hormone is back again with the seizure of oxytocin injections from an unlicensed store in MP this week, it has become clear that the hormone is still being used for the wrong purposes despite it being banned by the Government, notably to induce early puberty among girls who have been dragged into the flesh trade and sent to different parts in Indian and in the gulf countries abroad. Oxytocin was banned in 2014 by the Government of India. The study revealed that most of the girls were not told about the injection.The revolutionary filmmaker Pankaj dares to show you through the medium of Sudden Cry the dark underbelly of this menace of prostitution. The film is directed by the controversial Producer and Director Babita Modgil who earlier Produced Belly of the Tantra. The Sudden Cry movie trailer will be unveiled in a fortnight to surprise the world !
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.
LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
"Innovation for us isn't just about "doing things differently". It is about cultivating the valid pathways for development, providing the operational architecture at a large scale of operations, evangelizing positive change," states Mr. Gabriel Chaleplis, the leader of B2B GAMING SERVICES.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390480LOGO )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390479 )
The company goes from strength to strength in the fledgling online betting and gaming sector, in Europe and Greece, providing market "oxygen" to global and local online betting and gaming brands, enabling them to pursue their business, accommodating different regulation, legislation and taxation frameworks in Europe and the world.
"We grow our business by growing our clients' business," explains Mr. Gabriel Chaleplis.
Recently "crowned" with the status of one of ten top businesses in Europe at the so-called "Oscars" of European entrepreneurship (The European Business Awards 2015/2016), a National Champion for Malta (September 1st, 2015), B2B GAMING SERVICES is awarded also and for second consecutive year for growth and contribution to the Greek economy ("Diamonds of the Greek Economy" Awards 2015 & 2016).
B2B GAMING SERVICES is the first company in its sector to receive these distinctions in European Business Awards' history.
Mr. Gabriel Chaleplis summarizes his standpoint: "The story of B2B GAMING SERVICES is not a story about overriding competition, not development to its detriment. It is a common path and parallel development because the future, is ALWAYS common."
B2B GAMING SERVICES, an IT/TECHNOLOGY company specializing in services for Enterprises, via its innovative and constantly developing platform, "home of many" online gaming brands including its proprietary brand, Betshop, based in Malta, with other main offices located in London, (UK) and Rome (Italy), Nicosia (Cyprus) and Durban (South Africa), currently operating directly in 12 countries, among them Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Romania, Bulgaria, South Africa and Nigeria.
Since the beginning of its operations, B2B GAMING SERVICES culminates the approach of its leader, Gabriel Chaleplis, the architect and the evangelist of outthinking boundaries in business, constantly "gaming forward" in the innumerable ways people understand, use and enjoy technology.
Gabriel Chaleplis is an international entrepreneur (UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Romania, South Africa, UAE and Greece) of pioneering large scale operations, with more than 20 years of experience in merging mutual core capabilities for global leadership.
URL: http://www.b2bgamingservices.com/
SOURCE B2B GAMING SERVICES
BRUSSELS, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
Millions of jobs and all European manufacturing sectors at risk
On Wednesday 20 July, the College of European Commissioners will debate the future of Europe's entire manufacturing industry when it discusses if China should be granted Market Economy Status (MES).
"What China wants from the EU is a 'licence to dump' by treating it the same as bona fide market economies in any EU anti-dumping investigation. There is a serious risk that the European Commission de facto proposes granting such a licence, either intentionally, or not. The consequences however would be the same, regardless of additional measures put in place. The doors would be left wide open for an unprecedented attack on all manufacturing industries across the European Union. This will in turn endanger millions of jobs," said Milan Nitzschke, spokesperson of AEGIS Europe, a grouping of 30 European manufacturing associations.
"This is not only about overcapacity in steel, it is about every product category and technology from A such as Aluminium, to Z as in Zero Emission Technologies. It will affect every part of the economy, from SME sectors to those sectors with large-scale enterprises," warned Nitzschke.
In the EU there are 5 clear criteria that define a market economy. These criteria are undisputed - and they existed since before China joined the WTO 15 years ago. To date China has only met 1 of the EU's 5 criteria.
"It is imperative to relate any proposal about the calculation methodology used in anti-dumping proceedings to the EU's 5 market economy criteria. Without this, anti-dumping measures in the EU would be vulnerable to challenge. Consequently investments in the EU would fall under a cloud of uncertainty," forewarned Nitzschke.
The unfounded Chinese demand to be treated the same as bona fide market economies, would effectively render the EU's anti-dumping measures weak when it comes to imports from China. Furthermore, it would disregard the fact that Chinese state-financed export prices are well below international market prices and costs.
"To draw a comparison with sports - it is like having increased drug testing at the Olympic Games except for Chinese athletes who would just show a medical certificate issued by the Chinese government," Nitzschke concluded.
SOURCE AEGIS Europe
Effects on C-reactive protein and cholesterol efflux support dalcetrapib benefits on cardiovascular outcomes in patients with AA genotype of ADCY9 gene
Data support the rationale for studying dalcetrapib's effects on cardiovascular outcomes in DalCor's ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial in patients with the AA genotype
MONTREAL and LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DalCor Pharmaceuticals and The Montreal Heart Institute today announced the publication in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics of data demonstrating dalcetrapib's genotype-dependent effects on high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) from the prospective analysis of a randomized, placebo controlled clinical trial that included 5243 genotyped patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). In addition, cholesterol efflux results support dalcetrapib's benefits on atherosclerotic cardiovascular outcomes in patients with the AA genotype at polymorphism rs1967309 of the ADCY9 gene from the dal-Plaque-2 clinical study. Cholesterol efflux is a key beneficial component of HDL biology while hs-CRP is associated with deleterious inflammation in the cardiovascular system.
hs-CRP was measured at baseline and end of a 5243 patient study from the dal-OUTCOMES study. The dal-OUTCOMES study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled Phase 3 clinical trial designed to test the safety and cardiovascular efficacy of dalcetrapib in patients with ACS. Cholesterol efflux capacity of HDL from J774 macrophages was determined at baseline and 12 months in 171 genotyped patients from dal-PLAQUE-2, a randomized, multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel group Phase 3 clinical trial designed to assess the effect of dalcetrapib on atherosclerotic disease progression in patients with evidence of coronary artery disease. Efflux of HDL from the macrophage using the patient's blood is a relevant marker of lipid metabolism and is a sign of the healthy positive effect of dalcetrapib in patients with the right genotype.
In the article, titled "Genotype-Dependent Effects of Dalcetrapib on Cholesterol Efflux and Inflammation: Concordance with Clinical Outcomes" by Jean-Claude Tardif, Marie-Pierre Dube et al., the authors found that:
There was a significant increase in cholesterol efflux in dalcetrapib-treated AA population, but not the GG genotype group;
The GG population showed significant increase of hs-CRP whereas the patients with AA genetic profile had no significant increase (and even a trend for a decrease) in hs-CRP when treated with dalcetrapib compared to placebo.
Quotes
Robert McNeil, Ph.D., chief executive officer of DalCor, said, "Following positive results of the retrospective GWAS study we believe that targeting a genetically specific patient population with dalcetrapib has the potential to reduce risk of cardiovascular events in this select patient population. In this study, four cases of prospective analysis of samples of two different clinical trials delivered expected results: dalcetrapib is beneficial for a select genetic patient group and biology of the response is as we predicted. Consistency of the findings reinforces our expectation that dalcetrapib will show a reduction in clinical cardiovascular outcomes in our ongoing randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled Phase 3 clinical trial evaluating dalcetrapib in patients with the AA genotype. We expect to complete the clinical trial in the first half of 2020."
Jean-Claude Tardif, C.M., MD, FRCPC, FACC, FAHA, FESC, director of the Research Center at the Montreal Heart Institute and professor of medicine at the Universite de Montreal, said, "These data support the hypothesis that patients with a specific genetic profile will respond favorably to dalcetrapib and they provide us with key insight into the biology of this response. Matching dalcetrapib with the right patients based on genotype holds great potential to enhance effectiveness of therapy for better cardiovascular outcomes. This is a major milestone in the battle against atherosclerosis, the leading cause of mortality in the world and we hope to use these findings to further dissect the mode of action of dalcetrapib and potentially improve standard of care for patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease."
About Dalcetrapib
Dalcetrapib is one of four CETP inhibitors to have reached full-scale development. Over 17,000 patients have participated in dalcetrapib clinical trials. A large, double blind cardiovascular (CV) study, dal- Outcomes, randomized over 15,000 patients already taking statins. The drug was well tolerated but the study results were globally neutral there was no significant reduction in CV events in the dalcetrapib group.
In 2012, investigators at the Montreal Heart Institute led by Professors Jean-Claude Tardif and Marie- Pierre Dube found a significant association between the effects of dalcetrapib in altering CV events and the polymorphism at the rs1967309 location in the adenylate cyclase type 9 (ADCY9) gene. Patients with the AA genotype had a 39% reduction in CV events when treated with dalcetrapib compared to placebo, while GG patients had a 27% increase and AG patients had a neutral effect. This analysis was conducted in 5749 patients. Additional analyses of other studies also demonstrated reduced atherosclerosis in the AA population when treated with dalcetrapib.
DalCor secured a worldwide exclusive license for dalcetrapib together with rights to the genetic marker for use with dalcetrapib and is sponsoring the dal-GenE study, which is planned to include 5,000 patients to prospectively confirm the results of the pharmacogenomic analysis in the dal-Outcomes study in a patient population with the AA genotype at the rs1967309 location in the ADCY9 gene.
About DalCor Pharmaceuticals
DalCor is developing precision treatments by genetically targeting patients that will derive clinical benefits. By integrating clinical and genetic insights, DalCor intends to deliver superior clinical cardiovascular outcomes. The company's first development program, dalcetrapib, is intended to reduce cardiovascular events in a specific genetic subset of patients. DalCor Pharmaceuticals has offices in Montreal, San Mateo, Calif., Zug, Switzerland and Stockport, U.K. For more information, visit www.dalcorpharma.com.
About the Montreal Heart Institute
Founded in 1954 by Dr. Paul David, the Montreal Heart Institute constantly aims for the highest standards of excellence in the cardiovascular field through its leadership in clinical and basic research, ultra-specialized care, professional training and prevention. It is part of the broad network of health excellence made up of Universite de Montreal and its affiliated institutions. The Montreal Heart Institute ranks as the No. 1 research hospital in Canada for research intensity and research funds per researcher, according to Research Infosource. For more information, please visit www.icm-mhi.org.
DalCor Contacts:
Corporate
DalCor Pharmaceuticals Donald Black, M.D.
(609) 613-6637 dblack@dalcorpharma.com
Media
Russo Partners
Matt Middleman, M.D.
(212) 845-4272 matt.middleman@russopartnersllc.com
Montreal Heart Institute
Lise Plante
(514) 376-3330 x 2670
Lise.Plante@icm-mhi.org
Related Links
http://www.dalcorpharma.com
SOURCE DalCor Pharmaceuticals
SINGAPORE, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "Going back to negotiations is the only way out for the disputes in the South China Sea," said Zhao Qizheng, former Minister of China's State Council Information Office, "China will stick to the dual-track approach, namely relevant disputes should be settled properly through negotiations and consultations by states directly concerned, and China and the ASEAN countries should work together to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea."
Zhao made the remarks while delivering a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore, 18th July, 2016.
The Seminar which organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASSICBS), attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and countries in the region, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
Zhao expounded China's solemn position of non-acceptance and non-recognition of the award issued by the ad hoc Arbitral Tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration and reaffirmed China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea.
Zheng Yongnian, Professor and Director of East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, said, "The international law cannot help solve complicated political issues such as the disputes in South China Sea, and political will is of great importance."
Looking ahead, Zheng believed that China has the capability in maintaining peace and stability in South China Sea. He said, "The only way to solve the problem is to return to the political way."
Li Guoqiang, Deputy Director of CASSICBS, said, "The award issued by the ad hoc Arbitral Tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration deteriorated peace and stability in the region." Li thought that China, ASEAN countries have the ability, consensus and willingness to solve disputes in the South China Sea while maintaining peace and stability.
Oh Ei Sun, Senior Fellow with S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, concluded that China and the Philippines can set a good example to other Southeast Asian countries in coping with disputes over the South China Sea, if both sides resume bilateral negotiation and achieve pragmatic positive results.
SOURCE Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
GANZI, China, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On July 13th and 14th (Beijing Time), the 2016 Ganzi Mountain Tourism Festival was launched at Hailuogou in Ganzi, a mountain resort in western China's Sichuan province The event is attracting visitors from all over the world with its unique mountain scenery and beautiful nature complemented by a well-developed tourism infrastructure and excellent accommodations, serving as an example and model for sustained mountain tourism development.
The event lineup included the opening ceremony, the Sustainable Mountain Tourism Development Conference, the Ganzi Carnival and the launch of new themed and extreme tours, according to chengduvip.cn, the co-organizer, as well as a popular regional website in charge of overseas communications for the event. During the event, Ganzi started a series of new tour itineraries including 11 mountain trekking experience tours, 6 tours especially designed for international travelers and one tour that takes in the unique culture of the Kham, a branch of the Tibetan ethnic minority.
The event also attracted many foreign tourists who love mountain tourism. A man and self-described adventurer from the UK who drove to the event on his own posted photos taken during his road trip to Hailuogou on Facebook, inviting his friends to come and visit this unique locale in the mountainous area of western China.
On the southeastern tip of the Qinghai Tibetan plateau, Ganzi, Sichuan, at elevations ranging from around 1,500 to 7,000 meters, boasts unparalleled mountain tourism resources and, as roughly translated from the Chinese, has been nicknamed the "Open Air Heaven in the Orient". Looking forward, the tourism authorities in Ganzi plan to continue to drive the socio-economic development of tourism across the entire region, creating a unique and unparalleled travel destination consisting of Minya Konka in the east, the area surrounding Yading in the south and the Gesar cultural tourism zone in the north, in a move to transform the area's tourism resource advantages into economic advantages that will serve to improve the lot of local inhabitants, while attracting interested investors and travelers from all over the world.
SOURCE chengduvip.cn
DUBLIN, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
The Technology Channels Alliance (TCA), announced earlier in the year, has now been formally incorporated in Dublin and is open for business. The TCA is looking to recruit local and regional distributors across EMEA to share information, ideas and best practice - and to drive business for technology distribution channels across the region.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160714/389741LOGO )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160714/389742 )
Three former members of the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) are founder members of the TCA and will sit on the board of the EMEA-focused organisation. Multi-regional distributors Westcoast, Exertis and Esprinet have worked together to form the Technology Channels Alliance (TCA), which will work with the vendor community to help it understand and make full use of the benefits of working with local and regional channel partners across EMEA.
Robert Norum, chief executive of the TCA: "Our intention is to provide local and regional distributors in EMEA with a voice, and the TCA will represent the interests of local and regional channel players."
"We will be asking our members to sign up to a charter. They need to be professionally run, have a good reputation, and be trustworthy to do business with. New members will have to be ratified by the board, but if you are a genuine technology distributor headquartered in EMEA, you will be welcome."
In addition to full membership for EMEA-headquartered distributors, there is also the opportunity for corporate resellers and retailers to join as associate members, and for distributors with headquarters outside EMEA to join as affiliate members.
"We don't want anyone to feel excluded; it is going to be a democratic organisation with a one member, one vote approach on key decisions," he said, adding that the TCA will establish a social charter and set up a charitable foundation with a portion of its member fees
The organisation will run events, conduct research and produce case studies to help its members work more closely with vendors and each other to address issues and capitalise on local and regional opportunities. It will also promote new technology in the wider sense by giving back to the community.
Founder member Joe Hemani, chief executive of Westcoast, told CRN: "It is really about working together in Europe to get the best possible working practices, share case studies and bring knowledge to all our partners. It is about trying to get us all thinking in the European way."
Alessandro Cattani, chief executive of Esprinet, said: "We have an ambition to create what we call a 'chain of knowledge' all the way from vendors through the channel to end users, and the TCA will drive this agenda."
Niall Ennis, chief executive of Exertis, added: "Regional players are a hugely important part of the technology channel in EMEA and provide a focus and a range of services tailored to each of the countries in which they operate."
For further information, please contact:
Robert Norum, CEO on +44(0)7767-624-662 or
email rnorum@technologychannelsalliance.org
http://www.technologychannelsalliance.org
@TCA_EMEA
SOURCE Technology Channels Alliance
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.
(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
SHENZHEN, China, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Reed Huabo Exhibitions is the organizer of Vape Expo China. Reed Huabo Exhibitions is a joint venture with Reed Exhibition, the world's leading events organizer based in the UK.
After successfully organizing the 1st Vape Expo China from October 20-23 2015 in Shenzhen. The event attracted around 150 brands from China, the USA, the UK, France, Canada, Germany, Russia and Malaysia. It also welcomed around 10,000 visitors from all over the world. The website: vapexpoen.reedhuabo.com
The 2nd Vape Expo will be from Oct 20-23 2016 at Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, the same dates and venue as last year.
We are proud to announce the companies that have joined us:
Sigelei, Kanger, Aspire, Asmodus, VGOD, ATOM, Vpark, UK Ecig Store, Vaping Outlaws, LIQ Distribution, EU Eliquid, BMI, Element Eliquid, MHYY, Apollo, Volcano, Vapor Age, Elevate USA, The Natives, BLV, SWCH, Organic Labs, Reka Malaysia, Fizzy Kola Malaysia, Vapebro Malaysia, The Seventh Cloud, Arctic Dolphin, Athena, GreenVaper, SXK, Hotcig, BK and R&C.
With the aim to enlarge the vapor market in China and educate the huge number of smokers about vaping, the expo will encourage more buyers for our exhibitors and bring more benefits to them, before our October expo, we will have a national roadshow in 5 cities of China, taking our exhibitors to meet the local vape store owners, agents, distributors, and vapers in each city. We will visit almost 3,000 vape stores in China and invite them to visit our show in each city.
Here's the schedule:
Jun 25th: Shanghai (successfully held);
Jul 27th: Beijing;
Aug 27th: Shenyang;
Sept 24th: Wuhan;
Oct 20-23: Shenzhen.
There will be both B2B and B2C events in a big bar where we will welcome around 500 people.
Here's the agenda:
14:00-18:00: B2B Trade Show for our exhibitors. Every exhibitor has a counter to display the products, and have face to face communication and business negotiation with the vape store owners, agents, distributors, wholesalers etc.
18:00-22:00: B2C Vape Party for vapers and smokers who know little about vaping but interested in it. We will organize Cloud Competition and Vaping Tricks Show, with dancing and a DJ performing at the party.
Any exhibitor who reserves a 36sqm+ booth at our October Vape Expo can join this national event FREE of charge.
Media Contact: Annie Jiang
Email: anniej@reedhuabo.com
Mobile/WhatsApp: +86 159 8680 8634
Skype: jiang.yinyuan
Related Links
http://vapexpoen.reedhuabo.com
SOURCE Reed Huabo Exhibitions
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Regenerative Medicine - The Future of Therapy (http://www.frost.com/sublib/display-report.do?id=D6EC-01-00-00-00&src=PR), finds that medical device and drug manufacturing companies have been partnering to combine their tissue engineering platforms with the most advanced stem cell therapeutics in order to lower operational costs and time. There have been numerous local, regional and international initiatives to build first-in-class biomanufacturing facilities, while developing expertise in managing progenitor cells, and creating repositories of research and clinical grade stem cells. Some of the countries involved in these initiatives are the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Japan.
For complimentary access to more information on this research, please visit: http://corpcom.frost.com/forms/EU_PR_JSchoneborn_D6EC_13JUL16.
"Companies are steadily streaming into the regenerative medicine space by developing culture medium and reagents before advancing to the cell-based medicines market," said TechVision Industry Analyst Cecilia Van Cauwenberghe. "Their main goal is the development of cell-based medicines using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). In the long-term, iPSCs will drive the market and advance stem cell therapeutics worldwide."
The booming popularity of regenerative medicine research is attracting substantial funding from both public and private sources. Investments have been particularly high in cell therapies, gene therapies, tissue engineering, biomaterials, and small and biologic molecules in other advanced therapies.
In addition to resolving financial and technology constraints, stakeholders need to address the issues related to process development, manufacturing, logistics and intellectual property protection. Most importantly, the involvement of various countries in regenerative medicine research has stoked a need for new standards and common regulations.
"Domestic and international standardization is crucial for devices, packaging, transportation, equipment, consumable supplies, culture media and reagents and services in the regenerative medicine space," noted Cauwenberghe. "Stakeholders have already started consolidating strategic advisory boards to provide advice on clinical, logistical and regulatory issues, intellectual property strategy, technology transfer and licensing deals."
One of the prominent players in the regenerative medicine is Japan. In 2014, it created the Forum for Innovative Regenerative Medicine (FIRM), comprising 185 firms as well as organizations from the across the world. The health reform in the country in 2015 adapted policies, which encourage collaborations among multiple organizations and contract companies.
Indeed, the regenerative medicine has grown exponentially in recent years despite being nascent in terms of technology readiness for some applications. The escalating synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology and biomedical engineering will accelerate the introduction of products and technologies that can take regenerative medicine to the next level.
Regenerative Medicine - The Future of Therapy, part of the TechVision (Medical Devices & Imaging and Health & Wellness) subscription, studies the current landscape as well as new trends in regenerative medicine, focusing on technology roadmaps, trends, capabilities and applications targeted. It also covers stakeholder activities, industry initiatives, investment environment and support. Additionally, it offers technology benchmarking for specific applications.
Frost & Sullivan's global TechVision practice is focused on innovation, disruption and convergence and provides a variety of technology based alerts, newsletters and research services as well as growth consulting services. Its premier offering, the TechVision program, identifies and evaluates the most valuable emerging and disruptive technologies enabling products with near-term potential. A unique feature of the TechVision program is an annual selection of 50 technologies that can generate convergence scenarios, possibly disrupt the innovation landscape, and drive transformational growth. View a summary of our TechVision program by clicking on the following link: http://ifrost.frost.com/TechVision_Demo.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants.
Our "Growth Partnership" supports clients by addressing these opportunities and incorporating two key elements driving visionary innovation: The Integrated Value Proposition and The Partnership Infrastructure.
The Integrated Value Proposition provides support to our clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation including research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation and implementation.
provides support to our clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation including research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation and implementation. The Partnership Infrastructure is unique as it constructs the foundation upon which visionary innovation becomes possible. This includes our 360 degree research, comprehensive industry coverage, career best practices as well as our global footprint of more than 40 offices.
For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies?
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Regenerative Medicine - The Future of Therapy
D6EC
Contact:
Jana Schoneborn
Corporate Communications Europe
P: +49 (0)69 77033 43
E: jana.schoeneborn@frost.com
Twitter: @TechVision_FS
Linkedin: www.frost.com/techvisionlinkedin
http://www.frost.com
http://ww2.frost.com/research/techvision
Related Links
http://www.frost.com
SOURCE Frost & Sullivan
The Jigna sustainable mixed-use community in Abuja moves ahead with conceptual master plan
ABUJA, Nigeria, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Rendeavour, Africa's largest urban land developer, has appointed Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) for master planning services in connection with Jigna, Rendeavour's joint venture urban development project in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria.
With a track record including landmark projects such as One World Trade Centre in New York and the Hajj Terminal in Saudi Arabia, SOM will ensure that the firm's experience from these projects and others, such as the master plans for Phu My Hung Community in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia and the Baietan Urban Design Master Plan in Guangzhou, China, will be brought to bear on Jigna.
"Jigna is a compelling project to address Abuja's continued urban growth with world-class aspirations," said Daniel Ringelstein, Director of Urban Design and Planning at SOM. "We are excited by Jigna's vision to create a modern community promoting a tranquil lifestyle in an environmentally stunning location just a short commute from Abuja's bustling city centre."
Jigna, which sits on 707 hectares (1,750 acres) of land bordering the Outer Northern Expressway of Abuja, has already received its Environmental Impact Assessment approval from the Abuja Environmental Protection Board, as well as its temporary electricity infrastructure approval from the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company. The project will be centered on the protection and enhancement of the site's unique natural landscape environment, as well as providing a sustainable model for future urban communities in Africa.
"Our collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is a landmark agreement for Jigna and Rendeavour," said Rendeavour's Nigeria Country Head, Yomi Ademola. "Sensitive and comprehensive strategic planning is the bedrock of forward-thinking urban development and we are certain that SOM's global experience will contribute to us creating the most attractive urban development in Nigeria's capital."
About SOM (www.som.com)
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is one of the leading architecture, interior design, engineering, and urban planning firms in the world, with an 80-year reputation for design excellence and a portfolio that includes some of the most important architectural accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its inception, SOM has been a leader in the research and development of specialized technologies, new processes and innovative ideas, many of which have had a palpable and lasting impact on the design profession and the physical environment. The firm's longstanding leadership in design and building technology has been honoured with more than 1,700 awards for quality, innovation, and management. The American Institute of Architects has recognized SOM twice with its highest honor, the Architecture Firm Awardin 1962 and again in 1996. The firm maintains offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi.
About Rendeavour (www.rendeavour.com)
Rendeavour is Africa's largest urban land developer with over 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of visionary projects in the growth trajectories of large cities in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo. Rendeavour's vision goes beyond alleviating what is a self-evident problem that of stifling urban congestion and a dearth of quality housing and commercial property in Africa. Rather, we aim to help create the infrastructure the living and working spaces, communities, schools and hospitals that will help sustain and accelerate Africa's economic growth, meet the aspirations of Africa's burgeoning middle classes, and serve as a catalyst for further urban development.
Contact
Tim Beighton
Email: tbeighton@rendeavour.com
Phone: +234 8070 992 935
+234 8094 000 065
Related Links
http://www.som.com
SOURCE Rendeavour
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
Coming off successful participation at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in Russia and World Economic Forum's (WEF) Annual Meeting of New Champions in Tianjin, China, Ulmart was tapped by the Russian government to create a unique business program for WEF's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January, 2017 at what is officially now called "Russia House 2017 (RH17)".
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151015/277241LOGO )
In collaboration with Roscongress--official organizer for all Russian economic forums/conferences--Ulmart will seek to build on its success from WEF 2016 when it hosted the "Ulmart House of Innovation (UHI)." The UHI was visited by over 1500 people in three days from 23 countries.
"As leaders in the digital transformation underway in Russia, and obviously active participants in the 4th industrial revolution (4th IR), our chairman of the board, Dmitry Kostygin, at the end of our successful WEF this year challenged us to take a more proactive role in shaping not just Ulmart's image but Russia's message also at WEF '17," explained Brian Kean, Chief International Officer for Ulmart.
Like last year, Russia House will be located at the Davos-famous Kaffee Klatsch located at Promenade 72; but, whereas last year focus was on Ulmart and digital companies, this year the house will be opened to all Russian companies, media and even some government officials.
In addition to RH activities, to include up to six business discussions on Russia's role in the 4th IR, the current investment climate and growth expectations for the Russian economy in 2017, there will be a slew of cultural events hosted as well in venues throughout Davos.
"We plan to create a Russian presence at WEF 2017wherever one turns, they will see aspects of Russia that drastically differ from the misperceptions we have been forced to deal with as we tell our story to the world," added Kostygin. "Davos '17 will be remembered as the year Russian business of the 'new economy' stormed back onto the world stage."
WEF's annual meeting takes a bird's eye view of the world and contemplates current problems and issues.
"The annual meeting inspires CEO's and leaders from all over the world. At the RH, we will take this inspiration to the next level and target it at our own commercial and economic realities and hopefully learn so as to grow the Russian economy," mused Mr. Kean.
SOURCE Ulmart
PUNE, India, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
The report "Thin Insulation Market by Type (Sheets & Films, Vacuum Insulation Panels, Coatings), Material (Metals, Aersgels, Silica), Application (Building Thermal Insulation, Pipe Coating Insulation, Thermal Packaging), and by Region - Global Trends to 2021", published by MarketsandMarkets, The global market is estimated to reach USD 2.12 Billion by 2021 and is projected to register a CAGR of 5.8% during the forecast period.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )
This growth is fueled by the high growth potential from the building thermal insulation application due to increasing infrastructure development activities in North America and Asia-Pacific.
Browse 112 market data Tables and 55 Figures spread through 163 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Thin Insulation Market"
http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/thin-insulation-market-205070326.html
Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.
Plastic foams is the largest type of thin insulation
Plastic foams such as EPS, XPS, polyurethane foams, polyisocyanurate insulation, phenolic foams, polytetrafluoroethylene, and polyimide are widely used in the different applications of thin insulation. These are predominantly used in the oil & gas, construction, and automotive end-use industries due to their excellent thermal resistivity. These foams in particular have become the preferred choice for 10mm to 20mm thickness, solving the space and reliability issues in the construction industry. Thus, the increasing use of these foams in oil & gas and automotive end-use industries is expected to drive the thin insulation market during the forecast period.
Building thermal insulation is the largest application of thin insulation
Thin insulation is widely used in the building thermal insulation application for its thermal resistance or R-value, as higher the R-value, higher will be the heat resistance and lesser heat will flow. In buildings that have thin walls or timber constructions, the impact of additional insulation is significant in. In addition, thin insulation is used in the automotive industry to prevent heat and sound transfer in the vehicle and improve braking performance, which is expected to drive the thin insulation market.
Make an Inquiry @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=205070326
Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing thin insulation market
Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing market for thin insulation globally with China being the largest as well as fastest-growing country in the region. Increasing rural to urban migrations in the region are stimulating the housing construction demand in urban areas; consequently increasing the market size of the thin insulation materials. The growing construction industry (residential and non-residential) and advances in process manufacturing are some of the key drivers for the market in Asia-Pacific. Countries such as India, Indonesia, and China are expected to witness high growth in the thin insulation market, supported by increasing demand from the building & construction industry.
The thin insulation market has few global players competing significantly for the market share, who are actively investing in various strategies such as new product developments and joint venture & collaboration globally to increase their market share. In addition, companies are also investing on R&D activities. Major players such as The Dow Corning Corporation (U.S.), Actis Insulation (U.K.), BASF Polyurethanes GmbH (Germany), and Kingspan Insulation Ltd (U.K.) have adopted various organic and inorganic growth strategies.
Browse Related Reports:
Building Thermal Insulation Market by Material (Wool Insulation, Plastic Foams and Others) and Application (Roof, Wall and Floor) - Global Trends & Forecasts to 2020
http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/building-insulation-materials-market-510.html
Cold Insulation Market by Material (Fiber Glass, Phenolic Foams, Polystyrene Foams, Polyurethane Foams, and Others), by End-Use Industry (Chemicals, HVAC, Oil & Gas, Refrigeration, and Others) - Trends & Forecasts to 2020
http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cold-insulation-market-1117.html
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SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
CLEVELAND, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI) and Great Lakes Biomimicry, in collaboration with NASA, announced they will host the 1st Annual National Biomimicry Summit and Education Forum (BSEF). From August 2-4, biomimicry leaders across the U.S. will make their way to Northeast Ohio, which is quickly becoming the hub for the innovative industry.
Located on the OAI campus in Cleveland, the conference will give attendees the opportunity to learn from experts about the multitude of ways nature's 3.8 billion years of research and development is inspiring aeronautics, space exploration, robotics, materials development, communication technology, architecture and more.
"Experts from NASA and more than 20 universities across the U.S. are converging in Cleveland for BSEF," said Howard Thompson, OAI senior program manager. "We are excited to have 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers recipient, Dr. Vikram Shyam, as a presenter. He and his team of researchers at the NASA Glenn Research Center are bringing biomimicry to the aerospace industry with work such as airfoils inspired by harbor seal whiskers to reduce drag, fuel and noise in jet engines."
Over the course of three days, presenters will highlight first-hand experience of cutting edge biomimicry research and applications. Off-site evening receptions at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and Cleveland Museum of Natural History provide attendees the opportunity to visit renowned Cleveland landmarks, while enjoying the rich culture and excitement of the city.
"We are proud to collaborate with NASA and OAI in hosting this significant gathering of biomimicry technology experts," said Tom Tyrrell, CEO and founder, Great Lakes Biomimicry. "No one interested in the field of biomimicry should miss this rare opportunity to access so much knowledge in one venue."
The cost to attend the forum is $325 for general registration. A detailed agenda provides an in-depth look at the innovative and informative sessions scheduled.
ABOUT OAI
The Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI) is a non-profit organization that enhances the aerospace competitiveness of its corporate partners and university members through research and technology development, workforce preparedness and engagement with global networks for innovation and advocacy. OAI's industry membership program is the largest of its kind in the Great Lakes region. For more information, visit www.oai.org.
SOURCE The Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI)
Related Links
http://www.oai.org
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Margaret I. Cuomo, M.D., president of the Italian Language Foundation, announced today that The College Board's Advanced Placement Italian Language and Culture exam (AP Italian) in 2016 saw its highest level of participation ever.
"We are delighted that nearly 2,800 students took the AP Italian exam in 2016," Dr. Cuomo said. "With each passing year, since AP Italian was reinstated in 2011, more and more students are participating in the program, which encourages both a love of the Italian language and Italy's culture and, in some cases, provides college credit for work the students have done in high school. It's exciting to see the continuing strong growth of student interest in the AP Italian Program." Data about student participation was shared with the Italian Language Foundation (ILF) by the College Board.
Among the youngest of The College Board's advanced placement programs, AP Italian has shown strong growth in the five years it has been offered continuously. "This year, AP Italian was the fastest growing of any AP world language course," said Trevor Packer, senior vice president, AP and Instruction, the College Board. "What's more, AP Italian teachers and students also achieved the largest jump in college-credit-qualifying exam scores of any of the world language AP Exams. This is a year of victory both for participation and performance in AP Italianfor both access and excellence."
In 2016, nearly 2,000 AP Italian students met the standards to receive and Italian Language Foundation Dante Award. The ILF provides students with grants of $50.00 when they receive the score of a three, $75.00 for a four, and $100.00 for a five.
Students of AP Italian for the upcoming academic year may register as free members of the ILF to become eligible for the Dante Award at www.ilf.org.
In addition to advocating for Italian language and culture education and providing funds for the Dante Awards, the ILF offers free professional development workshops for teachers of Italian to prepare them to teach AP Italian. Workshops are free to teachers who are ILF members. Information about the workshops may be found at www.ilf.org.
AP Italian was inaugurated in 2005 and suspended in 2009. In anticipation of the program being defunded, Dr. Cuomo and Louis Tallarini, both advocates for Italian language and culture, founded the Italian Language Foundation in 2008 and subsequently helped raise $650,000 towards its reinstatement. In partnership with the Republic of Italy, the Columbus Citizens Foundation, the National Italian American Foundation, UNICO, and other organizations, the ILF worked with The College Board to successfully reinstate AP Italian beginning with the 2011 2012 academic year.
MEDIA CONTACT: Andrew Decker | 917-860-3557 | [email protected]
SOURCE Italian Language Foundation
Related Links
http://www.ilf.org
CLEVELAND, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Republican National Convention's evening program for Monday, July 18 will highlight presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's commitment to making America safe again. Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson will kick off the evening speech program with remarks. Other speakers include U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Lieutenant General (ret.) Michael Flynn, U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), military veteran Jason Beardsley, U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), Benghazi survivor Mark "Oz" Geist, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, and members of deceased Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry's family, Kelly Terry-Willis and Kent Terry.
The people speaking tonight include veterans, military leaders, elected officials, and concerned citizens. They will highlight the Republican Party's commitment to protect our country by strengthening our military, securing our borders, defeating terrorism, and supporting the people who keep our communities safe. Tonight's speakers will express their support for Donald Trump, who will provide strong leadership for a safer America.
See excerpts of headline speakers' remarks as prepared for delivery below.
Willie Robertson
"We need a president who will have our back.
"I can promise you this: no matter who you are, DONALD TRUMP WILL HAVE YOUR BACK.
"If you're looking for a job or trying to grow a business DONALD TRUMP WILL HAVE YOUR BACK.
"If you're a serviceman fighting overseas or a cop keeping us safe at home DONALD TRUMP WILL HAVE YOUR BACK.
"If you're an average American who feels like you've been forgotten neglected by far away leaders that the deck is stacked against you and you just can't win DONALD TRUMP WILL HAVE YOUR BACK.
"He may not always tell you what you want to hear you may not always agree and it may not always be politically correct. (But when your dad is Phil Robertson, you get used to that sort of thing.)
"But Donald Trump will always always tell you the truth as he sees it.
"And that is why we can trust him to make America great again as our next president."
Scott Baio
"We have a choice in November. We can go for Hillary Clinton: who wants to continue the same policies that are wrecking this country. Policies that make us unsafe. A woman who somehow feels entitled to the presidency . . . that she is somehow owed it."
"Or we can go for Donald Trump: A man doing this from the goodness of his heart and genuinely wants to help. A man who knows how to get things done . . . and a man who says what he means and means what he says."
"Hillary Clinton wants to be president for her. Donald Trump wants to be President for us."
Mark Geist A.K.A OZ (Benghazi)
OPTIONAL INTRO IF NEEDED TO SET STAGE:
"Thank you America for showing us the support and dedication that should have been offered by Hillary and her State Department to those who saved their butts."
"More than 30 American lives were saved that night.
It's because Americans never give up.
We refuse to lose.
Benghazi is not about politics.
It's about opportunities."
"Opportunities taken when we defied stand down orders and opportunities squandered when Hillary Clinton failed to protect her people on the ground.
Had she done her job, we would not have had to compromise the annex."
"Now we as Americans have the opportunity to elect someone who will make this country safe again."
"Someone who will have our backs.
Someone who will bring our guys home.
Someone who will lead with strength and integrity.
That someone is Donald Trump."
Kelly Terry-Willis and Kent Terry (Immigration)
Speaking about the late Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry:
"Brian was supposed to come home to Michigan for Christmas for the first time in three years. Instead of celebrating the holidays with him, we buried him not far from the family home. Two weapons recovered at the scene were traced to the Obama Administration's doomed "Fast and Furious" gun-tracking operation. No one was ever held accountable for its failure."
"The best way to honor him is to honor his fellow Border Patrol officers. They need the personnel and equipment required to keep our borders secure."
"Only one candidate is serious about border security: Donald Trump. He will give our heroic Border Patrol agents the resources and support needed to do their jobs. President Trump will make America's borders secure again."
Sheriff David Clarke (Police Support)
"In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote passionately about "the interrelatedness of all communities and states" and about our "inescapable network of mutuality, tying us in a single garment of destiny."
"He spoke of the basic morality of the rule of law, provided that it is applied equally to both the wealthy and the impoverished; both men and women, and yes, the majority and the minority."
"Donald Trump understands that what can make our nation safe again is a recommitment to a justice system in which no government official, not even those who have fought their way to the marble and granite halls of Washington; no private citizen, not even Hillary Clinton; and no group of people, despite the fervor with which they press forward their grievances, can claim privilege above the law."
Tom Cotton
"We don't fight because we hate our enemies, but because we love our country. We love its freedom. We love that we're born equal and live free, that no one rules without consent.
"We know these things are worth fighting and dying for because they make life worth living for.
"Our warriors and their families don't ask for much. But there are a few things we'd like.
"A commander-in-chief who speaks of winning wars and not merely ending wars, calls the enemy by its name, and draws red lines carefully, but enforces them ruthlessly.
"And politicians who treat our common defense as the chief responsibility of our federal government, not just another government program.
"This isn't much to ask for, but eight years without it is more than enough. So I say again: In a Trump-Pence administration and with a Republican Congress, help is on the way.
"And for that cause, I speak tonight not only to Republicans, but to the millions of independents and Democrats who share that dream and who wish to make America safe again."
Lt. General Michael Flynn
"Tonight, Americans stand as one, with strength and confidence to overcome the last eight years of the Obama-Clinton failures such as bumbling indecisiveness, willful ignorance, and total incompetence that has challenged the very heart and soul of every American, and single-handedly brought continued mayhem, murder and destruction into our neighborhoods and onto the world's streets."
"Let me be clear coddling and displays of empathy toward terrorists is not a strategy for defeating these murderers as Obama and Hillary Clinton would like us to believe. And releasing terrorists will not end this war; on the contrary, it simply emboldens the terrorists and prolongs war. Under Barack Obama, we have no coherent strategy to protect our citizens, and under Hillary Clinton, it will be more of the same."
"I promise you that Donald Trump knows that the primary role of the President is to keep us safe. He recognizes the threats we face and is not afraid to call them what they are. Donald Trump's leadership, decision-making and problem-solving abilities will restore America's role as the undeniable and unquestioned world leader. He will lead from the front, not from behind. He will lead with courage, never vacillating when facing our enemies or our competitors. And he knows that the advantage in life, in business, and in wartime goes to the competitor that does not flinch and does not broadcast his game plan."
Joni Ernst:
"The question I hear time and again is 'where is America's leadership?' There's a void in the world: a deficit that cannot be filled by others. Our country and the world of which we are a part simply cannot afford four more years of this lack of leadership under Hillary Clinton.
"Our allies see us shrinking from our place as a leader in the world as we have failed time and again to address threats. They are looking for American leaders who are willing to stand up and say 'enough is enough.'
"Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world.
"She has already failed us too many times before.
"We need a commander-in-chief who will stand up to our enemies, support our allies, and stand up for our veterans. We need a leader who will ensure America remains a strong, stabilizing force around the globe, and who will keep us safe here at home.
"Our country cannot take another four years just like the eight we've just had. It is time to stand up and fight for the security of our children, our grandchildren, and ourselves.
"With Hillary Clinton it's always about her, when it should be about you. Donald Trump is focused on you. He gave voice to a movement of millions of Americans who are tired of politics as usual, and I know as president he will work tirelessly to keep our nation safe."
Jason Beardsley
"Today, at this crucial point in our history, can we summon the spirit that forged our nation and bound us together under principles of liberty and justice for all? It's time for us once again to choose freedom over tyranny.
"Over the last eight years, the US has traded her role of active leadership for that of a passive observer. Americans have been told that the US has not always been a force for goodthat since we have made mistakes, we should forfeit our leadership or "lead from behind."
"This thinking has endangered not just the US but freedom across the world. The results fall squarely on the shoulders of the current administration, supported by Hillary Clinton.
"It's time we put someone in office who holds the same conviction that we hold that my fellow warrior heroes and I holdand that my friends bled and died for.
"As service members, we live by these convictions. Imagine a country where our President shares those convictions and upholds the honor of our military, a President who knows our past and defends liberty. With that leadership, we will go over the top and into the teeth of the 21 century.
"In Donald Trump's America, we will have that leadership AND the only time service members will get on their knees will be to thank their God that they are Americans."
U.S. Representative Ryan Zinke (MT)
"Together Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton brought us ISIS and brought down Benghazi. I shudder to think at how many more times our flag will be at half mast if Hillary Clinton is sitting in the Oval Office."
"Donald Trump isn't afraid to talk about radical Islamic terrorism, and he won't be afraid to destroy it."
Paid for by the Committee on Arrangements for the 2016 Republican National Convention. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
www.convention.gop.
Contact: [email protected]
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SOURCE 2016 Republican National Convention
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Lucosky Brookman and Spartan thank all of their friends, clients and colleagues whom have generously made donations and matching contributions. The amount raised will benefit approximately thirteen children from developing countries by providing them with life-saving heart surgery and post-operative care.
SACH is an international humanitarian project whose mission is to improve the quality of pediatric cardiac care for children from developing countries whom suffer from congenital and rheumatic heart disease. Lucosky Brookman and Spartan have adopted SACH as their charity of choice because of its mission and immediate impact on children around the world. SACH is dedicated to the idea that every child deserves the best medical treatment available, regardless of the child's nationality, religion, color, gender or financial situation. Since 1995, SACH has treated more than 4,000 children suffering from congenital and rheumatic heart disease aging from infancy to 18 years of age. SACH has helped children in over 50 countries, including Africa, South America, Europe, Asia and throughout the Middle East, where adequate medical care is unavailable.
Bob Press, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of TCA Fund Management Group, was honored at the event, receiving the Corporate Hero Award for his generosity and support of SACH. Mr. Press has donated money to the Save A Childs Heart Foundation through Lucosky Brookman Charity Events for the past three years and, through his donations, he has saved the lives of five children. Moreover, he is a great supporter of other children's charitable foundations, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation, upon which he sits as a member of the Board of Directors and has recently been named as Chairman of the Board. He is the largest cumulative donor in the history of the Southern Florida Chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He and his wife, Alysia, have donated millions of dollars over the past several years. He has changed the lives of over 500 children and their families. If there is ever a time when people are in need, he is always incredibly generous. He is a true philanthropist. Lucosky Brookman and Spartan thank Mr. Press for his ongoing support and congratulate him on being awarded the Corporate Hero Award.
Joseph Lucosky, Managing Partner of Lucosky Brookman, states, "We are pleased and humbled by the generous donations of our clients and friends. Each year, the Firm's charity event gets better and better, supported by the philanthropy of like-minded individuals all giving money to support the health and welfare of children. As a father of four children myself, I am honored to be a part of such a worthwhile cause."
John Lowry, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Spartan Capital Securities, LLC, likewise commented, "Spartan was honored to be a part of this special night to help raise money for such a deserving cause. SACH's dedication to providing medical care to children, regardless of race or religion, is not only saving lives around the world, but also building bridges."
David Litwack, Executive Director of Save A Child's Heart, U.S., remarked, "On behalf of the entire SACH organization, I wish to extend my heartfelt appreciation to Lucosky Brookman, Spartan and their clients, friends and colleagues for their extraordinary philanthropy and commitment. Raising $235,000 is truly amazing."
ABOUT LUCOSKY BROOKMAN LLP
Lucosky Brookman LLP (www.lucbro.com) is a leading corporate finance and securities law firm with offices in New York and New Jersey, representing public and private companies, institutional and privately-owned, both domestic and international, in sophisticated corporate and securities transactions, mergers and acquisitions, secured and unsecured lending transactions, PIPEs and general corporate matters.
CONTACT
Lucosky Brookman LLP
101 Wood Avenue South, 5th Floor
Woodbridge, New Jersey 08830
Phone: (732) 395-4400
Facsimile: (732) 395-4401
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.lucbro.com
ABOUT SPARTAN CAPITAL SECURITIES, LLC
Spartan Capital Securities, LLC (www.spartancapital.com) is a full-service, integrated financial services firm that provides sound investment guidance for high net worth individuals and institutions. The firm's in-depth market knowledge, calculated risk management strategy and investment acumen have earned it a strong reputation as trusted Financial Advisors. Its philosophy is simple: Understand its clients' objectives and execute accordingly.
CONTACT
Spartan Capital Securities, LLC
45 Broadway, 9th Floor
New York, New York 10006
Phone: (212) 293-0123
Facsimile: (212) 785-4565
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.spartancapital.com
ABOUT THE SAVE A CHILD'S HEART FOUNDATION
The Save A Child's Heart Foundation (www.saveachildsheart.org) is an international humanitarian project, whose mission is to improve the quality of pediatric cardiac care for children from developing countries whom suffer from heart disease. SACH is completely dedicated to the idea that every child deserves the best medical treatment available, regardless of the child's nationality, religion, color, gender or financial situation.
CONTACT
Save A Child's Heart Foundation
10050 Chapel Road, Suite 18
Potomac, MD 20854
Phone: (301) 618-4588
Facsimile: (301) 322-1447
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Web: www.saveachildsheartus.org
ATTORNEY ADVERTISING
This press release may be considered advertising under the rules of some states. Prior results cannot and do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390529
SOURCE Lucosky Brookman LLP
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http://www.lucbro.com
HORSHAM, Pa., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- AAMCO Transmissions, Inc. ("AAMCO"), franchisor of the world's largest branded chain of transmission specialists and an industry leader in total car care services, today announced its local Tulsa, Oklahoma, service center has been recognized by the Ernest Childers Tulsa chapter of The Military Order of the Purple Heart for its dedication to the local veteran community. Owned by AAMCO's largest franchisee, Thomas and Ronda Scott, the AAMCO Franchise in Tulsa, which is managed by Ron Smith, has been providing heavily discounted services to veterans in the community for more than a year.
"When Ron first received a call from The Military Order of the Purple Heart about a Purple Heart recipient who needed a new transmission, we knew we had to help," said Ronda Scott, franchisee. "Since then, we've helped about ten other veterans in our local community who had car trouble, including replacing one car completely. At AAMCO, we are strong supporters of the U.S. military and feel it's our duty to say thank you in any way possible to those who selflessly serve our country."
The Military Order of the Purple Heart was formed in 1932 for the protection and mutual interest of all who have received the decoration. Composed exclusively of Purple Heart recipients, it is the only veterans service organization comprised strictly of "combat" veterans.
The Scotts initially purchased the existing AAMCO service center in Tulsa, Oklahoma in November 2013, and acquired a second location in the market less than six months later. The entrepreneurs quickly transformed the two units into valued businesses, which are now the top performing service centers in the region. The team has received various accolades for their outstanding achievements from the company, including bottom line improvement, customer service and performance since their start with the brand in 2013. Their success is built on morale they strive to build value in their nearly 50 employees and aim for advanced customer service throughout all of their locations.
"We're incredibly proud of the initiative and dedication that the Scotts and their center manager Ron Smith have shown to their local community," said Rob Rajkowski, chief operating officer at AAMCO Transmission, Inc. "Many of AAMCO's franchise owners voluntarily give back to the communities they serve, and we're dedicated to supporting them and their local charitable initiatives."
For more than 50 years, AAMCO's network of locally owned and independently operated automotive service centers has employed the latest technology. Expert technicians diagnose a repair, fix it right the first time and back it with a nationwide warranty. Known as the world's leading transmission expert, the company has evolved into a total car care brand that provides a variety of services including brake repair, tune-ups, shocks and struts, routine maintenance and more. AAMCO was recently named to Entrepreneur's 2016 Franchise 500, ranking at the top of the transmission repair category. Based on network size, growth rate and financial strength, the brand also earned a spot on Entrepreneur's "Best of the Best" list.
To learn more about franchise or conversion opportunities with AAMCO, contact Eric Simon, director of franchise development, at 866-379-5649 or [email protected] or visit aamcofranchise.com.
About AAMCO
AAMCO is the world's largest branded chain of transmission specialists and a leader in total car care services. AAMCO has nearly 700 franchised automotive centers throughout the United States and Canada. Established in 1962, AAMCO-branded centers are proud to have served more than 45 million drivers. For more information, visit: aamcouniversity.com, aamco.com or aamcoblog.com.
Contact:
Claibourne Smith
Fish Consulting
407-808-2426
[email protected]
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150521/217798LOGO
SOURCE AAMCO Transmissions, Inc.
Making a dazzling design statement, amba Taipei Songshan welcomes savvy globetrotters into a vibrant urban oasis that blends modernity with authentic Taiwanese flavor. Panoramic views of Taipei 101 and the beautiful Keelung River are a spectacular feature throughout the hotel. The Lobby is a fun social space for guests to hang out, offset by views of Taipei 101. By night, color-changing lighting marks out Taiwan's hottest new hotel landmark.
Authentic Taiwanese craftsmanship is showcased throughout amba's streamlined design. Casting a magical glow is a signature collection of 24 giant eco-bamboo lanterns standing up to three meters high. Each lantern was custom crafted for the hotel by a team of artisans in central Taiwan from eco bamboo. The lights feature 17 different hand-woven designs that dapple the space with unique patterns.
Smart Guestrooms
More than 70 percent of amba's 189 guestrooms offer panoramic vistas of Taipei 101 or Keelung River. Room categories range from Smart Rooms (27 sqm/291 sqft) to Corner 101 View Rooms (32 sqm/346 sqft) to a stunning Studio (107 sqm/1,150 sqft).
A dream for tech-savvy travelers, amba's signature 'essentials' enable guests to work smart and recharge comfortably. Every guestroom offers complimentary superfast WiFi, a 48-inch HD TV, Bluetooth speaker and a Nespresso machine. Guest bathrooms offer a separate shower room fitted with a dual Ecostat Comfort rain shower and massage showerheads, plus a 'bathtub with a view' in the larger rooms.
Integrating form, function and fun with a designer twist, amba's guestrooms feature a soothing natural color palette accentuated by pop art, colorful chairs and industrial-style ceiling lamps made from silicon-rubber. Environmentally friendly materials include eco-wood flooring in the guestrooms, and recycled woven vinyl carpet in the corridors.
Destination Dining and Spectacular Events
amba's Que restaurant is a modern chophouse serving premium wood-fired steaks and seafood grilled over native fruit-tree woods. The hotel is ideal for creative meetings, joyful weddings and special events, seating up to 150 for meetings or 200 for banquets. Que 1 private room features panoramic vistas of Keelung River through 90-degree curved windows, and can cater up to 36 banquet guests or 50 meeting guests. The spectacular seven-meter-high Que atrium seats up to 90 guests, while SPIN inspires teams of up to 18 guests to put a new spin on possibilities with its playful design, ping pong meeting table and Taipei 101 views.
Convenient Location in Downtown Taipei
Travelers will appreciate amba's convenient location. The new hotel is situated at the nexus of Xinyi, Songshan and Nangang districts, and is directly connected to Songshan Station for metro and trains. Taipei 101 and Xinyi district are just five minutes from the hotel by free shuttle service. Raohe Night Market, Ciyou Temple and Rainbow Bridge are all within five minutes' walk.
Amazing Introductory Offers
Introductory rates on amba-hotels.com start from TWD3,500 and from TWD3,900 with breakfast, subject to 15.5% service charge and tax. Book early on the amba Hotels official site and enjoy up to 15% extra savings. For reservations, please visit amba-hotels.com or call +886 2 2525 2828.
About amba
Styled to resonate with today's travelers, amba Hotels & Resorts celebrates design creativity, responsible consumption, and fun, unique travel experiences. The first amba hotel, amba Taipei Ximending, opened in 2012 and was hailed by Wallpaper* magazine as one of the best new openings around the world.
amba Taipei Songshan (map)
8, Section 7, Civic Boulevard, Taipei 11562, Taiwan
+886 2 2653 2828
amba-hotels.com/en/songshan/ | facebook.com/ambaSongshan
Press Contact
More details | [email protected]
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160630/385237
SOURCE amba Taipei Songshan
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PHILADELPHIA, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Americans widely support the mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods, which is required in a bill approved by Congress on July 14 and sent to the White House to await President Obama's signature.
But most Americans are unaware of the scientific consensus that there is no substantiated evidence showing that genetically modified foods are unsafe. And a majority of the public (58 percent) acknowledges having only a fair or poor understanding of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Those are among the findings of a recent survey of U.S. adults, which preceded Congressional approval of the GMO labeling bill and was conducted by researchers from the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
The vast majority of Americans (88 percent) support the mandatory labeling of foods containing GMOs, the survey found. In addition, 91 percent agree that people have the right to know when they buy or eat products that contain GMOs.
Lack of knowledge about GMOs
But fewer than 1 in 5 people (18 percent) were aware of a report on genetically engineered crops issued on May 17, the day the survey commenced, by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The study committee found "no substantiated evidence of a difference in risks to human health between currently commercialized genetically engineered (GE) crops and conventionally bred crops..."
In the survey, only 1 in 5 people (22 percent) agreed that scientists have not found any risks to human health from eating genetically modified foods. Nearly half (48 percent) disagreed with that statement, while 25 percent neither agreed nor disagreed. Only 39 percent of people agreed that "GMO crops are safe to eat," while 27 percent disagreed with that statement, and 30 percent neither agreed nor disagreed.
The labeling bill approved by Congress calls for the use of on-package text, a symbol designed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or a digital QR code to designate food containing GMOs. A QR code, when scanned by a smartphone, can direct someone to a website with information.
How the labeling bill will be implemented is unclear, noted Dominique Brossard, a fall 2016 visiting scholar at the Annenberg Public Policy Center and professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Labeling is an important issue that still needs to be debated at the national level," said Brossard, a member of the National Academies committee that issued the GMO report. She found it "troubling" that only 1 in 5 people knew that scientists have not found evidence of adverse health effects from eating GM foods.
William Hallman, a 2016-17 visiting scholar at the Annenberg Public Policy Center and professor of the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University, said that while nearly 60 percent of Americans reported having only a fair or poor understanding of GMOs, the new labeling law might ultimately change this if consumers are willing to use QR codes to find out more about the products they buy. "One potential advantage of using a QR code is that consumers could be linked to much more information about genetically modified ingredients, and how they are produced and regulated, than could ever be printed on a product label," he said.
The phone survey of 1,008 U.S. adults was conducted May 17-21 by SSRS, a research firm. The margin of error was 3.75 percentage points. For more on the methodology, see the Appendix.
SOURCE The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
Related Links
http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org
FREMONT, Calif., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Asterias Biotherapeutics, Inc. (NYSE MKT: AST), a biotechnology company with three clinical-stage development programs focused on the emerging field of regenerative medicine, today announced that the company has appointed Ryan Chavez as Executive Vice President of Finance and General Counsel, effective today, reporting to Steve Cartt, President and Chief Executive Officer.
As Asterias' chief legal officer and a senior financial executive, Mr. Chavez will oversee day-to-day legal operations and strategy, utilizing previous in-house experience with publicly-traded companies including Questcor Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, plc. He will provide leadership on regulatory and compliance, risk management, M&A, litigation, corporate governance, general legal issues and corporate financial matters.
"Ryan is a highly accomplished legal and finance professional with broad experience in corporate law and finance," said Mr. Cartt. "Ryan's expansive knowledge within the healthcare industry, including regulatory law, securities law, compliance and M&A, combined with his financial and business acumen, further strengthens our executive leadership team."
Most recently, Mr. Chavez was Vice President and General Counsel of Mallinckrodt's Autoimmune and Rare Disease Division. Before joining Mallinckrodt in August 2014, Mr. Chavez served as Associate General Counsel at Questcor. Prior to joining Questcor in October 2012, he worked at the law firms of Stradling, Yocca, Carlson & Rauth and Rutan & Tucker. Previously, Mr. Chavez served in various financial roles at General Electric Co. He earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from Chapman University School of Law and his B.A. with honors and distinction from Stanford University.
Russell Skibsted, the current acting CFO of Asterias, and Mr. Chavez will work closely together on Asterias financial reporting and related matters while Mr. Chavez transitions into his new role.
About Asterias Biotherapeutics
Asterias Biotherapeutics, Inc. is a leading biotechnology company in the emerging field of regenerative medicine. The company's proprietary cell therapy programs are based on its immunotherapy and pluripotent stem cell platform technologies. Asterias is presently focused on advancing three clinical-stage programs which have the potential to address areas of very high unmet medical need in the fields of oncology and neurology. AST-OPC1 (oligodendrocyte progenitor cells) is currently in a Phase 1/2a dose escalation clinical trial in spinal cord injury. AST-VAC1 (antigen-presenting autologous dendritic cells) demonstrated promise in a Phase 2 study in acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and completed a successful end-of-Phase 2 meeting with the FDA in advance of assessing plans for a single pivotal Phase 3 AML study. AST-VAC2 (antigen-presenting allogeneic dendritic cells) represents a second generation, allogeneic immunotherapy. The company's research partner, Cancer Research UK, plans to begin a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of AST-VAC2 in non-small cell lung cancer in 2017. Additional information about Asterias can be found at www.asteriasbiotherapeutics.com.
FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
Statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating and/or clinical research results, future growth in research, technology, clinical development, and potential opportunities for Asterias, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical fact (including, but not limited to statements that contain words such as "will," "believes," "plans," "anticipates," "expects," "estimates") should also be considered to be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, risks inherent in the development and/or commercialization of potential products, uncertainty in the results of clinical trials or regulatory approvals, need and ability to obtain future capital, and maintenance of intellectual property rights. Actual results may differ materially from the results anticipated in these forward-looking statements and as such should be evaluated together with the many uncertainties that affect the businesses of Asterias, particularly those mentioned in the cautionary statements found in Asterias' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Asterias disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
SOURCE Asterias Biotherapeutics, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.asteriasbiotherapeutics.com
LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
"Innovation for us isn't just about "doing things differently". It is about cultivating the valid pathways for development, providing the operational architecture at a large scale of operations, evangelizing positive change," states Mr. Gabriel Chaleplis, the leader of B2B GAMING SERVICES.
Gabriel Chaleplis CEO B2B GAMING SERVICES (PRNewsFoto/B2B GAMING SERVICES)
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390480LOGO )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390479 )
The company goes from strength to strength in the fledgling online betting and gaming sector, in Europe and Greece, providing market "oxygen" to global and local online betting and gaming brands, enabling them to pursue their business, accommodating different regulation, legislation and taxation frameworks in Europe and the world.
"We grow our business by growing our clients' business," explains Mr. Gabriel Chaleplis.
Recently "crowned" with the status of one of ten top businesses in Europe at the so-called "Oscars" of European entrepreneurship (The European Business Awards 2015/2016), a National Champion for Malta (September 1st, 2015), B2B GAMING SERVICES is awarded also and for second consecutive year for growth and contribution to the Greek economy ("Diamonds of the Greek Economy" Awards 2015 & 2016).
B2B GAMING SERVICES is the first company in its sector to receive these distinctions in European Business Awards' history.
Mr. Gabriel Chaleplis summarizes his standpoint: "The story of B2B GAMING SERVICES is not a story about overriding competition, not development to its detriment. It is a common path and parallel development because the future, is ALWAYS common."
B2B GAMING SERVICES, an IT/TECHNOLOGY company specializing in services for Enterprises, via its innovative and constantly developing platform, "home of many" online gaming brands including its proprietary brand, Betshop, based in Malta, with other main offices located in London, (UK) and Rome (Italy), Nicosia (Cyprus) and Durban (South Africa), currently operating directly in 12 countries, among them Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Romania, Bulgaria, South Africa and Nigeria.
Since the beginning of its operations, B2B GAMING SERVICES culminates the approach of its leader, Gabriel Chaleplis, the architect and the evangelist of outthinking boundaries in business, constantly "gaming forward" in the innumerable ways people understand, use and enjoy technology.
Gabriel Chaleplis is an international entrepreneur (UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Romania, South Africa, UAE and Greece) of pioneering large scale operations, with more than 20 years of experience in merging mutual core capabilities for global leadership.
URL: http://www.b2bgamingservices.com/
SOURCE B2B GAMING SERVICES
LOS ANGELES, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BandLab, the first global, cloud-based platform for iOS, Android and the web where users can create, collaborate and share their music, today announced that it has acquired Composr, a European-based iOS and web music-making service, and has expanded its leadership team with a digital music veteran.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160717/390369LOGO
BandLab's acquisition of Composr will bring in both new users and talent to the growing company. Composr is an iOS and Web music collaboration app company founded by Nick den Engelsman, who joins the BandLab team.
"Aligning with BandLab will give Composr's community of users powerful new features and functionality and will accelerate Composr's mission to help musicians record songs socially. I'm really looking forward to joining this particular band!" said den Engelsman.
Meng Ru Kuok, BandLab's CEO and co-founder, said: "We are excited to work with Nick to expand the BandLab community and to bring our creative audio tools and capabilities to Composr's community of users."
BandLab also announced the addition of Fred McIntyre, who joins the company as its Chief Marketing Officer to strengthen growth and innovation for BandLab. He comes with a strong track record of building and leading digital music businesses at Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, Last.fm, CBS Radio, AOL, Winamp, Spinner.com, VIBE & SPIN. McIntyre has also worked closely with a number of leading digital music startups including 8tracks, Mixcloud and SoundHound.
Kuok said: "Our goal has always been to have a global presence. In adding Fred to our leadership team, I believe we now have the right strategy in place to be able to make that a reality. We have a very active community of users all around the world, constantly producing new music. So Fred's experience in growing music communities makes him the perfect fit for BandLab."
"More people are making more music today than at any point in history, and this shift is having a profound impact on how people interact with and around music", said McIntyre. "BandLab is building the platform for the future of music, and it's a privilege to be part of the team bringing this to life."
ABOUT BANDLAB
BandLab is a free, all-in-one (iOS, Android and web), cloud-based social platform that simplifies the process of making music. Its global community of musicians and fans work to create and collaborate on music, which can be shared across the global community. BandLab is part of BandLab Technologies, a connected ecosystem of brands covering musical instruments and accessories, web/mobile/social applications and commerce. The company's collective expertise in software and hardware developmentcombined with an ability to connect directly with consumers through both digital and physical touchpointsputs it in a unique position to shape the future of music.
Media Contacts
In the US:
Scott Robertson, APR
RobertsonComm for BandLab
[email protected]
+1 949-766-6789
In Singapore:
Catherine Ong
Catherine Ong Associates
[email protected]
+65 6327-6088
This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com
SOURCE BandLab
SACRAMENTO, Calif., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Bluett & Associates, Inc., a national real estate service firm based in Sacramento, has rented advertising on the Sacramento Electronic Billboard on Highway 50 at CSUS for the week. Lori Bluett, owner of Bluett & Associates, has become fed up with recent criticisms and lack of support of the men and women of service in our communities. Lori worked with Clear Channel Advertising and Graphic Designer Jason PAIR design, LLC in Sacramento to design and run the above Thank You All Law Enforcement ad that will be ran 1200+ times a day for seven days this week.
Bluett Thanks Law Enforcement
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160717/390362
Lori used Facebook to challenge other Sacramento and national business owners to do the same thing to keep the ad on electronic billboards for Law Enforcement to see the companies that support them. Sacramento's Commercial Real Estate Executive, Ethan Conrad, and another local anonymous Broker have stepped up to keep the ad running for the following two weeks in Sacramento under their logos. Also, several other companies in other states have picked up on Lori's Facebook challenge and will be running the same ad in their communities. Let's keep this going and get it across the country.
For Media Inquiries:
Lori Bluett
Bluett & Associates, Inc.
916-779-1031
Ethan Conrad
Ethan Conrad Properties, Inc.
916-779-1000
This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com
SOURCE Bluett & Associates
FRANKFURT, Germany and LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BNY Mellon, a global leader in investment management and investment services, has signed an agreement with Nomura Asset Management Deutschland KAG1 mbH (Nomura Asset Management Deutschland) to provide fund administration and middle office services to their German domiciled funds with around 2 billion in assets under administration2.
BNY Mellon will initially provide the full suite of fund administration services to Nomura Asset Management Deutschland including fund accounting, regulatory reporting and risk controlling via its affiliate BNY Mellon Service Kapitalanlage-Gesellschaft mbH (BNY Mellon Service KAG). Further front office solutions and additional services such as collateral management are scheduled to be added in the second half of this year.
"BNY Mellon stood out because of its ability to provide a customised package and holistic front-to-back office service," said Magnus Fielko, Chief Administration Officer of Nomura Asset Management Deutschland. "Our strategic relationship with BNY Mellon allows us to focus on our core business of asset management, while ensuring that our clients benefit from the scale and breadth of a leading global investment services company."
Nomura Asset Management is an existing client of BNY Mellon. In Germany, BNY Mellon also provides depotbank services and EMIR regulatory reporting services to Nomura Asset Management Deutschland which is a dedicated investment management operation of Nomura Asset Management.
"We look forward to developing our existing relationship with Nomura Asset Management Deutschland," said Thomas Brand, Head of BNY Mellon's Asset Servicing business in Germany. "The increased regulatory emphasis on transparency, accountability and consumer protection is encouraging more asset managers such as Nomura to ask for front-to-back office services. We have invested significantly in technology to handle multiple evolving processes at greater volume and speed as well as lower cost, so are well positioned to benefit from this trend."
BNY Mellon Service KAG has shown steady growth in recent years by securing new outsourcing mandates across the traditional securities business and also in the real estate space.
Notes to editors:
BNY Mellon
BNY Mellon's Asset Servicing business supports institutional investors in today's fast-evolving markets, safekeeping assets and enhancing the administration of client investments through services that process, monitor and measure data from around the world, allowing clients to focus on the management of their investments. We leverage our global footprint and local expertise to deliver insight and solutions across every stage of the investment lifecycle.
In Germany, BNY Mellon is one of the leading investment services companies. Germany is one of BNY Mellon's five core growth markets throughout the world. BNY Mellon has been continuously expanding its business ever since its German business started back in 1931 and now has approximately 450 employees in Frankfurt.
BNY Mellon is a global investments company dedicated to helping its clients manage and service their financial assets throughout the investment lifecycle. Whether providing financial services for institutions, corporations or individual investors, BNY Mellon delivers informed investment management and investment services in 35 countries and more than 100 markets. As of March 31, 2016, BNY Mellon had $29.1 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration, and $1.6 trillion in assets under management. BNY Mellon can act as a single point of contact for clients looking to create, trade, hold, manage, service, distribute or restructure investments. BNY Mellon is the corporate brand of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (NYSE: BK). Learn more at http://www.bnymellon.com/. Follow us on Twitter @BNYMellon or visit our newsroom at www.bnymellon.com/newsroom for the latest company news.
Nomura Asset Management
The Nomura Asset Management is a leading global investment manager. Headquartered in Tokyo, Nomura Asset Management has additional investment offices throughout the world including London, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, Frankfurt and New York. With a global workforce of over 1,200 employees it has been operating in Europe for the past 30 years.
Nomura Asset Management Deutschland has been managing individual funds for institutional investors and retail funds since 1988. It has established its reputation in the German-speaking market as a specialist in Asian equities and fixed income. Today, Nomura Asset Management Deutschland provides its clients with a wide range of innovative investment strategies including global, regional and single country equities, high yield bonds and global fixed income. This agreement represents Nomura Asset Management Deutschland's first outsourcing agreement for fund accounting services in Germany.
1A KAG, also referred to as a KVG, is a German regulated capital management company.
2Gross asset value as of 09.06.2016. Source: Nomura Asset Management Deutschland KAG mbH.
This press release is issued by The Bank of New York Mellon to members of the financial press and media.
All information and figures source BNY Mellon unless otherwise stated as at March 31, 2016.
The Bank of New York Mellon, London Branch, registered in England and Wales with FC005522 and BR000818.
Branch office: One Canada Square, London E14 5AL. The Bank of New York Mellon is supervised and regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services and the Federal Reserve and authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority.
The Bank of New York Mellon London branch is subject to regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority and limited regulation by the Prudential Regulation Authority.
Details about the extent of our regulation by the Prudential Regulation Authority are available from us on request.
Contact: Malcolm Borthwick
+44 20 7163 4109
[email protected]
SOURCE BNY Mellon
Related Links
http://www.bnymellon.com
DALLAS, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BoltBus today announced its partnership with GenHERation, an innovative company that provides young women in high school and college access to female executives, career exploration, skill-building activities and scholarships. As the official sponsor of GenHERation Discovery Days, BoltBus will provide transportation for the series of day trips in various markets for participants to meet some of the most influential female executives at top corporations.
"We're excited to partner with GenHERation as they provide young women the opportunity to engage with other females in executive positions," said Kim Plaskett, vice president of marketing, Greyhound Lines, Inc. "This is an important initiative to support the development of these young women into future leaders, and BoltBus is happy to offer safe and comfortable transportation for those participating."
Discovery Days takes place today through Aug. 8 and will visit companies in major cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into some of the largest brands, such as Google, Facebook, Uber, NASA and Bloomberg.
"Our partnership with BoltBus will allow young women to get a firsthand look at what it's like to be a female executive," said Katlyn Grasso, CEO of GenHERation. "I hope these trips will inspire the participants and leave them with actionable ways they can become leaders in their communities."
For more information about BoltBus, please visit www.BoltBus.com. To learn more about GenHERation, visit www.GenHERation.com.
About BoltBus
BoltBus provides fast, frequent and safe transportation with unmatched amenities for an amazingly low price. BoltBus is a division of Greyhound Lines, Inc. For fare and schedule information and to buy tickets, visit www.BoltBus.com or download the mobile app in the Apple iTunes or Google Play stores. Fans can follow BoltBus on Twitter at www.twitter.com/boltbus or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/BoltBus.
About GenHERation
GenHERation is an interactive media company for aspirational young women. We provide high school and college students with access to career exploration, female executives, skill-building activities, and scholarships through our digital platform and national events. Our members work directly with national corporations and nonprofit organizations to develop their own advocacy campaigns that address community issues. GenHERation has worked with a diverse group of companies including, EY, Adobe, Yahoo, the American Heart Association, espnW, and Women in Toys. GenHERation has empowered more than 65,000 girls and hosted 16 events across North America.
SOURCE BoltBus
Related Links
http://www.BoltBus.com
WAUKESHA, Wis., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Cardiac Science announced today that its Board of Directors has appointed Devdatt (Dev) Kurdikar as Chief Executive Officer. Prior to joining Cardiac Science, Kurdikar was General Manager of the Boston Scientific Men's Health business.
Cardiac Science, a portfolio company of Los Angeles-based Aurora Resurgence, is a global leader in the manufacturing and marketing of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) for the public access, education, police, and fire and rescue markets.
Sean Ozbolt, Chairman, Cardiac Science Board of Directors, said, "The Board is excited to announce Dev's appointment as CEO to lead Cardiac Science through the next phase of its growth. Dev is a highly accomplished healthcare executive with an outstanding track record of success, and his experience leading global operations for major medical device businesses will be a tremendous asset to Cardiac Science. We look forward to a long, productive partnership with Dev and the exceptionally strong leadership team at Cardiac Science."
Kurdikar added, "I am honored to be appointed CEO of this world-class organization, and I am excited about the opportunity to help lead the continued resurgence of Cardiac Science. For over 25 years, this company has played a critical role in saving victims of sudden cardiac arrest around the world, and we will continue to support this mission as we expand our product lines and global presence. Today, Cardiac Science is growing meaningfully and there is an extraordinary passion to win at every level of the organization, and I look forward to working with this impressive team to build on the company's success."
About Devdatt Kurdikar
Devdatt (Dev) Kurdikar has more than 20 years of experience in the life sciences and healthcare industry. He spent the last three years as the General Manager of the Men's Health business of Boston Scientific and that business's predecessor at American Medical Systems (AMS). Prior to AMS, Dev spent 11 years at Baxter Corporation in various leadership positions across several functional areas of Baxter's businesses, including strategy and operations, product development, finance, and marketing. Dev holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington State University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Bombay.
About Cardiac Science
Cardiac Science is a global leader in the development, manufacturing and marketing of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and related parts, components and accessories. The Company also provides a comprehensive portfolio of training, maintenance, and support services for AED customers. Cardiac Science is headquartered in Waukesha, Wisconsin and has operations in North America, Europe and Asia, with an installed base of over 500,000 units in nearly 100 countries worldwide. For information, call 1.800.426.0337 or visit http://www.cardiacscience.com.
For media questions, contact Ric Kositzke at +1.262.953.7624.
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150608/221368LOGO
SOURCE Cardiac Science
Related Links
http://www.cardiacscience.com
ISLANDIA, N.Y., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Teledata Communications, Inc. (TCI) (www.tcicredit.com), a provider of cloud-based loan origination solutions, announced that Champlain National Bank, a full-service bank with nine locations in Northern New York, has deployed TCI's cloud-based DecisionLender 4 loan origination system (LOS) to process all its auto loan applications. As a result of this implementation, Champlain National Bank has been able to quickly diversify its loan portfolio from commercial lending to expand into the indirect consumer-based loan space.
DecisionLender 4 is a cloud-based platform that serves the needs of a broad range of lenders, including banks, credit unions, finance companies and online providers. The solution provides unparalleled flexibility for automating loan origination processes, enabling financial institutions to manage lending rules, parameters, application fields and workflows, without requiring expensive and time-consuming IT resources. DecisionLender 4 also delivers comprehensive analytics tools that gives lenders visibility into a number of key metrics to assess and revise their lending operations in real-time. This high level of customization empowers financial institutions to become more proactive and agile in creating and augmenting lending programs.
Based in Willsboro, New York, Champlain National Bank has operated primarily as a commercial bank positioned to serve businesses throughout New York State's Adirondack region. The institution was looking for a fast and cost-efficient way to expand into indirect consumer lending, and selected TCI's DecisionLender 4 platform as the most expedient solution for entering this lucrative market. As a result of deploying the system, Champlain National Bank integrated its loan origination process with DealerTrack and RouteOne, and signed on a substantial number of dealers in its region.
"One of the bank's prime growth strategies revolves around the diversification of our loan portfolio," explained Steven Cacchio, president and chief executive officer of Champlain National Bank. "We have a strong loan portfolio in both commercial lending and mortgages, but recognized that adding a consumer lending component would give us that 'third leg of the stool' we had been seeking. We found that the DecisionLender 4 platform was certainly the most compelling technology solution for enabling us to enter this market in streamlined, cost-effective and flexible manner. The system was extremely easy to configure, and we have the ability to manage the entire loan decisioning process on our ownwhich allows us to quickly respond to customer needs and competitive opportunities. Just as importantly, the support we have received from TCI has exceeded our expectations. They know our business well, and have provided a number of suggestions that have allowed us to maximize performance."
According to Barry Kirby II, vice president at TCI, Champlain National Bank's diversification interests are becoming a common theme in the industry.
"Institutions like Champlain National Bank are facing competitive pressures from both traditional and online lenders, and are constantly looking to broaden their reach by pursuing lending opportunities in a variety of sectors," said Kirby. "The DecisionLender 4 platform is perfectly suited for helping these financial institutions. As a cloud-based system, it gives lenders unmatched flexibility for creating lending programs tailored for specific markets. This not only expands the addressable market for lenders, it allows them to substantially reduce operational costs while also improving efficiency across the organization."
For more information on TCI and DecisionLender 4, visit www.tcicredit.com
About Teledata Communications, Inc.
Teledata Communications, Inc. (TCI) is a leading provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) loan origination solutions for credit unions, banks, and finance companies. TCI's DecisionLender enables lenders to process a greater amount of loans, improve workflows, and adhere to security and compliance mandates. TCI's latest solution, DecisionLender 4, features a flexible design which online and traditional lenders can configure to address their specific lending criteria and workflows. As authorities in the lending marketplace, TCI's solutions have been adopted by nearly five hundred lenders across a number of sectors, including automobile finance, power sports, lifestyle, appliances, and other consumer-facing industries. www.tcicredit.com
Public Relations Contact
Glenn Goldberg
Chief Executive Officer
Parallel Communications Group
516-705-6116
[email protected]
SOURCE Teledata Communications, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.tcicredit.com
VANCOUVER, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Corvus Gold Inc. ("Corvus" or the "Company") - (TSX: KOR, OTCQX: CORVF) announces the closing of a CAD $2,601,000 non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") at CAD $1.02 per share. Pursuant to the Private Placement, the Company issued 2,550,000 common shares with no warrant, representing approximately 2.8% of the outstanding Corvus common shares. The common shares issued in the Private Placement are subject to a hold period which expires on January 26, 2017. The sole participant in the Private Placement is Osisko Mining Inc. (TSX: OSK). Proceeds from the Private Placement are expected to accelerate the Company's North Bullfrog exploration program in 2016 and beyond.
Jeffrey Pontius, Corvus' CEO states "Corvus is very pleased to be adding the Osisko group to our shareholder register. The additional funding will be used to accelerate the exploration program at our North Bullfrog project where recent results have been encouraging. The Osisko group has had a long history of recognizing quality investment opportunities and we are pleased they have chosen to invest with the Corvus team as we work to deliver the next major Nevada gold deposit."
The foregoing securities have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "1933 Act") or any applicable state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S under the 1933 Act) or persons in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the foregoing securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.
On behalf of
CORVUS GOLD INC.
(signed) Jeffrey A. Pontius
Jeffrey A. Pontius,
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and US securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding the proposed use of the proceeds of the private placement by the Company are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Company's latest interim Management Discussion and Analysis filed with certain securities commissions in Canada and other information released by the Company and filed with the appropriate regulatory agencies. All of the Company's Canadian public disclosure filings may be accessed via www.sedar.com and readers are urged to review these materials, including the technical reports filed with respect to the Company's mineral properties.
This news release is not, and is not to be construed in any way as, an offer to buy or sell securities in the United States.
SOURCE Corvus Gold Inc.
Related Links
www.corvusgold.com
DENVER, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DaVita Kidney Care (NYSE: DVA), a leading independent provider of integrated health and kidney care services in the United States, today announced support for the Dialysis PATIENT Demonstration Act (H.R. 5506 / S. 3090).
"This legislation transforms the quality of care delivered to Americans on dialysis," said Javier Rodriguez, president and CEO of DaVita Kidney Care.
"By assuming full clinical and economic accountability, ESRD providers will be able to coordinate care inside and outside the dialysis facility," said Rodriguez. "This model is good for patients and good for taxpayers. It will succeed because it empowers patients, emphasizes physician leadership, and facilitates innovation. DaVita joins dialysis patients and providers in supporting this bipartisan, patient-centered legislation."
Approximately 660,000 people in the U.S. suffer from end-stage renal disease (ESRD), also known as kidney failure. Many ESRD patients struggle with multiple chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and depression. They are also more likely to be socioeconomically disadvantaged, which limits their ability to access needed health care services.
H.R. 5506 is sponsored by Reps. Todd Young (R-IN), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Tony Cardenas (D-CA). S. 3090 is sponsored by Sens. Dean Heller (R-NV) and Bill Nelson (D-FL).
Follow and support the legislation via social media under #DialysisPATIENTAct.
About DaVita Kidney Care
DaVita Kidney Care is a division of DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc., a Fortune 500 company that, through its operating divisions, provides a variety of health care services to patient populations throughout the United States and abroad. A leading provider of dialysis services in the United States, DaVita Kidney Care treats patients with chronic kidney failure and end stage renal disease. DaVita Kidney Care strives to improve patients' quality of life by innovating clinical care, and by offering integrated treatment plans, personalized care teams and convenient health-management services. As of March 31, 2016, DaVita Kidney Care operated or provided administrative services at 2,278 outpatient dialysis centers located in the United States serving approximately 180,000 patients. The company also operated 124 outpatient dialysis centers located in 10 countries outside the United States. DaVita Kidney Care supports numerous programs dedicated to creating positive, sustainable change in communities around the world. The company's leadership development initiatives and social responsibility efforts have been recognized by Fortune, Modern Healthcare, Newsweek and WorldBlu. For more information, please visit DaVita.com.
Media contact:
Kate Stabrawa
303-876-7527
[email protected]
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140318/DC85712LOGO
SOURCE DaVita Kidney Care
Related Links
http://www.davita.com
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- LUNGevity Foundation today announced the recipients of its 2016 Career Development Awards for lung cancer research. These awards recognize outstanding scientists early in their careers, encouraging their continued development toward leadership in the field by supporting their innovative research projects and providing professional opportunities such as science communications training. Each of these prestigious three-year awards is for $100,000 per year, renewable in the second and third years based on research progress. Awardees serve as non-voting members of LUNGevity's distinguished Scientific Advisory Board for the terms of their awards.
LUNGevity is the only lung cancer organization with a programmatic focus on early detection and a robust Career Development Award Program. The Foundation's award recipients are working on finding a better way to detect lung cancer, and to better diagnose, treat, and prevent its recurrence. The research program, including CDA awards, is a crucial factor in moving the science forward to improve outcomes for people living with lung cancer.
LUNGevity is pleased to award the following researchers with its 2016 Career Development Awards:
Joshua Campbell, PhD, Boston University, who will study how normal lung cells acquire changes in their DNA to form pre-malignant lesions and develop a biomarker signature to predict development of squamous cell lung cancer
Lida Hariri, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, who will use a novel high-resolution imaging technique called Optical Coherence Tomography to perform virtual optical biopsies to determine its value in complementing tissue biopsies in the determination of early-stage lung cancer
Jonathan Lehman, MD, PhD, Vanderbilt University, who will investigate how small cell lung cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy and identify novel targets for treatment
"We are proud to fund Dr. Campbell, Dr. Hariri, and Dr. Lehman," said Andrea Ferris, President and Chairman of LUNGevity Foundation. "We believe that with these research projects and beyond they will contribute significantly to better outcomes for those with lung cancer, and it is a privilege to provide the support that can help make that happen."
Under the guidance of LUNGevity's Scientific Advisory Board, a group of 16 prominent scientists and researchers, LUNGevity ensures that grants are awarded to the researchers whose proposals demonstrate the greatest potential for finding lung cancer at its earliest, most treatable phase, as well as extending and improving lives for lung cancer survivors.
LUNGevity's Scientific Research Program is supported by the American Lung Association, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, a Janssen Research & Development Program Award, Pfizer, Upstage Lung Cancer, and individual donors.
For more information on LUNGevity Foundation, please visit www.LUNGevity.org.
About Lung Cancer
1 in 15 Americans is diagnosed with lung cancer in their lifetime
More than 224,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year
About 60%-65% of all new lung cancer diagnoses are among people who have never smoked or are former smokers
Lung cancer kills more people than the next three leading cancers (colorectal, breast, and prostate) combined
Only 18% of all people diagnosed with lung cancer will survive 5 years or more, BUT if it's caught before it spreads, the chance for 5-year survival improves dramatically
SOURCE LUNGevity Foundation
Related Links
http://www.lungevity.org
"Price to Beat and Expensify Rewards gamify corporate travel by giving employees a share of their company's cost savings," says David Barrett, founder and CEO of Expensify. "We're not here to enforce anyone's behavior, but we do want to bring transparency to the corporate travel industry and create a solution that's win/win for both employees and employers."
Although Price to Beat is still in beta, setting up a Price to Beat and Expensify Rewards policy only takes a few minutes. Policy administrators can customize policies according to their preferences and expectations and choose whether or not to enable Expensify Rewards. For example, policies can be set up that compare reservations to the average cost of a three-star hotel in the destination city, a nonstop economy flight, or a luxury rental car. There is no penalty for reservations that fall above the average price, but the difference in cost will be highlighted to both the employee and the administrator.
Administrators can even choose to include the reward amount as a reimbursable expense on an employee's expense report, so the user does not have to take any extra steps to receive a reward. If a company has Price to Beat and Expensify Rewards enabled, then the user simply needs to forward travel receipts to [email protected] within 24 hours of booking, and Expensify will automatically take care of the rest.
This announcement comes during GBTA, the Global Business Travel Association's annual convention, which Expensify is attending for the second time. "Expense report management isn't just about creating and filing expense reports," continues Barrett. "It's about streamlining business travel so that organizations can spend time focusing on building their teams and products instead of getting bogged down by the hassles of travel logistics."
To sign up for the beta or learn more about Price to Beat, click here.
About Expensify:
Named one of the hottest startups by Forbes and a Top 10 Most Innovative Company by Fast Company, Expensify takes the time, headaches, and paper out of travel and expense management. The app features a patented, industry-leading SmartScan technology that eliminates manual entry of receipt information, as well as integrations with all major accounting packages, company and personal credit card import, and more to simplify expense reports for both employees and administrators.
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140814/136145
SOURCE Expensify
Related Links
http://www.expensify.com
BEIJING, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SouFun Holdings Limited (NYSE: SFUN) ("Fang" or the "Company"), the leading real estate Internet portal in China, today provided a further update on its proposed acquisition of a controlling stake in Chongqing Wanli New Energy Co., Ltd. ("Wanli"), a company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange ("SSE") (stock code: 600847), and the sale of Wanli's assets (such transactions, collectively, the "Restructuring").
On July 18, 2016, the Company announced that Wanli had advised the Company that it had submitted an application for withdrawal of the application materials on the Restructuring to the China Securities Regulatory Commission ("CSRC"), considering that the relevant parties were unable to submit the required supplementary materials to the CSRC in a timely manner due to the workload. Wanli further advised the Company that it would resubmit updated application materials to the CSRC in due course.
The consummation of the Restructuring remains subject to the requisite internal approvals of the relevant parties and regulatory clearance, including by the CSRC. There is no assurance that these approvals or regulatory clearance will be obtained within an expected timeframe, or at all.
For further details of the foregoing transactions, please refer to public announcements made by Wanli, which are available at www.sse.com.cn, the official website of the SSE.
About Fang
Fang operates the leading real estate Internet portal in China in terms of the number of page views and visitors to its websites. Through our websites, we provide marketing, e-commerce, listing and other value-added services for China's fast-growing real estate and home furnishing and improvement sectors. Our user-friendly websites support active online communities and networks of users seeking information on, and other value-added services for, the real estate and home furnishing and improvement sectors in China. Fang currently maintains about 100 offices to focus on local market needs and its website and database contains real estate related content covering more than 320 cities in China. For more information about Fang, please visit http://ir.fang.com.
About Wanli
Founded in 1992, Wanli is a manufacturer of storage batteries. Wanli's shares have been listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange since 1994.
Safe Harbor Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Such forward-looking statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "is expected to," "anticipates," "aim," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "are likely to," "estimates," "may," "should" and similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the Restructuring. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Fang's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. Potential risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, whether the Restructuring will receive the requisite approvals and clearance, whether the Restructuring will proceed as planned, the impact of the Restructuring on Fang's business operations, the impact of Fang's transformation from a pure Internet information platform to a transaction-oriented platform, the impact of Fang's implementation of a "zero tolerance policy" that has resulted in dismissal of employees, the impact of the slowdown in China's real estate market on Fang and the impact on revenues of Fang's existing and new service fees reductions, the ability of Fang to retain real estate listing agencies as customers during challenging economic periods, the success of Fang's new business initiatives, the ability of Fang to manage its operating expenses, the impact of, measures taken or to be taken by the Chinese government to control real estate growth and prices and other events which could occur in the future, economic challenges in China's real estate market, the impact of competitive market conditions for Fang's services, Fang's ability to maintain and increase its leadership in China's home related internet sector, the uncertain regulatory landscape in China, fluctuations in Fang's quarterly operating results, Fang's continued ability to execute business strategies including SouFun membership services and SouFun Online Shop, Fang's ability to continue to expand in local markets, Fang's reliance on online advertising sales and listing services and transactions for its revenues, any failure to successfully develop and expand Fang's content, service offerings and features, including the success of new features to meet evolving market needs, and the technologies that support them, the quality of the loans Fang originates and resells and the performance of those loans in the future, Fang's ability to successfully service and process customer loans for its own benefit and for the purchasers of those loans and any failure to successfully integrate acquired businesses in the event of future acquisitions.
For investor and media inquiries, please contact:
Mr. Kent Cangsang Huang
CFO
Phone: +86-10-5631-9668
Email: [email protected]
SOURCE SouFun Holdings Limited
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- First Capital Real Estate Trust Incorporated ("FCRETI") and Presidential Realty Corporation (OTC:PDNLA/PDNLB), a Delaware real estate investment trust ("Presidential"), today announced that the parties have executed a Letter of Intent. The Letter of Intent relates to a proposed transaction pursuant to which Presidential would acquire substantially all of the assets of FCRETI in exchange for newly issued shares of Presidential. Suneet Singal, CEO of First Capital, stated that, "This transaction further advances our liquidity plan for the shareholders of FCRETI. This plan was outlined in our strategic partnership with Forum Partners earlier this year." Mr. Singal further stated, "It is our goal to effectuate FCRETI's liquidity plan through this transaction and other events in the near future." In connection with executing the Letter of Intent, the parties entered into a mutual 60-day standstill agreement.
The proposed transaction is subject to, among other things, satisfaction by the parties with the results of their due diligence investigations, approval by the Boards of Directors of FCRETI and Presidential and FCRETI shareholders of final terms, and as such, there can be no assurance that a transaction will be consummated.
About FCRETI
First Capital Real Estate Trust Incorporated is a public non-traded REIT based in New York City and founded in 2012. FCRETI, the Dual Strategy REIT, executes a dual investment strategy which seeks to generate both stable cash distributions and growth through the acquisition of stabilized, cash flowing real estate as well as value added and opportunistic assets. FCRETI's portfolio consists of 31 assets including land development, luxury resorts, multifamily, gas stations, hotels, medical offices, transitional housing, retail, and business offices.
About Presidential
Presidential Realty Corporation is a Delaware Real Estate Investment Trust organized in 1983 and is engaged principally in the ownership of income-producing real estate. Over its history the company has had ownership interests in apartments, office buildings, industrial properties and shopping centers in multiple states. Presidential currently owns one property in Massachusetts. The company's Class A and Class B common stock currently trade in the over-the-counter market under the symbols PDNLA, and PDNLB, respectively.
Forward-Looking Statements
This Release contains statements that do not relate to historical facts, but are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements relate to future events or trends and the future prospects and proposed development or business strategies of FCRETI and Presidential, among other things. These statements can generally (although not always) be identified by their use of terms and phrases such as anticipate, appear, believe, continue, could, estimate, expect, indicate, intend, may, plan, possible, predict, project, pursue, will, would and other similar terms and phrases, as well as the use of the future tense. Forward-looking statements in this Release speak only as of the date hereof, and forward-looking statements in documents incorporated by reference speak only as of the date of those documents. Unless otherwise required by law, FCRETI and Presidential undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Examples of forward-looking statements in this release include, but are not limited to, the ability of FCRETI and Presidential to agree on final terms and conditions for a transaction, the fulfillment of the conditions to closing such a transaction, including, without limitation, those set forth in this Release, and the categories of expectations about the various matters set forth in the Forward-Looking Statements paragraph and elsewhere in the public filings of FCRETI and Presidential.
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SOURCE First Capital Real Estate Trust Incorporated
BATON ROUGE, La., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Joseph F. Quinlan, Jr., Chairman of First National Bankers Bank ("FNBB"), announced today that the Florida Region has relocated its headquarters to 605 Crescent Executive Court, Suite 224, Lake Mary, Florida 32746-2133.
FNBB's Florida Region President and Chief Marketing Officer, Charlie Brinkley, Jr., said, "We are extremely excited about the move to our new location. This is a new and exciting chapter for Florida community banking and FNBB. Florida is a vibrant market and we are proud to be contributing to the success of community banks and the markets they serve. FNBB continues the longstanding tradition of being Florida's bankers bank with local leadership and local decision making. We welcome everyone to visit our new offices and experience Service Beyond Comparison." The new location will provide correspondent banking services to community banks in Florida. Jim McKillop, Florida Region Chairman and Chief Operating Officer, said, "The new upgraded facilities will serve as FNBB's Florida Region headquarters and demonstrates our significant commitment to Florida community bankers and our employees."
Founded in 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, FNBB has grown rapidly during its 32 year history providing correspondent banking services to community financial institutions across the southeastern United States. FNBB is the single banking subsidiary of First National Bankers Bankshares, Inc. both of which are headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. FNBB has approximately $870 million in assets and seven offices servicing financial institutions in thirteen states. More information is available on FNBB's website www.bankers-bank.com.
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SOURCE First National Bankers Bank
Related Links
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ORLANDO, Fla., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- For the sixth consecutive year, five Florida Technical College campuses have joined a selective group of traditional colleges attaining a coveted post at the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. This distinction is the highest honor a college or university can receive from President Barack Obama for service-driven initiatives that improve quality of life in communities throughout the nation. FTC is one of only a handful of for-profit colleges to have achieved such honor among more than 4,000 institutions competing for it nationwide.
"Community service is part of the learning process at Florida Technical College," said FTC President David Ruggieri. "Our students learn by doing and part of that is putting into practice, for the benefit of their communities, the skills they are developing in the classroom. We are humbled to have been recognize for that."
Five of Florida Technical College's six campuses Orlando, Kissimmee, Deland, Lakeland and Pembroke Pines- were named to the Honor Roll in the General Community Service category, while Orlando, Kissimmee and Deland were additionally listed in the Interfaith Community Service category. (A sixth campus in Cutler Bay, Miami, had not been open long enough in 2014 to qualify for a nomination.) Further, of 47 private and public college campuses which made the interfaith honor roll, FTC is the only institution recognized for multiple campus locations. Of the five Florida-based colleges recognized in this category, three are FTC locations.
At Florida Technical College, students, faculty and staff work together to improve their communities in many ways. Hope in the Street, spearheaded by the Kissimmee campus with a local church, is an initiative to feed and clothe the homeless, while providing free haircuts and basic check-ups. Other students, faculty and staff-led initiatives include a back-to-school bash to assist low-income families, career fairs for veterans and thousand volunteer work with organizations serving the physically or mentally disabled. FTC is also a key supporter of Heart of Florida United Way, Central Florida's most comprehensive health and human services charity and the largest provider of funds to the region's most critical health and human service programs.
"Our goal is for students to graduate with more than a diploma," Ruggieri said. "We are developing leaders and problem solvers unafraid to innovate. By encouraging our students to help others, we strengthen the community we all call home and the nation as a whole."
The college serves a majority of minority students and is committed to help them close the achievement gap, so they may obtain gainful employments and succeed in all areas of life.
Images available at:
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About Florida Technical College: FTC offers associate and bachelor's degrees and diploma programs in a range of professions, including healthcare, computer networking, graphic design, criminal justice, culinary arts and cosmetology. FTC's campuses are located in Orlando, Lakeland, DeLand, Kissimmee and Pembroke Pines. Founded in 1982 to provide private, post-secondary education in specialized fields, FTC is accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.
Contact: Maria Sanquirico
Mobile: 813-420-2922
SOURCE Florida Technical College
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- About the Foodservice Market in the US
Foodservice refers to the sale of food and beverages that have been prepared out-of-home for immediate consumption, either on the premises from where they are purchased or for takeaway or home delivery. The foodservice industry caters to cafeterias, hospitals, cafes, pubs, nightclubs, bars, and hotels. Foodservice has become prevalent in educational institutions and office complexes, as students and office workers prefer to buy lunch rather than cook at home.
Technavio's analysts forecast the foodservice market in the US to grow at a CAGR of 3.33% during the period 2016-2020.
Covered in this report
The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the foodservice market in the US for 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers revenue generated from the sales of various food and beverages sold by the global foodservice vendors in terms of revenue. The market is broadly divided into:
- Commercial foodservice: Commercial foodservice is any foodservice operation established to make a profit from the sale of food and beverages. The commercial foodservice segment in this report includes full-service restaurants, fast food or quick service restaurants, pubs, hotels, bars, cafes, takeaway, home delivery, and others.
- Non-commercial foodservice: In non-commercial type of foodservice segment, food is primarily prepared and served to support another establishment's main function or purpose. The non-commercial foodservice segment in this report includes educational institutions, workplaces, and hospitals.
Technavio's report, Foodservice Market in the US 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.
Key vendors
- Aramark
- Compass Group North America
- Domino's
- McDonald's
- Restaurant Brands International
- Starbucks
- Subway
- Yum! Brands
Other prominent vendors
- AmeriQual Group
- Atlas Food Systems and Services
- AVI Foodsystems
- B&G Foods
- Baldwin Richardson Foods
- Basic American Foods
- Ben E. Keith
- BiRite Foodservice Distributors
- Bon Appetit Management
- Brock & Co.
- Centerplate
- Chick-fil-A
- CulinArt
- Delaware North Companies
- Dunkin' Brands
- Gordon Food Service
- Subway
- Thompson Hospitality
- Wendy's
Market driver
- Growing popularity of fast-casual restaurants
- For a full, detailed list, view our report
Market challenge
- Need to maintain and standardize food safety
- For a full, detailed list, view our report
Market trend
- Increase in healthy and gluten-free food choices
- For a full, detailed list, view our report
Key questions answered in this report
- What will the market size be in 2020 and what will the growth rate be?
- What are the key market trends?
- What is driving this market?
- What are the challenges to market growth?
- Who are the key vendors in this market space?
- What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?
You can request one free hour of our analyst's time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report.
Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03971704-summary/view-report.html
About Reportlinker
ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.
http://www.reportlinker.com
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SOURCE Reportlinker
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ALBANY, New York, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
The report is titled 'Building Information Modeling (BIM) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2015 - 2022' and is available for sale on TMR's official website. According to the report, the global building information modeling market was valued at more than US$2.7 bn in 2014 and is expected to reach a valuation of US$11.5 bn by 2022.
Transparency Market Research (TMR) has announced the release of a new research report on the global building information modeling market. The report examines the current figures illustrating the performance of the global building information modeling market and presents forecasts based on sound analysis of the collated data. The market is comprehensively analyzed in the report for the benefit of readers, who will be able to formulate insightful strategies based on the information given in the report.
Building information modeling consists of preparing a 3D visualization of the architectural plan of a building. This allows engineers to make precise calculations regarding a wide range of variables, which helps boost the efficiency of the construction process. The improvement in the workflow achieved through the use of building information modeling is the primary driver for the global BIM market. According to TMR, the market is expected to exhibit a robust 19.1% CAGR from 2015 to 2022.
Get Sample Report Copy or for further inquiries, click here:
http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=3667
Apart from the increased efficiency, building information modeling allows architects and engineers to get a clear idea about other factors such as the materials to be used in the construction, the time it would take to finish the project, and the number of laborers required for the project.
The global construction industry boom has given a major boost to the global building information modeling market in recent years. However, the high cost of the technology is a key restraint on the market, along with the need to keep updating the product regularly. This is particularly of note among small and medium-sized businesses, which often can't afford to utilize state-of-the-art technology.
By end use, the report segments the global building information modeling market into water and wastewater; rail and aviation; roads, bridges, and highways; government buildings; houses and apartments; factories and warehouses; energy generation facilities; education and commerce institutes; dams. Of these, rail and aviation took up a dominant share in 2014.
Browse The Press Release: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/building-information-modeling-market.htm
Geographically, North America was the largest regional market for building information modeling in 2014, with a share of 33%. The advanced technological scenario of the region is responsible for the dominance of the North America market. However, in the coming years, Asia Pacific is expected to exhibit the fastest growth due to the expansion of the construction industry in countries such as India, South Korea, and China.
The report also examines the competitive dynamics of the global building information modeling market. Key players in the market are profiled in the report to shed light on the competitive hierarchy of the market. These companies include Autodesk Inc., Dassault Systemes AG, Synchro Software Ltd., Beck Technology Ltd., Tekla Corporation, Pentagon Solutions Ltd., AECOM, Bentley Systems Inc., and Nemetschek AG.
The global building information modeling market is segmented as:
BIM Market Analysis, by Solution Type
Software
Consultancy Service
BIM Software Market Analysis, by Type
On-premise Software
Cloud-based Software
BIM Market Analysis, by End Users
Architects
Contractors
Engineers
Developers
BIM Market Analysis, by End-use Industry
Water and Waste Water
Rail Transit and Aviation
Energy Generation Facilities
Roads, Bridges and Highways
Houses and Apartments
Factories and Warehouses
Educational Institutes and Commercial Spaces
Government Buildings
Dams and Others
BIM Market Analysis, by Geography
North America
Europe
Asia Pacific
The Middle East and Africa
and Latin America
Other Research Reports by Transparency Market Research:
Intelligent Building Management Systems Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/india-ibms-market.html
http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/india-ibms-market.html In-Building Wireless Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/inbuilding-wireless-market.html
http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/inbuilding-wireless-market.html Photoelectric Sensors Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/photoelectric-sensors-market.html
About Us:
Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.
TMR's data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.
Contact:
Transparency Market Research
90 State Street, Suite 700
Albany, NY 12207
Tel: +1-518-618-1030
USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com
SOURCE Transparency Market Research
TORONTO, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Golden Star Resources Ltd. ("Golden Star" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that Gil Clausen is joining the Company's Board of Directors, with immediate effect.
Mr. Clausen is the President of a division of Yamana Gold Inc., and former President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Augusta Resource Corporation. He also serves as an independent director of Plata Latina Minerals Corporation. With over 30 years of executive, financial, developmental and operational industry experience, Mr. Clausen has been responsible for executing growth strategies for mining companies on a range of continents and across a variety of commodities. He is a Professional Engineer and holds a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree, each in Mining Engineering from Queens University, Canada. He is also a graduate of a Queen's University executive business program.
Tim Baker, Chairman of Golden Star, commented:
"I am pleased to welcome Gil Clausen to Golden Star's Board of Directors. He brings solid operational and technical experience through his background in mining engineering, in addition to his wealth of corporate experience gained in senior roles with a number of large mining companies. He has a proven track record of delivering strong financial gains for shareholders and offers comprehensive knowledge of board governance, operations, corporate and project finance, strategic planning and investor relations. I look forward to working closely with Gil as Golden Star continues on its path to become a high grade, low cost gold producer."
Company Profile
Golden Star is an established gold mining company that owns and operates the Wassa and Prestea mines situated on the prolific Ashanti Gold Belt in western Ghana, Africa. Listed on the NYSE MKT, the TSX, and the GSE, Golden Star is strategically focused on increasing operating margins and cash flow through the development of two high grade, low cost underground mines both in conjunction with existing open pit operations. The Wassa Underground commenced pre-commercial production in mid-2016 and the Prestea Underground is expected to commence production in mid-2017. Both projects are fully funded and on track to begin production as expected. Production in 2016 is expected to be between 180,000205,000 ounces of gold with costs of US$815-US$925 per ounce.
SOURCE Golden Star Resources Ltd.
Related Links
www.gsr.com
Goodman Commerce Center Eastvale Business Park broke ground earlier this month and has already achieved early success, securing Volkswagen as a customer. The business park is part of Goodman Commerce Center Eastvale, a 205 acre mixed-use development located directly off the Cantu-Galleano Ranch Road exit on the I-15, and offering a variety of space options, including logistics, business park, retail and medical. The Volkswagen lease follows Goodman's recent lease with Amazon.com for the first of two, one million square feet logistics centers.
Offering new, modern commercial space the Goodman Commerce Center Eastvale Business Park is comprised of three multi-tenant buildings with suites ranging from 1,200-8,500 square feet plus four freestanding buildings ranging from 20,000-40,000 square feet. With space currently available for lease, the development is scheduled to complete in the first quarter of 2017. For more information please visit: www.goodmaneastvale.com
Brandon Birtcher, CEO of Goodman Birtcher said: "We are delighted to complete this leasing deal with Volkswagen, a global customer of Goodman Group. This facility is Goodman's fifth lease with the Volkswagen Group that now spans three regions. Goodman Birtcher looks forward to supporting Volkswagen's growth and development here in North America as we have internationally."
Volkswagen will invest an estimated $4.5 million to create a state-of-the-art training facility and are expected to begin operations at Goodman Commerce Center Eastvale Business Park in the first quarter of 2017. The training facility will house Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche training facilities for the purposes of technical, collision repair and sales training.
Patrick Wood, Steve Spartin, Jr. and Greg Lubar of JLL advised on the lease transaction.
Goodman Commerce Center Eastvale is one of a number of projects in Goodman Birtcher's US$2.3 billion identified US development pipeline, which will provide 17.7 million square feet of Class A logistics space. Goodman Birtcher continues to execute its US strategy, which is focused on growing its portfolio organically, targeting selective development and value add opportunities in the key logistics and industrial markets of Inland Empire, Greater Los Angeles, Northern New Jersey and Central Pennsylvania.
Over the last 12 months, Goodman Birtcher has completed 3.3 million square feet of Class A development product in the Inland Empire West and Greater Los Angeles logistics markets, with a further 2.6 million square feet currently under construction. This is consistent with Goodman's ongoing commitment to servicing the needs of its global customer base through the development of modern, well-located properties for long-term ownership.
About Goodman Birtcher
Goodman Birtcher is a wholly owned US subsidiary of Goodman Group, established in June 2012 and includes the former business of Birtcher Development and Investments. It is located in Irvine, California with a regional office in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
For more information: www.goodmanbirtcher.com
About Goodman
Goodman Group is an integrated property group with operations throughout Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, the United Kingdom, North America and Brazil. Goodman Group, comprised of the stapled entities Goodman Limited, Goodman Industrial Trust and Goodman Logistics (HK) Limited, is the largest industrial property group listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and one of the largest listed specialist fund managers of industrial property and business space globally.
Goodman's global property expertise, integrated own+develop+manage customer service offering and significant fund management platform ensures it creates innovative property solutions that meet the individual requirements of its customers, while seeking to deliver long-term returns for investors.
For more information: www.goodman.com
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SOURCE Goodman Birtcher
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NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A Grandparents.com (OTCQB: GPCM) recent survey completed by more than 3,300 registered users revealed that Alzheimer's is the primary health concern of grandparentsone-third (33%) of respondents cited it as the health condition that worried them most, followed by cancer (23.7%), chronic pain (15.9%), heart disease (10.8%) and diabetes (5.9%).
More than five million Americans struggle with the degenerative brain disease each year. Age is by far the biggest risk factoraccording to the Alzheimer's Association, one in nine people 65 and older has the disease, while a staggering one in three Americans over 85 years old has been diagnosed. These statistics, and the fact that there is not yet any cure for this disease, underscore the fear.
"Our aim is to supply grandparents, their loved ones, and caregivers with the best information and resources possible," said American Grandparents Association (AGA) COO, Lee Lazarus. "Far too many families are forced to look on helplessly as they watch their aging loved ones suffer through their later years, and the strain on families is incredibly intense. The solution has increasingly become assisted living for those who fear their parent's deteriorating mind might cause themselves or others irreparable harm."
As part of its health and wellness content, Grandparents.com has interviewed many Alzheimer's experts including Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D., Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, about breakthroughs in understanding Alzheimer's, as well as treatments and prevention.
"Once you have Alzheimer's disease, there doesn't seem to be a way to reverse it. But, Dr. Tanzi and others are now turning their attention to prevention of Alzheimer's and plaque that develops in the brain from a protein called beta-amyloid," says Lazarus.
"It's a paradigm shift in Alzheimer's," Dr. Tanzi told Grandparents.com. "We don't want to wait until you have symptoms because by then the disease has already begun.you have to treat amyloid 20 years before the symptomsjust like someone with high cholesterol treats the disease before the heart attack occurs."
"In terms of things people can do to prevent Alzheimer's, more research needs to be done," says Lazarus, "but there have been promising studies linking everything from getting more sleep, to daily walking, to eating foods with turmeric, as ways to help keep your brain healthy. And, of course, spending time with kids and grandkids improves wellbeing."
About Grandparents.com, Inc.
Grandparents.com, Inc. (OTCQB: GPCM) is a digital media company that focuses on services for America's 72 million grandparents and their families, by providing information on topics that matter most to this demographic health & wellness, money, family, travel and more. Through its membership association, The American Grandparents Association, Grandparents.com offers members access to special benefits including discounts and rebates on products, services, and certain insurance products. With approximately 10 million annual site visitors and 2 million registered users, the American Grandparents Association and its content site, Grandparents.com, is a leading resource for people 50+. Visit www.americangrandparentsassociation.com or www.grandparents.com
SOURCE Grandparents.com, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.grandparents.com
ATLANTA, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE: GTN and GTN.A) today announced that it will release its earnings results for the quarter ending June 30, 2016 on Thursday, August 4, 2016.
Earnings Conference Call Information
Gray Television, Inc. will host a conference call to discuss its operating results for the quarter ended June 30, 2016 on Thursday, August 4, 2016. The call will begin at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time. The live dial-in number is 1-866-249-5224 and the confirmation code is 3173477. The call will be webcast live and available for replay at www.gray.tv. The taped replay of the conference call will be available at 1-888-203-1112 Confirmation Code: 3173477 until September 3, 2016.
About Gray Television:
Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE: GTN and GTN.A) is a television broadcast company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, that owns and operates television stations and leading digital assets in markets throughout the United States. We currently own and/or operate television stations across 51 television markets that collectively broadcast over 185 program streams including 36 channels affiliated with the CBS Network, 27 channels affiliated with the NBC Network, 19 channels affiliated with the ABC Network and 14 channels affiliated with the FOX Network. We own and/or operate the number-one or number-two ranked television station operations in essentially all of our markets, which collectively cover approximately 9.5 percent of total United States television households.
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SOURCE Gray Television, Inc.
Related Links
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Headline presenters will include famed medical marijuana expert Dr. Sue Sisley, Chairman of the Los Angeles Cannabis Task Force Ariel Clark, Cannabis Regulatory Expert Avis Bulbulyan and the Deputy Director of the California Cannabis Industry Association Josh Drayton. The event will have additional presentations by Cheryl Shuman of the Beverly Hills Cannabis Club, Hezekiah Allen, Executive Director of the California Growers Association and Mark Goldfogel from the Fourth Corner Credit Union.
"There are a lot of uncertainties on the future of the cannabis industry in California and the National Cannabis Event will bring together relevant experts for a comprehensive discussion," said Andy Passen, President of National Cannabis. "We want our guests to walk away with the latest information available to keep their business moving in the right direction," he added.
Topics of discussion at the event will cover a broad spectrum of issues affecting California business owners in the cannabis market place. Presenters and panelists will help dissect the facts of the legalization bills and their effects on the cannabis industry, explore the barriers to US Marijuana Efficacy Research, discuss Increasing access to minority and female cannabis entrepreneurs and help evaluate when is the right time to invest in the cannabis industry.
Tickets to the event are $199 plus additional VIP options. Additional Information about the event and registration can be found on www.nationalcannabis.com.
National Cannabis is an event management company that specializes in conferences, expos, and educational seminars for the businesses within the Marijuana industry. Their mission is to provide a premium service that focuses on education and networking to help the legal cannabis industry gain market share and credibility. National Cannabis hosts emerging market business events in strategic locations across North America.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390601
SOURCE National Cannabis
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http://www.nationalcannabis.com
FAIRFAX, Va., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- After a successful collaboration in 2015, InfoComm Connections New York will again co-locate with the National Association of Broadcaster's NAB Show New York, Nov. 9-10, 2016, at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. InfoComm organizers have announced an all-new program for Connections New York focused on collaboration, digital signage, education technology and corporate events. Registration is now open at infocommconnections.org.
"Connections New York has proven to be a great way for technology managers and other AV professionals to discover new products, learn best practices and network with colleagues in one of the most dynamic technology markets in the world," said Jason McGraw, CTS, CAE, Senior Vice President of Expositions, InfoComm International. "By co-locating with NAB Show New York, we're able to expose attendees to more solutions and thought leaders in content creation and delivery. We're expecting more than 350 exhibitors overall, plus over 60 free sessions, in addition to InfoComm's targeted, deep-dive conferences at Connections New York."
InfoComm will offer four conference sessions during Connections New York:
Collaborate, Nov. 9.
This half-day conference addresses unified communications and collaboration trends and business challenges. A joint program by InfoComm International and IMCCA, panelists from the worlds of technology, finance and government will speak on the challenges faced by CIOs and technology managers, such as how to build collaboration rooms securely, choosing the best technology for huddle rooms and designing workspaces in New York City.
Digital Signage Summit, Nov. 9.
This conference will explore digital signage in retail and enterprise spaces. Presented by Invidis Consulting and Integrated Systems Events, the conference will focus on how super-fine LED technology, retail analytics and new digital signage solutions are reshaping customer journeys. Attendees will learn how to create differentiated consumer experiences by embracing tomorrow's digital touch points.
Exceptional Corporate Events, Nov. 10.
Corporate events are an opportunity to inspire passion for a brand among internal and external stakeholders. They're also a chance to throw piles of money down a bottomless pit without achieving measureable outcomes. How can companies make sure events achieve the former while avoiding the latter? The answer lies in the balance between content, space and technology. Through case studies, this half-day conference will explore methods for achieving the delicate balance among these three factors.
The New Learning Technology Landscape, Nov. 10.
Today's students have grown up in a connected world and they expect collaborative, interactive technologies to support their learning. What's more, they'll use the technology at hand in unexpected ways for better or worse. This half-day conference will explore new technologies that can be deployed inside and outside traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms to empower both the new generation of active learners and the instructors who must adapt to teach them.
Conferences include a luncheon and/or reception. Attendees can register for each conference individually. Early bird pricing is available until Oct. 1.
"This will be the first time we hold the Digital Signage Summit in New York, which is arguably one of the world capitals of digital-out-of-home advertising and enterprise digital signage," said Florian Rotberg, Managing Director of Invidis Consulting, the founding company of the Digital Signage Summit. "The program for InfoComm Connections New York is focused on using the latest technology and solutions to enhance the experience for consumers and users of signage applications."
David Danto, Dimension Data's Principal Consultant for Collaboration and IMCCA's Director of Emerging Technology, will lead the Collaborate conference at the show. "The topics we're covering at Connections are of critical importance to AV, IT and collaboration specialists in the region. The security vulnerabilities inherent in our collaboration systems have been overlooked by the industry for far too long, and we will be presenting actionable solutions to some of these real-world problems," Danto said. "We'll also be looking at all the changes in the emerging huddle room space, and the unique challenges faced by AV specialists in the New York area."
IMCCA session panelists will include industry manufacturers and end users from firms such as Google, Etsy, BlackRock, Citigroup and IAC.
With the InfoComm Connections Core Package, attendees will have access to more than 60 free InfoComm and NAB sessions at five Inspiration Stages located throughout the exhibit hall. The sessions include the InfoComm's own showcase, a series of 20-minute case studies presented by designers, architects and integrators in the New York area who have created exceptional AV experiences.
For more information and to register, visit infocommconnections.org.
About InfoComm International
InfoComm International is the global trade association representing the commercial audiovisual and information communications industries. Established in 1939, InfoComm has more than 5,000 members, representing over 70,000 AV professionals worldwide, including manufacturers, systems integrators, dealers and distributors, independent consultants, programmers, rental and staging companies, end users and multimedia professionals from more than 80 countries. InfoComm International is the leading resource for AV standards, market research and news. Its training, certification and education programs set a standard of excellence for AV professionals. InfoComm International is the founder of InfoComm, the largest annual conference and exhibition for AV buyers and sellers in the Western Hemisphere. InfoComm also produces trade shows in China, Europe, India, Latin America and the Middle East. Additional information is available at infocomm.org.
PRESS CONTACT:
Brad Grimes, Director of Communications, InfoComm International
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1.703.273.7200
SOURCE InfoComm International
Related Links
http://www.infocomm.org
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Insecticides are crop protection chemicals that are widely used to combat insect pests across the globe. Insects are the most diverse species of animals and are majorly found in tropical habitats such as swamps, jungles, deserts, and even in highly harsh environments such as pools of crude petroleum. Insects inflict damage to crops by directly feeding on them. This poses a challenge of food security for the mankind. Demand for insecticides has been rising owing to the increasing need for better crop yield and growing threat of pest infestation. Deterioration of the climate and rise in the average global temperature is leading to the growth of various kinds of insects. Insects also inflict damage to crops by introducing new diseases through fungus and bacteria deposition on crops. Adoption of effective and non-chemical route for crop protection such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM), organic farming, genetically modified (GM) crops, and crop rotation is hampering the insecticides market. These practices are found to be cost-effective and non-toxic by farmers and agricultural experts. Biopesticides are expected to be provide opportunities for the insecticides market.
This report estimates and forecasts the insecticides market on the global and regional level. The study provides forecast from 2015 to 2023 based on volume (kilo tons) and revenue (US$ Mn).
The study includes market estimate of five key categories of insecticides: organochlorines, organophosphates, carbamates, pyrethrins & pyrethroids, and others. The study also provides a comprehensive view of the insecticides market by dividing it into crop types such as cereals & grains, oilseeds & pulses, fruits & vegetables, and others. These product and crop segments have been analyzed based on historic, present, and future trends, and the market has been estimated from 2015 to 2023 in terms of volume (kilo tons) and revenue (US$ Mn). Regional segmentation includes current and forecast demand for insecticides in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Detailed market segmentation further includes demand for products and crops mentioned above in all the regions.
The report includes a detailed value chain analysis, which provides a comprehensive view of the market. This section of the report provides detailed information about value addition at each stage of the value chain in the insecticides market. The report comprises drivers and restraints for the insecticides market along with their support data during the forecast period. Additionally, the report includes the study of opportunities in the insecticides market from 2015 to 2023.
The report includes Porter's Five Forces Analysis model to measure the degree of competition in the insecticides market. The study comprises an additional section of qualitative write-up and analysis on market attractiveness, wherein product segments have been analyzed. Furthermore, the report provides price trend analysis for insecticides from 2015 to 2023 in US$/Kg.
Secondary research sources that were typically referred to include, but were not limited to company websites, annual reports, broker report, investor presentations, financial reports, and SEC filings. Other sources such as internal and external proprietary databases, news articles, statistical databases, national government documents, market reports, webcasts, and podcasts specific to companies operating in the market have also been referred for the report.
In-depth interviews and discussions with a wide range of key industry participants and opinion leaders were conducted to compile this research report. Primary research represents bulk of the research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Key players' product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents were reviewed for competitive analysis and market understanding. This helped in validating and strengthening secondary research findings. Primary research further developed the analysis team's expertise and market understanding.
The report covers detailed competitive outlook that includes market share and profiles of key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include ADAMA Agricultural Solutions Ltd., BASF SE, Bayer AG, The Dow Chemical Company (Dow), DuPont, FMC Corporation, Syngenta AG, Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd., and Nufarm Limited. Company profiles include attributes such as company overview (headcount, headquarters, and stock listing), brand overview, key competitors, business overview, business strategies, recent/key developments and acquisitions, and financial overview.
The global insecticides market has been segmented as follows:
Insecticides Market Product Segment Analysis
Organochlorines
Organophosphates
Carbamates
Pyrethrins & pyrethroids
Others (Including organosulfur, benzoylureas, botanicals, neonicotinoids, etc.)
Insecticides Market Crop Analysis
Cereals & grains
Oilseeds & pulses
Fruits & vegetables
Others (Including industrial & municipal, household, ornamental plants, grass, etc.)
Insecticides Market Regional Analysis
North America
U.S.
Rest of North America
Europe
France
U.K.
Spain
Germany
Italy
Rest of Europe
Asia Pacific
China
India
ASEAN
Rest of Asia Pacific
Latin America
Brazil
Rest of Latin America
Middle East & Africa (MEA)
GCC
South Africa
Rest of MEA
Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03752610-summary/view-report.html
About Reportlinker
ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.
http://www.reportlinker.com
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SOURCE Reportlinker
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The disorder, chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome , is named for the location on human chromosome 22 at which some DNA is missing. This loss of genetic material can have broad lifelong effectson the heart, brain, and other systems, and on overall development and behavior. Yet many patients and families experience a difficult diagnostic odyssey, sometimes for years, before a clinician pinpoints the underlying cause of these symptoms in a child or adult.
"Sharing our research and clinical experience about this condition is crucial to both diagnosing and managing this syndromeas well as raising public awareness," said Donna McDonald-McGinn, MS, CGC, associate director of Clinical Genetics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and director of CHOP's 22q and You Center. "One important focus is our growing knowledge of the links between 22q and conditions such as schizophrenia and anxiety disorders."
McDonald-McGinn plays a pivotal role in this week's events, as program chair for the 10th Biennial International 22q11.2 Conference, meeting Wednesday through Friday in Sirmione, Italy. Conference participants represent 22 nations from four continents. Nearly a quarter of the 133 presentations are by CHOP clinicians and scientists, from areas such as genetics, plastic surgery, cardiology, fetal surgery, endocrinology, hematology, gastroenterology, immunology, ENT, speech, psychology and psychiatry.
"This list of pediatric subspecialties reflects the wide range of effects caused by this syndrome," said McDonald-McGinn. "It also reflects the multidisciplinary, integrated approach we take at the 22q and You Center, the nation's largest clinical program dedicated to this condition."
McDonald-McGinn also co-chairs a pre-conference symposium on Monday and Tuesday for the International 22q11.2 Brain and Behavior Consortium, focusing on the biological causes of mental illness related to the syndrome. Rounding out the week, she is chairing a family meeting from Friday to Sunday that brings together scientific experts with family members of patients.
"The parent-professional partnership is key to mobilizing healthcare systems and regulatory agencies in connection with important initiatives such as newborn screening programs and standardized management guidelines for 22q11.2 deletion syndrome," said McDonald-McGinn. "This partnership is also important in visibility campaigns, such as the 22q at the Zoo Worldwide Awareness Day events that occur every year on the third Sunday in May."
To learn more about the 22q and You Center at CHOP, please visit http://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/22q-and-you-center
About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 535-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
Contact: John Ascenzi
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Phone: (267) 426-6055
[email protected]
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390645
SOURCE The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Related Links
http://www.chop.edu
SINGAPORE and PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea, July 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- InterOil Corporation (the "Company") (NYSE: IOC; POMSoX: IOC) announced today that the unsolicited proposal to acquire InterOil, the receipt of which was publicly announced by InterOil on June 30, 2016, was made by Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) ("ExxonMobil") (the "ExxonMobil Offer"). The Company's Board of Directors, in consultation with its legal and financial advisors, has determined that the ExxonMobil Offer constitutes a "Superior Proposal," as defined in InterOil's arrangement agreement ("Oil Search Agreement") with Oil Search Limited (ASX:OSH, POMSoX: OSH) ("Oil Search") and InterOil has provided notice of such determination to Oil Search.
Under the terms of the ExxonMobil Offer, InterOil shareholders would receive:
A payment of $45.00 per share of InterOil, paid in ExxonMobil shares. The number of ExxonMobil shares paid per share of InterOil would be calculated based on the volume weighted average price of ExxonMobil shares over a measuring period of ten days ending shortly before the closing date.
per share of InterOil, paid in ExxonMobil shares. The number of ExxonMobil shares paid per share of InterOil would be calculated based on the volume weighted average price of ExxonMobil shares over a measuring period of ten days ending shortly before the closing date. A Contingent Resource Payment ("CRP"), which would be an additional cash payment of approximately $7.07 per share for each tcfe gross resource certification of the Elk-Antelope field above 6.2 tcfe, up to a maximum of 10 tcfe. The CRP would be paid on the completion of the interim certification process in accordance with the Share Purchase Agreement with Total SA, which would include the Antelope-7 appraisal well. The CRP would not be transferrable and would not be listed on any stock exchange.
Under the terms of the Oil Search Agreement, Oil Search has a period of three calendar days, which will expire on July 21, 2016 (the "Response Period"), during which it can offer to amend the terms of the Oil Search Agreement. Oil Search is under no obligation to make such an offer and InterOil does not know if Oil Search will seek to amend the Oil Search Agreement. The InterOil Board of Directors continues to recommend the Oil Search transaction to its shareholders.
InterOil notes that there can be no assurance that the ExxonMobil Offer will lead to the termination of the Oil Search Agreement and the execution of an arrangement agreement with ExxonMobil, or that the transaction contemplated by the ExxonMobil Offer will be approved by shareholders or consummated.
About InterOil
InterOil Corporation is an independent oil and gas business with a sole focus on Papua New Guinea. InterOil's assets include one of Asia's largest undeveloped gas fields, Elk-Antelope, in the Gulf Province, and exploration licenses, all covering about 16,000km2. Its main offices are in Singapore and Port Moresby. InterOil is listed on the New York and Port Moresby stock exchanges.
Investor Contacts
Singapore United States
David Wu Senior Vice President Investor Relations Cynthia Black Investor Relations North America
T: +65 6507 0222 E: [email protected] T: +1 212 653 9778 E: [email protected]
Media Contacts
Singapore United States Ann Lee Communications Specialist James Golden/ Aaron Palash Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher T: +65 6507 0222 E: [email protected] T: +1 212 355 4449 E: [email protected]
Forward Looking Statements
This release includes "forward-looking statements". All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this release are forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements may include, without limitation, statements regarding the ExxonMobil Offer. These statements are based on the current belief of InterOil, as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to InterOil. No assurances can be given however, that these events will occur. Actual results could differ, and the difference may be material and adverse to the combined company and its shareholders. Such statements are subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of InterOil, which may cause actual results to differ materially from those implied or expressed by the forward-looking statements. These include in particular information and statements relating to the Oil Search Agreement, including but not limited to the size or timing of any payment under the contingent value right contemplated by the Oil Search Agreement , any future performance of InterOil or Oil Search, the ability to satisfy the conditions to closing of the Oil Search transaction, either on the expected timeline or at all, the future trading price of InterOil or Oil Search securities, the ability to integrate the businesses of InterOil and Oil Search, the outcome of the unsolicited ExxonMobil Offer, and those factors in InterOil's management information circular dated June 24, 2016, its annual report for the year ended December 31, 2015 on Form 40-F and its Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2015. InterOil disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable laws.
Legal Notice
None of the securities anticipated to be issued pursuant to the Oil Search Agreement have been or will be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws, and any securities issued pursuant to the Oil Search Agreement are anticipated to be issued in reliance upon available exemptions from such registration requirements pursuant to Section 3(a)(10) of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable exemptions under state securities laws. This release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities.
There can be no assurance that the transaction with Oil Search will occur. The transactions contemplated by the Oil Search Agreement are subject to certain approvals and the fulfillment of certain conditions, and there can be no assurance that any such approvals will be obtained and/or any such conditions will be met. Further details regarding the terms of the transaction are set out in the Oil Search Agreement and are provided in InterOil's management information circular dated June 24, 2016, each of which is available under the profile of InterOil Corporation at www.sedar.com.
SOURCE InterOil Corporation
Related Links
http://www.interoil.com
SHANGHAI, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Institutional Investor recently published its 2016 All-Asia Executive Team Rankings. James Jianzhang Liang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Ctrip.com International, Ltd., ranked as one of the "Best CEOs" in the Technology, Media, & Telecommunications: Internet category.
Institutional Investor is a leading international business to business publisher, focused primarily on international finance. The 2016 All-Asia Executive Team Ranking collected opinions from 1,007 portfolio managers and buy-side analysts and 611 sell-side analysts.
The Best CEO award is a well-deserved recognition of James' contributions to Ctrip and China's travel industry. James co-founded Ctrip in 1999, served as CEO between 2000 and 2006, and resumed his role as CEO in 2013. During his first term as CEO, Ctrip revolutionized China's travel industry with the "click-and-brick" business model and became the best known travel brand in China. Since his return, Ctrip launched key strategic initiatives including the transition to mobile, open-platform, and internal incubation for new businesses, transitioning the company into a mobile-focused one-stop travel platform. Under his leadership, the company has also made a series of successful external investments, solidifying its industry leadership. All these efforts have positioned Ctrip well for greater successes in the future.
About Ctrip.com International, Ltd.
Ctrip.com International, Ltd. is a leading travel service provider of accommodation reservation, transportation ticketing, packaged tours, and corporate travel management in China. It is the largest online consolidator of accommodations and transportation tickets in China in terms of transaction volume. Ctrip enables business and leisure travelers to make informed and cost-effective bookings by aggregating comprehensive travel related information and offering its services through an advanced transaction and service platform consisting of its mobile apps, Internet websites and centralized, toll-free, 24-hour customer service center. Ctrip also helps customers book vacation packages and guided tours. In addition, through its corporate travel management services, Ctrip helps corporate clients effectively manage their travel requirements. Since its inception in 1999, Ctrip has experienced substantial growth and become one of the best-known travel brands in China.
For further information, please contact:
Investor Relations
Ctrip.com International, Ltd.
Tel: (+86) 21 3406 4880 X 12300
Email: [email protected]
SOURCE Ctrip.com International, Ltd.
Bringing 25 years of investment experience, Dunne has held a diverse set of senior investment leadership roles at BlackRock, iShares and Barclays Global Investors. His most recent roles include Head of BlackRock's San Francisco office and Head of iShares Global Markets and Investments where he led the iShares Capital Markets, Investment Research and Product Management teams, and oversaw more than 700 investment products with over $1 trillion in assets under management. Prior to that he was Global Chief Operating Officer for iShares.
"Patrick's wealth of experience and diverse background across capital markets, strategy, portfolio management, product development and client service will help us drive the next phase of Lending Club's growth," said Scott Sanborn, President and CEO of Lending Club. "Lending Club's success in democratizing access to consumer credit is just the beginning, and Patrick will play a key role in reaffirming our continued commitment to our investors."
"Over the last nine years, Lending Club has transformed access to consumer credit for all investors while delivering responsible credit to consumers. I see this as a tremendous opportunity to join an innovative company with a strong foundation and I look forward to being part of its continued success," said Dunne.
Dunne has his BA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MS in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
About Lending Club
Lending Club's mission is to transform the banking system to make credit more affordable and investing more rewarding. The company's technology platform enables it to deliver innovative solutions to borrowers and investors. We operate at a lower cost than traditional bank lending programs, so we're able to pass the savings on to borrowers in the form of lower rates and to investors in the form of solid returns. Lending Club is based in San Francisco, California. More information is available at https://www.lendingclub.com. Currently only residents of the following states may invest in Lending Club notes: AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NE, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OK, OR, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, or WY. All loans are made by federally regulated issuing bank partners.
Safe Harbor Statement
Some of the statements in this above are "forward-looking statements." The words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "outlook," "plan," "predict," "project," "will," "would" and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. The company may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results or events could differ materially from the plans, intentions and expectations disclosed in forward-looking statements. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
Information in this press release is not an offer to sell securities or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities.
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140417/76307
SOURCE Lending Club
Related Links
http://www.lendingclub.com
CLEVELAND, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CLEANLIFE Energy, announced today it has relocated its headquarters to downtown Cleveland.
For CLEANLIFE Energy, developers of custom LED and power supply solutions for commercial, industrial, OEM and niche markets, the new space means improved office space, expanded production capabilities, new amenities for employees and the opportunity to grow in the future.
CLEANLIFE had been searching for a new space for some time. After careful consideration and evaluation, company leaders determined they wanted to find a location, a space, and a neighborhood that shared not only their aspirations, but also emphasized the innovative spirit.
"For a high-tech company in Cleveland, we want to have a corporate culture and a business scope that attracts the type of entrepreneurs and business people who want to stay," said CLEANLIFE Energy CEO Justin S. Miller. "In our new location, we're able to build an infrastructure that will support the future growth of our company. Graduates from local institutions, such as Cleveland State University and Case Western Reserve University, have a lot of opportunities across the country. To keep this type of young talent here, we need to be located in proximity to where people want to live, work and play. At the same time, our ability to participate in creating jobs and revitalizing Cleveland and its surrounding neighborhoods was a major factor in our decision to relocate."
CLEANLIFE will occupy the lower level of a former industrial space at 2400 Superior Ave. The site, a former futon factory, has been converted to provide expanded space for production facilities, electronic assembly, R&D and testing, quality control, and a new showroom, which is set to open in early fall 2016.
Also known as the Hotcards Building, the space is both adjacent to downtown and located in the heart of Cleveland's once thriving garment district. Around the turn of the 20th century, the garment industry was Cleveland's second largest industry. CLEANLIFE is looking to harness the same entrepreneurial and enterprising spirit and mentality of yesteryear that helped catapult the city to one of the premier manufacturing and innovation hubs in the United States in its move to maintain and bring more fresh innovation, brainpower and talent to Cleveland.
To help with renovations of the new headquarters facility, the City of Cleveland in March 2016 issued an $180,000 Vacant Property Initiative Grant to the company.
"CLEANLIFE is a great addition to downtown, run by great entrepreneurs," said Bobby George, the building's owner and a major supporter of Cleveland-based entrepreneurship. "It's great to take a building that is primarily vacant and turn it in to a place to help attract other tenants. It is exactly what CLEANLIFE needs to thrive."
On helping to fill a once vacant downtown Cleveland building, George added, "I love working with entrepreneurs. In addition to CLEANLIFE, there are fourteen workspaces. Each one is occupied by an entrepreneur with a vision."
To learn more about CLEANLIFE Energy's products or to learn about how its innovative technologies can help to benefit businesses, visit www.cleanlifeenergy.com or email [email protected].
About CLEANLIFE Energy
CLEANLIFE creates clean and innovative solutions for the world's future energy supply. A division of CleanLife Ventures LLC, it is a global-leader in custom LED lighting and power supply technologies for commercial, industrial, OEM, and niche markets.
CLEANLIFE's mission is to create a healthier planet through the design and development of advanced clean technologies that are economical and meet the highest international standards in safety and performance. CLEANLIFE is committed to protecting the environment by providing products and services that not only improve energy efficiency but also reduce dependence on natural resources and the presence of hazardous waste in the environment.
For more information about CLEANLIFE Energy, please visit www.cleanlifeenergy.com
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160715/390088LOGO
SOURCE CLEANLIFE Energy
Related Links
http://www.cleanlifeenergy.com
TRUCKEE, Calif., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BetaZi has opened the door to its first external investor with the recent initial tranche of funding from businessman and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, through his VC entity Radical Investments. Cuban's substantial business presence brings tremendous market opportunity to the early-stage data science company, which is quietly revolutionizing how independent assessment of oil & gas assets is done. The potential impact of BetaZi's unmatched accuracy on risk evaluation and investment decision-making was immediately clear to Cuban, who had this to say:
"BetaZi is the definition of disruptive innovation for oil and gas production forecasting. Its new model has physics, big data statistics, and machine learning combined for the first time to automatically produce the most accurate forecasts available, and that's why I've invested in them. It's a step change in the standards of analysis for oil and gas wells by E&P companies and Wall Street firms. Look for some incredible products to come out of this companyand soon."
BetaZi CEO Janette Conradson reached out to Mark Cuban directly when her company decided to take on outside investment in order to speed product development and market penetration. BetaZi has already made significant inroads into the finance, insurance, production, banking, and engineering sectors of the oil & gas industry, as well as successfully petitioning to provide services to federal agencies. With client demand and brand recognition growing and major new products set to launch Q4 of this year, Conradson said:
"Mark's promotion of the company comes at an exciting time for us. We welcome the buzz generated by his involvement as enthusiastically as we do his investment capital. Let's face it: Mark Cuban is a big deal. The value-add of having him on our team isn't lost on us."
BetaZi provides state-of-the-art production oil and gas forecasting solutions based on Physics-Based Predictive Analytics. BetaZi solutions give industry stakeholders meaningful, actionable intelligence with testable results. Since 2012, they have modeled over a million wells with cutting-edge technology and provided accurate and insightful production forecasts to decision-makers from the field to the board room. For more information, visit their website at www.betazi.com.
Radical Investments LP is a Mark Cuban VC investment entity that does seed and early stage venture funding. Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters, Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of AXS TV. He is also a 'shark' investor on Shark Tank.
Media Contact: Janette Conradson, BetaZi LLC, (530) 587-3858, [email protected]
SOURCE BetaZi LLC
Related Links
http://www.betazi.com
LOS ANGELES, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Global metal pioneers MEGADETH premiered their video for the new single "Post American World," along with complete details for the fall dates for the North American leg of their Dystopia World Tour. The tour kicks off in Casper, WY on September 20, 2016 and will take them across the U.S., visiting 16 states with special guests to include Amon Amarth, Suicidal Tendencies, Metal Church and Havok.
Tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday, July 22 check www.megadeth.com/tour for specific market info and local on sale times and dates. There will also be an exclusive pre-sale for MEGADETH fan club members. Pre-sale tickets for Megadeth Cyber Army club members will begin on Tuesday, July 19 at 10 a.m. local time at http://cyberarmy.megadeth.com.
Meanwhile, the current single "Post American World" takes an unflinching and timely look at the state of the modern world, and the dark vision of the Jake Macpherson-directed video takes the subject matter in still more menacing directions. Most other artists are unwilling to tread in this territory, preferring veiled metaphors, or more often, completely ignoring the most important topics of our day. But with their current album Dystopia, MEGADETH refused to compromise their craft and identity, and as such have again set the pace for modern metal.
Dave Mustaine comments: "The filming of Post American World was an eerie video shoot right from the beginning. Shot in just one day with only our guitars and drums, I knew that this was going to be amazing. There is something to be said about the simplicity of an artist and only his guitar or drums. This is clearly a 'less is more' concept and director Jake Macpherson nailed it!"
The raw and uncensored video can be viewed, in its entirety, at http://usa-tomorrow.us.
Dystopia has already been heralded as one of the top Metal albums of the year by major outlets, including Rolling Stone and Alternative Press. The album's chart impact was the strongest for the band since 1992's Countdown To Extinction, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard Top 200 chart (behind Adele and Beiber), No. 1 album on Billboard's Hard Music and Top Rock charts, and at No. 2 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart. Globally, Dystopia also achieved top 10 debuts in Canada (No. 2), Japan (No. 2 international chart), Finland (No. 3), Mexico (No. 4), Czech Republic (No. 5), Australia (No. 6), New Zealand (No. 6), Switzerland (No. 7), Poland (No. 8) and Germany (No. 10), which along with Belgium, Ireland and Spain contributed to achieve MEGADETH's highest ever chart positions in their thirty year history in a total of 10 countries around the world. Other countries with significant sales or chart debuts included UK, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Netherlands, and France.
Go to www.megadeth.com/tour for ticketing info and up-to-date information.
SEPTEMBER
Sep 20 Casper Events Center Casper, WY+ Sep 22 The Joint Las Vegas, NV Sep 24 "Ozzfest" San Manuel Amphitheater Devore, CA * + Sep 27 WaMu Theater Seattle, WA Sep 28 Matthew Knight Arena Eugene, OR Sep 29 City National Civic San Jose, CA
OCTOBER
Oct 1 1st Bank Center Bloomfield, CO Oct 3 Mid America Recreation & Conv. Complex Council Bluffs, IA Oct 4 Roy Wilkins Auditorium St. Paul, MN Oct 5 Sears Centre Chicago, IL Oct 7 iWireless Center Moline, IL Oct 8 UWM Panther Arena Milwaukee, WI Oct 9 Joe Louis Arena Detroit, MI Oct 11 Sands Event Center Bethlehem, PA Oct 12 DCU Center Worcester, MA Oct 13 Mohegan Sun Arena Uncasville, CT Oct 14 Prudential Center Newark, NJ Oct 16 BB&T Pavilion Camden, NJ
* Festival date
+ Non-Suicidal Tendencies date
MEGADETH burst onto the scene thirty years ago, virtually inventing a genre with their debut album Killing Is My Business And Business Is Good! (recently recognized by VH1 as the Greatest Thrash Metal Debut Album of All Time) sold more than 38 million albums worldwide, earning numerous accolades including 11 Grammy nominations, scoring five consecutive platinum albumsincluding 1992's two-million-selling Countdown to Extinction .
www.megadeth.com
facebook.com/Megadeth | twitter.com/Megadeth | instagram.com/Megadeth
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SOURCE Universal Music Enterprises
Related Links
http://www.megadeth.com
ANN ARBOR, Mich., July 18 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two executives from automakers will kick off the Center for Automotive Research's annual industry conference in Traverse City. Presidents from Mercedes-Benz U.S. and Toyota Motor Manufacturing will discuss their companies' investments and strategies for bringing luxury vehicle production into U.S. manufacturing facilities, during the opening World Class Manufacturing session at CAR MBS on August 1.
Wil James, Jr., President, Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. has led Toyota's largest automotive manufacturing plant in the world for more than five years and oversees a nearly $6 billion operation which employs nearly 8,000 people. At CAR MBS 2016, James will discuss Toyota's strategy for the ES 350, the first Lexus to be built in the United States. Toyota's investment of $350 million adds 50,000 units of capacity and 750 new jobs in Kentucky. James will also discuss Toyota's approach to culture, preparing the team, and developing the Lexus mindset in Georgetown.
Jason Hoff, President and CEO, Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, Inc. heads the Tuscaloosa, Alabama plant's 3,500 team members in producing the GLE, GLS and GLE Coupe luxury sport utility vehicles for more than 135 countries, as well as the new C-Class for the North America market. Hoff will speak from his broad experience not only in assembly operations, but also in supplier quality engineering, purchasing, and logistics and as division controller. He'll delve into the details behind Daimler AG's decision to invest an additional $1.3 billion, resulting in 300 new jobs to support the production of future generations of SUVs in Alabama.
"Today's world class production systems are smart, fast, and efficient" said Dr. Jay Baron, CAR's President and CEO. "These executives have lived in the trenches and know just what it means to deliver results in this highly competitive environment. This seminar will offer real-life experiences in producing world-class automobiles and automotive technology necessary to meet today's demanding requirements." Baron will moderate the opening session at MBS.
In a separate, special session of the World Class Manufacturing seminar, speakers will focus on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the automotive manufacturing environment. IIoT enhances performance through the use of machine sensors, machine-to-machine communication and network communication with advanced analytics to create a "smart" environment where many decisions never require manual intervention. IIoT also plays an important role in connecting the enterprise with other manufacturing functions and the supply chain. Speakers from GE Digital, Toyota Motor North America, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG will explore how several leading manufacturers are balancing their workforce with automation, information technology, and process advancements to achieve excellence in performance while producing world class automobiles.
Join CAR at MBS 2016 and learn more about how automaker executives are adding jobs and capacity in the United States. The full MBS schedule can be viewed HERE. Registration is still open and is free to credentialed media REGISTER.
The Center for Automotive Research is a non-profit organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Its mission is to conduct research on significant issues related to the future direction of the global automotive industry, organize and conduct forums of value to the automotive community and foster industry relationships. For more information, visit the CAR website: www.cargroup.org.
SOURCE Center for Automotive Research
Related Links
http://www.cargroup.org
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Bahrain deeply regrets the statement issued by Mr. Boris Johnson, UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, as well as the statement from the US Department of State. Such statements and positions are unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Bahrain, and in the decisions of the Bahraini judicial process, which provides all necessary standards of justice, fairness, transparency and independence. Further, such statements are unjustified and only give encouragement to groups which support extremism and terrorism.
In reaffirming that rights and freedoms are comprehensively guaranteed in the Constitution of the Kingdom of Bahrain, which also safeguards community security and safety, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses the hope that friendly and allied countries take into account the interests of the Kingdom of Bahrain, just as Bahrain is keen to take into account the interests of all allies and partners in order to preserve their distinctive historical relations, and to ensure security and stability in the region.
The Ministry underlined the Kingdom of Bahrain's commitment to working with its allies and partners to promote peace and sustainable development for all.
SOURCE Embassy of the Kingdom of Bahrain in the US
According to Pascal Beucler, Chief Strategy Officer, MSLGROUP, "in order to succeed in the conversation age, food and beverage brands need to rely on a contemporary mix of communications techniques from powerful visual stimuli to social influence at scale, as well build an attractive brand reputation, a brand narrative that delivers modern appetite appeal, a health and wellness story and a strong connection to culture."
MSLGROUP has organized the Six Communications Drivers into a new diagnostic tool that is the centerpiece of how it assesses and organizes the communications activities of food and beverage companies and brands.
"These drivers can help food and beverage brands profitably balance their communications," said Steve Bryant, Managing Director, MSLGROUP in Seattle and one of the global agency's top food experts. "They are the beginning of an important dialogue about how the latest communications practices, platforms and channels can be strategically deployed to maximize revenue."
Through opinion pieces from experts at MSLGROUP and in the food industry, The Future of Food Communications highlights key takeaways, which include:
Food in the conversation age is about more than just food
Food choices and preferences today depend on a multitude of factors, including peer recommendations, personal ethical concerns, specific health needs, and cultural relevance, among others. Food companies need to understand and respond with precision engagement to effectively win share of mouth.
Food choices and preferences today depend on a multitude of factors, including peer recommendations, personal ethical concerns, specific health needs, and cultural relevance, among others. Food companies need to understand and respond with precision engagement to effectively win share of mouth. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, food companies need to ensure trust
With increasing awareness of the broad impact of our food choices, consumers and activists are seeking and sharing information about what goes into their food. Proactive transparency are required to ensure consumer trust and advocacy.
With increasing awareness of the broad impact of our food choices, consumers and activists are seeking and sharing information about what goes into their food. Proactive transparency are required to ensure consumer trust and advocacy. Food brands need to be where the consumers are literally and figuratively
Food habits have evolved dramatically sit-down meals are increasingly replaced by on-the-go snacking. The connected consumers of today require brands to reach them where they are physically as well as mentally. It's as much about accessibility as it is about strategic, timely communication.
Food habits have evolved dramatically sit-down meals are increasingly replaced by on-the-go snacking. The connected consumers of today require brands to reach them where they are physically as well as mentally. It's as much about accessibility as it is about strategic, timely communication. Food companies need to carefully communicate the high-tech future of food
Technology holds great promise in food innovation, yet it is essential for the food industry to powerfully communicate the benefits, explaining new technologies, cultivating trust in unseen innovations, and popularizing new ways of eating, especially at a time when consumers value the apparent simplicity of natural, farm fresh foods. To successfully steer this conversation, food and beverage brands can highlight themes of transparency, innovation, personalization and mobility.
Summing up the report, Bryant concluded: "Consumers today seek a seemingly paradoxical all-natural, yet high-tech future of food. For marketers, that's a caution to revisit their communication plans, understanding what key factors now drive consumption and revenue."
To read 'The Future of Food Communications: Winning Share of Mouth in the Conversation Age' visit bit.ly/FutureofFoodComms.
About 'The Future of Food Communications'
'The Future of Food Communications: Winning Share of Mouth in the Conversation Age' is part of MSLGROUP's People's Insights project which shares views from our global team of 100+ strategic planners, researchers and insight experts. Other titles include The Future of Employee (Re)Engagement, The Future of Reputation, The Future of Business Citizenship, The Future of Creativity, Data In. Data Out. Transforming Big Data into Smart Ideas, and A Chance for Change: The Tipping Point for Sustainable Business.
About MSLGROUP
MSLGROUP is Publicis Groupe's strategic communications and engagement group, advisors in all aspects of communication strategy: from consumer PR to financial communications, from public affairs to reputation management and from crisis communications to experiential marketing and events. With more than 3,000 people across close to 100 offices worldwide, MSLGROUP is also the largest PR network in Europe, fast-growing China and India. The group offers strategic planning and counsel, insight-guided thinking and big, compelling ideas followed by thorough execution.
mslgroup.com | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube | Slideshare | Pinterest
About Publicis Groupe - The Power of One
Publicis Groupe [Euronext Paris FR0000130577, CAC 40] is a global leader in marketing, communication, and digital transformation. Active across the entire value chain, from consulting to creation, and production, Publicis Groupe offers its clients a transversal, unified and fluid model allowing them access to all the Groupe's tools and expertise around the world. Publicis Groupe is organized across four Solutions hubs: Publicis Communications, Publicis Media, Publicis.Sapient and Publicis Health. These 4 Solutions hubs operate across principal markets and are carried across all others by Publicis One. Publicis One is a fully-integrated service offering making the Groupe's expertise available to all clients under one roof. Present in over 100 countries, Publicis Groupe employs nearly 80,000 professionals.
publicisgroupe.com | Twitter: @PublicisGroupe | Facebook: facebook.com/publicisgroupe | LinkedIn: Publicis Groupe | youtube.com/user/PublicisGroupe | Viva la Difference!
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SOURCE MSLGROUP
Related Links
http://www.mslgroup.com
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Climate experts from NASA will discuss recent trends in global temperatures and Arctic sea ice, as well as research now underway to better understand their impacts, during a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 19.
NASA scientists track global temperature and sea ice data as part of the agency's mission to better understand our changing planet. The agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York will release its analysis of June global surface temperatures prior to this teleconference.
The teleconference participants are:
Gavin Schmidt , GISS director
, GISS director Walt Meier , sea ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
, sea ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Nathan Kurtz , project scientist for NASA's Operation IceBridge at Goddard
, project scientist for NASA's Operation IceBridge at Goddard Charles Miller , deputy science lead for the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
To participate, media must email their name and affiliation to Sean Potter at [email protected] by 11 a.m. Tuesday. Media and the public also may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.
Audio of the briefing will stream live at:
http://www.nasa.gov/live
For more information about NASA's Earth science programs, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/earth
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SOURCE NASA
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SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Wilshire Associates (Wilshire) today announced the launch of a new index Powered by Wilshire, the BrandTransact 50 (BTW50). The new index, created and owned by BrandTransact Worldwide, Inc., shows compelling up- and down-capture performance that has historically beat Wall Street. The BTW50 index is first in combining brand value metrics with Wall Street analytics to create a fully passive, rules-based methodology to identify companies whose share value is not fully recognized in the US Markets. The index equally weights the top 50 companies exhibiting a discount of brand and intangible asset value to market cap. This index is primarily a large cap portfolio and is rebalanced annually.
The underlying analysis includes a cross reference to historical brand value metrics provided by Tenet Partners, a highly recognized authority on brand measurement and valuation that currently analyzes over 1,000 US publicly traded companies. Tenet uses a highly stable, quantitative benchmark tracking system with a proprietary model correlating corporate brand to market capitalization. Tenet has been compiling quarterly brand data for US companies consistently since 1994.
According to statistics published in 2015 by intangible asset advisory firm, Ocean Tomo, 84% of the value of the S&P 500 is made up of intangible assets.
"Yet strangely enough, intangible assets are too often invisible assets that don't get the strategic, financial or fiduciary attention they deserve. But when you tie it all to stock price fluctuations, people tend to take it seriously. So with the launch of our BTW50 index it will be difficult for companies, fiduciaries and investors to continue to ignore the 'Elephant in the Board Room' that metaphorically represents the massive spread between a company's book value and market cap," states Bill Zabit, CEO of BrandTransact Worldwide.
The BTW50 index provides the benefits of intelligent security selection of active management in a passive format and shows a high correlation to the broad US market but has historically outperformed it. The proprietary methodology identifies companies with unrealized brand assets that have high potential for margin expansion and has historically produced a spread between Up and Down Capture that is better than most active managers have been able to achieve.
"Wilshire Analytics is thrilled to extend the Powered by Wilshire index family to include the BrandTransact 50. Wilshire's calculation and analytical expertise combined with BrandTransact's innovative, proprietary approach in creating an index that can help investors uncover unrealized market value is in the true spirit of the Powered by Wilshire brand," commented Robert J. Waid, Managing Director at Wilshire Associates.
For more information about the BrandTransact 50, please visit http://wilshire.com/indexinfo/poweredbywilshire/BrandTransact50Index.html.
About BrandTransact Worldwide
BrandTransact Worldwide specializes in advising corporate boards, the C-Suite, private equity firms and other trusted advisorson how brands and intangible assets impact the critical pre- and post-deal stages of corporate transactions, transformation events and capitalization opportunities. The company specializes in value creation and risk mitigation with a specific focus on corporate and product brands, intellectual property, reputation of brand and leadership, human capital and branded assets. BrandTransact Worldwide is the only single-sourcefirm that exclusively addresses theissues and opportunities related tothis full complement of intangible assets and how they strategically and financially impact key lifecycle events a company faces.
Please visit www.brandtransact.com for more information.
BrandTransact Investments, LLC is a separate entity with exclusive licensing rights to create investment products based on the BrandTransact 50 index and owns the IP for other related indexes that are in queue to be published. The first in a family of products to be launched is an ETF that tracks the BTW50 index.
About Wilshire Associates
Wilshire Associates, a leading global financial services firm, provides consulting services, analytics solutions and customized investment solutions to plan sponsors, investment managers and financial intermediaries. Its business units include, Wilshire Analytics, Wilshire Consulting, Wilshire Funds Management and Wilshire Private Markets.
The firm was founded in 1972, providing revolutionary technology and acting as an early innovator in the application of investment analytics and research to investment managers in the institutional marketplace. Wilshire also is credited with helping to develop the field of quantitative investment analysis that uses mathematical tools to analyze market risks. All other business units evolved from Wilshire's strong analytics foundation.
Wilshire developed the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index and became an early innovator in creating integrated asset/liability analysis/simulation models as well as practical models in risk budgeting through beta and active risk analysis. Wilshire has grown to a firm of approximately 300 employees serving the needs of investors around the world.
Based in Santa Monica, California, Wilshire provides services to clients in more than 20 countries representing more than 500 organizations with assets totaling approximately US $7 trillion.* With ten offices worldwide, Wilshire Associates and its affiliates are dedicated to providing clients with the highest quality counsel, products and services. Wilshire and Wilshire 5000 are registered service marks of Wilshire Associates Incorporated. Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index,Powered by Wilshire and Wilshire Bond Index are service marks of Wilshire Associates Incorporated.
Please visit www.wilshire.com for more information.
Follow us on Twitter: @WilshireAssoc
*Client assets are as represented by Pensions and Investments (P&I), detailed in P&I's "Largest Retirement Funds" and P&I's "Largest Money Managers (U.S. institutional tax-exempt assets)" as of 9/30/15 and 12/31/15, and published 2/8/16 and 5/30/16, respectively).
CONTACT: Lisa Herbert
+1-310-899-5325 (O)
+1-310-728-5341 (C)
[email protected]
SOURCE Wilshire Associates
Related Links
http://www.wilshire.com
"National Tequila Day is such a fun way we can interact with our customers and celebrate around food, friends and family," said Ashley Zickefoose, Chief Marketing Officer with On The Border. "That's why we're proud to add an innovative new beverage option for National Tequila Day where our customers can engage in friendly competition to name the mystery drink."
The limited-time-only, top-shelf cocktail will feature a deliciously smooth blend of Herradura Silver Tequila, mango syrup, orange juice, sweet and sour, Sprite and an orange slice. The naming contest will begin on Monday, July 18th on On The Border's Facebook and Instagram pages using the hashtag #OTBDrink. The savory new tequila cocktail can be tasted by all on National Tequila Day, July 24, by visiting any participating On The Border location and purchasing the mystery drink for a special celebratory price of $5. A winning name will be chosen based on creativity (and fun!) and the official new name and lucky winner will be announced on July 25. The newly named cocktail will remain available at its regular price of $8.99 until Labor Day.
Classic tequila fans will also find much to celebrate at On The Border during National Tequila Day with over 25 different tequilas served at each restaurant. Planned festivities include numerous ways for guests to delight in holiday-worthy deals on house margaritas and shots. All House Margaritas will be offered for just $2, and tequila shots will range from $3-5. Among tequilas available for guests to try are various brands including household names Patron, 1800 and Jose Cuervo. Celebrate the joyful moments in life with family and friends at any local On The Border location, and let the good times roll.
About On The Border
On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina is the world's largest Mexican casual dining brand, offering an extensive menu of great-tasting, classic and contemporary Mexican food, like sizzling mesquite-grilled fajitas, and Margaritas as big and bold as the border itself. On The Border is owned by Border Holdings, LLC, with more than 150 restaurants in 34 states, Puerto Rico, Asia and the Middle East. Follow and 'like' On The Border on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnTheBorderMexicanGrillandCantina, and @OnTheBorder on Twitter. For more information, visit www.ontheborder.com.
Contact: Jessica Chacoff
888.869.7899
[email protected]
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160715/390207
SOURCE On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina
Related Links
https://www.ontheborder.com
MINNEAPOLIS, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Systems, Inc., a leading provider of business software, officially announced the release of TRAVERSE Cloud, a complete ERP system hosted in the Microsoft Cloud. This announcement comes shortly after Microsoft approved Open Systems as a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider.
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"TRAVERSE Cloud represents the next step in Open Systems' 40 year history of innovation," said Dr. Michael Bertini, CEO of Open Systems, Inc. "We've been a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for many years and we are excited to strengthen our partnership by becoming a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider."
TRAVERSE Cloud ERP benefits:
Full ERP functionality for accounting, manufacturing, distribution, and verticals
Stable and secure Microsoft Cloud (Azure) hosting
Managed backup services
Monthly application and server updates
As low as $180 / user / month
/ user / month Pay by month, not year
"Choosing TRAVERSE Cloud means there's no compromise for the client," said Bertini. "Whether you need tighter inventory control, real-time reporting, full accounting, and manufacturing production are all available at your fingertips with TRAVERSE Cloud."
Open Systems invites those curious about TRAVERSE Cloud to visit their site at www.osas.com/cloud.
About Open Systems, Inc.
Open Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of powerful business, accounting, CRM, ERP, and mobile software solutions for organizations in many industries, including distribution, manufacturing, and nonprofit. Open Systems recently celebrated 40 years of serving customers with cutting-edge technologies, and adaptable business solutions. Products offered include Microsoft.NET and SQL Server-based TRAVERSE for the Microsoft platform, and Java-based OSAS for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. For more information on Open Systems products, call 800-328-2276 or visit www.osas.com.
Media contact:
Scott Martin
Content Strategist
952-403-5763
Email
SOURCE Open Systems, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.osas.com
SAN FRANCISCO, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
The global optical imaging system market is expected to reach USD 3.0 billion by 2024, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Technological advancements and rising preference for noninvasive technology are anticipated to be the preliminary market catalyst.
Grand View Research Logo (PRNewsFoto/Grand View Research_ Inc_)
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150105/723757 )
Rising R&D efforts by pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies requiring the use of optical imaging systems are encouraging the market growth. Additionally, veterinary hospitals and educational institutions are utilizing this technology in research and diagnostics, due to its noninvasive nature.
North America and Europe together accounted for the largest market share that was over 60.0% in 2015. Well-developed research infrastructure, availability of skilled professionals, and faster adoption rates of technically advanced devices within the region are certain factors promoting growth. Furthermore, supportive government initiatives in this region are propelling the growth in this sector. The government of Canada invested around USD 750,000 in the Canadian Imaging Research Center to promote research and commercialization opportunities in the imaging sector.
Asia Pacific is expected to witness the fastest growth rate during the forecast period owing to the easy availability of resources. Favorable environment is encouraging research activities as government funding for R&D is increasing in emerging nations, such as India and China. For instance, Impacting Research Innovation and Technology (IMPRINT), an initiative by the Indian government, promotes R&D in imaging and other technology sectors. This is expected to attract market players to this region, thereby facilitating higher penetration and expansion.
Browse full research report with TOC on "Optical Imaging System Market Analysis By Technology (Photoacoustic Tomography, Optical Coherence Tomography, Hyperspectral Imaging, Near-infrared Spectroscopy), By Product (Imaging Systems, Optical Imaging Software, Cameras, Illumination Systems, Lenses), By Application (Pathological Imaging, Intraoperative Imaging), By End Use , By Therapeutic Area (Ophthalmology, Cardiology, Oncology, Dermatology, Neurology) And Segment Forecasts To 2024" at: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/optical-imaging-system-market-analysis
Further Key Findings From the Study Suggest:
The optical coherence tomography segment is the largest segment over the forecast period. The largest share was attributed to the extensive application in small animal imaging and research projects.
North America captured the largest market share of around 35.0% in 2015. The market is expected to maintain its dominance during the forecast period. Technologically advanced research infrastructure and increasing use in medical testing for chronic conditions are some of the factors supporting the growth in this region.
captured the largest market share of around 35.0% in 2015. The market is expected to maintain its dominance during the forecast period. Technologically advanced research infrastructure and increasing use in medical testing for chronic conditions are some of the factors supporting the growth in this region. Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness a significant growth rate from 2016 to 2024 owing to the government initiatives in this region. For instance, the Asia-Pacific Optical Sensors Conference held every year by the Optical Society helps showcase new products to consumer, thereby increasing awareness regarding the market and its developments.
is anticipated to witness a significant growth rate from 2016 to 2024 owing to the government initiatives in this region. For instance, the Asia-Pacific Optical Sensors Conference held every year by the Optical Society helps showcase new products to consumer, thereby increasing awareness regarding the market and its developments. Some key players are PerkinElmer, Inc., St. Jude Medical, Inc., Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Topcon Corporation, and Koninklijke Philips N.V.
In order to curb the competition, key industry players are meticulously involved in the development of new systems that facilitate easy diagnosis. For instance, the Dragonfly Catheter series by St. Jude Medical, Inc. provides data sampling of around 100 MB per second.
Request for sample of this research report: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/optical-imaging-system-market-analysis/request
Grand View Research has segmented optical imaging system market on the basis of technology, product, application, end-use therapeutic area, and region.
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Technology (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Photoacoustic Tomography Optical Coherence Tomography Hyperspectral Imaging Near-infrared Spectroscopy
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Product (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Imaging Systems Optical Imaging Software Optical Imaging Systems Spectral Imaging Systems Cameras Illumination Systems Lenses Other Optical Imaging Products
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Application (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Pathological Imaging Intraoperative Imaging
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by End-Use (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Research Laboratories Hospitals & Clinics Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies
Global Optical Imaging Systems Market by Therapeutic Areas (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 Ophthalmology Cardiology Oncology Dermatology Neurology
Optical Imaging Systems Market by Region (USD Million), 2013 - 2024 North America U.S. Canada Europe UK Germany Asia Pacific Japan China Latin America Brazil Mexico MEA South Africa Saudi Arabia
Browse related reports by Grand View Research:
Rat Model Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/rat-model-market
Direct Energy Medical Devices Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/direct-energy-medical-devices-market
Fluid Management Systems Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/fluid-management-systems-market
Kidney Fibrosis Treatment Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/kidney-fibrosis-treatment-market
About Grand View Research
Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.
Read Our Blogs - ni2014.org , grandviewresearch.com/blogs/healthcare
Contact:
Sherry James
Corporate Sales Specialist, USA
Grand View Research, Inc
Phone: 1-415-349-0058
Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.grandviewresearch.com
SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
HOUSTON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Par Pacific Holdings, Inc. (NYSE MKT: PARR) ("Par" or "Par Pacific") announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Par Hawaii Refining, LLC, entered into a consent decree with subsidiaries of Tesoro Corporation ("Tesoro"), the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Department of Justice and other state governmental agencies (the "Consent Decree"). The Consent Decree concerns alleged violations of the federal Clean Air Act by a subsidiary of Tesoro that occurred prior to the acquisition of that entity by Par in September 2013 (the "Acquisition Date").
Tesoro will reimburse Par for all reasonable third party capital expenditures incurred for the Consent Decree to the extent related to acts or omissions prior to the Acquisition Date. Tesoro is obligated to pay all applicable fines and penalties related to the Consent Decree. Par Pacific estimates the cost of compliance with the Consent Decree to be approximately $30 million.
As previously announced, the Company is currently completing a refinery turnaround to execute routine maintenance. As a result of the Consent Decree, the Company has expanded the turnaround to undertake additional capital improvements to reduce emissions of air pollutants, to provide for certain nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emission controls and monitoring, and to install certain leak detection and repair equipment required by the Consent Decree.
About Par Pacific Holdings, Inc.
Par Pacific Holdings, Inc., based in Houston, Texas, is a growth-oriented company that manages and maintains interests in energy and infrastructure businesses. Par Pacific's business is organized into three primary segments of refining, retail and logistics. Par Pacific has refining and logistics assets in Hawaii and Wyoming and a retail distribution network in Hawaii. Par Pacific also owns an equity investment in Laramie Energy, LLC, a joint venture entity focused on producing natural gas in Garfield, Mesa and Rio Blanco Counties, Colorado. In addition, Par Pacific transports, markets and distributes crude oil from the Western United States and Canada to refining hubs in the Midwest, Gulf Coast and East Coast. More information is available at www.parpacific.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are intended to qualify for the "safe harbor" from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical fact, such as Tesoro's reimbursement of Par for capital expenditures related to the Consent Decree, the operational results and environmental impact of the expanded turnaround, and the estimated cost of Compliance with the Consent Decree, are forward-looking statements. Additionally, forward looking statements are subject to certain risks, trends, and uncertainties. Par Pacific cannot provide assurances that the assumptions upon which these forward-looking statements are based will prove to have been correct. Should one of these risks materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements, and investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are current only as of this date. Par Pacific does not intend to update or revise any forward-looking statements made herein or any other forward looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The Company further expressly disclaims any written or oral statements made by a third party regarding the subject matter of this news release.
Contact:
Christine Thorp
Director, Investor Relations & Public Affairs
(832) 916-3396
[email protected]
SOURCE Par Pacific Holdings, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.parpacific.com
Paragon also has scheduled a teleconference and webcast related to its second quarter 2016 results on Tuesday, August 9, 2016, at 8:00 a.m. U.S. Central Time. The teleconference can be accessed from the U.S. and Canada by dialing 1-888-771-4371, or internationally by dialing 1-847-585-4405, and using access code: 42991725. Interested parties may also listen to the webcast through a link posted on Paragon's website at www.paragonoffshore.com , under "Events & Presentations" in the "Investor Relations" section of the website.
A telephonic replay of the conference call will be available on Tuesday, August 9, 2016, beginning at approximately 11:00 a.m. U.S. Central Time, through Tuesday, August 23, 2016, ending at approximately 11:00 p.m. U.S. Central Time. The phone number for the conference call replay is 1-888-843-7419 or, for calls from outside of the U.S., 1-630-652-3042, using access code: 42991725. A replay of the conference call will also be available on Paragon's website at www.paragonoffshore.com, under "Events & Presentations" in the "Investor Relations" section of the website.
Paragon also announced today that it issued a report on drilling rig status and contract information as of July 18, 2016. The report, titled "Fleet Status Report," can be found on the Company's website at www.paragonoffshore.com, under the "Our Fleet" section of the website.
About Paragon Offshore
Paragon is a global provider of offshore drilling rigs. Paragon's operated fleet includes 34 jackups, including two high specification heavy duty/harsh environment jackups, four drillships and two semisubmersibles. Paragon's primary business is contracting its rigs, related equipment and work crews to conduct oil and gas drilling and workover operations for its exploration and production customers on a dayrate basis around the world. Paragon's principal executive offices are located in Houston, Texas. Paragon is a public limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 08814042 and registered office at 20-22 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4JS, England. Additional information is available at www.paragonoffshore.com.
For additional information, contact:
For Investors Lee M. Ahlstrom & Media: Senior Vice President Investor Relations, Strategy and Planning
+1.832.783.4040
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SOURCE Paragon Offshore plc
Related Links
http://www.paragonoffshore.com
SAN DIEGO, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Public Consulting Group (PCG) is proud to announce Mohammed Tuama, a Business Services Representative from PCG's San Diego office, has been honored as the 2016 Refugee of the Year and Most Achieved Refugee by the Alliance for African Assistance (the Alliance), a notable international Refugee resettlement agency based in San Diego, CA.
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Recognized for his own hard earned success after resettling in San DiegoMohammed came from Iraq in 2009as well as his unwavering commitment to helping other Refugees realize similar employment opportunities and successes, Mohammed exemplifies the Alliance's dedication to providing support and guidance to all Refugees in the resettlement process.
"We are extremely proud of Mohammed's achievements and applaud the Alliance for recognizing his hard work within the San Diego community," said Kathy Fallon, Director of PCG's Human Services Division. "In our San Diego CalWORKs welfare-to-work program, Mohammed plays an important role in connecting local employers with jobseekers that we serve, many of whom are newly arrived Refugees. In addition to his work, Mohammed is the Co-Chair of the Newcomers Collaborative committee in El Cajon and volunteers each week to help local Refugees convert their professional certifications and degrees to U.S. standards. He's very deserving of these awards."
Mohammed received both the Refugee of the Year Award and the Most Achieved Refugee Award at the Alliance's 15th annual World Refugee Day Celebration on June 25, 2016. The theme of this year's event was "Onwards and Upwards: Celebrating Refugee Successes." Mohammed delivered the Keynote speech and used the opportunity to showcase the successes of other Refugees.
Reflecting on these honors, Mohammed said: "I am truly humbled by the recognition. Helping other Refugees start over in a new country, offering support and assistance as they pursue employment opportunities, this is very important to me because I have been in their shoes. There is much we can do to assist newcomers and I am fortunate for the supportive leadership at PCG. They encourage my efforts to provide meaningful employment services to those in need in ways that reflect America's broadly-shared values of opportunity, responsibility, and security."
KPBS Public Radio recently interviewed Mohammed about his experience as a Refugee as well as being named Refugee of the Year and Most Achieved Refugee. A recording of that interview is available here.
About Public Consulting Group
Public Consulting Group, Inc. (PCG) is a leading public sector consulting firm that partners with health, education, and human services agencies to improve lives. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, PCG has nearly 2,000 professionals in more than 60 offices around the U.S., in Canada, and in Europe. The firm has extensive experience in all 50 states, clients in six Canadian provinces, and a growing practice in Europe. To learn more, visit www.publicconsultinggroup.com.
Contact Information
Stephen Skinner, Public Consulting Group
(617) 717-1150
Email
SOURCE Public Consulting Group
Related Links
http://www.publicconsultinggroup.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On Tuesday, July 12, 2016, ProclaRx, a biotechnology company developing innovative therapeutics for patients suffering from serious bacterial infections, held an awareness and networking event for interested individuals from the Ohio community. The event was intended to educate business and community leaders on the positive impact the ProclaRx technology could potentially have on those suffering from chronic ear infections as well as the resources required to get the technology to market.
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The evening event was held at the home of Karl O. Elderkin, the Managing Partner at Athenian Venture Partners. The festivities were kicked off by Ohio University President, Dr. Roderick J. McDavis, with a formal presentation on the importance of entrepreneurship, commercialization of science, and the important role the community plays in advancing technology. ProclaRx CEO, Dr. Joseph D. Kittle, Jr., presented the company to the audience. Other featured presenters and notable attendees included Chris Gerig, Attorney at Gerig and Gerig; Debbie Phillips Bower, Owner of RE/MAX Premier Choice; George K. Richards, President of Capital Drugs; Tim O'Dell, CEO of CF Bank; Bob Milbourne, President of RHM Advisors; John Kopchick, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology at Ohio University; Jack Ellis, Emeritus Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of The Ohio University Foundation, Ohio University; and Jim Sergi, President of CSSi LifeSciences.
"The outpouring of support from Ohio University, the Athens Innovation Center and community, and Athenian Ventures at Tuesday's event was greatly appreciated," said Nick Henderson, Chairman, ProclaRx. "ProclaRx is hopeful to one day bring this game-changing technology to market, which could potentially benefit hundreds of thousands of people and children suffering from chronic bacterial infections."
ProclaRx's technology is envisioned to address unmet needs in patients suffering from not only ear infections, but also chronic sinusitis. The treatment is intended to disrupt and clear bacterial biofilm infections.
CSSi LifeSciences has been partnering with ProclaRx over the past year. "We are very excited to collaborate with the ProclaRx team and recognize the importance these treatments of recurrent infections may one day offer to patients," said Jim Sergi, President, CSSi LifeSciences. "We strongly believe that ProclaRx is going to continue making great strides in the industry and beyond." During the event, Jim discussed the clinical and regulatory pathway for commercialization of the ProclaRx technology.
Established in 2014, ProclaRx and its staff of experienced scientists are committed to eliminating the causes of countless chronic and recurrent human infections. The Columbus-based company prides itself on developing and commercializing anti-infective technologies, with the goal of eliminating biofilms and helping cure diseases.With $6.5 million invested to-date, ProclaRx is seeking additional strategic partners to help further its continued efforts to develop multiple innovative therapeutics for patients suffering from serious bacterial infections.
To learn more about ProclaRx, please visit www.proclarx.com. If you are interested in supporting ProclaRx's efforts, please contact Nick Henderson for more information at [email protected].
About ProclaRx:
ProclaRx is a biotechnology company developing innovative therapeutics for patients suffering from serious bacterial infections. ProclaRx has a breakthrough discovery that inhibits and prevents bacterial biofilms. Lead indications include advanced wound care, chronic suppurative otitis media, and CVID sinusitis. Visit www.proclarx.com, call 949-302-2165, or email [email protected].
Media Contacts:
Courtney Gaddi
Public Relations & Marketing Coordinator
CSSi
(443) 308-5831
Email
SOURCE ProclaRx
Related Links
http://www.proclarx.com
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Below are experts from the ProfNet network who are available to discuss timely issues in your coverage area. You can also submit a query to the hundreds of thousands of experts in our network it's easy and free! Just fill out the query form to get started: http://prn.to/alertswire.
EXPERT ALERTS
Impact of Brexit is Anyone's Guess
Loan Defaults by New Reverse Mortgage Borrowers
Water Reuse Emerging as Megatrend
Pokemon Go and Generational Marketing
MEDIA JOBS
Breaking News Reporter Press of Atlantic City (NJ)
(NJ) Website Producer KTRK-TV ABC (TX)
Online Reporter/Producer Hartford Business Journal (CT)
OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES
Covering the Republican Convention This Week?
Breaking Into Writing for Children and Families
11 Ways to Captivate Your News Audience With Snapchat Stories
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EXPERT ALERTS:
Impact of Brexit is Anyone's Guess
Jason Obradovich
EVP of Capital Markets
New American Funding
"So what really is the impact of Brexit? The answer is about as definitive as a Fed rate change. At this point, there is only speculation with little fact or ability to predict the future. Brexit could be the start of a large trend of a dismantling of the EU. Lawyers could hold up and stop the Brexit. Fears of the damage Brexit causes globally could be overstated. The impact to Britain could be overstated, or understated. Everything is a possibility at this point. I would expect continued volatility until the picture of reality begins to appear. The impact of Brexit is difficult to determine right now and it could be months before it becomes clear. In the interim, I would focus on the global picture of continued challenges and a FOMC completely uncertain when to increase rates. The economy certainly has not given them reason. In my opinion, we may settle into a lower range in rates than what we saw earlier this year when the 10yr traded between 1.60 and 2.00%. I would call 1.40% the floor with the possibility of moving up to 1.80%. If we hold below 1.40% for a week, then a new range may be established and volatility could really heat up. It's anyone's guess."
Obradovich graduated with a degree in economics from the University of California, San Diego and has become known for his U.S. financial market commentary. He spent 13 years at Countrywide Bank, where he served as portfolio manager. He also ran the Secondary Marketing pricing and trading desks, trading more than $1 trillion in mortgages. Before joining New American Funding in June of 2013, he served as first vice president of secondary marketing at Kinecta Federal Credit Union. His vast experience has spanned some of the most unprecedented market environments providing a noteworthy perspective for his commentary.
Web: www.newamericanfunding.com
Contact: Nicole Johnson, [email protected]
Loan Defaults by New Reverse Mortgage Borrowers
Peter Bell
President and CEO
National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association
A new Issue Brief from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College projects a significant decline in loan defaults by new reverse mortgage borrowers. Recent changes to rules regulating Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, which are government insured reverse mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration, are projected to reduce the number of new loan defaults by 50 percent. Through data analysis and modeling, the researchers show that a combination of policies implemented in 2013 and 2015 designed to prevent HECM borrowers from missing their property tax and insurance payments should have a positive impact on new borrowers who share similar financial characteristics with those who defaulted on a reverse mortgage prior to the policy changes. Says Bell: "Reverse mortgages work best when loan proceeds are used slowly and as part of a broader financial plan. As an industry, we worked with policymakers to craft reforms that would help more borrowers manage their funds over time. The CRR Brief reaffirms our message that reverse mortgages are a safe financial tool that older homeowners can use to supplement their retirement income."
As a Washington, D.C.-based housing policy analyst and trade association executive, Bell has been actively engaged working with the U.S. Congress, the Department of Housing & Urban Development and the various federal bank regulatory agencies on matters impacting mortgage finance, affordable housing and retirement issues. He is frequently called upon to testify before Congress, as well as provide insight and analysis to congressional staffs and federal agency executives. He is the most often quoted source on reverse mortgage matters in the national press, and is often featured in coverage by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, and major network news reports and newspapers across the country.
ProfNet Profile: http://www.profnetconnect.com/peterbell
Website: www.reversemortgage.org
Contact: Jenny Werwa, [email protected]
Water Reuse Emerging as Megatrend
Snehal Desai
Global Business Director
Dow Water & Process Solutions
"Water reuse as it applies to a circular economy is emerging as a megatrend it will become the new normal. Companies and municipalities are driven by costs to think closed loops, and the more sophisticated of strategies are integrating sustainability and cost of nature into the bottom line. Solutions such as reusing wastewater, desalinating seawater and creating closed-loop water systems for everything from microelectronics to oil production enables more people overall to have access to safe and clean water while also improving business."
Desai has been a trusted editorial resource for numerous print, online and broadcast consumer business, sustainability and trade media outlets, providing perspective on critical water-related topics for Bloomberg BusinessWeek (he was profiled in the 2015 "Good Business" issue), GreenBiz.com, Yahoo! Finance, Water Technology, Water Online, and more. He has also been a keynote speaker at innovation and water industry events including IBM Interconnect and the International Water Conference, and has been an active panel participant at VERGE SF, Levi's Symposium on Water and Long Term Value, One Water summit, etc. He also sits on the U.S. Water Alliance board of directors. In his role as global business director, Desai is responsible for developing and implementing the growth strategy for the business and leading the approximately 1,700 employees worldwide. He has more than 25 years of increasing leadership responsibility experience in the sales, marketing and business development of water, plastics, chemicals and renewable materials. Specific topics he can address include, but are not limited to: water scarcity trends and conservation solutions: from commercial and industrial to municipal to residential (including oil and gas, food and beverage, and power industries); cost-effective, sustainable ways for companies and individuals to improve their water footprint; the water future: advancing a circular economy through water reuse; advancing the water-energy nexus; toilet to tap: extreme choice vs. practical reality.
Website: www.dowwaterandprocess.com
Contact: Beth Crisafi, [email protected]
Pokemon Go and Generational Marketing
Gabriel Shaoolian
Founder, VP Digital Services
Blue Fountain Media
"Pokemon Go is a great example of generational marketing. It brings relevant technology to re-market to those who were interested as a kid, as well as marketing to new consumers."
Shaoolian is available to discuss the Pokemon Go mobile app and its popularity among users, along with the marketing and development of the app. Based in New York, he is a contributor to Forbes and a blogger for Huffington Post.
Website: http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/mobile-app-marketing
Contact: Brian Kearney, [email protected]
****************
MEDIA JOBS:
Following are links to job listings for staff and freelance writers, editors and producers. You can view these and more job listings on our Job Board: https://prnmedia.prnewswire.com/community/jobs/
Breaking News Reporter Press of Atlantic City (NJ)
(NJ) Website Producer KTRK-TV ABC (TX)
Online Reporter/Producer Hartford Business Journal (CT)
*****************
OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES:
Following are links to other news and resources we think you might find useful. If you have an item you think other reporters would be interested in and would like us to include in a future alert, please drop us a line.
COVERING THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION THIS WEEK? Whether you're physically in Cleveland or reporting remotely, convention news can be delivered directly to your inbox. As the exclusive press release distributor for both conventions, PR Newswire is distributing speech copy, podium schedules and other convention announcements via the PR Newswire for Journalists media site. More details: http://bit.ly/29P7IYQ
or reporting remotely, convention news can be delivered directly to your inbox. As the exclusive press release distributor for both conventions, PR Newswire is distributing speech copy, podium schedules and other convention announcements via the PR Newswire for Journalists media site. More details: http://bit.ly/29P7IYQ BREAKING INTO WRITING FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES. Are you interested in writing for kids? In our latest Twitter Q&A, we spoke with Karl Beckstrand , an award-winning author of 15 multicultural books and more than 40 e-book titles. Beckstrand discussed how to find ideas and inspiration, working with illustrators, hiring a publisher vs. self-publishing, marketing your book and more: http://prn.to/29C1UQb
, an award-winning author of 15 multicultural books and more than 40 e-book titles. Beckstrand discussed how to find ideas and inspiration, working with illustrators, hiring a publisher vs. self-publishing, marketing your book and more: http://prn.to/29C1UQb 11 WAYS TO CAPTIVATE YOUR NEWS AUDIENCE WITH SNAPCHAT STORIES. Snapchat is broadening its appeal beyond its fanatical teen base. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that 14 percent of U.S. smartphone users over age 35 are now on Snapchat. With critical mass achieved and a rapidly growing user base of older millennials and above, mainstream adoption now may be firmly cemented. This is good news for those in the media and blogging world who are looking for new ways to reach these previously untapped demographics in addition to younger generations. Here are some tips for growing your brand and audience through Snapchat stories: http://bit.ly/29XDfuL
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PROFNET is an exclusive service of PR Newswire.
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SOURCE ProfNet
Related Links
http://www.profnet.com
NEW CASTLE, Pa., July 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Axion Power International, Inc. (OTCQB: AXPW) Chairman and CEO, Richard Bogan, announced today, that as a result of his trip to the Peoples Republic of China in May, Axion Power and LCB International, Inc. will work to reach an agreement with Fengfan Co. Ltd. (SH: 600482), the leading Chinese lead acid battery manufacturer, to be the sole strategic partner to commercialize the patented PbC Technology in Greater China.
Fengfan Co., Ltd. LCB International, Inc.
"Axion recently shipped a number of PbC Batteries to Fengfan's facility in Baoding, China for validation testing and evaluation for potential commercial applications in Greater China," said Bogan.
"Axion Power will also ship a number of its proprietary PbC Negative Carbon Electrodes to Fengfan for PbC Battery prototype design and development study," said Bogan. "An Axion Power senior engineer will assist on site in China."
Since the signing of the binding Letter of Intent in June 2015, Axion Power and LCB International have been in discussions for the commercialization of Axion's proprietary PbC Technology in China. Dr. WJ Gesang, principal of LCB International, said, "Fengfan Co. Ltd is the premier lead acid battery manufacturer and marketer in China and continues to innovate and explore new battery chemistries. LCB is excited about the opportunity to partner with both Fengfan and Axion to commercialize the PbC Technology in Greater China."
Mr. Zhen Zhijun, executive vice president of Fengfan, said, "Fengfan continues to search for collaborative opportunities around the world on advanced lead acid battery and other battery chemistries. These PbC Batteries and carbon negative electrodes will enable Fengfan to verify the technical superiority and commercial value of Axion's PbC technology."
In late July, Fengfan executives are scheduled to visit Axion Power's research and development center and principal executive offices in New Castle, Pa. Further collaborative work is targeted for late this summer.
"Periodically, I will provide progress updates on this collaboration," Bogan said.
About Axion Power International, Inc.
Axion Power is a technology leader in lead-carbon energy storage. Axion's patented lead carbon battery is the only advanced battery technology with an all carbon negative electrode. Axion's negative electrodes are designed to be directly substituted for lead acid negative electrodes producing the unique benefits of the Axion carbon technology. Axion Power's primary goal is to become the leading supplier of carbon electrode assemblies for lead-acid battery companies around the world. For more information, visit www.axionpower.com
About LCB International, Inc.
LCB International, Inc. is an investment and business development firm focusing on the battery energy storage system for motive and stationary utility applications in Asia.
About Fengfan Co. Ltd.
Fengfan Co., Ltd. belongs to China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation. Fengfan was established in 1958 and was listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange in July of 2004. Fengfan has been the leading automotive lead acid battery manufacturer in China for decades. Fengfan is on the list of "The Top 100 Automotive Component Suppliers in China" and the list of "The Top 100 Machinery Industry Companies in China". For more information, visit www.sail.com.cn.
Forward-looking Statements
Certain statements in this Press Release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and beliefs and are subject to a number of risk factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include the risk for the Company to complete its development work, as well as the risks inherent in commercializing a new product (including technology risks, market risks, financial risks and implementation risks, and other risks and uncertainties affecting the Company), as well as other risks that have been included in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, all of which are available at www.sec.gov. We disclaim any intention or obligation to revise any forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, financial estimates, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.
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SOURCE Axion Power International, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.axionpower.com
ABUJA, Nigeria, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Rendeavour, Africa's largest urban land developer, has appointed Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) for master planning services in connection with Jigna, Rendeavour's joint venture urban development project in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria.
With a track record including landmark projects such as One World Trade Centre in New York and the Hajj Terminal in Saudi Arabia, SOM will ensure that the firm's experience from these projects and others, such as the master plans for Phu My Hung Community in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia and the Baietan Urban Design Master Plan in Guangzhou, China, will be brought to bear on Jigna.
"Jigna is a compelling project to address Abuja's continued urban growth with world-class aspirations," said Daniel Ringelstein, Director of Urban Design and Planning at SOM. "We are excited by Jigna's vision to create a modern community promoting a tranquil lifestyle in an environmentally stunning location just a short commute from Abuja's bustling city centre."
Jigna, which sits on 707 hectares (1,750 acres) of land bordering the Outer Northern Expressway of Abuja, has already received its Environmental Impact Assessment approval from the Abuja Environmental Protection Board, as well as its temporary electricity infrastructure approval from the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company. The project will be centered on the protection and enhancement of the site's unique natural landscape environment, as well as providing a sustainable model for future urban communities in Africa.
"Our collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is a landmark agreement for Jigna and Rendeavour," said Rendeavour's Nigeria Country Head, Yomi Ademola. "Sensitive and comprehensive strategic planning is the bedrock of forward-thinking urban development and we are certain that SOM's global experience will contribute to us creating the most attractive urban development in Nigeria's capital."
About SOM (www.som.com)
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is one of the leading architecture, interior design, engineering, and urban planning firms in the world, with an 80-year reputation for design excellence and a portfolio that includes some of the most important architectural accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its inception, SOM has been a leader in the research and development of specialized technologies, new processes and innovative ideas, many of which have had a palpable and lasting impact on the design profession and the physical environment. The firm's longstanding leadership in design and building technology has been honoured with more than 1,700 awards for quality, innovation, and management. The American Institute of Architects has recognized SOM twice with its highest honor, the Architecture Firm Awardin 1962 and again in 1996. The firm maintains offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi.
About Rendeavour (www.rendeavour.com)
Rendeavour is Africa's largest urban land developer with over 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of visionary projects in the growth trajectories of large cities in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo. Rendeavour's vision goes beyond alleviating what is a self-evident problem that of stifling urban congestion and a dearth of quality housing and commercial property in Africa. Rather, we aim to help create the infrastructure the living and working spaces, communities, schools and hospitals that will help sustain and accelerate Africa's economic growth, meet the aspirations of Africa's burgeoning middle classes, and serve as a catalyst for further urban development.
Contact
Tim Beighton
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +234 8070 992 935
+234 8094 000 065
SOURCE Rendeavour
Related Links
http://www.som.com
LAKE FOREST, Ill., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- RoundTable Healthcare Partners ("RoundTable"), an operating-oriented private equity firm focused exclusively on the healthcare industry, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell Beaver-Visitec International Holdings, Inc. ("BVI" or the "Company") to TPG Capital ("TPG"). TPG is a global private investment firm founded in 1992 with over $70 billion of assets under management. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter.
BVI, based in Waltham, MA, is a global developer, manufacturer, and marketer of specialized surgical devices for the ophthalmic marketplace. BVI brings together the brands of Beaver blades, Visitec cannulae and instruments, Merocel and Weck-Cel ophthalmic fluid management products, and Wet-Field Eraser electrosurgery products. The products serve a wide variety of ophthalmic surgeries, including cataract, refractive, oculoplastic and vitreoretinal sub-specialty procedures. The Company operates two state-of-the-art manufacturing plants in Waltham, MA and Bidford in the United Kingdom. RoundTable formed BVI in 2010 by acquiring and integrating three separate ophthalmic product businesses from Becton Dickinson, Medtronic, and Aspen Surgical, respectively.
"BVI's management team has done a tremendous job building a world-class ophthalmic device company. They have created a market-leading product portfolio, a strong sales and marketing organization, and a lasting reputation for service and quality," said Joseph F. Damico, Founding Partner of RoundTable and Chairman of BVI. "We believe that TPG will be an excellent partner to help BVI achieve its next phase of growth."
Tom Kapfer, Chief Executive Officer of BVI, added, "RoundTable was invaluable in helping us execute on the vision of combining separate ophthalmic businesses into a well-run, global organization. Their support and resources have helped us accelerate organic growth initiatives and complete strategic acquisitions. We look forward to our new partnership with TPG and continuing to grow our business."
William Blair & Company, LLC acted as exclusive financial advisor to BVI, and Sidley Austin LLP acted as exclusive legal advisor to RoundTable in this transaction.
About RoundTable Healthcare Partners
RoundTable Healthcare Partners, Lake Forest, IL, is an operating-oriented private equity firm focused exclusively on the healthcare industry. RoundTable partners with companies that can benefit from its extensive industry relationships and proven operating and transaction expertise. RoundTable has established a successful track record of working with owner/founders, family companies, management teams, entrepreneurs and corporate partners who share a vision and believe in the value creation potential of its partnership model. RoundTable has raised $2.75 billion in committed capital, including four equity funds totaling $2.15 billion and two-subordinated debt funds totaling $600 million. More information about RoundTable Healthcare Partners can be found at www.roundtablehp.com.
SOURCE RoundTable Healthcare Partners
Related Links
http://www.roundtablehp.com
SAN RAMON, Calif., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Accela, the leading provider of cloud-based productivity and civic engagement solutions for government, today announced that the City of Santa Barbara, CA, has selected Accela Land Management on the Accela Civic Platform to help the City streamline planning and zoning, permitting and inspection, and code enforcement functions. By implementing Accela's solution, Santa Barbara will improve efficiency and accelerate productivity across multiple departments and provide a single point of entry, making the experience seamless for citizens.
"The Accela Civic Platform provides the foundation for creating a two-way flow of data and transparency that makes better government-citizen engagement possible," explained Maury Blackman, President and CEO of Accela. "By selecting the Accela Civic Platform, Santa Barbara will soon be able to offer both staff and citizens mobile, 24/7 access to the information and services they needboth in and out of the office. Accela's robust and scalable solution will provide the beautiful city of Santa Barbara a way to deliver time and cost savings for all."
Santa Barbara, a current Accela Right of Way Management customer, will implement Accela Land Management, Accela Citizen Access, GIS and Mobility on the Civic Platform. Once implemented, the software will facilitate better communication and coordination between agency staff and citizens, offering anytime, anywhere access to online services for submitting plans, permitting applications, fee payment, scheduling inspections and making inquiries or complaints. Staff will be able to directly manage cases and results for inspections and investigations using mobile devices, and easy document review and sharing from the field.
About Accela
Accela provides a platform of cloud-based productivity and civic engagement solutions to governments of all sizes worldwide. The Accela Civic Platform includes solutions to cost-effectively manage critical enterprise functions and mobile apps to foster greater citizen engagement. From asset, land and legislative management to licensing, finance, environmental health and more, Accela's software drives efficiency for more than 2,200 governments, including more than 60 percent of America's 50 largest cities. The Company was named to Government Technology's GovTech100 in 2016, a distinction of the top 100 companies focused on government customers. Accela is headquartered in San Ramon, California, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Portland, Melbourne and Dubai. For more information, visit www.accela.com.
Media Contact:
Rachel Fukaya
Barokas PR for Accela
(831) 229-5761
[email protected]
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SOURCE Accela
Related Links
http://www.accela.com
ROSEMONT, Ill., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sapa, the world leader in aluminum solutions, announced today that it has added two key staff positions to its North American extrusion operations. Dawn Young, Director of Compliance, and Jason Adams, Vice President of Quality & Continuous Improvement, have joined the Chicago area based Sapa Extrusion North America team, with a focus on strengthening the company's compliance and quality organization throughout Sapa's entire North American extrusion operations.
Young comes to Sapa with more than twenty years of compliance experience in a variety of highly regulated industries, including aerospace and defense, healthcare, and electronics. She is a certified compliance and ethics professional with extensive experience in global compliance leadership. Young will report to Sapa's Chief Compliance Officer, with a dotted line to the Sapa Extrusion North America Vice President & General Counsel. Young will further enhance Sapa's focus on managing compliance risks and creating streamlined compliance processes, as well as providing the company with additional ongoing compliance communications and training.
Adams is a seasoned quality professional in the steel industry where his areas of responsibility included engineering, process technology, operations management, supply chain, continuous improvement and quality management. Adams will report to the Sapa Extrusion North America Business Area President and will lead the development of Sapa's Extrusion North America quality systems, processes and organization. Additionally, he will be responsible for managing and strengthening the company's continuous improvement efforts.
"I am very pleased to announce the addition of Dawn and Jason to our Extrusion North American team," said Charlie Straface, Business Area President for Sapa Extrusion North America. "We continue to recognize the tremendous importance of compliance and quality in delivering a consistently high value product to our customers. Focusing our efforts on this area will ensure we continue to provide the North American market with the very finest extruded aluminum."
For more information about Sapa visit: www.sapagroup.com
About Sapa
Sapa is the world leader in innovative aluminum solutions, shaping a lighter future through a global reach and local presence within extrusions, building systems and precision tubing. The company has 23,500 employees in more than 40 countries. Global headquarters are located in Oslo, Norway.
Sapa Media Contact:
Joseph Tateoka, Edelman
P: 312-729-1710
E: [email protected]
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SOURCE Sapa
Related Links
http://www.sapagroup.com
MERCER, Pa., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry Secretary Kathy Manderino continued the "Jobs that Pay" tour today at a business roundtable with the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and a tour of the All-Clad Metals manufacturing facility in Canonsburg.
The business roundtable with the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce included discussion of the state's latest workforce development initiatives, such as the newly developed Office of Apprenticeship, business education grants, improvements to JobGateway, micro-stackable credentials, and the implementation and refinement of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.
"These roundtable discussions are a vital resource in the state's workforce development efforts," Sec. Manderino said. "I welcome the opportunity to sit down with business leaders in different areas of the state to get a sense of what each locality needs from us to help improve their hiring and training needs. The Jobs that Pay tour has allowed me to make these connections easily, and to share the work and achievements that the department has realized as well."
Sec. Manderino's stop at All-Clad Metals included a tour of the facility, as well as a discussion about the company's recent hiring trends and their needs for further hiring, training, and retaining workers. The secretary heard from the All-Clad executive staff about the apprenticeship training program and what has worked for them in implementing this program.
All-Clad, originally Clad Metals, started during the steel age in 1967 as a small metallurgical company that specialized in formulating bounded metals for a variety of industries. Today, from its own mill in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, All-Clad is the only merged cookware manufacturer to use American craftsmen and American-made metals to produce a line of superior cookware. The company employs 260+ people in Canonsburg, 200 of them members of United Steelworkers Local 3403.
"I am thrilled about the impressive work that All-Clad is doing right here in Pennsylvania," Sec. Manderino said "This is a company that is taking the initiative to pursue high tech manufacturing to create a product that is both expertly-crafted and American-made. All-Clad's commitment to local manufacturing and its workforce is evident in the 200 U.S. steelworkers employed there, and they are to be commended for this attainment."
The Jobs that Pay tour is an effort by state agencies to promote good-paying, family-sustaining jobs and career-paths available to job-seekers across the commonwealth, and to listen and learn from employers and employees about workforce development needs.
For more information about All-Clad Metals, visit http://www.all-clad.com/.
MEDIA CONTACT: Sara Goulet, 717-787-7530
SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry
Related Links
http://www.state.pa.us
Siegfried's New Hire Orientation program introduces professionals to its extraordinary culture, compelling business strategy and interesting work. During the three-day event, new employees learn more about the company, meet members of Siegfried's Leadership and Operations teams, and become acquainted with fellow Professional Resources. Notably, all new employees have the opportunity to meet with Rob Siegfried, Founder and CEO, about Siegfried's higher purpose: We help People become better Leaders to exponentially improve their Lives.
A welcome reception was held at the Four Seasons' Wit & Wisdom restaurant on the first night of orientation, and during the remainder of the week, the group enjoyed a meal at Cinghiale and a lively dinner cruise aboard the Spirit of Baltimore.
Siegfried is excited to welcome Jennifer Caren to its National Market Leadership Team.
Jennifer Caren, CPA
Jenn, a Certified Public Accountant, joins Siegfried's National Market Leadership Team as a Recruiting Director for the Central Region. Prior to this, Jenn spent time at Deloitte as an Audit Senior and at Global Logistics Properties as a Finance Associate. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Finance from the University of Iowa.
"Siegfried offers such unique opportunities and an amazing culture," she said. "I'm thrilled that I get to work with such a great group of people and that I will be able to place exceptional professionals with an exceptional company."
When Jenn isn't scoping out new talent, she enjoys watching horror movies and playing volleyball. She's currently planning her wedding and reading the Harry Potter series for the first time and despite the final book being published nearly 10 years ago, she's avoided any story spoilers!
For more information about a career at Siegfried, please visit siegfriedcareers.com.
About The Siegfried Group, LLP
The Siegfried Group, LLP (Siegfried) is a leading, national CPA firm that helps executives with Effective Leadership and Successful Execution, through leadership advisory and talent delivery services, to better ensure that our clients are "Doing the Right Things, Right." We help People become better Leaders to exponentially improve their Lives.
Contact:
Karen S. Campbell
(408) 209-2545
[email protected]
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390456
SOURCE The Siegfried Group, LLP
Related Links
http://www.siegfriedgroup.com
CHARLOTTE, N.C., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sodoma Law, P.C., based in Charlotte today announced the launch of a new initiative aimed at helping Charlotte area small businesses thrive. The series will consist of two monthly events: Small Business Saturday and Tuesday Business Talks. By offering Saturday office hours and ongoing business talks, Sodoma Law hopes to bridge the gap between Charlotte's growing business community and approachable legal counsel.
Tweet This: [email protected] offers approachable legal care in new #SmallBusinessSaturday series for #CLT business owners http://bit.ly/SBStsw
"Charlotte has a strong, growing community of small businesses. Unfortunately, however, business owners don't know what they don't know. We all too often are helping clients after it's too late instead of building the right foundation for them," said Nicole Sodoma, Managing Principal and Founder of Sodoma Law. "We are excited to launch this initiative to help build those foundations to make our business community stronger. With our business talks and Saturday meetings, we hope to accommodate client schedules, particularly small business owners who need to spend their days on site and not tied up in meetings with their advisors."
The first Small Business Saturday event is scheduled for Saturday, July 23 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm and will occur one Saturday every month through November. Appointments must be scheduled in advanced, and business owners are encouraged to bring personal, business, and employee documents in order for counsel to review the full scope of their needs.
Sodoma Law's first Tuesday Business Talk will occur on Tuesday, August 2 at a local co-working space, finalized details forthcoming. The speaker series will feature various Sodoma Law business attorneys and include topics such as: Are you an employee or an independent contractor? Should you LLC, INC, or something else?
"Many of the attorneys at Sodoma Law, including myself, have experience both in the courtroom and in starting our own business," shared Kerry Everett, attorney at Sodoma Law and a Tuesday Business Talks scheduled speaker. "Who better understands the hard work and dedication it takes to build a small business than someone who has done it themselves?"
For more information on Small Business Saturday and Tuesday Business Talks, please visit Small Business Saturday or contact Communications Director Allison Frazier directly at [email protected].
About Sodoma Law, P.C.
Sodoma Law, P.C. is headquartered just minutes from the courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. Its Family Law, Estate Planning and Business attorneys practice in the historic Walter Brem House and the historic G.G. Galloway House in Charlotte. Its location in Monroe, Union County, focuses on Family Law. The firm also has a fourth location in Ballantyne to serve its South Charlotte clients. The firm's areas of practice include Family Law, Assisted Reproductive Technology, Appellate, Estate Planning, and Business Law. Like Sodoma Law on Facebook, follow them on Twitter (@SodomaLaw), and follow Managing Principal Nicole Sodoma (@NSodoma).
Contact: Ariane Doud, Warner Communications
978-283-2674 or [email protected]
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SOURCE Sodoma Law, P.C.
Related Links
http://sodomalaw.com
"Sue Yannaccone is a dynamic real estate leader who has distinguished herself since joining ERA Real Estate," said Alex Perriello, president and CEO of the Realogy Franchise Group, the parent company of ERA. "Her strategic thinking capabilities, strong business acumen and outstanding relationship skills will be tremendous assets in this role. The time has come for Sue to take the next step forward in her career, and I couldn't be more pleased and supportive. The leadership succession plan we have executed also speaks to the management talent we have assembled within the Realogy Franchise Group."
Charlie Young, who has served as ERA Real Estate's president and CEO since 2009, is leaving to take a new senior leadership role within the Realogy Franchise Group, also effective September 1, 2016.
"I am honored to be appointed to lead the ERA Real Estate brand network, and I look forward to continuing to build upon ERA's unique 'family' culture and the value proposition we provide to our affiliated brokers and agents as well as homebuyers and sellers around the world," said Yannaccone. "Our strategic direction is clear. We are charting a course for growth with innovation as the cornerstone of our plan."
Since joining ERA Real Estate in July 2015, Yannaccone has helped move the organization forward with her laser-focus on growth and innovation. Earlier this year, ERA reached a significant industry milestone by being the first real estate franchise to connect its entire network on the innovative Zap technology platform, developed by another Realogy subsidiary, ZapLabs. By connecting thousands of ERA-affiliated brokers and agent websites into a seamless, integrated network that is relevant to search engines both nationally and locally, ERA has created a unique, competitive positioning for its network.
Yannaccone also has been instrumental in creating an enhanced service model that has increased broker satisfaction with the ERA brand, and she has fostered an internal culture of transparency, collaboration, execution and accountability. With a focus on franchisee engagement, satisfaction and growth, Yannaccone has overseen the addition of a number of newly affiliated companies, notably in Houston, Beverly Hills and the Greater Boston markets, as well as several strategic mergers and acquisitions for existing ERA brokers in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio.
Prior to joining ERA, Yannaccone served in a number of senior executive leadership roles at competing national and international real estate franchise brands with responsibilities ranging from network servicing to operations. She began her career in commercial real estate sales before moving into residential real estate.
Recently, Yannaccone earned recognition as a 2016 Woman Worth Watching by the Profiles in Diversity Journal, and in 2015 was named as a Woman of Influence by Housing Wire. She is a graduate of Clemson University, with a bachelor's degree in financial management.
About ERA Real Estate
ERA Real Estate is an innovative franchising leader in the residential real estate industry with nearly 45 years of experience in developing consumer-oriented products and services. The ERA network includes approximately 37,000 affiliated brokers and sales associates and approximately 2,350 offices throughout the United States and 33 countries and territories. Each office is independently owned and operated. ERA Real Estate is a subsidiary of Realogy Holdings Corp. (NYSE: RLGY), a global provider of real estate services. ERA Real Estate information is available at: ERA.com.
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Media Contact:
Melissa Drake
973-407-7904
[email protected]
SOURCE ERA Real Estate
Related Links
http://www.exploreera.com
Ms. Harman will be responsible for leading the company's Central Region Casualty team and growing its capabilities and revenue in the umbrella and excess liability lines of business. A proven leader in the Chicago marketplace, Ms. Harman brings almost 20 years of industry experience including claims, underwriting and team leadership roles at a variety of commercial carriers.
Robley Moor, Head of Casualty North America, states: "Christine's strong casualty underwriting background provides a solid foundation from which we will continue expanding our portfolio. A great fit for Corporate Solutions, she is dedicated to maintaining long-term broker and client relationships."
Mr. Poppie, who has been a key account manager at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions since 2013, will become Head of Sales Central Region. In his new role, he is tasked with generating new business, managing relationships with key regional brokers and driving growth. With over 16 years of industry experience, he is an expert in a wide range of industries and segments and new business origination. Mr. Poppie began his career in 2000 with Marsh in St. Louis.
Sylvain Bouteille, Head of Sales North America, says: "Swiss Re Corporate Solutions has a strong focus on internal talent development. Gabe has been a great asset to our key account management strategy in North America. I'm delighted that he will lead our regional sales activities. He is committed to strengthening our regional relationships."
About Swiss Re Corporate Solutions
Swiss Re Corporate Solutions offers innovative, high-quality insurance capacity to mid-sized and large multinational corporations across the globe. Our offerings range from standard risk transfer covers and multi-line programmes, to highly customised solutions tailored to the needs of our clients. Swiss Re Corporate Solutions serves customers from over 50 offices worldwide and is backed by the financial strength of the Swiss Re Group. For more information about Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, please visit www.swissre.com/corporatesolutions or follow us on Twitter @SwissRe_CS.
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Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160715/390099
SOURCE Swiss Re Corporate Solutions
Related Links
http://www.swissre.com/corporate_solutions
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.
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
For every euro that the EU exports to US, it only imports 0.7
21,1% of the US total exports to the EU are directed to the United Kingdom
Eight countries account almost 80% of the American exports to the EU: United Kingdom , Germany , The Netherlands , France , Belgium , Italy , Spain and Ireland
Infoempresa.com, economic intelligence web service by Telecoming, has carried out an analysis, going through different sources, on the commercial relations between the two major economic blocks worldwide: US and the EU. The main conclusion of the report indicates that the EU exports to US are 41% higher than those from US to the EU[1].
Both regions represent around a 30% of the world trade[2]. US exported more than 83.000 million to the EU during the first quarter of 2016, while the EU exported to US more than 118.000 million. So, for every euro that the European Union exports to US, it only imports 0.7. Compared with the same period of the previous year, the exports from US to the EU decreased by 0.8%, while on the other way round fell by 2.5%.
Within the EU, the main commercial partners of US are the United Kingdom, importing more than 21.1% of the total of the US exports to the EU, followed by Germany (17.5%). The Netherlands (14.9%), France (12.8%), Belgium (11.2%), Italy (5.6%), Spain (4.2%) and Ireland (3%). Meanwhile, Germany leads the ranking of the main exporters to US (31%), followed by United Kingdom (15.4%), Italy (10.3%), France (9%), Ireland (7.8%), Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain (5.6%, 4.6% and 3%, respectively).
Ranking of US exports to EU Ranking of EU exports to US United Kingdom 21.1% Germany 31% Germany 17.5% United Kingdom 15.4% The Netherlands 14.9% Italy 10.3% France 12.8% France 9% Belgium 11.2% Ireland 7.8% Italy 5.6% Belgium 5.6% Spain 4.6% The Netherlands 4.6% Ireland 3% Spain 3%
1. According to data from DataComex
2. According to Eurostat
The impact of Brexit and other current circumstances, on the commercial relations between both of these economic blocs, is yet to be determined. Rely on trustful sources of information that compile, analyze and distribute financial information at international level, will be decisive to establish business relations between countries. Infoempresa.com is a service that allows you to access to the official financial information of European companies, extremely useful to potential investments, agreements or purchases.
American interests in the Spanish economy
Thereby, taking into consideration the importance of these commercial flows, Infoempresa.com has conducted a study about the "US interests in the Spanish economy", reflecting the interest in the Spanish companies worldwide. According to this study, conducted on more than 250.000 users, US is the second country most interested in Spanish companies, with 8% of the 2015 total, and the one with the highest growth in 2016 (1Q) +3.9pp.
43% of the US business interests in Spain come from New York, California and Florida.
Three US geographical areas led the interest in Spanish companies in US, overcoming 43% of the country's total: New York (15.9%), California (14.2%) and Florida (13.2%). The Californian professionals' interest in Spanish companies is very significant, growing nearly 9 points in the first quarter of 2016. 3 of every 10 interests from this region correspond to the sectors of science, technology and communication.
Five sectors accumulate almost 70% of the US interests in Spain
Five sectors of activity gather nearly 70% of the US interests. The Spanish trade sector has been the one generating more interest between US professionals in 2015, with 20,9% of the queries, followed by the construction (12.7%) and the manufacturing industry (12.6%). In the first quarter of 2016, the interest in the Spanish manufacturing companies grew 9 points, becoming the second sector of business interest.
Top 5 Spanish sectors more interesting in US (2015) Sector US REST OF THE WORLD Trade 20.9% 23% Construction 12.7% 14.4% Manufacturing industry 12.6% 11.8% Professional activities 12.1% 12% Finance 9.6% 6.8%
The pull of the consolidated companies
On the other hand, American professionals show a clear preference for the consolidated company, understanding as consolidated a company with more than 10 years of activity (63%) and currently active (89.16%). Also, the weight of the US interest in corporations is 3 points higher (20%) than the rest of the international interest.
About infoempresa.com
Infoempresa.com is an economic intelligence web service that offers information about all the European companies and managers. Specialist in collection, analysis and distribution of financial information, it was created in 2014 as the industry's most innovative website in terms of usability, speed and traceability. Infoempresa.com is a product of Telecoming, a Spanish company focused on cloud and mobile technology, operating in 7 countries and recognized in 2016 by London Stock Exchange as one of the 1000 companies to inspire Europe.
http://www.infoempresa.com
SOURCE Infoempresa.com
SAN FRANCISCO, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Hacksaw Academy announced the public release of their fully interactive platform.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390572
"We've found that splitting programming projects into 30-minute sprints is practical, rewarding, and applicable to our generation's high-speed lifestyle," said James Lovatt Co-founder of Hacksaw Academy.
With over 5,000 beta students enrolled and 2,000 completed projects, the public will now be able to enroll in the fully interactive platform.
"Thousands of beta students from all over the world began calling Hacksaw the PokemonGo for learning to code shortly after the popular game was released last week. With its new nickname, the Hacksaw team is super excited to open the interactive platform to the public today," said Steve McGarry, Co-founder of Hacksaw Academy.
Today's launch is driven by beta student feedback and is part of Hacksaw Academy's mission to provide everyone access to a basic understanding of programming. The update is now available with a 14-day trial at https://beta.hacksaw.academy.
Hacksaw Academy was founded in 2015 by James Lovatt and Steve McGarry who started a previous company financing students to learn software development at coding bootcamps that was acquired in August 2015. The company offers a wide range of interactive projects designed to be practical and applicable to fill the skills gap in tech jobs.
For more information, press only
Contact Name: Steve McGarry
Email: [email protected]
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SOURCE Hacksaw International Inc.
Related Links
https://beta.hacksaw.academy
MAHE, Republic of Seychelles, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
The Company Introduces a Brand-New Website Which is More Trader-Friendly Than Ever to Back up its Attractive Customer-Focused Policy
Global ECN broker Tickmill is proud to announce that its trading volume of $49.1 billion (USD) in June was the largest and most impressive in the company's history. The year 2016 continues to exceed the traders' expectations as Tickmill is on a path of success.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/814103 )
CEO Sudhanshu Agarwal comments: "Our record-high trading volume in the first month of summer is the result of our drive to build an outstanding trading infrastructure and back it with a best-in-class trading experience for all clients. Traders understand that Tickmill wants them to succeed and provides top-tier trading conditions."
Tickmill's proven trader loyalty originated with the company's diversified range of trading instruments, mobile versions for smartphone and tablet-based trading, and extensive array of trader and IB tools in the highly functional Client Area.
But more recent developments, which propelled Tickmill's trading volume to record highs include a 'zero commissions' policy during the Brexit week and a unique Gold Rush campaign that rewarded traders with genuine gold bars.
"Tickmill demonstrated its reputation as a trustworthy broker serious about protecting client interests by offering the best of all possible trading conditions during an extremely volatile Brexit trading period," says Agarwal. "We did not charge any commissions during the Brexit week to ensure traders experienced one less worry during a very stressful time in the markets. Tickmill cares about each one of its traders and a commission-free Brexit week was one more way could provide an outstanding customer experience."
June also saw the successful conclusion of the company's Gold Rush campaign, a Forex industry first for Tickmill gold traders all over the world. The highest volume traders received 1 oz. gold bars while other winners who met the campaign terms were rewarded with 0.1 oz. gold pieces.
Says Agarwal: "As evidence of our commitment to value every client and treat them as partners, we were delighted to award valuable gold bars and pieces to qualified Gold Rush traders. It is safe to say the campaign was very popular as some participants traded more than 2,000 lots to get their hands on one of our gold prizes. We thank all participants and feel the campaign was a success for both Tickmill and our client traders."
Tickmill is also moving ahead in another key area as the brand-new and improved website is now officially open. The company incorporated both client and internal team feedback during the development cycle and the new website offers supreme online trading experience for traders all over the world.
"We believe the redesigned site does a better job of explaining who we are, what we do and what we offer traders," comments Olga Kikas, Head of Marketing at Tickmill. "Additionally, traders should find it easier to navigate to key sections whether they are on their home computers or on their favored mobile devices. The Tickmill website and Client Area can be conveniently accessed and navigated from anywhere at any time. We encourage all our existing and potential clients to try the new website and offer their feedback."
The new website is further evidence that traders always come first at Tickmill. The company genuinely wants traders to succeed by offering the best trading environment, solid trading conditions and no restrictions on profitability.
Notes to media:
About Tickmill Ltd
Tickmill is a global ECN Forex broker authorized and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of Seychelles with a license number SD008. The company's diverse trading instruments include 64 currency pairs and precious metals. The funds of Tickmill clients are held with Barclays, Unicredit Pekao, Erste Bank, PPF Bank and other top-tier financial institutions. For more information, please visit http://www.tickmill.com or email at [email protected]
SOURCE Tickmill
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tidemark, maker of modern cloud business planning and enterprise analytics apps, today announced its third consecutive appearance at the annual meeting of National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), a membership organization representing more than 2,100 colleges and universities across the country. Set for July 16-19 in Montreal, Canada the event will include Tidemark higher-education customers from the Pacific Coast Conference (PAC 12), Conference USA (C-USA), Atlantic Coastal Conference (ACC), and others. Tidemark will showcase its award-winning higher-education app at booth #303 and hold a special dinner focused on next-generation planning for colleges and universities at the annual event.
Higher-education institutions of all sizes are undergoing challenges with their budgeting and capital planning, according to research that was revealed by NACUBO members in a range of decision-making positions including Chief Financial Officers, Department Chairs, and VPs of Finance and Administration, as well as Academic Affairs. More than half of organizations polled said the use of manual spreadsheets are "too time-consuming," with 73 percent eyeing a change. In fact, there was significant disaffection with existing planning and budgeting systems, with many citing that current systems take too long and lacked timesaving automation. This significantly diminishes an institution's ability to get to the data that matters most, often resulting in a gap between expected and actual costs for educating each student.
Tidemark higher-education customers utilize the platform to transform disparate planning processes, bringing into the fold collaboration and mobile-first design so visibility across the entire university exists for individuals on the operational and academic sides of the organization. With pre-packaged processes for revenue and capital planning, departmental budgeting, endowment and grant planning, institutions can gain the control they need to understand current budget and funding situations, correlate that to enrollment data, adjust forecasts on the fly, and predict multi-year scenarios and plans.
"By eliminating the silos in department planning, integrating data from all sources across the colleges and moving to real-time predictive modeling, universities can gain complete operational and financial control while better servicing their students," said Christian Gheorghe, Founder and CEO of Tidemark. "When our customers tell us they've shaved months off their budget cycles and now have thorough visibility across all their schools, we can only thank them since their direct input has guided the development and roadmap of our higher-education application."
Tidemark will display its award-winning application at booth #303 from July 17-19. Features in Forbes and Campus Technology Magazine, the platform has served as a modern foundation for a number of institutions moving from legacy systems to collaborative planning in the cloud. Tidemark will also hold a special event bringing together higher-education leaders, academics and budgeting office executives to discuss the latest trends and best practices for utilizing financial and operational data across the university. Forward: Next Generation Planning for Colleges and Universities will take place on Monday, July 18 from 5:30 pm to 9 pm at L'Auberge Saint-Gabriel, the oldest and most historic restaurant in Montreal.
About NACUBO
NACUBO, founded in 1962, is a nonprofit professional organization representing chief administrative and financial officers at more than 2,100 colleges and universities across the country. NACUBO's mission is to advance the economic viability, business practices and support for higher education institutions in fulfillment of their missions. For more information, visit www.nacubo.org.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a new breed of enterprise performance management (EPM) software with its modern cloud and mobile-first design. Innovative higher-education institutions like Brown, George Washington, Stanford and the University of Miami, rely on the Tidemark platform and advanced analytics cloud to sharpen decision-making, reduce risk and improve business performance. Using Tidemark's unique, intuitive apps, decision-makers across the organization gain access to valuable data, deep analytics capabilities, real-time collaboration, and actionable visualizations from any device. Tidemark has offices throughout North America and Europe and is funded by Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and Workday. To learn more about Tidemark, please visit www.tidemark.com or follow us on Twitter @TidemarkEPM.
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SOURCE Tidemark
Related Links
http://tidemark.com
NEW YORK, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tin, a part of the carbon family, shares chemical similarities with germanium and lead. It is highly malleable and ductile and is capable of being transformed into thin sheet. Tin is unaffected by oxygen and water at room temperatures. It does not corrode or rust easily; hence, tin can be used as a coating material to protect other metals. Expansion in the consumer electronics industry coupled with rising demand in the food packaging industry is expected to drive the tin market during the forecast period. Additionally, its potential application in the solar energy industry is anticipated to provide ample opportunities for market growth during the forecast period.
The production of tin is concentrated in emerging economies of Latin America and Asia Pacific. Currently, China, Indonesia, and Peru are the largest producers of tin in the world. Indonesia, one of the largest producers of tin, is tightening its rules for tin exports in order to crack down on environmental degradation and smuggling. Myanmar is also anticipated to emerge as a major supplier of tin in the world in the near future.
This study analyzes, estimates, and forecasts the global tin market in terms of volume (kilo tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) from 2014 to 2023. Market numbers given in the report describe the global demand for tin, but not the production or supply. The tin report also analyzes several driving and restraining factors and their impact on the market during the forecast period.
The report provides detailed analysis of the tin market by key applications. It segments the market into the following key applications: soldering, tin plating, chemicals, brass & bronze, glass, and others (including lithium-ion batteries, ammunitions, and solar cells.) The report also segments the market based on major geographies into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. It further provides volume and revenue for each application segment for each region. This includes 12 unique country-specific analysis.
Based on application and country, the report analyzes the attractiveness of each segment and country with the help of an attractiveness tool. The study includes value chain analysis, which provides a better understanding of key players in the supply chain from raw material manufacturers to end-users. Furthermore, the study analyzes market competition through Porter's Five Forces Analysis.
Key market participants profiled in the study include Yunnan Tin Group Company Limited, Thailand Smelting and Refining Co., Ltd. (Thaisarco), Yunnan Chengfeng Non-ferrous Metals Co., Ltd., Guangxi China Tin Group, Malaysia Smelting Corporation, PT Timah (Persero) Tbk, Minsur S.A., Empresa Metalurgica Vinto S.A., Metallo-Chimique International N.V., and Gejiu Zili Mining And Smelting Co., Ltd. Profiles of key participants encompass vital parameters such as financial overview, company overview, business strategy, and recent developments.
Primary research represents the majority of our research efforts, supplemented by a widespread secondary research. We reviewed key players' product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents for competitive analysis and market understanding. Secondary research also includes a search of recent trade, technical writing, internet sources, and statistical data from trade associations, government websites, and agencies. This has proven to be the most dependable, effective, and dynamic approach for procuring precise market data, distinguishing business opportunities, and obtaining industry participants' insights.
Secondary research sources that are referred to include external patented databases, textbooks, financial reports, company websites, broker reports, commentaries, annual reports, stockholder presentations, and suitable patent and regulatory databases, statistical databases, and market reports, press releases, news articles, and webcasts specific to the corporations operating in the market. Secondary sources referred for this study include Chemical Weekly Magazine, ICIS Chemical Business Magazine, Hoover's, Factiva and company presentations.
The report segments the global tin market as:
Tin Market Application Analysis
Soldering
Tin Plating
Chemicals
Brass & Bronze
Glass
Others (Including lithium-ion batteries, ammunitions, solar cells, etc.)
Tin Market - Regional Analysis
North America
U.S.
Rest of North America (RoNA)
Europe
Germany
Belgium
Italy
U.K.
Russia
Rest of Europe
Asia Pacific
China
Japan
ASEAN
Rest of Asia Pacific (APAC)
Latin America
Brazil
Rest of Latin America (LATAM)
Middle East & Africa
GCC
South Africa
Rest of Middle East & Africa (MEA)
Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03752612-summary/view-report.html
About Reportlinker
ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.
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SOURCE Reportlinker
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IOLA, Kan., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Gary E. Sullo, Tramec, LLC President and CEO, announced the acquisition of Kansas Plastics Company, Wellington, Kansas, a custom manufacturer of injection molded components and assemblies. Kansas Plastics Company will align with Tramec LLC's Tramec Sloan business unit adding injection-molding expertise to the company's existing portfolio of diversified United States based manufacturing capabilities.
Mr. Sullo said, "Our acquisition of Kansas Plastics Company positions Tramec Sloan with the ability to offer increased value to our commercial vehicle customers and allows us to present our existing manufacturing capabilities to Kansas Plastics Company's customer base."
Kansas Plastics Company President, Richard Bloomer, stated, "The addition of Tramec LLC resources enables Kansas Plastics Company to accelerate growth for injection molded products and invest in the operation to support future technologies." Mr. Bloomer remains with the company as Vice President of Operations.
About Kansas Plastics Company
Kansas Plastics Company, an ISO 9001:2008 and UL certified company, is located in Wellington, Kansas, approximately 25 miles south of Wichita, Kansas. The company utilizes plastic injection molding machines with clamping forces between 60 and 1000 metric tons along with a variety of secondary operations. Kansas Plastics Company processes engineering and commodity grade thermoplastic and composite materials for commercial vehicle, aerospace, HVAC, agriculture, power distribution, consumer products and other market segments.
About Tramec, LLC
Tramec, LLC markets through three business units: Tramec Sloan, Hill Fastener Products, and Continental Aero. Tramec Sloan is a diversified manufacturer of screw machined products, fittings, electrical wire harnesses and connectors, air brake valves, switches, hose ends and assemblies for commercial vehicle and industrial applications. Tramec Sloan has facilities in Holland, Michigan; Iola, Kansas; and Galion, Ohio. Hill Fastener Products is a manufacturer of cold-headed specialty products and fasteners based in Rock Falls, Illinois. Continental Aero is a distributor of all-metal and purple nylon insert locknuts operating out of Alsip, Illinois and Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
For more information, contact Gary Sullo at [email protected], 847-455-5920, or visit tramecsloan.com.
SOURCE Tramec, LLC
FREDERICK, Md., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. Silica Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SLCA) today announced an agreement to acquire a leading regional sand producer for approximately $210 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing. The transaction will be funded using a combination of cash on hand (57%) and restricted stock (43%).The acquisition of the NBR Sand unit of the privately-owned New Birmingham Inc. is expected to close in August 2016.
The business, located in Tyler, Texas, operates a single sand mine and plant that has the capacity to produce just over two million tons of fine-grade frac sand per year. The east Texas facility currently sells its products FOB the plant to customers that are primarily drilling and completing wells in the nearby basins. Once completely integrated into U.S. Silica's market-leading operating, sales and distribution platforms, the Company anticipates the acquisition is expected to generate EPS accretion of $0.20 to $0.30 in 2017.
Bryan Shinn, president and chief executive officer of U.S. Silica said, "This accretive acquisition adds to our capacity and product offering for the growing regional sands market, increasing our ability to effectively satisfy our customer's needs. We expect to unlock the full potential of this excellent mine by utilizing our strong customer relationships and powerful distribution network. We believe demand for regional sands will continue to grow as a cost effective proppant option for many completions and this is another important step to position U.S. Silica as a leader in the regional sand market."
Shinn added, "Our team continues to work diligently to identify and close additional attractive, highly accretive acquisitions that are aligned with our corporate strategy. We have a strong pipeline of opportunities that will help our customers meet their goals in an environment with potentially surging sand proppant demand as energy markets recover."
The NBR Sand unit produces 40/70 Mesh and 100 Mesh Silica Sand. The low-cost, state-of-the-art facility is on approximately 1,400 acres near Interstate 20. It includes 12 storage silos with capacity of more than 10,000 tons and five load-out lanes. The property has more than 20 years of quality reserves. Closing is pending customary regulatory and other approvals.
A conference call and slide presentation to discuss the strategic benefits of the transaction with investors will be held on July 19 at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Hosting the call will be Bryan Shinn, president and chief executive officer. Investors are invited to listen to a live webcast of the call by visiting the "Investor Resources" section of the Company's website at www.ussilica.com. A presentation on the acquisition will be available tomorrow morning on the company's website as well. The call can also be accessed live over the telephone by dialing 877-869-3847 or 201-689-8261 for international callers. To access the slides, please click on the following link: https://event.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1111317. A replay will be available shortly after the call and can be accessed by dialing (877) 660-6853 or (201) 612-7415 for international callers. The conference ID for the replay is 13641678. The replay of the call will be available through August 19, 2016.
Forward-looking Statements
Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking statements" made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and speak only as of this date. Forward-looking statements made include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact and may include, but are not limited to, statements regarding U.S. Silica's growth opportunities, strategy, future financial results, forecasts, projections, plans and capital expenditures, and the commercial silica industry. Forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions, which may not prove to be accurate. These statements are not guarantees and are subject to risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from these forward-looking statements. Among these factors are: (1) fluctuations in demand for commercial silica; (2) the cyclical nature of our customers' businesses; (3) operating risks that are beyond our control; (4) federal, state and local legislative and regulatory initiatives relating to hydraulic fracturing; (5) our ability to integrate the acquired business; (6) loss of, or reduction in, business from our largest customers; (7) increasing costs or a lack of dependability or availability of transportation services or infrastructure; (8) our substantial indebtedness and pension obligations; (9) our ability to attract and retain key personnel; (10) silica-related health issues and corresponding litigation; (11) seasonal and severe weather conditions; and (12) extensive and evolving environmental, mining, health and safety, licensing, reclamation and other regulation (and changes in their enforcement or interpretation). Additional information concerning these and other factors can be found in U.S. Silica's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law.
About U.S. Silica
U.S. Silica Holdings, Inc., a member of the Russell 2000, is a leading producer of commercial silica used in the oil and gas industry, and in a wide range of industrial applications. Over its 116-year history, U.S. Silica has developed core competencies in mining, processing, logistics and materials science that enable it to produce and cost-effectively deliver over 260 products to customers across its end markets. The Company currently operates nine industrial sand production plants and eight oil and gas sand production plants. The Company is headquartered in Frederick, Maryland and also has offices located in Chicago, Illinois and Houston, Texas.
Contacts
U.S. Silica Holdings, Inc.
Michael Lawson
Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications
(301) 682-0304
[email protected]
SOURCE U.S. Silica Holdings, Inc.
Related Links
http://www.ussilica.com
As dean, Crouch has led significant enrollment growth, established strong partnerships with businesses and workforce leaders and elevated the colleges' national rankings. He has helped secure millions of dollars in federal support for major research centers focused on renewable energy, environmental security, space flight and flexible electronics displays among other areas of emphasis; has led expansion of engineering programs to China, India and Mexico, and enhanced online offerings for working professionals.
"We are incredibly pleased to welcome Dr. Crouch to the College of Engineering," President Vistasp M. Karbhari said. "Dr. Crouch has built a reputation as a forward-thinking, hard-charging, seasoned administrator and collaborative leader with a rare ability to cultivate relationships across communities from elementary school students to government leaders, from corporations to funding agencies and donors. He is remarkably well prepared to continue the growth in reputation and size of the UTA College of Engineering, and make it not just the best in Texas but one of the very best in the nation."
As dean, Crouch will lead the nationally ranked College of Engineering composed of seven departments: Bioengineering; Civil Engineering; Computer Science and Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering; Materials Science and Engineering; and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The College serves about 7,000 students and has awarded more than 1,500 degrees to date for the 2015-16 academic year, a 28 percent increase from the previous year.
Crouch said he was attracted to UTA by the University's reputation as an internationally recognized research institution in the heart of the vibrant North Texas region, by the vision for the model 21st century urban research university laid out in the Strategic Plan 2020: Bold Solutions | Global Impact and by the commitment to innovation, creativity and collaboration on the part of UTA faculty, staff and students.
"UTA is already distinguished by excellence and access through transformative knowledge production and education based on scholarship, collaboration, innovation, creativity and global impact," Crouch said. "To that end, we will set clear objectives to move the College to a new level. We will embrace the vision for what UTA will become, be equipped for and manage student growth, focus vigorous research on the university's guiding themes, and cultivate diversity across the College."
Jim Crites, executive vice president for the Operations Division of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, said, "I am delighted that Peter Crouch has accepted the opportunity to lead the College of Engineering to new heights. He has demonstrated his ability to enable all to succeed through his leadership at Arizona State University and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa."
Crites, who served on the search committee for Crouch and on the advisory board for UTA's College of Engineering, added, "I have every confidence in him to build upon the great foundation laid by Dean Koshrow Behbehani along with the faculty and staff in order that all can realize the vision we have collectively created for the college and university."
A native of England, Crouch earned his undergraduate degree in Engineering Science from Warwick University in Coventry in 1973, and his master's degree in Control Theory from Warwick the following year. Crouch then earned his Ph.D. in applied sciences from Harvard University in 1977. After joining Arizona State University in 1984, he rose through the academic ranks before being named dean of what would become the Fulton School of Engineering in 1995. He also served as ASU's vice provost for global engagement from 2005 to 2006.
Crouch was appointed dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in 2006.
In his previous roles, Crouch successfully enlisted the help and support of major corporations including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman Corp., Motorola, and others to advance excellence in engineering education. At ASU, he worked closely with university's leaders to secure the $50 million naming gift for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and helped lead the School into the top 50 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.
A strong collaborator and fundraiser, he helped attract two $5 million gifts for the Department of Bioengineering. Together with the now ASU W.P. Carey School of Business, he helped attract an $11 million gift from Motorola to enhance manufacturing research and education at ASU. At UH Manoa, Crouch co-developed the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Education. CRESMET went on to attract more than $20 million federal grants. Crouch also helped lead the successful proposal development of a multi-million dollar Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence grant called the Center for Island, Maritime and Extreme Environment Security.
"Clearly, one of the main rationales for engineering colleges is to support the engineering and technologically focused workforce. We excelled in that regard in Honolulu and Phoenix," Crouch said. "UTA already has great ties to those sectors that provide an excellent opportunity to serve the Arlington-Dallas-Fort Worth and greater Texas communities. The more we strengthen these bonds, the stronger UTA and our community partners will become.
"These relationships also tie into a fundamental research component that universities and those sectors share. We must provide a mechanism for businesses to think of UTA as a conduit for easily accessible research and development projects."
About the UTA College of Engineering
The UTA College of Engineering is one of the fastest growing Colleges in size and reputation in Texas and the nation. It offers 10 baccalaureate, 14 master's and nine doctoral degree programs, and its undergraduate and graduate programs are ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the best in the nation.
With more than 7,000 students and 25,000 alumni, the College of Engineering is the third-largest in Texas, providing the local, regional, and national workforce with motivated and highly skilled graduates. The College spans seven buildings, including the Engineering Research Building, which opened in 2011. A new Science and Engineering Innovation and Research Building is scheduled to be completed in summer 2018. With a commitment to creating viable solutions to today's most pressing problems, the College of Engineering is helping make UTA the model 21st century urban research university.
About The University of Texas at Arlington
The University of Texas at Arlington is a Research 1 Carnegie "highest research activity" institution which served about 54,000 degree-seeking students in campus-based and online degree programs in the 2015-16 academic year and is the second-largest institution in The University of Texas System. U.S. News & World Report ranks UTA fifth in the nation for undergraduate diversity. The University is a Hispanic-Serving Institution and is ranked as the top four-year college in Texas for veterans on Military Times' 2016 Best for Vets list. Visit www.uta.edu to learn more, and find UTA rankings and recognition at www.uta.edu/uta/about/rankings.php.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390585
SOURCE The University of Texas at Arlington
Earlier this year, former LPGA player Val Skinner, in collaboration with the LIFE Center at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, partnered with Discovery Education, the leading provider of digital content for K-12 classrooms, to develop an interactive biology and genetics education program supporting the study of cancer in high school classrooms. The website featuring the BioCONECT curriculum, www.decodingcancer.org , launched in January and is expected to reach more than 500,000 students this year. Through Discovery Education, Decoding Cancer, has the potential to reach millions of students and it is accessible to anyone through the website, giving the curriculum an international platform. At her event, Skinner announced a multi-year agreement with Discovery Education to continue funding for the program.
"Education about the science of breast cancer and the need for young women to be aware of early detection is imperative in the ongoing fight as our youth and advancements in genomics will impact generations to come," said Skinner. "I am proud that BioCONECT, the curriculum we developed with Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and piloted in New Jersey, now Decoding Cancer is reaching millions of students and teachers through Discovery Education. We must continue to drive awareness through education and this is a huge step."
Over the past 16 years, the Val Skinner Foundation LIFE Event has been one of the largest single-day breast cancer fundraisers in the country thanks to the support of LPGA players. This year's field included 2016 U.S. Open champion Brittany Lang and runner-up Anna Nordqvist, plus three Olympians.
In addition to supporting Decoding Cancer, Skinner announced Marsh Inc. is partnering with her foundation to fund a grant for precision medicine research with the LIFE Center at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. Proceeds from LIFE have funded other similar grants in the past.
More information on the Val Skinner Foundation, LIFE Event and programs funded by the event can be found at www.valskinnerfoundation.org.
CONTACT: Mike Alday
[email protected]
615-791-1535
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390628
SOURCE Val Skinner Foundation
Related Links
http://www.valskinnerfoundation.org
HOLMDEL, N.J., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Vonage (NYSE: VG), a leading provider of cloud communications services for businesses and consumers, announced today that it has received SearchNetworking.com's Network Innovation Award. Presented by the editors of Tech Target Inc.'s Networking Media Group, the award recognizes Vonage SmartWAN, launched in early 2016, which optimizes Quality of Service (QoS) for unified communications across a company's multiple locations.
Given to a select group of technology companies each year, the Network Innovation Awards are judged by the SearchNetworking.com editorial staff, in conjunction with a team of users, industry experts, analysts and consultants. The Innovation Award program recognizes companies that are making significant advances and network innovations in such areas as network management, data center network fabric, programmable networking, remote network management and software defined networking (SDN).
"Vonage SmartWAN complements the features and functionality of a company's cloud-based unified communications solution with the added reliability they need to maintain Quality of Service and keep their businesses running smoothly," said Sanjay Srinivasan, Vice President and Chief Technology Architect Business Engineering for Vonage. "We are honored to be recognized by SearchNetworking as we continue to look for ways in which to provide the best in Cloud Communications to meet the full spectrum of business needs for customers of all sizes, from SMB to mid-market to enterprise."
Vonage SmartWAN uses SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) technology to enhance quality of service and optimize real-time network traffic, like voice and video for businesses. It works over private MPLS or public broadband networks to improve quality and availability across locations for business customers that rely on high quantities of voice, video and data communications in their day-to-day operations. Blackout/Brownout protection, seamless failover and real-time, smart congestion prevention are just a few of the ways Vonage SmartWAN ensures business continuity.
Vonage SmartWAN also allows for more visibility into a company's network through Vonage's proprietary back office system, providing customers with an open door to installation, service configuration, trouble tickets, training, billing and call analytics.
About Vonage
Vonage (NYSE: VG) is a leading provider of cloud communications services for businesses. Vonage transforms the way people work and businesses operate through a portfolio of communications solutions that enable internal collaboration among employees, while also keeping companies closely connected with their customers, across any mode of communication, on any device. The Company also provides a robust suite of feature-rich residential communication solutions. In 2015, the Company was named a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as-a-Service, Worldwide and also earned the Frost & Sullivan Growth Excellence Leadership Award for Hosted IP and Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) Services. For more information, visit www.vonage.com.
Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in Holmdel, New Jersey. Vonage is a registered trademark of Vonage America Inc. To follow Vonage on Twitter, please visit www.twitter.com/vonage. To become a fan on Facebook, go to www.facebook.com/vonage. To subscribe on YouTube, visit www.youtube.com/vonage.
About SearchNetworking.com
SearchNetworking.com is one of the largest and most active online communities dedicated to the enterprise network. IT professionals in almost every industry rely on SearchNetworking.com for industry news, technical tips and valuable best practices on routing, switching, network security, network/systems management, convergence/VoIP and wireless LANs, so they can keep their networks up to date and cope with constant change.
Whether you are looking for advice on implementing a new technology or seeking new cost-saving strategies to improve the performance of your current network, SearchNetworking.com is an online helpdesk for IT managers and administrators. We provide unbiased news, a library of how-to tips, informative learning guides, expert and vendor Webcasts and white papers all in an effort to arm you with the tools and tactics you need to do your job successfully and make the right IT purchasing decisions.
(vg-a)
SOURCE Vonage
Related Links
http://www.vonage.com
CHICAGO, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- More than 1,600 people will attend the International OCD Foundation's 23rd Annual OCD Conference, which will be held this summer in Chicago. Running July 29 to 31 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile, the OCD Conference is the world's largest event dedicated to obsessive compulsive disorder and related disorders, including hoarding and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD).
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, The International OCD Foundation is the leading advocate for the OCD community. The IOCDF funds OCD research, trains professionals to treat OCD, helps patients access treatment and support, and oversees online resource centers for information on OCD, hoarding disorder, and BDD.
Obsessive compulsive disorder affects some 3 million people in the United States, including children and teens. Though OCD has no cure, its symptoms which include obsessions and compulsions can be effectively managed through cognitive behavioral therapy and medication.
The Annual OCD Conference blends research news with on-site treatment and support. Children often meet other youth with the disorder for the first time, while their parents find support and share tips. Attending therapists receive accredited professional education and training. OCD sufferers have the ability to meet with the country's leading experts and researchers and participate in programs that can jumpstart their treatment.
"OCD is an often misdiagnosed and ineffectively treated mental disorder," says Dr. Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the IOCDF. "So many individuals and families affected by OCD continue to have difficulty in accessing resources and finding effective treatment. Through our conference we want to bring our resources across the country each year to build new support systems, help families find efficient treatment, and change lives."
The conference's keynote speaker is David Adam, an editor with the science journal Nature and a former specialist correspondent with the Guardian newspaper. He is the author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop, an award-winning and best-selling book about his experiences with OCD. Adam will address the crowd and share his personal journey to recovery and advocacy with conference attendees.
John Green, The New York Times best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars, will receive the International OCD Foundation illumination award via video, an accolade given annually to influencers whose work accurately and respectfully represents OCD and related disorders in an effort to raise awareness and understanding.
Chicago's legendary comedy club, The Second City, has partnered with the IOCDF to host Improv for Anxiety, a three-hour workshop and discussion on how improvisation can be a recovery tool for people with anxiety disorders.
Registration for the conference is open to all and continuing education credits are available to qualified professionals. For more information and to register visit iocdf.org or call (617) 973-5801.
About The International OCD Foundation
The International OCD Foundation is celebrating its 30th anniversary as a donor-supported nonprofit organization, working to increase access to effective treatment, end the stigma associated with mental health issues, and foster a community for those affected by OCD and the professionals who treat them. Based in Boston, the IOCDF has affiliates in 22 states and territories, as well as 11 global partners. The IOCDF has a $2 million annual operating budget, has granted millions of dollars for OCD research, and is a vital resource for the estimated 1 in 100 individuals with OCD around the world. For more information, visit www.iocdf.org.
CONTACT:
Katie Stinchon
617-269-7171
[email protected]
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130715/DC47704LOGO
SOURCE International OCD Foundation
Related Links
http://www.iocdf.org
BEIJING, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd. ("Xinyuan" or "the Company") (NYSE: XIN), an NYSE-listed real estate developer and property manager primarily in China and recently in other countries, today announced that its new blockchain-powered real estate finance technology platform was released at the 1st China Financial Technology Conference held in Beijing in the second week of July. As IBM's (NYSE:IBM) first blockchain cooperation partner in China, Xinyuan established the online platform that connects home owners with broad channels for financing opportunities, while enjoying the safety, transparency and convenience afforded by IBM's blockchain technology. At the event, Xinyuan and Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance also jointly announced the establishment of Xinyuan Real Estate Financial Technology Research Center, a collaboration designed to support the platform.
With IBM providing the blockchain and smart contract technologies and Xinyuan building the real estate information database, the property evaluation system, the transaction system and the risk control modules, the Company expects that the platform will be able to support various types of applications, including consumer finance, investment and financing as well as industrial finance, by connecting investment and financing institutions, credit bureaus and merchants. The Company anticipates that this platform will contribute to the technological infrastructure of real estate finance and provide Xinyuan and other real estate developers with new patterns of real estate operations. The platform is also supported by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China ("ICBC") global credit blacklist system of corporations and individuals. The platform is currently in the close-beta phase and is expected to be officially launched in August 2016.
Mr. Yong Zhang, Xinyuan's Chairman, commented, "As the first real estate company to collaborate with IBM on its blockchain technology, we are very pleased to announce our real estate blockchain platform. This platform demonstrates our efforts to explore new opportunities in China's real estate market through strategic collaboration with leading companies and establishes Xinyuan as a leader in real estate finance technology. Through the standardization and digitalization of the property appraisal process, we believe our platform can help revitalize China's real estate market by stimulating consumption, investment and financing activities. We anticipate this platform will support our real estate development activities while also representing Xinyuan's strategic evolution from a pure traditional real estate developer into a more diversified, technology-driven real estate company with differentiated business segments and global operations. We look forward to providing our shareholders with additional updates about this platform in the future."
About Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd.
Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd. ("Xinyuan") is an NYSE-listed real estate developer and property manager primarily in China and recently in other countries. In China, the Company develops and manages large scale, high quality real estate projects in over ten tier one and tier two cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Jinan, Xi'an, Suzhou, among others. Xinyuan was one of the first Chinese real estate developers to enter the U.S. market and over the past few years has been active in real estate development in New York. The Company aims to provide comfortable and convenient real estate related products and services to middle-class consumers. For more information, please visit http://www.xyre.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
Certain statements in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements". These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements includes statements about estimated financial performance, sales performance and activity, among others and can generally be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates" and similar statements. Statements that are not historical statements are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated, including, but not limited to, our ability to continue to implement our business model successfully; our ability to secure adequate financing for our project development; our ability to successfully sell or complete our property projects under construction and planning; our ability to enter into new geographic markets and expand our operations into new operational areas/activities; the marketing and sales ability of our third-party sales agents; the performance of our third-party contractors; the impact of laws, regulations and policies relating to real estate developers and the real estate industry in the countries in which we operate; our ability to obtain permits and licenses to carry on our business in compliance with applicable laws and regulations; competition from other real estate developers; the growth of the real estate industry in the markets in which we operate; fluctuations in general economic and business conditions in the markets in which we operate; and other risks outlined in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2015. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or review publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date on which the statement is made.
For more information, please contact:
In China:
Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd.
Ms. May Shen
Investor Relations Director
Tel: +86 (10) 8588-9376
Email: [email protected]
ICR, LLC
William Zima
In U.S.: +1-646-308-1472
In China: +86 (10) 6583-7511
Email: [email protected]
SOURCE Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd.
Related Links
http://www.xyre.com
PORTLAND Ore., July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In separate actions, Arbitrators awarded $2.7 million dollars against Moody National TPS Portland MT, LLC and $1.7 million dollars against Moody National Grapevine MT, LP. Investors purchased the hotelsa 95-room Towneplace Suites hotel located in Scarborough, Maine and a 94-room Hampton Inn & Suites hotel located in Grapevine, Texasbased on securities offerings made by companies owned by Moody National Realty Company, L.P. Upon purchasing the hotels, the owners entered into master leases with Moody National TPS Portland MT and Moody National Grapevine MT. Although the hotels were independently managed, Moody National Management, L.P. eventually assumed management responsibilities. It was under Moody's management that the hotels failed to generate enough revenue to meet their lease obligations.
Respondents argued that the owners accepted the risks associated with an economic downturn when they purchased the hotels, and that the owners waived their right to back rent by not declaring default during the recession. Both arbitrators disagreed. One arbitrator explained: "No material evidence was produced to establish that the Claimants at any time agreed to forego or forgive any past due rents from the Respondent." The arbitrators also awarded the owners' attorneys' fees and costs.
In addition to the awards, Zupancic Rathbone assisted the owners with selling the hotels, avoided Moody's undocumented demands for a 3.5% disposition fee, and in the case of the Towneplace hotel, avoided Moody's demand that the owners pay for the hotel's outstanding payroll, management, and operating costs.
Brett Moody is the sole shareholder of Moody Management Corporation, the general partner of Moody National Management, L.P., which is the sole member of the tenant entities.
The arbitrations were filed with the American Arbitration Association as TIC TPS Portland 1, LLC v. Moody National TPS Portland MT, LLC, Case No. 01-15-0004-2084, and TIC Grapevine GP 2, LP v. Moody National Grapevine MT, LP, Case No. 01 15 0004 9713.
Coni Rathbone, Paul Barton, and Joe Carlisle represented the owners. Zupancic Rathbone represents tenant-in-common owners across the country with loan workouts, refinancing, sales, and litigation.
Please direct questions to Paul Barton at (503) 941-9624.
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Islamabad, July 16 : Popular social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, also a model and actor, was strangled to death by her brother in yet another "honour killing" in Pakistan, police said on Saturday.
Qandeel, known for posting bold videos and statements on Facebook, was killed by her own brother at the family home on the outskirts of Multan in Punjab, media reports said.
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, Dawn newspaper said.
Her father told the police that she was strangled by his son, The News International said.
The murder took place when she was sleeping in her room, said her parents, who were asleep on the rooftop.
There were no signs of bleeding and she seemed to have been strangled to death, a police officer said.
Qandeel, who became famous through her tireless self-promotion and suggestive "selfies" posted on social media, had amassed tens of thousands of followers.
"Nothing is good in this society. This patriarchal society is bad," she said in a recent interview.
Three weeks ago, Qandeel wrote to Interior Minister and the Senior Superintendent of Police in Islamabad asking them to provide security to her.
She had said her life was in danger and that she was being threatened via calls on her mobile number. "I need security from you," she said.
The model seemed to be troubled in the last few days, Geo News Multan Bureau Chief said. "The last I called her for an interview, she was crying on the phone," he said.
She was planning to settle down abroad after Eidul Fitr, citing security reasons.
Qandeel was derided and feted in equal measure in Pakistan. According to Dawn, her videos had been viewed more than 830,000 times and garnered thousands of likes.
She first shot to fame in Pakistan in 2014 after a video of her pouting for the camera.
Islamabad, July 17 : The brother of Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch has confessed that he drugged and then strangled his sister in the name of "honour".
Baloch's brother was arrested by the police on Saturday night after she was found strangled to death in her house in Multan early in the morning.
Her father Muhammad Azeem 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."
"She wasn't aware I was killing her," he said. "I gave her a tablet and then strangled her."
City police chief Azhar Akram said: "Waseem killed her by covering her mouth and nose after which he fled to Dera Ghazi Khan with two of his friends. We are searching for his friends and I am hopeful they will also be caught soon. After interrogating them, we will be able to determine their role in the crime."
The city police chief said the authorities will charge Waseem with honour killing and seek "maximum punishment".
In the First Information Report, the father of the deceased said his daughter came to Multan from Karachi to celebrate Eid with the family and Waseem also came to meet them on July 14.
Azeem further said that he, along with his wife, went to sleep on the rooftop while Qandeel slept in a room where Waseem strangled her to death as he was against her working in showbiz.
He alleged that Waseem had taken this extreme step at the behest of his brother Mohammad Aslam Shaheen.
Qandeel's funeral was held early on Sunday at Shah Saddardin, Dera Ghazi Khan.
A neighbour said she had visited the model on Friday night when her brother was watching television while she was in another room and everything was fine.
"It is unbelievable. Qandeel was a very nice girl," she added.
Baloch shot to fame in 2014 through her self-promotion and suggestive "selfies" posted on social media. She had tens of thousands of followers.
Dhaka, July 17 : 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.
Paris, July 17 : 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".
Amritsar, July 18 : Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal cleaned utensils at a community kitchen as he and other party leaders performed "sewa" (voluntary religious service) inside the Golden Temple complex here early on Monday.
Accompanied by senior party leaders, including Ashish Khetan, H.S. Phoolka and Bhagwant Mann, Kejriwal arrived at the Golden Temple complex, where the holiest of Sikh shrines Harmandar Sahib, popularly known as The Golden Temple, is situated, before dawn on Monday.
With his head convered by a handkerchief and folded hands, Kejriwal went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the "Langar hall", the community kitchen which serves food to over one lakh people in a single day.
Kejriwal and others, who remained in the shrine for about an hour, also partook of "langar" (community food).
The move by Kejriwal to come here was to seek forgiveness for his party's political gaffe after the party's youth manifesto carried a picture of the shrine along with a broom which is AAP's election symbol.
Amritsar, July 18 : Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal cleaned utensils at a community kitchen as he and other Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders performed 'sewa' (voluntary religious service) inside the Golden Temple complex here on Monday.
Accompanied by senior party leaders, including Ashish Khetan, lawyer H.S.Phoolka, AAP MPs Bhagwant Mann and Sadhu Singh, actors and AAP members Gul Panag and Gurpreet Ghuggi and others, Kejriwal arrived at the Golden Temple complex, where the holiest of Sikh shrines 'Harmandar Sahib' is situated.
The move by Kejriwal to come here was to seek forgiveness for AAP's political gaffe after the party's 'Youth manifesto' carried a picture of 'Harmandar Sahib', popularly known as the Golden Temple, along with AAP election symbol of 'broom'.
"While releasing the 'Youth Manifesto' of the party, we had committed some mistakes unintentionally. To seek forgiveness, we have done sewa at Darbar Sahib," Kejriwal, who remained inside the shrine complex for nearly one hour, told media after performing service at the shrine.
Sporting a white handkerchief to cover his head and with folded hands, Kejriwal went around the shrine complex, offered prayers and later cleaned utensils at the 'Langar' hall, the community kitchen which serves food to over one lakh people in a single day.
Kejriwal and others also partook of langar (community food).
The AAP, and Kejriwal, faced criticism from the Sikh community, Punjab's ruling Shiromani Akali Dal, Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and radical Sikh organisations for the goof-up. Protests were held against the AAP.
This was Kejriwal's second visit to the Sikh shrine within 15 days. He had begun his three-day Punjab tour on July 3 by offering prayers at the same shrine. It was immediately after his visit that Kejriwal released the party's controversial 'Youth manifesto' here, 250 km from Chandigarh.
AAP leader Ashish Khetan was also booked by the Punjab Police on charge of hurting religious sentiments of the Sikhs by equating the manifesto with Guru Granth Sahib, the Bible and the Gita. Apologies by Khetan and the AAP over both controversies were rejected by the Akali Dal, opposition Congress and the SGPC.
The AAP gaffe gave political fodder to the Akali Dal, Congress and others to corner the party just months ahead of assembly elections in Punjab which are likely to be held in February next year. The AAP is posing serious challenge to both parties in Punjab.
Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his deputy and son Sukhbir Singh Badal had accused the AAP leaders of "hurting the religious sentiments of the Sikhs" through their actions.
The Chief Ministerhad said the "atrocious act" of displaying a picture of the temple on the cover of the AAP 'Youth manifesto' along with a picture of broom was "blasphemy".
Akali Dal President Sukhbir Badal too said that the AAP and its leadership was a "bunch of outsiders who don't have any inkling of the culture and traditions of Punjab."
Punjab Congress president Amarinder Singh had questioned Kejriwal for seeking forgiveness 15 days after committing the mistake.
Washington, July 18 : A former African-American US Marine killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on his birthday, in an incident similar the July 5 Dallas attacks, where another former black soldier killed five policemen.
On Sunday, a man identified as Gavin Long of Kansas city went on a shooting rampage on his 29th birthday that left two police officers and a sheriff's deputy dead, CNN quoted police sources as saying.
Long, was a former Marine who spent time in Iraq and was discharged at the rank of sergeant in 2010, according to the US military.
Police officers who responded to Sunday's shootings killed Long in a gunbattle after the other officers were ambushed, the police sources told CNN.
The murder weapon was an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle, according to law enforcement officials.
Police have not officially released the names of the victims but one was identified by family members as Officer Montrell Jackson. Law officers Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola were also killed. That was corroborated with social media posts.
The gunman also critically injured a deputy who is "fighting for his life", said East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux.
Another wounded deputy and police officer have non-life-threatening wounds, law officers said.
Jackson had posted on Facebook on July 8 how physically and emotionally drained he had been since protests had erupted in Baton Rouge after the July 5 killing of the unarmed African-American man, Alton Sterling by police.
"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. ... These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart," CNN reported citing Jackson's post.
Long was a prolific user of social media, with dozens of videos, podcasts, tweets and posts under his pseudonym 'Cosmo Setepenra'.
Under that name, Long also tweeted a link to a news story about Dallas shooter Micah Johnson and said the shooter was "one of us! # MY Religion is Justice", CNN added.
President Barack Obama on Sunday condemned the killings and all attacks on law enforcement.
"We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement," Obama said.
"Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible," CNN quoted the President as saying.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a probe.
New Delhi, July 18 : At a time when Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with big data and video analytics, is the talk of every town globally, making sense of data and its optimum, secured storage is the key for the governments including in India, a top executive of US data storage company has said.
Increasing terrorist threats, cyber crimes and data breaches are driving investments in monitoring, security in IT and video surveillance systems in the country, said Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India and SAARC.
In an era of enterprise Cloud, NetApp that recently declared revenues of $5.6 billion for fiscal 2016, is seeking to capture a bigger pie in India with its top-of-the-line secured data storage and expertise in all-flash array market.
"At present, we are working with two Indian states and will soon deploy NetApp storage solutions in six to seven others. Our 'Smart City' campaign is centred on three key areas: citizen security, intelligent traffic management system (ITMS) and smart metering (of electricity supply)," Valluri told IANS in an interview.
According to market research firm 6Wresearch, the Indian video surveillance market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth of over 13 percent between 2016 and 2022.
Keeping this in view, the demand for efficient and reliable storage technologies is at an all-time high and the global data storage bigwigs -- EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Oracle and now NetApp -- are set to play a bigger role in India.
With us, "video data can be stored on solutions like SnapMirror -- software technology that provides fast, efficient data replication and disaster-recovery (DR) for critical data and SnapProtect -- that helps reduce the risk of data loss," Valluri informed.
NetApp expects to grow in the Indian market at a rate of 10-15 per cent every year.
"We are providing data storage solutions to some of the prominent banks in India like National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), ING Vysya, IDFC and Shamrao Vithal Co-op Bank Ltd. (SVC Bank)," Valluri noted.
The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has deployed NetApp's storage platform that provides cutting-edge video storage and analytics at 12 Indian airports.
"Aligned with its existing roadmap, NetApp Video Surveillance Storage platform (VSS) will support video monitoring and connect the 12 airports in real-time to COSAH (Committee of Secretaries on Aircraft Hijack) -- the apex government body situated at Rashtrapati Bhavan," Valluri told IANS.
With the deployment of VSS, NetApp provides efficient systems to manage world-class density and scalability of big data at AAI airports.
"With NetApp video surveillance storage platform, AAI can manage large volumes of video analytics and data to build a virtual infrastructure and better monitor important airports across India," Valluri said.
NetApp has also deployed storage solutions in police state video surveillance in the country.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement of establishing a 'Digital Locker' will trigger the volume of data responses. We are working from state to state on this. A lot of services will be rendered over government Cloud and a combination of government owned and public and private cloud and for this, our Data Fabric approach is the perfect solution," the NetApp executive added.
Data Fabric provides consistent data management, efficient data transport and the visibility to leverage the right IT resources, when and where you need them, says the company.
With the focus gaining ground to establish efficient data centres, the use of flash storage has begun to play a crucial role in the enterprise market in India.
"2016 is going to be the year of flash. As customers try to optimise IT performance while simultaneously balance their cost and agility at their data centres, new metrics for flash storage will be of great help and flash adoption, hence, will see an increase," Valluri told IANS.
NetApp registered a revenue growth of 238.2 per cent year over the year, which was 2.7 times faster than the all-flash array market as a whole, a report by the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) said last month.
All-flash array is a data storage system that contains multiple flash memory drives in place of spinning hard disk drives, allowing for much faster data transfer rates and more efficient use of data centre resources.
According to IDC, NetApp has moved to the second position from fourth in the tracker quarter over quarter, with 22.8 percent revenue market share -- ahead of Pure Storage, HPE and IBM. NetApp recently acquired leading all-flash storage system SolidFire with the promise of providing storage for the Next-Gen data centres.
"The data storage industry in India is adapting to better meet the growing storage needs contributed by drivers such as SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud), IoT and Digital India initiative," Valluri noted.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
London, July 18 : The world's six wealthiest countries host less than 9 per cent of the world's refugees, a new report issued on Monday said.
While the US, China, Japan, Germany, France and UK make up more than half the global economy, in 2015 they only hosted 2.1 million refugees and asylum seekers -- just 8.88 per cent of the world's total, international aid organisation, Oxfam said in its report.
Germany took the largest share of refugees among the world's richest countries (around 700,000), with the remaining 1.4 million split between the other five nations, CNN reported citing the report.
In sharp contrast, the nations that host more than half of the world's refugees and asylum seekers account for less than 2 per cent of the world's GDP, the report noted.
Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa and Palestine collectively host almost 12 million people.
"It is shameful so many governments are turning their backs on the suffering of millions of vulnerable people who have fled their homes and are often risking their lives to reach safety," CNN quoted Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, as saying.
"Poorer countries are shouldering the duty of protecting refugees when it should be a shared responsibility," she added.
According to the UN, the number of displaced people is currently at the highest ever recorded, surpassing even post-Second World War numbers.
More than 65 million people -- one out of every 113 people on the planet -- have been forced to flee their homes due to conflict, violence or persecution, a 5.8-million increase on the year before, CNN quoted the UNHCR as saying.
Chennai, July 18 : National Award-winning editor K.L. Praveen says working on superstar Rajinikanth-starrer "Kabali" earned him a lot of respect. He also said that the Tamil gangster drama is the most relaxed project he has worked on in recent times.
"Working on 'Kabali' earned me a lot of respect. When I worked on Ajith Kumar's 'Mankatha', people referred to me as 'Mankatha' editor. And now I'm being called as 'Kabali' editor. It's very special because I never thought I'll get to work on his (Rajinikanth's) film," Praveen told IANS.
Working on the project also earned Praveen nationwide recognition. The film's first teaser, which he had cut, has so far clocked over 25 million views on YouTube.
"After the teaser went viral, I received a lot of calls from Bollywood. I was even offered a big Hindi project, but I couldn't accept it because I was busy with 'Kabali'. Appreciation poured in from all quarters and it still keeps coming in," he said.
Admitting to have been nervous at the beginning of the project, he said the superstar himself made everybody comfortable.
"'Kabali' is easily the most relaxed project I worked on in the last few months. When Rajini sir watched the first cut and appreciated each and every one of us, it boosted our morale. He made us feel confident. Since he liked the film so much, we didn't care much about what others might say," he said.
Directed by Pa. Ranjith, "Kabali" is the story of a gangster's shot at redemption and how he fights for equal pay rights for Tamils in Malaysia.
"As much as it's a gangster film, it's equally emotional," said Praveen, adding audiences shouldn't expect another "Baasha".
"Unlike 'Baasha' and 'Thalapathy', this is a straightforward film about a man who has lost 25 years in prison. If you walk in not expecting another 'Baasha', you'll love the film. It's a Rajinikanth film sans any cliches one usually associates with his films," he said.
According to Praveen, Ranjith's realistic treatment of the script is what makes "Kabali" stand out from other gangster films.
"He is known for his realistic approach to his stories. Even Rajini sir admitted that 'Kabali' is a Ranjith's film all the way. It means a lot when such a comment comes from the superstar himself. It was after watching Ranjith's 'Madras' that Rajini sir expressed his interest to work with him," he added.
The film also stars Radhika Apte, and Praveen is all praise for her.
"It's very unfortunate that Radhika's Tamil films so far have been bad. However, Ranjith spotted her acting talent from her Hindi films and wanted her on board. She was extraordinary in the film. It takes a lot of effort for a co-actor to score over Rajinikanth in his film. Radhika was fabulous in some of her scenes," he said.
"Kabali", produced by Kalaipuli S. Thanu, releases in cinemas on Friday.
Dhaka, July 18 : Bangladesh police arrested a college teacher close to Shafiqul Islam Ujjal, one of those who attacked a Dhaka cafe on July 1 leaving over 20 dead, officials confirmed on Monday.
Milon Hossain, a teacher of Piyar Ali School and College, was whisked away on Saturday night, bdnews24 reported.
Milon was produced before a court that granted police five days to investigate him in custody, a police officer said.
Milon, who hails from Lalmonirhat, worked at Madbar Memorial School in Ashulia area near Dhaka.
Milon had helped Ujjal get a job as a teacher at the school, the officer said.
Ujjal was among six attackers killed by security forces to free the cafe siege hostages.
The Islamic State terrorist group published photos of five gunmen and claimed they killed over 20 persons in the cafe, bdnews24 reported.
Ujjal, a madrasa student from Bogra, was among the five "IS fighters".
He had left home six months before the attack, his family said.
At least 22 persons, including an Indian women were brutally killed during the siege on July 1 in the popular hangout, Holey Artisan Bakery and O'Kitchen Restaurant, in Dhaka's Gulshan area.
New Delhi, July 18 : The ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague on the South China Sea dispute in favour of the Philippines may have come as a setback for China but it will not stop Beijing from continuing with its quest for maritime hegemony in the region.
"The reaction of China on the court's ruling was on expected lines," Prashant Kumar Singh, Associate Fellow in the East Asia Centre of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), told IANS.
"In the immediate term, it might adopt aggressive posturing and show a defiant face to other claimants to the dispute and also to the US which is a security provider for many of the claimants, including the Philippines," he said.
But in the medium term, he said, how things would play out would depend a lot on domestic, international and regional responses to the situation.
An international arbitration tribunal in the PCA ruled on July 12 that China violated the Philippines' rights in the South China Sea, one of the busiest commercial shipping routes in the world.
The court accused China of interfering with the Philippines' fishing and petroleum exploration, building artificial islands in the waters and failing to prevent Chinese fishermen from fishing in the zone.
The tribunal held that fishermen from the Philippines had traditional fishing rights in Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea and that China had interfered with these rights by restricting their access.
The court held that Chinese law enforcement vessels unlawfully created a serious risk of collision when they physically obstructed Philippine vessels in the region.
China is locked in disputes over the Spratly and Paracel groups of islands in the South China Sea with other countries of the region.
While the other claimants over the Spratly islands are Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam, the Paracel islands are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.
The most heavily contested are the Spratlys, a group of 14 islands, islets and cays and more than 100 reefs that are strategically located.
Abhijit Singh, head of the Marine Security Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, pointed out that the tribunal has ruled that areas where China claimed for setting up exclusive economic zones (EEZs) could not be called islands as these were rocks and could not sustain life.
"China has made territorial and historical claims," Abhijit Singh said. "But the most important claim is that of sovereignty."
He said that China already has a territorial dispute with Japan over the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea west of Okinawa.
"China regularly keeps sending naval ships in the vicinity of the Senkaku islands," Abhijit Singh said.
China is also jittery about what former President Hu Jintao described as the "Malacca Dilemma".
The Malacca Strait is a narrow stretch of water between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra and serves as a crucial link to the South China Sea.
The Chinese are worried that the strait, which is effectively under the US control, can be choked any time if trouble arises, cutting down energy supplies from the Middle East and Africa.
"To overcome this, they are taking steps like building the Gwadar port in Pakistan," Prashant Singh said, adding that China was building ports at Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Djibouti as well.
That China was seeking to increase its dominance in the Indian Ocean region became evident when the Maldives parliament passed a land lease act in undue haste last year.
"It was perceived to be a move to clear legal hurdles for release of land to China," Prashant Singh said.
In fact, the process of shifting China's military strategy from land to the seas and oceans has been underway for some years.
But, the big official endorsement came in the form of the 2015 military strategy paper, according to Prashant Singh.
"The purpose is to protect China's sea lanes and energy supplies from the Middle East, Latin America and other parts of the world," he said.
The second goal, he said, was to protect China's overseas interests like in Africa.
"They cannot protect their overseas interests without having a robust naval strength and presence."
According to foreign policy expert Dhrubajyoti Bhattacharjee, China is trying to further its maritime ambitions under the guise of exploring for rare earth minerals, gold and natural gas through its deep sea submersibles Dayang 1, Jialong, Qianlong and Hailong.
"But the fact of the matter is China only has passive technology for deep sea mining (meaning it has the equipment but it has only been tested overground and not the under the sea)," Bhattacharjee said.
While China virtually holds the monopoly in exports of rare earth minerals, it has reported finds of gold deposits off the east China coast and in southwest Indian Ocean, the exploration contract for which it has got from the International Seabed Authority.
"Only India and South Korea have the active technology for deep sea mining," Bhattacharjee said.
(Aroonim Bhuyan can be contacted at aroonim.b@ians.in)
Paris, July 18 : French troops on Monday bombed new Islamic State (IS) targets in Iraq and Syria as a response to the July 14 Nice attacks that killed 84 people, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.
Le Drian said the new incursion against the jihadi group occurred on Sunday evening, EFE news reported.
"Our forces continue to strike, like the day before yesterday (Saturday) and last night (Sunday night), to contribute, within the coalition, to eradicate this cancer," he said.
The announcement came at the end of the third security council to occur in four days in France, and coincided with the final day of national mourning for the attack by Tunisian national Lahouaiej Bouhelel in Nice when he rammed into crowds gathered to watch the fireworks on the occassion of Bastille Day. The carnage also injured over 300 others.
The minister said he was convinced that the French army's anti-terrorist Sentinelle mission, which has 10,000 troops guarding the national territory, meets its function of "protecting and dissuading".
He also assured that the government was fully mobilised to guarantee French security.
"We need to continue advancing in the implacable fight we are waging against the IS at home and abroad," he said.
On July 16, the IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
Judicial investigations have not yet been able to connect the attacker with any terrorist networks, though eight people have been arrested, two of which have subsequently been released, including Bouhlel's ex-wife.
New Delhi, July 18 : Trinamool Congress parliamentarians led by the party's floor leader in the Lok Sabha Sudip Bandyopadhyay on Monday staged a demonstration in the Parliament House complex against rising prices of essential commodities across the country.
Displaying posters, the lawmakers raised slogans against the central government.
"Our protest is against the price rise. All over the country, there is no control over the rising prices," Bandyopadhyay later said.
The party said it had given a notice in the Lok Sabha for discussion on the price rise.
The TMC leader, however, asserted that during the ongoing monsoon session of parliament, it will play the role of a "responsible opposition".
"During the monsoon session, the Trinamool Congress will play the role of a responsible opposition in Parliament," he said.
The Trinamool members also attacked the Centre over the situation in the Kashmir Valley in the wake of July 8 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani by security forces.
Bandyopadhyay said his party also supported the passage of the Goods and Services Tax Bill in the Rajya Sabha.
Islamabad, July 18 : Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch, who was strangled to death by her brother in the name of "family honour" two days ago, was laid to rest in a local graveyard at her ancestral village near Multan, a media report said on Monday.
The funeral prayers of Qandeel were offered in the village Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan district on Sunday, Dawn news online reported.
Meanwhile, a Duty Magistrate in Multan remanded her brother and confessed killer, Waseem, in police custody for three days.
Qandeel's body was taken to her village, where a large number of people had gathered.
Before the funeral, women relatives of Qandeel applied henna to her hands and feet as per local tradition. Her mother repeatedly kissed her hands. Her brothers and two married sisters were also present to perform the last rites.
Talking to the media, Qandeel's father Mohammad Azeem said he would pursue the case against Waseem.
"She was my son, not a daughter. I have lost my son. She supported all of us, including my son who killed her," Dawn news online quoted Azeem as saying.
His sons were unhappy over "her achievements" and turned against her even though she supported them, he said.
The residents of the village condemned the killing of Qandeel, terming it "a brutal act".
Waseem confessed to having killed Qandeel in the name of honour. He said that he had no regrets, a police official told the media at a press conference on Saturday.
A woman in Multan, who lived in a house adjacent to Qandeel's, told the media that the deceased had asked for the hand of her daughter for Waseem. "It seems unbelievable that she has been killed by a brother for whom she was trying to arrange a marriage," she said.
Beijing, July 18 : China on Monday called for proper settlement of clashes in Kashmir which have left more than 40 people dead.
Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China was concerned about the casualties due to violence in Kashmir which began on July 9, a day after a top militant was killed by security forces, Xinhua news agency reported.
Stressing that China's position on the Kashmir issue has been consistent, Lu said Beijing hoped that relevant parties could resolve the issue through peaceful means.
Clashes broke out between civilians and the security forces after the killing of 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen militant group leader, Burhan Wani.
Srinagar, July 18 : The government in Jammu and Kashmir is not only fighting a war against stone-throwing mobs on the streets of Kashmir but also battling dissent within -- over differences on whether to quell the violent unrest with a "more military approach" or a "softer", caressing hand.
Highly placed sources told IANS here that a section of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's cabinet wanted the government to adopt a soft approach while dealing with street protesters and allow them to march without using "lethal force" after the July 8 killing of 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
Another section in the cabinet, however, wanted the government to adopt a "firm hand" and be tough against stone throwers.
The divide over how to tackle the violent situation emerged in the cabinet meeting Mehbooba Mufti chaired in Srinagar to discuss the fallout of the killing of Wani -- the social-media-savvy poster boy of new-age militancy in Kashmir -- who had attracted a huge fan following among Kashmiri youth.
The sources, privy to the cabinet meeting, said those who wanted a hard line stance against the protesters urged the Chief Minister not to allow protest marches and gatherings for the funeral prayers of Wani on July 9.
Dozens of funeral prayers were offered in absentia across the Kashmir Valley and according to police sources, some 100,000 people gathered at the Eidgah prayer ground in his hometown of Tral, some 60 km from here, in south Kashmir.
Those favouring a hard line stance were of the view that if more killings occurred while controlling unruly mobs in such gatherings, "Pakistan would grab the opportunity" and its beleaguered government, with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif battling corruption charges on account of the Panama Papers leaks, "would use it to its advantage and the situation will go out of our (the state government) control".
And that is what happened. The government allowed protest marches and funeral prayers on the second day of Wani's killing -- the day most of the deaths occurred in clashes in south Kashmir. Over 40 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 injured in firing by security forces so far.
Pakistan immediately seized the chance and raked up the Kashmir issue, not only nationally, but also at international forums.
The group in favour of a tough stance asked the government to impose strict curfew all across the valley, arrest prominent separatist leaders and known stone throwers, and not to allow local newspapers to function from the first day of protest.
However, the view was shot down by other cabinet members who were of the opinion that the public outcry against the militant commanders' killing was "but natural" and would fizzle out after his "chaharum" -- the fourth day of death -- was observed.
"They strongly opposed a tough stance and prevailed. And the result was out on the valley streets," one of the sources told IANS.
The sources said that another major issue the government is facing currently is "the serious differences" between two top police officers, which has resulted in preventing intelligence sharing within the police force.
(Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in)
New Delhi, July 18 : The Supreme Court on Monday declined the request by two amicus curiae - senior counsel Raju Ramachandran and Sanjay R. Hegde - to withdraw from assisting the court in the hearing of the appeals by the convicts in December 16 Delhi gang rape case.
Asking both to continue assisting the court in the hearing of the appeals by the four accused convicted and sentenced to death, the bench of Justice Dipak Misra, Justice R. Banumathi and Justice Ashok Bhushan said: "We can appreciate the anguish expressed by the learned amici curiae.
"We repeat at the cost of repetition that this court has complete faith in the intellectual integrity in the objective assistance of the learned amici curiae who have been appointed by this court and, therefore, they should not feel any agony on any score."
Reminding two senior counsel of their duty to assist the court, the bench said: "Their duty is to assist the Court and we are sure they will do the same."
"We may hasten to clarify, the learned friends of the court shall assist the court with regard to the case and not with regard to any particular petitioner."
Ramachandran and Hegde, in their communication to the court, sought to withdraw as amicus curiae following a letter by two accused objecting to their being nominated to assist the court in respect of their appeals.
The bench had asked Ramachandran to assist it in the hearing of the appeals by Mukesh and Pawan, and Hegde asked to assist the court in the hearing of appeals by Vinay Sharma and Akshay Thakur.
The court on Monday commenced hearing on the appeals by the four whose conviction and death sentence in December 16 Delhi gang rape case was upheld by the Delhi High Court on March 13, 2014.
Appearing for one of the accused, counsel M.L. Sharma took the court through the evidence that was tendered at the stage of trial. Since his submission was inconclusive, the next hearing will take place on July 22.
Mukesh, Pawan, Sharma, Thakur and Ram Singh along with a juvenile were accused of gang-raping and assaulting a 23-year-old paramedical student inside a private bus. The victim and her friend were thrown out of the bus after the crime.
Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide while in incarceration.
The victim died of grave intestinal injuries Dec 29, 2012 at Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital.
New Delhi, July 18 : Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Monday launched a 24x7 helpline - 1077 - to lodge complaints of water-logging in the national capital.
The government called a high level meeting to review water-logging problems after two days of continuous rainfall in Delhi.
"I have directed all agencies to conduct joint inspections at severely affected areas and submit reports by tomorrow (Tuesday)," Sisodia said in a tweet.
In another tweet, he said, "Dial 1077, 24x7 Helpline for registering complaints regarding water logging is functional now. Kindly register your complaint."
He also asked Delhi Police to send separate report on spot for water-logging in Delhi and the cause of it.
Vehicular movement was affected in Delhi due to continuous rainfall for the past two days. The city has been witnessing traffic jams at various intersections due to heavy rains and water-logging it caused.
Cleveland, July 19 : The Republican National Convention began on Monday in Cleveland, Ohio, for the purpose of officially designating real estate mogul Donald Trump as the party's candidate for the November 8 elections to the White House.
"Welcome to the 2016 Republican National Convention," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said to open the meeting at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, which is shielded by more than 3,000 policemen providing security for the conclave, Efe news reported.
Priebus asked for a moment of silence in honour of the five police officers gunned down by a sniper in Dallas last July 7, and for the three officers who lost their lives the same way this Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Some 50,000 people are attending the convention, of whom about 15,000 are reporters and other media personnel.
Also at the opening day of the convention, which ends next Thursday, are some 5,000 delegates representing the country's 50 states, the District of Colombia and five US territories.
Those delegates will be in charge of formalising this Thursday Trump's designation as the party's Presidential candidate, who will then contest the election with Democratic ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who will in turn be nominated next week at her party's convention in Philadelphia.
The debates at Monday's meeting, which has as its theme "Make America Safe Again", will focus on issues of security, including the war on terrorism, a subject Trump has dealt with extensively in his campaign, during which he has presented himself and his running mate Mike Pence as "the law and order candidates".
Among the speakers at the convention on Monday will be Trump's wife, the former Slovene model Melania Knauss.
The magnate let it be known that he will be there for his wife's speech.
"I'd love to be there when my wife speaks. So the answer is yes, I will be there," the New York multimillionaire said in an interview on Fox News on Monday, adding that "I'll bet she gives a great speech. She's worked hard on it."
The Republican National Convention kicked off after Trump announced last Friday that his running mate and Vice-Presidential candidate will be Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
The convention began in an air of tension, partly because of the murders of police officers on Sunday in Louisiana, and partly because of the many protests expected during the conclave.
Our open house program can further elaborate why University Commons Student Residence can be the ideal place for you during your stay in Florida.
The luxurious student residence in Gainesville, University Commons Student Residence offers local and visiting students a chance to win a complimentary scooter upon signing a lease on the same day. University Commons Student Residence has recently opened its doors for students and employees moving to Florida for the fall semester at the University of Florida.
University Commons Student Residence, strategically located at the heart of Gainesville, is an affordable student residence service offering a comfortable lodging facility to students and employees of Shands Medical Center and the University of Florida. For its proximity to leading institutions, the property makes the ideal place for people seeking quick access to the colleges. Besides this, the place also allows convenient access to prominent restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping centers.
University Commons Student Residence is now accepting rental reservations for the fall period. In light of this, the facility has initiated a no-obligation open house program to provide incoming students and university employees a chance to see the property on their own. Speaking about the announcement, the spokesperson for University Commons Student Residence said, We are excited to welcome hundreds of students and employees moving to Florida for the fall semester at the University of Florida. We have opened our doors to everyone seeking comfortable accommodation at affordable rates.
Designed with the specific needs of students in mind, University Commons Student Residence offers complete home requisites to make individuals feel at home. The 4-bedroom apartments are leased by room to provide inexpensive lodging, while allowing tenants easy access to home amenities including Internet, cable, and more.
Finding a comfortable place in proximity to the campus is certainly a key challenge for moving students and employees. Recognizing the problem, we offer a place that is not only near the University of Florida, but is also far more affordable in terms of price as well as the amenities it offers, concluded the spokesperson.
With direct access to multiple bus routes, students living in University Commons Student Residence can easily move to and from the city. People interested in taking a tour of the property can directly contact the company.
About University Commons Student Residence
University Commons Student Residence is a student lodging service. The company offers individual leasing to provide students and employees with affordable options to live during their stay at the University of Florida and Shands Medical Center.
Address: 2601 SW Archer Road,
Gainesville, FL 32608
Phone: (352)-377-6700
Website: http://universitycommonsuf.com
Email: LeaseUC(at)gmail(dot)com
For us, family is the most important thing, said Payscout President Manpreet Singh, which is why Ramsey is such a perfect location. Its a family-friendly area with great schools and wonderful people.
Payscout, Inc., a leading global payment processing provider, relocated its Ramsey, New Jersey offices this week to accommodate the companys fast-paced growth and establish a more prominent presence within the New York Metro area, one of the worlds largest financial hubs.
Bergen County, NJ, is an attractive area for business owners (Jaguar Land Rover North America is headquartered just a few miles from the new Payscout location, in nearby Mahwah) in part because of the densely populated talent pool. Ramsey has more than twice the national average 31.64% compared to 14.36% of management, business, and finance professionals living in the area. While many of those working professionals commute to and from Manhattan, the new Payscout location presents a competitive opportunity to work closer to home.
For us, family is the most important thing, said Payscout President Manpreet Singh, which is why Ramsey is such a perfect location. Its a family-friendly area with great schools and wonderful people.
Between the people, proximity to New York City, and the ability to serve our global client base in multiple time-zones, Singh continued, were thrilled to move into a larger location that accommodates our growth and gives us a more prominent presence within the greater New York financial sector.
Founded and headquartered in Los Angeles, California in 2011, Payscout now has offices in Atlanta, Georgia; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Shanghai, China; and Swaltar, Malta, in addition to the New Jersey location. Payscout has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing privately-held companies in America, ranking #2,416 in 2014 and #434 in 2015, on Inc. Magazines Inc. 500/5000 list.
For Payscout, each location presents a new opportunity to build community relations through its mission to support the entrepreneurial dream one transaction at a time and its commitment to cultural empathy.
When a Payscout location opens in any region, we bring more than just jobs and thought leading corporate citizenship, said Singh. Were making an investment in the businesses and families of the community, and we always look forward to building mutually beneficial relationships with local influencers.
One way Payscout builds these relationships is through a series of community outreach and social investment initiatives called Payscout Gives. Focusing on supporting education and creative intellectual property protection, Payscout has partnered with the Jefferson Awards Foundation to build a culture of service among our nations youth. That partnership is already showing signs of benefitting the local community, as Payscout and the Jefferson Awards Foundation worked together to donate furniture from Payscouts previous NJ location to a local non-profit.
Everything that we do at Payscout is based on the belief that, every individual has a social responsibility to make the world a better place, Singh concluded. In building and expanding our presence here in New Jersey, were looking forward to connecting with the people of Ramsey, and making an already-strong community even better.
About Payscout, Inc.:
Payscout Supports the Entrepreneurial Dream One Transaction at a Time.
Payscout is a global payment processing provider covering six continents by connecting merchants and consumers via credit, debit, ATM and alternative payment networks. What differentiates Payscout is its mission to support the entrepreneurial dream one transaction at a time. Payscout achieves this by being a thought leader in the payments industry. Its Go Global Now technology platform gives merchants instant access to 100+ countries, billions of consumers and trillions of dollars. Payscout offers payment processing solutions for brick-and-mortar and eCommerce transactions, and has earned acclaim as a new-generation provider of merchant banking services, specializing in online/eCommerce retailers with a predominant proportion of card-not-present (CNP) transactions; it is one of the few providers to deliver a true global payment solution that encompasses all merchant risk verticals. Customers can access Payscouts credit card processing services via a state-of-the-art, web-based user portal and through direct interactions with highly-trained experts. In addition to supporting thousands of clients across a multitude of industries and all 50 American states, Payscout maintains global partnerships with VISA USA, Bank of America Merchant Services, VISA Europe, VISA Latin America, VISA Asia Pacific, MasterCard Worldwide, China Union Pay, Deutsche Bank, First Data and Payscout Brazil. Payscout was recognized as one of Americas fastest-growing privately-held companies in 2014 and 2015, ranking #2,416 in 2014 and #434 in 2015, on Inc. Magazines Inc. 500/5000 list. Within the financial services industry, Payscout placed #140 in 2014 and #24 in 2015. For more information, visit http://www.payscout.com.
Michelle Kristel, Partner Michelle's experience as a nonprofit leader is a great value-add for our clients.
Joe McCormack, a pioneering and nationally recognized diversity recruiter in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, is announcing the formation of a new business partnership with Michelle Kristel, a former nonprofit executive and associate with the firm since 2013. The new partnership will be known as McCormack + Kristel, LLC, with offices in Palm Springs, CA and New York, NY.
Michelle Kristel is the former executive director of In The Life Media, producers of the acclaimed PBS series, In The Life. Currently, Michelle serves on the board of CenterLink, the national association of LGBT community centers; the advisory board of Quorum, an organization working to increase LGBT presence on corporate boards; and the steering committee of the Publishing Triangle, an association of authors, readers and publishing professionals.
McCormack + Kristel will build upon our 23-year reputation for excellent service and continue to expand our national recruiting practice, says Founder and Managing Partner Joe McCormack. Michelle's experience as a nonprofit leader is a great value-add for our clients. Because she has served in and managed many of the positions our clients seek to fill, Michelle has great instincts for finding talent and making successful placements."
In 1993, in a series of firsts, McCormack & Associates, the first openly gay-owned retained search firm, was founded with the mission to recruit leadership for the nation's burgeoning HIV/AIDS service organizations. The firm later expanded to serve LGBT movement organizations and is proud to have been the first retained search firm to embrace the transgender community as a source of talent for their clients. "Being a pioneer is a core value for us, not only as a business practice, but as a reflection of our commitment to social justice, said McCormack.
Since its founding, the firm has completed more than 400 searches for CEOs, board members and C-suite executives for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations across the country. Clients include amfAR, the ACLU, the California Endowment, Chicago House, Compassion & Choices, Los Angeles LGBT Center, National Minority AIDS Council, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, Planned Parenthood, the Tides Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, and scores of other public health, human service and social justice organizations.
"I am thrilled to be in partnership with Joe McCormack," said Kristel. "Great hires make all the difference for mission-driven organizations. Having the right players in the right positions is essential to advancing strategic goals, increasing program impact and engaging donors and constituents. Together, Joe and I will continue the firm's tradition of advancing social justice by supporting our clients to strengthen their teams and enhance their capacity."
McCormack + Kristel will continue its strategic venture with New York-based Wesley, Brown & Bartle, one of the nations leading minority-owned retained search firms. The two firms have partnered as WBB+McCormack to recruit leadership and C-suite executives for Amnesty International, AIDS United, the Chicago AIDS Foundation, the New York LGBT Community Center and other high profile clients.
Marketers can see where they stand and how to improves --and not worry about being hounded afterwards.
Customer Communications Group, (CCG) the full-service loyalty and marketing agency, offers businesses the CCG Loyalty Marketing Self-Assessment, a free, 5 minute self-quiz that grades loyalty marketing programs and gives detailed advice on how to better compete for -- and keep -- customers.
Take the CCG Loyalty Marketing Self-Assessment Here.
Marketers know that an effective loyalty program can earn and retain customers while boosting profits, but they often dont know how they stack up, said Sandra Gudat, president & CEO of Customer Communications Group. Many years advising top name clients in loyalty marketing have shown us what works and what doesnt. Weve designed the loyalty self-assessment to share that expertise so that businesses can evaluate their loyalty programs health, see where they stand, and get specific advice on how to boost results. And, no, were not going to call or hound participants its a service.
Based on answers to a series of multiple choice questions, the Self-Assessment grades marketers as Challenged, Middle of the Pack or Best in Class and gives them specific observations and steps to follow at three key stages in the loyalty marketing continuum:
1. Your program is still young, and customers are still getting acquainted with it.
2. Your program has now reached a level of maturity, and most of the operational kinks have been worked out.
3. Your program has now reached maturity, and your biggest challenge is keeping it fresh.
Each category contains recommended approaches and specific suggestions everything from anticipating negative ROI, recognizing best customers, adjusting customer communications, when to reevaluate program value propositions for customer impact, and much more.
Whether businesses are looking to crank up or tweak their loyalty programs, the self-assessment lets them know where they stand competitively, continued Gudat. Weve translated our expertise into an easy way to help marketers understand how their programs can reach full potential and deliver all they can in terms of customer retention, advocacy and profits.
Is your loyalty program best in class or merely so-so? How does it stack up to other retail loyalty programs? Discover strategies and steps to build loyalty specifically for your business and boost the bottom line
Take the CCG Loyalty Marketing Self-Assessment Here.
Customer Communications Group (CCG) is a full-service customer relationship marketing (CRM) agency that helps Fortune 2000 retailers and financial institutions improve their bottom line by improving their customer relationships, loyalty and retention. http://www.customer.com
Valuebound, one of the leading Drupal service providers, today announced the release of the new book Drupal 8 Development Beginners Guide which was also co- authored by team at Cameron & Wilding, London. Filled with practical examples, different chapters comes closer to delivering a hands on experience for newbies who is keen to learn the latest version of Drupal. - http://drupal8development.com/
On the release of the book one of the co-authors Krishna Kanth quoted, Writing the book was an experience by itself. We converged on the idea of writing a simple, stepwise, example driven guide, when we saw the difficulties for beginners on learning Drupal 8. While working on book we also developed and contributed a new module - Views semantic tabs - https://www.drupal.org/project/views_semantic_tabs. Apart from contributing to the community, with the release of Drupal 8, we wanted to help it grow with this initiative.
Drupal has gained its popularity over the past years with its features of being scalable,flexible and secured topping the board. Its key ingredient stands as, being supportive to mobile first platforms. Drupal 8, the latest version of Drupal comes with enhanced performance & more desirable developer experience. This book embeds the following for easy learning of Drupal 8.
A step-by-step example driven guide to build a live website using Drupal 8.
Covering the newly introduced native web services in Drupal 8, it does not fail to cover the basics of web content management and multi-media integration.
Getting to know the mobile first features of Drupal 8 along with enhancing the user experience.
About Valuebound
West New York, NJ: Valuebound based out of West New York, NJ with development centre in Bangalore, India is the service provider of Drupal, the leading Content Management System. The company specializes in providing expert Drupal consulting, development, training and support for media, publishing & product companies. From February 2016, Valuebound has been consistently ranked as the Top 3rd Drupal service provider in the world & No 1 in India at Drupal.org market place. More information on their services can be found on http://www.valuebound.com.
About Authors
Drupal architects Neeraj Kumar, Krishna Kanth, Rakesh James and Malabya Tewari are part of Valuebound team who work full time on providing solutions for media, publishing & product companies through Drupal. Apart from that, they indulge in growing the Drupal community through their active contributions.
Tassos Koutlas, Samuel Keen and Edward Crompton are Drupalers from Cameron & Wilding. They focus on web based projects for enterprises. Kurt Madel is an open source enthusiast from Captech Consulting.
Propertybase Inc., a leading provider of CRM and marketing software for the real estate industry, announced today the opening of their new office in Boulder, Colorado. The addition of this location, alongside their other offices in Salt Lake City/Utah, Sydney/Australia, and Munich/Germany, emphasizes the growing importance of the North American market for Propertybase.
Max-Michael Mayer, CEO: "As a result of our strong growth, it is critical that we operate in areas where we can continue to find great talent and keep our finger on the pulse of the tech world. Boulder is such a strategic location for us while at the same time being one of the country's most beautiful cities with an amazing community."
Steve Simmons, VP of Sales and Operations and head of the new office: "We are very excited about Boulder and the chance to open a new full service office housing sales, marketing, support and consulting which will ultimately help us better service our awesome clients. We are committed to Boulder and the community here and are looking forward to growing our operations in the Rockies."
The new office is located in downtown Boulder near the 29th street mall just off Pearl Street and close to the new Google campus.
Propertybase will expand its team in the new Boulder location quickly and is looking for sales, marketing, and support talent.
About Propertybase
Propertybase, with customers in 57 countries, is a fast-growing technology company with offices in the US, Europe, and Australia. Its software, the Propertybase Cloud, is recognized as the leading customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing solution for real estate companies around the globe. It is built on Force.com , the SaaS platform from Salesforce .
For more information about Propertybase, visit https://www.propertybase.com/
Propertybase LOGO for media: http://bit.ly/29NSWDG
Fragrance is a form of time travel. With Fifty Scents wax melts, we can slow down and enjoy our lives, even if just for a moment.
Fifty Scents, maker of highly fragranced wax melts, recently announced that Jasmine Stoker has accepted the position of Social Media Strategist for Fifty Scents brand.
Jasmine is a graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University with a Bachelors in Business Administration. Working previously in social media in the music industry, she brings an energetic voice that complements the twenty years of candle making expertise within the Fifty Scents brand.
Jasmine already had plans for the Fifty Scents brand on her first day. The first thing I wanted to do is to make sure as many people as possible had a chance to try these wax melts. Because, once someone smells these wonderful aromas, I know they will be a Fifty Scents customer for life! To make that happen, we set up a giveaway so that anyone could order one wax melt for free. Jasmine explained, It is our hope that this free gift will give us a chance to show off to potential customers just how incredible our product is. We will continue to give out free melts on our website until July 31st.
As the Social Media Strategist and Blogger for the Fifty Scents brand, Jasmine hopes to engage people in conversations about slowing down and taking life one day at a time. In a world where everything is fast-paced and high-tech, she aims to be an anchor. Fragrance is a form of time travel. With Fifty Scents wax melts, we can slow down and enjoy our lives, even if just for a moment. We can take a little time and be reminded of our favorite memory, time, and place, she explained.
Fifty Scents wax melts offers a variety of enticing scents that can be paired or used individually to create a unique Melt Moment for each user. To read Jasmines blog or to find out more about Fifty Scents wax melts visit: https://fiftyscents.com/blogs/fifty-scents-products. To try Fifty Scents wax melts for yourself, go to http://budurl.me/jasfree16.
Local dealers are our partners in the auto business and we work together to ensure that our members are highly satisfied - both with their experience at the dealership as well as with SCCU."
Space Coast Credit Union recently honored six local auto dealers with its Watchdog Dealer of the Year award, recognizing the superior service they provided to SCCU members in 2015.
The award, which has been presented annually to local dealers since 2009, is calculated based on both SCCU member survey ratings and total loan volume generated during the year prior.
This years recipients include: Coconut Creek Automall (Broward County), AutoNation Chevrolet Doral (Miami-Dade County), Daytona Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram (Volusia and Flagler Counties), Bev Smith Toyota (Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin and Palm Beach Counties), Rosner Chevrolet (Brevard County) and Universal Nissan Hyundai (Orange, Osceola and Seminole Counties).
Local dealers are our partners in the auto business and we work together to ensure that our members are highly satisfied - both with their experience at the dealership as well as with SCCU. We value our members feedback and share their voice through uncensored ratings and reviews displayed on our website to help inform and protect other members, says Jodie Kinley-Smith; SCCUs Indirect Lending Sales Manager. This award is a way to thank and recognize those dealers who provide exceptional service to our members.
In addition to a plaque commemorating their achievement, each recognized dealer also receives a special vehicle sale promoted to SCCU members at no charge to the dealership.
SCCUs Indirect Lending program, the main driver behind SCCUs Watchdog Dealer of the Year award, not only saves members money, but also time, by enabling members to obtain their loan when purchasing a vehicle right at the dealership.
SCCU Members' Watchdog promises to always watch out for its members' financial interests in all aspects of their lives. Beyond ratings and reviews, SCCU fulfills its promise by using its experience and knowledge to assist members through the auto buying decision, and providing the most competitive auto loan rates with no hidden costs.
For more information about SCCUs Indirect Lending program and a full list of participating dealers, visit SCCU.com/Dealers.
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Space Coast Credit Union was chartered in 1951 and is headquartered in Melbourne, Florida. The Credit Union serves over 300,000 members with assets of over $3 billion through a network of 58 branches and over 100 ATMs located throughout Florida and through its web site, SCCU.com. Space Coast Credit Union is open for membership to anyone who lives or works in the fourteen Florida counties it serves. Locations can be found at SCCU.com/Locations.
Montana Avenue has always embodied such a strong family feel. Not only is it a true pleasure to be among such a wonderful community, but also an honor to be able to give back to our beloved clientele and to those less fortunate." -- Sandra Miller
With a commitment to community, premium lifestyle real estate brand, Engel & Volkers Santa Monica, joins the annual Montana Avenue Art Walk with an event to benefit a beloved local charity.
The afternoon will include an exhibition of exquisite pieces by artist Amadea Bailey, as well as a fantastic selection of prizes as part of a raffle. Bailey has generously contributed one of her beautiful paintings valued at $500 to the raffle, of which all of the proceeds will be donated to One Voice. A non-profit organization helping families living at poverty level, One Voice provides programs ranging from emergency relief services to scholars programs in efforts of bettering the quality of peoples lives.
Montana Avenue has always embodied such a strong family feel, says Sandra Miller, Engel & Volkers Santa Monica License Partner. Not only is it a true pleasure to be among such a wonderful community, but also an honor to be able to give back to our beloved clientele and to those less fortunate.
The Art Walk will take place on Thursday, July 21st from 5:00 to 9:00 pm, where Engel & Volkers guests will be treated to gourmet bites, sponsored by Montana Avenue favorite, Ox & Son, as well as small batch wines by Rudius and Praxis wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties. Further details and raffle updates can be found on http://www.MontanaAveArtWalk.com leading up to the event.
About Engel & Volkers
Since its beginning in 1977 as a specialty boutique providing exclusive, high-end real estate services in Hamburg, Germany, Engel & Volkers has become one of the worlds leading companies specializing in the sale and lease of premium residential and commercial property, yachts and private aviation. Engel & Volkers currently operates a global network of over 7,000 real estate advisors in more than 700 brokerages spanning 37 countries across five continents, offering both private and institutional clients a professionally tailored range of luxury services. It established its North America corporate headquarters in 2007 and opened its first brokerage in the same year. Committed to exceptional service, Engel & Volkers supports its advisors with an array of premium quality business services; marketing programs and tools; multiple platforms for mobile, social and web; as well as access to its global network of real estate professionals, property listings and market data. Engel & Volkers is an active supporter of the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Opportunity Act. Each brokerage is independently owned and operated.
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For more information please contact:
Sheela Shouhed
Director of Communications
Sheela.Shouhed(at)evusa.com
Krishna Chintam, Managing Director, Kellton Tech with the award "Digital Innovations in Service Provider Industry" We are happy to be recognized, and will continue to harness the digital possibilities to affect transformational change in the existing systems
Kellton Tech, a global IT company, was awarded in the category Digital Innovations in Service Provider Industry, at the 3rd edition of The Digitizing India Awards, a Cisco initiative in collaboration with CNBC-TV18. In the ceremony held in New Delhi today, Kellton Tech received this award in recognition of its significant strides towards transforming digital experiences for organizations.
Kellton Tech, a pioneering enabler of digital transformation with strong grip on enterprise solutions, has been in the news radar for its rapid growth, successful deployments, acquisitions, and revolutionary use of its IoT innovation, KLGAME. KLGAMETM engages the elements of ISMAC (Internet of Things, Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) in a synergistic manner to provide holistic communication experience, and has already been implemented in various conferences besides having fielded some pilot projects across the globe.
Kellton Tech was also the implementation partner for mSehat, a SIFPSA initiative empowering frontline health workers to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes in five districts of Uttar Pradesh through ICT-enabled solution. Kellton Tech developed this cloud-hosted, mobile platform, which was touted to be the largest enterprise mobile application rollout in health and e-governance sector in India. mSehat was launched by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Shri Akhilesh Yadav last year.
Speaking on the occasion, Karanjit Singh, CEO, Kellton Tech said: We had invested in digital technologies much before the wave became apparent, and thus have the first-mover advantage. Our successful implementations of digital change have enabled comprehensive digitization of paper-based systems. We help businesses to deliver completely personalized experience through our ISMAC expertise, thus enhancing their value proposition to customers.
Expressing his delight on receiving the award, Krishna Chintam, Founder and Managing Director, Kellton Tech said: We are happy to be thus recognized, and will continue to harness the digital possibilities to affect transformational change in the existing systems. In fact, mSehat has positively impacted over 1 crore lives and will touch up to 1.2 - 1.5 crore people soon. Through our various projects, we are proud to contribute our bit to mission Digital India.
About Kellton Tech Solutions Ltd.
Kellton Tech Solutions Limited is a public listed (BSE & NSE: KELLTONTEC), CMMi Level 3 and ISO 9001:2008 certified global IT services organization. It is headquartered in Hyderabad, India and has development centers in the United States, Europe and India. For two innovative decades, Kellton Tech has put into practice the vision upon which it was founded viz. "to offer infinite possibilities with technology". The company is committed to providing end-to-end IT solutions, strategic technology consulting, and offshore product development services. Kellton Tech serves the full gamut of customers including startups, SMBs, enterprises, and Fortune 500 businesses. The organization has serviced customers representing a wide range of verticals including retail, travel, e-commerce, education, hospitality, advertising, market research, manufacturing, consumer goods, logistics, SCM, and non-profits. Kellton Tech is also a global leader in providing Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Mobile Application Development, Enterprise Solutions & Internet of Things.
Media Contact Details
Anupam Kumari (Manager Corporate Communications)
Kellton Tech Solutions Limited.
M: +91 8179592650 ; O: +91 40 44333000 Extn. 3009
media(at)kelltontech(dot)com
The partners of Dellecker Wilson King McKenna Ruffier and Sos have been named to the Florida Super Lawyers list for 2016.
Robert Dellecker has been selected to Florida Super Lawyers for Personal Injury - General since 2007.
Brian Wilson has been selected for Personal Injury - General, Professional Liability, Insurance Coverage since 2006.
Samuel King has been selected for Personal Injury - General, Personal Injury - Products, Personal Injury - Medical Malpractice since 2007.
Kenneth McKenna has been selected for Personal Injury - General, Personal Injury - Medical Malpractice, Insurance Coverage since 2010 and was named to the Rising Stars list in 2009.
William Ruffier was selected for Personal Injury - Medical Malpractice, Personal Injury - General, Business Litigation from 2006 2007 and since 2009.
Tony Sos has been selected for Personal Injury - General, Insurance Coverage since 2013 and was named to the Rising Stars list from 2009 2012.
Doug Martin has been named to the Rising Stars list since 2011 for Personal Injury - General, Personal Injury - Medical Malpractice, Personal Injury - Products.
Super Lawyers, organized by Thomson Reuters, is a rating service of outstanding lawyers. Their patented selection process involves independent research, peer nominations and peer evaluations. Lawyers enter the candidate pool through a managing partner survey, peer nomination, third-party feedback, or identification by the Super Lawyers research team. Each candidate is then evaluated on 12 indicators of peer recognition and professional achievement. Selection one year does not guarantee selection the next year, as the selection process is repeated yearly.
Blue Ribbon Panel members then evaluate candidates within their primary practice area. Based on all these results, final selections are made by Super Lawyers. Each year no more than five percent of lawyers in each state are selected to the Super Lawyers list. No more than 2.5 percent of lawyers are selected to the Rising Stars list, and are only eligible for the list if they are 40 or younger or have been practicing for ten years or less. Visit http://www.superlawyers.com/about/selection_process.html to learn more about the selection process.
Dellecker, Wilson, King, McKenna, Ruffier & Sos is a personal injury law firm that has been dedicated to fighting on behalf of Florida victims since 1989. Visit dwklaw.com to learn more.
American delegations chose the Riviera Maya to host the next gastronomic meeting this past month when they met at their annual congress in San Diego, California. Over 100 of the Most Prestigious French Chefs in North America Come Together for Mexicos First Gastronomic Meeting of its Kind, June 17-21, 2017
The AAA Five Diamond Grand Velas Riviera Maya will host the annual North American conference for the Maitres Cuisiniers de France (Master Chefs of France) and Academie Culinaire de France (AFC) in 2017. The event will bring together more than 100 of the most prestigious chefs from the United States, Canada and Mexico to the country for the first time from June 17 to 21.
The Executive Chef of Grand Velas Riviera Maya, Michel Mustiere, and Chef Philippe Fournier, both Master Chefs of France (MCF), will host the annual conference. Both organizations share a common goal of promoting the culinary and pastry arts of France and carrying on the great French traditions. The meeting's discussions will include new culinary trends, support of culinary education, and participation in the worlds top gastronomic competitions. The organizations Best Chef of the Year will also be named.
Members of the Maitres Cuisiniers de France are all French nationals. Selected by their peers, they are regarded as the most highly skilled in techniques and execution of the French culinary arts. These maestros, all trained at Michelin star-caliber institutions, are reshaping modern French cuisine in America. Members of the Academie de France include all nationalities, and welcome professionals from the entire food and beverage industry.
American delegations of both groups chose the Riviera Maya to host the next gastronomic meeting this past month when they met at their annual congress in San Diego, California.
It will be an excellent opportunity to showcase the flavors of Mexican cuisine and Mexicos position in the vanguard of international cuisine, said Chef Mustiere. Attending chefs will experience the best of regional cuisine, culture and the natural beauty of the region.
Leading chefs in these organizations include Daniel Boulud, Jerome Ferrer and Eric Ripert among many others.
Late last year, MCF Chefs Christian Tetedoie, Claude Le-Tohic, Claude Godard and Mustiere joined together to present a 10-course culinary experience complimentary for guests of Grand Velas Riviera Maya setting the stage for the upcoming congress.
For more information on Grand Velas Riviera Maya, visit http://rivieramaya.grandvelas.com/.
About Grand Velas Riviera Maya:
Set on 206 acres of pristine jungle and mangroves and with the finest white sand beach in the Riviera Maya, the AAA Five Diamond Grand Velas Riviera Maya is an ultra-luxury all-inclusive resort. Guests can choose among three separate ambiances in this Leading Hotel of the World, including adults only oceanfront, family friendly ocean view and a Zen-like tropical setting, embraced by the flora and fauna of the Yucatan Peninsulas jungle. All 539 designer-like suites are exceptionally spacious, more than 1,100 square feet each, all with balconies, and some with private plunge pools. All feature fully stocked mini bars, plasma TVs, Wi-Fi, LOccitane amenities, artisanal tequila, and Nespresso coffee machines. Bathrooms deserve special mention with walk in glass shower, deep soaking Jacuzzi tubs and marble interior. Eight restaurants, including five gourmet offerings, present a tour through Mexico, Europe and Asia. Cocina de Autor, at the hands of world celebrity chefs Bruno Oteiza, Mikel Alonso and Xavier Perez Stone, holds the AAA Five Diamond Award, the first all-inclusive restaurant in the world to win this prestigious distinction. Grand Velas Spa, a Leading Spa of the World, is the region's largest spa sanctuary at more than 90,000 square feet, known for its authentic Mexican treatments, offerings from around world and signature seven-step water journey. Other features include 24-hour Personal Concierge; 24/7 in-suite service; three swimming pools; two fitness centers; water sports; innovative Kids Clubs and Teens Club; Karaoke Bar; Koi Bar; Piano Bar, and business center. The resort offers more than 91,000 square feet of meeting space and outdoor areas for events inclusive of a 31,000-square-foot Convention Center, able to accommodate up to 2,700 guests. The resort has won numerous awards from Travel + Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, USA Today and several other magazines and major companies worldwide. This year, the resort entered TripAdvisors Hall of Fame for obtaining the Certificate of Excellence for five consecutive years in addition to the Signature Spa being awarded Best Luxury Resort Spa-The Americas at the World Luxury Spa Awards 2014. Grand Velas Riviera Maya was built and is operated by Eduardo Vela Ruiz, majority owner, founder and President of Velas Resorts, with his brother Juan Vela, Vice President of Velas Resorts.
John has been an instrumental part of our team as we experience rapid growth.
TechPoint, the growth initiative for Indianas tech ecosystem, is recognizing Indianas tech builders with the announcement of the second annual Tech 25 Class of 2016. We are pleased to announce that John Henry, Vennlis Manager of Customer Success made the list.
In 2015, TechPoint launched the Tech 25, a prestigious selection of twenty-five individuals who are critical and exceptional performers helping to grow our communitys tech and tech-enabled companies, but who not being the CEO or other top executives dont get celebrated publicly as often as they deserve.
Tech 25 winners represent a wide range of roles within tech companies, such as software developers, financial analysts, marketing directors and product managers. Executives could only nominate one team member for the Tech 25 Class of 2016, and a total of 57 Indiana technology companies participated in the nomination process this year.
At Vennli, John Henry combines his interests in consulting and entrepreneurship as Manager of Customer Success. John began working there while earning his MBA at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining Vennli, John launched two successful online startups, worked in new product development at Corporate Executive Board, and led consulting engagements in Washington, D.C. for Booz Allen Hamilton.
John has been an instrumental part of our team as we experience rapid growth. Our products mission is to incorporate customer choice insights into business decisions, and John lives this every day. He drives our client engagements towards success and advocates for our customers needs internally. Additionally, he has a lot of energy and is just a great guy to have on the team, says Bart Frischknecht, VP of Research & Customer Success at Vennli.
Winners were selected from three main categories, reinforcing the core roles that building product and building revenue play: 10 in tech product/R&D, 8 in sales/marketing, and 7 in other. In addition to being star performers at their companies, winners are committed team players who build others up through mentoring, volunteering and positive example and are committed to contributing to the broader tech community.
The entire Tech 25 Class of 2016 is viewable here: http://techpoint.org/tech-25-winners-2016/
ABOUT TECHPOINT
TechPoint is the nonprofit, industry-led growth initiative for Indianas technology companies and overall tech ecosystem. The team is focused on attracting talent, accelerating scale-up companies, activating the community, and amplifying stories of success. For more information, please visit http://www.techpoint.org.
ABOUT VENNLI
Vennli is the platform for visualizing and analyzing how customers make choices so that businesses can make quick, targeted decisions about marketing, product development, and sales. The SaaS platform combines ongoing customer surveying and a proven competitive strategy model within an advanced data visualization and analytics software. Vennli enables businesses to be different from competitors in ways important to customers and accelerate growth. To learn more, visit http://vennli.com
The old Customer Hub is on the left, and the updated Customer Hub is on the right. We think our clients will be very happy with the changes and how easy the new Customer Hub is to use.
Small business web design and online marketing company LinkNow Media has announced that they are launching a redesign of their Customer Hub.
LinkNow Media's clients use Customer Hub to manage their website content and other aspects of their online presence. According to Eve Mendelovitch, Director of Operations at LinkNow Media, the redesign is intended to make the Customer Hub more effective and easier to use.
"Our goal in redoing the Customer Hub design is to make the onboarding process as seamless as possible, both for our clients and our staff," says Mendelovitch. "Our long term goal with Customer Hub is to create a fully interactive member area where our clients can submit changes, track progress, and manage all aspects of their websites. This redesign is the first step towards this goal, and we think our clients will be very happy with the changes and how easy the new Customer Hub is to use."
There is no firm launch date, but LinkNow Media plans to release the update in the coming days. It will immediately be available to all existing customers and all new customers moving forward.
We have evolved from a loyalty marketing agency to a business that is sought after for all things loyalty
Kobie Marketing, Inc, a leading loyalty marketing provider, today announced the opening of its Kobie Contact Center in St. Petersburg, Fla.
By bringing first-line support of the customer experience in house, the loyalty marketing provider now has visibility into the entire loyalty experience. Contact Center representatives will engage one-on-one with clients loyalty members via phone, chat and email. Kobies existing loyalty fulfillment services will be relocated to create a comprehensive Contact Center wholly engaged in managing a superior customer experience.
The Kobie Contact Center will enhance the loyalty fulfillment and customer support work that its previously outsourced contact center started. Now, Loyalty Customer Service Representatives will be available to Kobies clients members for program information, support and extensive redemption options.
We have evolved from a loyalty marketing agency to a business that is sought after for all things loyalty, said Margaret Meraw, vice president of Loyalty Operations at Kobie. Having this direct first-line engagement with members is the next step in this progression and is essential to developing a more comprehensive knowledge of member insights and preferences.
With its new contact center and growing roster of clients, Kobie expects to create more than 60 new jobs in St. Petersburg this year. Recruitment, hiring, training and quality for the contact center will be handled internally to ensure client brands and loyalty programs are meeting and exceeding expectations. It will be led by the Vice President and Director of Operations, as well as a director for the contact center.
Its great to see a local company expanding and stimulating the economy so consistently, said Rick Kriseman, mayor of St. Petersburg. Kobie not only continues to create jobs for our community, but it allows employees an opportunity to be part of a growing company that gives its talent the chance to advance and succeed with it. Were excited to hear of yet another expansion that will create more jobs and opportunity for growth.
To learn more about Kobie Marketings contact center, click here.
About Kobie Marketing, Inc.
Kobie Marketing is a global leader in loyalty marketing and an industry pioneer, delivering end-to-end strategy, technology and program management solutions. For over 25 years, Kobie has provided innovative loyalty experiences to the worlds most successful brands, helping clients receive incremental revenue, product and household penetration, and brand advocacy. Kobie drives results and ROI through Kobie Alchemy, a best-in-class loyalty marketing technology platform. To learn more, visit http://www.kobie.com.
AcctTwo, a leading consulting firm and provider of cloud-based ERP solutions, announced that the firm has hired Mark Lincoln in the role of Business Development Executive. Mark comes to AcctTwo with nearly 25 years of experience in nonprofit executive financial management, strategic planning, and operations. He has served with numerous organizations, including Every Home for Christ, Hope for the Heart, the Hope Center Foundation, Wellspring of Hope, e3 Partners and I Am Second Ministry. He received a Master's in Business Administration from Regis University and was a finalist for Dallas Business Journals CFO of the Year in 2011.
Mark brings a keen understanding of nonprofit finance and operations. He has a great deal of experience with the new technologies and business systems available to nonprofits in the new world of cloud and SaaS solutions, and, as the founder of Ministry to Ministry Shared Services, he believes in AcctTwo's vision of Business Process as a Service solutions for nonprofit and faith-based organizations.
"I couldn't be more excited to have someone of Mark's caliber and with his experience join us at AcctTwo," said Marcus Wagner, Founder and CEO of AcctTwo. "I know Mark to be a well-respected, talented, and highly ethical force in the faith-based and nonprofit community, and we can't wait to learn from his experience and benefit from his leadership. I look forward to working with Mark to further establish AcctTwo as a hub for churches and nonprofits to find advice, support, and community as they grow and streamline their operations and take advantage of new technologies."
AcctTwo has decided to make this strategic hire because of the firm's continued long-term commitment to providing technology and services to churches and nonprofit organizations, and the firm's commitment to building a community where the leaders of nonprofit finance and operations can collaborate and learn from one another. "In a fast-paced and shifting landscape of new technologies and evolving regulations," adds Wagner, "we'd like to see churches and nonprofit organizations share the knowledge they've learned about technology, solutions, integrations, and best practices. There's no need to go it alone."
Mark Lincoln shares in this belief that churches and nonprofits should help one another and benefit from the collective experience of those who've gone before. "Sitting down with Marcus privately to discuss his vision to serve those in the nonprofit community was such an encouragement to discover that we both were in such alignment in our values and vision," said Lincoln. "It is that vision that moved me to join him in his pursuit and to be a part of the already exceptional and dedicated team at AcctTwo."
Additional resources:
About AcctTwo:
AcctTwo is a leading consulting firm and reseller of cloud-based accounting and ERP software. Our sophisticated systems solve the issues growing churches and non-profits face today. AcctTwo also provides Business-Process-as-a-Service solutions, allowing clients to focus on their mission. We provide the people, processes, technology, and office facilities to perform these functions, while allowing clients to collaborate interactively through an on-line portal.
AcctTwo is headquartered in Houston, Texas. For more information, please visit http://www.accttwo.com or call 713-744-8400.
Contacts
Peter Wagner
Director of Marketing
Cell: 512.415.6846
Email:pwagner(at)accttwo.com
Chris Wailes
VP, National Media Relations
Pierpont Communications
Direct:713.627.2223
Email:cwailes(at)piercom.com
With this integration, Aarki is able to efficiently collect necessary data to dynamically improve our user models and implement optimizations that will drive campaign performances.
Aarki today announced it is now integrated with mParticle, a mobile data platform that allows app developer to collect and send data to partners through a single API. This integration provides Aarki with rich data from app developers, enabling it deliver stronger app marketing campaigns.
As a leading provider of programmatic advertising, Aarkis big data analytics capability enables it to develop a user model for any pre and post-install metrics. The company utilizes Bayesian machine learning algorithms and multivariate technology to match target audiences with the right ad creative and media placements. This ensures it delivers strong app marketing performances to its clients no matter what their key metrics are.
Through this integration, app developer can now collect data and determine what and how much data will be sent to Aarki. In turn, Aarki can leverage the data it receives to further improve the accuracy of its audience targeting by dynamically updating the user model for key performance indicators. By targeting ads more accurately, app developers can achieve their performance goals and get stronger return on ad spend.
Our partnership with mParticle allows us to provide more targeted user acquisition campaigns to app developers, said Sid Bhatt, ceo of Aarki. With this integration, Aarki is able to efficiently collect necessary data to dynamically improve our user models and implement optimizations that will drive campaign performances.
About Aarki
Aarki is transforming mobile app marketing through unified optimization of creative and media. It delivers superior results using proprietary machine learning technology for performance optimization. The company's customer base includes leading brands, agencies, and app developers. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Aarki is a global company with offices in Beijing, London, Manila, Tokyo, and Yerevan. For more information, please visit http://www.aarki.com or follow us on Twitter: @aarkimobile.
Contact
Raj Misra
svp and global head of marketing
media(at)aarki(dot)com
Mike and I have remained committed to this program over the years because youth perform far better when they are provided the same opportunities as their more affluent peers.
For the fourth consecutive summer, one thousand of the Northeast Valleys underserved children will experience a personal back-to-school shopping spree, thanks to a $100,000 donation from Paradise Valley residents Ellie and Michael Ziegler.
All children, regardless of socioeconomic factors, deserve the opportunity to start the school year off on a positive note, on an even playing field, said Lisa Hurst, CEO of the Greater Scottsdale Boy & Girls Club.
To prevent children from low-income, distressed environments from starting school behind their peers, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale has implemented this program with Kohls, now in its fourth year. This series of altruistic shopping events began at Desert Ridge Marketplace in mid-July, and will conclude in August.
Ellies connection to the Boys & Girls Club goes back generations. Her grandfather, Ellis I. Levitt, founded Des Moines, Iowas first Boys & Girls Club. Her mother, Maddie Levitt, volunteered extensively for the clubs, and now Ellie and her husband also fund the Maddie Levitt Youth of the Year scholarship, honoring 12 graduating Phoenix Boys & Girls Club kids with partial college scholarships.
My mother carried on my grandfathers legacy. She volunteered tirelessly, and as children, we were always involved in her efforts, Ellie said. Mike and I have remained committed to this program over the years because youth perform far better when they are provided the same opportunities as their more affluent peers.
One thousand children will receive a backpack filled with school supplies and a $100 gift card to Kohls for clothes and necessities.
Director of Outreach Marybell Ramirez-Deeds said participants, ages 5-18, are selected from a those who are on full or partial scholarships, based on the criteria used for the federal governments free and reduced-price lunch program.
Youth from all nine branches of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale, including Fountain Hills, Phoenix, Mesa and Peach Springs, on the Hualapai Indian Community in northern Arizona will be chosen to participate.
A majority of the children are from single-parent households, where the parents are typically living paycheck to paycheck, Ramirez-Deeds said. Our volunteers assist each child in selecting the right items to build their confidence as they go back to school. It is such a joy to watch their faces light up.
About Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale:
Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale was established in 1954 serving 282 youth in order to keep them productive and safe during critical non-school hours. Since then, our organization has added, built and expanded Clubs, served thousands upon thousands of more children and teens, and expanded our reach to communities across the Northeast Valley and in Indian Country. Today, we serve more than 18,000 youth providing the same mission services established 60 years ago. In over 60 years, our commitment to providing quality opportunities for youth has never wavered. For more information visit http://www.bgcs.org
Media contact:
Christine Holtz
Phoenix Marketing Associates
602-282-0202
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Cronkite News has released a major poll with Univision News and The Dallas Morning News on important election issues involving the U.S.-Mexico border. Photo by Courtney Pedroza
The overwhelming majority of residents living along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border are opposed to the construction of a wall between their countries, according to a major bilingual poll released today by Arizona State Universitys Cronkite News, Univision News, and The Dallas Morning News.
The Cronkite News-Univision News-Dallas Morning News Border Poll found:
86 percent of border residents in Mexico and 72 percent of U.S. border residents were against building a wall between Mexico and the U.S.
Compared to other border issues, 77 percent of border residents in Mexico and 70 percent of U.S. border residents described building the wall as not important.
In addition, a majority of residents along both sides of the border also see the current tone of the U.S. presidential campaign as potentially damaging for relations between the two countries (Mexico: 69 percent; U.S.: 59 percent).
As a journalist, I hope this poll serves as a bridge in bringing two countries closer by shining a light on the border, a vibrant, complex and often misunderstood region where people on both sides have more in common than the differences that are too often highlighted, said Alfredo Corchado, the former Dallas Morning News Mexico City bureau chief who now serves as an editor on the borderlands desk at Cronkite News.
The Cronkite News-Univision News-Dallas Morning News Border Poll surveyed 1,427 residents in 14 cities along the U.S.-Mexico border to assess attitudes and opinions on important election issues such as the local economy, immigration and border security. Part of ASUs Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Cronkite News is the student-staffed, professionally led news division of Arizona PBS.
The poll was conducted in April and May 2016 by Baselice & Associates Inc., a public research opinion firm based in Austin, Texas, with extensive experience in the Southwest.
While people in Mexico and the United States have opinions about the border, this unique survey explores the opinions of people who live along that border, said pollster Mike Baselice, president of Baselice & Associates. We have the benefit of having asked several of the questions in this survey 15 years ago. Therefore, this survey tracks similarities and differences along with the responses to new questions.
In comparison to the 2001 poll, opinions on the status of the border region among residents have become less favorable. In 2001, roughly 40 percent of residents on both sides of the border felt the region had gotten better. When asked the same question this year, less than 20 percent said the region had gotten better.
The comprehensive Border Poll, which had an overall margin of error of 2.6 percent, surveyed residents in seven pairs of sister cities stretching from California/Baja California to Arizona/Sonora and Texas/Tamaulipas.
The 2016 poll showed that residents in neighboring border communities were deeply connected. Both share similar concerns for their families on issues such as safety, jobs and education.
When asked: Do you like your neighbors in U.S./Mexico, 86 percent of U.S. border residents said yes, as did 79 percent of border residents in Mexico.
When asked: Which of the following best describes how much your city depends on your sister city across the border, 79 percent of U.S. border city residents and 69 percent of Mexicos border city residents in Mexico said their cities are either somewhat dependent or very much dependent upon each other.
When sister city residents (such as those in El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Chihuahua) were asked if they favored or opposed allowing workers to cross the border to work and then return home, 76 percent of U.S. border residents and 85 percent of border residents in Mexico were in favor.
The U.S.-Mexico border is a major issue this election year, said Cronkite School Dean and Arizona PBS CEO Christopher Callahan. This extraordinary poll captures the voices of the people who actually live and work along the border, providing a critical component to the national discourse this election season and showing how united border residents are on many issues.
In addition to publishing the polls results, Univision News has assigned a seasoned television reporter and a team of digital journalists to focus on its most relevant findings. Univision Networks national newscast, Noticiero Univision, will feature their reporting during the week of the polls publication, while Univision News website, UnivisionNoticias.com, will launch a permanent section dedicated to border issues that will include the poll-related stories, videos and graphics prepared specifically by its team of journalists as well as other stories dealing with life on the border.
In the midst of an exceptionally contentious presidential election in which immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border have become hot topics, this poll provides a fascinating and underreported perspective that may surprise many voters, said Daniel Coronell, president of News, Univision Communications Inc. (UCI). Univision News has always given special attention to all aspects of the immigration debate, and now during the 2016 election cycle we are even more committed to being Hispanic Americas go-to source of information and analysis on border-related issues. This poll and our new dedicated digital section are two examples of this focus.
The Dallas Morning News will feature a multimedia package of stories on its website, dallasnews.com, as well as a full print report in its July 18 and July 19 editions. The news package includes a close look at how residents in Texas towns from El Paso to Brownsville view life along the border.
The Dallas Morning News is proud to be a partner in this project, said Mike Wilson, editor of The Dallas Morning News. Polling people on both sides of the border provides special insight into issues affecting both countries and gives readers and political leaders some of the information they need to make effective public policy decisions.
The Cronkite News Borderlands team of students, led by award-winning veteran journalists Corchado and Angela Kocherga, has produced multimedia packages and reports for the Cronkite News nightly newscast, which reaches 1.9 million households in Arizona, and the Cronkite News website at cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
This election year, a lot of people are talking about the border and the wall but not to border residents, Kocherga said. Those who live on the border know the issues first hand, and they are directly affected by policies. This groundbreaking poll reflects their views.
This summer, Cronkite News student journalists have traveled to the border, interviewing residents in English and Spanish about the Border Poll. Cronkite student Courtney Pedroza visited seven border cities between Nogales, Ariz., and Laredo, Texas, to interview people and document their issues and concerns.
Working on this border poll opened my eyes to a community I hadnt really seen before, Pedroza said. One I dont think people understand well. With my camera, it gave me the opportunity to document their lives, hopes and frustrations.
The Cronkite News-Univision-Dallas Morning News Border Poll was funded by the media partners and the public through the crowdfunding platform, Beacon, which matched the contributions.
Between the three news organizations, numerous stories and graphics are being produced for this project.
Our Borderlands team is committed to telling stories of life in the region, said Kevin Dale, executive editor of Cronkite News at Arizona PBS. This project with our partners at Univision and The Morning News illuminates the issues and concerns faced every day by those residents.
The complete Cronkite News-Univision-Dallas Morning News Border Poll and coverage from Cronkite News can be found at http://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2016/07/17/border-poll-overview/.
Follow the border poll on social media using the hashtag #borderpoll, as well as on Cronkite News social media (Twitter: @cronkitenews; Facebook: /cronkitenewsonline), Univision News social media (Twitter: @UnivisionNews; Facebook: /UnivisionNews; hashtag: #UnivisionNews) and Dallas Morning News Social Media (Twitter: @dallasnews; Facebook: /dallasmorningnews).
Tom Reichart, vice president of business development at Vantiv Integrated Payments. For more than 60 years, RSPA has promoted the growth and success of stakeholders and businesses whose work touches the Point of Sale technology ecosystem by providing essential knowledge and networking opportunities.
Vantiv Integrated Payments, a Vantiv company (NYSE: VNTV), and a provider of payments technology and services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), announced that Tom Reichart, vice president of business development at Vantiv Integrated Payments, will be sworn in as chairman of the board for Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA) at RetailNOW, held July 31 August 3, 2016 in Grapevine, TX. Reichart, who is currently Chairman-elect, has supported RSPA membership growth and critical organizational goals as a board member for the past seven years and has been affiliated with RSPA for more than 22 years.
Tom is a proven leader and has been a wonderful supporter of, and advocate of RSPA; we are looking forward to working more closely as he assumes this new role, said Kelly Funk, RSPA president and chief executive officer. He brings more than 44 years of experience in the industry and, as chairman, will continue to help accelerate the success of our members.
For more than 60 years, RSPA has promoted the growth and success of stakeholders and businesses whose work touches the Point of Sale technology ecosystem by providing essential knowledge and networking opportunities. RSPA members include resellers, distributors, hardware manufacturers, software developers, consultants and service providers who bring retail technology solutions to the marketplace.
We are thrilled to support Toms involvement with RSPA and dedication to advance the retail technology industry, said Matt Taylor, group president, integrated payments and emerging channels at Vantiv. As chairman of the board, Tom will help shape the future of the industry, and connect the Point of Sale technology ecosystem. Given his commitment and experience, theres no better person for the job.
A graduate of Eastern Illinois University, Reichart began his career at NCR Corporation, where he spent 32 years managing retail sales distribution team and distributors in the U.S. and internationally. In 2006, Reichart joined Mercury Payments Systems, now Vantiv Integrated Payments, where he is currently vice president of business development.
ABOUT RSPA
RSPA accelerates the success of our members in the point of sale and retail technology ecosystem by providing knowledge and connections. We annually host two signature events, RetailNOW and Inspire to provide live, face to face education and networking. Other member benefits include professional development and certification programing, a legal hotline, webinars, discounted shipping and event access, industry advocacy, as well as several publications. Learn more by going to http://www.gorspa.org.
ABOUT VANTIV
Vantiv, Inc. (NYSE: VNTV) is a leading payment processor differentiated by an integrated technology platform. Vantiv offers a comprehensive suite of traditional and innovative payment processing and technology solutions to merchants and financial institutions of all sizes, enabling them to address their payment processing needs through a single provider. We build strong relationships with our customers, helping them become more efficient, more secure and more successful. Vantiv is the second largest merchant acquirer and the largest PIN debit acquirer based on number of transactions in the U.S. The company's growth strategy includes expanding further into high-growth channels and verticals, including integrated payments, eCommerce, and merchant bank. Visit us at http://www.vantiv.com, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.
2016 Vantiv, LLC. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks, service marks and trade names referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. Vantiv and other Vantiv products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of Vantiv, LLC in the U.S. and other countries.
International law firm Greenberg Traurig, P.A. today announced the addition of Shareholder Jim Lang to its Tampa office. Lang is a corporate and tax attorney who focuses his practice on facilitating federal and state tax credit incentives designed to promote the revitalization and economic development of communities in Florida and nationally.
Experienced in the New Markets Tax Credits program, Lang assists borrowers, community development entities, and investors in securing tax credits for qualifying projects. He also has significant experience handling tax credits for affordable housing, renewable energy, and historic rehabilitation. Thus far, in 2016, Lang has closed or is facilitating more than $400 million in tax credits for various projects involving corporate and nonprofit expansions, renovations, and new developments.
This is a great opportunity to leverage Greenberg Traurigs national platform to expand my growing practice, Lang said. With future tax credit allocations expected to increase, I look forward to utilizing my experience and knowledge to enhance Greenberg Traurigs business in this area by partnering with developers, financial institutions, and companies throughout the United States.
Lang has broad experience working with investor, lender, and business clients throughout the structuring and transaction process. He is known for guiding clients through complicated tax and compliance issues, and identifying strategic opportunities to utilize tax credit enhancements.
We are very pleased to have Jim join our team, said David B. Weinstein, Managing Shareholder of Greenberg Traurigs Tampa office. His background and experience will provide invaluable counsel to both existing and future clients seeking to use tax credits to achieve their business objectives. For Greenberg Traurig, this is another example of how we provide value and strive to be a one-stop shop for our clients legal needs.
Lang received an LL.M. from the University of Florida and a law degree from Florida State University. He is a member of the American Bar Association Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, and the American Bar Association Tax Credits and Tax Equity Financing Committee. He is admitted to practice both in Florida and New York.
Also joining Lang at Greenberg Traurig is his associate, Justin Mayor.
About Greenberg Traurig Tampa
Greenberg Traurigs Tampa office represents clients in a broad array of civil and criminal litigation, trial, and appellate practice in state and federal courtsincluding complex and high-stakes trialsboth in Florida and around the country. The firm also regularly represents clients in labor & employment, real estate, environmental, land development, corporate, bankruptcy & creditors' rights, public finance, tax, and other business planning and transactions.
About Greenberg Traurig, LLP
Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, multi-practice law firm with approximately 1,900 attorneys serving clients from 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm is No. 1 on the 2015 Law360 Most Charitable Firms list, third largest in the U.S. on the 2015 Law360 400, on the 2015 Am Law Global 100, and among the 2015 BTI Brand Elite. More information at: http://www.gtlaw.com.
Keri Nicholas, a Realtor in Menlo Park, CA with Alain Pinel Realtors, ranked 27th nationally among real estate professionals by Real Trends. I show my clients we need to lead the market, not follow it, and it shows in the result.
Keri Nicholas of Alain Pinel Realtors Menlo Park office was named one Americas top real estate professionals by Real Trends, as advertised in The Wall Street Journal. She is now a member of The Thousand Top Real Estate Professionals, a prestigious national awards ranking sponsored annually by Real Trends and advertised in The Wall Street Journal. Nicholas is now ranked in the top one half of 1 percent of the more than 1.1 million Realtors nationwide.
The Thousand real estate professionals was announced on June 24, 2016, with four separate categories honoring the top 250 residential agents and agent teams for excellence in:
Individual Sales ProfessionalsSales volume
Individual Sales ProfessionalsTransaction sides
Team ProfessionalsSales volume
Team ProfessionalsTransaction sides
For the second year, REAL Trends has added two new categories to The Thousand ranking based off of average sales price. This new category is broken down into the top 50 residential agents and agent teams for excellence in:
Individual Sales Professionals Average Sales Price
Team Professionals Average Sales Price
According to The Thousand, Nicholas had sales volume totaling $182,557,200, ranking her 27th in the nation among real estate professionals.
Becoming a member of such an elite group as The Thousand is an incredible accomplishment in any market, but what Nicholas did during these challenging times is impressive on so many levels, said Marti Gallardo, vice president of classified advertising for The Wall Street Journal. Her efforts topped 99.99 percent of more than 1.1 million Realtors nationwide.
Im deeply honored to be ranked among the best of real estate professionals in the country by Real Trends, said Nicholas. I was born and raised in Atherton. I know the local markets intimately, and I believe that knowledge, along with my intense focus on the details of every transaction, distinguishes the value I offer to my clients. I show my clients we need to lead the market, not follow it, and it shows in the result.
Rainy Hake, COO of Alain Pinel Realtors, agreed.
We are extremely proud of Keri and all the hard work and dedication she employed on behalf of her clients to earn this remarkable honor, said Hake. Keris professionalism and work ethic are outstanding examples for all real estate professionals to model, and we are honored to have her on the Alain Pinel Realtors team.
The ranking of The Thousand can be found at: http://www.thethousandrealestateprofessionals.com.
About Alain Pinel Realtors
Alain Pinel Realtors (APR) is the fifth largest residential real estate firm in the United States and the largest privately-owned residential real estate company in California based on its closed-sales volume. The firm has 1,400 agents in more than 30 offices throughout Northern California. Celebrating a quarter century in Bay Area real estate, APR was founded in 1990 by CEO and President Paul L. Hulme, and is based in Saratoga, California. Visit us at apr.com, china.apr.com, facebook.com/AlainPinelRealtors, and @AlainPinel.
About The Thousand
This awards program was developed jointly by WSJ. Custom Studios (and is not affiliated with the Editorial Department) and REAL Trends, a leading source of analysis and information for the residential real estate brokerage industry. REAL Trends The Thousand honors Americas elite real estate professionals and their companies and is compiled and analyzed by REAL Trends with a special ad section included in The Wall Street Journal.
Optima Predict's Scenario Manager The accuracy of Optima Predicts analysis and recommendations will allow PCSES to strategically plan the utilization of resources
Intermedix Corporation announced today its partnership with Pinellas County Safety and Emergency Services, or PCSES, which serves more than 900,000 residents, responding to more than 225,000 requests for assistance annually.
Intermedix will support the strategic growth and planning initiatives of PCSES with its advanced simulation and modeling platform Optima Predict.
The first-of-its-kind solution enables agencies to accurately analyze, model and simulate scenarios to answer complex operational questions across a broad spectrum of fire and EMS challenges. The data-driven insights made available by the platforms analytic capabilities offer powerful justifications for resource allocation and identify optimal solutions for effectiveness and efficiency.
The partnership between Intermedix and PCSES is a testament to the countys commitment to constantly improve the capabilities and services available to its residents and visitors, said Chris Callsen, Vice President of Optima Solutions at Intermedix. The accuracy of Optima Predicts analysis and recommendations will allow PCSES to strategically plan the utilization of resources throughout its growing infrastructure to optimize response time and financial efficiency.
Intermedix Corporation provides technology-enabled solutions for America's health and safety net. The company focuses on the US healthcare and emergency response industries by delivering information technology and business services to manage revenue cycle, promote preparedness, support documentation and reporting, and enable interoperability throughout the healthcare system.
The Optima Predict technology will be on display in San Antonio at this weeks Pinnacle EMS Leadership Conference July 18-22. EMS leaders who want to learn more about the innovative solution can stop by tables 67-68 to get a comprehensive experience with the technology and speak with the Optima team members.
The Liberty University School of Aeronautics (SOA) recently received Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS) approval for its 44th Flight Training Affiliate (FTA) partnership, with Phoenix East Aviation in Daytona Beach, Fla.
FTAs are flight schools that partner with Liberty to provide flight training as part of the schools online Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics degree. The FTA program allows students to pursue a career as a professional pilot. Active military and veteran students, as well as those looking for a career change, can obtain their degree online while conducting all required flight training at a nearby airport. Many students are able to maintain their full-time jobs while they complete their education. Students are able to take online academic courses year-round with eight-week terms, and may finish the degree in as little as two-and-a-half years, based on full-time enrollment.
Libertys online aeronautics program is hailed as one of the most affordable university-level aviation programs.
Initiated in January 2014, Libertys FTA program now has over 550 students enrolled in 44 locations across the country, including schools in Washington, Hawaii, and Florida.
Schools applying to become FTAs undergo a rigorous review by the School of Aeronautics FTA Office, followed by an onsite inspection that investigates all aspects of the flight school to ensure it meets the level of quality required to be part of the FTA program.
The FTA program recently graduated its first two students. One is working as a pilot for Aeroptic, an aerial imagery company, and the other is working as a flight instructor to accumulate flight hours and experience for a career in the airline industry.
The reason I chose the FTA program was that it offered the highest quality education at the most affordable price for a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics, said Charles Vazquez, FTA program graduate. If I had to give a review of (my FTA) aviation adventures, I would give it a five out of five based on the instructors alone all of them saw my vision and helped me to achieve my goal.
Currently, the U.S. is facing a pilot shortage in the airlines, corporate aviation, and military and mission aviation. It is estimated that there will be a need for over 558,000 new pilots worldwide over the next 20 years, according to a 2015 report in Boeings Pilot & Technician Outlook.
Libertys FTA program has created an innovative solution and opportunity for those who have always dreamed of becoming a professional pilot, no matter their stage of life.
By partnering with FTAs that are nationwide, we have brought the training center to the students, said Brian Hough, executive director of business development/affiliate operations for the School of Aeronautics. Now the student doesnt have to unplug from their family or job to attend. They simply schedule their flight training at the local FTA and complete their online degree courses around their schedule. This creates a much more flexible training environment and pathway to a very lucrative career for less than most traditional university degrees cost.
Thanks to Liberty University Online Academy Libertys K-12 online homeschooling program high school students are able to get an early start on their college coursework with dual enrollment classes, while earning their private pilots license at their local airport.
The FTA program is opening doors of opportunity for hundreds of students and meeting a growing industry need, all while providing the level of education, service and value that makes Liberty University one of the nations top rated and fasted growing institutions of higher learning.
For more information on the program, visit Liberty.edu/FTA.
About Liberty University
Liberty University, founded in 1971, is the largest private, nonprofit university in the nation, the largest university in Virginia, and the largest Christian university in the world. Located near the Blue Ridge Mountains on more than 7,000 acres in Lynchburg, Va., Liberty offers more than 500 unique programs of study from the certificate to the doctoral level. More than 250 programs are offered online. Libertys mission is to train Champions for Christ with the values, knowledge, and skills essential for impacting tomorrows world.
Through our partnership with Microsoft, we can fulfill our commitment to driving the growth and success of our clients through developing new ways to leverage technology to solve business problems," said Terry Kerscher, Wipfli partner.
Wipfli LLP (Wipfli) has earned membership in the 2016 Inner Circle for Microsoft Dynamics, an elite group of the most strategic Microsoft Dynamics partners from across the globe. 2016 Inner Circle membership is limited to about 60 partners worldwide, and selection criteria include sales achievements and growth during the 2016 fiscal year. Members of the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle have performed to a high standard of excellence by delivering valuable solutions that help organizations achieve increased success.
We couldnt be more excited about joining the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle, said Terry Kerscher, Partner, CRM, Analytics & Growth Consulting. Through our partnership with Microsoft, we can fulfill our commitment to driving the growth and success of our clients through developing new ways to leverage technology to solve business problems.
2016 Inner Circle members have been invited to the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle retreat taking place in St. Pete Beach, Florida, from October 9 to October 11 where they will have a unique opportunity to share strategies and network with Microsoft Dynamics senior leaders and other successful Microsoft Dynamics partners from around the globe.
This recognition of the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle was announced and celebrated at last weeks Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), the companys annual premier partner event, taking place in Toronto. WPC provides Microsofts partner community with the opportunity to learn about the companys road map for the upcoming year, establish connections, share best practices, experience the latest product innovations and learn new skills.
With this years honor, Wipfli has been named to Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle eight times and to Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club 18 times. Using business applications, Wipfli provides implementation, training and consultation services to companies of all sizes, from small businesses to corporations. The firm specializes in providing Microsoft Dynamics products to companies in a number of industries, including manufacturing, distribution, financial institutions, health care, construction and real estate.
About Wipfli LLP
With 33 offices in the United States and two offices in India, Wipfli LLP (Wipfli) ranks among the top accounting and business consulting firms in the nation. For over 86 years, Wipfli has provided private and publicly held companies with industry-focused assurance, accounting, tax and consulting services to help clients overcome their business challenges today and plan for tomorrow. The firms clients include manufacturing companies, financial institutions, health care organizations, construction companies, real estate companies, insurance companies, nonprofit organizations, units of government, agricultural businesses, dealerships and individuals. Through the firms membership in Allinial Global, Wipfli can draw upon the resources of firms from around the world, helping businesses whenever and wherever they need it. For more information, visit wipfli.com.
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Podcasting is the most cost efficient way to get your message out to a wider audience and engage them with your brand.
A recent study by Edison Research found that one in four Americans ages 12-54 listened to a podcast last month and consumption is on the rise with a growth of 23% between 2015 and 2016. Smart marketing professionals understand the benefit of creating compelling mobile content. Produce Your Podcast positions them for success with production and promotion strategies to reach a targeted segment of the estimated 57 million American podcast listeners.
A separate study by comScore found that one in three podcast listeners expect to increase their podcast consumption over the next six months. The data also determined that compared to the average consumer, podcast listeners are more likely to have a college or higher education, $100k+ household income, and to be early adopters in multiple categories including movies, electronics, and consumer packaged goods.
Produce Your Podcast founder Traci DeForge says, Podcasting is quickly becoming the hottest new marketing platform and the most personal way to convey your message to a potential audience with worldwide access. Our team of award-winning veteran broadcasters assist business professionals in launching and managing their podcast series, as well as growing their audience of followers.
Produce Your Podcast offers full podcast production with live producers and distribution based on a customized marketing strategy to grow followers. The business officially launched last month, Produce Your Podcast is already producing podcasts originating from Denver, CO; Los Angeles, CA; Jacksonville and Fort Lauderdale FL.
DeForge says, "The biggest obstacle to starting a podcast is not knowing the technical process. It can often times be very intimidating. Once a podcast is up and running the next obstacle you face is the amount of time it takes to sustain it over the long term which is critical to its success. Our team has been in broadcast media their whole careers. We take care of the hard part so you are freed up to enjoy the fun of being on your own show."
Consultants, entrepreneurs, and marketing professionals interested in creating their own series of podcasts or internet radio show can visit http://www.ProduceYourPodcast.com.
About Produce Your Podcast founder, Traci DeForge: Over the past 25 years, DeForge has led a prominent broadcast and media career. As a radio executive, she took the broadcast company she worked for from $1.2M in revenues to over $10M, eventually positioning it for a $60M exit. From there, she took over as CEO of Ladies Who Launch and innovated the Franchise Media Model. DeForge then founded her consulting business. She has been an integral part of the launch of hundreds of small businesses in addition to consulting on branding and business development strategy with large organizations like British Airways, Microsoft, and Weight Watchers International. She produces and hosts two of her own podcast series: Journey to There and POP of Color. She can abe heard on two Georgia morning radio shows. Produce Your Podcast is DeForges newest business venture.
Photos and interviews available. Contact Traci DeForge at 912-223-9525 or LetUs(at)ProduceYourPodcast(dot)com
In her new memoir, Out of the Fog: Adventures through Lifestyle Change (published by Balboa Press AU), author Alana Henderson describes her journey from the turbulence of concurrent major illnesses stroke, cancer and diabetes through numerous adventures and challenges to build a confident, healthy, exciting and quality life.
The book challenges (health professionals) to apply best practice and creativity rather than limiting their knowledge in day-to-day work tasks, says Henderson. This includes learning from health and educational models where everyone wins.
As a baby boomer, Henderson questions stereotypical images and expectations of people as they age, especially in the face of major illnesses. The book provides a strong basis on which to proceed into the next phase of ones life with health, fitness, confidence, enthusiasm and creativity.
An excerpt from Out of the Fog:
My determination to continually test the limits was the catalyst for me to feel the joy of success across the various challenges that I encountered. I took up the options that felt good for me, and ran headlong with them. I learned new ways to cope with the turbulent waters. I always focused my thoughts positively on finding alternatives, to achieve outcomes that were far higher than I could ever have imagined or planned.
Out of the Fog
By Alana Henderson
Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 212 pages | ISBN 9781504302098
E-Book | 212 pages | ISBN 9781504302104
Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble
About the Author
Alana Henderson has worked for many years as an adult educator, public speaker and editor. She lives in New South Wales. More information is available at http://www.alanahenderson.com.au/.
Balboa Press Australia is a division of Hay House, Inc., a leading provider in publishing products that specialise in self-help and the mind, body and spirit genre. Through an alliance with indie book publishing leader Author Solutions, LLC, authors benefit from the leadership of Hay House Publishing and the speed-to-market advantages of the Author Solutions self-publishing model. For more information or to start publishing today, visit balboapress.com.au/ or call 1800 050 315. For the latest, follow @balboapress on Twitter and Like us at facebook.com/BalboaPress.
If you do have to face these kinds of problems, hopefully our special rates will help make the situation a little more tolerable for you.
Assured Comfort Heating, Air, Plumbing has announced three specials that will run through July 31. Atlanta area residents can take advantage of the following: $50 off any HVAC repair, a $79 diagnostic fee for a residential HVAC service call, and residential interior drain cleaning for a discounted rate of $99.
Theres never a good time for an air conditioning repair, especially in the middle of the hot Georgia summer, and you probably dont want to deal with clogged drains either. But if you do have to face these kinds of problems, hopefully our special rates will help make the situation a little more tolerable for you, says Jerry Hall, owner of Assured Comfort Heating, Air, Plumbing.
Homeowners in the Atlanta metropolitan area who would like to schedule an HVAC service call or an interior drain cleaning should call Assured Comfort by phone at 770-872-4168. Or, they can fill out the online form and save 10% on their service.
Win Tickets to the World of Coca Cola
In addition to Julys HVAC and plumbing promotions, Assured Comfort is also giving away four VIP tickets to one of Atlantas most popular attractions, the World of Coca Cola museum, and four combo vouchers to Atlantas famous drive-in restaurant, The Varsity (approximately a $200 value).
No purchase is necessary to win. To be eligible, first like Assured Comforts Facebook page, then fill out the online entry form. Entries must be submitted by July 31, 2016. The winner will be selected at random, on or about August 6, 2016.
It will be a memorable prize package for one lucky winner, Hall says. The World of Coca Cola provides visitors with a behind-the-scenes look at how Coca Cola came to be a worldwide sensation. Then have dinner at The Varsity and enjoy this restaurants famous chili, or hamburgers, fries and shakes. What a fun way to enjoy some classic American food and culture!
About Assured Comfort Heating, Air, Plumbing:
Founded in 2002 by Jerry Hall, Assured Comfort Heating, Air, Plumbing is a family-owned HVAC and plumbing company serving homeowners and businesses in Douglas County, Cobb County and the entire metro Atlanta area. Their professional team is dedicated to providing customers with high quality heating, cooling, plumbing and indoor air quality services. They also specialize in energy efficiency, providing home energy audits guaranteed to lower energy costs. On call for 24/7 fast repairs, they promise their customers You callwere thereits fixedyoure happy! For more information about Assured Comfort, visit http://assuredcomfort.com/ or call 770-872-4168.
The best selling BARVIVO coasters are the ideal tabletop protection for any table type. Your Choice Matters
The co-founders of the danish brand BARVIVO, Martin and Philip Spars, recently shared how their efforts toward selling Nordic designed wine and bar accessories are beginning to pay off. In a recent interview, the two brothers indicated that they are determined to offer the latest and best products in the marketplace.
During the interview, Philip Spars commented on his experience with the Amazon Prime Day sales event. He said, Amazon invited our company, BARVIVO, to be a part of the pre Amazon Prime Day event. This invitation was an important milestone for us as it resulted in the sale of over 500 wine openers in just under two hours.
In celebration of their latest success, the brothers have announced a continuation of the Amazon Prime Day sale. This time, their best-selling product, the BARVIVO coasters, will be highlighted during the retail event. The company is offering 30% off the regular sales price of $14.94. Buyers only need to enter the code PR30SAVE at checkout.
After establishing the BARVIVO company in Denmark in 2010, the two brothers and co-founders decided to enter the U.S. market through the online retailer Amazon in 2015. Using a combination of classic design and modern products, the BARVIVO brand quickly differentiated itself from other competitors in the marketplace. As a result, a large amount of publicity from bloggers and YouTubers led to a noted increase in sales.
For example, a well-known blogger in the wine industry, 1winedude, featured the BARVIVO wine opener in a blog post and the brand also received a recommendation from the YouTube celebrity, Tipsy Bartender, both who substantially increased BARVIVOs brand recognition.
Because of the added publicity from bloggers and YouTubers, BARVIVO also started to receive requests for its products from exclusive hotels and vineyards, all which led to further sales growth and recognition of the brand name.
The drink coasters, which represents the BARVIVO concept of an innovative yet traditional Nordic design, is a best-selling product on the Amazon platform. For the past five months, the product has sold out twice because of its unique appearance and brand concept.
Weve made sure to restock the coaster sets says Martin Spars, co-founder of BARVIVO. We expect the extended Amazon Prime Day sale, along with our new video for the BARVIVO bar drink coasters on YouTube, to further increase the demand.
BARVIVO continues to increase their presence in the U.S. marketplace by using the largest online retailer, Amazon, as its representative. The next product launch from the company will be an exclusive cocktail shaker, set to be introduced by the end of July. The cocktail shaker is scheduled to be displayed, along with the rest of the BARVIVO line of products, on the Amazon website.
Facebook fans are encouraged to Like BARVIVOs page on Facebook, where they can obtain tips for using wine and bar products and accessories.
Amazon shoppers who wish to take advantage of BARVIVOs extended Amazon Prime Day sale can purchase the BARVIVO coasters exclusively through Amazon by clicking on the following link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AD9X6JO.
As stated, the coaster set retails for $14.94 but, for a limited time only, customers can save 30% by entering the coupon code PR30SAVE at checkout. This product is backed by BARVIVOs 100% money back guarantee.
If visitors cannot find what they need effectively and efficiently on your website, theyre more likely to navigate away.
Rowe Digital now offers an innovative service called Broken Link Connection that detects and fixes broken links for website owners, bloggers, and publishers. The service also supports the visibility of fresh, relevant content that modern internet users crave. The results are more credible web resources and improved user experiences.
Rowe Digital offers its Broken Link Connection service free of charge to website owners, bloggers, and publisher sites. The company, which is known for its data analytics-based solutions, employs a web crawler that is similar to ones that are used by major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to rank websites. When Rowe Digital's crawler detects broken links within a site, the Broken Link Connection service automatically finds relevant content to replace the broken ones.
The Broken Link Connection service is a novel idea that has been introduced to the public at just the right time. As the internet matures, many websites develop a digital ailment that is known as link rot. Link rot happens when links that are referenced within websites get removed or relocated to other web addresses. When users peruse the information on these websites and click on the links, they receive error messages that indicate that the pages cannot be found. These website 404 errors heavily detract from the overall website user experience.
A study by Rowe Digital on 90 publisher websites found over 65,000 broken outbound links.
Rowe Digital provides a way for website owners to sign up for a free service to fix broken links on their sites. The company is able to provide the free service to them because it charges content producers a fee to submit their content for review and inclusion in the index. Rowe Digital facilitates the matches through Broken Link Connection.
According to recent research on the subject, 38 percent of the links on websites that are over nine years old are broken. Industry analysts view link rot as a real problem that will likely persist as the internet ages. Link-building expert and founder of Citation Labs, Garrett French, stated, "Most verticals content ecosystems are treated (especially by lay people) as a knowledge resource." While some websites are used as knowledge resources, broken supporting links on those sites can undermine the perceived credibility of their content in many cases. At the least, users do not benefit from the full educational experience of visiting those websites.
The Broken Link Connection's most obvious benefit to web publishers is improved search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience. Leading digital marketing expert, Jeff Bullas, said it best, "If visitors cannot find what they need effectively and efficiently on your website, theyre more likely to navigate away." Broken links result in a degraded website user experience and lower search engine rankings. Website owners who allow Rowe Digital to fix broken links gain the search engine visibility that their websites need to stay viable. The fixed sites provide more comprehensive informational resources to end users.
About the Company
Rowe Digital is an enterprise SEO, PPC and web analytics solutions provider that was founded by Kevin Rowe in 2012. Kevin and his team of search marketing experts have an extensive track record of transforming the search marketing program of major corporations as well as small start-ups.
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Learning and Performance Management for High Consequence Industries NetDimensions Talent Suite has the depth of functionality and flexibility which allows us to deliver high quality services to our clients. -Samantha Hall, Director of eLearning, Training & Certification, Moody's Analytics
NetDimensions, a global provider of performance, knowledge and learning management systems, announced today that Moodys Analytics has successfully completed the implementation of the NetDimensions Talent Suite to provide innovative risk management training solutions to financial sector organisations worldwide.
With deep expertise and experience in credit analysis, decisioning and risk management, Moodys Analytics is a leader in financial services education. Moodys Analytics helps organizations by increasing the competence, credibility and confidence of their staff, contributing to performance and excellence.
Moodys Analytics selected NetDimensions to provide a flexible and multi-language Learning Management System, which could be customised based on the needs of their clients worldwide.
NetDimensions Talent Suite has the depth of functionality and flexibility which allows us to deliver high quality services to our clients. After receiving positive feedback from our clients, we have expanded the use of NetDimensions solutions to NetDimensions Analytics for extensive reporting, said Samantha Hall, Director of eLearning, Training & Certification at Moodys Analytics.
NetDimensions Talent Suite provides a good user experience, with strong multi-language capabilities, and flexible configuration options. It can also be integrated into other systems using the extensive set of APIs.
NetDimensions CEO Jay Shaw said, We are very pleased to be working with Moodys Analytics. The NetDimensions Talent Suite is designed to support high-stakes training and certification management, especially in regulated industries such as financial services.
About NetDimensions
Established in 1999, NetDimensions (AIM: NETD; OTCQX: NETDY) is a global provider of performance, knowledge and learning management solutions to high consequence industries.
NetDimensions provides companies, government agencies and other organisations with talent management solutions to personalise learning, share knowledge, enhance performance, foster collaboration and manage compliance programmes for employees, customers, partners and suppliers.
Recognised as one of the talent management industry's top-rated technology suppliers, NetDimensions' award-winning solutions have been chosen by leading organisations worldwide including ING, Cathay Pacific, Nuffield Health, Chicago Police Department, Geely Automotive, Fugro Group, Fresenius Medical Care, tesa SE, and DB Schenker.
NetDimensions is ISO 9001 certified and NetDimensions hosted services are ISO 27001 certified.
For more information, visit http://www.NetDimensions.com/uk or follow @netdimensions on Twitter.
Text to Prompt promotes safety and helps save lives. "Emergency Relief Services in the U.S. make $9 billion a year,""says Scott Cooper, CEO and Creative Director of World Patent Marketing. "I project strong revenue growth for this industry until 2021 due to increased demand for emergency services."
World Patent Marketing, a vertically integrated manufacturer and engineer of patented products, announces Text to Prompt, a technological invention that enables people to contact the authorities easily and safely.
"Emergency Relief Services in the U.S. make $9 billion a year,""says Scott Cooper, CEO and Creative Director of World Patent Marketing. "I project strong revenue growth for this industry until 2021 due to increased demand for emergency services."
Human safety is very important which is why a lot of technological advancements are dedicated in promoting this, says Jerry Shapiro, Director of Manufacturing and World Patent Marketing Inventions. Text to Prompt is a technological invention that allows people to contact Law Enforcement agencies without compromising their safety.
Text to Prompt works much like a Teleprompter wherein users can use their smart phones to send messages directly to the authorities that is immediately noticeable. This gives them ample time to respond to the emergency call. However, unlike a traditional Teleprompter, it also works as a 2-way communication device so that the user can also quickly receive responses. As there is no need to talk, the user doesnt run the risk of being seen or compromised. This not only assures the user of a quick response but also ensures that they are safe while doing so.
When you cant risk your life to report a crime, Text to Prompt the authorities, says inventor Joseph A. Use this technological invention to alert the authorities when you need to be discreet. People are afraid to call for law enforcement for fear that the criminals will notice their actions and hurt them as well. This problem can be avoided by using this item.
Annie Graham, a parent blogger from Apopka, FL, has this to say about Text to Prompt: Times today are dangerous with criminal minds trying to wreak havoc on our daily lives. As good citizens, we want to do the right and call out the authorities whenever something bad happens but there are times where trying to help can put us in more jeopardy. There are cases where calling the cops will alert the criminals of our location. Text to Prompt allows us to be discreet while still calling for help. This also helps the mute and deaf since they can still ask help from Law Enforcement as quickly as normal people can.
Text to Prompt promotes safety and helps save lives. This ensures that prompt response will arrive without putting the callers life in danger. This is a big help to the police force, Law Enforcement, and the typical person. Everyone should have it.
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As a leader in patent invention services, World Patent Marketing is by your side every step of the way, utilizing our capital and experience to protect, prepare, and manufacture your new product idea and get it out to the market. Get a patent with World Patent Marketing and the company will send representatives to trade shows every month in order to further advocate for its clients. It is just part of the world patent marketing cost of doing business.
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Purdue University has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report for its large international undergraduate student population.
The recognition is part of the U.S. News Short List's 10 Universities That Attract the Most International Students. Purdue is No. 12 overall and No. 2 for public universities. The University of California, San Diego, is ranked No. 1 for public schools, and the Florida Institute of Technology is tops overall. The top 10 schools all have international students that represent at least 19 percent of their undergraduate student bodies. Purdue's enrollment is 18 percent.
"Purdue is known worldwide for its excellent academic reputation, and the ability to attract such a large and diverse population is a testimony to how well we are viewed around the world," said Michael Brzezinski, dean of international programs. "Students from Indiana and other American communities are able to study, live and meet others from more than 120 countries while at Purdue. These experiences help them to develop intercultural skills that will be necessary in the global workforce that awaits them after graduation."
Purdue's total international undergraduate student enrollment reached an all-time high last fall with 5,233 students. This total represents an increase of 15 percent since 2011. China, India, South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia send the largest number of undergraduates from abroad.
In January, the Times Higher Education ranked Purdue as one of nine American universities on its top 200 list of the Most International Universities.
In 2015, Purdue was recognized with a couple of international student awards, including being named by the U.S. government as the top STEM school for international students. The Institute of International Education also honored Purdue with the Heiskell Award for helping international students integrate into campus life and the local community.
Writer: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu
Source: Michael Brzezinski, 765-494-9399, mbrzezinski@purdue.edu
ORLAND PARK, Ill. (AP) A suburban fire department is crediting an off-duty Chicago police officer with saving the life of a boy who was pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool.
The Orland Fire Protection District says in a news release that it was the quick lifesaving actions of Cindy Guerra that saved the boy from drowning over the weekend. The release says the boy between the age of 10 and 12 was in full cardiac arrest when he was pulled from a pool in the backyard of an Orland Park family having a party on Saturday evening.
Press release submitted by city of Fulton
The Volunteer Millers at de Immigrant windmill in Fulton, Illinois, will host their monthly program on Wednesday, July 27, at 6:00 PM. The event will be held at the Windmill Cultural Center at 111 10th Avenue in downtown Fulton, across from the authentic Dutch windmill. The Miller Programs are supported by a grant from the D.S. Flikkema Foundation.
Korea: The Forgotten War is a historical account of the Korean War interlaced with the personal experiences of a twenty-year old draftee. Terry Dingmon tells his story along with the story of thousands of other young men from all walks of life who were caught up in the military draft in the early 1950s. They were sent off to take an active part in a foreign war in a country they had barely heard of. The program consists of a narrative and slide presentation of the war along with photos and firsthand accounts of what it was like to be an infantryman during the last year of the Korean War. Dingmon was drafted in January of 1952, and he had to leave his wife and infant daughter for two years. He served 13 months in Korea with the 2nd Infantry Division. Dingmon's purpose for giving the presentation is to rekindle the memory of that Forgotten War in Korea.
The Korean War began in June 1950 when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel to invade South Korea with the intent of uniting the two countries into one communist nation. The United States entered the war to contain the spread of communism. The war ended thirty-seven months later with a cease fire agreement on July 27, 1953. The date of the presentation at the Windmill Cultural Center marks the 63rd anniversary of that cease fire. Because the war ended with a cease fire, not a peace agreement, North and South Korea are technically still at war to this day.
Terry Dingmon is a retired manager from ADM. After retirement, he spent 11 years as a Volunteer Miller at de Immigrant Windmill. He created the current training and manuals in use at the Windmill Area today.
The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served following the presentation. The facility is accessible to persons with disabilities. For more information, visit the Windmill Cultural Center and de Immigrant Windmill Facebook page or call 815-589-3925.
Rated 4.2 out of 5 by 18 reviewers.
Rated 4 out of 5 by unpeudemoi + Chameleon-like Qualities In A Classic + I have the Brown and the Purple tone pins and am very satisfied with both. Given the overall size of the brooch and the many large stones I was surprised how light-weight they are. Each has its own affinity for a range of colors from dark to light, blending well with most seasons garb, including hats, sashes, evening bags and scarves. The domed profile reminds one of higher end jewelry which of course this is not, but for a classic piece of costume jewelry at reduced prices you can't go wrong. Also, makes a great gift, no sizing info needed! BTW, If you are accustomed to the weight and quality of many of Joan Rivers' pins you will be disappointed, which is not to imply poor quality here, just a different level of same. 09-17-16
Rated 2 out of 5 by linkhigh Wonderful for pastel lovers I ordered the purple colorway. I have jackets and sweaters in lots of different colors, and I was hoping that this pin could be worn with several items. While the pin is pretty as a stand alone item, I found that most of the jackets in my closet made the pin look less attractive. The center stone is burgundy, and it's so dark that unless it's on a pastel background, the color gets lost. The surrounding teardrop shaped stones are shades of pink and peach. They are so translucent that they pick up the color of the background fabric, and lose their own identity. Against a red background, the pin became red. Against a peach background, the pin became peach. Against a purple background, it became so dark that the colors were indistinguishable. If you are a lover of rose gold tones, and if you wear a lot of pastels, you'll love this pin. If you wear medium to jewel tones, this pin looses much of its charm. Although I purchased it at a great clearance price, I plan to return it. I'm looking for more "wow" factor, and against the colors my wardrobe, this pin lost all its pizzazz. Also, the pin is very dimensional-- it's at least 3/4" thick. Although it's not heavy, it may look too heavy to be worn on a lightweight sweater. It is really scaled to go on heavier fabric, like a wool blazer or a coat. 09-01-16
Rated 5 out of 5 by Clark55 Beautiful My pins arrived this week and I couldn't be more pleased. The colors are so striking. The pins really elevate the look of my wardrobe. I'm so glad that I purchased all 3 colors. 08-20-16
Rated 5 out of 5 by Goldie76 Utterly Gorgeous! My pins in "Purple" and "Brown" arrived today. I am stunned by their beauty. Louis Dell'Olio has an incredible talent for choosing colors and selecting shades that enrich one another. Such a color genius! These pins are a feast for my eyes. My only regret is that I did not buy them sooner so that I could have been enjoying them the last several years. 07-26-16
Rated 4 out of 5 by Seashell64 Too Heavy To Wear On Sweater Very pretty and well made pin, but way too heavy to wear on a thinner weight sweater that I specifically bought it for. Would be better on a jacket. Returned. 02-21-16
Rated 3 out of 5 by SHANEIA B NICE PRODUCT Purchased this for my grand mom and she loves it. Only downside is that it seems the latch that is supposed to secure and fasten the pin in place can be easily slid to the opposite side, which causes it to fall off her coat constantly. 02-03-16
Rated 3 out of 5 by Ingae Dull Point? The pin itself is very pretty. The problem I had with it is that I could not push the pin throught the lapel of my ponte knit blazer. My efforts made the pin bend and I am afraid it will break if I try to fasten the pin to another dense fabric. 10-29-13
Rated 5 out of 5 by designista Lovely This pin has great proportion and visual interest. I ordered the Black and I am extremely pleased with both the look and feel. It is chic without being flashy. 12-20-12
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LOGO by Lori Goldstein Knit Top with Embroidery and Lace Front is rated 3.8 out of 5 by 11 .
Rated 5 out of 5 by Princess9600 from Gorgeous Top!! This is such a beautiful top! Beyond thrilled I saw it as a Lunchtime Special and got it at such an amazing price. The applique is amazingly well done, so pretty and elevated, a boutique style top you would expect to pay much more for than even the regular price. Chiffon trim is a perfect finish on this top. It will need a light touch up with the iron after washing, just a little steam may do the trick. Be sure to pick this one up if they still have your size!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Joy4ever from Great choice I looked at this top many times before purchasing. The pictures made it seem short and the video gave it a thick appearances. I decided to go ahead and order based on instinct that this would be a great purchase. I was amazingly surprised with the excellent details of the embroidery, great length, and light weight material. This top can be worn year round on many occasions. Please take a chance and purchase.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Fascinated from Good purchase Wore this top, ordered in a large very pleased with fit. I sometimes order xlarge in Logo tops depending on bust measurement. Even though the fabric is thin, I didn't have to layer it; because of the lace and embroidery.
Rated 3 out of 5 by JenCip from Wrinkled Beyond Belief I love the LOGO brand and I have quite a lot of her tops and I ordered this and I just got it in a medium and it definitely runs small but I can get away with that but the packaging was awful it's So wrinkled and I don't know if I can get them out and my husband said what a shame it looks So cute on if I could get rid of the wrinkles out and for the price I shouldn't have to do that. I'd love to send it back but afraid I won't get a replacement as I had to send another one back for the same reason plus the tank that came with it didn't come over a month ago and I still haven't received the replacement for it. I spend a lot of money at QVC and this is very upsetting!!!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Margi from Beautiful top! A beautiful top that is even better in person than it showed in the presentation, and the best part for me is that it's in the cotton/modal blend which will be soft and cool to wear all summer long. The lace and embroidery are just exquisite. It is now one of my very favorite tops. I bought the blue, and the shades of blue in it are gorgeous and very denim friendly. I bought my usual L, and it is true to size. You will go from day to dinner in comfort and ease in this very special top.
Rated 1 out of 5 by bluevirginia from Disappointed After watching many Logo presentations, I finally decided to purchase one of her tops. I wanted one of the tops with the chiffon border so much. This top with the border and the embroidery looked great on TV. But when I received it, I was very disappointed. The embroidery did look nice, but the top is basically just a t-shirt and not very good quality fabric and as one other reviewer mentioned, it is way over-priced for what it is. By the time tax and shipping were added, it was almost $90, which I was willing to pay on easy pay if the shirt had been top quality. Sorry to say I returned it.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Louisejh from Beautiful top...except the price I purchased the ivory and it goes with many of Logo's tan family of pants. I wear it with the "mushroom" leggings. The lace and embroidery are really lovely as are the mix of shades of mushroom, ivory and other related colors. I just can't get used to the HUGE increase in the cost of Logo tops. I have many, but this is probably my one and only purchase at this price level.
LOGO Lounge by Lori Goldstein French Terry Cardigan with Single Button is rated 3.4 out of 5 by 58 .
Rated 4 out of 5 by mris from Great Cardigan! I agree with the other reviews, the armholes are smaller than expected which is the reason for the 4 stars. The color is beautiful and it's so soft and comfy- looks great but feels like I'm in PJs!
Rated 4 out of 5 by WisconsinMama from Simple Lounge Piece I saw this at its clearance price (22$) and 4 EZ pays and jumped! Looks cute buttoned or easy as a waterfall cardigan left open with a tank. Certainly long enough for leggings or great with skinny jeans. It's simply engineered and nothing majorly special (I've seen these at plenty of Dept. stores before for 35-40$) but LOGO Lounge is my favorite line from LOGO and for the price you can't go wrong. I got the Parisian Blue and it is lovely and I may go back for the green. It runs big- I sometimes go Small or XS in Lounge and XS was definitely good with ample room. I am 5'5"/size 6.
Rated 1 out of 5 by jsz from Not up to par for Logo Purchased this on sale. Have many Logo lounge pieces. The inside lining was similar to flannel and pilled terribly after the initial wash before wearing which would make wearing it open impossible. This one went back. Would not recommend it.
Rated 2 out of 5 by kct from Poorly Fashioned Armholes too tight (common with Logo Lounge), but the bottom of the garment is much too wide. The only possible way to wear this is open, and it flares way out, making you look huge, even if you're not. Not a good buy even at the $29 sale price. Disappointed, but should have known better, heed the reviews on this one.
Rated 1 out of 5 by Emmycat18 from Terrible!! I like the green color, but the fit & style are absolutely awful! Tight in the shoulders - could have sized up & maybe tried a different size, but WAY too much fabric that just hangs & adds bulk in all the wrong places! Took it off within 30 seconds of putting on. Got it on a good sale price so I really hoped it would work as I can't justify/afford most of this clothing line.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Lu Ann K from Lori Did Not Disappoint Just received in Gray and it's perfect! For the price a little high but this worth it.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Iowa Teacher from Love it! I love this cardigan so much that I have ordered four different colors. The fit is good and it goes with almost any tunic from either Logo or Susan Graver! It washes up well and does not need ironing. I get compliments almost every time I wear one. Just to let people know that the sleeves fit snuggly and will not push up, but that does not bother me. I just thought people need to know to make a good decision.
LOGO Lounge by Lori Goldstein French Terry Cardigan with Seaming Detail is rated 4.1 out of 5 by 15 .
Rated 3 out of 5 by lakalaka from so soft Well, am very happy with the softness of the material. This runs big so I decided to use it as a "1/2 robe" just around the house. I am disappointed that the material pills. They are small but are there none the less. Lori's items are spendy and I expected better. Haven't washed it yet to see how it holds up. I do enjoy wearing it but not as part of an outfit, just for warmth when I am home. 3 stars for cozy.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Chiffer97 from Perfect! Beautiful!!! Love the grey color and it's so soft and versatile!!! I ordered another one!!
Rated 2 out of 5 by Adelynn from Fabric snags and doesn't hold up. :-( I wore this jacket last Sunday to Church. It looked super cute and I decided I was definitely planning to order another color. Well, that is BEFORE I arrived home and saw what the lapels looked like. There were several threads pulled and the jacket looked horrible! The fabric on back that I sat on was also snagged. Please realize that I am in my 50's, I do not have young children that I was handling/caring for or any large jewelry on that could have caused damage to the fabric. I was wearing an 18" pearl necklace with stud earrings. I was not carrying any objects. The only thing that touched the fabric was the seatbelt in my vehicle and the leather seats and the pews at Church. I only wore this jacket for a total of under 2 hours and it looked like I was in dire need of a new jacket. I really love the Logo styles, but like others, I have noticed the quality has significantly declined while the prices continue to rise. I have had to return more items in the past 6 months than I have the entire 20+ years combined as a QVC customer.
Rated 5 out of 5 by va603 from Perfect, lightweight cardigan I purchased the cherry blossom cardigan after seeing the beautiful color on-air. I ordered my usual size and the fit is roomy. I am a nurse and wear these cardigans over my scrubs when I am chilly. They are so much cuter than scrub jackets and cozier too. This one is long in the back and covers the bum. The pockets are huge (which is good for me). I would love to have it in more colors.
Rated 5 out of 5 by LocoforLogo from Fabulous Cardigan I luv LOGO Lounge and this item surpassed my expectations. Soft, comfortable, slenderizing to the figure, casual elegance. I got silver grey which goes fabulously with A273382, blue spruce with mesh detail. I wish they would make this one in more colors!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Carol in Vermont from Such soft & gorgeous fabric! I ordered this open cardigan by waitlist in the gorgeous soft pink. Wow! Totally worth the wait. The fabric is not thin and chintzy, is soft, substantial and just gorgeous feeling. I ordered up as I figured I would be wearing over other things. Order your regular size. Mine is a bit big but it was SO great I did not want to take a chance on an exchange. The pockets are great, large enough to actually put something in. I wish Lori would bring more colors out in this one. I was so happy to find it in the soft pink, light color, as I get tired of all the dark colors. And...this one does not have a hood. So many of her jackets have hoods and I don't wear hoods at my age unless on a winter coat. To me the sweatshirts appear too juvenile with hoods. I think she likes them as so many are offered with. This one is just a plain, open cardigan and can be dressed up. I wore with grey slacks and white turtleneck with multi-colored Honora pearl necklace and it really looked good. Lots of compliments, but I also know that in the spring and summer this cardigan will also get a lot of use. More lighter colors please.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Leslie241 from Love this cardigan! Received this cardigan and tried it on immediately. The fit is perfect and the color ~ blue violet ~ is sooo pretty! I am 5' 4" and 143 lbs and the small is just right. I would even say that it is slimming, which is wonderful. I love the deep pockets and the length of the cardigan is not too long as to be overwhelming. This cardigan is definitely a winner!
LOGO Lounge by Lori Goldstein French Terry Zip Front Peplum Jacket is rated 3.4 out of 5 by 30 .
Rated 1 out of 5 by CatCB from Zipper Nightmate I have had this for a while, in the grey/blue, and I loved it. Well, I washed it today, cold water, partial dried on my dryers lowest setting, took out to hang to fully dry, and the zipper is now a third of its original length shorter than before the wash. The rest of jacket stayed its original length. The fabric along the zipper seams is horribly bunched up. Also the pockets are now wonky. I am livid!
Rated 2 out of 5 by chris1sierra from Zipper Problem This jacket is so pretty. I hated to have to return it because I loved the color grey and the feel Of this fabric. Too bad that the zipper buckled making it look terrible and the sleeves were so tight that I could never have worn it over another top. Wish the zipper and sleeves could be corrected cuz love this jacket especially the cute design
Rated 5 out of 5 by serriachris145 from Love This Jacket!! This jacket is so cute! It looks adorable and feels so soft and comfortable. I got the silver in 2x. I love it. The only draw back is the tight sleeves, but am keeping it anyway. Ive only warn it with sleeveless tops so far. I dont know yet how it would work with long sleeves. The color is beautiful.
Rated 5 out of 5 by baxiejack from My favorite LOGO piece Purchased this jacket with a adorable grey leopard tank (unfortunately tank sold out in 2 colors) sold out). This hoodie is not only stylish but to date it is my favorite LOGO top so far. Some of the LOGO fabrics pill after multiple washings, and are very thin. This one is Not thin and does not appear to pill in anyway with repeated wearings/washings. I am 5'3" and this jack is a great length! Not too long like some other tops from LOGO. Buy this one!!
Rated 1 out of 5 by Judith254 from Zipper shrunk Washed this garmentin cold water and air fluffed. Rthe zipper shrunk by at least three inches. Followed the instructions exactly. I don't mind dry cleaning, so if a garment requires it please say so. This one has to go in donation box after two wearings and one washing. Bummer!!
Rated 2 out of 5 by ChelyO from It was OK Material felt wonderful, cut was not flattering and seemed to run a bit large. Returning it, Perhaps should have ordered in a smaller size but it was just not worth the price in my opinion.
Rated 5 out of 5 by missy lisa from Awesome jacket Love the fit on this jacket! Super cute. I especially like the shorter length!
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!
Speeds of up to 250km/h are planned for the route, and in Ji Nan the line will be connected to the north south line from Beijing to Shanghai.
Shipments will start at the end of 2017 and the order is divided into two tranches.
The trials were carried out on the fast tracks between Reading and Didcot and were managed by infrastructure manager Network Rail. Two test runs were made at speeds up to 200km/h. Electrification of this section has been completed first to enable it to be used to test the 25kV 50Hz power supply system, catenary and the trains.
An inaugural trip with a bi-mode set was made from Reading to London Paddington on June 30.
Network Rail is currently electrifying the entire line between Heathrow Airport junction and Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford and Newbury, and it says the first services with IEP under electric traction are scheduled to begin in 2019. However, Great Western Railway plans to start introducing the trains in diesel mode next year on services from London to Oxford, Bristol and Swansea, and the fleet will also replace HSTs on services to Cheltenham, Worcester and Hereford.
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One of Zephyr Media founders recovers $87,000 from company
MOSCOW, July 18 (RAPSI) The Commercial Court of Moscow has partially granted a lawsuit of George Polinski, one of the founders of Zephyr Media, and ordered recovery of 5.5 million rubles ($87,000) of debt from the company, the court ruling reads.
The plaintiff demanded to collect 5.63 million rubles from the company.
According to court materials, defendant does not deny that on June 3, 2013 it received a 5 million ruble loan from the plaintiff. The loan was to be returned until May 31, 2015, but the defendant failed to meet that obligation.
Earlier the court set hearings in a 10.3 million ruble ($163,400) lawsuit between Echo of Moscow radio station and Zephyr Media for August 2.
Russian advertisement company Zephyr Media was founded in 2012 by George Polinski and several other former employees of the Europa Media Group. The company was selling advertisement on the Internet and radio.
Moscow court orders Crimea to pay Cypriot firm 18.3 million hryvnias
MOSCOW, July 18 (RAPSI) The Moscow Commercial Court has granted in part a lawsuit filed by Cypriot company DRGN Ltd regarding Crimeas bond loan ordering the republics Finance Ministry to pay the firm over 18.3 million hryvnias (in rubles at the Bank of Russia exchange rate current at the date of payment), according to court records.
Crimea sold the bonds in 2011 to finance a solid municipal waste treatment project in Simferopol and the Simferopol Region. The plaintiff borrowed over 25,000 bonds in January 2013.
In April 2015, DRGN Ltd turned to court demanding that Russias Finance Ministry pay the debt on a local domestic bond loan of 1.142 million Euros and interest for using the funds as accrued by the date of the court ruling. The republics State Council, the Council of Ministers and the Finance Ministry of Crimea were named as co-defendants in the case.
The Moscow Commercial Court ruled that the proper defendant in this case is Republic of Crimea represented by its Finance Ministry; thats why the court dismissed claims against other defendants.
Moreover, the court held that the sum of recovery should be converted into rubles but not into Euros as the plaintiff had asked because the case was considered under Russian law.
Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov announced earlier that the Crimean authorities had appealed to the Federal Security Service (FSB) to investigate the sale of the 2011 bond and the involved companies.
Aksyonov claimed to know who provided the funds and why. He said that Nikolai Skorik, Crimeas Finance Minister from 2010 to 2013, transferred the money to banks in Odessa that were affiliated with his friends where the interest on the money accrued.
Aksyonov added that a decision in the case would be made after the investigation is complete, but Crimea is not responsible for the debt because the money has not returned to the republic.
Head of VR Capital Group to testify over alleged misconduct by Yukos directors
MOSCOW, July 18 (RAPSI) Richard Deitz, the president of VR Capital Group which is said to be a controlling entity of Russian oil company Promneftstroy, is expected to testify in a dispute over alleged misconduct by Yukos directors.
Deitz, who resides in UK, was served with a subpoena when he was visiting New York on May 2. Deitz was expected to testify while he was still in the U.S. Nevertheless, he challenged the subpoena claiming that he did not reside or regularly and personally transacted business in the U.S. As a result, the subpoena was modified to allow deposition on a date and at a time agreed upon by the parties involved in the dispute.
The parties later notified a U.S. district court in which the case is pending that Deitz would submit his deposition at the Moscow offices of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP on July 21. The deposition may be conducted by videoconference if any lawyers of the parties are unable to travel to Moscow.
The lawsuit was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in June 2015 by a number of companies and foundations linked to now-defunct Yukos oil company and managing foreign assets of Yukos. Mark Fleishman, a YUKOS trustee, is also among the plaintiffs.
The defendant in the case is Daniel Feldman. From 2006 to 2014, he was a director of several of the Yukos entities. Until October 2014 he managed structures involved in lawsuits over Yukos assets and participated in the settlement of the disputes. In particular, since 2008 Feldman participated in the settlement of a dispute with entities controlling Promneftstroy over Yukos Finance B.V. and its assets.
The plaintiffs claim that Feldman for certain remuneration disclosed confidential information to representatives of Promneftstroy and later allegedly took part in several frauds until being barred from any YUKOS-related activities in October 2014. Therefore, plaintiffs allege breach of fiduciary duties and inducement of others to breach their fiduciary duties as well on the part of Feldman.
In his turn, Feldman denies claims of any wrongdoing and accuses managers of Yukos assets exceeding $2 billion of misconduct, including corporate mismanagement and waste of corporate assets. Feldman claims that after his dismissal he was subject to harassment and persecution for questioning the morality and appropriateness of his former colleagues actions. Feldman alleges that Fleishman and David Godfrey, another Yukos executive, fly first class at the top rates and stay at top luxury brand hotels. These bills are paid, or the funds reimbursed, by Yukos Group companies, according to Feldman.
He demands his damages resulting from a smear campaign against him to be compensated in an amount to be determined by the court, as well as his legal costs.
TOLOnews.com, July 17, 2016
By Nabila Ashrafi
A Pregnant 14-year-old girl, Zahra, who was set alight by her husband's family, has died in Isteqlal Hospital, Kabul.
The incident in Ghor followed after Zahra's father got a new wife two years ago. At the time, he gave his daughter to a member of his new spouse's family in order to settle the matter.
In Afghanistan, this practice is called bad dadan, where girls and women are given to settle a dispute between families, often a blood dispute. Zahra is an example of this practice.
(Photo: TOLOnews.com) (Photo: TOLOnews.com)
Ghor police said that Zahra's husband has disappeared and they are investigating the incident.
"Our investigative team has been sent to the area and has started a probe into the incident. Zahra's father-in-law has been brought before the court," said Zaman Azimi, acting police chief of Ghor.
Doctors at Isteqlal Hospital said her burn wounds were bone-deep. "A team of doctors worked on this patient, but unfortunately they failed to save her," said Mohammed Sabir, head of the hospital.
Zahra's father claimed that his daughter was a victim of domestic violence from the day she married his brother-in-law.
"They (the victim's new family) have power. The court works in their favor. The police headquarters and the provincial council office also are in their favor. Whatever they say, will be done by the judicial organs," said Mohammad Azam, the victim's father.
Zahra's step-mother, Taza Gul, claimed that she also suffered from domestic violence and to escape abuse, she left the house with her husband.
"No one paid attention to Zahra, even when she was stabbed, beaten and harassed. We lost her," she said.
"She was pregnant. She aborted while she was being burnt. Here, we have witnessed two murders and two crimes," said civil society activist Baqi Samandar.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) condemned the act and called on government to investigate the incident thoroughly.
"We urge the government to bring the perpetrators of this act to court and ensure justice for the victim," said the AIHRC chairperson Sima Samar.
As we see a surge in inflation globally, it is now critical that everyone is aware of the implications this will have along every step of the insurance and reinsurance value chain.
Summary
As difficult to accept as the United Kingdom's recent vote to leave the European Union is for many people around the world, for some citizens of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, it is just baffling. For several years, their countries have aspired to join the Continental bloc, though none has clinched an official offer of membership yet. Though the Brexit will not precipitate the European Union's demise in the immediate term, it will undoubtedly fix the union's attention on its inherent problems. Consequently, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia worry that EU interest in expanding east will decrease, enabling Russia's influence in the region to grow.
Analysis
For Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, the stakes of a Brexit are high. Already, politicians from all three countries are expressing concerns that the move will distract the European Union from the problems in Ukraine and Georgia and from Russia's military presence there. In the wake of the referendum, the Ukrainian and Georgian presidents traveled to various cities in Europe, including Berlin, to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU officials. The meetings were planned even before the Brexit vote, but they offered the leaders an opportunity to discuss what the general uncertainty in the Continental bloc will mean for their aspirations to join it. EU officials stressed that the immediate repercussions of the referendum will be limited for the three countries. Nonetheless, since negotiations on the United Kingdom's exit will take at least two years, the political situation in the European Union will be unstable for the foreseeable future. Now, the countries are preparing for a worst-case scenario in which visa liberalization, an important landmark in obtaining EU membership, is postponed even further, making accession as distant a promise as it ever was.
The Stakes
Visa liberalization is not the only issue hanging in the balance for Ukraine. Even before the Brexit, the European Union had shown some signs of give on the possibility of easing sanctions against Russia. The disarray following the British referendum will make the bloc more likely to reduce its restrictions, which were implemented in response to Russia's involvement in separatist uprisings in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Having resolved in early July to extend sanctions through the end of the year, EU members are becoming increasingly divided on the issue. With another EU parliamentary debate on the sanctions set for October, Brussels could reduce or even lift the measures beginning in 2017.
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Georgia, meanwhile, faces important parliamentary elections in October, and its government fears that the Brexit will sway the population's pro-Europe stance. Russia-allied parties are gaining ground in Georgia, and they are using the discord in the European Union as evidence that the country should align itself with Moscow instead of with Brussels. Moreover, in June, the European Union opted to delay granting Georgia the full visa liberalization it had promised. During a recent trip to Tbilisi, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier tried to assuage the Georgian government's fears that the decision bodes ill for the country's admittance to the European Union. Even so, many politicians in Georgia are skeptical of the Continental bloc's intentions.
In Moldova, a similar pattern is playing out. Prime Minister Pavel Filip has said the country will continue on its path toward EU integration despite the results of the British referendum. But opposition politicians such as Igor Dodon, the leading presidential candidate and head of the pro-Russia Party of Socialists, are using the Brexit to claim that the European Union is falling apart and that, as a result, Moldovashould stop its efforts to gain membership.
Military Concerns
The divisions in the European Union and the possibility for eased sanctions have also raised concerns among the three countries especially Ukraine that the West will not respond to a Russian military presence in their territories. In its past military interventions in these countries, Russia curbed its aggression to maintain good ties with the European Union. But without considerable diplomatic pressure from the West, Russia may be less restrained in its military activities in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
Overall, the three countries are unlikely to waver in their efforts to join the European Union. But the fallout from the Brexit will raise doubts about the future of the bloc and increase opposition to EU membership within each country. At the same time, forces sympathetic to Russia will continue to gain traction in Moldova, Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine. Yet, as the next vote on Russian sanctions draws closer and as dissent continues to grow among EU states, the hopes of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to join the European bloc will not come to fruition.
Britain's quitting the European Union sets the stage for a major mess in the funding of British science. Whatever the merits of Brexit, as the withdrawal is popularly called, exiting the present labyrinthine structure of EU science funding is going to be pure chaos. Government funding of science is always capricious and often wasteful. Brexit is merely going to present the world with a new record for this folly.
The basic problem is that government funding of science is very complex. First the government or government-related science office formulates a specific research program, and then gets it funded. Then it develops and publishes requests for proposals. Then the researchers develop and submit detailed proposals, which the government studies, ultimately choosing some and funding their awards. The process normally takes several years from concept to award. It can hardly take less.
The EU presently funds a lot of British researchers, as it should given that Britain pays over 12 percent of the European Union's operating budget. British universities reportedly get about 16 percent of their research funding from Brussels, well over a billion dollars a year. Given that this 16 percent is an average, some universities probably get a significantly larger fraction of their revenue from EU funding.
The EU funding of British science should end as soon as Britain stops paying its EU dues. There is a lot of talk about multi-year negotiations between the incoming Brexit government in Britain and the European Union, but the political reality is that Britain can stop paying its dues anytime it wants to. It is hard to imagine a government whose mandate is to leave the EU continuing to send them billions of pounds that it could use for its own purposes.
The point is that there is no way that Britain can simply replace that EU funding (assuming it wants to), even if it has the money to do so. It will first have to go through its own lengthy competitive funding procedures. Many of the existing EU-funded projects will probably be dropped midstream, their funding wasted. There is no reason the new British government should choose to continue these EU-chosen projects; quite the contrary, given the Brexiteers apparent disdain for Brussels. There may well be a multi-year gap in which nothing is funded to replace the present projects.
Untangling the science funding is thus going to be a true mess, unless Britain can work a deal to simply pay for continued EU funding as an associated country. Some small non-EU countries do this. But given that Britain is handing Brussels a big budget cut, such a side deal may not be possible. Moreover, the philosophy of Brexit would seem to preclude Britain ceding funding decisions to the EU, which these associated deals require. The fact that the research community came out loudly against Brexit does not help their case of need.
What this shows is not that Brexit is wrong, but rather that government funding of science is often a mistake. Funding of science by governments is not necessary for economic progress. The intrinsically political nature of the process makes it often wasteful as well.
Brexit is merely a very large example of something that repeatedly happens. An expensive research program is launched because it is politically attractive. Large sums are spent, and then the program is killed midstream, because the politics change. Half a project gives no results, so the money and researchers time is simply wasted.
The U.S. government is certainly prone to this kind of waste, to begin with because we get a new House of Representatives every two years, and that is where the money comes from. We also get new, politically appointed department and agency heads with every new presidential administration, if not more frequently. These officials often want to "restructure" their research program, as it is called. Or a new office director may want to do something new, within the existing budget, killing ongoing work in the process.
This sort of project chopping probably happens many, many times a year, at all levels. But the hundreds or thousands of chops are individually too small to be noticed outside of their immediate research community. Tremendous amounts of money and research talent is wasted in this way.
So when the screaming from the unfunded British universities starts, as it almost certainly will, keep in mind that this is just a very large case of the waste that plagues U.S. government-funded science as well. Science and politics do not mix.
The Obama administration has long said it will hold Iran accountable for acts of terrorism. It now has a chance to prove it: Interpol red notices for five former Iranian officials found culpable in Argentinas deadliest terrorist attack are about to come up for renewal.
Today marks 22 years since the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were killed, and the attack injured hundreds more -- innocent men, women and children.
In 2007, Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nismans exhaustive investigation concluded that the attack had been approved on Aug. 14, 1993, in a secret meeting attended by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, Foreign Minister Ali Velayati, and Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian.
Interpol issued red notices, which are akin to arrest warrants, for Fallahian and four other senior figures. Within Iran, that brought no stigma -- on the contrary, all have been rewarded, including in the time since Hassan Rouhani was elected as Irans supposedly moderate president.
Fallahian was Irans minister of intelligence at the time of the AMIA attack. Germany also still has an arrest warrant for Fallahian in connection with the assassination of five Kurdish opposition leaders.
The others for whom Interpol issued red notices include Mohsen Rezai, Mohsen Rabbani, Ahmad Vahidi and Amhad Reza Asghari.
Rezai was the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at the time of the attack. Today, Rezai is secretary of Irans Expediency Council.
Rabbani helped build Irans terrorist network in Latin America for 11 years before the attack. He used diplomatic cover -- officially he was Irans cultural attache in Buenos Aires -- to plot the AMIA bombing. Today, Rabbani is cultivating Iranian supporters through radicalization programs for Latin American students.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who worked with Nisman, understood Rabbanis role as the handler of Abdul Kadir, who is serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up fuel lines at New Yorks John F. Kennedy airport. Had that attack succeeded, it might well have been deadlier than the 9/11 attacks.
Vahidi led the Guard Corps Quds Force at the time of the AMIA bombing. He became defense minister in 2009. Vahidi was named director of the Armed Forces Joint Command Council Strategic Defense Research Center on Rouhanis watch.
Asghari, a member of the Guard Corps, was third secretary at Irans Embassy in Argentina from 1989 until 1994. Asghari was employed by a front company operated by the IRGC. He later worked for Irans Foreign Ministry.
Interpols guidelines preclude issuing red notices for presidents and foreign ministers. However, Argentina issued its own international arrest warrants for Velayati, Irans foreign minister at the time of the attack, and Rafsanjani, who was president when the attack was planned.
In advance of the upcoming Interpol General Assembly this November, Iran has been engaging in a full court press, including a legal challenge, to have the red notices lifted. Earlier, Iran had sought to achieve this goal through a secret back channel with the government of former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. That failed when Nisman exposed it. Another effort also failed: Iran and the Kirchner government signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly investigate the bombing, a transparent scheme to whitewash the culprits -- the red notice holders -- and accuse imaginary suspects. The new Argentine government headed by President Mauricio Macri voided the MOU, finding it unconstitutional.
When U.S. President Barack Obama visited Buenos Aires in March, he promised to help Argentina to finally hold these attackers accountable, but he made no mention of Irans role in the bombing -- despite the well-publicized revelation of an audio tape in which former foreign minister Hector Timerman acknowledges that 18 years ago, they [Iran] planted the bomb.
This is among the reasons there is concern that the Obama administration will yield to Irans pressure and not do what is necessary to ensure that the red notices are renewed. Since cutting a nuclear deal with Iran a year ago, the administration has often failed to hold Tehran accountable for its actions in meaningful ways. To take just one example: Recent German intelligence reports exposed Irans efforts to procure nuclear technology as well as its illicit proliferation activities involving chemical and biological warfare. There have been no repercussions.
Those who say we dont know who perpetrated the AMIA attack and suggest it will never be solved are, for whatever reasons, protecting terrorists. Nismans evidence of Iranian complicity in the AMIA bombing, and his exposure of the secret back channel aimed at getting the red notices lifted, angered Irans rulers.
Nisman was found brutally and suspiciously murdered a day before he was to formally present evidence to the Argentine Congress.
Iran continues to engage in nefarious activities in our hemisphere, and we ignore this at our peril. Not renewing the red notices would mean that justice will be denied to the victims of the AMIA bombings and to their families. It would mean that terrorists will get away with mass murder. President Obama should see that as a red line -- and not let it be crossed.
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Multiple sources are identifying the person who shot and killed three LEOs this morning in Baton Rouge, LA this morning as one Gavin Eugene Long. Long, a black male in his mid- to late 20s, is reportedly a former Marine who went by the name Cosmo Setepenra. He is a former Nation of Islam member who claimed to have been living in Africa for approximately two years.
Long's status as a suspect has not been confirmed by law enforcement, as best we can tell.
On his Twitter account, in which he referred to himself frequently in the third person, Long described himself as a number of things, including Alpha Preneur and Freedom Strategist.
One section of Long's website says the following.
While in Africa, Cosmos spiritual journey took him across Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Ghana and Burkina Faso. During that time he frequented the highly treasured and revered mountainous regions of Africa and was taught by Africas native spiritual practitioners and elder holistic healers.
According to CBS News, Long left the Marine Corps in 2010 with an honorable discharge and is originally from Kansas City. Their sources allege he rented a vehicle in Kansas City last week and drove to Baton Rouge. There he allegedly engaged responding BRPD police officers and EBRSO deputies with gunfire, striking six and killing three. He was killed in the exchange, his body left in place until an Explosive Ordnance Disposal robot could be used to check it for explosives.
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. President Barack Obama
This is the alleged killer in a recent YouTube post. You can locate his website here. His Facebook account is no longer active, though his Instagram account (@convoswithcosmo).
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Whats better than free museums, friends, Athens and a chance to expand your artistic palate? Nothing, especially when all of these things com
SHARE In this image provided by the 9/11 Memorial Museum a piece of art, created by Ejay Weiss using ash from Ground Zero from what was the World Trade Center garage and entitled "9-11 Elegies" is a painting that is part of a special 15th anniversary exhibit at the 9/11 Memorial Museum by 13 artists who have filtered a day of terror often with personal links into works of both grief and tenderness. (AP Photo/9/11 Memorial Museum)
By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) 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.
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By Nathan Solis of the Redding Record Searchlight
Shasta County officials do not see any problems with how water customers are billed in rural neighborhoods during the summer and reject most of the findings of a Grand Jury report critical of how those services are managed.
The board of supervisors will respond to two county Grand Jury reports Tuesday: Management of veterans' services in Shasta County and how municipal services and water rates are charged to customers.
The county disagrees with nine of the 11 findings from the grand jury report on water management and says there is no money to create a separate agency to oversee these water customers in the neighborhoods of Keswick, Jones Valley and Crag View like the grand jury report recommends.
Currently the county's water agency is overseen and staffed by employees of the Shasta County Public Works Department who also manage, inspect, bill and repair the water systems for these customers. The grand jury found this overlap odd, because there could be a lack of checks and balances. There's also the matter of outdated water contracts and inefficient water purchases.
The county purchases water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation as the Water Agency but also purchases water from the McConnell Foundation during the summer. The county agrees it will consider updating a 2005 contract on the matter of this purchased water.
The grand jury said two of these County Service Areas are owed money by the county and Keswick CSA was refunded $11,703.43 from the county in April this year. But the Crag View CSA was undercharged by as much as $7,016.59 and would not be issued a refund. There were also errors in how the grand jury factored the rate of water used by Crag View, said the county's response.
The McConnell water is purchased at a set amount, 250 acre-feet, and some water is lost. This can't be helped, according to the county, because over purchasing water is preferred to running into fines for over using water.
The county's water agency reported losses of $23,985 in 2014 and $18,225 in 2015 due to water purchases. In its report the grand jury said that money could go into staffing a new agency, which is not likely going to happen according to the county's response.
A second grand jury report that reviewed the Veterans Service Office in Redding will also be considered.
Getting services to veterans in Burney and placing college students to work in the VSO are already in place, said the county's response and were put in place before the grand jury report came out.
A criticism of the VSO's website was that it lacked any useful links. It was meant to be that way, said the county's response, in order to get clients to come into the VSO's office to see staff. Other links will be added by the end of this year to help veterans.
The VSO will not take the advice of the grand jury to start scheduling appointments for veterans, because walk-ins work better. Also, the grand jury's report is outdated when it says there is only one state accredited employee working out of the Redding office. There are two accredited employees now and more will be trained in the coming months so they can file claims for veteran benefits.
Also on the agenda:
A program that provides housing vouchers to homeless people will receive $17,000 to help staff process applications. The California Department of Community Services and Development will provide a six-month contract to the local Community Action Agency that gives housing vouchers to people referred to by veterans services office, probation, health and human services agency and non-profits.
Supervisors will consider a request to rezone a 61-acre parcel in the Shingletown area. If approved by the board, the developer would split the property into four parcels ranging from 3 to 10 acres, with a remaining 41-acre parcel. The board will hold a hearing on the agenda item.
The union representing Shasta County's probation officers have negotiated a salary raise that will amount to $521,000 over the next three years. The first salary hike for 3 percent is scheduled for August of this year. This increase will affect detention and probation officers and will put in place a retirement plan. The union also negotiated letting employees cash out vacation time, according to the terms of the agreement.
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Deputies stop alleged drug sale
Two men were arrested Saturday night after Sheriff's deputies found about 20-pounds of processed marijuana which allegedly was packaged for sale.
An anonymous report of a car parked near the intersection of Brophy and Rabbit lanes was called in to dispatchers as an alleged drug sale. Another report said a man had a gun in the same area, Sgt. Gene Randall said.
Several people were in the car when deputies arrived and there was also open alcoholic containers and processed marijuana.
Deputies searched the car and found the 20-pounds of processed marijuana, which looked to be ready to sell, said Randall.
Deputies arrested Nai Saephan, 30, of Anderson and Christopher Jamili, 38, of Redding on suspicion of possession of marijuana for sale. The Shasta County Sheriff's Office Marijuana Eradication Team took over the investigation. Both men were booked at the Shasta County Jail.
Firefighters monitor fire in Redding
The Quartz Fire, which burned 20-acres and threatened several structures, was under "patrol status" Sunday.
Redding Fire Chief Gerry Gray said no homes or structures were damaged as the quick-moving fire spread after it started at about 2:30 Saturday afternoon. One fire fighter was taken to the hospital for heat exhaustion, but was released, said Gray.
The wildfire 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 and quickly spread to 20 acres. Structures were threatened, but there are no reports of any being damaged.
The cause of the fire was under investigation. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection assisted city fire crews and an air tanker dropped retardant on the flames.
Singer Kanye West takes the microphone from singer Taylor Swift as she accepts the "Best Female Video" award during the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009 in New York. (Jason DeCrow / Associated Press)
NEW YORK It's Taylor vs. Kanye, part 242, with a dash of Kim Kardashian.
West's famous wife stirred the pot of beef between Taylor Swift and Kanye West on Sunday, when on Snapchat, she posted video of a phone call between the rapper and pop superstar about his song "Famous," in which he rapped: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous."
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Upon its release in February, West was condemned by many for the line. He insisted Swift had given her blessing to the lyric, but she denied ever hearing the lyric.
On Twitter on Sunday, Kardashian teased: "Do u guys follow me on snap chat? u really should ;-)"
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Then, she unleashed a series of Snapchat videos that threatened to break the internet.
On them, a smiling West tells Swift he's working on a song and wants to use the lyric: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex."
In response, Swift is heard saying she worries about overexposure, but West says the lyric would be good exposure. In the end, she appears to give her blessing.
"It's like a compliment," she says. "I really appreciate you telling me about it, that's really nice."
"I just had a responsibility to you as a friend. Thanks for being so cool about it," he responds.
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Swift also is heard saying it's a tongue-in-cheek line anyway, and that she would let people know she knew about it in advance. She also says, "I'm always going to respect you."
But when the song came out, the entire line was: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous." In a statement released at the time, Swift's rep said: "Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single 'Famous' on her Twitter account. ... She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric."
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Many on social media took glee in the leaked audio recordings on Sunday, and suggested that it proved Swift had lied. But in an Instagram post, Swift said the audio actually proved she had never approved the use of the world "bitch."
That moment when Kanye West secretly records your phone call, then Kim posts it on the Internet. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jul 17, 2016 at 9:14pm PDT
"Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me 'that bitch' in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened. You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that bitch' in front of the entire world.
"Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship. He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot 'approve' a song you haven't heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination."
Stars jumped onto the social media battleground on both sides. Khloe Kardashian praised her sister on Twitter, calling her "a savage." Swift's friend Selena Gomez rhetorically asked in a tweet why people can't use their voice for something that matters before adding, "Truth is last thing we need right now is hate, in any form." Justin Bieber appealed for calm on Instagram with a short video calling for "less hate, more love."
This is the latest chapter in a long feud between the pair that now dates back seven years, when West took the stage as a then 19-year-old Swift beat Beyonce for an MTV Video Music Award. West came onstage as Swift was accepting her award and said, "Yo Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!"
The infamous moment cast West as a villain, and damaged his image; Swift, already a multiplatinum star, went on to more fame. The feud continued for years, but the pair made up last year, with West, Kardashian and Swift publicly trading hugs and smiles in public.
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Cut to earlier this year, when "Famous" was released, the feud was back on, and Swift even took a dig at West when she accepted her Grammy for album of the year for "1989": "There will be people along the way that will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame."
In her Instagram post Sunday, Swift seemed as weary of the public battle as many in the public have become: "I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009."
Associated Press
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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)
Place your bets only on cities where you can easily monitor and where there is visible growth.
IMAGE: Tier 2 cities are the next big opportunity.
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.
IMAGE: Many of these cities like Lucknow could grow at a faster pace. Photograph kind courtesy: Superfast1111/Wikimedia Commons
Then, there's the government's smart city project. If successfully implemented, it has the potential to transform many Tier-II towns into metros.
"With infrastructure improving in these cities, more industries are coming up. This is leading to migration from adjoining areas to Tier-II towns, resulting in their expansion," says Santhosh Kumar, chief executive officer - operations and international director, JLL India.
IMAGE: Prices in Tier-II cities like Jaipur have seen a correction.
Investment opportunity
While real estate prices are stagnant in metros, some in Tier-II cities have seen a correction.
The index of Tier-II cities such as Jaipur, Kanpur and Kochi have seen 7.40 per cent, three per cent and eight per cent correction, respectively, in the January-March quarter compared to the previous quarter, according to RBI data. Prices have also fallen year-on-year.
One reason for the fall in price is the slowdown in real estate prices in metros.
The negative sentiment has gradually percolated down to these cities.
"Non-resident Indians (NRIs) usually invest in these non-metros either for their families or to create an asset that they can use if they decide to come back to India. With the global economy under pressure, there has been a slowdown in NRI investment," says Kumar.
IMAGE: Bhopal, a boom town to invest in. Photograph kind courtesy: Nitinwork/Wikimedia Commons
However, with India's economic growth expected to remain robust, these cities are likely to continue expanding.
The International Monetary Fund expects India to grow at over seven per cent yearly in 2016-17 and 2017-18.
"Globally, we have seen that there are always a few Tier-II cities that grow much faster than metros, as economic activity and infrastructure developments happen there. In India, for example, there were originally four metros. Now, we have the big eight, which include Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad," says Shrinivas Kowligi, partner, smart cities, EY.
IMAGE: Kochi has the potential to transform into a metro city.
Real estate experts feel that the government's smart city project could provide a fillip to property prices in Tier-II cities.
Explains Kowligi: "The government wants these cities to do area-based developments and offer better mobility solutions, more public spaces, better services and connectivity, walkability, etc."
There's also an element of real estate in it, he added. The government also offers higher floor space ratio in such areas.
Typically, these are existing areas that are spread out between one sq km and four sq km. Investors can look at investing in those areas within Tier-II cities that have been selected for development.
IMAGE: Smart city project could provide a fillip to property prices in Tier-II cities like Vishakapatnam. Photograph kind courtesy: SaiChandra004/Wikimedia Commons
Identifying the next boom town Tier-II or metro periphery?
Property investors are usually faced with an option-either to invest in an upcoming city or buy real estate in the periphery of a metro.
As metros continue to expand, many areas that look far off today will become part of the city in future.
Experts say the selection between the two depends on the investment expectations you have.
"The rate of return could be higher in Tier-II cities but the investment tenure needs to be long - at least a decade. If you have a shorter investment horizon, city's periphery makes sense. You will make stable but limited returns," says Kumar.
IMAGE: Coimbatore offers good options for investors. Photograph kind courtesy: Pratheept2000/ Wikimedia Commons
Where you choose to invest should also depend on how deep your pockets are.
Though distant suburbs of a major city are cheaper compared to buying a property in the metro, they might be more expensive than Tier-II cities.
Experts say on an average, an individual can get a two-bedroom flat for Rs 30-40 lakh in the heart of a Tier-II city with markets, school and hospitals in the vicinity.
If they want similar infrastructure in the periphery of a metro, they would need to shell out 50-100 per cent more.
IMAGE: Vadodara among the top Tier-2 cities. Photograph kind courtesy: Notnarayan/Wikimedia Commons
Identifying opportunity
Most of the cities that have grown rapidly were educational hubs that offered talent to industries that were setting up base in these cities.
"Typically, industries come first to these cities, followed by company offices and then commercial real estate development follows," says Surabhi Arora, associate director, research, Colliers India.
Also, watch for population growth, a city's growing prominence. Infrastructure development, such as a national highway or a zonal hub for business, is another factor that can help a Tier-II city grow rapidly.
"But, these developments need to be visible in the area that you have chosen. Don't rush to buy merely on the basis of announcement," adds Arora.
IMAGE: Investing in Tier-II cities carries its own share of risks. Photograph kind courtesy: Superfast1111/Wikimedia Commons
"Also consider political factors that can influence the city," says Gulam Zia, executive director - advisory, retail & hospitality, Knight Frank India.
He explains: Bhubaneswar has all the elements to be the next metro city but it lacks proper political heft.
On the other hand, many companies and real estate investors are firming up plans to invest in Ahmedabad after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister.
Kumar of JLL says you could earn better returns by opting to invest in plots rather than in ready-to-move-in houses in Tier-II destinations.
Not all rosy
Investing in Tier-II cities carries its own share of risks.
You should only put money in towns where you can monitor your investments or have relatives who can take care of it.
There have been umpteen cases of plots being encroached upon, or the tenant refusing to move out, taking shelter under the Rent Control Act.
"Always opt for a city that's not more than three-four hours from the place you live in," says Zia.
IMAGE: If you are opting for a plot, spend money on doing proper title search.
If you are opting for a plot, spend money on doing proper title search.
If ready-to-move-in houses interest you, do your own research on the developer by logging on to its website and visiting completed projects.
Investing in Tier-II cities is like investing in mid-cap stocks.
Have an exit strategy in place, in case your investment doesn't seem to be yielding desired results.
Zakir Naik, a gentle, rockstar televangelist, is dangerous as young Muslims may be swayed by his fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and justify victimhood and extremism, says Shekhar Gupta.
Until renowned Pakistani commentator Khaled Ahmed mentioned his name to me, I did not even know someone called Zakir Naik existed.
Ahmed was surprised that I didn't, in this conversation I think sometime in 2009 at a Track-II type conference, and said he was rising as a significant Islamic televangelist not just in the subcontinent, but globally as much of his discourse was in English.
"Watch his Peace TV closely," he said, "get to know this man, we will all hear a great deal more about him going ahead." Ahmed said he was impressed by his skilled rhetoric and rationalisation of conservative dogma.
I did go, where everyone goes, to 'Hazrat Google' (not my choice of the description, but someone else's who we will talk about in a bit) and started reading about Naik, and watching his recorded speeches.
It wasn't difficult to understand the point Ahmed was making. The degree-holding allopathic doctor-turned-tele-evangelist had emerged as the subcontinent's most significant, articulate and powerful spokesman for conservative Saudi-style Islam.
His language, easy smiling manner, prolific quotations from the Quran as well as the Bhagwad Gita, Upanishads and the Bible, his inclination to take all questions at his congregations -- even from Christians, Hindus and atheists -- set him apart from the stereotype of a maulana.
He wore a suit and tie, spoke measured sentences in fast-paced English and although his loose, relatively sparse beard and skullcap marked him out as a devout Muslim, little else in his demeanour did. I reached his people through one of my colleagues and they welcomed the idea with some enthusiasm that he and I record an interview together. Which we did in March 2009.
Naik does not have an official or religious title. He objected, on camera, to being described as a maulvi or a maulana. To be described as a rockstar of tele-evangelism (whatever my views on any religious evangelists) he not only didn't mind, but accepted most gleefully.
There is a television star quality to him. The conversation, by and large, was not confrontational. The tone was mostly friendly, he engaged and there wasn't much left to argue with when he praised -- and expressed his fullest faith in -- the Indian Constitution, judiciary ('all including Muslims, get justice, sooner or later,' he said).
His view on Partition, by the way, was no different from that of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: a tragedy for the subcontinent, as one nation, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would have been a 'global power, from sport to economy,' he said.
Most Muslims never needed or even asked for Partition, he said, and many who led the campaign for Pakistan were 'not even practising Muslims.' Of course, unlike the RSS, he viewed it more from the angle of Muslims' interest and I know there is a background to conservative Muslims opposing Partition, led by the Jamaat-e-Islami. But his position, in today's discourse, will be quite welcome and may only annoy most Pakistanis.
Even on Kashmir (he referred to General K V Krishna Rao, as the governor, asking him to use his wide influence in the state to calm things down), his view was what most of those who hate and demonise him would generally accept. That Kashmiris were fed up of both India and Pakistan and in a free vote would prefer to be left alone.
But since that was not an option, it was for India to improve education, employment and peace on its side and Kashmiris would be happy.
Subtle problems arose as we got to trickier issues. He would freely condemn 26/11 and even 9/11 as far as 'the person who has destroyed the twin tower is 100 per cent wrong. He cannot be a practising Muslim, he has to be condemned (but not sure if it's Osama bin Laden) because I keep on travelling, I get information from documentaries, 9/11, which says that it was an inside job, this 9/11 was an inside job done by George Bush himself... the evidence what I saw in that documentary is far superior to the evidence against Osama bin Laden.'
His rising hold over the Muslim mind was acknowledged in his making it to the carefully chosen Indian Express annual power list in 2010.
His Osama kind of equivocation underlines what is wrong and dangerous with him.
Besides the ancient stupidities he repeatedly supports, like the 'Islamic' way of punishing your wife, with 'light beatings as if with a toothbrush' or ruling that Muslim tombs are un-Islamic, his modern facade, quote-a-verse-every-three-sentences rhetoric represents a deep, conservative, scriptural view of Islam.
And while his method looks non-threatening and amiable, he is dangerous in how he can play with genuinely inquisitive, innocent minds.
I do not believe he would ever advocate violence against other people or the State, and definitely he will oppose Islamic State as a 'conspiracy against Islam,' but an innocent, young Muslim mind could easily extrapolate his fundamentalist interpretations of Islam to justify the more extreme alternatives and methods. No surprise, therefore, if some of the Bangladeshi terrorists were his followers.
A question is often asked: Why are so many new, young Muslim terrorists, particularly those of the IS, well-educated, English-speaking and from prosperous families. In short, why does the new Muslim terrorist defy the old poor, illiterate, Ajmal Kasab stereotype?
The answer may lie in what Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi, who is another favourite hate-figure of the Hindu right wing, once told me.
He took me for a drive around the inner city of Hyderabad which his family and its Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen have ruled for decades. He took me to see the educational institutions he runs there.
At his medical college, I was pleasantly taken aback to find a 70:30 girl-to-boy ratio in his MBBS class and happily posted some pictures on social media. It brought an avalanche of abuse with most complaining about the fact that all the girls wore the hijab. Ask those abusing you, he said, if they'd rather that these girls go to a madrasa instead of a medical college.
And then he reflected, 'Maybe, it will be better if young Muslims also went to the madrasa. A maulvi will tell them the meaning of Islam, its principles, even jihad. It will be better, he said, than when young Muslims become engineers, doctors and MBAs, have no knowledge of their faith and are now curious. So where do you go, but to Hazrat Google.'
On Google, he said, when a young Muslim hits jihad, he is 'most likely to see Hafiz Saeed and his Jamaat-ud-Dawah at the top.'
This, he said, is the biggest challenge for Islam today. Sure enough, he sees IS as an abomination and has put up hoardings in the old city against it.
Okay, he is no Mr Congeniality, but you can also see his larger, and more profound point. How do you deal with this phenomenon where young, educated Muslim professionals go to Google and even modern television evangelists to learn about their faith?
Their minds are overwhelmed with propaganda and Naik's kind of convincing story of Muslim victimhood.
Then some self-styled secularists, including Congress leaders -- not just Digvijaya Singh -- stoke that victimhood by calling everything, from the Ishrat Jahan encounter to Batla House a conspiracy against innocent Indian Muslims.
If this is how complex it is in India, you can imagine the situation in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and this assault on the minds of nearly 500 million, or indeed about 40 per cent of the world's Muslims.
Our fight is not against any political party, but against vandalism, corruption and communalism -- each of which are respectively represented by the SP, the BSP and the BJP.
Newly-appointed chief ministerial candidate Sheila Dikshit and state chief Raj Babbar came out all guns blazing against the SP, BSP and BJP, promising to restore the party to its grand days three decades ago.
IMAGE: UP Congress president Raj Babbar with the partys CM candidate Sheila Dikshit and senior party leaders Sanjay Singh and Rita Bahuguna Joshi at a road show in Lucknow on Sunday. Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI
The arrival of newly-appointed Uttar Pradesh Congress president Raj Babbar and the partys chief ministerial nominee Shiela Dikshit on Sunday marked the re-awakening of a party in the countrys most populous state where it ruled for four long decades before being voted out 27 years ago.
It was flowers all the way from the city airport to the Congress headquarters on Mall Road as the cavalcade of new state 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.
Actor-turned-politician Babbar, known for his antics and melodrama, easily captured the crowds, who applauded him each time he took potshots at the three key political opponents -- the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party -- against whom he declared war.
Asked if he was carrying a magic wand to infuse life into the state Congress, he told the press, Well, I do not have any magic wand, but the wand lies in the finger of every voter, who will soon realise that his true well-wisher -- the Congress -- is back in the reckoning and is all set to form the next government in Uttar Pradesh.
When a scribe sought to know which party did he consider his main political adversary, he shot back, Our fight is not against any political party, but against vandalism, corruption and communalism -- each of which are respectively represented by the SP, the BSP and the BJP.
He said, Both the SP and BSP had ruled the state four times while the BJP remained in power thrice, but the leaders of these caste and religion based parties only pursued their personal agenda and ignored the well being of common people.
Taking on the current SP dispensation, Babbar pointed out, Before the SP rode into power in 2012, its supremo, Mulayam Singh Yadav, went about flaying BSP and promised to send its leaders to jail for squandering away the taxpayers money, but after acquiring power, he said that the government was incapable of stopping the loot.
Babbar didnt waste much time as he also slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who he said had fooled the UP electorate into giving away as many as 73 Lok Sabha seats to the BJP in 2014, while terming BJP chief Amit Shah of being a wheeler-dealer.
Both Babbar and Dikshit profusely thanked party workers for turning up in such large numbers. They also had words of praise for the members of their team, which include nine-term MLA Pramod Tiwari, former minister Sanjay Singh, former UP Congress president Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Lok Sabha MP PL Punia, former minister Mohsina Kidwai to name a few.
Both the office-bearers also expressed their gratitude to the Gandhis -- Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka.
And when a scribe sought to know Priyankas status in the party, they described her as part of the family that was hailed as messiah of the country for which its members had sacrificed their lives.
Even though it is too early to predict what lies in store for the party, theres no doubt that the new team has acquired success in round one.
Three Islamists from the infamous Al-badr militia were on Monday sentenced to death while five others jailed until death by a special tribunal in Bangladesh for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
A three-member panel of judges of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal led by Justice Anwarul Haque pronounced the judgement as two of the convicts appeared on the dock while six others were tried in absentia as they were on the run to evade justice.
The verdict came as the prosecution accused all the eight of five charges relating to crimes like mass murders, abductions, tortures and lootings.
Prosecution lawyers said six of the convicts were members of Al-badr auxiliary force of the Pakistani troops during the war and carried out atrocities in northern Jamalpur district.
The two others belonged to Razakar, another Bengali-manned armed group raised by Pakistanis during the war.
Manned by activists of fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, which was opposed to Bangladesh's 1971 independence from Pakistan, the Al-Badr appeared as an extremely notorious force by carrying out ruthless atrocities siding with Pakistani troops.
The verdict came amid a nationwide tension following the recent two back-to-back Islamist terror attacks in the country following which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hinted that Jamaat could be behind the assaults.
Bangladesh has so far executed four war crimes convicts since the process began to try the top Bengali perpetrators of 1971 atrocities in line with the electoral commitment of Prime Minister Hasina in 2008.
A Bharatiya Janata Party-backed outfit in West Bengal will conduct a census of the cattle population in the state in an attempt to raise awareness about how to protect them.
From August 1, hundreds of volunteers of the Gau Raksha Committee, which boasts many BJP members, will fan out in the state for the exercise, the outfit said.
The survey will be done in two parts. A head count of cows will be done and it will be repeated after Bakr Eid in September to see how many cows went missing.
"Every year during Bakr Eid, thousands of cows are slaughtered and are smuggled to Bangladesh. This has to stop. It is true that cow slaughter is not banned in the state but even if a cow is to be slaughtered, there are certain norms to follow," Subrata Gupta, president of committee, told PTI.
Asked to explain the 'norms', Gupta said, "A cows is eligible to be slaughtered and sold if she is 14 years of age, doesn't have any disease and is not pregnant. A medical officer also needs to certify. But in most of the cases, a cow as young as four years old is sold and smuggled."
Gupta said that recently Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had said she wanted to see cattle smuggling curbed. "So being a citizen of this country and state, this is our duty to stop cow smuggling."
"After Bakr Eid, we will visit the households which we visited earlier and take a headcount of the cows. Id we find the cows missing, then we will inquire about the official papers and medical papers that are needed for selling a cow. If the papers are not satisfactory, we will file FIRs about the missing cows," Gupta said.
The BJP, which has increased its vote share from four per cent in 2011 to 10.2 per cent in 2016 winning three assembly seats, has often flagged the issue of cow smuggling through the porous Indo-Bangla border.
"Our volunteers will keep a close watch on all the entry and exit routes of transportation of cattle in the state," he said.
Gupta claimed that last year before Bakr Eid, the outfit had saved thousands of cows, which were illegally sold, from being slaughtered.
In December last year, an NGO trying to raise awareness against cow slaughter had come up with a novel idea of organising a "selfie with a cow" contest in the city.
China on Monday closed a part of the South China Sea for military manoeuvres as it moved quickly to assert control over the disputed waters after an international tribunal struck down its claims over the region.
The Peoples Liberation Army Air Force has conducted a combat air patrol with long range bombers in the South China Sea recently, which will become a regular practice in the future, a military spokesperson said.
The PLA sent H-6K long range strategic bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force as saying.
During the mission, the aircraft carried out tasks including aerial scouting, air combat and island and reef patrol, fulfilling the patrols objective, Shen said.
The air force aims to promote real combat training over the sea, improve combat abilities against security threats and safeguard Chinas sovereignty and security, he said.
To effectively fulfil its mission, the air force will continue to conduct combat patrols on a regular basis in the South China Sea, he said.
Shen pointed out that the South China Sea islands have been Chinas territory since ancient times, and Chinas rights and interests in relevant maritime areas should not be infringed upon.
The PLA Air Force will firmly defend national sovereignty, security and maritime interests, safeguard regional peace and stability, and cope with various threats and challenges, he said.
Separately the maritime administration in Hainan province, which overseas Chinas expansive claims over the South China Sea said it is closing off a part of the sea for military exercises this week as China simultaneously moved on both air and the sea to establish firm control over the area which was awarded by the tribunal to the Philippines.
The maritime administration said that an area southeast of the island would be closed until July 12 without providing details about the nature of the military exercises.
Beijings moves followed after the tribunal appointed by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration last week quashed Chinas claims of historic rights over the vast expanse of the South China Sea and upheld the Philippines claims under the UN Convention on Law of Seas.
China which boycotted the tribunal angrily rejected its verdict and said the award would not impact its claims over 90 per cent of the resource-rich sea.
Besides the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also firmly contest Chinas claims in the region.
As China moved in with its military to assert its claims, the US which is backing the smaller states in the area to stand up to Beijings bid to forcefully establish control asked China to implement the verdict and settle the row peacefully with its neighbours who have counter claims over the area.
The new military manoeuvres by Beijing came in the midst of the visit to China on Monday by the US Navys top admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, to discuss the South China Sea dispute in the aftermath of the verdict and ways to boost interactions between the two militaries.
Richardson met the head of the Chinese navy, Admiral Wu Shengli and held talks with him.
It is very helpful for us to strengthen communication between us and build confidence. Of course it can help to improve our working and personal relationship, Wu said.
Earlier, Sun Jianguo Chief of the Joint Staff Department of the Chinas all powerful Central Military Commission, said the freedom of navigation issue was bogus and one that certain countries repeatedly hyped up.
Without directly mentioning US, he warned that freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end in disaster.
Reiterating Chinas stand that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea has never been affected, he said there wont be a problem in future as long as nobody plays tricks.
Terming China as the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea he was quoted as saying at a meeting that Beijing wont let anybody damage it.
But at the same he said China consistently opposed so-called military freedom of navigation referring a number of US military vessels passing through waters close to artificial islands built by China in the South China Sea.
This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way, he said.
Image: Soldiers of China's People's Liberation Army Navy patrol on Woody Island, in the Paracel Archipelago, which is known in China as Xisha Islands. Photograph: Reuters
Ten commandos belonging to the elite COBRA battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force were killed and five others injured after a group of 200 Naxals surrounded troops and blew off 22 Improvised Explosive Devices in the jungles of Bihars Aurangabad district.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the CRPF in 2008 for undertaking special jungle/guerrilla warfare operations.
Officials said the encounter started on Monday afternoon in Dumari Nala area, under Madanpur police station area of the said district, in the Maoist hotbed of the Chakarbanda forests when the COBRA team assisted by other forces launched a special operation in the hunt for some top Naxal leaders suspected to be in the jungles.
They said after the COBRA made the fire assault and killed three Naxalites, they were trapped in a heavily mined area where a squad of over 200 Maoists surrounded the troops and blew off 22 IEDs amidst firing which led to fatal injuries to the commandos, specially trained in jungle warfare operations by the CRPF.
A chopper was sent around 3:25 pm to fetch the injured but as the area was heavily mined, the troops could be evacuated only by 8:00 pm yesterday, they said.
While eight commandos were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries later, the official said, adding the bodies of the three Naxals have been recovered.
Few more Naxals are suspected to have been killed and the search is still on, they said.
Some arms and ammunition, including sophisticated ones like two AK-47 rifles, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher were also recovered from the site by the COBRA unit in an indication that senior Maoist leaders were present in the area.
Officials said five other personnel were critically injured in the fierce gun battle that ensued after the IED blast and they have now been admitted to various hospitals.
CRPF Director General K Durga Prasad, Inspector General (Operations) Zulfiquar Hasan and other senior officers of the force have rushed to Bihar from Delhi.
In the wake of the incident, Home Minister Rajnath Singh spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and assured him of all possible help to tackle the Maoists.
Expressing grief over the incident, Kumar ordered home department officials to immediately pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to the next of kin of each deceased as per provisions of the state government.
Additional reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched, officials said.
All the slain commandos belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion which is deployed in the state for conducting anti-Naxal operations.
The martyred CoBRA men have been identified as Head Constables Anil Kumar Singh, a resident of Buxar in Bihar and K Opendra Singh of Thoubal, Manipur, Constables Sinod Kumar of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, Ramesh Kumar from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, Diwakar Kumar from Khagariya in Bihar, Polash Mondal from South Denajpur in West Bengal, Deepak Ghosh of Nadia in West Bengal, Manoj Kumar of Betul in Madhya Pradesh, Harvender Panwar of Muzaffarnagar in UP and Ravi Kumar from Siwan in Bihar.
Image: An injured CRPF jawan being taken to hospital after a Naxal attack near the border of Gaya and Aurangabad district on Monday. Photograph: PTI Photo
Hundreds of people have been evacuated to safer places in eastern Rajasthan after heavy rainfall over the past two days led to a flood-like situation in the region and severed road connectivity to many areas.
Incessant rainfall lashed Bharatpur, Dholpur, Karauli districts inundating several areas.
Bharatpur District Collector Laxminarayan Soni said: "Flood-like situation affected normal life in the district and nearly 400 people have been shifted to shelters. Army was called in for rescue work on Friday but was sent back last night as the situation improved."
He said many areas and villages were water-logged but the water level has been gradually reducing.
Dholpur collector Suchi Tyagi said two officers of the army on Monday reviewed the situation.
"Several villages have been cut off by roads and remain inundated. Policemen have been deployed to prevent people from crossing roads or bridges where water-level is high," she said.
The areas received light rain since last night, but the Met department issued a warning for heavy rains on Monday.
Tyagi said all arrangements for relief and rescue were in place.
Schools in Karauli district have been shut on Monday.
"More than 300 people are staying at five-six temporary shelters. Arrangements for food and medicines have been made," an official overseeing the relief work said, asserting all people in the district were safe.
A 35-member National Disaster Response Force team was camping in Karauli for relief and rescue.
Rajasthan has received excess rainfall so far this season. Against a normal rainfall of 149.85 mm from June 1 to July 17,
the state recorded 222.99 mm rainfall, a jump of 48.81 per cent.
Twelve districts -- Alwar, Baran, Bharatpur, Chittorgarh, Churu, Dausa, Jhalawar, Jhunjhunu, Karauli, Rajsamand, Sawaimadhopur and Sikar -- have received abnormal rainfall (60 per cent or more). Eleven, including Ajmer, Jaipur, Kota and
Udaipur, received excess rains (20 per cent to 59 per cent).
Despite this, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Sirohi have had deficit rains while Barmer, Jalore and Sri Ganganagar have had scanty rainfall so far.
Remaining four districts -- Banswara, Nagaur, Pali and Pratapgarh have recorded normal rainfall this monsoon.
Of the 822 dams in Rajasthan, 36 were fully filled and 391 were partially filled, while 395 are empty, according to water resources department.
Slamming the government over the situation in Kashmir, Opposition in the Rajya Sabha on Monday pressed for holding an all-party meet to discuss the issue and pitched for a political solution rather than using "barrel of the gun" while dealing with the unrest.
During a short-duration discussion on the Kashmir situation, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said while his party stands with the Modi government and the coalition in the state in dealing firmly with militancy, the "excessive use" of force against the common citizens, including children and women, is not acceptable.
For the current unrest, he blamed a number of reasons including BJP's participation in government with PDP in the state, provocative statements made by some leaders of BJP and RSS besides Pakistan, "whose existence is the root cause of all problems."
He underlined that Kashmir cannot be ruled "through the barrel of the gun or bullets" and demanded that responsibility be fixed for "excessive use" of force.
He also demanded all-party meeting on the issue.
Leader of House Arun Jaitley admitted that the situation in Kashmir was a "matter of concern" but rejected the contention that the violence in the Valley was a result of the BJP getting into power at the state.
Asserting that efforts are underway to restore normalcy at the earliest, he said the entire country should speak in one voice at this time and common man should not be made to suffer there.
Asking the youth to stay away from the agitation which is being held against the killing of a militant, he said, "When thousands of people attack the police, then understandably, there will be action. The fight is between the country and the separatists and common people are standing with the country which is in national interest."
It is the responsibility of the police on the ground to determine the kind of force that needs to be used to quell mob violence, Jaitley said while blaming Pakistan for promoting violence in the state.
In his speech, Azad said the government has not learnt from the earlier situation. Reminding that militants were always killed in the state, he said it was a matter of concern that the "present environment" did not exist even during the 1990s and added that youngsters have been killed in all the 10 districts of the Kashmir valley this time.
The Congress leader alleged that bullets and pellets guns were fired mercilessly and spoke of several "horrifying" pictures being circulated through the social media including that of a senior police officer pressing the neck of a young boy with his boots.
He said many children, as young as 4-5 years old, were left injured, with some losing their eye-sight while watching the violence from the windows of their house or terrace. Asserting that no one including his party supported militancy, Azad said the Congress stood by the government against any action against militancy.
"But distinction should be made between militants and civilians. The same bullet used to kill militants should not be used to kill children, women and youngsters. Should we treat them as militants? We are with you when it comes to eradication of militants. But we will not be a part of this (heavy use of force against civilians)," he said.
He said the government earlier, while dealing with militants with a heavy hand, also had the policy of "healing touch". He claimed that the commom people in Kashmir do not have any trust in the BJP.
Talking about his government when he was the J&K chief minister, Azad said that while his government dealt with militants sternly, it behaved "like parents to youngsters" and did what was required under a democratic set-up.
He said it was a sign of patriotism on part of Muslims in the country, that despite the highest number of practicing Muslims here, the IS has not been able to make any headway except in less than a dozen cases. Both Hindus and uslims should be proud of this, Azad said.
He said the situation was simmering for last one and half years. "This is lava. The lava does not erupt in a day."
Observing that provocative statements were being made by some Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders, he said "the Kashmiris see that action is not being taken. The treatment meted out to Kashmiri students in the name of security also plays in role, back in the valley."
While Islamic preacher Zakir Naik should be probed, those who announced a reward of Rs 50 lakh for his head should also be sent to jail, Azad said.
Derek O'Brien (Trinamool) blamed the Centre for "mishandling the situation" and demanded that "we must extend all help to the families of ordinary people killed there."
Expressing deep pain at the death of children, he alleged that unfortunately instead of harnessing the social media for constructive purposes, BJP was busy using it for PR and happy birthday messages.
"If you want digital India, do not understate the power of social media, else it will be divisive for India. There needs to be a dialogue with hard policing. We need a healing touch. Kashmir is not soil but soul, and keep the soul of Kashmir in mind," he said.
Taking a jibe at the prime minister, O'Brien said all all his efforts in meeting foreign leaders turned to a nought when United Nations Chief Ban Ki-Moon expressed regret over the loss of lives and injuries in the clashes in Kashmir. The TMC leader called on all parties to exercise "maximum restraint" to avoid further violence and hoped that all concerns would be addressed through peaceful means.
Sharad Yadav (Janata Dal-United) said he was "pained" at the situation in the Valley and killing of 8-10 year old children at the hands of security forces and treatment meted out to women and children.
"Hand over anyone breaking the law to legal process but you deface someone and no action is taken," he said, asserting that security forces should act within the limits of humanity.
At the same time, he said the Kashmir problem cannot be solved by force, power or use of the army as it needed a political solution.
"Why is there a difference between your policy and the one followed by the previous National Democratic Alliance government in tackling the Kashmir issue," he said and added that "political will is needed to resolve the issue".
He also took a jibe at the BJP-Peoples Democratic Party alliance in the state and said that the common minimum programme arrived at should be taken ahead.
Yadav also launched a scathing attack on media and asked why the government had failed to restrain them as they continued to show statements by separatists and some others from abroad, which compromised the dignity of the nation.
"Why is this drama allowed...Can't we tell the media to stop showing the propaganda of people supporting Islamic State in India," a visibly upset Yadav said.
"The internal security of Kashmir should be strengthened and at the same time we should have talks with those who dont share our views," the JD-U chief said.
The National Investigation Agency on Monday filed a chargesheet against six suspected Islamic State operatives arrested for allegedly conspiring to carry out terrorist activities in Delhi and during the Ardh Kumbh in Haridwar.
The NIA filed the chargesheet against Akhlakur Rehman, Md. Azeemushan, Md. Meraj, Md. Osama, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and Yosuf Al-Hindi under Section 120 (conspiracy) of IPC and Sections 18 and 20 of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in the case filed by the special cell of Delhi police on January 18, 2016.
On the directions of the ministry of home affairs, the case was later transferred to the NIA.
The NIA, in the chargesheet, said that after being motivated by the ideology of Islamic State, the accused conspired to carry out terror attacks.
The accused were arrested from Roorkee and Mumbai by the special cell.
Are you really fond of travel? Then these next 12 images will surely make you lose your mind.
National Geographic just announced the winners of its 2016 Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
The winning frame --an Inner Mongolian horseman whipping his team of horses in the early morning mist called Winter Horseman -- selected from thousands of entries, has won the photographer Anthony Lau a well-deserved seven-day Polar Bear Safari for two at Churchill Wild-Seal River Heritage Lodge with airfare.
So without further ado, here are the winners of this years National Geographic Travel Photographer Of The Year.
Please click on the photos to view hi-resolution images.
Grand Prize winner: Winter Horseman
The Winter in Inner Mongolia is very unforgiving. At a freezing temperature of minus twenty and lower with constant breeze of snow from all direction, it was pretty hard to convince myself to get out of the car and take photos. Not until I saw Inner Mongolia horsemen showing off their skills in commanding the steed from a distance, I quickly grab my telephoto lens and capture the moment when one of the horseman charged out from morning mist. Photograph: Anthony Lau/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
First place, Nature: Wherever you go, I will follow you
Romance is in the air. It was the time of day immediately following sunset. I heard a voice. Wherever you go, I will follow you the voice says. Photograph: Hiroki Inoue/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
First place, Cities: Ben Youssef
Even though there were a lot of people in Ben Youssef, still here was more quiet and relaxing compared to the street outside in Marrakesh. I was waiting for the perfect timing to photograph for long time. Photograph: Takashi Nakagawa/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Second place, Nature: Double trapping
Picture taken in the Brazilian Pantanal... when I downloaded the CF did not want to believe it... The nature knows we always give magnificent events but sometimes extraordinary. Photograph: Massimiliano Bencivenni/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Second place, People: Rooftop dreams
I arrived at my guest house in Varanasi at 5:30 am. I instinctively climbed the seven sets of stairs to the rooftop (which happened to be the highest in the vicinity) to see the sunrise over the famous Ganges river. As the sun was rising I looked over the right hand side of the balcony and my jaw dropped with disbelief. Below were families -- mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sister and dogs all sleeping on the top of their houses. It was mid-summer in Varanasi and sleeping sans AC was difficult. Photograph: Yasmin Mund/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Second place, Cities: Silenced
This photo was taken on my last trip to GuangZhou, China. This place is a school dormitories of South China Normal University. When I was hanging around, most of them were taking a break. After the lunch time, they need to go back to study. The dormitories were smelly and messy. Photograph: Wing Ka H/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Third place, Nature: Lagunas Baltinache (Atacama Desert)
The Baltinache Ponds, also called Hidden Ponds are a set of seven salt ponds located in the area of the Salt Cordillera, near San Pedro de Atacama, in the second region of northern Chile, in the Atacama desert. After much research, I believe to be the first photographer to publish night photos of this place, but it is still necessary to confirm this information. Tech Details: Photography done in one shot. Foreground was illuminated by the moonlight. Photograph: Victor Lima/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Third place, People: Remote life at -21 degree
Kinnaura tribal old women in remote village in Himachal Pradesh carrying big logs back home to warm up her house. Photograph: Mattia Passarini/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Third place, Cities: Celestial Reverie
Lightning seemingly strikes Komtar Tower, the most iconic landmark of George Town, capital of Penang state in Malaysia. It is symbolic of the rejuvenation that the city, famous for a unique blend of centuries-old buildings and modern structures, has enjoyed in recent years. While many of its old neighbourhoods fell into neglect in the 1990s and early 2000s, UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2008 sparked a transformation, and today, they are all part of a vibrant tourist destination. Photograph: Jeremy Tan/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Honourable Mention, People: Muscle Beach Gym
A weightlifter lifts a barbell loaded with heavy plates while a bodybuilder performs an aerial handstand at the Muscle Beach Gym in Venice Beach, California. Photograph: Dotan Saguy/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Honourable Mention, Cities: Divide
In the helicopter looking south on Central Park West -- dividing the architecture and Central Park, on November 5th 2014, a day before my 27th birthday. The flight was my birthday gift. Photograph: Kathleen Dolmatch/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
Honourable Mention, Nature: Bears on a Berg
This photo was taken far out on the sea ice in the Davis Straight off the coast of Baffin Island. This mother polar bear and her yearling are perched atop a huge snow covered iceberg that got socked in when the ocean froze over for the winter. To me, the relative smallness of these large creatures when compared to the immensity of the iceberg in the photo represents the precariousness of the polar bears reliance on the sea and sea ice for its existence. Photograph: John Rollins/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest
The Republican convention, which will formally coronate billionaire Donald Trump as the party's presidential candidate, will kick off in Cleveland amid tight security and heightened tensions following a series of shootings in the US.
IMAGE: Workers stand on the stage as preparations continue ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, US. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Sleuths of security forces and secret service agents have converged on the city and huge make-shift iron walls have come up several blocks around the Quicken Loans Arena where the Republican National Convention would be held over the next few days -- July 18 to July 21.
The convention which kicks off on Tuesday is aimed at Americans to "get to know Donald Trump the man" rather than Trump the candidate, his top campaign aide said in Cleveland on Sunday.
A different and new image of Trump, a successful businessman and a great human being, would be narrated through the personal stories of people who have known him and worked with him throughout the past several decades and along with his own family members, his campaign manager Paul Manafort said.
Manafort said the line to speakers have been selected in such a way which so that "Americans would get to know Trump the man" and not the candidate.
"They're going to see more of the man. I mean, they've seen him on the campaign trail, but they haven't seen him in the back, in the boardrooms. They haven't seen him up close and personal. They have a perspective of the man, but this convention is going to focus on the whole part of the personality," Manafort said.
Trump, 70, is scheduled to arrive in the city on Monday, but is unlikely to address the convention which would have a theme beginning with "Make America Safe Again".
Main speakers as per the list announced are Melania Trump, Lieutenant General (ret) Michael Flynn, Senator Joni Ernst, Jason Beardsley and Congressman Ryan Zinke.
"A Donald Trump administration will listen to and learn from our nation's heroes who have put themselves in harm's way and pursue a national security strategy and foreign policy that will strengthen our military and make America safe again," the Republican Convention said in a statement.
"You're going to have his family speaking. You're going to have friends who have known him speaking. You're going to have people who have worked with him both inside the company and outside of the company. And so you're going to see how he's built his successful empire," Manafort said.
Strongly refuting the allegations that the party is divided, Manafort said the Republican was united under Trump.
"It is a Trump convention. The delegates on the floor are going to be his delegates. More importantly, the message is going to be his. The platform that was passed in this past week that will be adopted by the convention," Manafort said.
Trump will deliver the acceptance speech on Thursday night when the theme is 'Make America One Again'. Other speakers on that day are Peter Thiel, Tom Barrack and Ivanka Trump.
"America faces serious challenges at home and threats from abroad. In order to turn our challenges into opportunities and keep America secure, we need leadership that will focus on what unites us, not what divides us," a statement said.
"Donald Trump will move our country beyond the divisive identity politics that have been holding us back by restoring leadership, building trust, and focusing on our shared love of country and our common goal of making America great again," it said.
Thousands of Republican supporters from across the country have started arriving in the city along with the party delegates.
Several thousand protesters along with the anti-Trump movement have also come to the city to hold peaceful protest rallies every day.
A Multi-Agency Coordinating Center has been set up which is staffed by representatives from participating law enforcement and public safety agencies.
A total of 74 different agencies providing security have been pressed into service. They would serve as the central 24-hour communications and coordination hub throughout the event.
While no official figures are available, it is estimated that several thousand law enforcement officials and those from security agencies have been roped into the city for the event to help the Cleveland Police.
The Department of Homeland Security has deployed nearly 3,000 personnel from more than two dozen components and subcomponents, including Transportation Security Administration, US Customs and Border Protection, the National Protection and Programs Directorate and the US Coast Guard.
These personnel will work closely with federal, state and local partners, including the Cleveland Police, to ensure the safety and security of convention, a statement said.
The activities in the city are also being monitored through satellite and helicopters.
Anticipating that there would be scores of protests in various parts of the city, during which they expect that a number of people would be arrested, all pending municipal court cases have been suspended to make way for near round-the-clock arraignments of protesters.
A 29-year-old African American gunman shot three police officers dead in Baton Rouge in Louisiana on Sunday.
Micah Johnson, a black military veteran, killed five police officers and injured nine others in another shooting incident in Dallas on July 7.
Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, who was involved in a spat over Twitter with Congress leader Shashi Tharoors wife Sunanda Pushkar hours before her death, has been questioned by Delhi police in connection with the murder case.
Tarars questioning took place in February at a place of her choice -- a prominent hotel in New Delhi. She was questioned by the Special Investigation Team probing the case in the presence of women police personnel, sources said on Monday.
Summons could not be issued to Tarar as she is a Pakistani national, but she had earlier stated that she was open to joining investigation into the matter and had also written to a senior official communicating the same.
A 51-year-old Sunanda was found dead at a suite in a five-star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, a day after her spat with Tarar on Twitter over her alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.
Tarar was questioned about her relation with the Congress leader and his wife, her fight with Sunanda over Twitter, and other issues revolving around Sunandas mysterious death. So far, she has refused any proximity on personal terms with both Tharoor and Sunanda, the sources said.
The questioning stretched beyond two hours and Tarar was also asked to fill a questionnaire prepared by the SIT, they said.
Tarar also figured prominently in a statement by journalist Nalini Singh, believed to be the last person to have spoke to Sunanda over phone hours before her death.
Singh had said that Sunanda had mentioned to her about Tharoor deleting Tarars messages from his Blackberry phone and had asked her if she could help her in retrieving the same. Singh had further said that Sunanda also told her she was unhappy following a meeting between Tharoor and Tarar in Dubai.
In January 2015, Delhi Police had registered a case of murder in connection with the death of Sunanda. An AIIMS medical board had earlier found poisoning as reason for her death following which the police had sent her viscera samples to an Federal Bureau of Investigation lab in US.
The FBI lab report, sent to Delhi police, endorsed the findings of the AIIMS Forensic report. As police could not firm up about cause of the death based on the FBI report, they requested a medical board of AIIMS to analyse the contents of the report.
Several persons including Shashi Tharoor have been questioned in connection with Sunandas death.
The police have also conducted polygraph tests on six persons, all prime witnesses in the case, including Tharoors domestic help Narayan Singh, driver Bajrangi and Sanjay Dewan, a close friend of the couple.
Asserting that Kashmiris are "our own people" who are being "misguided", Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday ruled out 'plebiscite' and blamed Pakistan for the unrest in the valley while saying that the government will take everybody along in dealing with the issue.
Replying to a debate in Rajya Sabha on the Kashmir situation, he affirmed that while militancy will be dealt with sternly, there should be "no instant" use of bullets while dealing with mobs which should first be tackled by the use of teargas and water cannons.
The use of pellet guns, which have been blamed for most civilian injuries, would be looked into, regarding which he will talk to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, Singh said after the discussion during which the opposition parties slammed the government and pressed for a political solution, instead of a use of "the barrel of gun".
Singh said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he himself had asked security forces to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with mob violence which started after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
The home minister said he had, on Saturday last, expressed desire to visit Kashmir and have a dialogue with the people directly. Mehbooba, while welcoming the offer, told him that after the situation normalises a bit, she will come to Delhi and have a meeting with him to discuss in what format talks can be held, he said.
Invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee's famous remarks of 'Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat and Insaniyat' (kashmiriyat, democracy and humanity), he said "If there is any place for Kashmiriyat in 'Jamhooriyat' (democracy), it can be only on the basis of 'Insaniyat' (humanity) and not 'Haivaniyat' (devilish acts). Those believing in Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat, cannot give space to haivaniyat."
Singh asserted that "Whatever is happening in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored. The name is 'Pakistan', but its acts are 'na-pak' (not pious)."
Referring to the demands for 'plebiscite', he ruled it out, saying it is "outdated" and people of Kashmir are being "misguided" on this issue.
"Kashmiris are our own people. We will bring them on the right path... We will make them aware of the reality," he said.
With regard to pellet injuries, particularly the eye injuries, which was raised by Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad, the home minister said he will look into the damage caused by it and could not say anything off-hand.
He, however, cited some study which had said that in the year 2010, six people had been killed, 198 were injured and five blinded because of the use of pellet guns.
He said a team of eye specialists has already been sent to Kashmir and the central government is ready to send even a special plane to airlift any number of people requiring specialised treatment for eyes as also other injuries.
Singh said the central government is ready to extend all help to the state government in meeting the situation, including the provision of essential commodities in the curfew-bound valley.
With regard to prohibitions on newspapers and mobile internet in Kashmir, he said it should not happen and that he will discuss this issue too with the chief minister.
He asserted that militancy will be dealt with sternly and Pakistan should not interfere in India's internal affairs.
Slamming Pakistan for its "irresponsible" role, Singh questioned its claim to be the "protector of Islam", asking, "How can a country claim to be protector of Islam when it was born on the basis of religion, when it is witnessing bloodshed in the name of religion."
He questioned how Pakistan could claim to be concerned about Muslims in India when it itself could not remain united despite being a Muslim nation.
"It is for the government of India to look after minorities of India and we will do so, whether it is Muslims, Sikhs, Christians or anybody," Singh asserted, asking Pakistan to lay off.
He asked the minorities to "keep faith" in the government, cautioning that there are a "lot of people out to misguide them."
"If we remain united, India is in such a position that it can become the world power," he said.
Responding to demands by opposition for holding an all-party meeting on Kashmir, Singh said, "I want to assure Rajya Sabha that any action to be taken in Kashmir will be taken after taking everyone in confidence. We don't do politics for forming government, we do politics to make the country great."
Blasting those who celebrate the killing of security forces, Singh said, "it is reflective of Haivaniyat (devilish behaviour)."
In this context, he criticised those who have described the gunning down of militant Burhan Wani in an encounter as "extra-judicial killing", saying such a mindset is "perverted".
"This mindset has been seen whether in the case of Dantewada, Bastar or Kashmir. If security forces are killed, there are celebrations. Such is the perverted mind. We will address it," he said.
Reaching out to the opposition, he said, "While addressing Kashmir unrest issue, we will take everybody along. This country belongs to all, including you (opposition)."
Image: Home Minister Rajnath Singh speaks in the Rajya Sabha on the opening day of the monsoon session in New Delhi. Photograph: TV grab
'These young men have become religious fundamentalists and gone to lead the life of Salafis somewhere.'
Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier reports on the mystery of Feroz Khan, arrested in Mumbai for alleged IS links.
Media reports say 24-year-old Feroz Khan from Trikaripur in Kerala's Kasaragod district was arrested in Mumbai on July 10 by the Intelligence Bureau for his alleged links with Islamic State.
His step brother Kunjabdullah says nobody from the government has confirmed his arrest to the family.
"News reports say that he has been arrested, but when we ask the police here, they do not confirm the news. We have no idea what the truth is and where he (Feroz) is," says Kunjabdullah.
After Feroz's family filed a complaint, the Kerala police started searching for him.
Feroz is one of the 15 young people who went missing from Kasargod. He is said to be quiet and introverted, someone who kept to himself. He had been working in a Mumbai guesthouse after he did not complete his graduation in commerce.
The common link in the Kasaragod youth is the Mujahideen mosque.
All the missing were closely associated with the mosque. Feroz is said to have been influenced by the Mujahideen group from the time the mosque came into existence in the village.
Kunjabdullah says Feroz changed after he started going to the mosque. All the young men who went to the mosque, he adds, became so refined that the villagers felt it had a good influence on the area's youngsters.
"if we were to say that there were changes in him in the last few years," Kunjabdullah says, "the changes were only positive."
Two months ago, Feroz came home to be with the family during Ramzan. When he told his parents that he was going to Kozhikode to pray in a mosque the whole day, they were flabbergasted. 'Why do you want to go to Kozhikode to pray when we have mosques here?' his elderly parents asked their son. He said he wanted to pray with his friends there.
His parents expected him to be back for Eid. But a day before Eid, his mother got a call from Feroz, saying he was in Mumbai.
"He told his mother he wouldn't be coming home for Eid, or anytime soon. After that, there has been no news from him," says Kunjabdullah. "As he is a quiet guy, we were not much worried about not getting any calls from him. We didn't give much importance to him not calling from Mumbai."
News reports of so many young people associated with the Mujahideen mosque going missing got Feroz's family worried. That was when they met Kasaragod MP P Karunakaran and gave him a petition.
Then came the news of Feroz's arrest in Mumbai, though the police have not yet confirmed his arrest to the family.
"Whenever we ask the (local) police," says Kunjabadullah, "they do not confirm the news. They tell us they have not been informed about the arrest. We have no idea whether Feroz has left India or he is in Mumbai."
Kunjabdullah does not believe that the 11 people who went missing from Kasaragod have joined Islamic State.
"Different news reports say they have gone to Sri Lanka, Tehran and Tel Aviv, but none of these countries support Islamic State. Iran and Israel are anti-IS. If they had any intention to join IS, they would have gone to countries that are pro-IS, and not to Iran or Israel," says Kunjabdullah.
"That is why I feel these young men have become religious fundamentalists and must have gone to lead the life of Salafis somewhere, far away from all," he adds.
The Mujahideen mosque followed the Salafi movement, says Kunjabdullah. (Salafis are described as fundamentalists who believe in a return to the original ways of Islam. The word 'Salafi' comes from the Arabic phrase, 'as-salaf as-saliheen', which refers to the first three generations of Muslims, starting with the Companions of the Prophet, also known as the Pious Predecessors.)
"Before the Mujahideen came, there were some other groups here who believed in rearing goats, living on agriculture and not doing any business. According to them, the way we lived was not right, and everyone would have to change to make a better world," says Kunjabdullah.
"It was reported after the bombing in Yemen that they found many such groups there and among them were many Malayalis." he adds. "Sometimes we wonder whether these people also have gone missing to live like the Salafis. None of us had any idea what was going on inside the group as they were a very small minority from the village."
The villagers are sure about one thing -- that everything changed after Abdul Rasheed's arrival in the area as a school teacher at the Peace International School.
Kunjabdullah feels you need just one person with such an outlook to influence other young men.
"Look at the profile of this minority. They are all young, educated and from well to do families," he says. "They went missing not alone, but with their wives and children. Some of the women were pregnant too. The impression we get is that they have gone to live a peaceful life somewhere far away from civilisation, and not to fight any war."
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This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
South Sudan: UN agency urges stability ahead of planting season to thwart food insecurity
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 16 July 2016 Cite as UN News Service, South Sudan: UN agency urges stability ahead of planting season to thwart food insecurity, 16 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ccb681.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
16 July 2016 - Millions of people facing hunger in South Sudan will be driven to the brink of catastrophe if renewed flashes of violence derail the fragile peace process, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today, warning that the human costs of recent fighting in Juba will be compounded by deepening hunger across the entire country if peace does not hold.
In Juba, which hasn't experienced such a level of violence in years, a fragile calm now appears to be holding, but uncertainty grips the city and supplies to food markets have been disrupted, said FAO Country Representative Serge Tissot.
And while we hope that the situation will hold, violence may flare up again. If the tenuous peace process falters, the consequences will be widespread and an already dire situation, in which over half the nation's population is food insecure, could get much, much worse, he added.
The most recent assessment, released last month, showed South Sudan was already in dire straits, with more than 4.8 million people severely food insecure and malnutrition rates rampant. The assessment projected severe food shortages over the months to come and warned of the risk of hunger crises in parts of the country.
A return to stability and the continuation of the peace process are essential to allowing agricultural production to continue and markets to open, emphasized FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva.
The people of the world's youngest nation cannot afford any further instability, said Mr. Graziano da Silva, adding: We have to remember that peace and food security are two sides of the same coin it's the currency that drives development and prosperity. The future of the country depends on the people of South Sudan making a firm and lasting commitment to peace, now.
Looted agricultural inputs need replacing
FAO is currently assessing the full extent of losses incurred following the violence that erupted last week, when its Juba warehouse was ransacked and stocks of essential supplies like seeds and tools earmarked to help food-insecure people across the country save their livelihoods were looted.
As the FAO offices in South Sudan remain operational, the continuation of our support to those most in need requires that additional resources be urgently made available to replace what was looted, said Mr. Tissot.
Under normal conditions, harvesting of the main maize and sorghum crop would begin in a few weeks' time planting of a second season would take place over the same period. How well those activities are able to proceed will have a big impact on food security in both the short and the longer term, he added.
The recent clashes between opposition and government forces have been the most violent in Juba since the end of the country's two-year civil war in August 2015.
Yemen: UN envoy urges 'definitive decisions' as peace talks continue in Kuwait
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 16 July 2016 Related Document(s) Security Council resolution 2216 (2015) [on cessation of violence in Yemen and the reinforcement of sanctions imposed by resolution 2104 (2014)] Cite as UN News Service, Yemen: UN envoy urges 'definitive decisions' as peace talks continue in Kuwait, 16 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ccdda1d3.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
16 July 2016 - The United Nations-supported Yemeni peace talks continued in Kuwait today after several weeks of daily sessions and two weeks of intensive consultations with regional and political leaders, the UN envoy for the country has said.
The time has come for you to take definitive decisions that demonstrate to the Yemeni people the sincerity of your intentions and your national obligations, said Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Yemen, in a statement, noting that the decisions will primarily revolve around Security Council resolution 2216 (2015) and other relevant resolutions, the Gulf Initiative and its implementation mechanism, and the outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference.
The cessation of hostilities declared on 10 April to end nearly 16 months of conflict in Yemen has continued to provide relief from violence in many parts of the country, but serious violations have occurred, such as the shelling of a popular market in Taiz on 4 June, which resulted in 18 civilian deaths and tens of injuries. In addition, there have been violations of the truce in Marib, al Jawf, Taiz and in the border areas with Saudi Arabia.
The Special Envoy indicated that meetings will continue to be held in Kuwait for an additional two weeks, during which the focus will be on the complete and comprehensive consolidation of the cessation of hostilities, the activation of the de-escalation and coordination committee and the local committees, in addition to the formation of the military committees that will supervise the withdrawal and the handing over of weapons from area A and on the opening of safe corridors for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
At the same time, the prisoners and detainee committee will continue its work, the Special Envoy said, reiterating the necessity of the release of all prisoners and detainees as soon as possible.
The priorities for this stage are the consolidation of the cessation of hostilities, the improvement of the humanitarian situation and an agreement on the security arrangements so that we can manage to address all of the other issues, he said.
Mr. Ould Cheikh Ahmed said that during the past two weeks, he convened intensive meetings in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Oman to discuss the security, political, economic and humanitarian issues.
He said he held more than one meeting with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, members of the Yemeni political leadership, and the delegations participating in the peace talks, in addition to the representatives of other parties and political actors.
In addition, the Special Envoy said he met the Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, and was in constant contact with other political figures and diplomats, who reiterated their support for UN efforts and the importance of reaching a final solution for the crisis in Yemen.
This stage is delicate and definitive; you are going to be closely scrutinized by the Yemeni and international public, the Special Envoy emphasized.
Noting that the UN has put at your disposal all of its political and administrative expertise, while the State of Kuwait kindly devoted a full team for logistical, security and political support, the envoy stressed that such efforts would not be sufficient if all efforts necessary to ensure security and stability in Yemen were made.
People do not require political statements detailing your concessions, patriotism or your concern for them. Yemeni men and women will understand your concern when you are concerned with their security and will appreciate your labours when their security, humanitarian, and economical situation improves, the Special Envoy said.
Political statements and speeches lose their credibility with every security breach and with each loss of civilian life, he added.
Emphasizing that there was much to achieve in the two weeks ahead, Mr. Ould Cheikh Ahmed expressed hope that those participating in the peace talks would take advantage of the opportunity.
Two weeks to demonstrate good will and credibility and concern for the national interest. Two weeks to build upon the solid common ground achieved and on the decisions of the previous period, he said, adding that the attainment of peace might be hard but derailing is easy.
You must listen to the voices of women and men who call for peace. Work towards bettering the situation of the citizens, human rights, and on achieving the aspirations of the Yemeni youth. Leadership is actions, not words, the Special Envoy concluded.
After intense talks with both parties, last month the envoy reported that he had presented a roadmap outlining a practical plan to end the conflict in Yemen. It provides for implementation of the security arrangements specified in Security Council resolution 2216 (2015) and the establishment of a national unity government that would ensure the delivery of basic services and address the recovery of the Yemeni economy.
According to the proposed roadmap, the national unity government would also be responsible for preparing a political dialogue to define the remaining steps for a comprehensive political solution, including the electoral law, the mandate of the institutions, which would oversee the transition period and the completion of the draft constitution. The delegations have responded positively to the proposals, but have not yet reached agreement on the sequencing of the different steps provided for in the roadmap.
Haiti: UN and partners express regret over failed deliberations on provisional governance
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 16 July 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Haiti: UN and partners express regret over failed deliberations on provisional governance, 16 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cceac413.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
16 July 2016 - The United Nations and its partners in Haiti have expressed deep regret that for the fourth time in as many weeks, the country's National Assembly was unable to deliberate on the provisional governance arrangements.
In a joint press statement, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Haiti and Head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), Sandra Honore, and the other members of the international community in Haiti represented in the Core Group (the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the United States and the European Union, and the Special Representative of the Organization of American States) cited the absence of a number of parliamentarians leading to a lack of a quorum as the reason for the failed deliberations.
Haiti continues to face serious long-term socio-economic and humanitarian challenges. These challenges cannot be fully addressed in an environment of institutional instability, the Core Group said in a joint press statement, reiterating 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, the statement also said.
On 14 February, the Haitian National Assembly elected Jocelerme Privert as the island nation's interim President, one week after former President Michel Martelly departed without a successor. Mr. Privert served as interim President for 120 days, and an election had been scheduled for 24 April, following an agreement known as the 5 February Agreement between Haitian stakeholders to preserve institutional continuity and further the electoral process.
Subsequently, on 25 April, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson issued a statement underlining the UN chief's deep concern that that the agreed-upon date for holding elections in Haiti was not met and that no alternate electoral calendar was announced.
In June, when Mr. Privert's 120-day interim period had come to an end, the Core Group called on the National Assembly to take action and reach a solution that avoids an institutional vacuum, and to facilitate the return to constitutional order through the holding of elections.
In Rwanda, Ban calls for concerted regional and international action in South Sudan
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 16 July 2016 Cite as UN News Service, In Rwanda, Ban calls for concerted regional and international action in South Sudan, 16 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ccef540b.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
16 July 2016 - On the margins of the 27th African Union (AU) Summit taking place in Kigali, Rwanda, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today addressed a regional body and met with several African leaders, stressing the need for concerted action to revive the implementation of the peace agreement in South Sudan.
Now is the time for decisive and collective action. The people of South Sudan need to hear the region and the world speak with one voice to end this mindless violence, Mr. Ban said at the Extraordinary Summit of the International Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-country trade bloc in Africa whose members include the Governments of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.
I know many of you have worked hard to secure peace for the world's youngest country and I know all of us agree that we cannot afford South Sudan slipping back into a civil war, he added.
Noting that everyone is appalled by the magnitude of the violence, the indiscriminate attacks on civilians and peacekeepers, and the immense loss of lives and suffering that the crisis has inflicted on the people of South Sudan, the UN chief emphasized that the renewed fighting is horrendous and totally unacceptable.
UN compounds have been caught in the crossfire, our warehouses and food stocks for hundreds of thousands of people have been brazenly stolen, and our premises have sustained significant mortar and small arms fire, Mr. Ban said.
The Secretary-General condemned in the strongest terms the targeting of UN personnel and international personnel from non-governmental organizations; premises and assets in Juba allegedly by soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA); and reports of sexual violence, assaults and killings of those personnel and South Sudanese civilians.
Welcoming the strong condemnation of the fighting and ceasefire violations by the AU Peace and Security Council and the IGAD Council of Ministers, the Secretary-General thanked the participants at the Extraordinary Summit for calling on the South Sudanese leaders to assume their responsibility and subject individuals who undermine the peace process to stern measures, including targeted sanctions.
Mr. Ban highlighted that he had spoken with the Special Envoy of the President of South Sudan, Nhial Deng Nhial, with First Vice-President Riek Machar, as well as with some leaders of the region, and had urged them to do everything in their power to bring about an immediate cessation of hostilities and recommit to the implementation of the peace agreement.
I have sent a clear message that leaders must be accountable for their actions. This includes the military chain of command the chiefs of general staff and other officials who are complicit in perpetrating the violence, the Secretary-General said.
Meetings with regional leaders
Among his other meetings today, Mr. Ban talked with Hailemariam Dessalegn, Prime Minister of Ethiopia and IGAD Chairman. The leaders discussed regional peace and security challenges, as well as climate change, with the Secretary-General commending the leadership role of Ethiopia in the promotion of regional peace and security, and its contribution to peacekeeping.
Mr. Ban met with Hailemariam Dessalegn, Prime Minister of Ethiopia and Chairman of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The leaders discussed regional peace and security challenges, as well as climate change, with the Secretary-General commending the leadership role of Ethiopia in the promotion of regional peace and security, and its contribution to peacekeeping.
The Secretary-General and the Prime Minister expressed alarm at the situation in South Sudan and the risk of further escalation, with far-reaching consequences for the country and its people, as well as for the region, said a statement issued by Mr. Ban's office.
They agreed on the need for an urgent and enhanced international action to avert full blown violence and further atrocities, and put back on track the implementation process of the agreement on the resolution of the conflict in South Sudan, the statement also said.
The UN chief informed the Prime Minister about his recommendations to the Security Council in favour of an arms embargo, the imposition of targeted sanctions against individuals involved in violence and blocking the implementation of the peace agreement, and the reinforcement of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).
The Secretary-General indicated that he was looking forward to the outcome of the deliberations of the IGAD and AU Heads of State and Government, emphasizing the important role of the African leaders.
The Secretary-General also thanked the Ethiopian Prime Minister for his country's key role and sacrifices towards stabilization efforts in Somalia, emphasizing the need to spare no efforts in creating the required security conditions for the successful holding of the forthcoming elections.
In addition, Mr. Ban underlined the debilitating effects of the El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena globally and in the Horn of Africa region in particular. The Prime Minister informed him of the steps taken by Ethiopia to mitigate the impact of La Nina and its commitment to the global efforts to address climate change, including through the early ratification of the Paris Agreement.
The Secretary-General also met today with Idriss Deby Itno, President of Chad and Chairperson of the AU. Commending Mr. Deby for his country's critical role in the regional efforts to combat the Boko Haram terrorist group, Mr. Ban reiterated the UN's support in that regard.
Mr. Ban also met with the High Representative of the AU for South Sudan and former President of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare, and the Chairperson of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission and former President of Botswana, Festus Mogae.
During that discussion, former Presidents Konare and Mogae updated the Secretary-General on their efforts for peace in South Sudan, including recent consultations in Juba with South Sudanese leaders, with the UN chief commending them for their efforts and encouraging them to remain steadfast.
Acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and the risk of relapse into conflict and that of further and widespread atrocities against the civilian population, the Secretary-General and the two former Presidents agreed on the urgency of concerted regional and international action to address the current challenges and bring about lasting peace and security in South Sudan. In that respect, they emphasized the role of IGAD and of African leaders.
In addition, Mr. Ban met with the President of Uganda, Yoweri Kabuta Museveni, on the situation in South Sudan.
In another meeting today, the Secretary-General discussed the situation in South Sudan with Gayle Smith, Administrator of the United States Agency for International, together with the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Linda Thomas Greenfield, and the United States Special Envoy for South Sudan, Donald Booth. The leaders expressed grave concern about the risk of further violence in the country, as well as the appalling humanitarian situation compounded by the recent fighting in Juba.
They look forward to the outcomes of the deliberations of the IGAD and African Union leaders on the matter, hoping that these will provide additional momentum to the international efforts to address the security situation, in particular in Juba, and ensure the effective implementation of the peace agreement, said a statement issued by Mr. Ban's office.
On Friday, Mr. Ban met with a number of African leaders on the sidelines of the AU Summit, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Algeria, Ramtane Lamamra.
UN officials condemn attempt to overthrow Turkish Government
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 16 July 2016 Cite as UN News Service, UN officials condemn attempt to overthrow Turkish Government, 16 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ccf2a40c.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
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.
Some 1,400 stuck at Hungarian-Serbian border amid dire conditions, UN refugee agency warns
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 July 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Some 1,400 stuck at Hungarian-Serbian border amid dire conditions, UN refugee agency warns, 15 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cd2d640d.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
15 July 2016 - The United Nations refugee agency today expressed deep concern about a new restrictive law at the Hungarian-Serbian border, and urged Hungarian authorities to investigate reports of abuse and violence in transit zones and bitten by unleashed police dogs.
"New legislation extended border controls to an eight-kilometre range area inside Hungarian territory, and authorized the police to intercept people within that area and send them to the other side of the fence, often to remote areas without adequate services," a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), William Spindler, told a press briefing in Geneva.
Since the new legislation came into force last month, a total of 664 individuals had been sent back through the fence, Mr. Spindler said.
He added that the Government had "significantly enhanced border security with 10,000 soldiers and police officers and also drone and helicopter surveillance."
People stopped at the border are instructed to go to one of the transit zones to submit an asylum claim, a push-back that has resulted in more than 1,400 refugees and migrants stuck at the border. That includes infants, unaccompanied minors, pregnant women and persons with disabilities and other specific needs waiting to enter the transit zones.
"Currently, only two transit zones were functional along the 175-kilometre-long Serbian-Hungarian border, at Roszke and Tompa, where on average only 15 individuals were admitted in each transit zone per day," said Mr. Spindler.
Health, hygiene and sanitation conditions posed serious challenges, with people staying in the open or setting up makeshift tents on muddy fields next to the fence. Mr. Spindler further noted that several hundred people were sheltered by the Government of Serbia in the Refugee Aid Point near Subotica but the capacity there was overstretched.
The spokesperson further said that the agency continued to receive reports of abuse and violence occurring when people were apprehended within the transit zones, or in police detention facilities.
"Such reports included cases of bites by unleashed police dogs, the use of pepper spray and beatings," he said, adding that the agency has requested the Hungarian authorities to investigate those reports. He also recalled a UNHCR statement, issued in June, after a young Syrian refugee had drowned, when allegedly pushed back into the Tisza River.
Majority oppose female genital mutilation in countries where practice persists UN agency
Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 July 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Majority oppose female genital mutilation in countries where practice persists UN agency, 15 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cd3fe40d.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
15 July 2016 - New data from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reveals that about two-thirds of men, women, boys and girls in countries where female genital mutilation is common say they want the practice to end.
"Although female genital mutilation is associated with gender discrimination, our findings show that the majority of boys and men are actually against it," said Francesca Moneti, UNICEF Senior Child Protection Specialist.
"Unfortunately, individuals' desire to end female genital mutilation is often hidden, and many women and men still believe the practice is needed in order for them to be accepted in their communities," she added.
In countries with available data, UNICEF found that 67 per cent of girls and women and 63 per cent of boys and men oppose the continuation of the practice in their communities, while, in some countries, men oppose female genital mutilation more strongly than women.
For instance, in Guinea - which has the second-highest prevalence of female genital mutilation in the world - 38 per cent of men and boys are against the continuation of the practice, compared with 21 per cent of women and girls. The same pattern is seen in Sierra Leone, where 40 per cent of boys and men want the practice to end, compared with 23 per cent of girls and women, according to the data.
Moreover, the agency said that in addition to a large majority of people opposing female genital mutilation where it is concentrated, there is evidence of growing momentum and commitment to end the practice.
In 2015, both Gambia and Nigeria adopted national legislation criminalizing the practice. In the 16 countries where data exist, more than 1,900 communities, covering an estimated population of 5 million people, have made public declarations to abandon female genital mutilation, according to UNICEF.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 include a target calling for the elimination of all harmful practices, such as female genital mutilation and child marriage, by 2030.
UNICEF's research also reveals a possible link between a mother's education and the likelihood that her daughter will be cut. Among 28 countries with available data, approximately one in five daughters of women with no education has undergone female genital mutilation, compared with one in nine daughters with mothers that have at least a secondary education.
At least 200 million girls and women alive today in 30 countries around the world have been subjected to female genital mutilation - a range of procedures that can cause extreme physical and psychological pain, prolonged bleeding, HIV, infertility and death, UNICEF said.
"Data can play an important role in exposing the true opinions of communities on female genital mutilation," said Ms. Moneti. "When individuals become aware that others do not support the practice it becomes easier for them to stop female genital mutilation."
UNICEF co-leads, along with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), a global programme to encourage elimination of female genital mutilation, and currently supports efforts in 17 countries.
China: End Abuse of Hunger-Striking Activist
Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 17 July 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, China: End Abuse of Hunger-Striking Activist, 17 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cd7274.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Chinese authorities should cease their force feeding of imprisoned activist Guo Feixiong and ensure his immediate access to adequate medical care, Human Rights Watch said today. Guo, 49, a rights activist whose real name is Yang Maodong, has been on hunger strike at Yangchun prison in Guangdong province since May 9, 2016, to protest China's authoritarian rule and its mistreatment of political prisoners.
"Chinese authorities should immediately end their abusive treatment of Guo Feixiong," said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. "Guo's case highlights China's poor treatment of detainees, made even worse by denying them access to adequate medical care."
Force feeding prisoners who are on a voluntary and informed hunger strike a form of peaceful expression is contrary to international standards, Human Rights Watch said.
The force feeding process as well as the denial of adequate medical care amount to cruel and inhuman treatment in violation of the Convention Against Torture, which China has ratified. Because of force-feeding's invasive nature, the World Medical Association, the preeminent international organization in the field of medical ethics and practice, has repeatedly condemned force-feeding of competent prisoners.
Guo's sister last visited him on June 7. Since then her repeated requests to see him have been denied even though Chinese law allows family visits once every month. The last time his lawyer was granted a visit was on June 20. They said that Guo looked very thin and had lost about one-third of his body weight.
The authorities have repeatedly abused Guo in a detention center and prison since he was first taken into custody on August 8, 2013. During his two and a half years of detention in Tianhe Detention Center in Guangzhou City, Guo was not allowed out of his overcrowded cell at any time, contrary to article 25 of the Detention Center Regulations and international standards, which require that detainees be allowed out of their cells to exercise every day.
Over the past year, Guo has suffered intermittent bloody or watery stools, as well as occasional bleeding in the mouth and throat. Although Yangchun Prison twice admitted him to hospitals once to Yangchun Prison Hospital and another time to Yangjiang City People's Hospital in Guangdong Province between April and May, when he was given medical checks, he was not treated or diagnosed. He has also been moved to a crowded cell where the prison guards frequently insult him.
During his hunger strike, Guo has made four demands: that President Xi Jinping should undertake political reforms; the use of electric shock should be abolished in all prisons; the treatment of political prisoners should be improved; and China should ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it signed in 1988.
Guo is serving a six-year sentence after a court in Guangzhou City found him guilty of "gathering crowds to disturb social order" and "picking quarrels and provoking troubles" in November 2015. He was sentenced for demonstrating in January 2013 outside the office of Southern Weekly, an outspoken newspaper, protesting censorship of an editorial, and organizing others to post online photos of themselves engaged in similar protests in eight other cities.
Guo began his activism in 2005, when he acted as a legal advisor to Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng. Guo is best known for his central role defending the rights of villagers in Taishi Village, a landmark case in the "weiquan" ("rights defense") movement in China. Guo was previously imprisoned from 2006 until 2011, during which he was repeatedly tortured, including with electric shock. Guo is one of China's most influential rights activists together with lawyers Gao Zhisheng, Chen Guangcheng, Teng Biao, and Xu Zhiyong.
Human Rights Watch called on Chinese authorities to end all torture and ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees, including denial of medical treatment; to accept an independent, international investigation with the participation of forensic and human rights experts from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights into the ill-treatment and deaths of detained activists, including Cao Shunli and Tenzin Delek Rinpoche; and permit a visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Foreign diplomats from all countries with bilateral human rights dialogues with China, or those that signed the March 2016 statement criticizing China's human rights record at the UN Human Rights Council, should request visits to see Guo at Yangchun Prison. If such requests are denied or receive no response, they should go to the prison and personally request access to Guo and to meet with prison officials to express concerns about his case.
"Guo should never have been imprisoned in the first place, and his cruel treatment since sends a chilling message about human rights in China today," Richardson said. "Respecting Guo's rights could help begin to repair the damage done."
Copyright notice: Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Bangladesh: Charge or Release Holey Attack Hostages
Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 15 July 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Bangladesh: Charge or Release Holey Attack Hostages, 15 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ce1114.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Bangladeshi authorities should guarantee all due process rights of two detainees who had been held hostage by armed gunmen during the July 1 siege on the Holey Artisan Bakery Cafe in Dhaka, Human Rights Watch said today. The two men, Hasanat Karim and Tahmid Khan, were initially held for questioning by authorities but have neither been charged nor released.
Armed gunmen attacked the cafe on the night of July 1, killing more than 20 people and holding others inside hostage. Security forces stormed the cafe on the morning of July 2, killing several of the gunmen, and securing the safety of the remaining 13 hostages. The hostages were taken to the Detective Branch headquarters, where they were questioned by the authorities.
All hostages, except for Karim, 47, and Khan, 22, were released on July 3. Their families have had little or no official information about their safety and whereabouts since. They have been allowed to send medicine and clothes, but are unsure if those were delivered to the detainees. The detainees have not been produced promptly before a judge, a right enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Bangladesh is a party.
"The attack on the cafe was a horrific event, and the authorities should conduct thorough investigations by questioning those held hostage but they must do so in a rights-respecting manner," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Karim and Khan have not had access to a lawyer, and the police continue to deny holding them although they are clearly still being held by the Detective Branch. The authorities need to either charge or release them immediately."
Human Rights Watch noted that Bangladeshi security forces have an extensive and well-documented history of custodial abuse, including torture. Given this history, there is a real risk of harm during detention and interrogation. Human Rights Watch has documented torture and custodial abuse of those detained by Bangladeshi security forces, including of one of its own consultants, in 2008. A 2012 Human Rights Watch report documented the mass arrests, torture, and custodial deaths of those suspected of involvement in a 2009 mutiny by the Bangladesh Rifles. Subsequent investigations by Human Rights Watch before and after the violent elections in January 2014 documented arbitrary and illegal arrests, leading in some cases to disappearances and deaths. Most recently, Human Rights Watch expressed concern at the nearly 15,000 mass arbitrary arrests by the government in a much-delayed reaction to a spate of killings of bloggers, atheists, foreigners, and gay rights activists.
Karim is a UK national and Khan is a resident of Canada. Human Rights Watch called upon both the UK and Canadian authorities to press for consular access to ensure the safety and well-being of the detainees.
"The authorities holding Karim and Khan are bound by Bangladeshi law and international law to ensure that both men are accorded their full due process rights, including the right to a lawyer and the right to be produced before a magistrate, both of which are key in ensuring their physical well-being and freedom from custodial abuse," said Adams. "The length of time the two men have been held incommunicado is a direct violation of their basic rights."
Human Rights Watch called on the Bangladeshi authorities to admit to the detentions of the two men, to make clear their whereabouts, and to protect their rights.
Copyright notice: Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Laos: Premier Should Account for 'Disappeared' Activist
Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 15 July 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Laos: Premier Should Account for 'Disappeared' Activist, 15 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ce18e4.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith should immediately disclose the fate of prominent activist Sombath Somphone, who has been forcibly disappeared in Vientiane since December 2012, Human Rights Watch said.
Since taking office on April 20, 2016, Prime Minister Thongloun has stayed silent on Sombath's disappearance, among the country's most serious human rights cases in recent years. Official investigations of the case have been rudimentary and inadequate, and failed to offer any credible explanation of his fate or whereabouts. Lao authorities have repeatedly disregarded concerns raised by foreign governments and human rights groups.
"Sombath Somphone's case is a major test for Prime Minister Thongloun's new government," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "The prime minister should end Lao's long silence on Sombath's 'disappearance' and explain what happened to him, instead of trying to deflect international criticisms and concerns."
Sombath, the 60-year-old founder and former director of the Participatory Development Training Centre, received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 2005. Security camera footage shows police stopping Sombath's jeep at 6:03 p.m. on December 15, 2012, and unidentified men taking him into the Thadeua police post. Shortly afterward, an unidentified motorcyclist stopped at the police post and drove off with Sombath's jeep, leaving his own motorcycle by the roadside. A few minutes later, a truck with flashing lights stopped at the police post. Two people got out of the truck, took Sombath into the vehicle, then drove off. The authorities later denied any knowledge of Sombath taken into custody. He has not been seen since.
Laos has signed, but not ratified, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Enforced disappearances are defined under international law as the arrest or detention of a person by state officials or their agents followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty, or to reveal the person's fate or whereabouts. Enforced disappearances violate a range of fundamental human rights protected under international law, including prohibitions against arbitrary arrest and detention; torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; and extrajudicial execution. Disappearances are a continuing offense that cause anguish and suffering for the victim's family members.
"The Lao government should understand that Sombath's case is not going to go away," Adams said. "Donor governments and organizations will raise concerns about this highly regarded activist until the Lao government provides answers about his fate."
Copyright notice: Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Uganda: Lethal Response to Killings
Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 15 July 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Uganda: Lethal Response to Killings, 15 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ce22e4.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
The Ugandan government should investigate the killings of at least 50 people in the Rwenzori region, 17 of them by security forces, between February and April 2016, and make the findings public, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the police inspector general.
A Human Rights Watch investigation found that members of the Bakonzo and Bamba ethnic groups in Uganda's western Rwenzori region clashed following contested local elections and political infighting, resulting in at least 30 deaths. During the subsequent law enforcement operations, the Ugandan police and military killed at least 17 people. One police officer and two soldiers were also killed.
"The Ugandan government should account for what happened between February and April in the Rwenzori region, so that those responsible, whether government security forces or civilian, can be prosecuted and punished," said Maria Burnett, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "To end the retaliatory violence, the government needs to fulfill its role in maintaining neutrality and ensuring justice."
Human Rights Watch interviewed 111 people, including survivors, victims' relatives, witnesses, community members, medical staff, police, and journalists in April and May, in Bundibugyo and Kasese. Human Rights Watch also gathered and viewed evidence such as post-mortem reports, photographs, medical and mortuary records, and video footage, and visited camps for internally displaced people and sites of killings, burials, and destroyed homes.
The recent wave of violence began in Bundibugyo district on February 27, following contested local elections. The Bakonzo cultural kingdom has historically had tense relationships with both the neighboring Bwamba kingdom comprised of ethnic Bamba people and the central government. A group of armed men all allegedly of Bamba ethnicity attacked two ethnic Bakonzo households in Busengerwa 4 village, in Bundibugyo district, shooting and killing one person and critically injuring another with machetes. This attack sparked the latest in a series of retaliatory, inter-ethnic killings in the district until early April, leaving at least 30 people dead, seven of them children. Hundreds of houses of both ethnic groups were burned, and hundreds were displaced as a result of the violence.
According to media reports, police and military initially arrested a total of more than 150 people in February and March for various crimes, but it is not clear how many remain in custody. The New Vision, a government newspaper, reported that police charged at least 13 men with murder, attempted murder, and arson, on April 7.
In the wake of the violence in Bundibugyo, armed people in neighboring Kasese also clashed. On March 10, following contested local sub-county elections, a group of people allegedly Bakonzo attacked a group of soldiers in an area known as Kikonzo, in Hima Town Council, stabbing and injuring four. In response, the soldiers fatally shot two people. This violence led to four more incidents between the government and Royal Guards of the Obusinga bwa Rwenzururu (Bakonzo) kingdom, resulting in the deaths of six Royal Guards, three government security forces, and an individual not affiliated with either security force. Royal Guards are volunteers who provide security to the customary king.
The central government responded by deploying security forces to both Bundibugyo and Kasese districts in March. In Bundibugyo, the army carried out large-scale cordon-and-search operations in villages, and in April, assumed the name "Operation Usalama Rwenzori [Bring Peace to Rwenzori]." In Kasese, the police deployed a unit called the Flying Squad, whose officers typically operate in civilian clothes, drive unmarked cars, and are most often deployed in response to alleged armed gangs. Human Rights Watch has previously stated concerns that police has given them a shoot-to-kill mandate.
The Rwenzori region is the site of past violence; in July 2014, members of the Bakonzo ethnic group attacked police and army posts, resulting in reprisal killings against Bakonzo civilians. Local media reports suggest that over 100 people were killed during that period. Community members of both ethnicities told Human Rights Watch that they believed that at least some of the recent violence was attributable to unaddressed violence in 2014.
Human Rights Watch investigations into the killings by security forces indicate that police and the army killed at least 13 people during alleged arrest attempts. Multiple witnesses said that in all of those cases, the victims were unarmed when shot and killed. In all but one case, witness accounts suggest that security forces shot people at close range who were not threatening them or others at the time of the arrest.
In one instance, security forces responded to a man running toward them holding a stick by shooting him dead. This and other accounts raise serious questions about use of lethal force during arrests. No member of the security forces has yet been charged with any killings.
Some government officials, including a parliamentary committee on defense and internal affairs and the Uganda Human Rights Commission, have conducted investigations that are understood to be completed, but their reports have not been published and it is not clear if they will be issued publicly.
The prosecuting authorities should investigate all instances of lethal use of force by security forces, Human Rights Watch said. The United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials require law enforcement officials, including military units responding to national emergencies, to apply nonviolent means before resorting to the use of force, to use force only in proportion to the seriousness of the offense, and to use lethal force only when strictly unavoidable to protect life. The principles also provide that governments shall ensure that arbitrary or abusive use of force and firearms by law enforcement officials is punished as a criminal offense under their law.
According to humanitarian aid agencies, approximately 23,000 people were displaced at the height of the violence in Bundibugyo, many fleeing to about 11 camps. An indeterminate number remain displaced, with approximately 600 people, gathered in Bubukwanga camp, while some of the remaining internally displaced people are in 10 informal "reception centers" based in trading centers. All the camps are ethnically homogenous. Many of the displaced are not in camps, but have been staying with relatives or in sub-county offices, schools, churches, or markets.
Some displaced people are unable to adequately access necessary goods and services, causing some to return to areas they consider unsafe to harvest crops for food. Aid workers cited the lack of health supplies, shelter, schooling for children, and household items as enduring concerns. Displaced people interviewed said that the government has urged them to return home, but many said that they considered it too dangerous. Some said that neighbors had burned down homes they had lived in for decades and that they have nowhere to live now.
"The killings of unarmed people has fueled sentiment that the government is not a neutral party between ethnic groups in the Rwenzori region," Burnett said. "Ensuring protection for everyone, no matter their ethnicity, and holding security forces to account for their conduct, is critical to preventing recurring cycles of violence."
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Canada's refugee success story
Publisher IRIN Author Brynna Leslie Publication Date 14 July 2016 Cite as IRIN, Canada's refugee success story, 14 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ce94e4.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Shortly after midnight on 31 December 2015, Iman and Zaher Ahmad* and their two young daughters arrived at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, Canada after a 14-hour flight from Beirut.
They didn't speak English. Not a word. There was confusion as they were moved into lines with other Syrians to be processed by immigration officials at Canada's largest airport.
Their only possessions other than their documents were parka coats, winter boots, and teddy bears issued by Canadian officials.
They were put on a bus and taken to a hotel to sleep, then awoken by strangers a few hours later and told they must return to the airport for the final leg of their journey to a place called Ottawa. They didn't know where it was, only that they were going there.
After a problem with their documents that delayed them for 12 hours, the family finally arrived at Ottawa's much smaller airport that evening, unsure of their next move.
Peering down from the top of an escalator overlooking the baggage carousels, Zaher saw their names on a sign in Arabic and a big group of people who began crying, waving, and cheering as they slowly approached. The 38 people turned out to be the family's sponsoring group who had come to welcome the Ahmads to their new home.
Public engagement
Last September, the image of a dead Syrian toddler lying facedown on a beach in Turkey triggered a massive response from the Canadian public, propelling a relatively unknown 37-year-old refugee sponsorship programme into the spotlight.
In the autumn, a newly elected Canadian government made good on an election promise to boost the number of Syrians resettled to Canada. Of the 25,000 Syrian refugees brought to Canada in the first two months of 2016, nearly half had been privately sponsored by groups of Canadians like the one that welcomed Iman and Zaher.
While Europe shored up its borders in the wake of record arrivals of refugees and terrorist attacks in 2015 and racist rhetoric became a feature of US presidential campaign, the Canadian government struggled to find and screen sufficient numbers of eligible refugees to meet the demand of willing, welcoming sponsors.
"The public interest in getting involved was unprecedented," says Leslie Emory, executive director of the Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization, which helps link immigrants and refugees with settlement services. "Although we have a very robust settlement sector within the city of Ottawa, we've never had this rate of arrivals: so many people over such a short time."
When an end to the Syrian sponsorship programme was announced in March, the resulting public outcry triggered a reversal in policy. The Canadian government announced it would extend the programme until the end of 2016 and resettle an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees. Another 8,000 refugees from elsewhere in the world will be privately sponsored to come to Canada by the end of this year.
According to Emory, privately sponsored refugees have a better chance of early and successful integration. A government evaluation has shown that privately sponsored refugees acquire language skills more quickly, enter the workforce sooner and have better health outcomes than government-assisted refugees.
"Privately sponsored refugees have an on-the-ground family here," explains Emory. "They have an entire group preparing for them specifically, anticipating their needs, setting up a home before they arrive."
Settling in
It's six months since Iman and Zaher's arrival. Laughter echoes from the open, second-storey window of their small duplex, not far from downtown Ottawa.
The family is celebrating Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Ramadan fast, with four of their Canadian sponsors. Among them is Jacqueline Couture, who slips a fistful of coins into their daughters' hands. "Eid Mubarak!" she says.
Sponsors Henri Bagdadi and wife Suzanne Defoy entertain six-year-old Mays and four-year-old Dahab with jokes and stories. The two girls excitedly share news using a mix of Arabic and English about spending the day at a massive conference facility near the airport, which hosted Eid festivities for more than 15,000 Muslims and their friends.
"In Lebanon, Eid is a small affair," says Iman. "Here it was big and very exciting with people from many countries." It's just one of the cultural adjustments Iman says she has made as a new Canadian.
Deidre Kelly, another sponsor, arrives and reaches out her arms to the girls: "Are we ready to go play at the park?"
For Iman, Zaher, and the girls, their sponsoring group has become the equivalent of their extended family in Canada. But friendships between refugees and their sponsors don't always develop. Training programmes offered to would-be sponsors tell them not to expect too much, and warn Canadians against imposing their own cultural norms on the families.
Not all plain sailing
In Guelph, a city in southwestern Ontario, sponsor Renee Fleming is among a group of 16 people who raised money to sponsor a family of four from Syria. After a heart-warming welcoming event in January, the new arrivals made it clear they didn't want to be friends, and craved their independence.
The Canadian press has reported other incidents of personal and cultural clashes between sponsors and refugee families. Some new arrivals have expressed disappointment that Canada is so remote. Fleming notes that the family they're helping has complained that the primary school system is "not strict enough". Canada's liberal approach to social issues women's rights and homosexuality, for example often fall in stark contrast to the religious and cultural norms of the Syrians.
Although the relationship between Iman and Zaher and their sponsors has flourished from the evening they brought the family home to a small, ready-furnished apartment in central Ottawa, Kelly admits it has required a delicate balance to offer support without intruding.
"The way people manage money is kind of an intimate thing," Kelly says. "There's a whole power dynamic, where we have all the power. We decided off the bat to give them money monthly and let them decide how to budget it themselves."
A tough start
Kelly says the first few weeks following the family's arrival were challenging. The day after the New Year's holiday, Kelly took Iman to a clinic for something that required "immediate medical attention". The same week, Zaher needed to see an optometrist. Before the girls could be registered for school, there were a series of medical check-ups and vaccinations to be done. Dahab also had to have major dental surgery.
Two weeks after their arrival, the sponsoring group, many of whom are French-Canadian, registered the girls in a French immersion programme at a public school where they receive half-day instruction in both of Canada's two official languages (English and French).
Kelly says she doesn't know how government-assisted refugees navigate the many hurdles of settling into their new lives in Canada, from banking to understanding the public health system.
"I'm from a very middle-class background, and there are so many things I've taken for granted," says Kelly, who appointed herself the group member in charge of health matters. "It's been a really eye-opening experience."
The group has found doctors, dentists, pharmacies, and childcare facilities within walking distance, all offering services in Arabic, which is the third most spoken language in Ottawa.
Sponsors are expected to help families become self-sustaining, so they can survive independently following the initial 12-month support period.
Iman and Zaher spend their days studying English. In the evenings, "I study more", says Iman. She has already attained a level of English that means she can register for college in September. Zaher hopes to soon start work at a local landscaping company.
Home
The sun is getting low and Eid al-Fitr is coming to an end. Mays is pedalling her little sister's blue-and-pink bicycle in the local playpark, frequently stopping to offer wild flowers to her sponsors. She's told it's time to go home to get ready for bed.
"Not yet. I'm not ready," insists Mays. She holds up two fingers and says in perfect French, "Attends! Deux minutes." The group laughs at her easy ability to switch between languages.
"I feel so lucky there was a group waiting for us," Iman says. "They are so nice. Whenever we need something, they come.
"They make me feel Canada is my country now."
*Last name has been changed
Will the refugee summit be "a missed opportunity"?
Publisher IRIN Author Kristy Siegfried Publication Date 15 July 2016 Related Document(s) In safety and dignity: addressing large movements of refugees and migrants Cite as IRIN, Will the refugee summit be "a missed opportunity"?, 15 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ce9d84.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
When world leaders convene at the UN General Assembly on 19 September for a high-level summit on refugees and migrants, there are high hopes they will do more than just commit new funding or resettlement places for refugees. The aim of the meeting is to come up with nothing less than "a blueprint" for a better, fairer and more predictable international response to large movements of refugees and migrants.
Central to this better response is the idea that the responsibility for hosting refugees and migrants should be shared more equitably between states. Currently, developing countries are hosting 86 percent of the world's refugees, and countries like Kenya are increasingly unwilling to continue shouldering what they view as a burden, particularly as international funding for long-running refugee crises dries up.
Ahead of the September meeting, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released a report setting out recommendations for its outcome. The report urges member states to adopt a "global compact on responsibility-sharing for refugees", which would set out all the elements of a new response plan. Ban has called for a similar compact for "safe, regular, and orderly" migration to be initiated at the summit and realised over the next two years.
In one sense, the timing for a meeting with such ambitious goals could not be better. The chaotic arrival of more than a million asylum seekers to Europe's shores last year has woken up Western leaders to the need for a new approach. Previous meetings, like the Supporting Syria Conference in London and the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, have also achieved some momentum on the issue.
In another sense, the timing could not be worse. Europe is in the throes of a major backlash in response to terrorist attacks and last year's unprecedented number of arrivals. The United States, too, is in the grip of an acrimonious presidential campaign, which has further polarised public opinion on immigration and refugees.
No roadmap
Early drafts of the declaration to be adopted at the summit, and a global compact on refugees, released at the end of June, suggest that politics may trump the willingness of states to commit to real change.
Both documents make ample use of human-rights friendly language to describe numerous commendable commitments to more equitably share responsibility for refugees and expand resettlement, among other things. But to the dismay of refugee and migrant rights groups, they come with no roadmap setting out how or when those commitments will be realised.
"The big criticism, particularly of the global compact, is that it was expected that there would be an actual mechanism that really spells out how this responsibility gets shared," said Brooke Lauten from the Norwegian Refugee Council's Geneva office. "It's a lot of lofty, 'we will try to do this', but it's also more or less a list of what's already being done. It doesn't actually bind anyone to anything."
Civil society has not been directly involved in the process of drafting the declaration, which is being led by Ireland and Jordan. However, 22 NGOs have formed an action committee to submit feedback on the drafts and to participate in consultations in the run up to the summit.
In their feedback on the first drafts, they warn that both documents risk becoming "empty words" unless the lack of implementation and accountability mechanisms is addressed.
"The document is long, with long lists of principles and vague commitments that don't add up to much responsibility in practice. We would like to see more concrete and clear proposals and what it would require from each state committing to it," note the NGOs.
Rushed negotiations
Wies Maas is coordinating the work of the civil society action committee in the lead up to the Summit. Speaking to IRIN from New York, as she rushed between consultations, she said that negotiations to finalise the documents have been taking place at a break-neck pace and are due to conclude by the end of this month. Considering the short time-frame, she said it was unsurprising that the biggest challenge was shaping up to be how to include real operational mechanisms in the outcome.
"We were actually quite pleasantly surprised that the first draft of the outcome document has quite a wide scope and reaffirms existing human rights conventions and international frameworks, which wasn't a given," she said. "But we are anxious and working hard to see how it's really going to achieve change on the ground for refugees and migrants. More ambition and real solutions are needed."
James Hathaway, director of Michigan University's refugee law programme, who has spent much of the last two decades advocating for a new model to ensure greater responsibility-sharing for refugees, is also bracing himself for a disappointing outcome to the summit.
"There is little here that has not been agreed to many times before," he commented on the draft global compact. "Rather than seizing the opportunity to shift to a managed model of implementing the Refugee Convention, the proposal simply encourages episodic cooperation, and then only in the case of a so-called large scale movement. Despite its grand title, this is really just a proposal to tinker with the existing system.
"In sum, the draft is pretty much 'same old, same old' a missed opportunity to fix an ailing protection system."
Business as usual at Leaders' Summit?
A second draft of the declaration, released on Thursday, contains some additions that strengthen states' commitments but more that weaken them, according to Lauten of the NRC. She noted, for example, that the new draft contains fewer references to states' "responsibility".
On Monday, civil society organisations will have an opportunity to put their concerns on the record at a multi-stakeholder hearing in New York. A summary of their comments will then be shared with member states as they try to finalise the two drafts.
The possible outcomes of a Leaders' Summit on Refugees, organized by President Barack Obama and taking place on the margins of the General Assembly on 20 September, are less clear. Only member states willing to make specific commitments to provide additional funding or resettlement places for refugees will be invited to attend.
Lauten said it could be "very complementary" to the high-level summit, but only if that summit produces a blueprint for responsibility-sharing that individual states can then act on. "If we don't have that, then it's just business as usual."
What changes and doesn't change after Turkey's failed coup
Publisher IRIN Author Annie Slemrod Publication Date 18 July 2016 Cite as IRIN, What changes and doesn't change after Turkey's failed coup, 18 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cea564.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
With more than than 290 dead, 1,400 injured, and 9,000 arrested (including 30 governors), a dramatic coup attempt by a segment of the Turkish military is over, or at least in its dying throes.
Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came out to the streets to protest the putsch on Friday evening, at his call. Tellingly, so did some of his opponents. After a weekend crackdown, the leader appears to have emerged in a strong position. However, he is far from invincible, and the country remains divided.
As Erdogan's government continues to cull the judiciary and the armed forces, and to shut down independent media outlets, it is clear that the repercussions will be felt for some time, both inside and outside the country.
Here's how the aftermath is playing out in some key areas of concern:
Refugees
While Turkey has been preventing fleeing Syrians from crossing its borders going so far as to shoot those who attempt the country has allowed 2.7 million into the country, and this has largely been thanks to Erdogan.
Had the coup succeeded, history dictates that there could well have been a backlash against the refugees. Take Egypt's 2013 coup: ousted president Mohamed Morsi backed some segments of the Syrian opposition (as does Erdogan). After his ouster, Syrian refugees became the target of abuse; many were forced to flee the country.
Now, not only will the refugees' situation presumably remain stable, but Erdogan may even have a freer hand in pushing forward his plan to grant citizenship to some 300,000 Syrians a proposal that had been dominating headlines up until this weekend's sudden turn of events.
Metin Corabatr, president of the Ankara-based Research Centre on Asylum and Migration, told IRIN that Erdogan's renewed power, even if it is temporary, might allow him to push through the citizenship plan.
Past efforts to expand protections for refugees in Turkey have repeatedly been blocked, in part by security concerns. But, with that sector clearly weakened, Corabatr said activists should seize this opportunity and reopen the debate about who actually deserves protection, or even citizenship reforming a system that doesn't officially recognise refugees.
"Erdogan came out as a stronger leader than before, and he has a free hand to change things how he would like to," Corabatr said. "So in that sense, human rights activists and others should [take the chance] to explain to the government that the asylum system should be changed and they can discuss nationality."
That said, Erdogan's supporters may not be as sympathetic to the plight of their Syrian neighbours as the president is said to be. Nationalist sentiment is running high. There have been reports of mobs attacking Syrian neighbourhoods in the wake of the coup attempt, although these could not be independently confirmed by IRIN.
EU-Turkey deal
Turkey's long-stalled accession to the EU was supposed to be given fresh impetus by a deal to return one migrant who did not qualify for asylum from Europe to Turkey in exchange for resettling one qualifying Syrian on the continent.
However, the agreement was quickly halted by questions over its legality and there have been no mass returns. Now there's another potential hitch: the death penalty.
Capital punishment is no-go for the EU: abolition is a precondition for entry, and Turkey abolished it in 2002 as part of reforms aimed at membership.
But, following the coup, politicians from Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have called for reintroducing the sentence. Erdogan has said he will consider it (not for the first time), and the hashtag "I want the death sentence" was reportedly trending on Twitter in Turkish over the weekend.
While European leaders threw their support behind Turkey's elected government, EU chief Donald Tusk also warned of concerns of a potential crackdown.
"The key question will be what kind of Turkey comes out from this crisis. How Turkey manages to come out of and deal with the consequences will be crucial not just for Turkey, but the whole region and EU-Turkey relations."
Presumably, the EU won't react favorably to the death penalty either, and any execution would throw a major spanner in the EU-Turkey works. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman hammered this home Monday. "A country that has the death penalty cannot be a member of the European Union," he said. "The introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would mean the end of accession talks."
PKK
Negotiations broke down between the state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in July 2015, and since the end of last year the two groups have been battling it out in the country's majority Kurdish southeast.
Civilians have been paying the price, with more than 350,000 displaced and more than 250 killed.
Kristian Brakel, director of the Heinrich Boll Foundation (and a Turkey expert), doesn't foresee a major change in Erdogan's policy towards the PKK.
That said, the rise in nationalistic sentiment in the wider population "never historically bodes well for the Kurds," he noted.
Fighting the PKK, which Turkey considers a terrorist organisation, has been a flagship Erdogan policy. But the militants will be emboldened if the post-coup purge leads to a badly fractured military (there have already been several detentions in the southeast)
The fight against so-called Islamic State
While the relationship has been tense at times, cooperation appears to have been on the up in recent days, with Ankara backing a Kurdish-led offensive against IS in Manbij.
That may now be at risk.
Incirlik airbase, which the US uses to send jets to Syria and Iraq, was temporarily shut down after Turkey said it had arrested plotters there. The airspace is meant to be open again, but operations are likely to be hampered by the reported detention of the base's commander.
Erdogan and his allies blame US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen for the attempted takeover Erdogan has pledged to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen supporters and has said he will request the cleric's extradition.
But others have strongly suggested that the United States itself was somehow involved in the coup.
Gulen denies involvement in the plot and has thrown the blame back on Erdogan.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, meanwhile, has strongly denied that his country played any part in the events and has invited Turkey to "present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny".
This war of words can't be good for ties between the countries and their deal to battle IS.
"Let's wait and see how it develops," cautioned Brakel.
While Turkey has been cozying up to Russia, Israel, and America of late, a formal request for Gulen's extradition "would definitely be a strain on US-Turkish relations", he added.
Media purge after abortive coup?
Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 18 July 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Media purge after abortive coup?, 18 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ced924.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) warns the Turkish authorities against any temptation to silence critical media outlets on the pretext of punishing supposed supporters of the 16 July coup attempt.
More than a dozen news websites suspected of "endangering national security or public order" have been blocked by the High Council for Telecommunications (TIB) in the past 48 hours at the request of the prime minister's office.
Under Turkish law, a government order blocking a website must be endorsed by an Ankara judge after the event.
The blocked sites include ABCGazete, Gazeteport, Can Erzincan, Ozgur Dusunce, Haberdar, Kars, Gri Hat, Aktif Haber, Samanyolu Haber, Meydan and Rota Haber. As of yesterday, none of them had been notified in writing although the blocking had already begun.
Only Medyascope, an innovative news site operated by the well-known journalist Rusen Cakr, was unblocked a few hours after being blocked.
"An editorial line critical of the government or supportive of the Gulen movement cannot be interpreted as open and explicit support for the coup attempt," said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF's Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk. "The government's response to the abortive coup must stay within the limits of the Turkish constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression."
ABCGazete owner Merdan Yanardag told RSF's Turkey representative that he failed to understand the grounds for the blocking.
"I was jailed by judges who support the Gulen movement," he said. "How can we, my website and I, be accused of supporting this movement and posing a danger. Our coverage just referred to the danger of another coup, an Islamist one, after the failed coup. We urged people to support democracy and not the [ruling] AKP. That's all! We will pursue our fight for democracy, rights and freedoms to the end. And we invite the public to do the same."
The ABCGazete website continues to be accessible via an alternative address abcgazetesi1.com. The human rights website Bianet has posted a list of alternative links for accessing news resources that have been censored.
Human rights lawyer Yaman Akdeniz told RSF that he and a colleague, Kerem Altparmak, have filed 25 requests with Turkey's constitutional court calling for the quashing of legislative provisions that allow officials to block sites on "national security" or "public order" grounds.
Their latest request was prompted by the blocking of the Russian government news agency Sputnik's Turkish-language website in April. The constitutional court has yet to issue a ruling in response to any of these requests.
The latest blocking has fuelled fears about more arrests of outspoken journalists. A warrant for the arrest of Arzu Yldz, a journalist with the Haberdar news site, was issued today. Lists of "pro-Gulen journalists to be arrested" are circulating on social networks.
Turkey is ranked 151st out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
South Sudan: Juba Monitor founder Alfred Taban held by security services
Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 18 July 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, South Sudan: Juba Monitor founder Alfred Taban held by security services, 18 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cedf24.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate release of Alfred Taban, a well-known journalist who has been detained by South Sudan's security services for the past two days.
Taban and Ana Namiriano, the editor of the Juba Monitor newspaper, were summoned to the headquarters of the security services in Juba on 16 July. Namiriano was allowed to leave after questioning but Taban (who founded the Juba Monitor in 2000, when it was called the Khartoum Monitor) was detained without any formal charge being brought against him.
His state of health is worrying and it is not known where he is being held.
"We urge the South Sudanese authorities to free Alfred Taban without delay and to ensure that his rights are respected and that he has access to a doctor," RSF said. "This leading journalist's arrest constitutes yet another violation of media freedom in a country that has endured extensive violations of civil liberties since the start of the civil war."
Several sources said the arrest of Taban, who also heads the Association for the Development of Media in South Soudan (ADMISS), was a reprisal for his 15 July "Let us speak out" column about a recent communique by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional group that is mediating in the South Sudanese conflict.
The IGAD statement took a firm tone with the leaders of both sides, President Salva Kiirr and Vice-President Riek Machar, calling on them to take their responsibility to end the violence that erupted on 7 July.
Since the start of this latest violence, in which hundreds of people have been killed and thousands displaced, officials have intensified repressive measures and the security services have imposed curbs on free movement. They had already been targeting journalists and human rights defenders in particular since the start of the year and many journalists are now in hiding.
John Gatluak Manguet Nhial, a respected journalist who coordinated and reported for Radio Naath FM in Leer, was killed with complete impunity in Juba's Terrain Hotel on 11 July, probably because he is a member of the Nuer ethnic group.
South Sudan is ranked 140th out of 180 countries inRSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index, having fallen 26 places since the start of the conflict.
Abortive coup Turkish journalists on the brink of the abyss
Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 16 July 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Abortive coup Turkish journalists on the brink of the abyss, 16 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578cee884.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the attacks against media outlets and journalists that took place during last night's attempted military coup in Turkey.
Soldiers stormed public broadcaster TRT's studios in Istanbul and Ankara at around midnight, forcing presenter Tijen Karas to read their communique and then interrupting programmes.
Another group of soldiers subsequently stormed the Istanbul headquarters of Dogan, a Kemalist media group that includes such leading outlets as the daily Hurriyet and the TV channels CNN Turk and Kanal D. After heated arguments, journalists were force to evacuate the premises at gunpoint and broadcasting was interrupted.
There was a similar sequence of events at the headquarters of digital and cable TV provider Digiturk. The police later recovered control of all these buildings, arrested the soldiers occupying them, and allowed employees to go back to work.
Yeni Safak photoreporter Mustafa Cambaz was gunned down by soldiers after appealing on social networks for protests against the coup attempt.
While covering events, Selcuk Samiloglu, Hurriyet's Istanbul correspondent, and Kenan Sener, a CNN Turk reporter in Ankara, were both physically attacked by government supporters suspicious of Kemalist media outlets. After being hospitalized, Samiloglu told RSF he came close to being thrown from a bridge.
This morning, Prime Minister Binali Yldrm apologized to the media for incidents of this kind which, he said, were the "result of the stress and emotion" of the demonstrators.
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were all extremely slow during part of the night, which may have been due to a traffic surge. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his supporters, who are usually very critical of social networks, made much use of them to call for resistance to the coup and to recover control of the situation.
"Like the rest of Turkish society, the leading news media demonstrated their commitment to democratic principles during the past night," RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. "It is time for the authorities to take note and to stop treating critical journalists as traitors and terrorists. Reinforcing national cohesion requires respect for basic freedoms including media freedom."
The official provisional toll from the abortive coup is at least 265 dead and 1,440 wounded. Turkey is ranked 151st out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Charges against five Turkish journalists must be dropped
Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 14 July 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Charges against five Turkish journalists must be dropped, 14 July 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/578ceebd4.html [accessed 28 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Charges of acquiring and divulging state secrets, membership of, and administration of a terrorist organisation brought against five journalists, including four former members of Taraf newspaper's editorial and investigative staff, must be dropped and one of the accused, Mehmet Baransu, must be released immediately and unconditionally, PEN International, English PEN, German PEN, Swedish PEN, PEN America, ARTICLE 19, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the European Federation of Journalists, the Ethical Journalism Network, IFEX, Index on Censorship, the International Federation of Journalists, Global Editors Network and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a joint statement today.
"These charges are a clear infringement of the right to free expression and a free press in Turkey and must be dropped, and Baransu released. It's yet another example of abuses by the Turkish authorities of the problematic Anti-Terror law to silence investigative journalists. The law must be reformed without delay," said Carles Torner, Executive Director of PEN International.
The charges concern Taraf editor, Ahmet Altan; deputy editor, Yasemin Congar; Taraf journalists Mehmet Baransu, Yldray Ogur and, a fifth journalist, Tuncay Opcin. All five journalists are facing charges of acquiring and divulging documents concerning the security of the state and its political interests punishable by up to 50 years in prison. Mehmet Baransu and Tuncay Opcin are facing additional charges of 'membership and administration of a terrorist organization' and face a possible 75-year prison term.
The charges are detailed in a 276 page indictment, which was accepted on 20 June 2016 by the Istanbul High Criminal Court, 16 months after the initiation of the investigation. Baransu has been held in pre-trial detention since his arrest on 2 March 2015. The journalists' next hearing is due to be held on 2 September 2016.
The indictments and the materials presented by the prosecutor in relation to the case are open to very serious doubts, suggesting that the charges are politically motivated.
While large parts of the indictment against the journalists focuses on a series of controversial news reports, titled the 'Balyoz (Sledgehammer) Coup Plan'[1], published in Taraf between 20-29 January 2010, about an alleged military coup to overthrow the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government, the charges do not, in fact, relate to this story. Indeed, the indictment does not suggest Taraf's decision to publish the Balyoz papers was criminal and Balyoz does not figure in the specific charges presented at all.
Instead, the indictment brings charges of acquiring and divulging state secrets against the five journalists concerning the 'Egemen Operation' plan - an out of date military war plan to respond to a Greek invasion. However Taraf did not publish state secrets regarding this operation, as a prior judgment of the Turkish Constitutional Court affirms.
"Beyond the simple problem of a lack of evidence, there are serious concerns regarding the indictment which suggest it has been written to obfuscate facts and to implicate the journalists in involvement in the Balyoz case, an already controversial story, to limit public support for their situation," said Erol Onderoglu from Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Additionally, 46 pages of the indictment prepared against the former Taraf journalists have been copied directly from the indictment against Cumhuriyet journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, who exposed illegal arms transfers by the Turkish Intelligence Service (MIT) into Syria and were sentenced to prison for five years for this crime. The degree of direct reproduction is evident from the fact that one paragraph of the indictment even starts with the words "The Defendant Can Dundar."
"The fact that large parts of the indictment have been copied from another high profile case targeting journalists raises significant concerns about the motivation and professionalism of the Prosecutor: not only does this call into question the extent to which the facts and evidence of the case have been properly examined, it reinforces concerns that the charges may be politically motivated," said Katie Morris, Head of the Europe and Central Asia Programme at Article 19.
PEN International, English PEN, German PEN, Swedish PEN, PEN America, ARTICLE 19, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the European Federation of Journalists, the Ethical Journalism Network, IFEX, Index on Censorship, the International Federation of Journalists, Global Editors Network and Reporters Without Borders call on the Turkish authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Baransu and to drop all charges that the five journalists face as a result of their work in public interest. Such legal actions against journalists, result in a pervasive "chilling-effect" among the rest of the media in the
country, which is compounded where fundamental fair trial safeguards are not upheld.
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[1] These reports were based on a series of classified documents and CDs acquired from an anonymous source. They led to widespread discussion in the country, which prompted Turkish prosecutors to initiate a controversial trial against the alleged coup-plotters named in the documents. The army officers implicated in the alleged coup plot revealed by Taraf have repeatedly claimed that the evidence against them was fabricated. In 2014, Turkey's highest court ruled that the authorities had violated the officers' right to a fair trial, leading to fresh hearings and mass releases from prison; including releases for several officers that had previously received sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
Reading, math scores down in 1st test since COVID. How Indiana did.
Kevin Johnson of Potosi has found his perfect job.
A native of Taylor County, Johnson attended Texas A&M University earning a bachelor's degree in animal science in 1979. After A&M, he began the management training program at Continental Grain's Coronado Feeders (now Five Rivers) and worked his way up to yard foreman. He returned to Abilene in the early 1980s to work for Hi Pro Animal Health, a division of Friona Industries.
In his 27-year career in animal health, he also has worked for Pfizer, Fort Dodge and Intervet/Schering Plough. All this time, Johnson maintained a cattle and ranch operation in Taylor County.
In 2010, he had an opportunity to teach animal health. After one semester, Johnson felt that this was his life's calling. Today, he is a part of the faculty of the Texas Christian University ranch program and holds the endowed Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Professorship.
'It is a unique program, where we take outstanding potential leaders in agriculture, subject them to a heavy study/workload and in 10 months have them ready to enter management positions in agriculture,' said Johnson. 'While it is only two semesters, the time devoted by the students is equal to 57 college credit hours.'
Johnson said it takes a special person to complete the program.
'We look for compassion and commitment as the two major qualities in the selection process.'
A typical class is 25-30 students whose background and ages vary a great deal. Students usually have some experience in production agriculture and have matured to a level that they are dedicated to the program. Since the program is so intense, they are told not to have any additional activities, such as employment, during the time.
'One thing that impresses me is the total staff dedication to the success of the students,' he said.
While one staff member may teach one topic, the entire group works with all students on the required projects assigned. Johnson uses this concept both in his teaching topics, and teaching life skills.
'I teach the students, as they go into the industry, to develop a team,' he said. 'The team may consist of many professional people, such as an NRCS staff member, a county extension agent, a banker and a veterinarian.'
Johnson tells the students to create a relationship before it is needed.
'I tell them that at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning is probably not the best time to meet your vet for the first time,' he said.
The life skills being taught are what has given the TCU ranch management program the credibility it has developed over the years.
This fall, the TCU ranch management program is in its 60th year. The program requires an academic year (nine months) to complete. The course of study is intense, challenging and time-consuming. Classroom instruction and discussion coupled with fieldwork observation culminate in the student implementing this knowledge in real-world projects reflecting agricultural asset management.
Attendance is mandatory for all classes and fieldwork.
The areas of study include livestock management, natural resource conservation, forage production and the business aspect of ranching. Field trips to agricultural operations are an important part of the curriculum.
While the program has no official job placement program, because of industry and alumni support students are able to find related positions with no problem.
Johnson said they are always looking for students who fit the objectives of the program. Anyone interested can make contact via the TCU ranch management website. http://ranch.tcu.edu/.
AMARILLO Something can be learned from every wheat harvest, but Texas A&M AgriLife Research wheat breeder Dr. Jackie Rudd said it is just 'fun' to see the success of this year's bounty.
After four years of drought, a battle with stripe rust, and a hailed-out crop last year, reaping 65-70 bushel-per-acre dryland wheat and 90-100 bushel-per-acre irrigated wheat this year in the AgriLife Research plots was a nice change, Rudd said.
'It was a lot of fun,' he said. 'It was outstanding this year because of the high yields. As a breeding program, what we do is develop new varieties for this area, and the research is all dependent on the environments we get.'
Rudd explained that research plots are similar to those of the producer, subject to losses from disease, pests, hail, drought and flooding.
'So much of the rest of the state was either planted late or not at all because of too much water this year,' he said. 'And a lot of what was planted was hit by stripe rust or sprouting or harvested late because of continuing rains during harvest time.'
This year, Rudd said things came together for the High Plains wheat harvest. Test weights were high, yields were high and even though the protein was a little low, it is a very marketable crop.
He explained the protein was a little low because no one was really expecting such a good crop, so additional fertilizer to compensate for the higher yields was not applied. Good April rains and slightly cooler May temperatures were an unexpected bonus for the wheat crop.
Developing a new wheat variety is a 10-15 year process, so after the four drought years of 2011-14 and last year's heavy stripe rust, Rudd said 'varieties that made it through are showing the best drought tolerance I can honestly say that we have ever had. This year, we were able to see the high yields on top of the drought tolerance and on top of the disease resistance.'
He said several experimental lines looked promising. TAM 111 and TAM 112 are generally used as the germ plasm base for these experimental lines.
Additionally, TAM 113 and TAM 114 are some of the Texas A&M wheat breeding program's newer varieties for the High Plains, and they did extremely well also.
'It's been very rewarding to see the things we have developed in the past five years perform so well. It's the wide variety of environments that we are able to test under that really contributes to our success,' Rudd said.
Rudd said the varieties are not only adapted to the Texas Panhandle and High Plains, but are grown all the way from the southern plains of Texas to Nebraska.
The reason they are so adaptable, he said, is they are tested in research plots across Texas.
'We are not necessarily trying to breed a single variety for the entire state of Texas, but it is important to know how they survive the severe disease pressure found in South Texas, the extreme temperatures of the Rolling Plains, the heavy rains of North Texas and the persistent droughts of the High Plains.'
In Cisco, you can have your pie and eat it, too. Or three. Or more ...
MONDAY
Movie at the library
In conjunction with the summer reading club for adults, a free showing of a classic pirate movie featuring Errol Flynn will begin at 10 a.m. at the Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St. Popcorn will be served.
Square dance workshop
TYE The Key City Squares will conduct a square dancing workshop at 6:30 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel.
Other ...
Blood drive, 7:30-11:30 a.m., Bandag, 4750 FM 18.
AARP, 10 a.m., Rose Park Senior Citizens Center Room B.
Cancer Services Network's Auxiliary meeting, 10:30 a.m., 100 Chestnut St., Suite 100. 325-672-0040.
Overeaters Anonymous, noon, Hinds Square Building, 100 Chestnut St., Room 112.
Schizophrenia Support Group, 1-2 p.m., Mental Health Association of Abilene, 333 Orange St. 325-673-2300.
Free swim class for people with multiple sclerosis, 5:30 p.m., YMCA, 3250 State St.
Anorexics Bulimics Anonymous, 6 p.m., Shades of Hope, 402A Mulberry St., Buffalo Gap. 800-588-4673.
Central Texas Gem & Mineral Society of Abilene, 7 p.m., 7607 Highway 277 South. 325-692-0063.
Abilene Toastmaster's Club 1071, 7 p.m., Conference Center, Texas State Technical College, 650 E. Highway 80. 325-692-7325 or abilene.toastmastersclubs.org.
Al-Anon, 7 p.m., First United Methodist Church, 1501 N. Broadway, Ballinger. 817-689-2810 or 325-977-1007.
Mid-City Al-Anon, 7 p.m., First Christian Church. 325-670-4304.
Memory Men (4-part a cappella singing), 7 p.m., Calvary Baptist Church, 1165 Minter Lane. Park on east side, enter through kitchen. 325-676-SING.
Those Left To Cope, 7-8:30 p.m., First Baptist Church Ministry of Counseling and Enrichment, 1502 N. First St.
Abilene Community Band rehearsal, 7:30 p.m., Bynum Band Hall, McMurry University. 325-232-7383.
South Pioneer Al-Anon Group, 8 p.m., 3157 Russell Ave.
Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Avoca United Methodist Church. 325-773-2611.
Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Group. 325-676-1400.
TUESDAY
Zoo Lady at the library
Joy Harsh, the 'Zoo Lady,' will give a presentation featuring live animals at 3 p.m. at the Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St. Admission is free.
Informational meeting
Big Country CASA will conduct an informational meeting at 6 p.m. at Mad Coffee & More, 8049 Highway 83/84. For more information, call 325-677-6448.
Square dance workshop
TYE The Wagon Wheel Squares will conduct a square dancing workshop at 6:30 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel.
Other ...
Mission on the Move Soup Kitchen, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Southwest Drive Community United Methodist Church, 3025 Southwest Dr.
Abilene Southwest Rotary Club, noon, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St.
High Noon Al-Anon, noon, Southern Hills Church of Christ, 3666 Buffalo Gap Road (south end; follow the yellow signs).
Blood drive, 1-6 p.m., Coleman County Electric Co-Op.
Stroke/Aphasia Recovery Program support group, 1:30-2:30 p.m. West Texas Rehabilitation Center boardroom, 4601 Hartford St. 325-793-3535.
Dystonia Support Group, 5:15-6:15 p.m., Not Without Us, 3301 N. First St. Suite 117.
Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS), 5:30 p.m., Brook Hollow Christian Church, 2310 S. Willis St. 325-232-7444.
Legacies Al-Anon Family Group, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Open Door Building, 3157 Russell Ave. 325-280-7584.
Family (of Mental Health Consumers) Support Group, 6-7 p.m., Mental Health Association in Abilene, 333 Orange St. 325-673-2300.
MHAA Bipolar/Depression Peer Support Group, 6-8 p.m., Ministry of Counseling & Enrichment, 1502 N. First St. 325-673-2300.
Free certified nurturing parent class (pregnancy to toddler), 6-8 p.m., Mission Church, North Third and Mockingbird streets. 325-672-9398.
Abilene Star Chorus, 6:15 p.m., First Baptist Church, 1333 N. Third St. 325-829-1470.
Overeaters Anonymous, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Exodus Metropolitan Community Church, 1933 S. 27th St.
Family Support Group for parents with special needs children, 6:30-7:30 p.m., West Texas Rehabilitation Center boardroom, 4601 Hartford St. 325-793-3500.
Alzheimer's Association North Central Texas Chapter, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Chisholm Place, 1450 E. N. 10th St. 325-672-2907.
Al-Anon Parents Group, 7 p.m., Hillcrest Church of Christ, 650 E. Ambler Ave. Use Church Street entrance.
Al-Anon, 7 p.m., Doug Meinzer Activity Center, Knox City. 940-658-3926.
Brigadier General John Sayles Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 366, 7 p.m., American Legion Building, 302 E.S. 11th St.
Abilene Society of Model Railroaders, 7-8:30 p.m., 2043 N. Second St.
Unity Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, 602 Meander St.
WEDNESDAY
Art film
A showing of the film 'Ai Wei Wei: Without Fear or Favor' will begin at noon at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 220 Cypress St. A discussion will follow.
Other ...
Overeaters Anonymous, 8 a.m., Hinds Square Building, Room 112, 100 Chestnut St.
Blood drive, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Blue Cross Blue Shield, 4002 Loop 322.
Abilene Cactus Lions Club, 11:45 a.m., Cotton Patch Cafe, 3302 S. Clack St.
Abilene Wednesday Rotary Club, noon, Abilene Country Club, 4039 S. Treadaway. $12 for lunch. Jo Ann Wilson, 325-677-6815.
Kiwanis Club of Abilene, noon, Abilene Country Club, 4039 S. Treadaway Blvd.
Clearly Speaking Toastmaster Club, noon, Westgate Church of Christ, 402 S. Pioneer Drive. 325-795-5570.
Alzheimer's Association Caregiver Support Group, 2-3 p.m., Western Hills Healthcare Residence, Comanche.
Alzheimer's disease support group, 5:15 p.m., Cedar Crest Care Center, 1901 W. Elliott, Breckenridge. Assists those who have a family member with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. 1-800-272-3900 or 254-559-3302.
Free swim class for people with multiple sclerosis, 5:30 p.m., YMCA, 3250 State St.
Veterans Peer Support Group, 6 p.m., 765 Orange St. 325-670-4818.
Mid-week Al-Anon Family Group, 6-7 p.m., Open Door Building, 3157 Russell Ave. 325-698-4995.
Advanced Square Dancing, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Wagon Wheel.
Al-Anon, 7 p.m., First United Methodist Church, 1501 N. Broadway, Ballinger. 817-689-2810 or 325-977-1007.
DivorceCare support group, 7 p.m., Hillcrest Church of Christ, 650 E. Ambler Ave. 325-691-4200.
THURSDAY
Book signing
A reading of the book 'Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear,' by Lindsay Mattick, will begin at 10 a.m. at The Grace Museum, 102 Cypress St. An art activity will follow. Registration is $5 per family, with a limited number of copies of the book are available for an additional $5. To register, go to thegracemuseum.org.
Americans with Disabilities Act celebration
Disability in Action will conduct a 26th anniversary celebration of the Americans with Disabilities Act from noon to 3 p.m. Thursday at the Abilene Civic Center, 1100 N. Sixth St. Former Army helicopter pilot Elizabeth McCormick will be the guest speaker. Admission is $3. For more information, go to http://disabilityinaction.org.
Self-defense for women
A free self-defense class for women age 12 and up will be presented at 6:30 p.m. at Team Chip Tae Kwon Do Centers, 2218 S. 14th St. Participants are encouraged to wear workout attire.
Other ...
Chronic Pain and Depression Group, 11 a.m. to noon, Mental Health Association of Abilene, 333 Orange St., 325-673-2300.
Abilene Founder Lions Club, 11:30 a.m., Al's Mesquite Grill, 4801 Buffalo Gap Road.
Kiwanis Club of Greater Abilene, noon, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St. 325-695-0092.
Blood drive, noon to 4 p.m., Taylor County Courthouse, 300 Oak St.
Retired Military Wives Club social meeting, 1 p.m., Rose Park Senior Activity Center, 2625 South Seventh St. 325-677-9656 or 325-793-1490.
Mental Illness Open Support Group, 1-2 p.m., Mental Health Association of Abilene, 333 Orange St. 325-673-2300.
Abilene 42 Club, 6 p.m., Rose Park Senior Center.
Teen Recovery Group, 6-7 p.m., Mission Abilene, 3001 N. Third St.
Free certified nurturing parent class (all ages), 6-8 p.m., Mission Church, North Third and Mockingbird streets. 325-672-9398.
Take Off Pounds Sensibly, 6:30 p.m. Brook Hollow Christian Church. Weigh-in begins at 5:30 p.m. 325-665-5052.
Free swim class for people with multiple sclerosis, 6:30 p.m., YMCA, 3250 State St.
Gambler's Anonymous, 6:30 p.m., Unity Spiritual Living Center, 2842 Barrow St. 325-338-2575.
Round Dancing, 7 p.m., Wagon Wheel. 325-829-1517.
South Pioneer Al-Anon Group, 8 p.m., 3157 Russell Ave.
Unity Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, 602 Meander St.
Movie at the library
In conjunction with the summer reading club for adults, a free showing of a classic pirate movie featuring Errol Flynn will begin at 10 a.m. Monday at the Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St. Popcorn will be served.
Zoo Lady at the library
Joy Harsh, the 'Zoo Lady,' will give a presentation featuring live animals at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St. Free admission.
Art film
A showing of the film 'Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favor' will begin at noon Wednesday at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 220 Cypress St. A discussion will follow.
Book reading
A reading of the book 'Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear,' by Lindsay Mattick, will begin at 10 a.m. Thursday at The Grace Museum, 102 Cypress St. An art activity will follow. Registration is $5 per family, with a limited number of copies of the book available for an additional $5. To register, go to thegracemuseum.org.
ADA celebration
Disability in Action will conduct a 26th anniversary celebration of the Americans with Disabilities Act from noon to 3 p.m. Thursday at the Abilene Civic Center, 1100 N. Sixth St. Former Army helicopter pilot Elizabeth McCormick will be the guest speaker. Admission is $3. For more information, go to disabilityinaction.org.
Self-defense for women
A free self-defense class for women and girls 12 and older will be presented at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Team Chip Tae Kwon Do Centers, 2218 S. 14th St. Participants are encouraged to wear workout attire.
Tour de Gap
The 2016 Tour de Gap bike race will begin at 8 a.m. Saturday at the Old Settlers Reunion Grounds, 131 N. William St., in Buffalo Gap. Courses of 11, 27 and 52 miles will be available. Registration will open at 6:30 a.m. Registration is $30, with proceeds going to Big Brothers Big Sisters. To register, go to www.bikereg.com/tour-de-gap.
Car show and poker run
The Houses for Healing Car & Bike Show will be open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at My Mechanic of Abilene, 3945 S. First St. Vehicle entry is $15. Judging will begin at noon. A poker run will be available for $15 for individuals and $20 for couples.
Family Fun Saturday
The Family Fun Saturday art program will be presented from 1-4 p.m. Saturday at the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, 102 Cedar St. Free admission.
Movie at the Mockingbird library
A showing of a classic animated film about dinosaurs will be presented at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Mockingbird Branch of the Abilene Public Library, 1326 N. Mockingbird Lane. Free admission.
Young Audiences series
As a part of the Young Audiences of Abilene summer show series, Betty Hukill and Barry Smoot will present an interactive program featuring stories and characters from the Children's Art & Literacy Festival at 10:45 a.m. and 3 p.m. July 26 at the Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St. Admission is free; for children 7 and older.
Sinatra tribute
A presentation of 'Dave Halston's Tribute to Frank Sinatra' will begin at 7:30 p.m. July 30 at the Paramount Theatre, 352 Cypress St. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $25, and proceeds will go to the West Texas Rehabilitation Center. For tickets, or for more information, go to WestTexasRehab.org or call 325-793-3512.
'Rocky Horror Picture Show'
A shadowcast of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show'will open with live music at 8 p.m. July 30 at Play Faire Park, 2300 N. Second St. A costume contest and ceremonies will begin at 10:45 p.m., with the film starting at 11 p.m. Admission is $8, with a $5 cooler charge. Participants are encouraged to bring lawn chairs.
Food protection management class
The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service in Taylor, Jones and Nolan counties will conduct a two-day professional food manager certification training course Aug. 15-16 at the Taylor County Extension Office, 1982 Lytle Way. Registration is $125 and includes training, materials and the ServSafe food manager certification examination. The certification will be valid for five years.
Registration must be made by July 25. For more information, call 325-672-6048 or go to taylor.agrilife.org.
Master Naturalist training
The Big Country Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists is accepting applications for the next volunteer training class, which will be Aug. 9 through Oct. 20. Most classes will take place from 6-9 p.m. Tuesdays, with some scheduled field trips. Participants most complete 40 hours of volunteer service within a year of graduation. Registration is $125 and must be made by Aug. 1. Space is limited. To register, go to txmn.org/bc or call 325-672-6048.
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Incident reports released Sunday by the Abilene Police Department:
Aggravated assault and family violence, 2000 block of North 19th Street, Saturday
A female victim reported that a 44-year-old man threatened her with a knife and then pushed her down onto a table.
Driving while intoxicated with a child, 900 block of South First Street, Saturday
Police arrested a 33-year-old woman after she failed a field sobriety test, and her blood alcohol test was twice the legal limit. The woman had three children younger than the age of 13 in the car with her.
Assault, 1400 block of Butternut Street, Sunday
Police arrested a 30-year-old man after responding to a fight call. They discovered the man assaulting a female victim by smashing her head against the pavement.
Public intoxication, 2300 block of South 14th Street, Sunday
A 36-year-old woman was arrested after police discovered her hanging out of her car. When police attempted to assist the woman, she was unsteady and appeared drunk.
Shoplifting, 4300 block of Southest Drive, Saturday
A 19-year-old woman was arrested after she was observed taking items from a place of business without paying for them.
Assault, 1800 block of Jackson St., Saturday
A 46-year-old woman reported that her husband, a 45-year-old man, had assaulted her by shoving her.
Robbery, 1300 block of Grape Street, Saturday
A 51-year-old man reported that he had been robbed at gunpoint by another man.
Burglary, 1300 block of Crockett Street, Saturday
A 47-year-old man reported that more than $1,000 worth if items had been robbed from his storage shed.
Criminal mischief, 300 block of North Mockingbird Lane, Saturday
A 52-year-old man reported that someone broke out the back windows of his van.
Assault, 600 block of Forrest Avenue, Friday
A 44-year-old woman reported that she was assaulted by her 36-year-old boyfriend at her north side home. The victim sustained bruises and did request to press charges against her attacker.
Burglary, 900 block of Avenue F, Friday
A 71-year-old man reported that his house was broken into, and more than $500 of personal property was stolen.
Today in history: On July 18, 1984, a man enters the McDonald's in San Ysidro, Calif., about 2 miles from the Mexican border, and opens fire. James Oliver Huberty kills 21 and wounds 19, grazing a responding firefighter. When Huberty had left home, he told his wife, 'I'm going hunting hunting for humans.' He was a security guard who had lost his job a month before the shooting and known to have mental problems. A hostage escapes and tells authorities Huberty is by himself, at which time he is shot to death.
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This just in...
When a country isn't ruled by law, the people panic. The purpose of the rule of law as a core universal value is to enable people to live without fear.
The policy of "comprehensive rule by law," as announced by the powers that be, should offer the unconditional protection of basic rights to all citizens, so they can get on with their lives in peace and security. This should be our gospel.
This brings us to a more immediate problem.
The public loves to read Yanhuang Chunqiu, but its parent think-tank has now been restructured out of existence. The president and his second-in-command have been replaced, while Xu Qingquan, the editor-in-chief, has also been given his marching orders.
In my view, this magazine, which has been running for the past 25 years without spending a penny of the taxpayers' money, has been stripped of its parent research institute and its freedom of press and publication.
So why do it? Surely the institute and Yanhuang Chunqiu must have done something wrong to merit such coercive measures.
No right to control
But disagreeing with the party line shouldn't be grounds for this sort of behavior. The magazine is there to serve its readers, and it's their opinion that matters.
The preferred line of its parent organization is neither here nor there.
As we all know, Xi Zhongxun [father of current president Xi Jinping] and readers like him don't share the party line on Yanhuang Chunqiu.
That doesn't necessarily mean that Xi Zhongxun and the magazine's readership are wrong, or that the views of a particular research institute are right. What right does any research institute have to control the editorial direction of Yanhuang Chunqiu anyway?
This has all taken place since the last party congress announced its "comprehensive rule by law" policy, so it must come under that policy, right?
Breach of rights
So, what laws did Yanhuang Chunqiu actually break? Its parent organization should tell us, not cover it up.
And if it didn't break any laws, then its parent organization is itself in flagrant breach of the "comprehensive rule by law" policy. If this is the case, then it's the parent organization that should be rectified, not the magazine.
My personal view is that the parent organization has breached the right of Yanhuang Chunqiu to the freedoms of press and publication, meaning that the rights to freedom of expression of its contributors and of its readers to freedom of information have also been lost.
The institute has breached the civil rights of both its writers and its readers.
Of course, my opinion is of little consequence. What does matter is that the [ruling Chinese] Communist Party's "comprehensive rule by law" policy should not be undermined and denigrated.
Who wants to live in a society where there's no room for a magazine like Yanhuang Chunqiu under the the rule of law?
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Bao Tong, former political aide to the late ousted premier Zhao Ziyang, is currently under house arrest at his home in Beijing.
In the face of beatings, arrests, political payback, and possibly assassination, leaders of the embattled opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party on Monday vowed to continue pressing for change in Phnom Penh.
Over the past year we have experienced the greatest tragic episodes of beatings and constant persecution inflicted upon the CNRP, acting party leader Kem Sokha said as the CNRP marked its four-year anniversary at CNRP headquarters in Phnom Penh.
However, we believe we have been walking down the right path thanks to our strong and unbreakable unity, he added.
Kem Sokha should well know the feeling of persecution as he has been holed up in the CNRP headquarters since heavily-armed police attempted to arrest him in May for ignoring court orders to appear as a witness in a pair of defamation cases related to his alleged affair with a hairdresser.
He has also seen his parliamentary immunity lifted in response to refusing to heed the court summonses and has been barred from leaving Cambodia.
These actions are seen by many civil society groups and outside observers as an effort by Prime Minister Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) to discredit the CNRP and maintain their three-decade-long grip on power in Cambodia.
Kem Sokhas words were echoed by CNRP President Sam Rainsy, who accused the government of sanctioning violence in its efforts to silence government critics like Kem Ley, who was gunned down at a Phnom Penh gas station on July 10.
They used violence to gun down Dr. Kem Ley
They have used violence. They have used their court to pressure, threaten, and intimidate the CNRP and its supporters, Sam Rainsy said via Skype. Recently, without hesitation, they used violence to gun down Dr. Kem Ley, who was a patriot and who was not even a member of the CNRP, because he dared to call a spade a spade and gave truthful criticism against the government.
Kem Ley, 46, was shot twice at point-blank range at a gas station convenience store that he often stopped at to talk with friends. Just days before, hed discussed a report by the British NGO Global Witness detailing the extent of the Hun Sen familys wealth.
A Cambodian court charged a former soldier named Oueth Ang with premeditated murder on Wednesday for the execution-style killing of Kem Ley. Authorities have said that Kem Ley was killed over an outstanding $3,000 debt to Oueth Ang, but many in Cambodia question that explanation.
Thousands have turned out to mourn Kem Ley at Watt Bodhiyaram in Phnom Penh, where his flower-covered glass coffin has been displayed.
His body will be taken to his home village of Takeo on July 24, said But Buntenh, president of the Independent Monk Network for Social Justice and a member of Kem Ley Funeral Committee.
There has been some external pressure to take the body out of Phnom Penh at the earliest convenience, he said during and RFA Live TV interview. The authorities appear to be paranoid about the body being kept in Phnom Penh.
Not just the CNRP
Sam Rainsy also knows firsthand the feeling of persecution, as he has been living abroad since he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in 2015 because of a warrant issued for his arrest in an old defamation case.
He has also been the victim of violence, as an apparent attempt to assassinate him in a 1997 grenade attack failed. While he escaped, the attack killed his bodyguard and at least 15 other people and injured more than 150. No one has been brought to justice for the attack.
Since Sam Rainsy left the country, Kem Sokha has been acting president of the CNRP.
While CNRP leaders say they have been targeted, Kem Sokha said the current political turmoil effects more than just the CNRP.
Not only has the current political crisis affected the CNRP and its leadership, but it also affects civil society organizations, the National Election Committee, independent political commentators and analysts, investors, and people who want peace and social justice, he said.
Kem Sokha may have been able to avoid arrest, but four employees of the human rights group ADHOC and a member of the National Election Commission (NEC) werent so lucky. An arrest warrant has also been issued for a U.N. worker.
Illegal acts
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan told RFAs Khmer Service the CNRP is playing politics.
They have failed to acknowledge the truth about their illegal acts, he said. Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha themselves, and Hong Sok Hour, Um Sam An, and the like have broken the laws. Yet they are politicizing the current situation to cover up their mess.
About a dozen opposition party members, including Hong Sok Hour and Um Sam An, are jailed in the countrys Prey Sar prison on various charges.
The government may be preparing to toss other opposition lawmakers in jail as the National Assembly convened a session on Monday to strip two more CNRP lawmakers of their immunity.
On June 30, the Minister of Justice Ang Vong Vathana submitted a request to National Assembly President Heng Samrin seeking to lift the immunity of CNRP lawmakers Tok Vanchan and Pin Ratana for violating Cambodias anti-prostitution ordinance.
Senior CNRP lawmakers Eng Chhai Eang and Son Chhay called the move unconstitutional.
Reported for RFA's Khmer Service by Maly Leng. Translated by Nareth Muong. Written in English by Brooks Boliek.
Nearly half the population of Cambodia does not have access to safe water and basic sanitation, a U.N. agency said Friday ahead of World Water Day, calling on the authorities to give greater attention to improving rural water supply in the impoverished country.
Some 6.3 million out of 14.9 million Cambodians are unable to access clean drinking water, most of them poor and living in rural areas, the United Nations childrens agency UNICEF said in a statement marking the Saturday event.
Improving the quality of rural water would help accelerate Cambodias social and economic development, it said, urging authorities to make greater commitments and investments to tackling the issue.
Attention to rural water supply, sanitation, and hygiene will unquestionably deliver resultsless child deaths, better learning at school, less disease, more productive workers, less health costs for the people and the system, UNICEFs Cambodia representatives Rana Flowers said.
These services are central to Cambodias future as a middle-income country, she said.
40 percent in rural areas
UNICEF Cambodias spokesman Meas Bunly told RFAs Khmer Service that some 40 percent of Cambodians in rural areas have access to clean water, compared to 80 percent in the capital Phnom Penh.
The main reason millions of Cambodians lack access to clean water is that the government has made other development areas a higher priority, he said.
The government has many priorities in terms of development such as infrastructure and other areas, so sometime it hasnt been focused on clean water and sanitation, he said.
Local authorities in rural areas often place more importance on building new roads and schools than they do on improving water supply in their areas, he said.
Boosting water supply is a vital factor which allows people to be healthy and contribute to the development of the country, he said.
Children vulnerable
The lack of access to clean water leaves Cambodian children vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhea, which is the second leading cause of death among children under five, according to UNICEF.
The problem is costing money and lives in Cambodia, and in order to improve health outcomes, authorities should also pay attention to improving sanitation in both households and public institutions, the agency said.
Some 40 percent of primary schools and 35 percent of health centers in the country do not have access to safe water and sanitation, it said.
World Water Day has been observed by U.N. member countries since 1992 to draw awareness to sustainable use of water, health, and sanitation, and other issues related to water resources.
This years theme is water and energy.
Reported by Ouk Savbory and Samean Yun. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.
Magazines about Chinese politics are displayed in a bookstore in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong, Jan. 5, 2016.
The editorial staff at a cutting-edge Chinese political magazine say they will have nothing more to do with its publication any more following a slew of high-level sackings and the imposition of new editorial leadership last week.
Du Daozheng, who was fired from his post as publisher of Yanhuang Chunqiu by its parent organization, said in a statement circulated online on Sunday that the magazine would now cease production.
"Anyone who publishes a periodical bearing the title Yanhuang Chunqiu will have nothing to do with [the existing editorial team]," Du, who is in his nineties, wrote.
The statement said that editorial staff had made the decision after Du was fired by the Chinese National Academy of Arts, an organization linked to the Ministry of Culture that sponsors Yanhuang Chunqiu last week.
A member of the editorial team who asked not to be identified said the academy has now posted staff to keep an eye on the running of the magazine, which often challenges the ruling Chinese Communist Party's official view of historical events.
"Nobody here accepts the ruling by the National Academy of Arts," the staff member said. "Of course, there's nothing we can do about it, because they have sent in staff to manage the transition, and they are sitting in the editorial department."
"Du is now in hospital, because of the shock of the announcement; he has high blood pressure," the staff member said. "It's not clear what will happen next, but to a lot of people it's looking like the final ax-blow."
A Beijing-based academic, who also asked to remain anonymous, agreed that the end looked pretty final for the magazine, which had enjoyed the support of high-ranking reformers inside the ruling party.
"They have gotten rid of all of the old staff, and they are bringing in new people like Jia Leilei, who used to be vice-president of the arts academy; the new editor is also from the academy," the academic said.
Breach of contract
Beijing-based rights lawyer Mo Shaoping said Du plans to sue the academy for breach of contract.
"Mr. Du has told me he finds this totally unacceptable," Mo said. "From a procedural point of view ... I have been instructed as their lawyer, so I will be looking at the contracts between the arts academy and the staff of Yanhuang Chunqiu."
"There are very clear provisions in the contract regarding the exercise of editorial and financial control, as well as regarding personnel matters," he said. "Yanhuang Chunqiu was given total autonomy."
Du's sacking came after China's media regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) told the magazine's editorial team in April that 37 articles published since the beginning of the year were in breach of political guidelines.
The magazine, founded by Du in 1991 to produce reform-minded scholarly articles on history and politics, appears to be the latest publication to run afoul of President Xi Jinping's ongoing ideological campaign to make all press and media organizations toe the party line.
Du was edged out under a rule, seldom enforced, that prevents party elders from taking up new posts after the age of 70. Du had reemerged from retirement to take the helm of Yanhuang Chunqiu, rendering him ineligible, the Chinese National Academy of Arts said.
Ideological rectification
The latest reshuffle looks likely to deal a final death blow to the magazine in its original form, although many previously cutting-edge media have continued to publish under their former names after ideological "rectification," a mere shadow of their former selves.
Bao Tong, a former aide to late ousted premier Zhao Ziyang who was toppled for taking too liberal a line with student-led democracy protests in 1989, challenged the government to explain the attack on Yanhuang Chunqiu.
"In my view, this magazine, which has been running for the past 25 years without spending a penny of taxpayers' money, has been stripped of its parent research institute and its freedom of press and publication," Bao wrote in a commentary for RFA's Mandarin Service.
"So why do it? Surely the institute and Yanhuang Chunqiu must have done something wrong, to merit such coercive measures?" he said.
"But disagreeing with the party line shouldn't be grounds for this sort of behavior," he wrote. "The magazine is there to serve its readers, and it's their opinion that matters. The preferred line of its parent organization is neither here nor there."
Yanhuang Chunqiu has published more than 200 issues in its 25-year history and is no stranger to official criticism.
It has been slammed for publishing articles about both late ousted premiers Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, for writing about the separation of powers, forbidden by late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, and for publishing accounts of Mao Zedong's early life written by his former secretary, Li Rui.
In 2011, China's censors shut down the magazine's website after it called for reforms to China's political system.
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
A new requirement that would-be lawmakers in Hong Kong renounce separatism before they can run in September's elections has sparked huge controversy in the former British colony, where many fear the city's traditional freedoms and promised autonomy are now a thing of the past.
Candidates for Sept. 4 elections to the city's Legislative Council (LegCo) are being asked for the first time to sign a form declaring that they accept Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China.
Candidates are also required to declare their support for the city's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, and their allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the city's Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC) announced last week.
Pan-democratic candidates and lawyers have hit out at the move as yet another sign that Beijing is seeking to curb free speech in the once-freewheeling city.
Beijing officials say the city's government is obliged to "safeguard national sovereignty."
Pro-Beijing lawmaker Tam Yiu-chung said the form is meant to force potential candidates to reflect on their own loyalty before signing up to fight the election.
"I have absolutely no problem signing it, because I think it's so natural and obvious," Tam said. "How could legislators take part in any action that would split the country, or fight for separatism or independence for Hong Kong?"
"All of that would be totally in breach of the Basic Law, and it's not the sort of thing that we, as Chinese, should be doing."
Moves against Leung
But new political party Demosisto, which is campaigning on a platform of "self-determination" for Hong Kong, says its chairman Nathan Law has entered himself as a candidate to contest a directly elected seat on Hong Kong Island.
Led by former student leaders of the 2014 pro-democracy movement, the group has refused to rule out discussion of independence for Hong Kong, if that is where its citizens want to go.
Law said the top priority of pan-democratic politicians should be to topple the city's deeply unpopular leader Leung Chun-ying.
"The progress of democracy in Hong Kong cannot be allowed to be halted by an insistence on following the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party's official line," Law said in a statement on the group's Facebook page.
"Instead, it should hold to its aim of dislodging the chief executive," he said.
He said he has confidence that even conservative voters among the 3.8 million eligible to cast a ballot will be worried about where Hong Kong is headed under Chinese rule.
"I think a continuing democracy movement, going forward, will have the support of large numbers of voters," he said.
Just the beginning
Former Occupy Central leader Joshua Wong said Law's candidacy is "only a beginning" for self-determination.
"LegCo shouldn't be a club for the elite few," Wong said. "Nor should it serve the interests of a few ageing politicians."
"It should be an agent of hope, and the democratic movement should deliver change," he said.
Several pan-democratic lawmakers have already refused to sign the new form. It is unclear whether potential candidates will be prevented from running if they don't sign it.
The Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC) has said it is "open-minded" on the issue, while top barristers claim that there is no legal basis for the new requirement.
Of 70 seats in LegCo, 35 will be returned through direct ballot in five geographical constituencies, while the remainder are chosen by members of trades, professions, and industry groupings.
Beijing rules, it says
A June 10, 2014 white paper by China on Hong Kong issued a strong reminder that Beijing rules the city, sparking renewed calls for fully democratic elections in 2017 and a 79-day civil disobedience campaign.
The city was promised a "high degree of autonomy" under the terms of its 1997 return to Chinese rule within the "one country, two systems" framework agreed between British and Chinese officials and enshrined in its mini-constitution, the Basic Law.
However, China's cabinet, the State Council, has said such autonomy is still subject to the will of Beijing.
The row over the elections comes as some 42 percent of Hong Kong residents are thinking of leaving, citing concerns over housing, the quality of government, and education, a recent survey indicated.
The number of Hong Kong people emigrating to Canada almost doubled in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, and the number moving permanently to Taiwan rose 36 percent over a similar time frame, Reuters reported.
The cross-border detentions of five Hong Kong booksellers accused of selling "banned books" to customers across the internal border in mainland China have eroded confidence that Beijing will respect the city's separate identity.
Reported by Lau Siu-fung for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Chen Pan for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
The deadly storming of a police station by a little-known Armenian political grouping has sparked a tense drama in Yerevan, as the gunmen demand the release of their jailed leader in exchange for police officers they are holding hostage.
When more than a dozen gunmen attacked the Erebuni police station on July 17, they killed one officer, reportedly a police colonel, and wounded six other people. The crisis then moved into protracted negotiations, and three of the seven hostages were freed on July 18.
But why are the gunmen demanding the release of the head of Armenia's Founding Parliament party, Zhirayr Sefilian, and calling on Armenians to take to the streets to overthrow the government? Here are four things you need to know about Sefilian and his group:
Who is Zhirayr Sefilian?
Sefilian, 49, is little-known outside of Armenia, but he is a prominent figure within the country thanks to his role in the 1988-94 conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.
A Lebanese-Armenian by birth, he gained military experience fighting in an Armenian quarter of Beirut during Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war before moving to Armenia with his family in 1990. During the Nagorno-Karabakh war, in which Yerevan backed separatists seeking independence from Baku, Sefilian commanded a unit of fighters that wrested the city of Shusha from Azerbaijani forces in 1992, scoring one of the first significant military victories for the Armenian side in the conflict.
Since then, Sefilian has used his war-hero status to gain an audience for his belief that Armenia is plagued by inept leadership and corruption and in need of urgent rescue.
He initially entered the political arena by mobilizing other Nagorno-Karabakh war veterans and voicing their complaints over poor housing, health care, and unemployment.
He then sought to widen his support base by launching Founding Parliament along with several like-minded public figures from a variety of backgrounds.
But the party is unique in that it deliberately remains outside of the current political system.
"They refuse [to participate in] the election process as it is today in Armenia due to violence and non-transparency in the system, and their program is that this government should resign and we should have a transition government and new elections," says Haykak Arshamyan, a political analyst at the Regional Studies Center in Yerevan. "Their ideas are a bit complicated and unclear."
Members of the group are believed to number in the thousands and many seem to see themselves as self-appointed guardians of society. The hostage takers have described themselves as the Daredevils of Sasoon, in reference to an Armenian epic tale from the Middle Ages about a generation of men fighting for Armenian independence.
Why storm a police station?
The assault closely follows the arrest of Sefilian and six other members of Founding Parliament on June 20 on suspicion of acquiring weapons and planning to seize government buildings in the capital, Yerevan. The arrests came after traffic police discovered that the driver of a car involved in an accident was carrying weapons and the driver pinned the weapons on Sefilian. When Sefilian appeared in court, he was formally charged with acquiring and possessing weapons, but the allegations of plotting a coup were dropped.
However, the arrest of Sefilian, who has been imprisoned twice before -- in 2007 and 2015 on charges of illegally possessing weapons and organizing mass disturbances -- may not have been the only spark for the current crisis.
WATCH: Armed Attackers Storm Yerevan Police Headquarters
Tensions are also running high among Armenian nationalists over purported leaks to the Russian press suggesting that the Kremlin is pressing Yerevan to trade land for peace in a new peace initiative. The leaks, reportedly from Kremlin officials, say that Moscow wants the Armenians to progressively give up land that they seized during the war around Nagorno Karabakh proper in exchange for international recognition of the self-declared government of the territory. The government of Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian says it has received no such proposal from Moscow, but the disclaimer has done little to calm former Armenian fighters' fears that they could lose some of the land they gained.
How is Founding Parliament viewed by mainstream opposition groups?
As a fierce critic of the government, some of Sefilian's views resonate with more mainstream opposition parties, though they distance themselves from his radicalism.
One indication of the mixed feelings about Sefilian is the key role of one prominent mainstream opposition figure in the negotiations to end the hostage crisis. Nikol Pashinian, head of the Civil Contract party, says he has intervened in an effort to avoid more bloodshed, but he also says the ruling party shares some of the blame for the action because of the "overall atmosphere of injustice in the country."
Another opposition party, the Heritage Party, has also said the government shares some responsibility. Armenia's main opposition party, the Armenian National Congress, has issued a statement saying it is against violence and hopes the situation will be resolved soon.
The mixed opinions about Sefilian in Armenia are mirrored in Nagorno-Karabakh, where he is hailed as a war hero but a dubious political ally. The administration of Nagorno-Karabakh, which follows a security strategy of staying as close to the powerful in Yerevan as possible, in January 2015 refused Sefilian entry into the territory. Sefilian, who was leading a 30-car convoy to hold political rallies, was confronted by police upon entering Nagorno-Karabakh and more than two dozen people, including Sefilian, were injured. The reasons for the confrontation have never been made clear, as a police investigation into it continues.
Where does the crisis go from here?
For now, Sefilian and his movement remain marginal players in Armenia. But the resolution of the hostage crisis could determine whether they remain so or become a rallying point for wider public dissatisfaction with the government.
The gunman have already killed one police officer. But Arshamyan says that, if the gunmen murder any hostages -- who include a deputy national police chief and a deputy head of the Yerevan police department, the action could tar the image of Armenia's opposition parties in general while rallying support for the government.
If the situation ends in such a way that any brutality is perceived as being carried out by the police, he says, and the gunmen can be seen as martyrs, the incident could instead help to consolidate political opposition groups against the ruling party.
Armenia is due to hold parliamentary elections next year as the country moves from a presidential system to a parliamentary system.
Yerevan bureau Editor In Chief Siranuysh Gevorgyan contributed to this report
So the big talking point coming out of the Kremlin is that NATO is overreacting to a non-existent Russian threat.
According to Moscow, rotating just four combat battalion groups, a total of 4,000 troops, on the alliance's eastern frontier constitutes a "provocation."
According to Vladimir Putin's regime, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have absolutely nothing to fear from Russia.
Nothing, that is, except provocative military exercises and troop build-ups near their borders.
Nothing, that is, except Russian warplanes violating their airspace and flying without transponders.
Nothing, that is, except their citizens being kidnapped from their homelands.
Nothing, that is, except bellicose rhetoric from Russian officials, including suggestions that the independence of the Baltic states is illegitimate.
The troop deployments NATO just announced in its most vulnerable members can in no way be called an offensive force.
Four thousand soldiers, of course, aren't nearly enough to mount an attack on Russia.
But they are clearly enough to establish a deterrent and set a marker; to send a clear message to Moscow that if you attack these countries, you will be engaging U.S., British, Canadian, and German troops.
Speaking after a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia would never attack a NATO member.
Maybe he's telling the truth. But given that the man lies for a living, it's probably best for the alliance to hedge its bets.
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In reaction to my blog post on Goran Hadzic, who died before the case against him at the International War Crimes Tribunal was completed, I received an e-mail from a well-respected U.S. historian. In a courteous and otherwise supportive message, the professor objected to my description of the level of devastation of Vukovar in 1991, at the outset of the Yugoslav wars:
"I want to correct a misstatement in the text that has become an urban myth in the annals of the Yugoslav wars: Having visited Vukovar shortly after the conclusion of hostilities and several times since, I can assure you that the city was far from 'totally destroyed'.To be more precise, only the relatively small downtown area was devastated. Although there was significant damage to outlying structures that were targeted by JNA [Yugoslav People's Army] artillery (every non-Orthodox church, the train station, the Eltz palace/museum, the water tower, among many others), most of the rest of the town was surprisingly intact. Vukovar residents themselves have been quick to point this out to visitors," the professor wrote.
Not every building in Vukovar was leveled to the ground. In that respect the professor is right. Parts of the city inhabited predominantly by Serbs were largely spared. But there can be no doubt that the scale of the destruction was staggering, and that it was fairly comprehensive. The center of Vukovar, its landmarks and emblematic baroque buildings were destroyed. The extent of the damage may be seen in this photo gallery:
PHOTO GALLERY: War Takes Its Toll On Vukovar
But the city was also destroyed in another sense -- its social fabric was rent asunder. One of the most diverse and multiethnic communities in the former Yugoslavia was extinguished completely as such. Even after the material damage has been repaired, Vukovar is no longer the same city. The formerly cosmopolitan spirit of Vukovar -- which belied the city's modest size -- was irreversibly destroyed.
Reduced To Ashes
Before the war, more than 20 ethnic groups lived in Vukovar. Not only Serbs and Croats, who made up the majority, and those who identified as "Yugoslavs" (roughly 10 percent), but also Ruthenians/Rusyns, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and many others. Moreover, the citizens of Vukovar were proud of their multicultural city, and ethnic background was irrelevant in daily life and social relations.
All of that was reduced to ashes after 87 days under siege and incessant bombardment by the Yugoslav People's Army and paramilitary groups from Serbia. Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times described the devastation after the fall of the city, in November 1991:
"Not a single home is habitable. No shop, no church, no public building survived. The rubber factory that provided jobs for the former city of 60,000 is a mass of twisted metal, crumbled brick and cratered earth. [] the city is a wasteland, devastated beyond repair. The only hope for a new Vukovar is bulldozing the ruins and rebuilding from scratch"
Today Vukovar has been rebuilt, but the tension and mutual suspicion remain. The Croatian government's recent attempt to introduce signs in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets (used by Croats and Serbs, respectively), was met with mass protests organized by those who claim to stand for a "Croatian Vukovar." The city has become a symbol of the Homeland War -- Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia -- and has been heavily exploited by Croatian nationalists as "Croatia's Stalingrad, the martyred city."
Connecting The Dots
Only after the war was I able to connect the dots between Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, and Mostar. What connects these cities, two in Croatia and the other two in Bosnia, is the fact that they were arguably the most successful multiethnic communities in the former Yugoslavia, true melting-pots of Balkan nations.
People in all four cities did not merely tolerate one another, they actively embraced each other's culture and ways. This was not just the result of the official ideology of "brotherhood and unity" proclaimed by the late president Tito, or some communist imposition. That way of life and cultural exchange was older than Tito. It was result of a troubled history. To protect one's neighbor was a survival strategy through successive occupations and liberations, the rise and fall of empires in the Balkans.
So that old "look-after-your-neighbor" culture, especially if your neighbor is of a different ethnic group, was the first casualty of war.
People like Goran Hadzic believed that they were performing a service for their nation by destroying the bases of common life, and eliminating the "other."
That is why I feel it's impossible to overstate the level and the nature of the destruction of Vukovar. Cities and communities do rise from the ashes, and I would settle for speaking of the "destruction" of Vukovar, rather than its "total destruction". But regardless of how we designate Vukovar's tragedy, there can be no doubt that Europe watched it happen, and did nothing.
In Vukovar, and later in Bosnia, Europe missed a chance to properly articulate and defend its core values -- tolerance, multiculturalism, civil society, peace, freedom, and democracy -- and chose not to stand up to violent ethnic nationalism, to those who propagated fear and hatred of the other.
Shortly after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, which has left nearly 300 people dead, some 6,000 suspects were arrested, most of them judges, prosecutors, and army officers. Many of the arrests happened in the first 24 hours -- the rest took place the next day.
No doubt, there will be more to come. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said as much: 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.
While it is inevitable that retribution and punishment will occur, the challenge for Turkey is to make sure it is handled with restraint. And the ongoing reckoning will raise some uncomfortable questions.
1. What Was The Aim Of The Coup?
A military coup usually targets the government, but that doesnt seem to necessarily be the case in Turkey. When the first shots were fired on July 15, the president was on vacation. None of the key ministers, governors, or police chiefs were arrested. The coup plotters took some of their own army commanders hostage and occupied the headquarters of the chief of command as well as an air base in Ankara. It looked more like a move against the army itself rather than against the government.
2. Why Was The Parliament Bombed?
After Turkeys parliament was hit by a bomb on July 15, all political parties, including the opposition, were united in defending parliament and democracy. Despite the attacks, deputies returned to the parliament building to demonstrate their support. Many observers immediately asked what was the purpose of bombing parliament, even if they had managed to completely destroy the building.
The damage, however, was minimal -- and the parliament is still functioning The satellite connection of many TV channels, including state TV, was damaged, although a few independent TV channels, notably CNN Turk, remained untouched. (Ironically, the latter became a tribune of protest against the coup attempt.)
The plotters also sent young conscripts to occupy some government agencies and a few media headquarters. But those soldiers were ineffective, didnt seem to be aware of their mission, and quickly surrendered. Some were brutally killed by angry mobs.
3. How Do You Find 6,000 Suspects In Two Days?
Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said that 6,000 suspects were arrested and that the arrests would continue. But how is it technically and humanly possible that Turkish authorities would be able to collect legitimate evidence on 6,000 citizens in such a short time? In absence of concrete evidence, it is possible that government authorities were working from watch lists of individuals considered a threat, which were drawn up from before the coup. A large proportion of the arrests -- around 2,500 people -- worked in the justice system. If the coup was just a small group within the army, as Erdogan has stated, why were so many judges and prosecutors involved?
4. Where Is The Evidence Of Fethullah Gulens Role?
The authorities were quick to lay the blame for the coup at the door of U.S.-based cleric Fetullah Gulen. Gulen has denied being involved and Ankara has not yet offered any clear evidence about the clerics role. Erdogan has called for U.S. officials to extradite Gulen, who has lived in the United States since 1999. (U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that the Obama administration would consider an extradition request for Gulen but would only comply if Washington was shown proof of the cleric's guilt.)
Whether or not any evidence transpires, the coup has provided a good opportunity to crack down on Gulens movement, which is designated a terrorist organization in Turkey. Many officials and media outlets have amplified the claimss about Gulens involvement, creating a climate where few will dare to question the accusations.
Ukrainians have increasingly woken up to the sound of suicide drones as Russia turns to Iranian-made imports to destroy civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Now they may have another deadly Iranian weapon to worry about -- ballistic missiles.
Cheap but effective, Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 "kamikaze" drones have already made a deadly impact in Ukraine.
If U.S. intelligence assessments pan out, Russia will soon be able to supplement its use of Iranian suicide drones and its own cruise and ballistic missiles with powerful short-range Iranian Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar ballistic missiles.
Coming as the Kremlin is reportedly struggling to maintain its depleted stockpile of aerial weapons as it ramps up strikes, the missiles would potentially boost Russia's ability to continue its costly air campaign.
Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East defense specialist at the global intelligence company Janes, said having more missiles gives Russia the ability to sustain the bombardment against Ukraine."
Going Ballistic
The Fateh-110, which was unveiled in 2001 and has a stated range of 300 to 500 kilometers, was developed from a heavy artillery rocket dating from the 1980s. To increase the weapon's accuracy, the Fateh-110 was given a guidance system and movable fins that allow it to be steered as it approaches its target.
The Zolfaghar, which debuted in 2016 and also has guidance capabilities, comes from the same family as the Fateh-110 but boasts a much longer range due to its use of a lighter carbon-fiber airframe and a smaller warhead.
Binnie said the Zolfaghar's use against the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in eastern Syria confirmed that the missile was capable of reaching at least 650 kilometers, which he said is "a statement of how much the Iranian tactical missile program has really advanced over the years."
Iran's claim that the Zolfaghar can travel even farther -- up to 700 kilometers -- would put the western Ukrainian city of Lviv within range of strikes launched from Russian territory, while the more powerful Fateh-110 could potentially hit the city from Belarus, which has served as a staging ground for Russian attacks.
While there has been no indication that Russia plans to purchase launching systems from Iran, Binnie suggests that the Russian military could pair the missiles with existing equipment because the Iranian launchers were adapted from a Soviet-era system.
"It might be possible for the Russians to quickly adapt some old equipment they have lying around into launch systems," Binnie said.
The Iranian military, he added, fitted the Soviet system to trucks, allowing for mobility and concealment.
"Those civilian trucks can be covered over to make it hard to spot that they're actually missile launchers," Binnie said.
'Lawnmowers' And 'Mopeds'
Iranian military drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been homing in on targets across Ukraine since late August, according to the United States.
The buzzing sound of the Iranian Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 drones, built with off-the-shelf components, have earned them derisive monikers such as "lawnmowers" and "mopeds." But the slow-moving, low-flying drones, which are maneuvered to crash into their target, have proven themselves capable of hitting their mark both in terms of military effectiveness and cost.
It is capable of extracting or delivering attrition and damage when launched, but it costs little compared to other UAVs that Russia has in its own arsenal," said Samuel Bendett of the Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses (CNA).
Ukraine alleges Russia has ordered 2,400 of the Iranian suicide drones, and its military has claimed to have shot them down in great numbers, often using conventional anti-aircraft guns or even small-arms fire. But their ability to be launched in bunches of five -- often from the cover of civilian trucks -- improves their chances of reaching their target.
"The Ukrainians are stopping most of these, but the whole point of these drones is that they fly in a large mass," Bendett said. "The air defense does not always catch all of them. All it takes is for several or even one to make it through."
The estimated range of the Shahed-136 varies, but Iran says it is capable of traveling 2,500 kilometers. The slightly smaller and older Shahed-131, which has been used by Huthi rebels in Yemen to attack Saudi targets in the Arabian Peninsula, has been estimated to have a range of 900 kilometers, according to tests conducted by the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry has published multiple images of downed Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks, and the Ukrainian National Guard on October 19 claimed to have shot down a Shahed-131.
Ukraine has also claimed to have shot down a more advanced Iranian combat UAV, the Mojer-6 drone capable of carrying out both reconnaissance missions and aerial strikes within a range of 200 kilometers. There have also been reports of Russian interest in obtaining Irans Shahed-129 and Shahed-191 combat drones.
"When launched from any territory that Russia controls or is allied with -- anywhere from the south, from the Donbas, from Belarus -- they're able to strike a lot of Ukrainian targets," Bendett said.
In addition to the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia will soon boost its arsenal with Iranian ballistic missiles, as first reported by The Washington Post on October 16, the White House on October 20 said that Iranians are now "directly engaged on the ground" in Moscows war against Ukraine after sending "a relatively small number" of personnel from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to assist Russian forces in using the Iranian drones.
Iran has denied sending combat drones to Russia, and Moscow has rejected claims that it is using Iranian UAVs.
Images of downed Iranian drones appear to show that they have been rebranded to look Russian-made, experts say, with the markings in Cyrillic naming them as the Geran-1 (the Shahed-131) and Geran-2 (the Shahed-136).
Observers are widely skeptical of Russia's denials, noting that the drones are essentially identical right down to the font of the serial numbers. Even Russian Defense Ministry experts have unwittingly admitted that the suicide drones are Iranian.
But the rebranding of the drones to make them appear to be Russian has opened the possibility that Moscow could, if it is not already doing so, seek to manufacture or assemble the Iranian drones on its own territory.
Sustaining A Campaign
The new aerial weaponry fits well with the Russian military's renewed focus on striking military and civilian targets far from the front lines in southern and eastern Ukraine. The air assault has ratcheted up following the October 8 appointment of Colonel General Sergei Surovikin, a former Aerospace Forces commander, to lead the Russian war effort.
Just days after Surovikin's appointment, Russia launched the biggest air strikes since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine in February. Moscow said the drone and missile strikes, which targeted civilian areas and infrastructure in cities throughout Ukraine, were in response to a bomb blast that damaged a key bridge linking Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
While the Kremlin has accused Ukraine's intelligence services of carrying out the "terrorist" attack on the Crimea Bridge, Ukraine has denied responsibility.
Since the initial air assault in response to the bridge blast, Russia has continued to pound Ukrainian infrastructure, often targeting power plants in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said is a deliberate effort to wear down the Ukrainian people by denying them heat and electricity as winter approaches.
"Civilian infrastructure is obviously the new layer in this war. The Ukrainian economy is now the target, the Ukrainian population is now the target," Bendett said.
Hard To Stop
The hypersonic speed and high trajectory of Iran's Fateh-110s and Zolfaghars, should they arrive, would be extremely difficult for Kyiv to counter without a network of high-tech and costly antimissile batteries it currently does not possess.
Ukraine has repeatedly requested more advanced missile-defense systems from the West, and in the face of the threat of the delivery of Iranian ballistic missiles reportedly sent an official request to Israel this week for components of its "Iron Dome" system.
While the United States has said that it is seeking to expedite the process of sending two U.S. air defense systems known as NASAMS, Washington has appeared reluctant to provide more advanced Patriot missile systems.
Janes' defense expert Binnie is skeptical that the delivery of the Patriot system, which has proven to be successful in shooting down ballistic missiles, is realistic for Ukraine.
"It's eye wateringly expensive and it's probably not really practical because each [missile] battery only covers one city," he said. "You would never get enough batteries to get the coverage you would want. You just wouldn't be able to find them, produce them, and train enough Ukrainians."
Shi'ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has threatened to target fresh U.S. troops coming to Iraq to help battle extremist Islamic State (IS) militants.
Sadr, whose Mahdi Army battled U.S. forces in 2003, said on his official website that the 560 new U.S. troops that will soon be dispatched to Iraq to aid in efforts to retake the northern city of Mosul "are a target for us."
The Mahdi Army was disbanded in 2008 and replaced by his Peace Brigades, which helped push back IS forces from areas near Baghdad in 2014 along with Iraqi government troops.
Sadr also leads a protest movement whose demonstrators storm the Iraqi capital's heavily fortified Green Zone government district twice this year.
The new U.S. troop deployment was announced on July 11 by U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
The extra troops are expected to arrive in the coming weeks and will raise the number of U.S. forces in Iraq to about 4,650.
Based on reporting by Reuters and Iraqinews.com
KYIV -- Russia's main security agency has said it detained a Ukrainian employed by international cease-fire monitors, accusing him of spying on Kremlin-backed separatists in Ukraine's war-torn east.
The Federal Security Service said on July 18 that the man, Artem Shestakov, worked as an interpreter for the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The service, known as the FSB, charged that, while working in separatist-controlled territory in the eastern Luhansk region, Shestakov had collected intelligence information for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
"Specifically, he divulged data on the movement of military equipment and manpower, the locations of military units and their commanders' telephone numbers to Kyiv," the FSB said.
The agency said that it detained Shestakov on Russian territory, though it didn't specify where or when. nd it said he had confessed to spying, including passing on information about Pavel Dryomov, a separatist Cossack leader in Luhansk who it claimed was killed by Ukrainian security services on December 12.
The agency said it later released Shestakov, and sent him back to Ukraine, because his activities did not undermine Russia's security.
Oleksandr Tkachuk, the SBU's chief of staff, told RFE/RL that the claims are "complete nonsense," and he said the fact that Shestakov was released "indirectly confirms his innocence."
Alexandra Taylor, an OSCE spokeswoman, would not confirm Shestakov was in fact the monitor in question, but said that the FSB report made it clear he was the person detained.
She said Shestakov was likely detained in the past three days while on leave.
The OSCE, which includes nations from North America to Europe to Central Asia, is tasked with monitoring the shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian government forces still engage in regular clashes.
The organization's daily reports on cease-fire violations are of great importance to Western leaders, many of whom say they will not consider lifting sanctions against Russia until the Minsk peace deal that Kyiv and Moscow agreed to is fully implemented.
Russia has long distrusted the OSCE, accusing it of bias. The organization's special monitoring mission includes observers from more than 45 countries, including Russia, as well as 305 Ukrainian staff.
"The Mission takes such allegations seriously; however, at this moment we have no evidence to support these claims," the OSCE said in a statement posted to Facebook.
MOSCOW Residents of the city of Oryol are campaigning against what has been billed as Russia's first-ever statue of Ivan the Terrible, the 16th-century tsar who is known for carrying out repressions and is said to have killed his own son. Officials want to erect the statue near a children's theater.
Authorities in Oryol plan to put up the statue in time for ceremonies marking the 450th anniversary of the southwestern city, which was founded as a fortress by Ivan IV -- known as "Grozny" or "Terrible."
Some residents are aghast.
"In almost 500 years NO ONE has erected a statue to Ivan the Terrible: no tsar, no emperor, no general secretary, no president," Natalya Golenkova, head of a group protesting the planned statue, wrote on the social network VKontakte.
"There's no Ivan the Terrible even on the Millennium of Russia Memorial," she wrote, referring to a prominent bronze monument in the city of Novgorod that features leading figures from Russia's past.
An online petition against the statue has garnered hundreds of signatures, and a protest was held in Oryol on July 18.
In Russia, what opponents call inappropriate, divisive statues and foolhardy city planning are frequently topics of fierce debate.
The fight in Oryol follows a series of controversies over monuments, including an ongoing debate over plans for an 80-meter statue of Jesus Christ in St. Petersburg, proposals to return a statue of Soviet secret police founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky to the spot where it was toppled in 1991, and efforts to erect a towering monument to Grand Prince Vladimir -- or Volodymyr -- in Moscow.
This time, even state television is questioning the plans.
On July 17, an exasperated-looking news reader on Rossia-1 listed several unpopular statues inthe country including a towering monument to Peter the Great (in Moscow, not St. Petersburg) before saying the decision to put up the statue of Ivan IV in Oryol was made "without taking into account the opinion of residents."
"It's unclear if we can find someone who can stop this 'monumental' irritation -- to stop this fruitless, pointless discussion. As if we don't have more important problems," he said.
Mass Repressions, Secret Police
Ivan the Terrible carried out mass repressions with the oprichnina, which he founded the original Russian secret police force and a precursor of the Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB, and the FSB.
The author of the petition says the planned site of the statue is inappropriate, and that the Free Territory theater for youth and children on Oryol's Karl Marx Street is a federally protected architectural site. A painting by Russian master Ilya Repin depicts the crazed-looking tsar cradling his bloodied son, whom he is said to have fatally struck with his staff in a fit of rage.
Responding to public concerns about the statue on July 13, regional Governor Vadim Potomsky said the Oryol statue "won't bother anyone," and that the "location was chosen well," the TASS state news agency reported.
Potomsky says he does not believe the tsar killed his son. "Not one source has seen a single official document confirming that Ivan the Terrible killed his son," he told the Moskovsky Komsomolets in an interview published on July 13.
Oryol itself is no stranger to controversy over planned monuments. Last year, residents battled efforts of the powerful local Communist Party to erect a statue to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. They gathered almost 7,000 signatures on a petition against the monument. The authorities ditched the plans as too divisive.
The Ivan the Terrible statue has been condemned from various wings of the political establishment from liberals like opposition lawmaker Dmitry Gudkov to pro-Kremlin journalist Vladimir Solovyov.
Kazakh officials say they believe they have captured the lone gunman in multiple attacks that President Nursultan Nazarbaev described as a "terrorist act," which targeted police and left five people dead in Kazakhstans commercial capital, Almaty.
The head of the country's National Security Committee identified the suspect as a 26-year-old man who adopted radical Islam during his incarceration on robbery and weapons-possession charges.
It is the second deadly attack in two months in the wealthiest of Central Asia's five post-Soviet republics, following a still largely unexplained rampage by dozens of young men in the northwestern city of Aqtobe that left at least 28 people dead. Officials blamed Isamists for that attack.
Nazarbaev ordered beefed-up security at public gathering places, but authorities declared the counterterrorism operation over and lowered the threat level from "red" to "yellow."
National Security Committee head Vladimir Zhumakanov was shown in an official video blaming Ruslan Kulikbaev for the July 18 attacks, which killed three officers and two civilians and wounded at least eight other people in the southeastern Kazakh city, the country's largest with around 1.7 million residents.
He said Kulikbaev "became close to Salafists" while in jail, a reference to a hard-line strain of Islam.*
Authorities had initially said they rounded up two suspects, but later described the other man as a motorist forced to drive the suspect between crime scenes.
Residents were initially asked to remain indoors, but the Interior Ministry said later on July 18 that "the situation in the city is stable and remains under control of law enforcement agencies," adding that "reports of gunfire in different parts of the city are untrue."
The attacks reportedly targeted a police station and a facility of the Kazakh Committee for National Security, and possibly a third location.
Early reports said the gunman lived in the Almaty region but was from Kazakhstans south-central Kyzylorda Province.
Authorities tied him to the slaying of a local woman over the weekend.
Extremist Threat
Border officials in two neighboring states to the south, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, announced they had increased security along their frontiers with Kazakhstan but the borders reportedly remained open.
Kazakh authorities have warned about the potential threat the country faces from Islamic extremism.
But tightly controlled by security services loyal to President Nursultan Nazarbaev, Kazakhstan has appeared to escape some of the most troubling signs of Islamic extremism besetting other countries in the region.
A small number of Kazakh nationals have departed to Syria and Iraq to join extremist groups there.
There have been incidents of violence connected to socioeconomic tensions amid yawning income disparities and an economic slowdown brought on by falling global oil and gas prices and recession in major trade partner Russia.
Outrage over an effort to overhaul laws on the ownership of agricultural land recently forced officials into postponing implementation of the reforms, a rare concession to public opinion in a country ruled by Nazarbaev since 1989.
* CORRECTION: This story has been amended to remove suggestion that Salafism is banned in Kazakhstan. It is not.
With reporting by RFE/RL's Kazakh Service and Reuters
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.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Putin's speech can be described as "for Freud," referring to psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud.
"The person who invaded a foreign country, annexed its land, and committed genocide accuses others of violating international law and the sovereignty of other countries? One truth: The person who started a wind, will get a storm. The storm is coming," he said on Twitter.
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."
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The U.S. Republican National Convention kicked off with an uproar on July 18 after critics of presumptive nominee Donald Trump failed to secure a symbolic vote demonstrating their opposition to his candidacy.
Trump fended off the insurgent move and held sway throughout the evening, making an unexpected early appearance and introducing his wife, Melania, who sought to help him overcome his image as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim by stressing that he intends to be an inclusive president if elected.
The four-day convention in Cleveland, Ohio, is expected to officially nominate Trump as the partys candidate for the presidential election on November 8 and is seen as an opportunity for his campaign to show that the party has united behind him.
But dissent within the party seized an early limelight on the first day of the convention as anti-Trump delegates sought to change the nominating rules to allow them a chance to back another candidate.
After a voice vote, party leaders declared that the opponents did not have enough votes, sparking an outcry on the floor of the stadium where the convention is being held.
Angry delegates proceeded to chant "roll call, roll call" in an ultimately futile bid to stage a vote in which every state would weigh in. Other delegates, including the delegation from Colorado, simply walked off the floor of the convention.
"We deserve to be heard. This is the people's convention!" Diana Shores, a delegate from Virginia, cried as delegates supporting Trump attempted to drown out voices of protest by yelling "Shame! Shame!"
Trump, a billionaire businessman and reality TV star, has never held public office. With his brash rhetoric and accusations that the U.S. political system is "rigged," Trump has struggled to capture the backing of many mainstream Republicans.
Factions within the Republican Party have launched a movement called "Never Trump." The candidate last week declared the movement dead, writing on Twitter: "#NeverTrump is never more."
Some 2,000 delegates have descended on the Cleveland arena, where Trump is expected to close the convention with an acceptance speech late on July 21.
The convention at the Quicken Loans Arena, where the gathering will take place amid tight security, opened in the shadow of recent killings of police officers and African-American men.
Trump's supporters will promote what he has billed as a tough line on law and order and national security in speeches later in the day.
The July 17 shooting of three policemen in Baton Rouge, a targeted attack that may have been in retaliation for a series of police killings of African-Americans -- hung over the gathering.
The theme for the first day of the meeting had already been set as "Make America Safe Again," a play on Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again."
Trump's wife, Melania, a Slovenian jewelry designer and former model, took center stage on July 18 with a speech in which she insisted her husband will be an inclusive president if elected, serving all Americans regardless of race, religion, or income.
Melania Trump's portrayal of her husband appeared aimed at pushing back against criticism he has faced over controversial statements about Muslims and immigrants.
"Donald intends to represent all of the people, not just some of the people," she told the convention after being introduced by her husband, who made a dramatic entrance set to the song We Are The Champions by the British rock band Queen.
Melania Trump acknowledged the "excitement and drama" of the Trump campaign but said that "through it all my husband will remain focused on one thing: this beautiful country he loves so much."
She was swiftly accused of plagiarism after the discovery that two passages of her speech appeared similar to the speech first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
In one of the passages in question, Melania Trump said: "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life."
It matched nearly word for word a line in Michelle Obamas speech.
Trumps campaign manager Paul Manafort dismissed the criticism, saying theres no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech.
"Certainly, there's no feeling on [Melania Trumps] part that she did it," Manafort said on July 19.
Among those set to speak later at the convention are Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, as well as former rivals who dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination: Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio.
Just a few blocks from the arena in downtown Cleveland, meanwhile, opponents and supporters of Trump faced off in separate street protests that were not marred by physical violence despite heated rhetoric between the two camps.
Cleveland police are reporting few problems and one arrest as night fell on the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams told reporters on July 18 that law enforcement had seen few problems on the first day of the convention. He said there had been just one arrest of a person who had a felony warrant and was being charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.
Trump has sparked controversy with his calls to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and restrict immigration by Muslims, steps he describes as necessary to protect Americans' security.
Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has said that "the plan for the Trump campaign for this convention is to help the American people understand more about Donald Trump the man, not just the candidate that they've seen on the campaign trail."
The Democratic National Convention will be held next week in Philadelphia, where the party is expected to nominate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate.
Addressing the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in another Ohio city -- Cincinnati -- on July 18, Clinton called Trump's candidacy a "threat to our democracy" and accused him of fueling ethnic and racial tensions with his rhetoric.
"Donald Trump cannot become president of the United States," Clinton said, drawing boisterous applause from the audience.
Clintons campaign on July 18 quickly released a video mash-up tweeted out by the presumptive Democratic nominee -- of the controversy on the convention floor in Cleveland, declaring that Trump lost control of his own convention before it even started.
With reporting by Reuters, AFP, dpa, and AP
3 Villagers standing on the slopes near the crater of Mount Bromo try to catch money thrown in by worshippers as smoke and ash rise from the volcan. During the Kasada ceremony, worshippers throw offerings, livestock, and other crops into the volcanic crater in Probolinggo, Indonesia. (Reuters/Beawiharta)
During the war in Croatia (1991-1995) the center of Vukovar, its landmarks and emblematic baroque buildings were destroyed. One of the most diverse and multi-ethnic communities in the former Yugoslavia was extinguished.
The father of a Maggie L. Walker Governors School student suing two school officials for punishing his son for bullying is asking a federal judge to turn down the schools request to dismiss the case.
Michael Browns son was reprimanded last year after sending an email to a university accusing a fellow Maggie Walker student of cheating.
In court papers filed Thursday, Brown argues that his sons right to due process was violated and that the act he was punished for did not meet the definition of bullying.
He also is arguing the school failed to provide adequate notice that his (sons) conduct was prohibited and that his sons conduct did not match the definition of bullying under which he was convicted.
By formally sanctioning (him), imposing school discipline and inaccurately labeling him a bully, defendants have jeopardized (his) post-high school future and his ability to obtain admission to the college of his choice, Brown argues in the court papers.
Brown is suing Jeffrey W. McGee, the schools director, and Philip B. Tharp, the assistant director, after his son was punished for sending an email to a university accusing a fellow student of cheating.
The lawsuit stems from an email Browns son sent to a universitys admissions office in February stating that a fellow student had been admitted into your prestigious university under falsified pretense.
Browns son claimed in the email that Maggie Walker officials deleted numerous accounts of honor code violations, to include instances of cheating on tests from the other students school records. The university forwarded the email to Maggie Walker officials.
In their motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed late last month, McGee and Tharp said that after speaking to the student and his parents about the matter, it was determined that Browns son violated the schools code because his email contained false statements about the other student. Bullying, they said, includes a single instance of making false statements about another person.
As punishment for bullying, Browns son was made to perform six hours of work detail at the school and to write a statement about what he learned from the experience.
In the filing requesting that the judge reject McGee and Tharps motion to dismiss the case, Brown argues that his son was following the schools honor code when he wrote the email to the university.
That code, according to court papers, mandates that students must not cheat nor tolerate those who do and report potential honor offenses.
Believing that Governors School administrators had covered up another students history of cheating during the college application process, (Browns son) reported the issue to (the university), which had accepted that student, apparently without knowledge of the students record, according to the court filing.
He reported the facts, as he understood them, using his home computer, after hours, directly to (the university) through its online communication portal.
In an interview shortly after filing the lawsuit in June, Brown said his son had no direct knowledge of the students behavior but it was a full-on discussion all around the school.
In their motion to dismiss the lawsuit, McGee and Tharp argue Browns sons email included information that was not true, which is what led them to charge the boy with bullying. They also claim that Browns son conceded in the initial filing that his email contained false information.
In his request to have the motion to dismiss quashed, Brown argues that no concession is made in the lawsuit.
PETERSBURG Moments before she died, 19-year-old Shaakira Ross made one final call on her pink-and-white Samsung cellphone.
Badly bleeding from at least five gunshot wounds, the 2014 graduate of Maggie L. Walker Governors School dialed 911 just before 10 p.m. on May 4, 2015.
I just got shot, Ross said clearly in a recording of the call played Monday for a jury in Petersburg Circuit Court. Then she began to sob and let out a hysterical, high-pitched scream that was unintelligible.
Karen Richardson, the emergency dispatcher who took the call, testified Monday during the first day of the trial for the man accused of killing Ross.
When a prosecutor asked Richardson about the emergency call, she took a moment to collect herself on the witness stand. Ive received thousands of 911 calls in my 11 years as a dispatcher I never heard one die before, she said.
The defendant, Leon Thomas Archer of Dinwiddie County, faces charges of first-degree murder, maliciously shooting into a car, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and use of a firearm in a felony.
A key prosecution witness, who is expected to testify today, has told police that she spoke to Archer not long after the shooting. According to this witness, Archer told her he was about to break into a home in the 1800 block of Fort Rice Street when he was startled by music playing behind him. Archer told the witness that he spotted Ross in her car and opened fire.
But defense attorney Shaun Huband said in his opening statement that Archer wasnt in Petersburg at the time of the shooting.
Only a few minutes of the 911 recording were played for the jury. Ross was able to convey her location on Fort Rice Street, but much of the recording is incoherent. Crying could be heard in the background and then garbled breathing. Then silence. Later, a man could be heard yelling in the distance.
The jury also heard testimony from Dr. Robert Lewis Jr., an emergency room doctor from Southside Regional Medical Center in Petersburg. Lewis said that when Ross came into the ER, she was not breathing and had no pulse.
Beyond any question, she died from gunshot wounds, Lewis said.
Huband objected to Lewis testimony, saying that a medical examiner is the only person qualified to assess cause of death. Circuit Judge Dennis M. Martin overruled his objection.
How fast this occurred to her and the extent of the wounds, theres no other possible cause, the doctor said, describing wounds in her abdomen, back, leg and arm.
Medical examiners recovered five .45-caliber slugs from Ross body during her autopsy, according to a forensic analysis of evidence in Archers court file. Eight shell casings, three bullets and one bullet fragment were found inside and around the car in which Ross was shot, according to Billy Blankenship, a forensic detective for the Petersburg Police Department.
Blankenship took photos at the scene of Ross car riddled with bullet holes. In the photos, rods were placed in the holes showing the trajectory of the bullets, which appeared to indicate the shooter circled the car from the rear to the drivers side. Shell casings from a .45-caliber gun were recovered within 2 feet of the car. Blankenship said the shooter would have been about that close to Ross.
Ross had graduated from Maggie Walker the year before she was killed. She was interested in pursuing a nursing career, according to school faculty members, but took a year off to plan her career path.
The night of her death, Ross was headed to a friends home to watch basketball. Muhammad Odum, who lives in the 1800 block of Fort Rice Street, said Ross never made it to his home that night.
In the midst of the game, we heard several shots, Odum said.
Odum said he ran outside after the first four shots, and a final shot rang out as he got there. He saw no one, he said, just a car with all the windows shot out. At his mothers urging, he said he checked the car and found Ross slumped over. Odum said she was dead.
Odum testified that he does not know the defendant or know what he was doing near his home.
Thats the biggest question I ask myself every day, he said.
In his opening statement, Huband cast doubt on the prosecutions key witness, arguing that she might be a spectacular actress and suggested that the police didnt properly clear the Odum family from suspicion.
The prosecution is scheduled to resume its case this morning.
A Richmond man was arrested and charged Monday morning in connection with a 2015 homicide on Christmas Eve of an 18-year-old in Creighton Court.
Richmond Police said Todd W. Jones Sr., 37, of the 2000 block of Creighton Road, was taken into custody early Monday morning. Jones is charged with voluntary manslaughter, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
In December 2015, on Christmas Eve, police responded around 10 p.m. to the 2000 block of North 29th Street for the report of a shooting. Within minutes, officers located Trayquaim Holmes, 18, of the 1300 block of Coalter Street, who appeared to be unconscious and was suffering from an apparent gunshot wound. Holmes was pronounced dead at the scene.
The father of a University of Virginia graduate who enlisted in the U.S. Army after Sept. 11 and died in Iraq protecting his troops will speak next week at the Democratic National Convention.
Khizr Khans son, Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, was one of 14 American Muslims who died serving their country in the 10 years after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Now Khan, whose war-hero son died in 2004, will have a prime speaking role when Democrats gather in Philadelphia, part of a diverse lineup of speakers assembled by party officials and the campaign of Hillary Clinton to promote its Stronger Together theme.
The Democratic convention starts next Monday, July 25. Khan will speak Thursday, July 28.
A number of Republican leaders, including presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, have called for bans or restrictions on Muslims traveling to the U.S. in the wake of terrorist attacks involving radicalized Islamists who claim allegiance to the Islamic State militant group.
We are patriotic American Muslims with undivided loyalty to this beautiful country, this blessed country, said Khan, a lawyer who lives in Charlottesville. He moved from the United Arab Emirates to the U.S. with his family in the late 1970s.
We are against all terrorism its something that we reject, Khan said. The only solution to resolve the menace of terrorism is joining hands, he said.
We were concerned that the remarks that Donald Trump made would cause more difficulty for our country, Khan said. We have a candidate that threatens liberty and equal dignity, and it is that threat that causes us to stand with Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
Khan spoke as he and his wife, Ghazala, were driving home from Fort Knox in Kentucky, where the Army had honored Humayun by naming a junior officer cadet command regiment after him.
Humayun had followed his brother, a Jefferson Scholar at U.Va., to Charlottesville as an undergraduate and enrolled in the schools ROTC program.
He graduated in 2000, joined the Army, rose to the rank of captain, and was deployed to Iraq.
In June 2004, while his infantry unit was guarding the gates of their base, a suspicious vehicle appeared. Khan told his men to hit the ground as he went forward.
He took 10 steps toward the oncoming terrorist vehicle before it exploded killing him but saving the lives of his soldiers and untold numbers inside the base.
Khan was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart posthumously. He was 27 years old.
Khan said he hopes his sons story, and his remarks next week, can send a message that terrorism can be defeated only by uniting Americans, not dividing them.
Equal dignity, equal protection, honor, sacrifice all good things this country taught our son and us they are a blessing that should not be taken for granted, Khan said.
CLEVELAND As the Republican National Convention opened today in Cleveland, Virginia's divided delegation met behind closed doors.
At their hotel in suburban Strongsville, the 49 delegates and their camp followers had a sausage-and-egg breakfast and got their feed from party leaders. The delegation has been rattled by speculation of a rules fight led by, among others, former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who helped fashion a Ted Cruz-heavy delegation even though putative nominee Donald Trump won the Virginia primary in March.
Cuccinelli said this morning that the disagreement over rules had been wrongly construed as an effort to unbind delegates in Cleveland on the first vote. A Cruz delegate from Virginia, in a largely symbolic victory, convinced a federal judge in Richmond to throw out a 1999 law binding delegates on the first vote.
Cuccinelli declined to say what rules change he'd be advocating, but Virginia delegates said privately that Cuccinelli was only pushing for a provision that would allow delegates to the 2020 convention to vote on its rules by roll call.
Corey Stewart, the chairman of Trump's Virginia campaign who clashed with Cuccinelli earlier this year at the state convention in Harrisonburg, said the rules debate won't derail Trump's nomination and the unification of the party.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
AS the country prepares for the hottest week of the year so far, emergency services have reminded people that hidden dangers lurk under tempting lakes and rivers.
South Yorkshire Police and South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue (SYFR) said that even though the weather is warm, the water might not be and there are many hidden dangers.
Insp Richard Batty, from South Yorkshire Police, said: We dont want to stop people from enjoying any warmer weather this summer, but lakes, rivers and flooded quarries hide a multitude of dangers beneath the surface.
Although the water might seem inviting, freezing temperatures, hidden currents and debris underneath the water can all pose grave dangers.
The water can often be a lot colder than expected and swimming in freezing temperatures, even if the weather is warm, can affect your ability to swim and can soon mean you find yourself in some difficulty.
With murky waters, its also unclear as to how deep a body of water can be.
People can throw all sorts in rivers and reservoirs, from old bedding to car engines and this can cause severe injury, particularly if youre jumping in from a height.
Weeds can also grow underneath the surface, which can prove to be very dangerous and can lead to swimmers becoming tangled up in them.
Steve Helps, head of prevention and protection at SYFR, said: We regularly receive 999 calls in the summer about people getting into difficulty in water, so its only a matter of time before someones safety is really put at risk unless people listen to our advice.
It can be tempting to cool off in the summer months, but stick to a swimming pool. Hundreds of people drown each year in the UK and places like rivers, lakes or flooded quarries are completely unsuitable for swimming as they hide a number of hidden dangers.
SYFR has attended 282 water related incidents since 2012 in which forty-nine involved rescuing people from open water and three people died.
Call police on 101 if you have concerns about people swimming in open water.
Here are some of the police's top tips for staying safe this summer:
BUSINESS was good for South Yorkshire firms during the second quarter of this year, according to new figures.
The business economy of the Sheffield City Region which includes Rotherham had a positive outlook, according to the data.
The Sheffield City Region Quarterly Economic Survey, which is compiled by the Sheffield City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), four Chambers of Commerce including the Barnsley and Rotherham Chamber and Sheffield University Management School, reveals that sales were up and so was recruitment.
The study, which is based on 400 responses from firms across the region, said that manufacturing businesses saw improved export sales as well as an increase in advance orders.
Although service sector companies saw a slight decrease in domestic and overseas sales from the previous quarter, they experienced an increase in cash flow like the manufacturing sector.
Both sectors said they undertook recruitment over the last quarter, with a slight rise in recruitment in the manufacturing sector.
This was predominantly for full-time permanent positions in manufacturing and temporary part-time jobs in services.
While fewer manufacturers said they intended to invest in training from the previous quarter, more firms in the service sector said they would.
Both sectors believed that turnover would improve over the next 12 months.
The main concerns for businesses in the second quarter was the EU referendum, red tape and the provision of superfast broadband.
Prof Andrew Simpson, of Sheffield University Management School, said: Overall the results show a confident regional view of the economy.
The forward-looking predictions are likely to see some measure of fluctuation in the short term following the referendum, and the next quarters survey will be critical in understanding the effects of the vote to leave the EU.
Sir Nigel Knowles, chair of the LEP, welcomed the figures and said they would help develop business strategy.
He said: These positive results from the Sheffield City Regions business community will help us to continue to influence strategy and inform the Sheffield City Regions approach to local, regional and national decision-makers and foreign direct investors.
The Quarterly Economic Survey helps us to shape policy and our support for our valuable businesses here in the region.
With these results driving us forward, we will continue to work together with the business community as we further solidify our position as a truly competitive centre of business excellence.
It is impossible to replace human emotions, neither with electronic gadgets,
nor with synthetics or even a Birkin bag...:
Alex Popov is the Chairman of the World Diamond Mark Foundation (WDMF), which was established over two years ago in Hong Kong. WDMF has rolled out several generic marketing programs for jewelry retailers worldwide and three exclusive marketing programs for Authorized Diamond Dealers. Mr. Popov told Rough&Polished how this project is being implemented and discussed the prospects for the diamond industry.
How are things going on at the World Diamond Mark Foundation you are heading?
We are working on several levels. In the fall of 2015, we introduced some changes to the program, which quickly found a positive response from both retailers and diamantaires. The WDM concept was refined with the help of consultants invited from the world of luxury. The goals and tasks set by WDM turned in to a clear and understandable concept to all. It presented a business plan for the next three years, which was approved at a meeting of the Foundations Board in Hong Kong in March.
The chief efforts of our team are aimed at developing digital marketing programs for consumers, taking into account the interests of diamond jewellery retailers.
We are currently working on launching two websites, passion.diamonds and trust.diamonds, where consumers will be able to "plunge" into the world of diamonds, to see and learn a lot for themselves, as well as to get information on how to buy diamond jewelry, find out the difference between synthetic and natural stones, etc. Using these websites, they will also be able to check whether a retailer has a WDM status, or leave their opinion about a particular jewelry store.
The other major direction is social media. We have conducted several experiments and found that by using social networks it is possible to achieve amazing results, while investing a relatively small amount of money. We are now working on developing pin-point advertising campaigns and templates for retailers to be promoted via social networks.
And, of course, there is The Facets of Mankind Project. Since the end of May, when we announced the launch of the World Diamond Museum, we have already received proposals from three cities to host the exposition there. But more about that later.
Does the economic crisis make you correct your plans?
In crisis, we see the opportunity to create something new and to be ready to move, fully armed, to the stage when our work will begin bearing fruit. There are no changes imposed by the crisis on our plans.
What is your attitude to the initiative to establish the Diamond Producers Association (DPA)?
Very positive. This is not an initiative it is a fait accompli. For a long time, there has been a need to join forces and work for the common good of our industry.
While the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) and the International Diamond Manufacturers Association (IDMA) have been around for many decades, the mining companies have always been, figuratively speaking, at the other end of the table, always having their dinner separately and, according to many, taking the best bits. Those few who were allowed to sit at the "master's" part of the table, had to behave "appropriately." This is still partly true today, but this state of things is gradually fading away.
Therefore, the professional association of mining companies is welcome to take a seat at the modest table of all other market stakeholders. The WDM was created by WFDB, joined by IDMA and Gem & Jewelry Export Promotion Council of India (GJEPC), and therefore I speak and act on behalf of everyone who is processing rough diamonds and sells finished products. Welcome!
How successful do you think is the new slogan for generic marketing Real is Rare. Real is a Diamond?
In my opinion, the slogan Real is Rare. Real is a Diamond is very successful for the audience for which it was coined the Millennials. The results will be announced after the 2016 holiday sales season! I sincerely wish the DPA good luck - for all of us it is important that this could be a success.
At WDM, we decided to focus on potential customers of jewelry stores with a slogan, which can be translated into any language Find a Part of You in Diamond. In this way we complement Real is Rare. Real is a Diamond with an invitation to go to a jewelry store, while DPA complements Part of You with an emotional aspect. I think it's a great tandem, as they say, a win-win!
Do you remain optimistic regarding the future of the diamond segment in the luxury industry?
I am generally optimistic, although they say that optimism borders on idiocy. I believe that in our industry it is not idiocy, but ones love for your business, a kind of fascination with your own product, maybe a kind of narcissism. Usually, it does not do any good, but without this our industry will lose its inherent relationship to art and instead become a producer of spare parts and components for rings, earrings and watches, with all the ensuing consequences.
There will be large and painful changes, but our industry will survive, because it is designed to awaken strong emotions in people, and this cannot be replaced neither with electronic gadgets, nor with synthetics or even a Birkin bag. I feel that I am extremely fortunate that I can somehow influence on the revival and a new era in the industry. I believe that this will come true.
We all remember the wonderful exhibition of Indian jewelry in the Kremlin. Do you plan to launch something equally interesting?
The answer is simple - yes! I have already mentioned The Facets of Mankind. If the Kremlin exhibition displayed jewels that enchanted the world from India, in this ambitious project we will show what nature and human imagination can do with the example of rough and polished diamonds and diamond jewelry gathered from around the world.
The concept of this museum is to show all the rough and polished diamonds and jewelry pieces, which in some way influenced the fate of people and even countries, and continue to excite the minds to this day. Of course, it is impossible to show all at once in one place, and so we are working in parallel on a grand multimedia installation and a traveling exhibition, which, in addition to the interactive part, will also include live exhibits - from 50 to 150 items, depending on the place of display, timing and availability of own collections in the hosting museums.
In addition, we are compiling an archive of studies and publications, which will be available for those who want to deepen their knowledge and maybe get interested in this fascinating subject.
There are decades of work ahead, but we expect to open the museum at the start of 2017, and those who will come after us, will continue to replenish and maintain the exhibits.
As I said, since we announced the Museum, almost every day I get letters from all over the globe offering to place exhibits, provide information, share family archives, or simply asking "how can I be useful." It certainly helps to maintain the optimism and energy to put all this into practice.
But this looks like a large-scale and long-term project!
All that I have mentioned requires not only selfless labor, but also talent and time, and this costs serious money. I want to encourage all industry players to take their mind off the current crisis for a while and ask themselves, where they see themselves in 20 years. If the answer is to switch over to real estate in Thailand, or create a new Uber, or move to Las Vegas (avoiding the Show), then you better forget about all the things I said.
If the answer is to stay in a new, exciting and profitable luxury industry, then it is necessary to contribute to our common future with your connections, talents, money, work, advice or in any other way. WDM is keeping a "golden book", which is actually white and blue, where all those who help in our work, inscribe their chapter of history. Someday, this book will take its rightful place in the World Diamond Museum, along with its authors.
Galina Semyonova for Rough&Polished
A group of female jewelers, who first joined together during the women's empowerment session at the Second LATAM Jewelry and Diamond Week at the World Jewelry Hub in June, has launched a grass-roots initiative that is designed to communicate their gender's particular perspective on the way jewelry and gemstones should be marketed.
Calling themselves "Mujeres Brillantes" ("Brilliant Women" in Spanish), the women hail predominantly from Latin America, but also count among themselves members from Turkey, Russia, Italy, Romania and Israel.
"Our general feeling was that is industry is focusing too closely on the business of selling jewelry, and not on the experience of buying or receiving an item of jewelry. As women we instinctively understand that the act should be a special and intimate moment that transcends the mechanics of a commercial transaction. The experience should be unique and meaningful, just like the item of jewelry," explained Ali Pastorini, WJH Senior Vice President.
The renewed emphasis on the consumer and the consumer's experience is underscored by the name selected for the new marketing initiative, "My Jewels, My Story," which was proposed by Victoria Kupfer, a jeweler from Panama.
"Our primary intention is not to formulate a specific campaign, but rather to emphasize a marketing approach, which we believe will be more successfully received and appreciated by female consumers," Ms. Pastorini said.
The dialogue that began in June is continuing in the social media, with "Mujeres Brillantes" groups operating on Facebook and Whatsapp.
Alex Shishlo, Editor of the Rough&Polished European Bureau in Brussels
Namibia has called on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) bloc to cooperate together to make Gaborone the centre of the diamond trade in the region.
Last year alone we exported diamonds worth more than $1 billion to Botswana, Namibian president Hage Geingob was quoted as saying by New Era.
We must cooperate more as fellow diamond producing nations in the same neighbourhood to build up a robust and diversified regional diamond hub.
De Beers Diamond Trading Company sightholder sales are now conducted in Gaborone.
Other functions such as sorting, valuation and the companys key account managers also moved to Gaborone from London as a result of deal reached between De Beers and Botswana in 2012.
Botswana was the worlds second largest diamond producer after Russia in terms of both volume and value.
Data released by the Kimberley Process (KP) last month showed that Botswanas diamond output eased 16 percent to 20.8 million carats valued at to $2.99 billion last year while that of Russia leaped 9.4 percent to 41.9 million carats worth $4.24 billion.
Diamonds from the southern African nation recorded an average price of $143.73 per carat compared to Russias $101.15 per carat.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
An amount of $715000, which was wire transferred by the Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council of India (GJEPC) to the account of the JCK show organizers in US, is reportedly not traceable as per a report in Times of India.
The GJEPC has approached the cyber-crime cell of Mumbai police, CBI and ministry of finance after organizers of JCK Las Vegas International Jewellery Show in the United States of America denied receiving payment for the stalls and other facilities.
"They (JCK organizers) have not received the payment that was wire transferred from our official account. The money involved is around $715,000 meant for payment of exhibition charges and setting up of India pavilion," the GJEPC chairman Praveen Shanker Pandya.
Pandya added, "We have lodged a complaint with police's cybercrime cell, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), ministry of finance and investigating agencies in the US. The council is yet to receive any confirmation from the bank where the money was lost or hacked. The bank is investigating on its part to trace the money wire transferred from the council's account."
Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished
Twenty-one women graduated from the first Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) all-female construction boot camp as part of the Women Build Metro Los Angeles program.
Six weeks of training were held at Los Angeles Trade Technical College (LATTC) facilities in downtown Los Angeles. The boot camp trained participants on heavy lifting, shoveling and wheelbarrow use, among other activities.
This is an excellent and unique opportunity for women to enter the predominantly male world of construction with support, training and encouragement from LACMTA, said Metro Board Member Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker. LACMTA meets its goal of hiring women for our construction projects. And women gain a secure, well-paid job that is career oriented.
In early 2012, the LACMTA Board of Directors approved the Project Labor Agreement and Construction Career Policy. Both policies were designed to help more people get jobs on LACMTA construction projects. LACMTA and the agencys partners and stakeholders have exceeded or met hiring goals of those policies.
LACMTAs program also requires contractors to comply with Executive Order 11246, which includes a goal of 6.9 percent female participation in what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry. Female participation is now 3.22 percent. The 21 women that graduated are a step in the right direction to assist LACMTA in reaching this federal participation requirement.
More and more women are being introduced to a world they may not have seen as a real possibility, said LACMTA Chief Executive Officer Phil Washington. This is only one example of what LACMTA can accomplish when building major transit construction projects. Were providing women with training and support that move beyond traditional careers.
LACMTA created a task force to recruit qualified women candidates for apprenticeship and placement with all trades on construction projects.
The first step came last November, with a symposium at the LATTC campus and continued with the six-week construction boot camp. The final step will be an interview and placement process that will take place after the luncheon/graduation ceremony.
LACMTA says it will continue tracking the progress of participants for one year after the graduation ceremony to determine the success of this effort and to plan future endeavors.
Turkey has arrested 6,000 people after a failed coup, with President Erdogan vowing to purge state bodies of the "virus" that caused the revolt.
Erdogan's top military aide Col Ali Yazici is among those now in custody.
The overall death toll for the weekend violence has risen to 290. More than 100 of those were participating in the coup.
Erdogan asked the U.S. to extradite an Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who is accused by Turkish authorities of being the ringleader behind the coup attempt. Turkey has long sought action against Gulen, who's been living in the U.S. for more than 15 years.
The U.S. President Barack Obama 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.
For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com
Political News
Stolt-Nielsen Limited (SOIEF) , a provider of integrated transportation solutions for bulk liquids, announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire the chemical tanker operations of Jo Tankers. The total purchase price is approximately $575 million, including the proportional share of the newbuildings in the joint venture.
The transaction is subject to competition authority approval, with a decision expected before the end of September 2016.
The deal comprises 13 chemical tankers and a 50% share in a joint venture with eight chemical tanker newbuildings. The 13 chemical tankers consist of eight all stainless steel ships, and five ships with a combination of stainless steel and coated tanks. Six of the 13 ships have been on time charter to Stolt Tankers for the last five years.
The newbuildings included in the transaction consist of eight all stainless steel eco-friendly ships on order from New Times Shipbuilding in China, the first of which was delivered in early July 2016. The seven remaining newbuildings are to be delivered in the second half of 2016 and in 2017.
The company said it has secured funding for the deal through some of its main banks with a combination of bridge financing, secured term loans and available corporate funds.
Niels Stolt-Nielsen, Chief Executive Officer, said, "The transaction covers the tonnage replacement needs of our current chemical tanker fleet for the next several years. While giving us some operational savings, it adds new trade routes to our service offering, thus expanding our presence on key tradelanes and enabling us to better serve the needs of our global customer base."
For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com
Business News
A US student was among 84 people killed in Thursday's terrorist attack in the French port city of Nice, the student's University authorities confirmed.
The University of California, Berkeley, said Sunday that Nicolas Leslie, who had been studying in Nice, France, as part of the campus's Study Abroad program, has been identified as dead. He was among those missing following the deadly truck attack in Nice.
Leslie, 20, was one of 85 participants in a local summer entrepreneurship program in Nice. Unaccounted for since the truck attack, in which another 200 were injured including three Berkeley students he had been the subject of an extensive search by university staff, local officials and family.
His death was reported to campus officials by the FBI, which was notified by its French counterparts earlier Sunday.
"This is tragic, devastating news," UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said.
Following the latest attack, two of the injured Berkeley students were released after medical treatment and have returned to their summer dormitories in Nice. They are Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, a senior computer science major in the College of Letters and Science, who sustained a broken leg; and Diane Huang, 20, a senior majoring in environmental economics and policy in the College of Natural Resources, who suffered a broken foot.
Daryus Medora, 21, whose leg was broken, remains in the hospital. He is an undeclared sophomore in the College of Letters and Science.
Leslie, an environmental sciences major, had been planning to begin studies at the Haas School of Business in the fall. Counselors are on the ground in Nice, where some 60 Berkeley students remain, and are available to speak with students on campus, the University said.
A vigil is planned for 4:30 p.m. Monday on Sproul Plaza.
For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com
Political News
The Mercedes-Benz Future Bus with CityPilot has driven autonomously for about 20 kilometers on the longest bus rapid transit (BRT) line in Europe, in Amsterdam. Driving at speeds of up to 70 km/h, the automated vehicles pays heed to bus stops and traffic lights, passes through tunnels, brakes for obstacles and pedestrians, and communicates with traffic signals.
A driver is on board to monitor the system, but his job is a lot easier than regular driving. Daimler is the first manufacturer to operate an automated city bus in real-life traffic situation.
Dr. Wolfgang Bernhard, Board Member of Management of Daimler AG for Daimler Trucks and Buses says two years ago the Highway Pilot helped showcase that autonomous driving would make long-distance truck transport safer and more efficient. CityPilot builds on Highway Pilot and facilitates driving autonomously on specially marked bus lanes. Public transport moves to a safer, more efficient and more productive mark.
Hartmut Schick, Head of Daimler Buses says technological competence and innovative strength make company buses successful globally. CityPilot Mercedes-Benz Future Bus demonstrates the companys strong positioning in the bus business. The company is investing about 200 million in the further development of its city-bus portfolio. CityPilot focuses on fuel efficiency with minimal stress on the engine. This in turn positively impacts operating and maintenance costs, vehicle lifetime and availability.
For CityPilot autonomous driving to succeed in urban traffic, theres a need for BRT lines with separate lanes. The Future Bus is able to determine if a route is suitable for automated driving and informs the driver accordingly so as to activate the system. Akin to cruise control, is the accelerator or brake pedal or steering is touched, driver activity overrules CityPilot. This ensures the driver is always in charge, and can take control as required.
CityPilot uses assistance systems including long and short-range radar, cameras and satellite-controlled GPS navigation system. Connectivity between cameras and sensors presents an accurate picture of surroundings and exact position of bus.
News Release
Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari had visited the Tesla Motors factory near San Francisco last year. During the visit, the minister met top officials of the American EV maker and extended an invitation to set up a manufacturing factory in India with a local JV partner.
To make a convincing case, the minister also announced various sops including land parcel if Tesla decides to locate its plant in the country. Soon it was revealed that three Indian states are already working hard to get the attention of Tesla. These three states are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
An export hub in Asia would be of strategic importance to Tesla.
But all this was talks was still taken by enthusiasts with a pinch of salt. Until in February this year, when Elon Musk surprised Tesla fans in India by confirming that they are indeed working towards launching Tesla in India. Elon Musk tweeted Hoping for summer this year (Tesla India launch).
This tweet not only surprised us, but also got thousands of pro-electric car fans here in India excited as the worlds foremost carmaker in future technology had just confirmed India launch plans. But, the excitement was short lived. This is what Elon Musk tweeted earlier this week.
This tweet more or less confirms that Tesla India launch plans are on the backfoot, atleast for some years now. But, if India manages to convince Tesla to establish a manufacturing facility in India, the launch plans would be accelerated. It would go a long way in increasing the acceptance of electric vehicles in the Indian market. As a part of the proposal, Mr. Gadkari also assured Tesla that he would make exports to other Asian markets from one of Indias well-established ports conducive. That is what the Indian govt is trying to do. See their latest tweet, in reply to Elon Musks tweet.
A senior executive of Tesla stated that the company appreciates the Indian governments offer of cooperation and added that the proposal will certainly be considered at an appropriate time in the future. The company also stated that India will definitely be a market for its next gen low-cost sustainable models.
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 ...
The behavior of a lone prisoner who has become the talking point among Australians and anyone else anyone who would have watched the 60 Minutes programme has done Samoas reputation a lot of damage. That much is undeniable.
But here is the chilling truth ladies and gentlemen; he is a small part of a bigger problem. Not taking away from the seriousness of what he did to this poor Australian couple who did not deserve what happened to them, it must be said that Lauitiiti Tualima has become the face of an issue that deserves a lot more attention, urgently.
Were talking about the recurring problem of prisoners waltzing out of Tafaigata at will, causing irreparable damage to the community.
They rob innocent members of the public, they rape unsuspecting young girls and mothers, they beat up business people for their money and the list of their heinous offending goes on. Its horrific. We know this. Its been happening for so long. Its a miracle that no one has died yet but then it might not stay this way for long.
We did not need a 60 Minute programme to remind us this ugly truth. The fact of the matter is that it has been happening for such a long time the unwanted exposure Samoa has received today could have been avoided had the relevant authorities acted sooner.
Sadly, they turned a blind eye so that the offending became regular and every time there was a story on the pages of this newspaper or in any other media for that matter about prisoners breaking away and wreaking havoc out there; it was treated as if it was normal.
Of course it wasnt normal. It should never have been accepted and the alarm bells should have been taken a lot more seriously.
Alas, Samoa today has become the laughing stock of the world in our day of shame. And down the drain with it are efforts to promote Samoa as a tourism destination and all the hard work being done to attract visitors to this country.
As Samoans, its hard not to feel embarrassed about the way our proud nation has been portrayed. Of all the wonderful things about this country and our people, in the eyes of people who dont know anything about us, we are not better than a country of rapists, a people who live in a paradise where criminals run around freely, doing whatever they want.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We are a much better country than that. We are a nation of caring souls who for the most part love and embrace visitors to our shores.
But as they say, one bad apple is all it takes to ruin that image. The condemnation and the outrage from members of the community in Samoa and abroad is understandable.
But the anger directed at 60 Minutes exposing the light on the issue is misguided.
Folks, lets not be irrational about this. And lets not allow our silly pride to blind us from the truth. For such a long time now, we have been saying that the governments attitude towards security at Tafaigata Prison is unacceptable.
And they should feel responsible for what has happened, knowing how much money has been wasted through corrupt practices that could have been better used to at least build a fence at the prison.
But that is just one issue. Then there are of course the more serious issues of rape, incest, petty crimes, robbery, violence against women and the list goes on. These are equally unacceptable and in terms of the bigger picture, they are issues which require all of us to come together so we can start working on ways to solve them.
Getting back to Tafaigata Prison, lets be reminded here again that the idea of jail is not just to teach prisoners a lesson.
One of the most important elements of sending them to jail is to protect members of the public from them. They are criminals and they should be kept away from us.
Over the years, weve had some many innocent members of the public hurt by these prisoners. The Australian couple in the 60 Minute story has become the most high profile case of many cases that are swept under the carpet and ignored.
Suffice to say, this couple did not deserve what happened to them. They - and many locals who have suffered every time these prisoners break out - should have been protected by the authorities, making sure that criminals like Tualima, are kept behind bars where he truly belongs.
When will this government wake up and say enough is enough? When will it stop making silly excuses and do something about it?
Heres the fact, as long as prisoners continue to walk out at will, no one in this country is safe - including tourists. And we might not have seen the last of programmes such as 60 Minutes.
Dear Editor,
Re: We lose to guns and bullets, we lose ourselves Samoa
There are always two sides to any story; fortunately thats all it is, stories.
I can say after reading this article, he got one right, you cannot compare Samoa to the likes of the U.S, Australia or NZ.
Not sure where the writer of this article was going, but if its about guns, the Commissioner of Police has demonstrated great leadership in taking over a corrupt untrained undisciplined police department.
A huge improvement from previous leaderships. At times we find ourselves quarter backing from the back when we have nothing nice to say about someone. The truth of the matter is, this police department for the first time looks and feels like a Police Dept.
Fuiavaalili will never be able to satisfy every critic but thank goodness he has thick skin. Samoa is not the Samoa of old; even the matai system hes talking about is not the matai system of old.
Some of the most corrupt people are the matais let just get that out there. So you cant say to use the matai system when theyre the ones that need policing.
Were seeing great improvements with the Police department. I say let the Police Commissioner do his job and if the writer is offering any advice why not offer the youth of Samoa some sound advice on drug use how about that.
Ma le faaaloalo lava.
Stella Sherman
Boston Ma
PR - Faiumu Faimafili Notoa from Taga Savaii is over the moon with the new lifeline thrown by government to keep his familys hopes alive with the reassurance that there is money to be made in vanilla farming.
Weve been laboring the land for over 30 years but have slowly lost faith in recent years as a result of the dwindling number in export markets for my organic vanilla , said the 62 year old Faiumu- crowned the best vanilla farmer in Samoa in the last six consecutive annually government funded Agricultural Show.
Financially, we are barely surviving with the family living off our merger income from coffee, cocoa and taro sales since our vanilla outlets collapsed.
I kid you not, before we had planted over 50 acres with vanilla, coffee and coconuts when the markets were aplenty.
Now, we are only planting just enough to cater for our daily needs and meet our regular orders from our outlets in Apia, which are mostly hotels and Lyns Store at Motootua.
But government has stepped at the insistence of Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi that vanilla exports is screaming for attention because it offers a lucrative income for local farmers.
To that effect, a scoping visit organised by the Samoa Estate Corporation, (STEC) the Ministry of Prime Minister and Cabinet, (MPMC), the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Labour (MCIL) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries is giving Faiumu, his wife Faiesea their children and grandchildren a massive dose of hope injection.
Were not asking for a hand-out, says Mrs Faiesea Faiumu Notoa. My family has survived from the fruits of our hard labour and were thankful to the almighty.
But we desperately need help when it comes to marketing and of course meeting the requirements for our locally grown organic vanilla to secure a foothold in the commercial export arena. We understand that some of the requirements are quite rigorous but as farmers for decades we also have a lot of experience.
I am beyond thankful that government has taken notice by resurrecting the interest in vanilla farming with the appropriate government thinking tanks taking the lead in securing overseas markets for us.
Mrs Notoa, is of course referring to the Equagold Vanilla Companys brainchilds; Ross and Diane Appleton who left their comfort zone in Auckland New Zealand to take up the governments invite to come to Samoa and lend their expertise to boost the locally initiated drive to bring back to life Samoas vanilla farming. I can understand their frustrations after meeting with the farmers and visiting vanilla farms, added Mr Appleton. There is huge potential in Samoa vanilla and rest assured when we say that Equagold stands ready to be a new export partner for Samoas vanilla.
Of course, there is a lot of work that needs to be done and from what we have witnessed for the export drive to realise its target, leadership is a crucial component.
To stimulate the local farmers attention in growing vanilla, Appleton highlighted the pros and cons of the industry and what farmers can expect.
Just last year, we sold 95.000 packets of vanilla pods into Australia.
We are in contact with clients from the United States and Europe trying to find vanilla sellers. We are talking about a demand for approximately 15 tons for the next six months.
Market prices for vanilla at the moment are in the neighborhood of NZ$200 dollars a kilo.
What sounds easy at first glance is indeed a protracted process for the farmers.
The process of growing vanilla can take up to three years to come into production. Growers need to be committed for the long term and must be realistic about the current market prices, Mr. Appleton said.
And Samoas Auckland based Trade Commissioner; Fonoti Dr Lafitai Iupati Fuatai is urging vanilla farmers for patience.
I am mindful that in any investment, the commercial element plays a decisive leading role, says Fonoti. But money should be secondary as most successful investment takes years of tolerant, trials and tribulations.
Having Equagold, a company with integrity working with government is an asset and we need to capitalize on these rare opportunities that will eventually see our vanilla farmers, their families and our Gross Domestic Product reaping the fruits.
For the Faiumus he is now praying that government will deliver a pathway that will open the gateways for vanilla farmers like himself to reap the fruits of their hard labour and of course be part of the a solution and not a nuisance.
A stall owner at the Fugalei Market has vehemently rejected a claim by the Accident Compensation Corporations (A.C.C) she owes a substantial amount of money in rent.
Mena Tuala Taimalelagi had initially criticised A.C.Cs decision to order her to pay $1,300 in order for her to resume using stall number 89 at the market.
She raised the issue after the A.C.C had sealed off the stall, demanding that she pays the arrears. An official at A.C.C rejected the criticisms saying Ms. Taimalelagi owed them $720.
But Ms. Taimalelagi disputed this.
The answer they provided is very disappointing, she told the Samoa Observer.
I agree that I have arrears but its only $180 tala, not $720.
According to the stall owner, the A.C.C needs to do the right thing.
They are covering up but the fact that they have ordered me to pay for $1,300 arrears while they are also chasing the previous owner of the stall.
That means if I pay and the previous owner also pays, we will both be paying the same arrears. This means that the amount we are paying is $2,600 which is ridiculous.
Asked if she would use the stall again, Ms. Taimalelagi said no.
For them to say its normal that anyone who wants to use a stall has to pay for the arrears thats already there is just ridiculous, she said.
I dont want to go there again but all I want now is for them to give back my $500 tala that I paid for that arrears and they can go find whoever made that arrears.
Thats all I want now is for them to give back my money.
Nobody should go through this by suffering to pay for someone elses debt, its just not right.
They know that they are wrong and yet they still cant admit that they are wrong. Instead they make it look like Im the bad one here.
The family of a prisoner has turned to the media in a bid to expose what is happening within the prison.
Maria Nauer, the wife of prisoner Ropati Nauer contacted the Samoa Observer to tell of the alleged abuse, beating and the violation of human rights at the prison.
She wants an investigation into why the authorities allow prisoners to beat other inmates.
Mrs. Nauer said her husband was detained inside the pasima when he was allegedly beaten by four other prisoners commonly referred to as the chiefs (matai) of their units.
Saturday is the only day that prisoners who are being locked up inside the cement wall are allowed to visit their families so me and my kids went to visit my husband, she said.
She did not say why her husband was being locked up in the cell.
When we arrived at the gate the security guard told me we are not allowed to see my husband. I asked him why.
The security guard told me that he was informed by the Office that my husband stabbed one of the prisoners with a knife.
So I asked the security guard more questions because I wanted to get to the bottom of things.
However, the security guard said to me he doesnt know the reason but all he knows is that he was told by an official from the Office.
The disappointed wife said while she was asking the guard questions, one of the prisoners called out to her and told her that her husband was beaten up by four other prisoners while inside the cement wall.
I contacted the Commissioner of Prisons and told him about what happened and then he told the guards that my husband needs to be taken to the hospital.
"At the hospital, I saw my husbands face. It was all bruised up and he told me that four prisoners beat him up.
When the Samoa Observer arrived at the hospital, Ropati Nauer was with his wife and two prison guards. He was not allowed to talk to the Samoa Observer.
But I need help please, he yelled out as he was taken by the guards.
In the meantime, Mrs. Nauer said she wants the public to know how things are run inside the prison.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. My husband is not the first person that has been beaten up by other prisoners.
This is what is happening inside the prison and this is one of the reasons why many prisoners escape from there because the officials and the guards are not doing their work. They are letting these so called matai" do the work for them.
What I want to know is why are they letting other prisoners do their work for them?
"They are getting paid to do their work but it seems like they are just sitting around doing nothing while other prisoners run the facility.
The disappointed wife went on to say that she understands her husband is serving time in prison because he had done some wrongs in the past but that doesnt give other prisoners the right to treat him the way they did.
They are all the same, they are all prisoners and it doesnt matter whether they are matais or not they are all prisoners so I am so disappointed with the way things are run in there.
Contact for a comment yesterday the Prison and Correction Facilitys Spokesperson Sagaga Galu Frost confirm the incident, but denied the allegations that the prison is being run by matais.
The matter has been referred to police for investigations because the Mr. Nauer stabbed one of the prisoners with a multi-tools knife, he said.
Ask how a multi-tools get inside the cement wall Sagaga said those are all the things that the police are investigating.
We left the matter to the police for their investigations so you will have to wait until it is done and for me to answer all those questions.
However about the allegations that prison is being run by matais I say it is not true.
You see we are all about culture and traditions and so we every prison cell they have a leader which is a matai.
They are the ones that help out with the prisoners behaviours so they are like our consultant (pei ni faufautua).
We are not perfect and we have been accused of so many things but that is one allegation that I am sure of is that we are not run by matais they are only our helpers inside the prison cell.
The Office of the Press Secretariat issued a statement from Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, last night about the 60 Minutes story titled Paradise Lost. The statement is published in full below:
60 Minutes Interview with the Prime Minister
On Monday, 4th July 2016, Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi granted an interview with the 60 Minutes Television Crew from Australia who had requested comment from government on the Lauititi Tualima case, which was before the Court; and on security concerns and services at Tafa'igata Prison.
Last night (Sunday) the 60 Minutes segment aired in Australia and of the 13 minutes of story, less than two minutes were given to the Prime Minister's responses.
The Prime Minister, whose office is always open to the media, interviewed for more than half an hour with the team from 60 Minutes.
The Prime Minister wishes to clarify issues that have been raised by the TV programme, especially by members of the public via social media, the main points of which are outlined below.
Government has allocated funding in the current budget, for the new Prison, and work has already started to clear the land and begin the project.
The prisoner Lauititi Tualima has pleaded guilty to all charges, and is due for sentencing this week. He is kept in maximum security at Tafaigata.
There are no prisoners currently unaccounted for and despite misinformation perpetuated by false reports, this is not a regular occurrence for Samoa. The rise in escapes were mostly during the time of Prison reforms when the Police Services and Prisons Services were undergoing separation.
Tafaigata Prison has successfully kept almost all prisoners within the boundaries of the prison wall, with the exception of a few unrepentant criminals. Despite the actions of a few rogue individuals, the majority of the prison population are peaceful.
Samoa's Prisons and Correction Services has already begun implementing a programme of rehabilitation for prisoners.
These programmes are in the form of vocational training, counseling, educational, health and spiritual programmes. These have been introduced to provide a positive pathway for prisoners so they can better reintegrate back in to their families and communities without resorting to a life of crime.
The implementation of Australian Aid to Samoa, especially for the Samoa Police, is well-documented and publicised by the Australian High Commission in Samoa, as well as through media campaigns and coverage to raise awareness of the ongoing developments, capacity-building and resourcing. The allocation of donor funds is a two-way agreement between the donor agency and government. Deciding where funding is to be allocated is not up to one party alone.
Tourism is an economic mainstay for Samoa, and for the most part every Samoan is protective and respectful of all visitors and holidaymakers who spend time in our country.
But as in any other society, there are always going to be good and bad people. In an unfortunate and very sad turn of events for the Australian couple who were holidaying in Samoa, they were attacked by a convict and subjected to a harrowing experience that has been utilized to maximum effect by the 60 Minutes Television show.
This is the first time a case like this has happened in Samoa, and the outrage felt by viewers of the 60 Minutes Television show is the same outrage and anger felt by the people of Samoa. This is an isolated incident, caused by a career-criminal, and from which many lessons for the future have been learned.
As a country that has recently graduated from Least Developing Country status, Samoa is working hard towards improving state services so they are befitting of a Lower to Middle Income Status country.
Samoa's development agenda has been set out, and ensuring attention is given to hundreds of priority areas can be a challenge when faced with a tight budget.
As Cabinet showed almost three years ago when it approved the Commission of Inquiry in to Tafaigata Prison - and its subsequent report which highlighted issues that were eventually addressed - once problems have been identified, government does not hesitate to make the necessary changes to raise standards and improve services.
Samoa continues to improve its methodology and public safety is of paramount concern.
As the Prime Minister made clear in his interview with 60 Minutes, Samoa is not the same as Australia, and to compare the two governments in size, systems and budget is simplistic and naive.
Samoa has its own set of priority areas, and they are not without their challenges and harsh lessons.
Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and improve for the future, and that is the approach of government as issues such as these come to light.
Unfortunately, the portrayal of the Prime Minister was skewed to fit in with the 60 Minutes Television Show's angle of diminishing Samoa's efforts at improving Prison systems, infrastructure and processes; and in painting Samoa as a dangerous tourism destination.
This could not be further from the truth.
Samoa remains a peaceful and safe destination for visitors and tourists.
Government agencies continue to work together with village councils to provide safe and secure communities for the public and our visitors and tourists.
Government intends to work hard over the next twelve months to ensure that there is no more delay with construction of the new prison, and in light of this, an invitation was extended to the 60 Minutes team to visit Samoa in June 2017 for a follow-up story on the new prison, and to update on Samoa's development efforts.
Ontario, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/18/2016 -- Cognitive Enhancers Canada is a newly launched blog that has been developed by Richard Jarvis to be an online resource for those who are searching for effective brain drug to help them enhance their brain's function to maximize their potential. The website is a one man's pursuit to find out the best smart pills and supplement that enhance mental function. The website is able to provide in depth and impartial reviews on products by remaining independent, his main objective is to share reviews that allow people to buy the safest, most effective and useful products.
Recently, a blog article discussed where people can find Nootropics in Canada and how these particular type of brain function enhancement supplement can benefit those over the age of 50. Nootropics have become next big thing in health supplements, discussions about Nootropics and its benefits have made their way to mainstream media. The Nootropics supplement first drew public attention after being used by many well-known personalities, entrepreneurs and celebrities to improve brainpower in healthy adults over extended periods of time. Their apparent and undeniable results have made Nootropic supplements an essential health aid that people are adopting to improve overall cognitive process and quality of life.
The use of brain drugs have become more and more popular in Canada and for all the right reasons, Richard first started researching about this topic after he experienced a decrease in mental performance. After suffering from problems such as poor memory, lack of concentration, brain fog and more after turning 50 years old, he found that he can improve his situation through the use of smart pills and supplements. Subsequently, he developed the website to share his experiences and the data he had collected over the years to help others in a similar situation improve their lives.
To get a better understanding of why some products are more popular than others Richard has combined his own data and experiences with the hundreds of real user reviews from other online resources. He focuses on products that allow users to improve their ability, efficiency, as well as alertness to remember and improve concentration.
About Cognitive Enhancers Canada
Cognitive Enhancers Canada is a blog developed by Richard Jarvis to help other find the best smart pills, brain drugs and nootropics on the market through his reviews and articles. For more information, please, visit: http://www.cognitiveenhancers.ca/
Name: Richard Jarvis
Company : Cognitive Enhancers Canada
Location: Tweed, Ontario, Canada
Email: cognitivecanada@gmail.com
Huntingdon Valley, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/18/2016 -- The well-revered supplier of quartzite countertops to Bucks County, PA area homeowners, Cosmos Marble and Granite, just released an article via its website indicating tips for maintaining a clean kitchen. The flagship piece of a series entitled "Countertips" covered keeping kitchen counters clean specifically. Subsequent write-ups emphasizing other areas of the kitchen are expected to release in the months to come.
"Step one is elimination," said Noula Karagiorgos, who heads up Cosmos, noting further that "a lot people don't even realize how little they use certain things. We recommend that homeowners take a thorough look at their kitchen inventories and determine whether there are items taking up counter real estate that don't need to be there." Her article mentioned slow cookers as a typical culprit, and suggested that folks who do not use theirs regularly stow them away elsewhere.
The second part of the article offered a few organizational tips that people can follow after they finish purging. "One smart thing you can do is to fill non-kitchen related itemsthings like scissors, notepads, pens and pencilsin a basket in the back corner of your counter," Karagiorgos said. Other tips the piece gave included placing large utensils like spatulas and wooden spoons in a jar next to the stove, and placing K-cups together in a jar next to the coffee maker.
To read the article in full or to browse their selection of stone materials, please visit Cosmos Marble and Granite's website. To speak directly with the supplier of quartzite countertops to Montgomery County, PA residents, please dial 215-501-7542.
About Cosmos Marble and Granite
Cosmos Marble and Granite is a family owned and operated business with over 25 years of experience fabricating and installing custom countertops for their Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey customers. The company cuts and installs stone surfaces with precision, and their expertise has led them to receive a positive reputation among business owners and homeowners across the Mid-Atlantic. Cosmos Marble and Granite offers competitive prices, exceptional service and guaranteed customer satisfaction.
To learn more about Cosmos Marble and Granite, and to schedule a free estimate, please visit their website at http://cosmosmg.com/.
Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/18/2016 -- Macadamia nut was introduced in the early 1960s to the Kenyan highlands from Australia. Macadamia is a member of the family Proteaceae, native to Australia. Australia and Hawaii are the major producing areas of macadamia with others including eastern and southern Africa, and Central and Latin America. Several species of macadamia exist in Australia but only two species such as M. tetraphylla and Macadamia integrifolia and their hybrids are grown commercially. Production of macadamia nuts in Australia is mainly in eastern shore of Australia (northern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland). Currently, Hawaii is the largest producer of global macadamia, accounting for around 70 percent of total macadamia production worldwide followed by Australia, around 22 percent, rest is produced by other countries including Malawi, South Africa, Kenya, Guatemala, Mexico, California, Costa Rica, Brazil, New Zealand and China.
Tree nuts include almond, cashew, hazelnut, pistachio, walnut, macadamia, and pecan. Currently, macadamia accounts for around only one percent among all the tree nuts available across the globe. Almond nut dominates the nut segment, accounting for around 34 percent. Increasing health claims for macadamia have witnessed a surge in recent years, which if succeeded is expected to increase the consumption of macadamia nuts among consumers.
Global Macadamia Market Segmentation:
On the basis of application the global macadamia market is broadly segmented into food industry, and cosmetics industry. In food industry macadamia is widely used in confectionaries including chocolate bar, chocolate covered candy, ice cream and other baking products. In cosmetics industry it is used in shampoos, sunscreens, soaps and others.
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Geographically, global macadamia market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa. Currently, North America and Western Europe account for major market share for macadamia however, Asia Pacific excluding Japan is expected to grow significantly in the forecasted years.
Global Macadamia Market Dynamics:
Owing to increasing variety of applications of macadamia, various workshop are taking places in order to increase the international trade for macadamia and since capitalise the growing demand for macadamia. Adoption of macadamia in chocolate and ice cream among consumers is expected to drive the demand for global macadamia in the near future. The biggest restraint for macadamia market is increasing crop losses due to immature nuts and moldy / rotten nuts. The crop losses due to these type of nuts accounts for around 50 percent of the total macadamia wastage globally. Thereby, reducing inclination of crop growers for macadamia and thus, hampering the market growth.
There is a high opportunity to increase the market share of macadamia in terms of revenue across countries such as Mexico, China, South Africa and others. Companies are investing in these countries through promotional activities in order to increase the footprint of macadamia worldwide.
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Global Macadamia Market Key Players:
Some of the key players operating in the global macadamia market are Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company, MacFarms, Wondaree Macadamias, NAMBUCCA MACNUTS Pty Ltd, Golden Macadamias, Royal Macadamia (Pty) Ltd., Kenya Nut Company Ltd. and MWT Foods Australia.
Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/18/2016 -- The report "North America Water Storage Systems Market by Material Type (Concrete, Steel) Application (Hydraulic Fracture Storage & Collection, Onsite Water & Wastewater Collection), End-Use Industry (Municipal, Industrial) and Country - Global Forecast to 2020", The North America water storage systems market is projected to reach USD 4.14 Billion by 2020 from the estimated USD 2.67 Billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 9.1% between 2015 and 2020. Depleting freshwater resources, growing population, and growing concern for water conservation are key factors driving the North America water storage systems market.
Browse 53 market data Tables and 55 Figures spread through 126 Pages and in-depth TOC on "North America Water Storage Systems Market - Global Forecast to 2020"
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Hydraulic fracture storage & collection is the largest application segment of the North America water storage systems market
Hydraulic fracturing is one of the important processes used to extract oil & gas from depleting oil fields. Due to the decreasing productivity of conventional oilfields, producers around the world are increasingly adopting hydraulic fracturing and enhanced oil recovery techniques to earn greater production efficiency from the oilfields. Water storage systems are an important part of the hydraulic fracturing process, as water is extensively used in the process. And with increasing oil and gas activities, the demand of water storage systems for this application is expected to rise.
The hydraulic fracture storage & collection is the largest application segment of the North America water storage systems market. However, the rainwater harvesting & collection segment is expected to be the fastest growing, as concerns for depleting groundwater resources have encouraged the collection and use of rainwater, which may otherwise be wasted.
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Municipal, the lifeline of water distribution in any city or town, is the dominating end-user of the North America water storage systems market
Municipal is the largest end-user of water storage systems in North America, and the trend is expected to continue in the near future as well. Municipal applications include water supply to public systems in various cities, towns, and other domestic regions. Water from water treatment plants has to be stored, prior to its distribution through the municipal network. Water storage systems are used to store this water, and for the delivery of the water when needed. The growing population and rapid urbanization are factors driving the water storage systems market in the municipal end-use segment.
Among countries in North America, the U.S. uses the maximum number of water storage systems
The U.S. water storage systems market held the largest share of the NA water storage systems market, in terms of value, in 2014. The U.S. market is also expected to account for the largest share of the NA market by 2020 due to the high oil and gas activities, growing population, and increasing scarcity of clean water. The North American region also holds the largest proven shale gas reserves in the world, and the growing shale gas activities will significantly increase the demand for water storage systems in this region in the coming years.
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The research report segments the North America water storage systems market on the basis of material type, application, end-use industry, and country. In-depth company profiles of the major market players are also included in the report. Some of the major players in this market are ZCL Composites Inc. (Canada), Synalloy Corporation (U.S.), AG Growth International Inc. (Canada), Chicago Bridge & Iron Company N.V. (The Netherlands), BH Tank, Inc. (U.S.), Caldwell Tanks, Inc. (U.S.), CST Industries, Inc. (U.S.), Maguire Iron, Inc. (U.S.), Contain Enviro Services Ltd. (Canada), Tank Connection, LLC (U.S.), Crom Corporation (U.S.), and Snyder Industries, Inc. (U.S.).
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Point-of-Use Water Treatment Systems Market by Device (Tabletop Pitcher, Faucet-Mounted, Countertop, Under-the-sink), Technology (Reverse Osmosis, Distillation, Disinfection, Filtration), Application (Residential & Non-Residential) - Forecast to 2020
http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/point-of-use-water-treatment-systems-market-131277828.html
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MarketsandMarkets is the world's No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to a multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.
M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.
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Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/18/2016 -- The report "Recloser Market by Voltage Rating (Up to 15 kV, 16 kV 27kV, Above 27kV), by Phase Type (Three Phase, Single Phase, Triple- Single Phase), by Control (Electric, Hydraulic)), & by Region - Forecast to 2021", The recloser market is expected to grow from an estimated USD 853.1 million in 2016 to USD 1,033.0 Million by 2021, at a CAGR of 3.90% from 2016 to 2021. Increasing investments in distribution automation and growing need for efficient & reliable power are driving the global recloser market.
Browse 68 market data Tables and 42 Figures spread through 137 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Recloser Market Forecast to 2021"
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Increasing preference for recloser of capacity Up to 15 kV
Reclosers of voltage rating up to 15 kV are extensively used in commercial and residential applications in distribution networks; therefore the demand for these reclosers is high among all the segments.
Electric recloser is the largest segment, by control
Electric recloser control is used in most three phase and some single phase reclosers, due to its features, which include greater flexibility, advanced protection and automation functionality, and ease of programing in comparison to hydraulic recloser control. This recloser is highly customizable with a wide range of accessories, and can solve several application problems.
North America is the dominant market for reclosers
In this report, the recloser market has been analyzed with respect to six regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. The North America region holds the largest market for recloser, driven largely by the number of distribution automation developments in the U.S. The Asia-Pacific region will become the largest market by 2021, given strong smart grid initiatives, high investments in T&D infrastructure upgrade, energy efficiency measures, and renewable projects.
The recloser industry is fragmented and offers several opportunities for consolidation and growth in efficiency through an increase in economies of scale. The industry has low entry and exit barriers. The top players of the recloser market include ABB Ltd. (Switzerland), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Japan), Siemens AG (Germany), General Electric Company (U.S.), and Eaton Corporation (Ireland).
Dominant players are trying to penetrate developing economies and adopting various methods to grab the market share. The scope of the report aids market participants to identify high growth markets and help managing key investment decisions.
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MarketsandMarkets is the world's No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to a multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.
M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.
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An international team of scientists has obtained and analyzed the genome of five barley grains that date back to the Chalcolithic period, about 6,000 years ago.
The 6,000-year-old barley grains were unearthed in Yoram Cave, part of a complex of three difficult-to-access caves in the Judean Desert, Israel.
Yoram Cave is archaeologically significant as one of the rare cave sites with a single layer of human occupation according to current radiocarbon dating findings, the authors said.
Unlike most other Judean Desert caves, there are no findings from the later Roman and Byzantine Periods. In addition, it is one of the rare cave sites that have not suffered from modern looting or hyena burrowing.
It is the only Chalcolithic cave site in the Judean Desert that has been excavated by high-resolution sampling methods.
The genome of the Chalcolithic barley grains is the oldest plant genome reconstructed to date, according to the researchers who published their findings in the journal Nature Genetics.
These archaeological remains provided a unique opportunity for us to finally sequence a Chalcolithic plant genome, said senior co-author Dr. Ehud Weiss, from Bar-Ilan University.
The genetic material has been well-preserved for several millennia due to the extreme dryness of the region.
In order to determine the age of the barley grains from Yoram Cave, the scientists split the grains and subjected half of them to radiocarbon dating while the other half was used to extract the ancient DNA.
They also compared the ancient barley genome sequences to the genomes of extant wild (Hordeum vulgare ssp. spontaneum) and domesticated (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare) barley.
The comparison of the ancient seeds with wild forms from the region and barley landraces (local barley lines grown by farmers in the Near East) allowed the team to suggest the origin of the domestication of barley within the Upper Jordan Valley a hypothesis that is also supported by two archaeological sites in the surrounding area where the hitherto earliest remains of barley cultivation have been found, said senior co-author Dr. Tzion Fahima, from the University of Haifa.
The teams findings suggest that barley landraces grown in present-day Israel have not experienced major lineage turnover over the past 6,000 years, although there is evidence for gene flow between cultivated and wild populations.
Despite hybridization events between wild and domesticated barleys over the last six millennia, the overall picture is that the genomes of extant Levantine landraces have remained remarkably similar to how they were 6,000 years ago, the scientists explained.
This is despite climate change and anthropogenic transformations of local flora and fauna, including changes in agricultural practices, which might have favored the introduction of landraces from other regions that were better adapted to the changing agricultural environment.
Although we found no indications of major lineage turnovers in the barley crop from the Southern Levant, the eventful history of this region makes it likely that the farmers who grew cereals there several millennia ago are not the ancestors of those who tend the present-day landraces. One can speculate that conquerors and immigrants did not bring crop seeds from their old homelands but favored locally adapted landraces.
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Martin Mascher et al. Genomic analysis of 6,000-year-old cultivated grain illuminates the domestication history of barley. Nature Genetics, published online July 18, 2016; doi: 10.1038/ng.3611
Leszek Borysiewicz, the vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, has served as chief executive of the UKs Medical Research Council and deputy director at Imperial College London. In this interview, the biomedical researcher tells SciDev.Net about how Africa needs to fuse local policies with global efforts on scientific collaboration. He says better higher education could help the continent solve many of its problems and maximise its greatest asset its youth.
Whats required to boost science and technology investment in Africa?
Africa is the continent with the youngest people, one full of opportunities and with an amazing amount of young talents. I am an ardent believer that this talent will drive the science and technology agenda of the future. That is why we need to harvest every opportunity not just for Africas benefit, but also for the benefit of the whole world. These young people are going to make a lot of contributions thatll help all of us.
But these young talents often struggle to access education. How can the continent deal with this?
This is why you have to action things in parallel, not in series. Africa cant afford to wait for a primary education or secondary education initiative to bear fruit, because the rest of the world is moving forward quickly. The continent needs to engage the excellent, high-quality talents in the tertiary education centres and the universities to turn them into scientific leaders in their own domains. So, you cant just do primary or secondary education. You must also do tertiary education You must create an environment where economic growth can result from science and technology. This is a very complex and difficult issue, but there is a real opportunity to be able to do that, especially in some of the wealthiest African states.
Many African nations are struggling to come up with the money for higher education. What kind of encouragements can you offer political leaders?
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Q&A: Mozambiques education minister on PhDs for growth The only way you are going to get real success here is to take the brightest and best that youve got and give them the opportunity to really succeed. In science and technology and particularly that driving at economic development it is a game of winners. That means a country must back its 100 best young students and actually ensure that the facilities are provided for them in-country.Within that there is a real risk. You have got to take some of your budget and risk that budget in high stakes. The rest needs to go towards the technical know-how required to sustain economic growth. This is much more open to central strategies and direction. And then you need to have a third pot of investment, which is providing education that supports young people and improves their livelihoods.
What role do you envision for universities in this?
The key word is autonomy. Universities should be allowed to choose who they educate, how they educate and the subjects they deem important. That doesnt mean there should not be points of discussions. But it is a game of trust. It is a very big challenge because, of course, voters will want to know what is being delivered for their money. Its a huge investment people have to commit to. This is where courage is needed from policymakers and scientists because they are taking decisions which may prove to be unpopular. My anxiety is that, if those investments are not made today, the continent will continue to fall behind, because the scale of investment is not as high as is theoretically possible.
Do you think Africa can produce the next Einstein?
Einstein was a brilliant scientist, but he was a loner. He did not work with teams. Modern science requires large-scale teams. What I want is the confidence of African scientists to engage in global collaboration. In my own field of biomedicine, in cases where leadership is very much with the African investigators, they now participate, showing leadership in their domains and tackling global challenges such as HIV and many other conditions. I would like to see that extended to mathematics, into physics, into Africa space programmes. With that confidence in them, when they go back to their own institutions, they will try to play a part in other international consortia. Africa has got to be part of solutions and play its part.
Thinking inwards, are African entrepreneurs responding to African needs?
When I am challenged in Cambridge University about entrepreneurship, I always refer the questioner back to my experiences in the high streets of Kampala. This is where you see entrepreneurship. Every single time somebody sells or buys something there is an opportunity. There are various individuals dealing with decisions. And that is vital for local economies as local know-how is created.
But the real paradigm shift happens when innovation and research go hand-in-hand. This needs to be widespread because these opportunities can create wealth over and above just the local environment. For that, one of the key issues is the protection of peoples intellectual properties to ensure that they can operate effectively within the global setting. Here I think the African Union has a lot of work to do by ensuring that the entrepreneurs are appropriately protected. Only then can we begin to enjoy the products of their innovations both in-country and on the global scene.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 for major carriers Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular and a Canadian carrier, have received approval from the FCC. The FCC is one of the last hurdles that a mobile device need to go through before its actual release.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Verizon variant recently made an appearance on Geekbench, which confirmed some of the device's specs. The report also noted that it has just passed through the FCC review and approval, Ooyuz Beta News reported.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 FCC filing released the list of the model numbers that correspond to each carrier. Build SM-N930V is for Verizon, SM-N930A for AT&T, SM-930P for Sprint, SM-N930T for T-Mobile, SM-N930R4 for US Cellular and SM-N930W for a Canadian carrier.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is rumored to be followed by another Samsung flagship smartphone, the next-gen Samsung Galaxy Note 7. No specifications were released yet for the handset, which will be displayed at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event in New York on Aug. 2. Samsung also stated that the New York announcement of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will be live-streamed.
Meanwhile, another main player in the smartphone business Apple, is preparing to release its new flagship device in the coming weeks, as they recently revealed its iOS 10. Along with the release is the new set of features and upgrades for the current versions iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.
Apple's upcoming iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus variants, which are expected to highlight an almost identical feature to that of the current iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, will be the first hardware to ship with iOS 10 out of the box, Gadget Concept reported.
iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus handsets will also be the first Apple smartphones to ship with higher-resolution AMOLED displays, which have been a staple in Samsung's flagship devices for years.
A South African radio telescope was able to find 1,300 galaxies in a small corner of the universe where only 70 had been seen in the past.
According to Yahoo News, South Africa's MeerKat radio telescope has spotted thousands of galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe. The report said that in the past, there were only 70 galaxies found in that part of the universe, leading experts to claim that the said radio telescope has a phenomenal power.
The satellite, located about 600 miles north of Cape Town, took its first image using only 16 of its 64 activated planned dishes. When all the receptors work, it will form part of the multi-national Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which can be considered as the world's most powerful radio telescope.
The imaged that MeerKat produced was far better than what was expected. The Guardian reported that according to the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, Fernando Camilo, even with the current capacity, MeerKAT "is already the best radio telescope in the southern hemisphere."
There are at least 200 scientists, engineers and technicians who are working with industry, local and foreign universities to develop the technologies, hardware, as well as software systems for MeerKat.
The South African minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, said "this the first time that an African group of countries will host global science infrastructure of this character."
"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.
Meanwhile, the SKA, set to be fully operational by the 2020s, will have about 3,000 dishes fanned out across an area of one square kilometer which will allow astronomers to gaze in to space much deeper than ever before. CNN News also said that SKA claims that it will have a discovery potential 10,000 times more than the most advanced modern instruments. It was also said that SKA will explore black holes, supernovae, dark energy and will also look into the origins of the universe.
It was also said in the report that there are more than 20 countries that are known members of SKA. The main bases for operation is said to be in Australia and South Africa, but the project's main headquarters is in the United Kingdom.
Dumbo needs friends, too. Because they friendly creatures, elephants, despite being the largest land mammals on the planet, need to have social lives more than they need solitude.
Baby elephant drinking. When they are this young, they don't yet know how to use their trunk pic.twitter.com/XhbISNPTWR Life on Earth (@planetepics) July 17, 2016
A recent report from the National Geographic said that when it comes to zoo enclosures, it is not the size that mattered, but rather the size of their social circle. Elephants are revealed to engage with their surroundings, which means that opportunities to engage with their surroundings - aka have friends and company - may be more important to these creatures than space.
The research, which is the largest of its kind to date, showed that interactions and engagements are the most important for these creatures. Cheryl Meehan of the University of California said that this is the first coordinated set of studies that have been aimed at evaluating the behavioral and physical aspects of welfare for the North American Zoo Elephant Population. It is said that the research factored in behavior, body condition, and foot-and-joint health of the creatures.
Findings showed that spending time alone is an important risk factor for elephants, while spending time in larger social groups, especially those that included young animals, had a protective effect on them - meaning that they are social animals and their exposure to larger groups affect their behavioral health.
The study, published in the journal PLOS noted that among the social behaviors that should be of concern is when elephants sway or rock - as this indicates that their welfare has been "compromised," as seen in 75 percent of the elephants studied, but the exact causes of such behaviors are difficult t pinpoint.
That being said, scientists recommend zoos elephant programs to consider management changes to support larger group gatherings, preferably multi-generational. Seeker.com also noted that enrichment programs for elephants could also help their reproduction issues - a problem most commonly found in African elephants.
LAKE CITY, S.C. - The American Heritage Festival, staged on Graham Farm outside Lake City, will return Dec. 2-4 with Revolutionary War reenactors and colonial area sutlers.
This past September's inaugural festival entertained with music, lectures and living history exhibits.
Paul Graham, Graham Farm owner and event directed, said recently reenactors will set up Friday night and the festival starts at 9 a.m. Saturday morning.
"We are working on finalyzing the exact schedule and printing rack cards for the Myrtle Beach hotels, South Carolina visitor centers, and Southern Campaign national parks," he said.
"I'm encouraged with the amount of interest we're receiving from the historical and re-enactment community," he added. "Dik Daso, PH.D. at The University of South Carolina and expert on the Southern Campaign has written a series of articles on Graham's Historical Farm that will go in the South Carolina Living Magazine in the months leading up to the festival."
Also, he said, "We have commitments from the 2nd South Carolina Regiment, the 2nd North Carolina Regiment; the South Carolina Militia, the 3rd Continental Light Dragoons, and Fager Companie Von Roeder (reenactment groups)."
"Beth Webb (96 Fabrics based in Bishopville) is heading up the sutlers," he said. "She also is interested in organizing Christmas Caroling on Saturday night along with a bonfire and the night of lights display from our reenactors. Beth always does a top notch job and I'm looking forward to seeing her colonial Christmas village."
Christopher Kennedy and Francis Marion University are planning on supporting the festival as they did last year, which includes volunteer students, historical speakers and presentations, Graham said. "Chris was instrumental in getting the first year's event off the ground and we hope to have a longstanding relationship with him and the university.
Additionally, Charles Baxley, editor of "The Southern Campaign" online magazine has committed to speaking; and we're hoping to get historian J.D. Lewis to commit also. Fund raising efforts are underway, Graham said, and support by way of sponsorship is crucial to having a successful community-based event that showcases the area's heavy involvement in winning the American Revolution, Graham said.
Contact Graham at 904-200-1232 for details about the festival and sponsorships; or visit theamericanheritagefestival.com or grahamsfarm.weebly.com.
DARLINGTON, S.C. Two people were arrested Monday in connection with a double homicide in Darlington County claiming the life of a 9-year-old girl and her grandmother.
Cephas Cowick, 23, and Katherine Baucom-Cowick, 25, have been charged with murder in connection with this incident, according to Darlington County Sheriff Wayne Byrd.
Both suspects are being held at the Darlington County Detention Center.
This incident occurred at 2129 East Bobo Newsome Highway in the Swift Creek community, eight miles west of Darlington.
Shortly before noon Sunday, d eputies responded to the residence where the victims' bodies were found, according to Byrd.
Coroner Todd Hardee released the identities of the two victims as Deziyah Davis, 9, and her grandmother Denise Couplin, 52. Hardee ruled their deaths as a double homicide.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) crime scene unit, SLED child fatality unit, Darlington County Coroner's Office and sheriff's office are still investigating the incident.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said on Monday that NYK had pleaded guilty to a charge of criminal cartel conduct in a Federal court.
The charge relates to the transport of vehicles to Australia between July 2009 and September 2012.
This is the first criminal charge laid against a corporation under the criminal cartel provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act, ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.
NYK faces a maximum fine of which ever is greater of AUD10m ($7.59m), three times the benefit obtained, or if this cannot be determined 10% of its annual turnover in Australia.
ACCC said investigations continued into other alleged participants in the cartel.
In 2015 executives from NYK and K Line were jailed in the US for price fixing involving their car carrier operations.
Included is a plan for a $400m cash capital injection, by way of a rights issue, within six months of the proposed transaction.
The future equity funding of the mega marriage is among the key developments unveiled in a just released Business Combination Agreement (BCA) and separate Shareholders Support Agreement (SSA).
The combined entity, interestingly positioned as the new Hapag-Lloyd, will as expected remain a registered and stock listed company in Germany with its head office in Hamburg, subject to the necessary regulatory and contractual approvals.
Todays media release, providing the first concrete details of the nuptials, highlighted UASCs solid presence in Middle Eastern markets and trades and the new companys commitment to further strengthening this presence by establishing a fifth Hapag-Lloyd Regional Centre in Dubai.
Interestingly, Qatar Holding LLC (QH) and The Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (PIF), the majority shareholders of UASC, are poised to become key shareholders in the Hapag-Lloyd holding albeit minority on paper given QH is poised to take a 14% stake and PIF just 10%.
CSAV Germany Container Holding GmbH, HGV Hamburger Gesellschaft fur Vermogens- und Beteiligungsmanagement mbH (City of Hamburg) and, logistics billionaire Klaus Michael Kuhnes Kuhne Maritime GmbH will remain controlling shareholders of Hapag-Lloyd.
Under the terms of the SSA, some of the controlling shareholders of either side have committed to backstop the $400m cash capital increase by way of the proposed rights issue.
Following the integration, the new Hapag-Lloyd will rank among the five largest container shipping lines in the world, with 237 vessels and a total capacity of approximately 1.6m teu, an annual transport volume of 10m teu and a combined turnover of approximately $12bn.
The fleet of the combined company including UASCs six recently received 18,800 teu ships and 11 newly built 15,000 teu boxships (the last of which will be delivered soon) boasts an average age of 6.6 years and average size of 6,600 teu.
This strategic merger makes a lot of sense for both carriers as we are able to combine UASCs emerging global presence and young and highly efficient fleet with Hapag-Lloyds broad, diversified market coverage and strong customer base, said Hapag-Lloyd ceo Rolf Habben Jansen, describing the merger as another historic milestone for the German company following the successful integration of CSAV last year.
Furthermore it will give the new Hapag-Lloyd access to ultra large container vessels.
The combined company will have a global, diversified trade portfolio, with leading product offerings in the major East-West and North-South trades.
With this merger, we are embarking on an exciting new phase of UASCs growth, said Jorn Hinge, the president and ceo of UASC whose role in the merged company remains unclear.
Leveraging on UASCs heritage in the Middle East as well as our recent growth in other markets, the combined company will provide customers with valuable expertise and very efficient service offerings in all major trade lanes and markets around the world, he added.
The company will be the key player in the new THE Alliance consisting of Hanjin, Hapag-Lloyd, K-Line, Mitsui OSK Lines, Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) and Yang Ming. THE Alliance is scheduled to begin operation in April 2017 and will cover all East-West trade lanes including Asia-Middle East/Arabian Gulf and Red Sea.
Hapag-Lloyd and UASC now take the next step to further consolidate and shape the liner shipping industry. The new transaction is strengthening not only our market position, but also our service portfolio. The merger will create annual net synergies of at least $400m and save a significant amount of capital expenditure for the company, said Michael Behrendt, chairman of the Supervisory Board of Hapag-Lloyd.
Pending regulatory and contractual approvals, the merger is expected to be completed by the end of 2016. Until then, UASC and Hapag-Lloyd will continue to operate as stand-alone companies. Each company will also operate in its own alliance as currently structured until the end of March 2017, after which THE Alliance will commence operations.
It is the third major M&A transaction in container shipping in the last 12 months following CMA CGMs buy out of Neptune Orient Lines (NOL), and the merger of Cosco Container Lines and China Shipping Container Lines (CSCL) as part of the wider merger of their parent companies. Hapag-Lloyd has been repeatedly linked to a possible merger with NOL over the years but no deal has come to fruition.
The dying moments of both men were captured in video footage that went viral online.
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.
A recent series of shootings involving police have exposed deep fault lines through US society surrounding racial prejudice and gun violence.
"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.
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.
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.
An ex-US Marine and Iraq war veteran shot and killed three Baton Rouge cops on Sunday, in an act reminiscent of slayings in Dallas to avenge African-Americans killed by police.
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 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.
RELATED: Are We Getting Desensitized To Shootings?
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 don't 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.
RELATED: Cleveland Buying $20 Mln in Riot Gear for GOP Convention
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.
The gender-flipped remake of "Ghostbusters" that's currently in theaters has generated plenty of opinions, but one aspect of the film is certainly convincing. The female scientists defending New York City from eldritch terrors are depicted as smart, creative and well-versed in physics.
That's entirely by design: Thanks to a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the film is intended to be inspirational for young girls interested in the creative side of the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
RELATED: Whatever Happened to Parapsychology?
According to an interesting write-up at MIT News, the film's producers put quite a lot of effort into the story's technical elements and background details. Janet Conrad and Lindley Winslow, faculty members and researchers with MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science, were brought on board as consultants early in production.
Conrad, professor of physics with MIT, even lent a roomful of props to the filmmakers so that the characters' research offices would look authentic. Kristen Wiig's character, an up-and-coming physicist, has an office filled with books, scientific models and academic papers taken from Conrad's actual workspace.
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Yu Sunhui calmly recounted how she escaped North Korea by train, jumping off often to avoid the checkpoints. She had to swim across a river to China, where she was sold to human traffickers before she managed to make her way to South Korea in 2010.
Yus story is fortunate compared with her sister, who was eight months pregnant when she and her husband were arrested. The couple and their child died in a North Korean prison.
This pain is in no way unique, Yu said through an interpreter after arriving Sunday in San Francisco as part of a delegation of North Korean defectors visiting the Bay Area through Thursday.
The visit, organized by the Hometown Mission Association for North Korea in Seattle and Korean Churches Council of San Francisco, includes 29 refugees, most of whom are living in the South Korean capital of Seoul.
This is the third delegation Seattle Pastor John Yoon, who escaped North Korea in 1950 and has been living in the U.S. for 36 years, has arranged to help Americans better understand the plight of North Koreans. Previous groups visited the states of Washington and Hawaii.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration sanctioned North Koreas leader, Kim Jong Un, for human rights abuses and for moving ahead with the countrys nuclear and ballistic missiles programs. The sanctions freeze the assets of the ruler and other top North Korean officials and prohibit them from doing business with Americans.
Yoon said he wants North Korean refugees who now have the freedom to travel to learn about the United States, and he wants the world to better understand the abuses that North Koreans are undergoing at the hands of the government.
Since the 1950s, as many as 300,000 North Koreans have fled the country, primarily to China, Russia and South Korea. Human rights groups estimate that only about 200 North Koreans are living in the United States.
Ju Yeongsun, one of the visiting refugees, escaped from North Korea after her two children, husband and mother-in-law died of starvation in 1997 during the famine of the 1990s.
Ju, 51, was one of a just handful of delegates who were willing to speak to the media as many fear for the safety of family still living in North Korea. She and her 15-year-old daughter, Eunhye, are living in South Korea. She said through an interpreter that she has a lot of pain but places her trust in God.
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.
The visit was also supported by other groups, including the Asia Society Northern California, the Human Rights Foundation, the Consulate General of Korea in San Francisco and the Global Children Foundation.
Yu, 59, a former lieutenant in the North Korean military, recently obtained a green card and moved to Southern California, where she hopes to help other North Korean refugees better adjust to life in this country. She said she would like Americans to better understand North Korea.
North Koreans are taught the United States is the ultimate enemy, but Yu described her experiences with Americans as exactly the opposite of the way we were brainwashed.
Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver
Telling their stories
The public is invited to hear the stories of members of the delegation of North Korean defectors on Wednesday, July 20, at 6 p.m. at Full Gospel San Francisco Church, 1480 Ellis St in San Francisco.
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Yu Sunhui calmly recounted how she escaped North Korea by train, jumping off often to avoid the checkpoints. She had to swim across a river to China, where she was sold to human traffickers before she managed to make her way to South Korea in 2010.
Yus story is fortunate compared with her sister, who was eight months pregnant when she and her husband were arrested. The couple and their child died in a North Korean prison.
This pain is in no way unique, Yu said through an interpreter after arriving Sunday in San Francisco as part of a delegation of North Korean defectors visiting the Bay Area through Thursday.
The visit, organized by the Hometown Mission Association for North Korea in Seattle and Korean Churches Council of San Francisco, includes 29 refugees, most of whom are living in the South Korean capital of Seoul.
This is the third delegation Seattle Pastor John Yoon, who escaped North Korea in 1950 and has been living in the U.S. for 36 years, has arranged to help Americans better understand the plight of North Koreans. Previous groups visited the states of Washington and Hawaii.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration sanctioned North Koreas leader, Kim Jong Un, for human rights abuses and for moving ahead with the countrys nuclear and ballistic missiles programs. The sanctions freeze the assets of the ruler and other top North Korean officials and prohibit them from doing business with Americans.
Yoon said he wants North Korean refugees who now have the freedom to travel to learn about the United States, and he wants the world to better understand the abuses that North Koreans are undergoing at the hands of the government.
Since the 1950s, as many as 300,000 North Koreans have fled the country, primarily to China, Russia and South Korea. Human rights groups estimate that only about 200 North Koreans are living in the United States.
Ju Yeongsun, one of the visiting refugees, escaped from North Korea after her two children, husband and mother-in-law died of starvation in 1997 during the famine of the 1990s.
Ju, 51, was one of a just handful of delegates who were willing to speak to the media as many fear for the safety of family still living in North Korea. She and her 15-year-old daughter, Eunhye, are living in South Korea. She said through an interpreter that she has a lot of pain but places her trust in God.
The visit was also supported by other groups, including the Asia Society Northern California, the Human Rights Foundation, the Consulate General of Korea in San Francisco and the Global Children Foundation.
Yu, 59, a former lieutenant in the North Korean military, recently obtained a green card and moved to Southern California, where she hopes to help other North Korean refugees better adjust to life in this country. She said she would like Americans to better understand North Korea.
North Koreans are taught the United States is the ultimate enemy, but Yu described her experiences with Americans as exactly the opposite of the way we were brainwashed.
Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver
Telling their stories
The public is invited to hear the stories of members of the delegation of North Korean defectors on Wednesday, July 20, at 6 p.m. at Full Gospel San Francisco Church, 1480 Ellis St in San Francisco.
#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...
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On a day when Americas struggle with racial issues raged again, hundreds of Bay Area residents gathered in the East Bay to remember a mostly forgotten race-tinged incident that occurred 72 years earlier, taking the lives of 202 African Americans and leaving 50 more convicted of mutiny.
The annual commemoration of the horrific Port Chicago explosion took place not at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, which President Obama made a national memorial in 2009, but a couple of miles inland under a large, wind-buffeted white tent.
The site houses an old building on the Concord Naval Weapons Station that will be turned into a visitors center for both the memorial and a future East Bay Regional Parks District park encompassing 2,500 acres on the former military base.
The Port Chicago explosion occurred on July 17, 1944, as hundreds of workers, Navy men, merchant mariners and civilians were loading munitions onto a ship at the port on Suisun Bay, about 7 miles east of Martinez. It was dangerous work assigned mainly to black men in a segregated Navy.
A series of blasts powerful enough to break windows in San Francisco killed 320 people 202 of them black men enlisted in the Navy. Weeks later, after a protest in which hundreds refused to load munitions, 50 were arrested and eventually convicted of mutiny.
The group, known was the Port Chicago 50, has never been exonerated, despite an ongoing campaign. The incident, however, is credited by historians with leading to major changes in the Navy, including its reintegration.
Sundays ceremonies featured plenty of speeches, including one from Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, who noted that the Port Chicago tragedy was part of the same battle against systemic racism that continues today.
What happened here in Concord is important to remember, especially in this difficult time, he said.
DeSaulnier read from a letter sent by President Obama that noted the protesters were part of a long tradition of defiance and that their efforts led to important changes in the military.
Today we still look to the lessons of Port Chicago to remind us that our journey to fulfilling our highest ideals will remain incomplete until all people regardless of who they are or what color of their skin may be are afforded the fundamental human right they deserve as human beings, the president wrote.
Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said Obamas designation of Port Chicago as a national memorial was a commitment of him and those under him that (the National Park Service) tell stories that are inclusive.
Jewell admitted that before she was asked to speak at the event, she hadnt heard of Port Chicago and its history.
Neither Obama nor Jewell spoke of the possibility of exonerating the Port Chicago 50. But state Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, did.
We need one more thing from the president to acknowledge from the highest level of this country that those servicemen deserve exoneration, he said.
Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
A fire caused by a faulty light fixture sparked a blaze early Sunday that displaced 40 to 60 people living in a downtown San Jose apartment complex, San Jose fire officials said.
The displaced residents are expected to remain unable to return to the 12-story building at 235 E. Santa Clara St. for at least a week while the water damage is repaired and the building undergoes inspection, said San Jose Fire Capt. Mitch Matlow.
The fire was very quickly contained by the sprinkler system ... however, it left a great deal of the building damaged by water, Matlow said.
The fire, sparked when a fluorescent light just outside the elevator on the ninth floor caught fire, started at 4:22 a.m., but was extinguished in about 10 minutes, he said.
But because the power had to be turned off and the elevators no longer functioned, American Red Cross officials called upon firefighters to assist residents in retrieving some of their belongings from about 8 to 10 a.m., Matlow said.
No residents were injured, but one firefighter suffered minor to moderate injuries while helping residents get their possessions, Matlow said. He could provide no additional information about the injury other that it affected an extremity.
The Red Cross has provided temporary housing for the residents, Matlow said. The water and electrical damage must be repaired, and the city needs to inspect the building before residents can be allowed to return, he said.
Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver
Two dogs are still recovering from a trip to an Oakland dog park last week, where they were reportedly stabbed by a man with a knife.
Dog owner Robert Selhorst told KPIX 5 that he was in a makeshift dog park in Oakland on July 10 with his dogs Otis, Carolina and Ruth when the incident happened.
The three dogs were off leash in an empty, fenced-off area when they noticed a man and his puppy on the outside of the lot. Selhorst said his dog, Ruth, went under the fence to sniff the puppy when the owner "flipped out" and started slashing the dog with a nine-inch knife.
Carolina had followed, and was also caught up in the attack and slashed by the suspect. The man then grabbed his dog and ran from the scene, according to Selhorst.
"I looked at my other dog and it was cut up real bad, from one shoulder all the way down the other half side of its body," Selhorst said.
According to a GoFundMe page set up to cover veterinary costs, one dog has been sent home to recover while the other is still at the hospital being treated for its wounds.
The suspect was described as a dark man, about 6 feet tall, wearing shorts and a Panama hat.
Requests for comment were not immediately returned by Selhorst or the Oakland Police Department.
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The man killed over the weekend allegedly by a drunken off-duty New York City police officer was a Bay Area native one year away from graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, school officials said Monday.
Andrew Esquivel, 21, known to friends and relatives as Drew, was walking with a group on a busy block in Brooklyn when a rookie officer drove his sport utility vehicle onto the sidewalk early Saturday, hitting the four pedestrians and leaving them with serious head and body trauma, officials said.
Esquivel, who graduated from Healdsburg High School, was in New York working as a summer intern for the mobile marketing firm Appboy. On the MIT campus, he was a wrestling club officer and research assistant in the Laboratory for Computational Physiology, which develops electronic medical record systems for underserved communities, according to a letter sent Monday to students from MIT Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart.
He was set to earn a bachelors degree next year in electrical engineering and computer science.
He was just that person that everybody loved, said Scott Weidemier, Esquivels high school wrestling coach and family friend. He was a kind, genuine soul.
It was obvious how intelligent he was, Weidemier said. He put the rest of us dummies to shame.
The officer, 28-year-old Nicholas Batka, was arrested and charged with manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, assault, driving while intoxicated, driving while his ability was impaired and driving on a sidewalk, police said. Batka, who had been on the force since January 2015, was immediately suspended.
Witnesses to the crash at Bedford Avenue near North Eighth Street in Brooklyns Williamsburg neighborhood said Batka got back into his vehicle after the crash and tried to flee, according to the New York Daily News. The officer was due at work four hours later, the reports said.
MIT student Sophia Tabchouri, recent MIT alumnus James Balchunas and a New York University student were injured in the crash and taken to nearby hospitals, university officials said. Esquivel was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, and his peers were in stable condition Monday, police said.
Mike Efram, Esquivels calculus and computer science teacher at Healdsburg High, called the former student one of the best.
He would always come back and visit, Efram said. Wed always joke that hed go and do great things and come back and take my job. Its so unfair what happened.
Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Echo Park Records Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Echo Park Records Show More Show Less 3 of 3
Jeffrey Paradise, a San Francisco State University alum and founder of the popular Blow Up dance nights of yore, returns for what is expected to be another notorious Bay Area party.
Poolside, Paradises Los Angeles chillwave outfit with Danish producer Filip Nikolic, is scheduled for a DJ set Sunday, July 24, where else but poolside at the Phoenix Hotel (non-hotel guests are not allowed to swim in the pool). The event is part of the hotels Summer Sunday Series that runs from June to October.
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BATON ROUGE, La. 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.
Three other officers were wounded, one critically. Police said the suspect was killed at the scene. Although he was believed to be the only person who fired at officers, authorities said they were unsure 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 in the nearby town of Addis.
He was identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Mo., said East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden.
The 29-year-old black man 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.
Honorable discharge
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 spring of 2012. School spokesman Chris Bryant said university police had no interactions with him.
Kansas City police, some with guns drawn, converged on a house listed as Longs.
One witness described a gunman who was wearing all black and carrying extra clips of ammunition.
The shooting which took place just before 9 a.m., less than a mile from police headquarters came amid escalating tensions across the country between the black community and police. Just days earlier, one of the slain officers posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.
It was the fourth high-profile deadly encounter in the United States involving police in two weeks. The violence has left 12 people dead, including eight police officers, and sparked a national debate over race and policing.
President Obama urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions.
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. Everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further.
Authorities initially believed that other assailants might be at large but hours later said that no other active shooters were on the loose. They did not discuss the gunmans motive or any relationship to the wider police conflicts.
Long search for shooter
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.
Almost 2 minutes after the first report of an officer getting shot, an officer on the scene is heard saying police do not know the shooters location.
Almost six minutes pass after the first shots are reported before police say they have determined the shooters 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.
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 Sheriffs Office.
There simply is no place for more violence, said Gov. John Bel Edwards. That doesnt help anyone. It doesnt further the conversation. It doesnt address any injustice perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself.
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.
Jackson 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.
Some drug runner out there is not winning employee of the month honors.
Law enforcement found 35 bales of marijuana from an abandoned fishing boat on the beach near Big Sur on Thursday. That's almost 900 pounds of weed.
The Monterey County Sheriff's Office was tipped by a caller who saw three suspects offshore in the boat and initially believed they were in distress. When the cops arrived, the suspects were nowhere to be found and their massive haul was left behind.
"If this was a landing spot, there was someone who was supposed to meet them with a vehicle," sheriff's commander John Thornburg said. "... We have run into people who are heavily armed."
"This could be a lot of money for somebody."
Big Sur has become a popular place for drug runners to dock in recent years as Southern California stops have been shut down by law enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security is investigating.
One homeowner is apparently so fed up with stampeding "Pokemon Go" players invading their yard that they posted a harsh note, and they even brought MC Hammer and Crystal Pepsi into the argument.
The sign, whether real or not, plays on the friction between Pokemon players and bewildered non-players who might unwittingly host Pokestops or gyms. And it -- shudder -- draws a parallel between Pokemon and other fads.
CLEVELAND 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 GOPs presumptive nominee for president. There are still some Republicans trying to stop him, but the partys 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.
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.
Authorities said three police officers were shot and killed Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., where the slaying of a black man by white police officers this month led to protests nationwide and heightened concerns about the state of race relations in America.
Trump quickly blamed a lack of leadership for that shooting, taking to his Twitter and Facebook pages to say he was grieving for the officers killed.
We demand law and order, Trump wrote.
Protests are widely expected outside the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, where the citys 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 tapped into a wave of populist anger that few others saw as the race for president began last year.
Trump has thrilled supporters with a willingness to hurl insults at Democrats and Republicans alike. 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 Latinos, 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 doesnt have natural filters, New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox said. Lets see about the acceptance speech. Thats probably going to be the most watched acceptance speech ever, because its going to be dramatic. People dont know exactly what its going to be.
ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT After inflicting heavy losses on weakened Afghan security forces a year ago, the Taliban under new leadership have been surprisingly slow to ramp up attacks at the midpoint of the traditional fighting season, senior American military officers said Sunday.
Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he is cautiously encouraged by a relative slackening of the Talibans aggressive tactics.
Citing a lower level of violence from the Taliban than we have seen in the past, Dunford was quick to say that while he believes Afghan forces have seized battlefield momentum, there are no assurances that the balance wont shift again.
Weve seen peaks and valleys with the Taliban before, but certainly on the ground right now the Afghan forces have the momentum, he said, speaking aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane en route from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Stuttgart, Germany. Dunford spent three days in Afghanistan speaking with U.S. and Afghan commanders, troops and officials. On Sunday, he met with President Ashraf Ghani and senior members of Ghanis government in Kabul.
Dunford commanded all U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan from February 2013 to August 2014.
Dunford said he found Afghan commanders and officials heartened by President Obamas decisions to keep 8,400 U.S. troops in the country when he leaves office, more than previously planned, and to authorize more aggressive use of U.S. forces in support of Afghan offensive actions.
Its a psychological turning point for the Afghan government and its security forces, he said, while adding: Im not sure its a turning point on the ground for actual war fortunes.
California community college system
Californias community college Board of Governors on Monday named a regent of the University of California as chancellor of the nations largest college system, with more than 2 million students and 113 schools.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley will continue to serve on the Board of Regents, to which he was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014. He is also president of Long Beach City College, a post he has held since 2007. He will give up that job to become the community college systems chancellor.
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If you watched the Disney movie 'Mulan' and came away thinking women are awesome and just as capable as men, you are clearly not Republican Mike Pence.
Donald Trump's running mate once wrote a scathing op-ed and pretty poor movie review of 'Mulan', Buzzfeed recently uncovered. The op-ed ran in 1999 on Pence's talk radio website.
"Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulan's ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis with her cloddish cohorts," Pence wrote.
There are many things to unpack about that sentence so feel free to pause for a moment and let it all wash over you.
Even worse, Pence goes on to argue that Mulan's romance with her superior officer (which, by the way, she doesn't act on until she leaves the army) proves that women can't control their feelings. It's why they have to stay in the kitchen, the only hormone-free zone in a woman's life.
"You see, now stay with me on this, many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually," Pence wrote. "Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan."
Mulan makes young girls mistakenly believe that they too can become soldiers, Pence argues. Which is obviously ridiculous because how can women serve in the military when they have breasts?! Mike understands women.
"I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan's story will cause a quiet change in the next generation's attitude about women in combat," Pence cautions.
For the record, 'Mulan' is based on a sixth century Chinese ballad that celebrates a legendary female warrior, not the whole cloth product of the liberal Disney agenda. Nonetheless...
"Moral of story: women in military, bad idea," he concludes.
Mike Pence has never served in the military, unlike the 200,000-some women who are currently on active duty.
With millions of rentals in less than a decade of operation, it's no wonder Airbnb has had its share of notable nightmares. While the overwhelming number of experiences are no doubt a success, the problem rentals are still going to happen, no matter how hard Airbnb tries to keep travelers and hosts safe and confident at all times.
Having had my own less than perfect Airbnb experience recently, I was curious how mine stacked up to other tales of woe. In doing so, I was surprised at how few genuine Airbnb horror stories there are considering the thousands of these rentals every day.
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PARIS Authorities investigating the truck driver who killed 84 people in a Bastille Day attack painted a complex picture Monday of a man who did not seem devout but had recently become interested in jihadist violence and researched past attacks in France and the United States, including one on a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said by all accounts Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel drank, ate pork and had an unbridled sex life. But his computer and phone showed online searches relating to the Islamic State and other jihadist groups.
A search of his computer illustrates a clear ... and recent interest in radical jihadism, Molins said, adding that Bouhlel had recently grown a beard and told people it was for religious reasons. While officials have said the attack was obviously premeditated, they have not found any evidence that Bouhlel had coordinated with an extremist network.
Internet searches on Bouhlels computer included Islamic propaganda chants, the terms horrible deadly accidents, and the recent attacks against the gay nightclub in Orlando, police officers in Dallas, and the killing of two police officials in Magnanville, outside of Paris.
As investigators continue to look into the attackers motives, his uncle in Tunisia, Sadok Bouhlel, said his nephew had been indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice. He said Bouhlels family problems he was estranged from his wife and three children made him easy prey for the Algerian recruiter.
Mohamed didnt pray, didnt go to the mosque and ate pork, said the uncle, a 69-year-old retired teacher, in the drivers hometown of Msaken, Tunisia. The uncle said he learned about the Algerian from extended family members who live in Nice.
The July 14 carnage in the southern city of Nice has shaken and angered a country still reeling from the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people at a concert hall, restaurants and cafes, and the national stadium, and a separate January 2015 Paris attack.
On the citys Promenade des Anglais, passersby piled garbage on the spot where Bouhlel was killed. At least one man was seen spitting on it, while another urinated on the pile to applause.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said 59 people were still hospitalized after Thursdays attack, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
BEIJING China is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, the government said Monday, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijings claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainans maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from Monday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
All rate requests are still preliminary and have to pass muster with the superintendent of insurance. The comment period is open until the end of August. The rates are not necessarily an indication of what might happen with group or commercial plans for government workers and large businesses. Those are based on the claim record of that employee group.
If Texas ultimately prevails, it could receive more than just extra water. New Mexico could be forced to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, experts say.
Just when you were getting over sticker shock for 2016 health insurance premiums, Bruce Krasnow reports premiums could jump even higher next year . Molina Health Care, for example, is seeking approval for a 24 percent increase.President Barack Obama says hes open to adding a public option where individuals would buy their health insurance directly from the government.Rio Ranchos elected officials salaries could be tied to the estimated median household income after city elections in 2018. The proposed increases got a thumbs-up vote last week. If the measure eventually works its way onto the books, the mayors salary would jump from just more than $30,000 to $59,000. City councilors' pay would also increase to $16,588.Speaking of money flows, New Mexico House Republican candidates appear to have a healthy campaign cash advantage headed into the fall election, but Steve Terrell reports that some state Democrats arent far behind.A high-stakes interstate water battle between Texas and New Mexico is heating up. Lawyers in the Lone Star State contend that New Mexico farmers are illegally curbing the flow of river water before it reaches the border. As the case makes its way through the legal system, a court-appointed master is recommending a motion to have the lawsuit dismissed or denied.Albuquerque and Santa Fe are used to hosting big-name movie stars for film and TV productions. Now its Las Cruces turn for celebrity sightings. Thereports that Cybill Shepard and James Brolin will be working on a comedic drama in southern New Mexico this fall.
That somehow massive contingent of unfortunately vocal assholes who have spent the last year or so trashing the new Ghostbusters movie online (before it had even come out, we might add) because it dared to (gasp!) feature four female leads may as well shut up nowit's one of the best movies this year! The reboot from Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids) and Parks and Recreation writer Kate Dippold is actually everything you want and more, so, like good scientists, let's examine the facts here.
We'll admit that we were, shall we say, apprehensive about Feig's new foray into the universe. In our defense, that first trailer was horrible, and we were actually pretty much prepared to write the whole thing off. Crisis averted. The new cast is completely stellar, with enjoyable and hysterical performances from everyone. Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids) shines as nervous physicist Erin Gilbert who, earlier in life, wrote of the metaphysical with brash fellow scientist, Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy). Through a spooky series of events spurred by a mysteriously sinister hotel bellman, the pair, along with sassy subway worker Patty Tolan (SNL's Leslie Jones) and ultra-weird/ultra-genius Jillian Holtzmann (a scene-stealing Kate McKinnon, also of SNL) get down to the business of bustin' ghosts in the funniest of ways. Soon the fearsome foursome opens a lab/business of sorts, and along with their boneheaded receptionist, played brilliantly stupid by Thor's Chris Hemsworth, they tackle horrors from the afterlife.
Those who may look back to the original film with rose-colored glasses will find plenty to love here, so long as they haven't completely made up their minds before they enter theaters (or they aren't like those ridiculous jerks who would hate a film for a female cast). Let's really think about the original Ghostbusters for a moment. Yes, it's beloved, sacred even, but some of the dated material, pacing and special effects have begun to show wear and tear. Now, before you show up at our offices with torches and pitchforks, know that we're absolutely fans; it's just that an update hasn't hurt the franchise whatsoever, and we're a little confused by the ire since a vast number of films these days are either remakes, reboots or sourced from other material.
This Ghostbusters strikes the perfect balance between new and funny enough to keep our attention and throwback/fan service-y enough to click our nostalgia into high gear. The lead actors each bring something different to the film, and the chemistry between them all is palpable. Wiig's Erin is vulnerable yet capable, and her inability to rein in her objectification of Hemsworth is a rich area for laughs. McCarthy turns in an excellent performance as well, which is particularly notable in that she generally winds up saying something awkward and then falling down in most of her films. Jones brings the flavor of the everywoman and sheds her usual angry persona for disarmingly sweet yet tough-as-nails. McKinnon, however, is everything as the fearless Holtzmann, a scientist/engineer whose professional curiosity overcomes her fight-or-flight response at every turn (and she provides one of the most badass fight sequences we've seen in ages).
Pepper in shriek-worthy cameos from almost all of the original cast and supporting roles from fairly prominent actors and comedians like Michael K Williams, Matt Walsh, Zach Woods, Cecily Strong and many more, and we've got one of those fun summer blockbusters like they used to make. Oh sure, there's a whole mess of CGI and a small number of missteps to nitpick, but as an overall product, Ghostbusters completely nails it. It's entirely OK to love the original movies and to feel like a part of your life has been messed with, but let's be real hereGhostbusters was never about high cinema or emotional storytelling. Hell, it's about scientists who build nuclear lasers with which they capture ghosts; relax. Assuming you do make an effort to keep an open mind, you'll find a well-executed take on a beloved property that stands up to its predecessors and maybe even outdoes them now and again. You ain't afraid of that, are you?
Ghostbusters
Directed by Paul Feig
With Wiig, McKinnon, McCarthy and Jones
Violet Crown, Regal
PG-13, 116 min.
Santa Fe Reporter
Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world's biggest shipbuilder, has beaten out its largest rival for the contract to build a $493 million ice-capable naval tanker for the New Zealand Defence Force which is part of an increased emphasis on the country's strategic interests in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
Hyundai and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, both listed on the Korean stock exchange, were shortlisted last year for the contract to replace the 30-year-old tanker HMNZS Endeavour, which is due to retire in 2018, leaving a two-year gap before the new vessel is delivered in 2020.
The Hyundai-built tanker is a step up for the Navy in terms of size and will be capable of refuelling two ships at a time while underway. It will have a range of 6,400 nautical miles, less than the Endeavour's 10,000-mile range, but with a faster speed of 16 knots versus 14 knots.
The vessel will be capable of supporting two Mini Typhoon cannons and a Phalanx CIWS system for defence against anti-ship missiles. It will also have a helicopter deck and space for at least 12 TEU shipping containers.
The Defence White Paper 2016 identifies Antarctica, the Southern Ocean and New Zealand's territorial waters as strategic challenges looking out to 2040, noting "a rising sophistication, range and number of actors operating within New Zealands Exclusive Economic Zone, Southern Ocean and the South Pacific".
The tanker will be able to work alongside an ice-strengthened offshore patrol vessel, allowing the Defence Force to conduct patrols in the Southern Ocean following the introduction of new international Polar Code regulations in 2018, according to the paper.
Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee says the tanker's ice-strengthening and "winterisation" features will allow it to deliver fuel and other goods to support Scott Base and McMurdo Station, during summer months once an icebreaker has cleared a path. And it will demonstrate New Zealand's long-term commitment to the Antarctic Joint Logistics Pool with the US, he said.
The IHS Jane's 360 website reported last year that Hyundai and Daewoo were looking to grow their naval support vessel order books. Daewoo had worked with UK-based BMT Defence Services to bid for contracts in Australia and New Zealand, having won a 452 million pound contract with the UK Ministry of Defence for four vessels and a contract for a similar tanker for Norway the following year.
Hyundai Heavy shares have gained 24 percent this year while Daewoo has fallen about 12 percent.
BusinessDesk.co.nz
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The Chinese government wants New Zealand to maintain its reputation for "not being difficult" on trade issues, fearing that if Wellington imposes countervailing duties on Chinese steel imports, other countries will escalate the international backlash against its steel producers.
That is the dynamic that appears to be behind the unsourced reports published in weekend media of China 'heavying' New Zealand over key exports such as dairy, wool and kiwifruit if the New Zealand government decides Chinese steel is being dumped at damagingly low prices in the local market and imposes countervailing duties to protect local steelmakers New Zealand Steel and Pacific Steel.
Chinese producers are undercutting producers in other countries at a time of severe global over-supply, with the US seen by Beijing to be leading a global push for heavy countervailing duties on Chinese steel imports. The US imposed duties on Chinese steel imports of more than 500 percent earlier this year.
The issue was high on the agenda at a China-European Union summit meeting last week and last Friday China warned the Brazilian government against using "protectionist" measures to stifle Chinese steel imports by using the same criteria as the US to determine whether steel products are being dumped in Brazil.
New Zealand is one of only a few countries not currently penalising Chinese steel imports with punitive countervailing duties, but BusinessDesk inquiries confirmed today that the local units of Australian metals group Bluescope had sought an anti-dumping inquiry for Chinese steel from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment some months ago.
The government agency has yet to decide whether to investigate.
The threats, which dairy exporter Fonterra Cooperative Group says it has "no knowledge of" were also initially denied by a former senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade negotiator, Charles Finny, who says he had been misreported in the Sunday Star-Times newspaper by appearing to give credence to the Chinese threats.
However, by early afternoon today, Finny said he had received a credible report from a highly placed diplomatic source that the Chinese government is concerned.
"It seems to be that New Zealand has a reputation for not being difficult for China on issues of this sort, unlike the US, who do this sort of thing at the drop of a hat," said Finny. "The concern is that if New Zealand were to find they were subsidising (their steel makers) then the whole world would feel comfortable in following suit."
However, other former trade negotiators continued to express doubts about the seriousness of the issue.
Speaking to Radio Live, New Zealand's former ambassador to the World Trade Organisation, Crawford Falconer, said that "a hurry-up, a threat, a comment" was "not unusual" in trade relations and it only mattered if it was a confirmed government position.
That was, as yet, unknown.
"If this was a considered thing from serious people then that's a pretty ugly event", but if it was the thoughts of a "mid-level Urg in the Agriculture Ministry, then don't panic", Falconer said.
Stephen Jacobi, now acting director of the New Zealand China Council and also a former trade negotiator, continued to maintain the issue was "a storm in a teacup".
"If there are issues, we need to see more real evidence," he said. "It's still all hearsay as far as I can see."
Trade Minister Todd McClay, travelling in Indonesia with Prime Minister John Key, has sought clarification from the Chinese embassy in Wellington, but his office said late this afternoon that he expected to make no further comment today.
BusinessDesk.co.nz
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NEW DELHI: 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'.
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NEW DELHI: 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 Leyland's 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% 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% 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.
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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 ITprofessionals 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.
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Peter Thiel is an icon of the tech community and entrepreneurs everywhere. So whatever he says or does is closely watched the world over. When he took the stage at the Republican Convention, his speech was probably the most significant besides those by the Trump family. So what happened to the iconoclastic Peter Thiel? Is he just a regular guy riding the Trump gravy train of free PR? How did a staunch lifelong supporter of libertarianism end up on that stage?
First some background on Mr. Thiel. Born in West Germany he moved with his family to California when he was one year old. Did his BA and JD at Stanford. His big entrepreneurial success came with his founding of PayPalmade around $50 M from that. His big investor success came when he wrote the first $500,000 check to Facebook and joined its boardmade over one Billion dollars from that. Then there are dozens of other investments such as in LinkedIn and Palantir that made him a ton more money. All notable achievements but nothing that would set him apart from a couple of hundred tech stars in Silicon Valley.
What made Peter Thiel interesting were his grand visions for America and for humanity. When he was at Stanford he started The Stanford Review, a Libertarian college newspaper. And his libertarian streak has been visible in many of his initiatives. He funded something called seasteading which is a plan to establish independent ocean communities (think floating countries in international waters) with their own social and legal structures, not tethered to any nation. Besides being a member of the Libertarian Party he has funded various candidates that share those views, including supporting Ron Paul for president in 2008.
Mr. Thiels other initiatives include funding anti-aging research that will help us live forever, fellowships for kids who drop out of college to start companies, supporting causes to protect freedom of journalists, various gay rights causes, and so on. All of these initiatives coupled with his strong libertarian views made him a very special person, mentioned in the same breath as Elon Musk.
2016 is a unique year in American politics. Two very unpopular and flawed candidates are set to battle it out. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton arouse such passions of hate from the opposite camps that this election is dividing this country as never before. The libertarian ticket consists of two tested former governors, Gary Johnson of New Mexico and Bill Weld of Massachusetts. Both conservative libertarians, much in the mold of Peter Thiel and everything he has stood for his entire life.
An iconoclast like Mr. Thiel could have impacted libertarianism with a $100 M check that would have finally broken the stranglehold of the two party system paving the way for a responsive political system in the future. But what does Mr. Thiel do when presented with this opportunity that he so uniquely placed to capitalize on? He gets on the stage with Mr. Trump and lends his support to a cause ofanti-immigrant, sexist, racial, and religious bigotry. So much for Peter Thiel.
NEW DELHI: 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.
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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The two-year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner triggered a massive rally and march through the streets of Staten Island Sunday evening.
Led by Garner's daughter, Erica Garner, hundreds of protesters marched through the North Shore demanding justice they believe has yet to have been served since the tragic incident on July 17, 2014.
"It's been two years since we've been talking and rallying," Erica Garner said, "how much more talking do we have to have?
"All these DOJ investigations and no one has been convicted for the murder [of my father]."
At around 5 p.m., the group of protesters began to gather in front of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in St. George.
Before the crowd began their march, Erica Garner briefly addressed her supporters -- saying that goal was to march "peacefully in the name of my father."
"Erica [Garner] is more than a greiving daughter at this point," said protester Alyssa Phean. "She has been a political and community leader."
Nearly 300 protestors shut down traffic, in both directions, along Richmond Terrace. They first stopped on the stairs of Borough Hall -- where NYPD officials arrived to escort the group -- before circling around from Stuyvesant Place to Bay Street.
"We've been marching for years asking for peace and equality," said Akeem Browder, brother of Khalief Browder -- who was beaten by inmates and prison guards in Rikers Island for three years before minor charges against him were dropped.
"Asking has gotten us nowhere -- we don't don't need police presence in our communities."
The group then made their way to the infamous death site near Tompkinsville Park -- where Eric's widow Esaw Garner wept.
Erica Garner gave a final speech -- saying that in the midst of such recent tragedies between police and African Americans, the Black Lives Matter has been unfairly compared to "terrorist groups."
"Just like how we marched down these streets today, [Black Lives Matter] is peaceful," she said. "We're being looked at like terrorists -- but that's not going to scare us."
The hundreds of men, women and children participating in the march then laid in the center of Bay Street, just feet from where Eric Garner was restrained by police, and chanted "I Can't Breathe."
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.
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.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The dry heat beaming down from the sun's rays couldn't stop family, friends and supporters from rallying together on the two-year anniversary of Eric Garner's death.
About 50 people came out Sunday afternoon behind the banner of "Black Lives Matter" in front of Bay Beauty Supply, at 202 Bay St. in St. George, where Eric Garner died in police custody.
Jewel Miller, Garner's ex-girlfriend and mother to their daughter, Legacy, had only one thing to say:"Two years later, no justice on Staten Island."
But Garner wasn't the only one being remembered on Sunday.
Some of the other names mentioned were Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, India Lagerfeld, Sandra Bland, Aiyana Jones, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Nicholas Heyward and Tamir Rice.
"It has been too many years coming out here fighting for the same thing, and nothing is being done," said Donna Heyward, step-mother of 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward who was killed more than 20 years ago.
"It's heartbreaking to everyday turn on the news and hear about somebody being killed. You can't even go onto social media anymore without seeing the same thing. It's sickening and disheartening," she added.
During the march toward the 120 Precinct, rally participants chanted, "I still can't breath," "Rise up to stop police terror," "Organize to end police brutality, and "Genocide, racist hate, America was never great."
"I have grandkids. I don't want them to grow up in a society like this," Heyward said. "Something has to be done and changes have to be made."
"Give us some justice, which is a long ways away," she said when asked about what she hopes these marches can accomplish. "I still always hope for that every time I march and rally. I don't know when it's coming, but I'm going to stop coming out to support."
Delegates.jpg
People cheer as delegates gather on the floor during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/John Locher)
CLEVELAND, OH - Where else can one find Christians for Trump and Bikers for Trump hanging out, shooting the breeze?
In Cleveland, of course.
It's day one of a four-day all-out party, a congregation of unexpected allies in mainstream Republicans, leather-wearing bikers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, die-hard conservatives and Tea Partiers all gathered to nominate Donald Trump and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and Staten Islanders have a front row seat to the action. Well, almost -- it's pretty darn close.
Through all the rallies, speeches, drinking, protests, street performers and cops -- cops everywhere -- the four men and one woman who make up the Island delegation have seen a lot. And it's only day one.
Councilman Joe Borelli, a delegate and official surrogate for the Republican National Convention, has long been the face of the Trump campaign on Staten Island and the general New York City area, appearing on dozens of TV news programs to support the candidate and the GOP.
On Monday morning, he spoke with Kevin McCullough on AM 970 The Answer based in New York City, located on radio row in the convention center, some of the 15,000 members of the media that descended on the city.
Borelli, former Councilman Vincent Ignizio, now the CEO of Catholic Charities on Staten Island, and Island GOP Chair John Antoniello, all delegates, made their way to the convention center, Quicken Loans Arena, Monday for an early afternoon session, voting on the convention rules ahead of the evening session, where Trump is expected to introduce his wife, Melania Trump, one of the many speakers slated.
Ignizio marveled at the fourth-row seats he got, as the New York delegation was front and center, directly opposite the center stage podium.
Assemblyman Ron Castorina Jr. and Mary Reilly, a former Island GOP chair, are alternate delegates and both attended the early afternoon session to hear some speeches as an appetizer to the big name speakers later: former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Melania Trump and many others.
Reilly was excited to hear GOP women speak: RNC Co-Chair Sharon Day, former Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, Carrie Almond, president, National Federation of Republican Women, and more.
Castorina also met with Republican members of the state Assembly delegation Monday, speaking about the party platform and the heroin and opiate epidemic. He also met with people from South Carolina and California to talk about the platform.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich directed his comments to the New York delegation Monday morning, including all the Staten Island representatives, where he addressed the nation's safety issues.
Giuliani is one of the many speakers slated for this evening, and Castorina is looking forward to it, especially eager to hear how he expands on his controversial statements last week about the Black Lives Matter movement, calling it "inherently racist."
TONIGHT: Follow Rachel Shapiro's live updates with the Staten Island delegation from opening night in Cleveland
He and Antoniello are both looking forward to hearing from Melania Trump as well, speaking about her husband's bid for the presidency.
Reilly too supports Trump, forgiving his gaffes and politically incorrect statements in favor of policies she supports.
"He's a typical New Yorker," she said. "He speaks his mind, sometimes doesn't think fast and you get into trouble that way. It happens to all of us but he's in the limelight constantly, he's very passionate. That passion sometimes boils over."
Discussing Giuliani's administration during and after 9/11, Antoniello recalled his leadership during a time of national disaster.
He was not only the mayor of New York City, he was the country's mayor and unified people.
Antoniello hopes to see that happen again in light of recent terrorist attack in Orlando and police killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
"We need a unifier, and I think Donald can be that unifier," Antoniello said. "He has a strong personality, he will take a very definite stand on these issues ... I think he's following in step with Rudy very, very closely to help bring American back where it should be."
Follow Rachel Shapiro on Twitter @Writingrachel as she covers the RNC convention in Cleveland July 18-21.
Tune in to SILive.com beginning at 7 p.m. for a live blog of convention events.
Nws Gingrich
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had been eyed as a VP for Donald Trump. He speaks Monday morning to the New York delegation at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Staten Island Advance/Rachel Shapiro)
CLEVELAND, OH - One day after a gunman shot and killed three police officers and wounded three more in Baton Rouge, the theme at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland Monday was "Make America Safe Again," and Newt Gingrich spoke to the delegation from New York, likening terrorists to wolves, on the prowl for innocent sheep.
Not on the original list of scheduled speakers for the state Republican delegation, Gingrich, the former speaker of the House in the 1990s and fingered as a possible Donald Trump vice presidential pick before he decided on Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, was blunt about America's problems.
TONIGHT: Follow Rachel Shapiro's live updates with the Staten Island delegation from opening night in Cleveland
"Safety, both at home and abroad, may well become the biggest issue and certainly should be at the center of our thinking," he said.
Radical Islamic terrorists -- wolves -- are eating sheep and the country's leaders aren't doing enough, he said.
"It's as though our leadership are sheep, and they watch the wolves come in and the wolves eat some sheep -- they ate 84 sheep in Nice -- and the leadership sheep say, 'Gee, I wonder what the psychological problem is, because after all, they can't be a wolf because if they were a wolf, my world would be different and I couldn't be a sheep anymore'," Gingrich said.
There are people who can't admit there are wolves, people who can't describe the wolves, people who can't respond to the wolves, he said.
With thousands of attacks last year in France, the director of British intelligence said last week "Before Nice, Europe was on the verge of civil war," Gingrich recalled.
"Sooner or later, terrorists are going to acquire one of those [nuclear] weapons" and devastate a civilized country.
"You know how horrifying 9/11 was -- add two zeros," he said, to arrive at the death toll if it goes off in New York City or any other major city.
Sheep leadership won't become guard dogs because they won't be tough, he said, something that Trump would do.
"They would rather lose than become tough," the former speaker said. "In fact they want to invite the wolves in. 'We don't have enough wolves here at home, let's get three or four thousand Syrians, there'll probably only be four or five wolves in the group, so let's not be judgmental.' It took one person to kill 84 people in Nice. ... Truck control was not the answer to Nice."
Staten Island's delegates were present for the speech: Councilman Joe Borelli, former councilman Vincent Ignizio, now CEO of Catholic Charities on Staten Island, Island GOP Chairman John Antoniello, and alternate delegates, Assemblyman Ron Castorina Jr. and former Island GOP Chair Mary Reilly.
As Sunday's attack on police was fresh in people's minds, Antoniello expressed disappointment with the president.
"It's a very sad day for the people in blue," he said. "They do so much for us and we have to support them. We have to make sure that we have a president that supports them and I think that's not happening now."
Reilly, who's father-in-law was a police officer and who was considering becoming one when she was younger, said she's disgusted with the attacks.
"We lived through 9/11. We know the effects of terrorism and I really hate what's going on because I grew up in a time where black and white people were more separated ... I don't see people by their color and I don't think anyone should, and the bottom line is we all bleed red, we're all Americans and we have to find a common ground and we have to stop going after the differences."
She said the public owes police a "debt of gratitude" for putting on the uniform every day and putting themselves in danger.
As police patrolled the streets of Cleveland on Sunday night, some protests took place as delegates, journalists and guests trickled into the city and prepared for the next four days -- people thanked the men and women in blue for their service and offered words of encouragement.
Gingrich, pleading with the New York delegation Monday morning, said, "I beg you, have the courage to open up the party, have the courage to go into every precinct in the city, have the courage to listen to fellow Americans and have the courage to develop the answers so we can win a decisive election, because if we carry New York by the margin we should, we will have changed American history."
Follow Rachel Shapiro on Twitter @Writingrachel as she covers the RNC convention in Cleveland July 18-21.
Tune in to SILive.com beginning at 7 p.m. Monday for a live blog of convention events.
Campaign 2016 Ginsburg Trump
In this Jan. 28, 2016 file photo, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
(Michael Dwyer)
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon, is severely criticized by ideologically-sympathetic law professors, prominent legal ethicists, and the editorial boards of left-leaning newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, it's reasonable to conclude that she's done something really inappropriate. Today's column takes a look at just how inappropriate her remarks about Donald Trump really were. Because they were also starkly out of character for her, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee might just have hit the nail on the head when he declared, "Her mind is shot."
Ginsburg was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton on June 14, 1993. A former counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union and an outspoken advocate for the feminist agenda, she was nonetheless presented to the Senate and the American people as a "moderate" by her Democratic supporters.
Although initially skeptical of that characterization, Republicans were sufficiently impressed by her performance during the ensuing Senate hearings that she garnered their support as well. Hence, she was confirmed expeditiously by a vote of 96 to 3.
Liberal ideology
After Ginsburg took her seat on the court on Aug. 10, 1993, all pretense of moderation quickly disappeared. As it turned out, however, she would become more than just another reliable liberal appointed by a Democratic president. To her fellow liberals everywhere, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would become an icon, their go-to person to challenge conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and their embrace of originalism, textualism, and judicial restraint.
Her tenure on the court began around the time I started writing this column. Over the course of the last 23 years, I've discussed numerous opinions written by her for the court, concurring with the court, and dissenting from the court. I read each and every one of them in their entirety, too, because anything less would have rendered my analysis not only incomplete, but intellectually dishonest.
I strongly disagree with Ginsburg's interpretive approach to the Constitution, rooted as it is in viewing the document as "living" and, hence, susceptible to the whims of activist judges and their proclivity to invent rights not expressly enunciated in its text. Distorting the plain language of the Constitution to achieve a result, even a desirable one, subverts the democratic process and deprives the American people of their right to govern themselves.
Intelligence and passion
Nevertheless, I've always respected Ginsburg's intelligence, legal scholarship and passion. She's also impressed me by being amiable, patient, polite, and dignified in her interaction with lawyers espousing points of view with which she disagrees.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that when Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite, died suddenly in February, she was extremely gracious in her remarks. Among other laudatory observations, she remembered Scalia as her "best buddy," and "a jurist of captivating brilliance and wit." Given the bitter divisiveness that's become American politics today, inveterate partisans of all stripes would do well to emulate such grace, and to remember that it is, indeed, possible to strongly disagree without casting hateful aspersions.
And yet, in a series of recent interviews with the New York Times, the Associated Press, and CNN, Ginsburg called Donald Trump a "faker," declared that she wouldn't "even want to contemplate" the impact of his election on the Supreme Court or the country, and opined that it might be time to move to New Zealand if, in fact, he is elected. These comments are especially baffling because they're so out of character with the kind of person Ginsburg has always been.
Judicial ethics
She certainly realizes that judges are ethically barred from engaging in partisan politics at all, let alone endorsing or denouncing a candidate for public office. She clearly knows that judicial conduct committees throughout the country have admonished, censured, and removed judges from office for violating this well-established principle. In fact, here's what she, herself, wrote just last year in Williams-Yulee v. Florida State Bar: "Favoritism, i.e. partiality, if inevitable in the political arena, is disqualifying in the judiciary's domain." This is so, she continued, because "the Due Process Clause entitles a person to an impartial and disinterested tribunal in both civil and criminal cases."
It's certainly true that judges, even those sitting on the Supreme Court, have political feelings.
It was always reasonable to assume that Ginsburg and her fellow liberals on the court would not be voting for Donald Trump. The whole world now knows, however, that Ginsburg's hostility toward the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is so strong that she went public with it.
The case for recusal
Besides damaging the Supreme Court as an institution, and her own legacy on it, Ginsburg's extraordinary remarks suggest that she would have to recuse herself from any case in which Trump has an interest in the outcome. While prominent legal ethicists agree, there's no mechanism to force her to do so. And, given the depth of her hostility toward Trump, the betting here is that she wouldn't.
It might be argued that Ginsburg, as a judge, could separate her personal feelings about Trump from any legal issue involving or affecting him. But even if she could, and even if she did, the appearance of impropriety would adhere forever to any ruling she might issue adverse to him. Besides, Trump, like every American citizen, is entitled to "an impartial and disinterested tribunal."
Why, then, did Ginsburg instigate this debacle? That's the question that won't go away regardless of how many statements she issues trying to mitigate it. Donald Trump has his own theory.
"Her mind is shot," he says. Given the implausibility of every other hypothesis, he just might be right.
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On Friday, July 15, the winners of the first Intangible Heritage Interscholastic Essay Competition hosted by the Department of Culture were awarded by Minister Jacobs.
The purpose of this initiative was to stimulate the young minds, inspire intellectual and creative thought and acknowledge the impact of African heritage on Sint Maarten and the entire world. Under the theme The United Nations (UN) has declared 2015-2024 the International Decade of People of African Descent. In keeping with the UN themes of Recognition, Justice and Development, describe the global impact of people of African descent from your perspective, three secondary schools participated: St. Dominic High, St. Maarten Academy and Learning Unlimited.
The top three finalist, hailing from the St. Maarten Academy where; Winner: Naomi Jankee, First Runner Up: Jacinth Hunkins and Second Runner up: Tiffany Sang. The winning essays were judged based on the criteria of originality, understanding, structure, presentation, relevance to topic, literary style, wow factor and impact.
The full exercise of human rights by people of African descent depends significantly on their access to education which is fundamental to human development. A combination of greater access to education, completion of each phase of education and higher-quality teaching is not only necessary to guarantee basic social rights, but also has a positive effect on economic growth and equity. Aspects that are important for the youth of Sint Maarten to understand, especially our students who are preparing to and are currently studying abroad who may be faced with social issues that are dissimilar to issues on the island.
Minister Jacobs commended the St. Maarten Academy and its English department for not only encouraging students to partake in the essay competition, but providing support and feedback to the students as well. During the ceremony, Jacobs also challenged the students to do more research on contributions of people of African descent in the pre-enslaved period and share their writings and findings with their peers as our history did not commence with slavery but has existed since the beginning of time as well as that the essays will be made public for all to read/hear and learn from.
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The president also seemed intent on demonstrating again his support for law enforcement. Some organizations have cast doubt on that support. The National Association of Police Organizations said after the Dallas shooting that America was in the midst of a war on law enforcement officers. The group said the administration needed to show political leadership by "supporting them and giving them the resources they need to protect themselves and their communities."
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France may be a country in mourning this week, but nothing will dull the shine of the glorious rococo gilding of Versailles when a small portion of it arrives in Australia this summer.
From Marie-Antoinette's harp to gilded furniture from the private rooms of Louis XIV and a 1.5 tonne marble fountain centrepiece, the famous palace's opulence will be on display for the National Gallery of Australia's summer blockbuster.
Versailles, Treasures From The Palace is coming to the NGA. President of the Versailles museum Catherine Pegard, left, and chief curator, Beatrix Saule, with NGA director Gerard Vaughan. Credit:Jamila Toderas
The exhibition, which opens in December, will feature more than 130 objects from the opulent palace rooms, including paintings, sculptures, tapestries, gilded furniture and personal items from the kings, their wives and mistresses.
In welcoming the show's announcement in Canberra on Monday, French Ambassador to Australia Christophe Lecourtier said there was a sad timeliness to the event, with his country still reeling from the tragedies in Nice.
Canberrans will pause on Monday to pay tribute to the 84 victims killed in the Nice truck attack.
The French Embassy in Canberra will hold a minute's silence at noon on Monday in memory of the victims. The event is open to the public.
It comes as a number of floral tributes have been laid at the gates of embassy in Yarralumla.
On Sunday, the French flag flew at half mast while mourners had left about half a dozen bouquets outside the front of the property.
The ACT government has come under fire for pulling out of a meeting with Dickson residents to discuss newly approved plans for the Coles and Doma development.
However, they have agreed to meet with the community after the timeframe to appeal the plans has expired.
An artist's impression of the Dickson development on the corner of Antill and Badham streets that has been approved by government.
The modified plans to build two supermarkets and 140 apartments near Dickson shops were given the green light in late June.
Dickson Residents' Group convenor Jane Goffman invited representatives from the Environment and Planning Directorate to a community meeting to discuss the plans.
Biscuit maker Arnott's and frozen confectionery giant Streets have gone to war over mint slice ice cream after a dessert deal between them crumbled.
Arnott's has launched Federal Court action against Streets to stop it from selling mint slice ice cream, alleging the new product would mislead shoppers into thinking it contained Arnott's Mint Slices.
Arnott's said it was shocked in June this year to discover Streets proposed to launch Blue Ribbon Mint Slice ice cream in supermarkets.
The Australian Financial Review, citing court documents, reported on Sunday night that Streets, owned by global giant Unilever, and Arnott's stuck deals in 2004 and 2008 to develop ice cream products together.
That resulted in concoctions such as Blue Ribbon ice cream mixed with Tim Tams and Cornetto cones embedded with Arnott's Mint Slice.
It's hard to believe I have to do this again, but here we go. Having freedom of speech means that you enjoy the freedom to speak, not some fondly imagined freedom from having to listen to people who disagree with your stupid opinion.
To be fair, it's not surprising that a TV personality like Sonia Kruger has trouble with this. She is not, to my knowledge, a professor of linguistics, or political philosophy. She boasts no degree of higher learning from any of the internet's fine universities of hairdressing, although she is blonde and she is on the telly so there's that.
She would also insist on reminding you that she is a mother, but other than qualifying her to discuss the care and feeding of her own spawn, that's not much of an appeal to authority. We'll let it pass though, because there are probably three or four hundred people in the whole country who can claim to bring anything like an expert opinion to discussions of migration policy, national security, or the psychopathology of religiously-motivated violence. And yet we all like to have our say. Who are we then to tell Sonia she can't have hers.
So yes, Sonia Kruger is entitled to go on TV and share with us whatever small isolated thought might be rattling around inside her head, even if it's not an actual thought but more of a sympathetic brain fart that leaked out after she read Mr Andrew Bolt's column and thought, "A pogrom? Why, yes. That sounds lovely."
While working in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, I saw up close one particular example of how not to run a modern economy, namely the European Investment Bank (EIB). Situated in Luxembourg, its capital is 232 billion ($338 billion) and one of the world's largest multilateral financing institutions.
The lesson of the Thatcherite reforms was that free enterprise produces higher living standards while the EU member states continue to wallow in stifling regulations, far too much political and socialistic intervention in the private economy and hence below par economic growth. And of the many successful businesses in Britain, the banking system is the envy of many. No wonder the Brits are proud of their financial sector as Australians should be proud of ours rather than the jealous ideology that Labor trotted out in our recent election.
The Brits have made the right decision to leave the European Union. Obviously it will take time to settle down to new arrangements in Europe but Britain, the world's fifth largest economy, will do better in the long run on its own.
The EIB is a good example of what is wrong with Europe. It is answerable to its government shareholders but in reality it is answerable to no one. No one minister has enough authority or interest in the EIB to exert authority over it. It has so many bosses it has no boss and little of the media scrutiny you would expect in many open democracies. It is a self-contained, self-perpetuating organism.
And for decades the EU's economic performance has been below par. As my host at one trip to the EIB admitted, there was a "renewed sense of urgency within the EU about economic performance of the community and, inter alia, the role that EIB could and should play in contributing to economic growth". All of which sounded good but as everyone has known since, the EU then and now has no appetite for the dynamic approach to reform that is essential to continue to grow a modern economy whether in the EU, Britain or Australia.
The EIB's director-general of lending operations, Europe, Thomas Hackett, was frank. He said it had been true of the EIB that its objectives had been very broad, in fact so broad that they have funded projects and decided, after the funding decisions, how they would be justified. The EIB had a free hand to fund whatever it wanted to fund. He should have been a politician he was good at avoiding the question. He said the Lisbon agenda (an action policy from 2000 to 2010) was going to promote innovation and a new dynamic approach to boost the economy.
So I asked him how he justified lending for 188 schools in recent years in Britain and if this was justified by a policy to promote "social cohesion". The schools were funded under a public-private partnership program (PPP) and the funds went to private investors who built the facilities and leased them to the local government education authorities. He could not tell me how this transferred risk to the private providers other than saying that children could destroy schools and under PPP the provider managed the risk. I later met the new EIB treasurer and he accepted that the schools funding was just a good way for the British government to fund schools, but off budget. What he didn't say was that it was a great scheme for his business. And of course no one explained why education providers in Britain could not use the local banking system.
There was no reason why the British government had to go to Luxembourg to stitch up a special deal to fund schools when London provides one of the world's premier banking systems. The scheme was a sham. The EIB was merely building its empire while denying the private sector from what it did best.
Andrew Barr has confirmed the desperation of Labor as October 15 approaches. The captain's call to offer Brendan Smyth the specially created position of Commissioner for International Engagement for five years, at a salary of $300,000 per year, three months out from the ACT election is further confirmation of the man's arrogance, his contempt for the people of the ACT as well as his desperation. Why was the position not advertised within the ACT community, or for that matter more widely? How could Mr Barr be assured that Mr Smyth, competent as he may be, is the best man for the job? Why was the position created three months from the election? What sort of people does Mr Barr think the people of the ACT are? No thinking person will see the appointment as anything other than another grubby act by an Australian politician. Such grubby acts display contempt for the electorate, which in turn holds those responsible for them in contempt. It is these grubby acts which have undermined respect for Australian politicians throughout the Australian community.
Kirsten Lawson ("Surprise move shows Hanson in for a tough fight", July 16, p6) has called the appointment as showing "Canberrans much about the the audacity and troubling dexterity of Barr" . This is a euphemism. It is arguable it shows that Mr Barr has the morals of Dr Faustas. Ken Brazel, Weston What with excessive rates, taxes across the board, parking, motor costs, every Canberra taxpayer will make a contribution to the excessive Smyth salary for a fancy position of little or no value to the people of Canberra. The big finger, again. Rex Williams, Ainslie End Mr Fluffy program
The demolition of the house immediately behind my house this week under the Mr Fluffy program has caused substantial dust contamination to my property. The measures taken by the contractors to prevent any dust contamination to neighbouring properties was clearly inadequate. If there were asbestos fibres in that property there is a real risk some of those fibres have now contaminated my property and most likely other neighbouring properties. At the very least, we cannot be sure that there has been no contamination leaving us concerned that our property is no longer a safe place to live. It would seem the demolishing of Mr Fluffy poses a far greater risk to public health and safety than leaving contaminated houses undisturbed. The program should be stopped. Kim Chapman, Griffith Free syringes bad idea
So the jail needle and syringe program rears its ugly head again ("Supervised injecting room at jail will go to staff vote", July 16, p4). CPSU secretary Vince McDevitt is right when he says it is easy to push for change when you do not work in the system. We suffered that in the jail I worked in, in Britain. Managers in offices far remote from the coalface, came up with ideas to justify their jobs, at the expense of the workers. Michael Moore of PHA Australia, sees that the deprivation of liberty as a punishment is an end in itself. Well I have news for him, what he is advocating, is enabling addiction by providing free syringes. Inmates have chosen a lifestyle outside the law, he says they are entitled to the same healthcare benefits as the rest of us.
I wonder how many inmates have contributed taxes like the rest of us to pay for healthcare? They are not entitled to the things that the rest of us are , precisely because they have chosen to shun the values we espouse. Honesty, integrity, duty, consideration for others rather than ourselves. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it wont go back, and you will be sorry if you go down this road. Ian Jannaway, Monash Blinkered Brandis is as pitiful as the prime minister he pays homage to
With the election result no longer in doubt it is time to comment on one of its distressing by-products. We are likely to have the same Attorney-General for the next three years. George Brandis appeared on the panel of Q&A on Monday, July 11, and, among his predictable assortment of ill-founded claims, he made one in particular that cannot be allowed to stand: that John Howard's years as prime minister (1996-2007) were "a golden age". Is our Attorney-General delusional? The moral and cultural vandalism inflicted by Howard included: his vengeful sacking of a cluster of public service heads when he first got the job; his revival of the odious race debate; his rejection of reconciliation that led to him being literally shunned by Indigenous Australians; his manipulative role in the republican referendum that produced a "no" vote, when 65 per cent of Australians were in favour (and the PM had vowed he would stay neutral); his cloaked role in the "children overboard" horror, a grim forecast of the bipartisan legislative cruelty that is still with us, to our collective shame; and his formative role in the history debates as he encouraged Keith Windshuttle to misrepresent pre-contact and contact history in the pages of Quadrant magazine and elsewhere, which impacted on school curricula. And I only have space here to mention a scattering of the damage. A "golden age"? The Howard years were regressive, parochial and, above all, mean in spirit and action. Howard was the second prime minister to lose an election and his seat at the same time. Natural justice suggests he should have been the first. David Headon, Melba
Good riddance Here we go again ("Top Liberal women slam male culture", July 16, p19,) the familiar cries for "special treatment" from females like Sophie Mirabella who can't accept that the voters of Indi didn't think she was up to the job of effectively representing them before representing herself. We should be celebrating the fact that so many women with real talent find that jobs in the public service and the private sector give them more satisfaction (and better outcomes for the rest of us) as opposed to working in the political arena where spin trumps substance for both policies and individual ability. Roger Dace, Reid Overcrowded planet
Unfortunately it appears Wally Reynolds (Letters, July 16) isn't aware that for the world's poor to enjoy the same basic standard of living that the first world does would require the resources of something like three earths. We are so far beyond the healthy carrying capacity of our planet now and causing so much damage to food-webs and their dependent ecosystems that it's doubtful we will be able to even maintain current standards in the first world. A recent announcement by a peak business lobby group warning the federal government that Australia was dependent on immigration to grow the economy is as damning an indictment of our current economic system as I have ever heard. Anthony V. Adams, Reid Dilemma for Seselja
I am puzzled why social conservatives in the Coalition, such as ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja, who are opposed to marriage equality still argue that the introduction in the Parliament of a bill providing for marriage equality should be conditional on a positive result in a plebiscite. Marriage equality has overwhelming community support and there can be little doubt that a plebiscite would produce a positive result. In that event, once a bill providing for marriage equality has been introduced in the Parliament those social conservatives will be faced with the dilemma of how to reconcile the result of the plebiscite with their personal opposition to marriage equality. Seselja has already indicated that it is likely he would sit on the fence and abstain in the event of a positive result. But I assume he would prefer to vote against such a bill in the knowledge that in so doing he would not be acting contrary to the express wishes of the Australian people.
Justin McCarthy, London Many years ago, at school and at university, I was taught about representative government, the concept that a person was elected to parliament by a group, to represent the members of that group, and to express their views and to speak for them. On the issue of same-sex marriage, can we get back to basics? Each member of Parliament should canvass his or her electorate to find out the majority view of the people comprising that electorate. Armed with that information, he or she returns to Parliament and votes; not according to his or her conscience, not along party lines, but in accordance with the wishes of the people he or she is elected to represent. The estimated cost of the non-binding plebiscite could then be directed to some useful purpose such as health or education. Let's step back in time and get our MPs to do what they are elected to do, i.e. represent us. Bob Gilleland, Gungahlin
Let them govern John Warhurst ("Voters should demand Coalition reveal pact", Times2, July 14, p5) says "there is no rational argument against the Liberal-Nationals agreement being transparent" meaning that it should be available to the press so that they can make "news" out of it. What nonsense. The rational argument against it is that, when you delegate authority for a period to someone (which is what the community does to elected members at election time), you should let them exercise that authority, and not require them to report to you on everything they do in exercising it, and judge them on the outcome. Warhurst tries to justify his view by saying the agreement indicates "the direction the new government will take". Again, what nonsense. The public is only interested in decisions the government takes, not in the detail of the process in making those decisions. Warhurst might as well argue that the details of cabinet discussions leading to its decisions should be made public, that there should be no concept of cabinet confidentiality Would he?
R.S. Gilbert, Braddon TO THE POINT NOT OUR WATER Graham Downie (Letters, July 16) lauds the extended Cotter Dam as a testament to vision and planning that will see Canberra through our next drought. But it is not our water. Why would the Murray-Darling Basin Authority prioritise us above others just because we impounded the common supply? John Trueman, Downer
JOKE FROM HEAVEN Pauline Hansen, James Ashby and 60 Minutes walk into an art show. Now there's the beginning of a joke made in heaven! Like collects like. If they think that between them they have a shred of political or journalistic integrity they are deluded. Funniest thing I've read in ages. Sue Cant, Kingston LEFTHANDED DOUBT
We have been told over recent weeks (most recently in Gang-gang, July 15, p8) that gangs are almost invariably left-handed. I disagree and feel that the opposite is the case. They hold on to their perches with their preferred hand, which is of course stronger, and eat with their weaker right hand. Doesn't this make sense? Anne Waight, Macquarie BLAME GAMBLERS TOO Much has been said about the owners and trainers of greyhounds, but no mention of the associated public.
If people did not pay money to attend this unnatural spectacle and to satisfy their gambling addiction then greyhound racing would not exist. John Simsons, Holt DRUM DEFINITELY LEANS Jenny Goldie (Letters, July 12) has gone over the top in her defence of ABC TV's The Drum against the criticism it is dominated by green/left opinion. She maintains on this program, we are subjected to "balance" from the Institute of Public Affairs "or the likes of Gerard Henderson and Nick Cater every night". Ms Goldie needs a fact-checker. I have never appeared on The Drum.
Gerard Henderson, Sydney SMYTH TO THE RESCUE How can the world get past this crisis of instability: Brexit and its fallout, the Nice truck attack, a military coup in Turkey, and "Trumpageddon"? Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's the ACT Commissioner for International Engagement, Brendan Smyth, here to save us all. John Howarth, Weston
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.
There are few parts of society that are more highly regulated and more heavily scrutinised than our schools. Care and protection of children is involved, so that regulation and scrutiny is appropriate.
School education in Australia has previously been defined as compulsory, secular and free. Despite this, different beliefs and their legitimate expression have now been a reality in Australian schools since their inception.
More than $50 billion is spent on Australian schools annually for the learning, wellbeing and future of almost 4 million young Australians.
Education authorities in each state and territory have responsibility for ensuring schools comply with strict laws and regulations. Schools can only be registered and operate as schools if they meet stringent standards. A safe environment for children, a quality curriculum and qualified teachers, are among the many requirements.
Likewise, the Prime Minister said on Monday that the first two priorities of his government would be to seek passage of the building watchdog and union governance bills, whose rejection prompted the double dissolution. Many will interpret that as a nod to conservatives who believed Mr Turnbull had failed to prosecute strongly enough during the campaign the case against Labor's union links.
Another test for Mr Turnbull was his new ministry. He retained all former cabinet ministers who held their seats and no one was demoted, although Kelly O'Dwyer was stripped of small business responsibilities to focus on the detail of superannuation policy. A key Turnbull supporter in last September's coup, Christopher Pyne, has been sent to defence industry, which is focused on South Australia where Mr Pyne failed to protect his Coalition colleagues from the Nick Xenophon Team.
Mr Abbott remains on the backbench, but a new guard of conservatives, including ACT senator Zed Seselja and Nationals social conservative Matt Canavan, have been rewarded as the former leader considers his approach.
Mr Turnbull can now claim to have a personal mandate. But many voters would have supported his government on the basis of his previously stated progressive views on social issues and climate change. Yet a cloud remains over the place of environmental issues in his new cabinet. Greg Hunt has been moved on to technology after managing in environment to keep options open for a trading scheme in Direct Action for almost a decade. The environment portfolio goes to a notable supporter of the future of coal and staunch opponent of emissions trading schemes, the conservative Josh Frydenberg, who also holds the energy portfolio.
On one hand environment and energy fit well together; on the other, Mr Frydenberg may well be less open to morphing Direct Action into a baseline and credit emissions reduction scheme as Mr Turnbull envisioned in 2009. Mr Frydenberg said in 2014 that "we will not allow an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax to come back into this country". Likewise, many will question whether Mr Frydenberg can treat renewable energy on its merits, given his campaign run-ins with conversation groups and strong support for coal-fired electricity generation.
Carrie Bickmore has broken down during an interview with the family of a toddler suffering from terminal brain cancer.
The Project co-host wept on Monday night's episode while talking to Perth parents Roy and Isabella Darch whose son Bede has been given just six months to live.
Bickmore lost her own husband Greg Lange to brain cancer in 2010 and is trying to raise $1 million for brain cancer research.
"I think it's great that someone is standing up because she's expressed her feeling about it," declared Hanson, clearly happy to find a fellow traveller in the media willing to mainstream the previously limited audience for Things Donald Trump Dreamed Up During a Rough Trot On The Toilet. Dastyari and Hanson had several exchanges about Islam. Credit:ABC TV Pursed of lip and purged of self-reflection, Hanson was in full-flight, so perfectly Pauline that had she offered the rest of the panel a deal on flake and chips during a quiet moment it would not have been a surprise. For better or worse, though, there were almost no quiet moments, barring a sequence of events at the end when Tony Jones appeared to recognise the nation had collectively reached for its nearest available drugs; he wisely turned the conversation away from Muslims to economic policy. Confronted by this road block, Hanson did as Hanson does - asked to recite the alphabet, she goes for broke and throws it in the air to see what lands. But for the full effect of the swizzle stick that passes for a thought process in the Hanson mind, you couldn't go past the earlier moment when she found herself engaged with her panel neighbour, Labor Senator Sam Dastyari. Sam Dastyari at age of 5, when he immigrated to Australia from Iran.
It will stand as one of the TV year's most jolting and compelling moments. Hanson: "Are you a Muslim? Really?" Cindy Rahal said Ms Hanson's politics were creating a "divided nation". Credit:ABC TV Dastyari: "Yeah and I have never hidden it away." Hanson: "Were you sworn in under the Koran?"
Khaled Elomar asked Ms Hanson if her views were driven by "hate, fear or ignorance?" Credit:ABC TV Dastyari: "I was born in an Islamic nation and by being born Hanson: "So you're a Muslim." Pauline Hanson repeatedly asked Sam Dastyari if he was a Muslim on Q&A. Credit:ABC TV Dastyari: "By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country"
Hanson: "You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting." Quite interesting indeed, or to truly reflect the Hanson inflection on this observation: "Run for the hills!" Dastyari went on: "Ms Hanson: "I think you're trying to make a joke of what is a serious" Hanson, having apparently mistaken Dastyari for a Mormon after he invited her for a halal meal on live TV on election night: "I'm surprised. I did not know that about you." And then an interjection from the Greens Larissa Waters: "Because he doesn't have three heads?"
This drew laughter and applause, but this was a serious moment, as Dastyari pointed out in one of his many heroically respectful but pointed challenges to the Hanson doctrine across the program. "Would you have allowed five-year-old Sam Dastyari into this country? He came to this country on 16 January, 1988, two weeks before the Bicentenary celebrations and my family has done nothing but contribute to this country since they've been here." Tony Jones pushed Hanson on the point. Jones: "Pauline Hanson, could you just answer the very basic question? Would you be happy to see him blocked from - someone in his position now who's been persecuted in another country that happens to be a Muslim - would you be happy to see that five-year-old blocked from coming here?" Hanson: "Muslims have been a part of Australia for a long, long time, many, many years. You go back to the Gold Rush days and they were in Australia but it is only in the last 10, 20 years that we have seen a rise of terrorism on the streets."
It was that kind of night. But the clear dignity of the evening belonged to the audience, among them Australians of Muslim faith who wanted to offer dignified rebuke to the hurricane of public bigotry they now endure. Cindy Rahal to Hanson: "I think that Muslims in Australia have constantly been telling people like you and who support you that that is not what Islam is about and it's falling on deaf ears and I think you have very selective hearing and what you're creating is not one nation, you are creating a divided nation. If you want to have a look at creating one nation, you need to look at way we can include everybody. All the Muslims and any other religion as well. You have a very one-track mind and unfortunately it is very dangerous." And, most powerfully, Khaled Elomar: "Senator Hanson, my 11-year-old son who is watching this program right now recently asked me, 'What is Islamophobia?' Rather than explaining it to him with my own words, he and I sat down side by side and watched a few of your past and recent videos. Then I asked him, 'What do you think Islamophobia is?'. His response was, 'Someone that hates us'. "I said, 'Islamophobia is one or a combination of three things: Hate, fear or ignorance'. I promised him that I would ask you this question so he can hear the answer from yourself, so with all due respect, Ms Hanson, what is the basis of your Islamophobic feelings? Hate, fear or ignorance?" Hanson: "None of the above."
Controversial comments calling for a halt to Muslim migration to Australia are just the "tip of the iceberg" and will become more common unless they are denounced by the government, according to leading academics.
On the Nine Network's Today show on Monday morning, Sonia Kruger who hosts reality show The Voice and mid-morning program Today Extra said she would like to see the immigration of Muslims to Australia "stopped now".
"Personally I think [columnist] Andrew Bolt has a point here that there is a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks," Ms Kruger said.
"I would like to see it [the immigration of Muslims] stopped now for Australia because I would like to feel safe as all of our citizens do when they go out to celebrate Australia Day and I'd like to see freedom of speech."
If nothing else, a Hollywood disaster movie should have a surprising supporting cast ready to die at the first sign of apocalyptic destruction. Take a bow, San Andreas: you killed Kylie Minogue! Millions of others presumably perish when two vast tectonic plates in California begin to shift, although they're usually such tiny digital figures on a citywide scale that their life and death is negligible. Dwayne Johnson, broad enough to span any divide, is search and rescue pilot Ray Gaines, who goes into protective mode for his former wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), and teenage daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), after Paul Giamatti's scientist makes clear that the big one is here. Brad Peyton's movie offers a degree of resourcefulness for the characters, but the sheer mass of digital effects dulls your interest. The film also ignores Johnson's self-deprecating humour, but Emma's new mogul husband (Ioan Gruffudd) gets what he deserves. Craig Mathieson
ABC, 9.30pm
This season five opener sees the return of Bailey (Suranne Jones) from her year-long stint working with "the big boys" of vice in London, and back with colleague Scott (Lesley Sharp), with only a couple of flashback montage scenes to indicate what she's been up to. She has picked up some tech skills though, helpful for her first case back in Manchester, investigating a creepy website on the Darknet where killers challenge each other to commit murders, leaving symbols as proof, and filming the brutality. Off duty, Bailey is finding it hard to fit back in while Scott is dealing with her teenage daughter's first brush with the police, which might have more serious reach than it first seems. After some awkward exchanges, the two are back on form as the most no-nonsense women in the police procedural genre. Kylie Northover
pay Lawless Island
Nat Geo People, 9.30pm
There's nothing lawless about the Alaskan village of Port Protection, apart from the fact that it doesn't have a police station. What it does have is a peaceful community of several dozen hardy souls who are as diligently self-sufficient as you would expect them to be, given that they live on a remote, freezing island accessible only by boat or seaplane. The new season of this reasonably interesting documentary series begins with winter closing in fast and the villagers needing to stock up on food in a hurry. Hans and Timbi aren't going to get by on eggs from the ducks they've started raising, so they're going fishing in the hope of filling their freezer with halibut. Old timer Gary spends a chunk of his meagre savings on diesel so he can sail around the island looking for a moose to shoot. An absorbing look at a very different way of life. Brad Newsome
Defence experts and industry figures say it makes sense for Christopher Pyne to take on a new senior defence industry role in cabinet but warn against Mr Pyne's using the job to favour his home state of South Australia.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has taken the unusual step of splitting the defence minister's role into two cabinet positions with Mr Pyne taking the industry side, responsible for about $90 billion in planned naval shipbuilding programs.
"What we are doing in the defence industry is completely transformational. We are building a defence industry in Australia People do not entirely recognise how big a change it is. This is a big change, a big reform and it requires additional leadership and additional oversight, additional advocacy and drive," Mr Turnbull said.
Mr Turnbull has spruiked defence industry and in particular naval shipbuilding as a key part of his plans to develop high-end manufacturing and innovation in the Australian economy.
Identifying himself as an opponent of "big government, big banks, big unions and big corporations", he said: "In the National Party, we believe that small is beautiful."
"Just because something does not have a price does not mean it has no value."
"While I am an economist, our national debate is sometimes driven too much by economists," he said.
While supporting measures that cut the cost of doing business, Canavan didn't buy into the prevailing orthodoxy which favoured deregulation, slashing subsidies and letting competition sort itself out.
In his maiden speech, he called for the introduction of an effects test into competition law to protect small business. That idea, shelved under Tony Abbott's leadership, is now official Coalition policy thanks largely to lobbying by Nationals such as Joyce and Canavan.
Canavan, who lives in Yeppoon with his wife and four sons, also proposed other radical policy ideas. He backed allowing young people to access their superannuation to buy a home and "income splitting", which gives single-income families more favourable tax treatment.
Rather than trying to maximise the number of people who work, he said governments should help mothers stay at home to raise children if that is their preference.
And he's certainly no greenie. The new Resources Minister praised fossil fuels for allowing humans to move beyond lives that were "nasty, brutish and short to ones of comparative luxury and leisure", saying: "The only form of energy that I want to promote is cheap energy."
There's no doubt Canavan's close relationship with Joyce was crucial to his rise. As the contenders to replace Warren Truss jostled for the leadership, Canavan was a fierce defender of his old boss, lashing out at "low-lifes" in the party who were undermining him.
The debate in Australia about Kevin Rudd's candidacy to head the United Nations will inevitably focus on the well-known personal strengths and shortcomings of the former prime minister.
For that reason, the Turnbull government faces a tricky task in deciding whether to nominate him. Many on the Coalition's right wing including some in Cabinet don't want to back the former Labor man.
There are hard-headed national interest reasons to consider as well.
Rudd has strengths: obviously he is a very strong foreign policy thinker with an encyclopaedic grip on issues relating to China. Many Australians in foreign policy circles think he's a considerably stronger candidate than New Zealander Helen Clark on that front.
The NSW government has signed a deal worth millions of dollars which will see ongoing collaboration in cancer research with the United States.
Scientists from the US National Cancer Institute will work with two Sydney-based research organisations on the "Cancer Moonshot" initiative, announced by US President Barack Obama in January this year, which aims to accelerate cancer research.
US Vice President Joe Biden speaks in Melbourne on Monday. Credit:Darrian Traynor
US Vice President Joe Biden signed a Memorandum of Understanding with NSW to allow the collaboration during his visit to Sydney on Monday.
The chilling black and white footage shows four hooded men, one brandishing a gun, creeping to the front door of a western Sydney home.
Their faces are obscured by bandanas. One man holds a hammer. Seconds later, one of the men kicks in the door.
At home that night on May 5, according to NSW Police, was a family of four including a nine-year-old girl, a 45-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man.
They allege the hooded men forced another resident, a 51-year-old man, to the ground and fired a shot into a television.
Corrupt former Labor minister Eddie Obeid and his son Moses have been charged over a $30 million coal deal, as authorities tighten the net around the one-time powerbroker and his family over a series of business deals.
Obeid is already facing jail time after being convicted in June of misconduct in public office over his business dealings at Circular Quay.
Former Labor minister Eddie Obeid is facing jail time over charges relating to Circular Quay cafes. Credit:Ben Rushton
Fairfax Media can now reveal the 72-year-old and his entrepreneurial middle son Moses, 47, were quietly charged last year over a coal deal at Mount Penny in the Bylong Valley near Mudgee.
The identity of a third person charged over the same matter cannot be revealed for legal reasons.
Three people have been charged with murdering a teenager who was stabbed to death in Sydney's west overnight.
Police and paramedics were called to Marco Avenue in Panania about 6pm on Monday, to reports that up to 15 people had been involved in a fight outside a convenience store.
A man had been stabbed in the fight and was bleeding heavily, witnesses said.
It's understood officers arrived to find the injured 18-year-old man, Adam Abu-Mahmoud, with a knife still lodged in his back.
Recommendations on the design of a new mental health facility for young people will come back to the state government in September, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Health Minister Cameron Dick told reporters on Monday.
This follows the scathing findings of a Commission of Inquiry into the previous government's decision in 2014 to close the Barrett Adolescent Centre at Wacol, Queensland's only live-in adolescent mental health facility for people with complex, severe mental health problems.
Three former patients of the Barrett Adolescent Centre killed themselves in the months after its closure. Credit:Michelle Smith
Queensland's Public Sector Commission is now reviewing a number of adverse findings made against several Queensland public servants after the centre was closed before new mental healthcare facilities were in place.
The new centre - promised by the Palaszczuk government - would have educational facilities and provide a live-in facility with up to 20 beds.
A man charged over a stockpile of weapons and explosives discovered at a so-called Brisbane "bomb house" has been jailed for three years after a court was told he just wanted to make homemade fireworks.
Daniel Fing fronted the Brisbane Magistrates Court on Monday, where he pleaded guilty to 11 charges.
Daniel Fing had an "ongoing fascination" with explosives and firearms, his defence lawyer told court. Credit:Jamie Wicks
They included manufacturing explosives without authority and weapons offences for possessing items such as a crossbow, flick knife and five tainted firearms.
The court heard he had a prior criminal history in NSW, where he was extradited from in March, and had possession of the explosive materials because he wanted to make fireworks.
A South Korean national was strangled to death, stripped naked and buried in a shallow backyard grave after seeking out a currency exchange online, a Brisbane court has been told.
But the man accused of his murder later told police he hoped, as a fellow Korean, that nothing sinister had taken place, a Supreme Court jury heard.
A man is accused of murdering a fellow Korean during a currency exchange.
Sanghyun Hwang, 31, pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to interference with a corpse on the first day of his trial on Monday.
The body of Min Tae Kim, 28, was found in a shallow grave at the back of an Algester property in December 2013.
Police have released vision of a dramatic car chase through the south-west suburbs of Brisbane on Saturday night.
Officers originally saw the vehicle, believed to be stolen, on Blunder Road in Oxley, and attempted to stop the driver but they alleged he continued driving.
The police helicopter tracked the vehicle to Redbank Plains where police used stingers in an attempt to stop the vehicle, but he continued driving for a short distance before abandoning the car and fleeing on foot, police said.
The police helicopter continued to track the man as he made his way through a number of backyards before removing his trousers and continuing to run.
The Victorian government is investigating using empty office space to house homeless people as it struggles to deal with a sudden surge of rough sleeping in the city centre.
On Monday, Housing Minister Martin Foley announced almost $850,000 in new funding to assist rough sleepers on Melbourne's streets.
A homeless person's camp in the Treasury Gardens. Credit:Pat Scala
He and Lord Mayor Robert Doyle appeared at a press conference at the state parliament on Monday to announce the funding, $500,000 of which will go towards providing additional emergency accommodation for homeless people.
Another $283,000 will go towards funding 38 beds at a crisis accommodation centre on Flemington Road in North Melbourne.
A court has heard horrifying details of sexual conduct a South Bunbury man engaged in with a girl who was 12 years old at the time of the offences.
Appearing via video link from Hakea Prison, Troy Phillip Milbourne, 42, pleaded guilty in Bunbury District Court on Monday to four counts of having indecent dealings with a child under 13 years and three counts of sexual penetration of a child under 13 years.
Man, 47, has been charged with sexually assaulting two girls in the South West of WA.
The court was told Milbourne responded to an online advertisement from the girl's father who was seeking other middle-aged men for friendship.
Having met up, the victim's father invited Milbourne to visit his house, sometime between January 1, 2014 and November 24, 2014.
Contracts to begin building the controversial Roe 8 project should not be signed until after the state election to allow the "people to decide" if the road goes ahead, Labor WA leader Mark McGowan says.
Mr McGowan claimed the state government signing any contracts eight months out from an election, and when further court appeals by community groups against the project were likely, would be "financially reckless".
Protesters are at the Beeliar Wetlands protesting preliminary work, 10 days before a high court decision is to be made. Credit:ReThink The Link
The first stage of the $1.9 billion federally-backed Perth Freight link, which involves an extension of the Roe Highway through the Beeliar Wetlands, was again given the green light to proceed after a Supreme Court appeal reinstated its environmental approvals on Friday.
The Environmental Protection Authority's approval of the project had previously in December been found invalid.
A Perth doctor has found himself in the wrong place at the right time after he missed his turn-off while driving and moments later was performing life-saving surgery without any anaesthetic on a man dying on the side of the road.
Royal Perth Hospital senior registrar Edward Yeboah was travelling along Great Ocean Drive in Yanchep when he realised he had missed the turn-off to a mango farm he had planned to visit.
Doctor Edward Yeboah with Simon Treloar five months after his rescue.
He decided to continue heading north until it was safe to turn around when he came across a head-on truck collision which had happened just minutes earlier.
"It was very confronting... one of the trucks was completely smashed, the dashboard had caved in and the driver's face was smashed," he said.
San Antonio, Venezuela: Thousands of Venezuelans streamed into neighbouring 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 subsidised 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.
Nice: The Tunisian-born man who drove a truck through crowds celebrating Bastille Day had a promiscuous sex life, drank alcohol, took drugs and did not practise Islam, but did show an interest in the so-called Islamic State in the weeks leading up to his murderous rampage and grew a beard for "religious reasons," the French prosecutor said.
Francois Molins said the attack was premeditated and Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel visited the Promenade des Anglais in the days before July 14. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel took selfies at the site where he would carry out his crime and was caught twice on surveillance cameras practising the route he would take.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel did not practice Islam, authorities say. Credit:Twitter
The prosecutor said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had told people close to him that he had been growing his beard for religious reasons and that he could not understand why Islamic State could not have its own territory.
"If there are no elements in the investigation to suggest at this stage an allegiance to Islamic State nor links with individuals from the group ... he showed a certain recent interest for radical jihadist movements," Mr Molins said.
Brussels: The European Union has warned the Turkish government against taking steps that would damage the constitutional order following a failed military coup on the weekend.
"The democratic and legitimate institutions needed to be protected," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters on arrival at an EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday, which was also to be attended by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
"Today, we will say, together with the ministers, that this obviously doesn't mean that the rule of law and the system of checks and balances does not count.
"On the contrary, [the rule of law] needs to be protected for the sake of the country itself. So we will send a strong message," Ms Mogherini said.
PHILIPSBUEG:--- The DP's 2016 draft political program is ready for review. The title of this document, Building on the Foundations of Trust, Transparency and Togetherness aptly describes the Red Thread through all the chapters of the program.
Some items appear again as they did in our 2014 program. And others are new or more pronounced in our 2016 program.
Ready for review means that the board of the party has to give its final stamp of approval, and the membership of the party, followed by the general public will be given the opportunity to offer input.
While the candidates of the DP in the 2016 election will be using this document to expound on the party's plans, our candidates will not engage in "pie in the sky" politics. In other words, promising the world and having no clue how to achieve these things.
Yes, indeed political parties are required by law to include in their statutes the obligation to publish their political program in a timely fashion before the election.
This is another indication of the legal obligation of parties towards the electorate.
However, I am convinced that the discussion about what the parties and prospective candidates want to do or think they can do, is the least important.
In the first place, a political program is not worth the paper it is written on, if we don't understand or care to understand the workings of government. Equally, if we don't respect the workings of government.
It would surprise the living daylights out of me, if one political party would get a majority of seats in the September election. No matter who says what.
That means that parties will have to come together to form the next government for St. Maarten. So, what people need to know in my opinion is where parties stand on the different fundamental issues and are the candidates in synch with their respective parties on these issues?
To illustrate, the Democratic Party in 2014 committed itself to St. Maarten on the basis of the following points of departure (objectives) in its statutes:
1. To function as a Political Party for the entire community of St. Maarten, rejecting all forms of discrimination. (Anti-discrimination.)
2. To continuously seek improvement of the quality of life on St. Maarten and to give quality leadership in all these endeavors. (Leadership.)
3. To uphold and respect the constitutional rights of each individual in the community. (Equality.)
4. To promote the socio-economic welfare of the population of St. Maarten according to Christian, social democratic principles and ideals, the Partys policies and principles. (Christian-social democrats.)
5. To do all that is possible to achieve greater economic opportunity for the island of St Maarten. (Economic Development.)
6. To promote social cohesion and patriotism amongst all inhabitants.( Unity and Inclusion.)
7. To protect the democratic fundamentals of the country's legal and constitutional system. (State of Law.)
8. To raise the political awareness of the general population. (Empowerment)
We have distilled from these founding objectives, as well as taking the current climate of our community into consideration, priorities such as family and district empowerment; transparency and openness in government, THE ECONOMY!! The emphasis is on the economy and every facet thereof, as with a thriving economy, unemployment can be combatted, business can thrive, government revenue will grow, opportunity will be created for social programs, education and health. With this balanced growth in all areas, the quality of live for all citizens will improve and a more harmonious work-life balance will be possible. A tall order, but achievable.
"Politics will not, can not be changed by the politicians. No matter how many good souls feel they have the solutions because they say so, politics have to be changed from deep within the belly of our society. The politicians' role is to educate AND lead by example."
ST. PETERS:--- As Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee New Parliament Building, the committee is looking forward to a speedy response from the Prime Minister regarding the proposed location of the New Parliament Building.
In a closed door meeting on June 22, the committee members discussed several possible locations based on options that were presented.
The Committee decided that the location of the current Government Administration Building is the most suitable to be considered. This location because of its proximity to the new Government Administration Building would complement each other due to short distance between the two.
A letter has been sent to the Prime Minister/Minister of General Affairs via the Chairlady of Parliament, requesting the Minister to look into the proposed location and whether it is feasible. The Ad Hoc Committee is looking forward to a quick reply.
Once Government approves the designated location, the next stage would be to look at the design and development plans for the peoples House.
We have to start thinking about national development. Government has to start thinking about locations for different projects and assigning the locations in the general interest of Sint Maarten. In the Government Master Plan they need to assign more land for parking spaces in Philipsburg, and to create more nightlife in Philipsburg.
The upgrading of Front and Back Street is part of the improvement project for the Great Philipsburg area.
My focus now is on the upcoming elections.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Chairlady of Parliament and Leader of the Democratic Party Sarah Wescot Williams reiterated on Monday during a press conference that she is focusing on the September 26th parliamentary elections as leader of the Democratic Party. She said when SMN News published the article that she asked to be the nominee for the Governors post, she immediately responded to the article in a lengthy press release. However, her focus today and the days ahead is to focus on the upcoming Parliamentary elections. Wescot Williams went on to say that the appointment of Governors is the sole responsibility of the Kingdom which done by Kingdom decree.
Asked by SMN News who nominated the current sitting governor, Wescot Williams said at the time she was not in office, however, she admitted that St. Maarten did play a certain role.
SMN News reporter then asked the leader of the Democratic Party Sarah Wescot Williams if there was a discussion as to whom should be the nominee when she announced that she should be considered for the post. The leader of the Democratic Party and Chairlady of Parliament referred to her press release in which she said she explained exactly what transpired, she did say she will not be releasing the names of potential candidates. SMN News reporter then asked Wescot Williams if she is asked to serve her country in the capacity as Governor knowing she held all the known positions in the country such as Prime Minister, Chairlady of Parliament, Minister and prior to 2010 commissioner. Wescot Williams said that if she is ever asked to serve her country in the capacity of governor she will not turn down or refuse to serve her country at any level.
St. Maarten wishes the people of France much strength.
The Chairlady of Parliament also expressed sincere condolences to the people of France especially the families and friends of those that perished in the July 14th attack in Nice. She said that the people of St. Maarten are praying for the families and friends of the victims and hopes that they gain strength during this time.
Electoral Reform and Integrity Law.
Wescot Williams told reporters that St. Maarten is back to the drawing board when it comes to electoral reform she explained the difficulty the country is facing in getting this done as the Kingdom already gave their opinion on the changes St. Maarten wants to make in the countrys constitution.
As for the Integrity Law that was quashed by the Constitutional Court Wescot Williams said that St. Maarten is working on a new draft law which would fit within the confines of the country. Apart from that she said that she intends to broaden the scope of the Constitutional Court which would give every citizen the right to take their cases through a lawyer, to the Ombudsman who would then have to take their cases to the constitutional court.
Wescot Williams said she also wants to have that court deal with the disputes since there the dispute committee has not been established and St. Maarten has had a number of disputes to deal with since becoming a country within the Kingdom.
Great Bay:--- Member of Parliament Cornelius De Weever has been following the recent developments regarding the integrity chamber for St. Maarten and has the following to say. The words fraud and corruption are not unique to St. Maarten and we should not be used as the poster child for it. Recently we read about another VVDer former alderman of the city Roermond Jos van Rey and former police chief Gerard Bouman who were convicted of fraud and/or corruption in the Netherlands.
On the floor of Parliament and during the IPKO meetings I have made it very clear that establishing a kingdom integrity chamber ordinance should be the order of the day. Curacao and Aruba also have their own integrity challenges which only illustrates that an integrity chamber is also needed for the entire kingdom. While the kingdom decides to work out the details of the integrity chamber, we in St. Maarten can focus on addressing our own issues and focus on preventive measures rather than punitive.
During the parliamentary debate on the topic of the Integrity Chamber, I mentioned the need to increase compliance within government. That need is now sensed more than before. As I continued to look at integrity from the angle of compliance, some interesting insights came up during my research and talking with those in the field. Our laws are or should be a reflection of our values and norms. Those laws regulate the various relationships we engage in and what those involved can expect from each other. When things go wrong, we have court systems in place to address disputes or render judgments as has been seen with the nullification of the Integrity Chamber Ordinance by the Constitutional Court.
Had we stuck by the rules and did things for the right reasons there wouldnt have been the need for such a shattering judgement. The more we stick to the rules, the smoother the interactions become and the less burden is placed on judges ultimately as less disputes would arise. In a practical sense it means that decisions from ministers, government or other public bodies will be more consistent and sound, citizens would be more aware of their opposing rights and obligations, thus creating an environment wherein corruption becomes easier to expose.
Are we to take integrity seriously, we need to ensure compliance. Compliance is not an external matter but an internal prerequisite in promoting integrity. Within banking institutions compliance officers are a norm and we should follow suite and establish or appoint a Compliance Commissioner. As the compliance officers within banking institutions, and borrowing from the Cayman Islands Information Commissioners Office, the Compliance Commissioner main focus would be to assist the various ministers, governing bodies and other related institutions adhere to the relevant national and international standards, laws and regulations. The second responsibility of the Compliance Commissioner should be to make recommendations for reform in the area of compliance. Thirdly, the Compliance Commissioner refers cases where it appears that a criminal offence has been committed to the appropriate authorities. Last but not least, the Compliance Commissioner should as much as possible publish the requirements of the various laws and the rights of individuals thereunder.
By clearly shifting the primary focus on compliance and not so much on investigations with the sole aim to prosecute offenders, we firstly strive to improve the operations within the various ministries and wider collective sector in a transparent and objective way of measuring performance; the law. When you comply with the law you are half way home. Add ethical behavior to that and we are back on track in bringing back the much needed moral and ethical values to our community. The Compliance Commissioner can temporarily be appointed through an unanimous motion of Parliament, which I will present as a member, and based on its powers to pose questions and start inquiries, while awaiting the establishment of the Compliance Commissioner Office by national ordinance ensuring objectivity, independence and securing financing. I will seek political support across party lines for this motion. Lets get back on track!
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.
Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association Calls for Suspension of Rights During RNC
Sunday's shooting in Baton Rouge began when two police officers approached a man who was openly carrying two rifles.
In the United States, open carry refers to the practice of "openly carrying a firearm in public", as distinguished from concealed carry, where firearms cannot be seen by the casual observer.
The practice of open carry, where gun owners openly carry firearms while they go about their daily business, has seen an increase in the U.S. in recent years--Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_States
Stephen Loomis, President of Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association (CPPA), has asked the governor of the state to temporarily restrict the state's gun laws during the Republican National Convention.
Police departments across the country are on heightened alert in light of the shooting that killed three officers in Louisiana on Sunday.
"We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something -- I don't care if it's constitutional or not at this point," Loomis told CNN.
Ohio's "open carry" laws allow any licensed gun owner to openly carry any firearm not specifically banned by the state, except in a few very limited secure zones. The RNC site, Quicken Loans Arena, is a secure zone, but licensed owners can legally have any or many guns and rifles in the streets and parks surrounding the arena.
Governor John Kasich has stated that he does not have the authority to arbitrarily suspend either federal or state constitutions or laws for any reason.
With big crowds of both supporters and demonstrators expected in Cleveland this week, Loomis called it irresponsible to be in the convention area with a weapon. He compared it to screaming "fire" in a crowded theater, and warned that officers would be "looking very, very hard" at anyone with a firearm.
First Amendment free speech protections do not extend to someone who falsely and intentionally creates a situation of panic and danger, such as yelling "fire" in a theater, but SCOTUS has never ruled on weather Second Amendment rights can be limited with that same reasoning.
Loomis's request may not be legally possible, but it is based on a very real concern.
A number of groups have scheduled marches or rallies around the convention, including Citizens for Trump and Black on Black Crime, Inc., a decades-old organization that has recently demonstrated alongside Black Lives
Matter protestors. Large gatherings and clashes between groups could offer cover for an attack on either citizens or law enforcement.
Republican national convention will probably include open carry as part of the party platform.
Hoping to increase individual safety, the CPPA has asked that the Cleveland Police Department not station any officer alone without the protection of a vehicle. They also want all foot officers to be assigned in groups of three, to offer one another support.
Police Chief Calvin Williams, has not yet responded to these requests.
LAPD ALSO REACTS TO BATON ROUGE SHOOTING WITH NEW PROTOCOLS
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck informed his force on Sunday that some new protocols would go into effect out of concern for officer safety:
- All 911 calls in Los Angeles will now be "carefully screened" to avoid ruse calls meant to lure police into a trap.
- Officers formerly on crime suppression detail will be shifted to patrol backup, so as to increase the number of cars arriving in response to all calls or stops.
- Available air support will be doubled
The account quoted above is a second-hand forwarding of a report by Earl Wright, who was in attendance at a December 2009 presentation given by Lt. Col. John G. Cotter of the California Air National Guard to the Rotary Club in Clovis, California, about the EagleEyes program for teaching military personnel and civilians to recognize elements of potential terror planning when they see it.
However, in reference to the above-reproduced report, Lt. Col. Cotter told us, That is my real name, and I am the Antiterrorism Officer at the 144th, but thats the end of the accuracy of Mr Wrights viral e-mail account:
This is a viral e-mail that went out from a fellow named Earl Wright following my Eagle Eyes presentation to the Clovis Rotary Club in December. It has gone around the world several times and I have heard back from folks who know me all over the place. The purpose of the Eagle Eyes program is to familiarize military and civilian folks with the eight observable steps leading up to a terrorist event and to encourage them to call the phone numbers I provided to the FBI, Fresno Police or Air Force OSI if they see something that doesnt look right. That way the appropriate agencies can intervene and stop an attack from taking place. Our program has been very effective and has been cited as the best in the Air Guard for two years in a row. Ive given this presentation hundreds of times to military and civilian organizations, and this is the first time something like this has happened. The quotes apparently attributed to me are false. I never refer to people as ragheads or f***ers, although I do stress that we dont profile. The examples cited in this e-mail have been distorted, mis-represented and inaccurately reported and attributed to me. If you or your agency would ever like to see the real presentation, Ill be happy to come and give it at your convenience.
The Fresno Bee also reported that other attendees did not recall Lt. Col. Cotters having made the remarks attributed to him:
Rotary member Bill Mayhugh, who is in charge of lining up speakers for the club, backs up Cotter. It was typical community outreach, Mayhugh says. He said that if you see something suspicious, call the police, FBI or Homeland Security. I sure didnt hear the stuff thats in the e-mail.
Occammd Enters European Market with Attendance at the LoRa All Members Meeting in Munich
Several industry reports by key research organizations and consulting firms have predicted the IoT market to develop into one that will have billions of devices with trillions in potential revenues. However, research has also shown that the primary problems in realizing this predicted scale are due to the complexity of developing and deploying solutions and ensuring the security of connected IoT environments.
Occammd, a leader in medical, military, and consumer device product design and development, embedded controls and sensors, addresses both of these market concerns by delivering design simplicity, technological innovation, end-to-end turnkey solutions, and importantly security peace-of-mind to its rapidly growing client base.
Occammd designs and develops best in class real-time embedded systems, communications systems (differentiated end-to-end LoRa solution, ZigBee, Wi-Fi, etc.), and secure embedded systems (from chip to board to gateway to complete IoT platform and cloud including 247 security monitoring). The companys clients include global medical device manufacturers, commercial equipment manufacturers, and the United States Military.
Michael Ferris, CEO of Occammd, stated We are extremely excited to be entering the EMEA markets and to be attending the LoRa All Members Event in Munich. Occammd has a best in class track record of developing intelligent products and devices across the healthcare, military, and consumer verticals in North America and we are now putting in place another strategic component by expanding throughout the EMEA to support customers IoT requirements.
Erik Staaf, Occammds SVP for Business Development in the EMEA, added LoRa brings fantastic opportunities for companies to better realize their IoT opportunities which can often be complicated and confusing to design and develop due to the large number of choices. Occammd removes that pain point by delivering end-to-end turnkey solutions. So if you are struggling to get your IoT systems going, come and visit our stand. Furthermore, Occammd has a differentiated LoRa offering that we would enjoy discussing with customers in Munich.
iTalk, Inc. Announces the Sale of Its WQN Division
DELRAY BEACH, FL (Marketwired) 07/18/16 iTalk (OTC PINK: TALK) (the Company) today announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to sell its WQN division and related domain for $40,000 in cash, subject to closing adjustments. The sale is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed by July 31, 2016.
David Lee, President, stated, This transaction represents an additional step in Managements objective to focus on maintaining and growing our leadership position in our core retail distribution expansion. Concentrating on our national retail location roll-out enables us to maximize growth in sales and earnings, ultimately delivering improved value for our shareholders. WQNs international prepaid business has diminished over the past twelve months and was not profitable and synergistic with the Companys core retail distribution business.
Mr. David Levy, iTalks CEO, said, This transaction also eliminates our balance sheet deferred revenue liability of $46,243.
iTalk is a full service solutions provider for the mobility industry, specializing in retail and wholesale distribution, master agent services, as well as providing turnkey dealer portal and logistic solutions to our customers and dealers. We have positioned ourselves to stay ahead of the evolving mobile technology curve through our focus on creative value added services. Through our extensive offerings, iTalk has set itself apart by implementing innovative solutions to the customers and dealers of the carriers it serves. iTalk is a proud preferred distribution partner with the fastest growing Post Paid carrier in the nation as well as the number 1 fastest growing Prepaid Carrier in the nation. Through its extensive portfolio of capabilities and talent, iTalk is able to provide turnkey solutions to meet the demands of todays wireless industry and provide value added solutions to its growing network of resellers and eCommerce driven consumers. Our foundation is built on a solid distribution network, comprised of various channels enabling us to continue to source and develop innovative products and services while quickly deploying new emerging mobile technologies and brands into the marketplace. iTalk currently employs 30 people and is based in Norcross, GA with operations in San Antonio, TX, Dallas, TX, the Carolinas, Georgia and Miami, FL, with planned expansion to growth markets throughout the United States.
:
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and iTalk, Inc. undertakes no obligation to update such statements. The above information contains information relating to the Company that is based on the beliefs of the Company and/or its management, as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company or its management. When used in this document, the words anticipate, estimate, expect, intend, plans, projects, and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company or its management, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the current view of the Company regarding future events and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including the risks and uncertainties noted. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as anticipated, believed, estimated, expected, intended or projected. In each instance, forward-looking information should be considered in light of the accompanying meaningful cautionary statements herein. Factors that could cause results to differ include, but are not limited to, successful performance of internal plans, the impact of competitive services and pricing and general economic risks, estimated, expected, intended or projected. In each instance, forward-looking information should be considered in light of these uncertainties.
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SafeBreach Enables Enterprises to Weaponize Threat Intelligence
SUNNYVALE, CA (Marketwired) 07/18/16 , a leading innovator of continuous security validation, today announced that it has integrated its platform with . Infusing real-time threat intelligence feeds and transforming them into breach simulations empowers SafeBreach and FireEye customers to quickly validate the potential of and take preventive action against cyberattacks that are impacting peers in their industry.
According to the Gartner report, by Neil MacDonald and Peter Firstbrook, published in Feb 2014 and refreshed in January 2016, Comprehensive protection requires an adaptive protection process integrating predictive, preventive, detective and response capabilities. The report states, based on reconnaissance of hacker attention, hacker marketplaces and bulletin boards; on vertical industry interest; and on the type and sensitivity of the data being protected, this category is designed to proactively anticipate future attacks and targets so that enterprises can adjust their security protection strategies to compensate.
The SafeBreach ability to weaponize threat intelligence and truly understand the activities that represent specific priority threats allows security analysts to dramatically improve their ability to anticipate future attacks, challenge their security defenses and train their security operations center (SOC) teams.
As more and more attacks occur, organizations are turning to threat intelligence for early attack notification, but on its own, threat intelligence can exacerbate the problem by overwhelming analysts with data that is out of context, said , CTO and co-founder at SafeBreach. The SafeBreach threat intelligence integration enables the average organization to understand how applicable indicators of compromise would play out in their environment in a practical, actionable and proactive manner.
The combination of FireEye iSIGHT Intelligences ability to help organizations understand their adversaries and how to defend against them with SafeBreachs technology that turns intelligence into simulations is extremely powerful, said Ed Barry, VP of Cyber Security Coalition at FireEye. We are excited to offer our joint customers this new way to proactively defend their networks.
SafeBreach with FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence integration offers a number of important benefits, including:
Provide greater understanding of which compromise indicators correlate to an organizations risk profile;
Proactively address attacks that are being seen by the industry;
Improve analyst detection and response within security operation center (SOC) teams; and,
Validate the efficacy of threat intelligence feeds
The SafeBreach centralized management system incorporates the complete Hackers Playbook of breach methodologies, and manages a distributed network of breach simulators from a centralized location. SafeBreach simulators perform the role of the attacker, simulating traffic within the cyber kill chain. For example, to simulate breach methods for a Payment Card Industry (PCI) credit card exfiltration use case, breach methods are executed between simulators placed in the PCI segments and other segments, including the cloud and Internet.
Funded by Sequoia Capital and investor Shlomo Kramer, SafeBreach is a pioneer in the emerging category of continuous security validation. The companys groundbreaking platform provides a hackers view of an enterprises security posture for total and continuous security assessment, validation and reporting. SafeBreach automatically executes breach methods with an extensive and growing of research and real-world investigative data. For more information, visit or follow on Twitter @SafeBreach.
Kayla Krause
CHEN PR for SafeBreach
781.672.3148
Historic building in downtown LaPorte collapses, investigation ongoing
The owner was doing renovations, but investigators say the work was cosmetic and not structural.
Artist's illustration of a sail-equipped, laser-propelled "wafersat" designed to explore the solar system and beyond.
All of the books ever written, the genetic blueprint for human life and much of the other information that defines us as a species could soon be riding laser beams toward faraway exoplanets.
A new project called "Voices of Humanity" aims to send all of this stuff and more out into the "cosmic cloud," just in case something terrible happens to us here on Earth.
"We sometimes use the phrase, 'We want to back up humanity,' which is not a joke we want to do this," project co-founder Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Space.com. [Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel]
This isn't Lubin's first space-laser rodeo; he's also a key player in Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million initiative that aims to develop the ability to laser-launch tiny, sail-equipped "wafercraft" to Alpha Centauri and other extrasolar systems.
Lubin has also received two rounds of funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to develop this laser propulsion technology.
Voices of Humanity is a different but related effort, and one that doesn't have solid financial backing yet. Indeed, Lubin, co-founder Travis Brashears (a physics undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley) and their colleagues are looking to the masses for funding, via a Kickstarter campaign that launched today (July 18).
The Voices of Humanity team initially hopes to raise $30,000. This money will be used to launch a "humanity chip" full of images and other data provided by Kickstarter contributors to low-Earth orbit, likely in mid-2017, project team members said.
If the Kickstarter campaign hits its $100,000 "stretch goal," the researchers will build a ground-based laser system that will beam digitally encoded information directly to the objects of campaign contributors' choice stars or exoplanets, for example, or even (for particularly dark thoughts) the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's core.
The laser-beaming system could be built within 12 months if the team reaches the $100,000 stretch funding goal, Brashears told Space.com.
"The Voices of Humanity campaigns purpose is to give a voice to all of humanity and to immortalize those voices. In this way, your voice will literally live forever," the project's Kickstarter site reads.
Over the long haul, Lubin envisions such space-based time capsules as being part of a cosmic ark that preserves humanity and its culture, via information-carrying chips as well as directly beamed data.
Schematic depicting a "wafersat," which researchers hope to outfit with information containing "humanity chips" and send out through the cosmos via laser propulsion. (Image credit: Voices of Humanity
The humanity chips whose memory capacity the team aims to increase every year would ideally not just ride aboard tiny, laser-propelled craft. Lubin said the team hopes one chip can hitch a ride on pretty much every future space mission. The mass of each chip will be just 1 gram (0.04 ounces), so adding one to a satellite or interplanetary probe wouldn't be a burden, Lubin said.
Such chips could carry the entire contents of the Library of Congress, a video message from everyone on Earth or virtually any other type of data.
"Personally, I would like to send out a blueprint for life on Earth and how to reconstruct us, how to make us," said Lubin, who has also formed a company called Directed Energy to help pursue such goals. "Everything required to have a do-it-yourself 'build humanity' project."
Not everyone is in favor of beaming information about ourselves into the cosmos. For example, the famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has warned that intelligent aliens could theoretically use this information to conquer humanity and pilfer Earth's resources.
But Lubin noted as others have that humanity has been broadcasting data into space since the invention of the radio a century ago. So Voices of Humanity and related efforts wouldn't really increase the risk, he said.
"If they want to come and eat us, presumably they already know that we're here," Lubin said. "People are used to being afraid of the dark from when they were children. We want to explore the universe not be afraid of it."
You can learn more about Voices of Humanity and participate in the Kickstarter campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793003507/voices-of-humanity-the-worlds-space-time-capsule.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
SpaceX's uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule splashes down in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California on May 11, 2016 after returning from the International Space Station.
SpaceX is pretty serious about this whole spacecraft reusability thing.
The California-based company landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket for the fifth time early Monday morning (July 18), during the launch of its robotic Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station (ISS) on a cargo mission for NASA.
This fall, SpaceX plans to refly one of its landed Falcon 9 rockets for the first time and a Dragon capsule should make history by launching on a repeat ISS resupply mission shortly thereafter, a NASA official and a SpaceX representative said during a postlaunch news conference Monday. [How SpaceX's Dragon Space Capsule Works (Infographic)]
"I think we're looking at SpaceX-11," said Joel Montalbano, NASA's deputy manager of ISS utilization, referring to the 11th resupply mission the company will fly with Dragon and the Falcon 9. (Monday's launch kicked off SpaceX-9.)
"I thought it was 11 or 12 something like that," replied Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability at SpaceX. "So, not too far from now."
SpaceX-11 is currently scheduled to lift off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in February 2017, and SpaceX-12 is slated to launch two months later, according to Spaceflight Now.
Dragon returns to Earth in one piece, making a parachute-aided splashdown in the ocean. This capability distinguishes Dragon from the other resupply vessels that currently fly to the ISS Orbital ATK's Cygnus spacecraft, Russia's Progress freighter and Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle all of which burn up in the planet's atmosphere when their missions are done.
SpaceX has retrieved every Dragon capsule that has come back from the ISS, but the company has yet to refly one.
"The whole goal is to lower the cost of space travel and space transportation," Koenigsmann said of SpaceX's commitment to reusability. "Ultimately, I think we will enable lower transportation costs and provide much cheaper access to space based on that."
Along those lines, the company also aims to retrieve and reuse the payload fairings that encase satellites during launches, he added.
"We've been working on that," Koenigsmann said. "There are going to be modifications on the fairing, and then we're going to test this out again. I don't think I have a schedule on that; it's going to be a couple more missions until we can work that out."
SpaceX is also developing a crewed version of Dragon that is scheduled to begin flying NASA astronauts to and from the ISS next year.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
NASA's Kepler space telescope has spotted four possibly rocky alien planets orbiting the same star, and two of these newfound worlds might be capable of supporting life.
The four exoplanets circle a red dwarf a star smaller and dimmer than the sun called K2-72, which lies 181 light-years from Earth in the Aquarius constellation. All four worlds are between 20 percent and 50 percent wider than Earth, making them good candidates to be rocky, discovery team members said.
Two of the four planets, known as K2-72c and K2-72e, appear to be in the star's "habitable zone" that just-right range of distances at which liquid water can exist on a world's surface, the scientists added. [How Habitable Zones for Exoplanets Work (Infographic)]
The habitable zone around stars is a so-called Goldilocks' zone where conditions are just right for liquid water. See how habitable zones work in this Space.com infographic (Image credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)
Because K2-72 is a red dwarf, its habitable zone is much closer in than that of the sun. For example, K2-72c completes one orbit every 15 Earth days, yet it is likely just 10 percent warmer than our planet. K2-72e has a 24-Earth-day year, and it's about 6 percent colder than Earth, the scientists said. (All four newfound planets complete an orbit in 24 Earth days or less, making them closer to K2-72 than Mercury is to the sun.)
The K2-72 planets are among 104 alien worlds recently discovered by the Kepler telescope during its bounce-back K2 mission. Study leader Ian Crossfield, of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, first announced this haul in January, during a presentation at the 227th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Kissimmee, Florida, and the results were just published online in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
Kepler finds alien planets by noticing the tiny brightness dips they cause when they cross their host stars' faces from the spacecraft's perspective. This work requires incredibly precise pointing an ability Kepler lost in May 2013 when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed.
However, Kepler team members soon figured out a way to stabilize the telescope using sunlight pressure and the two remaining reaction wheels. In 2014, Kepler embarked on a new mission called K2, during which it is observing a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena, including exoplanets.
But Kepler's planet hunt is quite different this time around. Whereas the observatory stared continuously at one small patch of sky during its original mission, Kepler is now peering at different regions during a series of 80-day "campaigns."
"An analogy would be to say that Kepler performed a demographic study, while the K2 mission focuses on the bright and nearby stars with different types of planets," Crossfield said in a statement today (July 18). "The K2 mission allows us to increase the number of small, red stars by a factor of 20, significantly increasing the number of astronomical 'movie stars' that make the best systems for further study."
Kepler has now discovered more than 2,300 alien worlds since its March 2009 launch about two-thirds of all confirmed exoplanets found to date. More than 2,000 additional Kepler "candidates" await vetting by follow-up observations or analyses.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
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Opinions about the imam couldn't be more divergent. People who have left his movement describe the community as a sect, not unlike Scientology. Others view Gulen as being one of the most important preachers of modernist Islam, which seeks to spread a more tolerant interpretation of the religion.
For a long time, Erdogan was one of Gulen's most prominent supporters -- and they even entered into an informal alliance: Gulen's supporters secured votes for AKP and Erdogan gave protection to the Gulen movement's opaque businesses after he came into power in 2002.
Parting Ways
But after the parliamentary elections in 2011, in which AKP won almost 50 percent of the vote, Erdogan apparently felt strong enough on his own to break the pact with Gulen. Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, fired important justice officials and party functionaries considered to be Gulen followers. He also ordered the secret services to monitor the movement.
The final break between the two came in November 2013, when Erdogan announced his decision to close the Gulen movement's tutoring centers. Around 2 million Turkish youth visit the schools in order to prepare for university entrance examinations. They provide Gulen with his most important source of revenue, but also serve as places where he can recruit new followers.
For years, Erdogan has believed that Gulen sought to challenge his hold on power. Gulen, meanwhile, believes that his one-time friend has become a tyrant intent on eliminating any opposition.
"Erdogan is so hungry for power that he believes everyone else is too," says Gulen. "Erdogan comes from a poor background and now he lives in many palaces. Success and power have poisoned him."
In Gulen's Bedroom
These days, Gulen is seeking to present himself as the polar opposite of the president in Ankara. His organization has millions in assets at its disposal, but Gulen himself claims to have practically no personal belongings. His aides say that he lives solely for his faith. His small apartment, which he has willingly opened up to his visitors on this day, has two rooms. He sleeps on a mattress on the floor, and next to it is a desk with books on it, small bottles of oil and a little Ottoman treasure box. A picture of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is hanging on the wall and a Turkish flag covers the shelf.
A closer inspection suggests that much consideration here has been given to security. Gulen's large veranda is furnished with black panels to ensure that he can't easily be seen and the rooms in his apartment can only be opened with a special chip card. An elevator takes Gul directly to the garage, from which he is driven to the hospital for regular check-ups. Otherwise, his people say, he never leaves the house.
Why Is He So Sealed Off?
Gulen has been described as extremely introverted, but it's difficult to imagine that being the case. How, after all, could someone so reserved build up such a major and influential movement? Followers of his movement are in important positions at all levels of the state -- in the judiciary, the military and in the political sphere. When Erdogan flexes his muscles inside the government apparatus, as he is currently doing, parts of Gulen's network are also affected.
But this quiet and modest-seeming gentleman also has a firm grasp on the political game back in his home country. Gulen insinuates it may have been Erdogan himself who staged the putsch in order to strengthen his power and he notes that the president spoke of a golden opportunity to conduct a purge. But Gulen says he was also surprised by the unusual course taken by the putsch. After all, he said, the rebels failed to eliminate the political leadership right at the beginning. In effect, he is spinning his own conspiracy theory to counter Erdogan's. But he has no proof.
Intrigues, Propaganda and Power Struggles
In this conflict, it is difficult to tell those telling lies from those telling the truth, or even just the half-truth. Turkish domestic politics long ago became filled with intrigue, propaganda and power struggles. But a visit with Gulen doesn't leave you with the impression that he is some sort of terror mastermind or putschist. Still, it is impossible to be certain. In such appearances, it is difficult to tell what is real and what is staged.
So what happens next? Erdogan is demanding that the United States extradite Gulen, but he hasn't yet filed an official request and Gulen doesn't believe he will be extradited. Erdogan, he says, has no evidence to show the Americans. "The US justice system works. The Americans won't turn me over if there isn't a tangible reason."
His praise is more than idle. With permanent resident status, he says he likes America a lot and feels at home here. Indeed, he has even taken up an interest in American politics.
"Hillary Clinton is a good woman," he says. "She is a figure of hope for this country."
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STAMFORD A curling iron plugged into a lamp adjacent to a sleeping child, a pile of fencing wood with nails sticking out and a heavy metal construction table near an outside play area were among a list of safety hazards found during recent inspections of an East Side home day care at the center of a baby homicide investigation.
Early Childhood Commissioner Myra Jones-Taylor has suspended the license of Nydia Carrillo, who runs Little Bears Beginnings Daycare, where 2-month-old Bella Redondo had trouble breathing last week and died several hours later at Stamford Hospital.
The babys death has been ruled a homicide, the result of blunt-force trauma to the head, police said.
The New Canaan girl was one of two babies who died in Connecticut last week following medical emergencies at a day care. In Sterling, a rural town in Windham County, police are investigating the death of a 9-month-old girl, though they dont believe the incident was criminal.
State regulators said the Sterling day care was unlicensed and operating illegally.
Police in Faifield said over the weekend the death of a 4-month-old Shelton boy at an unlicensed home day care has been ruled a homicide. The death on March 22 was initially ruled an accident, but has now been blamed on ingestion of Benadryl.
More Information Safety citations Here are some of the hazards state inspectors found during visits in December and May to Litte Bears Beginnings Daycare: A curling iron plugged into a lamp in a bedroom where a child was asleep on the floor. A pile of fencing wood with nails sticking out in the backyard. "Sharp edge" on grill leaves mark on child's face. Source: Connecticut Office of Early Childhood See More Collapse
In Stamford, Police Lt. Diedrich Hohn said investigators have identified three persons of interest who were at the day care when the baby had trouble breathing last Tuesday afternoon.
Carrillo, her husband, Alexander Corleto, and her sister, Claudia Carrillo, are listed as working at the facility, located on the second floor of a multi-family home on Wardwell Street. However, police have declined to say if they are being investigated as suspects.
An inspector for the states Office of Early Childhood conducted an unannounced visit to the day care in December when a curling iron was plugged into a lamp in a bedroom where a child was sleeping on the floor and electrical outlets were found without covers in and near a bathroom, documents show.
The inspector found a heavy-duty metal construction table, a pile of fencing wood with nails sticking out, gas grills and two propane tanks accessible to children in the backyard, state records show.
The backyard was ruled unsafe for child care until Carrillo completed a corrective action plan.
The inspector also discovered the familys dog did not have a current rabies exam and a new resident moved in without completing background checks or medical tests, documents show.
Maggie Adair, a spokeswoman for the states Office of Early Childhood, the department responsible for licensing, inspection and supervision of day cares, said the December visit was an annual inspection of the facility. She said none of the violations warranted suspending the license of the day care, which is one of 2,188 child care homes licensed in the state.
Adair said the office tries to work with day care facilities in these types of cases to help improve their programs. Adair declined to comment further about the Stamford day care until the criminal investigation is completed.
After at least two extensions, the corrective action plan drawn up in December was completed in the spring, but other safety hazards were found during a follow-up inspection.
An inspector wrote following a May 18 visit that two gas grills were accessible to children in the backyard. The inspector noted watching a child walking into one grill and a sharp edge made a minor mark on the side of his face. The report says Carrillo corrected the issues later that month.
Carrillo was issued a family child care license in April 2015, according to the states licensing database. The day care, which many neighbors didnt know existed, is allowed to have up to six children 12 years old or younger.
Christian Bujdud, an attorney representing Carrillo and her husband, said his clients have a hearing scheduled for July 28 before the Office of Early Childhood to contest the license suspension.
I dont understand the relevance of those previous violations, that have already been corrected, have to do with the current case at hand, he said Monday when asked about the inspections.
Bujdud said last week the baby could have suffered the head injury before arriving at the day care last Tuesday.
Hohn said the parents told police their daughter was in perfect health when she was dropped off between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m.
Hohn said samples from the autopsy are being examined. He said the state Department of Children and Families and doctors at Yale School of Medicines Child Study Center are trying to establish a timeline of when the infant was injured.
Hohn said the baby had trouble breathing when an ambulance was called to the day care at 3:12 p.m. Tuesday. The child arrived at the hospital at 3:40 p.m. and stopped breathing, he said.
Doctors tried for hours to resuscitate the baby before pronouncing her dead at 6:20 p.m., Hohn said.
Police said they were not notified until 6:27 p.m. even though there was evidence of head trauma in addition to the breathing issues when medics arrived at the day care. Hohn said the delayed notification has hampered the police investigation.
A spokesman for Stamford Hospital said they have fully cooperated with reporting requirements and the criminal investigation.
Friends and family of the baby, who lived with her parents and three siblings in New Canaan, launched a GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral costs and the parents lost wages for missed work.
The family was completely unprepared for such a loss of a child at such a young age, page organizer Becky DaMenace wrote. The Redondo family would like to take Bella back to her fathers hometown and bury her with her grandmother in Florida.
jnickerson@scni.com; noliveria@hearstmediact.com
This year my small business celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. Pop open the champagne because weve beat the odds. According to Dun & Bradstreet, businesses with fewer than 20 employees have only a 37 percent chance of surviving four years and only a 9 percent chance of surviving 10 years.
This made me consider why some small businesses succeed while others don't. Some may be a result of the experience and skill of the founder or startup team while others are heavily influenced by market factors, such as timing or chance.
Here are my top 15 lessons that have helped me survive and grow my business for the past 15 years.
1. Treat your customers business as your own.
Your time is their money so be efficient.
Many agencies use heavily designed presentations to report results or recommend strategies then bill the client thousands of dollars for design services. I typically supply these items in simple but detailed Word documents at no extra charge.
Additionally, in the event that there is a miscommunication, leading to either work done incorrectly or outside of scope, I swallow the cost of the extra work. I consider this an investment in our relationship and a learning experience.
2. Build and maintain a great network.
This will help you generate new business opportunities.
When the great recession hit several years back, many of my client contacts were laid off. I devoted several hours each week to help place talented PR and marketing professionals find new positions. While this support was offered out of genuine concern for my colleagues, it has paid dividends with several new business opportunities coming from these past clients and colleagues.
Additionally, many of my former team members remain friendly and in contact as part of my business community. Some of my best client referrals have come from past employees.
3. Assemble a strong support team of talented professionals.
It takes a village to run a business so assemble a strong support team of talented people.
It is a pleasure and a professional asset to know a lot of talented people. Ive built a modular team with experts dedicated to working with me on each client engagement. To make sure we are leaving no important ideas and opportunities on the table, I often reach out to other experts I know for functional expertise related to specific industries and business situations.
4. Establish a group of advisors.
This can be a board of directors or an informal peer group.
Either is a way to either expand the pool of people with a vested interest in your success. It's also a great way to exchange expertise without hiring consultants for advice on finances, human resources, contracts, marketing and other areas.
5. Invest wisely.
Avoid the temptation to overspend on luxury items, like office space, and try handling administrative tasks yourself if you are comfortable doing so. Look for opportunities to share the cost of tools and services. For example, I share a group subscription to databases and research services, which saves me hundreds of dollars each month.
6. Establish reasonable and manageable payment terms.
You shouldnt be financing your clients. Over the years, numerous large corporations have asked me for terms beyond 30 days, stretching to 60 and 90.
I have held a line and even rejected business and RFP opportunities with prospects offering terms greater than 30 days. My time should be spent doing great communications work and not chasing receivables or paying interest in order to pay my own staff.
7. Dont try to do everything.
Trying to be all things to all people just to land a new client distracts from your reputation and can dilute your focus on being effective within your core competencies and building your client base. Provide customers with what you do best, and refer or hire others with expertise you need but dont have.
8. Stay current with your professional tools.
Be sure whatever technology and services you use are up-to-date and compatible with your customers.
Throughout the past 15 years, my technology tools and capabilities have often exceeded those of my largest corporate clients. I make it a point to update my main office computer every couple of years, run the newest version of software available and have a recent model smartphone. Ive also found it vitally important that I be able to access my company server remotely from tablet, laptop, smartphone and other desktops.
Related: 10 Writers Who Turned Books Into Empires
9. Be a valued team member.
Working as a valued team member enables you to be kept in the information loop so you can perform effectively.
Although I am not required to do so, I often sit in on clients quarterly earning calls to be sure I am embedded in their organizations information loop. I attend seminars in my clients industry even if they have no staff going in order to keep both myself and the client abreast of the most current news and information in their industry. This helps me provide the best service and at the same time gives the client a feeling that I am more than just a contractor.
10. Exceed expectations.
Exceeding expectations with clear deliverables and smart and hard work leads to retention and referrals.
A few of our large corporate clients have historically retained big name global PR firms, while at the same time engaging with ICCC.
For one such company, ICCC handled North American crisis communications. Our work, developing a crisis communications plan, was so strategic and thorough that when the big agencys worldwide crisis plan was compared with ours, the ICCC North American model became the master plan, and its strategy and tools were pushed out to all of the other regions.
11. Offer something before asking for something.
Educate your existing and perspective client base through activities, such as blogging and public speaking to build trust.
Related: 7 Lessons to Take Away From Microsoft
12. Make referrals for others.
Connecting the people you know to others in your network reflects your ties to talent. It also shows your understanding of others needs and creates possibilities for reciprocation.
13. Build strategic alliances.
This can expand the scope of your services and help keep you going even when your core avenue of business is slow.
For example, we've brought in market research, video production, legal counsel, social media analytics and other firms or consultants to help clients or deliver on a project. ICCC doesnt charge for coordinating these services. Helping to provide these suppliers means clients know they can count on us beyond our core competencies, and it also helps us market to bigger competition.
Related: 7 Management Lessons From a 7-Time CEO
14. Contact former customers.
Just because a customer is no longer with you does not mean they may not need you again in the future.
A client that engaged ICCC to develop thought leadership content approached us at the completion of that project and asked about our employee communications expertise. We ended up developing an internal communications strategy and campaign to influence attitudes and behaviors. Another client contracted us for media relations and came back to us later to develop a portal and communications tools to engage their brand ambassadors and licensees.
15. Be a student of your business.
In todays world, tools and methods for doing business across many industries are evolving at a rapid pace. Keep learning about your industry to stay on top of innovations, and find new ways to be more effective and productive.
Every year I identify topics that will give me exposure to new thinking or enable me to strengthen my knowledge and skills.
I have attended conferences on topics, ranging from trade with China to social media and millennial trends. These are give-and-take experiences, where I share my expertise and simultaneously learn about innovations in software, data mining and industries from health and tech to travel, finance and education.
The knowledge I gain from these opportunities assists me in my current dealings with clients and helps me position my business better when pitching new clients.
While most of these tips can apply to any type of business, I would encourage you to glean those which you think are most relevant to your business and goals. Also, dont underestimate the value in learning from other entrepreneurs experiences and using that knowledge to build your own business.
Related:
Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Take the competition seriously, but not yourself. For Sir Richard Branson thats not just a passing quote -- its a motto he lives by.
Branson is no stranger to hard work. He founded Virgin Records in 1973, which sold for $1 billion, he owns Virgin Money, Virgin Airlines, Virgin Galactic, is and numerous other Virgin business ventures.
But despite being one of Forbes World Billionaires, taking himself too seriously never seems to be a problem. Branson captured national headlines this year by posting a goofy photo on Twitter with a sleeping employee, and he even brought attention to National Oceans Day by wearing a mermaid tail.
Related: 8 Times Billionaires Got Wacky on Twitter
He holds the title for the first crossing of the Pacific in a hot-air balloon, he bungee jumped out of a building in Las Vegas and has a flying submarine (which yes, he has used).
Branson turns 66 today. To celebrate, we have curated 8 times the silly billionaire made us smile.
1. When he was interviewed by Entrepreneur.coms Kim Shandrow
Bransons a busy man, that's no secret, but he made sure Entrepreneur.coms Kim Shandrow got all of her interview questions in, plus a few extra, when she interviewed him in Los Angeles for the Virgin Atlantics Business is Adventure event.
When his PR team asked Shandrow to finish the interview, the billionaire cut them off and made sure she had time to get all that she needed.
He then shared some of his most classic advice for starting a business, Screw it, just do it.
2. When he writes his own Tweets
Branson is one of the most active billionaires on Twitter often linking out to his blog. Many busy CEOs have their team for that, but the billionaire says he writes every word.
My first rule of social media is to make sure everything I post is absolutely authentic, Branson said in a blog on LinkedIn. If it wasnt really me writing on LinkedIn or posting my virgin.com blogs, people would spot it a mile off.
In fact, theres a lot to smile about when the billionaire takes to Twitter, it makes us smile. He once dressed in a mermaid outfit, blue scales and all, for World Ocean Day.
3. When he crashed a hot air balloon into the Atlantic ocean
Branson is not only an incredibly successful businessman, but he also loves adventure. In July of 1987, Branson, then 36-years-old, and a co-balloonist attempted to be the first to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon.
The next thing, we found ourselves being hurtled through the water at something like 100 miles per hour with water coming in the capsule, Branson told the New York Times. We climbed out on the roof, and the capsule started rising.
4. When he lost a bet, and paid up
Branson lost a bet to Tony Fernandes, AirAsia Group CEO, after his Formula one racing team finished after Fernandes. The bet? The loser dresses up as a female flight attendant for the others airline.
Branson didnt back down from the bet and wore bright red lipstick, fake eyelashes and he even shaved his legs (but not his mustache).
5. When he wrote this adorable letter to a 12-year-old
When 12-year-old Olivia Hill reached out to Branson to be the topic of her business studies project, she probably didnt expect to hear back.
Sure enough, Branson made time to respond to the young girl. He even adds to the end, Have you thought about your own first business idea yet? When you do, be sure to let me know. Adorable.
You can read the full letter here.
6. When he announced a full year of maternity and paternity leave for his employees
Not only does Branson offer his employees unlimited vacation days, but June of last year he offered Virgin Management employees in London and Geneva an entire year off for maternity or paternity leave. If the employees were working there for four years or longer they receive all of their salary for the 52 weeks.
He posted in a blog, If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your business.
7. When he bungee jumped off a casino in Vegas
He probably doesnt remember this 2007 bungee jumping adventure too fondly, as he crashed into the side of the building a little harder than expected (and ripped his pants), but the video certainly made us laugh.
He jumped off of the Palms Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, a 407-foot-tall building to celebrate his first Virgin America flight.
Related:
On His Birthday, 8 Great Richard Branson Moments
10 Quotes from the Fearless Arianna Huffington
8 Entrepreneurship Lessons That Counter What You've Learned
Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Body Lawson Studios
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.
S andwich bar staff around Edinburghs Regent Terrace might see an added spring in the step of some of its regular patrons from local fund house Baillie Gifford after the ARM deal with SoftBank.
The Scottish firm, which looks after 120 billion, is ARMs biggest shareholder with a near-10% stake, leaving it sitting on an extra 700 million today.
The jumbo deal also leaves the bankers on the deal quids in, with boutique Robey Warshaw adding to its roster of M&A (AB Inbev-SABMiller, LSE-Deutsche Borse) with a role for SoftBank.
Wall Street boutique Raine Group founded by former Goldman Sachs executive Joe Ravitch and Morgan Stanley dealmaker Jeff Sine is a regular in the SoftBank boardroom (it advised on the takeover of Sprint) and is back on the ticket although the fee may be bittersweet given Raines hedge fund shorted ARMs US shares.
Mizuho is also advising SoftBank. Anyone doubting Goldman Sachs M&A kingpin Anthony Gutmans juggling skills were left in no doubt after he snagged a role on the biggest ever Asian-UK deal while at the same time defending his firms role in the BHS saga before a Parliamentary committee.
Goldman is advising ARM alongside discrete banking stalwart Lazard.
Notable absentees include Rothschild and JP Morgan both of these companies advised on the $17 billion acquisition of Altera by Intel, one of the firms once touted as a potential suitor for ARM.
I n the week that Sadiq Khan began his campaign for more control over Londons finances, Theresa May concluded that the capital was already doing exceptionally well compared to the rest of the country.
The gaping chasm between London and everywhere else was identified by May in a speech about greater shared prosperity, given hours before her leadership campaign became a prime ministerial coronation.
Of course, there is a gap. An independent economic review carried out for the Northern Powerhouse found that the North produces 22,000 less gross value added (GVA) per person than London.
In the interests of fairness, of course this gap should be closed. But what must be worrying the Mayor and civic business leaders is how May proposes to do so.
The knee-jerk option would be to limit investment in London, prioritising infrastructure spending in the regions, and presumably hold back on granting the capital more fiscal powers.
"It is clear that capping Londons ambition will only harm the broader UK, not help it."
After all, until the North has developed a 21st-century mass-transit transport system rather than a programme of minor track repairs, there is little prospect of catching up with its southern cousins.
But just as hopes rise that new Chancellor Philip Hammond will begin borrowing to invest on a scale that his predecessor George Osborne would never have permitted, it is clear that capping Londons ambition will only harm the broader UK, not help it.
At his devolution summit last Thursday, Khan declared: We cant protect Londoners from the economic fallout of leaving the EU without more autonomy for London government. Many in attendance agreed. The Mayor could do with more cash at hand to counter the effect of a charm offensive launched by Frankfurt and Paris that may lure away companies and their well-paid workers worried about the UKs continued access to the single market.
The case for greater fiscal autonomy is a seductive one, suggesting that taxes set, collected and spent locally catalyse better economic results than those masterminded from the national centre. These powers also typically lead to greater borrowing to smooth out the new income stream.
London deserves more freedom to set its own course beyond the retention of business rates that is already promised, even though the evidence that more autonomy leads to more jobs and higher growth is flimsy.
What Khan must be mindful of is that elsewhere in the UK, the tide turned against London somewhere between the balmy days of our Olympic summer and the Brexit vote, when provincial voters rose up against an economic bloc they were tired of. To them, the capital is hoarding its euro-generated wealth while simultaneously draining talent and investment from the regions.
That is unfair, given how much tax pours into Treasury coffers to be dispersed nationally. But before asking for a deal that would put London on a similar footing to other world cities such as New York, there must be a better case made on the home front. In all sorts of ways, London plays the part of provider to the rest of the UK. The benefits flow in both directions.
Consider that 60% of Transport for Londons capital investment budget is spent elsewhere in the country in lieu of any train-manufacturing facilities within the M25. Or that Deloitte plans to double its Belfast workforce to 1000 by 2020, presumably not because the Northern Irish economy is booming but because its office there has become a vital nearshore outpost for serving national and international clients typically based in London.
The same can be said of JPMorgans Bournemouth base. The investment bank employs 4000 people there, providing operational support to more than 40 countries, but I doubt it would have made such a big commitment to Dorset if it wasnt already well-established in London. And then there is London as a tourism gateway, the starting point for 40% of inbound visits to the UK.
A 2013 report by London First tried to put some numbers on how much Londons economic activity contributes to the rest of the country. It analysed nine central London office developments by their construction expenditure, supply chain and employee spending. The upshot was that 1.7 billion of gross value added was generated and 34,600 jobs sustained. Rather than being concentrated in the capital, more than half of the GVA accrued outside London, as did more than 22,000 of the jobs.
Of course, London must share and share alike. Of course, Manchester and Leeds deserve their own bold infrastructure vision. But it is worth remembering that what is spent in the capital provides a boost hundreds of miles away.
In this climate of political fragmentation, when even the UK may disunite, it is just possible that our local economies are more connected than ever.
S tuart Chambers lasted three years at Nippon Sheet Glass after he sold Pilkington to the Japanese industrial giant. I have learned I am not Japanese, he admitted, somewhat ruefully.
Despite the cultural challenges he may have experienced then, today he was banging the drum to sell ARM to Japan, too.
To me, it is a moment of sadness to see this great British blue-chip sold to overseas investors. ARM has grown to its impressive size by being one of the few British-born tech companies to eschew the fast-buck option of selling out to a foreign rival. Instead, it has grown independently to join the ranks of the top-30 UK-listed companies.
Its independence has allowed it to act quicker than bigger rivals. While lumbering Intel became too attached to desktop PCs, ARM leapt into mobile.
As smartphone sales looked set to peak, it charged into the Internet of Things, creating the best chip designs for household appliances.
It has done this largely by massive investment in research and development some quarter of a billion pounds last year alone. Much of that goes into the UK.
As such, it is precisely the kind of company Britain needs to boost its horrendous record on productivity. It is clearly of structural importance to Britains technology industry. So, where would its takeover leave UK plc?
That all depends on how concrete we can make the assurances from SoftBank to retain and grow its operations here. In its Stock Exchange announcement today, it says it intends to double the number of employees, and intends to invest in building the company faster than it could under its current structure.
Welcome sentiments, but if weve learned anything from Krafts bogus pledges to keep open Cadburys Somerdale factory, its that buyers deeds may not be as good as their words.
"The good news is SoftBank is not a bland, couldnt-give-a-stuff US corporate."
The government must ensure SoftBank makes legally binding commitments to its pledges before waving through this deal. This is only reasonable, given that ARM receives tens of millions of pounds a year from R&D tax credits and the UK patent box allowance.
The good news is SoftBank is not a bland, couldnt-give-a-stuff US corporate. It does want to invest in and boost ARMs growth in Cambridge. Like ARM, it is entrepreneurial and fleet-footed. It would be a better owner than, say, Intel.
Also, and this will have comforted Chambers, Softbank is not one of those Nikkei behemoths steeped in the fusty corporate culture that has ossified Japans economy.
Reluctantly, then, and depending on those all-important investment pledges, we should welcome this deal. British jewels should be for sale, but only to the right bidder and with binding promises.
I nvestors who stocked up on bombed-out mining shares at the start of the year must be feeling pretty smug. After last years nightmare, the sector has rebounded strongly thanks to a recovery in commodities prices.
Among the best performers has been Glencore, which has doubled in value as it makes progress on its asset sales to pay down its towering debt pile. But analysts at Credit Suisse today called the top for Ivan Glasenbergs commodities trader-cum-mining giant as the broker downgraded the shares from Outperform to Neutral.
Their main reason for the gloomier outlook is copper, which accounts for about 40% of Glencores mining earnings. We remain negative on copper due to subdued demand and healthy mine supply growth, and we believe this will cap upside from here, said Credit Suisses Liam Fitzpatrick.
The move caused Glencore shares to retreat 2.3p to 183.65p. Its decline was matched by other miners, including Anglo-Aussie iron ore giant BHP Billiton, down 22.3p at 974.2p.
But the day belonged to ARM Holdings, which rocketed after agreeing a 24 billion takeover by Japans SoftBank, lifting the FTSE 100 14.50 points to 6683.74. The mega-deal had stock-market players trying to predict the next big targets away from the tech sector as foreign companies look to take advantage of the cheap pound.
The usual takeover candidates emerged at the top of the FTSE 100 leaderboard, including ITV, 4.2p better off at 192.7p, and cigarette maker Imperial Brands, up 50.5p at 4042.5p. More Than insurer RSA, whose takeover by Zurich fell through last year, rose 13.6p to 491.9p.
On the FTSE 250, Aldermore fell 2.8p to 138.3p as Peel Hunt cut its rating on the challenger bank from Buy to Hold. The broker warned that investing in lenders such as Aldermore was only for the brave after the Brexit vote.
Recent AIM recruit venture capitalist Draper Esprit made its first investment since going public last month, backing Swedish digital health firm Lifesum to the tune of 3.1 million.
The only company to outshine ARM was Transense Technologies, which leapt 0.58p, or 58%, to 1.58p after striking a licensing deal worth up to $750,000 (570,000) with General Electric. The AIM firm is behind sensors used by mining trucks to measure tyre pressure.
Outsourcery, the collapsed cloud-based business of former Dragons Den star Piers Linney, left AIM today after its assets were sold by administrators to services provider GCI.
B ritish schoolchildren who tapped away on a BBC Micro computer in the 1980s unwittingly sowed the seeds of ARMs success.
The firm grew out of computer pioneer Acorn Computers, founded by three Cambridge University scientists who struck gold when they signed a deal with the BBC to make the machine.
Scratching their heads to top the device, the burgeoning company developed a new microchip called the Acorn RISC Machine, later abbreviated to ARM.
The technology caught the eye of Silicon Valley and in 1990 Apple and US circuit board maker VLSI Technology persuaded Acorn to spin off the ARM unit into a new firm called Advanced RISC Machines.
The business, comprised of 12 former Acorn engineers, was led by Sir Robin Saxby and he pioneered the practice of licensing chip design to other companies.
Saxby brought entrepreneurial flair to the firm, famously winning ARMs first boardroom table in a coin flip with a local furniture dealer.
Nokias decision to license ARMs technology in its ubiquitous mobiles paved the way for a landslide of royalty payments to ARM, which floated in 1998.
Royalty payments continued with the next giants of the smartphone era Apple and Samsung a bonanza which continues today.
L ondon's response to Brexit has been swift: the launch of a renewed bid to attract overseas tourists and global investment. Under the hashtag #londonisopen the Mayor is leading a campaign using business leaders and actors and musicians to make the case that the city welcomes people from abroad here to visit and to do business; Brexit is a fact of political life, not a frame of mind. But if the campaign has a single political focus it is to emphasise that the EU nationals who are already here are welcome to remain; they are a valued part of London life.
Coincidentally, the Japanese takeover of ARM Holdings, the UKs pre-eminent technology company which designs microchips for every purpose, is announced just as this initiative gets underway. It shows Brexit has not deterred global investors from investing here the new owners have promised not only to guarantee existing jobs but to double the size of the UK workforce to about 3,000.
Undeniably, other institutions are reassessing their investment plans but at least we now have political stability, with Theresa May firmly in charge, and that is the prerequisite for investor confidence. Of Mrs Mays appointments, perhaps the most interesting was the creation of an Overseas Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, to go with David Daviss appointment for Brexit negotiations. It emphasises the Governments intention to be internationalist in its outlook.
Mrs May has also reintroduced the post of minister for London Gavin Barwell. Its important when the Mayor is not from the party of government to ensure that the citys interests are properly represented. He and the Mayor must co-operate to ensure London stays open.
An ill wind for Erdogan
The failed Turkish coup has worked out rather well for the countrys Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who responded with astonishing promptness by arresting all the dissident military as well as an astonishing number of judges and officers of the law some 6,000 people in all. Remarkably, he appears to have anticipated developments by having a list of opponents and potential opponents ready and has already observed: This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse the army. Whether security services fomented the coup or simply made the most of it is still unclear.
What is abundantly clear, however, is what a dangerous player President Erdogan is on the world stage: an Islamist at home, who hankers after a return of Ottoman influence in the Balkans. He has been a destabilising influence in Syria where he seized the opportunity to move against the Kurds, though Turkey has also taken in huge numbers of refugees. This purge of opponents should be a reminder to us all of Mr Erdogans quasi-fascist tendencies, reinforced by his deployment of mass demonstrations. This is not a remote problem: Turkey is a member of Nato and it controls much of the flow of refugees. It is now, as the French foreign minister said, an unstable ally. Yet the reality is Europe and the US have few options except continue to do business with him.
The capital sizzles
With temperatures set to reach 30C today and even higher tomorrow, the mood of office workers across the capital will be largely determined by the availability of air conditioning. Having had more than our fair share of rain, we should make the most of this mini-heatwave and thank God for London parks, as we make for green space and the shade of trees. Fewer people may be going abroad because of the weak pound but we can sizzle here too.
D on't groan but heres a maths question for you. There are 64 squares on a chess board. If you put one grain of rice on the first square, and double on each subsequent square (two on the second square, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on), how many grains would have by the time you got to the 64th square? The answer (of course) is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 18 billion billion grains. Thats enough rice to cover the entire planet, or if youre so inclined, build a rice mountain bigger than Everest.
If youre surprised by the size of that number, dont worry. We humans are terrible at understanding the power of exponential growth, which is a term to describe the way numbers quickly (and unexpectedly) mushroom if they keep doubling.
Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to technology. Over the past 40 years, computing power has doubled every two years or so an exponential trend called Moores Law. Thats why the smartphone in your pocket is millions of times more powerful than the computers Nasa used to get to the moon in the Sixties, and why politicians underestimate the social and economic impact technology will bring.
In recent decades, technology along with globalisation has shaped the world around us, especially when it comes to the jobs we do. In manufacturing, jobs were lost as factories became automated, as well as moved overseas. Today, as Oxford University researchers have shown, white-collar jobs in accounting, law and finance are being replaced by software, as technology becomes more advanced.
According to the economist Tyler Cowen, this is having a big impact on inequality because middle-class jobs are being squeezed, while earnings of people at the top are shooting up, in part because companies are more profitable when workers are replaced by machines. This means that returns on capital are improving, while the share of wealth taken by workers is falling. Indeed, if wages had increased in line with productivity since 1990, the average UK worker would be 20 per cent better off today.
As the Bank of Englands chief economist, Andrew Haldane, says: As machine has substituted for man across a greater number of tasks the balance of bargaining power has swung against labour. That would tend to show itself as labour securing a smaller slice of the income pie, as we have seen.
According to Haldane, the last time we saw such profound technological shifts was the Industrial Revolution, when trade unions formed to represent workers and fight for a fairer share of wealth. As a result of this bargaining power, workers got better pay and more rights.
If were going to have a fairer distribution of wealth, perhaps new forms of trade union are needed for the types of work growing rapidly in the information age, like self-employment. After all, there are now more than 4.5 million self-employed people in the UK, but very few are union members.
Modern associations like this might make a big difference. After all, its not inevitable that workers should get an ever smaller share of wealth that situation can, and should, change. As Haldane puts it: Unlike earlier phases of rapid technological change, labour has not shared equally in the fruits of recent great leaps forward or at least not yet.
I t is time for the Government to deliver its manifesto commitment, reaffirming our strategic deterrent as the ultimate defensive and protective capability for the United Kingdom.
We cannot rule out the future possibility of an extreme threat to the UK or our Nato allies. Conventional forces can deter conventional threats but only the nuclear deterrent can deter the most extreme threats.
The House of Commons will vote tonight on a motion which confirms that this is best delivered through Continuous At Sea Deterrence provided by a fleet of four submarines. Studies have demonstrated that a submarine-based deterrent offers the best resilience and cost-effectiveness.
The national interest is clear and I hope there will be overwhelming support on both sides of the House. By debating this issue, our new Prime Minister has demonstrated that defence and security is at the heart of her administration.
Parliaments support for Trident will send an important message that we remain committed to working alongside our Nato allies and playing our role in European and world security.
Philip Dunne MP, Minister of State for Defence Procurement (Con)
MPs will vote today on whether or not to replace Trident. Costing 205 billion, it will not meet our key security challenges and will be vulnerable to new technological threats.
Rather than spending this money on tackling todays problems such as terrorism, climate change, pandemics and cyber warfare the Government is proposing to waste money on a weapon that we will never use.
These weapons of mass destruction hail from a bygone age that is why senior figures from the armed forces describe them as militarily useless. Addressing modern security challenges requires a rational approach, not misplaced notions that having Trident makes us a power.
Spending vast amounts on redundant technology to retain a Cold War totem make us look antiquated and out of touch with the reality of the world today. That is why I am urging MPs to vote against a Trident replacement.
Kate Hudson, general secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Those who can remember back to the days of the Cold War will recall what nuclear weapons can do to world peace, even when they are not used. And given that the UK is struggling in areas such as the NHS and housing, surely the amount of money it would cost to renew Trident could be put to better use elsewhere?
However, it would be necessary should we decide against keeping Trident to look for other options to defend ourselves. We cannot become complacent when the threat from Russia, China and North Korea looks ever-increasing by the day.
John Edwards
Terror strikes at the heart of France
I was horrified to hear about the events in Nice. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends of those who lost their lives and those who were injured. The police officers and a motorcyclist who tried to stop the murderer should be commended for their bravery. But perhaps the most disturbing thing I saw was people taking close-up videos of the carnage.
Is there no respect for the dead and their relatives?
Rosemarie Jessop
Once again, an overwhelming cowardly act of violence has left the nation stunned. As Londoners, we must stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends in France and face up to the threat of terrorism.
Cam Billany
Donald Trumps this is war comments after the Nice attack were predictably disgusting. Surely he should be offering his sympathies and condolences for all those affected? It seems that Trump never misses any opportunity to gain political support, no matter what happens.
Donovan Wright
Oxford Street: an eye on the future
Great news that the Mayor wants vehicles to be banned from most of Oxford Street by 2020. A safe, direct cycle route must be an integral part of the plans. For years Oxford Street has been a no-go area for many cyclists, despite the huge demand for an east-west cycle route in this part of the city.
There is now a real opportunity to change that. People on foot and bike will benefit from a traffic-free Oxford Street but getting the street design right will be crucial and pedestrians and cyclists cannot be expected to share the pavement. We need a design that minimises the risk of collisions and keeps everyone moving and safe.
Caroline Russell, Green Party Group, London Assembly
At last there is action to reduce the high level of traffic pollution on Oxford Street. Removing all motor vehicles will make a big difference but the question of access and connectivity arises as Oxford Circus station often has to be closed in peak times because of overcrowding. So how will buses coming into central London bring people to Oxford Street?
Prof LJS Lesley
Again, Leadsom is way off the mark
Andrea Leadsom suggests men should not work in childcare because they could be paedophiles [ES online, July 15]. As a parent who has worked for more than 20 years with children aged under five as a nursery teacher, I find this offensive.
When I started my teaching career 40 years ago it was rare for men to work with children under the age of seven. Thankfully, things have changed and it is no longer quite so unusual. In my institution we routinely accept male students, of whom the majority go on to be outstanding, caring practitioners.
Young children need to be looked after and educated in environments that represent the wider society in which they live. They also need to come into contact with men who show what it is like to be male, as well as supporting their development.
Last week, Leadsom apologised to Theresa May for comments she made about her not having children. I call on her to make a similar apology to the men who have dedicated their lives to working with young children.
John Wadsworth, senior lecturer in education, Goldsmiths University
Review at a glance
I n the wake of the Nice atrocity the previous day, it was a brilliant inspiration to launch the BBC Proms with a restrained delivery of La Marseillaise all the more moving for being unannounced. The entire audience rose spontaneously to its feet.
Sakari Oramo followed that with an equally inspired reading of Tchaikovskys Fantasy-Overture Romeo and Juliet.
In stark contrast to the hyperactivity of the warring Montagues and Capulets, the love music was introduced at a slow tempo that risked sentimentality but was totally vindicated by the blissful evocation of a starlit balcony scene.
In an evening full of surprises, the Argentinian Sol Gabetta began Elgars Cello Concerto not with the traditional muscular extroversion of a Jacqueline Du Pre, but in intimate, confiding mode. Some of the detail was lost over the far side of the hall, but radio listeners may appreciate the nuanced dialogues.
The epic scale and patriotic fervour of Prokofievs cantata Alexander Nevsky, by contrast, are perfect for the Albert Hall, notwithstanding Shostakovichs criticism of the excess of physically loud, illustrative music (that would be Shostakovich, composer of the ear-splitting Leningrad Symphony).
Olga Borodina in gorgeous voice and two BBC choirs made impressive contributions, all marshalled by Oramo with the skill of a military general.
The BBC Proms continue until September 10
Proms 2016: Highlights to watch out for 1 /14 Proms 2016: Highlights to watch out for Proms 2016: Highlights to watch out for Browse the gallery to find out what not to miss. BBC Prom 2, July 16 Bryn Terfel will take the title role in Modest Mussorgskys Boris Gudunov, leading an illustrious cast. Brian Tarr Prom 6: Gospel Prom, July 19 This is only the second Gospel Prom, after it arrived on the programme for the first time in 2013. Michelle Williams will feature in a lineup that includes handpicked singers from gospel groups, brought together to make an elite superchoir. Proms 8: Strictly Prom, July 21 Strictly finalist Katie Derham will guide the audience through the sounds of the ballroom, with the BBC Concert Orchestra playing tangos, waltzes, and Charlestons. BBC Prom 19: David Bowie Prom, July 29 A celebration of David Bowies life will see musicians re-imagine the music legends back catalogue, including Berlin-based collective s t a r g a z e. BBC Proms at The Chapel, Greenwich, August 6 The first of the Proms relocations will see the BBC singers perform Rossinis Petite Messe Solenelle in the stunning setting of the Old Chapel of the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. thedpc Proms at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, August 13 The Proms will celebrate Restoration Theatre Music in the Globes intimate Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. It will allow the audience to be close up during performances of Purcell, Blow, Locke and Draghi. Pete Le May Prom 38, August 13 John Wilsons orchestra will pay tribute to one of Americas most celebrated songwriting duos, George and Ira Gershwin, including a performance of the ballet music from An American in Paris. Sim Canetty-Clarke Prom 44, August 18 This Prom will explore Shakespeares range of characters, with an all-British first half of classical music, and a second half devoted to American musicals such as West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate. Michael Lutch Prom 49: Quincy Jones Prom, August 22 The man himself will make an appearance during a celebration of the jazz giant Quincy Jones, with special guests collaborating on new arrangements of his hits. Gerg Gorman Prom 51, 24 August The Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra pay a visit in the year that the Olympics go to Rio de Janeiro. A celebration of Latin American music will include a performance of the work of South American composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Adriane White Proms at Bold Tendencies Multi-Storey Car Park, September 3 The Proms will go on the road to Peckham, with Christopher Starks Multi-Storey Orchestra making their Proms debut in a car park. They will perform a number of the works of Steve Reich. Ambra Vernuccio Proms in the Park Hyde Park, September 10 The Proms in the Park ends the two-month series of concerts and is Britains largest outdoor classical music event. It brings together pop and classical, and this year Tim Minchin, Frankie Valli and Rick Astley join the Royal Choral Society and the BBC Concert Orchestra. As well as a tribute to the late Sir Terry Wogan, the concert will celebrate Roald Dahls centenary year with a performance from Matilda the Musical. BBC Prom 75: Last Night of the Proms, September 10 Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez will be the star soloist of the evening in a concert that includes works by Vaughan Williams, Britten and Elgar.
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A forgotten slice of First World War history has been recreated in Bloomsbury.
The Shakespeare Hut provided a safe haven and a dash of culture for thousands of troops returning from the trenches in France. Now the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which was built on the site in Keppel Street, is home to an exhibition telling its story.
Hundreds of huts were built and run by the YMCA during the war but the Bloomsbury building was designed specifically to mark the 300th anniversary of Shakespeares death in 1616.
It featured regular performances of his work before it was demolished in 1924 to make way for the school.
The exhibition, created by multi-media production company Digital Drama, includes a replica room based on surviving photographs of the building which was particularly used by soldiers from Australia and New Zealand.
University of Brighton academic Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson, who worked on the project, said: Its fantastic that the school is celebrating the history of this forgotten but wonderful building. Soldiers, especially those so very far from home like the Anzacs, were lost in London and faced many dangers. The YMCA aimed to offer a safe place for them to sleep, socialise and enjoy a little home comfort.
Up to 100,000 servicemen sheltered, rested and recuperated in the Shakespeare Hut, many after experiencing diseases such as malaria. With its mission to improve health, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine was a fitting institution to replace the hut.
The Shakespeare Hut installation is on show at the school from 9am to 5pm on weekdays until September 18.
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I f youre the type of person that loves to while away hours browsing bestsellers, then youll definitely want to book a flight to Buenos Aires in the near future, as the city is home to what might be the most beautiful bookshop in the world.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid Bookstore has become a travel destination in its own right - as well as a much-loved landmark for locals - thanks to its incredible design.
Housed in a 100-year old cinema, the bookshop is famed for being one of the grandest settings in South America in which to get stuck into a good book.
The building was constructed in 1919 and was originally named Grand Splendid Theatre by Max Glucksmann, the Argentinian film pioneer.
Sadly, the curtains finally fell on the building in 1991 due to Argentinas degrading economic state.
After years of neglect, the Grand Splendid has finally been restored to its former glory; this time as a bookstore after a renovation by Fernando Manzone.
Alongside some 120,000 books, the theatre also still holds some of its stunning original details, like the fresco on the ceiling, and the eponymous red velvet stage curtains.
Books to read in 2016 1 /10 Books to read in 2016 Click through our gallery to discover the best beach reads for summer 2016... Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia The Girls by Emma Cline Clines debut novel first started to make noise in 2014 when the unknown 25-year-old sold her manuscript for a reported $2 million as part of a three-book deal. Now that the book is finally out, its fast becoming clear why it was so hotly anticipated. Beautifully written, this unflinching account of 14-year-old Evie Boyds enticement into a hippie cult is loosely inspired by the Manson murders of the late Sixties. But if youre looking for the next Helter Skelter, Cline has put the grisly details on ice, focusing instead on a coming-of-age story that will reacquaint you with your teenage self: angry, unheard and passionate. Fans of The Virgin Suicides and The Bell Jar will struggle to put this down. Youll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein Comedian Jessi Kleins hilariously candid autobiography offers a relentlessly funny collection of real-life stories and the lessons shes learned from them. These include her transformation from tomboy to tom man, attempting to find watchable porn and identifying the difference between being called maam and miss. If you liked Amy Poehler's Yes Please, this is a must-read. Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality by Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell Keep the spirit of this months Pride celebrations alive by reading this fascinating and moving story of the lovers, lawyers, judges and activists behind the groundbreaking Supreme Court case that led to one of the most important civil rights victories in history - the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Both inspiring and unforgettable, these accounts will stay with you long after youve finished reading. Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life by Kim Addonizio Kim Addonizio's wisecracking debut memoir is a hilariously salacious account that reflects on writing, drinking, dating and her wildest years as a young writer. She captures moments of inspiration at the writing desk and adventures on the road- from a champagne-fuelled sexcapade to sparsely attended readings at remote Midwestern colleges. Barkskins by Annie Proulx At over 700 pages, this book isnt for the faint-hearted, but youll breeze through it thanks to its brilliantly genius characters. Based on the taking down of the worlds forests, the book centres around the greedy and vengeful descendants of wood-cutters over 300 years who seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse. The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley Scooping the coveted Debut Novel of the Year accolade at this years Costa Book Awards, this Gothic work has earned praise from a host of literary critics and writers, including Stephen King who described it as an amazing piece of fiction". Set in 1976 it follows a familys annual stay in an old house in Lancashire, a place gripped by the mystery of the death of the local priest. The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock Set in Alabama in 1917, Pollocks novel follows dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett and his three young sons. Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family's entire fortune, his life is turned upside down, throwing him onto a tumultuous trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. Dark, violent and funny, this book will be like nothing else youve ever read.
Floors and floors are filled with towering shelves of books, stacked on balconies with panoramic views of the stage.
Amazingly, the theatre's old balconies have also been converted into cosy reading rooms, where you can curl up with a good book and lose yourself for hours on end. There's also a cafe on the back of what once was the stage.
This is definitely one that every book and design lover will want to make a pilgrimage to at some point in their lifetime.
But be warned: once you do, your local bookshop simply will not cut it anymore.
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David Cameron, who left Downing Street 10 last Wednesday (13 July), encouraged his successor, Theresa May, to be as close to the European Union as we can be. He said that My advice to my successor, who is a brilliant negotiator, is that we should try to be as close to the European Union as we can be, for the benefits of trade, of co-operation and of security.
Theresa May, who has been a long-serving home secretary, was yesterday formally appointed by the Queen to become Great Britains only second female Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher. Ms. Mays only public statements about the Remain-Leave referendum have so far been Brexit means Brexit, although she had previously supported the Remain campaign. Before she won the leadership, she had mentioned that she would not trigger Article 50 by the end of this year even though EU leaders have recently said they expect her to move quickly.
On top of the pressure from Brussels, Ms. May will have to deal with internal pressures as well since Scotland expects that its place in the EU will be protected. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has already warned the new Prime Minister that for Scotland, which voted pro-EU in every region, Remain means Remain, stressing that while Theresa May said in her view Brexit means Brexit. I respect that she has a mandate for that as England and Wales voted for it. But Speaking to reporters in London, Ms Sturgeon also added that Brexit doesnt mean Brexit for Scotland because Scotland didnt vote for Brexit. She emphasized that she had a mandate to respect the wishes of the people of Scotland to find a way of keeping Scotland within the EU or protecting our relationship with EU.
W hen the clock strikes 8.45am at the St Matthias Church of England Primary School in Stoke Newington, it means only one thing: time to tidy.
As the Mission Impossible theme tune begins to blast out of a CD player on one side of the assembly hall, 20 children at the other end jump up from their seats and start flying around as fast as their little legs can carry them. While one girl tries to finish eating her toast at breakneck speed, others, screeching to a halt in front of tables, put felt tip lids back on, make neat piles of colouring books, and clear away cereal bowls.
This is Breakfast Club, a weekday event set up by the charity Magic Breakfast to provide morning meals for primary school children who would otherwise not have the chance to eat it. Available at this breakfast buffet are Tesco low-sugar, low-sodium cereals, special protein-rich bagels from Bagel Nash (2,243,616 of these were provided last year) and Tropicana unsweetened juice diluted with water. In spite of the many reasons why they are here, clearly this club is the daily highlight for many of its young attendees, the majority of whom are buzzing around between bowls of Weetabix and games of Connect 4 or Snakes and Ladders.
Breakfast Club is the BEST. And bagels are the BEST, says an excitable little girl called Bolu as she finishes eating a bagel with butter on it. Opposite Bolu is Mohamed, slowly chewing on a piece of buttered bread, who cannot decide which juice he prefers from the choice of apple, orange or the Capella apple and rhubarb cartons on the table. Never having had rhubarb before (the Copella was bought by the school to encourage tasting), he is briefly flummoxed.
Two girls enjoy Breakfat Club Magic Breakfast
Immediately Bolu jumps up and offers to get Mohamed a cup so that he can sample some, and when he tries it he winces. Its sour, he exclaims. When I mention that rhubarb is a really cool long pink and green plant that grows in the ground, his eyes light up and immediately he and Bolu both decide that rhubarb is their favourite.
After this comes an intense discussion about favourite school subjects. Mohamed likes writing and maths, while Bolu says she likes all subjects:
Im a BRAINBOX. I used to be a nerd and I used to have glasses but then Specsavers took them away. So now I dont have any, which is good.
Soon, as Bolu is whisked away to practice reading a prayer for the mornings assemby, we are joined by three others keen to chime in to the breakfast debate. Fortunately it only takes a minute to reach a consensus: bagels, especially with butter on, are the best thing to eat and everyone likes it when the butter melts. Not everyone is keen on strawberry jam, but sometimes jam is OK.
Two boys at Breakfast Club Magic Breakfast
On another table Alicia, 7, is writing her name in different colours, while eight-year-old Jahnelle is drawing a picture of some flowers to give to her mum.
The best thing about being eight is that its an even number, she says. But also now I have to cook At home I make rice, and sometimes I mix egg in it - then we dont need to buy Chinese takeaway.
Seeing the club in action is a charming sight but knowing the reason for its existence makes it a poignant visit. Magic Breakfast - whose tagline is no child too hungry to learn - has been running clubs informally for 16 years. Back in 2001, having interviewed London teachers as part of her research for a book called Change Activist, Carmel McConnell, MBE, was stunned to discover that many of their pupils were attending school with rumbling stomachs. As a result she began buying and delivering breakfast to five Hackney schools and in 2003 formed the charity.
Now, Magic Breakfast organises breakfast for 23,500 students at 480 partner schools in London and England; 380 more are on the waiting list. It has also partnered with a number of London restaurants including Dishoom, Lyles, Foxlow and Hoi Polloi, some of whom will be involved with Hackney Fayre, a summer village fete-style fundraiser held in Hoxton Square this Saturday. After that the next plan is to set up in Scotland, as soon as more funding comes in.
Hackney Fayre, which raises money for Magic Breakfast
Back at St Matthias, three minutes have flown by and now the whole group is lined up, rucksacks in hand, on benches around the room. At 8.50am other children have begun pouring through the school gates and into the playground outside. Satisfied that everything has been cleared away, Breakfast Club leader Miss Emma - also a special needs teacher at St Matthias - lets them walk into the playground to have the register taken with the other pupils.
Im here every day with Miss Mary and we tend to have up to 30 children at Breakfast Club on a daily basis, but weve had fewer in today, she explains. It just depends on parents schedules - some of them will always come in as their parents need to get to work, for example we have a family of three children who are regulars. And they just love it. Some of them dont come at all, though, so some mornings we will cut up bagels and hand them out at the school gates so that they're not hungry.
Eight children not present today are on a register for something Miss Emma explains as meaning that they need our help because they dont get enough at home. So well wrap up eight bagels in tin foil and give them to those children at playtime.
It is a hard job, and on top of that she often takes after school clubs until 5pm, but for now she has to put away the Magic Breakfast kit before taking her first lesson.
I walk outside, the hectic dun dun, duhdun beats of Lalo Schifrins famous theme song still beating in my ears.
The Hackney Village Fayre is a free event open to everyone, held in Hoxton Square on Saturday July 23. All proceeds go to Magic Breakfast Charity. magicbreakfast.com
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H ow many times have you scrolled through the emoji keyboard, only to find that the icon youre looking for doesnt exist?
In an attempt to solve this conundrum and better embrace the diversity of its many users, Google has this week revealed a set of new emojis portraying women in gender equal roles.
Announcing the change on Twitter, the new icons include 11 new professions including female doctors, scientists and welders, across all skin colours.
Google has also revealed that 33 existing emojis - including the running person, the haircut and the weightlifter - are to be updated to include male and female versions.
The emoji update, the company says, is intended to empower female smartphone users.
Although there are several emojis which depict men in jobs such as police officer, paramedic and construction worker, the only options women currently have are princess and bride.
"Most than 90 percent of the worlds online population use emoji," wrote Nicole Bleuel, Marketing Lead & Diversity Champion, Emoji, in a recent blog post.
"But while theres a huge range of emoji, there arent a lot that highlight the diversity of womens careers, or empower young girls."
But the stunt, which was launched to celebrate World Emoji Day, backfired after Twitter users called out Google for being sexist.
I can't believe you let feminists get to you. Where is our Demi-queer Bi-gender disco pony day???? said Matthew Durmand.
So stereotypical they all have long hair, said another Twitter user.
Tweeter Sruthi Ramachandran also complained that the new symbols neglected giving men paternal roles.
She said: Why don't we get emoji's to represent humans/ mankind? Why women in particular? Then men also need some emojis like father, son etc.
ES invents ten emojis Londoners shouldn't have to live without 1 /13 ES invents ten emojis Londoners shouldn't have to live without Sad poo Like smiley poo, but to be used when one has food poisoning/ is using Elle Macphersons health supplements/things are just a bit shit Green juice drink Im detoxing/five-twoing/feeling smug with my NutriBullet/not up for boozing tonight Smiley face with square eyes Im binge-watching Poldark/Better Call Saul/Unbreakable Kimmy Schimdt (add fire or banned emoji to warn against spoilers) QQQQQQ Like the Zzzz sleeping emoji, but denotes instead that you are waiting for a table at a no-bookings restaurant/queuing for a black cab/queuing for the loo Bearded hipster Can be used as a points system. One = hipster with beard. Two = hipster with beard and topknot. Three = hipster with beard and bunches Ocado van If youre over 40, youre waiting for a food delivery. Under 30, its code for your flatmate that a Tinder booty call is on his or her way over Twerking girl Because who actually flamenco-dances? Troll You said something about Harry Styles on Twitter and now have angry 14-year-olds tweeting you sad poos House of playing cards If youre over 40, youre waiting for a food delivery. Under 30, its code for your flatmate that a Tinder booty call is on his or her way over Mobile phone screen with 'taxi' This partys dying, lets Uber out of here
But others praised Google for the move, claiming it is a step in the right direction for gender equality.
Whether youre for or against Googles latest announcement, the new gender equal icons are coming as part of a 100 emoji strong update.
So like it or lump it, London, you'll soon be receiving female rock stars and welders over WhatsApp.
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D espite being the birthplace of the US Constitution and the nations first capital, the so-called City of Brotherly Love is surprisingly low down most tourists must-see list of east coast cities. Midway between New York and Washington DC, Philadelphia was bestowed with the title of the USs first Unesco World Heritage City last year, on account of its unique history. It also played a major role in the citys selection as host of the Democratic National Convention, from July 25-28. Sadiq Khan is rumoured to be joining the 5,000 delegates expected at the Wells Fargo Center, where Hillary Clinton will make history as the first woman to be elected as a major party candidate for president.
Philly is a surprisingly walkable city, with stately squares, handsome municipal buildings and a quaint, historic old town. The Constitutional Walking Tour (001 215 525 1776, theconstitutional.com, $19/15), fittingly starts and ends outside the hi-tech National Constitution Centre the only museum in the US devoted to the Constitution and is a gentle, sociable way to soak up the history contained within a 1.25-mile walk. Highlights include Declaration House where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; the Liberty Bell, taken as a symbol of freedom by abolitionists; and the Presidents House, home to George Washington and John Adams when Philadelphia served as the capital from 1790 to 1800.
Benjamin Franklins House a striking steel frame built on the site of the original features amusing quotations etched on flagstones such as: I have placed my library where I can write without being disturbed by the noise of the children.
Bed down: a paean to home-grown heroes
The Logan Hotel (001 215 963 1500, theloganhotel.com, doubles from $329/253 room only), part of the Curio Collection by Hilton, opened late last year on Logan Square, at one end of the tree-lined Benjamin Franklin Parkway, placing it within easy reach of the airport and major arts and cultural landmarks. The staid opulence of the old Four Seasons (now relocating to the top of the new $1.2 billion Comcast tower when it opens in 2017) has been replaced by a more modern look that includes an art collection with fun and sensitive nods both to Phillys industrial heritage and home-grown stars such as Grace Kelly.
A cool and clever move is the Urban Farmer steakhouse set in a large corner of the ground floor with bare bricks and a laid-back vibe. Menus bursting with farm-to-table goodies include the lightest of breakfast blueberry waffles. Inventive dinner-menu sides include bone marrow with fragrant thyme and candied bacon.
Spacious rooms reveal local references and personality through grey hooded robes referencing fictitious local hero Rocky and industrial-style oversized lamps.
Fed and watered: bistros and BYOB
A combination of home-grown and celebrity chefs makes Philly one of the most exciting foodie cities in the US. Pennsylvanias unusual liquor laws have created a unique Bring Your Own Bottle culture at Philadelphia restaurants, exemplified by neighbourhood spot Helm (001 215 309 2211, helmphilly.com) in up-and-coming Kensington. This winning combination of vintage/reclaimed interiors and mouthwatering farm-to-table fare features dishes as colourful as their ingredients; mussels with shishito peppers and cauliflower turn the humble veg into something stunning. Mains from $15 (11.50).
At work: chefs at High Street on Market / Jason Varney
The Assembly Rooftop Lounge is the new open-air bar crowning the Logan Hotel with simple steel and glass fittings, giving unimpaired views across the art and museum district. Claiming to have the best list of fizz by the glass in the city, it serves champagne cocktails from $22 (17) as well as Premier Cru Superieur Chateau dYquem for an eye-watering $100 (77).
Renowned for the quality of its artisan breads and a cult favourite with Philadelphians, High Street on Market (001 215 625 0988, highstreetonmarket.com) sits in the heart of the quaint old city, serving seasonally influenced menus. Chef and co-owner Eli Kulp and partner Ellen Yin also run the much-lauded Fork, next door. Wholesome lunch dishes served in wooden bowls include grain salad with beets (pickled, roasted and shaved), puffed rice and smoked Cloumage cheese, $13 (10).
Set on the corner of leafy Rittenhouse Square, famed US restaurateur Stephen Starrs popular bistro Parc (001 215 545 2262, parc-restaurant.com) has attracted Denzel Washington and Jamie Foxx with its Parisian-style ambience and relaxed brasserie menu. The outside seating facing the square offers great people-watching opportunities as you tuck into generous portions of garlicky moules frites, $18.50 (14).
Dive in: the Logan hotel's pool
The cheesy but nevertheless obligatory run/walk up the 72 Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (001 215 763 8100, philamuseum.org) can be rewarded with Art After 5. The free, weekly event is held in the Great Stair Hall each Friday, with live performances of jazz, poetry and cabaret accompanied by drinks the Bloody Warhol made with Campbells tomato soup, $12 (9) and snacks (lobster mac and cheese bites $7/5.40), provided by Starr.
In the bag: market forces
Open since 1892, Reading Terminal Market sits under the now re-routed train station. Today this saved-from-extinction indoor market has a colourful and cultural mix of stalls selling everything from Amish specialities (Pennsylvanias Amish Country is 50 miles west) to novelty confectionary such as chocolate versions of Philly cheese steak and even a chocolate covered onion at Mueller Chocolate Co. Pearls Oyster Bar has a permanent line of diners sampling steamed clams and, of course, those oysters.
Rittenhouse Farmers Market keeps the square of the same name alive each Saturday with locals and visitors browsing stalls peddling goat pate, seasonal soups, mango guacamole and beeswax candles, year-round.
The Love Letter tour / Adam Wallacavage
Cultural agenda: the writings on the wall
In response to the unfettered graffiti spattered across the city, in 1984 the Mural Arts Program was created to allow artists to make their mark on designated buildings. The 3,600-mural program includes the Love Letter tour, revealing 50 rooftop murals visible from the elevated Septa train through run-down parts of West Philadelphia by local artist Steve Powers, aka ESPO, who explains it as a Love Letter meant for one but with meaning for all. Meaning it speaks to lovers, to his home town and to locals. Who isnt moved by sweet and funny slogans such as: If you were here Id be home by now and Prepay is on, lets talk till my minutes are gone. Livening up the Old City, Powers most recent mural, entitled Philadelphia, is homage to all things Philly, from Benjamin Franklin to the artery-clogging Philly cheese steak. The tour departs from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (001 215 685 0705, muralarts.org, $22pp (17).
Details: Philadelphia
British Airways (0344 493 0787, ba.com/philadelphia) flies daily from Heathrow; returns from 475. Philadelphia is also served from Heathrow by American Airlines and Delta.
The Philadelphia Pass can be bought for visits from one to five days and allows free entry to multiple sights and museums, $55 (42) for one day.
discoverphl.com
A young man is injured in hospital today after he was shot in south London.
Gang police are investigating after the victim, aged in his 20s, was gunned down in Denmark Hill this afternoon.
Police and paramedics rushed to the scene of the shooting on an estate near Basingdon Way at about 1.40pm.
The man was taken to a south London hospital where he remains in a stable condition.
His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening, police said.
A Met Police spokesman said: "No arrests have been made. Enquiries are ongoing.
The Trident and Area Crime Command has been informed.
T he deputy mayor of Istanbuls Sisli district has been shot in the head in his office, according to local media.
Cemil Candas is said to be in a critical condition after he was gunned down in his office by two assailants, Turkish broadcaster NTV reported.
Police detained his attackers and he was rushed to a nearby hospital from Sisli's district city hall
It is not immediately clear whether the incident is linked to Fridays botched military coup, in which up to 265 people died and over 1,400 were wounded.
The country remains in a state of high tension, though the government says it has the situation fully under control.
Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) runs the prosperous Sisli district. Along with other opposition parties the CHP has condemned the attempted coup.
The shooting comes as Turkey's state-run news agency said the Interior Ministry had sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country, following Friday's foiled coup.
The Anadolu Agency said a total of 8,777 employees attached to the ministry had been dismissed. Other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty.
Turkey coup - explained in 90 seconds
The Turkish government has blamed the failed coup on supporters of a US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who denies any knowledge or involvement.
A labourer who raped and killed a Hampstead schoolgirl in a notorious 1982 murder is likely to die behind bars after he was jailed for life today.
Father-of-two James Warnock who claimed to be a ladies man who looked like movie star John Travolta pounced on 17-year-old Yiannoulla Yianni when she was home alone preparing the family dinner, chasing her through the flat, submerging her in the bath, before raping and strangling her on her parents' bed.
Despite living less than a mile away, Warnock managed to evade police for 34 years until the 56-year-old was finally snared at Christmas last year, arrested for distributing indecent images of children as young as two and forced to give a DNA sample.
Instead of admitting his guilt, the jobbing tiler tormented Yiannoulla's family with a "ridiculous" story that he and the teenager, known as Lucy, had been in a secret affair in summer 1982.
A jury at the Old Bailey last week found Warnock guilty of rape and murder, and today Judge Nicholas Hilliard QC, the Recorder of London, told him: "You will very likely die in prison" as he sentenced him to at least 25 years of a life sentence.
"She endured a terrifying ordeal at your hands before she died, in equal measures cruel, brutal, and without mercy", he said.
"You terrorised Yiannoulla by making her think she was going to be drowned, you strangled her to death to obstruct the course of justice by killing your victim who was witness to the crime."
Warnock killed Yiannoulla Yianni, 17 / Metropolitan Police
The judge added: "Almost 34 years ago on August 13, 1982 you ended one life and devastated a number others.
"It's impossible to understand how one human being could do such things to another, and in the process you visited misery beyond measure upon those to whom Yiannoulla was and is so dear, and which will never leave them."
He said the circumstances of the murder are "truly dreadful", but they could not overshadow Yiannoulla's "sweetness of her nature" and her family's determination to bring the killer to justice.
An unshaven Warnock displayed no emotion as he was sentenced, nodding but swiftly walking out of the dock.
In the wake of conviction, brother Peter said the Yianni family have been "saturated in grief" for more than three decades as they tried to deal with the horrific murder.
Yiannoulla's other brother, Rick, said their father George had died six years after the murder "a broken man" and the family had "scarred for life".
"Our souls were prematurely ripped from us all", he said.
"Thankfully the long arm of the law reached out from the past to bring this evil being to justice.
James Warnock has been jailed for 25 years / Metropolitan Police
"I have no doubt Lucy's evil murderer will one day be passing through the gates of hell."
Warnock is believed to have stalked Yiannoulla through the streets in the weeks before the attack, learning her movements as she walked between the Belsize Road family home and her father's business, Nick's Shoe Shop.
On the day of the murder, on August 13, 1982, she left the shop to go home and prepare a leg of lamb for the family dinner.
James Warnock police interview
She kicked off her shoes and put on her favourite record, Forget Me Not by Patrice Rushen, but paused dinner preparations when she heard a knock on the door.
Yiannoulla, whose nickname was Noodles, was lured outside by Warnock who barged through the door and dragged her kicking and screaming upstairs into the flat.
It is believed the schoolgirl was held at knifepoint, her clothes were cut off, and Warnock submerged her in the bath and then strangled her.
Yiannoulla's parents made the horrifying discovery of the body on their bed, sparking one of the longest manhunts in Met Police history.
Despite repeated media appeals, televised reconstructions, and cold case reviews, it appeared the killer would never be caught until Warnock was arrested for sending child abuse images to an undercover police officer.
Warnock told police after his arrest he had been a "ladies man" in his youth, comparing himself to Travolta and claiming he and Yiannoulla enjoyed a secret love affair in summer 1982.
He subjected her heartbroken family to false tales of quickie sex sessions with the Quinton Kynaston schoolgirl.
"One couldn't get a clearer example of a complete lack of remorse", said prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC.
Brother Rick said in his victim impact statement: "This man has rubbed salt into the wounds by defiling my sister's good name."
Warnock, who had only been married for a year at the time of the murder, went on to have two sons with his second wife while continuing to live and work in London.
DNA he had left at the scene was stored for years before it could be used to try to track the killer, but Warnock had managed to stay out of trouble and off the police database.
Detectives searched around the world for a possible match, finally catching Warnock after his arrest in December last year.
George Carter-Stephenson QC, defending, conceded the 56-year-old "will in effect spend the rest of his life in prison."
Warnock, of Harrington Street, Kings Cross, was jailed for life and will serve at least 25 years before he is considered for release.
He was given a 20-year concurrent sentence for rape and sentences of four years, 20 months, and five months for the child porn offences.
T he Brexit battle bus has had its "lies" removed and replaced with the phrase 'time for truth' outside parliament by Greenpeace this morning.
Campaigners took the Vote Leave bus, which was emblazoned with the disputed 350 million NHS claim, and are stickering it with more than 10,000 questions for the new Government.
It had been said that, by leaving the EU, 350 million would have been freed up to spend on the health service, a claim which has since been retracted.
The Greenpeace stickers form a montage which spells out time for truth in huge white letters on the side of the bus.
Their battle bus re-brand comes as the new government starts its first full week in office.
A Greenpeace spokesman revealed the charity had contacted the company who hired out the battle bus and got hold of it for themelves.
Speaking from the bus opposite Old Palace Yard, Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said: The referendum campaign was marred by exaggerations and lies, but now we need the truth.
Greenpeace have rebranded the van outside Parliament / John Cobb / Greenpeace
Thats why were covering Boris Johnsons battle bus with thousands of questions for the new government from Leave and Remain voters.
Mr Sauven added that most of the framework protecting the countryside and wildlife derives from European law and people wanted to know what the government was going to do once those environmental laws no longer apply.
There are more than 10,000 stickers on the bus and Greenpeace are inviting people to send them more.
False: Brexiteers backtracked over the 350million saving for NHS claim / John Cobb / Greenpeace
A Leave voter from Swansea sent Greenpeace a message which is now on the side of the bus.
The message states: I voted leave. My greatest concern for our island is to protect what little natural habitat we have left.
I hope the government will not let the country down on this issue.
Another message from Paul in Worthing reads: When I was young. Raw sewage and industrial effluent was being poured into our rivers.
Now the rivers are clean enough to bring fish to our cities. Are you going to keep our rivers, landscapes and atmosphere clean or are you going to go backwards?
L ondoners are being told to stay indoors on the first hot, sunny day in recent memory.
The Met Office and Public Health England (PHE) today warned people in the capital to stay indoors because of the heat, which could rise to 32C tomorrow.
Officials put London on a "level 2" heat health alert after sweltering temperatures hit the capital. The mini heatwave is expected to continue until Thursday.
PHE advised Londoners to stay out of the sun between 11am and 3pm, and to avoid physical exertion.
PHE London regional director Dr Yvonne Doyle said: The hot weather wont make life difficult for all of us, indeed many of us will make the most of it when the sun shines.
"But some people may not be able to adapt to the extra strain hot weather will put on their bodies and may feel the ill-effects."
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Each year we hear stories of people who have fallen seriously ill because, even though its hotter they may wear clothes which are too warm for hot weather, they may not drink enough or just try to do too much.
By looking out for each other this summer we, health professionals, councils and the public, can all help each other stay well this summer.
Those having to go out in the blazing heat are advised to walk in the shade, apply suncream, and wear a hat.
PHE has warned people to look out for the elderly and young children and never to leave anyone in a parked car.
London set to be hotter than Ibiza this week
It has also advised Londoners to wear light, loose fitting cotton clothes and to drink plenty of water.
TfL are giving out 250,000 bottles of Evian water for free to passengers at some Tube stations tomorrow to combat the intense heat.
It has also advised passengers to carry water at all times and not to board public transport if they are feeling unwell.
B oris Johnson has vowed to enact the will of the people over Brexit as he meets his EU counterparts in Brussels today.
The new Foreign Secretary said he would offer reassurance to other foreign ministers that Britain will continue to cooperate closely with them once it leaves the bloc following last month's referendum.
He said: The message I'll be taking to our friends in the council is that we have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the European Union but that in no sense means that we are leaving Europe.
"We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds.
The former Mayor of London is on his first foreign trip since being appointed in a surprise move last week by new Prime Minister Theresa May.
Meeting: Boris Johnson talks to his Belgian counterpart Didier Reynders / REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
Before he arrived, his RAF flight was forced to make a dramatic emergency landing at Luton airport yesterday following a technical issue.
He arrived in Belgium later in the evening.
A 45-minute meeting last night with the bloc's high representative for foreign affairs, Federica Mogherin, was described as "warm and productive" and touched on Turkey, Nice and elements of Brexit.
Mr Johnson said: "I had a very good conversation to that effect with High Representative Mogherini and she very much agreed that is a role Britain should continue to play.
"When you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice, and Turkey where we have to work very closely together, you see the importance of that.
"On Nice, we will be ensuring that we co-ordinate our response to terror.
"On Turkey, it is very important in light of the failed coup that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and that is what I will be calling for.
"In the meantime, I am very much looking forward to meeting my colleagues from other European countries."
Meanwhile, the issue of EU migrants rights triggered debate again as "Brexit Minister" David Davis warned a "surge" in immigrants before Britain formally left the EU could lead to new curbs.
Mr Davis, who is in charge of exit arrangements, insisted that a cut-off point might need to be imposed on when newcomers to the country gained full residency rights if the UK's impending withdrawal saw migrant numbers increase.
After a breakfast meeting with US secretary of state John Kerry, Mr Johnson is also expected to have to deal with pressure on the margins of the summit regarding Britain's negotiating stance for its withdrawal.
Boris says that Brexit "does not mean, in any sense, leaving Europe"
The attempted Turkish military coup and the crackdown following its failure have caused concern in European capitals as fears emerge it could impact on the EU's deal with Ankara to stem the flow of refugees from the Syrian civil war.
The foreign ministers' summit comes as Mrs May is visiting Wales, which joined England in voting for Brexit, to underline her commitment to withdrawal and the embattled steel industry.
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Mrs May is meeting First Minister Carwyn Jones at the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff and reaffirming that she will "fully engage" with the Welsh government on Brexit negotiations.
O wen Smith declared himself to be normal as he sought to gain the upper hand in the Labour leadership race.
The former shadow work and pensions secretary is little known outside Westminster.
When interviewed on Sky News, the Pontypridd MP said: Im glad you think Im normal. I am normal. I grew up in a normal household. Ive got a wife and three children. My wife is a primary school teacher.
Ive been in Parliament for six years, before that I had two or three other jobs, in business, in politics and advising the peace process in Northern Ireland. Former BBC journalist Mr Smith did not appear to be seeking to compare himself to leadership rivals Angela Eagle and Jeremy Corbyn.
An aide added: He was just trying to say that he is an ordinary person, proud to live and represent his own community in Parliament. Mr Smith also said that he wanted the leadership contest to be fought in a comradely way, a position echoed by Ms Eagle and Mr Corbyn.
However, he risked controversy with his remarks as they come just days after Andrea Leadsom suffered a severe backlash after highlighting how she had children while her then Tory leadership rival Theresa May did not.
Smith on Labour contest
Mr Smith and Ms Eagle, one of the first openly gay woman MPs, were laying out to MPs today their visions for the Labour Party as they were both under pressure to agree to a unity candidate to challenge Mr Corbyn for the leadership.
The Welsh MP has agreed to stand aside if Merseyside MP Ms Eagle gets more backing, fuelling speculation that he is likely to gain more support which would put the onus on her to pull out of the race.
TODO: define component type apester
Owen Smith: problems facing Londoners are at the front of my mind
I may have launched my leadership campaign in Wales yesterday, but when announcing plans for a 200 billion British New Deal many of the challenges facing Londoners were at the front of my mind. Not least because the housing crisis in our capital is one of the clearest examples of government failing to take action and ordinary people paying the price for it.
A chronic lack of homes to rent or buy is holding millions of Londoners back. So a key part of my British New Deal would be major investment to get the country building.
In Sadiq Khan, Londoners have the strongest and most hard-working mayor possible to stand up for them. Yet Londoners also need a united Labour party that can take on the Tories at a national level.
We also know that despite this being such a wonderful city, with no end of opportunities, many people feel locked out due to poverty, as the Standards Dispossessed campaign showed.
Im proud to have led the Labour campaign that forced the Tories into U-turns over plans to cut tax credits and support for the disabled.
If members put their trust in me, I promise to not only lead the most powerful opposition possible, but return Labour to power.
Angela Eagle: Im right to challenge Corbyn
Sometimes in politics you just have to put your head above the parapet.
I knew that standing against Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership would prompt a backlash. But it is the right thing to do.
He has re-positioned Labour as an anti-austerity party, and I welcome this. But look at what else is happening.
Some of his supporters are using the same tactics of bullying and intimidation that Militant deployed in the Eighties.
Labour is failing to provide effective opposition to a Conservative govern- ment that has waged war on our public services, and the doctors, nurses and teachers that make them function.
Britain is deeply and dangerously divided. Brexit has presented particular challenges to London, threatening the powerhouse of the British economy.
But today both London and the regions are starved of resources by the government. The health of our democracy requires a second party offering a coherent alternative programme and capable of securing power. Under Jeremy, we offer neither.
Mongolia hosted the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) on 15-16 July. This years discussions focused on the theme 20 Years of ASEM: Partnership for the Future Through Connectivity. The leaders used the forum to review the progress made in 20 years of cooperation and set the course of mutual relations for the next 10 years. The event also sought to reinforce the main pillars of the partnership peace and stability, economic prosperity, sustainable development and better quality of life.
The EU was represented by European Council President, Donald Tusk, European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, and High Representative Federica Mogherini who were joined in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolias capital city, by leaders from about 50 other European and Asian countries. The summit provided the leaders with a venue to discuss the current state of the world economy including policies aimed at boosting inclusive economic growth and other inter-regional trade and investment issues. They also touched upon digital and transport connectivity, international security and stability as well as climate change, fight against terrorism and migration.
The ASEM was created 20 years ago as an informal forum of dialogue and cooperation between both continents. The initial ASEM partnership in 1996 consisted of just 15 EU Member States and 7 ASEAN Member States plus China, Japan, Korea and the European Commission. Bi-annually, ASEM heads of state meet with EU leaders to set the groups priorities. These events take place alternatively in Europe and Asia. The 2014 summit was held in Milan, Italy. Today, representing about 60 percent of the worlds GDP, of its population and of global trade, ASEM embraces virtually the whole of Asia and Europe.
T he post of Minister for London has been revived in recognition of the citys importance in achieving Theresa Mays goals.
Gavin Barwell, the MP for Croydon Central, has been handed the title and will play a key role in helping government departments and Mayor Sadiq Khan to tackle problems.
The last Minister for London was Tessa Jowell, who left office in 2010. The title fell into disuse under David Cameron.
Mr Barwell said the new Prime Minister saw the capital playing a central role in her campaign to govern for the many.
She is very keen that the Government work closely with the Mayor across a whole range of policy issues because London is absolutely critical to meeting the challenges she has set, he said.
A spokesman for Mr Khan welcomed the revival of the title and said they hoped to meet soon.
A mother who lost her camera while scuba diving off Scotland three years ago has told of her amazement after it was found 531 miles away in Sweden.
Adele Devonshire, an environmental consultant, lost the camera containing photographs of her honeymoon and pictures of her daughter while diving in the North Sea near the village of St Abbs in July 2013.
The Fuji camera, in a waterproof case, bobbed across the ocean where it was found by Lars Mossberg on the island of Gullholmen, home to around 100 people, off the west coast of Sweden.
Mr Mossberg posted a photograph of the camera, plus two images from its memory card, on the Facebook group Lost at Sea in the hope of finding its owner.
Facebook: This photo of Roger Devonshire led to the identification of the camera on social media
His appeal went viral and was shared by more than 2,000 people, eventually reaching Mrs Devonshire thanks to a friend who had joined the Facebook group the previous day.
I still cant believe it, she said. I realised the camera was no longer attached to my kit after a dive, the clip must have snapped.
To think its been bobbing around the sea all this time and it still works, its incredible.
I had quite a few precious photos on there, including some of dives all over the world. My friend spotted it on a Facebook group because she recognised the photo of my dad in his diving gear.
Retrieved: The lost camera was found 531 miles away
Mrs Devonshire, 37, who lives in Colchester with her husband and their two children, has now made contact with Mr Mossberg, who is arranging to send the camera back to the UK.
In his original post, he wrote: It has probably floated from the English east coast to the Swedish west coast. The photos include family members and diving sites from different places around the word.
Mrs Devonshire spent seven years as a consultant ecologist for international firm Amec Foster Wheeler, whose global headquarters are in London.
Hundreds of people who helped share the story today reacted with joy at the successful outcome.
One wrote: Sometimes youve just got to say wow. How amazing its been found and the right people happened to see this post.
C hannel 4 News today condemned former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie for questioning why a Muslim presenter wearing a hijab should lead coverage of the Nice lorry massacre.
Writing in his latest Sun column, he said he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw Muslim journalist Fatima Manji presenting coverage of the terror attack.
Press watchdog IPSO has already received more than 300 complaints about the article by the ex-editor.
Channel 4 News described his comments as offensive and arguably tantamount to inciting religious and even racial hatred.
In a statement, Channel 4 News said: The comments published in the Sun today by Mr MacKenzie are offensive, completely unacceptable, and arguably tantamount to inciting religious and even racial hatred.
Kelvin MacKenzie's column appeared in The Sun's print edition and online
"It is wrong to suggest that a qualified journalist should be barred from reporting on a particular story or present on a specific day because of their faith. Fatima Manji is an award-winning journalist.
"We are proud that she is part of our team and will receive, as ever, our full support in the wake of his comments.
Mr MacKenzies column, written just days after the 84 people were killed and 300 injured in the attack, was titled: Why did Channel 4 have a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of Muslim terror in Nice?
He wrote: "The presenter was not one of the regulars - Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Matt Frei or Cathy Newman - but a young lady wearing a hijab.
"Was it appropriate for her to be on camera when there had been yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim?
He continued: "Was it done to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer who looks at the hijab as a sign of the slavery of Muslim women by a male-dominated and clearly violent religion?
"Would the C4 editor have used a Hindu to report on the carnage at the golden Temple of Amritsar? Of course not."
The column has been widely condemned online, including by Tory peer Baroness Warsi who said: When xenophobia becomes this acceptable we should all be ashamed. This comment piece is gutter journalism.
She also wrote an open letter to the Suns editor in chief Tony Gallagher.
Other political figures and journalists rallied behind the presenter.
SNP MP Tasmina Sheikh said: What does @fatimamanji's chosen attire have to do with anything? She's doing her job. Are you doing yours?
ITV news reader Charlene White said: So Kelvin's "shocked" to see superbly talented (& hijab-wearing)@fatimamanji on @Channel4News? Welcome to the beautifully diverse UK, 2016.
Secunder Kermani, of BBC Newsnight, said: Yo @kelvmackenzie I'm a Muslim reporter too - could you send me an email with a list of subjects I'm allowed to cover? Thanks bae X.
T wo men have been injured after a runaway bus careered through a city centre street when the driver apparently went inside a shop.
Witnesses said the empty double-decker began to roll when the driver visited a newsagents and chased after the vehicle when it was on the move.
The out of control vehicle eventually ploughed into three buses and another car which struck a man in Renfield Street shortly before 4pm on Monday.
Arran Watkins, managing director of AW Painters and Decorators, said: "When a bus stops it normally makes a hissing noise and then it lowers itself, but in this case, the bus didn't do that.
"The driver ran into a newsagents and the bus started rolling down the hill. He chased after it, but the bus hit a blue Renault Twingo which was then smashed forward and hit a pedestrian.
"He was about 18 years old. Another pedestrian gave him first aid and then the emergency services turned up.
"The boy was lying on the ground and he was still conscious from what I could see."
Police initially confirmed one pedestrian had been injured before adding a second man had been taken to hospital.
A Police Scotland spokeswomansaid: "Around 3.45pm, police received a report of a bus having struck a male pedestrian on Renfield Street near to West George Street, Glasgow.
"Emergency services are at the scene and inquiries are ongoing to establish the full circumstances of the incident."
In a later statement, the force added: "The car moved forward and struck a pedestrian on Renfield Street.
"The bus continued to travel on Renfield Street before it collided with a stationary bus near to St Vincent Street, which then nudged into another stationary bus on Renfield Street.
"Two men have been taken to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary for treatment to injuries."
A First Glasgow spokesman said: "We can confirm that a First Glasgow vehicle was involved in an incident on Renfield Street this afternoon.
"Its too early to speculate on the cause of the incident. However, we've launched an immediate investigation and will work closely with the emergency authorities to determine exactly what happened.
"Our thoughts at this time are with the two men who were injured as a result of the incident."
D efence Secretary Michael Fallon today warned that abandoning Britains nuclear deterrent was a gamble we simply cant afford to take.
Ahead of MPs voting on renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system, the Cabinet minister also defended the 31 billion cost amid fears that it could spiral even higher.
He spoke out as Labour splits on the deterrent were laid bare with many MPs at odds with their leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Despite calls to scale back the deterrent, Mr Fallon told BBC radio: Our view, Theresa Mays view, the Governments view, and in fact both major political parties at the last election is that this is a gamble we simply cant afford to take.
On fears that the final bill could soar far higher, he added: We updated the cost at the strategic defence review just before Christmas and 31 billion is our latest estimate of what the four boats are going to cost.
Remember, these are four boats that are going to deploy the missiles for a 30-year period throughout the 2030s, the 2040s, and the 2050s so you need to see the cost against that 30-year timescale.
More than 100 Labour MPs, including plain-speaking Pontypridd MP Owen Smith, were expected to vote to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system.
But Mr Corbyn, a vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was set to oppose the move.
A third group of Labour MPs, including shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, were due to abstain.
Defending his decision, Mr Smith, who quit recently as shadow work and pensions secretary, stressed he believed the world was now a more risky, more unpredictable than it has been in our lifetimes.
However, pressed on Sky News that he had been a CND member, he responded: Well I was a teenager when I was a member of CND and Ive long since grown up and I now know that I dont think we can afford to divest ourselves of nuclear weapons right now.
I dont think we will make the world a safer place if we were to do that.
He highlighted reasons for Britain to retain its nuclear weapons because of potential future global insecurities including from Iran, North Korea and America if Donald Trump becomes president.
With Islington North MP Mr Corbyn at odds with many in his party on this issue, Ms Thornberry acknowledged he would always support unilateral nuclear disarmament, regardless of the outcome of Labours defence review.
The Labour party has to come to a collective decision and we have to do that by way of collecting evidence and considering it in a proper way, she said.
She also accused the Government of recklessly ploughing on with the most expensive option.
The Prime Minister was set to open the Commons debate on replacing the Trident nuclear deterrent by warning against abandoning our ultimate safeguard out of misplaced idealism.
Labour MP John Woodcock criticised the decision for Labour MPs to have a free vote on such an important issue of national security.
He also warned that pro-Corbyn pressure group Momentum could try to intimate his party colleagues into voting against Trident renewal.
Britain currently has four Vanguard submarines capable of storing and firing nuclear missiles. One of the four is always at sea and armed for attack, one is always undergoing maintenance, and the other two are kept in port or used for training.
The submarines can carry a maximum of eight missiles and a total of 40 warheads. The UK has a stockpile of 120 nuclear warheads that are operationally available.
F oreign Secretary Boris Johnson today called on the Turkish government to show restraint as the countrys government cemented its power after the failed coup.
Almost 2,000 special forces officers poured into Istanbul and took up positions at buildings critical to maintaining President Recep Tayyip Erdogans supremacy and F-16 fighter jets were ordered to patrol Turkish airspace.
It emerged today that 6,000 people had been arrested after the failed attempt to overthrow Mr Erdogan, including 29 top members of the military and several judges.
Mr Johnson said: On Turkey, it is very important in light of the failed coup that we see restraint and moderation on all sides, and that is what I will be calling for.
At a meeting of the EUs Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Turkish authorities reaction to the failed coup needs to be proportionate. He said he was alarmed by the arrests of judges and calls for reinstatement of the death penalty.
Some 1,800 special forces police officers arrived in Istanbul today, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported. They were reported to have taken up positions in key locations, government installations and on patrol in the city. Istanbul police chief Mustafa Caliskan is also said to have ordered the shooting down without warning of any helicopters flying overhead.
At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded when tanks rolled into major cities during the attempted rebellion on Friday. It was quashed by government forces and civilians who took to the streets.
Erdogan suggested last night that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, abolished in 2004 as part of the bid to join the European Union.
Speaking to a crowd, he responded to chants of we want the death penalty, by saying: We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get.
Flights to the UK from Turkey have begun to return to normal schedules.
The Foreign Office said in its travel advice that the situation was calming, but could still be volatile.
It advised tourists to avoid public places, especially demonstrations, in Ankara and Istanbul, and to follow the advice of authorities.
President Erdogan has called on the US to extradite Fethullah Gulen, 75, who heads the Hizmet movement. He has denied involvement in the coup.
Secretary of State John Kerry said that Turkey should present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny.
W hoever was behind Friday nights coup in Turkey, President Erdogan has lost no time in using it as the cue to round up enemies.
The main targets are elements of the army and air force commands, and the judiciary.
The military are old foes, and so, too, are lawyers and journalists who want a secular democracy, which they say is the true legacy of the founder of the modern state, Kemal Ataturk.
The coup was a half-hearted mess and the president and his prime minister never seemed in danger.
As the orchestrated demonstrations continue, Erdogans motives, and what he intends to do, must be examined.
Addressing the youths on the streets on Sunday, Erdogan said mutinous troops will pay a heavy price for this. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse the army.
Adherents of the Hizmet movement, led by cleric Fethullah Gulen, his one-time ally and friend in exile in the US, are also in Erdogans sights.
Hizmet wants a functioning pluralist democracy within an Islamic Turkey and has criticised the corruption and cronyism of Erdogan and the AK Party.
The fear is that Erdogan will push for a constitutional change so that Turkey becomes a presidential Islamic republic, closer to aspirations of the old Ottoman Empire than Ataturks republic.
He has been softening his approach to Putins Russia and Hamas in Palestine and the fear is that he will become an unreliable ally, in the words of Jean-Marc Ayrault, Frances foreign minister, over Islamic State and refugees.
Erdogan has said he needs no lectures from Nato allies and partners. Awkward and ambiguous friend he may be, but he would be an even more dangerous enemy.
F riends of an aspiring DJ who drowned in the sea off Ibiza have raised hundreds of pounds in memory of an absolute legend.
The body of holiday-maker Tom Jarvis, 21, was found by coastguards on Saturday morning in a cove near the tourist hotspot Cafe del Mar in San Antonio.
The management trainee from Romford is said to have died after going for an early evening swim with a friend on Friday.
Local police have launched an investigation in to the cause of his death.
Friends and relatives in the UK paid tribute to one of the nicest blokes you could meet.
His sister Hannah Jarvis wrote online: I miss you more than words. My world is empty. He always looked out for me, I couldnt wish to have anyone else as a brother.
His brother Billy added: Thank you all for the messages. Its so nice to see how loved and popular Tom was. Love you always brother.
A fund-raising page set up to raise 500 to help his family smashed its target within hours and has now reached almost than 1,500.
Friend and fellow DJ Ben Jerzyk, who is in Ibiza, is planning to play a set near to the spot where Mr Jarvis entered the sea tomorrow, on what would have been his 22nd birthday.
Another friend, Pete Dorling, stepped in to take Mr Jarviss place on a sponsored bicycle ride from London to Southend yesterday.
He wrote on Facebook: Tom gave me his entry to the event last week when he realised that he had double-booked this and Ibiza so I think its only right we all get together and put a little money in to ease the pressure slightly.
Lets all get together and show the world how loved he was.
Friends paid tribute to Mr Jarvis, a former pupil of Robert Clack Comprehensive in Dagenham, who worked part-time as a DJ.
One wrote on Facebook: Heartbreaking. I cant believe it. Youre going to be missed by so many. Rest in perfect peace, a true gentleman taken too soon.
A Civil Guard spokesman said: We were alerted on Friday evening and a sea and land search launched involving us and other agencies including the coastguards.
It appears he went out for a swim and disappeared. His body was recovered just before 9am this morning. A post mortem will now take place.
A n Indian student is recovering in hospital after allegedly being gang-raped by the same five men who attacked her three years ago.
Police said the 21-year-old was attacked last week in Rohtak, a town in the state of Haryana, and left for dead in the bushes.
Local media reported the alleged rape was to make her withdraw a court case against the men who are accused of gang-raping her in 2013.
The victim said she was forced inside a car and strangled during the attack on Wednesday.
She was found by a passer-by suffering with serious injuries and was taken to hospital for treatment.
The woman told a television channel: I was leaving the college when I saw them. They were the same five men. I was very afraid. They forced me inside the car.
"They tried to strangulate me. They said they would kill my father and brother.
"I have no idea where they took me. My attackers were the same five men."
After the 2013 attack in Bhinwani, the victim and her family moved to Rohtak, accusing the suspects of threatening them while on bail.
Protests have been held in Rohtak, demanding immediate arrest of the accused men but no arrests have yet been made.
Local police have confirmed they are investigating but are awaiting forensic reports before proceeding.
India has been in the spotlight recently following a series of violent rapes. The assault and killing of a student in 2012 led to large anti-rape protests aross the country.
F lights are returning to normal following an attempted military coup in Turkey but tourists are being warned the country is still "potentially volatile".
British Airways had cancelled flights to and from the country on Saturday and British tourists were advised to stay indoors during the attempted coup which killed 294 people.
Travellers have been advised by the Foreign Office to check all flights for disruptions before travelling to Turkey and to avoid public demonstrations.
The Foreign Office said security in the country "remains potentially volatile and advice on the Foreign Office website said: "Security operations to detain alleged perpetrators continue across the country, with reports of gunfire.
"We are aware of such action in Konya, Marmaris, Van and at Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul (which remains open and operating as normal). You should continue to exercise caution.
"Apart from Marmaris, 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."
Turkey coup - explained in 90 seconds
It 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."
Airports in the region have since reopened and airlines have confirmed flights are now taking off again following the weekend's events.
Istanbul Airport / Gokhan Tan/Getty Images
A British Airways spokeswoman said flights would be operating today, adding: "Our flights to Turkey have resumed but we recommend that customers visit ba.com to check the status of their individual flight."
EasyJet announced it had 12 flights to and from Turkey scheduled for Sunday, adding: "Current advice from the British authorities is to continue our flying programme. This will be kept under continuous review."
Thomson and First Choice flights to Dalaman, Antalya, Izmir and Bodrum are also operating as normal.
EU Member States have agreed on a Commission proposal to invest 263 million in key trans-European energy infrastructure projects. The biggest part of this investment will support the building of gas infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region as well as supporting the electricity sector throughout the continent. Nine projects have been so far selected under the EU funding scheme Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). The selected priority projects plan to increase the security of the energy sector, connect the isolated EU Member States to the wider EU grid and contribute to the Energy Union objectives of sustainable, affordable and secure energy.
The European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete said that Well-connected energy infrastructure is essential to achieving the Energy Union. This EU support will help fill existing gaps in energy infrastructure, putting us on the path to a truly connected European energy market. This is necessary to strengthen the security of energy supply and a more efficient use of the energy resources and integration of renewables into the grid.
The European funding will provide 187.5 million for the construction of the Balticonnector, the first gas pipeline connecting Estonia to Finland. When finalized, the interconnector will put an end to the dependence of Finland on a single gas supplier, which will contribute to the security of supply in the Eastern Baltic Sea region. Moreover, the EU will provide 18.6 million to support the project to enhance the Estonian-Latvian interconnection, which will enable better access to storage in Latvia and facilitate a more diverse natural gas transmission network. In the electricity sector, the EU will invest almost 30 million in the construction of a new 100 km electricity line between Dobrudja and Burgas in Bulgaria that will strengthen the resilience of the Bulgarian electricity grid.
A ny new parent will tell you the simplest task becomes almost impossible once you have a little one in tow. Juggling an unwieldy buggy and a screaming child demanding to be picked up while trying to carry shopping or open the front door is enough to drive the sleep-deprived to tears.
A baby carrier can be a life-saver for freeing up your hands while keeping your bundle of joy close by. Young babies love to snuggle in and snooze in them, while older children adore looking around to see the world from an elevated position. Theyre also a real godsend if you walk everywhere or if you have an older child who needs hands-on care.
When buying a carrier, consider how comfortable it will be for you and your little one, how easy it is to put on and take off and whether it will grow with your child for better value for money. Do make sure your child is the right age and weight for the carrier, whichever one you choose.
Other useful features to look for include machine washable fabric (you dont need us to explain why), adjustable straps so it can be used by more than one adult, extra pockets and covers in case the weather turns.
Here are the carriers we thought fared best out and about that also got the thumbs up from our junior testers too.
Nuna CUDL Baby Carrier
If youre keen to keep up with the Kardashians, this is the carrier to get your hands on. The Dutch brand was founded by a father of two and is already a favourite with La La Lands most famous sisters as well as with Beyonce, Jessica Biel and Serena Williams.
Theres certainly a lot to love about this chic, plush-feeling carrier which comes in a range of go-with-anything colours including black (Night), pale grey (Frost) and blue-grey (Aspen). Suitable up to around the age of three or 16kg, it has four carry positions for maximum support including on your back once your child is older. Its surprisingly simple to manage in all positions thanks to the whizzy magnetic buckles which click together and feel really secure. These made it one of the easiest carriers we tested to get on in a flash, though theres a certain knack to unfastening them. The removable head and neck support, leg opening buttons and breathable mesh that make it really comfy and supportive for your baby in every position.
We particularly loved the thoughtful extras we didnt know we needed including two removable organic cotton bibs, an attached sun shade and a roomy zippered pocket on the waistband for a packet of wipes and our phone. It might even be possible to leave the house before its dark from now on.
Nuna
150 | John Lewis
Izmi Baby Carrier
If you have no time for fiddly carriers that need endless adjusting, this reasonably-priced model is a great choice. Its very soft straight from the box and slips on without endless faffing with buckles and belts. If it needs tweaking, simply open up the waist strap and alter the Velcro tabs, which you can do in a matter of moments even if your bundle of joy is screaming the place down.
Theres an ingenious booster cushion to raise your newborns head above the material and the hip-healthy design keeps babies in the best position, without letting your back take the strain. We thought spreading the straps wider gave the comfiest carry though it can also be used with slim, straight straps. Though its as snuggly and easy to use as a fabric sling, the Izmi has the support of a more structured buckled carrier and it can be worn in several positions including front facing and on the back. We especially liked the fact it can be folded up small when not in use and even comes with its own storage bag. Best of all, its suitable from birth (7lbs) up to a whopping 33lbs, though we think a heavier baby might prove weighty without a little more padding.
Izmi
80 | Amazon
Infantino In Season Carrier
Be ready for anything with this ingenious carrier suitable for whatever the weather can throw at you. It has five integrated layers to adapt to the elements and make the carrier warmer (or cooler) if necessary. This really helped reassure us our little one wasnt overheating on warmer days when they were so close to our body. Theres also a breathable sun hood and a cover for snow or rain so you can rest easy knowing your baby is protected no matter what. Cleverly, the covers are all attached and have their own storage compartment so you wont drop one without noticing while dealing with a fractious baby in the supermarket.
Suitable for children who weigh between 8 and 40lbs, it can be used in four different carrying positions as your child grows; including facing in and out for both younger and older babies and as a back pack. We did struggle a little getting our older tester on our back without extra help though. However, we always felt really supported using it thanks to the padded shoulder straps and waist belt and especially liked the large parent pocket, perfect for stashing keys, a wallet and phone when heading out.
Infantino
79 | Amazon
Cybex Yema
While no baby carrier is ever likely to be a must-have fashion item, this surprisingly stylish option looks as good as any weve ever seen. Its clever curves, drapes and texture really make it stand out and it comes with either tie or click fasteners and in a range of colours including a distinctive leather look, denim and a brightly coloured patterned carrier designed by supermodel Karolina Kurkova.
Luckily its not a matter of style over substance and this cool carrier is very comfortable too in fact our small but hard-to-please tester could barely keep his eyes open once inside. Theres a head and neck support that suits babies of every size plus ergonomic seating with adjustable panel width so you can make sure its perfect for your little one. Its suitable up to 15 kg, can be used in three carrying positions and wont let your back take the strain with padded shoulder straps that can be crossed for added support. The padded waist belt is very soft for parents and doesnt dig in when you sit down like so many, yet its remarkably easy to whip on and off without needing an army of helpers. Its a great buy for any parent desperate to ditch the buggy and feel a little more free.
Cybex
49.95 | Online4Baby
BabyBjorn Carrier Harmony
When your little one is not-so-little, baby carriers can sometimes prove a strain on even the strongest back. We definitely struggle using even the hardiest carrier for long stretches so this super-supportive BabyBjorn was a game-changer on long walks. The wide padded shoulder straps and pressure-relieving waistband really made a difference. We particularly loved the padded lumbar support which kept our usual back complaints at bay. It may feel a little unusual for some people initially but its worth persevering to avoid nagging aches and pains.
Available in smart silver, navy blue and anthracite, the carriers innovative 3D mesh makes it particularly lightweight and stops you and your baby sweltering. It couldnt be easier to use too. The head support is flexible and can be easily adjusted with poppers. Its suitable from birth until around the age of 3 with no additional insert and its machine washable in case the worst happens although the built-in bib works wonders. It may be pricey but its worth every penny for pain-free parenting.
BabyBjorn
190 | BabyBjorn
Caboo Lite Carrier
If you love the look, feel and cuddle potential of a wrap carrier but cant face the hassle of tying it up, this soft stretchy carrier may just be your best bet. It pulls on easily over the head like a t-shirt then can be adjusted by pulling on the fabric through the rings. Once we found the right fit, it generally needed very little tightening for future use and felt supportive even with the wriggliest baby.
The carrier is very lightweight but surprisingly supportive with thick, comfy straps and a wide anchored cross to reduce shoulder strain. Its a great option for anyone breastfeeding too as its possible to sit and feed without removing your baby. As it can be used from day one, you may even stand a chance of finding time to eat lunch yourself. However, we found our junior tester preferred the chance to look outwards once they got a little older so be sure to buy while pregnant to maximise the time you can use this carrier.
Caboo
54.99 | JoJo Maman Bebe
Chicco Boppy ComfyFit Carrier
This fantastically priced carrier looks as soft and stretchy as a sling but also includes a little more support to suit a growing baby (and a tired parent!). Theres a buckle-fastened waist belt, wide shoulder straps and even a pouch to keep it all clean once you take it off. Luckily theres no struggling to tie the fabric around your body either as it simply clips round the waist, pulls up over the shoulders and then can be fastened to suit. We had it down to a matter of seconds after a little practice and loved the soft touchable material that made our mini-tester as snug as a bug.
Its the ideal carrier for a newborn or younger baby because its so quick to put on (even with a sleeping baby) and is completely machine washable. Although it can be used up to the age of 3, we think wed need a little more padding to carry a toddler for long periods though. However its a no-brainer to throw in the back of the car for emergencies or to take away on holiday.
Chicco
39.94 | Amazon
BeSafe Haven
Sharing the carrier with your other half? This is a doddle for both parents to strap on and go thanks to the clever Flex-Shape Buckle which automatically rotates to the best position for each wearer, whatever their size. So no more silent seething when youre in a rush to leave the house and all the straps need altering... The adjustable waist belt fits size XS to XXL too while the removable comfort pads reduce pressure. We also liked the fact the shoulder straps could be tightened by pulling in any direction so we didnt need contortionist-level skills to secure it quickly.
Luckily, it seems equally snug for the mini passenger too. Suitable up to 15kg, the carrier has an integrated air pillow that can be speedily inflated to provide a comfortable seat when facing outwards and we found that made a big difference when carrying as a parent too. It has a fold-down head support, removable UPF50+ sun canopy and even on hot days, was one of the least sweat-inducing carriers we tested thanks to the official Tencel material which wicks moisture away from the baby.
BeSafe
115 | Direct4baby
Verdict
The Nuna CUDL Baby Carrier strikes the perfect balance of practicality and style and was one of the easiest carriers for us to handle even when dealing with a grouchy baby. If you want to spend less, go straight for the Infantino In Season Carrier, which is extremely comfortable to wear and has thought of everything even the ever-changeable British weather.
A lden Ehrenreich has been officially confirmed as the new Han Solo.
The 26-year-old US actor, who was rumoured to have been cast in the role, took part in his first Star Wars panel discussion over the weekend.
The Hail, Caesar! star appeared alongside British actor John Boyega at the Star Wars Celebration Europe in London on Sunday.
Making it official, Ehrenreich was introduced as the new Han Solo, taking over from the character made iconic by Harrison Ford.
London-born Boyega was quick to congratulate the star on stage, saying: Oh man, youre playing Han Solo, man. Damn! Hes smiling just like him!
The films co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller revealed that he was the first of 3000 auditions worldwide before they returned to cast him in the part.
The Star Wars spin-off, which is slated for release in May 2018, has been shrouded in secrecy since it was announced last year.
According to reports, the film will focus on Han Solos early days before he became involved with the rebel alliance.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - Trailer
Star Wars: Episode VIII director Rian Johnson was also at the discussion and revealed how the new film would kick off.
Johnson confirmed that the next film would pick up from where The Force Awakens left off, with Daisy Ridleys Rey confronting Mark Hamils Luke Skywalker.
It was a surreal way to start things out, he said.
I didnt even really think about the notion that we were going to break a long-standing Star Wars tradition.